Thomas

@quintonthomas.bsky.social

2061 Followers 6244 Following

New Yorker in London. There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.

2017 op-ed by Michael Barone: "Obama never shook his faculty lounge arrogance"
July 2025 NY Times headline: A Defiant Biden Says Only the ‘Lord Almighty’ Could Drive Him From the Race
Screenshot of AI-related tweets made by Hayes in February 2026: https://bsky.app/profile/chrislhayes.bsky.social/post/3melwx6oxhc2s
Candidate Mallory McMorrow Dances Into Michigan Democratic Convention With Drumline
text from carville's wikipedia: Nicknamed the "Ragin' Cajun", Carville led successful state campaigns before gaining national attention as a lead strategist in Bill Clinton's winning 1992 presidential campaign. He also played a principal role crafting in the campaigns of several Democratic presidential candidates, including Massachusetts Senator John Kerry in 2004, New York Senator Hillary Clinton in 2008, and Colorado Senator Michael Bennet in 2020. He is married to longtime Republican political consultant Mary Matalin.
excerpt from Latour's 2018 "Down to Earth": “To go back to the well-worn metaphor of the Titanic, the ruling classes understand that the shipwreck is certain; they reserve the lifeboats for themselves and ask the orchestra to go on playing lullabies so they can take advantage of the darkness to beat their retreat before the ship’s increased listing alerts the other classes!18 For a clarifying episode that is not metaphoric in the least: Exxon-Mobil, in the early 1990s, knowing full well what it was doing, after publishing excellent scientific articles on the dangers of climate change, chose to invest massively in frenetic extraction of oil and at the same time in an equally frenetic campaign to proclaim the non-existence of the threat.19 These people – whom we can call the obscurantist elites from now on – understood that, if they wanted to survive in comfort, they had to stop pretending, even in their dreams, to share the earth with the rest of the world.”
A quote from Huxley's "Brave New World": "Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a lawagainst it. The records survive. Speeches aboutliberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient andmiserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a squarehole."
Graph from the linked piece that shows the "surging fortunes of California's ultrarich" over time
Screenshot from the linked piece: The El Niño building right now, and expected to crest around the end of next year, arrives on top of all our global warming. And it appears stupendously intense — almost certainly stronger than the “Super” El Niño of 2015-16, and perhaps the most intense since the epochal El Niño of 1877. The global consequences of that climatic event were so devastating that the environmental historian Mike Davis called them “Late Victorian Holocausts.”
A chart from the study referenced by the Guardian article. The chart shows the US consistently ranked lowest in healthy life expectancy from 2011-2021.
Sasse served the state of Nebraska in the U.S. Senate for eight years as a high-minded and, by his own account, sometimes ineffectual conservative. Then he quit politics to become the president of the University of Florida, pursuing a different model of civic reform.
Quote from the Maggie Haberman/Jonathan Swan NYTimes story on Trump's idiotic decision-making around Iran: "Tucker Carlson, the commentator who had emerged as another prominent skeptic of intervention on the right, had come to the Oval Office several times over the previous year to warn Mr. Trump that a war with Iran would destroy his presidency. A couple weeks before the war began, Mr. Trump, who had known Mr. Carlson for years, tried to reassure him over the phone. “I know you’re worried about it, but it’s going to be OK,” the president said. Mr. Carlson asked how he knew. “Because it always is,” Mr. Trump replied."
Quote from the WSJ piece: "Middle managers say they’re on the front lines of the war on fun. Once used to overseeing a handful of people, they now have far bigger teams. The average manager had roughly 12 direct reports last year, according to Gallup, a nearly 50% jump from when the firm first measured the figure in 2013. AI has changed expectations about productivity, too. Once-reliable career paths—from business school to consulting, for instance—now look shakier. “All the conveyor belts are broken,” said Suzy Welch, a management professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, at a recent symposium on purpose and flourishing. Companies are tightening scrutiny of employee expenses, meaning certain niceties are disappearing, too."
text of the book reviewer's corporate bio: "Alex Preston is Head of Advisory at Man Group, responsible for Advisory and for the firm’s client research collaboration with Oxford University, OMI Advisory. He was previously Head of Content at Millennium. Prior to that, he was Client Investment Strategist at Man Group, working for the firm from 2013 to 2020. Alex started his career in 2001 working for a credit hedge fund before moving to The Carlyle Group, where he was Head of Global Trading. He is a prize-winning author and journalist, writing regularly for The Economist, Financial Times and the Guardian. Alex graduated from the University of Oxford with an MA in English Literature, and holds a PhD from University College, London. He is also a CFA charterholder."
Links from today's NYT morning newsletter: "Here are columns by Thomas Friedman and Bret Stephens on Trump’s war with Iran."
"“Get over it” also seems to be his message, implicitly, to those who dwell on his bank’s deep ties to Epstein. Whatever he personally knew about his bank’s involvement with the sex trafficker, he set the tone and the standards for his senior executives, who cultivated Epstein’s lucrative business for years. “Jamie” didn’t act as a “moral compass” – and this wasn’t banking as a “public service”."
Screenshot of the New Yorker Radio Hour's latest episode, titled "Ben Shapiro is Waging Battle Inside the MAGA Movement."
A screenshot of Weiss on the call in question, captioned: "Weiss doubled down on her decision to spike the CECOT story during Monday's editorial call. (CBS News)"
Quote from the linked New York Times article on Donald Trump's long, close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein: "When they arrived at Mar-a-Lago, Ms. Coleman said, her daughter was promptly handed a glass of champagne. She took it away, but waiters kept offering more. Each time one of the middle-aged men at the party approached her daughter, Ms. Coleman would walk over and introduce herself as Ms. Davis’s mother. During a trip to the bathroom, they ran into Mr. Trump’s new wife, whom they had met earlier. Ms. Maples clasped her hands, Ms. Coleman recalled, and looked her in the eye. “Whatever you do, do not let her around any of these men, and especially my husband,” she told Ms. Coleman. “Protect her.”"
Haldeman also encouraged Canadians to follow his lead: “This country seems to have unlimited opportunities for development. The Rhodesias and South Africa could easily stand 50 million white people. We flew over hundreds of miles in which we could scarcely see even a native hut.”
Quote from the linked piece: "Like many anti-Semites, Haldeman saw natural allies in two seemingly opposing forces: communism and capitalist financiers. “Moscow and Wall Street always work hand in hand at the conspiracy to form a World Government under their control,” he writes in his book. In Haldeman’s telling, the International Conspiracy was even behind the anti-apartheid forces both within and outside South Africa. He said they had sparked the Sharpeville “riot” on purpose to make money on the South African stock-market drop that came after it. Haldeman consistently argues that Black South Africans are happy with their position under apartheid, even grateful for “the protection of the White people,” and that international meddlers are to blame for riling up opposition. “They know that the White man has done so much for them,” he wrote."
Quote from the linked story: "But Ms. Stefanik is not alone among Republican women in feeling aggrieved by Mr. Johnson. Some of them said privately that the speaker had failed to listen to them or engage in direct conversations on major political and policy issues, suggesting that doing so was a cultural challenge for Mr. Johnson — an evangelical Christian who has often voiced firm views about the distinct roles men and women should play in society."
"Nvidia Says It's Not Enron in Private Memo Refuting Accounting Questions"
An excerpt from the linked piece: "Even in our darkest imaginations, no one could have conceived of Gaza’s streets littered with the decomposing bodies and skeletal remains of our loved ones; that stray dogs and cats would be filmed feasting on those bodies; that Israeli soldiers would confess to driving their tanks over hundreds of living and dead humans and crushing them into mush; that parents would scour the streets looking for hacked pieces of human flesh to put randomly in plastic bags and consider each 10–20 kilos a child; that thousands of kidnapped Palestinians in Israeli “torture camps” would be systematically and routinely beaten, raped, forced to perform sexual acts on each other, forced to drink from toilets, starved to near death, blindfolded and chained 24/7 in crowded cages whose air is filled with the “putrid stench” of “neglected wounds left to rot” and amputated limbs, that the perpetrators would document and brag about their atrocities every minute of the day; and that the world would watch all this live-streamed and yet allow it to continue unconstrained."
YouGov polling of the question, "Should Britain start extracting shale gas?" As of Sept 2025, 50% of respondents responded, "Should not," compared to 25% who responded "Should."
from Starr's Wikipedia: Defense of Jeffrey Epstein In 2007, Starr joined the legal team defending Palm Beach billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of the statutory rape of numerous underage high school students.[65] Epstein would later plea bargain to plead guilty to several charges of soliciting and trafficking of underage girls, serve 13 months on work release in a private wing of the Palm Beach jail, and register as a sex offender.[66] Starr said he was "in the room" when then-US attorney Alex Acosta made the deal that yielded the plea bargain for Epstein and later described Acosta as "a person of complete integrity," adding that "everyone was satisfied" with the agreement.[67]
Quote from Jan 2020 NYPost story: "Also there was “a baby Yorkshire terrier” named Max, which Maxwell had been gifted, Oxenberg writes. “More than once, she threw the quivering little bundle violently across the room. She thought this was hilariously funny.” Oxenberg’s recollection appears as part of a serialized tell-all memoir that the writer has been updating every week on Patreon."
from Craig Shirley's wikipedia entry: "He joined the staff of the Republican National Committee in 1982. During the 1984 presidential campaign, Shirley was communications director for the National Conservative Political Action Committee.[11] After Reagan’s reelection, in the late fall of 1984, Shirley opened his own firm and worked on numerous matters in co-ordination with the Reagan White House including aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, support for the Strategic Defensive Initiative, support for the Afghanistan Mujaheddin, support for Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA, and support for the Tax Reform Act of 1986. He also worked on the White House Conference on Small Business in 1985.; and lobbying on behalf of The Heritage Foundation for weapons shipments, via apartheid South Africa, to perpetuate Jonas Savimbi's 20-year insurgency against Angola. He also supported Reagan's Tax Reform Act of 1986, which reduced the top marginal tax rate from 50 percent to 28 percent, and participated in the 1985 White House Conference on Small Business. In 1986, he became a consultant to Vice President George H. W. Bush's political action committee, Fund for America's Future, and supported George H. W. Bush's 1988 presidential bid.[12] In 1991, Shirley ran an advertising campaign that recruited Kuwaitis to make false charges against Iraq during its occupation of Kuwait which helped lay the groundwork for the Gulf War, later doing public relations for the Embassy of Kuwait and for an international democracy conference hosted by Czechoslovak President Václav Havel. Shirley briefly partnered with David Keene, but that association ended in 1992.[12] During the 1990s, Shirley founded, on behalf of a group of privately owned utilities, a lobbying entity called Citizens for State Power, which — as the Tulsa World pointed out — was a "secretly funded front group to create an illusion of public support," spending "$350,000 on ads for his anti-deregulation group."[13] In 2000, Craig Shirley & Associates …
Officials say the casings found with the gun contained messages. Officials said the casings and cartridge found alongside the gun that they said the suspect used to kill Mr. Kirk also had written messages on them. One of those casings contained the words “Bella ciao,” Mr. Cox said on Friday. That is an apparent reference to an Italian song adopted by the antifascist resistance during World War II. It is still sung by the Italian left to commemorate the end of fascism. Mr. Cox also said that he believed that an engraving on an unfired cartridge that read “Hey, fascist! Catch!” showed the gunman’s intent.
In the late afternoon, Mr. Trump signed a proclamation lowering the flags to half-staff in Mr. Kirk’s honor through Sunday. At around 5:30 p.m., a worker in black pants and a black shirt walked to the giant flagpole that Mr. Trump had installed on the North Lawn and cranked the flag down; he repeated the same move with the flag on top of the White House minutes later. The president was still on track for a visit to New York on the anniversary of the last significant event to unite nearly all Americans across parties: the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Trump is standing at a lectern making remarks at the 2024 Al Smith dinner. He's surrounded by fellow elites, including JPM executive Mary Erdoes, seated next to Trump and smiling enthusiastically at his remarks
the cover of "On Photography" by Susan Sontag
A quote from the piece: "But the French political crisis goes much deeper. It is about the damaged relationship between the people and their politicians, which looks likely to sour the country’s politics until the 2027 presidential election and beyond as the far right remains a potent force. “There is a broad anger towards political leaders who are seen as not bringing any benefit to the people … who are seen as playing more for their political future than the country’s,” said Mathieu Gallard, research director at Ipsos pollsters."
The cover of Amitav Ghosh's "The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis"
A NY Times Pitchbot tweet: “Having mastered epidemiology, toilet paper supply chain logistics, large language models, and submarine engineering, I will now proceed to explain the load-bearing capabilities of a truss bridge and the reverse propulsion system onboard a intercontinental cargo freighter...(1/93)”
A screenshot of the title of the latest episode of kara swisher’s podcast: “liberal media bias, trump & taming big tech with cable impresario john malone”
"“Thiel’s senior quote was from The Hobbit: “The greatest adventure is what lies ahead / Today and tomorrow are yet to be said.” Years later he’d say that he’d memorized the entire passage, which continues: “The chances, the changes are all yours to make / The mold of your life is in your hands to break.” It would become, in a way, the motto of his life—though it was still, at this point, a confused life. The passage is not, in fact, from Tolkien, who wrote The Hobbit, as well as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, books Thiel obsessed over. It is from a theme song, written by Jules Bass, creative genius behind the 1980s cartoon ThunderCats, for the animated version of The Hobbit, which had come out in 1977. That spring, Thiel got into Stanford, his dream school. Among his classmates, legend had it that on the application, Peter had been asked to pick a word that best describes himself, and Thiel chose “intelligent.”"
Les Moonves, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump cozying up with each other
Graphic showing that House Minority Leader Jeffries has received more than $1.7mm in funding from AIPAC
The moves, and others, signify what lies ahead. The school has been through upheaval, the exam results were awful, pupils and parents, not to mention fellow staff members, are fed up. This immediate term is set to be crucial in the life of “Starmer High”. Purpose and confidence must be restored, and fast.
I kept meeting scholars of ‘German-Jewish studies’ or ‘memory culture’ in Berlin. The word ‘memory’ usually seemed to mean ‘memory of the Jews’. In one sense, it couldn’t be otherwise. That Germany has a responsibility to remember the Holocaust is beyond question. But it’s striking how little concern there is for other populations that have experienced racial discrimination or violence at the hands of the Germans: Turkish guest workers and their descendants, Syrian refugees and Palestinians, to say nothing of the Namibians whose ancestors were the victims of an earlier German genocidal campaign, or the Roma who perished alongside Jews in the camps. ‘Memory culture’ is used to refer almost exclusively to German-Jewish relations between 1933 and 1945. And under the policy of Staatsräson, which has made the defence of Israel a central pillar of the German state, the lesson of the Holocaust seems to be that Jews must remain eternally protected so that Germany can expiate its guilt, even if the state that now claims to speak in the name of the Jews is carrying out war crimes – even genocide – against another people.
As Epstein’s operation continued into the 2000s, he began importing girls from the former Soviet Union. After the 1998 Miss Universe pageant, Anna Malova signed up with Karin Models, which had been founded by Epstein friend Jean-Luc Brunel. Known as “le fantôme” (the ghost), Brunel, who also owned MC2 Modeling Agency, was the subject of a 1988 piece that aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes in which several young models accused him of groping them sexually, drugging their drinks, and rape. “I really despise Jean-Luc. … This is a guy who should be behind bars,” John Casablancas, the late modeling agent, told journalist Michael Gross, whose book Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women alleges that Brunel repeatedly drugged and raped models. According to Casablancas, Brunel and his pals “were very well known in Paris for roaming the clubs. They would invite girls and put drugs in their drinks.” And Casablancas, who married a 17-year-old when he was 50, would have known, having used his stature in the modeling business to indulge in similar activities with young girls at a Look of the Year modeling competition at the New York Plaza Hotel, with his friend Donald Trump, then the hotel’s owner. Trump was closely involved with the contest, in which the average age was 15, and, according to The Guardian, several of the models said that they were required by their agency to have dinner with Trump and Casablancas.
NOT RUSSIAN TO GIVE UP HER TITLE It’s nice to know yesterday’s beauty queens aren’t always written off as over the hill. Oddly, Anna Malova was allowed to compete in this year’s Miss Universe pageant even though she was Miss Russia in 1995. According to beauty-world sources, it’s not a coincidence that the stunning Slav, who wound up a finalist in last month’s event, is a friend of Donald Trump, co-owner of the event. Did the Donald pull a few strings on an old friend’s behalf? “That’s something that’s never done,” a Miss Universe spokesperson says. “Russia has a pageant, and she won it fair and square. It’s impossible for Donald to select someone from another country.” Another spokesperson agrees. “That’s not the ethics of the pageant; our company has a great degree of integrity, and that’s not the way we run our company … that kind of stuff doesn’t go on in modern-day network TV.” While the Miss Universe camp insists Malova won the Russian event honestly, Malova’s agent says, “I don’t think she was Miss Russia this year. She was Miss Russia several years ago.” When asked for documentation that Malova – who lives in Trump Tower – won the title a second time (perhaps an occurrence unique to Russian contests), the Miss Universe Pageant headquarters refused to furnish it. Trump was out of the country and could not be reached for comment, and a spokesperson would only say, “I haven’t heard about Trump giving any preferential treatment to Malova.”
“Enter Jeffrey Epstein” On the morning of 9 February 1999 a small group gathered at Teterboro Airport, just outside New York, ready to catch a Gulfstream jet to Saint Thomas, second largest of the US Virgin Islands. One of the three waiting passengers was the glamorous socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who had fled to New York in 1991 from the UK on a hundred-thousand dollar annual allowance to support her father Robert Maxwell’s business activities. Shortly afterwards, the media baron with longstanding connections to British, Russian and Israeli intelligence had met a sudden and mysterious death whether from suicide, an accident or as his youngest daughter believed, murder. Her personal assistant, Emmy Taylor, waited with her. The third and final member of the group was Prince Andrew. He claimed he had met Ghislaine while she was at Oxford in the 1980s but it is far more likely he had been introduced to her through his ex-wife — both women were well-known on the New York social circuit. Andrew and Ghislaine were good friends — and over the years had been occasional lovers — and through her, the prince had come into the ambit of her boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was seven years older than Andrew and had made a fortune from his own money-management firm, J Epstein &…
"The President and the Prince" In December 2019, Donald Trump, interviewed on television, would deny knowing Andrew, in spite of extensive photographic records of their public meetings going back twenty years, including the visit to Trump's Palm Beach home in February 2000. In October 2000 both of them had attended Heidi Klum's Halloween costume party, at which Trump was quoted as saying of Andrew, 'He's not pretentious... He's a lot of fun to be with.' Shortly afterwards and clearly good friends, Trump and Andrew together were overheard at an event discussing Trump's plans for a golfing complex in the north-east of Scotland, talking entirely about 'pussy', with the American producing a list of masseuses for the prince. In a 2015 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump would be asked what he thought of former president Bill Clinton. He replied: 'Nice guy, got a lot of problems coming up in my opinion with the famous island with Jeffrey Epstein.' When a Bloomberg reporter asked Mr Trump what 'problems' he thought Mr Clinton would face, he replied: 'I don't know, but what island was really a cesspool, there's no question about it, just ask Prince Andrew, he'll tell you about it, the island was an absolute cesspool.' He was talking about Little Saint James, which Andrew had first visited back in 1999. In 2007, Epstein told one author that he had facilitated the relationship between Trump and his future wife Melania. "The first time Donald had sex with Melania was on my plane. Little did he know I beat him to the punch a year before when I was at a party of New York's top models by Metropolitan Models, one of the world's top agencies... Things got wild, and by the end of the night, I ended up almost naked in the back of a limo, going at it with Melania..."
A picture of Krauss posing cheerfully with Jeffrey Epstein
"What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening." -Donald J. Trump, 2018 "Since then, a struggle between the truth and the lie has been taking place. As alway, this struggle will end victoriously for the truth." -Adolf Hitler, 1941 "You must believe me because I have the habit -- it is the system of my life -- of always and everywhere saying the truth." -Benito Mussolini, 1924
An excerpt from the linked piece: "This winter in Israel-Palestine is a dark one, and not because the days are shorter. We have war crimes, man-made famine, and ethnic cleansing in both Gaza and the West Bank. Since early October the army has intermit- tently stopped humanitarian aid—namely food—from entering the northern part of Gaza, which has a population of some 200,000 or more. Much of that population has now been forcibly displaced toward the tent cities farther south, but it seems that tens of thousands of Palestinians are still hanging on in Jabaliya and Beit Lahiya, where the fighting and the bombing continue. Brigadier General Itzik Cohen, who is in command in the Jabaliya arena, has claimed that there are no civilians left in the north of Gaza. Oddly, many of these nonexistent ordinary people are being killed nearly every day. Here is one egregious example. On October 29, after four soldiers were killed in Beit Lahiya, the army bombed a five-story apartment building; it claimed that a “lookout” had been sighted on the roof. Nearly a hundred people died, at least twenty of them children, and we have no count of the wounded. An obscene question arises: Was it worth it—for a presumed lookout? But I can’t help asking myself: For this we created a Jewish state?"
"Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again," by Johann Hari
"One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps," by Andrea Pitzer
"Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime," by Bruno Latour