The parties are not the same, but what changed the GOP wasn’t a Trump-led Reform Party or a literal Tea Party so much as the heads of Jeb! or Eric Cantor painting the crenellations with blood.

The creatures outside looked from bot to man, and from man to bot, and from bot to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

“Durbin felt an emotion he couldn’t pinpoint. Relief? Satisfaction? No, he thought — this was vindication. The collegiality which was the heart of the Senate was still beating steady and strong. He turned and walked off, the KICK ME sign on his back flapping as he went to share the news.”

Ponderously phrased piffle on the reread, but to my mind at least it points toward something real:

bsky.app/profile/hull...

"Neither a Will Stancil nor a Won't Stancil be."

-sensible May Stancils

Not much of a hostage negotiation if the deal is that we pay the ransom while they keep the hostage.

If the consumer spending we socially define as necessary for decent living has moved on to less tangible items, and if very real value rises in say health or entertainment are socially erased by commensurate rises in baseline expectations, discontent seems not only plausible but inevitable.

Our devices may freely access nearly all known volumes of literary fiction, from near the genre's inception to the early 1900s. Valued as bygone generations' private libraries were, each of us holds a near-infinite dragon's hoard of treasures. Do we feel this wealth as such, or nearly so? No.

As a layman, I risk confusing myself and others should I try to stat-sniff my way to conclusions, but the seeming paradox of cratering morale attending real income rises may fade as we consider allocation, e.g. the shift of decorous consumption from durable goods to services or non-durable goods.

We may consider the existence of ghosts to have been disproved insofar as Peter Thiel still lives, and has not been unseamed from nave to chaps, Grendel-like, by a spectral J. R. R. Tolkien.

Books aren't just what the writer puts in. They're what the reader puts in, too. And some readers are assholes.