They drop some salacious nuggets about Dyncorp in this one.

The religious trip he’s been on started after the Podcast took off, maybe around 2018 or so.

He’s spoken about how he was completely materialist, not being able to comprehend the proposition that he could be spiritual or religious until recently. Most of the religious stuff is vaguely christian, but also has that weird pastiche a lot of 90’s and 80’s kids got from Eastern concepts conveyed through media.

So, you’ve got a lot of “love”, but all in service of the broader goal of self extinguishment, an ego death in order to understand oneself as a constituent part of a greater whole.

Also the faith, which isn’t placed in salvation by the grace of God or resurrection, but faith in the world eventually being upended and capitalism destroyed. The faith isn’t so much the conviction that you get with evangelicals, where you must believe it, it’s more circuitous. revolution can only be embarked on if you believe that you can succeed, and therefore faith is a prerequisite. Alternatively, he has said that if humanity fails, then you can put faith in successive sapient species attempts at building civilization; while we might fuck up and cook the Earth, we can put hope in “the Squids,” as he calls them. In this framing, you can attempt to make a change in the world (realistically on a small scale), and should you fail to do something grand, understand yourself as a component of a broader dynamic.

Ultimately, I see it as a concession that people can’t be Vulcans, and in order to live, either more fully generally or in defiance of capitalist realism specifically, one can benefit from adopting spiritual paradigms.

What are the core principles of Judaism?

Update: Found it, it was British Prime Minister Lloyd George at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

"“Mesopotamia, … yes…oil…irrigation…we must have Mesopotamia. Palestine…yes. the Holy Land… Zionism. We must have Palestine. Syria. what is there in Syria?”

Margaret McMillan’s Peacemakers (2001).

The censorship was real. The NYpost was the only traditional media outlet (if you can call it that) who would publish the story.

I remember some saying that the laptop was stolen and therefore they couldn’t report on its contents. Most people at CNN and MSNBC said that it was obviously Russian misinformation engineered as an October surprise.

I believe Facebook was preventing people from sharing the NYpost article, I know Twitter was keeping people from sharing and retreating somethings.

It was kind of wild to see. Media institutions more or less formed a consensus that the laptop was not only unnewsworthy, but that if you wanted to talk about it you were a crank who wanted to undermine American Democracy.

Wait, do we like video essays or not?

He makes good television. Nathan for You is amazing, The Rehearsal is art.

It’s crazy that Walt Jr basically invented GoFundMe for medical expenses.

Weren’t Trans Ukrainian women trying to get out first because they were afraid they’d be made to de transition and be conscripts? Like, stopped at the Polish border because their ID’s said “male” and then sent back?

Sometimes I try to tell Libs that this Identity politics more often will be co-opted and weaponized into preserving the shit state of affairs we’re all chafing under, and this is a prime example.

yeah, almost like people from a thousand years ago had different morals and values or something.

Much has been said about how Comic Books are reactionary; the only ones who try to change the state of the world are naturally villains and the status quo is defended by the protagonists. I do, however, think that a world that has been fixed by do-gooders and as a result has less strife is a less interesting setting dramatically. Could you make a movie about Mr Fantastic curing cancer or doing geoengineering to mitigate Global Warming? On the other hand, if this current cultural moment is giving us horror movies and dramas via the inventory of comic book characters, maybe we’re going to get a weird biopic, something in the vein of 127 hours, The Aviator, or A Beautiful Mind, but with comic book characters. A kind of “man against society” conflict story where a guy in spandex under a lab coat struggles to make the world a better place while reminiscing about his strained marriage and protean relationship with Dr Doom as they repeatedly come into conflict, each both trying to force the world to meet their conflicting ideals.

John Krasinski is Mr Fantastic as directed by Terrence Malick.