DON’T GET COCKY:
Eugene is great. Best thing to happen for the state party Democrats in 15 years.
But the emphasis on this just as emphasis are on all special elections are often overblown.
Per the great Kyle Kondik there have been nearly 300 U.S. House special elections since the mid-1950s more… https://t.co/pfQldkO96f pic.twitter.com/jDPBtINJxO— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) March 18, 2026
I DUNNO, ASIDE FROM A TEMPORARY SPIKE IN OIL PRICES, SO FAR THEIR FREE-RIDERSHIP SEEMS TO BE WORKING FOR THEM: Trump Wonders if Crushing Iran Would Wake Up U.S. ‘Allies.’
Maybe this might wake them up: What are the odds that Trump puts a tariff-like “security fee” on all oil transiting the Strait of Hormuz? . . .
MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE:
A federal court revoked the U.S. citizenship of a man who orchestrated a massive $3.8 million COVID-19 relief fraud scheme, ruling he obtained naturalization through lies while actively committing fraud. The defendant submitted numerous fraudulent loan applications using false… pic.twitter.com/K9o80N2tPP
— US Attorney Reding Quiñones (@USAO_SDFL) March 17, 2026
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Belifu Dual Channel TENS EMS Unit 24 Modes Muscle Stimulator for Pain Relief Therapy. #CommisionEarned
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Trump Effect? Oscar Ratings Crater in Second Term.
These celebrity galas often feast on anti-Trump lectures, be it those “ICE out” pins or mocking the First Family. The messages may differ, but the target is typically the same.
President Trump.
And, as a result, Hollywood, Inc. watched awards show ratings slump.
Their ratings stabilized somewhat during the Biden years, but with Trump back in office, the ratings decline resumed. Just look at the just-released Oscar numbers.
Also, Hollywood largely stopped making (and awarding) movies people want to see. Trump or no Trump, why tune in to see which movie you never even heard of won Best Picture?
OLD AND BUSTED: Russian Election Interference.
The New Hotness? US intel hid Chinese 2020 election meddling from Trump because they opposed his policies, memo says. “Dr. Barry A. Zulauf, a member of the Senior National Intelligence Service reported that others in the intelligence community said ‘I don’t want my intelligence going to the White House where it will be used by that vulgarian in the Oval Office to support policies against China with which I personally disagree.’”
IT WOULD TAKE A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH:
Today in this episode of “Twitter is not real life,” Ro Khanna’s supposedly immense influence resulted in every single one of these socialists losing. https://t.co/vbwap6nGad
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) March 18, 2026
IN THE WORDS OF CURTIS LEMAY, IF YOU KILL ENOUGH OF THEM, THE REST STOP FIGHTING: Iranian Intelligence Minister Who Led Assassination Plots Against US Officials Eliminated In Israeli Strike, IDF Says. “Israel on Wednesday killed Iran’s intelligence minister, Esmaeil Khatib, during an airstrike in Tehran, according to the Israel Defense Forces. Khatib orchestrated the violent crackdown on protesters earlier this year and ran an agency that attempted assassinations against U.S. officials.”
UM…:
Amazon received 10,044 H-1B approvals in 2025, the most of any company in America, while laying off 14,000 American employees. They are the single largest H-1B sponsor in the country. https://t.co/f1SRUXm68l
— bitchuneedsoap (@bitchuneedsoap) March 17, 2026
THEY’RE THE POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL: Mitochondria identified as key players in a rare disease causing microcephaly.
HMMM: American Diner Gothic.
You’re not hallucinating the great weirding of America. The visual evidence is everywhere. Start with what you can see.
You’re in a small town in Wisconsin, the heart of Normal America. The transgender assistant manager at CVS has a septum piercing, a wolf cut, and a nametag that reads “Finn.” A block away, the 4channer construction worker in the Sam Hyde shooter shirt listens to Bladee and plots his impending virality. At Target, the anime section has metastasized from one shelf to an entire aisle.
These aren’t random weirdos and they aren’t teenagers in a phase. Walk through any office park and you’ll find the same aesthetic bleeding through the cubicles: anime stickers on laptops, Discord running on second monitors. They’re a new American type, young but trans-generational, as distinctive as the organization man or the valley girl once were. I call them dinergoths: what you get when economic mobility dies, suburbs become psychic deserts, and Discord becomes more real than your cul-de-sac.
The term came to me when I was trying to identify what had, over the past decade, silently washed over the 95 percent of America that lived outside of the superstar cities. Placelessness without cosmopolitanism and with complacent downward mobility. A post-subcultural “alt” aesthetic with a post-nerd fandom orientation that’s become a new mainstream. Queerness but casual and prole-ified. Dinergoth: “diner” for provincialism, “goth” as lazy shorthand for alternative aesthetics.
These tendencies are correlated. Something is making them happen together in the places previously considered to be the most normal. A new quirk of 2020s America is that geek equals goth equals left-behind American.
Dinergothdom exists as both a concentrated archetype and a mass-cultural wave. The dinergoth core is the pierced-up, gender-fluid Amazon warehouse worker who streams on Twitch, writes fanfiction, wears a furry tail to raves, runs an OnlyFans, and dreams of voice acting while working nights at the fulfillment center.
While we’re on the topic: I’m a Furry. My Community Has a Violence Problem. An insider’s account of how online fandom culture can spiral toward extremism. “Within insular online communities, political narratives can spread quickly and go largely unchallenged. Friend groups often reinforce those narratives rather than question them. Over time, identity politics and extreme ideological positions have become increasingly common in certain parts of the fandom. Criticism of those beliefs is often interpreted not as disagreement but as a direct attack on personal identity. And that reaction makes sense if you understand how identity works within furry culture.”
FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOMS: Seven-ton meteor that fell from the Cleveland sky could be seen several states away.
Related: Meteor identified as likely cause of boom heard across Ohio.
BREAKING: Rolling Stone has Mild Disagreement with Trump’s FCC Chairman, Forgets Mild Disagreement with Trump’s First Term FCC Chairman:
Immensely proud to have progressed in the eyes of a publication called Rolling Stone from “History’s Greatest Monster, Even Worse Than Hitler and the Plague” to . . . forgotten. Grateful for the honor! pic.twitter.com/aCb4A9NUaD
— Ajit Pai (@AjitPai) March 17, 2026
RABBI MICHAEL BARCLAY: Iran Shows That It Is Truly Evil and Must Be Stopped.
WHEN YOU LOVE THE HOSPITAL SO MUCH: Florida hospital sues patient who is refusing to leave.
BLUE STATE BLUES: Virginians At More Risk Thanks to Soros-Funded Prosecutors. “At the exact moment Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger and a Democrat-majority legislature are ramming through additional gun control measures restricting the Constitutional rights of law-abiding Virginians, those responsible for putting bad guys who break the law behind bars are instead going easy and putting peaceful Virginians at risk. That includes the risk of getting murdered.”
More details at the link than I would have imagined.
FLASHBACK:
On January 12, 2016, while Barack Obama was president, Iran’s IRGC seized a U.S. Navy boat.
Iran released footage showing American sailors humiliated, some kneeling and others in tears before Iranian forces.
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) March 17, 2026
“DON’T DRONE ME, BRO.” The picture says it all.
Islamic Republic prez to Starmer, Macron, "Hold my beer." https://t.co/xYiZdRQ5dY
— Northern Barbarian (@xnoesbueno) March 18, 2026
2026 IS GOING PRETTY WELL:
Maduro gone, oil flowing, beaches open, nightclubs bumping, flights landing, commerce happening, beating America in baseball…what an absolute unreal Q1 for Venezuela
— Robby B (@bobrockmn) March 18, 2026
MAKING IT PERSONAL:
The attacks hurt rank-and-file morale and drove some security forces to begin sleeping in their vehicles, mosques or other sports facilities, Israel’s assessment said.
Meanwhile, Israeli intelligence officials began placing calls to individual commanders, threatening them and their families by name if they didn’t stand aside in the event of an uprising, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Journal reviewed the contents of one call between a senior Iranian police commander and an agent of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service.
“Can you hear me?” a Mossad agent can be heard, speaking in Farsi. “We know everything about you. You are on our blacklist, and we have all the information about you.”
“OK,” the commander said in the recording.
“I called to warn you in advance that you should stand with your people’s side,” the Mossad agent said. “And if you will not do that, your destiny will be as your leader. Do you hear me?”
“Brother, I swear on the Quran, I’m not your enemy,” the commander said. “I’m a dead man already. Just please come help us.”
Stay tuned.
EVERY BEST PICTURE OSCAR-WINNER, RANKED:
90. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2023)
Daniels Kwan and Scheinert’s tiresome comic drama about parallel dimensions and roads not travelled tries to be everything to all audiences: a piercing portrayal of the immigrant experience, plus disquisition on generational trauma/neurodivergence/insert-issue-of-the fortnight-here, with Power Rangers fights, superhero franchise tropes, and homages to Wong Kar-wai.
Should have won: Top Gun: Maverick or Tár
89. Gandhi (1983)
Everyone felt it was important to like Gandhi – and agreed that Ben Kingsley was tremendous in it. Richard Attenborough enlisted a pedigree supporting cast (Trevor Howard, John Gielgud, John Mills, Michael Hordern) and ranks of extras (300,000 for the funeral procession alone), but the net result is a Western-centric, sanitised view of a complex life. It also goes on forever.
Should have won: Even Attenborough admitted that E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial was robbed.
Flashback: “The Gandhi Nobody Knows,” Richard Grenier 1983 Commentary article, one of the greatest film reviews/demolition jobs ever written.
UPDATE: I had forgotten a lot of the newer titles on the above list, and as it turns out, I was far from alone:
Modern movies just don't stick like they used to. We won't remember ANY of the Oscar winners 5 years from now. Honestly, we won't remember any of them 5 days from now. Everything is so ephemeral and single-serving, these days. When you saw the Matrix, it haunted you for months.… https://t.co/rrMyZXoe0p
— Mann Made Cinema (@Hotshot_Movie) March 18, 2026
Combining poor product with TDS is a recipe for disaster, Christian Toto writes: Trump Effect? Oscar Ratings Crater in Second Term.
OCTOBER 7 DID NOT WORK OUT AS INTENDED: Israel Is Now the Regional Hegemon Iran Wanted to Be.
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