In 1981, as Iran’s new government hunted down political opponents, a KGB officer slipped into a bathroom in the British Embassy compound in Tehran. Vladimir Kuzichkin, 6-foot-4 and broad-shouldered, sat on a wicker laundry basket that creaked beneath him. Across from him, MI6 officer Ian McCredie sat on the toilet.
McCredie poured the Russian another vodka. He left the faucets running and turned on a radio to drown out their conversation. If the Revolutionary Guards overheard them, “they would both be arrested, interrogated, imprisoned, and possibly executed, once the torture was completed,” writes British journalist Ben Macintyre in his new book, “Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy” (Crown), out now.
Kuzichkin had come with Soviet secrets. He also had a very personal and bizarre question for McCredie, though he was in no hurry to ask it.
From there, things got weird.
I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN “STATE-RUN MEDIA” WAS HYPERBOLE:
This is straight up commie shit, BTW. The State is going to enforce political content restrictions? California is indistinguishable from a communist country. https://t.co/x0XwIkycFi
VOTE LIKE YOUR LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PROPERTY DEPEND UPON IT:
Republicans looking at polls – in Texas or anywhere – and accepting defeat are engaging in self-fulfilling prophecy. Be proud of what we’ve done, admit where we need to do better, expose the radical Democrats, & decide to win. Sports Psychology 101.
HE’LL CUT OFF CALIFORNIA’S NOSE TO SPITE ITS FACE:
Funny thing, this doesn’t even include federalized national guard troops, so Newsom basically just signed a bill making it harder for other states to help us with riots, wildfires, earthquakes or any other major emergency. Great job. https://t.co/8Guxfmkmsw
NASA said Friday that the agency had given SpaceX a $946 million contract to fly three more astronaut missions to the International Space Station, extending the company’s crewed flights to the station through 2030.
The deal brings SpaceX’s total number of NASA astronaut flights under the contract to 17 and raises the contract’s total value to $5.92 billion. NASA is relying heavily on SpaceX to keep astronauts traveling to and from the station while it works to maintain a second U.S. option through Boeing.
The clock is ticking on Boeing getting Starliner certified for manned missions before SpaceX deorbits ISS in 2030.
WHAT SOME ANALYSTS EXPECT AFTER THE RUSSIAN “ELECTION” IS A STEALTH MOBILIZATION, FOLLOWED BY… NOBODY REALLY KNOWS:
As SACEUR noted, when the Russians start bringing in blood plasma—it is no longer just a military exercise.
After the first American Eagle ad, critics accused her of promoting “White supremacy.” She was outed as a registered Republican. Then President Donald Trump posted his support on social media.
Unlike most of Sweeney’s liberal acting colleagues, who can’t shut up about their obnoxious anti-Trump views, Sweeney is very private about her personal politics, demurring consistently when she’s asked about it. And she often is.
In an interview with Cosmopolitan in January, for instance, she was questioned about the “MAGA Barbie” nickname that some had given her online and how she “understood” the moniker.
“I’ve never been here to talk about politics,” Sweeney responded. “I’ve always been here to make art, so this is just not a conversation I want to be at the forefront of. And I think because of that, people want to take it even further and use me as their own pawn.”
That’s exactly what they want to do.
New Yorker writer Jennifer Wilson wrote an entire piece questioning whether conservatives have “taken sexy back” and the “political implications of cleavage,” devoting her opening to Sweeney and her SYRN lingerie campaign.
“While we were pretending not to be looking, breasts had somehow become Republican-coded,” Wilson opines.
Despite all the discourse and uproar over Sweeney and her bosom, she’s trying to live her best life and make the most of her 20s (which, trust me, go all too quickly).
I just gave a talk to some Fund for American Studies students. The assigned reading was the introduction to The Myth of Left and Right by Verlan and Hyrum Lewis. One of the very effective techniques the authors use is to show how the positions held by the left and right move back and forth over time. I don’t think they talk about porn in the book, but it fits. When I was in college, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were leading a crusade against porn as dehumanizing to women. It commodified women, turned them into objects, reinforced sexual stereotypes, etc. I think they sometimes overstated their case, but the case was pretty solid. There were definitely feminists who disagreed, but in the early 1990s, the anti-porn side of second-wave feminists had the whip hand, so to speak.
By the middle part of the decade, the pro-porn side grabbed the whip, sometimes kinda literally. Camille Paglia is a special case, but there was also Susie Bright, Wendy McElroy (author of XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography), and all the feminists who embraced sex work, sex “positivity”, etc. Suddenly, selling sex—literally and figuratively—was empowering and cool.
I think there were wrong and right opinions all along the continuum. But we don’t need to get into the weeds on all of that. My only point is that these arguments are often weaponized for essentially partisan purposes. I don’t necessarily mean Republican vs. Democrat—though that certainly happens. If Donald Trump had run as a Democrat—not at all improbable given that he was one for quite a long time—I’m sure his appearances in softcore porn Playboy movies would have offended a lot of Republicans who now couldn’t care less about his cameo in Playboy Video Centerfold: Playmate 2000 Bernaola Twins (sorry pervs, no links to the actual movie). Heck, they don’t care that he cheated on his (third) wife with Stormy Daniels, award-winning star of Sexbots: Programmed for Pleasure. Heck, given all the AI chatter these days, I’m surprised she hasn’t been interviewed on MS Now about that one. And, let us not forget that many of the people who don’t care about Stormy D now cared a great deal about Monica Lewinsky back then.
No, I simply mean partisan in terms of the culture wars more generally. I think it’s preposterous to claim that Sweeney dallied “with eugenics-inflected advertising” or “flirted” with the “aesthetics of white supremacy.” The same ads could have been made with Beyoncé, and the people who read “great jeans” as an offshoot of The Boys from Brazil would probably be shouting “you go, girl!” at Beyoncé’s ownership of patriarchal white male space or some such.
The obsession with Sweeney’s very familiar self-marketing strategy is a great example of how media bias isn’t just about left versus right. Sex sells. Ask any TV producer to choose between two hot controversies (well, at least one of them is hot). The first is about water safety and the other is about Sydney Sweeney using footballs to barely conceal her boobs. When the choice is between a story with B-roll of people in lab coats testing water samples and footage of Sweeney frolicking, guess which one they’ll pick? When the B in B-roll stands for boobs—very nice ones, at least—your notes from that seminar at the Columbia Journalism School achieve their highest utility as a coaster for your coffee. I don’t make the rules.
This morning, in response to The New Statesman piece, I tweeted that “People are just trying way, way, too hard on this topic.” My friend Kyle Smith replied, “When you’re writing about bazongas, you have to try extra hard to convince yourself you’re writing an intellectual think piece.”
Trump wants to Make America Great Again – that’s a tall order. Sweeney, simply wants to Make America 2012 Again, a much more fun era before “breasts had somehow become Republican-coded:”
I ASSUME PEOPLE SAYING BLACKPILL STUFF LIKE THIS ARE AGENTS OF THE DEMOCRATS, OR THE CCP, TO THE EXTENT THAT THERE’S A DIFFERENCE NOWADAYS:
"OK, that's nice but Trump has not yet made all of my heart's wildest dreams and desires come true, so I'm sitting out the midterms."
/sarc off
This is a geopolitical masterstroke. In an era of aggressive Chinese economic and military expansion, this pact between the USA and… https://t.co/5XPdRSvF8b
BEWARE THE DEEP SEVEN: A new arms race is unfolding on the ocean floor. “It comes amid growing concerns of so-called hybrid warfare, a broad term which can include cyberattacks, energy sabotage, disinformation, and economic pressure, with or without being accompanied by conventional military methods.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE. They were, in fact, being dicks about it.
It is kind of hilarious that the most publicly communicative and responsive and available president ever is now being accused of being anti-free speech. Because they were dicks about it.
I’ve given Claude Opus various published papers (and my own unpublished ones) and asked it to review them. (Don’t panic—I’m not uploading confidential manuscripts.)
The reviews it produces are excellent. It finds statistical errors, internal contradictions, and conceptual…
Exit quote: “As a journal editor, I’m not sure what to do with this. If I gave up on human reviewers and used GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus instead, my bosses would fire me, probably rightfully so. The only constructive thing I can recommend is that, before submitting something to a journal, researchers and scholars use this tremendously valuable resource. (Just don’t tell the models that it’s your paper, because they do suffer from sycophancy.)”
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