Kathy Hochul delivers her second [nice] surprise in the past week. I've never been a fan but maybe she sees the kudos that Pritzker is getting for pushing back at the fat fucking moron and his drug-addled partner, and she's decided to join the club. Welcome Kathy. See if you can get your neighbor that asshole Phil Murphy to pull his head out of his ass.
Phil Murphy has been awful.
Also Polis in Colorado with his "RFK Jr. might have a point" schtick.
2.1: On the congestion pricing stuff he has been a complete opportunistic asshole. Does that extend to other areas as well.
He tried to wrangle Menendez's Senate seat for his wife, which was not just a terrible look but speaks to an ego that desperately needs brutal deflating.
2: The congestion pricing was what I was thinking of.
I am actually wondering if Trump's "Long live the king" and posting a picture of himself with a crown is finally a rhetorical bridge too far even for his fans.
And I am almost annoyed that Hochul came out swinging on congestion pricing. If I have to forgive her for everything else I'll be pissed.
7- my impression is that, for any individual fan, if something happens that would be a bridge to far, they deny that it really happened. The specific events are different for different people but the pattern of deflection is consistent.
Trump said it but didn't mean it, or it's a joke, or a staffer said it instead, or no one actually said anything and the media is inventing it, or it's a false flag operation...
The January 6 riot made this really clear. For a bunch of people, it would be appalling if that happened, so it didn't. It was a false flag operation and all the violence was caused by antifa. Simultaneously, for a different bunch of people, the rioters were true patriots who deserve medals of valor. Do individual people jump back and forth between groups, sometimes mid-conversation? They sure do!
I think that's right. It's emotion first, and then padding words around it that sound like some approximation of how people generally sound in conversation.
As I see it, the explosion of lies is a sign that the Musk/Trump Administration is cracking up after just one month in office.
So what should Democrats do? Nothing. Trump and Musk have created this situation, even as they try to undermine our democracy. They should be forced to own the disaster they made, and not a single Democrat should vote to help them out.
I like reading optimistic things from smart people, but I think Krugman (probably deliberately) leaves out the fact that the "explosion of lies" is key to Trump's appeal and his success in the real world.
His critique is largely a critique of policy, but Trump doesn't care about policy. Will that matter in the end? Maybe! Krugman correctly points out that Medicaid, for instance, is a program with real consequences that his supporters might notice.
But so far, I've generally been impressed with the ability of Trump/Musk to target broad assaults at their real enemies: Education, science, poor people, anti-corruption efforts, etc.
We do have four years for this all to play out, so I'm hopeful that the consequences will become apparent. Starving children in the Congo or US bribery in Nigeria aren't going to move votes -- at least, not away from Trump; foreign malnutrition has electoral appeal in the US -- but it's going to be pretty easy to tie the next plane crash to Trump policies.
And the fall of Ukraine? I'm not so sure. Trump could succeed in rebranding the Ukranians as fascist freeloaders. He's good at that.
I think Krugman is pretty much right. The frantic efforts to rehire the fired employees are probably the clearest sign that they're flailing. Still doing a lot of damage, of course.
He tried to wrangle Menendez's Senate seat for his wife, which was not just a terrible look but speaks to an ego that desperately needs brutal deflating.
Hilariously, they fucked this up so badly that the courts dismantled the entire corrupt "county line" system that the machine used to control elections.
We do have four years for this all to play out, so I'm hopeful that the consequences will become apparent.
Man, I've been feeling bummed out about having four years of this shit, but I'm always appreciative of a positive spin!
Not a full four years, heeebie! Only 47 more months.
14 and 15: Do you all think Trump will live until the end of his term? Vance, of course, is evil and it might be no better. Just sayinthat we might be rid of Trump before then.
Trump is going to die on the toilet from swallowing what was previously impacted feces, but not until 2028.
8, 19.
Governor Hochul saves LB from having to praise her further.
is finally a rhetorical bridge too far even for his fans.
Not even close. They will consider it successfully trolling the libs.
It is interesting to me that I am aware that two small planes collided in Arizona yesterday. I don't think that news would have reached me six months ago.
Sound travels further in the winter because of the density of cold air.
That sounds like National Weather Service propaganda to me. I'm glad we're cutting back on those entitled bastards.
T26: I no longer think there is any rhetorical bridge too far at this point. Some massive unmistakable calamity might peel off 10-15% but it would need to be huge.
my impression is that, for any individual fan, if something happens that would be a bridge to far, they deny that it really happened
This has been my impression as well. The most dramatic I heard was when I had the bad luck of getting a camping spot next to two guys in the neighboring campsite who seemed to be friends but disagreed about politics. They would talk politely about stuff and then veer into escalating loud yelling matches over politics. One of them, who was annoyingly pro-Nader, would keep coming back to a list of verbatim quotes Trump said that he'd sent his friend. The other guy, who pretended not to be a Trump supporter but who strongly believed that the DNC is the most corrupt institution in America and talked like a committed Trump-wing Republican, counterargued that either Trump never said those verbatim quotes or that somehow the quotes could be put in a context where they meant something completely different, and whatever that context was, it was the only context that could be correct.
Some massive unmistakable calamity might peel off 10-15% but it would need to be huge.
Luckily, reciprocal tariffs starting a trade war is a really good way to make a huge calamity.
Sound travels further in the winter because of the density of cold air.
Especially in notoriously cold places like Arizona.
The job losses are going to hit the Leopards Eating People Faces Party members too. If I had to bet, a critical mass of people will be in an uproar by the summer, and Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act and go Tiananmen Square.
So watch for military leadership to start getting purged and replaced.
The job losses are going to hit the Leopards Eating People Faces Party members too.
If the response to the NIH cuts is any indication, their Congressional representatives would rather beg Elon Trump than exercise independence. They're probably making lists of the most delicious faces in their districts right now.
I want Canada to win this hockey game more than I've ever wanted any sports outcome in my life.
34, 36: Yes, the attempted countermeasure will be to try to reverse it for specific areas and subgroups to forestall R dissatisfaction*. A complicated thing to pull of and will get lots of scrutiny. As always, the fun is seeing how it works out! A lot hinges on how faer in Fox News is willing to go?
*For instance Katie Britt has already raised the alarm about NIH grants going to the U of Alabama.
Universities without menstruation-related sports teams probably won't get as much help.
37 Yes. US Leading as I write.
34 I don't think there'll be enough uproar. We'll see.
Rs only need to lose enough juice to lose the House 20 months hence. That'll be a big deal.
They've abandoned the GTMO as immigrant jail project in such an abrupt fashion. I know folks in the various groups litigating this think their impending victories made this inevitable, but I have a different theory: That Guardian story showing that all the profit from GTMO migrant detention was going to an Alaska Native corporation completely deflated Trump's interest in the project. Convince me I'm wrong!
Yeah, for 7 et seq, let's remember that Elon Musk publicly performed a Nazi salute, refused to deny he had done so, and got essentially zero pushback. I'm old enough to remember when Nazis and their symbols were considered really bad.*
*Of course, I'm also old enough to remember when they were the amiable, if incompetent, goofballs running Stalag 13.
Bannon apparently noticed and decided to try it himself.
Maybe everyone involved was too lazy to travel to GTMO for their suffering-as-ASMR fixes and they didn't have another reason to send immigrants there.
In the future, they'll paint GTMO red, pollute its air, put a bag over that SpaceX guy's head, fly him there on a fake spaceship, take the bag off and tell him the Mars mission has been accomplished but the spaceship broke upon landing, tell him a new mission will be there to rescue him in a year, and then leave by boat without him.
So googling around about Hogan's Heroes, I have now learned that Robert Clary -- Corporal Lebeau -- spent three years in a concentration camp. What a world!
That cast was remarkable. Klemperer fled the Nazis as a kid. And Crane was a pervert who was like 40 years ahead of the technology.
Ukraine will not fall. You're less important than you think. Caveats later.
If I had to bet, a critical mass of people will be in an uproar by the summer, and Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act and go Tiananmen Square.
You'd be willing to bet that by 30 September this year Donald Trump will have ordered the US army, marines, or National Guard to open fire on a protest against him, and they will have obeyed and killed at least ten people? (Tiananmen Square killed 300, and that's according to the Chinese government, so might well be an underestimate. But let's say ten.)
Care to put $20 on it?
There's an amount of shouting at clouds in Trump, so am not very sure about the Tiananmen Square thing. He just does not seem aggressive in quite that way. Nor is he adventurous, so I don't believe in the expansionist threats either. Wall building, moat digging, yes. Recklessly and culpably negligent in terms of his casual verbal threats, yes.
Trump is too pouty to respond with force to protests. If the tide turns heavily against him, he'd hole up with Fox News. Tiananmen Square would only happen if he hands over military decision making altogether to Musk or something.
There was a great cartoon by a Portuguese artist showing a man standing in front of a row of armored cybertrucks.
49: I'll take that bet, and be even happier if I lose. Only caveat is that if more than one but fewer than 10 are killed, it's $10 to you.
The push has already begun to remove military leaders who were critical of or an obstacle to Trump in the first term. If the Pentagon and the services can resist that, then I'm probably $20 poorer but much richer in terms of how my country goes. If this first purge succeeds, then it's all working toward the Leader and anticipatory obedience in uniform.
Kent State was only about 2000 protestors, what it took was nervous young men with guns hyped up by their side's leaders and then feeling backed into a corner, and then it's Neil Young songtime forever more. If there's Guard officers working toward the Leader versus a crowd less than half the size of what fits into Tullahoma High School's football stadium, all you need is one trigger-happy squad leader and it's martyr city.
Another readily imaginable scenario is something like Yanukovich's goons during the Euromaidan protests. In that case, the central government actively wants martyrs, as a way of cowing the rest.
So yeah, sign me up for a bet I hope to lose.
I guess 53 qualifies as today's entry for "Ask a Germanist How Bad Things Can Get."
I didn't expect to be doomy enough to kill the thread!
(Or is it just that nobody's sufficiently bored at work yet?)
It sounds grimly plausible, but it's not an area where I know enough to have any kind of reliable judgment. I have been thinking that Trump and Musk are probably intending to turn the US military into something that will reliably fire on US civilian crowds, but again I have no real sense of how possible that's going to be for them to do.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/25/donald-trump-general-mark-milley-crack-skulls
https://theintercept.com/2022/05/06/mark-esper-trump-george-floyd-protests/
He wanted to do it last time.
might well be an underestimate
Almost certainly. But the numbers weren't the point; turning the military on citizens was. Trump has not been ambiguous or cagey about his beliefs on this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/us/politics/trump-2025-insurrection-act.html
Mr. Trump has long been attracted to the strongman move of using military force to impose and maintain domestic political control. In a 1990 interview with Playboy, he spoke admiringly about the Chinese Communist Party for displaying the "power of strength" a year earlier when it used troops and tanks to crush the pro-democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
Many years later, at a 2016 Republican primary debate, he claimed that his comments in that old interview did not mean he actually endorsed the crackdown. But then, as he continued talking, he described the Tiananmen Square demonstration as a riot: "I said that was a strong, powerful government. They kept down the riot. It was a horrible thing."
What do your friends in the military think about this - do they think it's likely that US troops would shoot protestors dead on orders from Trump?
Everyone I know who was in the military has retired. I don't know young people.
I think it would not be hard to get the military to fire on civilians. It's not that hard to get the police to fire on someone that they've decided is a Bad Guy. All you'd need is for 1/3 of the military to be earnest Trump supporters who believe they're firing on Bad Guys.
I know this contradicts what I said earlier, but all I meant was that Trump himself is too squeamish to order anything like that.
I don't know whether or not the intermediate psychopaths in the chain of command are detached enough to go for it.
I'm the same as Moby with not knowing people on active duty. And what I'm envisioning is less a Tiananmen direct order and more of a scaled up (or multiple) Kent State.
(Though an anti-Maidan type of action would definitely be direct orders to an elite-ish unit or group of units. "Kill a few of those insurrectionists and show them who's boss. The rest will melt away.")
MAGA in the upper ranks that starts to emphasize the supposed invasion on the southern border. They'll play up the assassination attempts against Trump and claim Dem electeds are calling for violence. (Already seeing this in MAGA-oriented social media - just spotted one saying Gov. Shapiro was involved in the attempt in Pennsylvania, neatly joining the two notions.) Any protests will be painted as our cities being occupied and burned. The WH order might be "shoot looters," or it might just be "use all necessary force." Either an ambitious true believer will take it from there, or, like at Kent State, parts of a unit will feel cornered and open fire.
If you're wondering how nutty and close to violence parts of the American right are, the answer is "There are more slaves in America today than there were at the time of the Civil War. American federal elected officials, the Dems/Rinos/Globalists have been allowing it."
I think it'll would be extremely hard now to get the military to fire on civilians, anfter two or three years of Trump/Musk running rampant through our institutions including the military and things would be different. And the National Guard is another matter.
Like, suppose the campus protests from last spring were going on again. Texas State Troopers were sent in to UT. It's not hard to imagine the National Guard being sent in, if it ramped up again.
64 crossed with 62 and 63, but very compatible!
If you're wondering how nutty and close to violence parts of the American right are, the answer is "There are more slaves in America today than there were at the time of the Civil War. American federal elected officials, the Dems/Rinos/Globalists have been allowing it."
I can't tell if a lefty person is saying this about the incarceration system, or a righty person is saying this about human trafficking. (I'm guessing it's rightwing because of "Rinos/Globalists", but honestly, the extremists on the two sides meet around in the back to breed conspiracies.)(Or maybe it's not about human trafficking?)
Excuse the typos in my 63. I've had beers after a boozy round of golf and am now at the pub having more.
How can you have more golf in a pub?
I once knew a guy who got arrested for breaking the window of a bar because his friends pushed him into it. The friends weren't arrested because it's a lot easier to get away when you haven't been shoved through a window.
A pub here regularly sponsors a golf brunch. You can get beers on the course and after all the groups are done everyone heads to the pub for the brunch part.
This was the last one before Ramadan
Barry's so drunk that he missed Moby's joke.
I'm really glad Canada won the hockey thing which is something I only learned existed last week.
https://pepperminttaste.wordpress.com/2015/07/16/canadian-stereotype-comics-by-kate-beaton/
The "got fucked up on hockey" is classic
60, 62: if there's anyone here (apart from me) who does actually know any currently serving members of the US military, I would be interested to hear their thoughts on this!
66: Rightist, and Texan. Claims it's cartels and their domestic allies trafficking women and children on an epic scale. (US Census for 1860 counted 3.9 million slaves.) Claims to have taught formerly trafficked children when she was a special ed teacher in the Houston area.
75: I've asked my stepbrother, who works for the VA and is active in various veterans' groups. Dunno if/when he'll answer.
66
I can't tell if a lefty person is saying this about the incarceration system, or a righty person is saying this about human trafficking. (I'm guessing it's rightwing because of "Rinos/Globalists", but honestly, the extremists on the two sides meet around in the back to breed conspiracies.)(Or maybe it's not about human trafficking?)
I feel like you can say any two things are the same if you describe them vaguely enough. A left-winger would say that prison labor is slave labor in a moral sense, but the vast majority of them acknowledge that it's legal and Constitutional in at least some cases thanks to that controversial clause in the 13th Amendment. A lot of right-winger wouldn't care about that kind of slave labor, but would say that there's also a lot of the illegal kind going on, involving omnipresent cartels, pizzagate-like sex rings, and so on, adding up to absolutely absurd numbers (and also incidentally minimizing the effects of antebellum slavery). These two things are not the same.
75: Of the military people I know, I can't imagine posing the question.
And if I had refreshed the page before posting that I would have seen 76. Oh well. And of course a lot of left-wingers would describe the plight of some illegal immigrants as slave labor. E.g. they're doing jobs Americans wouldn't want, they have no legal recourse to mistreatment if it means they'd be deported, etc. Still very different from anything most right-wingers would care about.
There are more domestic servants in the UK now than there were in 1901, and, I am fairly confident, more slaves in the UK now than at any other time in its history.
I'm on record elsewhere predicting a "terrorist attack", thwarted or not, shortly after the economic devastation becomes undeniable. The "culprits" could be just about any target of opportunity but "antifa", possibly funded by our longtime enemies in NATO, strike me as likely.
78/80: I realize they're not the same! I'm just saying the quote, in isolation, is almost indistinguishable from something either side might say.
Even the Kent State massacre was closer to an accident than a targeted attack. I could see a tinderbox situation like that, but I'm not seeing mass protests about being laid off. It's too scattered across the country.
One of the major IRS offices is local, and they're firing 1000 people here. In a city of 100,000, that's a lot. DoD cuts will hit HillAFB and the state is blowing up the universities. So, top three employers imploding. I hope some of my colleagues sell their Teslas because they're gonna get keyed.
There's a couple of different questions about the military, and I don't know the answers to any of them (don't know anyone currently serving barring a law school friend who is I believe still a JAG in the reserves). Would top level officers consent to using troops against US civilians; would mid/low-level officers cooperate if told to; would enlisted people actually pull the triggers? Just on first principles, I bet the answer to the first question could be made to be yes after a couple of purges - a there just aren't that many people at the top, and Trump could find some maniacs to take over. Mid-level officers and enlisted people? I honestly don't know: I bet the answer today is no, but I don't know how hard that would be to change.
84: I've seen some bumper stickers that say, essentially, "I bought this before I knew about Elon."
That would only work on an obviously older car.
I do have a good friend who is in the Army (though nearing retirement), but I missed our last couple remote D&D nights, so I haven't actually talked to him since the changeover. (He's an anti-Trump Democrat, but also has a paranoid gun nut streak.)
Term 1 Trump seemed to be using Bureau of Prisons and ICE to try to build an authoritarian-style internal police. At least, reporting suggested that's where the apparently official federal law enforcement who wouldn't identify themselves came from during the 2020 protests. Maybe with control of the FBI and military, they'll abandon that strategy, but it sounds like BoP/ICE has Trumpier people, and maybe also people with less restraint.
I am also past the age of knowing people still serving in the military, but extremism in the rank and file is a long-acknowledged problem that for sure is not getting addressed now that everything is DEI.
My stepbrother has looped a couple more guys into the conversation. Both have said "I could see something like that happening," but I'll let the conversation run a bit longer before coming back with more of a summary.
People may underestimate the percentage of the American right that doesn't see violence as a means to an end, but the actual goal in itself. Unsurprising that their biggest media figure is also the best-known UFC announcer, plus the relentlessly weird obsession with comic-book masculinity, even from pasty boarding-school melvins like Tucker Carlson and Stephen Miller.
Vaguely analogous to a large cohort on the left that views nonviolence as a freestanding virtue rather than a strategy for specific situations, I guess.
Thank you for not dragging Duke into this. Nixon and Miller could happen to anyone.
I know a few currently serving in the military and Guard, and spend time with some vets. The sense that I'm getting is that a Kent State situation is more imaginable right now. Given my own experience of DC protests over the past 25 years, I think the most likely scenario is cops (perhaps local, perhaps Park Police, perhaps shipped in from elsewhere) firing into crowds and then it's anyone's guess who fires in the ensuing chaos. If the National Guard is already present it would not shock me at all if they got involved.
Vaguely analogous to a large cohort on the left that views nonviolence as a freestanding virtue
We were supposed to stop doing this?
But what I meant (but maybe expressed poorly) is not that either one is wrong or right, but just that they are existing (sort of analogous) things.
...existing things worth factoring in when trying to predict the likelihood of outcomes.
I agree that they do sure like violence and punishment for its own sake.
It seems like we're pretty much guaranteed Trump-inspired violence. Will it be by the military? ICE? Police? Vigilantes or brownshirts? Over a four-year timeline, I feel pretty confident that we're talking "all of the above."
Trump himself lacks physical courage (this is one place where the Hitler comparisons fall short). But it's pretty difficult to identify some kind of violence done on Trump's behalf that Trump wouldn't approve of.
93: Cassidy hasn't heard from Duke yet. I have to be nice for at least a little longer.
Not really though. Anyway, they always did call the cops on that in the restaurant.
So wait. Trump's KGB codename is Krasnov?
They probably didn't spend much coming up with the name.
I heard the pee tape is now rumored to be an impacted feces tape.
I realize there are many much more pressing signs of American decline, but I just noticed that there are no more Unibroue beers here and that the shelf space they formerly occupied is now filled with White Claw.
That said, I probably don't need a 9% alcohol beer.
Not when I can have two 4.5% ones.
shelf space they formerly occupied is now filled with
70 different yet equally generic IPAs.
Those are in the cooler to the left. Or right, if bars work like stages.
The cooler in front of me is imports and awful shit (white claw, iron city, pbr).
I am not sure exactly how far things will get, but Hegseth firing the senior JAGs right off the bat is certainly a step in a direction.
Optimistically, maybe only 2 or 3 times Yoo.
I've done enough psychometric work that if I say it's a scale, it is.
When my mom was moved to assisted living, my sister hid a bottle of Scotch in her room, because she's very thoughtful. Because of that, I associate the taste of Scotch with death. Or because such Scotch often tastes like burning peat.
They offered me the Crown Royal bag again.
112: I realize there are many much more pressing signs of American decline
Yeah, I wore jeans tot the symphony tonight. At least they were nice ones.
Oh, and also the deranged mob boss who was recently elected President acting to form.
He can't wear jeans because of the diapers he needs to stop shit from soaking through.
Holy fuck, new Joint Chiefs Chairman is retired general Dan "Razin" Caine.
I guess there were no Jack D Ripper's or Buck Turgidson's available.
Raised from the retirement sinecure of venture capital partner for the military-industrial complex.
I just learned that Hal Linden is still alive. I came across that while looking up Jack Soo, because someone here looks kind of like him.
129 reminds me of the US diplomat (can't remember which one) who was chatting to an admiral at a party and the admiral said oh, yeah, I'd love to be a diplomat. When I retire I'd like to be ambassador to Italy. And the diplomat replied really? That's a coincidence, when I retire I'd like to command the Sixth Fleet. The admiral was not amused.
But you know, maybe politically appointed generals are the next step!
"Hegseth had previously taken aim at Brown. 'First of all, you gotta fire, you know, you gotta fire the chairman of Joint Chiefs,' he said flatly in a podcast in November. And in one of his books, he questioned whether Brown got the job because he was Black.
'Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We'll never know, but always doubt -- which on its face seems unfair to CQ. But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn't really much matter,' Hegseth wrote.
As he walked into the Pentagon on his first day as defense chief on Jan. 27, however, Hegseth was asked directly if he planned to fire Brown.
'I'm standing with him right now,' said Hegseth, patting Brown on the back as they headed into the building. 'Look forward to working with him.'"
Hegseth is definitely on the card when the administration's biggest douchebag tournament kicks off, but man is the competition fierce.
So the Army guys talked a bit amongst themselves about Rules of Engagement, about Afghanistan, about crowd control versus force protection, and so forth. One of them speculated about a situation in which different governors give conflicting orders to their National Guard units and you get an armed standoff at a state border; he said if he was still in the Pentagon that would be one of the things he would be worried about and working on. Personally, I think that's a lot further down the road to civil disorder than even the Trump-degraded USA is at or will be any time soon, but it was interesting to hear.
Another pointed out that since Kent State, the general rule is that Guard units in crowd control situations don't have live ammunition. But also some officers think that's the wrong way to go. The phrase "some dipshit Colonel" may have been bandied about a bit.
None of them was willing to categorically rule out lethal violence against civilians in a "No way, we don't do that" sense. The conversation featured twice as many people as required for a trend piece in the NYT, so clearly it's the gospel truth.
I know we take a professional military as a given, but we also took an independent Justice Department as a given until this year. Institutional resistance appears to be crumbling really quickly and the one thing I take him 100% literally on is that this term he is dedicated to exacting retribution.
and the one thing I take him 100% literally on is that this term he is dedicated to exacting retribution.
Yep. We came at* the future king and missed.
*Legalistically and electorally, but in the king's mind by many more routes including an actual assassination attempt.
||
But his reference to the empire as a beneficium, perhaps maliciously translated as 'fiefdom' by the imperial chancellor Rainald von Dassel, aroused consternation at court.|>
Is DOGE weaponizing technical infrastructure
Just found that Farrell and Newman had a guest essay in the NYT a few days ago after tour thread finished: "This Is How Trump Will Smash the Machine of U.S. Economic Power" (should be a gift link). Farrell referenced it in the context of the reported threat to turn off Starlink for Ukraine if they did not agree to the minerals deal.
"casually" is the key word here. As @abenewman.bsky.social and I say the Trump administration seems to assume there is no cost or risk to weaponizing infrastructure for short term advantage.
is the name DOGE an international throwback to the DOGE coin and meme? or just a coincidence?
Too bad nobody with influence stood on the point that only an act of Congress can establish an executive department. This cluster of incels should have been the Office of Government Efficiency.
ooge-booge, baby
149: wow. much internet. very autocracy.
Kind of a bummer, that pup was so cute.
Strange how the DOGE logo features a gear that has 14 teeth.
144 Someone should try to FOIA the AI prompt for that image.
Anybody else catch the story that Musk's blood boy Big Balls, who was terminated from his previous internship for leaking classified information and doesn't appear to have undergone a background check, turns out to be the grandson of a KGB agent that the Soviets executed in the Aldrich Ames affair?
I suppose it's confidential information at a private company, not classified information.
The Big Balls Ames KGB part was new to me. Wild
142/3: Cute dog -- https://toddleopold.wordpress.com/2020/09/06/sunday-read-if-you-dont-read-this-blog-entry-you-wont-find-out-what-happened-to-this-dog/
https://www.jacobsilverman.com/p/prominent-doge-staffer-is-grandson
Here's what a security scholar I know well has to say about the whole thing: http://saideman.blogspot.com/2025/02/why-civ-mil-people-are-freaking-out.html
https://x.com/chriso_wiki/status/1893339509204394392?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
If the angry town halls in Republican areas are a leading indicator, the party of political violence pissing off its armed supporters might lead to some unpredictable consequences. I wonder how many places in the US are not economically viable without the federal government playing a major role in the economy.
On the other hand, I would expect federal money to return to Republican areas eventually. At least what's left over that hasn't gone efficiently into the pockets of the Elon-connected.
I wonder how many places in the US are not economically viable without the federal government playing a major role in the economy.
Nearly all of them.
94 reflects my thinking, although the only active-duty people I know (IIRC) are in the Coast Guard.
Of the military folks I used to know (Air Force), I would have much more confidence in their diligence and integrity re: rules of engagement than over-armed and trigger-happy police (cf. Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop).
But remember that the 90-day clock is ticking for DoD and DHS to recommend to the President whether to invoke the Insurrection Act due to the situation at the southern border. It's one tiny step from the "southern border" to "border zones," which CBP has already long since defined as encompassing 200 million Americans. And it's not much more of a step to expand immigration "enforcement" against protestors.
There are a lot of unknowns in the next 60ish days, and I have no confidence that past history of US military engagement on US soil will be a useful predictor of future engagement.
156:
I wonder about this too. Like, MA will get fucked over by these NIH cuts. Our biotech prowess is tied to Harvard and MIT research and of course you need a functioning FDA. Of course the industry probably won't leave the state overnight. NJ still has some Merck facilities, even though most stuff moved up here.
If we (along with the other New England states) dropped out of the Union, we'd be subsidizing Maine, but we could pay for our own stuff. Right now, we're net givers. BUT, if you take all the Federal revenue in taxes and stop runn8ng the government, we're screwed.
Yeah, calculating who's subsidizing who on a net basis doesn't fix the problem of moving money around. NYS has a big enough economy that it could be a perfectly successfully prosperous country on its own, and even more so if it joined up with with all the contiguous blue states, but federal finding is so intertwined with everything that withdrawing it all would completely screw the state over.
Man the upcoming internal fight between Kash Patel and Musk is going to be something. State and DOD too
Patel has a weapon and he intends to use it, he doesn't want Musk to destroy it before he does
Musk ruined his weapon with an implant is what I heard.
Zelensky just said that he would resign in exchange for a peace deal that included NATO membership. I don't think Europe wants to commit to a land war with Russia, so I'm 90% sure it won't happen. What's his goal in making the statement?
I'm late, but this is a much bigger crowd than last week.
More people who aren't elderly too.
As a proportion, not just absolute numbers.
"You've all read the fucking poem."
Crowd: THEY FUCK YOU UP, YOUR MUM AND DAD!
Crowd: "I sing of arms and the man, he who, exiled by fate, first came from the coast of Troy to Italy...."
WHAT DO WE WANT?
PLUMS!
WHEN DO WE WANT EM?
PROBABLY BREAKFAST!
This video illustrates what used to be a regular topic of discussion here back in the old days
https://x.com/coexistinc/status/1893687675573453014?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
I never noticed that part of Skyrim.
I thought for sure pr0n.
Instead, I clicked on weird Tron.
I'm disappointed.
Well how many toddlers do you think you could take anyway?
True, but how many could you take down?
Good news from Germany for a change
Kinda depressing what counts as good news...
I did, however, like Trump gloating and congratulating I guess because "conservative", and then the dude came out with a very strong anti-Trump and Musk statement.
"My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA. I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program. But after Donald Trump's statements last week at the latest, it is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe."
My friend in the Army just posted a link to the Declaration of Independence together with an anti-king message on Facebook. I guess that's still allowed?
CALIFORNIA
ÜBER ALLES
163: if it's part of a peace deal, though, there wouldn't be an actual land war with Russia, by definition. And Europe has been committed to a potential land war with Russia since 1949.
163: I think he's just returning the ball. Saying (mostly I think to the Europeans) I am not the problem: you are the problem.
Also a reminder to them that Ukraine is a Rechtsstaat, and America isn't; and that they don't have to pretend anything is true because Trump says it is.
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Charles also initiated the imperial Christmas ceremony when in 1347, sword in hand, he read from St Luke's Gospel at Christmas Mass: 'there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that the entire world should be taxed'.|>
157 et al: I am not at all surprised that active duty military people are saying "yes, it's conceivable that Trump might order troops to open fire on a protest, and the troops would obey, killing at least ten people". It is conceivable that Trump will suffer a mental breakdown and wander off in the middle of the night without any trousers on, like Paul Deschanel.
That is not the same as "I bet it's going to happen within six months".
Maybe I should have checked the olives were pitted before I mixed them in.
On 157, I see that document also contains a 30 day deadline that expired last week. Did anyone hear anything about a "report outlining all actions taken to fulfill the requirements and objectives of this proclamation"?
I'm starting to see chatter that Zelenskyy is mishandling Trump. I disagree. Trump demands submission but doesn't reward it: lick his boots and he just kicks you more. Further, for Zelenskyy in particular, Trump is vindictive: Zelenskyy wouldn't manufacture dirt on Hunter Biden, and Trump will never forgive him. There is literally nothing Zelenskyy could do, including resigning, or handing Trump Ukraine's entire patrimony, that would erase that animus.
Trump is a poor person's idea of what wealth looks like; he's also an idiot's idea of what a king looks like. An idiot thinks, everyone has to kiss the ring, the king can just do whatever he wants.
A king demands submission, yes, but he doesn't just get it, he has to pay for it. At the root, stationary bandit, level, he has to be the gold-giver, collect plunder but distribute it to his followers, receive gifts, but give richer gifts in return. The bigger the polity, the more complicated the exchanges, but the pattern remains. Most of all, the king has to repay loyalty with loyalty. Trump doesn't get this, and somehow has never learned despite all his decades of bankruptcies and lost credit lines. He just fucks everyone at every opportunity.
Trump has gotten away with fucking over not just his own supporters, but also his lawyers. You'd think they'd know better.
198: The bankers do know better. That's part of why he's so dangerous: the Russians are the only one who will lend to him. I never worried about pee tapes, but loans - yes.
195: Remember Stormy. She beat him on the buttocks with a rolled-up copy of the Fortune issue with his face on and he became much nicer (or some similar form of words, I forget)
I'm not sure Zelenskyy swings that way.
Reuters says Bessent and Co threatened to cut Ukraine's Starlink access during their attempted minerals shakedown; Musk denies it. This suggests to me the threat (that is, a threat to Starlink's revenue) was made without his knowledge. Best get your lube, Elon.
195, 196: I disagree. Trump has a personal dislike for Zelensky I'm sure, but he would be against any patriotic Ukrainian leader. Any enemy of Putin is an enemy of Trump.
I don't think it's just Zelensky either. He won't reward any Ukrainian leader for doing what he wants.
The thrust of 203 can be true without disagreeing with 195, 1996. "Overdetermined" is the right word here.
202: Musk did not claim that Bessent is lying. And when Musk says Reuters is lying, Musk is plainly lying. It's at least a bit of comfort that Musk feels the need to tell that lie.
I wonder what authority Bessent and Trump have to shut down Starlink. Leaving aside Musk's influence with the administration, I assume it isn't really up to him. (But of course, one can't leave aside his influence.)
195, 196, 203: The fracking NYT is on the case. Headline and sub:
Fair or Not, Zelensky Is Angering Trump. Is His Style Hurting Ukraine?
Through three years of wartime leadership, Ukraine's president has mostly played weak hands wisely. But his approach has fallen flat with the Trump administration
As is often the case, the article is somewhat more nuanced than the headline, but still pretty insulting. And to my thinking completely misses the point per 195.last and 203.
For instance this little non sequitur:
But even backers in Ukraine of this diplomatic strategy say Mr. Zelensky's showmanship is an issue.
Rather than once laying out Ukraine's position, Mr. Zelensky reiterated at a security conference in Munich, a news conference in Turkey's capital and two news conferences in Kyiv that he would reject Mr. Trump's negotiations if they exclude Ukraine.
Why that petulant little showman, demanding his country be at the table for negotiations.
If I were to fault Zelensky it would probably be that he sucked up a bit too much during the campaign. (Not that it really would have mattered for the campaign or for now.)
In particular during the very awkward appearance he made with T, he responded to T's insults ("it takes two to tango") with nervous banality. His best hope was a Trump loss, and although he clearly could not directly act on that, some pushback to that kind of Trumpian BS would have been welcome.
For instance I think Merz made the calculation to skip the attempted niceties and get to the essential conflict that was coming anyway.
206: Despite everything I have seen from them, the NYT manages to piss me off anew.
207: I remember Zelenskyy being one of the first to call to congratulate Trump, and I don't fault him at all for that. The fate of his country is on the line, and if some sucking up kept aid flowing between November and now, or however long it lasts, it was worth it.
Merz will be running a country in an entirely different situation, and getting right to the conflict is a good idea. It also helps him fend off wanna-be Trumps on the domestic right.
He came out swinging against them, too. They said the CDU was taking over their platform. He said "You want to ditch the euro. You want to leave NATO. We've worked for seventy-five years to build stability and you want to throw that away. You want the opposite of what we want." Hard money and stability still play well in Germany.
He's also had a career as a transatlanticist, not some blowhard pseudo-germano-gaullist. He regrets very much that Trump-led America has shown that it is not a reliable ally, but he has drawn the correct conclusion. You will all be very surprised to hear me report that correctness also plays well in Germany.
First good use of AI I've seen
https://bsky.app/profile/marisakabas.bsky.social/post/3liwlwvvq6k2s
If that's the feet licking picture, I'm not clicking. Seeing that once was enough.
No Moby, it's the feet licking *video*
Most of all, the king has to repay loyalty with loyalty.
One of the interesting questions is how long will it be until everyone starts thinking of Trump as a lame duck who, before too long, won't have the power to reward loyalty (even if he wanted to). That's probably a ways off, but I'm not sure.
205: the whole thing of putting their defence customers into a structure called Starshield was to give DOD more influence over it (considered a good thing at the time). But if you're in full tricky dicky, send the IRS to audit those journalists mode, well, you could make the FAA refuse the NOTAMs for the launches and the FCC take away the radio spectrum licenses.
209 seems right to me. Zelenskyy, during the campaign, could still try for a better relationship with Trump. Merz understands that ship has sailed -- as Zelenskyy himself now does.
209: Yeah, I get that Zelensky is far more constrained than Merz, but I just think he was always going to get nothing from T, and an anti-Zelensky rage-a-thon might have been (minorly*) electorally helpful to Dems (assuming it was not promoted by egregious goading from Zelensky).
*Even the "normie" Rs I know seem to have soured on Ukraine. At the beginning of the war several of ostentatious neighborhood MAGAs added Ukrainian flags to their display which subsequently disappeared.
215: could still try for a better relationship with Trump
My view is that if he did he was deluded. Minor point, however.
Even if only for appearances sake
It's hard to evaluate the behavior of people who are forced into a losing position. This problem, in fact, is one of the roots of Republicanism -- poor people deserve to be poor, don'cha know. I likewise am not particularly into blaming Biden or Harris, or even particularly unhappy about the behavior of Democratic officials now. The human tendency to blame people for the cards they are dealt is counter-productive.
If Zelenskyy had not tried to court Trump, people would now be saying (correctly, I think) that there was nothing to be gained by antagonizing Trump. I'm not going to read the NYT piece, but "Zelenskyy is antagonizing Trump" is a spectacular bit of victim-blaming of the standard Republican variety. I do wonder if the NYT explains how Zelenskyy could have avoided antagonizing Trump.
220.last: I do wonder if the NYT explains how Zelenskyy could have avoided antagonizing Trump.
Implicitly the piece sort of suggests "by not being such a showman" and to recover completely caving now. But even the article really says "by not being invaded by Putin and fighting back."
220: There are a few things that I think Democrats should try to do which would make them more like a Parliamentary party opposition.
1. Give up on the idea that Republicans will vote with Dems. My rep keeps talking about legislation to rein in Musk that only needs 3 Republicans votes to pass the House. Bipartisan solutions to rein in the Executive are unlikely to work.
2. Articulate what they would do differently. Have leadership hold regular press conferences, not just criticizing Trump but saying what they stand for and how they would handle situations differently.
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NMM to Roberta Flack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HQZdBYZAi8
https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/soulful-songstress-roberta-flack-dead-at-88/ar-AA1zGLej
|>
Well, history shows one way to Trump's heart -- a hand-written love letter. Although, I'm not sure how the Kim Jong Un - Trump romance is going now.
If that's the feet licking picture, I'm not clicking.
Just so you don't miss the accompanying text, though: "This morning at Dept of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) HQ in DC as mandatory return to office began, this video played on loop for ~5 mins on screens throughout the building, per agency source. Building staff couldn't figure out how to turn it off so sent people to every floor to unplug TVs."
I have done an excellent job of curating BlueSky. Too many re-runs of items from different like-minded people, but no Trump foot sex at all.
Who's to say that Musk doesn't have two left feet? Maybe head had surgery done as some kind of stunt about dominating the left, along the lines of walking into an office with a sink.
227: The video was posted by someone who's been doing really good reporting about what's happening in government agencies. She didn't post it just to post a weird video, she posted it because it played in government offices (and is a weird video).
229: Right. I understand that an informed person nowadays must know of these things, and I hereby express my gratitude to Barry for offering it here. But in the future, a sensitive snowflake such as myself could use a trigger warning.
The internet, for me, is constant reminder of the Mark Twain quote from Following the Equator.:
"It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you."
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They've contact-traced one of the measles-people to Heebieville. Good times!
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Yes, we've smudged our house with ivermectin to ward off Republicans.
Ivermectin is French for "winter mectin".
234: It creates a threshold they can't cross unless invited.
I never mectin Bon I didn't like.
Ugh, heebie, sorry to hear.
If it makes folks feel any better, I had my MMR immunity levels tested a few years ago when I was going to be spending time around an infant too young to be vaccinated, at the time when there were localized outbreaks of both measles and mumps going on in Phila and NYC.
Doctor came back and said my immunity was great. So the traditional 2-shot MMR series I got as a kid is still ticking 30+ years later. Hopefully that gives some peace of mind to folks who also got the vaccines a while ago.
I think I'm older than the 2-shot series? Anyway, because of a measles outbreak among vaccinated university students, I had to get another measles shot before I was allowed to go on campus.
