Octopi Wall Street

I imagine they'll vote the way that sexual predator Donald Trump tells them.

The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.

The Democrats' seeming lack of interest in doing anything effective to push back against the Trump administration is easy to understand once you realize that their giant money-sucking spam machine works even better when they're not in power.

data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mother...

"The Ones Who Said 'Actually, I Hear Omelas is Lovely This Time of Year'"

First they came for Alan Dershowitz's pierogi, and I said nothing because I wasn't Alan Dershowitz and I didn't really want a pierogi right then anyway.

Now I think about it, though, a pierogi sounds pretty good, but I'm still not Alan Dershowitz, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ …

I love the fact that a thread about a mayoral candidate's response to gun crime turned into a discussion of bodega cats.

That feels very ... very New York, somehow.

Fortunately, the federal government is working on a 100% dirty electricity standard that should take care of this solar nonsense and make us firmly dependent on fossil fuel companies again, as God and the Constitution intended.

(and incidentally cook the planet as a side-effect. Hooray!)

Why does Mamdani refuse to admit he has no plan to prevent a resident of Nevada from driving across the country with an illegal weapon to commit murders in New York? Why is he unwilling to keep New Yorkers safe by hiring enough police to form a defensive line 5 deep outside every major building?

Great that the woman has been released, but this is also another classic feature of fascism. Members of the regime in good standing can get you exemptions from the law. It gives them extra power & creates networks of patronage. Members of the opposition, of course, have no such special powers.

He does get to spend quite a lot of time playing golf, which he seems to enjoy. And posting angry rants on social media, which, while it doesn't look particularly enjoyable, apparently scratches some weird itch he has.

During the War on Terror, the US government used to send suspected "terrorists" to places like Syria or Egypt to be tortured.

Now it's doing it again, but this time wholesale and to people who aren't even credibly suspected of any crime except being in the wrong place.

"There's a lot of interest in the Epstein trafficking case right now. We need to reopen a full-scale investigation."

"Awesome. So we can finally punish the abusers, right?"

"No, so we can find a pretext for pardoning one of the traffickers."

During a traffic court case, I realized that cops teach each other HOW to lie: the specific lies that the cop told were obviously designed to make sure that his testimony checked the required boxes to get a conviction.

I don't believe that the word "moral" means what he apparently thinks it does.

I've always assumed that while Trump might have plenty of sexual skeletons in his closet, the real dirt would be financial.

In addition to providing women & girls to powerful men, Epstein also moved a lot of dubious money. How much of that was connected to Trump & is that why he's REALLY panicking?

It's satisfying to think that, whatever you might assume at first glance, all three of the athletes on that podium were people of courage and integrity. It's a picture not just about righteous protest, but also about being an ally.

What can we learn?

Probably nothing, given that we didn't learn from all the other UBI studies that showed exactly the same things.

I firmly believe the entire Trump family's understanding of cryptocurrency starts & ends with the knowledge that if they do what they're told, they get some money. That's it. That's all they know.

The idea that Eric, the dumbest of a dumb clan, has a useful opinion on the value of $ETH is a joke.

Cram people into a refugee camp and expect them to become deradicalized? Sure, that'll work. Always has done before.

And by "always", I mean "never".

Even if you could overlook the moral issues, this simply will not work. They know that. Which means they aren't interested in making it work.

I'm convinced this is the plan.

And maybe they'll require them to "work off their debt" before they're deported, thus creating a slave labor force whose services can be offered to favored corporations at bargain basement prices.

I'm sure we're all shocked, shocked to hear of a possible conflict of interest and suggestions of shady dealings involving Donald Trump. Seriously, what are the odds?

Now that DoJ officials are finally interviewing Maxwell, we can expect some dramatic new revelations about Obama's role in Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking operation.

"We will do what it takes to be even crueler and more reactionary than the Tories."

They COULD just come straight out and say that democracy is "against the national interest", and then at least we'd know where we stood.

Not that we haven't guessed, of course, but they could make it explicit.

"When supporters of yours say things that are blatantly antisemitic, you can't leave room for that to just sit there."

Tempting to answer that with "Why not? The President does."

But I suspect that wouldn't help.

"You'll love new I Can't Believe It's Not Genocide™, with all the great human rights violations you love, but 100% of the deniability. I Can't Believe It's Not Genocide™: for that creamy war crimes taste you adore, but with no awkward trips to the Hague."

I'm not saying Donald Trump isn't a good judge of people, but by his own admission he only noticed that Jeffrey Epstein was "a creep" after almost two decades spent going to parties filled with half-naked, underage girls with him.

Maybe he just likes to give people the benefit of the doubt.

A meme based on a pair of images from the Simpson's. Bart, a child with yellow skin, looks agonized, while above his head appears the text 'Bove is the worst nominee ever' in white letters. In the second frame, Bart is joined by Homer, a bald adult man, who wags his finger at him. The text accompanying this image reads 'The worst nominee so far'.

Were they perhaps "IDF-involved shootings"?

Nothing says "using the power of AI to create a reliable source of unbiased knowledge" quite like having to tweak your creation continually so that it won't accidentally veer into liberalism when the real-world facts steer the model in the "wrong" direction.

People say that the government doesn't do enough forward-thinking planning to address the impact of climate change, yet here they are proactively creating a special security force to defend the super-wealthy and their assets against climate change victims and refugees, what more could we ask for?