I haven’t heard anyone caring. The people who would be upset are busy with culture war screeching. I think the Biden admin did something very astute by upending Trump’s entire social policy within the last month - it gives a bunch of left leaning groups a win to attribute to him, and it pulled focus from these folks who can’t seem to maintain their anger at any one thing for more than a week.

Everyone I know who watches politics from the right is up in arms over the title ix stuff. None of them are paying attention to Congress right now.

Keiko

My life changed when I started using spray. Makes it much easier to reapply regularly.

In addition to this, poverty levels were set like 80 years ago based on the cost of food alone. They took an “average” grocery order, made up, and used a set percentage to extrapolate out. So say the recommendation is 30% of your income on food and then average spend was $100 ->100/0.3= $333.

So while the levels haven’t been updated in a long time, simultaneously we’ve added whole sectors of the economy that weren’t envisioned when this calculation was performed. Transportation and education are huge expenses that used to be much cheaper or nearly free. Add to that the fact that housing, transportation, education, and medical costs have skyrocketed above average inflation, and the poverty numbers are worse than meaningless.

Especially if it’s peaceful protest.

Gotta build the narrative that these are disruptive individuals. If they won’t do it themselves, the universities and states will just lie and hope that it will be enough to sway public opinion against the protestors.

Tongues and thumbs.

Elon would lie and give them the coordinates for schools and hospitals.

People will seriously scream that you can’t assume malice when stupidity explains it, but at the same time we have Occam’s razor - the simplest explanation is usually correct.

And if these people were stupid, sometimes they’d benefit the American people and harm Russian oligarchs. But the evidence shows close to 0 help for Americans, and every action they take aids or provides cover for kleptocrats here and abroad. The simplest explanation is that this is their intention.

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Seems to be real from the search results.

Literally only people on whom propaganda is working.

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That’s the problem with the security council. They’ve been using their veto to spit on the world community since the UN’s inception.

Is North Korea supplying these too, or will they just mass arrest and conscript prisoners?

Sure, Jan.

There’s a great book called The Dictator’s handbook that explains why the Russian oligarchs couldn’t give less of a damn. There’s a YouTube video called Rules for Rulers that does a good recap of it, and the overall political theory behind all of it is Selectorate theory.

The long and the short is that as long as resources are available to the elite, and as long as they have enough to keep their underlings satisfied, the only time you have real unrest is when the dissatisfication from the bottom outweighs the resource allocation from the top.

Which they’ve done a good job of preventing by keeping the populous off balance and unable to organize.

It would have worked better in Germany too if we hadn’t had the USSR in the corner sucking the marrow from the sections they were in charge of.

They do that with humans because it’s harder to just get away with killing us.

For whales? They’ll just try to revive the whaling industry.

The take is actually grounded in history.

The US has notoriously bad spy craft when it comes to Russia. We spent literal decades believing they were an equal power, spending vast sums on defense to make sure we didn’t fall behind. The government funded all sorts of “studies” but anyone who questioned the narrative got blackballed, and the people who kept getting that work just parroted back what the generals wanted to hear.

And then the iron curtain fell and the Berlin wall came down, and we saw the state of their military…and it was abysmal.

We are seeing the same thing with their basic war capabilities right now. Ukraine has been able to hold them off, more or less, for two years using mostly NATO cast off equipment and sunflower seeds.

There’s a pretty good book that goes over a lot of this by Anne Jacobsen called The Pentagon’s Brain.

This. The “just go through the steps!” people are ignoring that one of the steps is approval, which can and will be denied if it would cost them more than they could expect to recoup.