We have to kick their respective asses if they don’t take rapid, decisive action within days of the new term. We don’t have the room to wait and let them move slowly. Already, the Democratic Party is being petitioned to be bold and move quickly once they return to power. If they return to power.

And yeah, if they fail to do so, then they are complicit in the destruction of the institutions of the United States.

Frankly, I am not an organizer and I’ve not been able to make sense of how non-violent revolution works. And so, I don’t know whether or not it means the people have to open with violence. However, they can open with noncooperation and civil disobedience, and if the establishment Democrats respond with paramilitary force, that will open hostilities and show that the Democratic party is collaborating with the fascist enemy against the public.

According to US historians, the philosophy behind the US was always about diversity, equity and inclusion, especially the postbellum US, when in Reformation the all men are created equal language was clarified as universalist.

Even before then, the concepts from the Enlightenment challenged the stratified society structure of the feudal monarchies. There was a general belief that slavery was a moral failing. However, many of the framers were slaveholders themselves, and even then the plantations were leveraging their wealth and power and lobbying to preserve the racist hierarchy.

Sadly, consolidation of wealth and political power was an impetus even then, and when we abolished slavery, the landowners did everything in their power to entrap their freed slaves into their former roles. When sharecropping and debt servitude failed, capitalists invoked the truck system, child labor, prison labor, immigrant labor (notably the Chinese, later, Irish and Italians, then the various Latins), and then moving factories to undeveloped countries that had weaker labor laws and bribable officials. Our current system of wage bondage, debt bondage and the suppression of labor has shown that common Americans have never really escaped serfdom. Only it’s to corporations rather than unilateral liege lords.

This is to say, the current playbook is the same one it always was, just far more extreme and reactionary and backed by more wealth than ever before. (Rockefellers and Vanderbilts were never as rich as the top millionth of a percent we have today.)

ETA: And all that is to say that when Trump and the far right propaganda machine campaigned against DEI, it was openly abandoning the fundamental pretexts of the great experiment that is the United States of America. Trump wants to be king, but then so do all the billionaires that financed his campaign.

But even that was bullshit. Culture in the US changes rapidly across time, and takes influence not just from immigrants but from trends among the youth and international trends. It’s a rapidly moving target.

Besides which, immigrants from all walks actively try to assimilate and integrate themselves into the larger community, where natural born citizens actively rebel against the culture of their parents when they become tweens or teens.

The culture war is and has always been contrived by ownership-class-owned media, including television evangelists and megachurches. Jerry Falwell turned fundamentalist Christianity into a voting bloc, got Reagan elected in 1980 by a landslide, and the culture war was on.

According to the Newsweek article, It is unclear whether the viral photo is genuine or, if it is, whether the upside-down flag was a mistake or an act of protest by a disgruntled employee.

If it was actually like this, it was only up for twenty minutes.

Another sign that billionaires and Zuckerberg especially, have completely become out of touch with the rest of humanity.

We are merely consumers to them.

This is a regular bit on FOX News. The list all the platform points of a Democratic official and play it as if it’s offensive when they should be positive points and are, popular policies according to most polls.

I’ve seen lists played this way on FOX for years now, including the original Green New Deal.

I don’t understand how this works, and am disquieted that it does. FOX is super confident in the thrall it has over it’s viewership.

And that presumption is why the empire collapses without ever learning anything.

When companies try to build new ones, industry analysts say they frequently do so clandestinely without revealing which tech firm would use the facilities. Researchers found that among 31 Virginia localities with existing, approved or proposed datacenters, 80% had non-disclosure agreements with the companies behind the projects, the Virginia Mercury reports

There’s an old adage from the 1980s:

California passes new laws regulating the pollutant output of motor vehicles in order to protect the Los Angeles valley. (The smog there routinely posed a dangerous health risk, and probably still does. Cars have since been required to pass smog checks.)

The automotive industry of Japan responded by hiring 30,000 scientists to develop less pollutant cars.

The automotive industry of the United States responded by hiring 30,000 lawyers to contest the new regulation.

(It’s a simplification, but the gist of it is based on fact. Eventually the US automotive industry would switch over to Non-Passenger Work Vehicles, id est, SUVs which were not regulated by the California laws. In 2026, 90% of active personal vehicles in the US qualify as NPWVs.)

The worst of the worst, they said. Rapists and murderers they said.

I suspect it will be decades before there’s any chance of a tribunal going after every last officer, policymaker and custodian involved, if ever.

And the United States voted for this to happen, fully informed of the nature of the beast it was freeing to run amok.

Newsweek says it didn’t happen. In 2022.

Disappointed, though. It should have happened.

Once again, the IPO ($135/share or $2.1 Trillion) was based on the success of some long term goals like space-based data centers and a Mars colony of one million permanent residents.

This is from the same guy who promised a fleet of Tesla robotaxis by 2025.

Space experts have since pointed out that the vacuum of space does not sink heat.

Some of the assets thrown into the SpaceX valuation include xAI (which is falling behind OpenAI and Anthropic) and Starlink (which is suffering from congestion problems already and cannot be scaled up).

So this is not unexpected.

In DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) this is called accessing the wise mind. A basic technique is to write down a question, and then, while pretend you are someone you admire (Jesus, Einstein, Darth Vader, whoever) write down a responsive answer.

And yes, this is subtly what the whole What Would Jesus Do? movement was about.

Would you like to know more about this monster?

Behind the Bastards did a four-parter (the Gravedigger of Democracy series, on YouTube)
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

BTB did another two-parter series Peter Thiel and the Antichrist which I haven’t listened to yet, but I assume is about Thiel’s recent speaking tour talking about how we’re now in the end of days.

I wouldn’t say they’re doing fine. They’re kind of doing fine in the way that the US was doing fine in the 1970s, which is to say, it may look okay, but the elements that would cause the later dissolution and collapse of the US economy were already in place, and unchecked. The first big symptom was Reagan getting elected in 1980 by a landslide.

Europe is suffering from the consequences of decades of neoliberalist policy thanks to the influence of international corporate interests, and we’re already seeing the decay of socialized services and the rise of far-right movements. It doesn’t help that the tippy-top (millionth of a percent) wealthiest have far more money relative to the rest of the population, enough to buy elections outright (or buy huge quantities of land and capital).

So the socialist features of the industrialized world are likely to suffer the same fate of numerous other socialist state that impeded large corporate interests, whether it is through legal shenanigans and political maneuvering (what caused Brexit and is kiling the NHS) or gunboat diplomacy.

Provided the disc doesn’t require a phoned-in registration key. I think Bioshock started the trend along with limited installations.

SONY has always been a little enormous shit.

🪟🔪

Hey! Wow! The new 2020-era emoji are tops!

Since all the regulatory agencies that keep corporations in check are captured, we’re going to see more and more abuses of consumers, especially through EULAs and TOS.

In fact, TOS and EULA abuse is so useful (thanks to the DMCA) we’re now seeing proprietary software added into devices just to force obsolescence.

See also UNEQUAL TREATIES
See also RIGHT TO REPAIR

Cuba has made some inroads into mutualistic society. It’s the primary reason the US has sanctioned it so long and now is thinking about colonizing.

That’s disappointing.