DC is bumper-to-bumper guys heading to think tank jobs to lobby the defunding of health and education programs. We’ve been doing this Murray Rothbard’s heyday. It’s one of the various “third-rail” issues of politics that politicians keep getting bribed into grabbing.
Yes, yes, we’re stealing from social programs to fund a fucked up war machine to support Israel and randomly attack countries for any reason, yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_Libya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_Syria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001–2021)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spartan_Shield
Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
Trump spent most of his political career casually mocking the warmongering and deficit hawkery endemic to both the George and Bill administrations (in favor of his own brand of at-home white nationalist police state).
That was his whole path to victory over the GOP Primary field in '16 and again in '24. He ran - quite literally and explicitly - as a Mussolini style “national socialist”. Nakedly and unequivocally fascist in the 1930s sense of the word.
Now he’s just another John Bolton / Jim Webb neoconservative. Everything the public soured on decades ago is coming back up like swamp gas. No wonder even lay Republican voters are souring on him. He’s indistinguishable from Jeb Bush.
Under socialism, you will live next to a first generation immigrant from a country full of brown people, you will eat their food, experience their culture, and work side by side in pursuit of a better life.
And you will like it.
We’re getting tantalizingly close to Repo: The Genetic Opera
Oh ho ho. You thought they were just racist against Muslims?
Well, buckle up, buckaroos.
You can just get another re-keyable lock for any added later locks or replacement lock sets.
All things that are a pain in the ass.
I saw someone being interviewed who didn’t know who hilter was. Apparently genuine.
There was a bit that Conan O’Brian used to do back when he had a late-night show. He’d go out and do Man-On-The-Street interviews in… Times Square, I think? Can’t remember if he was LA or NY. But he’d ask some absurdly complex question and get this excellently reasoned and well-thought out answer from randos. And then he’d ask what they did for a living. It was inevitably some NASA engineer or finance professional or other well-educated individual. And they were all just… in the crowd. Because in a city as big as that, of course you’re going to get this extremely mixed bag.
On the flip side, there’s Sailor Socialism, a podcaster and aspiring actress who baited an interview with an InfoWars reporter, in which she was dressed in a sailor fuku, then went viral talking about how she wanted universal health care and liked Bernie Sanders.
Interview twenty people and edit the content down to the one or two who make for good entertainment. It’s a tried-and-true strategy.
No way the general populace is that stupid.
It isn’t an issue of stupidity. Not like “Edward Snowden” is a name you can conjure up from first principles.
He was headline news back in 2008 and now he’s not. Anyone who wasn’t following national news nearly twenty years ago likely won’t be familiar with him. No more than a Millennial is going to know who Daniel Ellsberg or Robert W. Jackson are.
The entire Wikileaks project has been more or less obliterated.
Did you notice your electronic locks all have keys for when they fail?
No, because I don’t have them. I have a fake rock with a key in it and generally don’t bother locking my front door anyway. But I’m lazy and cheap, not terribly interested in changing out all my locks myself or paying someone else to do it for a marginal quality of life improvement.
Still, if you have a need for locked gates, a set of combination locks all set to the same combination or keyed locks with all setup for a single key once again minimizes the need for a bunch of bulky keys.
Sure. And if you’re setting up a security perimeter from first principles, that’s fine. But then you add an interior gate or you need to replace a lock that’s rusted through or yadda yadda life happens, and you can lose the single key design.
Case in point, my front door lock did foul a few years ago. My wife changed out the front door but didn’t bother to sync it with the back door. She didn’t want to bother with an electronic lock because she thought they were too expensive. So now we’ve got a front door that doesn’t match the side door or the garage door. And we only have two keys to the new lock, one of which has been lost almost immediately.
A digital system that I can just sync from my phone would be far more appealing than juggling keys. Or staring at a key dish and trying to remember which ones actually link to which doors.
You still need an interface. Bunch of ways to do it.
I just don’t understand the desire to control everything in your house with an app.
Shrinking the size of my wallet and getting rid of all my keys has an instant appeal. I’d much rather just carry around a single phone-sized multipass than a janitor’s worth of hardware for accessing a dozen different gates and appliances.
I work in IT and I’ve got most of those things.
But it is largely due to the inconvenience of installation relative to just coasting on existing home infrastructure. I also don’t bother with roof solar and home battery backups, a household wide firewall, or anything connected to a raspberry pi. Just implemented Jellyfin over Christmas and my wife regularly throws up her hands at it, preferring Amazon Prime or HBO Max at every opportunity.
For the most part, the cost of an individualized IT component isn’t worth the pain of support. If I was looking for an apartment or a condo, I would absolutely be interested in their building wide IT setup. But the whole point of IT is to deliver at scale. Homelabing can be a fun hobby but it’s a shit-pay second job.
Reagan had really done us dirty
He definitely kicked the county while it was down. But a big part of the US Golden Age was being the last economy standing after WW2.
The end of America’s economic dominance was inevitable, as old colonial powers re-industrialized and newly liberated post-colonial states gained control of their natural resources for domestic use.
By Nixon, American global dominance was sunsetting regardless of our domestic policies. That’s why we gave up the gold standard and adopted the Petrodollar as a globalized economic strategy. We couldn’t just import everyone else’s gold and sell it back to them at a premium anymore.
Panama makes some sense, because of the loch system.
It helps to know the history of Panama. Namely, how it exists because an independence group was sponsored by the US to break away from Honduras, because that group would then give the US better terms for using the soon-to-be-constructed canal.
Each ship that passes takes a lot of their drinking water, and they don’t need to bomb ships to stop them passing.
Ask Noriega about that.
It’s crazy how Iran deciding to start taking fees for shipping is a blockade, when the entire national business models of Singapore and Panama hinge on their ability to do exactly this.
They’ll get him eventually
A system’s purpose is what it does.
This system appears to be functioning exactly as intended.