90% of a Congressman’s job is just fundraising. They aren’t working seven months a year, they’re hustling 24/7/365.

It’s just that the “hustle” mostly involves dining at high end restaurants and golfing at luxury resorts in between begging billionaires for money.

“What they’re doing is illegal!”

“Sir, you’re being served with papers for a crime you’ve committed”

“I don’t have time for this, I’m on TV!”

Genuinely curious why these chuckle fucks haven’t done a Hiroshima over Tehran by now. It’s just about the only thing they (and Israel) haven’t tried.

The only two explanations I’ve got is (1) the protocol for releasing nuclear weapons for active use is such a slog that these dipshits don’t want to go through the paperwork or (2) our nuclear arsenal isn’t remotely as battle-ready as we’ve advertised.

Has anyone asked New Mexico what they think of this plan, or is that buried with the Epstein files now?

Funny you should mention the two in the same breath…

New Investigation Launched into Epstein’s 7,600-Acre Zorro Ranch. Here’s What We Know

Jesus christ how long until they just fire up the gas chambers and skip this song and dance of a trial

We past that point ages ago. This is a purely procedural motion to legitimize the de facto summary executions and extrajudicial murders already happening in the field.

IDF thugs have been bombing emergency vehicles, demolishing every source of potable water or edible food, and wounding children in order to lure adults out of hiding with their cries for help going back… straight to the Nakba of 1948 if we’re being honest. But it really took off in 2018, during the first peaceful March of Return. Then it accelerated enormously after Oct 7th.

Anyone Israelis have captured since then has been brutalized solely for military intelligence and propaganda. Executing them is a matter of course. There’s a case of a one-year-old being tortured in order to extract information from his father, for instance. Palestinians who leave Israeli custody have often been so maimed and abused that they die within a few days or weeks of release. This is deliberate. Their executions would have been a formality at best.

America: “We’re going to destroy Iran once and for all”

Creates Iranian Singapore

You don’t even need to go back 81 years. The post-war Germans were also horrifyingly antisemitic for decades. It wasn’t until the late stages of the Cold War that the German Christian Democrats felt the need to clean up their own rotten reputation and rebrand as zealously pro-Zionist. Curiously enough, this was just about the same time anti-Muslim bigotry was coming into vogue, and anti-semitism accusations could be leveraged to denounce Middle Eastern government leaders sitting on large oil reserves.

more than

Doing a ton of heavy lifting.

But arresting and deporting parents of US citizens is a national tradition. Goes straight back to Eisenhower and Operation Wetback

I guess it’s someone else’s problem then

It’s hard to imagine

People have been called antisemitic for less

How many years ago did you conclude we’re all fucked?

Folks have been waving “The End Is Nigh” placards for a long while. Things change. Systems fail. Societies rise and fall.

This isn’t the end. It isn’t even the beginning of the end. Life will get a lot worse for a lot of people, so long as the engines of industry continue to be piloted by sociopaths. But tell that to someone in Kiev or Myanmar or Gaza, and they’ll wonder where you’ve been for the last five years.

Do the best you can with the information and opportunity you’re afforded. Don’t lose sleep over a problem your great grandchildren will be looking forward to if you’re not actually in a position to do something about it.

It’s the Philippines. You’ve had six families passing a dictatorship back and forth between one another for the last 120 years.

We all knew that electing Trump would be bad

Americans have been fucking with the Middle East since the end of WW2. You can read about US plans for regime change in Iran going back to Truman - some obviously more successful than others. Trump’s a sloppy fuck-up who can’t actually execute a strategy, sure. But this isn’t his strategy. This invasion has been a neoconservative wet dream for nearly 50 years.

The situation in the Philippines isn’t the consequence of Trumpian foreign policy either. The Philippines has been a de facto US colony since McKinley (with brief interruption by the Japanese). We have them slaved to our merchantilist trade policies, trading their labor for pennies while we sell them overpriced utilities and military technologies at an obscene markup. The spike in energy prices wouldn’t be a problem for them if they had a domestically owned and operated energy industry, rather than being naked to the fluctuations in the spot price of Brent Crude.

Really great job, Americans.

The system is functioning exactly as it was intended. Now the only question is how hard we can squeeze Filipino workers before they push back or get crushed into a paste.

any third partiy that handles the IDs and biometric data that they receive to perform age checks are forced to delete said data within 7 days

With any system such as this, the open question is always “Why would I trust you to do this?” Because we’re asking a large state-affiliated agency with a huge incentive to mine biometric data to abide by an ethical guideline that neither they nor their state-affiliate have an incentive to enforce.

I did read something about Spain fining Yota for mishandling data

Spain’s AEPD fined Yoti Ltd €950,000

The company’s most recent published revenue figures, cited in the resolution as of March 2025, stand at €15,029,907

So, this is well below Yoti’s public revenues, making it look more like a cost of business than a serious deterrent. More importantly, I don’t see anything in the article suggesting Yoti lost contracts or future business opportunities as a result of this fine. Neither were any of Yoti’s executives or lead employees found liable for the infractions.

The violations relate to Yoti’s Digital ID app as operated in Spain. Data processing takes place on servers in the United Kingdom, with manual verification support from Yoti’s Security Centre in India. Transfers from the UK to India are covered by EU standard contractual clauses with a UK addendum.

Is Yoti still operating in Spain? Is their information still taking place on UK servers and processed a continent away in India? If we know the system to be insecure and identities mismanaged, why would Spain continue to do business with a known bad actor? Why are these penalties only civil and not criminal?

Is the Spanish government or private leadership in any way benefiting from these data breaches? And, if so, what incentive does the Spanish national authority have to escalate sanctions in the future?

Humanity needs to decide what level of barbarism we will collectively tolerate.

Historically, the bar has been set extraordinarily low. But that’s largely based on the question of informed consent. Articles like this aren’t going to show up on FOX or ABC or CBS, so long as the people perpetrating the crimes are Israeli. By contrast, if an Iranian or Russian or Chinese or <insert scary country here> police force engaged in such an act, it would be held up as an excuse for carpet bombing their power plants and assassinating their university professors.

If we allow them

We aren’t in a position to allow or disallow without a large scale mobilization of labor. Even then, a lot of what you’re talking about begins with boring bureaucratic shit like petitions and marches. The violence doesn’t just go away because some pollster can show a broad public disgust (for - again - events the major Western media isn’t interested in covering).

Without assess to mass media, the public remains broadly uninformed and disinterested. Without a mobilized labor movement, there is no organizational support for individual dissent.

Even when such things do exist (Italian and Spanish citizens have been at the forefront of the BDS movement), there are countervailing forces among the plutocracy that obstruct material change.

The belief that you can unilaterally or rapidly affect sweeping international policy changes - that you are some Great Man of History who has volunteered to be apathetic - is going to drive you insane, if you let it.

John Yoo rides again

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty.

Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

It’s nicer to live in the US than in a country the US has decided to re-colonize

They’ll be blind inside a month trying to work like that.

The trick is how to accomplish that in a country which is actively hostile towards education and working class empowerment.

It’s a real snarl, no doubt.