That’s what Trump wants.

It’s win-win. Either Dems don’t sign a blank check, and Trump uses this as an excuse to hand more power to the DHS. Or Dems do sign a blank check, and Trump uses it to fund an FBI dedicated to further dismantling the democratic state.

President Xi, I am sending you Trump’s golf schedule by way of TikTok coded message.

Please, President Pooh-Bear, you’re our only hope.

Mendacity.

He knew. He didn’t care. He just put out his hand and dared the Senate not to give him a black check.

And he’s going to get that check, because Democrats more are terrified of looking obstructionist than of looking like they can’t govern.

can you not get xenophobic and racist about it?

They can’t, no.

This is the root of the problem. Liberals are just as xenophobic and anti-Islam as their conservative peers. They are ultimately fine with Trump’s policies and more than willing to go along with them, when the policies target brown people.

That’s why you’ve got Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul, and even Gretchen Whitmer opening their state bureaucracies up to Trump’s DHS gestapo.

The “you stupid Arabs deserve what you get” rhetoric is justification for policy Democrats wanted, but were too squeemish to impose directly.

Republicans are the sword and Democrats are the shield in this Holy War on non-Christians.

Lesser of Two Holocausts

it’s all a magical story about a dude who didn’t exist at all probably

No shortage of self-proclaimed messiahs and apocalyptic prophets running around Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. Less a question of whether Jesus existed than which one you’re talking about.

American Christian resists the message but embraces the magic.

That’s hardly an American thing. All the Abrahamic religions and the pagan ones, too, were obsessed with the magical realism of their personal mythologies.

Neither were people blind, deaf, and dumb to the social message of the gospels. But people do lose sight of them as you become less like a 1st century apostle and more like a 1st century Pharasise.

There’s a link in the second paragraph to the technical details

I’m reminded of this mindset from the crypto scam surge.

Points at technical documents

“Well, it says it’s secure so quit arguing that it’s not secure”

Typically followed by

“If someone traced you/robbed you, then you were just doing it wrong”

Like, we’ve got high level white house officials feeding national security secrets to the Israelis because they just blindly implemented a “secure” Signal extension. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised people don’t look past the cover.

But come on. “You can just buy some tokens and then you’re secure” is painfully naive.

The magic of modern social media is that you can ensconce yourself in a made-up AM Talk Radio / AI-generated reality. CJ’s experiencing a bit of propaganda lag between experiencing the consequences of the policy and being told who to blame as the scapegoat. But that’s just due to us living in an in-between time with no elections on the immediate horizon.

Talk to CJ in the run up to the midterms and ask her why her husband is laid off and her kids credit scores are shit. I’m sure she’ll be able to explain in great detail how Illegal Gay ISIS Woke Feminazis are to blame.

I mean, we’re getting for it regardless of who we voted for. That’s the magic of singular senior executive in a three-branch government where the executive branch has functional dictatorship of the bureaucracy.

If Harris had won (perhaps by not pissing off big chunks of the Midwestern Arab population by repeatedly endorsing the genocide of their families) then she’d have been spared the indignity of getting what she asked for. But the wind was with the Republicans, so now we all get to hang out in the crumbling dystopian hell-hole together.

‘It’s digital colonialism’: how Facebook’s free internet service has failed its users

Free Basics, built for developing markets, focuses on ‘western corporate content’ and violates net neutrality principles, researchers say

…

“Facebook is not introducing people to open internet where you can learn, create and build things,” said Ellery Biddle, advocacy director of Global Voices. “It’s building this little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer of mostly western corporate content. That’s digital colonialism.”

To deliver the service, which is now active in 65 countries, Facebook partners with local mobile operators. Mobile operators agree to “zero-rate” the data consumed by the app, making it free, while Facebook does the technical heavy lifting to ensure that they can do this as cheaply as possible. Each version is localized, offering a slightly different set of up to 150 sites and services. But many of the services with the most prominent placement – on the app’s homepage - are created by private US companies, regardless of the market. These include AccuWeather, Johnson & Johnson-owned BabyCenter, BBC News, ESPN and the search engine Bing. There are no other social networking sites apart from Facebook and no email provider.

Incidentally, “Free Basics” and its derivatives are some of the biggest drivers of new Facebook user activity. The walled garden of internet access forces people to choose between open internet rates they are too poor to afford and being guinea pigs in Mark Zuckerberg’s AI maze of misinformation and saturation advertisement. Zuck can go to investors and insist “Our growth in these emerging markets is enormous!” and then go to the national governments of these poor countries and say “If you don’t legislate favorably, we’re going to flood your populations’ media feeds with advertisements by the political opposition.”

Can’t stop. Won’t stop.

Mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell.

You’re thinking of The Moops.

The perfect hand doesn’t ex-

What Republicans have come to realize (and Democrats refuse to accept) is that you can just DO THINGS at the executive level. And if the bureaucrats follow along, then you’ve functionally established new policy.

The Iowa legislature can pass a rule saying “No more issuing marriage contracts to gay couples” and the state courts can say “Okay, we’ll stop doing that and we’ll also stop recognizing existing contracts”, and all the low level county officials can just ignore the legal status of gay married families and then private businesses can follow suit. And then that’s it. No SCOTUS decision is going to pay out on insurance benefits claims to a legally de-certified no-longer-spouse.

On the flip side, the Iowa legislature can author this act and the people of Iowa can rise up in protest and say “Fuck you, we won’t do what you tell us.” Private businesses can continue to honor marriage contracts. Low level bureaucrats can continue to treat gay couples as married. Mid-level bureaucrats can defend and promote them. High level bureaucrats who continue to force these abhorrent laws on people can be removed from office.

The problem is that… the fish rots from the head. More likely than not, we’re seeing this push because Iowa’s basket of deplorable plutocrats want to expand the number of minorities they can piss and shit all over. Just like how DOGE gutted the “Woke” federal bureaucracy, I suspect we’re going to see Iowa state leadership tearing the spine out of any state or local government agency that refuses to accept gay rights are expired.

Do you have the courage to stand up to your boss? Do you have the support of your friends and coworkers to call a strike in a business that singles out the LGBTQ folks who work there? Will you march on your city council and demand they take your side or get out of the way? Will you march on your state house? Will you stare down a bunch of bigots in badges when you do it?

This is a big ask and its not easy to find enough folks willing to stand up for what is right.

In fairness, the thing he said that got everyone upset was “I am the King of Kings, abandon all your worldly ties and join me on a pilgrimage to the capital city of the Levant. I will fulfill the ancient prophecy of a new independent Jewish state blessed by the One True God who may or may not also be me, we’ll sort that out in another 300 years.”

But the “Good Omens” line makes for better dark comedy.

There is a massive functional difference to anyone with two braincells to rub together.

There’s a massive cognitive dissonance, certainly. And your brains are practically smoking, trying to juggle the contractions.

The only reminder of the triad’s existence is infiltrator trolls who make alts on other instances to post bad-faith arguments glazing the core devs.

IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS

Write me a better ending the Game of Thrones in five sentences

A special irony in it, because the “no we won’t help” crowd is calling the dev base Russian shills.

But they’re still using the “Russian” service? Even though they poo-poo Yandex for also being a “Russian” service?

Lemmyites are just as baby brained as the Reddit community they fell out of. Absolutely embarrassing.

I love to mock people who use the library by shouting “If you’re not the payer then you’re the product!”

Westerners are so baby-brained on this shit. Kagi can take your money and still spy on you. Yandex can not take your money and still not bother caching your search history, because there’s no good way for them to monetize it. Nevermind GitHub or Wikipedia or literally any other public good being hosted on any website anywhere.

The delusion that you’re safe using a free service is matched only by the delusion that you’re protected because you paid someone money.

It is funny to see people relentlessness stanning a paid service that’s built on a notoriously fraud prone crypto stack, then getting paranoid about something about as sophisticated as Lexus Nexus because it’s hosted out of Evil Country.

I hope nobody here bothers to interogate where their torrents are being hosted from too closely.

That was a bullshit twist ending and if dragging out an aging Schwarzenegger to do some of the stiffest line-reads in his career hadn’t spoiled the franchise, I’d say this was what put it out to pasture.

The thing that made the first two films (and the short-lived TV spin off) cool was this idea of a modern day insurgency against a dystopian future. As soon as you concede Judgement Day is irreversible, it sucks all the drama out of the story. Now you’ve just got What If Rambos Were Robots And They Were Fighting: The Movie, minus all that social baggage about Vietnam.