#and it’s been around for over 40 years elon

[telesilla]

Can you even imagine trusting all your money and securities to fucking X?

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ross Rosenfeld at New Republic:

As the old saying goes, there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Elon Musk has demonstrated mastery of all three, often simultaneously. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has made wild claims about the savings it has supposedly accrued during its blunt force takeover of government institutions, including the Office of Personnel Management, where Musk’s minions—some just recent high school grads—are wreaking havoc.

Before Trump took office, Musk promised to find $2 trillion in savings each year, despite the fact that discretionary spending totals only around $1.8 trillion. So far, no such savings—or anything close—has materialized, and no evidence of the massive waste and fraud Musk vowed to uncover has emerged. Instead, Musk and the Trump administration keep throwing out random figures that are misleading at best, and often downright lies. Their goal is not merely to apply a veneer of truth and legitimacy to their wholesale wreckage of the federal government, or to make it even more difficult for the fact-checking media to keep up with the Trump administration’s relentless, dizzying moves. It’s also a sleight of hand to make it appear as if it’s not corporate titans like Musk himself who are receiving sweetheart deals and robbing the American people blind, but “deep state” bureaucrats, DEI recipients, and African children. Though Musk alleges that the government is rife with incompetence, he and his DOGE team appear most incompetent of all, having created a website that was easily hacked last week. But that pales in comparison with the dubious statistics published on the site and spouted elsewhere by the administration. Some examples: DOGE posted claims of $16 billion in savings on Monday, half of which it said came from the elimination of a single contract for a diversity program at ICE. They were only off by a factor of over 1400, since the real savings from the canceled contract was no more than $5.5 million. As The New York Times pointed out, the contract they cited was actually for $8 million, not $8 billion—and $2.5 million of it has already been spent, and thus is unrecoverable. Even after the mistake was pointed out, DOGE continued to assert the $8 billion figure. The Times also noted, “A larger total savings number published on the site, $55 billion, lacked specific documentation.”

Not only was that $8 billion complete bunk; turns out, so were the next three highest “savings” claimed on the site. DOGE professed to find another $1.9 billion in savings from terminating three contracts for USAID, each for $655 million. But these contracts were what are known as Indefinite Delivery Vehicles, or IDVs. Such contracts allow the government to set spending limits but do not require it to meet those limits, meaning that it can cancel the contract at will. So far, the government had spent only $55 million of that $1.9 billion. It’s worth noting that spending on USAID—which Musk called “a criminal organization” and the Trump administration has unilaterally (and possibly illegally) shut down—is not wasted money, but brings tangible benefits, including providing HIV treatments in Africa, countering Russian propaganda, and aiding civilians devastated by war in Syria and Ukraine. It’s our best tool for soft power, burnishing America’s image around the world by providing material help where it’s need most. And despite Donald Trump’s claim that “billions of dollars have been stolen” by the organization, former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios told 60 Minutes that it is “the most accountable aid agency in the world,” with 40 percent of the staff, he estimated, made up of lawyers and accountants tasked with watching every dollar. The administration has also made the suspect claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security benefits. Musk said it “might be the biggest fraud in history” even shared a graph on X purporting to show this, apparently believing that everyone at the Social Security Administration was so stupid as to not recognize that the agency was sending out more than 5 million checks to people past the age of 140. Yet the only fool in the equation was Musk. Neither he nor Trump, who repeated the claim, appear to understand that while there are millions of people still in the Social Security database because their deaths were never recorded, these people do not receive checks. A total of 89,000 people 99 years old and over receive checks, which, unsurprisingly, aligns remarkably well with the U.S. Census estimate that there are 85,000 people 100 and over in the country. Simply checking a list of Social Security check recipients would have cleared up the entire issue. Yet Musk was either too dumb or too lazy to do so. Or, perhaps more likely, he just didn’t care if it was true or not because it served his purposes.

The stats that Trump and Musk are spouting in order to justify draconian cuts are bogus.

[mariacallous]

At a Trump administration cabinet meeting on Wednesday, unelected South African centibillionaire Elon Musk joked about how his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) “accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention. He assured the room that DOGE had “fixed” the issue. In reality, as an Ebola outbreak continues in Uganda, the aid response from the United States has been severely curtailed by the destruction of the country’s largest foreign aid arm—and other lifesaving humanitarian programs are also still broken, including AIDS and famine work.

Over the past month, DOGE has overseen the dismantling of USAID, first placing on administrative leave and then laying off the vast majority of its workers, and freezing funding for contractors implementing its programs. The State Department developed emergency humanitarian waivers intended to keep lifesaving work going—but current and former USAID workers and other public health experts have told WIRED that the waivers are useless.

“The waiver is a myth” says Asia Russell, the executive director of the international HIV advocacy group Health GAP.

Current and former USAID workers and other Ebola experts do not believe these issues are corrected, with Ebola-response teams having been dismantled and payments to partner organizations delayed, as first reported by The Washington Post. “The entire Global Health team has been gutted,” one current worker (who spoke under condition of anonymity for fear of retribution) tells WIRED. “So the response would be minimal.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head up Ebola prevention within the US, with USAID supporting efforts abroad. On January 27, the CDC was ordered to cease communications with the World Health Organization, the United Nations agency devoted to responding to public health crises.

"CDC was given an exemption to coordinate with WHO and other external partners to conduct public health outbreak and emergency response," CDC spokesperson Melissa Dibble told WIRED in response to questions about how the Ebola outbreak was impacted by the Trump administration changes. It is unclear when the exemption was granted.

Craig Spencer, a public health professor at Brown University and epidemiologist who survived Ebola after contracting it treating patients in Guinea in 2014, says Musk’s claims about fixing the issue are wrong. He points to the stark difference between the US response to a Marburg virus outbreak in Rwanda last year and the current outbreak in Uganda as evidence that things have stopped working properly. The US responded promptly to the Marburg eruption, he says, and helped contain the disease’s spread; this time around, Spencer says, Ugandan health workers struggled to get in touch with the CDC in a timely manner. While the WHO was able to step in, Spencer worries about future incidents without robust US global public health funding and infrastructure: “Outbreaks will be worse on the ground, and get bigger quicker.”

“The US funding freeze has affected key outbreak response capacities,” says World Health Organization spokesperson Alexander Nyka. The absence of USAID’s Outbreak Response Team is especially keenly felt; WHO describes its services as a “game changer.” According to WHO, the US previously provided around 20 to 40 percent of funding for sudden infectious disease outbreaks.

“Uganda’s Ebola outbreak occurred on the same day as the foreign aid freeze. Despite that, the waiver for assistance in addressing the outbreak was quickly reinstated,” the State Department told WIRED in a statement. “This is a process. If errors are made, they will be flagged and corrected as needed, while striving to do what’s best for the American people.”

Other lifesaving USAID programs ostensibly granted humanitarian waivers have encountered similar issues. Earlier this month, WIRED reported that the food aid and famine prevention program FEWS NET remains inactive, despite having received a waiver, with many of the workers who had implemented the program furloughed or laid off. This is still true today. “We have not yet been able to resume any activities,” says Payal Chandiramani, a spokesperson for Chemonics, the international firm implementing a large portion of the program.

Meanwhile, lifesaving AIDS and HIV programs are also not resumed. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is one of USAID’s most high-profile success stories, credited with saving over 26 million lives since former President George W. Bush founded the program in 2003. Around the same time Musk was joking about his USAID blunders with Trump officials, PEPFAR’s supporters gathered for a protest in Washington, DC, to draw attention to the impact of losing these programs. Despite receiving a waiver, PEPFAR has not been able to resume its work, along with other stymied AIDS-related programs, with funding and staffing cuts hampering the program. “The waivers have not been working,” says Emory Babcock, a former USAID contractor working on PEPFAR laid off at the beginning of DOGE’s cuts.

On the same day as Musk’s comments, the Trump administration terminated over 10,000 global health grants from USAID and the State Department, killing a variety of services that had been granted a lifesaving waiver.

The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, a nonprofit that often receives funding from USAID and works with PEPFAR, got notice on Wednesday that three of its project agreements with USAID had been terminated, despite previously receiving approval to resume activities under the PEPFAR waiver. The programs support over 350,000 patients in Lesotho, Eswatini, and Tanzania, including 10,000 children. “There’s nothing left,” says Russell. “The collateral damage is piles of bodies.”

Even though a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze foreign aid funds to temporarily fulfill outstanding bills and payments owed to contractors around the world, the Supreme Court stayed the order on Wednesday night, which means aid groups—including those working on infectious disease prevention in Africa—continue to go unpaid for services rendered, in some cases preventing any further lifesaving work.

Meanwhile, a new, deadly hemorrhagic fever has emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the past five weeks, with over 60 people already dead, and the number of people falling sick still rising. Although it causes a violent, rapid cascade of symptoms, including vomiting blood, it is not Ebola, nor Marburg, but instead appears to be an unknown disease. A USAID worker who spoke on the condition of anonymity tells WIRED: “We have nobody on the ground to monitor this.”

[probablyasocialecologist]

European stock indices have caught up or outstripped Wall Street over the past six months. The S&P 500 is up nearly 6 per cent, matching the UK’s FTSE 100, but behind 9 per cent for France’s Cac 40 and more than 20 per cent for Germany’s Dax. The region-wide Stoxx Europe 600 has jumped 8 per cent. The euro on Wednesday touched its strongest level against the dollar since early November, after Germany announced a massive spending package to fund its military and infrastructure. That piled pressure on a greenback that has been weakening after a sequence of poor US economic data. “We have gone from ‘all roads lead to the US’ to seeing numerous cracks to US exceptionalism,” said Alain Bokobza, head of global asset allocation at Société Générale. “At the same time we have seen several game changers in Europe . . . so Europe is back on the agenda.” Tesla, which nearly doubled in value between the election and mid-December as chief executive and Trump backer Elon Musk became a central figure in the US administration, has now given up nearly all its post-election gains.

[...]

Eight years after his first presidential election victory initially sent investors rushing for safe havens before they bet he would be a boon for stocks, many fund managers are again wondering how they got Trump so wrong. This time around, US stocks have been hit by worsening economic data — including manufacturers reporting a steep decline in orders in February — growing concerns about tariffs and a sell-off in the all-important tech sector as the market asks whether the artificial intelligence revolution will prove as profitable as had been hoped. Despite a robust earnings season, this has prompted investors to turn away from American stocks, whose valuation had moved well above those of international peers and which in January had become their most pricey relative to government bonds in a generation. Charlie McElligott, a derivatives strategist at Nomura, said US tech stocks were now seen as a “source of funds” for investors wanting to buy European or Chinese stocks. “Ironically, in a year [where] everyone said America First, other markets, including emerging markets and Europe, might outperform,” said David Hauner, global head of emerging markets and FX strategy at BofA. “We may be at the beginning of a bigger shift here.”

6 March 2025

[darkmaga-returns]

by Straight Arrow News, AP and NY Pos

Senator Joni Ernst’s office had been investigating the federal government’s telework protocols for the past year and a half and concluded that “The nation’s capital is a ghost town, with government buildings averaging an occupancy rate of 12%.” She revealed that a paltry 6% of the federal workforce “report in-person on a full-time basis” while almost one-third of federal workers are remote on a full-time basis, in a sharp turn-around from the pre-pandemic era in which only 3% teleworked daily. Elon Musk posted this comment: “If you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%! Almost no one.” She said that President Biden set a bad example by spending little time in the White House. She reported that his administration is not transparent and it redacted the “work locations of over 281,000 rank-and-file federal employees.” Ernst also faulted federal employee unions for hampering efforts to compel workers to report on-site for their jobs. The union for the Social Security Administration negotiated a contract that will prevent the Trump administration from requiring employees to appear in person for work.

They’re being remote-ly professional.

A paltry 6% of the federal workforce “report in-person on a full-time basis” while almost one-third of federal workers are remote on a full-time basis, in a sharp turn-around from the pre-pandemic era in which only 3% teleworked daily, a report from Sen. Joni Ernst’s office found.

Ernst (R-Iowa), who has long crusaded against the rise in remote federal work, is planning to reveal the fruits of her office’s year and a half inquiry to Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy during their visit to the Capitol Thursday.

“The nation’s capital is a ghost town, with government buildings averaging an occupancy rate of 12[%],” Ernst wrote in the blistering report. “If federal employees can’t be found at their desks, exactly where are they?”

Musk took note of Ernst’s report ahead of his meeting with lawmakers to brainstorm ways to rein in the federal bureaucracy.

[mightyflamethrower]

Democrat Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), who is running for late Sen. Diane Feinstein’s U.S. Senate seat, is calling for a $50 minimum wage, defending her position during a debate Monday night.

The moderator asked Lee to defend her call for a $50-an-hour minimum wage during the event, noting that it is “seven times the current national minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.”

When asked how that would be economically sustainable for small businesses, Lee immediately said that she owned and ran a small business for over a decade, creating “hundreds of jobs, benefits, retirement benefits, [and] also health care benefits.”

“I know what worker productivity means, and that means that you have to make sure that your employees are taken care of and have a living wage in the Bay Area,” Lee said. “I believe it was the United Way [that] came out with a report that — very recently — [said] $127,000 for a family of four is just barely enough to get by,” she said, pointing to another survey that identified $104,000 as not being enough for one person, essentially classifying them as low income “because of the affordability crisis.”

She added:

And so, just do the math. Just do the math. Of course, we have national minimum wages that we need to raise to a living wage — you’re talking about $20, $25 — fine, but I have got to be focused on what California needs and what the affordability factor is when we calculate this wage.

Lee ultimately failed to answer the question.SUBSCRIBE

By subscribing, you agree to our terms of use & privacy policy. You will receive email marketing messages from Breitbart News Network to the email you provide. You may unsubscribe at any time.

Fox 40 notes that “a wage of $50 an hour would total $104,000 over the course of a year.”

WATCH:

Her call generated mockery from critics, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who asked, “Who not $500 per hour?”

“Okay, why not $100 then? $1,000? Why not just make the minimum wage a billion dollars an hour? Then we’d all be richer than Elon Musk!” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk remarked.

“Economic illiteracy like Rep. Lee’s has been around for centuries. Every country that adopts it becomes a dystopian nightmare,” he added as others piled on:

Lee’s call comes as inflation comes roaring back with no immediate signs of relief, as detailed in Breitbart Business Digest.

RELATED — CNN’s Sidner: Hotter-Than-Expected Inflation Report “Another Sign” Economy “Getting Better”

[subdee]

Today journalist Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich noted that a thinker popular with the technological elite in 2022 laid out a plan to gut the U.S. government and replace it with a dictatorship...

Yarvin called for “giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization,” headed by the equivalent of the rogue chief executive officer of a corporation who would destroy the public institutions of the democratic government. Trump—whom Yarvin dismissed as weak—would give power to that CEO, who would “run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts.” “Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems”....The new regime must take over the country and “perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better.” It must “seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections.

AND:

Today, protesters gathered across the country to protest the takeover of the U.S. government by Musk and his cronies, and Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) noted on Facebook that the U.S. Senate phone system has been overwhelmed with around 1,600 calls a minute, in contrast to the 40 calls a minute it usually receives. Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI) announced he would introduce the ELON MUSK Act—the Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy Act—which would ban federal contracts for Special Government Employees, similar to the bans for members of Congress and other federal employees.

Excellent newsletter today.

We don't have to guess what these guys are up to, they have *published their intentions online* and are live-tweeting the ongoing coup.

All non billionaires in the US should be on the side of resisting this hostile takeover - which as Heather Cox Richardson points out, will hurt the Republican voting base more.

[azuremallone]

I'll never watch a DeNiro movie again.

DeNiro doesn't get a cent from me. Zero. Nada. His insanity and political bent is unhinged. The rantings of yet another old man with dementia. This, coming from a man who just pumped out a baby with a 63 year old woman. Let's just consider that a moment.

Tiffany Chen was 62 at the time she got knocked up. But wait, how the fuck does that work? That's ten years after the average age that most women begin menopause (which is 51 in the US). She must have been on insane amounts of hormone therapy. Let alone the risks involved, which expand greatly after 40 for women.

I'll admit that their mixed Italian-Chinese baby is adorable. That kid is innocent and not part of this at all.

And so this is the guy who is equivocating Trump to Hitler, Mussolini, and making wild on television interviews where he rants about how dangerous and evil the former President is. He goes insofar on his latest rant to say that if Trump becomes President, everything will go to shit.

NEWSFLASH: Trump was already President, you senile old fart.

... all of that happened or will happen under a Trump Presidency. However, it didn't. It DID happen under BIDEN'S PRESIDENCY! Biden isn't even running the puppet show in his own head, let alone the Office of the President. It's everyone around him that's manipulating the country into violence, chaos, and extreme inflation with job losses, illegal immigration, infiltration by potential foreign military and terrorists through the southern borders, massively expensive groceries that have impoverished the needy and rampant homelessness across the country. No, I'm sorry Mr. DeNiro, you're a fucking fruitcake lunatic who has no sense of reality considering that your youngest child will be under 20 when you keel over from decrepitude.

Furthermore, the hard-left believes January 6th was some kind of coup. Furthest from, considering that the shadowy trials and way it was swept under the rug went off. No shots fired. No storming of the White House. In fact, the only shot fired was by a Federal employee to kill an unarmed woman after they had unlocked the doors and let people in. January 6th was a protest that got out of hand, sure, but to call it anything but is ignorant of the fact that across the nation there were no sympathetic uprisings or attempts to take seats of power, which is the fundamental definition of the lie thrown about it by the Leftists.

Meanwhile, the Biden Presidency has just witnessed all the years of hard-left ultra-liberal education go to shit because of the Terrorists that took over college campuses to espouse hatred and the genocide of all Jews, calling for their schools and the country to destroy Israel or be destroyed. All of the literature found in the encampments after they were broken up support the destruction of America and the promotion of Terrorist activities.

They were not peaceful protesters. They were breeding a ground to establish Terrorist cells on college campuses with the goal of causing mayhem, murder, and generally maligned behavior to say the least. This also in the light that there's been a 6,000% increase in the number of Chinese nationals coming across the Mexican border.

Anytime anyone anti-Trump speaks:

Anytime I speak with anyone anti-Trump:

[newstfionline]

Saturday, May 3, 2025

A Tidal Wave of Change Is Headed for the U.S. Economy (NYT) When the Covid pandemic hit, factories in China shut down and global shipping traffic slowed. Within a matter of a few weeks, products began disappearing from U.S. store shelves and American firms that depend on foreign materials were going out of business. A similar trend is beginning to play out, but this time the catalyst is President Trump’s decision to raise tariffs on Chinese imports to a minimum of 145 percent, an amount so steep that much of the trade between the United States and China has ground to a halt. Fewer massive container ships have been plying the ocean between Chinese and American ports, and in the coming weeks, far fewer Chinese goods will arrive on American shores. While high tariffs on Chinese products have been in place since early April, the availability of Chinese products and the price that consumers pay for them has not changed that much. But some companies are now starting to raise their prices. And experts say that the effects will become more and more obvious in the coming weeks, as a tidal wave of change stemming from canceled orders in Chinese factories works its way around the world to the United States. By late May or early June, consumers could start to see some empty shelves, and layoffs could occur for retailers and logistics industries. The major effects on the U.S. economy of shutting down trade with China will start to become apparent in the summer of 2025, when the United States might slip into a recession, said Torsten Slok, an economist at Apollo.

After 100 days, the toll of Trump’s foreign aid cuts has begun to sink in (Washington Post) In the first 100 days of his second term as president, Donald Trump has presided over a dismantling of U.S. foreign aid so sweeping that in many areas only a skeleton remains. Few foresaw the speed and magnitude of the world-spanning cuts pursued by Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service (the Department of Government Efficiency). First came an executive order that paused all international assistance, followed by a stop-work order that ground aid projects to a halt, including in some of the world’s most impoverished and unstable regions. While some programs received limited waivers to continue, including those deemed to offer live-saving assistance, funding for these was often disrupted. Three months in, the Trump administration has axed more than 80 percent of programs funded through the U.S. Agency for International Development. Much of what remains faces an uncertain future. The United States accounted for 40 percent of all humanitarian aid the United Nations tracked last year. Aid groups around the world are navigating a head-spinning period.

He’s Held in El Salvador’s Mega-Prison Without Any Criminal Charges (WSJ) Carlos Uzcategui is one of more than 250 Venezuelan men the U.S. has sent to El Salvador to be imprisoned in the Terrorism Confinement Center, or Cecot. The U.S. contends that the men are members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The Wall Street Journal investigated Uzcategui’s story and found no criminal record or ties to any gang. Our review found no evidence to suggest he should be held in a foreign prison with no indication that he will ever be released.

The threat of a war with India empties a scenic Pakistani valley of summer tourists (AP) Neelum Valley in northern Pakistan attracts some 300,000 tourists each summer who marvel at its natural beauty. But the threat of war with nearby India has emptied its hotels. Gunmen last week killed 26 people in the Indian resort town of Pahalgam, fueling tensions between the nuclear-armed nations after India blamed Pakistan for the attack, a charge Pakistan denies. Neelum Valley is less than 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) from the Line of Control, the de facto border that divides the disputed region of Kashmir, making it vulnerable to any military activity. Hotel owner Rafaqat Hussain said Thursday the crisis has hit the tourism industry hard. “Most tourists have left and returned to their cities because there is a risk of war.” Authorities in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir temporarily shuttered dozens of tourist resorts following the attack as a precaution.

A superpower crunch over Taiwan is coming (Economist/editorial) Exactly four years ago, on May 1st 2021, we ran a cover with a map of Taiwan seen on a radar screen. Our title was “The most dangerous place on Earth” and we argued that the possibility of conflict between America and China over the future of Taiwan was no longer remote. Four years on, we are more worried than ever about Taiwan’s future. Relations between America and China are at a low ebb. Tariffs on both sides have severed trade between the superpowers. This has weakened America’s deterrence. In 2024 Donald Trump said that if China tried to invade Taiwan he would impose tariffs: “I’m going to tax you, at 150% to 200%.” Today tariffs are at 145%. America, in other words, has shot its bolt. China, meanwhile, has been honing “grey-zone” tactics that would sidestep the all-or-nothing gamble of an outright invasion of its island neighbour. An additional vulnerability can be found in the chronic dysfunction of Taiwan’s politics. If Taiwan is unable to take decisive measures to raise its defence spending, America will be less likely to come to its aid. None of this will have gone unnoticed by China’s president, Xi Jinping. Not long ago it made sense for Mr Xi to think he should wait to wrest control of Taiwan. He may now conclude that he has an opportunity upon which he must act soon, before it goes to waste.

Vietnam celebrates 50 years since war’s end with focus on peace and unity (AP) Vietnam on Wednesday celebrated the 50th anniversary of the end of the war with the United States and the formation of its modern nation with a military parade and a focus on a peaceful future. The fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975 marked the end of a Vietnam divided into the communist North and U.S.-allied South, and the country’s top official told crowds the past decades had led to ever increasing unity. Thousands camped overnight on the streets of the former South Vietnamese capital, which was renamed Ho Chi Minh City after it fell to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops, to get the best vantage point for the parade. Many lingered on the streets later in the afternoon and had picnics while waiting for drone and fireworks shows in the evening. “Now it’s time for peace,” said Nguyen Thi Hue, a city resident. “Peace is the dream that everyone in the world wants.”

Death Toll Rises Sharply in a Wave of Sectarian Violence in Syria (NYT) The death toll from this week’s outbreak of sectarian violence in Syria has surpassed 100, a war monitoring group said on Thursday, after clashes between pro-government forces and militants from Syria’s Druse minority spread to new areas. But by Thursday night, government representatives had struck accords with Druse leaders in a bid to calm the violence. The move also appeared to be a step toward achieving the new government’s goal of integrating the complex web of armed groups operating across the country into a national military. Leaders in the Druse-controlled Sweida region, previously reluctant to unite with government forces, expressed openness to doing so.

Drone strikes vessel carrying aid to Gaza (AP) A drone struck a vessel carrying aid to Gaza on Friday off the coast of Malta, said a statement by Codepink, a grassroots peace and social justice movement. The vessel belonging to the Gaza Freedom Flotilla was trying to get food and supplies to people in Gaza, said the statement. Malta’s government said 12 crew members and four civilians were on board and no casualties were reported. For two months Israel has blocked any humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, throwing Gaza into what is believed to be the worst humanitarian crisis in nearly 19 months of war.

Israel redraws Gaza map, limiting Palestinians to a third of the enclave (Washington Post) In the six weeks since Israel resumed its war in Gaza, Israeli forces have dramatically altered its map, declaring about 70 percent of the enclave either a military “red zone” or under evacuation, according to the United Nations, and pushing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into ever-shrinking pockets. The Israeli military says its evacuation orders allow civilians to flee ahead of fighting, and those who remain could be considered combatants. In practice, Palestinians say, the evacuation orders often force them to flee under fire. Recent evacuation orders have covered border areas and population centers and have displaced more than 420,000 people, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). In addition, Israel has enlarged its “security zone,” also called a buffer zone, along Gaza’s borders with Israel and Egypt, and officials have signaled they do not intend to relinquish this territory.

South Africa says its peacekeeping troops are withdrawing from rebel-held eastern Congo (AP) The South African armed forces said Thursday they had begun withdrawing their peacekeeping troops from rebel-controlled eastern Congo. The South African National Defense Force said the troops began moving out earlier this week and would travel through neighboring Rwanda to Tanzania and fly home from there. Peacekeeping troops from Malawi and Tanzania have also started withdrawing from Congo. The three countries contributed soldiers to a southern African peacekeeping force but they had been left trapped in eastern Congo after Rwanda-backed M23 rebels launched an offensive in late January and took control of the strategic city of Goma. Fourteen South African and three Malaiwan soldiers were killed in fighting with M23 in January. The southern African regional body decided in March to end its peacekeeping mission early and bring the troops home.

Kosmos (Universe Today) In 1972, the Soviet Union launched the Kosmos-482 mission, which was likely headed to Venus (the Soviets kept quiet about the intended destination of space probes until they were successful). A timer anomaly scuttled the mission in Earth orbit, where it has been for the past 50 years. What goes up eventually comes down, and it appears that the satellite—orbiting us once every 90 minutes—will crash into Earth sometime on or around May 10.

[ramrodd]

What do you think of Elon Musk's plan to accelerate the technological singularity by 2030-2040 and to build cutting-edge space science centers around the world?

COMMENTARY:

What I know about Elon Musk’s plans to build space centers all over the world is exacty what Eisenhowers 1956 Presidential Platform and the Nixon-Daniel Patrick Moynihan Affirmative Action social engineering has bee all about and that asshole Conservtaives like Elon Musk and William Fl Buckley’s nazification agenda that has become Project 2025 has successfully stalled and sabotaaged that exact aspeiration in the 40 years between the 1085 Polar Vortex and the 2026 Polar Vortext.

And DOGE is just making things worse, Elon Musk is a complete dip shit nerd who read all the science fiction literature between 1952 and 1969 but didn’t read the footnotes regarding Eisenhower’s process to transform the Quantity of the Military Industrial Complex into the Quality of the Starship Capitaalism of 2001: A Space Odyssey,

If Carter had been re-elected, we would have been to Mars and back already, I was working on Das Marsprojekt before Elon Musk began playing with his dick,

The only thing Elon Musk represents is all the shit the nazification agenda of the white supremacist Ivy League socialism of the John Birsh society has done, and is doing, to fuck things up so they can take over America. beginning with the murker of the Diem brothers, Jack Kennedy and MLK,

[mariacallous]

Elon Musk has pledged that the work of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, would be “maximally transparent.” DOGE’s website is proof of that, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, and now White House adviser, has repeatedly said. There, the group maintains a list of slashed grants and budgets, a running tally of its work.

But in recent weeks, The New York Times reported that DOGE has not only posted major mistakes to the website—crediting DOGE, for example, with saving $8 billion when the contract canceled was for $8 million and had already paid out $2.5 million—but also worked to obfuscate those mistakes after the fact, deleting identifying details about DOGE’s cuts from the website, and later even from its code, that made them easy for the public to verify and track.

For road-safety researchers who have been following Musk for years, the modus operandi feels familiar. DOGE “put out some numbers, they didn’t smell good, they switched things around,” alleges Noah Goodall, an independent transportation researcher. “That screamed Tesla. You get the feeling they’re not really interested in the truth.”

For nearly a decade, Goodall and others have been tracking Tesla’s public releases on its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features, advanced driver-assistance systems designed to make driving less stressful and more safe. Over the years, researchers claim, Tesla has released safety statistics without proper context; promoted numbers that are impossible for outside experts to verify; touted favorable safety statistics that were later proved misleading; and even changed already-released safety statistics retroactively. The numbers have been so inconsistent that Tesla Full Self-Driving fans have taken to crowdsourcing performance data themselves.

Instead of public data releases, “what we have is these little snippets that, when researchers look into them in context, seem really suspicious,” alleges Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor and engineer who studies autonomous vehicles at the University of South Carolina.

Government-Aided Whoopsie

Tesla’s first and most public number mix-up came in 2018, when it released its first Autopilot safety figures after the first known death of a driver using Autopilot. Immediately, researchers noted that while the numbers seemed to show that drivers using Autopilot were much less likely to crash than other Americans on the road, the figures lacked critical context.

At the time, Autopilot combined adaptive cruise control, which maintains a set distance between the Tesla and the vehicle in front of it, and steering assistance, which keeps the car centered between lane markings. But the comparison didn’t control for type of car (luxury vehicles, the only kind Tesla made at the time, are less likely to crash than others), the person driving the car (Tesla owners were more likely to be affluent and older, and thus less likely to crash), or the types of roads where Teslas were driving (Autopilot operated only on divided highways, but crashes are more likely to occur on rural roads, and especially connector and local ones).

The confusion didn’t stop there. In response to the fatal Autopilot crash, Tesla did hand over some safety numbers to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the nation’s road safety regulator. Using those figures, the NHTSA published a report indicating that Autopilot led to a 40 percent reduction in crashes. Tesla promoted the favorable statistic, even citing it when, in 2018, another person died while using Autopilot.

But by spring of 2018, the NHTSA had copped to the number being off. The agency did not wholly evaluate the effectiveness of the technology in comparison to Teslas not using the feature—using, for example, air bag deployment as an inexact proxy for crash rates. (The airbags did not deploy in the 2018 Autopilot death.)

Because Tesla does not release Autopilot or Full Self-Driving safety data to independent, third-party researchers, it’s difficult to tell exactly how safe the features are. (Independent crash tests by the NHTSA and other auto regulators have found that Tesla cars are very safe, but these don’t evaluate driver assistance tech.) Researchers contrast this approach with the self-driving vehicle developer Waymo, which often publishes peer-reviewed papers on its technology’s performance.

Still, the unknown safety numbers did not prevent Musk from criticizing anyone who questioned Autopilot’s safety record. “It's really incredibly irresponsible of any journalists with integrity to write an article that would lead people to believe that autonomy is less safe,” he said in 2018, around the time the NHTSA figure publicly fell apart. “Because people might actually turn it off, and then die.”

Number Questions

More recently, Tesla has continued to shift its Autopilot safety figures, leading to further questions about its methods. Without explanation, the automaker stopped putting out quarterly Autopilot safety reports in the fall of 2022. Then, in January 2023, it revised all of its safety numbers.

Tesla said it had belatedly discovered that it had erroneously included in its crash numbers events where no airbags nor active restraints were deployed and that it had found that some events were counted more than once. Now, instead of dividing its crash rates into three categories, "Autopilot engaged,” “without Autopilot but with our active safety features,” and “without Autopilot and without our active safety features,” it would report just two: with and without Autopilot. It applied those new categories, retroactively, to its old safety numbers and said it would use them going forward.

That discrepancy allowed Goodall, the researcher, to peer more closely into the specifics of Tesla’s crash reporting. He noticed something in the data. He expected the “without Autopilot” number to just be an average of the two old “without Auptilot” categories. It wasn’t. Instead, the new figure looked much more like the old “without Autopilot and without our active safety features” number. That’s weird, he thought. It’s not easy—or, according to studies that also include other car makes, common—for drivers to turn off all their active safety features, which include lane departure and forward collision warnings and automatic emergency braking.

Goodall calculated that even if Tesla drivers were going through the burdensome and complicated steps of turning off their EV’s safety features, they’d need to drive way more miles than other Tesla drivers to create a sensible baseline. The upshot: Goodall wonders if Tesla is allegedly making its non-Autopilot crash rate look higher than it is—and so the Autopilot crash rate allegedly looks much better by comparison.

The discrepancy is still puzzling to the researcher, who published a peer-reviewed note on the topic last summer. Tesla “put out this data that looks questionable on first glance—and then you look at it, and it is questionable,” he claims. “Instead of taking it down and acknowledging it, they change the numbers to something that is even weirder and flawed in a more complicated way. I feel like I’m doing their homework at this point.” The researcher calls for more transparency. So far, Tesla has not put out more specific safety figures.

Tesla, which disbanded its public relations team in 2021, did not reply to WIRED’s questions about the study or its other public safety data.

Direct Reports

Tesla is not a total outlier in the auto industry when it comes to clamming up about the performance of its advanced technology. Automakers are not required to make public many of their safety numbers. But where tech developers are required to submit public accounting on their crashes, Tesla is still less transparent than most. One prominent national data submission requirement, first instituted by the NHTSA in 2021, requires makers of both advanced driver assistance and automated driving tech to submit public data about its crashes. Tesla redacts nearly every detail about its Autopilot-related crashes in its public submissions.

“The specifics of all 2,819 crash reports have been redacted from publicly available data at Tesla's request,” says Philip Koopman, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University whose research includes self-driving-car safety. “No other company is so blatantly opaque about their crash data.”

The federal government likely has access to details on these crashes, but the public doesn’t. But even that is at risk. Late last year, Reuters reported that the crash-reporting requirement appeared to be a focus of the Trump transition team.

In many ways, Tesla—and perhaps DOGE—is distinctive. “Tesla also uniquely engages with the public and is such a cause célèbre that they don’t have to do their own marketing. I think that also entails some special responsibility. Lots of claims are made on behalf of Tesla,” says Walker Smith, the law professor. “I think it engages selectively and opportunistically and does not correct sufficiently.”

Proponents of DOGE, like those of Tesla, engage enthusiastically on Musk’s platform, X, applauded by Musk himself. The two entities have at least one other thing in common: ProPublica recently reported that there is a new employee at the US Department of Transportation—a former Tesla senior counsel.

[ranthaven]

I know a lot of Drumpf supporters at work. I work in a factory owned by a pretty big multinational corporation. You know their products, you’ve probably used a number of them. The stuff we make is good, useful stuff that most people need at least a few of our brands, and we make stuff that is generally good quality and reasonably priced. But we do not operate without some amount of corporate corruption in terms of our effect on society.

I have also spent around 20 years working in publicly funded educational institutions from kindergarten through graduate school. In that realm, I met a lot of people who really benefited from the programs and services we provided. But we often found ourselves working harder and harder just to avoid the loss of funding and the ongoing encroachment of corporate-style thinking in administration.

So I have met people from the whole range of our political spectrum covering the last 40 years. Most of them are not stupid. At all. They may be just average or in a range of, say, 10 points above or below average, but mostly all reasonable people with decent mental capabilities.

What do they all have in common, you might ask? How does a broad swath of society have a common thread that leads to our current situation? It is absolutely not that they are all dimwitted. That is just flatly wrong. I have met some inarguably stupid people, but nowhere near enough to account for the present moment.

The common thread, my friends, is a concerted effort by the wealthy elites and a surprisingly willing pool of corruptible politicians stretching back to the immediate post-WWII era when the elites were not completely in control and largely immune from any efforts to keep them from gaining extreme power.

In this roughly 80-year period, the wealthy elite and their bought-and-paid-for politicians have worked both publicly and behind the scenes to destroy every vestige of civilization that enabled the rise of the “lower” classes to relative equality and an almost fair share of our national prosperity.

They have worked to destroy public education, which has been the single greatest leveler of our society in all of history. They have worked the machinery of capitalism to the most destructive end of its spectrum of function. They have used every technological advance to destroy our commons of communication in every way they could find. And it has taken them a fairly long time, a lot of hard work, and quite an expenditure of money to achieve this social destruction.

Think about all the things you can still find in history books, old newspapers, and archives. Think about names like Ronald Reagan, Edwin Kaiser, Rush Limbaugh, Joseph McCarthy, Leonard Leo, Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and so many more. And then there were even more who have labored in relative obscurity. All of these people and all of their work has, on one front, been focused on destroying the ability of the American people to actually know anything, let alone understand any of what they do find out.

Even so, it is still less than half of our voting population that is convinced to vote for what the Republican Party has been turned into. Not because these people are stupid or dimwitted, but because the system has been rigged to keep them from being able to trust. If you believe you can’t really trust anyone you don’t actually know in person, how can you make good decisions?

The system has been designed over time to pull us all apart and break our social bonds in every possible way. You don’t have to be stupid for this to cause you psychological damage and an inability to vote for the good, or at least somewhat better, choices that are offered. You just have to have lived in the US anytime over the last 80 years.

Like the op, I sincerely hope we are all ready to work for the good, or at least better, future we ALL deserve. Please don’t give up, don’t quit, and don’t you dare let the bastards beat you down.

Lets be honest, most of the folks who voted for Trump are halfwits & heathens pretending to be patriots, or worse, Christians. The ones I know in a real life are a few generations into their ignorance and didn’t stand a chance standing up to his brand of bullshit. It was designed for the dimwitted and it worked, especially since it was backed by billionaires who made sure the misinformation & toxic iconography was force fed them at every level of their lives. Distracted and dumbed down by  anti- transgender talking points and xenophobic lies. They bit the bait like a blind catfish after a winter in the muddy waters of misfortune. They’re on the hook now and we will all pay a price for their stupidity. In the end truth and justice will win, if I had any doubt I’d already be gone. Instead I am ready for what may come. My hope is that you are too.

[beardedmrbean]

Police in Massachusetts are investigating fires that appear to have been “intentionally set” that destroyed seven Tesla charging stations, police said.

The fires were first reported at approximately 1:10 a.m. on Monday morning when the Littleton Police Department in Massachusetts were dispatched to The Point Shopping Center due to reports of several fires at the Tesla charging stations there, according to a statement from the Littleton Police Department.

MORE: Woman caught trying to plant explosive devices at Tesla dealership

“Chief Matthew Pinard reports that the Littleton Police Department responded to and is investigating fires at a Tesla charging station at The Point Shopping Center that are believed to be suspicious in nature,” authorities said. “Responding officers observed that several Tesla charging stations were engulfed in flames and heavy, dark smoke.”

Police said that the Littleton Electric Light & Water Department was immediately contacted and requested to shut down power but that while waiting for the electric department to arrive, another charging station caught fire.

In total, seven charging stations sustained heavy fire-related damage, police said.

Once the fires were extinguished and the electric supply was cut off, officers launched a preliminary investigation and determined that the fires appear to have been deliberately set.

“Littleton Police and Fire Departments and the Massachusetts State Police Fire and Explosion Investigation Unit attached to the State Fire Marshal’s Office are investigating and have determined that the fire appears to have been intentionally set,” police said.

No injuries were sustained in the fires, according to police, but authorities said that this case falls under the Arson Watch Reward Program, coordinated by the Massachusetts Property Insurance Underwriting Association.

MORE: Search for man missing for nearly 2 weeks in national park intensifies

“The program offers rewards of up to $5,000 for information that solves, prevents, or detects arson crimes,” police said.

Just last week in a separate incident, a woman in Colorado was arrested after police caught her with explosives at a Tesla dealership, police said.

The 40-year-old suspect, Lucy Grace Nelson, was arrested on Feb. 25 after the Loveland Police Department in Colorado launched an "extensive investigation" on Jan. 29 following a series of vandalizations with incendiary devices at the Tesla Dealership in Loveland, Colorado, according to a statement from the police released last Wednesday.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, and his company have faced backlash since he has taken a central role in the White House as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency.

MORE: California fire captain stabbed to death in her own home

Over the weekend, demonstrators around the United States gathered at Tesla showrooms to protest Musk and his sweeping cuts of federal spending that has led to mass layoffs of federal workers in Washington, D.C. and beyond.

The investigation into the Littleton Tesla charging station fires is currently ongoing.

[bllsbailey]

Don Lemon’s Latest Rant Against MAGA Shows Someone Needs a Wellness Check, Stat

When life gives you Lemons... well, there's no making lemonade out of this particular situation.

Former news anchor turned TikTok wannabe Don Lemon, once a member of the CNN cult before it became clear he was too unhinged even for their tastes, went on a rant about the supposed MAGA "cult."

It's unclear from the clip what prompted Lemon's meltdown, but it appears to have something to do with the recent dustup involving Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and immigration hardliners who had a spirited debate on X regarding the H-1B visa program.

What the former CNN host fails to realize is that the MAGA movement has been defined by spirited debates that will hopefully forward discourse in this country and move America to a better place. Very much not a cult.

Unlike Democrats and the media (I know, they're one and the same), who agree in lockstep on every leftist issue, no matter their own personal beliefs. Which is, of course, the very definition of what makes a cult member.

And yet, here you have Lemon, losing his mind and thinking the online debate is a sign that Musk and Ramaswamy are getting beaten down by groupthink in the movement.

“Finding out, you dumb f**king idiots? Now you’re just figuring this s**t out? You’re so f**king stupid, and you deserve it. You f**king deserve it because you’re so dumb," Lemon appears to be saying to those who got heat over their pro-H-1B takes.

It's difficult to discern which stage of grief Lemon has entered with this rant. Whatever it is, it seems clear he's gone full Lemon. Nobody goes full Lemon.

"You’ve been co-opted because you’re in a f**king cult, and you don’t even realize it ‘cause you have stupid MAGA brain, and you don’t get it," he continued speaking with all the fervor of a pre-teen. "How stupid and dumb are you?"

It really defies any explanation of how an adult male could sit there thinking the phrase "stupid MAGA brain" is a solid insult. Eight-year-olds would think that's a bit childish.

Don, buddy, I saw you unzipped your little turtle neck there (from both sides), but it seemingly wasn't enough to return oxygen flow to that little organ inside your dome. Maybe don't wear that thing anymore.

Trump Has Entered the Chat on H-1B Visas

Watching Don Lemon's public breakdown since Trump won the election has been amusing at times and concerning at others. Is there nobody among his friends and family willing to step in? To get him the help that he needs?

Rants like this are precisely why President-elect Donald Trump has accurately defined Lemon as the “dumbest man on television." So dumb CNN couldn't take it anymore. So dumb that he announced a new show on X and then had it canceled after one interview.

You may recall that CNN canned Lemon after a series of baffling remarks about women on "CNN This Morning."

Ramaswamy Schools CNN Host Don Lemon on How Ignorant He Is on Civil Rights

In a commentary about former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, Don attempted to show off his knowledge of the opposite sex by indicating women in their 50s are past their prime.

“Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime, sorry," he said. "A woman is considered to be in their prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.”

Lemon's new flailing is the latest in a string of embarrassing efforts over on whatever show he thinks he's producing on TikTok. Last week, he was owned by a soccer player after attempting the Democrat cult messaging that Musk is the "real" President-elect.

Don Lemon Has 'President Musk' Propaganda Slapped Down to His Face: 'We Own the News Now'

When he's not getting slapped around by YouTube personalities, he's having to fend off viewers who like placing a turkey filter over his head while he's speaking.

This will, now and forever, be the funniest image in the history of social media.

Lemon may have left the true cult in CNN, but it's clear he's still suffering from "stupid anti-MAGA brain."

Will anybody intervene and help this guy get the help he so desperately needs?

[aizenat]

I’m dying over musk and ramaswamy going mask off and revealing how lazy and mediocre they find average Americans. And Americans are so triggered while having never been to college, not reading a single book for years on end, denigrating and dismissing formal college education (“you don’t need a college degree to be smart,” claiming they have “street smarts” vs “book smarts” and pretending that makes them better than academics, complaining about schools being liberal and woke and discouraging each other to pursue it all while boosting up manual labor jobs that anyone with an able body can do without any real skill or knowledge, etc), and having literally voted for trump because understanding the nuances of political philosophy and policy was too hard for them.

Americans are aggressively mediocre and cheer on each other’s mediocrity. Why do you think red pillers complain about gold digging women even though the average man makes $40-80k; not even close to 6 figures or millions where maybe you can have that concern then? Why do you think they complain about women going to college more than them and therefore getting jobs where they can support themselves, making them not needed? And instead of becoming better men that women would WANT to be around (being nicer, keeping up good hygiene and style, developing interests and a personality outside of sports and/or video games and anime, becoming emotionally mature and being willing to help clean and cook and manage the household alongside a woman, etc), they instead spread tips and tricks on how to neg and gaslight women into being with them as their mediocre selves. Losers like umar telling women to give a man $700 dollars a month to make his dream come true instead of going to the bank to get a business loan like any other entrepreneur should (cuz his credit won’t allow for it). These men would rather fight tooth and nail to force women to accept their mediocrity than rise to the slightly higher expectations women have for them than previous generations had (literally it’s like a 15% higher expectation and they’re crying about it 🙄).

How can you see that and tell me modern/the average American isn’t lazy? When men would rather work a stupid and tedious dead end job for $60k then come home and play video games until it’s time to eat the food his woman makes and then watch tv as she puts the kids to bed. At what point is he doing anything to improve himself? Expand his mind? Anything? And then you’re surprised when tech bro billionaires are like “yeah you know Americans don’t get enough stem degrees so we gotta outsource that too.”

Americas biggest problem is its refusal to invest in its own people. Instead of paying Americans a living wage doing manual jobs, they’d rather outsource to immigrants who will work for much less. Instead of investing in American factories, we outsource the majority of our factory jobs in the global south for pennies. All so the wealthy can stay wealthy. Elon is right: you will be at a net loss for a while as you invest in homegrown workers. But what is the answer? To just outsource all labor overseas? What are Americans supposed to do then if we keep refusing a universal base income? That’s sort of where we are now.

But the mediocre voted for the man who has ZERO interest in investing in getting Americans up to speed. The very systems needed to allow for more American tech works are about to be dismantled. Elon and Vivek are right that American culture does celebrate and reward mediocrity. He’s right we celebrate prom queens more than we celebrate the smart nerd looking to go to an Ivy League. For the past 15 years anyone who went to college was mocked for “wasting time and money,” and more kids would rather be influencers than anything that would require them to get a degree.

But their solution isn’t to invest time and money into building up Americans. And the Americans who voted for them don’t even value education to demand otherwise. This is what happens when anti intellectualism runs rampant in a country where the average joe doesn’t have access to education nor the ability to build a decent life for himself without it. Or hell when the only ppl with college degrees able to get a decent life are the stem bros anyway. No one sees the value in learning multiple languages, learning how to read and write well, studying philosophy and the sort. All of this is needed to understand the stem shit too but we don’t understand that because it’s not immediately profitable. Our for profit society is killing us and Americans keep voting in the party that wants to make breathing a for profit activity we have to pay for. And yall still don’t fucking learn!

This is the problem. MAGA wasn’t to say they want to be great but Americans are too lazy to do the real work to improve. Reading and humbling themselves to actually LEARN from people with more knowledge than them instead of being intimidated by them. Making schools better for k-12, and giving more affordable and free college and secondary education options for the rest of us. A universal base income so people hand the freedom to pursue academic careers and degrees that will make us better. The problem is these mediocre idiots want to go back to a time where mediocrity got you a mortgage and four kids and a dog. Now mediocrity gets you shit and their reaction is well make it hard for those ACTUALLY doing the work to improve themselves intellectually instead of making it easy for THEM to improve. Because that would require them to learn actual policy. And that’s just too much work for the average American.

And so here we are. The fuck around and find out stage of MAGA would be funnier if we didn’t all have to suffer under their idiocy and bullshit.

[yourreddancer]

from Darren Cook FB comment:

The google search “did Biden drop out?” surged on Election Day. The problem was NOT the message or the messenger, Harris & Walz were phenomenal and I’m still not entirely sure if it wasn’t fraudulent somehow with Musk and his billions. Trump had been saying for weeks “we don’t need your vote, we have enough votes” and he had a little secret with Mike Johnson who trump said is going to be there a long time. He knew he was going to win somehow. 

Then at the end of the race he just appealed to the raunchiest fans by performing a sex act on a microphone and talking about Arnold Palmers junk. He was making a mockery of the contrast between him and her flawless campaign? Anyway that’s just a theory. It is our reality now. 

He is a white supremacist. Russia is an all white society and america is about to become more white. There will be no limit on the cost to deport the 11m illegal immigrants, estimated at $88B per year. Wonder if that will cause inflation? This man cannot take the presidency with absolute immunity for official acts, which would be anything he chooses. He will do whatever he pleases. I don’t know why there isn’t a 5 o’clock alarm. But it doesn’t matter. Vance is 40 years old and completely controlled by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks who are products of South African apartheid (white supremacists as well)

This isn't a coincidence. Now they’ve got the presidency with total immunity and a Supreme Court with 6 of his justices.

A large swathe of young people do not consume legacy media and have no idea what’s happening in the world. They listen to and watch misogynistic bro casts where they lame everything that is wrong in their lives on transgenders and illegals. Where they promote ”Trad wives” who stick to their gender roles and the women stay home barefoot and obey their husbands. I just hope when they make the lives of transgender people a living hell that if they decide they can’t take it anymore, I hope they make a spectacle of their suicides and do it in groups in front of the White House. Perhaps it will wake some people up. 

Society is disintegrating. We can’t let this happen in Canada. Read project 2025. It’s a horror show. Trumps got free rein. He’s immune. Male white supremacy is taking over. The handsmaid tale is coming true. Either that or I’m losing my mind. Society has become so fragmented and we each go into our own silos and we haven’t been paying attention to how these young men have been radicalized by the algorithms of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. The border wall is getting built now. Even if congress doesn’t grant him the money, he’ll use an executive order. Unconstitutional? It’s an official act. He’s immune.

I’m starting to think Australian Rupert Murdoch, who has been radicalizing people for 30 years, Musk, Putin and Trump are all working together to recreate white supremacist authoritarian oligarchies like in Russia where a few dozen straight white men control every and all the wealth while the poor suffer. 

They will probably default on all US debt and obligations, and switch to cryptocurrency for the great “reset”. Everything will be worthless and the billionaires will buy up everything with their crypto. Russia has said since the 50’s that they would destroy America from within. They have succeeded in getting the presidency with immunity. After the insurrection he committed crimes he knew he would be charged for and challenged them and got rewarded with immunity, just in time for his second term. Was covid actually released by China to make this all happen cause China was promised Taiwan? Am I a conspiracy theorist or am I finally seeing clearly? We’re fucked. These billionaires around the world are collectively worth trillions and they are taking full control of society. I feel like it’s an episode of Black Mirror. He’s going to have Elon’s robots protecting him, AI will not be controlled legislatively, neither will social media or the algorithms.