#trump was shot a WEEK AGO

[thepurplebones]

[faketokufan]

CAN WE SLOW DOWN FOR ONE FUCKEN SECOND PLEASE?!

[plugnuts]

what a fucking year this week has been

[ravenkings]

Bernie is wrong. He has always been wrong and is still wrong. The flaw in his theory is what he deems the “wealthy elite” versus what everyday Americans consider them to be. Voters don’t see all billionaires as the elites. They see college-educated liberals on the coasts, some of whom are billionaires, as elites.

Bernie-style populism didn’t land because billionaires figured out long ago they could undermine it by being socially right-wing, and the working class would forgive their wealth and privilege. That’s why this same demographic is willing to make it rain for grifters like Joel Osteen and Pat Robertson. That’s why they worship the wealthiest man on the planet like a God and consider him some real-life Tony Stark. People dismissed Donald Trump as a shameless attention-hungry New York oligarch until he called Mexicans rapists. Then he shot up to the top of the GOP primary polls. The working class didn’t think much of Elon Musk until he said “pronouns suck.” Then he became their hero. A scion of working-class Pennsylvania lost his US Senate seat last week to a hedge fund manager from Connecticut. West Virginia elected their richest man to the Senate after electing him governor – as a Democrat and later a Republican. Ohio tossed out their longtime Democratic senator, known for his strong support of labor rights, for – literally, no joke – a used-car salesman.

You can’t tell me the working class in America thinks being a billionaire alone is what makes one a “wealthy elite.” There are significant factors at play here Bernie is either oblivious to or purposely ignorant of.

In college, a professor once told me that Communism never succeeded in the United States because we are too religious and proud as a country. Religion, traditions, and culture were never widely discredited the way they were in Europe and Asia, where the clergy and nobility kept the bourgeoisie in figurative chains for centuries. The relative ease of social mobility made America unique compared to its Western counterparts. Historically, American progressivism has been focused on expanding social mobility – initially limited to only white men – to identity groups who had been denied it at the start: blacks, women, and immigrants. We have done it, with various amounts of success. While it may seem counterintuitive, Americans pride themselves in being the nation that pioneered the idea that wealth and status can be achieved through ingenuity and hard work and not just based on a lucky roll of the genetic dice, as it was in the Old World. It doesn’t mean we don’t have generational wealth in our country; we do, but since it isn’t the sole way to achieve wealth and power, we don’t care nearly as much about destroying all of it. Further, we will happily endorse it if the oligarchs and the aristocrats vow to promote and protect the social values we care about and the social hierarchy that benefits us.

It’s one of the reasons I believe Bernie could never beat Trump. If you ask working-class people what they want: an anti-immigrant, anti-intellectual billionaire or a Vermont socialist backed by kids from Harvard and UC Berkeley who hate our traditions and customs, the working class will always back the billionaire.

–Nick Rafter, "Bernie Sanders Can Take a Seat"

[darlingillustrations]

DO NOT USE STICKER MULE

I stopped using Sticker Mule years ago when I learned they donated to the Trump presidential campaign. Now they have taken their support of Trump propaganda one step further. This email was sent out to the Sticker Mule mailing list this morning (links removed for tumblr):

Donald Trump was shot. I don’t care what your political views are but the hate for Trump and his supporters has gone too far. People are terrified to admit they support Trump. I’ve been scared myself. Americans shouldn’t live in fear. I support Trump. Many at Sticker Mule do. Many at Sticker Mule also support Biden. The political hate needs to stop. Hopefully this email helps. Btw, this week, get 1 shirt for $4 (normally $19). I suggest buying one that shows you support Trump. The more people realize that millions of kind-hearted, compassionate people support Trump, the sooner the hate will end. Awesome people, all over the world, love Trump. Don’t limit your friendships and diminish your happiness by indulging in political hate. Vocalize your support. Stop the hate. Anthony Constantino Cofounder, Sticker Mule P.S. Discuss this message on X.

[batboyblog]

Strange feeling,

9 years ago I started knocking doors with two goals in mind. I wanted to elect America's first woman President, a candidate I believed in deeply who inspired me and who was amazingly qualified to take on the hardest most complex job in the world. The other goal was equally clear, our future and our progress was at risk if a Republican took office, the Supreme Court was on the line, Republican Party was fixated on getting rid of Obamacare, attacking Social Security and Medicare, rolling back our new wins for LGBT rights, and of course banning abortion. In the Summer and Fall of 2015 it became more and more clear that the Republicans would pick Donald Trump and so the goal became even more clear and important, Stop Trump.

9 years of knocking doors across 5 elections I've come right back to where I started, the doors are different, I'm older, grayer, this Election Day I was not up at 5am doing lit drops (and god bless all the early birds who did that today). But I'm again voting for, and supporting an amazing, smart, qualified woman candidate who inspires me, and I'm voting to Stop Trump.

9 long years ends today, Today we finally finally FINALLY get to turn the page and put an end to Trump. How good will it feel to go weeks, even months, and years, without having to think about Donald Trump, talk about Donald Trump? 9 years is a long time to be stuck in a national abusive relationship, and no it won't fix everything, but damn it'll feel good.

9 years ago, one of the things that inspired me to work as hard as I did for Hillary Clinton was my grandma. She turned 90 in 2015, and would have turned 99 a few days ago. She was whip smart, with a razor wit, she read two books a week every week. She was a feminist before it was cool, always had her own job and her own money and her own car, in the 1950s when married mothers weren't supposed to do any of that. She seemed like she'd go on forever but I was realistic, I knew 2016 could be her last Presidential election, and I wanted her to see a woman President before the end. She passed away in 2019, and I miss her a great deal. She used to refer to Trump as "That shit" the final word said in a hiss of disgust. So I'm carrying her with me as I head to vote, and I'm voting for every tough, smart, witty woman who never got a shot because they were born in the wrong time, and for every little girl who's ever been told "no that's a boy job!" I've fought for 9 goddamn years to break this highest and hardest of glass ceilings and today is the fucking day.

[caspiansinclair]

A LIST OF TFC KANDREW QUOTES/CRUMBS (i love them. i probably missed a good amount since this was from a light skimming through):

- to andrew: “you already have kevin”

- “[andrew] said he’d break his fingers if Coach ever made him play with kevin again.” “but he’s playing now?” “only because kevin is. kevin got back on court with a racquet in his right hand, and andrew wasn’t far behind. up until then they were fighting like cats and dogs. now look at them. they’re practically trading friendship bracelets and i couldn’t fit a crowbar between them if it’d save my life.” “but why? andrew hates kevin’s obsession with exy.” “the day they start making sense, let me know. i gave up trying to sort it all out weeks ago. you could ask, but neither of them will answer. but as long as i’m doling out advice? stop staring at kevin so much. you’re making me fear for your life.” “what do you mean?” “andrew is scary territorial over him. he punches me in the first time i said i’d like to get kevin too wasted to be straight.”

- “andrew was only here because kevin day never went anywhere alone.”

- about andrew: “he has only eyes for kevin”

- ‘“look at me,” andrew said. kevin turned a haunted at him… “it’ll be fine,” andrew said. “i promised, didn’t i? don’t you believe me?” it took a while, but at last kevin visibly relaxed. the dead edge melted out of his eyes as he absorbed every ounce of strength andrew could give him. the unwavering trust kevin had in andrew was amazing.”

- about andrew: “kevin needs him right now and that trumps whatever agreement you two had”

- “kevin had andrew to lean on”

- “i hate you.” “you don’t.” “how would you know?” “because if you did, andrew wouldn’t let you anywhere near me.”

- “andrew put his hand to kevin’s back and shoved him into the bedroom” (this one’s here for sillies.)

- “since kevin appears to be in the center of his (andrew’s) strange world”

- “this means andrew is keeping you, same as he kept kevin”

- “you’re the reason kevin’s going to stay with our team. andrew’s got kevin’s back, but you’ve got kevin’s attention. that makes you invaluable to andrew.”

- “kevin had to climb up andrew’s side to get to his feet after downing 13 drinks in an hour and a half”

- “Kevin was standing with Andrew inside the goal line, left hand out so Andrew could tug at his outer glove. Andrew undid the straps and peeled it off, then hooked it under his arm so he could take off Kevin's arm guard. He left Kevin's under-glove on, but unhooked the loop from Kevin's middle finger so he could slide the black cloth to Kevin's wrist. Kevin flexed his fingers slowly, staring at his scars, then turned his hand over and flexed his fingers again”

- “The look on Matt's face said he was just getting started, but Andrew stepped between them before Matt could go after Kevin again. Andrew was smiling and his stance was casual, but Matt knew better than to try his luck against the short psychopath. Matt took a step back, silently conceding the fight, and shot Neil a worried look. Kevin got to his feet behind Andrew and glared at Neil.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Petard (Part II)

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/31/the-blood-speech/#dudeface-from-chiapas

Biden's FCC unanimously passed a rules banning landlords from accepting kickbacks to force all their tenants to use one ISP as a rental condition. Last week, Trump's FCC boss Brendan Carr (who voted for the rule just last year) killed it, saying that he was sticking up for tenants, who would somehow save money from this sleazy arrangement:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/fcc-chair-nixes-plan-to-boost-broadband-competition-in-apartment-buildings/

In some ways, this is to be expected. The Trump agenda is about trussing and plating working people so rich sociopaths can conveniently devour them whole. On the other hand, this move lays bare the long-run historical phenomena that led to this moment. Case in point: back in 2013, I wrote a sf story about this very subject, Petard, which was published in MIT Tech Review's 2014 anthology Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/

I love that story, and upon re-reading it, I realized that it was extremely timely. So timely, in fact, that I decided to serialize it over four days on my newsletter. If you're feeling impatient, you can tune into a four-part podcast version from 2014 and 2018:

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_278

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_292

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_293

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_294_-_Petard_04

Here's part one of the story:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#part-one

And now, onto part two!

My advisor is named Andronicus Andronicus Niyazov, and her parents had a sense of humor, clearly. She founded the Networks That Change lab three years ago after she fled Kazakhstan one step ahead of Gulnara's death-squad, but they say that she still provides material aid to the army of babushkas that underwent forced sterilization under old man Karimov's brutal regime. Her husband, Arzu, lost an eye in Gezi. They're kind of a twitter uprising power-couple.

I'm the only undergrad in the lab, and the grad students were slathering at the thought of having a bottle-washing dogsbody in residence. Someone to clean out the spam filters, lexically normalize the grant proposals, deworm the Internet of Things, get the limescale out of the espresso machine, and defragment the lab's prodigious store of detritus, kipple and moop.

Two days after telling them all where they could stick it, I got a meeting in AA's cube.

"Sit down, Lukasz," she said. My birth certificate read "Lucas," but I relished the extra consonants. I perched on a tensegrity chair that had been someone grad student's laser-cutter thesis project. It creaked like a haunted attic and its white acrylic struts were grubby as a snowbank a day after the salting trucks. AA's chair was patched with steeltape, huge black cocoony gobs of it. And it still creaked.

I waited patiently. My drop was in my overalls' marsupial pouch, and I stuffed my hands in there, curling my fingers around it and kneading it. It comforted me. AA closed the door.

"Do you know why my lab doesn't have any undergrads?" she asked.

I gave it another moment to test for rhetoricalness, timed out, then gave it a shot. "You don't want to screw around with getting someone up to speed. You want to get the wo rk done."

"Don't be stupid. Grad students need as much hand-holding as undergrads. No, it's because undergrads are full of the dramas. And the dramas are not good for getting the work done."

"Andronicus," I said, "I'm not the one you should be talking to –" I felt a flush creeping up my neck — "they –"

She fixed me with a look that froze my tongue and dried the spit in my mouth. "I spent four years in Dolinka prison in Kazakhstan. Three of my cellmates committed suicide. One of them bled out on me from the top bunk while I slept. I woke covered in her blood.." She looked at her screen, snagged her attention on it, ignored me for a minute while she typed furiously. Turned back. "What did your labmates do, Lukasz, that you would like to talk to me about?"

"Nothing," I mumbled. I hated being dismissed like this. Of course she could trump anything I was inclined to complain about. But it was so… invalidating.

"Never forget that there is blood in the world's veins, Lukasz. You've done something clever with your years on this planet. You're here to see if you can figure out how to do something important, now. We want to systematize the struggle here, figure out how to automate it, but eventually there will always be blood. You need to learn to be dispassionate about the interpersonal conflicts, to save your anger for the people who deserve it, and to channel that anger into a theory of action that leads to change. Otherwise, you will be an undergraduate who worries about being picked on."

"I know –" I said. "I know. Sorry."

She held out a hand to stop me fleeing. "Lukasz, there is change to be had out there. It waits for us to discover its fulcrums. That's the research project here. But the reason for the research is the change. It's to be the bag of blood in the streets or the board-room or the prison. That's what you're learning to do here."

I didn't say anything. She turned back to her screen. Her fingers beat the keyboard. I left.

I pretended not to notice three of AA's grad students hastily switching off their infrared laser-pointers as I opened her glass door and walked back out to the lab. Everyone, including AA, knew that they'd been listening in, but the formal characteristics of our academic kabuki required us all to pretend that I'd just had a private conversation.

I pulled my laptop out of my bag and uncrumpled its bent corners. I'd only made it a week before and I didn't have time or energy to fold up another one. It was getting pretty battered in my bag, though, the waxed cardboard shell getting more worn and creased in less time than ever before. Not even my most extreme couch-surfing voyages had been this hard on my essential equipment. The worst part was that the keyboard surface had gotten really smashed — I think I'd closed up the box with a sharpie trapped inside it — so the camera that watched my fingers as they typed on the letters printed on the cardboard sheet was having a hard time getting the registration right. I'd mashed the spot where the backspace was drawn so many times that I'd worn the ink off and had to redraw it (more sharpie — a cardboard laptop owner's best friend).

Now the screen was starting to go, the little short-throw projector attached to the pinhead-sized computer taped inside the back of the box was misreading the geometry of the mirror it bounced the screen image off of, which keystoned and painted the image on the rice-paper scrim set into the laptop's top half. The image was only off by about 10 degrees, but it was enough to screw up the touchscreen registration and give me a mild headache after only a couple hours of staring at it. I'd noticed that a lot of the MIT kids carried big plastic and metal and glass laptops, which had seemed like some kind of weird retro affectation. But campus life was more of an off-road experience than I'd suspected.

But I'd never go glass-and-plastic. AA thought that the way to win a war was to shed your blood. I have a limited supply of blood. There's a lot more cardboard out there. Why fight with meat and blood when you can use free infrastructure and good code to organize a resistance. You'll never win a war of atoms against the Powers That Be. They'll always have more lethal atoms. When they're hitting you with a baton, your glass-and-plastic number will crumple just as surely as a cardboard laptop. The best way to beat a policeman's baton was to be somewhere else when he was swinging it.

I spent fifteen minutes unfolding the laser-cut cardboard and smoothing out the creases, re-sticking everything with fiber-tape from an office-supply table in the middle of the lab, and then running through the registration and diagnostics built into the OS until the computer was in a usable state again. The whole time, I was hotly conscious of the grad students' sneaky gaze on me, the weird clacking noise of their fingers on real mechanical keyboards — seriously, who used a keyboard that was made of pieces anymore? Was I really going to have to do that? — as their chatted about me.

Yes, about me. It's not (just) ego: I could tell. I can prove it. I was barely back up and running and answering all my social telephones when some dudeface from Chiapas sat down conspicuously next to me and said, "It's Lukasz, right?" He held out his hand.

I looked at it for a moment, just to make the point, then shook. "Yeah. You're Juanca, right?" Of course he was Juanca. He'd been burned in effigy by Zetas every year for four years, and his entire family, all the way to third cousins, were either stateside or in Guatemala or El Salvador, hiding out from narcoterrorists who were still pissed about Juanca's anonymizer, a mixmaster that was the number one go-to source of convictable evidence against Zeta members whose cases went to trial. If it wasn't for the fact that Juanca's network had also busted an assload of corrupt cops, prosecutors, judges, government ministers, regional governors and one Secretary of State, they'd have given him a ministerial posting and a medal. As it was, he was in exile. Famous. Loved. It helped that he was rakishly handsome — which I am not, for the record — and that he had a bounty on his head and had been unsuccessfully kidnapped on the T, getting away through some badass parkour that got captured in CCTV jittercam that made him look like he was moving in a series of short teleports.

"Yeah. You got the blood speech, huh?"

I nodded.

"It's a good one," he said. I didn't think so. I thought it was bullshit. I didn't say so.

We stared at each other. "Welp," he said. "Take it easy."

[covid-safer-hotties]

With the toll of new COVID-19 infections regularly topping 1 million a day and weekly deaths creeping toward the 1,000 mark, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has launched a campaign aimed not at protecting the public from this ongoing pandemic, now in its fifth year, but at washing its hands of responsibility.

CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen held a press conference August 23 to review the state of the COVID-19 pandemic and encourage the public to get their winter COVID-19, RSV and flu vaccines once they are made available. While bluntly acknowledging that “COVID is with us,” she tried unconvincingly to assure reporters and viewers that “we have the tools to protect ourselves.” She then added, as a way of shifting the blame, “We just need to use them!”

Dr. Cohen was silent on who was responsible for the failure of most Americans to get booster shots or otherwise protect themselves from a disease, which can be fatal for many and cause lifelong debilitation for many more.

She could have named the Democratic administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, which ended the COVID-19 emergency more than a year ago and treats the pandemic as a thing of the past. She could have named Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the promoter of quack remedies like ivermectin and bleach, who recently welcomed into his campaign the anti-vaxxer and enemy of science and public health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

And if she had been equipped with a mirror—and a conscience—she could have pointed to herself and other top CDC officials, who have collaborated in the anti-scientific rampage to shut down both mitigation efforts and even elementary data collection on cases of illness, hospitalization and death.

Most importantly (and therefore least likely) she could have acknowledged that within the framework of the capitalist system, the profits of giant banks and corporations are far more important than the lives of human beings. That is the meaning of the incessant claims that schools, factories, public transportation and facilities must be kept open, to save “the economy,” despite the inevitable spread of the infection as a result.

Dr. Cohen, like her predecessors and colleagues at the top of the public health establishment, puts political pressures above science and medicine. The nearly hour-long briefing was simply political theater, where a panel of experts attempted to place the public health agency in the best light despite acknowledging the monumental number of daily infections that have seen hospitalizations and fatalities climb.

Meanwhile, schools across multiple states have announced closures—affecting thousands—just as the new academic year has begun, in response to mass infections among faculty and students.

So far this year, more than 26,000 Americans have died from acute COVID-19 complications, and more than 800 per week are being killed by a preventable infection, a figure 20 percent higher than last year this time. At the current rate, it is expected that between 50,000 to 60,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 in 2024, a rate two to three times higher than fatalities from flu. However, these do not take into consideration excess deaths, and given the complete dismantling of the reporting systems, these figures are known undercounts.

Such figures could only appear low in comparison to the colossal death toll of the first three years of the pandemic, when 352,000 died in 2020, 464,000 in 2021 and 260,000 in 2022. In 2023, 76,000 COVID-19 deaths were recorded. All these numbers are underestimates, as excess mortality figures are considerably higher. The cumulative death toll from COVID-19 is likely well over 1.4 million in the United States and approaching 30 million worldwide.

Neither did the panel address any concerns over the fact that millions continue to suffer from Long COVID, which has taken a significant toll on the health of Americans and the world over. It bears mentioning that a recent study noted that 410 million people across the world have had Long COVID with a $1 trillion impact on global GDP. Yet, no treatment for this condition exists. Without health insurance and means, issues of brain fog, chronic fatigue and sleep disturbances become part of one’s physiognomy.

Much about Dr. Cohen’s characterization of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is deeply flawed and should have been taken up by the press, who remained silent on the matter. First and foremost, her claim, in response to a direct question that COVID-19 “is endemic,” is completely misleading.

An infection is endemic when it is contained, not spreading uncontrolled and not causing significant impact on the society. COVID-19 is none of these. It remains a pandemic, with new waves of infections where millions are being infected daily by a virus whose mutation far outstrips the efforts of public health agencies and pharmaceutical companies to provide vaccines, medicines and mitigation practices. It continues to cause large-scale social disruption, economic loss and general hardship.

The opposition of both capitalist parties to any significant effort to fight the pandemic was on display last week. The Democratic National Convention, like its Republican counterpart in July, was a massive superspreader event, with thousands of delegates and media personnel congregating in an enclosed arena, where there was continuous cheering, shouting and singing. There are already anecdotal reports of widespread sickness in state delegations returning from Chicago.

As for the Republicans, Trump staged his appearance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Friday afternoon, beaming as Kennedy announced he was folding up his independent presidential campaign and endorsing the ex-president and would-be dictator. Kennedy said he was working with Trump on staffing agencies like the CDC, NIH, FDA and USDA from the standpoint of ending the “chronic disease crisis.” By this he means, of course, ending efforts to fight diseases and letting children, the elderly, and the entire American population suffer the consequences.

Fundamentally, all large epidemics and pandemics are serious social issues that require broad-scale infection control in place to disrupt and prevent disease. And with respect to COVID-19 and all future pandemics, these require an international collaborative perspective.

In 2024 so far, 179 million people were infected in the United States, a total that is eventually expected to surpass 2023, when more than 248 million Americans, or three-quarters of the population, caught COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 wastewater levels throughout the pandemic suggest that there have been more than 1.1 billion infections in the United States, between three and four for every person in the country.

This begs the question how are those most vulnerable, such as the elderly, immunocompromised, and those with chronic disabling medical conditions, which represent a significant portion of the population, to protect themselves from perpetual mass infection?

For the CDC director to present public health efforts as a matter of individual, personal choice is a gross falsification of reality. The policy of mass infection has been forced on the population.

As for having the tools to protect themselves, what is being offered are simply vaccines and more vaccines as a means to prevent COVID-19. As the WSWS recently noted, “Despite the limitations, the uptake of the vaccines is vital for the health of the population. The shots have a strong, proven safety record and do prevent severe disease and potentially reduce the risk of Long COVID, as studies have indicated. However, they do not prevent infections and the immunity they offer is short-lived given the constant mutation of the virus.”

The vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna carry a cost of $120 to $130 per shot. In some regions, these can be as high as $160 or even $200. However, the rescinding in March of $4.3 billion from the Department of Health and Human Services in COVID-19 supplemental funding means access to free vaccines for the 26 million uninsured and tens of millions more underinsured, essentially all from working class families, will only mean that the vaccination campaign will simply languish as it did last year when only 7 million Americans accepted the boosters within six weeks of their delivery to pharmacies.

As for other tools in their toolbox, Cohen refers to anti-viral treatments like Paxlovid, which are regularly being denied to patients by their physicians or when they actually are given a prescription, face the daunting price tag of $1,300 to $2,400 per course because their insurance denies them coverage. Meanwhile, repurposed medications like Metformin, a drug that treats diabetes, which has shown anti-viral properties and shown in randomized trials to reduce COVID-19 viral loads and decrease risk of Long COVID, remain unmentioned. In particular, this raises the question of why there are so few tools in the toolbox, and why some are being removed, such as the ability to wear N95 masks in public.

The arrest of an 18-year-old New York man in Nassau County on Tuesday who was wearing a black ski mask utilizing the recently passed mask-ban legislation will only embolden police departments and threaten the public who face possible detentions and arrest simply on charges of police suspicion.

At the Democratic National Convention, guidance was issued forbidding mask wearing by attendees unless “it was necessary due to a disability” and this at the discretion of security.

[qqueenofhades]

I may very well be getting too far ahead of myself here, but reading your last two (back to back, hot diggity damn, queen!) essays got me thinking about the future. In the beautiful possible future where we keep up the fight, elect Kamala, and keep Trump out of office for another 4 years, do you think there's a real possibility we'll be seeing the same election (Kamala vs Trump) in 2028?

I hear the arguments against the possibility - he's old and unhealthy so he'll probably die (not counting in it), the Republicans cannot be stupid enough to try again (they can), his fragile ego will be too broken to try again (his ego disconnected from reality long, long ago), he'll be in jail (unlikely with this Supreme Court, and hilariously we have no laws preventing someone in jail from running), but even the sum total of them doesn't seem like enough to count him out.

Mind you, if he does run against Kamala in 2028, I feel like the odds would be on our side? I'm just. So. Tired of this guy. I'll keep fighting till the day I die, but it'd be nice if we could actually see this dude go down and take on the next one.

We honestly have a good shot to shut ourselves of Trump forever at this election, because of the simple fact that he is in rapid dementia decline and I honestly don't think he'll be remotely sane in another 4 years. Not that he's sane now, but at age 82 after another four years of associated legal troubles and/or penalties complete with his rapidly unraveling mental state... I just don't think it will be possible even for the withered husk of the GOP to trot him out again, and I say that as someone who always unfortunately knew he would be the nominee again in 2024 despite some overly optimistic prognostications to the contrary by others. As I've said before, this is the last-chance saloon for Trump in any number of ways, and that is part of the reason he is so desperate now.

We can't count on the legal system to rid us of Trump before the election, but the delayed sentencing in his NY felony trial is coming a couple weeks afterwards, the Jan 6th trial has restarted, and the 11th Circuit is fairly likely to reinstate the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. Trump running for president is a convenient grift to pay his legal bills, and if he gets crushed in November, even the most faithful MAGA diehard are going to find it hard to keep coughing up for his various fundraising appeals. I mean sure, he'll get something, because some of the cult members will be in it to the bitter end, but overall, he will be fucked. On many, many levels.

This is the delightful vision that is fueling me and frankly should fuel all of us, so yes. Vote. Remove stubborn orange stains, once and possibly fucking finally for all. Please.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

M. Wuerker

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 5, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 06, 2025

Five years ago, on February 5, 2020, Republican senators acquitted then-president Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial. Trump immediately vowed retaliation against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law for his actions. “It’s payback time,” one Republican said. “He has an enemies list that is growing by the day.”

Now Trump is back in office and purging the government of those he perceives to be his enemies. His administration is purging the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the civil service of anyone deemed insufficiently supportive of the president.

But it is not clear that the 78-year-old Trump is the one calling the shots. Although Trump maintained during his campaign that he had no idea what the right-wing Project 2025 was, multiple media outlets have established that most of his flurry of executive orders appear to have been lifted from the 922-page document. That document is the product of a group of far-right organizations led by the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to Viktor Orbán’s Danube Institute.

This week’s threatened tariff war blew up in Trump’s face. After his vow to put tariffs of 25% on most products from Mexico and Canada sent the stock market plunging, he was left declaring victory over Mexico and Canada after they essentially assured him they would do things they are already doing. In the meantime, as Carl Quintanilla noted today, Trump’s tariffs on products from China are increasing prices in the U.S.

Last night, Trump horrified even his own advisors by saying that the United States would take over Gaza and turn it into a resort area. Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported today that Trump’s team “had not done even the most basic planning to examine the feasibility of the idea” when Trump blurted it out. “[T]here had been no meetings with the State Department or Pentagon, as would normally occur for any serious foreign policy proposal,” Swan and Haberman wrote, “let alone one of such magnitude. There had been no working groups. The Defense Department had produced no estimates of the troop numbers required, or cost estimates, or even an outline of how it might work. There was little beyond an idea inside the president’s head,” an idea his own officials considered “fantastical even for Mr. Trump.”

Trump’s comments were so badly received in the Middle East that Matthew Gertz of Media Matters wondered if Secretary of State Marco Rubio had ordered additional security for the U.S. diplomatic facilities there.

Today, Trump praised Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for coaching Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in college, although Mahomes arrived at Texas Tech after Tuberville had already left.

In his important piece “The Logic of Destruction and How to Resist It,” published February 2 in his Thinking about…, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder reflected on the president’s multiple photo ops signing executive orders to, for example, blame former Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for a plane crash that happened during Trump’s term. Snyder referred to the president as “a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras.”

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. This would be a “reboot” of the country, Curtis Yarvin wrote, and it would require a “full power start,” a reference to restarting a stalled starship by jumping to full power, which risks destroying the ship.

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.” Once loyalists have replaced civil servants in a new ideological “army,” the CEO “will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern.” 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.”

Duran noted that Vice President J.D. Vance has echoed Yarvin’s prescriptions and that Trump sidekick billionaire Elon Musk appears to be putting Yarvin’s blueprint into action. “Musk is taking a systematic approach,” Duran wrote, “one that has been outlined in public forums for years.”

This morning, Anna Wilde Mathews and Liz Essley Whyte of the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk’s team has accessed payment and contracting systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Mathews and Whyte note that CMS sits at the center of the country’s healthcare economy. In 2024, it disbursed about $1.5 trillion, or about 22% of the total amount of the federal total.

On X, Musk said “this is where the big money fraud is happening.” But, in fact, CMS is not operating without oversight. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which operates out of the Department of Justice, investigates healthcare fraud. In June 2024 it announced criminal charges against 193 defendants across 32 federal districts who allegedly participated in healthcare fraud schemes that involved about $2.75 billion in intended losses and $1.6 billion in actual losses.

Indeed, as Eric Levitz of Vox pointed out, “DOGE has not presented evidence of ‘fraud’; they have highlighted millions of dollars worth of spending that Musk considers wasteful. By contrast, the [General Accountability Office] identified $233 billion of fraud in 2024. We don’t need to let a billionaire ignore federal law to do government oversight[.]”

“It is extraordinary how much access Elon Musk and his sort of creepy 22-year-old henchmen have to all of our data,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told MSNBC today. “They have information that would allow them to shut down your tax refund, your Medicare payment…. Potentially, they know everything about you and your family, and the reality is that this could get dystopian very quickly…. If you were to start speaking ill of Elon Musk on social media, Elon Musk might be able to stop or delay your tax refund, or your mom's Social Security benefit, in part because we have no window into what's happening inside the Department of [the] Treasury right now."

While Murphy didn’t say it explicitly, control over such information also gives Musk power over business rivals and political leaders. When Musk’s team went into the Department of Labor today, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) noted that “[h]e could manipulate quarterly job numbers and much more. We are talking about MARKET MOVING INFORMATION! Do employers want Musk to have access to any of their confidential data?”

Today, when asked about Musk’s conflicts of interest as he reviews federal spending while also receiving more than $15 billion in federal contracts, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had already promised that “if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, that Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.” Donald Kettl, a scholar of public policy, told Dana Hull of Bloomberg: “I don’t know of any other case, anywhere, in which an individual could determine for himself whether he had a conflict of interest. In fact, self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest.”

In a shocking attack on the intelligence personnel who collect information around the world to keep Americans safe, today the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent a list of all employees the agency hired in the past two years to the White House, sending the list by unclassified email. Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that a former CIA agent called the reporting of the names “a counterintelligence disaster.” Lowell also reported that Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that he understands that the White House “insisted” on the list coming through unclassified email.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, posted: “Exposing the identities of officials who do extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China. A disastrous national security development.”

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.

Opposition might well continue to grow, as the bite of the cuts the Trump administration and Musk are making to the federal government is only beginning to be felt at home (the collapse of USAID is already an international crisis). Those cuts are poised to hurt Trump’s own rural voters worse than they hurt Democratic areas. In Virginia, about 400,000 people in rural areas receive healthcare from federally qualified health centers; half of these centers have lost their federal grants and are stopping some services or closing. Trump is currently planning to eliminate the Department of Education; the top six states that receive grants under the department—Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Nevada—all voted for Trump in 2024.

Tonight, Democratic senators, led by Chuck Schumer (NY), Jeff Merkley (OR), Patty Murray (WA), Gary Peters (MI), and Brian Schatz (HI), will hold the Senate floor all night in a filibuster to stop the confirmation of Russell Vought, a key right-wing author of Project 2025, to direct the Office of Management and Budget. “Vought’s proposals to slash federal funding will threaten Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security,” the senators said. “Vought will also continue to carry out President Donald Trump’s illegal federal funding cuts, stopping taxpayer dollars from supporting local schools, police departments, community health centers, food pantries, firefighters, and other vital programs.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[imsobadatnicknames2]

wrt your post about US elections influencing the whole world and the "European privilege" we exhibit: yes and? The dogshit american empire rules us. Before them it was the soviets. Before that it was the nazis and before them it the austrians and hungarians and turks. What is your fucking point? we KNOW your ratfucker private-sector-imported political class is salivating to make us work 7 days a week for 14 hours, and cook us in our cities by burning 30 trillion times more petrol. We have to see your fucking politicians' faces on every social media site and be swamped with gofundmes for black folks shot dead by your SS policemen. Are you trying to say politics is a distraction from labour disputes? WHAT? It's the same. Politics IS labour dispute. None of us are free until we all are, we KNOW. FUCK. Like no bitch, we KNOW the IMF is fucking us in the ass because a bunch of US economists normalized the Ayn Rand ideas of market capitalism 50 years ago. Yeah we would machinegun them for christmas if we could but we CAN'T. We can't even vote for the slightly less gaza genociding party but you can. SO SHUT UP! Don't you fucking understand we're governed by your economic power with no recourse or representation? That everything comes from you because you're at the top? Even fucking LEFTISM is INFESTED by tankie shitheads from america whose only idea of communism is that it must be good because they've reversed american exceptionalism in their heads and think anything opposing the US must be better? I can't even go online without some redfash LA shithead telling me about the virtues of Ho Chi Minh and Ceaușescu. GOD. If Trump pulls NATO out of europe Putin will be at my doorstep TOMORROW. Shut the FUCK up about europeans complaining that you english ratfucker colonists are governing us. Vote blue no matter who, strike, kill your bosses, guillotine your politicians and maybe our children - which we wont have - can live in peace one day. And for the love of gun-toting truck-driving hillbilly american Jesus shut the FUCK up and let europeans complain. CHRIST.

I love when I get five paragraphs long asks that can be completely invalidated with the following words:

I live in the global south.

[almostloverboy]

No one say anything about this post, it's my way of coping with the stress of the election.

Tommy down the hall looks even better than last week. His beard is a little fuller and his arms are... firmer. He somehow always manages to catch the girl staring at him shyly when they pass in the halls or around the neighborhood. The way her eyes linger over his body holding something than sexual desire. Something much deeper. She always looked away quickly when she was caught so she didn't see the way Tommy's eyes noticed her body and her own discomfort with it.

So, when passing in the stairway, Tommy mentions that he's got this sick new movie that she's just gotta see. "I think it'll really speak to ya." He offers like she needed to be convinced. She nodded and immediately caught herself being too eager. The embarrassment still showed on her face when she was walking into his apartment later that night.

Tommy puts on Fight Club. She's never seen it before but she's literally sitting on the edge of her seat by the end. Tommy studies her response and at the end he mentions something about how he loved this movie before he came out. Had she ever thought about coming down to his gym sometime? He remembered her mentioning something about wanting to try bulking but was worried about what her shitty ex-boyfriend might say about it if she did. He was so glad when that frothing Trump humper was out of her life. She was ready now to do much more important things.

"I'll take you tomorrow. The guys at the gym are gonna love you." Tommy mutters, slipping a joint between her lips. Wait, hadn't he lit her up just a couple minutes ago? Her head is swimming and Tommy keeps whispering about how handsome she'll be once the hormones kick in. He had old binders she could borrow.

He doesn't cut her hair until after giving her the shot, though, because he wanted something to hold onto while he did it. At some point, her pants had disappeared and Tommy was pressed up on her bare skin when he pricked her with the needle and injected her very first dose of T. "And you've gotta think of a name that suits you better than the one you have now. Honestly, I don't know how you've handled being called that for so long." The haircut felt like shedding off layers of personality other people gave her over the years. Before she knew it, everything she thought about herself laid on the floor, trimmed to pieces by those loud, ugly clippers and Tommy's gentle hand.

The night ends in Tommy's bed and he's teaching his sweet little boyfriend how to take it up the ass like a real man. "Come on, dude, you don't really want me to fuck you like a girl, do you? It's cool, don't worry, I promise you'll cum for me anyway."

[mariacallous]

German voters go to the polls today but it is a different world from when the campaign began only a few weeks ago.

Nearly 60 million ­people are choosing a government that will have to grapple with the breakdown of the transatlantic alliance under Donald Trump and new threats to European security just as the country’s vaunted economic model is hitting the skids.

If the polls are correct, the man leading that administration will be conservative opposition chief Fried­rich Merz, a corporate lawyer with a decades-long desire to be chancellor despite never ­serving in government. His in-tray will be staggering. “The big expectations ­mirror the big challenges he’ll face from day one of his likely chancellor­ship,” news weekly Der Spiegel said. “An ­aggressive Russia, a hostile America and a Europe that is drifting apart: Merz could be tested more strongly […] than any ­chancellor of the postwar republic.”

Merz recently admitted that Trump’s effective abandonment of European defence pledges and his vice-president JD Vance’s aggressive backing of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) heralded ­“tectonic shifts in the political and economic power centres of the world”. Germany, he said, would not emerge unscathed.

Trump’s undermining of Nato and betrayal of Ukraine are “a wrenching punch to the gut”, said Ursula Münch, director of the Academy for Political Education thinktank in Bavaria, particularly for Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has “solidarity and friendship with the US deep in its DNA”. “The ­biggest ­challenge [for Ger­many] will be ­mustering a united show of strength by the EU and the UK.”

Germany, the world’s third largest economic power and most populous EU country, was already struggling with the muddled legacy of Angela Merkel, one of Merz’s predecessors as CDU leader and his longtime nemesis.

Her 16-year tenure as ­chancellor was marked by reliance on cheap Russian gas, brisk trade with China and Washington’s military and ­intelligence might, allowing Germany to focus on what it did best: manufacturing cars and machine tools while holding the EU together.

Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, took office in December 2021 buoyed by hopes for a fresh approach to long-neglected problems with a technocratic “traffic light” coalition named for the party colours of his centre-left Social Democrats, the pro-business Free Democrats and the ecologist Greens. But only weeks later, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine blew the best-laid plans of Scholz’s “coalition for progress” permanently off course.

Within days of the war’s outbreak, Scholz declared a Zeitenwende (turning point), establishing a €100bn (£85bn) fund to beef up Germany’s paltry military equipment stocks and pledging to meet a Nato commitment of defence spending at 2% of GDP. By 2024, he had kept that promise.

But the halt of Russian energy supplies sent prices soaring, ­spurring galloping post-pandemic inflation and weighing heavily on industries such as steel and chemicals. Scholz’s government scrambled to find new fuel sources while pushing ­renewables.

China, in the meantime, ­pivoted from buying German vehicles to undercutting them with cheaper models, particularly in the EV sector.

At a recent televised debate Merz, who left politics for business for 12 years after losing a power struggle with Merkel, accused Scholz’s government of economic “incompetence” after two years of recession. Scholz shot back: “I didn’t invade Ukraine!”

Scholz’s coalition finally ­collapsed in November – within hours of Trump winning the US election – over a still unresolved conundrum around the strict “debt brake” that keeps ­federal government annual ­borrowing to 0.35% of GDP. The implosion ­triggered a general ­election seven months ahead of schedule.

But Scholz’s era of political turmoil might soon look like halcyon days.

Germany’s true Zeitenwende is still to come, argues veteran political ­analyst Herfried Münkler, as Berlin faces up to the painful realisation that the postwar order that welcomed the country back into the community of nations after the Nazi atrocities has come to an end.

“The biggest loser of the latest developments is Germany, not only because its economic power has shrunk but also because German poli­ticians relied unconditionally to the end on the transatlantic relationship,” he wrote in the newspaper Die Zeit.

“The next government will have to take great pains to reassert German leadership in Europe.”

Reforming the debt brake will be essential to that process, said Sascha Huber, a political scientist at the University of Mainz, as more defence ­spending will have to be financed with new debt. “But the first challenge will be ­forming a stable coalition,” he said.

Because he is unlikely to win a majority, Merz has said he aims to build a new ­governing ­alliance by Easter, setting up long weeks of tense negotiations in which Germany will be focused inward. His most likely partner will be Scholz’s Social Democrats but he may need yet another party to make the maths add up – a recipe for further volatility, Münch said.

Meanwhile, surveys suggest the anti-immigration, anti-Islam AfD will double support from the last ­election, to win about 20% of the vote. It has been polling in second place to Merz’s CDU-CSU bloc for more than a year. It calls for mass ­deportation of migrants, a resumption of Russian gas imports, an end to military aid for Ukraine and exiting the eurozone.

During the election campaign there has been a series of attacks in which the suspect is from a migrant background, which some analysts believe could boost AfD support. The latest came on Friday, when a Spanish tourist was stabbed at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial. Prosecutors saidon Saturday that the suspect was a 19-year-old Syrian refugee who appeared to have planned to kill Jews.

Although most analysts expect Merz to maintain the “firewall” ­barring formal cooperation with the far right, a strong AfD finish would greatly complicate his efforts to produce a reliable majority.

“I think it will be essential to a centrist coalition for him to make clear that he won’t accept support from the AfD again,” Huber said, referring to a taboo-busting move by Merz last month to solicit far-right votes in parliament for hardline migration proposals. “Otherwise it won’t work. Tthe AfD will always be trying to drive a wedge between the coalition parties.”

Germany has long been considered among the most politically stable of the world’s big democracies, only triggering snap elections roughly every two decades. But that pace could accelerate if the political fringes grow in influence, Huber said.

That sense of looming turbulence, with the AfD waiting in the wings, has troubled many voters, drawing hundreds of thousands on to the streets in recent weeks in defence of democracy.

At a recent protest co-organised by senior activists Grannies Against the Right (Omas Gegen Rechts) in the eastern town of Teltow, 70-year-old retired history teacher Sabine Ludwig said she saw “scary” echoes of the Weimar era, a century ago.

“There won’t be endless chances for the democratic centrist parties to come together and keep the AfD out,” she said. “I hope they seize it.”

[darkmaga-returns]

The Russian regular army entered the civil war in Ukraine on this day three years ago, following a string of provocations by the United States. After three years, Russia has still not met Putin’s goals outlined in this article. NATO turned Ukraine into a proxy fighting force, whose aim was to weaken Russia and overthrow its government. But Russia has clearly survived, with its economy and military stronger than ever. 

The West is decisively losing its information, economic and ground, proxy war. In the distance, the end of the war is in sight after the Trump administration launched peace talks with Russia last week.  These are the reason for the Russian intervention and the goals that Putin laid out in a national TV address on Feb. 24, 2022.

By Joe Lauria Special to Consortium News First published Feb. 24, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a TV address Thursday morning that the goal of Russia’s military operation was not to take control of Ukraine, but to “demilitarize” and “de-Nazify” the country.  Moments after he spoke, explosions were heard in several Ukrainian cities.   

The Russian Defense Ministry said these were “precision” attacks against Ukrainian military installations and that civilians were not being targeted.  It said Ukraine’s air force on the ground and its air defenses had been destroyed.

The Ukrainian government, which declared a state of emergency and broke off diplomatic relations with Russia, said an invasion was underway and that Russia had landed forces at the port city of Odessa, on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, as well as entering from Belarus in the north. 

It said it had killed 50 Russian troops and shot down six Russian fighter jets, which Russia denied.

Putin said one of the operation’s aims was to arrest certain people in Ukraine, likely the neo-Nazis who burned dozens of unarmed people alive in a building in Odessa in 2014. In his speech Monday, Putin said  Moscow knows who they are.  Russia said it aims to destroy neo-Nazi brigades, such as Right Sector and the Azov Battalion. 

[freetheshit-outofyou]

I could not read all of this propaganda, but that's not to say the media is not beating the drums of fear loud enough to scare the sheep. Over the last two weeks there have been more and more "stories" in the "news" paining those in the military and those who have formerly Served with honor in very broad brushes. None of those brushes are flattering, almost all those brush strokes are wrong. Three weeks ago it was DoD Directive 5240.01, something that has been in place since 1982 and updated for current technologies. Now this hatchet piece on all military members linking them some how this this turd. Don't get me wrong, it sounds like Arthur is a king sized turd. But that doesn't mean the other 17,038,807 million living Veterans in the Unites states are also. This propaganda goes out of its way to link white, male active and former military members to everything from the Oklahoma City bombing and white supremacy to January 6th. and how Mr. Trump is the king shit of all of it. This "writing" states: "Arthur isn’t an anomaly. He is among more than 480 people with a military background accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, including the more than 230 arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection." (I notice it makes no mention of Wenheng Zhao, Jinchao Wei, Shapour Moinian, Ji Chaoqun, Ron Rockwell Hansen, Kevin Mallory, Korbein Schultz, Baimadajie Angwang, I wonder why that is? Becasue their motives sure seem ideologically driven and extreme crimes.) Umm, there are 16.2 MILLION Veterans in the united states, using the numbers from this propaganda 480 former and or active military members have been "accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes". That's 0.0028170986384199% (or .00013% of the U.S. pop.) of the Veteran population, if we cut out the 230 Jan 6 folks because we all know they got fucked, that number changes to 0.0013498597642429% (or .000066% of the U.S. pop.). If those are not anomaly level numbers I don't know what is. For reference, you have a .9% chance of dying in a car crash over your life time, a 16.67% chance of dying from heart disease and a 14.29% of cancer killing you. And for those who are chomping at the bit to pull out some firearms factoid, there is a 0.01393392540896% possibility of being shot and killed in the U.S., 53% of that number are self inflicted changing that number to a scary 0.0073849804667488%. If you were told "Walk through that door and you have a 0.0028170986384199% of dying, but if you stand here and do nothing you have between a 14.29% and 16.67% of dying in before that door opens." your ass would sprint to the door. Once again the media is beating those drums of fear and the masses are walking lock step to the rhythm.