Ireland has joined Finland, Germany, the UK, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark in issuing an official advisory against traveling to the U.S.
Demand for air travel between the U.S. and Canada has dropped over 70% year-on-year.
Are we great again yet?
American exceptionalism, baby!
The Atlantic has now released the entire transcript of the Houthi PC Small Group chat. Itâs pages and pages of bloviating - mostly by Couchfuck McGee, it seems - about how much Europe sucks. What is not there is anyone at all saying âHey, maybe we should not be discussing this stuff on Signal.â
You know why? Because they discuss everything on Signal and itâs all set to auto-delete.
They arenât using Signal to keep things secret from foreign adversaries; theyâre using Signal to keep things secret from us.
Trump announces tariffs on all foreign cars, a tale in two graphs:
And we can be completely confident that every one of those conversations has been intercepted by our enemies. Most of those idiots and their followers think that the problem was adding the reporter. Theyâll never grasp the larger problem and will continue to use unapproved means of communication.
Theyâre almost certainly using Signal on their personal phones and thereâs definitely a non-zero chance that theyâre using the same or similar passwords as Der Spiegel found on the internet. So thereâs a 100% chance that Russian intelligence has been able to extrapolate those passwords and accessed their phones. Itâs just math.
If it is only Russia, thatâs ok. Der Fuhrer is a Russian agent.
Yeah, Krasnov is giving Putin all the goods regardless.
That is what I see too. There is a Grand Canyon-sized division in this country.
Mind boggling.
Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and many others spent decades teaching one half of America to hate the other half of America. This is the result.
One of my newhire classmates at SWA used to fly that deceased piece of human excrement/windbag Rush Limbaugh, at his previous charter outfit in the late '90s.
He said Rush knew that his whole schtick was pure BS, but didnât care.
He and the other flame-throwers of vitriol may rot in hell.
Of course every intelligence service around the world knows what these slapdicks are doing. Theyâre doing it in broad daylight. In a normal world, that would be scandal enough. But the point made above is, in my view, the most concerning element of all of this - these freaks are using apps like Signal to hide what theyâre doing from the public, and that public obviously includes elected officials who in a normal world wield some power of oversight. This should be a Watergate level scandal with mass resignations and convictions and serious jail time, but instead itâs just a Monday.
As to the divide, the situation is far more serious than I think most people who participate in observable reality can imagine. These people are fed a constant stream of misinformation. They are lied to, all day, by the media apparatus that serves the Republican donor class. Thatâs why they think that the pharmaceutical industry is practicing wide scale malfeasance and that itâs safer not to vaccinate their kids. Thatâs why they think that Venezuelan gangs have taken over Denver. Thatâs why they think that the eleven trans athletes that compete in high school athletics across the country constitute some sort of national crisis. They get presented with made up problems and then itâs explained that Trump is solving them all, and, sure enough, he gets on TV and talks about all this nonsense. Itâs a never ending feedback loop, and it will be impossible to deprogram these cultist freaks.
Thatâs why Democrats have to quit acting like Republicans and start acting like progressives. They have to treat wealth and income inequality as the five alarm fire that it is. This growing inequality is the basis of almost everything that ails this society. Until these impotent fucks quit schumering they are going to lose to these fucking psychopaths in national elections every single time. Will the Democrats take over the House in a couple of years? Sure. Will they regain the Senate? Probably. Will that have any real impact? Fuck no, not with the courts and especially the Supreme Court in the bag for Trump. Unless they get a two thirds majority and can impeach this motherfucker, which they wonât, the only answer is to win the presidency. And if they keep running around acting like Republicans, well, guess what, thereâs an even better alternative in the mind of the average idiot, and thatâs actual Republicans.
I agree with almost all of this, but I do not think the Supreme Court is a lost cause yet.
Happy Opening Day my good friend.
Please forgive me for saying that I believe, on this point, you are deeply mistaken. Five of the six conservative justices were appointed expressly to do exactly what they are doing and will continue to do until they are replaced by someone far younger and even more insane.
The Supreme Court - through Citizens United - created the oligarchy under which we now live. And it wasnât by accident; the actual Citizens United case was a battle between trolls whereby the CU crowd were bitching that a trailer for a Michael Moore anti-Bush movie constituted an illegal campaign contribution.
SCOTUS, in overturning a district court ruling, used the case to strike down the entirety of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulations and create the environment we âenjoyâ today, where unlimited money can be spent on elections in secret. It took just 15 years from that decision to get to where Elon Musk could give openly Trumpâs broke campaign $200 million and in the process buy himself unfettered access to the federal governmentâs purse strings.
SCOTUS now has a 6-3 conservative majority including 3 Trump appointees. In very short order, it will have at least 2 more Trump appointees, giving it a 5-4 Trump majority. SCOTUS is lost and will shortly be nothing more than a MAGA mouthpiece (if it isnât already).
Weâll see. I am more optimistic about seven of them but am usually wrong.
Expansion is the only option and support of expansion should be a baseline requirement for participation in Democratic politics. But focusing on that right now is like collecting the garden gnomes in the middle of the Palisades fire.
FDR says hi.
