Pecker did it to help Trump’s presidential campaign. That’s the big connection that makes this more than a simple case of checkbook journalism.
Former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker testified at Donald Trump’s criminal trial that he suppressed a story about an alleged affair to help Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, even though it would have boosted sales of his tabloid.
Pecker and Trump are principals in this conspiracy…they’re the leaders of their respective teams, and everyone else is just an employee. Pecker got a deal not to be prosecuted, but he was Trump’s partner in crime and fully admits it.
Trump’s pecker sure got him into trouble this time.
Sorry, I’ll stop.
So there’s this meh diner in my town owned by a right wing ass who has this big rah-rah patriotic flag display next to it. Big, ugly and, typically, IIUC, said owner never served.
About a half block away, open field, is this little something. No clue who set it up or why or what it means. But I saw it this morning and pulled to the side of the road. More interesting than dingle-fritz’s multi-flag extravaganza though.
re: #3 Vicious Babushka
An eight-nine-foot long salmon?
Lotta lox you’d get from THAT bad boy…..
re: #9 Charles Johnson
I’m hoping she ended her political career with the puppy story, rather than boosting it. Online sociopaths will defend her, but most Americans love dogs.
re: #4 Charles Johnson
Trump’s pecker sure got him into trouble this time.
Sorry, I’ll stop.
Will you really, though? It’s too good to stop. Keep it up.
re: #10 🐈 Crush White Christian Nationalism 🐈
especially with other options, rehoming or repurposing for starters.
“Israel is secretly controlled by Jews“
— Dima Medvedev
I am flabbergasted by the incredibly sophisticated intellectual contributions we lose by restricting access of Russians to the European Union. pic.twitter.com/LCnYCePjF1— toomas ilves, ex-verif (@IlvesToomas) April 22, 2024
Meanwhile in Russia: seething about the resumption of U.S. aid to Ukraine, Vladimir Solovyov asserts that Russia’s borders extend all the way to Mexico, and if Russia needs the Atlantic ocean, it should take it as well.https://t.co/horM6hMTxg
— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) April 23, 2024
re: #14 Belafon
They boast loudest when they’re most frightened of what’s about to happen to them or Russia’s about to experience another embarrassing major defeat on the battlefield.
Interesting theory:
“The whole history of a happy & safe Europe is a result of Europeans losing imperial wars.” - @TimothyDSnyder explains what a defeated russia would look likepic.twitter.com/m4m3P0EOiY
— Andrew Chakhoyan 🇺🇦 (@ChakhoyanAndrew) April 22, 2024
re: #240 Romantic Heretic
Are they going to rename it Elite Guard of Donald Trump?
Ya know, like Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler?
Here’s President Nixon Guard’s uniforms;
re: #11 Colère Tueur de Lapin ✅
Will you really, though? It’s too good to stop. Keep it up.
I saw what you did there…
re: #10 🐈 Crush White Christian Nationalism 🐈
I’m hoping she ended her political career with the puppy story, rather than boosting it. Online sociopaths will defend her, but most Americans love dogs.
Trump is a psychopath and hates dogs. Noem’s story is perfectly calibrated for its intended audience. If Trump gives her the VP nomination, any Republican who presently purports to be against animal cruelty will swiftly reprogram themselves.
The most sickening part of her story is how easy it is to imagine her substituting “untrainable child” for “untrainable dog”.
re: #23 Rightwingconspirator
So I stop at a local deli in an unfamiliar town for a sandwich. While I wait I check out the meat section.
[Embedded content]
I read that first one with w’s where the r’s are. Without trying.
re: #23 Rightwingconspirator
So I stop at a local deli in an unfamiliar town for a sandwich. While I wait I check out the meat section.
[Embedded content]
Venison medallions with a Bearnaise sauce…yum.
So I go out to assess the Sorrel for tomorrow’s green borscht and there’s this big ass blue flower I don’t recall planting in the geranium bed…it’s fuckin’ sage! We had a small pot of sage that we never planted and I dumped the dead fucker and its dirt into the bed last summer…well, it must have had a living cell in it because it’s back with a vengeance.
The Ohio State student newspaper has retracted its earlier report stating there were no snipers on campus yesterday, in response to a viral Twitter post. They’ve now confirmed there were state troopers with long-range firearms on the student union roof last night.
— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) 2024-04-26T20:26:17.405Z
The new policy that Indiana University used to justify snipers, arresting students and faculty, and banning those arrested from campus for a year, was enacted *one day* before yesterday’s protests began. It wasn’t even posted online until yesterday morning.
www.idsnews.com/article/2024…— Jess Calarco (@jessicacalarco.bsky.social) 2024-04-26T12:39:42.610Z
How agile the response is compared to years of reactionary speakers doing inflammatory statements from stages while dragging wingnuts provocateurs with them from campus to campus. America isn’t willing to confront the larger, embedded institution of right wing prejudice, the thing with billions of dollar, millions of listeners, press agencies, and politicians with sinecures, but we’re ramping to kick the shit out of some mouthy kids.
Funny how this keeps happening. The Overton Window is open for fascists, willing to give them a spotlight; heck, we have fascists doing antisemitism in office, and far large chunk of rapture ready politicians absolutely chuffed that Israel’s getting closer to being burned out of existence.
Hm, I wonder if this is symptomatic of the same permissiveness that was granted to anti-Islam demogogues…I mean, we had to hear them out, too, right? Marketplace of ideas and all that. It’s almost like there’s a double standard for culpability and a selective application of collective guilt. I mean, you can facilitate two million dead Arabs and it doesn’t even move the outrage meter.
It’s almost like this isn’t about good faith engagement with anti-prejudice but about the ongoing justification of US political priorities in which the state of Israel happens to be an important proxy. Cold Warriors and the rapture-ready are all instrumentalizing Israeli lives but would prefer that not be talked about. Kind of like how we don’t talk about what the KSA or Egypt gets up to as downstream of our subsidization of their entirely-undemocratic governments.
Right wingers don’t get treated this way because no matter how loudly they’re calling for blood and discrimination, anything they implement mostly preserves existing power dynamics. Normal Americans…who are pretty much used to a drip-feed of state violence such that it’s viewed as necessary but impolite to discuss…can conceptualize a world where just a few more brown people, often far way, die but grocery and gas prices don’t go up.
The guns come out when the protesters are demanding something that might change the power structure status quo.
re: #17 Belafon
Interesting theory:
[Embedded content]
Yeah, I’d be happier if there were more than one single example, but I can’t think of a second case in history.
Reuters and other businesses that actually pay reporters should, in their own defense, stop using the phrase “checkbook journalism” when they describe the fiction and propaganda commissioned by David Pecker/National Enquirer for his friends.
re: #29 A hollow voice says: Abort SCOTUS
Yeah, I’d be happier if there were more than one single example, but I can’t think of a second case in history.
The problem is that a lot of the time, Europeans have lost imperial wars to other Europeans, which usually results in a bad time for both countries involved.
re: #191 goddamnedfrank
The corollary to this is that people with everything to lose probably shouldn’t get into a fight with people who have nothing to live for. We’ve given young people no hope and no promising future but we expect them to comport themselves as if these things still exist for them to jeopardize.
— Jason McGlothlen (@goddamnedfrank.bsky.social) 2024-04-26T23:55:05.290Z
re: #6 Jay C
An eight-nine-foot long salmon?
Lotta lox you’d get from THAT bad boy…..
So, a 15 weight fly rod, you think, with a rabbit fly? Not rabbit fur, an actual rabbit.
re: #31 Nerdy Fish
The problem is that a lot of the time, Europeans have lost imperial wars to other Europeans, which usually results in a bad time for both countries involved.
My problem is that the period of peace after the Congress of Vienna was a century long, and nobody lost imperial wars to achieve it. The EU peace (not altogether peaceful, but neither was the post-Congress period) has lasted less than that.
Of course there may be more to his argument than I’ve heard.
Quoting Popehat:
Look I know this all sounds bad but the thing to remember is that Kristi Noem’s surviving children are extremely well behaved.
Wow, Pecker even consulted election specialists and knew what he was doing with Trump was illegal as fuck.
re: #36 austin_blue
Quoting Popehat:
Look I know this all sounds bad but the thing to remember is that Kristi Noem’s surviving children are extremely well behaved.
Well, if she isn’t picked for the VP slot, she’s the leading candidate for the main villain in Fargo, Season 6. And she wouldn’t even have to learn the accent.
re: #37 Charles Johnson
Wow, Pecker even consulted election specialists and knew what he was doing with Trump was illegal as fuck.
This is how it’s done. I’m sure Pecker’s deal with the state is good testimony like this in exchange for him not being in the hot seat.
Apparently Trump dozed off a few more times this morning while his lawyer was doing cross with Pecker. One of these days he’s going to drop into REM and start speaking and say something memorable the whole courtroom can hear like, “melon” or “mussshhterd”…even just closing his eyes and mouthing words silently would be a great influence on the jury.
It’s also fascinating that checkbook journalism is just part of the National Enquirer business model, and only when it runs afoul of politics is it a real problem.
The missus had Alexa play Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors when she got home…we’re almost through it and I’ve yet to hear a song I don’t already know all the words to. What a great album.
re: #18 BeenHereAwhile
I guess Nixon was unaware of the inverse relationship between fancy uniforms and combat effectiveness.
5 pm MST and I’ve logged off…OMG, the last three weeks have been awful.
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re: #43 Romantic Heretic
I guess Nixon was unaware of the inverse relationship between fancy uniforms and combat effectiveness.
They’re very pretty, Colonel. Very pretty. But can they fight?
re: #43 Romantic Heretic
I guess Nixon was unaware of the inverse relationship between fancy uniforms and combat effectiveness.
It’s not like that matters — Nixon’s proposed White House praetorian guard would have been there to inflate Nixon’s ego, not engage in combat.
But this is obviously a picture that none of Trump’s bootlickers in his administration were aware of, or the idea would have been revived. Just like we know that none of the Trump toadies knew about the giant statue Turkmenbashi had erected of himself. It was even on a motorized base so it always faced the sun.
re: #44 mmmirele
You and me both, but for different reasons.
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re: #38 sizzzzlerz
Well, if she isn’t picked for the VP slot, she’s the leading candidate for the main villain in Fargo, Season 6. And she wouldn’t even have to learn the accent.
“Oh, yeah, eh, you betcha!”
{Three years in the UP of Michigan.}
re: #46 EPR-radar
It’s not like that matters — Nixon’s proposed White House praetorian guard would have been there to inflate Nixon’s ego, not engage in combat.
But this is obviously a picture that none of Trump’s bootlickers in his administration were aware of, or the idea would have been revived. Just like we know that none of the Trump toadies knew about the giant statue Turkmenbashi had erected of himself. It was even on a motorized base so it always faced the sun.
Leave that to his boot lickers in congress. When the fat fuck actually does die, there’ll be any number of bills to build statues in his honor to rival anything North Korea’s got for their fat fucks.
re: #51 darthstar
Sshh…they don’t know yet.
I’m not going to lie, my eyeballs glossed over it the first time because Russians and Jewish conspiracy theories, what’s a better pairing? But then it hit me, like Teukka’s drink on his monitor.
re: #13 Belafon
[Embedded content]
Psssst. Keep this one on the downlow, but The Vatican is run by *checks from side to side* … Catholics.
re: #17 Belafon
Interesting theory:
[Embedded content]
The less polite way is saying: European colonial powers got the shit kicked out of them so hard by insurgency and resistance that they retracted back down to merely nations, jettisoning enough of the self-concept of necessary for imperialism* to pursue a more stable societal structure in which liberal norms were not cut with the exceptions required to maintain an empire.
*you have to build an internal identity that is contingent on empire to create the labor force to take and maintain an empire. Imperial culture has preconceptions, blinkers: a really big one is the distinction of colonizer/colonized that acts as a kind of totalizing filter that makes the colonized, in the eye of the colonizer, incapable of asserting self-determination. The colonizer is thus paradoxically always engaged in paternalistic guidance and acting in self defense against a jittery animal. Whatever violence is committed, even prolonged terror, is a clinical and rational process because the complaints of the colonized are irrelevant..
It’s not a bad little analytical statement, but I think what he doesn’t cover which is that imperialism really only diminished when a new exploitation structures—modern international manufacturing and a global labor market which both send money primarily to banks in developed nations because property rights are so emphasized over labor rights—that channeled resources to ex-colonizers, which was absolutely a lubricant for those nations to slide into a more modern liberalism.
There’s a slippery middle stage before that giant infrastructural leap changing how capital is held where nations were constantly trying to prod imperialism into wakefulness. Both Spanish and Portuguese fascism, which were comparatively long-lived, leaned hard into a vision of restoration of their old empires only to get their asses stomped for a second time. Stupid shit happened in Britain..the Falklands, Thatcher basically turning the North back into a periphery, much ado about holding Northern Ireland, Frederick Forsythe tried to coup an island…that all fell into a class I’d call “imperial nostalgia.”
What makes this more slippery is if you look at, say, France…which lost Mediterranean Africa and SE Asia but kind of has kept its economic empire in the Sahel, as a bunch of those states were dependent on French scrip to maintain their internal economy (and staggering dynastic democratic rule). Or for that matter Denmark and it’s ownership and administration of Greenland…which is still a thing but is notable in some the shady sterilization shit they did to the natives.
So what Snyder says is kind of roughly correct: Russia losing this war could chill it the fuck out if regime change results. But I’m really torn because I don’t have his confidence precisely because the old colonial collapses occurred under different material conditions. Russian oligarchy is durable in no small part because of its web of international connection—their capital is British mansions and German banks, etc, but also the core capacity of their state is as an umbrella for other kleptocrats. Wagner’s zone of influence within African nations (many of them Sahel states breaking away from the French) is suggestive of a kind of past-neo-colonialist structure that could sustain the existing power holders because logistics has reached the point where the state itself is superfluous, you just need to control the mine and road to the port.
I mean internally Russia is still structured like an overland empire: there is a center (Russia proper, Moscow to St Petersburg) and a vast periphery in which there’s basically no infrastructure beyond what’s required for resource extraction. The Soviets at least tried to bring basic amenities to the whole country (although they had their own reactionary elements that allocated assets mostly to ethnic Russians…and sometimes Georgians under Stalin) but the oligarchs have basically weaponized precarity: by pushing Russians in the periphery to the very edge—no money, no health care, no prospects—they’ve created a market for the most dangerous labor as cheap as possible.
Conscripts aren’t just stealing Ukrainian toilets because they’re bastards, but because they’ve lived at a level of desperation where the opportunity to steal a toilet is something they’ll pounce on. Europe post-WW2 was pretty shit, but those countries that lost colonial wars had a fat pad to help them through the transition: the Russia periphery is skeletal by design, and the Russian center has enough cash that even the countries supporting Ukraine can’t quite give up on taking their deposits. I hope he’s right, but I don’t see what Ukraine could do to the center of Russia…the oligarchs, the capital of the oligarchs…that resulted in a regime change.
post bath fluffy sad snout
— Charles Johnson (@charles.littlegreenfootballs.com) 2024-04-27T00:48:02.000Z
Kristi Noem is not good at reading the room.
re: #58 Charles Johnson
Kristi Noem is not good at reading the room.
I mean, she’s trying to gain favor with psychopaths, sociopaths, trolls, incels, and white supremacists. Is she really?
Has the inevitable right wing defense of admitted puppy-killer Kristi Noem kicked in yet, or are they still trying to figure out how to handle this one?
— Charles Johnson (@charles.littlegreenfootballs.com) 2024-04-27T00:54:10.000Z
re: #55 The Ghost of a Flea
The fastest way to grok the cultivated empire mindset is to look at Japan’s speedrun of imperialism…often explicitly echoing back to European colonists their own justifications.
It’s not that the Japanese couldn’t be bastards beforehand, or their government wasn’t prior rapaciously self-justifying, it’s that you literally have to train your people to not-see other people. The build up of this mindset from the occupation of Hokkaido—a standard “well, fuck the locals” affair—to the Co-prosperity Sphere’s mindfuck combo of condescension and brutality is a kind of microcosm of how it all works.
Another good inflection point is the Belgian Congo, which famously snaps the camel in half in terms of its brutality hidden under paternalism…but the part that gets less talked about is how all the other colonizers use the Congo—including the Belgians that confiscate the Congo from Leopold—to justify their comparatively-less awful practices, conspicuously stepping over both the obvious similarities and how many of their young men cut their administrative teeth in rubber plantations.
Kurtz was an archetype.
Kristi Noem is banned from even setting foot into any of the four large indigenous reservations *in her home state*.
re: #55 The Ghost of a Flea
Europe post-WW2 was pretty shit, but those countries that lost colonial wars had a fat pad to help them through the transition: the Russia periphery is skeletal by design, and the Russian center has enough cash that even the countries supporting Ukraine can’t quite give up on taking their deposits.
I’m not sure this article is exactly on point so much as I’ve just been kind of looking for an excuse to bring it up. Also it seems salient in terms of approaching Russia’s internal politics through a lens of co-dependent abuse and deprivation:
At first glance, this seems paradoxical: the more Moscow ups the pressure and tightens the screws on ethnic groups, the more these groups support the Kremlin. However, in this case we are dealing with a fairly widespread effect, described by political scientists as the tragic brilliance of authoritarianism. In contrast to democracies where voters can punish the government for an economic crisis by voting for the opposition, authoritarian regimes can use crises for their own benefit.
A crisis is precisely the condition that can stimulate electoral support for incumbent authoritarian leaders. Here is the logic: in a period of economic growth, every region enjoys subsidies from the center (loyal regions more so than less-loyal ones). But during a period of limited resources and tightened centralization, it becomes clear that less-loyal regions can see their economic lifeline reduced, if not severed completely.
This results in competition for subsidies between regions, one in which political loyalty becomes a key advantage. A similar logic plays out with ethnic minorities in Russia under the pressures of crisis and centralization, during which they are less interested in expanding their political and cultural autonomy than preserving the status quo. Under the threat of losing all their remaining ethnic preferences, they are inclined to not only unite behind ‘their own’ regional head, but also adhere to his calls to vote for the Kremlin’s preferred federal players and not risk making the situation even worse.
This is the essence of authoritarian tragic brilliance. Tragic, because ethnic minorities are forced to give up their ethno-cultural rights; brilliant, because these tightening screws of authoritarianism paradoxically reinforce the ethnic minorities’ loyalty. Despite worsening conditions, the government can deliver truly ‘brilliant’ electoral results precisely in Russia’s ‘ethnic republics.’
re: #60 Charles Johnson
The Hill offers the excuse of “a bad hunting trip” in the headline instead of reporting that she imagined older dogs would do the work of training her puppy:
Kristi Noem describes killing dog after bad hunting trip in new book
thehill.com
“Noem shot the dog after taking it on a pheasant hunt.
She writes that she had taken Cricket on the hunt hoping she would learn from older dogs, but that instead the younger dog ruined the hunt by “chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,”
Killing a dog as a book promotion.
“We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm. Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years. If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping, preorder ‘No Going Back,’ she wrote.
It’s snowing hard again up in the high mountains, more water for the creeks and rivers.
I hope this isn’t an increasing trend of radical right psychos competing to see who can do more politically INcorrect animal slaughter.
re: #68 jaunte
If that was the case then this country has fallen so far out of grace maybe the revolution should commence… We’ll find out in November ???
re: #68 jaunte
Remembering Don Jr. and his elephant tail trophy.
The Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald has given a full-throated endorsement of “great replacement” ideology. angrywhitemen.org/2024/04/25/h…
— Chris Ingraham (@cingraham.bsky.social) 2024-04-25T14:00:15.835Z
Manhattan Institute is a great example of how utterly normalized fascist ideology is.
I mean, it’s never been great—founded by a CIA gnoll and a guy that pooped Hayek-based thinktanks around the Global North—but intellectual laundering of class warfare and racism has just turned into embroidering fascism with words and credentials.
While discussing campus protests against colleges doing business with Israel, Mac Donald said that conservatives should “shut down as much of the universities as we can” and “create as many alternatives as we can.” She added that they also must “speak up for Western civilization” and its values: “equality, tolerance, human rights, limited government.”
“These are all exclusively Western ideas,” she said. “They came out of no place outside of the West. They didn’t come out of Africa. They didn’t come out of China. They didn’t come out of Arabia. They didn’t come out of India. And now the Left uses the bounty of beautiful Enlightenment ideas to try and tear down the Enlightenment.”
This is one of the most perfect representations of how fascism is just colonialism turned inwards.
Everything above is bullshit, because states that fetishized “the European Enlightenment” immediately created hierarchical structures that it maintained until forced to do otherwise by Africans, Asians, etc. That’s not contentious, it’s literally what happened: the liberal world order was something forced by expulsion of colonialism. The brown people she despises did the actual labor of enfranchisement while the white people that claim ownership of those ideas used their vast resources to…steal fucking everything and build fancy buildings.
It’s a person arguing for the constriction of Enlightenment values to an elect of guess-what-color, guess-what-culture, citing the authority of the Enlightenment to validate her position as intellectually sound and not basic-bitch racism.
Note that she’s using Gaza protests as a pretext for broad-spectrum racism interlaced with anti-intellectualism; this is not an anomaly, this is how conservatives always envision identity politics. Israelis are the martial race disciplining the even-lower-tier Arabs and thus must be provisionally supported. At the same time “the Great Replacement” — a fascist thesis that often incorporates international Jews, if not Soros himself, as the prime movers diluting white nations—is an entirely acceptable position to advance, because the conservative base assumption is that Jews are nonetheless a different kind, and those that are not immediately providing value within the racial hierarchy are suspect.
The anti-intellectualism has to be present even as intellectual posturing is used as a justification, because otherwise the shitheads would have to acknowledge that we’ve actually built a system in which credentials signify something that can’t be explained by race…and they need race to be the determinant.
Kelly singled out Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg — who is currently prosecuting the hush money case against Trump — and ridiculed his education and legal acumen.
“Now instead of sitting back and asking ourselves ‘Maybe Alvin Bragg doesn’t have it. Maybe Alvin Bragg’s Harvard Law education didn’t exactly do for him what we had hoped,’ you’ve got the Joy Reids of the world who are having a very different reaction,” Kelly said.
She then played a clip of MSNBC host Joy Reid who called it “wonderfully poetic” that “the first person to actually criminally prosecute Donald Trump is a Black Harvard grad.” She said that Trump is “being held to account by the very multicultural, multiracial democracy that he’s trying to dismantle.”
re: #63 goddamnedfrank
In this sense, it is not important how, but where a candidate works. Given that almost all members of United Russia are in charge of an enterprise, people vote for them in the hope that they will provide material support for the village. Likewise, they avoid voting for the opposition in fear that the municipal head will punish the village by cutting financial support.
and
As it turns out, centralization and its tendency to reduce ethnic minority groups’ political and cultural autonomy in Russia strengthens their motivation to support politicians who represent their ethnic group. Therefore, these voters see republic heads who match their region’s titular ethnic group as defenders of their ethno-cultural preferences. Combined with fear of angering Moscow and losing even more autonomy, this trend leads to minorities being even more receptive to their regional leaders’ main message: support the Russian president and the United Russia Party.
stand out to me.
Bucketcrabocracy.
Mr. Popo is flying circles around downtown right now in Austin.
Hmmm…
Ugh. Horrific murder where I live. A kid killed another kid with a knife in a big fight at the town park, video was taken, social media posts were made…
My Dad would be horrified…
re: #61 The Ghost of a Flea
The fastest way to grok the cultivated empire mindset is to look at Japan’s speedrun of imperialism…often explicitly echoing back to European colonists their own justifications.
It’s not that the Japanese couldn’t be bastards beforehand, or their government wasn’t prior rapaciously self-justifying, it’s that you literally have to train your people to not-see other people. The build up of this mindset from the occupation of Hokkaido—a standard “well, fuck the locals” affair—to the Co-prosperity Sphere’s mindfuck combo of condescension and brutality is a kind of microcosm of how it all works.
Another good inflection point is the Belgian Congo, which famously snaps the camel in half in terms of its brutality hidden under paternalism…but the part that gets less talked about is how all the other colonizers use the Congo—including the Belgians that confiscate the Congo from Leopold—to justify their comparatively-less awful practices, conspicuously stepping over both the obvious similarities and how many of their young men cut their administrative teeth in rubber plantations.
Kurtz was an archetype.
Co-prosperity sphere would make a good entry at TV Tropes … < whistles innocently >
Addendum:
I want to describe this thing MacDonald is doing as treating human rights like intellectual property: it’s not the people that do the work of human rights that embody it, but rather it’s a thing owned by the descendants of the creators. It’s wild, so completely fucking wrong but also so intuitively makes sense with how conservatives interact with ideas: meaning isn’t important, possession is important.
(How do you exclusively posses an idea? Through using power to enforce that exclusivity. Like, say, not teaching people to read, or paywalling education through privatizing it.)
As always, it’s who you are not what you do. Nothing holds steady but their assumption of hierarchy. Everything exists to reify power.
Human rights as process..it’s a fucking idea, it’s not concrete and only exists through reproduction.
versus
Human rights as state, which makes no sense before you ever get to the notion of exclusive ownership because the idea of human rights exist in flux, expanding and contracting relative to other ideas. Exclusivity of human rights contradicts the notion of “human” that grants “human rights” it’s meaning; that’s literally the contradiction that drives so much history of civil rights expansion.
There’s a pattern I find very interesting where ideas become fetishes of themselves: at some point you hollow the actual idea, composed of myriad other ideas and existing only in the inherent tension of definition through language, and wear the corpse as part of a kind of performance of idea-ness that evokes the meaning of the idea as a source of authority or authenticity while discarding the work of understanding the idea.
I could kick conservatives more by pointing out how often they do this, but really it’s a thing that happens in any group of normies that through social learning absorb the importance of an idea but not the pins-and-strings connectivity of ideas to other ideas. A fetishized concept is effectively invoked in the same way a god or ancestor is.
re: #77 JC1
And catturd2 has a history of killing dogs on his “farm.”
A catturd2 Xitter post of catturd2 describing in detail him killing his dog
re: #60 Charles Johnson
[Embedded content]
Freepers are divided on whether Noem should have shot the puppy. When I looked earlier, “sometimes you just have to do that” was leading.
re: #37 Charles Johnson
Wow, Pecker even consulted election specialists and knew what he was doing with Trump was illegal as fuck.
Pecker took an immunity bath.
re: #79 teleskiguy
And catturd2 has a history of killing dogs on his “farm.”
A catturd2 Xitter post of catturd2 describing in detail him killing his dog
This is the end of her in politics and public life.
Art Of Coop @artofcoop.bsky.social
I went over to xhitter to see the reaction to that horrible Kristi Norm story, and as you might’ve guessed, there’s are MAGA creeps who think that “she’s got character” and “will get the job done” because she shot a puppy. We are so fucked
re: #83 JC1
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This is the end of her in politics and public life.
These are republican scum. I won’t hold my breath.
“It’s okay to kill a wayward dog with your pistol.”
Posted by every low level Republican out there in two weeks.
re: #86 William Lewis
These are republican scum. I won’t hold my breath.
I think that killing puppies is still a third rail. The ratio on Noem’s few tweets since this broke is incredible, both on her personal and official SD accounts. The scales have fallen from many former supporters’ eyes.
re: #86 William Lewis
These are republican scum. I won’t hold my breath.
They don’t need her. She needed then to accept her and she fucked that up in a bad way.
re: #89 JC1
I think that killing puppies is still a third rail. The ratio on Noem’s few tweets since this broke is incredible, both on her personal and official SD accounts. The scales have fallen from many former supporters’ eyes.
I’ll believe it if it happens, but these days I think the only third rail for republicans is disloyalty to Trump…real or perceived.
re: #89 JC1
I agree that Noem truly went too far, this time. Dogs, dude.
re: #92 Markm1960
I’ll believe it if it happens, but these days I think the only third rail for republicans is disloyalty to Trump…real or perceived.
The tipping point for her though is she offers them nothing.
re: #1 darthstar
Pecker and Trump are principals in this conspiracy…they’re the leaders of their respective teams, and everyone else is just an employee. Pecker got a deal not to be prosecuted, but he was Trump’s partner in crime and fully admits it.
This stuff in this trial would get a Hollywood writer fired for lazy hack writing work just 30 years ago. Now it’s real life. This is what MAGA and Trump bring to reality. Lazy, by the numbers complete corruption and hack profiteering not even worthy of a C-grade grindhouse movie.
re: #91 austin_blue
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Here’s the best trad harp player in the world, bar none.
Nice. But it made me remember this lady i follow on instagram. Not traditional. At all…
re: #99 William Lewis
Nice. But it made me remember this lady i follow on instagram. Not traditional. At all…
re: #98 Florida Panhandler
This stuff in this trial would get a Hollywood writer fired for lazy hack writing work just 30 years ago. Now it’s real life. This is what MAGA and Trump bring to reality. Lazy, by the numbers complete corruption and hack profiteering not even worthy of a C-grade grindhouse movie.
I wonder if that would be a good way to get through to some people. Present current events as a script exercise.
re: #100 William Lewis
Ok, Instagram links don’t show here. Did not know that. Let’s see if this will:
Instagram dot com /harpistkt/ or /p/C56rg1SgL8M/ for the electric version of “Crazy Train” I was trying to link to.
I wonder if the Noem family had any cats? If the family did, did the cats live long and lovely lives. Might as well piss off the cat people as well as the dog lovers.
(PS - Just about every ranch/farm has cats in their barn(s) for mouse control duties.)
re: #79 teleskiguy
And catturd2 has a history of killing dogs on his “farm.”
A catturd2 Xitter post of catturd2 describing in detail him killing his dog
TBF to catturd2 — the event he described was an accident; he was heartbroken and even tried to resuscitate the dog. Definitely not a cold-blooded deliberate effort to kill him.
re: #106 Hecuba’s daughter
1. She intentionally killed her dog for…reasons…
2. Time has passed and she still has no remorse for the act after having had years to reflect on it.
3. She thought such behavior would help her politically.
Noem will be forgiven by most Rs by next Friday. The NY Pust, WSJ and the NYTimes will be defending her in about 2 weeks
re: #109 Lancelot Link Returns!
Noem will be forgiven by most Rs by next Friday. The NY Pust, WSJ and the NYTimes will be defending her in about 2 weeks
She will forever be labeled ‘dog killer Noem’. That’s the FO part of FA.
re: #35 A hollow voice says: Abort SCOTUS
My problem is that the period of peace after the Congress of Vienna was a century long, and nobody lost imperial wars to achieve it. The EU peace (not altogether peaceful, but neither was the post-Congress period) has lasted less than that.
Of course there may be more to his argument than I’ve heard.
Uuh, the Congress of Vienna was a direct result of Napoleon losing an imperial war.
re: #109 Lancelot Link Returns!
Noem will be forgiven by most Rs by next Friday. The NY Pust, WSJ and the NYTimes will be defending her in about 2 weeks
Honestly, I’m tempted to spend 500 bucks on postage and send postcards to as many residences in SD as I can that say, “Gov. Noem bragged about shooting her puppy”
re: #107 darthstar
1. She intentionally killed her dog for…reasons…
2. Time has passed and she still has no remorse for the act after having had years to reflect on it.
3. She thought such behavior would help her politically.
Yes — she’s a monster but at least when it comes to animals, catturd2 seems to be a very decent person, unlike every other aspect of his life. I was only commenting on the description that catturd2 “killed” his dog; yes — literally true — but totally unintentional.
re: #113 darthstar
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He’s a very good man. His social media team is also very good; this is the same guy with the legendary photo of being mobbed by cheering schoolchildren after signing into law the bill that provides free school lunches for all Minnesota primary school kids.
I believe these are naturally occurring flares and nothing to be concerned about….enjoy.
This is what responsible presidents do…even when they’re running against a piece of shit traitor…
re: #113 darthstar
Post a picture with your dog that doesn’t involve shooting them and throwing them in a gravel pit. https://t.co/X5W61xGISd pic.twitter.com/qFQ63FTBQU
— Governor Gretchen Whitmer (@GovWhitmer) April 27, 2024
re: #119 darthstar
I believe these are naturally occurring flares and nothing to be concerned about….enjoy.
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Comrade Putin, that is you, da?///
re: #123 No Malarkey!
Even looney Loomer is repulsed. I wonder if Noem reads LGF, because not so long ago I suggested in jest that Trump test his VP candidates by ordering them to kill a puppy, and apparently Noem took the suggestion seriously!
[Embedded content]
Here is my post from March 31. Did Noem read it? littlegreenfootballs.com
I have to say, it will be very interesting to see all these Republicans currently repulsed by puppy-killer Noem do the GOP 180 if Trump picks her as his running mate.
Live Xitter feed in box of Trump and Putin performing a duet.
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
re: #124 No Malarkey!
Close enough for government work, although I think Noem’s puppy murder was from long before then.
Perhaps it gave her inspiration to tell the story, one psychopath seeking to impress another.
Because everyone knows that the only people Trump has ever shown any respect and admiration for are psychopaths even worse than he is.
Plot twist: Trump will look at this and then pick Michael Vick to be his running mate.
Look, I realize that this is horribly cold, but Noem is attempting to set herself up as something continuous with the Trump brand of performative indifference to polite norms and the classic GOP posturing as somebody who’s tough. The story is an exercise in branding, where the intention is describe an act that would trigger disgust and shock in the kind of people that conservatives view as weak, and to do so in a way that makes her more of what her target audience want than her competitors.
Here’s the part I hate but feel I have to point out: this story could be embellished because the parts we find upsetting and ugly are plausibly touch-ups designed to sell Noem to reactionaries. The stuff that seems so upsetting that you’d only write it because it’s true is feasibly an (unsuccessful) attempt to create ad copy for her intended audience: remember the selling point is how capable of doing dirty, uncomfortable things she is, that the direct contrast is “I can shoot my dog, I can govern my state because both are require coldness and expediently doing hard things.” By focusing on the act of shooting the dog we’re neglecting that she’s intentionally presenting shooting the dog as exemplary of…something. The act of depicting this, including the internal details such as her anger and disappointment with the puppy are deliberately put onto a page as ad copy.
Gross. It’s gross.
Think on that: think on what has become normal in conservative discourse to brag about, to say without shame. Shit, go look any given day at what Laura Loomer says into a microphone; watch Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley perform “Anything you can say that involves state terror, I can say worse.” Every new candidate trying to make themselves distinctive has to figure out how to set the bar lower…be uglier, be more shocking, more authentic in their compact indifference to norms in ways that signifies strength to cruel people that think themselves superior…while not hitting anything that upsets their audience because their own performative hardness is in fact riddled with sentimentality and genuine emotion that they just don’t admit to.
It’s like doing the limbo blindfolded, and the limbo bar is Donald Trump giving a speech where he graphically describes executing a Moro rebel with a bullet dipped in pig’s blood.
Weak people are more dangerous; they’ll arrive at killing you faster because they’re primed to escalate, to make everything a point about their strength. We’re looking at the aesthetics of the weak and cruel. It doesn’t matter if they are psychopaths, they are incentivized by the enclosed culture that they’re within to behave like psychopaths..which is actually scarier, because psychopaths are at least blessed rare, while tryhard fuckups doing anything for clout are myriad. The loop of performance and reward is spiralling down, it’s not a cult it’s teenagers goading each other into eating Tide pods. We don’t have the luxury of imagining that this is the bottom, the outlier, because pretty soon somebody else is going to have to top this.
The absolute shit is this?
Being a billionaire breaks your brain
— 🪷 tiffani 🪼 (@tranniehall.bsky.social) 2024-04-27T00:50:23.242Z
re: #130 goddamnedfrank
The absolute shit is this?
[Embedded content]
I can’t help but observe that being an exceedingly wealthy techbro seems to cause brainworms in a whole lot of people out there. Not everyone, of course - but far too many.
Conservatives would chicken out after eating a single Tide pod.
re: #130 goddamnedfrank
The absolute shit is this?
[Embedded content]
A stoner who thinks he’s profound?
re: #130 goddamnedfrank
Can’t he write a dystopian YA book like a normal person
LOLGOP
@lolgop.bsky.social
After a week of arguing that pregnant women should die in their cars outside emergency rooms and Papal Infallibility for Republican Presidents, “I enjoy killing puppies” is how a Republican moves to the center.
Apr 26, 2024 at 5:25 PM
re: #130 goddamnedfrank
The absolute shit is this?
Revenge of the Nerds is one of the most successful pieces of reactionary literature ever composed.
Our tech masters are several dozen guys who answer the question of what it would be like if Heinrich Himmler had access to Warcraft and ketamine, but had less consensual sex.
re: #136 The Ghost of a Flea
Revenge of the Nerds is one of the most successful pieces of reactionary literature ever composed.
Our tech masters are several dozen guys who answer the question of what it would be like if Heinrich Himmler had access to Warcraft and ketamine, but had less consensual sex.
Today I learned that Revenge of the Nerds was inspired by an article from Los Angeles Magazine. I had no idea.
re: #131 Dr Lizardo
I can’t help but observe that being an exceedingly wealthy techbro seems to cause brainworms in a whole lot of people out there. Not everyone, of course - but far too many.
They think they’ve done it all on their own. An affliction that Mark Cuban, among others, doesn’t seem to have.
re: #138 The Ghost of a Flea
As someone suggest in the replies, maybe we should go looking in the gravel pit. If you can shoot a dog, who else might you shoot?
Does anyone remember that Joe Biden broke his foot?
I’d wear confortabel shoes too if I was dealing with a broken ankle and neuropathy.
re: #140 Belafon
As someone suggest in the replies, maybe we should go looking in the gravel pit. If you can shoot a dog, who else might you shoot?
In her own story, she’s shooting Cricket out of frustration, not out of hard-eyed realism about her earning potential and the farm’s survival. And the goat seems to be for catharsis.
This comment stands out to me.
I’m really baffled about the choice to write these acts as so petty, so driven by emotionality. Part of me thinks it’s an error, an overstep while trying to perform an inauthentic grit, and part of me thinks that presenting it as petty is itself an attempted selling point.
I mean, when reactionaries position themselves as “doing what must be done” it’s usually…not something that must be done, but something they want to do out of pique.
I dunno, it’s late enough that I’m overthinking shit even more than usual.
re: #110 darthstar
She will forever be labeled ‘dog killer Noem’. That’s the FO part of FA.
Yeah. This isn’t something you come back from. Not cold-blooded dog murder. Not in America where people spend the equivalent of the GDP of small nations on their fur babies.
If she had killed her liberal neighbor she’d have been a hero. A puppy who was having the time of her life? Nah. That’s Jeffrey Dahmer and John Gacy rolled into one.
re: #139 Belafon
They think they’ve done it all on their own. An affliction that Mark Cuban, among others, doesn’t seem to have.
Which is strange since Cuban calls himself a libertarian and loves Rand. Somehow he has escaped the brainworms.
re: #142 The Ghost of a Flea
[Embedded content]
This comment stands out to me.
I’m really baffled about the choice to write these acts as so petty, so driven by emotionality. Part of me thinks it’s an error, an overstep while trying to perform an inauthentic grit, and part of me thinks that presenting it as petty is itself an attempted selling point.
I mean, when reactionaries position themselves as “doing what must be done” it’s usually…not something that must be done, but something they want to do out of pique.
I dunno, it’s late enough that I’m overthinking shit even more than usual.
It’s part of why I think a suggestion I saw earlier may be right, that the second half of the story about Cricket killing a neighboring farmer’s chickens and nipping her when she tried to intervene was fabricated. It may very well be the story she told her family about why she “had” to kill Cricket, that the dog had was “dangerous” and she couldn’t risk bringing it home and around her children. Note that the same reasoning (“danger” to her children) was also used to explain why she killed the “rancid” ram that she hated as well. The impression she tries to convey is that these are acts she did out of necessity, but the emotions she’s revealing show that it was all done out of spite. She tries to give the impression that she’s a “tough frontier-type” who does things that she doesn’t want to do but must, but instead comes off as a angry Karen-type woman who disposes of things that prove inconvenient to her cushy lifestyle.
re: #143 Yeah Sure WhatEVs
Yeah. This isn’t something you come back from. Not cold-blooded dog murder. Not in America where people spend the equivalent of the GDP of small nations on their fur babies.
If she had killed her liberal neighbor she’d have been a hero. A puppy who was having the time of her life? Nah. That’s Jeffrey Dahmer and John Gacy rolled into one.
Yeah, if we still lived in the pre-Trump days when the GQP was a party that pretended to be about principles and values, then her career might be shot and she’d have a hard time reviving it.
But in the days of Trump, when the highest mark of distinction in the party is to be so reprehensible that putting you in office is a turn-on to Repub voters because doing so is “stiggit” to liberal voters? Nah, they’ll rationalize killing a puppy out of spite as something worth boasting about because “Dems are too soft to do what’s gotta be done!”
re: #145 Targetpractice
Growing up on the farm, we did have a neighbor’s dog get into our chickens and it slaughtered half our flock. And unfortunately, yes, it was put down. But the behaviors of that fully grown dog and this one don’t mesh. Her story doesn’t pass the smell test to me.
Your Karen comment rings true. Unfortunately, that isn’t a bad thing to mass of GOP voters that aren’t on Twitter and the like.
re: #144 silverdolphin
Which is strange since Cuban calls himself a libertarian and loves Rand. Somehow he has escaped the brainworms.
His interview with Lex Friedman a few weeks ago was really good.
re: #146 Targetpractice
Except they already have all that with Trump. What does she add? Trump needs a VP that won’t hurt him and won’t overshadow him.
re: #144 silverdolphin
Which is strange since Cuban calls himself a libertarian and loves Rand. Somehow he has escaped the brainworms.
One of the “can count on one hand total” of billionaires who don’t need a permanent haircut…
re: #146 Targetpractice
Yeah, if we still lived in the pre-Trump days when the GQP was a party that pretended to be about principles and values, then her career might be shot and she’d have a hard time reviving it.
But in the days of Trump, when the highest mark of distinction in the party is to be so reprehensible that putting you in office is a turn-on to Repub voters because doing so is “stiggit” to liberal voters? Nah, they’ll rationalize killing a puppy out of spite as something worth boasting about because “Dems are too soft to do what’s gotta be done!”
I think that was what she was going for and that was her expectation of what the response would be. But I think it was a massive miscalculation.
Her only way back, maybe…because this really is a colossal problem for her…is if trump selects her as veep. Because then either they just go with their cognitive dissonance or not, and there are MAGAts who simply won’t because…dogs, man.
The most horrible people in the world love dogs.
There’s no escaping this.
And if trump does select her, that’s even more less voters for him coz this isn’t a bridge to nowhere, it’s a bridge too far.
re: #147 William Lewis
Growing up on the farm, we did have a neighbor’s dog get into our chickens and it slaughtered half our flock. And unfortunately, yes, it was put down. But the behaviors of that fully grown dog and this one don’t mesh. Her story doesn’t pass the smell test to me.
Your Karen comment rings true. Unfortunately, that isn’t a bad thing to mass of GOP voters that aren’t on Twitter and the like.
It doesn’t really mesh with the first half of her story either, which is why it feels like something that she thought up after the fact (either on the same day or much later) to justify her actions in her mind. If you excise the part about the chickens, then what you have is a woman admitting she took an untrained/barely trained puppy out on a hunting trip, tried to use brute force to control it and couldn’t, and then ended the hunting trip and killed the puppy in a fit of anger.
The explanation that seems to be missing is why she took this uncontrollable dog to the neighbor’s farm and either didn’t have it on a leash or left in whatever vehicle she was driving. Did she have business with this farmer? Was she looking for tips or advice to deal with Cricket? Was she just there to chat? The excerpts don’t really give us context for why she had the puppy out and running around where it could get away from her and attack these chickens so fast that she couldn’t intervene before it had killed several of them.
The Information: A window onto Apple’s AI strategy
in a discussion of how Apple could split AI between on device and cloud-based models, this stood out:
Plus, Apple faces unique challenges of its own: The company’s emphasis on privacy means that its engineers are under pressure to make sure user data doesn’t accidentally leak to AI models in the cloud (another reason to keep AI models extremely small, so they can run completely on-device).
This would only really be a worry if the AI servers in the cloud belong to someone else other than Apple. But what if Apple owned its own AI servers? So here is a wild guess, based on some other comments I have read:
Apple is going to develop its own servers for the cloud using their own silicon. These will be faster and use less energy than others. Apple will first use these devices for its own cloud based services - instead of renting others.
But I would not be surprised to see them sell these AI servers to others. Apple could make a lot of money going this route. Thus endeth the prediction.
re: #153 silverdolphin
The Information: A window onto Apple’s AI strategy
in a discussion of how Apple could split AI between on device and cloud-based models, this stood out:
This would only really be a worry if the AI servers in the cloud belong to someone else other than Apple. But what if Apple owned its own AI servers? So here is a wild guess, based on some other comments I have read:
Apple is going to develop its own servers for the cloud using their own silicon. These will be faster and use less energy than others. Apple will first use these devices for its own cloud based services - instead of renting others.
But I would not be surprised to see them sell these AI servers to others. Apple could make a lot of money going this route. Thus endeth the prediction.
The Big danger in this: remember Sun Microsystems, their servers & the Web Mk I & II that lead to the hubris of Java and them being eaten by Oracle < spit >.
re: #151 Yeah Sure WhatEVs
The most horrible people in the world love dogs.
FFS, Governor Noemi’s little anecdote (not just about the puppy, but the goat as well) quite literally makes her look worse than Hitler.
Dang, that took a while to see. 3/6
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re: #155 Dr Lizardo
FFS, Governor Noemi’s little anecdote (not just about the puppy, but the goat as well) quite literally makes her look worse than Hitler.
That was in the back of my mind when I wrote that.
re: #154 William Lewis
The Big danger in this: remember Sun Microsystems, their servers & the Web Mk I & II that lead to the hubris of Java and them being eaten by Oracle < spit >.
Yep, Apple left the server business because it provided no selective advantage. Its server OS and hardware just could not fully compete.
But AI servers may provide an opening. Apple has its own silicon that no one else has that not only uses less power but may well have somne real advantages with its Neural engine.
I would expect Apple to have developed its own server to use for its own AI needs, so it can tell its users that their data will be secure. Instead of renting servers from others, this would give it control. If it has such a server, I think this is the reason for its development.
But it would also allow them to have a new product to sell. Everyone has been looking at Apple for AI software, but what if it had a real chance to provide high pwoered AI servers based on its own silicon? It would be fun.
re: #158 silverdolphin
Yep, Apple left the server business because it provided no selective advantage. Its server OS and hardware just could not fully compete.
But AI servers may provide an opening. Apple has its own silicon that no one else has that not only uses less power but may well have somne real advantages with its Neural engine.
I would expect Apple to have developed its own server to use for its own AI needs, so it can tell its users that their data will be secure. Instead of renting servers from others, this would give it control. If it has such a server, I think this is the reason for its development.
But it would also allow them to have a new product to sell. Everyone has been looking at Apple for AI software, but what if it had a real chance to provide high pwoered AI servers based on its own silicon? It would be fun.
I find it very doubtful that they’ll be able to make a business case in a market that is so totally blindly Wintel obedient. Efficiency is nice but upfront cost is all that matters to wall street and Apple costs too much. Unless they can undercut the price of Wintel - and they can’t - their putative AI servers will go nowhere.
If they really want to rattle cages? Open Source their AI code base and the applications they’ve built on it. That will do more to cause their competition grief than any servers they might sell because it will undercut everything those companies are trying to sell.
re: #159 William Lewis
I find it very doubtful that they’ll be able to make a business case in a market that is so totally blindly Wintel obedient. Efficiency is nice but upfront cost is all that matters to wall street and Apple costs too much. Unless they can undercut the price of Wintel - and they can’t - their putative AI servers will go nowhere.
If they really want to rattle cages? Open Source their AI code base and the applications they’ve built on it. That will do more to cause their competition grief than any servers they might sell because it will undercut everything those companies are trying to sell.
Looks like this is something they are already doing. Apple Releases Open Source AI Models That Run On-Device Eight so far that run on device.
This is likely also important. Apple is forging a path towards more ethical generative AI - something sorely needed in today’s AI-powered world
And Apple is supposedly in talks with OpenAI and Google to license some aspect of their software. So lots of action on the software side.
I was just having fun speculating on the hardware side. I do noit really think it is likely but …
Okay, I was speculating based on my own independent idea in #158 and 160. So I finally decided to actually see what Google said. Turns out that Apple making their own Ai server is hot news. from the last 2 days:
Apple Rumored to Develop In-House AI Processor for Mass Production in the Second Half of 2025
Rumors but supposedly Apple has bought all of TMSC’s 3 nm production for the next year for the M-4 chips. If Apple really is making its own servers, the big deal would be if they actual sell them to others. Maybe they will only keep them for themselves.
We shall see.
re: #161 silverdolphin
Okay, I was speculating based on my own independent idea in #158 and 160. So I finally decided to actually see what Google said. Turns out that Apple making their own Ai server is hot news. from the last 2 days:
Apple Rumored to Develop In-House AI Processor for Mass Production in the Second Half of 2025
Rumors but supposedly Apple has bought all of TMSC’s 3 nm production for the next year for the M-4 chips. If Apple really is making its own servers, the big deal would be if they actual sell them to others. Maybe they will only keep them for themselves.
We shall see.
Two words for you. You may know them, if not, look them up: Symbolics Genera.
(I have a copy of Open Genera 8.3 😎)
M4 is a heck of a chip. So was the Ivory in it’s day.
re: #111 No Malarkey!
Uuh, the Congress of Vienna was a direct result of Napoleon losing an imperial war.
But the parties to it hadn’t lost their empires.
Howard Stern: I want to thank you for your compassion. We’re lucky to have you in the Oval Office and serving as the father of the country. I want to thank you for providing a calming influence and an organized administration post-COVIDPresident Biden: The American people… pic.twitter.com/3pdLlf269y
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 27, 2024
Watch the video. I want Howard to moderate a debate between Biden and Trump.
EDIT: Here is the Youtube version of the video.
re: #151 Yeah Sure WhatEVs
I think that was what she was going for and that was her expectation of what the response would be. But I think it was a massive miscalculation.
Her only way back, maybe…because this really is a colossal problem for her…is if trump selects her as veep. Because then either they just go with their cognitive dissonance or not, and there are MAGAts who simply won’t because…dogs, man.
The most horrible people in the world love dogs.
There’s no escaping this.
And if trump does select her, that’s even more less voters for him coz this isn’t a bridge to nowhere, it’s a bridge too far.
There was a way to present the story that would have made her sympathetic or even the “tough frontier-type” she tries to present herself as. She could have admitted to being embarrassed that she couldn’t control Cricket out on the hunt, that she’d compounded that feeling by letting him run loose on the neighbor’s farm and didn’t pay attention until Cricket had killed several chickens, and then remorse or guilt that she’d been forced to put down a puppy that had proven a danger to livestock and human alike. Critics would have still called bullshit, but her actions could have at least been seen by some as defensible.
But instead, she says she was angry that Cricket was “uncontrollable” despite screaming and using a shock collar, that it only escalated when Cricket continued to see it as “fun” to kill chickens as instinct told it to do, and then happiness when she drug a puppy to a gravel pit and blasted it with a shotgun in front of several witnesses. So much so that she then repeated the act (poorly) with another animal that had also angered her, botching it so badly that she had to go back to her car for more shotgun shells. And then compounding it all by saying that shooting a puppy she was angry with was no different than having three horses that had been with the family for 25 years put down earlier this year.
There was a version of this story that would have made her look like a leader who accepted their mistakes and pledged to do better. That’s not the story she chose to tell and the fact that she is not admitting fault when called on it says she doesn’t think what she did for the reasons she did them was in any way wrong. That tells you a lot about her character, none of it good and much of it very disturbing.
re: #15 darthstar
Whoa if true.
It would go a long way to explain about the space lasers and the banking, publishing, media and entertainment industries
re: #163 A hollow voice says: Abort SCOTUS
But the parties to it hadn’t lost their empires.
France was a party to it, and it had lost its empire. The whole point of the Congress was to rebalance power among the major powers. After 1815, France was done seeking empire in Europe, and the balance of power held for nearly a century until the imperial ambitions of Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany sparked a general war.
re: #167 No Malarkey!
France was a party to it, and it had lost its empire. The whole point of the Congress was to rebalance power among the major powers. After 1815, France was done seeking empire in Europe, and the balance of power held for nearly a century until the imperial ambitions of Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany sparked a general war.
A quote from Blackadder Goes Forth: “The British Empire covers a quarter of the globe while the German Empire consists of a small sausage factory in in Tanganyika!”
re: #169 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))
A qute from Blackadder Goes Forth: “The British Empire covers a quarter of the globe while the German Empire consists of a small sausage factory in in Tanganyika!”
Exactly, and Germany seethed at this imbalance as it sought its “place in the sun.”
This was Kristi Noem’s “what we are in the dark” moment, and the answer is “An absolute fucking monster.”
re: #171 Targetpractice
This was Kristi Noem’s “what we are in the dark” moment, and the answer is “An absolute fucking monster.”
It can also be regarded as an early attempt for a Republican politician to make a name for themselves in this degenerate Trump era. The way to appeal to the pig people is precisely by being an absolute fucking monster.
IMO this move by Noem puts her political career entirely in the tiny hands of Trump. If Trump picks her as his running mate, this will become a nothing burger, since Republicans and their media tools aren’t going to let an issue like this interfere with their drive toward fascism.
If her attempt to seduce Trump with this story fails, that’s probably the end for her as a national politician, and perhaps even in her state.
re: #171 Targetpractice
This was Kristi Noem’s “what we are in the dark” moment, and the answer is “An absolute fucking monster.”
A great candidate for Secretary of Education: “No Child Dare Let Itself Get Left Behind For Fear of Dying in a Ditch”
Of course, she would make Old Yeller mandatory reading.
re: #145 Targetpractice
Angry reactions tied to incompetence and lack of knowledge about dogs.
Just the combination one wants in those given power that can be used arbitrarily.
re: #147 William Lewis
Growing up on the farm, we did have a neighbor’s dog get into our chickens and it slaughtered half our flock. And unfortunately, yes, it was put down. But the behaviors of that fully grown dog and this one don’t mesh. Her story doesn’t pass the smell test to me.
Your Karen comment rings true. Unfortunately, that isn’t a bad thing to mass of GOP voters that aren’t on Twitter and the like.
My brother had repeated issues with a neighbor’s dog invading his property and killing his chickens. He was not mad at the dog since it was being a dog. He was mad at the owner not having his dog properly restrained according to the local laws and their BS excuses about half-hearted attempts *after* the issue was taken to a local magistrate more than once.
And farmers putting down dogs that start killing chickens goes way back since as the story goes once they start killing them you will never get them to stop. And if you can’t trust your dog around your free-range chicken flock your farm has issues.
(My brother’s actual fear with large dogs roaming about the area uncontrolled were for his wife and 6 yo daughter. And he had encountered them himself in the woods around the house once or twice.)
For something not related to a VP hopeful, this was one of the many things I did not miss disappearing when we were sold by Marriott and no longer had to give a shit about their guest loyalty program:
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re: #167 No Malarkey!
France was a party to it, and it had lost its empire. The whole point of the Congress was to rebalance power among the major powers. After 1815, France was done seeking empire in Europe, and the balance of power held for nearly a century until the imperial ambitions of Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany sparked a general war.
About 50 years since 1866-1870 there were some wars as Prussia morphed into the German Empire and Italy was consolidating following their independence. And lots of brush fire conflicts on the edges, especially in the Balkans where A-H, Russia, and the Ottomans did quite a bit of skirmishing and fighting via proxies.
No general war until 1914, but that example showed that large-scale wars were now something that bankrupted even industrial nations and caused more damage than they were worth.
Things that are mainstreaming as we speak:
killing dogs
total abortion bans
white supremacy
police snipers on college campuses during non-violent protests
Total Presidential Immunity
re: #175 FFL (GOP Delenda Est)
My brother had repeated issues with a neighbor’s dog invading his property and killing his chickens. He was not mad at the dog since it was being a dog. He was mad at the owner not having his dog properly restrained according to the local laws and their BS excuses about half-hearted attempts *after* the issue was taken to a local magistrate more than once.
And farmers putting down dogs that start killing chickens goes way back since as the story goes once they start killing them you will never get them to stop. And if you can’t trust your dog around your free-range chicken flock your farm has issues.
(My brother’s actual fear with large dogs roaming about the area uncontrolled were for his wife and 6 yo daughter. And he had encountered them himself in the woods around the house once or twice.)
My sisters and I were fairly young at the time too so that may have had an impact on our situation as well.
re: #170 No Malarkey!
Exactly, and Germany seethed at this imbalance as it sought its “place in the sun.”
Between Massie’s _Dreadnought_ and Tuchman’s _The Guns of August_ I got the distinct impression that German foreign policy post-Bismarck was a complete mess.
They believed they had a lot more influence than they did, generally acted bombastic and domineering in their statements, and horribly and totally misread both the French and British governments more than once. Plus the usual error of assuming other governments and leaders are going to react by doing nothing or reacting exactly as you predict they will react.
Beyond that the German naval policy was both folly* and something guaranteed to put the UK on the side of France in any conflict.
* - Folly in that Germany was never going to out build the Royal Navy. The UK government understood that Royal Navy superiority was vital to the UK’s existence. The German Navy was essentially a luxury for a land power and eventually the Army’s requirements for resources were going to be a hard stop on the navy’s demands.
re: #180 FFL (GOP Delenda Est)
Between Massie’s _Dreadnought_ and Tuchman’s _The Guns of August_ I got the distinct impression that German foreign policy post-Bismarck was a complete mess.
They believed they had a lot more influence than they did, generally acted bombastic and domineering in their statements, and horribly and totally misread both the French and British governments more than once. Plus the usual error of assuming other governments and leaders are going to react by doing nothing or reacting exactly as you predict they will react.
Beyond that the German naval policy was both folly* and something guaranteed to put the UK on the side of France in any conflict.
* - Folly in that Germany was never going to out build the Royal Navy. The UK government understood that Royal Navy superiority was vital to the UK’s existence. The German Navy was essentially a luxury for a land power and eventually the Army’s requirements for resources were going to be a hard stop on the navy’s demands.
Kaiser Wilhelm II’s “Hun Speech” is a lovely (not) example of the egotism that drove German colonial thinking at the time and all of it’s folly. I sometimes wonder what might have been had he not been crippled by the circumstances of his birth.
re: #181 William Lewis
Kaiser Wilhelm II’s “Hun Speech” is a lovely (not) example of the egotism that drove German colonial thinking at the time and all of it’s folly. I sometimes wonder what might have been had he not been crippled by the circumstances of his birth.
We forget in general that Europe was run by an inbred, inept group of dynasties that was unable to recognize that its time had long since passed.
re: #176 Targetpractice
For something not related to a VP hopeful, this was one of the many things I did not miss disappearing when we were sold by Marriott and no longer had to give a shit about their guest loyalty program:
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re: #165 Targetpractice
But instead, she says she was angry that Cricket was “uncontrollable” despite screaming and using a shock collar, that it only escalated when Cricket continued to see it as “fun” to kill chickens as instinct told it to do, and then happiness when she drug a puppy to a gravel pit and blasted it with a shotgun in front of several witnesses. So much so that she then repeated the act (poorly) with another animal that had also angered her, botching it so badly that she had to go back to her car for more shotgun shells.
Those witnesses are the reason the story ever saw print.
She had reason to believe they’d tell how it looked from their point of view, she tried to preempt them and did it badly.
re: #182 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))
We forget in general that Europe was run by an inbred, inept group of dynasties that was unable to recognize that its time had long since passed.
This is why America’s democratic form of government is totally free from nepotism and inbred dynastic families. Right?
re: #183 William Lewis
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re: #185 Nojay UK
This is why America’s democratic form of government is totally free from nepotism and inbred dynastic families. Right?
We haven’t reached the point (yet) of viewing them as God’s Appointed Elite
re: #185 Nojay UK
This is why America’s democratic form of government is totally free from nepotism and inbred dynastic families. Right?
Heh. We get lucky at least occasionally with the voters. Ya’all gotta get the Barons together in bits and bobs at places like Runnymede for their votes to count 😈
re: #182 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))
We forget in general that Europe was run by an inbred, inept group of dynasties that was unable to recognize that its time had long since passed.
The Great Powers in the early 20th century were quite a mish-mash:
Two sort of sprawling empires (A-H, Ottomans) trying to keep the lid on their ethnic minorities that were trying to split off as independent states.
Another empire (Russia) trying to keep the lid on a lot of internal and developmental issues as they tried to keep up with the rest of Europe. One of those trying to get all the intellectual benefits while keeping an absolutist authoritarian system intact at the top.
Two relatively young powers (Italy and Germany) trying to get their “piece of the action” in empire building. Both have issues with a neighbor due to previous relations from before they consolidated.
Two democracies with far-flung empires (UK and France). The UK is still playing the “splendid isolation” thing and that is one reason Germany thinks the UK might simply stay out of another France-Germany conflict. France seems to be in it’s usual cycle of moving from internal governmental crisis to another internal crisis along with this or that scandal involving their military in some way. The Dreyfus Affair being a good example.
That the French and English could handle their colonial frictions without a war was something that the Germans never really figured out.
re: #185 Nojay UK
This is why America’s democratic form of government is totally free from nepotism and inbred dynastic families. Right?
Well, no. But it also is not tied to a roll of the genetic dice like the old monarchies were.*
Political patronage was a huge thing in the US national political structure until the late 1800s. Following Garfield’s assassination the Civil Service exams came into being and that started some separation and emphasis on professionalism. But there are still a lot of appointments and an ability to do nepotism and crony selection for various offices. (State and local patronage issues are, IIRC, still an on-going thing though in places there are at least informal agreements. Though in our current political climate I think some of these are by the wayside now such as the DoJ getting more politicized.)
There have been US political “dynasties”. But they could be viewed as rarer than in Europe and perhaps limited by the youth of the USA compared to the European nations. (Is there a family with a nearly unbroken generational string of being political movers and shakers in US politics going back to the Founders?)
* - I except the English one from this since their royal power had been seriously curtailed compared to that of Russia, A-H, Germany, etc. by the early 1800s. A lot of indirect influence, but Parliament definitely had the upper hand.
re: #188 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))
We haven’t reached the point (yet) of viewing them as God’s Appointed Elite
The Kennedys and their “Camelot”, the laying-on-of-hands of Trump by Evangelicals, the Bush family business of Texas, Inc. plus a few passes through other governorships and the White House, oh yes I can definitely see that America is dead set against dynastic elites. Lots more where that came from, of course (Romney, McCain, Hunter Biden’s appointment to the Amtrak board etc.)
re: #187 Targetpractice
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re: #184 sagehen
Those witnesses are the reason the story ever saw print.
She had reason to believe they’d tell how it looked from their point of view, she tried to preempt them and did it badly.
Depending upon how old this story actually is, odds are most of the witnesses either long ago decided it wasn’t worth going public or are afraid of being sued into the ground if they did. The odds of tracking down any of them now and getting the “true” story are so slim that she doesn’t feel afraid to fabricate whatever she wants to make her look “tough” and “decisive.”
re: #193 FFL (GOP Delenda Est)
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re: #129 The Ghost of a Flea
Yeah, but the short of it boils down to Kristi “garden” Noem being the kind of person who, given unchecked power, would shoot and throw into a gravel pit children whom she deems as being “untrainable.” Without necessarily being conscious of it, a lot of people are suddenly making a connection between her behavior with a dog and her potential behavior, if given the chance, with vulnerable people.
There was a time when people drowned unwanted puppies and kittens. Put them in a burlap bag and go down to the river.
Using one for target practice does seem to be a bit… twisted.
re: #129 The Ghost of a Flea
Is this not the result of now more than two generations growing up in the era of modern media, of hyper-stimulation?
We want more and more gore on TV and in films.
We want more excess.
Regular stories now bore us, so entertainers have to get more and more extreme.
More shooting in computer games…
Anyway, I agree with you that the story was floated up intentionally to play into the “tough” persona which the Trumpers adore.
re: #199 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus
That sounds like more of a you problem than the general population; or you’re riffing off right-whingers. Genre specific, maybe, but many of those things that you’re positing are not true.
The line between birble and pardle is a simple 50/50.
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re: #120 darthstar
Awaiting the “Biden’s only forming a Transition effort in order to make himself look good” from the usual Conservative assholes…. Which goes to prove how far they have sunk into a lawless abyss..
re: #202 Florida Panhandler
That or the ‘he knows he’s losing’ narrative.
re: #191 FFL (GOP Delenda Est)
There have been US political “dynasties”. But they could be viewed as rarer than in Europe and perhaps limited by the youth of the USA compared to the European nations.
The point I’m making is that the US has such dynasties today and they hold and exert real political power today. Pointing to what Europeans did two hundred years ago is an excuse.
There’s a direct familial connection between anti-British Congressman Joseph Kennedy who was probably connected to the German Nazi Party and RFKjr who is reportedly getting ten percent of the Presidential vote this coming November according to polls. Ditto for the Bushes, over seventy years of the members of one family holding many high-ranking state and federal elected offices purely on their name and the ability of their family’s consiglieres to put them into power. This doesn’t happen in most democracies other than, say, North Korea and the like.
re: #163 A hollow voice says: Abort SCOTUS
But the parties to it hadn’t lost their empires.
Snyders point was about military expansion of empires, so I assume would be just France for that period. Basically, Putin (and whoever succeeds him) won’t give up their delusions of a greater Russia achieved by military force. Russia suffering total defeat is the only way Russian society can get rid of that cancer.
re: #205 BlueSpotinAL ✅
Snyders point was about military expansion of empires, so I assume would be just France for that period. Basically, Putin (and whoever succeeds him) won’t give up their delusions of a greater Russia achieved by military force. Russia suffering total defeat is the only way Russian society can get rid of that cancer.
Yep, France’s dream of a European empire was ended in military defeat in 1815, then its colonial imperialism was ended by defeat in Algeria and Vietnam in the 1950s. British colonial imperialism ended with defeat in the Suez crisis in 1956.
re: #204 Nojay UK
This doesn’t happen in most democracies other than, say, North Korea and the like.
Happens in Japan.
Let’s see… Canada’s PM is Justin Trudeau… whose father was also PM…
Norway’s PM… is the son of a very wealthy guy who himself was the son of a wealthy guy.
I’m sure we can go on if we spent some time at this.
Inner circles in societies happen. They just do.
re: #156 Yeah Sure WhatEVs
Dang, that took a while to see. 3/6
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re: #207 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus
Happens in Japan.
Let’s see… Canada’s PM is Justin Trudeau… whose father was also PM…
Norway’s PM… is the son of a very wealthy guy who himself was the son of a wealthy guy.
I’m sure we can go on if we spent some time at this.
Inner circles in societies happen. They just do.
The Gandhi dynasty in India.
re: #108 darthstar
Now that is something I wouldn’t mind lighting on 6/30/24 when I retire!
re: #185 Nojay UK
This is why America’s democratic form of government is totally free from nepotism and inbred dynastic families. Right?
Kennedy.
Bush,
Enough said,
not a good look, but a look
[image or embed]— Charles Johnson (@charles.littlegreenfootballs.com) Apr 26, 2024 at 8:25 PM
re: #214 Joe Bacon ✅
Look at that good boy worrying about you already.
re: #207 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus
Happens in Japan.
Let’s see… Canada’s PM is Justin Trudeau… whose father was also PM…
Norway’s PM… is the son of a very wealthy guy who himself was the son of a wealthy guy.
I’m sure we can go on if we spent some time at this.
Inner circles in societies happen. They just do.
It’s just that nepotism seems to happen so much in the Land of the Free and no-one seems to care. Mitt Romney, a US Senator is the son of a State Governor and his niece somehow ended up being the chair of the RNC for over five years. Funny that. Even funnier is the current RNC chair whose last name is Trump (any relation?)
As for money, Britain’s current Prime Minister is married to a billionaire and is himself seriously wealthy but there have been plenty of recent PMs who were not well off even as sitting MPs and their family connections didn’t get them selected for their seats.
re: #215 darthstar
Look at that good boy worrying about you already.
It hurt that I had to leave her behind but I had no choice. The steel industry was dying thanks to Michael Milliken’s junk bonding and Pruneface Reagan’s anti-union anti-protectionist policies.
When I went back home in 1997 the towns around Pittsburgh were economically dead. Mills gone and nothing came in to replace those good paying union jobs. And the Religious Right was in full brainwashing mode—more important to stop abortion than to have a good paying job…
The burgeoning Christian nationalist movement and well-heeled conservative donors have become increasingly entangled with each other, according to a new film.
In her review of the documentary Bad Faith: Christian nationalism’s unholy war on democracy, Guardian writer Adrian Horton remarked on how filmmakers have shown that far-right Christian evangelicals and their financial backers have a shared common goal: replacing representative democracy with an autocratic regime. The film kicks off by juxtaposing footage of participants in the deadly January 6, 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol with former President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisor, Paula White, praying to overturn the 2020 election.
“I think a lot of Americans have a very difficult time accepting and understanding the fact that such treason, such anti-democratic activity, could be carried out by people who basically look like Sunday school teachers,” Bad Faith director Stephen Ujlaki told Horton. “[W]hen they talk about recreating the kingdom of God on earth, they weren’t talking about something spiritual. They were talking about demolishing democracy so that God, i.e. themselves, could rule. And for that reason, I call it a conspiracy carried out in broad daylight.”
re: #156 Yeah Sure WhatEVs
Dang, that took a while to see. 3/6
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and Perfect! Connections
Connections
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re: #186 Dave In Austin
0 Dark and an hour to the lake.
Fishing Tournament this morning on Grainger Lake.
Only fished it once….. Boat driver has never fished it either…..AND high winds all day.
This will be fun. Probably wet as well.[Embedded content]
Tried to get out to the lake last night. One fishing buddy was visiting his kids and grandkids, the other STILL hasn’t gotten his fishing license. I didn’t want to go alone so figured I’d see what this morning brought. Rain and thunder, so no fishing this morning. Will get laundry and cleaning done this morning and hope for things to clear out and maybe get out later this afternoon.
re: #165 Targetpractice
……
There was a version of this story that would have made her look like a leader who accepted their mistakes and pledged to do better. That’s not the story she chose to tell and the fact that she is not admitting fault when called on it says she doesn’t think what she did for the reasons she did them was in any way wrong. That tells you a lot about her character, none of it good and much of it very disturbing.
Trump is the GOP role model: he never admits mistakes, never accepts responsibility for his actions and always blames others. She is emulating her leader.
re: #165 Targetpractice
There was a way to present the story that would have made her sympathetic or even the “tough frontier-type” she tries to present herself as. She could have admitted to being embarrassed that she couldn’t control Cricket out on the hunt, that she’d compounded that feeling by letting him run loose on the neighbor’s farm and didn’t pay attention until Cricket had killed several chickens, and then remorse or guilt that she’d been forced to put down a puppy that had proven a danger to livestock and human alike. Critics would have still called bullshit, but her actions could have at least been seen by some as defensible.
But instead, she says she was angry that Cricket was “uncontrollable” despite screaming and using a shock collar, that it only escalated when Cricket continued to see it as “fun” to kill chickens as instinct told it to do, and then happiness when she drug a puppy to a gravel pit and blasted it with a shotgun in front of several witnesses. So much so that she then repeated the act (poorly) with another animal that had also angered her, botching it so badly that she had to go back to her car for more shotgun shells. And then compounding it all by saying that shooting a puppy she was angry with was no different than having three horses that had been with the family for 25 years put down earlier this year.
There was a version of this story that would have made her look like a leader who accepted their mistakes and pledged to do better. That’s not the story she chose to tell and the fact that she is not admitting fault when called on it says she doesn’t think what she did for the reasons she did them was in any way wrong. That tells you a lot about her character, none of it good and much of it very disturbing.
Even explaining it that way doesn’t scream leader to me. There’s no good way to explain this episode short of killing the dog because it attacked a child (or even Noem herself!) and wouldn’t stop.
There’s nothing in the telling of this story with the scenario “facts”, no matter how you (not YOU you 😁) spin it, that makes her come off in a positive light.
re: #192 Nojay UK
The Kennedys and their “Camelot”, the laying-on-of-hands of Trump by Evangelicals, the Bush family business of Texas, Inc. plus a few passes through other governorships and the White House, oh yes I can definitely see that America is dead set against dynastic elites. Lots more where that came from, of course (Romney, McCain, Hunter Biden’s appointment to the Amtrak board etc.)
political dynasties — but not inbred. They weren’t marrying close relations.
re: #187 Targetpractice
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re: #198 steve_davis
Yeah, but the short of it boils down to Kristi “garden” Noem being the kind of person who, given unchecked power, would shoot and throw into a gravel pit children whom she deems as being “untrainable.” Without necessarily being conscious of it, a lot of people are suddenly making a connection between her behavior with a dog and her potential behavior, if given the chance, with vulnerable people.
She already did that during the pandemic.https://cnn.com
re: #198 steve_davis
Yeah, but the short of it boils down to Kristi “garden” Noem being the kind of person who, given unchecked power, would shoot and throw into a gravel pit children whom she deems as being “untrainable.” Without necessarily being conscious of it, a lot of people are suddenly making a connection between her behavior with a dog and her potential behavior, if given the chance, with vulnerable people.
Those people - MAGAts - don’t care at all about vulnerable people, they’d kill them as soon as look at them. But they (many of them) love dogs.
It’s the dog that changes the equation.
She’d escape fully if it was only the goat. There might be some raised eyebrows by some people but overall… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
There’s no escaping killing a puppy.
re: #223 Hecuba’s daughter
political dynasties — but not inbred. They weren’t marrying close relations.
No Cheney married a Bush to win the election.
Years ago when palin was announced as McCains running mate I was immediately appalled. A buddy of mine had a different view. He was a hunter and was excited to have a VP who could “kill a moose, skin it, clean it and process it” that’s what sold him.
Years later I saw a video of her “hunting” she took a shot at a caribou, missed and took several more shots missing them all. That video exposed the palin lie and confirmed what I had thought… that her image was completely manufactured. She wasn’t a hunter, she definitely didn’t know how to handle a firearm and didn’t know how to shoot. She looked like Ted Cruz trying to dribble a basketball.
I bring this story up to say that real hunters know now that noems image might just be manufactured. She had to play it up to pander to a certain portion of the base. She may have grown up on a farm, but her behavior shows that she’s either not a real hunter or if she is a hunter she lacks morals and ethics. She’s a POS.
On a sad side note my son’s wife’s hometown was devastated by a tornado last night. It went right through the neighborhood she grew up in. Her childhood home has been in the videos being shown and it’s pretty much roofless. Her family
Moved out a few years ago, so they were safe, but many people she knows have had their lives upended. Crazy sad times for them.
“Outside provocateurs did this,” “they have been indoctrinated by woke professors,” anything but acknowledging the possibility that this could be an organic reaction to abject horror
— Ian Boudreau (@iboudreau.bsky.social) 2024-04-27T14:15:54.304Z
re: #159 William Lewis
I find it very doubtful that they’ll be able to make a business case in a market that is so totally blindly Wintel obedient. Efficiency is nice but upfront cost is all that matters to wall street and Apple costs too much. Unless they can undercut the price of Wintel - and they can’t - their putative AI servers will go nowhere.
If they really want to rattle cages? Open Source their AI code base and the applications they’ve built on it. That will do more to cause their competition grief than any servers they might sell because it will undercut everything those companies are trying to sell.
It’s not wintel. Linux rules the AI world. GPUs matter more than CPUs.
re: #216 Nojay UK
It’s just that nepotism seems to happen so much in the Land of the Free and no-one seems to care. Mitt Romney, a US Senator is the son of a State Governor and his niece somehow ended up being the chair of the RNC for over five years. Funny that. Even funnier is the current RNC chair whose last name is Trump (any relation?)
I don’t agree that Bush or Trudeau is nepotism. Trump was all nepotism. You could even say Bobby Kennedy was to JFK as AG. Bush the younger and Justin earned their spots in government.
There are certain kinda of people who run for government jobs. And they tend to run in families because the youngers grew up in the environment. There’s a difference between being given a job and winning an election.
re: #188 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))
We haven’t reached the point (yet) of viewing them as God’s Appointed Elite
SCOTUS is busy working on it, though.
Turning a big dial labeled “old yeller rural brainrot” and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right
— Lord Businessman II (@lordbusinessman.bsky.social) 2024-04-27T14:24:28.910Z
Man, I wish Bluesky posts didn’t look like trash on iOS. 😔
re: #231 Yeah Sure WhatEVs
There are certain kinda of people who run for government jobs. And they tend to run in families because the youngers grew up in the environment. There’s a difference between being given a job and winning an election.
Nancy Pelosi’s father was a force in Baltimore politics when she was a kid. She learned plenty from him. But he had no sway in SF, she earned those jobs herself.
Hillary Clinton’s brother married Barbara Boxer’s daughter. Because when people bring their families to party events, that’s who you meet.
Nepo baby is more obvious in entertainment, because genetics will tell and looks are a criteria for employment. If you were a modeling agent who had a chance at a girl who “looks just like Cindy Crawford, but at an age to be just starting her career”, of course you’d jump at the opportunity to sign her. An actress who looks just like Goldie Hawn, an actor who looks just like Kirk Douglas
And Wolfie Van Halen probably started getting Master Class level teaching from as soon as his hands were big enough to make a chord.
re: #237 sagehen
Nancy Pelosi’s father was a force in Baltimore politics when she was a kid. She learned plenty from him. But he had no sway in SF, she earned those jobs herself.
Hillary Clinton’s brother married Barbara Boxer’s daughter. Because when people bring their families to party events, that’s who you meet.
Inbred in the sense of politics but not in the genetic sense.
re: #238 sagehen
Nepo baby is more obvious in entertainment, because genetics will tell and looks are a criteria for employment. If you were a modeling agent who had a chance at a girl who “looks just like Cindy Crawford, but at an age to be just starting her career”, of course you’d jump at the opportunity to sign her. An actress who looks just like Goldie Hawn, an actor who looks just like Kirk Douglas
And Wolfie Van Halen probably started getting Master Class level teaching from as soon as his hands were big enough to make a chord.
And in some sense, it’s logical that children who grew up in more-or-less good homes would be predisposed to follow in their parent’s footsteps, and good parents would want to help their children get a leg up and establish themselves in the world. I’m an engineer, and the son of an engineer, though we work in two separate engineering fields; but that doesn’t mean his contacts and knowledge weren’t valuable in helping me make my way into my professional sphere of influence.
re: #238 sagehen
Cindy Crawford became a thing because of her resemblance to ill-fated model Gia Carangi. At the beginning of her modelling career, she was called “Baby Gia”.
Had the opportunity to post this on a discord, so thought might as well post it here…
This is the Fallout shelter map for Stockholm downtown (it does not include shrapnel shelters). Sweden has been at peace for more 200 years.
To my knowledge, no public bomb shelters exist in Gaza. NONE.
And before people say that Stockholm downtown isn’t comparable to Gaza, my home borough has the same population density, and some parts of downtown have a higher population density than Gaza.
re: #181 William Lewis
Kaiser Wilhelm II’s “Hun Speech” is a lovely (not) example of the egotism that drove German colonial thinking at the time and all of it’s folly. I sometimes wonder what might have been had he not been crippled by the circumstances of his birth.
It would be hard to tease out what parts of his eccentricity were heritable traits and what were developed as a consequence of his upbringing.
They did absolutely insane stuff to him as a kid as part of “medical” treatment to make his short arm normal—at one point, a treatment was sticking his arm in a freshly-killed horse, I shit you not. But on top of that he was brought up in the Prussian military tradition and went through all the discipline and hazing that was just considered a normal aspect of making a German noble….you know, the old “isolate and brutalize the boy-children to make them martial.”
re: #238 sagehen
On the other hand, there are many children of celebrities who DON’T follow in their parents footsteps.
I saw it and now you have to, as well.
Aww. He must have embeds disabled on his posts. Visit the link if you have a Bluesky. It’s a hoot.
re: #238 sagehen
But even then, the child will only go so far riding their parents’ names. Look at Jaden Smith.
As compared to knowing you get the job when your parent gets out of the way.
re: #242 Teukka
Had the opportunity to post this on a discord, so thought might as well post it here…
This is the Fallout shelter map for Stockholm downtown (it does not include shrapnel shelters). Sweden has been at peace for more 200 years.
To my knowledge, no public bomb shelters exist in Gaza. NONE.
And before people say that Stockholm downtown isn’t comparable to Gaza, my home borough has the same population density, and some parts of downtown have a higher population density than Gaza.[Embedded content]
And people wonder why the Israel-Hamas war has turned disgustingly deadly. This is one of the reasons.
There is/was a fallout shelter in my little town in PA. It is/was in a building downtown that as of now is falling apart. Chains on the doors, but the fallout shelter sign is still there bolted to the bricks at the entrance way.
re: #199 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus
Is this not the result of now more than two generations growing up in the era of modern media, of hyper-stimulation?
We want more and more gore on TV and in films.
We want more excess.
Regular stories now bore us, so entertainers have to get more and more extreme.
More shooting in computer games…
Anyway, I agree with you that the story was floated up intentionally to play into the “tough” persona which the Trumpers adore.
Honestly?
No.
Reactionary culture has a coherent interior with it’s own mythos, it’s own texts, and it’s own aesthetics, and there’s a giant gulf between most people consuming overstimulating simulacra and what reactionaries think and do regardless of their consumption habits.
The big difference is that reactionary base assumptions as a cultural preset train members to handle the same media in an entirely different way: they enjoy the cruelty and explicitly connect simulated cruelty to actual cruelty, but they do that because all media is didactic: it doesn’t matter what the text says, the text exists to be parsed into their existing values and assumptions.
In Hindutva, the Ramayana is not just a story you can enjoy, it is a sacred text that must be granted deference and in turn it is instructing you to be a warrior for Hindustan. A Steven Seagal movie is pulpy crap for most watchers, but if you enter the film with a para-text of “this is what law enforcement should be like, it is aspirational” you’re Skinner Boxing yourself that the art is reinforcing your existing worldview. Reactionaries do this with any and all media: re-process it to mean what they need it to mean, and will do it even if their value system excludes them from a lot of modern high-stimulation media.
This is the opposite of most people consuming horror or violent video games—including me—for whom the safety and the unreality of the stimulus is a load-bearing aspect of the enjoyment.
There is a more pernicuous aspect to fiction when it’s the only source from which people understand a subject—for example, torture as a means of extracting truth—-but that’s a universal problem, not one that guides people to reaction.
re: #243 The Ghost of a Flea
It would be hard to tease out what parts of his eccentricity were heritable traits and what were developed as a consequence of his upbringing.
They did absolutely insane stuff to him as a kid as part of “medical” treatment to make his short arm normal—at one point, a treatment was sticking his arm in a freshly-killed horse, I shit you not. But on top of that he was brought up in the Prussian military tradition and went through all the discipline and hazing that was just considered a normal aspect of making a German noble….you know, the old “isolate and brutalize the boy-children to make them martial.”
His upbringing was essentially a political football. Bismarck feared the liberal influence of his parents (his mother was a daughter of Queen Victoria) once his father became Kaiser. So he tried to influence the young prince against his parents, liberalism, etc. etc. And Bismarck essentially helped create a autocratic monster who believed in monarchial absolutism, Prussian superiority, and militarism. Of course, said autocrat was not going to stand by as a figurehead monarch to let the chancellor run things like his grandfather had so Bismarck was sent packing soon after Wilhelm came to power.
An interesting what-if would have been what happened if cancer had not killed Wilhelm’s father when it did. A longer reign there might have had some interesting European political ramifications.
Noem should be disarmed. For her own protection. She shot the pup because it embarrassed her on a hunt it was not ready for. Now she has embarrassed herself on a hunt she is not ready for.
Israel is in violation of a White House directive requiring recipients of American military assistance to comply with international humanitarian law and permit the unimpeded delivery of U.S.-funded humanitarian support, USAID officials concluded in a confidential United States paper reviewed by Devex.
re: #242 Teukka
Made it into a tweet:
And before people say that Stockholm downtown isn’t comparable to Gaza, my home borough has the same population density, and some parts of downtown have a higher population density than Gaza.
One of the true reasons why the Israel-Hamas war has turned so disgustingly deadly.
/END— Teo 😷🧼↔️🌡🤬💉 (@Teukka1972) April 27, 2024
re: #142 The Ghost of a Flea
In her own story, she’s shooting Cricket out of frustration, not out of hard-eyed realism about her earning potential and the farm’s survival. And the goat seems to be for catharsis.
This comment stands out to me.
The killing of the goat completes her political tragedy.
Perfect! Connections
Connections
Puzzle #321
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟪🟪🟪🟪
All my chores are pretty much done for the day (still load in dryer and will do mopping tomorrow). Things are trying to clear up outside so may get some fishing at the lake done later this evening. Think I’ll go down to get a beer and fish sandwich, then pop under the bridge and cast a bit into the river.
re: #253 wrenchwench
Noem should be disarmed. For her own protection. She shot the pup because it embarrassed her on a hunt it was not ready for. Now she has embarrassed herself on a hunt she is not ready for.
She will never be ready to serve — unless it is to serve autocrats, traitors, racists, and theocrats, not to serve our nation.
re: #252 FFL (GOP Delenda Est)
His upbringing was essentially a political football. Bismarck feared the liberal influence of his parents (his mother was a daughter of Queen Victoria) once his father became Kaiser. So he tried to influence the young prince against his parents, liberalism, etc. etc. And Bismarck essentially helped create a autocratic monster who believed in monarchial absolutism, Prussian superiority, and militarism. Of course, said autocrat was not going to stand by as a figurehead monarch to let the chancellor run things like his grandfather had so Bismarck was sent packing soon after Wilhelm came to power.
An interesting what-if would have been what happened if cancer had not killed Wilhelm’s father when it did. A longer reign there might have had some interesting European political ramifications.
Quite right, IMHO: especially the bit about Friedrich III (Wilhelm’s father; and subject of intense historical what-if study for 130+ years). However, also: one factor that tends to get overlooked in studying Wilhelm II and the First World War is that, despite the Kaiser’s deep-seated attachment to “…monarchial absolutism, Prussian superiority, and militarism.”, the political and social structures of Imperial Germany (even including the military) had a number of built-in constraints to curb said absolutism; frex, there WAS a elected parliament with a degree of control over the budget, a stable bureaucracy, the sub-kingdoms of the Reich did have some limited degree of local autonomy, even the nominally subservient military was a highly-professionalized and operationally independent arm of the state.
For an interesting take on the geopolitical factors leading up to the catastrophe of WWI, (including Wilhelm II’s issues) I’d also highly recommend The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark (2012). Clark’s thesis about the causes of the war focuses on a different “villain” provoking the conflict - and, for a change, it’s NOT
Kaiser Bill….
re: #255 Teukka
I don’t know man, I feel like blaming the death toll on the lack of bomb shelters is the product of a bunker mentality and just represents more DARVO that avoids dealing with the reality on the ground. I mean when you’re dealing with more property destruction than Dresden most shelters just become mass tombs but props I guess on at least tacitly admitting that the IDF has dropped multiple nuclear bombs worth of ordinance on Gaza.
Three cities in Germany were effectively destroyed from the air during that war: Cologne, Hamburg and Dresden. In Hamburg and Dresden, a mix of high explosives and incendiary bombs created the notorious “firestorm” conditions that caused streets to melt.
Data analyzed by Scher and Van Den Hoek shows that by Dec. 5, the percentage of Gaza’s buildings that had been damaged or destroyed already had surpassed the destruction in Cologne and Dresden, and was approaching the level of Hamburg.
Also, bomb shelters don’t prevent famine, or the deliberate lies that lead to it.
re: #261 Jay C
Quite right, IMHO: especially the bit about Friedrich III (Wilhelm’s father; and subject of intense historical what-if study for 130+ years). However, also: one factor that tends to get overlooked in studying Wilhelm II and the First World War is that, despite the Kaiser’s deep-seated attachment to “…monarchial absolutism, Prussian superiority, and militarism.”, the political and social structures of Imperial Germany (even including the military) had a number of built-in constraints to curb said absolutism; frex, there WAS a elected parliament with a degree of control over the budget, a stable bureaucracy, the sub-kingdoms of the Reich did have some limited degree of local autonomy, even the nominally subservient military was a highly-professionalized and operationally independent arm of the state.
For an interesting take on the geopolitical factors leading up to the catastrophe of WWI, (including Wilhelm II’s issues) I’d also highly recommend The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark (2012). Clark’s thesis about the causes of the war focuses on a different “villain” provoking the conflict - and, for a change, it’s NOT
Kaiser Bill….
A lot more involved than just Kaiser Bill, though he proved convenient for both sides once the war ended. Europe to a degree was lurching from crisis to crisis from 1900 (or even sooner) that could lead to a war starting. The arrangements made by the Treaty of Vienna was collapsing and three of the empires involved (Turkey, A-H, and Russia) were all suffering severe internal issues as well as external ones.
Without the Kaiser’s love/hate relationship with the Royal Navy I think the German naval buildup never gets the support Tirpitz is looking for. And that build up was a major stumbling block with relations with the UK. Though Germany had effectively lost the building war by 1912 anyways.
After standing on the side of the road for hours waiting for Trump to return last night, the cult is disappointed he zipped right by them. Sad! pic.twitter.com/0UApDBtzbS
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 27, 2024
He repeatedly demonstrates he doesn’t give a shit about them, yet they continue to kiss his ass constantly.
re: #255 Teukka
Made it into a tweet:
[Embedded content]
There were plenty of non-public shelters in Gaza, the Hamas-proprietary tunnels. The only way the IDF could get at them was by going through civilians. Lots of civilians.
re: #147 William Lewis
Growing up on the farm, we did have a neighbor’s dog get into our chickens and it slaughtered half our flock. And unfortunately, yes, it was put down. But the behaviors of that fully grown dog and this one don’t mesh. Her story doesn’t pass the smell test to me.
Your Karen comment rings true. Unfortunately, that isn’t a bad thing to mass of GOP voters that aren’t on Twitter and the like.
Growing up in my neck of the woods in central FL (our county’s economic base was citrus, cows & chickens) , it wasn’t everyday but not unusual to see a dog with a dead chicken in a sack fastened around it’s neck.
One might say that’s cruel, but the dog was left to live to be some child’s pet, albeit not pleasant to be around for a week or so while the chicken rotted, but both the dog and the child learned some life lessons.
re: #262 goddamnedfrank
I don’t know man, I feel like blaming the death toll on the lack of bomb shelters is the product of a bunker mentality and just represents more DARVO that avoids dealing with the reality on the ground. I mean when you’re dealing with more property destruction than Dresden most shelters just become mass tombs but props I guess on at least tacitly admitting that the IDF has dropped multiple nuclear bombs worth of ordinance on Gaza.
Also, bomb shelters don’t prevent famine, or the deliberate lies that lead to it.
In 2007, Hamas became responsible for protecting the civilians of Gaza, by means of bomb shelters, by means of attack warning (systems). No-one else.
And they clearly have the capacity to build bomb shelters, as they have made many tunnels since coming into power, yet no bomb shelters (civilians are not welcome in the tunnels, only Hamas & Co fighters).
Who attacks an enemy without having ensured that the own civilian population is reasonably safe from the inevitable counter-attack?
I’m not DARVO’ing here. IDF has obligations under international law, but so does the Gazan government. One of the two hasn’t even tried to meet their obligations under international law.
That lack of trying comes at a cost which the civilian population in Gaza is paying as we speak. I’m not blaming the civvies in Gaza, I’m blaming the idiots who knowingly and intentionally put them in mortal peril to begin with.
News. They read the news.
— Comfortably Numb (@ygalanter.bsky.social) 2024-04-27T16:58:13.804Z
re: #264 Eclectic Cyborg
[Embedded content]
He repeatedly demonstrates he doesn’t give a shit about them, yet they continue to kiss his ass constantly.
He’s not just their bully, he’s the asshole that adults allow to be an asshole because he won a championship, and they need him to like them.
“We’re lucky to have you in the Oval Office.” After an hour long interview with President Biden, Howard Stern takes a moment to thank him for all he’s done for the country. (Video: SiriusXM) pic.twitter.com/G8Oj9w0Ekr
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) April 27, 2024
Stern is drinking conservative snowflakes tears.
The Good Liars at the Schnecksville Trump Rally [VIDEO] New theories, great tunes and SHOCKING breaking news. SUPPORT US: http://Herohero.co/thegoodliars SEE THE GOOD LIARS LIVE!WASHINGTON D.C. MAY 23RD: https://www.unionstage.com/shows/good-liars-fix-america/NASHVILLE, TN JUNE 6TH: https://www.etix.com/ticket/p/42992972/the-good-liars-nashville-the-lab-at-zaniesSAN FRANCISCO, CA JUNE 25TH: https://www.livenation.com/event/G5vYZbavGvggG/the-good-liars SUBSCRIBE TO OUR AUDIO PODCAST:Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-good-liars-tell-the-truth/id1731178442Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7mgfiwzr32907N4y68eFOCJoin this channel ...
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Best of April 2024 Nothing new here but these are a look back at the a few good images from the past month. Despite the weather, I was quite pleased with several of them. These were taken with older lenses (made from the ...
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Gateway Pundit, Sued by Election Workers, Declares BankruptcyA onetime favorite, now just pathetic figure around these parts, Jim Hoft aka SMOTI ("Stupidest Man On The Internet"), has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in response to the defamation lawsuits filed against him to the same election workers that ... Khal Wimpo (free internal organs upon request!)
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