It was a brilliant bit of theater, just like their mass drone response to Israel’s last provocation.

In both cases now, Iran has managed to make Israel, and now the US, look both antagonistic and foolish. Their precisely measured responses really highlight the fact that they didn’t provoke either of these fights, that they have no intention of engaging in pointless bloodshed, but that, if pressed, they can and will respond in kind.

It makes them look like the only adults in the room.

Israel is a rogue state.

And this is why DOGE gutted the Office for Vehicle Automation Safety at the NHTSA.

Even MTG is more principled and rational than Trump.

Between the Duterte family and the Marcos family, there really isn’t much question as to why Filipinos see politicians as a top source of disinformation, is there?

…Congress to claw back…

That would require courage and determination, which means it’s not going to happen, because those are qualities Congress no longer possesses.

I have zero sympathy for these “celebrities.”

They put themselves out there online. They make themselves objects of public scrutiny, and in fact, that’s the basis for their entire business model - to make themselves objects of public scrutiny and profit off of positive responses.

But they’re going to get negative responses too. That’s just the way it goes. And if they don’t want those negative responses, the solution is terribly simple. All they have to do is not put themselves out there in the first place.

They can’t have their cake and eat it too. They can’t shout, “Hey everybody! Look at me!” then complain when they do.

However, 100% of wealthy corporate donors think the current leadership is doing a perfectly fine job of guaranteeing that no major office will be held by a Democrat who might do something that would negatively affect their executive pay packages or lead to them having to actually pay taxes, so the party leadership are going to ignore this poll, and continue to slurp up soft money, run on “blue no matter who,” and blame the voters when they lose.

I had to read entirely too much of this before I could taste the onion.

Surely now at least some few of the people in authority who have ignored Trump’s grossly obvious unfitness for office will do something, right?

Right?

Paris and Marie-Louise, who both study mental health nursing at the University of Salford, said they felt that being respectful of others’ opinions is key.

Paris said she thought it was important to be able to “express your emotions and feelings without being disrespectful”, and allow others to do so too.

The problem is that, not coincidentally in our current age, the speech we’re expected to respect - all of the examples they gave - are conservative views on race, gender and the like, all of which are pretty much explicitly advocacy for disrespect for some subset of humanity. So the call for mutual respect has already been violated simply by the expression of those views. The exact point of them is that this or that group of people should NOT be accorded respect.

So the whole thing is self-defeating.

Quite simply - if their calls to deny respect and/or rights to some group of people must be treated as legitimate, then our calls to deny respect and/or rights to them must also be treated as legitimate. And if our calls to deny them respect and/or rights are to be disallowed, then their calls to deny others respect and/or rights must also be disallowed.

Then next up is to finish criminalizing homelessness so that those people (and many more) can be converted into slaves to the new generation of robber barons.

Of course, what she actually means is that people have been brainwashed in a somewhat different way than she would’ve preferred, but at least she’s right about the brainwashing part. Since she’s incapable of self-reflection, that’s not going to mean anything to her or change anything for her, but still… for someone as willfully and angrily ignorant as she is, that’s almost sort of impressive.

This illustrates one of the many oddities about Trump.

With any other president, we had policy debates and stated goals and decisions made and implemented.

With Trump, we just have this string of essentially arbitrary threats, promises and rhetoric, and alongside that is a string of essentially arbitrary policies arbitrarily enacted and rescinded and followed and ignored, and there’s no necessary correlations between any of it.

It’s another of the things that I think Trump does simply because he’s a delusional toxic narcissist, a genuinely stupid person, and emotionally a toddler, and another of the things that the would-be autocrats - the billionaires and the CEOs and the religious right and the Republicans and the rest of the greedy and power-hungry scum - take advantage of him doing.

And meanwhile,Trump and the Republicans and the billionaires still aren’t obscenely and destructively rich enough to satisfy their pathological greed, and are explicitly and methodically instituting a system to fuck everyone else over even harder.

Billionaire Buffet (feat. Kasane Teto)

Exactly as intended.

There is literally no scenario in which it could possibly be “necessary” to invade Greenland.

How long are people going to continue to pretend that the US is not being governed by malicious lunatics?

his chances of raising money and looking like a leader

Note that raising money is the first thing mentioned.

And note that winning elections isn’t mentioned at all.

Which neatly sums up what’s wrong with the DNC.

With any luck, it will kill google.

I don’t see how they can even pretend that it will do anything other than steal website traffic, since the exact point is to provide you with the information you would have gotten if you had gone to the website, leaving no reason to actually go to the website.

So painfully obviously, Google intends to steal the websites’ content in order to steal the websites’ traffic.

Which would seem to me to be grounds for class action lawsuits on behalf of the entire internet, which, if judged fairly, should bankrupt even that foul beast of a corporation.

And ironically enough, that would almost certainly “rejuvenate the internet.” As a matter of fact, I can’t think of a single thing that would do more to “rejuvenate the internet” than killing Google.

In the interest of clarity, I don’t think that Johnson quite qualifies as a hypocrite, since a hypocrite has to have something at least resembling principles, and Johnson appears to have nothing of the sort.

He appears to be an essentially complete, full-time toady, ready and willing and even eager to mouth whatever he thinks will please whoever he’s desperate to please at the moment. I don’t think he’s ever had a thought or opinion of his own in his entire life.

Not that that’s any better or anything - just an observation.