Good point. Newsome manages the fourth-largest economy in the world and Farage . . . well, I seem to remember something about a bus and the NHS, but I don’t think anything ever came of it, lol

Anyone else remember 2019 when Matt Gaetz and a bunch of other MAGA fuckwits breached the SCIF in the basement of the House carrying their cell phones and tweeting out selfies from there?

Thought security of a SCIF didn’t matter anymore. But now I guess they claim to actually give a shit. Huh. Maybe that’s just another part of our government they’re selling and they want to restrict access to paying customers now, because they sure didn’t give a fuck in 2019.

Right, we should never even start anything until any suggested plan meets with your full approval first, and only then if it is 100% guaranteed to hit the goal in one shot.

Fuck that. Shitting on a small start is just another way of saying you hate that anyone is trying to do anything. Like how the very same people who bothered to go to peaceful protests over the summer – “that’s not good enough! that’ll never do anything!” – are the ones now organizing direct action in their communities: I bet you think that’s coincidence.

Yeah, no. But thanks for letting us know what side you’re on.

Me, I stand with MN. If this is where they wanna start, I’ll start there too. There will always be plenty like you to judge helplessly from the sidelines.

Same here but in solidarity with MN we’ve just decided to refuse to spend any money anywhere, whether locally or online. It’s what we can do, and we’re doing it.

If everyone in the US (or elsewhere and doing business with US companies, if you feel so inclined) who is pissed about this simply does what they can, Friday will be a great start.

Me and mine sure are.

It is far more likely that the Danes selling a token number of US Treasurys as a shot across the bow soiled a number of handmade silk suits on Wall St, and someone was able to convey to the inner circle exactly what that fucking means, and that’s how we got Taco Wednesday. Note also last year how, when Japan started suggesting the idea of selling off Treasurys themselves, suddenly Japan’s tariff arrangement instantly improved.

And that’s only one part of what Europe could do. The anti-coercion instrument isn’t nicknamed “the bazooka” for nothing, and just because Europe has been our allies for 80 years doesn’t mean they are without means of both prevention and retaliation. It’s the orange excrescence’s fault for thinking nobody could do anything back, when that is the farthest fucking thing from the truth.

Honestly, having the rest of the western hemisphere unite in their loudest, strongest NO in tandem with Mark Carney clearly outlining a post-US-dominant world order built on fluid alliances is the best thing that could be happening to all of us right now, no matter where we live.

You say all that like there’s no Alberta.

Me and mine will be participating in solidarity, and I hop everyone angered by this insane govt overreach does whatever they can as well. A bunch of little adds up to a lot, and the powers that be hate that shit, so Friday the 23rd is the perfect time for all of us – not just Minnesotans – to do whatever we can.

I don’t expect mainstream media to cover it fairly, though. Any more that’s news by the rich, for the rich, and they hate this kind of thing. (Anyone else remember the air traffic controllers and how they got demonized for YEARS by the Reagan administration and the press? Yeah.) I’ll wait for Minnesotans to tell us how they feel about it on the day.

Honestly, I would expect a new Nullification Crisis much sooner than 2028, sooner even than midterms, inasmuch as the federal government, under this regime, is literally waging war – or trying very hard to start a real one – against the state of Minnesota, among others. A state could easily say, “Enough!” long before November rolls around.

I’m not saying Walz would do this, but hypothetically, a state that has enough of this federal incursion that finds no real respite in the courts, or finds itself being actively bankrupted or otherwise destroyed, could simply start nullifying the most onerous orders, or really, any federal orders, because at that point, restraint would make no real difference, as hypothetically every other imaginable remedy would already have been tried. Its exercise would hypothetically be the step immediately prior to secession, probably discussed directly as such, and like 1832 before it, the direct cause would likely be financial because unlike then, today the executive is already engaging in the use of force against a state.

The interesting thing, to me, is that the Nullification Crisis ended peacefully and fairly quickly in spite of the Force Bill because at the end of the day, both parties strove to find a solution that would preserve the union. Andrew Jackson being marginally less shitty and somewhat more sane than the current executive, they succeeded in that, so the Force Bill was never relied upon to use military might against a state’s nullification.

That is NOT the case here. In fact, we’re already past it. There have already been National Guard troops in the streets, on orders that were subsequently deemed unlawful by the courts, and we haven’t even really gotten near the federal defiance of Posse Comitatus and/or formally using the Insurrection Act yet, events that are almost certain to come as well. The fed does NOT want peace: if it can push a state to open fighting it will, and as far as I can see is already working strenuously to that end wherever it can. So from where I’m sitting, at that final point of provocation, whatever it ends up being, state nullification doesn’t look very much different from secession at all, either in execution or federal response to same.

Also, not really on topic but I’m just going to throw in a gentle reminder that it would take no more than a handful of Republicans in the House and Senate to put a stop to all this madness TODAY. That’s not an absolute majority, of course, but it is more than enough to rein in that tertiary syphilitic madness enough to make the threats to both domestic and international targets stop instantly.

Holy shit, yeah, you’re right. He’s Cuban-(Canadian-)American too. Forgot about him entirely, which is always a happy moment.

What else do you want from me?

Refrain from discouraging people just now showing up for action, and heaping loads of scorn and mockery on what appear to be tiny efforts for you. It’s big for that guy, who has never done anything like that before and never thought he’d have to. There are 340 million Americans spread across a massive continent, some of whom are just now waking up to the real threat our president is presenting not just to us but to the world. Many of them have been living in a propaganda bubble. Some, unbelievably, still are.

And if you’re European, do something about the threat in your own backyard, Putin. Our president is a Russian asset, and everything he is doing with his presidential power, literally everything, benefits Putin. Putin’s been firehosing us with propaganda for ten years, and now it’s paying off in spades: he got his own monkey voted into office. But he’s still your threat, more than ours. If you were to find a way to stop Putin’s propaganda machine today, both of them would be out of office by next week. I’m not even joking. It’s so bad in the US now that the instant the propaganda stopped it would be the end of this regime.

I’m pretty sure that we, the regular individual Americans you are sermonizing here, are the only ones who can stop the orange filth now. Washington can’t; they’re too corrupt. It’s up to us regular folk now. So what can you say and do that will help us win that fight? If you can’t or don’t want to, fine. But stop shitting on the people who are just waking up and don’t know where to start.

Yeah but they aren’t.

That’s some confidently incorrect shit right there.

How the fuck do you know what’s happening or not happening when media refuses to cover it, or worse, does cover it but downplays it in such a way that thousands of people showing up turns into “some protesting occurred today in downtown Minneapolis.”

Actual resistance is what got the National Guard ordered out of LA, Portland, and Chicago, and why ICE is increasingly departing Minneapolis proper for places further out in more rural Minnesota. But you don’t know that, because you’re sopping up headlines and nothing else, if that much.

Look to almost every other country to see what actual protests are. What actual resistance is.

At this point, all I have to do is look past you and at my neighbors and fellow citizens: we know what we’re up against in ways that are clearly over your own head, and we’re showing up. We don’t need your discouragement and ignorance but if that’s all you have, that’s all you have.

Yeah, no. Those numbers are just wrong. And not only that, in this bright red state, maga hats and signs and stickers are disappearing pretty rapidly. The exact same people who wanted all the rest of us “snowflakes” to fuck our feelings and know exactly what they stood for are now disappearing back into the woodwork hoping we don’t remember what they stood for.

There is a quote by Arthur Ashe that I refer to often because in the face of overwhelming personal adversity it keeps my head on the right track, and I think it may help you as well:

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

I don’t reply to your content often, but every time I see your handle pop up I wish you well, just because I am unfortunately so personally familiar with the trauma-creating circumstances you’re dealing with. I wish you could see you as I see you: someone with something so completely different from their banal, cruel family of origin that they have no knowledge of what a truly gifted person they are just to be able to survive and even see past that shit. Good luck to you, and I mean that.

I dunno about that. Usually kids start out great until garbage adults get a hold of them, and then all bets are off.

Maybe Putin proposed a trade in exchange for supporting a new fascist regime, but I suspect we’ll never really know.

Asking “What would Putin do?” explains pretty much everything out of this regime.

Destabilize daily life? Install Russian-friendly authoritarian order? Break all international alliances? Slow trade and destabilize markets with insane tariffs? Have all world leaders constantly in reaction-mode to whatever faux or real crisis the orange turnip has created today, distracting them all with the latest text of “Squirrel!” to Truth Social, squandering their resources and attention in the constant churn of political drama? Pitting neighbor against neighbor and pissing off even the most stable, long-held alliances? Ensuring that the US military is under thoroughly incompetent leadership and possibly about to be tasked with shooting at its own countrymen? Doing shit out of fucking nowhere that threatens WWIII with absolutely zero provocation?

Well, if Putin could control a US president, what would Putin do?

And there it is.

When it comes down to it there’s not much at all that the orange shitheel has done that does not also serve Putin very directly, in ways large and small.

Peaceful protest is what got the National Guard out of LA, Portland, and Chicago.

Not just protest, SPECIFICALLY peaceful protest is what made the judges declare sending the NG an unlawful order.

Yes, they are doing their absolute best to be the worst. That’s the point: to incite us to riot. And it takes far more strength on a personal level to refrain than it does to run out and fight in a blind rage.

When people like you start trying to get others to fight – because let’s be real, you’re not doing it yourself, you just want someone else in Minnesota to bleed for you – all you’re telling me is that you WANT the National Guard to be sent in, you WANT to empower these insane, unconstitutional and illegal orders, you WANT an end to democracy and a fresh new start with martial law. In other words, you WANT to install and keep this fascist regime forever.

That, or you’re just uneducated. But now you know.

Just a reminder that the orange shitstain’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is Cuban American.

I’ll save you a click, but when it comes to pulling up the ladder behind himself, there may be none finer than Rubio:

Marco Antonio Rubio was born in 1971 in Miami, Florida. … His parents were Cubans who immigrated to the United States in 1956 during the regime of Fulgencio Batista, two and a half years before Fidel Castro ascended to power after the Cuban Revolution. … Rubio’s parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of Rubio’s birth. They were naturalized in 1975. Some relatives of Rubio’s were admitted to the U.S. as refugees.

Rubio’s maternal grandfather, Pedro Victor Garcia, immigrated to the U.S. legally in 1956, but returned to Cuba to find work in 1959. When in 1962 he fled communist Cuba and returned to the U.S. without a visa, he was detained as an undocumented immigrant and an immigration judge ordered him to be deported. But immigration officials reversed their decision later that day, and the deportation order was not enforced. Instead, Garcia was reclassified to the legal status of “parolee” that allowed him to stay in the U.S. He reapplied for permanent resident status in 1966 after the Cuban Adjustment Act passed, and his residency was approved.

Maybe, but speaking for myself, my revulsion to the way they are currently trying to use AI is nothing short of visceral. No headline has a chance. It is such an intrusion to personal privacy, and toward incredibly bad ends all around, that I don’t give a shit what they say at all.

To get past that, they’d have to stop trying to data farm everything that crosses someone’s monitor, stop using AI to support and further large-scale national operations like genocide, and not use every word that anyone’s ever written that they can get their hands on to train their LLMs. Oh, and something more than a “You’re overreacting!” when it is pointed out that AI output is not at all neutral, but shaped to deliver their own chosen narratives, which its devotees tend to accept without question. They could even – and I know this is a novel concept – pay authors and artists for all the work they used without consent and without compensation.

It’ll never happen. And I will never not hate AI, for all of these reasons and more (like how they took my fucking em-dash and made it unnatural, so now I’m taking it back).

TL;DR: I hate AI so much and so deeply it’s automatic, there’s literally nothing they can say I would care about, and the more they try the more repulsed I am. Fuck 'em all.