A terrorist attack might be coming. It doesn’t even take a conspiracy, just confusion and ineffectiveness. 9/11 happened in the early days of the Bush administration, while confusion caused threats to be ignored.
The federal workers everyone takes for granted and the administration is actively trying to get rid of are the people who protect everyone from systemic failures, especially catastrophic ones.
Japan has figured out how to play trump. Be nice to his face and feed his ego, then go hard against him with actual policy. He doesn’t really understand the policy outside of it being a grift for temporary gains and is a nightmare to deal with behind closed doors with his ego and diminished capacity.
The best part is that when they manage to fuck up on an industrial scale and crash their insider trading money printer, the taxpayers end up bailing them out.
The whole world suffers, and they use the people’s money to buy the dip and profit even more when the fixed game comes back online shortly.
A public assassination like Kennedy’s is meant to send a message. Trump would just have a cardiac event and never come out of the hospital. The real issue will be that he’s old and fat and eats trash, so he could have a legit health problem and die from natural causes easily at his age.
But then, President JD Vance. I don’t think anyone but Peter Thiel and Elon Musk want that. Trump sucks, but he’s the devil you know. Vance could be turboHitler or just hand the whole country to Silicon Valley. Rule by ChatGPT may be the worst of all possible worlds.
These cases make the headlines, but they must be casually searching electronics and getting all kinds of private data, photos, videos, etc. They unlock your phone and download everything for their amusement and to violate your rights later. The fact that they’ll fuck with a lawyer to get his client’s info says volumes about the restraint being shown.
It might still feel like everything is normal in the US, but realize that you’re living in a fascist state in its infancy. The rule of law no longer applies.
I don’t understand how the timing of these announcements work. Do they wait for all their richest clients to pay the ransom money first? Explore every avenue of deniability until they’re exhausted?
China is very much aware that this is its moment. Position itself as an alternative to Trump’s chaos that isn’t afraid of him and offers a different path.
Militarily, China is outmatched by a wide margin, but combine economic strategy with diplomacy in the face of a superior rival’s extreme, unforced mistakes, and China is seeing a path to win the 21st century without having to fight.
It’s sad to think about the optimism people used to have for the internet vs. what it turned into.
Part of me honestly hopes that Michael Jackson faked his death and is fat and happy somewhere out there. Like Elvis maybe used to be.
IIRC, RFK’s stances on health issues were mostly based on a conspiracy theory that the institutions he now leads were deliberately burying studies and mass amounts of data. If that were true, he’d obviously be crowing about it at every opportunity.
Instead, he found out that his conspiracy theories are bullshit, and that he’s now beholden to Trump and MAGA fascism. He’s going to accidentally say something against the narrative from time-to-time. I’m sure Trump or Elon or whoever is in charge will make him do something humiliating to atone for it.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not defending RFK, Jr. it’s extremely sad that the apple fell so very far from the tree.
His motives may be unclear, but his actions are crystal clear. He’s tried to enact tariffs already and been stopped before they were implemented because everyone knows the level of damage they cause. He’s moving forward this time. He’s deliberately crashing the global economy.
Why? Who knows? His Silicon Valley overlords demand it? I doubt it’s Putin, because Russia’s economy is hanging on by a thread, and the last thing they need is a global downturn, especially when it craters oil prices. Is it just that Trump is stupid, maybe senile, and ultimately in charge?
Regardless, the leader of the biggest economy in the world has decided that it’s time for a global recession/depression, so unless that course is changed, that’s probably what’s going to happen.
Weegee (Luigi) is having its time in the sun.