Tad Nails It

The only constant is not change….it is extinction if you do not change. America ended on election night and a New America is our only chance to avoid the unimaginable fascist death machine that is in our future. Now.

Vichy

Destroy the truth, corrupt the other two branches, make murder normal, and end the free press. Almost there.

Everything, EVERYTHING reduces to the rich evading taxes and regulation. All the drama, the culture wars, the tariffs and austerity, the “war” against the enemies within, ALL OF IT IS A DISTRACTION. As long as the billionaire class keeps sucking up hundreds of millions of dollars every day then life is good. It is so obvious. And obvious they believe the citizenry are domesticated animals.

Evil Corrupt Politicians

In a democracy a politician must be the antithesis to Mammon, the demon prince of hell that has always been the ruler of this world. Greed places money and power above human life and a democracy must be the counter or it has no meaning and becomes a lie.

The critical first step that every democracy must take is to tax and regulate oligarchy into oblivion or it is simply committing suicide because it cannot survive.

Why Invade Venezuela?

Stupidity killed the dinosaurs because they were not smart enough to build a rocket to deflect the comet that hit the Earth. Stupidity ended them and greed is likely to end us. We are gambling on our very existences as a species. America was the hoped for superhero and is now the supervillain. Ambiguous grief over the end of America is something I am having a great deal of difficulty coping with.

Venezuela holds 299,953,000,000 barrels of proven oil reserves in the world as of 2016, ranking #1 in the world and accounting for about 18.17% of the world’s total oil reserves of 1,650,585,140,000.

CNN: It was in 2018 that the US Supreme Court struck down a 1992 federal law, which had prohibited most states from allowing sports betting.

Fast forward to 2024 and the gambling industry is engrained in US sports culture with leagues, franchises, players and networks now partnering with betting organizations.

Nevada was the lone state able to provide sports betting in 2018, but it’s now legal in 38 states and the District of Columbia, with active legislation surrounding sports betting in a further six states.

In February, when the Super Bowl was staged, Americans bet $10.49 billion on sports, a 24.8% year-over-year increase, according to the American Gaming Association’s (AGA) gaming revenue tracker.

Ahead of the Super Bowl, the AGA was predicting a record 67.8 million American adults (26%) would bet an estimated $23.1 billion on the event, a 35% increase from 2023.

And, overall, nearly $120 billion in legal bets were made last year.

NPR: World leaders are heading into the final days of COP30, the United Nations climate meeting in Brazil. They are trying to agree on how to curb global warming and pay for the costs of an increasingly hotter planet.

For the past eight years, one of the primary objectives of the annual negotiations has been to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to the temperatures in the late 1800s. That temperature goal was established after a landmark international scientific report laid out the catastrophic effects of exceeding that amount of warming.

But that goal is no longer plausible, scientists say. Humanity has not cut planet-warming pollution quickly enough, and the planet will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, likely in the next decade, according to a recent United Nations report.

Newsweek: A new study by Anthropic, an artificial intelligence (AI) research company, shows that the technology would be willing to kill humans in order to prevent itself from being replaced.

Why It Matters

The rapid advancement and development of AI has sparked some growing concern about the long-term safety of the technology, as well as over the threat it poses to employment.

While anxiety about AI has been long been focused on whether the technology could take over jobs, with a 2025 Pew Research study finding 52 percent of employees were nervous about the future of their job, this study now reveals another potential threat of AI—that it could chose to end human life if faced with the risk of replacement.

Lords and Peasants

This is why Peter Thiel hates competition. Like many techbros, he wants to be a feudal lord. Democracy is of course the mortal enemy of both feudalists and capitalists because it gives people the power to limit the wealth and power of individuals so they cannot make everyone their serfs.

Comments On Frum

Every day America is shredded a little more and will take far more to rebuild than to tear down…at some point the cancer will end any hope of a return to any form of functioning democracy.

@Mulchavelli
3 days ago
DOGE did achieve their goals just not their stated goals. The goal was to steal all of our data for monetary gain and to destroy people’s lives, and they were successful at that.

@2639tjw
3 days ago
Modern conservatism (free trade, etc.) had one fatal flaw and that was the mythology of trickle down economics. Like somehow “greed is good” was going to produce anything other than greed. Well .. it didn’t.

@goodun2974
3 days ago
Conservatism actively worked against the idea of a “commons”; it’s “every man for himself”, except with certain groups and classes being favored.

@SailorGerry
3 days ago
Here’s what the economist John Kenneth Galbraith (served as one JFK’s economic advisors) said about ‘trickle-down theory’ (aka ‘Reaganomics’):”If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to feed the sparrows”.

@goodun2974
3 days ago
​ @SailorGerry , also from JKG: “the modern conservative is engaged in man’s oldest exercise in moral philosophy, that is, a moral excuse for selfishness”. And from Frank Wilhoit: “conservatism consists of but one abiding principle: there must be an ingroup whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside an outgroup whom the law binds but does not protect “.

@jhbange
3 days ago (edited)
Indeed, trickle down was already based on a falsehood, that the rich spending money puts money in the pockets of middle and lower income people. But on top of that, it’s based on a much larger misconception, that perpetual economic growth is achievable. The notion is a throwback to a colonial-era mindset that was at the time accurate: you can grow the economic pie by expanding into new unexplored territories. We do not have any unexplored territories in the world anymore. The resource pie is FACTUALLY finite. Economics is, at this point, largely a zero-sum game. Shifting assets to the ultra wealthy means less for everyone else, and this is blatantly obvious. They use this money to “invest” in things like real estate, buying housing and turning it into rental property. This is LITERALLY rent-seeking behavior, which is universally understood to be a purely extractive activity by an unnecessary middleman that makes the world that much worse.

@gking407
1 day ago (edited)
@delta5297 Edmund Burke in the late 1700s got frightened and alarmed when French commoners dared to revolt against their morbidly wealthy queen Marie Antoinette while they were starving. Instead of siding with the citizens Burke decided they were all idiots who needed to know their place. Hence the roots of Conservatism were established.

A Fundamental Disconnection

Billionaires are threat to humanity and must be taxed and regulated into oblivion or we have no future. “Rich”, as in owning a house or two and cars and maybe a boat or a plane is fine. Super-rich is demonic. The central question in democracy is how much of the money an individual makes do we allow them to keep so they do not destroy democracy. The central fact of democracy is the only reason anyone owns anything is because the rest of us let them. The central purpose of democracy is to limit individual power to protect the collective.

They Are So Happy Now

8 years ago in Charlottesville Unite the Right brought white supremacy into the national spotlight. Yesterday an Afghan Refugee shot two National Guard soldiers in Washington D.C. Separating the rhetoric from the reality and tracking the actual threat is not going to happen. The real threat is white supremacists infiltrating our own government.

As I have said several times, Trump could live to 90 like Castro and hold on to power until his last breath. Nothing of America will be left.

Regarding Jan 6: “I had a failure of imagination back then, but my imagination is working fine now, and I am not going to make the same mistake.”