Right, what you said, but I’d remove the part where it increases productivity.

This is still the “faking it” phase of “faking it till you make it.” Their heroic victim narrative requires a criminal conviction, whatever the charge. So yes, they’re desperate, like every con artist is desperate to maintain the facade until they secure the prize.

Yes yes, we all know a conviction won’t disprove the obvious fact that they are hysterical infants in media tantrum, but like when she was still a screeching TV head, their Fox News anchor US Attorney is performing for an audience of one.

This was honestly the ballot item I was most concerned about. If we don’t retake the House in 2026 I’d say we’re pretty much cooked, and this at least keeps us in the game.

I’m surprised Retroid Pocket 5 is a reliable Switch emulator - are there games that don’t run at native speed?

[PSA voice]

Your government cares. If you are starving and plan to do something desperate, dial our Stephen Miller hotline, 1-800-NSF-RATU. National Guard and CBP members with hot weapons and martial law training are standing by.

Yes, good point, I should have specified I was thinking of the Spielberg version.

At this point Minority Report’s mostly ordered but slightly corrupt-behind-the-scenes society seems almost utopian.

Nope, we’re getting Biff Tannen’s Back To The Future 2 reality as a base, with a free AI dystopia expansion pack.

I predict Mamdani will get more than 50% of the vote, but yes, nice to have insurance.

Some of this information was available but read the entire article. It’s very good reporting on just how clear Trump’s intent to break the law was, the extreme sensitivity of the documents, and the clear lies Trump told in response to the raid and demands. Just an example excerpt:

Olsen’s minders then told him about a fourth stack of documents, stored in a separate safe, explaining that only one agent in the field office was approved to handle them. Each of the documents in the safe bore a ticket with coding that described its unique handling instructions — above and beyond the strict approvals for highly sensitive top-secret and sensitive compartmented information.

Olsen got on the phone with his counsel to read the codes aloud, one by one, to determine if he had permission to view them. Some of the documents were so restricted that top Justice Department security officials reacted with surprise to the code names: They had never heard of them before. Some involved special access programs that required the president or a cabinet member to grant approval to view.

The documents that Trump did not turn over - after repeated requests were ignored, after turning over the initial boxes, the false “complete” folder of additional documents, showing the FBI the room with other boxes that was staged after they moved out other incriminating documents - were documents so sensitive that infosec policy required the acting president or cabinet member to personally authorize any request to view them.

If Trump “authorizes” the DOJ to settle his frivolous lawsuit related to the FBI raid, it will be a criminal openly stealing public funds in retribution for catching him red-handed after he repeatedly lied to police, and for nearly but not even making him face consequences. It gives me a headache how corrupt, unethical, and immoral that would be.

It’s not just interest alignment, in my opinion. Pretty sure Trump doesn’t endorse anyone unless there’s a pledge of fealty behind the scenes.

He’s exceeded their expectations, I assume.

Yes, loose phrasing on my part. But agree completely.

This is the point - authoritarian regimes make absurd laws that are vague and impossible to follow, so that prosecution can be fully politically-selective.

They will decide after the fact, without any objective standard, if your legal conduct is “illegal” for loan forgiveness purposes. (Maybe also criminal charges purposes, but I think they’re saving that for next year after we all get used to this step.)

Uh, who wants to tell NBC News that Trump “focusing on” the economy is precisely why it’s in trouble?

No, he’ll order his military to kill a few citizens to make his point that the rule of law is over, and 90% will fall in line. The 10% will become the new “terrorists” that Kash Patel’s FBI hunts and imprisons or kills as continued examples, or he’ll start a war and send them in as fodder.

He’s trying to be Putin or even Kim Jong Un. He doesn’t need his military to suppress all rebellion, just to protect him from the consequences of his actions while he enjoys the privileges of power. That’s much easier.

I guess we’re already at the part of the presidency where he’s so desperate for both attention and distraction that he’s starting wars.

Boy, the writers of this season of The Fall of America are really leaving themselves nowhere to go for season two.

It’s the glycerin. Look at the contents of nearly every protein bar, and glycerin is in the first four ingredients, and man, once you know that, you can taste it, it coats your mouth, it doesn’t leave, and it tastes exactly like it sounds.

Yeah, no, I get that…Sorry, my point was that they are so deeply hypocritical, even that irony wouldn’t register.

To be clear, this is what I assume you’re referring to:

It cites language in the post-Civil War 14th Amendment to the Constitution barring from office anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or who has “given aid or comfort to the enemies.” The group argues that Mamdani’s own statements calling to resist ICE could violate the prohibition.

To them, there is no irony because they think anyone challenging their power or ideologically inconsistent with them is an insurrection or rebellion.

My feelings on AI are also complicated, but I’m glad we all agree this is radioactive trash.

I love to play around with local AI; random github releases, local-hosted-and-use LLMs, and free code seem genuinely interesting, even if I don’t plan to do anything public. And when it doesn’t feed back to a corporation, and the benefits go only to the user, I’m usually for it.

Like…My local-hosted Immich server has AI image recognition, fully locally hosted, no corporate parasitic training use, just the ability to use language to search. Like, I can immediately find that one picture from 15 years ago that I know has a dog in it by searching for “dog” and scrolling a tiny bit.

But AI platforms use that seeks to reinforce power (corporations like Google and Meta, politicians like Trump and Cuomo, billionaires like Musk) or startups obviously staking claims to try to capture and monetize users (OpenAI, and the fifty thousand other techbro VC simp startups) are physically repulsive to me.