Not normal at all. This was America’s 1932 Germany moment, there’s no going back now. 70 plus million of the dumbest Americans on the planet welcomed the Nazis with open arms.

Last I checked, Iroquois county had 9000 yes votes to secede. Good luck with that massive tax revenue base. Chicagoland’s 10 million plus residents will be happy to stop sending them money.

The media completely failed at their job of informing the public.

A democracy requires an informed citizenry, and the US media over the past eight years in particular created an increasingly misinformed citizenry.

When people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis might profoundly devastate the biosphere and much of life on it, human and otherwise, for the next 10,000 years, the media has failed. When people worry about crime when it is low, an economy when it is thriving and immigrants when they do much of the hard work that sustains that economy and commit fewer crimes than the native-born, the media has failed.

When it came to Donald Trump, they went easy on him, and they again and again let him and the far right set the agenda. They constantly treated asymmetrical issues as symmetrical ones – if the Democrats resisted Republican outrages, both sides were “polarized”. In the media everything had two sides, even if one side was the truth and the other was the lie, one side was the human rights or the law and the other side was their violation.

They went soft on Trump’s criminality and incompetence, and his sheer volume of scandals meant that the past ones were forgotten as the next one erupted. He would not have won his 2016 minority victory had the US news media adequately conveyed that Trump was not the fun fictional character in the reality TV show The Apprentice; he was a serially bankrupt man repeatedly accused of sexual assault with a lot of criminal ties and a history of not paying his bills, being helped on by the Vladimir Putin regime, which had itself seriously corrupted the information environment of the election.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/us-progressive-election-trump-maga

The full plan is detailed here: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/little-secret-trump-johnson-election/.

Basically, they just need enough States to withhold submitting valid slates of electors, which are due on Dec 11th. If that doesn’t happen, and it lowers the amount of electoral college voters enough so no single candidate has a majority, then the US House gets to decide.

In other words, we’re fully reliant on GOP controlled States doing the right thing. We’re fucked.

Not that easy when it’s a fleet of servers in multiple remote data centers. Lots of IT folks will be spending their weekend sitting in data center cages.

Shouldn’t conservatives be outraged that they stopped at age 18? The text in the 2nd amendment doesn’t have an age limit. Aren’t toddlers “people”? Logically the fucked up conservative courts should be ruling that babies can buy any gun they want. Because in their stupid world, the “well regulated” words have no meaning.

Trump at a rally this week: “Mothers will never again be forced to watch their children overdosing & hosp–lee. We will never allow mothers to watch their child hopelessly dying in their arms, screaming, ‘What can I do? Help me God, what can I do?’ We are a nation whose once revered airports are a dirty, crowded mess.”

Has any media covered that word vomit?

Step 1: vote against COVID vaccine distribution funding

Step 2: get COVID

Step 3: retire due to long COVID

Step 4: die from long COVID

It’s astonishing how quickly republicans have aligned to the behaviours of the Nazi party of the 1930s. They’re leveraging trump’s conviction exactly the same as the Nazis used the Reichstag fire to turn the power of the government against anyone opposed to them.

Hahahaha… he can’t even visit Canada now. “Criminally inadmissible”. Great head of state you’re voting for republicans.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/inadmissibility/overcome-criminal-convictions.html

Pretrial motions that she is responsible for adjudicating. She even told trump’s lawyers to take a slower approach on the motions, telling them to file them one by one instead of all at once. Source

Not with that attitude

Meanwhile, me over here with the self-doubt slamming ctrl-z

The 2017 tax bill that the Republicans rammed through had a time bomb in it for software developers. Starting in 2022, companies could no longer expense R&D costs, and instead had to amortize them over 5 years. This has led to massive tax bills in 2023 for companies. I have no doubt that this is another major factor in the recent tech layoffs.

Take an imaginary bootstrapped software business called “Acme Corp.” This company generates $1,000,000 of revenue per year running a SaaS service. It employs five engineers, and pays each $200,000. That is $1,000,000 paid in labor costs. For simplicity, we omit other costs like servers and hosting, even though those costs can also fall under the new R&D rules, and have to be amortized. So, how much taxable profit does this company make?

In 2021, the answer would be zero profit. In 2022, the answer was $900,000 in profits(!!)

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-will-us-companies-hire

Sometimes it’s like wiping a marker

Is there an equivalent of /r/JustFuckMyShitUp here? Yikes, this guy is rocking one atrocious haircut.

“War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.” – MAS*H

Here’s a verification of a video showing some of the aftermath of the attacks by The Washington Post. Since WaPo sometimes changes links on breaking stories, a copy is below.

A graphic video verified by The Washington Post showed the aftermath of a deadly strike along Gaza’s main highway Friday, part of a wave of Israeli attacks that killed dozens and injured more than 200 people fleeing northern Gaza, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza.

The video, recorded along Salah Al-Deen road, shows bodies,- including several young children- strewn along the road as black smoke rises from vehicles engulfed in flames. On the north-facing side of the road, bodies are laid out amid personal belongings, including a bicycle, on flatbed trailers attached to a truck.

The video was first geolocated by open-source researchers Chris Osieck and Gabòr Friesen and confirmed by The Post.

Late Thursday, Israel ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza’s 1.1 million residents within 24 hours, the United Nations said. On Friday, the Israeli military dropped leaflets over Gaza City telling residents to “evacuate your homes immediately and go to the south.”

Hamas’s surprise incursion on Oct. 7 killed at least 1,300 people in Israel, authorities said. Palestinian officials said the subsequent Israeli strikes have killed more than 1,799 people in Gaza.

The Israel Defense Forces did not have an immediate response.