Don’t think that plane is going to rise again in three days.

Well, but that’s impossible. In China, he won’t have any freedom. He needs to stay in the United States where he can pursue research into biology and medic- door bang

shouts of military police

repeated gunfire

screams of terrified research assistants

confused orders from multiple officers at once

more gunfire

moaning from injured civilians

more gunfire

radio chatter from officers

“Yeah, they were armed. Looks like syringes and a bunson burner. Yes. All illegal. Yes, we’re cleaning up now. No need to report this up the chain, they already know. Signing out.”

Largely rubber-stamping what they’ve already been doing.

We’re going to get an earful, in twenty years, when liberals clap themselves on the back for repealing this law.

Americans have wanted to invade Iran going back to the Reagan administration. Trump’s just so zooted up on his own supply that he thought he could make it happen.

That’s okay, though. We’re going to invade Cuba next. We can stop blaming Zionists and point the finger squarely at Florida Billionaires going forward.

We get to pay for that.

Can we even build these planes anymore? The C-17 was produced by McDonald Douglas, a company that went bankrupt back in '97 and had to be acquired by Boeing. Now Boeing is way behind on orders, because they’ve outsourced themselves to the hilt in the same way that ruined Douglas.

This isn’t just an issue of the fiscal costs. The US literally cannot produce airliners reliably anymore. Boeing is increasingly just booking orders it cannot fulfill. Even if Hegseth gets a blank check from the Treasury, this equipment isn’t going to be replaced any time soon.

Pete Hegseth going over to his emergency appropriations request and adding another zero to the back end.

Shock Doctrine was a fantastic piece of work.

Idk if she’s moderated, per say. Might just feel that way as the rest of the public has been radicalized

What they’re doing is laudable. But these boats are tiny compared with what the Cubans need to survive.

These appear to have arrived before the US tightened the blockage in earnest. Their plan was for a 2 GW combined installation, of which this represents maybe 1%.

Thankfully solar and other supplies are being given to Cuba in large quantities

That’s news to me. Was just listening to a podcast interviewing a local Cuban journalist, suggesting help was not - in fact - on the way.

Incidentally, Belly of the Beast does some excellent domestic Cuban coverage. But everything they are reporting suggests these supplies have not been forthcoming, on account of the military blockade of the island. Like, you cannot sail ships into and out of the major harbors (shy of outright smuggling or armed escort).

Much like with the Gaza Blockade, there are ongoing efforts to build political pressure by assembling relief and directing it at the island. There’s no reason to believe it will actually arrive.

Liberals are hyper exposed to the latter and sheltered from the former.

Check the Cuba coverage right now. We’re getting wall to wall #SOSCuba tier hysterics, while the devestation of the blockade and the threat of a military invasion goes fully unreported.

The biggest con with tumblr is the CEO

The ban of every website’s existence.

I’ll have to take your word for it

Goes back to email. Easier to create a machine that churns out digital messages than find humans to do the work manually. So you get increasing loads of spam and gibberish, attempting to out-shout one another in a digital space with no bureaucratic regulation or material limits.

That said, one thing that made early social media like Facebook and MySpace and Livejournal appear valuable was the degree of human interaction. What’s more, the interpersonal networks that formed between verified humans gave enormous value to communications across the platform.

Facebook did a pretty good job, early on, of limiting who could join based on authentication through college admin offices. MySpace had a large cohort of real human artists producing real human music, which attracted a real human following. Livejournal predated a lot of advertisement-by-blogging. After the Dot-Com bubble burst, this is where you could see green shoots of economic value in a digital space.

We’ve demolished all that chasing fictitious capital. How valuable it was in practice is debatable, of course. But it’s all gone now.

Reddit, very famously, used bot traffic at its inception to create the illusion of a community big enough to compete with Digg.

It was the OG “fake it till you make it” business.

As the company implements an increasingly draconian “ban every account that looks at me sideways” admin policy, I’m not sure if “2/3rds of the traiffc” isn’t lowballing it. There are entire threads - from initial post to bullshit bottom comment - that get created by bot traffic on the modern site. It’s a full blown hall of mirrors over there.

The irony of this image is that, on the one hand, you absolutely have the Blue Collar and the White Collar snearing it out at one another over who suffered more and earned the most.

On the other hand, you’ve got the Blue Collar guy doing 12-hour shifts to guarantee Mr. White Collar gets cheap energy and fancy techno-widgets and fresh food. Meanwhile, you’ve got the White Collar guy doing 12-hour shifts to make sure Mr. Blue Collar pays the highest price for gasoline and can’t afford a cell phone plan and shops at Dented Canned Goods Store.

Like, you want to talk about class solidarity. But White Collar Guy gets paid extra precisely because he makes Blue Collar Guy’s life worse. Then he pays Tophat Guy a hefty vig for the privilege.

Meanwhile, Blue Collar Guy is so sheep-dipped in the cultural propaganda that he thinks its some kind of privilege to pay a four-figure monthly truck note to commute to his flop house on a $40k salary. The only reason he wants that $50/hr job is to stack a bunch of mortgage debt on top of the car debt and the credit card debt. At no point does he stop and ask whether these consumerist babbles are benefiting him in a material way.

And neither of them seem to realize working harder is making their lives worse.

Iran is scheduled to play three group-stage matches beginning on 11 June, including fixtures against New Zealand and Belgium in Los Angeles, followed by a match against Egypt in Seattle.

The comments come after Iran’s sports minister, Ahmad Donyamali, said the team would not take part in the tournament following the US-Israeli war on Iran.

“Considering that this corrupt regime has assassinated our leader, under no circumstances can we participate in the World Cup,” he said.

Amazing how a six paragraph long article managed to bury the lead.

Feel the same way about people wringing their hands over dead US soldiers, as though they’re the only people who matter.

A Thai shipping frigate just got hit in the Straight of Hormuz, and I have seen absolutely nobody on national news raise the question of whether any of the crew were injured or killed. Similarly, Israel and the UAE have been incredibly close-mouthed about civilian deaths from Iranian attacks into civilian areas, because they consider it a public embarrassment. Nobody seems to want to talk about the “collateral damage”.

And then there’s the death toll in Iran itself. I was getting ear-blasted with “Iranian Government Murders 10,000! 20,000! 30,000! people!” for weeks. Suddenly, Iranian deaths don’t matter, unless they’re high ranking politicians or military figures.

This reeks of the same coverage we got out of Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and Ethiopia. National news is entirely contained within jingoistic nationalist terms. We’re covering (and increasingly gambling) on the outcome like its a basketball game.

Vile.

Epstein didn’t keep a low profile. He was everywhere, taking pictures and glad-handing other plutocrats and showing up at events.

Like, if anyone is on your short list, I would think it would be Elon Musk. Musk’s initial gambit was throwing a bunch of keggers at Stanford to make friends with the prior generation’s Silicon Valley failkids. That’s how he met Thiel and got into Paypal, made his first billion, and became an ahem Angel Investor for all sorts of glamour projects.