I’ll also throw in November Kelly’s No Gods No Mayors, and occasional guests Failure To Launch (space disasters) and Beyond The Breakers (shipwrecks).

But you know who does employ children, Sophie?

Also, we all forget he tried to gin up a war with Iran in his first term. Wartime presidents tend to stay in power, and he knows this - wartime protests would also give him an excuse to use the military at home like the blunt instrument he sees them as.

Actually, I think so. Remember that this guy wanted to gun down the Floyd protests not because he didn’t like the politics, but according to him, “good presidents don’t have riots”. He was willing to kill thousands of people just to preserve his own mental image of himself.

My governor has said he’s not sending in troops anywhere (after someone asked), but considering the EO allows the SecDef to literally send troops anywhere they feel is a “disruption of public order” in whatever quantity and capacity he deems fit, and considering Hegseth seems to be pretty much an administration hand puppet at this point…I’ll still go, but I’m definitely planning on knowing my escape routes just in case.

Yeah, the training for these includes “well here’s what not to do wink”.

Oh, Russia has an idea of their envisioned future. They even have a checklist for it.

Unfortunately, a good chunk of the steps are “and then the country surrenders to the overwhelming might of the Russian military”.

More specifically, there’s now a generation of people who didn’t get their ass beat for using their left hand (this was surprisingly common up through the fucking 90s in some places) and now they want leisure goods that are left-hand-capable.

Surprisingly, a lot of the white nationalist organs here in the US have VERY intimate contact with white national South African groups. I’m wondering how many of them are coming here to avoid getting caught in government dragnets in SA. Lots of the bombmaking know-how and quite a lot of weapons flowed into South Africa during the fight to keep apartheid from the 60s-90s (and now the fight to either topple the post-apartheid government or create a separatist state where they can institute apartheid), and much of THAT was supplied by contacts in the American KKK. Weird Little Guys did an incredible deep dive on the interlinking of the white nationalist movement internationally with white South African resistance to the ANC and the DeClerc and post-DeClerc governments.

Literally President Trump has said that, I believe in his first term. Something about how there shouldn’t be rules in war, and whatever happens/whoever happens to be in the crossfire, happens.

I was about to say, they tried. They have been trying for three years. They’ve committed a TON more forces than Ukraine, and still haven’t made significant progress. The invasion is a military failure on pretty much every level, and it’s only the most delusional that think Russia still has any chance of actually pulling off a successful annexation or occupation for any significant length of time.

You forgot the Spam.

Yeah, they chose El Salvador because they’ve literally abolished due process. It’s like Cambodia again - someone accuses you and you’re just instantly taken away. You MIGHT get to see a judge after you’re imprisoned for a month or two, likely after you’ve been beaten half to death so you’ll confess to anything just to make the pain stop. It’s a dressed up version of Duterte’s Philippines - we’ll kidnap you and let you die, rather than just some death squad rolling up to your door (because that doesn’t play well to the media and the other can be dressed up as “law and order”).

Precisely this. You route a shipment to an un-tarriffed/un-embargoed country, usually to a shell company or something, and then ship it to wherever using THAT country as the country of origin. It’s a pretty common way of avoiding arms embargoes.

Which is what they were doing with the old Maxims in Ukraine. Slap it down in a defensive position, where you don’t have to move it (or, in a few cases, weld that shit to a pintle mount in the back of a truck), and you can keep firing until the barrel melts or you don’t have anything left to shoot.

Apparently Trump is absolutely fucking terrified of people poisoning his food. It’s why he eats like shit - random fast food is harder to poison.

He also stopped wearing most of his gold after being down in New Orleans helping clean up from Katrina. Said he felt it was wrong to be displaying such wealth when he was staring at people who had just lost literally everything.

And then their server center burns down from the enormous influx of traffic, Musk pockets the money, and the entire world sweeps into something worse than the Depression because a good chunk of the entire world economy simply doesn’t exist now.

Nah, what he promised him is exactly what we see: $500B in rare earths, every year. Trump’s always been a terrible dealer, and this is no exception: he doesn’t do back-and-forth, he just tosses his entire hand on the table and says “here’s what I want”, then bullies you into accepting. If you don’t, he’ll either harass you, or back out saying YOU sabotaged the deal because you didn’t give him what he wanted immediately.

Don’t forget ICE going into schools and boarding schoolbuses so they can arrest Hispanic-looking kids. They didn’t just accelerate the genocide, they imported it home.

Not different. The Clinton admin invented the term whole cloth in order to not have to get involved in Rwanda.