Prelude to the Apocalypse

[Specineff]

Wonder if the captain of the Breitbart ship will go under along with it:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 9b593d3f76

[BryanM]

Always thought it was funny that Crispy's presidential ambitions were dead before they even began all because he patted Obama on the back once. But such reasoning isn't completely broken - if someone is Satan, and your supposed would-be champion is out there hanging out with Satan, they're probably not really on your side, are they?

Current Affairs has a recent blurb on how very well our puppets of vampires get along.

The democrats went along with burning the $80 billion dollars on a hot load of nothing (maybe they'll get a couple more corpses out of it, but I doubt it a great deal) and extended the surveillance bill.

It's somewhat incredible 50% of eligible voters even bother.

[gameoverDude]

The Hawaii EMA had sent out a false missile alert. And after that had gone out, it took 38 minutes to call it off.
People were fleeing their homes, making a mad rush to get to shelters, & abandoning their cars on freeways. Someone could have gotten trampled in the chaos.

Of course I'd be glad that the alert was fake. But then again, I'd be highly... nah, EXTREMELY pissed over the false alert and their taking so long to correct this epic blunder.
Those responsible should lose their jobs over such a grave misstep. It's inexcusable.

Given the tensions between Trump & Kim, it could've been a real mess. Trump was out golfing when the alert happened BTW.

[Specineff]

We all know it was Obama's fault. It simply has to be.

[Specineff]

Another clown has been crammed into the little car of the circus that is this presidency:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/us/p ... poena.html

Bannon is subpoenaed in Mueller's investigation. But don't worry, Trumpskis: it's all fake news meant to take down the TRUE AND HONEST alternative facts produced by the WELL-OILED MACHINE that is this administration. *eagle cry resounds in the background*

[BryanM]

The money laundering angle does have me doubting my vote on thread poll. Moments like this is why it's a binary choice with no take backs.

His fall should in theory be absolutely devastating to his party. Somehow, I still think the Democrats will manage to swoop in and save Goldman Sachs for him, though. It's what they're paid to do.

We have a system where it's so easy to be corrupt and legal about it. You'd have to be a complete bonehead to be a billionaire doing billionaire stuff but having to actually pay for it.

[quash]

The Onion proves yet again that they are the only true journalists left.

If you can't hear this wakeup call, you're already dead.

[Mischief Maker]

Why do you think this thread is crawling with Bernie Bros?

[quash]

Because people are desperate and easily duped into supporting policies that are practically impossible to implement given the current political climate. Which, to be fair, applies to many of Trump's supporters, as well.

Maybe not wanting open borders and endless wars in the Middle East makes me a dupe. Maybe thinking that universal healthcare and free college will ever happen in the US makes you a dupe. None of us will really know until it's too late.

And then, you have your true believers, who will forever remind us that it was her turn, damn it.

Really, though, it is incredibly amusing to see the collective Washington/media establishment gas light themselves over a mildly nativitst corporate Democrat. Imagine if we actually elected the next Hitler.

[BulletMagnet]

Well gee, is it already time for yet another ever-productive fun run 'round the mulberry bush? Who coulda guessed?

[Mischief Maker]

It's weird for a millitary man like yourself to be rolling your eyes at the pipe dreams of single-payer healthcare and government-paid tuition when you personally already have both these benefits.

Really, though, it is incredibly amusing to see the collective Washington/media establishment gas light themselves over a mildly nativitst corporate Democrat. Imagine if we actually elected the next Hitler.

Well look, dude, even Hitler didn't have the gas chambers set up in his first year. But Trump is doing a hell of a job re-creating "Diary of Anne Frank" conditions for non-white immigrants here in the US. There's even talk of those 200,000 El Salvadoran refugees being shipped to Qatar to work as indentured servants. And don't forget those organized Brown (Polo) Shirts marching and rioting in the streets!

Baby steps.

[BulletMagnet]

It's weird for a millitary man like yourself to be rolling your eyes at the pipe dreams of single-payer healthcare and government-paid tuition when you personally already have both these benefits.

Every single corporate-welfare plutocrat they send to office does exactly the same thing (heck, if memory serves even Ayn Rand cooked up some laughable excuse for why she happily kept cashing her Social Security checks ), so why should that surprise you?

[BryanM]

Because people are desperate and easily duped into supporting policies that are practically impossible to implement given the current political climate.

It's only impossible if you can't elect representatives that will do what you want them to do. (The minimum wage being last raised under George W being kind of a sign how easy it actually is to do popular things when some force is applied behind it.) The disconnect between normal human voters and the puppets advertised on TV is even higher than it was during the Hoover years. Right before FDR rose to power.

Who was indeed contained to some degree by the establishment. Henry Wallace getting replaced by Truman probably had a huge effect on our history. Wallace was a farmer. A fuckin' farmer was our Vice President. Can you even imagine that? It blows the mind.

But social security, public schools, the minimum wage and an end to child labor still burst forth like an eruption from those years. Far more extreme than what small reforms will be enacted in the next 14 years.

[Zen]

The three crone-ies tag team.
Back together once more, stirring their foul cauldron of deceit.

[BryanM]

Back together once more, stirring their foul cauldron of deceit.

Okay um, FDR is a liberal myth and never existed. Social Security isn't real, either.

[Zen]

Back together once more, stirring their foul cauldron of deceit.

Okay um, FDR is a liberal myth and never existed. Social Security isn't real, either.

Indeed, and;

don't forget those organized Brown (Polo) Shirts marching and rioting in the streets!

[Mischief Maker]

Charlottesville never happened now?

[Zen]

There has been quite a bit of rioting going on in America over recent years.
I do not think organised, brown polo shirt wearing, white men are the problem in that regard.

[Bananamatic]

they wear white polos though

[BryanM]

Right, it's the khakis that are brownish these days. How far we've advanced.

Soon we'll transcend this silly rubbish and become a fully pantsless society.

[BulletMagnet]

The three crone-ies tag team.

I do kind of like the fact that the one on the right has a snake around a pole; "come closer my pretties, we have health care!"

Seriously though, at this point your ongoing "commentary" could only get more petulantly trollish and devoid of substance if you tweeted it.

Soon we'll transcend this silly rubbish and become a fully pantsless society.

Considering how many porn stars our current Commander-in-Chief has paid off in recent years (including mere months after marrying Melania...though my personal favorite detail is her being told to spank him with a copy of Forbes magazine featuring him on the cover ) we're already well on our way there, from the top down! As, once again, the "moral majority" (y'know, the culture with standards everyone else envies), who would have freaked the fuck out if anything fractionally comparable had come out concerning, oh, I dunno, Obama, join together in yet another collective cuck-shrug.

But y'know what? Since you mentioned it, I'll spread a bit more deceit around: have you heard about how much President Trump is draining the swamp lately? And that when he was done he drained it some more? And then, because that's just the kind of no-holds-barred reformer he is, said "what the hell, I'll drain it again!"

Boy oh boy do the folks who worried that he might run the Oval Office in much the same openly self-serving slimeball fashion he'd run everything else with his name on it for the preceding half-century or more have egg on our faces.

(Almost as on-the-nose as Congressional Republicans suddenly being incredibly concerned about childrens' health insurance funding that they deliberately allowed to expire four months ago (don't want those kids or their parents getting complacent, right?) and have refused to bring back up for renewal until, hey, they can suddenly spot-weld it onto an otherwise-unrelated spending bill so they can hopefully kill off DACA too, and blame the whole ensuing mess on the Democrats (never mind, y'know, anything)! And heaven knows, the Fifth Avenue set will absolutely eat that shit up: "It's the debt ceiling and Neil Gorsuch all over again! Yeaaah fuck yooouu yeaaahhh!")

[BryanM]

Alright everyone, place your bets on how many days John Kelly has left. Winner gets 10 internet points.

I predict... thirteen days, but they usually do their firings on Friday (Fire Day) so I'll have to add one to that. Feb 2 and he's gone, says I.

[quash]

It's weird for a millitary man like yourself to be rolling your eyes at the pipe dreams of single-payer healthcare and government-paid tuition when you personally already have both these benefits.

Maybe it's because of this that I have a unique perspective on its shortcomings? Or perhaps it was open borders and endless wars in the Middle East that created the conditions which helped push me into this line of work? Food for thought.

Truthfully, most "benefits" we have are on paper. Military health care is a joke while you're in and a cruel joke when you're out. And, truthfully, I'm not even sure I'm going to go back to college at this point. My GIB may very well collect dust.

Well look, dude, even Hitler didn't have the gas chambers set up in his first year. But Trump is doing a hell of a job re-creating "Diary of Anne Frank" conditions for non-white immigrants here in the US. There's even talk of those 200,000 El Salvadoran refugees being shipped to Qatar to work as indentured servants. And don't forget those organized Brown (Polo) Shirts marching and rioting in the streets!

Maybe if you believe the Washington Post. Meanwhile, unemployment has reached an all time low across all demographics and illegal border crossings are down, a pretty big win for historically black communities that were being undercut by cheap labor.

[quash]

It's weird for a millitary man like yourself to be rolling your eyes at the pipe dreams of single-payer healthcare and government-paid tuition when you personally already have both these benefits.

Every single corporate-welfare plutocrat they send to office does exactly the same thing (heck, if memory serves even Ayn Rand cooked up some laughable excuse for why she happily kept cashing her Social Security checks ), so why should that surprise you?

Hey, I've made it no secret that I'm not a fan of the Federal Reserve, yet pretty soon here I'm going to be drinking directly from the faucet of QE and getting those fresh new dollar bills hot off the press as a contractor. It's almost as if people tend to take the opportunities that provide the best risk:reward. That doesn't mean you principally agree with them.

You want to overthrow the burgioise and live in a classless society, right? Why haven't you killed every investment banker, or moved to any number of Communist utopias in South America or Africa?

[BryanM]

quash is of course fucking lying about the quality of military medical care.

The care is just as good (or just as bad, if you want to whine about having to wait an hour to get a superficial cut on your finger sewn shut) as what civilians get, at an infinitely better price.

Veterans care is of course lowest priority versus active, and varies wildly depending on how far away they live from a centralized provider, and how poorly congress wants to fund the fund.

Biggest threat is maybe acquiring an addiction to tasty Percocet, but you're just as likely to end up with a sponge on your brain from private providers.

My GIB may very well collect dust.

lol I remember how you had to pay $1,200 to get the GI Bill. My gut screamed "pyramid scam" and I was one of the five guys in basic to turn it down.

And of course about just six months later they ended the pay-in requirement and retroactively gave the thing to everyone who put in at least 90 days post 9/11. Refunds? lol. LOL.

Young kids getting scammed out of 10% of their paycheck for a year, good 'ole neoliberal policies in action.

unemployment has reached an all time low

How massively cynical.

Like I told Gaijin, we don't use the rigged neoliberal metric that makes neoliberal policies look great. We use the one the one that measure the real unemployment rate: the participation rate.

Spoiler

We hit the current bottom four years ago and flat lined. The next recession should get us down to 60%, which will tie recent history's low back in the 1970's. Which preceded some sort of revolution or other.

Historical high was over 90%, but that was before the internal combustion engine rendered human labor obsolete and led us into the bizarre Star Trek communist reality we've been living in for the past half century.

You want to overthrow the burgioise and live in a classless society, right?

That's Bulletmagnet. He's a little behind the times and only at the tail end of early 2000's "republicans suck" Daily Show style liberalism. It'll take a full blown political revolution for him to finally don the necessary beret of freedom.

Which isn't that reprehensible - people who actually do anything, such as MLK, always face hardship. It's not always getting shot in the face, burned in the street, or ran over by a car, but always at least entails receiving bruises.

Why haven't you killed every investment banker, or moved to any number of Communist utopias in South America or Africa?

Africa? "Communist"? Do you know anything about anything?

You paid the $1,200 and aren't even going to use it, are ya.

lol just lol

[quash]

quash is of course fucking lying about the quality of military medical care.

The care is just as good (or just as bad, if you want to whine about having to wait an hour to get a superficial cut on your finger sewn shut) as what civilians get, at an infinitely better price.

You're prior Air Force, right? That'd explain it. Army and MC specialize in triage and giving out painkillers like candy. The Navy specializes in taking care of dependents first and telling you your staph infection is a bruise, now get back to work.

https://www.stripes.com/report-military ... s-1.291295

https://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2012/ ... -military/

lol I remember how you had to pay $1,200 to get the GI Bill. My gut screamed "pyramid scam" and I was one of the five guys in basic to turn it down.

And of course about just six months later they ended the pay-in requirement and retroactively gave the thing to everyone who put in at least 90 days post 9/11. Refunds? lol. LOL.

They refund it now if you switch without using MGIB benefits.

https://gibill.custhelp.com/app/answers ... 11-gi-bill

How massively cynical.

What can I say: we live in a cynical world.

If I have to choose between American citizens getting an underpaying job vs non-citizens getting paid under the table, I know which one I'm choosing any day of the week.

Africa? "Communist"? Do you know anything about anything?

I mean, according to the average leftist these days, America is an Ancap paradise and Real Communism Has Never Been Tried. I don't know where you're going with this one.

[maximo310]

But I thought you knew about the secret commie stashes that Africans are most known for!

Please forward me a list of locales as soon as possible!

[quash]

The declared and actual goals of a state can differ. For example, the United States is supposedly of the people, by the people, and for the people. Yet, the government just shut down over illegal immigrants being granted citizenship. So much for that farce.

There's plenty of failed ex-Communist/Socialist states in Africa that still continue the tradition of central planning in some way. I shouldn't feel the need to point out that the most successful "Communist" state in history has basically co-opted all of the strengths of America (the sympathy towards liberalism being notably absent), but maybe it's not obvious enough to some of you.

[BulletMagnet]

I mean, according to the average leftist these days, America is an Ancap paradise and Real Communism Has Never Been Tried.

...who the hell is the last "average leftist" you talked to? Is there a single rightie troll on this forum that doesn't draw an equivalence between "average liberal" and "biggest fruitcake nobody's ever heard of that I can find on YouTube and link incessantly henceforth"? It's just as nonsensical as the rabble-rousers who crow that anyone who votes GOP must be an inbred Bible-thumping Klansman; the main difference is that no liberal bloc ever proudly used "they called me a commie!" as an excuse to actually vote for a commie.

Yet, the government just shut down over illegal immigrants being granted citizenship.

You don't even pretend to read, do you? Fuck off.

[BryanM]

Communists are of course literally responsible for getting public schools, social security, a minimum wage and the end of child labor passed. Without them bible thumping for those policies loudly and endlessly, we would have never gotten them. Never.

So of course the #1 goal of billionaires was to unite and run propaganda against them. It's not about their ideas, because you can't win against their ideas, it's about labels and mindlessly smearing them. I'm not exactly sure how having a government is an example of a "stateless" society where everyone is equal, but these geniuses know that such irreconcilable paradoxes are easily resolved!

But in the real world, you're actively working against the working class if no one has ever called you a communist.

"biggest fruitcake nobody's ever heard of that I can find on YouTube and link incessantly henceforth"

The biggest fruitcakes out there are people like The Sane Progressive and HAHA Goodman.

The people he's talking about are moderate centrists that support popular things that win elections by massive margins.