Yeah, that’s off. Especially taken in conjunction with this:

The tickets were “allocated at no charge [0 USD] due to a prior payment issue during the checkout process,” Fifa said

So a tranche of impossible tickets shows up for sale on the World Cup site a full three months after the head of FIFA announced the games were sold out, the one guy who would know for sure but somehow did not, and are then very quietly made available much later on a single day in such a way that the buyers are making what looks like a standard purchase of tickets, except the system is also just as bizarrely set to charge them $0.

Do people actually keep checking on the official site instead of resellers for available tickets long after they’re supposed to have been sold out?

Huh. I don’t know enough about how FIFA ticket sales work to know with any certainty, but at first glance it looks almost like a plan that worked exactly as it was supposed to, except that some people who were not the intended recipients lucked into it as well.

It could also be something FIFA did not set up directly, but an insider or group of insiders who figured out a way to set aside some tickets, and now FIFA’s collecting after the fact.

Or it could all just be a magically lucky series of coincidences. I really don’t know but it’s hinky as hell.

Also of note in the article (emphasis mine):

The profit margins of facilities like Delaney Hall depend on coercing people into working for otherwise illegal rates, Andrew Free, an immigration lawyer and journalist who researches conditions in ICE detention, said. “The way you keep the place clean is you use the people who are inside to clean it.”

Those dollar-a-day rates have held since 1950, when they were established by Congress. It was keyed to the “international standard for prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, which was three Swiss francs.”

And,

But it’s generally cheaper to let people go than to transfer strikers to different facilities, Free said. So when some detained people are released—like an 18-year-old who was freed from Delaney Hall earlier this week after missing her high school prom—“that is just as much a predictable consequence of these hunger and labor strikes as the repression and retaliation.”

There are a few of them. Which one? Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Alabama, Oregon?

(I’d 100% agree on the Florida one.)

Like if you planned a city around canals, then why is it still so utterly car centric?

Water is recreation, but roads are for everyday living. You likely would not be able to shop easily or visit your vet via the water: the entire business district would have to be marina-style. This is about a fairy tale dreamed up by real estate developers more than anything else, not actually about water-based living.

Many years ago I briefly lived in a small Florida subdivision that was exactly like this. Like Florida itself, this canal-style layout has always been popular for people who want to live on the water, especially (at that time) snowbirds who didn’t know better. And it would have been impossible to use boats to get anywhere, because the actual marinas were nowhere near this subdivision, and to even get that far would have required actual boating skill to get in and out of the bigger swamp all of this carved-out land abutted.

It was all kind of shitty and we weren’t there long. The houses themselves tend to be overpriced because they are technically “waterfront” even if your view is the ass end of someone else’s dock. Boats are holes in the water into which you pour money. Your expensive water sports equipment sits under tarps most of the year, requiring both maintenance and insurance even when you’re not using it. And speaking of tarps, mosquitos breed in standing water.

Even the canals themselves interrupt the natural movement of water from point A to point B, so unless your locality is spraying regularly (which is another ecological nightmare) you are going to have a lot of problems with mosquitos, and even if you don’t, the water itself just gets stagnant, nasty and stinky. Look at that aerial view someone posted: how can the water naturally move or circulate past all those artificial obstacles? Answer: except for tidal motion and some wind, it really doesn’t move much at all. You cannot swim in it safely, and the nearer you get to the smell of the water the less appealing that idea of swimming even seems, which explains why you will see swimming pools behind a lot of those homes, just yards from the actual canal. Algae and excess moisture on everything exterior (and eventually interior, like on fans) is a constant problem.

I couldn’t speak for it today, but at the time there tended to be a good bit of turnover: people bought in on the dream of being able to live like it was vacation, realized what an albatross they’d hung around their own neck in terms of expense, maintenance, and general unpleasantness, and then sold up.

Some people do thrive on it, love it all and take their boats out regularly. But when they do, it’s not on a grocery run.

It’s gone, or at least as far as I can tell. It would have come out roughly around the same time she sued the Daily Mail for the same kind of story and they retracted as well.

It was not the only video or story of its kind, by far, and right now they’re ALL gone. Not just this video, but almost all first term or prior Melania interviews. There are only a handful of older Melania interviews still out there at all, at least via public search, and absolutely zero that involve the word escort, which this one had in the title. The most recent ones do look entertaining, though.

The Trump administration has quietly put forth a great deal of effort toward scrubbing the public internet for anything they don’t want out there, so I’m not really surprised.

Trafficking involves coercion. We’ve heard a lot about the minors, but not all Epstein’s connections, sexual or otherwise, were coerced: many were legally of age who were simply paid.

By all accounts, Melania came to the US of her own free will and was an adult when she interacted with Epstein. There is no evidence she was ever coerced, nor that she was pimped. She’s never said she was, and no one has ever suggested that about her.

And to drive the point home, she is most certainly acting out of her own free will now, and to the same end: selling her [name, title, access to power, story] for money.

About her? No. About the Epstein connections I do, and not only for their sake, but because these repeated allegations make it harder every time for her to successfully come back against her accusers with defamation lawsuits.

She likes to conduct lawfare against anyone who dares say a truthful word about the various acts of sociopathy in her past, but when the same things are alleged over and over again by different groups of people in different settings they give her accusers an obvious defense. That I do enjoy.

Yeah, same here. There was a video circulating before his first term (long before AI and deepfakes) where someone took apart an interview she did talking about “doing business” as a “model” and all the various ways her responses were common to the jargon of prostitution.

It wasn’t just one thing, it was many things, even one part where she put her hand up to her mouth like she knew she should not have said something the way she did because it was an obvious pointer to sex work.

If I can find it I’ll post it, but I haven’t seen it since 2015 or thereabouts.

sufficiently grease the right palms

Or the right poles. Melania was not particularly a moneymaker when she is alleged to have violated the terms of her initial visitor visa to work as a model.

he’s the wealthiest person in the US

As an aside, I’m not at all certain this is still true, if it ever really was.

What IS certain is that the absolute dollar value of the very wealthy is an ongoing shell game that reveals more if they want loans, and far less when it comes to paying judgements and taxes.

Even so, ketboy’s claimed wealth could stand a great deal more examination, especially these days. He gets a lot of access and influence thrown his way just on the claim alone. I’d like to see him stop getting that anticipatory cooperation based on a claim that has not been self-apparent for some time.

I’d put him in the top twenty of US wealthiest individuals, sure. But first place? Especially with what’s been happening with Tesla and X, not anymore.

Thank you for this context. I had actually suspected as much, especially in regard to how people use the Talmud for prooftexting (selectively pulling bits out of a text with which to authoritatively settle disputes) because that’s exactly how the Christian bible is used by the same sort of people, But as I said above I’m not overly familiar with the Talmud, so this tracks. And yeah, it is really dry reading! I did try a few times, lol.

But it’s depressing how similar some people are in their tactics to suppress real questions and debate, even across faiths.

It’s great when people bring the receipts and take the time to source a comment. Seriously, thank you.

P.S. This may also contribute. It’s something by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn I read probably forty years ago, and it put into words what I had been suspecting anyway, that organizations are NOT inscrutable entities made of their own special something but merely groups of individual humans.

Thus, when an organization does something shitty, it’s because some shitty individuals inside it think it’s a grand idea and the head shit signs off on it and then at that point, all the individuals inside that organization are then faced with a choice to either ride along or get off altogether, because there are rarely any choices in between those two poles. But there’s always a subset who would gladly throw a wrench in the works if they thought it would make any difference, because they think it’s ass and they resent it all, never having wanted it to begin with.

So I don’t believe in organizations anymore, only the individuals within it. And the line between good and evil crosses not between people, but across the heart of every person. That’s what I got from Solzhenitsyn.

From The Gulag Archipelago, Part 4, Chapter 1, “The Ascent”:

"It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good…

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil. "

Lol, I need to self-correct here just a hair.

No, it doesn’t, it absolutely does not advance my well-being or improve my life in any way. Actually the opposite. But it just doesn’t matter, perhaps we should stop focusing and acting solely on the base of what benefits ourselves, this is a delusional egocentric system. We learned that, regardless of what it is true or false, right or wrong, if it benefits us we should do it and if it harms us we should refuse it. Nothing else really matter.

I don’t agree.

No, you’re right, and it’s a failure on my part to frame the concept better. For myself, I believe that actions follow thoughts. So if I want to make or be part of positive change, first I have to lift my own thoughts. And how can I truly see someone else in their reality, as they really are, if I won’t even see myself as I really am?

What I found for myself was that I can’t wallow in thoughts that involve huge, vast conspiracies of evil because 1) it’s factually not true that every person in any given org supports everything that org does, especially if that org is doing evil shit because evil always involves coercion; and 2) it’s a thought structure that is overwhelming to the point of personal paralysis.

So when I wrote that, I was speaking solely of the inner world, of examining and even changing the way you hold your beliefs about evil if that current belief system doesn’t lift you up in a way that makes you a better person, NOT tangible externals and looking away from them because hey, fuck you I got mine. You’re right, that’s shit. If we have a conscience, we’re either using it OR we are deluding ourselves about having one.

Shit is not going well at all and we are NOT doing anything about it.

That’s one of the things that changing my own inner world got me to see and understand differently. There are a LOT of people doing something about it, in every little way they know how. Look around: it’s chaos. If everyone were cooperating with the powers-that-be it would not now be chaotic. But chaos is the kitchen of change.

Or to put it another (very hypothetical) way, if all you can see are the vast hordes of wrongdoers marching in lockstep, you will never see the less-noticeable individuals like me (hypothetically) flattening their tires and (hypothetically) sugaring their gas tanks behind their backs while they march.

We can all do something. I genuinely believe that. Even if it’s only getting in the way. There’s only one guy that gets to be editor of the NY Times and it’s not me, so they’re never going to tell the truth about full-spectrum resistance or direct action: I should stop waiting for public acknowledgement.

But if I see my thing I can do, and I do it, that lifts me and it lifts my world. Gotta see it first, though, and that requires a belief system that allows for seeing it. And that’s why I asked you the question I did. Thank you as well for a bracing chat. You’re a good person. Don’t stop.

Try naming it “Fuck ICE” and see what happens . . . or don’t, because for whatever reason the special snowflakes of that criminal org get really pissy when members of the public offer them honest and heartfelt feedback.

Ok, I think you know but I will play. The Jews of the New York incident above were hasidic jews, chabad-lubavich in particular.

No, I really did not know. Thank you for naming them. I will read more about them.

Can we say that all sects that think that their people are the “best” “chosen” “above” “special” is wrong

YES.

and we should NOT tolerate them?

Hmmm. For myself, I already avoid all religion, especially of the Abrahamic sort. But you’re talking about tolerating people, and that’s kind of a different story for me: I do not engage with the overly religious to begin with, for multiple reasons. (I quite like pagans, though.)

But if someone is of a particular creed and I don’t know about it, they are obviously well-behaved enough to keep that to themselves. I would say that such people, even as members of sects who think themselves above the rest of us – because remember, not all are there by choice or even because they actually believe – are fine by me.

Or to put it another way, if they are not shoving their personal elitist self-belief in my face via shows of entitlement or shitty behavior, I don’t care what faith they hold.

Why are we talking about christians now?

As an illustration that there is no difference whatsoever between belief systems when the real problem is evil behavior, perpetrated by humans. When you’re sprayed by a skunk, do you really give a shit how wide the stripe down its back?

Also, I left Christianity many years ago, but before that I was deep into it for decades and studied a lot, so it’s always where I start when I think about religions filled with self-righteous pricks who twist dogma and doctrine to justify evil.

in the year of our lord 2026

Not my lord. I’d rather have tertiary syphilis, thanks.

we are witnessing a total out of control ultra religious cult committing genocide with ZERO repercussions and managing an international blackmail paedophilic and human trafficking ring with the most powerful people in the world, including the current sitting US president.

All of that is 100% true, inasmuch as I myself know or would argue. But now that you’ve responded, I’m pretty sure our difference lies in your willingness (or my unwillingness, take your pick) to extrapolate outwards from the personal identity of the perpetrators of those great evils to tar vast swathes of humans with the same brush by simple virtue of membership. That’s not my thing. I see an asshole, I don’t go looking past their shit to see if other assholes match.

At the deepest level that is, at best, a self-protective behavior and outlook, and you’ll see it the most when people have personally been eviscerated by evil in the name of a god.

For myself I have focused more on getting the myth of Christianity out of my system, but I have no judgement for those who are seared by the ongoing abuses and control of organized religion, especially if they grew up in or around that.

Let me ask you a question then. Can you name another holy book used as a religious law that contains so much disgusting abhorrent behaviour as the Talmud?

That is an excellent question, and the truth is that I do not know, because my knowledge of the Talmud is superficial at best. Coming from Christianity, and such gems as the early fathers, such as Tertullian who thought women do not have souls, I’d say if you put them side by side they’d probably end up within spitting range of each other. I usually did not go into the source language for the repulsive bits, because that’s not what I was in it for, but they are certainly there. The Quran is also not a shining example of how to behave toward certain members of society, so we’re back to the whole Abrahamic thing.

what fucking religion has a book like this?!

That’s not religion, that’s self-delusion. My question for you would be whether that particular line, and those like it, are still being used to justify the foul and horrific sexual use of children, and by whom. If it is and they are, they should be lined up and shot, NOT for their religion but for their unholy use of the bodies of innocent children, AND their abhorrent use of religion to justify and self-excuse those vast evils. (If that’s the actual belief and practice of the sect you mentioned by name, then I genuinely did not know and I will stand corrected.)

You’ve clearly thought this through (which is more than I can say for the usual fare here, so thank you) and we’re not disagreeing on facts, as far as I can tell. It’s the context in which I personally hold those facts contrasted with the personal context in which you hold those facts, and I would not take my own position out further than I have. People do tremendous evil. For myself, I think all religions have some measure of repugnant shit, especially the Abrahamic variety.

Yet if someone holds a personal faith that lifts them up, lifts those around them up, that helps them to live in a hard and brutal world, then I personally won’t tar them with the same brush that I absolutely reserve in full force for the perpetrators of those evils you named. But you gotta do you, and that’s not just a blithe, easy statement. This is something I had to fight through to clarity for myself, it took years, and I expect anyone deeply fucked by religion has to do the same. Maybe that’s you as well.

So honestly, if I were to ask you one thing it would be this: look at your position, what you’ve written, and ask yourself what the end result is in terms of lifting yourself and your inner world up in such a way that you are no longer crushed by the evils you see around you, and which you may have even suffered yourself. Or to put it another way, “If I decide this is how I want my worldview to be, will the way in which I am viewing the vast evil around me advance my well-being or improve my life in any way?” When I left Christianity after decades, that was what I had to ask myself. It was quite possibly one of the most important questions I have ever been asked. So that’s what I am asking you as well: not for public discussion, but for you to consider privately, over time, along with the well-stated facts of your case.

I appreciate your thoughtful response, and if I have provided offense in any way, I apologize. That’s not my goal, and I hope that is self-apparent.

EDITED TO ADD that I looked up that sect, Chabad-Lubavitch, and beyond the mattress thing being discredited I honestly did not find any mention of pedophilia in regard to that sect. Trump and Putin both apparently love them, though, which is not in their favor. I will continue to look. If you want to toss me some links I will read them.

Yes, you should be honest with us. I note that you did not actually supply either the “branches of Judaism” nor the specific doctrine you claim supports this. So if it’s doctrinal, name it. That’s a simple enough ask.

Jewish people and Jewish doctrine are two different things, just as Christian people and Christian doctrine are two different things.

You’ve showed me an example of Jewish inhumanity, that’s great. Before I posted this comment, I posted another one all about that with linked examples on a grand scale.

All this is utterly meaningless in terms of describing doctrine, not just for Judaism but for every faith.

For every Jewish cruelty or inhumanity you show me, I can show you endless Christian and even atheist cruelty and inhumanity. The bounds of cruelty exceed doctrine and apply to the humans underneath; the doctrine is only relevant insofar as it directly supports the act or is twisted to serve as justification for obviously immoral and even amoral acts.

If what you posted were common only to Jews everywhere, you might have something. But they don’t. Organized pedophilia has been found everywhere, as have people who claim to be adherents of benevolent religion and then turn around and act in ways even that religion labels as abhorrent.

People take doctrine and twist it to their own ends. It doesn’t mean the doctrine is bad (or good); it just means people who do evil also lie to justify their evil deeds, and that happens everywhere, inside religion and outside of it.

When I first wrote the comment to which you are responding now, I thought the question was about the Israeli war atrocities being committed against Palestinians and I wrote my comment from that point of view; in that I was in error.

is there some kind of doctrinal root for this behavior? to have so many people involved from across the spectrum of Israeli society would suggest there is some small kernel here that can justify the behavior. anything?

EDIT: should have noted I am looking for responses that are NOT antisemitic.

You pose a valid question, but there’s no legitimate Jewish doctrine behind it, any more than there was legitimate Christian doctrine behind it eighty, ninety years ago when the Nazis were doing it to the Jews.

This is not so much a religious question as it is a problem of human nature. When your own national leader makes it clear that even the worst of human behavior is acceptable when you can plead patriotism in its defense, you will find that tacitly given permission magnified beyond your wildest imagination in short order as people with darkness inside them realize there really is nothing holding them back from having a go themselves.

If it were something doctrinal to the Jewish faith, you would also be seeing it outside Israel. If anything, it is a perversion of actual Judaism, just as white nationalism in the US is a total perversion of Christianity.

If you’ve never read it before, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a great read.

Yup. Me neither. Wherever there is an excess of money/power and entitlement, some perverted shitheel is going to organize pedophilia (and/or other sexual extremes) with other perverted shitheels. The entitlement tells them they should have whatever they want, then the money/power gets it for them and keeps it protected from external interference, and the train rolls on.

Epstein himself made a career of trading influence and favors on exactly that: occasionally he made the mistake of offering sexual access to minors to the wrong person and then he’d back off immediately, saying, “No, that’s not what I meant, bad joke, but wouldn’t you like [some other elite thing, like meeting a celeb] instead,” and no one would even bat an eye.

Israel is already credibly accused of raping everyone but children – men, women, prisoners, detainees, settlers – when it comes to Palestinians, activists, and others, so who legitimately thinks they’re not ALSO raping the kids?

Israelis applauded the two soldiers accused of raping a Palestinian man in detention, and of course the charges were dropped, so when that policy comes from the top down and many are even applauding the rapists, what possible restriction of sexual violence then applies to the children?

When you strip away insane amounts of money and power, and the perks and exclusivity and protection that money and power buy, you will always find that evil is indeed banal, and the vices that consume the poorest also consume the richest.

See the following articles for graphic descriptions of how Israel is using sexual violence as an act of war:
The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians - NYT
Israeli soldiers using sexual assault to force Palestinians out of West Bank, report says - The Guardian
“More than a human can bear”: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since October 2023 - UN Human Rights org (OHCHR)

And there are a lot more where that came from, unfortunately.

I don’t know about Cannon, she has enough wit to at least write coherent if corrupt decisions; but at best Alina Habba is a hack with mediocre legal skills who would get eaten for breakfast on the first day. Even the losers on this court are able attorneys, many (most?) with an encyclopedic knowledge of the law or close to it.

Cannon could easily become another Thomas, adequate, with just enough skill to sit there and hold a line for whoever pays him enough. So I’d say get Habba up there, just because I’d like to see her crash and burn, repeatedly shamed by peers with actual legal experience and skill. Trump judges legal acumen with his eyes, but SCOTUS isn’t going to give a shit what her legs look like when she can’t even turn in a coherent opinion, or worse. If she were to be allowed to throw out dogshit opinions, the court would lose its legitimacy in the eyes of many of the judges across the country who look to it for guidance and decisions. This may already be happening, but an appointment like Habba would speedrun the process.