A lot of it comes from conservative AstroTurf.

And, unfortunately, a lot of it comes from farmers and other people living in rural areas, who see fields of crops being turned into solar farms and think “these panels are ugly, these panels are industrial, these panels are taking up fertile farmland” and see it as just one more way the government is exploiting rural areas for the benefit of the cities.

They’re wrong, of course, but rural America has been abandoned and neglected and made the dumping ground for all sorts of polluting industries for so long I can’t blame them for thinking that way.

I think if we’re talking about “real dystopian collapse”, as in a major population reduction, there are going to be more leftover bullets than you could shoot in a dozen lifetimes. If you’re thinking about hunting small game, get something that shoots .22 LR, take it to the range every weekend, and don’t waste your time with slings and arrows.

And with that being said, trapping small game is more efficient than hunting with any kind of weapon, so if you wanted to learn bushcraft for hunting for food after the end, that’s where I’d start.

social connections would likely serve you better than wasting all your time and energy working a yard garden that produces a measly haul

Join a community garden. You get both social connections and the yard garden experience - and as a bonus, your social connections are with people who know how to grow food and can give you advice 😆

That being said, don’t be too dismissive of “supplementing” your diet. If you know what you’re doing you can grow all the fresh veggies a person needs on a few hundred square feet per person. Fresh veggies are the kind of food most vulnerable to supply chain disruptions - like if, “hypothetically”, some toddler dictator decided to throw a tantrum for no apparent reason and start a war right on top of the shipping lane that the majority of the world’s fertilizer passes through - and they’re also the most beneficial kind of food to grow yourself, because you can grow varieties optimized for taste and nutrition instead of varieties optimized for shipping and appearance on grocery store shelves.

(Book recommendation: Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World. Read the chapter on how fresh Florida tomatoes are grown and you’ll never buy anything but canned tomatoes again 😆 )

Yeah, it takes knowledge and experience. Which is why you should start gardening now, so that you’ll have those skills when they become necessary.

Shocking that these fascist clowns aren’t good at governing even for their own ill ends.

You’re missing the point of the exercise. They didn’t want to govern - they wanted to break shit.

Musk went in with the attitude “we will cut everything we have an excuse to cut, and then if one of our political allies objects to a cut, we’ll put it back”.

And DOGE implemented that plan perfectly.

They cut a bunch of grants that had nothing to do with “wokeness” because their goal was to cut as many grants as possible, no matter what they were for. The LLM was there as a propaganda tool - it let them falsely claim they were only cutting “woke” grants. It was there to give DOGE an excuse. The fact that it was wildly inaccurate was the reason they used it.

people losing income

More than a million of the poorest people in the world have died - so far - of starvation, exposure, and preventable disease, because of DOGE’s illegal cuts to federal programs like USAID.

Sure, we can call that “people losing income”. It’s technically true.

But Jesus, if I did something illegal and a million people died because of it, I’d spend the rest of my life in prison.

I’m sorry, what presidential candidate in the last five generations wasn’t part of the Epstein class?

Even Bill Clinton, a poor boy from rural Arkansas, got to be an honorary member of the Epstein class. And my God did he enjoy the privileges of that class.

look, hate harris all you want, but iran? venezuela? cuba? migrants in cages?

Remember Afghanistan? Iraq? Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine? And also Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and a dozen others? And all the proxy wars and “interventions” I’m forgetting about or that never made the news?

Pre-Trump America was less blatant in its warmongering. It made the effort to build “international consensus” before bombing the fuck out of poor brown people. And it preferred to made economic warfare, through sanctions, which don’t make headlines when they kill poor brown people.

Harris would have killed Iranians with sanctions rather than bombs. And perhaps you think that makes a difference. But whether a little girl dies of starvation from American sanctions, or is blown up by American bombs, she’s still fucking dead.

Fuck, Trump’s “random bombing go” strategy let Iran close the Strait and made America take the blame for it - and if that lets Iran negotiate with the world and end Western sanctions using the Strait as leverage, Trump’s war might end up saving more lives than it kills.

As for migrants in cages: Trump made no new laws. Trump made no new policies, even. Trump enforced existing laws more harshly and blatantly and publicly than America previously had. And Harris promised to do the same fucking thing in her campaign.

What’s happening to migrants today is what the American people wanted. The killings, the beatings, the disappearances, the private prisons and forced labor and inhumane conditions, all of it.

Only we saw it happen openly, on the streets in Minneapolis, in front of a million cell phones and cameras, instead of out in the Texas desert where the only cameras belong to the Border Patrol. And seeing the Border Patrol treat middle class white protesters like immigrants was too much for some people.

Putting migrants in cages is what America wants. America just doesn’t want to see the cages. It hurts their feelings.

I don’t vote.

Good people don’t vote.

I may not be a good person but I try my best.

And at least I can claim the dignity of refusing to participate in the Epstein class’s quadrennial popularity contest.

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The Democrats are a right-wing party.

They are the secularist wing of the American Capitalist Party, and the Republicans are the theocratic wing.

They aren’t the fucking opposition, and they’re certainly not the fucking left.

That’s why it’s called planned opposition. If you’re afraid of losing control to a genuine opposition movement, you set up a fake opposition movement that dramatically opposes you on a few big ticket items and generally agrees with you on the rest - or that dramatically opposes you on everything, but has no intention of keeping its promises.

Look, I’d like to be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But I expect Magyar is going to make some dramatic economic moves that don’t actually change the economy, run some corruption show trials, crack down on political participation outside the two major parties, back down on his pro-EU stances, and quietly take his orders from Orban and Putin behind the scenes.

Private prisons in the US charge the government a fee per prisoner per day. The government pays it with tax money.

The US Constitution allows slavery as a punishment for crime. Private prisons can force prisoners to work in prison shops, or rent them out to businesses, and punish them if they refuse to work. The prisons pay the prisoners less than a dollar an hour and make enormous profits off their cheap labor.

Let me emphasize: this is slavery. This is actual literal slavery. The US government, and the private prisons it contracts with, collectively own almost two million imprisoned slaves, the majority of whom are Black. Slaves who refuse to work are punished with solitary confinement or loss of “privileges” like food, hygiene products, or communication with friends and family outside the prison. United States law and the United States Constitution allow it. And slavery is extraordinarily profitable for the slave owners.

Finally, private prisons are allowed to charge prisoners more or less whatever they want for things like phone calls and purchases from the prison commissaries. A prison can charge $5 for a 15 minute phone call or $10 for a bottle of shampoo. Since prisoners, again, earn less than $1 an hour, these ludicrous fees are generally extorted from the friends and family of prisoners, providing another revenue stream for the prison.

All this is so profitable that private prisons’ contracts with the US have minimum occupancy guarantees. The US government guarantees it will supply a certain number of prisoners to each private prison to guarantee its income. Somehow, despite crime rates falling consistently for decades, the US government never fails to make quota.

FYI, the private prison industry was one of Trump’s biggest donors, and their investment paid off massively - the industry is making billions from imprisoning and enslaving immigrants thanks to Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Oh fucking please. Fidesz got hammered by corruption scandals in 2024, Magyar dramatically breaks from the party over corruption, and somehow builds a massive nationwide coalition in a matter of months? The Hungarian opposition somehow abandons all its beliefs and rallies around a politician who holds all Orban’s political views?

The term for this is “planned opposition”.

Magyar isn’t Orban’s rival. He’s Orban’s chosen successor.

It’s easy to win an election if you own all the candidates.

And y’all fell for it.

I had a theory about multiple accounts being connected to the same person and how they’d use that to hide their insider trading, but I did some digging, and in this case the trader is a single anonymous account which has a pattern of making winning bets - 16 of them - based on things Trump does:

https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/309527584561937

https://x.com/Mrminick_/status/2041170962368844105

So, yeah, you could make money by following this account and doing what it does, presuming you knew it had insider information, and presuming it doesn’t shut down now that people know it has insider information. After all, you want people to bet against you, and nobody wants to bet against the person with insider info, right?

Also, here’s an article with examples of apparent insider trading on oil futures, and explaining some of the ways multiple accounts can be connected to the same (anonymous) people:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/insider-trading-claims-after-stock-and-oil-futures-surged-minutes-before-trump-s-iran-post

For one, some people don’t know it’s rigged, while others think they can guess how it’s rigged and profit off it. I saw it a lot when I followed cryptocurrency scams - thousands of people bought into obvious pump and dump schemes because they thought they could time the dump and cash out before it hit. And even during the old analog days, tens of thousands of people bought into obvious pyramid schemes because they thought they were early enough to make a profit before the scheme collapsed.

The old saying “you can’t cheat an honest man” has a lot of truth to it, and degenerate gamblers are gonna gamble degenerately.

And for the prediction markets and the insider trading, it’s because people can’t. The online stuff uses anonymous throwaway accounts, and the more traditional insider stock trading only gets noticed when (if) the insider publicly reports their stock trades months or years later.

If there’s one benefit to the rise of AI slop, it’ll be pushing people away from mass social media and back to IRL meetups where you can mostly guarantee you’re talking to a real person.

My bad, I misremembered the connections between the Trump crime family and the prediction markets.

https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/us-iran-war-prediction-markets-benefit-who-owns-donald-trump-jr-leading-prediction-firms-polymarket-kalshi-nyt-report-11772336769064.html

I’ll change my title 😆

I agree. I think Miller and his dweeb crew have “flooded the zone” - done so much outrageous and horrible shit as quickly as possible - so effectively that protesting over specific issues just doesn’t work right now. It’s not that little Donnie has done one or more specific bad things that we want him to change policies on. Little Donnie is going out of his way to do as many bad things as possible, and by the time we organize a protest about bad thing number 67, he’s already moved on to bad things number 69, 88, and 108. “Go back to Epstein Island and put the adults back in charge” is the only rational message for a mass protest right now.

Strangely, I think this article gives Musk too much credit for good intentions. It assumes he honestly wanted to make government more efficient and fucked it up.

I think he wanted to, one, eliminate the dozens of DOJ investigations into his companies and delete the evidence they’d collected; two, sabotage every government agency that might possibly interfere with his companies in future, doing so much damage that it would be decades before they could return to even their pathetic Biden-era level of effectiveness; and three, collect all the US government’s information about us in one place so he could steal it for his surveillance machines.

Musk accomplished all of that brilliantly, and then fucked off to enjoy his trillion-dollar victory lap.