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.

this was a CIA Mossad operation that got out of hand stupid and sloppy

Pretty much the history of intelligence services in a nutshell.

the rich pedophiles really REALLY started liking the setup

I do kinda wonder what the final shoe to drop was. But my money is more on Epstein extorting more money/freedom than his handlers believed he was entitled to.

The fact that Trump took over in 2017 and Epstein was arrested/murdered a few years later suggests - to me, at least - that he maybe called up his old friend and started making a few too many insistent demands. And it occurred to Trump (or someone in his immediate vicinity) that it would be easier to just arrest this guy and wack him than keep paying him off forever.

assigns them a score if a citizen walks on the sidewalk correctly

Funny story about Jaywalking

The automobile lobby in the US took up the cause of labeling and scorning jaywalkers in the 1910s and early 1920s. In 1912, for instance, Popular Mechanics magazine reported that the term was current in Kansas City: “The city pedestrian who cares not for traffic regulations at street corners, but strays all over the street, crossing in the middle of the block, or attempting to save time by choosing a diagonal route across a street intersection instead of adhering to the regular crossing, is designated as a ‘jay walker,’ in Kansas City.”

In 1915, when New York City’s police commissioner Arthur Woods sought to apply the word “jaywalker” to anyone who crossed the street at mid-block, the New York Times protested, calling it “highly opprobrious” and “a truly shocking name.”

Originally in the US, the legal rule was that “all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way”. In time, however, streets became the province of vehicular traffic, both practically and legally.

Anyway, enjoy your hyper-criminalized car culture hellscape while making spooky fingers about Evil Foreign Country.

I mean, I wish that were actually true.

One of the bleakest turns of the post-war Eastern Bloc was the speed at which they re-incorporated ex-Nazi officers into the Stasi. I’d have to dig it up, but there’s a whole line about a German describing his career as roughly “First I worked for the monarchy to suppress fascism, then I worked for the fascists to suppress communism, then I worked for the communists to suppress capitalism, and now that the communists lost I’m old enough to retire.”

You’re going to trigger so many libs with this link.

My motto: Rhetorically cocks gun

ICE Officer: Actually cocks gun

:-/

So many keyboard commandos. Vanishingly few actual leftist militants.

Reminds me of the old (apocryphal) story of Stalin, FDR, and Churchill debating what to do with the Nazi officers’ corps after their defeat.

"The German General Staff, [Stalin] said, must be liquidated. The whole force of Hitler’s mighty armies depended upon about 50,000 officers and technicians. If these were rounded up and shot at the end of the war, German military strength would be extirpated.” When Churchill angrily declared he would be no party to such mass retribution, the President quipped that he would act as mediator, and suggested the compromise of shooting only 49,000. In heat, Churchill left the room. Stalin himself fetched him back, assuring him it was all a jest.

The tendency to treat enemy soldiers as honorable adversaries while foreign civilians are resources to be exploited or speed bumps to be flattened is extremely fascist.

What separates Hitler and Hegseth isn’t their army’s treatment of survivors of a military operation, but their view of their targets as military or civilian. Hegseth knows he’s targeting civilians and treats them just like a German military commander would treat other civilians.

2001

I believe we didn’t invade Iraq until 2003.

Although, curiously enough, Iran helped us do it.

Doubly ironic, given that Bush Sr was so instrumental in beefing up the Iraqi military ten years before the '91 invasion… for the purpose of invading its neighbors. (https://archive.is/HwX3A)

What is it about hardline reactionary Islamic governments getting baited by American neoconservatives to spin around, show us their backs, and point to the spot a knife would sink in most deeply?

Turns out the plan was to kill a bunch of people you hate.

Putting on my D.A.R.E. T-shirt and clutching my state issued copy of the Ten Commandments and snapping an Amazon Ring Camera on my front door, so I help the state identify any of those nasty, America hating Antifa I’ve been hearing so much about.

I’m helping!

“People should be in the streets to stop the war”

“Will a protest march stop the war?”

“No! But… it’s tradition, you know?”

our work

Posting

Do you think Harris would have kept us out of Iran?

She’s not Trump. That’s all that matters.

If she hadn’t bombed Iran, it would be because she was kinder and wiser and more serious. If she had bombed Iran, it would have been for better reasons and with more international support.

But the important thing is that she wouldn’t be Trump.

Many of us are fighting against this regime

There are more employees of ICE than activist opponents of the American regime

No no no. Trump is worse.

This isn’t a single continuous policy escalated intermittently across both regimes.

I’m sure we’ll hear about the Hamas tunnels any day now, assuming the media bothers to report on it at all

At the moment, it just sounds like “America is finally winning again” on all channels and frequencies

we haven’t followed the constitution in a very long time

But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.

~ Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority

Genocide does be like that.

Next they’ll start targeting all the bakeries.

I’m a Virgo

It’s a superhero TV show from the perspective of a kid growing up in the hood who is just a really big guy.

Me and my Dimetrodon saw you from across the club, and we liked your vibe.