Yup. And the US post office does a ton of the work for Jeff. Something like 2/3 of our “welfare” dollars just go to corporate welfare. What confuses me is why republican voters support this. Because I know they aren’t all multi millionaires or billionaires.

Corporate training. Rehearsing a play. Lecture or panel with question and answer portion. Bingo.

We broke our economic system a while ago. Citizen United really help drive that home. The part I find so funny is the people I know complaining about taxes and never getting anything from the government.

Yet the very same individuals don’t make a peep about the ridiculous amounts of money our society funnels to the wealthiest. Some kid getting a school meal for free? No no we can’t have that. Billionaires able to buy social media companies and make them shittier? Why just go right ahead. Multiple private space companies? Perfectly fine. How about maybe some college for the people? No dice nerds that’d cost too much money!

Totally and it is working. But this makes sense when one of our two parties is drowning in propaganda. Why would the conservative leadership and elites have any interest in an independent news media?

What is so interesting to me is how quickly they shifted any discussion of free speech to be about what you can post on twitter, and not about the gov’t restricting speech. It was truly amazing how quickly it worked as the conservative supporters just ate it up.

Didn’t ABC just pay? It looks like this tactic is working.

By economy they just mean the price of things that they regularly buy or the cost of a meal at the Red Lobster. They don’t want their taxes to increase and by taxes they just mean income tax.

The best way I can put it is that these aren’t serious people. They have very little understanding of how the systems that keep them alive actually work. Look at taxes and the messaging from conservative’s “they are stealing your money.” That’s super easy for someone to understand. Much harder to understand that taxes pay for public services, roads, and clean water.

I’ve got in-laws that stuck their aging parents in public subsidized retirement housing. These guys also vote republican. Lucky for them they live in a blue state with decent retirement care otherwise there is no way they could afford that level of care. We are talking thousands a week for over a decade. Do they have any understanding of how that works? No, not at all they just want to complain about taxes being high.

Hidden Brain had a good episode “Why You Feel Empty” Aug. 6, 2024. “We all know what it feels like to be sad” … “We also know what it feels like to be joyful and happy” … “Sociologist Corey Keyes says lots of us live in an emotional netherworld that falls between these two poles, we are not depressed but still feel unfulfilled.” Anyway, I saved it cause it stuck with me because I’ve been languishing for a while as well. Give it a listen let me know what you think.

It is kinda sad watching us blunder through this nonsense again and again. Do these conservative voters think it was the capitalist and business owners that wanted kids out of their factories? Do they think the tycoons were the one that pushed for a 40 hour work week and it was the workers who went on strike to keep their longer hours?

What are you trying to understand about conservatives? Like they believe in a hierarchy and follow a type of virtue ethics. Conservative brains are more fearful and less open.

If you want to understand conservative’s then just look at things through their view of stuff. For example, take Jan. 6 and the different interpretations presented. Conservative news just censors any actual coverage and just makes stuff up to serve their goals. So we get stuff like people were invited in by the cops and the only person who died that day was the girl that got herself shot. While completely ignoring the obstruction the Trump admin engaged in to ensure there was a delayed response to the assault on the Capitol.

Or just look at the coverage to both 2016 candidates mishandling classified documents. I know conservatives that couldn’t vote for H dawg because she mishandled those documents. Then eight years later they have no issue voting for Trump who stored documents in public areas of his resort and worked to obstruct the investigation into said handling. Why the different responses? Because conservatives believe in a hierarchy and their leaders can do no wrong.

Sorry for the essay.

We just those useless folks Congress. But, seriously we can’t let a few lazies clogging up the works be the reason to allow Republicans to continue destroying our institutions.

Of course he’s going to go ham this season. Why wouldn’t he? He was never held to account for any of the corruption and crime during his first term. The new Trump admin won’t be like the last one where some people were able to obstruct the most ridiculous requests. I predict we will nuke at least one hurricane in the coming 4 years.

We didn’t get it that bad. We had the golden age of the internet and were the first with actual broadband. We have tons to look forward to like robot butlers and self driving cars. Also flexible screens that are hard to break.

More automation can be real good if we say use it to make a 4 hour work day while keeping the full time pay. Prices for weed are going down.

We may be going through a rising wave of right-wingism currently, but last time Trump and his goons were in charge they got replaced. A couple of ways to deal with this is to not be a minority or poor. If people can figure out those two things they can survive another four years of Trump’s America. The better way to deal with this is organize locally, because the Federal courts are fucked, the Senate is fucked, and the President is Trump so we aren’t gonna get much done nationally.

Dang I just bought some onions.

There’s a permanent record for everybody that went to school in America. I remember it was drilled into us at a young age, that this or that could end up on our permanent record.

And if there isn’t one for cops and other positions of authority there should be one. Make it a phone app.

Also this should go on their permanent record. So they are never allowed to be in any position of authority anywhere again.

I’ve been calling it the Roman numeral for ten site formerly known as twitter. Are people just abbreviating this to ‘X’ now?

The Dems put up a good fight. Biden needed to leave earlier. Harris could’ve had an actual answer to what she would’ve done differently. The reality is they were fighting a huge uphill battle. We’ve got an extremely ignorant and uninformed citizenry with little understanding of the functioning of government. I’m talking about Americans a proud and reactionary group of people. There was zero chance after picking Kamala that the Democratic party was going to pivot from their neo-liberal views and what movement they did was towards the center.

Now that they’ve lost so decisively maybe we’ll see a window to move the party in a progressive direction. Personally I think the Dems need to get back to supporting labor unions. If we are going to “reindustrialize” this country because we are doing war with China then we should want strong labor organization. Get some progressives to run on policies that put people first instead of property and capital.

That would probably require getting money out of politics. In the meantime focus on continuing to improve the quality of life in blue states and blue cities. As far as the voters they didn’t fail the party they failed the country. We are going to see a bunch of our fellow citizens lose more of their rights.

If it were me I’d barricade the office and declare myself a constitutional special counsel. But what do I know I just love my country.

The Majority Report with Sam Seder just had a guest on today for an interview about this very topic. The guy’s name was Daniel Hunter and I found it solid.

The gist of the interview was that you can block boats that are carrying arms shipments with smaller boats and that might work for a while but the coast guard will probably fuck with you. So your best course of action is to get the dockworkers on your side and get them to not load the weapons onto the boats. I don’t know how much shipping is done in Utah as I’ve only been once.

You are just describing the Federalist Society.