Put yourself in their shoes

There may be little point to these comments, because the people who need to hear them most are incapable of empathy.

Our bombing of Iran was a surprise attack, and the initial missiles flung at them by Israel was done under cover of negotiations between US diplomats and Iran. It was about as underhanded as you can get. But Trump was oblivious to the dishonor when he posted a comment on Truth Social, that is parodied here.

@RealHirohito We have completed our very successful attack on Hawaii. All planes are now outside of America air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Pearl Harbor. All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great Japanese Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter

I deplore the Iranian theocracy, but you have to consider the people living under it.

I was born in an Iranian prison. My parents were held in their jails. My uncles lie in their mass graves.
Nothing you can tell me about the crimes of the Iranian regime that I haven’t lived in blood and bone.
That doesn’t mean I want my people bombed, maimed, killed, their homes in ruins.
If your vision of liberation comes only through the ‘l destruction of innocent Ylives, then it’s not freedom you’re after.]
Sahar Delijani,

Please, world, I would welcome the dissolution of the Trump/Republican regime that is wrecking our country, but don’t bomb me and claim you’re helping us.

America is a zombie nation infected with the rage virus

Two days ago, Donald Trump was whining that he wasn’t going to win a Nobel Peace Prize, despite the fact that he had been so great at negotiating peace in the world.

I am very happy to report that | have arranged, along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a wonderful Treaty between the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Republic of Rwanda, in their War, which was known for violent bloodshed and death, more so even than most other Wars, and has gone on for decades. Representatives from Rwanda and the Congo will be in Washington on Monday to sign Documents. This is a Great Day for Africa and, quite frankly, a Great Day for the World! | won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for this, | won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the War between India and Pakistan, | won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the War between Serbia and Kosovo, | won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for keeping Peace between Egypt and Ethiopia (A massive Ethiopian built dam, stupidly financed by the United States of America, substantially reduces the water flowing into The Nile River), and | won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for doing the Abraham Accords in the Middle East which, if all goes well, will be loaded to the brim with additional Countries signing on, and will unify the Middle East for the first time in “The Ages!” No, | won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what | do, including Russia/Ukraine, and Israel/lran, whatever those outcomes may be, but the people know, and that’s all that matters to me!

He really, really wants a Nobel prize to put on his mantel. Obama got one, you know.

So yesterday he went golfing, and made an unconstitutional attack, an act of war, on Iran, sending B2 bombers to drop bunker-busters on Iranian nuclear sites. Not that he cares about the Constitution — it’s not as if Congress will suddenly grow a spine — or that he cares about loss of life, or that he cares that he has now embroiled the country in another massive, futile war in the Middle East, he’s got to prop up his belief that he’s a strong man. This is just standard petty tyrant shit, lashing out with violence because he’s not good enough to use American strength to do something right. Blow something up, sure, yeah, that works in the movies, so it’s what he’s going to do.

Donald Trump: Remember what I previously said–Obama will someday attack Iran in order to show how tough he is.

Actually, Obama negotiated a nuclear non-proliferation treaty with Iran.

Hello, 2003. I never wanted to see your ugly face again, with your baseless accusations of Weapons of Mass Destruction to justify wrecking another nation, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, wasting thousands of American lives, spreading more chaos throughout a region on the other side of the world. All because Trump wants a “Mission Accomplished” banner of his very own, or, somehow, a Nobel Peace Prize. I expect he will at least get a bump in his favorability ratings, because this is a rogue nation in which many of the people will shout “YEE-HAAAW” and cheer as the bombs fall on some other country.

We’ve got the rage virus burning through the US. And you all know what you’ve got to do to stop a zombie.

When will we get a vaccine against Billionaire Brain Disease?

Would anyone be surprised by this observation? Wealth and privilege mess up your head.

In 2011, a Berkeley grad student named Paul Piff conducted an experiment that has since become famous in the world of social psychology. Over the course of several weekends, Piff and his research team crouched behind bushes at the intersection of Interstate 80 and Lincoln Highway in Berkeley, California. When a vehicle passed, they would catalog it — “five” for a brand-new BMW, for instance; “one” for a beat-up Honda. Then the researchers would observe the behavior of the car’s driver.

For centuries, humans have studied and tried to understand our own hierarchies — how and why we arrange ourselves into tribes and nations and by what means certain groups and individuals rise to the top. But Piff had realized that we had little data on how wealth — a prime marker of power in our current times — affects the psychology of those who hold it. “In the U.S., we spend a lot of time pathologizing poverty and valorizing aspects of the rich,” he tells me. “I was really interested in the flip side of poverty: If poverty has these effects, then wealth must also, and let’s start to try to uncover what those are. There must be some pathologies there too, right?”

What Piff and his team found at that intersection is profound — and profoundly satisfying — in that it offers hard data to back up what intuition and millennia of wisdom (from Aristotle to Edith Wharton) would have us believe: Wealth tends to make people act like assholes, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be.

At the intersection the researchers were monitoring, drivers of the most expensive cars were roughly four times more likely to cut others off and three times less likely to stop for pedestrians, even when controlling for factors like the driver’s perceived gender and amount of traffic at the time they were collecting data.

When someone from the research team posed as a pedestrian heading into the crosswalk, almost half of the grade-five cars failed to stop, as if they didn’t even see the person.

I’ve been doing a sloppy, half-assed version of this experiment for a while now — Morris only has two traffic lights on the main street, but all of the corners have crosswalks, and by law cars are expected to stop for pedestrians standing there. They don’t. I’ll step out into the street, not far enough that I’m in danger but far enough that drivers will have to notice my intent to cross, and then I count how many cars zip by before someone stops. Usually it’s not too many, but the ones who pretend I don’t exist are usually driving a monstrous huge shiny pickup truck, of the sort that MAGA like to buy to pretend they’re tough working class guys.

Even better is the corner with a traffic light, and a pedestrian signal to tell you when to cross. When I get the message to cross Atlantic avenue, the oncoming traffic gets a yellow light for a left turn. Many times I’ve started my legal crossing only to have someone in a big SUV decide to rush to make their left and turn right into me. A few times those drivers have been so annoyingly privileged that they honk at me to get out of their way.

You know this kind of behavior is going to have consequences…no, I take that back: it already has terrible consequences. Look at the people at the top of our government — all of them sociopaths. Not a single one I would object to seeing mowed down on main street by an oblivious Ford Super Duty F-450 driver.

…wealth-­related disengagement seems to not be so great for a species for which pro-social cooperation is programmed into our hunter-gatherer DNA. Clay Cockrell, a psychotherapist who caters to ultra-high-net-worth individuals, tells me he thinks of great wealth as subtractive: It doesn’t really add to one’s happiness, but it does take away struggles that can make someone unhappy. Yet it’s subtractive in a different sense, too — contributing to isolation, paranoia, grandiosity, and risk-taking behavior, as well as a pronounced lack of empathy. “As your wealth increases, your empathy decreases. Your ability to relate to other people who are not like you decreases.… It can be very toxic.”

Then in the middle of this article they bring up Darwin, only not Darwin, the bastardized version of evolution promoted by Herbert Spencer. Spencer is high on my long list of 19th century deplorables who invented various rationalizations for treating human beings horribly, justifying Gilded Age excesses and encouraging colonialism and various other kinds of exploitation.

Some of these men found such a justification in social Darwinism and the ideas of Herbert Spencer, a 19th-century psychologist and anthropologist who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” not to explain biological evolution but rather to legitimize social hierarchies: Rich and powerful people are rich and powerful because they have innate traits that make them superior. Never mind the effects of systemic oppression (Spencer was an unapologetic racist) or the fact that, in a functioning democracy, no billionaire is entirely “self-made” (where would Bezos be without taxpayers paving the roads his Amazon trucks clog?) — historians today see a direct line from the social Darwinism of the Gilded Age to DOGE. “[With] tech leadership nowadays, I think the arguments are a little different: They don’t make explicit appeals to survival of the fittest,” says Luke Winslow, author of Oligarchy in America. “But you get phrases like ‘make the world a better place’ and ‘move fast and break things.’ Well, that’s very Darwinian, because if you break things, if you have disruption, catastrophe, the hope is that the strong will survive. You don’t have this crutch of a government allowing the losers and the weaklings to survive; you’ll weed them out. And this idea is really big in Silicon Valley, this justification of the concentration of wealth and power based on this idea that they deserve it. How do you know they deserved it? Well, geez, look at how rich Elon Musk is.”

They aren’t worthy. They’re opportunistic parasites who have latched on to the capitalist system and are taking advantage of its weaknesses. They’re spoiled twits living in a fantasy land that panders to their delusion that they are the best, the smartest, the greatest people who deserve billions of dollars in their pockets, and that the little people are all there to serve them.

There is no clearer example of their stupid ideas than the tech broligarchy’s dream of colonizing Mars, which is not going to happen.

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

Then again, you don’t have to do a cursory examination of the facts of Mars if you believe tech is close to inventing a machine that can change the physical properties of the universe. In 2023, billionaire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman conceded that climate change was a huge problem, but brushed off its hugeness with the contention that super intelligent AI would soon be able to tell us how to make a lot of clean-energy facilities, how to amp up carbon capture, and how to do both of those things quickly and at scale. “What he said was, ‘A good way to solve global warming is to build a kind of machine without a clear definition that no one knows how to build, and then ask it for three wishes,’ ” Becker says with a sigh.

Sam Altman is notorious for his vapid echoing of the preconceptions of whoever he is talking to at the time. It would restore my faith in humanity a tiny bit if he were openly grifting, lying to get his next bolus of VC money, than that he actually believes in that nonsense about AI. I’m afraid I’m leaning more and more to the idea that these people are simply moronically stupid. And massively greedy and selfish.

The next edition of the DSM is going to have to include a long section on Billionaire Brain, the pathology of people given near unlimited access to everything they can dream of. It’s an ugly disease and it seems to be spreading to people who aren’t billionaires, but just dream of becoming billionaires.

Melinda Beck

The army is fast-tracking corruption right into the officer corps

I have a son who is a major in the army — he worked his way up in the ranks, and he’s hoping to earn a promotion to lieutenant colonel sometime before he retires, but it gets harder and harder the farther up the ladder you climb. Next time I talk to him, I’ll have to tell him he’s been doing it all wrong. He’s about to be outranked.

The U.S. military recently announced that four executives from some of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley have joined the Army Reserve as direct-commissioned officers. The move is part of a push to speed up the adoption of technology in the military, but as the news outlet Task & Purpose points out, it’s pretty unusual.
The Army said in a press release that the four executives are Shyam Sankar, CTO at Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, CTO at Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.

It’s not just that they’re being jumped up to high rank without earning it, but they also get a few special perks.

The four men are being commissioned at the high rank of lieutenant colonel as part of a program called Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps. As Task & Purpose notes, the men will get to skip the usual process of taking a Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, and they won’t need to complete the Army Fitness Test.

They’re also only going to have to work for about 3 weeks a year, and they’re probably going to be doing everything remotely, so no real soldiers will have to salute them.

The new reservists will serve for about 120 hours a year, according to the Wall Street Journal, and will have a lot of flexibility to work remotely. They’ll work on helping the Army acquire more commercial tech, though it’s not clear how conflict-of-interest issues will be enforced, given the fact that the people all work for companies that would conceivably be selling their wares to the military. In theory, they won’t be sharing information with their companies or “participating in projects that could provide them or their companies with financial gain,” according to the Journal.

If they’re really patriotic, I say send them to bases in Kuwait to prepare for the invasion of Iran. Tip of the spear, baby.

I can’t believe I’m suddenly pro-Iran

I don’t like theocracies, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re the Islamic Iranian kind or the Christian American kind, but Iran has a right to exist, and they are the victims of a surprise attack by Israel (aided by an American distraction). Unfortunately, America is led by an idiot who is demanding unconditional surrender and is itching to get involved on the wrong side — we might find ourselves involved in another pointless war for regime change in the Middle East.

I think we need a debate, and I found one: one side takes the position that “This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism,” while the other side says “No It Won’t.”

A little problem, though, is that it’s the Onion. No one takes them seriously.

Another small problem is that debate is from 2003, and they’re arguing about the Iraq War.

You’d think we’d have learned our lesson…but deja vu, man, deja vu.

Minnesota has lost a thriving business

Are you in the market for a pillow? You could go to MyPillow.com and order one, along with lots of cheap Chinese-made products.

Not for much longer, though. He has been tried for defamation for the last few weeks, because he made false claims against a person at Dominion Voting Systems. He was put on the stand to defend himself, and he used the time to repeat his false claims with more vehemence. His performance has had consequences.

Coomer said during the two-week Lindell trial that his career and life were destroyed by the statements. His lawyers said Lindell either knew the statements were lies, or conveyed them recklessly without knowing if they were true.

Lindell’s lawyers denied the claims and said Frankspeech was not liable for statements made by others. The jury found that eight other statements made by Lindell and others appearing on Frankspeech were not.

Lindell said he went to trial to draw attention to the need to get rid of electronic voting machines that have been targeted in a web of conspiracy theories. He said he used to be worth about $60 million before he started speaking out about the 2020 election and is now $10 million in debt.

He lost the trial and has been fined $2.3 million dollars, a drop in the bucket compared to the $80 million he has thrown away. This is a man who is digging a hole and doesn’t know when to stop.

You may want to avoid produce from Texas

I wonder what RFK Jr and the MAHA gang think of this:

This topic is all coming to a head right now because the great state of Texas has just passed legislation that allows recycled fracking wastewater to be used to irrigate crops in the Lone Star state. According to WFAA News in Texas, proponents argue the recycled water could supplement the state’s supply of fresh water and incentify the oil and gas industries to clean up their messes. Critics say it could contaminate the very land Texans depend on for food and survival.

Yum. Mystery chemicals, greasy surfactants, petrochemical contaminants, all the stuff we love to find in our salads. And that’s not all!

Farmers in Johnson County, Texas, are already fighting toxic sewage-based fertilizer biosolids. They are outraged by the new legislation that approves using wastewater from fracking to irrigate crops despite the fact that it contains many of the same carcinogenic chemicals found in those fertilizers,

“There was another bill that was put forth that would allow fracking water to be land applied. They’re going to… treat it and then it’s gonna be safe for land application,” Dana Ames, who lives in Johnson County, told WFAA News. “Contaminated with all kinds of chemicals from oil and gas fracking. We don’t even know all the chemicals because they’re proprietary.”

Mystery chemicals and sewage based fertilizer biosolids? Squeeee! Fortunately, they’re deporting all of their immigrant farm workers, so I think a lot of them will be rotting on the ground. Or not rotting, if this cocktail of toxic slime has miraculous preservative powers.

But don’t worry, the Texas Agriculture Commissioner is quick to reassure us that it’s been purified.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller believes the concept has potential if done right. “Well, we need water. We don’t really care what the source is as long as it’s good, clean water that we can grow crops with. Fracking water would be fine,” he said. He added that first all harmful substances like heavy metals would need to be removed. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality would be responsible for regulating the process. “As long as this water meets those strict guidelines, I don’t have a problem with it,” Miller added.

Miller said technological advancements are bringing the state closer to being able to fully clean and reuse produced water. “I don’t know that we’re all the way there yet, but with the technology and AI and everything that we’ve got available to us now, we’re in the technology age, so it’s certainly doable and it’s, you know, probably doable pretty quick, I would think.”

I note that he’s not saying that heavy metals are removed — they would need to be removed. And some other Texas commissioner, of environmental quality (I bet that commission is well funded and active!) would be responsible. But he doesn’t know that “we’re all the there yet,” but sure what with AI and all that, he thinks it is doable. He’s a moron.

You might be entertained by his campaign ad for Agriculture Commissioner, in which he brags about being a Christian, a cattleman (he runs a nursery business that grows decorative shrubs), and he supports the second amendment, all irrelevant to the job. At the end he mentions that Ted Nugent is his campaign treasurer. Yeah, that Ted Nugent. He’s also notorious for his embrace of every right-wing conspiracy theory (except those involving Big Oil) and corruption.

But he does own a big cowboy hat.

Texans will, apparently, elect anyone with a big enough hat, even if they’re planning to poison everyone.

Are you unmarried? Are you a Democrat?

You could be in trouble. Those rules that target trans people could be used against you.

VA officials cite the president’s 30 January executive order titled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. The primary purpose of the executive order was to strip most government protections from transgender people. The VA has since ceased providing most gender-affirming care and forbidden a long list of words, including “gender affirming” and “transgender”, from clinical settings.

Maybe you thought that executive order was a fine thing. It was hurting trans people, but you aren’t trans, so no worries!

Unfortunately, you didn’t realize that removing civil rights protections from one group opens the door to removing rights from other groups. If you didn’t complain when trans people were criminalized, you don’t get to complain when the fascists pound on your door.

Language requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated.

Doctors and other medical staff can also be barred from working at VA hospitals based on their marital status, political party affiliation or union activity, documents reviewed by the Guardian show. The changes also affect chiropractors, certified nurse practitioners, optometrists, podiatrists, licensed clinical social workers and speech therapists.

Are you single? Are you a Democrat? Have you joined a union? Have you been the vicim of a crime?

They “seem to open the door to discrimination on the basis of anything that is not legally protected”, said Dr Kenneth Kizer, the VA’s top healthcare official during the Clinton administration. He said the changes open up the possibility that doctors could refuse to treat veterans based on their “reason for seeking care – including allegations of rape and sexual assault – current or past political party affiliation or political activity, and personal behavior such as alcohol or marijuana use”./p>

Have you forgotten that civil rights are supposed to protect everyone?

So far, this is only a hypothetical danger. But talk to your gay and trans friends — they’ll tell you how rapidly a hypothetical risk can become an immediate threat to your health and well-being.

Creep

RJ May, a state representative in South Carolina, voted for anti-trans legislation, and then piously declared that

We as legislators have an obligation to insure that our children have no harm done to them.

He was declared Legislator of the Year in 2023 by Moms for Liberty, and was vice chair of the Freedom Caucus. He was a true conservative hero.

Unknown to everyone, though, he had set up an account on KiK, an instant messaging app popular because you don’t have to provide email addresses or phone numbers to sign up, which gives a nice illusion of anonymity. However, if someone uses the service for criminal activity, the police can get the IP addresses used by posters and trace them back to the person.

Guess who was swapping hundreds of images and videos of child pornography under the username joebidennnn69? You guessed it, I’m sure.

RJ May was arrested at his Lexington County home after a lengthy investigation and was ordered Thursday by a federal judge to remain jailed until his trial.

The three-term Republican is accused of using “joebidennnn69” to exchange 220 different files of toddlers and young children involved in sex acts on the Kik social media network for about five days in spring 2024, according to court documents that graphically detailed the videos.

Each charge carries a five-to-20 year prison sentence upon conviction and prosecutors suggested May could spend over a decade in prison if found guilty.

The files were uploaded and downloaded using May’s home Wi-Fi network and his cellphone, prosecutors said. Some were hidden by the use of a private network but others were directly linked to his internet addresses.

He is claiming that he didn’t do it, that someone stole his wifi password. Except…

Prosecutors said they also investigated whether May used a fake name to travel to Colombia three times after finding videos on his laptop of him allegedly having sex with three women. An agent from the Department of Homeland Security testified the women appeared to be underage and were paid. U.S. agents have not been able to locate the women.

Prosecutors said May created a Facebook account with his fake name and his internet history showed him switching between his real account and the fake one and even searching his primary opponent from the fake login.

He is currently being held without bail.

Prosecutors asked that May, 38, not be given bail because he lives at home with his wife and young children, and some of the files he is accused of sharing feature children of about the same age as his.

Every accusation is a confession.

They caught him!

The police caught Vance Boelter. Good. Now we can all forget him forever.

Except for the people whose lives he harmed. Two of them are dead, two were incredibly lucky.

On Sunday evening, US Senator Amy Klobuchar shared a statement from Yvette Hoffman expressing appreciation for the outpouring of public support.

“John is enduring many surgeries right now and is closer every hour to being out of the woods,” Yvette Hoffman said in a text that Klobuchar posted on social media. “He took 9 bullet hits. I took 8 and we are both incredibly lucky to be alive. We are gutted and devastated by the loss of Melissa and Mark.”