Hold on to your butts, comrades. We're about to get a preview of 2050. I just checked the live data, and the area off the coast of South America that is the index water for ENSO is 9° F above average in places. This is going to be a wild year.

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I notice that he's specifying "economic aid," not the other kind.

From the NYT's "labor reporter."

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Dude was selling illegal COVID tests out of an illegal short-term rental filled with illegal guns. Charges dropped without prejudice.

I'm thinking about flashing my phone to GrapheneOS to get rid of all the Google shit. Anybody have experience with it? Do you like it? Is there a better privacy-focused solution for Android phones? I've got a Pixel, and the process looks pretty straightforward but I'm curious to hear if any comrades here have tried it.

Just aggressively learning nothing as hard as possible. is a death cult.

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Off-duty from TikTok and their Fox News guest-panelist gigs, the young conservatives did exhibit a certain level of willingness to really get into it in a mostly productive way, which, I’ll admit, is more than I can say about a lot of people back in Brooklyn. Still, it was disconcerting how often a normal conversation with one of these so-called normal people could cannonball from politics and policy into, at the very least, a not-so-PC joke and, at worst, something hateful.

When I first reached out to Wexler, for example, asking to talk about her weekend plans for the inauguration, she wrote back, “Let’s do it. Full transparency, I think ‘pronouns’ are ‘ret-----.’” She asked me to tell my readers that. “Tomorrow, we’re going to have images of them rounding up illegals and deporting them. That’s exciting,” she said another time, cackling. She also called me a “man in lipstick,” though I wasn’t wearing any. Later, when introducing me to Sinclair, she said, “He’s a queer. But a friendly one.” I laughed.

“The hold the left has is coming to an end because you guys were making bad decisions,” a droll, self-confident IDF soldier tells me at Butterworth’s. “When you go too far, you isolate people, you polarize people. The pendulum effect is real.” Here, she says, “is where you can say whatever you want!”

I think one big takeaway from this (aside from how fucking insufferable these people are, of course) is that this coalition is extraordinarily fragile. A lot of people in this article are expressing support for extremely "thin" reasons--wanting to be on the winning side, wanting to be able to say slurs, aesthetics, and so on. There are former Biden and Bernie voters who are "on the Trump train" because it's the path of least resistance, and because the casual cruelty is both trendy and easier than giving a shit. It's really important to remember that a lot of these people are opportunists and/or grifters: the true believers of fascism are actually relatively rare. They had their opportunity for cultural ascendency here, and immediately squandered it by allowing those true believers to do whatever the fuck they want, which the vast majority of people find disgusting. I strongly suspect a lot of the people interviewed here will just sit out the next election. This isn't supposed to absolve them--they have blood on their hands as much as Stephen Miller does--but I think it's important to remember that this "cultural ascendency" is really a mirage. These people are fucking losers.

We love our misogynistic oligarchs don't we folks?

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The French offices of Elon Musk's X have been raided by the Paris prosecutor's cyber-crime unit, as part of an investigation into suspected offences including unlawful data extraction and complicity in the possession of child pornography.

Why We March

Vilifying billionaires is popular. Losing them is expensive. Most made their fortunes building companies that employ thousands and solve real problems. Their wealth is largely stock in those companies, not vaults of cash.

California benefits enormously when entrepreneurs choose to build here. We're currently watching them leave.

The Billionaire Tax Act has already pushed the founders of Google to leave the state, taking their economic contributions with them. By taxing unrealized gains and voting shares, the act would make it difficult for founders to retain control of their startups.