America

[busker]

The challenge is capital
A small Gazan business won’t have the money to buy the steel for the Highrise, the Egyptian granite, the Carrara marble, or pay for the plumbing etc
If they scrape and manage they’ll get a third world hotel which won’t attract Liz and Tom who want to roam Gaza with very little on. They’ll get Rashid and Latif who want to pray at the site of the bombed out mosque and distribute Syed Qutb pamphlets.

[busker]

On tariffs, the orange man is threatening tariffs on Australia because we have a GST!!
The US has several state level retail taxes! Australia has none!
And the GST applies to domestic sales and imports equally.

Either the man is all hot air when it comes to tariffs, or the trade SURPLUS that the US enjoys with Australia will soon be history. We don’t need Californian grapes and orange juice THAT badly.
And all the really useful stuff is made by our neighbours in Asia anyway

[CRNDLSM]

U nfortunately money doesn't make everything happy, but it can put up a smoke screen, illusory or militantly.
The land has two different values, one as seen by wealthy leaders who want resources and the other by poor spiritual folks who don't want to be forced around.

Imminent domain can happen to anyone at anytime

---

Red white and blueland

[CRNDLSM]

Accidentally fired a bunch of nuclear safety employees, tried to rehire them, can't find them, and the whole world knows.

Adhd wellness camps, imagine a whole bunch of like-minded autists without meds living and working together

Oof, won't know about the listeria breakout in Lettuce recalls,

[Mark A Becker]

Some predictions:

It'll take at least a year before the (red) states, and their voters, who receive a lion's share of the federal funding/support, realize that they have been royally screwed.

Musk has his demolition crew working at blitzkrieg pace, and his ego and money make him believe he is some kind of savior. Once DOGE puts down the sledge hammer, and have sufficiently cleared the field for the Project 2025 game plan, they will be thrown under the bus with extreme prejudice, and solely blamed for the misery. MAGA world will then seek them out for revenge; armed revenge. Dear Leader will make sure his adherents know who DOGE are, and where to find them, because he is always for We the People, as long as his people understand that it is Me the Leader who alone can fix it.

Any rulings that are finally handed down by the US Supreme Court, as a check on executive power, will be mostly pointless, because the cases will have taken far too long to work their way through the judicial process. By that time there will be little further recourse.

The Republicans in Congress will remain in the background, while the Democrats continue to wet the bed. (Of course, the main job of any politician, of either party, is to keep their job/power, and to convince you, the voter, that they will fight for you. And most of that fighting will be on the never-ending campaign trail, full of snappy slogans, and righteous indignation.) Red state voters will eventually rise up, but will recalcitrant Republican representatives listen in time?

Probable armed confrontations between citizens will provide a literal smoke screen as the executive branch, under Dear Leader, consolidates power, while the wealthier citizens, of both parties, demand that order be restored.

Within two years, many of the goals of Project 2025 will be achieved. I heard a farmers' union big shot claim that he thoroughly read the agriculture piece of that tome, yet wishes he had read it closer, because he now realizes that his mainly (red voting) members are, and will continue to be, very adversely affected. Folks like him better watch their back, too.

By the time voters wake up, and the Bed-Wetter-Party wins another presidential election, the oligarchs will have already laughed their way to the bank, and many voters will just accept a 're-organized' America, finding themselves still okay financially.

In this good ole US of A, there two things that I know for certain:
- those with less money want more
- those with more money want yours, too.

[busker]

This is reality TV for idiots: https://www.youtube.com/live/qyC2YiGdnWc...5jASXk6zEG

---

And the funding cuts to research are bad enough to feature in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00608-z

Well,it’s time for Gottingen and Cambridge, for the Lomonosov institute and the Ecole Polytechnique, to be the leaders once again

[Mark A Becker]

Thanks for those links, busker.
I am reading more, and more, about the depth of depravity.

The recent Ukraine/US meeting in the WH further distances the US from decency- a shake down and sham. The WH knows that the entire world watched that reality TV bullshit, and who the WH sides with.

My sincere apologies to all of our (former) allies.

[dukealien]

What we're experiencing in the US now (and, consequently, the world to a degree) is disillusionment or, better, disenchantment.

Not, as some would have it, disillusionment of Trump fans with their hero.  His enemies would love that, but it's not happening.

No, what we have here is disenchantment - the sudden breaking of a spell that had endured for six or seven decades and has now dissipated like a bad smell, in weeks.

The enchantment could be called DEI or wokeness, but those are only its terminal and most extreme manifestations.  It started, as many moods and fashions do, with a worthy idea:  shame at America's treatment of its black people and desire to do right by them in compensation.  Then, about 1964, it all began to go wrong.

The thing about an enchantment is, it makes the world (seem) different from its reality - this is the illusion - and the enchanted behave in objectively foolish, self-destructive, or downright insane ways.  Toward the end of the now-ended enchantment, people commonly believed that transsexualism was something other than a derangement, that BLM was something other than a violent grift, Hamas brave, honorable, and not a murder-suicide cult.  Anti-racists not, objectively, racists in their performance and statements.  All these mad things were current shibboleths all were expected to say and at least pretend to believe.

And now, in a few weeks, the spell is broken, the enchantment gone.  No one believes in woke any more (though some retain the tropes of speech and alignment it once enforced, crying bitterly for their vanished, comforting self-harm).  It's a new world.  America is now acting upon its actual national interests, not emotional sentiments.  False friends have a choice to make:  be real friends in need, or get off the bus.  You can call this betrayal, but it's betrayal of betrayers at worst, clear-eyed realpolitik at best.

Welcome to the new world.  It's going to be a rough ride if you don't hang on like your life depended on it.  But that shining city on a hill is back, and we're headed for it again if you don't fall off.

[CRNDLSM]

Woke= whatever offends klansmen easily.

[CRNDLSM]

The only people who seem to use the term 'woke' are 'anti-woke' people, everyone else just calls them human rights, letting people exist, lifting up the marginalized and oppressed, but you know, you can't have invasions without borders, mexico and Canada should just take over new America, like Russia to Ukraine cause you know, dictators be dickin

[busker]

Trump supporters are dumb enough to be distracted by the bogey of culture wars, while the real damage is done elsewhere.
The problem is not in pandering to the prejudices of Lyle in Kentucky, but in upending the global world order overnight. I kid you not that the damage done is irreversible. The toadying of big tech to the orange man makes it worse.
What is happening is that countries and businesses around the world have realised that America is unreliable.
What the fuckers at Fox don’t tell you is that America’s ownership of a unipolar world was not a one way street - it bought America many advantages. The universality of American tech being one. The dollar being one. American payment systems being one.

Now all of these are unreliable. What is to stop Trump or someone like him, pandering to the lowest common denominator, threaten to suspend cloud services for corporations based in Canada as a bargaining chip in a trade war? The data centre may be in Canada but AWS may say “sorry, courtesy this backdoor you’re locked out till the boss man says otherwise”.

The US payments system has already been shown to be worthless in the Russia Ukraine war.

So that’s it. Be under no illusion that things will not be the same again. The good times for millions of Americans are over. Even if Trump chickens out and cans his tariffs like he’s did with Mexico and Canada, the horses have bolted.

All hail China, all hail Russia.

---

“Shining city on a hill” - tell ‘im ‘e’s dreaming

[CRNDLSM]

Oops just sent another 4 billion to Israel cause we gotta get gaza, can't stay out of every war sheesh

[Mark A Becker]

To paraphrase what I said before:

In this good ole US of A, there are two things that I know for certain:
- less money wants more
- more money wants yours

Doesn't matter your political leaning, or your cultural tilt- your method of payment is what really counts.

[Mark A Becker]

.. about 1964, it all began to go wrong.


Welcome to the new world. 

But that shining city on a hill is back, and we're headed for it again if you don't fall off.

Being alive in 1964, I thought mostly about baseball, and girls; didn't notice much going wrong then. Oh, you must mean the landmark Civil Rights Act which attempted to level the playing field.Or maybe the Vietnam war? Or the nasty spate of assassinations in the '60's? Or the mini-skirts, and long hair? Or all of the sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll? A whole lot could've gone wrong with what was going on. But America still stands. Imagine that.

What new world? Just different players, higher tech, and more noise.

And that RayGun 'shining city on a a hill' b.s. It actually meant 10+ % inflation, 15-20% interest on major purchases, along with that 'ketchup is a vegetable' nonsense. That 'hill' was way off in the distance for most of us.

My wife and I are better positioned now, but plenty of folks are probably gonna be charging up that hill with pitchforks. DC burned in the '60's, and the smell will probably be about the same should that happen again. This time it may well be Proud Boys with tiki torches lighting the flames

[busker]

Ok, we’re officially living in Idiocracy

The mofo in the Shite House has levied tariffs not reciprocally, but based on the trade deficit!!!
As a result, even Norfolk Island, a tiny island owned by Australia that probably transhipped a can of tuna or something at one point but doesn’t otherwise transact any trade with the US, is slapped with 29%, separately from Australia!!!

Heard and McDonald islands, an Antarctic station owned by Australia, is slapped with 10% tariffs. That’ll wreck the trade plans of the penguins to take over the world.

Who put this idiot, this absolute clown of a senile geriatric nitwit, in charge???

---

From the comments on Foxnews.com, many Americans still evidently think that Norfolk Island charges the US 29% tariffs. They don’t realise that the “reciprocal” tariffs are based on the formula X = trade deficit / total imports from country * 0.5 and are unrelated to how much American goods are charged in tariffs. What a country to have nukes. What a monumentally daft support base for this clown.

[brynmawr1]

Trump is single handedly redefining the Dunning Kruger curve.  I think he really believes that the exporting country pays the tariff.  Of course he surrounds himself with sycophants, combined with his own emotional failings, makes reversal of this situation unlikely in the near future.  It is also quite likely that one goal of this exercise is to get corporations around the globe to capitulate to his will in order to avoid the tariffs.  I bet a nice dip into his crypto would really smooth things over.  So much for meritocracy.

[busker]

Trump is single handedly redefining the Dunning Kruger curve.  I think he really believes that the exporting country pays the tariff.  Of course he surrounds himself with sycophants, combined with his own emotional failings, makes reversal of this situation unlikely in the near future.  It is also quite likely that one goal of this exercise is to get corporations around the globe to capitulate to his will in order to avoid the tariffs.  I bet a nice dip into his crypto would really smooth things over.  So much for meritocracy.

It's not so much the tariffs themselves, but the way of calculating them that shows the emperor as having no clothes.
The formula that's been used is Tariff = Trade Deficit / Imports into the US from said country X 0.5 *100 %
So if Bangladesh has a trade surplus with the US in exporting, say, stitched cricket balls or Thailand has a trade surplus from exporting mangoes, they are tariffed based on the trade deficit, not on the basis of the existing tariff on US made goods into that country (which is what 'reciprocal tariffs' was supposed to imply).

This is the sort of pricing formula that a kid taking his first Econ 101 class might come up with, to prove he's so clever, before being asked to sit down.

In other words, this policy is attempting to make everything in the US, including shirt buttons and plastic combs. Of course it'll make everything more costly in the US, since the tariffs will just be passed on to the consumer, but it'll also disrupt the stock markets, global trade, cause a recession globally, and NOBODY will invest in the US to avoid these tariffs, even for those goods where the economics makes sense, because Trump can change his mind tomorrow.

Millions of people in the US and around the world are at risk of losing their jobs, having their homes foreclosed, losing their businesses, going bankrupt....for no good reason if this goes ahead. I have never seen a country head as brain dead as this one. Idiocracy is alive and well.

To the point about sycophants - absolutely. Again, only need to watch Idiocracy.

[Mark A Becker]

Those born with a silver spoon in their mouths have absolutely no clue how most people live. And they don't care, either.

As Jefferson said so long ago, the government you elect is the goverment you deserve

My favorite: elect a clown, expect a circus

As an American, I apologize for what's been foisted upon the world.

[rowens]

The world is not America. America has the social-cultural power. They made so, They?, right turns.

The America has to take care of It's self. The Reality Framework that people subject of lee feel.


Being Australian and living in the circles you do, busker, you can say such things. Australia is so free and liberal in the hearts and minds of Americans.



Leadership in a culture of Egoism based on nonego is the propaganda of fascism.


My neighbors are objectively retarded. Their rebel flags. My rebel neighbor likes the idea that his leg will me severed.

That is God and Country.



Country and God is Good.



We need standards to operate at all.


Your Subjective complaints add to the Masterpiece of the Disaster.


YOU are not above it all. Your very existence is perpetuating the supposed fascism.


America uses Christian values and Economical Fascism to Function.


America is great. I am a Genius.


Are yoU?



America does not define me. America is not my enemy.
You are. And I Heart Huckabees

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When I said me severed, that was a typo; I meante m sever

---

To base reality on your conditioned values is fascist.

To ask for democracy and equality, and be a human with your contradictory nature, is demonic.

I'm more liberal than Nader.
I'd kill any rapist that I came in contact with, and I see rapists as animals with a particular symbol system in their body-mind that I have no authority over.


They are Innocent. They aren't victims of their own demons.
There is no Democracy.


There is no Absolute.
The idea of Absolute gives authority to fascism.
There is no fascism.  . . .    All these ideas are Abstractions that are used as Propaganda to Trigger the Retardation is eachofus.


No one is retarded. Madness is natural. Don't lash out. See reality for what it is: not real.

Live and let live. Donald Trump is an animal infested with the same contradictions as you. As was Hitler. As is the worst of you.
Don't get caught up in it. Enjoy living.

---

See reality as not real. Living as not a gift but a Gift.

You are the Arbitrary Absolute, and you don't have to exist, you do.


Donald Trump is a particular rhyme and reason of conditioning, vibrations that connect.

I don't connect. Fuck you. I love you. Nonsense. Sewer Talk.


But, why?

There is no Absolute. You are not meant to be happy and you are not meant to be treated right. What is what would be the meant?

You make all this stuff up, based on conditioning, and become a fascist of your experience.


. . .


If I were right and if people listened to me, society would break down. Marriage, Faith, all these things keep Reality Real. Society and humanity would not exist without these things.


I am against Marriage and Faith. I support Marriage and Faith so that there is a reality a humanity for me to oppose, so I can feel alive.






__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________













busker, see all you do for yourself and your family and your friends and your business, and then see how easily a news story affects you.
Affect is good. The body needs these things. Anger, Lust, all these things are needed.
But how do you utilize these things? Do you jack off or have sex with your wife or write a poem or joke or laugh irrationally;
or do you give your Pure Energy to the Propaganda Machine and add to the Fascist Strings?



This goes for everyone.
I get drunk and rage and rant and jerk off to your wife, and everything is peaceful with me. My Wrath is Pure and nonviolent. 

Race and Religion and Nation and all that are synonymous with Difference and therefore Conflict: For me, Conflict is Love. Difference isn't between things, Difference is the Whole.


I AM ad hoc ad libitum