And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he'll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he's almost certainly right.

Well... yeah. Brazil's the B in BRICS and Russia's the R, so Brazil is officially pro-Russia.

And by the bye - China's the C.

These groups understand the Republican voters, many of whom are not inclined to rank candidates. Ranked-choice voting favors the more malleable Democrat voters who will do so.

Or in other words, Democrats are more likely to actually think about their votes and find things to appreciate in multiple candidates, while Republicans are more likely to just slavishly vote for whoever has an [R] after their name and disregard everything and everyone else.

And arguably more to the point, Republican politicians count on that.

Take note that this is from the government that the MAGA Republicans support.

This, to them, is honor and strength - to invade a sovereign nation, then threaten to drop nuclear bombs on them for daring to fight back.

That's the world the MAGA Republicans want - one in which they and their allies are fully entitled to do whatever they want to whoever they want, and the only choices others are to be granted are to submit or die.

Yeah - I obviously don't know, and it is possible that he's just naturally and coincidentally so reminiscent of a tweaker, but still...

It just clicked when I thought of it. It's all there - the constant effortless and entirely self-serving dishonesty and avarice, the revolving door of obsessions, the paranoia and the specific focus on (perceived) loyalty vs. (perceived) betrayal...

I'm not sure that it would be relevant anyway - the issue is who and what he is rather than how he ended up that way. Still though...

Mmm... possibly. Though I did know one flabby tweaker, years ago. I have no idea how he managed it - maybe he was just flabby instead of obese?

But yeah... as a general rule...

And it is possible I guess that Trump naturally developed a personality that just coincidentally is a spot-on match for a tweaker.

It's just that thinking about Trump's behavior of late, and particularly this thing with Loomer, put me so in mind of paranoid Hitler withdrawing to the bunker with Eva, and then it all just clicked.

As I've said a number of times now, I'm convinced that Trump can't meaningfully recognize the difference between true and false and right and wrong. I think his mind has been so warped by his pathological and increasingly delusional narcissism that his standard for whether something is true or false or right or wrong is entirely subjective and entirely internalized - that, quite simply, if he believes it then it's true and if he doesn't believe it then it's false, and if he wants it then it's right and if he doesn't want it then it's wrong. That's it - trapped in his self-serving delusions, he has no other basis on which to judge.

So of course he's defending Loomer - she tells him things he wants to hear, so in his deranged view, she tells him the truth. And since he's visibly coming apart at the seams and on track to lose the election, she's likely one of the few who are telling him things he wants to hear, so one of the few he trusts to tell him the "truth."

And it just now struck me, mostly because that all made me think of Hitler in his final days, and I have no idea now why it took so long because it suddenly seems so terribly obvious - Trump's almost certainly a long time meth user, isn't he?

Yeah - that fits. That absolutely fits.

I think you have forums confused with microblogs.

I presume I'm supposed to care, but I dont, and I don't know why anyone would.

Yes - they will sacrifice public lands to the oil industry. And the mining industry And the lumber industry. And any other industry that pays them sufficient bribes.

And when the people can't take it anymore and finally try to stand against the wanton destruction, we're going to learn first-hand why all those Cop Cities are being built.

It still surprises me sometimes how stupid he is.

Once they're in it, I don't think there's a way to get them out, or at least not effectively and productively.

It's a fundamental psychological need. For whatever reason, they can't cope with an existence that isn't anchored in some kind of supposedly absolute truth, so even if one could successfully break through to them and get them to see that their absolute truth is certainly not absolute and likely not even truth, all one would be doing would be tearing the props out from under their lives and leaving them with nothing.

And it's far more likely that one would fail to get through to them, and just end up alienating them. And, ironically enough, potentially leading them to cling to their make-believe absolute truth just that much more determinedly.

I think it's just one of those things that's going to have to be left up to philosophical and sociological evolution. If humanity can survive long enough, I would expect it to become less of an issue over successive generations. And that's likely about the best we can hope for.

To some degree religion encourages that mindset, but it doesn't create it. In fact, to a notable degree, it's exactly the opposite - the desire to believe in some absolute truth is a lot of the reason that religion came to exist in the first place. It provides the absolute (nominal) truths that reality does not.

In a way, your friend is right - the lack of absolute truth is at the heart of a lot of the world's problems. But that's not it by itself - it's actually the lack of absolute truth in concert with the desperate need so many people have for it. There are a great many people for whom absolute truth is not necessary - who are perfectly content with the simple fact that reality is murky and complex and largely inexplicable and that our perceptions of it are necessarily subjective. They - we - don't feel the compelling need your friend obviously has for absolute truth - we get by fine without it.

But for the many who can't cope with that - who can't or won't accept nuance and complexity and inexplicability and subjectivity - yes, the lack of absolute truth is certainly a problem.

The thing is though that the universe isn't going to change. Absolute truth isn't going to suddenly make itself manifest because a bunch of conscious animals desperately yearn for it. The universe is going to keep on being unimaginably complex and largely inexplicable, so it's up to people to come to terms with that.

So as far as that goes, your friend is terribly, terribly wrong.

And in fact, I think that the way in which he's wrong is actually one of the biggest sources of misery in the world. It's not just the absence of absolute truth, but the fact that a great many people, in the face of the absence of absolute truth, just go ahead and pick something and pretend that it's absolute truth anyway, even though it's self-evidently not.

That does two things immediately - it distances people from sound reason, and it sets them against all of the people who doubt their make-believe absolute truth, and especially those who have chosen to believe some other make-believe absolute truth.

I would say that if one were to dissect virtually any overtly destructive belief system - the sorts of things over which people will and do kill each other - one would find that basic error lurking at its heart.

So yeah - in a way, the lack of absolute truth is a problem. But your friend's way of approaching that fact is entirely and completely wrong, and is the real problem.

The donor class doesn't really care about Trump's mental (and psychological) issues, and really don't even care much about Trump at all. They're not actually supporting him - they're supporting the handlers and advisers with which they intend to surround him, and the policies (and primarily Project 2025) that they intend to enact through him.

If anything, his incoherence is, to them, a benefit, since he's just that much easier to manipulate. Since he can't form a coherent thought on his own, he can be readily filled up with someone else's ideas, just so long as they're framed correctly.

He's like a wind-up toy - all they have to do is feed him carefully crafted stories and get him wound up and pointed in the right direction, then just let him go.

It's really very simple.

If Haley sucks up to Trump and he wins, she'll likely be appointed to a sinecure.

Harris isnt going to appoint her to anything, no matter how hard she sucks up.

And that's it right there. To Haley, that's the entire difference.

No - I mean Trump personally. Not the Trump campaign, which is a separate thing.

Yeah - the campaign, between the cultish rank and file and the cynically power-hungry donors and operatives - still has a lot of energy.

But Trump the person is visibly coming apart at the seams.

At this point, we're watching Trump disintegrate day by day and virtually minute by minute.

I'm not sure if he's even going to make it to the election. It's really starting to look like he's going to come apart at the seams before that.

Either this Georg Szalai has managed to make a 20-plus year career out of being a mediocre writer or he turned that one over to an AI...

Hexbear is sort of like a village of eldritch abomination worshippers in a Lovecraftian horror story - isolated, insular, entirely wrapped up in their own esoteric rituals and ideas and language, and immediately and collectively hostile to outsiders.

Yellowstone is an odd and awkward combination of things.

I grew up in that part of the world and, unlike the author of the linked article (and the people he writes about), I spent a lot of my time in the outdoors. In fact, in the summer, my family spent more time traveling and camping than they did at home. I don't even remember learning about the outdoors - it's as if I've just always known how to function in it.

And from that point of view, there are two distinctive facts about Yellowstone.

First, as noted and as is obvious, it's packed full of tourists, most of whom know nothing at all about the outdoors.

The other thing though - the odd and awkward thing - is that it's unusually dangerous - not just to ignorant tourists, but to anyone. As a matter of fact, between the geysers, the terrain and the wildlife, I'm hard-pressed to think of another place in the whole of the northwest that's more immediately and inherently dangerous than Yellowstone. I mean - there are certainly places you can get to that are more dangerous - high in the mountains or deep in the deserts - but those all require significant effort. To just get out of a car and walk 50 feet into danger - nowhere else is even close to Yellowstone.

So it's just sort of ironic that it's also the place stuffed to the brim with dumb tourists.