the guy who self immolated outside Trump's courtroom expressed a lot of normal conspiracy stuff: predictive programming, the secret masters of the world hide sinister plots in plain site using TV and music

he is also obsessed with scams, and not irrationally so he considers cryptocurrency as a global ponzi scheme by the elite to destroy civilization. my guess is he lost money in a big way. he is correct that a number of major industrial leaders- Musk and Thiel- are advocates of massive crypto cons, ponzi schemes

so here's what's happened: there's a bank in Silicon Valley that funds all the gambling tech weirdos did in the low interest rate years

that bank made some bad bets that the good times would continue

now about $160 billion in the richest people's deposits are unsecured

https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1634028534107602944

at the moment we are looking at a run on the chief bank for rich gamblers. but banks in the EU and other parts of the US are already down tens of billions in cumulative trades due to the panic

Depending on how it shakes out this could cause rather severe knock on effects

there really aren't many people with weirder life archs than Arnold. trying to explain his existence in like, 150 years is going to be almost impossible

https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1632856164827291648

"he was raised by former Nazis in the shadow of war and became a steroid addicted bodybuilder who once told a journalist lifting weights made him feel like cumming. then he tried to star in a movie without speaking the language and later became the biggest star on earth"

the start of the Tyre Nichols video shows a group of police, for no discernable reason, immediately escalating to violence, threatening and hitting a young man while shouting contradictory orders at him

they threaten to tase him if he does not lie down, while he is lying down he escapes. the police attempt to tase him. then they stand around panting and drinking water. they are all absolutely gassed from beating a skinny young man five to one.

this is the only show I've ever wanted to write for

https://twitter.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1603559780005683201

look, on the off chance someone involved with this show follows me, this is my audition:

Since September we have attacks on at least five power substations in Washington and Oregon. Multiple stations taken out in North Carolina. An attack on power workers in South Carolina. And now intrusions in at least four locations in Florida.

https://twitter.com/WFLA/status/1600864717182058498

Now part of the story here is that vandalism etc on power substations is more common than you'd guess. A number of these are likely business as usual. But in 2023 a group of Nazis in North Carolina was arrested for plotting to attack power infastructure in the PNW and NC.

to be serious for a moment: building and launching a smartphone that meaningfully takes market share from Apple & Google is harder than making rockets

Building rockets is all math and science and iteration. You test new rockets until they work the way you need them to work.

https://twitter.com/Liz_Wheeler/status/1596222793388945408

There are many more variables in cracking the smartphone market, and most of them are not technical. Anyone with money can have an OEM make them a phone. But the tech industry graveyard is littered with huge companies- RIM, Motorola, Nokia, etc- who failed to crack this market

i dunno what bootlicker shit happened to country these last years, but I remember being like 12 and listening to "the road goes on forever", a song about how drug smuggling is unproblematic and executing a cop in the street is romantic as hell btw that song still fucks

my student loans have been paid off for years. I worked very hard (sold and wrote a fucking book) to clear them.

I am glad people with loans got $10k taken off, and I would be happy if we spent government funds paying off everyone's in full.

It was a scam. i have been fortunate enough to avoid falling for any MLM scams or other kinds of pyramid scheme. The one exception is college student loans. The whole industry is a giant fucking con on the level of doTERRA or Cutco.

i don't want to dissuade anyone from going after Kiwifarms. But sites like this are extremely hard to kill. There's nearly always someone willing to host them and provide critical services.

Remember the fight to take 8chan offline. It was a partial victory at best.

https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1562214558009217026

I think some folks are equating the ease of getting outrage against this site trending with an ability to force them offline, and that wasn't possible to do with the website that racked up a body count of seventy plus people in a year.

this is actually a broader issue in consumer tech, smartphones experience the same problem now. These products have gotten functionally as good as they can get, keeping in mind limitations (like streaming resolution or network speed) which rely on more than the device itself

https://twitter.com/JohnDiesattheEn/status/1561717449329885186

when i moved into a larger place i bought an 80 inch TV that cost less than my 40 inch TV a decade ago. i cannot imagine an additional practical feature I'd want this TV to have. I plan to keep it until it dies, upgrading would be pointless

the FBI raid on Mar a'Lago definitely has the potential to spark reprisal attacks, both on federal law enforcement and anything deemed representative of "the left".

The former is simple enough, and I presume those facilities are hardened. What concerns me is the latter. Everything from school libraries to homeless encampments to drag queen events gets accused of being a sinister hotspot of left wing organizing. I am somewhat less concerned about a new McVeigh than the near certainty of disorganized reprisals.

i want a Predator film set in the winter camp of an early Imperial Roman legion somewhere in modern day England

https://twitter.com/carlinspace/status/1556025334247485441

i want to see a Predator who comes to earth during the final siege of Constantinople. Give us an Ottoman equivalent to Jesse's Ventura's character, firing a bronze bombard cannon from the hip

i've told this story a few times, but as a kid in Plano like half the dads in my Boy Scout troop were Raytheon employees (my dad wrote for Barney and Radio Disney). All of them did stuff they could broadly talk about but our scoutmaster. The other adults all jokes about the fact that, whatever he did, was fucking hush hush even to them. I've no idea what project(s) he worked on, but the way he dealt with it was to spend several weeks alone at the bottom of the Grand Canyon every year

thinking about how Hot Fuzz dealt with the "some people become cops for good reasons" by revealing that Nicholas's cop uncle turned out to be crooked, and that the entire London police force sent him off to certain death when he did their job competently low key one of the most based mainstream movies with people who are ostensibly cops as the main characters

when you carried a gun as a federal agent, federal agents killed 20 children at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco

https://twitter.com/RepSpanberger/status/1529585682729119751

hey remember that time a federal agent did a backflip at a bar then his gun fell out and shot a guy

nbcnews.com/news/us-news/d…

an important thing to understand is that most people who have murdered large numbers of human beings were not mentally ill in any way most people who have shot children to death were perfectly sane and did so for reasons that were perfectly rational

showing pictures of bodies in warzones has not stopped us from going to war

If you insist on showing the corpses of massacre victims on TV you'll be providing murder porn to Nazis on Telegram. nothing more.

https://twitter.com/heroinebook/status/1529230659893571585

There's this weird idea that somehow America's gun problem is rooted in ignorance of what firearms do. It isn't. There are tons of armed combat vets who have watched friends and children die.

Cops who have seen many crime scenes go out on weekends and practice with militias.

Americans did not decide to do nothing after Sandy Hook.

Republican and Democratic leaders chose to turn it into a wedge issue to fundraise and rile up the base over.

Actual progress on gun control during the Obama years was functionally zero. Same as with climate change. Same as with Roe V Wade for that matter. It might have something to do with the fact that one of the most effective things we could do to stop these would be functional 'red flag' type laws to stop people with histories of violence, violent threats, ipv, from buying guns.

police are close to useless at stopping mass shootings. no additional funding will change this.

we are on our own, and the only functional response to fascist violence is to train and organize to confront it

https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1525876831303368704

on a practical level what does training and organizing mean? Organize to provide stop the bleed training to whoever needs it.

Folks who can be armed should organize, train, and carry where that is allowed.

None of this magically ends the problem.

A manifesto has been published on /pol, credibly claiming to be written by the guy who carried out this attack.

It's a standard fascist "white genocide" rant, filled with 4channy in-jokes, ala the Christchurch shooter. Most obviously he gives Sam Hyde's picture as his own.

https://twitter.com/BNONews/status/1525560617263841281

The manifesto is easy enough to find if you want.

Big take aways are he claims he picked the target he did because the area had the highest black population in his state and had strict gun control. He stated he wanted to shoot up a place with strict gun control.