I've read this and the comments.

Despite saving the US space program and Twitter, I do not place my faith in Elon Musk.

Rather, I completely support Rand Paul, Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

For me, the biggest issue is Trump's abandonment of his promises. His victory included a lot of independents and liberals, who have now been abandoned in the pursuit of Zionism.

This is not about Trump, but the same Christian fascists who gave us the Tea Party. We subsequently mocked their authoritarian politics into irrelevancy.

This is not a war against Trump, but against insane and murderous Zionism. We've been here before and know what to do.

Don't let conventional wisdom defeat us, before we've even begun. Anybody who argues against this, regardless of the historical record, has to be ignored.

This is for all the marbles. For years, I've been fascinated by the socialists and communists. My exposure to economists Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson taught that Modern Monetary Theory is actually 4,000 years old, and annual Debt Jubilees allowed civilizations to thrive for centuries.

It was not until the Industrial Revolution that workers left the feudal lands for jobs in the city. Mao took another approach in China and began murdering landlords in 1949. This holocaust ended with 800M citizens being delivered from poverty.

We've forgotten too much, when history provides answers to our problems.

From David Price and Bob Etheridge at the Raleigh N&O:

'The 2024 presidential campaign coincided with the widespread and unprecedented devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina. Also unprecedented was the degree to which candidate Donald Trump politicized the disaster, falsely accusing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) of ignoring Republican areas and diverting funds to support undocumented immigrants. Ironically, however, now that he is in office, Trump and Elon Musk, his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chief, seem to be making every effort to make those earlier accusations of FEMA underperformance come true.

Helene’s winds and torrential rains struck on Sept. 26, 2024, claiming at least 250 lives across seven states, 107 in North Carolina alone, and causing $58 billion in damage, as calculated by the state’s budget office. The scale and location of the disaster were unexpected, but FEMA had 1,500 personnel in the state within a week. By mid-October it had distributed $124 million in housing assistance to some 87,600 households and had set up fourteen Disaster Recovery Centers across the western counties to assist individuals and businesses in obtaining aid.'

newsobserver.com/opinion/articl… 'Trump, however, found nothing to commend and loudly made baseless charges: “Kamala [Harris] spent all her FEMA money,” he said, “billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants.” Elon Musk chimed in: “FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country, instead of saving American lives. Treason.” Reports abounded of FEMA workers being turned away by suspicious residents in western North Carolina communities. Misinformation “is reducing the likelihood that survivors will come to FEMA in a trusting way to register for assistance,” one administrator reported. All of this prompted a local congressman, Chuck Edwards (R.-NC), to urge constituents to cooperate with FEMA, assuring them that the agency had “NOT diverted disaster response funding to the border or foreign aid.”'

From Elizabeth 'Lilly' Egan at the TBJ:

'While hopes of a grocery store coming to the corner of South Elm Street and Gate City Boulevard in downtown Greensboro will likely not come to fruition, developer Andy Zimmerman plans to officially submit a proposal for a mixed-use innovation campus on the site, which he said already has "strong support," from the city council.

Zimmerman's proposal centers around transforming the South End of downtown Greensboro into a "makers and innovation district," that would create a mixed-use development. The project would center on a new home for community maker space The Forge and include workforce housing and open space for farmers markets, maker spaces, makers fairs and craft fairs.'

bizjournals.com/triad/news/202… 'Zimmerman has broken his vision for the project into four phases of development:

Phase one, which would include site work and the construction of about 220 parking spaces, of which up to 150 will be covered.

Phase two would likely start about six months after the purchase of the property and would \ 66 "workforce development" apartment units.

Phase three would be for the new space of The Force, which would be a square two-floor building.

Phase four would add additional housing and parking to the project.

While there are still specifics to be ironed out for the workforce housing, including price points, Zimmerman said the units would likely target teachers, firefighters and police officers. He said he is looking into opportunities to make the apartments more affordable, such as receiving funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Zimmerman said the proposal's inclusion of parking spaces would also benefit Greensboro, since there is a lack of parking in the South End, which has no public parking lots. While the lots would likely be filled during the day, Zimmerman said they would likely be free for public parking at night and on the weekends.'

From the Greensboro N&R:

'The demolition of the Bellemeade Street parking deck in downtown Greensboro is scheduled to begin next Monday, prompting several road closures.

These closures include:

Both southbound lanes of N. Greene Street from Bellemeade Street to below Sternberger Place.

The eastbound lane of Bellemeade Street from N. Elm Street to N. Greene St.

The southbound lane of N. Elm Street between Bellemeade St. and the area just north of the crosswalk to Center City Park, which is located roughly midway between Bellemeade St. and Friendly Avenue'

greensboro.com/news/local/gov… 'The closure comes when other streets in downtown are closed or partially closed for road work, including other segments of Greene Street as well as stretches of Friendly Avenue and Davie Street.

The city first announced plans to demolish the deck in November after a review found structural problems with the 36-year-old deck.

With nearly 1,300 spaces, the Bellemeade deck was the city’s largest single parking structure and accounted for almost a quarter of off-street parking.'

From The Economist:

'Russophilia was once an affliction of the American left, of socialists who made excuses for Stalinism or Soviet totalitarianism. No longer. One month ago, Glenn Greenwald, a heterodox American journalist once lionised by the left and now admired by the conspiratorial right, dropped by Moscow to absorb the wisdom of Alexander Dugin, a prominent, anti-liberal Russian thinker sometimes likened to “Putin’s Rasputin”.

During his trip to Moscow a year ago to film a sympathetic interview with Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlson, an influential MAGA media personality, visited Mr Dugin, too, and found him irresistible. “We were having a conversation that we were not going to film…but what you said was so interesting that we got a couple of cameras and put this together,” he gushed at the start of their interview, and nodded enthusiastically as Mr Dugin lambasted the failures of liberalism and the excesses of wokeness. This is not just eccentric provocation by MAGA attention-seekers; it is a window into a serious, philosophical concordance that is emerging between parts of the American and Russian right.'

economist.com/united-states/… 'The most obvious alignment is over geopolitics, especially the position of Ukraine. The hardline MAGA right objected to Joe Biden’s military aid not just out of partisan instinct but also because they believe Ukraine ought to have been more accommodating of its regional superpower. Just as America gets to dictate terms within its sphere of influence, to Canada over trade or to Panama over its canal, Russia has rights over Ukraine, this thinking goes. Adherents of America First are realists, not idealists like their neoconservative predecessors. They see foreign interventionism as futile adventurism. Their view of the world is multipolar, as is Mr Dugin’s.'

I've seen different versions of a property tax repeal, such as for retirees.

Of course, large portions of our local government would evanesce.

It would be really hard on the free shit army.

https://twitter.com/RealPatrickWebb/status/1890577458929221664

Trump has floated the idea of getting rid of the federal income tax. MMT says we don't need it.

At some point, the reduction in federal overhead makes the unthinkable possible.

We're headed in the direction of a socialist economy.

From the News & Fishwrap:

'RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina House members advanced Wednesday a Republican package to boost state recovery funding after Hurricane Helene as committees fleshed out details on how best to spend another $500 million to address the historic flooding.

The House's budget-writing committee voted for the latest spending proposal, which would emphasize repairs for damaged homes, private bridges and roads, assistance to farmers who lost crops and rebuilding infrastructure adjacent used by small businesses.

GOP House leaders had unveiled a version last week, but several amendments adjusted the measure in a special Helene recovery committee on Tuesday. A House floor vote is expected next week, said Rep. John Bell, the House rules chairman and co-chairman of the recovery committee.'

greensboro.com/news/state/nor… 'The package remains less than half of the $1.07 billion that new Democratic Gov. Josh Stein sought in new recovery spending earlier this month from legislators.

Stein's package contains several initiatives the House plan currently lacks, including money to recompense local governments in the mountains for lost or spent revenues and for two business grant programs designed to help small businesses directly.

Senate GOP leaders will have their own competing spending ideas that will figure into negotiations with House counterparts. Both Stein and Republican lawmakers want to get more Helene spending out the door early this year to address immediate needs. Additional funds are expected in the two-year state budget that would take effect July 1.

The legislature already has appropriated close to $1 billion since last fall for Helene aid in the weeks after it made landfall in late September.'

I'm currently in Twitter jail for retweeting content about Helene in North Carolina. What if X is merely a limited hangout, and actually interested in limiting certain content?

I'm pro-Russian and anti-Zionist, so it comes with the territory.