gAlienLifeform

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

traumatic brain injuries (eg, football).

This just made me think about a news story I saw a few years ago talking about how the Marines used to use a rocket launcher that gave the troops who fired it concussions and maybe/probably permanent TBIs, and I was just about to comment about how they used to use those…

2018 - “Marines Who Fired Rocket Launchers Now Worry About Their Brains”

2023 -“U.S. Troops Still Train on Weapons With Known Risk of Brain Injury”

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

If Americans were happy—about themselves, about their friends, about their country—then whining about parties of one would feel silly.

But for Americans in the 2020s, solitude, anxiety, and dissatisfaction seem to be rising in lockstep.

I wonder if cause and effect are backwards here. If you know there’s a good chance that going out and socializing is going to lead to you getting cornered by a loudmouth bigot maybe you stay home and shitpost instead.

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Hey, WSJ may put out unresearched bigoted op-ed pieces like this that made Dearborn pay for police overtime to handle all the death threats they were getting, but they also do serious reporting, like highlighting how a wealthy Jewish family has been lobbying the Biden administration for environment regulations, which was definitely 100% them being concerned about the influence of money in politics, and absolutely not them dog whistling antisemitic tropes at their readers, who are all definitely way too wealthy and sophisticated to be racists /s

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 months ago

When Trump learned that Cohn was dying of AIDS he cut his old friend off completely

The one and only thing I like about Trump is his ability to draw evil assholes into his orbit, somehow convince them that he would never betray them, and then betray them in a humiliating and painful way

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 months ago

Oh yeah, Giuliani is such a massive piece of shit he was leading fascist riots to overthrow democratically elected governments before he met Trump, every bad thing that happens to him is great news for the country

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 months ago

This one might actually hurt him because the core of it is about how he lied to banks.

Trump isn’t the problem … the American legal, political and wealthy corporate class that enable him are the problem.

I agree, Trump is just a symptom of a deeper rot, but this symptom could kill the patient before we can cure the disease

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 months ago

Article goes on to note about that study, “But critics say none of those studies mimicked the chaos and stress of being arrested or held in jail.”

It also points out “The Marshall Project and 10 Tampa Bay found at least five cases where coroners mentioned spit hoods as a possible cause or contributing factor in fatalities.”

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 months ago

Also, if something is technically possible but illegal for the CIA/FBI/etc to do, it just means they have to try to hide the fact they’re still doing it

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

I think knowing what he wants us to believe can be helpful, but that’s the beginning and end of the value of that asshole’s statements

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Seasonal declines and heightened enforcement by the U.S. and its allies led to the sharp decline, said Troy Miller, acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. U.S. authorities have repeatedly praised Mexico for a crackdown launched in late December.

“If we just push the human rights abuses a little further south, number go down!”

EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: Hey. Good morning, Leila.

FADEL: Good morning. So what have you been seeing and hearing as you make this journey?

PERALTA: Well, I heard a lot of hope, and then I heard a lot of that hope turn into agony. This big caravan left from Tapachula, which is a city near the Guatemalan border, on Christmas Eve. Some of the migrants had spent months in southern Mexico, hoping that authorities would give them permits to move through the country. They were frustrated, so a good 5,000 of them started walking north to pressure the government. And Tuesday it looked like the government had caved. The government started sending a bunch of buses over and told them, we’ll take you to a nearby town and process you, so get on the buses. But it wasn’t long before the migrants found out that immigration officials were lying about where they were sending them, and authorities also started separating families, so the migrants started trying to get off the buses, and it was chaos. Let’s listen to Gabriela Fernandez Rivero, who was separated from her boyfriend.

GABRIELA FERNANDEZ RIVERO: (Through interpreter) We have no idea where they’re taking us. We have no idea what they’re going to do. They don’t give us any answers.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking Spanish).

PERALTA: That man at the end is shouting, they’re separating kids. He was angry. He was calling immigration authorities killers.

FADEL: Do we know what ultimately happened to those people?

PERALTA: I mean, this caravan of migrants has been a headache for the president of Mexico. He said President Biden called him to tell him that he was worried about how many migrants were crossing the U.S. border. And Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he had taken care of it. And now what was a very visible migrant caravan is no more. That woman and a good 2 or 3,000 migrants were put on buses, and they ended up in a bunch of little towns across southern Mexico. We managed to track down a group that was left in a tiny town near Tuxtla, and I found Maria Isabel Tovar, who was desperately looking for her son. He had just turned 18, and she says the bus that they were on made a sudden stop, and authorities told her son to get off, and they told her to stay on. Let’s listen.

MARIA ISABEL TOVAR: (Speaking Spanish, crying).

PERALTA: And she’s been traveling for months from Venezuela. It’s been so hard, she says - traveled through so many countries, and just to lose my son this way. I don’t know, she keeps repeating. I don’t know.

FADEL: I mean, is this normal to move migrants, separate them this way?

PERALTA: It is. And it gives you a glimpse at Mexican immigration policy. What authorities are doing is trying to make it harder and harder for migrants to reach the border within the U.S. And migrants rights advocates here say that the U.S. has actually managed to build a wall on its southern border, and they say that that wall is Mexico.

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Instead, one of the three for profit businesses they’re giving away this $60 million to is literally Chevron

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Up until when these businesses don’t feel like sticking to their agreements and get their lawyers involved

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Stephen Jay Gould

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Soon

Gen Z is killing the food industry with a new fad they call 'dying of malnutrition ’

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Not really seeing why these bastard cops had to do SWAT style raids

The cruelty is the point

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

so the feds can literally just regulate whatever they want if it exists at all by extending this nonsense argument

Not to worry, the Supreme Court is on the case! They found that while the commerce clause does allow the feds to persecute homegrown medical marijuana users, they can’t give domestic abuse victims the ability to sue their abusers in federal court with it, because that would just be absurd government overreach.

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi Israeli informants, defectors politicians and exiles military leaders bent on ‘‘regime change’’ “exterminating Hamas” in Iraq Gaza, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks… Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq support Israel. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these… sources. So did many news organizations – in particular, this one.

The New York “we will credulously fall for the lies of government officials one million” Times

Also, this auto generated transcript is kinda garbage and you should just listen to the episode, but around the 6-8 minute range of Behind the Bastards’ Crack-toberfest Part 5 episode where they talk about Iran-Contra, they talk about a time when a few details of that conspiracy were just starting to come to light and the White House had to hold a press conference, and a reporter from a smaller paper was like, “Hey, we heard a rumor that the CIA is actually working with drug traffickers, is that true?” but before the guy running the presser could answer the NYT reporter attending blew up and started yelling at the first reporter about how his unserious questions were making them all look unprofessional, and the question never got answered (until like five years later when Gary Webb’s investigative reporting answered it for us).

They’re one of the best resourced news outfits in the world with a lot of dogged journalists who will do great work when they can, but the top levels of that paper make sure it’s always a mouthpiece for the powerful

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

So, does anybody really think the Wall Street Journal is genuinely concerned about wealthy individuals having too much influence on our politics? Or do you suppose they’re disingenuously dog whistling to their fascist friends about a wealthy Jewish family “conspiring to undermine America from within” (or whatever overheated racist tripe the John Birchers would use these days)?

Fucking “moderate” Republican scum

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Asshole judge trick number one: did someone you like (or don’t want to hold accountable for whatever reason) do something upsettingly bad? Just don’t talk about it! Flood the conversation with bullshit questions about hypothetical scenarios, and you’ll be off to give your paid speech to the Legion of Doom about how Americans need to have more respect for the law in no time!

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 months ago

I mean, I think that says everything that needs to be said

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 months ago

In addition to bitching on lemmy go register minorities and young people to vote.

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Can’t have shit in Decatur!

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

“There are a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying,” the president said in a session with reporters.

Gee, then maybe you shouldn’t have cut funding to the biggest single relief agency in the area just because Israel told you to (archive part 1, part 2), you fucking clod

e; Six pages of evidence (archive) about 12 people in an organization of 13000 that we probably didn’t even see (archive) and a bunch of disinformation from Israeli mouthpieces was all it took

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

demand better

“Sounds like someone wants a rubber bullet and tear gas sandwich with some trumped up terrorism charges for dessert!” - basically every police department

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Ah, good catch, thank you

Sheesh, they’re is no reason this language has to be so confusing

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Same as it ever was

And the wives hate their husbands, the husbands don’t care

Their children daub slogans to prove they lived there

A giant pipe organ up in the air

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 months ago

There’s not going to be a civil war

We keep saying this, but the fact of the matter is the federal government has lost control of part its territory to the state of Texas. I don’t think we’re there yet, but I also think it’s a really fuzzy line, and we’re definitely headed in the wrong direction towards it.

front lines.

I don’t think a 21st century civil War would have those, it would be a lot of guerilla warfare and nobody will definitively win or lose for a very long time, we’ll just keep seeing headlines about another attack another explosion etc etc

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 months ago

So tough they’re backing down and letting a state handle it?

There is so much about this that pisses me off, but yes, this right here is so insane I can’t stop fixating on it. The goddamned idiot political consultants running the White House are seeing all these polls come in where voters are worrying about border security and don’t trust the Democratic party to handle crime on the southern border, and their response is to let Greg Abbott openly commit crimes on the southern border and brag about it, because at the end of the day things like “toughness” and “border security” and “law and order” just mean doing whatever the loud angry white dipshits in charge want to do and fucking over brown people, even under a Democratic administration.

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 months ago

The fact that the White House actually believes in 4D chess strategies like this is a big part of why Biden’s approval rating has been so low imo

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 months ago

I fully expect that the rest of the US, assuming they still acted in concert, could occupy Texas indefinitely, but it would be like Iraq and would be a huge cost in all sorts of ways.

Exactly

many of the blue states frankly would be happy to see Texas go and stop screwing up so much stuff while costing federal dollars.

Perhaps, but they’d be really short sighted then, because Texas would just become the Afghanistan to our Pakistan, e.g. where terrorist assholes flee to after launching attacks in Pakistan

If we really get to this point, it’s going to be bad choices and worse choices and just a lot of needless suffering and death

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Dealing with Republicans is like talking to the dumb computer scientist in a Star Trek plot, “I know the last fifteen of these we tried betrayed us and killed millions, but we should totally give control of all our ships and weapons to my new AI program… Hm? Oh, yes, it is a new uniform, thank you for noticing. Yeah, my tailor said it matched the color of my blood.”

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Ha, this created an unexpected mixture of emotions for me. I never would have thought of this because a lot of my favorite characters are Vulcan crew members who tell non-Vulcans to stop being so emotional and trying to blast their way out of problems or whatever, but yeah, come to think of it pretty much all of those characters had to fight against Vulcan society a ton, so you’ve kinda got a point…

… Which is really annoying, because I’m in the middle of hate-watching Enterprise for the first time and I can’t stop seeing Archer as Rick Berman’s fantasy version of a George W Bush and the Vulcans as stand ins for Europeans and The Democratic party and anyone else who thought we couldn’t solve the problem of international terrorism by just " standing up to bad guys " (which back in our reality translated into conducting drone strikes on civilians and stuff)

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

It comes up a lot, off the top of my head I definitely remember episodes in lower decks and Discovery and the original series that dealt with this, but I honestly think I’m forgetting a few