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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. Who could have seen that libertarians would end up being the biggest cringe bootlickers of all?
  2. Hannity is going to get a “joint” interview with Musk and Trump from the White House. Has a sitting POTUS EVER done a “joint” interview with another American? I am struggling with my historical analogy. Am I watching Diocletian create the tetrarchy? Am I a Russian titular councillor trying to understand why Rasputin is speaking for the Tsar? Regardless, I think any historian will have to write that in 2025 the U.S. experimented with a dual executive system. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5146248-trump-elon-musk-hannity-fox-news-doge/amp/
  3. The lawyers are the first to show the most courage. Thank you SDNY Assistant Attorney General.
  4. There is not one. That’s really true, it doesn’t exist beyond what the Oval burps up from day to day.
  5. Russia won, yall. Not the it’s war on Ukraine. Russia captured a U.S. political party and its supporters and won. It’s over except for the formalities. Good work all around everyone.
  6. The Yasen M is a problem for our (and Allies) surface fleet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not popping off like Hesgeth. It’s not existential. But it’s a problem. https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-defence-systems/yasen-m-and-future-russian-submarine-forces
  7. The Yasen-M class is a very capable boat and the Improved Kilo II is as well. The latter is a diesel-electric but it is astoundingly quiet and well-armed. The Russian military has pockets of competence and investment and the submarine service is one of them. The Chinese would very much like to have boats as capable as the Russians.
  8. Russia has some submarines that are a serious fucking problem for us.
  9. On the other hand, there is this.
  10. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/top-federal-prosecutor-ny-resigns-told-drop-adams-charges-rcna192030 In a stunning rebuke, all the officials with a sense of ethics and morals have left the justice department while the ones who do crimes are staying and facing no consequences. It’s unclear how Trump will weather this storm.
  11. Mitch McConnell is now living out his twilight years in a hell completely of his own making.
  12. lol. “You can’t quit, I’m firing you.”
  13. Look, healthy multiparty proportional representation is my goal but if I can’t have that then I’ll just have to support the next best thing— the authoritarian party that is destroying constitutional checks and balances and handing state capacity to tech oligarchs. Stop debating the cowards and enemies.
  14. Look, I’m ready to accept getting doped up and having orgy-porgy at the feelies every Friday. Sign me up and I’ll quit the resistance.
  15. These are all going to be ambassadorial representational vehicles that are not used for anything more than driving between the official residence and the embassy and then receptions. They will maintain a fleet of up-armored SUVs and older sedans for long-haul trips and each mission will have an ICE backup or two. It’s absolutely waste in that putting these things in places with no charging infrastructure other than the residence and embassy means that you can’t use them for emergency evacuations and longer trips. What this is really about is Tesla getting to have its cars festooned with flags and in motorcades.
  16. Honestly they should give every Trump political ambo a Cybertruck and make him use it.
  17. Didn’t see it, mea culpa. LOL, enjoy everyone. The VIP car with flags flying and the police escort in every country is gonna be a fucking Tesla. The new “standard of the world.”
  18. They sent this out on a big blast and so it also went to plenty of non employees who had .gov email addresses. Contractors, uniformed service on detail, others. It’s all so dumb.
  19. This is just the procurement forecast and so other cost centers won’t be here. INL aviation isn’t a procurement. That many armored Teslas, I have to think the plan is to make Tesla the new default Ambo car instead of the existing Caddys.
  20. We are priming the fucking pump. Appointing presidents to cultural boards? Renaming centuries old geographic features. Military parades are coming. And there’s another place where the discourse should be freaking people out. Our military’s job is now to “secure the homeland.” Generations of Americans have understood that the homeland is most secure and that America’s military strength is best used far, far away. Fucking Lincoln explained that a foreign army could not lay a track on the Blue Ridge even if it were funded by the combined might of the Old World. That is a goddam luxury. Dipshits like Anastasis will celebrate this reorientation but a thoughtful American will ask why the fuck, all of a sudden, an exquisite and terrifying fighting force now needs to focus on America instead of the world abroad.
  21. I am going to (against my better judgment) make a high-effort post. All of us now live under an authoritarian government. Not an authoritarian state (yet) but the authoritarian government is here, and that has implications for how you should comport yourself and arrange your own private life. There is still time to turn off the authoritarian path, but that time is growing short and the way back rather harder than it was. Donald Trump fired the board of the Kennedy Center and replaced it with a new one who then elected Donald Trump chair of the Center. This is pretty stupid, and clearly the act of a petty and vain narcissist and most people will never go to the Kennedy Center. However, it’s clearly important to the Trump regime that Trump be seen as a leading, shaping figure in American cultural life in a way no president has ever been. Stalin created a union of writers in the Soviet Union despite a clear lack of interest in fiction. It was important to him. A smart citizen should ask why— why does the President also need to be a cultural luminary? The AP was ejected from the White House press pool for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico by its new, Trump assigned name. Google and Apple, notably, have updated their maps. This is a stupid and small thing, clearly a fit of idiocy by Trump that has no real impact on your life. But it was important to the White House that the AP use the White House’s words. In 2017, neither Google or Apple would have changed their maps, in 2025 they will. An observant citizen will ask: if Google will not defy the White House in a trifling manner, what will they for a serious matter? Trump’s firings of independent boards, IGs, commissioners, and others is patently illegal. That needs no comment. No other president tried to do it or needed to. The White House claims that no president has faced the opposition Trump faces. An observant citizen will note: the White House wants you to know Trump is special and different. Trump has a nebulous, undefined, set of people he works for (with Musk): “the people” and he exercise “their will.” “The will of the people” is a phrase very much en vogue. But the enemies are very defined and specific: federal employees, immigrants, transgender people, NGOs, disfavored politicians. They all deserve what is coming to them; they fleece, rob, humiliate, and get fat off of “the American people.” The citizen should ask: once defeated, what specific enemy will be found next? We are picking fights with all our friends, making enemies of Allies, and rapidly turning an American passport into a liability. At the same time we are dismantling the structures we used to make America attractive and exchanging soft power for a better uppercut. We will be very successful at using our latent power to get cringing acceptance and concessions. The Chinese do, too. The Chinese are also welcome nowhere on earth, their expat communities are universally loathed. One should ask— where would I go if America was no longer a safe home? Who might want me and who might want to help my country? My prediction is fairly boring. The end state here is somewhere between today’s Hungary and China as experienced by Han Chinese. No massive internment camps, no executions. America is very rich, very powerful, and can coast for a very long time by consuming itself and returning rewards to select beneficiaries. The Great Terror is not coming; there will be no Full Self Drive Black Marias. But some people you don’t know will go to jail for nothing. Some inconvenient people will go into exile. And, if we don’t take the hard road, we will find that we will go through the forms of democracy to no end, that our world will be grayer, our dreams dimmer, our choices constrained, our voices subdued. So what to do? First, realize that all who are not openly against this are for it. Do not trust them. You may not need to cut them out, you may not be advised to confront them. But, realize that you need to be as cagey as a Soviet. They may be invited to your home, but never to your kitchen table. Remember, they want to destroy your home. Read. Read Bulgakov, and Havel, and Orwell, and Huxley and Akhmatova and do not take them as warnings. Read them to understand where you live now. Cowardice is the gravest of vices. Put cowards and collaborators on ignore, here and in your life.
  22. EL OH FUCKING EL. The State Department released its procurement forecast and the single largest line item is armored Teslas. No one is even hiding this anymore. https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/FY25-Procurement-Forecast.xlsx
  23. https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
  24. A private citizen who came here from South Africa, wearing a gimme cap and a duster, his stupidly sci-fi named offspring rollicking at his feet. Countries get the dictators they deserve. We don’t even get the dignity of some semblance of style, zealotry, or even menace. Just sheer, exhausting tackiness to close out the American republic.
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