Politics is Stupid

As an individual, but we were as opposed to Russian expansion as a nation (Trump is the only American President to have ordered combat with Russian troops, even if they were “mercenaries”). If we had continued our energy production as before Russia would still be a mess.

I have said many times, as much as I didn’t like Trump as a person and the things he did personally, his administration got a lot right, especially as far as projecting American influence without sending American troops.

I don’t generally think that anyone in power in the US is actually working for Russia, but I do believe that there are people who have individual interests in this. There is so much money to be made out there that it’s becoming obvious that it’s just a question of how many hands are in the cookie jar, not if there are any in there at all. It’s almost like the old Cyberpunk stories about multinational companies running everything came true, but it’s all hidden under a veneer of respectability.

The fact that so much is known about so many people that should cause some sort of reaction and most people just shrug seems to mean this is just how it is now.

I gotta hand it to Mike Lindell. What is being called “his most bonkers claim yet” is actually really very brilliant. He has accidentally solved the problem of unemployment in the U.S. and dramatically reduces our dependence on foreign oil for the next 150 years or even longer.

Of course, there won’t be a country after about five or ten years due to the complete socio-economic collapse that would result from his claim being carried out, and the country would be weakened so much that it would be ripe for invasion, and we’ll have to do away with pesky things like child labor laws, child protection laws, unions, etc. But hey, at least he will have saved it from the rampant voter fraud that so obviously happened.

What is his bonkers but brilliant accidental solution to unemployment and importing oil? From his interview on Tuesday on the Real America’s Voice news channel:

“It’s so amazing, all the things that we have. We have all the pieces of the puzzle. You talk about evidence. We have enough evidence to put everyone in prison for life, 300 and some million people, we have that back all the way to November and December.”

That’s right. He’s got concrete evidence of criminal activity for the last two months (or 14 months if he means Nov/Dec 2020) that is going to put about 91% of the U.S. population in jail. Based on the 2020 census, if we go with an even 300 million, that leaves 31,449,281 people to guard the criminals. A one-to-ten ratio of guards to prisoners should be good. They can handle that.

But before we can guard them, we have to build a boatload more prisons. We can get a head start by converting all hotels and motels because no one will be staying in them any more. Remember, they’re going to be in prison for life and everyone else will be too busy guarding them.

The one down the street has 146 rooms. Other hotels should have about the same number. For the rest of what’s needed, I’m sure these despicable people that committed voter fraud won’t mind being conscripted so they can build the prisons they’ll be staying in.

Oh, wait a second. If we’re using a 1:10 ratio of guards to prisoners, that uses up all 31.5 million available people that aren’t in jail. Who’s going to grow the food to feed the guards and the prisoners?

Um, okay. Cut the number of guards by half. 1:20 ratio. 15.8 million should be enough to grow food for the entire country. Since the only people driving will be the guards as they go to and from work, that wipes out a lot of the oil we’ll need from other countries, so maybe what we produce locally will be enough for our gasoline and diesel needs.

Dang it! I forgot about oil refineries. How many people do we need to allocate to keeping those running? Ah, nuts. Power plants. And tool manufacturing. And electronics manufacturing. Sheesh. What else am I forgetting? IT staff for internet, LANs and WANs. Uniforms and other clothing for guards and prisoners. Gah!

Okay, new plan. A 1:50 ratio. 6 million for guards, 25.5 million for everything else. Better make sure we shut down all entertainment industries so we’re not short-changing any areas that we actually need. Somebody tell Regal, AMC, Disney, Universal Studios, Knott’s Berry Farm, etc., and all sports teams to shut down their businesses and venues. The whole kit and kaboodle. Go dark, now.

We better shut down lotteries and casinos, too. Can’t have people winning enough money so they can quit their job. We need all hands on deck.

Are we good? Good. Right.

Just exactly who will be going to jail once we get everything ready? Obviously, all people who voted for Joe Biden. They’re a part of the massive voter fraud. That’s a given. That’s 81.3 million, leaving 218.7 million criminals to be rounded up.

There were 168.3 million registered voters in 2020, but only 155.5 million voted. The 12.8 million that didn’t vote have to go to jail because they had the chance and couldn’t be arsed. That leaves 205.9 million criminals unaccounted for.

We can’t send people who voted for Donald Trump to jail. They did the right thing. They didn’t commit voter fraud. Now we’re down to 131.7 million. But we just ran out of voters. How’d that happen?

Hmm. Mike Lindell says that at least 300 million people are going to jail because of voter fraud. So I guess we have to start throwing ineligible voters in jail, which includes children, to reach that total? Am I getting this right? Neither group was eligible to vote but 300 million are going to jail. Looks like it. The math checks out. Okie dokie. Get on the bus, kids. You’re going on an extended field trip to see what life in prison looks like.

That’s a whole lotta people that are not going to be working any more and not having an income any more. Everybody better start tightening their belts because with that steep a reduction in taxes being collected, state and local governments and the federal government will have to cut services to the core.

I suppose we can shut down most of the family birth centers and save money that way. If we have separate prisons for men and women, then most of the pregnancies in the nation will just be among the guards and those not working in prisons, plus the occasional in-prison pregnancies that are bound to happen due to fraternization and abuse of power.

Anyone know how many decades it will take to rebuild the population of the US? The ones that are in jail are going to be there for the rest of their life, so somewhere around the year 2121, all or most of the prisoners will have died. We can just write off those 300 million now.

No, we can’t shut down the birthing centers. We’re depending on the 31.4 million people not in jail to get the population back to 331.4 million.

Boy, how do we do that? Use Dr. Strangelove’s suggestion of a 10:1 female-to-male ratio for selecting who doesn’t go to prison in the initial jailing? Put The Handmaid’s Tale into practice?

Whoof. Man, sometimes the cure for a problem that doesn’t exist really is worse than what it is supposedly trying to fix.

I don’t know how much of Partygate is making the news outside the UK but it seems that every single day more evidence arrives to show that the Prime Minister, his Cabinet, and a majority of his Government repeatedly broke the law and had multiple parties at a time when it was illegal in the UK for more than six people to be in any building at once.

Our “official “opposition”” party has also been found guilty of breaking the law in the same way.

So far as we can tell, the only reason why they have not been arrested and fined £10,000 per person per infraction is because… oh yes, the Police were also having illegal parties while arresting people for simply going next door to see their neighbours at a time of heightened national panic.

The really funny thing is that when Sir Keith (that is, Keir Starmer, Knight of the Realm, leader of the “working-class” “left-wing” Labour party) was confronted about his own party, his excuse was literally “oh no, it wasn’t a party, I was at a constituency office—” (not his own, of course) “—and we had been working, and stopped for some food and drinks, so you cannot compare that to the actions of the Prime Minister”.

He said that with a straight face to the BBC reporter while a video played behind his head showing him drinking beer and dancing with a colleague. Did I mention that at the time, dancing was also illegal (for whatever stupid reason)? So he’s there all spluttering and flustered and looking like a giant leg of ham on television while his story is unwritten behind him live on air as the reporter laughs at him. Absolutely delicious.


(The reason “opposition”, “working-class” and “left-wing” were all put in quotes is because Sir Keith (which we all call him after he said on television he hates people getting his name wrong) has been the least oppositional opposition leader in British history, supporting the government more than 97% of the time — his predecessor did the same 5% of the time — and he’s about as working-class left-wing as you can imagine considering he is a millionaire Knight of the fucking Realm. That said, there is no real difference between our political parties right now; the Tories are fabian socialists with a blue flag and Labour are fabian socialists with a red flag. The communist influence is repugnantly strong here)

… oh yeah and did I mention the Government were trying to hide the fact they had Chinese spies infiltrating them so hard that MI5 decided to tell the bloody public because the Government were in denial so hard that they literally were not doing a damn thing about it and even gave one of the spies two promotions even after they knew she was a spy.

The US is filled with Chinese agents at Universities and honeypots in politics. What’s funny, mostly sad, is the FBI arresting a Chinese American professor for spying using falsified evidence while at the same time Chinese funded organizations spend millions on Chinese centers at universities and sponsor classes, news stories, and professors all over the country. Some of whom “forget” to disclose their funding sources.

Also, dozens of stories of rules for thee but not for me. Several have been spotted vacationing maskless after accusing the Governor of Florida of murdering granny by not requiring masks. Closed restaurants hosting private parties, haircuts arranged under the table, breaking quarantine, whatever.

Mugabe enacted such a law, but it did not deter the people. They just did it in other ways.

Totalitarianism is not a good thing to have, much less if His (or Her) Worshipness have an army and police at his/her beck and call.

I want to get off this planet. It is no longer fun or safe.

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Hah, MSNBC had Al Sharpton on to discuss violence at a synagogue unironically.

What’s next, have him interview someone imprisoned falsely for raping someone?

Sounds like someone needs a Softplay Day… fun, and safe (so long as you don’t eat the foam stuffing…)

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Senator Rand Paul
@RandPaul

How to steal an election: “Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results.”

Um… what?
If I’m reading that correctly, this idiot thinks that getting more people to vote for you is stealing an election?
Surely nobody could be that moronic?

I think he means specifically seeding only already blue areas but not purple or red areas. They do that here too, pick areas with a lot of retirement homes (Tories) or student accommodation (Labour) or make-believe animal petting zoos (Liberals) and make sure each and every one of them gets postal ballots.

But surely that’s just active politics, not stealing an election?

It’s seen as awfully déclassé here; you’re not supposed to target specific people like that you’re supposed to climb on the back of your Volvo with a megaphone and dispense hollow election phrases, or take out full page adverts in newspapers etc saying about how unlike your opponent, you actually care about $issues.

It caused a lot of drama with our last snap election in 2019, it was the middle of an extra cold spell and suddenly every single pensioner was sent a letter by the Conservative party that was on the surface a political leaflet, but it also had a section showing them how to apply for postal ballot. Since Labour, the Liberals, and the Greens did not do such a thing, they all suffered the expected drop in turnout due to the cold weather (I think my former constituency had a turnout of close to 37%).

This is what caused the “massive”¹ “conservative”² landslide at the last election that caused so much of a ruckus amongst the left here. It was very disproportionately decided by the older generations, who themselves had been disproportionately targeted by a party promising things that pensioners typically like (more pension less tax, ironic considering what’s happened since) who also provided instructions for how to vote without going outside into -10° screaming windstorms.


¹ Actually just the largest proportion of one of the lowest turnouts ever.
² The current Tory party are just as “Conservative” as the Dems are “Democratic”, they’ve tripled a deficit they promised to lower, cut the state pension, increased taxes, and right now they’re growling on about war with Russia because hey suddenly it’s bloody 1972 again not 2022…

This isn’t really a new concept though. Back in the '70s and '80s when my parents used to work on political campaigns for some of the federal candidates here, it was offering people rides to the polls. Cavassers used to go door to door and, at least for the candidates Mom and Dad volunteered for, there were huge maps of the ward and who was a confirmed party voter. And one of the things in all the leaflets and that they would tell people - especially older ones - was that if you needed a ride to get to the polling station to call the constituency office.

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Andre Carson’s grandmother was locally famous for using church busses to pick up people and drop them off after the polls closed at a bar who knew the score. She would also have them pick up the homeless and have them vote, prior campaigns having registered them at a shelter or church as their address.

Perfectly legal except the free beer. But the woman literally owned multiple crack houses as a tax write off. Andre is cut from the same cloth.

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I’m leaving the rest of it alone because I don’t feel like arguing but this part is very much not true. Unless maybe you focus solely on Eastern Europe.

10 Countries in Europe have no minimum wage. Eastern European hellholes like Finland, Switzerland, and Italy. 9 countries have rates over the US. 24 have minimum wages under under the US.

The highest rates are around $13 in Luxembourg and Ireland. Assuming you can even find a job since Europe spends a lot of time in the high so goes and low double digits for unemployment.

In most of Europe there is a three day waiting period, you can’t abort after 12 weeks and you must be 16 without parental consent for an abortion.

So how am I saying g something very much not true?

Based on 2020 filings, Forbes estimates that Trump has $93 million in the bank. Not $930 million. Not $9.3 billion. Less than $100 million.

No wonder he keeps dropping hints and implying he’ll run for president. By billionaire standards, which he’s been very proud to proclaim he is, he’s broke. As long as he keeps implying and hinting, people will keep sending him money because they assume he’ll follow through with his (non-)promise of making America great again again.

The latest hints came when he played golf last week and the person recording it did the obligatory “state Trump’s importance” bit of saying the 45th president was teeing up. Trump replies “45th and 47th”. On Saturday, he says at a rally, “If I run and I win”, followed opening the possibility of pardons for the people being “unfairly treated” for breaking into the U.S. Capitol a year ago, and looking into criminal activity of those investigating him. (Translation: getting revenge against them.)

Trump does have some money coming in from other sources. He’s selling one of his prized properties for over $300M and one of the conditions is the name “Trump” will be removed from the building. He’s also looking at creating a new development in Florida, also notably without his name on it. And he’s got Trump Social Media 2.0 almost ready to go, which I’ll cover later because how it came about is really shady and what it will offer belied its mission statement even before it got started.

But not everything’s going his way. There’s still those loans coming due really quick that he’s personally guaranteed, to the tune of around $400M. Though his supporters will have missed it or will deliberately ignore it, by Trump saying “If I run and I win”, he’s also hinting that he might not run for president and that he could lose.

His son’s rant about Biden not being able to stand against China has people asking if Don Jr. was drunk or on drugs when he posted it. I watched it and wondered, “Is this what it looks like when you realize your family empire is about to collapse and there’s nothing you can do about it because your dad’s in charge? Or worse, that he’ll abandon you because he already said he’d rather see you go to prison instead of your sister?”

I look at The Donald’s actions over the past few years and I’ve come to the conclusion that if he had never gone into politics and had just remained a businessman, he would have been fine. He would have been able to skate from one bad business deal to the next, continuing to get banks to erase his debts because he’s Donald Trump. He would have made it to the end of his life and avoided the consequences of his actions.

But because he’s the man who always wanted more, craves the spotlight, wants everyone talking about him, wants everyone paying attention him, wants everyone saying his name, he’s getting exactly that because of what he did before and after the 2020 election.

People are paying attention to the fact that he said his apartment which is under 11,000 square feet was 30,000 square feet and got a bigger loan based on that. People are investigating to see if this is an established pattern where he inflates the value to get a better loan, then deflates the value to pay less taxes. People are paying attention to how much money his businesses have lost over the years even while he claimed they made tons of money.

People are paying attention to the fact there was a coordinated effort by Trump’s team, lead by Rudy Giuliani, to assign different people in seven states to cast votes for Trump instead of Biden in the electoral college.

People are saying his name by pointing out his name is being removed from his properties.

People are paying attention to the fact that a lot of his business documents had sticky notes on them so the original document would show one thing, but the current status was on an easily-removed piece of paper.

People paid attention to what he said. More of it was recorded for the public record because he was a public official. It continues to be available and becomes relevant again, like how he has encouraged those who worked with him to not cooperate with the 1/6 Committee and several of them have taken the Fifth to avoid incriminating themselves. “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment? The mob takes the Fifth.” —Candidate Donald Trump in 2016.

A lot of The Donald’s business career can be summed up as selling illusion. The illusion that he’s successful and wealthy. The illusion that he never fails because when he does fail, it’s always someone else’s fault or the economic conditions weren’t right or whatever it is that makes him not look like a loser. The illusion that if you pay him money, he’ll let you put his name on your product or property and then everyone will see you’re successful and wealthy by associating with him.

But sometimes, the people who talk the most about something are the ones that don’t actually have what they promote. They’re the emperor admiring their new clothes or they’re the tailor telling him that only the most discriminating can see the finery the tailor is selling.

Maybe when this is all over, The Donald can take comfort in being able to prompt people to applaud him by waving his hands.

A lot of minimum wage here suffers the problem of seeming like a lot more than it is because our respective Governments have been desperately hiding a cost of living crisis under a thin veneer of manipulated consumer price index updates. Sure £8.45 (US$11.40) seems like a lot, but a full tank of petrol costs £50 now (up from £35 last year) which is six hours work out of a forty hour week. Gas has almost doubled in price this last year so that’s another £40 for heating and hot water, which itself is £20 per week.

We went grocery shopping last week for the essentials (rice, canned tomatoes, flour, fruit and veg, butter, your actual essentials) and it came to £90 - more than one quarter of a weekly earning on minimum wage.

Also a majority of Millennials and Gen Z have school fees to pay back, where the minimum payback is £15 per week; almost two hours.

Rent where I used to live is about £130 per week…

You start to see how deceptively small it actually is when you see how enormous bills are getting. You can’t have stay-at-home parents, you can’t be disabled, you can’t afford to save, and you can’t afford to move or even quit.

State welfare works out at about £90/wk, by comparison.

Not the first or the last time. Hillary Clinton tried to start a movement to abolSish the Electoral College in 2017 after her other efforts to call the election a fraud didn’t pan out. She was fighting well into 2018.

Democrats are now saying the elections a year ago were the best ever but those same systems are at risk because they might not win. Because Georgia changed their voting to be less restrictive than New York and Delaware. Or something. Just like they were prepping in 2019 about the election being stolen until they won.

Yeah, that’s not exactly true. She actually started calling for the abolishment of the Electoral College after the 2000 election when Al Gore won the popular vote but George Bush was named President because he got more EC votes, the same thing that happened with Hillary Clinton in 2016. And, she renewed her call with the last election. Nowhere, at least not that I can find, did she ever mention fraud in her calls to abolish the EC. Rather, she has stated that she thinks the person who gets the most votes should be the President, which is not necessarily a horrible concept when your leader is elected directly.

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