If you're hopping mad about Trump destroying the White House, we've got a new hat or sticker for you.
Your purchase supports progressive groups working to build a fairer, more inclusive America for everyone—and win elections!
shop.onwardtogether.org/collections/…— Hillary Rodham Clinton (@hillaryclinton.bsky.social) October 24, 2025 at 9:14 AM
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BREAKING: Social Security recipients will get a 2.8% cost-of-living boost in 2026, reflecting an average increase of $56 per month.
— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) October 24, 2025 at 9:07 AM
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Inflation under Biden: "Should the President be fired out of a cannon or merely tarred and feathered?"
Inflation under Trump: "Well, pobody's nerfect!"— ArgellaStone but Spooky (@argellastone.bsky.social) October 24, 2025 at 2:49 PM
The American public, having decided they hated inflation combined with their paychecks going up, are now going to be getting inflation and also losing their jobs.
Let's see if they enjoy that more.— ArgellaStone but Spooky (@argellastone.bsky.social) October 24, 2025 at 2:50 PM
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The University of Michigan's Consumer Sentiment index fell -1.5 points in October to 53.6, its lowest level since May. That's down -24.0% from a year ago.
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) October 24, 2025 at 12:17 PM
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Trump's favorability has fallen among Hispanics, an AP-NORC poll finds, after the key group helped his return to the White House.
— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) October 24, 2025 at 7:48 AM
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But Trump gets a ballroom and Argentina gets a $40 billion bailout
— Senator Ron Wyden (@wyden.senate.gov) October 24, 2025 at 8:41 PM
Balconesfault
“The American public, having decided they hated inflation combined with their paychecks going up, are now going to be getting inflation and also losing their jobs. Let’s see if they enjoy that more.”
Wall Street will … because despite the inflation #s the job numbers can mean more RATE CUTS!
Deputinize America
cnn.com/2025/10/24/politics/anonymous-donor-military-pay-shutdown
If only there was some reliable, sure system for paying for public servants that was regularized and predictable, adequate and regulated.
Baud
Is the assumption that inflation will stay at 3% and not increase further?
Tony Jay
1) When we sent the boys over to wreck the White House, it was for solid geo-political reasons, as well as a little bit of spite.
So there you have it. Trump – Worse For America Than Drunk Redcoats.
2) And once again, it’s not a ‘ballroom’, it’s a Throne Room. I guaran-fucking-tee The Pustule will be having them mould and gild a separate Presidential Seat placed away from and above the courtier space. For security reasons, you understand, and so America’s First Citizen can see and be seen.
Once those ‘renovations’ are finished the Presidential sleeping quarters will be in the bunker underneath and he’ll make bank renting out the whole West Wing to bitcoin billionaires.
Betty Cracker
What happened to prompt Cole to tell y’all to stop being mean to each other in comments? I was mostly AWOL yesterday and am curious, for strictly anthropological reasons.
eclare
I hate this time of year. Pitch black.
JoyceH
The news has been interesting this past week. I’m certain that Trump always intended to demolish the East Wing but figured if he went fast and didn’t admit what he was doing until it was done, he’d get away with it. Instead there’s been a steadily increasing outrage. All this week the news has headlined the East Wing and the ballroom. And he doesn’t even have the consolation that “at least it’s a distraction from the Epstein Files” since so many people immediately started calling it the Epstein Ballroom.
MagdaInBlack
@JoyceH: It’s what those types do: move fast, break things. Then smile and shrug “too late, its done.”
Check what he did with the Bonwit Teller building in NYC.
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
Cuz it works. No one wants to hold a Republican accountable for something that can’t be fixed.
JoyceH
@MagdaInBlack: Americans are lame when it comes to historic preservation. A builder buys a piece of land with a historic building on it. Agrees to preserve the building, levels it and pays the fine. The fine was already factored in to the cost of the project. The UK takes no prisoners. There developers bought a property with a listed pub on it. Agreed to preserve the pub and then demolished it. Fine? Nope. They were ordered to rebuild the pub, on the same spot and using the same materials. Ouch.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
It wasn’t me.
frosty
@JoyceH: Given that our history only goes back a few hundred years it’s understandable. It’s not like Shakespeare spent time in one of our bars.
MagdaInBlack
Question: Is anyone familiar with Zev Shalev? I ask because he is on my youtube rotation. He does a lot on Epstein and has Lev Parnas as a regular guest. It’s all very interesting, but I do not know where this guy falls on the credibility scale
It seems credible, but…who da f knows anymore.
satby
@Betty Cracker: Apparently commenter named Matt got hostile to Geminid two evenings ago and the blog Karen brought it to John, as she is wont to. She, as she usually does, made a public announcement of her intervention because email apparently doesn’t exist.
lowtechcyclist
The Dems should announce that, when the House eventually comes back into session, they’re introducing an impeachment resolution over the demolition of the East Wing.
Sure, there are far worse things he’s done, but everyone can see this, and everyone outside the cult knows he had absolutely no business doing this on his own, as if this was his personal property rather than something that belonged to all of us. Hell, I feel wounded by this, and I’m about the least patriotic person you can imagine. Also, maybe a few GOP Congresspersons might be shamed into signing on, you never know.
JoyceH
@frosty: Well, it doesn’t have to be Tudor era for the Brits to find a thing listable. They list things like Victorian era water pumping substation. (Though to be fair those Victorians did some pretty awesome stuff with their early industrial infrastructure.)
MagdaInBlack
@lowtechcyclist: We are wounded by it because it is a physical manifestation of what he is doing to the country.
satby
No such creatures exist.
eclare
@JoyceH:
I thought it was the Romans?
satby
@MagdaInBlack: And it was done to wound and discourage people. It was another in a series of “fuck you all” moments designed to make him and his raw corruption and power grabs feel unstoppable. Starting to think a military coup is our only way out.
lowtechcyclist
@satby:
You never know ’til you try.
MagdaInBlack
@satby: Looking at Chicago, it feels like its already happening. Just not how you mean.
satby
@JoyceH: yeah, that would be a good law here. It’s possible to preserve and renew historic buildings’ uses without needing to level them and build something completely different.
Geminid
@satby: WaterGirl wasn’t being a “Karen.” She did not even read that thread until two commenters complained about Matt’s insulting comment. She forwarded the complaints to John, which is her job.
Matt’s comment pretty clearly crossed the line concerning personal attacks and I think the complaints were well-founded.
But I was not one of the people who complained I just told Matt “Fuck you” and moved on.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@satby: I’m not so sure; even Marjorie Taylor Greene (hack, spit) has her breaking point, apparently. I’ll grant you it’s not a safe bet that you’ll find many or even any more, but there’s a non-zero chance.
lowtechcyclist
If so, I think that was a bad bet, at least on the ‘discourage’ part. If there’s anything that could be our Saturday Night Massacre moment, I’d think this would be it. There’s no getting around what he’s done here, there’s no abstracting it, normies can see it plain as day. No way to treat it as same old same old, no way to think of this as just politics as usual.
satby
@MagdaInBlack: those aren’t regular military, and given the revelations about ICE hiring and training, they’re not even adequate LEOs. I wouldn’t be surprised if once the states start IDing and charging individuals we find out that a lot of them are 3%ers and Proud Boys with histories of disciplinary violations in their regular jobs. Stephen Miller was on whatever propaganda channel saying they had complete federal immunity in their job actions. They don’t, and the showdown is coming and will be in Chicago. Yesterday gassing Lakeview was an escalation and direct defiance of the judge’s orders on crowd control.
Tony Jay
@satby:
Huh. I didn’t know any of the people I’d label ‘blog Karens’ even had Cole’s number. His real number, that is. Not the one for Former Senator Manchin’s floating sexcapade location he puts out to keep commentators from faxing him their credenzas.
They needn’t have bothered getting involved, though, as the estimable WG was already dealing with the matter.
Hoodie
The East Wing demolition thing probably doesn’t have much traction except as a part of a bigger anti-corruption narrative. Otherwise it can come across as a bunch of historic preservationists with fairly esoteric aesthetic concerns. I don’t necessarily have a big beef with changes to the White House except with this particular event it’s a giant bribery scam with a bunch of techbros and other corporate interests sucking up to Trump. Part of me thinks we should turn the place into a museum and have the president operate out of an office building like a normal executive instead of some quasi monarch as part of killing off the whole imperial presidency thing.
satby
@Geminid: it was the public announcement of her highly selective enforcement that I object to; it’s unprofessional. But I don’t want to debate about it. So forget it.
Baud
Speaking of contacting Cole, I’m going to be off the blog for a while. Don’t email Cole.
Try Joelle. She’s more responsible.
Jeffg166
Out yesterday cutting the dahlias back to bring the pots inside for the winter. I have a few more to do today. Next step is to get the pots off the porch to the door of the basement. Then do a couple a day getting downstairs into the cold room at the front of the basement. If I am still alive next year they will go out again. I may need to get the guy who cuts my grass to bring them up from the basement.
satby
@Baud: Try Joelle. She’s more responsible.
😂😂 And more responsive!
satby
@Jeffg166: we had a freeze warning, and my weather app says it’s 30° out right now. So I’ll be doing the same after today’s stint at the market. Not even a frost, we went to a hard freeze right off the bat. So not ready!
mappy!
He may not have frequented whatever drinking establishment that may have existed in Albany in 1614 (he passed away in 1616), but he was there in spirit ; – ) We’re still fighting the same battles fought then.
Geminid
@Geminid: Some context: a commenter had remarked on how Trump’s peace plan for Gaza had “gone down in flames.” I pointed out that while the ceasefire had been broken by fighting that broke out Sunday, mediators were able to restore the ceasefire after ten hours and it was entering its 15th day as of Thursday night.
I went on to say that people who care about this story have to try hard if they want to stay up-to-date, because the bad news from Gaza spreads like wildfire while the good news does not get nearly as much attention.
That comment is what triggered Matt’s vile and self-discrediting attack. This war has really brought out the haters, and he is one of them.
Paradoxically, the ceasefire has too. It is resented by people on both the more extreme pro-Israel and anti-Israel sides Saudi security analyst Shahid Bolsen said of this phenomenon:
mappy!
@Jeffg166: We’ve had one light frost so far, but low 30s are coming. Most of the dahlias in pots are gathered, waiting to be cleaned and come inside to rest. There’s always work…
Baud
@Geminid:
You see the same phenomenon in domestic politics.
rikyrah
@JoyceH:
I am usually about to keep my rage in check about this Administration.
But, my visceral guy punch up on seeing those first pictures of the East Wing 😡😡😡
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Betty
Senator Dave McCormack, resident of Connecticut, former hedge fund guy, and presently representing Pennsylvania seems to have just found religion. These useless piece of rubbish has decided to urge RFK Jr. to revoke approval of the anti-abortion pill. He was bad enough when he was a nonentity, but now he is a clear and present danger.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: oh no
rikyrah
@Baud:
Baud, I hope that things are okay 🙏🏾
See you when you get back 😊
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
@rikyrah:
All good. Didn’t mean to worry anyone.
rikyrah
@Betty:
They were always going after it. Game plan from the beginning.
Baud
@rikyrah:
They’ve been remarkably patient, but they’re not doing to wait forever.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: I’m not worried I just won’t have anyone to snark with
rikyrah
Got a 7:45 car appointment.
Not the way I wanted to spend Saturday morning, but hopefully it will be finished before 11:00 🤞🏾🤞🏾
Betty Cracker
Thanks to all who responded to my query!
BTW, we’re getting into the Halloween spirit by watching old horror movies that can be streamed for free. So far, we’ve watched classics from the 30s and 40s (“Frankenstein,” “Wolf Man,” etc.) and some extremely schlocky 70s and 80s flicks. Highly recommended!
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
That’s the thing that really pisses me off: these are actual flesh-and-blood human beings in Gaza who’ve been through hell. They’re not just a bludgeon for anyone else’s political argument. Whatever comes next, these people desperately need a respite. Hopefully it can last, hopefully they can be fed adequately, and find at least some form of shelter. Maybe the cease-fire will break down, but one can only hope that that doesn’t happen for a good while yet, at the very least. These people desperately need this cease-fire, and that has to be the main thing right now for anyone who gives a damn about Gaza, or even pretends to.
To quote Godspell‘s version of an old hymn:
When wilt thou save the people, O God of mercy, when?
The people, Lord, the people, not thrones and crowns, but men?
Layer8Problem
@Baud: Well shoot, I hope it’s to somewhere nice.
If you would, notify Omnes and Steve in the ATL and tell them to up their game for the duration.
lowtechcyclist
@rikyrah:
I think we need to be showing photos of the demolishment under a big, screaming “ATTACK ON AMERICA” headline.
Baud
@Baud:
Doing = going
Matt McIrvin
@Hoodie: Vandalizing the White House is probably the Trump outrage that personally bothers me the least, but it’s ALL OVER the news in a way that most of his outrages aren’t. I think it’s actually a trigger for normies.
Think about how 9/11 enraged Americans in a way that the far more numerous deaths from, say, AIDS or COVID didn’t. A lot of that was the symbolic injury of having the terrorists actually destroy these iconic buildings and alter the skyline of New York. Losing the building was a bigger sock in the gut than losing all those people.
I’ve thought for a while that if 9/11 really had been an inside job and the government had just bragged about it and declared it a righteous strike on heathen New York City for Jesus and America, about 40% of the US population would have supported it. But the other 60% probably would have still been really, really mad.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Deputinize America: I personally am not keen on the military being paid by a private individual. Who do they work for?
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Not really, the difference is mostly because there was a singular human cause behind 9/11.
If an earthquake had taken down the Twin Towers, people would have been saddened, but not enraged to the point of making some really bad decisions.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
We’ll have to generate a surplus of snark this weekend.
trnc
“An illegal act cannot be an official act.”
This is a campaign slogan I would like to see every democratic candidate adopt. SCOTUS’ failed dime store logic puzzle is not legitimate and should not be treated as such.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Matt McIrvin: The destruction of the East Wing is symbolic (emblematic?) in the same way – the proverbial picture that says what a thousand words can’t. It’s a powerful tool to use to tell people: “This is what you voted for. If you don’t like it? Then help us set it right.”
PAM Dirac
@Baud:
Sounds like something I said in a weed infused undergraduate dorm session.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Well, we’ve sure got a singular human cause here!
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Baud: Hope your absence isn’t for anything unpleasant
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Yes. That’s why it resonates a little more broadly than some other things.
I didn’t mean to disagree that a lot of people value building more than the lives of others. That’s true too.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: Agree the war and the ceasefire revealed haters at both extremes. That said, I don’t blame anyone for being skeptical or anguished by the conduct of the war and the durability of ceasefire. Both were orchestrated by and overseen by some of the most vile and corrupt people on earth.
Matt McIrvin
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: I thought it might not be just because the East Wing is the least iconic part of the White House: notice, it doesn’t even appear on that hat up top. But the image of heavy machinery just wrecking part of the White House on what seems to be a whim from the President still has some power.
Baud
@Chacal Charles Calthrop:
I’d of course rather be here. But it’s all good.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Baud: in that case, come back soon!
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve wondered about that. I think it’s the fault of evolution: animals understand being attacked but sickness just happens. Our frontal cortex might understand that a disease can be as preventable as a war, but our brain stem does not.
prostratedragon
“The normies are meming. The normies are meming. 🚨 🚨“
iKropoclast
@prostratedragon: The death star might actually be more practical for hosting state functions than the ballroom designs I saw.
Ohio Mom
I wish the media would frame the suspension of food stamps in broader economic terms. A good amount of people are happy poor people are going to be hungry, they deserve it.
But supermarkets and the people who work at them, food distributors, etc., are also hit. There are ripple effects that can effect even the or-people haters. Oh, who am I kidding, the press is a lazy lot.
On another note, how dumb for someone to challenge Geminid on Middle East matters. That’s something he follows closely, I always read his comments carefully.
zhena gogolia
@Ohio Mom: It wasn’t exactly a challenge. It was a vile slur.
Professor Bigfoot
Good mornin’, y’all!!
Wifi died overnight; but the classic remedy (unplug it, pause for a few seconds, plug it back in again) seems to have worked.
I haven’t looked at the comment thread; just see Zhena G at 72 and it sounds like someone has been an idiot.
AND IT WASN’T ME!!
Hoodie
@Matt McIrvin: Tearing down the East Wing is not the worst part, which is him making this ridiculous fucking ballroom a monument to himself. This isn’t adding a basketball court or even paving the rose garden to make a patio. It’s a gross celebration of Donald J Trump that’s intended to live on after his miserable life ends. The White House has never been used that way, it’s not a monument to anyone. Trump wants to make it a royal palace. They can bulldoze the damn thing down if that’s what it’s to become.
prostratedragon
Harry Litman:
Professor Bigfoot
Well… maybe that explains why I got a nice note from the Blogfather asking if I was OK.
I am!
Well… desperately in need of coffee; but at least the wifi works now.
Chief Oshkosh
@JoyceH: Meh. It’s a win-win for him. Who’s talking about the Epstein Files now?
ETA: But yes, I’d love it if a foul East Wing were to blow.
Kosh III
@Betty Cracker: f you want a reallllly scary movie, check out on Prime :
Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla.
It’s scary because of how awful, bad, terrible and hilarious it is. Some consider it THE worst movie ever, worse even than Plan ( From Outer Space.
Kosh III
Tennessee theocratic fascist legislature+governor has decided to not pay for SNAP since they ONLY have a 2 billion rainy-day fund.
Kosh III
Help me Obi-wan
I am getting blitzed with ads to use a browser called Comet. I’m currently using Duckduckgo.
Ads for Comet promote it’s AI capabilities which I don’t care much about since I know what I’m doing which is just email and browsing looking around killing time.
Anyone familiar with Comet? Is it good and worth switching.
prostratedragon
This looks interesting:
iKropoclast
One would think that having people fed and healthy would be a benefit unto itself. Like planting seeds because you know the harvest will replenish the resources you used and then some.
M31
@Kosh III: no idea, but if a product is advertising its “AI capabilities” my instinct is to run away very fast
EarthWindFire
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I’m not keen on it either. Does the Pentagon even have the authority to accept it? Not the only one to say this on this thread but seems like it should go to the Treasury.
Not to mention that $130 million divided by a million active duty is about $100 per service member after taxes. This just sucks on so many levels.
WTFGhost
Hillary should have watched Krush Groove.
“Whose house?”
“OUR HOUSE!”
“I say, WHOOOOSE HOUSE?”
“OUUUUUUR HOUSE!”
Nah, she’d be attacked for misappropriation, and called one of the Fat Boys. Not that her failure to do so would slow down the firehose of hate, but, hey, hating political rivals and opponents is a key component of fascism.
iKropoclast
@M31: To be fair, if any features are available to be marketed as AI, that is what the marketing team will do. It appears to sell right now.
Doesn’t really speak to the overall functionality of the application. A good product with a gimmick attached is still a good product.
But I’ve never used Comet either.
Chief Oshkosh
@prostratedragon: Taking into account all pay scales in the US military, one month’s worth of compensation is $13-19 BILLION. (I was shocked and that, and I’m old and cynical.)
So, that $130 million is covering 1% of what’s needed this month.
I wonder if anyone in the press is asking about THAT aspect of this clown show.
The Pale Scot
@Tony Jay:
So instead of a throne made from welded together swords, it will be Big Mac boxes (vintage 80’s of course) glued together
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Things that happen really suddenly also grab attention in ways that gradual changes over years do not. I was musing on this yesterday, in the context of how many consumer goods we now buy from overseas.
But yes….. intentional injury feels much different from act of nature.
iKropoclast
I went back and forth for several minutes whether I even wanted to know.
Guess curiosity won out, who?
Cliosfanboy
@iKropoclast: Not to mention these supposed “Christians” are ignoring what Jesus specifically told his followers to do!
Scout211
@satby: name calling?
These morning threads . . .
☹️
SFAW
@Tony Jay:
I didn’t realize/remember that you’ve been on this here blog that long.
iKropoclast
Right to the very core. Faith is nothing without acts. And pumping oneself over their righteous faith to place one’s community over others is damning.
Gin & Tonic
@Professor Bigfoot: I think you just posted that to make those of us who’ve never gotten a nice (or otherwise) note from the blogfather envious.
Kosh III
@The Pale Scot: Where’s Drogon when you need him?
iKropoclast
@Gin & Tonic: I mean, damn, I can disappear for a month at a time without a word…
Baud
@iKropoclast:
In my early morning dyslexia, I read that as “Faith is nothing without cats.”
comrade scotts agenda of rage
This report from Ro Khanna, who lately has not been the Ro Khanna many of us know of loathe:
x.com/RoKhanna/status/1981922061309149318
That’s former Senator Sinema:
Yup, that’s right on-brand for her. Again, Khanna’s been very different for the last 6 months saying things that normally would get him called into the office whichever techbro is banking him that week for a stern talking to.
Gin & Tonic
@prostratedragon: Some back-of-the-envelope calculations tell me that, if active-duty military are paid roughly the US median wage, then their gross salaries would run about $1.6 billion per week. $130 million is a joke.
iKropoclast
Faith in terms of cats? The human/cat relationship could not work without faith (that they won’t eat you in the night).
WTFGhost
@MagdaInBlack: Note that this is how they got phones to hold so much of your personal information, that TikTok is a national security risk, if China gets their hands on it.
“Too late for privacy and security; everyone expects too much now!”
Hell, my high-tech hashpipe has an app for it, so I can broadcast that I use drugs which are unlawful at the federal level, if I have my phone outside a faraday cage.
Move fast, break things, and make sure people want what you have, the way you have it, so regulators have to take things away, no matter how bad or dangerous they are. You have a fascist party that’s glad to say companies are good when they’re wrecking good things, and America is bad when it tries to protect people from harm and death, so, regulators have a hard time getting anything done.
@Baud: It’s true, he posted credible sounding accusations of several state, county, municipal, and federal crimes, against multiple posters here, started a fight, broke a bottle, crashed three tables over people’s heads, and screamed “now who wants to take me on motherfucker!” and he *did*, in fact, apologize for using the eff word.
@MagdaInBlack: And that’s a story that really needs to be told – how the beauty of the nation was fading under a pile of fear and injustice from the powerful, suddenly made manifest by his destroying the very symbol of our democracy. He clearly thinks he is a king, above the law – he’s even demanding a better palace!
mrmoshpotato
@Betty Cracker: WWME is showing The Fly (Vincent Price 50’s original) tonight.
iKropoclast
Man, if we’re getting to the point where Trump starts declaring NIMBYs to be terrorists and starts intervening violently to force these resource intensive projects of questionable utility on communities…
I mean I don’t like NIMBYs either, but that’s right past the line, beyond the field, and over three successive horizons.
Wapiti
@Ohio Mom: Yeah, I was behind a old guy in the supermarket and his SNAP card was zero balance. That was the 22d, not really close to the end of the month. I figure inflation is eating some chunk of his food.
Fair Economist
@iKropoclast:
You are obviously not a Republican.
mrmoshpotato
@Fair Economist: Or a golfer.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
A really good piece in FTFNYT on the origins of crypto and gee, libetarianism figures prominently as does billionaires like Theil:
archive.ph/AYT7u
It’s not just about money, it’s about fracturing democracy itself which we’re seeing play out like a slow-mo multi-car pileup on the highway. Or as Theil said in 2009:
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,”
Conclusion from the article:
sab
I brought the delicate plants in last night, and now I have poison ivy on my hand. Not fair!
New Deal democrat
@Geminid: I just wanted to drop in and say how much I always appreciate your comments on the situation(s) in the Middle East.
Many thanks.
Fair Economist
Because of their extraordinary cooling needs, data centers generate a lot of noise, and it’s 24/7. They are a classic industrial nuisance, and belong only in areas zoned industrial. Zoning has been horribly abused to block housing in the US, but it’s needed for some things; even Japan, with the most permissive and logical zoning in the developed world, keeps heavy industry like that away from housing.
Baud
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
I wonder what happened in 2009 that caused him to distrust democracy.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@prostratedragon: Google tells me there are 1.3 million active duty US military. $130 million isn’t going to go very far.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Authoritarian, Rumored to be a foreign asset, widely despised for wasting tax money on self indulgence, creating an economic crises by out of control government spending, and refusal to help the poor. Trump is Marie Antoinette
catclub
@rikyrah: I think destroying the White House is about the least harmful thing Trump can do. More of that, then. If he just pays attention to that.
iKropoclast
A white supremacist can only be free with a permanent non-white underclass.
WTFGhost
@satby: Yes. Eventually, there will be enough publicity that mayors and governors can start confronting ICE and giving them orders. I know Illinois threated to eff them up over hiding license plates.
@Hoodie: I do hope that someday in the future, there is a memorial to the risk of fascism, and the then-former White House might be a fine choice to host it.
@Betty Cracker: Oh, that’s right – I have a Blu-ray of the original monster movies, and I guess Christmas is coming. I mean, Halloween is coming.
I keep getting them confused. OCT31=DEC25, so, see, it’s not just me!
@Baud: I doing doing=coming… oh, different context.
@trnc: How about “The President must execute the law FAITHFULLY?” Alas, it will only get people who understand “good faith versus bad faith.” But seriously: the President is charged with faithful execution of the law. Picking up one illegal immigrant, without adequate evidence, is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and denying due process is a violation of the Fifth. If Republicans actually gave a flying fig for the Constitution… ah, but they don’t. It’s just a tool, they’ll swear is on their side, just like they use the bible. It’s even easier if you don’t bother reading either!
@Professor Bigfoot: No funeral or wake for the deceased wifi? How callous!
Thor Heyerdahl
I saw this story from Pro Publica this morning about public health in Idaho.
Idaho Banned Vaccine Mandates. Activists Want to Make It a Model for the Country.
Leslie, let’s go visit a cemetery in Boise shall we. Why are there so many children’s gravestones before about 1950…hmm?
Dorothy A. Winsor
IMHO the destruction of the East Wing is hitting because there are pictures. Same with the ICE actions.
Steve in the ATL
@Layer8Problem: that’s a lot of pressure! Do I have to be the first poster in every thread too?
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Which might be why the Treasury Department issued orders to its employees overlooking the destruction to not take and distribute photographs. Which seems to have worked about as well as one might reasonably expect with such things.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Baud: That was about the time Thiel wanted create Bio Shock in San Fransisco and reorder California to suit his personal taste and got told no.
Also he ran against Jerry Brown for Governor as the GoP candidate and was ignored. That is the kind of freedom Thiel is talking about.
New Deal democrat
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
This was one of the pivotal points that brought about the downfall of the Roman Republic. Once the Senate allowed wealthy patricians to raise and pay legions, the loyalty of the legionnaires was no longer to the Republic, but to their paymaster. And if the paymaster ordered them to cross the Rubicon, oh well ….
iKropoclast
Even if it did work, I’ve never been there but I understand the building is visible from the street. Cameras also have zoom functions and even run-of-the-mill phone cameras actually capture a lot of detail.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Ohio Mom: Farmers sell food. SNAP allows people to buy food. If those people can’t buy food farmers sell less food. That means farmers make less money. Not a hard chain of consequence to work out if you have half a brain and think about it for 30 seconds.
Sorry that reads as though I’m attacking you but I’m not just pointing out that the Administration apparently hasn’t gamed out how they’re just about to hand drowning farmers another economic anvil. People could point that out.
iKropoclast
Maybe later, Blue Bloods is on…
Miss Bianca
Eh, speaking of fixing…
Nukular Biskits
Good mornin’, y’all.
Late start today …
WTFGhost
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: They should, but the reason SNAP isn’t being funded is because soft hearted liberals will give in, because people are hungry; liberals are refusing to give in, because if they do, they’ll use recission on SNAP and destroy the private insurance marketplace for the ACA.
So it’s all blackmail, “if you don’t surrender to us, we’ll starve YOUR PEOPLE!” And it could work; Democrats do consider all people to be “our people.” But it will burn people in poor (i.e., red) states most. I don’t think Trump and the Republicans realize that.
New Deal democrat
@frosty:
@mappy!:
It’s fascinating (to me anyway) that Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” was probably inspired both by the story of Pocahontas, and an actual shipwreck off Bermuda carrying members of the Virginia Company as well as two teenage Indians from the Powhatan tribe, who probably were largely responsible for the hunting of game on the island – until one of them disappeared, possibly murdered by the other.
On the subject of the burning of the White House. It was an intelligence failure even worse than Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Madison’s Secretary of War refused to believe that the British target was Washington itself until they were about 15 miles away.
Back in those quaint days of accountability, he was gone within a week.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@New Deal democrat:
That’s described in wonderful detail from the perspective of the military commander paying the troops, in this case Marius, in Colleen McCollough’s Masters of Rome series.
Very entertaining and very well researched.
Marius made it all sound very reasonable and needed…
Layer8Problem
@Gin & Tonic: “$130 million is a joke.”
Or a bribe. Or something helpful from a friend to keep something else running to stave off embarrassment because Shutdown. Money’s fungible and the Republican Congress and the Supreme Court don’t care anyway.
Matt McIrvin
@WTFGhost:
What’s this?
There’s children throwing snowballs instead of throwing heads
They’re busy building toys and absolutely no one’s dead
prostratedragon
iKropoclast
@Matt McIrvin: Perfect.
I have my own problems with October and December (and throw in August).
Octem->8 // Decem->1
Somehow September and November escape my confusion.
Betty Cracker
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Saw that clip of Sinema yapping at the planning commission meeting earlier on Bluesky. I hope she’s miserable because she’s a horrible person, and that clip made me think it’s possible she is miserable because it didn’t seem like the type of lobbying gig a self-important chucklefuck like Sinema probably expected her single senate term to buy her.
She probably figured she’d be traveling to exotic locales on private jets, taking sommelier classes with oligarchs, etc. But there she was, making dumb threats at a meeting in a municipal building like a common MAGA dope. Ha!
PS: I’ve also been surprised at some of Khanna’s recent content because I wrote him off as an obsequious Musk-humper ages ago. Stopped clock until further evidence of conversion emerges.
Belafon
(Redis ate my comment, let’s try again)
I love being a liberal and on bsky because people like these two exist. They each pledged to match up to $500 for donations to food charities. They’re already maxed out, but hopefully people will continue.
bsky.app/profile/pronounced-ing.bsky.social/post/3m3zjgyxpnc2l
prostratedragon
@Chief Oshkosh: What? … Sorry, I can’t hear you. Let me see if I can get this damn calliope turned down.
Miss Bianca
@mrmoshpotato: That movie terrified THE SHIT out of me as a child. So much so, that I literally had to creep home from my friend’s house where we watched it because my legs were wobbling so badly. To this day I remember scenes from it and I haven’t actually *seen* ANY of it in over 50 years! GAAAAHHH….!
Gvg
@Hoodie: The way it was done, ripping out with dangling parts, concerns me. I think it could have done damage to the whole White House pulling and tugging like that. The original structure is old and not made of modern building materials. It wasn’t made to withstand machines. The info on the ballroom builder doesn’t include any historic remodeling either. It looked like all new stuff done to look old. And Trump has never understood information security. He really just has never understood spying, in spite of not liking foreigners. In fact he really doesn’t understand national interests, only commercial and I guess social?
Anyway aside from wasting historical artifacts and upsetting sentiment, I think we will be hearing about long term damage. People will say he did it on purpose, but he may just be that stupid.
He also does not get sentiment. I don’t think he understands how people are going to take this. Sentiment about the White House exists even among hard core republicans. Some of his supporters even, unpredictably random which ones, will be upset by this. If he keeps doing things that bother even his supporters, they will fall away. It’s not one thing, but repeated rattles before they can bury the doubt again because all their friends are. If many their friends that were supporters are also having doubts at the same time, they won’t talk each other back into group think, they will fall into skepticism. So this happening while the Epstein problem is still bothering his supporters and prices are going up and Argentina gets a bailout but the farmers don’t is hurting him. Immigration and ICE are kind of mixed among his supporters.
I think one difference between this time and last is the democrats don’t have either house of Congress and no way to block him. His actions are being done instead of just talk. His supporters maybe thought talk was reality last time. They aren’t too bright either in my opinion. They seem to confuse TV shows with reality a lot and swaggering and boasting matter to them. So they thought they would get Trump term 1 again which to them was great.
Betty Cracker
@WTFGhost: If the ACA subsidies aren’t extended, it will definitely screw people in Florida, who are heavily reliant on the coverage because they are self-employed, have low-wage service jobs that don’t offer coverage, are early retirees who aren’t yet eligible for Medicare, etc., and the state never expanded Medicaid under the ACA.
Statistically, lots of those folks must have voted for Trump and DeSantis too. My shitty Repub House rep seems to understand the political ramifications. I asked a question about it at the recent “town hall” event he held, and in the torrent of bullshit that was his reply, he did convey the impression that he understands lots of his constituents will be screwed if there’s no extension.
iKropoclast
I forgot about this excellent children’s program. Or excellent in my inner child’s mind’s eye.
Professor Bigfoot
@Geminid:
@New Deal democrat:
I want to second New Deal on this— at this point valued commenter Geminid is my go-to for understanding what’s happening in the ME; I too read his comments carefully.
Much appreciated!
Eyeroller
@Kosh III: Comet is basically a version of Chrome with an AI wrapper that does .. something. The company (Perplexity) tried to buy Chrome a while back when it was thought Google would have to sell it, but fortunately they avoided that with heavy donations.
tobie
@Thor Heyerdahl:
I’m looking for eldercare for my mother. I wasn’t considering Idaho but, my gosh, how could anyone risk placing their parents or grandparents in a senior community there?
Kosh III
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: I think the R’s know it hurts red states but think they have brainwashed them sufficiently.
Professor Bigfoot
Once you see these people, you see right through them.
Conservatives, libertarians— white men will burn the Constitution they claim to revere because it permitted a Black man to become President “OVER them.”
(The “OVER them” part is key. They do not like the idea of one of their lessers being “over” them.)
Old School
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
What if the “donor” specifies that it’s only to pay straight white males?
iKropoclast
Kegbreath’s purge would make it redundant.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Gvg:
The walls are original, but the actual residence is a steel frame building inside the original walls.
Tony Jay
@The Pale Scot:
If they were really on brand it would be a gigantic golden toilet with a triple-intensity flush and TV screens set to all the slob’s fave channels while he surfs the Wingternet looking for stories about himself.
Tony Jay
@SFAW:
Since 2004, if I remember correctly. I think it was around the start of the Blogfather’s conversion period.
So old.
Geminid
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Shahid Bolsen, the Saudi Arabian I quoted above, commentef on a picture of the East Wing demolition:
A short rant:
I’ve only recently discovered Saudi social media and I gotta say, there are some very intelligent and aware people over there. I think a lot of my beliefs about the Gulf Arabs were conditioned 20 years ago, during the Iraq war. I probably underrated them then and until recently, I never took into account how rapidly these societies have modernized since then.
This is a lesson I’ve been learning ever since I got into Turkish Twitter in 2022. I long had an implicit belief that Middle Easterners were somehow culturally and intellectual inferior to Western Europeans and citizens of the English speaking nations. But if they ever were, they’ve caught up now. If anything, they’re ahead of us because they are not so insular and self centered.
Kosh III
@Professor Bigfoot: It might be that Obama and the D Congress were passing protections to keep people like him from nearly wrecking the economy again.
A wreck he could easily survive and profit from.
iKropoclast
@Tony Jay: Yes, the image of Trump holding royal court while endlessly taking a shit as he hears petitioners is exactly what I needed today…
I’m not even sure anymore whether or not I mean that seriously.
Professor Bigfoot
OMG there’s a cosmic coincidence— I hadn’t thought about octal in *ages* (tried to explain it to Mrs. B just now and she just rolled her eyes) and did the conversion and well.
😂😂
WTFGhost
@Betty Cracker: Well, you might think that… but not if you believe in FACTS, as Sinema might say (and maybe even believe – she effing curtsied to kill a minimum wage increase).
@Betty Cracker: Yeah, it could be a bloodbath, just like the housing insurance market down there. To give people a sense of scale, I suggest that if you give 1000 people medical care, you’ll probably save one life. One person, in a thousand, is facing a challenge that could kill them (or put them much closer to death, e.g., severe, untreated, diabetes), so, if you remove health insurance from a million people, you should expect a thousand deaths in a year. Now, is that accurate? Probably not, but probably somewhere between a third that many, and two times as many. So, out of a million people, think 300 to 2000 might die.
They want this to happen 25x over. They’re okay with 7500-50000 deaths, each year, because of their policies.
Oh: or, they’d have to reduce their billionaire’s tax cut by 1/3rd, to make it revenue neutral. So, you can understand: 50,000 deaths a year are okay (a little high, but, not crazy-high), so billionaires get a tax cut three times the amount needed to save those lives. It’s obviously a carefully considered decision, intended to please the people who really matter: the billionaires.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Gvg: Also, I’m not sure they’re ready to proceed with constructing the ballroom. If that’s the case, then it’s going to be cold in the WH this winter
Professor Bigfoot
@Kosh III: William of Ockham says he’s a typical white man who doesn’t want to see anyone other than maybe another white man “over” him.
Old School
@tobie:
Less of the inheritance would disappear in rent/fees?
Eyeroller
@Miss Bianca: Help meeeeeee
iKropoclast
Is octal used in any practical applications? I only know this to be the case with binary, decimal, and hexidecimal
mrmoshpotato
@Baud:
Ha! Maybe something that happened on January 20th.
Tony Jay
@iKropoclast:
Hey, Verisimilitude is my middle name.
Ha! It’s not. It’s Perpendicular, but the point still stands.
WTFGhost
@iKropoclast: It’s not used, generally, unless you’re doing something weird with bitmaps… even then, people are like “binary or hex!”
But as a math geek (MSc tOSU), and a computer person, the coincidence of dates and numeric naming conventions was too delightful. I, too, had to think, “OCT… OMG OCTAL!”
iKropoclast
🙄😂
Incidentally, “verisimilitude” is my favorite word to forget when I need it and remember a day later. On a no more than once a year basis, of course.
Eyeroller
@Professor Bigfoot: I agree but I am keeping in mind that what local reporters choose to publish in English may be highly curated. I cannot speak or read the relevant languages myself so I would also be reliant on English-only sources, but we must realize that it limits the perspective.
kalakal
@Baud: Boojums’r’us stock soars
Layer8Problem
@Steve in the ATL: You’re a labor legal type, right? Put your back in it! I believe in you!
tobie
@Old School: Must be that. Was at a home yesterday where the President of the community — a junior member at the age of 88 — proudly told me that 10 of the residents are over 100. I’m sure the Trump admin is convinced that we are wasting money on folks who can no longer work. (And to think it was Chuck Grassley who claimed during the Obamacare debates that Dems wanted to “pull the plug on granny.” What a shit.)
Eyeroller
@Geminid: Women are stlll being imprisoned in Saudia Arabia for asking for basic privileges like permission to drive, much less being considered full humans. So forgive me for being a bit skeptical there. As I said, most of us are only able to read commenters who speak English and are writing for an English-speaking audience.
Professor Bigfoot
@iKropoclast: “Back inna day” it was used— honestly I only remember using it in my Digital Logic class in school and that would have been the late ‘70s.
It’s that when doing this stuff you’re not thinking about a calendar— so to see OCT 31 equal to DEC 25; and to have both of those dates to be American holidays and cosmic coincidence. ;^)
WTFGhost
@Tony Jay: Well it has to, unless you make it perpendicular to a *wall* instead of the *floor* but who would do that?
(One person told me erotic spanking was not normal, and couldn’t be! Well, a “normal line” is a perpendicular to the line of interest. So, I said “if a lady lays precisely across my lap, it’s *perfectly* normal… and I advise you to check a dictionary before saying otherwise!”
Moron flamed me before looking up the definition. Sometimes, you serve up a straight line, and they take a massive swing, and what are you going to do, not announce they hit a grand slam of stupidity?)
Matt McIrvin
@iKropoclast: Octal’s day is mostly done but in the 1960s and 1970s, it was the most-used base for the purposes hexadecimal is used for today, as a convenient shorthand for binary.
Why is that? Well, consider: a hexadecimal digit represents 4 bits of information, whereas an octal digit represents 3 bits. Modern computer hardware usually uses word sizes and chunks of data that are multiples of 8-bit bytes, so they’re convenient to represent as hexadecimal, with two digits to a byte.
But mainframes and many minicomputers 50-60 years ago often used word sizes that were multiples of 6 bits, so it was convenient to represent them as octal numbers with two digits to every 6-bit chunk.
Why was *that*? Well, I think it was mostly because of the character encodings that were used to represent text in the first generations of mainframe computers. They were usually 6-bit encodings (and not very standardized ones). So an architecture with a word size of 18 or 24 or 36 bits was convenient to store that. (Note that these were often multiples of 4 as well, so in principle they could have used hexadecimal, but octal lent itself better to the mapping to characters.)
By the end of the 1960s, 6-bit encodings were looking inadequate for character representation and the 7-bit encodings ASCII and EBCDIC became dominant. It was often convenient to store and transmit those as 8-bit bytes, with the top bit sometimes used as a parity indicator for quick and dirty error checking. So architectures with 16-bit or 32-bit words started emerging in the 70s.
But there was some inertia in software and hardware design and standards. I remember my dad working a lot with octal dumps from 36-bit mainframes on big stacks of 132-column fanfold paper in the 1970s. The blank backs of those were my primary artistic medium as a kid.
When microcomputers took over the world, ASCII was firmly established as a standard for character encoding and they all standardized on 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit etc. word sizes. (Often the system character encoding would be an 8-bit extension of ASCII, with the top bit used to store a whole other plane of not-very-standardized special characters, either graphical dingbats and box-drawing stuff or characters with accent marks, or a mixture.) So in that world, hexadecimal was always the preferred human-readable way to represent binary, and octal largely died.
But you can see its influence even today in things like the numeric constants used by computer languages like C and everything derived from C (C++, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, etc.) Ever wonder why hexadecimal constants in those languages begin with “0x”? It’s because in C (well, maybe it was in its predecessor B) they first put in the ability to represent an octal number by beginning the constant with a leading “0”, zero for O for octal I guess, and “0x” is just a hexadecimal extension of that, “x” for “hex”.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Hoodie: Kinda tired of people saying Obama added a basketball court. He did NOT have a new court built. The White House grounds had an existing tennis court and he had basketball court lines painted on and rolled in some base-weighted hoops that were not permanent installations. I think he even left the tennis court lines painted in place so it could be used as either a tennis court or a basketball court. He didn’t “build” a new court in any way shape or form.
Also even if he did have a new court put in equating that to tearing down the entire East Wing is the mother of all false equivalencies.
I mean, they got infuriated because Obama wore a TAN SUIT, like that was total breach of White House decorum. Then Elon shows up in black jeans and a tech support t shirt and nobody says jack shit about decorum and honestly the reaction to tearing down a wing of the White House is like way more muted than it would be if Biden had done it but people do appear to be pissed. So at least there still is a line.
Professor Bigfoot
@Eyeroller: INDEED.
I think of this as a time in which we have to cultivate and curate our credible sources.
I cannot make heads or tails of Turkic, Arabic, OR Hebrew, but what Gemind says jibes with what I DO know of the region, with what I know of history, and with what (little) I know about the human animal and what makes it tick so…
But that just makes him one source in my network of trusted sources— because every one of them is human, and therefore can be mistaken— but who I believe are credible, truthful, willing to face up to mistakes and always clear eyed about the limits of what they can see.
I think I’m rambling…
RevRick
@Matt McIrvin: Trashing the East Wing of the White House is a visual, visceral representation of Trump’s trashing our country.
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: A FAR, FAR better explanation than mine!
iKropoclast
🤨🤔🤔🤔
Stands to reason
Actually, yes, though I may have forgotten I wondered without prompting
Thanks for the very thorough and readable explainer.
Miss Bianca
@Eyeroller: YOU BASTID!!
lowtechcyclist
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
The trick is, as long as nobody with a much better platform than this blog points it out, he can tell the Treasury to keep paying the troops, and maintain the charade that it’s all paid for.
prostratedragon
@WTFGhost, @Professor Bigfoot:
Oh! So often these days I wonder what we’re really doing. Like Data’s little hint to himself in Star Trek “Cause and Effect.”
iKropoclast
So are we definitively past the day where we can attract guest appearances by Congressfolk and produce/attract broadly popular writers?
Anyway
@Baud: Theil has always said that democracy is anathema to capitalism (his version) — these are the extreme guys who think any taxation any regulation is beyond the pale … all Ds are anathema to him not just Obama.
WTFGhost
@RevRick: It’s also a wonderful metaphor. “Let’s pretend we need a ballroom. Shouldn’t there be a plan? Trump never has a plan, and that’s what happens, when you start thinking only of what you want, and not how to get there. What he’s doing to the East Wing is precisely what he’s doing on tariffs, his “one big beautiful bill,” inflation, the economy – doing what he wants, without a plan, and without any warning.”
iKropoclast
Funny. I, too, say this; but I reverse it.
Miss Bianca
@WTFGhost: Sounds like a great attack ad in the making!
Deputinize America
@Kosh III:
Skidoo has entered the chat.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=sd6OxYZigFU
This Otto Preminger movie is so terrible that the whole thing is available on YouTube and no rights holder has demanded that it be taken down.
Kosh III
@Eyeroller: “Women are stlll being imprisoned in Saudia Arabia for asking for basic privileges like permission to drive, much less being considered full humans.”
A few years ago I led a hike. One attendee was a (hot looking) Saudi man who was attending a US college. He said he planned to stay in the US which was 100% understandable because aside from the fact that he had a neon pink shoulder bag, my gaydar was going off big time.
Another Scott
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: +1
Relatedly, Slaves built the White House and the Capitol.
Black men did much of the renovation work in Truman’s rebuilding of the WH in 1949-1952.
(from MySanAntonio.com)
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
JMG
I think not enough people are considering the possibility the whole $130 million story is just more Trump 100 percent bullshit. For one thing, I can’t imagine him getting his mitts on that money and then giving it to other people.
lowtechcyclist
@prostratedragon:
What’s FIRE, other than a song by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown?
kalakal
@Thor Heyerdahl: The Typhoid Mary Bill.
iKropoclast
This weeeeeed, man…
Matt McIrvin
@iKropoclast: I do think it’s kind of funny that, therefore, “octal” is the base preferred for working in multiples of 6, and “hex” is the base preferred for working in multiples of 8.
Another Scott
@WTFGhost: Beware of Abby Normal.
Best wishes,
Scott.
UncleEbeneezer
Oh, you noticed that too? People who truly want to see peace and self-determination for both sides (and I think that’s actually MOST people) are wise to steer clear of either extreme factions. Both are bug-fuck nuts, completely reject the complexity/nuance of it all, refuse to operate in good faith and only want either 1.) complete elimination of the other side or 2.) never-ending conflict that allows them to keep demonizing their opponents. But don’t take it from me, just listen to Obama, Hillary, Bill Clinton, Biden, Kamala, John Kerry, Michael McFaul, Anthony Blinken and anyone who has actually rolled up their sleeves and done the incredibly hard (and thankless) work of actually trying to RESOLVE the conflict. They’ve all warned about the extremists on either side misrepresenting the conflict to the point of prolonging it.
prostratedragon
@lowtechcyclist: No idea, I was wondering myself.
—-
Aha! Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
Spanky
@lowtechcyclist:
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
kalakal
@Betty Cracker: Who is your rep? We have nominative determinism exhibit Anna Luna
Sure Lurkalot
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Also, Marius wasn’t a patrician, he was 1st elected tribune of the plebs. He did marry Caesar’s aunt i.e. married “up”.
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: There’s actually a small error in what I wrote above: while the ASCII character-encoding standard was really 7-bit (with the unused bit often used for parity checking and later for proprietary extensions), IBM’s in-house encoding EBCDIC was an 8-bit encoding from the beginning. Doesn’t affect the overall story, though.
Geminid
@Eyeroller: Yes, these commenters are writing for an English-speaking audience, and that includes plenty of Saudis. English has been taught as a mandatory second language in Saudi high schools for some years now. It is the common language for much of both higher education and business in the Gulf states, and those people are all about education and commerce now.
As for woman being imprisoned for driving: women won the right to drive in 2018, and I believe the women imprisoned at the time for driving illegally have long since been released. France24 published an article a couple years about women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, and the reporter interviewed one of those woman. She was still critical of the government’s record on women’s rights, but she was not in prison. If you can find others who are I’d like to hear about them.
I encourage you to look up contemporary reporting on this questions, because much has changed just in these decade. My understanding is that while the Saudis are not yet where we are in terms of women’s rights and participation, they have come much of the way from where they were ten years ago.
iKropoclast
…which is still “a long way to go.”
prostratedragon
Who knew? A certain jerk is taking up far too much national bandwidth.
Glidwrith
@Chief Oshkosh: Husband just made an insightful observation: all this money being shoveled into Shitgibbon’s maw is straight up money laundering.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
“or face federal intervention.” The fuck!?
iKropoclast
Somehow I don’t think the intervention will be an eminent domain claim.
Eyeroller
@Kosh III: Saudi Arabia and Iran are both theocracies. They rigidly enforce extremely right-wing (as we would categorize them) religious laws. Everybody except the rulers is oppressed, but the most are women, LGBTQ+, and “guest workers” i.e. outsiders. They brutally suppress dissent. Assassinations like that of Khashoggi. Protesters jailed and executed in Iran. Women beaten to death for not being sufficiently covered–though this seems to have raised enough outrage to force the religious police to relent a bit. (One of the young women was Kurdish.)
This is, of course, where Christian Nationalists want the US to go.
Glidwrith
@JMG: Bullshit or money laundering?
Eyeroller
@Geminid: Is two weeks ago recent enough?
theweek.com/60339/things-women-cant-do-in-saudi-arabia
It’s a very mixed bag and a lot of the “modernization” is for PR purposes. The Saudis especially are spending huge amounts of money on PR e.g. the controversial Riyadh Comedy Festival, along with buying up Western sports teams and even entire leagues.
Comedians who accepted the truckloads of money to work the comedy festival had to sign an agreement that they would not criticize the regime.
Women can do more things now, but are not necessarily protected from the rest of society if they try. And some restrictions that were more informal have now been codified into law.
Progress has happened but it’s been slow.
dc
@Deputinize America:
This is illegal.
mrmoshpotato
@prostratedragon: One part chicken, the other part shits.
Sure Lurkalot
@tobie: The grifter Dr. Oz stepped in it yesterday when he said that the goal of healthcare is to boost GDP:
Not supposed to tell the probes that their goal in life is to work forever to increase the accounts of their betters.
Sure Lurkalot
@Anyway: The tech bro billionaires’’ lurch from liberal to libertarian to authoritarian politics and TESCREAL* crazy shit was a somewhat slow boil but Thiel was always a conservative racist.
*This episode of Gil Duran’s podcast explains the components of the philosophies these bros made up to justify their sociopathies.
youtube.com/watch?v=S1tcBUS0NYQ
Geminid
@Eyeroller: Well, you say “Progress has happened but it’s been slow,” while the subtitle of that article is:
Emphasis mine.
@Eyeroller: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Iran are different countries with different political systems, and I was talking about Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia is a monarchy, not a theocracy. The government did have a strong theocratic element until recently because of the power of Wahabi clerics, Reporters I read now speak of “De-Wahabisation” as an accomplished fact.
I’ve seen other reporting that Saudi leadership has looked to Kemal Ataturk as a model. Kemal understood that Turkiye could never modernize so long as the power of Muslim clerics rivaled that of the state’s.
The Saudis have not gone so far as Kemal did in secularization, but they have put the clerics in their proper place
Ed. You say “assassinations like that of Khashoggi,” but what were the other ones? I’m not extenuating that barbarous act, but so far as I know it was a singular event. It seems like you are using the plural here as a rhetorical device.
minachica
@Steve in the ATL: Can’t you and Omnes take shifts? This is an emergency here!
Kathleen
@RevRick: Along with the poop plane.
mrmoshpotato
@iKropoclast: Does the Death Star have HVAC and plumbing?
iKropoclast
Haha, famously, yes.
Geminid
@Geminid: I think it best I give some more context to this matter so as to avoid misunderstanding. This was the comment in question, #44 on the “Wednesday Evening Open Thread”:
The commenter first quoted this paragraph of a comment I had made, but left out the bolded parts:
I’m not quoting this to play victim because the comment didn’t bother me any longer than it took to reply, “Fuck you.” I’m putting it out in fairness to WaterGirl because her role in this matter was questioned, I think unfairly.
iKropoclast
How dare the blog moderators moderate the blog
She’s not Karen, she’s the manager.
WTFGhost
@Matt McIrvin: That helps me understand the reason for Octal better, though. I remember hearing it was used for modems (MOdulater/DEModulater, for those who never thought about the name), but I froze thinking “but the modems I used had 8 bits!”
Betty Cracker
@kalakal: Nepo Baby Gus Bilirakis! He pretends to be MAGA but is a bagman at heart. We used to have Daniel Webster until redistricting a few years back. Sounds like y’all got the worst end of the kook distribution deal.
sab
@Geminid: Years ago I had an Israeli friend who explained to me why English was so important in the Middle East. Almost all the college textbooks are in English even in Israeli universities. The market is so small that there is no point in printing books in Hebrew. He taught Anthropology and Sociology.
There would be a much larger market for texts in Arabic, but outside of literature the same market forces are applicable.
Professor Bigfoot
@Geminid: I am reminded that Saddam’s Iraq was far more secular and far freer for women than what came after.
That if you were political, you would absolutely get shit on; but if you’re just a person working and minding your own business, it was actually pretty good.
I know I’m stretching analogies, but my sense is much the same with the CCP— that as long as you’re not “political,” you can live a pretty damn good life; so I wonder if the Saudi monarchy are moving that way.
(ps, see! this is why I read your posts because you’re following people on the ground across the ME— following you kinda lets me follow them ;^)
Matt McIrvin
@WTFGhost: Modem settings in the days of dialup were… complicated. Parity, data bits, stop bit.
The 6-bit encodings had themselves evolved from the 5-bit ITA2 encoding used by teletypes, which was a small refinement of the 19th-century Baudot code (Baudot’s name is where “baud” comes from!) That only allowed for 32 distinct codes so it didn’t have upper and lower case, and digits and symbols had to be accommodated using a mode-switching system.
Geminid
@Professor Bigfoot: With the exception of the four northern provinces governed by the Kurdish Rwgional Government, Iraq is very reactionary when it comes to empowering women. The Shi’ite parties that dominate the Baghdad government are very conservative in this area.
Iraq will hold parliamentary elections next year. There electoral system is kind of funky in my opinion. MPs are not elected locally, but instead are elected on nationwide slates. If a party gets 10% of the vote they get 10% of the parliaiment’s members.
Ironically, that is also Israel’s system. But Israel is much smaller geographically, and its population is less than a quarter of Iraq’s 45 million. This system seems unweldy for a nation as big as Iraq but that’s what they’ve got.
I found Rudaw English to be a good source for Iraq news. They’re published out of Erbil,* which is the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region. They carry a lot of interesting news. The Kurdistan Region is the closest Kurds have come to self-rule in the modern era, and they’re doing some good things there.
* Erbil was calked Arbela back in the day. Alexander the Great fought a big battle not too far from there. It was his big big victory against Darius, the last King of Persia.
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: Secular “modernizing” tyrants were a thing in the developing world in the 20th century. Heirs of Napoleon. Knock them down and try to restore democracy and you might well get a reactionary traditionalist government. Which is worse? Depends on who you are and your point of view.
A lot of contemporary American reactionaries like Russell Vought and Curtis Yarvin convinced themselves that the United States was that: a nation of profoundly religious traditionalist little guys under the oppressive thumb of a tiny elite of overeducated radicals trying to forcibly wipe out their entire culture in the name of progress. Apparently Yarvin is now in the process of freaking out that the people don’t overwhelmingly love Trump, because he had the theory that that would rapidly happen once the yoke of woke was thrown off.
Ruckus
@Tony Jay:
Sounds about normal – for this maladministration.
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
I believe that John understands that we have far, far more to be mad about than each other. One person – with power to screw us all, one insane, pompous, arrogant person with a seeming IQ of 12. (And no I did not leave out any digits….) deserves the mad side of 300 million humans. (Likely, he’ll still have the support of some. No one knows or understands why)
Ruckus
@Professor Bigfoot:
AND IT WASN’T ME!!
It very rarely is.
Kayla Rudbek
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I think this may violate the Anti Deficiency Act (and set up a host of problems as you say). “Who owns a man; the one who rules him or the one that pays him?” David Eddings wrote
Kayla Rudbek
@Kosh III: anything involving AI is something that I won’t use if I have any other choices. Too many problems with data security and then the environmental impacts as well…