Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

T R E 4 5 O N

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

They spent the last eight months firing professionals and replacing them with ideologues.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

The lights are all blinking red.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

“woke” is the new caravan.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

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Sunday Morning Open Thread: Thank You, Bishop Budde

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Hey, it’s Sunday…Per the Washington Post, “What happens after you ask Trump to ‘have mercy’? Threats, praise and hope”: [gift link]

… It had been 12 days since the Right Rev. Mariann E. Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, pleaded with President Donald Trump to “have mercy” on immigrants, LGBTQ children and others who might be scared by his return to power.

Twelve days since the media storm began. Twelve days since praise started pouring in from around the world — and vitriol, too. Twelve days since a U.S. House member called for the New Jersey-born bishop to be “added to the deportation list.”

Now, Budde made her way to the altar for her first public service at the cathedral since that sermon, the final event of Trump’s inauguration. Congregants craned their necks and rose to their tiptoes. They stretched out their arms to snap a photograph…

Her direct appeal to Trump on that January day — some 24 hours after he had ascended to the highest office in the land for the second time — ushered in a deluge of reactions.

Was it a moment of political catharsis? An act of public resistance? An inappropriate politicization of the pulpit?

For Budde, it was an expression of basic Christian theology.

“It was rooted in Jesus,” she said, “not a partisan agenda.”

Trump demanded an apology and called her “nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.”

On Sunday, the cathedral appeared more full than for the post-inauguration service, which was not open to the public. The wooden chairs were packed with a diverse crowd of young and old: people who had walked to the cathedral from nearby homes and those who had driven upward of an hour and across state lines.

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War for Ukraine Day 1,080: That Didn’t Take Long

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As of 8:00 PM EST/3:00 AM local time in Ukraine, about 2/3rds of Ukraine is under air raid alert. And drone alerts are up for almost all of northern Ukraine.

Following on the beginning of last night’s update, it didn’t take long for another shoe to drop.

SCOOP: Kash Patel took $25,000 from a production company with ties to Russia propaganda activity to appear in an anti-FBI docuseries. He did not respond to questions about this.

www.motherjones.com/politics/202…

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— David Corn (@davidcorn.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 4:36 PM

From Mother Jones:

Last year, Kash Patel, the MAGA provocateur whom Donald Trump has nominated to head the FBI, received $25,000 from a Russia-linked production company to participate in a documentary in which he assailed the FBI and called for closing its headquarters.

In November, Tucker Carlson’s online network released a six-part series called All the President’s Men: The Conspiracy Against Trump that purported to chronicle the familiar MAGA conspiracy theory that a Deep State plotted against Donald Trump while he was a presidential candidate in 2016 and when he was president. The fourth episode focused on Patel and his years-long crusade to depict the Trump-Russia scandal—Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election and Donald Trump’s efforts to cover up its existence—as nothing but a total hoax orchestrated by nefarious Democrats and rogue government operatives.

In this film—which credits Patel as an executive producer—he offers a blistering attack on the FBI. He calls it a “corrupt” enterprise and claims it has been on the Democratic Party’s “payroll.” He says, “I’m the guy that’s going to tell you they need major reforms. I’m going to tell you to shut down the FBI headquarters building and open it up as a museum of the Deep State the next day. Seriously, you need 50 guys in Washington running the FBI.” He pushes the false claim that the FBI launched its Russia investigation in 2016 on the basis of the infamous and unconfirmed Steele memos. And he insists that the FBI and the rest of the US intelligence community that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election “knew it didn’t exist.” He also asserts that “globalists” have been working with Al Qaeda to make a profit.

The series was produced for Carlson, who is featured in the final episode, by Global Tree Pictures, a Los Angeles-based firm run by Ukrainian-American-Russian filmmaker Igor Lopatonok. He and Russian-born film director Vera Tomilova, the chief financial officer of Global Tree Pictures, who holds a US green card, are listed in the film’s credits as its producers. Global Tree raised the financing for the series, according to a contract filed in Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy proceedings. (Giuliani also starred in the documentary.)

Lopatonok has ties to Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts.

In recent years, he has helped lead a Kremlin-financed effort to persuade Westerners to move to Russia. In 2023, he chaired a competition dubbed “To Russia With Love” that invited bloggers to produce content that would show the “most appealing side of Russia” and encourage people to emigrate there. This project was funded by the Presidential Foundation for Cultural Initiatives, a state entity that Putin created in 2021 to “support projects in the field of culture, art and the creative industries.”

One of Lopatonok’s colleagues in this project was John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Palm Beach County, Florida, who received political asylum in Russia and who has been a key player in Russia’s disinformation operations against the West. In May, the New York Times reported, “Dougan has built an ever-growing network of more than 160 fake websites that mimic news outlets in the United States, Britain and France.” Dougan was listed on material as a member of the “Expert Council” of the “To Russia with Love” project and as a “mentor” for the winners.

Much more at the link.

Remember: money, ideology, compromise, ego. We’ve got money, ideology, and ego at play here.

And here we have money, ideology, and ego:

The firm was part of “the com,” aka 764, aka a CSAM (and other assorted cybercrimes) network

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— Meredith Rose (@mrose.ink) February 8, 2025 at 9:05 AM

From Krebs on Security:

Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration.

Wired first reported on Feb. 2 that one of the technologists on Musk’s crew is a 19-year-old high school graduate named Edward Coristine, who reportedly goes by the nickname “Big Balls” online. One of the companies Coristine founded, Tesla.Sexy LLC, was set up in 2021, when he would have been around 16 years old.

“Tesla.Sexy LLC controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” Wired reported. “One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market. While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review.”

On May 11, 2024, Rivage posted on a Discord channel for a DDoS protection service that is chiefly marketed to members of The Com. Rivage expressed frustration with his time spent on Com-based communities, suggesting that its profitability had been oversold.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of money to be made in the com,” Rivage lamented. “I’m not buying Heztner [servers] to set up some com VPN.”

Rivage largely stopped posting messages on Com channels after that. Wired reports that Coristine subsequently spent three months last summer working at Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant startup.

The trouble with all this is that even if someone sincerely intends to exit The Com after years of consorting with cybercriminals, they are often still subject to personal attacks, harassment and hacking long after they have left the scene.

That’s because a huge part of Com culture involves harassing, swatting and hacking other members of the community. These internecine attacks are often for financial gain, but just as frequently they are perpetrated by cybercrime groups to exact retribution from or assert dominance over rival gangs.

Experts say it is extremely difficult for former members of violent street gangs to gain a security clearance needed to view sensitive or classified information held by the U.S. government. That’s because ex-gang members are highly susceptible to extortion and coercion from current members of the same gang, and that alone presents an unacceptable security risk for intelligence agencies.

And make no mistake: The Com is the English-language cybercriminal hacking equivalent of a violent street gang. KrebsOnSecurity has published numerous stories detailing how feuds within the community periodically spill over into real-world violence.

When Coristine’s name surfaced in Wired‘s report this week, members of The Com immediately took notice. In the following segment from a February 5, 2025 chat in a Com-affiliated hosting provider, members criticized Rivage’s skills, and discussed harassing his family and notifying authorities about incriminating accusations that may or may not be true.

Much, much, much more after the link.

These guys are NAZIs. They’re also satanic, and I’m not talking the Church of Satan type of satanists either.

764 (previously CVLT and a subgroup of “the com“)[1][2][3][4] is a decentralized and transnational sextortion network with alleged ideological ties to the Order of Nine Angles, a right-wing Satanist terror network.[5] It is classified as a terror network by the U.S. Department of Justice, and is considered by the FBI as a “tier one” terrorist threat.[6] The RCMP also classifies 764 as an “ideological violent extremist network”, and it has been characterized as a “satanic neo-nazi cult” by multiple sources.[7][8][9][10] The network is most present on Discord and Telegram and usually targets children ages 8 to 17, particularly marginalized children or those suffering from mental health challenges.[11][12][13] 764 was founded in 2021 by Bradley Cadenhead, a teenager from Stephenville, Texas; the group derives its name from the town’s ZIP code.[14][1][15]

Victims are forced to commit recorded acts of self-harm to disseminate internally or share on social media platforms.[16][5] They are often asked to carve names on their skin as “cutsigns”, a form of branding to show their subjugation to the group.[10][17][12] They are given the end goal of committing suicide on livestream for the network’s entertainment or for the perpetrator’s own sense of fame within the network.[18][19]

Europol is chasing them. So is Canada. The US is, how long that lasts is anybody’s guess. This makes what Musk and his minions radically worse.

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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Saturday Night Open Thread: At Last, An ‘Oppressed Minority’ Trump Can Get Behind

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The press is going to Botha sides this…

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— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 6:27 PM

Thing is (and I will keep repeating this, because I’m stubborn) Elon Musk is *not* Afrikaner. He’s a soutpiel — his people are ‘English’/(and Canadian), a group that has always been suspected of having no loyalty to their adopted ‘homeland’. Ask the Afrikaners! Per the Washington Post:

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Groups representing some of South Africa’s white minority responded Saturday to a plan by President Donald Trump to offer them refugee status and resettlement in the United States by saying: thanks, but no thanks.

The plan was detailed in an executive order Trump signed Friday that stopped all aid and financial assistance to South Africa as punishment for what the Trump administration said were “rights violations” by the government against some of its white citizens…

The South African government has denied there are any concerted attacks on white farmers and has said that Trump’s description of the new land law is full of misinformation and distortions.

Afrikaners are descended from mainly Dutch, but also French and German colonial settlers who first arrived in South Africa more than 300 years ago. They speak Afrikaans, a language derived from Dutch that developed in South Africa, and are distinct from other white South Africans who come from British or other backgrounds.

Together, whites make up around 7% of South Africa’s population of 62 million…

Whites in South Africa still generally have a much better standard of living than Blacks more than 30 years after the end of the apartheid system of white minority rule in 1994. Despite being a small minority, whites own around 70% of South Africa’s private farmland. A study in 2021 by the South Africa Human Rights Commission said 1% of whites were living in poverty compared to 64% of Blacks…

I mean, my ancestors have only been in America for a century or so, but I’d resent an offer suggesting my American-born self should be ‘resettled’ to Liverpool, or maybe the Falklands, because it would make some anti-Gaelic bigot feel better about themselves!

sidney poitier and arthur ashe protesting apartheid in 1986 and teenage elon musk muttering to himself “i will make ten trillion dollars and fuck these people if it takes me the rest of my life”

— not an art thief (@famousartthief.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 11:08 PM

nelson mandela being released from robben island and teenage elon musk fucking crying his little eyes out

— not an art thief (@famousartthief.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 11:02 PM

How long before they are burning Nelson Mandela in effigy at Trump rallies?

— Kid Phantasm (@kidphantasm.bsky.social) February 8, 2025 at 8:44 AM

So we're revoking Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans escaping horrific repression & economic chaos at the hands of a dictatorship, but encouraging the immigration of specifically white South Africans due to a democratic law governed by independent courts aimed at remediating apartheid. Huh.

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— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) February 7, 2025 at 7:09 PM

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Too Many Protest Singers, Not Enough Protest Songs

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In case you haven’t noticed, we’re going to start posting protest sign pictures on the bottom right of the “right rail” ===>>>>

You can send them to me:  [email protected].  If you can, make sure there are no faces legible, but if you can’t crop a picture or blur, just send the over, my Photoshop skills are poor but adequate for the task.

WaterGirl is going to rotate them every couple of days.   I’ve uploaded a few already but it will be fun to see what’s happening at protests that you’re attending.

Open Thread - Send Your Protest Sign Pics
Loveland, CO – via the cyberstuck subreddit.

Here’s some news about the WankPanzer / SwastiKKKar / DivorceWagon:

A new analysis by independent automotive blog FuelArc suggests that fire fatalities are 17 times more likely in a Cybertruck than in the infamous Ford Pinto — the posterchild of deadly cars if ever there was one.

The site arrives at that conclusion by comparing the total units sold so far — 34,438 for the Cybertruck, compared to 3,173,491 for the ill-fated Pinto, discontinued in 1980 — and comparing reported fire fatalities for both.

At the current rate of horrible fiery deaths, FuelArc projects the Cybertruck will have 14.52 fatalities per 100,000 units — far eclipsing the Pinto’s 0.85. (In absolute terms, FuelArc found, 27 Pinto drivers died in fires, while five Cybertruck drivers have suffered the same fate, at least so far.)

A base model Pinto sold for $2K in 1970, which is roughly $16K in 2025.  IncelCaminos start at $80K.

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Keeping Up With Events in the Middle East with all the Turmoil Here at Home?

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A couple of weeks ago  Geminid wrote a comment on Syria that got me thinking about how to keep up with events in the Middle East when I can’t even keep up with what’s happening here at home.

Just wondering who seems to still be able to follow events in the Middle East and whether those of you who are interested and trying to keep up might share some of your knowledge and thoughts and resources in this thread.

And if that doesn’t grab you, feel free to talk about what’s happening in that neck of the woods with like-minded people.

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Smearing Poop on the Wall

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Maybe in the scheme of things, this isn’t that big a deal. (I honestly can’t keep up anymore.) Unlike other Trusk-Mump actions, this possibly illegal gambit won’t directly contribute to deaths from disease or starvation or put public safety at risk. It’s a pettier form of vandalism, more like rioters smearing poop on the walls of the Rotunda than beating up DC cops. (NYT)

Trump Says He Will Dismiss Kennedy Center Board Members and Install Himself as Chair
The move by the president, whose authority to make the changes was not clear, is the latest attempt to bring a Washington institution under his control.

President Trump announced his intention on Friday to bring the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington more firmly under his control, saying he would dismiss several board members and install himself as chairman.

“At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform.

Mr. Trump said he would “immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”

He added: “We will soon announce a new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP.”

After the majority of voters had the good sense to punt Trump in 2020, I remember thinking he was leaving an indelible orange shit stain on our national fabric anyway, even if we tried to tell ourselves he was an aberration. He and his horrible tacky, grasping family would remain an inescapable part of our history.

Well, they were more inescapable than I ever imagined, and here we are. This grotesquerie’s “Golden Age in Arts and Culture” will be the nightmare puke-stream AI barfs up after ingesting the decorating aesthetic of Liberace, the collected paintings of Jon Naughton and the musical oeuvre of Lee Greenwood. In other words, poop on the wall.

Open thread.

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Open Thread: Nice to Know It’s Working

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Lawmakers flooded with thousands of calls per hour as constituents demand answers about Elon Musk. Keep it going!
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202…

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— Silvija (still) stands with Ukraine (@svecrumba.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 5:03 PM

Per the Washington Post, “‘It is a deluge on DOGE’” [gift link]:

Constituents have flooded the phone lines at the U.S. Capitol this week, many of them asking questions about billionaire Elon Musk “feeding USAID into the wood chipper” and his access to government systems.

Senators’ phone systems have been overloaded, lawmakers said, with some voters unable to get through to leave a message. The outpouring of complaints and confusion has put pressure on lawmakers to find out more about Musk’s project, heightening tensions between the billionaire tech mogul and the government.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said the Senate’s phones were receiving 1,600 calls each minute, compared with the usual 40 calls per minute. Many of the calls she’s been receiving are from people concerned about U.S. DOGE Service employees having broad access to government systems and sensitive information. The callers are asking whether their information is compromised and about why there isn’t more transparency about what is happening, she said…

“It is a deluge on DOGE,” said Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota). “Truly our office has gotten more phone calls on Elon Musk and what the heck he’s doing mucking around in federal government than I think anything we’ve gotten in years. … People are really angry.”

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said he’s been hearing from constituents “constantly” on DOGE and Musk. “We can hardly answer the phones fast enough. It’s a combination of fear, confusion and heartbreak, because of the importance of some of these programs.”…

Open Thread: Nice to Know That It's Working 1

(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)

Lawmakers, including Republicans, have asked for clarity from the White House about the scope of Musk’s team’s access to data, including classified and personal information, this week. Some also expressed confusion about what is going on.

“A lot of people think that Elon Musk is off the chain and causing all kinds of havoc,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) said on the Senate floor Thursday. “I haven’t seen that yet.”

Tillis said that he was assured that no one without proper clearances is accessing classified information and that DOGE employees are not looking at detailed individual payment data, but rather just how the payments are processed, echoing the White House’s statements. He defended Musk but also noted that he has “put out social media posts that are incorrect,” which have fed into the concerns. “So he probably needs to tighten it up,” Tillis said…

Open Thread: Nice to Know That It's Working

(Matt Davies via GoComics.com)

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