The fact that the suspect is in custody, and not dead, makes me wonder if this was an op.

TIL. Somehow, I never realized yerba mate has caffeine. I’ll have to try some eventually.

How exactly do you expect a country of any significant size to effectively enact communism without anything resembling a state apparatus?

As an evergreen reminder, if the Democrats cared about single-payer healthcare, they’d have enacted it in the states where they control the legislative and executive branches (like California).

Right. I’m not saying everyone who shows up has nefarious intent, but I do think the national security state will take advantage, and is maybe even counting on people showing up to protest. I think we’re facing a race right now, for leftists to sufficiently organize before the crackdown comes.

The idea of “signing up” for a protest just smacks of surveillance.

Maybe it’s the paranoiac in me, but I swear these particular “protests” exist to build a dissident list of people to imprison/exterminate later.

Oh, absolutely. As the empire collapses, all that CIA violence will come home to roost. Anyone who hasn’t yet done so should read The Jakarta Method - it’s going to get really ugly.

And younger people have a less favorable view of Israel. Zionists are definitely behind the panopticon push, but I don’t think it’s going to change hearts and minds. I’m not sure they care about that, though. If they can shut people up, even if they’re still despised, maybe that’s good enough for them.

Given Ken Klippenstein’s recent article about the FBI pursuing terrorism investigations against minors, I don’t think this is coincidence. I think they actually want to cut teens off from viewpoints that oppose the regime.

Frankly, I’m not convinced there will be one either. I suppose we’ll see soon enough.

Maybe their plan is to only allow one more election cycle. The capitalist class has dispensed with many of their other ruses already, so why not one more?

Necessary, yes. Furthering our knowledge of the cosmos is a worthwhile pursuit for its own sake. That being said, the sudden focus on NASA is pure political distraction, a clumsy attempt to foment nationalism that isn’t going to be as effective as its architects were hoping.

I too hate this trend. A robotic voice answering the phone didn’t bother me, but now some companies have replaced those with AI systems and I find myself becoming frustrated and angry much more quickly with the latter.

It drives me up the walls when people tell me they’re using AI to write their emails now. If you thought USians were stupid already, give it a few more years of AI usage! You can just see people’s eyes glassing over when you try to discuss anything of import. We’ve seen AI-induced psychosis, but I predict we’ll see a rise in dementia rates if we don’t put an end to this.

Edited to add: after some reflection, I think what makes me so angry is the apparent assumption by whatever megacorp implements these that I, their customer, am stupid enough to be fooled or influenced positively by this. It’s condescending.

He should ask the last group of countries that strove to be neutral between the USA and a second large power how well that worked for them.

To describe the American justice system as “imperfect” is something of a massive understatement. Who is actually bound by the law? Any allowance of set monetary penalties shows that the laws exist to bind workers, not owners. If a $500 fine is enough to bankrupt a worker, but is pocket change for the owner, then can that really be called ‘justice’?

And who is the law enforced against? People of color, and workers, predominantly. In some parts of the USA, a poor black man can wind up serving a life sentence for selling some marijuana, a crime most people would agree does not merit that punishment, while a rich white man can defraud millions of their life’s savings and not serve a day in prison. That injustice is structural; it’s not an accident.

And if a man commits no crime, that is no guarantee he will not be convicted of one, as we have seen time and time again. For-profit prisons have need of their enslaved workforce, and the system will provide them. As we’re constantly saying on here, the purpose of a system is what it does, not what it claims to do.

They’ve already stopped exports of rare earths to US arms manufacturers. They’re the largest producer of gallium by several orders of magnitude, if I remember correctly, so it won’t be easy to find an alternative.

This is just FUD to herd people into areas where they’re easier to track. Do they really think we’ve forgotten about Snowden? I also highly doubt any of these elected officials give a damn about privacy.

Anyone in upper management or in an executive role, cops, and HR personnel.

Even while I was still a clueless lib, when I saw insurance companies sponsoring the DNC, I knew we’d never get publicly-funded healthcare.