_lost_username_

Boy, you need to go get you some.

I hate to sound like one of those people back when I was a kid who said "well back in my day ..." but I don't know how you can't feel that way with the hyper-targeting of kids, particularly girls, when it comes to cosmetic products on social media and everywhere else: Source: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025/nov/16/dermatologists-criticise-dystopian-skincare-products-aimed-at-children

Apparently, his days are spent giving an ongoing monologue that never seems to end in the Oval Office. He keeps talking and people just kind of do their thing around him.

He's not going to run. Outside of sports, the only place he seems to show up with any frequency is News Nation along with such names as Bill O' Reilly, Chris Cuomo and some other has beens. That network might hit 100K on a good night. Nowhere near the viewership when it was WGN ... even the final days when it was playing Blue Bloods marathons that drew an average of 300K viewers. What's this guy got anyway? He is a critic with no opposing vision, kind of like an internet contrarian except you see them brought to life on TV.

I can't find the exact article because I heard about it on Skeptics Guide to the Galaxy but people will stick with conspiracy theories and Trump no matter what is put in front of them for two primary reasons: 1. Conspiracy theories are, at least in part, responses to group-based threats. It's not so much the threat as it is that they have become part of a community and the desire not to be isolated from that community outweighs facts or the well-being of people outside of the group. 2. A lot of people are so invested in their "movement" or conspiracy theories that they don't want to back down. Honestly, I think a lot of this can be traced back to the mobile devices. The way they keep you engaged is both the feeling of community and stoking your emotions. It's not like before when you're shown to be utterly wrong about something and your response is to disengage for a while and come back when things are cooled and act like you had just sort of disagreed but not totally all along. Plus, people are addicted to the little approval icons like the thumbs up and hearts. Just staying most of these MAGA people would probably not be what they are now if it weren't for the ability for entities to brainwash and propagandize 24/7 via remote.

According to what I've read, Putin is trying to avoid sending ethnic Russians to the front lines, thus all the recruiting and conscription in Siberia and international mercs.

He doesn't need to have a functioning brain, he just needs a pulse. By the end of this we're going to be in a cycle of Mrs. Wilsons.

Our food pantry (part of a community action agency) relies on federal funds and because they aren't coming, we can't buy food. So, the people who are being told to go to our pantry are going to be out of luck. I don't expect private donations to cover everything, especially since the coming economic disaster means people are going to hold on to money instead of spend it.

Well, under-oath depositions ought to be interesting. So much for whoever said that the Daily Beast pulling the story discredits him: Link: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/author-michael-wolff-files-suit-melania-trump-jeffrey-epstein-threat-rcna239257

Michael Wolff is credible as far as he has sources around Trump that like to blab to him. He is a biographer, not a journalist. He is not going to be held to the same standard as a news reporter when it comes to information he was given. Much of what he reports is going to be hearsay and of course those it embarrasses are going to scramble to protect themselves, particularly when it come to Trump. Trump himself also willingly spent hours blabbing to Michael Wolff. He pretty much became a fixture in the White House by just hanging out in the halls and waiting areas. He spent more time than any writer around Epstein (who wanted Wolff to write his biography) recording around 100 hours with Epstein, so is probably the best source on that world than any other.

The best alternative to Musk's takeover of Twitter was not BlueSky, it was finding something else to do offline with that time wasted arguing with bots and trolls. By this time next year, at least 90 percent of the content you see on any social media is going to be AI or bot generated and the only reason they have engagement is that their algorithm has adapted to triggering you for engagement. That's why they shove people like "Edith Stein" in front of you.

Miller is there because Trump doesn't really get MAGA, according to Michael Wolfe. Trump is just interested in punishing people and institutions he believe destroyed him. Trump always wanted to be a Hollywood person and saw himself as someone that could hang with the art crowd but his publicity stunt to get higher ratings for his show backfired and he actually won, becoming a pariah to the people he wanted to be around him. He really, really hates the kind of people he sees in MAGA because he came up in a social class that looked down their noses at the people that make up the base of that and laughed at the people who claimed to be their intellectuals. Now he is sort of stuck with both and I think that is what bothers him the most.

He's a 79 year old man that looks like he could keel over any day. Of course you mention death with him, it's going to be taken literal. If I looked like that, I'd expect the same. Also, has he stopped dying his hair?

Na, the more people think that, the longer he will live. Hate and the best medical care any American could have is probably going to keep him going even after he forgets how to talk, move and whatever else. We'll probably just see less and less of him until all we see is JD Vance and Stephen Miller.

Man, Tr*mp has been escalating the crazy talk three days in a row now. He's always been losing it but I'd like to know why. Is it because the whole Kirk thing, as expected, didn't pan out in the total dedication and adoration he expected? Did he get bad news as far as his health? Or is his addled brain just stuck in drive at the moment?

You know, the money is one thing but the power that people, that means both Republicans and Democrats, have handed over to this new billionaire class is what's really brought us to this point. They are what the end game of the Powell Manifesto, people so wealthy that they pretty much can assert their will on the country no matter how the people vote. It's so entrenched now that it's hard to see how voting will ever end it. There currently isn't a desire to see it or a will to change it but there's a point where the quality of life and the amount of power between the wealthy and not wealthy is so imbalanced that you have a France 1789 situation.

There are only two things that seemed to break through from the whole thing, Erika Kirk's forgiveness and Tr*mp saying he hated his opponents. Everything else was pretty much as expected. It is probably going to stick with some of the people whose lives center around that world without other people to regulate them. Those are the people who tend to do the retaliatory thing against perceived enemies — especially dangerous now with the blessing of the guy they see as their leader.

So, over the next few weeks I'm going to guess that Tr*mp will forget about Kirk cause his addled brain can't seem to keep people who aren't perceived as enemies in his long term memory. Turning Point after it's massive flood in donations will fade away because the type of men that Kirk recruited aren't going to follow a woman, even if it's his wife. Kirk himself is going to be brought up forever by the the dwindling group of people who can't move on.

if anyone didn't know: Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/sep/22/donald-trump-charlie-kirk-autism-us-politics-live-news-updates?page=with%3Ablock-68d10e238f0860647077a0da#block-68d10e238f0860647077a0da

Honestly, the self-interest reason makes me feel better than the "I'm for free speech because I believe in free speech reason." People who profess to believe in abstractions without self-interest tend to be unpredictable when the g*n is pointed at them.

What good comes out of any administration using its power to suppress criticism and political enemies? Obama tried this to a lesser degree than T***p against Fox News and conservative nonprofits and it blew up in his face. One difference was that it was safe to give Obama the finger. Different story now. It hasn't done that for T***p yet because he has been able to just beat the resistance out of pretty much everyone. There isn't a resistance to him as much as people waiting around for cholesterol to finish what it started.

It's not invasive to Mauritius, it was killed by invasive species.: I expect the plan is to keep them in a confined environment and then move them to a protected area in Mauritius if they pull it off. There's current living species that should be prioritized though through habitat preservation and regulation. Colossal Bioscience is kind of questionable. They do a lot of press releases and the fake dire wolf (they created wolves with some dire wolf features but dire wolves are not part of the wolf family so wouldn't have looked like that ) stunt in order to generate donations. Plus, they're based in Texas if that tells you anything. I'm all for returning species that were rendered extinct due to humans as long as there is a way to re-introduce them to their habitats and not be just killed all over again, requiring these cloning companies to become like puppy mills for extinct animals.

I imagine Kimmel has a contract and can just sit at home and collect a paycheck. Disney could offer a buyout and he could say "no." What sucks about all this is just realizing how difficult it can be getting away from big media without being cut off from the most economic connection to what's going on in the world and the most popular form of entertainment.

Ridiculous. They'd own three out of the four Big Four broadcast channels in the city closest to me, with Sinclair owning the single ABC affiliate. I used to work for Nexstart. They don't pay well, turnover is bad and they love to cut everything to the bare bones and automate wherever they can. This deregulation of media is probably the worst thing that happened as far as the US is concerned in the 1990s ... which I remember being the most optimistic decade of my life. Broadcast sucks, cable sucks, streaming sucks, podcasts suck, YouTube and imitators suck. Once you have billionaires in charge, the little guys and the independent guys disappear and you're left with influencers and, ugh, content.

Got to give him credit. If there's one thing more politically dangerous than being against Trump, it's being a Republican against Trump. They've really stepped up the campaign to primary him, with a Republican named in the Epstein files being one of the ones funding it.