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I knew who Ben Shaprio was because he seems to be everywhere. I've heard of the Daily Wire, I just wasn't aware that it was this big thing. I guess they even got into the movie production business? I guess if it goes out of business he has the usual options like Fox, OAN, NewsMax, begging for money on Twitter, begging for money for his Patreon on YouTube, getting paid by College Republicans to incite riots on university campuses, etc., etc.

My wife and I went to a matinee and saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice last fall, that was my only adult movie trip since 2016 or something like that. Movies in general ... I usually take my kids to the $5 midday matinee of kid flicks the theatre runs during the summer. Will probably do it again this summer. I don't know if it was because I was a teen who went to the movies 1-2 times a week in the 90s but I just find the newer flicks too noisy, too cookie cutter and too fan servicey. I kind of liked going to the movies and watching Striptease one week and Independence Day the next and that being it instead of nonendings teasing the next sequel.

So, what leadership model will you use? Cool and disciplined TV series Captain Kirk or hot headed and order disobeying Movie Captain Kirk?

I prefer Death 'n' roll Entombed to Left Hand Path Entombed. Actually, I tried to like Left Hand Path Entombed and walked away bored.

Explain what the Daily Wire is to me. Is it a blog or a podcast?

Man, if only we had an agreement with other countries to circumvent China ... oh wait, we did have that agreement called the TPP and Trump torpedoed it.

To be fair, doesn't pretty much everything we have today start as wishful thinking? Trumpism started as wishful thinking with the far right decades before it manifested. The Great Society -- pretty much the same story but an earlier time frame. The Civil Rights movement was wishful thinking centuries before it happened. Putting a person on the moon just a fantasy for thousands of years. You never know what little bit of wishful thinking can turn into "something." Of course, that something may not manifest for a few hundred years but you can still put it out there and it makes it down the chain even though nobody will ever have an idea it came from you. We have no idea where the idea that "genocide is wrong" and "women are people too" came from, probably just some forgotten person mentioning it one day around someone that heard and told someone else and so on until it was eventually written and then eventually accepted and then eventually acted upon ... kind of like the chaos theory of a butterfly flapping its wings. Where is fucking Gaius? He'd be a novel into this right now arguing from whatever wing he decided to be at that point.

Source: Trump tariff pause sends markets soaring, with S&P 500 seeing one of biggest days since second world war – business live

As expected, his sheeple are bleating "just as planned!"

I remember in 2008 when Joe Horn shot and killed two fleeing unarmed burglars who were no threat to him and got off scott free. At the time, I knew a veteran guy who moved from Missouri to Texas for college. When it happened, he said he wasn't totally surprised after living there for less than a year. Of Texas he said "people are a special kind of mean down here" when it came to the character of people thought the moral option was killing two guys instead of just letting them run away with a TV. When I hear of pieces of shit like Abbot and Paxton, I think back to that moment because it pretty much what really led me to think of Texans as on a level of badness that no other state was even close to ... until Florida started making a name for itself over similar shit less than a decade later.

Alright wannabe policy makers and constitutional experts, lets see you flex. Misinformation - Incorrect or misleading information. aka, mistakenly saying something you misheard or non-bad intentioned wrong belief. Disinformation - misleading content deliberately spread to deceive people, or to secure economic or political gain and which may cause public harm. This is about Disinformation NOT Misinformation, so understanding the difference is key. The current supreme court holds that disinformation is covered by the first amendment. The question is: Should it be? Please explain your answer. Both legal and moral arguments are acceptable. If you don't think disinformation is protected, say how you what should of laws should be in place against it, how they should be enforced and what punishments are appropriate. Have fun!

I can get why people call Trump charming. I've met people who've gotten money out of him for this charity or that. Musk ... I don't know if I've ever heard anyone call him "charming." Dude's pick-up line is "how would you like to have my baby through artificial insemination." Musk isn't a vessel for his followers like Trump is. He couldn't do like Trump and tell one of his fans "let me shit in your mouth" without losing that fan. That's why I referred to him as a mascot -- Musk's fans seem to see him as the guy in the costume rallying the fans while Trump is the quarterback who can do no wrong. Musk could be replaced by the next guy with $200 billion willing to put on the costume while Trump is the only reason many of his people even show up to polls. Even when Trump looked OLD and weak during that messed up press thing with Musk and his kid, the main thing I heard from his people was "wasn't that so cute, he was acting like a grandpa!" Trump just has this ability to warp reality for the people that love him ... I don't think anyone loves Musk. Anyway, I think Musk is waning. Twitter is repulsive to most people. Teslas are shitty cars. He is losing his ability to keep saying "this will be real in five years, invest in me." SpaceX keeps blowing up rockets. Next year, he might not even be one of the top five richest people in the world depending on how bad Tesla suffers.

I disagree that it's conditional with is core, who are probably 1/4-1/3 of the voting public. After "Liberation Day" the attempts to offer explanations and rationalizations have disappeared. It's all just "Trust Trump" now. I don't see people doing that with Elon. I don't think Elon is smart enough to know that going after Trump directly on Twitter would be bad for him. He paid $44 billion for all these friends and he doesn't want to lose valuable allies like catturd2. He'd probably go after people in the administration who his Twitter base doesn't like, which would start being a big headache for Trump. Elon is more like a mascot than a cult leader. Elon and Trump differ in that Trump created a cult in MAGA and Elon just became the face of something that was already there. If Elon went to bed one night and didn't wake up, not much would change with his people, they'd just keep doing what they were doing and increase their Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson listening. If the same thing happened to Trump, his movement would just fall apart because it was all centered around him. I don't think that Musk is really a threat to Trump's cult. Trump can get his people to turn on a dime against someone and I don't think Musk is an exception to that. Musk does have a lot of fans but, like I said, I don't think the relationship is like Trump.

Musk isn't going to step out into the shadows. He wants to be recognized as a genius. He loves the attention. He spent $44 billion on Twitter so he could have friends that would tell him nice things about himself. He uses props on stages in front of crowds because he loves the attention. The dude is a narcissist and isn't going to step back. He is going to distort things and cry a little bit, then try to get attention again. It's bad for Trump in that he's tied himself to someone just like him, except the narcissism turned up to 11. I think there is a bit of fear as to what would happen if Trump didn't act delicately and E.M. started going after members of the administration to his followers.

I wonder how these guys are going to fare when the inevitable time Trump is not there comes and all anyone remembers them for is having their mouths placed firmly on his anus with muffled "more sir" over and over?

Man, he's in his 50s too. I don't know about any other guys here, but since I've turned 40 almost a decade ago now, I've found my need for bathroom breaks have increased. Kudos to him for taking the challenge at 55. Still sucks that I was 39 when Trump first became president and will be 51 when he leaves the presidency ... if he does it when he's supposed to.

Israel has pretty much made any two-state solution impossible by the way it has gobbled up Palestinian territory. Look at a map of the West Bank and at least a third of it has been "settled." Plus, neither side wants a two-state solution and has been pretty vocal about it. The only way a two-state solution is going to happen is if the rest of the world agrees to impose it upon them and stop arming both sides, which isn't going to happen. Kind of weird that the the world is probably just going to stand aside and let the Palestinians be purged from Gaza and then still stand aside when they finally go full force into the West Bank. What's after that? Kicking out the Arabs who've been living as Israeli citizens? Bibi is probably watching what Trump's doing and thinking "Hey, I need that El Salvador guy's number."

AI is stupid. It's not really an "artificial intelligence" as much as an "automated intelligence." The whole thing with its inevitable takeover in the next few years is overstated. The companies are selling and making promises that whole work forces are going to be replaced thanks to AI and a bunch of people who read too much scifi are pissing themselves over the singularity. What's really going to happen is AI is going to fail to deliver on its promises, crash, burn and the economy is going to be hit by another wrecking ball because of it.

Trump seems to get fixated on things and unable to let them go. It's like they take over his mind, like fentanyl, tariffs and Greenland. If he had any sort of strategy, he would've been trying to find a way to pull the wool over everyone's eyes on Social Security and Medicaid. He didn't do that, he just kept pressing with his obsessions. The only thing that seems to have made him stagger on tariffs is the stock market, which he seems even more obsessed with as it is his personal barometer of how well he is doing.

Seriously, who watches 100 minutes of anyone talking without being a cult member or a superfan? If you've ever read Rape of the Mind by Joost Meerloo, he talks about how leaders using longwinded speeches are using a form of sledgehammer to break mental resistance as well as re-enforce loyalty. It's something leaders like Hitler and Stalin did but its especially a thing with the North Koreans who've built a state centered around a cult of personality, which I think is what Trump truly desires.

Apparently there were a bunch of articles about him and the KGB that went out today or yesterday and then suddenly disappeared. I tried to view one at the Daily Beast and only got the 401 page.

God, I'm older than Trump now than he was when this scene was filmed.

Man, Thursday nights ... I think that used to be Adult Swim night back in 2001, right? Of course, the only anime they played was Cowboy Bebop at that time. I think there was Midnight Run still going on the other nights with Outlaw Star and Big O? Anyway, probably not going to make much of a dent in things. Hardly anyone watches AXS and Adult Swim is swirling the drain along with other linear cable networks. I think if this happened on a a free TV channel like Comet TV or MeTV, it'd have more impact.

I don't know if I call it optimism but I expect MAGA not to outlive Trump because: 1. Republicans hate each other and the power vacuum left behind when Trump is gone will probably destroy the party's current incarnation 2. Trump hasn't picked a successor but has appointed a lot of people with ambitions to be president to his cabinet and VP. Anyone who thinks that Vance, Rubio, Burgum, Noem, etc. are going to just step aside for the sake of Unity is fooling themselves. Then there's the ambitious outside of his cabinet like Tom Cotton and others who have more or less been molded into being a future Republican presidential candidate since they took office ... which is weird because Cotton is a robotic and uncharismatic bore. 3. They've counted on everyone who voted for them to NOT be people that need some form of government assistance to make it by, which is backfiring. 4. Trump is deteriorating right before our eyes. He can't keep hiding his age forever. 5. Trump isn't interested in the job of governing. He's lazy and wants other people to do the work for him but wants that work to benefit him personally. It's why he's allowed Musk to run rampant even though DOGE has been a bigger and bigger liability every day. It doesn't matter how many bots on social media tell you Elon is a genius at everything and DOGE is saving money, people are feeling it or scared they're going to feel it. 6. Parents will be pissed when he takes PBS Kids away.

I don’t think he’ll have the support to even try again in 2028, especially if his approval ratings keep declining. I also don’t think he has the force of will to pull it off. Just look at that Elon/booger kid press conference—Trump looked weak and small. His head slumped to his chest, and he just looked old. I doubt he’ll be in any condition to lead the fight for a third term—not that it matters since he hasn’t even chosen a successor. When he’s gone, the Republicans—who already despise each other—will turn on one another, and it will be glorious.