Trump has plenty of experience as a human trafficker, but those were underage models in his little fake modeling agency, Trump Model Management, which was a friendly competitor to Epstein’s MC2 Model Management.

But I can understand him not wanting to draw on that experience here. That and Hegaeth is a murderous fuck, and he was the one awake enough to give the order.

After an 11-minute car ride with no video. Suddenly, there’s a gun in the side pocket, one that was conveniently overlooked before.

Trump and Nixon, Hegaeth and Kissinger.

I’ll say the Kissinger was worse, if only because he seemed to be accepted by polite society.

Hegseth’s an unlikable alcoholic whose only command experience was in the early 2000s as a lieutenant.

His entire time as a captain was in a teaching position, and he phoned in his time as a major. Or rather he joined the DC national guard and was flagged as an insider threat because of his multiple white nationalist tattoos, so he quit.

So while Trump is unarguably more openly corrupt than Nixon, he also has surrounded himself with unqualified yes men who are often hated by their subordinates.

Allen Dulles, Sorry, he was the first civilian director of the CIA. I had misremembered that part. But yeah, he was the guy who pulled Kishe out of Prison to then rule Japan (and erase a lot of war crimes from their education system)

Yeah, that was never possible. Mostly due to the geography of the US.

As to the whole “if they could see the US now” bit, they could see it then.

The US before and after the Second World War was far too friendly with Nazis. The first head of the CIA was a Nazi and put a Japanese war criminal in charge of Japan.

The guy co-signed the declaration of war that launched the attack on pearl harbor, and that was the least of his crimes. The guy was pulled out of prison by the CIA and put in charge of the Japanese conservative party.

Now for the US behavior before WW1, the term Banana Republic was not originally referring to a clothing store. The US toppled multiple governments, so that fruit companies could literally take over.

Go earlier then that and you have genocide and slavery.

With all that said, Thomas Jefferson is the perfect founding father. A slave owner who wrote about freedom. A hypocrite of the highest order, who was called out on his bullshit at the time. Oh yeah, and a bit of a pedo. Sally Hemings was 14 when Jefferson started rapping her

Hemings was also the enslaved half sister of Jefferson’s wife.

Now, I can also do this sort of airing of dirty laundry for most of Europe, which is why no country of the time even thought to criticize the US.

As an aside, have you been following how Ukraine uses drones for anti personal attacks? Interesting stuff.

Yeah, the newly formed CIA of the postwar era actually pulled the man who signed the order for the attack on Pearl Harbor out of prison, to put him in charge of Japan’s conservative party, and with a heavy hand on the scales the leader of the country. All to fight off a group that wanted to unionize Japan’s workers so that they didn’t have to work themselves to death.

Basically everyone begged the CIA not to do this, and yet they did. Because the first leader of the CIA had been personal friends with several prominent Nazis, and had reportedly cried when America entered WW2 against the Nazis. The other Dulles brother wasn’t any better of a person.

Mob boss mentality.

Smart dictators try to breed both competence and loyalty. I’m glad that Trump and his handlers are not smart.

I think that was part of Gamer Gate. The toxic rightwing backlash to women existing on the internet, and not in porn. It was the exact same time period.

Could have been. Reddit never actually told us anything. One of the other mods got a private message on another channel (discord maybe?) from the missing mod about it. But details were light, and the missing mod never even tried to return to Reddit. Said the ban was good for his mental health.

Then there was some Subreddit specific drama, and Reddit admins actually did the good thing. Then the API change, the blackout, and a couple other things that specifically fucked over mods. So I too, mostly left.

I do indeed. I didn’t actually have an account back then, because I was mostly browsing from work… I also mostly frequented Digg until the 4.0 fiasco.

He was a Major. That’s not a rank with much in the way of responsibility. And he only served two years of weekends at that rank. The rest of the time at that rank was as an inactive reserve.

So his actual command experience was as a captain. That’s command of between 50 and 200 people.

Except that’s not true either, because Hegseth’s entire time as Captain was as a teacher in the counter insurgency school in Kabul.

So his only experience leading people seems to have been as a lieutenant, and I can tell you, no one respects a lieutenant.

So yeah, his entire reason for being picked for that role was his loyalty to Trump.

Every continent with people had some culture that took scalps.

If you expand that to any trophy taking… Well, the game knuckle bones might have started with sheep bones, but soldiers throughout the ages have played it with bones from humans.

All that said, the European Colonizers did pay bounties on scalps of anyone with native seeming hair and skin color.

Oddly, that was Spez, and when he went away for a bit, Reddit got really good. And then he came back and it went to shit.

Are you me? Because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I set my default browse experience to Top 6 hour and then scroll All.

I do miss the community aspect of Reddit. There were other users who I ran into regularly in the comments. And usually not in a hostile way.

Hell, there was one sub where I was invited to the mod team because of those interactions. I did that for a couple years and continued to be active in the sub until Reddit start pissing off mods. That and my main “friend” on the mod team had his account nuked by Reddit after he fell for a troll.

Reddit removed every comment he had ever made, including wonderful and well cited rebuttals of the right-wing bigotry of the day.

So yeah, I logged out of that reddit account and have never logged back in, instead I use a burner account and try not comment on anything.

The ghouls on the supreme court have ruled that to be banned, a punishment must be both cruel and unusual. If it’s cruel and common then it’s fine for certain types of cruelty. Like solitary confinement lasting weeks, or months, or even years in some cases.

There are more okay forms of cruelty, and a lot of things that are banned, but fewer banned things than anyone with human empathy would condone.

Probably nothing.

Larry Ellison also wants Warner Discovery. He’s kissed the ring so much that Trump has to wash the slobber off.

So we’ll see. Larry Ellison is the worst option here, even worse than media consolidation and price hikes, because Ellison wants to be the new Rupert Murdoch.

I’ve found that the more you know of the actual history of Israel, the more fucked up it all seems.

It was a machine, it was not an engine. At no scale could it be used to power anything. And it would actually be dangerous to scale things too much. We know because people tried.

The aeolipile was a toy. And yes, toys can showcase interesting physics. I owned several of them as a child, and own a few today as, arguably, an adult.

Still, the thing about invention is that it isn’t a flash of inspiration and a new thing appears, it’s more of a slog of learning new things and applying old things in new ways.

Most often in history the most striking inventions were new ways of getting the raw resources, or improving the quality of those resources.

You can’t have a steam engine without a way to consistently produce steel.