Monterey Bay Aquarium
ellievsbear
roma★
occasionally subtle
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
🪼
tannertan36
tumblr dot com
we're not kids anymore.
Claire Keane
ojovivo
Jules of Nature
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PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
taylor price
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Origami Around
hello vonnie
Misplaced Lens Cap
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@truthdogg
Raising Epstein from the dead was certainly a, um, choice.
As were the attacking figures coming from the sky. This is one of the most deliberately demonic images I’ve ever seen. At this point it’s like he’s trolling his supporters to see what they’ll tolerate.
US & Israeli bombs have killed an estimated two thousand people in Iran so far. The idea that Iranians want US & Israeli attacks on their infrastructure would be laughable if not so grimly serious.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party have somehow managed to take one of the world’s absolute worst regimes—one that literally uses cranes to hang gay men in gruesome public spectacles, one that kills young women who allow the sun to shine on their hair then bills their families for the bullets—and made people across the globe root for these monsters to win.
This is one of the biggest failures in international diplomacy and global relations the US has ever committed. It rivals that of Abu Ghraib or My Lai, not in visceral brutality but in its abject stupidity, made worse because it cannot be dismissed as the actions of a few deranged individuals. It is the official policy of the United States, and its implementation by a foul collection of pedophiles and sexual abusers has meant that there was never any moral high ground to lose.
From the moment of the first attacks, the undeniable evidence of Trump’s sickening abuse of women and girls immediately framed his wanton decision to bomb another nation as that of a cornered rapist pedophile attempting to change the subject. That is the inevitable narrative not only in the US, but around the world, and the expected result of putting such a person in office. “Rapist pedophiles lashing out” is now the basic way the entire US government is perceived globally, by everyone from the common person on the street to diplomats and presidents.
And the worst part is that it’s not even wrong. This administration fills its appointments based on loyalty, following the classic authoritarian approach that the unqualified are the most loyal, and that the compromised can be controlled. That has led to an entire government comprised of podcasters and activists who spend meetings competing for the title of biggest sycophantic suckup instead of raising issues and solving problems. The only problem they seek to address is how to tighten their grip.
The Democrats, meanwhile, have been voted into oblivion by a populace obsessed with humiliation and vengeance, who see Walter White and Tony Soprano as heroes to emulate instead of the cautionary tales that they were meant to be. The letter above is one of the few things they can do, and even that stays hidden from the public by a media bent on seeking approval and focused on its bottom line.
By Michele Walker-Harmon
The Strait of Hormuz, where those four ships had been stationed for 35 years, now contains an unknown number of Iranian naval mines.
The ships that existed to clear them are being scrapped.
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Any military is only as good as its leadership. Trump & Hegseth appear determined to destroy the capabilities of the US armed forces. By firing capable & experienced commanders, by decommissioning needed ships, by pushing religious missions onto troops, and by stating illegal wars with no strategy for how to complete them.
Every day Trump is president, Americans are measurably less safe.
Iran may have needed help to move forward, but there’s simply no way that any govt supported by the US & Israel will ever be seen as legitimate.
If this govt is in fact toppled we are only setting Iran up for decades of war & even greater oppression. Even the Trump Admin has said that if Khamenei were to fall he’d be replaced by worse.
A competent multinational coalition working on behalf of Iranians at massive expense for many years might be able to help make a transition to a peaceful govt. That isn’t remotely what we have here.
It’s mind boggling that anyone imagines Trump could be successful with this. He lashes out, then moves on. It’s what he’s done his entire life.
The Iranian people deserve far, far better than what is about to happen there.
Repeat after me: THIS IS CONSERVATISM.
US conservatism—yes, including fiscal conservatism—has one primary goal, and that is to conserve and enforce the existing social hierarchy.
Note that fiscal conservatives never introduce policy for balancing budgets or saving money. Ever. Instead they focus on cuts that undermine the economy to the benefit of their wealthiest donors.
Consistently for over a century, their focus has been on killing programs that benefit the public in some way, or that save costs by pooling resources. They push for privatization, which always results in higher costs after implementation. They push for deregulation, which costs all of us in the form of monopolistic price gouging, reduced competition, physical injuries, and even deaths. They push for shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to the poor.
“Fiscally conservative” does not mean “fiscally responsible.” Strike that from your vocabulary. It’s a dangerous and destructive lie.
Decree banning the use of blackletter font, 1941
For general notice I announce the following by order of the Führer:
It is false to regard or describe the so-called Gothic typeface as a German typeface. In reality the so-called Gothic typeface consists of Schwabacher-Jewish letters.
Just as they later came to own the newspapers, the Jews living in Germany also owned the printing presses when the printing of books was introduced and thus came about the strong influx into Germany of Schwabacher-Jewish letters.
Today the Führer, in a discussion with Herr Reichsleiter Amann [Reich Leader for the Press] and the printing company owner Herr Adolf Muller, decided that Antiqua [Roman] type is henceforth to be designated as the standard typeface. Gradually, all printed matter should be converted to this standard typeface. As soon as possible in regard to school textbooks, only the standard script will be taught in village and elementary schools.
The use of Schwabacher-Jewish letters by authorities will in future cease; certificates of appointment for officials, stree signs, and the like, will in future only be produced in standard lettering.
By order of the Führer, Herr Reichsleiter Amann will first change over to the standard script those newspapers and magazines that already have foreign circulation or whose foreign circulation is desired.
sga. M. Bormann
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/rubio-stages-font-coup-times-new-roman-ousts-calibri-2025-12-09/
If you’ve ever thought that the Trump Administration is scapegoating diversity in much the same way the Nazis scapegoated Jewish people, they’re even copying them in mundane items like font choices.
(Also it’s interesting & odd that the Nazi decree still uses blackletter on the stationery.)
An old post, but evergreen.
This is what conservatism does. It seeks to hold on to privilege and power, and attacks any convenient group on the margins if it may help them reinforce the status quo.
We always knew the Trump DOJ coverup would be sloppy. But this is on a new level of sloppiness.
Donald Trump is a disgusting and abusive pedophile. At this point, I simply do not and cannot believe anyone who claims not to know it.
While the deaths of people around the world due to his incompetence and venality must not be ignored, this is the primary thing he will be remembered for. It will be what schoolchildren learn first, what colors every mention of his name. When future scholars dive into the unprecedented corruption, incompetence and theft of his administration, his perversions and the people who enabled and covered them up will loom over every study.
This is what happens when one side’s goal is to have everyone bow to them, while the other side’s goal is to have everyone be treated equally.
The double standard isn’t hypocrisy, it’s built in to the politics. It’s the whole story.
The right isn’t simply using a double standard to get what they want. They want the double standard to be how they run the country.
The first tiny release of overly-redacted Epstein documents and Trump’s lackeys add in an unrelated publicly-available photo of Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson, and Diana Ross. This gives Trump the distraction point that Bill Clinton is in the files, so when Trump is found he can publicly dismiss it.
However, this photo was easily findable as being unrelated. It seems that the larger goal here may be to make sure nothing the DOJ releases can truly be trusted.
Remember that authoritarians revel in easily debunked lies. It is a flex on opponents that they can do it, which their most engaged supporters (the hard MAGA) love. But those lies are still believed by other supporters (the mild MAGA) who desperately want to think they haven’t been conned and support what the authoritarian does.
These are the people who will quickly dismiss the whole tranche of documents now, and say “you don’t believe all that stuff, do you? Biden had those files so long that they have to be a mess.”
There’s no nuance or investigation with these folks. The files are either all believable or all fake. Their brains can’t handle the idea that the original files themselves can be investigated and analyzed so that the insertions or removals can be found. One obvious fake document and mild MAGA won’t believe anything in the entire release.
Edit to add: The only real saving grace here is that the Trump DOJ is so bad at this. That won’t affect the current political discussions much, but it does create a trail of illegal behavior for a prosecutor or impeachment coordinator to follow. Eventually the narrative of truth can win out; the question becomes how long it will take before it can happen.
This is what’s happening as of now, 12/20/25:
The Republican House speaker had a deranged defense of Donald Trump’s AI poop video response to the No Kings protests.
“Speaker Johnson, you say that the Democrats had a ‘Hate America’ rally, but what does it say that the president of the United States over the weekend released a video of him pooping on the American people?” The Independent’s Eric Garcia asked Johnson at his Monday press conference.
Johnson chuckled. “The president uses social media to make a point. You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media for that. He is using satire to make a point,” Johnson replied. “He is not calling for the murder of his political opponents, and that’s what these people are doing.”
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For Johnson’s comments to make the least bit of sense, we first have to assume he believes that President Trump is already king. This fits, of course, with the creepy deference that Johnson displays toward Trump, as well as the White House’s tweets from the weekend showing Trump in a crown.
It also implies that Johnson believes the guillotine (or its modern equivalent) is the only way that the Trump family intends to leave office.
Of course, in the next breath, Johnson explains the anti-American action Trump would take if he was king, which is to shut down any message of disagreement or protest against him: “If President Trump was a king, he would’ve closed the national parks and the National Mall so they couldn’t have had the rally out here,” Johnson said.
None of this should be ignored. Johnson may sound deranged to us, but his comments likely make sense to his supporters.
President Donald Trump says the United States could purchase Argentinian beef in an attempt to bring down prices for American consumers.
This guy will never, ever put American farmers first.
He has destroyed the US market for soybean exports. Now he’s going to do his damnedest to destroy the market US cattle as well.
Businessmen who have served as president have consistently been notoriously bad for the economy. (The only notable exception to this is Truman, but he was a small business owner, not a large company executive.)
Donald Trump is the perfect example of the worst sort of businessman to lead a large organization of any kind — someone who has bankrupted companies over and over but always emerges with more money for himself. It’s unsurprising that such a person has run us into a ditch faster than Hoover. It remains to be seen if that ditch will be as deep, but I’m not optimistic about our chances.
I want to see the Portland and Chicago protesters wear inflatable Epstein costumes.
But then again that might mean that our news media will show even LESS video from those cities than they’re showing now.
Donald Trump has hated the US Government since he was sued for racial discrimination by the feds in the 1970s.
He is using every tool he has, and many that he does not legally have, to destroy it.
I doubt I’ll see it function effectively again in my lifetime. And do not get me wrong: most of it DID function effectively until now. Sure there were problems, just as in any large organization, but it has taken literal centuries to build what we have today. We are going to miss it, and badly.
Image problems
Most Americans' idea of a "conservative" is usually some guy in a suit who manages his money and minds his business. The type of person who hasn't held a state or federal elected position in decades, somebody like their deceased granddad or Dwight Eisenhower. Actual elected conservatives today are basically all hateful partisan nutjobs.
Most Americans' idea of a "liberal" is usually somebody who has never been elected in this country. Some anarchist kid who talks about communism fondly and wants to build a shelter on another person’s property. Actual elected liberals are basically all benign policy nerds.
How do we fix this?
Our ongoing mass shootings are the POINT of no gun regulation, not some accidental side effect. Otherwise, who are the “tyrants” the far-right is stockpiling their guns to kill?
Righ-wing Daily Wire commentator Charlie Kirk said at his Turning Points USA Political Action Committee Faith conference on Wednesday that t
Here’s the most important line of the article, because this, ultimately, is the basis of today’s right-wing conservative belief in the purpose of the 2nd Amendment:
“The Second Amendment is not about hunting. I love hunting. The Second Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government.”
They’ve taken one comment about “watering the tree of liberty,” and applied it to all of the founders, even to those who were very clear, in writing, about the purpose of the 2nd Amendment and the need for citizen militias. It’s insane, and it makes zero sense that a government created by an elite minority of wealthy men would have specifically wanted the powerless non-voters to be able to kill them all, but that’s apparently what these guys truly believe.
But for our purposes, who even are these “tyrants?” At first, they seem to be referencing a Stalin or Hitler-type leader, especially since so many love to tell us that Hitler disarmed the Jews. But that’s not the sort of leader ever mentioned in the real world of policy and elections. So do we have a parliamentary system that may appoint a madman like Hitler? No. Did we recently elect a lunatic who tried to stay in power after being voted out? Yes, we absolutely did, but they clearly don’t mean a leader like him since they mostly all supported the self-coup. So who is it that they’re so afraid of?
Conservatives like Kirk often refer to the founders’ real fears of a “tyranny of the majority,” meaning the landless laborers, slaves, and minorities who had no right to vote. They see themselves as the rightful inheritors of the founders’ elitist political power, arrayed against those who outnumber them. For their part, the founders were right to fear a disenchanted majority; after all, they had just invented a republic that put themselves at the top of a power-sharing arrangement to replace a king, and they knew that despite their revolution they had avoided a French-style massacre of elites. Further, they had also just agreed to perpetuate a dystopian society for a large portion of the population that would take another two centuries to slowly and painfully unravel.
Embracing that language of the founders does help to demonstrate just how wrong the right-wing misinterpretation of the 2nd Amendment truly is. It also shows us how much they want to return to a tightly limited number of voters, based once again on wealth and race. But today’s conservatives only share the founders’ traits of being overwhelmingly white and wealthy, with zero sense of their noblesse oblige or even a rudimentary responsibility to the future.
But back to tyrants. The way we most commonly hear the word “tyranny” used today, by far, is when a right wing candidate simply loses an election. Rather than moderating their positions or trying to improve the outcomes of their policies, the right simply doubles down, claims “tyranny of the majority,” and insists on power. Extreme conservatism, they believe, must be represented in government, even if those being governed don’t want it. So who, again, are the “tyrants” in this right-ring fever dream? Who are all these weapons being stockpiled to kill?
That would of course be me, you, and anyone else who disagrees with, doesn’t look like, or—perhaps most of all—votes differently from them.
This isn’t some future scenario, it’s happening now. From a Buffalo grocery store to a Colorado Springs nightclub. From synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway to a church in Charleston. Mass murders are not some accidental side effect of this ludicrous interpretation, they are its purpose. Charlie Kirk says “it’s worth it” because the terror is the intent. It’s more than worth it, it’s part of the program.
Unless and until we come to terms with just what, exactly, these far-right activists are seeking and supporting, we’ll continue seeing our friends, families, and neighbors terrorized and killed. Every mass shooting we have, every single one, is a product of that desire on the far right to murder so-called tyrants, and far too often a literal manifestation of this philosophy in action.
Because increasingly to them, losing power or simply being outvoted is tyranny, and the tyrants—be they you, me, minority groups or progressives of any sort—must be killed.
If Kirk could have known he was going to meet his demise at the end of a gun, would he have been more disappointed that it wasn’t in a mass shooting, or proud that someone saw him as one of the tyrants?
E Jean Carroll won her case, but in Trumpland the only sex offences that matter are committed by paedophiles with links to Democrats, says G
When misogynists try to claim a moral high ground, rapes and assaults of grown women are excused and ignored. Attacks on children are receiving all their focus instead.
This was integral to the Trump campaign’s political strategy for downplaying Trump’s proven rape of a 52-year old woman while she was out shopping: focus on her liberal views and her independence, and make her into the type of victim that the Republican base simply doesn’t care about, while pushing conspiracy theories about Democratic pedophiles. It worked, for a time.
Now it appears they may have overplayed that message. Trump’s long, close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, his clear knowledge of his wingman’s serial child rapes (and likely involvement in some of them), are part of the story of Trump’s life that is not going away. It can’t. His supporters have put all of their moral outrage into one place—pedophilia by public officials and the elite—and they may not be able to simply switch it off, not even for their dear leader.
