For instance, he sought to deploy soldiers to carry out shows of force along the border with heavy weaponry; he ordered us to paint the border wall black so it would get boiling hot in the sun and burn the hands of anyone who touched it; he demanded the we install flesh-piercing spikes at the top — so that those who attempted to climb would be visibly bloodied, sending a message to the others; and most ludicrously of all, Trump toyed with digging a 2,000-mile moat along the southern border and filling it with deadly snakes and reptiles to devour the arriving asylum seekers. (Inquiries were also made from the White House about heat-ray devices that could be pointed at the migrants to make them feel like their skin was on fire.)

This may all sound draconian — and it was — but the President seemed to settle on a simpler demand than elaborate booby traps and military spectacle to scare people away from the border: just shoot them. Trump proposed, on more than one occasion, having authorities fire upon the migrants. What better way to deter them than to kill some of them? When told that using deadly force against unarmed civilians was illegal, Trump bristled, as if we were weak-willed.

“Yeah, yeah yeah” was the tenor of his response. […] While I was on a flight to New York, I watched live on television as the President responded to footage of migrants throwing rocks at border authorities. Trump erupted. He publicly declared that if migrants threw rocks, the American soldiers he’d sent to join our border agents wouldn’t hesitate to respond. They’d open fire.

“They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back,” the President said. “We’ll consider — and I told them — consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexico military and police, I say consider it a rifle.”

If this sounds familiar (beyond 2019-era politics that we experienced, but have been washed away by scrubbing our memories with insane new stories a few thousand times), it’s because this is how ICE has been treating protestors for the last year.

We have an administration that is entirely psychopathological. Empathy is a concept that Trump doesn’t understand or value, and at each level of the reporting structure, sycophancy reinforces that psychopathy. People like Hegseth, Noem and Bondi (and the reincarnated phantasms of Trump’s id currently doing the latter two’s jobs) repeat and revel in that psychopathy because it was currency to show their loyalty to an unprincipled madman.

The thing that is so demoralizing is that the only people that matter in this world are Trump, Trump’s power-hungry throne-sniffers, and billionaires. Regular citizens, much less valid asylum-seeking immigrants like above, are already the untouchables that don’t even rate as humans to these people.

I would absolutely expect the GOP to withdraw (or use congressional procedure to effectively withdraw) the subpoena, however.

The Times‘ Tyler Pager had previously reported that “President Trump has discussed firing Attorney General Pam Bondi in recent days as he grows frustrated with her leadership at the Justice Department and her handling of the Epstein files” on Wednesday. “Among his top complaints is Ms. Bondi’s handling of the Epstein files, which has become a political liability for Mr. Trump among his supporters. He has also complained about her shortcomings as a communicator and vented about what he sees as the department’s lack of aggressiveness in going after his foes, according to people who have spoken to him recently.”

Well, about the only catharsis we get is watching the most awful people stab each other in the back.

Bondi should be in jail. But Trump’s complaints are incredible here. They were:

• the Epstein files? So apparently Bondi released files where his name appears over a million times instead of the original probably three million+, but not the desired zero. Has Trump tried not being BFFs with a lifelong pedophile, and almost certainly also being a pedophile himself?
• her communication? She was already criminally non-responsive in congressional testimony, which is to say, utterly and completely sycophantic and combative - how much more can he even ask.
• not going after his foes? No attorneys save freaking Habba and Halligan would even sign onto ultimately frivolous, grand-jury-rejected indictments.

So the lesson to Zeldin (and Rubio and anyone else still trying to ride the power train) is: sycophancy isn’t enough. It’s not enough to swear on your life that the naked emperor has clothes and maintain the lie even in the face of basic grade-school knowledge.

No, Zeldin will be tasked to gouge out the eyes of anyone who might be able to see it.

Played it today, it’s excellent!

They’re following the Hungary model, which in turn was a variation on the Russian model.

What they’re attempting is a “legal coup,” which is the typical modern democracy-to-authoritarianism transition. They want to retain the facade of constitutionality and lawfulness, to avoid creating an armed insurgency situation, and to avoid burning the value of the current economic system by crashing the stock market or causing investment to flee.

If you’re evil nowadays, you can just buy a Mar-a-lago face to short circuit the whole process.

Heroes of Science and Fiction

Oh, this looks great!

I’m more excited for this than I have been for a game in years. It looks like HOMM3 with modernized QOL updates and graphics. That’s really all I need.

And he said securing the throttled Strait of Hormuz is “not for us — that’ll be for France,” Trump said. "That’ll be for whoever’s using the strait

Shocking, I know, but I don’t think he knows how global markets work.

Also, just a fantastically on-brand “I shit in your punchbowl, sounds like a you problem” psychopath response.

Well, I suppose we should be grateful this is happening early enough for a court challenge to play out instead of a last minute EO that will just make be followed automatically by red and purple (with red governors/AGs) states.

But no doubt the timing is because there are twelve additional fascist election moves in Trump/Miller’s playbook, any of which can subvert the election, and they’re just giving themselves time to run down the list.

Seems like timing is a bit early to move to “center” for the general, Gavin, seeing as how we haven’t had 2028 presidential election primaries yet.

Thanks, sorry, I must have scanned the article three times before I saw it.

You’re technically correct. The best kind of correct. Thanks.

Is there a readable story (not a podcast)? The story’s Politico link is to a separate story.

It certainly would be news if Miller was losing Trump’s ear, because Trump has pretty much handed over all immigration policy to Miller with no restraints since the beginning.

Edit: Thanks replies, here is the link to the transcript: https://newrepublic.com/article/208332/transcript-trump-allies-shiv-stephen-miller-midterm-panic-grows

Memory that is embedded in GPUs.

So…to be clear, this was formed just prior to the release of the app, and almost certainly the app was being developed by this person/group before then.

Sure would be good to know what public funds were used to pay for this app (I assume too much), and whether there was a bidding process (I assume there wasn’t), and whether this person is someone the decision-maker already had some relationship/connection to (I assume that was the case).

Because regardless of the public value of a tracking & propaganda window favoring one party (none), it would be completely shocking, just totally unheard of, if this was a corrupt overpayment and misuse of public funds to pay for substandard work to personal and political connections.

I mean, we didn’t just see this happen with Noem or anything.

You’re sitting on a gold mine - first DDR6/HBM, then DDR5, then DDR4 got expensive. If trends continue, somewhere around 2028 you’ll be able to sell that desoldered 128KB of SNES RAM for a fortune.

It’s like the FIFA World Peace Prize means nothing anymore.

I don’t know a single thing she’s done, and have been cynical about “content creators” as opportunists lowering the standard of entertainment/art.

But just now I decided, why hate? Seeing all our entertainment being produced by fewer and fewer billionaires every year… All the best luck and support to anyone who isn’t helping prop up that system.

Upvoted for a different perspective, but I suspect it ends in the same place.

OpenAI is kept solvent by investor capital, and capital is kept flowing by the perception of OpenAI being the market leader. Seedance being a better model, enough to cause OpenAI to exit the market, still ruptures the perception of value. In a market with no clear profitability path, that’s ground falling away.

It also can’t be simply commoditized because generations (I’m sure even Seedance) are expensive and still not good enough for production use, even if 50% of their consumer base might boycott if a major studio even did use it in production. Commoditization can’t occur when there’s still no economically self-sustaining, market-acceptable “good enough” product. Without that, even if the leader changes, it’s a race between lemmings (sorry) off the cliff.