94 thoughts on “While We Sleep”

  1. a word from those who work to wake us up


    No cameras were present when President Trump signed the bill requiring the release of the Epstein files, Attorney General Pam Bondi glitched while defending the DOJ’s new stance on investigating Epstein’s crimes, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wants air travelers to remember their manners.
    and

    Jimmy woke up this morning to Donald Trump once again posting that Jimmy should be fired again, his minions at the FCC are now launching what they call a review of the relationship between networks and TV affiliates, Newsmax defended Trump against the idea that Jimmy would in any way connect him to the Epstein files, Trump was not invited to Dick Cheney’s memorial this morning, he did finally sign the bill to release the Epstein files, the Justice Department now has 30 days to release the files, a group of six Democrat lawmakers made a video reminding members of the Armed Forces that they are not required to follow illegal orders, Trump mused that this was “seditious” behavior punishable by death, First Lady Melania Trump was in North Carolina to rally the Marines, Trump is set to meet with the incoming Mayor of New York Zohran Mamdani, and This Week in Unnecessary Censorship.

  2. and even more from seth

    Seth takes a closer look at Trump writing a long and incoherent social media rant about the Epstein files.

  5. Illegal Orders Aren’t Theoretical
    A Trail Mix Brief on What’s Illegal, What’s Not

    If today’s political circus has you wondering what counts as an actual military illegal order, this new Trail Mix Brief breaks it down fast.

    We took the kind of blustery, over-the-top commands Trump sounds like he’s giving — the “go grab the voting machines,” “round up the critics,” “move the troops in, no lawyers” stuff — and translated each into its real legal meaning. Then we walk through why every one of those commands would slam straight into the Constitution, federal law, or military rules.

    No theatrics, no doomscrolling — just the legal reality behind all the shouting.

    Full Brief here:

    Illegal Orders: What Troops Can’t Be Told To Do

  7. Forget A25, because treason is the reason for the season.

    Impeachment, conviction and removal for treason means we quiet Piggy and everyone else in his sty.

    Donald J. tRUMPsky is a dangerous, demented loon.

  10. https://fortune.com/2025/11/20/elon-musk-tesla-ai-work-optional-money-irrelevant/

    “My prediction is that work will be optional. It’ll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that,” Musk said. “If you want to work, [it’s] the same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you can grow vegetables in your backyard. It’s much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, and some people still do it because they like growing vegetables.”

    That includes his goal of having 80% of Tesla’s value come from his Optimus robots, despite continuous production delays for the humanoid bots.

    That includes his goal of having 80% of Tesla’s value come from his Optimus robots, despite continuous production delays for the humanoid bots.

    *Says the guy who overpromises at these Tesla talks, and who may be the world’s first trillionaire (a title of which he should be deeply ashamed). He has enough money (on paper) to eradicate so many of the world’s ills, but do you see a hospital or library with his nameplate on it? Nope.

    I believe the guy with the water glasses.

  11. Craig – I wouldn’t mention it. His army of nut jobs may go after anyone who does. No, I say they campaign on the harm that Piggy and Republicans have done to them and to this country, because they have felt the pain. I would not campaign on it.

    Any Dem worth their salt knows that impeachment is coming given the chance. Treason, not A25. Boot out the entire lot and then charge them with all of their wrong doing, starting with Stephen Mitler.

    Have any Republicans in Congress stood up for their colleagues who simply reminded military they do not have to follow illegal orders, and were then threatened with execution by hanging by Dementia Patient 45-47?

  12. Levremembers | SUBSTACK
    Unleashed Trump Escalates Demands
    Read on Substack →

    *Lev is not to be trusted, in that he seems to be a grifter, and he’s been claiming to unleash the truth for months, but this is an interesting discussion. The hate symbols being OK is courtesy of Gestapo Barbie.

    One of the commenters had a point: Is threatening Congresspersons an official act of POTUS, and does he have immunity?

  14. https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5612146-marjorie-taylor-greene-doj-full-epstein-files/

    “I was called a traitor by a man that I fought for five — no, actually, six — years, and I gave him my loyalty for free,” Greene said, referring to Trump. “I won my first election without his endorsement beating eight men in a primary, and I’ve never owed him anything, but I fought for him, for the policies and for America first, and he called me a traitor for standing with these women and refusing to take my name off the discharge petition.”
    Greene added that the Epstein files issue has “ripped MAGA apart.”

    *Get out ahead of and read the list of names from the victims, girl.

    She is building her brand, but there are so many men that don’t even want women to be able to vote anymore.

  16. https://www.commondreams.org/news/ocasio-cortez-ai-bailout

    US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Tuesday that the federal government should not consider a taxpayer bailout of the artificial intelligence industry as fears grow that the rapidly expanding sector poses systemic risks to the global economy.

    “Should this bubble pop, we should not be entertaining a bailout,” Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said during a House subcommittee hearing. “We should not entertain a bailout of these corporations as healthcare is being denied to everyday Americans, as SNAP and food assistance is being denied to everyday Americans, precipitating some of the very mental crises that people are turning to AI chat bots to try to resolve.”

    Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks came on the same day that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sounded the alarm about potential Trump administration plans to “use taxpayer dollars to prop up OpenAI and other AI companies at the expense of working class Americans.”

    “The Trump administration’s close ties with AI executives and donors—including millions of dollars of contributions to President Trump’s new ballroom project—raise concerns that the administration will bail out AI executives and shareholders while leaving taxpayers to foot the bill,” Warren wrote in a letter to the White House’s AI czar, David Sacks.

  19. This would be a perfect ad for 2026, but there needs to be more of a spotlight on income inequality, or maybe income inequality just needs to be the tag line.
    Also, he is the problem, it’s just other folks who refuse to fix him.

  20. This Is All John Roberts’ Fault

    Today, as the Roberts court rewrites the Constitution in the image of Trumpian autocracy, it’s become clear that Roberts’ promise to be a neutral umpire was a lie. We are watching a rigged game, and Roberts set it up.

    Democracies are built on the right to vote and choose representatives. The United States finally recognized this right for all people with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But over the last five decades, Roberts has taken aim at the law, beginning as a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department fighting its reauthorization, when he claimed it would “lead to a quota system in all areas.” He lost that skirmish when Congress overwhelmingly voted to strengthen the VRA in 1982, but he won the larger battle decades later as chief justice, helping craft a string of rulings kneecapping the law, starting with his 2013 opinion in Shelby County v. Holder. The decision overruled Congress and freed states with histories of discrimination to change their voting rules, spurring the creation of 115 voter suppression laws in more than 30 states. Many were inspired by Trump’s election lies.

    Roberts didn’t just strip political power from ordinary people—he handed it to billionaires. His decisive vote in 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC lifted restrictions on political spending, while ludicrously insisting it would not “lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.” Political spending by billionaires has since increased 160-fold. There’s a direct line between the ruling and Elon Musk buying Trump the White House with more than $290 million and being given free rein to fire his companies’ regulators in return.

    We are now operating under a Robertsian reimagining of the separation of powers, in which laws passed by Congress are mere suggestions for a monarchical president. “By creating out of whole cloth this ‘presidents can commit crimes with immunity’ doctrine that is anathema to the Constitution and rule of law, the Roberts court validated Trump’s view of himself as above the law, beholden to no one,” says Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of Take Back the Court Action Fund, which advocates for adding justices to alter the court’s makeup.

    By then, the Roberts court had handed Trump almost unlimited power to defy the law without accountability. And once Trump was back in office, it weaponized the shadow docket to bless his lawless actions, reversing lower court findings, often without a word of explanation. As of this writing, the right-wing majority has used the shadow docket to uphold Trump’s actions roughly 90 percent of the time, repeatedly bailing him out of any obligation to follow the law.

    Trump needed Roberts to win, and Trump’s victory came just in time for Roberts. The court’s increasing radicalism had been fueling a movement for reform by adding justices or enacting term limits. The court had also spent the past year under an ethical cloud, beginning with the revelation that Justice Clarence Thomas had secretly taken millions of dollars in gifts, vacations, and loans from a handful of billionaires with interests before the court. Thomas also refused to recuse himself from January 6–related cases, even though his wife had fought to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss. Justice Samuel Alito also didn’t recuse, despite flying flags outside his homes that valorized Trump’s failed coup. Congress was demanding answers, and calls for an enforceable ethics code were growing. Moreover, Thomas and Alito were in their mid-70s, raising the odds that if Trump lost, the court could flip to a liberal majority. So Roberts did what he had done for Bush in 2005—he gave the president broad new powers, and in so doing secured them for himself.

    Attempts to guarantee equality under the law and Constitution were rolled back by a Supreme Court that, by 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, officially gave Jim Crow the Constitution’s blessing.

    Today’s court is on the same trajectory, bent on retrenching white political dominance. But it will go further. It will greenlight Trump’s corrupt, self-enriching behavior and unlawful power grabs. The majority will instinctively know that its fate is tied to the fate of Trump’s movement, and so it will protect it. The result will be a democracy in name only.

    Under the Roberts court, it won’t be enough to rewrite the rules of the game. The umpires are the problem.

  22. nothing’s illegal when you can interpret the law any way you want to

    or when nobody is willing or able to bring you to justice

    or when you have a mortgage to pay and health benefits to lose

    or when you’re a 21-year-old kid educated by video games like call of duty

    or when you’re a masked steroid-abusing meat-head-for-hire (with coded numerical name-patches have you seen those??) literally kidnapping people without due process every day in our nation’s cities

    or when the Supreme Court rules that you’re not capable of committing a crime

    or when you’re murdering fisherman in international waters

  26. Trump’s the CiC and the Supreme Court ruled that he is incapable of issuing in a illegal order.

    Or that illegal orders can be retroactively justified just because they came from the office of the president

    …however you would like to interpret their legal contortionism

  28. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/national-guard-dissent-9.6957454

    Capt. Dylan Blaha and Staff Sgt. Demi Palecek, both Democratic candidates, say Trump’s demands are unlawful

    https://people.com/2-national-guard-members-say-they-would-defy-orders-deploy-chicago-11839419

    “As members of the U.S. military, we swear an oath to defend the Constitution and protect the American people. I did not raise my right hand to be used as a pawn and activated against my community,” he says.

    Palecek, a veteran with 14 years of service between the U.S. Air Force and the National Guard, agrees.

    Capt. Dylan Blaha, who is running for Congress in the same district, echoed those sentiments, making a comparison to the use of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany. “There is a point where if you didn’t stand up to the Gestapo, are you just actively one of them now?” he asked.

  29. Besides being a rapist just who was Jeffery Epstein?
    Is he one of the powerful hidden oligarchs, the manipulator behind the scenes? I alway knew he had social connects and anyone who was important in New York social circles would be at one of his parties. This article from the Nation makes it feel much more like a Rasputin like conspiracy come to life.
    The link to the nation article
    Jeffrey Epstein Was a Warlord. We Have to Talk About It.

    This exchange, which was reported by Drop Site News, gets at the heart of one of the more hidden aspects of the Epstein scandal. Epstein’s name is inextricably linked with sexual predation, as it should be. But it should just as readily be linked to global militarism and authoritarianism. Epstein trafficked not just in the bodies of the children he abused but also in social connections that could bring elites together. He well understood that the “desperation of those in power” could make them eager to buy what he was selling: connections with other powerful figures and security systems to clamp down on dissent…….

    The Epstein e-mails document his ties to a wide swath of the US and global elite in ways that transcend partisan lines. Among those Epstein was on easy terms with were former treasury secretary Larry Summers (who held high office under both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) as well as Trump adviser Steve Bannon and right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel. Even Noam Chomsky wrote glowingly of his “highly valued friend.”

  30. Anon, let’s keep that presidential immunity ruling, bad as it was, in perspective, not overstate what it did.

    Court ruled that a president cannot be criminally prosecuted for “official” acts as president, and sent the case back down the chain for a lower court determination whether his acts in that case were official or not.

    They can still find some military orders illegal, such as seizing ballots or shooting peaceful protesters. That’s a different case than whether he can be prosecuted for it.

  32. if Democrats are going to encourage public servants to disobey illegal orders, they should simultaneously be setting up legal support networks for anyone that follows their advice and provide assurances to them

    “stick your neck out and best wishes to you” is shitty messaging

    (and what assurances are they capable of providing? nothing)

  35. Just think, if Kamala were in the WH, it would still have an East Wing; Argentina wouldn’t have the $40 billion that would extend ACA subsidies for another year; our defections would not be in the trillions, because we wouldn’t have wasted money in DOGE to scrape out data for further surveillance and to terrorize federal workers; we wouldn’t be blowing up fishing boats under they guise of dealing with drug trafficking, when we know this about regime change and Venezuela’s oil reserves; there wouldn’t have been money wasted on ICE and Gestapo Barbie’s PR stunts and two planes; vaccines and food safety wouldn’t be under attack; the J6ers would still be in jail, and Ghislaine wouldn’t be in Club Fed; wr wouldn’t have wasted millions on Piggy’s golf outings and JD’s vacations.

    We could’ve had nice things.

  37. That’s a different case than whether he can be prosecuted for it.

    what is a law that can’t be enforced?

    …and an “official act” is anything Trump says it is

    You’d be right about everything if we didn’t put a criminal in power, that was probably a really dumb fucking idea

    😃

  38. all you law school grads spoke like this stuff was written in stone from 2016 to 2020. Trump made a fool of all of you (with a lot of help from his cronies and enablers)

    fuckin guy breaks 10 laws a day

  42. Dumb and Dumber

     New York Magazine
    THE STUPID ISSUE

    A Theory of Dumb It’s not just screens or COVID or too-strong weed. Maybe the culprit of our cognitive decline is unfettered access to each other.
    By Lane Brown, a features writer for New York Magazine

    A Theory of Dumb

    Experts were sure that the 20th century would make us stupid. Never before had culture and technology reshaped daily life so quickly, and every new invention brought with it a panic over the damage it was surely causing to our fragile, defenseless brains. Lightbulbs, radio, comic books, movies, TV, rock and roll, video games, calculators, pornography on demand, dial-up internet, the Joel Schumacher Batmans — all of these things, we were plausibly warned, would turn us into drooling idiots.

    The test results told a different story. In the 1930s, in the U.S. and across much of the developed world, IQ scores started creeping upward — and they kept on going, rising on average by roughly three points per decade. These gains accumulated such that even an unexceptional bozo from the turn of the millennium would, on paper, look like a genius compared to his Depression-era ancestors. This phenomenon came to be known as the Flynn effect, after the late James Flynn, the social scientist who noticed it in the 1980s.

    Because these leaps appeared over just a few generations, Flynn ruled out genetics as their cause. Evolutionary change takes hundreds of thousands of years, and the humans of 1900 and 2000 were running on the same basic mental hardware. Instead, he posited that there had been a kind of software update, uploaded to the collective mind by modern life itself. Better education trained students to reason with hypotheticals instead of just memorizing facts. Office and industrial jobs required workers to grapple with ideas rather than physical objects. Mass media exposed audiences to unfamiliar places and perspectives. People got better at classifying, generalizing, and thinking beyond their own daily experience, which are some of the basic skills IQ tests are designed to measure. Flynn liked to illustrate this shift from literalism toward abstraction with the example that, a century ago, if you asked someone what dogs and rabbits have in common, they might answer “Dogs hunt rabbits,” not “They’re both mammals.”

    Maybe, then, all the noise and novelty wasn’t rotting our minds but upgrading them. (Studies suggest that better nutrition and reduced exposure to lead may have also helped.) In any case, the Flynn effect held steady for so long and through so many apparent threats that there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t last forever, even if, someday, somebody invented a chatbot that could do homework or Theo Von started podcasting.

    Or so thought Elizabeth Dworak, now an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, when she chose the topic of her 2023 master’s thesis. She decided to analyze the results of 394,378 IQ tests taken in the U.S. between 2006 and 2018 to see if they exhibited the same climb. “I had all this cognitive data and thought, Hey, there’s probably a Flynn effect in there,” she says. But when she ran the numbers, “I felt like I was in Don’t Look Up,” the movie in which an astronomy grad student played by Jennifer Lawrence discovers a comet speeding toward Earth. “I spent weeks going back through all the code. I thought I’d messed something up and would have to delay submitting. But then I showed my adviser, and he said, ‘Nope, your math is right.’”

    The math showed declines in three important testing categories, including matrix reasoning (abstract visual puzzles), letter and number series (pattern recognition), and verbal reasoning (language-based problem-solving). The first two, in which losses were deepest, measure what psychologists call fluid intelligence, or the power to adapt to new situations and think on the fly. The drops showed up across age, gender, and education level but were most dramatic among 18-to-22-year-olds and those with the least amount of schooling.

    Dworak knows what her findings suggest, but as a scientist, she’s required to add a few caveats. First, scores weren’t down in every category. They rose in spatial reasoning, or the ability to mentally rotate 3-D objects, which is crucial for playing Fortnite. Second, her data came from voluntary unproctored online tests. “This wasn’t like an SAT. Somebody could have been taking it on a bus,” she says. “But I did have almost 400,000 data points.” Third and most important, “we can’t exactly say that people are getting dumber, just that scores in these categories are going down.” IQ has always been a rough proxy for intelligence, less a direct gauge than a reflection of certain mental habits that society rewards. Its scales are renormalized every decade or so and its meaning constantly debated among statisticians, some of whom still wonder if both the original Flynn effect and its reversal might owe more to inconsistent methodology than to real cognitive change.

    “So I spoke with reviewers who were really well established in the field, and I got great feedback, and I was able to add some wonderful nuance so I wasn’t just publishing clickbait,” says Dworak. “And then after the paper came out, it was funny. Most of the reaction among both academics and laymen was like, ‘Oh, IQ scores are down? I could have told you that.’”

     
    The world is dumber, and we all know it. Lately, it feels like that culturewide upgrade to our mental operating systems has been rolled back to an older and buggier version.

    Stupidity, like intelligence, is a nebulous thing, hard to define but easy to spot in the wild. It’s not just that children have been bombing their standardized tests (ACT scores are at their lowest in more than 30 years, and high-school seniors’ average math scores in a national exam were the lowest since 2005) or that more than a quarter of U.S. adults now read at the lowest proficiency level. It’s also that in nearly all aspects of life, we’re opting for routines, entertainment, and entire belief systems that ask less and less of our brains. The stigma that was once attached to ignorance has disappeared, and the loudest and least informed voices now shape the conversation, forcing everyone else to learn to speak their language.

    For example, polls suggest as much as a quarter of the electorate is now composed of so-called low-information voters — the type who can’t name their representatives and get most of their news from memes but tend to be more persuadable than their better-informed neighbors. That makes them all-powerful in swing elections, provided campaigns can reach them with a message simple and arousing enough to resonate with what little else they know.

    In finance, economic fundamentals have become meaningless as investors have adopted the Dada-esque illogic of crypto, treating the stock market like a Ouija board and moving their money wherever they assume the stupidest among them will. The latest result is a Ponzi-shaped AI bubble that almost nobody can justify with a straight face. Yet when Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the premier AI stock, was recently photographed eating at a Korean-fried-chicken restaurant, shares of unrelated Korean-fried-chicken companies jumped up to 30 percent, which, by the rules of the current market, seems perfectly rational.

    It’s tempting to blame all this on the pandemic, an unprecedented stress test on human minds. We emerged blinking into the daylight after spending years on our couches, staring into screens, and repeatedly catching a virus with neurological side effects only to find that our attention spans had been chopped in half, our kids’ grades had cratered, and all of our friends had spent their lockdowns woodshedding some pretty wild theories about 5G and pasteurized milk. But while that lost stretch surely did damage, the brain fog we stumbled into had been gathering for years. The trend lines were in place well before 2020.

    This probably isn’t evolution, either. We’re not living in an Idiocracy-style scenario where the dumbest people are just having more babies. A 2018 study of Norwegian families found that both the long rise and the recent decline in IQ scores have been observed within families; children were scoring higher or lower than their parents in ways that matched broader trends. So if, as James Flynn argued, the IQ surge of the 20th century was caused by environmental factors, its reversal almost certainly is too.

    Those environmental factors could include anything from changes in education, nutrition, family structure, and economic pressures to a cocktail of potentially brain-damaging exposures — microplastics, antidepressants, wildfire smoke. But in 2025, the consensus is that the factor to blame is the thing in our pockets.

  44. what is trump planning that the Dems in the video know about that compelled them to offer guidance on “illegal orders”, anyway??

    🤔

  48. You’d be right about everything if we didn’t put a criminal in power, that was probably a really dumb fucking idea

    No argument about that.

    Talking about specific intelligence about Dumbass’ plans doesn’t make much sense – they aren’t worth the paper they’re [not] written on.

  49. Anon- Dems were kicked out of a military meeting a week or so ago; only Repugz allowed. Since those in the video are military/former military, perhaps they got intel from the inside, or maybe their spidey senses were tingling.

    The reaction from Piggy Of The US is enough to think that he feels threatened. After all, Piggy thinks of it as HIS army.

    Remember what happened to the other Piggy in LOTF.

  50. I think these Democrats — most if not all with military background — were quite right to elevate the discussion about unlawful orders.

    Officers are well aware of the rules but grunts probably aren’t.

    And nobody pushed it on stage better than Trump by calling for executions — which made it painfully obvious why we need to talk about this.

  52. Now what is Wall Street up too.
    If you have a pension they may be buying it and moving it off shore where it isn’t regulated.

    Private equity firms and other alternative asset managers — including Ares Management Corp., Blackstone Inc., Brookfield Corp. and KKR & Co. — are reshaping the once-staid world of life insurance. Over the past decade, they’ve bought, built or partnered with insurers that sell policies and annuities, collectively commanding hundreds of billions of dollars.

    In a previous era, life insurers parked their money in the safest corners of the market — mostly high-grade bonds and big-name stocks. But as Wall Street firms expanded into the business, they adopted bolder strategies to boost profits.

    Many are shifting liabilities to offshore affiliates subject to less detailed disclosure requirements than in the US. Insurers and those overseas entities are also pursuing higher returns with more sophisticated and potentially less-liquid investments — such as exotic asset-backed securities and other bets tied to private credit or private equity.

    If these pension funds fail the taxpayer will bail them out.
    This is the financial crises all over again. Where the risk falls on the American taxpayer

  55. More Trumpsters Looting The Treasury

    Kennedy Center: No-Work Contracts, Huge Venue Discounts For Conservative Media

    The Kennedy Center has entered into a $10,833.33 per month contract with Kari Lake’s husband Jeff Halperin for “social media editing services”.

    Also: deeply discounted venue rentals to conservative organizations, including a $19,820 discount for a NewsNation town hall and a $21,982.60 discount to the American Conservative Union Foundation.

    Trump loyalist gets a $15,000-per-month contract to perform “policy research and speechwritingm.”

    These contracts don’t explain in detail “how the work relates to the Kennedy Center’.

    — Read more at The Playbill

  57. https://www.idahopress.com/news/local/idaho-legislators-briefed-on-mountain-home-air-force-base-qatari-training-agreement/article_d8d0f7ad-5087-4fb6-89a1-dc1f58036d7a.html

    Idaho legislators briefed on Mountain Home Air Force Base Qatari training agreement
    Clark Corbin Idaho Capital Sun Nov 17, 2025

    Gunter said the ability to train with allies with Qatari Emiri Air Force at Mountain Home Air Force Base helps ensure they will be prepared to serve with multinational forces during more stressful, high stakes combat missions in the future.

    …an initial contingent of about 50 Qatari Emiri Air Force personnel could arrive for training at Idaho’s Mountain Home Air Force Base beginning around 2030…

    *There’s a base in TX where the husbands of several neighbors from Singapore trained to fly helicopters. This is not that.

  58. The billionaires are against Mamdani.
    The yt supremacists were invested in an election that has nothing to do with most of them.
    The “America First” folks are gonna have a tizzy.
    Did that Qatari bastard agree to take him out, so Piggy needed to make nice to distance himself from what may come?

  59. Piggy never talks about his ear.
    Piggy and the Pigsty have stopped talking about Charlie Kirk.
    If something happens in NY, but they quickly move past it, you’ll know why.

  60. lol Mamdani is THAT charismatic

    i said “Mamdani” in a conversation on the street yesterday, and a bunch of (white) people turned around and gave me a dirty look

  61. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/11/21/usha-vance-melania-trump-no-wedding-ring/87399269007/

    There was no ring on the ring finger of second lady Usha Vance when she visited Camp Lejeune, a military base, alongside first lady Melania Trump earlier this week.

    A spokeswoman for the second lady told USA TODAY in a statement Nov. 21 that Vance is “a mother of three young children, who does a lot of dishes, gives lots of baths, and forgets her ring sometimes.” The Vances have three children: Ewan, 8, Vivek, 5, and Mirabel, 3.

    The Vances met as students at Yale Law School, where she excelled.

    *Where she majored, presumably, in doing dishes, and giving baths.

    Before President Trump picked her husband as his running mate, Vance was a lawyer at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a firm that specializes in litigation and corporate law.

    *When she was a high-powered lawyer, was there dishwashing involved?

  64. Anon – Are these the white folks who are afraid of NYC, LA, and SFO?

    *I get email blasts from the Manhattan borough prez & they already have plans to cut bureaucracy to build more affordable housing, because $5K per month (on average) for a rental is nuts.

    Four ballot proposals passed:

    Ballot Proposal 2: Creates two new processes to fast-track affordable housing projects. The first is a new zoning action for the Board of Standards and Appeals to approve 100% affordable publicly financed projects that are consistent with existing neighborhood character. The second creates a new, streamlined public process consists of Community Board and Borough President review and City Planning Commission approval for projects with affordable housing in community districts where the least affordable housing is being built.

    Ballot Proposal 3: Introduces a new simplified 90-day public review process for modest housing proposals that increase the amount of allowed housing by small amounts. This process will also apply to infrastructure projects like street grade raisings within the 100-year flood plain, helping speed up work that strengthens our city’s resilience and livability. Projects will go through Community Board and Borough President review, and be subject to City Planning Commission approval.

    Ballot Proposal 4: Establishes a new Affordable Housing Appeals Board — made up of the Mayor, City Council Speaker, and Borough President — to give promising housing projects going through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) an extra chance to succeed. The process otherwise remains the same, preserving Community Board, Borough President, City Planning Commission, and City Council review and public hearings at each stage.

    Ballot Proposal 5: Requires the Department of City Planning to create a single, digital city map, a modernization effort that will streamline planning, improve transparency, and make city operations more efficient.

    *If I were a city planner, I’d make small, cheap, but clean and safe units for theater kids headed to NYC; some in each borough. After two years, you give someone else a turn. You should have made friends and can get a place together. Many will go home, of course.

  66. I think those bombings of boats in the gulf may be the “illegal orders” since war has not been declared and none of those murdered have been identified as drug dealers.

  67. Craig – Perhaps Trump’s polls suggest that he should appear more reasonable. Some are speculating that yesterday’s MBS visit may have had some effect.

  68. bId – one thing that really stood out in the pics of Ms Veep wife, is she looked healthy again. No more sunken eyes and now a smile. I am sure the lawyers are working out suitable arrangements for dissolvment of the marriage. If it is R.Cath. annulments are not too expensive. Giving up the Naval Observatory also has some dollar figure attached to it.

    Although her views are as horrendous as his are, she can escape the hellscape that is D.C. for the next few years. America probably has to deal with the former Mrs. kirky. Grifter and (former) grieving widow. Just thinking about this makes me feel like I have been in the dairy barn all night.

  69. https://www.narativ.org/p/trumps-worst-week-ever-from-epstein

    U.S. Defense Department contractors in masks landed on Playa Bagdad in Tamaulipas, Mexico this week and hammered six signs into the sand declaring it “Department of Defense Property.” They were a dozen miles south of the actual border. Mexican Navy Marines showed up with machine guns, yanked out all the signs, and the contractors sped off while the Pentagon claimed “altered perception of the international boundary’s location” caused by shifting sandbars. This happened less than 48 hours after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum told Trump that cooperation on cartels is fine, but U.S. military strikes on Mexican soil are absolutely not happening. The operation appears to have been staged from Elon Musk’s Starbase facility—a deliberate test of whether Mexico would push back. They did.

    ***

    The U.S. Coast Guard tried to reclassify swastikas and nooses as merely “potentially divisive” symbols rather than hate symbols in new harassment guidelines. After The Washington Post broke the story Thursday morning, the backlash was so immediate the Coast Guard completely reversed course by Thursday night. But here’s the tell: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s spokesperson attacked the Post as publishing “baseless smears and revolting lies” even as the Coast Guard confirmed the policy existed and then changed it. This is the same Coast Guard that fired its first female commandant on Trump’s first day in office for focusing on diversity initiatives. When your military can’t decide if swastikas represent hate, the rot runs deep.

    ***

    He [Vance] told Canadians their “stagnating living standards have nothing to do with Donald Trump.” This came literally the same week Canada locked in $50 billion from the UAE, tens of billions from Sweden for fighter jet production, and over $1 billion from Germany for naval systems. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s stated goal is to double non-U.S. exports within a decade. While Vance blames diversity for Canada’s problems, Canada is building an economic architecture that doesn’t need America—and it’s working.

    ***

    The president retweeted a Nazi account calling for Democrats to be hanged “like George Washington would,” adding his own endorsement. This came after multiple Democrats released a video featuring former CIA operative and Navy legal expert explaining that Trump has already committed over 150 unlawful acts and urging military personnel not to follow unlawful orders.

    Now a Democratic challenger in North Carolina’s District 5 is running explicitly on “impeach, convict, remove” as his entire platform. David Clayton dumped his prepared speech and told voters that on day one of winning his race, he’ll introduce articles of impeachment. When the president threatens to hang you for opposing him, maybe Democrats need to stop pretending this is normal politics.

    *There you go, Craig. We’ll see how this impeachment promise plays out.

  70. The Europeans are pushing back on the Trump/Russia screw over of Ukraine

    The plan is “pure Russian,” a senior European diplomat said. European leaders plan to meet Saturday on the sidelines of a Group of 20 meeting in Johannesburg to put together a counterproposal that they believe will be more favorable to Ukraine.
    Another diplomat involved in the discussions said Ukraine is under “extraordinary pressure” to agree to a deal. A separate person said that while Washington’s vow to withdraw support from Kyiv is real, it probably would not be implemented for another two weeks at the earliest.

    The leaders of France, Britain and Germany held a joint phone call with Zelensky on Friday and appeared to push back on several of the plan’s key points. German government spokesman Stefan Kornelius said the leaders had agreed that “vital European and Ukrainian interests” must be safeguarded.

    German Chancellor Friedrich Merz also spoke to Trump “in a good and confidential phone call,” the German leader wrote on X. “We have agreed on the next steps at the advisors’ level. I will now brief the European partners.”

    Full article on WaPo
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/11/21/ukraine-war-peace-proposal-witkoff-thanksgiving/

  72. No I am not attending BID, having lunch with a long time DC friend who moved to California and is making a rare trip back. I would try to get him to go but he’s got a bad case of Parkinson’s.

  74. I can only tell you that the groupthink is very strong here in Trump country, BiD

    If anything is spoken outside of conventional dogma, dirty looks will be cast. I am used to them.

    in fact, they validate me 😃

  76. Jamie – Have you read Wicked? Now that’s some dark stuff. It sounds like they pulled a bit more of the book into the musical, because there’s nothing too awful in the Broadway version.

  77. the truck in front of me has a “these colors don’t run, they reload” bumper sticker

    what a charming populace

    also a bunch of Christian stuff because as we all know, American Christianity is a white supremacist cult

  79. i am not capable of expressing how thoroughly and effectively the right-wing propaganda machine disseminated anti-Mamdani sentiment among their adherents for the last few months

    and now trump’s a big fan 😆

  80. One person said to me, “don’t you think the Democrats are trying to replace us with Muslims and implement Sharia law”

    To which I replied “ I thought it was the Jews trying to replace us with Mexicans to win elections”

    That particular person’s brain then shorted out

    they say this shit to me because they know I’m a liberal

    These people just wanna be cool like us and know shit like us, but without the reading or critical thinking

  81. https://www.wired.com/story/pranksters-recreated-a-working-version-of-jeffrey-epstein-gmail-inbox/

    Using Jmail, you can read thousands of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails in a familiar format. Use the star function to highlight notable finds.

    Jmail is a website that looks very much like Gmail, except that there is a little hat hanging on the logo and that the profile picture in the top right corner is a grinning Epstein. (Click on it and it says “Hi Jeffrey!”) The inbox lets you click through thousands of emails, formatted to look exactly like a regular message would in your inbox. In the sidebar, you can sort by Inbox, Starred, and Sent. In Gmail, a lower sidebar section reads Labels and separates emails by category. In Jmail, it is a list of people who corresponded with Epstein.

    The site was created by serial prankster Riley Walz and Luke Igel, cofounder of an AI video editing tool called Kino AI. Igel tells WIRED that he brought the idea to Walz—something Walz confirms—and then the two of them put the website together with Cursor in a single night. Walz revealed Jmail in an X post, writing, “We cloned Gmail, except you’re logged in as Epstein and can see his emails.”

  84. https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-874573

    Republicans must address Nazi problem among Gen Z conservatives, Trump ally Laura Loomer says

    Laura Loomer said that a failure to do so could lead to a Democratic blue wave in the 2026 midterms and pave the way for California Gov. Gavin Newsom to take the White House in 2028.

    Loomer pointed to “Gen Z glorifying Hitler and doing Sieg Heils all over TikTok” and to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggesting that “people who killed Jesus killed Charlie Kirk” as examples of antisemitism among conservatives.

    “I hope the GOP is ready to lose the midterms in a landslide and have President Gavin Newsom,” she wrote in a post on X on Tuesday. “The GOP won’t address it, so they have nobody to blame but themselves when they lose.”

    Loomer went on, “That is a Nazi problem. If the GOP doesn’t address this, then they deserve to lose the midterms. And yes, it will cost us the midterms. Good luck losing in 2026 and 2028. There is zero moral clarity in the GOP right now.”

  86. Trail Mix Live heading to Johannesburg tomorrow…
    🚨 NEXT CHAT: 10am ET Saturday 11/22
    Europe Scrambles Over Trump–Putin Ukraine “Deal”
    Huddling on the sidelines of the G20, European leaders review Zelensky’s warning that Ukraine has been given a week to choose between its “dignity” and its U.S. partnership.

    Chat Studio

  87. https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5614365-bondi-halligan-disbarment-comey-ty-cobb/

    Former White House lawyer Ty Cobb said Wednesday that Attorney General Pam Bondi and interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan should be disbarred over the Justice Department’s prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey.

    Cobb said it was “shocking” that the Comey indictment “was never properly returned,” which made it “dispositive.”

    Cobb added that he thinks “both Halligan and Bondi should be disbarred.”

    “You know, Bondi has twice submitted affirmations to this court about the propriety of Lindsay Halligan’s grand jury presentation,” Cobb continued. “She knew this. There’s no way she could not have known this. And that just means that she lied, or that she’s equally incompetent, but more likely that she lied.”

    First, I think it’s because of the illegal appointment that is before another judge, Judge [Cameron] Currie,” Cobb said. “But Magistrate Judge [William] Fitzpatrick’s opinion today will be taught in law schools for 50 years as the epitome of prosecutorial misconduct.“

    Cobb then blamed Halligan for “fundamental misstatements on the law that could compromise the integrity of the grand jury process,” referring to language Fitzpatrick used in his 24-page ruling.

    Her time in the grand jury is extraordinary,” Cobb told CNN anchor Erin Burnett. “She told the grand jury, basically, that Comey didn’t have a Fifth Amendment right at trial to refuse to testify. And therefore, he would be able to give his explanation as to the events and counter the government’s evidence, which the judge noted appropriately was burden shifting.”

    These missteps could form the “basis” of Bondi and Halligan being disbarred, Cobb added.

  88. Craig – Why? What am I missing?

    Oh, I hadn’t seen her resignation notice. She can make a lot of trouble for tRUMPsky between now and January 5th.

    Too bad she’s leaving, though, because now it looks like 🍊🐓💩🌮 won.

Comments are closed.

Join the Trail Mix

Get an alert when Craig goes live, and the link when our Open Thread heats up.