WesternInfidels

Everything he does makes sense, if you can accept that he sees the United States itself as an rival for the attention and praise that is rightly his. Commanding other people’s attention, redirecting it to himself, has been the only trick behind his falling-up success, his whole life. This is what they mean when they say “all publicity is good publicity.”

Now we’re not talking about Iran, we’re not talking about America’s future, we’re talking about him.

Are… are the ceasefire talks in the room with us now, Donnie?

Edit: Trump Was Watching a U.F.C. Fight in Miami While Iran Talks Collapsed

I don’t think the suggestion is that she’s a victim. Just that what we’re seeing is the fallout of a power struggle from behind the curtain.

This Threads post tells a theory / story that’s worthy of a soap opera. Spoiler: Everything comes back to Epstein, as it always seems to.

Robert Reich had some theories, including:

3. Melania is pissed off at Trump for any number of things, and today’s news conference was a way of letting him know she’s capable of making his life miserable.

Hey, could we automatically register everyone to vote at the same time?

I’m kidding. I know the answer is “no.”

I never see any Christians decide that the president was chosen of God – as a punishment.

That would actually plug seamlessly right in to the whole evangelical world-view and aesthetic. It’s an idea with so much explanatory power, right there for the taking. “We live in a fallen world, and the president is the proof.”

I haven’t got the stomach to watch the whole thing, but in the bits of it I’ve watched, he seems so much more alert, so much more present, so much, dare I say, smarter, than he’s been when speaking publicly recently. He makes jokes, he’s funny, he smiles. He completes some sentences. He doesn’t seem like the tongue-tied partially-senile Fox-News-grandpa he is when he talks to the public or the press.

He quips that somehow he’s a “king” but he can’t get his ballroom approved. He’s a piece of shit, he behaves like he’s here to destroy America as we know it, but that’s a legitimate by-God joke. I’ve never seen him make an actual joke before.

Am I imagining that? I don’t know what to make of it. Is the “flailing senile dumbass” just a character he’s playing? Is it a ruse? So many people who have had face time with him say he’s genuinely a moron.

The president then proceeded to insult motherhood and apple pie

I don’t see a definition in the bill. I don’t know if there’s a standard legal definition for that or not.

Even a good-faith interpretation of “performer” could leave some gray areas, I’d think. A song-and-dance number for an audience gathered for the purpose is a performance with a performer, sure. What about an appearance on a talk show, an interview, a forum discussion, a podcast?

Unfortunately, “performance” is a bit of jargon for a specific, unrelated concept in contract law.

The reservations your question suggests are very reasonable. I don’t intend to dampen anyone’s alarm at this absurd effort to implement legal, systemic bullying over nothing. I just so happened to be reading about the Ohio bill shortly before I came across FreshParsnip’s comment.

The red ones taste like my favorite glue.

Things are bad; I’m not going to argue that things aren’t bad. I’m not a lawyer, I eat crayons.

That Ohio bill hasn’t been passed yet. I don’t know how likely it is to pass. Too likely, I guess.

It also doesn’t dictate a blanket ban on cross-dressing. What it does do is put “performers or entertainers who exhibit a gender identity that is different from the performer’s or entertainer’s biological sex” into the category of adult entertainments like stripping, meaning it’s restricted in the same ways. No kids allowed. That’s lines 153 to 165 here.

That’s very big, it’s very bad, it’s very stupid, it’s mean, it’s anti-freedom. Un-American, I’d say. It would seem to create problems with Bugs Bunny, Harpo Marx, Monty Python, etc. But the most obvious thing it’s targeting is “Drag Queen Story Hour.”

But it isn’t a ban on cross-dressing in general. Yet.

Edit: If you live in Ohio, you can find and contact your state Senator regarding House Bill 249, the “Indecent Exposure Modernization Act,” through this page.

they check for things like alcohol abuse, drug habits, sexual behavior, debt, gang affiliations, and any other dark secrets that could make you susceptible to bribery or blackmail

Yes. When I was interviewed by the FBI, because a friend of mine was seeking a clearance, this kind of thing was all they wanted to talk about. That was a couple decades ago, though.

top FEMA official defends his claim that he was teleported

21st centry headlines you never saw coming, part 2,756

I think more Americans need to know that Iran is big. Here’s a view from thetruesize.com. If you could move Iran to the US, it would stretch from Florida to Iowa to New Jersey.

Iran is 3.5 times larger than Iraq and roughly twice the population. That’s a handy comparison because we know what it took to invade and then hold Iraq: coalition forces peaked at half a million deployed personnel during the invasion. Iran is bigger in every way and so would demand a larger army and thus an absolutely enormous investment of troops, money and fundamentally lives in order to subdue.

– Bret Devereaux, The War in Iran

My door. Your butt. Don’t allow two objects to occupy the same space at the same time.

“Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people.”

When we say every accusation is a confession, by golly, we mean every accusation.

I don’t think it’s strictly about “moral high ground.” If you’re willing to do anything to win, then if you do win, the winner will be a person who is willing to do anything.

I don’t think I would have guessed this one was generative imaging, certainly not from one or two pictures. I would have guessed something was up with it, though, from the prurient interest. The barefoot poses, the tongue-out poses, the so-short skirt, the pictures specifically framed to include the high heels, the form fitting crop top with the perfect “emphasize my bosom” pose. Individually plausible, I guess, but together the effect is less military and more OnlyFans.

Edit: I guess I’m not finishing my point, here. A more subtle operator would be able to fool me with this level of image generation, in fact, I don’t have any good reason to imagine that hasn’t happened already.

“This technology” is, as used here, industrial scale lying which was made possible through industrial scale theft.

We can re-phrase the question: “Why is the right jumping headlong into industrial scale lies and crime, while the left loses ground on this front?”

An answer suggests itself to me.

She went to the place she wanted to go, with her guests and her security detail, and she got the food she wanted to eat. She had the chance to eat it.

Somehow even this write-up. which is not particularly sympathetic to her, is framing this as a kind of affront, a consequence, a humiliation. But she pretty much got what she came for, didn’t she? She’s facing no practical consequences at all. She lost a little face, maybe. This was a public declaration that people don’t like her, don’t like what priorities she’s chosen to serve.

Maybe we wouldn’t be in this pickle we’re in, if this kind of getting-through-to-the-isolated-elites happened more often. If we didn’t have isolated elites in the first place.