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🔥Burn Fascism To The Ground!🔥

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We need to have a conversation about racist mediocre white men. They’re a plague on this country, and they’re killing everything good in the world. They’ve become so dangerously toxic, there is a very real possibility they’ve doomed us to half a century (minimum!) of misery and death because they cannot bear the idea of being the mediocre nobodies they actually are. They HAVE to be special and powerful and in control, and if they’re not? Well, then everything has to burn to the ground. That’s what you get for not acknowledging how superior they are in their mediocrity.

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about a so-called “extinction burst.” This is the idea in psychology that when a toxic behavior is no longer rewarded, it intensifies in a desperate bid to restart the reward cycle. If that fails, the behavior dies out, aka, goes “extinct.”

This is supposed to be what we are seeing right now with racist, mediocre white men. Men who have nothing to offer but their rage and weaponized incompetence. They’re lashing out and destroying everything around them because they need to show the world they are actually mommy’s special little snowflake. They need to prove that they’re superior to all the mean dark-skinned people and cruel women and scary gays and even scarier trans people. To do that, racist, mediocre white men have gone all in on fascism and white nationalism. That’ll show those meanies who’s in charge!

Is it an extinction burst, though? Only if we make it one. Are we prepared to do that? Are we finally sick and tired enough of racist, mediocre white men to shut them down for good?

I was told the Tea Party was the last gasp of racist, mediocre white men. Then they elected the most racist, most mediocre white man on Earth. Their temper tantrum was rewarded.

I was told Trump’s first time in office was the last gasp of racist, mediocre white men. Then he stayed in the headlines for four years and “won” the 2024 election after building an even larger and more racist cult of mediocre white men.1 Rewarded yet again.

Now this fascist shithole regime is the last gasp of racist, mediocre white men. There’s always another “last gasp.” Always another “extinction burst.” The racist, mediocre white men always get another bite at the apple they’ve covered in shit and filth.

Until we say they don’t. Until we say, “Fuck you. No more of your bullshit. Sit your bitch ass down and shut the fuck up, spoiled little white man.”

We have to do this. We have to stop coddling racist, mediocre white men.

There are encouraging signs we are reaching/have reached a tipping point. A lot of women are being really blunt about who these men are:

Women have been speaking out about this for a very long time, but it’s reaching a crescendo. Women, especially younger women, are so absolutely fucking fed up with racist, mediocre white (and non-white) men that they’re just checking out. And since bisexuality is not nearly as frowned upon among women, they’re looking elsewhere for romantic and sexual fulfillment. Or they’re just going solo, and they’re fine with that because the alternative is garbage.

Men are left to fend for themselves or listen to fucking morons like this:

@lucasanswerNever Help With Chores!

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Look at this fucking loser. Listen to his advice for racist, mediocre white men. Don’t be a partner. Don’t cook or clean or participate in any way in being in a relationship. She’s either your domestic servant or you are hers. Listen to that advice and then ask yourself what women would ever put up with that shit? None I know.

Then men have the fucking gall to cry and whine and rage about a loneliness epidemic? Why won’t women date me? Why won’t they have sex with me? Why do women prefer to be alone? Are you shitting me? Have you MET a woman in the real world? Women are horny as fuck. They WANT to get laid as much as men do. What they don’t want is a penis attached to a loser who thinks women exist for his pleasure and nothing else.

No one is forcing men to follow the path of the incel. No one is forcing them to be lazy slobs who think the only emotions worth showing are anger and lust. Is it easier? Sure. Is it working? Obviously not. Men are falling behind, and they’re not getting laid, and they’re not getting married. Even when men put the effort in to look good and be successful, too many of them do it for the wrong reasons, imagining that toxic masculinity and dominating women will make them attractive partners. Imagine their surprise when all they attract are women who don’t give a shit about them personally, but rather view them the same way they view women: A means to an end. How emotionally fulfilling. 🙄🙄🙄

Sure, they’re having sex, but it’s JUST sex. Sooner or later, the emptiness of that life will eat away at their souls and leave behind the bitter resentment etched into the faces of hollow men like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. I’ve been with Mrs. Ogre since 1997, and I promise you, I’m a thousand times happier and more fulfilled than the “manly men” who have slept with 500 women and wake up every morning to an empty bed.

But back to the main point: With each “last gasp,” the racist, mediocre white men of America become more and more extreme and unfuckable. They become louder and stupider and more obnoxious. They’re not even bothering to pretend to be decent human beings anymore.

They decided that the best way to show America they deserved to be in charge was to go full Nazi.

You never go full Nazi. Ain’t no American woman ever got turned on by a goose-stepping fascist screaming about how Jews need to die, women need to submit to his authority, and 14-year-old girls should have his white babies.

But here we are, anyway. The final extinction burst. Because after this, we either make the racist, mediocre white men pay such a steep price for their arrogance that they grow the fuck up, or we are lost as a nation for a generation or two (or three).

And that really is what we’re talking about: Making racist, mediocre white men grow the fuck up. I’ve written about this more than once over the years, and it really does seem to be penetrating.2 We have coddled these manbabies for literally centuries, and the only way forward is to stop. Stop the coddling. Stop them. Stop all of it.

When the regime falls, and it will, the chorus of enablers will be deafening. They will insist we have to “look forward” and “join hands to heal the nation.” What they’re actually telling us is to reward the temper tantrum yet again by not holding racist, mediocre white men accountable for their actions, just like we’ve been doing for over two hundred years.

But spoiled children never learn unless there are consequences for their actions, and it has to be more than a slap on the wrist. These screaming toddlers have to learn to fear the cost of trying to destroy America. They have to look around at their fellow fascists and see them spending decades in prison or swinging from the gallows for the crimes they’ve committed. The racist, mediocre white men who fancy themselves the masters of all have to learn they are masters of nothing because they were only ever mediocre nobodies. Their only power was being white, angry, and stupid in a country that refused to hold them responsible for anything, ever. Take that away, and they are left with the choice to do better or slink off into the background, never to be heard from again.

I’m ready to kick this plague of losers to the curb and reclaim our future from the dumbest, angriest fucksticks America has ever produced. My kids and hypothetical grandkids deserve better.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

🖕FUCK THE PATRIARCHY!🖕

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There are 182 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

More than a decade ago, I was reporting in Brazil about the country’s strict abortion ban. I interviewed a doctor who had been excommunicated from the Catholic Church for providing an abortion to a nine-year-old rape victim — he was threatened and protested, and the girl herself had to be smuggled past vicious anti-abortion protesters to even get into the hospital. I talked to a young woman who, pregnant and desperate, told doctors she had been raped so that she could get a safe and legal abortion. While Brazil criminalizes abortion, the state also forced its will women who chose to have babies — for example, by forcing women into C-sections under threat of criminal penalty — and allowing for the widespread abuse of birthing women. “It's part of Catholic culture that this experience of childbirth should come with humiliation,” one doctor told me.

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The abortion rights legal landscape, like the landscape for reproductive rights more broadly, was pretty abysmal. But some one million women were still having abortions in Brazil every year. And they were doing so largely thanks to abortion pills.

This is true all over the world where abortion is banned. I’ve reported many times on the proliferation of abortion pills, which women manage to get on far-flung Indonesian islands, in conservative pockets of Pakistan, in Bangladeshi refugee camps, in rural Kenyan villages. Abortion pills have been legal in parts of Europe since the late 1980s. In Latin America, where abortion was long criminalized across most of the continent, women began noticing that the ulcer medicine Cytotec came in interesting packaging, with a little symbol of a pregnant woman with a red line drawn over her and a strongly-worded warning not to take while pregnant. Well. Lots of women began turning up at pharmacies complaining of ulcers.

Nothing has changed abortion access as profoundly as abortion pills, which in the US are typically a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol, and in places where abortion is banned are often misoprostol alone. Before misoprostol, abortion in countries where the procedure was outlawed mostly looked like it did in America’s pre-Roe days: The wealthiest and most well-connected women might be able to travel overseas to end a pregnancy; others might be lucky enough to find a kind and well-trained albeit illegal provider; but many went to scammers and dangerous charlatans, or tried to take mattes into their own hands. In America, the symbol of abortion’s Bad Old Days is the coat hanger. In sub-Saharan Africa, where I’ve reported for many years on abortion access, it might be the sharp stick.

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Predictably, this killed a lot of women. Some 70,000 women were dying every year from unsafe abortions, almost entirely in countries where the procedure was outlawed. Five million more were seriously injured year after year after year. And each year, roughly 220,000 children were left motherless. As you might imagine, unsafe abortion was one of the top drivers of maternal mortality worldwide.

Today, deaths from unsafe abortion number closer to 29,000, a nearly 60 percent decrease from 2009. This is still horrific, and these deaths would be near zero if all women worldwide had legal access to safe abortion care. But cutting unsafe abortion deaths by more than half is a huge achievement. It’s worth noting that the global maternal mortality rate has decreased by 40 percent from 2000. In other words, unsafe abortions decreased at a much faster pace, in a shorter period of time, than pregnancy-related deaths generally. Something about abortion changed.

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Just when you think you’ve seen it all…

Seconds after watching the concluding round of the PGA Tour Cadillac Championship golf tournament at his Doral golf club in Miami, Donald Trump went on his Truth Social account and posted his war plans to use the United States Navy to “guide Ships” through the Strait of Hormuz beginning tomorrow morning “Middle East Time.” And yes, he capitalized “Ships” and “Crews” throughout the post.

I have a hard time comprehending exactly how insane this is. First of all, there is a war going on with Iran, and Trump is down there in Florida, staying at his residence/hotel/club/top-secret-stolen-documents-storage-facility, Mar a Lago, and what he thought was important to do today, with American troops in danger in the Middle East, was to attend a fucking golf tournament.

Then there is the usual insanity of using Truth Social to blast out what he thinks he’s going to do in his war against Iran. Of course, there is the plan itself, to help “people, companies, and Countries that have done absolutely nothing wrong — They are victims of circumstance.” The circumstance being that Trump started a war with Iran and in retaliation, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, stranding some 2,000 ships that have been anchored on either side of the Strait since February 28, more than four months ago.

Now comes the rationale: “This is a Humanitarian gesture on behalf of the United States, Middle Eastern Countries but, in particular, the Country of Iran.”

Huh? Iran closed the Strait. The U.S. has had all Iran trade under sanctions for years…until Trump started his war and Iran closed the Strait, starving the world of 20 percent of the international oil trade – except for Iran’s oil, on which he lifted sanctions, along with sanctions on Russian oil, because of the oil shortage that he, Donald J. Trump, caused on February 28.

So get this: Iran is selling its oil on the open market. Iran’s ships are transiting the Strait of Hormuz, except that we’re blockading them. Or something.

Trump goes on to say he thinks escorting the ships will “go a long way in showing Goodwill on behalf of all of those who have been fighting so strenuously over the last number of months.”

This statement is more insanity. Just between you and me and Trump’s golf caddy, “all of those” who have been engaged in this war are three: the United States and Israel, who started the war, and Iran, whom they attacked. Trump also whines that the “Crews” of the stuck vessels, which he falsely identifies as “largescale” for some reason, are running out of food and suffering from “health” and “sanitary” problems.

As if Trump has ever worried about the health and sanitary conditions of anyone other than himself and his immediate family, and probably not so much about Eric and Tiffany.

He also has to issue a threat, because what would a Trump post on Truth Social be without an ill-conceived, ill-directed, unplanned-for, and insane threat. If his “Humanitarian process is interfered with, that interference will, unfortunately, have to be dealt with forcefully,” Trump claims at the very end of his post.

Any sane person considering such a plan and such a threat would ask: Exactly how is this going to happen? We have somewhere between 15 and 20 warships in the Persian Gulf region, including three aircraft carrier strike groups. One of these strike groups typically consists of the aircraft carrier – those on station in the region are the Gerald Ford, the Abraham Lincoln, and the George H.W. Bush – and seven to twelve combat supporting vessels, so if their strike groups are at full combat readiness, there goes the availability of all the guided missile cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and supply ships that are necessary to defend the three aircraft carriers.

If all those naval vessels are busy defending the floating targets we call aircraft carriers, what ships are we going to use to “guide” commercial vessels through the dangerous Strait of Hormuz, which at this point has been mined by Iran and is protected by a flotilla of vessels that have been hidden from U.S. attacks by the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Those vessels include fast-attack speedboats, catamarans armed with missiles, and unmanned naval surface drones. Despite Trump’s constant bellowing that the U.S. bombing has put the entire Iranian navy, which he says consists of 159 ships, “on the bottom of the sea,” there are reports that with 1,200 miles of shoreline and countless small bays and hiding places, Iran has managed to save as many as 1,000 of its small attack craft.

So, let’s review. There are 2,000 commercial vessels stuck on either side of the Strait of Hormuz. Some of them are said to be close to running out of fuel oil, so they would presumably need refueling before they could be “guided” through the Strait. We have about 20 warships in the region, including three carriers, so that means about 17 usable escort vessels, because our Navy isn’t going to let one of its precious carriers anywhere near the Strait, which is defended not only by the IRGC small boat fleet, but by missile batteries deeply dug into the range of mountains that overlooks the entire Iranian shoreline and is within range of firing those missiles on any ship daring to enter the Strait.

With 20 Navy warships that we can’t use, because they’re defending aircraft carriers, how are we going to “guide” even a single ship through the Strait? If Trump and Hegseth are foolish enough to dispatch one of our destroyers or guided missile cruisers to escort a commercial vessel – and they just might be that foolish – and it is attacked, Trump has already told the world, including Iran, that we will deal with it “forcefully.”

Which means bombing the shit out Iran, so they’ll be ready for that, too.

Trump’s entire 18^th hole war plan is idiocy of the first order…and the second and the third and the fourth. It’s worse than folly. It is public, out in the open, in the clear military planning madness.

Donald Trump isn’t the only one who can use social media to make military plans and threats. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps has an account on X. The IRGC concludes that “Trump’s room for decision-making has narrowed.” Noting that Trump has sent a “passive letter to Congress” brought on by the 60-day deadline which caused him to “declare that hostilities are over,” the IRGC says “there is only one way to read this: Trump must choose between ‘an impossible military operation or a bad deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran.’”

The IRGC use of the English language on X is better than that of Donald Trump on Truth Social. Naturally.

I wonder how that response went down at the 18^th hole at Doral as Trump watched the final foursome making their putts at the “Cadillac Championship.”

The whole world is watching, and the whole world is laughing at our certifiably demented and insane president, who has been bragging over and over that he has been officially tested three times by real doctors, and he passed because he can tell the difference between a bear and a giraffe.

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These are dark times but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!).

🌊Join The Blue Wave!🌊

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Even as the most corrupt Supreme Court in history tries to put its thumb on the scale for the GOP, his has been a phenomenally bad week for the party of fascism and stupidity. They had their shot and missed. Now Republicans are just trying to stop their inevitable destruction which is all they’ve been doing for the last 40 years. Too bad their greed keeps getting in the way…womp womp.

Come on, let’s see everything you missed this week!

Monday: They’re sooooo fucking predictable.

Tuesday: I’m sure this won’t backfire on them at all…

Wednesday: Great job, dumbass!

Thursday: Podcast!

Friday: Anxiety and depression are suuuuch a pain in the ass.

5 Things I Found Interesting This Week

1. The Trump Freak Show Just Jumped the Shark - Trump forged a coronation of victimhood out of Butler, PA. Last night at the Hilton, the encore flopped. by W.A. Lawrence at Glass Empires

2. The Fertilizer Crisis Just Got Worse. Food Prices Will Catch Up by Fall. - Four fertilizer shocks are stacking on top of each other. Your grocery bill catches up at the fall harvest. by Preparedness & Politics

3. An oligarch’s dystopian scheme to discredit journalism with AI by Caleb Ecarma at Popular Information

4. We Should Start Paying Attention to the Manosphere Again. We’re Already Inside It. - How the Manosphere moved from the margins into mainstream conversations. by Letters from a Feminist

5. Why Trump Can’t Deal - Putin and Obama are driving our current president to a breakdown. And you cannot understand what’s happening in Iran without understanding why by LOLGOP at The Cause

We’re talking here of the hell of conventional weapons, not nuclear. Name a war that was won with conventional bombs. Flattening Dresden and Berlin and Germany’s war industries didn’t end the war against the Nazis. Vietnam? We dropped three times the tonnage of bombs on Vietnam that we dropped during World War II before the North Vietnamese showed us the door. Gaza? Israel tried to make Gaza uninhabitable using bombs, and when that didn’t work, they moved in with bulldozers. Did turning Gaza into a parking lot knock out Hamas? Nope. They’re still fighting.

The New York Times reported that Trump received a briefing in the Situation Room on Thursday that was “similar” to the one he got on February 26, two days before he started an all-out war on Iran. Today, it was reported that Trump was “not satisfied” with the latest proposal Iran sent via Pakistan with an offer to end the war.

That sounds an awful lot like bombs will fall and missiles will fly against Iran, and soon – this time, according to Pentagon sources, on key infrastructure such as bridges, power plants, and oil facilities, more or less the way Putin has been bombing Ukraine.

Oka-a-a-ay. But what does that mean?

The big, and I mean REALLY big deal about a new bombing campaign on Iran is that it will make Donald Trump happy. He’ll be able to hold up photos of blown-out bridges and burning oil tanks in the Oval Office…if he can keep his eyes open long enough…to prove that we have “the most lethal” military in history.

Trump thinks he’s so fucking macho. He takes a briefing, he picks up a phone, and thousands of miles away, jets take off from aircraft carriers, and 1,000-pound bombs start dropping on what they constantly refer to as “targets” in Iran.

Whoop-de-fucking-doo. One of the first “targets” his missiles hit after the war began on February 28 was the girl’s school in Iran that Trump’s war planners thought was part of a military facility. It wasn’t. They were looking at out-of-date maps and satellite photos.

But damn! They blew the hell out of that school! A photo of the school taken after the U.S. Tomahawk missile hit shows a building missing half its structure. But they didn’t have to knock down the whole building to kill about 175 schoolgirls and teachers. The blast radius of a cruise missile carrying a 1,000-pound warhead is only about 50 feet, but it can kill people who are about twice as far away as that.

Man, that sounds powerful, doesn’t it? A 1,000-pound bomb dropped from an F-14 fighter flying off an aircraft carrier has a lethal blast radius of about 150 to 400 feet. One of these bombs, which are highly likely to be the kinds of munitions that will be used if Trump orders another attack from the air on Iran, will be able to take out buildings and kill dozens, if not hundreds, of people if they are near the so-called “infrastructure” that Trump will assure us are the “targets.”

It’s all mil-speak for how deadly and destructive U.S. bombs and missiles are. We have tens of thousands of 1,000-pound bombs, thousands of 2,000-pound bombs. These were the same bombs Israel used on Gaza – yes, they dropped bombs supplied by the U.S., which had to resupply them, Israel’s bombing was so heavy. It’s hard to know exactly how many bombs Israel dropped on Gaza, but I’ve seen figures of 85,000 to 200,000 tons, more than the tonnage dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II, according to authoritative estimates.

But consider this: Gaza is about 25 miles long and about 5 miles wide. Iran is 1,600 miles long, and about 800 miles wide, from Iran’s northeast to southwest. Gaza is 140 square miles. The metropolitan area of Iran’s capital of Tehran alone is 850 square miles, while the whole country is about 636 thousand square miles.

Are you getting the picture here? All those bombs dropped on Gaza didn’t knock out Hamas. Do you think an equivalent number of bombs dropped on Iran will end Trump’s war?

Not even a teeny-weeny chance. Warfare today is almost entirely asymmetrical. Ukraine is a tiny country compared to Russia. All those bombs and missiles and drones Russia used on Ukraine…for four fucking years…and Russia is about where they were back in the summer of 2022. Has Ukraine waved a white flag and given up because Russia is about 30 times as big as they are, with an economy 10 times the size of Ukraine’s?

How’s that war going for you, Vladdy my boy?

Who’s bigger than who doesn’t matter anymore. Ukraine can build drones and missiles underground for as long as it takes. It doesn’t even matter that Trump has largely abandoned Ukraine. Europe took up the slack. This year, Russia is taking 30,000 to 35,000 casualties…per month…and it’s been worse in past years. Russia cannot recruit enough replacements to account for its losses. Some estimates say that Russia is running a deficit of 9,000 soldiers a month between its casualty losses and recruitment.

Iran, just by placing a few mines and getting on the single-sideband radio pressing the talk-button and threatening tankers in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, has completely stopped the oil trade passing through the Strait of Hormuz. No bullets. No bombs. No missiles. Just threats on a fucking radio by Iran and the world is screaming for the 20 percent of oil that isn’t coming out of the Persian Gulf.

Let’s just put it this way. Donald Trump can order the Navy to drop bombs and send missiles into Iran for as long as Israel bombed Gaza, about 18 months, and Iran won’t open the Strait of Hormuz, and their “nuclear dust?” That’s staying in a tunnel in a mountain. They’re not giving up on either count.

The problem with Trump’s likely new plan to bomb Iran is that “bomb” isn’t just a word. Bomb means bodies. Thousands of bodies. There will be families whose lives will be disrupted by loss of life, no electricity, having to move away from whatever areas that Trump declares to be “targets,” so there will be displaced persons in the hundreds of thousands if not millions.

But all that human misery will not win Trump his war.

Here’s the deal. War is hell, but hell isn’t enough to end wars anymore. Donald Trump is a flaming, ignorant asshole. The biggest problem he has is that the leaders of Iran know how big of an asshole he is, and they know something else, too: All they have to do is wait. Trump will revert to TACO. The clock is ticking. His poll numbers are crashing. The midterm elections are on the horizon. Trump can’t have a winless war going on with gas and food prices going through the roof and expect his political party to win in November.

He’ll probably order new bombing so he can feel better for a while, and then he’ll go back to whining on Truth Social about how mean Jimmy Kimmel is to him on late night TV.

He’s a loser, and Iran knows it. Now, I ask you: who do you think is going to “win” this unwinnable war?

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Just in case you missed this one.

Oliver plays this one as close to straight as I've ever seen him do, I suspect because he seems seriously and deeply angry about the damage being done by chatbots. This is worth a watch, but there are two points well worth underlining-

One, these bots were rushed to market long before any guardrails or responsible oversight were worked out (and really, our tech overlords don't seem in any hurry to work on them).

Two, the chatbots number one job is to get you to keep using the chatbot. They need you to upgrade to a paid version, and then they need you to stay with that bot as long and as often as possible, because that's how they maximize revenue. Again, the main job of the chatbot is to keep you talking to the chatbot.

As always, there is language of which my mother would not approve. But some of this is shocking-- I knew most of these stories, but to see it laid out, and hear the quotes from the techbros-- it's all very alarming. And a reminder that these bots should be nowhere near children.