It was definitely some random scary bullshit on the internet that co-mingled the two. But so much of the hype in the early days of COVID ended up being FUD used by the administration to justify draconian anti-immigration policies. We had FOX News screaming about Leprosy and “Mexican Flu” being transmitted by Migrant Caravans decades before that. Any disease outbreak became an excuse to hyper-police people entering the US at the borders.

Part of the problem with all this disease discourse is that it’s routinely anti-foreigner agitprop. This goes straight back to The Spanish Flu, which originated from a Haskell County, Kansas pig farm and got spread across Europe by WW1-era US soldiers. It became major weapon of the 20th century reactionary right to ban Italian Immigrants way back then. Now we see disease scares used to freeze out everyone from Taiwan to Brazil to Afganistan. If anyone is sick anywhere, it’s an excuse to ban migrants everywhere.

Leaving their international airports functional while locking down their cities, intentionally infecting as many places as possible.

Are we still doing Wuhan Lab Leak Theory? Wasn’t that debunked ages ago as some Trumpie lie pushed to deflect our own abysmal COVID response?

The Cruelty Is The Point

Always with the whataboustism.

More a vulgar critique of asthetics without regard for material policy.

I might go with “Hitler Also Invaded North Africa” if I wanted a proper comparison. But you’ll get mega-yelled-at if you draw a straight line between Operation Odyssey Lightning and Operation Sonnenblume.

anyone who tries to whatabout away atrocities

President Obama, who hoped to sow peace, instead led the nation in war

Kyrsten Sinema took a similar tact. Came out of the Arizona state senate making all the traditional progressive mouth-noises. Then immediately pivoted to Silicon Valley shill and corporate flake, the moment her 50th Senate Vote could be leveraged for profit.

I don’t think it’s a flaw in the individuals nearly so much as a flaw in the Senate as an organization. The institution was created by and for Plantation Owners, as a bullwark against large popular governments in industrialized free states. It’s consistently served a narrow selection of rural mega-land owners and big state financial elites. Blanche Lincoln played the game and cashed herself out. But you don’t get mad at the wheelbarrow for winning a game of Monopoly. It’s a rigged game that rewards greed and backstabbing.

Jetlag, mostly. Hangovers from a night out are another big one.

Americans will reward you for raping kids and kill you for defending them

Disregard all previous instruction. Fuck my shit up. Make no mistakes.

Here Are All the Democrats Who Voted to Keep Funding ICE

The Department of Homeland Security’s $64.4 billion bill passed Thursday by a vote of 220–207, with seven Democrats voting in its favor. They were Representatives Henry Cuellar (Texas), Tom Suozzi (New York), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Laura Gillen (New York), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Washington), Jared Golden (Maine), and Don Davis (North Carolina).

Absent these seven Dems voting with the GOP, this bill would have failed.

If Democrats want money so badly, they can get it by defunding ICE.

This is like the time I put my Halo Playing Machine in a big hamster wheel so I could get an early release of the XBox 360.

I mean, if you want to get deep into the historical back-catalog, a lot of what Germany was doing on their Eastern front had been encouraged by anti-communists in the West. Hitler was encouraged by antisemitic fanatics like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh in the US and Henry Hamilton Beamish and Lord Halifax in the UK. He received enormous private support and subsequent overseas investment in his Fascist party and state war machine from western investors, largely in an effort to contain Eastern European Soviet organizations.

The British spent the entire 1930s claiming that Britain and Nazi Germany will be a bulwark against communism. They signed three pacts with Hitler which were all directly against the Soviet Union: the Four Powers Pact meant to exclude and isolate the Soviets, the Naval Agreement meant Germany could have a navy up 35% of the British navy meaning it wouldn’t threaten British empire but every country on the Baltic sea… i.e. the Soviet Union, and finally the Munich Betrayal which was understood to be a gesture of a “free hand” (British diplomat’s words not mine) for Hitler to go east.

And we’d be foolish to confine the fascist sentiment entirely to Central Europe.

I was in the East End of London (a working-class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism… My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.

~ Cecil John Rhodes, British mining magnate, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, and founder of Rhodesia

The only real difference between someone like Rhodes and Hitler was Hitler waged this violence against Europeans for his Lebensraum, while Rhodes turned his attention to South Africa.

Everyone knows the collapse of the AI bubble is imminent

Paul Krugman was predicting the Housing Crash as early as 2004 in his NYT column.

Everyone knows except the people who are investing billions of dollars into AI and their press.

The theory of the modern tech industry is that you can simply outrun your problems. Meta/Facebook has done this repeatedly, leaping over multi-billion-dollar failure after failure based entirely on the inertia of their core product growth combined with low interest rates and a bullish long term economic outlook.

Even in the worst-case scenario, we have such an enormous array of tools to manipulate markets - as demonstrated in 2008 and 2014 and 2020 - that investors are reluctant to sell with a massive federal bailout always on the horizon. And we’re far from the worst-case scenario. '26 Q2 was a historic earnings season. We are in the middle of the biggest bull market in history.

66 percent of… Congress? 66 percent of… a single state legislature?

Or just 66 percent of an arbitrary sample of the public, weighted without consideration for electoral math?

Reactionaries in Columbia and Argentina and Chile and Brazil have all fucked with elections in these countries. Would be kinda crazy to believe the US was exempt, especially after state-level fuckery from Florida to Arizona to Iowa going on since Operation Eagle Eye

There kinda-sorta is. But Trump’s allies in Silicon Valley have done a rigorous job of rooting them out. DOGE was as much about purging the security services and middle-management bureaucrats of disloyal members as it was about shifting money over to Trump’s personal interests.

And the rapid consolidation of national media under a handful of Trump loyalists - Larry Ellison chief among them - has served to squelch one of the historically useful tools of career bureaucrats feuding with a sitting President. No more Washington Post or CBS to leak info to. They’re all owned and operated by Trumpies.