Mirshe

Thiel has spoken enough on his love of Tolkien that it's pretty clear he's a big fan of the books, meaning he knows what he's naming. A lot of these people are actually pretty devoted fans, they just think Saruman/Sauron/etc had bad PR.

This is a strategy, and has been for years, ever since political advertising became a thing over the air. "Congressman X voted NO on a bill that would stop people from drinking raw sewage (because it also contained a section that would limit the ability of the federal government to regulate food)", etc.

Actually, a lot of the scientists themselves spoke on it, and people who had first-hand accounts of what they went through. Even a few former members have spoken on what they did. We know the data is effectively worthless for much the same reason as we know Mengele's data was worthless - the subjects are all sorts of ages and backgrounds and most had been tortured or at least starving in a concentration camp. Data on, say, frostbite affecting HEALTHY people might be worth something, but there are so many confounding factors between disease, starvation, injuries, etc that it's almost impossible to disentangle the testing data from what was already there.

Additionally, a lot of the data is very obvious shit anyone could've told you already, and the experiments (especially with 731) done to make things that looked like science, or experiments that were done to replicate Western science so Japan could internally take credit. It doesn't take a surgeon to tell you "hey if you put people in a vacuum chamber, they die" or "hey if you vivisect someone and take their lungs out, they need those and they'll die."

So, interesting points. However, consider that just in the last few years:

• A Trump ally bought Dominion, the largest producer of electronic ballot boxes and the ones used by a LOT of states. Several studies have shown that via a hardware-side injection, it would be quite easy for anyone with physical access to the...power strip, I think, could manipulate the ballot recording without leaving a significant trace.
• DHS has asked for voter rolls from all states, and ICE/CBP have conducted raids on prominent voter activism groups.
• The FBI has also normalized raiding election offices and has seized ballots from at least the 2020 election, and at least one sheriff's offices has also attempted to do the same in very similar fashion in California, with very similar warrants, looking for very similar "fraud", and have also attempted to seize ballots.

The big problem with fucking with a midterm isn't ease, it's just scale. When you have cops, the federal and a lot of state and even local DOJs, the President's personal goon squad (which has now been significantly inflated and equipped), and the FBI willing to harass, intimidate, or arrest voters, steal ballots, and challenge every single race, everywhere, all the time, all backed by think tanks and funding orgs that are backed by some of the richest people in the entire world, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to stop up the gears of democratic elections.

Sure, your locals can challenge the results. They can make noise. But at the end of the day, "move fast and break things" works surprisingly well as a governance tactic if your desired end result is maintaining power, because by the time people have untangled the knots you've woven, you're already ten steps ahead and "well it'd be REALLY HARD AND EXPENSIVE to run a special election (if your locality even has a legal way to do that - most don't).

We effectively had our Hannibal moment getting locked into a stalemate with Iran.

Russia is at the point where it's more economical and more effective to mobility kill a vehicle than destroy it. Getting rid of it takes more material on your side, and makes it easier and faster to replace because they can just buy another. Repairing a broken vehicle, you have to either tow it out or have it repaired on-site, with an operation that might take a couple of guys to do and MORE equipment that you can take out with the saved explosive from the other half of the mine.

It feels weird, but it's classic attrition warfare.

Stand-up was literally started as an idea by a man who self described as a fascist. Behind the Bastards did a decent two parter on it...last year?

I was about to say, you nod along with Ted until he starts into the racist bits.

Nah, aside from the WH UFC fight, the "Michelle Obama is trans" bullshit has been floating around since 08 when Obama was running the first time.

No, there's a scaffold in front of the WH to support the asinine UFC fights tonight (and the stands for those). It's a temporary structure, theoretically (though of course, Dear Leader has floated the idea "as a joke" of just keeping it in place permanently "for other events".)

Not if they're hit with a missile or another satellite. Debris could pretty easily be rocketed up into a higher orbit from a military strike.

remove and destroy

Nah, we only wanted to remove it. Trump and Hegseth have both been public that we should start building another huge wave of nuclear weapons, and you need uranium to do it. Far easier to try and mug someone else for theirs (and their oil and whatever else you think you can get) than it is to actually buy it and refine it yourself.