"The rich" aren't a monolith. Some are neutral like MLK's favorite target the apathetic liberals, some are working on funding things they think will help some positive progress in the world, and some actively created (and are still creating) the poisonous breeding ground that led to the current apocalypse.
But also, yes.
Cyprus.
Portugal, Malta, Greece and Italy
I wanted to make a comment about, sounds like a tax shelter more than fearing instability. US passport is still gonna work worldwide unless something goes really wrong. Nobody's telling you you have to do something like this to have a home in Cyprus if shit's going down back home.
And then I started thinking about it more. Yeah, I can see things going so badly wrong if Trump gets a second term that US banks back home won't be stable, US dollars won't be stable, US citizenship won't be the same opener of doors that it is right now, as of 5-10 years hence. I think this is unironically a very good idea. Not like it's GTFO time right now. But yeah, it's "let's make a contingency plan" time right now, if the US becomes neo-Russia for 20 or 30 years starting 2 or 3 years from now.
Like if a wealthy businessman was in Germany in 1931, do you think they would have been sensible to start making plans for a new place to have a full home base that wasn't Germany? Yeah I think they would have. it makes sense to me.
There's a massive difference between police who are imperfectly accountable to the government as a whole, which is based on a semi-corrupt system which is still imperfectly accountable to the will of the voters, versus a singular entity which is explicitly under the control of one particular politician.
(Yes I know about Sheriffs -- they are still accountable to the legal framework in a way that I strongly suspect this guy wants his not to be.)
Put it this way: When they came to take over the capitol, the majority of the capitol police fought against the rioters and everyone took as it given that the National Guard would be there to fight against the rioters. This guy wants a police force that will fight for the rioters, without anyone getting put on administrative leave or anybody reviewing bodycam footage or anything if someone on the "enemy" side is getting shot during.
Democrats should agree with this, and amend the bill to indicate that all citizens should have the right to vote (ideally with it being a felony to try to prevent them from doing so). Let Trump and Johnson explain why they don't want that part of it.
Yeah, I was basing that part of the whole little edifice on one sentence out of this article which might have been facetious. I edited it and also made some other factual corrections after rereading the thing.
Well this will certainly be productive
Okay so let me tell you about the tree lobsters.
They're these behemoth weird bugs, like crickets as big as your hand. They live in the trees and don't do much, they just muck around trying to find food like every other peaceful species. When rats arrived on their little island they had a holocaust; they just weren't equipped for it in any way. The islanders honestly didn't seem to mind very much; they were kind of off putting creatures and did nobody any good in particular. Everyone thought they were extinct, oh well, I have work tomorrow and things on my mind.
Not the biologists. They heard a rumor that a little population might have hung on, way out on some godforsaken spire of rock out on the water that was too far away from the island for anyone to care about. They went out there, in bad weather, more than once, put genuine risk to their safety having to climb up like mountaineers up this massive sheer rock spike; eventually they realized they had to go at night, out on the water, and they kept at it until they actually found a few of the damn things alive, and brought them back to try to set up a little breeding population.
Most of the them died. No one really knew what to feed them but they managed to figure it out just barely in time. Out of 4 they brought back from the dwindling population, 2 died, leaving 2: 1 male and 1 female. To hear the scientists talk about it and how panicked they got about this being for real the last chance that these unique little creatures might have, that their whole lineage might live or die depending on what this little handful of people in the lab can figure out or how hard they try to make sure they get what they need to keep living, honestly gets me a little choked up thinking about it. Anyway, they're still around, and producing eggs and little babies now.
To me -- I am dead serious about this -- this is part of what I love about humanity. For as much fucked up stuff as we do I do not know of any other species that would do something like this. The whole unique combination of caring enough to risk your safety and spend years of effort, a significant chunk of your one and only life, and this level of intelligence and talent and shared knowledge, all invested in some weird little beasts that can't really do anyone any good at all. It's just, oh shit, they're in trouble, real bad trouble and we can help them so we have to.
Things go extinct all the time. Mother Nature doesn't give a shit any more than Shell Oil does. But now these little guys have temporarily someone to look after them who really cares, for maybe the first time in their whole species' lifetime.
At least as far as I know they are still around. They tried to introduce them back to the island, which is difficult, and which the island's inhabitants may or may not want, but the lab still has a bunch of them. They're still around for now.
Edit: Corrected some details
Yeah. And it could be both -- it could be both a useful tool for law enforcement to wiretap foreign adversaries that are trying to elect Trump or do something similarly awful, and also a convenient loophole if they want to track protest organizations where one of the members sometimes calls his brother who lives in France or whatever. Russia/Trump would only care about the first, and someone who's chiefly concerned about civil liberties in the US would only really care (or even be aware of, by definition) about the second.
I don't think anyone needs more evidence that Trump is a crook; I think the concern is that Trump is enough in cahoots with for-real foreign adversaries who are at odds with FISA-authorized surveillance (as it makes real operational problems for them), and they might be telling him how badly he needs to kill this to weaken it. He usually doesn't get anywhere deep into policy on this kind of stuff. Unless someone smarter than him is telling him what's important, he just talks about windmills and toilets and Crooked Hillary and how the election was stolen.
I honestly don't know whether it's that, or whether he's having an unexpected interest in policy details just because it came to his attention somehow and he knows the US national security apparatus is bad because it was mean to him. It could be either one.
I have never been so conflicted about a news story
Like hey hooray, congress did something good!
Wait
Wait
Did they?
The video goes into a bunch more detail, but for me I think just take a step back. Why are you in the conversation? For me I like talking about this stuff and learning about it, and I think it's productive to communicate my point of view. If you look at it like that, it's easier to avoid getting sucked into a back and forth or just pointless bickering -- like what's the overall goal? I mean it's fine just endlessly answering bad-faith arguments one after another if you want to, but usually it doesn't feed any particular end goal. It's just a waste of time.
If someone makes a substantive argument I'll feel like I have to respond to it, but if they're clearly just using the opportunity of us talking to blather a shifting series of stock flimsy Biden-is-bad constructions, then I don't feed too much into it; I think it's perfectly fine to just make my own series of constructions for my own point of view.
Bro you should have investigated the actual answer to this question before asking it publicly ๐
It's not to say you're watching lots of soft core porn but the algorithm has definitely decided that you'll like it