Donald Trump

[stevebrooks]

This man is an idiot;

Mr Zelensky, according to sources present, then hit Mr Biden with a list of other demands, to which the 46th president lost his temper and shouted to Mr Zelensky that he should show a little more gratitude.

So spare me the carry on about how Mr Trump’s conversation – which was on similar lines – was an abandonment of Ukraine.

You see there he goes, her thinks a private phone call between Biden and Zelensky in which Biden got annoyed with Zelensky is the same as a performative ambush in front a world wide audience, the entire point of the Trump thing was to humiliate Zelensky, that he thinks these two things are the same is....well it's moronic!

Nor can NATO and the US put boots on the ground, because Russia would call in China and then you’d also have World War III.

Why the fuck would you assume China would instantly rush in to help Russia?

Russia cannot bomb the living daylights out of Ukraine and claim the whole country, because that would draw the NATO forces of Europe and the US into a full-blown war and you’d have World War III.

What the fuck is he talking about, that was the entire point of the Russian invasion from the very beginning, if it wasn't for the staunch defense by the Ukrainians that would be the situation right now, Putin wants Ukraine and he has been bombing the daylights out of it for 3 years, he has broken every single peace deal up to now, what makes him think this one would be any different?

Ukraine and Russia seemingly have a willingness to end the war, but the problem is, it will not happen without concessions on both sides.

Russia has captured about one-fifth of Ukraine. You’re not getting that back without World War III and, on a global scale, the reclamation of that land is clearly not worth the destruction it would cause.

According to what I have heard of the Trump peace deal Russia is conceding nothing, there are only two ways this will end, Russia withdrawing or Ukraine surrendering, Trumps entire plan is just a long drawn out surrender!

There is no way to force Russia’s hand, when it has an unholy alliance with China, to end the war.

There's no unholy alliance, China is in this for nothing other than the money and will swing whichever way will give them the most benefit, and putting troops on the ground in Russian gives them none at all.

As I said, an idiot, maybe he should study how well previous "concessions" to the invaders worked out in the past!

https://www.news.com.au/world/north-ame ... 0c329790ac

[nibble]

"But it makes sense when you realize his goal is to create something like Russia where the economy is run by a few oligarchs loyal to him,"

https://www.msn.com/en-au/politics/gove ... xxmZfapSNA

[pipbarber]

"But it makes sense when you realize his goal is to create something like Russia where the economy is run by a few oligarchs loyal to him,"

https://www.msn.com/en-au/politics/gove ... xxmZfapSNA

I can't open that article so i hope i'm not saying what it said, but one might make a lot of money from shorting the market just before a tariff war is announced, or any market sensitive announcement, which Trump continually makes. He and his could be doing this, it's certainly feasible.

But then again, there's Hanlon's razor. Hard to dismiss that.

[stevebrooks]

"But it makes sense when you realize his goal is to create something like Russia where the economy is run by a few oligarchs loyal to him,"

https://www.msn.com/en-au/politics/gove ... xxmZfapSNA

I can't open that article so i hope i'm not saying what it said, but one might make a lot of money from shorting the market just before a tariff war is announced, or any market sensitive announcement, which Trump continually makes. He and his could be doing this, it's certainly feasible.

But then again, there's Hanlon's razor. Hard to dismiss that.

Yeah but the problem at the moment is it's difficult to do when you don't know from one week to the next whether tariffs are on or off. Trump has just declared that tariffs on cars are off, a week after putting them on, but they are off for 30 days, at which point they may go back on, or not. Canada has basically said, fuck that we are just going to keep our tariffs on, we can't plan based on the current system where tariffs may in place one week and not the next, so we aren't playing that game!

That sort of behavior doesn't actually create any sort of system to short because you never know when or if tariffs are actually going to be on, and the market simply doesn't react because they are in the same position, a 30 day suspension isn't suddenly going to make the US car manufacturer stocks boom if they expect the tariffs to be back on in 30 days.

The other thing is tariffs don't work if the other side simply decides not to buy any of your stuff, prices aren't going to go up in Canada on whisky due to tariffs because the board that buys US whiskey has just said they are going to stop buying it, they'll get it elsewhere.

BC has just announced tariffs on cars transitioning through BC to Alaska, which is interesting, because that means they are actually getting tariff money from the US because the companies shipping cars through BC to Alaska are actually US companies, oops.

Basically the unpredictability of the entire system causes the market to crash because large corporation plan years ahead, and if the system changes month to month, or even week to week, they can't plan, and you can't short on a market that never recovers.

[stylofone]

Skum keeps on blowing up rockets and his cultists say "that was the most brilliant failure ever, that failure only makes the next success even more glorious."

Trump seems to be doing the same with the US economy, its global alliances, and any hope that America will be able to compete with China in EVs and renewable energy. So much more chaos. It is such a bin fire.

My fear is that when the failures start to burn Trump's followers, the fascist playbook calls for scapegoating of minorities, using hate and violence to prolong the hypnotic effect and use their own failures to entrench tyrannical power.

A contrary, optimistic assessment is that they believe their own bullshit so much, they won't actually HAVE a plan when they smell the smoke coming from their own burning arses.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo ... r-AA1Aoveu

[pipbarber]

Skum keeps on blowing up rockets and his cultists say "that was the most brilliant failure ever, that failure only makes the next success even more glorious."

Trump seems to be doing the same with the US economy, its global alliances, and any hope that America will be able to compete with China in EVs and renewable energy. So much more chaos. It is such a bin fire.

My fear is that when the failures start to burn Trump's followers, the fascist playbook calls for scapegoating of minorities, using hate and violence to prolong the hypnotic effect and use their own failures to entrench tyrannical power.

A contrary, optimistic assessment is that they believe their own bullshit so much, they won't actually HAVE a plan when they smell the smoke coming from their own burning arses.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo ... r-AA1Aoveu

The fascist play book when everything goes to shit also includes a chapter on starting a war, it's an obvious out, but it would be unpopular and i'm quite sure there'd be resistance from the military, of some sort. Attacking minorities will be far easier until even that starts to look ridiculous. What then? Maybe just decay and collapse.

I'm suddenly reminded of TS Eliot's Hollow Men.

....This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The whole poem actually, is quite prescient to maga world. Worth a re-read. (Written, i might add, in 1925)

[stevebrooks]

Trump intent on setting up a coup in a foreign country, at least the CIA did it on the quiet, Trump isn't even pretending to not interfere in another country!

According to the report, Trump’s inner circle has been engaged in “secret discussions” about whether Ukraine could hold snap presidential elections, potentially paving the way for Zelensky’s ousting.

The current elected government supports Zelensky, they voted on it, the constitution prevents elections being held during a state of martial law, so there's no way there can be an election of any kind until some sort of peace is settled.

https://www.news.com.au/world/europe/tr ... 4aed5689d7

[stevebrooks]

Still going with the Canada bit, not he wants to redraw the border, probably wants to push it all the way back to Alaska, but that's not going to happen if Canada has anything to say about it!

But he also “brought up something much more fundamental”.

“He told Mr Trudeau that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary,” The Times reports.

“He offered no further explanation.”

The treaty finalising the boundary between the two countries was established in 1908.

“Mr Trump also mentioned revisiting the sharing of lakes and rivers between the two nations, which is regulated by a number of treaties, a topic he’s expressed interest about in the past,” The Times reports.

“Canadian officials took Mr Trump’s comments seriously, not least because he had already publicly said he wanted to bring Canada to its knees.”

Of course they could revise the boundary so that the states that rely on Canada for power and etc are part of Canada, I am sure that would them happy!

https://www.news.com.au/world/north-ame ... 7efbaa2a26

[stevebrooks]

30 years of research and study and this idiot Trump put in charge of the US HHS is now going to start a new study to try and find a link. But lets be clear, he's not trying to find whether or not it causes autism, he already believes that, he's trying to find a way to link it to autism so he can declare himself right! If you think vaccine avoidance was bad before, just wait, people will take this as sure fire evidence that vaccines cause autism, I mean why would they be studying if it it doesn't?

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which sits underneath Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, is planning a large study into potential connections between vaccines and autism, Reuters reports.

Prior scientific research has either disproven or failed to find any links between vaccines and autism, the causes of which remain unclear.

The planned study comes as the US battles a large measles outbreak, fuelled by declining vaccination rates. Mr Kennedy has long sowed doubt about the safety of the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.

No-one in the CDC wants to do this, they already know, backed up by years or national and international research, that vaccines don't cause autism, they have been told to do this.

https://www.reuters.com/business/health ... 025-03-07/

[stylofone]

Jeremy Clarkson is a shit and he confirms it in several places in this little diatribe. But he also calls Trump, Musk and Vance shits, and it's in The Times no less, a Murdoch organ and a long-established "journal of record". I think it's interesting, because it shows how internationally at least, Trump V2.0 has turned the cognitive dissonance level up to 11, and it's finally been too much for some members of his drooling fan club. I don't know how long it can stay this way, but being anti-Trump is a more of a thing in some lairs of conservativism. Sadly we haven't yet experienced it on either side of politics here, it's a conga line of suckholes, business as usual.

If anyone was stupid enough to like Trump at first, they are stupid enough to drift back as soon as he or his replacement slot back into the sort of sweet deception the faithul crave. But for now, at least, words like this are welcome, as we ponder the paradox of Vance being simultaneously a "knob" and a "twat".

But then came that White House meeting when poor little Volodomyr Zelensky was hauled in front of the world’s press and openly bullied in what, let’s face it, is his third language. Soon, the whole gang was at it, demanding to know why he hadn’t sent the people of America a thank-you letter and why he wasn’t wearing a suit. Had he not been thrown out after a few minutes, it’s fairly certain someone would have said his dad was a poof and that he smelled like wee and poo. Some have called this scene “an uncomfortable watch”. But it was worse than that. It was despicable.
And since then, things have got worse. Trump sided with Russia and North Korea in a United Nations vote on Ukraine. He pulled American military support completely and when various European leaders met to decide on how best to deal with this, JD Vance, the vice-president, scoffed, describing Britain and France as random countries who haven’t fought a war for 30 or 40 years.
Now I don’t want to stoop to his level, but I’m going to. Vance is a bearded God-botherer who pretty much thinks that women who’ve been raped should be forced to have the resultant child. I’ve searched for the right word to describe him and I think it’s “twat”. He also has no clue about history.
Because far more recently than 30 or 40 years ago, as Vance claimed last week, our brave young men were being blown to pieces in some godforsaken desert to support whatever madcap scheme the American president had embarked upon that week. And let’s not forget that while they were out there, dying in agony, the UK was still paying the US back for all the weapons we’d bought from them to defeat Hitler in the Second World War. In fact the last payment for all their “help” was for £43 million in 2006.

https://archive.is/9kCeh