Wait, so this is spam? And y’all knew about this? She sent me a DM, too. Guys am I compromised?

This is true, the US is awful big. There’s work arounds, though. Balloons aren’t hard to build and launch, but the fact that they would be sending and receiving data packets directly inside US airspace would make them ridiculously easy to track and take down.

Like, I remember the pirate radio station making a big hubbub during that time when rock n roll was banned in the UK. I could see illegal porn sites operating on ships in international waters, outside the boundaries of US enforcement using satellite connections to get their content out there. Problem is, the US is a little more trigger happy and might just send Navy ships out to sink them. If it happens in international waters nobody has to know.

If I were Green I’d have swung it upside the head of the Sergeant-at-arms. Wouldn’t be the first time a cane was swung in the Capitol.

Either Al Green or Anthony Weiner. I watched an old speech of him defending a bill to fund medical care for the first responders of 9/11, and he spoke with such fire and passion. He put House Republicans on blast for sitting on their hands and hiding behind procedure before voting “no”. While we don’t need people with his character flaws (he sent unsolicited dick pics to someone who may or may not have been a minor, I’ve read conflicting reports), we definitely need people with that kind of fire.

The mirror Star Trek happened when Zephram Cochrane shot and killed the Vulcans arriving to greet them instead of shaking their hand. The nearby people stormed the ship and raided the weapons, using them to conquer the rest of Earth.

This. They just do the work, and then if they feel like it they do a video or whatever claiming responsibility and whatever afterward. That’s how Al-Qaeda did it on 9/11/2001. They just hijacked the planes and hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, then Osama bin-Laden released a statement afterwards. He didn’t announce the attack beforehand. That day would have gone much differently if he had. But this isn’t like some comic book or Saturday morning cartoon where the villains go on some monologue about their fiendish plot before they do it.

I can agree with most of this. Capitalism, and society in general, banked rather hard on Galileo’s old saying,

“Measure what is measurable, and make measurable that which is not so.”

They took that to mean, "Give every facet of everything an objective measure in order to determine how make imaginary lines go up so imaginary numbers in our bank accounts go up.

For the landlocked, may I recommend the Dead Drop Protocol? Leave the message in a place that everyone knows about, but only the intended recipients knows a message is there to be read. Like the Message in a Bottle, it supports all encryption methods and is disconnected from the Internet.

Removed the ability to communicate cryptographically. Our only tool.

Not entirely. The old methods still work. I’m talking about old fashioned pen and paper. OTP ciphers and dead drops. Messages, hidden where only the intended recipient knows it’s there. The problem is, there’s no dead drops in cyberspace. There’s no place one can leave a hidden message that can’t be seen by others in cyberspace. And while quantum computing might break OTP, it’s too expensive to use for that purpose.

There’s a certain artistry to the old ways. Invisible inks, dead drops, One-Time-Pads, and the like. Cryptography existed long before computers. Those who would be our rulers have bent so much of their energies towards preventing our communicating in cyberspace that they’ve neglected those of us who studied the pre-Information Age methods. And we can still use them. A guy walks by a trash can, and throws away a seemingly innocuous food wrapper, and a couple hours later another guy goes and collects it, knowing that there is a message written on it in ink that can be revealed with the use of heat and lemon juice. If their intent is to return the USA to the “good ole days”, then let’s use the spy tricks from the “good ole days”.

It’s the sequel to the first one, and historical accuracy was like, at the center of of that one. Your character starts off the game not knowing how to read, because in medieval Europe, literacy was not widespread and the son of a blacksmith certainly wouldn’t know how to read, so books you pick up in the game are total gibberish until you learn to read.

And why his current wreckage of government still has many conservatives approving: they believe he is answering, kind of.

Now, if we can get them to see that he’s got people in his orbit at billionaire techbros who think they’re all going to be John Galt, and that the “capitalist utopia” he builds in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” is what they’re trying to build and it won’t be good for them,

Right, back when they were just a bookstore. All I really know about Amazon is that they focused on long-term profitability over increased short-term profits to expand and capture more of the market, and it worked. The problem is that not everyone can do that. They spent every year since 1994 operating at a loss, when anyone else would have been snapped up by another company in the space, and it’s not clear how that didn’t happen. The landscape of e-commerce would have been very different if it had.

Exactly. A systemic issue with capitalistic markets is that they inherently select for short term thinking.

Does it make sense to destroy 90% of your profitability 5 years from now for a 20% bump in profit this quarter? Well, yes, it does, because that’s 20% more profit to expand and take over the market.

Even if a business were to try to make good long term decisions, it would immediately be crushed and pushed out of the market by all of its competitors willing to make those shortsighted decisions for immediate profits.

Except in the case of Amazon, thanks to AWS they were able to make good long-term decisions with their e-commerce platform by making short term decisions with AWS.

CA better get their hands on some ICBMs. Keep one pointed at DC, and another pointed at Mar-a-Lago. It’s pretty much the only way a state can keep its sovereignty.

I want to agree, but terms like “vice” and “virtue” are subjective. To label what Cuckerberg and his ilk are doing as “virtue” signaling lends credibility to their idea that their vice is virtue. Similar to how the GOP calls themselves the party of “law and order”.

Thank you, Based Mod. Not every day, we see one.

FROM THE DEPTHS OF HELL IN SILENCE,

CAST THEIR SPELLS,

EXPLOSIVE VIOLENCE,

RUSSIAN NIGHTTIME FLIGHT PERFECTED,

FLAWLESS VISION,

UNDETECTED

If we’re going to be talking about badass bitches, we can’t forget the Night Witches?

You know, I learned that a long time ago, Catholic Priests used to be allowed to marry, but because they didn’t really have any of their own possessions or property, priests were cared and provided for by the Church. If they did get married, the wife also was cared for. And in a religion that sees birth control as blasphemy, that means that the kids would also be cared and provided for. And when you have a lot of priests, all getting married and having lots of kids, that gets expensive. So now priests have to be celibate.