Well, that’s what I get for not reading the article, I guess.

The signs, driven into the sand near where the Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico, caused a stir when witnesses said men in a boat arrived at the local beach known as Playa Bagdad and erected them.

This is right over the border, like ~10 miles South of the Rip Grande. It’s possible the US government did this, but it’s also entirely possible that some militant yahoos with a boat did it.

I haven’t had time to flesh this out, although I have been thinking of making a post, but I think the US, at least the current admin, does intend to compete with China on manufacturing, just not on the “cheap stuff”.

I have been trying to square the circle on how the current immigration enforcement strategy benefits any of the GOP’s monied interests, given that the US economy, at least at the lower levels of service and agriculture, essentially runs on cheap labor, and these policies will interrupt that supply. I was talking with someone who works at a large agricultural co-packer, and they mentioned that the CEO started a project that they spin off into a new company based around a robotic/fully automated harvester. This is a machine that is too expensive relative to migrant labor to be profitable for farmers or agricultural corporations. But if that pool of migrant labor dries up, if the ICE polices essentially act as a tarriff or import ban on cheap labor, then all of these robotic, AI driven machines being built by the tech/VC people that have made an alliance with Trump became much more economically competitive. I suspect the goal, other than to create a new bastardized SA for the American right, is to make cheap labor scarce, and thus not cheap, in the process bolstering American production of new advanced machines that previously were too costly to make sense for most business.

Brace Belden always jokes “the dragon rises” in regards to China, but in terms of foreign policy, “the jellyfish floats” seems more applicable.

I have a hypothesis floating around in my head about the US seeking to control/neuter China not by outcompeting it in production but by taking control of enough of its customers that the US has essentially monopsony power over Chinese production, but not enough to put into an effort post.

Did China ever offer Assad AA batteries?

Honestly surprised that their aren’t more assassinations of conscription officers.

This mega was much better when people weren’t giving themselves wedgies arguing about what met their classification of news.

In conjunction with this study, researchers also asked some of the same questions of 4,574 Americans who do notidentify as Black or African American. The findings show that Black Americans are more religious than the American public as a whole on a range of measures of religious commitment. For example, they are more likely to say they believe in God or a higher power, and to report that they attend religious services regularly. They also are more likely to say religion is “very important” in their lives and to be affiliated with a religion, and to believe prayers to ancestors have protective power and that evil spirits can cause problems in a person’s life.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/02/16/faith-among-black-americans/

I’m not sure “Black Americans are one of the most oppressed therefore they have the most revolutionary potential” by itself a good, complete analysis. The main counterpoint I would make is that Black Americans are also the most religious of any race in the US, and are therefore likely harder to radicalize, in part because on top of being religious, they predominately belong to churches that are more socially conservative than non-Black Democrats. Frankly, if the GOP ever managed to stop being fucking racist, you would likely see a significantly shift in Black voter alignment in the US. This is, of course, also not a complete list or analysis of why Mamdani didn’t get as much support, just an additional point I wanted to make.

Sabotage the Panama Canal.

I will never forgive AI for forcing me to stop using em-dashes because now everyone assumes you used AI if you use them. BUTLERIAN JIHAD NOW!

Won’t stop shipping them oil, though

What if we did Los Zetas, but gringo style?

I propose we work on cutting off the money supply to the cartels by giving every member of Mar-a-Lago and the Trump admin a hair drug test.

The judge took one look at the 14 pages ChatGPT generated to describe a meal and said “I’ve seen enough here.”

I am doing statistical analysis for “non-technical” people who would likely react by laying people off if they aren’t spoonfed the correct takeaways from the data.

Coworkers: Hey, do you have that analysis we requested?

Me, out loud: No, I haven’t figured out how to get the data model to work correctly yet.

Me, in my head: Yes, I finished it two days ago, but I don’t trust you to not do something stupid with it yet until I can dig into it more.

What is going on here? Are these people who are trying to flip game skins?

The tech people are the same people complaining about non-white men stealing the spots in college that are “rightfully theirs” due to DEI. There’s no distance between them and the only people that care about work visas in the US are the ones where someone needs to be in US office, which, outside of servicing something physical, is increasingly less important. None of these tech guys care about whether the work gets done by an Indian engineer in San Francisco or Hyberbad, as long as the work gets done and they pay as little as possible for it.

It seems like they are on the same side at the moment. Not sure what the split would be.