Holy moly. MAGA is losing their mind over an uncovered video from 2016 where Donald Trump says people should use the bathroom they feel is inappropriate and speaks out against trans bathroom bills. RT this so MAGA implodes.
https://x.com/CalltoActivism/status/1861033427476091309?t=1eMmmecoamllXUw-5OwiKw&s=19
I’m seeing a lot of such comments about Trump, Nancy Mace, and others. It’s supposed to be a gotcha of some sorts but it’s the opposite. Everybody who today is horrified by what “trans rights” have become started from the baseline of wanting to be kind and accommodating on this issue. Everyone, including me. And including, clearly, Trump.
We all fell for the line that it’s such a small thing, such a tiny group of people, such a rarity, let’s just humor them in this tiny, unimposing aspect, it’s the kind thing to do.
We all as a society were prepared to humor and be kind. But our kindness was turned against us. We saw male rapists in female jails. We saw girls beaten into a disability on a sports field. We were publicly and shrilly diagnosed with non-existent mental illnesses for not believing that men are actually women. I was directed at my job to remove all syllabi that are “transphobic.” You know what that means? It means the ones that mention the words “woman” or “man”, “male” or “female”.
Progressivism is the mentality of unimpeded, constant movement. It’s always in search of more, more, more. Any concession leads to more demands. You’ll have to stand up to progress sooner or later because otherwise there’s no end to this journey.
So yeah, we changed our minds. We all collectively decided that our kindness has been abused enough. The hand that we extended as a gesture of goodwill and consideration has been spat into. Our generosity has been turned into a cudgel to beat us into submission.
We changed our minds. I used to wear a Hillary Clinton badge the size of a dinner plate and now I vote for Trump. Trump was a New York liberal and now he’s not. There’s an exodus of Biblical proportions from your side because nobody can take your incessant demands any more. But go on, keep pouting and demanding. We can use more people on our team.
Clarissa's Blog 
OT: but I’m seeing some fascinating tidbits this morning from our president-elect, promising (who knows if he can actually make it happen?) to institute a 10% tarriff on all Chinese imports, and a 25% tarriff on all Canadian and Mexican imports, until the flood of fentanyl and migrants coming across our borders ends.
Forget “build the wall”. This, plus reinstating “wait in mexico”… seems likely to make a very big dent in the problem almost immediately, if we can actually do it.
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“About 85% of Avocados in the US come from Mexico. Get ready to pay $4-5 for an avocado at the supermarket.
The same goes for tomatoes, berries, limes, mangoes, corn, beans, beef, shrimp, tuna tortillas, and many, many more items.”
https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1861226557013987730?t=zSkAcJmTxHqjRZxrcIFDeA&s=19
Every few years we go through a round of drama over avocados. Don’t people notice how entitled they sound prattling about avocados when we are experiencing a fentanyl crisis of terrible proportions?
“Yes, but the avocados!”
Are they trying on purpose to sound like dicks?
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They’re not trying to sound like dicks. It’s just that they *are* dicks.
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–and in case there was any ambiguity there, the idea that letting 30 million unvetted illegal migrants and enough fentanyl and contaminated meth to kill or brain damage every man woman and child in America, is totally worth it so you can have cheap avocados… yes, that makes you a dick.
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It’s not just avocados. That was a dumb example. It’s a whole host of other things like pick up trucks, construction materials, fruits, vegetables, etc. Basically a lot of things that affect inflation and the bottom line of most Americans.
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You know how it affects low-income housing?
It scarfs it all up so that low-income citizens get priced out of the market.
Since rent is the #1 expense for most of us, that has to sit in the driver’s seat.
Imported trucks…? Look, right now I’m driving a pre-2005 Corolla with no speedometer, no odometer, no radio, a freaky sensor problem that causes the engine to surge while idling, and half the door handles broken off. Caring about new vehicle prices belongs to some other galaxy of concerns. It’s like trying to care about the high cost of backyard pool maintenance, or the desperate struggle to find a good caterer… does not compute.
Next biggest expense after that is insurance. That one is bloody killing us right now. Part of the reason it’s gone up is because the migrants are bad drivers, and uninsured. I have a sneaking suspicion that’s bleeding over onto us, even though we live in an area that isn’t getting many of the newcomers, simply because insurance companies can’t realistically confine the costs to the areas where it’s the biggest problem, or nobody could afford insurance there at all. Medical expenses are in there too, and whoa, look, migrants are involved in that one as well. Yes, we also need to take a hammer to pricing rackets, but hospitals have to treat everyone… and what happens when you bring in a sudden flood of unhealthy people with no money and no insurance and lots of interesting health problems? Costs go up for all the people who *are* required to pay. We have a system that is hugely dependent on *most* people being able to pay, one way or another, when they get in a fender-bender or have a medical emergency. Adding more and more people to the system who can’t pay, is accelerating the inevitable collapse of those systems. I’d say good riddance, but… we haven’t exactly got anything in the works to replace it.
And since groceries have gone up anywhere from 20%-100% (depending on whether you’re talking about noodles or beef) without any deportations whatsoever, a few extra cents a pound for fresh fruits and veg hardly even registers.
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This thing about fruit and vegetables is so strange. So many countries are managing to produce more than enough of both, cheaper and tastier, with no immigration at all. In Ukraine, which is a heavily agricultural country, there was never a problem with this. Even in times of war, there are no shortages of fruit and veg. Yet we have somehow convinced ourselves that it’s not humanly possible to have fruit and vegetables without mass migration. It’s utter delusion.
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For real. I might actually care, if we could even *buy* real produce here instead of pale sick ghosts of fruits and vegetables. I *grow* good vegetables, but I can’t buy them. There is zero connection between people growing high-quality produce locally, and outlets selling produce. I don’t know how we did it, but the US has completely severed the connection, unless you are rich and live in the sort of upscale area where you have chi-chi farmers’ markets on the weekends and people stroll about for the ambience more than the produce. The purple carrots are mostly for decoration. Those stall rentals are not cheap, and if you’re a little truck garden with one or two crops, you can’t sell there, because you have to rent the booth all season.
The only place we approach it here, is the guy-with-a-truck in the abandoned gas station parking lot randomly selling watermelons, peaches, collards, or coolers full of shrimp.
Loquats are the most amazing local fruits here. I love them. They’re soft, tangy, fuzzy, and sweet and you absolutely cannot load them into crates and ship them to NYC: they’d be mush before they got there. And because Walmart and everybody else has central distribution rules, if you can’t sell it *everywhere*, you can’t sell it *anywhere*. ** So even here, where we *grow* loquats, you cannot buy them.
The bizarre part is, like… take something like mangos. I’ve seen how that works on the harvesting end, in VN. It’s not one giant conglomerate mango farm growing all the mangos they sell at Walmart. It’s literally everybody in town. Some people have a mango grove, and some people have two mango trees, carefully tended in their yard to shade the house (the temperature under a big mango tree is like ten degrees cooler: they make their own breeze!). When it’s mango season, the trucks come in on the main road, and everybody collects their mangos in crates and bags and boxes, brings them to the truck, and the truck buys them. Little kids climb up the trees, drop the mangos down to their siblings, who catch them in a cloth sling to avoid bruising. That’s literally *hundreds* of growers, one or two buyers, who then ship them overseas by the containerload, and they sell them at grocery stores in the US– somewhere, maybe you’ve bought a mango at the Stop & Shop that was grown on the tree at the gates of the monastery school in a rural town in SE Asia. But if you grow fruit in *your* yard, in the US, it is not possible for a grocery store to sell it, because if you grow in the US, the only way to sell *into* that distribution system is if you grow enough to supply every store in the grocery chain. There’s no truck to buy your crate of grapefruits.
It is nearly impossible for a single household to be a unit of production in the US, even though this is normal in most of the world. There’s no supply chain and no sales venue for it. We killed it.
**There are some weird exceptions to this, and I wish we could leverage them. In our region, you can buy green peanuts at certain times of year, in regular chain groceries, including WM. That stuff doesn’t sell in other parts of the country because nobody knows what to do with them in, say, Maine. So there *are* ways to get in through the cracks, but still not at a household-production-unit level.
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***between farting around on the internet and checking on the turkey this morning, I am transplanting Asian mustard greens into the garden for the cool season, digging the camotes and harvesting the last of the roselles. There’s always more than we can use, and if you knew how good they were, you’d want to buy them. But you can’t 😉
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methylethyl
Yeah, I was laughing at your difficulties of local foods. My wife was always telling our adopted kids that, “You can’t buy it at the store, you have to grow it or make it.” ;-D
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methylethyl
Okay, what the hell now? Even Turdo the Second is too stupid to send immigrants into the USA, in fact he has allowed about 100,000 “refugees” to enter at the Roxham Road crossing out of upper New York. And seeing as most of them arrived in taxis, and were not only very well dressed, but also carrying expensive suitcases, he wisely immediately put them all up in pricey hotels and restaurants at the taxpayers’ dollat ;-D
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Dunno. I know that we do get at least a few illegal crossings from the north, but I’ve never heard it’s anything like what we get across the US/MX border. (shrugs) Could be typical DJT bluster. We’ll see. But since the tide of migrants have reportedly slowed down just on the news of election results…. perhaps even bluster serves a purpose.
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LOL, I was just being sarcastic, the border between Canada and the USA is the largest unwatched border in the world. I have in laws and outlaws in New York, Maine, Tennessee, Texas, and California…and those are just the ones that we know of ;-D
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Yeah, exactly. They don’t care about those “deplorables”. Those fellow Americans are “garbage” after all, they don’t have avocado sandwiches for breakfast, they’re “not one of us”…
Nor do they care about those immigrants, legal or illegal, as long as they keep those avocados coming and staff the supermarkets, service the petrol stations, drive the UPS vans, deliver their Amazon packages.
They.Do.Not.Care: as long as they get their stuff and their lawns are manicured, other people are just hell to them.
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…and seriously. Avocados are 70 cents each right now. 10% would bring that up to 77 cents.
So these people also can’t handle math.
Or they’re shopping at Whole Foods.
Probably both.
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“other people are just hell to them”
Other people are hell to a lot of us…. but not all of us want a serf class to keep cheap goodies coming our way.
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On the actual topic: that’s how the Democrats lost this election AFAICT.
They’re currently in the business of finding everyone guilty of raaasexism and kicking them out of their Purity Club for crimes such as posting a tweet eight years ago that was vaguely off-color.
Meanwhile, the right is cleaning up by figuring out how to be a big tent for once: oh, hey, welcome to all our new friends! We literally had a long-haired flagrantly gay dude out there signing up thousands of new Amish and other Pennsylvanian voters… and possibly flipping PA for the Republicans.
Funny time we live in.
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So you did finally vote for Trump!
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Yes!
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That’s amazing news. Bhattacharya was my ray of sunshine during COVID. A true hero.
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That’d be a heck of an improvement over the current management.
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OT: I just discovered the German twitter feed “Old people pointing at things”. It’s a highlight reel from German print/online media (where pictures of old people pointing at something seem to be a staple) and it brings me an inexplicable amount of joy.
https://x.com/RentnerdaDz
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The flag of Israeli foreign policy unfurled
Israeli War Objectives in Lebanon: Trump foreign Policy in the Middle East
Hezbollah recently released a video titled “Our Mountains, Our Treasures.” What war aims, propaganda does this psycho arms display seek to negotiate?
Hezbollah’s Tunnels and Weapons Video: Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group, recently released a video titled “Our Mountains, Our Treasures.” In this slickly produced video, they unveil an extensive tunnel network used for storing and launching missiles. What purpose does this achieve? Hezbollah seeks to influence the negotiations for a Cease Fire favorable to their terms.
Prior to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon Hezbollah declared they would stop firing missiles when Israel withdrew from Gaza. But seeing that Hezbollah attacked Israel on Oct 8th, before Israeli IDF entered Gaza, this Hezbollah demand rings hollow. Why did Hezbollah attack on Oct 8th? Did it make a strategic error?
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups launched a coordinated armed incursion from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel. This attack marked the first invasion of Israeli territory since the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Hamas together with UNRWA forces attacked Israeli border settlements near Gaza. Currently Hamas still holds 97 stolen hostages whom remain in Gaza. The Red Cross Double Cross has never visited these Israeli prisoners since the Oct 7th attack; which involved multiple elements: a barrage of over 4,300 rockets launched into Israel, vehicle-transported incursions, and powered paraglider infiltrations. This Hamas surprise attack compares to the Dec 7th Pearl Harbor 1941 surprise attack. Also the attack on September 11th 2001 World Trade Center.
Mount Dov, also known as Shebaa Farms, from the early 1950s until Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War, Syria was the de facto ruling power. Documents from the 1920s and 1930s, during the French mandate, they indicate that inhabitants paid taxes to the French government, Lebanon a French mandate territory at that time. Maps issued by France placed the Mount Dov within Syrian territory.
Mount Dov lie along the border between Lebanon and the Golan Heights. During the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon (1920s and 1930s), the border between Lebanon and Syria wasn’t officially demarcated. So, Mount Dov, its status, Hezbollah propaganda unilaterally declared this Golan territory as “occupied territory”.
After the French mandate ended in 1946, Syria administered the land. Mount Dov appeared on maps—both Syrian and Lebanese military ones as Golan territory. This strongly supports the Israeli opinion that Mount Dov in the post 2000 dispute, constitutes as part of the territory of the Golan Heights which Syria lost in the 1967 War.
No evidence exists or supports that the abandoned farmlands ever Lebanese. League of Nations mandate (1923-1946), only thereafter did either Syria or Lebanon cease being a protectorate mandate! The UN “graciously” proposed maintaining the existing boundaries of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force in Syria (which included Mount Dov) “without prejudice” to any future agreement between Syria and Lebanon. However based upon the one sided UN bias of repeated condemnations which pervert Chapter VI “suggestions” to Chapter VII “Korean Ultimatums”, plus UNRWA war crimes, and UNIFIL criminal incompetence – Israel rejects the “objectivity/neutrality” of the UN-nations
After Israel withdrew from Lebanon in May 2000, Hezbollah propaganda claimed that the withdrawal notcomplete because Mount Dov mysteriously Lebanese—not Syrian Golan—territory. Only empty J’Accuse antisemitic Arab Nazi-like racism. Post the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah propaganda declared, as if they were God, the “Shebaa Farms” as occupied territory.
The unprovoked Oct 8th Hezbollah attack upon Israel requires that Lebanon surrender any and all claims to Mount Dov Golan.
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