“There was a sense that it worked. But maybe over time, it worked less well. That the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze,” said a former U.S. official who read reports on the program. “This is actually an example of creative, out-of-the-box thinking by the agency. … It was dealing with a problem in a non-kinetic, nonmilitary way.”

Hmmm, I’m no rocket scientist, but aside from Afghanistan’s economy, I wonder if there could have possibly been any other downstream consequences as a result of the CIA intentionally diluting the potency of the global opium supply between 2004-2015.

“I wonder why I’m not getting the same effect by using the same amount I always take? I guess I must be developing tolerance, and need to take more.”

Drug overdose death rates in different countries: Who should be alarmed?

In 2013, illegally manufactured fentanyl and fentanyl analogs (IMFs) entered the U.S. illegal drug supply as adulterants of or replacements for white powder heroin in the Northeast and have now replaced heroin as the dominant opioid in the United States

If fentanyl was already in the supply by 2013, and the CIA stopped trying to weaken Afghan poppies by 2015, I wonder what could possibly explain that sudden spike and second wave of increased overdoses around 2016-2017?

I feel like even aside from turning Trump’s base against him, history should always remember the valuable lesson about the domino effect that can happen when you refuse to let shit go.

Think of the long trail of elite assholes who were thrown under the bus as a distraction/sacrifice in an attempt to kick the can further down the road. Unrelenting public scrutiny was directly responsible for a member of the royal family having his titles revoked. For something his family had already known about for decades and tried to ignore/hope eventually we would just let it go.

Mississippi and Louisiana*

Alabama is 45

It’s the size of the box not the fact that there’s no information about the candidates jfc

The size of the text for the names of the candidates is smaller than even the text of the small individual Yes/No boxes for the propositions.

It’s not that they’re less important. These were very important propositions, but normally the election and proposition boxes are the same size.

This was an election where an incumbent candidate from a local political family had already done some things that seemed to undermine getting people to vote in the election.

There is a common misconception in Louisiana that if you have a felony conviction that you cannot vote – this is wrong (check out if you are eligible). Mr. Lombard promised to update the Clerk of Court’s website with the eligibility criteria a potential voter must meet if they have a felony conviction. As of today, the Clerk’s Website fails to share this essential voting information. This is not a great look for the City’s Chief Election Officer.

Up until September 5, 2025, under Mr. Lombard’s leadership, the Clerk of Court’s website listed wrong dates for the next election, and listed the wrong voter registration deadlines.

It’s either coincidental incompetence of the guy up for re-election, or more examples of the much bigger problem Louisiana has historically had when it comes to undermining the democratic process.

Nobody is (usually) standing at polling booths armed in order to intimidate people, but can you really call these passive aggressive attempts to test the boundaries and undermine equal participation “respect” for democracy?

I think it says a lot that they keep bothering with this passive aggressive shit. Why bother trying to stack the deck in your favor if you truly didn’t need to worry about how it’s stacked?

Democracy is trapped under the boot of oligarchy and corruption, but I don’t believe it’s quite dead yet. Looks like Duncan won by ~67%

Calvin Duncan projected to win hotly contested criminal court clerk race against Darren Lombard

I agree, it’s very complex, but I blame the downfall of America on 3 main things:

1. The constantly increasing level of presidential executive power, especially over the last ~30ish years (this is one of the few things I’ll give the “both sides” argument), and definitely not unrelated to that, is the unilateral decision making to involve the U.S. in foreign policy. I’m definitely not an isolationist, but I would rather the U.S. dump as much money and resources into helping improving NATO and the U.N., rather than yo-yoing between the elite world police who take over the entire investigation, or the world police who often refuse to even respond to 911 calls when they’re being begged for help by the wrong neighborhood.

2. Citizens United. Overturn it. Also, implement something like term limits on supreme court justices.

If not an actual set term limit on appointments, maybe even the possibility of giving the American people the option (every 4 to 8 years) to vote on allowing individual justices to remain in their appointment or be replaced. Just do something to make these people actually give a shit about public accountability. That way maybe they would actually make decisions on behalf of the people of this country, and not the party that handed them a lifetime of holding waaay too much power.

3. This goes back to the first point: I don’t even fully understand what all kinds of fucked up shit the patriot act actually did, but I do know that we need to undo a lot of it, and that nothing good has come from allowing the president to appoint the leader of the CIA.

It’s really unclear if even having a CIA has arguably done anything “good” for America. They didn’t even exist until WWII, and it seems like every fucking time things start to go well for this country (or any other country) they intervene and fuck it up while saying some paternalistic bullshit like “this is for your own good.”

Spoiler alert: it never fucking is.

I wish it was Clinton, allegedly it’s not.

So if it’s really not Clinton, and presumably it’s not some random guy named Bubba that the wealthy elite picked up on the side of the road and let join in their weird little games… Bubba is also a nickname a lot of people (myself included) call their brothers growing up.

I’m pretty sure it’s also not my Bubba, but Mark Epstein’s Bubba? That would actually fit with the well known anything goes party vibes. It would also make Epstein saying that Trump has zero good qualities a very sick burn that haunts from beyond the grave.

I used to think I couldn’t hate anyone more than Peter Thiel, but I fucking hate this guy so much.

“Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem, not the Republican’s problem!” Trump wrote on social media. “They all know about him, don’t waste your time with Trump. I have a Country to run!”

No credible evidence has surfaced that Clinton, Summers or Hoffman were involved in Epstein’s sex trafficking.

Legitimate question, with release of the files still pending, don’t they have roughly the same amount of evidence for these guys as they do for anyone else? Clinton signed the birthday book, and Summers was part of several back and forth emails released yesterday.

I get that Trump is lobbing this as a distraction, and the president shouldn’t be calling for the DOJ to investigate citizens in some kind of “Don’t look at me, look at them! Off with their heads!” bullshit, but the House and Senate should be looking into all of these people. Every single person who was ever on that jet, everyone who emailed or sat down to discuss business with him, and especially anyone (cough:PeterfuckingThiel) who had any kind of financial transaction with Epstein, should be facing the same level of scrutiny that any regular person would if their name kept popping up in connection with this guy.

1. When are we going to hear more about what Trump did in response to JP Morgan warning him about the suspicious transactions in Epstein’s account right after he died?

2. If Trump cares so much about investigating JP Morgan maybe he should start with bank records between Thiel and Epstein, and ask why Republicans in the House have already blocked a subpoena for those records more than once in the last year.

3. Why is the house dragging this vote out another fucking week? Just get this shit over with! Are Republicans going to block it again or not? Will the few Republicans that were willing to vote to release the files before the shutdown suddenly have a change of heart? Will some of the Democrats? Who fucking knows at this point.

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I’m saying this as somebody who loves technology and progress, but I strongly believe humans are supposed to control tech not be controlled by it:

Fuck the oligarchy

The U.S. sold China their mass surveillance tech, and basically let them test it out for them and work out all the kinks.

During Trump’s first term, Peter Thiel selected a CTO for Trump’s admin, (now his current science advisor) who laid the ground work for this AI race with China bullshit. He argued that China’s mass surveillance (that silicon valley created) is what enables China to gather so much data and gain the edge in AI. To “compete” with China, he argued the U.S. would have to accept something similar, and that any attempt to regulate that technology would only result in us losing the AI race.

Now here we are in 2025, and the psychotic “liberal” CEO of Palantir has just come out and said an authoritarian surveillance state is just the cost we will need to accept to win the AI race.

It’s almost as if both countries colluded to create the illusion of a NeoCold War for their own profit, that they’re now allegedly locked in a race to “win.” In order to “win” this made up war, citizens of each country will just have to accept that a sacrifice of their human rights and privacy, is simply their patriotic duty, so that the handful of wealthy men controlling their government can maximize their profits and continue colluding with each other.

Again, fuck the Oligarchs globally and at home.

Trump CTO Addresses AI, Facial Recognition, Immigration, Tech Infrastructure, and More

Silicon Valley enabled brutal mass detention and surveillance in China, internal documents show

Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race

The government is supposed to exist to protect the people from exploitation, not protect the exploiters from the people. Somewhere along the way we got that all kinds of fucked up.

The “freedom” to fall in line and be controlled by a bunch of billionaires who have never actually created anything of their own, who purchased all the tech they are associated with from somebody else, and then have the fucking gall to whine to no end about “meritocracy” and “free markets” while trading government contracts between their small circle of friends to help protect each other’s state run monopolies and destroy any competition that threatens their grip on power, is not freedom and it’s not progress.

Ok, but why do you trust Peter Thiel and/or the establishment to oust him right now and install their own Senate leader.

While the few trustworthy Dems aren’t jumping on the bandwagon to oust him now, it seems pretty odd that the name Thiel’s mouthpiece Ro Kahnna is floating to replace Schumer (Chris Van Hollen) also happens to be one of the last road blocks potentially standing in the way of Thiel’s new crypto bank that just got preliminary government approval.

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Party of projection.

My grandma’s second husband was a farmer who lived pretty far out in the country. There was a guy that worked on his farm who just went by Plowboy. I have no idea what his actual name was, that was literally what everybody including his family called him.

Anyway, when I was a kid (probably 8ish), I overheard my grandma telling somebody that Plowboy’s brother had gone into the biggest nearby city to take care of something, and Plowboy had insisted on going with him for some reason but wouldn’t say why.

When they got there they split up, and apparently Plowboy had decided he wanted to go into the city to rob somebody. I don’t know why, but I guess maybe he figured it would be easier to get away with it there than in the little town where he lived? It really didn’t seem like he had given it much thought either.

He picked some random stranger, snuck up behind him, and stuck a glass coca cola bottle in his back like a gun and told him to give him his money.

The guy turned around and saw it was only a glass bottle, so he just took it from him and smashed it over his head then called the cops. I can’t hear about a bottle being smashed over somebody’s head without immediately remembering that story.

Kahnna was the first to immediately begin calling for Schumer to step down Sunday night, and he has been in the news non stop since then repeating the same thing over and over.

The media has been helping him push the narrative that Democrats are furious with Schumer. Yet when two of the most trustworthy Dems (AOC and Sanders) were asked directly, neither called for him to step down and both warned that this was a much bigger issue than just Schumer.

It’s very odd to me that Kahnna is the one Democrat receiving all this press as he lobbies this message. My assumption has been that since Kahnna has been backed by Peter Thiel for most of his career, it would benefit Thiel for Schumer to be gone.

Sept 10: Dem Orders Congressional Probe Into Epstein and Peter Thiel’s Relationship](https://www.thedailybeast.com/ron-wyden-orders-probe-into-epstein-and-peter-thiels-relationship/)

Sept 10: Schumer moves to force Senate vote on Epstein files

Sept 10: US Senate Republicans narrowly reject Schumer bid to force vote on Epstein files

Since the House should finally have enough votes to get the Epstein files released, Thiel could potentially hope to install a Democrat that he trusts, or he could just be trying to signal to other Democrats that he has the power to end anyone’s career if they try to investigate him, even someone like Schumer.

Nobody is saying Mike Honda should run for office. I’m saying people should be asking why Kahnna is the singular face of the call allegedly coming from the entire democratic party for Schumer to step down.

Why would somebody who has been owned by Peter Thiel for his whole career, be going on every news outlet and speaking on behalf of what the all the Democrats allegedly want?

Why aren’t any of the trustworthy Democrats actually jumping on the bandwagon when they’re asked if they believe Schumer should step down now? Instead, when asked that question directly, AOC and Sanders have both said it’s a much bigger problem than one person, and as Sanders asked who would actually be replacing him.

Presumably, given who is lobbying so hard to oust him, the person who finances him, has somebody in mind.

Given that Kahnna has been the face of all of this, I still believe there’s no way that Thiel wasn’t heavily involved, but if that’s true it actually makes me think that the establishment forces who control the dem party were also probably pressuring Dems to vote to end the shutdown (and let’s be clear here, as hard as it was on the American people it was even harder on the economy /s)

Regardless, if it’s just Thiel or Thiel and others including the Dem establishment, the narrative seems pretty clear. They want Schumer gone for a reason. Even if he didn’t “push back enough” to keep the party united, he definitely doesn’t seem to be getting rewarded for whatever he did or didn’t do.

I have been assuming it was mainly Thiel retaliating for Schumer forcing a Senate vote to release the Epstein files (the same day Wyden called for an investigation of JP Morgan’s records of transactions between Thiel and Epstein) after House republicans blocked it for a second time, but Thiel definitely isn’t the only big politically adjacent name being investigated with Epstein, and there are some very big names who aren’t conservatives.

Thinking about who among powerful Democrats would want to retaliate because of the Epstein investigation, there are a few possibilities. It might not be a coincidence that Tim Kaine was one of the democrats to turn, given who he presumably remained somewhat close with after returning to the Senate in 2016. Presumably, since all the other Democrats who voted that way are also older/about to retire, they may all have been fairly close with the same person or her husband.