Living in the US and having any trust of institutions at all feels like Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football on repeat forever. I mean, it’s not that they’re all 100% malicious or something. If it was that straightforward, there’d have been several revolutions by now. There’s actually this consistent trap to it, where you can get taken in by how nice and sincere the everyday employees are, or think the general policies will protect your interests, and miss the exploitative financial tendrils of the institution (or industry) as a whole; the process seems designed so that by the time you notice a problem, it’s either too late to fix it or you are more likely to blame yourself for not catching it. If I didn’t have dialectical materialism / class analysis / etc. to ground me, I’d probably become vaguely anti-institution/anti-establishment over time.

And “it’s your fault” works hand in hand with “liberty” narratives; personal choice, it’s your decision, it’s up to you. They love to promote this kind of stuff because not only does it legitimize the idea that the US is “free”, it also means that if something goes wrong, it must be because you decided wrong, not that the institutions failed you (or worse, intentionally exploited you).

Green Don Theory: (the successor to JDPON Don)

Donald Trump is fighting Climate Change by destroying the oil industry. Strangling supply until demand comes down and then reinvesting all the millions of dollars he scammed out of the stock market into a monopoly on green energy. His trade war on China is to block his american competitors from obtaining rare earths and solar panels from China while he makes back room deals with Xi to obtain a monopoly on those same things for his green energy empire. He is tricking all the big tech bros into investing in the AI bubble so they don’t move to green energy themselves and when they go belly up he is going to snap up all their infrastructure and turn it into his manufacturing base.

Good morning

7:10 AM UTC+1

President of Serbia officially signed his resignation a minute or two ago. I hope a Communist org/s can get a foothold in the state. I don’t doubt he won’t try to get right back into government (as PM instead of president), so if the people wan’t their actions to last, just axting through the present mechanisms won’t get them anything. They have their own candidates, but I have no idea as to what they’ll do.

As a Yankee, it messes with my head a bit, the thing of connecting with people over overlap of pop culture interests. Like having played the same video game and liked it, or liked the same books or movies. The fact of it alone is not what weirds me out. It’s the extent to which that seems to be a primary way of connecting, if that makes sense. Like there is not that much to bond over because so many things that are more serious, people are so divided on? So the fandoms sort of become a stand-in.

I just can’t unsee it in the context of that Iran quote about Qasem Soleimani. The more liberated parts of the world, who have had to battle for sovereignty, have real heroes to look up to. The west has Spongebob Squarepants. It seems rather pathetic to me. It’s like escapism became a mainstream cultural crutch rather than a fringe coping mechanism.

It’s wierd to think that FDR was literally inches from dying right at the start of his presidency due to an assassination attempt which would’ve let John Nance Garner [basically a dixiecrat who wasn’t super pro-new deal] become president. I really wonder what would’ve happened if that occurred.

Context:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Franklin_D._Roosevelt

i will never get used to stop signs and red lights being mere suggestions in California

The state I live in has a drug problem. We mainly manufacture nearly every XTC pill for the entire continent. Think Breaking Bad but with molly.

Sadly that’s the only thing we get referenced for in cultural stuff. Every serie that gets produced that takes place over here has drugs as a theme. On top of that they also portray us as stupid hillbillies. We have our own distinct dialect which they can’t be bothered to either learn or hire, you know, locals. So you get butchered accents with overly caricaturized versions of us. And the serie will always contain carnaval. Because all we do here is make molly, be stupid and drink beer at carnaval.

I was watching a Dutch news report (NOS Journaal) from the day of 9/11, and in this report they immediately started theorizing that (other than Al Qaeda) Iraq, Afghanistan or Palestinians could’ve done it and also showed clips of cheering Palestinians. The idea of military intervention was also already thrown around. I didn’t know they started blaming them so quickly.

Cyprus — Anti-nazi banner in the Nea Salamina stands.

If you have no plans for the Weekend, you can watch the finals between the DRPK and Spain!

Is anyone following the Russian elections and the accusations of fraud?

I know it’s a propaganda issue, and my pro-NATO acquaintances keep talking about it. But I don’t know where I can find out more about the topic.

If I had to describe Indi’s latest post Like Uber-for-Bombs I’d say “Its like a stand-up comedian historian poet explaining the current state of geo-politics.”

If I’m not wrong, comments refering to Lemmygrad were deleted on the latest deprogram upload. It hasn’t been too long since the video went up, so there still aren’t many comments.

It’s really annoying when certain things are so normal to me that I don’t think to bring them up as childhood problems

Like, why was teen me the one in charge of my mom’s birth certificate and stuff? I only realized today that that’s not normal.

I’ll try not to talk about my mom and trauma on here too much anymore though. I know I had it a lot better than others