The New York Times did a brilliant job on this research. The Iranians have claimed that they severely damaged many U.S. bases in this war, and our guys have claimed that Iran’s claims were exaggerations and propaganda.
One of the questions I have asked since the beginning of the war is how we can possibly believe either side in this conflict, given that Donald Trump’s lying is only topped by Iranian state media.
I was wrong. Trump still holds the Pinocchio Cup, despite having been awarded the the FIFA Honesty Prize. It turns out that the Iranian claims were 100% accurate. Satellite imagery shows 18 sites in seven countries were hit, and the damage was exactly as claimed by Iran.
American air defense systems in place at their bases across the Gulf had around a 90 percent interception rate, ideally. But even at 90 percent, this still leaves 10 percent of Iranian drones and missiles that can get through the air defense shield.
Cue Trump shitting himself all over again about the ‘failing New York Times’.
Yet another in the long list of bullshit this country is going to spend decades recovering from. His propaganda machine runs non-stop with his mindless cult right there behind him as he lies his way to a reality that doesn’t exist. Business genius? Go look up the Foxconn plant story in Wisconsin in his first term to see what a genius waste of taxpayer money that was.
Deporting criminals? Look up how many individuals with criminal records were deported – better yet look at the cost of ICE to the taxpayer to deport low wage crop harvesters, day laborers, and housekeepers to no benefit to anyone.
Go look up the corporate tax breaks his first term for the executives to do stock buy backs. Who then sell off to gain a few hundred million or billion more while they go merge or acquire other companies – only to cut jobs and raise prices.
And here we are at the Iran war, as the deficit explodes, we’re going to be spending out the ass on this for decades thanks to he and his moronic supporters. The only people he’s benefited in all of this are the rich elites making money sitting on their ass on conference calls, using other people’s labor and money to enrich themselves with crooked investments, or his insiders betting on Polymarket for the next stupid decision to come down the pipe.
The costs of this incompetence should be coming out of the paycheck of every dumb fuck that voted for him.
I live in Wisconsin, where the Fox-Conn con went down. I think we may actually be turning down the new AI data center con because we remember Fox-Conn,
If you want the gold standard example of the failure of trickle down economics, there’s no better case study than this one.
The Verge did the ultimate column on this years ago here
Essentially, the Trumper Wisconsin governor spent millions of taxpayer dollars to build the infrastructure for this plant, and the tax credits were dependent upon meeting a minimum amount of employees. Foxconn scrambled with no real business plan to do ANYTHING there, so rabidly hired people to meet the government incentives and had them sit around all day inside this barely constructed building to try to game money from the state.
Nothing was done, the tax incentives ended up at best paying about half a million dollars for mid-level positions at its best case (rather than the government creating the jobs themselves without the overhead of Foxconn’s profits), and now I believe the property was taken over by Microsoft for a dat center.
That’s the crux of it, but the column is a great case study for the stupidity of the entire Chicago-school trickle down philosophy. Essentially the government (and the taxpayer) ends up paying multifold more in overhead for taxpayer money directly to a corporation and it’s wealthy C-suite and investors to create a job rather than doing it themselves.
Meanwhile Musk and Trump used DOGE to axe legitimate jobs, but they’ll turn around and use taxpayer money to offer credits for half a mil a head or so to go create an $80,000 job – so people like them who’ve benefitted their entire lives from other people’s work can accrue infinite resources.
Corporate socialism at it finest.
anti american like usual, donate tho.
The truth has no political position. I am pro-facts, pro-truth.
It’s important to remember what America really is. It is not a bunch of Democrats and Republicans.It is the concepts of justice, freedom, opportunity, honesty, open government, compassion and equality. It is the separation of powers. In that regard, I could not be more pro-America. I believe in its principles and ideals. Since I’m not a spiritual man, America is my religion.
When our leaders desecrate those principles, I may oppose them, but I never oppose America.
concepts of justice, freedom, opportunity, honesty, open government, compassion and equality are headed the way of the passenger pigeon in the US.
Hope springs eternal. We survived romances with Communism in the 1920s and Fascism in the 1930s. We survived the Great Depression and emerged stronger. We survived WW2 and emerged stronger. We survived Joe McCarthy. It’s my hope that we can survive our current romance with plutocracy and mindless populism.
My greatest fear is that people lock themselves in a media bubble where they listen only to what they want to hear. I don’t know the cure for that. In a way, it’s good that Trump is such a fuck-up, because he leaves results that can’t be glossed over by propaganda. People can see the gas prices and their home heating bills.
I think worse is people not willing to question their own fundamental philosophies and adapt with the times. As Max Planck said, “Science advances one funeral at a time.”
This country has been in the brain rot era for a decade plus now, on some fundamental philosophies that those who earn all the wealth (and the scales continue to relentlessly get unbound) do so because their knowledge, skills, abilities, and effort merited them as gods of society. Yet when you read about these people and how they are on a daily basis, you get insight into some of the most ridiculous incompetence and ignorance around. When you looks at the ridiculous law of diminishing returns industries have had on society the past decade, and the income inequality chart going absolutely bezerk in the wrong direction, it shows what a scam this all is.
America doesn’t reward merit – it rewards exploitation. At one point, at its best case scenario, concepts like ‘rugged individualism’ during the 1980s worked better during the PC boom where there was no dominance, no IP laws, competition to create things that were doable with an idea and a lab. It was reasonable at one point to say, hey making money means actually hiring people for a business opportunity to make a thing because a thing *could* be made from proof-of-concept to production. The streams overlapped that at least in concept for a period of time, people had to actually spend money to hire people, to make money.
Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and IBM were not concerned with the intellectual property laws that constrain the world today, and the government invested in the internet. So you could actually have an economic boom that resulted it a several decade technological advancement. Those days are long gone.
So you see this post-Capitalism environment smoldering under the surface. There’s an AI bubble where the best new ‘advancement’ is to utilize aggregate information from humanity in large language models simply for the purpose of reduction in force. The bubble has also inverted hardware costs, with components of the same quality actually going UP in price versus down.
There’s no independent disruptors out there because they can’t compete at the economies of scale needed to take on giants like Amazon, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, etc. And even if one did, they would get their ass sued off by the archaic legal methodologies utilized that were very lax in the early tech boom era.
Back to exploitation: so what you see now in this environment are all these executives and investors playing the meta over how capitalism is structured to continually profit. That doesn’t involve lowering costs through consumer products, or hiring more people. It’s getting rid of people and replacing them with AI slop to keep the machine going and using mergers and acquisitions, stock buybacks, and other capitalist administrative functions in which the end result is less good jobs and more costs for consumers with escalating compensation for the top of the hierarchy who aren’t providing anything to society.
At some point I think realization of the game is going to set in, but as Planck said, it will take one funeral at a time and a new generation to resolve these injustices.
The number of dumbasses who still think Trump is good for the country is pathetic
50% of all people have IQs under 100. Those people vote, and Trump knows how to sway their thoughts and harness their power.
As he says, “I love the poorly educated.”
Wow, 100% of the people who anointed Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee have IQ’s under 100. And there was only a 50% chance of that? Impressive.
Well, see, Jeff, it’s like this. Very few people were thrilled with Kamala Harris, but millions voted for her because the only other choice was Donald Trump, who had consistently proven himself to be a vile, selfish, narcissistic, cruel and stupid person and a convicted criminal who would have been convicted of much more serious crimes if Merrick Garland had been competent. Given the presence of Trump on the ballot, virtually any other name would have been the more intelligent choice.
The same was true of Joe Biden. Nobody was enthusiastic about him., but the only other choice was Trump, and therefore people voted for ol’ Joe. If Biden had run against a normal person, a Reagan-style conservative, I probably would have voted red.
Dear Jeff
A stapler would’ve arguably been better than Kamala.
A stapler would’ve been light years better than Trump.
They told me if I voted for Harris, the world would go to shit. Turned out they were right.