6469 - Thursday trees

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6468 - Long joke Sunday

Hey! Let's start WWIII. Way to go MAGAts!

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A Manager and a programmer are sitting next to each other on a long flight from LA to NY. The Manager leans over to the programmer and asks if he would like to play a fun game. The programmer just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks. 

The Manager persists and explains that the game is real easy and a lotta fun. He explains, "I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me $5. Then you ask me a question, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $5." 

Again, the programmer politely declines and tries to get to sleep. The Manager now somewhat agitated, says, "OK, if you don't know the answer you pay me $5, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $50!"

This catches the programmer's attention, and he sees no end to this torment unless he plays, so he agrees to the game. The Manager asks the first question. "What's the distance from the Earth to the moon?"

The programmer doesn't say a word, but reaches into his wallet, pulls out a five dollar bill and hands it to the Manager.

Now, it's the programmer's turn. He asks the Manager, "What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down on four?" The Manager looks up at him with a puzzled look. He takes out his laptop computer and searches all of his references. He taps into the Airphone with his modem and searches the net and the Library of Congress. Frustrated, he sends e-mail to his staff -- all to no avail.

After about an hour, he wakes the programmer and hands him $50. The programmer politely takes the $50 and turns away to try to get back to sleep.

The Manager is more than a little miffed, shakes the programmer and asks, "Well, so what's the answer?"

Without a word, the programmer reaches into his wallet, hands the Manager $5, and turns away to get back to sleep.

6467 - Saturday jokes

Her to friend: He cheated on me with the same girl my other ex cheated on me with.

Friend: Go sleep with her too. See what all the fuss is about. She's up on you 2-0. You gotta play some offense.

A teacher had recess duty. A kindergarten girl came running over with another girl following her and said, "She called me the B-word". When she ask the second student if she called the first student the B-word, she turn to the first one and said, "Motherfucker doesn't start with a B!"

tRUMP protest sign: Can we skip to when he shoots himself in the bunker?

Hey Donald: No one was paid to protest against you on your birthday. We hate you FOR FREE.

tRUMP protest sign: This is nothing compared to the party we'll have when you die.

And then a squeaky tank came by and woke him up.

Imagine how shitty of a person you have to be to get millions of people to use their day off to protest you.

Florida MAGA voter tears up after ICE detains a third of his workers. And now he can't find new ones.

The doctor said to me this morning, "I'd like to talk to you about your weight."

I said, ”Well, it was about 25 minutes, but at least the chairs were comfy."

A real smart TV would increase the volume when you start eating chips.

Tulsi Gabbard announced Trump's DOJ is looking into who is funding the anti-ICE and No Kings protests.

Let me save you some time DOJ. We're doing it for free.

Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman...

Superman: We told you a threesome would be to much for you, but you kept yelling, "I'm Batman!"

Batman: It was dark, and you grabbed the wrong ass Clark! That's why I was shouting, "I'm Batman! I'm Batman!"

Sign: English tooter 

      215-555-1234

Bible verses condemning trans people: 0

Bible verses about welcoming migrants: 33

Bible verses about advocating for peace: 429

Bible verses about loving God and others: 714

Bible verses about taking care of the poor: 2000+

(I didn't verify these numbers.)

Did you know that if you sit on the toilet at 11:59 and the clock strikes midnight, it's the same shit, different day?

Have any of you been in so much trouble you had to win the presidency?

Steven Cheung: Amazing. Despite the threat of rain, over 250,000 patriots showed up to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the US Army.

Sundae Girl: 200,000 people were dressed as empty aluminum benches.

Happy it’s raining, we needed it. We haven’t had any rain in like 14, maybe 15 minutes.

Older people still print boarding passes because we survived "Microsoft Word has encountered an error and needs to close" as we watched our term paper vanish into thin air. We know technology will betray you at the worst possible moment.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, age 91, held a hearing on Biden's cognitive decline.

Senator Durbin walked in, played a video of Trump's crazy statements, told them they're wasting everyone's time, called the hearing a distraction, and left.

At the end of the day we are all human beans.

And together we will rice.

Lettuce pray.

Ramen.

Gaza must be freed from Hamas.

Israel must be freed from Netanyahu.

Ukraine must be freed from Putin.

America must be freed from tRUMP.

Man goes to a fancy dress party wearing only a glass jar on his penis. Lady asks, "What are you?" He says, "I'm a fireman." "But you're only wearing a glass jar," says the woman. He says, "Exactly, in an emergency, break glass, pull knob, and I'll cum as fast as I can!"

My ex taught me that not every "I love you" is real.

I taught him neither is every orgasm.

Them: So, are you seeing anyone right now?

Me: Like dating, a therapist, or hallucinations?

Them: Never mind...

I keep seeing MAGAts proclaim that Republicans freed the slaves and Democrats started the KKK.

That's true. You know what is also true? Progressives freed the slaves and the right wing started the KKK.

I'm great at multitasking. I can waste time, be unproductive, and procrastinate all at once. (Bilbo)

Forget riding your bike without a helmet. Growing up, the most dangerous thing you could do was change the house's thermostat. 

Just emerged from my Y2K bunker.

Everybody okay?

Her to cop: How dare you pull me over. Do you know who my father is?!

Cop: No, I'm just like your mom, I have no idea.

6466 - Did Kamala win?

Interesting...

https://thiswillhold.substack.com/p/she-won-they-didnt-just-change-the

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Added at 12:49pm...

I got this in an email from Robert Reich...

Friends,

Draw a circle around all the assets in America now devoted to Artificial Intelligence.

Draw a second circle around all the assets devoted to the U.S. military.

A third around all assets being devoted to helping the Trump regime collect and compile personal information on millions of Americans.

And a fourth circle around the parts of Silicon Valley dedicated to turning the United States away from a democracy into a libertarian dictatorship led by tech bros.

Where do the four circles intersect?

At a corporation called Palantir Technologies and a man named Peter Thiel.

In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a “palantir” is a seeing stone that can be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality. During the War of the Ring, a palantir falls under the control of Sauron, who uses it to manipulate and deceive.

Palantir Technologies bears a striking similarity. It sells an AI-based data platform that allows its users — among them, military and law enforcement agencies — to analyze personal data, including social media profiles, personal information, and physical characteristics. These are used to identify and surveil individuals.

In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring all agencies and departments of the federal government to share data on Americans. To get the job done, Trump chose Palantir Technologies.

Palantir is now busily combining personal data on every American gleaned from the Department of Homeland Security, Defense Department, Department of Health and Human Services, Social Security Administration, and Internal Revenue Service, including their bank account numbers and medical claims.

Will the Trump regime use this emerging super database to advance Trump’s political agenda, find and detain immigrants, and punish critics? Will it make it easier for Trump to spy on and target his ever-growing list of enemies and other Americans? We’ll soon find out.

Thirteen former Palantir employees signed a letter this month urging the corporation to stop its endeavors with Trump. Linda Xia, a signee who was a Palantir engineer until last year, said the problem was not with the company’s technology but with how the Trump administration intended to use it. “Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse,” she said.

Palantir’s work on such a project could be “dangerous,” Representative Warren Davidson, Republican of Ohio, told the Semafor news site. “When you start combining all those data points on an individual into one database, it really essentially creates a digital ID. And it’s a power that history says will eventually be abused.”

On Monday, a group of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Palantir, asking for answers about huge government contracts the company got. The lawmakers are worried that Palantir is helping make a super database of American’s private information.

Behind their worry lie several people who are behind Palantir’s selection for the project, starting with Elon Musk.

Palantir’s selection was driven by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir, who still holds a major stake in it.

Thiel has worked closely with Musk, who devoted a quarter of a billion dollars to getting Trump reelected and then, as head of DOGE, helped eviscerate swaths of the government without congressional authority.

Thiel also mentored JD Vance, who worked for Thiel at one of his venture funds. Thiel subsequently bankrolled Vance’s 2022 senatorial campaign. Thiel introduced Vance to Trump and later helped convinced Trump to name Vance his vice president.

Thiel also mentored billionaire David Sacks, who also worked with Thiel at PayPal. As a student at Stanford University, Sacks wrote for the Stanford Review, the right-wing student newspaper Thiel founded as an undergraduate there in 1987. Sacks is now Trump’s “AI and crypto czar.”

The CEO of Palantir is Alex Karp, who said on an earnings call earlier this year that the company wants “to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.”

Palantir recently disclosed that Karp received $6.8 billion in “compensation actually paid” in 2024 (you read that right) — making him the second-highest paid chief executive of a publicly traded company in the United States (behind Musk).

A former generation of wealthy U.S. conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater because they wanted to conserve American institutions.

But this group — Thiel, Musk, Sacks, Karp, and Vance, among others — doesn’t seem to want to conserve much of anything, at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote.

As Thiel has written:

“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Hello?

If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy.

Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of the U.S. had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.

When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.

If America learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel abuses of political power — as Trump, Musk, Thiel, Karp, and other oligarchs have put on full display — which in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.

The danger inherent in Palantir’s AI-powered super database on all Americans is connected to the vast wealth and power of those associated with the corporation, and their apparent disdain for democratic institutions.

Last Saturday, had you walked to the end of Trump’s military-birthday parade and gazed above Trump’s reviewing stand, you’d have seen on a giant video board an advertisement for Palantir — one of the chief sponsors of the event.

Tolkien’s palantir fell under the control of Sauron. Thiel’s Palatir is falling under the control of Trump. How this story ends is up to all of us.

Robert Reich

6465 - Thursday trees

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