Fuck Zuck. And the Phillips Exeter horse he rode in on. This Rich Kid, Harvard College billionaire is not who I care to listen to for “elitism” advice. His orange-ass-kissing is pathetic and disgusting.

The money wants to be with the CEOs and thus have the chance to be spent on private jet rentals and lavish vacations in exotic places with influential people. It wants the chance to be spent on expensive tuition at old-money, name-brand universities and third and fourth homes in the country and on post-apocalypse survival compounds in expensive, English-speaking island nations. If you were a dollar, wouldn’t you want this too? Or would you want to spend your days going in and out of tills at Walmart and Dollar General or forked over to some prole delivery driver as a tip, a driver who’ll just spend you on fuel or fries at some greasy drive-up. Money wants to be free, free to live the good life, and to live it with the people who care about it more than anything else under the sun.

You’ll need to get a Prior Authorization on that offing to show that it’s Ethically Necessary. Fortunately you’ve come to the right place.

That was good enough for Ahab, and he was able to captain a commercial ship using his! Back in the good old days nobody expected insurance to cover ordinary everyday whale attacks. Those were “acts of God” just like everything else.

Right, but I wasn’t claiming that he wasn’t seeking to spread terror for his cause, assuming that these are the facts. I’m remarking on the fact that the “big” Trump supporter and a highly trained Green Beret wasn’t immediately branded a terrorist by the media just like the NO guy was, despite committing an act that was, as far as I can tell, an act of terrorism. Is it only “terrorism” if you’re motivated by some kind of religious belief, and specifically, some kind of Islamic group’s belief?

Correct, it’s a common abbreviation used in the States. Sorry if that wasn’t clear.

One thing I’m finding interesting: we’ve got the NO attack and this Trump/CT attack, happening in close temporal proximity and both hurting/killing innocents, but I’m only seeing the former labelled by the media as a “terrorist” attack. Could it, maybe, possibly, have something to do with the NO attacker potentially having an Islamic background? In contrast, a US military member, and a Trump supporter in particular, could never be awarded the “terrorist” badge by the press, “bomber” is the most he could hope to earn it seems.

Then why were they looking for him in the forests of Washington?

The Freemasons locally all invoke The Great (or Grand) Architect of the Universe as a way to avoid seeming to require that prospective members have any particular religious beliefs. The whole approach to religion seemed very “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and I was told, by Masons, while socializing w/them at the Lodge, that Freemasonry didn’t dictate any particular religious beliefs and that they had among them Brothers with very non-mainstream supernatural beliefs.

But … while you could (I was told) hold pretty much any supernatural/superstitious beliefs you wanted to and still become a Freemason, having no superstitious beliefs at all was a hard disqualifier. No exceptions. This was a bunch of years ago, and I’m pretty sure I asked “why do you care about my supernatural beliefs if you care so little about their exact nature” and I got only “mumble mumble ‘reasons’ mumble” and something about needing superstitious beliefs to “understand” (or at least accept?) Masonic teachings &etc. Maybe what they’re looking for is guys who are pre-screened (via organized religion) to be intellectually and morally pliable more than anything?

Oh yeah, and you still can’t be a chick and join, and yeah, they’ll jump to tell you about the “auxiliary” groups that DO admit women, but just like having no religion, being a woman is a hard disqualifier for joining a mainline lodge. For reasons.

Meanwhile, amidst all this gatekeeping, the Lodges (some w/beautiful historic buildings) are shutting down left and right, their premises invariably ending up repurposed as for-profit “event centers” that get little utilization or for restaurants and other commercial endeavors … almost never for the kind of “community” space that people here are describing. The lodge back in my hometown, one that many of my family going back generations (just the men of course) have belonged to, is teetering on the brink of shutting down as the oldsters have died off. It’s a shame, but they seem to have chosen “no change, no exceptions” as the hill to die on, so …

That’ll learn ya. I bet you’ll never do it again. Not unless Jehovah 1 tells you to in a dream anyway. A substantial donation will get you on the schedule, don’t delay.

Congrats to Buffalo, it sounds like things are looking up there.

In my area (WA state) there was a small-ish Xian church (the one-storey building was probably <2000 sq ft and cheaply built - the steeple-ish thing (w/o a bell of course) blew off in a windstorm once)) that shut down a year or two ago and was boarded-up. It’s been repurposed as a homeless shelter that specifically serves people with serious medical problems. The change has greatly improved the 'hood.

People here are arguing for the (gate-kept) community that Xian churches once offered in the US. By “gate-kept” I’m referring to the fact that Xian churches were, and are, open to only the “right kind” of people. I’m sympathetic to the need for community, and have even looked around locally for what’s on offer from Xian or Xian-aligned/compatible organizations, but haven’t found any that promote an ideology that isn’t based on superstition and that don’t demand that I defer in all things moral/ontological to a human power hierarchy within the church. One whose authority, such as it is, is based on “it’s in the Book”.

Hard pass on that. I’ll find my community through volunteering and possibly, one day, through fraternal orgs, though I’ve found the ones around here (Masons, Rotary, &etc) are still hardcore on gatekeeping themselves, despite being on the wane just as much as Xian churches are. If you think you’d be most comfortable in a Xian-churchy sort of context, but are politically and socially “liberal”, the UCC seems pretty inoffensive, though they still (at least locally here) carry on about “worshipping” invisible deities all the time. The Unitarian Universalists (uua.org) seem the least offensive of any old-timey church that I’ve encountered and it has a certain appeal to me for its association with New England and with 19th-century intellectuals like Emerson and Thoreau. The local UUs have had a local schism in the past five years, with the historical church taking a politically rightward lurch and another UU church spinning-off it but seemingly being more preoccupied with how their church is controlled (no more all-powerful pastor-types, only collective decision-making allowed) and less with charity and community. Finally we have Unity here (unity.org) which has potential for community, but where weekly service addendees seem to be almost exclusively elderly, so I wonder how much longer it will be a going concern?

I’m hoping that someday we get a Satanic Temple that meets in-person here. I could definitely see myself joining that. The Church of the Subgenius (https://www.subgenius.com/), praise “Bob”, would suit me well too, and I already own a copy of the Sacred Text, but they don’t meet in person AFAIK.

they would remain the person primarily responsible for keeping house and caring for children, but in which they would also be the sole financial provider, as well.

Huh? Sole? House-husbands? I don’t think I’ve ever met one. The norm across the vast majority of working- and professional-class people I’ve encountered is for both partners to be working or, if wealthy enough (the minority) for the woman to be the stay-at-home child-raiser.

I could definitely imagine many, if not most women being disgruntled at the current socio-economic situation (at least in the US) where they’re expected to both work at a paid job full-time (just like their spouse) while also doing a majority of the unpaid child-rearing work.

So AP, why not Name and Shame this ninth company?

When our economy collapses due to the Musk/Trump “management” of it, then Musk/Trump/etc will need to start a hot war to put citizens to work and excuse vast new amounts of spending (financed with borrowing), mostly on the MIC. Just like Hitler did in the late 30s. Who the victim will be, I’ve no idea. The stupid little post-9/11 middle-eastern wars made MIC types richer but I don’t think they greatly affected the US economy otherwise. No, I think we’ll need a big war, against a fairly powerful opponent, to justify all of the “sacrifice” the domestic Poors are going to be asked to engage in. The opponent should be, ideally, a prime target for racial and cultural bigotry - a people that the Poors already think is gross. That’ll boost the enlistment rates among their young, who’ll be all too happy to sign up to murder whoever MAGA says is foul and hateable and responsible for the shit sandwiches that they’ve found on their plates. But will Musk/Trump try to take on a Russia or China or NK, opponents that might let fly with nukes? Wall St. won’t be keen on that I think, and the billionaires own MAGA now, but still there’ll be all those starving, diseased poors … how will we protect billionaire wealth while maximally leveraging the poors’ racism/bigotry and their desire to feel strong and important, to have a stage and to have at least a micro-MAGA-sized personal claim to glory?

thrown off of a moving train

It’s called “dying of an apparent suicide” and the authorities can find no sign of foul play. It’s so sad when this sort of thing happens. The company’s thoughts and prayers are with his family.

citizens of another country

Or another planet. Back in the day we addressed the alien problem with style, advanced technology, and a cool theme song. Nowadays it’ll be just MAGA bumfucks running things, people who can barely put two coherent thoughts together, and that’s on a good day.

Loser incels are so pathetic.

If this becomes law the charitable-giving industry is going to be slammed. Right now there are lots of ways that you, a donor, can give to your favorite causes via an intermediary, taking a current tax deduction for doing so but (possibly) having the intermediary pay out in the future (an endowment), possibly forever (if endowment growth exceeds charitable outflows). If all of a sudden a large chunk of the nonprofit space are deemed anti-Trump “terrorists” then these intermediaries (public and private foundations and donor-advised funds (DAFs) for example) will suddenly have far fewer recipients to write checks to, and may have no recipients at all in the case where funds are directed to just a few recipients or areas-of-interest by the terms of the donation. Oh sure, the money will be disposed of one way or another, but it might very well not be disposed of in the way the donor intended at the time of the donation, and might well end up being disposed of in a way the donor would never have agreed to. Tough luck donor, you took the tax write-off, you can’t get the donation $ back and you can’t have it disbursed to non-charities either.

These intermediaries, the foundations and charitable-fund managers, are themselves charities. Their job is to disburse donor funds to a myriad of charities more or less according to the wishes of their donors. So what happens when, say, Fidelity Charitable is deemed a “terrorist” org for sending donor money to the ACLU? If it’s stripped of its nonprofit status, it can no longer be a DAF manager, so what then? What happens to the donors and all the assets under management? I suppose there will need to be a follow-on bill that will compel the fund managers under such circumstances to cut checks to Trump and Trump-affiliated orgs (nonprofit or not). I read recently that the sum of DAF assets under management alone is around $250B (2023 numbers I think) so if a substantial amount of those funds are deemed “terrorist” funds, then it’ll be mighty tempting for “somebody”, somebody bad at business yet well-known for criminality to see about doing some confiscation.

Also, right now, if one is, say, a DAF donor, many of the managers (most?) allow you to make anonymous donations out of your account. But if you are (or were) having checks sent to newly disfavored (i.e. not regime-aligned) orgs, will the manager have to turn your name over to the government? After all, you’d then be a “terrorist” yourself wouldn’t you?

I could really see this decimating the charitable-giving industry. Charitable foundations and fund managers have got to be losing sleep over what these laws could entail. As a donor, unless I was already MAGA-aligned and really wanted that tax deduction, why would I bother with all this uncertainty and risk?

Good. From another article posted here today, regarding NC domestic terrorists:

In the summer of 2024, before Hurricane Helene, Veterans on Patrol was active in Spokane, Wash. In Telegram message from July 2, 2024, Veterans on Patrol announced to the police that it “would no longer be safe” for one of its officers “to work his beat.” The channel also posted the home addresses of city council members.