Well, the "not a flamethrower" is a roofing torch wrapped into the plastic furniture of an airsoft gun. Its purpose is to fortify the cultishness of The Musk, and maybe extract some more cash out of the followers of the Cult of Musk on the side.

You never know. Today, these kids in a neighborhood with a 40%+ poverty rate steal some Nikes, tomorrow they sell you mortgage-backed securities or run a gulag for the Chicago PD. It's a slippery slope, boyos.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/wildcat-strike-indianapolis-shut-down

The corresponding article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/

So the privately run "family detention centers" like the one set up in Dilley, Texas, by the Obama administration were acceptable, but this is a step too far?

This shit didn't magically appear out of thin air. You can trace it throughout the entire history of the US: the separation of children from their parents during slavery, the forceful removal of children from reservations and their placement into "Indian schools", the mass incarceration of primarily minority youths for the crime of being poor, and physical removal of parents in foreign nations by incinerating them in drone strikes, etc.

This shit is despicable, but it's not a deviation from previous actions -- it's just the next step. And for Maddow to "break down" over this... There are Syrian refugees living in the apartment building across the street from me. How many Syrian, Libyan, Somali, Pakistani, Afghani and Yemeni children have been separated from their parents by US bombs and missiles? Never stopped Maddow from warmongering.

Doesn't look like anything to me.

Al Jazeera has a terrific visualisation of the Saudi war in Jemen:
https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2018/Saudi-Arabia-air-raids-on-Yemen/index.html

And to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq, the supreme crime for which none of those reponsible have been hanged yet, Jeremy Scahill outlines how the US have been piling up Iraqi corpses for 55 years:
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/21/us-war-iraq-legacy-of-blood/

A few leagues have been using the VAR system (video assistant referee) for a while now, and it'll also be used at the upcoming World Cup in Russia.

They only interfere in case of obviously incorrect decisions by the ref or situations of significant impact (i.e. penalties, send-offs, off-side goals, etc). This particular case would have led to the ref booking the attacker for a dive.

Works pretty well in Germany these days after going through some issues in the first half of this season.

If Gina Haspel truly takes over as the Director of the CIA, watch out for the reactions to her nomination. There will be celebration about the first female Director of the CIA, but will they mention that she ran a black site (aka torture camp) in Thailand and was the agent who led the destruction of the CIA's torture tapes?

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/02/trumps-cia-chief-selects-major-torture-operative-to-be-agencys-deputy-director/

If you do decide to try it at home, don't forget to tighten your abs as a dummy or you'll get the shit squished out of you, even from the prone position.

Well, things are not as rosy as folks like Steven Pinker would like us to believe. As much as I dislike resorting to Hollywood for philosophical insights, True Detective was absolutely on point in this quote:

„Transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It's catharsis. He absorbs their dread with his narrative. Because of this, he's effective in proportion to the amount of certainty he can project.“

Now, they were talking about a preacher. But I'd argue this applies to scapegoats as well. And if your arguments undermine the scapegoat, it starts losing its efficiency as a focal point of people's discontent.

Most of us have so much day-to-day shit to deal with that outsourcing the macro-shit to a boogeyman, any boogeyman, helps us get through the day without wanting to bash our head against the wall. Or bash someone else's head in, for that matter.

This doesn't excuse this level of self-delusion, but maybe it explains it to some degree. I'd say keep doing what I know you've been doing for many years: present your case in a respectful manner.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/taibbi-russiagate-trump-putin-mueller-and-targeting-dissent-w517486

Not as informative as Greenwald's recent piece on Hamilton 68, but you just gotta love Taibbi's style.

"By an extraordinary coincidence, virtually all the "anti-system" movements and candidates that so terrified the political establishment two years ago have since been identified as covert or overt Russian destabilization initiatives, puppeteered from afar by the diabolical anti-Western dictator, Vladimir von Putin-Evil."


And on this decade's most effective propaganda effort so far, the Hamilton 68 dashboard:

"That these people now are being upheld as heroes of liberalism is incredible. Only a few short years ago they were widely derided as the very dumbest people in the country, raving paranoiacs who humped every false lead from Niger to Ahmed Chalabi's hotel suite in order to justify invasions, torture, secret prisons and the establishment of a monstrous, intractable, and illegal surveillance regime. And now we're letting these same people dominate every news cycle when this time, years early, they're already admitting they might be wrong?"

Those can be blocked by adding the following filters to your ad blocker (i.e. uBlock):

youtube.com##.ytp-ce-covering-overlay
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element-shadow
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-covering-image
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youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element.ytp-ce-video.ytp-ce-element-show
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youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
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youtube.com##.iv-click-target

*doublepromote

And if you like Intercepted, listen to Citations Needed. It's every bit as good.

Yes, that's a larger diameter than an anti tank rifle, which usually was between 12.7mm and 20mm. But compared to, say, a 20mm Lahti L39, this most likely uses a lot less propellant in the cartridge. A lot. Thus less muzzle energy, less recoil, less injuries.

For comparison, Rock Island had a four gauge and a .950 JDJ (that's ~24mm) in one of their auctions, and they took them out for some shooting. Here's the clip: link. And yes, that's Ian from FW in the background.