Nightwingdragon @ Nightwingdragon @lemmy.world

Posts

48

Comments

2,073

Joined

2 yr. ago

Source: Dealt with government contracts (admittedly, low-level, but still) for a couple of decades.

There's plenty of fraud and waste.

I've seen plenty of people take advantage of government regulations because they know that the relevant overseers either are too inexperienced/overworked to notice, or simply don't care. I dealt with school lunch programs. You'd be absolutely amazed at what food service vendors try to get away with, and you'd be even more amazed at how much of it gets through because of the ineptitude of the state officials they're dealing with. (And on the flip side, you'd also be amazed at what inept state regulators who don't understand the regulations they're supposed to be enforcing try to push on school districts and vendors. Trust me, it goes both ways.)

And even when everybody is on the up-and-up, there are some government regulations that are simply out of date. Regulations that sometimes directly contradict each other. Procedures that shouldn't be a thing in 2025 but still are because the bureaucracy hasn't kept up with technology.

There is plenty of fraud and waste to go around. I saw it all over the place, and I'm about as close to the bottom of the totem pole as you were going to get. I can only imagine how bad it is higher up the food chain. But that's not the kind of fraud and waste they're looking for. To them "Fraud" is "anything that helps poor and brown people", and "Waste" is "anything that doesn't result in more tax breaks for the wealthy".

You are correct. I edited that in because it should have been obvious and included from the beginning. My bad.

Has anyone else witnessed that while the racists get louder, more people are fed up with their shit?

Really? Because all I've seen is every institution that was supposed to stand up to racism rolling over and playing dead at the first sign of pressure. Businesses, government entities, the press, colleges. Even Harvard has ultimately decided to bend the knee.

You really think a handful of local cops are going to get into a firefight with federal agents? This isn't the movies. They're not going to just see a handful of local cops and say "Drat! Foiled again!" while twirling their evil mustaches.

There's only a handful of ways that's going to go down.

1. A bunch of local cops end up dead.
2. A bunch of local cops end up in jail for crimes ranging from interfering with the duties of federal officers to murder of federal officers.
3. A bunch of local cops just hand him over to the feds.

The problem is that every time they get voted out, they get replaced by an even bigger MAGA suckup.

"Sorry, the best we can do is tell everybody how terrible it is until 30 seconds before the vote and then vote for it anyway. That cool?"

-- Chuck Schumer.

I'm not exactly going to shed any bitter tears for Susan Collins, but if she is ultimately replaced by another Republican, they're almost guaranteed to be exponentially worse. Depending on your point of view and whether Dems are able to take the seat, it has the potential of becoming a case of "Be careful what you wish for, you might get it." if her seat is taken by a MAGA suckup.

Dude’s gonna be shitposting the whole way to The Hague.

How cute, people still think Trump will ever suffer repercussions for his actions.

And for the record, it is enshrined in our Constitution that the US doesn't recognize the authority of any foreign body such as the ICC and in fact has laws on the books authorizing military strikes against the Hague if a US citizen is being detained there. Even if Trump were to face a trial, it would be in a US court in front of a US jury.

So the mission that is likely to spark regional wars in the Middle East was either a success, or it wasn't. And Israel and Iran have agreed to a ceasefire, unless Iran hasn't.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Trump administration.

So is this a 12 hour ceasefire? 24? Permanent (read: until the next time)?

And why does it start in 6 hours? Do the two sides get to just lob missiles at each other for the next 6 hours and then just say "gg" in a text to each other or something?

Whether Trump had anything to do with any agreed upon deal should also be taken with several grains of salt. Remember, he likes to take credit for things he had nothing to do with such as the ceasefire between India and Pakistan. This assumes there is even a tentative ceasefire in place, which itself I question given the source.

Or Iran could just be playing Trump for a fool. Let Trump think that he won because he's the bestest thing ever, and then while he's taking a victory lap, lob some bombs at Tel Aviv and make Trump look like a complete moron in the process.

Barring the participation of larger military countries such as China and Russia, Iran (and the Middle East in general) does not have the capability to retaliate against the US in any militarily significant way outside of symbolic attacks on US bases in the area. Troops are never going to set foot on US soil. Planes are never going to reach US airspace. Missiles will be shot down over the water long before they get close to US territory. The US is in a unique position on the globe that makes any kind of military attack or invasion borderline impossible. I do not fear "WW3" or anything because Iran has no capability of taking action that could spark WW3 independently, or even in a coalition with regional allies.

What I do believe will happen will be terror attacks on the US mainland by suicide bombers and Iran sympathizers. It's the only possible way that Iran can directly attack the US in any meaningful way, as it would be again borderline impossible to stop a lone wolf attacker from landing on US soil, heading to Home Depot to buy some supplies, and pulling a Timothy McVeigh. And Iran isn't on a time schedule here. They can wait a month, 3 months, a year or more if they want, wait for our guard to be down, and launch a retaliatory terror attack in the middle of East Bumfuck, Idaho. Or smack dab in the middle of Chicago. Or at a baseball game. I am infinitely more afraid of them pulling something like that than I am of this turning into WW3.

And if Iran's top advisors have half a brain, they'll allow the US to continue thinking that today's attack on the base in Qatar is the end of it. The "symbolic gesture" of retaliation meant to save face. Let the US think that this is all they're going to do and then spend the next 6 months planning for the real attacks. Heck, play into Trump's ego and let him believe that Iran is too afraid of Trump to do anything else. He'd be dumb enough to fall for it.

Trump doesn't even get that far. He stopped at the words "due process" and said "Nope."

As far as I'm concerned, the next terrorist bombing on US soil is Trump's fault. And the one after that. And the one after that. Because they are going to retaliate. There's no chance that they'll be able to directly attack the US with planes, military troops, or even missiles. So most likely their response is going to come in the form of a WTC-style bombing.

What frustrates me is how we, especially on the left, tend to fumble these moments. Instead of recognizing that some of these people might be waking up, we rush to humiliate them. We waste the opportunity to build something better just so we can rub their faces in it and get our own little high.

I'll give a prime example of this: Liz Cheney.

Now don't get me wrong. I disagree with 99.9% of her policy decisions. And yes, she helped create the beast. But we keep asking when Republicans are going to finally say "I've had enough of this." and stand up to Trump. And she did. Again, say what you will about her policies but in the end, she literally put her career on the line and got excommunicated from her own party in order to expose Trump and attempt to hold him accountable.

And we responded to the courage it must have taken her to be the first prominent member of her party to break ranks with Trump by ostracizing her too. "HAHAHA now teh leopardz r eating ur face". We laughed as she was basically run out of politics at warp speed. Rather than at least try to work with her and use her to build a bipartisan coalition against Trump, we decided to get a few kicks of our own in while she was down. And then we wonder why nobody else from the party has followed in her footsteps.

I'm not saying we should have thrown her a ticker-tape parade or anything like that. But we keep asking what it's going to take for Republicans to break ranks and cross the aisle to stand up to Trump. How can we expect them to do that when that is how they're going to be treated? If the best Democrats have to offer them is to make fun of them and kick them while they're down, it shouldn't be a surprise that they stick to the abusive relationship they're already in. And I'm not saying that we needed to vote her back into office. But there was an opportunity to use the influence she had to at least try to build a bipartisan coalition against Trump and we squandered it because we have also allowed politics to get so tribal that anyone on the other side is always wrong no matter what and is always the enemy forever and ever and ever amen instead of ever admitting that they may actually have a point once in a while.

Let me know when they start doing something about it.

So my guess is that the Republicans who signed on to the "bipartisan" bill preventing Trump from taking action against Iran are suddenly going to have a whole lot of nothing to say......

I want people to realize the outsized amount of leverage that farmers will have on their employees. Employers will literally be able to say that they'll do what they're told and take whatever they're given or the employer can just drop a dime to ICE and have them deported without being able to settle their affairs or contact their families.

Once again, people can say "this is illegal" all they want.

But nobody seems to be willing or able to actually do anything about it. Chuck Schumer can call it a "silly piece of paper" all he wants, but right now he and his colleagues are being held off by that silly piece of paper.

Is anyone going to do anything about it? No. Is anyone going to force their way into these facilities? No. Is anyone in ICE going to face consequences for spinning this policy out of whole cloth? No. Which means, for all intents and purposes, what they're doing is de-facto legal.

Not that anyone will be around to learn about it.....

This goes to show just how far AI speech-to-text recognition has become. It's absolutely amazing. All the assistant on Huckabee's phone heard was "GLARGGGGARGLLLARGGGARGLEGARRRGL" for about 20 or so seconds, and it immediately knew what Huckabee was trying to say while gobbling down Trump's balls.