“This isn’t the department of baking cookies,” one source said. "This is the Department of Homeland Security, where you can be deported from the country. And we’re now employing people who are not equipped to tie their own shoelaces”

And giving them firearms…

Its more of a squares and rectangles thing IMO. All MAGA are conservatives but not all conservatives are MAGA. Maga is inherently a conservative political movement. “Make America Great Again”. Its in the name. Return to an idealization of the past (even if the idealization was never reality, nor feasible to achieve)

Pryor, whom was appointed by Bush. So literally a majority conservative panel

What are they even trying to say with the whole thing about Europe vs the US? If Europe had used their devices for shorter lengths of time, ie higher capital amounts spent on tech replacements, then they would have had higher productivity?

But that necessitates a level of investment that doesnt exist. Its like saying “if investments in the Congo were on parity with the US they would have increased productivity by 2 million percent”. Which is neither guaranteed to be true, as there are limitations in a smaller country, plus fairly useless to even say as there are limits on what is reasonably investable in the Congo without more risk than reward. Its literally useless econobabble arguing in favor of hypotheticals that make no sense on paper

Even the tech investments that occur already in the US make no sense on paper, consumer nor commercial. People dont need a new iphone every year. I get 5 years out of mine on average

It physically nauseates me remembering Laura Loomer exists, but you dont see me bragging about it

Bold move to order an entire team of way manlier dudes to tail your girlfriend that is half your age

Trump looking for a taste of that cardamom

In her resignation video she looks like she has a gun to her head. Maybe not literally in that moment, but in the general sense

Missouri isnt really a good example considering MO tends to pay the federal government more than it receives. At worst they occasionally break about even. But the majority of the time they pay their fair share, unlike many other states

I would think that the primary issue is the potency of fentanyl vs heroin, as fentanyl is far more likely to cause an overdose and to be misdosed than heroin. Fent might have been in the supply on a technical basis in 2013, but it wasnt popularized whatsoever. The average American did not know what it was, and the average user was probably not taking it (at least knowingly).

The spike in 2017 and rise beforehand probably correlates with increased presence of fentanyl in the US market, courtesy of China. Most US heroin was coming via Mexico and not highly related to the Afghanistan poppy production. As the current article notes, most of that production was supplying heroin to Europe and the eastern hemisphere.

China, circa 2014-2015 and just before, was ramping up their supply of illicit analogue research chems to the US. It seems like that mostly dwindled down to just focusing on Fentanyl, and then fentanyl took over as the primary illicit opiate. This also correlates with the same time period that the US was significantly tightening restrictions on legitimate pharmaceutical opiates like Oxycontin. Around 2014-2016 large numbers of patients who, for better or worse, had been legally prescribed pain pills were being cut off of them. Which drastically increased the market of people seeking illicit opiates.

I would think the overall spike is due to the increase in market size due to restricting pain pills, the popularization of fentanyl as a specifically sought substance, the ease of importing fentanyl by bad actors (given that it is a far stronger substance by weight), and the significantly higher likelihood of the end user overdosing. Due to it being a stronger substance, when it is cut with other mediums it would make any given part of the final sold product a toss up in terms of strength. One part of the cut mix might have hardly any fent, while another corner of it might have a lethal dose, even if the user is taking the same amount of the final mixture. The process of producing heroin created a more homogeneous product even if it was cut before making it to the end user. It wasnt a matter of a few grains here of there that meant life or death for the user.

Plus you factor in that junkies have a penchant for seeking out batches that have caused overdoses rather than avoiding them, because they are looking for high strength even if it might kill them. Yet another reason why fent became so popular that it displaced heroin.

I think very little of it has anything to do with Afghan heroin production to be honest

Which edition Patel is your favorite?

😵‍💫?

😠

Or

😟

The “pee” tape everybody talks about was not actually “pee” in the report. It was “P tape”. Which at the time was speculated by many to be shorthand for pedo, and that has only become more and more likely to be true over the last decade

Voters have selected a neoliberal candidate every election for decades. Republicans are even more neoliberal than the mainstream Democratic party is. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is inherently a neoliberal tenet. “Free market” economics is a neoliberal tenet.

Neoliberal doesnt mean “new liberal” as in “new left wing politics”. It is a rehashing of the term liberal as in classical liberalism. Neoliberalism is a spectrum of political approaches that spans everything from virtually-no-government libertarianism all the way to ineffectual big government (IE mainstream leftwing politics). Its all various approaches to the question “how small can government be while still maintaining the status quo of the social contract, the market, and extractive economic policy?”.

Progressive politics, of most all forms, are closer to classical liberalism because classical liberalism also spawned socialism eventually, just as it spawned neoliberalism. It goes back to the idea that government should actually be something for people, not the bare minimum of whatever placates people while still being able to bleed them dry.

Quite honestly, given the American penchant for electing neoliberals, and the rich man’s affinity for funding them, a neoliberal woman is far more likely to get elected than a woman who isnt. Hence Kamala and Hillary both being nearly elected. The only reason they lost is because they were running against an even more neoliberal candidate whos party has the EC locked up. America elected its first black president because he was a neoliberal. If Obama had been a Mamdani style progressive candidate he would have gotten smacked down by John McCain. He probably wouldnt have gotten anywhere near the nomination

Idk I think its fair to say she knows she got elected in the first place for being such an outspoken toxic person. There is a real chance that the people that actually elected her will turn against her if she chooses a different path. Even if she turns a new leaf, the odds of her constituents doing the same, rather than continue blindly following the cult of hate, is not very high

Kids these days will never know life with non-AI demonic Tickle Me Elmo

She stood no chance of winning over enough women in red states to win the election, even though that was obviously part of the political calculus (or lack thereof) in pushing her as the candidate

Toilet paper that doesnt suck

“I dont care if the files get released” says man who happens to also be furiously shoving documents into paper shredder