Commenter Archive

Comments by wonkie*

On “Xi and China’s military: an off the wall theory

Apparently some big officer guy in Germany is forcing all the men under him to view Melania. We need to do some purging here of wackos and nutcases.

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Yeah, there is that. But imagine if Xi is splitting the difference between those three and Marshall.

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Hitler, Mao, and Stalin employed similar, albeit a bit more drastic approach to reforming their officer corps. Results vary.

On “Moral insanity

Please add a 'what' (without tf) after But and before will.

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Maybe not moral insanity just brazen bull (I propose the unit of 1 Ph* for this kind of thing, subdivision to be determined)
https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-gateway-federal-funds-rename-dulles-penn-station
Now he also wants to rename the already renamed Gulf of Mexico after himself. But will he do after renaming Greenland? How will he call America?
If he was still alive, this guy instead of Kim Jong Un would probably be his role model (although he'd be unable to poperly pronounce the name): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saparmurat_Niyazov

*after Phalaris whose main claim to fame was a brazen bull.

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This is David French in today's NYT on fairly simple measures that can be taken to protect the midterms, given Trump's "nationalise the election" rhetoric:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/opinion/trump-nationalize-elections-midterms.html?unlocked_article_code=1.J1A.41j0.KnVRs-ShXqZm&smid=url-share

On “Bingeing on schadenfreude

You are dead
cody rudland<████████>
to <jeeproject@yahoo.com>
Aug 13, 2019 6:48 AM
Lol good riddance

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Wow, when starting to read the post, I was thinking that it was some sort of alternative to gmail that was the subject.

...but then it ALL BECAME CLEAR.

So, not as big as gmail, but much less evil? Please proceed.

On “Moral insanity

This, from Jamelle Bouie in today's NYT, seems a pretty succinct summing up of the governing idea behind the Trump presidency:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/opinion/trump-presidential-power-comments.html?unlocked_article_code=1.J1A.ZFRC.nNClfSmkgGZn&smid=url-share

On “Adam Tooze

W.r.t. renewables vs. fossil, I urge anyone interested to check out the first YouTube clip in cleek's recent post. If you keep watching past the first, fake sign-off, you'll hear a rousing finale, full of words and music, clarifying the difference between politicis and partisanship.
--TP

On “It is never “Simple as that”

You could go the route of Fantastic Mr. Fox:

Badger: In summation, I think you just got to not do it, man. That's all.
Mr. Fox: I understand what you're saying, and your comments are valuable, but I'm gonna ignore your advice.
Badger: The cuss you are.
Mr. Fox: The cuss am I? Are you cussing with me?
Badger: No, you cussing with me?
Mr. Fox: Don't cussing point at me!
Badger: If you're gonna cuss with somebody, you're not gonna cuss with me, you little cuss!
Mr. Fox: You're not gonna cuss with me!
[Both start snarling at each other, and then settle down]
Mr. Fox: Just buy the tree.
Badger: Okay.

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nous for the win!

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That's "Farging ICEholes."

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Maybe I'll go with the Johnny Dangerously lingo.

Farging iceholes! Sonamabatch!!

A little humor with the spice can't be bad.

And yeah, these people are farging iceholes. I'm kinda looking forward to the Epstein stuff clearing the decks - send them all to jail. If that includes Bill Clinton, I'm OK with it.

I gotta go play some music now so I don't lose my mind.

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What cleek said.

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FWIW. i like spicy russell. his presence confirms the severity of the situation.

but, breaks are always good, too.

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I can tell from the increasing frequency of F-bombs in my comments that it's time for me to take a little break from current events.

We are governed by greedheads and sociopathic weirdos. It is what it is, and it is what it's gonna be until we can figure out how to change it.

And, nonetheless, we all still need to live our lives as best we can.

Stay safe and sane out there, keep on keeping on, and don't let the bastards get inside your head. Saying that to myself as much as anything else.

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How did the local cops get that person in jail in the first place? They got a warrant and went and took physical custody of them. In many cases, they went to their house and arrested them.

Without an MRAP.

So I think ICE is capable of doing the same.

I beg leave to doubt that ICS is capable of doing the same. It would require a level of competence that they show no sign of possessing.

Say, rather, that ICE should do the same.

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Here's the thing. This statement right here:

"We're prioritizing the types of people we're arresting. We're going after the worst of the worst. And we're not just going out there willy-nilly picking up people."

Is bullshit.

Miller has set a quota for deportations that is orders of magnitude greater than the number of criminal undocumented people. ICE and CBP folks are getting bonuses for making their quotas. So they grab anyone who is brown or has an accent.

Immigration enforcement is not the job of local police. We don't ask ICE or CBP to enforce traffic violations etc., and we should not ask local cops to do immigration work. For all the reasons discussed in the piece.

You don't need 6 or 8 guys to arrest a criminal undocumented alien. You don't need an MRAP, or a sound cannon, or "less lethal" ordinance to arrest a criminal undocumented alien.

ICE has to go to somebody's house to arrest someone? OMFG, what a burden.

How did the local cops get that person in jail in the first place? They got a warrant and went and took physical custody of them. In many cases, they went to their house and arrested them.

Without an MRAP.

So I think ICE is capable of doing the same.

These guys have killed people, blinded people, shot people, rammed into people's cars, beaten the shit out of people, threatened people with guns drawn. It's an exercise in dominance. Aimed in particular at blue cities in blue states.

Fuck that.

Want co-operation? Stop terrorizing people. Short of that, get the fuck out.

And I appreciate that Homan is a kinder gentler version of Bovino, but we have the man on tape taking a $50K bribe.

That's the best Trump and Miller can come up with?

These guys have a long history of killing and abusing people and coloring outside the legal lines. The only difference now is they're killing white people.

Time to burn it down and start over from a clean slate.

On “Moral insanity

wj - Made worse by the detail, for those with a clue about the difference, by the fact the Border Patrol’s remit only runs within 100 miles of the border, which Minneapolis isn’t.

True, but the CBP agents and the BOP personnel who are there in MN are there not as part of their departments' actions, but on assignment to ICE to make up for not having enough agents to make the surge sustainable any other way.

And then there are the bounty hunters and other contractors who are doing the legwork to find enough immigrant-y looking folks to round up and keep those quotas met. Doesn't matter if they have to release them later on, all the bonuses are tied to the front end.

It's a peckerwood banquet.

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anyone who is talking about this on the various programs from the dem side rails on ICE and makes no mention of Border Patrol.

I suspect that, for most people, ICE and Border Patrol are indistinguishable. The difference is just too inside baseball for most of us. Made worse by the detail, for those with a clue about the difference, by the fact the Border Patrol's remit only runs within 100 miles of the border, which Minneapolis isn't. Not that those sorts of niggling legal details make any difference to the Orange Nero.

On “Adam Tooze

Thanks, lj. I didn't realize how much had changed. Although in retrospect that number for photovoltaic manufacturing should have been a clue -- those factories don't appear all at once.

On “Moral insanity

lj - I’d observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we’ve been told are minimally trained.

Well, it's not as if DHS has not had a problem with the sort of people that hairshirthedonist mentioned being employed in their ranks for a lot longer than just this last year. The US Justice Department was doing its best to rid itself of right-wing militia members under Biden after finding that there were hundreds of Oath Keepers working in federal law enforcement:

https://www.pogo.org/investigates/hundreds-of-oath-keepers-have-worked-for-dhs-leaked-list-shows

Truthout highlighted one particularly telling quote from the report when they covered it shortly thereafter:

The Oath Keepers’ overlap with agencies within DHS is ideologically consistent with the way that many of these agencies operate. Border Patrol and ICE carry out the U.S.’s most cruel anti-immigration policies, for instance. As one Border Patrol agent wrote, per the report, “Most Border Patrol Agents are Oath Keepers, we just haven’t signed up yet.”

(I'm not linking to that article only because I don't want to end up in the spam filter.)

In 2022 Biden issued an executive order (EO 14074) aimed at screening out white supremacists and others with dangerous biases against minority groups, and Raskin and Casten were pushing Garland to fully implement the EO in 2024 ahead of the elections. That did not get done in time.

Naranja Nero rescinded that EO along with pretty much every other order issued by Biden, and deactivated the database that was put together to track these sorts of things:

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12515

So any new recruits who are ideologically oriented towards white supremacy and white nationalism are going to find that there are plenty of others already there to welcome them in.

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That's true, but the line I hear emerging from dem politicians is that it is because ICE is undertrained that these problems are emerging. I may be missing stuff, but anyone who is talking about this on the various programs from the dem side rails on ICE and makes no mention of Border Patrol.

On “Adam Tooze

Re: coal, in Tooze's lecture, (roughly here in the youtube video) he points out that after Kyoto, China undertook a national industrialization project that, according to estimates, killed 1.4 million chinese citizens a year, because of increased air pollution, which is why wj refers to coal.

However, there has been a 'hard pivot' against that. Here is the youtube transcript, cleaned up a bit

we're talking here of a truly violent process of transformation which the Chinese regime can be fairly said deliberately opted into as a choice and then pivoted hard against and that pivot begins in the 2010s. It is a matter widely understood of regime survival because there's only so many times people can see their babies choking to death before uh you need to pivot. By the early mid2010s the air pollution standards imposed on Chinese coal fired power stations were actually more strenuous than those in either the United States or Europe. As unpalatable and as uncomfortable it is, we need to reckon with the fact that the cleaning up of China's first phase of dramatic hypergrowth was accompanied under the leadership of Xi Jinping by a extremely explicit commitment to environmental protection at first on a limited scale and then secondly on a global scale culminating in that Chinese appropriation of Europe's vision of green modernization in 2020. 

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