CJ πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ€˜
drensteppur.bsky.social
CJ πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ€˜
@drensteppur.bsky.social
2.4K followers 1.8K following 4.7K posts
Texan, shiftless layabout, wearily homosexual. user policy guru for a large tech company. safe use policy, data security, malicious user behavior analysis, phishing & impersonation prevention, cloud data protection & best practices.
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it's genuinely shocking to see this laid out visually like this. this monstrosity *must* come down when we win back the White House. there's simply no way we can leave this monument to his ego left standing once he's finally out of office.
How Trump’s ballroom will dwarf the White House
Trump’s new 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom would be almost as large as the rest of the complex.
wapo.st
when I was working part time in service (for waaaay too many years, god what an exhausting industry), we saw it all the time. "I was drugged," okay but our safety cameras show pretty clearly that you weren't. three martinis can make you *feel* like you were, tho!
yeah, this is correct. three or four strong cocktails is way more than enough to make *most* people look like they've been "drugged" in those situations. the date rape that happens is still very, very real, but a 120 lb. woman who only drinks once or twice a month will be BLASTED after a few drinks.
this is exactly why he could spend basically four full years campaigning for reelection, promising a million! different! ways! to drive up prices & tank the economy, yet the voters of this country only saw what they wanted to see: someone who would do the opposite.
Trump's political superpower, from the first moment he descended down the piss-gold escalator in his wretched tower, drawn from the fact that he is a man who believes in NOTHING, is that he has the unyielding ability to be an empty vessel upon which *anyone* can project whatever they want him to be.
Reposted by CJ πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ€˜
Man what is up with defence guys in europe and taiwan you dumb motherfuckers of course trump was going to fuck you
Officials in Taiwan were quietly optimistic when Donald Trump was re-elected. Less than a year later, the island is confronting one of its deepest fears: what happens if America abandons it?
What is Taiwan’s plan B?
It is starting to hedge against the risk that America abandons it
econ.st
Reposted by CJ πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ€˜
I worked in the White House. For 12 years. I am, in fact, allowed to have views about the Easy Winf without clearing it with whichever dickheads are on shift in the orthodoxy police on here
also, the replies are ... exactly what you'd think lolol. a bunch of folks pointing to the dictionary definition of populism and asking why it's a bad thing. lots of retconning of, 'but FDR was a populist!' (spoiler alert: no he wasn't. Huey Long and the OPPOSITION to the New Deal was populist!)
oh yeah, totally agree 100%, you will hear no argument from me. but this is definitely not a new phenomenon. in the US they've been doing this since the ascendency of the Tea Party; they think that "populism" is a positive thing that they can ride to the top of our political power structures.
why are people on the left using "populist" in a positive way now, you shouldn't want your politicians to be populists, "populism" isn't good
lol yeah, any of those "missions" were always deserving of some side eye, but in ***2018***??? like, maybe if we were talking about pre-2011 ... but holy shit, to go AFTER we knew about everything? that is, uh, some questionable judgement there, to put it mildly.
the Resolute Desk? it's been there since Carter. LBJ & Ford didn't use it because they both preferred larger workspaces. I'm not sure Nixon used it either, but he did lots of photo ops with it. (iirc he split his time in the residence office a lot?? he was the one that liked working "at home.")
wait, the incoming Irish president went on one of those "diplomatic" Assad propaganda tours? in *2018*?? what. the. fuck.
I guess I don’t think she’ll be a disaster, in that the office provides limited scope for disaster (and Lord knows Michael D has tested the boundaries) but I can’t get past the fact the new president voluntarily went to Syria as a guest of the regime in 2018, when we knew all to there was to know
I'm a little late to the party on this piece, but holy shit, there are so many amazing observations that Mr. Roth lays out beautifully. Take a few minutes out of your morning to read this in its entirety; it's not very long, but it IS more than worth the small amount of time you'll spend with it.
ngl, I always kinda liked the minimal & neutral aesthetic that Reagan went with. It was the only thing to like about his eight years in office: him and Nancy obviously had okay tastes in decorating. She also had some really great additions to other parts of the White House.
we are witnessing a genuine decline in the taste of american elites
This is as big a flashing red warning light as we're ever going to get: they are 100% planning to attack the tattoo. They smell blood in the water.
From the way NRSC designed the pollβ€”presenting platner’s *defense* of his Nazi tattooβ€”and the fact they publicly released it, I think it’s fair to say Susan Collins would prefer to run against the guy with a Nazi tattoo than she would the sitting two-term governor.
Reposted by CJ πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ€˜
man an issue where trump can't get a majority with republicans
that sort of audience capture & feedback loop just does not fuckin happen on our side. everyone somehow magically expects every Dem post to somehow immediately pervade the entirety of our media & social media infrastructures, and they then *get mad* when it doesn't happen.
I think there's also an audience problem wrt the impact of these things on social media. like, when a Trump moment happens, a bunch of MAGA freaks on every social media app will share it not just once but like SEVERAL TIMES over SEVERAL DAYS, like, and talk about it for a week. they *make* virality.
he literally NEVER STOPPED SAYING IT, NOT EVEN THE DAY BEFORE THE ELECTION. it just stopped being novel, so it stopped showing up in people's social media feeds, and we all know that if it doesn't show up in your social media feeds, it doesn't count as real life.
like, you can still easily go find YouTube videos of his speeches from the closing weeks of the campaign, and he drops the weird line at least a couple times *in every single speech*, but the average angry Bluesky yeller will swear up & down to your face that "Dem consultants" killed it way earlier.
Tim Walz called Republicans weird in like every campaign stop and the media stopped covering it after a week and everyone thought he stopped doing it
average angry Bluesky user: "Dems need to do [whatever p.r. stunt is en vogue at the moment], if they don't they are WORSE THAN USELESS!"

*Dems did the thing two days ago / do the thing they want within hours of skeet*

Bluesky user: "THROW THEM ALL OUT THEY DO NOTHING THEY'RE ALL COLLABORATORS"
Will any of the "Dems need to stand in front of the WH and get the media to pay attention to them but there too theyre to FECKLESS" ppl on here even take note of this?
Trump’s tearing down the East Wing to build himself a $350M ballroom while Americans struggle to afford health care.

Senator Ruben Gallego went to the site of the Trump teardown.
Look, 2016 and a bunch of other presidential elections were pretty dumb, but 2024 is absolutely going down as the stupidest fucking one in all of history. We the People chose so. incredibly. wrong.
Trump take egg... and house and gas and car and doctor and daycare and aaaaaaaall the things.
Price changes over last year (September CPI report)
Gas Utilities: +11.7%
Electricity: +5.1%
Used Cars: +5.1%
Fuel Oil: +4.1%
Medical Care: +3.9%
Food away from home: +3.7%
Shelter: +3.6%
Overall CPI: +3.0%
Food at home: +2.7%
Transportation: +2.5%
New Cars: +.8%
Gasoline: -0.5%
#EconSky
I just recently threw a Ryzen 5 7600X & a slightly used RX 7800XT into my personal / gaming rig, and it's still not quite enough for some of the AAA games that're coming out here latelyβ€”unless I set my resolution to 1080p instead of 1440p. it's STUPID what 'mandatory ray tracing' is doing to specs.
oh god, I can't even begin to imagine it's gonna run on anything less than a Threadripper or an X3D cpu + a 4080/90 or 5080/90 gpu setup. the few videos we've seen are absolutely *insaaaaaane*. they've got individually rendered blades of grass & leaves on trees!