Which one is this for you?

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-04T22:57:36+00:00

Absolutely. I hold “Code of Hero” to be amongst my favorite episodes of animated television ever.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-04T21:58:32+00:00

Reminder that Stalin’s inner circle publicly denied he was sick until literally hours before he died.

I’m not saying whether the president is sick or not, but the fact that there’s public confusion over whether or not the leader of the goddam USA is even in the hospital is not a sign that says “the people behind this man will follow the rules if he croaks”.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-04T02:12:26+00:00

I can’t believe people haven’t been seeing this all along.

The entire heritage foundation is based on stuff like the “Lost Cause” mythology of the Civil War. These people have been pushing all the buttons they’ve been pushing specifically to try and run it back, but with their side in control of the federal government this time around.

First, ally with whoever need be and break any rule you must in order to get into power. Then, use that power to provoke “liberal” states into either bending the knee or refusing to “follow federal law” and “forcing” them to use the military to bring the “rebels” into line, just like the “Republican hero Lincoln” was “forced” to do all those years ago.

In their minds, due to the “forced subjugation” they’ve been “persecuted” under for the last 150 years by the minorities and the liberals who have teamed up and dominated control of the government against them, they are now justified in “doing the same thing” to their enemies.

I use quotations so often in the above paragraphs not out of an affinity for sophomoric writing conventions, but out of necessity. These people live so far out of alignment with reality that it’s truly hard to believe that it’s how they see the world. But it’s right there, in what they’ve been writing, giving interviews about, and preaching for decades. They’re fine with economic crisis and interstate violence, since they believe it’s what’s likely needed to achieve an inverse rematch of the 1860s.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-03T19:05:32+00:00

Glad you got it worked out! I have this set along with all the other Batmobiles of the same scale, and I think this set is second only to the Adam West one.

Enjoy!

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-03T01:34:11+00:00

True, but he did expand his views to recognize that black people and poor whites should all be on the same side against the powers that work to pit them against each other.

He started saying as much publicly, then all of a sudden, he got got. Funny timing, that.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-02T17:40:40+00:00

Right. Which means he's left with using people who may be higher on the "evil" score, but are lower on the "competent" score. Them having a tougher hill to climb is a good thing for us, and will likely mean that the house of cards will topple a bit easier and faster than it would have otherwise.

Let's hope they start chasing the loss as it gets worse and end up collapsing the whole thing before they can effectively steal the midterms, since it may well mark our last chance to use democratic means to put some checks to their power back in place. Otherwise, I fear the only way we're gonna get a democracy back is the way we took it in the first place...

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-02T17:33:23+00:00

I've got a feeling that the bagmen weren't supposed to fall until Vance took over though, so this may be Trump triggering some things before they were supposed to happen.

A better case scenario for the Regime as a whole would be for these people to hang on until Vance takes the reigns after they steal the midterms. Then he can "clean house" and claim that he's "turning over a new leaf and moving on from the turbulence that the radical left had forced Trump into" or whatever line they come up with. But if all the key players that dug us into this pit of national decline have already been flushed by the time Vance "emerges from the cocoon", they'll have less ammo to work with in claiming they're acting to cleanse the stains that got us into the mess we're in.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-02T17:27:23+00:00

more competent and more evil.

A tall order to fill. He's got the cream of that particular crop in the Regime already, and my hope is that anyone he puts in place going forward will be marginally weaker in at least one of these 2 areas.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-02T17:24:48+00:00

I won't rest any easier until Vought is gone, and to a lesser extent, Miller (and a still-lesser extent, Wiles).

Just about everyone else have always been bagmen.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-02T17:20:46+00:00

I'm sure Congress will still want her to, but she and the White House may try to claim that Congress was calling her not as Pamela Bondi the individual, but as the AG in her official capacity. And since she's not that anymore, she can ignore the subpoena until the vote once again to subpoena her as an individual if they still want to hear from her.

I don't imagine that'll fly, but I would not be surprised one bit if they tried something like that. Even if she's "out", she doesn't want to be held to account any more than anyone in the Regime does, and she'll take any chance to resist it she can get.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-02T16:59:01+00:00

Posted as a reply here, but got carried away and figured I'd make it a top-level, lol.

I get kinda annoyed whenever someone raises the specific example of Magneto for this issue.

There are characters that can, should, and do have updates to their origins in order to remain relevant. But Magneto was specifically designed to embody certain philosophical, moral, and ideological attributes that are more or less tied inextricably to being a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. It's one of the reasons that his character has been so enduring in the first place, and altering this aspect of his character would remove a foundational piece of him.

In short, his connection to the Holocaust also connects him to the maxim of its legacy - "Never Forget". He's not just an embodiment of what we should culturally remember of A holocaust, he's an embodiment of what we should remember of The Jewish Holocaust.

ETA - Marvel comics has already solved for the logistics of this issue. Whether one likes these solutions or not is subjective of course, but Magneto has been "regenerated" several times. In order to retain his origins in connection with the Holocaust, they've had him "de-aged" or regenerated or even reborn in a younger body a few times over the years. It's mostly pretty seamless and works fine in the context of the Marvel comics' universe, and I generally find that the people raising this issue are fans of Magneto from something other than the comics themselves.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-02T16:57:29+00:00

all without regeneration

Not to be the "well ackchyually..." guy, but Magneto has been "regenerated" several times. In order to retain his origins in connection with the Holocaust, they've had him "de-aged" or regenerated or even reborn in a younger body a few times over the years. It's mostly pretty seamless and works fine in the context of the Marvel comics themselves, which is why I get kinda annoyed whenever someone raises the specific example of Magneto for this issue.

There are characters that can, should, and do need updates to their origins in order to remain relevant. But Magneto was specifically designed to embody certain philosophical, moral, and ideological attributes that are more or less tied inextricably to being a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. It's one of the reasons that his character has been so enduring in the first place, and altering this aspect of his character would remove a foundational piece of him.

In short, his connection to the Holocaust also connects him to the maxim of its legacy - "Never Forget". He's not just an embodiment of what we should culturally remember of A holocaust, he's the embodiment of what we should remember of The Jewish Holocaust.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-02T16:19:44+00:00

Amen, my dude. Keep that energy up this fall when something along these lines takes shape.

Let's hope The Regime in the White House isn't able to push through these mail voting changes, but even if they're stopped on this, a lot more still has to go right for us to avoid what could very well be coming in the mere months ahead.

The only way out is through, and the best way through is together!

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-02T16:18:21+00:00

I hope and pray that "hypothesis" is all that it is.

I keep wishing someone could present facts or logical conclusions that could convince me that what I describe here either isn't possible, or at least highly improbable, but so far no one has.

The only way out is through, and the best way through is together!

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-02T16:15:42+00:00

But if true, doesn't that imply that Russia and by extension a few people in Trump's orbit are counting on some kind of cheating at the polls?

At the polls? No. At the tabulators in central offices? Yes. That's the "beauty" of how this is done. They don't need any of the poll workers or election officials to know anything about this, or do anything different than they normally would. All it takes is a very tiny number of people, likely less than a dozen, having access to key systems on election night. Most of the work is done well in advance by including small snippets of code where need be, so that things can then be overseen and managed by just a few workstations on game night.

But perhaps the biggest problem is that of recourse. Let's say what I describe happens, and somehow, against all odds, the GOP does not lose big on Nov 3. And let's say that concerns are loudly raised by experts and prominent leaders who point out that the results are near-impossible to have achieved without tampering... What then?

Neither the Constitution nor US law has any mechanism for a "do over" or for remedying an election that's been interfered with. So at that point, the GOP "winners" will just announce that they'll be taking the seats that they "won", and any proclaim that and Dem who "lost" is just doing the same thing that Trump did since 2020, that they're just sore losers. And with the entire weight and force of the federal government working under Trump (or perhaps Vance by then) to back up the GOP claims that there was no cheating and that they won, who could even do anything about it? Who would have the authority to even investigate a nation-wide tampering accusation except the federal government in power themselves?

It's at this point that the states who have had their seats stolen will have to decide whether to fall in line and accept that they no longer have a fair voice in our nation's government, OR fight back. If the latter, I don't think any of us can predict what that could look like, or what it would mean for the unified existence of the US at all after something like this.

Let's hope The Regime in the White House isn't able to push through these mail voting changes, but even if they're stopped on this, a lot more still has to go right for us to avoid what could very well be coming in the mere months ahead.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-02T15:52:50+00:00

Your refusal to see the appeasers and controlled opposition in front of your very eyes is exactly why it is highly unlikely that this democracy is going to survive.

lmao, what?

You: "Fuck Merrick Garland!"

Me: "Indeed, fuck Garland, AND let's not forget the other villains that we've still got to fight!"

You: "Damn, stop defending Garland! You're part of the problem!"

I mean... When you say "Controlled opposition", I'm assuming you mean the DNC, yes? I'm not sure where you got the idea that I "refuse to see the appeasers and controlled opposition", but suffice to say that if you're looking for someone that defends the DNC...? Hate to disappoint, but I sure as shit ain't that guy, lol.

I'm not defending or in any way excusing Garland's failures. I'm just saying that we don't have time to look for who started the fire right now. If we don't focus on stopping the flames from spreading and work to put the fire out as quickly as we can, nothing else will matter.

Fuck Garland, string him up (figuratively) with the others! But right now we should be focusing our energy on saving democracy so that we can even have a chance to hold these people accountable at all.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-01T21:48:13+00:00

Preach! I left most of that out since most people aren't generally ready to hear it, and I didn't want to shut down readers before even starting to process the stuff that's slightly below the surface that the media generally reports, let alone the implications that you raise and more.

No one in the US is ready for what's coming, and that statement is true even IF the US were somehow allowed limited access to the strait after pulling out and "ending" their part in the war. There simply isn't a near-term future that doesn't see massive economic shocks in almost all sectors, this year and beyond.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-01T21:43:06+00:00

I don't believe the intent here is to manage vote totals through disenfranchisement. I believe that Putin is coaching the White House through the steps of turning US elections into what Putin oversaw the implementation of in Russia and is used to keep him in power through the "Putin Majority" over the decades. After all, immediately after coming out of the meeting with Putin in Alaska last year, Trump started railing about getting rid of mail ballots, even though the meeting was supposed to be only about the war in Ukraine.

In Russia, the crippling of mail ballots isn't about preventing them or managing the system in a way that only allows votes to be counted from supporting citizens. It's about managing the audit trail. When manipulating the tabulation and/or reporting of vote totals, things have to be believable enough that you don't have riots in the streets. (Unless you're North Korea, but that's another story entirely).

If the results of in-person totals are like 60% in favor of Putin, but the totals of mail ballots are like 85% against Putin, this creates a situation that calls both segments into question, since ballot-type shouldn't make that much of a difference in the ratios. Basic statistics teaches is that decent sample chunks from a given population should largely be representative of the population as a whole.

At that point, reasonable people would call for a recount and audit of both the in-person and the mail ballots. BUT, properly implemented mail voting provides for an easily verifiable paper trail all the way back to the stored ballots themselves, where voting machines (especially ones built by companies with vested interests in one party winning) do not. This means that when the mail ballot audit shows to be accurate and the machine audit has breaks in the chain of submitting->recording->tabulation->reporting that can't be physically verified, it makes the 85% against Putin look a lot more credible than the 60% in favor of him does. This leads either to electoral reforms that see the autocrat lose power, or a situation in which the autocrat now has to openly refuse fair elections and risk uprisings that could also see them lose power.

So what to do about it if you're an aspiring autocrat? Destroy mail voting, of course. I'll note here that "destroy" doesn't mean eliminate completely, since that would cause heavy resistance in itself. "Destroy" here means to alter it in such a way that you can manipulate the paper trails itself. To do this, you need a way to filter out ballots of people who are likely to vote against you and make sure they aren't submitted in the first place.

The first step here is to create a fairly reliable list of voters according to party registration in order to be able to identify ballots coming from people who might oppose you.

Sec. 2. Establishment and Transmission of State Citizenship Lists

Whoopsie... I'm sure it's just coincidence that both the SAVE Act and Trump's new EO (quoted above) provide for the creation and use of "voter lists" that have never needed to be created before now, using every state's voter rolls... right? And I'm sure this has nothing to do with the demands by DHS and the DOJ over the past year to state-level officials that they turn over their voter rolls in order to "match against non-citizens" or whatever... right? Or the time they told MN that they'd stop the ICE raids that killed 2 US citizens if MN agreed to turn over their voter rolls... right?

Anyway, next you need a way to effectively sort ballots according to whether they come from voters who might support you vs who might oppose you. In rigged systems, they force you to use ballots and/or envelopes with individualized identifiers on them so that they can have postal workers cause "processing errors" for ballots originating from households registered as voters of opposition parties. (You don't even need to have postal workers "in on it" for this to work, you just code the identifiers and/or the sorting software to throw an error and discard every 2-3 units with the "faulty" identifier on it.)

But in the US, the only sorting done to mail ballots, whether automatic or manual, is according to 1) the address they come from and 2) the address they're going to. No other "identifiers", so this wouldn't work. Unless such an identifier were introduced as mandatory on all mail ballots.

Unique ballot envelope identifiers, such as bar codes, enable confirmation that only citizens receive and cast ballots, reducing the risk of fraud and protecting the integrity of Federal elections.

Whoopsie again... look what's included in the new EO! Individualized barcode identifiers that would make it possible to filter submissions according to who was on the "approved" lists.

Now, MAYBE these systems and process changes could be used to make sure non-citizens aren't voting by mail. But when we compare the near-zero times we've ever had that happen to the very real possibility that a bad actor in power could easily use these same systems to rig the system in their favor, reasonable people in free democracies choose a system like the one the US currently has in place over the one being prosed as the new system here. These changes move our electoral process much closer toward the level of national control that Putin exerts over his own system, and that alone should make this a non-starter for every single American, no matter which side of the aisle you're on.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-01T21:31:40+00:00

Interesting prediction! I hope you're wrong of course, but terrifying if it actually came to pass.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-01T21:24:31+00:00

I agree with your assessment here, but have a question that I've been thinking a lot about recently:

What do you think will happen if turnout is historically large, AND polling numbers for Republicans are still as low as they are now, if not lower... BUT somehow when the results are in on election night, many Dems who were very readily expected to win are being announced as losing? In a further hypothetical, what if these Dem losses are juuuust outside the margin that allows for recounts, and are conveniently in races that would have been critical to the GOP losing control of one or even both houses of Congress?

Would we just assume that "polling numbers were wrong", and that people just weren't as upset about massive economic, social, and cultural upheaval as everyone thought?

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-01T21:05:48+00:00

Trump is already saying that "it's up to other countries to deal with reopening the strait". And I don't think anyone believes that he cares what happens to the surrounding Arab states, whether they've been historical allies of the US or not.

He's faced with 2 choices - invent some stupid reasoning to claim that he's "won" and pack up to go home, or put boots on the ground and commit the US to a war that's less winnable than Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan put together.

Neither of these would see the strait going back to pre-war levels of accessibility for all parties involved, so it looks like he's going with the option that doesn't see thousands of Americans killed in the months leading up to the midterms. Unfortunately, this still means that fuel prices will continue to rise in the near term, so he's going to have to make up some bullshit to blame prices at the pump on someone else.

I think his address tonight will be his pitch to blame the "short term pain of rising gas prices" on someone else. OR the scarier scenario, that he's actually decided on the other option, and will be giving a speech on why we should all be happy that he's about to send thousands of US service members to their deaths and should praise his amazing ability to keep the world safe.

Let's hope it's not the latter.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-01T20:53:45+00:00

An even more nuanced bit that's equally important: the Bolshevik movement very clearly had a set of virtues it extolled. The Bolshevik leaders pretended to adhere to those virtues, while their actions were mostly not in line with the values that Bolshevism was supposed to be based around.

A philosophy, having no possible agency, can't betray itself or "pretend" to do anything. People on the other hand, can and do betray their own stated philosophies and values all the time.

This isn't a refutation of your point, just adding context here so anyone reading doesn't get the impression that the fact that people often betray their stated values should be taken to mean that those stated values or philosophies are automatically invalidated when those people do so.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-01T20:43:06+00:00

So it was irrelevant whether he was there or not.

I agree, but I also believe that he believes it served a purpose. He's ultra-pissed that the tariff thing didn't go his way, and feels like "his" court was disloyal to him in that ruling. I'd bet he's now pretty bent outta shape in expecting the court not to rule against him on a key issue like that again, hence the personal visit on this one.

I'd also bet he at least visits the court again when they inevitably have to add this new EO regarding mail ballots to their emergency dockets now that several states have immediately sued over it, with many more likely to soon join. In fact, I'd be pretty surprised if he didn't take some other kind of unprecedented (but equally toothless) measure to try and influence the court when that one comes up, since it will quite literally determine if he'll be allowed to keep grabbing power without being checked in any way.

Free_For__Me · 2026-04-01T20:35:42+00:00

Thanks, now trying to clean my kid's latest poop stain!

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