Tom Clancy’s ‘Debt of Honor’ features nearly the entirety of the US government being wiped out:

Supreme Court, House Representatives, Senators, President and most of his cabinet… are all present at a State of the Union Address.

And then a 747 is flown by terrorists into the Capitol building.

In the book, the main character Jack Ryan, the Vice President, is basically running late, and is the only senior officer of government to survive.

Book came out in 94, before 9/11.

MAGA cult members are rather infamous for constantly spouting absurd nonsense that could easily be disproven with a moderate application of actual facts and basic logic…

But they don’t care.

They are addicted to being aggreived, to blaming non existant or vastly exagerated problems on things that are either entirely or barely tangentially even related to what they are angry about.

My dad is a MAGA moron as well.

I can easily imagine him bitching about his 401k in exactly the same way, then I could get him to pull his actual balances over the last 10 years, showing him he is just factually wrong.

And then he would somehow either praise God or his own cleverness as to being the reason why he is the only person with a 401k who miraculously wasn’t affected by this massive stock downturn he knows happened to everyone else, and would then just loop back to ‘Biden is destroying everyone’s 401ks’ within 48 hrs.

They are cult members, their brains are impervious to anything that goes against their constructed cult identity.

The DJIA hit an all time high of about 45000 in Dec 24, not too long aftet the election.

It has been about 4 months since then, and the DJIA has dropped about 10%, to about 40500.

But before that, the average growth of thr DJIA, per year, for the last 10 years, was about 9%.

US median yearly wage is about $50k.

Avg Inflation for the last 10 years is about 3.5% a year.

Same for median wage growth.

Lets say you are 50, and have 150k vested into your 401k, the rough average for a 50 yo with a 401k, and you contribute 10% to your 401k, with a 50% (of your 10%, so 5%) employer match.

Ok then.

Here’s what your retirement looks like if these trends all continue.

You have $761k to live off of for 20 years after you retire at 65 and die at 85.

$38k a year.

Ah, but now lets just have a momentary 10% drop in the stock market, but hold everything else the same.

Now you’re retiring with $706k, a $55k loss, about $35k a year.

Ok, now lets say your wages only grow at 0.5% a year, the stock market growth for the next 15 years averages 1%, and inflation averages 6%.

Oh, well now your 401k is actually uh, $252k at age 65, $12.6k a year to live off.

If you think that’s unrealistic… the stock market didn’t top its peak in 1929 untill 1954.

That is a 25 year period with an average stock market growth of zero, over that time period.

The tariffs Trump just enacted average out to around a 22% effective tariff rate.

The Great Depression era Smoot Hawley tariffs were only 19%.

…Oh right, and thats all assuming you don’t get laid off.

So that’s a lot.of words to say your dad is a fucking imbecile, sorry about that.

My dad is also a MAGAtard, but he’s also all the way down the QAnon rabbit hole, builds ghost guns in his garage… I now live many states away from him.

Ok so…

SHEIN and TEMU are done, as in, just over, for Americans, and possibly just in general.

Their business models basically no longer work.

Almost 50% on Vietnam and Cambodia?

Ok, thats at least an instant 50% price hike on… most clothes Americans buy?

Fucking…computer hardware?

Jesus Christ, throw another 30% on already bonkers GPU prices.

Cars? Beyond fucked.

Components very often get shipped to one country, partially assembled, cross the border, get assembled more, do that again a few times before final assembly… oh right, and they all are massively computerized now.

Yeeep. Great Depression 2.0 here we come, certainly for America, and probably to a lesser extent for the rest of the world as the US can no longer consume imports… and we will almost certainly have a massive financial collapse, which will almost certainly to at least some extent fuck over finances everywhere else.

Every less developed country that just has its currency pegged to the USD is now fucked and will be in chaos as they figure out how to respond to this.

I’m in a similar boat as you.

Got my routine 6-7 year CDR packet in the mail… took me 2 weeks of off and on trying to access the site last month to input and submit all the information digitally … as sending it through snail mail would probably be too slow (10 ish days), I don’t have a car and am mobility challeneged.

Now I’m trying to call my local office to make sure they actually got everything but uh wow big surprise, that ain’t going well either.

… At least I did get my payment direct deposited.

I say we deport him to Mars.

He has literally said he plans on dying on Mars.

Let’s oblige him.

EDIT:

I somehow forget to link to this banger.

EDIT 2: Alt, Live Take at KEXP

… Persians ate my face?

I mean, I agree, but… politics is theatre to a very significant degree, or optics, or perception management, whatever phrase you want to use…

This at least shows that at least some Dems are making a publicized spectactle of resisting…

… As opposed to the old, or possibly still current official Dem talking point memo / strategy of ‘Do not become the story.’ … which translates to ‘be a collaborator / bend over and take it’.

Fillibustering and doing absolutely everything possible to fuck with the opposition party… is literally exactly what the Republicans did back when the Dems had a trifecta during at least half of Obama’s first term.

All the Dems have to do is literally copy that playbook… and Booker here is actually doing it.

Having a functional opposition party that actually looks like it is trying to resist fascists in the government is a pretty important part of an overall societal resistance to fascism.

It is of course not the entirety of a good resistance plan… but…

If your plan does not involve that, well then congrats, you are a terrorist in the eyes of the fascists, hope you have more guns than they do.

Sure it’s not technically a fillibuster, but if he can go over 24 hrs and 18 minutes, he’ll beat Strom Thurmond’s… current record holding fillibuster length for… opposing the Civil Rights Act, back in 1957.

Erp.

Well then.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_States_Senate

He’s done it.

Excellent work Sen. Booker.

Tch tch tch, those damn self combusting, self immolating Teslas.

Someone should probably just ban them all, astoundingly unsafe, especially the cybertrucks.

Ah, the actual ‘last possible mate in the world’ strategy.

We must procreate for thr human species!

lol

… The Bush era joke is still holding up:

Americans learn geography via which countries they (threaten to) invade.

… I guess it is just fully beyond a joke and is now just completely literally true.

Do… do you think…

That a person working… at Walmart…

… has the financial resources…

… to sue Walmart?

Delays could be disastrous for many Americans. In one study, 42% of Americans aged 65-plus said they wouldn’t be able to afford basic necessities like food without their monthly check.

There are approximately 60 million Americans aged 65 and over.

42% of that is about 25 million people.

… And thats not counting those on Disability, SSDI, like myself.

Thats another roughly 11 million people, under 65, disabled and unable to work due to serious, debilitating injuries or medical conditions.

If these idiots actually do this, and fuck it up as much as they are likely to, we’re looking at something approximating 5% to 10% of the country becoming homeless within months … and then likely starve to death or die of exposure, we’re talking about the eldery and disabled here.

… This would effectively be somewhere between, or comparable to, the varying estimates of avoidable deaths of Holodomor or the famine during the Great Leap Forward.

Vance: Pulls out a box of crayons with a big dopey smile, shakes it a bit.

Ah, ah? Hehehe.

Marines: Absolutely no change of expression or behavior.

… Ok then.

My only income is SSDI.

… Guess its time to set up a go fund me or my cash app tag in my profile or something…

There are absolutely a lot of very snarky things I could say, that would be completely justified…

… But it is actually a very good sign that Trump and his admin have managed to fuck shit up so hard, and get so much backlash (the townhalls, numerous protests)… that we actually have any Republicans saying, outloud, ‘we fucked up’.

Maybe this is baseless optimism, but it could actually be that significant cracks are forming in the MAGA alternate reality cult universe… it is at least possible that the absolute worst outcomes can be avoided if enough Republicans defect, even slightly, and the Dems can … you know, actually do politics.

Breaking ranks from the MAGA cult and calling out its leader, Trump, would have been utter heresy, unthinkable, just 3 months ago.

This article mentions 2 R congressmen, and we’ve also got Susan Colins ® in the Senate making pretty serious ‘the President cannot effectively line item veto budget items via executive order’ noises, and she’s the head of thr Senate Appropriations Committee.

https://thehill.com/business/budget/5217825-susan-collins-trump-emergency-funding/

Not a VPN, but you may also want to look into I2P.

https://i2pd.website/

https://proprivacy.com/privacy-service/guides/i2p-guide

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FNp0TRDG0BQ

Basically, a p2p protocol for the entire internet.

Its considerably more complicated to set up than most modern VPNs, where nowaday’s its usually as simple as install an app with a GUI, verify some settings and you’re good to go, and i2p is also quite slow…

… but its totally free, and you can torrent over it, and as far as I know, if you’ve set it up properly, it is basically undetectable by ISPs, due to how it uses ‘garlic’ routing: basically, a whole bunch of users net requests are encrypted, anonymized, and then smashed into a big packet… so an ISP would have to untangle all of that for every packet, and afaik, none of them have figured out how.

I2P would obviously be horrible for watching streaming content though, snail speed.

On the contrary, a 100% yearly tax from the assesed value of the property, enacted after the property is vacant for 12 months straight, would be a strong motivator for your idiot uncle to actually visit the property, and/or the rest of you to just renounce or disclaim yourselves from ownership of what you described as a near worthless asset, and then let your idiot uncle eat 100% of the improperly assessed value’s vacancy tax.

Elsewhere in this thread you state the house is basically worthless, the land is worth 40k… but idiot uncle thinks both the land and house are worth 200k together, if I read your right.

Organize everyone other than idiot uncle into a plan to disclaim themselves from the inherited property provided the uncle ponies up 40k ( or maybe more if your idiot uncle can be duped into such ), so your parents in the trailer can just buy another plot to park their mobile home, and idiot uncle can deal with his idiocy.

I mean, that seems to be a reasonable plan with or without the proposed vacant property tax, unless there are more complications between the … non idiot uncle parties to the estate.

I don’t know for certain of course as I don’t know your locale, but… you could probably find another plot of land for about 40k?

Idiot uncle thinks its worth over 4x that, so… from his perspective, this would be a steal, to basically gain sole ownership? Let him deal with selling or demo/refurbing the house/land.

… Or have ya’ll already tried something like this, and idiot uncle refused?

I mean, you nailed it right there, if it was that, then they could just say who had the similar name.

… but that isn’,t possible when everyone involved is a sentient piece of ratshit molded into the form of a human, that has absolutely no ability to ever admit any fault or take responsibility for anything, ever.

These people are all completely unqualified, sociopathic opportunists with moral fiber composed of fucking anti matter, they’d instantly explode if they ever attempted to flex those moral muscles and develop any actual principles.

I have, entirely seriously, known multiple meth/fentanyl addicts (in the process of detoxing) with better moral character, sense of responsibility for their actions, honesty, loyalty, and principles they strive to live by.