Everything posted by Brisketexan
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ICE activity/raids
Also, on this Holocaust Remembrance Day, as a segment of our society continues to work itself into a frenzy to demonize and attack and imprison and brutalize "the other," I read the story below. That fucking broke me. This is who humanity should be. This is what "never forget" means. I lived in England my junior year of college in the 90s. I lived with a British family who became my British family. They had a friend, D, and he was a WW II veteran. He had been in the battle of Dunkirk all the way to the end of the European war. After D-Day he was put on-loan to an American division to assist with their communications. This was the division who liberated Buchenwald concentration camp. I will say the rest as he said it to me—as best as I remember: No one talks about the smell. I had been a soldier for several years at this point. I knew what death smelled like. But this, this was more than death. This was systematic. It was horrible beyond words. This was evil. The physicians had gotten there before us and told us that we couldn’t hand over our food to them. It struck me as wrong but they said it would be worse. I started documenting. And then…This little boy. This tiny little boy came over to me and fell at my feet. He said something in Polish and then passed out. All of a sudden why I was here was crystal clear. This boy was not going to die. Somehow this boy was going to live. I called an American soldier and together we found a doctor. My American friend stayed with the child as I tried to find someone who knew Polish and English to tell me what he said. I kept repeating the phrase and a woman who had been helping came over to me and asked me to repeat the phrase. She was so thin and so frail I had no idea how she was still alive. I repeated the phrase and said a little boy had said it to me. She started to weep. I thought I had inadvertently stepped on her foot or hurt her and she said, “No, it is good that after this I can still weep. The child said, ‘Papa, I knew you would come for me.’ The child still has hope and it is good.” I went to see him. He was asleep on a cot. He looked so small. I relieved my American friend and sat next to the child. I took his hand. And his grip tightened on my hand in his sleep. He said the Polish phrase again. And I sent a telegram to my wife who was pregnant with our first child. I tried to explain that if we didn’t find his people, I wanted to adopt him. Her answer lives in my heart. Four words. "Bring our son home." D pulled out his wallet and showed me the telegram with those words. I then looked at him, his wife, and their son. Their son, A, was a big man-linebacker big. While D and his wife were lithe. A pulled back his sleeve and showed me the number on his arm. He said that he tried to make living a good life, full of love, his mission. This Holocaust Remembrance Day — I remember A and all those who did not get a happy ending. And to make my life one that does them honor. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ That. Fucking. Breaks me. Bring our son home. This is what we the people are fighting for. For the Constitutional protections that are literally the thing that makes us a nation. For no more camps. For no more terrified children - human beings, children of God. Is this a fight worth fighting? Dear God, if it isn't, then what is? Never again. Not here. Not on our watch. It ends here. It ends now.
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Jeffrey Epstein needs his own thread
Hey, all you "follow the law!" types who are blindly supporting ICE....shouldn't the admin follow the LAW requiring them to release the Epstein files? Or do you only expect the law to be followed by people on "the other team," and your guys don't have to follow the law at all? Just checking. Cuz, you know, I'm sure y'all would hate to be hypocrites.
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Papers, please. Surly thread of deportation cruelty dominance
The admin coming for literally ALL of your individual rights at once is pretty impressive. Fuck the 4th amendment, we don't need warrants. Fuck the 2nd amendment, carrying a firearm = instant death sentence. Fuck the 1st amendment, you cannot protest, and in fact, we're going to subpoena/spy on all of your protected communications. At this point, I expect the admin to order that ICE troops be quartered in private homes, so they can violate the 1st through 4th amendments completely. It really is amazing how cavalierly they violate core constitutional rights, and then double down to do it some more.
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Papers, please. Surly thread of deportation cruelty dominance
ICE has already done their thing. As long as they exist, here's the simple messaging to everyone, especially anyone not lily-white: They have kicked in doors and dragged people from their cars for no reason but how they look. They insist that they don't even need a warrant to kick down your door and drag you to a detention camp. They could do that to you right now, this second. Watch hour door. They say they have absolute immunity, and can do whatever they want to you without being subject to any law: they can beat you, gas you, shoot you in the head. And there's nothing you can do to stop them. Except this: vote for me/us. We'll protect you. Your home. Your sacred American rights. This doesn't happen here, and it shouldn't happen to you. We will make sure of it. This egg can't be unscrambled. As long as ICE exists, what they have done can happen again, to anyone, at any moment.
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The GQP: Trumpist Death Cult
Imagine the stupidest perspective imaginable. And that's these morons' perspective.
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ICE activity/raids
ICE: too evil for Palantir. Man, that's something.
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ICE activity/raids
You mean “it’s a MAGA dream come true.” The death, suffering, and cruelty is the point. It’s how they know their policies are working. Every story like this is a feature, not a bug. And MAGA gleefully masturbates to them. When you realize that they are making monsters, it all makes sense. They can all go to hell. Where they came from.
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The GQP: Trumpist Death Cult
She’s fantastic. She needs to speak out more. Because the more that the rest of America sees what MAGA is, the more, in dribs and drabs, they turn away. I say put all these MAGAs on the big screen at Times Square, hell everywhere. Go out there, and show your evil ass for the whole world to see.
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Hey Steel Shank!
Hope all is well and keeps going well. We did our children's hospital stint 12 years ago. It sucked, but the support was incredible. I hope that all goes well.
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ICE activity/raids
We've seen it before. Damned near the exact script: "One of the shocking realizations about the Holocaust and other campaigns of genocide around the world is that these atrocities were perpetrated by seemingly ordinary individuals rather than monsters. In his book “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland,” Christopher Browning (1992) explores how average middle-aged German police officers became mass murderers. The author’s “multicausal explanation” (Browning, 1992, p. 215) includes a wide range of factors that include propaganda and dehumanization of the Jews, conformity and peer pressure, deference to authority (however tentative), gradual desensitization and routinization, division of labor, assertions of fear of punishment, career advancement, and the context provided by the war." We are dealing with monsters. Monsters aren't fearsome creatures from the land of fantasy. They are ordinary men, who casually support and slide into mass murder. The commenters above, and the ICE agents who joined recently? They are evil monsters. And they are quite ordinary and banal, at first glance. Hannah Arendt's title "The Banality of Evil" was spot-on. The monster who will happily send you and your family into a mass grave is not a fork-tailed devil from literature. He is a "regular guy," who will execute you with glee, and clap afterwards. We have a cancer. Time for some brutal chemo.
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Texas -- a failed state
I agree that all blue states should produce 1% of their voter records, redacted to remove all info except page numbers. Goose, gander, and all that.
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Winter Weather 2026 - I Can Haz Cold Front?
Starting to get some real melt around here. The south-facing part of our roof is thawing so fast that the water is running off at a high rate. So much so that I went outside to make sure it was just runoff, and not from a busted pipe somewhere (we don't have pipes in the attic....that I know of...but made me check). So, that's good. Road out front is starting to look really clear. A couple of more hours of this, and we should be pretty good for the morning commute tomorrow.
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Trump’s America
Is being a stupid fucking narcissist asshole piece of shit a form of dementia? Cuz if so...he's got it bad.