Castle Magus

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"Hi. On today's episode, we look at the Trump administration's cuts to FEMA, the NOAA, and the National Weather Service, and ask why anyone, even the GOP, would want to get rid of these valuable, non-political entities that only exist to help people."

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Could have done without the stupid "scream machine" skit, but otherwise, good episode.

Anyway, in conclusion, to hell forever with DOGEald Trump and everything to do with Project 2025, as usual.

"Hi. People say 'the government should run more like a business' all the time, but when you think about it, that's a pretty bad idea precisely because of how businesses work."

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Betteridge's Law of Headlines strikes again.

Also, spoiler alert: it's all fascist, Nazi shit. Because, these days, of course it is.

(I certainly wouldn't mind if the current government [as in the people in charge of said government, not necessarily the rank and file workers] was run like Battle Royale or The Hunger Games or The Long Walk or Survival of the Fittest or the Thunderdome [but only as long as the surviving winner is immediately fed feet first into a wood chipper].)

"Hi. Today we're looking at right-wing lies. But not the banner headline, 'They’re Eating The Dogs'-type lies, but the under-the-radar, insidious lies told by chuds like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Matt Walsh, and Elon Musk."

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But... there are so many. And this video is only an hour long?

"...either stupid or a liar..." I mean, to be fair, they can be both. Stupid people can believe that other people are also stupid enough to believe their lies, after all. And in too many cases, those stupid people are actually right about all the other stupid people who do indeed believe their lies.

"Hi. What is the value of watching confounding word wizard Jordan Peterson debate 20 atheists? What can we learn from the intensely frustrating experience of watching one of these Jubilee 'Surrounded' videos? We actually have an answer."

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Hmm, not sure if it's particularly timely for Some More News to put out yet another over-an-hour-long video about, specifically, Jordan Peterson, considering the overall trashfire state of the rest of the world right now. (Like, seriously, I probably would have never even heard of this assclown if it weren't for SMN.)

On the other hand, spending roughly 35 minutes and 36 seconds[1] watching Cody Johnston dunk on Jordan Peterson could be a "nice" "vacation" from all the other news in the world. So, I guess that's what I'll do. On to the video! Oh, wait, first let's drop that "middle-finger-worthy" tag down there, just to get it out of the way. This video is about Jordan Peterson, after all.

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( Whole lot of text behind cut )

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So yeah, in the end, this video was indeed rather timely, after all.

[1] - Not counting the four or five times that that it took to create this post. (Actual time of hitting the "Post to" button: exactly 2:00pm EST.)

"Hi. The House of Pod's Kaveh Hoda joins Katy, Cody, and Jonathan to talk about Trump's decision to bomb Iran, the ceasefire, and his desperate desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize. They also discuss the Supreme Court's ruling that the administration can feel free to rendition people to countries they have never visited."

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Youtube auto-captionimg translated "sycophants" (in reference to the guest talking about Trump's sycophants) as "sick fans." I think that works, too.

Man, why can't Stephen Miller be excommunicated from the cult in the same way that Steve Bannon and Elon Musk and so many others have been? The problem with Donald Trump isn't just Donald Trump, but also that Donald Trump is surrounded by (has surrounded himself with) people who are arguably and possibly even worse than he himself is, and that's really saying something, since Donald Trump himself is literally worse than a wet, leaky sack of dogshit.

Also, if Donald fucking Trump ends up getting a Nobel Peace Prize, then that will just pretty much invalidate the entire concept of Nobel Prizes forever afterward.

And they're talking about Trump sounding tired and so done with this shit or whatever... well, just a reminder, this is what happens when Trump finds something to be too difficult to deal with and he just doesn't want to bother anymore:


Link, in case the embed goes to shit later.

"Hi. Today we're looking at U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency that Donald Trump is using to do his Mass Deportations Now. We look at where they came from, why they're allowed to wear masks, and the movement to stop them from taking over American cities."

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A few choice quotes:

"The only gang causing trouble is ICE."

"Kids, the thing you gotta know about post-9/11 America is that almost everyone lost their entire goddamn minds. According to polls, a slim majority of Americans thought it was necessary for some civil liberties to be ceded in order to defeat terrorists. Xenophobia and racism skyrocketed, specifically on the Right. So, we did a Patriot Act, which allowed law enforcement to collect our records and search our homes without notification, so long as they could prove that they 'thought' we were doing a terrorism. Which, at the time, simply meant that you looked Arab or Asian."

"What is ICE? It's just America, bro. It's the institutions we've given unchecked power to over the decades, the end result of the Patriot Act and our broken law enforcement system."

"It seems pretty bad if the system we're all used to is built on the gradual dismantling to civil liberties, because that's the thing: we're used to it. If Trump has any positive talents, it's his ability to make evident that which was already there. He is so grotesque and loud in his terrible goals that, in pushing the limits of his power, he's exposing the seams that everyone ignored. He's the guy who makes the mall security guards realize that, technically, there's no rule against skinny-dipping in the fountain. This is all to say that Trump and ICE are quite horrifyingly working in tandem with a system that most Americans consider functional."

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I honestly had never heard of ICE, even though it had existed since the time of Dubya, before Trump started using it as his own personal Gestapo, back during his first """""administration,""""" and I wish I had never heard of it at all (by that I mean I wish it didn't exist at all) now that he's quadrupling down on that Gestapo shit. Oh, and good on Tim Walz, the guy who should be Vice President right now, for saying pretty much the same thing. I didn't know about that until I did a certain Google search just now. He's not wrong, and he's not the only one saying it. ICE == Gestapo. And if the Department of Homeland Security find the comparison "sickening," then fuck them, too. DHS can go piss up a rope.

Anyway, in conclusion, to hell forever with Donald Trump, as usual, and to hell with that Todd asshole, too.

"Hi. Alex Steed joins Katy, Cody, and Jonathan to talk about the protests in Los Angeles, the FBI manhandling Sen. Alex Padilla, and the return (and arrest) of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Here is Wired.com's guide on how to protest safely: https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-pr...."

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Anyway, in conclusion, to hell forever with Donald Trump and everyone who still, despite everything, thinks he's doing a good job, as usual.

"Hi. What a day for Cody Johnston to have jury duty! On today's episode, Some More News head writer Dave Bell joins Katy and Jonathan to talk about all the angry, petty, childish tweets sent by two people who also happen to be the most powerful person and the richest person on the planet. (Also: Cody shows up for five minutes on his juror lunch break to join in the fun!)"

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Good hedge of bets to posit that they might be friends again by the time this video was released. However, fortunately for the rest of us, Trump and Musk are still not friends anymore. Hell, even I didn't know it had gotten quite so bad between these two gargantuan manbabies. But then, I don't have an account on either """""Truth""""" Social or on 卐, so... *shrug*

Here's something that occurred to me as I was watching this (and I kind of expected them to actually mention it, too, but they never did): rather than fighting Mark Zuckerberg, maybe Phony Stark could cage fight Dumbshit Jackass instead? I'd much rather see that fight than any Musk vs Zuck one (as long as it ended in permanently debilitating, possibly fatal injuries for both combatants).

(EDIT) And for all the liberals/Democrats writing "think" pieces about should we accept Musk "back," now that he's on the outs with Trump... hell to the fuck no on that one, good buddy. The Left never "had" Elon to start with. He's always been a shitheel. He just used to do a better job of hiding it. Let his ass twist in the wind. (/EDIT)

Also, guys, you do know you could do an episode specifically about Peter Thiel and Palantir[1], right? You're saying here that "nobody knows who Peter Thiel is" and that "maybe the guy backed by Peter Thiel probably shouldn't have been the vice president" and all that, so... make an episode explicitly about that shit. I mean, you've already mentioned it as asides in several other episodes, but do a whole-ass episode just about that topic. Granted, the eyes and ears that really need to see and hear it would never do so, but still, it's better than just lamenting that "nobody knows who Peter Thiel is."

[1] - Seriously, what is it with right-wing kooks and directly naming their asinine horseshit after easily corruptible and evil magical artifacts from fictional stories? What's next, Trump or Musk or somebody unveiling a literal Torment Nexus? (I mean, Trump just being the president is already a Torment Nexus in its own way, in all but name, but still.)

"Hi. Katy, Cody, and Jonathan are joined by Leah Litman, author of the new book 'Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes.' They discuss how the Supreme Court is making it up as they go and allowing Donald Trump to do pretty much whatever he wants while they maintain a facade of legitimacy."

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Before even starting to watch the video: a big part of why that is the case is because three of the six RWNJ justices were explicitly appointed by Trump, during his first reign as SCROTUS IMPOTUS, and (at least) one of the other three pre-existing RWNJ justices was a flagrantly corrupt pile of shit even before Trump came along and is an even bigger corrupt pile of shit now. And, of course, the three non-RWNJ justices are basically irrelevant now, since the RWNJ justices outnumber them (by design), thus making the RWNJ word of the RWNJ majority, literally, the law of the land now (also by design).

Now to actually watch the video.

Okay, right off the bat, why would anyone with even a single working brain cell believe that the Supreme Court are "the heroes who are going to save us from Trump," when they (aside from an extremely rare few noted exceptions) have been doing literally the exact polar opposite of that since even before Trump became the SCROTUS IMPOTUS a second time? Hell, their direct actions and rulings are at least part of why Trump even is the SCROTUS IMPOTUS again.

Yeah, Republicans, hypocritically, have been expressly doing for the past several decades the very thing they've been whinging that Democrats have been trying to do, i.e. politicizing the court system and stacking the courts (not just the SCOTUS) with judges favorable to their RWNJ positions. And Democrats have mostly just been sitting there with their thumbs up their asses, harrumphing about the sanctity of the courts or whatever, and doing little to nothing to stop them.

Also, yeah, the fact that Supreme Court justices are just openly taking a shit ton of bribes now doesn't help, either, and the fact that so very few people seem to care about this is just mind boggling. (But then, look at Trump. He just accepted a bare-ass, glaring bribe in the form of a jet from Qatar, he isn't even trying to make it not look like a bare-ass, glaring bribe, and Trumpanzees seem to be perfectly fine with that, so why should they care about Clarence Thomas or whoever accepting similar, only ever so slightly less bare-ass, glaring bribes? I mean, sure, anyone who isn't a Trump-fart-huffing sycophant is calling it out for what it is, but who cares what we think, anymore?)

Katy makes a good point. Taunting the 700-pound gorilla in the White House and calling him a chicken or a taco or whatever is more likely going to cause the 700-pound gorilla to start smashing things with his giant 700-pound gorilla fists, rather than acting in anything remotely resembling a reasonable human manner.

Oh, they're talking directly about Trump's own acceptance of blatant bribes now. Yeah, well, what I said two paragraphs up remains the same.

I am pessimistic enough to believe that we will never see a moment where die hard Trumpanzees see something that Trump did and say "He did what?! No! He's gone too far this time!" or whatever. They'll simply perform whatever mental gymnastics, same as they always do, that are required to allow them to say that whatever Trump does is always good, actually, and it's all the Democrats' fault, somehow, even up to and including a hypothetical scenario where Trump literally knocks on their door and tells them that their homes are going to be bombed on his orders with them locked inside. I'm only being maybe 51% facetious there.

(Oh, and Dreamwidth seems to be having issues at the moment, because nine times out of ten that I hit the "Preview" button on this post, it just goes to a white page with "Sorry, there was a problem" at the top of it. Hope this post doesn't get eaten when I actually try to post it.)

"Hi. Zeteo's Mehdi Hasan joins Katy, Cody, and Jonathan to discuss interviewing Republicans, Zeteo's new documentary about the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh, Afrikaner 'refugees,' Ms. Rachel, and Trump's corruption tour of the Middle East."

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Trump is literally "palling around with terrorists" now. When did we all get dimension-shifted to Bizarro World? And that's just one of several horrors they talked about in this episode. Go figure.

Everyone who is not a Trump anus-sniffer is just so done with all this shit already, and yet, we still have another 3.67 years to go (at best, assuming Trump's handlers don't figure out a way from him to get yet another term).