The government has mismanaged its resources for decades.

“Water exists! Food exists! They’re just hiding it from us!” is going to be the Big Lie of global politics as the climate crisis compounds.

That, and lots of people doing prayer circles for rain that never comes.

He’s not a potential future rival. He’s the sitting Polish president and head of the biggest party in the country.

Tusk is holding together a shakey coalition of smaller liberal parties. He’s not the most popular politician in the country.

236M of America’s 343M residents were eligible to vote. So we’re talking about 70% of the population, baseline.

Of the eligible pool, only 174M were legally registered, because our voter registration system is archaic and deliberately exclusionary. We also nixed mail in voting after 2020, driving down participation for rural and minority communities enormously (because our voting infrastructure is dogshit). This depressed actual turnout to 153M.

Of that 153M, it broke out 77M Trump and 75M Kamala. But get under the hood and recognize only five states actually mattered by vote margin - Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Georgia. Every absent voter in California turning out for Harris couldn’t help her. Record turnout in Texas helped Trump more than Biden in 2020.

Of the five swing states, four (excluding Georgia) produced statewide wins for Democrats. These were winnable elections for Team D. They came within a razor thin margin - less than 2% of total votes each - at both Presidential and state levels.

And yet Harris was so fucking unpopular that people refused to vote for her in states other Democrats won.

Let that sink in.

I don’t think a lot of westerners can comprehend the idea that Iranian religious conservatives might be as angry with their liberal president as expat liberals are with the Guardian Council. The county isn’t going to secularize because of a drought.

Nevermind how Masoud Pezeshkian getting the Maduro treatment (or the Ismail Haniyeh treatment) summons desperately needed rain and snow.

This is a climate change disaster, but people keep talking about it like Iran’s water shortage can be solved at the ballot box. Might as well try voting for the Titanic to stop sinking.

Why did the Romans fail?

I remember learning that the Romans fell because they were too gay and debauched and woke, so they lost their manly vigors.

Nevermind, history doesn’t like copypasta

I suppose its worth noting that the Roman Empire lasted centuries (millennia, if you see the Byzantine/Ottoman Empire as a continuation of Roman history). The UK is more comparable than the US, which flourished after WW1 and made it barely a century before fumbling.

But also, the book is hardly closed on the US as an empire. China, India, Persia, Rome, France… they all had their ups and downs.

The US writes the history books, runs the universities, and manages the international media networks.

Hey Atlantic Magazine, this you?

Created by The Atlantic’s marketing team and paid for by American Petroleum Institute

Bringing heat, light, and mobility to two billion additional people worldwide by 2040 – the projected increase in global population. Leading the world in natural gas and oil production. Reducing emissions to the lowest level in a generation. This is the work facing the modern natural gas and oil industry. Ten years ago, achieving these goals would have been considered monumental. Today, meeting them is just another part of the job.

Can’t imagine why these guys would be excited about a “liberated” Iran.

Awarding a distant relative of Hawaii’s last king the Star of Lenin while declaring ownership over all the pineapples on the island chain.

They seem to find no issue judging the Uygurs as needing to die

Are they killing Uyghurs by the millions or teaching them Mandarin?

So much of the hysteria around China seems to stem from domestic campaigns of infrastructure development. The Three Gourges Dam, the rapid expansion of urban infrastructure, development of schools and hospitals in the historically rural corners of the country, expansion of universities, trade with East Africa, the BRI - all described as brutal forms of colonial oppression by a savage and sadistic Far-Left Totalitarian Communist government.

Nobody described Bolsonaro’s Brazil in these terms, as his administration clear cut the Amazon and rapidly displaced tens of thousands of migrants. Nobody described The Phillipines or Indonesia this way, even as Red Tagging was used as an excuse for vigilante executions and toxic dumping sent cancer rates stratospheric. Hell, its hard enough to get Israel described in these terms in any major western publication of record, and they’re outright shooting children in the head before labeling them “Hamas Terrorists”.

Why are liberals so eager to re-characterize literacy programs as a form of holocaust? Why do they seem so gleeful at the prospect of a China-Taiwan hot war? Why do we have a President threatening to invade Venezuela, Nigeria, and Greenland all at once, while his biggest “critics” complain that he’s not bellicose enough?

Fucking wild times.

Taiwan is America’s property in the same way that Venezuela is America’s property and Greenland is America’s property and Nigeria is America’s property and everything is America’s property.

In November 2025, less than two months before Trump’s operation to take over Venezuela, Singer’s investment firm, Elliott Investment Management, inked a highly fortuitous deal.

It purchased Citgo, the US-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, for $5.9 billion—a sale that was forced by a Delaware court after Venezuela defaulted on its bond payments.

The court-appointed special master who forced the sale, Robert Pincus, is a member of the board of directors for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Elliott Management hailed the court order requiring the sale in a press release, saying it was “backed by a group of strategic US energy investors.”

Singer acquired the Citgo’s three massive coastal refineries, 43 oil terminals, and more than 4,000 gas stations at a “major discount” because of its distressed status. Advisers to the court overseeing the sale estimated its value at $11-13 billion, while the Venezuelan government estimated it at $18 billion.

Trying to imagine the outcry if this had been done by a Russian firm on Ukrainian assets or a Chinese court on Taiwanese property.

Is any major US news agency covering this as a story, I wonder?

How much TrumpCoin did the host country buy in advance?

Forming an agreement to protect Poland at all costs and calling it the Warsaw Pact.

What? No? Is that one taken?

Tusk is on thin ice, with Law and Justice poised to take an outright majority in the 2027 election. It’s strange that we keep seeing these Tusk-friendly articles while refusing to acknowledge Nawrocki is the future of the country on its currently trajectory.

US Government increasingly desperate for revenue as the economy slows and hostility towards middle-class income taxes expands.

Like tankie never really meant anything before

I mean, its historically described Soviet policy in Eastern Europe and Chinese domestic policing (Khrushchev putting down the Hungarian fascist revolt with armored infantry and Deng sending tanks into Tienanmen Square).

Now it just means whatever the opposite of neoconservative policy is, updated daily.

Being against tanks makes you a tankie at this point.

Everyone knows that if you’re against US tanks, you must be in favor of non-US tanks. You’re either with US or you’re with the Tankie-rists

Look up the stats on defensive gun uses. Just Google it.

The vast majority (90+%) end with no shots fired- the criminal sees the gun and runs away.

Because it’s regularly over reported.

People call the police and claim they saw/heard a thing, then grabbed a gun. Police arrive to investigate and it is - predictably - nothing. Resident self-reports that they must have scared the ephemeral assailant of. Cops dutifully write it up without further investigation.

Gun-as-security-blanket is registered as successful defensive use.

Feels a bit like we’re getting the opposite.

They are so understaffed these days that they are no longer fast anymore.

The food itself is pre-prepared and re-heated on the spot. Go when there’s not a rush on and you can get your food in minutes. Go during rush hour and you’ll still be in and out much faster than at a sit-down establishment (that’s also inevitably understaffed).

They’ve got people addicted to 7,000 times the amount of recommended daily sugar, fat, and salt content.

I’ve heard this line and I think there’s an element of truth to it. Food really does taste differently if you’ve been eating the high salt/sugar junk for an extended period.

But you can get junk food anywhere. You don’t need McD’s to make it for you. Gas stations have soda fountains. Grocery stores have microwaved meals full of preservatives and sweeteners. You can just make yourself a hamburger at home, it doesn’t have to come from a store.

It just takes time, a certain degree of skill, and a kitchen with functional appliances that you’re going to need to clean up after you’re done. McD’s just goes in the trash afterwards. Far faster to buy a burger than cook one.

Historically, it was one of the cheaper items on the menu. In college (20 years ago) I could get a large fries for under $1. Back in the 80s/90s they were practically free. Like, loose-change free.

Also one of the tastier meal items given that they went so fast you could safely assume they’d be fresh, why the sandwich options could be sitting in the warmer for half an hour or longer depending on the speed of business.