Reading
“‘I am not a senator, a governor or a former cabinet secretary,’ J.D. Vance wrote on the first page of ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ by way of establishing his regular-guy bona fides. That was all true in 2016, when Vance was a former Marine and Yale Law School graduate with ‘a nice job, a happy marriage, a comfortable home and two lively dogs.’ His memoir reads a little differently now.” – Critic A.O. Scott, New York Times, 7/15/24
“What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives Peter Thiel’s money and how willing you are to lie for it. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s the Left’s fault. And it is.”
Yes, you can use Signal without sharing your personal phone number. Here’s how I did it.
The post How I Got a Truly Anonymous Signal Account appeared first on The Intercept.

- by Valerie Tiberius

- by Jonathan S Blake & Nils Gilman
Starting in 2009 and especially after Citizens United, I’ve been advising Americans who can get out to do so. I recognize that many people can’t: you have to “shelter in place”, but for those who are able to leave America and haven’t, well, the advice is the same, but more urgent.
The US is no longer meaningfully a Democracy. The funneling of wealth and income to oligarchs continues unabated and even accelerated during the pandemic. Official economic statistics from the US are now almost entirely fantasy based: completely unrelated to reality due to how inflation and other statistics are “calculated” and due to the over-reliance of GDP, which is no longer tracking welfare.
The massive increases in necessities like food is a very very bad sign.
The possibility of civil war is real, and so is the chance of collapse. Nothing is going to get better for the majority of Americans; everything is going to get worse.
Greg Stoker, ex-Army Ranger, offers a critical analysis of the security failures that led to a deadly shooting at a Trump rally, highlighting systemic incompetence and the potential impact on the upcoming election.
The post Lax Security at Trump Rally Leads to Deadly Shooting: Analysis by Ex-Special Forces Soldier appeared first on MintPress News.
Recent studies show it wasn’t the climate that did them in.
The post What Happened to Ancient Megafauna? appeared first on Nautilus.
“It is incredible that such an act can take place in our country.” — Donald Trump, writing on Truth Social after an attempt on his life, 7/13/24
It is a sad time in American history, folks. A crazed gunman attempted to assassinate me, Donald Trump, in an act of hatred and violence that sits in stark contrast with the political era of hatred and violence I have single-handedly created.