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So, reading various Americans who think annexing Canada would be a good idea, it’s clear most of them know nothing about Canada. Let’s educate them. The basic principles here are “Canadians are not Americans and Canada is not just America with fewer people.”

Canada Has Universal Healthcare

If you’re American you don’t know what this really means. Let me start with myself: if I had been born in America, I’d be dead the past thirty-one years. I needed millions of dollars of healthcare in my 20s at a time when I would have had no insurance if American. Since then I’ve needed serious care twice, in both cases when I’d have no insurance as an American.

I am not alone. There are a lot of Canadians who know they’d be dead, or unable to get healthcare if they were American. So, irrespective of any resistance, American annexing Canada means a lot of people will die.

Trumpers whine incessantly about their victimhood. But in the face of actual tragedy that affects people they don’t see as Real Americans or even human. They are using the horror in LA as an excuse to treat the residents and its leaders like garbage: (FYI, everything Watters says is a lie. Of course.) More from the Asshole in Chief-elect, who has been tweeting garbage like this all day long: The idea of secession is sounding better all the time.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

“The consistent defunding of other city programs in order to give the LAPD billions a year has consequences,” said a local activist.

The post LA Budgeted Money For Cop Jobs While Cutting Fire Department Positions. Now the City Is Burning. appeared first on The Intercept.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Wetlands in film are overwhelmingly associated with discomfort, misery, and death

The post The Trouble with the Swamp appeared first on Nautilus.

The idea that mysterious stuff speeds up the acceleration of the universe could be a big mistake

The post These Physicists Want to Ditch Dark Energy appeared first on Nautilus.

Kash Patel and Pam Bondi are being nominated to purge the “Deep State” of all people who have not pledged fealty to Donald Trump. But there’s no reason to believe the DOJ or the FBI will be emptied. There are plenty of Trump loyalists in those agencies and have been from the very beginning. Recall that James Comey revealed the “investigation” into the Anthony Weiner laptop just days before the 2016 election largely because he was aware that the NY FBI field office was full of Trumpers who were planning to leak the information. (He should have just let them and we could have called it the phony dirty trick it was. Instead it became front page news. two weeks before the election.) Now we have more evidence of Trumpers in the woodpile. Philip Bump reports: In early 2020, the coronavirus pandemic reached the United States, leaving state governments and the Trump administration scrambling to respond. Trump pushed for a quick return to normal, with his reelection bid looming. His subsequent disputes with medical experts and the increasing toll from the virus became central elements of the 2020 presidential campaign.

Watching, on the one hand, the Israeli soldiers’ video confessions of their genocidal intent and acts and, on the other hand, the Palestinians’ livestreaming of their own deaths and devastation, it is ever so easy to throw one’s hands up in the air, to despair, to want to shut the cruelty out, to find solace […]

The post What to watch out for in the unfolding Palestinian genocide – a video briefing on 9th Jan 2025 appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

I can hardly believe that this is real: There’s a nascent, concerted effort to make Oklahoma the first state to ban new renewable energy projects. And it’s picking up steam. Across the U.S., activism against wind and solar energy has only grown in intensity, power, and scope in tandem with the recent renewables boom. This is in direct contrast to hopes many in the climate movement had that these technologies would become more popular as they entered communities historically hostile to the idea of switching away from fossil fuels. If anything, grassroots angst toward the energy transition has only surged in many pockets of the country since passage of the nation’s first climate law – Inflation Reduction Act – in 2022. Nowhere is this more true than Oklahoma, which on paper resembles a breadbasket of possibilities for the “green” economy. Oklahoma is the nation’s third largest generator of wind energy, home to a burgeoning solar energy sector, a potential hydrogen hub, and maybe even the nation’s first refinery for cobalt, a rare metal used in electric vehicles.

The Republicans are back, baby! They sound like the warmongering assholes we’ve always known and hated. I knew it was only a matter of time. I haven’t thought about Manifest Destiny since about the 8th grade. It’s a ridiculous concept in the 21st century but then virtually everything Trump is doing and saying is about returning to the 18th and 19th centuries. I have yet to read a good explanation of where Trump and his moronic followers are getting this stuff. We know Trump doesn’t read books. And while I certainly believe that he may have come up with the idea of taking over the world all by himself, the extolling of the gilded age and McKinley and all that has to have come from someone else. In the past I would have thought it was Steve Bannon but he doesn’t have trump’s ear anymore on this kind of thing. I wonder who does? Update — It’s on! I wonder why they bothered to delete it?

Thanks to Trump’s giveaways and Biden’s reticence, private equity is coming for your 401(k) savings.

Jimmy Carter was an evangelical. A liberal evangelical. A liberal evangelical in the age before...

I don’t see the kind of wall to wall coverage I might expect from the national news media if this horrific disaster Los Angeles is experiencing was taking place in the east. But I’m sure you’ve seen something about it and it’s actually much worse than you know. Luckily there is robust local news covering this so people in the area are able to get real news. They certainly aren’t on Twitter which is a total shithole during times like these since Elon fired their disaster team and Facebook is equally unreliable. Bluesky is good but it doesn’t quite have the scale to do what Twitter used to do. I was going to share some pictures here but I don’t have the heart to do it. It’s just devastating. And keep a good thought for all the animals in the mountains that are on fire here in southern California. It breaks my heart. By the way, if anyone tells you this has nothing to do with climate change and everyone should just rake the forest, they are wrong. This 2015 article in Rolling Stone by Tim Dickinson explains it well: This is the present, and the future, of climate change.

Whether it’s banning articles on X or killing fact checks on Meta, the only constant is that it benefits the powerful.

The post My Ban From X Is About One Simple Thing: Elon Musk Controlling the Flow of Information appeared first on The Intercept.