The bigger issues from what I have seen is that 1) The Texas Appeals Court has been pretty far behind due to Covid bullshit, so he was behind a ton of different cases, and 2) the judge in his original case was so bizarre in his ruling that its difficult to even figure out where to start. And this is before we get into the fact that the laws in Texas were changed and the culture around being able to sue for defamation has also changed.

On the plus side, the people who defamed him are also in pretty poor financial shape and are just kind of treading water, while Vic is still living life as reasonably as he always did.

It takes skill to fail this hard.

And on a side note, this is why I have been adamant that you cant beat "Get woke, go broke" forever. You can use all kinds of tricks to prop up the money and try to keep it going...but eventually someone is going to run out of money to keep the music playing. And losing trillions in a few months will do that to you.

I think it's the tractors and their improper and overuse which inflamed the dustbowl and actually helped to make the droughts even worse, if not cause them by preventing normal rainfall from occurring thanks to the dust storms.

Having grown up in territory that got hit by the dustbowl and growing up hearing about what went down from people who actually lived it, I wouldnt put it up to tractors. At least, not by themselves. Tractors had already been a staple of farming for almost 80 years in these parts by the time the dustbowl happened.

The cycle basically went like this:

• Farmers in the area were growing more crops because they could make absolutely hilarious amounts of money selling it in Europe after WW1. This continued until about the 1920's, when Europe started to rebound.

• Farmers made all kinds of loans, bought land and equipment, and made promises off of the idea that the prices would stay high.

• Europe started to rebound and the early pangs of what would become the Great Depression started to emerge, and prices fell.

• Farmers drastically increased their acreage and planting to compensate for the decreased cost of food. This included tilling new land, plowing fields that should have been left fallow, and pushing fields to their limits.

• This causes further price drops due to excess product, causing farmers to get into a cycle of making the above point worse. When they finally ran out of fields and room to expand, farmers started cutting down trees to make the fields even bigger.

As it turns out, those trees were windbreaks, and had been there because it kept large wind gust from blowing onto the fields. Then a drought hit, the land turned extremely dry, and then windy season hit. This caused all of that dry soil, now without windbreaks, to be blow up, and create the dust storms. Then the dust storms became a self-sustaining machine where the soil remained dry, so it caused storms, which further dried the soil. It took a wet year before it finally fixed the situation. And people started to replant the cut trees and return to the old size fields.

Its still stuck in limbo last I checked. So odds are his appeal will be denied since it has been almost 3 years now. Which is unfortunate, but it seems like he is starting to get his foot back in the door with people who realize it would be stupid to leave good talent just sitting on the table for no real reason.

How do I know this isn't just some run of the mill "bad guy attacks revenge man's family" movie.

You're not far off. Its "Spec Ops Man revenges people who killed his team with experimental drugs and then covered it up by offing them" movie. So very generic action movie plotline. But look at that quick blurb again. Can you guess which part they say is the "unhinged right-wing" part?

there's no reason for an Ethno-Nat to like DeSantis at all. He is not now, and is never going to be a White Nationalist.

The only real idea I have is they think he can be changed. Like they did with Trump until they figured out that Trump was going to roll over them and tell them to suck fat 'nards and go look at their furry porn collection. And then they will be once again disgusted and enraged that actually, no, the MAGA movement is not a home for them. No matter how much the media tries to tell them otherwise.

(note: This theory relies on them not be subversives or agitators. If latter is true, reason is much more straight forward and obvious).

What you are probably thinking of is the judge in the case significantly reduced his bail last week. Originally, the DA wanted the bail to be $500,000, but the judge said that was entirely unreasonable for a first time offender who was claiming self-defense, so reduced it to $50,000.

8 year old conflict, many knew of it already and see Ukraine as the aggressor,

Then they are wrong. Russia has been the aggressor for this entire time, and its their own damn fault that Ukraine has been moving away from them. To the point that when Russia came screaming into the country, a ton of territory in the east that everyone thought would side with the Russians instead started fighting back with a savagery rarely seen in war. To the point you saw cities that were majority ethnic Russians deciding they would rather be razed to the ground than join the Russians. Which is part of the reason that the Donbass is still not secure, even though they were the ones who said it would be done almost as soon as they invaded.

Ukraine being ultra corrupt

Who isnt in Eastern Europe? That doesnt change the fact that Russia is the larger threat, and it would behoove us to side with Ukraine. Just like we did the Hungarians, Polish, Baltics, Bulgarians, and Romanians. All of these governments are fairly corrupt. But sometimes you have to look the other way to deal with a larger threat.

Ukraine Govt shutting down Biden corruption investigation because Soros told them not too,

Did you...did you just link to a statement from the guilty party themsleves?! No freaking shit the Atlantic Council says they had to shut down the investigation. It would have implicated THEM! Ukraine never stopped any such investigations. The US just said they didnt want to hear it anymore, because it turns out that Trump was on to something when he said something was rotten over there. And I would like to remind you that for all the complaints that people have thrown his way, it was Zelensky who was saying that he liked Trump and was wanting to work with him on corruption issues...which was the entire basis for the "Ukrainian Collusion" they tried to impeach him over.

I think the scale is tipping back in their favor. They have been buying up a lot of current-gen F-16's (the ones that have gotten a ton of upgrades to the avionics and radar), and they have been getting a pretty extensive SAM network. They also have a pretty significant anti-ship missile capability now (thank you Trump), and have even started upgrading their navy. Japan has also said that they will view an attack on Taiwan as an Article 9 worthy event, so its unlikely Taiwan would even be going it alone.

And this is of course all assuming you believe the Chinese combat capabilities. Because lets be honest: China uses most of the same stuff Russia does, and we have spent months seeing that their shit is nowhere near as effective as was advertised.

The reaction of a lot of my fellow right-wingers has been confusing to me over the course of this entire war. Its entirely in reason to cry foul over raw cash being sent, but I would have thought giving a nation the firepower it needs to fight its own war would have been a welcome change in foreign policy instead of putting our own citizens lives at risk (I know I favor it in the future). And I would have thought they would have taken heart in a people deciding they would fight and die to defend their own nation, and that we should hope to be so brave if the time came for our own.

But no. For some reason, a ton of my fellows on the right went all rootless cosmopolitan and have said that the Ukrainians should have fled without a fight, and just accepted their new rulers because "Putin is the savior of the west and the white race" or some bullshit. Even though Putin is the one killing white people through his own brutality and ill-advised war, and lets also forget that he has said his goal is basically to reform the Soviet Union, and this will bring him into conflict with a ton of other nations who are even more hostile toward him than Ukraine.

Quite frankly, I dont really care anymore. Give them beans and bullets, keep the receipts on the cash for later, and let the Ukrainians go buck-ass wild so that we can destroy a nation who is a threat to the West and the world at large. Then tell China "Your next. Dont even think about Taiwan."

It's not official content btw.

I was going to say: It literally says "Steam Workshop" right there on the tab. And you can find any number of fake nations to use.

For all the jokes, I think most Americans know Geography better than the memes say. It’s just the stupid ones are always picked out and shown off because it’s funny.

Egad, its brilliant! Why has no one thought of this before?

I just wish people pushed for the forms of power that made sense for their local area. For instance, I live in Kansas, and we have had no issue with wind. We get almost half of our power from it, and there has been no blackouts or brownouts related to any weather or our wind power.

But you know why it works here? Because we are on the plains! The wind never fucking stops blowing. If you ask a Kansan and they say "There is no wind today", what they actually mean is "There is a light breeze today." If the wind ever actually stops, that is when we get concerned (the only times I have ever seen that were before tornadoes or wind storms). So no shit wind power works around here. And then we have a clean coal plant, a nuclear plant, and several natural gas plants to provide backup in the event the wind power dips. And if shit well and truly hits the fan, most small towns have their own large diesel generators that can do emergency power for a day or two.

Its almost like, an energy policy of "All of the Above" and "Based on the local conditions" is the smart way. Instead of just ignoring things.

If you like Battle Beast, Beast in Black is also pretty good. They released a new album last year that was also pretty good.

Actually, in general, I have been vibing pretty well with modern Metal and Rock albums, and I have not been hard pressed for new content.

Very fair points, but the fact it was memory-holed just doesnt sit well with me as a murder-suicide. I know some have tried to say it was some CIA-shit where he was killing people to cover up the assassination of some Saudi prince, but I dont buy it (not because I dont think an evil government would. Just that it doesnt follow in this instance). They were gearing up to use it as a gun control push item, and then just dropped it. Like it never happened. It was right around the same time they were beginning to investigate the shooter as well.

So they must have found something that freaked them out and they decided it would be more damaging to them than the need to push for gun control. So it just raises an eyebrow for me.

Of course, its also possible that it was a murder-suicide, but the media stopped covering it because they thought it could be seen as a political execution. Even if it wasnt.

I suppose the good thing is that people on the Right are starting to learn this again. You have Bannon and people associated with him taking over territory, and you have the likes of Scott Presler (1) making it so that the Republican Party outnumbers the Democrats in registered voters for the first time ever (and most of those votes are being pushed toward MAGA types). And they are using this newfound power to start taking the fight to the enemy in turf they can win to start fighting back. And then you have Daily Wire and other Right-Wing companies and individuals starting to set up their own cultural institutions, and they are even pulling in normies with some of this stuff .

The fight back is coming, and I think the ones in charge understand that. Its why I think they have become so brazen about their corruption. Much like the plotters at the end of a financial scheme, they have pushed it as far as they can go, and so are cashing out everything they can and hoping to make it so that someone else is holding the bag when the music stops.

Of course, keeping up with the Viking analogy, resecuring territory isnt the hard part. The hard part will be dealing with the areas that have been conquered and are under the thumb of the Danelaw. Although I still think we win in the end. And so far, the world has been following the outline from a historian I watched almost a year ago.

(1): I still cant believe they let him get away from Jan. 6 stuff without an arrest, even though he is probably one of their greatest political threats. Of course, it shows that maybe they dont think he is, and that will be their own undoing.

While there was never really any closure to it (because it got memory-holed), I stand by my theory that the mass shooting at the country music festival in Las Vegas was a Leftist attempting to kill "Trump Supporters." And that the media memory-holed it because if it came out that a Leftist killed almost 80 people and injured hundreds on the grounds of "Trump is a Fascist! The Media told me so!", it would have ended in a very bad time for them and their cause.

But then they might have to admit the war is winnable, and its their own defeatism that is making them miserable and causing their losses. And then they might actually have to step up and fight, instead of just bitching and moaning about how its all over but the crying. And we cant have that, because its so much easier to just bitch and moan instead of put your nose to the grindstone and fight.

If someone wants to hold the institution hostage... we can always destroy the institution and build a new one.

To the point I have even heard someone I know say "Kill the hostage" in relation to institutional capture. And yea, I have noticed it is a very American attitude, especially over the last few years.

I was thinking about it today listening to the Lotus Eaters podcast, where Carl was yet again going on one of his anti-republican rants. Where, in relation to the US, he said that he opposes republics because they are (direct quote) "inherently unstable and prone to corruption", and was once again saying how constitutional monarchy is the superior government. Yet I distinctly remember him and his cohorts bitching and moaning that Elizabeth is fine-ish, but the rest of the Royal Family are a bunch of clowns kissing up to Klaus and the Davos brigade. Because I suppose they would rather keep up that old English decorum instead of living wild and free.

Meanwhile, I have found that an increasing chunk of people are open to what would have been considered radical change even just a few years ago, for the simple reason of "The hostage is an enemy agent. Shoot him." Just to go with law enforcement (because its the one I have noticed one of the largest swings), there is the obvious, growing push to nuke the FBI. This is expected, the FBI has been an issue since it was established. But I have even heard some people taking on the stance that we should get rid of all municipal police, and replace it all with sheriffs. On the grounds that a sheriff is elected, and therefore directly accountable to their voters. Because I am sure its not coincidence that all of the based law enforcement, saying things like "Fuck the state and their mask mandates! Live free or die!" and "You know, honestly, just shoot the bastard if he breaks in your house. I wont even be mad." have been elected sheriffs in almost every case. And the only national level police I have heard people be willing to spare are the US Marshals, and I would imagine that is because they are usually too busy doing gangster shit to be someone's political hitmen.

But like you said, suggesting something like that happen in the UK would cause a sharp "I SAY, SIR!!" and cause them to go into an existential crisis...which is why they fail.

Although I will say, to me the whole situation has kind of shown what you are talking about for how you cant just back away and then wage a war to destroy the Fabians (in relation to the idea of "national divorce"). Because Putin attempted to do just that, and now he is getting absolutely laid out due to a combination of his own military being incompetent/underequipped, the Ukrainians going absolutely buck-ass wild on Russian ass against everyone's initial beliefs, and it being laid bare that US/NATO equipment is significantly more potent. And so now Putin will likely be destroyed, and all of his efforts to protect Russia from the Fabians will be for naught.

Hey, let’s just run with the Lefts view in this: You are not Black, because you are acting White. Therefore, you don’t get deported to New Liberia.

(Note: this is me deliberately running with an absurd premise for a joke, do not take seriously)

That depends. Does “Literally recreating the Southern Aristocracy word for word, with with American blacks taking on the Plantation owner position with the natives as slaves” count as treating the natives like crap?

If you want more proof of this, look at the war in Ukraine right now. Russia is getting its shit pushed in, all of its “game changing” weapons are either nonexistent or a joke, and their true capabilities are shown to be even more of a joke.

And this is against a country they actually share a border with. Naval invasions are the single most difficult military operation to perform. And you expect me to believe China, who lost the last war they fought since they went Commie, can do it? While facing down the objectively superior US and Japanese navy, as well as Taiwans extensive anti-ship mission and not insignificant navy? Don’t make me laugh.

Much like with Russia, I don’t fear their military. I fear their subversion. And even that is starting to fail as China’s economy is beginning to falter.

And now Twitter is suing him to force him to buy. Its almost like they dont even understand the game being played. Because its blatantly obvious that Musk is going to respond to that with "Well, if you insist." and take it over...after they spent months fighting to keep him from doing that very thing!