imagine thinking western Germany isn't a fascist stronghold, because the political party support there is one of the other, friendlier fascist brands that has never bothered to root out Nazis from the intelligence or state security apparatus and has been all to eager to clamp down on those speaking against the Israeli genocide of gazans.

as soon as the wall fell, the west eagerly began a process of re-nazification on the east through the standard Nazi-era projects of privatization and the hollowing out of social support programs.

you libs would be far more amusing if you weren't so eager to support the material conditions of reactionary violence everywhere you turn and then pretend like you aren't the handmaiden of reaction.

the one sitting in the cabinet cubby to the far right like a creep is mine.

as one of thousands of assholes that has such an undying affection for older, light duty trucks that I own one... yes we would. america defacto banned light duty pickups in the 70s with the chicken tax, which is why that market segment vanished by the 90s. I have one of the last ones and it is about 12 months from qualifying for "antique" status.

everybody as his brother asks me about it and if I'm interested in selling.

the US can't compete with foreign made when it comes to smaller, efficient anything so the regulators stepped in to do protectionism 50 years ago. that's why the only trucks you can find anymore of 4 door, tiny bed monstrosities and a shitload of actual tradesmen are rocking old pickups or fuckin awd subaru hatchbacks.

my first question. I bet they combine them as two full names. like Honda-Nissan instead of a new mixto name.

like DaimlerChrysler or Weyland Yutani.

yesterday, I was at this little Thai place I like to hit on sundays and halfway through my feeding, they turned on the music and it was this song. but something was wrong with whatever media app they use, because it would make it about a minute into the song and then start over.

there was hardly anyone else there. even though this song drove me insane when I worked hospitality enough to hate it's continued omnipresence at Christmas time, there was something so surreal about this experience that it made me laugh each time it would start over, especially watching the reaction on the only other patron's face.

what the fresh hell.

I used to drive this ancient Toyota that had a "bad oil leak". I was broke and sourcing which gasket would have made me have to live out of the car, so I just kept an eye on its levels and added back oil frequently until I got into a better situation. not proud of it, because leaking engine oil is bad for the environment.

my bad oil leak was probably something like a quart every 3-4 months of daily operation.

this isn't an oil leak. this is just dumping oil in the ground.

the communists always said the Berlin wall was an anti-fascist measure. the wall falls and 25 years later, the fascists are back, heavily organizing in the east.

Her: My dad says he found you masturbating noisily in the garden shed in the middle of the night.

/pops Mentos

Me: I had really bad diarrhea and was dehydrated.

well, obviously the solution here is to reduce the material security of the working class so much they can't afford to travel abroad, to ratchet up global tensions through militarism and "warnings" to make traveling abroad seem more dangerous than it is, and to increase the bureaucratic hoop-jumping around gathering/maintaining the documentation necessary to travel abroad.

i would take the deposit and use it to hire freelancers to do some kind of Die Hard 1 / Die Hard 3 / Under Siege sort of situation. or just get everybody to ingest/inhale ricin lol. just kidding, i would never do that because it's illegal and i am a good boy.

i've heard of people doing that kind of thing, like invoicing some giant multinational company for something after they've figured out the address for accounts payable or whatever and getting away with it. but i've also heard of people getting caught in an audit and hit with fraud charges because it went through the US mail, which above a certain amount is a felony. but, respect the grift lol.

450 million iraqi dinar

I wonder how many of these sorts of events at the periphery by impoverished peoples it will take to crack the image of the American military here at at home, as some elite, all powerful fighting force with supreme talent and technology... and not a big pile of expensive bullshit that mostly just redirects public funds into industry shareholders as palm grease, graft and jobbery.

lots of money is spent at home to deliver cultural products everywhere one night gaze to reinforce the myths, so it's going to take a lot but it seems inevitable.

now with the power of Food Science and Innovation, you can have the ecstatic joy of fair food 24 hours a day, 365 days a year in under 2 minutes at a fraction of the price.

experience the rapture, the glory and the shame without ever being 10' from your toilet.

yeah he probably only spent like $450 million, which whomst among us.

how do you spend over half a billion on a wedding? did he buy the entire city of aspen and surrounding mountains?

i think it's a 3 shift operation. you get 2 shifts (8 hours each, back to back) running a line of treat A. during 3rd shift, they swap out a couple of critical components during the 3rd shift production line deep line (to meet HACCP / health standards) and run Treat B for two shifts. i'm sure the engineering team that figured out how a single production line floor can, over the course of a week, run 10+ product lines each with their own packaging and terminating in a frozen/frigerated truck for shipping are some real logistics wizards.

imagine if they were paid to come up with built environments, networks, and community support systems to prevent diabetes and heart disease.

EDIT: no chance i would buy an entire box, but i would 100% try a deep fried twinkie.

The degree to which Europe has lost ground to the U.S. in terms of economic competitiveness since the turn of century is breathtaking. The gap in GDP per capita, for example, has doubled by some metrics to 30 percent, due mainly to lower productivity growth in the EU.

Put simply, Europeans don’t work enough. An average German employee, for example, works more than 20 percent fewer hours than their American counterparts.

had to look this asshole up. wrote for the WSJ for 15 years and won something called the "Gerald Loeb Award" which is a finance journalism award cooked up by a founder of a huge brokerage form on wall street in the late 1950s. it's given multiple times a year for "Excellence in Journalism". The german wikipedia bio claims this award is the highest honor for journalism in the US. that's news to me, Hauptman Matt! he has no english wiki, suspiciously. i wonder if this guy wrote his own german wiki.

anyway, this award worthy multi-author article in the WSJ was more or less a description of Bank of America buying Merrill when it went teats up. not an investigative retrospective, but literally an article saying it happened the day after it happened. how in the holy christ it's worth a journalism award escapes me. very "Dog Bites Man" type shit that it apparently took 3 people to write.

what a fucking hack, though i can see why his career floats ever upward on the wings of capitalist love.

Graeber's book Debt goes into the ancient religious language used when referring to debt, the reasons for this, continual corruption of this meaning, and the resulting moral confusion in the modern era where people impoverished people in debt peonage are treated as the perpetrators while rich and powerful usurious lenders have victim status. here's a brief interview. https://davidgraeber.org/wp-content/uploads/What-is-Debt-%E2%80%93-An-Interview-with-Economic-Anthropologist-David-Graeber.pdf

In Sanskrit, Hebrew, Aramaic, ‘debt,’ ‘guilt,’ and ‘sin’ are actually the same word. Much of the language of the great religious movements – reckoning, redemption, karmic accounting and the like – are drawn from the language of ancient finance. But that language is always found wanting and inadequate and twisted around into something completely different. It’s as if the great prophets and religious teachers had no choice but to start with that kind of language because it’s the language that existed at the time, but they only adopted it so as to turn it into its opposite: as a way of saying debts are not sacred, but forgiveness of debt, or the ability to wipe out debt, or to realize that debts aren’t real – these are the acts that are truly sacred.

I always thought one of the unspoken implications of being an economy focused on finished goods/value added processing was total dominance (militarism/colonialism/neocolonialism) of raw material producing communities. a firm grip on their political economy, swift retaliation against liberator/insurrectionary/reform movements, regime change, purpose-driven underdevelopment, etc.

it seems like somewhere along the way, the administrators of empire began to see the MIC as more of a direct giveaway to capital formations rather than a useful tool to be maintained. this is apparently how the first Dutch colonial projects failed too: the capital formations saw the enforcement arm as not-critical and cannibalized it then lost their heavy stick to subdue restive populations.

its like they came to believe the public PR face of capitalist logic: people will let me extract value because I "own" these resources, not because my ownership is backed by the capacity for incredible violence.