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https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/14/climate/uk-climate-protests-policing-laws-prison-intl/index.html
 

Interesting take on UK legal actions for comment by those HERO board folks across the pond. The UK has had some interesting legal enforcement items in recent months, I thought this one was a little different. Don’t really know enough to comment meaningfully. What are the political implications of this, if any? 

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Elon Musk Secretly Funded ‘Pedophile’ Fliers, Attack Ads Against Texas Prosecutor

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Elon Musk, the Austin-based father of (at least) 12 children who creepily offered to impregnate Taylor Swift earlier this week, secretly funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in an unsuccessful attempt to remove Travis County District Attorney José Garza from office, according to a blockbuster Wall Street Journal exclusive.


Musk — who runs Tesla, SpaceX, and the social media site formerly known as Twitter — is worth more than $240 billion. And he’s been using that money to support Donald Trump in his bid to reoccupy the Oval Office. At the same time, he’s been more involved in politics than was publicly known, apparently acting as the primary funding behind a group that disseminated fliers and spent more than $650,000 on television ads attacking Garza. The Journal’s report cites corroborating sources in addition to corporate documents and Federal Communications Commission filings.

The fliers the Musk-backed group disseminated included a photo of Garza and a blood-stained teddy bear with the words: “José Garza is filling Austin’s streets with pedophiles & killers. The next victim could be your loved one.” The money, per the Journal, flowed from a tax-exempt organization, which doesn’t have to reveal donors, unlike Musk’s Trump-supporting PAC.

Garza won anyway, with 67% of the vote. He’s expected to win the general election in November.

And because (it’s Friday the 13th and) we weren’t yet thoroughly spooked, The New York Times has also published an in-depth look at what it called Musk’s “mushrooming security apparatus,” which details how the billionaire creator of the world’s ugliest vehicle has “barricaded himself behind a growing phalanx of armed bodyguards as he has become more wealthy, more famous and more outspoken — and as the threats against him have evolved.”

 

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1 hour ago, Old Man said:

 

 

Supposedly this guy is "from" here, but actually only moved here in 2018.  His online presence is... active and emphatic, though not terribly coherent.

 

Also, registered Republican, apparently bought the AK in Florida as soon as he landed.  It's not clear whether he ever fired it.

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3 hours ago, dmjalund said:

I have this nasty suspicion is that they are sent from the project 2025 group, to make the unpredictable Trump a martyr with the intent of sweeping their man Vance into the presidency.


Possible, but so far everything about this guy screams “lone nutjob”. 

 

edit: Best theory I've seen so far is that these assassins are time travelers sent back to prevent a timeline where Trump takes power.

Edited by Old Man
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https://archive.ph/otQp3#selection-3167.0-3167.427

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Routh was a supporter of Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley, according to one of his posts in which he encouraged the Republican presidential candidates to continue their races. “You cannot quit. Why. You must stay on the ballot to the end. You must fight. You must continue giving speeches and push all the way to election day no matter the election results. Do not give in. Join Nikki and keep working. Never give up,” he wrote.

 

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More on allegations of Haitian immigrants eating pets: JD Vance admits he makes up stories for political purposes.

 

JD Vance explains the political utility of anti-immigrant hostility (msn.com)

 

Well, so. One does not tell stories of dark-skinned immigrants eating people's beloved pets because there is evidence it happens. One does so to emphasize that the dark-skinned immigrants are NOT US!!! and therefore evil and rouse tribal instincts of righteous fury at the subhuman invader.

 

I forget whether it was an episode of The Daily or Today, Explained that gave an in-depth look at Springfield and the browing tensions between long-time residents and the new Haitian population. There are real problems, but they have real solutions. For instance, The Haitian immigrants brought a rapid increase in the city's population after decades of decline. That causes an increase in rents because the supply of market-ready housing hasn't kept up. Haitians deal with this by having four or five families share a house and the splitting the rent; white renters don't. (Though the city government appreciates Haitians reconditioning and occupying boarded-up houses, reversing decades of urban blight.) Or, Haitians line up hours before medical clinics open, making it difficult for anyone else to get services. But maybe that's showing a fundamental  problem with supply and delivery of health care.

 

But hey, solving shortages of social services is hard. So much easier to tall stories about "those people" and so goad folk into fighting over scraps.

 

Dean Shomshak

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9 minutes ago, DShomshak said:

More on allegations of Haitian immigrants eating pets: JD Vance admits he makes up stories for political purposes.

 

JD Vance explains the political utility of anti-immigrant hostility (msn.com)

 

Well, so. One does not tell stories of dark-skinned immigrants eating people's beloved pets because there is evidence it happens. One does so to emphasize that the dark-skinned immigrants are NOT US!!! and therefore evil and rouse tribal instincts of righteous fury at the subhuman invader.

 

I forget whether it was an episode of The Daily or Today, Explained that gave an in-depth look at Springfield and the browing tensions between long-time residents and the new Haitian population. There are real problems, but they have real solutions. For instance, The Haitian immigrants brought a rapid increase in the city's population after decades of decline. That causes an increase in rents because the supply of market-ready housing hasn't kept up. Haitians deal with this by having four or five families share a house and the splitting the rent; white renters don't. (Though the city government appreciates Haitians reconditioning and occupying boarded-up houses, reversing decades of urban blight.) Or, Haitians line up hours before medical clinics open, making it difficult for anyone else to get services. But maybe that's showing a fundamental  problem with supply and delivery of health care.

 

But hey, solving shortages of social services is hard. So much easier to tall stories about "those people" and so goad folk into fighting over scraps.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

There's safety in numbers when you learn to divide

How can we be in if there is no outside?

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On BBC News Hour, a Republican Congressman tried to blame the assassination attempts against Trump on Democratic rhetoric about Trump's danger to democracy. The presenter offered samples of Trump's blood-and-guts rhetoric as a counterpoint, but the Congressman that it didn't mean what it meant, and no Republican claims Harris is a threat to democracy!

 

Except both would-be assassins show Republican histories, though they seem difficult to pigeonhole as anything but wackadoodle. Anyway, certainly not fervent liberal Democrats.

 

Another observation: The advantage of being dull. Would I be out of line to suggest that Trump's relentless self-puffery makes him a more attractive target to wackadoodles? Biden and Harris are just politicians. Not larger than life; no divine charisma. Even though the far right tries to present them as monsters of iniquity, we don't hear about would-be crusaders of righteousness trying to kill them. At least not yet. They are merely mortal, and that doesn't appeal to a would-be assassin's sense of personal grandiosity.

 

Dean Shomshak

Edited by DShomshak
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4 hours ago, BoloOfEarth said:

 

This seems to be becoming somewhat redundant.

Well, yes, but there are different kinds of wackadoodle. The July 13 shooter seems to have been motivated by vainglory rather than anything political, as his phone showed his interest in Biden and the Princess of Wales as well as Trump. Routh urged support for Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley as alternatives to Trump, and All Things Considered says he also voted in the Democratic primary, so he certainly wasn't MAGA kind of crazy.

 

According to the report, the principal bee in his political bonnet seems to have been the war in Ukraine -- earlier he was trying (unsuccessfully, of course) to recruit Afghan War veterans to fight in Ukraine, and said he wanted to go there himself despite his lack of combat training. So it is *possible* -- and I stress that this is speculation on my part -- that his motives for trying to kill Trump were not entirely crazy, in that there might be a comprehensible goal the act was meant to achieve -- namely, to make sure that Trump as president could not cut off military aid to Ukraine.

 

Not a smart plan, in its execution. Not a moral plan, certainly. But not purely wackadoodle. Eh, I should know better than to generalize from only two examples.

 

Meanwhile, Today, Explained did a program about the troubles in Springfield, Ohio, and the far-right, White Supremacist attempts to exploit them through the pet-eating lie.

 

https://podbay.fm/p/today-explained/e/1726509600

 

Dean Shomshak

Edited by DShomshak
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Springfield is about 45 minutes north of me - been there several times.  Even the heavily conservative 700 WLW (main am radio station in southern Ohio - home of the Reds and Bengals) and Republican Governor DeWine have repeatedly stated that these are false rumors. There are now 36 state troopers having to patrol schools and many school days cancelled over the last week.  At least 33 different bomb threats in that time.

 

The Haitians are legal and came to Springfield due worker shortage...many of the local business owners where they work have publically defended them.

Edited by Starlord
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Perhaps I don't remember them.  Perhaps they didn't get noticed.

 

But I don't think so.  Bomb threats strike me as epidemic, which I read as, our entire society is on edge.  2 young teens, 13 and 15, were arrested recently for making bomb threats down here.  And we're *relatively* quiet, politically.

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