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Two Republicans in Carroll County, KY, shut down noise limits on data centers, but were furious when residents made them listen to the sounds themselves.
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Republicans won’t cancel student loan or medical debt for us, but want taxpayers to bail out their billionaire campaign donors’ companies when they fail.
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Jonathan Swift published Gulliver's Travels anonymously 300 years ago in October 1726. Everyone knows the story, tiny people preforming bondage on giants, plus talking horses. Most people dont know it's one long howl of rage at how England treated Ireland. He was a savage.
Swift was born in Dublin to English parents, and for the first part of his career he wanted London and kept getting Ireland instead. He became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in 1713 and stayed there until his death in 1745. This city never let him go, and by the end he'd stopped trying to leave.
The lad was a genius, but he was difficult to be mates with and he suffered terrible with mental and physical health issues. He'd severe vertigo, tinnitus, and his cognitive decline later in life was due to Meniere's disease. Swift was acutely aware of the stigma and terrible care surrounding mental illness, satirising his own legacy in his 1731 poem Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift but more on that in a second.
The book itself Gulliver's Travels has a Cavan connection cause Swift spent time around Swanlinbar and Mullagh visiting his uncle and a mate. The local folklore there has a giant farmer nicknamed Big Doughty supposedly which inspired Gulliver's scale, and a night spent asleep by a cottage fire ended with local boys tying his hair to the chair similar to how the Liliputians staked him on the beach.
But its the Anglo-Irish and French politics, that had an unmistakable influence. Lilliput and Blefuscu going to war over which end of an egg to crack is Swift mocking the pettiness of English and French squabbling, and by extension the absurd laws heaped on Irish Catholics and dissenters at home.
Laputa, the floating island that starves the land beneath it by literally blocking the sun, is Britain's government hovering over Ireland with total indifference. And Lindalino, a city that rises up against the island and gets censored out of early British editions for the trouble, is Dublin in a very thin disguise.
Although published anonymously Swift wasn't writing this totally disguised. Under the name "M.B. Drapier" he'd already talked all of Dublin into rejecting a rotten British coinage scheme with the Drapier's Letters, and a few years later he'd publish "A Modest Proposal", satirically suggesting the Irish poor sell their children as food, just to show England how it sounded when cruelty was dressed up as policy.
He left his fortune of about £12,000 to found what became St Patrick's Hospital, Ireland's first psychiatric hospital, which finally opened its doors in 1757 and is still treating people today. That poem I referenced earlier goes
"He gave the little wealth he had
To build a house for fools and mad And showed by one satiric touch No nation needed it so much."
He was one of the good ones, and we must go for a jar with him in the DTM again soon. He's buried in St Patrick's Cathedral under an epitaph he wrote himself. In Latin translated by W.B. Yeats as:
"Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveller; he Served human liberty."
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COP Keating (Gen. Randy George), Mosul and Diyala (Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia), and the 82nd Airborne / JSOC (Gen. Chris Donahue) were the literal tip of the American combat spear, not lazy "woke" flag rank.
So why is Pete Hegseth's influencer ecosystem (Rob Maness, Kurt Schlichter, Sean Parnell, and E-Ring accounts) suddenly flooding the zone with narratives about a "dishonest officer corps", "leakers", and "checking boxes on readiness slides"?
Because it is a coordinated 4-part political inoculation campaign. Here is why they are pushing that script right now:
1. SHIFTING BLAME FOR THE $29B MUNITIONS BURN TO THE GENERALS
Washington Post and CENTCOM figures confirmed Iran Round 1 cost $47.0B total and burned $29.0B in munitions (with 81+ U.S. aircraft lost or damaged and Patriot stocks depleted ~66% down to 759-827 rounds).
• That depletion happened because Hegseth and Pentagon CTO Emil Michael cut CENTCOM targeting oversight by 93.75% (from 16 to 1) and pushed 1,000+ AI targets/day while pricing scarce multi-year interceptors as free goods.
• If the public and the President realize Hegseth, Michael, and Colby broke the U.S. missile shield right before Iran Round 2, Hegseth gets fired. Pushing the "officers lie on readiness slides" narrative sets up the uniformed military as the fall guys.
2. REBRANDING MILITARY PUSHBACK AS "SUBVERSION" OR "LEAKING"
Hegseth has built his brand on a populist grievance against commissioned flag officers, painting Joint Staff planners as risk-averse bureaucrats.
• Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia (Joint Staff J-5) shattered that cartoon: West Point '94 infantry combat commander, Purple Heart, two Valor devices, Presidential Unit Citation in Diyala, cleared IEDs in Helmand, and led the brigade that broke ISIS in Mosul.
• Because Sylvia is the second J-5 war planner Hegseth has purged (alongside firing Joint Staff Director LTG Douglas Sims and ousting Army Chief Gen. Randy George, which caused Trump's own Army Secretary Dan Driscoll to resign), Senate Republicans are asking why every 3-star planner who looks at the Iran war plan gets fired.
• So the E-Ring runs a two-track smear: Parnell claims an "Air Force OSI leak probe" on an Army 3-star (hours after the Joint Staff thanked Sylvia for 32 years of service), while influencers prime the base to believe senior officers are inherently dishonest.
3. INOCULATING AGAINST LTG SYLVIA'S SENATE TESTIMONY
Hegseth, Colby, and Dan Scavino know what happens next when you fire the Joint Staff J-5 days before the midterms and right before Iran Round 2:
• Lt. Gen. Sylvia is going to be called to testify under oath before Senate Armed Services and Senate Intelligence.
• Under 10 U.S.C. 153, the J-5 is the exact officer who had to tell Colby and Hegseth that after burning $29B in munitions in Round 1, subtracting the 500-round Indo-Pacific/NATO reserve floor leaves ONLY 3 TO 5 JORDAN-SCALE PATRIOT RAIDS (3.70 to 5.45 packets) for Iran Round 2.
• Smearing Sylvia now as a "leaker" is a preemptive attempt to poison the well with GOP voters before he sits down at a Senate witness table.
4. COVERING FOR N=1 VENDOR CAPTURE
Look at what actually leaked over the last 7 days that triggered Hegseth's polygraph dragnet:
• It wasn't battle plans given to the enemy. It was internal Pentagon alarm over (a) the $47B/$29B Iran munitions burn and Russian targeting data going to Tehran, and (b) Musk's Oct 13-24 Starshield throttle and the frozen European-paid Patriots for Ukraine.
• When an incompetent leadership team outsources sovereign C2 to a single conflicted vendor (QRR = 0.00) and burns the physical missile shield down to 3-5 raids, their only survival move is to make "leakers" and "the officer corps" the story instead of the math.
This is a coordinated operation destroying the exact experienced combat warriors we need at the Pentagon, all to hide the incompetence, corruption, and failures inside Hegseth's circle at the direct expense of our military.
Frangipani retweeted
A Houston homeowner tested his water meter with a bucket after questioning his bills. The reading showed a major discrepancy. #enough #enoughhouston
Read the full story at the link in the comments.
Frangipani retweeted
Michael Dell: A 70% tax rate? "Name a country where that worked. Ever."
The United States, from 1936 to 1980.
Dumbass.🤦🏻♀️
Tax rates rose to 79% in 1936, rose up to 94% during WWII, fell to 82% in 1949, hovered at 91% from '51 to 63, and then stayed at 70% or above until 1980.
These rates drove us out of the depression and into powerhouse economies.
It was not until Reagan crashed the rates into the 30% range that we started accumulating massive debt and income inequality.
Facts matter.
And the facts show:
Republicans are not good for the economy.
Vote blue on Tuesday, November 3rd!🌊
Frangipani retweeted
Plan B will not affect a pregnancy that has already begun and it will not impact a woman’s future fertility.
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We all need a therapy cabinet right? Little miss is just letting off some steam.
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Well that was one hell of a closing argument tour by Trump on behalf of candidates. He salivated over men’s body parts, said high gas prices are good because oil companies are making billions, bragged about his ballroom, and said if he gave people $5k they still couldn’t afford to buy dinner at his club.
