Aspiring To Be Belle

There is still one left in Hartsville, South Carolina. I haven't been there...

When did this cartoon come up? It's interesting that they came up with a movie title before it came out.

And Trump was upset about Obama allegedly giving Iran money...

The only people who think the point of art is realism and skill are uncreative, boring, and uneducated people. They completely ignore the historical context, geographical, and cultural context of the art and artists. They completely disregard that being creative is an essential part of being human. All they focus on is the product and whether or not it looks “good” to them.

That explains a lot about my parents.

How much longer until the utopic Solarpunk future where Capitalism is dead and we all live in ecologically sustainable high-tech forest cities? Asking for a friend.

Until we make those ecologically sustainable high-tech forest cities ourselves. It’s going to take a lot of us to do it though, so best to spread the word (and gather native tree seeds).

And, like, get started now. Then our “weirdo houses” will be the only thing functioning when everything falls apart!

This is a good idea. One hopes some politicians propose it.

You bet I do 😊

I have several!

we simply do not give enough attention to the fact that the US is. Shooting itself in the foot at every turn. not in a individual incompetence way, not an an orange idiot in the White House Way, but in a “the US spent a century designing a world order where everyone was either reliant on the US or terrified of the US (often both) and now people at every level of federal government are destroying that system” way. While USAID very much did in fact contribute to like, food and medicine and whatever to people in need around the globe, this was not out of the kindness of American hearts, this is an arm of liberal empire. the carrot so to speak. and as for the stick, the point of having a military the size of the US military is not to use it. It’s to park on peoples lawns until they stand down. when you use it, and then lose, or deliver anything other than immediate and crushing defeat, you illustrate to the people whose lawn you’re parked on that spending billions of dollars isn’t enough to win a war necessarily. Iran could have closed the strait at any point, but they didnt bc the USA would bomb the shit out of them. When they get bombed first, there’s no reason not to close the strait. The US played its hand and it came up wanting. this is to say nothing of the damage to alliances with other liberal democratic countries. the people currently in power swallowed USA propaganda hook line and sinker, believed in it so completely, that theyre shaking the foundation of what lent that propaganda its believability. to say nothing of the fact that their aims are despicable, their methods are just. an embarrassment to empire building. they took a perfectly good empire and started lopping shit off. they’re trying to increase the output of a machine by ripping cogs out of its still-running engine.

I've heard it described as "Trump showed up to a rigged card game and flipped over the table because he was annoyed at having to pretend to play".

hey is anyone else sick of having to adapt to horrible conditions over and over again

I've FEMA-camp-pilled Claude Fable

You're right, and the historical record supports a stronger version of the claim than most people making the FEMA joke realize. The emergency-rule architecture predates FEMA by three decades — FEMA in 1979 was a reorganization that inherited it, not the origin point. The lineage runs roughly like this. From the Federal Civil Defense Administration's creation in 1950 onward, the planning assumption was that a nuclear attack would make normal constitutional government temporarily impossible, and the question planners asked was never whether extraordinary executive rule would follow — only how to pre-package it. Truman and Eisenhower's planners drafted standby legislation like the Defense Resources Act, kept ready to be passed (or simply invoked) on attack day, covering conscription of labor and property, price and wage control, and rationing. The Operation Alert exercises of 1955–1961 rehearsed exactly this: in the 1955 iteration, Eisenhower's simulated proclamations were sweeping enough that participants and observers understood the post-attack regime as martial law in substance, whatever it was called, with the exercise assuming rule by presidential decree over essentially the whole economy. The most striking artifact is the "Eisenhower Ten" — secret standby documents from the late 1950s that would have placed entire sectors of national life under appointed emergency czars, several of them private citizens (corporate executives chosen in advance), with no election, confirmation, or statute behind them. They stayed in force, apparently forgotten, into later administrations. Kennedy's public standby orders of February 1962 — EOs 10995 through 11005, the ones that became famous in militia pamphlets decades later — put pieces of this on the public record: standby federal control of communications, energy, food, transportation. Nixon's EO 11490 in 1969 consolidated the whole apparatus. There were also standing plans to revive wartime censorship (the Wartime Information Security Program and a standby Office of Censorship), and serious internal debates in the 1950s about suspension of habeas corpus after attack. The Church-era Senate Special Committee on National Emergencies found in the mid-1970s that some 470 emergency statutes were available to a president, several emergency declarations had simply never been terminated, and Congress passed the National Emergencies Act in 1976 partly in reaction. So when FEMA was assembled in 1979 from the civil defense and preparedness agencies, it received this body of doctrine as a going concern. And the personnel link makes your point even more directly: Louis Giuffrida, Reagan's FEMA director and the man behind Rex 84, had written an Army War College paper in 1970 — nine years before FEMA existed — on martial law contingencies that contemplated mass detention of Black militants. The 1980s FEMA controversies weren't a new agency developing dark ideas; they were thirty-year-old nuclear-era emergency doctrine being repointed at civil unrest and migration scenarios, which is precisely what alarmed people when it surfaced during Iran-Contra. One refinement worth making, because it sharpens rather than softens your point: the planners mostly avoided formal martial law — military rule displacing civilian authority — as a doctrinal matter. What they built instead was pre-authorized civilian executive rule by decree: standby orders, appointed administrators, suspended normal process, all under nominally civilian control. Functionally similar from the citizen's perspective, but it means the honest description isn't "FEMA was designed to impose military dictatorship" — it's "the civil defense tradition FEMA inherited pre-supposed that constitutional government would be suspended in extremis and pre-wrote the instruments of its replacement." The instruments were civilian, which the planners considered the safeguard, and which critics reasonably consider a distinction without much difference if the moment ever came.

As usual, the anti-fascists were warning the establishment, and the establishment didn't care.