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June 30th, 2025: Today's comic was inspired by Robert "the Bobster" Frost! To answer your question, I have NOT researched his nickname and do not intend to. – Ryan | ||
The fact that Waymos need to use video cameras that are constantly recording their surroundings in order to function means that police have begun to look at them as sources of surveillance footage. [...]
The fact is that police have begun to look at anything with a camera as a source of surveillance that they are entitled to for whatever reasons they choose. So even though driverless cars nominally have nothing to do with law enforcement, police are treating them as though they are their own roving surveillance cameras.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
LOS ANGELES — A leaked memo from high-ranking law enforcement officials encouraged officers on the street tasked with confronting protesters to “Picture them as your wives and children” so they would be more willing to inflict extrajudicial violence.
“Don’t forget, you are a hero. People might give you the finger, spit on you, and call you a class traitor for pursuing a career on the police force, but just remember you have the upper hand because you are above the law,” read a small portion of the memo. “Some of you might still have a shred of humanity left inside of you and it can be hard to fire a tear gas canister into someone’s face from point-blank range. We encourage you to picture these lawless heathens as your wife who won’t stop nagging you, or your children who recently went non-contact with you. This will make it easier for you to get your revenge and help you sleep better at night.”
Local Los Angeles Deputy Peter Kelliher said the memo helped him through a tough day.
“We were fenced in. There were dozens of people holding phones up at us, waving flags, and talking really loud. Honestly, I was afraid for my life, but then I just pictured all of them as my bitch wife and started firing rubber bullets at the eyeballs of anyone who wasn’t wearing glasses,” said Kelliher. “Everyone else in my platoon followed suit, and soon enough we were able to heroically beat back the crowd with our strength of will, military grade body armor, and vast array of weaponry that we were encourage to fire at will.”
President Trump commended the officers on the front lines.
“Antifa is at it again. I’ve seen these guys, real bad hombres. They were there on January 6th starting a riot, but it was also a day of peace, and we love peace don’t we people? There has never been a more peaceful time in America, and we are going to make it more peaceful by putting big beautiful tanks on every street corner and aiming the barrels at any house that isn’t saluting the flag,” said Trump. “The brave police in Los Angeles will soon be joined by the Marines, really buff guys, I’ve seen these guys, I’ve felt their muscles. Almost as big as mine, close, but not as big. Doctors said my muscles are almost too big sometimes, and that’s all natural. Can you believe that?”
At press time, GOP members of the House introduced new legislation that anyone who says “Fuck ICE” will be put to death by lethal injection
The post New Report Shows Cops Were Told to Escalate Violence in LA By Picturing Protesters as Their Wives and Children appeared first on The Hard Times.
If you want to create completely free software for other people to use, the absolute best delivery mechanism right now is static HTML and JavaScript served from a free web host with an established reputation.
Thanks to WebAssembly the set of potential software that can be served in this way is vast and, I think, under appreciated. Pyodide means we can ship client-side Python applications now!
This assumes that you would like your gift to the world to keep working for as long as possible, while granting you the freedom to lose interest and move onto other projects without needing to keep covering expenses far into the future.
Even the cheapest hosting plan requires you to monitor and update billing details every few years. Domains have to be renewed. Anything that runs server-side will inevitably need to be upgraded someday - and the longer you wait between upgrades the harder those become.
My top choice for this kind of thing in 2025 is GitHub, using GitHub Pages. It's free for public repositories and I haven't seen GitHub break a working URL that they have hosted in the 17+ years since they first launched.
A few years ago I'd have recommended Heroku on the basis that their free plan had stayed reliable for more than a decade, but Salesforce took that accumulated goodwill and incinerated it in 2022.
It almost goes without saying that you should release it under an open source license. The license alone is not enough to ensure regular human beings can make use of what you have built though: give people a link to something that works!
Tags: open-source, heroku, webassembly, javascript, web-standards, html, github, pyodide
Advisory: This post discusses genocide and mass murder.
The accelerated destruction of the United States, the global economy, and the modern liberal democratic order is underway. Yet Curtis Yarvin – Peter Thiel’s “house philosopher,” who has been advocating such extremism for years – is disappointed. The San Francisco software programmer behind the so-called Dark Enlightenment doesn't seem to be enjoying the fruits of his own revolution. In fact, he sees failure ahead.
It’s April 2025 and President Elon Musk – the CEO-dictator of the United States – is busy dismantling government. This demolition comes straight out of Yarvin’s playbook, which calls for a CEO-dictator to conduct a mass purge of government employees.
Gil Duran
Though regarded by many as a mere internet troll, Yarvin – who Vice President J.D. Vance affectionately calls a “reactionary fascist” (and often quotes) – is now getting his due. His extreme theories on replacing democracy with corporate dictatorship are finally being tested in Washington. The Financial Times, the New York Times and Time Magazine have all paid homage to his role in shaping our current reality.
But there’s a problem: Yarvin is unfulfilled. Musk’s destruction of government apparently does not meet the vaunted Dark Enlightenment guru’s standards. In fact, he gives the effort a mediocre grade and says it will likely fail:
After six weeks, is Trump 47 going well? It is and it isn’t. Frankly, I give it a C-. While still far below its potential, it at least has not failed. Which is frankly amazing.
What is frustrating about this administration is that it has the opportunity to win and the strength to win, but neither (it seems) the will or the understanding to win. So, it’s going to lose. But it is not yet fated to lose.
The key issue: Yarvin doesn’t think Musk has the competence to carry out a revolutionary transformation of American government. “Not only can Elon not manage an operation on this basis – God himself could not manage it,” he writes.
Despite the ongoing destruction in Washington, Yarvin complains it’s simply not enough:
Unless the spectacular earthquakes of January and February are dwarfed in March and April by new and unprecedented abuses of the Richter scale, the Trump regime will start to wither and eventually dissipate. It cannot stay at its current level of power—which is too high to sustain, but too low to succeed. It has to keep doing things that have never been done before. As soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes.
Yarvin is a long-winded writer. This paragraph comes from a bloated, 7,000-word monstrosity titled “Barbarians and Mandarins,” published on March 6. A competent editor would slash it by 90 percent – maybe more.
The essay brims with false dichotomies, logical inconsistencies, half-baked metaphors, and allusions to genocide. It careens from Romanian tractor factories to Harvard being turned “into dust. Into quarks” with the coherence of a meth-addled squirrel.
Yarvin's fetish for authoritarian governance matches his prose: undisciplined, self-indulgent, and ultimately impotent. But I digress...
Allow me to summarize Yarvin’s whiny gobbledygook in three main points:
1. He's upset that Musk/Trump aren't being authoritarian enough
While most Americans are shocked by how the current administration is breaking norms, Yarvin thinks it’s a middling effort. He wants full dictatorship:
First, the government needs to be run top-down from the Oval Office. This is why we call it the “executive” branch. “Executive” is a literal synonym of “monarchical”—from “mono,” meaning “one,” and “archy,” meaning “regime.” “Autocratic” is fine too. The “executive branch” is the “autocratic branch,” or should be if English is English. Libs: if these words don’t mean what they mean, what do they mean?
According to Yarvin:
Power creates power. The more power you use, the more power you have...
In his view, half-measures are worse than nothing at all. Musk/Trump must increase the severity of “things that have never been done before” or watch their regime “wither and eventually dissipate.” The real point, he declares, is to “take power from the libs, then keep it.”
Apparently, Musk/Trump are falling short:
Unless the monarch is ready to actually genocide the nobility or the masses, he has to capture their loyalty – or, in liberal parlance, obtain their consent. That’s just how it works. You’re not going to foam these people, like turkeys with bird flu. Right? That means your only option is to convince them to love you, right?
Notice the casual mention of genocide. For good measure, he links to the Wikipedia entry for foam depopulation:
Foam depopulation or foaming is a means of mass killing farm animals by spraying foam over a large area to obstruct breathing and ultimately cause suffocation. It is usually used to attempt to stop disease spread.
Yarvin has a penchant for evoking frames of genocide and violence (even though he looks like a guy who’d surrender his lunch money with nary a whimper). He stops short of calling for literal genocide – but keeps reaching for the language of it: mass death, institutional purging, systemic annihilation. And he rarely seems to notice – or care – just how grotesque that really is.
More on this is the next section.
2. He thinks the entire system needs to be “cremated” – and then rebuilt – not reformed
Yarvin has no patience for simple budget cuts and bureaucratic layoffs. He wants total destruction, followed by a radical rebuilding. Or something like that.
“DC does not need better policies,” he insists. “It needs a complete reboot—as complete as the denazification of Germany in 1945.”
For example: "Every existing institution of science, outside the scientists and the labs themselves, must be fully cremated in a nuclear autoclave."
Again with the flippant use of violent imagery. First, foaming, now crematories. Are we talking about a Holocaust?
Yarvin again uses a mass murder metaphor to describe the firing of employees at the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health:
Someone in DOGE hacked the law (hacking is good, taking dramatic actions is good) by realizing that a certain class of administrative employees in NSF and NIH, so-called ‘probationary employees,’ could be legally shot without a trial. A review of unused drainage ditches in Bethesda showed adequate excess capacity. DOGE acted. The customer service records show few or no complaints about seepage, odors, etc…
Seepage and odors? Not only does Yarvin use a killing metaphor to describe the fates of federal employees – he also fantasizes about them rotting in mass graves. A healthy mind does not do such things, and these regular invocations of death and violence say much about Yarvin. He bathes his brain in the putrefying flesh of imaginary bureaucrats. Oh, and – in a positively flaming Freudian backflip – his parents were career federal employees.
Yarvin contradicts himself often. For example, he wants everything nuked – buildings included. Yet he's oddly miffed that Musk/Trump want to shut down the Department of Education:
Why do you want to shut down the Department of Education? Don’t you want to be the one writing the “Dear Colleague” letters? Doesn’t education in the US need to be completely rebooted – from kindergarten to university? How else are you going to do that, except with all the dotted lines that come out of the Department of Education?
Apparently, it's very frustrating to be a reactionary fascist theorist without also being a reactionary fascist dictator. If you want authoritarianism done right, you must do it yourself.
3. He's learning that “revolutionaries” make terrible administrators
After years of theorizing about the overthrow of democracy, Yarvin has discovered that turning theory into practice is much harder than it looks.
Those of us with experience in government and politics already knew this. Getting a single, simple change can take years. Overthrowing the entire U.S. government? Not a task for addled, inarticulate amateurs.
Yarvin seems shocked that Musk (with zero government experience except for a reliance on government contracts) is doing such a poor job. He also seems chagrined at Trump's specific actions, like tariffs, which are throwing markets into chaos. In political terms, the whole thing is a total disaster. By early 2025, millions of Americans are marching in streets and even Republican voters are showing up at town halls to express seething anger.
Yarvin seems to have come to a stark realization: If Musk/Trump fail to destroy the democratic system, extreme anti-government pseudo-intellectuals may face a bleak future. He urgently warns them against half-assing the revolution – and reveals his own fear of what might happen when the pendulum swings in the other direction:
But in the end, it is the road toward winding up in the foam yourself—probably with me, for all my troubles. (This is what usually happens to right-wing intellectuals, actually.)
Yarvin sees his desired revolution unraveling under the weight of its own stupidity. He pines for intensified destruction, but it's not clear that will happen – at least not to the extent he considers necessary. So, in creeps the fear.
In early 2025, Yarvin is coming to terms with the towering mediocrity of his ideas. His complaints about the CEO-Dictator system prove exactly why it's inferior to American democracy. Despotism is a dog with no name. Once you let it go, you can't call it back.
Ironically, Yarvin may soon find himself grateful for the very institutions – democracy, bureaucracy, and laws – he enjoys deriding. Our liberal system, imperfect as it may be, does not stack its citizens in mass graves for having terrible ideas.
The only foam Yarvin needs to fear is the flecks on the corners of his mouth. May they serve as cruel reminders of the hysteria that led him here.
Dear ICE official(s),
I noticed you recently detained your first Iranian foreign national. As a first-generation Iranian American, I’ve been conditioned to assume this is a testament to our great Persian culture. At least I’m sure that’s what my dad will say. Is he from Shiraz?
I just had a few questions ahead of any potential deportation and/or the disappearance of myself or my family members.
I know a lot of people might criticize your lack of a formal DEI initiative, but I want to commend the diversity of the first batch of students you’re detaining. It’s like the cast of The Sex Lives of College Girls, if you swapped the white girls for a South Korean and a Palestinian.
Speaking of college, are you deporting only Western, South, and Eastern Asians (and Muslim Africans) with impressive educations? I noticed that, thus far, most of them are pursuing their PhDs. If it helps, despite pleas from my dad, I have no interest in being an MD or PhD.
I also noticed the students are in fields like mechanical engineering or have elite credentials like being a Fulbright Scholar. Again, my dad really wanted me to pursue that path. “Just get a business degree,” he told me. “What about being a lawyer?” he asked. I think he would have settled for a minor in business. But I just got an English degree, and my GPA was not great. Does that help my case?
Also, are you deporting only these legal residents with ties to college campuses, or do you plan on expanding to other places, like cultural centers or the Halal Guys?
I guess what I’m wondering is, are you super committed to universities, and what would you consider a “tie” to a university? If I go to a college campus once a week to take my kids to piano lessons, will you abduct me there, or is this really more to instill fear in all of the “good” immigrants that come to the United States to share their talents here instead of staying at home? Like, is this just an attack on the brain drain that benefits America?
I want to emphasize again that I only have an English degree. Yes, I ended up getting a master’s, but that was in social work, so again, really nothing to see here.
Speaking of preparation, I noticed you’re starting to use plainclothes agents. Bold move. Way to instill fear. Is there any sort of uniform hoodie we should be aware of, or just generally be afraid of any hooded white guys? I actually was already afraid of them, but honestly, I usually felt okay in broad daylight in a public place. Thank you for reminding me that I was never really safe.
Hypothetically speaking, if my Iranian dad had a relationship with a blonde American from the Midwest, thereby ending in my conception, will my 23andMe DNA results be taken into account when choosing what country to deport me to? Or do you detain/deport/disappear based on the highest percentage?
I deleted my 23andMe account out of concern for my data privacy, but on the off chance it will help me make my case, let me go ahead and disclose I’m actually only 49.7 percent Iranian. (I’m 0.5 percent Ashkenazi Jewish, so I physically can’t be antisemitic.) I’m 40.1 percent British and Irish.
If it’s possible to make a request, I wouldn’t mind Ireland. I know it’s not perfect, but they have access to abortion. Also, they speak out against genocide. Of course, I guess that’s what made me a target in the first place.
Thanks for your help,
Saba Khonsari
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