Posts made by hubrys

‘America First’ Is a Lie

An excellent explanation of how Trump's skinflint foreign policy is destroying American power around the world.

@blablarg18 said in USA "Social Security" system has some fraud. Watch Bernie Sanders pretend he doesn't know:

Your own article describes software so messed up, it would support fraud well.

The software is only "messed up" because DOGE doesn't know how COBOL works. It is an antiquated programming language that is not taught in schools anymore. SSA is not the only agency that relies on COBOL.

And it's not even the worst record-keeping system the US has. The National Archives, responsible for keeping up with the employment records, retirements, and pensions of every government employee going back to the late 1800's, are stored on paper in manilla folders underground in a limestone mine near Kansas City. The records are manually updated, on paper, by government workers going in and out of the caves like ants and replacing files in folders in filing cabinet drawers.

@blablarg18 said in USA "Social Security" system has some fraud. Watch Bernie Sanders pretend he doesn't know:

They established that some bad checks go out.

To be sure, there are instances of overpayments and fraud within the Social Security system. A July 2024 report from Social Security's inspector general stated that from fiscal years 2015 through 2022, the agency paid out almost $8.6 trillion in benefits, including $71.8 billion — or less than 1% — in improper payments. Most of the erroneous payments were overpayments to living people.

The statements being made by Trump and DOGE are patently false. Millions of dead people are not getting checks. No one 130, 150, 300 years old is receiving checks. The SSA automatically stops payments at the age of 115 by default regardless.

Finding that 10, 100, or 1,000 dead people who receive checks doesn't make Trump and Musk's statements true. They didn't say that 10, 100, 0r 1,000 people were getting checks. They said millions. And they did so because they were either too stupid to understand the computer language used by SSA, or they did understand and were too deceitful to care.

@blablarg18 said in RFKJ backs measles vaccine. What does media do? Lie, of course.:

BUT, there is debate about whether they died of measles. Because some reports have said, -with- measles.

Those who die from measles tend to die from the pneumonia, dehydration, and/or encephalitis complications caused by it.

But even if the children don't die from measles, they can still suffer lifelong problems such as brain damage, blindness, and have to live with the ever-present threat of encephalitis (SSPE and MIBE) that can occur years after they "recover" from the measles.

@blablarg18 said in RFKJ backs measles vaccine. What does media do? Lie, of course.:

Second - child in Texas. Um, unvaccinated because migrant? Reports don't say.

The outbreak appears to originate from a close-knit Mennonite community. Mennonites tend to be of Swiss and German decent, not Latino.

@blablarg18 said in RFKJ backs measles vaccine. What does media do? Lie, of course.:

measles is so often benign

Measles has a 1 in 5 hospitalization rate. In 2024, the hospitalization rate in the US was up to 40%. I don't think you'll find many folks who went through having measles, outside of religious crazies, that would wish their children to have to go thru with what they did.

@blablarg18 said in RFKJ backs measles vaccine. What does media do? Lie, of course.:

RFKJ PUSHES MEASLES VACCINE to solve outbreak.

The problem is that he also pushed Vitamin A supplements and Cod Liver Oil as a cure for the measles. And he's had the CDC send doses of clarithromycin, an antibiotic, down to Texas to treat measles. HINT: Measles is a virus. Antibiotics don't cure viruses.

And if he keeps telling folks that Vitamin A is a treatment for measles, then it's only a matter of time before someone kills or seriously hurts their child by giving them high doses of Vitamin A. Unlike most other vitamins (e.g., Vitamin C), Vitamin A doesn't flush out of your body as expensive pee. Vitamin A builds up in your body and destroys your liver. Just a matter of time before a kid goes from blotchy red patches on their skin to blotchy red patches on their now yellow jaundiced skin because their dumbass parent destroyed their liver with cod liver oil.

No, 150-Year-Olds Aren’t Collecting Social Security Benefits

Part of the confusion comes from Social Security's software system based on the COBOL programming language, which has a lack of date type. This means that some entries with missing or incomplete birth dates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago.

The news organization WIRED first reported on the agency's use of COBOL, a programming language which is more than 60 years old.

Additionally, a series of reports from the Social Security Administration's inspector general in March 2023 and July 2024 state that the agency has not established a new system to properly annotate death information in its database, which included roughly 18.9 million Social Security numbers of people born in 1920 or earlier but were not marked as deceased. This does not mean, however, that these individuals were receiving benefits.

The agency decided not to update the database because of the cost to do so, which would run upward of $9 million.

New Social Security chief refutes claims of deceased people over 100 years old getting checks

"Hey, boys can wear bras and girls can wear ties until we’re blue in the face, but it won’t change the reality that the homosexual lifestyle is abnormal and immoral."

• Another banger from Pete Hegseth

How did we go from competent business men like Cheney and Rumsfeld to a television info-tainment talking head who hasn't ran so much as a lemonade stand, yet we want him to run an organization with millions of employees and a trillion dollar budget? Can't we just dislike him for being incompetent and unqualified for the position?

You do realize that the vast majority of those countries use fluoridated salt programs, fluoridated milk programs, or have naturally occurring fluoride levels in their water that renders supplementation unnecessary? Oh wait, you're stupid, so of course you didn't.

@lololulu19 said in Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks Democrats control the weather.:

Apparently you never heard of HAARP

The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, has been called a missile-defense tool and a mind-control device. The truth is a bit less ominous

Ask a HAARP scientist about allegations like this, and he’ll either laugh or lose his temper. “This is completely uninformed,” says Umran Inan, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University whose research group works with HAARP. “There’s absolutely nothing we can do to disturb the Earth’s [weather] systems. Even though the power HAARP radiates is very large, it’s minuscule compared with the power of a lightning flash—and there are 50 to 100 lightning flashes every second. HAARP’s intensity is very small.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene Says ‘They Can Control The Weather,’ Promoting Conspiracy About Hurricane Helene

She is a national embarrassment!

@blablarg18 said in USSA watch: Libs openly discuss plans to "torch the Constitution", crush First Amendment:

SCOTUS established idea in 1919 case....... -then overturned it- in 1969 case.

Wow, you are dumb and ignorant.

Shouting fire in a crowded theater was used, in dicta (i.e., not part of the holding of the case) by Justice Holmes in Schenck v, US (1919) as a hyperbolic example of the kinds of speech that the government could punish someone for because it represented incitement to immediate danger/harm.

It wasn't "overturned" (since the concept of 'overturning dicta' is nonsensical) by Brandenburg v. OH. In fact, the Brandenburg court pretty much agreed with that example, since the holding of Brandenburg was that the government's power to restrict freedom of speech was restricted to banning advocacy which is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

The quintessential example of such speech that the government can prohibit is still regarded to be shouting fire in a crowded theater. That's even what you're taught in law school. it is the classic example.

And you should be aware that the government still punishes people for such things. Wasn't it just last year that they punished a Democrat representative for misdemeanor for pulling the fire alarm in Congress to delay a vote?

@blablarg18 said in FBI says: Iran sent stolen material from Trump campaign to Biden’s camp (now Kamabla):

No, Trump didn't use hacked material in 2016. (only Wikileaks did)

From my link:

Trump — even though he had in August been told by U.S. intelligence officials that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin was behind the Clinton campaign hack — began citing the stolen material continuously for the rest of his campaign, starting on Oct. 10 and right through Election Day. At rallies around the country that month, he proclaimed, “WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks,” and “This WikiLeaks stuff is unbelievable! You’ve got to read it!”

The hack-and-release operation was the biggest piece of the Russian influence campaign designed to put Trump in the White House, according to investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In total, Trump referred to WikiLeaks by name 137 times in public appearances and media interviews between Oct. 10 and Election Day, according to PolitiFact. There were another two dozen times when he referred to the emails but did not name the entity.

Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.

She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.

But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

The Women Killed by the Dobbs Decision

She already had a 6-year-old son, and decided that she could not raise two more children. But she couldn’t get a termination in her home state. And so she scheduled a surgical abortion in North Carolina, took a day off work, hired a babysitter, borrowed a relative’s car on a false pretext, and got up at 4 a.m. to drive four hours with a friend to the clinic. But they hit traffic, and Thurman missed her appointment. The clinic could not give her another time slot, because so many women from out of state, also facing tough new laws, were booked on that day.

So Thurman was offered abortion pills instead. These are widely used and overwhelmingly safe and effective for early pregnancies. In less than 5 percent of cases, though, women need another dose, or a procedure called a dilation and curettage (D&C), to empty the uterus completely. In countries and states where abortion is legal, this is a simple and routine procedure that carries little risk.

But not in Georgia. Back home, Thurman’s bleeding would not stop. She went to the hospital at 6:51 p.m. on August 18, and medical examinations showed all the classic signs that her abortion was incomplete, and that the tissue remaining inside her was poisoning her blood. But doctors did not give her a D&C. Nor did they do so the next morning, as her condition continued to worsen. When she was finally taken to the operating theater, at 2 p.m., her condition was so bad that doctors started to remove her bowel and uterus.

But it was too late. Thurman’s heart stopped on the operating table.

LINK: Trump Falsely Accusing Harris Of Using Hacked Material – Which Is Exactly What He Did In 2016

Pro-Trump Media Firm Abruptly Folds After Russia Scheme Exposed

The fallout from the alleged propaganda scheme lost Chen her broadcasting gig with another far-right media group, Blaze Media, which has already wiped episodes of her podcast from Spotify and deleted her contributor page from its website. Blaze Media CEO Tyler Cardon told Semafor that the conservative anchor had been “terminated.”

Looks like everyone, left or right, is treating them as radioactive at the moment.

@blablarg18 said in In name of "trans", Paris Olympics have Man beat up Woman on world TV:

Hey genius - In 2020 no one knew.
2023, Khelif got cheek swab.
If it has a Y, it's a guy.

She received the same gender testing in the previous years that she did in 2022 and 2023. Also, the IBA won't say which tests it performed on Khelif and Lin. All we have, to my knowledge, is the increasingly erratic and hysterical statements of the IBA's ex-president on Social Media; though, he hasn't provided any evidence either. Officially, the IBA won't say where, when, or how it tested Khelif or Lin...just that Khelif failed a non-testosterone-based test and that Lin failed a biochemicals test.

Personally, I wouldn't put my faith in the IBA. It's had decades of bribery, cheating, betting, judging and refereeing, and other scandals, which were only exacerbated when it elected Gafur Rakhimov, an Uzbek businessman associated with Russian organized crime and heroin trafficking, as its president.

After Rakhimov, they elected Umar Kremlev, a close friend of Vladimir Putin and pro-Russia zealot. He moved IBA's operations to Russia and made it's sole major supporter the state-owned energy company Gazprom. Kremlev isn't a fan of the International Olympic Committee trying to tell him how to run the IBA. He's called the IOC leader a "sodomite" and accused the IOC of supporting anti-Russian organizations such as Common Cause Alliance.

Most Western countries have withdrawn from IBA and joined World Boxing as an alternative ruling body; however, Algiers and Taiwan are still members of IBA. In retaliation, the IBA attempted to ban any athlete who participated in events sponsored by non-IBA organizations.

Kremlev has stacked IBA's board of directors with cronies and prevented attempts by members to elect different leadership by having all of his opposition "disqualified" as candidates for IBA's elections; an action that was later reversed by the international sports arbitration court. However, instead of holding new elections with the now-reinstated candidates, Kremlev merely allowed his board of cronies to "vote" whether they wanted to hold another "vote." They did not...unsurprisingly.

The IOC informed all of its member organizations that Russia and Belarus would be banned from competing under their national flags and anthems in the 2024 Olympics, but the IBA under Kremlev ignored this mandate and allowed Russian athletes to compete.

The IOC has since cut ties with the IBA with the extraordinary remedy of permanently banning it from participation in the IOC. In fact, if the international boxing community doesn't get its shit together, boxing won't even by in the 2028 Olympics.

As stated above, Kremlev is a pro-Russia zealot. But why would he want to punish Khelif? Because she loudly and embarrassingly beat then-undefeated RUSSIAN female boxer Azalia Amineva. They allowed Khelif to box Amineva even though gender testing of Khelif had already been conducted a year prior; however, when Khelif beat Russia's undefeated champion, the IBA suddenly (and with continued refusal to release the evidence) decided to declare Khelif ineligible to fight and retroactively awarded the win to Amineva, protecting her undefeated record.

IMO, Kremlev wanted to fuck with the IOC in retaliation for the IBA being ousted, and he looked around for athletes he had control over (remember, Algiers and Taiwan were still competing in the IBA) that were also going to compete in the Olympics, and he tried to de-legitimize the IOC's boxing this year. It was a two-fer because he also got to protect Russia's undefeated boxing champion.

But you believe anything you want. Personally, I wouldn't put all my eggs into the corrupt IBA basket.

It's funny how none of these very outspoken conservatives said anything in 2020 when Imane Khelif didn't even make it out of the quarterfinals, beaten by an Irish boxer. I guess she's only a man when she's winning.

@blablarg18 said in More fake right-wing outrage.:

This next moment: Kids are not in frame, but by all accounts, kids were present / it was inflicted on them.
Nightmarish.

You realize that's just a tear in his stockings, right?

As much as I hate and despise that man and his politics, watching that video make me profoundly sad and sick to my stomach. America should be better than this.

How the conspiracy-fueled Epoch Times went mainstream and made millions

...Today, The Epoch Times is one of the country’s most successful and influential conservative news organizations. It’s powered by Falun Gong, a religious group persecuted in China, which launched The Epoch Times as a free propaganda newsletter more than two decades ago to oppose the Chinese Communist Party.
...
Epoch Times representatives also deny an affiliation with Falun Gong, despite the two groups’ clear financial and organizational ties: The Epoch Times board members and most staff are Falun Gong practitioners. The nonprofits behind The Epoch Times and Friends of Falun Gong, the movement’s advocacy organization, share executives and provide grants and services to each other, according to tax filings. And the newspaper, along with a digital production company and the heavily advertised dance troupe Shen Yun, make up a nonprofit network that the leader of the religious movement calls “our media.”
...
Falun Gong — or Falun Dafa, as some followers call it — is a kind of personal development movement started by Li in China in 1992. It combines tenets of Buddhism and Taoism, and followers practice with meditation and flowing breath and movement exercises, and by studying Li’s teachings.
...
To his followers, Li is a God-like figure who can levitate, walk through walls and see into the future. His ultra-conservative and controversial teachings include a rejection of modern science, art and medicine, and a denunciation of homosexuality, feminism and general worldliness.

How The Epoch Times Created a Giant Influence Machine

...But the organization and its affiliates have grown, in part, by relying on sketchy social media tactics, pushing dangerous conspiracy theories and downplaying their connection to Falun Gong, an investigation by The Times has found. The investigation included interviews with more than a dozen former Epoch Times employees, as well as internal documents and tax filings. Many of these people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation, or still had family in Falun Gong.
...
Many employees and Falun Gong practitioners contacted by The Times said they were instructed not to divulge details of the outlet’s inner workings. They said they had been told that speaking negatively about The Epoch Times would be tantamount to disobeying Mr. Li, who is known by his disciples as “Master.”