The War on Drugs was never about drugs.
Nixon's domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman said it himself, on the record, in 1994:
"We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be against the Vietnam War or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs?
Of course we did."
The architect of the drug war admitted it was a political weapon.
Not a health policy.
Not a safety initiative.
A weapon aimed at Black communities and antiwar organizing.
That was 1971.
The weapon is still firing.
Let's talk about the 13th Amendment, since we're being constitutional about it.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States."
Except as a punishment for crime.
After emancipation, Southern states immediately passed Black Codes, laws that criminalized unemployment, loitering, "vagrancy."
Black men were arrested under these laws and leased to plantations and coal mines as convict labor.
Legally.
Constitutionally.
Under the explicit exception written into the amendment that was supposed to free them.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is constitutional history.
The Constitution was used as the mechanism.
The mechanism was operated by people who knew exactly what population they were targeting.
"It's a constitutional problem, not a race problem."
Cliff, they used the Constitution to do the race problem.
70% of SNAP and Medicaid recipients work full time.
Have employers tried not paying poverty wages?
When workers are paid less than a living wage, they’re forced to rely on taxpayer-funded social safety nets to survive.
That’s a taxpayer handout to corporations.
I don’t use machines at the gym, and I never have, except for the cable machine sometimes. Machines are purpose-built to isolate specific muscles, and in doing so they eliminate the use of stabilizer muscles, particularly in your core. Strengthening those stabilizer muscles is one of the most crucial ways to avoid injury and stay mobile as you age, and you simply won’t get that from machine work alone.
There’s nothing wrong with doing supplemental/accessory work on machines, but I will always encourage everyone who is able to use free weights (barbell especially) for their main lifts. It’s what makes the difference between *looking* strong and fit and actually *being* strong and fit.
Machines = aesthetics
Free weights = function
Basically every Israel-Palestine debate goes like this:
"Israel did X."
"Yeah, because the Palestinians did Y."
"Yeah, because Israel did Z."
"Yeah but only because the Arabs did A."
But if you bring the debate back far enough in time, eventually you get to the part where the western world forcibly dropped a brand new ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization without the permission of — and to the extreme detriment of — the people who were already living there.
Sure you can go further back and say "Oh yeah well the Jews lived there thousands of years ago," but that's just silly. There's no valid reason to believe some Jewish guy in New York City even has any meaningful lineage connecting him to that land more strongly than any random Muslim in Turkey or wherever, and even if there was, it would still be absurd to cite ancient history as the basis for a territorial claim. I'm only a few generations removed from my ancestry in Ireland and Scotland, but it would be ridiculous for me to show up demanding the home of someone who lives there.
So the original source for the grievance is clearly the artificial creation of an ethnonationalist state in the mid-20th century, and the push by Zionists and western imperialists to make it happen.
And how has that decision worked out? You see the results before you. Generations of nonstop violence and abuse, culminating in the slaughter and chaos throughout the middle east today.
This means that creating Israel was a mistake. A mistake that needs to be corrected.
Zionists will collapse into a shrieking pile of vitriol and hyperbole when you say this, claiming you're calling for the extermination of Jews, but this is false. Certainly ending a national order premised on putting the interests of Jews before Palestinians and righting the wrongs of the past would inconvenience a lot of the Jewish people who've been living there, but there's no basis for the claim that it would entail their deaths. Apartheid South Africa was dismantled without the extermination of millions of white people, and there's no reason to believe the dismantling of apartheid Israel would entail the extermination of Jews.
The Israel experiment has been tried, and it has failed. It is time to try something else.
A dark-money campaign tied to OpenAI, Palantir Technologies and Andreessen Horowitz is secretly paying influencers to push pro-U.S. AI and anti-China narratives on TikTok/IG.
Influencers are reportedly offered up to $5K per post, given scripts like “China beating the US in AI could threaten our kids’ data,” and told not to disclose or tag the campaign (Build American AI).
Source: Wired