Steven Rustad🇦🇺🇳🇴

Trekkie, politics, rural living. trumpers, antivaxers and other blue ticks blocked on sight. Not a good person.

[Steven Rustad🇦🇺🇳🇴 @HobbsSteven]

@lydiakauppi I used to deal in machinery, whatever they tell you, it’s double plus 5 years.
And yes they’re unaware that date codes exist.

[Moe Davis (U.S. Air Force, Retired) @ColMoeDavis]

When I was a judge at the Department of Labor, black lung cases were the biggest part of my docket. Miners applying for black lung benefits are entitled to a hearing within close proximity to where they live, so I traveled to coal country regularly to provide them their day in court.

Often, the miner would enter the hearing room pulling along a portable oxygen tank to aid with breathing. I watched some who’d have to stop for a minute and catch their breath as they walked a hundred feet or so from the parking lot to the building. Sometimes it was the widow of a miner who showed up for the hearing because the miner died before his case could be heard.

Trump calling it the “beautiful clean coal industry” is like calling the current explosive diarrhea epidemic a “delightful colon evacuation opportunity.” From the deadly coal dust inside the mines to the toxic coal ash residue leftover after it’s burned, there’s nothing beautiful or clean about coal at any point in the process.

When the Black Lung Benefits Act was first enacted, it established a presumption in favor of the miners if they could prove they worked at least 15 years in the mines and had a totally disabling lung condition. When Reagan was President, the presumption in favor of the miners was abolished and the balance shifted in favor of the coal companies who were trying to avoid paying benefits. The presumption in favor of the miners was restored in the Affordable Care Act thanks to Senator Robert Byrd. When I used to write black lung decisions I would note that it was Obamacare that shifted the burden back in favor of the miners and made it harder for the coal companies to avoid paying benefits to the men that coal mining left disabled.

The condition that the father and son in the article have, progressive massive fibrosis, is called complicated pneumoconiosis. It’s incurable and it’s not a question of will it kill you, it’s a question of how fast you’ll die. It gets harder and harder to breathe as the scarring in the lungs increases and you’ll feel like you’re suffocating as you struggle to draw a breath. Eventually, you’ll suffer respiratory failure and then you’re gone.

Trump likes to throw around the word “hoax.” Well, hoax is the right word to describe so called “clean coal.” It’s also the right word to describe Trump’s claim that he loves coal miners.

https://t.co/LBfd22F70a

[Steven Rustad🇦🇺🇳🇴 @HobbsSteven]

@JessicaUSAF @wiredowl Would never have guessed.

[Scott Stedman @ScottMStedman]

The real scandal that happened in 2020 was that Russian spies Andrii Derkach and Konstantin Kilimnik produced Trump aide Michael Caputo’s anti-Biden documentary. Then, LAST YEAR, Caputo got Trump to personally kill the FBI investigation into the matter.

The swamp, baby!

[Ruth Ben-Ghiat @ruthbenghiat]

Mussolini ordered everyone to refer to him as Him, as though he was some kind of infallible God. Then he entered Italy into a losing war and his incompetence was revealed.

[NoelCaslerComedy @caslernoel]

I wish y’all had believed me in 2016 that this motherf*cker was on drugs.

[Steven Rustad🇦🇺🇳🇴 @HobbsSteven]

@quite_majority Same day appointment, $0 out of pocket is my experience.

[Cheryl Kernot @cheryl_kernot]

Really worth a watch.

[Ronni🧂Salt-WhoWroteGunnawahYeahThatOne @RonniSalt]

@strangerous10 ▫️

This man is a US citizen - a US citizen, resident in Australia pushing, for the rights of Israel to interfere in the way Australian universities are run - at an inquiry allegedly into the actions leading to the Bondi incident

Why is he there?

▫️
https://t.co/FJabTtJhg6

[Steven Rustad🇦🇺🇳🇴 @HobbsSteven]

This is the WORST One YET… https://t.co/jqgtvBq9Zv via @YouTube

[Steven Rustad🇦🇺🇳🇴 @HobbsSteven]

@tonez725 @0liviajulianna Frightened of things that never happen.

[Steven Rustad🇦🇺🇳🇴 @HobbsSteven]

@JamesTate121 He’s used to a high work load, like running a school with no students.

[NoelCaslerComedy @caslernoel]

Assholes have always been drawn to Trump like flies to sh*t. Todd Blanche is a good example of this, so are the folks you know in real life who voted for him. It is true that DJT is the most destructive force this nation has known but it never would have gone so far w/o enabling.

[Steven Rustad🇦🇺🇳🇴 @HobbsSteven]

@JoeBasement1 @TheMaineWonk @ossoff

[Steven Rustad🇦🇺🇳🇴 @HobbsSteven]

@MAGAts_Exposed @DHSgov USA—>GDR in front of our eyes.

[Steven Rustad🇦🇺🇳🇴 @HobbsSteven]

@ShesEdible @FPWellman You and trump’s mushroom.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

It does not matter whether the man federal immigration agents killed in Maine had work authorization. It does not matter whether he had a social security number. The state killed a man, and the national conversation turned first to his paperwork. That order of priorities is worth sitting with for a moment.

The debate underway is whether the victim somehow earned his own death. The question that should be asked, why agents of the state are killing people over immigration status at all, has gone strangely quiet.

It deserves saying plainly: this is not a normal practice anywhere. Most authoritarian states, whatever else they do, do not execute people over work permits.

Among Western democracies, the number of countries that do this is zero. I say that carefully, and I include the United States in the arithmetic. A country where this happens, and where the response is to audit the victim, has stepped outside that category, whether or not it has noticed yet.

Nobody knows where this ends. America will not repeat anyone else's history; it will make its own, and its own history books will one day have to account for this chapter. But the direction of travel is visible from here, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

What worries an outside observer most is not any single incident but the paralysis around them. When one side asks the government to stop killing innocent people, the answer is not reflection but reflex: do not listen to them, they are the other side. When even that request has become a partisan position, something essential has already broken.

And the pattern from here is familiar. One killing becomes several. Unrest follows, because decent people will try to stop what they cannot accept. And unrest, in turn, becomes the argument for emergency powers, manufactured or real, which enable more of what caused the unrest in the first place. This is not prophecy. It is simply how these sequences have always run.

For decades, people asked how ordinary countries slid into darkness. The answer was never a dramatic turning point with sinister music. It was a Tuesday, a news cycle, a paperwork debate over a dead man. Then another one.

To my American friends reading this: I know the majority of you want no part of it. But watching from the outside, we notice something your own media seems unwilling to show: one half of your country has effectively been silenced. Not argued down, simply removed from the picture. The cameras point one way now.

They find endless airtime for the people explaining why someone had to die, why a mother lunged at twenty-two masked men, why the latest body is somehow its own fault. The people asking why any of this is happening at all do not get a microphone.

A majority you can neither see nor hear is still a majority. I have known your country too long to doubt it. So the rest of us will say what your cameras will not: the America worth remembering does not kill people, documented or not, and every single one of you knows exactly why that sentence should never have needed writing.

Stay connected, follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

[Steven Rustad🇦🇺🇳🇴 @HobbsSteven]

@PistoneDominick @ColMoeDavis The boss is a fucknuckle.

[Steven Rustad🇦🇺🇳🇴 @HobbsSteven]

@BeckyABerry @CattardSlim His associates are, but you support them.

[Cuckturd @CattardSlim]

Trump has done more to block Epstein investigations than Jeffrey Epstein himself.

And Maga will still tell you the Pedo has nothing to hide.