Gruart

father, gardener, tinkerer, brewer, scientist, logician, malcontent

[the Juice Media @thejuicemedia]

The Government™ has made an ad about #Palantir, and it's surprsingly honest and informative.

[Andrew Leach 🇨🇦 @andrew_leach]

This is pretty startling.

[ArtButMakeItSports @ArtButSports]

Untitled, by Alma Thomas, 1968 (slightly rotated), 📸 by Justin Setterfield

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Hasan Piker: “Nick Shirley is a right-wing propagandist and someone that I genuinely think is medically stupid. He is the newest Republican mouthpiece. He went to Minneapolis, looked at a bunch of kindergartens, demanded to see the children inside and thought because the people were reluctant to allow him entry into a kindergarten, which would have been illegal anyway, that they must have been up to no good”

[Acyn @Acyn]

Ossoff: Let's be very clear about what the president is saying to the American people. The president is saying that he will not sign a bill whose purpose is to make housing affordable unless his allies in congress pass a voter suppression bill to rig the election. He is saying, I won't even sign a bill that will give economic relief to Americans unless the rules of this election are changed so that he, Donald Trump, cannot be held accountable for all of his misdeeds because that's what he really fears most of all is that when there is a change in the balance of power, and when we restore checks and balances, he knows that there will be subpoenas flying that officials from his administration will be testifying under oath about the full range of misconduct and corruption that we already know has been happening since the moment he was sworn in.

[NoelCaslerComedy @caslernoel]

Y’all acting like you’ve never seen an octogenarian drug addict blow 16M on Reflecting Pool reno cause he gave a no bid gov’t contract to a guy who looks like he sold quaaludes to The Riddler & then blame the algae bloom on a 350 ft boxcutter attack by underwater Antifa before?

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

With today's passing of Alan Greenspan, the one thing you are obligated to do is watch this C-Span clip of Greenspan being utterly destroyed by Bernie Sanders, at a time when every other lawmaker was praising Greenspan as a hero as he created conditions for the financial crisis.

[BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ @mmpadellan]

Holy sh*t, this dude @JonathanPieNews thoroughly OBLITERATED trump, and it is glorious.

Definitely worth a watch.🔥🔥

[Yasmina @yasminalombaert]

Brilliant!

“Trump, the peacemaker.” - Jonathan Pie

“Back to you, Sophie.
Thank you. It's interesting, isn't it, that Trump signed this deal in Versailles, you know, the location of another famous humiliating, total capitulation. But you know, of course, Trump will spin this as a massive success because he's got form in declaring he's won when clearly he hasn't.

But this war was a success in the same way that paying $14 million to have large chunks of blue paint floating in an algae-infested reflecting pool was money well spent.

The truth is, the United States has rarely looked weaker, and Iran has rarely looked stronger, having now worked out that if anyone doesn't do exactly what they want them to, they'll just close the Strait of Hormuz, and they've got the whole world by the bullbags.

We went from week one: "I will win. Victory will be easier than that time I kidnapped the president of Venezuela."

To week two: "I won."

To week three: "Why aren't you helping me win?"

To week four: "I don't need your help to win, but if you don't help me win, I'm going to destroy NATO."

Week five: "If you don't let me win, I'll annihilate an entire civilization."
It's quite a feat to give the Iranian regime the moral high ground, but luckily, Donald Trump shattered the illusion of American morality a long time ago.

Week six: "We're winning, and to prove it, here's an AI picture of me dressed as Jesus.”

Week seven: "The Pope is a soy-filled, woke, Guardian reader."

Week eight: "I'm getting bored now."

Weeks nine through to 14: "Really bored now, and I've got ballrooms to build and cage fights on the White House lawn to organise."

And four months later, victory!

Thank you very much, where's my peace prize?

And if the rest of the G7 can just clear up the mess and pay the bill, that would be great.

The outcome was always inevitable, but you know, it's been fun to watch.

Most of Trump's posts on Truth Social around the conflict have sounded less like the leader of the free world and more like a 14-year-old boy who's the only one left in the class not to have fingered anyone.

One particular highlight being on Easter Sunday, when Trump went on to Truth Social to write, "Open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards."
Which are the words of a true diplomat with supreme control of the situation.

He then spent some time at the White House Easter Egg Roll, where he gave a speech to a bunch of bemused primary school children about how he's thinking of starting World War III in Iran and Joe Biden's auto-pen.

But this conflict hasn't all been plain sailing. Trump got really angry with the UK, and Spain, and Canada, Australia, Italy—in fact, anyone who raised any objections to this gross example of imperial overreach was branded a coward.

It was as if he felt like we should all be grateful that his latest piece of American expansionism didn't involve making Canada the 51st state or carpet bombing the sleepy village of Greenland.

Perhaps if you want your allies to be good allies, then maybe start treating us like allies. Don't bully your allies, or slam illegal tariffs on your allies, or interfere with their elections by overtly promoting far-right parties across Europe whilst hurling insults at our leaders and threatening to invade Allied sovereign territory, and then demand we come to your aid just because you started a war because one, Benjamin Netanyahu told you to, and two, to distract from the fact that you appear in the Epstein files more times than Jesus is mentioned in the Bible.

But at least someone did all right out of this whole thing. Well, for me, the highlight of the whole shit show was the $2.1 billion in bets placed minutes before presidential announcements about the war in Iran.

1/2

[evan loves worf @esjesjesj]

No community note. It’s true

[Negan @Roger_Negan]

This

[Gruart @grouef]

@ThatEricAlper I can get almost any janky electronic interface working through a combination of forceful breath and manual micro-adjustments

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Legendary #Maddow: “Headline: ‘Donald Trump can’t open the Strait of Hormuz, so instead he’s blocking the Strait of Detroit.’ It’s a headline from The Globe and Mail, the Canadian newspaper. The big beautiful new bridge that Trump is not allowing us to use, is a bridge that crosses the Detroit River. It goes from…Detroit…to…Ontario. Canada fully financed and paid for this bridge. It is ready to be opened, it will be the biggest U.S. border crossing in Canada, it will be one of the most important routes for trade in the entire world, the single most important one with one of our two most important trading partners, Canada, but Trump won’t let anybody use it, even though it’s ready, ready to be driven on.” 🤦‍♀️

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Legendary #Maddow: “It was supposed to open Friday, it is not open because Trump says he does not want it open. When this bridge does open some day, if Trump ever lets it open, you should know that there is a competing bridge a little way down the river, a privately-owned very old very congested toll bridge that will likely LOSE some of its traffic…because of competition. It will lose some of its traffic to this pretty, brand new bridge that has just been built. The family that operates the competing old bridge, earlier this year, made a $1 million donation to Donald Trump’s super pac. In short order, a member of that family then got an in person meeting with Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The White House and the pac say that was just a coincidence…but after the million dollar donation, he gets this meeting, and then the SAME day of the meeting, Howard Lutnick calls President Donald Trump and then Trump suddenly discovers new supposedly trade-related reasons why he’s now suddenly against this bridge, even though previously he has been for it.” 🤦‍♀️

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Psaki: “Now, the origin story of how we got here is very worth remembering because part of the reason Elon Musk’s companies were able to become so successful in the first place, is because they received a ton of government subsidies, investments, and contracts, and that money was especially crucial to Musk’s companies in their earliest days, when their success was far from a sure bet. Without a critical taxpayer funded investment during a very precarious time for Tesla, it may not have survived at all. And likewise, the financing and contracts that SpaceX received from the federal government in its early years, were absolutely VITAL to making it the company it has now become. So the federal government that Musk took his chainsaw to, was the SAME federal government that enabled that guy to become the world’s richest man by the massive margin we see today.” 🤔

[Gil McGowan @gilmcgowan]

Here are a few excerpts from a column Mintz wrote about Alberta leaving Canada. He hates many of the things Canada stands for (eg. public health care). The arsonists want us to believe they’re the ones we should trust to put out the fire they started.

[🇨🇦Wayne🇨🇦 @Reil76]

The Carney government just dropped a $3.2 billion food security strategy and it’s worth understanding what it actually does.

Right now, only 11 cents of every dollar you spend on groceries reaches the farmer who grew it. Five companies control 80% of the grocery market. And Canada exports billions in agricultural products while turning around and importing processed versions of the same food from the US at a markup.

This plan attacks that problem structurally. $1 billion goes toward food terminals and distribution hubs so independent grocers can buy directly from Canadian farmers, cutting out the middleman. The Competition Bureau gets a funding boost to go after the property control tricks big grocers use to block competitors from moving in nearby. And Farm Credit Canada gets $1 billion for domestic food processing so we stop exporting raw product and importing it back as something more expensive.

The targets are concrete: expand the Ontario Food Terminal by end of year, open two new food terminals and 10 regional food hubs by 2028.

This isn’t a handout to Loblaws. It’s infrastructure to break their stranglehold on the supply chain.

Will it fix your grocery bill overnight? No. But building real competition into the system is how you get lasting price relief, not a rebate that disappears after one quarter.

[John Collins @Logically_JC]

This one hits hard.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Graham Platner: “We should never tax someone into poverty. We should also still raise taxes on billionaires and corporations. Bezos wants us to think if you raise his individual taxes, that money isn’t going to pay for all the things you want. That’s why we’re not raising it just on you. We’re raising it on all 930 billionaires in the US. It’s why we’re also not just going after your income, but the wealth as well. The wealth they sit on, the wealth they never actually bring into the real world so they never pay capital gains on it, but they borrow against it so they can have liquidity. Of course Jeff Bezos is gonna tell us if we raise his taxes things won’t get better. He doesn’t want us to raise his taxes. He’s a greedy person. That makes perfect sense to me that he would say that. He’s just entirely wrong and self-serving”