Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

[ti-amie]

Idiocracy on full display. The chyron is interesting too.

[ti-amie]

[ti-amie]

MeidasTouch
‪@meidastouch.com‬
Sources tell MeidasTouch the White House will shut down portions of the I-5 for Vice President JD Vance’s Marine Corps spectacle during No Kings Protests, triggering chaos, gridlock, and outrage as troops go unpaid during the shutdown.

The Trump admin is apparently finalizing plans for two days of events under the pretext of the 250th anniversary of the Marines. Sources close to MTN describe the closure as part of a “vanity parade” that may involve Navy warships shooting live missiles into Camp Pendleton as a “show of force.”

Governor Newsom's press office responds:


EXCLUSIVE: Governor Gavin Newsom’s office confirmed to MeidasTouch he is working with local partners to minimize what would be “a massive disruption, and reckless disregard for California’s infrastructure and communities.”

[ti-amie]

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https://news.usni.org/2019/05/28/expert ... al%20ships

Aaron Rupar
‪@atrupar.com‬
Trump: "They spent $900,093,000 on the catapults trying to get them to work. And they had steam, which worked so beautifully and it has for 50 years, right? So we're gonna go back. Seriously fellas, I want to make that change. I'm gonna do an executive order."

New video at link: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3m4ah3fm5z72s

[ponchi101]

Wait till the sailors see the new rowing rooms to power the aircraft carriers. The oars will be beautiful.
It is so easy to see he is senile!!!

[ti-amie]

JD Vance repeats comments he wants wife Usha to convert to Christianity

US vice-president announces to 10,000 attenders of Turning Point USA that he prefers wife, who is Hindu, to be Christian
Lauren Aratani
Sat 1 Nov 2025 14.01 EDT

JD Vance is doubling down on comments he made about wanting his wife, Usha Vance, to convert to Christianity – remarks that drew political backlash from some quarters.

At an event with Turning Point USA at the University of Mississippi to honor the conservative group’s slain founder Charlie Kirk, an audience member questioned the US vice-president about how he sees the links between American patriotism and Christianity.

“Why are we making Christianity one of the major things that you have to have in common to be one of you guys? To show that I love America just as much as you do?” the audience member asked, after pointing out that Vance’s wife, Usha, is Hindu and they are raising their children in an interfaith marriage.

Vance said that his wife grew up in a Hindu household “but not a particularly religious family” – and noted that when he met his wife they would have both considered themselves agnostic or atheist.

Vance converted to Catholicism in his 30s after being raised in a loosely evangelical family. He was baptized into the church in 2019 just as he started to become a prominent supporter of Donald Trump, who chose Vance as his running mate when he successfully ran for a second presidency in 2024.

“My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching,” Vance, a former US senator for Ohio, said at the time of his baptism. “I saw a real overlap between what I would like to see and what the Catholic church would like to see.”

At the Turning Point USA event, Vance said that he and his wife eventually decided to raise their kids as Christians.

“Our two kids go to Christian school. Our eight-year-old just did his first communion a year ago. That’s how we decided to come to our arrangement,” Vance said, to roaring applause. “As I’ve told her, and as I’ve said publicly, and as I’ll say now in front of 10,000 of my closest friends: do I hope, eventually, that she is somehow moved by the same thing I was moved by in church? Yes. I honestly do wish that, because I believe in the Christian gospel and I hope that eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.

“But if she doesn’t,” Vance went on to say, “God says that everybody has free will, so that doesn’t cause a problem with me. That’s something that you work out with your friends, your family, the person you most love.”

Usha Vance has publicly stated that she doesn’t intend to convert to Christianity. In June, she told conservative blogger Meghan McCain that while the family has made church “a family experience … the kids know that I’m not Catholic”.

“They have plenty of access to the Hindu tradition, from books that we give them to things that we show them to visit recently to India, and some religious elements of that visit,” Usha Vance said.

The executive director of the Hindu American Foundation was critical of Vance’s remarks, telling the New York Times that the vice-president was “basically saying that … this aspect of [Usha] is just not enough”.

“That’s a lot of uncertainty in the community,” Suhag Shukla said to the outlet. “This just added kind of fuel to those fears.”

After his comments Wednesday, Vance replied to a social media post – which has since been taken down – that said “it’s weird to throw your wife’s religion under the bus, in public, for a moment’s acceptance by groypers”, a term for certain far-right extremists.

Vance called the comment “disgusting” and an example of “anti-Christian bigotry”. He said that his Christian faith “tells me the Gospel is true and is good for human beings”.

“[Usha] herself encouraged me to re-engage with my faith many years ago. She is not a Christian and has no plans to convert, but like many people in an interfaith marriage – or any interfaith relationship – I hope she may one day see things as I do,” he wrote.

“Regardless, I’ll continue to love and support her and talk to her about faith and life and everything else, because she’s my wife.

“Yes, Christians have beliefs. And yes, those beliefs have many consequences, one of which is that we want to share them with other people. That is a completely normal thing, and anyone who’s telling you otherwise has an agenda.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ristianity

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[ponchi101]

So, when he married her (talking about Vance here), her religion did not matter.
Her reply should be easy: "Next life, I will be Christian".
That should settle it.

[ti-amie]

This video is being deleted in some places.

[dryrunguy]

So, when he married her (talking about Vance here), her religion did not matter.
Her reply should be easy: "Next life, I will be Christian".
That should settle it.

My understanding is that, when they met, according to statements made by Vance, they were both basically atheist/agnostic when they met. He eventually became Catholic (almost certainly for political reasons). For whatever reasons, she chose the Hindu faith at some point because it was the religion in which she was raised. (Her family is not devout about it, though.)

It's all meaningless and pointless, of course. But that's the loose sequence of events as I understand it.

[ti-amie]

So, when he married her (talking about Vance here), her religion did not matter.
Her reply should be easy: "Next life, I will be Christian".
That should settle it.

My understanding is that, when they met, according to statements made by Vance, they were both basically atheist/agnostic when they met. He eventually became Catholic (almost certainly for political reasons). For whatever reasons, she chose the Hindu faith at some point because it was the religion in which she was raised. (Her family is not devout about it, though.)

It's all meaningless and pointless, of course. But that's the loose sequence of events as I understand it.

They are said to have bonded over Ayn Rand so make of that what you will. The MAGAts were already sniping about her but the media hushed it up. She is said to still be in his corner.


Vance and Erika Kirk's hug

[dryrunguy]

I'll put this here. A very thoughtful, and thought-provoking, piece from this morning's NY Times Opinion newsletter. I haven't been able to shake it since I first read it this morning. It's long, but it's well-worth the time investment.
::

How to Be a Good Citizen of a Bad Country

By M. Gessen
Opinion Columnist

When your country pursues abhorrent policies, when the face it turns to the world is the face of a monster, what does that say about you? In my experience, it is strikingly easy to shrug off one’s responsibility for the country where one pays taxes, contributes to the public conversation and, at least nominally, has the right to vote, if that country is the United States. It seems one can just say “Not in my name” and continue to enjoy the wealth and the freedom of movement one’s citizenship confers. But as this country builds more cages for immigrants, deploys military force against civilians in city after city, regularly commits murder in the high seas and systematically destroys its own democratic institutions, that may change. It should change. What does one do then? How can one be a good citizen of a bad state?

On a recent trip to Israel, I talked to a number of Jewish citizens who have grappled with this question. In the last two years, as Israel has carried out a genocide against Palestinians and has all but dropped any pretense of democracy, many Israelis have come to dread telling people what country they are from. Some see this as unfair, having never personally supported their country’s far-right politicians or its prime minister, and having done what they could to change the course of Israeli politics. Others — a tiny minority — are grateful for the scorn of other nations, in hopes it can bring change to their own.

The people I sought out don’t agree on everything. But all of them have reckoned with questions of belonging and complicity, have wondered whether they should stay in their country, and have asked themselves what they are morally obligated to do to stop or slow the actions of their government. (About 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Palestinian, but for this article I spoke only to Jews, for it is in the name of Jewish safety and Jewish nationhood that the Israeli government claims to act.)

“In a free society, all are involved in what some are doing,” said Abraham Joshua Heschel, an American rabbi who opposed the Vietnam War and participated in the civil rights movement. “Some are guilty; all are responsible.” Michael Sfard, a human rights lawyer who has spent much of his professional life representing Palestinians in Israeli courts, has adopted this understanding. Over the years, Sfard has come to consider himself a dissident rather than a member of the opposition: There is no political party that represents his views, and it has grown increasingly difficult to pursue justice through the Israeli court system. And yet, he said, “As a citizen and a resident, I benefit.”

We were having breakfast at one of Tel Aviv’s myriad lovely cafes where one could have good coffee and fresh food while some 40 miles away people were starving. One could reasonably assume that many people at the cafe were at least somewhat uneasy about that starvation, but the discomfort wasn’t visible; what was, Sfard pointed out, were three different displays devoted to Israeli hostages in Gaza, who were still captive when we spoke. He had no objection to these displays, he hastened to add; it was the lack of any acknowledgment of the genocide that concerned him. Both the genocide and the obliviousness were policies of a state to which, Sfard stressed, he continued to contribute, “not just by paying taxes, but even now, as I’m talking to you, I contribute to an understanding of Israel, which Israel benefits from.”

Over the summer, Sfard told me, “I had to get away.” He and his family went to Italy. While they were there, some of the most dire reports of mass starvation started coming out. The distance helped put things in perspective. When Sfard returned, he wrote an essay that Haaretz, a left-wing newspaper, published with the headline “We Israelis Are Part of a Mafia Crime Family. It’s Our Job to Fight Against It From Within.” Many people look at the far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, “these two petty fascists, who — unlike their Italian or German counterparts — have neither class nor aesthetics, only raw racism and sadistic cruelty,” Sfard wrote, and think, with relief, “This doesn’t represent us.” But, he continued, “the criminal, felonious, unforgivable project of Gaza’s destruction is an all-Israeli project. It could not have happened without the cooperation — whether through active contribution or silence — of all parts of Jewish Israeli society.” Admitting one’s complicity means being called to action, including action that many Israelis perceive as disloyal. Sfard called on his readers to get behind people who refuse to serve in Gaza, and to support sanctions, political isolation and international investigations into Israel’s actions.

Many of Sfard’s friends and colleagues — a “staggering” number, he said — have left the country in the last couple of years. Sometimes, he told me, he is moved to show something to a close colleague and it takes him a few minutes to remember that the other lawyer no longer lives in the country. As for Sfard, “I’ve told myself that as long as I can struggle, I am here.” But it’s not all about him and his work: Sfard asks himself if he wants his two children to live in a politically extreme, socially conservative, increasingly religious, segregated Israel. Many Israelis are struggling with some version of this question. One couple who, like Sfard, are determined to stay as long as possible, told me that their 2-year-old son had spent all of his birthdays so far in a bomb shelter. But another family told me that they worried that moving their kids to Europe would expose them to overwhelming anti-Israel sentiment.

The question that haunts all Israeli Jewish parents is what will happen when their kids turn 18, the age of compulsory military service. A family’s biggest contribution to the state is a child who joins the army. Universal military service (with some exemptions, including for the ultra-Orthodox and for Palestinian citizens of Israel) has been a pillar of security and national cohesion since the founding of the state of Israel. It is also the state’s most effective instrument for implicating the maximum number of people in its policies and its crimes. At one of the weekly protests in Tel Aviv, where, for many months, thousands of people gathered every Saturday night to demand a cease-fire and the return of the hostages, I met a left-wing journalist two of whose children were serving in Gaza. So were the children of two friends who usually joined her at these protests.

Almost 35 years ago, when Sfard reached conscription age, he joined the military. But when he was ordered to serve in Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, he refused — and went to military prison. Now, he told me, he wouldn’t serve at all — both because the military has changed and because his understanding has evolved: He has come to see that the entire military structure reinforces an apartheid system.

Refusing to serve in the military is probably the most potent form of protest available to Israeli Jews. During the 2023 mass protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to abolish judicial independence, thousands of reservists publicly pledged not to report for duty if called, and more than 200 teenagers signed an open letter saying they would not enlist. It’s impossible to track down every signatory to every such letter, but it seems that the teenagers might have kept their word better than the reservists, many of whom reported for duty following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on the south of Israel.

Israel’s most prominent refusenik may be Ella Keidar Greenberg, who was 16 when she signed the 2023 pledge to refuse enlistment. She was scheduled to report for service on March 19 of this year. On March 18, Greenberg posted a video. “I am not willing to take part in the genocide in Gaza,” she said. “Refusal is the imperative.” The following day, she reported to the army base, where she was promptly jailed. Greenberg, who is transgender, spent a month in near total isolation because, she told me, trans prisoners are separated from other inmates.

These days Greenberg spends much of her time in Masafer Yatta, an area in the South Hebron Hills featured in the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land.” Masafer Yatta comprises more than a dozen small villages, each of which is fighting for survival in the face of constant attacks by Israeli Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers. In July, a contributor to “No Other Land,” a teacher and activist named Awdah Hathaleen, was killed by a settler. In other incidents, Greenberg told me, settlers have commandeered sheep and used rubble from their own construction sites to block entrances to the caves where some villagers are living. Soldiers and settlers routinely detain Palestinian residents for hours or days, subjecting them to physical abuse and humiliation. Greenberg is one of dozens of activists — all of them Israeli Jews or foreign nationals — engaged in what’s called protective presence. They often insert their bodies between the villagers and their attackers. Most of the time, attackers seem to recognize these Jewish or Western bodies as more valuable than those of the Palestinians. Still, Greenberg has taken her share of beatings. A few weeks before we met, Greenberg told me, there had been a “pogrom,” in which settlers had fractured at least one activist’s skull.

What is it like to be protecting Palestinians from your countrymen? “I’ve had shame and guilt, but these are not the things that bring me to action,” Greenberg said. “Responsibility brings me to action. And rage.” She sees no way to disavow being an Israeli. “No matter what I do, I am Israeli. It’s a choice that I have no choice but to choose.” She can decide what to do about being Israeli, though — and doing nothing is not an option. “Being an idle bystander is doing something, too. I’m either maintaining the system or dismantling it.”

For a few months, Greenberg was living in the West Bank, only returning to Tel Aviv, where her mother, grandmother and older sister live, every other weekend. The hourlong journey from Jerusalem was the hardest part of her life. “I am on the train with those soldiers, and they see me as one of them — and at that point I am actually one of them,” she said. After what she has experienced in the occupied West Bank, being among people who are wearing Israeli uniforms feels unbearable. “It’s too much to hold at once, to remind yourself, ‘These are kids my age, they were brought up this way.’ No. I have to think, ‘They are (expletive) monsters.’” A couple of years ago, her older sister was doing her mandatory service. One time, Greenberg went home straight from an anti-occupation protest that the Israel Defense Forces broke up with stun grenades, rubber bullets and beatings — and there at the dinner table sat her own sister, wearing the uniform.

In my life in New York I have not yet seen a single ICE officer — though I know that buildings in my neighborhood have been raided — and I can go for weeks, if not longer, without interacting with a Trump supporter. Israeli dissidents, on the other hand, always feel as though they are swimming in a sea of otherness. Noam Shuster-Eliassi, a comedian and the protagonist of the new documentary “Coexistence, My Ass!” lives in Wahat-al-Salam/Neve Shalom, a village where about 60 Palestinian citizen-of-Israel families and as many Jewish Israeli ones live together in an attempt to model what their land could be. Shuster-Eliassi grew up in the village, speaking Hebrew and Arabic, and moved back there a few months ago, when she learned she was pregnant. But even life in a utopian experiment doesn’t allow her to escape the dominant Israeli reality. “I go to the hospital and there is a father with an M16 over his shoulder, and he is escorting his partner in a very gentle way, like my partner is doing with me.”

The last time I interviewed Shuster-Eliassi, about a year and a half ago, we sat at a cafe in Jaffa and people kept stopping by to say hello or ask for a selfie. She is popular. And yet, she told me, bookings have dried up. The comedy scene is alive and well, and some comedians are cracking jokes about Gazans dying when a shipment of humanitarian aid falls on their heads. “These comedians who are making fun of starving children — I know the booker, I know the guy, I know how bad he smells, because I’ve shared the stage with him,” she said. That proximity makes Shuster-Eliassi think that she is “just lucky” to have been raised differently from most Israelis. Her father repeatedly went to prison for refusing military service. Her Iranian-born maternal grandmother, faced lifelong discrimination. And in the village, Shuster-Eliassi grew up alongside Palestinian kids whose families carried the memory of the Nakba. If not for this unusual childhood, she said, “I could easily have been swept up.” It’s a humbling awareness — and a reminder that she cannot shrug off her Israeliness. “Even if I were to burn my passport, I couldn’t escape. It would be irresponsible of me to escape.” Shuster-Eliassi takes her cue from Iranian artists she knows, who manage to find ways to resist in a country that’s far more repressive than hers.

I have been visiting Wahat-al-Salam/Neve Shalom for about seven years, and have seen the village transformed by both the passage of time and, especially, the attack of Oct. 7 and Israel’s war on Gaza. On my first visit after Oct. 7 I met Jonathan Dekel, a filmmaker who had signed a reservists’ pledge not to serve an undemocratic government. And then, on the morning of the Hamas attack, he reported for duty. Knowing that people — including someone he knew in a kibbutz in the south — were being slaughtered made him feel as though he had no choice. Just before Oct. 7 he had completed a film called “Checkout,” a dark satire of Israeli military intelligence. Now he was serving in intelligence, where his first task was to sift through footage from Hamas body cams — footage that formed the core of the 47-minute film Israeli officials have been screening all over the world for two years, to justify the onslaught on Gaza. Israelis refer to the reel as “the atrocity film.” When I met him a few months later, he seemed to be struggling to make sense of his life: He was still serving, and still coming home every night to the co-living village where he had moved his family in the hopes of raising his children for a different future. He found it increasingly hard to see what Israel was doing in Gaza as a just war, and yet he felt that he should continue to serve.

This time, Dekel and I met on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A couple of months earlier — nearly two years into the war — Dekel had moved his family to the United States because, he told me, “that was the only way I could avoid forever active duty.” He felt that if his unit called again, he wouldn’t be able to say no. But if he was 6,000 miles away, he wouldn’t have to make the choice.

It was a few days into the cease-fire, and Dekel was again — still — trying to get his bearings. He told me that he wished he could see things in clear black-and-white terms, like his friends who are further to the left do. These friends back in Israel used to judge him for serving in the military. He tells them that they, too, could be doing more to resist. “The fact that you are not in uniform doesn’t mean you have to keep paying taxes for these uniforms.” Then he shifted his gaze to American leftists. “It’s great that you go to ‘No Kings’ protests, but who is paying” he asked, for the bombs that had been raining on Gaza? As Dekel pointed out, “Trumpism and Bibism are joined at the hip.”

Dekel was trying to shift some of the responsibility for his own actions — his own resistance, which he felt was insufficient — onto unnamed others, and in doing so he was telling an important truth about resistance in general. Seeing other people act makes it less frightening to join in protest. Even more important is an unspoken principle my conversations with these Israelis reminded me of: To be a good citizen of a bad state, one has to do scary things. It may be writing an op-ed calling for your own country’s isolation, as Sfard did, knowing that it would cost him friendships and get him branded a traitor. It may be using your body to shield someone more vulnerable, as Greenberg does. It may be withdrawing your economic cooperation. It is weighing leaving against staying, moral obligation against fear, flying under the radar against taking a risk — and opting for the risk.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/opin ... f11dfcd63a

[ponchi101]

Very interesting indeed, but the question was not answered. What can you and what MUST you do when you are a citizen of a country like that?
I am a firm believer that technology is stunting resistance. And by technology I mean two: military technology, in which the brute force of one single soldier equipped with modern warfare tech (machine guns, tear gas launchers, kevlar armor) can stunt any force of 100 people, and information technology, in which one operator with some AI (or regular algorithm tech) can surveil and monitor hundreds of thousands of possible dissidents, and dispatch the goons to chop the relevant heads off.
So, what can you do? Stand in front of the ICE goons and get beaten up and arrested? Not a good option, especially when then the media manipulators paint you as a terrorist. Film and upload to the web? Yes, and what has that ever done?

I am always at a loss. Being a Venezuelan, I have been saying by almost 15 years that the sole solution for us is through violence, but it has to be evenly matched violence: we must have as much fire power as the government animals.
But in the USA, you will never be able to do that. There is no way a civilian movement will be able to match the Military/Intelligence might of the US GOV.
So who knows if dissident movements are a way of the past.

[dryrunguy]

I think the point is there IS no answer, ponchi. Here was had a handful of people who drew their line in their own way and in accordance with their own compass. They agree on some things but disagree on others. Their juxtaposition from one another is precisely the same as any other bad country dealing with similar, highly complex, conflicting issues. The big difference between the people profiled here and, say, their counterparts in the U.S. would be that the people featured here (except perhaps for the very young transperson in the piece who speaks in unequivocal absolutes with zero doubt or room for negotiation, but I'll give her the benefit of the doubt for this brain exercise of mine) would probably be able to sit around a table and discuss these complexities rationally and sensibly, at least for the most part, while their U.S. counterparts would ultimately end up vilifying one another for not going far enough or going too far.

Anyway, I keep coming back to the wise words of Hannah Rosin in the aftermath of the famous catcalling video from 2014: "Activism is never perfectly executed." And the reason is there is not, nor will there ever be, just one clear, easily identifiable path for everyone to take in response to the bad countries we live in.

And maybe that's okay? Maybe? Can anything of substance be accomplished by lateral forces working in sometimes competing or contrary directions?