A Grand Jury, the Best Jury, Extremely High Quality Jury: Today in Tweets

@Oogly
Worst part is, if he does war it up with Fake Despot Korea, hate crimes against Asians will likely increase. ‘Model minority’ didn’t protect the Japanese in the 40s. This would be bad on every level…

There are so many threads in Trump’s Russian connections that I wonder if Mueller’s team can ever untangle them all. The most important thing is to find a thread that he can nail Trump with, but the knot is huge. The simplest part, and the one that Mueller seems to be focusing on, may be Trump’s incredible number of Russian business contacts. They strongly suggest that Russian oligarchs, who are all subservient to Putin, have been using Trump’s businesses for money laundering for years. But a lot of the deals involved are very complex. (A sample: the antics of Felix Sater.)

Possibly the most disturbing part of the knot is the tangle of connections surrounding Cambridge Analytica, a company that seems to have been central to right-wing campaigns to analyze and manipulate voters in both the presidential election and the Brexit vote. It belongs to Robert Mercer, a strongly Trump-supporting billionaire, and it’s tied to Bannon, the European far right, and Russia. It exemplifies how the world is increasingly controlled by a global ruling class, and how they’re using 21st-century technology to pull it off. That’s the fundamental story underlying Trump’s victory (well, that and the xenophobia, sexism, etc. that the rulers use to manipulate their subjects). But it won’t get the kind of widespread coverage it needs. Everybody’s focused on the spectacular vomit coming out of Trump’s mouth.

@kiki:

I was really excited when I first saw Ciri in the lead-up to The Witcher 3‘s release, because I thought it meant we would be getting a new main character to play.

I guess technically that’s true, but not in the way I’d been hoping. 🙁

I’d be happy to have a Trump Presidential KFC. I think that’d be appropriate.

Trump Presidential KFC

Or maybe the Trump Presidential Municipal Waste Facility?

@Oogly

Any show of hands on how often media will bury hate crimes against asians if Trump were to war with North Korea or some other Asian Country?

They didn’t say a passing word during Pride Month and nobody in the administration seems to care that nooses keep popping up at the Smithsonian. Ya know, the one in FUCKIN WASHINGTON!!!

Dunno how that sent…

Anyway, buried is too meager a word, I reckon. After all, we have always been at war with East Asia…

@Oogly

Yep. And I’m a Chinese Vietnamese immigrant with Trans issues, mental illnesses and am too brown to be seen as White

When you lay it all out like that, just… yeesh

Ha ha ha I’m so dead, fuck the American War Industry

*protective bubble hugs*

@ Gussie

Trump Memorial Tire Fire?

Pack enough anthracite coal into the tires, and it will burn for decades.

I’d suggest a yearly ceremony of dumping hot garbage into the fire, but adding that much to greenhouse gas emissions would be mistaken for glorifying.

Ha. Trump’s Presidential Library will be just a bunch of ghastly gold guilded furniture, crappy gold and crystal chandeliers, and copies of Fox and Friends broadcasts that verbally fellated him. Hung on the walls: crappy portraits of him and fake magazine covers.

No thanks.

@Skiriki:

I’m a sheltered person, and yesterday I saw the animation of the potential reach of NK’s missles and how it basically covered 80% of the US. I turned to my husband who was cooking and he just gave me a raised-eyebrow, “yeah” kind of look and my stomach hit the floor. I didn’t know. :/ I spent the rest of the night in dumb, terrified silence. It was bad enough when I was just worried South Korea was in danger. We’re dealing with toddlers smashing their little toy soldiers together and it’s terrifying.

But of course, my dad will still insist he made the right choice.

@Oogly

I’ve already got enough history from my own native countries to know that this isn’t new.

Oh, I know. That’s kinda my point. The way the country just goes hog-wild for any chance at killing brown foreigners dates back before the founding of the country. It is a major contributor to the chronic prevalence of fascist politics in the States, as ‘support the troops’ is a magic phrase to make antifascists look evil.

Yep. And I’m a Chinese Vietnamese immigrant with Trans issues, mental illnesses and am too brown to be seen as White

*hugs*

@Lumen8
North Korea is years at best, possibly decades, from having the capacity to launch anything at the U.S. Their recent test shows a rocket that is hypothetically capable of reaching Guam, or maybe even the Aleutian Islands. Neither of which are major military targets. That leaves completely aside the question of payload for said missiles, if and when they get ones with long enough range to actually reach California. Which they haven’t got, their nuclear weapons program is shit. And that’s just what they need to launch one single missile at the U.S. To actually pose more of a threat to Americans than our own gun laws, they’d need hundreds, at a minimum, and making a prototype isn’t at all the same as actually going into production. U.S. news is fearmongering about it to prepare the ground for the announcement of war. See “Saddam Hussein has WMDs!!!!111!!!11!1!!!11!” for another recent example of this.

Dalillama: I mostly agree. The only thing: NK can get a rock into orbit, which means it could land anywhere in the world.

Making that rock be a nuclear weapon that can survive re-entry and land somewhere they want to destroy and blow up — that’s indeed a tall order, one that took the US and USSR a good decade from their first orbital spacecraft. They had a much better-off economy to do it with (and a much larger population that could access both education and food), but also had to discover all the concepts.