Hitler didn’t take power democratically. Neither did Mussolini or Franco. They each found cracks in how liberal democracy worked in their respective countries. Those cracks were usually the places where the system was decidedly undemocratic, which in those three cases, was generally something where the old nobles still had some power and they lined up behind fascists to save them from leftists.

America never had nobles, but it does have plenty of cracks in its liberal democracy to be exploited by fascists.

So to answer your question simply, no, there are no instruments to fix this. Congress can potentially either reign Trump in with legislation, or even impeach him, but I don’t expect either one to happen. If the GOP can be swept out of Congress in 2026, then we can maybe start to fix some things without resorting to extralegal methods. Even that is only a starting point.

I do know for sure that we can’t go back to the old trajectory as if Trump was just an outlier.

Don’t worry about it.

In Chrono Cross, when entering Time Fortress Chronopolis, you immediately encounter the PolisPolice. This isn’t framed by the game as a boss encounter, but it is.

There is a design problem with this boss that you probably wouldn’t see in a more modern RPG. To survive its big attack, you need the White Plate to absorb white-based magic attacks. You get the White Plate by stealing it from the Sky Dragon. If you already fought the Sky Dragon and forgot to steal at the time, you are hosed. The game doesn’t let you go back and redo that, and the PolisPolice encounter is about 2/3rds of the way through the game–very late to be starting over again.

I replayed that encounter 20 times before I finally lucked out on the attack cycle to keep the party alive. Then I encountered the actual hardest boss: a disc scratch that prevented the game from continuing towards the very end.

Buzz Aldrin went to the moon, and only then did he understand why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Is there a Nintendo Power article I have to read to get past this one part? It’s not an authentic experience otherwise.

Billionaires fell over themselves to be a part of Trump’s second inauguration. The connection to fascism is right in front of you.

Context. I know kinky dom men who keep a Hitachi along with their floggers and clamps, and they might bring it out on a first time partner. They also tend to clean it and may even wrap a condom around it.

Windows running WSL running a VM running Debian 2.2.

Oh, it’s not just that. Trump wants to setup a bitcoin reserve. Ulbrich had 50,676 bitcoins (~$5.3B at the current exchange rate) that were all confiscated as part of his arrest. He doesn’t get those back just because he was pardoned. Good chance it’s now the seed money for the bitcoin reserve.

You have to be pretty damn naive to think Trump pardoned the guy in a vacuum. That’s not tribalism, but a simple observation that Trump doesn’t do anything unless it benefits himself.

They had months to draft the definition in the executive order. Perhaps more than a year if it was started internally by Project 2025. They still fucked it up.

If you’ve watched Babylon 5, this is like when ISN came back as a propaganda network.

If you haven’t watched Babylon 5, go watch Babylon 5.

They kept calling me a commie, so I had no choice but to become a commie.

I can only speculate on why. Perhaps they come as a package deal with servers, and they would prefer to avoid them otherwise.

There are plenty of drives of equivalent or more runtime than the Seagate drives. They cycle their drives every 10 years regardless of failure. The standout failure rate, the Seagate ST12000NM0007 at 11.77% failure, has less than half that average age.

Did it ever occur to you to watch the video? Even the first time was a very deliberate movement, and the second time should remove any doubt.

I wouldn’t call those numbers okay. They have noticeably higher failure rates than anybody else. On that particular report, they’re the only ones with failure rates >3% (save for one Toshiba and one HGST), and they go as high as 12.98%. Most drives on this list are <1%, but most of the Seagate drives are over that. Perhaps you can say that you’re not likely to encounter issues no matter what brand you buy, but the fact is that you’re substantially more likely to have issues with Seagate.

• Claim tested when at rest relative to the chair. Some restrictions apply. Offer void in Nebraska.

Backblaze.com gives stats on drive failures across their datacenters:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2024/

Seagate’s results stick out. Most of the drives with >2% failure rates are theirs. They even have one model over 11%.

What does it say when Marco is one of the most sane appointments we’re going to see?

Democrats do the minimum. Republicans make sure we don’t even do that.