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The Trump Arch and Trump Ballroom should be demolished when that becomes possible. An explanation:
How Long Does It Take? Trump Is Building Hitler’s Arch. The Next President Has To Blow It All Up. Period. Stop.
We spent 11 days walking Hitler’s Germany with our sons. Here’s what the Allies did to his monuments, and why Trump’s arch, ballroom and name all have to come down.
Some more thoughts:
Bouie is going to be disappointed because it’s unlikely the next president will be as willing as Trump was to reduce part of the White House to an embarrassing pile of rubble, again, for anti-Trump symbolism.
If they’re JD Vance or Marco Rubio, of course they’re keeping it, as is.
If they’re some Democrat, they’ll argue the White House needs an event space, then remove Trump’s name, remodel, reduce its size, etc. with White House preservationists leading the work etc.
But plunge the White House into another 4-8 years of trailer trash construction mode? Doubtful.
I’m still irritated the Bidens didn’t restore the Rose Garden to the way Jackie had it. That could be easily done. Although now we know it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
Last night my ADT smoke alarm began to malfunction. I go online – unfortunately ADT never updated anything so their site still thinks I live where I lived three addresses ago. So I call the 800 number and get a smarmy, unctuous AI which – prepare to be shocked – was fucking useless. This morning I called again and got a human, who easily, if temporarily, solved my problem.
So today, since ADT can’t be bothered to send anyone over the weekend, I will go through and yank the rest of ADT’s smoke alarms out. I’ve already ordered nice, dumb, reliable replacements from Amazon. Then, if I can reach a human again, I will have ADT change my billing to reflect the removal of part of their system.
Someone should, and someone no doubt will, make a list of companies that reject AI customer service bots and use humans, because the dumbest human alive is still better at customer service than the smartest AI. We will be seeing the AI-free label start to pop up.
AI is not a servant, it’s a parasite plagiarizing human creativity, and may, if not treated, end up as so many parasites do, by killing its host.
I hope the dumb ones you bought off of Amazon aren’t the Kidde brand. We’ve had nothing but trouble with them, and their website/800 number is borderline useless at best, with no AI. And, no humans, apparently.
We had a (second) less than 2 year old smoke detector fail. The first time, we just replaced it. This time, we checked the user guide/directions, and the combination of blinks/alerts wasn’t even listed in the “things that might be wrong” guide. These things are like $75 a pop, and so we reached out to the brand for a replacement. It took well over a month of phone calls and emails to get it.
We’ve had several neighbors who have also had problems with Kidde. The brand’s default response is to tell people to clean them. They are really f*cking expensive to have to constantly replace.
BRK (which I think are now under the first alert brand) are the best ones that I’ve found. They still kinda suck, but if you look carefully there is a model that lets you essentially pause the “hey my battery is low” chirp for 8 hours, which I probably don’t need to point out is a godsend at 3am when it starts up
Here’s a link to yesterday’s Grimm Historian substack, “The last person to know the dictator is screwed is the dictator”
Mostly it’s about how dictators misinform themselves, especially about public opinion. It also explains the main difference between El Taco’s first usurpation and the second: no adults in the room at all, only irresponsible toadies chosen by their willingness to kiss the orange ass’ ass.
I do wonder if some in the Taco so-called cabinet realize they’re implementing terrible policies and simply don’t care, or if they really believe the idiot fantasies the orange moron proposes are good policy.
I don’t wonder in the case of Rubio. He does know better.
I suspect Rubio is trying to sustain sufficient distance from the more egregious idiocies to retain the support of “legacy GoP” while also dodging the wrath of MAGA.
A fine line to walk, but he’s actually being quite artful about it.
Letting Hegseth make the running a catch the blame re the Gulf, letting Witkoff and Kushner lead failing “negotiations”, and JD Vance embark on “culture wars” with Europe and Canada, keeping his head down re “tariff wars”.
I suspect he may have his eye on 2032 rather than 2028
In the context of global economic problems and warfare in Easten Europe, the German far right score an election victory in Saxony-Anhalt …
NOT NOW GERMANY! We’re busy, OK?