They know very well what they are doing. It’s just that their wealth isolates them from the consequences of it. They don’t care about healthcare, climate change, education, unemployment, because that’s for the 95% to worry about. They are rich enough to don’t give a fuck, and they feel safe doing so.

And that rather obviously describes someone who's rather obviously mentally ill.

Specifically, they lack empathy and have little to no conscience, so have little to no concern for the harm their decisions might cause to others. Those are the hallmarks of both antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy.

Mm... sort of.

The US had the enormous advantage of starting its life with material resources of which most can only dream, so it couldn't help but achieve some fairly significant success, and as long as things were relatively easy, it generally did. But it never quite managed to pull its head out of its ass. Its material advantages made it so that it generally managed to get by in spite of the fact that it's head was firmly lodged up its own ass, but that also meant that it never learned anything. So it just stayed in a diminishing circle of bad decisions until it reached a point at which smart decisions were necessary, and it revealed itself to be mostly incapable of making them.

And at the moment, it's actually subject to a mass movement that lauds the days of the bad decisions as the good old days, since the people still have their heads too far up their asses and can't recognize the reality that they were always bad decisions, that the prosperity that accompanied them was simply due to the US's enormous material advantages and in spite of, rather than because of, the bad decisions, and that a return to those bad decisions in an era in which those material advantages have been squandered is just going to make things even worse.

Which, granted, is still sort of a "good run" - much smarter people have still failed to do even close to as well, since they were stuck starting out with pretty much nothing but disadvantages.

But one can't help but wonder what could've been had we not had our heads so firmly lodged up our asses...

It's really very, very simple.

Regulation of things like pollution serves the interests of the people broadly, but undermines the interests of a handful of obscenely wealthy sociopaths.

And much of the current Supreme Court explicitly works NOT to serve the interests of the people broadly, but to serve the interests of the obscenely wealthy sociopaths.

And that's it, right there. Just as has happened in numerous past civilizations, the power structure in the US has become so warped and corrupted - so entirely in the control of sociopaths - that it not only no longer even pretends to serve the interests of the people, but tends to explicitly work against their interests.

And the hell of it is that the ruling class is so far gone in corruption and shallow self-interest - so sincerely deeply mentally ill - that they don't recognize that ultimately they're working against their own interests - that serving the interests of the people maintains the health of the society from which they benefit, and that working against the interests of the people undermines that health. Like any other mindless parasite, they're going to destroy their host, and in so doing, ultimately destroy themselves.

And the US will just be added to the ever-growing list of societies destroyed through the machinations of a relative few profoundly mentally ill people granted undue wealth and power.

None.

I think that the exact measure of whether or not a war is justified is whether or not people are willing to fight it.

It's very rare for a war to be a direct threat to the people. That's generally only the case in a situation like Gaza, in which the invaders explicitly intend to not only take control of the land, but to kill or drive off the current inhabitants.

As a general rule, the goal is simply to assume control over the government, as is the case in Ukraine.

So the war is generally not fought to protect and/or serve the interests of the people directly, but to protect and/or serve the interests of the ruling class. And rather obviously, the ruling class has a vested interest in the people fighting to protect them and/or serve their interests. But the thing is that the people do not necessarily share that interest.

And that, IMO, is exactly why conscription is always wrong. If the people do not feel a need to protect and/or serve the interests of the rulers, then that's just the way it is. That choice rightly belongs to the people - not to the rulers.

I pessimistically expected that.

If he bowed out and the Dems nominated a halfway decent candidate (which they likely wouldn't do, but that's a different subject), they'd demolish Trump. He'd lose so badly he couldn't even pretend it was fraudulent (though of course he'd claim that anyway, since he has the emotional maturity of a spoiled five-year-old). The race would instantly go from a terrifying risk to a complete rout.

But between Biden's ego and the DNC's determination to stick with a wholly-owned establishment neoliberal hack at all costs - even if it means losing - I expected that they wouldn't take this golden opportunity.

Transparent astroturfing.

The staff is laying a foundation so that when Trump - an arrogant, oblivious nitwit with the attention span of a five-year-old - inevitably comes out of it the obvious loser - they will already have the base primed to believe that that somehow reflects poorly on... Biden.

Yes - it's pretty much a given, cynically, that a corrupt court is going to rule that corruption is legal.

As I often do, I wonder if this is going to be one of the things that future historians will point to as a notable event in the days leading up to the collapse of the US.

They called it a gratuity to try to divert attention from the bludgeoningly obvious fact that it's just a postdated bribe.

This is what this country has come to. In the face of an ever-growing failure of the government to represent the will of the people because their influence has been bought and paid for by moneyed interests, the Supreme Court is legalizing bribery.

Of course, it's certainly not a coincidence that one of the institutions that's been bought and paid for is the Supreme Court itself.

Literally, officially, it's now entirely legal under federal law for officials to accept and even solicit bribes for specific services rendered, just so long as they do it after, rather than before, the service is rendered.

They aren't even pretending to be a legitimate court of law any more - they're just a rubber-stamping service for the oligarchy.

The Supreme Court basically just ruled that it's perfectly acceptable for officials to accept and even ask for bribes, just so long as they wait a few weeks after the service for which the bribe is meant to pay.

Seriously. That's exactly what this ruling in effect says - that bribes are only bribes if they're paid before the service is rendered, and if they're paid after, that's perfectly fine.

And people still wonder why I'm such a cynic...

So as near as I can tell, the Supreme Court's goal is to create some vague illusion that corruption is not to be tolerated by making it a crime if and only if people with a specific interest in a specific ruling or piece of legislation offer a substantial amount of money or something of equivalent value while clearly communicating their intent to buy the influence of an official and said official then accepts the bribe, clearly announces their intent to act according to the bribe-payer's wishes solely because they've been paid to, then does so.

And in literally ALL other cases, it somehow won't count and will be entirely legal.

I've never bought this spin.

Certainly Russia had a hand in getting the leaks to Wikileaks, and certainly because they had an obvious vested interest in the US electing Putin's sycophant Trump.

But I've never seen or heard of any specific evidence that any of it was "disinformation" - just the repeated unsubstantiated claim that it was. It appears to be exactly what it looks like - a detailed record of the DNC's overtly fraudulent maneuvering to torpedo the Sanders campaign in order to ensure the nomination of Clinton, or more precisely, to torpedo the campaign of a sincere progressive who would likely threaten the ongoing flow of big donor soft money in order to ensure the nomination of a transparently corrupt neo-lib who could be counted upon to serve establishment interests and keep the soft money flowing. And notably, early on that was how the DNC treated it themselves, even going so far as to issue a public apology to the Sanders campaign "for the inexcusable remarks made over email" that did not reflect the DNC's "steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process."

So what it actually all boils down to was that the DNC really was acting in a manner contrary to the public good, driven by their own greed and corruption, and the fact that Russia had a hand in exposing that in order to serve their own interests doesn't alter that fact.

No matter how one slices it, the bulk of the blame for the whole thing rests squarely on the DNC. Yes - it served Russian interests to reveal the information, but had the DNC simply been operating in a legitimate, honest and neutral way, instead of self-servingly and dishonestly, there would've been nothing to reveal.