2 hours ago, Lexx said:

https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/discord-peter-thiel-backed-persona-identity-verification-breach/

"In addition to verifying a user’s age, researchers found Persona performs 269 distinct verification checks, including screening for “adverse media” across 14 different categories such as terrorism and espionage. It then assigns risk and similarity scores to user information."

So basically, what we expected to happen with the age verification crap is exactly what happened - in fact, it's even worse. They wouldn't just use your data for ai training, you also get put into a huge ICE / FinCEN / terror watchlist database.

/Edit: Here is a video about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCi9Uq5GZ18

None of this is about protecting the children - if they wanted to do that, they would jail their pedophile elite.

obviously this is going to happen every time

if google and microsoft already leaked all the data they stole multiple time

so will everyone else

AP News

Supreme Court rules the Postal Service can't be sued, eve...

A divided Supreme Court has ruled that Americans can’t sue the U.S. Postal Service, even when employees deliberately refuse to deliver mail.

Shouldn't be using mail-in voting anymore: your post office would seem to be allowed to steal or destroy your mail without repercussion now.

Edited Wednesday at 02:20 AM3 days by Bartimaeus

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/02/20/mamdani-nyc-budget-affordability-crisis/

Fareed Zakaria has written an article highlighting serious concerns around Mamdani's budget and plans to deliver on his promises to make NY " affordable "

 This is  almost always the case with socialist promises, they end up with a massive tax bill because how do you pay for it? He also raises a trend around financial mismanagement seen in several Dem controlled cities

I have included the full article below and I would encourage everyone to read it who is following Mamdani and his plans going forward 

"Zohran Mamdani ran on a promise to make New York City affordable. This week, he unveiled a budget that is, in a word, unaffordable. 

New York has been fiscally profligate for so long that the headline number — $127 billion — produces little shock. But for perspective, these are similar to the annual expenditures of a midsize nation (with all the expenses a country requires) — like Greece or Thailand — devoted to governing one city.

New York City’s budget has ballooned in recent years. Mike Bloomberg’s last budget, adopted for fiscal 2014, totaled about $70 billion. In little more than a decade, the budget has nearly doubled, growing faster than inflation and faster than the city’s economic growth.

And much of it has happened as the city has been losing the one thing that makes big government easier to finance: people. New York City’s population fell sharply amid the pandemic, with a 5.3 percent decline from April 2020 to July 2022. More recent reports show a rebound, but the city remained below its 2020 baseline as of 2024. The arithmetic is brutal: A larger bill is divided among fewer payers.

Per person, the imbalance is stark. Using the Lincoln Institute’s fiscally standardized numbers, New York’s general spending in 2023 was more than 30 percent higher per capita than Los Angeles’s — and more than double Houston’s.

And what do New Yorkers get for this? Look at New York City schools, the largest district in the country. The city’s education budget has climbed while enrollment has shrunk. It has risen from roughly $34 billion in 2019 to more than $40 billion, with per-student spending projected to reach nearly $35,000 in fiscal 2026 — among the highest in the nation. The outputs — graduation numbers, test scores and reading levels — are at best middling, often comparable to places that spend a fraction of what New York does.

Now come the taxes — because every political argument in New York eventually ends up at the same curbside: Who will pay?

New York City already sits at the extreme end of the American tax spectrum. For high earners, the combined state and city income tax rate reaches 14.776 percent. Add federal taxes, and the combined marginal rate can exceed 50 percent, reaching roughly 55 percent on certain investment income. New Yorkers pay tax rates comparable to those in European countries that provide, in return, universal health care, free college education and amazing infrastructure. New Yorkers get some 300 miles of sidewalk sheds and construction fences.

On business taxation, the city is also off the charts. The Citizens Budget Commission reports that New York City business activity faces the country’s highest combined marginal corporate tax rate — 17.44 percent once state, city and regional layers are stacked. Mamdani wants to hike income and corporate rates even further, or else he says he will raise property taxes by almost 10 percent. Property taxes already made up more than 27 percent of the costs of homeownership in the city as of 2022, above the national average.

New York is really the prime example of a problem Democrats seem unwilling to confront. Blue cities are out of control, promising more, spending more, delivering less and pushing off the fiscal problems to some future day.

Take Los Angeles — another one-party metropolis wrestling with affordability and disorder. The city’s homelessness budget for fiscal 2025-2026 totals about $950 million. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported that in 2023 homelessness was up 9 percent countywide and 10 percent in the city, and a 2024 Associated Press account noted that homelessness has surged 70 percent countywide since 2015 (and 80 percent in the city) amid public frustration “despite billions spent.” An audit reviewed $2.4 billion in city homelessness funding and found that officials could not reliably track where it went or what it achieved. Or take Chicago, with a mayor whose approval rating is deep underwater and where the pension promises are so large that they will surely bankrupt the city at some point.

What is the theory of good government here? If the answer is “keep adding programs,” the city will keep producing unaffordability — because unaffordability is what happens when government becomes a machine that grows faster than the society it governs.

Mamdani’s basic instinct is right. Focus on affordability, especially housing. But not by providing government subsidies — these only seem to have driven up the cost of rent, as subsidies naturally do. (The city’s rental-assistance spending rose from $263 million in fiscal 2020 to $1.34 billion in the most recent reported fiscal year. That is a fivefold increase in a handful of years — and housing costs only got worse.) Matt Yglesias persuasively argues that the city should make it easy — and routine — to build abundant market-rate housing. That will bring in more people, expand the tax base, fill the schools and increase local GDP. And that will make the budget affordable.

Democrats in city halls can make the right choice: stop governing as if the goal is to announce new entitlements, and instead make government work — safer streets, functioning schools, predictable sanitation and, above all, enough housing that the middle class can find places to live.

New York does not need more soaring rhetoric. It needs more homes."

UK. The Green Party of England and Wales won the by-election in Gorton and Denton, leading by 40%. Reform UK (Trump-lite) came second, while the 2 major parties were further behind.

It is a promising sight that a party which values human rights, animal rights, and the environment can also be victorious and have the power to implement these ideals.

This by-election also shows that we do not have to be locked into a 2-party system.

5 hours ago, Hawke64 said:

UK. The Green Party of England and Wales won the by-election in Gorton and Denton, leading by 40%. Reform UK (Trump-lite) came second, while the 2 major parties were further behind.

It is a promising sight that a party which values human rights, animal rights, and the environment can also be victorious and have the power to implement these ideals.

This by-election also shows that we do not have to be locked into a 2-party system.

the entire bureaucracy of uk are rigged against building anything new

wonder how could green penetrate the fog and build the renewable energy they promised if they come to power

That result really ought to be the death knell for Starmer's leadership. Blocking Burnham from standing was done for purely selfish reasons (to prevent him being a potential alternative leader, for those not following UK politics) and likely made the result even worse.

Favourite Starmer fact: his Labour Party got half a million votes less than the 'unelectable' Jeremy Corbyn did the previous time around. He won entirely due to the electoral system with Tory vote being split by Reform and a turnout of less than 60%, not due to growing Labour's vote base. He barely even grew the vote share, and given how awful the Tories were that should have triggered some real worries over his actual popularity.

Hannah is awesome.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/28/world/iran-strikes-trump?smid=url-share#c954c0a9-28cf-5238-9219-80b016e35130

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cn5ge95q6y7t

I had bet on Thursday, good thing I stayed off Polymarket.

Here is Trump's justification for attacking Iran, its only 8 minutes long

It's a combination of legitimate reasons like the nuclear program and then he talks about regime change and destroying Iran's navy

It's not very convincing unless you planning on a protracted war which is exactly what his supporters were told the US under Trump wouldn't do

Regime change in Iran is also impossible to imagine how it could realistically happen

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116147082884192486

Well Israel will try to murder as much of the leadership as they can

2 hours ago, BruceVC said:

Here is Trump's justification for attacking Iran, its only 8 minutes long

It's a combination of legitimate reasons like the nuclear program and then he talks about regime change and destroying Iran's navy

It's not very convincing unless you planning on a protracted war which is exactly what his supporters were told the US under Trump wouldn't do

Regime change in Iran is also impossible to imagine how it could realistically happen

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116147082884192486

Iran's nuclear program was annihilated last summer according to Trump and co, so interesting to see it again as reason to attack

2 minutes ago, Elerond said:

Iran's nuclear program was annihilated last summer according to Trump and co, so interesting to see it again as reason to attack

You mean you still believe everything Trump says on geopolitical events especially when he is notorious around how he sensationalizes and exaggerate things ?

Come on, I thought we stopped doing that after his first presidency years ago

They damaged the Iranian sites, they didnt destroy them completely. How would anyone even know what that means if even the IAEA didnt have access to inspect them?

Edited 1 hour ago1 hr by BruceVC

Just now, BruceVC said:

You mean you still believe everything Trump says on geopolitical events especially when he is notorious around how he sensationalizes and exaggerate things ?

Come on, I thought we stopped doing that after his first presidency years ago

They damaged the Iranian sites, they didnt destroy them completely. How would anyone even know what means if even the IAEA didnt have access to inspect them?

It was bit sarcastic joke. Last summer I said that I don't believe that US strikes were able to eliminate Iran's nuclear program only ensure that they will seek nuclear weapon

Both Bahrain and Abu Dhabi have been hit. No videos from Israel that I could see.

Edited 1 hour ago1 hr by Sarex

17 minutes ago, Elerond said:

It was bit sarcastic joke. Last summer I said that I don't believe that US strikes were able to eliminate Iran's nuclear program only ensure that they will seek nuclear weapon

Yeah, I know you were joking

I know you know Trump exaggerates these types of events

Its all part of his hubris, insecurity and constant need for adulation and praise

"Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please"