Tariffs...what to make of them.

Diversion Don. The LA "riot" is manufactured to keep the real news off the front page: Elon's Epstein files, tariff deal failures with China and EU, and abandoning Ukraine as Russia bombs civilians. BTW, ICE raided a clothing manufacturer in LA and arrested 50. These were workers sitting at sewing machines. Not gang members, drug dealers and rapists.
 
UtahJoe said:
So we have now invaded Los Angeles?
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We woke up at dawn, heads pounding, in a hut lit by a single bulb. We were two clicks outside the perimeter and three clicks from the nearest Lamill or Blue Bottle—a desperate goddamn distance, no no no this can’t be happening. The hut was a rustic healing space owned jointly by Sting and Carrie Underwood.

The fucked-up things we had seen—face-lifts, mostly—would blow the brains right out of the skulls of most folks back home. People wearing glasses they didn’t even need because it “made their look pop,” lining up for hours for some kind of doughnut that looked like every other doughnut. Sawyer, one of the grunts—his cousin was one of these people—brought us truffle fries a few times. Those were the good days, and there weren’t a lot of them. Most of the days, we just had regular fries. Fuck.

The things we carried were determined largely by necessity. Among the necessities or near necessities were Oakley wraparounds, dog tags, hypoallergenic SPF 50 face lotion, a good moisturizer, the wildfire app, binoculars, a map showing where 1980s sitcom actors had lived, and a browser bookmarked to TMZ.com. Things could change in a second out here, and you didn’t want to be caught in the field with your dick out when a vibe shifted. Some days the local girls were stanning Blake, some days it was Taylor, and if you didn’t know which was which before you put your gear on, it was gonna be over for you in the time it took for a chopper’s blade to turn. God, the choppers—they were constant, they never stopped, SoCal 511 and KNX 1070 and KCAL and NBC 4, the whine of the rotors always reminding you exactly where you were, every hour on the hour.

Our first day out past the line, we couldn’t tell a hostile in an Essentials hoodie from a friendly in an Essentials hoodie. Floating through the dark, the Art Deco practically seeming to breathe and pulse around us, catching glimpses of the strangest things—gas that cost $5.79, more Denny’s than it would seem possible for a local economy to sustain, one word whispering on the wind: Ohtani. One of the guys in the unit, raw, green, just lost it, crying, screaming—threw his M60 in the gutter and ran straight in the front door of a Whole Foods. We never saw him again. They said he saw an Erewhon smoothie spill out on the sidewalk, just couldn’t stop staring at it, the way one minute it was in the cup and then it was out on the ground, just gone, man.

Their leader, their god, was some guy named Piker. They said he lived in the hills [Ed. note: Beverly Hills] but never slept in the same place twice, they said he had a beard as long as his people’s pain, they said he had played Mario Kart for 84 straight hours. He killed 14 of us, may God forgive him. In Fortnite, I mean. We didn’t incur any physical casualties in-country.

We lost a few to the jungle along the way. You could see them change slowly, then all of a sudden. First they’d try to cover for it, say it was just to impress the “baddies” at the juice bar, but eventually you could tell that they’d stopped believing in us and started believing in them. Agreed with the local men that you should be able to grow a beard even if your job took place indoors on a laptop. Cursing Rob Pelinka with bitter epithets in the native tongue. Saying things like “Sure, they [the Kardashians and Jenners] can be ridiculous, but it’s actually kind of cool and inspiring how they all support each other.” They just slipped away.

Sometimes it was hard to believe we were there, really. We felt like there was nobody out there, we felt like we were all alone. We never wanted to feel … like we did that day. Take us to the place we loved—take us all away. Under the bridge downtown, that’s where we drew some blood. Under the bridge downtown, we could not get enough. Under the bridge downtown, we gave our life away. And we said yeah, yeah , yeah yeah, oh no, no, no, yeah yeah, yeah yeeaaaaaahhhhh yeahhhhh [bass solo].

The sun was creeping over the San Gabriel Mountains, shining like death off the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It was past time to move out. We were supposed to make it to the Grove and back by nightfall, the crazy assignment of desk jockeys who never had a fucking clue, guys who’d shit their pants if they saw what the Waze app looked like on Sunset at rush hour. But it was time to go. It was time for all of us to go. The last helicopter out of the Ace Hotel was leaving in the morning, and someone said a guy who looked like Joaquin Phoenix was at the bar
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Santapez said:
Nah, we've proven you can just invade, topple a government, kill their leader, lots of their innocent population and then just leave when you get bored.
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I miss the good old wars where we got cool shit like the privilege of establishing military bases on the defeated country's land and stay there forever.
 
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