Contracts Show Millions of Dollars and Diverted Disaster Resources Were Used to Build DeSantis’ ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

Any idea when? Are they doing it alphabetically? 330 million of us will take awhile. The Nazis took 10 years to round up less than 10 million. I don’t have enough time to get into all of the ways that this is not Nazi Germany. Alligator Auschwitz is a good name for it, and I hope it sticks. So what’s the plan? Time for war? Remember that it took almost a decade of abuse by King George, after people started complaining about it, before shots were fired. It was a long chain of abuse indeed. I would call this situation much more like the decade before the War of Independence started than it is like Nazi Germany. MAGA is literally the American Revolution in reverse.

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I agree with @brian512. They look like the heavyweight zip ties favoured by cops and insurrectionists. They’re just nylon. There will be only polystyrene eating utensils for the prisoners, but a sharp rock picked up outside will do the trick given a couple of hours.
The rightwing billionaire’s outfit, Uline, offers these:

Black UV Stabilized Nylon Cable Ties - 8", 120 lb S-14936 - Uline
In reality they (the prisoners) would only have to abbrade away half the thickness of a few adjoining ties, and when the time is right a few guys yank upward, and Bingo! If they pass the stones around, several cages could break out simultaneously.

ETA: The mooks who tied down that fencing didn’t even have the sense to put the vulnerable locking heads on the outside of the fencing. When I see a proper cyclone fence job, the fencing itself is secured to the tubing with continuous wire about an 1/8" diameter, which only a hacksaw, or very heavy pliers will cut.

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Man, when it comes to wasting the public’s tax dollars, defrauding the voters, and abusing their authority, the Republicans are tops. When the next hurricane hits, “Joe Biden” will be the reason there’s no assistance money for Floridians. Because diverting blame and shirking responsibility are GQP superpowers.

“No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up.” (Lilly Tomlin)

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m_buxbaum said:
'As he toured the grounds, Trump declared that it was “not a place I want to go hiking anytime soon.”

‘The idea that Trump has ever been hiking in his life is ridiculous.’

→ Not entirely accurate, I’m afraid. Donald “the John” Trump was known as an unusually energetic hiker while tracking the elusive juvenile on Isla L’Epstein.

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and there will be prison sentences too, right? Right? RIGHT???

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Suggesting also, “T**** Auschwitz”, to tie it directly to him and his family, and his family name. Forever. Stark, unambiguous terms that resonate and convey the horror of the depraved ghoul that he is. And is proud to be.

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Anyone still under the delusion that the US military wouldn’t fire upon American civilians?

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So does Lowes and Home Depot. I just bought a package 175lb tensile strenght to pole mount a security camera at home.

With something having a decent edge, it would take them no more than a few minutes to compromise several of them.

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Well, question I have, did they flush cut the overage or leave a nasty point. That might slow them down. :slightly_smiling_face:

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When? I dunno, maybe next Tuesday? And no, it’s not Nazi Germany. BTW have you read Richard Evans’s work on Hitler’s era? But we are shaping up, or being shaped up, to be the American analogue of those times. The people of King George’s time didn’t have instant news flooding their lives every day; didn’t have instant international wire news; or television or radio: and so on. The sheer slowness of information dissemination put a brake on resistance. On the other hand the sheer mass of numbers in the Trump camp does, I believe, put a brake on resistance here and now. We may not become Nazi America, of course, but we stand in danger of becoming Trumpy America and that has the potential to be very Naziish. Then again it may be more likely that the arrogance and incompetence of the Trumpettes may crash their whole nightmare before it can really dig its claws in. But I think we’re better off if we take the darkest vision to heart and prepare for it, prepare to fight against it in any way we can, as individuals, as groups, as a nation. We cannot sit back and pretend they are not coming for us. They don’t need to take all 330 million. Knocking on a couple of million doors at 0400 hours should be sufficient to cow the rest into obedience and to normalize a polICE state. Remember the McCarthy era?

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That’s not the US military. That’s a single drill sergeant with a platoon. Someone is still under the illusion that “some” means “any” or “all”.

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They’ve got time…

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My daily newsletter from Esquire has Charles Pierce reporting (paywall, so I couldn’t actually read it) that the Trump admin has burned some $800,000 worth of food, already paid for, which USAID was going to ship to starving countries from Dubai. Here’s a CNN link:

There have been followup stories today disputihg the original charge. Given the “credibility” of the current regime, it may be awhile before we learn the truth, if ever. Meanwhile, people are starving in lots of places, no thanks to us.

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Probably thought they were doing a bang-up job cutting them flush. Doesn’t matter in my scenario. If there was crushed stone used anywhere in the enclosure, those guys will be on it in a heartbeat. They’re collectively familiar with these materials and mechanisms. I’m thinking we should put a pool together for how long after the place is at >50% capacity before the first escapes.
If the population doesn’t go full-on Lord of the Flies, with some leadership and organization, they could make the fascists look like fools. Unfortunately there’s liable to be some deaths involved. Which will play well with our “allies”… Especially given the location in the home state of the, ahem, Secretary of State.

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I just reread my post. Made an edit. It would not take much time.

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D’accord.

We have used simple zip ties for the last few years to secure a big shade cloth over the cactus nursery area. The New Mexico winds flap the cloth and flex the ties to where they fail before the end of the summer. We’ve switched to simple natural-fiber twine.

So maybe the concentration camp residents could flex their way out?

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The combo of constant flexing and, possibly uv damage in the outdoor application, I think is a recipe for early failure. I don’t know anything about the fatigue behavior of nylon, but steel it most definitely ain’t.

If they coordinated “shaking the wire” events to concentrate on a couple of key spots they might could flex their way out. In an abstract way, it’ll be interesting to see what goes down.

Full disclosure: I was a big fan of Paul Brickhill’s Great Escape years before the film.

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I have not read that work. It’s on my list now. It is looking like the analog mainly by default. Any instance of growing fascist dictatorship invites the comparison to a well known example. Fascism is like an opportunistic infection that can occur under a number of similar conditions, but not necessarily the same or with the same outcomes exactly. As for numbers, let’s start with the understanding that there are more than enough MAGAts to cause a real problem, as we see. That said, they make up no more than 20% of the population. We outnumber them 4:1. This is about the ratio of Hutus to Tutsis in Rwanda, where the Hutus slaughtered the Tutsis. If we are going to insist that Nazi Germany (essentially) CAN happen here, we need to allow that the Rwandan genocide can too. In this case, it would be in revenge for what the violent extremists did. Our ‘Tutsis’ in this analogy are the first aggressors, just to be clear, with the Hutus just settling the score after years of abuse from the belligerent minority.

The numbers are in flux, with trump losing more support every day according to every poll out there. The Epstein flap has lost trump a few million " bros" who voted for him for no good reason to begin with. That’s a lot of military aged men who are now back in our column. No Kings day turned out 5 million by the most conservative estimates, while Trump’s tiny tank parade flopped with maybe 20,000 in an area that should have held 200,000. In 2021, the MAGAt terrorists brought an estimated 30,000 to the siege of the capitol. That number was drawn from a population base only 1/5 the size of ours. So, we should be able to bring at least 150K to Washington. That many could shut the whole city down, not just the hill. Really we need more like a million. Mass resistance works effectively elsewhere, such as Romania, S. Korea, and Hungary. So why do we selectively say that “can’t happen here”? Fascism can, but that can’t? We have to try. Ultimately, it may take a war to drive these traitorous scum out.

We need to form a resistance in this country. Y’all Qaeda terrorists don’t have a monopoly on violence, and neither does the government. What we need is the courage of our convictions and the bitter rage that I feel constantly. The deep hatred that these monsters are inspiring goes way beyond what they think trump derangement syndrome is. They have no idea what they are causing.

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Richard Evans wrote a trilogy detailing the course of the Third Reich (very detailed), and another volume of bios on the leading figures of the Reich. Both works were fascinating.

Regarding your final sentence, I believe they know what they are causing, just as bullies always believe they are causing fear and aggrandize themselves because of that. And if anything is certain about the Trumpettes and the Grand Asshole himself, it is that they are bullies. They inspire the bullying tactics of ICE (I consider ICE to be Trump’s Brownshirts analog.) The real point of ICE and of the recent massive boost to the ICE budget is not to clear immigrants from the country but to build a paramilitary force loyal to Trump. Just to push an analogy a little further, the Aryans here are rich white people, and the middle class aspirants to wealth.

I don’t disagree that internal war is coming, but I suspect it will be partisan warfare, guerilla warfare. The mass of still-sane Americans are not ready for bloodshed. They will go along to get along. They would rather survive on their knees than fight on their feet. And they still believe they’ll have a chance in the next election to do something. I seriously doubt that there will be an election next year, and if there is I’m sure the Trump forces will jigger the votes

We are now governed by madmen and idiots, fools and psychotics, and there is no end to the horrors they will create. And as long as the Trump forces focus their ire on the brown people and the yellow people and the black people, the mass of white people will go along, just as they are now - they can march and chant, but they won’t fight for their country.

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