I cant tell if those are rhetorical questions because you’re upset…

Or if you genuinely don’t understand why the oligarchs are mad kids aren’t having babies…

He’s just ripping off the Brain Slug platform…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ5iEn3m7Vc

It’s a bizarre read, but the strangest thing about it is Esquire’s justification for the stunt. “We were stoked to have some face time with the Japanese-American actor, but his schedule prevented it,” writes Esquire’s Joy Ling. “With a driving need for a feature, we had to be inventive. Harnessing our creative license, we pulled his verbatim from previous interviews and fed them through an AI programme to formulate new responses.”

So they rephrased questions he was asked…

And tried to use AI to rephrase his answers…

Everyone involved needs to be suing Esquire, but especially every organization that spent money/resources on the sourced interviews

Like, this is actually huge precedent if there’s no consequences, even if the actor signed off on it.

You can’t just rephrase an interview and pretend you did it. If they can, that’s what every media company will start doing. They’d “interview” 1,000 people a day and have a constant stream of slop for people to mindless click and not even really read.

Like, they stopped writing articles people want to read decades ago, they write headlines people will share on social media. And people will reflexively share interviews with people they like, even if they don’t care enough to even open the link.

They just want to post it to talk about that thing.

Yeah, no shit…

Wealthy people from all over the globe take advantage of those people and their ancestral homeland, trashing it and paying them slave wages.

Of course some of them are gonna start ripping them off.

Yeah, the picture in the comment is still small scale, but illustrated what I’m talking about.

So the bottom row, a guy standing on the ground does.

That second row, would have a guy standing on it. He do his feet, the row chest height, and then usually one more row above. Then another guy on top of that is as high as we’d go. So the higher up you are, the less you have to lift, but the scarier it gets.

I remembered the ones I visited in Cuba were 10 feet high tops

My uncle that fell out of a barn started using crazy long rows one high, and then he’d put tarps over it so it doesn’t get rained on.

It’s just takes up an insane amount of space, and the curing (drying process) isn’t as easily controlled, the plants on the end will all be lower grade. It’s sold via auction, so pennies a pound adds up.

In a barn there’s going to be narrow doors on the side that go up the whole length of the barn, every 10-20 feet.

Depending on conditions you open/close the doors to slow/speed the process. The better it goes the more you make when you sell.

Same principle as why you keep cigars in a humidor

So the “sticks” that the tobacco goes on are like 5-6 feet long.

Each “bay” needs to be just wide enough for the stick to hang. When “up in a bay” you’re standing on the same thing the sticks hang on, so doing the splits for hours on end while doing manual labor.

Depending on barn, usually at least one person needs to be up in a “bay”. In my family barn we had one person on the ground, one standing on the second “bay” and then someone else a couple rows up above the floor. Like 2-3 real stories if we were talking a house. Because the “top” touched the less weight, that’s where the kids started lol.

Sometimes your lucky and the bays are made of cut wood, often it’s just a straight up fucking locust tree trunk, that’s not even tied down so it rolls side to side a little

The length of a bay varies, but when there’s not a lot on there, it moves/bounces. When you get far enough down the bay that it stops, it starts to sag and creak from the weight. Again, this whole time you’re doing the splits 10-30 feet off the floor of the barn.

It’s so hard to get down/up, you start taking water breaks in the top of the barn.

Where it’s hot as fuck and the air is full of dirt and tobacco dust, but at least you can sit on a beam for two minutes after constantly doing the splits.

Hell of a workout, just not as easy as driving a harvester thru a tomatoe field.

Quick edit:

But it’s not just scary. I saw an uncle have a “bay” break, and he fell maybe 20 feet with shit ton of tobacco and pointy sticks, and his leg went thru the floor of the barn, but he didn’t fall all the way thru.

He was fine, but all that weight and all those pointing sticks, at any moment something can give from the weight, and consequences could be fatal.

Yeah, was just surprised tobacco is a common base for experiments.

And that explains why it’s used here, it’s never going to be at scale

Still tho…

It’s the same process to harvest leaves.

I grew up on a tobacco farm, hardly any aspect is mechanized.

To harvest it:

1. Put a six foot stick in the ground

2. Put a metal spear tip on top.

3. Cut plant with hatchet

4. Impale on stick

After like 6-8 plants, start a new stick.

Then after a couple weeks load it on a wagon by hand, then hang it in a tobacco barn (aka death trap) where you’re a couple stories high doing the splits, and people pass the sticks up to you and you hang and spread them to dry.

Months later you climb back up and bring it all down.

Then manually remove each and every single leaf.

Grade it.

And compress it into bales using hydraulic jacks.

For tomatoes:

1. Drive a tractor over the field

2. Dump tomatoes

Like…

I’m just saying if we need a lot, this is t the means for production. If it’s just testing and it’ll end up somewhere else, no worries.

I don’t know what scale would be required…

But absolutely wild they’re starting with one of the most labor intensive crops.

Tomatoes are the same family, and waaaaay easier to grow at scale. Seems like it would have been an obvious choice.

But if an acre is an annual supply, it doesn’t matter.

From his wiki:

Asked why he made such a show during the arrest, he said he wanted to appear crazy so he might be placed into an asylum where it would be easier to escape.

Apparently he was a grifter and was using so many fake credit cards that an American Express investigator was there and called the cops.

and stop calling yourself Mr Manager Sharpie

Michael Bluth Sharpie customer service supervisor

It was 99.9% a “four seasons landscapers” type deal.

He shouted at someone to get “sharpie” on the phone to order these.

Some boomer searched “how to order custom sharpies” without realizing how easy of a thing that is in 2026, called the first number, and hand the phone to the president of the United States, who likely got some $11/HR manager at a stationary supply store 5 blocks away from Marlago who thought it was a prank call.

The dumbest explanation is often the correct one these day

Between:

“The head of Sharpie gets a call. I don’t even know who the hell he is,” Trump said. “He said, ‘Is this really the president?’”

And:

Sharpie’s parent company, Atlanta‑based Newell Brands, said in a statement that it had no information about the specific conversation Trump described.

There’s a very real chance he just called a local Staples and placed a normal order for custom designed sharpie and laid the same price anyone else would have…

I wouldn’t be opposed to him running as a Republican…

https://allhiphop.com/news/afroman-addresses-patriotic-photo-opp-with-donald-trump/

But he sure as shit shouldn’t be allowed to take a spot in any election from an actual Dem.

No…

But great job assuming that reading a single comment about it somehow means you know more about it than what the comment contained.

I legitimately only know a handful or so of people that overconfident in themselves.

That’s not even the worst…

Our House of representatives is supposed to make up for it, but each rep represents over 20x the people they did when the country was founded.

The reason we lost so much representation, is the room they occasionally meet in would be too cramped if they kept adding chairs to it.

But just in general, it’s almost always best to blame political leaders for a government’s actions and not just blame every person living there.

Good and bad.

or the electoral college

That’s the part that’s relevant…

Whether a state goes 51% of 100%, counts the same.

This leads to depressed turnout and obviously no elections being on “all Americans”. Most of our votes for president don’t matter because most states go one way or the other.

The thing is, as a foreigner, and speaking bluntly, this is on the entire American population

No problem.

To put it bluntly I don’t expect Americans to understand our political system, so I’m not surprised when foreigners clearly don’t. Shits complicated and nonsensical

I just wish more would ask questions instead of sharing uninformed opinions as facts, but maga thinking isn’t reserved for Americans…

I just love the quote:

So, we need, I, I would really, I’m demanding…

He starts with needing help, starts to say he just really wants it, then pivota to demanding it.

The fact that he went thru those steps shows how much pressure he’s facing.

His two biggest wings of influence has been Israel and American christo-fascists, if they start pulling him in opposite ways, he can’t hold onto both.

He’s fucked, but so are the rest of us by extension. Hopefully just till midterms at least.

He later said: “So, we need, I, I would really, I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory because it is their territory, it’s the place from which they get their energy and they should come and they should help us protect it.”

Then came the line that quickly sparked reaction online:

“You could make the case that maybe we shouldn’t even be there at all because we don’t need it.”

It’s Iran’s terrority, and Iran is defending it after being attacked…

But I really think he’s getting pressure from Christian extremists to abandon Israel. Their endgame was always Israel getting wiped out by its neighbors to start Armageddon and rapture Christians.

If no one joins against Iran, trump will likely try to slink away and Bibi holding the bag.