not Haivng him as Ur lock Screen bcuz Ur ashamed of His Face ? That Just means U guys are a Private , Introverted , Discrete Couple . not Like all those other Gross weirdos Doing PDA on the Tram !! cant Stop stalking Ur hotter Exes On their Socials ? it's Because U Kno they Cant Compare 2 Ur Boyfriend's GROUNDED, DOWN TO EARTH , UNIQUE hotness <3

A Statement from U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Edward R. Martin Jr. pic.twitter.com/XlEmzSlbBq

— U.S. Attorney DC (@USAO_DC) February 3, 2025

They really said:

The old page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250125135209/https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/before-you-go/travelers-with-special-considerations.html

New page:

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/before-you-go/travelers-with-special-considerations.html

right at the bottom btw . That's some foreshadowing, gays !

--

/r/4tran4 reacts

There are a lot of policies they're putting in place that will directly hurt trans people, but this one in particular strikes me as purely performative. They're trying to make sure the LGB-without-the-T idiots continue to tow the line by pretending that they still care about them. It's a distraction tactic to keep eyes off their efforts to outlaw gay marriage.

sorry for existing

Oh were not going to make it

Step 1, make it very difficult to transition

Step 2, make it very difficult to get treatment

Step 3, censor their existence

Step 4, marginalize everyone who is trans

Step 5, make the world see them as horrible beings so that no one can relate to them

Step 6, in a generation or two, have completely eliminated trans people

we're finally free from being associated with strags

Its not the lgb that dropped the t. Its us that dropped the lgb

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-readies-new-1-bln-arms-sale-israel-wsj-reports-2025-02-03/

700m of bombs and 30m of armored bulldozers made by Caterpillar

mrw the $DASHA price goes uppic.twitter.com/gOBo5ymUIl

— Pericles 'Perry' Abbasi (@ElectionLegal) February 6, 2025

Fuenty will u buy my coin https://t.co/1UXZw4Da0H

— dasha (@dash_eats) February 5, 2025

@FormerLurKONG

!redscarepod

How is big sis going to freeze the whole entire patriarchy if she can't even freeze reddit jannies 😭

Sheldan Nidle lived in an alternate reality from the rest of us.

Throughout the late nineties, while everyone else was surfacing from a post=Seinfeld world, gawping at a presidential s*x scandal, and mourning the death of grunge, Nidle was filling a nascent internet with tales of mass alien visitations and the transformation of the human race into five-dimensional, super-evolved beings. He called his initiative the Ground Crew Project (GCP). Probably the strangest aspect of the GCP, though, wasn't its prediction of a coming fleet of spaceships or the extradimensional expansion of all human consciousness. After all, alien interventions and apocalypses are as common in cults as messiah complexes and communes. What is unusual, though, is that the GCP was, and still is, almost entirely a virtual cult.

Nidle was born in New York City in 1946. He went to college at Ohio University and then the University of Southern California, after which he settled in the Golden State. And those seem to be the only factual parts of his biography—because Nidle claimed he was visited upon his birth, threewise-men-like, by extraterrestrials from a planet called Sirius. These beings would speak to him telepathically, land their ships in his backyard, and take him aboard for flights through space. And that was all before the age of fourteen.

Over the course of Nidle's life, aliens continued to send him messages through an implant they placed in his body, telling him all the secrets of the planet and the cosmos. He learned that humans were part of a divine/extraterrestrial experiment (the divine and the extraterrestrial seemed to be parallel in his mythology, although angels and aliens were distinct creatures). The creator had populated the planet—which is sentient—with what Nidle called "laggard souls," with the hope that they would transcend their limitations to find their place among the other evolved peoples of the universe, thereby joining the Galactic Federation of Light. The GCP were those earthbound members tasked with helping humanity transcend to the point at which they could be welcomed back into the Galactic Federation (hence the "Ground Crew" in the name).

The world learned about the GCP in 1996, when Niles starting writing about it on the burgeoning internet. His site welcomed visitors with statements like, "You are about to embark upon the greatest journey of your

life. You and the rest of life on Planet Earth are about to partake in the raising of planetary consciousness." But his GCP website wasn't just an FYI. It was an urgent message. Niles predicted that on December 17, 1996, the "laggard soul" experiment would end. He said that on that day, the planet would pass through what he called a "photon belt," which he described as an "extremely loving energy" composed of photons, gamma rays, and antimatter particles that occurs every 25,000 years.

That love light from space would hit our pineal glands and cause a spontaneous evolution in human beings. Our three-dimensional forms would expand to five dimensions. Our DNA would increase from a mere two strands to twelve. We would stop aging or getting sick. The blind would see. We would become telepathic. We would be able to manifest things just with the power of thought. Humanity would finally see the universe as it really was.

According to Nidle, even though the photon belt would turn us into superhumans, it would at the same time destroy our cities and machines and weapons. To help us survive the destruction, the Galactic Federation was supposed to send some 15.5 million spaceships to Earth. These ships were meant to shelter the human race from the planetary apocalypse, by keeping people either aboard the ships or in holographic matrixes that mirrored their lives. Some of the members of the Galactic Federation were building underground sanctuaries, as well.

It's impossible to gauge how many followers Nidle had in the early years, but the most appropriate metric was probably hits instead of commitments anyway, and he kept those numbers to himself. He did have enough followers that several New Age/UFO websites had a rule that members couldn't shill for his cult on their forums, so I imagine it was a considerable number of people buying into this shit. There is no record of any meetings in the meat space. Nidle stuck to posting weekly updates about the coming global transformation.

Of course, the big day came and went without even a twitch of anybody's pineal gland. That was no problem—Nidle just rescheduled the transformation to the following year. Meanwhile, he was creating a mythology of galactic history and its races. He described the human-like Andromedans and their cigar-shaped, hundred-mile-long mother ships; the horse-like Arcturians with their supply ships that resembled "wok lids welded together"; and the Sirians and Centaurians and Mintakins and Bellatricians, the latter of whom were reptilian. At some point, he added villains to his universe as well: beings called "dark cabalists," who were anti-transformation, as well as the "planetary elites" on our own Earth.

Some of Nidle's conspiracy-type theories fit well with the concurrent X-Files mania that began after that show debuted in September 1993. Nidle wouldn't have been alone in that influence, although he was more inclined to drop Star Trek and Star Wars references in his writings. According to a Reuters article from 2009, Britain's Ministry of Defense documented 609 UFO sightings in 1996, a huge jump from 117 the year before. The defense ministry noted, "This coincided with the rise in popularity of The X-Files." A similar phenomenon was occurring in the United States at the time. Still, Nidle's stories of the Galactic Federation were becoming so detailed that they could have been their own multi-arc TV show. He was, to use a term that these days refers to entertainment IP, "world-building."

Nidle eventually settled on May 5, 1997, as the new date for the transformation, and he tied it to the approach of the Hale-Bopp Comet. According to the messages from his implant, the comet was actually a massive, camouflaged spaceship. It contained a crew of more than 200,000, including 10,000 alien ambassadors whose mission was to help guide humanity through the transformation. A shuttle from the faux-comet flagship was supposed to land near Ayers Rock in Australia to kick off the party.

Of course, that didn't happen. But something else did: the Heaven's Gate tragedy. Just over a month before the GCP transformation date, the thirty-nine members of the UFO cult Heaven's Gate committed suicide together in a town north of San Diego. The members of that cult also believed the Hale-Bopp Comet hid an extraterrestrial ship sent to save them. They believed that their suicide would help them transcend their current existence and ascend to the ship.

Because Heaven's Gate had sported their own website, as both a recruitment tool and a suicide note, the media started scouring this newfangled internet for other groups with similar beliefs. They found Nidle and the GCP. The Florida Palm Beach Post, for instance, ran an article with a list of strange groups with an internet presence that included the GCP. The headline for the piece was: "Beyond Heaven's Gate, Web Is a Creepy

Place." Meanwhile, an article in the Atlanta Journal reported that "A group identifying itself as the Ground Crew Project of the Spiritual Hierarchy and the Galactic Federation held a toll-free conference Thursday, promising to reveal details about how to get aboard the UFO. The group's advice: meditate."

At that point, the GCP rebranded, but not because of the negative attention from being linked to Heaven's Gate. It was because of a woman named Valerie Donner, who was a part of the inner circle of the GCP. After a falling-out with Nidle, she left the group, but managed to take with her both the name of the organization and its all-important web domain.

Instead of fighting for the GCP domain, Nidle relaunched his efforts online under a new name: the Planetary Activation Organization (PAO). The new group also had a new tone to its teachings. Nidle pulled back on prophesying the date of the transformation, claiming there was just too much intergalactic politics to ever be sure. Instead, he preached that the transformation was unspecifiably imminent, much like the Christian rapture. He also put more of the onus on humanity making itself worthy of transformation, with members of the PAO responsible for lighting the way through mass meditation and spreading the word of humankind's potential to "activate." In addition, his mythology began to trend more New Age than science fiction. He started working in concepts from other religious groups, such as Ascended Masters, an idea borrowed from theosophy and the cult of I AM. He encouraged his followers to set up their own PAO groups in their individual communities to create a network of enlightenment around the planet. He also began claiming that Earth was not just an experiment in the overarching galactic story, but the fulcrum of it. Its transformation would be a blueprint for the transformation of the entire galaxy. It was also supposedly the home of special crystals vital to the rest of the universe.

Via the PAO website, Nidle also continued to exhort his followers to prepare themselves for the coming ascension. One such update ran thusly:

The call went out for that global meditation day on the equinox, to visualize the Christ Grid energy following a certain procedure. That day was magic for those of us who experienced this 1 to 2 hour meditation. The Galactic Federation and the Confederation of Free Planets plus the Angelic Realm have all confirmed that our meditation has caused the necessary mass consciousness shift needed for the mass landings to become a reality. Therefore, they were given the go-ahead by Earth spiritual Hierarchy to proceed with the landing options depending on the secret government's intent to resist.

Nidle's productivity increased as well, and he began pumping out books and webinars and DVDs and speaking engagements at New Age and UFO conferences. His books and DVDs bore titles such as You Are Becoming a Galactic Human and Tour a Sirian Mothership and Inner Earth, Your Future Home.

On March 17, 2011, Nidle's health started to fail. The PAO website describes it this way: "As he sat at the computer, he was hit with a Direct Energy Weapon that caused marked personality changes, brain damage and, eventually, dementia. By September 2021 his health had deteriorated further and he entered a care facility, where he now lives." Wow, is he the first documented case of Havana Syndrome?

However, his presence is still alive as his followers continue to preach his gospel. Nidle's words continue to fill the internet as they did back in 1996. The PAO website still sells his books and DVDs. The organization still hosts regular webinars and podcasts and posts regular updates. YouTube has lots of videos of Nidle speaking or being interviewed. The Facebook page of Sheldan Nidle has 7.9 thousand followers, although its last update was on September 30, 2021. Among cults, the GCP/PAO stands out. Its messages\ are similar to those of many others—doomsdays and aliens and messiahs leading the way to a new and more advanced civilization are common in cults—but the outcome of its teachings is notably different. There have been no known abuses, suicides, murders, or prison sentences. Every once in a while, a comment on a YouTube video launches an accusation of hucksterism, but that's about the extent of it. Most of the members or followers of the PAO seem to be genuinely dedicated to the evolution of themselves and the human race through meditation and science fiction.

The internet might make it easier for cults to recruit, but in the best-case scenario, it also removes the element of physical isolation that is so often necessary for these groups to go rotten. It's much easier to escape a cult when you can leave with the click of a button.

Their website: https://www.paoweb.com/

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ny-judge-resigns-claiming-defendants-010731112.html

The past two nights I've been stuck around liberals that have stared into the abyss for too long. They claim that scared idiots like conservatives like simple answers. Yet the simple answer they cling to for their election lose is that America is racist and sexist.

Never mind the fact that compared to Biden, Kamala got 6 million less votes. Trump only went up by 3 million votes compared to his last presidential rub. The fact of the matter is no one liked her. She has a history of being unpopular.

They say that Trump is holding onto power so he doesn't go to prison. That makes zero sense because he could give himself a blanket pardon just like Biden gave his family.

I really wish these people weren't in so many of my social circles. I need to find ways to meet more regular people

The cheapest models on the market in 2025

1. Keyu KBW-4 – The cheapest car in the world

With an incredible price of just $610, the Keyu KBW-4 is currently the cheapest new car in China, and indeed in the world. This miniature pick-up is primarily intended for urban… pic.twitter.com/JH7KRLIwkN

— Djole 🇷🇸 (@onlydjole) February 5, 2025

!cars !asians

A recent discussion I had about AGP got me thinking about which fetishes cross the line into psychological disorders and it occured to me that every Masochist I've ever met has been self destructive outside of their BDSM shit and every sadist I've met has been sadistic outside of their s*x life too so the idea that the whole thing is a LARP isn't very convincing.

Granted, I'm working with a small sample size but the one hardcore sadist I met IRL was a huge bully in his teen years who did all his "roleplay" with severely depressed chicks and also liked hurting people or watching them get hurt for the fun of it outside of his s*x life and had other antisocial traits. He was also into the really extreme shit like crying and bleeding.

I've met several women into it and unsurprisingly all of them had really low self esteem and depression.

Thoughts?

You do it for free!

In Berlin, a decision has been made to sideline and silence the Iranian people and to appease the Islamic Republic.

At this important moment of change in Iran, I was pleased to be invited to take part in this year’s @MunSecConf. However, my participation in this conference has…

— Reza Pahlavi (@PahlaviReza) February 6, 2025

What did they mean by this

Dismal decision by Germany. They should back track. Western govts should firmly back the Iranian people and open the door to an important figure opposing Khomeini’s export of Islamist terror to the UK and around the world https://t.co/5LUHaJHp6R

— Lord Walney (@LordWalney) February 6, 2025

🔴 Unbelievable:

Germany has BLOCKED Iran's King in Exile from attending a conference in Munich, without specifying why.

Meanwhile they gladly open their doors to mullahs, regime supporters and anti-Western propagandists.@GermanyDiplo what is this insanity? pic.twitter.com/0iFP7aHGGi

— 𝗡𝗶𝗼𝗵 𝗕𝗲𝗿𝗴 ♛ ✡︎ (@NiohBerg) February 6, 2025

The shameful action of the German Foreign Ministry must be strongly condemned.
Prince Reza Pahlavi is the voice of the Iranian people and their hope for the liberation of Iran from the criminal Islamic Republic regime.
The refusal to allow Prince Reza Pahlavi to attend the Munich… pic.twitter.com/LA1jsx65QS

— Shahin Najafi 𓃬☼ (@shahinnajafi80) February 6, 2025

Shame on @ABaerbock, Germany's far-left Foreign Minister, who, despite the previous invitation to His Majesty @PahlaviReza for the @MunSecConf, has pulled strings to keep him out.

This is a blatant slap in the face to the Iranian ppl, the essence of democracy, and free speech,… pic.twitter.com/h5d27TrtUJ

— 𓄂✺Yaar - يار ‌‌قدیمی🎗️ (@YaarGhadimi) February 6, 2025

Why is it always the leftist/globalist western politicians who bow to and appease the terrorist Islamic Regime occupying Iran?

Germany's @ABaerbock is no different than Canada's @JustinTrudeau.

Enabling and appeasing a bloodthirsty Islamofascist Dictatorship is not a good look. https://t.co/OjtT4CfN0q pic.twitter.com/kItEoQ0EtJ

— Goldie Ghamari | گلسا قمری (@gghamari) February 6, 2025

.@ABaerbock @GermanyDiplo
You claim democracy and human rights, but you are allies with dictators and terrorists.
Shame on you.#WeRemember pic.twitter.com/H9Fd9HyGQw

— TIGER (@tanhayektiger) February 6, 2025

Brandon Sanderson

For those that don't know, Brandon Sanderson is a Mormon author that specializes in writing fantasy for people that believe video games are art. The Mormonism manifests itself as embarassing and clunky attempts at insults.

For example:

But don't worry. He doesn't need the crutch of Mormonism to help him write atrocities.

Sanderson started getting big in 2006 when not mentioning current-day issues in your writing wasn't considered violence. Because his early work was inoffensive, some of his fans had certain opinions and would be described as chud-adjacent today. We'll come back to them in a moment.

With success came the the desire to expand, and what better way to reach more people than making it more relatable™ and courting a "modern audience"! It started out subtle: a background character making comments about the same s*x, allegories about mental health and, eventually, an out-of-place political desire to install a modern democracy in a medieval fantasy world. It got progressively more obvious with each new book, but it clearly worked, because you can't go anywhere online to discuss fiction now without being bombarded with Sanderson recommendations.

And now a large chunk of his fan base looks like this

Wind and Truth

The most recent addition to the Sanderson Literary Universe was the 5th book in the Stormlight Archive series, Wind and Truth.

We're going to look at some 1-star reviews, which are mostly chuds dumb enough to have kept reading up until now.

Remember the excerpts from earlier? ALL his writing is like that. All 4 previous books in the series. These geniuses endured 4,546 pages of slop to get to this point

Goodreads Link. Sort by 1-star reviews. 2-stars are also funny, but it's mostly just people begging him to get another editor.

I will be honest, I cried

I didn't realize I was reading garbage until there was a gay character!

^ This is an actual quote

This guy wrote a whole novel in protest

Can't read it? You're welcome!

It turns into an impassioned plea for Sanderson to renounce Mormonism in favour of mainstream Christianity, which is funny, but not actually worth reading.

I couldn't drug myself to sleep, so I used boring audiobooks

The best part of these 1-star reviewers pouring out their hearts (and some of them posting from accounts with face pics and real names) is that none of it meant anything. The book was well-received overall and will fund the next 5 books in the series!

We have been lied to about the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting event that claimed 60 lives and injured over 850 more, a thread 🧵: pic.twitter.com/veab2WCtjx

— Green Beret Nap Time (@GBNT1952) February 6, 2025

Please thank @Kongvann for this or else

Also there's a new furry award in the shop, as you can see here on this post not limited to just the house! Now everyone can dabble in yiffing OwO

https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/1ii0o9g/us_government_department_to_tie_funding_to/

>Biden offers increased child tax credit to encourage people to have kids

>Drumpf offers more money to cities that encourage people to have kids

Those minnesota links are to a channel/playlist that just redirects to a channel (not an actual livestream)

right now some guy is talking about midwifes

>33 people watching

DRUMPF is finished