Yeah I still can’t get over how a couple of days later his right ear didn’t have a mark on it. At his age, even with the best of plastic surgery, he wouldn’t have clean skin on an ear for at least a week if he’d actually had a bullet pass through any part of it. I don’t believe things he has to say about his health- he has a pretty solid track record when it comes to not telling the truth about his height, weight, bone spurs, being a stable genius, etc

On the one hand, their pro-Palestinian politics are morally valid and increasingly popular as the world watches horrifying human rights violations in Gaza- I agree with them, it’s important to put pressure on the Democrats to get on the right side of this issue.

On the other hand, I honestly think we are one GOP sweep victory away from an end to democracy in the USA- and my take on that is that the establishment-Dems probably think a 4-year stint of being punished by Republicans will teach those uppity leftists and minorities to toe the line better and in the interim they’re pretty sure they’ll be fiiine.

The reason I lose sleep over this sort of thing is I believe that once political power becomes decoupled from the consent of the governed, the rights and protections that arise in the constitution will become instead favors granted by an unaccountable power, contingent on whether or not they find you supplicant enough. Also we shouldn’t count on being able to vote our way out of a situation where the rules prevent voting from making a difference- should it come to that, it’s dark days friends

Y’know, if you don’t bother writing the history after bothering to win the war and then letting the enemy go home and be governors, judges, congressmen and senators and presidents anyhow, you’ll end up how the United States did after its civil war.

Consider using a dropbox- that’s more secure in chain-of-custody terms.

‘Guard the vote’, here, seems pretty likely to mean go into liberal areas and do what it takes to prevent them from voting

DNC never learned their lesson

At this point I honestly think the lesson they’ve learned is that curb-stomping the progressives and daring them to stay at home gets us all 4 years of punishment under the GOP and in the next election they get 100% of what they wanted in the first place without any actual lefties having power.

When you remember FDR, this is exactly what they did then- FDR, scion of privilege, ran on a progressive platform for an electorate thirsty for lefty policy. He surrounded himself with other left-leaning bluebloods interested in progressive politics but dead set against actual leftists gaining power. They doled out progressive policies as political favors but strictly kept the rabble out of actual power.

Likewise, in the waning years of the Prussian Empire, Otto von Bismarck (a staunch monarchist, facing an uprising of social democracy politics he despised) famously undertook socialist-y policies like socialized medicine and old-age insurance/pensions to steal political support from the social democrats while keeping them strictly out of power.

Can we just call these people pro-pestilence instead of dignifying them with names like ‘medical freedom activist’?

I swear this sort of euphemism has become the obvious tell that they’re up to no good and still demand respect for it

It was infuriating to watch how slowly the wheels of justice worked in Chauvin’s case- not only did he commit murder, he did it on camera in front of witnesses and we all saw it on the news over and over and there had to be protests before charges were considered- and even after all that, there was serious debate over whether or not he was guilty.

…and in this situation, charges being brought against his attacker are the news, which illustrates the double-standard of a system that plain didn’t want to work on George Floyd’s behalf but certainly does seem to want to work on Chauvin’s

This is what happens when Koch money goes to public media like PBS and NPR- they start hiring corporatist toadies

It shouldn’t be, but enough people are either ignorant that it’s a racket or they profit somehow by it that nobody says anything, or they’ll call you a damned commie if you openly question powerful people like that

Part of what’s happening on this front (things are expensive) is antitrust-related.

Mergers and Acquisitions among competing companies, and ‘vertical integration’ along supply chains (both of which ought to get a lot more antitrust attention than they have for a long time) often means the resulting companies control supply enough that they can throttle supply and look, there’s not enough of the things! Prices then go up- and the loss in productive capacity that happens when competing firms consume each other is behind those mysterious ‘supply chain issues’ that led to empty shelves during the pandemic.

The election wave immediately following Watergate swept a lot of then-young, centrist Democrats into the halls of congress- and in so doing, also retired the Democrats’ institutional interest in anti-monopoly enforcement. Since then, neglecting antitrust enforcement on boring things like commodities and pharmaceuticals has been a bipartisan affair.

With any luck pretty soon they’ll look at alfalfa farming in the desert too

Hahahaha yesterday during the pie preparations my daughter and I passed each other as I was heading back to the kitchen and she said, apropos of nothing, “I didn’t just steal any whipped cream, shut up!”

LOL I didn’t know they’d been looting the whipped cream before that point but bless their hearts it was cute

Oh no, they’re uncomfortable?

All the more reason for them to comply, really

Wilders is another Putin stooge capitalizing on how shitty everything is with immigrants and all that

When you think about that even a little bit, Putin is responsible for a solid amount of the immigration crisis that has Europeans feeling like there’s too many immigrants (Syria, Ukraine, etc) and the answer must be less democracy and fewer human rights protections because if refugees don’t have human rights they don’t matter, right?

It’s a bit like how the GOP uses its power to make life objectively worse for people in general, and then turns around and argues that it’s proof that democracy doesn’t work.

I’ve seen youtube content on piped I know full well to be 4k video be blurred so badly as to be nearly unwatchable- they honestly decided to spend money to make their content worse as a lever to get you to watch ads or to submit to tracking etc

I hear that a lot, and I get that there’s a reason for how it is, but I still don’t understand why that means court officials must be made to endure more crimes without reaction or accountability or consequence in order for it to happen.

It’s as if saying “will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest” is a time-tested means of getting meddlesome priests murdered, and somehow it’s still effectively legal for the Trumps of the world to incite that kind of violence. It’s also as if America’s justice system plain doesn’t want to hold wealthy or powerful people accountable

I wrote test automation for Microsoft for years. My team turned a process that took 6 weeks of a hundred people working full time to produce manual test results into one that could complete in an hour on a couple hundred computers in a lab somewhere. It was a massive breakthrough in productivity on our part. Of course, 90% of the team was laid off when the code they’d written could be maintained by a couple of people.

So yeah, the difference “went to the shareholders”, certainly not to the people that did the work

I got tired of seeing my teflon-coated pans wear out like that or lose their non-stickiness, it bothered me to realize that the ‘premium cookware’ I was buying was temporary trash I’d need to replace every couple of years.

I retired my teflon cookware and now have just steel and cast iron (and ceramic-coated cast iron) and I don’t miss teflon-coated cookware at all.

Sure, sometimes I end up with stuff stuck to my pans, but realistically that was true with my ‘non-stick’ pans as well. The nice thing about cast iron and steel is that with use, they seem to get better, whereas the teflon pans start out nice but deteriorate in the way they work. When I do end up with stuff stuck to the pan, I can scrub that clean in a few seconds with a steel scrubber or scraper, whereas stuck-on stuff with teflon (the stuff the dishwasher didn’t get, anyhow), seemed to demand the extra-soft scrubber (and lots of time, because the soft scrubber doesn’t work as well).