Monument @ Monument @lemmy.sdf.org

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2 yr. ago

That’s a great answer, but I’d like to proffer “Why don’t you find out?” as a response - assuming appropriate context, situation, and preferences, of course.

People will know you as the man with swagger as big as your … feet!

My people.
I feel a kinship with each and every one of you.

I’ve always had a rocky relationship with my mom. It took years to just not care about her.
After she died, amongst her things I found evidence that multiple people had told her to get me tested for ADHD when I was a child. She opted not to, but after I graduated college 10 years after my peers, she told me not that she was proud of me, but that when my sister was a kid, people had told her to get her “tested” (she didn’t elaborate), but instead looked me square in the eyes and said “but I knew none of my babies were retarded!” It’s clear the story wasn’t about my sister.

I might actually hate her more now than I did when she was alive.

I know of an organization attached to a prestigious university that solely exists because at the end of some billionaire’s life, he decided he wanted to chuck some cash into a foundation to try to burnish his image.

But he was so morally corrupt that his version of helping others was to mandate that the foundation focus on “helping” people in developing countries find business opportunities.
Read: they assess how people and environments can be exploited for capitalism while focusing on telling stories about how that exploitation improved the quality of life for people there.
Most of the professors who work with the foundation are very wealthy from their non-academic pursuits.

Not only do I have an increased range of motion, but I (very recently learned) that an old injury is causing spinal stenosis – my spinal canal is narrowing due to bone overgrowth on my vertebrae. (Car accident. I was rear ended.)

About 20 years ago a chiropractor popped my neck by twisting it, and it so freaked him out that he leapt back from the table and did the heebie jeebie dance.
He told me to never let a chiropractor pop my neck by twisting it ever again.
Reasonably certain I could kill myself showing off doing yoga, like in that Dead Like Me episode.

I’ve seen speculation it was a mechanical failure of the arrester system.

How a sailor shortage is crippling ship maintenance at sea – Navy Times

Perhaps plain ol’ mismanagement of resources.

I mean, everyone is already fucked, and that’s what keeps everyone else in check.

Russia has made great efforts to hack municipal systems all over the world, and may actually have some control over Microsoft systems, owing to that credential hack last year that Microsoft still hasn’t confirmed is contained. (Recent Russian hacking campaigns are using malicious signed MSI files, so my bet is no…)

China has all that communication equipment everywhere, with rumors swirling that it’s intentionally compromised. There’s also Tuya, a massive IOT company that produces its own products and also white label products. And there’s all the EV power inverters that can be hacked and used as a botnet to destroy electrical grids. Not that they need to, because apparently they can shut down the U.S. power grid remotely. And who knows what they’ve managed to do with the U.S.’s backdoor access into telecom systems.

The U.S. has its own devices, hacking, and infiltration efforts, although as a U.S. citizen, my awareness of them is decreased due to U.S. media.

But my core point is that there’s basically a digital Cold War happening. And the U.S. is all but surrendering, making successful surveillance, hacking, and sabotage campaigns more likely.
If a situation goes hot at the same time that large parts of U.S. see poisonings or health issues en masse due to tampering with water supply chemical or filtration systems or even the possible destruction of drinking water systems, the explosion of natural gas lines as C&C systems over pressurize domestic lines, followed by a prolonged grid-wide electrical outage, the U.S. will have basically no ability to do anything but focus on domestic issues.

He seemed to know of the shipments being halted after he ordered them to be halted.

I’m not sure if you don’t know or if your question is a setup to try to convince the person who responds that she didn’t actually kiss ass, but she’s been cozying up to Trump in the name of putting the work above her ego, and it’s lead to some embarrassment for her. I wouldn’t necessarily say she’s been kissing ass, but I mean, she’s playing the game.

Before I say what I came here to say, I want to digress with a story I heard about Whitmer.
In the opening, uncertain, days of the pandemic, when it looked like there were going to be unknown outcomes from the economic slowdown, and Michigan’s governmental revenue (via taxes) was going to take a hit, Whitmer made the hard call to furlough many state-level employees.
… Right after the Federal Government passed an increased unemployment assistance bill, and Michigan re-scoped unemployment to include partial furloughs, starting at 6 hours a week. Whitmer took every state worker in Michigan that earned less than about $350 a day and automatically signed them up for unemployment, and furloughed them one day a week off for 12 weeks. My friend more or less got 12 weeks of 4 day workweeks, with 6 days worth of pay. (It might have been 8 weeks - my memory is crap, but even still.)
With an awful lot of respect, I say that I think she’s a clever operator, and she can ‘play the game.’ Trump did set her up a few weeks ago, but I trust that whatever angle she’s working, she’s probably got a good plan. I know that sounds a lot like compromising centrist talk, and that’s fine - that’s what Whitmer is. I haven’t seen her backpedaling on important issues (yet). (Which is weird, now that I think about it. Fuck she runs a good media game.)

Anyway - like 2 1/2 weeks ago, She was in DC for a meeting with Trump and he ambushed her with a press conference where he signed a bunch of awful executive orders.
Whitmer Shows how Democrats are playing with fire in cozying up to Trump.
'A hug?!?' Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's optics with Trump could cost her in 2028.
Whitmer defends her working relationship with Trump: ‘Put service above self’

Which is to say - I can see why people think she’s kissing his ass. But like, she’s gotta govern, and has to live in this reality. She’s not kowtowing to him as far as I can tell. She seems to be rather deftly doing what she has to do, while (it seems, so far) not compromising herself or her policymaking.

I was wondering same!

Maybe it’s something to do with hotels...?

It’s not like the guy they voted for is a rare qualified pick from the Trump camp.

It’s David Purdue, a failed pillow company CEO, as well as ceo for other textile companies. More recently he dabbled in politics as a Republican senator from Georgia, failed gubernatorial candidate, 2020 election denier, climate change denier, and generally an idiotic sycophant.
The textile experience gives him a small amount of plausibility as a choice, but everything else far outweighs that. Just another loser grifter in Trump’s orbit.

Right. In real life you can look someone in the eye and see some semblance of humanity (or at least fear). Online, it doesn’t matter what you say or how you’re perceived, because people get to hide in their perceived anonymity. And you never know when some psychopath with no morals or sense of decency is going to have you swatted.

I read deeper into the article than I care to admit because I wanted to find the date of original introduction.

The Equality Act was introduced in 1974, only 10 years after the civil rights act, which it sought to amend.

In the 8 legislative sessions where democrats have held a trifecta since the act’s introduction, they have not attempted to pass it (instead, favoring stripped down versions that often have many LGBT+ protections removed if a bill has been introduced at all). Every time it has lost the vote or died in committee. And now here we are, less than a week after Trump has moved to nuke the way that the CRA is enforced. So… if both succeed we are actually further from the goal.

Great. Good politics. Not ineffective virtue signaling while being passenger princesses on this ride to fascism at all.

Well, shit. I have been operating under the assumption that these were part of the same conspiracy.
But there have been some gaps that link the two things (linking Koch to Thiel on certain things, for instance) that I have assumed were merely gaps due to one party or the other doing better at hiding their involvement. I’ll have to bear what you said in mind as I continue to figure stuff out.

Do they need to succeed?

The Koch brothers already have a new U.S. constitution drafted and a majority of the states they need to call a constitutional convention. They’ve had plans in motion for years.

I think Trump and Musk were always supposed to be the fall guys. But if they break enough, or reveal enough non-working about the current system, the plan we’re not supposed to realize is in play will succeed.

I told my friends back in mid-October of 2023 that I thought the Hamas attack was probably 1.) heavily influenced by Russia, and 2.) going to throw the election to Trump or whoever the Republican candidate was going to be unless he could get that thing zipped up and a peace deal in place within a month or two.

So stupid. Biden could have done better so easily. But here we are, I guess, witnessing the oligarchy take over the world, using Trump and Musk as patsy’s, letting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Ukrainians die by the hand of genocidal fuckwits.

The following should be taken as a bit of a ramble because I want to express this idea I have, and I don’t think it should be taken as any sort of attempt to correct or challenge what you’re saying because I don’t think what you’re saying is in any way incorrect.

I think the right wing shift is a mirage that is being perpetrated by corporate-owned media. That’s not to say that every media outlet is racist or is explicitly attempting to push a narrative, but I think that the large corporations in the U.S., at least, that own news media have a vested interest in not offending both monied and powerful interests. In that regard they are avoiding reporting on topics that will rally the public, or are outright changing how they report on certain topics.

Which is a lot of words to say that I think what we’re seeing is false consensus driven from the top down, rather than a ‘bottom up’ shift in opinion. I think many of the normal folks are ill-informed, or outright propagandized.
Doesn’t change the outcome, or the opinions held by so many, though… sigh

Well, one line of my comment was about her being part of the CIA torture apparatus. The rest detailed how she, personally and with the help of the Democratic Party, did fascist things like subvert the will of the people by preventing real political choice.

This isn’t a situation where we can pick the lesser of two evils and hold our nose. I’m outright saying she’s part of the problem — so fuck her and her insistence that we focus on only the kings they want us to be concerned about. And fuck her desire to step away from our moral duty to protect others from discrimination.

I will not abandon my principles for word games.

Is he really an illegal immigrant? And is he guilty of the crime that he was in the hearing for?

If he’s here illegally, then deport him. If he’s here legally, let him have his trial, and let the rule of law prevail by meting out whatever justice is deemed necessary. Sure, a crime may invalidate a visa or legal standing or whatever, but you still have to have the damned trial. Innocent until proven guilty.

Trying to arrest him at his pre-hearing to rendition him is fucking wrong. And trying to punish the judge for trying to block that miscarriage of justice from happening is doubly so.

Ah , see, that take is rationalizing. She’s a former CIA torturer who worked under Bush. Within Michigan she once moved into a lobbyists house to avoid getting primaried after redistricting. (The lobbyist’s house was in a safe democrat area that the Democrat party did not field a local candidate for.) Her ascension to state senator was equally questionable - all the other candidates dropped out after meeting with party officials.

It’s clear she’s the Democrats new Joe Manchin, put there to avoid progress and force concessions if they ever win a plurality. All the Michiganders I know vehemently hate her.

She also is only in office because she kept district hopping to avoid getting primaried until she was up for a senate seat, whereupon the Democratic Party pushed out or made concessions to all the other better candidates so they would drop. She’s widely reviled.