Yes, the Department of Offense IS a socialist organization. But the fact that it has to do with offense and killing and ‘projecting power’ and bribing ‘friendlies’ with money and weapons while scaring ‘unfriendlies’ with the same, does not whitewash it into acceptability. We could, and should, take that roughly $850B/yr and plow it into domestic infrastructure, public R&D (no patents or other encumbrances), education, public health care, social supports (such as Medicare/SS), the Arts, basic research, the sciences (climate, space, etc), public housing and clean energy generation to name a few things. We could do all this if it weren’t for the fact that in the US the only acceptable form of public spending is public spending on weapons of war, on the means of bullying and killing those who we don’t like or who won’t cooperate with us. By all means, we should keep up the socialist spending, but it should be directed in such a way as to improve the lives of the citizens directly, not just as hypothetical trickle-down improvements from making ever more deadly and expensive killing technologies.

Just a few hours from me is the Grand Coulee Dam, built in the 1930s and one of the Wonders of the World. There’s no reason that we couldn’t be engaged on projects of this scope and size all the time, but nope, that’s evil socialism, and big government-funded projects are only acceptable in America if they directly have to do with providing us with new or better weapons to wield against Those People (foreigners mainly).

As my 90+ YO (now dead) aunt put it to me, “90 is enough!”. She lived on her own and was relatively healthy right up to the end, but had no fairy-tale beliefs about the joys and virtues of extreme old age. I once asked her, after she made such a proclamation, why anyone who, like her, wasn’t put away in an old folks home or suffering from illness/injury would prefer The End arrive, and she said “there’s just so much you can’t do anymore”. I took that to mean a) activities that you are newly physically incapable of (say, rock climbing), b) activities that are now too difficult and/or dangerous (say, solo long-distance hiking), and c) activities and life-paths that are practically-speaking now closed off to you, like finding one’s soul-mate, traveling the world w/same, getting an advanced degree, being hired-into and rising through the ranks of some admired org … all the sort of stuff that might still seem perfectly possible in one’s 20s/30s/40s/even 50s. I can see how even in the best of cases, the world slowly but surely crushing your dreams and closing you out of any potential joys could bring you around to the belief that ‘90 is enough’.

My thoughts exactly. Somehow, year after year, we can always come up with $800B+ for the offense budget ($842B FY2024) and that never gets seriously questioned, despite the US not being technically at war with any other major or minor powers. The offense budget is always a “must pass” proposition, whereas spending that actually helps Americans, like Medicare, Medicaid, and SS, are treated/portrayed as some sort of obscene “entitlements” that only the most profligate and immoral nations would ever direct tax money to. Those, and any kind of non-military infrastructure, are just examples of coddling the undeserving citizenry. Investing in the means to kill “foreigners”, in contrast, is money well spent!

The whole “standing army” paradigm needs to be scrapped and the sooner the better.

Another recent law penalises “discrediting” the Russian army, and it has been applied to a broad variety of actions interpreted either as support for Ukraine or criticism of the war.

These include:

• Wearing clothes in the blue-and-yellow colours of the Ukrainian flag
  

• Writing anti-war slogans on cakes, as did pastry chef Anastasia Chernysheva
  

• Dyeing one's hair blue-and-yellow or listening to Ukrainian music
  

• Displaying anti-war posters with messages ranging from "No War" to eight asterisks - the number of Russian letters that spell "No War" - or even just a blank sheet of paper.
  

A village priest in Kostroma region was fined for discrediting Russia’s armed forces after praying for peace and mentioning the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”.

I wonder if the surfer was insulted that the shark didn’t even clean its plate… like there was something wrong with the leg?

“both sides” BS to not vote

I have an acquaintance, a “formerly” rabid-right-wing, anti-union, global-warming-isn’t-real, they-hate-our-freedom, wealthy, fossil-fuel-family Reactionary from the western US who is doing this now. Apparently now with grown daughters and an immigrant son-in-law, Trump, formerly touted to me by this guy as “a really smart guy” and “doing some great things” (at the time, the great thing was withdrawing from the Paris accords), is not quite as palatable as before. But rather than focusing on Trump’s shortcomings, it’s better in the Reactionary’s view to fixate instead on Biden’s genocide support (while ignoring Trump’s and the GOP’s enthusiasm for the practice), assert that “both sides” are just a “uni-party”, and throw up his hands and claim to be not voting this time around, or voting for some hopeless brain-worrmed third party candidate. Anything, anything at all, except for showing one iota of opposition to old Doddering Donald, anything but admit that you, the Reactionary, made disgusting wrong choices in the past and are about to, for all intents and purposes, make them again. The bottom line aim is that taxes remain low, dividends and capital gains remain high, and regulations, whether it be on the Environment or child labor, remain minimal. Voting for Trump directly is preferred to achieve these aims, but both-sides-ing him into office again is fine too if you need the plausible deniability because of pressure from your misguided Communist family members.

I donated a truck to these MFs about five years ago. Nice to know now how they waste donation $ on frivolous homophobic legal BS. Needless to say they’ll never see another penny from me.

Absolutely, bring it. These LARPer pussies need to learn a lesson, one they’re not getting from video games, firearm manufacturers, and their imbecile Discord blabberings. So funny to think that THEY think that everyone but them is quaking in fear of their ‘civil war’ talk and vague threats of violence. Nobody’s afraid of them at all, nobody respects them at all, and that’s not going to change, period.

And to be clear, this wasn’t just some mistake, some lamentable error. The cops deliberately set her up in order to protect one of its own. Not a single cop or police force will pay any price for ruining this woman’s life.

The review found that local police ignored evidence that directly pointed to one of their own officers - Michael Holman – who later went to prison for another crime and died in 2015.

Holman’s truck was seen in the area the day of the murder, his alibi could not be corroborated, and he used Patricia Jeschke’s credit card after claiming he found it in a ditch.

A pair of distinctive gold earrings identified by Ms Jeschke’s father were also found in Holman’s home.

None of this was disclosed to Ms Hemme’s defence team at the time, the review said.

Ms Hemme was interrogated by police several times under the influence of antipsychotic medication and a powerful sedative after being involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. She had been receiving occasional psychiatric treatment since she was 12 years old.

Her responses were “monosyllabic” and she was “not totally cognisant of what was going on”, court documents showed, and at times could barely hold her head up straight and was in pain from muscle spasms – a side effect of the medications.

Judge Horsman’s review noted that no forensic evidence linked Ms Hemme to the murder. She had no motive and there were no witnesses linking her to the crime.

Tnx for the heads-up OP. I need to get some Forever int’l stamps (currently $1.25/ea IIRC) if they’re going up too.

A Biden aide said that it was “not an ideal start” for the president at the beginning of the debate, but that there was “no mass panic” at the campaign headquarters in Delaware.

When Arizona passed the legislation that allowed for private school vouchers, the program was projected to cost $65 million in 2024 and $125 million in 2025. But the most recent estimates put that cost at a staggering $940 million per year, more than 1,000 percent of the initial estimate.

The Christofascists won’t be satisfied until every school is a 100% Christian-run, 100% taxpayer-funded, stone-age-war-god-ideology fascist brainwashing center.

Same. I’ve had two used Dell laptops over the years, running Linux, and no major problems other than the batteries going bad. The most recent I’ve had for 10+ years now and it’s still going strong. Pretty sure it’s an ex-corporate machine if that makes any difference.

Welp, I can see it’s time to re-up as a member with the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and maybe a few more. I haven’t been active in the Church:State fight since the early 2000s when GWB was kissing-up to Christofascists but the latter are really gaining momentum of late now that they have Their People in power from the SCOTUS on down to the lowliest municipal admin spot. We as a country are truly f*cked if we don’t neutralize these people. I’ll probably join TST too because I agree with them ideologically, they’re doing some great women’s health care work, and I want to make sure that I get on all the Christofascist’s Lists as a certified Demonic influencer.

I swear he comes across as even more senile each and every day. But …

The rich would support this - they can only consume so much after all, and most of that would be discretionary. No more income taxes on vast incomes, stop buying imported shit, huge win for them. The chowderheads supporting Drumpf would probably be enthusiastic about such an idea too - imagining their small paychecks without that hated tax deduction box and imagining no more paying every year for that scary tax return software. And then, they lose their jobs because countries that we export to retaliate with their own tariffs. Prices on pretty much everything goes through the roof (because even domestic products have foreign supply chains), and most of the cheap shit they used to be able to afford (like electronics from China, bulk foods from overseas and (fast-)foods made with it) they can’t afford now.

Meanwhile, with the economy crashing, federal receipts (both tax and tariffs) dry up and it’s Government Shutdown time. All working according to the Plan. Grandma and Grandpa lose their incomes and health care and have to move in with unemployed, impoverished JimBob and the wife, which is darn near intolerable what with all the hillbilly kids being home all the time now that the schools have been shut down. Kids that are wailing about being hungry all the time just like the oldsters.

It would be fun to see what carve-outs to the tax/tariff policy they’d have, to try to keep the MIC funded. Borrowing is of course the preferred way to fund it, but nobody’s going to be touching the bonds issued by an actively collapsing national government.

“Bloomberg reported the memo indicated a “newer” first officer was flying at the time and inadvertently pushed forward on the control column.”

So, is this another “pilot tries to crash the plane” incident? It’s hard to imagine how a pilot could “inadvertently” shove the controls forward, especially at that altitude when both would totally dialed-in to flying the plane and doing their checklists and whatnot (vs. say, getting up to go to the toilet or something). Fortunately, “the event was addressed appropriately as we always strive for continuous improvement” said SW, so now I feel better.

It’s right there in the paragraph about nuclear weapons.

Oh don’t be such a baby.

I use the one that’s built in to the Fastmail service. I have a custom domain just for aliases. The Fastmail alias-creation API is integrated with the Bitwarden app (which I use) so that makes creating new accounts (that use email addresses as usernames) on websites really easy. I also use Spamgourmet which is free, convenient, and has been around a very long time. No custom domains there, but they let you use a variety of their domains and they have some short ones which is nice, but I do find that they’re blocked pretty often, mostly by major mailing list services.

Makes me think: this could be turned into a profitable new “sport”. I’m imaging something like a boxing ring, where a Boeing whistleblower and a Boeing MBA fight it out in public. Could be pitched as quasi-legit, like boxing, or maybe something along the lines of “professional” wrestling. Tag teams, outrageous costumes, stories of insult (“the MBA shot my teamie in his pickup truck!”, “this 'blower reduced dividends by $0.50/share!”) and revenge. I don’t follow fighting sports so maybe you guys could figure out something that would sell well in 2024+. You’d want betting of course, not sure if you could legally do that in IL or WA, might need to move Boeing HQ to Las Vegas. All profits would go to buying Boeing a new management and towards class-action lawsuit costs.