So he wants to import socialism from other countries? Doesn’t sound very American of him.

Mostly nothing special in preparation. I have a grill in the back, a propane and a sterno camping stove, so I can still cook food. I have a one-gallon water-filtering thing that I can use if we need to go to boil-water status (our water treatment plant is probably a bit lower than it should be), and I have a camping solar panel (and several power banks) that I can use to recharge the electronics. We also have lanterns, flashlights, headlamps and a lot of candles.

If it’s going to be a major storm, I’ll fill up the gas tank and stop by the ATM - get small bills where possible, sometimes people can’t make change. Oh, and if you’re running low on a prescription, see if they can refill it early. If it floods: a long time ago, in a 3am fit of doomscrolling, I figured out what the nearest highest point I can get to without crossing any streams or storm drains. And after Katrina, when all those people survived the flood but died when they got trapped in their attics - well, I had nightmares about that for a long time, and I eventually mounted a hatchet to the attic wall.

How do we pass the time? We’ll talk with each other or our neighbors - gotta check in on everyone, make sure everyone’s doing as okay as we can be. Maybe go for a walk to check out the neighborhood as well. We all have books and magazines and been meaning to catch up on, so it’s a good time for that; family jigsaw puzzles in the early evening before the light gets too bad. It’s also really nice to just sit and listen to the world without the constant background noise of civilization.

Apparently, Chad Caruso set the Guinness world record as the first person to skateboard across America in 2023, from Venice Beach to Virginia Beach. It took him 57 days to cover 3,162 miles, adventure adventure of 55 miles a day.

To deport someone, the receiving country has to agree to accept them. Mexico will accept their own nationals, and possibly those of some other countries, but they won’t accept everyone. What do you do with people who’s country refuses to accept them back (this has happened)? And what do you do with them when you can’t determine where to send them back to? You’ve already promised they won’t be let loose, so you’ll put them into containment facilities - all very hastily-built, because there are so many people you’ve accumulated so quickly.

But you have more people than you know what to do with, and they’re all just idling in the camps, and the nation is desperate for workers. The temptation is too great: instead of spending all this money maintaining the camps, you can offset the expenses by renting them to various industries as cheap labor.

It’s still expensive, your people still resent spending money on them, and you still want to deport them, so you don’t spend much on food or medicine or clothes or sanitation. Winter comes, disease rips through the camps, and masses die - but that’s not your responsibility, these things happen …

Just a reminder that most of the concentration camps Germany built weren’t extermination camps, they were slave labor camps but the administration didn’t care if the prisoners died of disease or injury, they’d just round up more people to feed the German machine.

It is.

I found this interesting [emphasis in original]:

men without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than women to say they just didn’t want to get one. In turn, women without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than men to say they couldn’t afford a four-year degree.

To be fair: there are home fridges that sell for over $20k, and that wouldn’t be out of place in a $6.5m condo.

“It is racial because the people who carry in the Capitol are primarily white people“

Because the black ones are accosted and harassed if they’re armed? Something I heard a long time ago was that whites fear becoming a minority because they know how minorities are treated. I just find it odd that they use that as a reason to obsessively cling to power instead of trying to make everyone’s lives better.

Back in 2020, Democratic lawmakers requested a change to firearm regulations in the Capitol when armed demonstrators and militia members went into the building demanding an end to COVID-19.

Funny how gun laws and gun restrictions are okay when it comes to protecting lawmakers, but not okay when it comes to protecting schoolchildren.

While I agree this is an issue, this article is from 2018.

Reminder that Ben Stein was a member of the Nixon White House. So was Diane Sawyer.

I think so too!

Rola Makki, the Lebanese American, Muslim vice chair for outreach of the Michigan Republican Party, shrugged off the criticism. “I don’t think everyone’s going to be happy with every appointment Trump makes, but the outcome is what matters,” she said. “I do know that Trump wants peace, and what people need to realize is that there’s 50,000 dead Palestinians and 3,000 dead Lebanese, and that’s happened during the current administration.”

And trump will let Netanyahu wipe all the Palestinians off the map and murder even more Lebanese. I hope it’s all worth it to you.

New Jersey is in one of the worst droughts of the last 120 years. I’m not sure how many wildfires they’ve been fighting recently (it’s a lot); I know there have been over 200 brushfires in New York City in just the past couple weeks.

What’s scary is this 2016 column from Rolling Stone, titled Will America’s Worst Wildfire Disaster Happen in New Jersey?:

[…] the single most destructive blaze in U.S. history could occur in the Northeast […] The Pine Barrens is the lone island of contiguous forest [between Richmond and Boston] [covering a 1.1-million-acre tract in southern New Jersey].

Whereas regular fires used to thin out the Pinelands, large swaths have remained relatively untouched for decades due to strict preservation laws. The result is a giant tinderbox of untended woods that’s surrounded by 100,000-person suburbs. A Wildfire Risk Assessment published by New Jersey compared the Pinelands to “an inch of gasoline covering all of south and central New Jersey.”

In other words, they’re going to confirm him. :(

The attorneys invoked a New York rule that allows attorneys to withdraw when a “client insists upon taking action with which the lawyer has a fundamental disagreement” or when a client “insists upon presenting a claim or defense that is not warranted under existing law and cannot be supported by good faith argument,” or when “the client fails to cooperate in the representation or otherwise renders the representation unreasonably difficult for the lawyer to carry out employment effectively."

Translation: they’re afraid of sanctions or even being disbarred if they continue working with the man publicly flouting court orders.

”Mr Trump doesn’t have to help me get out of this,” he said as he stepped into a car. “All Mr Trump has to do is straighten out the legal system, and you’ll find out who the real criminals are.”

This was a civil case, there’s nothing to overturn. And you lost it by default because you couldn’t be arsed to show up in court.

Can you pick it up and deliver it to the new office in person?

But you don’t eat her food, why should she want to?

Just because you changed the clocks back doesn’t mean that time actually changed.

But that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to close the door! You know that, right?

Thank you so much, I’m gonna make that this weekend!