thou_dog ✡

But at least our daily life, and the daily life of people we might otherwise be bombing, would only be affected by the broader trends, which is probably a lot less misery than dealing with that AND our current & ongoing bullshit.

I know weather and violent crime are stochastic patterns that sometimes take many years to show effects of any changes we make, and the bloodlust among White House and Pentagon top bureaucrats will have persistent ongoing effects even if we put them out on their ears or behind bars today.

Maybe if we as a society stop kicking the shit out of immigrants, women, trans people and queers more generally, and other minorities here, and stop kicking the shit out of Iranian civilians among others abroad, and jail the fuckers at the top, the madness will subside...?

Who am I kidding, though.

And after our unseasonably hot day followed by a fierce storm yesterday, today it's unsettlingly windy and it's going to freeze over later.

We're only at Thursday.

I'm not saying it's Divine retribution for *gestures broadly* but, y'know, I'm not saying it isn't, either.

Earlier this week my dad texted me to ask about an active shooter incident in my neighborhood (someone barricaded himself in a house with hostages and started shooting at police).

Yesterday we got a tornado warning telling us we were in extreme danger and must seek reinforced underground shelter.

I probably shouldn't have laughed, because it's not funny, but Gd help me, I laughed.

They're near that point already IMO. Not as a matter of explicit policy yet, I think, just randoms getting hauled in and abused for other persecutions by federal & allied state & local enforcers.

Not yet, anyway.

The thing is, there is someone by that name, which I don't think is a common one, on LinkedIn listed as working in DC - for the VA, as a data analyst and RVSR. Their bio is fascinating.

The FTC has my fraud report. I wonder if that VA worker, if they're real, will be grilled. :/

I got a voicemail (but not a phone call 🤔) purporting to be someone from the "Account Status Verification Department" of the "Taxpayer Mediation Support Office", with a Washington DC number.

The voice had this very particular, meticulously clear diction that makes me think it's computer-generated.

A screenshot of a news page, featuring "Army approves first new offensive hand grenade in nearly 60 years", illustrated with a photo of a camo- and glove-wearing arm and hand holding a mostly cylindrical hand grenade, above a photo of Pete Hegseth wearing a tense expression he probably intended to seem resolute

I laughed at this juxtaposition of images, because if you don't already know about grenades specialized for offense vs defense, the at-a-glance meaning goes very well with Hegseth's worried face.

We will need to enshrine the phrase "knee phrenology" as a new and remarkable cultural artifact of the 21st century.

No, it really doesn't.

The closest thing is descriptions of purges by or among the Inquisition or the High Lords, and those are mostly described either in an offhand sort of mention, as backhanded comic relief(!?), or as part of a narrative that's full of achingly, miserably bad writing.

WW2-based entertainment media really suffer from (mostly) treating the Nazis as a symbol of evil in general. Relatively few pop culture entries in that field really touch on the day-to-day life of ordinary people under their rule.

Hey, Warhammer 40K, of all things, takes the assignment seriously.

I understand, I'm sorry. I've been there.

Is there an Ernst Röhm award for, e.g., Lindsey Graham?

"He'd keep you bound to DNA, it's a disgrace!" is a hell of a sentence (and a song lyric).

I hope you have retained yourself the right to stretch and go for a walk, do something else for a while, eat and drink, and take care of other human necessities.

Posted with respect, not derision.

I am sure a Guide to the Perplexed: Nuclear Fuel Cycle Edition exists out there somewhere, and hiring a decent attorney to study it & the US needs/wants priority list and then go negotiate on our behalf would have been better than letting these proudly ignorant conmen do... well, anything.

That's fair.

Sweater

Not so much religious in general, but especially in the Eurosphere, it's specifically Christian. Imperial religions in general, I'd imagine, with their emphasis on the need for obedience and order.

I think someone met one of those spiders that use their hairs to produce a slightly unsettling sound when startled.

Oh. Yeah, I think a handful of transit systems in the US are free to ride, but most that I'm aware of aren't.

That doesn't address the specific issue of transit systems typically requiring paid passes for rides. It doesn't have to be the person holding the pass that pays for it, but someone must. That said, that's probably a good use of tax dollars.

Eh, the divisions of tribe and clan exist independent of religion - religion can influence how we draw those divisions and what we do about them, but we do fundamentally have a thing about dividing the world into "my people/not my people".

For all the potential for transhumanism to take our civilization down terrible paths, this seems like it would be a pretty decent one. Gender should be a choice. Anatomy should be a choice!

I mean, we'd probably need to have some anatomy, but that's not what I mean & you know it, pun lover. <3

(Oh yeah, the R at the end of HVAC/R helps with production and distribution of food too. Among other goods & services, like vaccines and so on.)

(Okay, I know, the dead horse isn't getting any deader.)

I've never farmed, but if I had, well, we all need to eat, too.

Sure, capitalism sucks, but how we use the technology we develop is the moral choice, not whether to develop technology in the first place. (I know we're on the same page here, I just needed to overexplain.)

And of course a lot of what I was doing could have been automated, albeit maybe not the judgment calls, yet (such as "is it safe to reach over someone's fence to retrieve the public rental bike they stowed in their backyard").

Big shrug from me. I don't have a doctorate, but while I have worked backbreaking labor jobs, they were in industries that benefited me more or less directly. Working distribution centers for vendors that sell HVAC/R stuff and micro-mobility services means we have better AC and transit options.

Once again, the problem is we aren't doing a good job ensuring that tribalism, greed, and plain thoughtlessness don't fuck up our attempts to build a better world.