I’m a drinker and the day Orange Diaper Baby kicks it, I’ll be heading to our fine neighborhood bottle shop, which is owned and run by some East Indians, to acquire some celebratory brews. One thing I’d love to be able to buy is a strong IPA brewed explicitly to celebrate Donny’s demise. I’m not sure if the brewers are clever enough to see the market for such a thing, and also not sure if the Narcissist In Chief will give enough notice to get the fermenting done in time. Just imagine what could be done with the artwork on the products - instant collector’s items.

Depends on where you mean. Spokane city is pretty purple and the city council is more left-leaning than ever: https://www.inlander.com/news/progressives-and-moderates-dominate-conservatives-in-local-races-flipping-a-spokane-council-seat-and-ousting/article_ef72e2af-a02f-4a5f-966d-9813d8ba585f.html . They just passed a ban on algorithmic rent price fixing by landlords for example.

When you leave Spokane, the closer you get to Idaho the more regressive things get. Spokane and Spokane Valley are night and day in my view - no good reason for going into the latter. The same is true when you head north (hwy 2, 395) and south, at least until you get to Pullman. I haven’t spent much time in central WA but my impression is that it’s pretty right-wing compared to Spokane or Puget Sound, so yeah.

That said, I’ve lived in Seattle and the S. Sound and once you get out of the city proper and away from the Eastside and close-in suburbs like Issaquah (Fall City, Snoqualmie and North Bend are probably considered suburbs now too!), and also out of places like Olympia/Tumwater, it gets redneck in a hurry.

Gotta protect Private Property at any expense. What next, will people be stealing slaves in America?

It’s only foul if the dead person is white and Christian. Funny the sad excuse for a news article didn’t mention whether the decaying body qualified as a Master Race member or not. You’d think the wife would have known the details but the sad excuse for a news article doesn’t say what happened to her. Maybe the cops killed her with their toys.

Times are hard, period-authentic gear is expensive. What machine gun would a self-respecting Nazi have used? “A representative for the investment group that initiated the eviction” - oh great, the building was owned by Private Equity - the Nazi should have launched V2 at it.

has … incredible capabilities

What kind of news story writing is this? Just what incredible capabilities does the machine have? Tell me! Name them. “Incredible abilities” wastes two whole words in this CBS news story and they tell me exactly nothing, they just take up space. This is more like the writing I’d expect from a high schooler, or from bad AI.

Why is the NYPD helping ICE? Hasn’t the mayor banned them from doing so? If not I would hope the future mayor will issue a no-helpy-ice order to them.

Same. I cannot for the life of me understand why people have adopted phones as their computers - those shitty little screens and those shitty little fake keyboard and those shitty little toy CPUs. Why would anyone ever use one as their primary computer? For computing I use a real tricked-out desktop that I can upgrade and fix myself, with a 32" display and a real “ergonomic” keyboard. My phone is used for making phone calls, listening to music when I’m out of the house (I have a real audio system at home with real speakers and an amp and a real radio receiver), and reading websites and forums &etc when I’m at the gym. If I’m taking pictures I have a real DSLR for that as well as a couple of other casual-use digicams. Phones pretty much suck and I won’t be buying another until the one I have dies or becomes too much of a privacy/security risk.

I’ve got a “refurbished” Dell laptop that’s about 15yrs old. Some ex-corp model. 4C/8T, 16" 1900x1200-ish display, Nvidia GPU, 20G RAM, and it’s still going strong except for the battery which stopped holding a charge. I could get a new battery but I use the system rarely and just for browsing/email so running it off the AC brick is fine. It’s been running Linux Mint for as long as I can remember. My phone is a cheapo model from 2021 and it is also fine. The only reason I might replace it is if the battery tanks like with my other phones (planned obsolescence) or if I finally decide it’s mandatory to up my security/privacy game and need a phone that runs GrapheneOS, which means a Pixel. An old used one.

The debate over the city’s long-standing anti-discrimination rules started with a Facebook post, the Sandpoint Reader reported. In October, a YMCA lifeguard posted that she had seen “a man semi-dressed … as a woman” using the facility’s women’s locker room. The YMCA and the Sandpoint police told the lifeguard that this was permitted because the city’s ordinance allowed people to “use the locker room that aligns with their gender identity.”

The post unleashed a “torrent” of responses from the community, the Reader reported, about whether the rule was treating all members, including transgender individuals, fairly — or whether it was endangering cisgender women in shared changing-room spaces like the YMCA’s.

During Wednesday’s meeting, Grimm argued that deliberations over such issues are “complex civil rights questions that, in my opinion, belong to the state or federal law.”

“I believe it’s inappropriate for the city of Sandpoint to insert itself into intimate spaces where privacy norms, safety expectation and long-standing social boundaries already exist,” he said.

Many of those who supported the repeal spoke about their desire to protect women from sexual harassment or assault. City Council Member Kyle Schreiber said he takes those concerns “very seriously” — but that the focus on transgender individuals’ use of one locker room or another is misplaced.

“It seems like every other day there’s another article in our local paper about a sexual predator,” he said Wednesday. “Here’s the thing, though. None of those incidents involved a man dressed as a woman in order to gain access to his victims. I couldn’t find a single one.”

Does Putin have the pictures?

This can’t be any more humiliating than being JDV’s half-brother.

I’m sure they (Jewish people) are really going to appreciate that comment, especially coming from someone who can’t string together two coherent sentences. Way to win friends and influence people.

Same re:HD and Lowe’s. My nearest Lowe’s has three of these cameras in their parking lot. They not only spy on you but they flash their lights and play audio messages at you too. In the fine print of the Lowe’s “Pro” membership (it’s really a loyalty program and anyone can sign up) they ask you to explicitly agree to Flock surveillance and to agree that you have no rights to/over the data they collect. I avoid Lowe’s when I can now - clearly they have no respect for their customers and their prices/selection are no better than elsewhere.

The deflock site doesn’t show any cameras at my closest HD but I don’t know if this means that they respect their customers slightly more than Lowe’s or if it means the site just hasn’t been updated yet. I’ll have to make a point of looking the next time I’m up that way. Yeah, there aren’t a whole lot of good alternatives to BigBoxHomeStores here either. Sometimes Walmart will have the more commodity stuff, but who wants to spend money at Walmart? At my nearest one, the management has lately been permitting anti-trans signature-gathering, allowing hate groups to set up tables on Walmart property right outside the main entrance where they can accost customers easily. The store is also hiring off-duty city cops to stand around doing nothing. If I want to be watched by cops I can get that anywhere in public - don’t need to breathe Walmart air too.

“It’s literally landmark,”

“Literally.”

I guess a gravestone is sort of a landmark. Idaho will be needing a lot more of those.

Why are we paying diplomats when everyone is just using a “playbook” these days? I bet they’re not even real books - just PDFs they’re reading on a phone.

And don’t forget, the “doing something” has to be fun and entertaining and kid-friendly and there needs to be a convenient Starbucks nearby. Warm & sunny too, because who wants to be uncomfortable outside “doing something?”

If you’re young enough they might take you up on that offer.

It blows my mind how computer illiterate people are these days. All while congratulating themselves on their “tech skills” in comparison to “old people” who they claim “don’t understand technology” like they do. Most everyone, up until maybe, what, 10 years ago, knew how to use a desktop computer and desktop software like browsers and word processors and spreadsheets and email clients. Now if the software isn’t a phone app and if the interaction is more than voice-recognition or pictures or video or sound, people are helpless and happy that they’re helpless.

Inventing and punishing thoughtcrimes seems to be a favored tactic among dictators. Trump-MAGA and ICE remind me most of Stalin and his NKVD (secret police). Solzhenitsyn wrote about how ordinary citizens would frequently be arrested/shot/sent to the gulag over mere assertions that they held anti-Soviet/anti-Communist beliefs, or had counter-revolutionary sympathies. It was illegal to not rat out others who you suspected held such beliefs and inclinations - if you didn’t you could be shot yourself.

I think we’re getting there. I soon expect to see federal government websites and apps where you can report your friends/neighbors/family members for anti-capitalist and/or anti-fascist and/or anti-evangelical-Christian leanings.

From Wikipedia (Great Terror article)

The purges were largely conducted by the NKVD, which functioned as the interior ministry and secret police of the USSR. Soviet politicians who opposed or criticized Stalin were removed from office and imprisoned, or executed, by the NKVD. The purges were eventually expanded to the Red Army high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military. The campaigns also affected many other segments of society: the intelligentsia, wealthy peasants—especially those lending money or other wealth (kulaks)—and professionals. As the scope of the purge widened, the omnipresent suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries (known collectively as wreckers) began affecting civilian life.

The campaigns were carried out according to the general line of the party, often by direct orders by the Politburo headed by Stalin. Hundreds of thousands of people were accused of political crimes, including espionage, wrecking, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, and conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups. They were executed by shooting, or sent to Gulag labor camps. The NKVD targeted certain ethnic minorities with particular force (such as Volga Germans or Soviet citizens of Polish origin), who were subjected to forced deportation and extreme repression. Throughout the purge, the NKVD sought to strengthen control over civilians through fear and frequently used imprisonment, torture, violent interrogation, and executions during its mass operations.