Curious Canid

I, for one, welcome our new rodent overlords. Although I’m kind of hoping for dogs instead.

I came here for this!

And “No step on snek!” is still ours.

To quote a popular bumper sticker: Be nice to America or we’ll bring democracy to your country.

Actually saying that they want slave labor is considered bad public relations.

Mississippi doesn’t have enough character to be the worst. It seems to be bad in every way, but it doesn’t have the flair for actively destructive stupidity that make Florida and Texas what they are.

This does ring true. And the right has been systematically attacking public education for decades, with considerable success. They have created the constituency they knew they would need to do what they actually want to do. The worst of it is that there’s nothing we can do about it, in the short term. Education operates on a generational time scale. We desperately need to fix this, but even if we had the political power to do that, which we currently do not, it would be at least twenty years before it could begin to affect things.

I think we are nearing the point where even the far-right base is realizing that what’s being done is making things worse for the, not better. We may get a window of opportunity to start fixing things. When and if we do, progressives need to be decisive and daring. Big changes need to be made and made quickly.

The Democratic party, as it currently stands, is not going to do what is needed. It needs to be reformed or replaced if we’re going to make this work. The best of the alternatives would be the return of something like the Great Depression.

I don’t think the system we have will allow the practical creation of a new party, but I have begun to wonder if we can’t get away with bypassing the Democratic “leadership”. If we get progressive candidates through the primaries as Democrats, and support them directly with funding and volunteers, we can get them elected.

All of mine are casement windows. The taller ones hinge open to one side and the shorter ones hinge open from the bottom.

Under this administration, an ethics advisor is a clear case of government waste.

All of Trump’s appointments and hires have been based on compliance, and nothing else. Well, actually, competence may be a negative and honesty is completely unacceptable.

It’s impossible to tell anymore. There was a time when we could have assumed it was a bit. Now we have mentally incompetent people running our government and encouraging their followers to be delusional.

If you show the person at the border your paper, and they still won’t let you in, it doesn’t matter that you have the paper. It is just that simple. It’s illegal, but when the people who are supposed to be enforcing the laws are the ones breaking them, there isn’t any real recourse short of a popular uprising.

I’m getting a T-Deck, but I don’t feel too bad about using Bluetooth on a phone, as long as everything else is disabled. It isn’t hard to track, but it will be a distant third after cell and Wifi in terms of what the authorities will be tracking. Not ideal, but an acceptable compromise for now.

We got some Meshtastic radios that we use for protests (as well as for protests). They solve most of the problems quite neatly.

My microwave can boil a single cup of water faster than my kettle. My kettle can boil four cups of water a lot faster than my microwave. It all depends on the microwave and kettle (and the voltage available).

I live in the US and I heat my tea water in an electric kettle. It probably isn’t as fast as yours, but it is still close to microwave speed. And I can heat up enough for several cups of tea and have it keep the rest hot. I usually drink more than one at a sitting.

If you live in a place where there are still old lead pipes in the system, which almost everyone in the US does, you should start pushing your city representatives to get it fixed. It’s a major hazard in all sorts of ways.

I live in one of the very few cities in the US that replaced all of its lead pipes a couple of decades ago.

I want an Alef Model A so badly!

I’m reading Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series. They fit modern fantasy into a British police procedural framework. What makes them exceptional are the characterizations, plus the wit and snark of the dialog. They are both good stories and a lot of fun to read.

Share the planet.

As an American, I would be happy with either Denmark or Canada invading.