Maybe something like “you get what you repeatedly vote for.” In this case, Chicago repeatedly votes for the worst possible mayors (and, sadly for the rest of the state, the worst possible Governors). And Chicago suffers for it. Will they ever vote for “the other side?” I doubt it. Not until the city collapses utterly, the population drops by 90% and the survivors are replaced.
Refuse to learn at your own peril.
A whackaloon second-rate dictator with access to nukes? What could possibly go wrong?
Where the case is made that fandoms are composed not of people laser-focused on a single mono-topic, but who are *generally* nerdy, conversant in a range of fandoms, some related, some not, but all somewhat similar in having canon and lore and the like. The point being that when franchises and IPs are taken over by people who are *not* nerdy, they cannot relate to the fans, and end up making a mess of the product. They have fundamentally different worldviews.
A convincing case is made that the Kakhovka Dam was destroyed not by military action, but through incompetence.
The Constitution has of course been amended numerous times before. But amendment that curtail existing right have been few and haven’t gone well.
The 28th Amendment will permanently enshrine four broadly supported gun safety principles into the U.S. Constitution:
Translation: deletion of the 2nd Amendment. The 1st Amendment will be “amended” shortly after, I suspect.
Of course, Newsom knows that this is going nowhere. An amendment must be ratified by three-fourths of the states; the map below suggests that that is unlikely at best. But these sort of announcements are always good; it’s useful to be reminded from time to time that some of our “leaders” are evil.
If Governor Newsom *actually* cared about gun crime victims, instead of making millions more citizens into criminals, he’d actually demand enforcement of existing laws, and would ensure that those arrested for any and all violent crimes would actually see justice. But that’s not what he’s doing.
Uuuuuuuhhhhhhgh.
Britain is doomed. Lack of manufacturing, wholly uncontrolled mass invasion… “Britain” will soon be relegated to the chapter of the history book filled with nations that no longer exist. But while the Soviet Union or Austro-Hungarian Empire went away, the *people* remained, as did their language and much of their culture. But England specifically and Britain as a whole? Their own government is working to erase their existence. It’s remarkable.
Good news:
This is *many* orders of magnitude away from a practical solar power satellite… but ya gotta start somewhere.
And on the other hand, bad news:
Problem one: bits of the parachute system aren’t as strong as they should be. Bad, but readily solvable.
Problem two: the wiring is flammable. This… is monumentally stupid, a problem that has been well understood since the Apollo 1 fire. this may well require that the capsule be largely disassembled so that *miles* of wiring can be replaced.
Good luck with *that.*
And while Boeing continues to struggle to get a capsule not fundamentally different from Apollo flying SpaceX continues to send crews to the ISS in Dragons.
19 years later… pic.twitter.com/2xead0zqaA
— Rare North American Space Koala (@culpable_mink) June 1, 2023
Today I swung by “The Davenport,” the century-plus old apartment building that partially collapsed a few days ago. Roads were closed off for a radius of a block or two around it so I couldn’t get very close in my car, and I didn’t have the time to find someplace to park and walk. Ehhh, oh well. Anyway, a lot of information has come out about it; the city of Davenport has released a bunch of inspection reports and other documents going back several years showing that it has been falling apart for some time. Bricks have been popping out of the face of the building for years. It looks like the sort of place that your average person would have been able to look at and go “Nope” and run to some other accommodations.
Someone’s gettin’ sued.
The City of Davenport website with the documents:
https://www.davenportiowa.com/cms/One.aspx?portalId=6481456&pageId=19580321
In retrospect this sort of thing is not too surprising. A lot of the buildings around here are old brick structures, and The Davenport was only a few blocks from the Mississippi river. “500 year floods” seem to happen every few years now; this had *got* to have an effect. Whether water seeps into the ground that far inland I don;t know, but having tens of thousands of tons of new watery overburden from time to time has got to cause the ground to flex at least some. There are also the occasional earthquake; small by the standards of even Utah, but if you have a brick building not built with earthquakes in mind… that’s not so great.
In all honesty, “The Davenport” looks like a *lot* of buildings in this part of the midwest. Built a century ago, having seen better days. Like our roads and bridges, the infrastructure has not been well looked after. I won’t be surprised if the next few years are filled with increasing tales of buildings and bridges falling. Imagine if the dozens of trillions dumped down the black hole of welfare were instead spent on repairs, maintenance and replacements of structures that needed it.
A recent Mexican TV news piece showed a cartel member wandering about with a shoulder-fired AT-4 anti-tank rocket slung over his shoulder. A number of commenters immediately leaped to one or both of two wrong conclusions:
1: It’s a Javelin missile
2: It’s a missile we gave to Ukraine, which they then turned around and sold on the black market.
Number 1 is easy enough to debunk; it’s simply not a Javelin. Number 2 is more troubling: but then there’s a little detail on the launch tube that makes it clear that wherever the cartel got this thing… it’s not something to fret about too much.
It seems obvious by this point that a rational corporation would, when presented with the option of weighing in on politically decisive “culture war” topics, just stick their fingers in their ears and hum real loud until whatever -themed month it is ends, and spend their time trying to sell their normal merchandise to their normal customers. But, no. Due to the insidious and invasive influence of “woke” ideologies and diversity initiatives, companies have been led to believe that they *have* to build up their diversity social credit scores, or else… something.
Target stores are the latest to discover that attempting to appease a small group of weirdos ticks off a far larger group of people who don’t want to sterilize, mutilate and drive insane their children.A lot of customers have expressed outrage; a few by pestering the employees (these are just regular folk trying to earn a paycheck, leave ’em the frak alone); a few others by causing damage (come on, you’re not on the left… the law *will* go after you for vandalism). But by far, from Targets perspective the biggest threat to the corporation are the large number of customers who are simply not spending their increasingly thin dollars there. Apparently Target has lost about nine *billion* dollars so far. So Target has decided to move their displays of child-grooming-friendly products further back in the store where they’ll be less conspicuous. This, supposedly, is in response to threats to the stores, products and employees from customers who don;t like those products.
But now they’re getting threats from the *other* side… bomb threats from weirdos ticked off that Target is now attempting to appease right wingers.
You know who’s not getting bomb threats from *either* side? Companies that didn’t delve into goofy identity politics in the first place. There might be a lesson there.