154 Comments

Here’s why you’re more likely to die from a DEI bridge collapse than a burn pit.

National Review

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Having mastered submarine mechanics, balloon technology, and helicopter headwinds, here’s why I think the concern for burn pits have been overblown.

NYT

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OT: So, how's tricks with Roodles?

𝗝𝘂𝗱𝗴𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝘂𝘁 𝗚𝗶𝘂𝗹𝗶𝗮𝗻𝗶'𝘀 𝗺𝗶𝗰 𝗮𝘀 𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗽𝘁 𝘁𝗼 '𝗱𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗼𝘆 𝗗𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗱 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝗺𝗽'

https://www.rawstory.com/rudy-giuliani-arizona-court/

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These guys get threatened too much. Time to just do whatever you are wanting to threaten. No more warnings. They know that they're not supposed to act like that. They've just been allowed to get away with it for years.

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THIS. You and I sure wouldn't receive multiple judicial/legal do-overs.

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Amazing how they hate how some states have eliminated cash bond, yet as soon as they have to pay it the go all "UNFAIR!! HELP, HELP I'M BEING OPPRESSED!!"

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"Bailiff, whack his chram."

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OT: Thanks, Texas for taking everybody off the grid!

"Fierce storms leave 140,000 Texans without power for days"

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69045473

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>>Even days after the storm, the apartment where Alexis McCartney, a remote tech company employee, lives remains without power. Working from home is "basically impossible", she told the BBC. "It's been a huge, inconvenient experience, to say the least," she said. "We're in the prime of Texas summer...it's easy to work up a sweat."<<

Oh honey, it's not even June. This is just Mother Nature doing a little vinyasa yoga before she goes full Bikram.

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Heat index in Austin today is 100-102 degrees F which is way cooler than 559.67 degrees Rankine.

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This isn't the grid being overloaded like during Snowmageddon. This is lines and transformers being taken out by hurricane-force winds, which isn't on ERCOT. ERCOT sucks, but this isn't their fault.

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The Snowmageddon thing was utterly uck-fayed. All they had to do was do what their engineers told them to do, which was to install some basic weatherproofing. We have that on all our power plants in Minnesota and it works just fine, and we get way colder than the cold snap they had in Texas.

What really makes me mad is that I'm still paying on my gas bill a surcharge for that event in Texas. ERCOT had to buy so much energy on the spot market that it drove up costs for everyone, including us, who had spent the necessary money to avoid just such a situation.

ERCOT kept the money, didn't spend it; and now they're getting indirectly bailed out by everyone else in America because they broke the spot market through their greedy incompetence.

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There's your Republican personal responsibility in action.

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I'm in San Diego now, and mostly the prices are much higher here. But utilities are MUCH lower, because Not Texas.

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I still prefer to blame it on overload and you can't stop me. ;)

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:-D

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Oh. Okay.

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I mean, I understand thinking it's ERCOT's fault, because it usually is....

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:) Yes

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And it's super-fun to blame them because they usually deserve it.

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It's the windmills and solar panels that caused the grid to crash.

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Those have been some nasty storms. Probably would have taken down the grid even if Texas had a real grid instead of ERCOT.

But with ERCOT, they don't stand a chance, poor bastards.

Hundreds of thousands of people around Houston have already been without power for over a week, and many may not get it back for weeks to come.

Houston, without air conditioning, would not be a huge city.

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Just wait til August/September. AND for Hurricane Season.

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Also, too, a story on NPR I heard this morning said that, like Florida, insurers are leaving the Texas market in droves. It had over the past year something like a 23% increase on property owners forced on to the last-resort state insurance plan.

But, hey, at least the state's putting razor wire in the rivers to murder desperate women and children who are looking for better lives by not being murdered in their own countries.

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They're already predicting this season is going to be a doozy. YAY. /deep dark sarcasm

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"Record-breaking." Which is NOT what you want to hear in this context.

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Again?

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Joe is fighting for the health care our veterans deserve. trump doesn't want the damaged bodies on the same stage as it gives him the creeps.

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Remember when Trump raised money for the Vets, but then kept it for himself?

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He made the 9/11 Firefighters Cancer Fund disappear. No one has figured out how.

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ETTD

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Cue the .gif of Doug Henning, saying, "It's an Illuuuuuusion!!!"

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He pissed it away, OK?

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Jr. got on that gravy train as well. 95% to "admin."

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He hoovers every Benjamin that comes close to his orbit.

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OT: MSNBC right now -

Jury instruction conf. starts shortly

- Looks like Chump may be toast!

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I thought they were delaying jury instruction until next Tuesday.

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Closing arguments are next week, but I'm sure there will be tons of fucktussles over jury instructions in the meanwhile.

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I'm not getting my hopes up again. I've had that football pulled away too many times already...

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Ok

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From your beak....

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A chirp

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...to [Deity of your choice]'s ear!

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Trump is back to the courthouse again.

We call the area where he speaks "The Playpen."

It's VERY fitting.

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Behind a couple of bike racks cobbled together. How the mighty fall.

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OT. Boeing can't catch a break.

"CNN — One person has died and at least 71 others were injured on board a Singapore Airlines plane that encountered severe turbulence on a flight from London to Singapore. The Boeing 777-300ER plane diverted to Bangkok, according to a post on the Singapore Airlines Facebook page. It said 211 passengers and 18 crew were on board.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/21/world/singapore-airlines-turbulence-bangkok/index.html

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While it's not necessarily going to be Boeing's fault, this is something I really want to stress for folks as this keeps happening.

Please, please, keep your seatbelt on when you're seated. These things happen suddenly and that's a lot of Gs in a short amount of space. And it's lights out once you contact the overhead panel.

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With absolutely no knowledge of the incident beyond the sketchy first reports; I can't see how this is Boeing's fault. Apart from Boeing's contributions to global warming, that is.

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True. But any bad news involving a Boeing is just another straw on the camel's back. imo

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And you're correct in that thinking.

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What liberals get wrong about burn pits.

By Ross Douthat

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AHEM:

In an interview with political analyst Jon Delano at KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, Trump was asked if he supports any restrictions on a person's right to contraception.

"We’re looking at that and I'm going to have a policy on that very shortly and I think it’s something you’ll find interesting," Trump said. "I think it’s a smart decision. We’ll be releasing it very soon."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-looking-policies-restrict-birth-control-access-rcna153323

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ABSOLUTELY NOT.

Folks, Mount up for the fall!

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Looking forward to Contraception Week.

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In other words he doesn't have squat. He'll roll it out during his next Infrastructure Week.

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He's just going to go with whatever the religious loons that worship him want and then try to gish gallop the rest of us.

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He'll be all "I solved the contraception crises by limiting the access for everyone, you're welcome" all over this one any second now.

Sad watching a brain decay while the body lives on ... but there you have it

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How very reassuring, ladies! He'll have a policy on that shortly! No need to jump the gun and say "of course we'll oppose such restrictions, how fucked up do you think we are?"

Keep voting for the rapist, I'm sure he has your interests at heart. When he's not raping, that is.

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Roe, Roe, Roe your Vote.

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trump always makes us wait for the smart shit.

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Two weeks, forever, yada yada yada

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When I built scenery and did special effects for TV commercials, it was "20 minutes."

A Producer would need something changed and demand to know exactly how long it would take because everyone was on the clock and the clock was ticking. If I told them the truth, they would get pissed off.

So I learned to tell them, "20 minutes." It was a short enough time they'd leave me alone. And it was long enough that when they came back in an hour, I could tell them again, "20 minutes," and that would be pretty accurate.

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When the arraigns come,

They run and hide their head,

They may as well be dead,

When the arraigns come.

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Well, I thought I could smell flop sweat, Creosote Just For Men, Ass Body Spray, ass, cheap dog turd cigars, turds, booze farts, and booze today. Now I know why, I'll stop blaming The Crew.

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It speaks to how badly life in Middle America has deteriorated that we can get anybody to join the military, considering how horribly this country has always fucked over our soldiers.

I tell this story a lot, but my father’s career was as a VA chemist during the Reagan Administration and beyond, working in the lab to figure out what was wrong with ex-soldiers suffering from exotic cancers from whatever the hell they were exposed to during their duty in Vietnam. He had few resources and no budget because Reagan took all the funding away.

The roots of my rage can be traced to visiting him at work as a little kid and seeing those guys on gurneys in the hallways, because there weren’t enough rooms, screaming and writhing in puddles of their own piss because there weren’t enough attendants. Those men deserved better. We failed.

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Thanks, Republicans!

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I don’t think so many people know about the poor treatment of many vets. MSM doesn’t generally keep those news items front and center. Jon Stewart really tried to keep some issues in public awareness.

The ‘Ra, Ra’ military promoting crowd doesn’t like constant reminders about veterans getting poor treatment, IMHO. Reagan, and his past and current cult, would never admit such a thing happened under his watch. I think they’re mostly concerned with stock prices for military suppliers.

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When they say they support "the troops," they mean the defense contractors.

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For-profit cannon fodder.

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My dad was a VA psychiatrist who fought like hell to get mental health benefits for his patients.

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I did my first year nursing school clinical rotations in our city's Veteran's Administration Hospital during the early nineties. Virtually ALL of the long term care patients in that facility were Viet Nam Vets.

It's impossible for me to clearly express how much of an impact becoming acquainted with some of those men actually had on me.

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OT: Since one of y'all earlier brought up cooking Down Here, and since the fruit on the tree in our side-yard is ripe enough, I've decided to do chicken with papaya for supper tonight.

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Republican on Fox Calls for the GOP to ‘Shut Down the Economy’ to Fix Immigration: ‘We Should, Really’

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/republican-on-fox-calls-for-the-gop-to-shut-down-the-economy-to-fix-immigration-we-should-really/

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The "Trick or Treat" solution.

Turn off all the lights, close the curtains, hope all scary immigrants move onto the country next door.

Eat all the chocolate ourselves.

Profit.

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I thought they hated the government. Now they hate the economy? That's an escalation.

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He may be responding to The Pope, who yesterday said that shutting down borders was madness.

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I'll take the Pope's words.

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Well, in 2020 Trump did find a way to stem the flow of immigrants--he fucked up the pandemic and the resulting shutdowns and job losses kept immigrants from trying to get here.

Brilliant!

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right, the 'Border Crisis' that you slope browed troglodytes threw up your hands and ran away from because Fuckface a la Orange told you to.

Fuck your party and your disingenuous politically motivated 'crises'

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Malicious, deliberately manipulative fiscal malfeasance as propagated by a proponent of the very same variety of Reich that the Deposed Despot so virulently embraces.

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We can't save the world from climate change or defend ourselves from a deadly pandemic because it might hurt the economy.

But OMG brown people. . .

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spoken like someone who doesn't understand what "the economy" is.

sheesh

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He probably doesn't know that its illegal to employ all those undocumented workers and its really easy to check their documents.

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And then slap massive penalties on the employers.

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Well, it's at least a new reason for Republicans to do their usual wrecking of the American economy.

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10% across the board tariffs and deporting 15 million immigrants should do the trick.

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This is why I don't put a lot of stock in achievable goals.

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That would sort of be like dealing with the fly that lands on your coffee table with a twelve gauge.

Unintended consequences much?

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Burning down the house isn't a recommended technique for dealing with a spider?

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a lot of Heads are Talking about it.

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How did we get here?

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Where is my beautiful wife?

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ISWYDT

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Shut down the economy to save people from dying of covid? No!

Shut down the economy to round up brown people? Sure, no problem!

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FISCAL RESPONSIMABILITY!!1!

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Not nary a word on CNN because it's more important to speculate on some asshole's trial

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OHJB isn't a ratings draw. CNN follows the money, always.

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