There is no better book for Holocaust Education than Maus, Books 1 and 2, partly because Art was dealing with his father, who wasn’t perfect, and trying to understand him by writing Maus (“There are still good cornflakes in that box. Don’t throw it out.”). Every adolescent has to come to an understanding of their parents, which gives Maus an immediacy that The Boy In Striped Pajamas and The Diary of Anne Frank lack. (Those are really books for parents and writers.) And Art does not make his dad any the less a son of a bitch at the end than he was at the beginning. Art’s dad is a survivor, unlike Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice. He is a lot like Shukov in One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovitch, getting through from sunrise to sunset.
If the Anti Defamation League and AIPAC were really interested in promoting sympathy for Jews and an understanding of the Holocost, they would be taking the money spent on defeating Kori Bush in Missouri, and spending it on distributing copies of Maus Books 1 and 2 to middle schoolers and their parents in Missouri, and funding the opponents of Jay Ashcroft and his ilk who have had the book banned for reasons of political advantage.
Studies show that kids who learn to read early, excel. She knew that and she wanted a country full of higher achieving kids. Bless Dolly for her generosity and selfishness.
Why can't jeff bezos take over the states’ shares? Amazon began as a book seller; wouldn't he support this? Or maybe Zuckerberg, trying to maybe atone for the damage he has caused to children? Couldn't he pay the states’ portions?
If they weren’t greedy AF. One is too many, and a trillion is never enough. Imagine Bezos or Zuckerberg donating all the royalties from Whitney Houston’s cover of “And I Will Always Love You” to charity. You can’t, can you. Now squint. Still can’t? Neither can I. But Dolly did.
The fund slashing for Dolly's Imagination Library has turned my conservative but sensible brother into a Dirty hippie liberal. We need more people like him.
Precocious hyperlexia was actually one of the reasons I ended up on my school district’s lucrative child psych to special ed pipeline, and all the trauma and torment and Kafkaesque court battles that went along with it. This was in the late 80s-early 90s so well before anything RFK Jr or Wakefield came about. I got to be at the center of a humiliating dressing-down struggle session in front of the whole Kindergarten class, told that I was a “show-off” because I filled up three Pizza Hut Book It charts. I was told in no uncertain terms to apologize to my classmates for making them feel inadequate. When my mom told the teacher that none of the other kids ever said to me that they felt inadequate and like I was showing off, she was told it was “implied” and that I should have realized it intuitively but for the fact that I “lacked empathy” and “was ignorant of social norms.”
So I actually had it instilled in me at a very early age that reading too much is a sign of pathological behavior, because once I got “labeled” I was no longer welcome in the public school and my mother was told to sign over her parental rights to the state so I could be placed in an institution of their choosing for behaviorally disordered autistic children. They threatened her with criminal charges and CPS seizing me from the home. A battle went on for ten years during which I was sort of ad-hoc autodidactically self-homeschooled. The real reason they were so hell-bent on having me packed away was because of a gross misunderstanding of what’s now called “AuDHD” and because the more “referrals” to institutional hellholes they handed out, the more money they got in kickbacks. Essentially I was an unwitting pawn in a massive Ponzi scheme where the town was abusing ADA funding and cooking the books, and the officials were scrambling to cover it up. They had help, from quacks on their payroll who worshiped Bruno Bettleheim and pegged my mother as the classic “refrigerator” archetype, because she had a graduate degree herself and was therefore responsible for how I turned out. Bad mother, you read to her instead of scolding her to play “house” like girls are supposed to do.
Eventually I mainstreamed into high school and got a bachelor’s summa cum laude. But the damage to my sense of self-worth has been long-lasting. Precocious hyperlexia still is considered a symptom of Asperger’s and ADHD, so the mental health system does consider it a problem. At the same time, there’s so much handwringing about kids not reading anymore, and even adults being functionally illiterate at barely a fourth-grade level. Well, maybe if a childhood interest in books wasn’t so pathologized, you’d see more reading going on because doctors wouldn’t be saying your child has a serious brain disease that the lay public considers to be as horrifying as a tumor (and, of course, worse than polio or measles). No diagnosis, not even cancer, has so captured the paranoid imagination of Americans as autism in any form. So if Republicans connect the dots that the APA themselves have provided, they’ll want to shut down libraries even more than they already do, because libraries are like Chinese “flu clinics”and autism leaked out from the lab.
Poor Dolly felt so bad for her dad who couldn’t read, that she started this whole program to encourage kids to do so. Little did she know that by the standards of RFK Jr and a very warped proto-MAGA pocket of Massachusetts (different kind of Kennedy country), she was contributing to the autism epidemic. Not even by encouraging vaccines but by spreading a “social contagion” of early literacy. Just be stupid, and that’s it you’re finally cured!
Oh. I taught myself to read because I was annoyed that my father would add new stuff to the stories from our storybook, and thus decided that it was time to take matters into my own hands. Teachers in the late seventies weren't able to deal with that, so I was yelled at and made fun of...for being able to read.
Honestly I think putting shrinks in schools has been one of the absolute worst things to be done to American education. Psychiatry itself is a scam of weaponized and projected neurosis by the practitioners of the field. Unfortunately it carries an outsized weight of prestige that shapes public opinion and the practices and policies of institutions and the law. There’s supposed to be a new DSM-6 in the works. I think it should be scrapped and go to DSM-Zero.
I remember reading to both of my girls when they were babies sitting up in their infant seats. Watching their eyes grow brighter and wider as Momma voiced different characters in a story as the tale grew more exciting was just damned gratifying. Hearing their precious laughter when Momma made the silly voices was music to my ears.
It brought tears to my eyes when many years later my firstborn granddaughter dissolved into peels of laughter upon hearing Granny giving the characters in her story books unique voices of their own.
There are few actions more fulfilling than reading books to wide-eyed little ones.
My mother read to all of us when we were very young, and all but one of us turned out to be regular, some voracious, readers. Nothing works every single time.
There was nothing I loved more than being read to. Everyone read to me when I was a child: My mom and dad, my Nana and Papa, my aunts and uncles (on my dad's side). When I was older I would read to my little brothers and my younger cousins.
I used to make a grumpy voice for the main character when reading Green Eggs and Ham, getting grumpier as the story went on, and a softer, playful voice for Sam-I-Am. My son loved it so much; he would laugh the entire time I read it to him.
NC went from the middle or top third of states in education right to the bottom tier with the GOP got control of the legislature. NC is lowest in teacher salaries because of their cutting and we've experienced a migration out of the state of people who would otherwise stay and become teachers right here.
Especially when said children have stupid, entitled parents. The school district/state/municipality isn't paying enough money to put up with that much shit.
I had a co-worker that was an entitled parent like this. She micromanaged her daughters while they were in college. She would have several conversations daily with them about what classes to take, grades they got on assignments, etc. One daughter went to law school and became a big fan of FoxNews. A few years later, when that daughter got a job with a law firm, she called her mom, upset because there was a bug in her office and the other lawyers were making fun of her for being a Karen about it.
I can't find the bluesky post where I first saw this, but one Dad was saying he asked his daughter if she knew of Dolly Parton. And she said something like "I didn't know-know her, but I liked her because she sends me books".
I am hearing my boss explain on the phone the Canadian tariff situation to a client, who I know without a doubt voted for Assface. I wanted to shout YOU VOTED FOR THIS loud enough to be heard.
The majority of my workplace voted for him and the tariffs have negatively impacted us. They just don't talk about him. They all went strangely silent when it became obvious he was all wrapped up with Epstein.
"Why is aluminum so expensive?" says the MAGA hat.
And when you explain it to them, they act as if, once again, there's some major conspiracy that's undermining Trump's noble efforts. They never simply acknowledge that he's either a fucking moron or he's fucking the economy on purpose.
Actually, they are not willing to admit that they were fucking morons for voting for him. Oh, wait, they voted for him because they hate the same people he does.
I think they vote the way that they do because politics is a game to them. They voted for Trump because they wanted liberals to lose the game, not realizing the stakes were fundamental rights, rule of law, and their own livelihoods.
In this case, I think it's a dash of good old fashion racism mixed with "I'm a traditional NH Republican", still in denial that that party hasn't existed in over 20 years.
These are dumb fucking human beings. Just dumb. Don't waste your precious time, thinking, or nervous system hits trying to "reason" with these putrid chudfucks.
does $9.99 universal remote still allow the block and hide trick? what if only used intermittently? clearly they'd know 'twas you... saboteur self sacrifice
Our Canadian vendor is only hitting us with 10% at the moment, so pricing for some components on our end will be like--$15.00 is now $16.50, $26.50 is now $28.50, and so on. Instead of being nickeled and dimed, they will be dollared and loonied. It adds up fast and it's money the endpoint consumer is never getting back.
I make sure to flatly state that the President is responsible for imposing the tariffs and that we can only absorb so much of it ourselves. I also make sure to tell clients that we are absorbing the 33% increased cost of fuel without passing that on in our shipping charge and that I don't know for how long we can sustain that. I place the blame where it belongs without being smug about it.
Federal trial court judges will enter preliminary injunctions against enforcing this shit, courts of appeals will leave the PIs alone, and the MAGAnificent Six will stay the preliminary injunctions pending final dispositions in the lower courts and cert petitions to SCOTUS. If the lower courts manage to fast-track final judgments, SCOTUS will slow-walk the matter past November.
Justice Jackson was absolutely correct; it's all about fomenting chaos.
I'm fortunate in that I always have a CA state controlled drop box within a 1/2 mile of my house. I get the mail-in ballot but don't have to depend on the USPS for delivery. And California's tracking and notification system is wonderful.
Good luck rural Republicans. Your vote may not count.
His replacement wasnt much better. Those around Mr's age in USPS are realizing there isnt much of a future. Republicans have worked hard for decades to destroy it. Hell, his COWORKERS supported Trump
USPS simply cannot screen mail using a database that doesn't exist.
The core of the problem is that states set the way they handle elections, but they don't control USPS. Which is a big problem, the way USPS is being dismantled.
OT: Zuck executed a bunch of layoffs within the company, with the idea that those workers would be made redundant by AI. But then .. the next wave of layoffs was cancelled because, well, they all of a sudden weren't sure about all those promised AI productivity gains materializing. Also, it is reported, AI agents made "“large-scale, disruptive actions that humans are unlikely to execute," leading to increase in "major technical and security incidents" (https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/metas-scrapped-plans-to-go-ai-native-included-slashing-teams-by-60-percent/). Reminder: Zuck is a huge asshole. Also reminder: Meta has an even crappier AI strategy, if you can call it that, than most companies. Mostly involves throwing money down a hole, in part by investing in their own AI models, which are so far also-rans in the AI world. In fact, they have an 0.1% market share (https://firstpagesage.com/reports/top-generative-ai-chatbots/).
Correction Zuck is a huge incredibly insecure asshole. One can be a huge asshole and not do all the petty stupid things that Mark has done like pretend he's a big white hunter, an MMA fighter, that fucking yacht of his, even forbid his subordinates from beating him at card/strategy games (seriously), plus all his actual ideas have been shit/noted failures after the big one he stole from someone else. That insecurity is what is at the core of Meta's continuing self destruction of their money machine.
I'm okay with that, but I'm hoping it accelerates.
Terms of service mainly effects costs of litigation.
But they have repeatedly admitted in public to illegally accessing other people's systems. The fact that they built automated software to do it doesn't grant them immunity.
Some smartass startup is going to refer to themselves as Skynet as an injoke. The LLMs have surely already scanned in The Terminator, and away it goes.
This exposes the fundamental flaw in Meta's business model. There's no way that they can make a worldwide platform for posting media and text by individuals that doesn't require a hell of a lot of moderation by humans that can be profitable from advertising.
Without heaving human moderation, localized to specific countries with their own culture and legal framework, there's always going to be content that's downright offensive in certain geographic territories and audiences or outright illegal somewhere.
That's why a lot of the advertising on Meta - advertising that's their bread and butter - isn't from major companies, but scam artists and shady politicians. It's also why their algorithms, designed to engage users with commercial content, rather than what users want is making people leave the platforms because of shitty content and the creepiness of tracking and selling data about its users.
The big companies tried to commercialize Usenet when the web came along and it never worked. And that's why.
I also wonder who they think is going to be buying the products in their ad sales if AIs take all the jobs. Like, sure I will have infinite time to scroll social media, but no money with which to participate in the economy. And eventually you don't have money for electricity, phone, or internet service either, so who is going to be scrolling and looking at ads? Other AIs? Where are they getting and spending money?
The entire premise is just not functional in terms of the economy. So, is that because they just don't give a shit that they could destroy everything about modern life, or is that the point?
The point is to make as much money as they possibly can in the short term and move on to the next scam if it all comes crashing down, like so many scam companies in the 1920s that made a few people a fortune. The only companies that survived at the big Crash of 1929 were the ones that actually had long-term business strategies and weren’t get rich quick schemes.
Has anyone else noticed a lot of murder/suicides recently. And not just one person, multiple deaths at the hands of men. Two happened this week alone. What's going on with men?
Desperation. Some of the MAGA cultists are seeing that their dear leader might not be the God-King they thought he was. Since they so deeply bought into his narrative, they see no way out for themselves and their families.
Better to be dead than be overrun by Mexicans and queers.
They quite literally see us as an existential threat. Some of them actually believe all that bullshit about how we want to shut down the churches and make everybody transgender. FOX News (and the rest) have been winding these people up for 40 years.
There is no better book for Holocaust Education than Maus, Books 1 and 2, partly because Art was dealing with his father, who wasn’t perfect, and trying to understand him by writing Maus (“There are still good cornflakes in that box. Don’t throw it out.”). Every adolescent has to come to an understanding of their parents, which gives Maus an immediacy that The Boy In Striped Pajamas and The Diary of Anne Frank lack. (Those are really books for parents and writers.) And Art does not make his dad any the less a son of a bitch at the end than he was at the beginning. Art’s dad is a survivor, unlike Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice. He is a lot like Shukov in One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovitch, getting through from sunrise to sunset.
If the Anti Defamation League and AIPAC were really interested in promoting sympathy for Jews and an understanding of the Holocost, they would be taking the money spent on defeating Kori Bush in Missouri, and spending it on distributing copies of Maus Books 1 and 2 to middle schoolers and their parents in Missouri, and funding the opponents of Jay Ashcroft and his ilk who have had the book banned for reasons of political advantage.
Maus does not tell, it shows.
Studies show that kids who learn to read early, excel. She knew that and she wanted a country full of higher achieving kids. Bless Dolly for her generosity and selfishness.
May the name "Ashcroft," be obliterated from the mind of man.
Why can't jeff bezos take over the states’ shares? Amazon began as a book seller; wouldn't he support this? Or maybe Zuckerberg, trying to maybe atone for the damage he has caused to children? Couldn't he pay the states’ portions?
If they weren’t greedy AF. One is too many, and a trillion is never enough. Imagine Bezos or Zuckerberg donating all the royalties from Whitney Houston’s cover of “And I Will Always Love You” to charity. You can’t, can you. Now squint. Still can’t? Neither can I. But Dolly did.
The fund slashing for Dolly's Imagination Library has turned my conservative but sensible brother into a Dirty hippie liberal. We need more people like him.
Oh, and new post.
Ow. Dammit.
My legs stopped working while I was in the bathroom and I collapsed on top of the bathroom trash can. It is clear why pain is a four letter word.
This is going to leave a mark.
I hate falling down. Feel better.
Oh my Dog!
Am sorry!
Get yourself to a couch and sit down.
>>>>> “You’ll never have a better investment than a few million dollars a year to get books in the hands of kids.” <<<<<
Precocious hyperlexia was actually one of the reasons I ended up on my school district’s lucrative child psych to special ed pipeline, and all the trauma and torment and Kafkaesque court battles that went along with it. This was in the late 80s-early 90s so well before anything RFK Jr or Wakefield came about. I got to be at the center of a humiliating dressing-down struggle session in front of the whole Kindergarten class, told that I was a “show-off” because I filled up three Pizza Hut Book It charts. I was told in no uncertain terms to apologize to my classmates for making them feel inadequate. When my mom told the teacher that none of the other kids ever said to me that they felt inadequate and like I was showing off, she was told it was “implied” and that I should have realized it intuitively but for the fact that I “lacked empathy” and “was ignorant of social norms.”
So I actually had it instilled in me at a very early age that reading too much is a sign of pathological behavior, because once I got “labeled” I was no longer welcome in the public school and my mother was told to sign over her parental rights to the state so I could be placed in an institution of their choosing for behaviorally disordered autistic children. They threatened her with criminal charges and CPS seizing me from the home. A battle went on for ten years during which I was sort of ad-hoc autodidactically self-homeschooled. The real reason they were so hell-bent on having me packed away was because of a gross misunderstanding of what’s now called “AuDHD” and because the more “referrals” to institutional hellholes they handed out, the more money they got in kickbacks. Essentially I was an unwitting pawn in a massive Ponzi scheme where the town was abusing ADA funding and cooking the books, and the officials were scrambling to cover it up. They had help, from quacks on their payroll who worshiped Bruno Bettleheim and pegged my mother as the classic “refrigerator” archetype, because she had a graduate degree herself and was therefore responsible for how I turned out. Bad mother, you read to her instead of scolding her to play “house” like girls are supposed to do.
Eventually I mainstreamed into high school and got a bachelor’s summa cum laude. But the damage to my sense of self-worth has been long-lasting. Precocious hyperlexia still is considered a symptom of Asperger’s and ADHD, so the mental health system does consider it a problem. At the same time, there’s so much handwringing about kids not reading anymore, and even adults being functionally illiterate at barely a fourth-grade level. Well, maybe if a childhood interest in books wasn’t so pathologized, you’d see more reading going on because doctors wouldn’t be saying your child has a serious brain disease that the lay public considers to be as horrifying as a tumor (and, of course, worse than polio or measles). No diagnosis, not even cancer, has so captured the paranoid imagination of Americans as autism in any form. So if Republicans connect the dots that the APA themselves have provided, they’ll want to shut down libraries even more than they already do, because libraries are like Chinese “flu clinics”and autism leaked out from the lab.
Poor Dolly felt so bad for her dad who couldn’t read, that she started this whole program to encourage kids to do so. Little did she know that by the standards of RFK Jr and a very warped proto-MAGA pocket of Massachusetts (different kind of Kennedy country), she was contributing to the autism epidemic. Not even by encouraging vaccines but by spreading a “social contagion” of early literacy. Just be stupid, and that’s it you’re finally cured!
Oh. I taught myself to read because I was annoyed that my father would add new stuff to the stories from our storybook, and thus decided that it was time to take matters into my own hands. Teachers in the late seventies weren't able to deal with that, so I was yelled at and made fun of...for being able to read.
Honestly I think putting shrinks in schools has been one of the absolute worst things to be done to American education. Psychiatry itself is a scam of weaponized and projected neurosis by the practitioners of the field. Unfortunately it carries an outsized weight of prestige that shapes public opinion and the practices and policies of institutions and the law. There’s supposed to be a new DSM-6 in the works. I think it should be scrapped and go to DSM-Zero.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oNgLTgsbUQ
The incredibly talented Orville Peck gives voice to his love for Dolly Parton.
Not a dry eye in the room.
I'm seeing him September 18th at the Hollywood Bowl. And Squeeze the next night.
Birb, you've kilt me.
I remember reading to both of my girls when they were babies sitting up in their infant seats. Watching their eyes grow brighter and wider as Momma voiced different characters in a story as the tale grew more exciting was just damned gratifying. Hearing their precious laughter when Momma made the silly voices was music to my ears.
It brought tears to my eyes when many years later my firstborn granddaughter dissolved into peels of laughter upon hearing Granny giving the characters in her story books unique voices of their own.
There are few actions more fulfilling than reading books to wide-eyed little ones.
My mother read to all of us when we were very young, and all but one of us turned out to be regular, some voracious, readers. Nothing works every single time.
My spouse is not a reader. I read to our kiddo all the time when they were young, but nope. Did not become a reader.
There was nothing I loved more than being read to. Everyone read to me when I was a child: My mom and dad, my Nana and Papa, my aunts and uncles (on my dad's side). When I was older I would read to my little brothers and my younger cousins.
LOVED IT.
And I would read to my daughter in the same way.
I used to make a grumpy voice for the main character when reading Green Eggs and Ham, getting grumpier as the story went on, and a softer, playful voice for Sam-I-Am. My son loved it so much; he would laugh the entire time I read it to him.
I remember reading Sesame Street books for my nephew, and doing Oscar and Elmo and Bert and Ernie voices. He loved it.
Someone must be chopping onions now.
When Budgie was in high school, she did tutoring for a kid who was at the school where her mother worked.
I still remember that as one of the most fun experiences of my life. The kid was shy. I helped him learn how to pronounce what he was seeing.
:)
I hope that kid is doing all right today. I'm sure he is. :)
Washington also fell from 27th to 31st in education and i can only blame the kidfucker
NC went from the middle or top third of states in education right to the bottom tier with the GOP got control of the legislature. NC is lowest in teacher salaries because of their cutting and we've experienced a migration out of the state of people who would otherwise stay and become teachers right here.
It's almost like it's difficult to convince a person with a master's degree to take a $40k/year job to be a surrogate parent to 30 children.
Especially when said children have stupid, entitled parents. The school district/state/municipality isn't paying enough money to put up with that much shit.
I had a co-worker that was an entitled parent like this. She micromanaged her daughters while they were in college. She would have several conversations daily with them about what classes to take, grades they got on assignments, etc. One daughter went to law school and became a big fan of FoxNews. A few years later, when that daughter got a job with a law firm, she called her mom, upset because there was a bug in her office and the other lawyers were making fun of her for being a Karen about it.
In some states the job pays well. IF you can get into a decent district, and stay there long enough.
I can't find the bluesky post where I first saw this, but one Dad was saying he asked his daughter if she knew of Dolly Parton. And she said something like "I didn't know-know her, but I liked her because she sends me books".
❤️❤️❤️
OT
I am hearing my boss explain on the phone the Canadian tariff situation to a client, who I know without a doubt voted for Assface. I wanted to shout YOU VOTED FOR THIS loud enough to be heard.
The majority of my workplace voted for him and the tariffs have negatively impacted us. They just don't talk about him. They all went strangely silent when it became obvious he was all wrapped up with Epstein.
These people are so fucking stupid.
I have clients like that, too.
"Why is aluminum so expensive?" says the MAGA hat.
And when you explain it to them, they act as if, once again, there's some major conspiracy that's undermining Trump's noble efforts. They never simply acknowledge that he's either a fucking moron or he's fucking the economy on purpose.
Actually, they are not willing to admit that they were fucking morons for voting for him. Oh, wait, they voted for him because they hate the same people he does.
I think they vote the way that they do because politics is a game to them. They voted for Trump because they wanted liberals to lose the game, not realizing the stakes were fundamental rights, rule of law, and their own livelihoods.
💯
It's not like that brown-black lady didn't warn them at each and every campaign stop she made on those 107 days on the campaign trail....
In this case, I think it's a dash of good old fashion racism mixed with "I'm a traditional NH Republican", still in denial that that party hasn't existed in over 20 years.
He did say he doesn't think about the American consumer at all.
These are dumb fucking human beings. Just dumb. Don't waste your precious time, thinking, or nervous system hits trying to "reason" with these putrid chudfucks.
The local Sinclair affiliate is on all the time in our break room; their take on this stupid bullshit makes me want to pop my own eardrums.
does $9.99 universal remote still allow the block and hide trick? what if only used intermittently? clearly they'd know 'twas you... saboteur self sacrifice
These folks live in a bubble. If they don’t hear it on Fox News it doesn’t exist to them.
Our Canadian vendor is only hitting us with 10% at the moment, so pricing for some components on our end will be like--$15.00 is now $16.50, $26.50 is now $28.50, and so on. Instead of being nickeled and dimed, they will be dollared and loonied. It adds up fast and it's money the endpoint consumer is never getting back.
A small price to pay for keeping men out of the WMBA…even though they don’t watch and can’t name any players.
*footnote, the M in WMBA is intentional and not a typo.
I saw you do that twice before and wondered about it.
"I'm sorry, but this is the price. If you have a complaint, call 202-456-1414 and ask for Don."
I make sure to flatly state that the President is responsible for imposing the tariffs and that we can only absorb so much of it ourselves. I also make sure to tell clients that we are absorbing the 33% increased cost of fuel without passing that on in our shipping charge and that I don't know for how long we can sustain that. I place the blame where it belongs without being smug about it.
Every leopard victim will swear they were sure it was gonna be the other guy . . .
"Kamala would be worse!"
Fucking prove it! Show your work.
Or that Trump was “the lesser of two evils.” How was Kamala evil, stoopidheads?
The states have already filed suit (after the rule was published) and requested an immediate order. I don't think this shit will survive long.
OT: https://bsky.app/profile/kylegriffin1.bsky.social/post/3mu3cc3ulus2h
Reuters: U.S. POSTAL SERVICE SAYS MAIL-IN VOTING RESTRICTIONS REGULATION NOW IN EFFECT AS COURT CHALLENGES CONTINUE
Federal trial court judges will enter preliminary injunctions against enforcing this shit, courts of appeals will leave the PIs alone, and the MAGAnificent Six will stay the preliminary injunctions pending final dispositions in the lower courts and cert petitions to SCOTUS. If the lower courts manage to fast-track final judgments, SCOTUS will slow-walk the matter past November.
Justice Jackson was absolutely correct; it's all about fomenting chaos.
Doesn't the military use the mail in voting system?
I always did. I sent away for my hometown ballot, because the generic ballot only lets you vote for President.
And every voter in Oregon.
Yes, as do rural republicans.
As does TFG.
Who?
That Fucking Guy, aka Donnie.
I will cast my ballot by mail in November as has been the practice here in Washington state for several years.
Taking that away is going to be a helluva lot more difficult than the Fetid Fascist presumes.
I'm fortunate in that I always have a CA state controlled drop box within a 1/2 mile of my house. I get the mail-in ballot but don't have to depend on the USPS for delivery. And California's tracking and notification system is wonderful.
Good luck rural Republicans. Your vote may not count.
Womp. Womp.
If, of course, USPS lets them mail you a ballot in the first place.
Who in the fuck is controlling the USPS now? I thought they got rid of that fucking De Joy tyrant?
His replacement wasnt much better. Those around Mr's age in USPS are realizing there isnt much of a future. Republicans have worked hard for decades to destroy it. Hell, his COWORKERS supported Trump
This is disgusting. Just fucking disgusting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_P._Steiner
Wow. Fuck that guy, too.
Jesus fucking Christ we need to do better.
Uue are right.
He stinks.
Cast that ballot around Oct. 21, I'd suggest. And if Washington State has a tracking system, use it.
I will vote early in person.
Here in Hoosierstan, there's a list of "approved" reasons to vote by mail. Voter convenience is not one of them. We do early in-person voting.
as do I. voted today for the primary, was speaking to the town clerk afterwards and she stated that 60% of the town requests mail in ballots
That's my plan too. I like to get it out of the way early and then treat myself to a sweet treat afterwards. :)
Same way illegal handguns are regulated . . .
USPS simply cannot screen mail using a database that doesn't exist.
The core of the problem is that states set the way they handle elections, but they don't control USPS. Which is a big problem, the way USPS is being dismantled.
which is the point.
no ballots will be delivered.
In either direction.
that is the thing
Your lips to Hog's ears.
OT: Zuck executed a bunch of layoffs within the company, with the idea that those workers would be made redundant by AI. But then .. the next wave of layoffs was cancelled because, well, they all of a sudden weren't sure about all those promised AI productivity gains materializing. Also, it is reported, AI agents made "“large-scale, disruptive actions that humans are unlikely to execute," leading to increase in "major technical and security incidents" (https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/metas-scrapped-plans-to-go-ai-native-included-slashing-teams-by-60-percent/). Reminder: Zuck is a huge asshole. Also reminder: Meta has an even crappier AI strategy, if you can call it that, than most companies. Mostly involves throwing money down a hole, in part by investing in their own AI models, which are so far also-rans in the AI world. In fact, they have an 0.1% market share (https://firstpagesage.com/reports/top-generative-ai-chatbots/).
Correction Zuck is a huge incredibly insecure asshole. One can be a huge asshole and not do all the petty stupid things that Mark has done like pretend he's a big white hunter, an MMA fighter, that fucking yacht of his, even forbid his subordinates from beating him at card/strategy games (seriously), plus all his actual ideas have been shit/noted failures after the big one he stole from someone else. That insecurity is what is at the core of Meta's continuing self destruction of their money machine.
I'm okay with that, but I'm hoping it accelerates.
That whole “Meta-verse” idea was a huuuuuuge flop. So many billions wasted for what?
If I were an AG I'd be bringing cybercrime prosecutions for this "oh no, my software 'malfunctioned' and hacked another company's systems!" bullshit.
No, fuckface. You created a software tool you don't understand and you should be prosecuted for the criminal acts you set in motion.
Let's see is OpenAI is so valuable when you start locking up their developers and their customers
Criminal prosecution is unlikely. They could be sued, but I expect their terms of service have a cap on liability, among other terms.
Terms of service mainly effects costs of litigation.
But they have repeatedly admitted in public to illegally accessing other people's systems. The fact that they built automated software to do it doesn't grant them immunity.
"major technical and security incidents"
Some smartass startup is going to refer to themselves as Skynet as an injoke. The LLMs have surely already scanned in The Terminator, and away it goes.
This exposes the fundamental flaw in Meta's business model. There's no way that they can make a worldwide platform for posting media and text by individuals that doesn't require a hell of a lot of moderation by humans that can be profitable from advertising.
Without heaving human moderation, localized to specific countries with their own culture and legal framework, there's always going to be content that's downright offensive in certain geographic territories and audiences or outright illegal somewhere.
That's why a lot of the advertising on Meta - advertising that's their bread and butter - isn't from major companies, but scam artists and shady politicians. It's also why their algorithms, designed to engage users with commercial content, rather than what users want is making people leave the platforms because of shitty content and the creepiness of tracking and selling data about its users.
The big companies tried to commercialize Usenet when the web came along and it never worked. And that's why.
They just settled the lawsuit over harm to teens on their platform, for $17.1 billion (the suit was asking for more, though). Their legal bills in the last quarter were reportedly $2 billion (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/meta-settlement-social-media-addiction-lawsuit.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8lA.piH8.PDrA0_XaCUK4&smid=url-share).
I also wonder who they think is going to be buying the products in their ad sales if AIs take all the jobs. Like, sure I will have infinite time to scroll social media, but no money with which to participate in the economy. And eventually you don't have money for electricity, phone, or internet service either, so who is going to be scrolling and looking at ads? Other AIs? Where are they getting and spending money?
The entire premise is just not functional in terms of the economy. So, is that because they just don't give a shit that they could destroy everything about modern life, or is that the point?
The point is to make as much money as they possibly can in the short term and move on to the next scam if it all comes crashing down, like so many scam companies in the 1920s that made a few people a fortune. The only companies that survived at the big Crash of 1929 were the ones that actually had long-term business strategies and weren’t get rich quick schemes.
This is going the way of their VR/AR strategy. Nowhere, with the loss of billions of investment.
Quelle surprise.
Humans love being replaced at work with shitslop?
It totally figures that Zuckerberg doesn't know what AI is and is not.
Move fast and break things. I didn't mean my things though
OT!
Has anyone else noticed a lot of murder/suicides recently. And not just one person, multiple deaths at the hands of men. Two happened this week alone. What's going on with men?
Desperation. Some of the MAGA cultists are seeing that their dear leader might not be the God-King they thought he was. Since they so deeply bought into his narrative, they see no way out for themselves and their families.
Better to be dead than be overrun by Mexicans and queers.
What happened to complaining about it while drinking beer with a friend? Now we have to kill our own family?
They quite literally see us as an existential threat. Some of them actually believe all that bullshit about how we want to shut down the churches and make everybody transgender. FOX News (and the rest) have been winding these people up for 40 years.
Bad economy, but Fox News lying and telling them everything is fine... so it must be a personal failure that they can't keep up in life.
Not enough testosterone?
There's no way to understand what motivates monsters.
Just learned that 94% of all murders are committed by men and 64% of family murders are committed by men.
Here's an odd one. A guy seemingly stabbed someone, then jumped off a bridge onto a highway and was run over by several cars.
https://www.firstalert4.com/2026/08/25/man-jumped-overpass-after-committing-murder-soulard-police-say/
𝘈𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘺, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘢𝘵 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵 16 𝘮𝘢𝘴𝘴 𝘮𝘶𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘚 𝘴𝘰 𝘧𝘢𝘳 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳, 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘶𝘯 𝘝𝘪𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘷𝘦, 𝘢 𝘯𝘰𝘯𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘦. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴 𝘴𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘷𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘮𝘶𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘥.
𝙄𝙩 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙐𝙎’𝙨 𝙛𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙩𝙝 𝙢𝙖𝙨𝙨 𝙢𝙪𝙧𝙙𝙚𝙧 𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙘𝙚 7 𝘼𝙪𝙜𝙪𝙨𝙩.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/24/murder-suspect-found-dead-oregon
Christ on a Cracker!
Deaths from despair?
They need to murder their family members because of despair????? That's psychological issues.
They need to rule out the chance that their family might eventually ever be better off without them. :P
I think this is the truth. When you're raised to believe the world revolves around you....