“I mean, Elon Musk joked to me, and he has, I think, many times, that he’s going to go to prison if Trump loses,” Carlson said.

Elon, what have you been up to?! No wonder you’re so fired up for Trump to win. Does this have anything to do with all those phone calls to Putin these past couple years? The ones that started around the time the Putin invaded Ukraine and you got put on the hook to buy Twitter?

A) That’s false.

B) Even if it was true, I fail to see the downside.

Netanyahu has denied any wrongdoing and distanced himself from the case

Desperate corrupt official lies to keep power and protect from prosecution, news at 11 …

Skyler Philippi, a man dedicated to white supremacist ideology and the destruction of our critical infrastructure

That’s an awfully long way of saying “domestic terrorist” …

iirc, there’s also a knife - it’s the thin piece of metal right next to the left-side straight piece.

The guy who helped create the ad even says

“They took a person’s sanctity of their ballot and turned it into a conversation about men owning the behaviors of the women in their life,” Pagitt said. “And like, well, I didn’t think you were going to make our point for us. We’re very grateful that you did.”

Ooh:

To [the person running the group that created the ad], the furious responses from some men online reinforces the need for the video’s message. “They took a person’s sanctity of their ballot and turned it into a conversation about men owning the behaviors of the women in their life,” Pagitt said. “And like, well, I didn’t think you were going to make our point for us. We’re very grateful that you did.”

Years ago, I took a sociology class, and one of the things they covered (briefly) was the differences in communication styles between genders. This is something I’ve always remembered:

You know how there are these old-time stereotypes about your spouse, where the wife always complains that her husband never listens to her and the husband claims that his wife is always changing her mind? Turns out that (in a general sense) when women are listening to someone speak, they tend to nod their heads, whereas men don’t nod.

The thing is that the women were nodding to show that they were listening to what the other person was saying, while the husbands were interpreting the nods as agreement to what was being said. The wives were interpreting their husbands’ lack of response as “he never listens” and the husbands were interpreting the mods followed by disagreement as “she’s always changing her mind”. Such a simple stylistic difference on how we communicate, and it’s led to so much misunderstanding over the years.

I’ve been thinking of that difference a lot these past few months, where so many right-wing men are absolutely convinced that they’re right and everyone obviously agrees with them, and how they’re always blindsided and confused when that turns out to not be the case. And I wonder how much miscommunication (or not-correcting misunderstandings) is going on between couples these days.

Can we break this situation down a bit?

Re: income: You’re earning just a little too much for government aid: if you got government aid, would that aid offset the loss of income? Like, if you were earning $100 less a month but got $400 in assistance, I’d say it was worth it. Take a look at the numbers. If it’s worth it, talk with your boss and see if you can get either your hours or your pay cut slightly enough to qualify for government assistance.

Re: the taxes: in my experience, every government process (including tax collection) has an appeal process. You say your agent is relentless and merciless; get in touch with their supervisor, figure out the appeal process. Unless this is a private company, there should be a way to put this on hold; the issue is finding it. It’s a slow season right now; it might be worth it to contact a tax attorney and ask for some free advice.

Re: expenses: Check with your county social services office. A lot of places have programs to possibly help with utilities, like the HEAT program. Unfortunately, some states are significantly more generous with support than others, but it may be worthwhile. Also look into local charities that may be able to help with some kind of expense. Even if it’s not the expense you were looking for help with, any kind of expense-savings is good.

Re: mental health services: check your local universities and colleges to see if any of them offer advanced degrees (Master’s/PhD) in psychotherapy, psychology, sociology, social work, or related fields. For those that do, check if they have a community counseling program (they may or may not). If they do, contact them and see if they’ll accept you as a patient; they might, they might not, or they could put you on a waiting list. They’ll also often have sliding scale payments for therapy, like $10 or $15 a session. Yes, it’ll be another expense, but it’ll be helpful documentation for your disability claim.

If you can’t find anything locally, try farther away; most places started allowing online sessions during the pandemic, and some of them still allow it.

sigh Okay, yes, people-at-risk should get spring as well as autumn vaccines - but I would argue the everyone is at risk and should be getting regular vaccinations (long covid is very debilitating!).

However, I’m mostly here to say that people who are moderately-to-severely immunocompromised should see if they can get Pemgarda, a pre-exposure prophylaxis infusion that also reduces your risk of getting covid by 70%.

So, I looked up Geary’s last published budget (2024-2025 projected), which happens to include the last couple budgets for comparison (you can read it here).

For the police department, they’ve gone from a “capital outlay” budget of 47k in 2022-2023 to a proposed budget of 18k in 2024-2025 - I guess the town is sick of paying for new toys? More notably, “personal services” (which I take to be payroll for the police department) was 662k in 2022-2023, and was proposed to be 399k in 2024-2025. If the department remained the same size throughout, the average police officer went from about $165k each to about $100k each. Which may be a steep drop in money, but still gets you pretty fucking far in a place where the median home value is 64k, the median wage is 46k, and almost a quarter of the people live in official poverty.

One nice thing I’ll note is that the 2023-2024 budget had a decrease of 85k in ‘fines and forfeitures’, saving an average of $100 in penalties for the 853 residents.

Gee, let’s see how this plays out [FTA]:

Chief Deputy Mike Young sent a statement to the news station that said, in part, the Office agrees the comments made were highly inappropriate and do not reflect the Sheriff’s Office’s delivery of service to all residents, regardless of their voting preference. He stated that the station and Lt. Rodgers would work especially hard to regain the public’s trust.

“Lt. Rodgers would work especially hard to regain the public’s trust.” As in, ‘regain it in the future’? So, pretty much no consequences then.

It is also suggested that a possible medical issue is involved in Rodgers’ actions.

Of course there’s some kind of excuse - that’s not what I meant, you’re taking it out of context, you’re twisting my words - or, in this case where there’s no ambiguity, ‘It must have been the drugs - but only the legal drugs, not any illegal drugs that might impact my career!’

WHIO obtained an investigative file and discovered in an inter-office communication with supervisors that Rodgers wrote, “I do not remember writing these posts or deleting any posts.”

Of course he doesn’t. If he “remembered”, he’d have to explain why he didn’t clean them up afterward.

The file also indicates that Rodgers is prescribed sleeping medication, which Rodgers documented, “It does cause some of my communication to be ‘out of character’ which is a documented side effect.”

Here’s the thing: afaik, sleep aids don’t change your character, they just remove filters, so it’s likely be does feel this way and just doesn’t want to face the consequences of what he says. Secondly, again, he didn’t clean it up afterward. If you know it ‘causes some communication to be out of character’, then wtf aren’t you double-checking what’s been posted? And aren’t the posts written a little too coherently for someone spaced out on sleep meds?

According to WHIO, the Sheriff’s Office apologized for Rodgers’ behavior and said he received a written reprimand for violating the department’s social media policy and will remain on duty.

Oh, no! Not a one hour meeting and a written reprimand! The horrors!!

I can’t help but think he’s saying this now as an attempt to distract from the stories of "Musk has been talking to Putin since the spring when they were both faced with problems: Musk being forced to buy Xitter and Putin unable to steal Ukraine. Odd how Musk has been becoming more rabidly pro-Russian-interests, isn’t it?

The main issue I have with full self driving is that it’ll probably never actually be full self driving; there’ll always be use cases where people have to take over - ice, snow, slightly flooded roads, sand, whatever*. And humans will have to take over under conditions when it’s extremely helpful for them to have had extensive driving experience under a range of conditions - experience they’ll no longer have because the car’s been driving them everywhere.

* Yes, I know we’re not supposed to drive in some of these conditions, and yet sometimes we have to, even if it’s just to get to a safer place.

The best use cases I can think of for full self-driving are the elderly, the visually impaired, the drunk, the disabled, and the easily distracted.

I took Amtrak across the country once. The freight trains are supposed to give priority to the passenger trains so they leave and arrive (mostly) on time, but (outside the NEC) they mostly don’t bother and they’ve never been held to those requirements. Once again, prioritizing “stuff” over people.

Mushroom stroganoff, mushroom pot pies, mushroom pasta sauce. And yeah, I made a similar mistake :/

Fuckwad didn’t even bother to show up to court when he was told to be there.

Was he pulling out the Trump and local Republican signs too? No? Then he knew, he just didn’t want to get in trouble for what he did. Fucking cowards don’t have the conviction to actually stand up for their beliefs.

I had a doctor’s appointment on Halloween a few years ago. I was getting ready to go out, I put out a bowl of candy (nice mix of different chocolates) and went back inside to grab my purse and my test results for the doctor. I was inside for maybe 45 seconds? During which time I heard a couple kids come up to the porch, say something like “What do you think?”, and a slight scuffling sound. When I exited the house about 20 seconds later, they’d scooped the entire bowl clean and disappeared.