UnderpantsWeevil

Left: “We should have socialized healthcare, education, and housing.”

I mean, there's The Left[Hakeem Jefferies/Gavin Newsom] and The Left[Bernie Sanders/JD Pritsker/Jeremy Corbyn] and then The Left[the DSA kids distributing food and fresh clothing to my nearby homeless encampment]. These are three very different flavors of American Left.

You: “Both sides are the same.”

A big part of the problem with liberal democratic politics is how deeply co-opted all these parties have become. At the end of the day, John Thune and Chuck Schumer, Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer, Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre all bend the knee to Jamie Diamon and Jeff Bezos and Muhammad bin Salmon.

Wish it weren't so, but that's the world we live in.

Don't forget the $1.4T/year they took out of the economy to squander on elaborate, invasive, predatory mass surveillance, serial racialized harassment, and overseas mass murder, in the name of peace and security.

That's not autism. That's getting spam calls ten to twenty times a day.

Would be nice if we had blue state agencies and universities willing to step up and absorb some of the shock by hiring these professionals and issuing grants to continue their projects. Instead, we've got institutions wasting time and resources on elaborate surveillance programs aimed at Palestine protesters

The competition was convincing Obama to send them the shuttle instead of Virginia, by aligning with Obama's legislative priorities. Again, this was effectively a political gift to Congressmen who supported his budget priorities in '09 and '11. Republicans tried to filibuster everything he advanced to death, so he cut their states out of the Shuttle museum program.

But now Dems aren't in the majority anymore. So Republicans are earmarking funds to move the Shuttle to a red state.

It's hardly a one-time thing. Kehoe came up through a rich Catholic School, owned an auto dealership, became a bagman within the State Senate, and eventually climbed up to the governor's mansion by iteratively taking bribes and doing favors over the last 30 years.

Where do you think he raised the $13M war chest to run for governor in the first place? He'll never stop supporting these reactionaries because he never wants them to stop shoveling money into his pockets. And if he wants to continue climbing? (And every governor secretly has an eye on the White House) He's going to need those millions to become billions. That means he's got to prove his loyalty. Go above and beyond. Really stand out as the kind of guy who will shove a few thousand babies into a wood chipper if his bosses demand it of him.

Genuinely wonder how much mileage you could get if you just went on Truth or Rumble or 4chan or wherever reactionaries are pooling today and started posting a bunch of "These are the machines that the Deep State is using to control the weather" entirely unironically.

Slap in some numerology, blame California Leftists and Chinese Communists and George Soros. Get the QAnon-ers to bake on it. Might get a few of the more enthusiastic zealots to start seeing coal fired plants like Christian Conservatives see abortion clinics.

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin and The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang are notably influenced by the Harry Potter Wizarding World. Both include wizarding schools that do a better job of explaining where and how students are organized and regionalized.

Also, there's the age-old standby Earthsea.

But yeah, this is the same problem as with Quidditich. When the story is about One Special Boy around which the rest of the world revolves, the resolution of non-Harry adjacent people and places gets blurrier and blurrier the farther you get from him. One reason the setting could have used a sequel (or prequel) series that has characters doing some world traveling, rather than cloistering themselves around the implied history of the original.

…made in 2018 by a Russian team. Way before the whole Ukraine war thing, you understand

Flipping through a history book on Russian/Ukrainian relations in the 21st century

Closing the book, putting it back on the shelf, whistling, and walking away

More seriously, I'll never understand folks who hear "So-and-so is from Nationality X, so now I must/must not purchase products from them because of their bloodline."

I am a professional encoder and I always put all my codes in a single big file marked EXE for faster execution.

A cunt who is getting crazy kickbacks from the Chamber of Commerce.

Business groups lobbied heavily to overturn the measure passed by 58% of voters, arguing it would cost jobs. The bill also repeals annual inflation adjustments for the minimum wage, in effect since 2006.

The action followed a pattern established over the past 15 years where conservative Republicans have used their majorities in the legislature to roll back or repeal measures that became law through initiatives pushed to the ballot by progressive groups.

...

In a news release Thursday, Kara Corches, president and CEO of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry, called the mandated paid sick leave a “job killer.”

“Missouri employers value their employees and recognize the importance of offering competitive wages and benefits, but one-size-fits-all mandates threaten growth,” Corches said in the release.

...

The action on sick leave is similar to a bill in 2011 weakening provisions of a ballot measure from 2010 called the “Puppy Mill Cruelty and Prevention Act,” that specified appropriate living conditions for breeding operations and including action this year to overturn the abortion rights amendment approved in November.

Incidentally, Missouri's abysmal animal rights laws had, up until that ballot measure passed, made it the national leader in breeding (and killing of surplus) designer puppies.

Unfortunately, Cheng Kai-Shek wants Conservative Catholicism and coal fired power plants. Meanwhile, Tojo wants chattle slavery and genocide.

So, you're going to need some help.