I live somewhat close to an area where the klan still has some presence. A friend of mine worked at a convenience store in that area for a while.

He’s practically a living caricature of blond-haired, blue eyed whiteness (and also one of the genuinely least racist people I know, he’s currently engaged to a black girl)

So looking the way he does, the local grand wizard or whatever ridiculous title he had took a liking to him and would hang around and try to talk to him.

Since he was on the clock, he couldn’t exactly just tell this guy to pound sand, and he actually managed to have some interesting conversations with him while he was there.

Overall, the impression he got of this klansman was that if black people and white people could just kind of each have their own countries, he’d be totally ok with that and would wish black people the best with their endeavors.

Not that that’s a good way of thinking at all, but coming from a card-carrying racist asshole, that almost feels like progressive thought.

Also I remember an quick throwaway scene in Orange is the New Black, where a couple of the racist white characters were having some kind of discussion among themselves along the lines of “I’m a white nationalist, not a Nazi” or something along those lines.

I won’t pretend to know all of the details, but as I understand it, the basic idea is something along the line of Christianity was an attempt to make Judaism more palatable to the masses so that their influence for spread.

Which, when you’re looking at it through that kind of crazy racist lens, I guess it makes some kind of sense, Jesus more or less did say “hey, you know all that old testament nonsense with crazy rules about how you can cut your hair, not eating pork, circumcision, wearing different fabrics, not turning on the lights on Saturday, etc? Yeah, ignore that shit, no one likes it and it’s not important. Now go out and spread my new, cooler version of Judaism around the world” (Not a direct quote) And it was successful, some sort of jewish-derived religion did end up taking over much of the world.

I don’t buy that there was any sort of conspiracy to rebrand Judaism into Christianity, and if even there ever was I think they clearly lost control of it at some point.

As for who believes this, again, it’s a big fractured world of crazy racists, so it’s not always easy to say “here’s an organized and recognizable group of people with shared beliefs” and I really don’t feel like going down the rabbit hole to find a bunch of fringe white supremacist groups who hold some variation of that specific idea.

But off the top of my head, I believe Varg Vikernes, known for being influential in early Norwegian black metal, murder, and burning down churches, subscribes to some version of that conspiracy.

While they’re all pretty much the same in all the ways that matter to everyone who isn’t a racist asshole, if you care to dig into it there’s a lot of different white supremacists ideologies that really aren’t compatible with each other. Historically a lot of different movements there spent a lot of time arguing and fighting with, and hating each other, which is why the “unite the right” thing was kind of a big deal.

KKK doesn’t like Catholics, that’s a sizeable portion of white people they have a problem with

There’s some that think Christianity in general is a Jewish conspiracy, which is part of why you get some of them being all about Norse paganism and such.

Do they want to take over the US and remake it how they want, or do they want to split off from the US and start their own country?

Are they in favor of some sort of democracy, monarchy, theocracy, dictatorship, even occasionally some form of anarchy, etc?

You can go really deep down the rabbit hole trying to unpack all of their competing ideas. They’re all crazy and extreme, but they’re crazy and extreme in different ways.

It’s not at all surprising to me that some of them don’t like trump, maybe they just outright don’t like him, maybe they think he’s a useful idiot who has outlived his usefulness, maybe they think he isn’t going far enough, maybe they’re just insane.

Without knowing the content of the training or the actual intent of the people who decided to pull it, it’s pretty hard to say whether it was malicious compliance, or just plain-old compliance.

However, it got at least one republican’s feathers ruffled (the one who called it malicious is a Republican)

So if they knew it would get that kind of reaction and did it specifically to do so, that would be “malicious”

I could certainly imagine someone in the airforce deciding “You know, Alabama has pretty much nothing to be proud of except for the Tuskegee Airmen. I bet if word gets out that we’re stopping this training, some Alabama politician will make a stink over it, and make us roll it back. Then when they get on our case about other ‘DEI’ training, we can point to this as an example and say ‘well we tried to stop that one and you got butthurt about it, and these are more of the same kind of thing, so either make up your fucking minds or get off our fucking backs and let us do our god damned jobs’”

Again though, without knowing their actual intention it could just be plain ol’ compliance or even just incompetence that led to this.

I’ve had a mix of different vaccines, but slightly more moderna than the others

My first dose was moderna and was the only one I had any real noticeable symptoms besides a sore arm. Mostly fatigue and chills.

It was a bummer though, I worked overnight at the time, I went and got it after my shift, probably at around 8 or 9 AM, went home feeling fine and went to sleep, woke up in the afternoon still feeling alright, then a couple hours later it hit me. I pretty much kept to my normal night shift schedule on my days off, so I was up most of the night feeling like shit.

By the time I was ready to go to bed in the morning I was feeling better. If I had been on a normal schedule and had gotten the shot first thing in the morning I probably would have slept through the worst of it and wouldn’t have noticed anything.

Haven’t had any real symptoms from any of my subsequent doses, the last one I got a couple months ago maybe left me feeling a little fatigued, but it’s hard to say because I got it at a time when my sleep schedule was kind of fucked up from some other stuff and I’d been really busy so I might have just been the normal kind of tired.

Off the bat, every one of those 258 incidents paints an important picture about the gun violence issue in the US, however there’s a whole lot of people who are going to take issue with their methodology because they’re defining a school shooting as any time

a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims (including zero), time, day of the week, or reason.

And honestly that feels a little too broad for me.

If a gun is simply brandished, that’s just not a shooting. It might be an attempted or potential shooting that was stopped before it started somehow, but by definition it’s pretty hard to call that a shooting if no shots were actually fired. It’s a closely-related and important statistic that should be mentioned along with actual shooting numbers, but lumping it together with incidents where a gun was actually discharged feels like a really disingenuous to inflate the numbers.

They go into a lot of detail on their website about their methodology and what sort of incidents could potentially be counted as a school shooting but I feel like they missed the mark here a bit.

When we hear the phrase “school shooting” I think we all picture a pretty similar scenario, something like columbine or sandy hook where someone brings a gun to a school during a time where they expect students and staff to be present and open fire intending to do harm to those students or staff, not two assholes having a shootout on the school yard at 3AM on a Saturday when there’s no students or staff present, or some parent negligently discharging their firearm in the car while waiting to pick up their child, or any other number of other shooting or gun-related incidents that could occur at a school.

I think it would be more appropriate if the data were narrowed to something like

An incident where a gun is intentionally fired on or at a school property during or up to one hour before or after school hours or any school-sponsored activity where students or staff are present

Leaving one hour to allow for students who are dropped off early or are late being picked up, just kind of linger around the school to hang out, etc.

Which still leaves a bit of wiggle room for the shooters intent, who/what they were aiming at, etc. but that can sometimes be hard to determine objectively so I’d be ok including those, it would also include situations where the gun was fired but no one was actually hit and I’m also ok with including that.

It also would include some situations that aren’t the sort of “classic” mass shooter scenario we tend to envision, like two students with a personal dispute or a gang related incident that happens to play out at school with guns, and I’m also ok including those, the core of the issue is shooting happening at school during school functions involving students and/or staff and that fits the bill.

When we leave the definition so broad it leaves too much room for assholes to deflect and nitpick and say that our arguments are invalid because we’re making up numbers, even though they miss the point that even one school shooting a year is far too many, never mind the countless other similar incidents that occur as well. I think it’s best to get out ahead of that by keeping the definition more narrow.

I work in 911 dispatch, this will vary somewhat from one jurisdiction to another, and this isn’t necessarily relevant to how the stats are collected, but it definitely gives some insight into how I frame these incidents in my mind. If I get a call about someone with a gun at a school there are about 10 ways I might enter it (maybe even more, but these are what immediately come to my mind)

1. Suspicious Person- There is someone with a gun at the school. It’s holstered, someone saw it in their bag, etc. they’re not brandishing it or threatening to use it, and they may or may not be otherwise acting strangely but the gun is just present but otherwise not involved in the situation

2. Disturbance- They’re arguing or fighting with someone but the gun is not involved, just present

3. Domestic - same as a disturbance but the involved parties have some kind of relationship- family, roommates, exes, boyfriend/girlfriend, etc.

4. Assault victim- basically a disturbance or domestic where someone is hurt and needs EMS but was not shot (or stabbed, we also have a stabbing code)

5. Armed Subject- Someone has a gun and is using it in a threatening manner but has not fired it

6. Shots fired - a gun has been fired, intentionally or unintentionally, but no one is believed to have been shot

7. Shooting - someone has been shot

8. Active Shooter- the shooter is still there actively shooting (whether or not someone has been hit)

9. Suicide attempt- someone has shot themselves

10. Behavioral/Psych Emergency - there’s going to be overlap with this and some of the other incidents, but we might use this code if the person is having a psych issue, is threatening to kill themselves, etc. and needs to be taken for an evaluation or committed but otherwise no one is injured.

Each of those have their own special considerations, different types and amounts of resources are going to be sent with different priority levels, and ideally our police will handle each situation differently as appropriate (cops in my area are generally pretty good at that, but YMMV) and it feels weird to me that using this database’s methodology a lot of these could potentially all be lumped in as the same sort of “school shooting” incident.

Like others are saying, crypto laws are a bit murky

In general though, it’s pretty well in agreement that you’re supposed to pay capital gains tax when you sell, I imagine that’s something they may try to do away with.

I bought a tiny amount of Bitcoin probably a decade ago, and have basically been sitting on it ever since. It’s of course grown in value significantly since then (though we’re still only talking enough for maybe a couple nice dinners or a modest vacation, not life-changing wealth)

Capital gains tax takes a pretty good chunk out of what I’d earn from it, don’t get me wrong, I’d still make money off of it no matter where I tried to cash out, but currently it’s hovering right around the point where I’m not sure if it’s worth the hassle of having one more thing to keep track of and figure out on my taxes for a relatively small payoff.

If they did away with the capital gains tax on crypto, I’d probably cash out right now (and never look back, I don’t feel I need to repeat this experiment)

I’m not saying that they should do away with capital gains on crypto, just kind of pointing out one way they could get it and how it might affect me personally.

A few years back my area got hit with a pretty bad storm, beat the previous flood record here by about a foot, that previous record was set about 85 years prior. Bad flood, but statistically not totally unprecedented, you often hear talk about 100 year floodplains, and so that was almost a textbook perfect illustration of that, if you normally only get a flood that bad about once a century we were just about due.

Then the next year hurricane Ida hit, totally smashed that fresh new record by about 5 ft. It took them like a week to figure out exactly how bad the flooding actually was because it totally swamped all of the river gauges.

NOAA’s website has a list of 42 historic crests of that creek going back to at least 1933. 29 of those crests have been since 2000, and 7 have been in just the last 5 years.

Once upon a time in my area, ice was an industry, big blocks of ice would be cut out of nearby lakes in the winter, shipped out around the area, and stored to last through the year. There may even be a handful of older residents in our area who were alive when it was happening, and certainly a few who are old enough that their parents would have remembered it. We’re only about a century removed from that time.

My friends’ dad used to tell stories about being able to ice state down the local Creek in the winter and being able to skate all the way from our town to one about 6 miles downstream.

I have rarely seen any of the waterways in my area freeze over with even an inch of ice, certainly none of them freeze over thick enough that I’d be comfortable ice skating on them (I keep an eye on all of the ice conditions because I want to try ice fishing, been keeping an eye on it for a decade, haven’t had a chance yet. A lot of the local parks have posted regulations for ice fishing because it used to be a thing you could do around here) and absolutely not thick enough that you could cut a block of ice out of it.

We also set a record last year for the longest recorded stretch without an inch of snow. Snow totals have been overall trending downwards for a while, over the last couple decades a lot of the local school districts have cut down on the amount of snow days they build into their calendars because they just weren’t using them. A small local ski slope near me has had to invest in new snow making equipment because they absolutely couldn’t count on getting real snow anymore, or necessarily even the temperatures being cold enough for their old equipment to work reliably

Climate change should be pretty damn obvious to anyone in my area, and yet a whole lot of people around me refuse to see it.

I understand that I come from a place of pretty significant privilege, but it is wild to me that when faced with these kinds of situations anyone is gambling on the kinds of medical care they might/might not be able to receive in these red states with restrictive abortion laws.

I know that if any of my friends, even if we’re not particularly close, came to me and said they needed me to drive them halfway across the country for an abortion because they may not be able to get life-saving medical care in our state if something goes wrong, we’re going, right then and there, no questions asked, I’m calling out sick from work, running up my credit cards on gas and hotel rooms and whatever else we may need and we’re hitting the road, and if needed I won’t ever breathe a word of it to anyone.

The fact that people are in a position where they feel like they can’t do that or don’t have people they think they can trust to do that for them is maddening.

I take part in a lot of outdoorsy activities, there’s kind of a split. Lots of conservation-minded folks like myself, and lots of assholes who don’t seem to realize or care that they won’t be able to go hunting, fishing, etc. if they develop over all the woodlands, poison the waterways, etc. and just want an excuse to shoot something or justify their much-larger-than-needed, lifted, coal-rolling truck.

Also a fair amount of people who don’t feel particularly strongly either way.

Sales of hunting/fishing licenses and such do end up funding a lot of conservation efforts, though arguably in a lot of cases the money doesn’t necessarily go where it’s most needed.

The more conservation-minded folks tend to be quieter about their interests and don’t make it their whole personality, they’re usually not the ones posing with a deer or fish in their profile pic.

This chucklefuck:

“babies born with any deformities or disabilities should be shot in the forehead.”

What trump was trying to scaremonger about and claimed democrats support in the debate:

He also says execution after birth, it’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born, is okay

Seems he’s once again confused

Politicians lie and use all kinds of weasely doublespeak bullshit all the damn time, it’s pretty much their signature move, everyone knows it, it’s been the punchline of countless jokes, no one likes it, but anyone with half a brain understands that it’s part of how the game is played and how you get the morons that make up a lot of this country excited to show up and vote for you.

So why are Kamala and so many other democrats so bad at just doing that when it counts?

How many undecided idiots does she think have fracking as their big tentpole issue, who are saying “gee, you know, I kind of agree with everything else she’s saying, but I don’t know if she agrees with me that fracking is the greatest thing since sliced bread, so I guess I’ll stay home on election day or maybe vote for the guy who’s skin looks like it was stained orange by fracking chemicals”

Compared to how many people in her base who are strongly against fracking, and feel that by supporting it she is just plain not listening to them and who may choose to stay home on election day because they feel so alienated and hopeless about the state of politics in our country.

How hard is it to just say nothing about these kinds of issues? Or if it’s something you absolutely have to comment on, why not just dance around it and say some vague bullshit about making fracking safe?

Play the fucking game, and play it to win.

I know she’s in the pockets of megacorporations that support fracking, her record speaks for itself for anyone with half a brain who cares to look into it, most people aren’t going to look into it though.

I don’t support fracking, but I also know if Trump wins then it’s game over, and oil and gas companies might just start a fracking operation from my bedroom and dump their waste in my dog’s water bowl just because they can, and since we’ll be living in a fascist dictatorship hell scape, there’d be no clear path forward to do anything about it.

If Harris wins, fracking stays more or less as it is now, and there’s a path forward, even if it’s a narrow one, to get a better candidate next time around.

But like I said, a lot of people are idiots who refuse to see that bigger picture, they’ll see Harris doing shit like this and just lose interest and not show up on election day or throw their vote away to some third party because they think they’re making a stand.

When I left my old job, a lowly shipping/receiving guy in a warehouse, my job panicked and offered me a pretty significant raise if I stayed.

After having been there about 5 years, I’d made myself somewhat indispensable, they kind of just kept piling responsibilities onto me, I absorbed a lot of a supervisors duties when he retired with no replacement hired for him, I had fairly minimal oversight and was mostly left to figure out how things worked on my own (which I didn’t really mind, it made the job more interesting and I was up to the task, but I definitely didn’t get paid nearly enough for the work I was doing) so I was pretty much the only one who knew how all of our shipping and receiving stuff worked.

Along the way I wrangled myself a couple OK raises, but not really enough to bring me to a proper living wage. I had asked a couple of times about at least getting a promotion in title if nothing else so that I would have something more impressive on my resume that “warehouse associate” which I’m pretty sure was my job title the entire time I was there despite effectively being a supervisor.

When they offered me more when I told them I was leaving, it pissed me off more than anything. If they’d just paid me that much from the get-go and kept on top of giving me decent raises to reflect the job I was doing there’s a good chance I’d still be working there now and never would have tried looking for another job. What they offered me wasn’t quite my starting salary at my new job but it was pretty close.

I could have left them really high and dry and just left, but I didn’t want to screw over whoever was replacing me too badly, so I wrote down instructions for everything I could think of that was my responsibility because honestly no one else had the whole picture, a handful of people there could do parts of my job but a lot of it, like I said, was stuff I had to figure out on my own. All of the business cards I’d acquired for different shipping companies, vendors, etc. and I gave 3 weeks notice and attempted to pass on as much knowledge as possible to my likely temporary replacement before I left. Last I heard, they went through several replacements within a few months of me leaving.

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I don’t know the specifics of this project, but not all Amtrak trains are electric, they also run diesel and dual mode (diesel/electric) trains (I’m pretty sure, but not certain that the northeast corridor is all electric)

There’s also other things worth considering like emissions from construction or maintenance vehicles, some lines are used for freight and passenger rail, construction might stir up any crap that might be in the soil, I suspect there’s some amount of metal dust created by the constant grinding of wheels on rails, plastics from brakes and such, leaks from any hydraulics onboard the train, refrigerant leaking from the air conditioning, etc.

In the grand scheme, even if they’re running straight diesel trains, leaking fluids, asbestos brake pads, etc. it’s probably all negligible in emissions compared to just living in Baltimore, maybe even offset if it leads to more people using Amtrak instead of driving but all of it is still worth considering.

First of all, I’m not at all against medical (or recreational for that matter) marijuana. It helps people, and those people should have access to medications that help them, and I’d rather have the current system than no access to medical marijuana at all. I feel like I need to start off with this because otherwise I feel like parts of this comment may come off as anti-marijuana, and that’s not my intention at all.

But it’s always been kind of wild to me how the programs we have are handling medical marijuana, I’m pretty sure if a doctor tried to handle any other medication like we usually handle medical marijuana, he’d lose his license.

Marijuana isn’t one drug, it’s several, THC, CBD, Terpenes, various other cannabinoids and other active ingredients, all with different interactions with your body and with each other that can produce a variety of effects on their own or in combination with the others.

And often you’re given little to no medical guidance on which ones will actually help with which issues, how much or how often you should take them, and in what way.

It’s kind of like being given a bucket of assorted pills that may or may not help your condition and being told to mix and match them and try taking them in various ways until you feel better.

And don’t even get me started on smoking it. Yes, it can be an effective delivery method, and you can go back and forth on how marijuana smoke is more or less harmful in various ways than tobacco, but at the end of the day putting smoke in your lungs is bad for you, and I don’t think there’s a doctor in the world who would disagree with that. If nicotine was some sort of wonder drug that could help with various conditions and you could get a prescription for it, I guarantee you it wouldn’t come in the form of tobacco, you’d get pills, patches, maybe some kind of inhaler, vape or nebulizer, injections, suppositories, etc. some sort of purified product with a known dosage.

It’s practically impossible to really do medical grade QA on a plant, there’s going to be variation from one plant to another, or even from different parts of the same plant depending on weather, light, water, fertilizer, and other variables in the growing conditions, not to mention just the genetic variations in the plants, and knowing exactly how much of which active ingredients are in the product is kind of key to being able to dial in what is an effective dose.

Yes, a lot of that has to do with all of the shitty laws and regulations we have around marijuana and our broken medical system in general, I’m not going to go into that too much because this comment is already going to be long enough that a lot of people won’t read it, but I’ll leave it it’s hard to study marijuana to figure what works and how, and it’s hard to build up the kind of industry needed to make actual pure and consistent medical grade marijuana products.

Now of course, if we handled medical marijuana the way it probably should be for the best results, it would probably turn out to be a hugely expensive undertaking under our current healthcare system. There’d probably be a lot of doctor-patient interaction to help you dial in your dosages, with more guidance on how and when to take it, we’d probably be getting into territory where you’d need some sort of a compounding pharmacist who could provide you with a custom blend of the right active ingredients in precise ratios in the delivery method that’s most effective for your condition and needs, there’d be a huge pharmaceutical industry (and probably all of the corporate greed that goes with it) that would need to be built to provide these medications, etc.

And unless we have some major overhaul to our healthcare system, that would all probably price a lot of patients out of being able to afford these treatments.

And yes, the current system works well enough for a lot of people, but it’s possible that it could work even better for them and for even more people if we treated marijuana more like other medications.

I don’t exactly have a grand plan on how to fix things. I don’t want to make marijuana more expensive or inaccessible for the people who need it. I don’t want to feed into the pockets of big pharma. But I do want to make sure that our treatments are as effective as possible, that we’re treating marijuana seriously as a medication and that people view it as such, and that we’re not just settling for our treatment options being “good enough” when we can do even better. We didn’t stop at willow bark, we built on it to develop modern aspirin and other NSAIDs, and someday we will probably do the same for marijuana, there will probably come a day when almost no one will turn to plant-derived marijuana products for medical reasons because we will have long since isolated, synthesized, and developed entirely new classes of drugs based on what we learn from studying marijuana that do the same things more effectively, more safely, and with even less side-effects.

no incumbent has ever won a second term with an approval of less than 51%.

Sigh Relevant XKCD

In my experience, there are a lot more people out there who own guns who are kind of afraid of them than you probably think. They’re afraid of everything, that’s why they got a gun in the first place, and once they have it they’re too afraid to actually carry it or train with it. And of course, if the time comes that they actually need to (or feel they need to) use it, they’re as much or more of a danger to themselves or others with that gun as whatever it is they’re feeling threatened by in that moment.

Luckily, most of the time these paranoid idiots actually live very safe lives, and their gun does no harm sitting somewhere out of sight and out of mind in their home giving them some false sense of security.

If we want to get a bit weird with it, I’m a Republican because of Trump, not because I like him, but because I want to vote against him at every chance I get. Before this I bounced around between being registered independent and various 3rd parties.

Overall I do tend to consider myself to be somewhat conservative but the Republican party always manages to go off the rails in a direction that is totally against my personal understanding of what conservatism should be. Pretty classic example is gay marriage. When I look at marriage through the ideas of small government, the constitutional separation of church and state, etc. my position is more that the government shouldn’t be involved in marriage full-stop. The idea of marriage is between you, your partner(s,) and whatever god or gods you do or don’t believe in, want to say you’re married, go for it, as far as the government should be concerned “marriage” shouldn’t have any more legal standing than being best friends. And as for all of the stuff with taxes, inheritance, etc. that the government does kind of need to concern itself with, that doesn’t need to have anything to do with marriage, if you want to share your benefits of file your taxes jointly with your friend, cousin, spouse, neighbor, barber, or have them designated to be the one who can make medical decisions, or to inherit your belongings after you die, that’s between you and them and the government is just there to make sure the paperwork is in order.

So when the options are the party that is open to more people getting married, and the ones who only want very narrow definitions of marriage, neither really fits my views, the “conservative” narrow definition of marriage is arguably technically closer in some senses to my ideal “the government doesn’t concern itself with marriage” situation, but in spirit the “liberal” system is closer to what I want.

I’m registered as a Republican to vote in their primaries. In general, I can live with whoever the Democrats put up, I may not love them, they may not be my first, second, or even third choice of candidates, but they’re OK enough. They kind of mostly fall on a spectrum from “meh” to “pretty good.”

Republicans, on the other hand, fall on a spectrum from “outright evil fascist psychopaths” to “meh,” and I’d like to try to head off the worst of them before they get to the general election.

With the way Republicans have been going for the last few decades (fielding very few “meh” candidates in the first place and electing even fewer while skewing further and further into crazytown) it’s going to be a cold day in hell before I vote for one in a general election, but I’ll try to pick the least bad one in the primary so hopefully it comes down to a contest of “meh#1” vs “meh#2” (or, dare I dream, “meh1” vs “pretty good”) since roughly half the country is going to vote for whoever has an “R” next to their name, might as well try to leave them with the least offensive R possible.

Ideally I’d like to push the Republicans to occupy pretty much the same space the Democrats do currently and have the Democrats move further left. In pretty much any other halfway functional democracy, our Dems would be considered a conservative party.

There’s a handful of Republican talking points I could kind of get behind if they weren’t using them as covers for their personal greed, racism, religious fundamentalism, etc. but at best the things I would otherwise tend to agree with them on over the Democrats are only paid lip service at best, more often they outright work against them, and very often they take the absolute craziest possible interpretation of one of their supposed ideals and run straight off the deep end with it.