No, there are other things keeping them together, like “starve the beast” tax cuts, racism, and Fascism. They want to make sure that the “others” are sufficiently put in their place.

There may be some collateral damage along the way. Loomer is especially dangerous because she is unaccountable to voters, so is able to do things that a politician looking for votes cannot. But I don’t think the occasional slap fight will derail the overall mission of the party to entrench themselves as the ruling class, in spite of their dwindling numbers.

All those more “competent” fascists are simply trying to position themselves for the inevitable post-Trump GOP. God will eventually exercise His Ultimate Veto on Donald Trump. When that happens, the GOP will appear to be divided into folks who double down on Trumpism (like Vance), and folks who are just as evil but will use Trump’s absence as a fig leaf to pretend the party has changed (like DeSantis)

This division won’t be real at all. It will all be performative, like the Kayfabe in Pro Wrestling, or the factions in Survivor. It will still be racism and Fascism all the way down. But the GOP Reality Show will still need to pretend there is a choice that they can rally the team around.

Found it!

C U Next Term

Well, there was no physical torture in that Congressional hearing, but that might only have been because of the cameras.

When I heard he said “hide your head in a bag” my mind immediately went to those awful photos from Abu Ghraib. Sure enough, Wikipedia has that one picture front and center on its page about the prisoner abuse:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse

It wouldn’t surprise me if that what this poor excuse for a human had in mind, too.

I was gonna reply that Hermain Cain was probably the “Black Donald Trump”, but I looked it up and Cain actually had success in his business ventures. He also was only married once.

Most states (maybe even all of them by now) offer a non-driver ID, which has just as much validity as ID as a drivers license, but isn’t valid for driving.

All that ID does is prove residence, though, it doesn’t prove citizenship. Most first-time applicants will also have to submit a birth certificate or other document proving citizenship. The USA has no other national document that proves citizenship. This service is for passport renewals, presumably the first time you apply for a passport you will still need to show up in person, with your documents.

He didn’t call the Europeans “backwoods countries”. He called those other places that. He specifically says that European countries should be more like us, for all the white right reasons…

NYT says this switch to pagers has been recent, after the Oct 7 attacks last year, when Hezbollah suspected that Israel was spying on the cell network, and using it to locate targets for strikes. So all these pagers got distributed to Hezbollah-affiliated people in short order . This system doesn’t use commercial networks, and has been called a “closed” network by the NYT.

If all that is true, then that means anyone with one of these closed-network pagers got it from being involved with Hezbollah in the first place.

What I really want out of Google Maps is a way to ask about particular alternate routes. I know it will suggest alternates if it thinks those will save time. But I want to be able to ask it “Should I take the Whitestone or the Throgs Neck”, evaluate both routes, and tell me which one is better (and by how much). It already knows where I am going after all.

Bonus points if I can teach it what I prefer. So, I want to be able to tell it how much I hate the Cross Bronx, and that it’s OK to send me on a different route if it’s 15 minutes longer, if it means I am not stuck on that.

It was, until the mods got rid of it

(Nvm, it is still there, I forgot I blocked the loser)

NYT has a link up which it claims has been verified. It is a video of someone at a market who had one of these in their messenger bag. The video shows a decent size explosion, which blew a big hole in the bag and knocked the guy to the ground.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/17/world/israel-hamas-war-news/44771255-fd1d-5028-8228-aff0ca5b8139

I doubt you could make an explosion that big with a AA battery. They must have planted the stuff in some massive supply chain hack.

The equity structure for these tokens will be that 20% of the project’s tokens are allotted to the founding team, which includes the Trumps, 17% of tokens are set aside for user rewards, and the remaining 63% of the coins will be made available for the public to purchase, said founder Zak Folkman.

I don’t think there’s any guarantee at all that all 63% of the coins “allocated to the public” will be released at first. They will probably release a fraction of that, and the constrained supply will not be enough to meet the demand from the Saudi and Russian governments looking to funnel money to Trump.

So the price will zoom up, and then they will decide whether to sell their own stash or more of the public stash into that surge. The end game is to harvest as much cash as they can from these foreign actors. And if any loyal Trumpists happen to lose their piddly life savings in the meantime, that’s a chance Trump is willing to take.

“Hey, free knife”

It only happened yesterday, if the footage backs up the cop’s story it will get released eventually.

Yes, but this time their body cams seem to have worked. Amazing how that happens when it shows things that can justify the cop’s story?

But it sounds like the guy said “I’m gonna kill you if you don’t stop following me”, then hopped on the train with the knife out. You think the cops in LA would have let him do that?

The guy only threatened to use the knife after they stopped him for turnstile jumping.

I should say that there are transit cops that check tickets in L.A. If you don’t have one, all they do is escort you out of the station. And this is the LAPD we’re talking about.

The first step to “escorting you out of the station” is stopping you, is it not?

My whole point is that the cops didn’t get belligerent until he pulled the knife. It also sounds like he might have boarded a train with the knife out, too. (It was the L train, though, I’m sure the riders have seen worse.)

They didn’t start shooting because he jumped the turnstile. I bet if he didn’t have a knife they would have just wrote him a ticket and made him leave.

You dont think your LA cops would have treated their fare evader a bit differently if he pulled a knife?

It sounds like the guy had a knife and threatened to use it. It also sounds like the cops tried to taze the guy first, but it didn’t work.

We can argue whether the cops really needed to shoot the guy. But they weren’t shooting at a fare evader, they were shooting at a guy with a knife who also happened to jump the turnstile.

I’d argue that the real problem is that the cops didn’t know how to de-escalate the situation without shooting. It’s like the tazer was their only “non-lethal” option, and when that didn’t work, they panicked. (I could also believe that they were simply incompetent, and couldn’t work the tazer properly.)

Most states (perhaps all of them?) require at least a year of US history to get a HS diploma. They do not guarantee the students retain the knowledge after passing the class, of course.