veterans & active duty currently serving & consider the Constitution something that must be protected:
if you still want to vote for this traitor, you might as well take a dump on the Constitution next to the one he & his gang will be adding. anything that is sacred in the United States isn’t to this felon. he was the first president to not only attempt to not peacefully transfer his power he also incited an attempted insurrection. do you care about cops? one died on January 6th.
this should be career-ending. it’s illegal. it’s a federal offense. but somehow this rich, spoiled narcissistic asshole spits on what we hold dearly & revere & yet he continues to be celebrated. are you angry? offended? upset? i should hope so if you actually respect our fallen.
if you still stand up with this piece of shit you’re just as much of a traitor. do you look forward to shooting your fellow countrymen if they make the misfortune of having a problem with going through hell because of this man? you’re fucking awful. do better. to anyone else who has served or are currently serving & you changed your mind or have always been here, welcome.
i was active duty & have since been honorably discharged. the Constitution is still very important to me. if this isn’t sacred then neither are our rights. we need to fight to protect them. this evil man who avoided the draft with his fake bone spurs will never understand this.
please check your registration status often. vote early if you can. don’t stop talking about Project 2025/Agenda 47 & this psychotic weirdo’s connection to it. you want to know why he never talks about policy? it’s because Project 2025 IS his policy. we can do this 💙
Lobbying groups across most of the device manufacturing industry—from tractor manufacturers to companies that make fridges, consumer devices, motorcycles, and medical equipment—are lobbying against legislation that would require military contractors to make it easier for the U.S. military to fix the equipment they buy, according to a document obtained by 404 Media.
The anti-repair lobbying shows that manufacturers are still doing everything they can to retain lucrative service contracts and to kill any legislation that would threaten the repair monopolies many companies have been building for years.
In a May hearing, Sen. Elizabeth Warren explained that “contractors often place restrictions on these deals [with the military] that prevent service members from maintaining or repairing the equipment, or even let them write a training manual without going back to the contractor.”
“These right to repair restrictions usually translate into much higher costs for DOD [Department of Defense], which has no choice but to shovel money out to big contractors whenever DOD needs to have something fixed,” she added. Warren gave the example of the Littoral combat ship, a U.S. Navy vessel that costs hundreds of millions of dollars per ship.
“General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin consider much of the data on the ship to be proprietary, so the Navy had to delay missions and spend millions of dollars on travel costs just so that contractor-affiliated repairmen could fly in, rather than doing this ourselves,” she said.
To solve this problem, Warren and other lawmakers introduced something called Section 828 of the Defense Reauthorization Act, a must-pass bill that funds the military. Section 828 is called “Requirement for Contractors to Provide Reasonable Access to Repair Materials,” and seeks to solve an absurd situation in which the U.S. military cannot always get repair parts, tools, information, and software for everything from fighter jets to Navy battleships, because the companies want to make money by selling their customers repair contracts.
Section 828 states: “The head of an agency may not enter into a contract for the procurement of goods or services unless the contractor agrees in writing to provide the Department of Defense fair and reasonable access to all the repair materials, including parts, tools, and information, used by the manufacturer or provider or their authorized partners to diagnose, maintain, or repair the good or service.”
Manufacturers are not happy about this prospect, and are aggressively opposing it. But, interestingly, it’s not just major military contractors who build warships who are mad. Some of the groups opposing the legislation in the letter we obtained are things like the “Institute of Makers of Explosives” and the Aerospace Industries Association. But others opposing it include, for example, the Irrigation Association, whose members make irrigation equipment, the Motorcycle Industry Council, the North American Equipment Dealers Association (who represents John Deere and other tractor manufacturers), the Plumbing Manufacturers Association, AdvaMed (which represents the medical device industry), TechNet (whose members make consumer tech), various state groups like Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce and the Arizona Manufacturers Council, and dozens of others.
In the letter to lawmakers, these groups and dozens of others argued that being required to sell repair parts to the military “would impose significant burdens on contractors throughout the country, including the many small and medium-sized businesses and commercial suppliers that contractors rely on to support the Department’s operational readiness and effectiveness.”
The letter states that the companies themselves “are critical to the Department’s ability to repair and maintain its assets,” which the military Warren has said is exactly the problem: the military is often stuck relying on the original manufacturer of a product to either do the repair or send through critical repair information, which can be expensive and cumbersome.
The letter argues that the legislation “would undermine the principle underpinning existing technical data rights statutes, which are designed to balance the government’s technical data needs against contractors’ need to protect sensitive proprietary and trade secret information.”
This idea that device repair information cannot be provided without giving away trade secrets and proprietary data is one that manufacturers have been making for years at the state level to kill right to repair legislation for consumers. State lawmakers largely have stopped buying this argument, but anti-repair lobbyists are still trying this line of attack with Congress and the military. The letter also takes issue with the idea that there would be cost controls for the military, which Warren said are necessary to prevent “price gouging.”
The fact that groups who represent companies that have nothing to do with the military have lined up to oppose this suggests that device manufacturers more broadly are worried about a national right to repair law, and that the entire sector is trying to kill repair legislation even if it would not affect them.
“The goal of this legislation is to ensure that the lives of our service members, and their operations, are protected from repair restrictions gumming up the works. Incredibly, most of the signers don't even make military equipment! They range from motorcycles, to farm equipment to consumer devices,” Nathan Proctor, senior director of consumer rights group US PIRG’s campaign for the right to repair, told me. “Why are appliance manufacturers against the military buying equipment they are allowed to fix? Are the profits from additional service revenue, or more frequent device replacements, more important than the safety of our military personnel?”
throwback to 2021 when the exact same player started doing this extended water bottle bincoculars sight gag in the dugout
this is the same guy who also made himself a fruit cocktail midgame. he is The manic pixie dream girl
baseball is actually not a sport it’s just a documentary of human nature and how we battle boredom. the stuff these teams get up to while they’re waiting their turn.
and it’s hilarious when they pull pranks on each other, like attaching things to other people’s caps:
or the beloved hot foot prank:
or when they decided to put a guy’s pants over his head and make it seem like he was walking on his hands:
or when they opposing pitchers took turns playing tic tac toe every time they got on the mound:
i take back everything bad i’ve ever said about baseball these boys can fucking Post
Sometimes you have to entertain yourself out in the field too, like the time Victor Robles made friends with a praying mantis.
A source with knowledge of the incident said the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump staffers from filming and photographing in a section where recent U.S. casualties are buried. The source said Arlington officials had made clear that only cemetery staff members would be authorized to take photographs or film in the area, known as Section 60.
When the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump campaign staff from entering Section 60, campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official aside, according to the source.
So this is the weirdo whose going to make America “great” is it?
A wife-beating convicted felon whose paid thugs verbally and physically harass the people looking after the final resting place of dead war heroes?
Maybe he’d have some respect for this place if it was a cemtery dedicated to people who lied about having “bone spurs”
I’m out here buying tshirts and pants like a chump while some people are just wearing the world’s best rectangles
Pre-manufacturing cultures will really be like, here is the most elegant and gorgeous outfit you can imagine, and it’s achieved entirely with rectangles, ropes, and pins.
Over and over again, across the world, in cultures that never even knew of each others’ existences. Just, rectangles, knots, and pins. And I love that for them.
Indigenous groups across the Americas had all encountered Europeans differently. But where other coastal groups such as the Haida or the Mi’kmaq had met white men who were well-fed and well-dressed, the Inuit frequently encountered their future colonizers as small parties on the edge of death.
“I’m sure it terrified people,” said Eber, 91, speaking to the National Post by phone from her Toronto home.
And it’s why, as many as six generations after the events of the Franklin Expedition, Eber was meeting Inuit still raised on stories of the two giant ships that came to the Arctic and discharged columns of death onto the ice.
Inuit nomads had come across streams of men that “didn’t seem to be right.” Maddened by scurvy, botulism or desperation, they were raving in a language the Inuit couldn’t understand. In one case, hunters came across two Franklin Expedition survivors who had been sleeping for days in the hollowed-out corpses of seals.
“They were unrecognizable they were so dirty,” Lena Kingmiatook, a resident of Taloyoak, told Eber.
Mark Tootiak, a stepson of Nicholas Qayutinuaq, related a story to Eber of a group of Inuit who had an early encounter with a small and “hairy” group of Franklin Expedition men evacuating south.
“Later … these Inuit heard that people had seen more white people, a lot more white people, dying,” he said. “They were seen carrying human meat.”
Even Eber’s translator, the late Tommy Anguttitauruq, recounted a goose hunting trip in which he had stumbled upon a Franklin Expedition skeleton still carrying a clay pipe.
By 1850, coves and beaches around King William Island were littered with the disturbing remnants of their advance: Scraps of clothing and camps still littered with their dead occupants. Decades later, researchers would confirm the Inuit accounts of cannibalism when they found bleached human bones with their flesh hacked clean.
“I’ve never in all my life seen any kind of spirit — I’ve heard the sounds they make, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes,” said the old man who had gone out to investigate the Franklin survivors who had straggled into his camp that day on King William Island.
The figures’ skin was cold but it was not “cold as a fish,” concluded the man. Therefore, he reasoned, they were probably alive.
“They were beings but not Inuit,” he said, according to the account by shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq.
The figures were too weak to be dangerous, so Inuit women tried to comfort the strangers by inviting them into their igloo.
But close contact only increased their alienness: The men were timid, untalkative and — despite their obvious starvation — they refused to eat.
The men spit out pieces of cooked seal offered to them. They rejected offers of soup. They grabbed jealous hold of their belongings when the Inuit offered to trade.
When the Inuit men returned to the camp from their hunt, they constructed an igloo for the strangers, built them a fire and even outfitted the shelter with three whole seals.
Then, after the white men had gone to sleep, the Inuit quickly packed up their belongings and fled by moonlight.
Whether the pale-skinned visitors were qallunaat or “Indians” — the group determined that staying too long around these “strange people” with iron knives could get them all killed.
“That night they got all their belongings together and took off towards the southwest,” Qayutinuaq told Dorothy Eber.
But the true horror of the encounter wouldn’t be revealed until several months later.
The Inuit had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned several belongings. When a small party went back to the camp to retrieve them, they found an igloo filled with corpses.
The seals were untouched. Instead, the men had eaten each other.
There’s an EU initiative going on right now that essentially boils down to wanting to force videogame publishers with paid games and/or games with paid elements such as DLC, expansions and microtransactions to leave said games in a playable state after they end support, or in simpler terms, make them stop killing games.
A “playable state” would be something like an offline mode for previously always online titles, or the ability for people to host their own servers where reasonably possible just to name some examples.
I don’t think I need to tell anyone that having something you paid for being taken from you is bad, which is a thing that routinely happens with live service and other always online games with a notable recent example being The Crew which is now permanently unplayable.
Even if you’re not European or you signed it already, you can share this initiative with anyone who is, even if they don’t care about videogames specifically because this needs a million signatures and there is different thresholds that need to be met for each EU country for their votes to even count and could also be a precedent for other similar practices like when Sony removed a bunch of Discovery TV content people paid for.
This would be great. Recommended for my EU followers.
I can’t believe none of this post shows off the actual most unique feature of this squid!!
One eye of this species is normal, the other is more than twice as big and bugged out. Each has different sensitivity to light levels so she can aim one up (towards the brighter sky) and the other down (to the darker depths) as needed.
No other animal has this setup that we’ve ever found!! You can’t ignore her monocle!!!
look, yes, of course a pond will kill you. A little-L lake will kill you, if you are careless enough, but they are lazy things, pitcher plant predators, and they do not hunger. The Great Lakes remember when they were the blistering endless winter and the slow crush of ice reshaping the land. They remember the implacable starvation of an unbreaking cold across the continent, and they carry that ancient ice water in their bellies, hungry still. Lake Superior wears her winter boldly, and she will wrench frigid breath from your lungs in the heat of August and pull you, unrotting, to her depths. Huron beckons you further and further from shore with such a gentle slope, so easy, until you are finally chest-deep in the water but you cannot see the shore anymore, only the endless expanse of her. Erie sends her fogs like snowfall, whiteout blizzards, blinding you to her rocky shallow basin, reaching up to claw the belly of boats. Lake Michigan pretends, charming, a child's ocean, and her longshore tides creep along her beaches and tear away anyone foolish enough to believe the clear blue lie of her docility, most lethal of all.
Ontario is no business of mine.
Here, in order of appearance: Superior, Huron, Michigan and Erie.
The Great Lakes aren't haunted. No matter what anyone says, the Lakes aren't haunted. They are the memory-eaters, the old dark painted over with charming blue, and what sinks does not rise, not even the dead. When the Lake raises goosebumps, it isn't the bodies in the depths. It's just the Lake, reminding you that you are mostly water and water calls to its own.
The oceans, the old saltwater womb, warn you with every breaker that they are dangerous. The oceans never let you forget that you crawled from their hold, with your saltwater veins, but not all of your ancestors did, and there are things beneath the ocean tides, waiting with teeth to spill the blood you stole. The oceans with their shawls of hurricanes, their steady beating, make it impossible to forget the threat of them.
But the Great Lakes? The Lakes will lie to you. The Lakes will not gift you the buoyancy of saltwater, will tempt you with still surfaces and cool drinkable freshwater. The Lakes will promise that there is nothing with teeth waiting below, as though the Lake itself is not the maw of something hungry. The Lakes are new to the world, in the scale of epochs, and they play games. They lap at your knees like they are tamed, but if you swim long enough there will be a moment where the Lake throws you sideways, pulls you under, and you remember that this is a wild thing, with teeth of ice and nothing but water in its belly. They hold the last breath of every foolish swimmer that lowered their guard for a second too long, and the carcasses of centuries of shipwrecks, and they do not surrender what they take. No, the Lakes are not haunted. The Lakes are not cursed. There is no monster waiting in the depths, only the depths themselves, and that is enough.
They say that freshwater doesn't lay quiet in its bed until it's had its measure of blood, and the Great Lakes are thrashing at their shorelines.
Oh, my darlings, bodies and shipwrecks and memories are not the only things the Great Lakes devour--seasons, too, the Lakes cling to. All summer long the Lakes hold tight to the chill of winter, scattering cool breezes off their shoulders onto the coast. All summer long the Lakes hoard heat, storing it down in the deep thermal reservoir of fresh water, the golden heart of sunlight tucked away for the dark winter months. All summer long the Lakes steal warmth from the air and store it away, and when the sharp northern winds bring winter, the Lakes breathe out the last ghost of summer and fling themselves skyward. When the air is freezing, the Lakes have held fast the deep battery of summer, and the warm memory of July evaporates from the water and crystallizes in the atmosphere as January snow. All summer long the Lakes trade in winter winds, and all winter they shake out the white storm coat of summer.
My friend's wife found several half-siblings... When her dad lived in Los Angeles in the 70's, he messed around with every woman in his apt building...
my dad took some ancestry tests and eventually found out who his father was (and that he has 5+ siblings who are also finding all of this out) and honestly it’s been pretty bizarre and emotional so far, naturally
but one of the biggest changes for me is no longer having to give the whole spiel of “oh i know i’m racially ambiguos but hey there’s a whole story behind it because this that and here’s my father’s backstory”
A master to his action-hero trainee says, “Your movements are sloppy. You lack awareness of your body when you fight. Your hands move and yet you do not hold them in your mind’s eye. Come. We will remedy this.”
And then the master paints his trainee’s fingernails and orders the trainee to complete a series of complicated tasks without smudging the nail polish.
Trainee grumbles that this is stupid when the first set of tasks is just cleaning the dojo. Within two minutes he reaches for the dustpan and knocks the edge of his pinky nail against it in a way he’s never noticed before. He’s staring at the baby blue smudge and suddenly he understands things differently.
There’s a montage of days passing as he fetches water, chops wood, hoes crops, washes clothes. His nails are a different color during each cut. He’s sprinting up the mountain with a fresh wet pedicure and the master is nodding in approval. The master’s nails are flawless tech art.
He’s reached his final assessment and it’s a sparing match against his master. The air smells of acetone. His and the master’s nails are all freshly painted. He must land a blow on the master with his mani and pedi fully intact.
Suns and moons pass. Streak in the ring finger. Smudge on the pinky. A full-handed block at the cost of three nails of paint. A hit on his master, and he hoots in delight until the master points out the unguarded toe whose polish is now streaked across the master’s robe.
Days pass in frustration and exhaustion. By day 40, he has every digit of his acutely in his mind’s eye. He senses the master’s attack, ducks, dodges, all fingers all toes all himself, aware, and he strikes with his wooden sword.
It connects with the master. The master pauses. The trainee raises his left hand into view–5 digits of flawless sunflower yellow. His left foot. His right foot. And finally his right hand, raised in triumph.
The master smiles. “You have passed. I have just one more technique to teach you.”
The technique is how to draw little flowers into the nail art. So really this one is optional.
it’s optional but in the final climactic battle nonetheless somehow important
