ಠ~ಠ

For this reason, I would much, much rather JD Vance stay on the ticket.

Nikki Haley… I think she could so some damage to Harris’s election chances. It’s gonna be a tough fight to win this November, and Haley is much more palatable to moderates than JD Vance is.

It’s so funny that these people will then turn around and deny all of the violence and unrest brought about by MAGA.

Charlottesville, January 6th, the attack on Paul Pelosi, the attempted kidnapping, torture and execution of Gretchen Whitmer, I could go on. They even wrote 900 pages on how they want to dismantle decades of progress in the US.

They then have the audacity to say that it’s the democrats who need to “turn down the rhetoric” and stop trying to take away their rights?

It’s maddening.

I am dreading seeing some of the bullshit they’re gonna cook up to attack her.

It’s gonna be a horrible mix of racist, sexist and God knows what else.

This short video explains the coconut reference.

Basically, it comes from a speech she gave in May 2023 at a White House event about Hispanic excellence. In her speech, she also touched on how the democratic party can better support young leaders by understanding the context they grew up in.

This led into her personal anecdote from her mother, saying:

“My mother, she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?! (Laughs) You in exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.’”

This basically took off and got mixed up with the whole “pill meme” terminology. Those that wanted Biden to pass the torch to Kamala started saying they were “coconut-pilled” and the rest is history.

It’s crazy to me that this is an actual criticism they came up with.

Okay, so she laughs… AND??

The demise of third party apps made me look for a Reddit alternative. I had been using Apollo for years, and it was so much better than the official app. I had been using Reddit for more than a decade when they made the API changes.

The official reddit app is trash. The’ve injected more advertisements, and now they’re even injecting ads into comment sections. it’s the very definition of enshittification.

This is all only stuff that’s visible on the surface, too. Under the hood, there’s definitely bots manipulating the conversation and posts that get upvoted and downvoted.

It’s still fine for smaller communities that are more niche, but that doesn’t change that Reddit has a monopoly over online forums and we really need alternatives. The fediverse seems like it’s able to do that, though it still needs to grow and diversify a bit more.

According to this 2022 YouGov poll, respondents over the age of 65:

• 31% want to provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
• 22% support increasing the number of legal immigrants vs 36% who want to decrease the number of legal immigrants. 42% either want no change or are not sure.
• 61% think that immigrants detained at the Mexico border are being treated humanely.

Overall, it looks like the plurality (42%) of Americans believe immigration has made the U.S. better. A minority (25%) of Americans believe immigration has made the US worse, and less than that (16%) believe it has not made much of a difference.

So for boomers specifically, it looks like around two-thirds are digging their own grave here.

I agree they should have codified it. They had since 1973 to do it.

In the end, I think the dems miscalculated and never thought the republicans would actually kill their golden goose; abortion was a major sticking point for single-issue voters. Hindsight is 20/20.

I feel like anytime a character in any medium says “there is zero possibility for failure” you can pretty much guarantee that it’s going to fail lol.

The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

Seems pretty clear cut and dry to me. These guys really are the epitome of “Rules for thee, but not for me,” aren’t they?

Considering how big a piece of shit Henry Kissinger was…

This should be interesting.

Edit: In case anyone is having trouble with the website on mobile (I was) I pasted the article content below:

In response to a lawsuit by Rolling Stone and National Security Counselors, the Department of Justice has turned over two tranches of FBI documents related to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Rolling Stone’s Freedom of Information Act request, filed hours after the announcement of his death in November 2023, seeks expedited processing of FBI files related to the former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to President Nixon. Kissinger is widely considered to be a war criminal for his role in the bombing of Cambodia, a coup in Chile, and massacres in East Timor and Bangladesh, and his legacy remains controversial among historians despite his bipartisan embrace by Washington, D.C. power players over the last half century.

While a historic figure in American foreign policy, Kissinger had an impact on American diplomacy right up until his death. After his death in late 2023, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken lauded the former Nixon advisor and revealed that he had sought Kissinger’s counsel ”as recently as about a month ago.”

“Even after only two releases, we’re already learning new things about one of the most polarizing American public figures of the last hundred years, and that’s just from the archival records,” said Kel McClanahan, an attorney at National Security Counselors representing Rolling Stone. “This is a man who single-handedly shaped much of post-WWII US foreign policy and kept his fingers in every foreign relations pie up until his death, and we will keep pursuing the truth and our right to learn it as soon as possible, not when the FBI feels like telling us.”

The Department of Justice has released two batches of documents thus far in response to Rolling Stone’s suit. The documents, which cover the background investigations into Kissinger throughout successive administrations, illustrate the extreme deference shown to the former Nixon foreign policy strategist, despite severe lapses in ethics and his role in the illegal wiretapping of an employee.

In 1969, Kissinger instructed the FBI to wiretap one of his deputies on the National Security Council, Morton Halperin, without a court order based on the false belief that Halperin had leaked news of the Nixon administration’s bombing of Cambodia to the New York Times.

Halperin learned of the wiretapping in 1973 as the Watergate investigations unraveled the Nixon presidency, and he filed a lawsuit against Kissinger.

But the FBI appears to have paid little mind to the suit when reviewing the then-secretary of state’s security clearance that year. In files released by the Department of Justice, the FBI notes glowing reviews about Kissinger’s character and judgment from luminaries like Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Harvard foreign policy scholar Samuel P. Huntington. Tucked into a sole paragraph labeled “miscellaneous,” agents noted the existence of the suit and that it was “pending at the present time.”

Kissinger received his clearance, which many successive administrations continued to grant him over decades. But a court found that the wiretapping of Halperin was illegal and a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. After a nearly 20 year long lawsuit, Kissinger and his former deputy settled the case in 1991 following an apology letter from the late strategist and diplomat.

Reached by phone on Friday, Halperin was forgiving of his former boss.

“He believed — and with reason — that this was something that had been done by every president in the postwar period and continuously by the FBI,” says Halperin. “The attorney general signed off on the wiretap, so I think he did not think that this was not legal.”

“The apology letter, we actually worked on it together,” Halperin explains. “We reconciled for a while but he seemed more distant after that. I was always ready to reconcile and friends were constantly trying to get us together. It never really quite happened and I’m not sure whether he really didn’t want to reconcile or was just too busy and had other priorities.

The files indicate that the FBI in particular could be sensitive on the subject of Kissinger’s security clearance. Cable traffic from the Bureau released in response to Rolling Stone’s lawsuit detailed a 1973 incident in which retired Marine Corps Col. Mitchell Paige, a recipient of the Medal of Honor for his heroism in the Guadalcanal in World War II, said that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover “would never grant Henry A. Kissinger, now Secretary of State, a top secret clearance,” adding that “Hoover did not trust Dr. Kissinger and considered him to be a threat to the United States.”

The incident took place in a private setting among individuals outside of government who weren’t privy to the director’s thoughts, much less Kissinger’s. But the files indicate that the Bureau was sensitive enough about criticism on the subject that the Special Agent in Charge of the San Francisco field office planned to ask Paige to “cease making these statements” and inform him that the FBI does not “clear” anyone.

Paige, the FBI later noted, had a history of intemperate remarks, including a 1961 ”statement that Earl Warren, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, should be hanged.” The Bureau drily noted that “He subsequently apologized for having made this statement.”

This makes sense.

I am still surprised Alito voted with the majority lol.

I see that now at the end of the article; it’s his second absence.

Still, the ruling says 8-1. Did he rule for it in his absence? Or should the ruling actually be 7-1-1 (or something?)

Lol of course Thomas would be the only one to dissent. Though, I am surprised that Alito didn’t also.

To be honest, I am kinda surprised this was upheld at all, given how conservative the supreme court is.

Not that I’m complaining; at the very least it’s a step in the direction for gun control.

Just from looking at these dates and cross-referencing them with the day of the week and major holidays, it would seem the following is true:

• Weekends (including Friday) are more popular.

• People are superstitious and do not like the 13th of any month lol.

• Mid August - August 18th in particular - looks to be the most popular, but so do other weekends in August. (Again, excluding the 13th lol.) Summer months in general are popular.

• Some people really like getting married on Valentines Day, but not the rest of February or the cold months in general.

• Very few couples want to get married on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day. However, New Year’s Eve seems to be slightly above-average for December.

Altogether, not too surprising, but interesting nonetheless.

Sometimes, I cannot help but wonder why there are so many different species of ceratopsians (I think that’s the right term,) but then I remember that these guys existed for millions upon millions of years and probably didn’t even exist all at the same time.

It’s crazy how much life on earth existed and how we will never know anything about 99.99% of it.

I am so happy this is happening lol.

As someone in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction industry, fuck Adobe. They’ve gobbled up all their competitors, jacked up their prices, and cornered businesses and consumers alike. You pretty much have no choice but to use them and they know it.

Personally, I hope this leads to a larger anti-trust. Adobe breaking up would help designers everywhere.

And while they’re at it, the US government should gun for Autodesk too; they’ve also flown under the radar for similar monopolistic, anticompetitive bullshit.

Sorry, I am just very bitter towards those two companies lol.

I am not sure if this has been posted here, but @ernest@kbin.social posted this on codeberg a couple weeks ago.

”I have been away from home for a long time now and do not have all accesses. I will try to restore access in the coming days. The care of the instance will also be handed over.”

I sincerely hope Ernest is able to get back on his feet; his health hasn’t been good since the beginning of the year. Kbin is a great concept.

Same…

I am still hoping that Ernest is able to recover and get back on his feet. I did really like how Kbin was able to interface with Mastodon and Lemmy.

Ernest did respond a couple weeks ago on codeberg. Looks like he plans to hand the instance over for new management. I have no idea when exactly that will happen.