Let this be a reminder to all called to jury duty (grand or otherwise) that you do not have to convict.

Reid was arrested in July for allegedly resisting attempts to restrain her after she refused to back away from ICE officers who were conducting arrests outside the D.C. Jail. In the process, they said, an FBI agent received scrapes to the back of her hand.

and:

Reid’s attorneys, assistant federal public defenders Tezira Abe and Eugene Ohm, say she was arrested by officers who didn’t want to be filmed. Video evidence presented during a preliminary hearing captured an ICE officer telling Reid during her arrest, “You should have just stayed home and minded your business.”

Lady is trying to film. Legal. An agent gets scrapes while trying to stop her. Lady is charged with "an enhanced felony version of an assault charge that requires inflicting bodily injury on a federal officer and carries up to eight years in prison."

Say NO.

“So MAGA wanted tariffs to bring manufacturing back to the US. But when a company tries to open a plant here, MAGA undermines it. Once again you proved what an embarrassment your party is to our country,” a user wrote under one of Branum’s Instagram posts.

Branum’s Instagram has since been set to private.

I don't mind the leopards eating HER face, but why do all her would-be constituients have to suffer for her racist idiocy? MAGA or not, people want that factory to run smoothly.

We learned this in 'Computer Science 101'. It WAS tested before use, but the issue was missed because when the machine was initially tested, no one was particularly fast at using it.

An experienced operator could edit treatment parameters so fast that the software skipped a safety check due to a ‘race condition’ between the input handler and the radiation beam logic.

You're kidding, right?

We rode without seatbelts in the back of stations wagons. Worse: just ready to fly free in pickup beds. It was almost expected that people would drink and drive.

All that said, you can still eat, drink, and change stations in most places and it is far, far less distracting than phones.

Before this, I'd been complaining about frozen vegetables for a while now. I have several soup/casserole/savory-pie type recpies that all call for frozen vegetables by the pound (ex: Defrost 1lb. broccoli and 1lb. cauliflower). Now all the veg comes in 12oz bags instead of 16oz, and I don't want to make 3/4 the food, I want the WHOLE recipe -- and I don't want a bunch of half-used bags in the freezer.

Messing with cake mixes is an even bigger problem for me. On the rare occasion I make a cake, it is either homemade carrot cake or from a box because I all my attempts to make a decent regular cake (chocolate, angel food, or whatever) have been too dry, too crumbly or otherwise inferior. I guess Betty Crocker just doesn't want my money. S'alright. I like my carrot cake and its surely more healthy.

Reminds me of this site (which offers no answers):

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

“They’re waiting for the other shoe to drop,” MacMillan explained. “Regularly starting with a compliment to ease into a critique quickly teaches people to be on high alert. They end up ignoring the positive and resenting the negative.”

This sounds like too many people only offer compliments immediately before a complaint. Further down, the article lists alternate strategies, but never gets to the idea of giving intermittent positive reinforcement.

They want options. They don't want to leave now , but maybe later. Maybe when you pull out the vacuum cleaner or when the TV gets too loud. Mostly, it's nice to have another escape route.

Years ago a friend was in a horrible car wreck and came out mostly paralyzed and with no memory of the last few years. She didn't remember her college friends and clung to her newly found relgious support group. She was never religious before. Her personality was completely different in numerous ways. She was effectively a different person and we no longer had anything in common. I don't know what happened to her after that, but I mourned the loss of a friend.

The author understands their sources don't know the shooter's current thoughts on anything because he became isolated over the years. Older thoughts include:

Asked about the inscription on the bullet, the friend said: “Josh was an edgelord who wanted someone to get blamed. I think he tried his best to write something goofy … to rile people up.”

Another friend showed me a Facebook post describing how Jahn had flooded his friends’ comment sections with rape jokes — “playful shock humor,” the friend said.

More nuanced:

That said, one friend recalled that when Trump first came to power, Jahn “was not a fan” — though he had contempt for mainstream politicians in general. His friends say he had more of a libertarian bent, with one recalling an interest in the libertarian figure Ron Paul.

And finally:

“If you’re having trouble finding people besides immediate family who knew him, that’s part of the story,” one friend said. “Every mutual friend drifted away over that kind of edgelord behavior.”

We used to lock up the mentally ill and disabled in state run institutions. They were generally horrible (see One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). Reagan shut them down and homelessness on the streets surged. His government also cut federal assistance to local governments by 60%. The country never tried to find solutions and the issues never got better.

The police in D.C. are not there to fix homelessness or crime. They are there because fascists need brute troops to intimidate the populace and keep people from 'disorderly conduct' like protesting or demanding their rights.

We've known for decades that Texas has loose regulations allowing development to ignore flooding concerns. "Texas shoulders the most urban stormwater runoff of any state in the country ". After Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston in 2017, everyone was talking about the development issue, but alas, mostly just about Houston instead the state as a whole.

Post Harvey, The Atlantic had a big piece on how, "The combination of climate change and aggressive development made an event like this almost inevitable."

Also from that 2017 disaster, The Washington Post concluded:

Thus, to ensure acceptable stormwater-system performance, jurisdictional agencies and officials must ensure that the type, timing and amount of real estate development are in sync with the capacity and configuration of the jurisdiction’s storm system. Many communities are at risk because of overbuilding or for allowing building in areas with inadequate infrastructure.

Some argued that "Houston isn't flooded because of its land use planning" ... but while the author there is an expert in urban planning, he is not an expert in hydrology.

Of course the recent tragedy was no where near Houston. It was closer to Austin and San Antonio. On Austin: "Flash flooding is a pressing concern for Austin, so much so that it has been labeled the "Flash Flood Alley" of Texas." On San Santonio:

San Antonio is a populated area in one of the most flash-flood prone regions in North America. SARA manages a series of structural controls (dams and drainage systems) to help prevent and/or reduce flood problems. For example, the San Antonio River Tunnels (see illustration) proved invaluable as they diverted water safely underneath downtown during the 1998 and 2002 floods.

I don't want to hear "No warning at all." This was a risk known for decades where the state and municipalities decided they'd rather allow an eventual catastrophe than spend the money needed to prevent one.

Doctorow doesn't allow DRM on his works (both print and audio) so he can;t distribute through sites lilke Amazon that require it. Instead he runs a kickstarter to pay actual talent to do the audio and distributes through smaller channels.

The entomology book Life on a Little Known Planet taught me that bebugs mate via "traumatic insemination". The female has no opening, so the male pierces the exoskeleton and the wound later heals over -- all of which allows entomologoists to count the number of times a female has mated by the number of scars on their abdomen.

My German 'must have more' was the sauerkraut. It is sooo much better there than in the states, and it was slightly different in each town I tried it. My staple meal was whatever the local version was of: sausage, sauerkraut, and wheat beer.

Yup. Buy dry beans and dry rice -- none of that precooked stuff. Buy fresh potatoes tho. If you can afford it, I'd also get a bag of onions, maybe carrots, and some spices that do NOT contain salt. You can also buy salt, but it is way cheaper per-gram to get salt and other spices on their own. Note that brown rice has more vitamin content than white rice (thiamine deficiency), but most white rice is enriched to compensate.

Oh there;s lots of new experiences in getting old: going through social security rigmarole, turning grey (or bald), finding yourself unable to do stuff you used to do, arthritis, gout, bone loss, needing a cane, getting up several times a night for the sake of your bladder...

Sure, you're getting worked up about her misrepresenting the number of illegals, but I'm over here all incensed that she's saying a person is just ONE meal for an alligator? As if gators wouldn't join in and make a party of it? How dare she! An adult alligator will eat 20 pounds of food a week during warm weather but can go for weeks without eating during the winter. That means a generic 100 pound human should feed at least 3-4 gators (or up to 5 if we don't count bones as food). Suggesting a person is only one alligator meal is like suggesting a person isn't unemployed once they're run out of unemployment benefits -- and who'd be stupid enough to suggest that?

Is Ours. Just cuz we don't use don't mean it yurz.

Wasn't this the initial 'threat' that got ABC to pull Kimmel? I thought Sinclair made this threat, then the FCC chimed in, then everyone else objected.

So now Sinclair is following through, and we'll see what the FCC does.