This needs a line going up the Appalachians for the “You-uns” belt.

Also pump-action weapons. I’m pretty sure if semi-auto weapons disappeared tomorrow everyone would still have ARs, they’d just replace the gas tube with a push rod and convert it to pump action.

Yes. It means that the gun is only capable of firing one bullet per single action of the trigger, and automatically re-cocks itself for you after you fire.

Fully automatic means a firearm that can shoot multiple rounds per single action of the trigger – i.e. a gun that keeps firing as long as you hold the trigger down. This is also the legal definition of what a “machine gun” is.

Also, a “sub-machine gun,” in case you ever wondered, is a machine gun that shoots pistol caliber bullets rather than rifle caliber.

The frustrating thing is that Trump didn’t even get more votes this election than he did last election. There wasn’t a bunch of new Trump voters that came out of the woodwork and turned the tide. He was absolutely beatable. He only won because 15 million of the people who voted for Biden last election just didn’t bother this time.

It’s always a grift with these people.

It’s not even surprising anymore. Oh… wow… the Scooby Doo villain’s mask came off again… crazy… who ever could have seen that coming… crazy…

It’s just tedious.

I was so disappointed when Kamala came out strong for Medicare For All and then pretty much immediately caved and walked it back.

I have a strong suspicion that there is enormous pressure from the business world to keep the healthcare system the way it is. I’d bet almost anything that the instant healthcare is no longer tied to employment there is going to be a mass exodus of people from their jobs, and an absolute explosion of people starting their own businesses. I mean, I’ve had about half a dozen good scalable business ideas waiting and ready to go for years now, and the only reason I haven’t pursued them is because it would probably mean giving up my health insurance. I can’t possibly be alone in that.

And I bet if we got socialized health care, a lot of the problems we have right now with suppressed wages and poor working conditions would suddenly have a way of working themselves out.

They fucking better, because he’s definitely going to.

Bezos: “Hey Donald, I stopped my Washington Post editors from endorsing Kamala for you. Didn’t I do good, daddy?”

Trump: “Fuck you! Lawsuit! Fuck you!”

In my state (Colorado) early voting works exactly like regular voting, just, you know, earlier. Registered voters get their ballots automatically sent to them in the mail. You can return your ballot by mail, drop it off at an official drop box, drop it off at a voting location, or you can show up at one of the early voting locations in your county and vote in person the traditional way if you prefer that. Right now in my county there are six locations where you can do in-person early voting. There will be orders of magnitude more in-person voting locations open on the day of the election, but I think most people choose return their ballots by mail or drop box.

Every voting/counting location is staffed with a bipartisan team of election judges, and election observers. I believe the locations are run by paid county officials, but largely staffed by volunteers who have completed a training program. I’ve never heard of there being a shortage of volunteers

The voting drop boxes are big reinforced steel boxes which are securely anchored into concrete. You would need some seriously heavy duty cutting tools to get one open without the key. They are placed in front of city offices like City Hall, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the city library. They’re usually in open high traffic areas, and are under 24/7 video surveillance. I believe they’re also emptied multiple times per day. I wouldn’t say they’re impossible to tamper with, but it would be extremely difficult to do so and get away with it. To my knowledge, so far nobody has tried. I’m not actually sure what it would really accomplish. I guess you could destroy ballots, but stuffing one with counterfeit ballots would probably be caught almost immediately.

There’s a pretty robust system in place to track who has cast a ballot, how, when, and where. If multiple ballots show up in the name of the same voter, that gets automatically flagged and triggers a fraud investigation. Also there’s signature verification system. Every ballot that’s returned by mail or drop box must be returned in its security envelope, which has the name of the voter and several unique QR and bar codes containing information tying that envelope to that specific voter. This envelope must be signed by the voter for the ballot to be counted. If the signature on the security envelope doesn’t match the signature on file, the ballot gets flagged for investigation, and doesn’t get counted until the voter can be contacted to verify it was them casting the ballot and not someone pretending to be them. Voter fraud is really pretty rare here, but it’s taken very seriously, and gets seriously investigated. When it does happen it’s usually someone trying to cast the ballot of a deceased spouse, or family member, and even that usually gets caught.

There are a lot of safeguards and redundancies in place here that make getting away with voter fraud extremely difficult, but lot of the reason why our system works as well as it does is that people genuinely care about their votes being fairly counted and so are willing to staff and fund the offices who investigate voting irregularities. Our voting system is considered kind of the gold standard for the United States, and I’m lucky to live in a place that has that. Voting systems in other parts of the US are unfortunately not run with the same vigilance or sense of equity.

I don’t know if they officially count as grindhouse, but when I was a kid I loved a ton of the B-grade action movies that the Cannon Film Group put out in the 1980s. American Ninja, Delta Force, Cobra, Bloodsport, the Death Wish movies, Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, etc. And, of course, the greatest ninja movie ever made:

Ninja III: The Domination.

Just gonna leave this here.

I keep getting served some supremely mediocre eastern European hip-hop in Release Radar and other Spotify-generated playlists because of some guy who performs as Devo. Same with guys performing as Slayer, Poe, etc.

A lot of the time they’re listed on the track along with two or three other people, so I go to the pages of those associated acts and tap the “don’t play this artist” option in the three dots menu, and that usually cuts down on how much I see them in my feeds. At least until they do a new collab.

And while we’re on the subject, if Spotify could also stop lumping several artists of the same name together on the same profile, that’d be great. There’s an old surf-rock band called the Astronauts that I listen to sometimes, and at one point there were albums from at least four different bands included on their discography page. There’s still at least two.

Sounds like someone is trying to immanentize the eschaton.

They criticize everything the Democrats do. Literally everything. They double down on anything that catches traction. The more traction it gets, the harder they push it.

That’s my recollection as well.

I really hope the Denver one doesn’t pass. It’s basically targeting one small employee-owned meat processor (the one local chefs go to for higher quality meat products), trying to force them to close. And that will shunt all their business to the huge industrial slaughterhouse up north in Greely.

City Cast Denver interviewed the supposed whistle blower that the campaign to shut the place down are holding up as an example of how awful the place is supposed to be, and it turns out the parts which aren’t untrue are wildly exaggerated. The whole thing feels kind of sleezy, in bad faith, and a gift to the giant corporate meat packers. I hope people see through it.

Given Tesla’s usual build quality I feel like it’s pretty much inevitable that there are going to be an enormous amount of skull and limb injuries from those gullwing doors.

I feel like a ton of conservatives would actually be socialists if they had any idea what socialism actually was. Mostly they have only known the word as a synonym for ‘thing I don’t like,’ but I always find it striking how much socialist language conservatives use when they want to get their base on board with something. Even the introduction for project 2025 goes like: socialist idea, socialist idea, socialist idea, statement condemning socialism as the cause of the world’s problems, positive sounding authoritarian statement presented as a solution. Then it goes back to socialist statements to keep the reader engaged and feeling like the author is working in their best interest. It’s like some weird rope-a-dope bait and switch strategy.

I bet if socialism got a rebranding that stripped out all the language that usually triggers the conservatives, you’d see a lot of conservatives jump on board with it. At least until the billionaires spin up their media machines to destroy it again.

Maybe you need something like a motorized tie rack.