Happy Friday gang! Hope everyone is doing well. Nothing exciting going on here. The derelict boss is trying not to pay people who are leaving their earned vacation time. And wonders why everyone keeps quitting! iT’S a mYsTErY.
Best M.O.U. that the world has ever seen!
US launches new airstrikes against Iran hours after Trump threatens to escalate
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/09/iran-trade-strikes-ceasefire-extended-donald-trump
Class action suit against AI makers over deepfake child sexual abuse material expands
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/09/nx-s1-5885052/spacexai-stabilityai-deepfake-csam-class-action
Me telling my BF not to touch a gd thing down on the Mall!
Former Olympian pleads not guilty in reflecting pool vandalism charge
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/09/nx-s1-5887308/reflecting-pool-vandalism-charges-plea-olympian-canoeist-david-hearn
Anyone in San Francisco need a kitten?
Have a great day!
I don’t blame you M^3, especially if the BF can’t afford a lawyer that’s smarter than Judge Box Wine who can’t even indict a ham sandwich. The problem is Lawyers aren’t cheap and if they are then they’re usually shit.
When my dad sought legal advice against his neighbors, he said what would $400 get him? I laughed and said do you want a good lawyer or to pay to lose? $450 is what I paid for the 25 year old Scotch I gave to my friend, a shark/litigation attorney in the end for his legal advice. He solved my parents neighbor issue without going to court/war and I appreciated that. Otherwise dad was looking at a $8k for retainer.
Apparently Trump hires lawyers for the DOJ like if my dad did.
I’ve heard a phrase that says basically “The litigation is the punishment.”
With nuisance shit like this, even if you win, you’ve lost money and had to deal with all of the other shit, like being arrested and arraigned and everything else. The point of the prosecution is not to win, it’s to make you miserable.
Yeah, this is it: If you have more resources, it’s a far easier to win by attrition rather than winning in court, especially if your case sucks. Not surprisingly, this is how Trump got away with not paying people over and over again in the past — he was always ready to tie things up in eternal litigation and most people didn’t have a team of lawyers on retainer to handle it.
You’re right about that. My parents neighbors didn’t realize the son (me) had seen that and been played like that before (got into a minor accident then sued for 1 million dollars for a fender bender… I wasn’t the target but it really did piss me off and throw me for an emotional loop.)
This is what my ex did during the divorce. We could’ve easily wrapped the whole thing up in six months and walked away. But she dragged it out for 18 months and wiped me out in the process.
Damn cat distribution system.
She ain’t wrong about cyclists as I know a few. White as mayo.
Can confirm. Used to be one. The barriers to entry are pretty high, as really good bicycles are not cheap. So that tends to cut out most of the folks on the lower end of the economic spectrum.
In some ways it’s sad. I was on a 60-mile ride many years ago and saw a black guy way out ahead of me. Decided I was going to catch him. He eventually glanced over his shoulder and it was ON.
He ran me into the ground. I finally caught up to him at a convenience store and he was on this old rusty rattletrap, wearing shorts, t-shirt, and old beat-up sneakers. I’m standing there in my spandex with $200 shoes with toe clips and a composite frame bike that cost a pretty penny.
He very graciously said, “Hey, you’re pretty fast. You almost caught me.” I really wish I could have seen what this dude could do with real equipment. He’d probably have qualified for the Tour de France.
That’s not the vibe I got from the post. Isn’t she saying that they’re crazed about it because they think cycle lanes are DEI? Which would imply they’re not for Caucasians? What am I missing?
…I could be wrong…but the first assumption I went with was “DEI bike lane” was a contraction of [all that stupid woke] DEI [logic that means you end up with stupid things that support the wrong side of every division like] bike lanes [when clearly you should be driving to a pump to fill her up like a real red blooded american]…or something to that effect…& that bike lanes should be wiped out like DEI for the good of the body corporate or whatever
…so it’s at least adjacent to ironic that a lot of avid cyclists & street-planning types are somewhat of a pasty complexion?
Yeah, my take was “it’s stupid to call it DEI when most avid cyclists are white people.” Didn’t quite make that clear in my post.
Same.
Orange idiot tries to take credit for Walmart rollback pricing strategy.
White House Rages After Embarrassing Trump Story Exposed
Between this and “Freedom Gas” or whatever it’s called, it’s pretty clear that Republicans are absolutely desperate.
I know this is well-trod ground now, but the GOP’s only hope for November is “Downplay Trump as much as possible” and they’re stuck because he’s incapable of that. The media framing is still that his fans will never give him up (true) and that makes him sort of popular (untrue and clearly violates the iron law of “don’t print lies in the newspaper”) but there’s been a noticeable uptick in stories pointing out reality not lining up with his words. It’s still subtle and gentle — as always, if Obama lied the way Trump did, each one would be front-page of the NYT for 17 weeks — but the tenor is slowly grinding toward W’s second term when everyone kinda just admitted his ass was cooked.
The time to escape him was 2021 when they, you know, could have showed a backbone and convicted him during his 2nd impeachment.
Yeah, I posted that before. The irony is, if Republicans actually impeached the orange clown, they’d have a better chance in November. But that’s the one thing they’ll never, ever, ever do.
Oddly enough, I feel like the one MAGA who recognized the trap and ducked out of it was MTG. I suspect she will actually be in a good position to eventually take advantage of the crumbling shards of MAGA by virtue of being able to say: I stood up to Trump when I realized he was fucking all of you. Yes, WE know better, but the MAGA mouthbreathers will eat. that. shit. up.
As it turns out, cowardice doesn’t always pay off! Had they done it in 2021, it might have been a clean-ish break in the longer term. Doing it now, though, it wouldn’t be like ripping off a band-aid; it would be way more like amputating their own legs. It would be a GOP civil war that I don’t think would help them in the short term (and might lead to some longer-term schisms).
Also, of course, bears eternal repeating: They’re fine with Trump doing what he’s doing, they just don’t like how he goes about it.
(and side note: that last sentence applies to WAY too many Democrats, too.)
I think “bike lanes are DEI” is actually closer to the truth than these idiots usually blather. Everything they hate comes down to either gender, race or any change from what they’re used to. That’s really it; bike lanes aren’t giant SUVs and it makes them uncomfortable, just like ladies and gays and Hispanics do.
I ghosted a MAGAt I was once friends with. He still rants about his fear of PUBLIC TRANSIT… in TORONTO! On the other hand, he’s not a very good driver which explains why he’s been involved recently in a road rage incident where he’s been driven off the road by a psycho.
It’s only because in his mind (GASP!) only poor brown and black people take transit.
…being no stranger to a bus I once got a relative on one of those in a town where the buses are fine but is america (to be fair to them not the one they’re from but that’s a whole other can of cans of worms we can skip for this bit of anecdata) despite them being broadly aghast at the idea of not driving or at worst being driven in a sense-other-than-bus
…couple of stops after we got on when it gets to enough people some who clearly need them don’t have seats I get up to give mine to one of those & they look at me like I lost my entire mind…which was when I drew their attention to the clear notice that the whole section they’d sat in goes away in favor of parking a wheelchair there if someone in one of those gets on…good thing, too…they almost had time to get over it before they had to ride the bus standing up
…based on how much I had to hear about the indignity I’d brought upon them being comedically unforgivable if anyone who knew him ever found out I’d let him humiliate himself that way for…pretty sure that went on for days rather than hours…but…to refer back to the can of cans of worms…growing up in “the valley” can do some shit to people & it may legitimately just be an obscure dialect of a love language style school of “endearing” banter…or he really does think the time I figured we could walk from downtown to the place with the exhibit to walk about was a sincere attempt to kill him via over-exertion, I guess?
…did…that nice josh johnson lad do one about how to tell if someone is “bus people”?
…I kinda feel like that’s a thing I remember having seen but I may just be having a shaq-in-that-movie-that-doesn’t-exist moment?
I’ve posted it before, but my MAGA relatives were aghast that we used public transportation in New York City. They truly believe that the PATH train is crawling with characters from Mad Max.
…I survived both buses & the underground transit in LA las time I made it that far…& the first time I ever set foot in that town I arrived on a greyhound
…all three of those things made the person I was mostly there to visit look like they might be having a heart attack based on how short the distance was from just saying it to imaging calling my folks to tell them I died on their watch…still blows my mind…when I showed up on that bus I’d been taking those since I landed in not even america & mostly way the hell over where the west coast was the other side still…&…been fine the whole way?
…genuinely credit that trip with most of my ability to roll with the cognitive dissonance of trying to make anything make sense in terms of how the US is presented to the bits of the world that aren’t “from there” even if it was a long time ago now?
…like…I’ve been to lots of the same places since for varying amounts of time but that’s all time spent in an effectively different environment that in most ways works like the difference between “visiting jamaica” in the sense that means you have people to stay with & family to catch up with & “visiting jamaica” when that means hanging out within the layout of a resort that’s just holidaymakers + staff & you can put nearly anything on your room’s tab & nowhere is more than a few minutes’ ride away on a golf-cart…just…less starkly delineated?
…always kinda seemed to me like of all the places I got around to LA was the one it was the most true of…so many people in one place that wasn’t built for it they had to make jack nicholson famous for the chinatown angle & there’s colors in the susnset that don’t belong outside the northern lights…but used to be able to support orange groves as far as the eye could see back when the view from the hollywood hills would make sense to me to call beautiful…&…somehow it comes close to nearly no two of those people living in the same city like there’s a ruleset involved with a lot in common with the tv-sci-fi kind of “out of phase” where the wall isn’t real but the floor manages to be?
…you ride in your bubble from this or that node of the network you treat like it’s all one big bubble & not a bunch of squirming tubes of different dimensions with different amounts of people in them in different degrees of comfort finding it different sorts of a task to keep getting where they want to be to such an exaggerated extent that it barely seems to make sense to say LA is “a” place the size of the footprint we label that way on any map that shows anything that you’d have to label as outside it
…the five boroughs sort of seems like it sort of works like that…& maybe that’s part of why the east-coast/west-coast differential became the fulcrum it did in people’s schisms of faith within the hip hop ardents & such…but for my money whether it’s london or new york or paris or brussels or amsterdam or probably more places I could name than I could claim to have spent time in…even as much as to a pedestrian absent local knowledge somewhere like manhattan hides most of the cool stuff in a way…I dunno…madrid at the right time of the day literally stretches to the kerb like an open book…LA feels like an outlier for being more parts shared hallucination than the sort of place I think about when I say “big city”?
…pretty sure there’s a good few like it in places I haven’t been…not least in places where I’m not familiar with the script on the signage…but I suppose that’s largely speculation on my part…which may be hard to tell apart from the rest of this comment…so…I probably ought to quit digging this hole, I guess…maybe try to pass it off on those damn rabbits like I’m elmer fudd
..you know…to preserve my remaining dignity & all?
You also have to remember that these people are terrified by everything and everyone who isn’t whiter and richer than they are. Like yeah, they hate Brown and Black folks, but also, seeing any of them makes them want to piss their pants. They’re so afraid of what they think of as “crime” that they’ll cheerfully give up anything to make themselves feel better, from privacy to money to even simply avoiding anywhere with any population density.
…there’s also the #notallcyclists of it all…like…in london they called the first ones “boris bikes” but by then the vélo in paris were a hit with a famously ornery bunch of snooty assholes (I happen to like paris but it has to admit is has the rep) & under favorable conditions that stuff works pretty good
…in some places it led to whole landfill looking mass graves for mountains of bikeshare-brand-liveried scrap…or just pissed everyone off locally because people think they vanish when they un-equip them like a video game so they leave them lying in places you usually need a cat to have decided to be in to be that in your way
…&…if…as I semi-regularly get to witness…you can provide an actual two-way dedicated cycle lane with a kerb between that & the traffic & with pedestrian crosswalks & everything for both…you can still find some cyclists either trying to pass the bus that can’t see them on the inside…or expecting pedestrians to clear out of the way so they can coast down the sidewalk
…arguably you don’t have to see the spectrum of gear display akin to what @bryanlsplinter mentioned across the rush hour equivalent of a peloton to figure out that there are a lot of variables involved in adopting pedal power in a commuter context & everyone from the ones that planned the road layout to the one who can afford everything but apparently the ability not to look like they ought to have fitted stabilisers when it comes to handing out blame?
…the predominance of the pasty-hued proponents might be fair…dunno…but as far back as when nobody had electric assist & the new fashion was the stubby-short handlebars there was a not-as-white-as-all-that tone to most pockets of taking bikes seriously I ever crossed paths with from the cycle-courier hardcore to the half-pipe-hitting bmx crowd to the suspension like you mean it mountain bike lot
…never really hit up a lot of velodrome type stuff, I guess…maybe that works a bit like formula 1 with the vroom-vroom things?
The funny thing is that in the U.S., the biggest complaint about bikes is that they’re in the way of cars, and we have oriented our society around “nothing gets in the way of cars” … which is, as you can probably deduce, the sort of thing that bike lanes fix, but that also is a bad answer because uhhhhh, it just is, OK?
I’ve been talking about this for years, especially since I’ve moved to MA and discovered that I’m paying less in taxes here than I did when I was living in TN. When I tell right wingers here that the TN sales tax applies to groceries, they are absolutely horrified. That’s when I remind them that nothing comes for free, and the right wing states get to pretend that they’re “low tax” while gouging the people least able to afford it.
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/09/taxes-america-income-sales-taxes