“Trump, he’s had it with these people, because he knows they’re playing politics,”

Lmao.

Oh no, the would-be dictator got his little fee-fees hurt!

That happened to me a few years ago, just tragedy after tragedy after tragedy. One day toward the end of this horrible run, I called my best friend to remind them of something random, like “remember it’s X’s birthday this weekend” or something. Friend wasn’t home, her mom said she’d have Friend call me back. No worries.

Anyway, my friend gets home, and her mom is in the dining room having tea with a neighbor. Mom says, “Oh, hey, Aramis called, I told 'em you’d call back,” and the neighbor immediately exclaimed, “Oh my God, what’s happened to that poor person now?!?!”

I was driving along these narrow backcountry roads once, the ones with little drainage ditches on either side of the road. It’s dark out A deer comes bounding across the road in front of me. Knowing that deer travel in packs, I stopped.

Some asshole fucker in a lifted truck or SUV, speeding toward me way over the speed limit on these tiny backcountry roads, did not stop. Another deer ran across the road and the truck/SUV hit the deer and catapulted it right into my car, then kept speeding off into the night. My car was mostly totalled, as in it (extremely unhappily) managed to limp me home at about 3 miles an hour, screaming the entire way. [It was a back road and I was afraid of another asshole coming along and driving right into my car before a tow truck could possibly get to me. And there was no place on the side of the road where I could safely wait for a tow truck.]

All my friends were like, “Oh no, did you get the plate number of the guy?” And I’m like, “Initially they were too far away, then their headlights were blinding me - and how they missed seeing the deers with those lights is beyond me. And by the time they were close enough for me to see a plate, there was a deer in the way.” Then they’re like, “Did you call your insurance company?” And I’m like, “Why in the world would I do that? What world do you live in? My car is 16 years old, they’d give me $500 and then raise my premiums a thousand dollars a year for the next decade.”

I hope that fucker in the truck/SUV wrecks their next five cars in ditches and bogs and gets stuck in snowbanks in the middle of winter for the next decade. Fucker.

Story time?

They’re talking about doing away with the filibuster, which would lower the number of votes they need.

[cont]

And when one of their slaves became too ill or malnourished to work, there was a seemingly unending stream of other slaves to replace them.

End comments:

I don’t think I made it clear in my previous comment (and it’s up against the character limit, so I’m not going to go back and try to edit), that the camps inside Germany itself generally were intended as labor camps, with extermination as an eventual side-effect of the existing and incoming prisoners; and the camps outside Germany - particularly those in Poland - were established as extermination camps, with slave labor as a minor byproduct.

Also, my comment is obviously a vast, vast simplification of a process that developed over years.

And having finished my comment, I realize I went way beyond your original question, but IMO the slow development of oppression and extermination, as well as focusing beyond the Jewish people to the other six million who were murdered in the camps, is also of value. It’s why we need to focus on the groups currently being targeted by the government - not only immigrants and the trans community, but the LGBT+ community in general, the homeless, the disabled, etc. And yes, even the Democrats - the anti-Democrat language and propaganda being pumped out by the more extreme “news” channels and influencers is very similar to type of language that tends to precede civilian uprisings and ethnic cleansing against other segments of their population - see the massacres in Kosovo or Rwanda as an example.

When Hitler took power in 1933, he didn’t actually start with the Jews, & they weren’t kidnapped off the streets. The first concentration camp was at Dachau, & the first prisoners were political enemies - trade unionists (union organizers and members), Socialists & Communists. [Conveniently, not only were these groups Hitler’s political enemies, each was a group used to working with it’s own large membership to accomplish their goals; by imprisoning these people, Hitler not only neutered the political opposition, but he struck a heavy blow against civilian resistance as well.] Originally, they were simply arrested & disappeared, but yes, eventually the Gestapo became increasingly aggressive & did plain kidnappings.

Dachau was originally intended as a prison camp, but it needed to be expanded very quickly to accommodate all the newly arriving prisoners, & the ever-efficient Nazis (remember, they came to power because of the onerous penalties inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles, - the world was in the Great Depression, so the government really couldn’t afford to spend any money) decided the best way to build out the camp was to not-spend much money doing that. Instead of hiring outside workers (who might also bring out word of conditions in the camp, be inclined to transmit messages/contraband in & out of the camp, & potentially hear messages of solidarity from union workers), they decided to have the prisoners build out the camp instead. And why pay the prisoners, when they should be glad to be getting their lodging & food provided for them? The camps were destined to become slave labor camps.

Some companies, still in the throes of the Depression, & with some portion of their workforce now inside the camps & no immediate candidates to replace them, asked the German government if they could hire workers from the camps. The government agreed. The companies got cheap labor & stopped struggling in the Depression, the government got the money to spend on governing, & life improved for those outside the camps - you just had to ignore the camps & slaves themselves. And over time, other industrial-scale companies that didn’t have skilled workers in the camps turned to hiring other workers from the camps; if they didn’t they couldn’t compete in the marketplace.

Meanwhile, having neutered the political opposition, the Nazis started turning to “undesirables”. Even here, the immediate targets weren’t the Jews; the next targets were gypsies (Roma & Sinti), gay men, & Jehovah’s Witnesses, all of whom were thought to be “soiling” German civil society. Lesser targets who didn’t always end up in the camps included immigrants & the homeless; & later targets also included people with mental /physical disabilities, & in some cases just abnormalities (ie, dwarves).

Please note that I’m not saying that the Jews weren’t being targeted by the government & civilians, just that in the early days of the Hitler regime, those actions were a series of increasingly restrictive laws & increasingly-frequent/severe stochastic attacks encouraged by the government. However, Jews originally weren’t interned in the camps to the scale they were imprisoned later on; they were “encouraged” to emigrate. The major turning point against the German Jews is generally accepted as Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass), in 1938, five years after Hitler took power.

Remember that, in the 1930’s, the majority of formal political & economic organizing was done by men, so the majority of the original prisoners were also men. The government did imprison women & children, but not originally at the scale later seen, so the imprisoned women & children were a necessary burden to “cleanse” German society. It was only after Germany started World War II by invading Poland (1939), that things turned dire.

In the newly-occupied territories, yes, the occupying forces kidnapped & killed/imprisoned those suspected of being enemies of the Germans, or just against what Germans thought their society approved of. They established camps for those they targeted in occupied territories, & forced occupied Jews into ghettoes, which were eventually “liquidated” either directly (mass killings) or indirectly (the people in the ghettoes sent to camps).

The camps became a problem. Established quickly, there were too many people to properly feed or care for. Medical attention was essentially non-existent. Conditions in the camps meant that diseases periodically ripped through the populations there. Since the Germans determined to imprison everyone in their target groups, that included young children, the very old & infirm, the chronically ill, etc. The camps became crowded, with a noticable percentage of people who simply couldn’t work to “earn their keep”. In merciless fascist logic, it was more “efficient” to kill those people and direct whatever meagre resources they were willing to allot to the camps to go their slave laborers.

Lock screen ads are coming to all smartphones. Because you know that, once they get one group to accept it, they’re going to shove it onto everyone.

I had heard (though I’m not sure how reliable the information was) that the landlord had been wanting to tear down the building but was running into tenant opposition. If true, this is the same as it ever was: a bunch of inhumane farms, factories and slaughterhouses would call in immigration when their undocumented workers started complaining about conditions and pay, knowing they’d never be held to account for hiring and abusing them.

Take all the current litter out of the box. Give the box a thorough cleaning, then run some diluted bleach around it. Drain the litterbox and let it air-dry. When the box is completely dry, put it down in it’s usual place and put the new “litter” in the box.

If you have multiple cats, you’ll need to arrange something where the sick cat is the only one who can access that litterbox (and that the sick cat can’t access a second one, either).

Check with the vet; many times you can refrigerate a urine sample overnight if necessary, but it may depend on what time the lab stops by their office to pick up samples.

If all else fails, you can bring the cat to the vet for them to collect a urine sample. This may entail then keeping the cat in a cage and periodically checking the litter there; or (more likely) the vet will insert a needle into the cat’s bladder and draw a sample directly. For obvious reasons, cats tend to dislike this second option.

Ask your company if they can do matching funds for your donation.

Yeah, don’t care.

Optimistic of you to assume we’ll have free elections with an un-gerrymandered map.

Time used to be a respectable magazine. These days it just seems like anyone can submit and “publish” there.

One interesting thing about the Quantum Leap finale is that God is played by Bruce McGill (who shows up in a number of Bellisario’s shows, but ignore that for now). Which doesn’t seem particularly interesting until you realize that Bruce McGill also appeared in the Quantum Leap pilot, implying that God has been involved in the whole “Leap that went wrong” thing from the very beginning. I’ve never been entirely sure how I felt about that, but it was an interesting bit of casting, regardless.

People doing God’s work shouldn’t be afraid or ashamed to show their faces.

Came here for this!

A lot of them end up culling the believers too in the end.

Robespierre was killed by the Revolution.