Article 5 and Catch 22, which in this case would be formulated as, “They can do anything that we can’t stop them from doing.” One could make that argument, but who’d be listening?

One of the Big Lies that they repeated over and over throughout the election season was the one about the “border crisis,” where allegedly criminals and rapists were flooding into the country across the southern border by the millions. They promised to round up and deport all of them, literally millions of people. You can see where the problem arose: Lies collided head-on with reality. There simply are not millions of migrants for ICE to round up. They don’t exist. They never existed. It was all a lie.

Now, the regime has to appear like it’s Doing Something™ by actually deporting people. Stephen Miller has even given ICE a quota of 3,000 deportations a day, and it’s struggling. They have to make the numbers somehow, and the low-hanging fruit are the immigrants that they already have records on, and know about. ICE can just comb the immigration records, and go pick up people whom they know exactly where to find. Morality and logic have nothing to do with it, it’s all about throwing the red meat of performative cruelty to their base, and intimidation to their political enemies.

A rainbow appearing in the sky over Dublin on the day that Ireland voted to legalize same-sex marriage? A tornado destroying the house of Rep. Joe Harding, who authored the infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida?

I don’t know how much clearer He can get!

No. As noted, it’s a rivet. It was originally a straight piece of metal rod with a cap (visible in the top image) at one end, inserted into the joint, then the other end deformed with a rivet tool to create a lip on the end (lower image) so it stays in place.

To remove it, use a drill bit about the same diameter as the rivet shaft, and drill it out from the end in the lower image. You usually only have to drill less than a millimeter before the lip breaks free, and you can pull out the rest of the rivet. The trick here is that the rivet is probably hardened steel, that means it’ll take a carbide drill bit, and some time.

This is obviously a destructive procedure for the rivet, and then you need special tools to put in another. It might be possible to replace with a screw, but it won’t be quite the same.

You read the part about the dog’s skull, and well, you hope that the blenderizing happens slowly.

Best President since Jimmy Carter is a low, low bar. We forget that Carter was a neo-liberal who threw labor under the bus. Because the Presidents since have been so right-wing, he looks like a leftist in the rear view. And throwing the working classes under the bus is one of the major reasons we’re here now.

Can we start delivering those 2,000lb. bombs that the U.S. gives to Israel one by one, to Netanyahu’s house, by airmail?

Fascinating how the subtext is always that we should feel comforted because a mass-casualty event that’s a normal part of the system that kills and injuries people every day isn’t terrorism.

“Oh, that’s just the machine crushing orphans. It’s supposed to be doing that.”

That’s the leftist ideal. (Which, true, few people fully reach.)

There are multiple meanings of “support.” There’s an endorsement meaning, which can be explicit or tacit, and there’s an aiding meaning. The Democrats may not explicitly endorse it, but the Biden administration certainly did tacitly endorse it by directly aiding it. And most of the party has been tacitly endorsing and aiding it for decades.

Huh, that’s really odd conclusion to draw from Democrats literally supporting genocide. Harris couldn’t even be bothered to come out against it during the campaign even when they knew their support was a losing issue.

It’s a simple moral calculus, don’t you see? You must always vote for Hitler and help him kill 5,000,000 people, if the alternative is somebody who’s going to kill 5,000,001 people.

This was obviously the outcome no matter who was elected. Israel has always been very clear about this.

You’re correct, my memory took a shortcut. Thanks for the very thorough explanation!

Americans can’t buy them new because of the so-called Chicken Tax. We can only import them if they’re speed-governed, or at least 25 years old.

Even with those restrictions, lots of Americans want them, including me. There are quite a few importers bringing them over, including one that just started up in my area. They’re desirable enough that major media outlets are running articles about how people who need to get real work done covet kei trucks.

Yes, Americans would buy them. Americans are buying them.

It depends how you define it. I first installed Slackware at work on a retired IBM PS/2 in '94 or '95, because somebody was working on MicroChannel bus support. (That never materialized.) Later, we checked out Novell Linux Desktop, maybe Debian, too. At a later job, we had some Red Hat workstations, version 5 or 6, and I had Yellow Dog Linux on an old Power Mac.

At home, I didn’t switch to Linux until Ubuntu Breezy Badger. It was glorious to install it on a laptop, and have all of the ACPI features just work. I had been running FreeBSD for several years, NetBSD on an old workstation before that, and Geek Gadgets (a library for compiling Unix programs on Amiga OS) before that.

Yeah, nobody’s buying this bullshit.

Reminds me of a meeting my co-worker and I had with the IT staff of a company that is a customer using research instruments in our facility. The meeting was to ask us to enable data synchronization through SharePoint. (We’re a Linux shop.) We asked what the issue was with getting their data files with SFTP. They said, “It’s open source.”

Then, a few beats of silence as it sinks in for us that there is no next step in the chain of logic. That is the totality of their objection.

That’s amusing to me. Back around 2010, I used a lot of state legal forms that they only released as PDF files, but not fillable. It was annoying to print them and fill them by hand, and terribly fiddly to use the PDF annotation tool on the computer.

So I just used OpenOffice.org to create almost-pixel-perfect versions of the forms, with fillable text boxes, then exported them as PDF. Word couldn’t do it at the time.

Now, at work, I use Microsoft365 because that’s what everyone uses because of the site license. I wish we’d switch to something else, because Outlook fails so hard at basic email stuff.

I’d say that 20-50 years is generous. Maybe if they’d won every election, but that’s now how US politics goes. When one side stages a coup, and history shows they’re going to win an election again within the next cycle or two, not throwing the leaders of the coup in Gitmo by January 21, 2021, at the latest, sure seems like enabling fascism.