Tnx for the heads-up OP. I need to get some Forever int'l stamps (currently $1.25/ea IIRC) if they're going up too.

The California-based Raw Milk Institute called the warnings "clearly fearmongering." The institute's founder, Mark McAfee, told the Los Angeles Times this weekend that his customers are, in fact, specifically requesting raw milk from H5N1-infected cows. According to McAfee, his customers believe, without evidence, that directly drinking high levels of the avian influenza virus will give them immunity to the deadly pathogen.

By all means, drink up, morons, get the hell out of our gene pool, we've got enough troubles without your Dimwit DNA.

Just stay tuned for the show when/if the Orange Fascist gets into office again. Cuts to Medicare, SS, and a dismantling of the ACA will be top priorities, and then you're going to see huge increases in the numbers of homeless old folks. Grandpa and Grandma trudging their carts down the road, loaded with the sum or their earthly possessions, heading for the next place to sit next to traffic with a cardboard sign or heading for the nearest tent-city that hasn't been ripped apart by the cops. These income/benefits cuts (and similar - think Medicaid) will be savage for younger people too, but younger people can at least, usually, at minimum, get some kind of crappy job whereas older people, the vast majority of whom are on small, fixed incomes, will very often be unemployable due to illness or injury or (as should be obvious to anyone who pays attention) age discrimination. If that sub-minimum-wage job office job can be done by 20yo Sally or 70yo Sam, if that house-painting job can be done by 20yo Chad or 60yo Cindy, guess who's going to get the job and who's going to be unable to rent even a single-room flat because of no job, no income.

I point this out mainly because one seldom encounters articles that are sympathetic to the financial plights of older people - they're assumed to be all out playing golf at The Club all day, eating restaurant meals afterwards, taking long vacations whenever, just because, and living in comfortable, fully-owned houses with incomes that support their upkeep as well as the upkeep+use of that brand new gigantic RV parked outside. Oldster unemployment and poverty and medical debt and, ultimately Oldster homelessness, is just outside of the narrative.

You can be sure that these jailed homeless people will end up being forced into labor - enslaved - because you can't let dirt-cheap labor go to waste, and you can't let a poor person look like they're getting something for nothing - mooching, free-riding - even if it's not their choice. Handouts are legitimately only for the rich and their corporations after all. If someone's fined+jailed and won't work for some capitalist exploiter, what will be done? I would guess some kind of torture will be employed to change their minds, but wouldn't be surprised if they're simply executed, especially if they're non-white.

Just lovely. Despite being a long-time Mint customer (and currently pre-paid for quite some time into the future) I fully expect to get screwed in some substantial way by this.

If only the rest of the military would Mann-up like this.

How in hell can your 10-14yo not go to school and nobody lifts a finger? School's not mandatory in W. VA? Somebody's been watching closely enough that they know how many times the girl left the house in four years, but nobody thought intervention was called for?

Cowart was held on a $37,000 bond before being released from jail the same night.

TF, she walked free and presumably is free currently? I guess this behavior is no big deal in TN.

Welp, I can see it's time to re-up as a member with the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and maybe a few more. I haven't been active in the Church:State fight since the early 2000s when GWB was kissing-up to Christofascists but the latter are really gaining momentum of late now that they have Their People in power from the SCOTUS on down to the lowliest municipal admin spot. We as a country are truly f*cked if we don't neutralize these people. I'll probably join TST too because I agree with them ideologically, they're doing some great women's health care work, and I want to make sure that I get on all the Christofascist's Lists as a certified Demonic influencer.

I swear he comes across as even more senile each and every day. But ...

The rich would support this - they can only consume so much after all, and most of that would be discretionary. No more income taxes on vast incomes, stop buying imported shit, huge win for them. The chowderheads supporting Drumpf would probably be enthusiastic about such an idea too - imagining their small paychecks without that hated tax deduction box and imagining no more paying every year for that scary tax return software. And then, they lose their jobs because countries that we export to retaliate with their own tariffs. Prices on pretty much everything goes through the roof (because even domestic products have foreign supply chains), and most of the cheap shit they used to be able to afford (like electronics from China, bulk foods from overseas and (fast-)foods made with it) they can't afford now.

Meanwhile, with the economy crashing, federal receipts (both tax and tariffs) dry up and it's Government Shutdown time. All working according to the Plan. Grandma and Grandpa lose their incomes and health care and have to move in with unemployed, impoverished JimBob and the wife, which is darn near intolerable what with all the hillbilly kids being home all the time now that the schools have been shut down. Kids that are wailing about being hungry all the time just like the oldsters.

It would be fun to see what carve-outs to the tax/tariff policy they'd have, to try to keep the MIC funded. Borrowing is of course the preferred way to fund it, but nobody's going to be touching the bonds issued by an actively collapsing national government.

Explosives were fascinating when I was, like, 10 years old. Now, as an adult, they're just stupid, but we have an ever-growing population of people who derive their sense of self-worth from producing maximally loud, obnoxious, pathetic spectacles (think street-racers, coal-rollers, rap-blasters to name a few), so there you have it. When you're a nobody and have no attributes that anyone would look up to, well, at least you can force people to pay attention to you and do it on the cheap (important because you're poor). Boom boom pop pop.

When Arizona passed the legislation that allowed for private school vouchers, the program was projected to cost $65 million in 2024 and $125 million in 2025. But the most recent estimates put that cost at a staggering $940 million per year, more than 1,000 percent of the initial estimate.

The Christofascists won't be satisfied until every school is a 100% Christian-run, 100% taxpayer-funded, stone-age-war-god-ideology fascist brainwashing center.

Welcome, life is good here. Stay the hell out of ID though - it might give you flashbacks.

Archive link: https://archive.is/Qsioy

Rouge: noun, A red or pink cosmetic for coloring the cheeks or lips.

You want that stuff all over the net? And just who is going to clean it all up when you're done? The bot surely won't - it'll just claim that it hasn't been trained on cleaning.

"Bloomberg reported the memo indicated a “newer” first officer was flying at the time and inadvertently pushed forward on the control column."

So, is this another "pilot tries to crash the plane" incident? It's hard to imagine how a pilot could "inadvertently" shove the controls forward, especially at that altitude when both would totally dialed-in to flying the plane and doing their checklists and whatnot (vs. say, getting up to go to the toilet or something). Fortunately, "the event was addressed appropriately as we always strive for continuous improvement" said SW, so now I feel better.

... and over the fact that article mentions the universe being billions of years old, which we know to be false because some old book says so, supposedly, not that any of them have read that book. Ban all Webb data, keep that stuff out of our libraries and schools!

Knowing you are the reason your kid is dead. Or maimed. Christ how do you live with that?

Re: the comments here I'm not for a moment buying the "too busy to cook, must eat fast food" argument or similar arguments portraying fast food as, why, almost necessary in this busy day and age! If you don't want to cook (I don't want to if I can avoid it, but do it anyway occasionally and usually make several days worth of dish X at a time to minimize my cooking time), you can easily go to you nearby Winco/Walmart/Aldi/etc and load up on some interesting frozen dishes for way, way less $ than the prices I'm seeing mentioned here. And I'm not talking about some kind of 1960s "TV dinner" things either - bogus stereotype of the concept. Even Trader Joe's (where you shouldn't shop b/c anti-union) is comparatively cheap and has super interesting frozen stuff. No time to cook tonight? Well just pop your frozen dish out of the freezer and into the microwave and five minutes later you've got an actual "meal" of sorts in front of you, and likely one with 1/10th the calories of that "meal" you got from McFatsos at 5x the price.

Ah, but it won't be DEEP FRIED goodness and lots and lots and lots of volume and lots and lots of pure concentrated sugar in that totally mandatory fast food dessert. No, you'll probably be getting a relatively (to McFatsos) small-ish portion and it probably won't have started its life being deep-fried and it might just have some interesting veggies ... and no dessert unless you explicitly microwave something else.

This Will Not Stand! Must have fat and more fat and more deep fry and more sugar .... that's a "meal" ... and must have it because, er, oh yeah, "no time". Yeah, that's it, no time.

Americans are simply addicted to garbage food (fat/sugar) and in tremendous quantities and if they don't get it, well now, the world is going to hell clearly.

Partial source: worked in fast food in HS (McD's clone) for a few years and did pretty much every task there was to be done in the "kitchen". The "kitchen" being, in that case, a grill for cooking greasy burgers and prepping greasy bacon and a deep fat fryer for frying up those potatoes in bulk and also the "tots" (same grease as the fries) and also the frozen "pie" concoctions (same grease as the fries).

Eating this crap if you have a grocery store anywhere nearby and a microwave is completely unnecessary but people do it anyway because it tastes soooo good! .... because of grease and sugar.

OK if you're on the road all the time, a trucker or on an extended road trip, you have to figure out something cheap/healthy, but pretty much every motel room I've ever rented has come with a fridge and a microwave and I've had no problems figuring out a workable solution with the hardware available.

Say "no" to garbage "food" addiction and you'll save a fortune.

I think the controversial bit was that when queried about various aspects of admittance to "heaven", the Google AI assumed that the question had to do with, specifically, the Christian idea of "heaven", going so far as to make reference to some "Jesus" entity. Christianity doesn't own the concept of heaven or an afterlife, but, apparently, the AI has been trained such that it responds to such questions from a seemingly Christian perspective. That was my take on it - the discussion is in the article, best have a look at it yourself.

More here: After ‘whites only’ job posting, tech staffing firm settles with DOJ, Labor [npr.org]

"The whole conceit was that you were getting some OK-level of food ..."

Don't be conceited. And cook your own food at home. You're welcome.

That is annoying as hell.

Bad site, no clicks.

NPR is steaming down the "condescending" path now too, with their daily headlines of the form "XYZ, what you need to know" and "what to know about ABC" .... as in (today) "What to know as jury selection begins ..." . I'm just like, "FU NPR, I don't need you to dictate to me the things that are important or not important to me, I'll make that call, your job is simply to fill in the blanks when and if asked, no more and no less."

It would be such a shame if kids ended-up discovering orgs and info like this - https://y.dsausa.org/ .

It's right there in the paragraph about nuclear weapons.

Yeah, and I've gotta wonder if the women this pathetic loser was preying on got any say on the deal and on the faux-punishment that was handed out? If I was a victim and the AG came to me and said "hey we can skip the trial, the dirtbag will get a slap on the wrist, but he'll never work as a cop around here again, whatddya say?" I imagine I'd say "duck no, I want to see this bastard do time and pay six-figure restitution, preferably to us victims".

I lived in North Bend for six years, and I'm not even a zebra. Nothing much ever happened there but the town, together with neighboring Snoqualmie, was used in some of the Twin Peaks filming, none of which involved zebras AFAIK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Peaks_(fictional_town)

The AG's press release is an infuriating read.

[WA attorney general]Ferguson filed a lawsuit in February 2022, accusing Providence of billing and aggressively collecting money from low-income Washingtonians without determining if they qualified for financial assistance.

Ferguson’s Consumer Protection investigation started in 2020, following complaints about collection practices at Swedish. It revealed Providence engaged in numerous practices between 2018 and 2022 that prevented patients from accessing financial assistance. Providence trained employees on aggressive and deceptive collection tactics. Their script included:

• “Ask every patient every time” to pay outstanding medical costs;

• “Don’t accept the first no;”

• "If a patient declines the first request, ask for partial payment;"

• "Use phrasing that signals to patients “payment is expected.”

The lawsuit asserted that Providence knew many of its patients were likely eligible for financial assistance and not only failed to inform them, but also kept collecting payments from them. In fact, Providence sent thousands of patients it identified as “presumptively” qualified for financial assistance to debt collectors. Internal emails revealed Providence did this because it knew those patients were more likely to pay their bills if collection attempts continued.

Moreover, starting in 2019, Providence sent thousands of Medicaid patients to debt collectors. Medicaid enrollees are among the lowest income Washingtonians, and are deemed eligible for financial assistance under Providence’s own policies. Providence staff caught the issue early and raised concerns to leadership. In fact, according to internal records, one employee warned: “We are sending the poor to bad debt and not treating them the same as other patients.” Providence did not correct the problem for more than two years.

Yep, I'm now adding ND to my list of states to completely boycott with my tourist $. Fortunately, most of these states have about as much appeal as an un-flushed toilet so no great loss.

I refuse as well, and will continue to refuse, at least until my 1997 and 2005 vehicles can no longer be repaired for some reason. I'd love some EV tech but the idea of driving a Big Brother vehicle that's fender-to-fender loaded with spyware and "features" that can only be enabled via subscriptions is horrifying and dystopian. Also forget all the Big Screen distractions inside and all the self-driving antifeatures. At least 1/2 of my driving is done for pleasure and I expect to be focusing on the road and what's happening around me.

You're in the running for a BoneAppleTea Prize, so that's something. There's also the Nobel Prize but that's overrated IMO. The real glory is with the Ig Nobel, you should consider submitting your work there.

While I'm not against the feds working on this, I would much rather see the company that owned the ship and/or its insurance companies foot the bill for the whole mess. "Personal Responsibility", that was supposed to be a virtue of some sort I've heard. That and "anti-socialism". Let's see BigShip corporate types walk the walk here, preferably right off the plank.

Oh don't be such a baby.

The rest of that solution is to ban any kind of birth control a woman might choose on her own.

Did you ever get that library? https://piped.video/watch?v=znlxif61eGw

This is maddening. It's not just Big Food that's in on the "fat is fine" bandwagon. My gym, a YMCA, likely once upon a time had "fitness" instructors who would help you craft a workout plan. Now that's all gone, and they have "wellness" instructors instead, who happen to be, at my gym, two very obese people clad every single day in 100% stretch-wear. Of the TVs in the weight/cardio area, half are tuned to professional sports and the other half are tuned to "cooking" shows - Chef Fatso hawking his/her wares to all the "food" addicts in the room and sending the message loud and clear: "eat whatever tastes good, eat as much of it as you want (the more the better), and don't let anyone make you feel bad/weird for doing so". There's no question that today investors are backing fat and overeating whereas there was a time in the not-too-distant past that they were backing fitness and controlling (meaning, restricting in some way) dietary intake instead.

Nice outfit. She looks like she just took off her D. Vader helmet.

whatever new term comes into Vogue

These people are reading Vogue? That's an interesting twist. I wouldn't have thought the average Fascist would be all that into fashion. Fashists?

Sorry, just ate a grape, I can't think right now.

Those same Republicans have almost succeeded in ruining one public college in N. ID.

https://www.columbian.com/news/2024/apr/02/north-idaho-college-has-one-last-shot-to-fix-accreditation/

The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities has required NIC to make teach-out agreements for all of its academic programs by the end of August. These agreements would be signed by nearby institutions that would allow students to transfer if NIC loses accreditation.

Swayne said it still could be a hardship for some NIC students to transfer to another school. There isn’t another Idaho community college nearby, and even transferring to University of Idaho in Moscow would bring higher tuition and would require moving. Transferring to a college in the Spokane area would mean out-of-state tuition and a commute.