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Easier to require the disbursements to be dribbled out based on the number of actual charging stations created. Minimize the potential for graft that typified the Biden administration handling of funds.

Agreed. I think that parents in general don't realize what is available on the "mainstream" social media sites.

One of my best friends is a public defender. The people he has to deal with and the stuff they did is almost sickening. But the cops in his jurisdiction routinely plant evidence (those cases rarely ever go to trial because the PD has good evidence, including that the only prints *inside the baggie* belong to cops, the guns recovered only have cop prints on the rounds, etc.). He's a government official, but he sees the most important part of his job as preventing "government error".

She is despicable. There’s nothing special about government service unless you’re going to be shot at or at least a high risk of being shot at. Seriously, WTF is with people thinking they’re Mother Teresa just because they did a garbage major at college and then took a government job. Government work is not charity; it’s participating in oppression.

+1

I worked construction for a number of years between HS and grad school. It wasn’t so obvious back then, but we actually had Amish guys kvetching about how the crews that used illegal immigrant labor undercut even the Amish. That said, with a very small number of exceptions, I’d trust Amish construction over others if I was building my own house as long as I built a realtionship with them first.

that was my first thought. +1

Permits are for the little people. The California nomenklatura get what they want when they want as long as they donate correctly.

And FEMA has contingency plans for a literal zombie apocalypse, and the CDC war games various pandemic scenarios.

Of course, the FEMA zombie apocalypse literature tells people to obey the government and head to government shelters and only has slow movers. I guess slow movers are more in line with the other government workers FEMA deals with but yeah, that plan shows a whole lot of nothing. If there were a real zombie event, it would most likely be rabies-based and they'd be fast for a while. But the government wants us to move to their shelters. I'm not feeling a lot of trust in authority here.

so what does that say about wargaming the invasion of Greenland? First, there's one major port, one major "city" [large town?], no significant military presence, and the only realistic reason for the invasion is to headstone incursions by other powers. With Thule military base, I doubt the actual Danish/Greenlandish population would notice an "invasion" beyond the absence of Russian or Chinese overlords suddenly descending upon them.

Somewhere deep in the jungles of the South Pacific or South America, there is a large tribe of cannibals licking their lips when they look at that hearing video and other pictures of average Americans on the smartphones helpfully airdropped by USAID.

5.5 / 10 for sad pathetic goodbye posts. Wish you wee still here, but not totally saddened because you’re gone.

+` bump to top

I’m sure the family has been careful to keep the gofundme contributions separate from Karmelo’s assets, so they’ll enjoy the money and there won’t be anyway for a subsequent civil suit to recover that. it’s sick to think about what some people are thinking when they give money to this guy’s defense. Or, maybe I’m wrong, perhaps they really do just care about the defendant’s right to an effective defense.

Retief is a Diplomatic Service agent in the distant future, except mysteriously the diplomatic scene in the far future seems to resemble world politics in the 1950s and 1960s. Career diplomats constantly attempt to surrender to alien powers, only for Retief to take decisive action, win the girl, and save the world. Mostly, the series is a witty and well-written satire of the U.S. State Department as it attempts to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory time and again only for Retief to foil their efforts and put they human confederacy on top. Here’s a link to audio of some of the stories (not professionally narrated): https://archive.org/details/the-retief-stories-vol-1-by-keith-laumer

My cell phone doesn’t do so well with AM radio.....

Literally stunned by the number of people suggesting oral exams. Oral exams open the door for the instructor to grade upon whether they like your voice, whether you sound like a hot blond or the dweeby nerd from “Revenge of the Nerds.” The professors I know in hard sciences and graduate schools all say they just want anonymous work-product. They really just want to grade what’s on the paper.

At the same time, I’m told that there are standard software packages that will let students just type without access to the internet and also without the professor having to decode their handwriting. Every prof I know other than a few in social sciences type fields desperately wants *NOT* to know anything about the person answering the question.

Oral exams are so open to abuse that it’s scary they’re still allowed in Europe. In today’s litigious victimhood oriented student body, a professor would be insane to give oral exams instead of just requiring anonymous bluebooks or typed exams. (There are exam software packages that just turn the students’ laptops into typewriters with no internet access).

The idea that the State Department is non-political is laughable. Having known many people in the State Dept for the last 30 years, all I can say is that Keith Laumer’s “Retief” series was absolutely spot-on. I am starting to think that only sociopaths can exist in that environment.

I’ll take “Reasons why you shouldn’t use social media when drunk” for $1000, Alex.

I didn’t see your post about poor Grzegorz before I posted. My Polish friends are impressed that I can pronounce his first name but even after years of study the rest of the name as well as where he’s from are just an absolute joke. They’ve told me that that part of Poland has a dialect not shared by most of the rest of Poland, and that partisans in WWII really did use phrases from that part of Poland to identify Nazi spies. Other Poles can pronounce those phrases with only a little difficulty, no one who doesn’t speak Polish natively will be able to.

And that’s such a good movie.

Of course the standard SovCit response is that driving an 18 wheeler is clearly "operating in commerce" and so naturally should have to have a license. :-)

“One of the things that we’ve noted is that you’ll have a person in Poland applying with a very complicated name,” he recounted, “and then when you get them on Zoom calls it’s a military age male Asian who can’t pronounce it.”

Similar to Nazis trying to pronounce “Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz”.