Lou Katz @lou@entropyservice.com

Here's the thing about Trump's demands for immunity.

The only other president to demand immunity was Nixon.

People don't ask for immunity on principle or for fun -- they ask for immunity BECAUSE THEY COMMITTED CRIMES.

You can tell the Old Testament is the product of a desert people, because when they tried to imagine the end of the world they went with “rained for forty days and forty nights”, which in Ireland is just called Spring.

@gyokusai @pluralistic "In corrupt systems, a few bad actors cost everyone else billions in order to bring in millions – the savings a factory can realize from dumping pollution in the water supply are much smaller than the costs we all bear from being poisoned by effluent. But the costs are widely diffused while the gains are tightly concentrated, so the beneficiaries of corruption can always outspend their victims to stay clear." 👍👍

So there's a double cruelty to prison commissary price-gouging. Prisoners earn *far* less than any other kind of worker, *and* they pay vastly inflated prices for the necessities of life. There's also a *triple* cruelty: prisoners' families - deprived of an incarcerated breadwinner's earnings - are called upon to make up the difference for jacked up commissary prices out of their own strained finances.

6/

Not that prisoners have a lot of money to spend. The 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of convicted criminals, and so even though many prisoners are subject to forced labor, they aren't necessarily paid for it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Six states ban paying prisoners *anything*. North Carolina caps prisoners' pay at one dollar per day. Nationally, prisoners earn $0.52/hour, while producing $11b/year in goods and services:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

5/

@TashTaylor @marvin @chu @blogdiva @pluralistic @Locusmag 🌟 I love this game

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

@GottaLaff
You know who else has never read any of Trump's books? Trump.

I have decent etymology instincts but an hour ago I would have bet money that English got "skosh" (as in "just a skosh") from Yiddish, or at least something with Indo-European roots

then I did my Japanese practice for the day and learned 少し!! "sukoshi," "a little bit," u and i both very short/absent. apparently Americans picked it up during the Korean War.

remembering fondly the linguistics professor who liked to remind us: word origins are weird. don't just guess. look it up.

#linguistics

MAGA Greene has one goal - the destruction of US Democracy!

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said she doesn’t care if the “Speaker’s office becomes a revolving door” in Thursday comments as she pushes for the removal of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) just months after he took the position.
#AureFreePress #News #press #headline #GOP #Politics #uspolitics #uspol #Trump #MAGA

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4603178-greene-says-she-doesnt-care-if-speakers-office-becomes-a-revolving-door/

Chicago police make a traffic stop for a seat belt violation. Then they shot 96 times in 41 seconds. #trafficstops #pretextstops https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/04/09/seatbelt-check-cops-fired-96-shots-at-black-motorist-killing-him/73265324007/

@JamesGleick That headline is pure malpractice. The Times political reporting just sinks lower and lower.

@brouhaha Still weird to me that you have to do a gallon of that stuff for prep, but we use two 150mL glasses of Pico-Salax up in Ontario, taken about 12h apart.

Which admittedly tastes bad, but not that hard to down it in one go.

Friends, if Microsoft tries to squeeze you to buy a new computer to run version 11 when every new version of Windows gets worse and adds ads then please consider that more than 100 million people use Linux on their desktop computer, including people who make all sorts of projects with videos, illustrations, digital photographs, laser cuttings, animations, paper media, CAD, CAM, 3D printed stuff, circuit boards, etc.
Will it be exactly the same as Windows? No.
Can it be awesome? Yes.

Just picked up another jug of Gavilyte from the pharmacy.

"This staff's great, Doc! May I please have more?"
– no one ever

Israel’s War Campaign: Systematic Devastation, Assassination and Stalemate https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/18/israels-war-campaign-systematic-devastation-assassination-and-stalemate/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Every time someone who just got back from traveling says, “I caught a bad cold” I want to scream. But no one is listening and no one cares because we are living in the absolute dumbest times

Blog post: Once again, NY Times amplifies right-wing trolling, omits vital context. It's journalistic malpractice, and it's the norm in Times political coverage.

https://dangillmor.com/2024/04/17/again-ny-times-amplifies-right-wing-trolling-omits-vital-context/