Install Blocktube or another extension that stops videos from starting when you open the link, and read the transcript. It used to be at the top, just under the video itself, but now they’ve moved it to the bottom of the video description so you have to go through all the affiliate links just to get to the fucking transcript button.

But once you’ve found it, transcriptions are your best friend: skim it to see if there’s any real reason to watch (usually not) and enjoy that portion of your life that you just saved for things that YOU want and not what Google and that content creator want. The transcript will also tell you what portion of the video you need to watch, if actually watching it suits your needs.

I also regularly speed up videos; 1.25 is great under most circumstances, 1.5 if they’re really trying to draaaag shit out. You can always slow it down again, but it’s great for getting through the fluff if you need to hear it all (like repair videos for something you’ve never done yourself).

Jared Kushner is a fucking slumlord and a losing one at that; I don’t think for two seconds anyone is expecting him to successfully “manage” anything but his in-laws. Which is what the cash is for, regardless of what they want to call it. If his father-in-law weren’t Donald Trump they wouldn’t even know his name.

Apparently not. It’s about crazy ass book bans in schools to begin with. This seriously creepy fuck just gratuitously tacked on his coworker’s name as though she was part of the narrative, but the original effort goes on:

The sponsor of the bill, Republican Sen. Joni Albrecht, apologized to her colleagues on Monday. “I’m so sorry that your name was injected into it,” she said. "That is absolutely, I will be the first to stand up and say I’m sorry.

But then, in the SAME SENTENCE, without a breath between, she adds,

This is in our schools. This is what’s going on. And I don’t want to see this elevated to any level."

I absolutely do NOT believe a person with a working conscience (!!!) would narrate a passage of graphic sexual violence out of a book as an example of what is being read by kids in schools and then ADD THEIR COWORKER’S NAME to the retelling as though she was a participant in the events described, whether as a joke or a come-on or for whatever perverted reason. That’s the difference between knowing right and wrong.

But what I’m getting from the article is that some (most?) of those present were fine with it, no one stopped him while he was doing this, and at least one of them (Albrecht, above) apologized only to try to rescue the book banning effort from this perv’s “one twist too far” efforts to use fear and loathing to ban more books.

So pointing out this asshole’s new low, as justified as it is, is almost like trying to find the worst protagonist in the last chapter of The Lord of the Flies, IMO. Because in the end, all this seriously warped bastard did was manage to shoehorn some very open and tightly targeted workplace sexual harassment into their concerted group workplace effort to harass the entire student population of Nebraska.

Which is the worse crime?

I honestly don’t know. I only know I would not be caught dead participating in either, and no one I know with an operating sense of human empathy would either: if you’re already lying to ban books, killing women by criminalizing pregnancy, demonizing people of color, and openly embracing other equally repugnant fascist principles, why would this further misbehavior against a woman shock and horrify you so much?

Also, consider that whatever justification he comes up with, it only has to work for his fellow Republicans, and that’s a bar low enough to turn an average cockroach into an Olympian.

But a male Republican state senator openly sexually harassing a Democrat female state senator on the floor of the Nebraska state senate? As horrific and gratuitous as that performance was, as much of an open sexual act toward his coworker as it was, nothing will be done, except the female senator will be pressured to “forgive” and let it go. Why? Because the doer is a man, a Republican and a state senator in Nebraska.

https://www.reddit.com/u/PhillyCanada/s/O52X2oGf5V

It’s gone now, on www. and old. via browser. “Page not found” with a pic of that snoo crying under a hot sun because he bought the pre-IPO shares, lol.

other Christian or near-Christian faiths will not be spared. This is certainly a religious movement, but it does not have Jesus of Nazareth at its head.

They certainly were not spared during the original exercise of fascism.

And I’ll go one point further and assert that the closer a single individual is to walking the tenets of classical Christianity – compassion, honesty, practicing ethical consideration in choosing personal acts, abhorring unnecessarily hurtful acts – not only will they NOT be spared, they will be among those most violently targeted, as soon as they become known to the persecutors.

Why? Because these are True Believers, and they are what real resistance is made of.

Regardless of the belief system underlying a True Believer, that’s what makes a True Believer tick: the belief itself. It doesn’t have to be Christianity, or even any specific religion; just their own belief system and their near-exclusive personal reliance upon it in daily life, and especially in times of crisis.

Nothing outside that belief system moves them in matters that are important to them, nor do they require external validation for their choices. That makes them impossible to control, hard to spot because they are not necessarily talkative or participative on social media, and frequently impossible to predict if you don’t know them personally.

So when that belief system involves a deep abhorrence of all things unnecessarily hurtful to others (or “evil” if you will), when they are the ones who actually decide to be that One Good Man in their current reality when they hear the old maxim “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” – classic Christianity, in a nutshell – they are deeply threatening to authoritarian governments and regimes that rely on manufacturing fear and the manipulation of personal belief to maintain control over individual citizens.

Yep, you hit the high points. The McMartin daycare thing was insane.

And I am sorry to report that I did in fact read Michelle Remembers whenever it came out; I had finally forgotten it Thank You Very Fucking Much lol. Of all the lurid unworthy trash I have read in my life, that was likely the unworthiest.

I thought it was the 80s, with the backmasking/D&D/Judas Priest bullshit?

Jesus, I’m so old all the screaming/arm flapping/Chicken Little satanic panics are starting to blend.

EDITED TO ADD: I should have read the other comments first, lol.

From the article:

it’s also important to remind people that everyone is vulnerable sometimes, and scammers are willing to try endless variations until an attack lands at just the right place, at just the right time, in just the right way. If you think you can’t get scammed, that makes you especially vulnerable:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

If that’s true, neither The Guardian, the NY Times, nor WaPo have it.

What they DO have as of right now (6pm Eastern) is Fani Willis staying and accepting Nathan Wade’s resignation, as the judge said one or the other had to go.

The Graun:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/15/nathan-wade-resigns-fani-willis-trump-georgia-case

NY Times (including Nathan Wade’s resignation letter):
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/us/fani-willis-trump-georgia-ruling.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/15/us/nathan-wade-resignation-letter.html

Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/15/fani-willis-trump-georgia-case/

Yeah. In a nutshell. The number of commentaries, old and new, formal and informal, asking the exact same questions from every possible angle, are countless. And every single one of them is pointed at trying to make it make some kind of sense, lol.

Funny you should mention that.

In the mythology of the bible, 2 Samuel 24 talks about how King David took a census of Israel, and it pissed god off so much that he killed 70,000 completely uninvolved Israelis over it, and would have killed more but he stopped when he got to Jerusalem.

And these modern day chuckleheads are doing it on purpose, lol. If only they believed a fraction of their own holy book, I would have the best time gladly explaining to them via scholarly biblical exegesis how and why they’re gonna DIE a nasty death if they do this.

If only. -sigh-

Not that I don’t have absolute, unshakeable, limitless faith in law enforcement and local school boards, but I genuinely hope Nex’s family gets a second autopsy outside Oklahoma. Not least because their initial symptoms seemed to have a lot in common with head injury.

No, it won’t bring Nex back. But if they did this, then establish that fact via disinterested parties. The local government and law enforcement are anything but neutral parties here.

If Nex’s family is willing, I genuinely hope they are considering getting a second opinion: in many ways, this outcome lets the bullies off the hook . . . and not just the ones in the bathroom.

I don’t need to know the details, but I would like to see this conclusion confirmed by another forensic medical examiner elsewhere, and I don’t think I’m the only one.

That’s what I was wondering: whether this was just a generic fuck you or a special Fuck YOU In Particular. Glad to see him pulling out his special Tea Party skills just for her and the rest of the GOP, I like it.

Thanks for answering the real question, hope you get someone actually interested in representing their own constituents in the special election. (Lol I know, but I can dream, can’t I?)

Well played.

I got into SOOOO much trouble over the years by whipping that out from time to time, lol.

Good to see it here. Thank you.

With no offense taken but with respect to this community, I’m going to decline to answer.

All of us look back on the path that led us to where we are today and see that our hands aren’t clean. I said and did so many hurtful things. Things that can never be taken back or made up for.

That’s how I feel too. But I can at least NOT REPEAT that shit. I can do that much.

It’s not about what we failed at in the past, it’s about doing the best we can with what we have at any given moment, and that includes the knowledge of human empathy and compassion.

I said some seriously horrific and cringeworthy shit in my youth, and actually longer than that. Hurtful stuff that seemed funny at the time. I don’t even wanna talk about it. But I stopped as soon as I realized there were real people on the receiving end of all that, and since I can’t undo it, that’s the best that can be asked for.

Maybe that’s why I don’t completely trust people who have never erred. I trust people who have erred, and then changed their ways. Like Alexei Navalny: the tankies always point to a video he made in 2007 – that has remained on his YouTube channel since because he never took it down – where he is marching with far right wingers and Nazis. But that was it. He didn’t do it again.

And that’s my point: if someone has to go back seventeen years to find your truly shitty behavior, chances are excellent you’re a man with a conscience, and not just another lying fraud pretending at human decency.

We do the best we can with what we have at any given time . . . or we don’t. I am. You are too, sounds like. So is the Squid, above. That’s the best that we can do.

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” – Arthur Ashe

I haven’t signed into YouTube in maybe 5 or 6 months, I turned off history two or three years ago, cookies get deleted every time I shut down the browser, and I keep my subscriptions in FreeTube. But some things, like foreign language videos that need automatic caption translation, I still watch in YouTube.

Even so, I’ve only encountered a blank page like this maybe three times in all those months. And the beautiful blankness doesn’t last: as soon as I open a specific video URL – any video URL – it fills right back up again with the same old shit, except now it’s ALL related to that one single video I open.

This is no big deal. Open up any video and you still get sidebar recommendations. I use Blocktube to ensure I don’t see channels I don’t want, so it doesn’t just fill back up with Mr. Beast and Fox News, I continue to use FreeTube for everything else, and all is well.

I read the Reddit S-1, the lock-up period is three days. Yeah, I’m a nerd, but in this case it was more just wanting to know how long Huffman et al will be forced to sit and watch the stocks freefall before they could ditch them, lol.

One occasionally wishes it would be more . . . compelling. For those in the make it up as you go along Christofascist crowd, hell has most assuredly lost its heat.

It’s not like they’re going to make up anything bad in the afterlife for those in the “in” group: if they think there’s a hell at all, it’s always and only for The Other.

So at least we know where they’re headed after they die and realize there’s no vice beyond the pearly gates.