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Well, lately right-wing Americans HAVE been doing precisely that.

They claim that our military is too diverse and inclusive. But they "support" our arned forces*

* offer void if the veteran is female, non-white, LGBT, non-Xtian, suffers from PTSD, or does not support Trump.

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If you're having trouble keeping up with what's going on in Palestine because of US news coverage of university protests, here are some articles you can read and a video you can watch:

While CNN & all the other mainstream media try to paint the university protests as "pro terrorism" (which they're not, they're literally anti-war protests.) Palestinians are being slaughtered by the minute.

Please don't stop speaking about Palestine.

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I misread that as FLAMINGO sword at first.

And, I mean, a trans lesbian flaming sword is fine and all, but I am not fucking with someone who wields a flamingo as a weapon. It's slightly less badass, but significantly more deranged.

TRANS LESBIAN FLAMING SWORD

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Adapt

This weekend another popular coffee shop in the DC area is closing for good - Radici by Eastern Market. Now, I liked it because unlike Port City Java it wasn't a half-assed Starbucks clone, and it was in my opinion better than Peregrine Espresso.

However, I get down to Eastern Market only a few times each year, and it has been long-established that even my coffee habits cannot keep a coffee shop in business.

What I note is, it's closing after being in business for ten years, almost on the dot. And I can think of, offhand, over a dozen small businesses which closed right at the ten year mark.

My suspicion is that when a business closes tells you a lot about why. In my experience, ten years translates to "This is successful enough to stay in business but not enough to hire someone else to run the place and I really miss having weekends and sleep."

Which, you know, legit. It's sad to see a place like that go, but running a business is tough.

Moreover, I think that the post-pandemic world has made it really difficult to run a small business downtown. So many business models relied on office workers coming in during the week, and it has become apparent that we don't need people sitting in office buildings for 40 hours a week to get the work done. Unfortunately, current commercial rent does not reflect that, and I keep seeing businesses close but the space they occupied sitting vacant for months or even years.

I believe that people want to go out, they want to see people and do things. But the current commercial models are wrong, and the people with money would rather let their properties rot than lower rents or consider new ideas.

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This is why I need to make a new table for my espresso machine.

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Replaceable

One thing that is hitting as I am firmly ensconced in middle age, is that many of the things I buy now, I am buying for the rest of my life. Not the big things, not yet - I am definitely not at the "this is the last car I will ever own" or even "this is the house which I will die in" (it could be, but we totally plan to have a retirement home with useful features like "ramps" and "walk in bathtub" and "no fucking stairs").

But if I buy a pot or pan? That's probably going to last for upwards of 50 years. If I build a nice wooden table? I'm going to be putting my coffee cup on the table until I can't have coffee anymore. Hell, unless I start dropping coffee cups on the regular - which could happen - I'm going to be using the same ones when I retire and beyond, as I'm using now.

And no, our stuff isn't who we are. But the decisions we make are. At my age that comes with the realization that many of my simply daily decisions are in fact lifelong commitments, simply because the durability of many daily goods exceed my own prospective durability by a fair degree.

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#I do think this intersects with why most people do not particularly enjoy renting#it's not JUST the lack of autonomy over your surroundings (can you paint the walls a new color? depends on your landlord)#it's also that the inherent impermanence means you don't go around making adjustments to make it a nicer place to live in for yourself#so you're both stuck with all the little ways it's Not Optimal#and also you don't get those little reminders that you Did That Thing from the space you live in#affordable homeownership IS a mental health issue!

I believe you are very correct. Moreover, even as a homeowner, there's a lot of pressure to make your actual home as completely bland as possible in service of future saleability and "curb appeal", because even your home is not allowed to be a safe refuge from endless capitalism and the need to turn us all into Homo economicus with no personal desires and definitely no interests aside from money.

We have So. Very. Many. mental health issues, and so many of them trace back to a system which has managed to manufacture scarcity in an era which has the greatest amount of resources per person in history.

On progress

Here’s something that has done good things for my mental health.

When I go into the bathroom and shut the door. See, when we moved in that door wouldn’t latch. A couple of months ago I grabbed a drill, a dremel tool, and a screwdriver - and I fixed it. It latches now, and every time I shut the door I’m reminded that I made that happen. When I go into the basement and see the exposed rafters - that’s because I took out the awful drop ceiling which used to be there. When I go into the office and walk under the projector screen hanging fromt he ceiling - that’s because I mounted it up there. When I use the laundry sink in the basement - that’s because I installed that thing. When I turn on the under-cabinet lighting - that’s because I installed that lighting. Owning a house means I’m surrounded with daily reminders that I can Do Things. I can affect the environment around me and make it better. And if I could take out that drop ceiling, or build the desk I’m using right now, or fix a door frame… well, I can clean up the back yard, too. I can replace that dodgy ceiling fan and repaint the closet.

All the time I am reminded I can achieve things. Because the work I do on the house matters.

Most people don’t own a house, so that part doesn’t quite scale. But we can make furniture, fix clothing, or just sort a collection of stuff. Point is, I think it helps to have a tangible reminder of real achievement and improvement. That today really is better than yesterday because of something you did.

It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be instagrammable. It just has to matter to you.

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*heavy sighs*

Yeah, I'd been hearing.

I'm 100% expecting another Kent State here.

And you know what I hate? This will affect the election, and the two choices are "I would really rather you not protest or have principles" and "If you have any principles other than blind obedience to me as the personification of the state I will have you killed".

It's like Nixon running against Mussolini.

Just a little prognostication that soon the police will create an excuse to violently take down the protests against the genocide in Gaza.

They will lie about it. They will claim it was provoked, that they were attacked. If there is violence, eventually it will be discovered - but never officially acknowledged - that the violence was instigated by agents provocateur.

They will make up any bullshit. Maybe, eventually, they will drop charges. But at the end of the day a whole bunch of peaceful protesters will be beaten by uniformed thugs, and to a disgustingly large portion of the populace this is acceptable and desirable.

But we must, if nothing else, face any police claim with disbelief. Not skepticism, but with the direct awareness that their claims are inherently coming from a dishonest place and with deceptive intent, and even their "evidence" will be carefully curated to sculpt a false narrative. They do not deserve any benefit of the doubt when it comes to police brutality and suppression of free speech.

Public discourse is not a court of law, and we can consider context and history. The question is "Why should I even listen to you when you chose to don the liar's uniform and say the same lies as we were told in the past?"

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I think what would bother me the most is the lack of an explanation. Just "Here's a room with blood on the ceiling and paper towels soaked in blood and all the furniture shoved off to the side. Was there an accident? Were we ritualistically slaughtering goats? Did someone think it would be funny to explode guinea pigs? You will never know!"

Most days as a cleaner are pretty chill. You go to work. You sweep the floors. You go home.

And some days you go to work and there’s blood splatter everywhere and a bin filled with blood soaked towels that you’re just expected to clean up.

I’m not going to post any of the pictures I took but every so often I just randomly enter a splatter horror movie at an awkward time in the story.

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I feel like whores deserve benadryl, too

Excuse me while I sneeze 30 times in a row…

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It's because they want to be

DISRUPTIVE

(which is tech industry code for "I was always the specialest boy in school so the rules shouldn't apply to me")

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Alexander Petrosyan aka Александр Петросян aka Aleksandr Sergeevich Petrosjan (Russian, b. 1965, Lviv, Ukrainian SSR, based St. Petersburg, Russia) - Black Cat from Street Photography.

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Wasn't the notion of the knight basically to have a ready fast response force to protect your land rather than having to spend a season mustering an army?

So wouldn't historical knights have more correspondence with American Revolutionary minutemen than most other concepts?

i entirely get why people are like "actually knights were historically land-owning nobles waging war on people" and reminding people that idealised modern conceptions of knights are not historically accurate, it's just really really funny given that people have been idealising the institution of knighthood since like. the twelfth century or earlier, go take it up with fucking chrétien de troyes

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Just a little prognostication that soon the police will create an excuse to violently take down the protests against the genocide in Gaza.

They will lie about it. They will claim it was provoked, that they were attacked. If there is violence, eventually it will be discovered - but never officially acknowledged - that the violence was instigated by agents provocateur.

They will make up any bullshit. Maybe, eventually, they will drop charges. But at the end of the day a whole bunch of peaceful protesters will be beaten by uniformed thugs, and to a disgustingly large portion of the populace this is acceptable and desirable.

But we must, if nothing else, face any police claim with disbelief. Not skepticism, but with the direct awareness that their claims are inherently coming from a dishonest place and with deceptive intent, and even their "evidence" will be carefully curated to sculpt a false narrative. They do not deserve any benefit of the doubt when it comes to police brutality and suppression of free speech.

Public discourse is not a court of law, and we can consider context and history. The question is "Why should I even listen to you when you chose to don the liar's uniform and say the same lies as we were told in the past?"

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Oh to have a crow friend to be silly with.