Out here on the West Coast houses out in the country and in small towns are lousy with signs lol

Along with ‘Back the blue! They face what you fear!’ signs. Whenever I drive by I have to fight the urge to go knock on their door and ask what they think of Uvalde.

Well, okay, first, a point of order: ‘Free Speech’, as outlined in the First Amendment, simply means that the government can’t persecute you for saying things they don’t like. The First Amendment has no bearing, or jurisdiction, on private businesses.

Not that our government hasn’t been violating the First Amendment too, of course. But that wasn’t what you were ranting about.

And were we ever up the tubes? I mean, I suppose we were, and still are, if you consider white rich male landowners to be the only ‘America’ that counts… which they certainly seem to believe…

But for everyone else it’s always been kind of a shithole, let’s be honest. For some more than others, of course.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

(That’s Frederick Douglas’ 4th of July speech btw)

Probably by the ‘Huzzah for Trump!’ signs plastered all over their house and car. Most Dump lovers aren’t exactly subtle.

OTOH, maybe she was just taking a bath in the lake she lived beside when Arthur rocked up asking for a kickass sword?

And even now, the quality of the sword is often determined by how much you’re willing to pay for it. It’s possible she just gave him the most expensive, high-quality sword she’d ever made, because as the local king he was the only one who could afford it.

The face of innocence lol

Has she tried the new bit again?

Wilhoit’s Law:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

And their firm belief that they, being super special sparkly people, of course belong in the first group.

But the thing is, even the ‘in group’ has tiers, because they believe that if there isn’t Order and Structure with Everyone Knowing Their Place and Great and Glorious (white male) Leaders at the Top then the world will descend into chaos and civilization will be destroyed. Seriously. They actually think that.

And the way you show who’s in a higher tier? They can violate more of the rules. So your Grandpa believes he’s higher-ranking than you (because he’s older and therefore wiser) so he gets to lay down the rules and then flaunt them, while you have to obey them. This keeps Order.

Also, somewhere along the way this got mixed up with Prosperity Gospel, so they also believe that people deserve to be on a higher tier the more money they have, because they’re rich. If you deserve to be on a higher tier, then you’d be rich too, or figure out how to become rich.

(That’s also why they like Trump. He’s from a ‘rich’ family and breaks all the rules and gets away with it. Therefore he is high ranking. And the lower ranks should always unquestionably follow the higher ranks, because civilization will collapse if they don’t.)

Is this circular reasoning? Yes! But who cares because it means they get to lord it over other people while having someone tell them what to do so they don’t have to think for themselves.

I mean, what’s mentioned in this thread is what rich people I know do. Plus saw a lot of it in Palm Beach.

Because they’re also power-hungry assholes who like to watch people scurry around an office on their whim. That and they figure that they’d slack off at home and do nothing, so of course their workers will too, and how would they know?

And the stuff he saw himself. He mentioned in an interview once that he kept his office job for a long time after making it big with Dilbert because he got so much material.

I dunno, Jackson still has him beat by a little bit.

I mean, yes, but it is also a well-established bit of the lore. It even shows it in the first anime when Charizard is so unimpressed by Ash that he usually refuses to fight at all, and the one time he does fight (because the other Pokémon was strong enough to interest him) he just does his own thing and doesn’t listen to anything Ash says.

Because, when you think about it, what are you really going to do against a giant fire-breathing lizard that says ‘no’ when you ask him to fight? Especially if you’re a ten-year-old kid.

I’ve always thought that Terry Pratchett said it best:

No-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine they made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.

When you coming home son

T. rex was unfeathered (or at least the adults were) but other members of the Tyrannosaurus family were partly or fully feathered. Yutyrannus, for example.

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

-Susan B. Anthony

Actually, a fair number of those that hold power are high on their own supply. They’re just also smart enough to use that supply to manipulate others too.

That’s because most companies cut the patterns out in bulk, so given how fabric wiggles you end up with an inch or two of variance across the group.

Unfortunately that just makes them shoot the women instead as punishment for being ‘whores’.

When you think about it that way it’s no surprise they worship the Orange Pedo as the Second Coming of Christ. You’ve been Living A Wicked Life and have Gone Down The Path Of Sin, and so you deserve to be smited by the divine! But the divine never answered his prayers; you and all those other icky upstart ‘sinful people’ kept having a nice job and everything that he felt should be taken from you.

And then Trump comes along and grants his prayers with deportations and shootings and everything else he thinks you deserve. Is it any wonder he’s willing to suffer himself, as long as you ‘get what’s coming to you’?

That’s because you missed rhizomes, not roots. And if you keep cutting the remnants down after you get the main body of the plant out they’ll starve and die eventually, it just takes a few years.

Speaking as someone who has worked with bamboo for a living for over a decade, an ounce of maintenance is definitely worth a pound of cure. Setting up a proper root-pruning system and cutting the young rhizomes twice a year before they have a chance to spread is much easier than chasing it down after the fact.

Now, tropical timber clumping bamboo… those are tough to deal with once they’re mature. They’re like a boulder that grows lol.