Marijuana was banned to target minorities, but alcohol prohibition mostly was repealed not because white people like alcohol (white people instituted prohibition in the first place, after all), but because alcohol is stupidly easy to make from a wide variety of substances so most cultures around the world produce some kind of alcohol with their local crops. You can use pretty much anything sugary: fruit (wine), honey (mead), and grains like rice and wheat (sake & beer). It is really hard to ban a substance when half the foods in our diet can be turned into that substance if you let it sit in a jar or bucket in your closet for a few weeks.

Prohibition was repealed primarily because it was a futile effort and with alcohol being banned, very strong distilled spirits were the economical way to discreetly transport and serve alcohol since it is easier to hide a few bottles of liquor from authorities searching your truck or business than to hide large barrels of low ABV drinks like humans had been brewing and drinking for millennia. It is also a lot easier for people to drink themselves sick with distilled drinks, so ultimately it was decided that it was safer to make alcohol legal and regulated instead of having it still plentiful, but getting people sicker and funding criminal empires. It’s a lot easier to ban one plant than to ban every food source with sugar in it, but the marijuana prohibition has clearly led to many of the same problems as alcohol prohibition did.

There are still people who would love to ban alcohol if they feasibly could. Many places in the US still have local alcohol bans, I currently have to travel two counties away to legally purchase liquor and one county away from home to purchase beer or wine. Prohibition only ended on a federal level.

I had a chick tract with that exact message left on my car recently, it was very disturbing. The tract’s solution to global warming was war in Israel so Armageddon happens and we all get raptured away from this trashed planet. I didn’t keep it, but I found a copy on their site. I am sharing an archive link because I don’t want them getting more traffic and thinking they need to print even more of these.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240323153015/https://www.chick.com/products/tract?stk=50

Mountain lion only describes one type of habitat cougars live in, they have the widest distribution of all the big cats and live in a variety of habitats, including the Everglades swamp in Florida, in canyons, and in areas with a lot of scrubby brush they can ambush from.

These polygamist Mormon cults have a long history of child abuse. It is relevant that they continue to arrange child marriages and facilitate child abuse even as their previous leader is spending the rest of his life in prison for the exact same thing.

It is the same group, Warren Jeffs is technically still that group’s leader from prison, but Samuel Bateman started telling followers that Jeffs died in prison to convince them he is their new prophet and they need to give up their minor daughters to him as wives.

https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2023/05/25/53-felonies-polygamist-leader/

The CEO of the streaming platform was participating in the stream, I think this visit was meant to be a publicity stunt to drum up more interest in the platform which is trying to become an alternative to Twitch. It’s investor money that was lost here, not the streamer’s money.

Someone has to stock and clean and maintain all that space and pay for the electricity it takes to illuminate and air condition such a huge area. Good luck convincing people to increase their taxes in exchange for indoor tennis courts and lounging areas. I love the idea of having more free community spaces, but the last city I lived in had the downtown library basement essentially become a homeless encampment until they closed off that entire floor of the library and then the city sold the entire library to developers who plan to demolish it and build something else there. With people struggling financially and spending most of their time staring at screens, there isn’t much demand for government spending on new public spaces.

In some places it never left.

All of the big hotel chains use the same plastic key cards that are credit card sized, they are durable and can be reused many times but also cheap enough to not fret over them if a customer forgets to return it before leaving. As a former aircraft maintainer myself, I don’t personally think it would be an issue if Boeing or its contractor ordered a bunch of standard hotel card blanks for seal testing, but if they were meant to use that as their test device it should be documented , there should be a part number for that card and authorized suppliers, and there should be a specific procedure to follow when using them. The article mentions the lack of documentation, so this was probably an unauthorized improvisation on the fly. I doubt these were being used to measure a specific tolerance, this case was probably something stupid like “the cabin pressurization check failed after we replaced the door, let’s poke a card along the seal to find where the gap is and squeeze extra sealant in that spot.” My specialty was avionics though, so I will admit I don’t really know much about the pressurization checks and seals, I was always at the plane for some other work whenever I encountered them.

I knew Taft had been widely regarded as one of the worst presidents, but I had no idea he only managed to collect 8 electoral votes when running as the incumbent. That is really extreme!

This monster was born in Texas, it is clearly a domestic religion.

Paper tea bags usually contain polypropylene or another plastic so they can be heat sealed shut. They aren’t fully compostable.

Senator Mitt Romney has been a vocal never-Trumper all along.

For the Texans specifically, I would like to add that Ken Paxton is trying to primary Presiding Judge Sharon Keller, Judge Barbara Hervey and Judge Michelle Slaughter of the Criminals Court of Appeals which is the highest level criminal appeals court in Texas. He is upset with them because they wouldn’t allow him to pursue voter fraud cases unilaterally, his office has to get permission from a local prosecutor now.

Ken Paxton has also put a lot of money into trying to primary state legislators who voted to impeach him, that is why so many incumbents do have challengers right now. Definitely look up your local races before going in to vote.

In case anyone is out of the loop on Attorney General Ken Paxton, I have one more link about the charges of securities fraud he was indicted on eight years ago. The case is finally going to trial in April.

He is also a black hole of Republican financing though, so many donations to Trump‘s legal defense means a lot fewer dollars to go to other Republican candidates. It isn’t easy to be in the shadow of Trump.

They also claimed they were going to become a streaming platform that would replace Netflix and Disney+ and they would have 80 million users in their first year, pretty sure most of that valuation is imaginary. Didn’t they only make it to around 5 million users?

Just because you swear an oath doesn’t mean you will feel like sticking your life on the line to sneak past the secret service and assassinate a domestic enemy president. At best, the military might refuse some unlawful orders.

That is such a ridiculous argument. The harm is in the opportunity cost to other potential borrowers and the burden of the added risk the bank was taking on unknowingly. He was tying up bank funds on risky fraudulent investments and that meant there were less funds available to loan to other people who weren’t fraudulently claiming their assets had a highly inflated value. He has declared bankruptcy in the past, there was no guarantee the investments would’ve worked out and the bank could’ve been exposed to huge losses without enough assets to cover their liabilities if a bunch of people started using Trump tactics and lying about their holdings to get extra loans. Banks don’t have infinite money.

That whole thing was so ridiculous, they were talking about what kills the virus on surfaces. There are a lot of things that can sanitize a table or counter but that doesn’t mean they can kill germs in your body without also killing you. Imagine having a sunburn inside your lungs because someone shoved a light down there, that was Trump’s genius solution to the pandemic in that moment.

When the opposition is trying to end democracy so it can have free rein to do whatever it likes, sometimes you have to. This isn’t a polite disagreement about convoluted economic theories, they want to eliminate large segments of our population and their supporters are already violent. At some point they are going to stop busing foreigners to different cities and start gunning them down. They likely aren’t going to be too gentle with LGBTQ populations when they work to eliminate them. They are already controlling what kind of medical care women have access to and they will probably find more ways to restrict women’s lives to promote their ideas of Christian morality. Women are already being told they have to be at death’s door to have their miscarriages treated, this situation is currently at the point of being a life and death issue for many people when the christofascists have barely started taking control.