• 5 Posts
  • 451 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: March 7th, 2024

help-circle
  • A) Qatar had been trying to offload that plane for several years, so it needs maintenance work.

    B) The plane sat under foreign control for a while after the transfer was announced, so every vital part of the plane needs to be checked for potential sabotage.

    C) Qatar (and possibly other countries) have undoubtedly bugged every inch of that plane, so everything needs to be gone over with a comb, to find bugs.

    D) It doesn’t have enough gold.

    All of which means they have to disassemble and then reassemble the plane before they allow it into service, which is going to take quite a while and a lot of money.

    But it was a great deal for Qatar! They got to offload a plane they’d been trying to get rid of, they avoided the sanctions list, and they get training on US fighter jets and a base in the US.






  • There was an interview about a year and a half ago, with some Congress person who was asked why they made so many right-leaning votes. They said that, out of every 5 phone calls they received on an issue, 4 of them supported the right and only 1 can would support the left (because the right wing is really good at stirring up their base). While money does talk, so do the people - at least for now.



  • We sit around and bitch about the corporations caving to the alt-Reich, about Congress people just giving in to Trump, about ICE not having a conscience to do the things they do.

    Yet as long as we only sit and bitch, as long as we’re not fighting back in some way, we are also complicit in what our country’s government does.

    If you honk your horn to warn people ICE is around, you are protecting them. If you protest the regime, others will see that there’s are others standing up and this is not inevitable. If you call your Congress people, you are telling them what the will of the people is, and that people are watching their actions. You don’t have to do everything, but you should be doing something.

    How can you expect corporations to care or Congress people to have a spine, if you won’t even pick up a phone? Courage, and consciences, are contagious.



  • Cuomo said the race is down to a democratic socialist in Mamdani and himself, a true Democrat. “What’s really happening is there’s a civil war within the Democratic Party going on, and the Democratic Party is looking for its identity. And there are two factions. You have the democratic socialists, and then you have the Democrats, they have a very extreme view that they’re pursuing, which is different than the Democratic Party,” Cuomo said Monday on “The View.”

    Well, he’s not wrong about that. But after years of being told to vote for Democrats just because they’re not Republicans, and being offered a real alternative that fights for the people, he is wrong about that.

    “I learned a lesson, a painful lesson, which is to be much more cautious about everything you say, any joke, any comment,” Cuomo said Monday. “I won’t kiss a person on the cheek unless they initiate a kiss. So they taught me a lesson, just to be super cautious, because there is a sensitivity that has evolved that is real. If people feel it, it’s true, and it has to be respected.”

    Right, it’s all just a big misunderstanding, a joke, can’t you take a joke …









  • Also, what’s an incinerator shaft? Like a trash chute that leads to an incinerator?

    Pretty much. In my grandmother’s apartment building, you could hear it go off every so often. The heat was used to help keep the hot water hot and, during the winter, to heat the steam in the radiator pipes that warmed every apartment in the building. Actually, thinking about it, it’s October 1, the day when they switch on the heat, so I’m guessing that’s got something to do with it.

    With environmental regulations, I’m pretty sure the furnaces have all been replaced with garbage bins or maybe compactors, but yeah, there was an incinerator in the basement back in the day.

    Edit: Looking at work permits, it looks like they were doing work on the boilers in 2022-2023: sealing oil tanks in place (I guess they were leaking?), switching the boilers to gas, they brought in a temporary boiler for a while. Since they’re saying this was a gas explosion, I’d guess something was deficient with the work.


  • The thing that pisses me off is that, back in the late 1970’s / early 1980’s, the Church became aware they had a sex abuse problem and could be held liable. And instead of mocking the priests to places where they couldn’t commit harm, they:

    • Increased their movement of assets away from individual churches and dioceses info separate ownership, so those assets wouldn’t be forfeit in case of lawsuits;

    • Purged a bunch of documentation about abusive priests, shredding, burning, or throwing it away;

    • Moved the documentation that remained to secret local archives supposedly sealed by the confessional and clerical privilege, and then away from local churches and dioceses to the Papal Nunciature (Embassy) in DC where they’re covered by diplomatic immunity;

    • Went out and bought a massive amount of specific insurance to cover any sex abuse claims that might arise - and got a very cheap price for it, too.

    • Continued their practice of moving abusive priests between dioceses and parishes, denying there was a problem to anyone who might ask and giving those priests the opportunity to give other victims.

    Probably other shitty stuff, but those are the points I remember offhand (and it’s more than enough). They never cared about their victims, only preserving their money and power.