And don’t spend money on fancy prescription sunglasses - that gives you an extra pair of expensive glasses to lose. You can get over-glasses sunglasses for like $20 each. They fit over your regular glasses; provide more sunglare protection from the sides, overhead and even reflected upward; you’ll still be wearing your regular glasses so you won’t lose them; and they’re cheap enough that you don’t need to worry about scratching or losing them.

Name eight members of his Cabinet that you think would’ve voted to remove Trump.

Vance didn’t have a majority of the Cabinet.

The New York Times also reported that despite polling his top advisers, he often only heard “what he wanted to hear,” and his team wound up serving as an echo chamber for his gut instincts.

Vice President JD Vance was the most vocal in his opposition to the United States going to war with Iran, while CIA Director Jim Ratcliffe, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Trump that Netanyahu had “oversold” him on what could be achieved by the bombing campaign, according to The New York Times.

None of them, though, except Vance, went as far as to say to the president that war was a “terrible idea,” according to the report. The vice president is said to have played a key role in negotiating a ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. as Trump threatened to wipe Iranian civilization off the map.

Honestly, this sounds both like Vance is trying to recover his image after those disastrous press conferences, and Team Vance trying to position themselves as “the more responsible alternative” in the impeachment stakes.

Iran also gets to charge every tanker that goes through the Strait $2,000,000 (they’ll split it with Oman, who has the other side of the Strait), in order to rebuild everything that got bombed, but I’m sure that toll will go on pretty much forever. So gas supplies may slowly start to recover, but prices won’t. We’re going to be paying higher prices for gas, energy, any goods that need to be moved, anything made of plastic, and anything that needs fertilizer to grow, for a long time.

Do Not Obey In Advance.

You might check around with your friends and relatives, to see if any of them digitize stuff; I’ve done it on a casual basis for some of my friends and relatives.

Alternatively, you can probably get an old VHS machine at Goodwill, give it a quick cleaning, and pick up various digitizers (standalone recorder or computer-input) and convert your own tapes. If you do it yourself, I would strongly suggest checking your setup with old commercial tapes first, so that you iron out any setup issues on something you don’t care about, before sending your irreplaceable tapes through whatever process you have.

[Note on commercial tapes: some of them have copyright protection on them, which will make the video fine when you send it to a tv, but just make it erratic when you send the video through another device. Very very occasionally, for undetermined reasons, an entirely home-recorded tape will also exhibit this behavior. If this happens to you, there are two main options: (1) if the device you’re recording onto has front input jacks, switch your setup to record through those jacks, as many of the front inputs lack the monitoring needed to screw up your recordings. (2) Check eBay or other online shopping places for a “video stabilizer”, which is old-timey code for “copyright buster”. Look at the listing for some indication that it’s used for VHS or VCR.]

If you think there might be issues with the tape quality (for example, dropouts or the magnetized bits sticking to the back of the previous strip on the reel), you might want to go professional - but only after seeing what steps they take to minimize this, and what that might cost.

Edit: when I did this for family and friends, I’d monitor the first five minutes or so of each recording, simply to make sure that the tape wasn’t crinkling (more likely to happen at the start of a tape, or some midpoint that was heavily used (repeatedly rewatching a single scene) of where someone had left the tape sitting. And then I’d check in periodically, to see if the tracking needed to be adjusted. I’d also try to at least stay in the same room, so that I could react quickly if I heard the tape crinkling.

Also, in an attempt to minimize problems with the tape having become slack over the years (even if properly stored on their spines), before I started any new tape, I would: if it was stopped partway or at the end of the reel, I would rewind the tape to the start, fastforward it to the end, then rewind it again, to try to reset the tension on the tape. If the tape was stopped at the start of the reel, I’d fastforward and then rewind, to reset the tension.

Also, if you do this yourself, it’s good to have some old tapes lying about that you don’t care about, either old commercial tapes or home-recorded tapes with content you don’t care about. This is because every so often, a tape will jam inside it’s cassette, at which point you need to open it up and unjam it. But sometimes the cassette itself (but not the tape) has developed problems, and you need to re-shell the tape into the shell of a different cassette.

The government never announces that it is becoming fascist. They announce that anti-fascists are the enemy.

So do Rubio, Noem, Bondi, and Stephen Miller. Tulsi Gabbard and the White House budget director are looking into moving as well.

Fun point: many farmers are switching from corn and wheat this year to growing soybeans, because soybeans need less fertilizer. Now you can get biofuel from soybeans, but you need to crush and process them first, and it’s more expensive and time consuming than corn-based ethanol.

Even if they decide not to support fascism in this one specific case, they have deliberately, intentionally and repeatedly encouraged the development of facism in multiple other cases.

This is like 30 years ago, before electric cars were really a thing. Some friends and I were hanging out in the Pine Barrens one night. It was an area we knew pretty well, and we’d walked down this long sandy road with no turnoffs to get to where we happened to be hanging out.

Suddenly, all of nature around us went silent - and I mean all of it. Sound carries at night, especially with the lakes to echo off of. We looked up the road we were walking back along, and there was a pair of headlights coming our way. We could tell they were headlights because they were lower than a person would carry a flashlight, they were moving in that peculiar synchronization that headlights have, and they’d do several quick bounces when they hit a rut in the road.

So anyway, we’re in this road in the ass-end of the Barrens, everything’s turned absolutely deadly silent, and there’s this car coming down the road toward us. And the three of us suddenly realize that it’s absolutely silent. Not only is nature silent, but the car isn’t making any noise either.

We watch the headlights of this car headed down the road toward us - it’s a couple hundred yards away now, the Pine Barrens are still dead silent, and the car isn’t making any noise either.

My nerve broke first. I bolted off the road and partially vaulted over a couple shrubs, my friends close behind me. We turned around, and the car was still coming toward us - and then suddenly the headlights went out. We waited, but nothing happened - no car headlights, no interior lights, no car doors opening, no voices - nothing. We waited, and still nothing.

We dithered and talked over what to do and we eventually grabbed a couple branches and headed back up the road. We reached the area where the headlights turned off - and there was no car. We turned our flashlight on the (very) sandy road, and we could see our tracks heading down, but there weren’t any recent car tracks. We checked the road and the verge all the way back to our car, and - nothing. The forest went dead silent, there were headlights, the car didn’t make a sound, and then it just … disappeared. We went back the next day, and there still was no sign of anyone on that road that night except us.

.

There’s also a rest stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike heading into New Jersey. Like two miles before the rest stop, there’s a sign saying something like “New Jersey - 25 miles”. We pull into the rest stop, get some gas, relieve ourselves, grab a snack, get back on the road. Go maybe two or three more miles, and there’s another sign saying “New Jersey - 5 miles”. Like, wtf? If there a space warp at that rest stop or something?

Do you have insurance that covers it?

Retribution for what? Not immediately kowtowing to the wounded narcissist?

Here’s the animated one; here’s the Lego one. And the first one on this page is (afaik) their most recent.

I hope he saw that animated “explanation” video Iran did (not the Lego one, the shorter animated one) because, while it’s probably too complicated for him to understand, that’s the closest “briefing” I’ve ever seen to his level of stupidity.

Aside from what everyone else’s already mentioned, there’s the whole hassle of setting up a new device - debloating, tweaking the settings, etc. Why go through the pain of adjusting to a new device when the old one works just fine?

Funny how the price has gone from 200m to 300m and now 400m - gee, I wonder where that money has come from and disappeared to.

which he aims to complete by 2028.

So he has to live with the noise of construction for three and a half years and gets to enjoy it for maybe 2-3 months? Not the actions of a person who’s planning on voluntarily leaving office.

QAnon people would go absolutely rabid conspiracy minded.

I don’t know if it would work in Canada, but I just buy a Visa gift card and use that.