What do they mean “aren’t supposed to be there”?

What was the reveal in the comics? I stopped watching the show so I have no idea what’s going on.

Whereas these demand-side safeguards can be replicated across industries, using state-support to onshore all of the strategic industrial value chains that China dominates (or is likely to dominate within the next decade) would risk the ‘Sovietisation’ of European and partner economies.

Lol!

A specter is haunting Europe…

Saving this for later. I’ll reply tomorrow!

Sorry, I thought these were @Cowbee@hexbear.net 's chip bags.

Let’s really think about this folks:

What is a mousetrap? It’s a mechanical device used to kill a pest living inside a home or place of business. Because its mechanical, that means its constructed, and not natural. It’s a tool, a product of human engineering. If this was a message about the dangers of natural pathogens, why use a human made device? Why not a snake or a badger or a grizzly bear or some other alpha predator? I think the artist knows what we all know about this virus. It’s plain to see.

What is, cheese? A tasty treat, one you can enjoy in all kinds of ways. You can eat it with crackers, or burgers or just by itself. There is no wrong way to enjoy cheese. It’s also great to share with family, friends, and coworkers. It’s a completely natural product, one discovered by accident, meaning given the right conditions it forms naturally in the wild. Doctors however, will tell you, too much cheese is bad for you, that you shouldn’t have too much cheese. They’ll say “Bob, how much cheese did you say you eat again? You have to stop eating so much cheese!” But we know that cheese can be part of a healthy diet, offering high-quality protein, calcium, and nutrients like vitamin b12 that support bone health and satiety. You can never have too much of a good thing I always say.

The trap, presented here, is clearly a false flag. If you know anything about traps, you can tell right away that this is a trap that only looks threatening. Its designed that way, with intention. Some might say “Bob don’t eat that cheese! It’s going to kill you!” But don’t let them fool you! If you do your own research you can spot the false traps and allow you to enjoy that delicious cheese! I’ve been “eating” this “cheese” for over 40 years and never once have I ever had a medical issue that I’m aware of. My homeopathologist says I have the heart of a horse! Which, since the transplant I had in the sewers of the Philippines many years ago, is a true statement.

Comrades, listen to your gut here. Eat the cheese!

We went out to our favorite breakfast place yesterday morning with the kids and it was a wild experience. We usually go just us, on the weekends we drop the kids off at my parents.

I guess they didn’t anticipate that people might be out early and in higher numbers for mother’s day. We sat and ordered drinks and it took almost a half hour to get them. The owner came over maybe 15 min later to take our order and we decided that for our youngest (3) we would just ask for an extra plate so we can give him a little off each of our plates.

When we asked the owner this, she said “Oh, OK, extra plate… That’ll be $2”.

She charged us $2 for an extra plate…

We learned later that the owner of this place is like this all the time. Apparently she hates when people show up and only order coffee and pastries. Several reviews stated as such. On one she replied “This is a breakfast place, not a coffee shop”.

So… That kinda sucks.

We were a little defeated by the experience. We thought about just heading home, instead of going to the gardening center. But we did it anyway, and that turned out to be a good idea. We saw a super cute shop cat just walking around like she owned the place. Very friendly! The kids got a kick out of seeing a kitty in the store. We got some stuff for the garden, we also got the kids some shovels to help us out with the dirt (and for playing). We got some flowers too.

Right by the garden there is a Greenway, and we decided to take the kids on a little walk. The Greenway ran along a river, so we walked it for a bit, let the kids run loose up and down the path. It was a good diversion.

Then we spent most of the afternoon doing yard work and garden work. The kids were able to help out with their new shovels. Very productive afternoon. All and all, not a bad mother’s day!

You’re making a more interesting argument than standard reformism, so I want to take it seriously. The claim, as I understand it, is this: entryists push from within the Democratic Party until the neoliberal machine overreacts and purges them. That purge creates a public spectacle that clarifies the line between liberals and leftists. The expelled faction then becomes the nucleus of a genuine workers’ party, carrying with it voters, infrastructure, organizers, and a built-in grievance narrative that resonates with millions of Americans. In this telling, it doesn’t matter whether Hasan believes he’s a reformist. What matters is that his strategy, intentionally or not, sets the stage for the Democratic Party to blow itself up.

I understand why this seems plausible. The problem is that the historical parallels you’re reaching for don’t work the way you need them to, and the structural facts about how American political organizations actually function make this scenario a fantasy.

Let’s start with structure. If your strategy depends on a “purge” creating a catalyzing split, you need to explain who is doing the purging and who is being purged. Neither question has a clear answer, because the Democratic Party is not a membership organization.

There is no formal process for joining the Democratic Party. You can register as a Democrat to vote in primaries, but that registration confers no rights within the party itself. The party has no membership cards, no dues, no internal congresses where policy is debated and voted on, and no mechanism for members to discipline or recall leaders. Political scientists classify the Democrats and Republicans as “cadre parties,” a category that is the structural opposite of the mass parties that emerged from the European socialist tradition. In cadre parties, organization is dominated by professional political operatives, donors, and officeholders. The “party” is fundamentally a legal brand and a fundraising apparatus, not a participatory body.

The DNC, which is the closest thing to a governing body the party has, is best understood as a service provider for candidates, not a command center. It coordinates presidential campaigns, organizes the national convention, helps devise the platform, and supports candidates at various levels. But it holds no legal authority over state party organizations, and scholars have long observed that neither the DNC nor the RNC exercises dictatorial power over the state parties that actually run elections.

This is not a structure with a membership list to purge people from. It is not a structure with formal ideological factions that can be expelled in a way that creates a public spectacle. When the party establishment turns against someone, it does so through donor money being redirected, primary challengers being recruited, committee assignments being denied, and media access drying up. This is not a dramatic public trial that radicalizes the masses. It is a quiet bureaucratic process that the vast majority of voters never notice.

When Lenin talks about the “political death of the Hendersons and Snowdens, as happened in the case of their co-thinkers in Russia and in Germany,” he is not describing a scenario where communists got expelled from a bourgeois party and then formed their own.

In Russia, the “co-thinkers” he’s referring to were the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. They were not expelled from a bourgeois party. They were Marxist factions that split from the RSDWP or existed as independent parties, then joined the Provisional Government as socialists, then were politically destroyed by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks did not need to get expelled from the Kadets or any liberal party to build their organization. They had their own party, their own program, and their own base before they ever entered the Duma. The split they engineered was between themselves and the reformists within their own movement, not between themselves and a liberal donor network.

In Germany, the reference is to the Independents and the Spartacists who broke from the SPD. Here, at least, the structural analogy is closer, because the SPD was a mass membership workers’ party with formal congresses, ideological factions, and mechanisms for expulsion. But the causal sequence still doesn’t work for your argument. When the war split the party, the anti-war faction already had an independent political line, an organizational network, and a base among radicalized workers. They didn’t discover their politics by being expelled. Their politics caused the split. The USPD and later the KPD were not the product of an expulsion. They were the product of years of organized opposition within a mass party that had real ideological life.

In both cases, the independent communist pole existed prior to the split. The split clarified lines that were already drawn. It did not create them out of nothing.

The closest thing America has to the kind of mass membership organization where your scenario could theoretically play out is not the Democratic Party. It’s the Democratic Socialists of America.

DSA is a membership organization with dues, a constitution, internal caucuses, and formally democratic procedures for selecting leadership. It has the structural features your theory requires. And within DSA, the very debate we’re having right now is alive and institutionally organized. There are organized caucuses representing the reformist, Democratic-entryist wing. There are organized caucuses representing the left, independent-party wing. Both have existed inside the same organization for years. They have fought at conventions, run competing slates for leadership, and articulated fundamentally incompatible strategies for achieving socialism in the United States.

And what has not happened is exactly the thing your theory predicts. There has been no purge. The reformist wing has not expelled the left wing. The left wing has not expelled the reformist wing. Neither faction has broken away to form a new party. The organization has simply continued, managing its contradictions through internal democratic processes, without producing the kind of catalytic split that is supposed to radicalize millions of Americans. If your mechanism can’t even produce a split inside the one organization that has the structural features it requires, why would it produce one inside a party that lacks those features entirely?

Meanwhile, an actual independent communist pole already exists in the United States. The Party for Socialism and Liberation is a Marxist-Leninist party with a Central Committee, a formal constitution, national conventions, branches in major cities, and its own newspaper. It runs its own candidates rather than seeking the Democratic ballot line. It is small, it is not currently capable of winning national elections, but it exists on its own terms with its own program and its own organizational sovereignty.

And here is the important point for your argument: the PSL was not born from a Democratic Party purge. It was created when revolutionaries split from another explicitly socialist organization, the Workers World Party, because they believed its leadership was no longer capable of fulfilling its mission. That split occurred within the Marxist left, not within a bourgeois party. The conditions for its formation were not a public grievance narrative against the DNC. They were a cadre organization with a clear program and a willingness to build.

If an independent working-class party can be founded without first spending a generation inside the Democratic Party hoping to get expelled, then we don’t need to wait for the expulsion that your theory requires but that no structural mechanism can actually deliver.

The Bolsheviks did not get expelled from the Menshevik faction and then build their party. They had already built it. The split was the result of having an independent political line, an independent organizational structure, and a base among the most advanced workers. The split was the consequence of those conditions, not the cause of them.

If you want to replicate that process, you need to start by building those conditions. The Democratic Party cannot expel you because there is nothing to expel you from. There is no membership roll. There is no formal mechanism of expulsion that creates a public spectacle. There is only the quiet operation of power, which has successfully absorbed and neutralized every progressive insurgency for the past fifty years without once producing the kind of catalytic rupture your theory depends on.

In Lenin’s cases, the communists had a pole to stand on. They were not hoping a bourgeois party would overreact and do their organizing for them. They had already organized. If we want to follow that example, the work is not to wait for the machine to chew people up and spit them out. It is to build something outside the machine. Something the PSL is already doing. Something that does not require a spectacular expulsion to justify its existence. Something that is simply there, independent, with a program and a line, waiting for the rest of the class to find it.

At present it is often difficult for the British Communists even to approach the masses, even to make themselves heard. But if I address the masses as a Communist, and invite them to vote for Henderson against Lloyd George, I most certainly will be listened to. And, being listened to, I shall be able to popularize the idea, not only that Soviets are better than Parliaments, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is better than the dictatorship of Churchill (disguised under the name of bourgeois “democracy”), but also that I am prepared to support Henderson by my vote in just the same way as a rope supports the man who has hanged himself. ​And, as the Hendersons draw nearer to the formation of their own government, it will be proved that I am right, it will draw the masses to my side and will facilitate the political death of the Hendersons and Snowdens, as happened in the case of their co-thinkers in Russia and in Germany.

Michael, I might not know what this is, but I do know we’re about to find out together.

How many did they decommission.

You have to give your card to the pump up front. They precharge you $1 and then retroactively change the charge to whatever you pumped after you’re done. You can’t just pump and run. EV charging currently works the same way (I think), but a lot of variable priced transactions work that way as well, where you are pre-charged up front as a validation method and means of capturing your information to charge you later. For these cars, they likely cut off once you’re car reports it’s fully charged. You don’t need someone to watch these.

One thing I think is funny about all this though, is this idea that I need to charge my car at Walmart. My ICE car gets almost 400 miles (ca. 644 km) to a tank of gas (it’s from 2015). A lot of modern EVs come very close to getting that much mileage now on a single charge. Rivian gets 410–420 miles with the “max” package. The BYD Denza Z9 GT gets about 600 miles (965.61 km) on a single charge and the Atto 3 (EVO) get around 300 miles (ca. 483 km) on a single charge. Teslas are anywhere from 300 to 400 miles (643.74 km) depending on the model. I can’t “charge” my ICE car at home, but you can charge all of these cars every time you return home. The idea that, in your day-to-day life, every time you stop at a place of business you’ll be charging your car, is frankly ridiculous. It’s not an expectation of ICE cars, and I see no reason why it should be an expectation of electric cars. The charging times are only going to go down in time. The range is also only going to go up in time. In many cases, charging is more ideal to do off peak-hours which is in the evening, especially in places that have a variable rate for electricity.

Open two agent instances in the same project and give them competing instructions. They’ll end up in an endless cycle of fixing the things the other breaks.

Hit the i95 and let the other drivers know you’re smoggin!
Crank that dial, roll down those windows, were louder then your Dad in hay fever season!
W S! N! Z! Aaahhhh-chu!
[Record Scratch]
[Clip from ghost busters]
Peter: “He slimed me.”
Ray: “That’s great! Actual, physical contact.”
Peter: “I feel so funky!”

Their morning radio show is called “Sniff and Wheez in the morning! The only morning show that BLOWS”. They have a few sideshow characters who call in like, “The Drip”, and “Runny Ron”, and an awful rock/rap artist who goes by “Clean-X”.

I have 192 episodes to go, and its at 64gb of content, wild!