Boston has the fattest squirrels.

But the skyline is nice.

You fucking psycho.

A top elections official in Milwaukee has been fired after allegedly obtaining military absentee ballots for fake voters through a state-run website and sending them to a Republican state lawmaker, Mayor Cavalier Johnson announced Thursday.

Kimberly Zapata, deputy director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, allegedly requested the military ballots through the state’s MyVote Wisconsin website, Johnson said.

The Republican nominee for Congress in Texas’ 7th district is a self-proclaimed history buff, but his take on Anne Frank is not one that most historians would endorse.

Johnny Teague, an evangelical pastor and business owner who won the district’s primary in March, in 2020 published “The Lost Diary of Anne Frank,” a novel imagining the famous Jewish Holocaust victim’s final days in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps as she might have written them in her diary.

The kicker: In Teague’s telling, Frank seems to embrace Christianity just before she is murdered by the Nazis.

Salon fucking sucks

Twitter, that is. An amusing couple of months.

But, no more for me.

Not interested in being part of Musk's next toy.

Yes, I do drive a Tesla. My only excuse is that I bought it more than a year ago, before Musk had fully blossomed into his current florid assholery. He was just a jerk. Now, ugh.

System justification theory (SJT) is a theory within social psychology that system-justifying beliefs serve a psychologically palliative function. It proposes that people have several underlying needs, which vary from individual to individual, that can be satisfied by the defense and justification of the status quo, even when the system may be disadvantageous to certain people. People have epistemic, existential, and relational needs that are met by and manifest as ideological support for the prevailing structure of social, economic, and political norms. Need for order and stability, and thus resistance to change or alternatives, for example, can be a motivator for individuals to see the status quo as good, legitimate, and even desirable.

According to system justification theory, people desire not only to hold favorable attitudes about themselves (ego-justification) and the groups to which they belong (group-justification), but also to hold positive attitudes about the overarching social structure in which they are entwined and find themselves obligated to (system-justification). This system-justifying motive sometimes produces the phenomenon known as out-group favoritism, an acceptance of inferiority among low-status groups and a positive image of relatively higher status groups. Thus, the notion that individuals are simultaneously supporters and victims of the system-instilled norms is a central idea in system justification theory. Additionally, the passive ease of supporting the current structure, when compared to the potential price (material, social, psychological) of acting out against the status quo, leads to a shared environment in which the existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred. Alternatives to the status quo tend to be disparaged, and inequality tends to perpetuate.

The longtime water superintendent for a small town in Vermont has resigned in protest after local officials ordered him to restore the town's water to the state's standard for fluoride levels—which he had been secretly and unilaterally lowering for years due to his own personal anti-fluoride beliefs.

And his righteous, five-page resignation letter offered yet another bombshell in the small-town water scandal that has made national headlines in recent weeks. He asserted that he had been surreptitiously lowering the town's fluoride levels for much longer than previously known—for over a decade rather than the nearly four years officials had previously disclosed.

Restoring the town's water to the state-recommended fluoride level "poses unacceptable risks to public health," the now-ex water superintendent, Kendall Chamberlin, wrote in his resignation letter, according to local media. “I cannot in good conscience be a party to this."

Chamberlin held the title of water superintendent for 37 years in Richmond, Vermont, a town of about 4,100 in the northwestern part of the state. But apparently in that time, he failed to mention to his fellow residents that he had been taken in by unfounded fears that fluoridated water is harmful.

A number of right-wing media stars have recently been peddling a prepaid cellphone carrier to their audiences, hyping it as a low-cost alternative to “woke” AT&T.

There’s just one problem: PureTalk—which these personalities have promoted as a patriotic, “veteran-run business” that doesn’t peddle “wokeness”—actually relies on AT&T’s wireless network.

So what kind of politics should conservatives today, as inheritors of a failed movement, adopt? For starters, they should stop thinking of themselves as conservatives (much less as Republicans) and start thinking of themselves as radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries. Indeed, that is what they are, whether they embrace those labels or not.

...

Put bluntly, if conservatives want to save the country they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it. Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips.

The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about “small government.” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.

...

To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war. For now, there are only two paths open to conservatives. Either they awake from decades of slumber to reclaim and re-found what has been lost, or they will watch our civilization die. There is no third road.

Source: We Need To Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives

"Fascists" is it, then.