I got a brief but good look at a wild Jaguarundi in south Texas nearly twenty years ago. I thought it was a bobcat at first, but it turned so I could see its tail and profile, and there was no mistaking it.

I remember the internet before Google, and how game changing it was to have all of the internet indexed in one place (even if that wasn’t actually quite true back then). If you had asked me 15, 10, even 5 years ago if I would be cheering its downfall and yearning for a return to a simpler, far less centralized internet, I would have called you crazy. And yet here we are.

They are building an American Freikorps.

All of this is accurate, but it is still hilarious seeing NPR of all organizations act aghast at the idea of a supposedly “independent” media organization serving as the mouthpiece for Empire.

Good people do not, as a rule, seek personal power for themselves, and a drive to do so is a prerequisite for seeking public office. The result is that the best you can hope for in electoral politics is a psychopath who shares your values, because they are all psychopaths, and most of them don’t see the rest of us as human, much less their equals.

https://www.opentech.fund/news/february-2018-monthly-report/

It’s not a secret. It’s on their website. Note: the Open Technology Fund is the CIA. Just like Radio Free Asia (or Radio Free X, they’re all CIA-run appendages of the US state department) which the fund grew out of. The US government very often funds technologies and startups that have the potential surveillance applications (among other things) and Signal was one of them. The people calling this a conspiracy theory have no idea what they are talking about, but that’s not uncommon when it comes to Americans and swallowing their own propaganda whole.

Signal was developed with financial backing by the CIA, so do with that information what you will. I use Teleguard which is very similar to Telegram but run out of Switzerland, and with 2-way encryption automatically enabled, unlike signal or telegram.

Yes! I work for a non-profit, providing a highly in-demand service to my community, for free or at a reduced cost. Nobody is getting rich doing what we do, but we are actively enriching and supporting our community. It is also a fantastic foot in the door for other forms of cooperation, community support, and mutual aid.

Not all non-profits are on the level, but no company with a profit motive will ever provide the kind of environment that a good non-profit can.

This dude is genuinely a nightmare. He’s an outspoken evangelical jesus freak who is explicitly using his position to maintain a deeply unjust water monopoly for his home-town farming community. Every part of his biography reads like he was cooked up in a Reagan-era laboratory somewhere to be the ultimate Republican. In the four years he’s been in his position he’s already completely dropped any pretense of working for equitable water rights. He’s a fully committed weapon for a specific, tiny, hateful little community full of water-thieving land-barons who derive those very same water rights from treaties that they reneged on with the local Native Americans. I hope he stubs his toe on every chair and table he ever passes, for the rest of his natural life.

I used to watch Mary-Lou’s Flip-Flop Shop every Saturday morning as a kid. Apparently it was locally produced in Houston, where I lived, so I wonder if it was even known about elsewhere? Basically she had a Saturday morning kids’ show that ran for one season, and it aired at like 6:30am. For some reason I was obsessed with it (despite being slightly older than the target demographic by the time it was airing) and I would wake up ungodly early on Saturdays to watch Mary Lou do somersaults and tell jokes.

In 1986, they first met Lynch (a.k.a. Kathleen, a.k.a. Ta-Da the Shit Lady), who was then working at a strip club called Sex World in New York City.[75] Though never an official member, she became Butthole Surfers’ famous “naked dancer”, performing intermittently with them through 1989.[9] One show in Washington, D.C., with GWAR saw Kathleen take the stage to dance in nothing but gold body paint and antique wooden snow shoes. At another particularly wild concert in 1986, Haynes and Lynch, by now completely bald, reportedly engaged in sexual intercourse while on stage, as Leary used a screwdriver to vandalize the club’s speakers. This came after only five songs, during which time Haynes had started a small fire.

I don’t know if it’s the absolute best, but the page for the band The Butthole Surfers is pretty excellent.

You will definitely never see me defend Clarence Thomas, I just needed to point out that this isn’t a partisan thing in this one specific instance. Democrats are frequently bad politicians too, it’s just not a solid requirement like it is for the GOP.

Nah, Menendez is actually corrupt, this isn’t the first time he’s been in trouble for this. New Jersey politicians in particular seem to be just shamelessly corrupt, regardless of party affiliation.