Thank you for reading the article and using your brain.

Yeah. If he was hoping for approval from left and center. Big if

Yeah, my kid’s like “sounds like a normal day”, but I think concentrating everyone’s best effort on one day is a good idea.

“shifts its approach” sounds so cool and methodical

I don’t know anything about this guy, but from your chart the whole libertarian half looks pretty weak. The portrait doesn’t need to be in the middle in this meme.

Dude, I thought they meant people who shared the same name and I didn’t even think it was too stupid to be true.

God, that article is just one long list of totally avoidable disasters, for people all over the world and for US future diplomacy. All to save some undetermined fraction of 1% of the budget and stop imaginary condom distribution. The ends are stupid and the means are worse.

I’m not sure what specifically is meant by phonics. My grandma taught first grade for 30 years, ending around 2000. She said when phonics came in “that’s just teaching reading” and when phonics went out “well, obviously we still have to teach how the alphabet works” and when phonics came in again “eye roll”. So, whatever the school leadership says, my guess is kids are learning phonics.

Here is the quote, I had to click through a couple links to get to it, really they need to be putting his quotes front and center because by paraphrasing they make him sound more nuanced and reasonable than he is.

“The FAA diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. That is amazing,” Trump said, claiming the FAA wanted people “with severe disabilities, the most underrepresented segment of the workforce, and they want them in and they want them - they can be air traffic controllers.” Asked how he could blame diversity, equity and inclusion hiring for the crash, Trump said, "because I have common sense.”

About the iconography, our flag, etc. I agree with you, but if you use them it is very important to be clear and specific in whatever else the poster says, because vague statements can be very easily misread and those symbols by themselves will likely give comfort/anxiety to the wrong people. You can’t just wave an American flag and say “resist fascism” or “preserve women’s rights” or “protect children” or something like that, because those phrases mean different things to different people, and the color of the flag has been a useful way to know at a glance what the speaker intends.

From what I can see in conversations with Trump voters, it’s the specifics that give them pause – did I really vote for that? So, pick some particular action to respond to, or several in separate posters. There are so many to choose from.

Weird: this is Safeway, Canada

No, I read it that he is demanding more water for Los Angeles for some reason.

“I want to see two things in Los Angeles: Voter ID so that the people have a chance to vote. And I want to see the water be released and come down into Los Angeles and throughout the state. Those are the two things. After that, I will be the greatest president that California ever has ever seen,” he said

California requires state or federal id when registering to vote and when voting for the first time in person. They recently banned cities and districts from making additional requirements.

Los Angeles primarily gets its water from three main sources: the Owens River, Northern California, and the Colorado River, along with local groundwater. Approximately 57% of the region’s water supply is imported, while groundwater accounts for about 34% of the total supply.

As a former los angeleno, I have always been proud of the changes they’ve made to conserve water in homes and business over the last few decades and I don’t believe most people living there expect to receive more water from outside the region as the climate worsens. But then, I don’t own any golf courses

Thants

Holy shit. Kepler was born in the wrong solar system

I don’t have any suggestion off-hand, but I understand your request and actually have been reading so much less the past couple years just to avoid the heightened emotional tones that seem so pervasive. I want to read to learn and understand but I don’t need calls to action or tugs on my heartstrings or the sort of smug outrage and moralism that is everywhere – those come from all the rest of life.

Here are some of the professor’s comments in the interview in question (not the one linked in this article), from a year ago, at least this is what I think most likely to be construed by the university as targeting a group of students:

And what the students were able to do is examine video from that protest and identify, I think, three older students. We have a — Columbia has a program. It’s a graduate relationship with older students from other countries, including Israel. And it’s something that many of us were concerned about, because so many of those Israeli students, who then come to the Columbia campus, are coming right out of their military service. And they’ve been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus. And it’s something the university has not taken seriously in the past. But we’ve never seen anything like this. And the students were able to identify three of these exchange students, basically, from Israel, who had just come out of military service, who were spraying the pro-Palestinian students with this skunk water. And they were disguised in keffiyehs so that they could mix in with the students who were demanding that the university divest from companies that are supporting the occupation and the war, and were protesting and demanding a ceasefire. So we know who they were.

Ok, thanks for the added context. My point is the same things were said about the Altadena fire when I was in high school nearby, the same year as her first Parable book was published. Fire was not new to the area then, either.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinneloa_Fire

I may be wrong as I haven’t read closely, but I don’t believe anyone is surprised by these fires. Growing up in the area, fire burned those same areas more than once during my school years. It’s chaparral and it is supposed to burn every 10 years or so. But like anytime else it’s a big deal when it hits your (or a celebrity) neighborhood vs a couple miles away, and the biggest difference is over the last few decades is that they keep building higher and higher into the mountain, so what used to just be a wildfire is now a neighborhood burning down.

Yes, I have one pair and those are still my go to when I leave the house, but problem for me is the middle distance (computer screen), which was giving me neck pains from unconsciously tilting my head to put it in the right spot. And reading in bed, where having the readers at the bottom portion just doesn’t work. So, ended up juggling glasses anyway.