Install Blocktube or another extension that stops videos from starting when you open the link, and read the transcript. It used to be at the top, just under the video itself, but now they’ve moved it to the bottom of the video description so you have to go through all the affiliate links just to get to the fucking transcript button.

But once you’ve found it, transcriptions are your best friend: skim it to see if there’s any real reason to watch (usually not) and enjoy that portion of your life that you just saved for things that YOU want and not what Google and that content creator want. The transcript will also tell you what portion of the video you need to watch, if actually watching it suits your needs.

I also regularly speed up videos; 1.25 is great under most circumstances, 1.5 if they’re really trying to draaaag shit out. You can always slow it down again, but it’s great for getting through the fluff if you need to hear it all (like repair videos for something you’ve never done yourself).

The New York Times did what I think was the best article ever on this entire subject in 2022, and while it is a very long read, it is a deep and accurate dive into the French history, endless threats of war and repayments, and then the US coming into take whatever was left in the 20th century. And the pictures are also incredibly good, especially the ruins of La Citadelle in the fog (having just read exactly what it was there for).

Easily the most informative – and moving – piece I have ever read on Haiti. If I remember correctly, it started off as a journalist’s attempt to tally the actual numbers, and ended up being a great deal more. It also explores how it wasn’t just the loss of Haiti’s cash to France, but the parallel loss of not having any of that cash invested in its own people, commerce, or society: it was a double blow that has gone on for centuries.

Here are the links for anyone interested:

NY Times – The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers

Gift link

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Netanyahu said in a press conference he had told Washington that he objected to any Palestinian statehood that did not guarantee Israel’s security.

Bibi’s only insisting upon that point because there is literally no such thing in reality: there is NO arrangement between warring neighbors that can guarantee “security” apart from the willingness of the participants themselves to stand down. And even if there were, he’d never agree to it anyway. (Nor would Hamas, off in their Qatari penthouses watching from afar.)

Plus, of all the participants who would have to agree to stand down, Israel seems to be the biggest force and the side waging the most active battle of the war. That’s problematic, because why would any of the weaker participants stop fighting when the biggest force has no intention of doing so? Israel would have to stand down first before any of the rest, for the détente to be taken seriously by anyone else involved.

Thus, by demanding the impossible and refusing to settle for anything less, Bibi maintains the status quo (and his own power, as well as that of Hamas). Corrupt authoritarian asshole.

Legally, I would not think it wise to put my business in the crosshairs between two warring states. Not only is the act of transporting immigrants into sub-zero temps without notice to either the immigrants or the receiving state morally repulsive and indefensible, that company has also now made itself a direct legal target of Illinois’ displeasure AND a handy disposable cutout for Texas to discard when Illinois sues it out of business.

In short, if I’m this business owner, I’ve just made it so that Illinois doesn’t have to fight Texas directly when they can just sue me and ensure I never operate in Illinois again, all at my own cost because the states already have armies of attorneys. And depending on local law, I may well be setting myself up not just for civil suits, but criminal charges, if some aggressive Illinois AG thinks I am actively participating in human trafficking.

No sane business owner would do this. Which means that Wynne Transportation is probably owned by some MAGA fool who has completely bought the propaganda and lies, and Greg Abbott is laughing because both that MAGA fool and his company are disposable while they stand between the two states and help absorb Illinois’ legal wrath.

Domestic violence isn’t just hitting.

Last January, authorities had responded to a disturbance call because of a verbal argument between Barrett and his estranged wife.

Whatever it was about, the “verbal argument” was so loud or bad that someone called the cops. Maybe your definition of verbal abuse is different than mine, but I guarantee you that if you’re shouting, or getting shouted at, loud enough for someone to call the cops, there’s a non-zero chance that verbal abuse is taking place.

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First we’d have to get rid of the propaganda that keeps the fear and entitlement well stoked in the sizeable minority that support the Gun Ownership Party – we’ll call it the GOP for short – and the foreign cash that funds it, and I don’t see the GOP letting go of that any time soon.

I haven’t experienced this because I don’t log in, and haven’t since all this fuckery started a couple months ago. I have to double-click play, but that’s it. Fully loaded uBlock Origin and AdBlockPlus, no problems in browser at all.

I keep FreeTube loaded with my subscriptions, so if I want to see what’s new I can open FreeTube and either watch there or copy the YouTube link and watch on YouTube.

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Oh, that is righteous. Congratulations!

An enameled cast iron dutch oven like OP posted is also the perfect size and shape for no-knead bread.

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That really sounds like some dystopian science fiction novel.

Funny you should say that. When she first told me what was going on, my mind immediately went back to that Robin Cook novel Coma from the 70s, lol.

Thank you. I don’t mind saying it’s scary as hell.

Yeah, and it’s still ongoing. She can leave and get hit with an as-yet-unknown fee/bill, or she can stay and not have her own needs addressed but be pressured into carrying on underwriting her own clinical trial eligibility tests.

She’s terrified of setting foot in there now because when she started to argue she’d never had [whatever] and didn’t need these tests they got really aggressive. Not physical, just verbally hard hitting, like abruptly changing the subject and then coming back around to it two minutes later to insist she needs this, and doing that over and over again, ignoring or twisting anything she tried to say in reply, and this was at the end of a day long fast for blood tests. There’s more, just petty shit like you’d expect from a high-pressure con, but that’s the kind of thing.

Fortunately the tests she was objecting to were not common, and she has an in-law who is retired from medicine, so when she asked him what was going on and named the tests they wanted he was able to cotton on pretty quickly and at least tell her it had nothing to do with her or her own needs.

But the only red flag up front was that they have ZERO local reviews. None. They have pay-to-play awards like “best in town” in a local newspaper, and NOTHING else anywhere. That was odd. Now we know why.

I don’t see how this ends well. She’ll either pay some fat bill or end up in court, none of which has anything to do with the healthcare she signed up for. I wrote all this so that maybe someone thinking about DPC will think twice before they sign up.

There is a current movement called Direct Primary Care, where you sign up to a binding agreement to pay a continuing monthly subscription fee that covers your office visits, and your labs and prescriptions are also discounted. So it’s possible. And it sounds absolutely fantastic upfront.

But the problem there is that places that do not accept insurance and/or Medicaid and Medicare are also not governed by HIPAA and other state and federal healthcare laws, something most people don’t even know until they find out the hard way. I have a relative who thought DPC was the best thing since sliced bread until she found out that all the strange tests she kept being told she needed were not actually for her, and she was actually being submitted to various clinical trials without her knowledge and against her directly expressed wishes, for symptoms and diseases she’s never even had.

So now she’s paying for a monthly DPC subscription she can’t use because she’s afraid of them and refuses to go back. They won’t even give her her medical records (not surprising, because that practice is all a clinical trial fraud scam so they’d be a work of fiction anyway). And she doesn’t have a lot of money to start with; she can go to an urgent care place if she needs something immediate, I suppose.

But if you break a DPC agreement, you have to pay full value for every office visit you ever had, every non-billable service under the agreement, and it gets added up against the monthly subscription fees you’ve been paying. These agreements are written so as to be difficult to break (pick one and look for the following “Termination” language):

If this agreement is terminated or held to be invalid or unenforceable for any reason, you agree to pay practice an amount equal to the fair market value of the services actually rendered to you during the period of time for which the fees were paid commensurate with prevailing rates in the practice area . . .

So yeah, DPC is great in theory, as long as in practice it’s not just a front end for some other medical scam, because they lack oversight and are exempt from all the consumer protections built into insurance-oriented laws like HIPAA. There is no recourse with these non-insurance places, because insurance laws are also pretty much the only consumer protection laws with teeth that exist in the doctor-patient relationship, and very few states have any legislative experience with, much less written law, in regard to Direct Primary Care. We’re trying to find an attorney that knows enough about it to be able to assist, but even that’s a challenge.

I don’t know if fraud was the primary intention of Direct Primary Care, but because of the way it is structured it absolutely attracts the bottom feeders of medical practice who want to pull in otherwise underserved (uninsured, poor, undocumented) patients for some kind of economic exploitation.

propaganda regarding white supremacist and accelerationist ideology

For those like me who had to look up “accelerationist ideology” because the mountain of hate-filled right-wing “make it up as you go along” bullshit is too deep for me to keep up with anymore, here it is. From Wikipedia:

Accelerationism is a range of revolutionary and reactionary ideas in left-wing and right-wing ideologies that call for the drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, infrastructure sabotage and other processes of social change to destabilize existing systems and create radical social transformations, otherwise referred to as “acceleration”.

That’s bad enough (speed up entropy until everything goes boom faster than expected) but apparently it’s also really popular with the fascists as well.

I guess no one told these evolutionary wonders that historically, when you blow shit up, you do NOT get shiny new utopias, clean fields and places to start anew. You get huge mountains of waste no one is going to cart off for you, people even more exploited and needy than they ever were before, and the kind of “radical social transformation” no one ever wants for themselves.

It’s funny, but people are happy to do to the living what they generally would be horrified to do with the dead. I’m not kidding. People will treat other living beings horribly, but start messing with corpses and the average person gets really upset.

Huh, I missed that. But if it was, they would be able to provide proof of consent to the family, which they are apparently unable to do. When it comes to body parts, you have to have more than a spoken agreement, so if they actually had legitimate consent executed in a legally compliant manner, they’d be able to produce it.

Check out Alabama law on the subject:

22-19-164 Manner of making anatomical gift before donor’s death.

(a) A donor may make an anatomical gift:

(1) by authorizing a statement or symbol indicating that the donor has made an anatomical gift to be imprinted on the donor’s driver’s license or identification card;

(2) in a will;

(3) during a terminal illness or injury of the donor, by any form of communication addressed to at least two adults, at least one of whom is a disinterested witness; or

(4) as provided in subsection (b).

(b) A donor or other person authorized to make an anatomical gift under Section 22-19-163 may make a gift by a donor card or other record signed by the donor or other person making the gift or by authorizing that a statement or symbol indicating that the donor has made an anatomical gift be included on a donor registry. If the donor or other person is physically unable to sign a record, the record may be signed by another individual at the direction of the donor or other person and must:

(1) be witnessed by at least two adults, at least one of whom is a disinterested witness, who have signed at the request of the donor or the other person; and

(2) state that it has been signed and witnessed as provided in subdivision (1).

(c ) Revocation, suspension, expiration, or cancellation of a driver’s license or identification card upon which an anatomical gift is indicated does not invalidate the gift.

(d) An anatomical gift made by will takes effect upon the donor’s death whether or not the will is probated. Invalidation of the will after the donor’s death does not invalidate the gift.

EDITED TO ADD: The death occurred at a non-prison hospital, and the autopsy was done by University of Alabama Birmingham pathology department. Hospitals absolutely know the legal requirements for all death-related transfers, gifts, and destruction of body parts/biologic material, and it’s unlikely (though not impossible) that the hospital is where the theft took place. Rather, I would bet cash that there is someone on the take at the UAB pathology department selling parts on the side, because autopsy is where the actual bits get separated from the whole and disbursed (and a frequent locale for cadaver parts theft).