Ingesting lead can and will kill you, and it will impair your cognitive functioning in the meantime. Lead was banned from automobile gasoline in 1975, but it was too late. There are small amounts of lead in the air and water, almost everywhere, that will remain for centuries and that were not there before cars,

The insurrection took place on January 6, 2021, which was three years ago.

Over 700 people have plead guilty or been convicted for crimes they committed at the capitol that day. Others have not yet been apprehended or gone to trial, and some others have not been identified. https://apnews.com/article/capitol-riot-jan-6-criminal-cases-anniversary-bf436efe760751b1356f937e55bedaa5

Trump has also been charged for his actions three years ago, but has delayed the trial with repeated appeals all the way up to SCOTUS. https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4468789-trump-special-counsel-jack-smith-supreme-court-jan-6-trial/

I don’t know what Brazil has to do with January 6. In the United States – as in many countries with “decent legal system” – a defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Anything less than proving Trump guilty beyond a reasonable doubt will be taken as a complete victory for him, and very possibly catapult him to re-election in November.

“People’s definition of good is also different.” That’s exactly what makes working as a server a difficult job.

Take you, for example. It sounds like you don’t like to be bothered when you’re dining out. An excellent server might be likely to recognize that and leave you alone after the first or second visit – as well as get your order right and bring your bill promptly. Even if not, there’s nothing wrong with politely asking to be left alone, but you can’t expect your server to read your mind. Some people do like to be bothered. Some people value the experience of being served while dining out to be as important as the food or the ambience. People have different definitions of good.

In your “first” part, I hear you talking about resentment toward feeling obliged to tip servers when they give poor service. I understand and agree, to an extent. Paying servers minimum wage (or more) would not necessarily improve the service, however, and could possibly allow it to become worse. The amount you leave as a tip – if anything at all – is still completely up to you. That’s a big part of tipping culture as well.

As for your “second,” and your “third,” I’m talking about tipping culture at sit-down restaurants in the United States.

Because you are able to conceptualize tipping as a “a mechanism to justify suppressing wages” does not mean that’s the only way to conceptualize it. Do you really believe that raising server pay to minimum wage (or more) would end tipping culture in the U.S.? I do not believe that at all. Because there really is a culture to it, even it is merely a custom to folks like you.

We can stop its spread – we can refuse to tip at places that never expected a tip before. But tipping at fancy sit-down restaurants is ingrained in American culture. It would take generations of social engineering to breed it out. There are people who like to be able to tip for good service, wealthy American people who will seek it out. Even if it became the norm not to tip at restaurants, I bet tipping would been seen as a status symbol at the fancier ones.

And what about the “excellent server” I talked about earlier, who makes more money in tips than anyone else on the shift? To you, maybe that person is akin to some sort of prostitute, to be asking for extra money in exchange for personal consideration, when already making almost as much as “ffs EMT personnel”? Seriously though, no matter how much you raise that server’s wage, they’re still not going to be making anywhere near as much as they did working those big-money shifts for big tips. All else being even, they’re not going to choose to work those crappy hours anymore either, so the restaurant no longer has its best staff working its most demanding shifts.

Anyway, it didn’t really seem like you were punching down. It did sort of seem like you failed to address some of the points I tried to make about tipping culture in the US, and instead provided information about your personal preferences and bad experiences dining out at full-service restaurants. That, and pushing the single-problem-single-solution minimum-wage idea, again without really addressing any of the possible collateral consequences I tried to suggest in the original post.

Tipping is more than just a custom; there really is a culture to it. If you’re tipping only because you know the server makes less than minimum wage from the restaurant (or that greedy restaurant owners are completely to blame for this injustice), I think you may be misunderstanding an aspect of this culture.

Working in a restaurant is as hard a retail job as there is, and working as a server is often the hardest job in the restaurant. Being a truly good server requires a rare mix of people skills, math skills, memory, and a thick skin. So why do people choose to take the hardest job there is in the whole restaurant, when it pays less than all the other jobs?

Most servers end up getting paid better than the people doing other jobs in the restaurant. In most restaurants, servers make more than minimum wage. At the end of their shifts, most servers in turn tip-out the front-of-the-house employees, such as hosts and bussers, who often do only make minimum wage.

A truly excellent server may be the highest-paid employee for an entire shift – that certainly includes the manager and anyone else on salary, and it may even include the owner, when you add in labor and upkeep costs.

In order to make all that money, however, this server has to work at all the times that everyone else is out having fun – Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday morning. This server must put up with drunks, picky eaters and other narcissists, as well as seating errors and kitchen mistakes, all with a smile, for six or eight or ten hours straight. This server, who earns more than anyone else on the shift, is working harder than anyone else on the shift.

This is the other aspect that I wanted to address. Tipping culture is what gives that excellent server the opportunity to earn a better wage, more appropriate to the effort and expertise they devote to the job.

I’m sure this all sounds very capitalist, because it is. This may not be the most capitalism-friendly forum, I know, but I’m not trying to make any larger argument here.

I’m just saying that to me, it seems like this should be a “don’t hate the players” (owners, managers, servers, rich/drunk people who like to leave big tips) “hate the game” (tipping culture). And even if you do hate tipping culture, it couldn’t hurt to consider how it works for the people who don’t hate it.

I remember Gilbert Gottfried at a Friar’s Club roast. Can’t remember what the actual joke was, but I remember he lost the whole audience, and then won them back with a spontaneous telling of “The Aristocrats”

Kudos for Carlin, who made fun of government propaganda. Maybe not so much for Joan Rivers for making fun of FDNY widows.

(I’m not a boomer, though. Or a millennial. Or really that edgy anymore, if I ever was…)

I still tend to look back on GHWB as probably the most moderate, institutional-minded GOP POTUS of my lifetime, yet I see Thomas as probably the most radically right-wing and corrupt Justices of my lifetime.

Thinking about it now makes me want to ask, “how could that have happened?!” But then I think back and remember how it happened.

Russian emails? Are you thinking of the Wikileaks stuff, with the hacked data from Clinton’s campaign staffers? I am pretty sure those are different and separate from the emails that Comey was investigating for the FBI.

There are two “Hilary’s emails” stories. It is easy to confuse the two – Republicans worked very hard throughout 2016 to make it easy to confuse the two – yet they are two different series of events and almost totally unrelated to one another.

The original “Buttery Males” story: Comey and the FBI investigated emails that were stored on a private server owned by the Clinton Foundation, a server that Hilary had used for official business while serving as Secretary of State. In July of 2016, Comey announced that while they did find a small number of documents marked “classified” stored on the server, this violation was obviously inadvertent and should not be prosecuted. “Sloppy but not criminal,” or something like that. Then later in October (after taking a few months of heat from his fellow Republicans for not going after Clinton harder) Comey announced that there may be files on a laptop owned by Hilary’s assistant, Huma Abedin, that the FBI had not yet had a chance to review. Comey announced this privately to a congressional committee and it was leaked almost instantly, about a week before election day.

The “From Russia with Love” email story: Meanwhile, Russian hackers infiltrated Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and stole thousands of personal emails and other data from her staffers and people they’d communicated with. None of these emails were classified and the FBI never investigated the Clinton campaign in this case (except as the victims of a crime). Wikileaks and Julian Assange got in on the action and built up lots of hype. That’s when, in the middle of a campaign speech, Trump made his famous on-stage plea: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Trump was clever, mendaciously associating the original “classified documents on your private server” controversy with the “Russia stole your data and is about to release it on Wikileaks” controversy, but the two stories don’t really have anything to do with one another, at all, and they never really did.

It may even be to their advantage, as the new candidate receives Trumps blessing and gives Trump clemency.

I also have been wondering what the race will look like in six months, when all this speculation about Trump’s trials (and potential prison time?) will be upon us for real.

Legally (so far at least) they say Trump can run from prison. If he were to win, as POTUS he’d have many options available to clear his name, dismiss his accusers, and attack his opponents.

I don’t think Trump will give another candidate his endorsement, even from prison. If he does, it won’t be without that other candidate publicly swearing fealty and promising to grant clemency, as you say. The way I see it, any candidate who’d be willing to do that will look weak and subservient, and probably look worse than Trump’s going to look, even from prison, by the time they get to the general election.

I think the only way another candidate wins the GOP nomination is by taking it from Trump – not by Trump lending it out to them.

A pastor usually leads a Protestant church. Catholic churches are led by priests.

Confession of sins to (God though) a priest is a rite in the Catholic church, but not in Protestant churches. Protestant churches often encourage members to ask forgiveness for their sins directly to God through prayer.

There are more Catholics than protestants in the world, but there are more protestants than Catholics in the U.S. The type of Christianity most often associated with socially conservative Republican/MAGA primary voters is Protestant “evangelical” Christianity.

Evangelicals are a hardcore subset of Protestants who take the Bible literally. They’re sometimes called “Born-again Christians” because of their belief in the importance of personal conversion. That is, you’re not really a real Christian until, as an autonomous adult, you willingly choose to surrender yourself, mind body and soul, and devote your life to (your pastor’s teachings about) the teachings of Jesus.

Anyway, now I’ve done an eight-hours-later four-paragraph TED-talk riff on what is otherwise quite a fine and clever comment. I mean no offense and hope none is taken. I mostly just wanted to note that when Nikki Haley talks about “pastors,” she isn’t talking to Catholics; she’s talking directly to the GOP evangelical voter base.

As long as Cannon doesn’t start conducting the trial in a way that actually prevents Smith from winning that conviction, keeping her in place is in everybody’s best interest.

I’m pretty sure he tried, but institutions held and the military didn’t let him get away with it.

I think Gen. Mark Milley was on-guard against Trump’s antics (especially after he got tricked into appearing in uniform with Trump for that upside-down Bible photo-op) and that through the end of Trump’s term, Milley stood firmly against use of the military against civilians or for political purposes.

But if Trump really were to be elected again, who will be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under his new administration?

Jack Smith does not want to remove Cannon. Or he shouldn’t at least. Not at this point, anyway.

By far, the best possible outcome is still for Jack Smith to convict Donald Trump in Aileen Cannon’s Florida courtroom. As long as Cannon doesn’t start conducting the trial in a way that actually prevents Smith from winning that conviction, keeping her in place is in everybody’s best interest.

This morning’s (11/07/'23) headlines are all about how Trump verbally attacked the judge in his fraud trial in New York yesterday. Trump has repeatedly accused Judge Engoron of being partisan and biased, to the press and now in his sworn testimony. MAGA eats that shit up. The more Trump looks like a victim to them, the more riled up they get in his defense.

It seems to me that “The Case of the Stolen Nuclear Secrets” is going to be much simpler and easier for people to understand than “The Case of Strategically Shifting the Valuation of Heavily Leveraged Real Estate Properties for Various Tax and Loan Purposes.” Considering even just the evidence that has already been made public in this case (photos of boxes of classified documents haphazardly stacked in a spare bathroom; audio recordings of Trump bragging that he shouldn’t be sharing a classified brief he’d illegally kept) the chances of a conviction are strong.

If Trump gets convicted by a jury in a Florida courtroom run by so seemingly biased a judge as Cannon, it’s going to be a lot harder for him to claim it’s all rigged against him by the Democrats. It’s going to be a whole lot harder to work that conviction into the whole victimhood narrative that Trump is currently thriving on.

Trump did not win all 50 states in the GOP primaries. In 2016. Cruz won Texas and a handful of other Midwestern and non-coastal western states; Kasich won his home state of Ohio, and Marco Rubio won in Minnesota.

In 2020, in some states, the GOP didn’t even bother holding primaries or caucuses. States like Kansas, Nevada, SC, cancelled public voting in primaries and caucuses after the RNC pledged its undivided support to Trump in back February of that year. So Trump didn’t really “win” primaries in “all 50 states” in 2020 either, because primaries were not held in all 50 states.

There have been rumors about this for months now. We already know Meadows has met with Jack Smith, and that Meadows’ testimony about his book was used in making the DoJ’s federal cases against Trump.

So why is this story breaking now? Why are the rumors about Meadows’ immunity suddenly newsworthy?

I think it’s because Meadows is getting ready to flip in the Georgia case, too. His immunity deal with the DoJ doesn’t help him at all if he gets convicted in Georgia.

Meadows was unable to move the RICO case to a federal court. Now Hall, Powell, Chesebro, and Ellis have all taken deals in Georgia. Those who flip first get the best deals, and I bet Meadows is looking to be looking to be number 5 out of 19.

There will be no going back from this for him, though. The next flip in the Georgia case will be just as public as the last four have been. It will be Meadows’ Michael Cohen moment. The point of no return.

It sounds like this Scott Graham Hall guy flipped on Sidney. So now who’s Sidney going to flip on?

She was in a lot of meetings with a lot of people, including Trump and Giuliani. I bet she has a lot to say about that.

Giant food stores in Mid-Atlantic US

There is a phone app, that pretty much allows you phone to work like the scanner gun. I’ve used it before and it works fine, but my phone’s camera is not as good as the guns at scanning barcodes.

Also, as much as I realize I am trading privacy for control, I figure there’s no need to have the grocery store’s app living on my phone, when it is just as easy for me to use the dedicated device they provide in-store.

In the produce section, they have scales that print out barcoded price stickers. I look up the item I’m weighing (or enter the PLU) and it gives me a sticker I can scan.

In the bakery section, where you can pick out individual muffins or donuts, they have barcodes printed on the self-service case above each item. I can just scan the barcode for whatever I take.

(I do also have the option of checking things out at the end, if I didn’t scan them with the gun.)

==

EDIT to Add:

Ironically, the only time I remember taking something from that store without paying for it was a time that my self-scanned order had been flagged for an audit. I was trying to buy a watermelon on sale, but the sale price didn’t come up when I scanned it, so I set it aside to figure out at checkout.

When I got to checkout, my order was flagged for an audit. (Maybe even precisely because I had scanned the watermelon but then removed it from my cart when it came up at the wrong price.)

The guy running the self-checkout saw the flashing light at my register. Without comment, he came over to perform the ritual of scanning the certain number of items in my cart to reset the transaction and allow me to pay and be on my way. He and I had both been through this procedure many times. He probably performed it several times each shift he worked there.

I was distracted by the audit, however, and I forgot about the watermelon. When he scanned enough items and punched in his code, the register came up with my total and asked me how I was going to pay. I stuck in my credit card, clicked “yes” to the transaction amount, and made my way out of the store with a pilfered watermelon.

The grocery store I shop at has handheld scanner guns for customer use. I check out a gun by scanning my loyalty card, then make my way around the store, scanning each item as I put it in my cart. When I’m done, the handheld scanner displays a barcode that I scan at the self-checkout scanner. My entire order shows up on the screen there, along with the total cost. I pay, take my receipt, and head out to the parking lot.

I like scanner-gun shopping a lot. I like it because it’s efficient, but also because it puts me in control. I can see the real price of everything I take off the shelf, in real-time. If something doesn’t ring up at the price it’s marked, I know instantly. The device keeps a running total as I shop.

Most days, my entire grocery experience involves no direct interaction with any store employee whatsoever, except maybe to exchange pleasantries with a stockperson. I do 100% of the work of checking myself out. I imagine the money the store saves on me in labor might make up for a lot of the money it loses in shrink.

But the store gets something else from my use of its scan-as-you-shop service. It gets to collect a huge amount of data on the way I shop. Not only does it record everything I buy, but it knows when and where I buy it. It knows the patterns of how I move through the store. It can compare my patterns to the patterns of all the other shoppers who use store scanner guns. It can analyze these patterns for useful information about everything from store layout to shoplifting mitigation.

One of the ways the store mitigates shrink from scanner gun shoppers who might accidentally “forget” to scan an item they put in their cart is point-of-sale audits. Not usually, but every so often and on a regular basis, my order will be flagged for an audit when I go to check out. When this happens, the cashier running the self-checkout area has to come over and scan a certain number of items in my cart, to make sure they were all included in my bill.

My main point in all of this was to offer a narrative that runs counter to the narrative I picked up from the article. I prefer to have more control over my checkout experience, and I will willingly choose to surrender personal information about my shopping habits and check-out procedures in order to gain that control, every chance I get.

Trump became a god to that entire swath of willfully ignorant racist Americans, way back when he first attacked sitting President Obama for not being an American citizen.

Trump used the same tactic against Obama that he always uses. The same tactic he perfected in all his ridiculously public feuds with people like Rosie O’Donnell. It’s simple: The more audacious the accusation, the more press coverage it gets. The bigger the lie, the more it gets repeated.

In a certain way, I still think of the entire MAGA movement as payback for America electing a Black man to be President in 2008. And I’m still shocked to think even before 2008, there must have always been that much anger and hate and fear there, among my fellow Americans. But the hate was quieter before Trump, and easier not to see unless you were looking for it.

But that’s why I think Trump is so much more dangerous than DeSantis, or any other wannabe strongman autocrat). Trump’s already tapped into all that pent-up American hate years ago, and Trump’s completely owned it ever since. As demonstrated countless times already, he controls that hate and can use it to make his followers do or say literally anything.

How can Tuberville hold up all these nominations, all by himself? I had to look it up. The way Senate rules work, they figure out nomination approvals in committee and then pass them on the floor with votes of “unanimous consent.” By withholding his consent, Tuberville forces all the committee work to be done on the floor of the Senate.

That is to say, he is hijacking the nomination approval process. This process has developed and become institutionalized in the Senate over many decades. Tuberville is hijacking this process for a largely unpopular, far-right political purpose that is, at best, only tangentially related to the services with vacant leadership positions, and that is in no way related to the actual nominations in question.

Ironically, perhaps, the reason this glitch in the Senate rules allows one person to hold up all the nominations for everyone is itself just another institution. Senate “holds” have been around for decades as well. It wasn’t until 2011 the that a bi-partisan group of Senators voted to change the rules to disallow “secret holds.”

So Tuberville is exploiting one Senate institution in order to shut down another Senate institution, just to generate propaganda for his federally mandated forced-birth agenda.

It’s like an echo of Gingrich in the '90s: It’s like he’s saying, “The interests of the people who elected me are more righteous than the interests of the people who elected all the rest of you all, so there will be no compromise from me on anything. We will run things my way or I’ll use my position to shut it all down.”

The only difference is that Gingrich shut down all the post offices for a few weeks. This asshole Tuberville is trying to shut down our military.

EDIT:

Maybe this could be McConnell’s saving-grace swan song, before he gives up his GOP leadership position in the Senate. As the leader of Tuberville’s party, I’m pretty sure rules allow him to end the hold that Tuberville requested.

Doing so would go against precedent and it would go against the spirit of the institution. But Mitch McConnell is no stranger to going against precedent and disregarding institutions when he thinks it serves his purpose.

It wouldn’t earn him much forgiveness from people like me, but it would make him look a little better on his way out.