What?

"A certain faction"? More than one faction, I think. I have my own strong opinions about which factions are worse, and yes there ARE better and worse factions... but there sure as hell isn't just one or even just two.

But none of this is about the rights of parents of whatever stripe. It's about the rights of the children, who are their own human beings and deserve to fully grow into their independence. And who are capable of sorting through a whole hell of a lot more than adults give them credit for, especially if you help them out a bit.

Your kid seeing a drag show isn't going to turn them gay. Somebody blathering the "good news" at your kid isn't going to turn them into a Jesus freak. NOTHING is going to influence your kid like that unless they get a LOT of it CONSTANTLY, AND been sheltered to the point where they never hear it challenged. The vulnerable kids are the ones who've never been asked to choose between real alternatives, never heard one adult contradict something another adult has told them, never been exposed to anything but indoctrination, never been given any critical thinking tools, never been taught to recognize when somebody's trying to persuade them, never really been allowed to question anything important, and have no resistance.

And even then they often get over it. You can brainwash a kid if you try hard enough, but it's a full time job and it's not results are not guaranteed.

The thing people really worry about is not kids getting other people's weird shit "shoved down their throats". It's that being exposed to the idea that there is weird shit out there might get their kids thinking about whether their OWN indoctrination falls into that category.

I think the FSB theory is even less credible than the "random drunks" theory. If you're Putin, you don't really want to make your statement in Moore County, North Carolina, and you're sure not going to destabilize the US by shutting down Moore County. And Putin loves sending messages. If he'd ordered it, it would have been intentionally obvious, and then he would immediately have issued an equally obvious bullshit denial.

As for the MAGA/Jesus types hitting the grid, I'm not saying they did, because there are plenty of other possibilities.

But you could imagine that they might have wanted to shut down the show from far enough away that they could avoid being noticed. They might have feared they'd be seen and even recognized if they came close to the building, in the middle of town with a lot of people around and at least some of those people on their guard against them personally.

And/or, as long as I'm making stuff up wildly, I could imagine they might have had military training that (1) suggested substations as targets, because they're effective military targets, and (2) didn't deal with the risk of getting caught by law enforcement, because the FBI doesn't typically isn't methodically tracking you in war zones. If they followed that training without independent thought-- and independent thought isn't one of their well known strong points-- then they might have done exactly what they did. They might not even have really been clear about how LONG they were going to shut down the power. It's not what they would have done if they'd been trained as INFILTRATORS, of course.

Or I can spin even more random stories. They could have wanted to do something bigger than the theater to make a point, or a threat, or even make other people believe that the judgement of God truly was coming down. Their Fearless Leader tweeted something that was technically not an admission and technically didn't claim "credit"... but sure kind of sounded like an admission and a claim of credit. Then she walked it back with "The Lord works in mysterious ways", which was just KIND of plausible because she's a known religious nut and what she'd tweeted just happened to also admit that interpretation. You could imagine that that whole show was designed to create fear of crossing her and her group, but in a plausibly deniable way. Almost Putin-like, but aimed more to create uncertainty and less to assert power by daring others to challenge the lie. She WAS a PSYOPS officer.

Of course, to come up with that plan, she'd have to be totally ignorant of how thoroughly law enforcement can crawl up your ass when it's a priority for them... but law enforcement's full capabilities are something she COULD plausibly be ignorant about.

Point being we don't know, and it could have been anybody, and I could make up these stories all night long, but if I were the cops I'd be keeping those people in mind as suspects (while going over the whole place with a fine-toothed comb). And I don't think I'd be suspecting the FSB unless something fell in my lap to point to them.

If he was in a position to make sketchy business deals, it was on the sole basis that he is the Big Guy's...Little Guy. Why else would these companies / countries have any relation to a cracked out, dropped on his head attorney who would have rightly been dishonorably (had his name been anything other than Biden) discharged from the Navy (guess who commissioned him nine months prior) from Delaware, with absolutely no history or experience in the field of these businesses, or regions in which those companies operated? They wouldn't. The only reasonable answer is, at a minimum, these companies and countries wanted back door access to The Big Guy's office and influence, and they wanted to use Biden Jr to facilitate that end. The most probable explanation is he was tantamount to be installed on those boards by Big Guy himself, just like how papa got son his Navy job.

Go and get concrete information, for crying out loud. You can mostly look this stuff up and do some back of the hand calculations, but I'll spare you if you'll listen: to replace a typical whole home forced air heater with an air source heat pump / air handler setup is usually WELL above $5000, which might buy just the equipment. I mean, 5k dosent go far these days, and is just a little more than a qality single room mini-split setup installed by the homeowner, if they need to bring an electrician in to run another circuit but competently do everything else on their own. And that situation is a rarity. Factor in the good chance that an older home will need to have its whole service upgraded to put a whole home heat pump in, by the time you buy your permits and inspections and pay your trades you might well be into it for 20k+ for a modest house. Source? BTDT.

Regarding apartments: do you think an A/C fairy just up and descends from the heavens and bestows comfortable living conditions to the poor unwashed masses because you pile a few bodies under the same roof? Who do you think pays for that shit? The tenants pay for it one way or the next, pal. That's who. I suspect, like so many others, you also think the government just covers the tab for all of the entitlements your kind votes in, while simultaneously wondering WTF happened to make their property taxes so goddamned high.

Ugh. I can practically see your purple hair and smell your patchouli/hemp enhanced B.O. from here. I've always found 'UX' design people insufferable, and no wonder; the professional lexicon might as well have been lifted from an anthology of L. Ron Hubbard's later works.
Furthermore, those who noun verbs suffer from excremencephalawhisy* and should be dragged into the street and stoned, both for their own good and everyone elses'.

*excremencephalawhisy is the state of readily being able to fit one's head into their own anus, either through having an exceptionally small cranial cavity, or an exceptionally large anus.

Apple actually values privacy
They like to have that image, but I'm not much convinced about it. I think most likely, they simply abhor others vacuuming data off their cash cows.

I'm sorry but WTF. Is that normal in the USA? I have 2 credit cards, one is a work card for corporate expenses and the other is my bank's which gets used on booking.com and ... no I think just booking.com. Actually the only reason I got it is because you can't hire a car without a credit card.

For better or worse, yes. Certain stores have certain perks, cash back, etc. when you use the store card in that store. It's also impossible to get a sizable loan without extensive positive credit history (having a card that you never use counts as history), even if you always pay your bills. Some millionaires use credit so little that they're just as invisible to credit agencies as much poorer folk.

On time payments are a huge factor in your credit score, of course, but so is utilization, and average age of credit (how long you've kept accounts open). People who have many credit cards, (even if they don't use them) are hit significantly less for opening a new line of credit than those who have only one or two cards, ditto if they have a significant unexpected expense (more cards that you never use means lower utilization in such an event). Credit coaches will encourage people to periodically open new accounts for that reason. People with more cards also often pay less for insurance, as they use credit as part of their secret sauce in determining your rates.

Consider it part of the game. Successful people tend to have many open accounts, of which one or two which get used frequently and are paid off quickly. You want to look like one of them to algorithms / bankers.

What you're leaving out is that you pay a higher rate if you don't use the card with Apple Pay.

I left that out because it isn't true.

Objectively, it is true. With the apple card you get 3% back at certain retailers, 2% back when you use contact-less apple pay, and 1% back when you use the physical card or the virtual card in online purchases. It's only 1% difference, but it is 1% more money in your pocket than you'd otherwise have, all else being the same.
If I'm a seller of gew-gaws and do-dads and come up to you and said "If you don't lay on your back and spit up into the air, I'll charge you 1% more on your next transaction" and you decline to participate but still buy a do-dad from me, it's effectively the same difference.

Let's be honest, they could probably get more quick funding from the MIC by prototyping a Thunderscreech based Boom (can't lie about their name) Annoyatron-9000 drone fleet whose sole job is to inexpensively fly above hostile territory 24x7 and cause the enemy and any supporting civilian populations sleep deprivation and demoralization.
If it could somehow support Ukraine, they'd throw literal wheelbarrows full of cash at it.

You know, I'd be happy if I could just lay my grubby mitts on any kind of Raspberry Pi for a reasonable price. It seems the only options are to buy at 400% of the manufacturer's suggested price from a scalper (fuck that noise), or get lucky and find one somewhere in Europe and pay 2-4x of the previous going price when you factor in shipping, taxes, duties etc. etc. Slightly less offensive, but still too much trouble.

Get it right, friend. He tortured the puppies before murdering them.

Compulsory after work drinking with the boss. It's just a little less socially acceptable to get shitfaced whilst hanging around a vending machine.

If the growth is so flat, or even negative as you claim, perhaps you'd be inclined to explain how the population of Arizona has gone from 1.8 million in 1970 to 7.2 million in 2020, or how California has gone from 20 million to 40 million in the same time period, or why the growth curve for every other southwestern state looks just about the same as those two states? Maybe you'd like to explain how the general population of the USA from 200 million in 1970 to 330 million today?
All of those additional mouths need fed and watered.

Fluoroquinolones are a wonderful thing.
They are, in that they can wreck some really nasty infections that could otherwise kill you. They're also quite good at wrecking the human body. Tendon ruptures, aortic aneurysm, detached retinas, mitochondria malfunction; the list goes on and on, lots of fun and not terribly uncommon side effects come along with those drugs, and remarkably, a surprising number of physicians aren't aware of it.

it's all the globetrotting anti-vaxers and ultra-maga religious mega-conservatives fault // it's never muh precious illegal immigrants importing diseases long since eradicated in the first-world (paraphrasing)

An interesting claim, but I don't think it's rooted in reality. The guy in charge of the border says at least 20% come with a disease. That was at a time, by the by, wherein Mexico was blocking the migrant caravans for us at various stages of their journey--something which they are no longer doing.

Secondly, a great number of these illegal immigrants originate outside of Mexico. We have people coming in through from every remote village of south and central America, Caribbean islanders, remarkably, even people from western Asia are coming to Mexico and hoofing it to the border. Many have never seen any kind of decent medical care outside of the village witch-doctor or maybe a Christian religious mission which included some vaccinations. Even among the illegals which have been inoculated, many have not have had the full spectrum of inoculations simply because various diseases aren't prevalent in their home regions. (these people are tacitly pro-open border BTW)