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flatdawgs

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by flatdawgs

  1. That game was quite CONCACAFy. Fortunately, for a competition of this magnitude, they got the very best officials from (checks notes) Jamaica and Trinidad for this match. Still enjoyed attending. (I actually always enjoy the international matchups, and the Sounders have a decent record against Liga MX sides.)
  2. haha no, they're too smart for that. Mom actually looked into in many years ago and even she didn't qualify. Pity, though - I love Denmark.
  3. Birthright citizenship hasn't always been sacrosanct - it's been taken away from various out groups at various times. In doing some genealogical research I came across a naturalization certificate for my great-grandmother. The hell? I knew her; knew she had been born in Dundee, Illinois to American parents; knew she probably had never even left the country in her lifetime. It turns out that, due to the Expatriation Act of 1907, if an American woman married a foreign national she had to take his citizenship and forfeit her American citizenship (and no, of course it didn't work the other way). At the time there was no dual citizenship and there was a backlash against immigrants, which is somewhat of an American pastime. My great-grandfather was a Danish citizen who had not yet naturalized as an American, so she became a subject of the King of Denmark (apparently in his Spokanish Realm) and no longer an American. It wasn't until the 1930s that she was allowed to become an American citizen again - but only after having to go through the naturalization process. All that to say there is precedent for revoking birthright citizenship, and although Congress actually passed a law in that case, this SCOTUS seems to have no particular care for that sort of thing when it suits them.
  4. (partially cross-posted from 'quake thread) I was 30 miles from Mt St Helens the day it blew; everyone knew it was going to, it was just a matter of when. Dad took us down to see it one last time (it was a gorgeous, Fuji-like cone) and we camped with a tall ridge between us and it. The next morning when it blew, everyone on the other side of the ridge, the ridge that marked the exclusion zone, died. All we got was a lot of really warm ash, of which I still have a little jar. Those lahars and pyroclastic flows are scary as shit. There were 2 or 3 smaller but ashy eruptions after the big one; a town called Ritzville (narrator: it isn't that, at all) about an hour west of Spokane got 10+ inches of the stuff. Later that summer I went to stay with my older brother, fresh out of the Army and living in Lewiston, ID working as an air traffic controller, and the ash was still piled up in drifts across Eastern Washington when I rode the grey dog over to visit.
  5. Yep and yep - in Seattle and a lahar is much less frightening than Nicole near a lake (of which we have a few here). OTOH, I'd hate to be a bad host to out-of-town guests. I've had a good run.... (correct about a lahar; it'll never come anywhere near where I am. Humongous earthquakes are much more, uh, interesting to me.) I was 30 miles from Mt St Helens the day it blew; everyone knew it was going to, it was just a matter of when. Dad took us down to see it one last time (it was a gorgeous, Fuji-like cone) and we camped with a tall ridge between us and it. The next morning when it blew, everyone on the other side of the ridge, the ridge that marked the exclusion zone, died. All we got was a lot of really warm ash. Those lahars and pyroclastic flows are scary as shit. /csb
  6. And here I thought it was all y'all who lived in the middle of nowhere... 😉 (this very large lake next to me, where there has been a paucity of bodies found over the years, has a large underwater forest that was dumped into it by the 1700 mega quake. So, ya know, we're just waiting. Warn everyone. Most of my friends here nowadays already seem to be Texans.)
  7. Jeez, Nicole, I'm right here. Stop scaring me. And anyway, there's a big ass lake just down the street from me, miles closer than Mt Rainier, so... oh shit....
  8. Vai pro caralho, laranjão safado! Foda-se essa merda.
  9. I don't disagree with you; I want to see the rot within the system completely and utterly excised. I personally don't believe that can happen through reconciliation but will take some hard lessons being learned. American history does not show that we will do anything other than "forgive and forget" however, and right now I see no signs that will change. My hope otherwise is in the youth of the party. We shall see. Regarding your first point - this all has happened before. Many, many lawful Hispanic residents - including no small number of citizens - were driven out of the US in the 1930s (the "Mexican Repatriation"); estimates are anywhere between 200,000 and 3 million people. Loss of birthright citizenship? Oh yeah, we've done that too. My great-grandmother, born in Illinois to American citizens and who probably never left the country in her life, lost her US citizenship because she married a foreign national who had not (yet) naturalized. Yep, that was the law in the 1920s if you were a woman. She had to go through the naturalization process later, same as any alien; I have her naturalization papers. What is happening today feels different to us because in our lifetimes nothing like this has ever happened, but in the long, often ugly and usually xenophobic history of the USA we've always managed to be complete and total shitbags to some part of the population (and no, we're certainly not alone there, then or now). Stephen Miller and his ilk - why, they can eat a giant bag of muledicks. I hear the mini-mart down at the Esso station might have some, if they hang around long enough.
  10. Deserved or no, highly unlikely. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission is probably the most that can be hoped for, and even that's probably not in the cards. Americans, sometimes for better, often for worse, are a forgiving people who (as you know as well as anyone) tend neither to look to the past nor to learn any lessons from it.
  11. Saw that IRL yesterday. It's on one of the monorail support pillars in downtown Seattle.
  12. Yes, and closed nearly all of them in 1935 as they had served their re-education purpose; i.e. putting fear into the hearts of the opposition that still remained. ("Moorsoldaten"/"Peat Bog Soldiers" is a song by and about those held there then). They ramped them up again a couple of years later for other even more evil purposes, later building the death camps as well. (so yes, things can become a very steep and slippery slope.)
  13. It also ends in Rwanda, the Khmer killing fields, and a bunch of other heinous shit. Dealer's choice.
  14. The bigger issue is the continued use of the bug/vermin metaphor, particularly coming from those in power. That sort of thing traditionally ends in very, very dark places.
  15. I don't wish harm or death to anybody. However, there are a lot of obituaries that I devoutly wish to live long enough to read.
  16. Sandpoint's a nice town, beautiful surroundings. Buddy grew up and has a lake house about 45 minutes away, on the WA side of the border (headed over there in a couple of weeks). Priest River and up towards Priest Lake is where you'll find a lot more of the white supremacist crowd (and Bonners Ferry, as you mentioned). Oddly enough, Pend Oreille county on the WA side is certainly very conservative but not quite the same vibe as across the river; I've enjoyed visits to the tiny county fair and other community events there. It's probably because it's close enough to Spokane to get the weekender lake house people. (If you’re ever in Usk, you owe it to yourself to stop by Mellany's for a shockingly good meal made by the kindest people you'll ever meet.)
  17. And Oregon (Bundy/Malheur), and California, and... well, pretty much everywhere in the country, particularly those places where there is actually wilderness left to hide in/around.
  18. Yes, very much so - although the people of CdA itself have fought back successfully against some of these groups via the courts.
  19. Check Spokane media (KREM TV, etc.) - they are the largest city near Coeur d'Alene and will have live coverage. Kootenai County sheriff live press conference right now. Two dead, "many" injured. I know this area a bit; my parents were married in CdA.
  20. Yeah, there's been a movement here (Seattle) to switch to even years; the state lege forced all municipalities into off-year elections in 1969, so both municipal and state law would need to change. Turnout in off years even in a vote by mail state like WA is about half of even-year elections. That said, terms would be shortened by a year at the bridge rather than adding an extra year as Miami is doing. Oh well, at least we're going to ranked-choice primaries in two years.
  21. 30-35% +/- is baseline in most countries; it's the fact that we have a two-party system that exacerbates it (Portugal's far-right Chega party, for example, took 35% in last month's elections but they did not take power as the other two major parties locked them out; similar percentages are found in recent elections from France to Brasil). Not great, but certainly not an outlier.
  22. Spokane is a purply-bluish city (fun fact: Democratic Speaker of the House Tom Foley represented Spokane's congressional district, albeit 40 years ago; much more recently the state House speaker was a Democrat from Spokane). That said, 5 miles out of town in any direction and you hear banjos; 10 to the east and you're in northern Idaho. Every year some Republican backbencher from the area floats secession from the state; this year they kind of gave up on that and now are onto "autonomous region", meaning "we don't want you to tell us what to do, but please keep sending us that sweet, sweet tax money to pay for all of our services." So - hell yeah, Spokane!
  23. Well, that was post-Balfour, which came from that imperial British genius of promising everything to everyone, all at once.
  24. David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace is a great read on the topic, although at 35 years old or so it's not fully up to date. That said it's a very good survey on the end of the Ottoman Empire from the Young Turk movement pre-WWI to Ataturk; the effect of the war on Türkiye, the Levant, and Palestine; and the creation of the modern Middle East.
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