No. Katrina was a colossal fuck-up for Bush. His aides had to make a DVD of the news coverage to get him to realize the severity of the situation and that he needed to deploy significant resources. It was a huge embarrassment for the administration.

And then several Republicans in Congress were questioning whether the city should be rebuilt at all. People had to sit them down and explain that it’s important to have a port that basically every navigable river east of the Rocky Mountains is a tributary and the Port of New Orleans is critical national infrastructure. A lot of agricultural exports go through it. It was so stupid.

There were mistakes by the mayor and governor but a lot of the federal government was just oblivious (aside from the Coast Guard, who saved hundreds, if not thousands of stranded people.) And that’s just New Orleans. Katrina was massively wide and Mississippi and Alabama were having issues too.

You can give your info to the registrar and then make it anonymous to whois domain.tld searches so it’s not public. Cloudflare is the registrar I use these days because it’s a one-stop shop and used the company address but, at least in the U.S., they need your info for both credit/debit card processing. (Processing fees are cheaper the more info they provide but usually any address with the same zip code is enough.)

If you have nefarious plans, I don’t have a good recommendation. But if it’s just about privacy, I don’t know if it’s really possible to be completely anonymous anyway. I guess you could use a gift card or something but at least in the U.S., if you own or buy a house, your address is public info already anyway. Shit, city hall will probably give you blueprints of any house.

We did that in New Orleans for confederate traitors and everyone under 60 adjusted within a few weeks. Older people still fuck it up but whatever. You forgive grandparents for calling street names by the wrong name. They call half the buildings in the city some name I never even heard of because it changed before I was born. And the building names aren’t even offensive. It’s just whatever company owned it in 1970 to them.

There should probably be a tax on anything that can be described as “ultra-orthodox” of any kind. I’m not a theologian but I’m pretty sure the concept of “plastic” isn’t banned in any faith tradition’s holy book.

Tariffs basically never help except in a few select situations. For instance, “infant industry” situations where a country needs time to scale up some industry and there’s real promise that once they do, it’ll be competitive. If a country is trying to corner some critical market by dumping, targeted tariffs can be smart. But mostly, tariffs are stupid.

There’s a legit national security argument for steel and probably aluminum but a better solution for materials used to make things would be to just subsidize those companies for domestic sales so you don’t screw over every industry that uses them. Steel definitely isn’t an infant industry. We have the technology.

An even better solution is to not piss off all your most reliable allies and trading partners. But I guess that cat’s out the bag.

I’m not saying they’re not an annoyance sometimes. But they’ve been in Louisiana (possibly a different species as ours are fully black in color with the same big orange noses). But we have termites, mosquitos, and probably everything else. And the birds, lizards, frogs, etc. have learned to eat them so they probably keep the population in better balance than if they were new to town.

They’re pollinators that don’t sting, bite, or eat your house. They’re not locusts that ruin the harvest or whatever. And in Spring/Summer, it rains basically every day here around 4pm. That probably mostly cleans them off cars and stuff. They’re just part of the ecosystem. If you want birds, you need bugs.

For real. Love bugs are harmless and kind of cute. The main problem is that if you drove anywhere when it was mating season, you had to get a car wash. As bugs go, they were amongst the least annoying. I don’t want to call them “the best” bugs because some butterflies and lightning bugs are pretty cool but love bugs don’t care about us and we don’t care about them. They don’t bite or try to get in your house and birds and other animals have a feast.

They might be the best behaved bugs. They’re just trying to get their freak on.

I think it requires 60 votes to overrule the parliamentarian. They just want to make a show of it.

Not anywhere close, in my opinion. People have these ideas that only right wingers have guns and red state vs. blue state but my conservative relatives who live in the country and hunt are afraid to go to cities. They ask me all the time if I’m nervous living in one and there’s a school bus stop by my house where kids get dropped off.

A related point is that in the last Civil War, there was a somewhat blurry but pretty clear regional divide. Now, it’s an urban vs. rural divide. I live in Orleans Parish (aka county) in Louisiana and we went 82% for Harris/Waltz, roughly the same as Manhattan. I’m pretty sure California had more Trump voters than Texas. If a gun brawl breaks out, it’s going be local and contained.

Also, what’s Meal Team Six gonna do in a real battle? Most Trump voters are like 60+ years old and watch Fox News all day. Nobody wants the smoke.

It’s just WeChat. It’s basically like Venmo. It’s been that way for awhile. Even rural farmer’s markets and street vendors and stuff took WeChat last time I went and that was 7 or so years ago. It’s not a digital currency.

It should be noted that WeChat is very much more expansive in China than in the West where it’s just a chat app. An American friend lived there for awhile for work reasons so I’d go visit her. My WeChat was just a chat app and hers was the “everything app” Elon Musk dreams of making X into. (Which I seriously doubt will work in America because we have different apps that do all that. China didn’t and WeChat filled the void.)

Hey, they stole that idea from centrists!

Rolling Stone has been doing surprisingly good work too. I don’t know how Teen Vogue and Rolling Stone became more reliable than all the other legacy media but come the fuck on. I guess they just had to reinvent themselves sooner because of their younger readership but I don’t know.

For non-Americans and you’re wondering about bias, they lean left but in a youth way and not a “we’re trying to spread Marxism” way. They’re just able to say, “Fuck that old bigot.” and that’s kind of the real divide in the country right now. But they were rarely overtly political when I was young.

Vote blue no matter who, you centrist assholes.

What job has he ever had that wasn’t funded by taxpayers? He was a football coach at public colleges and is now a Senator. And he lost to Vanderbilt.

We keep acting like Netanyahu isn’t going to jail as soon as there’s no war. He’ll bomb the Seychelles before he goes to jail.

They act like the mayor of NYC rules with an iron fist when there’s a whole city council and even borough presidents and shit. I don’t live there and don’t know the local political structure well but I’m pretty sure mayors can’t just make decrees and have them be binding law.

Has someone told him where his house is?

Edit: I fixed some grammar.

Who even wants a Bill Clinton endorsement? I don’t live in NYC so it’s not something I’m going to have to deal with but who is thinking “Oh, the elderly sex pest endorsed him? That’s going to change my decision.”

I probably should have specified Los Alamos National Laboratory instead. It was definitely not a place I was authorized to be. I was just driving from Bandolier National Monument to Santa Fe. I’ve never been to Oak Ridge, Tennessee but I would hope someone stops me before I get to a transuranic element or something.

To be honest, I probably shouldn’t be around anything beyond iron. (I’m a star.)

I’d judge him but I once was forced to rent a car in France because of a strike and drove through what was definitely a total pedestrian/restaurant area because it was on a map as a road. It can happen if you’re an idiot with no sense of direction.

Also, Google Maps once tried to give me a shortcut through the Manhattan Project site in New Mexico. The security guard asked for ID and I gave him my driver’s license and he said, “Here’s what you’re gonna do. Go to that turnaround right there and never come back.”