@goodymade can’t remember exactly when/where I heard him say it, but I recall Billy Joel explaining himself no, the song doesn’t fit Allentown. He had Bethlehem in mind when he wrote it but didn’t want people to think it had anything at all to do with Jesus or religion.
Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???
If you’ve been a conservative all your life but what’s happening right now doesn’t feel right, trust your instincts. Trust your eyes and your ears. Take a break from right wing media. Talk to your friends. You know what’s right in your heart, and this isn’t it. It’s not too late.
If you’re not happy with recent events in this country, don’t bother screaming into the void of social media. Use that energy to let your Congressional Reps and Senators know. Email them. Call them. Demand they do their jobs.
Alex Pretti was a Minneapolis ICU nurse who spent his days caring for and saving others. Today, he was shot and killed by a Border Patrol Agent. Alex’s life was extinguished by state violence. We must tell the truth about what is happening.
My father warned us, “When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind.”
What we are witnessing now (masked raids, people taken without due process, vigilante, Gestapo, and slave patrol-like tactics normalized under the color of law) is a moral crisis.
Nonviolence demands more than outrage; it demands action.
Congress must dismantle ICE; enact just, humane immigration policies; and ensure implementation of the policies by people who honor the humanity of Black and Brown immigrants, respect those raising their voices in support of immigrants, and seek the safety of community.
The blood of those who are being kidnapped and unjustly killed by agents with impunity is not only on the hands of those who pull the trigger, but on every lawmaker and every court that has the power to intervene and chooses silence.
Creating the Beloved Community requires truth, accountability, and the courage to act before more lives are lost.
#Minneapolis #CallToAction #ShowUpCongress #BelovedCommunity
I impeached Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, those were my articles of impeachment that passed in the House of Representatives. I unapologetically believe in border security and deporting criminal illegal aliens and I support law enforcement.
However, I also unapologetically support the 2nd amendment.
Legally carrying a firearm is not the same as brandishing a firearm.
I support American’s 1st and 4th amendment rights.
There is nothing wrong with legally peacefully protesting and videoing.
MAGA, consider it like this.
We lost our minds when we watched Biden’s FBI track down and aggressively carry out home invasions and arrest on peaceful J6’ers who walked in the Capitol through open doors.
Imaging if one of our MAGA independent journalists or even just a MAGA supporter stood in the street outside a J6’ers house while Biden’s FBI carried out a law enforcement operation, home invasion, and arrest.
Then Biden’s FBI goes to the MAGA guy videoing it all and shoves a woman with him to the ground and sprays them with bear spray then throws the MAGA guy to the ground as MAGA guy was trying to help the woman off the ground. Then Biden’s FBI beats MAGA guy on the ground, disarms MAGA guy, and then shoots him dead.
What would have been our reaction?
Both sides need to take off their political blinders.
You are all being incited into civil war, yet none of it solves any of the real problems that we all face, and tragically people are dying.
Our highest loyalty doesn’t belong to people or parties. It belongs to principles.
If you wouldn’t accept it from the “other side,” you shouldn’t accept it from yours.
Integrity is upholding your values even when your own group violates them.
Claiming to follow Jesus who was unjustly accused, arrested, and executed by the state, all with religious justification, and then passionately supporting the state without question as it aggressively goes after people has to be one of the most blatant contradictions in history.
The government's stated rationale for this killing is that the victim was carrying a legal firearm.
The very people that told us we need to accept mass child slaughter for the right to protect ourselves from scary Obama, now say the govt can kill you if you possess a weapon.
If there was ever a moment for libertarians and conservatives to step up and join the rest of us, we’re in it.
Americans have to unite and stop this descent from a freedom-loving nation into the kind of place where masked, militarized government agents are sent to politically noncompliant areas to roam the streets, terrorize civilians, and deploy violence with impunity.
So where are the Gadsden 2A musket bros now, when Americans are being shot in the street by roving government gangs? If you claim to oppose tyranny, this is your moment to show it. Liberty that stops at your enemies isn’t liberty at all. Wake up. Tyranny is here.
“Get it all on record now — get the films — get the witnesses — because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower, after visiting liberated concentration camps in April 1945
If the Second Amendment does not apply to this exact kind of moment, what do people think it is for?
A citizen can lawfully carry, see masked federal agents beating someone in public, move toward the scene to help, and then get erased with a hail of bullets because “he had a gun.”
That excuse is an insult in a country where possession is legal by design, where the whole point is that the public never becomes a disarmed audience watching state power operate with impunity.
I’m not interested in arguing frame-by-frame footage. I’m interested in the principle that a free people cannot accept a standard where lawful carry becomes a death sentence the second authority feels threatened.
If that is the standard, then the 2nd Amendment has been reduced to a vibe. The founders did not write it so Republicans could do militia cosplay on weekends.
To see the people who’ve spent years stockpiling weaponry for a potential faceoff with an overzealous government suddenly telling citizens to comply or die is certainly an experience.
The deadly shooting in Minneapolis today was a straight-up execution of a protester by Trump's federal brownshirts.
The thugs wrestled him to the ground. They pistol-whipped him, then shot him multiple times. They murdered him.
The videos don't lie. A man is dead, killed in cold blood. There is no conceivable justification for this intentional homicide. And make no mistake, that intentional, unjustified homicide was committed on behalf of Donald J. Trump.
Trump's militarization of Minneapolis and other parts of our nation isn't about illegal immigration. It's not about enhancing public safety. It's about destroying any sense of that safety—to intimidate political opponents, and to punish dissent. It's about a corrupt, out-of-control regime's effort to provoke citizens in order to justify the violence it desires to commit against them so that it can expand and retain its power.
That is fascism. It is tyranny. It is governmental criminality.
And the ultimate legal check the Framers of our Constitution provided to stop this kind of tyranny and criminality in the executive branch is impeachment and removal of the executive.
Congress needs to do its job.
Now.
Before it's too late.
It doesn’t make you a lib to be disgusted to see a man get murdered for practicing his first and second amendment rights. Blindly defending ICE because Trump and his administration tells you to makes you the opposite of a patriot and is as anti-American as it gets.