2018-06-19

stormdog: a woman with light skin and long brown hair that cascades over one shoulder. On her other side, she is holding a large plush shark against herself. She has pink fingernails and pink cat eye glasses (Default)
2018-06-19 08:12 am
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(no subject)

I'm using the spare room in the condo for both the large clothes drying rack I snagged from the garbage (because why pay for clothes drying, put additional wear on clothing, and use unnecessary energy when I don't have to?) and now for bike work. My work stand folks up nicely and goes in the closet when I don't need it.

I found the nasty little piece of glass that had worked through the tire and got it out. It was mostly embedded in the tire so I had to work at it with pliers from both the inside and outside. I tried to patch the inner tube too, but I had apparently forgotten how to it correctly and failed. I put my spare in instead and will need to buy a new spare. (I read some tutorials about it later and realized what I was doing wrong for next time.) I put the new grips on the handlebars too. Wrestling the old ones off was so difficult that I ended up using a utility knife to just cut the second one into pieces. The new ones went on a little more easily, though still with great effort. I had to cut them shorter to make them fit in blatant disregard of the safety warnings to only allow competent mechanics to install them and to never modify bicycle components. If you never hear from me again because I was killed by improperly mounted and modified bicycle hand grips, my love goes to you all.

I had a nice ride to work today with a tailwind, that near-mythical creature, with me almost the whole way. I also tried a minor diversion near the end to avoid a bridge with heavy traffic and uneven road where it's joined with the roadway and will be going that way in the future.
stormdog: a woman with light skin and long brown hair that cascades over one shoulder. On her other side, she is holding a large plush shark against herself. She has pink fingernails and pink cat eye glasses (Default)
2018-06-19 09:37 am
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(no subject)

Regarding the separation of families at the border:

"“I don’t know how this could be justified either legally or morally,” said Napolitano, who led the Department of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2013 during the Obama administration. “The notion that you’re going to somehow create a deterrent to illegal immigration through this kind of policy – we’ve seen this before and it just doesn’t work. And it’s cruel.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/19/janet-napolitano-family-separations-653306

I agree. The things is, while this kind of deterrent doesn't work, deterrent policies contingent on high risk of death have been in place for some time. This podcast series talks about the fact that funneling illegal immigrants though dangerous land where some significant number will die is intentional. A government report noted that one metric of program success is an increased number of illegal immigrants dying in the desert.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/border-trilogy-part-1/

I'm not saying these things are directly comparable. Just that immigration policy has been morally bankrupt for a long time. This is just a new kind of moral bankruptcy.