Some of us have had Cascadia dreams. The problem is that Canada has its own issues and is on the same oozing, shambling drift towards fascist autocracy.

But yeah, the problem is that the US is a big pastiche of purple, and we can't even tell how much of the red side is pressured by peer pressure and the colossal far-right-wing propaganda machine that features the most popular media offerings in the nation. Huge swaths of people are literally being mind controlled, and no-one is addressing this. (On a related note, we keep allowing more loopholes to allow gambling outside Nevada and Georgia, not to mention have failed to criminalize lootboxes)

The US isn't even trying to be democratic and hasn't for decades, which is how seventy seven million people, many of them low-information voters, voted for the guy who campaigned on a fascist autocratic coup d'etat.

That is to say once we finally unseat President Donald J. Trump, we should get ready for a Pete Townshend scream:

Meet the new boss!
Same as the old boss!

The Heritage Foundation is a society of monarchists. It's supported by oligarchs who want to be king to push the world towards that agenda, and such oligarchs routinely infuse it with capital.

Do we know it was a pure tourist visit and they could choose the location? Many state departments are already flagging the US with a state instability warning if not no-go, so I'd assume she (or the husband) was here on business, or because there were circumstances that pushed them.

To be fair, NYC is pretty blue, it's just the NYPD that has been for decades a threat to the people, especially nonwhites, with Bloomberg's mayorship taking much of the blame.

3000 abductions a day is the ICE quota. They just want warm (non-white) bodies.

I've come to assume We're in danger from the state is the theme of this year's pride.

Bring a brick.

Whenever I see memes based on this comic, I remember the original and the creepy squicky feelings come right back.

These days, the best thing to be armed with when drama happens is a camera. Preferably with a tripod, a good zoom and a shotgun mic, but that is typically a big ask.

You should never feel bad for laziness. In fact the notion of laziness or sloth is a device by industrial authorities to press more work out of an already beleaguered labor force.¹

We've seen how it goes during the 2020 epidemic lockdown and furlough: most people couldn't couch potato for a week and turned to hobbies, enough of which were monetizable enough to cause the great resignation and give us a moment of elevated ground-floor wages. The rest of us suffer from avolition, a symptom of major depression (or a number of other potential diagnoses).

Industrialists (and churches and civil officials) fail to recognize that the drive for profit to upper management and shareholders has made a lot of work environments toxic. Most of us who work are overworked, underpaid, and poorly treated by management, if not also dealing with bully coworkers, pollution from industry without adequate PPE, safety hazards and oppressive work conditions. Our capitalist masters could treat workers well, and even would see a productivity surge worth the additional cost, and yet they still crunch in the video game industry, and overtask rather than running a high-morale clerical pool with slight redundancy (where the task list is always short).

I was lazy enough in my career as a victim of major depression to sleep for about nine months (getting up only to eat or excrete), I am a pro at couch potatoing. Granted, it's not good for me to go without some contact outside, but I'll happily do it. In the meantime, when I was forced to work in late 1980s clerical pool conditions, it drove me to suicide, and typical conditions are even worse today.

Laziness is a product of slave drivers or mental health disorders. If you're feeling too tired to get work done, it means it's time to take a break. Don't worry, if you're mentally fit, you'll be on task again.

¹ Though my sin nun explained the cardinal sin of Sloth as avolition specifically to engage in the work your faith calls for (e.g. feeding the poor, housing the stranger and the transient, healing the sick, etc.) If you have energy to engage in costly signalling and praying loudly in public, but don't mind the unfortunate, then you're engaging in the cardinal sin -- according to a cloistered nun I called for tech support.

We're pretty sure it's the Monsanto pesticide and anyone who suggests it is hit with a litigation threat. Curiously, as we're speed-breeding domesticated bees the wild bees are dying out faster, so as the bee population dwindles it also becomes more domesticated and less wild. I know that's a bad thing, but I am fuzzy on the why details.

I'm a brown thumb, and plants wilt as my shadow falls on them, but if you're a green-thumb, plant pollinators, which will help the bees.

Also plant milkweed for the monarchs.

In the aughts, once the US torture programs started getting public attention around 2003, I did my obsessive thing on the German Reich and the Holocaust.

During Operation Barbarossa, the SS was experimenting with eradication methods. The most common was the pogrom, endorsing the locals to massacre the undesirables. When they weren't undesirable enough or it was the whole village, the einsatzgruppen (death squads) had to come do it, usually forcing them to dig a mass grave and then executing them along the side.

It was messy and brutal and gross, and there was high turnover among the death squads (the US has a similar problem with its combat drone operators). And this was a major problem.

The SS experimented with other ideas, including deathwagons that would pipe the vehicle's exhaust into an enclosed chamber to kill dozens at a time, but even that was too harsh and too slow.

This is how the prototype genocide machine was made at Auschwitz. The program was contrived so no one who interacted with the live prisoners also interacted with the dead corpses. The guy who pushed the execute button was two persons removed in the chain of command from the guy who signed off on the execution order, and none of those people had to face the prisoners or the outcome. The point specifically was to make the process of massacre less stressful for the people involved.

Once the Miserables found themselves outvoted in the Estates General of 1789 by about 3% of the population (the ones with money), it became very uncomfortable in France for aristocrats.

Just saying,

My (unpopular?) solution is to make sure the rest of society isn't so desperate for food that they're willing to rob a robot.

In an unrelated suggestion, if youre in a grocery store and see someone stealing food, no you didn't.