I need to call my Senators tomorrow. I have one from each party. I tell the ® how much the shutdown is hurting me and my entire extended family and tell them I want them to end the shutdown even if it means giving the Democrats everything they want. Then I call the (D) and tell them that I know they’re under pressure to end the shutdown but me and my entire extended family have talked it over and we really really need them to stand firm about Medicaid money and access, ACA premiums, food stamps access, etc.

It’s a fun game I’ve been playing every week, and I encourage y’all to join in!

That reminds me, I need to call my Senators. I have one from each party. I tell the ® how much the shutdown is hurting me and my entire extended family and tell them I want them to end the shutdown even if it means giving the Democrats everything they want. Then I call the (D) and tell them that I know they’re under pressure to end the shutdown but me and my entire extended family have talked it over and we really really need them to stand firm about Medicaid money and access, ACA premiums, food stamps access, etc.

It’s a fun game I’ve been playing every week, and I encourage y’all to join in!

All we want is voter ID, you go to a grocery store, you have to give ID, you go to a gas station, you give ID, but for voting, they want no voter ID.

A) I don’t need an ID for gas or groceries; B) Buying gas and groceries aren’t Constitutional Rights.

Overall, grocery prices have increased almost 30 percent in the last five years.

I’d’ve thought it was more than that.

Someone told him it was going to be overwhelmingly boring and everyone would report on his falling asleep. And what does it matter, when he owns the court anyway? Even if they rule against him, he’ll just continue breaking the law, saying the “ruling is unclear” or changing the word “tariffs” to the 'bribe the president fund" or something.

They claim they’re not sure where the money will come from and they didn’t want to break the law by pulling it from an unauthorized fund (despite there being a fund explicitly for this), yet they’ve had absolutely no problem committing multiple illegal acts every. Single. Day. since taking office.

“Trump, he’s had it with these people, because he knows they’re playing politics,”

Lmao.

Oh no, the would-be dictator got his little fee-fees hurt!

[cont]

And when one of their slaves became too ill or malnourished to work, there was a seemingly unending stream of other slaves to replace them.

End comments:

I don’t think I made it clear in my previous comment (and it’s up against the character limit, so I’m not going to go back and try to edit), that the camps inside Germany itself generally were intended as labor camps, with extermination as an eventual side-effect of the existing and incoming prisoners; and the camps outside Germany - particularly those in Poland - were established as extermination camps, with slave labor as a minor byproduct.

Also, my comment is obviously a vast, vast simplification of a process that developed over years.

And having finished my comment, I realize I went way beyond your original question, but IMO the slow development of oppression and extermination, as well as focusing beyond the Jewish people to the other six million who were murdered in the camps, is also of value. It’s why we need to focus on the groups currently being targeted by the government - not only immigrants and the trans community, but the LGBT+ community in general, the homeless, the disabled, etc. And yes, even the Democrats - the anti-Democrat language and propaganda being pumped out by the more extreme “news” channels and influencers is very similar to type of language that tends to precede civilian uprisings and ethnic cleansing against other segments of their population - see the massacres in Kosovo or Rwanda as an example.

When Hitler took power in 1933, he didn’t actually start with the Jews, & they weren’t kidnapped off the streets. The first concentration camp was at Dachau, & the first prisoners were political enemies - trade unionists (union organizers and members), Socialists & Communists. [Conveniently, not only were these groups Hitler’s political enemies, each was a group used to working with it’s own large membership to accomplish their goals; by imprisoning these people, Hitler not only neutered the political opposition, but he struck a heavy blow against civilian resistance as well.] Originally, they were simply arrested & disappeared, but yes, eventually the Gestapo became increasingly aggressive & did plain kidnappings.

Dachau was originally intended as a prison camp, but it needed to be expanded very quickly to accommodate all the newly arriving prisoners, & the ever-efficient Nazis (remember, they came to power because of the onerous penalties inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles, - the world was in the Great Depression, so the government really couldn’t afford to spend any money) decided the best way to build out the camp was to not-spend much money doing that. Instead of hiring outside workers (who might also bring out word of conditions in the camp, be inclined to transmit messages/contraband in & out of the camp, & potentially hear messages of solidarity from union workers), they decided to have the prisoners build out the camp instead. And why pay the prisoners, when they should be glad to be getting their lodging & food provided for them? The camps were destined to become slave labor camps.

Some companies, still in the throes of the Depression, & with some portion of their workforce now inside the camps & no immediate candidates to replace them, asked the German government if they could hire workers from the camps. The government agreed. The companies got cheap labor & stopped struggling in the Depression, the government got the money to spend on governing, & life improved for those outside the camps - you just had to ignore the camps & slaves themselves. And over time, other industrial-scale companies that didn’t have skilled workers in the camps turned to hiring other workers from the camps; if they didn’t they couldn’t compete in the marketplace.

Meanwhile, having neutered the political opposition, the Nazis started turning to “undesirables”. Even here, the immediate targets weren’t the Jews; the next targets were gypsies (Roma & Sinti), gay men, & Jehovah’s Witnesses, all of whom were thought to be “soiling” German civil society. Lesser targets who didn’t always end up in the camps included immigrants & the homeless; & later targets also included people with mental /physical disabilities, & in some cases just abnormalities (ie, dwarves).

Please note that I’m not saying that the Jews weren’t being targeted by the government & civilians, just that in the early days of the Hitler regime, those actions were a series of increasingly restrictive laws & increasingly-frequent/severe stochastic attacks encouraged by the government. However, Jews originally weren’t interned in the camps to the scale they were imprisoned later on; they were “encouraged” to emigrate. The major turning point against the German Jews is generally accepted as Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass), in 1938, five years after Hitler took power.

Remember that, in the 1930’s, the majority of formal political & economic organizing was done by men, so the majority of the original prisoners were also men. The government did imprison women & children, but not originally at the scale later seen, so the imprisoned women & children were a necessary burden to “cleanse” German society. It was only after Germany started World War II by invading Poland (1939), that things turned dire.

In the newly-occupied territories, yes, the occupying forces kidnapped & killed/imprisoned those suspected of being enemies of the Germans, or just against what Germans thought their society approved of. They established camps for those they targeted in occupied territories, & forced occupied Jews into ghettoes, which were eventually “liquidated” either directly (mass killings) or indirectly (the people in the ghettoes sent to camps).

The camps became a problem. Established quickly, there were too many people to properly feed or care for. Medical attention was essentially non-existent. Conditions in the camps meant that diseases periodically ripped through the populations there. Since the Germans determined to imprison everyone in their target groups, that included young children, the very old & infirm, the chronically ill, etc. The camps became crowded, with a noticable percentage of people who simply couldn’t work to “earn their keep”. In merciless fascist logic, it was more “efficient” to kill those people and direct whatever meagre resources they were willing to allot to the camps to go their slave laborers.

Take all the current litter out of the box. Give the box a thorough cleaning, then run some diluted bleach around it. Drain the litterbox and let it air-dry. When the box is completely dry, put it down in it’s usual place and put the new “litter” in the box.

If you have multiple cats, you’ll need to arrange something where the sick cat is the only one who can access that litterbox (and that the sick cat can’t access a second one, either).

Check with the vet; many times you can refrigerate a urine sample overnight if necessary, but it may depend on what time the lab stops by their office to pick up samples.

If all else fails, you can bring the cat to the vet for them to collect a urine sample. This may entail then keeping the cat in a cage and periodically checking the litter there; or (more likely) the vet will insert a needle into the cat’s bladder and draw a sample directly. For obvious reasons, cats tend to dislike this second option.

Yeah, don’t care.

Optimistic of you to assume we’ll have free elections with an un-gerrymandered map.

Time used to be a respectable magazine. These days it just seems like anyone can submit and “publish” there.

A lot of them end up culling the believers too in the end.

Robespierre was killed by the Revolution.

Which is exactly what they said last spring, and then crickets. Fool me once …

Supreme Court cases.

Interestingly, NewsMax refused before Fox did.

Lol, after most other places had already rejected it. They only feel safe when they can hide in a crowd.

We sit around and bitch about the corporations caving to the alt-Reich, about Congress people just giving in to Trump, about ICE not having a conscience to do the things they do.

Yet as long as we only sit and bitch, as long as we’re not fighting back in some way, we are also complicit in what our country’s government does.

If you honk your horn to warn people ICE is around, you are protecting them. If you protest the regime, others will see that there’s are others standing up and this is not inevitable. If you call your Congress people, you are telling them what the will of the people is, and that people are watching their actions. You don’t have to do everything, but you should be doing something.

How can you expect corporations to care or Congress people to have a spine, if you won’t even pick up a phone? Courage, and consciences, are contagious.