#politics
Jenna Ellis has flipped.

Yep, that makes three.

I can hear the ketchup-laden plates hitting the wall all the way out here in Olympia.

No paywall:
https://wapo.st/3tMutJB

WaPo subscribers:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/10/24/jenna-ellis-plea-deal-georgia/

#politics
The political situation is dire -- we still have a third of the electorate solidly for Cheetolini, and another big-enough bunch that could go either way -- but headlines like this give me consolation and hope.

Jim Jordan on path to losing third vote for House speaker

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/20/house-speaker-vote-live/

Wordle 852 2/6

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Lucky today!

#politics
It's up to Congressional Republicans to do the right thing (*hollow laugh*). Having Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker would be a dreadful humiliation for them, exposing them for the dysfunctional mob of lackeys, grifters, and fanatics they are. Having Gym Jordan as Speaker would -- hmm, actually it would do just the same thing, only with less actual legislative work getting done between now and 2025.

Gym Jordan as Speaker w

The state of Washington imposes an "additional vehicle weight" fee on our car -- a Prius. Which is just the kind of puzzle I like to solve over my breakfast (don't judge).
The law comes down to this:

●If your car's registration first comes due on or before 7/1/2016, and it weighs more than 4000 lbs, you pay an additional weight fee.

●If your car's registration first comes due after 7/1/2016, you pay an additional vehicle weight fee. Period.

Makes perfect sense.

Graeber & Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything" shows in passing that the transition from foraging to agriculture isn't/wasn't at all simple. Coincidentally my spouse shared this with me: the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) people turned an entire island into a farm, which European settlers completely missed and called "untamed wilderness"--somehow not asking how it happened that nearly every plant on that island was edible.
https://crmuseum.ca/2023/09/28/how-does-your-garden-grow/

Wordle 845 4/6

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I had to use a rhyming dictionary for this one.

#israel
What's making me sad, besides all the present barbaric cruelty, is that this has been going on since 1947 and there's no letup in sight. This week's atrocities remind me of the war on the Plains Indians in the 19th century US, which was finally settled by genocide or the next thing to it.
I don't want to say there's no other way out; I hope there is. It seems neither Hamas nor Netanyahu are even looking for it.

Had to admire Biden spokesperson John Kirby's tapdancing when #npr reporter Mary Louise Kelly asked whether cutting off all food, water, and electricity to Gaza wasn't a war crime -- but I don't much admire Kelly's failure to press him for a real answer. In my head I kept hearing what a good BBC bulldog would have done: "but that meets the definition of a war crime, doesn't it? What's the administration's position on war crimes?"

ETA: transcript at https://www.npr.org/2023/10/10/1204950066/nsc-spokesman-john-kirby-says-more-u-s-military-support-is-heading-to-israel