having the power of one Gillette

The first photo is from 1956. It shows a Black woman watching members of the Ku Klux Klan (a terrorist, racist, far-right organization focused on white supremacy) walking along a sidewalk in Montgomery, Alabama (USA). I couldn't find the photo's author, but most sources state that it was taken in 1956.

The second photo shows members of the Patriot Front group (a white supremacist and nationalist group, formed in 2017, that openly advocates what they call "American Fascism") traveling on the subway during the 250th anniversary of the U.S. independence in Washington D.C., while a Black woman watches them. The photo is by photographer Cheney Orr, taken on July 4, 2026, 70 years after the first photo.

Blocked again :(

I think this gives me the current full set!

My nephew is very allergic to eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, and sesame. Last year my sister discovered all hot dogs and hamburger buns now contain sesame. Not "may contain", but listed in the ingredients. This year basically every brand of sliced bread also now contains sesame, making it very difficult to find bread items he can eat.

They're just adding it to their products, so they can just list it as an ingredient and not bother with worrying about cross contamination. And they aren't even bothering with telling anyone. Capitalism is going to kill us all.

"Which brings us back to Kellogg’s. Back in 2016, the company found a way around the added burden and expense of complying with the FSMA: they simply began adding trace amounts of peanut flour to their cracker products. Doing so allowed them to list peanuts as an ingredient of the product, freeing them from having to prevent cross-contact.

Okay, let's say that these people mentioned *do* deserve to die, just for the sake of argument.

Who gets to decide that they do? Who actually genuinely has the right to make the final decision, specifically?

Is it the judge? Is it the lawmakers? It can't be you. It can't be a case by case basis where you get input, this is being carried out by the state.

Do you trust those people to never ever get it wrong? Do you trust the state?

If you do trust them, you aren't paying attention to literally anything that has ever happened in this or any country.

If you don't trust them, you must shift your stance to oppose the death penalty because a circumstance where an innocent person is killed is unacceptable.

Peeling back the curtain, yeah, my personal feelings are that there *are* people who should stop being alive. I don't think that's a good thought for me to have, but I have it.

And I don't trust the fucking state, or myself, or judge, or a panel of people, or ANYONE to be able to, with ZERO false positives, make that determination. No one, no one, NO ONE has the right to make that call because no one can always get it right.

So I oppose the death penalty even though, yeah, my gut reaction is that certain people who have severely harmed others and will do so again should be killed. But the death penalty is wrong. For even a single innocent person to die is a moral failing, an unacceptable loss. There is not and never will be a way to administer that fairly and perfectly.

Lethal injection protocols with three drugs (which is most of them) are designed to give the appearance of a clean medical death without suffering. The truth is:

Many states use midazolam as their first drug to “induce sedation.” Midazolam is not physically capable of maintaining unconscious deep enough to overcome agonizing pain! It also has a “ceiling effect” meaning that it literally cannot do any more after a certain point, as it bonds to GABA receptors(?) and you only have so many! Despite many doctors testifying, briefing, and submitting affidavits to this effect, the Supreme Court ruled it was okay.

Why was it okay? Well, the inmates had to demonstrate that they would definitely be tortured to death and then they have to propose in detail an alternative method of execution (what???). But they don’t have that evidence because the second drug is a paralytic that acts to ensure that the body cannot move no matter what pain it’s in. It literally only gives the appearance of a peaceful sleep without really doing anything to help the execution.

Both the second and third drug are horrendously painful.

The huge overdose of drugs introduces chemicals of the wrong pH into the bloodstream. This balances quickly but not before an extremely acidic or caustic fluid goes through the lungs. Most inmates lungs in autopsies after executions are filled with fluid and froth and show signs of struggles to breathe. Literally the drugs dissolve their lung tissue and drown them while they are conscious (because midazolam does not keep them unconscious) and paralyzed.

Placing IVs frequently goes wrong because medical professionals rarely participate, this being wildly against the Hippocratic oath. This results in drug delivery constantly going wrong, creating huge blister-like bubbles full of drugs in people’s joints or muscles.

Drug companies refuse to supply medications, meaning prisons use huge cash transactions with dubious compounding pharmacies whose names are kept secret by special state laws or just on the black market. Or they lie when they buy the drugs.

Independent reviews are nonexistent. Reviews are often prohibited by those same secrecy laws, which many states have specifically to protect the fiascos that are state executions.

If I were ever sentenced to death, I would opt for firing squad. Fastest. Probably least painful. And it’s a horrible look for the correctional center. Let them live with the guilt personally.

"From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored—indeed, I have struggled—along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor.

Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.

It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies. The basic question—does the system accurately and consistently determine which defendants "deserve" to die?—cannot be answered in the affirmative.

It is not simply that this Court has allowed vague aggravating circumstances to be employed, see, for example, Arave v. Creech (1993), relevant mitigating evidence to be disregarded, see, for example, Johnson v. Texas, (1993), and vital judicial review to be blocked, see, for example, Coleman v. Thompson, (1991).

It didn’t work. It didn’t save her. But it’s so very possible that he spent his last moments alive trying to save someone else, one of his crew, and they probably both knew that it wouldn’t work, that there wasn’t a lot of hope in a blizzard on the lakes in November, but he tried … he tried anyway. Even if it did nothing but maybe make her body easier for her family to find.

You know that Mr Rogers thing of ‘look for the helpers’? How many times has someone, facing the end, done something tiny and fragile and maybe hopeless just to try and help someone else? Whether it works or not. How many people went to their graves at least trying?

That has to say something about us. As a people. As monstrous as we sometimes (perhaps often) are, so many times we were also …

Whoever saves one life, saves the whole world.

And sometimes you can’t save one life, sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes there’s no getting out of this for anyone, but … try anyway. Because it matters anyway.

Got nice video of a nerodia looking for tasty crayfish over at our usual fishing spot. He was very polite when he realized we were there. Just kinda popped his head up and chilled.