smh @ Florida

From our Orange County Economic Task Force meeting

https://i.ibb.co/wwSPRYV/FB-IMG-1590090283634.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBqY-4oDWAQ

I'm not clicking that, but holy shit, that's what happens when you pass out so hard that you don't even wake up when your giggling asshole friends are tattooing your face.

You're missing out. For real.

I have lived with people like that, but they were crustpunks, not juggalo types.

Story time?

For a brief period of about four months or so in 2013, I lived in a squat in West Oakland named Skeletor. It was mostly dudes, travelling crust punk types who were drunks or junkies or both, along with some more regular punk types down on their luck and needing a free room to crash in.

Every day of the week had a different theme, so I'd come home from my part-time job and it would be third-eye Thursday and everyone would be getting blind drunk while hallucinating on mushrooms, setting fire to each other's shit in the courtyard, throwing dog shit and beer cans at each other and calling one another nerd while listening to Agoraphobic Nosebleed and Dropdead and whatever. I bonded mostly with the quiet drunks who would get really amped when Godflesh came on and spent their days flying signs and playing chess.

One good story was the night someone brought home a bunch of condoms from a health clinic and some of the dudes, who all hated condoms, blew them into balloons and used them to play keepaway with the dogs until each condom was burst. Then they threw all the busted condoms on the street and alley in front of the house.

There was also a time when these dudes had been huffing paint all day and then one of their lady friends came over and they had sex in the only common room while all of us were just watching in the courtyard. Eventually, those two had a child, he disappeared into the crack scene in SF, came back and impregnated her again, then disappeared again.

Three of about eleven people I lived with there are dead, one is addicted to crack and living on the streets, and one was in a motorcycle accident that left him permanently disabled. The rest are doing reasonably well, given the circumstances of living a rough life.

I should say, I also spent time riding freights and doing all that shit, but I'm definitely more a Vollmann type than a type to be nicknamed Horse Shit, shooting up in an alley in Sparks.

Three of about eleven people I lived with there are dead, one is addicted to crack and living on the streets, and one was in a motorcycle accident that left him permanently disabled. The rest are doing reasonably well, given the circumstances of living a rough life.

I assume 'the rest' includes you, so I'm glad you're ok.

Thanks! The past decade has been a doozy, but I'm doing reasonably well.

Thx for video, mashup of Mandy and Gummo was unexpected but inspired

He makes good videos.

Health officials in Florida have sounded the alarm over the discovery of a rare, brain-eating amoeba in the county that encompasses Tampa and several other cities.

The Florida Department of Health announced the news Friday that a person in Hillsborough County had suffered a confirmed infection of naegleria fowleri, a single-celled living amoeba that can lead to a dangerous infection of the brain called primary amebic meningoencephalitis.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/deadly-brain-eating-amoeba-confirmed-in-florida?ref=home

This bacteria pops up every few years; it's why I don't get swimming in lakes (ours are warmer, of course, and have gators).

yeah, everybody panicked about it a few years ago when it happened then. I was taught about amoeba in 7th grade and I was terrified of swimming in a lake even though I'd never done it before anyway

everybody on my timeline is wigging out saying "omg this is so 2020" when it's like, we had a case of it in 2016, we had multiple in 2013, and NOBODY I know that lives here in Orlando that is freaked out regularly swims in warm freshwater and gets it up their nose, sooooooo

Four prison guards threw a man in a shower, turned up the water to 180 degrees, and left him there for 2 hours, until he died with burns covering 90 percent of his body.

Fernandez Rundle didn't charge any of them with a crime. https://t.co/RuFbgR0oJY

But experience, amiright? https://t.co/9IGUmVNHcj

— Taniel (@Taniel) August 9, 2020

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/08/12/901756223/florida-sheriff-orders-deputies-and-staff-not-to-wear-face-masks

I've done my best to spread the story on social media to force the sheriff to take a syringeful of bleach.

Good man.

Is this even legal?

Florida prosecutors at their finest

https://reason.com/2020/09/25/florida-drops-prostitution-case-against-robert-kraft-still-pursues-charges-against-the-women-he-paid/

https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2020/11/17/florida-man-with-sovereign-citizen-views-shot-to-death-by-woman-police-say/

xp :(

Linked at the bottom of that^ Tampa Bay News page:

Up next: Man arrested after I-4 power pole is found strapped to his car roof

is "power pole" a euphemism

this is Orange County, defined:

https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2021/04/28/oops-misspelled-word-painted-in-orange-county-school-zone/?

so Florida is *mostly* unaffected by the pipeline hack, other than the Panhandle. however, idiot rumormongers started a rumor that gas shortages would occur here, so now pumps in unaffected TAMPA and other cities are empty. fucking idiots

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/florida-gov-ron-desantis-declares-state-emergency-sunshine-state-doesnt-need-panic

Two stories counts as trend, right?

https://floridapolitics.com/archives/485132-john-kuczwanski-killed-in-road-rage-incident/
https://wgntv.com/news/pregnant-hit-and-run-driver-fatally-shot-after-instigating-road-rage-incident-police-say/

1.) Florida state Republican official ends up dead after a.) causing a traffic accident and then b.) trying to shoot the person he hit — who turns out to be carrying too (yes, even the Prius drivers are armed). "He was a quiet fellow," a coworker says — a quiet fellow with a previous conviction for threatening someone with a gun during a road rage incident.

2.) Pregnant Florida woman hits a motorcyclist and speeds off. Motorcyclist follows her to her house, she comes out armed and shooting, motorcyclist (also armed, of course) shoots and kills her.

In both cases, I wonder what would have happened if the road rager had been successful in killing the other motorist. My guess is they would have gotten off on "stand your ground" or similar defense.

The second article doesn’t say she fired?

Ah, you're right. I guess brandishing was sufficient cause for the other guy to shoot her.

It really does seem like we're coming to a point where whoever survives a gunfight gets to claim self-defense. At least in "stand your ground" states.

Further feeding my working assumption that every driver on the road is armed and ready to shoot, so I never so much as even honk aggressively at shitty and dangerous drivers.

I have cut way back on honking for the same reason. We had a road rage shooting death in our neighborhood last year. I honked at a guy the other week who zoomed across two lanes of traffic to get on an interstate ramp. My wife yelled, "Don't honk, he'll shoot you!"

This is our great 2A society.

Not to worry, I'm sure they're all good guys with guns.

we are just going to go back to dueling to solve disputes aren't we?

An armed society is a polite society.

Florida is breeding grounds for road rage. I completely abstain from antagonism now (save for a dude I flipped off for holding up the line at my apt complex entrance, then telling him to get the fuck back in his car when he got out - I was in a mood that day).

have had too many friends be the victim of road rage. there was a colleague that worked for my company once who was a perpetrator of it here - like ten years ago or so. he I guess got in a road rage incident with a dude and they must have hit each other so he got out of his car and punched the guy in the car in the face, and that guy was packing and shot him. he didn't die, but he was in bad shape for a while.

i am thankful I live in a much bluer area of Florida, just sayin'.

I call drivers assholes and tell them to go fuck themselves on my bicycle all the time. At a certain point, I know I'm being reckless, but the options are yelling and maybe getting shot or not yelling and definitely getting hit by some shithead driver.

I mean in that case, it's survivalist instincts!

So in an actuarial sense, would hunting down the person that hit your car and winning a gun fight raise or lower your insurance rates?

Republican politicians wife is a piece of work, claiming he was "assassinated"

In my fucking backyard

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2022/1/30/2077621/-A-Neo-Nazi-rally-has-taken-place-in-the-suburban-streets-of-Orlando

Livid

I wonder if they got permits for this protest, and if so, how they did so.

In Sacramento, they would always hide behind these group names like "South Africa Survivors" and stuff, then the people who would show up would be identifiable members of various skinhead/fash groups.

If permits were issued to the NSM, then Orlando has some bigger problems than we knew.

I'm going with the latter given our Governor

Why wouldn't they get permits? Not getting one would violate the First Amendment, no? It's the Skokie argument.

(I uh am not defending them; it's the law)

Oh I know you wouldn't defend them, but I couldn't really tell from where they were standing whether that was just some random stripmall or a place of power— in Sac, they would always be at one end of the capitol building.

As in, if it was just some random dudes at a stripmall, then it might not actually be protected— if it was the stripmall's property. But whatever, I know it's Florida.

Waterford Lakes is a strip mall, basically with Chili's, a Regal, Best Buy, etc.

Very busy area where they knew they'd have a lot of visibility

It's near the University of Central Florida

Also a much bluer area than the rest of FL so they knew they'd get a rise. Pieces of shit.