tumblr.com/futileexercise/8122…

#Body-Positivity #Men

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^Tumblr

A resource for y'all

afroindex.org/

Afro Index – Black Hairstyle Reference Library

A reference library for Black hairstyles with accurate naming, structured filtering, and curated reference images.

^{afroindex.org}

Decades ago, it was possible to build your own Mac using spare parts and generic PC components. Given the tools and options available to vintage computing enthusiasts today, let’s see what happens when old meets new!

youtu.be/RUUVNi_X8w8

Congrats Trump on being the greenest president ever

cnbc.com/amp/2026/03/24/iran-w…

#Green-Future #Green-Energy #Solar #Heat-Pumps

#uspol Figures. Not only does a #Walmart opening near you ruin local business, they are tax supported! Yet, they want tax breaks that lead to cuts in public assistance?

In Nevada, Walmart had 4,574 employees, 29.3% of their employees in that state, enrolled in Medicaid in 2024. In four states (Colorado, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Michigan), Walmart had a total of 10,920 employees enrolled in the SNAP food aid program.

The media organization More Perfect Union points out that Walmart not only relies on SNAP to make up for the low wages they pay their workers, but they also benefit when people use food stamps to buy groceries in their stores. According to a Numerator survey covering the 12 months ending July 31, 2025, Walmart ranked No. 1 for SNAP benefit redemption, receiving nearly 26% of all SNAP dollars.

Very quotable article from Common Dreams: commondreams.org/opinion/16-bi…

Ok, today's cover is going to be an easy one, more country, a country cover of a country song about driving a truck, what could be more country than that? Yep, no rock cover of a country song or country cover of a rock, nothing but pure truck driving country.

youtu.be/_VnwVOf3NxE

#Country #March-of-the-Covers #YouTube #Music

Vancouver has long had organized crime. So why didn’t the Italian mafia ever really take root here?

Because Joe Celona, a local Italian crime boss, realized something outrageous: why build a mafia when you can just rent the police?

In 1919, Celona arrived in Vancouver and opened a cigar shop. It became popular with politicians and police. But behind that legitimate front, he was also running brothels and gambling dens, most notably out of the Somerset Hotel, now the Washington Hotel.

Joe’s success was almost anti-mafia in structure. Instead of relying on omertà, the code of secrecy, he made himself highly visible. His pitch to police was simple: make me the vice king, and I’ll keep everyone else in line.

Cash, of course, helped sell that arrangement.

So when other organized crime outfits showed up in town, Joe would first send his brothers—his actual family—to have a “polite discussion.” If that didn’t work, the police would show up as muscle and drive them out.

The other key to Joe’s success is that he didn’t really run a traditional mafia. He ran something closer to a franchise model. He didn’t care whether his partners were Italian. He cared whether they made money.

A lot of his operations were run by madams like Gussie Hall and local bookies who paid Joe a fee. In return, he offered the most valuable commodity in the city: police protection.

So when the Black Hand arrived in Vancouver, Joe shut it down. He understood that the real money wasn’t in extorting honest bakers. It was in licensing the criminals. In other words, the Italian mafia was bad for business.

To make sure it never came back, Joe also worked to marginalize the hoodlum element in Vancouver’s Italian community by becoming its patron. He helped immigrants with paperwork, found people jobs, settled disputes, and founded St. Giorgio’s Social Club in Strathcona.

Joe ran Vancouver’s underworld for more than 30 years. Paradoxically, the key to that longevity was visibility. It was an open secret that Joe Celona was Vancouver’s vice king. He was investigated more than once, but enforcement was suspiciously lax.

Gerry McGeer even ran for mayor on a “War on Crime” platform aimed directly at Celona. Joe was finally convicted in 1935 and sentenced to 10 years, but he was back on the street in 5. Once released, he resumed his role as vice king, just with less public visibility.

It all finally started to collapse in 1955 with what became known as the Mulligan Affair.

Reporter Ray Munro, frustrated by the silence of Vancouver’s local press, published a series of sensational exposés in the Toronto tabloid Flash, calling Vancouver a “Gangland Eden.”

In those stories, he alleged that Vancouver Police Chief Walter Mulligan and his inner circle were effectively doubling their salaries through weekly envelopes of cash. In exchange for “protection,” gambling dens like the Mushroom Patch and bootlegging operations tied to Joe Celona were allowed to operate openly.

After the exposé dropped, Detective Sergeant Len Cuthbert, one of Chief Mulligan’s insiders, tried to kill himself with his service revolver. He survived and later became a star witness against Mulligan.

That led to the Tupper Commission. Public hearings began, but midway through them, Chief Mulligan abandoned his post and fled to California. He spent the rest of his life as a bus dispatcher and nurseryman, never held accountable for what he’d done.

In the end, the inquiry concluded that Mulligan and others were “criminally corrupt.” But the Attorney General still ruled there was “insufficient evidence” for criminal prosecution.

As for Joe Celona, he was never charged for his role in the Mulligan Affair either. He retired to Oak Bay in Victoria and died a free man, never spending a day in prison for his role in the scandal.

Here’s the irony.

A traditional Italian mafia never took hold in Vancouver because other crooked Italians got there first.

They profited from organized crime. They just saw a formal mafia as bad for business. Why rely on street hoodlums when the police are more efficient?

To this day, there are still local Italians involved in organized crime in Vancouver. But instead of working through a distinct Italian crime family, they tend to plug into biker gangs and multi-ethnic syndicates like the UN Gang or Wolfpack Alliance.

Heads up, the fuckers in GitHub have opted everyone into training Copilot. You can see your setting under a new "Copilot Settings" item github.com/settings/copilot/fe…

Anyone who opts people into bullshit like this should be instantly thrown in a volcano

GitHub

GitHub is where people build software. More than 150 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 420 million projects.

^GitHub

ok fuck let's commit to the jump then. I'll start looking for hosts.

long shot but I don't suppose anyone reading this would be interested in hitchhiking from Berlin to Poznań with me for a day on two during the Easter holiday next weekend?

Alright, another one a day late, but better late than never. Yeah, this year is country heavy, but ain't nothing wrong with country? I ain't never seen a problem with it, and so today's is I Ain't Never, originally written by Webb Pierce and Mel Tillis in 1959, recorded by Pierce in 59, and Tillis in 72, or rather that's the recording everyone knows, he'd previously recorded it in 62. This version is a more recent one by BR5-49, a now defunct country/alt country/roackabilly/country rock band

youtu.be/pRCvqzo4Gxg

#Country #YouTube #March-of-the-Covers #Music

Ok, lets get up to date on the covers with Air That I Breathe by Hank Williams Jr. I'm not actually sure which version I'm familiar with, I mean I have this one in my collection, but considering who wrote it, Albert Hammond in 72 who released it on his debut album It Never Rains In California, and while I don't recognize his name, I do recognize that album title as a song I've heard, so there's a fair chance I've heard it. And then there was the Evrly Brothers cover in 73, we all know them, followed by a Hollies cover in 74 produced by Alan Parsons, yes, that Alan Parsons, there's a lot of versions I could've and prolly did hear before this version. To make things even crazier, it was covered in 98 by Simply Red, a band name that sounds familiar, though I can't say from what song.
So, yeah, lots of artists that I know and like have done this one, so which was the first I became familiar with is definitely a hard one to say, but they're all good. Kinda funny, the Wikipedia article lists other covers as well as the important ones, and this one doesn't show up any where.

youtu.be/NUdNPJ9-QME

#Music #YouTube #Country #March-of-the-Covers

So, having finished the last run of book selling via app, I've started using another one, BooksRun. I'm rather impressed at what they're taking, I thought with these being the leftovers, they'd reject 9 out of 10, but they're taking a fair number. What's really interesting is that visiting their site, they buy, sell and rent books. They also sell and rent ebooks, which is rather interesting.

booksrun.com/books/rent

#Books #Book-Buying #Book-Selling #Book-Rentals

This week, the Director of AI Safety at Meta gave OpenClaw unrestricted access to her emails. It nuked her inbox, pulled up hundreds of old emails, and deleted them too.

Then, she tried to scold it. AS IF AI CAN FEEL GUILT.

I know you're all *here*, but if you also happen to still have a Facebook or Instagram account, maybe consider who's in charge over there and how competent they are.

(Posting from my phone, so please someone #Alt4Me )

Anyone know of an Android alternate that can be loaded onto a Cat S22/Unifone S22? I know the specs of the latter say its running Android 11, but when I had one it wasn't full Android, it was whatever Google was calling the light version, so as well as being so old most software won't work with it, its not even full Android so that means even less working software.

#Cellphone #Android #Android-Alternative