Get your sacrifices ready, I guess.

Clarkville is just a terrible name. I haven't eaten there since pre-covid though so not sure how good the place is nowadays.

Potentially yes

The most infuriating renaming in history. Did they not understand the concept of a pun?!

Now I need to go to Clarkville for first time since covid, just to see this historic site.

Or inside the city limits more likely

Sure was. And 3.5 years later (holy shit I can't believe it's been that long) the pavement is also crumbling away like crazy in that spot, once again.

I don't know which Pine/Osage collapse you're talking about. Not one by 43rd Street for sure - all the houses around there are original AFAIK. But yeah, the low-lying corners of 43/Spruce and 43/Baltimore are for sure big flooding zones.

What are you even talking about?

Looks more like it might be a tributary of the main Mill Creek? Either way, same issue applies I guess.

They've had to expand it westward, as now the original area Penn was trying to gentrify has become entirely unaffordable to buy in if you aren't upper-upper-middle-class at least.

Upwards of $750k easy

I was just thinking about this earlier today as I went past 43rd and Baltimore. The path of Mill Creek runs south, approximately under 43rd St, from about Walnut down to Baltimore where it then goes under Clark Park (the Bowl was a former mill pond) and onward to the Schuylkill. Upstream of there, it goes more to the northwest. Maybe someone else can link to a good map, as I'm lazy/in the middle of work.

I would be pretty hesitant to buy a house anywhere along that creek. Now, obviously the vast majority of blocks on top of its course are fine....but there have been some dramatic cases where they were very much not fine in the past century.

Two big examples come to mind:

• Around 50th and Brown, about half a city block worth of rowhomes were swallowed when the ground caved in along the creek/sewer's course. There's now a playground on the site.

• The location of Supremo at 43rd and Walnut was formerly home to houses on the 4300 blocks of Sansom and Walnut, many of which were also destroyed by a similar cave-in.

As an honorable mention, the 2019 sinkhole in the middle of Baltimore Ave at 43rd was of course caused by subsidence along the same path. And before the redesign of Clark Park, you'd often get ridiculous flooding at the corner there - I have a photo from 2010 of at least a foot of water engulfing the northeast corner of the A Park.

Even if houses along the creek's course aren't necessarily at a super high risk of collapse, it has to be higher than...well, literally anywhere else, and also I have to assume they deal with way more basement flooding than the average.

Personally I like living, if not on the top of a former hill, at least on the upward half of a slope, in between former creek basins.

>everything is super biased and not worth looking at.

Except, apparently, unconfirmed info spreading around police scanners by people who haven't had time to vet the information at all. Real galaxy-brain level thinking here.

What a jackass! Let's punish him. But what can we do? I know! We'll post about him on the internet, thus totally not playing into his hands and giving him the attention he wants!

How many of them did anything whatsoever to push back against him? Did the organization do anything at all to speak out against his corruption, racism, or authoritarianism? Did they stop supporting the party that he became the absolute leader of?

I'm gonna bet they didn't. Plus, just recently they did some event dickriding Desantis, who is every bit as bad and un-American as Trump.

>The Republican party is made of a lot of different wings.

And all of them happily fall in line behind fascists.

>The UL is more akin to fiscal conservative/constitutionalist type.

Yes, supporting the guy who spent four years shitting on the Constitution and tried to do a coup, very constitutionalist, much rule of law, wow.

>If Trump is running the Union league will side with his primary opponent.

And if (when) he wins the primary, they will go back to tacitly supporting him, just like they did before.

I agree, there's obviously a lot of sticky issues involved here. But the government does get into the business of deciding what's a real religion or not. If I declare my house the holy site of a new religion, and myself the prophet, do you think I'm getting a tax break out of that? Fuck no. So the question is already where we draw the line, not whether.

>(For one thing, they're all made up and dumb.)

My whole point is, some are vastly and demonstrably more made and up and dumb than others. A scam cooked up by a moist-mouthed creep from the 1950s is a world apart from a millennia-old collection of traditions spanning continents.

Eh, Mormonism fits that description way better than the other two. Mormonism also makes explicit claims about recent historical events that can be flatly disproven, mainly stuff about the history of the Americas (tribes of ancient Jews coming over by boat, the existence of horses and metallurgy when we know those didn't exist here, naming the sites of enormous battles at locations where archaeology can establish that didn't happen, etc.)

>Like, do you think people walk in and get abused and keep coming back?

Uh, yes, that's literally how cults work. Was this supposed to be a serious comment?

Sure. The difference is, while mainstream religions all contain examples of abusive behavior, with Scientology, the abusive behavior is the whole thing.

Porcupine Tree - Trains (track) or Lightbulb Sun (album)

Lots of people would say In Absentia as a gateway album as it’s their most popular. I think Lightbulb Sun is a little more accessible as it isn’t as full of heavy riffs and extremely dark lyrics (Russia on Ice excepted). Personally Deadwing is my favorite, but it has some of the same barriers to accessibility that IA does, plus a ten-minute opening track rather than a catchy, right rock song like Blackest Eyes.

Lazarus is also a great choice for a gateway song; that one is generally a crowd pleaser for those not into overly heavy music.

Also, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

For real, that fucking video footage of his nasty-ass mouth ought to be enough for anybody to stay far away from anything he invented.

It's not about the validity of the beliefs, it's that the entire "religion" is transparently an abusive cult.

Although, we can also speak to the validity of the beliefs. While ancient religions like the Abrahamic or Indian ones might ask you to believe things without evidence, Scientology asks you to believe that a drug-addicted, serial-lying grifter from the 1950s holds the key to universal truth.

A more important question is "why do we grant Scientology religious status like it's a real church?"