Yes, thank you. Every generation “discovers” the Palestinian issue and then some act like its a new problem. And then some dumb-asses in America choose that as their hill to die on. To the point where they helped Trump get elected this time.

The Palestinians have been locked in a death embrace with Israel for 80 years and no amount of whining by privileged American protesters is going to change that. Do they really think that more river-to-the-sea terrorism is going to make the Israelis just give up and die? No, a two-state solution where all the Palestinians move to the West Bank and all the Israeli settlers move back to Israel is the only viable solution. Every generation eventually figures that out, too. Also, Gaza is finished this time. It was always a dumb idea to have two separate Palestinian enclaves.

It is down to the practical matter of separating the two sides and imposing a peace since apparently they can’t do it for themselves. If that sounds harsh, it is almost certainly better for the Palestinians than letting the Israelis settle it the Roman way. And that is on the table now, since I’m sure we can all agree that Trump doesn’t give a single shit on his golden toilet about the Palestinians.

OK, so what does this mutual aid look like? Are you talking about organizing armed resistance for when the Gestapo come for you? Or more like food-sharing for when the revolution comes and destroys the economy you don’t care about? I don’t have a sense of what you are getting at.

Couple of things:

1. Revolution sounds good until it actually happens, and then it sucks. It unleashes all the crazies and the outcome is uncertain. And it tanks the economy.
2. If you look at exit polls, people told you why they voted for Trump. Rightly or wrongly, they don’t believe he is a fascist, or at least that the US system won’t allow him to indulge his fascist tendencies. Again, I don’t know if they are correct, but that’s what most people believe.
3. The majority believe that the wokism and identity politics of the left is a greater threat to democracy than Trump.

So, the answer to your question is that you won’t find much support IRL because most people don’t actually think they are supporting fascism. Time will tell if Trump is an actual fascist or just a blowhard. I wish we didn’t have to wonder, but there you have it.

It’s because of the drive-thru. If I could get a locally-made channa masala on rice or a good salad at the drive-thru with a decent cup of coffee, that would be my daily lunch. And, yes, I know that’s lazy, but the drive-thrus are packed so I know I’m not the only one. Unfortunately, only the fast food chains have drive-thrus where I live. There is a business opportunity.

According to NOAA, the ocean was originally not very salty but became saltier over time as rivers eroded the land and delivered the dissolved minerals to the ocean. At the same time, salts crystallize out of the water and are deposited on the ocean floor. This input and output are now more or less balanced so the ocean is not getting saltier. Apparently, this salt cycle involves about 4 billion tons of new dissolved salts being added to the ocean each year and about the same amount being deposited from the water to the ocean bottom.

So, why aren’t rivers salty? Apparently, it is because rivers carry only a small amount of salt and are kept fresh by constant rainfall, whereas the ocean has been accumulating salt for the last 4 billion years.

Lakes that don’t drain to the ocean, like the Dead Sea, can get salty over time, just like the ocean.

I think it depends entirely on the integrity of the cremator. I have a good friend who does pet cremations. He cremated one of my pets and told me that he had a hell of a hard time getting the bag of ashes into the box I gave him. I laughed and asked him why he didn’t just pour some out so the bag would fit more easily. Who would know? Who would care if there were a few grams missing? Especially if the reason was that the client-provided box was too small. But he was genuinely shocked and said he would never do that.

This is the conclusion I’ve come to as well. I used to be frustrated at how stupid Trump supporters are. I would wonder how anyone could be so gullible, cynical, racist, or mysogynist as to vote for Trump. How does he get away with, even prosper, saying such crazy and harmful things? But I’ve come to the conclusion that Trump voters are just extremely unhappy. A vote for Trump is a big fuck-you to the establishment. Both parties were basically run by a modern day aristocracy. The Kennedys, the Clintons, and the Bushes are the most obvious dynasties, but they also have many, many surrogates. More importantly, they defined a kind of cursus honorum for becoming president, including all of the right schools, fraternities, clubs, contacts, donors, etc that you have to follow to move up through the various offices to get to the top. The Tea Party disrupted the Republican aristocracy, but then Trump came along and just obliterated it.

Now, on the one hand, we can probably all get behind the idea that breaking up the aristocratic hold on political parties is a good thing. However, history has also shown that supporting populist demagogues who specialize in chaos and hateful rhetoric often leads to a bad time for the country and the people.

These last five years are the first time in my life that I’m genuinely worried for the stability of the republic. It has been said many times by people who have lived through it that people never think civil war will actually happen until it does. And then they look back and the signs were obvious. Whoever actually wins, when half of the population is voting for a hateful chaos candidate, that’s a big red flag.

My guess is that assassination isn’t as easy as it is made out to be in the movies. The CIA, the best funded intelligence agency in the world, tried to take out Castro hundreds of times and failed. They couldn’t find Osama for a decade, either, and even then the US used Seals, not the CIA. Sure, killing some rando is probably easy, but not a government leader who is actively avoiding assassination, as I’m sure Hamas leaders are doing.

It isn’t such a simple question and I don’t remember all of Scaramucci’s points, which is why I gave the reference. Also, given how long OP’s post was, I figure they probably do want the longer explanation in the podcast. But since you ask (even though you claim its not important to you), here’s what I recall:

1. Many people, especially uneducated people, can’t tell the difference between entertainment and politics. To them, Trump is entertaining, so that’s who they like. When Trump says crazy shit, as detailed by OP, it isn’t a negative. They love it because it is entertaining.
2. Many voters don’t understand economics and the business cycle. They assume that the current state of the economy/inflation/affordability is the direct result of whatever the current president is doing. So, if affordability is bad right now, it is Biden/Harris’s fault. If affordability was better when Trump was president, they want him back. I think The Mooch called it “economic nostalgia”.
3. Racism and misogyny plays a role.
4. There is a large segment of the population, not just in the US but around the world, that believes in the “strong man” style of leadership. A big, loud and proud alpha male type who never surrenders is comforting to many people. This is lizard-brain stuff that goes way back to caveman days.
5. Straight white males have been either ignored or actively disparaged by many on the left. Things like DEI may be justifiable on a group level, but proponents sometimes forget that people are not just members of a group, they are individuals. As individuals, they may not feel the privilege that they supposedly have. So, as much as a straight white male may support the goals of DEI or “wokeness” or whatever you want to call it, they don’t want to be discriminated against as individuals, anymore than women or minorities do. This is why support for Trump is much higher among white men than women and minorities.

That’s all I can remember right now.

It’s not an advertisement, dumbass. I found the last two episodes of that podcast pretty much exactly answered the question that OP posed.

If you really want to know why Trump is still competitive, listen to Anthony Scaramucci, a.k.a. The Mooch. He worked for Trump for a couple of weeks before being fired by him. The Mooch is a long-time conservative investor-type who knows Trump well and can’t stand him, so he has been helping the Democrats. Thr Mooch really understands Trump and his followers. I’m pretty sure he helped with Harris’s debate prep, especially helping her understand how to get under Trump’s skin.

He hosts a great podcast along with Katty Kay called The Rest Is Politics US (as opposed to the parent program The Rest Is Politics UK). https://tripus.supportingcast.fm

In particular, check out the last two post-debate episodes:

#27 Trump vs. Harris: What You Didn’t See

#28 Why Kamala Harris Still Has a Problem

I think you are misunderstanding the nature of the conflict. The war is between Iran and Israel. Gaza is just one tiny battlefield in the larger war. Iran and its proxies don’t want to solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Cui bono? Iran and its proxies, that’s who. Kamala Harris knows this. She isn’t stupid and she is well-advised by experts. You and your fellow protesters aren’t helping at all, you are just making her job of defeating Trump harder. Wake up, my friend.

Hezbollah and Hamas are Iranian proxies that have wrecked Lebanon and Gaza respectively. Hamas’s murderous attack on Israeli civilians on October 7 was all about creating chaos, provoking Israel, and undermining the Abraham Accords. It wasn’t about solving the problems of the Palestinian people, it was done to further Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” goals. In that sense, Hamas’s October 7 operation was very similar in nature and purpose to Bin Laden’s 9/11 plan, and Israel is responding much the same as the US did back in the early 2000s against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Iran and Hamas started the current clash with the purpose of provoking Israel into a drastic response in Gaza. Gazan civilians are caught in the middle, but if you think it’s Israel’s fault, you are falling exactly in line with what Iran and their proxies intended.

The Russians, for all their faults, have a well-developed sense of realpolitik, and they have a term for people like you and your fellow protesters: useful idiots. I prefer the term “naive but well-intentioned”, but there is quite a lot of overlap in this case. That “naive but well-intentioned” outlook is fine, even laudable, most of the time, but it is quite unhelpful at this moment when the competition between Harris and Trump is so close.

Hold up there, cowboy. Hawaiian pizza is Canadian cuisine, not American.

I think you may be wrong. Wikipedia tells me that:

“In 1880, the ages of consent were set at 10 or 12 in most states, with the exception of Delaware where it was 7.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_the_United_States

Yeah, but she was his cousin so…

You, sir, are a poet. And now we all know it.

As everyone else has said, this is a risky practice due to heat-tolerant bacterial toxins. Here is an article about it, if you want to do some more reading:

https://blog.foodsafety.ca/what-are-bacterial-toxins

The reason the meat smells better after you partially cook it is that you are killing the spoilage bacteria coating the outer surface and washing away or destroying their smelly byproducts. Oddly enough, those aren’t the really dangerous bacteria. The ones that cause serious food poisoning mostly do not stink.

Also, cutting the larger chunk of meat up into smaller pieces is a very bad idea. You are just spreading the surface contamination into the muscle. Also, using water as a medium actually limits the upper temperature you can achieve. If you really want to save a piece of meat while minimizing your risk, do this instead:

1. Leave the cut of meat intact.
2. Put a high-heat vegetable oil like canola or sunflower oil into a steel frying pan.
3. Heat it until the oil smokes just a little. The smoke point of sunflower oil is 248 Celsius, whereas water boils at 100 Celsius, so you can easily see why this method is more effective than boiling.
4. Pick up the piece of meat with two pairs of tongs and place it into the hot pan. Rotate it around until a brown crust forms on the outside. This is called searing.
5. Remove the meat from the pan and let it cool.
6. With a clean sharp knife, cut off the seared meat at the surface and discard.

Note that you should not attempt this with poultry, only whole, non-tenderized cuts of beef or pork. This, by the way, is how restaurants prepare beef for serving raw dishes like steak tartar. Or at least that’s how they are supposed to prepare it from a food safety perspective.

Note also that this doesn’t guarantee that the meat is safe, but raw, whole, non-tenderized cuts of meat are usually only contaminated on the outer surface. Obviously it is safer to avoid the risk altogether, but if you must try to save the meat, this method is far, far better than your current practice.

There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, about the Israeli Cabinet, after the surprise attack that started the Yom Kippur War, always requiring a “tenth man”. The theory is that if nine people agree, then it is the duty of the “tenth man” to disagree, no matter what and no matter how much the other members pressure them. They are considered irritating but necessary to avoid dangerous group think.

I’m not sure I completely understand what you mean by a jabroni. Do you think they are the “tenth man” of our communities?

Some companies laser etch and track their natural diamonds, too. It’s to distinguish them from blood diamonds.

I work with nurses. The vast majority of them are lovely people, but I’ve seen the nurse cliques you are talking about. So has my wife, who also works with nurses. I’ve seen departments of nurses with that “mean girl” vibe that require long-term HR intervention because they are so toxic to one another.

If you see this kind of behavior, run for the hills. However, if you are just talking about normal human interaction to pass the time and socialize, then it is you who are not conforming to normal social expectations. You don’t have to conform, of course, but there are consequences to being anti-social.

The question is, are you an introvert or a misanthrope? An introvert needs alone time to recharge and that’s fine. A misanthrope doesn’t like people, no doubt because of some childhood trauma. If the latter, then therapy might help.

If you truly are an introvert who needs alone time to recharge, I’d suggest “going home to check on the dog” during your break. Even if you don’t have a dog. The point is that you need alone time and that’s perfectly valid.

If you are generally sociable, but simply find their particular conversation boring or insipid, I’d suggest training for something where the work culture is more professional. Regular hospital floor nursing almost always has a “break room culture” and it is easy to get trapped in it, but there are lots of alternatives. Learn surgical assisting, for example, or become a nurse practitioner. Street nursing, public health nursing, and home care nursing are all examples where there is no real break room culture. Or get into management, where there are no breaks.