My doom and gloom is catalyzed by a lot of things including, yes, a novelty cookbook that appears to be made in recognition of desperate times. It isn’t the only thing that informs my doom and gloom, and this isn’t to say I don’t have hope. But it is a Goblins at the gates of Gondor kind of situation, in which a lot of things have to go simultaneously right before we’re out of the fine mess we’re in.
In the Great Depression, it’s not like anyone was starving to death. Rather it was like they were eating flour paste and dying of malnutrition.
That we are in an era that we need the SBC speaks to how bad things are. Here in the states, we don’t have food deserts, we have food swamps, where the only thing one can get is junk food.
Sink plungers without the flange work better on sinks, in my experience. So it’s nice to have one of each.
There are different builds for drainage snakes for sinks and toilets as well.
One way to be a better neighbor is to get a good drain snake and lend it out as needed.
Clean it first. Then clean the sink after using soiled plumbing tools.
You should vote regardless (downballot blue votes also help resist the creep towards obe-party autocracy).
At the same time, be aware of efforts that might be active in your area to disqualify you:
Yes. Fixed!
To be fair, in 2008 Obama and Hillary Clinton were viable candidates (despite not being a white Christian rich man) because the US public was really tired of Republican shennanigans, and of the Bush administration specifically. While McCain seemed reasonable Sarah Palin was scary and the McCain campaign took its cues from the ur-Maga Karl Rove / Tea-Party Republican talking points, who were only onto public benefits if no-one else got them.
Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize for simply not being Trump Bush and admitted as much it was rather silly when he promised to work to rise to the level of deserving it.
Sadly, Obama retained a lot of Bush policies and was more neoliberal than we needed.
I really thought after Bush, we’d never vote for a Republican president again, nor would we allow one to win by the EC. I was wrong and the US paid for it dearly. So I’m really sore and bitter about the whole affair.
Metatron: …Loki nor Bartleby would ever be allowed back into Paradise.
Bethany: Were they sent to Hell?
Metatron: Worse. Wisconsin
I think the disagreement is not if Hell exists, but its properties. Having watched the most recent main segment of Last Week Tonight the Palestinian underbelly of Hebron sounds pretty hellish. And there remain military hot zones where the soldiers of belligerents are killing each other over irreconcilable differences, or at least the disagreements of their overlords playing their games of thrones.
As for afterlife, well, we haven’t found any mechanism by which afterlife happens. Once you die, your brain stops working. Your story ends.
This seems to logically follow. The copy of a copy of a copy paradigm. We train AI on what humans like. By running stuff back through the trainig data, we’re adding noise back in.
To be fair, we already add noise, in that human art has its own errors, which we try to filter out using additional data featuring more of what we want and less of what we don’t want.
Who, exactly, trusts this third party?
I’m so used to getting treacherously betrayed by third parties distrust is my default setting.
I can only speak about my cat, for whom the solution has been mostly to make sure he has sufficient fresh scratching cardboard.
Trimming claws helps but he doesn’t like it. I get a partner to distract him, but mostly he keeps his claws in good, if sharp, order.
If the scratch pads are too dusty or too used, he’ll start favoring the sofa, but sometimes he’ll do that for sake of mischief, getting away with something. He seems to like to test that we’re paying attention.
What is more interesting to me is he could have persons of interest detained and disappeared as per the still-active surveillance, national security and anti-terror states from the aughts and 2010s.
I would avoid doing anything to Trump directly as the US wouldn’t want to martyr him but it would be delightfully ironic to detain the SCOTUS associate justices for sake of their own safety where they can stay at black sites within earshot of the screaming.
In the meantime there are Heritage Society members and other thinktank analysts who have been caught on hot mic or text discussing policies that would drastically change the character of the United States, that are contrary to the spirit of the Constitution of the United States and parallel to the indictments in the Declaration of Independence.
So it would be entirely justified to introduce them to the US secret detention system and possibly to the enhanced interrogators to remind them what kinds of presidential power they endorsed in eras past.
I’m sure they plan to remind Trump of these resources when Trump wants to make someone sorry they were born.
Right I’m having a hard time not embracing my inner Magneto when I imagine being in Biden’s shoes. After all, these guys made it very clear what they will do to me when they have half a chance.
I realized today, by giving the president protection from the law, the opinion also implies the court system, including SCOTUS is too incompetent to adjudicate.
In another country where we had actual jurists on the bench representing the highest council for 320,000,000 people, I’d expect them to be more than capable and willing to wade through the delicate nuances of any presidental action, and determine if criminal acts were justified in the service of the state. But Roberts essentially is admitting he and his associates are either too inept or too corrupt, and either way are not up to the task.
If the US democracy is to survive, we will not just need a constitutional amendment, but a complete judicial overhaul, and a federal election reform to restore power to elections and thus, to the people. Until all this happens, we are governed at gunpoint, rather than by consent.
So put away your fireworks. The nation is too unwell to be celebrated.
This YSK offering does feel like a way to provoke a fight among boomers and Gen-Xers.
I hqve noticed that judicial buildings a seem to be built to be imposing, as if to imply we rule you petty serfs
History confirms Henry VIII had huge scathing fragile ego problems. So this all tracks.
I’d say you’re not south enough.
My proctologist would not approve. But then he doesn’t like bathroom tissue.
And this illustrates a problem of using facial recognition databases as a security measure. False positives lead to false convictions.
In my case enjoying life is not something that I can simply do. I manage mental illness which features chronic suicidality, but it’s been driven into me very hard that I am at fault for my grief and trauma. But having a sober understanding of why I feel the way I do, and the social forces that drove parents, teachers and authorities to treat me the way I did helps me counter those neural processes.
This cartoon illustrates the dynamic I’ve encountered, and I hypothesize the mental illness epidemic in the US is intergenerational and compounding.
That we’re also dealing with a couple of imminent great filters the human species is unprepared to navigate hits hard for me.