I was so disappointed when Kamala came out strong for Medicare For All and then pretty much immediately caved and walked it back.

I have a strong suspicion that there is enormous pressure from the business world to keep the healthcare system the way it is. I’d bet almost anything that the instant healthcare is no longer tied to employment there is going to be a mass exodus of people from their jobs, and an absolute explosion of people starting their own businesses. I mean, I’ve had about half a dozen good scalable business ideas waiting and ready to go for years now, and the only reason I haven’t pursued them is because it would probably mean giving up my health insurance. I can’t possibly be alone in that.

And I bet if we got socialized health care, a lot of the problems we have right now with suppressed wages and poor working conditions would suddenly have a way of working themselves out.

The state of science reporting has been absolute dog shit for decades. The vast majority of the time when you track down the study an article is based on, the claims of the article are either massively exaggerated, or sometimes even completely different than what the article claims. It seems like a whole industry of taking fairly mundane studies and punching them up into some exciting pieces of short fiction. So many years of garbage reporting has me immediately skeptical of any article with a bold claim, or which mentions any kind of significant breakthrough.

I was hoping it was going to be jaankenschnitzel.

Huh, I would have guessed it would be more of a urine and mildew smell.

At the time? Practically everybody. She got absolutely slaughtered in the media, and it went on for years.

So the guy who notoriously despises public transit failed to come through on his promise to revolutionize public transit?

Wow.

I mean, who could have seen that coming?

Nah, I hired an electrician to handle all that for me. Now if I want electricity all I have to do is stick a plug in a socket, or flip a switch. It’s way more convenient.

Of course it would be. Dictatorships aren’t really possible in a country with a military that refuses to march against its own people.

So… 16%?

I don’t want to sound like I’m defending Biden, but I don’t know why people find this surprising. I’ve only been paying attention to politics for about 30 years, but he’s been saying this loudly and proudly for as long as I can remember.

Maybe people are just now noticing because it suddenly matters more than it used to. It definitely hits different when Israel is actively attempting a genocide, and it feels to me to be in pretty fucking terrible taste to beat that particular drum right now, but people are acting like this just came out of left field. He has been absolutely consistent about calling himself a Zionist for decades. It really shouldn’t have come as a shock.

Sure, let’s all hustle like crackheads:

“Oh, your job isn’t paying enough? Well, have you tried stealing from your family? Your grandma has a social security check coming, right? Oh, your family doesn’t talk to you anymore, huh? Well have you tried selling your neighbor’s car stereo? What about his propane grill? How about stealing tube socks from Walmart and trying to sell those on the street to anyone who walks by? Still not cutting it, huh? I don’t know man, maybe it’s time to try sucking some dicks.”

These memes seem a lot less clever if you’ve ever been close to someone whose life got snowed under by addiction, or lived in a neighborhood that has a crack problem. Seeing real crackheads really hustling is pretty fucking bleak. They’re not getting ahead. They’re not winning. They’re burning everything with even a shred of value to service their addiction, including family and personal relationships.

I don’t know, maybe it’s a very apt metaphor for capitalism, and what our capitalist system expects of us, but I have no desire to trade the people and things that make my life bearable just so I can brag about having a couple extra dollars in the bank.

It’s definitely happened. I think the technical term is “vertebral artery dissection.” I don’t think it’s like a daily occurrence or anything, but there is a very real risk of it happening whenever you get a chiropractic adjustment on your neck. Basically you have some delicate arteries running through your neck bones and the sharp sudden movement of certain chiropractic adjustments have the potential to rupture them. It can cause a stroke and some various other bad things that can happen when blood flow through the spine is interrupted.

The guy to the right of Saddam is Eric Harris, the other Columbine shooter, and Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter.

Didn’t Costco’s pharmacy get in trouble for this exact thing a couple months ago? I have a feeling we’re going to see a story about this for all the major pharmacy chains.

The list of subreddits I really miss is actually pretty short, but one of them for sure is ThatsABooklight. Not the most active sub, but you could lose most of a weekend scrolling through all the weird stuff that got dressed up as a movie prop.

It’s basically the entire point of fascist movements: to create an in-group who is protected by the law but not bound by it, and an out-group who is bound by the law but not protected by it. The hypocrisy isn’t just endemic, it’s foundational.

I used to have this idea of shady lobbyists skulking around Washington with big bags of money, trying to entice wayward congresspeople and lure them to the dark side. Then a friend of mine did a short internship in the office of a congressman, and I found out it’s actually very much the other way around.

You’d think a congressperson spends most of their time reading, writing, debating, and voting on the laws on which the country is run. That’s their job description. That’s what we’re taught in school that they do. But what they actually spend most of their time doing is cold-calling people and soliciting donations. So if you define their job by what they spend the largest amount of time doing, your congressperson and your senators’ job to beg for money so they can keep their job. There’s a big call center just off the Capitol grounds, and as soon as the session at the Capitol ends they all walk over to the call center, plop down in their cubicle, and spend the rest of the day calling past and potential donors.

But a principled politician could just choose not to participate, right? Maybe, but even if you could self-fund your own campaigns, you still have to get out and earn for your party. Having the support of your party is contingent on hitting predetermined fundraising metrics based on the population, demographics, and economics of your constituency. If you don’t hit those metrics you might suddenly find that it’s tough to find support for your legislation. It’s the same in either party.

It was one of the most disappointing things I ever learned about how our country works. The corruption isn’t just baked into the system, it’s all but mandatory. And this was like 25 years ago, before Citizens United. I can’t imagine it has gotten any better since then.

But… Indiana Jones famously doesn’t speak Hovitos.

Is it just me or is this article written under the false assumption that Facebook not serving you ads is somehow the same as Facebook not collecting your data? Because just yesterday I read an article about Costco being in trouble for allowing Facebook’s tracking pixel to collect their customers’ HIPPA-protected medical information through their pharmacy’s web interface. I can’t imagine that serving ads or not serving ads is going to stop Facebook from collecting and exploiting all the personal data it possibly can. Paying to opt out of seeing ads seems like it would, at best, just make Facebook’s data mining less visible.

I guess it depends on your definition of “life.”