I have been THC free now for like 18 months. Loved getting high, still miss it sometimes, but same as you, less anxiety, more in control, more ambitious.

My spouse got me the book Paddle your own Canoe by the very funny Nick Offerman (Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec)

One really good piece of advice in that book that I took to heart was that I needed something to replace getting high. We moved out to rural Ohio around the same time and I made working the land my hobby.

Mowing, pruning, sawing, digging, there’s always something to do and in the end I have this nice sense of accomplishment. Getting high used to be my hobby, I’d get high and play video games or watch a movie or listen to music and it was great and sometimes I still miss it. Realizing that losing one hobby is a lot easier when you replace it with another hobby though ended up being what made this stick.

18 months later I still occasionally think “it would be fun to get high” but it has definitely gone from craving to passing thought that I can dismiss.

Whether you stay thc free or indulge occasionally I hope you have a happy and wonderful life.

The problem is that doing nothing causes the electorate to vote in fascists.

I think the argument I often see between Dems and those further to the left is so difficult because both things are simultaneously true.

• If people voted in the Dems it would keep the republicans out of power.
• The Dems failure to deliver causes people to not vote for them.

I think this is where my frustration lies with the party. The job of the party is to win elections and if they can’t articulate and then deliver on policies that cause people to vote for them, they aren’t doing their job. And people can be angry at those that don’t vote for the democrats because it gives the republicans power, but anger in one hand and not much else in the other isn’t going to make those people vote.

So I think the cycle in the meme is largely correct, except I’d probably replace “vibes” with “the consequences of the republicans awful governing finally fuck things up enough that voters kick them out and the Dems are the only other game in town”

If the Dems want to stop being the ticket of last resort after a failed pandemic response leaves a mountain of corpses and a broken society in its wake or literal world war 3 happens, they need to get in power and then use that power to make people’s lives better. Not just a little better around the edges, not just “oh you can stay on your parents insurance until you are 25, still participating in a fundamentally broken system but you get a slightly longer grace period,” not with benefits that phase in over a decade and can be undone by an opposition party before they take effect.

I don’t hold out much hope though, because the Democratic Party has shown me that when push comes to shove their donors win. And their donors make a lot of money from the systems being broken. Hard to cut out the insurance companies from healthcare when they are cutting you big fat election checks. Curtailing predatory loans would be easier if the fees they extract from the working poor didnt in part end up in politicians pockets.

Both parties are owned by the donor class. The republicans figured out they could say they are pro business and they could lie and say they are pro worker, their voters aren’t carefully double checking. The democrats try to do the same thing with a neoliberal twist, they want to keep business in check but are for common sense public private partnerships, proud capitalists who believe in the power of the free market with regulations. It sounds all well and good but the donors would rather not have regulations and those public private partnerships would be a lot more appealing if the donors made a bigger profit and they’ll have even more to donate next election cycle.

The grift grinds on and the democratic base gets outraged that “those stupid voters let the republicans have power again” but if the Dems aren’t doing anything to improve their lives, why do we expect those mercurial voters that swing around untethered with some vague sense that “this is all fucked up” would stick around. It is all fucked up, so many things in this nation are a fucking scam so some small handful of wealthy fucks can have just a little bit more. Sure their idea of “let the republicans have a turn” isnt going to make things better and in many ways will make things worse, but shits fucked up, Dems allow the shit to stay fucked up, those people are just reacting to the fact that things aren’t getting better.

Supreme leader trump hs declared that to protect capitalism domestic oil producers are restricted from selling on the global market.

Patriots must sell oil only to the homeland and forego the global markets.

CPAC has burst into chants of USA USA and free market analysts on Fox News are calling this an obvious win.

Comrades, trump has said if any privately owned oil fields produce oil for export he may have to seize the means of production. Truly a new golden age is upon us.

Additional context:

TSA is part of DHS (Department of Homeland Security). ICE and border patrol are also a part of DHS.

After ICE started shooting citizens, the democrats said “no additional funding without some reforms.” In trumps Big Beautiful Bill ICE was already given a huge chunk of funding for the next few years, but they would like more.

Democrats have been trying to fund TSA but want a separate vote for ICE. This arrangement recently passed the senate but republicans in the house voted it down because they think they can pin the blame on the democrats and force them to give ICE more funding along with the TSA.

I updated my comment to rerun the numbers for just us employees and it comes out to $40 per employee. So good catch, they screwed them over even worse than I originally thought

In the conversation with Fortune, Murrell added that he gave a $1.5m bonus to employees of Five Guys’ 1,500 US stores to try to make up for the chaos unleashed by the promotion at various locations.

Globally … FiveGuys has 30,000 employees.

So let me get this straight. This fucking moron dreamed up a dumbass promotion that made 30,000 employees lives miserable as angry customers demanded free burgers and most likely hurled vitriol and hate at them.

His big brain protection was to give every store $1000. $1.5M spread out amongst 30k employees is $50 per employee.

You think one of these employees could be mad enough to shoot you and then go “hmm… $50 ought to do it”

I sorta hope someone spend their $50 on ammo

Edit: fiveguys made $3.5B in revenue last year or about $10M per day and this guy wants a slap on the back for handing out 1/10th of 1 days revenue to the people that actually make that money for the self serving reason of not getting shot.

Edit: for those that would prefer I rerun these numbers for just the US employees

From the fiveguys website

We average roughly 25 employees per Five Guys location. Add it all up and we currently have more than 30,000 people working for Five Guys worldwide!

At our corporate office, we have around 250 employees.

So let’s take the $1000 per location (which I calculated with the number of locations in the US) and divide that by 25 employees per location and we arrive at… $40.

For those upset that I used revenue instead of profits, five guys doesn’t publish annual profit figures so I’d have to guess and I can’t imagine that would make you any happier. At a 10% profit margin it’s 1 days worth of profits.

As someone that lives near a lot of corn, one interesting thing people don’t realize about corn fields is that they “sweat” in the morning releasing a ton of water vapor which in the summer months often becomes fog and makes everything more humid and miserable.

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/03/nx-s1-5094251/corn-sweat-is-real-and-its-made-extreme-heat-in-the-midwest-even-more-uncomfortable

So a field of solar panels is actually probably nicer that a field of corn

If this works as well as anti-drug programs I look forward to our communist future

It’s even worse.

There’s no advantage here. He said this to have a fleeting moment of feeling special because he knew something private and had the power to reveal it.

That’s it. That’s all he got out of this, for a second he got to feel like a big man, and that was enough to smile and tell everyone someone else private medical information.

See how important I am, I know something not everyone else knows. Sure it’s terrible news for that guy, but I’m not that guy so why would I give a fuck. He said he would stay and lick my boots up until his death, so I guess the only real tragedy is at some point he will die and I’ll need to find a new person to lick my boots.

That’s what’s flowing through trumps rotten brain

My spouse identifies as non-binary and I try my best to use their preferred pronouns. That’s a more recent development and I’m used to calling them by feminine pronouns.

The first “she” is an old habit, my mistake.

This is very stupid.

My spouse was diagnosed later in life with a severe gluten intolerance. She went from enjoying beer and soft pretzels to being told “never again if you don’t want to shit yourself in public”

We have a simple rule. Bog standard gluten stuff is fine for me to have, sandwich bread, cereal, etc.

They told me that it was just very upsetting if I was enjoying some delicious gluten treat that they could no longer have.

I love my spouse, so I don’t eat delicious gluten treats in front of them because it would make them upset. Instead I figured out how to make lots of gluten free treats we can both enjoy together. Sometimes I miss the ease of getting a Popeyes chicken sandwich (I still can as long as I don’t eat it right in front of them) but I’ve learned to make gluten free fried chicken we can both enjoy.

Maybe other people would think this is silly, but the person I love is worth it to me.

Capitalism.

Now there are all kinds of things people think of when you say capitalism, the free market, democracy (for some reason), etc.

But I mean the idea that the guy that owns the means of production should get the value produced by labor.

If you boil it down to that, it’s kinda crazy. You want to start a company digging holes, but you don’t have enough money to buy a backhoe.

Fred has plenty of money and can afford a backhoe. He buys it and makes you a deal, you can use his backhoe and he will own the company, you go out and dig holes and he will pay you a couple bucks an hour.

Obviously he has to charge the people that want the holes dug more than he’s paying you to make it worth his while, and he has to recoup the money he spent on the backhoe in the first place.

Fred will never pay you enough to live and save up to buy your own backhoe. After a while he’s made back all the money it cost him to purchase the backhoe.

So now the situation is this. A customer wants a hole dug, you come and dig the hole, and Fred, who has done nothing and already recouped all the money he spent to purchase the backhoe, gets most of the money. And that arrangement just goes on forever. When Fred dies, Fred Jr will inherit that backhoe, Fred Jr will have never spent a dime for that capital, in fact Fred Jr will have had a very comfortable life paid for by the sweat of your labor digging holes.

Fred Jr will get most of the value of your labor for his whole life for doing nothing at all, just because he happened to be Fred’s son.

This is the way we decide who gets the rewards of all the work humanity collectively does (under capitalist systems) and it’s resulted in a hundred or so people so insanely wealthy we can’t even conceptualize how much money they have and everyone else scraping by.

And very serious people (often paid by those billionaires) will be on the news (or replying to this very comment) telling you how this is just the only system that makes sense. But listen closely when they do, they will always say it’s good because of free markets, or competition, or democracy or something that is NOT capitalism. Capitalism rarely defends itself by talking about why it’s good for the rich guy that owns the capital to get all the value, it always misdirects you to something else, a free market or freedom just generally. The freedom to pick between 10 different ultra wealthy companies that own everything and work to make them even more wealthy for your entire life.

7th Guest

That’s the classic in case you just wanted to know the most important piece of information they kept out of the headline to get you to click.

Oh good the long term damage to oil production, storage, and shipping is solved!

The US uses 20M barrels of oil per day this is less than 9 days worth of supplies.

This is burning down all your crops and going “don’t worry though I picked up a box of protein bars so we are good food wise”

Wakes up and says he’s going to hit Iran 20 times harder today.

Finds out about mines and says… he’s going to hit Iran super duper hard.

You might want to save some room throughout the day for escalation you fucking moron.

I remember the day so clearly when Bernie had won a few of the early primaries, Biden was coming in 4th and seemed like he would wash out.

A colleague told me something big had happened, it was the day all the other centrist candidates pulled out right before Super Tuesday and threw their support behind Biden. It worked he ended up winning a bunch of primaries in a bunch of states that would later go on to vote for trump in the general election, but that was enough for the media to crown him the winner.

I was in California at the time, working phone banks for Bernie, and there was tons of excitement for him. That day was a gut punch, I remember thinking “we haven’t stopped our slip into fascism just pressed pause”

Ive never wanted to be wrong more in my life. Now I look around and think about the 4 years where we could have zealously prosecuted MAGA for the crimes they committed right out in the open (every time I bring this up people go, “oh you want them to punish their enemies and ignore the law.” No I want them to enforce the laws which would have the side effect of actual consequences for MAGA)x

Instead, and unthinkably after a terrible pandemic response and literal attempt to overthrow democracy, the bland 4 years did nothing to prevent another trump term.

• Biden didn’t deliver punishment for MAGA to hold them accountable
• Biden didn’t change the conditions of American life enough to make the siren song of the fascists unpalatable

This isn’t to say he didn’t do anything good, but look where we are. The actions failed to meet the moment and now we are asking ourselves “will an armed paramilitary force prevent people from voting?”

Love Biden or hate him, this is where we are.

Don’t worry, just like with the war powers acts, if the Dems find out that there is a concrete plan to steal the elections you can rest assured that 4 Dems from safe districts will join up with the republicans to vote down any attempt to stop it.

https://time.com/7382846/democrats-who-voted-against-war-powers-resolution-iran-conflict-trump/

212-219 because 4 Dems crossed over, if they had held to the “party line” that’s a 216-215 vote.

The best thing for the Democratic Party is for everyone to blame those 4 politicians. It happens every time though, different politicians, always just enough.

There’s only two ways to interpret whats going on. The first is the one the party wants you to believe, they are just too weak to keep their members from voting against the party. They like this because they can reframe that weakness as a strength, you see they are such a big coalition and put such a priority on independent decision making that it’s a good thing that just enough Dems defect every time to keep the party from achieving any goals. What can they do? Aw shucks, guess whatever horrible thing we just failed to stop is going to happen.

The second way, which I think is closer to the truth, is that they are bought. For each issue there’s some deep pocketed interest going “alright pick a few people from safe seats, just enough to pass / vote down this thing.”

Otherwise it’s just terrifically bad luck right? Every consequential vote has a different set of just the right number of defectors to not do anything.

All the while the emails and texts go out pleading dor just a little bit more money. Sure we couldn’t get the bill you wanted passed, but if you give us some more money for our fight fund, boy you won’t believe how much we will not fight next time.

As a lifelong democrat that donated thousands of dollars to them over the years, I’ll still vote for them because our voting system means there’s no good alternative, but I’m no longer believing they are anything but controlled opposition. They make noises, they go on tv and say “oh this is bad,” but when it comes to actually doing anything about it they are always just a little short. They need just a few more seats, just a couple more donations. Ok we’ve got a 58 seat majority in the senate, but you know, it’s really time to compromise and make sure the republicans get what they want.

It’s such a shame that all of human knowledge isnt readily available to this person. Oh it is, on the very device he’s using to post this, how embarrassing

I think there is a very good chance that if Iran just said

“Hey we unconditionally surrender”

Trump would declare victory and fuck off.

Israel though would just keep bombing them.

Stupidest timeline problems demand stupidest timeline solutions. The 200 IQ play would be for Iran to say they unconditionally surrender and that Iran is no more, do a corporate rebrand and start calling themselves trumpistan, put that big ugly orange fuck on their flag.

Checkmate trump, whats he going to do, call the trump country with the trump flag bad? He’s a fucking moron, he’d have a 2 hour long phone call with Fox News about how great trumpistan is now, how it might be even hotter than America, how finally someone was smart enough to slap his stupid fucking name on a country.

Hell play your cards right Iran and he’d probably give you some nukes to use against Israel, just send someone to give him a big gold trinket and tell him what a cool dude he is and swear that Israel totally called him a bitch behind his back.

We are living in the dumbest fucking time

He can tell Americans they are in a new golden age all he wants, his hyper focus on it belies his anxiety.

People will swallow a lot of lies. Immigrants caused you to be poor, trans people pose some existential threat to you, if it were for woke DEI youd be better off.

These lies work because there’s no real way for the listener to validate it, you are giving them some reason why their lousy lot isn’t their fault.

The lie that doesn’t work is “you have it good” because that person you’re lying to knows whether or not they have it good. They are paying the bills and if you tell them “actually the bills are cheap” even the most believing believer will have to compartmentalize that. They will either have to sit with the lie and accept it or contort themselves into a less blatant lie like “things could be worse”

Trump is at the bar chatting up the down on her luck, past her prime, divorcee, telling her how now that she’s met him she’s hot again, everyone is saying how hot she is, everyone is saying how rich she is, everyone is saying how much she’s winning. But when she looks in the mirror, or in the bank account, she has to believe him more than her own eyes.

That’s a tough sell, he has a cult so it might work, but it’s a real tough sell.