I once thought it was that simple so I understand where people on here are coming from on all this. But after ten years in the San Joaquin valley, ag central, I can tell you, having grown up in Seattle and thus seeing the contrast, there is a distinct power in fundamental formal education and when that is lacking it doesn't matter what happens to them, the powers-that-be always know how gullible they are and will mold them like playdoh. I think the schools need to be funded by the central government not local governments. Big city liberals should have to put up frankly with their local neighborhood schools being taken down a few notches through evenly spreading education funds across jurisdictions if they don't want schools way out in the boondocks to be as vapid as one finds them. If you won't pay for their education my attitude is don't complain about their politics and try your best not to complain about their intelligence. I find that hard myself - I get frustrated all the time with the people in this small town, but I still try to remind myself what I've learned about education itself and I try to have compassion. Maybe that's what ten years out in the boondocks teaches a Seattleite.

Like russian nesting dolls. Just starbucks all the way down.

This is gonna turn into the byzantine empire if we keep up with all these endless complications.

Yeah around there. I'll check it out.

Grandma died. I also kind of realized that my dad probably has dementia. So now the core of my "support system" has fallen apart. I have a theory about where my grandma got reincarnated to - somewhere good; but my dad I think is slowly taking on the life of a cockroach in an old trailer I used to live in. I have theories about dementia and reincarnation. That's what my grandma had. Vascular dementia. Anyway, with my dad no longer able to competently screw with my head I feel kind of liberated. My music finally feels like really good music. I'm like a really good musician I feel like now. Like I'm really confident all of sudden listening to my own music. I guess my dad, once upon a time mentally competent, always actively made me feel inadequate musically.

All I can say is freedom isn't free. Maybe that's something Canadians need to learn, I don't know - I don't really want to assume. But I got a cascadian flag tattoo on my left arm like a soldier's patch for a reason. I've been thinking in neomedieval military terms since I was a teenager at an alternative high school in the late 2000s.

Freedom needs to be constantly defended. If you can't give up any kind of tribute to a governing authority or series of governing authorities to defend it for you or don't find any existing entity as authentically defending it then you frankly have to defend it yourself. Same principle for arguing in favor of participatory democracy - if you don't participate in democracy in some meaningful way you are bound to lose it.

Well I think they really only did two things : A) appeal to far right people with their roots waaaay out in the boondocks mostly northward rather than southwestward using stuff like dog whistles, and B) use doublespeak to simultaneously appeal to, draw in, and superficially radicalize the more centre right types just enough to get their vote over the top, to have a substantial base, and to be able to call it 'a mandate'. I mean they really went out into the deep country for campaigning.

If I don't starve before then.

Yeah as I go read more it seems like what I'm more concerned with is OSAT (open source appropriate technology) where there is heavy consideration of sustainability. Also some of the things people are mentioning here which seems to kind of overlap - open source ecology, right to repair, etc. I think though I'm kind of wanting like a deliberate synthesis of all of this, the whole range of issues, almost like the intersection of 'green politics' and open source everything. I feel like that intersection doesn't get nearly enough attention. I don't know if it's because the 'science wars' make it a little awkward or what.

We need to look at this thing called 'adapting in place'. I think this is just such a complicated situation that people just need to figure out what's going on around them, at least for the time being. Radical simplification - corporate greed, yes, but it's still complicated as to what exactly we do about it.

Technically that would make king charles my head of state seeing as I live in California. Not into that. A lot of pros/advantages though, I'll say that much.

u nasteh

This becomes what russian hegemonic law looks like in the US. The DOJ does whatever the Kremlin wants or needs on this, a sharp departure from other administrations or even other jurisdictions such as blue states. We become a patchwork of neomedieval geoplitical clashes constantly caught in between the jurisprudential spheres of entirely conflicting global and financial agendas. Individual politicians and public servants serving throughout the government become agents of different global factions and different hegemonies and the people are continually subjected not just to unstable and unreliable patterns of legal text and texts indicating some kind of public policy but to endlessly shifting pretext of every type to the jurisprudence and statecraft themselves. The federal government has been collapsing for a while but this just makes it faster than it has been.

All these diseases coming out, I freaking swear...I just want to lock my door and shut out the world he's ruining.

Shrodingers rat penis situation sounds like.

Well the republicans are in some kind of hyperfascist accelerationist mode so I'm not sure exactly how much time we have to give them.

It's the consumption of an idea. There's very little in the way of substance at Starbucks. I achieved more than any Starbucks order by grinding my folgers classic roast just now while using an unbleached compostable coffee filter and having cleaned the coffee maker with all natural biodegradeable dish soap. Can't afford good coffee grounds right now, but recently I had 'Punk Goes The Bunny', Billie Joe Armstrong's (from Green Day) coffee brand.

But here I am wondering if I'm just consuming a bunch of ideas myself. Consuming the idea of Punk Rock for instance, or eco-friendliness, or health. But then I catch myself and say "Those are tangible benefits." Anything more likely to make me listen to The Clash is a positive, anything that's not gonna put bleach in my body, anything that's gonna be clean for making coffee but without such a residue of dangerous chemicals as is typical with cleaners, and anything to add to my compost.

I've been all over the map on this historically looking at every angle - there's no understating that. After just such deep and broad consideration, at this point I think it is perfectly fair to be deathly concerned that big tech and the power structure of which they are a part do not remotely have our interests at heart. They have all of this psychological knowledge about addiction to which you refer, and they are using it to make people more addicted, more engaged, more dependent, all to make more money. It's actually simple in that respect. It is my old naivety to even begin to think again that there is something socially responsible left at the foundation of big tech. I am not a flawless specimen of mental health independent of big tech, but the economic model upon which they are based is an important aspect of my overall problem in life. There is more room to heal, more room to breathe and lick my wounds apart from them on balance, so that is where I am headed. I am surprised that a decade after Edward Snowden there are actually still people saying "don't be afraid" implying that the system is fundamentally good.

When I lived in that nice middle class neighborhood growing up there was a drive-by shooting (which we all completely panicked about and made a huge deal), a meth lab that was discovered one day three doors down (the police came with hazmat suits and everything), my drug-addicted uncle was often wandering into the house drugged up on heroin, and there was this longstanding story about a guy a few houses down the other street who killed his wife then went up to a nearby mountain and shot himself. People had been warning me about poor neighborhoods all my life up until I was 21 saying they were even worse. But since winding up constantly in poor neighborhoods I've never been mugged, developed a generally thick skin, basic street smarts, learned who not to look in the eye, what not to do, how to react, how not to react, stay out of people's business, what situations lead to what other situations, don't be such a stickler about every little crime or suspicion of crime, listen to some gansta rap, know the greats, vibe, and everything is gravy. Seems simple to me now. Now I just enjoy the neighborhood. Birds chirping. Trees swaying. Haven't heard about any murders, meth labs, and I can afford a place of my own, or at least a room of my own. It's better than being a thin-skinned suburbanite who finds themselves walking on eggshells the minute a wild crime-ish energy appears.

Being paranoid about getting robbed wasn't exactly my anxiety though. It was a lot more so the physical proximity to locally powerful people who make decisions every day that ruin dozens or even hundreds of lives in big ways with total impunity making me wonder how they are actually willing to entrap and hurt me or to have me be hurt. I hardly ever go to my dad's house anyway. Material possessions aren't a big factor in my sense of security. I have very little social competence in dealing with powerful people aligned for whatever reason in whatever way against me let alone physical competence (i.e. police), but there is a sense of social competence I have with people who would rob in a poor neighborhood. It's like a different bioregion and I feel like it is increasingly separating from the entire rest of America like a checkerboard. I have seen so few police cars lately, it's strange.