the number of deaths that will be directly attributed to the cutting of USAid internationally and the loss of healthcare, jobs and environmental regulations in the US

Hey now, we didn’t cut USAID. We just sent $40B to our good friends in Argentina. And now Milei’s party has won the midterms, which means he can continue his War On Leftism inside the state and along the borders.

We’re also helping to arm and secure Guyana, in a Kuwait-like project to drill into neighboring Venezuelan oil fields. That’s not happening for free. Lots of Latin Americans and US government contractors are absolutely getting their palms greased. It’s been a bonanza for NATO aligned mercenaries since the Bush Era, thanks to all the money we’re spending on freelance military.

We’re saving lives, man. All that money is putting food on the tables of any number of cocaine snorting, whore house frequenting, tacti-cool sunglass wearing Afghanistan washouts and their Guasano peers.

Are you just going to ignore that?

If they claim they know that these boats have drugs on them, they could just apprehend them when they made port

That would require due process, instead of a spectacle of Shock and Awe.

Also, let’s say, hypothetically that these aren’t drug boats. Let’s say they are boats moving medical supplies or fuel or building materials between Venezuela and Cuba. Let’s say they’re actually military units working on behalf of the Venezuelan Coast Guard or just fisherman who got caught in an international crossfire.

It’s just easier to say “Drug Gang. Killed them.” knowing no major American media source is going to publish a rebuttal. Nobody in the US has access to the details of the attack. Nobody is going to interview the families or investigate the wreckage. Nobody is going to contradict this regime when it comes to butchering citizens of the Global South.

So why not call them a drug gang? Call them human traffickers. Call them roving nautical pedophiles. Call them Islamic Jihad.

American audiences won’t hear anything different.

Buying back your stock with your payment package in an ouroburos of financial fuckery

What becomes epidemic can often be assumed as normal.

A Cautionary Tale: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome And The “enlarged” Thymus Gland

In the first half of the 19th century, physicians were becoming alarmed by sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Healthy infants would be put to bed and found dead in the morning. In 1830, pathologists noted that SIDS-affected infants had enlarged thymus glands compared with “normal” autopsy specimens. It seemed logical to conclude that these “enlarged” glands were in some way responsible for the deaths.

…

If an enlarged thymus was leading to sudden infant death, removal of the thymus might be of preventive value. Radiology had advanced to the point at which physicians began making the diagnosis of thymic enlargement from x-ray films. After radiographic diagnosis, thymectomy was initially recommended, but the mortality rate was unacceptably high. Thymus irradiation became the treatment of choice.

The first “successful” use of irradiation to shrink the thymus was reported by Friedländer in 1907. Thousands of children eventually received radiation to prevent status thymicolymphaticus. Some physicians advocated prophylactic irradiation for all neonates.

There was only one slight problem. It turned out to be deadly

The cadavers used by anatomists to determine the “normal” thymus size were from the poor, most having died of highly stressful chronic illnesses such as tuberculosis, infectious diarrhea, and malnutrition. What was not appreciated at the time was that chronic stress shrinks the thymus gland. The “normal” thymus glands of the poor were abnormally small. Here is where the fatal mistake occurred: because the autopsied thymus glands of the poor were regarded as normal in size, the SIDS-affected infants were erroneously believed to have thymic enlargement

In a household or community where large numbers of people express the same symptoms, it is very possible for people to assume this condition to be the normal one and good health to be the abnormality. They may even conclude healthy people are in need of treatment to bring them back to “normal” patterns of behavior.

You can see this error repeated historically, from abusive parents assuming “being beaten by my parents toughed me up so I should do the same” to anti-vaxxers who think measles and whooping cough build character.

My Diagnosis

~ Rachael Bloom, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

We’ve definitely got cause for hope after this last election cycle.

But given the stubbornness of the Cuomo-crats, we continue to have some cause for alarm.

He’s an edge case. And - don’t get me wrong - if this is a self-reproducing model for future campaigns, awesome!

But Mamdani himself is exceptionally charismatic with good politics to back him up. I wouldn’t even say guys like him don’t exist, they just tend to prefer climbing the escalator of retail politics to the greased pole of democratic socialism.

Out-of-sight, out-of-mind. I was absolutely hooked on softdrinks through my teenage years. Then I had a couple of really painful root canals. Scared me to the point that I simply couldn’t touch soda without thinking about it.

Easiest thing in the world to not drink the stuff when you simply don’t have any of it in the house.

What are the trade-offs of slowing/stopping climate change?

Too numerous to list. You’re talking about fundamental changes to agriculture, transportation - both consumer and commercial, mining, construction, and energy production. Entire industries need to stop what they’re doing. Labor forces need to be fully repurposed. Whole new industries need to be developed to change how our post-industrial society functions.

And because the current state of play is designed to maximize private profits for a central group of very influential stakeholders, what we’re talking about isn’t a simple matter of consumer choices. Its a class conflict that echoes with some of the bloodest acts of state violence committed over the last 200 years.

Ending racial discrimination? Unlimited corporate spending on political campaigns?

You talk like the Civil Rights Movement isn’t over sixty years old. Or that there’s national political leadership that isn’t tainted in one way or another by corporate spending. This is obviously not a matter of individual consumerist choice (unless that individual is a trillionaire, and they’ve got some very strong incentives to continue both of the above).

These issues and many others have clear moral imperatives attached

But they still require enormous economic structural changes. Vanishingly few people in positions of authority seem interested in pursuing these changes.

The flip side to this is “oh, snacks are in easy reach? Time to eat”

Also, the procrasta-snack. Where you go into the kitchen to look for food because it beats doing whatever it was you are trying to avoid.

I hope that when the dam breaks it washes away the entire GOP

If you look at the Labour Party in the UK, they walked in with comically oversized majorities last year. Then they proceeded to govern exactly like their Conservative predecessors - with no few MPs gleaned from the ranks of fleeing conservatives - such that Reform UK is now ready to pick up the Prime Ministership in the next election cycle.

The problem with the modern American conservative movement is that its not confined to the GOP. It is a consequence of the donor base. And the donors continue to be enthusiastically bipartisan.

Oh no! Worse for Trump, you say?

Like… so bad that Kash Patel might actually do something about it? So bad that any one of those 91 indictments from two years ago might result in a prosecution with penalties attached? So bad that literally anything bad might happen to America’s Golden Child?

despite the ignorance and stupidity of the masses

:-/

I see this tossed out casually, as though we live in a world of correct answers that people aren’t picking rather than trade-offs that people aren’t agreeing on.

Might be worth interrogating why Obama’s popularity tanked following his election.

Dominion Voting sold to company run by ex-GOP election official

If California withheld all their public employees’s federal income tax

The payroll system is fully privatized. California bureaucrats don’t control it, they just submit information to private banks and payment processors.

Again, you don’t understand how the IRS actually functions. Or how HR and payroll function. There isn’t a big toggle under the governor’s desk that stops W-2 withholdings for every state employee.

If you tried to do this inside a single company, you’d be setting off alarms in whatever bank or accounting firm you contracted to process paychecks. Even just an individual trying to zero out withholdings with get a dirty look from HR and a polite deny.

I think the idea is that the state will collect federal taxes in escrow

That’s not how the IRS works. Never has been.

It’s absolutely not lawful but none of this shit is

It’s not feasible. What are you even proposing? That the New York State Government try and seize federal tax revenue from IRS offices in the state? Given how much money is functionally digital, I’m not even sure how that would work.

Might as well say they should nationalize the NYSE while you’re at it.

I have no idea why you jumped to it from millionaires needing to be taxed more.

But if you think knitting as a profession is some kind of joke, why would you defend people from taxation when they were profiteering off the textile work of others?

Or are you just saying people should take up knitting

Man, don’t even get me started on the fast fashion industry. We’re killing the planet so that we can turn raw cotton into landfill waste on the backs of East Asian slave labor.

If we could end that by telling Jeff Bezos and Chip Wilson to take up knitting? Yes, absolutely.

Save the planet. Shut down Temu and lock Colin Huang in an oubliete until he darns everyone else a decent sweater.

People might say they could live on less, but doing things is expensive.

Doing things is expensive because people with million dollar a year incomes make it expensive. That’s where the million/year comes from.