Merry Crisis (and a Cool Zone New Year)

Remember folks: if you have any small amount of artistic talent, any sex appeal, or can make your friends laugh, the richest man on earth is crying screaming throwing up because he can’t be you.

This looks like one of those reality TV show houses where the architecture is optimized for generating conflict

We have other federal courts making SCOTUS redundant. And "checks and balances" are as usual either checks against actual democracy or don't exist because it has been completely captured by the same bourgeois interests that have a stranglehold on the presidency and congress

Union membership can make a life-or-death difference, even when the union kind of sucks. Teamsters seems to be one of the better ones in the US

EMH is a fairy tale. Even traditional stock/bond markets are irrational most of the time. Trading data can tell us what the consensus is, and said consensus is sometimes a vibes-based mass delusion instead of coinciding with reality

SCOTUS justices are appointed for life and there is no getting rid of a bad justice through elections. In practice SCOTUS is yet another cudgel used to suppress democratic will in favor of corporations and the wealthy, just like the senate and EC.

My go-to comparison would be Andrew Jackson

On that same token the senate and SCOTUS need to be abolished. In a sane world these would be minimalist (i.e. reformist or socdem-coded) demands, not even pie-in-the-sky maximalist ones

Basically this
bsky.app/profile/shuc...

Tbf I did gloss over the "America-hating" piece given my ambivalence towards the idealized America that progressive liberals insist can/should exist, and hatred for the genocidal imperialist settler project underpinning the actual existing America (insert Hans Moleman "I was saying boo-urns" here)

America is "complicated" but its best-intentioned liberals, the neo-Jacobinists invoking 1776 and 1789, seem to have a child's understanding of what the actually existing America *is*. They think it can still be a progressive force at this late stage without being rendered unrecognizable

Noah had me in the first half. Pretty much dancing around the reform vs. revolution question

An accidental invocation of homelessness matching the tone deafness of Pharell's "room without a roof"

Considering this my push to return to a book I barely started reading that's just been sitting in my bag while I doomscroll bsky during work breaks

YouTube video by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell Geoengineering: A Horrible Idea We Might Have to Do

Watch this for the probable answer if you don't mind having your day ruined
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSu5...

"why is everything so transactional these days" because ppl that do collective care are literally being priced out of being able to exist. Everyone is stressed and with dysregulated nervous systems.

They hear parents' complaints about finances and think it's their fault (or they're being blamed) for existing instead of the reality that working households are being robbed by monopolies and inflation almost any time they have to spend money on the things socially necessary for mere reproduction

The thing is this is exactly how capitalists see kids: only useful for "unskilled" labor until they're educated/trained.

Kids might be internalizing this through bourgie-owned MSM framing of the issues that affect them, concluding adults aside from their parents and teachers must be sociopaths

...and because they've been fed the lie that we live in a democracy and this was all decided democratically (rather than imposed to appease bourgeois tantrums) and everyone is okay with this instead of a majority of conscientious people being too beaten down and disorganized to push back

"Their parents are willing to kill them" likely refers to willingness to risk getting them sick for political/financial reasons; money seemingly more important to the parents than their own lives, not recognizing the instrinsic link between financial stability and access to health under capitalism

The patchwork approach to school reopenings/sanitation theater seems very much an extension of adult apathy regarding gun violence in schools, which for alphas and zoomers already *was* the pre-covid status quo ante they were born into

b) The horrifying realization that some adults in their lives, even parents, consider them a net burden (because childcare costs are out of control), and adults with decision making power consider them completely disposable in the name of making Line Go Up.

If I understood them correctly:
The alpha kids are dealing with the complex trauma (i.e., ongoing traumatic conditions, chronic stressors like those endured in the middle of war), resulting from:
a) The pre-covid social order collapsing before they were old enough to think of it as "normal"; and...

I guarantee most of the inmates treat him absurdly well and protect him when they can

If it is it's a brutal, gory seinen.

Shonen mindset can be a really effective coping strategy though

I don't blame you, that story sounds infuriating. Mediocre hateful dipshits getting through life by preying on people's insecurities

Swearing by and cosigning this advice. At least one of pancakes, pasta, omelettes (or eggs and bacon), or charcuterie, at least weekly, between struggle meals is a huge mood boost.

Or hell, even just carving out an hour for toast and jam (or pesto) with tea or coffee on an idle Saturday or Sunday

You were lucky not to fall

It took me too long to figure out what was going on with your feet

And we live under a dictatorship of capital. The common working-class consumer is, in so many steps, functionally enslaved by the ruling capitalist class, the terms of production, consumption, and trade usually dictated and imposed on the rest of us by them