Maggie Marbles

Isn't that how all insurance works?

Letting fascists take over the technology may have seemed like a short-term boost, but there will be long-term costs. A year ago I barely knew who Sam Altman was, and now I dream of his downfall.

Christmas doesn't have the role reversals anymore in most places, but it used to. That was my point. The drunken misbehavior, especially by ordinary workers in public and not the rich in private or even your uncle at dinner, is more traditional than a lot of modern Christmas rituals.

Letting the workers blow off steam periodically, especially relaxing the servant/master relationship temporarily, is one of those things that keeps coming around in different cultures. It was a feature of Christmas before the 19th century in a lot of places, but it's older than that.

It all depends on who and where. Letting the "lower orders" run amok (especially young men) has sometimes been part of the formal event and sometimes strongly condemned. Same goes for fires, which go way back as a solstice thing. Some fires were good, and some bad.

Probably more pagan midwinter stuff, and various Christian groups (e.g., the Puritans) tried to stamp it out. Family-centered, kid-centered Christmas celebrations cut it back considerably, so now a lot of it happens on New Year's Eve rather than the whole 12 Days of Christmas.

Does getting drunk count as a specifically Christmas thing? I think it's got more of a historical claim than the trees, much less the sweaters, but I'm not sure how unique it is. I suppose Muslims and Mormons are the ones who get left out, but much of the rest of the world can participate.

Agreed. The sort of people who end up in government beyond the local council level learn how to make small talk in a room with people they can't stand. They even learn how to be allies to get a bridge built without forgetting why they run against the other side. Trump is different, and so is MAGA.

I don't buy the ones advertised as such, but I look for shoes that stay on my feet without pressing them from the sides, top, or bottom. The top is actually trickiest, especially for loafer-looking shoes without fastenings. High arch = high instep.

Same here re: arch support. I have high arches too, but the closer to barefoot I am the better I like it. I don't want my shoes to force my feet to do any particular thing, just to protect them from ice and snow and broken glass and stuff. A little padding is nice too, but not too much.

This time, I want to hear from Democrats who are going to clean house on crimes in office both domestic and international. And if the Supreme Court doesn't go along, the Supreme Court is complicit and it's no longer a serious legal body.

Not going after the torturers was the biggest failure of the Obama administration, and the reason I still don't regret my 2008 vote for McCain. I did vote Obama in 2012 and ended up liking him in general, but I'm still unhappy that he didn't take that one thing seriously enough.

It's not quite as weird as if the accusation was infidelity because his ex was unfaithful. That one's really hard to fix. But frugality, liking grilled cheese, eating the same thing for a few days because that's what you bought, and so on shouldn't freak anyone out. Talk, with or without a pro.

Democrats aren't going to get the Christian Nationalists or Nazis, but we should try to get every other white person. Even a lot of Tea Party guys are proud that their grandfathers fought AGAINST Nazis.

Judy Garland who was in her teens? Very few 30-something women have the same bodies they had at junior prom. Those who try can end up looking strange.

I don't know what medication he took, if any, but he had a taste for coffee and the doctor said it was fine within reason. I drank tea from a young age, but he's the only kid I've seen who actually wanted coffee and kept asking for it after he tried some.

My nephew with ADHD started drinking a mug of coffee every morning at a young age. One day when he was about 8 I saw him with his coffee and a newspaper, which for some reason was one of the funniest things ever. He just needed a cardigan and tweed hat.

If you can drink fluids and keep them down, that's a lot cheaper. Add a Centrum if you want vitamins and minerals. And there's no shortage of drinks that have sugar or caffeine.

From the standpoint of this former centrist who just keeps moving left, I think that using language like "the system" is what keeps people from articulating an ideology. When you turn left, you start saying "four decades of Reaganomics" and pointing blame at the right and not at abstractions.

What I was going to ask. Those are very different things.

Because they were moved to the Department of Education. When the federal government moves a function, it moves the people instead of firing them and assigning a whole different group of people.

I found the perfect cure for jet lag when I went to Australia. The first night I got roaring drunk (not hard in Australia), tried to dance, and fell off my espadrilles. Whacked my head good and hard against the floor. Jet lag didn't bother me at all the next day!

For me it's a test. I lie down, and my body either says "thank God" or "I'm bored." If it's the latter, I have to get up and do something, even if it's just reading a book.

Glad to see the "inborn ability" line go down, even in the South. But we also need to see a "poor public policy" line, because bad educational opportunities and bad labor protections can often trace back to the same set of political priorities. Which are popular in the South.

It was a solid agenda, the best one anyone has put forth in recent years, but a strategic mistake in the current environment.

And politicians get away with gutting the safety net because too many people make the mistake of thinking the thing that mostly-kinda works for the average person also accounts for all the other cases. They don't say "there but for the grace of God" about the poor, or "what the hell" about the rich.

It's not 100%, but still worth betting on for most people. The people who didn't get an inheritance and buy houses young probably live in decent rentals, if their earnings are solid. And the person who gets sick and recovers might still bounce back. Deep poverty and vast wealth are something else.

A lot of Americans tend to apply middle-class rules to the extremes, where they don't work. Work hard, save your money, invest... yeah, those can be a very good recipe for getting yourself from the 47th percentile to the 63rd. But that's not why some people are at the extremes at either end.

(I want a government that can wrangle a good infrastructure bill. But we've got to fight fascism first.)

Democrats go straight to policy wrangling. How to wonk out over details, how to make deals to pull together a vote. These are the tools for putting together an infrastructure bill, which Republicans can't do. They aren't the tools for fighting fascism.