Again and again, when the Times attempts its false balance — trying to make Republicans sound less unhinged than they actually are — it results in bad journalism. It is the same problem social media platforms have encountered in moderation: removing misinformation and deplatforming bad actors means removing and deplatforming more Republicans. Eventually, using the excuse of “fairness,” social media companies gave up.

The Verge also cites this Politico article on how the right actively worked to discredit Claudine Gay. From Politico:

When you put those three elements together — narrative, financial and political pressure — and you squeeze hard enough, you see the results that we got today, which was the resignation of America’s most powerful academic leader.

Lordy, how I wish truth and logic was sufficient to fight lies and crazy.

For a brief moment reading this, I couldn’t remember the last time I ate beef – but then I remembered the summer sausage in the fridge… which probably has beef in it, so… yesterday. Other than that purchase, I don’t know if I’ve had any other beef this year.

The study found that 12% of Americans consume nearly half of the country’s beef

So if we got that particular 1/8th to cut down, we’d be half way there! Just like if we could get the 1% to cut down on [so many things], we’d be in the clear!

Not likely. Fetterman has two huge issues that pull him towards MAGA: a) tons of MAGA voters he must appease, and b) the stroke that messed up his brain.

A relative got billed thousands of dollars for post-medical transport back home. Insurance covered the cost to fly him to the hospital, but not the trip back. This guy has spent decades enjoying his home in the middle of nowhere, but everything has gotten harder as he’s grown older. He knew he was getting short of breath more easily, but didn’t realize his lungs were severely deteriorating – until his wife found him passed out on the ground instead of doing yard work.

Now he has to use oxygen (5l/min) all the time, is mostly stuck in the house, and lives too far from most services to do anything. His wife can drive to town to get groceries and the like, but he has to calculate if he’ll have enough oxygen to make a trip, and his wife doesn’t want him driving at all lest he get dizzy and cause an accident. Airlines won’t let him fly.

The couple are having a hard time finding people to drive all the way out to their place to help take care of things. They are pretty much stuck out there with a lot of chores they can’t do and very little entertainment. They did finally manage to get someone to install a generator so when the power goes out (which happens often enough), they can keep recharging the oxygen.

Prior to this, he’d been making long trips to see doctors for back and neck pain because there weren’t any close providers, but those docs somehow missed his breathing issues. I don’t know if he was seeing a GP as well, but his choices were limited. Family had urged him to move somewhere more … well, if not urban, at least suburban for over a decade because his medical care never seemed very good. Now it is nearly impossible.

Does that answer the question? The guy went from doing yard work one day to incapacitated the next. I’m sure the change is usually less instantaneous for most people, but there are cases like his where the change from healthy to ‘not’ is fast.

They just announced they were upping the ad content. You are seeing it in real time.

• https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/business/movies-theaters-ads-amc.html
• https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/amc-theatres-commercials-1236256062/
• https://deadline.com/2025/06/amc-responds-more-commercials-1236423804/

I’m doing better without him, so don’t worry too much about it. Old women tend to live alone simply because men die younger, so it’s no biggie if some of us start that trend a bit early.

I remember an old guy who really wanted to remarry when his wife died, courted and married someone new, and then expected her to do all the household chores because that’s what women do. She was aghast. He hadn’t given any indication that what he wanted was a free maid while wooing her, and she backed out of the whole thing immediately – much happier to be on her own than take on his expectations.

The reddit hivemind gets triggered by the very idea of cheating. As far as I know, there was no cheating in my marriage and eventual divorce, but it didn’t matter to me if he cheated or not. It mattered to him that I didn’t cheat, so I didn’t. From my point of view, I’d have a problem if he was spending all his free time with someone else instead of helping with the house, chores, relationship, and so on, but random sex was fine by me – as long as it didn’t result in pregnancy or become a full-blown relationship.

Years ago I read some paper about how humans have two primary and competing reproductive strategies: monogamy versus promiscuouness. It theorized that cultures tend to codify monogamy as the standard to follow because its proponents get very hostile to the promiscuous whereas the promiscuous do not much care what the monogamous do.

Agreed!

I might think it is in my self interest to lie, cheat and steal, but if I do that, my community and my reputation are worsened, and I may have a harder time getting a better position in a crappier world.

If instead I think it in my self interest to volunteer at the local food bank, I might see my community and reputation improved, and by demonstrating a commitment to community, perhaps I will get a better job offer.

More basically: civilization has figured out that fair trade benefits both the farmer who needs tools and the blacksmith who needs food. It is in everyones’ self-interest to support things like: rule of law, commerce, and education.

It sounds like your mom did you wrong. You can’t change that. You CAN change what you do now.

Look, I’ve known more than a couple people who heard the same and worse from their mothers. One girl knew their dad had been abusive and their mom had to step in and take punches to keep the then-toddler girl from getting hit. A guy who’s dad ran off had a young mom who really never meant to be a mom, was bad at it, and couldn’t afford to feed her kids. I don’t know the full stories for all my acquaintances, but those are two who both heard their moms say things like, “I wish you were never born.” and “You ruined my life.”

It sucks to hear that, but moms are not perfect, have their own stresses to deal with, and sometimes too much heart break can get a person to say things they should not.

Maybe life IS meaningless, but there’s a bunch of us fuckers stuck here who are all struggling to make a go of it despite the circumstances, and while we can acknowledge that everything sucks, you probably don’t know we think that because we’re not in the worst of depression at the moment and try to fill the emptiness with small pleasantries rather than slip back into the well of sorrow, saying a mindless patter of things like, “It’s a beautiful day” or “We needed the rain”, or “Great game last night.”

You are not alone. You can get through this. Be kind to yourself. Be kind to others. Try to do something – anything – for yourself, or for someone else, or for everyone.

He’d tell you because I was crazy.

I’d say it was because he wanted us to both move in with his (wonderful and supportive) family.

I was crazy, but not THAT crazy.

We had been living far away from his family, but he’d landed a fantastic job in their home town. Before the move, his mother started calling me and telling me that if I wanted to live in her house, I’d have to be respectful, and not go out drinking all night and coming home drunk – something I’d never done or conceived of doing – or what chores I would have, or how loud I could be, and when we would eat, and so on. I told him that I could not live 24/7 with his mom. I said I was moving to MY mother’s and when he got us a place of our own, I would join him. He didn’t. We divorced.

The divorce was fairly amicable. That was all about 30 years ago and I never remarried. I did shack up with a wonderful man for about 20 years, but I eventually kicked him out because he’d shrink into the shadows when I most needed support and I was tired of feeling emotionally devastated when I reaching out for succor and instead finding a void. I explained that I’d rather know that no one is there to help if I’m flailing about than to have someone I trusted stand by and do nothing. Yeah, I’m bitter about that one. I still love the guy, but sheesh.

This surely varies by state, but in Alaska, for example, I’m told Japanese vacationers LOVE to try out guns. So, if you can rent a gun on a range, shooting off weapons is the most American thing I can think to do before you leave.

When I hear ‘government bloat’, I think $500 hammers and fat cat contracts where big companies get huge contracts that mostly go in the pockets of a handful of rich owners while little goes to the actual project.

I do NOT think it means randomly removing workers. Salaries cost little and are the support structure of the government. I might not want to buy a ‘bridge to nowhere’ but I certainly don’t want to take out 10% of the supports on each bridge.

Everything DOGE has done seems destructive and none of it seems to reduce government waste. In fact, the opposite. p.s. I know there’s more to the hammer story, but – like transgendered instead of transgenic mice – the public mostly only heard the price tag.

Nah, gotta got vinyl because cassettes deteriorate just sitting in their cases while vinyl stays pristine … until you actually play it, anyway – but if you want to store an audio recording for longevity, press a gold version of a vinyl album.

When I was in high school, I was very anti-authority and swore all the time to be “against the man”. When I started working in day care I had to cut out all swearing all the time because it was too automatic to ONLY stop in front of kids. When I got a real job, I continued my no-swearing bend as a general rule because – at least until you get to know the people around you – people will treat you with more respect if you don’t sound like a foul mouthed low life.

Swearing all the time for no reason is a very low-rent affect. Letting out a rare swear will add considerable emphasis when your peers know it is not your normal behavior. Always swear when you hurt yourself. It helps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_herbs_with_known_adverse_effects

The list itself says it is incomplete and I immediately thought of a couple items not listed that have known toxicity issues:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perilla_frutescens#Traditional_medicine,_phytochemicals,_and_toxicity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruta_graveolens#Toxicity

I think Germany is known for serious police. In fact, I half remember a joke about that… something about the perfection of a British Cop, a German car, and an French Chef – compared to the misery of a German Cop, a French car, and a British Chef.

Obviously not funny in the mangling, but the joke wasn’t that German cops were bad, just not the generally pleasant ‘fair cop’ stereotype of Brits.

Personally,. the stereotypes that have stuck in my head are: that low-level officials in India (including cops) can be bribed to look the other way for minor things, Nordic cops are well trained in de-escalation and restraint techniques where no one gets injured, Brit cops might be fair or might be racist, but the laws give better protection to citizens, and that German cops are stern, and will rigidly follow and enforce all laws and rules… generally. Not sure if it is true or not, but I’ve also heard that German cops will fuck you up if you give them reason, but you’d really have to give them reason.

I thought I was going to rely to this question, but you covered it so perfectly that I’ve nothing useful to add. Thank you for putting in the time.

The vast army of Georgia poll workers report for duty only about three days a year and get paid about $7.25 an hour. Every time we come in, the rules have changed, so we train for eight hours to learn the new protocols. Election day itself, including set-up and break-down, starts at 5:30 am and ends at 9:00 pm, two hours later if you’re a manager delivering the ballots to the regional office. Most of us are retired, and many are elderly (read: not tech-forward).

And poll workers are not perfect. One of them puts on a sweater and inadvertently obscures her name tag (not allowed). Another shows a new person how to work the check-in station (not allowed). Another tells a nonprofit they can set up their food hand-outs inside the building so as to stay out of the rain (not allowed). And at some point during the 15 hour work day, all of you find yourself accidentally socializing with one another (also not allowed). Likewise, the clerks are socializing with the voters (you guessed it: not allowed), which, worst case, is akin to being smothered in grandmas.

This sounds very like my experience back when I used to work the polls. We all did the best we could and we all knew a fair chunk of the voters, so chatting was frequent.

I believe the main issue is that it doesn’t get ‘clicks’ these days because everyone already knows about it. “Dog bites man” doesn’t get as many clicks as “Man bites dog” and all that. Still, a quick search brought up a couple articles from the last 12 months that weren’t stifled:

• https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/produced-water-midland-pollution-18561991.php
• https://www.texastribune.org/2023/10/31/texas-oil-gas-fracking-wastewater-spills-railroad-commission/
• https://www.cleveland.com/open/2024/05/fracking-waste-wells-owned-by-an-ohio-senator-are-leaking-the-state-paid-13-million-to-clean-it-up.html
• https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2024/04/30/athens-co-fracking-leak-inaction-show-the-dire-public-health-dangers-of-ohio-regulatory-capture/
• https://www.denver7.com/news/front-range/erie/an-erie-oil-well-surrounded-by-homes-leaked-toxic-chemicals-as-cleanup-continues-neighbors-fear-health-risks
• https://www.alleghenyfront.org/rager-mountain-equitrans-gas-leak-fine/

tangential: https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2024/09/12/methane-emissions-much-higher-than-gas-industry-targets-study-says/

Are you trying to greenwash fracking??? Industry never cleans up. There’s no profit in it. You would hear them advertise their ‘commitment to nature’ if they rescued one tree or bunny from their own contamination. When you hear nothing, they are continuing to wreak havoc.