Who let George Santos onto Lemmy?

The storyteller can sit next to me. 8 hour flight? The only conversation will be settling bags/items, to/from bathroom trips, and nothing else. I’ll sit there for hours without even acknowledging anyone’s existence without any compunction.

The original Anarchist Cookbook was incredibly scary to the feds. It was filled with mostly useless and dangerous (mostly to the “Anarchist”), but the name and the feelings at the end of the Vietnam war captured the public’s attention.

It was passed around mostly by Xerox machine or fax copies. By the time I saw a version in the late 80’s the one I ran into was a blurry and unreadable mess. The original author is on record saying that he had no idea what he was doing when he wrote it and that no one should follow any of the bomb making bits because he’d never made one himself.

Even with all of that, it holds a serious impact on our communal memory and social ideas. The name alone is going to live forever, even if the original text is lost to time.

Ranked Choice Voting (fairvote.org) or any other preference polling voting system significantly mitigates that problem.

Then 3rd party can be a real strength for the political system, not just a weapon to use against your opponents.

Vote better voting first. Any kind of preference polling would open the door to actually party reform and 3rd party viability. Ranked Choice Voting (fairvote.org) or anything other than first past the post as we mostly have now is a huge improvement.then vote 3rd party first, followed by the lesser of the old two evils. In no time that 3rd party will be a top contender, but only once we fix our voting system.

Wealthiest country, not healthy country. The US is not a developed nation anymore. Developed nation is a moving target, both because the bar raises as other nations move forward, and as tech/health advanced happen. A nation must keep investing in itself to stay in the developed nation category. The US stopped investing in itself seriously in the early 1980’s and we’ve been coasting on May fronts since then.

We have immense wealth in the hands of corporations and the handul of individuals who really own them. The concentration of wealth is worse than during the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons that ended with the Great Depression and union wars.

The wealth has pushed up the cost of living while driving down the income of people not in higher positions already, creating a gulf of destitution anyone now joining the community must face. Some make it over, but more and more are not making the leap, and many who used to be past the hump of establishing a household and having a middle class lifestyle are backsliding into the gulf of destitution (that’s me).

Corporate profits are at all time record highs while effective incomes are lower than they’ve been in many decades. The nation as a whole has lots of money, but the average person is being crushed by greed and no protection by our government. We’re a rich, but failed nation now.

And how about when insured and it’s still insane? I had a regular checkup on a medical device. The doctor 15 minute long “how’s it going, looks fine, see you in a year” was billed at $360 and using the machine to check that the device was fine was $250. With other add one the total “cost” was $690. Outrageous.

Insurance (supposedly good) paid about $300 of it. Holy crap. A single visit to have a doc say you’re good at a rate of $1450/hr ended up being more than I can save in a month. Complete insanity. I’ve gotta get out of this country.