It was a shit system in the first place, designed to consolidate power.

I guess it’s just a strange thing to threaten: “watch out or you’ll be in trouble with yourself”

Face prosection from who exactly? Pam Bondi controls indictments for tampering with evidence and Congressional contempt actions are referred to the DOJ which then go to… Pam Bondi.

Submarine sandwich, grinder, hero, hoagie, wedge, spuckie.

What do you think truck stop bathrooms are for?

I couldn’t roll my eyes harder at this level of zeroing in on random drugs based on someone getting an IV.

Did you look where you last used it for it?

I’d go for the gorgon’s sisters then, the Graeae. You can look upon them at least without dying, but understanding how creatures can share between them one tooth and one eye while being distinct beings is understanding something outside the cosmic order.

That’s kinda the late Roman myth where she was cursed. In the original Greek she was one of the many monsters spawned by ceto or the sea monster.

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

She ain’t ugly because her hair is snakes. Gorgons are the spawned granddaughters of chaos and she’s just the weakest. They’re lovecraftian horrors that turn you to stone precisely because you’re viewing what does not exist in the realm governed by the gods, the kosmos. The idea of beauty is outside of their very category. They’re ugly because they’re ontologically hostile to your concept of the world. You could only hope to view them though a bronze mirror darkly if you wanted to try because then you at least filter the true horror of what they are into a shadowy distorted form.

The hero’s party quit and now everybody expects me to kill the demon King.

By energy infrastructure improvements you’re talking about building houses and installing solar panels in places that nobody can live in because the only jobs are building houses and installing solar panels right? Because if ridgeline wind turbines, rail electrification and improvement, and grid backbone power lines are what you’re talking about I don’t think that’s in the bill.

I’m extremely skeptical as to the impact on these investments in the first place. Retraining workers to install solar panels and drywall and building a solar panel installation warehouses in an area that doesn’t have the economic engine to buy this new construction seems extraordinarily backwards. It’s like a free market version of China’s ghost cities but worse because you don’t even get actual infrastructure from it.

Homestuck, man, it’s always Homestuck.

Would be useful if those fed dollars the author is decrying was much more than military jobs and general entitlements like ag grants, Medicaid, and SNAP. Like yeah, their legislators don’t care about those folks either. But we ain’t exactly pulling a TVA anymore here so playing like neolib Clinton era bare minimum spending on poverty is a grand handout is pretty silly. For the most part nobody in the South or the Rust belt has gotten shit post NAFTA. The new deal has been dead for a long time but we’re sure they owe us for managing poverty.

All Mamdani had to do was go in there and say both him and Trump are mavericks out to fix the system by breaking the dumb neoliberal rules and Trump would be all for it. You tell Trump you’ve got similar qualities that are good and he’ll think you’re hot shit for gassing him up.

I’m not minimizing the impact of people if the natural rent extraction of the market would result in the collapse of the system. The savings are overstated precisely because it creates a very poorly optimized mixed system. And if there’s one thing markets are optimized to do it’s extract rents from these things. See: the entirely of the American public private partnership. Medicare part D is the most recent egregious example on its own.

In the end we needed a lot more than even Medicare for all because the administrative bloat in the healthcare system needs a flamethrower taken to it even after the giant leeches of the insurance companies were removed. But it’d be a start.

Public healthcare in any reasonable iteration uses regional agencies solving regional problems with cooperative agreements or wholly public enterprises. Right now the nursing home system that is top heavy even while it relies on a combination of Medicare and Medicaid should be example enough of that. Medicare for all alone would just create the worst of both worlds of bloat just like we see with US defense, infrastructure, and increasingly space funding.

So I wanna give data and information and facts and arguments and they are just seeing in their minds carnage, and I sound obscene.

These videos of reality are devastating to my attempts at dehumanizing rhetoric! Kids today are anti-literate.

This dudes main contribution that I can see is some sort of attempt to peg happiness to income so we can figure out just how many bread and circuses the proles need for us to keep them content. Like yeah, Trump is operating well outside of the lines by talking about grocery prices going down, but these dudes have been going full ham about how income inequality is actually a healthy thing.