That's it. Those are your options. Homelessness doesn't go away based on "crime crackdowns." You will imprison the unhoused, and when they are free, they will be unhoused again. Or they will die in prison.

When you burn encampments or force people out without their stuff, they remain unhoused or freeze to death.

After working with the unhoused, it's become abundantly clear that those who don't want to support them instead want them dead.

By Philip C. Johnson - July 16, 2025

A Spark from American Thinker Last week, a friend sent me an American Thinker article that’s been stuck in my head ever since. Titled “Zohran Mamdani Has All the Earmarks of Being Another Barack Obama,” written by Norman Krieg on July 4, 2025, it sparked questions about something most folks overlook: CIA-adjacent programs. What are they, who’s involved, and are they quietly reshaping America in ways we don’t see?

The Roots of CIA-Adjacent Programs CIA-adjacent programs aren’t direct CIA operations but initiatives linked to U.S. government or intelligence interests, often through groups like USAID or the Ford Foundation. Born during the Cold War, they aimed to build global influence. The Kennedy-era “Tom Mboya Airlift” (also known as the “Kennedy Airlift”) provided scholarships to East African students to U.S. universities, grooming pro-Western elites. Similarly, Operation Paperclip (1945) recruited over 1,600 German scientists—many former Nazis—for U.S. programs, while Operation Mockingbird infiltrated media, placing journalists on CIA payrolls to shape narratives. The catch? These efforts all had intelligence ties, raising questions about foreign influence and ethics. Today, figures like Barack Obama and Zohran Mamdani echo these programs’ lingering reach. 

Modern Echoes: Obama and Mamdani Who’s involved? Krieg points to Barack Obama and Zohran Mamdani. Obama’s father, Annan Hussein Obama, arrived via the 1959 airlift, a program with documented CIA connections. Mamdani’s father came from Uganda in 1963 under a similar scholarship. Both men’s mothers worked with USAID and similar outfits, often flagged as CIA-adjacent for pushing U.S. agendas abroad. These individuals often end up in high-impact roles—politics, academia, activism—steering narratives here or overseas.

Mamdani’s Meteoric Rise Mamdani’s rise as New York City’s leading mayoral candidate feels eerily like Obama’s “out of nowhere” ascent to the presidency. A 33-year-old Shiite Muslim and self-described democratic socialist, Mamdani stunned the Democratic establishment by trouncing Andrew Cuomo in the June 2025 primary. How does a relatively unknown state assemblyman, with a platform some call communist—free buses, rent freezes, city-run grocery stores—rocket to the top in America’s biggest city? His viral social media, backed by 50,000 volunteers and small donors, fueled a grassroots wave, but the speed and scale feel less than organic. Like Obama’s rapid climb, it raises questions: is this raw talent, or is something bigger at play?

A Shadowy Intelligence Network The network behind these programs is shadowy but real, and the conspiracy angle is tough to dismiss. Some argue CIA-adjacent initiatives, like those tied to Obama and Mamdani, are covert ways to plant assets into global power structures, with “classic earmarks” of Deep State grooming: exotic backgrounds, rapid rises, polished personas. Are they handpicked to push globalist policies, sometimes at America’s expense? The CIA’s history shows a knack for manipulating domestic and foreign spheres, raising concerns about whether foreign nationals, once trained, become conduits for U.S. or rival nations’ agendas. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the CIA’s shenanigans:

Operation Paperclip Launched in 1945, Operation Paperclip brought over 1,600 German scientists, many former Nazis, to work on U.S. military and space programs, including NASA’s moon missions. By whitewashing their pasts, the U.S. prioritized technological gain over ethics, planting foreign expertise—tainted by war crimes—into America’s core.

Operation Mockingbird From the late 1940s, Operation Mockingbird saw the CIA infiltrate U.S. media, with over 400 journalists on payroll by the 1970s, per the Church Committee. Outlets like The New York Times and CBS were allegedly co-opted to push pro-U.S. narratives, (whatever those might be at the time) undermining press integrity and shaping public opinion covertly.

1953 Iran Coup In 1953, the CIA orchestrated a coup to overthrow Iran’s elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, installing the Shah to secure U.S. oil interests. Codenamed Operation Ajax, it showed the CIA’s willingness to manipulate foreign governments, often with blowback like the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Ukraine’s 2014 Unrest In 2014, the CIA supported pro-Western groups during Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, which ousted pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych for a Western-aligned leader. I was in Kyiv covering the protests, and locals told me directly the CIA was fomenting the revolution, a claim later backed by declassified cables revealing U.S. funding for NGOs. This echoes CIA-adjacent tactics, raising questions about meddling in sovereign nations for geopolitical gain.

Epstein’s Tangled Web Then there’s Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex trafficker whose shadow still looms in D.C. and media circles. I won’t wade into the current buzz around the Trump administration’s “Epstein files” promises, but consider this: his 2023-revealed calendar, per The Wall Street Journal, included meetings with CIA Director William Burns and Obama-era counsel Kathryn Ruemmler. Former NSA counterspy John Schindler ties Epstein to an Israeli operation called MEGA, suggesting he was a nugget in a broader intelligence web. While not directly linked to these scholarship programs, Epstein’s elite connections point to overlapping networks where power and espionage collide.

Why We Should Care Most Americans haven’t thought about this, but they should. Paperclip’s ethical breaches, Mockingbird’s media manipulation, and CIA coups echo today’s concerns about CIA-adjacent programs. Are we letting foreign influences into our system, against our better judgment? The evidence suggests a web where intelligence, philanthropy, and politics intertwine—often to our detriment. It’s time to ask who’s really calling the shots.

People who are already working on fixing climate change need to convince more people to work on it. And a popular thing is to share writings that describe how doomed we all are if climate change is not fixed, how terrible everything will be because of climate change, and how quickly all the treasures of our world are being lost.

There is a particular understanding of human behavior that is being accepted here without thinking about it hard enough. Popular news media shows headlines with terrible prophecies, written that way in hopes of getting the attention of otherwise disinterested people, who will then be "motivated" to fix climate change.

The trouble is that fear is no good for motivating thoughtful, patient, steady commitment to solving a problem. Fear is made to cause an organism to avoid things that might harm it. It creates a brief and explosive pulse of action where the organism's energy pours out as it instinctively, thoughtlessly reacts to escape the danger as fast as possible.

It's silly to blame people for avoiding thinking about climate change. The point of an organism responding to stressors is to avoid them. Oftentimes, the only tool people are presented with is personal choices about what products to buy, which inevitably is horribly frustrating and stressful, since a person will frequently be coerced by their situation into buying a certain product, and even if they don't they see others doing it all the time.

Relentless exposure to imminent threats that cannot be escaped causes Trauma, which severely impacts a person's ability to be resilient to stressors.

I think there is definitely a type of trauma associated with being constantly aware of the destruction of the environment and feeling helpless to do anything about it, especially since we as humans have a deep need for contact with other living things and aspects of the natural world, such as trees, water, flowers, and animals—a need that is often totally denied and treated as merely a Want or a hobby meant only for certain people who enjoy particular activities, like Hiking or Gardening.

We need to expand our minds on how this disconnection can hurt a human being. Imagine if a child's need to be loved by their caregivers, a person's need to be loved by their friends and family, was treated as a desire for indulgence or luxury, or a certain use of free time!

Yes, yes, one person has a condition that makes it hard to walk up hills, another doesn't like the bright sunshine, another is allergic to the grass or fungal components of the outdoor world, but WE ARE PART OF THE FAMILY OF ALL LIFE ON EARTH and WE EXIST IN SYMBIOSIS WITH THE ENVIRONMENT WHICH TAKES CARE OF US. Who showed you what beauty was, who taught you to feel peace and relief inside you in the form of a caressing breeze and rustle of leaves, who gave you awe and wonder at seeing the stars or the mountains? Where does every delicious food come from but the soil teeming with creatures? Isn't the most perfectly sweet berry grown from a plant, nurtured by the soil and pollinated by the bugs? Don't you feel delight at seeing a springy carpet of moss, a little mushroom, or a tiny bird? Think of all that the trees give us. Whose breath do you breathe? Whose body frames your home?

The writings of Indigenous writers such as the book by Mary Siisip Genuisz I am reading right now show me that the other life forms are our family. They take care of us and provide for us, and they would miss us if our species disappeared. Isn't that a powerful, healing fact? I think everybody is so enthusiastic about the book Braiding Sweetgrass because it is a worldview that those of us coming from the dominant colonizer culture are straight up ravenous, starving to death for.

Maybe, I think to myself, humans can experience a kind of trauma from being deprived a relationship with their Earth, just as they would experience trauma from being deprived relationships with other humans.

I really believe that it hurts us to be surrounded by concrete instead of soil, to see a majestic tree cut down on a whim without any justice possible, to see wild animals mostly in the form of mangled corpses on the roadside, to have poison sprayed everywhere to kill the insects that life depends on, to hear traffic and lawn mowers and weed whackers instead of birds and flowing water.

We KNOW that this is physically bad for our health, the stifling, polluted, and stressful environments of a civilization that doesn't know the ways of the plants, but I think it's a kind of moral injury too, right? To see a beautiful field turned into a housing development of ugly, big, expensive houses—no thought given to the butterflies and sparrows and quail of the field? To see a big old tree cut down, a pond full of frogs obliterated and turned into a drainage ditch beside a gas station? They aren't just things, they are lives, and while expansion and profit and progress are "necessary," a nice old field of wildflowers or a pond full of frogs are a different kind of necessary. I remember feeling this as a child without words for it—the sheer cruelty of a world that is totally without reverence for the other creatures.

"They own the property, they can cut down the tree" "They bought the land, they can do what they want with it" <but it can also be wrong, and many people know this on some level, even though our culture doesn't provide us with the framework.

Fear could never give people the motivation to fix climate change. Constant fear of what will happen in the future forces a person to protect themselves from the relentless stress by shutting it out entirely or developing apathy.

A fear based argument for fixing climate change either causes a worldview of nature with no bond of kinship at all, based on the physical and practical dependence on Nature as a "resource," or forces people to experience their kinship with Nature only through grief.

Fear tells us that we want to live—it does not tell us WHY to live. If a person tries to live on fear alone, they will eventually find the desire to live burdensome and painful in itself. I see this emerging on a society wide scale in the USA, feeding on influences from the Christian evangelicalism that sees the Earth as something already sullied and worthless, to be thrown away like a dirty tissue, and on the looming monolith of nuclear winter that gave our parents recurring nightmares as children.

If you go to r/collapse on Reddit (don't do that) you will see a whole community of people who cope with the threat of climate change by fantasizing about it, imagining it as a collective punishment for all humanity and a cathartic release from the present painful situation.

We cannot learn to live without seeing the reason for living. We cannot save the Earth without loving it. We cannot heal nature without caring for it. In order to collectively take action against climate change, we must be moved by something other than fear—and that something is love. Not just love of the outdoors as an activity, but love of the Earth as something that loves us.

The dominant Western culture cannot borrow Indigenous land stewardship techniques as though they are just one climate resilience strategy, without being also willing to change its dreadfully impoverished way of viewing human relationships with Nature.

What right have we to think, "Huh, maybe those guys were on to something with the multi-level polyculture systems and controlled burns" while still thinking humans are nothing but a disease on the Earth, and that Earth would be happy to be rid of us? The sustainable ways of using the land practiced traditionally by cultures who have lived in relationship with their ecosystems for many generations work because humans can exist in mutualistic symbiosis with the life forms around them. We care for them. They care for us.

I know for a fact that plants seek relationships with us, and I was taught by them to see how interconnected everything really is, and how I was made to be a caretaker of my ecosystem. I was, a few years ago, just as I describe above. Too scared and pessimistic about the future of nature to bother loving it, and because of this, I could not realize my niche in the ecosystem. It felt for many years like I could do nothing—i believed in climate change, but I felt hopeless, so I put it out of my mind. But when I began to cultivate a love and reverence for the sad, scraggly, beaten-down fragments of Nature around me, everything changed. So much became possible.

I am still learning and exploring, trying to open my mind to ideas totally different than the ones I knew growing up, paying close attention to every plant and learning its ways. And it stuns me to think—some people write about climate change without this process.

Read this news article. This is what I'm talking about.

I mean first of all it's fucking weird that this article frames it like scientists Secretly Know How Bad Everything REALLY Is but they're like. Arguing about whether to "reveal" it to the public. The way it's written is like dangling the fact that he Knows A Truth that is sooooooo scary he can't even tell you what it is.

It's a weird article to write about a topic that has been relentlessly broadcast and educated and written about for years. Like dude I PROMISE people have already thought of doing scicomm about climate change. It's not like scientists are standing around like "Should we, tell people about climate change, or not...?"

He cites this study claiming that climate anxiety drives positive action and what the study actually says is "We surveyed a bit over 1,000 British people and higher levels of climate anxiety seem correlated with 'green behaviors' like recycling and eating organic food."

First of all, correlation is not causation, being someone who values the environment is probably correlated with both recycling and being afraid of climate change, but that doesn't mean fear made them recycle, and it doesn't mean these people would have a better impact on the environment if they were more afraid.

Second of all, what we need isn't 'green behaviors,' it's collaborating with other people to change society, and he literally says as much in the article, so the study is just...irrelevant to the point. I could argue convincingly that most of the 'green behaviors' in the study have a questionable and/or negligible impact because they're the ones promoted by corporations as a way of making fixing climate change all about "personal choice" and Buying Product.

If you can't see that average people's consumption of fossil fuels and plastic is coerced by withholding food, shelter, and agency from them, we can't have a conversation.

Anyway. Here's what he has to say about solutions and resisting despair

Yeah, no shit. "If only everyone would just join with other people to drive change." Everyone will not just.

Why not?

Because "joining with other people to drive change" is a whole entire art, science, skill, and lifestyle that takes work, experience, and practice to develop!!!!!!!! There are huge barriers to it in an individualistic, isolated, overworked, traumatized, perpetually exhausted culture!!!! Barriers not of convention or discomfort, but barriers as solid as a goddamn cinderblock wall, so if you want to see people rise up and come together to heal the world, buddy you better pick up that chisel and start chippin'!!!!!!

I know a lot about fear. I've been terrified my whole life. I was a terrified child, born terrified, haunted by how many casual cruelties the world dealt to a terrified child, and haunted further by how my sensitive, deeply-feeling body and mind seemed specially, sadistically calibrated to experience them as excruciatingly as possible. Even when I was a tiny kid, I was scared to death of so many unavoidable things, and I remember this monolithic exhaustion at the thought of living and facing them again and again and again, when it never. felt. better.

That's WHY opinions like this make me mad. I've been to the place he thinks we all should go. A brush with the Fear can be mistaken for an energy boost, but only when you have a relatively shallow experience of fear. I'm not questioning the intensity or sincerity of his fear about climate change, but I question whether he's ever been eroded to a truly marginal existence where the survival mechanisms within him are so starved he can really see their bones. Fear draws up energy reserves WHEN YOU HAVE ENERGY RESERVES. If you have those, lucky you! Don't count on having them forever.

Writings like this are right that many people respond to climate change with shutdown and avoidance. But the writings understand these things as just...willful, petulant bad behaviors that people have to "just get over." (Note the author comparing 'facing the reality of climate change' with going to the dentist.) Shutdown and avoidance are survival mechanisms. They can be maladaptive. They can also be very much adaptive. Fear does not give you energy- it RELEASES your energy. It SPENDS your energy. Shutdown and avoidance kick in to stop you from becoming too exhausted to stay alive.

You know how immediately after a traumatic event, people usually don't feel intense distress, just numbness? That's because feeling the event like normal would take so much out of you that you couldn't survive the threatening situation. Your brain will literally delete your memories of a traumatic event if you aren't safe enough to process them without overdrawing.

Learning that an unimaginable catastrophe lurks on the horizon, that no one is currently acting sufficiently to stop it, and that everything you know and love and find beautiful is going to be destroyed, and that all of this is partially your fault (as climate change is often taught) and living for years under this awareness isn't "unpleasant," it's traumatizing. The sheer dysfunction of our relationship with the natural world, being taught to see ourselves as a disease loathed by Nature, is fucking traumatizing.

And most people right now in this world? Are poor, are traumatized, are having their human rights taken away, are facing violence, or are hurting and grieving on behalf of others experiencing those things, if not all of them at once. Poverty is its own trauma with its own way it shuts down parts of your mind for survival, and it is relentlessly exhausting, and especially painful in this context, because many of the 'green behaviors' people do to give themselves a sense of helpfulness, are inaccessible to poor people.

So the reason why people don't seem to "respond" to being screamed at about the horrors of climate change, could be that they can't. Telling them "how scary everything is" WILL NOT HELP people that are in this place, it will shut them down more. The ability to rely on continuous stress as a motivator on a long-term, sustained timeframe is not about willpower, it's about how long your body can take it before you either break or die. That's basically what poverty is and poverty slowly kills you.

It's useless to tell other people what they ought to care about. You have to help them. These mental barriers, often are not thickets it's painful to get through, they are walls. And the people trapped inside those walls are smart, motivated, caring people with hearts and minds that truly CAN change our world.

Is "post-colonial" literary theory a joke? It's distressing that a book printed in 2021 by a reputable academic press can be so painfully Eurocentric, and I mean PAINFULLY. The philosophical and literary frameworks drawn upon in most chapters are like what some British guy in 1802 would come up with. In most of the chapters, every framework, terminology, and example is inseparably fused to Latin, Greek, and/or Christian philosophers, myths and texts, even down to the specific turns of phrase. You would think only Europeans had history or ideas until the 20th century.

Don't get me wrong, non-european and even specifically anti-colonial sources are used, and I don't think all the writers are white people, but...that's what's so weird and off-putting about it, most of the book as a whole utterly fails to absorb anything from non-European and in particular anti-colonial points of view. The chapters will quote those points of view but not incorporate them or really give their ideas the time of day, just go right back to acting like Plato and Aristotle and Romantic poets are the gold standard for defining what it means to be human.

In brief, the book is trying to examine how literature can shed light on the climate crisis, which is funny because it completely fails to demonstrate that literature is good or helpful for the climate crisis. Like that is for sure one major issue with it, it shows that people *have* written stuff about climate change, but it sure doesn't convince you that this stuff is good.

Most of the works quoted are rather doomerist, and a lot of the narrative works specifically are apocalypse tales where most of Earth's population dies. The most coherent function the authors can propose that literature fulfills is to essentially help people understand how bad things are. One of the essays even argues that poetry and other creative work that simply appreciates nature is basically outdated, because:

“One could no longer imagine wandering lonely as a cloud, because clouds now jostle in our imaginations with an awareness of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other atmospheric pollutants” (Mandy Bloomfield, pg. 72)

Skill issue, Mandy.

The menace of doomerism in fiction and poetry is addressed, by Byron Caminero-Santangelo, on page 127 when he references,

the literary non-fiction of a growing number of authors who explicitly assert, some might even say embrace, the equation between fatalistic apocalyptic narrative and enlightenment…they are authoritative in their rejection of any hope and in their representation of mitigatory action as the cliched moving of deckchairs on a sinking ship

He quotes an essay “Elegy for a country’s seasons” by Zadie Smith, who says: “The fatalists have the luxury of focusing on an eschatological apocalyptic narrative and on the nostalgia of elegy, as well as of escape from uncertainty and responsibility to act." Which is spot-on and accurate, but these observations aren't recognized as a menace to positive action, nor is the parallel to Christian thought that eagerly looks forward to Earth's destruction as a cathartic release from its pain made fully explicit and analyzed. Most of the creative works referenced and quoted in the book ARE this exact type of fatalistic, elegiac performance of mourning.

I basically quit reading after Chapter 11, "Animals," by Eileen Crist, which begins:

The humanization of the world began unfolding when agricultural humans separated themselves from wild nature, and started to tame landscapes, subjugate and domesticate animals and plants, treat wild animals as enemies of flocks and fields, engineer freshwater ecologies, and open their psyches to the meme of the ‘the human’ as world conquerer, ruler and owner.

This is what I'm talking about when I say it's dripping Eurocentrism; these ideas are NOT universal, and it's adding nothing to the world to write them because they fall perfectly in line with what the European colonizing culture already believes, complete with the lingering ghost of a reference to the Fall of Man and banishment from the Garden of Eden. It keeps going:

“Over time, the new human elaborated a view of the animal that ruptured from the totemic, shamanic and relational past.”

Okay so now she's introducing the idea of progression from shamanic nature-worshipping religions of our primitive past...hmm I'm sure this isn't going anywhere bad

“While humanity has largely rejected the colonizing project with respect to fellow humans, the occupation of non-human nature constitutes civilization’s last bastion of ‘normal’ colonialism. A new humanity is bound sooner or later to recognize and overthrow a colonialism of ‘nature,’ embracing a universal norm of interspecies justice.” (pg. 206) 

OKAY????

Not only denying that colonialism still exists, but also saying that humans' relationship with nature constitutes colonialism??

Embracing limitations means scaling down the human presence on demographic and economic fronts…(pg.207)

ope, there's the "we have to reduce the human population"

Embracing limitations further mandates pulling back from vast expanses of the natural world, thus letting the lavishness of wild (free) nature rule Earth again” (pg. 207) 

aaaaaaand there's the "we have to remove humans from wild nature so it can be freeeeeee"

don't get me wrong like I am a random white person with no particular expertise in anti-colonialist thought but I think this is an easy one. I'm pretty sure if your view of nature is that colonialism involving subjugating humans doesn't exist any more and actually humans existing in and altering nature is the real colonialism so we should remove humans from vast tracts of earth, your opinion is just bad.

Perhaps silly of me to think that we would've got past the old Eurocentric thought in the highest levels of academia. Those institutions sure talk a lot about getting past it, but do they do the work??

For me, environmental considerations are so impossible to extricate from the impacts of colonization, that it didn't even occur to me that a writer could write about it without including post-colonial thought.

Am no havin Children

I’m no’ havin’ children, ‘am gonnae hae weans,

And ye can ask what a cry them, no ‘what are their names’

And they’ll be getting a piece, no a wee ‘packed lunch’

And they’ll be haein a scran, no ‘having a munch’

They’ll fanny aboot, they won’t waste time

When they write their wee poyums, I’ll make sure they rhyme.

I’m no ‘having children’, am gonna hae weans,

Who’ll be gowpin and bealin’ when they’ve goat aches and pains

And instead of ‘don’t worry’, a’ll say ‘dinnae fash’, 

Instead of ‘stand your ground’, ‘dinnae take any snash’

Ma weans will be crabbit, no ‘in a bad mood’

And they’ll greet, no ‘cry’ when their day isnae good.

I’m no ‘having children’, am gonna hae weans,

With a proud ancient language crammed in their wee brains

An whenever life tells them their English is bad

I’ll tell them the hassles that their mammy had

And a’ll say ma maw’s words till the day that am deid

‘Ye’ll be alright hen, ye’ve a guid Scots tongue in yer heid.

Thank you.”

I remember the first time I came to this realization.

I was nineteen, pregnant. We couldn’t afford to heat the house because we couldn’t afford the deposit to turn the gas on. It was miserably cold. The duplex we were renting was old and rickety and drafty. The window frames were messed up and there were cracks you could stick your finger through that were open to the elements.

Just, like, to give you an idea where we were financially. And this was better than we’d been doing before!

Anyway, I had recently started going to DSA meetings. And that month, they were talking about how a moderate democrat had successfully gotten a small increase in WIC benefits monthly. It came out to, like, $10 a month.

The members talking—mostly male, almost all doing decent—were scornful. The democrat should have pushed harder and gotten more, refused to accept anything until everyone else caved to their demands. I remember sitting there, quietly drinking the latte in the smallest size they had that I had bought with scrounged quarters, listening. Wishing it wasn’t held in an indie coffee shop because it was a luxury I really couldn’t afford, but it would be rude not to. Enjoying the coffee anyway.

I was one of the lucky ones who was getting that additional $10 a month through WIC. Even more exciting, we were now getting a voucher for the farmers’ market. I casually mentioned that WIC recipients would now be getting farmers’ market vouchers, too.

The guy who organized the meetings was a hard worker, passionate guy. Did something in tech.

He was like, “That’s the thing! These people don’t want farmers market vouchers. They want—” and he went on to describe a bunch of pie in the sky desires. That, yeah, sounded good.

But one. I was one of those people! A lot if the tamiles were super excited about it, myself included.

I had never been to a farmers’ market before. I tried arugula for the first time, a piece pulled from a bunch by the grower as he explained the flavor difference. I hadn’t known before then that different lettuce greens had different flavors, that it was more than just the texture and shape. I tried pesto, which delighted me. Goat cheese. I got three full pounds of strawberries for two dollars, since they were closing soon and the old man selling the berries got a kick out of me.

Anyway. It was like, you have a decent life. Not great but decent! The things that are life changing for me, for us… you already have.

The ten dollars at the grocery store made the difference between a meal of broken-noodles-with-some-half-horrible-pantry-scraps and a meal. It kept me full and healthy! And the additional farmers’ market voucher was world changing for me.

like you guys forced people to go to the bathrooms of their “biological sex” but now when they do it’s disconcerting that men look like men. (yes even if that man has a vagina.)

Transphobes are shocked to realize trans men aren’t all “uwu soft boiz” and HRT does what it’s supposed to. It’s so mind boggling to them that trans people don’t look like their bigoted characatures.

Anyways here are some men that will be forced to use the women’s restroom in states like florida, texas, kansas, etc.

And how do you feel about term limits for the supreme court?

On the contrary, it is much easier for lobbyists to sink their teeth into new members of congress. New members of congress who want to survive have a strong need for legislative information and institutional experience; professional lobbyists have both, and are very eager to build relationships with the new lawmakers who need it. This is why there's an event attended by all new members of congress which is basically a convention led by lobbyists and business executives. Term limits do mean lobbyists have to create new relationships more often, but they're also the easiest type of relationship to make.

Grose, et. al. (2022): "Our survey reveals that lobbyists in states with term limits reported meetings [with legislators] in social settings more frequently than lobbyists in states without term limits (e.g., 79% of lobbyists in term-limits states met a legislator at a coffee shop and 65% in states with no term limits; p≤:01)."

I have a long list of ideas for reforming congress but if we're talking about addressing corruption specifically:

Ban members of congress, their spouses, and their senior staffers from owning individual stocks, instead requiring them to keep all of their money in pre-approved mutual or index funds while in office.

Restrict members of congress from accepting suspicious outside payments, like high-paid speeches at corporate events.

Lifelong ban on lobbying for former members of congress, along with public disclosures of their income in the years after leaving office. (Doing this effectively would also require expanding our definition of what counts as lobbying).

Completely overhaul our anti-revolving door policies and lobbying regulations to address ethics and corruption directly (this could be a long list in itself).

Turn the Office of Congressional Ethics into an independently-funded organization with authority over both chambers of congress. Further empower ethics committees as well.

Expand independent congressional organizations who can replace the role of lobbyists in providing policymakers with important legislative information (CBO, CRS, GAO, etc.)

Strengthen truth-in-testimony rules so that people providing testimony to congress have to disclose their institutional conflicts of interest.

Pay congressional staffers better, encourage their unionization efforts, and provide congressional offices with the resources necessary to conduct their own research.

nah, not really. bear in mind that i'm nowhere near an expert and i'm just badly repeating second-hand info from actual experts and people who make AI art, but: the AI doesn't 'combine' or 'remix' parts. it looks at many, many images and makes statistical correlations -- from the most basic ('pixels of the same colour are often next to each other') to the more complex ('images tagged as 'selfies' tend to have a big oval shape in the middle of them'), and so on -- but it's never more than a series of statistical correlations

Source

Was taught how to tell the difference between poisonous and edible mushrooms in my first year of primary school, and knows this is a non-universal experience

Knows how much AI is prone to inaccuracies

Erectile dysfunction medications absolutely are gender affirming therapy. Their primary function is to allow cisgender men to maintain an erection. They are outright referred to as "male enhancement" medications. A significant portion of cis men who are unable to maintain a erection feel like less of a man. Medications like Viagra and Cialis allow them to feel like a man again. If that's not affirming one's gender, I don't know what is.

Similarly, menopausal hormone treatments are used when someone's body begins to stop creating estrogens and progestins as cisgender women age. What happens when a body used to those hormones suddenly doesn't have them anymore? Well, the latent testosterone levels in a cis woman's body is enough to cause darker and thicker body hair, acne, a change in sex drive, and even thinning hair or balding. Cis women going through menopause don't feel like women because their hormones have shifted. Again, gender affirming therapy.