So, y'know...

If China and India remain in the Paris agreement, they will have a seat at the table to negotiate and set terms and regulations, which will be to their economic and political benefit since they’re already moving strongly in that direction. This would be a tremendous opportunity to rebalance power around the world away from the West. With the added benefit of, y’know, saving the world from flood and famine.

Meanwhile the myopic political and financial elite in the US try to eke out what value they can before their ignorant old white asses die. And they (we) won’t have a seat at the table to negotiate, allowing everyone else who does the chance to place onerous terms not in the favor or the US. Exiting the Paris agreement and ceding that territory to China would be a clear indication that the US is a country in decline.

Why cut off your nose to spite your face when you can cut off the nose of the competition?

fastbreakthrees:

im mad these are all bangers

UP.

(Also, Jackie Treehorn's house in The Big Lebowski)

Okay, let me tell you a story about Hillary Clinton.  She first made national headlines when she was something like 22 and the student graduation speaker at Wellesley College.  Now Wellesley is the most famous women’s college in the United States and at the time when women were not admitted to most of the Ivy League it was considered one of the top schools in the country for a woman to attend.  She used her platform to eviscerate the sitting Senator of Massachusetts, a Republican, for his support of the Vietnam War.  To his face because he was on the stage with her.

She was identified as a future leader of the Democratic Party from when she was in her early twenties.  After law school at one of the top law schools in the country she was hired as a staff worker on the Watergate Commission.  Now everyone in American politics in 1973 knew that the young people who worked on the investigation of Richard Nixon’s criminal activity were the future leaders of the Democratic Party.  

And from that moment, in her twenties, the American right decided to try and destroy her.  As an aside the right has spread unfounded rumors that she was fired from the Watergate Commission, the man who claims to have done it never had the authority to fire her and she worked on the commission until it closed down only leaving when all the staff at her level left, but facts have never gotten in the way of a good demonization of this woman.

She was one of the leading advocates for abused children and legal aid for poor people in the country in the late 1970s and 1980s when she was living in Arkansas and the narrative about her then was that she was the demon feminist who was masterminding letting children “divorce” their parents.  Because apparently there is never a circumstance in the minds of those on the right that a child might need to be emancipated from their parents or that children’s rights might be independent of those with the most power to control and abuse them.

When her husband was running for president she was attacked for her looks (and for the looks of her at the time twelve year old daughter).  Her career as a lawyer and as a law professor was used against her and the reason we have a “first ladies cookie recipe contest” every presidential campaign is because she had the audacity to say she was busy having a career and not baking cookies.  By the way this humiliating exercise is one she won both times when her husband was running and the magazine didn’t think that perhaps when she was running for president this little 24 year old personal attack exercise against her should be retired when she was making history.  Bill submitted the same recipe she won with in the 1990s.

And then the investigations started immediately.  

She lost several hundred thousand dollars in an investment scheme and she was accused of insider trading.

A personal friend committed suicide and she was accused both of having an affair with him and of killing him.

She was routinely accused of sleeping with … basically any female friend of hers.  Because making someone a scary lesbian wasn’t yet out of fashion in the mid 1990s.

She was attacked for trying to keep her family together as she was humiliated daily on national television.

And she was attacked for being mad at her husband as she was humiliated daily on national television.

They even attacked her cat because proper presidential families have dogs and it was clearly her witchcraft familiar.

The Republicans in congress have been launching fishing expeditions against this woman for the last 22 years and that’s not even counting the smear attacks that started in the late 1960s.  Today the Republicans in the House have spent more time and money investigating the attack on the embassy in Benghazi when she was secretary of state then was spent investigating the attacks on 9/11.  Ignoring that attacks on American embassies have occurred under every presidential administration for the last six decades and there were far more of them under George W Bush and for more people died in them under Ronald Reagan.

Oh.  And she was mocked in the late 1990s for daring to say there was a vast right wing conspiracy against her and her husband.  Because a woman should never acknowledge … you know… a provable fact.

So of course the average American voter has trouble distinguishing the truly horrific facts about Trump from the noise about Clinton.  We’ve been fed a steady diet of it for 45 fucking years with the express purpose of making sure this woman was never president of the United States.

Have you been eating well? If not, eat a piece of fruit or a handful of nuts. You need vitamins; you need protein.

You’re probably not drinking enough water.

When is the last time you showered? Take a cold shower to wake you up or a hot shower if you need to relax.

Do the laundry that’s been piling up. You’ve been wearing that sweatshirt for too long.

Take care of the dishes in the sink that have been there for three days and have started to stress you out.

Did you brush your teeth this morning? How about your hair?

Listen to the messages on your phone that have been there for days.

Go outside for at least a couple minutes. You don’t even have to do anything; just sit down. Breathe in the fresh air and get some vitamin D.

Open your blinds. Your room is too dark and it’s probably making you tired.

Spend some time with your pet. Pet them, feed them, take them for a walk or clean out their litterbox. Caring for them will make you feel useful and responsible and give you something to do.