Go. Be great.

like without government intervention, strawberry jam would have wood in it. like it's a thing. food companies realized that they could use less of the expensive strawberries as ingredients and just use wood. there are laws you cannot legally call it strawberry jam if you do this. you have to call it a strawberry product or spread. food companies are always trying to get that shit through. they have lobby groups pushing that all the time

it is more expensive to put metal detectors in a food processing plant. companies want to cut costs. it is a legal requirement in a lot of countries to have them. so it forces companies to install them.

also to do routine inspections. that is a government requirement. so are building codes. a lot of codes are the bare minimum. like some companies will exceed the code and have more protections but a lot don't. like if it is not in the code, they don't do it. so that's why having governing bodies that regulate building safety, worker safety, food safety and product safety are crucial. because without them, your employer will not see the need to have exit doors with quick release handles, or do routine fire sprinkler inspections or have road salt for the sidewalks. some of it is basic fucking stuff.

companies when left alone do not regulate themselves. it's been historically untrue. companies want to give you a product that is cheap for them to make and that they can sell at the highest price so they can get the most profit. for everyone who loves capitalism, that's what it is. the free market will not self-regulate. if you don't have anti-monopoly laws and anti-wage theft laws and workers' protections, the open market will not fix that organically.

In middle school, I came to conclusion that success in capitalism just looks like who can screw over the most people most efficiently.

Chickens are omnivores. They eat meat, they eat eat all sorts of fruits and vegetables.

Actual piranhas don’t act like Hollywood piranhas.

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.

moreover they should be prepping the bite point with an alcohol wipe.

and while I’m at it, I’ve noticed a blithe disregard for health & safety when it comes to blood pacts. can’t believe I have to say this but you should absolutely NOT be cutting your palm open with the pocket knife from your belt holster (??????)

Medium-term background: Over the last ten and especially last five years, college football has gone from the fiefdoms of stuffy provincial old farts so devoted to the mirage of amateurism that programs could get in trouble for putting cream cheese on bagels, to a free-for-all wild west where players go shopping for new teams every season and whoever has the biggest firehose of money wins. This is in large part because the athletes being unpaid in the first place was never legally sustainable and only lasted so long out of inertia and coordination issues. If you're pro-labor it's a good and necessary thing overall, but for smaller programs, their fans, and anyone with a bit of romance about the game, it's been a disaster. On a related note, sports gambling has gone from something only legal in a handful of US cities to infinitely accessible to anyone with a smartphone over the same five years. Some would say these are both part of the same trend, namely very rich people getting to do anything they want because no one gives a shit about rules or ethics anymore, but that's neither here nor there.

Short-term background: A year or two ago, Texas oil billionaire Cody Campbell basically bought the Texas Tech athletic program. Tech has historically been a B-to-C-tier team with a massive chip on its shoulder thanks to never being able to get past the A-tier schools. Campbell is now chairman of the board of regents, i.e. the boss' boss' boss of most of the other people in this story. This past offseason he paid $5 million to recruit a quarterback named Brendan Sorsby, previously with Indiana and Cincinnati.

Last few weeks: Sorsby is outed as having a massive gambling addiction, from the stereotypical "up 'til 3 AM betting on Malaysian soccer" stuff to betting individual balls and strikes in baseball games to (brace yourself) betting on his own teams to lose or underperform. For example, to paraphrase a redditor's take, 'he saw his teammate struggling and instead of wanting to help him get better, he put a hundred bucks on the guy to get Under 2.5 Catches next game'.

From most of the Chicago White Sox in 1919 to Pete Rose in 1989, any professional athlete who has done anything remotely like this has been banned for life from their sport and made persona non grata. But again, college sports is a lawless wasteland right now and Cody Campbell didn't get rich by taking losses on his investments, no sir. He paid for Sorsby and Sorsby's gonna play. After the NCAA (college sports' governing body, a shambling rotten corpse of its former cream-cheese-outlawing self) seemed to have finally found a rule they could enforce without a labor-law suit bitchslapping them, banning Sorsby, Campbell more or less went judge-shopping until he found a retired judge willing to issue an injunction allowing Sorsby to play.

To be clear, Campbell and his puppets (head coach, athletic director, university president; their collective inability to shut the fuck up throughout this has led people to suspect that Campbell basically ordered them to go all-offense in PR.) aren't disputing that Sorsby is a gambling addict who bet on his own team to lose. They're saying that it would be discrimination against the mentally ill to not allow him to play. The words the judge used were 'irreparable harm'. Analogies spread on reddit over the last few weeks have included "holding AA meetings in a bar", "letting a drunk driver go scot-free because alcoholism is a disease", and "a banker caught stealing from customer funds getting a promotion".

The entire college football world, which had spent the last five years tearing itself apart over TV money and private equity, immediately united against Campbell and Tech. Several colleges wiped any games with Tech in any sport from their schedule, their conference intimated that they can and would expel them by member vote, the attorneys general of Oklahoma, Utah, and Kansas all promised to take action. And to be clear this was a truly existential, all hands on deck crisis: if the athletes are taking dives for money, then there is no sport. It's a bunch of mercenary hustlers dressing up like football players to pretend to play football. Even the vampiric sportsbooks themselves don't want this: nobody bets on fixed matches.

Bear in mind also it's not out of the question that Sorsby could be arrested for this: he was under 21 for much of this and sent money across state lines for family and friends to gamble with. So Campbell got his own lawyer: Ken Paxton, Texas state AG and current senate candidate. While Reddit hates every Texas Republican politician, the Texan posters do seem to regard Paxton as uniquely stupid and incompetent. He was impeached three years ago, which, how do you manage to do that as a Republican AG in Texas?

Anyway, this is where my law-fu gets a little weak, but apparently Paxton's filing on Tech and Campbell's behalf was so incompetently written, so wildly aggressive without any authority to actually see it through, that it opened up his clients to legal vulnerabilities that wouldn't have existed otherwise and sets the prosecution up for a thorough beatdown. So, late last night, Tech dumps mutually parts with Sorsby, rumored to have kept around half of his $5 million payday for barely avoiding becoming the Shoeless Joe Jackson of football. Campbell gets told "no" for the first time in years and loses millions of dollars for nothing. Paxton was (admittedly they say this every time) apparently in a tight race with Democrat James Talarico, and now he very publicly has argued that the 5th-most-popular college team in his own state should let their quarterback fix games for gambling rings because his billionaire sugar daddy threw a tantrum over it. May end up mattering, may not.

Soupçon actually means “suspicion” and the reason nobody called me out on this is because I would use the word to imply the idea of something sprinkled on top of something else ala croutons. If someone said, “A soupçon of homoeroticism,” I thought it meant “Someone sprinkled homoeroticism on this story like croutons on a delightful Caesar salad.”

I wrote multiple essays that used soupçon as a noun with this translation in mind and I got a degree and this haunts me.

I 20s (F) have a 20s (M) fiancé, V, and he’s been talking about this terrible secret he cannot tell me and he keeps almost starting to come out and then backing out. The issue is V and I were raised together by his parents, and my surrogate 40s (M) father and (now deceased) surrogate mother arranged for our marriage back when we were both children. They thought it was the best for us and at the time we were too young to realize the implications and had no reason to reject to the match. When we were teenagers our mother was on her deathbed and she told us again that she wished for us to marry, and of course we both agreed. However, V is also best friends with a 20s (M) guy called H, and they were nearly inseparable as boys and teens. They also went to university together and shared an apartment but V had to come home due to family reasons. Lately he’s been going out all day and coming home at night hours later. He insists that he’s fine and that we all leave him alone and not worry for him, but I think he and H have been sneaking around. He even delayed our wedding day by arranging a trip to go to England alone with H. It’s exhausting for all of us and I think I should just tell V I know and support him and that we can call off the marriage, but I’m not sure that’s the best course of action? I’m completely fine with not marrying him - he always felt more like a brother to me anyway - but I worry it might come off wrong. The worst part is he’s really beating himself up about it. He’s so guilty it’s beginning to take a toll on his health. I don’t care if he has a boyfriend I just want him to be happy.