why am i like this

Britain:

I’m not asking politely, I’m telling you firmly.

He was a enjoyable cuss who didn’t care for war mongering.

Especially profitable war mongering and excuses for it!

He certainly didn’t like selfish husbands and fathers!

Politicians who turned on their words once they got theirs weren’t safe.

He said fuck the police!

He absolutely didn’t like people ruining little things for kids.

He stood up for foreigners. Especially those doing their best to communicate with limited second language knowledge.

He was not having any tomfoolery when it came to gun safety and laws. Especially with youth involved.

You had better not abuse a animal with him nearby. He’d right that wrong real quick!

And best of all him and his wife were both prickly cusses together. Relationship goals.

The USPS is about to declare bankruptcy. It’s at the center of the longstanding plans for disaster recover and has been since the Cold War. It’s the only institution that could (for example) deliver covid meds to every home in America in one day.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#going-postal

But Congress has decided not to bail out the postal service, despite Art 1, Sec 8 of the US Constitution: “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”

Maybe it’s because without a USPS we couldn’t have a postal vote in 2020?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#save-usps

The proximate cause of the post office’s bankruptcy is the pandemic, but that is merely the finishing blow. The USPS was murdered in 2006, when Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/04/will-the-united-states-post-office-become-a-victim-of-covid19.html

The Act gave the USPS a mere 10 years to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years.” That is, to set aside cash to pay medical bills for future employees who hadn’t been born yet.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-6407

The Act gave the USPS a mere 10 years to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years.” That is, to set aside cash to pay medical bills for future employees who hadn’t been born yet.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-6407

The USPS’s murder is straight out of the neoliberal playbook: “1 Defund, 2 claim crisis, 3 call for privatizatization, 4 profit!”

As Lambert Strether points out, it was a bipartisan act of murder, cosponored by the “centrist” Democrat Henry Waxman.

Killing the USPS looms large in the Trump admin’s (nonmetaphorical, actual) privatization playbook, “Delivering Government Solutions in the 21st Century Reform Plan and Reorganization Recommendations”:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Government-Reform-and-Reorg-Plan.pdf

The proposals are for USPS to become a Wework clone or franchisee, but not to become a publicly owned bank - a common line of business for other nations’ postal services, natural based on the amounts of cash they handle.

The USPS is the nation’s second largest employer of veterans, with 630,000 employees. Trump is about to allow it to collapse so that UPS, Fedex and other private firms can skim off the most profitable parts of its business and leave rural Americans totally isolated.

The loss of the USPS would mean the loss of the last truly universal federal program in America and would unduly hammer the people whom Trump claims to love – veterans and rural voters.

Geralt, Jaskier and Roach on the road

Capsule Hotel & Bookstore, Qinglongwu, Zhejiang province, China,

From the mouth of a One Percenter -

they come (obviously) from the sherlock holmes fandom, and they are two different ways of explaining something in a story. say I’m a fan and I notice that, in the original books, watson’s war wound is sometimes in his leg and sometimes in his shoulder. the watsonian explanation is how watson (that is, a person within the story) might explain it; the doylist explanation is how sir arthur conan doyle (a person in real life) would have explained it. 

sherlock explains the migrating war wound by making the shoulder wound real and the limp psychosomatic. the guy ritchie films explain it by having the leg wound sustained in battle before the events of the film and the shoulder wound happen onscreen. the doylist explanation, of course, is that acd forgot where the wound was.

this is very important when we’re discussing stuff like headcanons and word-of-god. I see this when people offer watsonian explanations for something, and then a doylist will say something like “it’s just because the author wrote it that way,” and I see it when a person is criticizing bad writing/storytelling (for example, the fact that quiet in metal gear solid v is running around the whole game in a bikini and ripped tights) and someone comes back with “but there’s an in-story reason why that happens!” (that reason being she breathes through her skin).

there’s nothing wrong with either explanation, and really I think you need both to understand and analyze a text. a person coming up with a watsonian explanation has likely not forgotten that the author had real-life reasons for writing something that way, and a person with a doylist interpretation is likely not ignoring the in-universe justification for that thing. 

we have the technology to have unlimited solar energy and we don’t use it

we have the technology to turn the Sahara desert into farm land and we don’t use it

Turning them into farmland would wipe out countless species. There’s also a reason little grows there. What we can do, is place solar farms out in deserts. A small fraction of the sahara could power the world. That is within our technological ability. This is where captialism strangles us.

Our food production is just fine. We produce too much. Our distribution system however, is not. It focuses on where the most money can be gained, to hell with everyone else. This is where capitalism strangles us.

We also don’t need to turn salt water into fresh water. We need to manage our fresh water better. Use that tech to clean it, and stop poluting it in the first place with fracking and dumping sewage and replacing lead pipes. And to stop letting one or two conglomarates monopolize them. This is where capitalists strangle us.