Phi for All

Back in May, TFG took his armored limo with a motorcade across the newly painted pool. The limo alone weighs 10 tons. But they're looking for terrorists who damaged the paint job. AP NewsTrump drives across Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to i...President Donald Trump has visited the Lincoln Memorial to see the reflecting pool he's painting in a color he calls “American flag blue.”

Try as I might, I fail to see the good idea that got corrupted wrt original sin. Was it the worship? The knowledge of good and evil really doesn't need any gods. If you don't play the game, there is no universal shame involved, only what you bring to the table personally. To me, if you're shameful but have to rope all of humanity into your shame to make it more palatable to you, you'll never be able to take real steps to overcome it.

I think all the Abrahamic religions are designed to create a hierarchy of judgement and competition. The best way to win is not to play at all.

He was deeply flawed before he became POTUS, was my point. I wasn't dismissing current behavior based on the past. The older Americans felt slighted by all the promises unkept. Where's the trickle-down? Where's the leisure time since robots mean we don't have to work as hard? Where is the improvement in living conditions that have been the hallmark of each succeeding generation? The younger Americans are being held to standards that don't include them wrt wealth accumulation. They're making barely more than they were when they joined the work force, but prices continue upwards as quality goes downhill. They're told it's their fault for having a poor work ethic when they're usually just refusing to be taken advantage of. Unfortunately, since humans don't like being at fault, we'll grab any opportunity to point the finger somewhere else. It's far too easy to blame someone who is more relatable than a billionaire, like an immigrant or a person of color or a single mother. I keep seeing a cartoon of how the cockroaches voted "insecticide" because they knew it would hurt the ants. They all ended up dead, including some Libertarian grasshoppers and a housefly who never voted.

And underlying the bitterness, the psychologists tell us, is shame, pure and simple. Shame they didn't make better choices. Shame they didn't learn to read and spell well like other people can. Shame they haven't become as wealthy as they think they deserve. Shame that some people are doing better than they are when they shouldn't, based on skin color or gender or nationality or some other irrelevant factor. And humans don't generally handle shame very well. Promise them a target other than themselves and their shame and many will happily change their aim. TFG may understand manipulation, but I think he's also, buried deep in his psyche, deeply ashamed of what he's done in his life, or at least afraid of what might happen if the whole truth comes out. He defends his actions with almost every breath, which is part of why he lies so much, but in the end it's the shame that seems to drive him.

It makes me wonder if the villains don't end up being memorialized officially as a way to soothe our own consciences. Forget about what got them kicked out of office and reviled by all, point out something benign and build them a monument to it. We did the same with Columbus and Woodrow Wilson.

Everyone near him thinks the economy is just fine. The most out of touch POTUS ever. This push to put his name on everything, besides feeding his narcissism, seems designed to make it harder for people to accept his guilt when it comes out. It reminds me of how many of the men we've memorialized by naming lakes and streets and mountains after them, erected monuments to them, and taught about their accomplishments in school, later turn out to have been horrible humans. We had to rename a local mountain recently because the former governor who got the honor was also responsible for the massacre of an indigenous population at the time. With TFG, I hope we can keep removing his tacky self-aggrandizements as fast as he puts them up. What a waste.

I'd start with how corporations are taxed. No more sitting on piles of cash, we have to tax wealth over a certain amount to force investment. Set a standard for living wages that allows people to participate in their own economy, and only give tax breaks to corporations who meet that standard. Something needs to be done to stop turning American workers into crude labor units that are ultimately replaceable; we have value beyond that, and employers need to start recognizing it. I'm not sure what to do with journalism, honestly. I don't know anyone who trusts what they hear from news shows. Raw data/just the facts may seem fair and without prejudice, but not everyone can form a perspective from that. We have a great local reporter in my area named Kyle Clark who's been moderating some gubernatorial debates recently, and I love his style of asking very hard-hitting questions based on things politicians have said in the past. It's amazing how many, Republican and Democrat, have a hard time defending something they said just a few weeks ago. Lying is like breathing to so many of these folks. Do we bring back the Fairness Doctrine, where broadcasters are required to air opposing views? Would people appreciate this with all the choices available today? Sooner or later even the corporations are going to feel the pain. The average car in the US is 13 years old now, up from 9.1 years in 2000. When enough people can't afford to buy your products, can you afford to keep raising your prices and lowering your quality? I think many corporations might welcome the right kinds of regulation, something that at least slows down this mad race to keep gobbling up more for your stockholders as your own people suffer working full time PLUS several side gigs to make ends meet. It's my thought that they wouldn't mind treating their people more humanely if everyone was required to do it, so the competition is even.

We thought none of this was possible, that surely our presidents went through psychological testing, and that they were required to divest themselves so they couldn't profit from the position. We thought laws were already in place that would prevent a sitting president from being able to abuse the system the way he has, that surely the SCOTUS would protect the constitutional rights they're charged with interpreting, and that the checks and balances we have in place would continue to serve us well. We were wrong because most of us were counting on the free press to keep us informed, to ask the right questions, to dig into corruption and unconstitutional actions. They're a joke, all of them, since you end up with more coverage of actual events from social media (which has very little journalistic process, so it's hard to trust). I'm old enough to remember pre-Clinton journalism, where reporters asked the tough questions and nobody walked out of interviews with the press for fear of looking shady. I'm hoping the next version of the USA corrects the mistakes made, provides the provisions we left out for some reason, and moves ahead keeping all the good stuff while discarding this MAGA trash. It's been over a decade now, and we're heartily tired of how slow the wheels are moving.

Check with a local courier service there in NOLA. Do you know the weight? I'd pick a small, local company, maybe even a moving company in case they have a small vehicle. A big company probably won't be able to help you with something outside their protocols, but a small local one might just be happy for the business.

I have SO many reservations about AI. I've always lamented our tendency to use our brains to make us stronger and more capable of aggression instead of just focusing on being smarter, which would seem to be our strong suit.

I think the use of the phrase is a signal in this article. I get the feeling "some" implies a fringe support, and "theorists" implies that they may be "theorizing" or just professing a strong suspicion or belief. In print, I rarely see scientists, even those involved in developing a theory, referred to as "theorists". Is it different in professional life?

https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/why-conspiracy-theorists-are-obsessed-with-cern.htm

I'm having a hard time imagining looking for something it would be pointless trying to explain. Is this just a feeling you have?

To me, the recurrent laryngeal nerve is the best evidence that the statement above is accurate, that evolution is at work here. That early fish-type thing had an organ that performed a gill function, and when branches of this species went onto land, evolution repurposed that organ to eventually become the larynx. Unfortunately, as the organ travelled over a long time, the recurrent nerve got wrapped under the aortic arch of the heart. There's no good reason for such a long nerve to connect larynx with brain, but that's how it evolved. And all chordates have this setup, even giraffes, where the recurrent laryngeal nerve is around 15 feet long!