January 25, 2024

That's why I took care to empower rather than scold

I did not accuse the poster of being a bad person or lacking willpower; nor did I minimize the difficulty.

As to overeating, the key there is not simply eating less, but rather finding healthy foods the person ENJOYS, substituting them for less healthy foods, and giving it lots of time for the weight to ease away. If it takes a person 20 years to gain a hundred pounds, they should expect to take maybe ten years for it to go off. The time is not the issue, the way forward is to gradually incorporate healthy eating in a way that is pleasurable and sustainable. Moderate exercise helps, but not directly (not by "burning calories" ), rather by making the body work better all round. Fad diets, pills, crash diets, eating rabbit food, drastic changes, ... they rarely work beyond a year or two.

There are also psychological issues outside of the eating that may need addressing, such as stress from external stressors (think "comfort food" ). Removing stressors is healthy.

My message is that on weight issues and drug issues, the person CAN do it, when they are truly ready. Quitting drugs cold turkey is often effective but sudden drastic changes in diet are almost never effective. People need to be encouraged, not scolded. In that you are correct. Scolding does not work.

January 24, 2024

I think the RepubliCon party will split

Probably the saner element will establish a new party, because of the iron grip tRump has through his maga zombies on the old party.

But if the orange menace were to off himself sooner rather than later, it might go the other way.

The bottom line is that magas and especially "America First" magas are fascistic and therefore incompatible with people who have taken on board the fundamentals of democracy which rest on a foundation of the peaceful transfer of power.

January 19, 2024

Ukrainians to Medvedev: "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death"

Seems to me I've heard Repulicons say that in the past, but not from the current crop.

But what I'm really hearing is echoes from America's founding.

January 13, 2024

There is a way back

Results matter, even to magas and deniers.

They are continually being frustrated by events. To deal with it they keep expanding the ever handy Deep State. It is getting to the point where only the few thousand anti-Deep-State influencers are not part of it. And of course the red-pilled magas who eat it up.

We should point it out to them, any time it is safe to do so.

The more we point out that their predictions and their advice and their alt-facts keep getting trumped by reality, the more any people on their fringes wavering to leave are likely to leave ..., and the more likely it is that wobbly people around them get dissuaded from joining them.

The more they are wrong, the more massive the conspiracy needed to hide their "truth".

The more massive conspiracy, the more likely it is to collapse.

Keeping a conspiracy among a hundred people would require enforcers to get in the face of some of them, to say "Nice little something you got there. It'd be a shame if anything wuz to happen to it."

Make it five times larger and you'd need another layer of enforcers to enforce the enforcer's silence.

The conspiracies they imagine involve hundreds of thousands of people, when you really work it out, which the nitwits don't. Work it out in front of them.

NASA moon photos faked? Okay, about 50 astronauts and backup astronauts. About 50 wives. About 200 support staff who would have been putting astronauts into the capsules on the launch pad and all the suiting up and prep and driving them there to the tower, etc., who have to lie about what they did. About a hundred keeping them in some hotel somewhere or on a military base. Who drove them to the base?

Who built the sets? Who researched and designed and built the fake 1/6 gravity effects? Who made the tons of lunar soil?

Who bribed all the thousands of scientists around the world who have worked on the lunar rocks?

Who were the accountants and paymaster paying all this under the table bribing? And so on.

But nobody in it ever talked? Preposterous.

Rub their noses in it. Especially if there is an audience of 1, 2, 20, 100.

There are hundreds of bogus conspiracies they invoke.

Demolish all of them.

January 10, 2024

No. They do not own them. Your nihilism is counter-productive.

A case can be made for media bias in headline writing and choice of stories being favourable to Big Money and GOP. But that is definitely not the whole story.

The courts have been denying the Big Steal election lie, like 61-1. That's not being "owned". In one state, they've taken him off the ballot for his insurrection.

The police are not owned. There are problems with police; too many authoritarian thugs. But they responded to Mr. Pelosi's predicament. They respond thousands of times a day to help people who are known Democrats or visibly Democratic.

If you are going to claim the GOP "owns the police" you'll have to present some evidence because it definitely not self-evident.

The GOP do not "own the ballot boxes". If they did, the Pink Ripple of 2022 would have been a red tide. If they did, Biden would have lost by 5 million votes and lost by 74 electoral college votes instead of the other way around.

If the GOP "owned the Secretaries of states", then they would not have certified Biden's win. All 50 states certified the election, which included a Democratic win in Congress.

Saying the "GOP owns Congress" is shitting on Schumer, Jeffries, and all the elected Democrats. Stop shitting.

You are spouting a reich wing talking point. Democrats are proud of Biden's success with the economy and many other issues.

"own Jesus": you just kicked in the teeth of the many Democratic christians who faithfully and honestly believe in Jesus.

"8 year veteran": everyone has the right to call it out with you or argue against you. Military service does not give you more rights. It earns the gratitude of the nation (and me) so the nation does give you more entitlements. And an 8 year veteran does not have more rights than an 8 year emergency room nurse or 8 year early childhood care provider. Perhaps you are buying into the theory behind "Starship Troopers".

"30 percent" who don't vote: turnout in 2020 was the biggest in US history. Now you are shitting on the voters.

"a joke to world", nope. They laugh at Putin. They laugh at tRump, not at Biden or the US military.

Why do you post this overwrought doom and gloom, especially when it is not true and especially when it is counterproductive? Do you want to dampen Democratic volunteer enthusiasm? Do you want to discourage voters from voting? Or are you trying to pose as one of the few who see the real deal, the big picture, ... even though you don't.

The worst part about your relentless negativity in your post is that you provide no suggestions to reverse it.

January 6, 2024

Hiccups are a reflexive expulsion and reswallowing of air

So you have to break the cycle. Water, sugar, and other stuff sometimes help but are not the key and not necessary.

1. Sit or stand. Standing might be a bit better.

2. Stretch your torso a bit in the front by looking up and stretching your windpipe a bit so there is a straight path down. The key here is to have a clear path for the air going out, and to stretch your esophagus muscles a bit so that the reswallow phase gets a bit interrupted.

3. Then when a hiccup comes, relax the stomach-windpipe-throat-mouth to expel the air or to let it escape freely.

4. Simultaneously or just instantly after, tighten the lower abdomen a bit and help prevent the reswallow.

5. The overall feeling is to be burping yourself without the patting we might give burping a baby. Make it easy for air to go out and harder for it to come back in.

You'll have to do it for a minute or less, mostly learning the technique. Pay attention to what your muscles are doing and how to relax and tense specific groups at specific moments in the cycle. If it is not working, sit down, rest for a minute or two and then go for it again. It might also help to hold your abdomen with your hands and gently but firmly push in at specific points in the cycle.

It has been so long since I've had hiccups that I can't be more specific, but I was able to teach it to my mother. On a few occasions I've felt hiccups coming on or just start and by relaxing and sort-of-burping myself they hardly got started.

January 4, 2024

"support for DEI has cratered": Nope

Rufo is mistaking two tactical victories for a sea-change.

Radical support for Hamas among university students is just that: radical. Nobody mistakes it for a majority opinion, except for CONservatives with an axe to grind and a bubble to maintain.

December 31, 2023

All these reports only say Republiconners get conned all the time

They don't know how to shop and they don't know how to balance a household budget, despite their whining about "running the gubmnt like a mortgage payer would".

Because they don't know basics about spending, RepubliCONs run up huge deficits and Democrats have to clean up the mess.

Note how tRump increased the amount of Federal Debt held by the public by 50% and increased the Trade Deficit by 40%.

December 27, 2023

I bet Appeals Court rules against tRump & Supremes let order stand without comment

The Supreme Court declined to take the case before the Appeals Court has ruled.

Either they want the Appeals Court to do their research for them or the tRump position is so ridiculous they would rule against him anyway. In the latter situation (the one that pertains, I think) the Supreme Court has no desire or need to touch the Br'er Rabbit tar baby and get entangled with everything that comes from it, especially in an environment of maga threats and maga violence.

You are exactly right: to rule that tRump had immunity would be to rule that presidents (tRump) and Presidents (all the rest) are Kings.

December 27, 2023

"Create man in god's image": the average man is not white or male

The "average man" (person) is slightly female (maybe 51%).

Going by their own book, christianists should acknowlege that god is probably very brown and might be zebra striped or multi-colour patched.

god might be trans or bi or lesbian or hetero-cis or asexual depending on the hour or the day of the month. Or all at the same time.


Truth of course is that "god" was created in man's image. The people doing the creating were predominantly whiter than the average human being. Hence white Jesus and white Adam and white Eve and ....


Ceiling cat makes as much sense as christianist Dominionist white guy god.