High quality Greek yogurt. The flavor and texture is very much noticeable.

I’m starting to realize high quality organic coffee is a thing too.

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If you’ve never been, there’s a functional oil derrick in front of their capitol complex. 85% of the state functions like the movie “There will be blood.”

They have a whole celebration around eating bull testicles. The roads are long and straight like Kansas and Iowa…oh, and they’re toll roads. Most of the people I talked to hated it there and wanted to get the hell out. By far my least favorite state I’ve visited.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some decent things there. Red River is cool, watching a terrifyingly enormous thunderhead clap in the distance at night is starkly beautiful. It’s chock full of tribal culture and native and folk art. It’s the birthplace of Sonic Drive Ins and one of the smartest Product Managers I know came from there. But there’s a reason sometimes Oklahoma is removed from contiguous maps of the US.

Best bet short term is to rig something that dulls the noise. A few insulated panels would do, so long as the heat isn’t too intense, but will have the unfortunate effect of reducing the heat to your residence, so you’ll need to augment that somehow. If there’s air in the line, then it’s probably not working to its fullest potential anyway.

Long term, I agree with everyone else. Have the super hire a professional. This is not one you want to DIY, especially while it’s operational. I’ve done carpentry, wiring and plumbing. I’d never touch steam, doubly so while it’s running.

Trump is our time’s Andrew Jackson but somehow worse.

The more well off ones usually have a connected airport and “fuck-you-money” level security. As someone else mentioned, helicopters are an option, or perhaps boat if they’re by a waterway.

So congratulations, you’ve trapped the community doctors and lawyers, maybe a very well off Grammy or two with limited faculties, but you’ve set off the alarm bells to the true predators of society, who’ve now made it to Madagascar and shut down the ports.

Yes, it was called the whiskey rebellion and George MFing Washington curbstomped their asses.

Let’s not try to break up the Union anytime sooner than the inevitable, okay?

I would produce a pill that rewires the human brain to focus on the good events occurring around them and in the world.

Far too many of our societal problems are due to a significant portion of the world focusing on negative events. How many channel 9 news events are focused on car crashes or shootings? How much social media profit is based upon rage bait? How many hours wasted scrolling on insta fantasizing about being anyone but your own self?

We have within ourselves already great capacity to do great things, we just need to unchain that potential.

Yeah, I mean, Isn’t glass simply sand that just got really hot?

One of the wittier guys in the trailer park I grew up in did that trick where it looks like you can pull one of your fingers off from one hand. As an 8 year old, that was fucking cool. Perhaps you could even augment it with some fake blood.

Another time he did the quarter behind your ear trick and then gave us the quarter.

To this day, I still remember him more than any shucker of a Milky Way or Babe Ruth candy bar. So yeah, go for it, make an impression.

Orange man learns new word this week, uses it everywhere.

Don’t stop the guac, don’t stop the guac.

Good for Japan I guess? It’s typically the Conservatives who elect women first, because those are usually the ones who so vehemently oppose a woman candidate. It’s a bit of mind fuckery.

Now let’s see if they either set her up for success, or if she’s out sooner than a head of hakusai.

4/5 - coming of age film about a scrawny, scrappy poor kid. Opening shot is a fight against other kids in a trailer park to level up in status. Or maybe even earlier to my mom standing there pregnant, and then her mom punching her in the stomach upon finding out her teen daughter, though as much as she had tried to shut her away, had somehow gotten herself knocked up. And then following the resulting trail of blood. Regardless, it starts out by getting the shit kicked out of me a few times.

Sprinkle in the multiple times I almost died, slipping on wet cement that had just been coated with muriatic acid, that time a demented kid tightened a noose around my neck, the countless nights I’d wake gasping for air with my chest heaving because we had a cat urine and roach problem and couldn’t afford an inhaler. That one time two girls thought it would be funny to see how long they could hold me underwater, at a pool, of course unsupervised, and only stopping just so as things faded to black and all I heard was this saint of a kid saying to them “Stop! He’s dying!” Nary a parent in sight.

The sex, the drugs the drinking all at 13.

The divorce, the handoffs from family member to family member moving each year. Finally settling into a mountain town in rural Appalachia. Having a town general store purveyor of goods taking me under his wing. Learning a passion for the outdoors and skiing.

Going mudding in a Honda Accord with a bunch of other delinquents. Going streaking after we got stuck. Flash forward to a court house and nearly going to jail for vandalism and other stupid teenage mistakes.

Going back to the area I was raised and finding that everyone had 2 kids and a drinking problem…or worse.

Flash forward to the struggles of leaving my past behind. Failing out of university after 9/11. Constantly watching those two planes smash onto the twin towers in a dark dormitory until it was etched into mind.

And then more struggle to leave my past behind as I sought out a soulmate. Dropping out of the Peace Corps due to it.

Quitting my job and finding a love for cycling. Being given a dog who hated wheels, but even she eventually fell in love with cycling. The smartest, best damn dog in the world.

Nearly dying another handful of times. Motorcycle in the mountain roads of Tennessee, more motorcycle, sliding in the snow with a big rig behind, that time wrecking it the one dumbass time I went for a joyride after drinks. Being on the 3rd floor of a house as it collapsed on a rainy day in high winds and walking out mostly unscathed.

Discovering a love for travel. Still trying to escape my past, but working on it, like really really working on it. I try not to die anymore.

Could call it something like “The dirtbag’s field guide to survival, part one.”

If Daria got a movie and it did pretty well, surely you can.

Greek yogurt, walnuts, craisins, pumpkin seeds, hemp hearts, chia seeds, maybe cinnamon, maybe a dash of honey, possibly some frozen fruit if I feel like waiting for it to thaw a bit. Coffee with a dash of oatmilk.

1. Amendment to get rid of gerrymandering. Districts will be drawn up by statistical models that emphasize culture, values, demographics of the district. Every citizen also gets a vote by mail ballot.
2. Amendment to implement sensible gun control. Not ban guns, as people need some way to fight back against a tyrannical government. And some people truly do need to keep themselves safe from wildlife, crime, etc.
3. Amendment to bring in Puerto Rico and Washington DC as states in the union. If Texas wants to split into East TX and West TX, I’m fine with that too.
4. Law to require 2 years voluntary service. Meals, food, housing, recreational stipend will be provided. Similar to CCC, you’ll learn a trade and build up a camaraderie that will last a lifetime. As a citizen in a country, you should have skin in the game, it gives you a sense of ownership . Bonus is infrastructure gets kept up and senior citizens are cared for. Volunteer groups can be unionized.
5. Gas tax goes up significantly. Seriously, Europe pays $8/gallon. Why the hell do we need to keep it at $3? Tax will pay to build out much needed public transportation and sustainable energy grid infrastructure. We need trains people. If China can do it in a country much more mountainous than ours, we can do it.
6. Wealth tax. Anything over $100 million earnings is taxed progressively at 70% anything above $1B is taxed at 90%. Tax on unrealized gains, but can be balanced by unrealized losses.
7. Abolish tax exempt status for churches. You can be nonprofit, but you will still be taxed. No more slave owning mega-pastors.
8. Amendment to overturn Citizens United. Political contributions will be limited. You want your money to be speech? Sure, do it the old fashioned way and convince enough people to align with your cause.
9. Federal Healthcare for everyone damnit! What the hell is wrong with us!?
10. Give more power back to the states. There will be some cohesive things that we all agree upon that keep the tether of our society together, but New York is not Oklahoma is not Colorado is not Alabama. States should have more power to govern themselves. Think of it like Catalonia in Spain or Scotland in UK. States are the test beds of democracy.

Would I get a second term? Hell no. I’m a change agent technocrat. People like a showman. There’s a reason city planners are divorced from mayors at the municipal level. I come in like a four mile freight train then I go home. Some populist demagogue would probably replace me.

South US, but in the mountains where it is much cooler. SO is vegetarian and I am an omnivore but skew vegetarian, especially at home. I leave heated things out to cool from hot to warm before putting in the fridge. About an hour, maybe 2 when I am being forgetful. Anything over that is taking risk. I’ve had a few nasty bouts of food poisoning before so I skew on the safe side.

My mom on the other hand grew up very differently. Lives by the beach in a much warmer more humid climate. She’ll leave moist dump cakes unrefrigerated for days. She’s more homeopathic than me, says the spices have been used for ages to preserve food. She’s not wrong, but you have to throw in a lot more cinnamon than what our Americanized palate is accustomed to. We are very careful about what we eat when we visit, and even then, small bites to try first.

I’m sure you’ve heard this so many times before. It’s not necessarily the bacteria itself, but their waste products that put you at risk. I’m not sure what the salt content of taco meat is, and if your taco meat is dry or wet, but I do think you may be putting yourself at risk in this particular instance.

Federal workers will get back pay. You’re parroting the right’s messaging. People wanted the left to fight.

Because of how the people gave the right all of the levers of government last election, this is one of the few areas where dems have any power to wield - senate needs 60% to pass any funding legislation.

You wanted a battle, the dems took it to the mattresses. We should be praising them for being bold and we, the left, should be seeking out those government workers who are struggling the most and doing gofundme’s to care for them. This is a war and they are soldiers on the front lines, directly in the line of fire. We need to be their support regiment.

Conversely, the right needs to feel the pain of what a lack of federal government looks like, because a lot of them don’t value it at all, because they don’t understand how it serves them. They only see it as “protection money” that come out of their paycheck. For them, we need to find the union workers who left the left. We need to gain back the dirt farmers in Montana, the disenfranchised Hispanics in Southern Texas and in the burroughs of NYC and the suburbanite moms in Bucks County. Moreover, we need to fight like hell to show that we give a damn and have a spine and that we will, we will, fight for them.