My uncle took his own life when he was 19. He didn’t leave a note. He didn’t warn anyone. Just one morning my grandmother walked in and saw him hunched over on his bed completely pale, all the blood drained out of his face. There was a glass of cyanide in water on his bedside table.

It broke them. Neither of my grandparents recovered. Years later I was staying with them for a while and I overheard my grandmother say “we have our son back”.

Every suicide is like that. It’s like a bomb that shatters the lives of everyone close to you. It isn’t a solution. It doesn’t end the pain. It just passes it on to everyone else. But nobody would do it if the pain were bearable. “Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping.” There is no blame, no judgment, only tragedy and pain.

But people who survive and find help Will tell you that it gets better. That they’re glad they survived and that recovery is possible So if you are thinking of suicide, know that it is the worst possible option, no matter how hopeless it seems. There’s always another way.

Dvorak at work, QWERTY away from work. I occasionally start typing Dvorak at home, but it doesn’t take much to reset the brain to QWERTY. I learned touch typing in high school in the 80s on a mechanical typewriter.

So is it just the DMT or is the psychotherapy part important? How important? What type of psychotherapy are they using, CBT, IPT, MPCT?

I always just use a cold stick of butter like a crayon. Grab the hot toast and wipe the butter on it straight from the stick. Butter knives are only for room temperature butter.

“If there was one person Donald Trump stayed loyal to it was Michael Jackson.” … Trump … didn’t believe the accusations of child molestation levied at the “Thriller” singer… The president defended Jackson as recently as 2015, when he tweeted that “Michael was very misunderstood - a great talent.”

He was just misunderstood, guys. He wasn’t a pedophile. It doesn’t matter if she’s nine years old. Age is just a number. – Trump, probably.

I’m my experience it’s about a ten to one ratio of people who shit on vegans because they “never shut up about it” vs vegans who actually never shut up about it. So a vegan wanted to show she could climb Mt Everest. She did it, then she died of acute altitude sickness during the descent, something completely unrelated to her diet. Her husband, also vegan, lived. She became one of hundreds of people who have died in that climb, all of whom wanted to prove they could do it. Just let people live their life how they want to. Heaping scorn on someone who died trying to prove themselves isn’t cool.

First thing to understand is global collapse isn’t an event. It’s a slow process that unfolds over years, or more likely, decades. We are already seeing it happening, but since it’s not like the movies most of us don’t recognize it.

The second thing is that baring some catastrophic imminent localized danger you aren’t going to see hordes of displaced people fighting for your potatoes. It takes real desperation to pack a bag, leave all the rest of your things, leave your home, and walk far away hoping it’ll be better somewhere else. Even now people stay in some of the most dangerous and inhospitable places.

So, odds are you’ll have time to set up a garden, set up a rainwater collection system, maybe get some solar panels. Whatever you want to do to prepare for what you expect is coming, you can probably do it. One guiding principle in this is try to minimize your external dependencies. If you can feed yourself and live comfortably without a big shopping trip every week you are doing better than most. Independence from utilities is more difficult, but doable if you want to put the effort and money into it. Another principle is learn useful skills. Learn how to build things, fix things, buildings, cars, electric motors, etc. Most people jump to protecting yourself from bandits. Do you live in a high-crime area? If so maybe move. If not, take some reasonable self-defense precautions. You aren’t going to fight off an army or even a coordinated gang, so just don’t worry about it too much. Basically, live in an area where you get along with your neighbors and you help each other out. Bonus points if they are self-sufficient too.

I mean, you can’t predict what’s going to happen, so just try to insulate yourself from whatever system shocks might appear. You’ll need to adapt as the years go by and things get worse. Good luck. :-)

These kinds of takes have legs because the capitalist parasite class really does value profit a lot more than your life or mine. When a drug company finds a cure for blindness and decides to charge almost a million dollars for it, you can’t really argue that they have your best interest in mind, or even a shred of human decency. That said, the take posted is not how it really works. If they discovered a drug that cured asthma in 3 days they’d patent it and sell it for a million dollars. They’ve already done it for other ailments. No one can argue they wouldn’t.

(and btw, just disable JS to kill the paywall on that link)

Are you just sick of beans and rice or have you not found a recipe you like? If the latter, try this one. I made it a day or two ago and it’s good.

Serious Eats Foolproof Pan Pizza is one of my regulars. You can put all kinds of stuff on a pizza and it’s still good. I’m vegetarian so I use fake chicken and such, but here are a few of my favorites. (they all have mozzarella)

• Teriyaki sauce base, fried tofu, green beans, mushrooms, red onion, fried eggplant
• Barbecue sauce base, chicken, mushrooms, red onions, pickled jalapenos, sweet corn
• Refried bean base, cheddar, onions, mushrooms, pickled jalapenos. Top with Romain salad w/ ranch.
• Tomato sauce base, mushrooms, onions, peppers, olives. (flexible, use what you like)

You can make the pickled jalapenos. And the refried bean base is just a can of beans with a little water, garlic, and salt. Heat to cook the garlic then blend/mash.

I also like a good vegetable pot pie. That one is made with simple ingredients like potatoes, carrots, celery, and mushrooms, along with any spices you like. She has a nice pie crust recipe too. Turned out well when I made it.

Well, your showerthought post was basically rich people cause suffering and climate change. It’s true they generate a hugely disproportionate amount of CO2. But my point (and maybe it wasn’t clear) was that when there is an easy energy resource just sitting underground, it’s going to get used whether by rich people or not. It provides too much of an advantage. Having coal and oil at your disposal is like having a near endless supply of free workers. One liter of gasoline, when used in an engine, produces roughly 2 to 4 kWh of mechanical energy, equivalent to the daily labor of about 100 people. No society is going to turn down that many guiltless slave workers. We were told 100 years ago it was going to cause climate change, but we didn’t have the technology to replace it with electric at the time. Effective batteries are a recent invention. So there really was no alternative. Your neighbor country is making use of millions of ‘energy slaves’ and growing their population like crazy. Are you going to continue plowing your fields with donkeys and hoping you can feed your people? No, using that energy was inevitable.

And now? Theoretically we could replace our energy infrastructure with renewables. In the US it would take at least 5 trillion dollars and who knows how long and how much energy to do it. But I don’t think it’ll stop climate change. Call me a doomer, but I think it’s already too late for that. We’ve already released enough CO2 to kill the planet. The effects just take about ten years or more to show.

Sure, we want to blame climate change on the fossil fuel industry, the capitalist owners thereof, the big industries, long haul ocean shipping, etc. But I don’t think it’s realistic. Imagine the situation a few hundred years ago. We burned wood to keep warm in the winter. We cut down forests and pre-burned them in vast quantities to make charcoal which we then used in smelters to make iron and steel, in kilns to make pottery and glass, in steam engines to turn all sorts of things. We were on track to cut down every tree on the planet to use for one of those things. Then we found fossil fuels. They were better than wood in every way, except that the generated CO2 wasn’t renewable. Any nation that used them surged ahead of all others in productivity, defense, offense, and quality of life. To refuse to use them, even if you knew they would kill us all a few hundred years later, meant that you got outcompeted, and probably overrun or conquered. There was no option. So everyone used them more and more. That’s been the story ever since. It’s a Faustian bargain. You get comfort and success now and someday your ancestors will suffer. But you figure that they will be smart enough then to solve the problem so you don’t worry about it. Yes, our economic system guarantees that a small number of people will profit from it the most. And they will make it worse one way or another. But climate getting worse just a matter of time. Even if we had the most enlightened people making decisions for us who would agree when they said we all had to stop using fossil fuels? There is almost nothing you use in your life that isn’t made with fossil fuels somehow. And it’s too late now. We can’t go back. We can’t all be subsistence farmers. There are too many of us. We can’t survive without fossil fuels.

tl;dr - yeah, the capital owners are awful, but climate change would have happened without them.

My first guess was a three way portmanteau: fucking + tangled + angular. Not sure how angular fits. Maybe sharp pointed or something?

The closest thing I have to a religion is Buddhism. I practice it. I meditate daily. I read about it. As far as belief goes, though, it doesn’t ask you to have faith outside of believing that if you follow the practice you will see the results they say you will. The millennia old texts that it’s based on are called Suttas. One of them, the Kalama Sutta, explicitly tells the villagers of Kalama not to believe it just because they are told it is so.

"Come, Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another’s seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, ‘The monk is our teacher.’ Kalamas, when you yourselves know: ‘These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,’ enter on and abide in them.

Personally I have seen the results of my meditation in my life. I’m still early on the path, but it seems to be progressing as they say it will. I have developed, through a few years of practice, the ability to focus on the present moment and still my mind to the point that, at least for a short time, thoughts don’t arise. I’m fully aware of where I am and what is happening, but my mind is still. It doesn’t last for long, but with more practice it will. I’m developing what’s called samadhi, a type of concentrated focus where, eventually, nothing interrupts your concentration and you can maintain it as long as you like. I have a ways to go, but it appears to be progressing as expected.

So to answer the question, I believe it because I have experienced it. Many of the parts I haven’t yet experienced I suspect are true, though I will only understand and believe them when I do experience them for myself.

Well, I didn’t mention tomatoes. And I’m slowly replacing my grass with a sort of food forest. It may not be native wildflowers, but I don’t think I’m lost.

The point in the article assumes you are solely reliant on rain for watering your plants. Where I live it doesn’t rain for like three or four months in the summer, so that argument is invalid. I use irrigation in my orchard every couple of weeks to deeply soak the area around a tree. The wood chips around the trees do help prevent the soil from drying out because they keep it cool. It takes heat energy to evaporate water. And since the mulch blanket keeps the soil cool I only have to water the orchard once every two or three weeks.

Yeah. It was a lot like that. She’d find a recipe to try, or want one of her favorites, and I’d just ask her how she wanted things chopped and prepped.

She is. She has cancer and spends a lot of time resting. She has more energy in the morning. She makes her breakfast. But I do all the cooking at night and usually lunch too.

eh, it can work. when my wife was well enough to cook we’d divide it like she washes, I chop and prep, and she cooks, then we split cleaning. Now I’m doing all of that and I really appreciate the occasions where we have a friend visiting who is willing to do some prep and cleaning. I usually do the cooking even when I have help, mostly because it’s rare to find someone who knows how to cook what we eat. But I’m always eager to have help.

Also relevant as a fallacy of argument.

The motte and bailey fallacy is a rhetorical tactic where an arguer retreats from a controversial claim (the “bailey”) to a more defensible one (the “motte”) when challenged, without admitting defeat on the original point. This tactic is named after a medieval castle’s defense, where inhabitants could retreat from the exposed courtyard (bailey) to the fortified tower (motte) if attacked. An example is someone arguing that “Trans women are not women” and, when challenged, shifting to the more palatable “I’m just saying biological sex cannot be changed”

They are, but then you’re pooping out of your vagina, and that’s something that one would notice.