Currently I recommend bupropion and atomoxetine, but once I get an appointment with a psychiatrist, I’ll probably recommend lisdexamphetamine.

Modafanil is pretty great too.

It’s out of their hands.

Uh, yeah, it literally was. Unless you’re saying that you want the president to be able to do whatever they want, even when a majority of congress and courts say no.

This might give you some better idea of what happened.

It’s not lying under any conventional definition of lying though. Saying something is a lie usually indicates deceptive intent, along with a knowledge–or a reasonable belief–that something you’re saying isn’t accurate. If I believe that the earth is flat, and I say so, am I lying? Or am I just wrong?

Biden said that he would cancel student loans; he’s done everything in his legal authority, and a few things that weren’t, to try an cancel them out. Do you think that the fact that SCOTUS prevented him from doing so makes it a lie? Or was he unable to follow through due to factors that he couldn’t directly control?

In re: medical -

I’m uninsured because the only insurance I had available to me at the time was about $11,000 annually if anything happened where I needed insurance (that’s between the premiums, the annual deductible, and the out of pocket maximum). I have a torn rotator cuff. It was >80% torn when I got an MRI in late August. It might be fully torn now, because it doesn’t hurt very much anymore. I tore it in May of this year, and yeah, it took me a few months to be able to get an MRI, and then a few weeks for them to deliver the results (even though that should have been under a week). I need surgery. I got a quote for $16,300 and managed to pony up the cash from long term savings. Then surgery was cancelled by the clinic. I rescheduled and it was sent to a hospital instead of a clinic; the new quote was $49,000. That was three weeks ago. I have another consult next week.

It’s been about six months since I tore my rotator cuff. I should have been able to get in to see a doctor and get an MRI immediately, but I couldn’t have afforded and ER visit on top of all of the rest of this. I don’t even know if it’s repairable at this point.

Complaining about long waits, given the alternative, seems really, I dunno, privileged?

On some level it’s reasonable to say that you own shares in a mutual fund, not shares in the individual companies.

But the other side of that is that you can fairly easily see what the mutual fund is doing, and copy it, without the problematic companies. Yes, it will be less profitable, but you can do it, and you can do it without too much difficulty when you’re talking about millions of dollars in investments. So it seems, I dunno, weak to say that you can’t divest your own personal investments from these things. Plus, I’m pretty sure that there are at least a handful of mutual funds that entirely avoid those kind of companies in order to attract ethical investors.

Obama was prevented from closing Gitmo by congress. IIRC, a big part of the problem was how to handle the criminal cases; all of the prisoners (“detainees”) in Gitmo have been tortured, the chain of evidence has multiple breaks in it, and it’s highly debatable that they can be tried in any kind of court. Yet intelligence agencies remain convinced that the remaining prisoners are guilty of terrorism. Congress didn’t want to move any of them to the US, because they didn’t want purported terrorists being held on US soil because ???

The president isn’t supposed to be able to act unilaterally, but we’ve allowed that Overton window to shift towards heavily authoritarian.

To paraphrase Nietzsche, that which doesn’t kill you psychologically scars you and leaves you with a lifetime of therapy bills.

According to Mormons, god is literally male, with (perfect) male genitalia. There is also a god–the-mother, who is female, and is both secret and sacred (they really don’t like talking about her), and also utterly subservient to god the father, because of course she is. According to Mormon theology, both gods were once mortal, and were raised up to godhood by their godly parents; Mormons–if they’re good enough–can go to Mormon super-heaven, where they will also become gods in their own right. Before everyone was born physically, they were born spiritually, in… More or less the same way babies are born now, except in heaven, to a heavenly mom. And there were hundreds of billions of spirit babies, so I guess that god the dad and god the mom really like sex or something? The implications start getting really, really weird, very fast. Which is part of the reason why Mormons don’t usually want to talk about stuff like this with people that aren’t Mormon.

I believe that the quote is, “As man is, so once was god. As god is, so man can become,” or something like that.

Source: was Mormon for >25 years.

Ooooo! Can I play?

Let’s say that you have a pro-genocide Republican, a pro-genocide Democrat, and an anti-genocide 3rd party candidate, but the anti-genocide candidate also wants to give all school children machine guns and grenades, and require cars to intentionally run down pedestrians?

Or or or let’s say that the anti-genocide candidate’s campaign is so bad that her own party is telling her drop out? .

Where o where is UniversalMonk when you want to shove something in his smarmy, trollish face…?

What exactly are the “material conditions leading to gun crime”?

Largely economic and educational, yeah, but also systemic racism and ingrained misogyny. While it’s facile–and accurate–to say that Republicans block efforts that would help these problems, the fact is that Democrats often do as well, opting to ban firearms and features rather than addressing root causes. I recall one particular violence intervention program that got cancelled in Chicago by–IIRC–Rahm Emmanuel. And unfortunately, many of the centrist Dems don’t really believe in programs that work, like enrolling inmates in college to reduce recidivism.

Why do other countries thar have lots of guns have less gun crime?

Other countries with a relatively high number of firearms also tend to have significantly better social welfare systems, more focus on rehabilitation than punishment in their criminal justice systems, and a lower rate of income inequality overall. If the US had, for instance, the social conditions of Finland, while still having the same number of firearms, I expect that you would see a sharply lower rate of firearm homicides. (Interestingly, Finland has very similar rates of suicide as we have in the US overall. I’m not sure what to make of that. But I also note that all of the Nordic countries seem to have fairly high suicide rates, and all of the Mediterranean countries tend to have quite low suicide rates. Climate and amount of sunlight, maybe?)

Aside from the, the right to keep and bear arms is an individual civil right. IMO, attempts to restrict that right should be subject to strict scrutiny. NYSPRA v. Bruen helped with that, but it hasn’t gone far enough. Think of it this way: voting is supposed to be a right. Republicans want to limit the ability to vote in ways that favor them. I would say that this is wrong, and that Republicans need to change the way that they govern or message so that they can attract more voters, rather than trying to make it harder to exercise a civil right.

or the gas station clerk to get a gun pointed at her and told to give up the cash.

…Which you aren’t very likely to do once economic conditions have been addressed. Not very many people go out and rob people for the sheer joy of it. Little Johnny shoots Susie because society has taught him that the only acceptable emotion is rage, and he can’t deal with his emotions in any other way. Again: address the messaging–about gender norms and expression in this case-- and fix the underlying problems, and then access to the tools of violence becomes immaterial because there’s no longer the impetus towards violence. Dems have made some inroads regarding gendered emotional expressions, but a lot of far-right influencers are actively working against those efforts.

parents of shooters bought them guns despite clear warnings

I think that this is probably appropriate in limited cases, such as with the Crumbleys in Detroit, MI, and with the Grays in Winder, GA. In both cases, the parents (father, in the case of Mr. Gray) had credible information from authorities that their child was at risk of harming other people, and both of them gave firearms to their child despite and after receiving the credible information about them being a risk. I would say that, if parents made a reasonable attempt to deny a child access to firearms, or did not have credible information about their child being a risk, then you should no longer be looking at a criminal or civil case. It seems to me that having your firearms locked inside your home or vehicle should be enough to say that you made a reasonable effort, because anyone that takes a firearm from those places knows that they’re breaking and entering already.

The desire to make locking firearms up is yet another way of making firearms prohibitively expensive, and functionally denies the right to keep and bear arms to people that can’t pony up the $1000+ for a locking firearms container that’s even slightly secure.

Well. technically he was an ape rather than a monkey.

It really depends on where you bury the body. Once you get out of developed areas, it gets very hard to track things down. Take this example; she was missing for two years, and her body was found in a tent, in a sleeping bag, just two miles off the Appalachian trail, which is one of the busiest hiking trails in the US. If someone was actually buried out there, the odds that they’d ever be found are very, very poor.

Admittedly, carrying a body off trails through fairly dense forests ain’t gonna be easy. If you were going to do it, I’d say start by getting an old car with no GPS, get some paper maps, make sure that you leave all of your electronics at home so that there’s no electronic trail of where you’ve been (especially your cell phone!), and only use cash for gas, etc. while you’re driving to your body dump site. Assuming that the body isn’t recovered for at least a year, you’re likely in the clear.

The entire Ultima series for sure. I think those were the first CRPGs I played. I loved Ultima: Underworld I & II, but I was never able to get Ultima VII: Pagan to run properly on my computer. (And, holy fuck, that was 30 years ago.)

But also The Elder Scrolls: Arena, TES: Daggerfall, TES: Battlespire, TES: Redguard, and TES: Morrowind. The first two TES games would be challenging to make, given that many of the areas were randomly generated, rather than being designed.

Having seen the trailer for Gothic, it looks good. I really hope that it’s actually good.

Example: roids. Used appropriately, they can help improve your body.

Correction: they can improve aspects of your body, at a very, very steep cost. Pretty much all oral anabolic steroids are C17α-alkylated, and they’re hepatotoxic (i.e., cause liver damage). All steroids will fuck up your lipid profile to one degree or another, and all of them can cause heart disease, specifically hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. While most AASs will increase red blood cell count, Boldenone in particular will sharply increase RBC production, which in turn increases blood pressure and can cause strokes. All of them will shut down the hypothalmus-pituitary-testicular axis (HPTA) feedback loop in men, leading to testicular atrophy. Most AASs will cause hair loss in men that are sensitive to DHT. AASs can fuck up your hormones enough that men can start lactating (!!!). High doses of testosterone can cause gynecomastia, because testosterone aromatizes into estradiol. In women, all AAS will cause some degree of virilization.

There are not very many IFBB pros that make it to 80; if you want your candle to burn brightly, it’s going to burn out fast.

Who TF is sending in their registration cards…?

I mean, seriously, I’ve never sent one in. I threw all of them away, along with the cards asking me to join the NRA.

Also, as I’ve said before: if Dems would drop gun control entirely–and concentrate on changing the material conditions that result in gun crime–that would absolutely gut right-wing orgs that rely on fears of gun bans and confiscations to rile up a base.

I believe that’s correct; but it’s not all handguns, only a very, very few. Any handgun that’s gas operated (and there are, like, five) is definitely still going to fire.

So, um, 400M rockets.

Yeah, that ain’t happenin’.

I think you wildly underestimate the amount of trash we’re be talking about here. This wouldn’t be a rocket, this would be thousands, or hundreds of thousands of rockets. And that’s just the start.