Hidden Brain had a good episode “Why You Feel Empty” Aug. 6, 2024. “We all know what it feels like to be sad” … “We also know what it feels like to be joyful and happy” … “Sociologist Corey Keyes says lots of us live in an emotional netherworld that falls between these two poles, we are not depressed but still feel unfulfilled.” Anyway, I saved it cause it stuck with me because I’ve been languishing for a while as well. Give it a listen let me know what you think.

It is kinda sad watching us blunder through this nonsense again and again. Do these conservative voters think it was the capitalist and business owners that wanted kids out of their factories? Do they think the tycoons were the one that pushed for a 40 hour work week and it was the workers who went on strike to keep their longer hours?

They already are… Look at the states and counties that vote red. Leaders in education and life expectancy they are not. Great in poverty with a dearth of opportunity they are. Over the decades these places have been ravaged by big business. Then business moved overseas and opiates moved in.

What do these people do? In a flash of absolute genius they vote in the guy whose administration is filled with tech bros. The problem is the tech bros all think these people are trash and are happy to see them occupied by video games and drugs.

So clearly the immigrants working for low pay are the reason the economy is fucked. The solution must be the administration whose only legislative accomplishment was a massive tax cut for the wealthy and corporations. Because the economy can’t possibly be fucked because as a society we’ve given to the top 1% all of the gains in productivity since the 1980s.

What happens to all the normal non cartel people caught up in the middle of your drug war?

We just those useless folks Congress. But, seriously we can’t let a few lazies clogging up the works be the reason to allow Republicans to continue destroying our institutions.

Of course he’s going to go ham this season. Why wouldn’t he? He was never held to account for any of the corruption and crime during his first term. The new Trump admin won’t be like the last one where some people were able to obstruct the most ridiculous requests. I predict we will nuke at least one hurricane in the coming 4 years.

Maybe some better healthcare?

Ben Burgis went on his show a couple years ago, he wrote an article about it (https://jacobin.com/2022/04/the-joe-rogan-experience-podcast-democratic-socialism). Sam Seder just did an amazingly patient appearance on the Tim Pool show. So they get on the popular show and spend a ton of time just establishing basic reality with the hosts. Then we get stuff like Carlson not airing an interview with Rutger Bregman not because he was spouting white supremacists rhetoric but because he called for taxing the ultra wealthy. Carlson and Fox have no problem platforming the neo-nazis.

The thing is all their shows and content are free and the right wing content is way more popular. People want their junk food content, the kind of stuff that makes them feel smart and never challenges them. Maybe we need to spend more time teaching viewers basic critical thinking skills and media literacy. Something like before youtube let’s you play that third whatifalthist video you have to take a quiz that demonstrates you don’t have donkey brains.

I’m not a Rogan fan and have only seen a couple of his “interviews” but the guy is really stupid. The ones I saw Rogan acted like the kid that didn’t read the book before attempting to interview the author for three hours about the book.

It is all good to have an open mind but maybe not so open your brains fall out. Anyway, the problem I have is that these are not serious people, Rogan is either unwilling or unable to do even the most basic amount of research into a topic before platforming a guest. What is impressive to me is that people eat this shit up. Rogan is like Fox News because they are both just sugary nonsense with no meat and potatoes.

The way I see it these casters are doing to politics what Ancient Aliens did to history.

I think what they are saying is that Rogan has no values or principles and can easily endorse freedom and unfreedom thus averaging out to a middle position. Truly the most open minded individual can both believe the earth is a globe and flat.

We didn’t get it that bad. We had the golden age of the internet and were the first with actual broadband. We have tons to look forward to like robot butlers and self driving cars. Also flexible screens that are hard to break.

More automation can be real good if we say use it to make a 4 hour work day while keeping the full time pay. Prices for weed are going down.

We may be going through a rising wave of right-wingism currently, but last time Trump and his goons were in charge they got replaced. A couple of ways to deal with this is to not be a minority or poor. If people can figure out those two things they can survive another four years of Trump’s America. The better way to deal with this is organize locally, because the Federal courts are fucked, the Senate is fucked, and the President is Trump so we aren’t gonna get much done nationally.

Dang I just bought some onions.

There’s a permanent record for everybody that went to school in America. I remember it was drilled into us at a young age, that this or that could end up on our permanent record.

And if there isn’t one for cops and other positions of authority there should be one. Make it a phone app.

Also this should go on their permanent record. So they are never allowed to be in any position of authority anywhere again.

I’ve been calling it the Roman numeral for ten site formerly known as twitter. Are people just abbreviating this to ‘X’ now?

The Dems put up a good fight. Biden needed to leave earlier. Harris could’ve had an actual answer to what she would’ve done differently. The reality is they were fighting a huge uphill battle. We’ve got an extremely ignorant and uninformed citizenry with little understanding of the functioning of government. I’m talking about Americans a proud and reactionary group of people. There was zero chance after picking Kamala that the Democratic party was going to pivot from their neo-liberal views and what movement they did was towards the center.

Now that they’ve lost so decisively maybe we’ll see a window to move the party in a progressive direction. Personally I think the Dems need to get back to supporting labor unions. If we are going to “reindustrialize” this country because we are doing war with China then we should want strong labor organization. Get some progressives to run on policies that put people first instead of property and capital.

That would probably require getting money out of politics. In the meantime focus on continuing to improve the quality of life in blue states and blue cities. As far as the voters they didn’t fail the party they failed the country. We are going to see a bunch of our fellow citizens lose more of their rights.

I don’t know about you but some of us chose to get born. I remember rolling my round ass down through a warm long tube as I waited for my other half to meet up. And, I also remember waiting patiently for the right blast off, one that wasn’t going to end up in or on a tummy, and swimming so hard and fast past all the other guys.

I’d still probably do it again, but it would’ve been nice to know more about the outside world. But back then it was all just about swimming and trying to hook up.

If it were me I’d barricade the office and declare myself a constitutional special counsel. But what do I know I just love my country.

The Majority Report with Sam Seder just had a guest on today for an interview about this very topic. The guy’s name was Daniel Hunter and I found it solid.

The gist of the interview was that you can block boats that are carrying arms shipments with smaller boats and that might work for a while but the coast guard will probably fuck with you. So your best course of action is to get the dockworkers on your side and get them to not load the weapons onto the boats. I don’t know how much shipping is done in Utah as I’ve only been once.

Women’s Suffrage was fairly significant and the Civil Rights movement also used protests. Then in the 2000s people rose up against the canceling of Firefly and demanded a movie as compensation. Serenity was that movie and it was awesome and it remains amazing.

Finally, internationally one man named Gandhi used nonviolence to defeat the British empire.