Sort of, but it’s more a comforting theory rather then a true belief. I came up with it when I was younger, doing a lot of psychedelics, and meditating often on the nature of existence and reality.

My theory is that God is everything. The earth, the stars, our fellow beings. All of reality makes up a complex web that I loosely refer to as a “consciousness” for lack of a better word. The nature of this “consciousness” is incomprehensible to us. It does not activly intervene in our daily lives, and operates on a scale beyond our comprehension. Mostly, it simply is. It is the oblivion from which our consciousness was once plucked, and it is where we will one day return.

In essence, each of us is a tiny fragment of reality experiencing itself. The meaning of life is to experience it. All of it. Joy, pleasure, and suffering. It is all a part of the whole of existence. When we die and return to the infinite our individuality is lost, but maybe God learns something about itself.

Even where there is viable public transport, there’s a stigma against using it. The city I live in has a decent and cheap Metro system. It’s reasonably clean, mostly runs on time, and you only have to deal with the occasional crazy. I took it for a summer after a car got totaled and it was fine.

Yet I work with a bunch of impoverished young people who spend $30-$40 on Ubers every day getting to work. I’ve suggested taking the bus to many of them, there’s even a stop right outside our workplace, and they are always dismissive and disgusted by the idea.

I think they’re starting with foreign prisons until the process becomes more normalized. Right now it would be too risky, the victims would have too many pesky rights. Need lawyers and journalist afraid of being sent to the El Salvador Death Camps before we can open the American ones.

I mean… kinda? Its no excuse, but Trump, Musk and the lot of them seem to all have deep insecurities rooted in childhood trauma. A toxic culture that encourages abusive behavior and discourages self-reflection and accountability certainly doesn’t help.

The memes about it how these men would rather destroy America then see a therapist are pretty real.

I daresay he almost looks… Stately in the portrait. It’s like a look into an alternate reality where Trump was loved by his father and got into politics out a desire to serve his country, and were he’s also done the bare minimum to care for himself for the past 79 years.

I mean, it could be a shitty disfunctional country with a very poor QoL, but still an independent country.

Small states will likely form coalitions with neighbouring states with whom they share culture and values. Texas, California, Florida, and New York might be independent, with nearby coilitions of states falling into their spheres of influence, or they may be the dominant power in a coalition of states.

It would be interesting to see what becomes of the states in the Midwest and the Great Basin. None of them have the economic power to stand on their own, and they will be reliant on having good relations with States that have ports.

Border disputes and tensions will be widespread, and the state-lines we know today will likely be completely redrawn. It’s likely too that many States will be facing their own internal succession movements from regions on the other end of the culture wars. Not to mention foreign powers pursuing their interests in the remains of the United States. The only certainty in this hypothetical future is that is will be a big, bloody, mess.

A chilling look into what could be the first real steps towards the Balkanization of the United States. It’s sad that it’s gotten to this point, but realistically I don’t see another path forward. It may be unconstitutional, but unfortunatly that founding document has lost its legitimately as the current administration wipes it’s ass with it on a daily basis.

A rare moment of honesty

Yeah I stopped doing it in High School after realizing that it’s some North Korea level bullshit. Got a few other kids in my homeroom to stop too, which really angered our teacher. She was a military spouse and would actually yell at us for refusing to participate. In the end, we compromised by standing but not reciting it. Was the begining of my political and social awakening.

TNG and DS9 are the only two series that I really know well enough to make these recommendations for.

I would highly recommend watching TNG before DS9, even if she likes DS9 better. TNG and DS9 work best as companion shows, with TNG building up a lot of DS9 plot-lines in its latter seasons. I would also highly recommend against starting with any episodes involving Q or the Borg, or any of the series “highlights”. Let those plots build, and you don’t want to spoil some of the best episodes in a sampler. My go-to TNG introduction picks are:

-Cause and Effect

-Darmok

-Measure of a Man

DS9 can be harder to pick introductory episodes for. Its more serialized nature means that a lot of later episodes have a lot of spoilers. I would highly recommend against picking any episodes that highly involve the Dominion or the Dominion War, let that plot build itself up. That does however, leave us with a lot fewer options. My DS9 introduction picks are:

-Duet

-Past Tense

-Bar Association

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This definitely applies to a good number of gay couples in Texas too. Hetero Women do have it worse in this regard though. Progressive Southern woman’s options are pretty much:

A) Be celibate

B) Move somewhere else

C) Settle for the Most Racist Man Alive

Single Hetero Progressive men are unicorns in the American South, and them being Progressive is no guarantee they will treat a woman any better. They often come with their own batch of issues and a lot of them are fuckboys.

Seems like a win tbh. Meta stops influencing people and collecting their data, while dumbass corps waste money on ads nobody will see.

Mike using his YouTube money to buy and preserve old TV and Movie props is the best arc. Maybe in his retirement he can curate his collection

Picard starts every day by broadcasting “Space… The final frontier” to the crew

Unrelated to the opsec, why is a SpongeBob Movie premiering on Netflix? Isn’t Nickelodeon Paramount?

That’s why I dislike these kinds of memes that say, “Oh, I shouldn’t be working all day; I should be living a life of leisure and free to create”.They feel like the conservative strawman of the “lazy leftist who just envies the rich”.

Living as the meme describes inherently requires the exploitation of labor. Unless a society becomes technologically advanced enough to achieve fully automated post-scarcity, meeting a person’s needs still requires a certain amount of human labor. The issue under capitalism is that some people do live as the meme describes, and they do so by exploiting the labor of others through capital. As a result, the rest of us struggle even more.

Found Red Skulls account

Oh I agree completely. There is a fascist aspect inherent to Superheroes. Cap is just one lf the less egregious ones.