“How is it that there are so many Americans who own so many guns who are so indiscriminate about using them when someone makes them upset, and yet you’ve got four in 10 American adults carrying medical debt?” (Doctrow) said. He’d heard of people who wouldn’t approach someone who was texting at a movie theater or swerving across traffic because they might have a weapon. “How is it that people who fly off the handle under such trivial circumstances are so sober and responsible and even-keeled when it comes to these things that when I imagine them, all I can think is I would lose my mind?”

I can tell you why in less than 25 words: the gun lobby wants people to buy guns and be afraid of everyone, and you never see the person who approves medical procedures.

vulture capitalism at it’s best. and when I say best I mean the absolute worst.

the party would rather have members who play nice with money and power and make public pointless grandstanding actions in public rather than members who connect with the actual people, listen to the people, and fight for the people.

with 3 exceptions, I have always voted for the democratic candidate in the 22 years that I have been eligible to vote. and I refuse to register with the party because the national party does stupid shit like this. it’s as though they are intentionally trying to never join the party. and yet I get bombarded with fundraising emails and snail mail. MEIN GOTT the begging.

i vote for democrats because they are closer to where I am and they are viable. how many nonpartisan voters like me aren’t that tactical and stay home and cost themselves elections?

before this election I was not in favor of an electoral age cap for office. now I’m strongly in favor of one. it’s clear as day that these gerontologic electeds who have been in office since clinton and bush, the first bush, that they are so out of touch that mercury has a better chance of touching pluto than they are with the base of the party. vote out all of the olds. I don’t just want them not in power but still in office because then they could still have influence behind the scenes. get them away from the controls of power.

my workaround for glucose watch monitoring is an android app called gluroo. if you’re using an app that sends your glucose data to a server gluroo pulls that data from the server and displays it on your watch as a specific watchface so the info that’s displayed is as accurate as the sensor you’re currently using. the downside is that gluroo can’t pull directly from whatever app you happen to be using, so going to an area with no data service at all will show no stats even though your phone is right there.

and kids in their classrooms.

since a lot of functionality at my job that doesn’t require me to physically be in the office can be done on a web browser I use my tablet as a work computer if the office is occupied. before this year I used my smartwatch as a phone monitor because even vibrating I can’t feel my phone ringing in my pocket or vibrate for text messages. and it was literally vitally important that I be available 24/7. these days I no longer need to be constantly available but I now have to monitor my glucose levels so I found a watchface and corresponding phone app to send that information to my phone.

tablets and watches still have a place for a lot of people.

they aren’t doing this to convince us, the proles. they’re doing it for their corporate masters. it’s a sign to them that they will cower and comply in advance to make sure that we, the not wealthy, won’t be given any more ammunition reasons to start going after any more of them.

it’s not going to work, the corporate media not only ripped any credibility they had during the last 16 years, they decided to go for broke and nuked it in the last 3 months. does anyone really believe anything anyone associated with a major media outlet has to say about anything related to people who are at least millionaires?

voting is absolutely worth the squeeze when you do it. however voting also is heavily dependent on a voting base that is both highly engaged in the process and is knowledgeable about the issues.

so when you have elections where:

1. a third or more of all eligible voters do not vote
2. laws have been passed to make it harder to vote for some people
3. a majority of the people who do vote have only paid attention to campaign issues for at the most the two weeks directly before the end of voting and
4. voters are not given the facts about each candidate by a press that is more interested in manufacturing a close race for pure financial gain rather than accuracy in telling the truth about the candidates

voting completely defeats the purpose. because the end result is not one based on actual facts, it’s an outcome manufactured by vested interests with near infinite resources given the petina of legitimacy by playing on the fact that people were freely given a choice. more times than not there’s enough people who are paying attention to overcome that deficit in the ability to message. but the times when it does not it goes really wrong.

voting

there is no statute of limitations for murder

shouldn’t have constantly sanewashed trump.

sholdn’t have given the guy who launched trump 20 hours of television and a “best of” weekend show.

shouldn’t have had a management team that was more interested in ratings than actually reporting on real news since the lewinsky affair (both meanings of the word).

should have brought back keith olbermann despite rachel maddow vetoing his latest comeback attempt.

shouldn’t have fired tiffany cross and constructively fired mehdi hassan.

shouldn’t have let the 20 hours of live tv morning guy dictate guests for all dayparts of the channel.

should have fired 20 hours of live tv morning guy and andrea “mrs. allen greenspan” mitchell 15 years ago at minimum.

msnbc has an uncertain future because they sure as fuck don’t want to be the liberal network they would have a monopoly on and make lots and lots of money and their entire management team are a bunch of self indulgent idiots who failed up into their current positions and have no idea how to run a successful cable tv channel.

i used the android app “reddit is fun”. i had stopped using reddit well before the api and public offering drama so i had absolutely no idea it was going on. i needed to get an answer to a question and the google search led to a reddit link. typically i normally chose web links, but this time i said, what the hell, and opened the link with rif. then i read the changelog of the app. that pointed to a lemmy instance for rif (which does not have a lemmy version btw) and that’s where i caught up on all the bullshit i missed during the intervening 3 years.

ps i also have a .ml account. it was the easiest one to create an account with at the time. if i could transfer all the stats and comments i made with this account and transfer it to one that allowed swearing (for instance you can’t use the word that describes selling one’s self for money or other favors that sounds similar to a garden tool called a hoe) i’d do it.

so the genius free speech absolutist has rigged his platform so that if journos, news orgs, and content creators post links outside of his platform those posts get buried UNLESS that content is posted on his platform.

in other words elon wants to own the work produced by others.

and then he wonders why people are fleeing his nazi echo chamber in droves.

this is another reason why I hate apple. other tech companies would rather follow apple than forge their own design path.

I also hate the tech reviewers who reinforce the belief of apple design superiority that pushes this false belief that encourages those bad design changes.

as an aside I find it a bit disturbing how many affable game show hosts are in their private lives terrible people. sajak is another example.

latin, a little bit. it was a required 7th grade class. it’s been 25(!!!) years and I’m neither a lawyer or a catholic clergy so my retention of it is almost non existent. the things I do still hang on to are from my exposure to spanish and french at work where I can remember a few base words.

it is.

I had been using samsung devices and lg devices for quite a bit and I could send audio to two bluetooth devices with the note 8. I had always carried two devices, my other device was the a32. I had thought it was something that was a normal thing. then I upgraded to an xperia 1 III. a while later I then tried to send audio to two different speakers. I first connected to one of my speakers and then tried to connect to another one at work. it did connect, but it disconnected from my speaker. looking around I find out that it was a pretty much samsung only thing. opening up the ability to all android devices is a good thing.

when I hear golden age, I think gilded age.

and the gilded age was absolutely shitty for people who weren’t moderately wealthy. the last time I looked, that describes 90% of the american population.

They’re simply bad at showing off the good that they do

pardon me, but I think this is an extremely bad take. because the two things that were glaringly obvious to me over the last 8 years have been

1. the total whitewash, sanewashing, and normalization of trump in every aspect by major legacy media and
2. the total ignorance of any democratic accomplishment by that same media.

it is extremely hard for a party to proclaim their good things when the people who have the most exposure to the public outright refuse to tell people about it. pundits have complained bitterly about the democrats communication problem on network tv but never seem to question those same tv networks why they won’t talk about what the democrats just did. and when democrats appear on those same shows and bring up their accomplishments themselves the hosts are completely disinterested in the topic and don’t allow the democrat to expound further on their accomplishments.

this country has a severely unbalanced media coverage and bias issue that no one wants to talk about because it exposes how much the media has been bought and bullied by the right wing. for at least 40 years it’s just accepted that what a republican says goes unchallenged while the democrat gets no positive press whatsoever. acceptance of the false “liberal media” trope is baked in and simply taken as fact. it’s no wonder why the news is distrusted and no one pays it any attention anymore.

I’ve been saying this for years.

why is it that there’s no liberal media distribution network? take a look at free streaming services for example like plutotv. last I checked there were 4 or 5 right wing free propaganda networks right there available to anyone with a stream stick, smart tv, or internet browser. know how many I saw for left wing viewers? one. and it’s production quality is night and day to the other side, as in the right wing nets were the day and the left wing one was somewhere above a good cable access show.

there are many liberal minded people who go on these “friendly” cable news shows and complain endlessly about fox, and outlets like the daily wire, oan, newsmax, and content creators on the various streaming outlets. but you know what my major fucking issue is with those people?

THEY ALL HAVE THE MONEY TO COUNTER ALL OF THIS. MANY OF THESE PEOPLE ALSO HAVE THE MEDIA EXPERIENCE TO MAKE IT WORK.

I’m sorry, but I am sick and goddamned fucking tired of a bunch of liberal elitists who go around removed to everyone who will listen about how bad democratic messaging and talking point distribution is and refuse to lift a fucking finger to do something about it. in my mind they are as culpable of the right wing disinformation era we’re in right now just as much as those who spread it. until they themselves do something about it they are dead in me. get out and do some work yourself or just shut the fuck up since that’s essentially what you have been doing.

and don’t talk to me about air america radio. the idea was sound but executed extremely poorly if you call that execution at all. at the start of the network, run by not-radio people, it had more writers on staff than they did on air talent, including the people who read the news at the top and bottom of the hour. it was a venture doomed to failure because the people who owned and ran it had no idea what they were doing.

so because the people who know how to or know the people who know how to get the message out in a 24/7 manner chose to literally not put their money where their mouths were, we will descend into right wing religious race based fascism. but don’t worry. they’ll still advocate for us on that famously well known liberal media from the comfort of their homes in their gated communities.