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I think we’ve already been outmaneuvered by the machines, but we had a good run.

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This is fantastic.

Flooded Forest

by Konsta Punkka

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Housekeepers and Janitors Need Praise As Unsung but Very Much Important

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The gerontocracy continues. Fuck these ancient, useless windbags.

Brave!

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TLDR: treat minimum wage workers like human beings and give them the tools they need to thrive in their work. People who make hamburgers and coffees, people who sweep floors and clean bathrooms, are PEOPLE.

I feel like a good shorthand for a lot of economics arguments is "if you want people to work minimum wage jobs in your city, you need to allow minimum wage apartments for them to live in."

"These jobs are just for teenagers on the weekends." Okay, so you'll use minimum wage services only on the weekends and after school. No McDonald's or Starbucks on your lunch break.

"They can get a roommate." For a one bedroom? A roommate for a one bedroom? Or a studio? Do you have a roommate to get a middle-wage apartment for your middle-wage job? No? Why should they?

"They can live farther from city center and just commute." Are there ways for them to commute that don't equate to that rent? Living in an outer borough might work in NYC, where public transport is a flat rate, but a city in Texas requires a car. Does the money saved in rent equal the money spent on the car loan, the insurance, the gas? Remember, if you want people to take the bus or a bike, the bus needs to be reliable and the bike lanes survivable.

If you want minimum wage workers to be around for you to rely on, then those minimum wage workers need a place to stay.

You either raise the minimum wage, or you drop the rent. There's only so long you can keep rents high and wages low before your workforce leaves for cheaper pastures.

"Nobody wants to work anymore" doesn't hold water if the reason nobody applies is because the commute is impossible at the wage you provide.

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This might be the most amazing thing I have ever seen.

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“A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Dispossessed (via firstfullmoon)

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https://qgpennyworth.com/portfolio/sermon-no-9-there-are-no-bars-or-cages/

Sermon No. 9: There Are No Bars Or Cages is a work from Holy Nonsense, a Creative Commons project. View Holy Nonsense 2020 here.

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Rev Roger Sermon #9: There Are No Bars Or Cages -

Brothers and Sisters, sinners and mutants, freaks and walking glitches, I bid you a good evening. This evening, we are gonna talk about prisons.

Now, there are a few different kinds of prisons...there is The Big House, The Prison of Toil, and The Prison of Your Frickin' Head.

The Big House, as we all know, is the prison they send you to when you get caught breaking one of their rules (Which, as Kafka noted, you can't help doing. The rules are so complex, you WILL break them, every day). We aren't gonna talk too much about this type of prison, because you can see that on any network, though not so much now as the last couple of years...save for this: All of those prison TV shows, "Inside reports", "OZ", "The Big House", ad infinitum, ad nauseum, are there for a reason. The lesson they impart, my friends, is this: If you get out of line, we'll put you in a cell with people like THESE!

The Prison of Toil, however, is a prison they put you into starting at age 5. You are placed in an unnatural state for a juvenile primate; you are forced to wear clothes, sit in an uncomfortable position, and stay still for HOURS while they teach ya the proper art of the Fnords. You are told that you must excel, so you can go to college, where presumably, the Fnords can't get you.

Once you get to college, however, you are told that you must continue to toil, so that you can get a good job... you STILL aren't safe from the Fnords. Then, one day, you graduate to the supposed "real world", where you are told that you must now work hard for your parole at 65... because if you don't the Fnords will make you eat dog-food in your retirement... WHAT A SUPRISE! The Fnords don't eat children, they eat senior citizens. They lied AGAIN! The problem is, even if you DO follow their advice, you are still screwed. By the time you are paroled, you are too old to enjoy it, and just like real prison, most inmates don't LIVE long enough to GET parole. What can you do about this? How can you escape THIS prison, which has no bars (though many inmates DO have cells, or cubes as we call them)? Well first, you have to escape the REAL prison, The Prison of Your Frickin' Head.

The Prison of Your Frickin' Head is the worst jail of all...As G.G. Gordon once said, "Where can you run, where can you hide, when the man in blue is on the INSIDE?" This is the prison from which very few people get out alive. There is NO parole, and you will spend all the days of your life inside it, should you not escape. This is the prison built for you by those around you, wih your willing help. It is done in the following fashion:

1) You are convinced by society that you are not good enough, and that all of your accomplishments so far have been GOOD LUCK. You will be found out for (as RAW said) the "no good shit" you are. The only escape from this is ego-training, or stupidity. Most talented people think, deep down inside, that they are frauds. Most utter fools consider themselves gawdlike. Go figure.

2) You are told by society that they are watching. Just who they are is never made clear; but it IS made clear that they had better not catch you in any funny-business, or you are screwed. (Of course, they are the Fnords)

3) You are taught to "fit in", one way or the other. Either you fit in to the mold the establishment sets up for you, or you rebel...and most rebels tend to fit into one group or another (Goth, Punker, New-age bliss zombie, Discordian, Subgenius, etc)...and if you aren't careful you fall into the conformity of non-conformists. If you don't dress a certain way, or mouth the correct ritual sayings, you are obviously a "normal" or a “greyface"... Despite the fact that the weirdest freaks, the truest Yeti, usually BLEND RIGHT IN!

So what do we do about it? How do we escape? We escape SYSTEMATICALLY. You don't saw each bar a little at a time, you whack each bar out, methodically...thus:

1) For the ingrained failure complex, use ego-training. Not that "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough" affirmation shyt, either. No, you are superior. This is proven by the fact that you even noticed the cage in your head at all! When you look in the mirror, don't THINK there are no flaws, KNOW there are no flaws. When you screw up, screw up catastophically! ROLL IN YOUR MISTAKES! WALLOW IN THEM, AND LEARN FROM THEM. Most "normals" will start wars to avoid admitting they made a mistake. Don't fall into that trap. When you are no longer afraid of mistakes, you will make less of them, and you WON'T CARE about the ones you still DO make.

2) There is no they. You've been lied to, all these years. THERE ARE NO FNORDS! There never have been. The cage is only in your head, there is no warden, and we are all free, should we realize it. It's all a collosal LIE. Now, most people are afraid of freedom. They might make a mistake...for that, see #1. As far as getting caught and going to The Big House, well, if you can't outwit the morons who run the system, then you aren't much of a Yeti after all, are you? LIE to them, SMILE in their face, and KEEP YOUR BOBDAMNED MOUTH SHUT AFTER PRANKS! He who kicks society in the crotch and shuts his mouth, usually lives to kick it again tomorrow.

3) Don't worry about fitting in. Just because you LIKE to dress like a Goth, for example, doesn't make you a conformist...provided that's REALLY why you do it (as opposed to seeking acceptance from Goths). If you say to yourself, "Is my image perfect today", you are probably screwing up. If you say, "Cool" when you look in the mirror, you're probably ok...the best rule is, if you are BEING YOURSELF, don't sweat it.

Or kill me.

[aside: Over the last year over 50,000 deaths were attributable directly to surprise.]

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"They don't care if you fucking starve.

Who do you think pays the bills for all those palaces?"

Anti-monarchist sticker spotted in Telford, UK

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Reblogging to kill god for sure

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There’s enough pain and misery in the world. What is the point of adding to it?

No One Ever Helped Me So I Will Never Help Anyone Else & Do Not Believe Anyone Should Be Helped Ever is one of thee most loser mindsets btw

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i’ve never been sadder that the onion isn’t real

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Alcoholic vampire who only feeds on drunk people.

Vampire that’s dirt poor, doesn’t have a sprawling manor or vast riches accumulated by interest. Can’t afford those black leather boots they really want. Travels as a bat to save money not cuz they like it.

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The rulers here have dropped any pretense of caring about the working class. We’re cattle to them, organic parts of a profit-making machine that are simply tossed aside and discarded when not useful. To them, children are useless unless they’re incubating babies or providing cheap labor. The values of the ruling class are reflected in the realities that the rest of us endure.

I'm serious when I say the United States is actively hostile to children. Constant school shootings our leaders refuse to do anything about. Child Protective Services that overwhelmingly do nothing of the sort. No healthcare. Our education system is abysmal. Very few areas in the public that are safe for children to be in. Large swaths of states making gender affirming care for trans kids a felony. Child marriages are legal in a lot of states. Treating kids like property parents have every right to do whatever they want to, to the point where the U.S. is one of the very few countries that refused to ratify the U.N.'s Convention On The Rights Of The Child explicitly on the basis that treating children like people erodes the rights of American parents. And now states are enacting laws that overturn child labor laws like it's the goddamn Victorian Age. And even before those laws were made, it turns out that migrant children have been working in factories for a lot of companies, including the supposedly socially-minded Ben and Jerry's.

As complicated as adult life is, I would never want to be a kid again, with no say or agency in my life and completely helpless to the whims of the adults around me.

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I had a strangely vivid dream. There was a long buildup to it, but I don’t remember the specifics. Whatever happened, the dream became super intense right at the end. In the dream, it was just before sunset and the family and I were watching some sort of a parade. It was tense, crowded, with the parade kind of dragging on. There seemed to be military hardware in the parade, jeeps mostly, but the parade had a distinctively militaristic feeling to it. Suddenly, just in front of us, a huge owl — shaped like a barn owl but darker in color — flies out of a tree and silently circles into the setting sun. There was an ominous feeling in the air, and when I awoke from the dream I found myself reflecting on the things that the owl can signify.

Some say the owl signifies change. Others, that it signifies mortality and death. Still other interpretations say that owls represent the occult, that they are bearers of hidden knowledge. I have been on an occult kick lately, and I have long been fascinated by owls, so the provenance of the dream is probably quite mundane. But I have also been ingesting mind-altering substances, so it’s entirely possible that the feeling of significance and wonder is little more than an artifact of the psilocybin.

On the other hand, the human experience has long included elements of the spiritual. Signs, omens, and visions have inspired and terrified us for millennia. And humans have used various mind-altering chemicals like psilocybin, peyote, and cannabis ever since we figured out what they do. I believe that reality is far more complex and bizarre than we could imagine, and that the human mind is capable of experiencing reality in new ways if we train it correctly. Is this all just a bunch of bullshit? Maybe. Perhaps the nihilists are right, and we’re just clumps of cells experiencing awareness as an artifact of neural architecture or whatever. But since the fabric of society and reality seems to be slowly collapsing, I’m going to look for signs of wonder.

I don’t know what, if anything, that big owl in my dream represented. But paying attention to dreams and interrogating the things the subconscious serves up is an excellent way to learn more about yourself. If nothing else, the quest to explore the more mystical side of the human experience will keep me entertained as we gently slide into the apocalypse.

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Yesterday I took 2 grams of psilocybin mushrooms. I experienced some visual effects but the bulk of the experience was split between (1) a massively embodied high and (2) a profound psychological or psychedelic experience.

The embodied feeling of the high was amazing. I was acutely aware of my physical position in space. I could feel my entire physical body in a way that I normally can’t. It was empowering. I got a shitload of yard work done. I planted a tree, transplanted several old plants into new pots, and also potted several new pups from my succulents. I tidied the yard up and trimmed the hedges and trees. I didn’t feel invincible or unstoppable, just capable and focused. I got a lot more done than I would have on a normal day.

The best part of the experience was the mind expansion. I was able to think in new ways and explore aspects of my everyday life that I usually struggle with. I also found myself processing a lot of past events and dynamics that have affected my life in one way or another. I reflected on my relationships and my own behaviors and had some helpful insights. It was an overwhelmingly positive experience.

Visually, nature was highly appealing. I watched the breeze play with the trees and grass. At one point a murmuration of small birds happened, which was absolutely entrancing. Colors were more intense. The slow and ceaseless changes of the clouds were a source of great wonder and beauty to me.

A day later I feel fine. I feel calmer and less anxious. I feel less depressed. I tackled a major cleaning project and had a nice time with people I care about.

While I am aware that some users of mushrooms report bad experiences, I believe a lot of that has to do with the intentionality and headspace you are in when you consume them. Used with respect and care, I believe these mushrooms to be a powerful tool to help us function better as human beings. A few small doses of magic mushrooms have helped me feel better than a decade of antidepressants. I am curious to find out what else this intriguing fungus might have to offer me.