Yam tits! That is genuinely a new one for me. Excellent.

I’ll never, as long as I may live, get over the utter embarrassment of being born and raised in a country who could support that maniac. I suppose the worst thing I could do is leave. The only way to alleviate my shame is to stay and keep voting for the least insane option.

Making paper out of trees is one of the dumbest things our species does. Paper can be made out of fast growing plants like hemp and bamboo, yet we’re making it out of the SLOWEST growing plants in existence? Make it make sense.

In the early days of the USA, wealthy land owners lobbied the government to make hemp illegal to grow because they knew that using the trees on their land was an inefficient way to make paper, but it made them money. Hemp was a threat, and so these greedy short-sighted capitalists made it illegal to grow.

Sweden should learn from our mistakes and grow hemp.

Fair enough. I didn’t mean to imply that we’re as good as the French at protesting. I don’t think anyone is. They are the world champion protestors. I wonder what platform they use to organize.

Yes, I covered that in my comment.

Are you saying that if the people organizing the event aren’t members of Congress, that they will be targeted and vanish? That’s a scary thought. Perhaps the leaders should be kept anonymous.

I would argue that we are. 21,000 in Paris is very similar to 34,000 in Denver. The thing us Americans need to get better at is organizing ourselves. We shouldn’t require leaders like Bernie Sanders and AOC to get us to show up. The regular people of France are amazing at protesting on their own, and we desperately need that kind of energy.

I was just reading about how vigilance can make mindfulness more difficult. I have a lot of childhood trauma which causes me to experience emotional flashbacks almost constantly. My baseline anxiety level is kept higher than it should be because my brain believes that I am in constant physical danger.

Sometimes the things preventing us from being mindful are also the reasons why being mindful would be so beneficial in the first place. I’m working on treating my trauma and practicing mindfulness simultaneously, and it actually seems to be working.

Last Week Tonight did a story about dollar stores:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM

Yeah, they’re as bad as you’d expect.