Honestly, I’ve been pawing through the list of medical conditions that let you still be eligible for the new covid booster. I have something that I think will qualify. But my funnier goto is that depression is one of the eligible conditions. And nothing makes me more depressed than an anti-science quack running our vaccine system!

I’ve been on tirzepatide for maybe three months at this point. I highly recommend it. I think the risks are massively overblown. It’s predictable fear-mongering that is simply an understandable reaction to how greedy the pharma companies are with their pricing on it. If you can’t afford it, it’s tempting to convince yourself it would be a bad thing to take it anyway.

I can’t afford it, but instead of spreading FUD about it, I found a third way. I just pirate the shit out of it! I’m not just taking tirz, I’m taking bootleg tirz! So far I’ve dropped from about 180 to 150.

¿Por qué no los dos?

I’ll take every vaccine I can get. Hell, I would sign up for the smallpox vaccine if I could get it, even though that disease hasn’t existed in the wild in decades. I want every covid booster. I want it all! Jab me up, give me that sweet MRNA!

And I’ll take the other stuff too. I love me a good edible. I’m on tirzepatide myself, even though insurance doesn’t cover it. How do I afford it? Simple! I pirate the hell out of it!

Tale as old as time. The abused grow up to become the abusers.

Yeah…this is the kind of person that the mob was most useful for back in the day. This was the kind of guy that got his knees broken for being a wise guy.

You’re ascribing more competence to these people than they deserve. They’re not omniscient. And trawling social media only gets you so much. Hell, you can tell them you’re generally liberal but opposed to illegal immigration if you really want. Yes, the Trump admin has some pretty extensive social media search capability, but that’s for their upper level cabinet officials. They just can’t afford to be that picky for the type of low-level position I’m talking about. ICE has expanded by leaps and bounds, way beyond any ability for them to properly screen applicants.

Eh, officially being fired for incompetence is a pretty good piece of evidence in your favor. Plus assumedly there wouldn’t be any witnesses that could report you actually committing any of the worst ICE offenses.

If your mortgage payments are fixed, but your pay increases with inflation, your real monthly mortgage payment goes down over time.

That if is doing so much heavy lifting it just qualified for the Olympics. The problem with inflation is that your wages don’t keep up with it.

Sure, there is that difference. But the series doesn’t even address the fact that he’s already killed hundreds of people. Intentionally or not, it’s still absurd to hand wring about killing when you’ve already killed hundreds of people, accidentally or not, and the one person you’re worrying about taking down is literal genocidal maniac. To me that just sounds like not being willing to take responsibility for your own actions. Intentionally or not, Aang killed hundreds of people. And it’s not like he never went into the Avatar state again after taking out the Northern fleet. Hell, he fought Ozai while in the Avatar state. Maybe he should have just “accidentally” killed Ozai while in the Avatar state and just washed his hands of moral culpability, just like he did all the other people he killed before then.

Regardless, Aang found a way to make peace with the fact that he had taken hundreds of lives. But when the person in question is someone of power and renown? Then it becomes something to fret over.

Thanks! Fixed.

For me, the best version of this is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Aang spends an entire arc lamenting how he may need to spill blood and kill the Fire Lord. Meanwhile the very same Aang had previously sunk an entire naval fleet single-handedly.

How many thousands of sailors, most of them probably people drafted against their will, did you kill that day Aang? Remember when you literally sliced entire ships in half? Your hands cut through steel, would you have even felt the flesh you were cutting through? Or how about all those ships you sank? A fair number sank instantly. You think everybody got out safely from those ships? Or how about that time you destroyed that giant drill machine, the one manned by thousands of soldiers, outside the walls of Ba Sing Se? You think everyone managed to miraculously escape that fireball? And those are just the major battles. How about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fire nation soldiers you casually tossed around like rag dolls with your powers of air, water, and earth during dozens of minor skirmishes? What are the odds you managed to toss all these men around like playthings and NOT have a few of them have their skulls bashed open on rocks when they hit the ground wrong?

The point of this is not to condemn Aang’s actions through the series. His actions were fully justified, as he was fighting a war against an expansionist colonial military power. What he did was an objective good. But by the time he’s hand wringing about having to kill Fire Lord Ozai, Aang had almost certainly already taken hundreds of lives. Hell, he probably killed hundreds just in that final climactic battle against the airship armada. The Hindenburg disaster saw 1/3 of the passenger and crew parish. And that was from an airship that crashed when it was already landing and close to the ground. Aang was dropping ships from miles in the sky. Maybe some soldiers with fire bending powers could somehow slow their own descent enough to survive, maybe they had some parachutes. But there’s zero chance that Armada didn’t have a fatality rate at least comparable to the Hindenburg disaster.

So Aang blithely kills hundreds of conscripts without a second thought. But then he has a crisis of conscience that takes multiple episodes to resolve, and that crisis of conscience is all about…Fire Lord Ozai? This is like if someone nonchalantly participated in the Firebombing of Dresden and then suddenly developed complex moral doubts about putting a bullet in Hitler’s head. Aang had already killed hundreds of people that Ozai had sent to their deaths. No one was forcing Ozai. He wasn’t a conscript. He had full autonomy; he’s the absolute ruler of the Fire Nation. He doesn’t even have a Congress or Parliament to answer to. He has absolute total moral responsibility for every evil thing the Fire Nation has done. Yet, when it comes to actually holding the powerful accountable, suddenly Aang wants to talk about the morality of killing.

New law. LLMs will only be accessible in very particular forms. Engaging with an LLM will be more like visiting the Oracle of Delphi. You’ll have to travel to some remote location and ask the LLM in person. It will then respond in riddles or vague prophecies that leave a lot open to interpretation. This will be the only legal way to use an LLM.

But what is ownership? Ownership is the society-recognized right to the exclusive use of property. But society establishes certain limitations on those rights, including requirements to allow the lawful access by law enforcement to the property.

You intrinsically give law enforcement permission to access property if they have a warrant. It’s just part of the bargain of land ownership.

I don’t have to worry about being drafted, I’m officially morally unqualified to serve in my nation’s armed forces!

Eh. We can use some of the good things from the past without using the bad as well.

I like this look. It has this aura of beautiful golden light about it. It has that aura without going the full gaudy gilded look like you would find in something the president built.

If nothing else, at least the new Iran war will make all us Millennials feel a bit young again. Time to relisten to American Idiot, at the very least.

Or maybe I’ll just feel even older, as I can’t believe we’re still doing this shit.

As another trans person, I say the best thing to do now may be to avoid the typical liberal “protest and vote” advice. Protesting simply isn’t as effective as it used to be, and voting should not be the foundation of your political activities. Voting is useful, but especially in a firmly blue or state, it’s mostly a symbolic gesture.

There are trans people in your local area who are being hurt by this administration. Forget protesting. Focus on helping the actual material needs of the community. Every blue state currently has trans refugees coming into them. Often these are young adults showing up with few resources, often ending up homeless. There’s likely a population of homeless trans kids in your own community. These are the people you should be focusing on helping right now. Join a local trans support group to help out your brothers, sisters, and siblings. If an organization doesn’t exist, start one. Things to focus on:

• Housing and access to housing

• Job assistance.

• Food and other essentials (one group in my area runs a trans specific food bank, as many trans folks have had bad experiences with church-run food pantries.

• Medical assistance. Provide recommendations to local providers. Educate people on safe DIY use. If there are local HRT homebrewers in your area, help organize distribution and mutual aid.

*Traditional gender support groups for newly transitioning folks.

• General mutual aid and emergency assistance.

Honestly, for trans people, it’s completely valid to just laser focus on the material needs of our own community right now. We’re being targeted by an organized campaign of state persecution. There’s hundreds of thousands of us that are internally displaced refugees within the borders of the US. There’s a lot of people hurting, and a lot of people in need. Protest if you want, but personally, I’ve found focusing on direct material needs and mutual aid to be a much more productive and rewarding path. The Trump regime is trying to destroy us. Simply helping your brothers, sisters, and siblings is an act of political resistance and defiance.

Your goal is not to bring down the Trump regime. That is not your responsibility. For those most targeted, simply surviving these years is your primary act of resistance. Take care of yourself, and take care of your brothers, sisters, and siblings. That is how I as a trans person have found meaning in this time. I voted, but that was only symbolic. And I’m not currently participating in protests. I’m focusing on actually directly helping people instead. Survival is resistance.

Nobody wants Iran with nukes.

Frankly, I do want Iran with nukes. Iran hasn’t declared war on anyone for over 200 years. They’re stuck in the same neighborhood as a rogue nuclear state that engages in frequent wars of expansionist conquest. The region is incredibly unstable precisely because there is no military counterbalance to Israel. Iran getting nuclear weapons would be an immense boon to peace and stability in the Middle East. I trust the Ayatollahs with nukes a lot more than I do the Israelis with them. At least the Iranians don’t believe that their deity gave them the right to annex entire nations.