And follow basic manners - don’t chew with your mouth open, shake hands, don’t pick your nose, ears, teeth or wedgie in public, be nice, say please and thank you.

Mango Mendacity can’t/won’t appoint ambassadors to completely nice places like Sweden, Australia, Switzerland, Norway, Italy...

Seriously, I am counting the days until I can sell our cars and just subscribe to an on-demand, driverless service. $300 a month for up to 200 trips or 500 miles? Count me in. When I want to go further or need a specialist vehicle (like a van, pickup or moving box truck) I can still rent something to drive. That’s…

It’s a not-unknown, and not-stupid strategy. Build a rep and a bank account doing work that one wouldn’t necessarily choose, but does make one a better lawyer. Once money is sufficiently stashed and reputation is established, go do passion projects that don’t necessarily pay as well.

I admit I had an initial reading comprehension fail and read the names as Emma and Alexander, which I thought was a lovely tribute to Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, early 20th century anarchists and philosophers. I find I’m slightly disappointed now that my head-canon was based on a faulty assumption. But Ella…

I don’t disagree with you, either. She also failed Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Whistleblowing 101 online, no credit course here. Maybe she was willing to take the fall. I can’t know, I’m not in her head.

So... we’re finally getting a taste of the worst aspects of hereditary monarchy after generations of cousin marriage, without the inconvenience of having either a heredity monarchy or the centuries of inbreeding. Thanks, Muse of History. We needed the object lesson. But we’ve learned it.

Inaccessible Island. Or Clipperton Island if we can convince Mexico to lease it to us for 50 years. Tristan da Cunha if we’re going to insist on a populated place. But not Antarctica. There are very nice scientists there doing critical climate work, and they don’t need the Mango Mendacity fucking up their data. And…

Okay, seriously, is June 5 National Asshole Pride Day? Because they all seemed to crawl out of their dark, stinky holes today at once.

Dammit. The reason Snowden is in Russia is the US State Department’s fault. They canceled his passport while he was traveling. State knew where his plane was headed. They put him there. That was bad strategy on our part. That’s one of those pieces of fake news/narrative that chaps my hide, because I clearly remember…

Except fuck the fucking Intercept. They’ve been shitty since they started, but they’ve also clearly either 1) learned nothing from burning their first whistleblower, or 2) been turned into a honey trap to specifically burn whistleblowers. I lean towards the second. It looks like they published this specifically so she…

Yes. Two years is about 12 months too long. Yeah, the stepdown is not as fun as a trip to Disneyland, but it’s not that bad, either. The first week of each step feels like a shitty cold - headaches, some joint pain, maybe some nausea. Under the protocol that those who are licensed for treatment are supposed to follow,…

Like bindweed and thistles.

Okay, so this might possibly be a good use for NextDerp (NextDoor). I’d write that up, with a good description of dog and person, and post it. Or write it up and print out a lot of copies, and leave them at the dog park near the poop station.

What’s terrifying is there’s actually a legal precedent that allows for this. And the person who walked away without a scratch, and sued the family who got a TBI and a dead child in the car accident, got $50K for his emotional trauma. (Oh, and the science they used to prove he deserved it.... probably suspect.)

Yeah, I know. Mine, too, and I actually don’t think the ACA had much to do with it other than (literally) coincidentally. The media reports happened to happen at the same time the ACA became a reality. But people in general are really stupid, and often confuse coincidence for causality.

Of course, the PT, rehab and specialists are actually necessary, because surgery necessarily does damage to the surrounding tissue while repairing the broken part. The scrip for post-surgical pain control doesn’t heal anything. So if the hospital/insurance cheaps out on the PT, rehab and specialists, it’s effectively…

That’s one positive of having gone through legalization and private ownership already. There are a lot of people who are mostly hobbyist gardeners who once put their efforts into orchids or roses, and branched out into marijuana when it became legal, because it presents an interesting learning experience as a…

In the choice between two evils, I’d rather have a population on suboxone than heroin or prescription opioids/ates. As step-down protocols go, suboxone is much better than methadone, and there’s a better chance of getting off suboxone relatively quickly. But jesus crispy fries, suboxone isn’t a maintenance med,…

There are places that have drawn a connection between Medicaid expansion/ACA and the crisis. The story goes like this: The town’s big employer used up the workers in the 70s and 80s, then pulled out. Those workers have been struggling for years, and have been without coverage for a long time. Along comes…