... Republican lawmaker Tony Bacala told his colleagues, “Some of these kids are already lost when they’re two years old.”

How ghoulish and completely divorced from reality must one be to look at a two year old as a criminal?

Fun fact: Most red states derive a significant portion of their tax revenue from sales tax. In some places (like Texas) it accounts for 80% of the state's budget. If enough people significantly reduced their spending in red states, they could cripple the government and break no laws or contracts that would expose them to legal liabilities.

If political ideologies were geography bound that would make great sense. Break it up, let the pieces govern themselves. But the problem is not everyone living in a red state is a Republican or maga fetishist and not everyone living in a blue state is a democrat or liberal.

Cities are usually liberal, rural is usually conservative. I'd personally advocate for an expanded, air tight bill of rights with a federal government capable and willing to enforce it and all remaining decisions and rules be set by the local community, either city or county. Abolish state governments and reform them into regional managers that upkeep shared resources like roads, but with no legislative power.

The world has changed significantly since you were your kiddo's age, but it sounds like you might be stuck thinking you can regain the things you've lost. Time only goes one way and you have to find new ways to live and express yourself.

Look for parts of your life where you are just killing time. Browsing social media, watching a streaming service, playing video games, etc, and see if you can do less of that. Look at what things you buy and see if you can buy less, used, or local to free up some budget for pursuing other interests. And if you feel tired all the time, get some exercise, it really does help with fatigue over time.

Both your partner and kiddo can also help, they would prefer a happy, authentic husband/dad and probably would support you if you asked them for specific assistance.

Ultimately you have to make it a priority or nothing will change.

A significant reduction in the population leads to better outcomes for the survivors. Mass death events in history, such as both world wars and the various pandemics, are usually (but not always) followed by a period of progress and prosperity.

Humans breed faster than their civilizations can keep up with and in the modern era scarcity is artificially created by arbitrary ownership of natural resources. Fewer people means more resources per person.

However if your hypothetical pandemic were to strike, it would create a problem the world has never encountered before (at least as far as I can find) so predicting what might happen is basically guess work. Given how violent brutes tend to be more successful in scarce environments, the outcome would be very grim.

Aren't books shipped in boxes though? I guess maybe a printer might palletize the books and find it cheaper to not wrap the whole pallet?

It still seems like the individual book is the wrong place to focus on protecting it from damage it might incur in transit.

I don't know if y'all have this in Canada, but in the American South there is a racial slur for black folks that is related to racoons.

Seems like an unfortunate coincidence and a bit dehumanizing given the way in which the dying/dead person is depicted.

If HAARP can control hurricanes, why do we have to deal with them at all? Wouldn't any shadow government secretly controlling the weather have a strong incentive to divert any dangerous weather away from the US? The loss of life is low enough in each hurricane that a few black ops soldiers would be far more cost effective for eliminating enemies. Show me a power hungry autocrat that is going to feel okay funding fema knowing they could have just kept those funds for other things by preventing those disasters.

Or even better, direct them at our enemies and countries we don't like. Why hasn't Cuba been ravaged by decades of severe hurricanes leaving the country in shambles? HAARP has been around long enough they could have destroyed dozens of enemies of the US.

It's not like anyone could stop the US. It has the most powerful military on earth, most of the world's nuclear weapons, veto power in the international organizations that matter, and provides defense for most of the western world. What is the shadow government waiting for?

I know religious people who could not explain their faith so specifically.

This feels like an onion story

Machoke me daddy.

Aw cool, the little tracking device I carry around in my purse everywhere I go just got more features.

As a trans Texan I can't help but wonder when the ads on my phone will be used to track me down.