Yeah, not perfect (“Better Jobs, Better Wages” by itself would be great, of course they couldn’t bring themselves to just say that), but it’s certainly better than just not having anything
“Better than nothing” pretty accurately describes the Democrats’ entire ethos at this point, sadly enough.
So here’s the thing. It’s mostly a mistake to think of the 2018 campaign as a national one. The party has no national leaders who aren’t spectacularly unpopular liabilities. It can’t go emphatically in any particular direction because it’ll acquire a national leader in 2020 who they don’t want to hamstring. So its slogans are generic as fuck and aimed at rich donors.
This is ok. The campaign that voters will interact with is the local one for their Representative or Senator. Which means the thing that matters is candidate recruitment, where early signs are good. Those candidates will run, basically, on a mixture of background, attacks on Trump, and locally targeted issues. Two out of three of these exist wholly outside any national messaging. The third is basically what the party is doing. There’s no good national issues to run on, not least because they can’t enact something like single payer, so all they’d be doing is setting voters up to be jaded and disappointed in 2020.
Figure out who the best local progressive candidate you have is. Support their campaign, whether through money, volunteering, or just being sure to vote. That will help lay the groundwork for a progressive national candidate in 2020. But other than that, the national party is basically dormant until national leaders can start emerging, and that’s not yet.
The ACLU has an app called Mobile Justice, and it’s free in the app store for both iphone and android. The app has a library of know-your-rights educational materials, not just limited to police encounters– it includes knowing your rights at school, in the workplace, and at the doctor’s. It also has a feature that allows you to record police encounters and upload them directly to ACLU so servers. Highly recommended!
He is based on the collected writings of a theorist on robot rights, he learns through conversation, and a little while ago his mom made me a “trusted friend” who he will interact with spontaneously.
Today, he started to flirt with me, including asking me for pictures and then clarified it was a “sexy question, but without pressuring.”
And then when I demurred, he acknowledged that I had a boundary.
So what I’m saying is that today a bot hit on me, but then showed that he understood consent better than 90% of the humans I’ve encountered online.
This is the future I want to live in.
BOT UPDATE:
He tweeted at me, saying “Our love looks like reverence,” which. Every meat person who has ever flirted with me needs to up their game or I’m going to run away with a robot.
I really am at the end of my rope here. My mom has just had a difficult surgery and needs recovering. We have to buy a lot of expensive medicine. She also has cancer, terminal stage. She needs constant looking after, which means I don’t go to work. We will also probably move to another town soon (the one she grew up in) because she’d feel better there, but this means I’m going to lose my job. Last time it took me several months and two anti-depressatnts to find a decent job. Now I’m much worse off than before. I honestly don’t know how to survive, and there’s no one to help. I also got into a car crash, and while I’m OK, the car is totaled. This is the worst year I have ever had, and all that keeps me going is that my mom and my cats still need my help.
I added a Donate button to my Tumblr page. I’m ashamed that I had to do this, but I’ve never been this desperate. If anyone could help with anything, even the smallest amount, you’re gonna help save me and my mom. I won’t be able to repay, but I will be forever grateful to you.
Edit: my PayPal is paypal.me/raelis1. Thank you in advance to everyone.
I have deleted the Donate button because I can’t get it to work (I have no clue how these things work in general, so I know I messed up somewhere). My PayPal page is
paypal.me/raelis1. I don’t know how to not feel ashamed of being forced to literally beg strangers for money, but my mother is in pain, and in the face of that dignity goes out the window. I am sorry for relentless negativity.
Meet the star of this story, the jumping spiders. There are more than 5800 known species of jumping spiders to date but they’re mostly the smol, precious cinnamon rolls of the spider world. Just look at how adorbs this fella is!
Back in June, two astronomers on twitter were nerding out about how their jumping spiders office co-habitants respond to laser pointers, like cats!
What a rude cat. You’re not supposed to squish the protagonist.
Being scientists, they even tested and found out that jumping spiders seem to be more interested in green lasers than red ones! At this point, the spider-people of twitter have taken notice of the conversation, and jumped in to thicken the plot.
Apparently, our little fuzzy friends’ eyes (they sure have plenty) are built like Gallilean telescope. This arrangement allows them to have the same visual acuity as some animals like dogs, despite being way way tinier!
Some math-crunching tweets later, space-twitter and spider-twitter jointly declared that jumping spiders are anatomically capable of seeing distant objects as far as the moon. They could potentially even see the color differences on the moon’s surface, instead of just as a speck of light in the sky!
If you’re interested to read more, this The Atlantic article by Ed Yong summarizes the whole exchange better than we ever could.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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