That doesn’t sound like anything like a problem. We had a similar discussion on a local winter biking group, and there were some people who had issues from washing their face three or more times a day, exfoliating regularly, and such. Yikes!
Hope the hyaluronic acid helps!
Bigger picture, what’s your current facial skin care routine? If it includes a lot of cleansing, exfoliating, hot water, strong soap, multiple daily washings, et cetera, dial that all wa-a-a-ay back. All of those things strip away the natural oils quite effectively, which leads to that red, inflamed look in the cold. The best way to keep your skin moisturized is to keep the moisture it naturally has from escaping, and that’s 10 times more important in cold, dry climates.
Be sure to drink enough water, too. It’s deceptive, you lose a lot of water through breath in cold, dry air, so you can be dehydrated even without sweating.
Who’s going to hold him accountable? These things are true:
If an individual or small group tries, they’ll be arrested or killed by authorities.
A large enough group of people acting together could do it, but it has to be large enough, or see #1.
To build a large enough group requires getting the word out, and getting the word out means that the authorities will hear about it. See #1.
If the word goes out by anonymous, untraceable communication channels, then each person has to trust people they haven’t met and don’t know to act in concert with the plan. If the others fail to act, see #1.
I just realized that I’ve re-created the need for resistance networks (a web of trust in which each person only knows and trusts a small number of others each) from first principles. But even those require people willing to risk getting arrested or killed, because sometimes the authorities bust resistance cells. Basically, this is how all dictators hold on to power against overwhelming discontent in the populace: Nobody can get together in large enough numbers to do anything about it, and individually, going along with the regime is slightly (or a lot) better than not.
Dictators fall when enough of the population decides that the status quo is worse than defying the dictator. The United States is nowhere near that stage yet.
I’ve decided to pay as little attention to the news as possible, since I can’t do much about it anyway. But I believe I heard that the continent is now called Mexican America? Imma go with that.
Indeed, and I realized in the process of writing that comment that the famous graphs showing the growth of productivity vs. the growth of real wages explain a whole lot more about people’s experiences than the consensus generational divisions.
I think I used to hear that, too, but I searched when writing the comment and found the consensus is now 1981. But then, people I know who were born in 1979 have so much more in common with elder Millennials than Generation X people born in the 1960’s. That’s why I’m skeptical of the whole generations concept. I mean, without looking up her birth date, is Kamala Harris a Boomer, or GenX?
It’s explained on his Wikipedia page. He was an Army captain in the Kosovo War, when a NATO commander (Wesley Clark, who later ran for President) ordered his unit to secure Pristina Airport, which Russian troops had already occupied. Blunt refused to engage them, long enough for the British general get involved to countermand the order, on the grounds that he didn’t want his men to start WW3.
For some reason that reminds me of how the first member of the Wampanoag tribe to greet the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony, named Samoset, spoke to them in English. Then he came back later with another tribe member, Squanto, who also spoke English.
James Blunt possibly prevented the start of World War 3. (But became best known for the song You’re Beautiful. Reality is weird.)
That sounds like the story in the Oliver Sacks book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. There was also a story in there about a man who taught himself to see just fine, even though his eyes didn’t work at all. His brain just made educated guesses.
Along those same lines, we’re all blind literally around half the time we’re awake. Our optic processing system can’t keep up with the input as our eyes flit from thing to thing, so we don’t see anything while they move. And they’re moving constantly, even if we’re not aware of it, because only the fovea in the center of the retina has a high enough density of receptors to see details, and also because of sensory fatigue from prolonged static stimulus. In short, we have a tiny field of detailed vision that’s not even working much of the time. That field of vision that feels like a 4K video feed into the mind is a complete lie.
Like the way our subjective experience feels like a continuous, integrated mind fully in control of itself, but in reality, consciousness dips out a couple of times every minute while the brain attends to sensory input.
Even weirder, the conscious mind might not even exist, except as an illusory, emergent phenomenon of sensory experience and memory. There isn’t a place in the brain where it ‘lives’, no part that’s only ever active when we’re conscious.
A couple of factors: Back in olden times, before Douglas Coupland applied the Generation X moniker in 1991, they used to talk about the Baby Bust generation. The Baby Boom was when all of the GIs got back from the war and all started getting jiggy at the same time. Then, the birth rate dropped significantly. In my elementary school, we had combined grades 2/3, and grades 4/5, because there weren’t enough kids enrolled for full classrooms otherwise.
Also, the Baby Boom generation is defined as 1946 to 1964, which is 19 years, compared to the 16 years of what we call Generation X now, from 1965 to 1980.
Granted, is not a huge difference—71 million Boomers and 73 million Millennials vs. 64 million Gen X—but there’s fewer of us. But also, the name and the generational categories are pretty recent developments. When Coupland’s book came out, I was too young to be Gen X, the people he was writing about were adults out into world. I wasn’t part of the classic Gen X disaffected-slacker culture, and its touchstones don’t really resonate with me. It wasn’t until years later that the definition of Generation X definitively included me. That’s why you’ll often see a lot of younger Gen X identify with the Xennial label, because we have a lot more in common with “elder Millennials,” which makes the whole cohort less cohesive.
It’s almost like the generational cutoff years are arbitrary, and that society changes continuously, and not in discrete jumps. It’s almost like, too, that something unspeakably neo-liberal happened in 1980, and the real division is between the people who came of age before they pulled up the ladders to prosperity behind themselves (Boomers and older Gen X) and the people who came of age after (Xennials, Millennials, and so on). Nevermind, sorry, that’s just some anti-capitalist hogwash. /s
Reading between the lines in this one, I think she’s being thrown under the bus for our societal guilt. The prosecution emphasized “six years of training,” but that’s so obviously bogus… Medical doctors are only in school for four, so that’s clearly not referring to a professional certification, but six years of (probably recycled) on-the-job training sessions by the bus company, which is what? Probably not much, because transportation is a huge, huge cost for school systems, and they go with the low bidders for contracts. It’s an expensive business to run, so the contractors cut costs. How much did this woman earn? Not much I’ll wager. The bus company didn’t even provide her with a company phone, and didn’t bother to install proper restraints in the bus itself.
So here’s this low-paid, probably not highly-trained, young woman who loaded up a girl in a wheelchair with restraints she just had to trust because she’s not allowed to touch them, because in six years of training, she hasn’t been trained on them. Besides, the parents/siblings ought to know best, right? The bus doesn’t have proper equipment, but what’s she going to do, refuse to let the child on? It’d make a scene, embarrass the child, annoy the driver and the parents, probably leading to a complaint that could cost her job.
Besides, this was undoubtedly not the first time. In six years, she’d loaded up how many kids in wheelchairs onto buses with broken or inadequate equipment, and it’s been fine. We all tend to think of our vehicles as a safety cocoon. Strap the kid in, and it’s a temporarily solved problem. No more worrying about what they’re up to for the duration of the trip, a mental reprieve. So, yeah, this woman made a mistake, but one that every driving parent I’ve ever met makes on the regular. And it’s one of those psychological quirks of humans that we come down like a ton of manure on people who were unlucky enough to suffer consequences for dangerous mistakes we’ve all skated on. Related to the Just World Hypothesis, probably.
So this woman made a mistake, an understandable one if you put yourself in her shoes, and she’s taking the fall for meager school funding, poorly regulated school transportation, and our collective guilt, too.
I have to push back here and say that I think that the “emotions are feminine” explanation doesn’t give the whole picture. There’s also instrumentalization of men.
We’re all familiar with objectification, the tendency of (some) men to ignore women’s agency, and treat them as objects for their own use. On the flip side, in my experience, (some) women instrumentalize men. That is, treat men as agents to be used as tools to achieve their own goals. As a result, I think that (some) women use men as a bulwark against the stresses and existential terror of human existence, or sometimes even literally, like a bodyguard, or the one who has to deal with the spider in the house.
You want your vacuum cleaner to suck up dirt when you pull it out of the closet, and then disappear quietly back in there once the job is done. You don’t want to have to change the bag, and clean the motor, and replace the belt every time. More metaphorically, you don’t want to find out that your emotional ramparts against a scary world are built on sand, and that’s what kind of happens when (some) women find out that their partner has fears and weaknesses, too.
I’ve heard the same story many, many times from men whose partners begged them to open up emotionally, only to flee once they found out that those emotions included fears and self-doubt. It doesn’t make sense that they’d do the first part, if emotions were unattractive, per se.
(Edit: Missing word.)
Assuming this is a good faith argument, I’ll throw in: Some thoughtful, leftist commentary claims that the Democrats and the Republicans are fundamentally the same behind the scenes, with identity politics as the window dressing to distinguish them, and keep the lower classes divided.
Well, look at what we have here: Identity politics successfully dividing the lower classes. The two parties do differ quite a bit in some ways, and the window dressing is causing the estrangement.
Worst case, he does it. Best case, he gets resoundingly thumped by the legal system. But neither of those is going to happen. If he’s even still alive in four years, I don’t think the people really in charge will be able to hide the dementia like they are now.