Nobody is more precise than the ruling class in their calibrating how much exploitation they can exact from their beasts of burden (us). That’s their job, that’s where their money comes from. They exploit us.

It’s not gumption. It’s not novelty. It’s not intelligence. It’s cruelty.

I honestly thought this was about to be another orb post from the thumbnail.

Which I’ve been saying into the void for a while. Ideally in capitalism demand drives supply. If their demand is lack luster (for people upgrading to premium), rather than trying to cajole people through force into buying their product, they should drop the fucking price. Instead, they want to keep it bundled with music, and thus make it prohibitively expensive, while simultaneously competing in two seperate markets simultaneously. Give the people a video only tier, at a truly reasonable price, and begin (read: continue) to rake in cash. It’s very frustrating.

The 10 warmest years in the historical record have all occurred since 2010.

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature

In July, David Grusch, a former intelligence official, testified that the U.S. government was holding nonhuman bodies taken from U.F.O. crash sites, that the military is misusing funds to cover up a “U.A.P. crash retrieval and reverse engineering program,” and that people had been injured in efforts to conceal these operations. He also alleged retaliation from his superiors for previously making similar claims. The Pentagon has denied the allegations.

On Friday, some lawmakers saw tantalizing hints in Mr. Monheim’s presentation that there might have been something to Mr. Grusch’s claims and, while the rules of a classified briefing barred them from actually repeating what they had learned, they suggested the inspector general had found some of the claims credible. Which ones? No one would say.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/us/politics/ufos-aliens-classified-briefing.html

Well, there’s more people now then ever. The environment is either at or past an irreversible tipping point. Every year being either the coldest, the hottest, the wettest, or the driest in recorded time. We have too much CO2 and not enough potable water. The ice caps are melting, the choral is bleaching, the sea is rising, and bugs are on the ropes. We’ve got fascism problems in basically every country simultaneously. Not to mention there is frank discussion about not whether or not there are aliens, but what about them should be declassified and discussed with the public. Our terrestrial telescopes can’t see shit because of the sheer volume of satellites blanketing the night sky. And we’ve got cascading humanitarian crisis being captured in high definition and beamed to our 24 hour pocket sized global information machines, but all anyone seems to care about is what genitals you pledge allegiance to.

There may be precedents for these times, but they are the type of precedents that immediatly precede a global cataclysms. If anything your average person is not being dramatic enough.

DEA ultimately has final say though. And we are definitely living in tumultuous if not unprecedented times.

Speaking of HHS (from NYT):

Marijuana is neither as risky nor as prone to abuse as other tightly controlled substances and has potential medical benefits, and therefore should be removed from the nation’s most restrictive category of drugs, federal scientists have concluded.

The recommendations are contained in a 250-page scientific review provided to Matthew Zorn, a Texas lawyer who sued Health and Human Services officials for its release and published it online on Friday night. An H.H.S. official confirmed the authenticity of the document.

But sadly

Last month, Michael D. Miller, a Justice Department official, defended the D.E.A.’s prerogative in making the final decision on the administration’s position.

“D.E.A. has the final authority to schedule, reschedule, or deschedule a drug under the Controlled Substances Act, after considering the relevant statutory and regulatory criteria and H.H.S.’s scientific and medical evaluation,” he wrote in a letter to Representative Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat who has pushed the D.E.A. to reconsider marijuana.

I see no motivation for the DEA to voluntarily forfeit power and money just because it’s the right thing to do. Also think of career DEA guys’ pride and ego. They are not going to easily admit they’ve been wrong and that their rhetoric has been overheated for the past 50 years.

And unfortunately, the scheduling is determined by none other than the DEA itself. So I wouldn’t hold my breath on them forfeiting funding and purview over of anything as trivial as medical research or the will of the people. At least not easily or without some other political quid pro quo.