The Biden Administration. Document the atrocities - Praise the graces

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Hell Joe, why not just let Manchin and gQp run the show already. Oh wait, they are.

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Meanwhile the government keeps trying to seek minor misdemeanor charges for the people who stormed Congress in January.

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PFA/PFOA are one of my personal soapboxes. This is another thing that would never occur under a Republican administration, and will probably be stopped if they ever regain power.

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This piece from John Oliver had me looking for new filtration options…and finding none: :frowning_face_with_open_mouth:

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I wonder what the distinction is?

Oh No Eye Roll GIF by Aardman Animations

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Perfluorooctanoic Acid–Induced Developmental Toxicity in the Mouse is Dependent on Expression of Peroxisome Proliferator–Activated Receptor-alpha | Toxicological Sciences | Oxford Academic (oup.com)

Among many such papers. There are essentially no organ systems not affected by this stuff. But since it doesn’t instantly kill you, we let it continue to be pumped into our environment.

Neonatal exposure to perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) causes neurobehavioural defects in adult mice - PubMed (nih.gov)

Deranged spontaneous behaviour was observed in mice exposed to PFOS and PFOA, manifested as reduced and/or lack of habituation and hyperactivity in adult mice. These effects were also seen to worse with age.

But this is what makes me crazy. We are destroying our children’s ability to adapt, and then forcing them to adapt. We will be judged harshly by history, assuming there is such.

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Sad Ice Cream GIF

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DNC rather than Biden, but dropping it here.

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There’s bound to be tons of truely embarrassing stuff in there - but why they think anyone would bat an eyelid over this after four years of Donnie-Two-Bibles’ presidioting is beyond me.

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The Trump presidency ought to be the biggest mail in the coffin of every wack-a-doo federal government conspiracy theory out there, from aliens at Area 51 to falling the moon landing to the secret war with the mole people, because not once in four straight years did he run his mouth off about any of them.

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Embarrassing to who? Who is still alive to be embarrassed?

Institutions.

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Less talk more action please.

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Maybe he is finally waking up to the fact that the Republican Party has been completely subsumed by a group intent on destroying the USA as we know it and replacing it with an oligarchy while putting the “lesser thans” back in their places? Maybe? Finally? I would like to think (although I would be shocked) that Manchin might be facing that same wake up call after the voting rights debacle. But Sinema I am afraid is a lost cause, and without all 50 dems, filibuster reform cannot happen.

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by erecting complicated systems that an untutored public must navigate. Ordinary people who qualify for benefits — usually because they are in great financial need — are drafted into becoming unpaid bureaucrats, forced to spend time and effort to access what the system owes them. It’s confusing and exasperating, and it has sapped the faith that Americans once had in their government. Simply put, Democrats cannot continue to campaign on solving big problems and then fail to deliver without destroying their political project and alienating voters.

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I can’t agree with this. There’s a distinction between the untutored public and the willfully ignorant. I’m thinking about folks who never learned civics. State and federal governments put a lot of money into offices and officials whose job it is to help people navigate “the system.” Contacting your elected representatives is all it usually takes to point people in the right direction if going online to search is not an option. Knowing which one to contact is the first step.

If after going through that process there’s no relief, then I can understand the need for complaints. There are ombudspersons at most levels of government, too, for complex situations. Government employees working to support those systems help millions of citizens every year. Making the necessary calls and filling out forms makes you an applicant, not an unpaid bureaucrat. The idea of making things super simple and “hassle-free” tends to end in waste and fraud - which the government gets blamed for enabling. :woman_shrugging:t4:

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Counterargument: any disabled person who has tried to get or keep disability payments in any country which provides them. Britain, the US, and Australia’s NDIS especially come to mind.

A friend of mine is autistic, amongst other things. She has several children, almost all of whom are also on the spectrum. When she was trying to access the NDIS, she had to do all the organising, all the phone calls, all the record-keeping, all the negotiation, all the telling the people whose job this supposedly was what she was and wasn’t entitled to, all the negotiating yet another medical report because apparently the last three weren’t good enough, for herself, and for her children. And not get distressed or lose her temper, because she needed these people on side to even have a hope of getting support. Dealing with phone calls what were never returned, with case workers who got reassigned, with supervisors who needed everything explained again, with doctors primed to treat her as just another complaining woman.

And she’s not a unique, rare, or even particularly special case. This is endemic, and as far as anyone is able to see, systemic and by design.

All those people who have to go back every couple of years to prove that they’re still autistic or that their leg hasn’t grown back; all the people who are terrified to take a job which they could do, which would give them dignity, because doing so would strip away all the resources which allow them to, who take cash-in-hand jobs terrified that their benefits would vanish if anyone found out. The people who were forced to understand the deliberately labyrinthine and byzantine bureaucracy better than the people who work there do in order to be able to live at all (and don’t even think of doing better than “surviving”, because if you think about that you might hope for it, and in those circumstances nothing will destroy you faster than frustrated hope).

These people are neither “untutored public” nor “wilfully ignorant”. And it’s sure as hell not anything as simple as “filling out forms”.

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