Standing on the Edge of Greatness @christophercolbath - Tumblr Blog

As usual, the TL;DR: When you are planning an EMDR session to help you deal with the burnout of Big Capitalist Companies, you aren’t usually

#therapy #menwithempathy #newworldman

My Journey with Food Stamps

I find my self at another crossroads in life where the life I am living is no longer sustainable, and the maintenance price may be more than I can bear. It is on days like these I remember the quote "Ad Astra Ad Aspera" or "Through Hardship to the stars" or something like that. I heard it on Star Trek from Una Chin-Riley and then again from Lt. Boimler. If I am wrong, get in the comments! I am certainly going through hardship and the choices I have to make are leading me to more of it to get where I might be able to relax again and pursue some of my dreams, if they still exist. And, if any of us with dreams still exist. If Project 2025 has its way, many of us won't live to see their dream, myself included. Tangent. Sorry. Relevant, but not what I wanted to talk about. I want to talk about the decision I have to make because of bullshit government regulation on who deserves money for food. Spoiler Alert, not the actual poor folks struggling to step out of it. The price to stay alive is high now. Thousands per month just to have food and shelter, while getting paid barely enough to get what you can afford. Here are some of the ways you can lose SNAP benefits: - If you make too much money, benefits are reduced or removed. Too much is over 1200 a month, or so. I just hit about $600 a month and I am worried mine will go down. - If you do not provide regular updates on your income. They will send you a reminder to log in and update any changes you made, even if there are none. Failure to do within the deadline and they cut you off from benefits until you do. If you wait too long, you have to start over and reapply. Other than having a break in benefits, it might actually be a better, faster choice to just reapply after the deadline... - If you fail to provide documentation of the money you make. Even when their website is down or non-functional and no one answers the phone, you are made to get every paystub for the last few months and somehow get them to DES. This month, I had to drive down to the DES office, wait in line for 90 minutes, and in 30 minutes finally got all the issues and how I could fix them. They were: - I had to sign something letting folks know my adult child is currently living in my house and that I did not prepare food meals together - making sure if I share food I buy, I could lose benefits because I said I didn't. It is true enough that I signed it, but the Man will never know. - I had to upload my last few paystubs, as they needed proof of income rather than just my estimates. Since their website didn't work, I had to upload them to a link the Person helping me sent, and then that was done. - I had to get my boss to fill out a form showing a TON of details about my employment. I filled it out, had her review it and then sign it. Next it needs to be dropped off at the DES office which is not open until Monday, I believe. - If you share your SNAP benefits with anyone, such as buying them food. I covered it above somewhere, but yeah. I can't share my food stamp money to feed anyone but me. - And more ways I don't know of yet. They'll send you a letter to inform you of your new quest! For this most recent update, they were upset about three things, each of which being a pain in the ass (see point 3, above for details) adventure for me. - Jaz moved in. In the process of updating my income, I also added Jaz to my household. - I started working at HiHi Donuts packing donuts for their wholesale business. Had to report this new income. - They still want me to prove I am not working at a certain temp agency, even though I worked there once for 3 days. It was a cryptic letter, and once I figured it out, I tried to comply but their website was not cooperating. After multiple attempts to get the site to function, including multiple calls that took about 15 minutes for them to hang up on me, I gave up and looked up the closest DES office to visit the next day. Depression and exhaustion made that become three days later. But, I was helped to solve all of the issues they had and spent quality time at the donut shop as well. Side Note: My boss is pretty cool. Once I drop off the papers on Monday, I wait until they decide if the info I gave them is sufficient to get to eat next month. I am sure I will get them, I just hope I don't have too much of a dip in amount or to have it get delayed too far. /sigh To summarize the process and how I feel about it, I leave you with this.

Walking the Path, Me. Read the full article

wilwheaton

“The Trump administration’s decision to publicize something like Alligator Alcatraz is not just a useful weapon that they can now threaten their enemies — and Elon Musk — with. It’s also a distinctly new form of propaganda. Something they seem to have picked up from the video tours of Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) in El Salvador. The concentration camp reimagined as a hype house. A place to make content, both real and AI-generated, that glorifies the power of the state. What Democratic super-poster Will Stancil described this week as “pornography for Trump’s sadistic base.” But also content that desensitizes you. That normalizes state violence and, most importantly, turns it into a meme. Trump’s administration knows that most effective propaganda of the 21st century is viral, ephemeral, and, crucially, stupid. Something CNN hosts can joke about on air, distracted by how idiotic the name is. How goofy the T-shirts are. Completely removed from the human misery happening behind closed doors.”

—

Trump’s big, beautiful gulag

This is what Republicans voted for. This is what they wanted.

Don’t let anyone tell you they didn’t vote for this, they actually voted for [low taxes | strong defense | the party | the price of eggs| some other bullshit], and now they are horrified. They never wanted masked thugs to terrorize and kidnap an innocent mother while her children watch. They never wanted masked vigilantes to terrorize entire communities and beat fathers bloody in front of their families.

They never wanted any of this, they tell us, and maybe they didn’t want it, but he promised it, and his base held up signs celebrating it. He promised to inflict this terror and this sadistic cruelty on as many people as he could, and that even if they say they didn’t want this to happen, his repeated promises to do exactly this certainly weren’t enough to stop them from voting for him.

So many people who voted for him like to pretend that they aren’t Nazis; it’s the MAGA extremists who are the Nazis. It’s not this guy who lives in the middle-class suburb! This guy goes to church and takes his kids to soccer practice! He was appalled by January 6 (though he’s rewritten almost all of it in his head into something less violent). He doesn’t support those MAGA people; in fact, he’s embarrassed by them!

Deep breath. Okay. Hey, buddy, I have some news: there is no difference between you and them. You’re just as deplorable, and you do not get to pretend you didn’t vote for this like they did. You may dress nice and check all the “good neighbor” boxes, just like a lot of Germans did in the 1930s, but you don’t fool me.

Whatever justification you invented to feel good about what you did, doesn’t matter. It’s the result of your vote that matters, and you voted for terror, suffering, and incompetent malevolence aimed at the heart of our Constitution.

I will never forget this. I will never forgive you for the suffering you enabled.

the-august-one

Resources From The Leftist Feminist Philosopher

Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.

Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.

Keep a list of sites you never heard of!

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.

depsidase

progressivemillennial

hetrosjistin

The sad thing is that this should be a satire thing but it really isn't.

The democratic party leadership isn't actually filled with 5th column conservatives. But what it is filled with is people who have been patholigically conditioned to find compromise at every step.

They've been convinced, since JFK got his dome popped, that the only way to do business is to court the right because the Left has no choice but them, and because young leftists just won't turn out to vote.

That's obviously not the case, or if it was, it was because they screwed the pooch every time.

So they can't really conceive that energizing your voting base by offering actual policy changes and pushing for things that aren't compromises with a group of extremeists who make up barely an 8th of the nation but have gerrymandered their way into power is the answer.

Edit: Wow a lot of people are reblogging this, but I think I do a better job of explaining all of this in a follow up post!

💬 74 🔁 8785 ❤️ 12699 · no, all this bullshit because they got scared when jfk exploded and then they backed another leftist candidate (dep

liberalsarecool

White supremacy is their religion, human garbage is their god.

liberalsarecool

Cis men are trying to deflect and deny their manifest sexual abuse of women by creating the fictional 'trans women offender'.

Don't trust cis rape culture to protect women.

liberalsarecool

Projection.

theknightlywolfe

cheese-pull

remember, if one person in the country has no due process no one has due process. it's easy for these people to pretend all of us are just numbers on paper, but there is stuff we can do.

hide your neighbors. hide your loved ones. do not allow they be taken. treat these kidnappers as your would any other human traffickers.

wilwheaton

“In 1881 the doctor overseeing President James Garfield’s recovery from a gunshot wound repeatedly probed the president’s wound with dirty instruments and his fingers, prompting assassin Charles Guiteau to plead not guilty of the murder by claiming, “The doctors killed Garfield, I just shot him.” But just four years later, germ theory was so widely accepted that the U.S. Army required medical officers to inspect their posts every month and report the results to the administration, and by 1886, disease rates were dropping. By 1889, the U.S. Army had written manuals for sanitary field hospitals, and the need to combat germs was so commonplace medical officers rarely mentioned it. And now, in 2025, the top health official in the United States, a man without degrees in either medicine or public health, appears to be rejecting germ theory and reshaping the nation’s medical system around his own dedication to a theory that was outdated well over a century ago”

— May 4, 2025 - by Heather Cox Richardson