Possibly, but doesn’t have to be. I grew up in a home that was built as a duplex, one apartment per floor. So the stairs were 17 unpadded wooden steps that were straight down - no landing or turn.
I slipped and fell down them when I was 4. I clearly recall this. But that made me remember that I had done the same thing a year or even two before (which was worse, because at age 4 I was large enough to stop myself before I hit the bottom - not so much at 2-3).
I wouldn’t remember the first incident without the second, but because of it, I do.
Phenylephrine is a placebo for nasal congestion, but it’s a solid drug for raising blood pressure. Used all the time in anesthesia (obviously not an OTC use).
Tchoup is just unpronounceable to most outsiders; the shibboleths are the streets that are pronounced very differently from what it would be anywhere else. Like Calliope (rhymes with TALLY-hope) or Burgundy (emphasis on second syllable).
Or Chartres ("Charters") or Melpomene (/ˈmɛl.pə.ˌmiːn/), I get it. My wife has corrected me on quite possibly each and every one of the streets with a locally specific pronunciation.
Ooh, thought of another good place name like that: Quincy (/ˈkwɪn.zi/), Massachusetts! Massachusetts has a fair number of those, owing to its English settlement heritage.
My advice has always been to start with Small Gods. It is a standalone book that references but does not rely on any others, and is far enough into his career that it’s fair to say that if you don’t like it, you won’t like his work in general.
The funny thing is that from what I heard with the antiques markets (which is admittedly possibly a decade or so old) it is antique luggage of all things which is 'in' and antique furniture which is out relatively speaking to the past.
The grandkids not wanting it may still apply if they are still minors, there would be plenty of time for tastes to shift again.
It’s not suitable for air travel, but I treat anything for air travel as disposable. I still use it all the time for car-based travel. It’s larger and nicer than what I fly with.
Nothing springs to mind that gives a good overview without going to primary sources. It's been literal decades since I spent time reading up on a wide range of these ideologies.
The main split is between "right-communists" and "left-communists" (hence Lenins "Left Wing Communism: An infantile disorder"; the Bolsheviks were considered "right"), where the "left" are those who rejected ML/Leninism on the basis of "democratic" centralism and the idea of a vanguard party.
Most of the anti-ML ideologies like council communism, anarcho-communism, libertarian Marxism are in that category.
Perhaps texts by Joseph Dejacques, Kropotkin, Rosa Luxembourg, Emma Goldman would give a reasonable introduction to those.
I think a fundamental problem here is that people who don’t know any 2A/RKBA people think it’s like most political opinions. Oh, you’re a gun guy, you’re a Republican who like country music and hates them black folk.
It isn’t. It’s a group of people, some of whom are country-music-loving Republicans who hate them black folk, but who also include a lot of them black folk, a lot of Democrats, and a lot of people who hate country music. It is a group that has decided that one issue is more important than anything else to them. And they vote. For you, if you are for them, but for your opponent, if you are not. They will primary you. They do not care if D or R is next to your name. In fact they love pro-gun D politicians, because it’s a chance to pull that party into respecting all constitutional rights.
The NRA is massively successful because of this. They do one thing, and everyone in it knows that. They don’t have to agree on anything else, because if you can’t have guns, the rest of the politics is irrelevant.
A company that made the slightest anti-2A movement would be dead by sunset the next day. No store would carry their product. No consumer in the know would buy their product.
I think it's actually mostly about school shootings and 'gang violence' that drive these regulations at least here in washington, which is a little paranoid. I don't think we've had too many school shootings. I know in seattle we had a shooting OUTSIDE a high school that killed a student, but I'm not sure we've had any columbine type situations.
We're unprepared to deal with world wide 24 hour media. With 350 million people even extremely rare and weird failure modes will happen often enough for the media to fearmonger a big chunk of the population into falsely believing they're significant threat. In reality firearm homicide among teenagers is a fraction of death from auto accidents, half that of suicide, and closer to deaths from drowning. But the latter three don't make for spectacular and fear inducing news coverage.
Which is, in itself, a manipulation. They largely aren’t 13- and 14-year-old innocents; they are 17, 18, and 19-year-olds who are engaged in criminal enterprises.
The murder rate in the US is far too high, but if you have no contact with the illegal drug trade your chances of being murdered plummet.
> I think a fundamental problem here is that people who don’t know any 2A/RKBA people think it’s like most political opinions. Oh, you’re a gun guy, you’re a Republican who like country music and hates them black folk.
> It isn’t. It’s a group of people, some of whom are country-music-loving Republicans who hate them black folk, but who also include a lot of them black folk, a lot of Democrats, and a lot of people who hate country music.
But... that is what most political opinions are like.
I didn’t explain well here, so mea culpa, but the meat of my argument is later: regardless of their disagreement with a politician on any other issue, these will vote (or not) on one issue. Very few political opinions are that strong. Party is irrelevant. Other concerns don’t apply. Agree with this person on every else, but they are anti-2A? Not getting a vote.
They learned discipline the hard way. They may not vote for the other guy, but they aren’t showing up for you. Very few blocs work that way, that strongly. The ACLU is a great example of a group that was captured and turned to things that really have nothing to do with the core mission of protecting civil liberties. They protect the ones that a certain class of folk deem worthy. They sometimes defend a Nazi to show that they are balanced, I guess. They promote diversity - which is a fine opinion, but isn’t the mission. The 2A groups have a laser focus. Nothing else intrudes. So hippies and rednecks and rappers can all get along because they only have to agree on one thing, and the organization does not care about anything else.
I'd imagine quite a lot of smaller ones don't have anything. Take a look at https://energy.usgs.gov/uswtdb/viewer/ and notice that huge swaths of the US have almost no wind turbines.
We will probably be using that in aviation for a long, long time. Turbines are pretty efficient and jet fuel has a remarkably high energy density for something that does not easily explode.
> how easy home brewing, wine-making, and distilling are
They're not technically complex, but you need space and time for them, and producing a beer you would actually want to drink and bottling it isn't trivial.
I know one guy who moonshines for family-and-friends consumption, not sale, and I'll pass. It's not that much cheaper than just buying it (note: my state alcohol taxes are not that high) and it's a lot more work. I might make a batch of wine -> brandy from fruits that grew on a tree in my back yard if I had plums, just to say I did, but I'm not interested in making a big batch of corn liquor.
I slipped and fell down them when I was 4. I clearly recall this. But that made me remember that I had done the same thing a year or even two before (which was worse, because at age 4 I was large enough to stop myself before I hit the bottom - not so much at 2-3).
I wouldn’t remember the first incident without the second, but because of it, I do.
The stairs got carpeting shortly after that.
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