Now I remember, DIBro is the guy who won a bet by correctly guessing what Trump's nickname for Bannon would be.

Wonder who I'm gonna pick in April

Friend and I have been going hard at Battletoads vs Double Dragons for months and can't ****ing beat that ****

Should give him a pass due to this imo.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018...escalates.html

The White House pushed back on a report Thursday that H.R. McMaster would soon leave his position as national security adviser.

he's in the running but it's no lock. we've heard similar about the ultimo rexxy last year and he's still on the island by march. scrappy!

Please refrain from posting images of Trump in front of an Australian flag, it's bad for my heart.

Quite a good piece from Andrew Sullivan on the opioid crisis and a connection to the breakdown of community in America.

I really hope that McMaster sticks it out, he may be saving the country or even the world. Bolton would obviously be insanely terrible in that position, and even if not him, almost any Trump hire would almost certainly be worse than McMaster.

He could be generally successful while also being useless as a busybody.

Johann Hari, who is mentioned there, was featured in the first part of the most recent episode of the Ted Radio Hour

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510298/ted-radio-hour

Maybe it's only because I know so little about it, but some of what he had to say about addiction (and depression, which I do know about) was startling. I may pick up his book.

Is Michael Flynn playing survivor too?



https://twitter.com/jiveDurkey/statu...22360884531201


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Edit to add full darth tweet



https://twitter.com/darth/status/968963410405675008

There's an article in which he says, I assume, most of the same stuff here. I think he's telling a simplistic story there, which is of necessity in a short piece. In particular, I think the underlying issue is a lack of meaning in life and that human connection is a subset of that. The psychologist Emily Esfahani Smith summarizes the possible sources of meaning in life as:

1. Bonding - this is what Hari is on about
2. Purpose - for example, people for whom raising children or their jobs are at the center of their lives
3. Transcendence - spirituality, philosophy or religion
4. "Storytelling", meaning the narrative we tell about ourselves as people. On the most basic level, telling a story like "I used to be full of promise and now I'm a drug addict" is a bad idea.

All of these are under attack in some way in modern life. 1) is obvious. 2), because working lives are becoming less secure and frequently more alienating, in the Marxist sense. 3) is obvious. 4) because the problem of comparison to others, which is how we often judge ourselves, is becoming more acute. If I were to take my Facebook feed at face value, I would have to judge myself in the bottom decile of people in terms of fulfilment and happiness.

McMaster is the nutjob telling Trump to bomb North Korea. We could get a real whackjob like Bolton that’s worse, but the Russia guy sounds better. Luckily Bolton’s mustache puts him at a big disadvantage.

do we need, like, a separate thread to talk about russia's crazy new nukes?

i feel like there should be more pant ****ting about this

LOL Trump Supporters

If you start letting trunks sag you'll wind up letting pants sag and that's bad for America imo.

I know this is my fault for trying to make sense of a Garrison cartoon, but having Google/Facebook/Twitter and Trump supporters who post on those sites both represented as vehicles on a freeway makes no sense. It's a category error.

Yes Hari covers the same ground in that HuffPo piece as on the Ted RH. The Vietnam statistics are particularly striking and make me think yeah, this is worth paying attention to. What you've listed from Esfahani Smith "feels" right, but it's the kind of soft and fuzzy psych stuff that's hard to precisely define and quantify. So it's fine but how far can we get with it in understanding and solving problems?

That said, storytelling is interesting to me. I recall hearing another talk where it was claimed that all we are, as individuals, are our stories. So like we can't even remember childhood events before a certain point because we hadn't yet started to construct our story. Story forms like a framework for personality and experience so that we wouldn't really have a sense of continuity of our lives or selves without it- we'd be more like what we imagine animals to be.

It is difficult to keep our stories from taking a negative arc, more and more so. It's probably a good idea to practice some kind of psychological hygiene, but I'm not good at that. I stay away from fb at least, but I constantly consume news which is pretty much all bad ofc. The other day my sister asked me why I always have news on tv/radio/internet. I told her when Trump gets impeached, I'm going to be watching 24 hours a day, lol.

Iceland is having great success in reducing teenage use of alcohol and drugs by providing them with other fulfilling things to do. There's an article on it here.

Yeah. The self is a story we tell, that's all it is really. Cognitive behaviour therapy is an effort to change the story. Meditation is, in large part, an effort to step outside the story and release the hold it has over us.

Huh? Why? And could it go both ways? Difficult to keep our stories from taking a positive arc as well?

Iceland is a poor analog for any other place, especially wrt drugs and alcohol. It's just not part of the culture there; they had prohibition until 1989 and have sky-high alcohol taxes and no good beers or drinking culture what-so-ever. ZOMG did we all hate our Iceland vacation.

Hard to smoke and drink and get into trouble if by law you can't even be outside.

If only everyone in a child's life gathered around and showed love and gave him the opportunity to play sports/arts/music etc. but set strict boundaries regarding anything that could lead to trouble. God I would have been a bitter teen in Iceland. Lets all gather around and sing Kumbaya, gross. One would be lucky, and/or incredibly irritated to be a smart kid with aspd in that country.

Why is the job search engine Indeed called Indeed?

They've clearly hit this one out of the park, and all the pieces fit, and it all makes perfect sense, so why does it give me a sad? (Probably just bitter that running the streets at night, and keeping bad company, and developing bad habits was good enough for me, but not good enough for Iceland.)