I have good news: It exists! http://retrographer.org/

A lot of them are unrecognizable, but here’s an example of a good one: http://retrographer.org/photos/4215

The bad news is that’s a bit limited. It was the senior project of a CMU student in 2010. It only exists for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If you wanted to make one for another city, though, I think you could contact the creator, ask for the code, and then recruit people to get a ton of photos from another city’s historical institutions, and then crowdsource geotagging them (which is what the guy did).

http://retrographer.org/learnMore

Ok, I saw that.

I encourage anyone with the power to keep fascists out of office to do what they can.

I also think, though, that if there is one thing that might save us, it would be Jill Stein breaking into the mainstream. I think Bernie’s campaign in 2020 created the conditions that moved Biden and organized what become his turnout operation, and he needs a lefty foil or he’s gonna fall flat on his face.

This is absolutely a myth.

Green party candidates can run and win many tickets other than President, but it’s very, very hard to get ballot access, public funding, or voter awareness. In any state that isn’t a swing state, voting Green most likely has more actual consequence than voting for one of the two major parties. This builds infrastructure that lets Greens organize the way parties do in other countries: doing actual outreach between elections instead of just threatening people every time they need votes.

The Green party is also often the only way to actually challenge the duopoly when both parties are taking the same pro-corporate position. What they do in a race is break a cartel dynamic, which forces Democrats to actually adopt popular positions which they can then be pressured to act on.

Vote strategically: if you’re in PA, MI, or NC, by all means stick with a Democrat, but in about 40 states, you actually have a lot more voice and potential impact voting Green than you do otherwise.

Mojofrododojo isn’t going to see this, because he won an argument so hard he had to block me.

But if anyone else is reading this, I just want to state that being a dick to political allies because they’re upset by a cold hard reality that you reject is not only a shitty way to build successful political movements, it’s just a straight up a shitty way to treat people.

Oh well.

This is out of touch with the problem.

The long term problem is that we don’t have a political economy that actually represents the public.

But the short term problem is that Trump is currently on track to win, and the people who don’t want that to happen are sticking their heads in the sand.

We need to (1) reengage the Democratic base. Biden’s victory in key swing states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia in particular – was built on the backs of grass-roots door knocking campaigns by Bernie supporters. His campaign was absolutely reliant on the support of people who didn’t really like HIM, but really wanted to get Trump out of office. Those people will probably still hold their nose and vote for him, but that turnout operation is shattered, and I don’t see a way he can match his close victory in 2020 without it.

If progressives find a champion in Jill Stein, it’s possible that they start dreaming of something better, and if Biden turns things around, they’ll have the drive to rebuild that critical lefty turnout machine.

(2) Biden needs a metaphorical slap in the face. He won last time because Bernie’s team wrote half his platform in a reconciliation committee. This time, there was no primary, so Biden has reverted to all his instincts, and they are TERRIBLE. He’s trying to win Haley voters as if that’s not like Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy’s football. If Stein gets momentum, maybe it’ll knock sense into him.

This is all aside from the fact that voting Green builds party infrastructure and ballot access for a meaningful third party. There are lots of complicated reasons why voting Green has long-term strategic benefits, but I’m not even getting into those. I’m just talking about how we save Biden from himself. Sorry if it sounds like 4D chess, but polls already show Biden losing and he’s not taking note, so I think seeing popularity for a left alternative is the only thing I can think of that will rescue this thing.

You know, Bertrand Russell might say that in the present moment, you’re the one who needs to demonstrate some facts, but I’ll oblige.

National polls: Losing, consistently.

Key state polls: Biden is losing, in some states by shocking margins.

The midterms: The polls were dead on. A red wave was predicted by pundits who ignored the polls. This was easier to do because a lot of elections were close, and hundreds of close elections make predicting the overall breakdown in seats very hard, but the specific polls were all historically accurate. Polling the presidential outcome in key states is much less unclear. In all the most important states, he’s either losing badly or it’s a toss-up, favoring Trump. I don’t know of any precedent for a polling error massive enough to explain polls like this without Biden being significantly behind. That could change, but it won’t as long as Biden and his enablers keep denying the reality of our dire situation.

The effect of Roe: the polls already capture this. It isn’t like people answer polls without factoring in Roe, and then suddenly remember it at the voting booth. Biden IS already getting the benefit of Roe, and the current terrible poll numbers are how he performs WITH this benefit. He’s historically unpopular. If he were running in 2016 against a conventional candidate, he’d be getting Carter or Bush numbers. These numbers are WITH his advantages.

Here is a question for you: WHY??? Obama had a tough election because he had a brutal economy. HOW is Biden not a runaway favorite to win? Why in a time of low unemployment, following the passage of highly popular bills, against a reviled opponent is Biden even struggling? Even if you don’t think he’s losing (again: it’s really not subjective, he’s objectively losing right now), explain to me why it is even close? What story do we tell ourselves to make sense of the obvious wrongness of all of this? He is doing worse than Hillary in 2016 by a lot. I don’t know how anyone can claim that this is not an absolute catastrophe in the making. Expecting Trump to implode is crazy. He just went through a primary, and he mopped the floor with everyone. Everyone already knows that he’s a monster. What do folks think there is to learn? He’s a historically despised fascist who tried to seize a second term by violence on live TV. If that were going to work, it would have worked by now. That isn’t a strategy that is going to work without Biden either reinventing himself or stepping aside.

This should be a five-alarm fire. Please don’t get mad at me for trying to sound that alarm. Wake UP and figure out what we’re going to do about it (suggestion: demand a new candidate).

Bruh.

Your arguments are totally wasted on me. I’m not saying he hasn’t done good stuff. I’m saying that he’s running a losing campaign, and so far has been totally unwilling to change.

Regarding polling: I don’t know how to get through to you that he’s losing. If you’re not accepting reality, then we’re fucked. Are you going to reject the election results too? It’s not really even in the margin of error most weeks, he isn’t even close to having the votes he needs in the states he needs to win. I can’t believe we’re replaying 2016 when we’ve already been through it. Wake up: we’re on a collision course and need to change direction NOW.

Regarding his achievements: These are largely great. Which just makes it so much more painful that no one knows about them. He’s never been a skilled candidate, and unfortunately getting older has not done him favors. If he had a really strong campaign, he could certainly win, but if you give a guy who isn’t good at the fundamentals of running bad support and bad guidance and a muddled, poorly delivered message, we’re going to wake up under President-for-life Donald Fucking Trump.

Did people forget that he was president? He won. It’s like I’m in groundhog’s day, and no one knows that we already ran this simulation, and the result was terrible.

If Jill Stein hits 15% in polls we’ve wandered into bizzarro world and all bets are off anyway.

We are already in bizzarro world! The leading candidate is a known fascist/rapist/felon, and the current incumbent is the most unpopular president in contemporary history.

People don’t even remember that Trump was found guilty of rape last year, because it’s not even newsworthy because he keeps quoting Hitler. And he is CURRENTLY IN THE LEAD.

Smash the glass and pull the alarms! All bets ARE off! This is a god-damned crisis, and repeating why BIden SHOULD be winning is pure copium. Put down the pipe and put on a pair of comfortable shoes, because saving America is going to need actual organizing work! And that starts with accepting that we have a problem.

I’m not saying that we need to make Jill Stein president, but we need something to convince Biden to either let someone else take the nomination or start running like he means it. He (and you) need the loudest possible wake-up call or mark my words: Trump WILL win.

I relate to this, but I keep trying to tell people that we need to get a clear diagnosis of the problem and figure out how we’re going to get out of this bind.

Ultimately, Biden is currently on track to lose. He’s been losing in the polls all year, and alarmingly, he’s insisted that he isn’t going to make changes. He’s staying the course.

Those of us who want to avoid a Trump dictatorship need to find a way to change this dynamic, and I don’t see any way that complaining about Biden’s disaffected base fixes this. I don’t think complaining about Biden fixes it either. I think he’s made peace with losing. So what will?

The Democratic establishment – the campaign managers and staff in particular – can largely tolerate a Trump dictatorship more than the loss of status. “Leaders of the Resistance” is okay with them. “Collaborators” or “nobodies” isn’t. If Jill Stein hits 15% in the polls and starts drawing major crowds, I thik this would be such a painful shock to the self-image of Democratic campaigners that I think this could dislodge the race and force Biden to reconsider his approach, and hopefully campaign for president the way he did in 2020.

If you don’t want Trump, don’t blame the left. They aren’t the primary source of his polling collapse. That’s coming from moderates who see no vision or benefit. And the Democratic party’s most popular agenda items are all leftist anti-corporate stuff. So criticism is all that I see saving us from Biden’s terrible judgement.

I posted a comment impulsively, then saw that you already gave the same answer better.

I’d like to go a bit deeper.

I don’t think people invented socially controlling practices because they found religion, I think they found religion to frame the invention of socially controlling practices.

Masturbation is a gratifying act that relives pressure to settle into a rigid domestic arrangement that serves to make more workers and soldiers, and create dependents that need fed, and whose well-being would be threatened if a parent became defiant and provoked the ire of elites.

Masturbation is good for the individual at the expense of the nation and its rulers. So it’s inevitable that priests would decry it as an affront against god, as that’s historically been their purpose.

I’m shocked more people aren’t already better prepared for this, but it’s actually the same thing we should be doing now, and continue to do if Biden actually wins:

Organize locally. Get hyperlocal. Organize your city, neighbors, block, building, workplace, and friend group. Establish mutual aid networks, take back city councils, county boards, and school boards from the stewards of landlords and big employers.

Establish protection for those who need it, and plant the crop of future national leaders who will do the long overdue work of putting government to work for the masses. Make it harder for any president or governor to exercise state violence by getting our people in prosecutors offices and judgeships.

The Democrats are not going to save us. Biden is just planning to go down with the ship. Absolutely vote for the lesser of two evils if you live somewhere where your vote matters, but recognize that the Democratic party is not an ally to the antifascist movement, because combating fascism conflicts with the interests of capital.

That can change, but until it does, don’t put faith in them. Anything positive they do will be because power-players were replaced. And that starts in your own neighborhood.

Edit: Since this has been well received, I want to say a quick word on third parties: don’t be afraid of them.

Without getting into a lot of details, there are a lot of myths about the risks that third parties present, but before we parrot all of that, we should just acknowledge that there is no harm in listening to their platforms. It doesn’t make you a kook to hear ideas that often get suppressed by the mainstream, or to use third parties as a way to network and meet people. I think Jill Stein has a lot of useful things to say, and if a pollster asks me, I will gladly try to bump her numbers up so that she is harder to ignore. Don’t be afraid to do that.

Thanks for this clarification!

That all sounds great. Thanks for the shout-out too!

Honestly, I don’t recall the details. What I shared was my best recollection. I think what you said sounds reasonable, but I can’t reliably say.

Hi. I’m not a doctor, but I can opine as a biologist.

The transplanted cells have blood vessels, because all cells need a supply of oxygen to avoid expiring. If they didn’t have a supply of blood, they’d quickly turn necrotic.

When you deplete your short term energy stores, the body converts fat molecules within fat cells into sugar, then shuttles those through the body in the blood stream.

The body doesn’t draw on fat stores within the body in a totally even way, so I don’t know how quickly it would draw from the transplanted cells, but it works presumably still burn fat from these cells when needed.

And the reverse is true as well: when excess sugar is available, the body would generate new fat molecules to fill those cells, and if necessary make new fat cells as well.

Okay, thanks for the update.

It’s either because of DEI or work from home. It’s not clear how, but it’s got to be one of those.

The comedic momentum of the story is excellent.

In my head, I can hear the foot going through it. FWOOMP! “Do you want me to take the others?”

Hacking solarpunk. This was a conversation among folks making projects in a hacking Discord server.

I would also argue that the constructive use of medication to ameliorate ADHD without stigma is a solarpunk concept.