So, I'll relay here the deets as I've been able to procure them - not to make a political statement, but to attempt to elucidate my swamp existence.

The last police involved shooting in my county was in 1934 during a string of bank robberies. (There was a state trooper who was killed during a traffic stop some years ago, but he didn't discharge his weapon during the stop, so it's not an office involved shooting as such).

There have been a string of day time break-ins and robberies in the Eastern part of my swamp and the neighboring county. So many in fact that the police had theorized that it was as many as 5 different people possibly working in tandem. Aware of this fact, a neighbor in the swamp next to mine noticed that somebody unusual was doing something in their neighbors yard as they drove past to get groceries, so being a small swamp-county too they called the police.

Police arrive, and confront the man who is carrying furniture out of the house and loading it onto a trailer. They question him. He responds that he's moving out. They inform him that they know that he doesn't live there. He scrambles past them and enters his truck and drives off - the police give chase.

They chase him into my county and the very lowest reaches of our Eastern swamp parts - wherein he gets off the road and takes his truck and trailer through the empty corn fields. Due to excessive mud the police cruisers can't follow, his trailer also detaches and throws his unfortunate victim's belongings all over the field. The officers busy themselves collecting said belongings, being unable to do much else, and put out an alert to our Sherrif's department that he is entering our county off-road.

A guy I went to school with who patrols that portion of the swamp during the day (one of 3 officers who are ever on duty at a given time) receives a dispatch notification that an elderly woman, who lives alone, had called in to report that a strange vehicle had driven down her driveway and into a wooded area behind her home. He decides to make a stop before checking out her house, and picks up an additional sherrif's deputy who happened to live between his position and the house he was supposed to check out. He dons a shirt that says "sherrif's department" but doesn't have his service weapon with him.

They reach the home. They stop in the driveway and walk to the woods on foot. There they witness a man painting a truck that matches the description received from officers in the neighboring county. As he paints the truck they decide that it would be best if my former classmate would go back to his cruiser and get his belt (which contains his gun). He then realizes that he had forgotten his belt that morning, because his wife had removed it from the car the evening before as she needed to use the car and didn't want to have his service weapon in the car when she did (each deputy has his own vehicle that he pays for and can use whilst off duty). They decide to return to the woods and observe after radioing it in.

They then see the man enter his vehicle and withdraw a shotgun and sit down in the driver's seat apparently waiting for his new paint job to dry. It's at that point they decide to collect the elderly woman and withdraw. Eventually 3 more (armed) deputies arrive, along with a deputy from the neighboring swamp, and when they call out to him (from the woods) he then brandishes the shotgun and fires on them at which point they return fire. They attempt to administer first aid, but he was killed in the gun battle.

The other strange part of the story is that the fellow appears to live well over an hour away from the location that he was robbing, and his truck was filled with paint cans of varying colors and upon investigation, had repainted his truck several times.

And that is how the biggest incident in my swamp in 80 years went down.

Having a job at 16 isn't unusual, and it's entirely possible to emancipate yourself once you do.

My assumption is the ice bath is more for reducing inflammation.

Funny story, I was reading a health book, for high school students, from 1908 and it too recommended cold showers to "exercise your capillaries" now while I doubt that's actually a thing that's possible to do, I too have been on the cold shower train.

I actually prefer to use no hot whatsoever, and I often find myself laughing sort of maniacally before I get in and really enjoy the rush. It also massively cuts down on the amount of time I waste in the shower which is nice for my bills.

You can - though usually stuff of the ar-15 variety needs to come from a real gunshop because the actual demand for such rifles isn't high enough for Wal-mart to justify carrying any/many of them (they're also usually pretty expensive). Wal-mart tends to deal more in hunting/sporting rifles, small gauge shotguns, and muzzle loaders.

Another pretty solid option is to take a small vacation - a big part of addiction is the habit itself - so avoiding places where you typically smoked is a good idea. So, if you've got a day trip or something in mind I'd do it because the new surroundings wont trigger cravings, and your mind will be occupied with new experiences. You'll still have to come home and deal with the habitual behavior, but during the early stages I've seen a lot of success with new surroundings.

When I smoked more regularly I would crave it when I was at home, but never any place else. So when I decided to cut it down to special occasions only, I just peaced out for a few days lol.

Another option that I've seen people use in addiction counseling is to figure up how much money you're going to save in a month by not smoking (I'd figure it's around 20-50$ or more depending on how nice the cigs were and how much you used), and then spend that dollar amount on something you've wanted for a while as a reward once you make it to a certain milestone (a week, a month etc).

Part of it comes with age, once you come to terms with the benign indifference of the universe.

But, the easier thing is just to come up with something else to say instead since you apparently feel the compulsive need to say something. Saying nothing is a good substitute, "oops" is also acceptable in some circles. But in general the easiest way to handle it is never to say sorry unless somebody actually draws attention to your mistake - because chances are nobody noticed/cared.

A vacuum is definitely the way to go for the exterior of the case and the ports that air comes through. Depending on how easy your vacuum cleaner articulates you may be able to use it inside of the case after you ground it to discharge any static electricity. If you happen to have a metal chair you could also just ground the thing by touching said metal chair while you do it lol.

Compressed air in a can seems to be the best bet from there - I've used my air compressor in the garage with EXTREMELY good de-dusting results, but various connections always end up coming loose due to the pressure lol.

A light rub with a paper towel doesn't hurt other plastic parts that may have dust caked onto them (this is particularly bad in the interior wells of fans usually) so extensively that compressed air won't break it loose. I've also used slightly damp towels with alcohol to clean such situations before because the alcohol will flash off in a few minutes so long as you don't absolutely soak the thing.

I've always wanted to use Dr. Feelgood tbh. https://youtu.be/1XHcPYorSJw

Being as I have a 10 year old who has to do a "science fair project" every year, this is literally my go to in different iterations

2 Things.

1. Common materials as insulators.

Get several large plastic containers (or any other thin material will do or even plastic bags), and then get some standard plastic bottles - fill said bottles with water. Wait forever for the tap water in the plastic water bottles to arrive at room temperature.

Place the bottles in the plastic bags or plastic containers and bury them in the same weight of various materials: Dirt, shredded newspaper, sand, rocks, whatever you've got around. Place a lamp over each container for a set amount of time (I shoot for 2 hours because I only use one lamp).

Extract water bottle and see if the temperature has changed relative to a "control" of a water bottle not buried in anything. Make sure the lamp is always the same distance away. Now you've done science.

Second.

Get some kind of quick growing plant, and plant the seeds in an egg carton or some other segmented container (ice cube tray, etc). Water the seeds with different types of water and other liquids and see if anything wacky happens or if the plant dies/fails to grow.

If that's not acceptable, I would just repeat #2 but plant the seeds in different commercial brands of potting soil and see which grows bigger/faster as they often claim to speed or help plant growth.

I've been working like crazy, and I have to go in at 8 am tomorrow because fml? They told me when I hired on so long as I showed up before 9:30 I was good, and suddenly we get all these requests to come in at 9 and 8:30 am? lol.

I'm still pretty upset I can't go to Cali for the LAN, but I'm getting a 6k raise for my financial scheme whose perpetration I will be missing said LAN for :/ So, maybe the universe balances out.

The simplest response is that the territory of the Soviet Union was highly prone to famine anyways (by drought or blight - and as a fellow who lives in an agricultural region lemme' tell you I'd take a drought over a blight) so it's difficult to *actually* determine to which degree Soviet policy was responsible vs. recurring structural problems within Russian/Soviet agriculture itself. Still far less than 60 million or other absurd numbers that came out of the 1950s. Even if you account for millions upon millions of deaths in Ukraine you're still far under the 20-25 that's cited by Western historians (mostly based on guess work anyways).

The whole collectivization question is intensely interesting to me, as Lenin himself was STRICTLY opposed to rapid collectivization of agriculture. His idea was more or less to get small subsets of farmers to willingly agree to collectivize their resources either under government control (Sovkozy) or transitioning existing individual, local, control set ups (Kolkohozy) - there were already areas of Russia where collective agriculture had existed since time immemorial. Testing the two systems to see which was most efficient would commence, and then whichever worked out best would be used as propaganda cases to encourage other farmers to do the same. A downright pragmatic approach. Bukharin, later killed by Stalin, even declared in a speech "Peasants enrich yourselves!" to signal that collectivized or state owned agriculture wasn't a priority for Soviet policy.

Besides, the policy seems logical enough, as after the end of serfdom in 1861, many Russian farmers were in possession of plots of land too small to farm beyond the barest subsistence level. So why not combine them? This happened in virtually every Western society as smaller farmers moved to the cities to obtain work or sold out to larger farms and did the same - the Russians basically wanted to use government policy to affect the same outcome, but didn't have the level of mechanization present in the West, so the agricultural labor force could remain in place for the time being.

The first five year plan, at its outset, planned for a *very* marginal growth in collectivized farms over its 5 year period (less than 12% of all farms). However, the Stalin government decided, after having accepted the plan, that they needed to rapidly collectivize agriculture - for an array of reasons, many of which will probably never be properly understood. This caused massive problems for 2 major reasons (among others). 1.) Farmers with profitable farms *did not* want to collectivize and farmers who had unprofitable farms did. So the state ended up rapidly laden with a tremendous amount of struggling agricultural enterprises, while private individuals who refused to collectivize continued to be OK since they were always as such. 2.) The five year plan didn't allocate *any* resources to accommodate such a tremendous explosion of government owned (or whatever word you prefer to use here overseen?) agricultural enterprises as what Stalin's policies caused within the first 3 years of the five year plan (over 80% of all farms collectivized). Note the plan only allocated resources to cover 12% of all farms and instead they had ~700% of that number.

So, in the end the Soviet government chose to blame the "kulaks" ie, farmers who had profitable farms, for their own failures in agriculture because they decided unilaterally that collectivization was the best policy.

Why did they think that? Well Soviet economists became obsessed with what they called the "scissors crisis" which was basically that, like all Western societies in the 1920s, prices for agricultural goods were rapidly falling world-wide, while the costs of industrial labor were increasing exponentially. As such, farmers got very little for their produce, while factory goods became even more expensive. This resulted in an agricultural crisis as the tools used for modern agriculture became too expensive for common farmers to buy. So, rather than work out a scheme to encourage small, non-viable farmers to move to the cities (like Western countries did) and become factory workers or pay them not to farm at all (as the USA did - to raise agricultural prices), the Soviet government decided to force everybody to collectivize under its umbrella whether they wanted to or not, so that they could set agricultural produce prices to obtain enough money to buy the agricultural equipment they needed.

It obviously didn't work out very well as agricultural production, and exports, fell precipitously in the late 20s and early 30s (the Great Depression played a role here too) and the farm population dropped substantially anyways as people moved to the cities; being superfluous to the success of agricultural production just as they did throughout the West.

Like I said earlier, nobody will really understand all of the factors that played into the undertaking of the "rapid" collectivization of agriculture when the whole Soviet Economy was not at all prepared for such an undertaking; nor was the 5 year plan ever adjusted to accommodate such a tremendous explosion of collectivization. I tend to believe that the upper echelons of Soviet leadership became convinced that collectivized agriculture would produce some sort of downright magical effect on Soviet agriculture, and as a result screwed over a huge portion of their populace. In their defense, collectivized agriculture on such a massive scale had never been tried before - but even still - they were irresponsible to dream as they did and Stalin and all of those attached to him in that time bear the responsibility for their actions.

For the debate topic at large you have an article written by Stalin which was entitled "dizzy with success" which reads in part:

But the successes have their seamy side, especially when they are attained with comparative “ease” — “unexpectedly” so to speak. Such successes sometimes induce a spirit of vanity and conceit: “We can achieve anything!”, “There is nothing we can’t do!” People not infrequently become intoxicated by such successes; they become dizzy with success, lose all sense of proportion and the capacity to understand realities; they show a tendency to overrate their own strength and to underrate the strength of the enemy; adventurist attempts are made to solve all questions of socialist construction “in a trice.” In such a case, there is no room for concern to consolidate the successes achieved and to utilise them systematically for further advancement. Why should we consolidate the successes achieved when, as it is, we can dash to the full victory of socialism “in a trice”: “We can achieve anything!”, “There is nothing we can’t do!”

Hence the Party’s task is to wage a determined struggle against these sentiments, which are dangerous and harmful to our cause, and to drive them out of the Party.

Which is seen by most historians as Stalin realizing his tremendous mistake and trying to slow it down with his personal influence - far too late of course.

You got authentic Marxist thoughts there lol as opposed to my earlier "devil's advocate" posts above. There is a real tendency among young Marxists today to adopt Stalin as a sort of father figure or to ignore him completely as a brute. I'd argue to quote Stalin himself, "both are worse."

The real irony with the Trotsky thing, is that the folks who discovered (outside of the USSR) that Trotsky actually had sought to form some sort of secret political organization in Russia were Trotskyites in the USA who were doing research with the Trotsky papers at Harvard so as to prove that the Show Trails against the "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites" were a complete sham. Instead they ended up finding undeniable evidence that Trotsky had indeed sought to create a secret political organization with the express objective of infiltrating the Soviet government. Now, that's not to say that the Show Trails were in themselves legitimate, but I'm under the impression that there isn't a government on the planet that wouldn't react strongly to some secret organization attempting to infiltrate and encourage government officials to leak information to it.

http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hou00301

You could likely get some copies of the microfilm (you can google around for the specific letters) through interlibrary loan if you *really* wanted to blow up somebody who brought up the show trials lol.

Get off work at 4 (Tues-Sat schedule), go to the brewery, drink, talk, whatever. Get something to eat. Come home watch movies, etc, talk shit in mumble.

Sunday - Sleep and house chores.

Monday - read and do fuck all after dropping kiddo off to school.

If you've made a firm commitment I'd stick to it, but you can try to modify that in a number of ways.

1. Remain, until such a time as a suitable replacement for you has been found. That way you're free from regret, don't damage your relationships, or screw anybody over.
2. Attempt to modify the amount of time you spend doing things you don't want to do (fewer scrims etc - sometimes that's all that's needed).
3. Tough it out entirely, and then remember how much you hated it the next time you promise somebody something.