Is this the case that was being watched because, as part of the settlement, the Sackler family was likely to be granted immunity?

I don’t think I disagree with you, but with this comment you’re kinda being an ass

If you have apples lying around, tearing one in half with your bare hands is actually pretty easy. There are quick guides on YouTube but basically, if I’m remembering right, you put the heels of your palms together at the bottom of the apple and finger tips at the stem and kind of squeeze the apple and try open the apple like a book. It makes a big difference having freshly washed hands.

These were the words I used when discussing an upcoming potential termination,

“But the person I’ll be on the other side of [this crisis of maybe termination] will be no more absolutely or permanently diminished than the one I became after any other of the subjectively substantial life-changing crises.”

I’ve lived through some pretty painful shit. I feel quite angry about the misery I consider my life to currently be, but I still choose to live. With these words I was explaining that this “disaster” couldn’t be any more miserable than the sundry other miseries I’ve learned to live with. The consequences of this “crisis” may absolutely be something I will hate deeply and bitterly, but I doubt it’s going to be the straw that gets me to break this camel’s back.

Last night my dad was talking about this “liberal propaganda” about the “supposed climate crisis” talking about the movie Don’t Look Up. Fuck it pissed me off, I don’t know how to respond to that. Conservatives aren’t in reality, every fact that disagrees with their backwards fantasy is just some kind of liberal conspiracy that “wise” men would never bother considering.

Right. I fight not because I believe I’ll win, or even because I believe victory is “possible”, but because it’s more comfortable for me so to speak to be fighting than to quietly and passively support the ideology I disagree with. It is more “restful” to me to be fighting a fight I believe in than to be resting in a world I hate.

Was that ever in any doubt?

I am no longer a Christian, I came from a super fundamentalist bent of Christianity. The idea of choosing to not sin even if you know your sins are forgiven has to do with love.

“For God so loved the world he gave his only son for our sins” etc

So the pastor tells us that we know we are a real Christian who is really saved by our “good fruits”, that is, the good things we choose to do and the bad things we choose not to do. So by choosing not to sin, you’re proving to yourself that God is real and that God really saved you, because, as everyone knows, it’s impossible to be for even a moment anything but absolutely selfish without God’s help.

Most Christians aren’t that Calvinist though. That was the church I grew up in.