Can someone tell me why, whenever someone mentions Kanye West, in addition to noting that he's batshit, they always note that he's a "genius?" Can you ELIW the genius of Mr. West?

Now I can't find the link, but my understanding is that with the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian troll farms have stopped feeding the US rightwing quite so intently and have switched to invasion-related propaganda. What I remember reading is a top-10 most-shared items from before and after the invasion, and the former was something like 80% Republican propaganda, and the latter was 80% celebrity and human interest stories.

If they stay distracted, how much of the extreme rightwing Republican movement loses its steam? Does Fox News dilute a bit, since they have been a straight-up mouthpiece for Russian propaganda over the past five years? (or more) Does it help stem potential losses in the midterms?

My brothers and I were all together at my parents' house yesterday. The last time we were all five together was in 2017, and the last time we were all at our childhood home was 2003, I think. And the last time we were all home without spouses or anyone outside of our nuclear family would have maybe been 1993?

Anyway, I guess the Fed repealed DST and the senate raised interest rates while I was having a family moment?

Why not chat here?

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while. There is no way it could function as that sentence implies, but it's still nice to have a thread.

Episode Kobe twenty.

So if you'll recall, I cycled through several ADHD stimulants. Over time, each one gave me increasingly bad headaches when the meds wore off in the evening, and last summer I gave up. It was a bummer. For various reasons, I went back to the psychiatrist a few weeks ago to see if he had any ideas about me trying stimulants again.

He asked some general lifestyle questions, and when I said I drink a fuckton of coffee, he thought it might be worth quitting, on the general premise that perhaps coffee was using up a major part of my general headache buffer, and so then the stimulants on top were pushing me over the edge.

Fine, I said, with trepidation. I'll quit coffee. (You may remember me complaining a lot in the comments.) My instructions were to taper down, and then take one full week with zero caffeine.

So finally, last Tuesday, I got to try out the stimulants again. I was on a very small dose. During the day, it was great!! And then in the evening, I had a blindingly awful headache. Just the worst.

There's a perennial recommendation on ADHD boards to try magnesium for headaches. I've tried it, and nothing happened. This night, however, I dipped into Google Scholar, and found out there's actually a robust literature on the effectiveness of magnesium on headaches. For example, this metastudy.

So I started taking a megadose of magnesium, based off one study where participants were taking 400-600 mg a day. (First off, if you take too much, it just gives you the runs. Hence Milk of Magnesia.) And ...it worked. It's working great. The first night was a much milder headache, and then they've been gone entirely since Thursday.

On the gastrointestinal distress: by the Friday I switched from Magnesium Citrate to Magnesium Threonate, which apparently is more bioavailable than the shit-inducing kind, and I don't know, it's working for me.

The thing is, I feel like a conspiracy-theorist, on the order of "Big Pharma doesn't want you to know about Cumin because it's so cheap!!" Hawaii gets headaches, and her doctor did recommend magnesium, but it was in the same breath as peppermint oil. It sounds like "Do your research!" nonsense to rant that one of these nutty supplement folk medicines is actually grounded in the literature and mainstream doctors seem mostly oblivious.

I'm still very cautious, and not sure if this will work longterm. However, I am also optimistic that I might be able to start drinking my goddamn coffee again, since that seems to be an unrelated variable.

Lurid Keyaki writes: So the thing other than the Ukraine-Russia war that's on everyone's mind in the U.S. is the rash of anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ+ in general, and anti-abortion bills... they are individually bad, but I think the big picture needs to be brought into focus. A ton of anti-right organizing energy over the past 5 years was specifically anti-Trump: with Trump much less in the picture and Dems (barely) controlling Congress and the presidency, that organizing energy feels much attenuated to me. By contrast, the GOP is deliberately targeting school boards and elections boards and pushing a lot of legislation (anti-CRT was a bellwether) as one of its post-2020 power strategies. It's largely working because, in my view, these are things that the center-left mostly doesn't want to control. The asymmetry between one side (the right) wanting zero-sum ideological dominance and the other side (a majority of the left) wanting to generally support enlightened pluralism is a problem -- but I'll say that much and leave it at that, because the real question is how to motivate people to fight. "Consider zero-sum ideological dominance as an alternative to enlightened pluralism!" won't motivate a whole lot of people. (You always get a few, though.)

So maybe we should just have a general discussion of U.S. politics and political strategy? This feels like a perilous moment to me, and I'd like to explore it from many sides.

Heebie's take: The battle cry "Consider zero-sum ideological dominance as an alternative to enlightened pluralism!" is funny.

One problem is that a lot of those fights - CRT, trans kids - are local (at least for now), and local pushback and fights require local strategies. I'm not sure about this sentence, though: "It's largely working because, in my view, these are things that the center-left mostly doesn't want to control." I think the center left loves school boards, don't they? Getting mired in squabbles over how to optimize childhood? And the anti-abortion and anti-trans kids legislations certainly mobilize those who are further left.

Neither of those address the central point of strategy, though. I have a feeling the answer is mundane: large national organizations need to spend money and training on small scale local organizers who know their communities well.