It's 7 o'clock. Do you know where your freedom is? And we're back, as if we haven't been on break? Hey, everybody, as you can tell or probably know, this is a me and you episode, which are always shorter, but the break is over. Here we are Seven years going, congressional length breaks aside, seven years of psychosemantic yeah, I guess I just wanted to say you're still here since then.
Thank you, and if you've shown up along the way, also thank you, and I hope you've had good fortune since we last spoke. If I don't edit them all out, you will hear the remnants of a cough. That was not COVID, that seemed to take forever to go away. But for the most part I have spent my time away just focusing on other parts of my life. I think I had already mentioned that I've been working at the Art Museum.
I've been doing more of that, still keeping up with the world and hyperfixating on all the things that are going on. Now it is time to kick off the cobwebs and shake out the dust and scrape off the rust. Maybe it's just because I've had I've been doing some working on myself, but I feel like not. The things aren't dark, but I kind of feel like one of the reasons why there was the little gap was because I feeling in a dark place. I was.
I don't know if that's over, I don't know if that's frustrating, but I had always planned on taking periodic breaks to recharge and stuff from the unhealthy amount of attention I pay to local and global politics, but I never really did for more than a few weeks at a time.
As far as fact checkers, you know what to do, but in the time that my life had me busy in other places and other ways, I tried to shed some of that and so hopefully, if you were feeling that too, hopefully there's a noticed difference. I wanted to say that here we are in the January of the 2024 American election cycle. I was trying to look back.
Seven years ago, the global gag rule was reinstated by the Trump administration that foreign organizations that receive USAID cannot have anything to do with abortion, including mentioning the word or providing women with information, even when the organization used their own non-US money to do so. So I don't know if we want to go down that way, but seven years ago they were still trying to decide whether or not fucking moron Betsy DeVos could be the education secretary. We saw how that went.
So, yeah, maybe just to say seven years ago, shit was really fucked up and I feel like not necessarily people who are here and definitely I don't think anybody that is actually listening to this specific talk but a lot of other people were just starting to notice how drastically it seems funny to say, but like how drastically major world events could affect their lives.
But that was something that seemed, at least in my online sphere and in some of my personal sphere, that seemed to be the case, and so I think there was a lot of focus here on suffering together and rallying to fight back the floods, and a lot of uncertainty and a lot of comforting and a lot of civic education and things like that, and that, of course, tapered out to its level that it is now, but I feel like it's always been the same show. Just that's the way I am, or that's the way I do things.
Hyper focus on a handful of things, in no particular order, but, as per usual, there's most likely going to be a person talking with me, the movies being covered and other things like that. I was. I've been given homework assignments by my little dude and when I started comparing the Avatar like James Cameron or the movie and video game Avatar, not Airbender stuff.
When I started drawing all kinds of comparisons between Israel and Palestine, I kind of thought that it would be a time to, yeah, really make the time to start these conversations back up again, and there have been some talks already started about what the next movie covered on the show should be.
I know that some of there's a lot of cross-platforming amongst shows, but for those who didn't hear my traditional my annual crime documentary series that I do over on podcasts under the stairs with Duncan and the people that are here also who were or are listeners to the VD Clinic pod with Vanessa, I had said that we had recently touched base and that she's doing well and but there's not any talk right now about that starting back anytime soon, not saying that it's over or anything like that,
but it hasn't come up. We've just been talking as the friends that we are. So, yeah, just doing therapy and some decent political wins. Here in Ohio, we, the Years-long fight for reproductive and abortion rights.
We voted in protections into the state constitution, which was drastically opposed by the people who claimed to want less government in people's lives and they suggested that it be not a constitutional amendment but more like a citizen's ballot initiative, like the legalized recreational marijuana that we also voted in.
But the thing is they're still trying to fuck with the constitutional amendment, seeing if they can take the power away from the courts to enforce it, even though the amendment specifically says that the courts are the final arbiter of it, of the protection clauses, but they are trying to see what they can do with passing legislation that says that the courts don't get to decide, that the legislature gets to decide. And also they pointed towards why don't you do it like the marijuana bill?
They are trying to change that in so many ways. There's been a lot of backlash against both, but so that's been. I've been watching that, but as it is right now, when it becomes fully as of December 7th 2023, both went into effect, but they're still trying to get cases overturned that have to do with the abortion and contraception rights and it's, from what I can tell, it's sort of like when John Travolta is talking about Amsterdam at the beginning of Pulp Fiction.
But it's legal to recreationally have weed in Ohio, but the only dispensaries that are open are the medicinal dispensaries and you can't get anything there without prescription, like so many of us are fortunate to have, and the clause that said that people over 21 are allowed to grow their own went into effect, but there's no legal way to have the seeds, since the medical dispensaries don't have the seeds and there are no. So it's a bit of a weird limbo.
They are talking about that all being up and running by September of 2024. Time stamp that. We'll see how that fucking goes. To those who are listening. I mean, what do you want me to be talking about? What do you want me to focus on? Or what are we doing next, if you have suggestions or else you're just gonna have to deal with whatever my weird brain comes up with. I know the Iowa caucus already happened. New Hampshire is this week, today, maybe even this may be the most.
This isn't gonna be very long, and that's kind of funny to look at it with an actual timer, but this might be the longest uninterrupted that I've spoken in a while. I've already had a bunch of Republicans drop out of their race, if they want to call it a race.
I paid varied levels of attention and it kind of seemed like they were all arguing with each other about who kissed up to their other opponent the most, their other opponent who never showed up to any of the arguments about who was going to support him the most, as kind of already, except for Chris Christie who was running to be that person saying that their opponent sucks.
And then, you know, I don't know what he's aiming for next, something on CNN or MSNBC, but everybody else kind of seemed like they were running for Vice President or Campaign Contributions. I haven't heard anything about any of the other parties besides the Democratic Party and I don't think I don't see it happening. But it would be cool if there was an actual primary challenge to Joe Biden. But I mean, there's all sorts of shit we can talk about. You know a lot of movies, cool shows.
I don't know if we want to do some video game analysis, political video game shit. I'm down. This is a. You know, this is a growing thing, this is a living sort of thing, a fluid sort of thing. It was started out that way on purpose, because you want to leave room for change and adaptation. Guest suggestions topic suggestions. You know where to find me on Facebook, discord, instagram.
It still says Twitter on my phone because I haven't updated the app, but I guess it would be X if I log in on my tablet, but anyway, I hope you're well. I'm feeling a little bit better and a lot of fucked up shit is still happening, so we've got a lot to talk about. So until then.