Biden absolutely has some control over this, but Netanyahu is the bigger problem at the moment. Biden has influence over Netanyahu (with a lot of caveats and red tape due to decades of foreign policy), and Harris has influence over Biden…but that’s not the same thing as absolute control. There are also parts of this that have to get approved by congress and there’s only so much the office of the president can do unilaterally.

They can be doing more, and they should be doing more, but Harris’ role and capability is limited to that of an advisor (under strict scrutiny from everyone) right now, and that doesn’t actually give her that much power.

I’m not terribly old, but I’ve been around long enough to know that the lower offices are where you actually affect change in this country. The higher the office, the less they listen to their constituents.

There are lower ranking Democrats that are espousing the right ideas about things like the filibuster, gerrymandering, and even some that are agitating about the electoral college BS. The best strategy I see right now is to clear as many Republicans out of office as we can, and support the newer, lower-level representatives that are aiming to affect real change.

My voting strategy has always been to “vote blue, no matter who” on the top of the ticket, then do my research and be more selective about the offices lower down, especially in the primaries. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter if more progressive candidates take hold of the House and the Senate if everything they pass just gets vetoed by the fascist in the Oval Office anyways.

You do realize that she’s the Vice President and doesn’t actually have any authority or power unless Biden kicks the bucket, right?

Because it really seems like you think that she has any ability to make unilateral decisions or enact her policy platform right this second, and that simply isn’t the case.

America is, unfortunately, a two party system. If not enough people vote for Harris, Trump wins. Period. There are no options besides Harris and Trump, and only one of them has talked about how Israel should literally nuke Gaza (I’ll let you take a guess on which one it was.)

I see your idealism, and I agree that any amount of genocide is unacceptable, but letting Trump win will just accelerate the genocide in Gaza, expand it to the West Bank (more noticeably, anyways), and likely start new genocides here in America. I’ve been writing to my representatives and sending them articles about the atrocities being committed by the IDF and imploring them to do something about it…but I’m not dumb enough to withhold my vote from the Centrists and allow the Fascists to take over.

I repeat: withholding your vote from Harris is effectively a vote for Trump because America is a two party system, and there’s only two options to pick from.

I was following along with some of your other comments and whatnot, but this diatribe tells me a lot about your intentions behind this post.

I have ADHD, and I’m a medical student. I suppose in your mind that makes me one of the “dumbest motherfuckers” in training, but I will speak from the education and authority that I do have. There are many health conditions and comorbidities that can make stimulants a bigger risk than they’re worth. Personally, I have idiopathic sinus tachycardia, so my psychiatrist had me get a consultation with Cardiology before she would prescribe a stimulant because one of the major risks of stimulant medications is Sudden Cardiac Death Syndrome (which is exactly what it sounds like) and if you have a high heart rate or other cardiac or electrophysiological abnormalities, it drastically increases your risk.

I get that getting by without medication is extremely difficult for some people. I had to do my first semester of medical school on hard mode while I got my official diagnosis and medical clearance for treatment sorted out. Healthcare access, particularly mental healthcare access in America (and pretty much everywhere else for mental health) is criminally abysmal, but that is not an excuse to encourage people to ignore medical advice and consensus regarding medication safety.

(And as a side note: Surgeons are really good…at anatomy. Most of the surgeons I have worked with would really prefer it if the primary care/family med/internal med/literally-anyone-else doctors did the pre- and post-op medication management. Anesthesiologists are the ones that are intimately acquainted with pharmacology when considering physicians in the OR)

I’m repeating my reply to someone else in the thread so hopefully more people can see it:

I looked it up and read through the NIH paper that did a review of available information about it. It’s essentially a recreational drug that can be formed in your body when you take methylphenidate and alcohol at the same time.

I will put out this caution though: there were a lot of reports of bad trips, worsened focus/cognition, dangerous side effects like increased heart rate and body temperature, and there was a very high rate of addictive responses. So it may sound like fun, but you’re running the risk of causing yourself a lot of problems and using Ethylphenidate (or methylphenidate plus alcohol) may make your regular ADHD meds less effective and lead into addiction problems.

TL;DR: This is a dangerous, bad idea and as a medical student with a decent understanding of pharmacology, I do NOT recommend doing this.

I looked it up and read through the NIH paper that did a review of available information about it. It’s essentially a recreational drug that can be formed in your body when you take methylphenidate and alcohol at the same time.

I will put out this caution though: there were a lot of reports of bad trips, worsened focus/cognition, dangerous side effects like increased heart rate and body temperature, and there was a very high rate of addictive responses. So it may sound like fun, but you’re running the risk of causing yourself a lot of problems and using Ethylphenidate (or methylphenidate plus alcohol) may make your regular ADHD meds less effective and lead into addiction problems.

And as long as CPR machines are obscenely expensive and difficult to obtain and maintain for a lot of smaller hospitals and EMS systems.

Here’s the problem with that: it relies on things like the LUCAS CPR assist machine which doesn’t fit on a lot of people. I’ve done CPR on a lot of people, and only a handful of them would have even fit in a LUCAS in the first place.

When I was working as an ER tech, I had a patient that was in the early stages of DTs in the lobby because he lied and told the medics in the ambulance that he was having a panic attack. We were up to 8 hour waits in the lobby and non-critical ambulances were being brought out to the lobby. He was perfectly lovely the entire time, but around the 5 hour mark when the valium was wearing off, he started sweating and shaking profusely. I had to have our registration folks distract his dad so I could ask him privately if he was withdrawing from alcohol. When he said yes to that question, that bought him a ticket to the front of the triage line and we got him into the next available room.

I will remember that incident for the rest of my career, because if I hadn’t looked at his medical record to see that he had previously had a consultation regarding alcohol cessation and known what the symptoms of withdrawal looked like, I wouldn’t have pulled him aside to get the truth of the situation and things could have gone extremely badly for him. I can’t imagine what he was feeling, devolving into DTs in front of his dad who was so judgemental that he had to lie to the medics about what he needed help for.

Withdrawal from many drugs is miserable to go through, but because of the chemical mechanism of the dependency formed in alcohol use disorder, withdrawal from alcohol can lead to death without other comorbidities or complications. Some of the symptoms of acute withdrawal include delirium tremens and seizures which, while awful, are just the harbingers of the later stages of acute alcohol withdrawal that lead to death. This is also ignoring the plethora of other health problems that can develop as a result of long term alcohol use disorder, many of which can be fatal all on their own.

It’s also one of the most dangerous drugs to try to quit. Going cold turkey on alcohol can very well be lethal.