Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Styxhexenhammer666"
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@SoilToSoul Nature also has buffering effects. Better conditions for plant and coral growth, which locks carbon up in living and dead and decaying plant matter, coral skeletons (reefs). The Kaibab Limestone that's the common cap-rock in the Grand Canyon is super thick and super extensive. Just think of all the CO2 Mother Nature locked up, right there.
But don't ask me about the chemistry. CO2's solubility in water is higher at lower temps. So I think that's in line with warmer temperatures spurring coral growth, the same way they spur stalactite growth. Colder water dissolves lime better than hot, because there's more carbonic acid dissolved in it.
My guess is that in the end, The Science will say that CO2 emissions are a net benefit, but that emissions are still a problem for all the other stuff they pump into the atmosphere, the metallic impurities in coal and so on. Then they'll circle back to "clean-burning fossil fuels," and "natural gas, the hero we deserve." But by then, the world will be a much poorer place.
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@thewayfarer8849 : Most of academia consists of very narrow-minded, narrow-specialty "scholars," who think being expert at ONE THING makes them all-knowing and morally superior to everyone else, and especially anyone who disagrees with whatever narrative the New York Times or CNN is pushing on any particular day. Their reasoning powers are not that great, generally speaking. They're really good at memorizing facts long enough to pass a test, for the most part. And that's how they teach.
As a member of academia, I'm nothing special, but I do notice that I'm much broader than most of my peers (better read in history, especially, but other fields, generally), much more "live and let live" in outlook, and much more respectful towards people OUTside of academia. The more you learn about different subjects, the more humble you seem to get, because you realize nobody can do everything, and we all need each other, especially people who work with their hands, which requires a lot more brain work than even THEY appreciate, because to THEM, anybody could do what they do.
This is pretty common amongst people who are truly skilled at something. They look back and don't see themselves as God's Gift or anything. They just know how much time they put in honing their skills, and see it as more of a stick-to-itiveness thing than a talent thing. I feel the same way about MY skills. If you put in as many hours as I did on math, you'd probably be a better mathematician. Not talent. Just persistence.
In academia, though, people think that because they put in all those hours, they're somehow more gifted than everybody else, because they more than most people about one thing. In the workaday world, people don't put on such airs, but I see a good dry-waller doing what would take me 100 hours in 1/2 hour, and doing it better, and I'm just as impressed by that as I'm impressed by a historian who knows what day Socrates was born.
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I disagree. The slow escalation could lead to a major break. As StormShadow and if ATACM, then Russia might say "Screw it!" Russia's been mobilizing, training, and blooding its forces, and are closer and closer to being able to just roll to the Polish and Rumanian borders. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are going all-out to impress NATO before the meetings, next week.
Ukraine's getting some propaganda footage, from Russian infantry retreating, but it's all of a piece. "Chase us. We retreat, and call in artillery." The Ukrainians do seem to have better precision munitions, but they don't have very many, and the West is hard-pressed to supply a strategically significant number of such munitions.
The Russians have a lot of tanks. If they decide to go all-out, they can sacrifice a lot of tanks to get a location on the batteries taking them out. Frankly, I don't think they'd have to sacrifice very many tanks, and may even rig up some remote-controlled vehicles just to draw fire. I think the Ukrainians will run out of ammo long before they make a significant dent in an all-out, combined-arms assault. I think it's just a matter of time until Russia feels like it's ready.
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I think a LOT of people think Gay Pride events are creepy, but respect their right to be weirdos. I think the vast majority agree that whom you are attracted to is not a choice. To the extent that what goes on is between consenting adults, and no one is hurt, I think 90% of us accept the rights of people to do whatever. But this LGBT acceptance has turned into "Every day is 'let's tell gays how wonderful they are' day. Nobody wants that. Most LGBTs don't want that. But it's in everybody's face, every day. Rainbow this. Rainbow that. Worship the rainbow. Do not question or criticize the rainbow.
A dash of "words are violence" false equivalencies, and an apparent untoward interest in children that is being pushed is turning things ugly. I grew up before acceptance of gays was the norm, and I think we can all too easily slip back to those days, as the pushback against the attack on our children's innocence grows to the point of militancy, because these people will not relent in their assault on child HEALTH and SAFETY. When you start a pre-pubescent on hormone blockers, you're on a path to their chemical sterilization. Their organs do not develop normally or fully. That little boy, Jazz, was put on blockers, and they surgically made him a girl as a teenager, because his penis and testes never developed.
On and on. My whole point is that LGBT, entire, will be hated, if this pedo nonsense doesn't stop.
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Accidents of nature occur in dogs and humans. Some pups and some kids are just born psychopaths. But with 99.99% of dogs, if you raise it properly, it will be a calm, well-behaved dog.
Every pit or rott I've ever known was gentle with its family. Depending on how bad the owner was, the dog would be more or less aggressive towards strangers. I just never felt like pits or rotts were very practical dogs. They're city dogs, never far away from shelter. Most rotts would be pretty useless on the trail. Good for pulling a milk cart at a slow walk from a couple miles out of town.
Every farmer I've ever known, and all the farm kids I grew up with, had guns close to hand. As soon as a kid's big enough to hurt themselves with one, they're taught about them. They watched their dads (and sometimes moms) shoot, field dress, and at least hang a carcass, if not butcher it, themselves. You don't deprive a child of a roof over their head because they might kill themselves falling off it. On a farm, you are the nearest law enforcement. That pistol's no good to you in a pinch if it's locked in a safe.
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Farley Moab : The USA elected Trump. Things had already gone too far for Working Americans, before 2016. There's still a lot of inertia in government institutions consisting of the same lefty, I'm-smarter-than-you types embedded in government and education, not to mention leaking over into the private sector, with diversity officers (Soviet Commissars) finding work at major corporations and pushing the same Obama-executive-order mandates that never passed the smell test in the legislature, but which bureaucrats, without the legal authority to do so, went ahead and "passed" by what is essentially DECREE.
As a faculty member at an American college, I'm obliged to take Title IX training, every year. At first, I thought it was because the training must suck that taking it once isn't sufficient, but it's because with annual training, they can update us on the latest re-defining of dictionary terms for things. To get their way, liberals are incessantly re-defining terms to suit themselves, and these trainings are how the Establishment get these new, language-and-meaning-destroying terms out into the public sphere, by making SURE that all teachers take the same indoctrination, every year, like computer updates.
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@rexcatston8412 Yes. Roe v Wade is a very shaky decision, defended by hysteria rather than logic. It's based on 1960s (early '70s) science establishment's understanding of the viability of the fetus. As we push the definition of "viable life" closer to the moment of conception, we push the definition of legal abortion closer to the moment of birth. This was bound to reach a flashpoint, eventually.
Roe v Wade was unassailable, with all the momentum, for a long time, but it's going to be revisited, with 50 years of new science informing the decision.
One day, we'll be able to store fertilized embryos indefinitely, making much of the abortion question moot, or at least changing the discussion quite radically. Why abort when you can put the kid on ice 'til you're ready to raise it?
Anyway, this is a discussion that Styx sounds awfully unprincipled about. A libertarian arguing against the civil rights of the very young, essentially.
It's just a very sad thing. We've been committing infanticide since the Stone Age, and probably administering abortifacts since that time. Hunter-gatherers are pretty savvy about such things, always on the lookout for new food sources, trying to eat just about everything they could lay their hands on in the battle for survival. I imagine it was always a sad thing, done only in extremis, in times of famine, and often after birth.
Too many mouths to feed. The tribe can't afford it, but always wishes it could. It's especially heartbreaking in a civilized society with real resources and supposedly real education. Abortion should be safe and rare. With over 3 million a year, it's not at all rare, which should be a major embarrassment, at the very least. Many view it as a human rights atrocity, and a clear indication of a dysfunctional society.
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YouTubers LOVE the monetization feature, but those advertising dollars come from very repressed advertisers, who are terrified of their brand being associated with ANYthing controversial. If you want to stay monetized, your content needs to look and feel like the content that the MSM have been cranking out on commercial t.v. since the '50s. You're free to use foul language and take risks on YouTube, but don't expect advertisers to follow you there.
YouTubers are in the unique position of decrying corporate practices while relying on corporations to fund their offerings. It wasn't going to last long, anyway. If you want to make it on YT, for REAL, and post the content you WANT to post, then you need to reach out to direct subscribers and get them to part with some coin. That's why viewers are smart to support the people they really like, and cut the corporations out of it. I think it's a bit hypocritical to whine about being de-monetized, when you're posting content that Big Business doesn't want to support.
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Some good points. Some sort of garbled ideas you might reflect on and re-state better another time.
Trump changed some things for the better, but there were just too many bad appointments, and too many times he got out-maneuvered and hornswoggled by careerists and other insiders. His own people lied to him and he lacked the discernment and administrative skills to suss it out. He saw the big picture, but he was too lazy about key details. He was by turns too brash and too timid.
He left CRT training in place in the military and all government agencies and institutions receiving federal money. He could've ended it all with ONE executive order, the same way that crap got started by Obama executive orders. All those institutions are blue thru and thru, i.e., what we USED to call 'pinkos.' So that Marxist, authoritarian stuff was embraced like a long-lost child. And it went on, full steam ahead, for 4 years, and not a word. It was something well within his power to change with the stroke of a pen.
No, the army's not gonna pay for your bottom surgery and hormone treatments. No, the Navy isn't going to waste time on 500 pronouns. No, agencies of the federal government will not be taught segregation and racial preferences. That's BASIC and FUNDAMENTAL stuff that he just let slide until he was a lame duck. Was it an oversight or was it political cowardice or did he just want that s*** to continue? I don't know. I just think that, at best, he was in over his head.
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Chimera XDX : They're thrashing and trashing, because they've enjoyed uninterrupted success for so long, and they're caught in a rip tide that threatens to un-do decades of uncontested domination of the public square. All this shit is indicative of LOSS OF CONTROL. It'll probably get worse before it gets better, but we're at a tipping point, where the more crazy and violent they get, the more they marginalize themselves.
It's easy to forget just HOW dominant on college campuses and government these idiots have been and for how long. It only SEEMS like things are careening out of control because of their lunatic knee-jerk reaction to THEIR loss of control. Everywhere they look, there's another heretic. They PERFECTED their control of education only to see "rebellious youth" (just like the '60s) re-defining "cool" as speaking truth to THEIR power, and just like Bible-thumping dogmatists of the '60s, they're powerless against anti-establishment satire and derision. It's driving them crazy. But they're really not that powerful.
All these big outfits that are trying the same-old, same-old control strategies are cutting their own throats. FaceBook was invincible until it wasn't. Google has a major toe-hold into education institutions but the institutions themselves are systematically marginalizing themselves. They live in an echo chamber, and the rest of the world is passing them by. As a college prof, I'm seeing some AMAZING kids coming up. I thought I was hot shit as a teenager, and these kids are coming in, 16 and 17 years old, taking Calculus III, which I didn't get to until my 2nd year in college, around age 20.
You wait and see. Success breeds success, and the top-down controlling motherfuckers are defenseless against the ground-up (r)evolution that's taking place.
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A lot of people also live wastefully. There are some kernels of truth in the sustainable living narrative. I think permaculture is pretty cool stuff. I like arranging things so I don't burn a lot of fuel in my day-to-day life. Of course, I still want the option of affordable transportation, too, and that means fossil fuel. We should evolve to a lighter footprint, but not forced evolution by people who are more interested in THEIR solutions rather than letting us come up with our own. The regulators are WAY behind us on home construction, and the regulations keep us from building smarter. Too much cheaper to build a wooden box aboveground than an earth-sheltered home with a daylight basement.
Yes, little EVs for tooling around and close to town make sense. But don't suck up all the battery production on replacements for all work and pleasure-trip vehicles. I think a 2- or 3-wheeled EV that can handle my shopping and errands around town makes a ton of sense. But when I want to go over 100 miles? I'd rather watch my fuel gauge than my battery level. It's like having a car with a tiny tank and the mileage gets worse and worse every time you fill the tank AND it takes too long to fill the tank.
That said, over time, standardized battery "cassettes" might be good. You go to a charging station and they swap out your battery for a charged battery, and the charging station is constantly charging x number of batteries. That solves the fill-up problem. I can see that kind of thing working in the city and stations springing up farther and farther out, over time. But let it grow organically, as the market allows. Don't force it. The fear mongers always reveal their urge to rule underlying their urge to save when they resort to force.
This channel ain't about force.
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@r.cogburn816 : Hey, Rooster! What government does NOT have is millions of volunteers who can overwhelm just about anything they try to do on the Interwebz. VEWRY difficult for them to totally suppress real news, when everybody everywhere has a smart phone. Sure, the MSM still control what THEY put out, but for the last 10 or 20 years, they haven't had the absolute monopoly that they enjoyed for decades. We see what Google's doing, and we recognize it for the clumsy top-down control-everything bullshit that the establishment has always done, but they can't QUITE shut us all down at the same time, and they have no counter to the "Streisand Effect."
We've gotta flip all the questions, like - dare I say - Trump does. Got an administration shot full of never-trumpers and other leftists? Don't worry about getting rid of them. Just keep appointing your own people, to where anybody up to no good in can no longer be sure that his pal over in State or her buddy in the DOJ has got their back. Can't fight those infiltrators, directly, but you just keep building the pressure on them, until they end up fighting each other, which we're about to see, I hope.
Most of all, with ALL the programming talent out there, we need something like Bit-Chute only BETTER. Take the key functionalities of YT and improve on them. Make your new platform quicker, slicker, and with better discussion clients. YT client is better than Bit-Chute, but that's setting a pretty low standard.
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You can take ALL the money of the rich, and it won't be enough. Maybe it can give you a nice bump, short term, but you end up killing the goose that lays the golden egg, which government MUST have in place, in order to tax and spend. In the end, the people who end up shouldering the burden are the hard-working people in the middle class, and the elites don't care if they drag the middle class down into poverty. They'll just have programs to help them.
The trouble with a program for everything is that somebody has to pay for it, and you eventually run out of people with the ability to pay. Nanny government is a Ponzi Scheme, that politicians specialize in, because it wins (buys) votes in the short term, but sows the seed of eventual malaise, with a people who are less and less able to care for themselves, and people who CAN take care of themselves are essential to create the golden eggs that government wants to divide amongst its captive voting public.
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I think we're just waking up after 1984 already happened! And now that people are waking up, they're using the same exact tools that they've always used, only they're obsolete tools. Yes, Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, Milo Yiannopoulis, Paul Joseph Watson, and others appear to be hurt by it, but I think they're simply switching to alternatives. Alex Jones still has a HUGE following. FaceBook banning them is only hastening the demise of FaceBook. YouTube banning and shadow-banning these individuals is the beginning of the end for YouTube. Google is going to have a Microsoft kind of presence, because libtard institutions have chained themselves to their "fre,e" services.
I just don't think - short of destroying the Internet, itself - that there's any way for them to squeeze like they have in the past. And the more they shut down the Loomers and Watsons, the more blowback they will suffer. I think they're very afraid, and they still wield considerable power. But I think there's a sea change taking place. There's a tipping point for everybody. For some, it was Alex Jones. For some, it'll be Styxhexenhammer666. People will vote with their feet in a big way, and these behemoths will see the sand slip through their iron grip. I think it's inevitable, short of the end of civilization and the Internet backbone. THAT is my main worry. I'm just not sure if there're any real limits to what the establishment elites will do.
Like China, I just don't think they'll be willing to do without systems on which they depend. So those systems will remain in place. And they can't control those systems like they could a relatively small number of major media outlets, starting with ABC, NBC, CBS and later on PBS over the airwaves. Cable is still a matter of getting your channel included in the "bundle," which was also fairly easy to control. But now, the Internet is 2-way, so consumer can almost immediately become producer, and they can't suppress all of that without losing all the functionality on which THEY depend.
Yeah, Big Tech has a helluva head start, thanks to a lot of government kick-start funding and favoritism. But the bottom line is the "controlled" product is clearly inferior. The bureaucrats have NEVER been particularly competent. They've been good at one thing: Staying In Control. But their controls are inadequate to the current task. They can control/subvert CNN to their hearts' content, but it's all for naught if nobody's watching! LOL!
I say it's the same in China, because they can not compete with the best talent from around the world without developing their OWN talent, and THAT means creating a growing number of people with KNOWLEDGE and MEANS, who can't be controlled by (incompetent) leaders, who depend on them to run all their control schemes. The FACT of connectivity is creating a population that's evolving MUCH more rapidly than the controllers can keep up with, and the controllers DEPEND on this evolving populace to manage all their control systems. The Chinese can't compete with free people without allowing (or enabling) freedom in their OWN house. Wait and see. If they don't tear the whole thing down with Nuclear War or something equally devastating, I think distributed power will defeat centralized power.
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@Chud_Bud_Supreme : You can see AntiFA types following the Alinsky play book, but you can also see that those tactics are no longer as effective, with every Tom, Dick and Harry having a smartphone, so the street tactics paint them in a bad light; whereas, a decade or two ago (and before), when the lamestream media had a monopoly on video (and would swarm the occasional citizen with video), it's a lot harder to cherry-pick.
You see this in the Covington Kids case. The legacy media still operate the same way, and by playing the one juicy clip that makes the kids look bad, were running with it, as they have with all such events in the past, to paint a narrative-affirming picture. But in less that 24 hours, the "extended cut" had made the rounds, and the Internet knew it was a bunch of bullshit, while the lamestream were still pushing the standard narratives. They used to get away with that shit, and they still haven't changed their modus operandi, which has given them yet another black eye.
They're all fooled, because they're still managing to fool their ever-shrinking audience, as ever. But they're living in that shrinking echo chamber, not realizing (until it's too late) that they do NOT have the monopoly on the narrative any more. It's amazing at how blind they are to the fact that the curtain's been pulled back and that millions of ordinary people are WATCHING them pulling their levers. Toto, who pulled back the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, takes the form of a multitude of independent content creators and regular folks with smartphones.
We really saw this at the peak of the campus hate mobs before and after 2016. The media was pushing the same narratives it pushed back in the Free Speech protests, half a century ago, but it was plain to millions of people that the protesters were actually hate mobs. Those tactics are still working in Canada, with more restrictions on media and the Internet, where you REALLY have to be creative to get something not sanctioned by the Canadian government and the Canadian Broadcasting Company. In the USA, there're more people willing to put themselves out there and show the shit for what it is. In Canada, you can be arrested for covering things the way we dirty USA citizens cover things.
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I agree, Tony Mathis. If Trump IS a good guy on this issue, this is still how he needs to play it, publicly.
It's crazy, but I keep coming back to James Clavell's "SHOGUN" when I see how things are playing out with Trump. Toranaga would posture one way and then the other. Only he knew the full array of forces against him and how he needed to posture in often contradictory ways. The emperor summoned him to Kyoto, where he would undoubtedly be killed, and his supporters were SHOCKED when he immediately agreed. But he knew that if he refused, he would be killed (ordered to commit seppuku on the spot), and if he agreed, he would be killed (ordered to commit seppuku) when he arrived in Kyoto. So he agreed, and - surprise, surprise! - he "fell ill" and had to postpone his trip.
Meanwhile, he'd maintained a very firm anti-Christian stance in order to mollify his "base," and then out of the blue, he agreed to let the Portuguese build the biggest cathedral in Japan in his own capital, and suddenly the Christians were on HIS side. He put that thorn in their paw (rabid anti-Christian stance) just so he could be the guy to pull that thorn, later. This tipped the balance of power in his favor, winning all the Christian daimyos (lords) to his side.
Trump did something very similar with DACA. Took a hard-line stance AGAINST it, in order to get the Democrats to say how unreasonable he was, and how unwilling he was to compromise. They even conceded a point or two on border security measures, just to show how reasonable THEY were, and it threw them into a tailspin when he suddenly reversed his stance on DACA. He obtained concessions by taking a hard-line position that he really didn't intend to push to the limit. He was just posturing. Negotiating. Bargaining.
The Democrats then freaked, and their only comeback at THAT point was to publish some Obama-era photos of children sleeping on concrete under space blankets. That's when "child separation" became the big meme, because he pulled the rug out from under them on DACA. Child separation remains a buzz phrase in far-left circles, but Trump took a big bite out of their credibility when the "child separation" thing was debunked as an OBAMA policy.
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The coalition of guilt-ridden and entitlement-driven is fragmenting. Huge voting blocs, whom the left had in their hip pockets for generations are breaking away. African-descended voters used to vote 90% or more for liberal Democrats in the USA. They're dividing along the "Leave me alone, so I can do for myself" vs "Take care of me" crowd, much as any other racial or ethnic group. Democrats used to count on similar numbers from the Latino vote. That's going away, too, and the INEVITABLE DOMINATION BY THE LEFT, on the verge of manifesting, here and abroad, is turning into a "Democrats are now a marginalized minority" situation.
And they're using every dirty trick and smear tactic at their disposal, starting with the NOW-marginalized, so-called mainstream media. Unlike the USA, however, the other countries don't have a 1st Amendment, guaranteeing Free Speech. And their governments are used to just taking whatever powers suit them, in the moment, so they censor the Internet. They're trying to censor it in the USA, as well, but it's much more difficult to totally silence the growing dissent.
The only question in my mind was how far the left would take things before the inevitable blowback. The farther it went - or so I speculated - the bloodier the "correction" would eventually be. But I'm used to the U.S. Constitution, and parliaments are much more subject to the day's political weather than in the U.S. They're much more responsive to the daily whims of the public, so they go over the deep end, quicker, and correct their course, quicker. Not as well thought out and deliberate, because they don't have to navigate protections built in for the dissenting minority in the USA.
I like the more deliberate American way, because the weakest and poorest are ALWAYS the ones done the most damage by sudden shifts in policy at the top. The best thing you can do for the disadvantaged is to have a stable rule set and compassionate INDIVIDUALS, rather than a government that can only PRETEND to be the expression of its people's compassion.
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Bottom line for YouTube is the same for all platforms, these days. The monetization of content. They had huge assistance/capital behind their startup, and had their bandwidth and server storage all set up before they made a nickel. And they took over the fledgling market by offering so much for free. The entire enterprise was set up like a "loss leader" sale at the grocery store, or free samples from a dope dealer that get you hooked.
But making it truly profitable without a subscription model is very difficult. Most people got hooked on free stuff (with commercials), and they're generally easy to manipulate, and their content is pre-sanitized, in keeping with the mores of corporate/government establishment in our fascist system. But they're STILL losing money on all the NPCs, and the sanitization of content is disgusting to most who would be willing to pay.
I paid for YouTube Premium for a time, hoping to encourage YouTube to free itself from the shackles of its awful business model (and corporate advertisers). It just got WORSE. So I canceled.
The algorithm forces content creators to produce content every day, to keep the algorithm happy. Tim Pool's a master of this. There are others who produce fresh content, daily. Styx is one. He does it on the cheap, says what he wants, and keeps it short. Even then, he's often just following the news cycle, and I may or may not watch stuff like that, because everybody ELSE has a take on it.
The bottom line is almost NO ONE has enough to say to justify daily shows, especially daily shows of more than just a few minutes.
Paul Harvey did it for DECADES before the Internet. He did his own research, and had a team of helpers, always scouring all the news feeds for gems that no one else was talking about. He was sort of hybrid old and new. You could probably re-run his shows and it'd still be relevant (mostly).
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Then there're guys like Limbaugh and Crowder. Limbaugh did it pre-Internet. But neither of those two really had enough fresh to say to keep their daily 2- or 3-hour shows worth your while, unless you're stuck on a road trip, or have it on in the background.
Your average "good" creator has maybe a solid half-hour per WEEK to offer up. But they all want daily shows, to make money. and so it gets padded with fluff and personalities and personality cults. I remember this happening to Jamie Dukes (Put up your dukes!"), who started with a half-hour show, which was pure gold, so they expanded his show to 5 days a week, and it started to suck after a week or two.
You can tell when a content creator's jumping the shark, trying to drum up views for $$$, and that's where click-bait comes in. It works, for a time. But the public slowly (It's actually very fast, and accelerating) figures out that the titles and the content aren't matching up, or they're REALLY stretching a point for clicks. To observers in real time, the positive evolution is taking place at a snail's pace, but from "System Control"s point of view - and from the historical perspective 50 years from now - things are changing SUPER fast.
Bottom line is that Styx's model is a pretty sound one. Grow no faster than your support. Eschew the "monetization" model so many others are tied to. Say what you want. Disperse your content across multiple platforms, like bread on the water, and live on DIRECT support.
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@BatalionHunter : And the state - socialist or otherwise - always has an interest in never-ending growth and expansion. That's a major cause of environmental degradation. Everybody has to produce an extra 20-30 percent on top of what they need to get by, just to pay for what the government's doing.
I think all the people who say "socialism has never been tried" need to start up their damn communes and prove it's a better way of life. Some people can do quite well under a socialist "family" setup. Trouble is, not everybody is family and not all families see the world the same way. That's the beauty of the U.S. Constitution. It's a way for people of ALL persuasions to have a BASIC rule set that doesn't tell anybody what to do or how to live, as long as they respect the rights of others. It's not perfect, but it's the best we've thought up, so far.
Socialism, on the other hand, to operate on a national level, MUST use authoritarian means to achieve its goals. And it can NEVER achieve 100% socialism, because government can't run EVERYthing. It's impossible. So it just targets the biggest stuff, the biggest industries, and then makes sweetheart deals with those industries in order to ensure their survival, so government can keep running them. Socialism, in practice, amounts to the robber barons' total takeover. Or the robber barons they replace the old, stupid ones with, after they kill them off and set themSELVES up as industrialists. Bureaucrats become industrialists! Nobody gets to keep the proceeds, but the guys on top somehow end up with limousines and 2nd and 3rd vacation homes, well out of the eye of the public.
Socialism takes the privileges that the lower classes resent and bestows them on a smaller oligarchy than the one the lower classes are conned into rebelling against.
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Good point, but not made often enough: Lots of people are struggling, right now, to cope with daily living, itself, especially with the COVID-19 crisis, and here are all these bratty, well-fed, well-dressed (even COSTUMED) individuals with lots of free time on their hands, bent on making things WORSE!
Small businesses on the brink of bankruptcy, people straining to pay their bills, and if you want to talk about rent moratorium, then you need to talk about property owners who aren't receiving the rents upon which THEY rely, and THEN if you say "Let the feds bail out the renters/landlords/etc.," and THEN talk about the American taxpayer, who in the end will have to pay - usually several times over, by the time the bureaucrats take THEIR cut - for ALL the stimulus and bailing out...
It's sheer madness, and the media are contorting themselves like world-class TWISTER masters, to present a totally false and contradictory world view. Please let the lies catch up to them, before it's too late for the rest of us!
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Same. Trump needs to call out those people. Peter Navarro, who was Trump's "jobs guy," said the same thing about the horrible appointments. But I haven't heard anything from Trump other than how great a job he did.
Also, skeezy as Biden's stripping Trump of executive privilege is, there is no law governing executive privilege. Only custom. Only doctrine. There is judicial precedent, most notably regarding Bill Clinton's executive privilege, which was upheld in court in 2012, I think. But all it takes is one judge deciding the other way, to change everything.
McMaster, Milley, Pompeo. Bolton, ... Most of his top generals were political promotions by and for Obama. There were other top appointments that were trash, like Wray. There were other political hacks he should've fired his first week in office, like Comey, Clapper and Brennan. Recall, Brennan, head of the CIA, pushing Russiagate Hoax nonstop? That should've ended with either Trump in jail for espionage or Brennan in jail for sedition and an attempted coup.
But somehow, Trump always backed down at the critical moment. Always maintained the never-ending drama, feeding the opposition's delusions and encouraging similar delusions amongst his supporters. Trump had innumerable opportunities to clear the air, and basically refused to do so. And meanwhile, Obama's insane and destructive CRT trainings permeated the entire Trump admin, all of public education, and the U.S. military. If Trump's the main culture warrior for honesty and sound policy, why didn't he do away with CRT training and Obama's more or less secret CRT mandates passed down to all organizations receiving any kind of federal funds.
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The mistake that we make is the same mistake they made with the Bolsheviks, long ago: We assume that the left are acting in good faith. They are not. They infect adult conversation with the kind of wheedling you only hear from children manipulating their mothers. It's a tactic that's worked their entire lives.
The thing about Tucker Carlson is he'll make a wonderful point and then follow it up by professing his faith and its absolute truth. I respect people of faith, but faith, by definition, is not a fact-based argument. it's "I'm right, because unicorns and rainbows," which is no different than those whom he criticizes. It's actually weaker, because the left doesn't admit their secular faith is just another cult like any other. And they have cult leaders embedded in academia, giving it a false patina of scholarship.
Ann Coulter's a good researcher and writer, but she's over the top when it comes to immigration. Trump's position is clear, and he's got 200 miles (and counting) of wall built, in the face of total opposition by career politicians.
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That's why I'm glad - and proud - to live in a country that guarantees the right to free speech. Oh, they're trying in the U.S. to crush all criticism of crazy left-wing ideology, but the government can't participate in that. It's restricted to mass (shrinking) media and government-run education - so I guess gov't DOES participate in the nonsense - which is bad enough, but we still don't see people being thrown in jail for their opinion, as they do in Europe (and just about everywhere else).
In the push to fight fascism in the 1940s, most of Europe went pretty fascist. They put lipstick on the pig with the label "Democratic Socialism," but it's all about government running everything. Like they had to bring down Hitler and Mussolini so they could incorporate many of their principles into their own nation states. Government-run health care? Prime feature of fascism. Government control of industry? Fascist. (And government "control" just means crony capitalism, with big businesses controlling the rule sets by controlling a small number of people in government.
We do the same thing - just not to as ridiculous a degree - in the USA. We stick it to the poor and the middle class on a daily basis by "going after" the robber barons, who've controlled the major agencies created to regulate them since the very beginning, with a revolving door between said industries and the agencies overseeing them. It's undeniably fascist, when you look at the relationships between defense contractors and government.
That's why Antifa is such a joke, here. People who support virtually every tenet of fascism, right down to their street tactics, in the name of opposing fascism.
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Sleepy also sticks because Biden DOES appear a little sleepy and off-stride. His gaffes used to be of the sharp-tongued variety. Now they're just kind of a vague thing, where he's speaking truth, but really hasn't thought out his arguments. It was a very legit point he was making about sitting down with segregationists and hammering out legislation. The point he was making was that people were still civil and able to get things done, even though the divide was much greater, in the past, than it is now. To him (and quite a few of us older folks), they're making 21st Century society sound worse than Jim Crow and it just ain't so. When things were worse, somehow both sides were more civil.
What Democrats still can't argue around is the fact that blacks were gaining ground on whites economically and socially much more rapidly before Lyndon Johnson than after. Democrats may mean well, but their policies foster dependence and a sense of entitlement. Blacks are disproportionately affected, because a higher % were poor when both the New Deal and the Great Society programs were enacted. Both also fostered loyalty to the people who "helped" when other people were down. But that gratitude has been turned into more of a means by which to KEEP people down, rather than LETTING them stand on their own two feet.
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Our medical care is a system where they tried to make everybody happy. Government's the biggest player. They set the prices. For some procedures they set their prices lower than the cost of the procedure. Causes distortions.
A little history: There was no such thing as health insurance until the big corporations needed a workaround for wage freezes imposed by the federal government in the 30s/40s, due to Depression or WW II. I forget which. Wage freezes imposed by the feds were a big competitive advantage to companies big enough to offer health benefits, without raising salaries. This gave those companies a huge advantage in the labor pool, and made them look like white knights to the public.
Before that, you bought the health care you could afford, and the community usually pitched in quite a bit, too, with fund-raisers for hospitals, and doctors that weren't rich, but the car dealer gave him a car, the contractor built him a house, the farmer gave him a cow, ... A good doctor was never hurtin' for money, and he spread his skills as far and wide as he could manage, and people felt pretty good about pitchin' in. It ain't like that, today. And given what advantages we have, we could do community hospitals like we used to, but government's removed that from our personal consideration, so we just think of it in terms of money and paying our bills and letting somebody else take care of it.
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A lot of highly partisan voters, with a 1950 or 1970 caricature understanding of conservatism, eat that shit up. That's why it persists. They have to keep it up, to keep THOSE people in line, rather than rushing off to vote Green or socialist or whatever crazy party that appeals to those types. They've lost most of the critical thinkers and just about everybody with an open mind and a memory for previous news cycles. Everywhere you cruise on the Information Interstate, you see nothing but 3-story collisions, and jack-knifed 18-wheelers loaded with fake news. People with the ability to remember the endless parade of hysterical smears are leaving the Demokkkrats in droves.
They're basically pandering to stupid people and people whose lives are too busy to check facts and do more than watch the same legacy channel every night. They're not necessarily stupid, but they're only listening closely enough to catch the fact that Trump is an evil, lying, demonic presence, bent on killing babies, oppressing women and everyone with a trace of pigment in their skin. They won't hear or see the retraction. They'll just remember that there was an endless stream of "facts" that "prove" Trump is terrible.
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Every time the bureaucracy encounters a snag, some stuffed-shirt generates another form and another office to process all those forms, and everybody on the job has to spend MORE time filling out forms. The forms are a substitute for good management. People trying to run everything by remote control. People who are out of touch with the actual product or service, let alone the customer. And every time they get a bright idea, they make MORE busy work for their workers, and rarely give any thought to the challenges facing the workers. Just add one MORE task to an already-full day.
Every time MY bosses get a bright idea, I figure THEY didn't think the work I was already doing was a full-time job. "What do I stop doing in order to have time to do all this new stuff? Oh, you just want me to work, late, take my work home every night. I get it." In the schools, the big "diversity" push takes the form of expecting teachers at the college level to teach all the high school stuff they didn't get in high school, simultaneous with the actual college-level course. And the teachers are expected to continue to pass ill-prepared students on to the NEXT level.
Real cognitive dissonance. And they HATE when teachers push back and say things like "The standards for this course remain the same. The more underprepared students you inject into courses, the more failure you will see." My dean actually told us all to make persons of color ESPECIALLY welcome. What? Make a big fuss over somebody's skin color? How condescending is THAT? They think they're being tolerant, but they're really just putting a happy face on their bigotry towards persons of color.
You know what makes a person of color confident? Being held to the same standard as everybody else and SUCCEEDING.
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@davidkavetsky2377 The 5 are too neocon for me. It basically looks like just another show like all the other networks do, only it's Republicans talking over Democrats instead of Democrats talking over Republicans. Either side of that you prefer, you're still falling for the notion that Dems and Repubs are the two - and the ONLY two - poles in the conversation.
Yeah, I used to hate what Juan Williams said, but the other 4 wouldn't let him finish and then rebut him, directly. They'd interrupt him and talk over him. Yes, you know he's engaging in spin and sophistry, but where's the rhetorical wherewithal to argue point by point? I think you can flay Juan Williams and 99% of the Dem shills they surround with 4 Republicans/conservatives. But the arguing is more partisan than philosophical. More about Dems over Repubs or vice-versa, which is a huge distraction from the truly important isues of our times. All of cable is about the news cycle and what's trending THAT DAY. Policy matters are all about months and years into the future. But none of 'em talk about that.
About the only FOX pundit who distills it down to its essence is Kat Timpf, the resident libertarian. But you never see her on the 5. She's on Gutfeld! and she's doing something with Tyrus on FoxNation, or was.
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The way the bureaucracy works, every manager wants more staff. One go-getter in mid-management can destroy your efficiency, by going the extra mile on something, making themselves a hero for all the marvelous things they're doing (also called 'meddling.'), and gee, they could do so much MORE if they had another assistant. They get a raise for going above and beyond. Then they get a raise for managing a bigger staff. We have these 'employees of the year' in a lot of places, especially in government.
I think remote work is fine, if you have the right people doing it, and you are good at measuring productivity. It saves a lot of energy and time. A lot of urban pathologies we see could be mitigated if there weren't millions of people commuting long distances, because of the cost of housing and/or just preferring to not live in the heart of the city. And some workers thrive working remotely. The main issue I see is lack of training and oversight. It's too new. I saw it during COVID where I work. As someone who already did a lot of their remote work, the crash course in remote work that everybody else at work took was NOT conducive to the best results. But it was more because they expected everyone to change overnight, instead of building the proper infrastructure and giving employees time to learn the new way, or opt out if they wanted to stick with the old way.
This is especially true in the public schools, where teachers just were not trained, properly, and neither were students. Throw in the fact that millions of parents got to see what losers some of the teachers were, and remote learning got a huge black eye, and CONSERVATIVES wanted to go back to the same crappy in-person learning. I guess if they can't see how bad the teachers are, things will be better... We always take the wrong lesson from our mistakes.
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@philagelio336 : Obama ended the Fairness Doctrine, which sort of kind of kept the news sort of objective. Now they've been green-lit to gas-light, and they're taking full advantage. I think Obama did us all a favor, though, because the bias has ALWAYS been there. They just stopped trying to hide it and candy-coat it, so it's obvious to everyone. They were MUCH more effective when they tried to hide what they were doing. Now it's all out in the open.
I actually kind of enjoyed the insanity coming out. For YEARS they've maintained this lie of objectivity. Now the mask is off. The curtain's pulled back. And everyone can see. The propaganda was much more powerful in years past, because guys like Ted Koppel would wear this fake mantle of objectivity, while spinning, cherry-picking, and mis-directing our attention.
Now it's blatantly partisan, which is causing quite a stir in the short term, but takes us back to an earlier time, when people didn't kid themselves about the press. The 1st Amendment is there so that EVERYbody gets to tell their lies, and EVERYbody knows the bias of a given rag.
The New York Times was a MUCH better purveyor of propaganda back in the days when people believed in it as the "newspaper of record." Now, they're so CLUMSY about it, that they've been reduced to tabloid status.
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Paul hugo : Yup. The CCP puts you in prison, types your tissues. Then waits for a rich American who wants a transplant. Then they kill the prisoner, harvest their organs and take in a cool $150,000 for the heart or liver. All told, they make about three quarters of a million dollars off executions. This is the kind of thing our elites will never address, because they might need a heart or kidneys, one day, and they don't want to be put on a waiting list like all the rest of us who do things legally.
You can NOT get an organ transplant on schedule without scheduling the execution of another human being. Rich people in America make organ-transplant appointments all the time. This is some very heinous shit and nobody's talking about it.
The CCP is absolutely ruthless, absolutely corrupt, as are all communist regimes. We should never trade with them and guard our secrets as closely as possible. If they couldn't steal from us, they would be about 50 years behind us, technologically, because authoritarian regimes can't innovate like free people always do.
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They wrote you and I off long ago. They're playing to the young, the ignorant and the indoctrinated. Keep in mind that there really wasn't much of an Internet at all, a mere 30 years ago. From a historical perspective things are changing very rapidly in very good ways, at a rate that surpasses the ability of centralized authorities to handle. It always has, actually, but it's never been more apparent than in the current era.
Next time you are appalled by what somebody types in the comments, remind yourself that the equivalent of that benighted individual from 30 or 40 years ago couldn't read or write. The dumbest of us is way smarter now than in the pretty recent past. At the same time, our "best and brightest" are slipping into mediocrity.
My rule of thumb is that the more wonderful/exalted a person is, the more deficiencies they're hiding from you. And that dumb-ass you look down your nose at has wisdom you never in your wildest dreams suspected.
Like that time I was lecturing to a bored and disinterested group of students in Finite Math, when all of a sudden, one of them had a seizure. I swear to God 3 EMTs emerged out of the class, somebody was calling 911, and the person having the seizure was taken care of like a billionaire at Johns Hopkins. The positive potential residing in all the shitheads around us is enormous. We just have to pick up a mirror and admit all the things we're shitheads about.
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Just being contrary, here, but I wonder how many YouTubers blame the algorithm, when it's actually just their schtick getting old. Maybe they grab audience because they're unique or events promote their content. I can think of one or two, like Alistair what's-his-name who did the Burger-King-BREXIT routine that went viral. I subscribed to his channel, thinking he'd have tons of fresh things to say, but he's either not as funny as he thinks or the sound reproduction is crap, or his rapid-fire dialect is just too mushy for me to understand, or something (He doesn't know how to work a mic like a pro should), but I'm not as enamored of his close-ups as he is, and that seems to be his favorite thing. Say something edgy and then zoom in on his grinning face.
Zeducation is kind of like that, too. Good stuff, but I don't want his face FILLING the screen, while he murmurs at full volume in my ear. Dude! Don't be a close-talker! Give me my 3 feet of personal space. The only time I'm that close to a person's face on purpose, it's because I'm about to kiss her.
Even without the algorithm pushing independents to play the game and post click-baity videos on a daily basis, sometimes multiple postings every day. Tim Pool's the biggest click-bait whore out there, but he puts in the work finding stories people are likely to click on. He's a liberal whose content is mostly critical of the left, not only because they have it coming, but also because he knows he'll get more views by grabbing conservatives than he'll get by catering to his skate-board buddies. Conservatives are HUNGRY for news that isn't totally sanitized of conservative ideology and then drenched in left-wing talking points.
The bottom line is that independent content creators often have GREAT things to say, but they run out of anything really fresh after a week or a month, like that Alistair what's-his-name. This happens to legacy media as well. The NFL is so big that there are daily hour-long or 2-hour shows from the same group of people, who ran out of fresh insights about 5 minutes into the show, and they've got another 2 hours to fill with drama and speculation. As a football fan, there's an ENDLESS amount of content that would keep me going, but they'd have to actually drill down to the deeper questions, analyze game film, and present some unexciting x's and o's analysis. I'd eat that shit up. But let's spend an hour on Colin Kaepernick, instead. That's trendy, right? gag
I think you've got enough stuff to share from your regular researches that your stuff is pretty fresh. Coming to YouTube with hours and hours of content already more or less queued up is smart. Plus it's just refreshing to see a guy I got my weed from in the '70s, but with libertarian/constitutionalist philosophy, instead of a trust-fund hippy's "Soak the rich! Corporations evil! Don't touch MY money or tax the property I inherited!" world view. Plus we're not getting baked, together. Just a smart, long-haired reprobate-lookin' dude who reminds me of people I grew up around and knew in school.
I wish that you independents would start collaborating and create a space where your stuff isn't going to be pushed down the stack by 3rd-party platform operators. Then you guys could trim what you put out, and refine it to that one half-hour of "fresh" that most creators can crank out per week without burning out or wasting the time of viewers. A few, like you and Pool and Dice and... who have survived the YT gauntlet should band together and lead the/a community of content creators.
I know I can generate an hour or two every day that's fresh. But I don't think there's a huge audience for higher mathematics, unless you're signed up for it! LOL! But you could reduce the pressure on creators to crank out something, every day, whether they have anything new to say or not. If they put out 1/2 hour per week of the best stuff they can dig up and refine for an audience, I think the quality and viewership would support a lot of people.
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Chavez didn't realize that the money from oil required heavy up-front investment. He just wanted to take money OUT of the oil business, and he wrecked the oil business in the process. Venezuela's got great oil reserves, but they can't extract it, profitably, unless oil prices stay above $100 per barrel. But at that threshold, there are a lot of competitors joining the market from around the world, so their profit margins are relatively slim. With all their eggs in the oil basket, they don't have anything else to make money with.
You see the same problem in the Middle East, where they just try to do everything with oil money, and the money never makes it to the people. They need to use that oil money to diversify, but it's easier to just live the high life and throw the people a bone, now and then, without ever helping the other portions of the economy to prosper.
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Yes. Buttigieg is right on this issue. Broken clock, etc.
This is the big authoritarian hole in nationalized health care. If everybody pays into a commons for health care, then people over-indulge in food, tobacco, alcohol, ANYthing, then everybody else in the society has a legit gripe with them. It suddenly becomes OK to mob a fat woman or surround and taunt a smoker. Not because they're being stupid with their own lives, but because they're taking money out of everybody else's pocket, by over-indulging. No, by indulging at ALL.
I don't "support" being overweight, but it's sure everybody's right to BE overweight. Just let them pay the consequences. And if you really think people ought to help, do the math. Look how many folks are makin' it on their own. If YOU help 2 people, and other folks LIKE you help 2 people, themselves, poverty would be eliminated.
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A true libertarian will NEVER win in a big way. It goes against their nature to chase after personal power like that, and a true libertarian won't make the moral compromises necessary to win a majority against people who will stop at nothing and stoop to anything.
I subscribed to Borysenko's channel when she first started. She was against critical race theory and had done some research on it. She's no Jordan Peterson, but she knew from her training as a team building consultant that grievance politics was poison in the workplace. Speaking against it got her kicked out of her progressive knitting circle, and she did a deep dive on the subject, sharing her journey on social media. She picked up an encouraging number of followers, and tried to make it her career.
i think in her core, she's still pretty indoctrinated in a leftoid way of thinking, arguing, and presenting herself. She strikes me as a progressive who doesn't like the stuff progressivism is putting out, but still thinks it's a matter of the wrong leaders than the wrong principles. I could be wrong. She's libertarian in some ways. Wants to make property tax voluntary (i.e. abolished) and get the government out of running the schools. But I have no idea how she feels about federal interventions in things like medicine, drugs, or agriculture.
She SAYS she's trying hard to get up to speed on what libertarianism is, which is her way of saying she has no real clue. Once you embrace the non-force principle, everything after that is very simple, requiring little additional learning. All you need is the ability to reason from that one axiom.
The fact that her first thought was not to block an asshole, but to try to get them BANNED for saying things she doesn't like, and the iron hand she shows in all her livestreams, suggests she's just another authoritarian grifting for power. Her whole thing about how she's "triggering" Styx seems torn from the Alinsky playbook. Her perception of "clankdom" just screams "I don't really understand this whole 'liberty' thing." I could never be a Kekistani, but I sure get a kick out of them or ignore them, by turns.
Too bad she didn't study math. If she went for an MS or PhD in math, where the whole point is to eviscerate your peers at the chalkboard, she'd be more tolerant of people who think differently or challenge her.
Anyway, I was an occasional Borysenko channel watcher, and this latest episode with Styx only confirms why I went there less and less frequently. Now, I may go back once or twice, over the next week or two, because the drama is mildly entertaining, I'm pretty much done with her. I'll always check in on Styx, every once in awhile, if I'm looking for an appropriately acerbic take on something that's REALLY stupid, depending on the news cycle.
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I think hybrid vehicles make a lot of sense, but I have very little confidence in the big automakers to make anything close to what I really want. I've owned several small pickups over the decades. As a man with a genetic defect, I was never going to start a family, so I never worried about seating for 4 or more. Pickup's just perfect.
Anyway, I loved my '74 Datsun, '82 Nissan (same company), '84 Toyota, '80 Ford, '93 Toyota, and current 2012 Toyota. The last one is a club cab with the back seat torn out, of course. The only thing wrong with all the rice burners up to '93 was the lack of power at highway speeds, and even though I'm an avid back-roader/off-roader, most of the drive getting there is highway, and most of that is up around the Continental Divide (in various Western states).
The only thing wrong with 2012 is it's a bit of a gas hog, getting around 20 mpg. The '93 is a bit better, but not much, and while it's better than the 4-bangers who went before, it's still slightly underpowered, which the 2012 definitely is not.
My ideal vehicle would be just like my '84, with hybrid boost and short-range electric option. It outperformed lifted rigs with oversized tires in everything except highway driving. Rough terrain or mud, I never had anything better. I know people who bought late-model HiLux for something comparable, but you have to order it from overseas, because apparently, the best that pre-EV tech has to offer is illegal in the states.
Yes. Modern computers do everything they can to keep the user from accessing the directory tree.
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If it weren't for the fact that legacy t.v. weren't an inferior product, losing viewership daily, their lunatic messages and messaging would've been accepted unquestioningly across the country. It still is, amongst the more benighted people who either don't know any better or it's just the way they've done things all their lives, since the long-ago. It's not their lies, so much, as the fact that those lies no longer enjoy a monopoly over the public square.
I think their last, best gasp, was mobilizing the entire country to support the war in Iraq. The unholy alliance between MSM and the state was at its peak. They rolled over anyone who got in their way. Then one of the few who voted against such nonsense was voted into the Presidency. And re-elected in 2012. In the meantime, better and better competition for MSM was asserting itself. The MSM has been under siege and is doing everything it can with OLD methods, to break free and take over, again. I think it's a forlorn hope, but if they succeed, through big tech and the movement for government interference (key to the wrong things happening is bringing in the government, which has a monopoly on FORCE but can be corrupted by bribing or otherwise coercing a very small number of people), then this will just be seen as a brief last gasp of informed populace reining in the state, and seeing it for what it is.
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I think Borysenko's a progressive Democrat who got kicked out of her sewing circle, because she's against Critical Race Theory. She is/was some kind of team-building consultant who recognized CRT as toxic to the work environment. That made sense. But she tried to turn that into a career.
She claims to be a libertarian, but doesn't ever talk about free-markets and limited government, that I know of. She's into the weeds on CRT, conspiracies, and trying to build a following. I liked some of her stuff on CRT, but she comes across as a Democrat who doesn't like CRT and wants pot legalized. It's not really clear - maybe because I don't follow, closely - what her actual policy positions are. When I tune in, it comes across as theater.
She has her "nothing controversial" segment, where they do some new-age, hippie wu-wu mysticism, with her Chuckie sidekick. Anyway, just semi-following, it looks like she's really struggling to get views. She seems to get 20 or 30 attendees to her livestreams, and her videos are pretty much tanked. If she got any traction as an actual libertarian, she'd be SWAMPED by left-wing trolls. Making a big fuss about 1 troll, and trying to get them banned from the platform is NOT how an actual conservative or libertarian would respond. First of all, a real conservative or libertarian would have THOUSANDS of foul trolls and death threats. At worst, they'd block somebody toxic from their feed.
What's maybe most annoying is her thumbnail, where she's always peering up at you over her glasses like a catfish on Tinder.
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@Mahaveez : I would think it wouldn't take a huge investment on the part of parents to make the cost of being caught very high and the likelihood of being caught very high. I mean, in a room full of 5-10-yr-olds talking about Barney or Pokemon or whatever kids talk about, these days, a pedophile is gonna stick out like a sore thumb, if they push the pedo or THEIR pedo agenda in any way. A parent can pretty easily monitor what their kids are up to with a good browsing-history that caches all the content, including the chats and asynchronous comment sections. The younger your kid is, the more you limit their online-browsing time, and the easier it is to read every single sentence they did. You can keep on top of your own kid pretty easily. I think there's a lot of learning they can do with their computers, but that doesn't have to mean they're accessing anything outside of the learning management system while doing so.
As they grow older, take off the leash. I'm not sure what age that is. 10? 12? 16? How long does it take to teach 'em not to get into the car with strangers or even friends, without a parent-approved reason and parent-approved friend.
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Don't go down the "spirit of the first amendment" rabbithole, Styx. Next you'll be saying things like "penumbra," and suddenly it'll be OK for gummint to step in for our own protection. Don't be stampeded by the wrong tactics into asking for government help. It's like asking the Cosa Nostra for help. Sure, they'll help. But then they'll own the platforms, for all practical purposes.
Fascists teach that you don't have to be government-owned in order to be government-controlled, which is why intelligent people with a grasp of reality and history make no real distinction between fascism and communism, even though they hate each other, but it's the hate of competitors who use the same exact tactics and create the same authoritarian/totalitarian systems, once in power. It's not a philosophical difference, really. It's just brand competition, like Kellogg's fighting with General Mills.
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We're seeing a media blitz reminiscent of the run-up to the Iraq War. But I think people have wised up - or some of them, at least.
I remember being surprised at how many liberals were all fired up to mess up Iraq. How the media universally beat the drums, and how cool it was for them to be "embedded with the troops," fawningly reporting on our heroes in the desert, in lock step with what George II wanted to do. I never was, because I knew the U.S. didn't have the economic will to follow through on the killing with a serious Marshall Plan.
As I expected, they half-assed the Peace, destroying military assets and seizing key strongpoints, but we really didn't commit enough troops or humanitarian and institution-building resources to get 'em up 'n' runnin', so we could set 'em loose, with the memory of the destruction that'd rain down when they flouted international law and the sovereignty of their neighbors.
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We're having mini-revolutions on a daily basis. There's a passel of whip-smart kids comin' up, all under the radar. Yeah, the ed system ain't what it oughta, but I've never seen as many advanced students of high-school age coming through the calculus, like happened last semester. They're a full year ahead of anything any of my peers did, by or before their 18th birthday. A year-and-a-half or 2 years ahead of where I was at their age, and far more disciplined than I, by far.
It kinda doesn't matter how bad your teacher is, nowadays, because you can go online and find somebody who does it the (a) way you understand. You can't MAKE Johnny learn, but if he wants it, there's nothin' stoppin' 'im.
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Yes. You touch on the irrationally rational practice of religion. It's probably a bunch of made-up bullshit, but those who cling to it have a way of crowding out those who do not. The Gnostics were possibly the most pure followers of Jesus there were, in some ways, and as a result they didn't innovate in order to be stronger, politically. They didn't strategize to grow their church as an institution.
One of the earliest techniques used by organized Christians was the Potluck Dinner. And, as so many gentiles expected pork in their diet, well, then, Peter figured pork was OK, even though the early Christians, as converted Jews, still held to the teachings of Judaism, which forbids pork. The Gnostics disappeared. Peter's Church eventually took over Rome, and by the time it did, it bore little resemblance to your basic "Learn from Jesus" Gnostics.
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Make them play by fair trade rules if they want to trade. And tax the shit out of the slave-produced goods. If we do that, our products will be super-competitive, because our workers are way more productive. This will come at some cost, short-term. And we need to use those tariff revenues to target affected individuals. And as for the miniscule number of farmers who depend on selling soy to China, help them transition, short-term, but tell them the free ride's ending and they either start growing something else, or go broke.
Same for sugar-beet farmers, whose support has us paying double the price for sugar, already. That's protectionism, which is a separate (but related) deal.
We can profit, short-term, as can GOOGLE, the NBA and a plethora of other tiny interest groups. But long-term, we will lose our freedom and our prosperity. So we need to make some tough choices, which nobody in the DC Beltway except Trump seems willing to make. I don't want ANY goods from a factory that needs suicide nets to keep its workers from flinging themselves out of 10th-floor windows!
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Of COURSE! What an obvious filter! LOL! But I think all the legacies get turned off by sophisticated YT users. "Don't recommend channel" is one of my favorite options. If I WANT MSNBC, I just have to type the 5 letters plus whatever topic.
It doesn't matter if I'm subscribed or not, if I've passed over Channel A a bunch of times. The algorithm instantly shoots the most recent stuff at me, first.
Just like washing the dishes or mowing the lawn, you need to switch your browsing method to your subscriptions, and view your subscribed channels, piecemeal. Styx is one of the better ones at giving you 5 or 10 minutes of fresh content. I may or may not view "CoronaVirus N+1, N+2, N+3" if I already watched "CoronaVirus N" and the next headline gives me a number. I'm glad somebody's trackin' it, and I watch a significant fraction of his content.
There was this really pathetic story on MSNBC by a loyal MSNBC viewer, who said she voted for Bernie, because she felt MSNBC was entirely too critical of Bernie, and giving everybody else a free pass. He was made more popular by their negative reporting on him. I totally got that. Works on many levels. The pathetic part is the woman openly admitting she watches MSNBC all the time. What a small world she must live in, to sit through commercial t.v. news all day. Shallow, superficial news and opinion, squeezed between corporate-establishment advertising. She could listen to all the candidates in open-ended conversations on the Internet. And if she's limited to what her UHF/VHF brings in, then she's livin' in the '50s.
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What's more, neither Iran, nor any other oil-producing nation want shipping in the region interrupted. USA can help keep shipping open, but whoever threatens the shipping is pissing off the whole rest of the world. The Chinese? They need that oil. The Russians? They DO stand to benefit by disruptions in the region, if they can move oil and gas by pipelines, inland. And it would increase prices, which is also good for the Russians. But they would antagonize everybody else, including the Chinese.
The reason there's so much resistance to pulling out of Iraq, now, is because it shows up the war mongers who got us in there and kept us in there, in the first place. Major loss of face to the supposed foreign-policy "experts" and intelligence agencies in the entrenched, permanent-state bureaucracy. The last two Republican presidents were interventionist, creating havoc and leaving tension behind, and the last two Democrat presidents were ditherers, who just maintained the status quo and the uneasy tensions left them by neocon Republicans.
Bush left about 160,000 troops in Saudi Arabia for Clinton to sort out. Clinton left that same number in Saudi Arabia for Bush, Jr. to sort out. The Republican presidents waged ground war. The Democrat presidents waged air war, while leaving the ground situation pretty much static. The troops in Saudi Arabia were a constant, suppurating sore of corrosive culture clash. We drink alcohol. Our women aren't modest or subservient. In the West, women talk about toxic masculinity, here, but in Saudi Arabia, toxic masculinity is the LAW.
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Butting in, a CENTURY ago, upset the balance in Europe, leading to World War II, which ended with us on top, able to do anything, anywhere in the world. And we got it in our heads it was our job to protect the peace. Yes, we need to disengage, but the question is "How?" And then the question is "How will the world look if we STOP throwing our weight around?" There will always be bad actors around the world. I think we were put on this path by Woodrow Wilson, and we've learned NOTHING from his terrible example, doubling down on our meddling, ever since.
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Find a better balance? Daoist principle? You're in a good situation, doing what you have passion for, but you can become too one-note in your life if you obsess. YouTube burnout is pretty common, and you produce a lot of content. Tim Pool and you are rare in that you both generate a lot of fresh content on a daily basis. And the algorithm drives you to maintain a presence or lose your positioning in the feed.
As for myself, when I'm really into something, I obsess on it at the expense of balance in my life. And in the long run, it probably hurts my overall productivity. But you don't notice, in the grind, because you only see the need to crank out more content, and you (I) kid yourself, because "Gee, look at all the content I'm cranking out! Isn't that wonderful?"
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In years past, they'd either be the only ones with a camera OR buy the footage from whoever had it, and then cherry-pick what they wanted the public to see. It's not that the alt media forced them to abandon fact-checking. It's that alt media kept proving they were full of shit.
And yeah, they resorted to Fake News for click-bait purposes, thinking the click-bait online was their problem. It's not. It's an outmoded, cobbled-together system of media that held the virtual monopoly for decades being out-competed by better viewing experiences. I'll take 10 minutes of Styx or 2 hours of Joe Rogan ANY day. No commercials. Just open-ended conversations that are done when they're done, and not because they're obliged to take a break every 5 minutes to sell shit.
It's not the click-bait. It's simply an inferior product under an inferior paradigm. The rush to publish or air un-vetted nonsense was a tactic they employed, in the wrong-headed belief that THAT is what is hurting their viewership numbers. In actuality, their numbers are on the way down because they suck, and there's nothing they can do about it, constrained as they are by all the commercials and a slavish adherence to SCHEDULE. Their marginalization is inevitable.
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Russians are essentially defensive-minded. You don't like to see them expanding beyond their more or less natural boundaries at the expense of sovereign nations around them, and yet, if you look at their history, they are profoundly paranoid about the stupid mistakes of crazy governments on their borders - FOR GOOD REASON.
It's easy to forget just how BAD the war with Germany was. And before him Napoleon tried the same crazy shit. Both were defeated mainly by the long distances between USSR/Russian border and Moscow. The Iron Curtain was a turrible thing, but putting myself in their shoes, after the bloodiest war, EVER, that I WON, DECISIVELY, you're damn right I want to put vassal states between myself and those nutcase Europeans, especially.
Their natural borders sufficed to stop Napoleon. Mechanized Armor pushed the reach of wars of aggression clear to the Western edge of the former Warsaw Pact. Recall, Hitler, with 1940s technology, laid siege to Moscow by winter of 1941. With modern weapons, the Russians probably have their sights on all of Europe, just as they've always had their sights on obtaining deep, warm-water ports throughout their history, which reminds me of the Crimean War with Great Britain (warmwater access to the Mediterranean). I mention this, because the recent furor over annexation of the Crimea seems to ignore the fact that Crimea was about 90% Russian, before the annexation, and it's territory Russia has owned, off and on, for a very long time.
So we get our panties in a bind, when a country that basically gave back all of Eastern Europe in 1988 looks to re-absorb territory that's 90% Russian, ethnically, anyway, clear on the other side of the planet from us and RIGHT on their access to the Mediterranean. It's not a perfect port, because access to the Med is through Turkish-controlled the Bosporous and Dardanelles Straits. So you know the Russians will always prefer to own it or make damn sure the Turks don't mess with their access. But by comparison to the U.S., with WONDERFUL ports on the West Atlantic and East Pacific have no such insecurities.
And look at what's happening in Europe, and how patently insane those policies are. Just the sorts of policies to CREATE situations in which nutcases come to power, who want to KILL people. They make gov't too BIG to be NICE, and then that BIG GOV'T TURNS MEAN, because of how those collectivist (precursor to identity politics (or vice versa)) ideas polarize the population, between those who take + those who are kind and those who are sick of paying everybody else's bills. How long do you think it'd take a fascist regime in Europe to decide Russia was the Great Satan, and turn their eye Eastward?
It's the ones actually doing the work and paying in, while others take out who end up being the dangerous ones. And the leftists' good intentions create the conditions that weaponize the resentment. And because the ones taking out are spending other people's money on yet OTHER people, the waste and corruption are inevitable, given enough time, and enough chances for idiot climbers to rise to decision-making positions. In other words, Europeans are nuts, and they've dragged us into 2 world wars, already.
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Earth has natural feedback mechanisms and BUFFERING mechanisms, many of which we are not even aware, because of the relatively low CO2 levels. Everybody does linear regressions, because most phenomena observed are mostly continuous, smooth even. That means locally linear (why we perceive the Earth as flat (Euclidean), even though it's curved (Elliptical), because we're small relative to the radius of Earth's curvature.
Anyway, the point I'm failing to make, here, is that there are almost certainly thresholds beyond which different rules apply - so-called "tipping points." We don't know, because it hasn't happened. But at some point, I expect mega-growth of plants and mega-formation of coral, locking up atmospheric CO2 at rates never before seen. If you want to impress ME with your climate science, predict those tipping points and the new rule set that ensues. Fact is, nobody can (probably) and no one has (for certain).
The one thing I'm most certain about is that if we allow the technocrats to decide what's best for everybody, we'll get what's worst for everybody, except the technocrats, who will definitely work things for their own benefit, first, not to mention exempting themselves, personally, from any harm resulting from their authoritarian schemes, along with a "rules for thee" approach, when it comes to actual implementation. "I need my jet, so I can fly across the continent and deliver my planet-saving address."
In my opinion, the warming we've seen, and elevated CO2 levels, to date, have been mostly beneficial. Better for crops. Better for forests. Better for most people.
The best Earth/PaleoClimate/Solar science suggests we're close to the end of an interglacial period. This means some warming is likely to continue, but eventually, temps will be cooling. All our CO2 is a flea compared to elephantine solar cycles and volcanic activity. Shit could get real cold or real hot in a hurry, depending on what phenomenon kicks in (increasing insolation = hot, acidic volcanic eruptions = cold), or the Sun could just go through a "cool" period. In any such cases, there ain't a damn thing humans can do to change it. Only adapt. And we adapt more quickly the less the adaptation is directed by ivory-tower technocrats.
Local collectives not the answer. Local, for-profit, small-plot farming is. See NeverSink.
Fracking is shutting down, due to oil dumping by Saudis (and others?). Neither frackers nor Venezuela can profit until you get up to around $90/barrel. Current price for crude is about $40/barrel, I think. So much for the "peak oil" asshole arguments...
Anyhoo, sorry (not really) to bloviate. If climate change IS a problem for us, going forward, my money's on the people, not the government, when it comes to adapting.
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China, Russia, India, more or less in that order. EU is really 2nd or 3rd rater, taken all together. That's why it was so funny watching Trump meet with EU/NATO, and see the reactions on the major networks. EU know they're lightweights, who've been ripping us off for a long time. We're not the ones who need to be afraid of a trade war. Meeting with them, first, was getting the house in order before the Big Meet with Putin.
I kind of speculated that China would go the way it seems to be going. Yeah, they're growing like mad (polluting like hell). But they're kind of stuck, trying to get to a certain point while still telling their people what to do on every little thing. The more they "steal" our knowledge, the harder it gets to control the ones who stole it!
And although we kid ourselves about how free we are, we see the American Establishment brands of control ALSO slipping. No matter how they try to control the interwebz, they still haven't figured out quite how, and all kinds of subversive conservative ideas about limited government at home and limited footprint, abroad.
The more countries behave that way, starting with US, the sooner we'll be, in effect, a globalist system, but _without_giving_up_liberty_to_do_it! That's the problem with the so-called "globalists," who are mostly just a thinly veiled socialist international, a cooperative global organism is to be found in independent individuals in independent states making free trades with other individuals - near and far. We're on the cusp of it. And our kids can really see it, once they're off the government-centric Kool-Aid we raise them on.
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I would rather wade through openly-partisan content than trust any mainstream source to be objective. People HATE seeing bias, but this is how our country was founded! Let EVERYbody wear their heart on their sleeve. You want to know the dirty tricks Republicans are up to? Go to a liberal/progressive site. You want to see the shit Democrats are up to? Go to a conservative/libertarian site. Then fact-check the shit out of BOTH of them.
Remember, the 1st Amendment was created because of our own pamphleteers putting out blatantly partisan (even seditious) propaganda against King George III. They had ZERO illusions about "objectivity." Now, maybe one or two sources you dig up DO seem to report the news, objectively, or more objectively than others. Add them to your reading/viewing list.
One of the worst things to happen to the public psyche is a century (or more) of believing that the news it was getting was objective news, because all the major networks would say the same thing, even though those networks have been hanging off the balls of government insiders since Day 1. They KNEW FDR was fooling around and never reported it. They KNEW Kennedy was fooling around and never reported it. But what's worse is they'd take CIA or other government-agency leaks as FACT, and tell us that the Soviets were 10 times as big as they were and "Oh Noes! If we don't get another $50 billion for defense, they will invade!" At their PEAK, the Soviet economy was only 1/3 as big as ours. NOW, the Russian economy is 1/15 the size of ours, largely due to a system that STILL doesn't respect civil or property rights of the individual. (See "Professor Kotkin" for more background.)
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A white man his age, growing up in New York City? Trump's probably used the n-word. I spent most of my growing-up in the Northeast, although it was out in the sticks, where there was at most a token black person in any one class or any one church. Boys being boys, we used racist slang, just to sound tough. But if we laid eyes on a black person, they would seem very exotic to us, because there just weren't (m)any around. My father, may he RIP, still cropped out with it, in the 2000s. He was city-raised, and as a juvenile delinquent, he mostly met blacks who were also delinquents. And they were always in competition, and mutually hostile on sight. He was very racist. I was rural-raised.
Be hard to find people in New York City who never used the word, if they've lived long enough. Christian ladies and some of the Christian men, maybe not. But those are the absolutely pure ones, who rarely consciously sin, and tend to be a little insufferable, when I feel like a beer, a smoke, and an f-bomb-laced conversation.
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5 cops defending the BLM sign. But de-fund the police. Selective, nonsensical and corrupt law enforcement, all at the behest of far-left mayors. .
I fear that we who diversify our news and consume citizen video are in a bubble of sorts, as well. We assume that the easily-found (with some intelligent searching) information WE have in any way relates to what the vast majority of people are seeing. I've been watching guerrilla video on the Antifa hate mobs in Portland, Seattle and Berkeley for years, and KNOW what they're all about, and it's so OBVIOUS to me that I assume EVERYone MUST know this, and reject such nonsense and the Democrat enablers in state, local and even federal government, but the fact is that most people either watch legacy networks or nothing at all.
So thinking that the Republican alternative (flawed but lesser of two weevils) is a shoo-in in November could be a serious miscalculation. And just because someone is "highly educated" doesn't mean they're very savvy about history, politics, or the nature of liberty and the NEED to limit the reach of government, in general, and central government, in particular.
And one of the biggest ironies, right now, is all the conservatives pushing HARD to send their kids back to germ-spreading indoctrination centers. But they're so bent on ending these authoritarian lock-downs... I despise the lock-downs and the hysteria, especially in light of clinical evidence showing that the 'Rona's evidently quite treatable, and with off-the-shelf asthma medications, the acute, short-term lung function and permanent lung damage associated with the 'Rona is virtually eliminated. And the mortality rates associated with it are actually lower than "ordinary" flu strains, for which we have NEVER shut down all of society.
Conservatives should, at most, play-act that they WANT the schools re-opened, and RELUCTANTLY accede to the hysterics, and encourage home-schooling and remote learning. I think millions of parents will decide to never send their kids back to broken public schools, and discover their kids can master the standard k-12 curriculum in about half the time, learn what they need to learn BETTER than in an institutional setting. This could be a golden opportunity to break the back of the corrupt and incompetent public education system, especially in the inner city, which was doing a terrible job for a terribly high price, long before the 'Rona.
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Yeah, I can see that. I always ran with a fairly fast crowd in my teens, 20s and even into my 30s. It was probably good that I didn't make much more than subsistence 'til I was damn near 40. Idaho has a good, land-grant system for higher ed. There was no tuition at the 4-year school, and I got a waiver as a teaching assistant when I went to grad school in-state. It was about $500 a semester at the 4-year which went up to about $800 a semester in grad school. So between that and livin' small, I didn't run up much debt. If I hadn't wanted a pickup and super-beetle at the same time, I wouldn't've borrowed anything. And I never should've borrowed THAT.
But anyhoo, living poor on your own for a while builds good habits, like scratch cooking, and just generally being happy as long as I'm physically comfortable. I don't think many people are like that, these days. My nephews had some 6-figure years before they hit 30. They spent it like water. They still spend it like water. At least the older one does, on the "I might be dead, tomorrow" theory. Maximum fun, NOW. I get it. I just don't need all the toys to be happy.
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"CIA black sites" and "waterboarding" were things Trump SAID he was thinking of doing, to trigger a response, likely to provoke even MORE over-reach by his political foes. I say this because you said you were calling him out on what he was "doing," when in all likelihood, ALL he was doing was posturing, WHICH IS WHAT ALL SALESMEN DO. You have to understand he's in an intense, multi-level negotiation with EVERYone, from casual social media consumers to his most ardent foes and even his most ardent supporters. His posturing includes "I should just shut this Mueller thing down," which triggered the exact kind of hysteria needed to keep the Fake News going and even make it WORSE. It EXPOSED the Fake News media, big-time, with one "Walls are closing in" piece after another, when nothing of the sort was actually taking place.
With Trump, I think you have to make the distinction between what he's actually DOING with what he seems to be SAYING. Most of what he says is to get SOME kind of movement from the opposition, often sort of a "Tactics of Mistake" kind of deal (See "Gordon R. Dickson." Good book.), where he APPEARS to be blundering, just to get the enemy onto the ground of HIS choosing. The more outlandish the claims made against him, the easier it will be at the end of the day to topple the entire edifice of fabrication. But it has to be so blatant, so overt, that his accusers can't possibly wiggle out of "I'm an idiot" status.
In the SHORT term, it can feed all the worst in his accusers' apparent arsenal. In the LONG term, it makes the "They're gullible and incompetent idiots" conclusion inescapable.
For instance, the neocons who seem to be up to more Iran-Contra type nonsense in Central and South America (and the Middle East). Is he REALLY using them (or giving them a free hand) to pursue those same old strategies and tactics, or is he waving them like a metaphorical club, while keeping them in check, in fact? Is this more about using an apparent threat to push people to react, one way or the other, or is he actually up to the same bullshit as Obama, Bush and Clinton? His big, flashy "missile strike" in the Syrian bay of ?Tartis was it? made a lot of flash and noise, but he gave advance warning beforehand, everybody cleared out of the strike zone, and THEN he launched the attack. It seemed to me he was throwing Deep State a bone, letting them think he was all-in on their messed-up strategic plans, but maybe he was just posturing. Then he pivots on a dime, declares victory over ISIS in Syria and - albeit against great resistance from his own people and allies - announced a plan to pull out, entirely.
With Trump, I think you have to look at where things end up - actual results - more than perceptions and posturing. "My grandma owned this very same model and put 500,000 miles on it before she even changed the oil" is the kind of thing a car salesman would say to make a sale. It's a lie, obviously, but what if it's a pretty good vehicle and a pretty good deal, and it pushes the customer into making the purchase?
Recall his fire and brimstone rhetoric against Kim Jong Un, followed by the historic face-to-face? Everybody freaked at the rhetoric, but he got the first sit--down with a North Korean dictator since North Korea was created! Nobel Peace Prize stuff, made possible by posturing in such a way as to bring the man to the table, where MAYbe something could be worked out, and CERtainly a totally new - and for the first time hopeful - climate was created.
I'm not saying this IS the case, but it seems to fit most of the facts more neatly and simply (Occam's Razor) than all the hyperbolic, hyperventilating conspiracy theories we all hear bandied about. I'm prepared to suspend my disbelief and maintain high skepticism, as always, until unequivocal facts are laid before me. In the end, I think Trump's intelligence is of a different sort and a higher order than most of his critics really understand. He's respected the law MUCH more than his predecessor and eschewed the weaponization of government agencies against his political foes, which is WAY more than you could say about Obama, whose IRS, FBI, DOJ, CIA and NSA still have much to answer for. That bunch treated the people's government like their private play thing, and Trump's pulled us farther out of that than I ever dreamed possible.
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TheWin200000 : The plain fact of the matter is that if you show up at an emergency room, badly hurt or deathly ill, you're not going to be turned away by an American hospital. That's the thing. We've always just taken care of people and let the government and the insurance companies sort things out. When Democrats whine about the "uninsured" and the "underinsured," they're being pretty disingenuous. If you haven't a farthing, hospitals still will care for you. It's when you make just enough to eat, but not enough for insurance that they screw you. Under our system, you're better off just not working at all, or just showing up without citizenship.
That's the thing about Obamacare that's so phony. The system was already dominated by government, with bureaucrats setting prices in negotiations between insurance companies, hospitals, and self-anointed kings called "civil servants." What could go wrong? Obamacare just formalized and tweaked a few things to try to make it solvent and quit kidding ourselves that our system isn't already largely socialized, with more and more decisions being made by 3rd parties, rather than doctors and patients. Other than making a blatant stab at sucking more money out of everybody (who works for a living) 's pockets for health care, Obama wasn't really doing that much that was philosophically different from what we'd already bought into. Conservatives whined, but the health care system is a nightmare web of regulations, government parasites, and a slow but steady decrease in the earnings of the people whose skills make everything the hospital does possible: the doctors, themselves.
You see that $100,000 medical bill? Well, the surgeon who performed the operation got about $600 of it. Our best and brightest are going to stop going into the medical profession, which used to offer wealth and status as reward for the sacrifice and years of training. Now a pumper on an oil rig is making about as much.
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People like me need to change platforms, but we're lazy and YouTube has a big lead on content. What I'd do for a competing platform is take the best asynchronous chat (sbnation.com), and recruit trusted commenters to monitor the comments. Sites on sbnation did that, and volunteers did a great job, and those volunteer jobs translated into real jobs down the road. Seth Keysor now has a job as a football analyst, and there are many others, B.J. Kissel now works for the KC Chiefs after doing some of his OWN videos for Arrowheadpride.com, which is under the sbnation.com umbrella.
I think there are distributed ways of managing channels such as this - ways of delegating to up-and-comers - that would create a vibrant medium that employs as many (or more) people than the major legacy networks ever did. It can be a way to make a little money off the sites you visit for entertainment and information. I think you guys are on the cusp of discovering how to actually make it all work, and if you DO, then you will have hordes of individuals cooperating, which will simply out-mass anything rich people can manage with their top-down, corporate style of control.
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I think if you do it, right, and focus on vetting and recruiting your monitors, it's quite scalable. The bigger you get, the more good people you've got. Make use of them. The BIG channels throw up their hands at monitoring their own channel, but if you recruit as you grow, the small percentage of destroyers just get out-massed by the larger number of good people. Rather than worry about the handful of destroyers (complainers and red-flagger lefties), make THEM worry about the TWO handfuls of good people you recruited to keep a lid on the "Kill All Jews!" assholes (most of whom are probably lefties trying to submarine good sites, in my opinion).
The sbnation.com comment sections are the best I've seen, and they treat their software as proprietary. But I bet a good programmer or team of programmers could achieve the exact same functionality, quite independently. The 'z' key scrolls you to the next un-read comment, so you can re-visit a story that interests you and see what the replies were. YouTube comments are so crappy that it's too much work for me to ever go back and read replies. I just spew into the ether and move on, leaving a cloud of shit in my wake.
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In probability, there is a principle of "complements." To know what the probability of something is, sometimes it's easier to calculate the probability that it is NOT, and subtract from 1.
When experiencing "magic," you need to ask yourself, "What's the probability that this weird shit would NEVER occur in 4 billion trials?" Then notice that there are billions of people on Earth. Weird shit happens every day.
We REMEMBER the odd coincidences and the strange things we can't explain. There's a certain arrogance in concluding that these things are "magic" when they're just the strong law of large numbers in operation. And wishful thinking. And selective memory.
Like the near-death "light at the end of the tunnel" thing. It's physiological. And you populate your "experience" with all kinds of magical properties because you really want to believe. IF you can believe, then this mortal coil in which we are all wrapped is somehow, maybe, something we can "magically" escape. It's good for some people's sanity. Then there are those of us who simply accept the FACT that we don't know and have no means of knowing. It's an uncertainty with which many are unable to cope. Hence, religion. Hence, magic.
If it makes you easier to deal with while we share this time and space on this planet, then I've got no problem with it. If it makes you creepy and looking to make a blood sacrifice, I'm not into it.
For instance, "What's the probability that at least 2 people in a room of 30 people have the same birthday?" It seems like it'd be a pretty low probability, until you get down to the technicalities of ensuring that NONE of them have the same birthday. The probability of shared birthdays is surprisingly high. To someone ignorant of these things, it seems almost mystical. To a mathematician it's a big yawner.
What's the probability of a false positive in a test for a disease that's 99% accurate, if the disease, itself, is very rare? The probability of a false positive, when you GET a positive at ALL, is quite high. That's why AIDs tests had 2 stages. The first test. Then a follow-up test, if positive for AIDs was reported.
Then there's the subconscious mind. We take EVERYTHING in, unfiltered. Then our conscious mind gets ahold of it and filters out about 99.9% of the inputs, to make it possible to function. It could be an odor you detect without knowing it. It could be a sound that didn't quite register on your conscious mind. It could be a micro-expression on the face of a person you just met, but who creeped you out for no reason. Magic? Nah. Just something real that we don't really understand or perceive.
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Buttigieg has no gravitas. Harris and Biden can look the part. But Biden's gone to seed, as has Sanders. Sanders came along about 20 years too soon for a serious run at president. Sad for him, because there are more openly socialist voters than ever before. if Democrats hadn't gotten into a "Who's crazier?" contest, they'd probably own the center and center-left. But on the brink of total domination, they started holding Oppression Pageants and donning vagina hats, screaming their outrage at a society that's more tolerant of them than they are of it, a fact of which these totally un-self-aware morons are oblivious.
They're PISSED that a bruthuh got a job. They ignore the immigration crisis, and then turn around and blame it on the guy who's been telling them there's an immigration crisis since taking office.
And on the purely partisan-politics side of things, the Russiagate investigation has wrapped up, and now the way is clear for the Trump administration to actually investigate the investigators, who by most indications, lied their heads off to obtain warrants to spy on a presidential campaign and later, a sitting president, after Trump prevailed, in spite of the fix being in.
I think history is going to show that careerist politicians and bureaucrats became so arrogant during this period of time, that not only did they flout the law, but they were downright stupid about it! Can you imagine their carelessness with electronic communications? Let me ask you this. Did you ever watch HBO's "The Wire?" In a Byzantine game of cat and mouse between police and drug gangs, the systems of electronic countermeasures arrived at by common Baltimore street thugs were far more sophisticated and disciplined than these clowns who supposedly represent the cream of the crop.
Can you imagine being in one of the very top offices in the federal government, texting your girlfriend on the company phone, saying the shit that Strzok said? What was he? #2 in counter-intelligence in the FBI? And Hillary, as sec'y of state, with her own private server in her residence, in violation of laws and regs she SHOULD have been trained to follow and followed her training! I think she decided she didn't need those trainings, and nobody argued with her. That might be the entirety of it, and everything else the machinations of cover-up, to avoid embarrassment of everybody around her who was probably too intimidated to say anything.
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I love that the outfits that are cheating to stay on top are losing. But content-creators, like you, Styx, can be done a lot of harm in the meantime. I'll figure out a way to shoot you some coin. We need guys like you, Anthony Brian Logan, Mark Dice, Steve Turley, and the list goes on and on. As long as the Internet remains in place, guys like me are more than happy to split up our entertainment money amongst the channels we watch, and it's only natural that this is going to take over.
YouTube and FaceBook were fun for a while. By 2016, they were both in full-on, fight-the-right mode, because the conservative awakening was taking place and they only have authoritarian means to squelch the power of rational thought!
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Health insurance was invented because the federal government froze wages during the Depression, and the BIG COMPANIES used BENEFITS as a loophole to pay their people more without violating the law. From the start, government intrusion was a way to favor big over small. Small companies couldn't afford those benefits. But until that time, everybody knew health insurance was silly. You insure a car. You total the car when the cost is greater than the replacement cost. You can't do that with a human being, so more and more gets spent, because who could be against THAT? They change the rules, requiring insurance companies to cover treatments that didn't even exist when they set their rates, and the insurance companies must raise their rates.
It's a death spiral, basically. And more and more of the people who would be GOOD doctors are choosing different careers.
All these actuaries (The guys who do the calculations of rates for insurers) need to protect the survival of their insurance companies, and when government can change the rules on them at any time and force them to insure treatments that weren't originally covered, they need to rake in EXTRA money, in the expectation that they will be paying more in the future. Not to do so is a disservice to stockholders, and a guarantee of future bankruptcy. So our insurance rates are based, in part, on imagined costs in the future that do not exist, today. It looks like profiteering, but it's just prudence, with the government such a big stakeholder and price-setter in health care.
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How would YOU feel, Styx, if somebody was slapping their brand on your videos and making bank from customers who watched your shit on HIS channel, and all he did was slap his watermark on it? That's work you did, and he's making more (maybe) than you are from it. Copyright IS important, and it hasn't been respected by "independent" content creators very much.
Or maybe nobody makes more from your content than you do, but 50 or 100 people are stealing most of your hits, taken all together, and the sum total received by all 100 exceeds what you're making as the original content creator. It's a problem, and much as I disdain FOX, CBS, etc., I'm not too keen on watching their content on another channel that's done nothing but change the header and put their logo on the video and cut out yours.
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I don't know the in's and out's in detail, but as I get older, I see that nothing and no one is all good or all bad. Nature is the Tao. I think Shapiro is marvelously gifted and very well-read and well-educated. But he's no scientist. He's got huge blind spots that he papers over with religious dogma. Crowder and he both think being gay is a sin, rather than a condition. It's not wrong because God Said, but there are tendencies in that population that are anti-life, starting with pairing sexually with a member of the same sex. There's a tendency to promiscuity that presents additional health risks to the tribe (humanity, generally). This can't be ignored as LGBT would have us do, nor is it to be forbidden just because God Said. The true answer is something else, a balance between the two.
No, it's not generally as healthy as the way Creation designed us for procreation. But making it taboo instead of encouraging monogamous relationships and similar privileges for permanent, monogamous pairings as we do for hetero couples. Not for entirely the same reason (procreation), but to protect society with social norms that reduce the spread of STDs. There should be rewards for long-term pair bonds, regardless, because it's best practice. More children raised more properly and fewer anonymous encounters in public restrooms, because they don't have to sneak around for thrills when they're in a community-recognized relationship. A public marriage is an announcement to the community that those two are off limits. If you attend the ceremony, you're taking an oath (implicitly or explicitly) to uphold that union for life. There is no doubt that the two of them are off the market. This tends to cut down on the promiscuity, and lots of 'a little better' is 'a lot better.' The Tao. You're not going to save the world, but your corner of it is calm, healthy and prosperous, and people are treated with kindness and respect. Probably that imperfect but ever-improving state IS God's Kingdom on Earth.
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One of the things you don't understand about public education is that every state and federal dollar provided to the schools is tied to state and federal mandates. So someone in the White House gets a bright idea, or in the DOE gets a bright idea, or in state or federal legislature gets a bright idea, that bright idea is passed to the schools as a "new initiative." All these new initiatives have to be administered. That means people to make sure that the mandate's being followed, along with all the new forms that need to be filled out so some "compliance officer" can fill out a spreadsheet for the politicians or bureaucrats who run compliance.
The biggest, newest thing is Diversity and Inclusion. An entirely new, entirely parasitic layer of bureaucracy that does NOTHING to actually educate kids. It just goes around making sure that everyone is politically correct, according to that day's definition of political correctness. There's already (an essentially useless) Equal Employment Opportunity Commission making sure you hire enough people of color to please the current ruling junta. The 14th Amendment already exists. Equal Protection under law. Anybody can sue under that amendment if an employer's acting like a dick.
We spend more on education than ever before, but the funds are HORRIBLY misallocated to bureaucrat drones who produce not a single lesson, grade not a single student's paper, run zero copies of tests, etc. Nowadays, faculty are their own desktop publishers, with essentially zero help from staff. We did more for less when there weren't any computers! A college would have a president and a vice president and that was pretty much IT. A dean of letters and science. A dean of arts and humanities. Maybe a dean of vocational-technical programs. And one secretary for each and one secretary for one or two or 3 departments.
Now there are 8 vice presidents, and about the same number of deans as there used to be. There are more secretaries than ever, but they don't support the faculty (i.e. students).
The colleges have to be run that way, because a HUGE chunk of the college's income is the federal financial aid paid to students. When they take the king's schilling, they have to comply with all the rules and mandates handed down by the king, whoever the king happens to be at that time, and whatever mood they're in on Tuesday. Every one of those mandates creates a huge amount of effort and resources to comply. What's sad is that the colleges don't fight that stuff. They LOVE that stuff. It means they get more people to boss around. And since there's zero competition, it doesn't matter how inefficient it is.
So in an age where GREAT CONTENT is available FREE (or almost free) online, the cost of education SOARS. And none of the money goes to the actual teaching and learning.
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@OSYofRR : For DECADES I've watched Dems score rhetorical points with emotional arguments that resonated with low-info voters. So it's funny as hell watching him give speeches, just knowing how Dems DESPISE the way he pushes voters' buttons with very simple, simply expressed, low-brow type arguments that he KNOWS - by playing the t.v. ratings game for over a decade with his reality-tv shows.
His crudities aren't really very crude, when you compare them to the way REAL people talk to one another on a daily basis. This is what America's all about: offending the sensibilities of tea-and-crumpets aristocrats. REAL Americans know that to accomplish just about ANYthing worthwhile, you have to hack your way past entrenched elites and would-be aristocrats. Real Americans DESPISE the holier-than-thou, preachy types that infest the upper echelon of legacy institutions.
As educated white trash, I find Trump very refreshing. As a (poor) student of history, I see most of our progress in the large as NOT the result of intellectuals breaking things down and leading us to the Promised Land, through logically sound and reasoned arguments. Positive change doesn't come from flowery speeches. Real, positive change is some schmuck in his garage inventing a better mousetrap! We evolve in SPITE of our 'leaders.' We notice the 'leaders' who preside over sea changes, or appear to. But the sea changes are always ground-up affairs, and 'leaders' are just the few who see which way the wind is blowing, or who just happen to be in the right place at the right time to be noticed. But 9 out of 10 times, what they actually do is observe the parade and race to the front with a big, fancy baton and taking credit.
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@Nyver253 : He's got more backing for it, than ever, and the support is building. That's why the Dems are hyperventilating and fighting rearguard action. They still have some mean tricks up their sleeve. Trump's always postured aggressively, but he really hasn't FORCED things, yet. If he had used his full executive powers, the push-back would've been immense, and the Dems would've had plenty of weight behind digging in their heels. If you're caught up in the day-to-day, you maybe don't see how far the Dems have been FORCED to change their goalposts - not by Trump, but by perception and public opinion turning against their intransigence.
They're incapable of moderating their tone, but they're arguing in totally different ways, now. When Nancy started talking about "mowing the grass" and "drones" and "sensors," the cracks were there for all to see. In 2017, they were just "NO!" Now they're quibbling over means. They KNOW they're swimming against the tide on this, but they can't back down or they'll lose face and lose base They MUST win EVERY pissing contest, EVERY DAY, but if you take a step back, you see they're losing the war.
The same thing is sweeping Europe. The USA usually lags behind Europe on these movements, so the results tend to show at the ballot box, more than the streets, because things don't go far enough to drive us out into the streets in any significant numbers. People play it like Antifa is this huge thing, but they're basically a few hundred or a few thousand against a score or a few hundred. It seems like they're big, but they're just the biggest frogs in a very insular and tiny pond of people pissed off enough to go out and wave signs.
By the time this globalist, intersectional, identity crap reached the working man in the U.S., Trump got elected, and jobs for those people appeared. This didn't happen in Europe. There, the working man was on his last legs, in a system that was taxing him to extinction. With Macron running the show, and looking for more of the same. Here, Trump was elected and brought jobs back, and tapped into that Nationalist Populism right when the left-establishment were at their peak, EAGER to go the way of Europe, IGNORING the tidal wave of populist resistance, even though the left in Europe was already backing off globalism, out of self-preservation. Without the working class, the left is down to the super-rich and those who live off the system, rather than contributing to it. Another few years of Democrat presidents and we'd be in a similar situation to that in France.
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Term limits would put Washington even MORE in the hip pockets of career technocrats and industry lobbyists. Government's too complicated, now, for anybody to oversee everything. So I think term limits might not be the panacea people think.
If federal government were vastly down-sized and simplified to just perform the BASIC functions defined in the U.S. Constitution, term limits would be fine, but probably unnecessary. We might WANT to send the same well-to-do schmuck to Washington, because he's the one guy in the district with the leisure time and resources to serve in the position and the position wouldn't be this great plumb that such positions are, NOW, because there wouldn't be much he could or would want to do. Just rubber-stamp the last year's budget, with maybe one or two small changes.
But with the lives and livelihoods of millions hinging on legislation/regulations pertaining to every occupation in the country, these guys are made FAR too important and FAR too much the target of corrupters, and FAR more likely to be corrupt, themselves, in the first place, because of all the power and wealth associated to such far too important positions.
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Big corporations love the SJW bullshit because they're big enough to comply and remain competitive; whereas, a small Mom 'n' Pop can't hire 50 lawyers to keep up with the ever-shifting and increasingly-insane demands of the far left, let alone send 50 lobbyists to Washington to tweak the rule set so it ensures the survival and future prosperity of the companies they represent.
This is nothing new. Big airlines LOVE the Federal Aviation Administration. Once they subverted THAT agency, we saw a rapid reduction in the number of airline companies to just 3 major companies. I think '3' is the magic number, because it's just enough to give the false impression that \ American Airlines, Continental Airlines and Pan Am Airlines were competing with one another more than they were in cahoots with one another to squeeze out any upstart competition. Dominated for decades.
FCC? CBS, NBC and ABC. Decades of dominance. Ted Turner (TNN, CNN, TNT) and Rupert Murdoch took the new-tech cable capabilities and broke in, but CNN and FOX are totally corporate, just like the rest, with a few more truthy stories getting past the gatekeepers at FOX.
Such behavior eventually leads to ruin, but it can take decades before the rickety edifice collapses of its own top-heaviness and non-competitive practices.
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We live in an age when education should cost very little to provide, by private vendors. But we're locked into a public education system that, by its nature, can only become more expensive for the value provided. Government intrusion has made the product worse and the cost for the product higher. This, to liberals, is a dog whistle for MORE government intrusion and MORE well-meaning but stupidly expensive programs to solve the problems that the same people created in the first place.
In private business, they'd be OUT of business. But because they can take money from citizens by force, there is no incentive to do things better, and all the "improvements" amount to watering-down the curriculum and adding nonsense to the curriculum. I think there's a small but growing number of people who are taking charge of their kids' education, and I'm SEEING those kids at my community college, taking college-level course at 14, 15 years of age. These kids aren't all super-geniuses. They just had better training by motivated parents who transmitted that motivation to their children.
If you WANT to learn and have average intelligence, you CAN. And you can learn much more than is taught in public schools, much more quickly. Liberals are still stuck in a 19th-Century world view, where improvement meant creating a bureaucracy. But the centralized, bureaucratic approach is NOT suited for a rapidly changing world, using methods that were revolutionary in the 18th and 19th Century, when we were trying to cope with the industrial revolution. Yes. Herding the kids to one place for "schooling" is a great way to get Mom AND Dad to work, with free baby-sitters and a growing tax base to support whatever government wants (wanted) supported.
Yes, let's get all the kids in one place, so EVERYbody catches the flu, when it's in season. Yes, let's also make sure they're in gun-free zones, so that a mass shooter has lots of soft targets. Let's put them all on school buses. Let's make sure they're in classrooms where one child acting out can ruin the lessons for everybody, and let's make sure that you can't get the acter-outers out of that classroom. Just tell the teacher to deal with it, and add expensive training (that has nothing to do with the actual lessons), so that teachers can be clinical psychologists and social workers. As long as they get certified, we don't care if our k-12 teachers are actual masters of the material they're supposed to be teaching.
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What astounds me is knowing that even though we can support it, anybody who travels the land knows how hard it is not to see another human face or human habitation. The places where the eye can rest on nothing but nature are growing fewer, and more people want to enjoy that experience. We're all kinda rubbin' up against each other. That's why city dwellers seem so insane to the rest of us, and thank goodness the presidential election has a winner-take-all setup in the electoral college, on a state-by-state basis.
So ALL the countryside and at least a FEW pissed-off cities in the heartland can dig in their heels, when the cities lose sight of reality, which is very easy in an artificial environment, where so many people are living so close to so many other people. All kinds of illusions can take root and grow in an artificial setting, like that. We adapt to the rules that are in force, and the rules can get turned upside-down, when folks are too far away from the Earth.
I can see folks liking to have neighbors, but everybody should be in daily touch with a patch of ground, somewhere. I just had 2 apple trees put in and await delivery of a maple. Spent a little extra for a tree that was farther along. (At 5,000 ft asl, trees and such don't grow that fast, although they do appreciate the sunshine, if it doesn't burn 'em up.
The point that I lost is that it's pure joy to add a couple trees to the back yard. Grew up on Johnny Appleseed. Doin' my bit, between the high plains and the Rocky Mtn Frontrange. Any and every person alive ought to have that kind of goal. "I wanna bit of land that I can stick a pair of apple trees on, if I want to." Sculpting your own little part of the world can make the world richer. I love planting edibles, figuring ways to get 'em water. Added raspberries. Already have a rabbit family out back. Want to retire some place where there's DEER in the back yard. And a lake in the back yard.
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Dang. Got sidetracked. Last few days of vacation and just slurpin' 'n' burpin' knowledge.
What I started out to say was JUST when the West solved the population growth problem, they freaked out and needed to DO something. That's a big part of the immigration deal. And I get it. But the immigrants need to conform to the norms (and know something of our IDEALS) in order to reside in our borders. If they DO, then they'll probably fast-track to prosperity and become selfish middle-classers, who can't be bothered raising kids, pursuing art and music careers and spending their days taking selfies... But what we do, instead, is offer an easy way to a free harem for a man from a different culture, who USES women. The welfare checks for 5 wives, sharing meals and
Heh. I think we're looking at a pretty benign solution to the stress we put on the environment, and it's apparently Western culture! So why mess that up, by importing more people? Howzabout we find a better balance, within ourselves, and limit immigration to a manageable number, selected primarily for good citizenship prospects, as in educated or skilled in a trade.
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Too many RINOs and I don't see (m)any Democrats joining Freedom Caucus.
FISA warrants DO have to go through a judge. But FISA courts are rubber stamps for the DOJ, which lies and misrepresents all the time, using FISA to go after drug dealers by calling them terrorists or sweeping up a drug dealer through 2 or 3 degrees of separation from a suspected terrorist, and they don't need much to "suspect" someone's a terrorist.
Parallel construction: Want drug dealer. Find everyone within 2 degrees of separation of the drug dealer. Find one who's gone on a foreign trip. If they came anywhere near somebody who's terrorist or terrorist-adjacent (like in the same town at the same time), that's enough to have a suspicion, get warrants on everyone within 2 degrees of separation. There's your warrant on a drug dealer. That's a lot like what happened to Trump, who was the target, and he was adjacent to Carter Page, and Carter Page was adjacent to bad guys. Didn't matter that Page actually reported to the FBI. They didn't mention that to the FISA judge. So they got to tap Trump and insert agents into his circle during the 2016 campaign.
FISA is a license for the FBI to investigate anyone they please, tap all their e-communications, phones, and even bug their conversations. They can find something.
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There are places Shapiro can't or won't go. 3rd rails he won't touch, to keep his green check and his YouTube revenue rolling. As far as Israel goes, how would WE feel if a bunch of foreigners decided that the noble Sioux nation should be given full sovereignty over North and South Dakota, took those states from us by force, and armed the Sioux well enough to withstand the entire might of the U.S. military.
That's pretty much what happened after World War II, due to the Holocaust, with all of Christendom behind the notion of restoring a sovereign Israel. It'd be like a bunch of Asians who joined a Sioux religious order, just decided to carve up the USA, due to atrocities of the past committed against the Sioux. You could make just as good an argument for that as we did for the creation of the state of Israel in the late 1940s. What followed was endless resentment and violence in a region that was almost 100% Muslim, parking their sworn enemies in their midst and arming them to the hilt. "They're ba-ack," we said to every Arab nation, "and you can't do anything about it, because God Said and bad stuff happened. To an outsider, it just looks like the USA setting up a proxy to keep our foot on the neck of the entire Middle East.
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I'd guess that what we all consider "Bernie Bros" are the fringe members of his followers. There are probably as many white supremacists and jew-baiting trolls on the right. The difference is they get called out on conservative sites, and don't get the traction that the most radical lefties will tend to get on left-leaning sites. The left are afraid to call out the radicals, because the end justifies the means to them, apparently.
Maxine, Ilhan, Alexandria, Chuckie, and the like, should be pariahs on the left, but they're sacred cows or something. Al Sharptongue should be a pariah, but Dems will bend the knee to him, because they want his race-baiting on THEIR side, and they want that niche vote, because their strategy is generally to build a coalition of special interests that, along with the low-info vote, will theoretically give them a working majority. It worked for years, because they downplayed the obvious cognitive dissonance, and their voters just kept voting Democrat, regardless, because Republicans are bad. But the pandering has finally caught up with them, and playing to the radicals to get THEM under their tent has made them unelectable (one hopes).
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Yes. Many of us are still on YouTube. It's because we're lazy fucks, and it's easier than learning a new platform. There's a limit. If they hadn't backed off on Black Pigeon Speaks, they'd've lost me, forever. And I DO notice how they've demoted BPS in the feed. And others. They're trying to do it just beneath the level of perception of most of us. But the accumulation of bullshit has us very unhappy.
Somebody needs to work up a better platform than the competition has, to date. I'm amazed that no one has. YouTube's asynchronous chat is pretty lame, but it's better than the other competing platforms are doing. Muh Free Speech is a good thing, but not if the user has to fuck around with a 2nd-rate platform, for usability.
One thing I'll say about independents is that it's likely that a lot of you guys who THINK you're being de-platformed have actually saturated your natural niche. "I've got 10,000 subscribers but only 400 views! Somebody's cheating me!" When actually, maybe a lot of people are subscribed and skip right past your headline for whatever reason. If you're commenting on a big story, I've only got time for Tim Pool, maybe, or Anthony Brian Logan, maybe. I know I pass up on a lot of THEIR content, because it came in after I already knew the story, and didn't need or want to sit through THEIR version of it, because I'm on to other things that day.
I think that's why there is/was so much click-bait out there. I say "was," because I think that the audience has grown to distrust the click bait. I think people just struggle to come to grips with the fact that there's an audience for just about everybody, but maybe NObody is going to EVER be as big as, say, NBC or CBS were, back in the day, when the audience was basically all captured. Maybe 400,000 is your ceiling, styx. Yeah, you've got draw in MY generation, because you look, talk and think like a pot dealer from the 1980s. But you're not going to pull in many grandmothers. And where you're deepest (occult literature?), you're looking at a very niche audience.
And that's OK. You're wildly successful for what you do. But maybe 400 K is just your ceiling for what you provide and how you present. And that's OK. With 400 K subscribers, you don't have to do MUCH to monetize at least several thousand. And if you've got several thousand kicking in a buck a month, you're financially independent. Maybe you'll never be Jerry Lewis. Maybe you're just gonna be his dad, making a good, middle-class income playing hotels in the Catskills! LOL!
For independents to REALLY take the next step, they need to provide more than just commentary on news reported by others. The originators of the reporting deserve and demand their slice of the pie, and independents have been very disrespectful towards the original creators. If you spend an entire video criticizing Brian Stelter, with copious clips of his stupidity and disingenuousness, you should give CNN a percentage! Nobody does. Everybody just takes. Then they act all self-righteous when the people they've been stealing from get some of theirs back.
Tim Pool TALKS about on-the-ground reporting, but he hasn't provided a SINGLE original-reporting story in ANY of his videos. It's all stuff he's GOING to do in the future, like he's WeWork or something. Lots of hat, but no cattle.
Until you guys figure out some sort of co-op and actually do some real reporting, you'll always be sucking some other outlet's tit.
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You're right about Harris, and it's too bad for Dems, because she's the only one who looks presidential to me. She has the presence and the charisma that none of the others have. Biden 20 years ago would just run his mouth when he got asked the wrong question, making him the king of gaffes, and preventing him from winning the nomination. Now he knows enough to hold his tongue, but those moments when he really doesn't have a strong response just look awkward, dithering and doddering, instead of "WTF is he talking about? Did he really just say what I think he said? OMG! He's DONE!"
I think Joe's always had big holes in his understanding of things, and always appeared smarter than he was because of his delivery, diction and looks. FWIW, that "next president," reaching over and patting Booker on the arm was old-school classy. He picked up points, there, and Booker lost points with a schoolboy come-back after he got owned. There was a warmth that Biden at least simulated that looked more real than anything except everything Marianne said. She ain't holdin' nothin' back, her.
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I've been outraged at the power grabs by Washington for my entire adult life. I never once REEEEEEEEE!'d anybody or laid hands on anybody because they triggered me. MY guy NEVER wins the presidency, because I always vote for men of principle. Every once in a rare while, a GOOD one gets elected, but I rarely see it coming. Those are the presidents I vote for a 2nd term, like Trump. Reagan was another one. I never voted for the Bush's. Just obscure Libertarians. I voted for Reagan's 2nd term and will vote for Trump's 2nd term.
It's just so weird that when a guy I sort of like (as it turns out) gets elected, half the country goes into this mindless outrage mode, full-time.
I just wish we had limited government, so I wouldn't have to waste so much time seeing what government is up to. If we stuck to the Constitution, then what happened in Washington wouldn't much matter. There wouldn't be much mischief for them to get into (and all the rest of us into), if they didn't stick a finger into every single pie, regulate every activity, and go to war at the drop of a hat without any formal declaration of war.
The only really "just" wars we've fought were the Revolutionary War and World War II, and we wouldn't've needed to go to war in the 1940s if we hadn't stuck our nose into World War I in 1917. And from Admiral Perry on up to the 2nd World War, we were acting a LOT like the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and English in Asia. Ramming OUR trade terms down Japan's throat, and posing an existential threat to Japan, which depends on foreign trade to meet its needs. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was almost a good idea, except the Japanese treated everybody in their sphere like crap.
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Copyright infringement has definitely been weaponized by many who don't tolerate criticism. At the same time, numerous YouTubers serve up the content of others, virtually unmodified, and make money from it, without a nickel to the original creators. They're always the bad guys, I know, but legacy media ARE getting ripped-off by more than a few so-called "independent content creators."
I don't watch t.v. on my cable. I just stream the internet, and keep the cable for when I have guests who actually watch that shit. I can tune in FOX, but I never will. And most of the Gutfeld Show episodes I've watched were just re-posted by some slob in Cancun or Pakistan. I try to find FOX's version of it, because they own that content. I'd even let the commercials run while I went to take a piss, sometimes, just so they get paid for their content, even though, like a schmuck, I already paid for it in my bloated Comcast bill. Someone snap me out of my wretched benighted condition.
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I think Putin understands this kind of thing, and, being Russian, he's not crazy, even though he's got to always be worried that OUR leaders and elites will GO crazy. Trump performed Job 1, letting Putin know that Priority #1 is for us to not NUKE one another. Meanwhile, our press wanted him to call Putin an evil lying bastard to his face, and return to America in a righteous and rightful state of outrage, justifying more stupid stuff, like killing each other.
Idiots. Trump played it just right. Stern policies already in place, and an "I believe you, but I must also believe my own intelligence community. You're a good guy. Trust and verify." Exact right tone.
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Actually, the "full report" doesn't need redacting, because during Clinton's term, Democrats, wanting to keep a lid on any kind of embarrassing revelations, passed a law that said all the report can contain is a laundry list of indictments, referrals, and non-referrals, with a brief explanation of why the non-referrals weren't pursued any further. So already we know that there won't be any real meat on the bones of the report. The fact that Mueller will be making no further indictments, which is already known, pretty much says it all, which is why everybody's saying it's a nothing burger.
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malikail57 : I didn't hear about plans for internment camps. But I have to admit, I saw the iron fist in the velvet glove worn by liberals 30 years ago, when I talked about the slippery slope they were on, and where things might lead. If you got them feeling comfortable enough, they'd talk about sterilizing welfare mothers with more than one baby, and things like that, without even the slightest twinge of conscience telling them how fucked-up that is. To the intellectual liberals, it was pure zero-sum thinking. A matter of managing inputs and outputs, "scientifically," with zero concern for unintended consequences. Just "Here's problem. Hit problem with money we take from over there. Problem solved. (Only problem isn't solved and grows worse, but no matter.)
It's a soulless, mechanistic view of reality based on an oversimplified mathematical formula (similar to the CO2-causes-global-warming formula).
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"Subpoena his manuscript!" is a masterful troll by POTUS. Unless they do a total re-write, there's nothing but fawning adoration for Trump in that manuscript. Before he got in trouble with the law, he was almost certainly angling for a job at the White House. But just by being in Trump's orbit, his past sins would be ferreted out and be his undoing. They probably had all the subpoena powers they needed to investigate Cohen's taxes clear back to the Stone Age, and that's what made this what it is. Cohen's sworn testimony without corroboration would be torn to shreds in court, but it makes for great theater. I'm just not sure anybody's buying it, because of all the liars breaking trail in front of him, who were later discredited at "the big reveal" moment, when there was nothing but allegation, with no corroboration, just as with JUSTICE Kavanaugh.
There've been too many proven lies reported as established fact. Even the American people are skeptical, and we're some of the most gullible people in the world.
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"Activist" journalism is pretty much what the 1st Amendment sought to protect. Saying you represent an activist group or movement doesn't disqualify you. It just lets the listeners know what axe you're grinding, right up front. Black Conservative Patriot starts up every video letting you know his opinion on 2 genders, Christian faith, and if you don't like it, then he just saved you the time you would've wasted finding out, later.
I think activist/partisan journalism is the only decent KIND of journalism, and if everybody's up front about their leanings, the pathetic surfers, like me, can take the pulse of a wide spectrum of perspectives, and come up with a closer approximation of the truth than relying on any one of them. And over time, we sickos build up trust in the ones that prove out more consistently. Jimmy Dore's a Progressive version of Ron Paul on foreign policy. Both good sources. But I don't buy any outlet's version until it holds up under all available criticism and facts. This is actually one of the best times in history for news, with more cameras in the hands of citizens than ever before.
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RT's The Duran has ucky production values, but will bring you facts and background you're not going to find elsewhere, and Alex Mercouris has a unique take and fact set to offer. I don't always agree with him, and I've seen him be more Russia-phobe than I on some matters and more Russia-phile than I on others. Hard to tell if I'm getting all good stuff, or a mixture, based on the considerable-but-not-unlimited reach of Mercouris's experience, understanding and due diligence.
On SOME things, like gas pipelines from Russia to Europe, I just scratch my head. Why are we supporting NATO, and what right do we have to obstruct a pipeline that gives Europe another option for energy? If they get a better deal for energy, that lowers their costs, and makes their products cheaper. That's generally good for the people, everywhere. None of the USA's business. Yes, any use of force to punch that pipeline through sovereign countries, with or without permission, is a bad thing. But if both sides and everybody in between think it's OK, then it ought to be OK, and USA keep its damn nose out of it.
I've heard that the Russians don't tell their news and opinion people to push an agenda, although I'm sure that they don't mind too much what those people had to say before they hired them. I'm always a bit reserved about Russia, knowing its history and culture, but I can see it evolving towards many of the noblest and highest aspirations of the American system. Americans only seem to remember the corruption in Russia after the wall came down, and don't realize how the people are grateful to Putin for finally putting a ceiling on the corruption and bringing that ceiling down, with some basic better governance.
Americans don't like his ruthlessness, but in many respects, it appears to me that he did what he had to in lesser-of-two-evil situations. But I'm not the scholar and newshound that Mercouris is.
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We're really feeling the pinch, now, but I think it's clear to everyone that if they don't destroy the Internet infrastructure, the times we now live in will be seen as the last gasp of centralized power. That's the thing about China, now, too. The old top-down, authoritarian ways need to give way. Too many people are talking to too many people, through social media. Of COURSE they want to shut it down and get us all pissed-off at social media and swear off.
But in 100 years, this stuff will be in its proper place. People will be able to get all they want, but it won't dominate their lives, because part of the culture will be not to waste too much time on such nonsense. That behavior is for cripples, like me, who aren't outside, in the garden or away from civilization when they're not earning their daily bread, with a lucky few out there in the woods earning their daily bread.
Editor's note: Geez, Mills. Basically saying that if you're anywhere close to fit, you're not spending more than an hour or two a day on this technology outside of work.
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I'm no scholar, but the Catholic hierarchy has always been notorious for debauchery. I think that's why the chastity of priests thing was invented. Before that, the whoring was pretty much out in the open. Centuries ago, the priesthood was one of the most privileged groups within the larger ruling class, and their amorality was widely known.
It's ironic that the Lutheran Church was hand in glove with the governments of Northern Europe for a long time. They were part of the civil authority. I think Soren Kirkegaard was deeply affected by this.
It's not the Catholics or the Lutherans, per se. It's any hierarchy that persists over large spans of time and space. The fact of its existence means power. Power attracts the corrupt and corrupt. And the corrupt within its ranks play politics to rise within the hierarchy. It's the same in churches as it is in government institutions as it is in corporations.
That's why we need limited government, to keep a lid on the harm done, and make it harder to hide the corruption in government. In turn, that limited government, with a BASIC rule set, keeps the corporations in check by never complicating the rules that keep those corporations on top long after the rot sets in. A free market, with an even playing field, will check those big corporations when they get out of hand MUCH better than government regulators with the authority of the state but on the payroll of the corporations, especially with a truly free press and whistleblowers calling them out.
But the more the government intervenes, the easier it is to have a fake free press that does the bidding of corrupt government and corporations. They all do each others' will for their mutual benefit and to the detriment of the common person.
Whatever the (contrived) issue/crisis of the day, government intervention is always done in such a way as to protect the big and punish the small. We saw it with COVID, with terrorism, and we've already seen it with climate change - and more to come on climate change, now that COVID appears to be running out of steam.
In a truly free market, with a truly free press, private businesses will set higher standards than mere government minimums, and good, small companies aren't so easily crushed by selective enforcement and regulations designed to prop up big and hurt small.
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@shadowwolf9909 : I didn't like Perot, especially, but definitely preferred him over Clinton. Daddy Bush was Ivy-League, Skull-and-Bones, war-hero, CIA Director, ... Insider-elite to the core. Perot was more likely to do something stupid, like decide not to kill a bunch of people. I would've preferred that over Clinton or Bush. Clinton and Obama were ditherers on foreign policy, and they'd just watch situations deteriorate, without seriously looking for positive solutions, or at least ending the policies that weren't working. Then decide that large-scale bombing campaigns were the perfect coward's way to deal maximum death.
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@bozobonsi1807 : Sadly, the hippies morphed into regressive liberal-orthodox-establishment assholes no different from the establishment assholes they scoffed at during Vietnam. Rejecting archaic/obsolete norms and traditions is a good thing, generally. But it's a dead end if you're not CLEAR about what to replace them with. This is the one problem with seeking change that few people understand. The current system, whatever it is and whatever's wrong with it, exists because it basically worked well enough to replicate itself down through the generations.
Treating the symptoms of malaise within the established order is rarely a full solution. In fact, history shows that if you don't understand the entire system, wholistically, you generally do more harm than good, due to unintended consequences, like a farmer who figures that if a ton of pesticide helps his crops, then 10 tons of pesticide must be 10 times better...
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Russia has been - and still is - locked in a culture war with Islam. I don't kid myself about Putin's religious beliefs, but I do believe he throws support behind the Russian Orthodox religion for a number of reasons. Let's not forget that in the long-ago, the Pope designated Russia as the Protector of the Church (or some such) in areas that Russia has and always will consider prime real estate on the approaches to the Mediterranean. Russia hasn't forgotten. They always have and always will chafe at having to deal with Turkey to get their ships to and from ports on the Black Sea, and Russian Orthodox Church is a wedge Russia could use to expand into those and adjacent areas. The Church is also a bulwark against demographic take-over of his country by Islam. When people talk about Russia's dealings with Iran, I would always remember that one of Russia's priorities is to NOT have Islam injected into THEIR borders by Sharia from Iran's direction. Russia wants White Christians having babies, because they don't want to lose their power to Muslim Theocrats.
After decades of foolish U.S. policy in the region, Russia seems like a stable voice of reason to many countries. Maybe you don't like the Russians, but at least they won't leave you hanging out to dry, when a new administration decides to flip-flop on you, and doesn't feel it needs to honor the deals of the previous. America is very unstable in that sense, because presidents make agreements that are not ratified by the Senate, and basically rule on those matters by decree (executive order), until and unless the incoming president decrees otherwise! You can blame the incoming president, or you can blame the outgoing, for making a stupid deal, and then ignoring the will of the people as expressed by the legislature. Is it the new guy's fault, or did the old guy abuse his powers to the detriment of the nation and its international standing?
But when I look at our history since WW II, I see America making lots of bad deals for itself, and then throwing its weight around, irrationally. Just not rational foreign policy, which is why Trump is making such a stir, demonstrating by simple common sense how nonsensical our foreign policy and trade policy were.
I personally don't think a president should be able to make deals that last only through his term of office. If the Senate doesn't ratify your agreement, that should be the end of it, and the U.S. needs to give our negotiating partners a straight-up "Sorry, no deal." But instead, when the Senate hasn't ratified, our presidents have taken it on themselves to assure foreign leaders that we will follow the agreement, anyway, and then those foreign leaders get hung up to dry, when the next administration half-asses the agreement or even breaks it.
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Good point. Germany will go plenty fascist, as long as it's given the label 'antifascist.'
Fact is, the former Eastern Bloc, for all its hatred of Soviet-style socialism, is still very authoritarian. And I'm not sure that's necessarily a problem for a smaller country with a more homogeneous population. One of the reasons - and nobody remembers this on the left - that our federal government was LIMITED in the FIRST place, was because of DIVERSITY. The concerns of Boston, Massachusetts are NOT the same as Birmingham, Alabama's. So legislating on everything under the sun for the whole COUNTRY is just STUPID. Build the basic rule set (The U.S. Constitution) and let the states run their affairs within that very simple framework.
You want single-payer? Let some states experiment with it. (We have. They failed. Bureaucrats are no more suited to running health care than they are suited for running a farm, an auto company, or ANY OTHER BUSINESS. Paid bureaucrats DGAF about the customer or efficiency or effectiveness. They have all the wrong incentives to run things properly. But a business person with their reputation and future livelihood on the line HAS to play it fair and square, UNLESS there's a government bureaucrat they can hide behind! And we see THIS all the TIME, but libtards still love muh regulations and regulators, who are the biggest thieves of all! That's why they go for those jobs! The POWER!
You can run a small state or a company in top-down fashion, and get away with it. There are lots of advantages to being able to just order everybody around on some things. But in the long term, you need the constituent parts of the system to be self-correcting, self-sustaining, and self-replicating. No government bureaucrat is qualified to make those decisions, but we seem to want them to make all our decisions for us!
The societies that are most stable and advance most rapidly, do so from the ground up, not from the top down. Bill Gates, building computers in his garage. That's how the BIG changes take place, especially in the Bill Gates's themselves, who quickly become creatures of the establishment to make it REALLY big! LOL!
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Yes. You have to really DIG to find good content, and most people won't. Those of us who DIG think YouTube is still allowing things to proceed as usual, because we've hard-wired our feeds with our subscriptions and our more informed searches.
Every once in awhile, I'll tour YouTube as "anonymous" and it's ALL MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, Jimmy Kimmel, Steven Colbert, and other non-stop-Trump-hate and derangement.
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What the (so-called) left is better at is demagoguing an issue. "People who oppose this legislation don't care about the poor." Well, we care about the poor, but we don't think the federal government is the means by which we can best help. That requires nuance. That requires explaining effects on the populations being helped in that particular way, and the creeping authoritarianism that always emerges in the bureaucracies administering the assistance. They have no interest in actually solving poverty, because that poverty means JOBS and AUTHORITY for the bureaucrat class.
See? Look how long that took. And it would take hours of history to bring somebody up to speed.
I think that's why the left HATES Donald Trump. He reduces a complex argument such as I failed to make, above, to "These are not nice people. Not nice. Not nice at all." That's the kind of speech that the masses can understand.
"Look at what's happening on our border. Terrible. Human trafficking. Drugs. Just terrible."
It's infuriating to the left. They can see what he's doing, because it's what THEY do. It's the one thing the Republicans and libertarians have been bad at, because the best of them are HONEST, and don't stoop to making simple-minded, populist arguments.
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