Youtube comments of Harry Mills (@harrymills2770).
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I remember when most of the companies sending me e-mail notifications for various reasons made sure they sent me a "Support BLM" message. It creeped me out, at first. That's when I trashed my Uber account. Not long after PayPal sent that obligatory message, PayPal denied service to "problematic people" because they weren't "on-board." That's when I closed my PayPal account.
That's what everyone should have done with their PayPal, but almost no one did. That's when I knew, for sure, that we were in a dystopian reality, and started making plans to move back to Idaho. Universal acceptance of "2 weeks to stop the spread" in March, 2020 was when the first thoughts of "I need to get out of here. These people are effin' crazy" came. George Floyd was in May.
I was "fortunate" enough to have some serious injuries around that time, and started working from home on a temporary basis. Now I'm working from home on a permanent basis. How lucky it was to have crippling injuries! sigh
Now, when we see "Your company's racial diversity is lacking," we're starting to question the people making such claims, rather than the companies being (essentially) extorted by activists.
It sounds like Valve just plowed through the BS ans has come out the other side of it as one of the strongest companies going, and they should (and probably will) just shrug off the racists trying to attack them.
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@dshin83 I guess I'm too dumb to understand this. Why not make a new hypothesis if your data support it? It makes sense to me to try to scry what the data are telling you. Then run more experiments to test the new hypothesis. As a trained geologist, that was sort of what we did, and I never met a more honorable and humble bunch of scientists. They understood the limits of their observations and were totally OK with presenting more than one theory, rather than making one theory their mission, and become advocates for that theory, and making things political.
Maybe in physics, you hypothesize that the distance a body falls is proportional to the cube of the duration of the time spent under acceleration. Your data disconfirms your hypothesis, but suggests a squared relationship, with a proportionality constant very close to 1/2. While more experimentation is always better, that data is good support of a new hypothesis. Do you deny the world your discovery, because your first guess was wrong?
One of the frustrating things to me as a student of geology was how strong the claims being made in psychology (and anthropology) were, compared to the weakness of their data. The softer the science, the more opinions harden, and the acceptance of one theory over another becomes a political fight between 2 sides that wield institutional power to prevail. Great statisticians. Terrible scientists and experimental designers.
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@The_oneand_Only1 Yes. More regulations, please. We can't have people pursuing their dangerous dreams.
Free market polices manufacturers much better than government regulators. The big car makers are like CBS, NBC, ABC, etc. A handful of big companies who slammed the door behind them and started working with and for the U.S. Government, which worked with and for the big car makers. We get an over-regulated market with superficial differences, but essentially the exact same government-approved product. Same with Big Food. The FDA, USDA, etc., work for them, and they in turn work for the government. "What are we pushing this week, Sam?"
"Everybody's flying BLM flags, boss. No, wait. It's a rainbow - no, it's a Ukraine flag."
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Women are weak, but can twitch their hips or simply SMILE or worse, CRY, and every alpha male in the vicinity is her slave. Women have quietly been pushing men's buttons since we lived in caves.
It was always an equally powerful position as the men held, only different. But it came with trade-offs, such as playing that game tends to make you be treated like chattel by the very men they manipulate. They want all the benefits of their feminine powers but they don't want to pay the piper, as can be seen when a woman hits a man, the man hits her back, and she's outraged because he hit a woman.
If they want equality, then that means registering for selective service and picking up garbage at the curb and drilling for oil and climbing telephone poles and working next to high-voltage transmission lines and saving babies from burning buildings...
They want the "male privileges," but NONE of the responsibilities and dangers that go with it.
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I think Hela's antlers were totally ridiculous. I think Valkyrie would've been annihilated by the scavengers in the Thor-is-captured scene. But as a strong, diverse female, she of course had to kick everyone's ass, even if they had to stand still so she could do it. Major plot armor, there.
Then the "I gave you one job" scene between Loki and Scourge. There's no communication between the portal and the palace? Really? They can't get word to the palace any faster than a guy in armor can run a mile and a half?
Rufalo's Bruce Banner was a neurotic cry-baby, and total cringe. And BOY did they want to get that line in about his PhDs NOT being in piloting, even though the way they staged it was totally nonsensical. You're going to take your eyes off what's in front of you so the writers get to giggle? THIS is the guy Black Widow loves?
Other than those minor issues and the hint of woke from the Valkyrie scenes, which I'm admittedly hyper-sensitive to, after years of the shit, I thought Ragnarok was easily the best one of the bunch. The opening scene with the giant demon was pure gold. Thor's character arc was awesome. Teaming up with Loki, in a sort of redemption arc for the trickster, was good. I liked the "Asgaard is a people, not a place" idea.
Then they snatched it all away in Infinity Wars, taking all that character development AWAY from Thor, and then portraying him as fat, weak and emotionally fragile in EndGame. But then, the actor Chris Hemsworth, who actually LOOKS like a hero standing next to all the shrimp actors around him, just had to be taken down a few pegs.
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If by "stalemate" you mean relatively static front lines and trading blows, then it is a stalemate. But it's not a stalemate when you consider the relative cost of the trading of blows.
I think NATO and Ukraine have been making decisions based on realities that no longer apply. Russia has gotten its house in order, step by step, over the last 25 years, while the West has been sabotaging itself, with one blunder after the next, for over 30 years. Energy, manufacturing, culture, and the very relationship between state and citizenry (They work for us, not the other way around, and they've lost sight of that). They are at war with themselves. They're still capable of great mischief, but their underlying fundamentals are in the toilet. They've basically outlawed everything that once undergirded American (and its European vassals') ascendance, and clung to/reverted to all the old, corrupt, aristocratic forms that they used to brag about leaving behind.
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@Станислав-с6п8я Manned aircraft can drop more ordinance, but the gap between them and various forms of artillery is shrinking. The quality of indirect fire is pretty amazing, nowadays, due to the proliferation of unmanned aircraft and, of course, satellite surveillance.
But absolutely, the reports of Su-24 bombing runs is indicative of the erosion in Ukrainian air defenses.
War is much more like chess than it was in the 1940s. Both sides have greater knowledge of enemy positions and movement, 24 hours a day, in all weathers.
I'm no expert, but oddly, my first opinions before and after the military operation began have only been reinforced by subsequent events. The only thing that surprised me is the level of duplicity by U.S. officials and the lapdog media. I guess it's not surprising, if you know a little about Vietnam. But due to the Internet, the duplicity is right out in the open, with half the people seeing it clearly, but an alarming half of the people who dig no deeper than what's on cable news.
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"Movie Stars" were inventions of movie studios, when the local theater was the only game in town, and the studios could quash any negative stories in the papers. "Access media" is still going strong, today, but it's utterly discredited by the Fandom Menace. It's utterly outdated. Plus, with all the media outlets there are, today, we get to see these "stars" speak off the cuff. When they do, we realize they're not very bright, highly egotistical, and deluded assholes living in cushy echo chambers, where everyone worships them for nothing more than looking good while reading lines written by someone else.
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The pull-out of 2,000 troops in Syria is NOTHING compared to the 40,000 we have in the region and whom the 2,000 will join. But it's a step in the right direction towards a more disciplined (military) spending profile in the federal budget. Reducing the likelihood of war is GREAT for the budget. Getting NATO countries to pay for their OWN defense is a good thing, budgetarily.
And Trump doesn't have to make any big cuts in the welfare state to get the domestic side to come down. Work requirements for able-bodied food stamps recipients has had a HUGE impact wherever it's been implemented. Don't want to call anybody a freeloader, but it seems that a sizable percentage of people can get along without food stamps, when there's work attached. Still a lot of work to do on multi-generation welfare way of life, where babies are brought into this world in a totally disrespectful way (into shithole family and community situations), when they're not killed before birth.
Democrats want to address the shit that happens. Republicans want less bad shit to happen in the first place, and it starts with the family, and Democrat policies that destroy family.
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@hangerq5735 Something was definitely fishy about that story. And some of the interviews were clearly performative, with a guy laughing and joking until the cameras start rolling, and turning on the tears like a faucet for the interview.
Alex got out over his skies a lot. He didn't as often as some think, because a lot of the rants I saw were when he started out with "If this is what's going on, then..." If you came in on the "then" part, and didn't know it was a hypothetical, or if CNN left out the fact that it was a hypothetical, then you would definitely have a low opinion of his performances. Some people like that performative stuff, like Mark Levin or half the commentators on sports and news channels.
But the damages assessed against Alex Jones were political. The lawsuit was political. The system has been weaponized against dissent for a long time, and for the past 10 years, the liberty and common sense voices have been the dissenter, which you probably don't know, given the talking point you threw out there.
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I've always been always will be left of center, but in the purely classical sense. Liberty and limited government. But in today's bastard tongue, I'm "right." I hate how the language got twisted. I was always for equal treatment under law, and felt like the 14th Amendment was redundant, if you follow the stated intention of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence (The self-evident truths that form the axiomatic foundation for the law).
I never cared who slept with whom, unless they slept with my partner. I never cared what religion a person practiced as long as they respected the rights of others. I've always lived by "Charity starts at home," and never believed the federal government had any say in anything but defending the Constitution and the national soil. That last may entail federal infrastructure projects.
That, to me, is true liberalism. I don't think the government exists to solve the human condition. It's job is to intervene just enough to preserve the Constitution, and the human condition is for people to solve for themselves. Or even, maybe, enjoy a little bit.
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Liberals are supposed to criticize the establishment from the outside, and argue for a devolution of centralized power and control systems. But that's not what "liberal" means, any more. It used to mean "Leave us alone. We know that all of your 'help' is an urge to power on your part." But nowadays, "liberal" means "Govern me harder, Daddy!"
I've been arguing with "liberals" since the 1980s, and every time I dug into the philosophical underpinnings with a few "What if?"s they always showed their authoritarian side. There was no end to the rules and regulations they were willing to endorse, if their big giveaway programs created NEW problems with the system. Too many babies born to poverty? Maybe welfare moms with 4 children should be sterilized. Stuff like that.
I'd argue that that kind of intrusion into the reproductive decisions of a human being by the state was just WRONG, and that was why the big giveaway program was wrong in the first place. Now the government dominates health care (while pretending there's still a free market), and it's locking us down and mandating experimental medical procedures on the entire populace. Is Fauci a crumb bum? Yes. But he or somebody like him is ALWAYS going to rise to the top in a big, bureaucratic hierarchy. The problem isn't Fauci, or at least not entirely. The problem is a public medical system that puts guys like Fauci in charge of medical decisions for EVERYbody. If he gets one thing wrong, for whatever reason, it's a national catastrophe!
But people still clamor for their Med-4-All, which for all intents and purposes, it's already HERE. It's just a little less efficient than it might otherwise be, due to all the circumlocutions necessary to preserve the illusion of a free market. But it will never be as affordable and ethical with government running it as it will be in a true free market. But they have the perfect grift going. The illusion of free markets justifies more government intervention, when systemic problems become glaringly apparent. Yes, the insurance companies are expletive deleteds. But what makes them REALLY toxic is the government intervention that tries to keep them afloat, so it can pretend we're still free-market.
Nothing about medical care is free market, except a small but growing number of cash-for-services clinics. The government and medical establishment that profits most from government intervention don't like those clinics. But if you go to one that doesn't take insurance or medicare/medicaid, you can get treatments for about 20 cents on the dollar (based on very little research, but suffice it to say, MUCH CHEAPER). My knee surgery with great group insurance? $70,000. Shoulder surgery for cash for my nephew? $3,000.
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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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@jazzdub4958 By "pro-American" you mean pro-war? How many of those pro-America movies had heroes breaking the law for the greater good? Because that's how the Permanent Government (the unelected part) sees itself and wishes to be portrayed.
I can't name a single movie in my lifetime that portrayed an honest business man or an un-bigoted business man. The narratives have shifted over time, but Hollywood pushed socialism. You never see the good guys in a Hollywood film arguing for LESS government intrusion.
Her dad was right. You don't realize how you were being indoctrinated at the time, methinks.
As for Ronald Reagan, he talked a good game, and he was right about high taxes stifling prosperity and tax revenues over the long haul. He was right about government intervention as being a bigger problem than the problems it purported to solve. But in actions, he was very authoritarian. War on Drugs, 55 mph speed limit, low-interest loans for New England fishermen, ... He intervened any time he pleased, because he was so sure he was right, which is exactly what he supposedly stood against.
And don't get me started on the Cold War. I was staunchly anti-Soviet during those years. I think I would have taken a different view if I had known all the things we were doing to different countries prior, during, and since his administration. The main thing that made me believe as I did was the ridiculous over-estimates of the actual Soviet threat. Our "Intel Community" sold me a bill of goods, routinely over-estimating Soviet threats by easily a factor of 10.
Reagan slowed the rate of growth of domestic spending, but he made no fundamental shifts in domestic policy in that regard. The teeth gnashing by Democrats over entitlements was enough for him to mostly leave them alone. More than that, the enormous over-estimate of the Soviet threat gave the defense industry and all its minions a blank check. He and all his successors bought and SOLD us a world view full of dangers that justified any manner of murder, war, and subversion to fight those dangers, setting the stage for the war-mongering security state of today. Reagan did some good things and some bad things. He's not the idol so many on the right seem to worship. Like Trump, he was elected to drain the swamp, but when he left, the swamp was bigger and stronger than ever before.
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John Clemens P. Rubi I think they had the cameras out for the duck drive parts. But in the translation, it said that they leave the ducks on the land for some months, from 20 days old. Until they're ready to start laying. It sounds like they don't have to feed the ducks, at all, while they're spread out on the rice paddies, and they live more or less normal duck lives, except they can't fly, and there appears to be little or no problem with predators.
They really didn't show us very much of the day-to-day of the ducks on the paddies. And we don't know if they cage 'em up for the 3 years of egg-laying.
He didn't say "no pesticide." He said "less pesticide." I wonder how much pesticide that means. Somewhere between "zero" and "a lot."
Beekeepers ship their bees across the American continent to fertilize almonds in California, every year. Goat herds are used to keep the weeds down on public and private lands, and are also used in land restoration. In Idaho, people kill thistles with chemicals, blow torches, ANYthing to eliminate invasive Canadian Star Thistle and other nasty and tenacious species. But a smart person with goats could keep her herd fed for the cost of transporting them to fresh weed-infested pasture.
Thistle has the virtue of bringing up nutrients and trace minerals from deep underground. A season or two fallow, where you let the thistle take over is a first step in land restoration. Goats love thistle, and their digestive system kills the seed (unlike birds). But the nutrients are returned to the top of the soil by their poop. Move some pigs on the ground for a short time, move them to the next space, and they'll soften up the soil and uproot everything in their enclosure. Move them after they've rooted it all up, and you're dang near ready for planting.
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I still love teaching, but I'm on my way out, because the bureaucracy is so out of touch with the actual teaching and learning. And they put up barriers to best teaching and learning in the name of "success." And NOWadays, it's getting super-toxic and super-expensive, because of the multiculturalism and political correctness. If only I'd talk down to people of other races, I would fit right in. But I treat everybody the same, which is now considered politically incorrect, because of the wide variety of "lived experiences" in the classroom.
Nobody ever cared about MY lived experience. They just expected me to perform, and expected me to KNOW what came before the next class, instead of "Oh, you're such-and-such color, so we'll just re-teach that last class that you forgot everything from (or more like, that your last teacher didn't cover, because it might impede your "success."
One-size-fits-all education is no longer necessary, and it's terribly inefficient. We can teach directly to the skill level of the student, and keep them at that one lesson until they master it, before dumping them into the NEXT class on the NEXT level, with holes in their foundation. But that's how liberals define "success." Passing. Passing someone who doesn't have ALL the skills needed to master the next class just passes the buck to the next teacher, assuming the next teacher doesn't do what 90% of public school teachers do, and pass that kid (SUCCESS!) and pass the buck to the NEXt teacher.
For years, it's been the college teachers who had to tell kids who were promoted inappropriately that they don't have the prerequisite knowledge. Now, even in college, they expect you to teach "down" to the students' level, instead of the (what used to be) strict standards adhered to in college. So now we pass the buck on up through college and into the workplace, and we wonder what's wrong, because everybody in sight is "successful."
Liberals live on Lake Woebegone, where all the kids are above average.
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As a long-time Peace-through-strength kind of guy, I remember back in the '80s, poring over American assessments of Soviet capabilities, and supporting ABM systems, and wanting a super-strong defense, and by all means, hemorrhage the budget because we need more aircraft carriers, etc. Years later, we all come to find out that the Soviet capabilities were vastly over-reported by a CIA that earned praise and funds by inflating "enemy" capabilities and intentions.
Along about this time, I waded through Heinlein's "Expanded Universe." It's not for everybody, but everybody should buy or borrow a copy and read his chapters on his trip to the Soviet Union, and HIS take on the Soviets. He says a lot of things about how the bureaucracy worked (or didn't), which some find insightful, but that's not the relevant bit, here. Heinlein was in the logistics part of the navy during WW II and even though "Intourist," the Soviet tourist bureau was very selective about what he was allowed to see, they couldn't stop him from visiting a city and seeing EXACTLY how good and how big their ports and port facilities were. His wife learned Russian before the trip, and just through casual conversations with babushkas, they arrived at a number for the overall birthrate.
Heinlein came away with estimates that were tiny fractions of published U.S. government data on the state of the Russian economy, population, and ability to support, for instance, the actual number of ships at sea or under construction. So it goes back before I was voting-age and reading up on these things. The CIA has a long history of getting it wrong and leading us astray, storing up bad karma for us, abroad, for years to come, every time they open their mouths.
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@gorkyd7912 : A teaching certificate doesn't mean a whole lot, other than that the person took a lot of education courses that are NOT related to the disciplines they mean to teach. As a former college student, I saw the wash-outs who decided to get a teaching certificate because they weren't fit to compete in any major area of study.
A master's only says you have some competence in the content area. A teaching certificate only says that you took a bare minimum of regular courses and a bunch of "education" courses. Neither says you're any good as a teacher. Only observing you in the classroom and seeing how students respond really tells you, and that's easy enough to do, unless it's a public school and administrators (and teachers) don't want to visit classrooms. In a private setup, if you suck, you're OUT.
In a private setup, parents have real skin in the game, and if you suck, they're pullin' their kids out and spending that money somewhere else. There's no penalty for failure in the public schools. The worse you suck, the more money you get. And year after year, the number of staff and administration per actual working faculty member goes up and up, without end. And there are actually LESS staff supporting the actual faculty. The staff and administration do everything BUT anything related to the actual teaching and learning.
And every time you TRY to implement something meaningful and really quality-control-related, the teachers' union or some state bureaucrat will obstruct you. Public education is a definite scam, and some of the worst scammers are the people always whining for MORE money. It's not a money thing. It's a product-quality thing. And nobody holds the public schools accountable. And NOWadays (and for the last 20 or 30 years), it's all been dumped on the COLLEGES to remediate all the damage done by k-12, instead of holding k-12 accountable.
But "student success" means students pass. And the only way to guarantee that students pass is to lower standards, which they've been doing non-stop since I started teaching back in the 1980s.
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Anti-cop sentiment flows from the War on Drugs. There are literally millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens who want to PARTY using substances a bunch of moralizers don't want them to have! It's Prohibition, staring us plain in the face, with all the organized crime entailed with PROVIDING the prohibited substance(s). MILLIONS smoke marijuana in states where it remains illegal. We have laws that make criminals of huge swathes of society, and we wonder why the public doesn't feel comfortable around police.
Also, the War on Drugs puts police in temptation's path, PERPETUALLY. There's big money changing hands, big money being confiscated, and big-money DRUGS being confiscated. There's an entire corrections industry making BANK off incarcerated drug offenders. There are police budgets and salaries that are built up to FIGHT drugs. And, as our friend Robert Mueller could once attest, the intelligence agencies can be weaponized against drug dealers, using tools designed to fight TERROR. And it comes as no surprise when we see such use of those tools becoming so commonplace, that those tools got used to spy on presidential campaigns. But that's another topic, I suppose.
End the War on Drugs, and 90% of the public-police hostility goes away.
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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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Total about-face on border policy, while pretending it's not an about-face, because Orange Man Bad.
Foreign Aid is how the USA props up corrupt governments, in return for their compliance on whatever the U.S. government wants. Most or all of the money ends up in the pockets of government officials, and more than a few times, some of that money has found its way, directly or indirectly, back into the hands of the policy-makers in the U.S. government who sweetened the aid package.
They're very cagey about it. A year or 10 years down the road, somebody will get a seat on a board or some other do-nothing post that pays big money, and you see the money or influence behind the plum position coming from one of the politicians they basically bribed. Hunter Biden is the poster child for this phenomenon. Before he became a big name, I think Chelsea Clinton was one of the most conspicuous "What has she ever done in her entire life to be appointed to that board of directors for high 6 figures?" It's all about connections and quid pro quo, which, I am convinced, is why they pushed the quid pro quo nonsense in the Trump Ukraine phone call. Dirty him up as much as possible as a distraction and mitigating factor when and if the expected allegations about the Biden Crime Family surface. They already built their trenchworks with the smear on Trump, for sure.
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Be sure to bring up Hearst when people say they yearn for the "good old days," when news was objective. It's NEVER been objective. The 1st Amendment is there to protect dissident/dissenting speech, based on the ORIGINAL PAMPHLETEERS of the American Revolution.
It used to be more subtle, is all. I noticed this in the 1970s, when I was coming of age. They "objectively reported" what they reported on, but unless you did a lot of digging, you wouldn't know how many things they chose NOT to report, thereby suppressing 'inconvenient truths.' In the '70s, though, you didn't have 100 people on the street with video cameras in their hand-held devices, so when legacy media cherry-pick and slant reports on Antifa actions or the Covington Kids, there's a viral video from INDEPENDENT media that shows what's REALLY happening.
Doesn't mean I trust independent media. I just want to see competing media (not media oligopolies) put it all out there, and let the public pick and choose what's more believable. I like biased reporting, and I want to see left, right, middle, space-alien, and overweight bubble-gum chewers to put out what THEY see, and fact check ALL the SOBs.
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@theywouldnthavetocensormei9231 We gave up the moral high ground long ago, trying to emulate the British Empire model.
What would/should we do if Russia/China staged a coup in Mexico and poured military aid into Mexico and talked $hit about how its purpose was to take on the USA?
U.S. officials assured the USSR that NATO would not expand if the USSR decided to do what it did. Then as soon as it did what it promised, we said "We are the only superpower, so we do what we want, and expanded NATO. Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, ...
Meanwhile, at home, we are increasingly authoritarian and collectivist, making ourselves into a version of the USSR.
I'm just not buying the "But they are worse!" argument that I've been fed all of my life.
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@MrFurmos LOL! The FACT that Scientific American would publish such drivel says all you need to know about the publication. Very low quality control.
Also, I used to read Scientific American in the '70s and '80s. It went off the rails on climate change and has never restored itself in my good graces since. If they were right on any of that stuff, then why is New York City not under water? ALL of those models predict a planet on fire. NONE of those models, when applied to real-world data, succeed in predicting global temperatures.
Start the model in 1900. By 1950, the ice caps are gone. Start the model in 1950. By 1980, the ice caps are gone. Every single model exaggerates the amount of warming by a little or (usually) a lot. The more doomsday the article, the more praise it receives. But point out that ocean levels are rising at the same rate as they have for centuries and you will be canceled. Point out how HOT it was in the 1930s and get canceled. Point out how most of the 20th Century was global cooling, from the 1930s to the late 1970s and get canceled.
1978 was the low point of global temps in the 20th Century, after trending downward for decades. I remember reading articles about the impending Ice Age in the 1970s. They didn't switch to global warming until temps started rebounding in 1978/1979. This is the so-called "Hockey Stick," to which all must bow and offer sacrifice.
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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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@voodoochild1806 Neither were Republicans. Not a single firearm in this so-called "insurrection." After a year of non-stop "mostly peaceful protests" across the country by LEFTISTS that legacy media called "mostly peaceful," while cities burned (including federal buildings), but the INSTANT it was a mostly peaceful protest where some idiots got out of hand (with the assistance of DC police), well THAT'S an insurrection.
It's an old story. They bully you for YEARS and the ONE TIME you lose YOUR cool, YOU'RE the one who needs anger-management training. It's duplicitous, underhanded and malicious.
It's the result of the FACT that over 90% of journalists working for legacy media are left-of-center Democrats with absolutely ZERO ethics about telling the full story. No. Legacy media in the USA are the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party. Seeing it any other way is delusion. FOX is, at best, controlled opposition. It avoids stories that make their corporate advertisers uncomfortable.
But not to worry. MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX and CNN are lucky to bring in 10 million viewers out of a nation of 320 million. Nobody pays attention to them, except politicians, who pretend those obsolete networks actually represent what the American people are thinking. For decades, they manufactured consent. Now they just pretend we consent. For decades, if all the networks said the same thing, it DID represent what Americans were thinking. But NOW? Now, most people who DO watch are gnashing their teeth and changing the channel because of all the lies, smears, and downright IGNORANCE.
I don't know how it is in the Australia, but my experience in the USA is that the journalists are typically the least talented and least inquisitive students in college, today. I dealt with them as a student and as a teacher. Bare minimum to get a passing grade, and grumble the whole time about how "hard" everything is. Then a metamorphosis occurs. They get their teeth fixed, their hair done, a little nip here and tuck there, maybe some speech therapy, and there they are in front of a camera, acting like they know more than anybody else about EVERYthing.
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Nod and a wink to BLM and Antifa property damage, intimidation and violence.
And yes, a lot of the weaponization of agencies got started under George W, with the Patriot Act. Bush warned about where it might lead, and tried to keep up the appearance that he wasn't abusing the new powers, although I think it's going to be pretty clear that he did abuse them. But Obama came into office with Patriot Act a fact, and acted like a kid in a candy store.
But i think Robert Mueller's championing of "parallel construction," which basically says it's OK to use the CIA and NSA to spy on citizens on U.S. soil, if you can build a case against people without it APPEARING that your wiretaps were illegal. That would be bad enough, but they took it to another level, by falsifying evidence and ramming it through the FISA courts, unopposed, to give themselves justification for the spying.
The amazing thing is that in spite of all these abuses, they didn't find anything that stuck. If there were anything there, Trump would be out of office by now, and nobody would question how it was done for another 10 years, and it would be called a conspiracy theory.
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After the Gulag leaked out, championing socialism became a tough sell. Since George Orwell - a former socialist - figured out it was all a sham, the elites switched tactics from "Socialism is great!" to systematically discrediting free-market capitalism. With generations indoctrinated against free-market capitalism, socialism became more and more popular amongst academics, who dared not speak its name until quite recently. Now we're back to the 1920s, again, where socialism represents some kind of utopian alternative to free-market capitalism and limited government.
Most people don't understand the basic principles and main differences between socialist authoritarianism and free-market capitalism. Nobody understands the concept of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand," because it's, well, invisible! It's far easier to parade a few people you used taxpayer money to benefit than it is to show the destruction of the engine of prosperity that lifts EVERYone. It's not an invisible hand. It's an invisible tide that raises all boats simultaneously, through millions of individual transactions and choices made VOLUNTARILY by people. The so-called 'left' (whom I see as re-branded authoritarian right with a kinder, gentler mask) don't trust the people, so they foolishly put all their faith in the most toxic power seekers in the country, rewarding foolish policies with votes, because there's Free Stuff in it for those who support total demagogues.
Most of the progress of the 20th Century was in SPITE of what the government was doing. Our free-market economy generated so much wealth and prosperity that the erosion of our prosperity by demagogues was not as great as the engine of prosperity: Free people incentivized to excellence by profit. The economy is NOT a zero-sum game. We CREATE wealth through hard work and innovation. And we get the most innovation from a free society that allows EVERYbody the right to KEEP what they build or earn. Socialists hate that. They want power and they want to MAKE winners they can show off, rather than LETTING people win on their own merits.
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What Barr said was that the entire Trump-Russia investigation seems to have been run outside the normal chain of command. Higher-ups were bypassing normal procedures and maybe even breaking laws and/or violating regulations and/or ignoring best practices (which Comey pretends to champion). All very irregular. As a highly experienced top-dog government lawyer, Barr knows when things aren't "jiving." We'll see what comes of it. But the picture that's emerging is one of unprecedented bypassing of the normal procedures and protocols by higher-ups, combined with a shocking lack of discipline down the ranks. I just get an impression people were more interested in getting their pictures taken than in minding the store, and contemptuous of the rules if the rules stood in their way.
In my view, the higher-ups had some smear materials handy, and knew they wouldn't pass the sniff test. The only way they could get this whole thing rolling was by pulling a fast one on the FISC. Once full surveillance got green-lighted, they probably figured they had it made. They'd turn up something, or get a petty crook within 2 degrees of separation from Trump (or Carter Page or George Papadopoulos), and have their star informant/witness. Amazingly, nobody, including Cohen or Manaforte, really gave them anything. Amazingly, nothing has really stuck to Trump, and the investigations are now in the other direction. And just as an outsider looking in, I figure there are enough facts in the public square that the Trump team has as many or more surveillance warrants out as were ever sworn out in his direction.
I think a major reason he hasn't gone after his accusers is to avoid the very obstruction charges on which the Democrats now pin their hopes. The Mueller report finally being submitted gets Trump out from under not being able to run the DOJ properly. Dems can rant against Barr, but he's head and shoulders above the AG they gave a free pass under Obama.
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Coming over from Africa makes you much different from somebody of African descent immersed in American entitlement culture. The excellent performance in our education and economy by Africans proves that it isn't skin color holding people back, but their attitude. There are as many or more white people infected by entitlement culture, but there's an expectation that a person of color think exactly the way white liberals WANT them to think (and vote), and if you think for yourself, they call you a race traitor.
There are people on the right who will call whites "race traitors" for NOT being racist, but they are a very small minority that are very much marginalized. On the LEFT, the least tolerant and most racist people dominate the conversation, and are singled out for praise.
What's ironic is how those who FOLLOW the narrative are called stunning and brave, while those like yourself, who THINK, are shunned, doxxed and abused in the public square.
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@winnieblews Pretty much. FOX will let slip some things the other networks won't, as will SKY News. Both have their own 3rd rails. FOX is also pro-vax, while acting skeptical about vax mandates, sometimes.
FOX and SKY are about the only legacy media I'll touch. But they're still only a small fraction of the news I consume from other, more independent outlets. If I want an honest lefty, I'll check out Greenwald, Taibbi, or Jimmy Dore. For conservative take, EPOCH, JustTheNews, or Heritage Foundation. I love Tony Heller on Climate Change. I'm prob'ly fringe libertarian/constitutionalist.
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@shawngillogly6873 "Show me a revolutionary and I'll show you a closet aristocrat." Herbert had a much bigger story to tell, and a lot of people lost interest after the first installment, where the good guys win and Paul is made Emperor. I think it all holds together very well until possibly the last installment, published after his death, by his kid and a co-writer (Poul Anderson's kid).
The prequels which came along later are faithful to the canon, but much weaker than the original DUNE, itself. Lots of people don't "get" God Emperor of DUNE," but I think it's possibly the best of the bunch, tying everything together in a nice critique of human nature and political power. The PURPOSE of Leto II's empire was its destruction, and the MANNER of its destruction (and Leto II's death), the development in humanity that Leto II was aiming at, was key to humankind's survival against the return of the machines. Leto II didn't know how it all would end up, millennia after his demise. He just knew that if he departed in any way from his Golden Path, that the end of all human life was inevitable.
It wasn't that the Golden Path was all that GREAT. It was that all other paths he used his prescience to explore, led inevitably to human extinction.
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The only thing the Duran's gotten wrong was when Alexander dismissed the notion of a Russian invasion of Ukraine in January and early February, before the February invasion of Ukraine by Russia. There was good reason to be dismissive, because Russia initiated hostilities with far too few troops and far too little equipment in position to conquer Ukraine.
And once it started, everyone looked at it like we currently look at the Kursk invasion: Just not enough behind it to defeat Russia. The "stupidity" of the SMO was the opinion of most, but as history unfolds, it appears that Russia's been 2 or 3 moves ahead with the overall strategy from the very beginning.
They lost some of their best men in the opener, in the feint at Kiev, but everywhere else, they made enough progress to keep ALL the fighting on Ukrainian territory, and the way Russia has fought has been very sparing of its troops and unstinting in its expenditure of ammo and equipment, where it has enjoyed a lead on the combined West's stockpiles and expenditure of ammo, armor and artillery since before hostilities commenced.
You see how it had to have been all mapped out by Putin's team from the very beginning. The "lightning" in this war is the pace at which the Russians can fortify a territory, with their heavy equipment in the thick Ukrainian soil.
Obligatory Alesia reference: In 6 weeks, Julius Caesar, with 25,000 legionnaires, but a 9-mile wall around Alesia and a 13-mile wall around THAT, in 6 weeks. It was a tremendous engineering feat.
The way Russia fortified behind those early gains in February-March, 2022, is a similar feat in the modern era. When those fortifications were built and it became clear how hard it was to reach them, let alone breach them, in the summer of 2023, that the basic math of the situation was playing out on the battlefield, and Ukraine's situation was hopeless.
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That's the trouble with judging history by our own modern values. Higher standards are the product of pretty universal prosperity. Throughout history, human life was filthy, brutal and short.
The "evils" of industrialization, of which much has been made in the last 50 years, invariably leaves out the fact that child labor was often the difference between a child starving and a child surviving. By our standards, it's NASTY. By the standards of 100 or more years ago, the alternative to that "awful" exploitation was DEATH by starvation, or heavy manual labor from sunrise to sunset for kids of all ages, out in the countryside. Those kids were in the cities working in factories, because their parents couldn't support them in any other way and HAD to move to the city, or die.
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Now that we KNOW that human beings will abuse their powers when granted them, maybe you progressives will be in less of a hurry to give government so many responsibilities, each of which gives it more authority and power over us. Progressives feed the dragon and then complain when their houses burn down. Conservatives say "Stop feeding the dragon. Of COURSE it offers you all your heart desires. It's its nature! But one day, your home will be ashes! Don't fall for it!"
But when it comes to these fake attacks on Trump, we see eye to eye. I agree that there are real things of which to be critical. Knee-jerk, Deep-State-lookin' missile strikes after what was VERY likely a false-flag chemical attack, when Assad had the situation on the ground WELL in hand. The only thing that could've cost Assad the war with the rebels was something stupid, like a chemical attack, provoking U.S. intervention.
I still think that the WAY "we" executed that missile strike, we intended to do minimum harm. It was mostly symbolism. Some conservative conspiracy theorists suggest Trump was just throwing Deep State a bone, to keep them off his back a little longer, while keeping the Russians from getting too pissed-off, by warning everybody out of the vicinity before the attack. Supporting that claim is the fact that the Russians DID pull their people out of the affected area ahead of time. So you know they had the heads-up. So you know Assad had the heads-up.
I think Schiff's number of "Avenatti moments" is becoming too great for even the legacy media to ignore. Guys who are the most brazen about making unfounded accusations end up having the most to hide, a lot of the time. Jimmy Swaggart will preach fire and brimstone and then hire a hooker, because he "just wants to watch." (I think he DID only watch, but that was it, for him, when it came out.) The champion of women's rights just can't keep his hands to himself at work. The guy digging up 10-year-old tweets turns out to have some 10-year-old tweets of his OWN.
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I think they vastly under-estimated Trump. I think he spent his whole life keeping his focus on what HE did best, and delegating everything else to others. It's the only way to have "scalability" as an executive. Most businesses can never grow beyond the amount of work that the guy at the top can do. Trump has plenty of energy, but largely because he sticks to what he does and keeps tabs on what others are doing for him. And if there are too many of those people to keep track of and still get HIS stuff done, he hires somebody ELSE and keeps an eye on THAT guy.
Great presidents/generals/captains-of-industry have one thing in common: A good staff and the ability to delegate. I don't think Trump's particularly gifted at choosing staff, but he has no hesitations about shuffling the deck and getting somebody in who MIGHT do a better job.
But the point I'm belaboring, here, is that, unlike any president I've ever seen, before, Trump takes EVERYthing in stride? Gonna go after him in court? Hire a couple more hot-shot lawyers. Any other president under the kinds of unfair, unceasing and seemingly overwhelming partisan attacks from every quarter would've been beaten down, by now. Trump just hires someone to handle the little bit extra, and lets his lawyers do all the fighting in court. Meanwhile, he just gets back to implementing policies and trying to get government to work better.
Pro athletes are known for this kind of attitude: Do what you can (train and prepare) and leave the rest up to fate.
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Pretty much my thinking. In many respects, tanks are now obsolete. I think the tank losses have a lot to do with the stand-off weapons like StormShadow.
But I think that such munitions are in relatively short supply, which calls for a different approach from the Russian side. The meat-grinder strategy doesn't work when the Ukrainians can reach out and touch armor formations from long range, with precision-guided artillery. These tit-for-tat, low-level skirmishes are too close to even. Trade a couple-few tanks destroyed every day, and the losses slowly mount.
The WORST tank in WW 2 was the Sherman, but it could be mass-produced with ease, and the farmers who manned them could fix a lot of what went wrong in the field. Their standard cannon was very weak, but if they could attack from the sides or rear, they could take out a Panzer IV or even a Tiger, and the Germans couldn't afford the losses.
If Russia gears up and go all-out blitzkrieg with everything they've got, I don't think Ukrainian forces have enough ammo to take them all out. They may suffer serious losses, but between their air superiority and overwhelming armor and artillery advantage, they could swamp the trickle of advanced weapons NATO is able to provide.
I think the dysfunction of Russian MoD is greatly exaggerated, but we are at a tipping point, where doctrine must change, because at the skirmish level, Ukraine's giving almost as good as it's taking. I think there is probably a big strategy debate taking place, with the advent of StormShadow and possibly ATACMs in the near future. The USA meanwhile, has a new-gen weapon beyond the ATACM.
One of the dangers of introducing StormShadow and ATACM is it opens the door to the Russians and reverse-engineering Iranians to get their hands on these new systems. The Pentagon claims to not even know where a lot of the military aid is going. The Israelis refused Ukraine any Iron Dome air defense systems out of precisely that fear. There's also a fear that the Chinese will get their mitts on these systems. Who knows how much of that military aid is going elsewhere to line the pockets of Ukrainian oligarchs? Who can guarantee that none of these systems will be captured by the Russians?
Anyway, good points made. I wonder if there will be a shift away from tanks and toward lighter, faster vehicles with lethal weapons systems on-board. Maybe the Bradley attack vehicles, themselves are too big and slow.
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Unless the power is solar, hydro or nuclear, EVs simply shift the consumption of fossil fuels to big power plants. Given energy losses converting fuel to electricity and/or transmission losses bringing that power to your vehicle, you would be burning more fuel to power your EV than if you'd simply used fossil fuel to power the vehicle, directly.
And that's not accounting in any way for the environmental and monetary cost of making the batteries and disposing them.
There's a place for EVs, but everyone using them, exclusively, is currently a pipe dream. People always want the quick fix, and there are no quick fixes. But the closest thing to a quick fix will be found by free markets. Government bureaucrats and politicians should stay the hell out of it. Their main impact is to steal resources from OTHER good ideas, without ever having to COMPETE wiith those other ideas. The only people guaranteed to make out on EVs are the bureaucrats, politicians and cronies lining up for government subsidies.
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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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I've often thought along the same lines. And Trump Derangement Syndrome is a very real thing, and the last, spiteful, money-grubbing act of "crumbling media" is to infect as many as possible with it.
It is very true that a LOT of people think it's funny as hell that millions hang on every tweet. I see Syndromers all the time, at work and socially. They HATE the man. BOILING hatred. Want him DEAD.
As a Libertarian, at heart, I've always been disappointed by our refusal to govern ourselves, intelligently. My guy NEVER wins. But I've always just hoped for the best - and seen some of the best coming out in Dave Rubin Report and other outside-of-mainstream outlets - and expected the worst.
And yes, if Hillary had won, things would've continued more or less the same as Obama, with an Iron Lady hawkishness abroad that nobody anticipated.
I think folks are right when they say Republicans start wars. But nobody pays attention to how Democrats escalate the tensions and leave the pot simmering, hoping it doesn't boil over, but if it does, it gives them emergency powers and a nice bump in popularity.
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@davedee6745 : You really think the government is your friend and is providing good health care at reasonable cost? You're too ignorant to realize that most of the problems in health care, today, are the RESULT of heavy-handed government interference, in cahoots with Big Pharma, Big Insurance and Corrupt Politicians who buy the votes of fools like you by making promises with everybody's money but their own.
Take the Red Pill. Break your addiction to Fake Free Stuff, on which we, the people are lucky to get 50 cents on the dollar, by the time the government bureaucrats are paid and all the red tape is filled-out. Maybe you're just unable to care for yourself, and so you NEED stuff from other people to get by. So you're OK with taking from them by force, rather than seek to improve your own situation in a setting that has opportunities for schmucks like us to get ahead, withOUT robbing somebody who works harder or better than we do.
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@itsokaytobeclownpilled5937 : Perhaps you haven't noticed the frenzied resistance he's met at every turn. I think Repubs AND Dems would've banded together to impeach him if he'd pulled out of Syria before this. You have to prepare the ground before you.
And really, bad as illegal immigration is, IF we can control the border and return to SANE immigration policy, then the illegals who are already here just mainly need to be assimilated. The key is to stem the FLOW. If we do THAT, then we can absorb the people already here, no problem. Just turn off the welfare cornucopia. If you are here in this country, and aren't a citizen, and can't show means of support, then go back where you came from. We USED to require those attempting to enter our country to SHOW that they could support themselves, before allowing them in.
What? You're just here for the Free Stuff? Sorry. We're fresh out. Turns out that we're gonna take care of our OWN, first. And that's the hole in the left's argument for open borders. You're leaving your own people in a bind just so you can virtue signal. If I were a poor person in the U.S., I wouldn't vote Democrat at ALL, until they pull their heads out of their asses on open borders. They swamp poorer communities with illegals and the crime that comes with them. It's destroying a sizable chunk of the butt-hurt-and-guilty-elitist-white-liberal coalition.
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@Tynab Never deal with your children in anger. Everyone gets angry, but it better only be like once a year or something. If you're angry with your children, they'll be angry with their children.
"Gentle but firm" is the old saying. I see a lot of moms and some dads who want to be their kids' friend more than they want to be their parent. That doesn't mean you should be unfriendly to your kids. But you have to set boundaries and stick to them. Kids will test their boundaries, and if you show weakness, they'll try to walk all over you, forever.
If they can beg and wheedle to get their way after you told them "no," they will beg and wheedle all the time. That's where fathers are supposed to come in. "No means no" dads. There are some moms who understand this, but not the vast majority.
Rather than telling the kid 5 times to do something and getting louder and more threatening each time, just calmly assess the punishment, whatever it is. Kids actually prefer clear boundaries. When you see a kid throwing a tantrum in the grocery store, you know there's bad parenting going on.
You're the adult. Behave as an adult. Too many let themselves be dragged down to the child's level.
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@elstongunn4277 Crime-scene investigators aren't detectives. I could be wrong, but I think McCarthy was a technician. There's a lot more involved in detective work than just the evidence collected at the scene.
If she did it, which seems likely, she saw the phone records as part of her plan, including texting from the victim's phone. It's entirely possible that a CSI would overlook the fact that the victim's phone would ping off a cell tower if it weren't in use. It's an easy thing to overlook. Maybe she thought she turned it off. Maybe she forgot to turn it off. Maybe it didn't occur to her that leaving it on would leave a footprint.
When you're trying to commit a perfect crime, there's any number of ways you can get tripped up. I imagine you probably can't possibly foresee all the different ways you might be exposed. Murder for money or revenge is pretty hard to cover up. Serial killers who kill strangers are the toughest to track down, because there's no clear connection between victim and murderer.
I'd keep in mind too, that your average sociopath thinks everybody else is stupid, because they're CONSTANTLY lying and gaslighting others, sometimes just for their own amusement, and they rarely, if ever, get caught if they keep their misbehavior below a certain threshold. Honest people assume others around them are honest, because living in truth is just a much better way to live your life. Surrounding yourself with trustworthy people and TRUSTING them is a good way to live.
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I remember in the '60s and '70s, when the free expression crowd all ended up looking, talking, and dressing alike. They were trying to be bold and be different, but they all ended up more conformist than the establishment they rejected. Now, that generation is the new establishment, and for all its protestations to the contrary, is more conformist and authoritarian than their extremely permissive parents.
The thing about so-called "progressivism" is that everything it stands for hearkens back to the principles operating during very regressive, authoritarian days, when the king's word was law, and all of his minions were free to run roughshod over us peasants, at will, by law.
They put pretty words around it, but it all boils down to "We, the political class, will 'take care of you,' and you, in your turn, will obey us in all things, even silly things (like wearing masks during COVID)."
True liberalism, with minimalist government, IS the innovation. The ball really got rolling with Locke and Hobbes, in the Age of Enlightenment, about 300 years ago, culminating in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, which was the first and remains the only constitution with anything like a Bill of Rights. No other nation has that, and the political class would love to take that away from us, starting with the right to criticize the government, and the right to keep and bear arms right behind THAT.
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It's the "Long March" through our educational institutions. The Soviets made it impossible for anybody to openly support socialism. There was just no hiding the Gulag, and no stopping Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago."
Since you couldn't rationally defend communism or its re-branded socialism, the idea was to de-construct capitalism. "Look at how unfettered capitalism has run amuck! Look at how people live in poverty!"
It was never capitalism that was being criticized, but fascist features that crept in when big corporations learned how to manipulate the rule set at the source by bribing Congress and the regulatory agencies created to regulate them. This became what is known as "crony capitalism," which isn't free-market capitalism, at all; rather, it is capitalism with a rule set that is distorted by a small number of very powerful interests and interest groups, what we call "public-private partnerships," today, with a straight face.
Public-private partnerships and regulatory capture creates, in essence, a fascist system, in which everything is under the government, nothing is outside of government, and no one may be against the government (according to Mussolini).
What people don't understand is that communism = socialism = fascism. They're all the same thing, with different brand names and all brands claiming to be better than all other brands. But functionally identical:
You will get what the government gives you and you will obey the government without question in all things.
This sounds a lot like an atheist's version of "Divine Right of Kings," back in the old days of monarchy. Different labels. The same exact "lords and ladies telling the serfs what to do and the serfs better darn well be happy and better darn well OBEY."
So aristocracy = communism = fascism = socialism. Functionally identical. Just applied with modern tools and modern terminology but the same fundamental idea: The individual must give up all autonomy and property to the collective, and the collective will decide what to give to the individual, if they feel like it, and when they get around to it.
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@gerk7238 The scientific method is a method of multiple working hypotheses. You don't rule anything out, and you lean towards the theory that fits the facts in the most simple way (Occam's Razor - the simpler explanation is preferred/more likely).
Wuhan Lab was at the epicenter. They were doing research on this precise strain of bat virus. Early on, we heard of scientists being sent home with corona-like symptoms in November 2019. The prima facie evidence is that it most likely got loose out of the lab, and that theory should've stood as at LEAST as probable as other theories, and more investigation needed to be done. What happened, instead, was the guy who SENT THE MONEY OVER TO WUHAN, Peter Daszak, was the guy whose word everybody took, without fact-checking - indeed, FaceBook made him their head fact-checker!
And you know how THEY knew he had no conflict of interest? His word that he had no conflict of interest.
And if you have no sense that theories embarrassing to China and Fauci's Funders were ruthlessly and arbitrarily suppressed as "debunked" without ANY real investigative reporting being done, then you haven't been paying attention. The fact that they got it all wrong can NOT be called "an honest mistake." It was pure censorship, implemented by the very person who was likely complicit in the creation of the virus.
What YOU do is take the word of ONE GUY you decide to make the arbiter of truth, and then think it's OK to silence all competing theories. That's authoritarian bullshit. That's not how we produce knowledge in the West. That's now how we judge truth in the West. We spent millennia refining how we measure truth and reason to a better understanding of the world around us. Science. You know? All that stuff that made this conversation in the comments section possible?
Nope. Once they make it political, nobody cares about truth any more, because to them, the truth is already absolutely known.
You make a big show of "following the facts and evidence," but it is clear by the abject FAILURES that our leaders were not following facts and evidence, and many of the measures imposed did more harm than good.
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@DarkFox2232 Our farmers are locked into chemical farming that's bad for the environment. I don't think the big harvesters and tractors are the problem, and that the fuel invested is well worth it, but I don't like the petrochemical side of it: the pesticides and fertilizers.
Farmers are forced to farm this way, because of global price competition. They're also led down blind alleys by crop supports (government subsidies) that make one crop artificially more profitable.
I also think it's better to practice old-fashioned plant- and animal-husbandry, where the people growing the crop set aside some of their best for the next year's seed, and not have to buy seed, or worse, BORROW to buy seed every spring.
We do need a revolution in agriculture, but not the one that's being forced on farmers, now that politicians are pushing the climate-change agenda.
The global supply chain is not a bad thing, but people should be buying the vast majority of their food, locally. It's good that we CAN ship "truck vegetables" across the planet, but there are some developing niches for all of those vegetables to be grown locally on very profitable small plots.
We have the ag. tech., now, to save vast amounts of labor on small, hyper-productive farms serving local customers. Plant your seeds in winter in a ribbon. Load the ribbon in your planter, and get perfect spacing for max production and crowding out weeds. Plant them as fast as you can walk down the rows, with a seedling-planting device of pure genius.
We could have a whole new generation out there "homesteading" as a lifestyle choice. I think if we just left farmers alone, they'd evolve very quickly, with the more clever ones branching out into multiple strategies and multiple crops as "side gigs."
Even before Bidenflation, we were already at the tipping point where it's profitable to grow citrus in greenhouses as far North as Wyoming. See "Oranges in the Snow" video(s). It's just a matter of someone deciding they want to do it. Florida farmers get a tiny fraction of the retail price on the oranges they grow. One guy, with a contract to supply a few grocery stores within 50 miles of his place, could pocket almost all of that money. Now, with fuel prices soaring, it's even more competitive than it was 10 years ago.
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You can still die of it if you don't have a doctor who has HCQ, Ivermectin or ?fluvoxin? I can't remember that third medicine.
All we needed to do was take cold symptoms more seriously, get checked out by a doctor, and enter a commonsense COVID treatment regimen, if we tested positive. The medical and epidemiological establishment got everything wrong, and the political establishment leaped at the chance to test its authoritarian wings. The really scary thing was how many sheeple became totally unhinged and unquestioning.
We knew by March, 2020, that it was treatable with treatments that clinicians could tailor to their patients, as they always have, for over a century. We've never given government agencies as much power as they have, now, and we're paying a heavy price for their fecklessness, incompetence, and ZERO connection to or concern for the interests of the people.
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That's pretty hard-hitting stuff. It's a nasty business. Civilized societies need to come up with something better. Medical science is far beyond the science of the early '70s, when Roe V Wade was decided. I've hunted and fished, and I know how the sausage is made. I'm not squeamish. I like meat and I know where it comes from. But this is pretty bad. Think about that baby that would command the affection and protective spirit of every loving and kind person on the planet, if it survived. And people are snuffing it out before it breathes air.
I know it's a no-no, but I'm pretty situational ethics about it. And my understanding is that K-Cl (Potassium chloride) without any kind of go-to-sleep drug before it, is not a good way to go. And I think that the better we get at saving the lives of pre-mature babies, the closer to conception the line on abortion ought to move, but libs have been moving it in the opposite direction. That's regressive. Progress is catching pregnancies, earlier and earlier, and keeping babies alive earlier and earlier.
As a hack historian, I think that infanticide is a reflection of how harsh the times are, how close to the bone the society is, and how fecund the society is. It might be that the survival of the tribe is helped by being able to choose not to have babies, now, and be able to make them in a hurry when times are better. Get through the crisis. But decades of upward-trending numbers of abortions is not a tribe on the verge of extinction saying it can't raise babies that year.
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I'm all for free trade, but not when "free trade" means our trading partners protect their products, tax ours, and we do nothing. Trump is using tariffs, brilliantly, to extract much-needed concessions in foreign policy and trade negotiations. I'd much rather see that, than dropping bombs on people, and the whole "constructive engagement" where we trade with nations who oppress their people and cheat us at every opportunity is very passé. I wouldn't trade with China, at all, if I had my 'druthers. They need to change their ways.
In the situation we're currently in, we can't just turn off the spigot, but we can and must pressure trading partners such as China (and Mexico) to do the right thing, or pay the cost. The last few or several presidents - when they couldn't bully through force of arms - negotiated as though the USA has no leverage and is grateful for whatever bones our partners would throw them. Trump came into office and said "Hmmm. That's a bad deal for us. That's a bad deal for us. And THAT'S a bad deal for us. And why the hell do we keep going to war for no reason?"
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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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I would NOT want to wear a body cam; however, office-hour interactions with students and definitely classes with a room full of students SHOULD be recorded.
That's the thing I LOVE about going full-on ZOOM! The parents are actually seeing and hearing what goes on in the classroom. Some of it's good, but you can pinpoint incompetence in very little time, if classes are recorded/streamed, and the parents can SEE what's being taught and how it's being taught.
While I think there's already a growing trend away from the public schools, I think COVID accelerated that trend. Millions of parents shocked and appalled by what's going on.
Thing is, there are so many great education products out there that, with very little parental involvement, can assess a child's competencies and deliver exactly what the child needs, exactly when the child needs it, with INFINITE patience to assess the child's work. These online Learning Management Systems (LMS's) aren't a panacea, but they can do a LOT of the heavy lifting. I think a blended approach, with more of a "expert (in the subject) facilitator" rather than a "lecturer" would serve most students BETTER, teach them how to learn things withOUT being spoon-fed a one-size-fits-all lecture at the exact same time and the exact same pace, which is how we've been doing it.
We need to train our kids how to make use of better resources than we've ever had in HISTORY, and quit pretending that the traditional schools are anything more than over-priced baby-sitting services.
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@nicholasleclerc1583 Well, if you're going to deny that Paul and Leto II were actually prescient, then why did you even bother reading past the first book? Paul and Leto II both saw the extinction of humanity within a few thousand years. Paul lacked the ruthlessness to do what was needed. Leto II, born a Fremen, had the necessary ruthlessness. It cost him his humanity, but as the books tell it, humanity DID survive, due to Leto II's sacrifice.
Of COURSE it's fiction. And I really enjoyed Herbert's systematic dissection of theocracy, monarchy, and even representative republicanism. How they all start out with the/a good idea, but time and human nature always find a way to corrupt them, assuming they weren't corrupt from the word "Go."
Leto II's main message was "Humanity will NEVER AGAIN put all its trust and faith in one leader, after what I'm gonna do to 'em." He WANTED to be overthrown, and it took 4,000 years for humanity to find its way around him, an eventuality that he met with great joy, hope - and utter despair for himself. He NEEDED a Delilah (Hwi Noree) to bring him down, and he embraced her arrival with all his heart, because she proved humanity's next stage of evolution had been achieved.
Anyway, I thought the entire series did Asimov's Foundation saga one better, although if you're familiar with Asimov's works, you see how he's wrestling with very much the same sorts of concepts and resolves them in very similar - and similarly unjustified - ways. None of these questions will be resolved in OUR lifetimes, but guys like Jordan Peterson are at least sketching the outlines of "What is the proper balance between the rights of the individual, the responsibility of the individual to the whole, and the responsibility of the whole to the rights of the individual?"
There's a balance between the collectivist and the anarchist that each generation must strike. Most of human history consists of the surrender of the individual to the collective in some way, shape or form, to the detriment of the individual and the collective. Historically, it's fear of outside threats, but at various times, internal threats - like contagion or the Jews - serve as the rallying point for those who hunger for power over others.
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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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"No such thing as bad weather. Just bad equipment." That's a Colorado saying, which applies to its northern neighbor. After 7 years up in Gunnison, Colorado, just to the south, Wyoming winters hold no mysteries, even though 8,000 feet in the Bighorns is colder than 8,000 feet in the San Juans.
You have to develop a certain level of smugness about defeating the elements. "Yeah, it's cold, but I'm not." I spent some time in Laramie in the winter, and they ain't lyin' about the wind or the cold. Even if you love the outdoors, there are good stretches where nobody's going outside! So you better like puttering in your shop or curling up with a book next to the fire.
Speaking as a sportsman and outdoorsman, I think I prefer Wyoming over Colorado. Colorado's got some great places, and some great out-of-the-way places, but even in those places, you're likely to run into strangers who think nothing of invading the hole you're working, like it's nothing, and scare all the fish. I remember getting offended a few times in Colorado, and then offending others in Idaho, when I acted too much like a Coloradan, and the 50 yards I gave 'em wasn't enough to suit.
If you like having the whole area to yourself, like I do, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho are all better than Colorado.
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@jollygoodgordon5580 All the Abrahamic religions have a political component. A model for tribal survival that's scalable. Arguably, the whole thing was made up by a handful of smart chieftains, who knew that the tribes needed to unite or be destroyed, one by one. I'd like to argue that Mohammed focused more on the political aspect, for a more aggressively expansionist faith with a strong will to nationhood, but the Christian offshoot is no stranger to imperialism by divine right, either. Straight-up Judaism appears to be the least harmful of the three main branches. I think they'd've been quite happy within the confines of what is loosely considered "Israel" in the current day. It was Islam and Christianity that aggressively, by persuasion or force, converted huge swaths of the planet to THEIR belief systems.
Anyway, I take wisdom where I can find it, and I really like the "ideal human" presented by the Christ archetype. People with their eye focused on that "ideal human" are going to make some good decisions they otherwise might not. Same with idealized notions of a Great Prophet, like Mohammed.
The Holy Bible has definitely been filtered and rearranged by church and political hierarchies along the way. The Hebrew Bible (Torah?) is pretty much unchanged, since (according to video) the 3rd Century BC. Lots of latter-day Christians would like to see more books included than came out of Nicea. I can see why they did it and that they mostly meant well, but maybe people would look at the whole thing, differently, with the Book of Thomas included. I'm not a doubter (or a believer), necessarily, but I think the message is a whole lot more ambiguous, and can be taken as far more about better living in THIS world, than the big hook the politicians in the group wanted, which is the promise of everlasting life, which is their #1 recruiting tool (after free potluck dinners).
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Ryan Reynolds got buff for Blade III, years ago, and talked about chicken breasts, protein drinks, and shitting in streams for 3 months, while his chest felt like it'd been run over by a truck every day, from the workouts.
If you're under the guidance of a professional trainer who knows how to bulk you up and you stick to your diet and exercise routines, you can look pretty buff after 3 months or more. Most of the guys we're talking about are relatively young and fit, to begin with. Hugh Jackman and The Rock aren't all that young, but they were always in good shape. The Rock's been a semi-body-builder his whole adult life.
None of these guys are going to win a body-builder contest. Some guys, like Efron, maybe had a lot more work to do to bulk themselves up. Maintaining your physique requires discipline, but it's a lot easier to LOOK good than it is to be a competitive athlete. So once they've gotten into movie shape I don't think it's too hard a struggle to stay that way or close.
Now, knowing it's Hollywood and how degenerate the place is, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that many or most are taking at least some form of oral PED.
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Did you know that Bill Gates originally refused to have an office in Washington, D.C.? He didn't think it had anything to do with making (stealing) software. But because of his refusal, Congress went after him in a big way. Now Microsoft is one of the biggest lobbyists in the country, and everything's hunky-dory for Microsoft.
The PROBLEM is Congress legislating on everything under the Sun. They don't have the expertise to craft the legislation, so they rely on "industry leaders." Needless to say, those "experts" have a big-corporation bias, so just about everything Congress comes out with favors the big corporations. When they SAY they're sticking it to the corporations, it's actually the big corporations sticking it to US by controlling the crafting of the rule sets by which we all must abide.
Congress needs to stay in its fucking lane, but there's just too much political and monetary gain in it for it to resist.
We need another Davy Crockett in Congress. When he was in Washington, there was a bill proposed to help the widow of a war hero, who'd lost everything. Everyone said what a compassionate and patriotic thing that was, but Crockett said "It's not our money to GIVE! But I will donate one week's pay to her and if everyone who supports this bill would do the same, she would be set up in style." Well, needless to say, nobody in the Congress wanted to give up THEIR money to this noble cause. Their compassion ended when it had to come out of THEIR pockets.
We've come a long way (down) since then. There's nobody to challenge them on their fake compassion. "Sounds good! Let's do this 'for the American people.'" They're not doing it for us. They're taking from us to do for themSELVES.
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The Baron had no idea how many Fremen there were. He only got an inkling from his new, temporary "twisted mentat," Thufir Hawat, after Duke Leto was dead. Hawat figured it out from the Baron's recounting of a conversation with Count Hasimir Fenring, who worked for the Emperor. "Witch's blood!" was what Hawat said, as I recall.
The Baron innocently talked about how he might use DUNE as a training planet for his own troops, following the Sardaukar's use of Salusa Secundus, a similarly hellish place, where only the best survived. The Emperor already understood the threat from the Fremen of Arrakis, whose entire lifestyle was basically better than Sardaukar training!
But I don't think the Baron ever really figured out how many Fremen there were until the very end. Hawat, never dreaming that Muad'dib was Paul, took all that information and basically made the Baron's plan for Feyd (Fade, not Fay-yed, imo) even better.
The Sardaukar were the MUSCLE, not the precision. It was the Baron who paid for them to come to Arrakis. The cost was monumental.
Anyway, I don't think the Emperor knew how strong or how numerous the Fremen were. To me that's a bit of a plot hole, because the Bene Gesserit must have known. They were all up in the Fremen's business, and had even engineered their religion, centuries before. It just seems a bit unlikely that they would've withheld that bit of information from the Emperor, when Mohiam was basically working for him.
It never made sense to me that Mohiam would be so pissed-off at Jessica and at the predicament they were in, after Paul used the family atomics to destroy the Shield Wall protecting Arrakeen. The Emperor had no idea what he was up against, even though he knew enough not to want the Baron to make DUNE a prison planet, like Salusa Secundus.
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@PATTHECATMCD : Yep. They're trying to tighten the screws. I think - HOPE - that these 19th-Century-style elites are going to find that the old ways of controlling perceptions no longer work. They're taking it as far as they can - and farther in the UK in many ways than in the USA - but I think they will eventually be tripped up by a new transparency that - it turns out - works AGAINST the elites as much as it helps them.
Yeah, they can spy on ALL of us, and singly any of us out for retribution. But they can't single ALL of us out. There're just too damn many of us. And the tech they weaponize against us, time and again is weaponized against THEM. It turns out that their intrusions against us can just as easily turn into intrusions against them. Yeah, you can use your old-school political-machine bullshit to deny Bernie the nomination, but your arrogance left a big hole in your servers, you got hacked, and now all the back-and-forths are public domain, and your lies and deceit are writ large for all the world to see.
Strzok manipulated the process at FBI/DOJ in the time-honored way, and got tripped up sending love notes to his mistress on his FBI-issued phone, before Mueller was in place as special counsel to wipe the phone - which he faithfully did, which is why the compromising texts are ALL from the time before Mueller was Special Counsel, to execute the cover-up.
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@HolyKhaaaaan Bad things tend to happen when all the establishment institutions insist on murderous and feckless nonsense. 1950s Domino Theory was the intellectual (no data to support, btw) justification for interventions abroad, most notably Vietnam. When students would ask about Vietnam in school, they would get the Domino Theory.
Many rebelled at the interventionist foreign policy this theory was used to justify. But EVERY establishment institution was 100% bought-in to the proposition, and the big networks were all very "intellectual" and "wise," taking time to indoctrinate the general public into the Domino Theory.
But people kept questioning. An anti-war movement began, and grew by leaps and bounds. And an entire generation asked the question "If they're lying to us about THAT, what ELSE are they lying about?"
Our establishment institutions experienced their first meltdown. People rejected their lies. Trouble was, they hadn't a whole lot of self-evident truths beyond the ones already in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and they should've insisted on that.
But the older generation dropped the ball, big-time. They were so used to "duty" that a lot of what they did and believed was "just because that's the way we do things, darling."
It's not until fairly recently that evolutionary biologists and psychologists are coming up with rational explanations for traditions that persist over large spans of time and geography. We don't entirely understand why, other than that things that work tend to persist. But the kids of the 60s, lacking any RATIONAL explanation for why to behave a certain way, decided to experiment (and re-invent the wheel, basically).
Everything they would've done would've gotten them to the Enlightenment of 3 centuries ago, with a little better technology, but they basically had to re-discover the joys of single parenting and venereal disease, all over again.
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Social media accelerates the rate at which ideas spread. Both good and bad ideas. But it's not like bad ideas were invented in 2013.
I know what you're saying about Tik-Tok, but all the stupid fads you see going around are really not embraced by as many people as it seems. Also, for every bad idea that gets traction, there's a good idea that can also spread, virally.
The longer Tik-Tok and other social media are around, the more positive I think it will be. Long-term users figure out what helps them and what doesn't help them, and things kind of naturally lean that way, whichever way it is, over time.
Just because we can all see the cultish behavior rising and falling doesn't mean that people weren't trapped in cults of all kinds over the years before social media. It was just not as easy for the rest of us to see, because virtually everything we saw was curated by a handful of rich people.
As long as we stay one step ahead of the censors, and I don't see how we cannot, short of breaking the Internet. And if our would-be controllers break the Internet, they're basically breaking their own institutional means of control, because it will signal a total failure by the institutions so bent on controlling us! LOL!
In any case, if the establishment breaks the Internet because we, the people, get too uppity, Tik-Tok will be the least of our problems.
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That's part of it. Another part of it is that even "winning" many or most of these over-reported skirmishes can leave Ukrainian forces depleted.
NATO artillery (including drones) have often proven more accurate than Russian artillery. But the Russians can sacrifice "old" armor and small numbers of soldiers to both expose and deplete Ukrainian artillery and air defenses. And they can do it at relatively low cost to themselves.
I'm not saying Russia doesn't have territorial ambitions. Russia always has had ambitions, which is why it grew to be so large in the first place. The collective West has always tried to deny Russia their Holy Grail of warm water ports. Ukraine doesn't directly help them in this regard, but indirectly, it may.
With the West being confronted in 3 theaters simultaneously, even as their financial and economic systems are being wrecked by a perfect storm of historical forces and historically bad policy decisions at the top, Russia is on the threshold of having many ports across the Global South. India plays a huge role in this, and their relations with Russia are better (and more predictably positive) than their relations with the West.
I think COVID-19 really gave India a bad taste in their mouths. They handled COVID-19 much better by ignoring the "Buy our vaccine!" nonsense from inept and corrupt USA leadership. Russia's had India's back and vice-versa, many times in the past. Relations are very cordial. India's not in Russia's pocket, but they sure enjoy refining and re-selling Russian oil to the feckless West!
Sorry for writing a (bad) book. But the daily, detailed blow-by-blow accounts, while habit-forming and monetizable, are not all that informative about the larger scheme of things. The West appears to be in a death spiral of denial and authoritarian mis-rule. Support for Trump offers some hope, but with the bureaucratic and donor class united against him, the odds of the West emerging from the next 5 years in peace and prosperity remain low. Too many psychopaths stand to gain too much from doubling down on insanity, even if Trump wins.
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Sukan : Stories are even more farfetched, now than in 2016, when there was some doubt what was going on. After 3 years of this bullshit, even you idiots should be aware that you're consuming Fake News if you're watching ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN or reading the NY Times or HuffPo or Buzzfeed or... Doesn't make alternate sources RIGHT, but they are definitely NECESSARY, because all the outlets named speak with the same voice.
Whenever they trot out another Fake News operation, you can hear all the networks using the EXACT SAME buzz-phrases. Wake up!
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I disagree with Alexander when he says that the Russians are only just realizing what leverage they have. I would give more weight to what Alexander said earlier about how the Russians appear to be fairly scientific in their operations, achieving objectives with a minimum of collateral damage. But as Alexander says, ALL parties involved depend on trade.
Russia could've cut off rail to the Baltic at any point they wished. But they don't WANT to shut down trade. THEY benefit from it, too! And they'll want it back to normal after the nonsense in Donbass simmers down.
I think to blindly follow NATO talking points is to ignore the last 30 years in Ukraine, and especially the last 8 years. I never thought I'd say it, but for all its faults, the Russian government is being run more responsibly, and there's more functional freedom and prosperity there, than the job the Ukrainian oligarchs, in league with American oligarchs, are doing. They've been in a shooting war in the contested areas for 8 years, since an American-supported coup in 2014. Political elites covered-up their pay-to-play schemes by trumping up the exact same charges against the aptly-named POTUS.
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Such people have ALWAYS pursued positions of power. But in the early days of democratic republics, we gave public officials less power. THEN some of us realized that currying favor with such people could translate into Free Stuff, and now those public officials have WAY more power than they had 50 or 100 years ago. Nobody seems to understand that anything the state does for you is something else the state can do TO you, later. How's that state-run medical going? How're those state-run schools doing? How's that state-affiliated news serving you?
It all seems so marvelous that you're getting something for nothing, even though you end up paying double, in the end, and wind up with absolutely no authority or agency over your own life.
Anyway, this character has all the attitudes of entitled elites. The trick is to quit asking them to do everything for us, and manage our OWN damn affairs. But I think Western Society is 90% socialist-indoctrinated, so we're seeing all the old forms of monarchy and aristocracy rear their heads. They use different terms/words for it, but "all good comes from the King, and all must bend the knee to the king, because we need the king to protect us from this scary world." The original hook was protection against foreign invaders, but now it's extended into every aspect of our HELPLESS LIVES.
I remember when "liberal" meant you just wanted to be free to make your own life. Now it means "take care of poor little helpless me."
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Acquaint yourself with as many facts as you reasonably can, and don't back down when they try to steamroll you. Don't lower yourself to their level, when they get hysterical. But don't allow yourself to be bullied, either.
Christians were rare and very much abused in 1st-3rd-Centuries. They offered no violence and died, bravely with God's name on their lips in the Coliseum and other arenas. The Roman people saw that and were IMPRESSED by that. Their PERSECUTION was what won the hearts and minds of the Romans, until the Edict of Milan (313 A.D.), when Constantine decriminalized Christianity, and Christianity eventually became the official religion! Of course, they warped and twisted it to serve the goals of the elites at the time, but it's STILL an object lesson in how to win hearts and minds.
The more obvious it becomes which side is actually fascist, because "our side" continues to fight with ideas (and humor!), while the other side uses bullying tactics and censorship to silence dissent, the more people we win to "our side." We'll never win an argument with a religion whose claims are unfalsifiable and even superficially true. But their own members will see how abusive and deranged "their side" is, and #walkaway. Sometimes it's when the mob turns on THEM. Sometimes it's when the mob turns on somebody that did nothing wrong. But they red-pill THEMSELVES when they've seen and heard enough bullshit.
I hope and pray we don't have to be fed to lions in the Coliseum before the other side starts to change its mind. But people are getting martyred on a daily basis by having their lives destroyed by lies, smears, and violent threats. It's more way-of-life threatening, today, than it is actually life-threatening (although this too will come, if things continue on the current path). But Antifa's doing its level best to create martyrs like Andy Ngo and the little old lady crossing the street. They're not dead, but the harm done is plain for all to see.
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@based9930 Whatever the reason, 2-hour-movie makers will always be at odds with the fans of the original work, because they're trying to make something complete that is over in about 2 hours of runtime. To the movie makers, it's always a one-off, and they'll add or subtract whatever they think they need to in order to make the one movie a success. I've seen this over and over, since long before critics started criticizing it.
While there are definitely some deliberate cultural genociders out there, in the main, it's the nature of the medium to butcher the original intellectual property. I'm always the geek who's read the book before seeing the movie, so I've seen how they butcher books in order to get a self-contained, 2-hour movie that'll make money.
I think it used to be relatively rare for someone to know "the canon" before the movie came out, and most people's only exposure to, say, Wuthering Heights, was the movie. The audience that'd be disappointed was always far outnumbered by the "normies," who'd never heard of it until they made a movie about it. But they opened up a can of whoop-ass when they took on the Marvel and DC Universes, with millions of comic-book fans coming out of the woodwork, angry at how they took great stories and, to be repetitive, butchered them, not for any story-telling purpose, but for some other purpose.
I think audiences are also a lot more sophisticated, generally, because of the glut of entertainment, the Netflix Binge Phenomenon, etc. There're still a lot of normies, but the number of people who are susceptible to just any old thing if it's got good special effects is dwindling. Hell, everybody's a critic.
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@joemoment-o1275 : Keepin' the troops in dry socks, alone, is a major undertaking! LOL! There is a "Patton" theory wherein the idea is to be so deep into the enemy that you can seize your supplies as needed, from an off-balance enemy, if you push forward, and will lose the initiative if you worry about supply lines. But the British were very Roman in how they devoted themselves to logistics and engineering. From fortifying Portugal, to paying gold for everything they took from a Spaniard in the peninsula, they beat Napoleon's "move fast and forage off the land" approach.
Montgomery's greatest successes were when he secured his supply and refused to proceed until he had overwhelming force. His biggest blunder was Nijmagen (sp?), where he tried to get super-aggressive. But some will still argue that it is better to take 80% casualties taking an objective with 1,000 men than it is to take 20% casualties with 500,000 men. And you look at the Japanese in Singapore, who followed that strategy and humiliated Percival.
I think "smash-and-grab" in the abstract is fine, but at some point, you have to move troops and materiel from point A to point B, and it becomes impossible, when every hand is against you in the countryside, as the Spaniards most definitely were against Napoleon. You can think of it as "supply lines," but if you turn to pillage to sustain your army, you're going to set the natives against you.
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I bought a used '74 Vega in the early '80s. Maybe it was the Herbie the Lovebug of Vegas, because it ran great. Previous owner treated it gently, as did I. I hate to say that I LIKED the car, in the context of this video, but the guy or gal before me babied it, as did I. In those days, people were used to great big, bulletproof V8s, which in those years were very forgiving of hard use and indifferent maintenance.
I liked the way it handled. I loved the fold-down rear seat. I slept in the back of my hatchback many a time. I don't even remember when I sold it or traded it in, but I pretty much went with pickups after that. Not as good to sleep in, but room for all my camping gear!
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@johnbnyc64 There's a lot of commercial property losing money. Some of it is just techno-cultural. Why go into the city when UPS will bring it right to your door? Why go into the city or pay city rates for housing, when you can do the same work from 100 miles or 1000 miles away? Not everyone can do it, but everyone who can probably has a hankering to.
But let's not kid ourselves about crime, either.
But you are 100% correct that you can spend all day and night watching horrific stories and lose sight of the fact that they're all one-in-a-million or one-in-250,000 occurrences, and most people don't witness any of it.
Where you're kind of off base is in explaining away the tent cities, the filth, and yes, the crime. Crime is up. Mayor Adams put National Guard in the subways. This isn't "business as usual." This is a civic structure that's crumbling. Democrats have had their run. It's time for something different. Short term, that appears to be Republican, but long term, I wish it were a lot more libertarian.
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I think you'd be surprised at how many Sowell and Williams fans there actually are. "Mainstream" and "pop" ain't what they used to be, in either quality or reach. And Sowell's sowing many seeds of wisdom in the form of his books, but especially in quick-hitters and long-form conversations.
Sowell's a little more "traditional conservative" than I am. He just seems more like someone who started out (a LONG time ago) thinking that it was OK to criminalize sex play between 2 consenting adults of the same sex, and was skeptical about gay rights and gay marriage.
Yes, the state sanctions marriages, and awards a special status to married couples, like pension and health benefits, that gay couples were denied, unfairly, in the past. But I'm not a big fan of company-paid benefits. They were only invented by big corporations as a loophole during wage and price freezes by heavy-handed government. Health and pension plans were something the big companies could offer that Mom & Pop shops couldn't (or never thought of).
I think we should be very charitable, as a people, toward the health care profession. But I don't think government's the way we should express our charity. Instead of campaigning for Med-4-All, sincere liberals should be running fund-raisers to improve the local hospital and raise the level of quality that way. Do it at the grassroots level. If you can't, then doing it by force from on high is not going to turn out well in the long run.
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These things take time. They have to be patient. Let the process work. I also think that actions SINCE Trump's election may be key to back-tracking to the real dirt. Just as with Nixon, I think you crack the Deep State by the actions taken to cover up from inside the government. That's why I THINK Trump has "let" them play him for so long. Yes, they CAN use their office to stonewall legitimate oversight. But by doing so, they open up FRESH cans of worms.
I think that over time, as key spots up and down the chain are turned over, the DOJ and FBI become Trump's DOJ and FBI. I think that if they'd gone all-out against the Never-Trumpers, from Day 1, that there were enough residual partisans up and down the chain, to torpedo the effort.
I THINK there's a bit of rope-a-dope going on here, allowing the partisan hacks to punch themselves out in the early rounds, so we can knock them out in October-November.
I THINK they're trying to time things for maximum impact. Certainly the Democrats are planning to have Mueller make HIS big (fake) reveals in the fall, to hurt Trump like Comey hurt Hillary. It's all coming to a head, at the end of summer and early fall.
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And any big state has a lot of city folks living in situations FAR different from the situations of people in suburbs and rural areas, especially. In cities you have a gun-fearing populace who are all the time shooting each other, and a gun-embracing culture in the countryside where NObody gets shot. Real estate can run in the millions per square foot in the city. In the country, it's $1,000 per acre. Totally different settings. Totally different kinds of problems and people and problem people.
The idea that centralized administration and control is how we should run things runs counter to liberty and good management practice. You need the people to know what they're about where they are, and not be told what to do by strangers living in artificial urban environments and gated communities, a thousand miles away. Federal intervention is for acute, short-term crises, but it's no way to run things day to day. Trouble is, every ACUTE problem the government sets out to solve turns into a CHRONIC problem, with immortal agencies whose existence (and paychecks) depend on there being a problem that only they can "solve."
Is it any wonder that 10s of millions of people are on food stamps? We have an entire INDUSTRY (industries) devoted to "solving" the problem of hunger. No surprise, there are more and more hungry people every year, which is used to justify MORE such programs and spending, when in actuality it should only be used to justify firing ALL their asses!
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Looking at the man give his press conference, I'm beginning to think Mueller's just an empty shirt, and Wisemann's been running the Mueller Show, all along, and Mueller is just a figurehead. I think Mueller was a nasty piece of work, back in the day, and his heart's still there, but I think he's past it, in a lot of ways. The man who gave that stumbling, 10-minute statement was not the formidable former FBI Director. He just looks like a vague, slightly confused, possibly senile old man.
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@donalddon5 They pulled out all the stops in 2020 and election laws were broken across the country. Secretaries of state in many states are under harsh scrutiny; election workers are under criminal investigation. Whether it turns the election or not, when you fail to provide chain-of-custody for ballots, you're in violation of law. The people in charge of those ballots are liable for massive criminal and civil litigation.
As the indictments, and especially the civil suits mount, it will be increasingly difficult to maintain the pretense of "free and fair." People are watching. And yes. The whole world is watching. And the rest of the world and well over half of the American public, are not in the echo chamber any more. The mask is off (in more ways than one). It's going to be really hard to pull the same kind of BS that was pulled in 2020 under cover of COVID and a bit of arm-twisting at the counting houses.
That mother-daughter team in Fulton County, Georgia have been called in for depositions. They're stalling it, but they will eventually be deposed, assuming Hillary doesn't get to them, first, so to speak. I'm no Republican, but I hope and expect to see major landslide for Republicans in 2022. Nobody trusts the Democrat/RINO establishment, any more.
The way we "overthrow" them is to vote them out. The Democrats tried for the federal takeover of elections, everywhere, but failed. Now the states are doing their thing, and it will be much more difficult to "fortify" 2022 and 2024 elections. If we can't do this from the grassroots, through peaceful political process, we are lost. It will be a war. An info war. And we are winning.
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All good points. Sadly, they don't want you repairing your petrol vehicle, either!
Planned obsolescence is one of the biggest causes of major pollution, today. Think of the energy and resources and pollution that go into (or come out of) the manufacture of a new vehicle. So to save 100 gallons of gas a year, you're going to expend the energy and resources equivalent to a $200,000 new Tesla? How about taking that money and applying ot towards a home that's closer to work, so you don't have to drive as much?
I'm sort of blurring the practical environmental value of an electric car with planned obsolescence, but they're closely linked in my associative mind.
A more sustainable model for greener world would be a vastly reduced auto industry that builds cars to LAST, and only the young or egotistical older people would ever be buying the "latest model."
If I could - and I'm trying my damnedest - I would drive my '93 Toyota pickup the rest of my life. I remember as a young man in the 1980s helping rebuild a '55 Chevy. There were parts manufacturers in Mexico and the USA that still made "new old stuff" and put out their catalogs for backyard mechanics and professional auto shops. Not so much, any more. I'm not sure, but I think you can still build a complete VW Beetle out of new old parts, if you want. You can certainly restore those old Beetles.
The EPA will tell you those old cars are bad but they never figure in the pollution that comes from junking the old cars and making entirely new cars. That's why I'm convinced that all this environmental alarmism is driven by profits for a few and not for the betterment of the planet or mankind.
Rossman should be able to repair Nokia flip phones to this day. Any smart phone should be built to last forever or be easily repairable for freaking ever.
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@ninoslavp127 : We have a small window that Euros and other countries are doing their damnedest to slam closed, with independent content creators (like Duran, but not JUST Duran) shedding light on these matters. The monolith of state-and-corporation-controlled media is cracking. The only way to patch those cracks is to crack DOWN on independent media, and they're doing their damnedest. They can't do it legally in the USA like they can just about everywhere else, but in the USA, they're using their muscle, smear campaigns and de-platforming withOUT government force, and it's coming close to being as absolute as what governments around the world - governments NOT restricted by anything like our 1st Amendment - are blatantly implementing.
In the USA, there's shadow-banning and private companies de-platforming people. In Europe, Asia, Africa, etc., they just throw people in JAIL for "hate speech" or whatever excuse.
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@leonrobinson8180 If you live long enough, you discover Nietzsche was full of shit when he said "What doesn't break you makes you stronger." Sometimes, you just come out weaker, more fearful, more scarred, or more cynical, or some subset from that list. I survived the great battle, but I'll never be as good as I was before I blew up my knee and had three holes blown in my midsection.
I think there was room for one or two de-constructed heroes. What's the saying? If the hero lives long enough, he becomes the villain? Conan finally wins the kingship, and although he turns out to be a pretty wise and tolerant king, the mere fact of BEING king forces him to hurt or even destroy someone or something good for the greater good of the kingdom.
MY big gripe with the movies is that they were NEVER as good as I thought they were. You become old and wise and educated enough, you can't help but realize that ALL Hollywood writers are ignorant cretins, and pretty much always have been.
That doesn't mean that wokeness hasn't made things worse.
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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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@Oners82 It's Democrats who suppress voter's rights, by opening-up the process to extensive fraud. Voter ID isn't racist. It's the ones who fight AGAINST voter ID who are racist and dilute the votes of everybody else. It's Dems who pushed the lock-downs and still push them. How's that good for the worker? How's that good for the little guy?
No. Dems represent the super-rich and the white-collar bureaucrat class, of which you're undoubtedly a made member, with your degrees and your high IQ.
You sound highly educated and under-informed. Typical postmodern "intellectual," bearing NONE of the consequences of your bad ideas, and parading around like you're an expert on everything, when the guy who's working on my roof has more common sense and practical skills than you do.
I suppose you like lots of regulations and think we need to pay higher taxes, too, amirite? Yes. You're so smart, you're the robber barons' best friend. They'll make use of you until you wake up, and then they'll silence you, because you you're no longer fit for (their) purpose.
You see some of the ills of society and rather than seeking to understand the cause, you always turn to government as the cure, rather than seeing those problems as unintended consequences of your profligate use of force to MAKE or COERCE people to do YOUR will. All your solutions lead to new layers of bureaucracy, new things to control and track. I bet you're a big fan of Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, yet you're oblivious to some of its main themes. "I'm British. I know how to queue."
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We still have a lot of inertia to overcome. Students raised in an institutional spoon-fed setting want and EXPECT to be spoon-fed. They're CERTAIN that traditional lecture is "how they learn best." I know as a long-time lecturer how poorly even the BEST lecture serves the student audience. Back in the late '80s and early '90s, my students would actually clap at the end of lecture (like Jordan Peterson!), because I covered the material AND made them laugh. I was very entertaining and I know I covered the knowledge thoroughly.
I was winning awards and telling myself what a gifted lecturer I was. But when I checked their notes or graded their homework and tests, I could see that less than half of them were actually getting the concepts from the live lecture. Most weren't interacting directly with the knowledge. Most were interacting with the knowledge, indirectly, through me. Like I'm a high priest interceding with the Math Gods on their behalf, or Jesus Christ, even. And a LOT of lecturers LOVE that position. It feeds their ego. It used to feed MY ego.
I since switched to a 'flipped' format, with extensive resources on video and our face-to-face time free for questions. I don't insist on everyone's attention. Just their courtesy. Many self-motivated students just work quietly with an ear out for something they struggled with, previously, but most of the self-motivated can get through the assignments just using the videos and notes. And if they can quietly work with their earphones in, watching the video that applies to what THEY'RE doing, in the moment, then I'm all for that. '
But when they always wait for the next day's spoon-feeding, they're always a day or two or three behind where they should be. The questions they ask about 3.1 should've been asked on the day we covered 3.1, but they didn't even LOOK at 3.1 until after I lectured over 3.1.
"Traditional lecture" was wonderful, when there was only one guy in town who had the book, and "No you may not borrow my precious book." But I'll tell you all about it if you come to my lecture. Wonderful way to share knowledge in a time when few had books. But obsolete since books became widely available, and especially since the Internet made it possible to put the lectures on video. NOW your time with the instructor is wide open and he has 20 minutes to give to one question. Those who have the same question are ready for the answer, and those who don't have that question (haven't gotten there, yet or figured it out on their own or already asked about it) are free to work on whatever they want to work on, and I don't demand their undivided attention. I just ask that they not disrupt the conversations that are taking place.
Active learners LOVE what I do, because I don't get in their way, and I'm always available for questions and, because I'm competent in the content area (many math teachers are not, in my opinion), I'm ready for anything and not just giving a planned lecture with nothing off-script to trip me up, which I've seen many do. The worst ones are the "education majors," because they know everything there is to know about teaching (or so they think), except the subject being taught!
One of my colleagues wanted to tell everybody how to teach their classes because she had her brand-new PhD in education to show everyone. But she was actually quite weak in the content area, itself. This follows along with how things went in graduate school. Peers of mine who hit the wall as undergraduates switched to getting teaching certificates for grade school and high school. Peers who hit the wall in graduate school went on to get advanced degrees in education. And the teaching-certificate and "education doctorate" types are invariably the ones who seek to climb the ladder in administration so they have the power to tell everyone else how to run their classes. Invariably, the least competent people in the actual mathematics are running the math-education establishment.
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French history of 'people rising up' is spotty, at best. They throw out the old rascals and generally bring in WORSE rascals. Louis XVI was out of touch. Bonaparte was a megalomaniac, who basically invented total war, with HUGE conscript armies. He had 3 main innovations as far as I can tell: The realization that really BIG guns can kill more people than small guns, that you can build a huge army if you institute the draft, and you can invade without worrying about supply lines if your 'citizen army' specializes in pillage. Maybe a 4th innovation was the simple idea that if your drummers beat a faster tempo, your army would march faster! Woo-Hoo!
Unlike the American revolution, the French had no real idea of what self-rule should look like. They just rejected the decadent monarchy, with no clear plan for civilian rule. So they went from a traditional autocrat, king by birthright, anointed by the Church, to an Emperor who grabbed more real power than the Bourbons ever had. They weren't against being ruled by a dictator. They just wanted the dictator to be a god-like figure who made all the RIGHT decisions. Similar situation in China, where the people don't really have any understanding of self rule, and the ONLY way they turn over their government is when the current one's incompetence can no longer be denied.
Sadly, this is human nature. It took some pretty unique conditions for the U.S. Constitution to be created. Self-rule. Explicit limitations on the exercise of power, before our government ever CAME to power. Every other time in history, limitations were only ever instituted AFTER severe abuses took place. I think the USA is the only country whose government was more or less a scientific application of the lessons of history. What made us exceptional is that we didn't kid ourselves that we were exceptional, and somehow immune to the same corruption and decay that caused us to revolt against the monarchy in the first place. Very rare in a bunch of revolutionaries. That's the exceptional part. That George Washington would serve his 2 terms and refuse to run, again. That no president (until a power-hungry Democrat in the 20th Century came along) ever sought more than 2 terms and that we'd even write it into law. Would that the Congress would write such laws governing themSELVES!
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University professors typically have 9 contact hours per week one semester, and 6 contact hours per week the second semester. They're expected to be active in the profession, which includes, but is not limited to publishing research.
I think 12 hours per week is pretty standard for colleges, and maybe, maybe not release time for research or other professional activities.
15 contact hours per week is pretty standard for a community college, with release time negotiable, depending on other activities deemed valuable to the institution.
That seems like part-time work, but it doesn't include the hours spent preparing for lecture or grading student homework. English and especially Mathematics teachers have a heavy grading load, compared to most other professors. The more dedicated you are, the more time you spend giving feedback on the work, because that's how students grow.
Older, more experienced teacher don't have as much work to do preparing for lecture. After 10 or 20 years, about all I needed to know was what topic I was covering, and I'd already know all the theorems, examples, talking points, and even the jokes that go with the particular topic. From 8 pages of potential lecture, spilling over into the next lecture, to one page (or less) of the "talking points" for a more experienced lecturer.
If you've ever watched a Jordan Peterson college lecture, you might be amazed at what he can do without (m)any notes, but when you consider he's in his 60s and has been giving those talks for over 30 years, the miracle would be still needing a lot of notes to give the talk. It'd be akin to the Rolling Stones coming to a gig with sheet music for "Satisfaction."
The rule for students is 2 hours out of class for every hour in lecture. For a professor doing their work thoroughly and efficiently, the figure is about the same. So, a community college professor, who's taught less than 10 years, 15 contact hours per week is 45 hours per week. You can shave that down by experience. Some professors use the same notes every semester, which reduces their prep times. I had a chemistry professor who did that. But when you consider he was running all the labs for his courses, he rarely got that number even close to 40 hours. More like 60 hours.
Teachers in the humanities can really cut down the hours devoted to teaching, especially if they're not assigning a ton of written work. I think that's why they are typically the most active (and activist) professors on campus.
I think the majority of professors are hard workers, who do their best. But the fact is that a professor who's a slacker can get away with it, if they want. The only thing that decides is the character and work ethic of the professor, and I've seen quite a few older slackers just marking time to their retirement.
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Or maybe Adam Schiff is just really, really stupid and he thought his inside source was giving him actual transcripts, and they were so perfectly damning, so perfectly confirming his low opinion of the president, that he just couldn't wait to find a microphone, because he finally had his Trump-killer. He'd have to be really stupid to rush to a microphone like that, without checking. Very stupid and incompetent. In the end, maybe that'll be what ends up saving the republic. People who can lie and cheat without remorse THINK they're smarter than everybody else, when really there's something MISSING in their brain, or they'd have a conscience. And it leaks out, because they have no awareness. "What does it matter?" "We came, we saw, he died. Ahahahahaha!"
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I don't agree with his ideology, but he DOES make some good points about intolerance. We're finally starting to see some indoctrinated liberals who are willing to listen, for a change. That's a major break-through.
And there's a BROAD middle, who agree on probably 50% or more of the issues - like government spying, interventionism abroad and free speech - and the rest is something we could compromise on, for instance the welfare state.
I think most liberals would agree that charity starts at home, in the community, and NOT in Washington, DC. And if we can't get OUR shit together, in our communities, there's nothing that the feebs (feds) can do to change that, by edict, from the throne in Washington, D.C.
Well, they can - unlike everybody else - write checks with an empty bank account. This creates the false impression that everyone can somehow take OUT more than they put IN. Throw in a few guilty white liberals and you have a working majority that will ask for more and more government interference, even though it's ultimately destructive to everybody.
Liberals' (and neocons') policies are destroying any hope of economic success for our next generation, because they (we?) never see anything they don't think the government should spend money on, be it preserving generational poverty or killing people we don't like, overseas. This profligate spending has each and every one of our children saddled with a $50,000 debt, from the cradle, and growing every day.
Liberalism seems to like nothing more than taking a shit on future generations, with stupid policies that are - at root - sheer selfishness on the part of all us grown-ups voting ourselves a living. And if we don't change our ways, we're all rushing towards the cliff of economic and societal collapse.
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I'm pretty sure there are laws against vagrancy, and public parks have rules against camping. Since the Obama administration, Democrat-run places have passed record numbers of rules and ordinances, but pick and choose which ones they enforce. From turning a blind eye to states legalizing marijuana and basically encouraging rioters, down to petty theft and vagrancy.
As a libertarian, it's almost like Obama was on the right side of the marijuana thing, but he ignored the law. As long as those laws were on the books, he was obliged, as president, to enforce the prohibition on sale and purchase of marijuana. He should've been sued or impeached for not doing his job. Most of all, he should've gone to bat for the repeal of certain laws, and done it RIGHT. Very bad precedent for our country. Now most of the cities in the country ignore the law when it suits them, or rather, enforce it selectively.
On the flip side, your town being only 6,000 says that there's a good chance your local sheriff doesn't waste time going around enforcing lock-downs or vaccine mandates, because they don't carry the force of law (and they're nonsensical).
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That thing about testosterone and how it affects these young girls was something I hadn't put together. They feel so good after that first shot, they're sold on the proposition of transitioning, when in 99% of cases, they're probably just feeling insecure, awkward, or unloved.
I never thought about how testosterone affected MY attitude. I've been crushed a LOT of times, emotio. nally and physically, but my reaction was always "Eye of the Tiger!" It's not that women aren't strong, but they're so much more social, and whereas a guy who's kicked around gets "plumb mad dog mean" or nerds out on books or does something else to distinguish themselves, girls mostly want ACCEPTANCE. Guys want acceptance, too, but it's more of an "I'll show THEM! I'm gonna work out every day until I can kick that guy's ass! Or I'm gonna work my ass off at school, so I'll get the last laugh on that jock who's been bullying me, when he comes begging for a job."
I don't know about ALL guys, but testosterone probably makes most of us stupid-brave, and makes us think we can and will be GREAT some day, especially as we go through puberty and get WAY bigger and stronger, almost overnight. It's bad enough to be built that way, surrounded by other guys who are just as big of assholes who can't WAIT to bring you down to Earth, by force, if necessary, but for a girl, getting a heavy dose of testosterone right around puberty, she probably feels like Captain Marvel, especially if she feels marginalized, which is kind of the normal state for teenagers, with one foot in childhood and the other in adulthood.
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Real Actual News He's pretty socialist. He offers some improvements for how they ADMINISTER socialism, but it still comes down to Peter robbing Paul to take care of Mary. Peter doesn't care about spending Paul's money wisely, and he doesn't really care if Mary gets back on her feet. He has nothing at stake.
I think Universal Basic Income makes sense if it's a J. Peter Grace "negative income tax" kind of deal. Grace Commission proposed negative income tax when Reagan was president. The idea was to bring everyone up to the poverty line and leave the rest up to them. Eliminate HHS and all federal programs and just pay you the difference between what you earn and a basic subsistence level. It would reduce the federal bureaucracy SIGNIFICANTLY.
But I don't think that's what Yang's proposing. He just wants to give away $1,000 per month, so teenagers and 20-somethings can live like college students without owning anything. Just get 3 or 4 people who want to share a house and sing kum-bye-ah until you retire. Very attractive to young people, who want to hang out and party. Maybe work on their guitar or basket-weaving skills...
I put Yang in sort of a Tulsi Gabbard category. He says things neither establishment party wants to hear. It's just not a good enough reason to vote for him.
He also has a serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. He bought the MSM characterization of Trump, without giving him credit for the things Trump was right about, like immigration, regulatory capture, reducing our military footprint abroad, getting politics out of the classroom, making cities pay their own way by curtailing MASSIVE state-and-local-tax writeoffs for big-spending cities, shifting the tax burden from big-spending blue city governments to flyover country, getting government out of the way of working stiffs and small businesses.
Of course, everything good Trump did with regard to the last two got wiped out by COVID.
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Much like the Japanese taking on the USA. Don't look at the odds of success. Look at the near-certain decline of both Germany and Japan - in THEIR eyes - if Western Europe and the USA kept tightening their grip on world trade and keeping them encircled. Germany feel this keenly after the Treaty of Versailles, and Japan, an island nation, felt even more vulnerable to supply chain issues, being dependent for almost everything but labor on trading partners.
People forget (or never learn) just how "free trade" worked in the centuries leading up to the 20th Century. Japan was dragged into world trade on terms very favorable to Europe and the USA in the 19th Century, after centuries of one Asian nation after another falling to Western powers. We don't like to talk about the Opium Wars, but the Chinese sure haven't forgotten!
Neither country wanted to be at the mercy of USA/Europe. To them, autarchy (self-sufficiency) was the goal. More than just a goal, they saw it as a necessity, if they were to preserve their national sovereignty in the face of such obvious scoundrels as the French, British, and other European colonial powers, who always saw and treated Germany like a 2nd-class country, and did everything they could to lock up trade partners and trade routes before the Germans ever had much of a navy.
TIKHistory has a great, in-depth study of Barbarossa.
Even at the very beginning, Russian forces were HUGE. They were just deployed to the east, out of fear of Japan's apparently unstoppable westward expansion. Siberia had (and has) vast quantities of oil, timber and minerals that Stalin naturally believed the Japanese naturally lusted for.
Compounding that error was the terrible railroads (built by socialists, i.e., slave labor) connecting them to Moscow.
I don't think the Germans had much/any idea of the buildup that was taking place to the east of the Ural Mountains. I don't think they had any idea of the USSR's true industrial capacity or - something that surprised every critic of Bolshevism - the insane courage of the Eastern European and Russian people when it came to defending the motherland. Hitler gave every Soviet citizen someone they hated more than they hated Stalin.
In my opinion, the Nazis' biggest mistake wasn't splitting their forces in Barbarossa. Their biggest mistake was not having a plan for conquering England and carrying it out. They could have made Dunkirk a meat grinder and kept the BEF from escaping at Dunkirk if they had pushed themselves as hard in that effort as they later did many times over on the Eastern Front.
Their best chance may have been to make the main push towards Stalingrad and the Caucasus. They still could have made considerable gains in the North with a relative small fraction of what they eventually committed, there. If their goal weren't Moscow, but were just to push the front lines maybe a third or half of the way to Moscow, and then set up to fight defensively in the North.
I think they could've inflicted heavy losses on the Soviets with light losses of their own for quite some time, if they had attacked with 1/4 or 1/2 as many men and machines in the North and just thrown everything else at Ukraine and the Caucasus. There's a slim chance they could've held on to enough territory long enough to get the oil, iron, and food they needed.
Their mixed strategy put immense pressure on the Soviets, but even if they had taken Moscow, I just don't see an answer to the torrent of men, armor and munitions that would've kept flowing over (and through?) the Urals from the east.
No matter which way they went, their disdain for those they conquered really hurt them. Welcomed as liberators in Eastern Europe, which had had quite enough of Russian-style Bolshevism, the occupation of Europe and Eastern Europe went much as Napoleon's occupation of Spain in the early 1800s. Any unguarded convoy. Any messenger. Any anything. It took a full regiment to guarantee their arrival at their destination. It wasn't enough that they had long supply lines, but they had to guard every inch of them, 24/7/365.
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@blueskygal255 He did everything in his power to divert attention from his own culpability, expressing his deep regard for how well the Chinese were handling it, when all evidence was to the contrary. When he sought to dispel the "Wuhan lab-leak" hypothesis, I was already smelling a rat. Now that we know what they've finally allowed us to know, thanks to FOIA and an uncharacteristic and abrupt end to total-lockdown censorship on the hypothesis, it's plain as day that Fauci KNEW the lab-leak hypothesis was by far the most likely scenario for the outbreak.
What makes it worse is that the Chinese did everything possible to cause maximum harm to other nations once the outbreak occurred. I get that their incompetence wasn't intentional BEFORE the outbreak, but they systematically did everything they could to mislead and cover up, and all their proxies in the USA sang the same tune. After this, it is plain as the nose on your face who the traitors are in MSM news.
Basically, ALL of them. ZERO curiosity about the truth. Slavish publishing of government and corporate press releases. No time for fact-checking. No interest in fact-checking. Worthless. Worse than useless. They actually cause HARM. And the whole time they pose as the wisest and most concerned of all of us. They're the WORST of us. People who should know better, but behave badly, anyway.
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@rhaynne900 ... or how many families around the world aren't getting together, this year, because of restrictions, inflation, job loss, ... Meanwhile, if you're "sophisticated" enough, you can gather where you want, when you want, without a mask. The crap they push on us regular people, while they live above it all, or WORSE, enrich themselves even MORE, is creating changes in the electorate that no amount of campaigning against Democrats could've achieved.
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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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Oddly enough, I think bullying is more rampant and mean-spirited than when I was growing up in the '60s and '70s. Adults are so controlling that kids find new ways and meaner ways to bully each other. It's the kid who sticks up for himself that they put on Ritalin, nowadays, because he has "anger issues." Teachers are more bullying than they used to be, and it's all in the name of being "nicer," and "nice" is defined in terms of political ideology.
When I was growing up, everybody knew who the bullies were, and they were quickly put in their place by other kids. Usually it just took one bloody nose. Nowadays, the schoolyard bully provokes violence in someone without as much emotional armor and then turns right around and cries to the teacher about how mean the bullied kid is.
When I was growing up, the toughest kids in school weren't bullies, but were the guys who beat the shit out of bullies. And EVERYbody teased everybody else. If you weren't being insulted, then you weren't respected. If you were weak or not as socially acceptable, you might be ignored or marginalized, but the general population of kids despised anyone picking on somebody weaker. NOWadays, they seem to LOVE finding someone to target and harass, MERCILESSLY, until the kid snaps, at which point the bullies go crying to the teacher.
Nowadays, kids don't have many opportunities to interact without adult supervision, which point Haidt makes. But I think it makes them MORE vicious whenever they're NOT being supervised. And more helpless, simultaneously. Nobody's a bigger cry-baby than an Antifa member with a skinned knee. "Defund the police" and "Call the cops" all in the same, un-self-aware breath.
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@janrozsypal7079 You describe a house of cards. Petrodollar keeps the dollar propped up no matter HOW poorly the U.S. government manages its fiscal house, no matter HOW the federal government hollows out the industrial base. But you can only borrow so long before the bill comes due and USA is upside-down on its debt:GDP.
American bullying is bad enough, but when its economic foundations are rotten AND it's a bully, the rest of the world is forced to go its own way.
The U.S. Government is incapable of balancing its budget in peacetime. It is doomed. It will have to pull in its horns, die back, or have its horns amputated by foreign countries.
If USA stuck to its original principles, the globalist utopia would just sort of happen, organically, as nations around the world governed more lightly, just to keep up. Just to emulate the clearly most successful combo of liberty and self-responsibility. But those in government always see themselves as the New Aristocrats. What are the Old Aristocrats? They're the first bureaucrats (and warlords) to put on airs due to their inordinate and temporary position of power, thinking that made them special, and seeking to make it permanent, down through the generations. It's all quite mundane, with sordid and unsavory beginnings that self-styled bluebloods always back-fill as a larger-than-life legacy handed down by giants.
Nothing changes. The USA was an eyeblink exception. We could get back to that, except now almost half the people have a vested interest in perpetuating and growing the corruption and rot, and it's the half containing those who swarmed into government, for the power and prestige. Nothing changes. Just the language.
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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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NATO is based on 1940s strategic situation that no longer exists. Trump's crying crocodile tears, if any, on this whole Nordstream 2 thing. I think he'd meet all kinds of resistance to de-coupling or re-defining NATO. But this way, it looks like he's fighting against it, but really getting his own way. What does the USA care if Germany gets a better deal, closer to home, for oil and gas? Some of this could just be theater for Deep State consumption, achieving a smaller military footprint while appearing to be playing along with the neocons he's dealing with at home.
Nordstream 2, and Germany's natural desire for it, simply highlights the ridiculousness of the current arrangement. By pointing out the billions the USA spends on the defense of Germany and other NATO countries from the country Germany's buying oil/gas from, Trump is basically "letting" Germany tell the USA that the current arrangement is just dumb. Due to the unique political situation, he can probably get the re-boot much easier by pretending to resist new arrangements.
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@1158supersiri : Moscow was THE main railway hub for East-West and North-South transport. If the Germans won their way to and around Moscow, they'd have gained a pretty big advantage. The Soviets would have a LOT harder time re-supplying North and South, and the Germans would've been able to attack North and South, separately, in greater force. But wherEVER the Soviets had to let off their tanks, wherEVER the German-Soviet frontier was, there were T34s coming from the East in endless waves. And I believe the Soviets succeeded in moving their industrial production East of the Urals.
To me, it's not clear if it would've made any difference. Eventually, the German assault would run out of steam, and more and better armaments would come streaming in from the East, to drive them back.
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@politicallycorrectredskin796 The Hobbit was written for kids and kind of a warm-up for LOTR. Dwarves were pretty helpless in The Hobbit, yet somehow in the larger story, they were pretty bad-ass. The Hobbit, itself, was pretty inconsistent about the nature and abilities of dwarves.
I think they could've made a good trilogy out of The Hobbit, regardless. Painting the actual picture of the Barrow Downs, Tom Bombadil's abode, his wife, ... They could've worked in an Ents connection, there, because Bombadil's wood had trees that were pretty Ent-ish. They could've stretched out the parts fighting the spiders. The escape from the wood-elves.
There, again, is another inconsistency within Tolkien's own work. The pettiness of the elves in The Hobbit, as opposed to their tragic nobility in LOTR. The incompetent blundering by dwarves in The Hobbit, but the near super-hero abilities of Gimli in LOTR.
They could've spent a huge chunk of movie on how Bilbo engineered the escape from the elves. They didn't delve into that. It was actually a pretty cool thing that Bilbo did. Bilbo changed a TON in The Hobbit. Not to really capture that in the movies, and to insert a love affair between a dwarf and an elf that wasn't in the book was just bleah. Instead, they did a lazy montage of what could've been a HUGE part of the movie. Lots of room to be creative, there, because Tolkien uses a very few words to describe a pretty monumental achievement by the burglar.
I think a trilogy for a story as rich as The Hobbit is totally appropriate. And while I agree that they did a pretty darn good job on LOTR, that could easily have been serialized into 10 beefy 1- or 2-hour installments. I hope that's what they start doing more of. Mini-series and midi-series-length is hopefully the wave of the future. But the creative types have to figure out how to make it and get their money back for it, in a changing marketplace.
I think there's plenty of pent-up demand and $$$ for good movies and better, smarter adaptations. Peter Jackson's not the only one who can do them, nor is he going to hit a home run on every swing. Still, I wish I'd seen more elaboration on things Tolkien DID indicate, without going into great detail, because The Hobbit did need some tweaking to really stand up on screen. It would've been cool to actually see Beorn out on his night's travels, and not just a single shot from a distance, which is all Tolkien gave the reader. They could've built on that legend. Readers thirst for more on Beorn. More on Bombadil. There's so much room for some creativity that is NOT just standard Hollywood fluff.
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Women have been sold a bill of goods. Go to college. Break that glass ceiling. You don't need no man. We're still somewhat early in handling industrialized society and we're already into e-society.
I think we have a pretty good idea of how this thing works, but we always point to the dysfunctional marriages where people feel trapped. The happy marriages are too busy living the dream, with young ones underfoot, to waste much time griping or posting on social media.
As a late boomer, my parents were definitely caught up in the rat-race, too tired when they came home from work to really have much time or use for us kids. Before industrialization (which has many benefits), kids saw what Mom & Dad were doing, and learned how to do the same things, themselves. In the '70s, Dad would leave for work in a bad mood because he didn't want to go to work and then when he got home he was tired and in a worse mood.
This sort of idea is explored in Iron John literature. "Work" is something mysterious Dad does in a giant factory that he hates, and your job, as a boy, is to grow up and do the same thing. It's not very appealing.
But some parents get it right. Their focus is their kids and the work is just a means to that end, rather than an end unto itself that children just make more aggravating. Along about that same time, in the '70s, moms had all the labor-saving devices invented in the '50s and were suddenly not content to be home-makers, any more. Staying home wasn't glamorous or exciting, like the women on daily soap operas that they watched. I think a lot of brain rot started setting in about that time.
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@Kiyoone We used to have trains and local rails in all the cities. Then Goodrich (or was it Goodyear) wanted to sell tires, so they greased palms and regulations pushed the local transit rails/trolleys out and brought us buses, which are far less efficient and pollute a lot more.
This is your government at work. It will make whatever it wants sound like the morally superior path, but really they're only helping their buddies, who in turn, donate large sums to their campaigns or give high-paying nothing jobs to their family members, etc.
If we got the government out of everything, there would be for-profit rails flourishing almost everywhere. But, like Nazi Germany, as soon as the government decides it's going to take over an industry "for our good," things go to shit, eventually, and everyone points fingers, but it's all the same. Whoever gets scapegoated for the history books, it was the government intervention and use of government force that threw everything out of whack and changed our decision making from "What makes sense and will make a sustainable profit" to "What does the government want, so I can be sure to cash in on that tax rebate or subsidy?"
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And they're starting to see the fallout, as we speak. Cracks showing. They import about most of their doctors, now, because people living in Western society don't want to work that hard for what the government will pay. If you're really sick and don't want to wait until you die to get treatment, you fly to the USA. Cancer? Heart disease? On death's door? Rich people come to America, because they know that when government rations ANY product or service, you gotta get in line, and the quality will deteriorate.
Still, if a small country wants to do it, it's about like one state in the USA doing it. Every time a state in the USA has tried it, they've gone broke doing it. Do you really trust your bureaucrats to do right for you? Do you really trust the same kinds of politicians who sent millions over the top in WWI to die in sprays of machine gun bullets and poison gas? It's bad enough we give government the monopoly on use of force. But giving education and health care over to government represents 2 legs of the Nazi tripod. The 3rd is control of media, and if I didn't know better, I'd say the elites control that shit, too. Just softening societies up to be walked all over, as we see happening in most of the countries listed.
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@allianssd I want the America imagined by George Washington:
A union of autonomous states, all abiding by the u.s. Constitution and managing their own affairs, with free trade and free markets between and within each state.
A federal government that defends the Constitution from without, enforces the Constitution within, and enters into no entangling alliances.
If you want to become a state, put in for it and abide by the Constitution. Then we'll defend you as our own. Otherwise, it's not our place to run the world.
Very simple. And with the tech we have today, Citizen Oversight, where they are, is far more potent than government oversight by an understaffed bunch of bribery targets. We should be a nation of whistleblowers who need no force to effect change. Just by unrestricted right to expose shenanigans without interference of fear of reprisal. When the people know, they all stop buying. That's the best protection against shenanigans.
Then add one more thing: Grow a culture that won't buy anything from any outfit that isn't 100% transparent. Don't comply with any government mandate that is not fully explained, justified, with 100% open books on all the facts available.
People always say that education is the problem, but get the government out and the people will educate themselves overnight.
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@etiennepilorget8777 The difference between a Christian and an atheist, in most cases, is that a Christian knows what he's taking on faith. An atheist makes innumerable assumptions of which they are unaware.
To me, at root, Abrahamic religion is basically two things: "I Am." This is the fundamental assertion of self-awareness, and the Name of God is "I Am."
"Life Is Good."
So, basically, "Life is good and I know it." And all of Judaism and Christianity boils down to that basic act of faith. After that, it's a matter of man-made doctrine and dogma, to me. IMO, Jesus was trying to teach us how to treat each other. The free ticket to Paradise is more of a hook that organized religion uses to recruit and keep people in line.
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I think it was Liz Claman's last-second "But he lifted them in North Korea," as the rebuttal to a claim she didn't like. Facts are about halfway in between. Trump OFFERED to lift sanctions, if NoKo did certain things.
But really, it's a specious point the "expert" is making. Trump's wielding sanctions like a sword, to be sure, but he IMMEDIATELY got some assurances that things would change, sooner rather than later, and he immediately extracted some trade concessions that did some of our farmers some help opening-up markets the Europeans had closed through impossible tariffs and outright bans on certain products.
No, Trump hasn't lowered any of the tariffs he's raised. Now is the difficult time, where you have to be patient and SIT on them long enough for them to realize that a U.S. President actually means what he says, and is perfectly willing to take the heat long enough to get the concessions he REQUIRES from them. They're not used to that. They're used to hearing "Red Line," followed by dithering. Trump makes threats that are realistic and nonviolent, and he's perfectly willing to wait them out.
I'm really hoping to see Britain and/or the E.U. crack, before the midterms, so Trump will have something substantial to show for his strategy, and can then lower the tariffs to reasonable, FAIR levels for both sides of the Atlantic. Merkel's posturing, but she's really quite impotent. E.U. will either change their ways, from NATO obligations to trade practices, or they'll be feeling real pain. They've been enjoying trade surpluses with the U.S. for a long time, largely due to protectionist practices of their own, to which the U.S. has never responded in any substantive way.
If she lays ANOTHER big hit on the E.U. economy just to make US hurt, she's going to lose her controlling coalition sooner, rather than later. She's already walking the razor's edge, with a powerful nationalist populist movement that's winning in the polls. And that movement has already swept many E.U. nations, with BREXIT in Britain, and some frankly regressive laws being passed in Denmark, Austria and Hungary aimed DIRECTLY at the Muslim immigrants that E.U. technocrats have Opened their Borders to.
Merkel also got caught out by Trump, for making a HUGE deal with the Russians for their oil, making them richer, while allowing the U.S. to defend Germany from..... the Russians! She's 100% committed to the deal with the Russians, so she's damned if she doesn't and a totally dishonest hypocrite if she does. She's counting on that oil.
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Frank Nash : Hannity's full-on Trumpster. The rest are all over the map. What I don't like is when they go all Victorian, and say that Trump should stop Tweeting. But regular folks LOVE the short and sweet plain speech. The fake shock/distaste for his pithy remarks. Real folks LOVE THAT. Heck, real people, talking to their friends, let loose with far WORSE than Trump. I love that Trump is so openly and persistently critical of CNN in his statements, without actually using the powers of the Presidency AGAINST the press (not beyond his bully pulpit), weaponizing his offices against reporters, like Obama did.
Obama was truly scary when it came to stuff like that. He didn't care if he had the right or the mandate. He just cared that he had the power, and I'm SO glad Hillary didn't follow in his footsteps, because all the pieces were in place, with cronies and fellow travelers all up and down the government.
I think we're going to come to find out that Hillary already had the people she wanted, up and down the bureaucracy, and the power to appoint all THEIR bosses is simply terrifying. Her brand of corruption plus her blatant incompetence and disregard for the law and for other human beings (especially if you cross her!) are horrific. I
As far as its being beneath his dignity as President, in the current climate, if he DOESN'T get down in the dirt and roll around a little (or a lot), he'll be drowned out by the insane attacks. That's a fact of politics. The only thing worse than "swinging down" at a detractor is to "take the high road" and ignore the detractor. That's a KNOWN recipe for electoral failure. When they're slingin' mud 24/7, you're gonna get dirty, regardless. Might as well land in a few good shots. The only thing certain is that you will lose if you don't fight back, just as hard or harder.
Trump really flipped the question, and I love that. Rather than spend all his time with lengthy refutations, he'll plant a counter-meme with a Tweet that took him (and his crew) 5 minutes to compose, or a one-liner in a speech that has everybody appalled, and controls what people are talking about. He forces his opponents to make it all about him, and the minute they do that, they make it about themselves, and it's hilarious how they're trapped, and keep making the same awful mistake in order to somehow "win."
Can't win for losin'.
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@christoph8365 Yup. She's still a gun-control, nanny-government, economically-illiterate progressive. Sadly, the nanny-government thing is pretty much in the Overton Window, nowadays, on both sides of the aisle. Progressives can see the rot in the military-industrial complex and some of the rot in the media-industrial complex, but they turn a blind eye to the domestic-industrial complex, consisting of Depts of Ag, Interior, Education, and all the rest.
I think the feds should handle national defense, national emergency, border control, and maybe the interstate infrastructure. Everything else needs to devolve to the states, and to the extent possible, states should devolve it to the counties and cities. And the cities should be run in such a way that build strong, resilient and self-reliant families. If you want that for your families, then you want government out of the way, and not mucking things up with its wrong-headed help.
Look at the homeless debacle in Portland. All kinds of generous citizens wanting to pitch in and convert an old prison into a homeless shelter, and DOING IT for a FRACTION of what city council is doing in a much less suitable place, serving many fewer people, at far greater cost, in a run-down cat-house with a collapsing roof. *SMH*. We pour millions and billions into helping people, and all it does is line the politicians' pockets in places like Portland.
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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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@Topfblende : I still think the Nazis were doomed. This or that different decision only affected the timetable, not the eventual outcome. I think the Germans vastly underestimated the extent of Soviet forces in the Far East, as well as the ingenuity and dogged determination of the Russian people, in general. They moved entire factories from one side of the Urals to the other, and kept right on manufacturing.
Yes, MAYbe if they'd won the Battle of Britain, they'd've had enough resources to take out the Soviets, but the tide of battle had already turned long before the Normandy landings in 1944. Like Napoleon, I think they choked on the sheer expanse of territory gained, and like Napoleon, they created some of the fiercest partisans in history, from Poland to the gates of Moscow. Such ferocity hadn't been seen since Spanish guerrillas forced the French to side every baggage train with an entire army. Multiply that by a factor of 10 and you get some idea of what prosecuting that war was doomed from the first burned village.
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@Homobikerus Russia is holding Ukraine at bay on Ukrainian territory, while its mobilization and training of new recruits continues at a rapid pace. And their arms manufacture, which was already greater than the combined production of NATO, is accelerating.
Russia COULD make an all-out assault, but every day, they are growing stronger. They weren't BUILT to execute the kind of overwhelming offensive you're talking about. One of the ways Putin got Russia's fiscal house in order was to shrink the military down to size. That was one of his keys to turning the Russian economy around, building up massive gold reserves, and improving the lives of the Russian people, with actual laissez-faire economics. Oh, the state will still intervene at its pleasure, but it largely pleases his government NOT to intervene. They have the system in place to take it all away any time they want, but functionally, the Putin government is less interventionist than the USA's, imho
And, while I wouldn't say Russia is an American-style Republic guaranteeing its people many if any rights, the security state is also expensive, and not something Putin leans into. They're still autocratic to a great degree, but by and large, his government doesn't generally exercise its full powers. The Russian people enjoy a lot of functional freedom, and are even allowed to dissent to some degree, certainly more than under Soviet rule.
In some ways, Russia is more American than America. Putin celebrates his Russian Orthodox faith and encourages traditional (Christian) family values. While this no doubt has its uses as a system of control, that used to be an American thing, and the Soviets were explicitly atheist. Meanwhile, in the USA, uppity Catholics and parents who complain at school board meetings are on terrorist watch lists, with the FBI surveilling them and looking for any excuse to round them up.
Makes me think. Maybe that's why Hollywood always de-constructs all its heroes. It's a reflection of the lie that America has become. Worse than that, a lie it tells to itself, to its ruin.
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We've known that the Soviets and Maoists were BAD for DECADES. Hence the rise in Postmodernism, where internationalist socialism promoted itself NOT in its OWN name, but by systematically tearing down everything it is NOT. Marxist-Leninism is the only thing left standing, after "de-constructing" capitalism. The ideology discredits, one by one, every feature of free-market capitalism and individual rights. After word of the Gulag came out, they stopped campaigning FOR the Marxist takeover, and focused on campaigning against everything that is NOT Marxism.
Couldn't bring it in the front door, so they snuck it in the back door. Here, near the end game, they are more and more openly Marxist, which they absolutely couldn't have done 20, 30 or 40 years ago. Tearing down capitalism was the long game. Once that is achieved, the only ideology left standing is Marxism.
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@michaelmoorhead762 : Military tribunals will confirm all the worst fears people have about Trump. He must be careful how he goes about this, or be branded a dictator on a mad purge. It helps Trump to have them all stacked against him, even to the point of his being edgy just to provoke them, because it'll make normal Americans root for him. And something these semi-educated journalists look down their nose at is just how regular folks speak to one another.
"Them're good groceries!" is how you REALLY compliment the chef! Horrifying. Trump communicates more on a blue-collar level. Common sense. Simple language. Sound-bite-length declaratory sentences. Trump, as president, probably brought a lot of intel resources to bear, as soon as he was sworn in. Got the straight of a lot of things, and has been preparing the ground, politically, in the general public and within his own administration.
I think they did a Tyrion Lannister thing to leakers, where documents would be subtly altered, pin-pointing leaks by the fine details of the story that were wrong that the reporter just accepted at face value. Dated the 11th? Yeah. That was the fake we floated past so-and-so. Got 'er! I think Trump just sat on leakers and built up the pressure on them. A war of appointments as much as anything, with time on his side.
It's like they've gone radio-silent, especially since Barr took over. But I saw a thing, yesterday, that spoke about how Sessions was quietly plugging leaks. A lot of counter-intel going on, in a clandestine war against never-Trumpers, who it appears will stop at nothing to poke the president in the eye.
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@marshmower Chevy gives you a choice of an EV or a giant, $100,000 V8 SUV. I always felt like those old 4-cylinder rice burner pickups of the '70s - '00s were the most practical vehicles. Then they finally built 4-cylinder engines that could push them up steep hills without dying go the speed limit on the Interstate, and they immediately switched to 6-cylinder and up. With all kind of government-mandated garbage you don't need and don't want.
And you should be able to fix them forever. And you should be able to fix everything on them. The auto industry was turned into a resource-wasting, anti-environment monster BY the government, which never says a word, not one regulation, about durability and repairability.
Something like the old Toyota pickup or the Hilux sold around the world, without all the garbage on it. Motor, chassis, drive train, seats and good-sized bed. You could make it bulletproof for well under $20,000 and get a good used one for dirt cheap.
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Antonio Perales del Hierro Nice sarcasm. Recognizing the superior policy positions Trump had on immigration, diplomacy, trade, economics, free speech, and the right to keep and bear arms doesn't mean I'm giving him a tongue bath. Not only superior policy positions, but superior deeds. Kim Jong Un barked at Trump. Trump barked back, to the shock and dismay of neocons and neolibs everywhere, and next thing you know, he's meeting f2f with N. Korea's president, and they each cross from North to South and South to North. There was talk of reconciliation and even some steps toward reunification between and of the Koreas.
If not for sniping from neocons and neolibs, we could be on much friendlier terms with Russia, right now. Putin is doing a lot of things right. He still has the same territorial headaches and ambitions that Russian leaders have had since Peter the Great modernized the nation by force of personality and utter ruthlessness. That's always at the core of Russia's will to survive.
I'm still suspicious as hell of them when it comes to Ukraine, Crimea, and all things Mediterranean-related. Part of that is natural distrust of their territorial/imperial ambitions. But right now, all things considered, Russia's doing more right by their people than our leaders are. They honor the religious institutions and speak of a better future. They have a rock-solid currency, backed by commodities. They don't run deficits. That makes them more honest than our government, which has CONDITIONED us not to save, by fiat currency that erodes the value of the dollar every single day. It's outright theft which our government calls "keeping campaign promises."
Still, I don't have much doubt but that Putin's doing his bit to chip away at Ukraine's territory and sovereignty. The USA did an extremely poor job handling the fall of the Soviet Empire. Profiteers - may's well call 'em carpet-baggers - feasted on the bones of the former Soviet Union, turning members of the former Soviet Apparat into oligarchs of a new, chaotic order.
I distrust the unchecked powers of the Russian president. It's one thing in Hungary or Austria or some other European nation of more or less homogeneous composition. It's another thing in a nation the size of Russia. But near as I can tell, without claiming to be a scholar, is that Putin's the closest thing to a statesman amongst the superpowers. Helsinki was Trump, Putin, and a bunch of pretenders.
At the time of the Helsinki Summit, Trump was embroiled in RussiaGate, which has since proven to be totally fabricated. When asked whose intel he trusted more, he said "Putin's." it's plain as the nose on your face. We KNOW that most of the conspiracy theories that got ANY play were conspiracy theories from his opponents. But you of course believe the opposite, because you lack true discernment.
Anyway, free writing is fun.
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@ProofCare I came looking for Eddie's solo straight from Lukather interview. I remember thinking at the time that the solo guitar was awesome, but I didn't remember - if I ever heard - that it was Eddie on the solo. I never associated Michael Jackson with shredding guitar.
I just heard the story of how the collaboration came about. Eddie didn't believe it was Quincy Jones calling him on Michael's behalf. Something like 4 hang-ups, before he took Quincy seriously.
Then in the studio, Eddie changed the song structure from the original idea of just trundling on the I chord behind the solo, to playing the solo against the verse form. I'm sure he could've done something great just hanging on the one, but by playing over the chord projection for the verse, his solo had somewhere to start and somewhere to go, like all good solos should.
The solo definitely boosted the song's power and popularity, but Michael deservedly got most of the attention, for the vocals, choreography, and production values of the video, itself. People loved the solo, but it wasn't the focal point. It's pretty cool to learn this story so many years later. Better late than never?
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Venezuelan oil isn't exactly sweet, light crude. It's the crudest of the crude, and requires enormous investment to get it out of the ground and refine it for a profit. It was never going to be easy, but with outside oil companies building the infrastructure and operating it, they could make a solid profit, which they immediately spent before they got it, so that everyone could have a microwave in their socialist utopia.
They started running out of money and decided to nationalize everything, and in their wisdom, forgot that they knew nothing about the oil business. Then oil prices took a nosedive and they were stuck.
There's still a lot of oil, there, but their government is a huge obstacle to their ever developing the resource in a measured, sustainable way. Their government saw riches on the horizon and spent them before actually earning them.
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As with most human traits, empathy is on a spectrum, and we all fall somewhere on that spectrum. Children are born innocent, but also pretty selfish. It's part of their charm.
I think you can lose empathy, to a degree, through trauma. "If no bones are broken and no blood is spilled, what the hell is he so upset about?" Depending on what you've been through, you can tend to be dismissive of minor hurts. It can seem like lack of empathy, but sometimes it just isn't something that would bother them if the shoe were on the other foot. I've been caught that way, myself. After the things I went through, there are quite a few things that are just piddly-ass to me, compared with something bigger that I'm MORE concerned about, but which cut more sheltered/fortunate people to the bone.
I knew an Army Ranger who was "diagnosed sociopath" (to stick in some tie-straightener's craw). He was a good dude. He was pretty callous, but he didn't wear any masks. He was just elemental. He believed in having a code of honor and that made him a pretty reasonable guy.
The Jesus archetype works for some. I think if you can sell 'em on the salvation deal, they'll do good things for the eternal-life prize at the end. If they believe some spirit is reading their minds and keeping score, they sometimes will control themselves. Of course, if they're really malignant, twisting God's Word is super-easy, barely an inconvenience.
It's hard to imagine a sociopath recognizing they're a sociopath and training themselves out of it, with family support. But if it's learned, which some say is what separates sociopaths from psychopaths, then it can be unlearned, and there's hope for sociopaths.
Going through a lot of abuse does change how your brain forms. I think they say it affects the emotional centers where empathy lives. I think a psychopath is just born with those parts of the brain misfiring, stunted, or absent.
But anyway, I think the way they define things, now, sociopath sort of implies it's learned, and there's nothing organically wrong with the brain. Finding the/a right life partner and working at it with intention, sounds like a pretty cool thing.
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@ldaws-3912 Clintons, Bidens, McConnells, Sanders, Pelosi, ... They ALL got rich at the public trough, and nobody's going to hold them accountable, and the ones in office, still, can't be removed, because they control how the votes are counted.
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AwakeAmericanow. Trump's policies were solid. I didn't vote for the salesman in 2016. When people like you lost your minds, I changed mine. "I didn't vote for him, but he's pissing off all the right people!" Unlike Democrats, he stayed within the law. He didn't abuse his office. He didn't weaponize federal agencies against partisan foes or the press, like his predecessor did.
While you were giving Obama a tongue bath, he was abusing the office. Then when someone who didn't abuse the office came along, all you could think to do was impeach him. Fast and Furious, alone should've gotten Obama impeached. Setting the IRS on his political opponents should've gotten him impeached. Benghazi should've gotten him impeached and Hillary arrested. Uranium-1 was on his watch. The deal with Iran was criminal.
I thought he might be an OK president when he was one of few senators who opposed the invasion of Iraq. But once elected, he became the drone-bomber-in-chief.
He ENCOURAGED the riots. He pushed CRT for all he was worth (which ain't much, granted).
Trump was like a breath of fresh air, and I didn't even like the guy before November, 2016.
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@jimfarmer7811 Turning a blind eye to widespread irregularities, suspicious outcomes, and lack of oversight in violation of election law does not "certify" an election. If the election was not stolen, then why the ENORMOUS resistance to audits? If you want faith and confidence in elections, then why don't you want anybody to look into it, when there were some VERY unprecedented lapses in chain-of-custody and provenance on mail-in ballots.
I'm not against mail-in ballots, but it takes time to set it up and verify that all the votes are coming from bona fide voters. Nations around the world LAUGH at Democrats' arguments against voter ID. Voter ID is something ANY 1st-, 2nd- or even 3rd-world country can manage. But not the USA! LOL!
I think the voting "irregularities" disproportionately favored Democrats, so it will disproportionately favor Republicans to have solid audits, overall. But it wouldn't surprise me one bit to learn that more than one Republican has benefited from voting machines over the years, especially the RINOs like McConnell, who's a machine politician from way back beyond the bend.
There're enough doubts and obstruction for me to want to outlaw the voting machines and go back to paper ballots. It's not that hard. When 2 different machines give 2 different counts on the same stack of ballots, you can't trust the machine counts. Plain and simple.
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My 'nuanced' take on this is that it's possible for Prigozhin, Popov, Gerasimov, Shoigu and Putin to ALL be right at the same time. I think the brass have an excellent strategy, but even in the best of conditions, the front lines are going to be placed under a lot of pressure. Big picture is primary military objectives were achieved at minimal cost. If they'd done a full mobilization prior and done it "right," Ukraine would've had time to dig in and fortify. Also, they would've had more time to accumulate aid from NATO nations. This trickle has been murder, but imagine if Russia had waited and that trickle was already started months before and Ukraine had ALL of it on Day 1, with time for more people to get trained-up, also.
It would've been much tougher going, with much higher losses and ammo expenditure. Ukrainians could be the ones with multi-layered fortifications and be fighting in a gray zone on the Russian border, itself, in spots (maybe).
The trouble is, those early gains must be expanded on and at least defended, while the general mobilization continues. The skeleton force they've been using to hold what they took and inflicting maximum damage to the Ukrainian military, which is forced to counter-attack at minimum cost to the Russian military, OVERALL. But it comes at great cost and to no apparent purpose to the men on the front lines. They expect to CRUSH the enemy, not fight at the enemy's level.
I think the Russian brass have to balance the fatigue of their experienced fighters with the losses that green troops will suffer if rushed to the front lines prematurely. Every week the front remains static is another week of training for just-mobilized recruits. They have quite a few, now, who can start getting their feet wet, but it's got to be gradual, or the situation can deteriorate very rapidly. They're bigger than Ukraine, but the death-dealing capability of modern weapons is such that small mistakes can snowball.
Assuming the above is close to reality, then Prigozhin and Popov popping off is a not entirely unexpected phenomenon. I think the advent of StormShadow, Himars and other stand off weapons changed the calculus for the Russian brass, and they're adjusting on the fly. But there were logistical snafus for both Prigozhin and Popov. But that's just war. It doesn't mean anybody miscalculated. What matters is how they adjust, and to my amateur eye, it looks like they're adjusting as well as they might be expected. I wouldn't expect the frontline commanders to LIKE it very much, but the overall strategy is sound, and what's more, there isn't a whole lot of adjusting they can do, until the Muster of the Rohirrim is complete or at least more complete.
Even though they're taking losses against Ukraine's final roll of the dice, the counter-offensive has devastated Ukrainian forces. And you're starting to see more and more of the young 20-somethings who will essentially take over from the more experienced (and exhausted) veterans that've been doing all the heavy lifting. They're pushing those guys to the breaking point. They're giving the new recruits as much time as possible to finish training and rotate to the front. The more time they can give them to develop, the better they will be, albeit at great cost to the original fighters.
Is Prigozhin (his commanders) out of line? Somewhat. But he's also right. And any good commander ALWAYS takes care of his men, and becomes skeptical of Command when they're given insufficient manpower or artillery, or are ordered to play patty-cake, without gaining territory or fighting for the same territory over and over. Nobody wants to be cannon fodder in a war of attrition, even if their side is "winning," especially when half the guys you started with are dead and wounded.
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I think you'd be surprised, then, to learn how many Republicans are part of the problem. Mitt Romney's a Democrat in all but name. He's the new John McCain. I can't believe I thought he was a good presidential candidate compared to a Democrat. What I've learned, since, almost makes me glad the Democrat beat him. McCain was scary. Romney has proven himself a never-Trumper. He was always a RINO, anyway. Dems would never vote for the Republican, and at the same time, Republicans and independents weren't very excited about Romney. He wouldn't have to change much to run as a Democrat. Just move back East where he enjoyed so much success, and leave Utah alone, since they'll re-elect the most famous Republican, every time, and he's it.
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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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The writing's on the wall for all these elite globalist types. One after another, countries in Europe are seeing broad nationalist center-right movements. The more the Brussels (and Berlin) agenda is pushed, in opposition to the movement, the elites are committing political suicide.
The EU have seen Hungary and others as exceptions, and "How do we sort this out and get them to come around?" is their mind-set, instead of "This is a trend, and these policies ineed to be re-examined." Instead, they dump refugees in poor working class neighborhoods, and go home to their own gated communities at night. They are insulated from the consequences of their decisions by their privileged positions and great wealth. But the dock worker, living paycheck to paycheck, can't afford to move anywhere else, when what they do causes his neighborhood to deteriorate, and him to worry about his daughter's safety, in a situation over which he has zero control.
And what does he get from his government? "You're an intolerant racist Islamophobe." No, he's not. He's a guy trying to get by, and he doesn't need to be preached at. He needs his next pay check and a safe neighborhood to raise his kids. He doesn't want to live next to people who have to be TOLD it's not OK to rape a pretty girl, just because she's not shrouded head to toe or unaccompanied by a man.
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Alex Jones espouses principles of liberty and freedom, opposes big government and crony capitalism, and has some whacked out stuff to say about current events that is WAY ahead of the news, to the point that it just sounds crazy.
Like the pedophile rings he was ranting about. Again, CRAZY. Next thing you know, you're reading about a thousand arrest warrants being served all across the country. So he's got some sources. He just comes out with some of it so far in advance of mainstream media.
That said, I've seen more than a little info-wars stories/videos that were a little light on the facts and biased as hell. Selling a narrative more than being news. But that's OK. Other channels/networks do it as much or more than Alex.
ALL news outlets are over the top in some way or another, or pushing an agenda, or protecting somebody with money from negative coverage, or something. And that's fine. It's human nature. But the pretense of objective news has gone out the window, which it should've done, the moment someone uttered the phrase "Farness Doctrine."
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I've never known a Mexican who didn't work hard and seek to improve himself. But that's because I hire tradesmen. Menjivar's the best tree groomer in town, I think. Those guys know their business. They dressed up two shaggy shade trees (trash trees, but good-sized and great microclimate-providers) in my front yard for $700. 6 or 7 guys. Good equipment. The Don told me his truck and bucket lift were all paid for. Showed up at 3 and were done in about an hour-and-a-half. Clean as a whistle when they left.
I think they gave good value and got a fair price. The whole crew sat with me and had a beer, as it was close to 5:00, they'd finished a little early, and I had a fridge full of beer.
3 or 4 ROUGH-lookin' dudes on that crew, I'll tell ya what. But they all knew their business and they hustled.
If there are 2 white guys and 1 Mexican doing landscape, the Mexican gets as much done as the other 2. I think I'd keep up with him, if I were still fit, but that's why I pay people. Speaking of which, I better pay SweetLawn!
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You don't understand Putin's strategic position, what he started with, in 1998, and what he did to right the ship. Putin slashed the military, and set his country's accounts in order. The current build-up has been many years in the planning and execution. Yes, he's authoritarian, but he's developed his nation's natural resources and built a strong industrial base, while countries in the West have systematically gutted theirs.
He built up a huge lead in conventional munitions, and he put together a well-trained, but small army. Not quite big enough to be taken seriously, but big enough to slurp up some territory at one gulp, dig in, and dare UFA to come get them. I think there were some tactical surprises and drone warfare changed mechanized armor tactics (and value, frankly). But I think Russia achieved pretty much what it wanted, and put the onus on Ukrainian to push them out.
There was much loss of life in Bakhmut, but the sheer expenditure of artillery to flatten every square meter in front of them is far beyond the capacity of NATO, let alone Ukraine on NATO's leavings, to match. The plain fact all the neocons seem to overlook is that western stockpiles are low, and western coffers are bare. Their biggest expense is interest on their debts.
U$A and Russia are two totally self-sufficient nations that should stand together and make an example of fairness and square dealing, because we don't have to treat anybody bad to get by just fine.
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Yes. But let the regulators come in and bureaucrats really take over the filtering programs, and we'll be well on our way to homogenization. I hope Trump keeps his hands off and just lets THESE kinds of conversations get his job done for him, marginalizing the Big-Brother Platforms. It's hard for people to imagine, but really, things change very rapidly, nowadays. The culture's left the culture manufacturers behind, and it's becoming more and more obvious, every day.
You CAN shadow-ban or slyly slip my comments into the SPAM folder, but in so doing, you create an advocate against your service. And all my friends. And all their friends, because we use the e-coms against the people who seek to sanitize them. The mindset of those who would control makes them clumsier than the society.
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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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@nobodyherepal3292 Even with training, green troops are less effective and suffer higher losses. But I don't think these losses are putting a dent in their replacement rates, and they're gaining experience with every engagement.
I do agree that the missile attacks on Russian logistics, supply and even convoys behind Russian lines are very troubling to the Russians, but for that reason may have the opposite of their intended result. Russia was content playing patty-cake along essentially static lines outside of Russia, especially with favorable casualty rates, thanks to retreat-and-counterattack-with artillery tactic.
Yes, the Ukrainian counter-offensive is putting stress on the forces currently on the front lines, but it's costing Ukraine and NATO more than they can afford to sustain, and as long as Ukrainian zone of control hasn't even reached the first line of Russian fortifications, Russia has the luxury of a steady build-up, even if the tactical situation isn't ideal, the losses are not much more than skirmish-level, begging the question of the larger strategic and geopolitical considerations, virtually all of which weigh heavily on the Russian side, and trending to increasing Russian advantage.
You can make a movie about the brave Tiger crew that destroyed 10 T34s at the Battle of Kursk, and still miss the fact that it was a resounding victory for the Soviets.
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That's because you're getting it from teachers who have about ONE crash course in it, PLUS you're used to being spoon-fed and entertained by a live lecture. Live lecture is a one-size-fits-all delivery system that delivers the exact same lesson to the EVERY student at the exact same time. No student is exactly like the one next to them.
Learning is the most individualized experience there is. Public schools condition you not to interact with the knowledge, directly, but through the intercession of a teacher. Most students wait for a lecture on the material before reading their books. Home-schooled and charter-school kids, often more advanced than their own high school teachers, know how to crack their books and learn.
In the future, because of the broken schools, more and more kids are going to get stuff on their own, and just need an expert to facilitate and answer questions, instead of "Everybody got their bibs on? Here comes the next spoonful of knowledge."
There are really GOOD learning products out there, for CHEAP, if you WANT it. Do you WANT IT?
If you local school is going online, chances are good, there's another online product that is FAR SUPERIOR to what your teachers are giving you at the local school. Once we go full online, there's no reason to use the local school over any school in the world!
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@HolyCanoley : No. That's just ordinary ignorance. I see it all over CNN, CNBC, CBS, ... The ones that get me are the libtards who think a degree confers some sort of expertise in all things, which it doesn't. My PhD is in math, but I was about a year away from a history/poli-sci degree, when I graduated (and econ and chemistry and physics), but I learned more history since LEAVING school than I ever learned in school.
Anyhoo, what you're witnessing is the lowest common denominator and it's actually a lot HIGHER than it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. The schools are worse than they ever were, but the silver lining to that cloud is all the people who are learning on their OWN. The lowest common denominator a couple decades ago didn't read much and didn't write at all. You're criticizing people who are expressing their thoughts in the written word.
You don't like their words, but we've come a long way in a pretty short time. Legacy media and legacy education are built for a technological and social landscape that no longer exist. Government, too, for that matter. You appear to be one who clings to the "old way" of central control and public harassment of people outside of your narrow liberal orthodoxy. We had a name for people like that, back in the '50s. We called them "McCarthyists." Before that, there were the Puritans, and before THAT, the Papists. Same game, different people, different time. Still the same.
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Actually, the term "right" is kind of a misnomer. Yeah, there are certainly some conservatives who want us to live by Bronze-Age rules because their Bronze-Age books tells them it's God's Plan. But all the stuff we're talking about: free speech, the 2nd Amendment, and mistrust of state power? Those are what the original liberal were all about. What latterday "liberalism" represents is nothing less than rigid conformity and serfdom. If things keep going the way they've been going, it wouldn't be long before the closet aristocrats embedded in government pass on their jobs to their kids, and tell us that's what God wants us to do. We already see this in how celebs and politicians lie, cheat and bribe their kids' way into the most prestigious schools. These young mediocrities are being groomed for high office, NOT through any merit of their own, but because they build networks with other mediocrities, through family and school connections.
How do you think Al Gore became a Senator and then a Vice President? It wasn't because he was any good at anything or some kind of saint. It was because of his daddy, who was a senator before him. May's well call it primogeniture. First-born son gets his daddy's gig. Lord, King, whatever. Same with the Bush brothers.
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@jennifers8843 Because it aligns with the values and political beliefs of most of the government. You can be conspiratorial about it or just chalk it up to human nature. I'm kind of mixed. I think there are a lot of useful idiots and probably a few dedicated Marxists who infiltrated the academy and nudge things in their direction.
Yeah, I've listened to Yuri Bezmanov, and yeah, I do believe that was the Soviets' plan to undermine us. I just don't think the Russians are behind it, even if its initial impetus was from the KGB. Frankfurt intellectuals also played their role.
Anyway, this stuff doesn't have much power, once people see it for what it is, and that's happening, conspiracy theory or not. Yeah, COVID dealt us a gut punch, and we're on the brink of high inflation times. But we're not starving peasants at the end of our rope after centuries of deprivation. We're also armed. So I think we're going to see the pendulum swing at Peak Woke. We may even be past Peak Woke, unless - and this is possible - the Algorithm's feeding my confirmation bias.
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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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@RuleofFive Which ER/ICU doctors are you talking about? The ones on legacy media or the ones they de-platform? If the protocols for treatment were sensible, 99% of people presenting with symptoms would be successfully treated as outpatients. But they give them cough syrup and send them home to get sicker, without the benefit of corticosteroids or HCQ or 1v3rm3ct1n, which, if I spelled it correctly, would be removed from the comments by censors. Who, on the side of truth, resorts to censorship?
ICU doctors are only in the conversation when the front-line doctors FAIL. And this virus is totally treatable, and has been since the beginning. But doctors treating thousands in front-line clinics with 99.98% success rate without long-lasting symptoms are SILENCED. Why is that? Why aren't YOU asking that?
Try educating yourself by reading the Great Barrington Declaration and put this whole atrocity in its proper scientific, epidemiological, and historical context.
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@dpersonal4187 : The 2 major parties are viral. As soon as a 3rd party becomes a threat, one or the other of the major parties will appropriate the message and absorb most of the voters likely to vote for the 3rd party.
In elections where I'm not in "lesser of two evils" mode, I typically vote Libertarian, even when they field a dumb-ass, like Gary Johnson. That's what I did in 2016, which was basically a pro-Hillary vote. But the choice was between the Car Salesman and The Witch, as I saw it in 2016. Trump's done a far better job than expected, in my opinion.
Domestically, he sure pisses off the Progressives, who are quite mad when it comes to domestic policy, and pleases Progressives by pulling the hell out of Syria and now, Afghanistan. But to a libertarian-minded person such as myself, Trump's doing the same thing, abroad that he is at home. Cutting down government meddling. Progressives have this unbelievable faith in the wisdom of bureaucrats. They criticize the HELL out of them, and then eagerly vote them even MORE power. Insane.
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@randomuser1596 I've only hung out with rock and artifact hounds in and West of the Rockies. I don't keep track of it, but I went to some digs up in Gunnison, and got an earful of the political in-fighting over competing theories. Seemed like if there's room for disagreement, everybody should just work together to find out as much as possible, but it sounded like the two schools of thought were in contention for grant money, and it got political.
MY main takeaway from rubbing shoulders with the anthro/archaeo crowd was how extensive the trade routes were. Obsidian points showing up 1,000 miles from their source, etc. Flint and obsidian sites were widely known and people traded finished products and raw materials far and wide, as far back as you'd care to go. That came as sort of a shock to me, at first, but not every valley's gonna have a handy source of flint or obsidian. But people were pretty much everywhere and most were using stone tools.
They almost certainly traded furs, too, but there's no record of that. The stone tools last forever in the ground.
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@mrade5321 The population sold itself down the river YEARS AGO when it said "Please, kind and generous government, take care of our health for us!" This is the predictable result. I'm surprised NHS worked as well as it did as long as it did, but when you put 3rd parties between you and your health-care provider, you can't expect full value. It's the same with public education. There's no competition for quality or cost of the care. And when budget crunches hit, star chambers decide who gets what kind of care and what kind of care is available.T
In the USA it's even worse, because they prop up the chronically under-funded socialized system out of the pockets of those who move heaven and Earth to pay their insurance premiums. The government pays what it's going to pay and the insured make up the difference. Meanwhile, the government makes sure the insurance companies survive by making private health insurance uniformly EXPENSIVE. In the USA we have a 3-tiered system: Those who receive free care, those who are insured, and those who pay cash. Those who pay cash only pay a tiny fraction of what they charge the insured.
The beauty of the American system is if they run out of money, they just print MORE! LOL! Nobody cares that they're living off the debt slavery of their children and grandchildren.
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@chasbodaniels1744 You refuse to acknowledge cooling trends from the 1930s to late 1970s that had us worrying about a new ice age. Now that you and others want us to worry about global warming, you conveniently ignore that, or memory-hole this inconvenient truth, and focus on global temps since the late 1970s, which was basically the low point of the century.
Maybe you're too young to remember all the scientific articles about the new ice age that were coming out in the 1950s-1970s. Maybe you're just ignorant. Maybe you're just stupid. Not sure which.
There's no question that we do harm by polluting so much. The question is what we do about it, and carbon credits are a typical bureaucratic solution that solves nothing, gives bureaucrats lots of power and a new, permanent niche, and the excuse to order us around and bully us. The fact is that Westerners are voluntarily reducing their footprint with voluntary life choices, including getting off the global supply chain, which is very harmful to the environment, and growing their own food, close to home.
MEANwhile, the SAME politicians who browbeat us about OUR carbon footprint, fly around in private jets to attend more meetings about what NEW means they might use to take more control over our lives, while at the same time, exporting our jobs to high-polluting China and other 3rd-World countries who have NO regard for the environment. Their actions and their words do not coincide. Also, these same people have been buying up beachfront property for years, including pseudo-scientist Al Gore, the tip of the grifter spear.
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@lindakeays2864 : That's why seeing the under-the-surface conflicts of interest is so revealing, and why ANY public defections are so significant. Authoritarian/totalitarian governments become infested with "climbers" and "skimmers" with no real competence, except how to navigate the Byzantine bureaucracy and enrich themselves. Eventually, the incompetence overcomes the entire structure.
The cheating and skimming then percolates DOWN, becomes a way of doing business for ALL, especially with literal millennia of "This is how things get done" that aren't much different. You see billions devoted to public works, and even when there is enough money allocated, objectively, to get it done, the low bidder then subcontracts with other low bidders, who subcontract with low bidders, and by the time it actually gets to the project, itself, the last low bidder ends up having to cheat on materials, safety and worker pay. And as many as 5 levels of contractors, each of whom took a nice slice of the pie, without doing any actual work.
There's no shortage of competence in the general population, but everybody knows how things work. This is why, historically, China has been called a "paper tiger." If China could only rid itself of parasitic "warlords" (now openly crimelords), it would uncork an unprecedented amount of industry and creativity. Nobody better than an average Chinese person at making more do less. Couple that with real freedom and real meritocracy, and prosperity would EXPLODE across all of Asia, as a - for the first time in history - a rising tide of ingenuity and prosperity emanating from China lifted all boats and percolated outward to surrounding nations and nations around the world.
But history teaches that there was really only ONE revolution where a vibrant, independent and free middle class was harnessed to REAL principles of liberty and equality under the law. However flawed the American Experiment was, the conditions were uniquely suited for a closer approximation to a form of limited government that truly fostered a free and prosperous nation, in 1776. USA has NEVER been PERFECT, but it's ALWAYS been pretty WONDERFUL in a multitude of ways.
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Who knows what Russia would give up if Ukraine agreed to be a neutral trading partner, rather than a stooge and a proxy for the USA? When Russia's security concerns about NATO's eastward expansion were ignored, Russia resorted to force. Having resorted to force, Russia's invested heavily in its war effort, and it's not about to give up what it fought for, given Ukraine's abrogation of the Minsk Accords.
Now, I don't think Russia will take Zelensky's or the USA's word on anything. Any agreement would have to have real teeth in it, to prevent a repeat of Minsk Agreements.
What I see as more likely is some sort of nominal Russian federal governance of semi-autonomous eastern Ukraine, with Russian forces on its western boundary to guarantee its security against Ukrainian attack.
Is there a longer-term goal of eastern Ukraine or even Crimea returning to Ukraine? Maybe. Certainly in eastern Ukraine. Maybe or even probably the Crimea, if Russia can be sure that Ukraine will behave as a peaceful, friendly trading partner to all.
To my uneducated eye, this entire war is more about corrupt oligarchs in Ukraine and the collective West. Nobody sees what they did in 2014 and what they continue doing as a good thing, except them, and whomever they can keep brainwashed through propaganda and censorship.
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Russia gains objectives with minimal troop losses and maximum casualties on the enemy. But they don't hold those objectives very tightly. They retreat against offensives, inflicting maximum casualties. Rinse and repeat.
As for Prigozhin announcements, I think it's all smokescreen. Convey the impression of weakness and division, inviting Ukrainian forces into yet ANOTHER forlorn hope, at great cost to themselves.
Russian ammo expenditures are off the charts, but Russia prepared well in advance, with enormous stockpiles, while the West frittered away its actual fighting abilities and economic wherewithal to support them.
USA is trapped in cascading errors and misconceptions, if you assume its purpose is liberty, civil rights, and economic prosperity for all. To my eye, they're making things as bad as possible for themselves, to trigger cascading crises that will justify the final step(s) to functional dictatorship. Right now, the apparatchiki think they will all rule beside their masters, but they will be the first to go, as power at the top seeks to consolidate. Who will be our Lenin? Who will be our Trotsky? Who will be our Stalin?
The wheel turns. May human progress prevail in spite of those who insist on shaping it by force.
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@sugarshane8622 : Free-market capitalism is not business hand-in-glove with government. That's fascism you're describing, and we're all against that. The thing is, if we didn't make government over everything, there wouldn't be bureaucrats to be bought off and tilt the playing field in their cronies' direction!
A lot of people are so caught up in catching robber barons doing evil robber baron things, they create the very agencies that are the main tools of the robber barons! Washington, D.C. is a cesspool. Big companies HAVE to lobby and contribute to politicians' campaigns because not to do so means that the next laws and regs are going to destroy your company. The problem isn't that politicians are corrupt. We always knew that. The problem is we let them (BEG them) to legislate and regulate, which creates 4 or 5 powerful people with the power to make the robber barons' dreams come true, and who will also create nightmares for them if they don't open up offices in D.C. and attend committee hearings, etc.
What we need is to disempower the central government to lord it over every little thing, and go back to protecting our borders and enforcing the U.S. Constitution. They do both, very poorly, just as they do the million other things they have no business doing: poorly.
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Nobody's perfect. Diversify your sources and fact-check all of them. EPOCH Times, Hoover Institute, American Thought Leaders, and others make a good counter-balance. There are some who make a real attempt to be objective and report the facts, but the press has always had its slant, one way or the other, either in the way they spin the stories or more importantly, how they cherry-pick what stories to report.
It's always been this way, but since Hitler, the entire West has pretty much done what Hitler did, in the name of fighting what Hitler did. "Fairness Doctrine" and other myths created to give the impression that the major news outlets are objective, when they're not. Just see who pays their bills and who owns them, and you know who they will lie for.
I just watched a thing on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and it's spent something like $320 million on media all over the world, and is the single biggest non-governmental funding source for WHO and FDA.
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Yes, we pay a price for tariffs, no doubt. But if you only think about consumers, you lose sight of the fact that our industries can be targeted, one by one, by one after another foreign country that wants to corner the market on one thing, and we end up buying cheap EVERYthing, only nobody has a job to buy it with. There are also strategic considerations, when it comes to key industries such as steel, aluminum, industrial chemicals, etc. (You can tell almost exactly what a country's fundamental strength is by tracking nothing more than sulfuric acid production. Tells it all.)
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I think it's more to do with the chip shortage. Yet another reason to go back to making basic, good cars and trucks.
But I think we're seeing auto makers more or less going on "Pause" mode, waiting out the delusional political class. But they KNOW the realities. They have their own actuaries. They can see how impossible the EV dreams are, with what we have, now.
I think that if EVs are superior, they'll take over. Let the market decide. The environmental trade-offs are too close to call, when you figure in everything that goes into the making of EVs. If everybody jumps on board all at the same time, we'll run out of copper, cobalt, lithium and other mineral resources. Our grid will be taxed beyond its already fragile limits. We'll also have to turn a blind eye to unfair labor practices in China and, for instance, Congo.
People know it's better to burn less and burn cleaner. People all over the world are working on every imaginable aspect of this, and sharing their knowledge with others for clicks and good feelings. I wish the government would just get out of the way. I think we'd de-centralize in a hurry if people didn't resort to force to push things the way THEY want them.
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Probably. But it would give the Resistance a lot of free ammunition, claiming that the pre-election release was yet ANOTHER attempt by Trump to steal an election. As it was, the traditional opposition bump that hurts every president in his first midterm election was not much of a bump, ESPECIALLY when you look at the number of Republicans resigning and retiring, leaving mostly Republican seats up for grabs. And when you look at the makeup of the House, many of the Democrats ran on downright Trumpian platforms (1st and 2nd Amendment. Drain the swamp.), the Republicans who were elected were mostly more conservative, and the Republicans who lost were mostly RINOs.
Trump was wildly successful if you look at the House and Senate in ideological terms. Add to THAT the far-left candidates like AOC, Tlaib and Omar, who were "primaried" into office by a focused strategy aiming at getting progressives elected in Democrat-dominated districts, and you see a Democrat "coalition" that is by turns centrist, center-left, center-RIGHT and far left. If Democrats in the House vote the way they campaigned, Pelosi will have a hard time pushing things to the left a millimeter. And if they flip and vote party line, they won't get re-elected. If Pelosi tries to get bills passed that the centrists can vote for and still face their constituents, she's going to lose the Progressive wing. We see the attempt to censure Omar for anti-semitism turning into an empty platitude that doesn't TOUCH her as prima facie evidence of just how Pelosi's hands are tied. Damned if she does and damned if she doesn't.
Democrats KEPT the big-money donors in their pockets by making Pelosi Speaker. The trouble is, she's an aging neoliberal, who looks like what she is: A corrupt, old-school swamp rat. But she's the face of the party! So congratulations! Pelosi's still on top! And condolences! Pelosi's still out front. Her American-Gothic tag team with Senator Schumer at her side was an announcement to the whole country that the corrupt Democrat MACHINE is still calling the shots, and it's NOT a good look!
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"Meat wave attacks" are pretty much Ukraine's stock in trade, which is why the pundits are projecting this onto the Russians.
The Russian "Fire Wall" or "Wall of Fire" method is very expensive in ammunition, but sparing of men, and is nothing new. This was how they marched into Berlin, in 1945: behind a wall of fire.
It's not even uniquely Russian tactic, as this was how Field Marshal Montgomery liked to fight: Overwhelming firepower. Just carpet bomb the area immediately in front of you. Montgomery lost more men to asphyxiation from the "Wall of Fire" than he lost to the Germans in the 2nd Battle of El Alamein.
But yes. From my easy chair, the Russians do appear to be fighting "smarter." They were maintaining pretty straight front lines, for the first year or year-and-a-half. But since Ukrainian air defenses in the south have been depleted or destroyed, we're seeing more classic "maneuver warfare," where the Russians (sometimes) bypass fortifications, threaten encirclement, and attack from 3 sides, in a more classic combined-arms attack with infantry, armor and air support.
Sheer speculation on my part, but I think that when Ukraine still had plenty of equipment and ammo, the classic pincer maneuvers just got the two pincers mangled, due to FPV drones and a then-abundant reservoir of precision artillery on the Ukrainian side. We saw a resurgence of this in the Kursk campaign, where Ukraine mustered the best of what it had left, and decimated more than one Russian convoy of reinforcements. But in the south? I think they're maneuvering much more aggressively with their armor.
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Soviet Sans Of the Holy Britannian Empire : A lot of people subscribe to a lot of channels, and then lose interest, but never un-subscribe. They just tell the algorithm enough times that they're not watching that channel, any more, and the algorithm pushes those channels to the bottom of their feed. I've heard YTers complain about their apathetic subscribers. "YouTube is shadow-banning me, because I've got X subscribers, but only Y viewers." At least SOME of those shadow-banned channels just aren't all that good, and people will subscribe at a moment's notice, but often never un-subscribe, even though they're not watching the channel.
I've been subscribed to Crowder for a long time, but I don't watch him very much. Just too "gay," at times, with kind of a lispy way of speech and florid hand gestures. Then, he comes out with all kinds of anti-gay-from-the-Bible kind of talk, which is to ANTI-gay for me. I was raised on Biblical teachings, and I gained a lot of wisdom. I also saw enough in the Bible and in the Church to know if it IS inspired by God, parts of it are also most definitely put in there by humans, out of their own self interest or intolerance or closed-mindedness. Anyway, Crowder's religious faith causes him to speak from a place of authority, which I feel is false, even though I might agree with him on the merits.
But yeah, he's against recognizing gay marriage, which I think goes against equal protection. Of course, I'd argue that straight marriage is also no concern of the state, and its recognition of married couples as something special is not really equal protection, relative to those who do NOT formally tie the knot. It's not something for government to encourage or discourage, just because government builds more power for itself when we make more babies and deliver them unto government for their education (indoctrination) or anything else!
I wince a lot watching Crowder,, and I defend his right to the same platform as anybody else. What he says isn't nearly as over-the-top as what is accepted every day from left-wing channels. And I don't want anybody shutting them down, except by sheer disinterest from potential viewers who can see EXACTLY how bad TYT is.
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It's a lot easier to stick to 9-to-5 schedule when you're in a cubicle watching the clock. At home, you're more likely to not notice and think more in terms of getting things done than what time it is, or the short dress the hottie 2 cubicles down is wearing.
We'll see what happens in education. I think the lock-downers in education are shocking parents out of their complacency. "If we're going online, why use the local school, when there's a better one in the next county or state? There've been online learning management systems (LMSs) available for years, and a lot of parents are discovering that home schooling isn't the near-impossible task it once was. You can shop for education products the same way you shop on Amazon. And you don't need a teaching certificate to ensure that your child is being well-served. Easy to track their progress. And if you don't like how you're being served in math, it's $100 to choose the competing product.
I can see the idea of sending your kids to school, where they'll be stuck in a room full of snot-noses spreading whatever bug there is to every family in the district. Plus, those ZOOM sessions give parents an intimate understanding of just what's going on in the classroom; just what's being taught. Going remote has brought parents into the classroom. It's a delightfully ironic twist. institutions do this to protect themselves, but it very well spell their doom!
COVID restrictions favor big over small. This is creating a much greater loyalty to small, local businesses, who are being destroyed. It'll get worse before it gets better, and the global supply chain isn't going away any time soon. But there's a trend of "localism" underway. Locally grown foods. Local businesses. Living off the grid (or on the grid, just not using it as much). A growing distaste for the big box stores, etc.
Conservatives have been arguing for school choice for a long time (since Reagan, in fact). This could be the tipping point. This may be the point at which society finally rolls over the teacher unions and establishment education interests.
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This is how a dominant party behaves, as soon as it gets the chance. With the legacy media in their hip pockets and a captive voter base stretching as far as the eye could see, they fall into all the same patterns of unchecked power. Progressives are good at seeing the symptoms, but never blame themselves for the engines of inequity the create by supporting the big government in the first place.
If you don't want government corruption taking over everything, you need to limit the mandate of government. It's the only cure. Progressives are always tempted by the carrot and then whine about the stick, because smart as they think they are, they NEVER make the connection.
"This thing we created is out of control!" cries the progressive.
"Why did you create it and what's your plan to get rid of it?" asks the conservative.
"Oh, we want to keep it around. We just want it to do what WE say," answers the progressive.
"That's not how the world works," says the conservative. "You can't have it both ways. You can't turn your wishes into reality without old-fashioned hard work. Quick and easy government solutions aren't quick, they're never easy, and usually have the opposite of the intended effect over the long haul. Project your thinking beyond tomorrow and look a year or two or 10 or 20 down the road."
"That's too hard. And how can you be against Free Stuff, you Nazi?"
"Free Stuff is the Nazi's calling card, idiot."
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@BillWagnerMusicianTurnedDev : Quite possible. I've been very skeptical of Wray since he took over from Comey. Same stonewalling. Same "national security" excuse to keep Congress from obtaining documentary evidence. Slow-walking FOIA materials to Judicial Watch...
These things are difficult to scry from MY perch. But I do know that GOOD counter-intel operations leave the suspects in place, and let them think they're still getting away with their crimes. And it's possible that Wray's been doing what he's been doing to keep the Deep Staters overconfident. Just hard to say.
Just about anything that happened DURING Obama admin is obscured by cover-up and the passage of time. And how did they get NIXON? They got him on the cover-up, not on the break-in. And this cover-up has continued well into the Trump administration, but the number of Obama players has dwindled over time, destroying the good-old-boy network of mutual assistance and ass-covering. They couldn't LEAVE, for fear of losing hold of the levers of power, but they can't pull those levers of power, indefinitely, without the circle closing in on them.
To those of us on the outside, it's been very frustrating, but imagine the erosion of cover and mutual support as Trump slowly but surely appointed his own people.
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High-school marching band really brings back the memories. I remember in the '70s, when I saw my first black high-school marching band. I felt like we were really good marchers, with our dressed lines turning corners in unison, with the guys on the inside marking time and each marcher as you went out taking bigger and bigger steps, so the line was perfect as you made the turn as a group. Then the black schools would not only do THAT, but they'd start bustin' dance moves with that same precision, and my mind was blown. I remember being jealous because their bands were way more hip than ours. It would've been a blast to have band leaders that taught THAT.
Marching bands and music programs aren't what they used to be. Band, team sports, vo-tech, ... THOSE are the things we need schools for, more than the book learning. The schools are failing on the book-learning part, already.
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@GGGR2012 : If you had that money to invest, yourself, instead of just taking what the government decides, you'd be RICH when you retired. And yes, their ultimate solution is to keep their promises with worthless dollars. Inflation is the most insidious tax and the worst destroyer of people's wealth than anything else. Governments - especially governments with 'progressive' economic policies, invariably punish prudence, frugality, and savings. They do it in the name of helping the weak, but the net effect is to punish every honest schmuck who's trying to do the right things, isn't rich, but has a chance to improve his situation. Democrats hate those kinds of people. To them it's rich people and poor people and they want to keep both groups the same over the generations.
America is where we're supposed to have a rule set that fosters the little guy getting ahead. That's not how it works, and a big part of that reason is progressive-liberal policies.
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Putin had to cut personnel dramatically in '98-'99 to get Russia's financial house in order. I think he was wildly successful, considering the state of Russia in 1998. He still kept building up arms and equipment, but on a budget, and by avoiding war. Sell? Yes. Use? No.
Not everything is Putin's way, but I think the general plan is solid. Prigo and Popo probably don't like it, because the strategy comes at the expense of the professional soldiers while they're building and training a citizen army. I think the basic calculation still holds up, and even though Ukraine is doing some damage from long range, the scale of the damage is not huge, and needs to be weighed against the potentially huge losses suffered when you rush green troops to the front before they're ready.
I think Russia can already make out OK with massive reinforcements of green troops, but the strategic brain trust doesn't want to suffer higher losses. Fighting retreat and coordinating artillery strikes requires well-trained and experienced troops. Even if it's the optimal strategy to be patient, your Prig's and Pop's might not be happy about it.
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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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Robert Mueller has long been known as a supporter of "parallel construction." Use the special powers of NSA and CIA to dig up dirt, and then try to find a believable chain of legally-obtained evidence to make the charges stick. And he's always been a VERY aggressive prosecutor, using the weight of his office to crush people. 4 a.m. perp walks are his trademark. In my opinion, he exemplifies the damage a good man can do with the powers given him by the Patriot Act.
9/11 served its purpose. While we were all freaking out, the U.S. Gov't rammed through laws that basically made us a police state. And Mueller's the exemplar of a hard-charging prosecutor can do (get away with), nowadays. FISA was DESIGNED to be abused, and the FBI wasted no time. I bet it gave a lot of police a thrill putting away drug dealers they couldn't've touched without NSA intercepts. Guilty? Some of 'em. But many were no doubt railroaded by blackmail. "We KNOW your kid brother did such-and-such (NSA taps), and if you don't roll over for us, we're gonna go after him.
It doesn't have to be something on YOU or something they can actually prove in court against a loved one. But YOU don't know that. You may even cop a plea to get a 6-month sentence, just to keep your uncle from spending 20 years in jail for tax evasion. There are many ways to leverage illegally/improperly obtained information to bring somebody to heel, to commit perjury (Dershowitz calls it "composing") because it's what the prosecutor wants to hear. "Say this or your wife spends the next 5 years in federal prison."
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Yes. And what seemed like odd passivity in spots may turn out to be just LETTING them win, and letting the world see what happened. I think if Trump had acted any sooner, we might have had a coup, already. He pushes, but not too hard. Then lets the Dems beat him on procedural grounds, and they can't help themselves. They twist the process all out of shape and no one stops them.
But if you look across the Atlantic, you see how the center-left have done basically the same thing, and the people are rising up. "You don't represent us!" UK voted for BREXIT, but the bureaucrats in London and Brussels have fought it tooth and nail, by controlling the decision-making process at the top. The people are getting sick and tired of that shit, and are finally rising in rebellion. It's ugly stuff for the center-left in Europe, and any thinking person, watching the American Left use the exact same tactics to secure short-term WIN, knows this will lead to the shattering of the center-left coalition, and a rapid growth of support for the right and center-right.
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YIN YANG: Yes. I think it took about a New-York minute for agencies to start abusing unprecedented NSA surveillance capabilities. In a frenzy to sabotage Trump, the Obama admin explicitly opened the walls between agencies and it was a free-for-all leak festival.
We have guys - starting with Mueller - who are past masters at parallel construction, boot-strapping their way with illegally obtained intel, and back-filling how they got there, by bullying individuals into guilty pleas or bankruptcy. Miller's an advocate for parallel construction. It's how he leverages fruit of the poison tree into a fake semblance of factual, legally-obtained evidence.
We see cracks in the whole leverage-and-backfill strategy, when a big company with plenty of its OWN lawyers stepped up to represent one of the Russian troll-farmers. Faced with the prospect of discovery, Mueller's stalling, suggesting an empty - or illicit - hand.
I think a combination of becoming complacent within the good-old-boy network and sheer incompetence PLUS using these weaponized agencies against somebody big enough and cocky enough to fight back is what it took to expose this behavior, which we know stretches back to J. Edgar Hoover (and beyond), but in the current era, their surveillance capabilities are orders of magnitude more powerful, and the stakes are higher.
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@magicsam8247 : Because it devalues the quality and overall value of the learning product. The more we divorce the customers from the true cost of the product, the lower the quality, the fewer the choices, and the higher the cost. There are many learning products out there that do a better job than public institutions and at a tiny fraction of the cost. But the teacher's unions don't want you to know that. Over the next 10-20 years, we're going to see more and more cheap, high-quality learning products taking up more and more of the education market.
When you make the product free, there's less pressure on the student to pursue productive skills. They can indulge themselves in all kinds of nonsense that adds zero value to society, like the entire Grievance-Studies wing of the humanities, in which students learn nothing of value, but everything about how to protest and virtue-signal in a game of high-stakes I'm-more-oppressed-than-you contests . I got all the activist training I needed just by hanging out with the hippie crowd, in college. It had nothing to do with the language, science and math skills on which I built a successful career. Now even math and science are giving way to political correctness, with science-deniers trumping the facts and evidence with victimization ideology.
The quadratic formula DGAF who you voted for or what color your skin is. It simply IS.
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Defamation is an area of the law that doesn't seem fair. I usually want to cancel the advantages politicians enjoy, but in the area of defamation, politicians are treated much worse than the average citizen. Much easier for Sandman to get a fat settlement than for Trump to get a fat settlement.
If there's two things I'd change, it would be to beef up the tort system (expand it), and make it relatively easy to sue for, say, $10,000. Eliminate the regulatory agencies, but make it easy for private citizens to sue for harm done. The fact that companies like NIKE and Apple basically support slave labor in China should be on full blast on all channels and nobody should buy their stuff, until they change their ways, and some of us they lost, forever, already.
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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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@captintinsmith3146 : I think yo two OD'd on Red Pill. Dial back on your dosage. There are plenty of Christians, Muslims, atheists and agnostics involved in manipulating the public for their own selfish gain, knowingly or unknowingly enabling tyranny. There will always be people who are detrimental to the good and the will of the people. Some wear yarmulkes. Some don't. By putting everything in one Zionist basket, you make the same mistake as the intersectionality jerks, who see racism everywhere, causing all the problems, everywhere and always.
With your one-track, one-explanation world view, you are easily set chasing chimeras, while the Machine of Corruption and Incompetence keeps rolling.
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@Sinéad L : Maybe it's because a false allegation ruins a man's life whether he's guilty or not. It's terrifying. And who knows how many men are THREATENED by an allegation for blackmail purposes, or job advancement purposes? I had a female student who stayed after class one time and made up a bunch of stuff I didn't say, because she was failing my class. It was the one time I didn't follow the Pence rule, and the classroom door was shut. Luckily, there were a bunch of people standing just outside, or God knows what she would've said about me when she saw the 'F' on her grade report.
It's terrifying to be on the verge of a he-said, she-said. Luckily I document everything and save everything. She very carefully clipped one of her graded tests and showed my boss and my boss's boss the note I wrote her on her test "Don't ruin a good thing!" I said to her. Sounded creepy. But I kept a photo copy of her test, and showed the ENTIRE note to my superiors. I also showed them the entire test, which was generally pretty poor. Tests are where you're supposed to give just a summative assessment. I also make them a formative assessment, writing a book, trying to explain what they need to succeed on the NEXT test.
I was talking about work that I could barely see underneath her eraser marks, where I said "Yes! This is correct! You didn't trust your first (correct) instinct! Next time, go with your first idea! Don't ruin a good thing!" That girl is toxic. She's going to leave a lot of damaged people in her wake. I barely escaped and consider myself lucky.
You know how women are paranoid about men harassing them? There aren't many men like that. But we've all encountered them. Same with some women. Some people are just sociopaths.
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'80s was the calm before the storm that had already been brewing since the '40s and '50s, as the USA (and the world) adjusted to the New Hegemon, the accidental empire that must never be named, like Fight Club.
We beat the USSR in real terms, but we seemed to lose the ideological battle in the process, with an ever-growing, ever-sprawling welfare state, and takeover of the whole country by a new bureaucrat/technocrat class in Washington, who know they're smarter than we are, but have no real connection to the daily concerns of the people, and nothing but handouts and government takeovers by way of "solutions."
In the 20s, word got out about the true nature of Soviet Socialism, and it took them 60 years of deconstruction of and government intervention into the free-market capitalism that was always our biggest strength, to a point where close to half of the country thinks capitalism is evil and socialism is good. You couldn't say "socialism is good" for 40 years, but now, even though state intervention has created a fascist framework, we're brainwashed into thinking the problem is "unbridled capitalism." I'd much rather have "unbridled capitalism" than have the government and a handful of the biggest corporations working hand in hand for their own mutual benefit. It never ends well.
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@Sytall In ancap, those big companies get crushed by society, itself. In YOUR vision of utopia, they are shielded by the government, itself. They WRITE regulations that only they are big enough to comply with, which weeds out all competition. Before the FAA there were hundreds of airline companies competing. Now there are just a few, and they're all considered "too big to fail."
You see it in every arena the government regulates heavily. Agriculture, health care, auto making, you name it.
When government and big business speak with one voice, we're in big trouble. We live in a fascist dystopia that is cheered on by the very same people who claim to despise the big corporate interests and billionaire class, yet do their bidding, while congratulating themselves on their discernment and education.
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@jd01665 This is my kind of comment, except I use paragraphs. I endorse the rocket-stove mass heater idea. The complete burn from the insulated riser and the heat transferred to a thermal mass make it clean and highly efficient. I think to make it work the way it's supposed to work, you need some kind of secondary air injected. That's the only part I'm not sure about.
The draft of the chimney means drafts all over your house. Every tiny leak becomes a motivated draft when the fire is running, so the perimeter of the house gets colder than it would without the fire. A rocket stove isn't running all day, so there's less of a draft. But you could design it so that it brought fresh air in over or past the fire box, and the outside air coming in is warmed up, and you greatly reduce the cold air coming into the living space.
Nobody builds houses with these kind of ideas. Maybe a few hippies who groove on some Paul Wheaton vibes, but nobody wants to fool with it, and you can lose your homeowner's insurance if you put one in without securing proper permits and inspections, and there's no guarantee you can even get a permit or find someone who can inspect it and put the official seal of approval on it. It's very unfortunate.
It's also very unnecessary. These things can be built very safe and very reliable, requiring very little maintenance.
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It's called the "Soap Opera Syndrome." Modern, stay-at-home housewives, with dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers, automobile transportation, and the luxury of staying at home, have a lot more leisure time. Time enough to waste 2 hours a day (or more) watching Hollywood's idea of glamorous living, and they felt their lives were drab, by comparison to the rich and powerful career women on "Days of our Lives."
It's weird how the 20th Century played out. Comfort = Discontent.
In all seriousness, I think it's all about how high you are on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When food, shelter, and clothing aren't a struggle, you have time to contemplate the meaning of life and examine your own life. Mass media and now social media give you endless of examples of people who are living more glamorously or prosperously than you. Comparison to that cultural projection of inordinate prosperity leaves you feeling left out.
People with wealth and leisure time have entirely new things to worry about, like saving the planet, or looking for more fulfillment from their work. They're looking for self-actualization.
"Is this all there is?"
I think there's another aspect to this as well: As technology makes us more prosperous, we also have more crap to keep track of. Every business wants you to waste time with THEIR app and to fool around with THEIR rewards program. It's amazing all the different things that you can get sucked into wasting time on. All these labor-saving devices, and we working longer hours than ever before!
Projecting forward into the post-scarcity era, with AI looming, people are going to be cared for, but they won't be able to find work... Or WILL they? Imagine if you had a guy who organized all your apps and managed all your different rewards programs at all the different stores, and on and on. I can see "life manager" becoming a trade until itself. "Let us worry about this. You go do what you want to do."
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@ Roman Russkiy
Русский перевод, любезно предоставлен Google:
Даже когда я не согласен с Путиным, я никогда не считаю его беспомощным. Во время Хельсинки это была встреча Трампа и Путина в качестве разумных лидеров, ищущих точки соприкосновения, зная, что есть конфликт, который необходимо разрешить, но над чем нужно работать вместе. Когда задают вопрос: «Кому вы больше доверяете? Своему собственному разведывательному сообществу или Путину?» Трамп шокировал западные СМИ, ответив «Путин».
Я затаил дыхание в тот момент, надеясь, что он скажет ТОЧНО то, что сказал! В американской прессе случился сердечный приступ. Я чуть не кончил. "RussiaGate" с самого начала был обманом. В нашей стране Демократическая партия стремится стать однопартийным правителем, как и Коммунистическая партия Советского Союза. Между тем, бывший Советский Союз проводит разумную денежно-кредитную и фискальную политику. Он держит слово своим союзникам.
Как бы то ни было, я всегда с подозрением отношусь к территориальным амбициям «Русского медведя», но внешняя политика США по «смене режима» глупа, безрассудна и приносит США больше вреда, чем пользы. Наш внешнеполитический истеблишмент смотрит на мир так, как будто на дворе 1945 год. Трамп это знает.
Между тем, страны НАТО по-прежнему нуждаются в американских деньгах и военной помощи против несуществующей угрозы, и в то же время хотят зависеть от России в вопросах газа и нефти! Это верх безумия - поддерживать их в военном отношении и наблюдать, как они планируют «Северный поток 2». У меня нет проблем с «Северным потоком 2», но тот факт, что страны НАТО хотят, чтобы это произошло, говорит лишь о том, что «НАТО знает, что НАТО - это фарс».
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@oiitzME1266 : Meh. Textbook publishers set their prices according to orders already taken, before they eaven move one book. Every book they sell, new, after that, is at that same price and is immensely profitable to the textbook company. BUT they're not in the business of printing extra copies just in case somebody randomly comes along, later. There are some, but not a whole lot beyond what they originally had contracts for.
Or that's the way it used to be. They're going through some tough times, right now, with everybody going to open source. The best deal is probably the online license, because it comes with a teacher who's always awake, always ready to take your questions, and who grades your work, instantly. Learning management systems aren't perfect, but they can do a lot of the heavy lifting in education, with very little human interference. IOW, for free.
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Meanwhile, Russia is producing 125 tanks per month!
NATO/USA has made the same mistake about tanks that Nazi Germany made. Yes, they had tremendous firepower and super-thick front armor. But when it's 5 super-fantastic tanks versus 100 cheap tanks, the enemy can surround and fire at your super-tank from all angles.
Tanks are for infantry support against small arms. The enemy will always be able to build munitions that can pierce any kind of armor, so it's a futile endeavor.
If you have a sound combined-arms strategy, and prepare the ground ahead of time, tanks have a role to play, but it's not this glorious charge of 100s of tanks, without both infantry or air support.
Napoleon was criticized for his rejection of rifled firearms. The British could reach out from 300 yard away and target officers and artillery crews. The French would drive the rifles off with artillery and the threat of cavalry overrunning the infantry.
Advantage France, because they could train up musket infantry quickly. And even though their skirmishers only had muskets, their tactics were impeccable, and they had skirmishers galore. The advantage of the rifle's range was match for well-trained skirmishers (Voltigeurs). Napoleon could draft people off the street and make them effective fighters in mass formations.
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The main redeeming feature of the USA was its constitution, recognizing this fact, LIMITED the federal government, EXPLICITLY. And for 250 years, the politicians have systematically circumvented or overturned almost all limits on the role and scope of the federal government.
Now we're like any nation in world history, no longer exceptional, only WORSE, because most of us still buy into our exceptionalism, which they've twisted to mean "We can impose our will, by force, on any nation or group or person we choose." Our elected officials behave like - and in some cases literally are - hereditary aristocracy. The Bush dynasty. Al Gore's daddy was a senator. The list goes on and on.
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Adult vs Agitator and Activist. An adult is too busy working to make their corner of the world a better place to waste time on activism or agitation. An adult does the math, helps one or two people, and contributes to charities, in the sure knowledge that if everyone did the same, nobody'd be wasting time agitating or protesting or petitioning government, because they'd be too busy making tomorrow a better day, right where they're at.
Don't protest for Med-4-All. Hold a barn dance and a raffle to pay for a new x-ray machine or a couple more beds at the local hospital. People SENSE that the local medical care is a community - i.e., communal - thing. But if you can't make it work at the local level, there's no way the feds, who are operating at about 30 cents on the dollar efficiency, aren't going to fix it for everybody. You want to be active? Start fund-raisers for your local/neighborhood/community clinic, so medical care for everybody in your vicinity is a little better than it otherwise would be. Take pride in that as a community.
There's big status in being the rich guy who made a big contribution to the hospital. Local hospitals should have huge endowments, if people REALLY cared about their health care. It's just easier to virtue signal and complain when you don't get everything you want from somebody else. What's the health care industry getting from YOU, without being forced to it?
Before Johnson's Great Society, places like Harlem were pretty classy, and on the way up. And they were doing it the RIGHT way. Harlem had some very good schools in the 1950s and '60s.
Harlem was like a charter school, by today's standards, and one of the better school districts in New York City. Before and immediately after the REAL fight was won, for equal treatment under the law. "Leave us be, and we'll do just fine." Dems lost that civil rights battle and immediately built a federal plantation. Normal people of ALL colors are getting tired of the new racists calling themselves anti-racists. WORKERS of all colors are increasingly far-removed from what you college kids believe, and no wonder, when you look at the one-party capture of the academy. Boasting about one's degrees and IQs is like announcing to the world you probably need help tying your shoes.
I'm sorry, but that means cleaning your room, fixing good food, working on projects, including yourself. Like that stone wall for the raised beds.
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Janusha : As the ancient Chinese observed: ORDER ARISES SPONTANEOUSLY. People are already growing noticeably more resistant to Internet trolls. More and more you see trolls start their shit, and people just talk around and over them, just like parents talk over their kids. "Let the grown-ups talk" is about all I'll give a troll, beyond a thumbs-down and a big ignore.
Same deal with the chaos of information bombarding us. We, as intelligent consumers, check out what people are saying and find voices that are more truthful, reasonable, and even entertaining (like JIMMY!). Over time, the good stuff gains more followers. Sure, the nutcases get their followers, also. But that's OK. The world isn't perfect. Some people are just dead set on fucking up, and there's nothing you can do about it until they commit a crime against persons or property. Or at least that's how it should work.
But now we've got Speech Police and we're a hair's width away from Thought Police, because, after all, we're all super-duper racists, even if we don't know it, right? Don't like what CNN's got to say? Well then, obviously, you're a racist, even though you don't think so. That's how this shit works.
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@philippe2715 Not an expert, either, but I'll put my amateur spin on it:
They were forced/induced (Maskirova?) to shift forces to the north by Russian attacks (feints?) along the northern border. Then, maybe they tried to turn a mistake into an advantage, by using those forces to try to use the same trick against the Russians, and provoke them into shifting forces in the East to the Northern front.
The alternative would've been to try to shift those forces back to the main front, where they probably (rightly) realize they weren't going to stop the juggernaut head-on, but they might distract it and turn their blunder into a success. Shifting those forces back to the South would entail a fair amount of attrition.
But as Legends is saying, and others have pointed out, Russia has more than sufficient forces, locally, to rally against the Ukrainian incursions.
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The ancients came up with all kinds of mythological explanations for things. "You have a dragon in your belly!" And the treatment for "dragon in the belly" was some herb, and that herb - it was said - would calm the angry dragon. Of course it wasn't a dragon in the belly. But the herb cured the stomach ailment, and the dragon myth became "science."
I think Peterson's trying to get at how we humans have (psychological) archetypes that seem to be hard-wired into our brains from birth. Universality of red = blood, light = wisdom, for instance (pulling these outta my ass, here). Actual scholars can tell you the common threads found between all religions. Religions grapple with unanswerable (by science) questions about life, death, and meaning. None of them are perfect. All of them address a deep need in the human psyche for meaning. True or false, it doesn't matter, IF THEY WORK. And even if they. DON'T work, people will eagerly embrace belief systems (faiths) that resonate with them.
Now put all this into a hopper and turn the time crank millions of years, from pre-human, to the first self-aware human, on to today. We in the West think in terms of Christianity, which derives from Judaism, which derives at least party from the Egyptians, which derives from archetypes apparently hard-wired in humans since pre-historic times.
What we're coming to find out is that it's irrational to hold religious convictions. It's also irrational NOT to hold religious convictions! And it turns out that the ABSENCE of any over-arching meaning for life is a sure path to extinction. That's why atheism is irrational. Without the mystical, society's not stable enough for scientific advancement. Scientific advancement exposes all the holes in religious doctrine. Rejecting religion leads to extinction, because religion fills a psychological need in self-aware, MORTAL beings. Without the religion, humanity stagnates. WITH religion (or its political-ideology substitutes), we devolve into hedonism, nihilism, and totalitarianism, replacing God and Morality with Government and Law.
I don't think Peterson is offering any kind of final answers to these phenomena. He's just pointing them out, and he has some PRACTICAL ways of coping that seem to help people live better lives. Life is suffering. Life is uncertain. Life is TEMPORARY. How do we resolve these facts of life in such a way as to keep life on the up-tick, without descending into chaos? Without harming others or imposing our will on others by force? That's kind of the role of religion. Finding things that WORK over long time periods, spanning many generations of finite-lived human beings?
My PERSONAL solution is to be scientific, with an overlay of "God is watching" and "Jesus loves me" from my early upbringing. It's superstitious. It's silly. But it helps ME interpret the world around me using reason to judge what IS and LOVE to set the goalposts. Over time, I try to work towards what SHOULD be, by understanding what IS.
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Nice little squared-off hatchback. Makes a nice porch off the back. No leaks along the seam at the top. Very nice feature. Your bed seemed a bit cramped, but it looks like you had the option of a bigger/longer bed. Maybe it was just a trick of perspective.
Title said "Disastrous," so when you hung up your keys and walked off, I thought the monkeys were going to make off with them, and maybe other items. Then I thought maybe the embankment, undermined by flood water, was going to collapse or something.
In the American West, distances are so great, mountain passes so high, and winds on the plains so strong, that I always end up with a little bigger and more powerful pickup truck. Part of it is also due to u.s. government interference reducing the available options to a hand full of favored companies, with all other competition eliminated by regulations that don't permit new companies to spring up.
I spread out a lot more than you when I make camp, although when I was your age, I did something closer to what you do than I do now, only my way wasn't as refined. Your quilted window covers are very nice. I've been known to just stick a towel across a window and roll it up. Make that pass for a curtain. Then unfold a sun visor for the front windshield.
Crude but effective. Bigger, messier kitchen than your efficiency setup, but always plenty to eat and share.
I'd cook outside, maybe with a Coleman stove on the tailgate. Button it all up and crawl onto a pallet in the bed of the pickup, or make shift in the passenger compartment. But I'd be out in the weather for all my cooking. Never thought much about it because I always had good rain/cold gear. More than one night, I'd stretch a tarp overhead. Nothing as elegant as your setup.
Now I drag a mini-camper behind my pickup, which allows me to build a little tent city, complete with wood heat! I like to invite friends and to have all the arrangements for guests, in case they're unprepared, which happens quite a bit.
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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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Now you're catching on, Pat Hunnicutt. It's so funny how he's kept the opposition off-balance, so far. You can tell from the MSM coverage that it's total spin mode, now.
MSM still has many followers, but their ranks are thinning as more and more people catch on to the shifting narratives and the abandonment, one after the other, of narratives slowly, inexorably being proven false as more facts roll in.
It's kind of funny. Hannity sounds like a nut. Then 6 months later, things happen pretty much as he predicted. It seems like things are moving slowly, but on a historical time scale, things are happening very quickly.
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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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I don't think you understand the goals or the strategy to achieve them. To me, it looked like a feint at Kiev, in order to make maximum gains with a force no one thought was big enough to execute an attack and conquer virtually all of the Donbass. War on civilians in Donbass had been going on for years. Kiev agreed to stop the bombing and ethnic cleansing, and then broke its word.
Gaining territory wasn't the goal. Meat grinder was the goal. Russia has a huge advantage in ammunition and manpower. For most of the operation, they have spent the former without restraint, and tried to protect manpower more than territory. For the bulk of the $MO, I think military casualties have been far higher on the Ukrainian side, and virtually all the civilian casualties have been on the Ukrainian side, because all of the fighting has been outside of Russia.
Russia didn't have to or want to conquer all of Ukraine. It just wanted to sit on it and bleed its war-fighting capacity to reduce the threat to its home territory. The use of $tormshadow to bomb locations in Crimea and Moscow only convinces Putin he must push the neutral zone farther West. Those spite bombings of rear targets only help unite Russians behind Putin, giving him more political backing, including volunteers for the war effort.
You'd think the West would want to give assurances to Russia that it's not starting up its centennial invasion of Mother Russia. It was war in the West that brought about the Bolshevik Revolution. A century before, Napoleon made his try for the Russian throne, and all HE got was scorched earth. Anyway, Western Europe is acting crazy again, so yeah, Russia wants a buffer state to its west. I can totally understand Russia's actions, and I think half of Putin's authoritarianism is due to his nation being on a war footing against a hostile and quite frankly, feckless and amoral West.
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@sebsignat8286 You've decided you fear the one thing above all others. Hopefully NObody dies off in large numbers, but frankly I'm more worried about joining the experiment being run by people who are proven liars than to take my chacances with herd immunity, my natural immune system, and treatments that are known to work very well when it's caught early.
IMO, the proper response to COVID would've been "See your doctor if you present with cold or flu symptoms." And to make HCQ, Ivermectin, remdesivir and other off-the-shelf treatments that are clinically proven. Of course, you wouldn't know about the clinical results, because those don't fit MSM narratives, so if you rely on MSM, you wouldn't even know about these treatments other than to call them conspiracy theories.
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Agency capture is inevitable when you insist on legislating on everything under the sun. That, of course, requires "industry expertise" to try to prevent destroying what you purport to regulate. Legislating on everything under the sun gives government officials an enormous amount of power - power that will forever be a target for corruption.
Thing is, they "need" the industry expertise, because they're a bunch of lawyers trying to dictate how EVERY industry MUST manage its affairs.
We don't need regulators. We need whistleblowers and tort reform. Make it easy for individuals to make small claims against big companies. If word gets out on their doing bad things, deliver a death by 1000 cuts through 10 or 100 million people suing them for $10,000 or less.
We've evolved, technologically, beyond the point where bureaucrat regulators would do us as much good as open, 2-way communication provided by the Internet. Get the government OUT of the business of regulating FAR MORE than the Congress has people or expertise to regulate!
You know what big corporations fear more than the government? They fear losing their reputation. The government is a bulwark between the people and big corporations. We have a population of over 300 million, and almost everybody's got a smart phone with a video recorder on it! That'll do a lot more to force corporations to be obedient to their customers, rather than obedient to government officials who enforce rules created by the corporations!
You keep wanting to perfect top-down governance, i.e., socialism (or more likely its fascist brother, through the regulatory state), when you get BETTER governance through free-market mechanisms.
You see American history as a process of passing laws that solved big problems. I see American history as a process of government racing to the front of the parade RIGHT when there's a critical mass of pissed-off Americans who are already rejecting the BS, organically. And from the very beginning, the new agencies become the servants of the industries they're supposed to regulate, and we have one more government agency preventing new competition from ever threatening the big corporations already in existence before the regulations were enacted.
Federal regulations is the main reason we don't see new air carriers or auto makers threatening the Big 3. Regulations are why 100s of different carriers and companies were reduced to 3 or 4 in the first place.
At some point, when you're bemoaning the fact that media, industry, agriculture are being concentrated in the hands of a few mega-owners, maybe you'll realize that it was your own earlier meddling that created the conditions that drove all the closures and mergers.
The EPA is why I drive a mid-sized pickup, rather than a compact pickup. Think about it.
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There's always a tension between the collective and the individual. Pakman fosters the illusion that all we need is a sufficiently competent, ethical, and enlightened leadership telling the collective what to do and allocate resources on the collective's behalf, for the benefit of all individuals. The trouble is, you rarely get competent, ethical and enlightened leadership. And it's always the duds who want the most control, just the like the worst driver in the room wants to show you how good their reflexes are out on the road.
See? We're DRAFTING! Great fuel efficiency! *CRASH*. Everything would've been fine if that asshole in front of me hadn't slammed the brakes. It's that other guy's fault. Pakman's totally shilling for Democrats.
So Trump's not a great speaker. He gets his point across. And if you watch him fence with hostile reporters (like Obama never did) off the cuff, he comes off better, thinking on his feet than any of the Democrat candidates. And no, you're not going to explain away how out of it Joe Biden is by micro-analyzing Trump's body language. I'm about 30 minutes in, and all I'm hearing are Democrat talking points. Give it up. Join Jimmy Dore, who's at least honest about what he sees in a very common-sensical way. He's a hopeless lefty, but he's not makin' shit up to fit his narrative. And I bet he can find 100s of Democrat 'experts' who'll spin you all the things that are wrong with Trump. Use your eyes and your brain and not your hopes and wishes, dude.
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I part ways with Kittle on versatility. There are positions, like TE, where versatility is more winning than being great at receiving without being able to block in-line. Denver under Shanahan, went for RBs who were above average at everything, if not great at anything. Shanny wanted 7s across the board, rather than a guy who was a great runner who couldn't catch or block worth a darn.
Specialists at WR are more valuable, although WR blocking is also pretty important. But winning 1-on-1 outside is harder to do and requires a special kind of athlete.
KC goes for versatile DEs, who aren't the pass-rushing aces, necessarily, but they can play inside or out, and stop the run as well as rush the passer. They just don't have anyone named "Bosa."
In the modern league, there are so many elusive QBs, that you have to be able to inject LBs and Ss into your pressures, and mix up the zone blitzes. That blue chip EDGE can be schemed around, especially if your investment in him takes away from what you can do at other positions.
Picking late in the draft every year, KC is shut out from the top blue-chip players at every position, especially OT and DE. It was a stretch for them to trade up for Mahomes, but since they did, they don't have to worry about QB for a long time. KC wants more contain and run defense from their DEs than a lot of other teams, which allows them to shift the back 7 guys around a lot more. They also like to have DLs who can drop in short zone on the change-up.
They scheme different guys to come free or have an advantage with the angle, rather than just the DEs pinning their ears back. To get pressure they send or threaten to send 5 guys on every snap. Even when they DO blitz, they might only send 4. They just keep teams guessing which 4. One of the keys to Lebeau's PIT defenses being great for so many years running was having guys on the d-line who could drop into short zone. In his 3-4, OLBs were both DE and LB, and if they could drop anybody from their front 5 in zone, that made them more multiple. He used to talk about that trait in d-linemen, how rare it was, and how much it helped make life difficult for an offensive coordinator.
One overlooked aspect of KC's D was how often they left contain on the shoulders of their EDGE players, even against Lamar Jackson. People focus attention on getting good 4-man pressure, which is understandable, but if you can contain Lamar with 4 guys, you can run coverages Lamar never sees. If you have a guy up front who can play short zone for even a brief time after the snap, you can inject a LB or DB into the blitz, with a far greater chance of tracking/running the QB down.
Just flashing a red jersey where the hot route or throwing lane is supposed to be can provoke QB hesitation or force the QB to put more air under the ball. A lot of QBs will instinctively throw the hot route to the area the blitzing DB vacated, because they're trained to do that. Khalen Saunders didn't have to take on anybody 1-on-1, but he could for sure drop 5 or 10 yards where, in theory, no one should be. James Harrison made a lot of interceptions because opponents were more worried about him as a rusher, and he'd catch puff passes because QBs were playing by the book and lofting it where the blitzing safety was blitzing from. He could engage the LT just enough to bring the safety free, and drop. It was killer.
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Yeah, I'm no expert, but countries DO devalue their currency all the time, in order to dump their products on us. We want a strong dollar and a strong Turkish Lira and Russian Ruble. And we don't want our people to lose THEIR jobs, because some other country, through fiscal and monetary mismanagement (or manipulation), inflate their currencies.
Beyond that, why should we reward a country for stealing its people's savings by such mismanagement? Screw those leaders. Get your financial house in order, start treating your people right, and we'll be your best friend and most honest trading partner.
I actually LOVE the fact that Trump is aggressive with economic sanctions and refrains from force of arms. You don't have to be rooting for Assad or Putin to know that it's a bad idea to support ISIS rebels in Syria, _like_our_last_president_did_. I'm SO happy Hillary didn't get elected. Her epitaph will be "We came. We saw. He died." shudder
T
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Yes. Interesting crowd dynamics taking place. Seeing the current state of discourse and protest, it appears that SOMEbody on the conservative side decided to go about knocking the legs out from under the Alinsky playbook. Crowd tactics with big bodies. The only ones bringing weapons are the Antifa. And frankly, sizing up the two crowds and the tip of the spear on the Patriots side, if push came to shove, the Prayer side would just take the weapons away from Antifa and use them against Antifa if the Antifa side got stupid.
I think if the Antifa side behaved in a civil manner, the prayer group would have a nice, feel-good little parade, some brief inspirational speechifying, and a lot of good barbecue! Heck, they could feed the homeless + Antifa, if they all just showed up to party, even if they plugged their ears when the preacher got started, and started shufflin' towards the door, so to speak.
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@hayleylongster4698 I'm not sure HOW you structure things so that the nation is secure, the people are mostly better off today than yesterday, and the economy is on a solid footing. This cat seems to think Putin's economy is a total failure, when it looks like he's doing more right by people than one almost has a right to expect.
Something people don't much talk about is all the territory he has that borders or includes Islamic territories. He doesn't want his country to be Islamified. He also shares age-old territorial ambitions in Crimea and parts West and South. Hillary sold us out on Uranium-1, but she and her neocon cronies worked systematically to deprive Russia its ports on the Mediterranean. If they got too cozy with anybody in the Middle East, well, then maybe it was time for some regime change...
But when I look at the big stuff, like living within your means and backing your currency with precious metals, etc., I see a man respecting the property rights of the citizenry more than the USA does! If only we could get economic good sense and EXPLICIT recognition of people's rights, we'd have a great country!
Sorry to free-write at everyone's expense.
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@SymphonicEllen Nah. Just do away with the minimum wage. It sets the bottom rung of the ladder to success out of reach of poor people so that they remain dependent on the government to live. Not everybody's going to prosper with an entry-level job. Nobody should expect to. Those are jobs for teenagers, giving them some scratch, teaching them how to work and some specialized skills, and laying a foundation for their future.
Any self-respecting adult with a brain should never be worried about the minimum wage. The minimum wage is entry-level. Nobody who trains and educates themselves is going to accept minimum wage, anyway.
Minimum wage hurts people at the bottom. A homeless guy just down on his luck could maybe sweep out the corner bodega, stock shelves, and do other helpful things for a few bucks and a place to stay. Maybe just a cot in the back, and a place to get clean and a sink to wash his clothes. One guy, without much, helping another guy without much. But don't let the authorities find out, or they'll destroy the shop owner and close down his business.
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Western leaders believe world order is just a matter of punishing anyone who steps out of line, and that they are in a dominant position in every respect.
Meanwhile, they're cutting their cultural and economic throats at home, and their economic wherewithal to continue bullying everyone economically and militarily, is very much waning.
I think NATO has only been political cover for American actions, and not an equal partner. "See? Europe is with us, so be afraid!" At the same time, America has acted as proxy for Europe's centuries-old imperial aspirations. Cheap resources from a backward Africa. Cheap labor from Asia.
We have leaders who were raised at the Dulles brothers' knee, and they still see the world through a 1947 lens. Oh, they'll claim they're forward-looking and all who disagree with them are mired in the past, but they all are behaving as though they think it's 1950. Or 1990.
I remember being so proud that the USA had world hegemony in its grasp, and refused to squeeze. Looking back over the last 80 years, and learning more every year, it looks more and more like the USA was simply executing empire by other means. This is not at all in keeping with the vast majority of Americans' idea of what America stands for. It's not all our fault, because we believed what we were told. But it's at least partly our fault, for believing what we were told.
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Trump also has a responsibility to the working poor, whose jobs are threatened by illegal immigration, the poor in the neighborhoods that are taken over by Mexican drug cartels, and the middle class workers who are footing the bill for Democrats' supposedly well-intended vote-buying machine. Build That Wall.
And if you're old as dirt, like I am, you've seen the Democrats pull this kind of shit every time we try to pass meaningful immigration reform that shows RESPECT to the people who come in the front door and RESPECT for the American citizen. But it's been bait and switch for as long as I've been watching it. "Give us amnesty and we'll get you border security, later" . Well, "later" never comes. For DECADES.
Finally a president with the balls (AND THE MANDATE) to stand up to them and say we're proceeding no further until we secure our nation's borders. Securing the borders was and IS government's #1 job, and government wants to stick its nose in, EVERYwhere, except into the very first job they were constituted to perform.
Democrats insist government do everything except its job. Sick of it. Trump needs to wait the bastards out.
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@xxxlonewolf49 And the U.S. military-industrial complex doesn't WANT to go that route, because it cuts into their obscene profits producing very expensive "super weapons" that can't be deployed at scale
We knew this in WW II, with the Germans emphasizing Tiger tanks, which had the best guns, but were very expensive, unreliable, hard to repair, and too big or too heavy to be worth a damn on maneuver.
The Americans could build thousands of Sherman tanks for every 10 or 100 high-dollar Tigers. The Soviet T-34's were cheap to build, very simple, superior track/propulsion design (from an American engineer who was rejected by our government), and easy to repair.
"Bells and whistles" is what the MIC wants. Auto manufacturing has gone the same direction. We've forgotten how to "Keep it simple, stupid."
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I think it's way easy for most men who have a job and some self-respect and confidence, to hook up. I think the big issue for men and women is finding partners who are actually functioning, well-rounded adults. Men have the advantage of being a little hypogamous. A woman doesn't have to be a college-educated professional in order for a man to feel she's worth his time. If she's just a good woman with adult living skills, he can be quite happy with her, even if she doesn't challenge him, intellectually. Some men even prefer it that way. Most women end up despising a man who can't keep up with her, intellectually.
All that being said, I don't necessarily believe that the guys on Tinder are getting the raw end of the deal. When I was into clubbing, I quickly learned that you just have to set aside fear of rejection and proposition every woman you WANT to proposition. None of the "No"s matter. You're all about the first "Yes," because that's all you need if you're looking for a night of sex. The math is easy. It's a lot like the kid who knows it doesn't matter how many times Mom says "No," if she eventually might say "Yes," and so he keeps on nagging her even if he doesn't get his way, because the ONE time she relented and said "Yes," out of exasperation. In the club scene, the player flips the question.
9 out of 10 women will say "No," so you just gotta ask at least 10 women, and you score every time you go out. You've just to be brazen and absolutely shameless.
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@ECP90 : Actually, Fascism is the means by which Western societies "Progress" into Socialism. And when you're on that insane path, you set yourself up for the exact kinds of economic and social crises that drive the most regressive and violent factions on the left. When you look at the American system, we have adopted virtually every feature of Nazi Germany's political economy, with government over everything, nothing outside of government, and nothing against government. Stranglehold on the public square that only the Internet has broken, which is why the elites are feeling so threatened, right now. They only have about half of the dumbest citizens on their side, and falling fast. The majority they saw stretching out endlessly before them has imploded, with libertarian values held by most people, EVERYwhere, are beginning to express themselves in the polls.
Hitherto captive voting blocs are peeling away from the Democrats. If more than 10% or so of blacks vote Republican, it DESTROYS the Democrats. And Trump's popularity among black MEN is climbing upwards of 30% in some polls. The wahmen are still 90% Free Stuff for Me, but the men are waking up.
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@chuckdawg2799 The Internet caused a glitch in their matrix. For 70 or 80 years, the handful of legacy t.v. networks were captured by government agencies, without our even realizing it. It was indirect control, but all it takes to suppress or promote a story is 4 or 5 phone calls, and all the networks and major print media fall in line. It all got started to fight fascism, and has been the custom for generations.
They're trying to do the same with social-media platforms. They would prefer it be beneath our level of perception, like it is in traditional media. But they're so powerful, now, they've become quite arrogant about it, getting caught saying the quiet bits out loud, more and more frequently and blatantly. People worried about the take-over of the nation by a small, super-rich minority need worry no more. It's already happened.
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I think I saw her on The View, where she acquitted herself, very well, I thought. Thought she was a young talent on the rise, who would make a compelling spokesperson for anyone who wanted one. Seemed like she had a firm grasp and defended her turf quite gracefully. Managed to poke right back at Behar, who tried to poke at her for how fine she looked, if I recall correctly. Thought to myself "This girl can think on her feet. I like her."
What SHE said was quite different from what the one reporter said. We'll see where this goes. So far, every time I've seen her on camera, she's made sense. But I haven't watched more than 5 minutes of Reality TV, since that 3-month stretch of Springer, when I was laid up, and watched a lot of antenna t.v.
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But... But... A troll farm bought $5,000 worth of FaceBook Ads! It swung the election! LOL!
Knowing what a joke our "intel community" has been, especially lately, with Brennan force-feeding the Dossier to anyone who'd listen, I think Trump's Helsinki comments were spot on. Our "intel community" has been getting it wrong, over and over, since before the fall of the Soviet Union. These are the people who brought us ISIS. These are the people who brought us WMDs. And most recently, these are the people who brought us Russian Collusion. There's a cadre of elites who are in it for themselves, occupy key positions in government, and lie to us on a daily basis, just so their cronies can enrich themselves. That in itself is bad enough, but they also think nothing of bringing us to the brink of war just to distract everyone from their own misdeeds.
I think Trump probably got more truth from 5 minutes alone with Putin than he got from the people working for him when he entered office. Can you IMAGINE James Comey being your top guy in the FBI, who works for YOU, and the entire top echelon of your own administration making him essentially untouchable? Rosenstein advised Trump to fire the guy for obvious abuses and then turned right around and appointed Mueller to investigate Trump, partly because firing Comey was instantly spun into a bullshit narrative of Obstruction. Obama Administration proved that there are a handful of people in top spots who have too much power and too little oversight.
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People want the cheapest house possible and contractors have enough to worry about, just keeping up with all the new recommendations. Some of the best designs and green designs are actually frowned on by local, state and federal governments.
It costs extra, if you're only thinking modular, mobile or stick-built, to do things like build into the Earth. Most new housing outside the big cities is modular home on a concrete slab.
All my older homes had full basements, because they were built before air-conditioning was a thing. Things like building a home with long axis north-to-south, to minimize the surface area of direct sun. Cool on the west side of the house until after noon (longer if you have shade trees, which my older homes all had). Cool on the east side after noon, with shadows starting and growing longer in the late morning. The 1951 house I'm in, now, has eaves the perfect length, just like you're describing.
Permaculture crowd want the long axis east-west, with strategies for shade in the summer, but soaking up as much sun as possible in the winter.
I think you need more than just eaves, when you're building this way. I think you need natural shade. I always plant trees wherever I put down roots. LOL! But I also love setting up trellises. If you're in a hurry, the trees are spendier, but the extra expense is more than worth it, because you get that lived-in look a lot quicker, and not look like somebody out in the sagebrush country with your trailer and a bunch of scraggly seedlings.
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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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Failed offensive. Failed meeting in Vilnius, which was the POINT of the offensive. Now, with their forces vitiated, I think Russia's about ready to end this, by force. Ukraine's still not making it easy, but the build-up and forward staging of overwhelming forces is well underway. I think we're already seeing them begin to rotate the most battle-weary troops. First, Wagner made a theatrical exit, stage left. Popov's crew are getting reinforced and I'm guessing rotated out, without Popov.
If I didn't know any better, I'd say that Popov and Prigozhin drama is all orchestrated. What was the result of the drama? Russia rotated those forces out of the front lines and there're fresh troops and more artillery in those places. They're not as good, man for man, but the artillery and air advantage is growing.
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@altaiaurelius : Yes. I do NOT like the fact that many people think "nationalist populism" is the way to go, just because they see it as an antidote to globalism. Globalism is simply nationalism on steroids, with a lot of folks dreaming of world empire in the mix.
Nationalism is as big a cancer as globalism. What we need are more smaller, independent states that have to cooperate between themselves in order to prosper. Something like the USA is set up, but with more autonomy on the individual state level.
That's almost impossible to make happen, when "bigger is better" in so many ways. The bigger country can bully the smaller.
Maybe the WuFlu taught us something about the folly of placing the fate of entire continents in the hands of a small number of "experts." When everybody has to do what the one guy says, the stakes are very high, and rely entirely on the one guy being right. WuFlu proves that the so-called "experts" get things wrong, all the time, assuming that the Global Warming Panic didn't teach us anything.
Much better to de-centralize and learn from each other, rather than have one-size-fits-all solutions passed down from on high by people who are entirely too powerful.
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He had no business being top dog at FBI. I just wonder who'll crack, first, and how the media will run damage control in coming months. I think what's likely to happen is the MSM will have to jump on the band-wagon, when other outlets are getting great ratings covering the Spygate Scandal. It's been a long time coming, but I don't think Trump had all his ducks in a row, when he first took office. Didn't know friend from foe in the careerist ranks. He still doesn't in some cases, but the uncertainty amongst the good-old-boy club grows larger, every day.
Every new appointment within the admin. Every new COURT appointment.... Trump's position gets stronger. I don't think he could've gotten a solid investigation launched with an absentee Attorney General, the courts stacked against him, and his own DOJ stacked against him. Getting rid of Brennan doesn't get rid of all his buddies he promoted. The bias and subterfuge had a lot of momentum. The animus for Trump was deep-seated and widespread in his own administration, when he first arrived. And anybody who'd been up to no good, or witnessed abuses without saying anything, had good reason to impede and sabotage any real investigation into the goings-on in the Obama Admin, especially right near the end, when they all realized there was gonna be a new sheriff in town, and it wasn't gonna be his pet deputy.
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@dannyboy8474 They always HAVE, since Hurst and Pulitzer manufactured support for the Spanish-American War in 1898. The "Communications Act" of 1934 made sure that any national radio (and later t.v.) network broadcast NOTHING that was hostile to government-insider narratives. You just didn't report on FDR's affairs or J. Edgar Hoover's cross-dressing or the FBI's illegal activities.
Gulf of Tonkin, WMDs, RussiaGate... So many hoaxes supported by the so-called "free press." We've had the ILLUSION of free and objective news for over 80 years, and it was never either one. We're only aware of it at ALL because of viral video on an as-yet more-or-less-free Internet. FaceBook, YouTube and Twitter seek to be the next generation of ABC, CBS, and NBC. But too many millions of people can SEE what they're doing; whereas, 50 or 60 years ago, all it took was one phone call from Washington, and they all quietly sanitized their content.
We'll see who wins the race between freedom and the continuation of the last 80 years of corporate-government control (i.e. FASCISTIC) control of the Public Square. I'm not very optimistic. But it's been nice, the last 10 or 12 years or so, to run into people on the street who are more or less aware of the lies. It was much more rare in the '70s, '80s and '90s.
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Heh. Due to a condition, I've been injured (busted bones, torn tendons, etc) a jillion times. Scars everywhere. A former army ranger saw me in short sleeves and said "I see you've been through the wars, too. 'Embrace the suck.' You get it." I told him "I get 'embracing the suck,' but I NEVER got hurt putting my life on the line on behalf of someone else. You're up here and I'm down here," holding my right hand up high and my left down low. "I'm just a stick boy, who does stupid shit. Thanks for your service."
I figure if I were fit, I'd've tried for the 82nd airborne, 'cuz that's what Dad did. Anybody in my presence, who's served in combat, never has to buy a drink or a meal or go without a job and some dollars in his pocket. I don't think it makes him necessarily any smarter then me about anything, EXCEPT the combat, but he earned more than just his pay when the bullets were flying and the bombs were dropping, and I always try to do my bit to pay that back.
I'm what you'd call a fiscal conservative, civil libertarian, and half-ass-self-taught student of history. I ain't big on federal programs. But our VA hospitals should be the ones civilians WISH they could get into. After all the soldiers are taken care of, VA probably SHOULD be one of - if not THE - biggest charity comprehensive-health service, that does a LOT of good for those in need, when we're not busy gettin' our guys shot at. Not interested in many of the other gov't programs, but ya gotta take care of the guys ya put in harm's way.
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I respect adherence to Divine Authority as a guide. It's survived for millennia, which speaks to the power of its truths. But a regimen for tribal survival in the Bronze Age is subject to some minor revision, 3,000 years later. Don't scrap it. But maybe admit that some of the writers of the version of the Bible that you read had their own axes to grind and their own prejudices. The earliest writers came along centuries after the fact as it was.
MY version of the Bible got re-worked by scholars under King James. I don't know about yours. Grain of salt for all that stuff, especially the bashing babies' heads against the wall and "proper treatment of slaves" stuff that SHOULD be universally rejected.
Homosexuality is one of those things we can be more like Jesus and less Old-Testament about, in my opinion. But it was good advice back in the day, given the promiscuity of males, in general, and homosexuals, in particular. It was a danger to a small tribe with no understanding of medicine, but enough sense to tie venereal disease to rutting males.
In the current era, gay marriage should be no big deal. We should ENCOURAGE gay couples to be monogamous, given what we now know about disease and its spread, and the way health and retirement benefits are tied to family members of workers. I don't much care for HETERO couples to get a tax break just for making babies, for that matter. But a couple that's together for decades in the same house, with one the earner and one the home-maker, it sure makes sense to give them the same rights as hetero couples with respect to health and pension.
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@rustymaximus9179 True. But we're discovering some unintended consequences to chemical farming. Food that is less nutritious from soils depleted in trace minerals. We're going to evolve away from massive, industrialized monocrop farming. Small-plot farms for locally-grown produce are becoming a thing. It's more expensive to grow fruits in a greenhouse than outdoors, but you can only grow outdoors in a few places, when it comes to bananas, citrus and the like. And the middle-man cost (brokering and transporting) makes locally-grown much more competitive than it used to be, and increasingly competitive as fuel prices rise.
Long term effects of Round-Up and other pesticides are only now being recognized. Then there's the GMO plants, where they're getting great yields, but the pesticide is in the food, itself, now. Then there's the effect on GOOD insects, like bees, from all the chemical spraying and possibly from GMO plants, not to mention how mono-crop farming reduces the variety and hence the nutritional value of the nectar and pollen on which the bees subsist.
There are all kinds of unintended consequences.
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@rustymaximus9179 No. I just think you're a bit behind the times on small-plot market farming. You're also not forward-thinking on supply chain costs, which will go up as the cost of energy goes up.
There's a real up-surge in small-plot market farmers. You should explore "NeverSink Farm" and see what they're doing, now. How they condition the soil. Also check out "oranges in the snow."
There's a lot of exciting stuff going on in agriculture, right now, that's going to make the big, mechanized, mono-crop farms largely obsolete.
You make the classical pro-chemical-farming arguments. But putting fertilizer on a field, year after year, doesn't replenish the trace minerals. You can keep getting plants to grow on it, but they won't be as nutritious as they would be if you farmed more like, say, the Amish or the Pennsylvania Deutsch. The longer THOSE folks are on the land, the better the soil gets.
And the GMO stuff? They're basically putting the pesticide and pest repellant IN THE FOOD.
We conservatives/libertarians like to preach about unintended consequences, but I think many of us don't think about the unintended consequences of brute-force, chemical farming methods. We see it so clearly when progressives want another damn program (pesticide) to fix the problem their LAST damn program created, even though they won't admit it...
I worry we're shittin' where we sleep sometimes. Just because a lot of the lefties are crazy doesn't mean they're wrong about EVERYthing. Anyway, the way we do Ag right now is geared towards big corporate, from land use rules to subsidies to enviro regulations to 'government-approved' pesticides and everybody's getting seed from the same place, instead of doing it the old-fashioned way, with the seed from their crop, set aside for re-seeding.
They get forced into it, because under the subsidy and global-competition framework, the profit margins are very small, and they'll fall below competitive production per acre if they don't buy the PATENTED seeds from the seed bank.
Anyhoo, we're all fascist-ized in agriculture, thanks to all the "help" from USDA. But it turns out that if you grow for the LOCAL market, you have a HUGE transportation-cost advantage over everybody else. That Florida citrus grower only gets a tiny percentage of the wholesale price. The local grower gets every nickel.
There's a paradigm shift a'comin' in the way we grow and deliver our food. Right now, the successful small-plotters are super-high-quality, reasonably-priced, and keen to spy out a niche vegetable that they can grow cheap and well. But I think in the long run, the culture will just trend that way, because people will prefer locally-grown.
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hoodiewoman louisiana : Foreign meddling is a by-product of democracy even though the people, by nature, don't like it and don't like war. This was one of the "problems" for leaders of so-called democracies, around the end of the 19th and on into the 20th century. It was solved by propaganda. Step by step, persuade the people how terrible some foreign leader is, and slowly overcome the resistance to violence by demonizing and dehumanizing whomever the elites decide it's in the elites' interest to destroy.
Lately it all starts with
1. nexus of terror designation.
2. economic sanctions.
3. no-fly zones and "surgical" air (drone) strikes.
4. need for "regime change."
5. Operation Iraqi freedom, destruction of Libya, occupation of Afghanistan, and, most recently, supporting/destroying (nobody's sure which) ISIS in Syria.
These bastards never stop. And they're no different from Victorian-era imperialists, except for how they cover their tracks and hide the fact that it's imperialism.
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Different tactics are called for in different circumstances. The situation in 1944 was very different from the situation in 1941. Russia has massive manpower and artillery advantage, but the manpower advantage is only now really making itself felt. Russia began the smo with a relatively small standing army. They're experiencing and will experience the difficulties of growing an army by leaps and bounds not unlike the Red Army in the 1930s and 1940s. (Forget the purges, which were exaggerated. Most of those officers remained in the Red Army, but there was still a great shortage of experienced commanders.)
The $oviets, like the Russians of today, were continually training and developing their troops. That meant green troops and commanders in the field. it was brutal, but by the end, in 1945, they were possibly the best army of all time (and no surprise, the Allies were shaking in their boots, looking across the boundary between E and W Berlin).
It's just sad that our side didn't act gracefully when the wall came down. Big opportunity for lasting peace and prosperity, but a lot of people in the security business would've had to find real jobs. They had to have a boogey man to keep their little ecosystem thriving. That's one of the reasons people like Trump. He'd be a monster in trade negotiations, not putting up with cheating and making trade partners pay a hefty tax that made treating people and the environment poorly less profitable than doing things the right - or at least a better - way.
It's called constructive engagement, and it's a good idea, but none of our leaders seem capable of finding a middle path that is strong and peaceful.
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GihKaL : The humanities are pushing a lot of nonsense. Unfortunately, the nature of that nonsense is such that they believe they can impose their will and their dogma on all disciplines. And in a lot of places, they CAN, because the math and science teachers are just as immersed in the culture as the humanities professors. But really, the humanities professors are the ones who should know better.
But it's so appealing, because it's wrapped in peer-reviewed respectability, just like the one source of Russiagate was spun into several, because one guy spread the story to multiple media outlets, whose reports were then used by the FBI to say to the FISA court "See? Everybody knows something's going on," just like "Everybody knows Donald Trump is a racist," but nobody has any evidence. It's grade-school stuff, where one big-mouthed kid starts saying Susie has cooties. Such a thing can get traction and cause a kid problems for the rest of their lives.
The more I reflect on the last 4 years, it just looks like a bunch of crooks using accusations against others to stay out in front of devastating evidence against THEM that was percolating out in the cloud. Most of what Hillary did wrong was petty and corrupt, but what exposed the underbelly of government was what all her cronies did to cover for her. And then the brazen, false accusations against Trump, whom a SMART media could've made mincemeat of, in the real world, but This Is ClownWorld.
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@l.w.paradis2108 France is at a tipping point, with Debt:GDP = 98.1%. USA is past that point, and in deep trouble. France must be careful about negotiating better pensions, and it's not the can of worms to be opening, when the nation's fiscal situation is so shaky.
All the West (almost) is spending money faster than revenues are rolling in, and current leadership thinks that's just fine. "We'll just print more."
Of course, that's inflationary, so one can definitely see WHY the French people want to renegotiate pensions that I bet are falling behind the rate of inflation, and that rate is only going to go up, if they spend more than they take in, year on year, forever.
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@sl66ggehrubt Yes. One of the biggest complaints of blue states is how the other states ruin their gun-control plans and poverty programs. "All the poor people move here! The OTHER states need programs like OURS!" It's THEIR fault we're failing.
And they've never talked about but totally relied on State and Local Tax deduction on the federal form, so that the rich who pay all the high taxes in blue cities and states can no longer get it all back on their federal taxes. Eliminating that one deduction made the blue states and blue cities sink like rocks, BEFORE COVID-19. I think they're trying their hardest to use COVID-19 as an excuse to get a federal bailout, and the rest of the country's saying "Things are tough all over, New York! Now YOU get in line like the rest of us. The blue cities have been receiving free government services for decades, gaming the rest of us with the SALT deduction.
Yeah, all those rich liberals living in the cities with their virtue signaling have been writing that s*** off the whole time and getting every nickel of it back. And they get the best of all the city services, from extra cops for their events, to free infrastructure for their building projects. "We proudly pay our fair share. Go ahead and raise taxes on us. We're fine with that. wink-wink "
The countryside's been footing the bill for lavish, wasteful, and ineffective city programs for a long time. Sadly, even stealing the funds like that, they were still running those cities into the ground.
Personally, I feel that most families, and especially the families that give a darn, would do a lot better with an education funding formula that went to the students, rather than to the institutions. You can have a full-service private school do a better job than PS 109 for that same amount of money. There's a ridiculous amount of overhead in municipal public schools. There's a lot of money, but a lot of overhead. The rural schools can be taken down by one too many special-needs students, and they don't have near the tax base of the city schools, which also get pretty good subsidies.
It's not that we don't spend too much money. We've just let education become a monopoly, with all the pathologies associated with monopolies. They should make schools fight for customer dollars, imho.
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Alan Because women don't think they look as good with big pockets, and so women won't buy them. My sister always seemed partial to Wrangler's because of the cut. A snug pair of Wranglers squeezes a woman in all the right places. Decent pockets. Not the best pockets, but decent.
When money stopped being an issue, I started going with Carhartt's, because they were thicker, their zippers were rugged, and you could buy the double-fronts over the knees. You feel bulletproof in them, even if you're spending time on your knees, and they last forever.
But I bet if you looked around all the different brands at Eddie Bauer or some other sportsman outfit, you'd find some made-for-women clothing that looks good and has decent pockets. I imagine it's pretty hit-or-miss.
But maybe this isn't really a problem, at all. Maybe it's the universe telling you there's a niche for good blue jeans with good pockets, made for women. Put your mind to it, I bet you could make men jealous.
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@mikelly1128 Nothing short of profound reduction and rollback of federal role and scope will even put a dent in the corruption. The corruption in government institutions is inevitable. The ONLY way to keep a lid on it is to severely restrict what we empower the government to do in the first place. Only then do we have even a chance of overseeing everything, in detail.
We will never abolish these institutions. I doubt that the legislature will ever reduce these institutions' role or scope. There is no reward to a politician for doing LESS, and nothing but praise for doing MORE. So agencies and programs are spawned - and spawn each other - far beyond anything the Congress can HOPE to oversee.
I fear that the only way to get even close to the kind of freedom and individual responsibility we once had (for the most part) in the USA is if these institutions crumble of their own weight, and that's a world none of us wants to see. But it's coming. Stuffed-shirts will issue mandates, dicta, and commands, but there will be nobody to carry them out. Basically it'll be like the fall of the Soviet Union, and for much the same reasons.
Companies will scrap their EPA-compliance divisions, but they'll still make being clean a selling point, because customers want that, and they won't be shielded by regulators any more - the companies won't, I mean. People will generally be non-racist, but companies and institutions will eliminate the dead weight of their divesity-and-equity offices, because things will be tight, and they don't produce anything but problems, the same way political (communist) commissars sort of disappeared in Russia.
Same thing happened with the Roman Empire. Everything was outwardly the same, but if the locals didn't maintain the status quo, there was no maintaining it from Rome or Constantinople. The farther away from the metro centers, the less of Rome you saw. Like England as compared to France, the latter of which retained many of the trappings - and the authoritarian mindset - of Old Rome.
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@flintb6559 The USA send megatons of food to Africa over the years. As a younger man in the '70s and '80s, it looked like Soviet Communist tyranny trying to extend its power. It was easy to see the USA as the good guys. It was even easy to turn a blind eye to assassinations and coups that BOTH the USA and USSR were engineering in the region, for the upper hand in the Cold War.
Looking back, I feel like the leadership of both nations was more keen on winning than on morality. They both felt their ideology was so superior that anything they did in its furtherance was, by definition, a good thing. That mentality was punished in the USSR by their fall. I think that mentality is why the West is failing, today.
Now, an old man, I see how Western hegemony managed to extract many resources from Africa, without ever bring true liberty and prosperity to Africa. It was easier to deal with despots who gave us what we wanted at the point of a gun.
I'm not sure the Russian influence is necessarily a good thing, but I know that the USA's influence is toxic. Our intel and military are stilly playing dirty tricks and engineering coups to this day. That's not America. That's ruling-class elites.
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Yes. There's still a huge, nanny-government left, philosophically, if the left would discard its more lunatic notions, like identity politics and globalism. If they want to see themselves as movers and shakers on this new world stage, then they must needs secure the votes at home, and that is necessarily more of a nationalistic sort of thing.
As a libertarian, I think getting globalism down to nationalism level is a step in the right direction, but then I'd immediately set out to whittle away at nationalism in favor of the counties and boroughs. Return more authority and self-responsibility to the boroughs, and the Danish invaders will have no chance against the nation. Sure, band together to fight off foreign invaders and the odd major catastrophe. But the key to sustainable nations is in the sustainable and self-supporting nature of its constituent boroughs.
From the volunteer fire department, to the delightful social events that raise money for more beds and an MRI at the community hospital. Take CARE of your old folks, who were kind and took care of YOU. Real charity, in other words. Government services have atrophied the community spirit. I can see a return to that in the future, as more and more people reject how the stuffed-shirt government-administrator types muck things up, trying to run everything by remote control, in top-down fashion. Top-down is for the crisis. Bottom-up is for the day-to-day, and we've lost sight of that.
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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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@TafTabTah There's a multitude of reasons. More parents less interested in their kids. More free-range kids. More super-sheltered kids. Lowering standards in education, because everybody needs to be educated, whether they want it, like it, or are suited for it or not. The canonization of entitlement. The celebration of weakness and emotional helplessness.
I'd say it's all just the natural consequence of good times breeding weak people, but there are major milestones in the 20th Century, like the income tax, fiat currency, "emergency" war measures that remained in force for decades after the fall of Nazi Germany, the deconstruction of free-market capitalism when socialism couldn't be sold on its own merits, creeping fascism, ...
A lot of what alarms people, NOW, is less about how bad things are and more about the fact that they're not hiding what they've been doing under the radar for a long time. The Internet giving people alternate sources of information exposed a lot of BS to a lot of people that never would've broken through otherwise.
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It's more nuanced than that. Antifa extorts businesses to put up Antifa symbols and support Antifa causes, or their businesses get targeted for Antifa vandalism and violence. They can not find themselves on the wrong side of ANY left-right divide, without risking property or physical harm.
I think it's the definition of terrorism, but I think it also fits the definition of old-fashioned extortion racket. Probably have more luck going after Antifa with RICO. Go after one or two rich people or big celebrities that support them under those statutes, possibly. It is a form of racketeering. Just for political gain instead of direct monetary gain.
These are not good people. They use hyena tactics, singling out victims and sending a mob after them. If you watched them go after a picnic in the park, because they didn't like their Christian message, it was brutal. 10 people would gang up on 2 people, as soon as they caught them away from the event on the way to their vehicles. They'd get that 10 on 2 and just follow you, saying mean things and acting threatening, to see if you showed fear, and to bore in on you if you did, and no cops were around. Then the Portland mayor, Ted Wheeler took the side of Antifa, and the cops were ordered to stand down, when they started acting like fools, rioting and looting in the chaos of the rioting.
This is America. Everybody who wants to get up to mischief pretty much can. They're pretty much depopulating the inner city. You're gonna have to move out if you want access to a nice clean grocery store. I think people are seeing what's happening and are going to want to buy local, support their neighbor instead of the big box. Use eBay to shop what's out there.
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"Reportedly exposed?" smh It's exposed in almost every single show and every single talking head they've got. It's just funny that it takes an exposé by Veritas to draw attention to what any but a brain-dead zombie doesn't know.
But so what? That's the American tradition! In the 18th, 19th and early 20th Century, everybody KNEW that the news reflected the opinions of the editor-owner of the paper. Warring papers would rise and fall all the time, and the public was aware of both sides. During the 20th Century, it became a monolith, with a pretense of objectivity that did more damage than any network being OPENLY partisan has done. It's just funny that CNN still tries to maintain any pretense.
I think it's great to see so many openly partisan content creators, nowadays. Listen a little to a LOT of different sources, and piece things together for yourself. And just recognize that CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC are all just part of one monolith. Sure, hear what they have to say. Then check it. Do the same with FOX and every other content creator out there. You get a much more complete picture of what's going on. And when Jimmy Dore agrees with Anthony Brian Logan, you can pretty much take it to the bank.
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Put yourself in Trump's shoes for a minute. You like having people who disagree with each other giving you advice. Sit back and listen to them bicker and slowly come to YOUR decision, based on everything you can possibly lay your ears or eyes on. So you want the Boltons in the room. And you would THINK that you wouldn't want them heading up your NSA, either, and flying around the middle east giving Kurdish rebels encouragement and a renewal of promises that others like Bolton had made to other rebels in other countries, to prosecute illegal proxy wars of insurrection.
Democrats and Republicans didn't like it when gung-ho zealots under Reagan turned coke money into guns for rebels, back in the '80s. That's something Americans are pretty united on. Always. Bolton's (cliché alert!) a dinosaur, still playing the Great Game of the Victorians. The deeper game - and Americans know this in their GUT - is being the country that doesn't start shit, doesn't pull shit, and can lay the hammer down. These guys obsess over the 3rd thing, and violate the 1st and 2nd rules, in order to demonstrate the 3rd.
If you're an alpha dog, you don't start shit, pull shit, or TAKE shit. You don't have to. You're content, if nobody infringes on your deal. Add a few higher rungs on Maslow's ladder, due to the prosperity that freedom brings, and your foreign policy is as much about just not dealing with authoritarians who subjugate their people. I'll buy direct from a Chinese citizen with something good he made, but I don't want it passing through the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.
Anyway, the point I started out to make is that as a negotiator, sometimes you want to stick a thorn in somebody's paw, just so you can be seen as the one who conspicuously removes it. This is a huge, indirect overture to North Koreans, Iranians, Russians, ... and he's looking for something good to emerge. He's prepared the way.
Also working in Trump's favor is that Democrat assurances to the contrary, Trump will not only finish his term, but he will also win re-election in 2020. Now, Iranian leaders are thinking it's NOT going to be 2 weak years before Trump is run out of office, but the real deal, 8-year situation. 8 years is a long time. You don't want to be on the wrong side of things for 8 years, especially if the same policy becomes normalized in American politics. Better deal with the Trumpster.
But we'll see. It appears there's a half-a-trillion-dollar deal between China and Iran, now. We'll see how that works out. I think it's more announcement than wherewithal, more hat than cattle. These things very rarely turn out the way the CCP makes them out to be in the beginning. But maybe they've robbed enough to actually do the Iranians right. Wouldn't surprise. I just think that the Internet makes it harder and harder to pull shit on your people. Where that backbone goes, knowledge and differing opinions proliferate. If your people are smart enough for you to compete, they're smart enough to know you're an asshole.
Compulsion eventually gives way to persuasion. It's a force of history none can withstand, but nobody really notices, because we all obsess on the many setbacks. The fact that so many perceive the setbacks AS setbacks, tells you which direction the tide is flowing. Take a step back, and it's a rising tide, for all the fear-mongering.
Can't compete without tech-savvy population. Can't remain an asshole and stay on top with it. The people you need are the people you can no longer abuse.
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Great Britain has been trying to keep Russia and Germany as landlocked as possible for centuries. If Russia ever became a sea power in proportion to her land power, Britain would become a minor player in the Great Game. Britain has stayed in the Great Game by allowing and sometimes manipulating America to act as her proxy.
The USA picked up where Britain left off, which allowed Britain to maintain the illusion (and sometimes the reality) of its former imperial glory. To this day, if there's a nation with a significant Russian presence in its seaports, it's likely to succumb to regime-change operations. Britain's ambitions in the Middle East, Africa, and the Far East have pretty much been carried out by the USA.
We, the collective West, have a maddening habit of dragging other nations down and then saying "See? This all shows our civilization is superior to theirs, and why we have the right and the duty to intervene and draw the map for them."
"See? All they do it hate!" And I think "Well, no wonder."
I also think that the stresses we impose on societies around the globe are in large part responsible for the regressive and authoritarian regimes we hold in such scorn. We keep them on a constant war footing and then blame them for being so top-down in their governance.
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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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@eldermillennial8330 Fascists/communists believe that all means of production are under state control. ALL forms of collectivism only end up collectivizing those companies/industries it singles out. There's too much going on in an economy to be socialist about the whole thing. It's all pretty arbitrary. And they invariably destroy whatever industries they nationalize.
The Nazis nationalized heavy industry, agriculture (more bread for the people!) and the railroads, among other things. Their ability to feed themselves was destroyed, because the bureaucrats had no idea how to run a business, as you say. People were freezing in winter because there was no coal. Actually, there was PLENTY of coal. They just couldn't get it from the mines to the people because the socialist government decided cheap train fares for family vacations were more important. No cars for coal. Not even enough for passengers, because the demand for the under-market train tickets was through the roof. It's all pandering and incompetence. The Nazis were terribly incompetent.
Krupp Steel remained under private ownership, but it was more than happy to do and make anything the government told it to do or make. Some - like me - believe there is no functional difference between government ownership and government control. In either case, production is dictated by the government. Eventually, as is always the case, they needed slave labor to prop up their socialist project. They also needed to rob every Jew with two pfennigs to rub together. Privileges that accrue to industrialists under fascism also accrue to industrialists under communism. Big business welcomes government control. No more competition and too big to fail.
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@atriumfalanggaming6470 The USA adopted MANY fascist features in the war against fascism. Those features didn't go away over time. They were baked into the political economy and the culture as "good things." Surveillance state shifted to anti-communism, and grew into what can only be described as 21st-Century Cossacks. State-run media was achieved, functionally, by media who were given insider access in return for printing government (and corporate) press releases VERBATIM as "news." Stories embarrassing to establishment members were suppressed/censored.
Indoctrination of children in state-run public schools has been going on since the turn of the 20th Century, if not before. State involvement in the health care industry has made a red-tape NIGHTMARE that's grossly overpriced for anyone who actually pays out of pocket. Socialized medicine was the thin edge of the wedge of fascism in Weimar Germany. Bismarck came up with the idea in the late 19th Century, because industrialization and a growing middle class was making the aristocracy (the ruling-class Junkers) obsolete.
The model for socialized medicine was taking from Krupp Steel, which basically invented the company town. They spent their corporate largesse on a paternalistic business model. Company workers gave their loyalty oath to the company, and in return, the company "cared for them." Nobody thought to ask "If you can afford all these freebies, why don't you just pay your workers more and let THEM decide how to handle their health care needs?" Bismarck really liked the loyalty oath and the fanatical loyalty such patronage instilled in Krupp workers. Bismarck wanted that kind of unthinking, unswerving loyalty from the masses towards the state and hence towards the ruling elites.
Free stuff from the state is just a way to perpetuate serfdom by another name. That's the upshot of all the Marxist theory. It's just a way for a small ruling elite to get control over us peasants. We want a NEW way, not some pseudo-intellectual justification for a return to the OLD WAYS, and that's all that government-paid "free stuff" amounts to. "Let's get 'em hooked on the government tit, and we can get away with ANYthing!"
I'm sure that's not what Marx was thinking. Marx was an intellectual who wasn't paid what he thought he was worth. An overgrown child, who could spin any tale required to cast himself as poor and picked-upon, even though he was born with all the advantages of a good education and hard-working parents who'd built up a modest fortune, which he IMMEDIATELY squandered on himself. A political theory created by a spoiled narcissist doesn't carry much weight with me.
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@jobvanhetkaar8848 There were many factors, but air and sea superiority was a huge factor in the North African campaign. So was the quite mundane digging of latrines, and using a wooden box with a hole in the top that they covered with burlap to keep out the flies. German troops just took a dump over the next sand dunes and poisoned themselves with their own rotted feces, courtesy of the flies that were all over them and their food.
I think Monty cost lives by being too cautious most of the time. You're wasting manpower and materiel if you just wait until you have overwhelming forces. Those are resources that could swing battles, elsewhere, but he wanted to protect his percentage of troop losses. If you can get there sooner, it might cost you 50% losses on 10,000 men, which is less costly than 5% losses on a quarter of a million men.
Rommel was clearly overstretched, when he failed to capture Tobruk, it should've been over, but the Germans weren't done.
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I don't think the Russians ever intended to take Kiev. That's just Western propaganda. I think the thrust at Kiev was to draw forces to its defense, away from Donbass.
I think Ukraine and the West could've avoided all this by honoring the Minsk Agreement(s). It's easy for Euros and Americans to forget the madness that sees Russia invaded by madmen ever century or so. But I think memories are fresh in Russia.
Not a huge fan of Putin. But I'd be paranoid about my security, too, watching the fecklessness, greed, and warmongering NATO countries throwing their weight around since the end of WW II, continuing the imperialism virtually without interruption (without admitting that's what we're doing) for 500 years.
I think the proof is in the pudding. Russia runs annual budget and trade surpluses. The ruble is stronger, now, than it was before hostilities; whereas, the West is economically bankrupt. We can cause more pain and suffering for all parties by continuing the madness, or we can sit down with the Russians and give them the security guarantees for ethnic Russians inside Ukraine and Russia in general. We forget - assuming we ever admitted - that the Warsaw Pact, ugly as it was, was to put geographical buffers between Russia and a Europe that goes insane every 50 years or so.
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@Blazo_Djurovic : Arguably, most of the old guard didn't understand mobile, mechanized warfare and combined arms. The REAL problem was not the purge, but the unprecedented expansion of the Red Army. With or without the purges, the Red Army was short of officers, and so they promoted good fighters from the ranks and a lot of non-commissioned officers (sergeants) were promoted to officer ranks with a few weeks' or months' training.
To most of us, the idea of giving sergeants those promotions was probably good, but even the best of them weren't accustomed to command, especially the large, combined-arms principles that the Germans were employing (air, sea, infantry, artillery, armor). Napoleon understood combined arms, which was part of his genius, but he also eschewed advances like rifles. The Germans understood combined arms, and had lots of practice before meeting the Red Army.
One of the things you see dating back to the Napoleonic era is that even when the sergeants were great leaders, the ranks didn't respect them the way they respected blue-blood, highly educated officers, who could do stuff like quote Marcus Aurelius in Latin, or discuss the literary merits of Shakespeare. (We're seeing more of that, in recent years in America, where entirely too much faith is placed in people who display all the trappings of the elite.)
Anyway, the Red Army promoted men far beyond their level of training to command large forces, when they maybe only understood things from the artillery POV or the infantry POV. Or they were tank geeks, with an exalted opinion of themselves and mechanized armor (which is nothing without infantry, when it comes to the short strokes). Even some who embraced the advent of mechanization didn't really understand logistics, combined arms or the coordination of entire armies or battle groups consisting of multiple armies.
Compared to the scale of the massive growth of the Red Army from the '30s and into the '40s, the effect of Stalin's purges was a drop in the bucket. One of the reasons that the Great Patriotic War is seen to this day as a wonderful time of unity and power, is because the Red Army was forced to become a meritocracy. If you weren't a fighter, you were DONE. If you were a fighter, promotions were fast and furious, and based on proven merit. They were still hampered by political officers, for the most part, until Stalin went into 'not one inch" mode on defense, when the political officers and the military officers got on the same page.
Also, many officers who were "purged" were back in command with very little delay. Maybe a demotion or shifted to another theater.
Stalin was a bad guy, and he bungled quite a few things. The Bolshevik practice of attaching "political officers" to military units probably didn't help. But the purges are way overblown. And much of what the West considers WWII "history" is based on self-serving memoirs by butt-hurt Nazi officers trying to cover their own asses and shed glamor on their catastrophically failed careers.
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It's not strange at all. That's why "MSM" is no longer "MS". It's "LSM" for "Lame Stream Media." And these media outlets in the USA are becoming more and more marginalized, with their clear adherence to globalist/imperialist agendas. Unlike Europe, where the dominant networks (like BBC in UK or CBC in Canada) tend to be state-run (elite-controlled), the USA has "independent" networks, whose manipulation by the elites is more underground, but just as pervasive as anywhere else. But what's happening in the USA is because we weren't as far along as Europe in our suicidal pursuits AND we have a 1st Amendment guaranteeing free speech.
But wherever you are, you're seeing that independent and unaffiliated content creators are doing a much better job ferreting out the real news and the real issues, and the digital media are thriving, in spite of efforts to suppress independent voices (by which I mean outside of the legacy media). Regardless, the legacy media still exercise far more influence than their actual reach in society. Lazy people, and people whose livelihoods are tied to government (apparatchiks of all descriptions), the people on assistance, and the super-rich are the only people buying into the elites' narratives.
The elites control the process, from dog catcher to Prime Minister. So there's a lot of momentum. But the people control the ballot box and, in the meantime, the streets. I think there will be quite a shift in who's in charge in spring elections. We'll see what the insiders do to distort or subvert elections, because that's their fall-back position in this rear-guard action against what I see as a Great Awakening. No, government isn't God. It isn't end-all, be-all. Yes, you are probably more qualified to make decisions affecting your life than some overstuffed technocrat buried in the bureaucracy.
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@billyandrew I used to read LaRouche's stuff, back in the '70s. Some of it held up. Some of it didn't. I liked having his paper as an alternative resource. I can't even remember what it was called.... Looking... Oh yeah. "New Solidarity." I was just a kid, but Dad was pretty omnivorous, always looking for alternate voices that confirmed his biases.
As I recall, some of his stuff was good. Some of it was trash. But it was excellent for contrast-and-comparison with MSM. My main takeaway was he was pretty fast and loose, sometimes, which made him only about 1/4 as bad as MSM. I came away from the '70s concluding that the best thing was to ignore the day-to-day news, diversify my sources, and basically believe NObody, 100%, just try to arrive at principles that seemed to be moral and seemed to work.
You can devote your entire waking life to this stuff and end up more full of misinformation than facts, because EVERYone has an axe to grind. EVERYbody has something good to offer. EVERYbody has something to hide. The one principle that seems to hold up is that any concentration of power is prone to corruption and will eventually be corrupted, because the wrong people will eventually be in those high positions. Organized distrust of concentrated power in the hands of a few always seems to be the right stance. Think not of all the good they can do, but all the harm that will inevitably be done, and visited on EVERYone. Keep the power de-centralized and nobody can screw everything up for everybody, and MOST people will handle their business better on their own than under the orders of others.
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This is the lesson of America, that everybody on the left has forgotten: We're smart, capable, virtuous PEASANTS, every one of us. Equal protection under the law is VERY corrosive to the aristocracy, and the left is now clearly on the side of the old, hereditary aristocracy. Meritocracy is where it's at, baby! That's one of the main reasons that Genghis Khan was so wildly successful. You didn't have to even have Mongol blood, if you had ability. HUGE recruitment tool for talented people in a very benighted era. The idea that a Chinese engineer had as much or more status than a pureblood Mongol won him excellence in the ranks and a degree of loyalty from the ranks that was unprecedented.
Yeah, he was a bastard, but he had the sense to reward merit, and the old aristocratic setup simply couldn't compete. Of course, once he was ON top, he tried to do the same things, dividing up his empire between his own (male) children.
One of the things that Alexis d'Tocqueville was amazed by was when he went to an orchestra concert and there, right next to rich people in fancy clothes were ordinary people in homespun, with just as sophisticated an understanding and taste as the most elite of the elites. In Europe, you'd only see rich people in the audience. In the USA, more common people had the price of a ticket, and SPENT that money for high-class entertainment. This was unheard-of in Europe of that day. Unheard-of ANYwhere except in the USA, because of our Enlightenment Principles and a rejection of the aristocratic class.
The elites have hated this from Day 1 and they've done everything they could to secure their privileges down the generations for THEIR kids, through wealth and connections. I think the Crimean War was when the British finally realized that nobles buying commissions in the military (officer rank) outright was NOT very competitive. But it took them a long time to turn the corner on that, and the elites are still fighting it to this day. Meritocracy sucks, when your spoiled-brat kid doesn't work as hard or have as much talent as you. So you tilt the system in your kids' favor. Only human nature. But a peasant-run country such as ours needs to be on guard against that nonsense at all times. Merit > Birthright. It's been proven over and over again throughout history, but the elites HATE meritocracy. Always have.
Does ANYbody doubt that George W. Bush's Ivy League education was anything more than just his daddy buying him a spot? Now, with educators doing away with "grades" and evil "high-stakes testing," it's gotten ridiculously easy for rich kids to have that Yale or Harvard degree, without any demonstrable competence in any academic field, whatsoever. I'd rather send my kid to trade school, and use his own money and time to educate himself, as needed. It's never been cheaper or easier for a "peasant" to do that, but nowadays that means going OUTside the traditional institutions.
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I don't think you have the best take on historical mistreatment of women. Things were also tough on men in the past, too. There just aren't many of us who were first out of the trench left to talk about how THEY were oppressed (and brainwashed into thinking being first was a good idea). The so-called "patriarchy" was the distillation of all strategies tried by both men and women, together, and what resulted was the "fittest culture" to survive and/or spread. We have traditional roles for a lot of good reasons.
Not all those reasons are good. The patriarchy does provide niches for some pretty pathological men. Men who think "honor and cherish" means it's only the WOMAN who must "honor and OBEY." But in real life, for most couples, "cherish" means the man spends most of his time obeying his wife's wishes - even trying to anticipate them! A good, traditional marriage, is the imperfect best for the most people possible.
I think the proliferation of high-paid jobs for women changes the landscape, and we still haven't adjusted to it. Being a single Mom still sucks, and denies the next generation a healthy male role model in the home, in a healthy relationship with the mother. Women are still genetically programmed for hypergamy. Women still risk more in the act of sex and child-bearing. Men still care more about physical attraction, fertility, and innocence than about how much money a woman brings home.
I don't think the traditional way is necessarily the best way, but it's better than single parenting.
As a college prof, I've seen a number of "married-young-and-raised kids" women show up in college. They have their (mostly) grown children, they know (better than 18-year-olds) how to work, and they're still in their 30s, which is young enough to take a career as far as they wish. Of course, after raising kids, they're MUCH wiser about how much of their home life they're willing to give up to the law firm or the corporation. This will still keep them out of the top spots that only an unhealthily career-centric man is likely to have. So I don't see the gender pay gap going away any time soon. This is not necessarily bad for women. Who wants to die of a stroke at age 50?
I think the younger generation aren't perfect, but they're sorting some things out. Their access to information far exceeds my generation's. You'd be amazed at how many people are graduating high school semi-literate, who decide in the 20s to figure things out, and educate themSELVES in things I couldn't imagine at their age. "I made that plastic piece for the shelves on my 3D printer, last night."
The hinges on Pandora's Box were sprung millennia ago. Call it the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, or whatever you want. That thigh bone club really helped in the hunt, even though it was also used a time or two on the skull of a neighbor. It's all trade-offs, man. It was never perfect. It's not perfect. But human progress continues, mostly in spite of us.
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Food for thought. Definitely more authoritarian than I would want to see practiced across the whole USA, but not a bad model in many ways for ground-up governance of individual states within the United States, with what amount to town hall meetings, plans issued, and plans re-visited the next year to be kept or modified or eliminated according to how well they're working or not working for that community.
I think the government-run education is a net plus over the SHORT term, but even as the video talks about how a "ministry of everything" results in the greedy and corrupt eventually - if not immediately - dominating those ministries, dispensing favors to themselves and their cronies at the expense of the people, so can education be taken over by ideologically-driven political hacks who seek to control the people by controlling what the children learn in school. In the USA, we see how far astray public education can go, and Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union stand as extreme examples of those same dangers of education-cum-indoctrination. But as long as it's only Rwanda-scale (Say, state-of-Illinois-scale in the USA), there are MANY beneficial aspects to the now-state-run education that emphasizes the traditional subjects of science, math, history and language (English, in this case). Just the realization that the people actually involved probably know more about what's fair and what works is a HUGE improvement over the idea that some bureaucrat in the city knows best for everyone. To the extent possible, you want people with the authority AND responsibility to manage their own affairs, without outside interference and without being able to hurt or take from anyone else along the way.
Quelling the fires of tribal hatred was HUGE. I don't like the president-for-life thing that's taking place, and the dangerous part will be how well the current brilliant and charismatic president arranges for a peaceful transition of power after he's gone. But for the time being? He sounds like the best guy for the job in Rwanda. And that $2100 figure might be a little off if there are many individuals BARTERING in those open-air produce markets, with many growing their OWN food and selling or trading off the surplus.
Makes ME want to invest in a Rwandan entrepreneur, because it SOUNDS like the government wants to FOSTER free enterprise and not just steal the proceeds to give to their friends, as we see in virtually all the corrupt socialist countries around the world. I expect I'd have an honest, highly motivated, and hard-working person at the other end, who'd make BOTH of us rich, with some investment money sent their way.
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What Hamas - a creation of Israel injected into Palestine - did was terrible. But if what they did was terror, what do you call what Israel has done to Gaza?
In the American West, you had a similar ongoing conflict between ethnic groups. It, too, was very lopsided in favor of one side. What's downplayed/ignored is that the massacres and atrocities on both sides were committed by a very small number of renegades by enraged people (on both sides) lashing out in fear or retribution or both.
Your focus on the latest act of terror doesn't blind me to the fact that if you want to count dead children, Israel has killed more children in the last few weeks than Russia has in a full-scale conflict in Ukraine in almost 2 years. Let's not gloss over the open-air prison the Israelis are operating or forget there is such unbridled antipathy for Israel, Europe, and the USA in the Middle East. The USA picked up right where the British left off re-drawing the map of the Middle East by force.
But even the British didn't carve out an entire nation for the Jews and force hundreds of thousands, if not millions, out of their homes and off their land. The ongoing situation in Gaza is intolerable. The treatment of Palestinians is inexcusable.
I get that Israel is in a non-stop battle for survival, surrounded by hostile nations. But you have to ask yourself "Why is that?" Maybe it's because the USA under the UK's guidance, made a whole country out of thin air, called it "Israel," and evicted and oppressed the locals.
Under that logic, we should evict all European and African-descended Americans from America! How do you think they would react if someone came along and said "For the greater good, you must give up your home and your homeland," and used force to bring it about?
You're worried about 10 hostages, but don't mention 1200 Palestinian children killed. I guess it's OK to drop bombs on people, but if their feeble-best response is to chop off a few heads and seize 10 hostages, then that's terrorism? It's terrorism if you don't have advanced military hardware and bombers? You need to see this as - as Dave Chapelle called it - asymmetric warfare. There's a war being waged on these people and it's been ongoing for a very long time.
I'm not justifying hostage taking, but I see it as the consequence of way worse that's been going for a very long time. This is just ONE atrocity you can point to, and there's no denying it's an atrocity, but don't let your confirmation bias blind you to the big picture or the MANY atrocities committed by the side you happen to support.
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I disagree. When you're in an insane situation, only something crazy is going to work. For instance, the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941 wasn't a mistake. It was trying to take a puncher's chance in a situation the Japanese knew would otherwise end in their subordination to American and European interests, like China and every other Asian nation at the time. Japan was the Last Man Standing in Asia that wasn't under the thumb or had a chance at getting out from under the thumb (See "Commodore Perry steams into Tokyo Harbor (circa 1830, iirc)."
It was crazy. The USA was a behemoth compared to Japan. But Japan was slowly, inevitably losing if they did nothing, and the USA was only getting bigger and stronger in the meantime.
Maybe Kursk offensive pays off. Maybe it triggers an outpouring of foreign assistance that's an order of magnitude (or 2) greater. Game changer. Maybe the political impact of the brazen attack galvanizes support for scrappy Ukraine from nations all around the world.
If it had (It didn't), then the audacious, strategically unsound offensive is made into something much more.
Ukraine needed to change the game. It was losing the game. The Kursk offensive will hasten their end, if it fails, which it appears it has, but it gave them a puncher's chance of re-setting the game board, something Ukraine desperately needed.
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@wickedAberration Tim TRIES to be objective, and the most obvious lunacies are coming from the left. Oh, there are plenty of right-wing Bible-thumpers, but they don't own the public square like the SJWs, who despise ANYbody who appears to be happy, well-adjusted, or shows any sign of enjoying themselves.
Tim's just plucking the low-hanging fruit, and he does a news crawl every day. His problem is he mistakes a gift of gab for an actual in-depth understanding of the issues. If he continues doing his daily news crawls, he will have built up enough history, experientially, to actually have a sense of how things work... in about 20 more years.
But I could say that about most people. Read your Adam Smith. Read your Locke and Hobbes. Read your Blackstone. Figure out how things REALLY work and start understanding the REAL sweep of human progress, which is NOT in the history books. The REAL human progress is in the inventiveness, hard work and good will of the common people. But none of THEM own newspapers or have press agents (i.e.. historians) on the payroll.
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Penalties should be HIGHER, because of the harm they do with their enormous powers causes widespread harm to MILLIONS. Life in jail. Instead, they use their powers to hide from any sanction, shielded by the might of the U.S. Government. John Brennan, Jim Comey, Sztrok, Clapper, Wray, Rosenstein, ... Those are just a few of the many who need to be in jail, in my humble opinion.
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That's good to know about the (lack of) performance of generators in severe cold. It's not enough to have the generator. You also need to keep it out of the weather and the extreme cold. Some kind of shed. Some kind of way to buffer the cold temperature of the air that they're breathing.
I'd do something similar to what they're doing with their generators, but with more of a heat-exchanger on the exhaust, to keep the place warm when they're running, without making them breathe the cold, outside air, directly. Small heater to keep the shed above freezing or near freezing in any extreme cold conditions.
No fan of HOA's here or in Willow, but that drone overflight gave a distinctly white-trash sort of impression. They love the wild outdoors, but their own nests look pretty trashy. Not the guys featured in the video, who appear to be pretty organized and mindful, most of the overhead views suggested that if the same people stayed there for generations, there would be a large and growing junk yard adjacent to their houses.
I am a bit divided over urban sprawl. I sure would like to live a little farther out, but I'm in a small town, far from the big cities. Our valley of about 70 thousand, evenly dispersed on either side of the Snake, is the closest thing to a metropolis for about 6 hours in any direction. Anyway, if you're going to move to a remote location, it doesn't mean you can blight your little corner of it. The idea is to live with a small footprint, and try to blend in with Nature as much as possible. Or that'd be my idea.
Respect for people that close to the Arctic Circle, year-round. Just not for me. I'm a south-of-the-(Canadian)-border kind of guy. Well north of the tropics, but also well south of the Arctic. Still more north than south is my preference. I like the 4 seasons. I like some topographic relief (mountains).
Far enough south for really good passive geothermal potential (Oranges in the Snow type stuff) without much effort or cost, for passive heating and cooling, year-round.
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@Mrkontrol007 : In many ways, the Soviet Army was more of a meritocracy than their enemy. True merit (and good luck!) made for rapid promotion. If you sucked, you didn't last very long. People look back on the Great Patriotic War as "the good old bad days," when people were truly heroic, and everybody was pulling in the same direction in war-time.
But I keep coming back to the fact that Stalin had fresh armored divisions, just sitting there in Manchuria on June 22nd, 1941. It took them 'til December to arrive in and around Moscow, but at the end of a bitter road, the Germans, tired, decimated and demoralized had 2 fresh armored divisions from the Far East added to the equation.
I'm sure that lend-lease didn't hurt any. I haven't made a study of how decisive it was. But considering the fight the Soviets were in, and that they were the last man standing against Hitler in any meaningful way, Lend-Lease was the least we could do. Yes, the Battle of Britain was important. But the real war was won and lost on the Soviets' Western Front. A far bigger war than the one the Allies fought on the Germans' Western Front. Yes, the U.S. put a period on the hostilities with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Without the A-Bomb, the Soviets were planning the invasion of Hokkaido, and the U.S., sick of spending lives, was more than half-way OK with the idea, I suspect.
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You say "went back" as if journalists once were unbiased. This is a myth. The Founding Fathers put the 1st Amendment in the Bill of Rights so ANYbody - popular OR unpopular - could speak their mind. They were under no illusions as to the objectivity of the press. The press, to them, were the pamphleteers who DARED oppose the establishment.
Objectivity was a myth created near the beginning of the 20th Century, when, in their ignorance, they couldn't IMAGINE there being more than one or two channels, EVER. On RADIO. So they came up with the "Fairness Doctrine" that was supposed to ensure journalistic integrity. But it was all a bunch of made-up shit, and it took a New York Minute for the rich and powerful to reach their tentacles into CBS, NBC and ABC, to PRESERVE the Existing Order, or to drum up support for war or new government programs or whatever those bastards were selling, OR to simply NOT report things that were embarrassing to the power elite.
Just forget about objectivity in journalism. Instead, DIVERSIFY your sources. I'm a hard-core libertarian, who thinks Jimmy Dore is an unaligned socialist. He's not humming the Internationale, or anything, but his philosophy on the proper scope and role of government is essentially socialist.
But Jimmy GETS IT when it comes to imperialism, abroad. So even though I'm a freedom, self-reliance and limited-government kind of guy, Jimmy's one of my favorite sources. I just with he were more of a classical liberal (Get government off my back.) instead of a Progressive (Big gov't's OK, so long as it only does what I want it to do). That's a fallacy. Government is poison. We should only take it in small doses: National DEFENSE (not OFFense), enforcement of the U.S. Constitution. That's it.
Progressives are like farmers, who see that a ton of fertilizer/pesticide on their 20 acres is good, so 10 tons of fertilizer/pesticide on their 20 acres must be 10 TIMES as good. Meh. Bleah.
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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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@DieselRamcharger : That's not entirely true, although it's more true in K-12 education, where people who can't finish a program will go for their teaching certificate, instead. They go to the high schools and are considered "gurus" if they got a 'C' in an upper-division math/chem/physics course. That 'C' told them they weren't going to cut it in their chosen discipline, but means they're overqualified to teach our children.
I graduated with geology and math degrees and in both disciplines, the ones who couldn't finish took their 'extra' science and math credits and went to get their teacher certification. Then in grad school, majoring in math, the people who couldn't pass the PhD examinations (Prelims) tended to go into EDUCATION, to get a PhD in EDUCATION, 'majoring in math.' With the EDUCATION degree, they were trained to become administrators, so the real math PhD's have bosses who have PhD's in education and/or administration. The least capable of them become the bosses of all of them.
Isn't that the way of things? Can't hold down a job? Become a politician, Bernie!
But don't knock the academic life. You get lots of time off. You get to be creative trying to find better ways of getting through to students. It's a never-ending and always-engaging vocation, if you like to see the lights go on in somebody's head. I'm underpaid for my skill set, until you figure in the time off for Christmas and summer! Then it's about right. I never cared too much about money. Just wanted a job that I'd want to get up for, every morning. And teaching is that kind of job. Until the last few years, when Obama made the whole school system into an SJW nightmare.
In recent years, the bureaucracy has set up one stumbling block after another in the way of actual student learning. It's not nearly as rewarding as it used to be. Instead of upholding standards, the bureaucrats' way of measuring success is students passing their classes, and the easiest way to achieve THAT is to lower the standards and treat students like they're babies. "Let anyone in your class. We'll remediate their lack of skills 'on the fly.'" The OLD way of not passing a student until they UNDERSTAND and can PROVE IT is falling by the wayside. And good teachers are getting out.
Schools, nowadays, are in the business of promoting incompetence. And it's disgusting. And you do no one any favors telling them they can do something they can't. "You're really good at flapping your arms, Johnnie. Now jump off this cliff and show us how good you fly!"
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For every one story like yours, there are 99 stories of people who dream big, but lack the talent to make it big. I see it all the time. Kids with only bonehead math on their transcript heading to college "determined" to be electrical engineers. I try never to discourage anyone, but if you're 18 and you still don't have algebra and trig out of the way, you're already adding a year or two to your expected graduation date, because engineering programs - 4-year engineering programs - are based on starting with Calculus I.
Rather than try to bring them down, I just lay out their program of study, with a semester of college algebra and college trigonometry taking up the first year. And that's assuming they're even prepared for college algebra, which many are not. They like tinkering with things and they like the idea of being a high-paid engineer, but they have no idea what they're up against in the years to come. The only "discouragement" they get from me is my being realistic about how long it's going to take them, and, given their current level of learning, how EARLY it is for them to be deciding they're cut out for engineering, at least in the traditional sense.
A lot of those kinds of young people would be better served getting into a vocational-technical program for electricians or electronics-repair.men. It may even put them closer to what they actually want, which is to tinker with electronics and build their own cool projects. And if they're STILL determined to be a traditional, college-graduated engineer, they've got a skill to help PAY for it, so they don't have to live like poor college students for 5 or 6 (or more) years, with nothing certain except for a mountain of debt when they're done, assuming they finish.
As a mathematician, I feel that a good engineer is BETTER in some areas of math than I am, because of their immediate applications to their field, and their constant use of those areas. There are also a lot of DIGITAL techniques that serve the same purpose, but without all the theory, other than a general understanding that if they've got enough data, they can build a model, empirically, without really concerning themselves with what classical function it most resembles. A LOT of the math they'll teach in a classical engineering program is built on mathematics that was invented because if they didn't find something clean to represent their model, they were at a loss, because they lacked the computing power to brute-force it.
If we had computers before Newton came along, maybe we wouldn't care one bit about "smoothness and continuity" principles, but just build a digital model of how far the apple has fallen after x number of seconds, build a smooth curve through all the data points and extrapolate from that curve you built off empirical data. You might never have to know the basic falling-body model in order to predict when the apple hits the ground and how fast it's moving when it does.
In real-life engineering, there's a lot more experimentation and testing than theory. They may not know WHY x amount of this metal makes the alloy the strongest, but they tried every percentage and took the one that was best. Maybe in 20 years or 30 years, they'll figure out why.
I remember teaching an applied problem: "How long should your eaves stick out if you want to block the sun in summer and let the sun in in winter?" problem. I used data for the angle of the sunlight at the solstices and equinoxes, and gave a really complicated derivation of the ideal length. A physics prof taught in that room the next hour, saw what I was doing, and said "Why not just use a stick to see where the shadow falls on those days, and use that?"
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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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It's the closet racism raising its head again. "Those parents are too dumb to make their own choices."
Got the same thing from these people on Voter ID: "Voter ID is racist, because 'those people' are too stupid and helpless to acquire a picture ID."
By labeling people as helpless, they create helpless people. And that's what they WANT, because they get to lord it over them, due to their helplessness. Liberalism is a crippling mind-set, and it cripples EXACTLY the people it purports to help. From public education to the welfare state to you name it. "You're just too dumb to choose or do anything for yourself; therefore, we will choose and do FOR you, and you will just have to shut up and take it, because it's for your own good."
Liberalism = condescension on steroids.
ALL people want to be held to a high standard, and ACHIEVE that high standard. Liberals want everyone to achieve, and the way they get there is by lowering standards! It's an insult, and it makes no sense that people vote for the Democrats who embody this message and this approach to the body politic.
You're too stupid to get a better job, so we'll fix things so you can get $15/hour for this shit job. MY first job, I wasn't worth anywhere NEAR a living wage. As an undersized 12-year-old, only my HEART was big enough to buck those hay bales. My body? Not so much. But I worked my ass off all day long stacking the bales that the bigger kids threw up from the wagon. I could at LEAST get those bales to chest level and stack them one tier above my head, with lots of body English.
At the end of the day, I was heartbroken at how little I was paid for how hard I worked, and the bigger kids got paid double (or MORE than double), but I KNEW that they were WORTH double (or more than double), because they got a LOT more done. Throwing 60-pound bales up into the loft so that 70-pound weakling can stack them is way more work. And worth way more to old Hank Flower.
He took the sting out by taking us all out to dinner and letting the midget order anything he wanted. Well, I wanted a large pepperoni pizza, and I ate every bite, to the amazement of old Hank. But that job taught me what hard work really was, and every job after haying was a cake walk. If Hank had had to pay minimum wage of $15/hr to ALL of us, he wouldn't have let me work at ALL. Couldn't afford it.
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My take on the last year or so is that he prevented something that would've gotten worse, with no end in sight, if Hillary had won. I think it would've been full-on "enrich the virtue-signaling oligarchs" in their seats of privilege, at the expense of everybody else, from insider stock tips to sweetheart-deal speaking gigs, to not-even-thinly-veiled pay-to-play going on in plain view.
I LOVE the venom and hatred of the president being spewed. He is VERY MUCH on notice, as ALL presidents should be, that we are watching, and some of us hate him so much we'll make shit up and BELIEVE it the next day. All presidents should be under this kind of scrutiny.
I think we're discovering that things got lax, because the same crew got used to having their own way for too long. A 2-term presidency represents close to a decade of the same guys, who all know each other, doing favors for one another, from insider stock tips to sweetheart land deals, to not-even-thinly-veiled pay-to-play taking place in plain view.
And we see a pattern of lawless behavior (and relaxation of compartmentalization of intel at Obama's discretion) that was ignored, if it was in the right cause.
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That's why I always look for insight into the way of life of the common people, which is the landscape upon which all the "glorious victories" take place. The landscape, especially technologically. Frank Herbert once called technology a race between innovation and extinction, concluding that humans MUST expand beyond the solar system, else blow themselves up, eventually. "It's not enough to fight. One much also learn to run!" or words to that effect.
I'm not sure I subscribe to that, entirely, but I DO see a constant tension between technological advancement's empowerment of the individual (bottom up) versus its empowerment of the state (top down). You can bomb a country into dust, but can you rule what you bombed? Do you extract any value in return for the act? It turns out that, so far, those with the ability to destroy don't WANT to destroy. They want to RULE, which, so far, has kept a lid on the extent to which they will destroy. More importantly, though, is how the people live and how much functional freedom they actually exercise.
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What we could use - and it's already happening to an extent, quite organically - is for you independent journalists and content creators to create some form of consortium or organized co-op, where you share info and divide-up the regions of coverage, for a truly independent media that fact-checks itself, in the natural course of things. Take it all the way down to the citizen-with-a-smartphone level, bypassing and rendering obsolete the kind of big-corporate news models. Something akin to a wiki but more resistant to corruption by a handful of highly motivated asshats, whom we see corrupting whatever chunks of Wikipedia they target. You can go in there on Monday at noon to correct blatant falsehoods or mischaracterizations of history, and it's GONE before 1 p.m.
Just a thought. Journalism should be a bottom-up thing and not a top-down thing. It should be raw and uncensored. Messy, chaotic, and mostly truthful, with opposing viewpoints hashing things out publicly, in a format that forces people to take turns.
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FOX gets some good facts and commentary out there. Nice counter-balance to the competing voices on all the other (once-) major, mainstream networks. But I agree that it's only smart to keep track of who owns what, and what FOX conveniently leaves out of THEIR reports. I don't agree with Hannity or Tucker on a number of issues. I think there's often as strong of a neocon tilt from FOX as there is a neoliberal tilt from all the other networks. But there's more good, honest, libertarian-center commentary from FOX that I really respect.
Since Jon Stewart hung up his cleats, I think Jimmy Dore might be the pre-eminent honest voice from the Progressive side. I respect him, and on a good day, I don't entirely hate Noam Chomsky. But I think they're both collectivist idiots, who just... don't... get it, when it comes to the importance of LIMITED government on the federal level. If Massachusetts or Colorado want single-payer health care or hefty welfare benefits, that's up to them and their voters. But the feds need to butt the hell out of 90% of what they now do. Dore and Chomsky don't care how big and intrusive government is, so long as the people calling the shots on top of their rigid hierarchy do Dore and Chomsky want them to do. They don't get that the original mistake was putting ANYbody other than themselves in charge of their lives.
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@eriknielsen1849 : I think you overestimate the need for a conspiracy to see things unfold as they have. But I agree that the lack of any accountability, and the continuing obstruction by Deep State actors within Trump's own administration, like Christopher Wray, and others, who CONTINUE to stonewall the release of information. Those guys who stalled and slow-walked everything Trey Gowdy was asking for as chair of intel committee. Those guys all worked for Trump.
But I see other theories having just as credible as your "They're ALL in on it!" theory. If you look at the political climate and the absolute control of legacy-media narratives from the Democrat side, PLUS the large fraction of civil service that were actively working to sabotage Trump since before he even took office, maybe there's something ELSE taking place. For one, I do NOT believe for one SECOND that Rachel Maddow, Don Lemonade, or Chris Matthews are secretly in cahoots with Trump. I don't for one second believe that they WANT their narratives falling on deaf ears. No. They're all shocked and really kind of in a state of disbelief that the same forms of propaganda that manufactured the public's consent so successfully, so many times in the past, are not getting traction.
I, too, was initially very concerned when I learned that Barr used to work for George Bush, Senior. I still have some reservations. But IF he's on the up-and-up, this is exactly how Barr should be playing it. And before I totally jump into the same ocean of cynical despair in which YOU are wallowing, I'm going to wait and see just how this all plays out. If Trump were truly a neocon, I think things would've played out much differently in Syria, especially Northern Syria, where the Kurds have been trying to carve out an ethnic homeland for decades. John Bolton would still be working for Trump, if that were the case.
As for wanting eggheads like Kissinger around, I think this is pretty much Trump's way. He has brought in a diverse set of experiences and beliefs into his cabinet, and the "chaos" reported by WaPo and other legacy snake-in-the-grass media is exactly what I would expect, if he didn't just hire people who just agree with him on everything. Reagan was similar in this regard, allowing his staffers and cabinet to have free-ranging debates amongst themselves, before he made his decisions.
If Trump were a neocon, he'd've wrapped himself in the flag and been at war with Iran by 2018. I think that was probably the neocon plan, all along. Iraq, Syria, Libya, then knock off Iran... There've been some bumps along the way. The missile strike after the false-flag chemical attack was not a good look. But as I read between the lines, I found out that the death toll from his missile attack in Syria was virtually nil. They KNEW the attack was coming, they knew WHERE the attack was coming, and people cleared out of the way. Russian shipping cleared the hell out with plenty of time before the attack, which I'm starting to think was mostly show, and maybe even to keep the neocons around him at bay a little while longer.
But we'll see. I think we're seeing Trump do as he pretty much always has. I think if he had acted as aggressively as you or I might have wished, in the early going, he would've been savaged in the media, sabotaged by the never-Trumpers lingering in his administration, and removed from office by any means necessary. Instead, he kind of sits on you. He can't track down all the leakers, directly. But he CAN slowly appoint his own people, and ratchet up the pressure on the leakers, who don't know if the new guy is one of their own, or somebody quietly looking over their shoulder on Trump's behalf. Instead of Trump looking over his shoulder out of fear of the never-Trumpers, it's the never-Trumpers who are hearing footsteps.
The proof will be in the indictments that Durham brings. Is he working for us, or is he just working for the insiders? As for Trump, himself, he's been saying the same things for DECADES. "We're getting ripped off in our foreign trade. The Chinese are thieves and liars. Uncontrolled immigration is bad and must be stopped. We have too many ridiculous regulations." Very simple ideas that were not and are not mainstream, unless you talk to the average working man in the street, who's sick of being bled dry so that rich, champagne liberals can fly around in their private jets and lecture us about global warming.
I actually wish Trump were a bit MORE ideological, but he's basically an FDR Democrat, like Reagan was, although Reagan made more ideological arguments about limited government, in general, and opposing Soviet Russia's "evil empire." I don't think Trump sees things that way. But as a practical man, whatever programs we have in place, he wants them to work and be run more efficiently. Not a philosophical break from big government. More of a "Well, this ain't working" kind of blue-collar appraisal of government.
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Tribal behaviors are well-suited to the survival of stupid people, because once you're in the herd, you only need to be able to run faster than the slowest zebra to escape the lion. That's why you always hear stupid people reciting their best recollection of the boob tube's narratives, because they're signaling that they're IN the herd.
This means that if the media control the culture, the "main herd" can easily fall in line behind some very stupid ideas, because the limits of a stupid person's abilities is to try to mimic what they think the herd is thinking.
This can have very negative consequences. But if the good guys are winning the culture wars, they can trump the messaging of a small, echo-chamber elite, and the good guys win over the stupid people. These shifts can be very sudden and very dramatic, and not always bad.
I think that's what infuriated Democrats the most about Trump. He used very simple, accessible messaging, and the Democrats could see that he was very appealing to people at ALL levels, including the stupid people. "That's what WE'RE supposed to do, you demagogue!" It drove them nuts. Their insanity prevailed for 8 years. Now the dam has burst.
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I dunno, Paul. To my eye, we're looking at a red-pill awakening by a growing fraction of a once-captive segment of society, and the hysterical sky-is-falling reaction by the still-captive, still-indoctrinated, still-brainwashed so-called liberal left is creating a short-term period of bitterness and hate. Their nice little utopia is breaking down, because people see that the more they listen to them, the worse things get.
And when I cruise YouTube, I keep stumbling across more and more people of color who actually GET IT. They're not just haters. They actually understand what's going on, and are listening to (and sharing with one another) the best minds on the Classical Liberal side, like Jordan Peterson and Thomas Sowell.
It's an awakening. And the education our kids have been denied in public schools is all there for the taking on the Internet, for instance, asshat teachers giving instructional videos away for free:
http://www.harryzaims.com/
Don't like the way I lay it down? Khan Academy. Don't like Khan? There're a million other places to get the knowledge, if you want it.
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For centuries, nationalism was an organizing, centralizing principle. NOW, I think that nationalism is more of a DE-centralizing principle, resisting the many impositions necessitated by membership in super-national bodies, whose interests are not aligned with the interests of the working class.
In America, part of the major shift is that nationalist populism resonates in the black community. People getting passed over for somebody who speaks no English, because they'll work for dirt cheap doesn't go over big, when you're looking for work. This is true for working-class whites and blacks, and causing a schism in what used to be a 100% Democrat voting bloc. And - imho - because of the Internet, a lot of red-pilled blacks have educated themselves (like Abraham Lincoln!), and there's a whole new stratum of smart, black voices in the American cross-section.
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Women are bred to seek security and safety for themselves and their brood. The government proposes marriage and many women eagerly accept, and any threat to that government assistance is "life or death" for them, so they get hysterical.
Being a good woman, taking care of yourself, and proving you're going to be a good partner with good morals for life is too high a bar for a few, and therefore unfair in the eyes of all.
They're authoritarian because to them, authoritarianism is preferable to ANY kind of uncertainty, and government programs have no uncertainty, until of course, the wheels fall off society because of all the boys raised in fatherless homes, and other factors. The women don't see this. They just see a threat to next month's check.
Many people will not strive to improve their situation if their needs are met without work. The lack of greed amongst such people is admirable, but what's not admirable is to think that everyone can be a net taker from the system, rather than a net contributor.
We're in an era now where the contributors are being crushed by the recipients, and the bureaucrats whose wealth and status are derived from administering the re-distribution of wealth from contributors to recipients (and to corporations. Corporate welfare is also a thing.). Politicians LOVE constituents who live off the dole. Those are easy votes to win. Just promise more free stuff than the other guy, and you have a huge voting bloc.
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@Lennis01 : Yes. I'm all for a united world, but from the ground up. Like us US schmucks speaking directly to UK schmucks. Globalists, today, want globalism from the top down, in an authoritarian/totalitarian system of government, run by globalist elites. The only thing "elite" about them is their wealth and power. Their incompetence and arrogance is what's bringing them down as we speak.
If people were free of authoritarian rule EVERYwhere, national boundaries would be rather silly. But as long as there are super-states and super-powers, there's no getting rid of the authoritarian and expansionist tendencies of large states.
Globalists want to run a CENTRALIZED world government. The rest of us want to see power devolve to the cities and towns. If we can do that, and guarantee civil liberties and property rights around the world, we would have a de facto "world order," where NObody tells EVERYbody what to do.
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@downwindfish1 Europe's trying it, now. But Texas, alone, is bigger than Germany. There is no law that says an individual state may not indulge in more socialistic programs to help the needy and so forth. But even just Texas is more diverse than Germany. There are not one-size-fits-all prescriptions to make your social democracy work on a large scale. And the only way to impose social democracy everywhere (because many states just won't stand for it), is by force, from above.
No. Centralized governance is the wrong direction to go. Government picking winners and losers is the wrong way to go. lots of problems cropping up in Europe as they embrace multiculturalism. Cultural restraints that make nanny-government features sustainable over long periods of time start to fall apart. Scandinavian countries, especially, are steeped in the responsibility of the individual to the whole. Bringing in a ton of refugees from other cultures, who aren't indoctrinated the same way is a problem for them. A Swede would be ashamed to be dependent on the state without working. A Somali might say "If you're dumb enough to pay me, I'll just stay home and make babies, fool!"
There are also many authoritarian features that leak into the culture and governance under "social democracy." Now, a state the size of Texas can make adjustments. But a nation made up of many states, like the USA and like the EU WANTS to be, ends up making policies that work in one place and not another.
The fundamental problem with social democracy is that 50% plus 1 of the population can force 50% - 1 of the population submit to things to which the latter are 100% opposed. Social Democrats aren't content to do what THEY can to help their brothers. No. That's not enough. They must convince the GOVERNMENT to perform any and all functions the Social Democrats deem necessary, and impose those functions on all the land, by force.
"You voted for it. It's fair."
"I didn't know that's what I was asking for. I just thought you were bringing me some free stuff."
"Well, here's your free stuff. Now, comply."
Make your social democracy work on the local level, as the locals see fit. I'm fine with that. Usher in your social democracy from on high on mere majority vote, and you're storing up trouble, especially in a large, heterogeneous nation such as the USA. This is also the problem with the Globalist Project. You can't achieve without imposing it from above. The people on top can't possibly tailor one-size-fits-all policies that are suited to the geography, climate, culture, and economics of widely divergent localities or regions.
In the USA, you might say "What works for New York City does not work for North Dakota.
When I talk to social democrats, I say "Make it work well in your TOWN before seeking to impose it on 320 million people in one fell swoop by edict from on high."
As an American, I watch the wild swings in policy that occur in Europe. Too collectivist one day. Too open borders one day. Then the next day, Austria's outlawing Burkas or Hungary's eliminating all the critical-theory garbage that the colleges are putting out. America is 10 years behind on the takeover by leftists like you, and takes 10 more years to be rid of them. That's because we understand that rapid change, in itself, hurts the most vulnerable of us and can lead us into blind alleys faster than we can extricate ourselves.
That's why we're so slow to turn socialist (by gradually more and more fascistic measures) and why it'll take forever to un-do those changes, barring total collapse.
On the scale of a European nation, social democracy MIGHT work. So far, what I see is governments whose sensibilities and interests diverge more and more from those of the people they're supposed to serve. But they're SMALL enough to rectify their mistakes virtually overnight. In a nation the size of USA, you can't turn on a dime. That's why there are careful and specific limits set on what the government is empowered to do in the first place, and an elaborate set of checks and balances to prevent too much change, too quickly. If you assume that everything isn't already broken, then you don't want to break it by meddling too much.
In the USA, the "social democrats" should make their ideas fact on the local and state level. They can't. So they go to the feds, who not only have say over all the states, but can also print money they don't have, so it all seems to sort of work. Except we keep slipping deeper and deeper into the hole. You can't be the All-Father, bestowing gifts on the people, without extracting obedience FROM the people. You can't leave any loopholes and expect the culture to carry the day like you can in Scandinavian or European countries over many generations.
If social democracy were really GOOD for us, it would build from the local level upward. That's not what we're seeing. I think it's because too many people don't need or want government to be their mommy.
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KELLI2L2 : Many didn't like the neocons around him, and some of the things he was doing in the Middle East seemed to have neocon fingerprints all over them. Only history will tell how much of this was Trump buying time by pussyfooting around and playing along with them, until he had his ducks in a row and was ready to announce the withdrawal from Syria. I felt like Trump's big "missile attack" was more of a show - maybe purely for the folks back home - than any kind of strategic "destroy the bad guys" stuff. From what I gathered, he basically told everybody where he'd strike and gave everybody time to clear out oft the affected area.
Anyway, the point is that it seemed pretty half-hearted, but the talking heads, with total buy-in on the false flag chem attacks were thinking Trump finally did something right, and I know it pleased the entrenched deep-state neocon types. Maybe that bought him the time and the room to get us on our way out of there before New Year's.
But the scattering of resignations from this surprising move, which idiot reporters say was entirely due to the Erdogan conversation, are probably a good thing for his admin. If it smokes out some neocons (mutter-mutter John Bolton mutter-mutter. ) like Mattis, who LIKE that sort of thing, that's probably a good thing.
I just wonder if this was Trump's plan, all along and the beating-around-the-bush stuff over the last couple years was for his own political survival if not physical survival. No way of knowing, at this point, but the dumber people make Trump out to be, the more he seems to win on issues I care about, and the entire weight of the establishment opposes.
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I agree with him on limited government principles. I agree with him on traditional values, but not tradition because God Said. Tradition because it became tradition in the first place because it worked and was sustainable, else those who followed it would perish (or be conquered).
But from the very first, when he got my attention with that great "Facts don't care about your feelings" quote, I got the sense that he was what we're now calling "neocon." Very pro-establishment and forever war. Very much a "Great Game" approach to foreign policy and security matters, which is to say "Dirty tricks are fine, because we're the good guys and those other guys are subhuman. The Shah is our buddy, so whatever he does is fine. Chang Kai Shek is marvelous because he opposes Mao. Zelensky's great, because Putin is literally Satan, himself."
I always thought the U.S. Constitution and the legacy of George Washington would ensure that the USA was not at all imperialist. Trade? Fine. War? No thanks. Mess with us? You're done.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. It's like we threw out the British Empire so we could become the NEXT British Empire. That's not us. That's never been us. But as soon as our "leaders" get anywhere close to the top of the government, they start thinking they're aristocrats, in a nation specifically engineered to keep the aristocrats in check.
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@Chill_Im_Probably_Trolling It's OK for you to be right about foreign policy but to be a nincompoop about socialism. Maybe COVID taught you nothing. You do NOT want your health care determined by bureaucrats, and that's what you're asking for when you ask for socialized medicine. Yes, we should care for our weakest members of society, but we should do it from the ground up, not from the top down, or we'll have Fauci's telling YOUR doctor what they can and can't treat you for and what treatments are and are not permitted. It's an illusion.
What progressives don't understand is that fascism is built on the tripod of state-run media, education and medicine. When you have all 3 under state control (which we essentially have, today), the people will believe ANYthing, first of all because they WANT to believe, second of all because that's all they KNOW to believe, and third, because to depart in any way from the state's positions is to risk losing your health care and free education.
Progressives just don't get that the government isn't their friend, even though they'll spend hours listening to Jimmy Dore explaining how corrupt the establishment is. Do you REALLY want those motherfuckers teaching your kids and telling your doctor what to do?
If you want the poor to be provided for, give YOUR money and encourage others to do the same. Don't hold all of us at gunpoint for your one-size-fits-all, bureaucratic, government-centered solutions. They're not real solutions. They're hopium.
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@isabeljimenez6067 I lack the faith to be atheist. Belief in and denial of God are equally faith-based, as both are unprovable, with no physical means of being disconfirmed.
I'm a superstitious agnostic raised as a Christian. I think Jesus gave us a blueprint for living in this world, and using the brain God gave us to judge right and wrong in real time. I suspect the rest of what's baked into organized Christian doctrine is political in nature, and the main driving force behind the virality of the faith. But to me, that doesn't mean I throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Jesus broke the law to help a person in need on the sabbath, when the law forbade any labor. He did what was right, and he faced the ultimate penalty for it. He didn't try to get away with it, because he was right. He did it in the open and didn't deny it. Peaceful civil disobedience in the light of day that harmed no one.
While a "good" atheist and a religious person will arrive at similar codes of ethics, I'm not sure that most atheists consciously examine their root assumptions. Two acts of faith I make: 1. Life is good and 2. I didn't create it. (I only partake of it. I'm just along for the ride.). Appreciation and humility work pretty well, and pretty much everything else follows. Religious people are more explicit about their assumptions than most atheists I've known. Debunking dogma is not proof.
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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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@ridew3072 : There are certainly hard-core Marxists who revel in chaos. They're probably no more numerous than the highly-over-reported boogeyman of right-wing white supremacists. Nevertheless, Marxist ideology HAS infiltrated our education system, whether by design or otherwise. Personally, I think that people already crossed the philosophical Rubicon of state-centric solutions for any and all ills of humanity, which is indistinguishable from morally bankrupt socialist ideology...
... an ideology written in Bohemian excess by spoiled trust-fund hippies who squandered the family fortunes handed to them, and spent their entire adult lives whining about what they thought they had coming to them, and NEVER, despite being well-educated and not disabled in any way, TOOK more from the world than they ever put into it. NOT the kinds of people you listen to if you want to get anything worthwhile accomplished. They're the drunks who sit and watch you dig a ditch, tell you you're doing it all wrong, and complain because they're out of whisky, and expect you to go get them more.
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Russell, you're exposing your economic illiteracy by whining about the minimum wage. It's not MEANT to be a living wage. It's supposed to be an entry-level wage, and the idea is that you build your skill set, gain experience, and work hard, so that you no longer have to accept a minimum wage.
You're all upside-down in your economic and TRUE fairness to individuals. A job flipping burgers is not a career! It's a starting point. I flipped burgers as a teenager and once or twice in my 20s, but the entire time, I was working to IMPROVE myself, so I could earn MORE.
Now, after MANY years clawing my way up through my education (that I paid for) and work experience, I make out all right. When I was making minimum wage, I was still living at home, mostly, and when I did move out on my starvation wages, I had to get a roommate or multiple roommates to make rent and feed myself.
But I didn't settle for that. Nor should anyone else.
Anyway, you should do some economics research before trotting out your minimum wage claptrap, which only exposes your ignorance.
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Elected representatives are supposed to vote their conscience, not just pander to the mob. Every representative advocating for his district, rather than defending the constitution is the problem in our country. They all make bad votes, if there's something in the bill that brings some pork to their district. Immensely popular moves that are bad for the whole country.
Think about how your home district is HURT when you go for the pork. If every OTHER representative is doing the same thing, then your district is paying extra for all the pork everywhere else. Everybody loses.
The principled thing to do in Congress is to oppose ALL the pork, including pork for your district.
The majority gets things wrong all the time! The job of a representative is to LEAD. That means to persuade the constituency that there's a higher principle in operation. If they don't like it, they can vote you out. If you're a good leader, you will win them over. More likely, you'll just pander and get re-elected that way.
The problem with this country is every representative testing the political winds, instead of acting out of PRINCIPLE.
There's a tension between majority rule and principle that must be maintained. For decades, we were too populist. Now, we're too authoritarian. That doesn't mean that populism is end-all, be-all. Populism is bread and circuses. Principle is "That's not the role of the federal government, even though it seems like everybody's getting something for free."
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Mike Hill : That's how it starts. It ends with "inconvenient." Roe-V-Wade is already outdated, because the restrictions it placed on abortions were based on early '70s medical science on viability of a fetus.
One day, I hope the debate will be over, because we learn how to put zygotes on ice, until the mom's ready to have a child. Or implant the fertilized egg in someone who WANTS a child, but can't. I think it's coming. Then we can turn the page on a very troubling and often hypocritical era. I'm a hypocrite, too, because I can't say "die" to a fetus and I can't tell a mother she has no right to take herself out of Darwin's game. I think she's really only hurting herself and her chance to participate in reproduction and passing on her genes.
And I don't even want to talk about the father in the equation, where his rights begin and end. But if I were thrust into such a situation, I'd want the mother to have the child and give it to someone who wants it. And if nobody else in the equation wanted it, I'd raise it, myself, however horrifying that might be for everyone else! LOL!
The only principled stand I could take on it was "I'm not gonna cause one."
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Democrats triggered the financial meltdown in the name of poor people owning homes. They made it so that anybody with a pulse could borrow a mountain of money for new homes or against the homes they already owned. Before the Democrats stepped in and used force to relax lending standards, those hedge funds were ALWAYS sound investments. But after lending a ton of money to anybody with a pulse, those hedge funds (take 1,000 mortgages and bundle them into one instrument) weren't worth the paper they were printed on. Investment bankers and others thought they were still good investments, like they had been for DECADES.
The irony is that Democrats, to this day, blame Republicans for the collapse, when it was 2-faced, lying idiots like Barney Frank who PUSHED to relax standards on real estate loans. They're like Bart Simpson, breaking a lamp and then blaming somebody else for it. "It was like that when I got here," he'd say.
This is how Democrats roll. They hurt EVERYbody in the name of helping some small group, and then blame everybody else for their ignorant and un-thought-out policies.
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@25Soupy First of all, the income tax itself is unconstitutional, at least at the federal level. They pulled some bullshit to push that through.
Second, the "only property owners" thing is sort of a good idea, but that's a slippery slope. Squeeze people out of their land, and simultaneously take away their vote?
I think a more generic "You gotta put in more than you take out" rule would work. People who take out more than they put in are totally incentivized to vote for more free stuff. It reaches well up into the middle class, as all the boomers want their gold-plated health care, but KNOW they can't afford gold-plated health care. Lots of people I know in my generation are terrified they'll lose everything when/if they need a $100,000 or $250,000 procedure/treatment. ZERO understanding of the fact that if MOST people can't afford that shit, then there's no way the government can make up that difference.
We see it all across the world, wherever health care is guaranteed. Denial of service, long lines, cheaper doctors brought in from 3rd-world countries. It's all to keep a promise that can't be kept, by liars who'll tell you anything to get your vote and your obedience. And people fall for it, over and over, throughout history.
They say history is a big laboratory. And in the best tradition of science, we run the same old experiments over and over, and sure enough, the destruction is perfectly replicable. But then the "lab report" gets memory-holed by demagogues. "Health care is a right!" The minute they make it a right is the minute the quality and availability of care start nosing downward, and costs go up without restraint. Then when they finally DO admit they need to place limits on it, those limits are set by bureaucrats and pencil necks who crippled YOUR ability to pay and now deny you service, outright.
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6 hours a day, 5 hours a week should be PLENTY to cover the required course work. Maybe junior or senior year, they should have college-prep work in a semi-college format, where the class meets 3 days a week, with 6 hours out of class required, with 2 of those hours in the classroom, transitioning to the 2-hours-out-for-every-hour-in that is the expectation for college math, for example.
In high school, they spend a whole year on courses that receive one semester in college, meeting 3 times per week, with an expectation of 6 hours of work outside of class for the average student. College Algebra can be easily covered with little or no homework in one year. Sneak in the trigonometry in one semester, with a fair amount (but less than college amount) of homework, and the student has an idea of the level of effort required at the next level.
Fact is, we cover stuff in high school at a snail's pace AND send kids home with a pile of homework, and they still don't come to college with the skills they need. It's not a homework or not-homework question. It's a question of what they're doing in the classroom.
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Oh, I don't know. Look what Avatar achieved, visually. I think Peter Jackson set a very high bar. He was fortunate enough to get a 3-movie commitment out of the gate. He stretched the movie format to the breaking point of darn near 3 hours per installment, but that's as close as Hollywood's business model can probably stretch. With three long movies, the trilogy received a treatment that even Tolkien fans felt did a good job.
There were some things I wanted to see and didn't, like "The Scouring of the Shire." I would have liked it more if it ran a whole 'nother hour or two for the bits after the fall of Sauron. Tolkien went into some detail about Aragorn's ending and the sad story of Arwen's loneliness. I'd happily sit through to the bittersweet end.
So maybe the thesis is correct, at least in a way, because Hollywood is just not built to provide anything comparable to Jackson's legendary trilogy. But I try to look beyond Hollywood as we know it. I think there's still a buck to be made making great movies, and some other business model that's less top-down and more collaborative with more of a profit-sharing approach, where a lot of people can make a decent amount of money putting projects together as more of a team, where everyone stands to make out well if the project succeeds.
Look at how music has become much more of a middle-class phenomenon and how the studio system in music is hitting a wall. It's just too easy to create your own label and keep all the proceeds. A lot more people are actually succeeding in the music business. They're not charting or anything the trades would bother to report on, but they'll have a local following and an Internet following. Maybe they never sell a million CDs, but they're selling something like 10,000, plus whatever they make doing live shows, they're living pretty good.
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By all means, let's focus on the effects, and ignore the causes. I'm sick of people hating one side or the other, when the real mover and shaker is the USA, who, on the advice of the UK, carved the state of Israel out of Palestine, by force. It's been an open wound on the Middle East that we just can not and will not allow to heal. We just throw more money at it, ensuring that there is perpetual enmity and hatred on a regional scale.
In the American West, there was ethnic conflict, but all people talked about at the time was the atrocities of "the other side." Mostly it was renegades sparking it off, but good people on both sides were righteously angry, and felt that there was no punishment too severe or atrocity too grotesque to inflict on "the other side," because of how BAD "the other side" was. Murray, Shapiro, and every politician in Washington, DC are hell bent (I don't use the term lightly) on keeping the wound open and bleeding, without ever addressing root causes of the ethnic conflict in the region, let alone whether it is moral to continue throwing our treasure and our (and others') lives away, endlessly doubling down on "stupid."
Say something productive, Douglas. Don't just clutch your pearls in indignation and horror.
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I can get trying to reach for something better/different. Nature does this all the time through random mutations, most of which are not good for survival. Edison said "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration." As an "inspiration" kind of guy, I usually don't put in the perspiration it takes to make it happen, or end up making it happy in half-ass fashion. Hat tip for Nolan reaching for the concept AND putting in the perspiration. But even with all of that, it's REALLY hard to get it right.
When it comes to movie-making, though, trying to be new seems to get in the way of doing what works. Tough balancing act.
Most of the movies I'd like to see would run 8 or 10 hours, which is what it took me to slurp up my first reading of "DUNE," and require multiple sittings, especially after Netflix introduced me to binge-watching and stories unfolding over many hours, instead of the standard 2 hours. I did DUNE in one marathon sitting, in my first (and one of only a handful) of baby-sitting gigs, when the lady down the street was pumping out yet ANOTHER son, while my big sister was hospitalized with mono. I'd never had such responsibility for others, before, and I didn't dare sleep that night. So I read "DUNE" all night, and I was so into it - after the McGavins' boys took me through their morning bath and breakfast drill. I just stood back and tried to make sure nobody drowned...
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Let the market handle this. Vote the CO2 worshippers out of government and LET society evolve. Left to our own devices, we will get EVERYTHING cleaner and more efficient because we WANT to. The government's only as smart as government officials and government officials are insulated from (and willfully ignorant of) the full impact of their policies on the common people and the ecosystem.
Water, air, and land pollution are all problems we need to deal with, and we've tried letting government manage the trade-offs, and government has proven, yet again, to not be up to the task. In most cases, the government has been the cause of greater pollution. They can only seize on one or two things they can point to as "doing something" and they never account for the harm they do, system-wide. From "helping the disadvantaged" (leading to an explosion of disadvantaged) to "flattening the curve" (covid response), not only do they get things wrong, but they silence their critics, which is not only bad for their critics, but bad for the people who are denied the full array of views and facts on the matter.
The cleanest solution for automobiles would be a policy of making durable goods that can be repaired by anybody for as long as possible. Nothing the EPA has done since its creation has helped in this regard. Let the cities try different things, but don't impose what may work for a major metro area on everybody. EVs and mass transit make total sense in such places, but that doesn't require federal law or federal intervention. It's not so much that the feds get everything wrong, but that every mistake they make is imposed on the entire nation, all at once.
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Did Ukraine not understand the state of things in Europe and the USA well enough to understand how empty their security guarantees were?
While I'm largely in agreement with you guys, maybe you're arguing in a somewhat partisan way about the terms of the Istanbul agreement that didn't go forward.
Agreeing to disarm yourself, while your great, big, fat neighbor makes no such commitment is foolhardy for any sovereign nation. If assurances of peace were all it took to disarm yourself, then why has every nation that lasted longer than 5 minutes in history done its best to field a defense against external aggression.
Where you're the strongest is in your criticism of the military-industrial complex and its political leadership's fecklessness and ruthlessness (an odd combination). I think it dates back to World War II, during which the USA became, for all intents and purposes, world hegemon.
I think there were a bunch of eggheads in Washington - two brothers in particular - who loved the days of the war, when they could do anything they wanted, and the press, the schools, the media, entertainment, and the government were all of one mind, and it was universally accepted that the government could and should censor anything damaging to the war effort.
The security state has done its best (and been largely successful) to keep us on a permanent war footing, or at least a permanent "crisis" footing, ever since. If there's always a war or big enough crisis, then the normal, moral way of doing things must take a back seat, in service of the existential struggle the war or crisis has plunged us into.
How many times have we been told that secrecy and national security trumps transparency? How many times do we have to see official documents being slow-walked through the DOJ, only to be entirely redacted by the time any of us, the unwashed, have a chance to see them?
We all know we didn't get the straight scoop about Iraq, Libya, Kosovo, Ukraine, or Gaza. We all know we never will, if the permanent government - in what should be a representative republic - has its way, and we have no reason to believe it won't, because it always HAS, since at least World War II.
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@emperorstevee ; i disagree. If education were truly run like a business, you'd get better and better education at lower and lower prices. What you're describing isn't really a business. You describe a RACKET. And the fact that we're all here discussing this wonderful lecture, and it's being delivered at zero marginal cost (cost of your Internet, essentially, but no additional cost for additional content, once the infrastructure's there), says that our institutions of learning are horribly dysfunctional.
Year by year, we pay MORE for a product that is of poorer and poorer quality! If education were the purpose of our public school system, it wouldn't look anything like what it looks like, now. It is, instead, a means for the state to indoctrinate the youth, but MORE importantly, keep a lot of not-good teachers employed. Heck, even allowing that most teachers mean well and do an OK job, you see our institutions of learning as nothing more or less than a sinecure for incompetent administrators. They're the ones getting most of the money, and the only thing that grows in these institutions is the number and salaries of administrators!
Get that office remodel. Gut the classrooms for safe spaces and administrators' private fiefdoms. Teachers buying their own damn materials so that kids can have paper to write on, and something to write with. No money for that sort of thing. Budgets are tight. But what we REALLY need is an office of diversity and equity that we got along fine without for centuries, and whose only purpose is apparently to go look for grievances and impose mandatory trainings in intersectionality and critical race theory. Total waste of everybody's time and taxpayers' money. And if they're successful with their equity and diversity, then students will be protesting their oppression! When college is closed down for a 'day of absence,' you have succeeded in your program, and all that remains is rooting out the last remaining white supremacists on campus, preferably with roaming bands of pissed-off students.
Public education, as we know it, is nothing more or less than a ridiculously expensive jobs programs for school administrators!
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@kelleymcbride4633 Oh it's been devised. It's called the U.S. Constitution, where the powers of the central government are carefully enumerated and explicitly RESTRICTED and all else is left up to the PEOPLE. We, the people, have given up responsibility for our own lives and now we cast about wondering how to free ourselves, when all it takes is to cut central government's role and scope by about 90%. If they stick to the basics, it's easier to discern the corruption that inevitably sets in, AND they can't mess up what they don't control!
But even the U.S. Constitution is no guarantee, if the people, out of greed, fear, and insecurity, vote to EXPAND the scope and role of the national government. They can't screw up what they don't control.
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@relic6457 : That's not what he's saying, at all. Just saying there are big, hairy gays and they use the term "bear." I didn't know that, myself, but it made sense when I heard it. Heaven forbid I should learn something from someone different from me. Of course, you can't learn from people just like yourself, because you already know everything they know, amirite? SJWs ruin diversity concept, but it really is a cool thing, and kind of the basis of our ornery, unruly, smart and big-hearted nation.
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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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Zionism is not Judaism. Defeat of Hitler's failed, would-be ethno-state is not justification for the creation of an ethno-state by force, by foreign powers, 1/4 of the way across the planet. There were many Christians and Muslims thrown off their land by this "just cause." Holocaust against Jews does not justify holocaust against non-Jews.
Until you address this, and the corrupting influence of the USA on Israel and vice-versa, you're going to be stuck in forever war. We don't need Israel as our proxy in the Middle East, and Jews do not need the USA as their proxies in the Middle East.
Many rabbis are in opposition to the Zionist Project. Many Jews do not believe that the creation of the state of Israel, by force, from without, is pleasing to God.
That begs the question of what to do, now, but we should be on a trajectory to the withdrawal of the USA/NATO from the Middle East. Those are not our lands to be governed by us.
Abraham Accords offered some hope. But if the only way to maintain your ethno-state is atrocity, you need to re-think.
Israel is locked in an existential fight that will go on, forever, if nothing changes. Surrounding nations are locked in a struggle against external forces that wish to re-draw the map of the region by military force, and maintain it by military force. That's not God's way. That's man's way.
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@miskatonicalumni5612 : Are you LARPing? LOL! You DO hit the talking points that a CIA proxy would hit! I think you're spot on! :o)
As for me, I don't know that there's a Deep State, per se, but I do know a little something about power and corruption, so it's only natural that people who are corrupt and in power or seeking power, would "work together" in pretty natural ways, just to feather their own nests. I'm not saying this very well, but for a nice entertaining take on Closet Aristocrats, Frank Herbert's DUNE Series. I think the saga climaxes in the 7th book, Sandworms of Dune, but the social commentaries in God Emperor in the form of the socio-political musings of Leto II, who had the memories of all his ancestors and lived for over 4,000 years.
Oh, uh. Back to the present:
That's what I think is going on, myself. People who despised Trump so much, that they'd go a little too far, and the next guy who also hated Trump would run with THAT and take it too far, spiraling into a bunch of mostly venal/petty abuses that grew into something quite big, because "everybody was doing it and everybody thought it was the right thing at the time."
There was ta culture of entitlement, wrapped in arrogance, that permeated the Obama Administration. Bush II used Terror and WMDs to go to war and give the president unprecedented power and discretion, and set the NSA loose on everybody. But Bush II wasn't as crass about using those newly-authorized tools and methods against his political foes as Obama was. Bush II made it possible. Bush II dished him the ball Obama laid it in.
Anyway, it was probably just a slow slide into a lazy and oblivious, privileged way of operating over time, with a relatively small number of psychopaths and sociopaths given far too much power and no conscience about using it. Weaponized IRS against the Tea Party Movement. Weaponized the security apparatus against an incoming Republican, who wasn't supposed to win. They were so used to winning. But too many people picked up on HOW they were winning and how they were governing after winning, and THAT was something they didn't account for. The same iron grip on the major networks was in place, as before, but the major networks are no longer that major!
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Eastern European countries aren't a continent-spanning empire. They're still very authoritarian, but they're small enough, there's a "sense of the people." And not just Eastern Europe, but throughout Central and Western Europe as well. There's more of a cultural homogeneity that you don't necessarily have in a sprawling behemoth like the Russian Federation.
I just wish the USA would go back to something just this side of the Articles of Confederation, i.e.. something more like the original U.S. Constitution, where the power of the individual states was greater. But since Lincoln made such a fetish of The Union, with abolition of slavery as the pretext, the USA's been getting progressively TOO centralized. I wish that the Russians AND the Americans would find the proper balance between local autonomy and unity of the whole. USA was very close to that, early on, but the old forms almost immediately re-emerged, with a self-appointed and would-be-hereditary ruling class. A ruling class with imperial ambitions.
We, the people, don't want any of that nonsense. We just want to be free and encourage (not force) others to be likewise.
I think the world would be a better place if it were easier to JOIN the USA and easier to LEAVE the USA!
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@jamespyke6764 : As if Wikipedia is ever going to allow anything but the establishment narrative to grace its pages. You lot have failed to predict global temperatures every time you've tried. And you've overshot every bleeding time by a very large amount. Get back to me when your models actually work and ONE of your predictions comes true. Until then, I'm pretty sure the science is on my side.
You guys' say the science is settled, and then you unselfconsciously move the goalposts from Global Warming to Climate Change to Extreme Weather. And if you want to reduce negative human impact on the ecology, you should support prosperity and liberty, which are the only things that seem to get people to give a damn about anything beyond where the next meal's coming from.
I think time will prove me right, and AGW is a bunch of bullshit made up by people who want to herd sheeple this way and that, for their own ends, quite apart from fake messianic missions to Save The Planet! People will choose to live green when they have the option. And they'll get there a helluva lot quicker than government bureaucrats will, and with far less harm to the weakest members of society, whose backs you leftists piss down every bloody day, while telling them it's raining. You're the worst kind of people.
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Very similar to what's happening in the USA. There are more circumlocutions necessary, because the U.S. Constitution is very clear, and the law is very clear, but there are subtle and non-subtle pressures used to coerce (but not technically coerce, mind you) everyone into DEI compliance.
Public outrage helps, but our "elite" institutions scorn the public they supposedly serve.
What really seems to have moved the needle in the USA is the threat of lawsuits against institutions implementing racial/ethnic/gender preferences, in violation of the law. This is especially the case in academia, which went DEI in the FIRST place to avoid nuisance suits from "far left activists." These institutions are cowardly about such things. They are terrified of being sued.
There's more to it than just that, because the administrators of these institutions absolutely agree with neo-Marxist ideology, of which DEI and CRT (critical race theory), etc., are an integral part. They are constantly looking for ways to circumvent the law without being penalized, and from top to bottom, these institutions are all-in on the ideology, so even when we "win," all the same people and ideas remain in place.
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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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Whatever you think of Graham Hancock, our species dates back a long time, and there's a lot of our history buried under the ground and especially under the water.
Whatever you think of Noah's Ark, it wasn't that long ago that we were ALL flooded out, if we lived very close to sea level during the ice age(s), and it stands to reason that most of us DID live closer to the sea than farther from it. Fish protein from an easy source might be why we have big brains!
But even if only SOME of us lived close to the ocean, the flooding that took place after the end of the last ice age inundated any and every civilization in that zone, and it stands to reason that it would be the richest zone of human activity during the last ice age. For all we know, there may be more than one ice-age-and-interglacial period on our back trail, but have no evidence for it because we've never spent much time looking, offshore.
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Better yet, Jimmy, how about we take the government OUT of education, health care, etc., so that every little thing doesn't HAVE to become political? You come right up to a better way of looking at the actual trade-offs, and then you're right back on politics. Ask anybody about education. They'll all tell you how important it is. Then ask them if their kids would learn to read if the schools were shut dow. All of them will say 'of course MY kids will get educated. It's the guy down the block whose kids won't get educated, and THAT'S why we need public schools."
So what happens? The good parents' kids get shoved into big classrooms with all the bad parents' kids, and the school has to teach to the lowest denominator, and your kids have to go to classes that are continually being disrupted, slowed-down, and side-tracked by a handful of knuckleheads that would get kicked out of any GOOD school. How about those people be the ONLY people who go to public school, and all the parents who care get to KEEP their money and CHOOSE their schools?
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CIVILIZED countries around the world use Voter ID, and look askance at the USA for not securing its elections.
The filibuster protects the minority against the tyranny of the majority. If more than 1/3 of the nation is dead set against the majority, then the majority must COMPROMISE. Eliminating the filibuster on presidential appointments allowed Trump to ram through a lot of his appointments, despite Democrat opposition. Pure majority rule has been tried and failed miserably in the Roman Empire. Majority-rule aspects of our CURRENT system have created a real Bread-and-Circuses situation in the USA.
There's a REASON for the filibuster.
Also, the "gerrymandering" issue is more nuanced than they make it out to be. What if there are 30% Democrats and 70% Republicans in a state? Without redrawing districts carefully, you would have ZERO Democrats in Congress from that state! So a 30% minority would have ZERO representation. And it doesn't have to be that extreme. It could be 51% to 49% but again, ZERO representation for half of the state/nation.
HR1 is what Democrats HOPE will mean one-party Democrat rule forever. We can't let that happen.
Then there's the danger to Democrats of severe blowback, giving those powers to the Republicans. All it would take would be one election, and as long as the Republicans didn't do anything too crazy, they could shut out the Democrats in perpetuity.
What the Democrats want is for the cities to dictate everything. If you live OUTside the city, they want you disenfranchised.
And there's more than one way to disenfranchise voters. One is by allowing illegal aliens to vote, even though they don't have the right and should be deported. Ballot harvesting is another way. Just send your Democrat operatives to nursing homes and the housing projects. "Help" people with their ballots, checking all Democrat candidates. This is pretty blatant in Democrat strongholds. Only Republicans seem concerned about this, because Democrats don't care about principles. All they care about is winning.
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I'm instinctively against the public option, because I know how the government can and will corrupt anything it controls. But I'm not sure that it wouldn't fix much that is wrong with the system in the short term.
I'd kind of like to see a law that states "You may NOT leave elected office wealthier than you entered." Or something along those lines. You KNOW the system is corrupt when you see the mega-millions these people retire with, after starting in "public service" without much money at all. Clintons, Obamas, Schumer, Pelosi, McConnell, Sanders... There's only one RINO Republican on this list, but that's just lack of research. Grassley, Specter, and many other "lifers" in the House and Senate grew immensely wealthy by leveraging their elected positions.
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I don't think it needs to be a shrink. But yes. If it were legalized, there wouldn't be much or any money in selling it in the street.
Legal or illegal, every human needs to take that journey, either staying away or weaning away. It's not something that can be done "for them, for their own good."
Drugs are like a virus. Do you become an authoritarian to achieve herd immunity, or do you use more traditional, time-tested means? Think about what alcohol did to Native Americans. Then think farther back to what it did to Europeans for centuries BEFORE that. We kind of adjusted. Some still fell prey to drink, and still do, but most of us don't. We try to restrict minors getting it, with VERY limited success, but the culture just kind of handles it. Treatment's there for anybody who wants it, but we know from history that taking it on directly, through prohibition, just led to machine-gun fire in the streets.
So before you get too into the idea of legalization being stupid. Think about what illegalization has brought us. Life isn't perfect. Life is trade-offs.
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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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Bernie's only talent is acting self-righteous and promising Peter's money to Paul. He can't even manage his own campaign. Of course, his socialist ideology is intellectually bankrupt. The only reason progressives have the right to talk shit redistribution is because of liberty and LIMITED government. You progressives think forced redistribution is the answer, when you all KNOW that politicians serve themSELVES and top-down governance ALWAYS leads to worse problems than the ones progressives bitch about.
Progressives are the REASON we live in a corporatocracy. They wanted government to protect them against robber barons, oblivious to the fact that robber barons will ALWAYS pull the strings of ANY small group of people who are "in charge." Income inequality exists, but fixing it by force (government action/regulation) is the ANTI-fix. You're just putting all the power into the hands of a handful of big corporations. The best, albeit imperfect solution is social consciousness, transparency, and open competition.
Example: We spend more per pupil than ever before in history. The reason the public schools are failing is because they operate without any competition or accountability. Education should be a very cheap PRODUCT that 90% of parents purchase for their kids, the same way they buy food and clothing. If we viewed education as a PRODUCT rather than a government BENEFIT, kids would learn more, and it'd be about 1/10 as expensive as the current, corrupt and rickety public-school system.
Jimmy recognizes "career climbers" but supports an ideology that subjects ALL of us to such people. He's RIGHT to scorn government corruption and incompetence, but thinks (ironically) that government is the solution. It's not. Help your damn neighbor. Be responsible. Government is for the small fraction of people who can't. Government intrusion mainly increases the size of the fraction of helpless people, who would otherwise be OK, and with a little bit extra to help their neighbors. Now, every time somebody gets a hangnail, progressives DEMAND a new government program, feeding the dragon they bitch about every day.
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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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iii: What you don't understand is that the groups you place ABOVE individuals are no better than the character of the individual members. YOU don't suddenly become a math whiz, because your teacher put you in a group with a genius geek. But in modern education, that's enough to get a passing grade, with your INDIVIDUAL competence in the discipline is subsumed into your ability to work well with others and copy the smart kid's work.
When your worship of arbitrary distinctions between groups becomes paramount, the system you create can not account for, nor respect, the individuals within your arbitrary groups, and it ends up crushing everybody, except maybe the technocrats and bureaucrats calling the shots in a new form of aristocracy that ALWAYS ends up dominating everybody.
Modern-day liberals, in their love and worship of the BORG, reject the values that filled their bellies and allows them to dissent in the first place. They don't even realize it, but they're taking us BACK to the days when all wisdom and power was in the hands of the local warlord, and the people get the stick.
Yes, there were always socialists associated with getting the worker a more just share of the pie. But all the workers wanted was fairness, and a fair wage for a fair day's work, commensurate with the value provided by the worker. What neither the socialists nor the working class understood was they were NOT under free-market capitalism, but under an essentially fascist hierarchy, where the robber baron OWNED the local government and was aided and abetted in their misbehavior by fascists.
They just don't understand that replacing fascists by socialists is just another recipe for the same entrée. It's not the capitalism that was corrupt. It was having the local law enforcement and city council in the hip pockets of the local robber baron. You REALLY fight the robber baron by offering competitive alternatives, and choosing to buy from somebody else.
The left, rather than seeking to open up competition, always subvert their own cause by asking for MORE government interference. This just ensures that the robber baron stays in business, as long as he follows the new rule set. What people MISS is that the new rule set inhibits new competition, because only the existing big boys have the resources to follow the new regs. What people MISS is that the robber barons go from BREAKING THE LAW to ensure their pre-eminence, to having the law on their SIDE, when the regulations - written BY the robber baron - somehow only keep new competition from rising.
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HeyLena: You bring up a good point. Change can be good. In nature, most changes are bad and quickly eliminated, because they don't work as well as the original. Also, change means that individuals who WERE flourishing may no longer flourish, so anyone making conscious change to the political system better be damn sure they're right, and have more than speculation and pseudoscience backing their proposed remedies.
As for the whole gay marriage thing, we haven't even stopped and asked ourselves why marriage became an institution in the first place. It was probably invented by the collective to keep a lid on unwanted and unaffordable new members being created and needing to be provided for.
If you have a male-female tag team, and both appear to be competent, then their offspring generally have a good chance of surviving and not dragging down the tribe with them, or just causing the tribe to incur extra costs.
Say what you will about what went before, but the reason it became tradition is because is SUCCEEDED and was passed on as a trait/behavior to the following generation. If it's sustainable, it persists. So when you poke holes in an institution like that, you better have a pretty good idea of exactly what you're replacing it with, or you're going to create negative feedback systems that can grow out of control and put the tribe at a disadvantage in some fashion.
So the collective decided to put the brakes on adolescent lust, but give advantage to those who did decide to marry and have children. As a strict individualist, I'm not sure I like the state getting that involved, but it's the tradition, and it's all about making and supporting more children, essentially for the purposes of the state.
Still, I do think it's a decent idea to enable an individual to confer "family" status to their family, intentional or biological. A gay couple who cohabitate and split the family chores like a family for 20 years, then it's only common sense that benefits similar/identical to those accruing to the surviving spouse of the breadwinner in a hetero couple.
But I still question whether in an advanced civilized society that the government should need to put its imprimatur on ANY family arrangement. If you want to partner up, then plan accordingly. If you want babies, then that's your choice, unequivocally, and it's nobody else's say whether they're yours by blood or by adoption. But you chose to make them or adopt them, and your choice to do so doesn't entitle you to the money from other families. That's the thing. No say on how you run it, but in return, it's up to you to make it work.
With paternity tests removing all doubt, I don't see why we need marriage as an institution. We can hold the baby-makers strictly accountable for their responsibilities quite easily. Maybe better. How many cucks are bound by law to raise up some other SOB's babies, because a married woman fooled around?
I want more babies raised by parents who planned for them and cherish them and who KNOW it's a sacrifice. I want zero babies from teen-age girls who only had them because the government would set them up in a household of their own, as an escape from the welfare mom and all the boyfriends that she had to grow up being victimized by. Now I know we'll never have a perfect world, and I shore wouldn't throw away a living baby. But I shore would like there to be a system that didn't incentivize negative behavior, and in my lifetime, those are the only remedies Democrats have offered, and we know the results.
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@questioneverything3026 "Free press" and government have been hand in hand since at least World War II. We didn't fight Nazis just to end fascism. We also fought the Nazis to perfect our OWN fascist controls of the hearts and minds of the public. All in a good cause, at first, but that cozy relationship has only strengthened over time.
Barack Obama did us all a favor by abolishing the "Fairness Doctrine," which meant to distinguish between opinion and objective news. What the fairness doctrine actually did was create a Washington Beltway consensus on reality that was then promulgated as "objective truth" to the masses. This back-door censorship was much more insidious, pervasive, and difficult to oppose than the BLATANT partisanship, de-platforming, shadow-banning and outright censorship that is now on full display.
I think Obama thought this would put the media on total Democrat lock-down. Gloves off. Push the socialist/globalist project through the home stretch to Democrat Party hegemony. All he really accomplished was short-term success and long-term disaffection, as the lies are not NEARLY as well-hidden. Throw in the proliferation of smart phones, and suddenly every citizen has the potential to scoop even the biggest network, and expose truths that conflict with what's on the ABC/NBC/CBS (The American equivalent of BBC, only less obviously creatures run by the government).
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You overlook prior centuries of colonialism. What about Commodore Perry's White Fleet sailing (and steaming) into Tokyo Harbor and telling the Japanese "Trade with us, or else." Japan was the last man standing in Asia. Many in Asia LIKED the idea of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, until they realized what Japan actually meant by it.
The Japanese had ZERO respect for the conquered. What they did was definitely terrible, but it's exactly what they expected from others if THEY were conquered.
Newt Gingrich wrote a book on this period of history. I picked up some Cliff Notes on it, so to speak, and the Japanese saw the same kind of colonial oppression to be visited on them by America in the future that the British, Portuguese and others visited on Asia before that. Memories of the Opium Wars were still fresh throughout Asia, and after Perry said "Trade or die," they were galvanized into a crash campaign to modernize and fight back.
I think the Japanese saw themselves becoming powerless vassals of the USA if they did nothing, and even though they were rightly skeptical of their chances in a confrontation with the USA, it was either fight back or lose their autonomy and identity. With their tradition of no quarter for the enemy amongst themSELVES and a strong "death before dishonor" ethos, Pearl Harbor sneak attack was seen as their best - albeit slim - hope of remaining independent and preserving their nation and culture.
What I'm seeing from this video is the traditional, 70-year-old version of events. Japan DEFinitely had territorial and imperial ambitions, but they were not wrong in seeing the USA and European Allies as imperialist aggressors. But as the Nazis did in Europe and parts East, their contempt and abuse of conquered peoples and lands was in many respects their undoing. If they had ruled more "gently," they may've found will allies in Asia. But they just didn't/couldn't think that way, after centuries of "death before dishonor."
"We beat you. You're still alive. Why are you still alive? You obviously have no honor. There's nothing we might do to you that you don't deserve." They committed innumerable atrocities, but they expected the same kind of atrocities should THEY be conquered, because to them, the defeated have no rights. "You lost. Just slit your belly and be done with it."
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This is unclear. He's taken a zig-zag route on foreign policy, but his openly stated aims appear to remain the final goal. That missile attack in Syria sure looked Deep State to ME, but then, months later, he's trying to get OUT of Syria and Afghanistan (where empires go to die). If he were serious about that missile attack, do you think he would've announced it and then given time for people to clear out of the way? I think he's trying to create the impression in and out of his administration that he's going along, when I think he might just be sandbagging, in order to give himself wiggle room.
An alternate take on Maduro in Venezuela is that - as with Kim Jong Un - he's rattling his saber to effect change in policy in Venezuela. I don't think he's into the whole "smear, destabilize and overthrow" strategy we've been following for many years, now. I just think it's not easy to dismantle the apparatus all at once. And I suspect the whole Bolton-Abrams thing is just posturing, in order to extract/induce concessions/moderation. If N. Korea and Venezuela think he's "dangerous," and not some blithering weak-wristed idiot, they become pliable. And if they don't, then their fear may goad them into precipitating their own downfall, without our having to use any force, whatsoever.
I think Trump understands the dangers of using force. The blowback. I think The Resistance is addicted to force, and habitually manipulate media and gov process for their selfish aims. I keep thinking of SHOGUN, and how Toranaga (historical figure, Tokugawa Ieyasu) appeared to be losing on all fronts, because of all the dangers he was juggling simultaneously. What he was actually thinking the whole time bore little resemblance to what the onlooking fools thought.
Unlike the "Zionist Conspiracy" crowd, I think there are Jews on both sides of this fight, the same as there are blacks, whites, Christians, Asians, and Muslims on both sides.
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Most of the stories have already been told. In fact, most were told ages ago, and all we've been doing, ever since, is changing around with the details. Star Wars was just a space Western. Most Westerns tell old, old stories, with cowboys instead of men in robes.
What makes it entertaining and relevant is the execution.
About the only thing I'm racist about is when I read a book and it describes a character in detail, only to see them race or gender-swap that character to fill a quota. But it didn't start with wokesters. Before "woke," it was "Yeah, but that actor isn't famous enough, so we'll use this blonde-haired guy to play the Asian lead."
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The press's ORIGINAL job was to take sides, and the 1st Amendment exists to ALLOW that. In the 20th Century we forgot about that and we've been lying to ourselves ever since that the media are or ever WERE objective! And except for FOX, plus a bunch of other networks denied a place in cable, the legacy media are one-note. The Founding Fathers envisioned an open and free competition between competing viewpoints. In the 20th and on into the 21st Century, we bought into one perspective as The Objective perspective, when the networks should always have been fighting and bickering between different world views, while the American people decided for themselves which viewpoint is closer to the truth.
The "good old days" of objective journalism NEVER ACTUALLY EXISTED. Things are contentious, now, and so much censoring is going on, now, because the MONOLITH lost its stranglehold on the public square. It's ugly. It's messy. It's the way things should be. Everyone agreeing is SCARY - or should be! Everyone bickering and arguing over proposed changes is SUPPOSED to keep things fairly close to what was already a pretty good thing, already.
Our system is supposed to keep it simple, and not deviate much from basic principles. The feds hastily stick their noses into EVERYthing, with less skill or competence than the average person working in the field or industry over which the federal government wrongly legislates. Free flow of information in a free market has ALWAYS gotten the people to a better place more quickly and with less unintended harm than anything idiot politicians ever did.
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Welp, most of the guys who are gonna be up on charges have left the administration, by now. We have a much better chance of making a case, now, than when, for instance, Comey was still FBI director. Maybe this isn't late. Maybe it's simply the right time. You don't want to go rushing at the enemy with spears, only to be mowed down by automatic weapons. There's a TON of stuff that's only recently been discovered.
And on a historical time scale, things are moving REALLY fast! I'm a geologist, and I haven't caught my breath since November, 2016!
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@michelguevara151 Not everyone has time to watch the longer stuff. But if you didn't do the readings as a younger man, the longer videos are worth listening to. For me, doing the readings is much more efficient. I can't always concentrate the entire length of a video, but when I'm reading, I'm totally engaged until I put it down. You can run the video in the background while you go about your mundane daily activities, but it's easy to miss chunks.
Sometimes, I queue up a video before I go to bed. But I always fall asleep before it's over, so that method requires some work getting through the stuff you slept through.
The half-hour pieces are more distilled. I already knew a lot about the delusion of command economics, and that the Nazis were totalitarian. TIK brings the facts, in detail. But it's always the same thing. The political class knows what it wants and can get a lot of it by force. But things always fray at the ends. The sand slips through their fingers. Without real price-based valuation and allocation of resources, everything crumbles.
This is why war is wasteful, and wasteful people need war.
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I disagree, foxbat144. I've known a lot of idealistic leftists, who treat the world like family and wonders why everybody isn't like that, and sincerely believe that the gov't should express their values, including being a giver. To them, every nickel spent on weapons systems is a nickel that could've gone towards Internet for some poor kid, or food in someone's belly, or a warm, dry, not-stinky place to sleep at night.
When you think like that - and it seems to hold up to scrutiny - you can miss the fact that gov't can't change as fast as society is changing around it, and believe me, we've got the gov't surrounded. That transparency thing is a 2-way deal. As the state learns to use high tech, so is high tech used against them.
Since my 1st e-mail, back in the '80s, I think, I've always assumed what I sent could live forever.
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Very sad day. I'm not sure that never letting your kids play, unattended, is the solution. But you shouldn't let them out, alone. There's safety in numbers, with or without an adult. When we were kids, the fear wasn't that some adult would mess with us, but that we would torment adults! Yes, know who your kids are with. But we played on our own, together as kids, all the time. And God help any adult stranger who messed with us!
A far greater danger to kids than "stranger danger" is the trusted friend, neighbor or relative, who abuses that trust. That adult who has permission to be around your kids, but shouldn't. If kids don't learn to get along without adult supervision 24/7, have trouble getting along without an authority figure throughout their lives. Kids need to learn to settle their differences as equals, and having Mommy in sight all day long is not how that happens.
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I've never been able to find the movie, again, but there's one where he bumps into somebody, knocks them down, they start chasing him, he bumps into somebody else trying to escape, and so on, until the entire town is chasing him. He runs into a blind alley and swarms up a drain pipe to the roof like a monkey or SpiderMan. Rushes to the other side, makes his death-defying descent, and soon there's another chain reaction mob chasing him, so there's one on his heels and another one looking for him, with all the confusion and mayhem you might expect. As I recall, two of the mobs (I think there were more than just two) run into each other and start brawling, until somebody spots him and they join forces.
Non-stop laughs. You honestly can't stop. Good thing they were silents, because by 1 minute in, the crowds must've been SCREAMiNG with laughter. I just can't remember the title.
Years later, I think the snobs all agreed that "The General" was, in fact, a masterpiece.
So many of his shorts were lost or destroyed in fire or by other causes.
Nobody - I mean nobody - could do a chase scene like Buster Keaton. He was an unbelievable athlete.
I'm not sure how I feel about his first wife. I think he fooled around a LOT, even before she gave him permission. The ladies LOVED him. I imagine there are 10s or 100s of long-faced descendants with some other last name running around to this day. In his wife's defense, there's probably no telling what STDs he might have brought home. I don't blame her for refusing to sleep with him, after a certain point. The one thing I have no respect for is how his first two wives spent his money and walked off with most of it. Patriarchy, indeed!
I used to feel sad, learning his life story, but I think he had a good old time - better than most - for much of it.
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Not quite, Jimmy. Yes, things are being run by criminals, but it's progressives like you who gave them the power they have by insisting that the federal government fix everything, when the only way society gets fixed is from the ground, up.
You'll never be able to fix things top-down. That's what's wrong with your thinking. You want to fix medical care? Abolish the Department of Health and Human Service. You want healthy, safe, affordable food at the grocery? Abolish the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
You want to be safe during a major health crisis? Abolish National Institute of (ill) Health and the Centers for Disease Control.
You can NEVER be sure that the people running these institutions are without sin. Of course you're going to get pathological people rise to the top in these major institutions, if not today, then next year or the year after. The underlying problem is your insistence that we centralize everything in Washington, DC and give ANYbody that much power.
Russell Brand has woken up to this. De-centralize. Leave decisions to the local communities and gasp families.
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Both drivers were asshats in this situation. I don't think anybody's going to get out a yardstick to prove the cammer car entered the lane too soon. But the driver in the other car was clearly confused about where they were, coming to an almost complete stop in the thru lane before pulling into the turn lane without looking.
I don't think the cammer car was intending to pass. It's just that the other car was so slooooowwwww. Still, the cammer car should have started slowing down, when the other car slowed way down. Similar to situations where someone's trying to merge AHEAD of you, forcing you to brake, only a lot of these cammer cars do NOT back off, because they KNOW they're RIGHT. It's annoying as hell when people try to pass a line of cars JUST in front of the lane ending. If nobody will let them in, that's their problem, but the people not letting them in are turning bad situation worse.
I think this is a tendency with semi drivers when they have the right of way, because keeping momentum is such a big part of keeping those big trucks moving at speed. I'm just a 4-wheeler operator, but I've driven more than my share of the early rice-burners to be jealous of every bit of momentum, because it takes forever to build it up. Nowadays, most 4-wheelers are pretty peppy, but I (can only) imagine how a semi driver must feel about giving up the momentum because someone's actin' the fool.
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All these "new problems" are being created by the people who promised to solve the "old problems," if we'd just give them more money, personnel and power. This created the "new problems," which they'll need more money, personnel and power to solve. They never solved the "old problems," so they need to keep that power from before, plus these new powers. Any BUSINESS that was run in this way would quickly fail. Government just votes itself more money.
It's like giving the school football team to the school basketball coach with an 0-34 record. Handling BOTH teams, he'll need a lot more assistants, and maybe take on some of the duties of the Athletic Director, just so "things will run more smoothly." In government, failure gets you a bigger budget. It doesn't get you fired. In fact, you will be praised for all the good work you're doing and everyone will agree you just need more money.
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I see these young bucks outdoors, testing their bodies (wrecking their bodies?), and it seems like a great activity for city kids. It's such a young sport, though, most of the 'community' is kids who like loud music and probably smoke weed (but maybe that's my USA bias). Neither the music nor the dope-smoking are big deals to ME, but if I had small kids and I lived on that block, I'm sure I'd look at it, differently.
But I think parkour is here to stay, and as the current generation gets a little older, they'll work the system to make parks dedicated to parkour, just like you see skateboarding parks all over the USA.
As an old fart, I'd rather see kids toughening themselves up, outside, doing parkour, than loitering around getting into mischief in an urban desert, where the main 'healthy' outdoor activities are organized sports run by grownups.
I'm not as much into seeing the unnecessary/gratuitous gymnastics (Look! Double pike-position!), but I enjoy the timed competitions and would LOVE to see a "follow the leader" kind of race. Endlessly fascinating to see the 'solutions' these kids come up with for shaving seconds off their times. Like the first guy to say "Screw that route. I can just jump clear over that obstacle and WIN!"
My biggest issue with parkour would be watching live events, where a kid crashes and burns. Edit that stuff out, AFAIC. I hate seeing people get hurt! Like the replays in NFL football, where they do the super-slow-mo of a guy's knee exploding... I don't watch those bits, even though I know a lot of people do, and they'll never stop showing them. Heh. That's fine.
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The elephant in the room is the history of Europeans and especially the British Empire re-drawing the map to please themselves and then getting the usa to do it for them, and keep the resources coming from underdeveloped countries in such a way that they never develop on their own.
I don't care how much we love our Judeo-Christian heritage or Christ, Himself. Who were we to create a nation-state from scratch against the will of the people living there? How many OTHER nations have perished over the millennia? Why does Israel get a do-over, enforced by, exploited by and exploiting overwhelming force from lands far away? What the Nazis did ini the first half of the 1940s doesn't justify what we did in the 2nd half, nor what we've been doing, since, to maintain a (mostly) soft hegemony around the world, except when we decide to "go hot" and wreak destruction around the world.
Hamas are renegade. We made them renegade, or at the least had a hand in the pathology we see manifest in ungovernable Palestine. Megyn sounds neocon on this issue. It's a knee-jerk reaction in American politics. Nobody asks "What right did we have to carve out a re-born nation by force in the region?" Go back a little farther in your history, Megyn. This is an ethnic/territorial dispute that's gone on for millennia. What business is it of ours?
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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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Not true. Russia HAS been largely contained, even at the height of the Soviet Empire. They never achieved their own frontage on the Mediterranean, and we destroy (regime-change) countries that offer them sea ports abroad to this day. (Libya and Syria are two.)
Russia still doesn't have any warm water ports it owns. It's got access to the Black Sea, and can only get to the Mediterranean by Turkey's sufferance. That sticks in their craw. We kept Russia from having any colonies abroad during colonial times.
After WW II, the USA picked up where Europe left off, keeping the Russian Bear contained.
IMO, Putin's probably the only man strong enough and with enough integrity to pull off the re-birth of a HEALTHY, LIBERAL Russia. Since trying to overthrow Lenin, back in the day, we've done nothing to nudge Russia towards a true liberal representative republic. Everything we've done has forced their leaders to SQUEEZE more, pushed them towards a war-time footing in perpetuity. The more sanctions there are, the more Putin has to use force on his own people, just to keep his country together.
The main result from all this is the USA becoming more and more like Communist dictatorships it supposedly opposes.
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Same deal with doctors, only worse, dating back to the 1970s. Free medical for everyone! Then they run out of money, and stop paying doctors. In the '70s, you couldn't find a male doctor. Nurses would kind of become pseudo-doctors, because what the Soviets PAID doctors wasn't worth giving up 8 years of your life for the training. When asked, doctors in Soviet Russia stated they would prefer to be farmers, because the state took good care of farmers (at the expense of, for instance, doctors and engineers), because of their ideology which basically put the government in the position of just deciding who does what and what they'll be paid.
Even in homogeneous societies (which ours isn't), socialized medicine runs up against limited resources, and government is a TERRIBLE manager. You're guaranteed your health care, but they decide if you're worth curing, and even if you are worth curing, you're going to have to wait in line.
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What Kissin (sp?) doesn't get is that the West abandoned the moral high ground and is NOT as strong as it once was. Look around. In debt up to our eyeballs and talking about war? We're in no position to speak in such terms. We're teetering on economic catastrophe, not because of free-market capitalism, but because of falling into fascism while PRETENDING to be a beacon of hope and freedom, while we piss it all away on one stupidity after another.
How can we export ideals that we no longer exemplify?
And Putin's totally justified in feeling nervous about expansion of NATO into Ukraine. Russia's not a bunch of saints, but look at the last two centuries. Napoleeon in the 19th, Hitler in the 20th, and now saber rattling by NATO in the 21st.
And while we're all uptight about Russian troops on the border (is that really more than there were, before? I don't think so.), we don't even consider actions we have been taking to influence politics in Ukraine, how we pour tons of money into Ukraine to prop up corerupt oligarchs from whom a handful of top U.S. officials are extracting millions for their own personal and family fortunes. If they can demonize the Russians, maybe nobody notices how they're feasting on Ukraine's corpse, with the assistance of corrupt oligarchs, there.
This has been going on for 30 years, and the Russians have a legit gripe. WE have been destabilizing Ukraine, and obstructing thseir efforts to end corruption, even to the point of impeaching Trump for trying to HELP them fight corruption. Meanwhile, Joe Biden is on video bragging about how he used American aid as a lever to STOP them from prosecuting the company his son worked for. Not a WORD in mainstream media about the BLATANT pay-for-play and quid-pro-quo going on, THERE, but everybody heard a bunch of made-up shit about Trump along those same lines.
Putin's holding all the cards. We can still mess things up for everybody’s , if we listen to the war mongers and let them embroil us in another murderous conflict, abroad, with no exit strategy and no real purpose.
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@Pho8os It starts with BAD SCHOLARSHIP IN THE HUMANITIES and it spreads like a cancer, through use of false authority and untenable theories presented as proven fact. I think it's sweet irony to see Christian cultists going toe-to-toe with collectivist cultists. The collectivists are masters of sophistry. The Christians have the courage of their convictions.
But a lot of atheists are against CRT, too. I'm a superstitious agnostic, myself. I'm fine with Christians when they don't get too oppressive. They're generally more tolerant and definitely more honest overall than the collectivist cultists who want all MY money, which they will count in their mansions, and have no compunctions about using any available form of coercion necessary. Shaming, smearing, character assassination, intimidation, silencing, ... These are all on full display by the collectivist/statist side. I'm not seeing it from the Christians, at present. They're in good-behavior mode when they're out of power.
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It's not even about whether masks do what they say or not. It's about NOBODY weighing the trade-offs and nobody sincerely trying to minimize the harm. If they were, then they'd also try to make sure everybody was able to make a doctor's appointment. People die of all kinds of different things. The giant brains in government didn't weigh things rationally. They just seized on the small array of solutions most beneficial to themselves and then used coercive, deceptive, and secret means to exclude all others.
Same with climate change. Whether you believe it's a looming catastrophe or not, the elites latch onto one solution or one set of preferred solutions, excluding all others, and accuse you of science denial, because you're more worried about the drawbacks to their schemes. "Listing drawbacks is literally genocide."
How about making it easier for people to incorporate permaculture/Earthship concepts in their homes, instead of harder? How about selling people on the idea of a nifty little EV to zip around town in? That'd make sense. But no. There's no comparison to an internal combustion engine if you need to do a lot of work or cover a lot of ground. We don't have nor do we want the infrastructure necessary for full-on EV future. Makes sense in the city. Makes no sense in the country.
Even if sincere, the nature of government is to bureaucratize and for bureaucratic elites to eventually run amuck. We're in the "run amuck" phase, right now, and hopefully the people who want to call themselves "liberal" will wake up and realize the government can't solve the human condition. Good people who care about and look out for each other as a culture come closest of any means discovered to date. Such people operate best in a limited-government setting. The minute you put an agency in charge of solving homelessness, it is no longer your responsibility to help anyone, because you cheerfully pay your taxes. smh
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@yukitai9063 ... or by copying Mon or Dad. Most of these boys who act out aren't getting much positive attention from Mom or Dad. And if their Dad isn't around, most boys are going to take Mom's measure by age 10 or 12 and do pretty much whatever they please. Some mom's are stern and consistent enough to pull it off, but mine wouldn't've been, not without Dad to put the fear of God into us.
That's about the age I was when I realized Mom couldn't catch me, corner me, or hit me if I didn't want to be caught, cornered or hit. Dad could run all of us down into his 30s, and proved it. By his 40s, all he had to do was act like he was 'bout to get up, mad, and nobody wanted to test him.
But I saw other kids who obeyed their parents, but weren't under constant death threats from the Old Man. After years of teaching, I've learned that you can demand a lot out of people without dire threats, insults, and a$$-kickings.
That's how I was early in my teaching, because that was how my father taught me. But most people don't thrive under the tutelage of a narcissist. I used to think Dad was just toughening us up for the real world, and I suppose he was, in a way, but looking back, it was all about his ego and keeping us kids feeling worthless, and building himself up.
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On the other hand, some people tend to "disappear" without being immersed in the in-person work force. Some students will struggle to do their work, if there's no in-person meeting and daily work hand-ins, where they see everybody ELSE turning in THEIR work. I just think we need to catch the kids when they're young, and teach them how to use online learning tools, which are WAY advanced, compared to when I was trying to make it work 35 years ago, with the first phone modems operating at 9600 baud.
As with traditional lecture, there are students who THRIVE on the remote format. Some, especially adult learners who KNOW how to work, find the remote to be the only way to grow their skill sets while still taking care of family or working a full-time job.
The thing about remote learning is that the traditional teaching isn't working any more.
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Actually, we haven't become more radicalized. What's happening is the people who feel the strongest are hijacking all the platforms, giving us a false dichotomy between crazy left and crazy right.
A "normal" person needs to pick and choose, and have the courage to call out lefties and righties when they go too far. Sometimes Jimmy Dore gets it right. Sometimes Alex Jones gets it right. But no "normie" I know agrees with anybody on everything.
For instance, Tucker Carlson gets a lot of stuff right, but he doesn't score any points with me when he cites divine revelation (his religious faith) as the source of his belief in something. I can respect that belief, but it's not moving the needle for me in the "That's RIGHT! It's in the BIBLE so it MUST be true," because I know a little something about the nature and motivations of the people who wrote the thing. Bronze-Age wise men were definitely wise, and definitely limited in their understanding.
For instance, making homosexuality a taboo is a fairly good survival strategy for a Bronze-Age tribe with no notion of disease transmission or safe sex. Men are dogs, and when men have the hots for other men, runaway promiscuity can take place. But in a modern society, making it a taboo actually leads to less responsible behavior. This is another reason I like the idea of the same recognition of marriage between same-sex couples as any other couple. Encourage long-term, monogamous relationships, rather than encourage repression of your desires for long periods, with short periods of zipless sex in restrooms or orgies, which are an epidemic just waiting to happen.
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It was just a matter of time. I doubt these crooks will ever be prosecuted. If there were actual WILL and PRINCIPLE on the Republican side, they would have gone full attack mode during lockdowns. They didn't. They just waited for the political winds to shift, and THEN they suddenly grew a brain and a backbone.
Due to my job and my particular situation, I was able to just keep my head down and keep working, without being forced to take an experimental medication. I can't tell you how I would have responded if it was "get the jab or lose everything (but save your soul and your health)."
The inhumanity, corruption, stupidity, cowardice, and greed were on full display.
People think that changing leadership will change this, but unless the cabinet appointees GUT their own departments, which none of them will do once they're in office and enjoying the POWER of the post.
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If Trump jacks up the tariffs on Chinese goods to 25%, the river of jobs leaving china will become a flood. And they held the summit in Vietnam, which is EXACTLY the part of the world that will profit, handsomely, if those tariffs kick in, because SE Asia is where those jobs are going, already. And China's economy is already stumbling, because of Trump's threat to carry out the 25% tariffs. And more.
The Chinese have been behaving like thugs in the world economy, and it's catching up to them. Their current policies have all the hallmarks of Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere, which seemed like a good thing, when Japan seemed to offering an alternative to European colonialism. But as soon as they got in the door, they proved that their brand of imperialism was far more brutal and exploitative than even the European colonialists prior to that.
For Chinese to compete in the world economy, they need an educated and productive middle class, but you can't maintain that middle class under totalitarian rule. As soon as people start getting educated and build their skill sets, they start questioning authority. China's always happy to crush dissent, but it comes at great cost in economic freedom and growth. They can't compete with us without becoming more like us. There's the same glass ceiling above Chinese ambitions that there was over Soviet ambitions.
I think they underestimated their vulnerability, with things all going their way, offering sweetheart deals to get in the door with many countries in various difficulties, but once in, they show what they're really after and how they operate, and one after another, countries are saying they don't want the Chinese. It turns out that their proposed infrastructure improvements in one country after another are tied to using Chinese companies to build the infrastructure, with control over all aspects.
My big worry was how the Chinese were buying up so much American debt. They thought by doing so that they'd have the U.S.A. at their mercy, and that all presidents would fold like Obama-Biden or Clinton or Bush, in order to finance the welfare-state Ponzi scheme (and the bloated war machine) that establishment politicians can't seem to resist. If the big spenders can't beg to borrow Chinese money, then the deficits on which they rely (at the expense of our children and grandchildren) will eventually sink the USA's economic boat.
Trump changed all that. But if USA doesn't get its fiscal house in order, de-facto Chinese economic hegemony will be close to absolute. Trump's attacking the prosperity side of the equation. We'll see what he can do in the next 6 years to put the budget on a trajectory to fiscal solvency, but economic growth and American jobs are the underpinning of that. Obama was CERTAIN that American factory jobs were dinosaurs, and that there was no bringing them back from extinction. All Trump had to do to bring investment back to the USA was threaten to trade with other countries the way they trade with the USA.
There was INSTANT reaction to those threats. There were sudden announcements of new factories in the USA and jobs fleeing China for parts South, where labor is cheap and tariffs are low.
I don't see the USA farming out its welfare programs to the 50 states any time soon, but in the meantime, it doesn't take huge changes in how Food Stamps and other programs are administered to get things under control. When Alabama passed laws requiring able-bodied welfare and food-stamp recipients to WORK for their benefits, the welfare rolls dropped by 85%. 85%! To see for yourself, just Google "How many food stamp recipients left the rolls in alabama?" You don't have to eliminate the social safety net in order to rein in the ridiculous excesses and high costs.
Other states have (and will) follow suit. But it takes a Republican governor and state legislature to pass those kinds of resolutions. As big-spending-and-taxing-and-regulating states go broke, the tide will turn.
Then, if Trump can keep his promise to reduce the American military footprint, abroad, then the bloated Defense Department can actually work on National Defense, starting with securing our nation's borders! With HUGE SAVINGS for American taxpayers. Reining-in the welfare state AND the military-industrial complex are the two keys to fiscal solvency, and - by an annoyingly and necessarily zig-zag path, Trump is getting us there. He may be the best president we've ever had, in spite of his flaws.
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@samuelmartens9390 Maybe not my FAVORITE part, but definitely a most gratifying denouement, especially Galadriel's Gift and the new Mallorn.
I can see why it'd be tough to include in the original and very long trilogy without seeming anti-climactic to most noobs. Maybe a standalone for geeks? I can't see them investing a whole lot in it, after the bigger story that had just ended.
I would happily sit through another hour or more tacked on to Return of the King, but I'm not sure how anybody could see it as a big money-maker and giving it the kind of investment. Then again, the only special effect would be hobbits-vs-men scenes, and most of that can be handled with pretty mundane camera tricks.
I think we're seeing a migration away from mass society and old funding formulas/business models for higher-end movie production. There's definitely a convergence between capabilities of big studios and the independents. I just stumbled across a random video where guys were using drones, scale models, and clever camera work to create some outstanding imagery that's one step removed from the best Hollywood's putting out.
I can imagine people like that forming co-ops to collaborate on big projects, one day. Maybe we're not there, yet, but I can definitely see a convergence taking place between what little guys can do and what the big studios are capable of doing. And the big studios can't get out of their own way. They've diverged so far from their customers that I don't think they're going to be economically viable for much longer. They're too hemmed in by their own delusions, hang-ups and political religions.
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I think you're only just starting to see the iron fist in the velvet glove of their so-called "compassion." Government gives you half the service, charges everyone double to pay for it, and pretends it's doing you a favor. But you don't see the true cost, sometimes for decades. But it is inevitable. The recipients are lulled into being less prudent and self-responsible, the providers have no incentive to provide quality at a low price, and the taxpayer is lulled into thinking everything's OK, even though the government puts us all in debt to pay for the crappy job it does... We just don't see the full cost right away, and then we're dependent.
This was always coming. It was just a matter of when, and how it would make itself apparent to the people who ignore history. Sorry if that's harsh.
On the bright side, half of us already knew this was coming, and many others are waking up before we lost all agency. I hope.
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50 years ago, some loon chasing a woman in the subway would've been gang-tackled by 8 passers by. Now, if you defend yourself or others, YOU go to jail, and the criminal walks off, a free man. Insanity.
Democrats want their cities to fail, because since tax reform of 2017, they lost their massive federal subsidy. Before Trump, blue cities would tax the rich without mercy, but the rich could write it all off on their federal tax forms. Now, with a hard cap of something like $10,000, which doesn't affect regular working people, there's no more tax write-off for the rich people who pay for everything in cities like New York.
Now, the rich people are moving out, and the cities' crooked way of shifting their wasteful spending onto the backs of citizens in the heartland is no more, they NEED direct federal intervention. They need to force/persuade/invite the federal government to come in and establish order over the chaos these Democrats created, seemingly on purpose, because surely no one was so stupid as to believe their "re-imagining law enforcement" was anything but bad.
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@Spanky Harland : The Bolsheviks were helped by two main factors: The Tsar was a murderous tyrant and their bellies were empty. They lost power due to two main factors: The Bolsheviks were murderous tyrants and the people were radioactive (Chernobyl). The big enemy of ruling by fear is that people will stop following you if you FAIL. You can rule by fear as long as you keep winning. The Tsar lost BIG-time to the Japanese. The Soviets were proven incompetent by Chernobyl.
Incompetence at the top (or just the absolute impossibility of effectively running a command economy (like progressives seem to want, btw) from the top down, no matter how smart you (think you) are. Shit won't be more fair when you appoint one top dog commissar to ensure fairness. An economy is built on individual choices by individual people, every day. By the time the government gets around to fixing a problem, it's too late, and they probably couldn't fix it by force, ANYway. But you buy one shirt that falls apart after one washing, and you will NEVER buy a shirt from that asshole, again. In a command economy, there's just the one shirt-maker, you take what you get, and you keep your damn mouth shut, you ungrateful bourgeoisie mother-fucker!
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P Nomis : I think that 9-million figure should be discounted, quite a bit, especially when you factor all the dead people still voting in Illinois, all the illegals voting in California, all the people voting in New York and Florida simultaneously, AND all the ballot-stuffing activities run every 2 to 4 years by Democrat fraudsters in control of virtually ALL city elections.
But more to the point, Trump won a RECORD NUMBER OF STATES. And the Electoral College is in place PRECISELY so that city people, cut off from God's Good Earth, can't in their collective insanity, insularity and group-think way, run rough-shod over the REAL PEOPLE out in the countryside and in the heartland. I'm guessing you probably live somewhere (probably a city) where you rarely encounter anyone who doesn't think the same low-information way YOU think, and when you DO, there's always a mob around to shame, harass, bully and smear the idiot with a different perspective than you and all your pals.
Conservatives don't labor under that handicap. We're typically SURROUNDED by people like you, who are OFFENDED by any opinion that is not 100% in line with your religion that you don't even realize IS a religion, because your faith is so deeply embedded in your consciousness that you don't even question most of your assumptions, let alone any of your conclusions, even though both are firmly footed in SAND.
For conservatives, it's kind of heady stuff to be in a comments section that isn't overrun by bigoted, low-information NPCs, who all have the same programming, so they think they're the smart ones. Hopefully, we're more gracious than libtards are, when the shoe's on the other foot. You're misguided, misinformed and otherwise a bit ignorant of the real world, but at least none of us here is instantly labeling you as a racist, in order to marginalize and otherwise SILENCE you.
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poodle dog: I think it was Berkeley where I saw Unite America First dude get messed with (standard camera attack and flee), and the cops witnessed the act, the UAF dude was super cool and super well-spoken. Cops made the arrest and then came back to UAF and asked if he wanted to press charges. It was a (malicious) misdemeanor where the guy took a hard swipe at the phone, knocking it from his hand and catching his head. But it didn't seem like there was much harm done to phone and person, other than having some dumb-ass do that to you, and put you through that
UAF is African, with dreads down his neck, and a bright red MAGA hat, just circulating around. I don't know how tough he is, but he'll go right into the crowd and start talking to people. He's got a unique look and a real gift for inoffensive gab. If ANYbody can engage crazy people in give-and-take, UAF can.
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"After that attack that happened in Portland two weeks ago, I went to Twitter to express my anger and to spread awareness as to what Antifa is. And the closest I ever got to expressing anything dangerous, was to say that conservative need to arm themselves for self-protection. But I said not to just go out and buy a gun, there’s more to it than that. You need to take classes, you need to understand, respect, and fear that weapon and know the law.
"But it’s sad that this is one of the things that we have to do now because it’s getting that bad. There literally is a group of people going around beating people up because they have different political points of view. And, at some point in time, we have to stand up for ourselves."
And anyone who's honest and did some research knows that the violence in the streets of Berkeley and Portland is far left. They're trying to provoke the right and center-right at every opportunity by starting fights that the right will finish in front of cameras, making their prophecy self-fulfilling. I'm amazed at how restrained the right has been through all this. The media still spin it against them, every time, but there are just too many damn smartphones in citizens' hands to suppress it. That's why Antifa attack reporters and anybody else obviously video-recording their activities.
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The "bad" head teacher is only passing on the diversity, inclusion and equity trainings that Robin DiAngelo and other race grifters have made (almost) mandatory for teachers in public schools in USA and, apparently, the UK, and which the education establishment embraces as the latest and greatest thing in education.
Critical theory opened up entire new areas of education research, with a new body of junk literature becoming canon. We already know what works and what doesn't in subjects like math, science, English, etc. But that doesn't get an education major much opportunity to do research. So, putting a racial angle on everything gives you easy stuff to do "original research" on. It's the same kind of "creativity" you see in Hollywood, where tokenizing a character to fill more racial/gender checkboxes is what has replaced original stories and storytelling. It's all intellectually and morally bankrupt. It's the invasion of the academy by a non-theistic religion.
You want under-represented groups to show up in college and succeed? Get them out of the public-school system that has abandoned learning in poorer communities. In the USA, they spend well over $10,000 a year on each child. Imagine if parents had that money and could shop for the best school possible with it! The public schools would empty out and private schools would spring up overnight.
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@JIMDEZWAV "Misinformation" is whatever the establishment deems it to be. Last year's conspiracy theory is this year's "Well, of course that's what's happening!" Lab-leak hypothesis? Censored. Why? To keep Dr. Fauci's cabal out of jail and above suspicion, while they engineer the stupidest response to an epidemic in history, while we worship political appointees as the only scientists we're allowed to listen to.
"Don't deny the science!" But I remember when the tobacco companies had a line of scientists stretching clear out the door swearing on the Bible that nicotine wasn't addictive and smoking didn't cause cancer. COVID can ONLY be treated by Big Pharma vaccine. Shut up about any other treatment you kook! Don't talk about survival rates for COVID for people who aren't over 65 with co-morbidities. Let's just quarantine everybody. It'll be fine.
Scientists don't suddenly become 100% wise and truthful when they get their diplomas. As a scientist/mathematician, I can make things look any way you want them, and I can make it stick, too, if you silence everyone who questions my data manipulations. In multivariate settings, you can crank out whatever result you want, just by tweaking one or two coefficients in your model or throwing out "problematic" data. That's at the root of climate-change hysteria. No, I'm not a "denier." I just have a difference of opinion with the power-grabbers as to how significant our impact is and DEFINITELY part from the establishment when it comes to their self-enriching, fascistic "solutions," which even the experts admit will do little to solve the problem, while costing the poor and middle class ENORMOUSLY.
"Sorry, Mrs. Jones. You're going to have to freeze to death this winter because we're going to raise the cost of energy beyond your ability to keep your home heated. It's for your own good. I'm saving you, don't you see? YOU are destroying the planet. Not us, with our private jets and military consumption (Biggest consumer of fossil fuels), which comes before the planet's needs (apparently). China can keep on polluting as much as it wants, of course. We don't need to crush THEIR people. They're already crushed."
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It's the left who deny reality. Their fruits are manifest in the education system, which is failing, inner cities, which are blighted, and lack of reason and outright lies to push a collectivist agenda. History proves that the ultimate result of collectivism is the crushing of the individual. Deny history and the historical rise of humanity. Deny the main obstacle to such: authoritarian government. Then insanely push for more authoritarian policies, attacking free speech and the right to keep and bear arms.
If ANYbody's in a religious cult, it's the empty-headed consumers of establishment propaganda that's been force-fed Americans through the major media since major media were invented. The Internet has finally offered a voice that is NOT controlled by elites, and so of course, the Establishment reaction is to paint everyone who doesn't wish to live under fascism a religious cultists.
You guys are the real cultists. You ignore and suppress any science that isn't in line with your ideology. It's very transparent, unless all you do is listen to lefties, who are very clever at plastering over the contradictions, such as "We want freedom" offered side-by-side with "We want government to run our lives for us!"
Unfortunately, there remain people who want - and DEMAND - authority over their own lives, and REFUSE to just roll over while elites try to turn us into herd animals.
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Probably. The only way to trap the bastards was to NOT take them head-on as they hoped and expected. Just LET them act the fool, cover your ass, and mock them. The best defense against the anti-Trumpers was their own arrogance and bias. Any other man would be shaken and close to breaking, with half the nation and his own administration out to get him. But not Trump. Water off a duck's back. Control what you can and put that other stuff in a compartment, while you go about your business. Frettin' does no good. And acting unfazed through the whole thing, without resorting to force to just STOP the madness, he let the madness run its full course to the point where his most ardent and respected detractors have made absolute fools of themselves.
I'm not sure Sessions' recusal was part of a larger plan, but what it did was leave an apparent Trump-free zone at the top of the DOJ, which encouraged the "Resistance" to over-reach. And, after 8 years (plus) of playing a crooked game with a stacked deck, that's just what they DID. A Tweet, here and there, to poke the hornets' nest, but apparent weakness on the process side, which was still under Obama-supporting partisan hacks. Hacks are GREAT when you just need a "Yes" man to rubber-stamp whatever you're selling, but as active agents of the resistance, without guidance, and joined by a growing number of Trumpatriots in the positions around them? If they're up to no good, they have to be subtle and think things through. They're hacks, though, and they just see the surface, themselves, but at the same time, if you reach out to them to guide them, you're opening yourself up to charges.
I think the conspirators - if there were any - HAD to keep their hands off. Of course, Slick Willie, whose whole career consists of impulse followed by cover-up by his Clinton Crime Family in Arkansas - and eventually U.S. - government, just HAD to talk to Loretta Lynch, because that's how he always did in the past. Exert your position and charisma at top people, and let all the underlings run around chasing ghosts. I think we saw the same kind of thing with Jussie Smollett, because Obama kind of did the same thing. Regardless of process or law, one phone call to the right person makes it all go away. That can work. For a while, but they over-reached. Over-used the same kind of simple-minded power-and-influence play to thwart the system that millions of us BUILT and millions of us must abide by.
Basically, we had 24 years of these same kinds of neoliberal/neoconservative people, from Clinton through Bush and then Obama, and they're SO used to winning by the same old tactics of controlling key positions, using lackeys to smear and intimidate opposition, spoonfeeding the media the preferred narrative, and even murder. But it made them complacent, lazy, and blind to the incompetence that they invited into their own ranks for the purposes of CONTROL, and the network of cronies was compromised and disintegrating with the Disruptor in the top spot, slowly replacing them with his own appointees.
24 years of the same mafia-style, banana-republic-style manipulations, and I think they just don't know any other way. They thought they had it all sewn up, but somehow, the part of America that is STILL just a basket of deplorables who just want to work, earn, raise kids and have a better life in the HEARTLAND rose up and voted the rascals out. It was a very near thing. It took winning 30 out of 50 states NOT under the domination of concrete-jungle cities under the domination of Democrat-machine politics and politicians. But he pulled it off. Still an uphill battle, with establishment media and most government employees absolutely against anybody upsetting this "thing of ours," where privilege and rank were passed out like candy to anyone willing to go along to get along. You see it in every statement of Hillary's, every "ah shucks" moment from Comey, and every smirk from Sztrok. These careerist insiders thought the U.S. Government was their own private plaything, and Trump came along and started kicking them out of their sandbox. Tears. Hatred. Resentment. Hysteria.
I think they hysteria, itself, coming from a sense of real outrage (and panic) was eventually their undoing.
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You're TOTALLY missing the point, Joey Koningsbruggen. Objectivist distrust government and would restrict its mandate to the original intent of the Constitution (without slavery and women not having a vote). We have added some nice innovations to the original (some good amendments), but the core truths (inalienable rights, limited gov't.).
The idea is that the gov't gets the monopoly for a very restricted set of tasks (defend the territory, uphold the Constitution) has been lost because politicians get re-elected by exceeding the Constitution, using force to benefit one group over another group.
I don't think a true objectivist, steeped in Ayn Rand's childhood under the Bolsheviks, and following her reasoning to Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal (not her famous works. Just her basic work, complete with footnotes), has much, if any, trust in gov't.
Quite the contrary. You don't seem to be getting the point about free trade between a society of free traders will always exceed gov't minimum guarantees.
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We oscillate wildly between giving China the keys to our castle and treating China as an adversary. There's a middle path, where we don't tolerate predatory trade practices or export our jobs (and pollution) to China AND we don't antagonize them, either.
Same with Russia.
I'm all for constructive engagement, provided the engagers are neither simps for the CCP nor saber-rattling imperialists. Our leaders appear to be either one or the other.
I think we can hold China accountable without threats or being jerks. Just tell them that if they want to trade with us, we need full transparency of work conditions. When they commit genocide, either cut off trade or raise tariffs, so they know there's a real cost to behaving like totalitarians and running roughshod over their people. Penalties for theft of intellectual properties should HURT.
But we just handed them most-favored-nation status, without any accountability.
As far as Russia goes, we're our own worst enemy, there, as well, dating back to WW I. We tried to overthrow Lenin right out of the gate. Of course they viewed us as antagonists. Yes. Marxist-Leninist ideology is toxic. The Russians know that better than WE do!
But time and again, we exaggerated the military threat (by a factor of 10 in some cases) and ignored the far more dangerous creeping socialism in our own country. NOW, when Russia appears to be getting its act together and on a trajectory to some kind of liberal democratic republic, we are now the socialists/fascists trying to cripple positive developments taking place.
Looking at what Putin inherited, I don't like his use of force, but I can't say he isn't on the middle path to something better. But he started with a country and a people emerging from Soviet rule. They went straight from the Czar to Lenin. They've NEVER known self-government. They don't have a thriving middle class. They never have. They're getting there. It's not perfect, but Putin's not the demon our MSM make him out to be.
It almost seems like the once-free West resents his sound economic and fiscal policies. Their TERRIFIED that he might create a gold-backed currency that's superior to their own fiat currency and fractional-banking practices. Russia resembles the USA before fiat currency and creeping socialism took over in the USA. Russia's a "recovering" socialist state, and we seem bent on de-railing the recovery, while WE descend into socialist malaise.
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I think she's romanticizing American journalism. There is definitely a Holy Grail called "objective journalism," but the best you're ever going to get are the ones who sell themselves as objective AND what they say holds up over time.
Mainstream media (so-called) has failed in that mission of reliability and objectivity. They had an oligopoly and they abused the power to sway public opinion in the exact wrong direction at some pretty critical points in recent history, and people are actually starting to remember, here and there. WMDs, lockdowns, mandates, Ivermectin-is-horse-paste, HCQ-is-not-an-option, RussiaGate, Hunter-Laptop-has-all-the-hallmarks-of-Russian-Propaganda, ...
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If you slept warm the whole night, you wouldn't've been waking up every couple hours to build the fire back up. It's still do-able, and you do get comfortable before you drop back off to sleep, after you stoke the fire, again, and the radiant heat starts hitting your shelter, again. But getting up every couple-three hours to build the fire back up says you got cold in the middle of the night. With your setup, you'd be putting on and taking off your boots, to kick the unburnt ends towards the middle and stoke it back up.
I think you were a little disingenuous about staying warm all night. You wouldn't've used up that wood if you didn't wake up a little chilly, with more desire to get up and stoke the fire than stay in bed. I do kind of like the way he built his fire. As it burns, it works its way towards the ends, so as the intensity dies down, there's more length to the fire. I imagine it becomes a smoking mess right before you re-stoke it.
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Here's the thing about stimulus: It's Stone Soup. And we can weather the storm if people place value on the stone soup, and throw in a carrot and a potato of their own. Next guy's got an onion, and another shot a rabbit this morning. And Granny just harvested fresh tomatoes from her window box. Nobody's makin' 'em chip in. They just all want to taste the soup, and when you season it with joy, it's mighty tasty.
It's a time to be generous to one another. I check with my neighbors, periodically, to see if they need anything or are short on anything. I give generously to the Food Bank (Not that generous, Harry. Time to re-up.). I threw $100 into the pot, which ain't great, but times 30,000 people working in this town is $3,000,000 for the Food bank Better to give it than to have it taken from you, I always say. My needs are simple and I stay in my flight envelope, financially.
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@aoelp Those all suck, too. Diversify your sources. Look especially for alt-tech sites where people who have been banned from Big Tech, which is just an extension of legacy t.v. networks, that are all in the hip pockets of corrupt government officials.
There's a lot of noise-to-signal, and you have to do your own checking of diverse sources. But you should've been doing that, all along. Only NOW, as the fascist media start disintegrating, are people realizing that a very small club of very powerful people are in control of what you are allowed to see on so-called "mainstream" outlets.
CNN? There are YouTubers who get more views and spit more facts. The "old" networks are dying. Their power far exceeds their actual following, as government officials control what is on those networks and act as if those networks represent the will of the people, which they most certainly do NOT.
FOX, as controlled corporate opposition, gives you more straight facts than the other legacy networks, but it's still controlled opposition.
A good place to start is anyone who had a sizable following who got banned from FaceBook, Twitter or YouTube. They don't get everything right, but they will tell you truths that you won't get from the so-called "mainstream."
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It sounds like China's struggling to punch that Eurasian transportation network into some of the more backward/smaller countries. A lot of fi'tin' 'n' feudin' in some places, because the Chinese appear to be running things for THEIR workers, rather than the native citizen workers, and reap all the rewards of the infrastructure.
But from a "historical forces" viewpoint, it didn't matter that the Romans or the Mongols were vicious bastards. The FACT of open roads over vast territories benefited all people, tremendously, which we don't notice due to our disdain for their barbarity and disrespect for human rights, starting with human right to life, itself. The better that transport network works, the better the lives of the people of all nations. And with prosperity comes more holding-the-government-accountable.
Continued human progress basically hinges on how right or wrong the Anthropogenic Global Warming crowd are. But the ultimate path to balance with the planet is through general prosperity. Achieve that, and populations stabilize or even shrink, which is a victory for Western 'Democracies' that has everyone terrified. With prosperity, children become more of a burden than a retirement plan, and ya gotta want 'em to mess with havin' 'em.
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No, Dr. Drew. If they'd been totally up-front, more people would've chosen to not get these hasty jabs. The lengths to which they went to keep us in the dark on everything, from the unknown long-term risks to all the treatments that are available, they would've had more trust, but probably less compliance! They did everything possible to maximize the number of people taking the experimental jab, even when it's becoming more and more obvious to everyone that its value is very slight, and it comes with risks that are right up there with the risk of COVID itself, when you factor in the total absence of information/data on long-term side-effects and the unwonted "rush to Jab!"
I see a lot of people taking the "It's just a problem with the marketing" tack, and it's TOTALLY DISINGENUOUS, and yet ANOTHER dishonest attempt to build trust where none is warranted.
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The Western model has drifted into government bloat and a fascist-flavored form of socialism that's trending towards the kind of governance that the Russian people rejected in '89.
I think the Russian people have become accustomed to a high level of functional freedom, simply because the infrastructure for top-down control crumbled, and as it was doing so, they were already ignoring the commissars or in cahoots with them to eke out a better life, without openly defying the regime.
Or that's my guess.
Anyway, these are delicate times, and the USA is doing everything it can to keep Russia as authoritarian as possible, by keeping the cold war simmering. Always adding stressors to their existence.
I think we should be friends, myself, and I think there are too many people who want to keep us at odds, for their own wealth and power.
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Yes, MrLeermeister: But they will be happy in their new religion, because everyone (except the small ruling class) will be equally poor, powerless and miserable.
But you show me a protester and I'll show you a closet aristocrat. They think THEY will be the ones ruling the proletariat. And when things don't turn out that way, they'll start protesting all over again, only to be crushed by the police state they ushered in.
I'm very low on human nature, right now. I think the socialists have already taken over. I see the kids entering college, these days, and they're ignorant of history and brainwashed by a whitewashed history of socialism, which has done nothing but get hundreds of millions of people killed in the last century.
Government is like the One Ring. Everybody thinks if THEY could have the power, the world would be a better place, but Sauron wins every time.
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Obama increased division. America loved proving it wasn't racist by electing him, and was looking forward to interracial harmony. But that's not what Obama delivered. He stoked the fires of resentment in the black community when he could've been like Jesus and stilled the waters. But he didn't. He pretty much encouraged it. And as someone who works in education, I never saw as much BS coming down from the federals in the 15 years I taught BEFORE he came alo,ng. And all of a sudden, the college bureaucracy went from one president, one vice-president, 4 deans and 12 chairs, to 8 vice-presidents, the same everything else, and entire new layers of bureaucracy devoted to monitoring and enforcing diversity mandates (from the desk of the president of the USA.). More trainings. More re-education. Even the definitions of words are changing from year to year. Without stability of the language, the language is useless in describing reality.
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@Stevarooni This. So much this! The worst people - the political climbers - infest the administrations of schools everywhere. The best teachers are too busy teaching to play those games.
As a mathematician, I saw this up close and personal. The people who couldn't cut the mustard in pure math got k-12 teaching certificates. So the weakest math majors ended up teaching math in high school. Then in graduate school, the people who wanted a doctorate, but couldn't cut the mustard got PhDs in "Math Education." THEY went on to become administrators. So basically, the worst math people became the teachers of our young children and the bosses of the mathematicians in the university!
I saw it REALLY up close from a colleague of mine, who was so SURE she knew everything about teaching math, and insisted everybody follow HER way. Then, privately, she would come to me and ask me questions about Calculus I !!! She knows HOW to teach, but she doesn't know the actual SUBJECT MATTER! It's disgusting. She didn't get what she wanted from our school, so she took another job at another school, where she could be the BOSS.
"No high-stakes testing." Translation - Don't force the students to actually prove they know the stuff.
"The students NEED to do activities a, b, c, t, u, v, w, x, y, z, because they learn better." Translation - If I can force MY students to work 30 hours per week on just MY class, with all MY activities, then they will really know the material well. (Of COURSE they learn more when you make them work at it 30 hours a week! But nobody has time for 30 hours a week on one class!)
"Students NEED group work!" Translation - We can get more students to pass if we don't require ALL of them to do the work.
Meh. I insist on the basic activities: homework and tests. I teach college, and a lot of my students are adults with full- or part-time jobs. It's not enough to be effective. You must also be EFFICIENT. I want the most learning in the least amount of time, and so do they.
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T. Henderson : Trump is a SALESMAN. He's up front on what he's selling, and he'll blow all kinds of smoke to sell it. "This truck has the power of 10 locomotives." And I can't tell you how many times I've seen the opposition in media make concessions they wouldn't, otherwise, without Trump FAR over-stating his case. As long as they can CORRECT what he said, they're more likely to let slip a fact or two on his side. It goes like this:
Trump makes wild claim.
"That's TOTALLY unreadonable. Now, if he'd said 'x' or 'y', then that would be reasonable."
Trump was just trying to get 'x' but he knew if he asked for it, that it would be only 'y'.
If you're not too caught up in the day-to-day, you see the method behind the apparent madness. The fact is that Trump is a better marketer than all who oppose him.
If you're not too caught up in the day-to-day, you also see that under all the smoke and fire, he's been more restrained and stuck to the law and the process, where other recent presidents have been like kids at Christmas, running wild with executive orders that took things beyond what Congress would do. Trump's fired off a kazillion executive orders, but a sizable fraction of them simply reversed previous presidents' end-runs around the legislature. And he's gotten criticized and even sued for doing it, by people who are pissed-off at how easy it was to dismantle so much of Obama's executive-order kingdom.
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@SniffBackBetter The disinformation campaigns waged against HCQ, Ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies, etc. are crimes against humanity, and should give pause to ANYbody pushing for Medicare-for-All. You don't want the bureaucrats controlling your medical care. The bureaucrats are controlled by Big Money and Big Pharma, but more importantly, they're spending Peter's money on Paul, so they don't care about quality OR cost, which is why socialized medicine for the masses is not a good idea. Safety net? Sure. Maybe. But for the majority? No. If the majority can't afford their own care, then no organ of the state can, either, inasmuch as they derive all their resources from the people.
Socialized medicine should be a last-resort thing, used only by the poor. The RICH understand this, because there's no way anybody in Congress (for example) is going cheap on THEIR medical care, but it's OK for the rest of us.
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@pauldi7268 : Everything YOU see as runaway capitalism is actually the result of government intrusion, which removes all the incentives to behave properly, and cements robber barons on top.
The free market does a much better job of responding to and serving the values of its customers, through competition than government regulators coming in and trying to solve problems, by force, under advisement from robber barons.
You fight the wrong thing. You really should read Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" and think about the proper role and scope of government. The problems you see in our system are invariably due to politicians weaponizing the outrage of people like you to take a little more power and cause more problems, which they always say are "unintended," but any fool could see coming a mile away.
Free markets have always imposed higher standards than government bureaucrats. By the time there's enough public outrage to demand government do something, the markets are already responding. Moral behavior and reputation are potent forces in marketing. Government sets arbitrary standards and the net effect is to favor the worse companies over the better companies.
Free markets created the rising tide that created the leisure and extra resources to actually seek higher values in the first place. It wasn't government. Government always follows society, garnering votes and virtue by wrong-headed programs that cause more long-term problems that idiots like insist must be solve by yet MORE government action.
You want sustainable living? Get government the hell out of it. If it's a value you demand, then there will be a free American just dying to provide that value.
Your antipathy towards capitalism denotes an almost religious faith in politicians and bureaucrats to do what good people like you and I can do much better. Do you honestly think Nancy Pelosi knows or cares about root problems, or do you think she (or Trump) are more interested in exploiting those problems to secure their positions of power and privilege?
Me, personally, I'm more inclined to think Trump is in it for the right reasons. He was a billionaire before deciding to run. Careerist politicians WANT the system we have. They made millions off the taxpayer tit.
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I haven't read as extensively as JBP, but his sense is my sense, when it comes to a better, greener future for all. You want people to care about the environment, then RAISE their level of prosperity. A person living day-to-day is not at all concerned about the environment. They're worried about food, clothing and shelter TODAY. What's the best way to get there? Reduce the size and scope of national governments around the world. Guarantee the rights of person and property to ALL.
What's the best, most humane way to curb population growth? Raise the prosperity level of the people. Middle-class and above tend to have smaller families. For the poor, especially in places like India and China, there's enormous pressure to have more kids, because those kids are free labor and eventual pension plan. To a white-collar worker, children are an EXPENSE, and a HINDRANCE to their early retirement! They're a SACRIFICE made out of love, and not a way to make YOUR life easier.
China, a totalitarian state, instituted a 1-child policy, to achieve population stabilization by FORCE. That didn't work out so well, and millions of female children were aborted - some AFTER being born, because if you can only have one child, there's more to be gained from a male child.
These climate alarmists want to do the exact opposite of what makes sense and are totally oblivious to the environmental harm done by their idiotic plans, every single one of which is destructive to the aspirations of the little guy or gal wanting to improve their situation.
As soon as someone improves their situation, their higher values kick in and they seek to make their little corner of the world greener and more in harmony with Nature. It took me 'til I was 50 to afford my own home. What have I done to this property? Planted trees, installed solar, and insulated the dickens out of the place. My long-postponed prosperity also gave me the flexibility to purchase my home within walking distance (4 blocks) of where I work.
That's what these megalomaniacs in supposed power can't wrap their heads around. The world doesn't get better by the few things they can do by force. The world gets better by the individual decisions made by millions (billions) in their own best interests and in service of their higher values. But they need freedom and prosperity to get there, not feudal lords deciding arbitrarily that 'x,' 'y' and 'z' must be implemented by force, while 'a' through 'w' are prevented by their interventions.
There's no way a handful of regulators and lawyers can keep up with the ingenuity and new, better ideas being sought by billions of people right where they are and sharing their successes and failures with the rest of the world, freely, with, for instance YouTube videos on "My Passive-Solar Greenhouse." The regulations are written by big corporations to fit what big corporations are good at. Who's first in line for government subsidies? Billionaires like Elon Musk. If you think all the wonderful things he does and says aren't buttressed and motivated by government intervention, then you're not paying attention.
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Drug laws are messed-up. But nobody's seriously looked at how legalization, regulation and taxation would be sensibly implemented. Under the current, progressive-led push, the elephant in the room is they still haven't provided a LEGAL means of obtaining those drugs, so that all of the "decriminalized" drugs are sold on the street by criminals, via drug cartels. Legalization, done properly, would cut the legs out from under the drug cartels. They'd have to turn to something else, the same way they pivoted to opiates after alcohol prohibition was finally ended.
Illegal drugs are no different from alcohol, except that they're illegal. We KNOW that alcohol causes harm, but we decided that harm was less than the harm caused by ongoing war between more and more militarized/violent law enforcement and more and more militarized/violent organized crime organizations. Street shootings between LEO and gangsters and between gangsters was the obvious result of prohibition, but everyone - right AND left - refuse to see the obvious.
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@MAGA4EVA1986 I think a rational and intellectually rigorous atheist would immediately recognize that mere rationality doesn't explain everything. You can reason your way to most of the 10 commandments from a "Life Is Good" axiom, but that right there is something you must accept as true without proof before applying it. It's a grand act of faith of which most atheists seem supremely oblivious.
I'm not saying that every or even any religion gets it right. But most admit and are COGNIZANT of what they're taking on faith. Most atheists, I would maintain, are NOT.
I think someone who is truly rigorous in their thinking and reasoning should probably be agnostic. Atheists like, say, Sam Harris, think that destroying specific dogmas and doctrines with facts and science utterly destroys the IDEA of anything greater being out there or being responsible for all of Creation. The simple fact is that science and reason are utterly SILENT on the subject of the existence of higher-order intelligence arranging things, let alone running things or watching over us.
Personally, I'm kind of a superstitious agnostic. I come at it from sort of an evolutionary psychology point of view, thanks to Jordan Peterson. There's SO much buried in our subconscious, primitive parts of our brain that drive us without our very thin layer of rational thought even being aware of. And the ideation of the IDEAL is necessary to self and societal improvement. You can't make progress towards a better world if you never conceive of something better that is not already manifest in the world around you. This ideation lies at the core of human progress, and atheists don't seem to recognize that, or even give credence to the POSSIBILITY that our reaching for God in our clumsy, imperfect, beings-with-mass-and-subject-to-time is in any way legitimate.
1,000 years ago, God was OK with slavery, if you believe what people believed 1000 or 2000 years ago. Then, the act of reaching for God taught us that slavery was wrong and we sort of got things wrong. Does that mean God was wrong, or does it mean that our ideas are evolving to something closer to God, or - as the atheists would have us think - that there is no God? I think the recognition that humans must've gotten this or that wrong doesn't disprove the existence of God. But if I may paraphrase, "absence of evidence is not proof of absence." It just means that we don't know and for now, we CAN'T know.
Not knowing or "can't know" is very different from proof something doesn't exist. That denial requires a leap of faith all its own, and that most atheists are too closed-minded and, frankly, arrogant to admit.
I prefer to remain a superstitious agnostic. I was raised a Christian and have all those archetypes pounded into my head. Whether Jesus is savior or not, he represents an ideal human, a perfect human, that I carry in me and judge my and others' actions by. Live in love. Use reason to test whether what you're doing is coming from or of love. Also, be thankful that there's air to breathe, a roof over your head, food in your belly, and clothes on your back. Did you work for most of that? Sure. But being ABLE to work for that, even to be able to breathe, is a gift that I receive just by being born on this planet.
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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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Yeah. We saw how effective those Russkies were. One protest, here, for Trump, that got about 10 people to show up, and another across town for Clinton, that got about 10 people to show up. They talk about Russian collusion and in my mind's eye, I keep seeing guys in dirty underwear playing on their computer in Mom's basement. Sure, the Russians do this shit. Sure the Americans do this shit.
And of course, Putin wanted Trump over Clinton. Clinton would do anything to get her way, including starting a war for no good reason, or worse, if it meant she could wrap herself in the flag, and be seen as a big, strong leader. And she had no problem feeding the fires of Islamic terrorism if that meant causing problems for Russia, who live a lot closer to the Middle East. This is seen as a legitimate tactic in cold-war-hangover Deep State, engaged in by Neocon/Neoliberal types for decades.
Weaponizing the Taliban against the Soviets in the '70s and '80s, then bitching about the Taliban, years later, without admitting that we're the ones who built up and then exploited a very regressive and warlike interpretation of Islam, so we could beat the Soviets.
Much of what we don't like about the Russians the last few years is THEIR style of preserving THEIR culture against the rise of Islam and Sharia on and within their own borders. They're more brutal and ruthless than we are, maybe (although I kind of doubt it), but things also went a lot farther on and within their borders.
Imagine how we would feel if Muslims moved in, bred themselves up a majority in, say, Tennessee, and decided to declare their independence and impose Sharia Law in Nashville. Maybe we'd have a different take on Chechnya? I dunno. Just asking.
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@Lili5833 Americans are protesting less because the government's been a lot more hesitant to impose draconian measures like other countries without constitutional protections guaranteeing Natural Rights of Humans. UK, France, Germany, ... They don't have individual rights guaranteed like Americans do. Of course, the American establishment does everything it can to subvert and circumvent the U.S. Constitution, but in MOST places, you don't see mask mandates or vaccine mandates.
Western democracies' "freedoms" are cultural, and not really codified in law.
USA isn't much better, because its Constitution is in tatters, but its Constitution still exists, and MILLIONS of Americans understand what's at stake. But we won't go guerrilla until we're pushed too far, and we haven't been pushed HALF as far as citizens in Europe, UK, and elsewhere.
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If Jimmy Dore applied the same disdain for government intervention, domestically, that he feels for our foreign policy, he'd be a libertarian. He KNOWS they're screwing things up around the world, based on lies and misinformation, but he can't see that the same exact people are screwing things up at home in the same way and for pretty much the same reasons.
Jimmy's half-smart. He sees through the military- and media-industrial complexes, but what he doesn't see is the reason things are screwed up is because of too MUCH intervening by the state. He wants MORE intervention. Totally wrong-headed, there. Is there some diverse Space Jesus who knows all, sees all, and will run everything by diktat? No. But when you believe there is (like a religion), you're just setting yourself up for tyranny and social and economic ruin.
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I think maybe he was just part of the long game. If they took on each battle, directly, every day, they could've had more early successes, maybe, but lost the war on the perception front. By exercising restraint, Trump has left the Collusion Mafia without a leg to stand on. And also, by letting them KEEP playing that game, he's probably got them on as many or more things that took place AFTER he and his people were there to watch them doing it.
Look at the makeup of the Mueller team. Shot through with Obama and Clinton cronies, who would otherwise never have been noticed. But LETTING them join the team put them on full display, in positions of power that led them to temptation on a daily basis! It's actually the standard way of running counterintelligence ops. You don't ARREST anyone. You just leave them in place, feed them a toxic mixture of information and misinformation, and just see whom they talk to, what makes its way out, and whom it makes its way out TO. You have to be PATIENT and take a lot of public hits along the way, but it's the best way to defeat them. Use their own arrogance and tendency to abuse their power to defeat them.
Trump totally flipped the question from not knowing who HIS friends were to his enemies not knowing who THEIR friends were. If my analysis is anywhere close to the truth, it looks like a brilliant strategy.
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Trump's re-defining the terms of engagement from the "We're war hawks when we're not busy being absolute pussies" of the past. I think there's a LOT of common ground. We bitch about ISIS, but we're the ones that exploited radical Islam and jihad, to oppose the Soviets in Afghanistan. We showed them the way and we gave them the means (RPGs and SAMs versus Soviet helicopters).
EVERY time Westerners have sought economic or strategic gains in the Middle East, all we've accomplished is a lot of misery, death, and unintended consequences. We PUSH a bloody brand of liberation theology in the Middle East and then we bitch about radical Islam. Like Judaism before it, Islam was and is a way to unify the oppressed against the oppressor, which flows uninterrupted into religious oppression when theocracy takes over the government.
I suspect that Islam would have evolved very similarly to Christianity in the West if we hadn't reinforced its most dangerous and regressive forms. And MAYbe they'd've found a better balance between acceding to secular reality (and sprucing-up their dogma/doctrine) and societal decay. Formerly Christian - now mostly secular - Western governments have evolved to embrace the new, but haven't entirely figured out how to sustain - literally - a healthy society.
Just when we licked getting women voting, educated and in the workplace, we have found that the women doing so aren't creating a next generation to continue that. This is the sort of thing that Jordan Peterson ponders much more intelligently than I.
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I agree that Trump wants to keep his campaign promises. I think he's dealing with Maduro like he initially dealt with Kim Jong Un. Hard line - super-hard line - to begin the conversation. But at some point, his NeoCons need to either Come to Jesus or leave the administration. I'm fine with Maduro worrying about the worst, with all the SIGNALS saying "typical American regime-change tactics." This also might serve a dual purpose, in keeping the back-stabbing neocons and neolibs in his administration from pulling the plug on him. Keep them encouraged, but off-balance, at all times.
It's a zig-zag course, but I hope and expect to see Trump flip to olive branch, down South, at some point between now and 2020. I don't think Trump is dumb enough to go against all Democrats PLUS half the people in his base. If he really DOES do an Elliott Abrams in S. America, there's no way he's getting re-elected, and he's gotta know that.
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Bari has tried to turn a new leaf. But no, she hasn't always been on the side of the Angels. I think she was part of the crowd who called Trump a racist for wanting to secure the southern border. Things like that.
Even now, I think she's on the Zionist side, relative to my more neutral position. "The Nazis took a $hit on the Jews, so it's only fair we should take a $hit on the Palestinians and evict them from their homes and carve out New Israel, by force." There are a LOT of tribes and ethnic groups yearning for statehood, with just as good a case to make, but we arbitrarily chose one tribe. Wasn't our place to re-draw the map of the Middle East. It's British Empire thinking and basically did the will of the British Empire, as if the British Empire never ended, but operates to this day through its proxy, the usa.
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It's 1 Ukraine v Russia. It's Ukraine + Military Might of the "West." But even THERE, the numbers just don't add up for Ukraine. American and European production capacity is a fraction of Russia's. Ukraine can go through a month's worth of American production in a few days.
All the military aid Ukraine has received is a tiny fraction of what is needed, and the West's stockpiles are empty! We don't HAVE any more to give without cutting into our own reserves. We simply don't have either the reserves, the energy, or the manufacturing capacity required to fight a conventional war against a great power. The Green Agenda took all that away. Maybe if we got China to side with us against Russia, we could keep up, but that ain't gonna happen!
We don't make our own stuff any more! This isn't 1939! We off-shored ALL that stuff!
The only way we could stop Russia on the ground if they WANTED to invade Western Europe, would be tactical/strategic nukes! And that's my fear in Ukraine.
Our leaders are systematically taking away our energy and industry, and think they can rule the world with banks and finance. We can - and have - for a time, but the underlying fundamentals are catastrophic for the West. We're cutting our own throats on all the wacky, insane identity politics and "We want our cars and phones but we don't want them made, here" policies.
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If you go around sanctioning everybody, eventually you teach them to survive by other means. Eventually, they no longer need you, and because of your bullying behavior, they no longer WANT you.
I'm not against punitive tariffs, if a trading partner is unfair to us or to their own people. Let them know that they can make the same or more money by being nicer to everyone. But trying to HURT or CONTROL other countries by heavy-handed sanctions, calculated to do the greatest harm possible, you're not making friends.
The more complete the economic encirclement, the more desperate the nation that is encircled. It is possible to constructively engage other nations. All nations. But it needs to be measured and fair to both sides, and you can't lie about it being good for you when it's not, or about it being good for the other nation when it's not.
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I think that ANYone who so brazenly challenges the group-think is going to raise the temperature, more so if that one wants to effectuate any real change. If you're afraid of that, you'll get nowhere. Things are so far the one way, with outrage being the main medium of exchange, you just have to hold your nose, call things as you see them, and SELL your point of view, which includes (as any salesman) vastly overstating things in order to get ANY movement towards something reasonable (make a sale).
I recognized Trump as a salesman from Day 1. Never thought much of salesmen. But the right salesman with the right product was definitely what was needed. It still may not be enough. I know a lot of respected people who are "smart," who are absolutely irrational about politics. And I also know a lot of weak-minded people who won't believe what's reasonable, until they see that "side" as the group for them to blindly agree with on everything (tribe!). We're kind of programmed that way - bred that way - after generations of "my tribe, right or wrong" being the ones whose tribe obliterated the competition and survived to pass on this trait to future generations. Religion kind of the same deal. You can find irrationalities and regressive features in 'most any myth-based belief system passed down from our less-informed ancestors, but also features that made those beliefs a SURVIVAL trait to be passed on.
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@davidmaisel8062 : Actually, is says a lot that there are so many conservatives on the Jimmy Dore channel. It also says something that we generally behave ourselves and discuss things, rationally, compared to some. Conservatives come here because he's smart, funny, and he's half right on about half the issues. Good conservatives are anti-war, big-time. Jimmy calls it like he sees it. I don't have to agree with his bifocals to respect his integrity. He's the guy I want at all my parties, to sit and argue politics all night. Anything conservatives and progressives agree on is something that should probably be the law of the land. But other forces conspire to keep us apart.
You want to size down the military to DEFENSIVE needs, and us to mind our own business? And libertarians are more open-borders than otherwise, especially the purists. I think open borders are fine, when people on both sides are livin' more or less the same and more or less the (a) right way. But a lot of those banana republics are so corrupt, they'll never maximize the brain power of their people for a thriving economy and a thriving middle class, which are the key to getting people to live cleaner and have a reasonable number of babies, without compulsion. Gotta evolve that kind of culture, and it starts by protecting people's property rights. That house a guy lavishes thousands of hours of improvements on, because it's HIS and he wants it to be beautiful. You don't get that in Section-8 housing.
I just wish he and his cast were better-schooled on the real roots of freedom and prosperity, and how it isn't something the U.S. is hogging, but a way of life and treating each other, with equal protection under the law (for most of us), and respect for property rights. 90% of what's wrong in Africa is every time a guy builds something to be proud of, somebody with a gun comes along and takes it from them. I think Africa would explode, economically, if they all respected the rights of their people.
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They only like democracy when they agree with the voters. I personally fear referenda, generally, because the people's eyes are always bigger than their stomachs. For instance, Californians correctly voted a referendum limiting tax hikes. But at the same time, they voted for lavish state programs. People want the programs, but they don't want to pay for them. This is always true. A big flaw in democracy. This is why democracies eventually commit suicide, as history shows. People need to be smart enough not to fall for voting themselves a living.
That being said, you can't argue with a referendum, once it's been passed. Well, you can ARGUE against it, but you're obliged to follow the express will of the people. Personally, I like the 2/3 thing. Can't change anything unless 2/3 of the people support it. Otherwise, things remain the same. You absolutely can't oppose a 2/3 majority. Just make sure that guarantees of individual rights are written into the law before you make a 2/3 threshold to make changes!
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@Dandokee You'd be surprised at how many Trump supporters oppose the War on Drugs. As far as I can tell, the only people insisting on its continuation are those who profit from it, like drug lords, prison corporations, the CIA, law enforcement, and politicians.
Of course, any time you support nanny government, you invite and perpetuate authoritarianism, because the hand that gives is the hand that squeezes and punches. That's the paradox of so-called "liberalism," which wants to be "free" and at the same time insists on being "taken care of." If you care about the disadvantaged, then HELP them. Don't virtue-signal with MY money! I give plenty, in addition to paying my taxes. More than most so-called liberals. Yeah. The same liberals who lecture me about global warming with their clothes dryers running, on the phone during the hours-long commutes to work, every day.
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@LoriDawnLynn1981 : Obama gave Trump the power to change a LOT of things by executive order, simply by bypassing the Congress on so many issues, himself! Trump dismantled much of what Obama created, using the same executive-order means as Obama. Trump didn't have to work with Congress to un-do Obama's executive orders. (And yes, the next president could un-do much of the un-doings with their own executive orders.)
But Trump also sneaked some key legislation under the radar during his 1st 2 years, in spite of RINO Republican leadership. The tax reform bill was HUGE, and is forcing big-tax-and-spend cities and states to pay the full freight for their "generosity." For many years, cities like NYC, LA, Detroit, and Chicago soaked the rich, but federal tax law allowed those rich people to turn right around and soak the out-of-state taxpayers, by getting most of it back as a federal deduction. Limiting state and local tax deductions to $10,000 slew the cash cow that corrupt Democrat politicians in state and local government have been milking for decades.
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You make no clear connection between wavelength and momentum. You just make the claim and treat it as fact from that point forward. It makes for a nice, slick presentation, but it is not very informative, and possibly misleading. Allow me to mislead you some more, with my simplistic take.
Here's how I understand Heisenberg:
Imagine you could locate a single water molecule in an ocean wave. You have to get small to locate it. By the time you're that small, you have no awareness of the larger wave in which it resides, no very good measure of the wavelength of the particle.
Now, to measure the WAVELENGTH with high accuracy, it's a simple matter to step back a mile, count the wave crests over a fixed - preferably LONG - distance. Then divide by that distance. The average you obtain is a very precise measure of the wavelength. But from your great distance, you have very little idea of where exactly that one water molecule we were just talking about actually IS.
This simple idea leads to all kinds of nonsensical and unsupported statements.
In quantum mechanics, we can't get down to the subatomic particles, so, like a statistician, we look at the behavior of millions or billions of particles, and observe their behavior as a group, attempting to reason our way to what the individual particles are actually doing. That's why you hear people talk about a particle being "smeared" probabilistically across many locations, simultaneously.
Your inability to locate that one electron or one quark or whatever doesn't mean it doesn't have an actual position. It's just that you're unable to do more than locate a general area in which that particle must reside at a specific point in time.
I think this is why Einstein said "God does not play dice," in his disputes with Niels Bohr.
An analogy I use comes from a statistical device called "the bell curve." It is described by an exponential function ( exp(-x^2) )that decreases symmetrically as you move farther and farther from the average (in this case, x = 0). Like quantum mechanics, inasmuch as populations tend to congregate near the average and super-small or super-tall individuals, farther from the average, are fewer in number. This sort of fits nature pretty well, because most of the action takes place within 2 or 3 standard deviations (In this case, sigma = 1) from the average.
Nevertheless, there is a positive probability of a person standing over 500 feet tall, because that decaying exponential is a positive function for all real values of (in this case) height. There are zero 500-foot-tall people, but according to the standard normal distribution, if you get enough people together, you're eventually going to encounter a 500-footer!
Writers, entertainers, and grifters all love this quantum mechanics stuff because it makes it SEEM like the world is magical and not deterministic. I'm OK with quantum mechanics as long as it makes useful predictions, much the same way I'm OK with a traditional Chinese herbalist who knows a particular plant will cure your upset stomach, even though his explanation involving dragons in your stomach are defeated by the magic herb which makes them cross-eyed and paranoid is total poppycock.
I'm still more on Einstein's side than Bohr's. I don't consult a statistician to predict where that rock flying towards my head is going to hit. I might ask one for the best hiding place when the mob comes for me, though.
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I don't doubt that Putin's embrace of Orthodox Christianity is part of a strategy to prevent the Islamification of the Russian Federation. Modern women don't have big families like traditional women do, and if Russia doesn't do something about it, Muslim demographics will be the downfall of the Russia-led federation.
The problem with Muslim domination of the political sphere is that the most motivated, regressive factions of Islam eventually rise to the top. Same with Christian countries, to be honest. I love most of the values in both religions, but I don't want religious zealots running my country. Most Christians and Muslims are gentle folk, who value love, learning, and tolerance. But they always get pushed aside by more fanatical, power-seeking minorities within their ranks.
You're endorsing the Maidan coup in 2014? You're endorsing the expansion of NATO eastward? NATO countries are notorious for regime-change foreign policy. The Russians didn't and won't forget the bombing campaign in Kosovo by Bill Clinton.
Anyway, our foreign-policy brain trust don't need to invade Russia if they can topple its government. They're also encouraging the forward deployment of nuclear missiles, which would scare me, if I were Putin, especially since Trump pulled the USA out of the INF Treaty (Intermediate-range nuclear forces = INF), no doubt on the advice of the neocons in his cabinet that he was fool enough to appoint.
Anyone who looks at the strategic basics know that Russia is not in any shape to attack Europe. Anyone who knows history, knows that Russia's been invaded twice in the past two centuries from the West. Anyone who knows history knows that the USA tried to overthrow the Bolsheviks in the late teens and early twenties of the last century.
Not a fan of Lenin or Mao, but their rise to power was the direct result of incompetence, corruption, and general misrule by the regimes they replaced.
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Populism has been bad, overall. Populism is what turned the USA into an authoritarian regime, by the people voting to be taken care of, rather than be left alone. I'm not against helping the poor. I AM against the help being concentrated in the hands of a small number of people in Washington, DC.
Here's how it works in the USA: You can't get the local governments to operate a nanny government, because they have to live within their means, and they know they will be thrown out of office if they impose taxes high enough to pay for everything, and they can't run budget deficits. So "populists" got the federal government to step in, which it's only too happy to do, and it doesn't mind running budget deficits every year. Just kick the can down the road, but hey. The people are getting their free stuff, so they're happy, even though they complain about the economy and social fabric tearing apart.
Instead of "Govern us less," the populists say "Govern us harder, Daddy!" and expect that budgets will magically balance themselves, taxes will be low, and everyone will be happy.
Now we're reaching a tipping point, where the majority are saying "Get off our backs" and now, suddenly, Democrats hate populism that has served them so well for re-election. "I'm the guy with the Free Stuff."
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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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@Jacob K The reason martial arts are so big in the Far East is because they invented the first form of "gun control,' by outlawing swords in the hands of peasants. Guns were considered very bad in the old days, because the elites had the monopoly on swords and body armor. With the advent of the firearm, you could assemble and train a peasant army in a matter of weeks, and destroy conventional armies of the day.
The NEXT level up from peasants with guns was CONSCRIPTION. Mandatory draft for all able-bodied men. The other nations in Europe were led by aristocrats, and the rank and file were "volunteers" from the prisons. Napoleon Bonaparte changed all that with the draft. That was why it was so hard to beat him. If he lost 100,000 men, which his enemies couldn't afford, he'd just go draft a whole bunch more.
Bonaparte also astounded and confounded his enemies with a more mobile army, by the expedient of a faster drum beat for the march AND the concept of foraging off conquered lands, rather than securing supply lines. This was what eventually got him beat in Russia and Spain. In Russia, because the Russians burned every square foot of land in his path before he got there, and in Spain, because his rape-and-pillage ways enraged the countryside. He needed half his army just to guard his supply lines, and he couldn't forage, because groups of foragers were captured, tortured (BRUTALLY) and killed by Spanish Guerrillas.
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@bobegan2865 With few exceptions, the apparatchiks of BOTH parties are big-government interventionists, at home and abroad. There are some differences in how they go about it, but philosophically, the bipartisanship in our government runs very deep. The Democrats will create and maintain high tensions. The Republicans will do the same, and are more likely to see things boil over into boots-on-the-ground war.
Trump's one of few presidents who stood up to the apparatchiks and started taking one pan after another off the fire. This was INFURIATING to foreign-policy and defense wonks (and their war-industry cronies), and they're the ones the whole RussiaGate hoax came from. It got so Trump was afraid to do much of anything, for fear of being accused of being 'literally Hitler.' And even when he was very specific about troop drawdowns, his own administration defied him and kept our people deployed behind his back. One ambassador was caught joking about it, quite openly. They KNEW the fix was in.
If Trump had had another 4 years, back-to-back, we'd have a smaller footprint abroad AND peace, and we wouldn't be dependent on the communist Chinese for ANYthing. It was urgent for the "ruling class" in the USA that he be removed. No surprise, every Democrat-run institution was out to get him, and that includes virtually ALL government agencies, including the military, which Obama did his best to fill with party hacks and woke. It spread to all government contractors and of course much of it started in the education system, which is 99% Democrat.
I love the way the establishment calls taking out a dissenter as "speaking truth to power." smh
Anyway, I'm struggling to get to the point I wanted to make about Biden. Yes, he's obviously not up to snuff, but when you vote a guy in over another guy, you're really voting for their STAFF. It's the staff who run everything. You think Obama's a nuclear engineer? Presidents are only as good as the people they have around them. A lot of those people serve multiple presidents. They can expedite orders or slow-walk orders. There's all kinds of ways to thwart a president, without seeming to. This has been done for inbred royalty for centuries.
When I complain about what the admin's doing, it's really a complaint against the DNC establishment who engineered his nomination and eventual election. Some say the engineering of the election was fortified by a lot of cheating, but again, that goes to the people HANDLING Biden.
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France is caught in a death spiral of socialist fallacies. The people protest against the fruits of socialism, but the only solution they can think of is a "better" version of socialism. They'll strike. They'll get their wage increases, shorter work week, whatever. And then everything gets more expensive, things work less well, and they're all set to protest again for more state interventions, to get the NEXT socialist to do a better job. It's just a blind alley. What they NEED is to get the government off their backs, and the only way they can do that is to wean themselves off the government's teat, which they will never do. The French Revolution understood that aristocracy was bad, but didn't quite get what to replace it with and why, so Napoleon... Macron...
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I think the amount of air cover provided by Ukraine side is even less than you allow. The Russians aren't flying air cover for their assaults to any great degree, unless they're confident they have suppressed anti-air. Both sides are standing off and firing missiles from long range. Even that is fraught with some danger for both sides.
If Ukraine can keep the battle down to the level of its western supply, they are probably enjoying a tactical advantage, in terms of precision guidance. This low-level, tit-for-tat fighting is testing NATO's re-supply capacity, but as long as Russia allows this level of fighting, there's plenty of hopium for Ukraine.
The strategic reality remains unchanged, except for continuing mobilization and steady build-up by Russia that far exceeds NATO's, let alone Ukraine's. Eventually, I expect a full offensive. I think it's pretty clear the rate at which NATO can re-supply Ukraine. I think Russia grows weary of fighting on Ukraine's level. I'm not sure why they're waiting. It may just be a matter of waiting until they're as trained-up and built-up as needed to carry out an all-out offensive, which I don't think we've seen, yet.
Maybe they're trying to smoke out the last family of "advanced weapons," to develop counters preparatory to the assault. But I think we're already beyond the point where there is enough in the way of munitions to knock out a significant percentage of Russian forces in an all-out attack, even with perfect accuracy, even assuming the Russians won't immediately destroy the launchers, artillery, and aircraft.
I have no idea what the Russian thinking is. No. I have LOTS of ideas. But it's all speculation.
It depends on his global assessment of western capabilities and western will. This entire war might just be Putin's way of adding stressors to an already brittle West, both economically and politically. Western people are on their last nerve with the far-left domestic policy and Uni-Party foreign and security policy. Basically, the political leadership of EU and USA are writing checks their a$$es can't cash, and as Japan, China, and other nations around the world sell off their U.S. debt and the price of U.S. treasury notes (bonds) craters, its (and I suspect many others') ability to finance their chronic debt shrinks.
It's already making life more and more difficult for the common people. We're tired of making sacrifices for our leaders' self-created "emergencies." We see political families reaping millions from oligarchs around the world, while our economies implode. This is a very dangerous time. Will their failures bring about their collapse or will it usher in full-on police state? After RussiaGate and the COVID tyranny, I'm just not sure that liberty will prevail.
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@86zerueldososo64 Chani was WAY more ruthless than Paul, who in the later books proved to be too soft to make the tough choices necessary for human survival, even though his prescience clearly showed his chosen path to be a dead end. It was the Fremen piece of his own son, Leto II, guided in large part by Chani within, that put him on his Golden Path. Paul was too "civilized" to take such a brutal and ruthless path, because it would cost him his humanity and everything he loved. Leto II took that path, KNOWING where it would lead, and how excruciating and ignoble his own death would be at the end of it, some 4,000 years later.
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Public posturing notwithstanding, the INF could put Russia at a disadvantage with non-signatory nations, such as China. I'm not sure I'm buying Mercouris on this one. The strategic situation is VASTLY different from what it was in 1987.
Also, I used to be up on the actual terms of INF, but maybe there were clauses in the treaty limiting what you can do to DEFEND against missile attacks, which the Russians were far behind in, at that time. In the current strategic setting, more Strategic Defense Initiative and less MAD Doctrine might be the order of the day, as Pandora's box has been open for quite a long time, now, and more nations are getting nuclear weapons capabilities, no matter what non-proliferation agreements are in place and how good they think they're tracking production of fissile materials.
I suspect that this may not be what Mercouris fears. Technology and the geopolitical landscape have changed a lot in the last 30 years. Under the patina of panic, I think the USA and Russia are on the brink of more open partnership and less adversarial. I think Bolton's influence is more apparent than real. You just have to understand negotiation the way Trump understands it. You ask for 3 times more than you want or expect to get. You don't get what you want in a negotiation by starting out reasonable. You make a big show of making major concessions that take the main sticking points off the table.
Trump's strategy is to put a thorn in your paw so you think he actually did something FOR you when he removes it. Rattled his saber like NObody's business when Kim Jong Un was acting all blustery and aggressive. Next thing you know, an American President is sitting across a table from the North Korean dictator for the first time in HISTORY. He took a VERY hard line on DACA, only to concede on DACA, which put the Democrats off-balance, forcing them to pivot to Trumped-up outrage at separating illegal-alien children from their families. That was the first crack in the Open Borders armor. And a rather clumsy recovery by Democrats.
I think Alexander Mercouris may be over-reacting to this, a little (or a lot).
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I think the blackouts are a direct, gut-level communication from Putin to the Ukrainian people. "If we're winning, why is there no power?" All over the West, we have people believing all kinds of nonsense that will immediately go out the window, when the light switches stop working. I think the blackouts could be as much about cutting into Ukrainian morale and establishment propaganda than anything else.
I also think Putin wants things up and running as soon as possible after hostilities cease. I don't think he's eager to destroy any infrastructure that can't be quickly restored.
As a bit of a Napoleonic Wars buff, one of your criticisms of Putin's "softness" in how he goes about "war-making" may be undeserved. The more restrained he is, especially compared to his enemies, the more likely he will gain grassroots support, like the British did in the Peninsular War. The Spanish people hated the French and made things very difficult for them, even though the Spanish monarchy, itself, was moribund.
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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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It just goes to show how long they've had it their own way and had total domination of the public square, that they could be so blatant and clumsy about it. I think they miscalculated after unqualified success in mobilizing the population in the Iraq War, to where George W. Bush was even temporarily quite popular as Commander-in-Chief, for the simple reason that nobody wanted to cross the president when our boys were in harm's way, overseas. It's what the insiders wanted, so it was what all the establishment media pushed, and it was an unqualified success. Just drum up enough hysteria about Weapons of Mass Destruction, paint Hussein as the Devil incarnate, and then all the rest of the violence, bloodshed and wasted resources were justified.
You see it in case after case. War. Character assassination. "Crises" justifying infringements on liberty and confiscations they could never justify under ordinary circumstances. But the people are forming an immunity, thanks to the "fool me once" phenomenon and independent media insisting on putting forward a dissenting point of view. Thank goodness there are people like Robert Barnes around to cry bullshit on this, and have a big enough stick to back it up. Guys like Barnes (and Rubin) are our best hope.
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@philippesantini2425 : Jones has at least a passing familiarity with principles of liberty and limited government, with which conservatives agree on the core level. But the theatrics is what keeps his audience coming back. I enjoy keeping up on what he's saying, but from a distance, and usually only to get a peek into what will be in the news as fact in 6 months or so, long after he gets lambasted for saying it.
But on 50-60% of his schtick, he's not much different from Rachel Maddow, starting out on a totally speculative idea, then proceeding straight to being utterly outraged IF the speculation be true. Like Rachel's "Imagine if the Russians decided to hack our electrical grid..." The next half-hour will be spent talking about all the bad shit that will happen if the Russian plot to target the electrical grid comes to fruition. By 5 minutes in, the "if" part is taken out, and she's foaming at the mouth about how awful it will be, so stock up on canned goods!
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I don't like Ilhan Omar, BUT the fact is that the USA has fallen into some very wicked, neocolonialist ways, with our foreign policy wonks still living in an echo chamber transplanted whole from 1945 realities. The Soviet Union no longer exists. NATO has become a rubber stamp for American aggression abroad. USA pays billions to provide European security against a threat that no longer exists.
Nordstream 2 is a HUGE hypocrisy by the EU. Boy they want Russian oil and gas and at the same time expect the USA to keep troops stationed in Europe and waste billions of dollars. USA also gives EU major trade concessions that aren't in the USA's interest, unless their purpose is to have NATO give them an imprimatur of legitimacy for the USA's destructive regime-change policies. The USA never should've gotten involved in European politics and wars in the first place. If not for the USA, then no unconditional surrender. If no unconditional surrender, then no Treaty of Versailles. If no Treaty of Versailles, no Hitler...
Anyway, I couldn't care less if Europe wants to buy oil and gas from Russia. But if they're going to do that, and if everybody agrees that an overwhelming number of Russian tanks are NOT revving up on the border of Poland, then let NATO go! NATO's just an alliance for prosecuting wars in the Middle East and anywhere else the USA feels like. That's bullshit!
And every time we send another drone to "get the bad guy," we create another 100 or 1,000 terrorists. The more we do this regime change nonsense, the more dangerous the world becomes, and the more excuses the U.S. government has to tighten its grip on the American populace with a surveillance state that Stalin would've given his eye teeth to control.
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Imagine what a parent could do to educate their child with the $10-15,000 we pay, PER PUPIL, to k-12 public schools. For about $1000 per year, you can hook up your kid with SOLID online learning management systems. The other $8-13,000 will buy a lot of organized activities, such as sports, the arts, music, whatever the parent wanted.
At the lowest level, around $10,000 per pupil per year, that's $100,000 for 10 students. One good teacher could do 10 kids a lot of good for $100,000!!!! Maybe we don't need all those superintendents, vice-principals, equity-and-diversity officers, building maintenance crews, and miscellaneous paper-pushers!
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@Contented Man Actually, if you're conservative/libertarian and look for that kind of content, there are so many strong black voices layin' it down that conservatives, especially, don't judge blacks by their skin color. They know too many smart, thoughtful blacks who think more like THEM than ANY white liberal. On the "other side," you have a lot of white people who don't think at ALL like the people they claim to champion. To THEM, blacks are lesser and other, which is the ONLY justification for treating them differently in any way, shape or form! But I see Eric D July, or Barricade Garage guy, ABL, or Jericho Green as guys who are more like me on the big picture, more like my brothers, than any white liberal.
There IS a form of "privileged white" pushing the "white privilege" narrative. But it all comes down to thinking blacks need whites to SAVE them, when in OUR society, they mainly need whites to STOP trying to save them and leave them the hell alone! In their "good intention," they set up a system of incentives that couldn't do more to destroy the family, punish good people trying to help themselves through their own works, and put a drug dealer on every corner eager to recruit their 10-year-old son to gangster life in precisely the communities that white liberals "help" the most, if it had been planned!
But nobody talks about how the Jim-Crow through 1st Civil-Rights-Act period saw REMARKABLE advances in the black community. Harlem was a Great Place, with Good Schools. HBCUs were taking off, ALL without any government help and quite a few disadvantages. It wasn't until the welfare state kicked in that we went from "guarantee my rights!" to "You owe me a living!" This entitlement attitude captured more whites than blacks, but basically the same percentage of poor in both populations. There were just a higher percentage of blacks that were still poor at the end of the '60s. Add to that the fact that in a lot of those communities, whites and blacks intermingled, but the mixed-race ALWAYS goes in the "black" bucket, which is crazy, so things are skewed that way, too.
Everyone should read "Losing Ground." You can see the economic convergence of blacks and whites throughout the postwar period, UNTIL Lyndon Johnson. Then things changed. The gap between whites and blacks started growing again. Some of this is mirrors, because there was generally more cross-breeding in the inner-city communities that are hardest hit by poverty, so it all gets counted as "black," even though it's mixed.
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It's tough to drill down to the hard-core facts on this one. When we regulate Google and other Big Tech like utilities, and ACCEPT that they are monopolies, we end up cementing them in the position of BEING monopolies. Google WANTS net neutrality, and if they get it, does that mean they become and remain THE dominant platform? If so, are you sure you LIKE the way they censor and de-monetize? And if you don't like how they control who gets a platform and who doesn't, does that mean that the NEXT step is putting unelected bureaucrats in the FCC in charge of how they operate?
We're only NOW getting out from under the "Fairness Doctrine" that turned the news we got for about 100 years into nothing more than government and corporate propaganda? Do you really trust those same people to NOT eventually do the same sanitization of the Internet, by locking-in Google on top, and Verizon and AT&T as monopolies? Maybe you don't like the idea of pricing according to the bandwidth consumed. But maybe if it's all guaranteed to be the same for everybody, then all incentive to push more data through the pipe than is currently be pushed will be removed.
It sounds good, but I think maybe the American public is being sold a bill of goods that won't come due until the Internet is as shitty as the legacy media (NBC, CBS, NBC for most of the past century, with a little more when cable hit, and a LOT more when the Internet hit, finally exposing some of the lies that were universally reported as truth on a small number of highly centralized and highly controlled media outlets)
Remember the explosion in innovation and choice, when they finally broke up AT&T? When they finally de-regulated, and suddenly other companies were able to compete? Maybe Net Neutrality will be the reason that most of us NEVER get fiber-optic Internet, because there's no incentive to put it in. They'll fool us into thinking that the government-regulated "utility" we have is in our best interest, while we fuck ourselves up the ass on what we MIGHT get if the 2-tiered system incentivized competition.
Maybe instead of whining about better treatment from the local monopoly, you should leave the door open to new competition. When you use government to insulate the market from the real cost of ANY product or service, people always end up paying more for less in the long run. Sounds good. Might be shitty. And all in the name of fairness, the same way that "fairness" turns out cities into shitholes.
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This is one I'm not just taking his word on. I think there may be more layers to this particular onion. It's easy to confuse Trump's posturing with Trump's policy. And it can be difficult to parse what his policy even IS, when part of achieving his goals requires taking an indirect/zig-zag path.
I'm concerned about any major treaty withdrawal. But after a couple years of Trump, I'm reserving judgement until we see what comes. I suspect half of what he does is to keep the neocons from sticking a shiv between his ribs. Until the broad middle fully understands what's at stake, right now, I think he's obliged to go along with some things, in order to push his main agenda items.
Also, withdrawing from INF could be the proximate excuse for getting some major face time with Putin. It'd be a major coup for BOTH leaders to hammer out a deal both are happier with. And again, China is not bound by the agreement. Maybe the Russians want out of the original terms of the INF.
But other than more and more marginalized Russo-phobes in more and more marginalized legacy media, I don't think the Russians and U.S. are natural antagonists, any more. Trump's pulling out of NATO (or set us on that path). The days of Stalin are over. The Russians do NOT have thousands of tanks massed in Eastern Europe, poised to continue their Westward sweep after defeating Hitler. The U.S. shouldn't be obliged to maintain a force in Europe 72 years after the end of WW II!
The EU is failing. If not as an over-arching framework for commerce and travel, then definitely as a nation-state comparable to the United States. There's no real threat to Russia from that quarter, if the U.S. pulls out (which it should). INF is a part of a geopolitical landscape that no longer exists. And I'm pretty sure that Trump did NOT pull out, because we have 10,000 intermediate-range missiles that we can deploy in 5 minutes, if only we weren't bound by INF.
I'd say "Let this play out." Trump's on record for wanting to quit being so freakin' imperialistic. There's BROAD American support for that. I think by the nature of the forces arrayed against him in media and even within the career-civil-service in government, that there is no straight-line path to keeping his promises. He zigs and zags when confronted by roadblocks, like he's running the West Coast Offense. Get 'em goin' side-to-side and then go down the field. Like Alexander the Great (No, the OTHER one. The FIRST one) at Hydaspes.
We'll see. If we live.
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I keep coming back to how the West bankrupted itself in peacetime, while Putin, in a much worse situation, ran budget surpluses, built strategic reserves, and avoided self-crippling policies that the West embraced - and continues to embrace, even as it literally goes begging for its energy needs - and just generally ran his administration in prudent, responsible fashion. Now it's a race between being destroyed by the West and the West destroying itself.
My concern, now, as ever, is what Western leaders will do at the critical moment. I think the Western political class would rather burn it all down than lose their power, wealth and prestige. Aristocratic forms that the U.S. Constitution was designed to combat, have re-emerged, as over the years, career civil servants and career politicians have carved out their little fiefdoms throughout the government and other large institutions.
They're not barons of this or dukes of that. They're "directors" and "chairmen(women). They don't derive their power directly from the lands they own and the people they suffer to live on their lands. No. It's not divvied up according to land. It's divvied up according the the powers vested in the agencies they run. They trade favors and influence, just like dukes and earls traded livestock and gold. They expand their reach and power not by invading their neighbors, but by invading the taxpayers' pockets for bigger budgets, more equipment, more manpower....
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I used to hold the same view as Mercouris on Neville Chamberlain. After years of study and pondering, I know that often the right thing results from a wrong thing. IF Chamberlain had held the line and NOT handed Czechoslovakia over to the Nazis without any support from Allied powers (as he did), then the German General Staff would've prevailed, and the planned blitzkrieg would've waited another year or two, during which Germany was building a war machine MUCH faster than France, Britain or the USA. The submarine wolf packs would've been at full strength, the air force would've been one or two generations farther along in size and technology (for instance the first jet fighters, the ME 262s might have been in full production, rather than just the relative handful they eventually put into service), their rocket tech would've been one or two years farther along, their heavy-water installations would've been one or two years closer to their first atomic bomb...
It's hard to say how things might have turned out if they'd followed the wisdom of Winston Churchill in the run-up to the war. The German lead in weapons and military developments would likely have WIDENED, putting a different complexion on the Battle of Britain, entirely. As it was, the Germans weren't REALLY quite ready, but Chamberlain may have served to induce them to jump the gun AGAINST the counsel of their General Staff. But once Hitler won Czechoslovakia without firing a shot, nobody (or very few) questioned his bat-shit crazy and premature war.
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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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Depends on how you look at it. I see it as a tension between competing cultures and world views giving rise to something uniquely British! But then I'm more of a David Starkey kind of guy. I think he gives a good take on the complexities of the situation.
Certain Frankian notions came from Roman traditions, and were eventually seized upon by those who Would Rule. The notion of a Church-Approved Anointed King was a huge deal for obtaining at least the perception of legitimacy. The idea of absolute rule by the monarch and absolute authority of Lords and Ladies over tenants on land that was parceled out by kings to lords and ladies.... That's more of a Frankian/Roman thing.
The Danes, Swedes, Norse, etc., brought a nice infusion of "Yeah, you're the top dog, but you're only 1st among equals, and you only lead on the sufferance of those who agree to be led." It made it harder for them to organize, which is why Alfred eventually beat them off by building a system of fortified boroughs. To accomplish that, Alfred and his descendants very much used the church as an arm of the government. But at the same time, the pagans from the continent brought a lot of concepts and attitudes towards lords and ladies that eventually led to Magna Carta. Thank the Germanic and Nordic tribes for a lot of that. In many ways they were more tolerant people than Christians of that day. And remember, virtually everything Christian was the direct result and under the direct guidance of the Pope in Rome.
Christianity took over from paganism because it was very much in the interest of kings to have a strong church backing them. The Romans were masters at weaponizing religion, and when Christianity started getting traction in spite of all efforts to crush it, the Romans switched to Christianity and pushed it the same way they pushed the previous religion, whose name escapes me. But active "evangelizing" was a big part of the Roman model. Burn the temples, send in your own priests and build NEW temples. Or just hijack the temples already built. Just stick a cross up on the steeple and call it good.
In North America, it's fascinating how many Native American principles and ideals have percolated into the larger culture. There's a brand of stoicism there that would put Marcus Aurelius to shame. We exaggerate the regret of things lost, but in the larger scheme, we recognize and celebrate the mingling of genes and cultures, mostly for the benefit of all involved. Not entirely. Nothing's all one thing. But I'm not going to be mad at Asia because that tall, blonde Swedish woman has a deep tan and beautiful cat eyes from Asia.
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Yes. I never heard it put that way. She also had the clearsightedness to recognize that most MEN just have jobs.
I'd already sort of put it together, witnessing white women in college from privileged families, who got all their school, housing, food, plus clothing allowance paid for by my parents' tax money. The welfare state is a GREAT deal for middle-class white women. They still have the support of their families, but they pretend they're out on their own, get pregnant, and then the government aid starts flowing.
I never got any of that. I pushed a broom, turned a wrench, anything I could, to pay for school. They had it handed to them by moving out of their rich parents' houses for 1 year and getting pregnant. I went to different ones' apartments, and they had all the best clothes and home entertainment systems, etc. None of it paid for by them. Their rich parents just gave them stuff, but still didn't have to pay for their "little girl's" education or in any way support the single mothers they parented.
They were always smug and self-righteous, talking about compassion, while I worked at the grease under my fingernails and rested my aching back.
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I dunno. Whites and other colors mixing make some beautiful, smart babies. We're all the same species. It's MORE about getting everyone to understand about their rights and how to protect them, and whatever color, we've been giving them away to the snake-oil peddlers who pretend to have all the answers, to enrich themselves.
It's a culture war. It's an information war. And my side's pretty persuasive, when you see the sweep of history and human progress the way I do, from "first among equals" traditions grafted onto Great Britain by Germanic invaders (The King rules by CONSENT, not Divine Right), to Magna Carta, the Enlightenment, with Locke and Hobbes, Blackstone, Wealth of Nations, Milton Friedman, Dierdre McCloskey...
It's the way people work. It's the way the world works. Limited government is better than the alternatives. Anarchy sucks. But so does authoritarianism. The happy, imperfect medium is LIMITED government. Ours is not.
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Reality is not a zero-sum game. New jobs that haven't even been invented, yet, will follow. They always have and they always will. People were horrified that the hand-crafted wheelbarrow market was collapsing, and people were buying wheelbarrows made by mass-production factories. But with the money saved making wheelbarrows more efficiently, there was more wealth for other things. There was no such thing as a job as a "web designer" or "computer programmer" 50 years ago. Think of all the OTHER jobs that exist, now, that didn't, before. Look at how many more people are in media than ever before. Making a living off YouTube, for example.
That being said, arguing for an artificially high minimum wage only HASTENS automation. I say let nature and the free market decide. Don't force the automation forward by pricing humans out of entry-level jobs by requiring they be paid more than the real value of the service or the sustainable wage for such jobs. Minimum-wage jobs are NOT what a responsible adult expects to work at their entire lives and raise a family on. For CENTURIES, if you wanted to support a family, you needed a skill of some sort, and entry-level wages were the least of your concern. The idea of being able to live well off the minimum wage is ridiculous.
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Actually, they used FISA warrants to put a wire on a server in Trump Tower, didn't they? It's not exactly a wiretap.
You're quibbling over the difference between using a Mason jar or a juice class to listen to somebody's conversation through the wall. Snooping is snooping. Eavesdropping is eavesdropping, whether you're tapping a phone or tapping a server. That's mighty fine hair-splitting from a mighty well-spoken demagogue, right thar.
Hannity definitely beats the partisan drums, and keeps pushing the dossier as the primary basis for the FISA warrants, which isn't at all clear without more facts, and the DOJ and FBI ARE trying to keep the facts out of view. We need to hear from the FISA judges and keep a close eye on that front. FISC is notorious for rubber-stamping anything DOJ/FBI puts in front of them.
For the judges' part, they've generally taken DOJ/FBI at their word, and it sounds like DOJ/FBI have been scamming the system to go after anybody they want, including using incidental NSA materials to target drug dealers, for example. I can see a lot of law-enforcement types LOVIN' that shit, even though it violates the U.S. Constitution.
As for Mueller. It's hard to imagine a billionaire real-estate developer in the Big Apple not having skeletons in his closet. If Mueller keeps poking around long enough, and can flip or otherwise induce a witness to say bad things about Trump, he can definitely cause Trump problems.
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Dorsey turned the ship around, but yeah. I think Veach piloted it to the quay. I think Dorsey brought more analytics, but I think Veach leans more towards the game film and live-game evaluations than measuring tape and stopwatches. There's still no getting away from the underwear olympics (Combine), they've been very successful getting drafted-for-need players on the field and producing.
I don't like seeing drafting for need, after decades of Carl Peterson taking best player available at position of need, and settling for lesser players because the need was so great and KC had to pick where they sat. Veach and Dorsey both were more aggressive in the draft and more perspicacious. They'll move up to get their guy, if the talent tiers demand it. And they seem to have a much better handle on other teams' needs and intentions. I watched both Peterson and Pioli draft players at the bottom of some huge talent cliffs.
I still see more drafting for need, but when Veach does it, he appears to know what he's doing, and has the draft scoped out to where he knows what he needs to do to get what he needs. No more taking the 5th-best guy, because that's all that's left and they can't or won't trade up.
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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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Modernization doesn't chew into jobs. It creates NEW jobs. But you're going to have to actually, you know, improve yourself and gain some skills if you want the new job.
Still, the old job that was lost was primarily lost because of the high cost of hiring people in Dimocrat's upside-down universe. So, you automate.
All goes back to "Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938." Nobody thought, then, that it would mean knocking the bottom rung off the career ladder. But my dad remembered...
Nobody's crying about automatic pin-setters in bowling alleys. But that was a pretty cool gig for young trouble-makers, about 70 years ago. A nice first rung on the ladder to prosperity. Dad lost his job as a pin-setter, due to the 1938 law, which made it more cost-effective for bowling alleys to install the pin-setters we all grew up with. The generation that used to set pins by hand - their first job! - are all mostly dead, now.
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@GIDSKID100 America is based on supreme distrust of government power. The people have voted for more government power, out of fear, ignorance, and sheer laziness. That government is best which governs least. Ours used to be that, but from the beginning, the elites have always sought to restore the old, aristocratic forms, usually thru fear and state-serving ideology, especially since the central government took over education, health, and the press.
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Back in the '70s, used bookstores used to have to tear the front cover off used paperbacks.
Back in the '90s, the price of college textbooks was based on existing pre-orders. They set the price to make all their money back from the orders they already had. Everything after that was profit.
What I'm doing, NOW, as a math professor, is purchasing the Learning Management System that accompanies the textbook for around $100. Included in the LMS are homework exercises that are graded automatically, for instant feedback. There's "View an Example," "Help Me Solve This" and "Ask My Instructor." They will give you a pre-test and auto-generate a custom study plan for you (and your deficiencies).
They suck for graphing and can't (yet) automate the partial-credit grading of written work, so I supplement with a handful of "Writing Projects" that are graded by hand by a human, the old-fashioned way. But a LOT of students learn a LOT from what LMS's CAN do.
The price of a new book is $100-plus. IMO, the LMS is WORTH $100 for a semester. The LMS comes with an eBook as part of the service. Students who want a hard-copy textbook may still purchase one, new, but I tell them "ANY EDITION OF THE TEXT IS FINE." So they can rent or buy used on eBay or Amazon or wherever. This way I can build a course based on a particular author and re-use the materials online for YEARS.
I think the new books are a major scam, but the publisher can still get their $100 per pupil AND the pupil gets ALL KINDS of on-demand help. That help isn't always the greatest and some of the "Go to Read About This" just sends them to a chapter without directing the student to the actual part of the book that pertains to their question. That's why I make a video for every question the students might have. MY take on what we're covering.
At my institution, the issue is quality control for remote and online courses. During COVID, the testing center stopped supporting written test proctoring. So I'm testing online with lock-down browser and cameras. But that's not the same as a WRITTEN EXAM under a TIME CONTROL with a PROCTOR overseeing the test-taking, to reduce cheating. You can spoof a lock-down browser and camera pretty easily if you want. Every time I bring this up, nobody cares. Academia is trying to get away from "high stakes testing" so that more students will "succeed." I consider anything less than mastery to be a failure, but I see more students "passing," who wouldn't have 3 or 4 years ago, when we still had the in-person testing under a time control.
Now, Disability Services hands out extra time on tests like candy, and I have to accommodate those diktats. I think that if you give them extra time on everything, you're not really getting a fair measure of their competence. "He can get 100% if you just give him 10 hours!" Taking 10 hours to do what a competent person can do in 1 hour is not mastery. It's welfare, and may God help their employer when they show up and work REALLY REALLY SLOW.
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@benjurqunov It wins for Democrats in the short run, but the people coming in have strong traditional values. Ron DeSantis is Latino heritage. A guy like him could inspire 1st- and 2nd-generation immigrants. The stuff the Democrats are pushing - by increasingly oppressive means - go against everything these immigrants believe in. These are strong family-values people, and as soon as they get one whiff of prosperity, or their kid comes home with a pornography assignment for homework, they're never voting Democrat again.
We're going to see more and more Latino conservatives. With Charisma. DeSantis, with his nasally twang, is not particularly charismatic. But there are young, liberty-minded firebrands coming up. It's just a matter of time. The Democrats are pulling out all the stops to win, NOW, and defy the majority for years to come.
Same with Muslims, of whom Democrats couldn't get enough for the last 10 years. Now, in the UK, you're seeing them protesting LGBTQ indoctrination in local school districts, who QUICKLY capitulate, because they're afraid to tell the Muslims "No."
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A Western chauvinist is someone who believes in Western principles of life, liberty and property, won at great cost, over centuries of 3 steps forward, 2 steps back. This as opposed to the rigid, authoritarian, conformist, nationalist-imperialist EASTERN chauvinist principles.
You go to Turkey, they'll tell you all about the peak of the Ottoman Empire. You go to Iran, and they're steeped in their history and the Persian Empire. Chinese? You guessed it. Russian? The same. zerbaijan? Same. India? Same. Pakistan? Same. Afghanistan? Same. Saudi Arabia? Same. Westerners are more skeptical of governments and more interested in how the PEOPLE are doing. In that sense, I, too, am a Western chauvinist.
Of course, this lady works for CNN, so the only thing "chauvinist" she's ever heard of is "male chauvinism." Ignorant reporter. No surprise.
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@kiae-nirodiariesencore4270 Those are legit concerns. Government intervention was always in the name of making things better, but all it did was put the government in the hip pocket of all the industries it purported to "regulate." The net effect of such interventions is always rampant abuse followed by destruction of the industry, itself, after the intervention has driven out all smaller competitors.
I would much rather see a true free market.
Now, I'd like you to address the sourcing of the raw materials needed to support this EV panacea you love so much. EVs aren't really cleaning things up. They're just trading one form of environmental degradation for another, without really ANY concern for the actual value of each. Just a religious certitude that CO2 is the Great Satan.
Where are we getting most of those minerals from? Countries that don't care at ALL about the environment. Your arguments are really just "not in MY back yard!" arguments, that make you feel good, but you're just moving the pollution over the China, which also shares the same planet we do!
The oil companies wouldn't own the government (essentially) if the government hadn't decided to cash in on a big business's profits and pretend to "regulate" them in the interests of the people. Every time the people are up in arms and want to see change, the government steps in and CONTROLS the form that change will take, and the controls they implement are ALWAYS in consultation with the very companies that the public was about to make bankrupt!
What really ends up happening is what always ends up happening: The agency gets captured by the very people it purports to regulate.
We see this all the time, and it's only getting worse.
Now, if you're right about the importance of putting fossil fuels in the rearview mirror, the best way to achieve that is through free markets, NOT by government intervention. Set a good example and try to convince others to follow your lead.
Government intervention gets to parade all the winners, but it harms everyone in small ways, so it's hard to get at the actual harm that is done. But all those small "harms" are stacking up, and anyone with a brain can see that where we're headed is serfdom, where no one can afford their own home or the ability to go where they want, when they want.
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They were all going to "enjoy unusually heavy snow fall." Sounds like rich people on ski holiday.
That would explain why so many died. Rich people tend not to take the gear with them. It would be inconvenient to do all that packing and hauling baggage around. It's easier to just buy the gear after they get there. I can see rich people and/or lowlands/city people getting themselves in trouble. I doubt anybody from the area died.
I used to live in Gunnison, Colorado, and I saw a lot of that. Rich people fly in, buy the gear they need, and then sell it before they leave (actually dump it at 2nd-hand shop on consignment). It's like renting, only they never have to use anything that's tainted by somebody else.
Lots of 2nd-hand gear that's just been used once in places like that. Gunnison is just down the road from Crested Butte, where there's some world class powder (snow. not cocaine). I bought some high-quality gear at bargain prices by living there. $300 GoreTex jacket for $80. Not a thing wrong with it. Good-as-new Sorels for $30.
I'm more like you. I've traveled all over the American Rocky Mountain West and NorthWest, following my trade around the region, with lots of trips back home and to various places I wanted to see. And I lived on the road pretty much the same as I lived at the house, right down to the dishes and cookware I used in the kitchen. I'm a lot older, now and can afford separate camp kitchen, but I still go on the road the same way I always did. Raiding the kitchen the day before you leave is just automatic! LOL!
Getting trapped in a snow storm would just be a chance to camp where they'd ordinarily chase you off!
All that being said, perishing of the cold and/or dehydration is an unexpected and unpleasant end for ANYbody. My heart goes out.
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COVID-19 was a proof-of-concept, as was BLM, and the transgender movement that ran rampant through all our legacy institutions. Note the term "legacy institutions." Those control systems have been wildly successful, yet at the same time, spell the doom of those control systems and the controllers, thereof.
USAID and NED are on the lips of many. Church Committee reforms were thwarted by their creation. This whole public-private thing is the very definition of fascism. It's just fascism by other means, when the direct, socialist path has lost traction.
What pisses me off, the most, is the supposedly limited-government Republicans and the supposedly anti-establishment Democrats are uni-partying us into tyranny. They agree on all the worst things, and those with a clear liberty message are considered fringe! Even the election of Trump doesn't really change that, fundamentally, or so I fear.
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Israel is just a problem for everybody, including Israel. You don't just step in and create a nation by force, but that's what we did. The history of the region is very complicated. Israel has been a state, off and on, for a very long time, and lived under various empires over the centuries as more or less autonomous vassal state, and at other times as a true, independent state.
Once created and recognized as a nation, then those rules apply. Some Arab states still refuse to recognize Israel. This makes it OK to screw with them. Israel's generally seemed to expand in response to attack. Give up the Golan heights, and before long, there are mortars falling on Tel Aviv. So they re-take the heights. Refuse to give them up. And when the Egyptians were warring with them, they grabbed land from the Egyptians.
It's kind of similar to how the Soviets basically annexed Eastern Europe after WW II, as much, I think, to have a buffer between Moscow and crazy Europeans as anything else.
A lot of stuff like that. A lot of stuff I don't know about the settlements. One thing I do know is that wherever the Israelis take over, it goes from wasteland to productive land. I think they're net exporters of agricultural goods, surrounded by neighbors who can't feed themselves, without imports.
Lots of bits and pieces.
Anyway, I agree with just about everything you said, although I'm still not sure I grok the whole picture regarding Israel. The more I learn, the more gray it becomes.
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Institutions are artificial constructs that take on a life of their own, and act in the institution's and the institution's administrators and staff's interests, instead of the people the institutions were created to serve. We see this in primary and secondary education, creeping upwards into and dominating postsecondary education.
From Vietnam and the Cold War, to Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom, we see that these "experts" are frequently out of touch, and the longer the institutions persist, the more out of touch they become. Rarely does a government agency perform the tasks it was created to perform, over long periods of time. The incentives are all upside-down.
When I see these institutions do as they do, I don't have to point to a bunch of people who wanted it this way. It's just the Life principle. Once something that's self-perpetuating, it tends to grow. That's why I don't have to believe in "intelligent design" for creation, to believe that what persists, tends to persist. Anything that acts to grow an "organism" will continue to grow that organism until something acts to stop it.
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Here's the thing:
The state of Israel was created by force by foreign powers. It is surrounded by nations who despise how it was created and the creation, itself.
I totally understand BOTH sides. What I don't understand is why we continue to double down on an unwise use of force 75 years ago. There will always be tension and escalation, as both sides see themselves locked in an existential struggle. In such a struggle, atrocities abound.
The usa needs to QUIT propping up artificialities abroad. This is NOT the American Way. Our leaders for decades have measured their own worth by a European yardstick, when we, the people, REJECTED that yardstick over 2 centuries ago. We have military bases all over the planet. We destabilize and overthrow foreign governments at our whim. It's disgusting for any American who believes in the founding principles of the usa. Trouble is, our leaders think they're royalty, when ours is a nation of commoners, who believe in self determination, liberty, and personal responsibility. That's why we're lied to, every day.
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I don't know the law well enough to judge, but after last night's stay at Holiday Inn Express, it occurs to me that Sullivan got caught in the middle. People on both sides of the Flynn case acted in bad faith, from his perspective. First, the prosecutors, who broke the rules over and over to GET Flynn. And for Flynn's part, he pled guilty to get the heat off, short term, but never turned state's evidence against Trump. I think it was that he didn't have any evidence to give, but he apparently kept stalling or failing to provide the 'dirt' that the prosecutors wanted.
Defendants who make a plea and then don't hold up their end of the plea agreement get pretty short shrift from the courts. What happened is pretty unprecedented, with the DOJ withdrawing all charges. Whatever the right of it is, the judge has a right to feel like he was played by prosecutors and defendant. That being said, he's acted a lot like a partisan hack in stretches.
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@ptbot3294 : Yes. Anyone with access to more than the "Uncomfortable and self-conscious teen being harassed by Native American" that was spun into "Racist white supremacist smirking at noble Native American" can see that the Black Hebrew Israelites were hurling vulgar invectives at EVERYONE, but they got a free pass. Nathan Phillips, would-be professional outrage activist ("I'm outraged. Give me money:" i.e., Talcum X wannabe), went into the crowd, which parted for him, except for the one kid who just stood his ground, smiling.
I get that same nervous smile in tense situations, where I know I have to stand my ground, without blowing my top. It pisses people off, because they misinterpret it as a smirk, when it's just the goofy half-smile I get when I'm in a situation that could go South if I succumb to the same emotional outburst as the person in front of me. I've lost a lot of arguments on emotional grounds, because people see the OTHER person, who's going off the deep end as the victim, when really they're just weaponizing their outrage to garner sympathy. I just stick to the facts and keep my emotions under a lid.
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She's the perfect hack for implementing Demokkkrat policy. The policies are insane and wildly unpopular, and Joe and Kamala are left holding the bag, while those who engineered their installation and are engineering their administration are failing at everything and - of course - trying to make it appear to be Joe and Kamala who are failing. When everybody was cheering at their "brave stand" regarding open borders, neither Kamala nor her handlers were anticipating the actual tough questions that would accompany the totally predictable total failure.
They EXPECTED the Demokkkrat-run media to run interference for them, and for it to be an unending love-fest, like it was for Obama. But since the Obama Admin, it's gotten harder to hide the misfeasance and malfeasance, and a lot of the crimes of Obama Admin are catching up to the Obama team, as well.
Democrats have been reasoning from plausible - but FALSE - premises for a long time, now, and. the inevitable absurdities are getting too big to cover up, any more. They're choking on their own success, because that success is built on lies and misconceptions. To the extent that they are misconceptions, they just aren't ready to admit that they got things wrong. They still cling to those misconceptions, but the facts from the real world - which they don't live in - are piling up.
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I'd take the temperature of the comments, just to see who I was appealing to and what it brought out in them. But I think beyond a certain point, you're going to have a pretty good idea of the kinds of criticisms you're going to get, and know your own faults more acutely than any of your critics.
This makes me think about student evaluations of teachers at the end of every semester. After 30 years, you know what your strengths and weaknesses are. You can be fooled into thinking something's really working great, even when it isn't, because 5 people sing your praises. You can think something sucks, when it doesn't, because lazy students don't understand how many reps it takes for them to master a skill, or they'll tell you that they're fine with the homework, but the test questions are just too hard, even when you went out of your way to just tweak the numbers on homework exercises on the tests.
Administrators try to emphasize student evaluations, but other than the most egregious cases of bad teaching that TERRIBLE evaluations can flag for you, they really don't help you improve your teaching craft. I know - as a hoary old goat of a teacher - exactly how to play the students if I want great evaluations, just by planting suggestions and creating an atmosphere of "You're doing great!" even when they're not. I don't have it in me to lie to them. I just act kindly towards all and give them what they earn. It's important to never take anything away from anybody. Just award them the points they EARN, like it's a job.
If I were Joe Rogan, with a nice income, I'd probably hire somebody I trusted to monitor the comments and create an irreverent, but welcoming place. It's not that hard to do, and it's as easy or easier to ban bad actors (like the guy who sees Zionist conspiracies everywhere, and quotes Revelation all the time) as it is for the trolls to come up with new identities. Just one person could probably monitor 3 or 4 pretty beefy channels for a uniquely open and troll-free experience.
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@iggy5347 Yes, the people in Hong Kong were more free under Great Britain than they will be under China. But the British had no right to even BE there to HAVE a Hong Kong, in the first place, and what they did in the Opium Wars is a blot on British history.
That being said, I consider Hong Kong to BE China, at this point, and I don't want Mainland products passed off as made by free people in free Hong Kong, when they aren't. Any special privileges enjoyed by Hong Kong should cease as soon as possible, because it's 100% China, now, no matter how they dress it up. And I don't want cheaper products at the price of propping up tyranny. If it's not obvious that China is an oppressive and tyrannical totalitarian state under CCP, then you need to catch up on your China Uncensored.
I think China becomes a backwater if we hold it accountable and insist on fair and transparent trade. They don't meet the transparency or fairness criteria. They're rogue traders we did a favor to allow into the world trade community, on the assumption that they would behave better if we treated them nice. We know beyond a doubt that they just kept up with their same old ways. We don't need to fight them. But we don't need to do business with them, either.
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It depends on who's in charge. Under Bush's, Clinton and Obama, it was non-stop de-stabilization and regime change, functionally identical to colonial empires of the 17th - 20th Centuries, only with better tech and more sophisticated media.
There's a mind-set in the foreign-policy establishment that insists that we not abandon x, y or z because we made promises to freedom fighters. If we abandon the Kurds, it will make it harder for us to recruit freedom fighters in the future! That was Bolton's thinking. I think Trump foolishly let himself get talked into protecting those oil fields in NE Syria, on behalf of the Kurds.
There's all this bad policy that was justified during the Cold War and now there's a "sunk-cost fallacy" embedded in all their thinking. Rather than cut their losses and admit that meddling extra-legally, abroad, is just non-stop blowback, they talk about all the years and money investing in "developing assets abroad." Well, maybe the American people don't want U.S.-funded paramilitary all over the planet. Today's freedom fighter is tomorrow's terrorist. Our foreign-policy wonks set us up for this, time and time again, and are never held accountable. Their main skill is in smearing those who dare challenge them or call them to account.
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I would add that the people who abuse their positions of power because they think they know better than everyone else, usually do NOT know better than everyone else, and are the least competent people in the administration they seek to subvert. Brennan, for example, is a political hack, promoted FAR beyond his station by OTHER political hacks, who kind of adopted him as a mascot, because the one thing he was good at was kissing ass and doing what he was told. Brennan's a classic "climber." He got his foot in the door and based his entire career on personal advancement, at the expense of the job he was hired to do. Comey's the same way.
People who aren't too bright always think they're the smartest person in the room. I know, because I'm the smartest person in the room! LOL! None of us are immune, but the dumber you are, the further you run with such nonsense. If you're actually smart, you have some appreciation of the possibility you might be wrong. Idiots and narcissists operate under no such handicap. Hence, Brennan. And I doubt you'll see (m)any people in high places who don't believe they're there because they are The Anointed. They're special. They're more wise and well-intentioned than everybody else. Narcissism is everywhere in Washington. Even Trump is a narcissist. But he's OUR narcissist, fighting fire with fire.
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@O'Shay Muir : So you're saying they've been fighting a 2-front war against libertarians and sincere conservatives on the one side, and Progressives and sincere liberals on the other. Because that's a theme that runs through 70-80% of normal people on both sides. But it's way more visible on the left, because of all the meet-you-for-brunch liberals who still watch lamestream media, and jumped on the Iraq War bandwagon.
It's just a theory, but there are a LOT of conservatives/libertarians who love the way Jimmy eviscerates them on this front. Jimmy's still way out in left field, domestically, because he hasn't yet figured out that government will ALWAYS take things this direction in ALL things government touches, INCLUDING (and especially) domestic programs. You want to see all the worst features of what you're protesting against? (poverty, racism, education and health) . Just ask the government to "fix it" for you. Then I guarantee things will get more fucked up than they were before you asked. And why the hell did you ask? Why don't you roll up your sleeves and HELP the nearest person to you who needs help? If all liberals/progressives ACTED on their feelings, on the ground, we wouldn't HAVE to ask the government to help with poverty, health, and education!
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@Dead_World_Walking : Easy stereotypes, but you have NO understanding of how hard it has been to be a principled conservative for the last 50 or 60 years. Tell it like it is and they tear you a new asshole. Mention "limited government" and be called a racist.
The FACT is that in a society that's immersed in left-wing ideology, the "bad boys" are now conservatives and the conformist choir boys are all on the left. If you're on the left, you won't see a SINGLE principled conservative on lamestream media or in the schools. It's EASY to be left. It's CONFORMIST to be left. The free spirits are all on the right, nowadays, and it's why they meme better.
Remember how edgy and noncomformist Rolling Stone was back in the '60s? THOSE kinds of voices - and most of the creativity - now seem to reside on the right. Now it's not your school teacher ramming Jesus down your throat. It's your school teacher ramming postmodernism down your throat. And the rebellious youth are rebelling against the same Establishment, just from the opposite direction, because all the New Puritans are on the left! Being "conformist," nowadays is almost 100% a phenomenon of the (neoliberal, postmodernist) left. Shaming and harassing for holding any view that's not in line with the dialectic. Bullying someone in public because they wear a Trump hat. This is all coming from the left, and if the left don't police their own membership, they're going to be a marginalized minority very soon.
And yes, I remember the '80s, where I found myself agreeing with regressive traditionalists on this or that issue, only they supported the same side for some pretty stinky, authoritarian reasons. And there are still a small number of true regressives who are going to vote Republican because God told them. But don't believe for one second that that stereotype in any way characterizes the conservative movement or the vast majority of limited-government types. The regressives on either side never care about how big government IS, they just want it to do what THEY say, in tribalistic fashion, as if you could tame that tiger and he'll be happy with his bowl of Purina when you are meat on the hoof.
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Assange is where you see crossover between principled conservatives and progressives like Jimmy Dore. Free thinkers on both sides of the political divide abhor the use of force and violence abroad in our name. Liberal people - real liberals - don't like dirty tricks abroad. Liberal people - real liberal people - want to shine a light on as much as possible. Top-notch intelligence-gathering? Essential. And you don't have to infiltrate high government to pretty much know what's going, just by going through their durn garbage, with full forensics. Heh. Dad went on numerous "spy missions" - i.e., dumpster dives - in the parking lots behind stores they wanted filled with Potlach Forest Industries products. P&G did the same sorts of things. You can tell a lot by the empty boxes, alone. But I digress. As usual.
"Regime change" is a catch-all term that basically justifies going to war with whomever the powers-that-be decide is the bad guy. And yes. It looks bad when millions of dollars change hands between Russians and the Clintons right about the time Hillary was in a position to veto the Uranium 1 deal. She should've recused herself - in which case the other 8 people who voted for it would take all the blame. But she's the one of the 9 who had veto power and she didn't. Having made that call, her hubby pulling in $500,000 for a speaking engagement in Russia, and paid for by oligarchs, reeks of corruption. So does money finding its way into the Clinton Foundation from similar sources. To have spun this whole thing into suspicion of collusion by Trump with Russians is brazen genius. Balls of brass, nay, steel.
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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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@pathfinder1295 : Might be surprised what happens, once the Mueller investigation wraps up, if Trump is exonerated, which I think he will be. I wouldn't read too much into all the neocons around him. I think he may be using them to posture/position himself. Want Maduro to get his shit together, maybe pressure the Chinese and Russians? Hire Elliott Abrams and have Bolton accidentally reveal "5,000 troops to Brazil" on his legal pad. Create the perception. get movement from Maduro.
Unlike the neocons/neolibs, I don't think Trump thinks in terms of regime change. Set aside the rhetoric. Remember he was gonna fire Mueller? I don't think it even entered his mind as a possibility, but he knew it would set a panic - and a wretched, sleezy hope - in the hearts of Democrats, They SO wanted it to happen, it dominated the networks. And he didn't do it. Just let it fester. Maybe stoke the fires a little with a tweet that'd keep the opposition occupied for DAYS with something it took him (and/or his team) 5 minutes to think up and throw on Twitter.
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When you raise the minimum wage, by law, all you're doing is making everything more expensive for everyone, including and especially those who work for minimum wage! You're also eliminating many jobs for teenagers, who usually aren't WORTH that much, until they learn how to work!
Here's a story:
Man owns a bodega. There's a homeless man he befriends, and tries to help the guy out, time to time. The homeless man volunteers to sweep the walk out front. The bodega owner, let's call him "Steve," pays him $5.
Steve isn't very rich. He's just getting by. The homeless man, let's call him "Mike," is grateful, and before long, he's stocking shelves, sweeping the floors inside, etc. Steve doesn't have much to offer, but he does have a room in the back where he sets up a cot, and so Mike has a safe, warm place to sleep at night.
Then, Russell Dobular happens by, and being the knight-errant justice warrior that he is, he notices downtrodden Mike and asks him what he's making, because his clothes are pretty raggedy. He's clean and his clothes are clean, but they're next to rags, so he asks what Mike is making.
Mike loves Steve to death, so he tells Russell about the arrangement they have and his hopes for the future. Russell, a champion of justice, reports Steve to the Labor Relations Board, because of his PERCEPTION of the unfairness.
Steve is given a choice of either paying Mike more, or being sued. Reluctantly, Steve informs Mike that he can no longer work there, and Mike is back on the street. Russell, all puffed-up with self-righteous self-importance, goes home and brags to all his friends how much he cares....
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@Benjamin Figgins : The U.S. has abandoned innumerable proxies in the past, when it suited the U.S. elites. Trump's not a member of that club. He just looks at it and doesn't think using proxies for regime change is cool. Most people don't remember the shit that went on in Africa in the '60s and '70s, when any dictator who messed with the Soviets was our "friend" and without sin. The Soviets were not nice. No doubt. But just as we used Hitler as an excuse to model much of OUR system after HIS, in the "war effort," so did we use the Soviets as the pretext for all kinds of bullshit.
Classic Machiavellian thought. Make us afraid of our economic insecurities to grab power (the federal welfare state) and our international insecurities to grab power. Progressives get it half right, but have no fuckin' clue that the BEST bulwark against poverty is a free market with minimal government interference. It's when the government gets involved when robber barons can set up the system THEIR way, by bribing, conning, or coercing the 5 or 6 people we foolishly give the power to decide for us.
In the age of smartphones, the average citizen - and threat of exposure - is a far stronger (and less corruptible) defense against abuses by private companies. And if you read and understand your Adam Smith, you would see that the REAL explosion in prosperity that brought MORE people up from poverty than any 10 government programs was property rights and limited government. Progressives abhor BOTH, which makes them as much a part of the problem as any Deep-State asshole. Not because they're evil, but because they're stupid and feed the dragon they all like to bitch about all the time.
Don't like poverty? Use your freedom to generate some personal wealth and HELP SOMEBODY OUT! If more people LIVED that, we'd be much better off. If you think government (career) bureaucrats are going to do a better job on health care than you and your local community, you're a fool..
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Why did the Israelis take the West Bank? Because it was used as a staging area for invasion.
Why did they seize the Golan Height? Because Syrians were lobbing missiles from them.
I don't pretend to have any solutions or to support the Israelis, but I UNDERSTAND them. Why did the Soviets take and create the Eastern Bloc? Because that was where Hitler invaded from! I hated the Iron Curtain and the fact that the Soviets held vassal states. But a bit older now, in the post-cold-war era, I totally understand how that tyranny was seen as a matter of self-preservation by the Soviets, especially bordering Europe, which has historically gone bat-shit crazy every 20, 50 or 100 years, fighting over everything from resources to inbred-family squabbles for centuries! And when you look at the strategic situation on their Southwestern flank, the invasion of Afghanistan and more recently wars in Chechnya, Ukraine and Crimea, they are all understandable (not necessarily supportable), when you see the problems they have on their borders with defense against toxic, expansionist Islam and unfettered access to the Mediterranean at stake.
There's a lot to un-pack, here, but as a small nation surrounded by nations that seem bent on their destruction, the Israelis act in totally rational ways for their own self-preservation. I don't think they care one bit about the West Bank, if they're getting along with the Egyptians. I don't think they care about the Golan Heights if they can be assured that the Syrians (or Islamic extremists) aren't going to lob missiles at them from there.
Taking a step back from my ill-informed writing exercise.
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Yes, but when the money is all in the one interpretation and censure and disrepute attach to any other, some get the impression that the one-note outcomes are political/ideological. And there is pretty strong evidence of some number-cooking and an abject failure of the climate models to align with the data as we get 5, 10 and 20 years into this foolishness. It's becoming painfully obvious their model is exaggerating the effect of man-made CO2.
That doesn't mean we all don't want to live cleaner. It's just that most of us are skeptical that government is competent, not COMPETITIVE, with the ideas the ordinary folks are coming up with, like Mass heater rocket stoves that use 1/10 the wood, with near-zero particulate emissions. The EPA can't approve them, because what comes out the pipe is only warm, by the time you run it through your mass. The people are evolving more rapidly than a government bureaucracy can hope to keep up with.
I think we, as people, know that it's better to live cleaner than dirtier, and probably not have too many babies. Let that percolate in society. Middle class want to source their food closer to home. We don't need laws to go local. Just some good advertising from the guy that put up the greenhouses on the North side of the canyon.
Yeah, the distribution network is marvelous, but sustainable living is all about import replacement, and that includes things like truck vegetables, and in my case, local grown, grass-fed beef or venison. I can see communities growing in that more sustainable direction, without any prodding. It's something that's high-value that most middle-class are more than happy to pay extra for.
Love to see Farmer's markets running year-round, where you the lady who grows the stuff you eat, and you've been out there, and it's totally sustainable, organic goods.
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sergio perez: You realize that if they leave Social Security as is, that it will go bankrupt? What's YOUR proposal? MY proposal is that we do away with it, entirely. It was openly a pyramid scheme from the very beginning, propped up by a never-ending growth of new participants at the bottom of the pyramid, and plagued by adding more recipients to the list, while the population explosion that made it all seem like utopia is over, and the Baby Boomers expect MORE benefits, and they will ruthlessly extract them from a shrinking number of young people.
If Bernie Madoff does it, it's a felony. If the federal government does it, it's government doing a good deed out of love, compassion, and better-than-yours virtue.
To every concern, the answer is "No, this program will never be used for that. And we keep the money in a 'lock box,' that nobody will ever or can ever (ever ever ever ever) use for other purposes." And then they keep adding new ways for people to receive benefits without paying in.
I will grant 'em this, though. When they then do the inevitable 'lock-box raid,' they're careful to put a sincere and heartfelt IOU in the box. So we got that goin' for us. Also, they're very good about keeping it quiet, and it's good not to rile people up.
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My institution has added new staff over the last few years, for Title IX, FERPA, and Diversity offices. Not a bit of it has to do with providing knowledge to students. In fact, it steals time from already busy schedules, with mandatory trainings and new committees.,
It's making the production of the product MORE costly, RIGHT when technology can cut costs to the consumer/student to nearly ZERO! There's a lot of inertia, and lots of folks will turn to the same institutions, as in the past, but costs are spiking, right when the existing institutions need to hop on the new paradigm.
I anticipate significant "die-back," myself. We'll see.
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Government sets itself up as the protector of lands and turns right around and builds roads that loggers need into areas loggers and miners otherwise wouldn't've touched, for economic reasons. AND they stand in the way, with their regs and rules, of anybody trying to run a small operation. And small operations in the old days tended to leave parks behind, with plenty of new growth coming back, because they, as owners, saw the land as a stewardship, and they always wanted to have trees to harvest, forever, and pass something on to their kids.
But on PUBLIC LANDS? Hell, just go in and get every board-foot possible for minimum investment and move on to the next area. Bitch about how slow the Forest Service is to make the roads they promised... People who live in the woods tend to become stewards of the land. People who receive subsidies to (over-)work public lands tend not to be.
I wish we'd just let the tort system and societal evolution manage the problems that the gov't sets itself up to solve. Nasty effluent from your factory? You get sued by the folks downstream. Make being cleaner a selling point. We'd probably be cleaner, now, if we hadn't given shit over to the EPA, and policed ourselves. Nixon jumped on this shit after there was a critical mass in society already pushing HARD in the right direction.
But there are some old-school ranchers who DO ranch on public lands and ARE stewards of the land. So there's always exceptions. But if you don't like clear cuts in the wilderness, then you're unhappy with the gov't.
But I'm not sure what to do about public lands. I dunno. All of them, combined, are a small fraction of what we took, by conquest, centuries ago. For whose benefit, and how much authority government or citizens should have, are questions that are beyond me.
I know there's the law, but if you spend time up in the woods, you meet folks who poach for the dinner table.
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I adore Jimmy Dore, but like all my adorable progressive friends, he sees a lot of the symptoms and obvious abuses, but doesn't see to the root of the problem, which was putting government in charge of too much.
We do need a central government for the common defense, as long as there are other countries that would otherwise hurt us. But we don't need to police the planet, so gov't's gone too far in that direction. And there's nothing in the constitution about the federal gov't doing charity work. That's the job of us in our communities, and we should take pride in our communities.
Keepin' folks fed ain't the feds' job, except in national emergency, but to be in a state of national emergency - on a war footing since December, '41 - perpetually, for decades without end says that the feds have been totally unable and unwilling to declare victory and leave the petty stuff to the folks at home.
It's debilitating to our states, towns and neighborhoods, imo.
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You are correct, ArtemiaSalina. "The market never lies." But government can lie to itself all day long and impose its will where it can. The bloated monstrosity that sits atop us, now, is unable to respond to the kinds of rapid changes taking place.
There are too many new things popping up that haven't been legislated on, yet. At some point, on some level, at all times, society is well ahead of government in the realm of "What's possible?" Thing about Uber and Couch Surfing and how established businesses tried to use gov't to lock those innovations out, even though they're a more efficient way to allocate resources, and just a way cooler way to interact with the culture you're visiting.
Kids with their noses in their smartphones can spread info nationwide in seconds, one text message or phone call at a time. As long as that infrastructure's up, there's just too much for gov't to process (in my uninformed opinion), and way more advantage in individuals having such coms available, as long as the stuff works.
Ideas. Good ideas. From rocket stoves to backyard vacuum-tube production.
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Every time some idiot does something stupid with a firearm, y'all want to pass laws that make no sense, and do nothing but further restrict the law-abiding citizen.
I'd like to see licensing for firearms coming with some required training, and make that training a very easily-obtained and common elective in junior-high or high school, just like Hunter's Safety was when I was a kid. I learned all about firearm safety at 11, in a community full of kids that would harvest their first deer at age 12 (and save their family a ton of money at the meat counter).
If you pass the training, then there'd be no delay in the purchase of a firearm, because you're untrained. But everybody should be trained in firearm safety before they're 18. Age 11 or 12 seemed to work just fine in our rural community. We respected guns, but nobody feared them, any more than they were afraid of a car or a tractor, although all 3 had high mischief potential.
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I stand as living proof, aurora123borealis. Coming up, my math mentors were not uniformly left or right, but the lefties were more outspoken. Mathematicians have very strong reasoning skills, but our proofs and conclusions are no better than our initial assumptions. Einstein, himself stressed the fact that mathematics is always internally consistent, but the extent to which that internal consistency applies to external reality is never a sure thing.
We don't go from using the Bell Curve as a tool in analyzing empirical data to concluding there is a human being, somewhere, who stands 10,000 feet tall, even though the normal distribution says that there are.
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@markbeiser : You could spend years slurping up the flat-Earth theories and purported proofs. You could be pretty smart, too, but still have your brain filled with the alternate reality to the exclusion of more widely-accepted science. Doesn't have to mean a person is stupid. Just still a bit ignorant. For the average lay person, there isn't necessarily a straightforward way to sort out the truth from the fiction.
Imagine filling your days with 24/7 Colin Flaherty. You come away thinking every black person you encounter is about to pull a knife or just start beating you up. And he has enough content to keep you busy for weeks or months, even years. It's very easy to get a twisted take on reality in a world so full of people, eager to have you listen to them, not to mention how many thousands of pathological situations you can come up with in a country of 320 million, on a planet of billions. Against those numbers, mere thousands amount to not very much. They're the one-in-a-million situations that when multiplied by all the millions and billions of us can keep you going night and day, non-stop, for years.
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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 would argue that the American system is already largely fascist, given that the education and health care systems are basically run by the federal government, either directly, through mandates, or by threats of cutting off funding.
The third leg of the fascist tripod is state-run media, which the USA technically never had, but has had, as a functional matter, since (at least) World War II. It's not obviously state-run, but the Twitter Files are just the tip of the iceberg of behind-the-scenes pressure/coercion, inserted agents (Look at all the ex-CIA in top commentator spots across all legacy tv), and indoctrinated news agencies who deliver The Message of their own volition.
In fascism, you get to own stuff, but the government controls what you can do with what you own. The Krupp family dynasty owned Krupp Steel for a century before, then during, and ever since the Nazi regime. Krupp steel built all the tanks and guns for Hitler (and every German government since the 19th Century).
Anyone who hasn't read "The Arms of Krupp" needs to.
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Sometimes religion is the main bulwark against oppression. It's a strong unifying/organizing force, like a labor union. It's good to have around in bad times. Some of the most progressive movements in human history were spearheaded by conscientious leaders of faith.
As a semi-superstitious agnostic, I think Hitchens missed a lot of the GOOD that religion brought. Without such an organizing principle, much good that has been done over the centuries by true believers that otherwise would have been left un-done. Many people who just get up each morning and make life possible and sometimes just BETTER, because their faith tells them it's the right thing to do, to take care of their bodies, because it is what God would want them to do, and so forth.
Sure, any hierarchy is subject to capture by the malevolent or simply the incompetent. Sure, believing in something that can't be seen, felt, smelt, or heard is nutty, but getting up every morning and doing the mundane stuff is also kind of nutty if there's no ultimate payoff and the whole thing is futile. Seeing yourself as part of something bigger is very beneficial to many people.
What I'm trying to say is that if there were zero religion, maybe we wouldn't all be here in the first place, with full bellies and the leisure time to poke holes in our superstitions.
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@tombombadil8709 Russia can keep on pounding NATO/Ukraine forces at much greater cost to them than to Russia. Russia doesn't have to conquer all of Ukraine. It just has to destroy the war-fighting capability of Ukraine to remove it as a threat.
This has many of the hallmarks of the Kursk incursion. Great success, at first, only to find yourself worse off than when you started, because of the resources that were wasted. USA has been building up the rebels for quite some time, so they have an early advantage, but is the wherewithal there to really hold Syria? We'll see.
I think American logistics aren't up to the task. I don't think American will to fight another war in the Middle East is there. Even if it's there, the military is soy, and totally beholden to the military industrial complex, which wants to see expensive weaponry that only works if you have total air superiority, which nobody has in a battle between major powers.
What I'm not sure of is how much Turkey has to put into the effort or how serious Turkey is about trying to hold on to Syria. That will make a huge difference, one way or the other.
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How about we get the government out of the health care and education business? We could do the latter very easily, with nothing but benefit for education. Health care is a stickier wicket, because of inertia of the existing, corrupt and inefficient system. There are people relying on Medicare/Medicaid that you can't cut off, instantly. Retirees and soon-to-be retirees, who've made their life plans based on the current rule set.
But we need to wean ourselves off federally-funded health care, as painlessly as possible. Things we can do more or less immediately is pull the teeth of NIH, FDA, USDA, and other agencies that poison us in the name of saving us, apparently for the benefit of self-interested bureaucrats, Big Pharma, and Big Ag.
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I find myself in a bit of a paradox, siding with nationalists, not because I like how nationalism can be used to inflict the wishes of the few on the many, but because globalism is the worst of nationalism. People wanting top-down control of MANY nations, all at once, when I don't even like top-down on the national level. We should be de-centralizing within the current framework, rather than centralizing globally. Nationalism is half-way between where we want to be and globalism, so I end up siding with a lot of people who are in it for nationalistic/patriotic reasons. I'm also patriotic, but to me, patriotic means family, then town, then state, then federal, not everything according to federal. The more local autonomy, the less state and national boundaries matter, and they lower themselves, organically, rather than by force from above.
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America (re)created Israel by force, without asking anybody who lived there, except for one ethnic group. We set Israel up to be forever embroiled in war. The bad things Israel does are totally justified because they're constantly being attacked.
They are always being attacked for a lot of reasons:
1. Israel's creation, by force, by foreign powers.
2. Israel's willingness to act as the USA's proxy.
3. USA's willingness to support any and all adventurism by Israel.
4. Israel's great success defending itself.
5. Israel's hypocrisy of maintaining an ethno-state with the trappings of democracy.
Israel's not pure bad guy. The constant attacks from safe havens in neighboring countries makes Israel aggressive towards neighboring countries. People forget that Israel gave up the Golan Heights, only to be attacked by missiles and artillery from the Heights, which they re-took and refused to give up.
Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but from a distance, whether I'm right or wrong on the details, the fundamentals are pretty clear. Protecting and preserving Israel (and Western interests) in the Middle East, by force of arms, creates thousands of new terrorists every year. The terrorists are bad. Spanish Guerrilleros in the Peninsular War (against Napoleon) were bad. But to THEM, they were locked in an ongoing, asymmetric war, where the enemy had modern weapons and they had nothing but determination and past atrocities against them and/or their families driving them.
The USA has no thought of exiting, let alone getting as far as an exit strategy. There will either be forever war in the region or a relatively brief period of chaos after the USA pulls out. Either way, it's going to be bloody. Do we rip off the Band-Aid or do we do nothing until we have to amputate the arm?
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@sypher0101 : You got it right except for the "far right" piece. But everybody gets the left-right thing wrong, especially now, after decades of the left being on top, becoming the establishment, and as such, becoming the new "conservative."
Meh. None of it matters. A critical mass, a super-majority of Westerners, now basically believe in a fascist setup, with government running education and health care, just like Bismarck taught Hitler. We see how the Nazis brainwashed entire generations and then we turn right around and defend public schools under centralized control.
AFAIC, government programs were invented to maintain the ascendancy of the existing political class. Industrialization had us common folk getting mighty independent, creative, and uppity, so the ruling elites had to do something to put the focus back on them. The people finally weaned themselves off the Jünkers, and immediately hopped in Der Fuehrer's lap. Nobody learned from WW II. We became what we said we were fighting.
We're absolute dumb-asses, when you get right down to it. Staring us in the face. And nobody sees it.
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When you wonder why the world is so strange, just look at what the big networks have been airing for the last 4 or 5 decades. They're fading, now, but they used to be the only game in town and even now they're still the biggest outfits. Reality TV is really a pretty small niche audience, but those same networks have driven the culture for so long that the everybody who still watches - and everybody who has to deal with them - are still being driven by what looks more and more like a vestigial organ. But because they play what the establishment wants and the establishment still takes its cues from them, these dying appendices still have huge influence. And they systematically take down or hijack the biggest outfits on the Internet.
But when you take a step back, I think their grip on the public imagination is actually slipping. Badly. Lies always catch up, just maybe not directly, or in the way you expected. Yes. The stranglehold on legacy media is there and legacy media still has a lot of momentum, but it's DWARFED by thousands of public squares, like this one on BB, that are going their happy way, satirizing an increasingly out-of-touch establishment. They're saying everything the Democrats want them to say on CNN, but CNN matters less and less every day.
Maybe the mask thing will be the ultimate red-pill. That seems to be the case in some parts of Europe.
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The alliance that re-created the state of Israel against the will and the wishes of the people living in Palestine is fragmenting, and the will to support Israel is waning in the USA. The Balfour Declaration was carried out by the Allies after cessation of hostilities in WW II. Israel was artificially created and has been a proxy for the USA (and vice versa) ever since. Yes, its neighbors have been much more aggressive towards Israel than conversely, but all concerned need to take a step back and recognize that the decades'-long hostilities are due to a provocation by victorious allies after 1945, creating the state of Israel by drawing lines on a map.
What happened to self-determination? That's something the USA, Israel and other NATO (soon-to-be-former?) need to recognize, and instead of addressing the elephant in the room, they've dealt with each flare-up, piecemeal. I don't like what Hamas is doing. I think their leaders are ruthless and greedy scoundrels, who - as Rubin quoted - care more about taking the lives of Jewish babies than in preserving the lives of their own.
Things are just extremely tangled. They should have held a plebiscite, years ago, BEFORE Balfour, and let the people there decide for themselves how they wished to organize themselves into a nation. Now that Israel's in existence, the gentlest course would seem to be a 2-state solution, with holy temples held jointly, in some way, shape or form. But there I go, trying to tell everybody else what's fair. My only sure response is the same, lame, piecemeal "Hamas started this one" response.
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That's changing. In fact, it's better to use the term "legacy media," because those old networks, newspapers and magazines no longer manufacture consent like they used to. I see a lot of progressive crossover into conservative/libertarian sites and certainly a lot of conservatives and libertarians checking out Jimmy Dore, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate and others on the left for their take, as well. I can disagree with socialist lefties on domestic policies, while still agreeing with them on a lot of the foreign policy (anti-war) stuff. There's really a lot of crossover.
And I think conservatives and progressives recognize a lot of the same problems on the domestic side. I bet if legacy media weren't driving the conversation 24-7, that there's a lot of crossover between the so-called right and so-called left. Maybe you'd find more agreement on the social safety net, for instance, if progressives could get away from notions of running everything from Washington. You might be surprised at how much a conservative is willing to chip in, VOLUNTARILY if it's "of, for and by" the members of the LOCAL community and not run by a handful of people in Washington, who can (and usually are) bought off (or misled or blackmailed or just plied by women or simple flattery).
Instead of wringing your hands over federal Med4All, why not hold a damn fundraiser for your own local hospital? See how much money you can raise for un-met medical needs of your friends and neighbors! Take in a homeless person! Build your OWN homeless shelters, and volunteer to help manage and maintain them! Pitch in! Don't bitch about everybody who isn't! Don't use FORCE to impose YOUR morality on everybody else!
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The Germans definitely had their plans of genocide.
People don't talk as much about the many pogroms the Soviets executed against ethnic groups in their own borders. Jews, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Poles, Ukrainians, ... Such is the way of empire, be it east, west, north, or south, throughout history and probably before.
But ALL of those people pulled for the Soviets once they got a taste of Nazi rule.
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He uncovers the truth very frequently, but he's also part of the big, progressive, socialist lie. He doesn't mind that government is too big. He just wants guys just like him to run it. This is the case with all so-called "progressives."
He'll rail all day long against the abuses of our major institutions, and be 100% correct, but never once does it occur to him that the institutions themselves, are the problem. So many federal departments and agencies that should never have been created in the first place.
Glenn doesn't mind the big government. He just thinks that, somehow, we're going to elect and appoint only genius-saints to the top spots, and life will be perfect. Stuck on a wheel of his own making, like so many of us, including me.
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@michaellong9214 You are just like Glenn Greenwald, insisting on the idea that you can have civil liberties and big government living side by side.
My POINT is that when you create a government that does everything FOR you, it is INEVITABLE that the government will start doing bad things TO you.
You're basically feeding the crocodile that will one day eat you, but you tell yourself you're for "civil liberties." That's why I say he (and Jimmy Dore and a number of other good progressives) are trapped on the wheel.
They want a utopia in which government makes sure no one suffers, and all government leaders are genius-saints.
As a civil libertarian, I know that when you concentrate that much power into so few hands, the eventual result is corruption, mismanagement, and tyranny. There are things that progressives should know better than to ask for, but ask they do, and then they blame everybody else for mucking it up, when the original project itself was doomed, due to human nature.
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Critical reviews can save you a lot of time filtering out things you won't like and locating things you WILL like. You just have to find critics whose preferences align with your own. Rotten Tomatoes and other outlets clearly have their audience that likes what they say. It's not a very big audience. Apparently 1% of the users on Rotten Tomatoes, for example.
What this Dave Chapelle story tells us is that 9% of the public is out of step with one outlet. So find another outlet. There're more of them out there than ever before in history, thanks to social media on the Internet.
Legacy media have been in an inevitable decline for a couple decades, now. Their entire business model is wrong for the current era, and they're scrambling to secure a stable niche for themselves. It's just that people are controlled by their habits, and so the legacy media have a lot of inertia. For now and the next few years, people that grew up on commercial t.v. are still at the top, with more money than the generation after them, and we're still conditioned to watch that crap. Younger people, not so much. They can buy a game that entertains them, tirelessly, for hours, with zero commercial interruptions. They can binge a t.v. series on Netflix or Amazon. I'm binge-ing the Australian-produced "City Homicide," right now.
I don't think many people watch any series premieres, any more. Why watch a series that ends in shit? And when you're in a mood for movie/series entertainment, part of making it more fun is being able to watch it for 2 hours straight, without commercials. Make the product fit YOUR preferences, in a sufficient amount to keep you going for days. Maybe your hour or two of t.v. each day that week is the first couple seasons of "Arrow," and you spend the rest of your time outside or reading books. And there's enough good historical content out there on video, that you can give yourself a pretty good liberal-arts education for free.
You won't have a teacher grading your written work, but you can go to a brainiac channel and spout your nonsense, and they will tear you to shreds better than any teacher with a red pen. You can compare your writing to the better writers in the comments. You can learn like crazy on the Internet, and plainly a lot of people out there are doing just that.
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@dannyfirst6544 : Actually, it is. There's just such a ruckus, right now, because those who once dominated the entire public square are being reduced to just one more voice among many. They can't keep the independents from talkin'. They can't stop regular folks talkin' like regular folks to one another. If advertisers don't like dissent or cuss-words, that's their problem. You see, those fools work for us, they forgot that fact, and they're getting their comeuppance in lost revenues, audience and prestige. It's actually happening very quickly, if you take a step away from the 24-hour news cycle and compare to a year or two ago. These "assaults on free speech" are very strong, but their "victories" just mean their retreat is slowed, slightly. The trend is down for legacy media with legacy business and advertising models.
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Electric Vehicles are pretty practical to anyone living in their own house, who don't need to commute an hour to and from work every day or whose job doesn't entail driving hundreds of miles every day. I think it can and SHOULD be a growth market, without ANY government intervention.
There will never be enough batteries in the near future to replace internal combustion engines. But for SOME people, it will make a lot of sense and even be cheaper than fossil fuels. My sister has an e-bike, and she loves it.
If you re-think how big and heavy you need to make a car, there could be a light, 4-wheeled vehicle that looks like something between a bike and a conventional car or truck, could be good for people who don't need to travel long distances every day. There's a limit to how much of that can be done to replace fossil-fueled engines. Let price and availability in a free market determine what and how much we go in that direction.
But I think the conventional gas-powered vehicle is - and should be - for years to come. People are generally mindful of the environment. It's not that gasoline engines are bad, but too MUCH of it is a bad thing. Lots of ways to KEEP them and at the same time reduce our environmental impact. Don't situate your home an hour away from work. Work remotely, if you have a skill conducive to remote work. Not everybody has to do everything to put us on a trend to better balance with Nature. Freedom's how we get there. Not governmental intervention, which ALWAYS back-fires.
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Italy was terrible ground for offensive fighting.
It can be deceptive just looking at losses at the company or even regimental level. There can be objectives that can be taken with under 1,000 casualties, if you can get a suicide company that takes 90% losses to get there before the enemy has had time to fortify or bring up reserves. You lose 162 out of your 180-man company, but if you did it "right," you'd wait until you had 3- or 4-to-1 odds and overwhelming firepower to throw at them, and just level the town, with light, 1% casualties from the 100,000 men you assembled. So by playing it smart and cautious, you lost 1,000 men, when you could have taken the objective 2 weeks earlier, and only lost 162 men.
I'm not saying it's always like that, but if you have the initiative, but only so much force to maintain it, that force can be in for it, but achieve more objectives, sooner, and with lighter losses when you tear your eyes away from the percentage losses and look at the total losses.
As I recall from my history, there were a lot of big egos trying to fight their way up the Italian peninsula faster than the other big egos, and achieving objectives quickly was more important than the losses required to achieve them.
That's why I could never be a general, or would insist on being at the front, and probably not last very long. It takes a different sort of man than I am to send other men into a meat grinder. I'd have nightmares my whole life if I did such a thing by accident, let alone with intention.
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@daniellamcgee4251 That's a weak appeal to authority:
"neurology, psychology, psychiatry, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, endocrinology, genetics, etc...."
"Consensus science" is garbage science. Science is not just the opinion of who happens to be chair of the department and passed down, but is from the laboratory, up. Many claims by transgender ideology that were given the patina of "real science" were nothing of the sort.
In case you haven't noticed, academic peer review is broken. Hoaxes abound.
Hijacking the term "gender" isn't getting you anywhere. There are men who are more feminine and women who are more masculine. There's a spectrum. Deal with it. Don't destroy the meaning of words.
A man with a more feminine brain still will never know what it feels like to be a woman, because he isn't plumbed for it. His body chemistry is male. His genes are male.
All that aside, this is about compelled speech, and compelled speech is anathema to free society. If I'm wrong, it's my right to be wrong, as it is yours to be wrong.
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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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I think your stove was still smoking when you opened the front. I don't think it works the way you think it works, quite. The solution is to squeeze down the air flow even more, by inserting the damper.
When you get too big of a fire going, you exceed the capacity of the chimney to (basically) get rid of all the smoke. Even with the door in place, the opening in the front is big enough that it becomes a 2-way, air-in-and-smoke-out situation.
What you want is an opening in the front that is smaller than the chimney, by a fairly large margin. Then the breathing is all in one direction. Stoke the fire, once, and don't re-stoke it until it has burned down to the point where the draw from the chimney will handle every bit of smoke. Throw in a load and let it breathe wide open until it catches, and then close the door, again. For the best burn, you want a small, hot fire.
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I've lit thousands of fires and never heard of priming the chimney until recent videos. I guess I'll keep it in mind, but I don't see myself changing the way I start fires. The smoke wants to go up, and the chimney's up. But maybe it's a lowlander thing in extreme cold. I've never lit a wood stove at under 2600 feet (about 800 meters) elevation, and that one low one wasn't a very tall chimney. All the others were a mile or more above sea level, where the air ain't as heavy.
I like seeing the down-to-basics hiking and camping in snow conditions, but a snowmobile and an outfitter's tent or line cabin would be more my speed. Something closer to what Jay's doing, maybe canvas the first year or two, and then something more substantial,
I see those videos where the guy or gal is using a hand-saw to cut up stove lengths after they reach their destination, where I see myself doing all that work ahead of time and dragging loads of firewood on a sled, like Jay's doing, so the only wood processing is making kindling. I can see spending weeks at a time out at the camp/cabin, year-round. I've got a job that works me hard for long stretches, but I get some nice stretches off in all 4 seasons. Best place for writing and contemplating.
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Populism is how we got the welfare state. It's how being against ANY expansion of that welfare state became a death sentence for politicians who spoke truth. We voted for the politicians who promised to do MORE and expand the federal apparatus. Now, it's populism pushing back against the inroads those politicians' policies have made on liberty and prosperity.
Populism is Bread and Circuses. Once the people learn they can vote themselves a living, that's just what they'll do.
That's why the U.S. Constitution enshrined principles on which 2/3 of the people and states could agree on and forswore the federal government from expanding its role and scope beyond that, without a 2/3 majority. Of course, after 250 years, mere majority votes have ushered in many encroachments that are fully antithetical to the literal word and the spirit of the original constitution.
So many laws that should've been struck down by the Supreme Court but were not. The Constitution lies in tatters, and that, in my estimation, is the biggest single problem. It's rarely expedient, in the short term, to abide by the shackles placed on the federal government by the U.S. Constitution. But it's always essential. Find another way.
But populism demands that the state intervene, when it shouldn't. Now it's demanding that the government intervene less, but nobody really knows how to accomplish that. Too many sacred cows in too many quarters to ever dismantle the monster we built, telling us it would save us, when there's no saving any of us. We all die. In the meantime, to lead our best lives, as adults, we must stop begging the government to be our parent. It's not its role, although it's always happy to try.
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Good to see a young fella who sees the hypocrisy of the Great Game others believe they are playing on our behalf. I think we can be both strong AND principled, and without the latter, we end not being the former. Maybe that means you pay a higher price for rare earths, but you also place a tariff on products containing rare earths obtained from tyrant states. I really wish we had a moral trade policy, rooted in human rights and human dignity.
And I don't see how the U.N. can be used to help in any way. Of 29 human rights offender nations, 9 are on the Human Rights Council, with Congo recently being added to "... Burundi, Egypt, Rwanda, Cuba, Venezuela, China, India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates." (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/un-human-rights-council-members-saudi-arabia-china-venezuela-abusers-violators-a7958271.html)
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Surplus Sean : Yes. Some people actually want to see our country stolen right out from under us. Ain't gonna fly, especially with the black libertarians becoming a force in politics. If the blacks threw in with the Republicans for an election cycle or two, things would get much better, very quickly. Things at home would get better, and our only worry, then, would be to cut the Deep State off at the knees and start behaving like a civilized country in our foreign policy.
Sick of our Intel Community suckering us into killing other human beings. It's horrific. Detestable. We don't need to back rebels in foreign countries for ANY purpose. Their internal affairs are none of our business. And if other countries meddle, then cut their asses off. Boycott the bastards. Embargo the bastards. Behave yourself and we'll be your best friend. That's the reputation we should strive to achieve, and put our actions where our principles lie: Non Force Principle. Yeah, we'll fight if we have to, but we're not going to impose on others by force.
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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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They KNOW they're right about EVERYthing, and so any dissent is obviously ignorant hate speech, because we ALL know that people mustn't hear anything "bad" for their own protection. These are people who know anything not in the Washington Post or New York Times or CNN must be false, because only THOSE outlets are reliable and will "protect them" from wrong think. These are people who prop up the corporatocracy while pretending to hate it. SMH. They get their facts from legacy media that are owned by a handful of MEGACORPORATIONS and they dismiss anything the megacorporations don't approve as "conspiracy theories."
It's very sad. Many are pretty smart people, in some ways.
But they don't ask themselves why it's OK to go to the casino, but not OK to go to church. Or why it's OK to go to WalMart and other big-box chains, but the corner bodega is closed until further notice. It's OK to protest AGAINST Trump and the police, but it's NOT OK to demonstrate for anything of which they disapprove, because "these idiots are literally going to get us all killed." THEIR protest is "more important" than concerns about contagion.
Or the story about the crazy people on the beach without masks, while the whole crew BEHIND the CNN camera aren't wearing masks, either. The hits just keep coming.
I especially loved Obama's eulogy, in a packed church, insisting that universal mail-in ballots were ESSENTIAL, because of the virus. That same church probably limited attendance to a nobody's funeral to 10 people. But if there's an opportunity to score points for the DNC, well, then it's just too important to worry about the virus.
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The greatest thing about Trump was what he did NOT do. As a 1970s Democrat, he believes in letting states rum most of their own stuff within their own means and learn from and compete with one another. He could've gone after South Dakota for not mindlessly issuing mandates. I'm sure a Democrat president would've heaped scorn upon and threatened sanctions against South Dakota.
That's the thing about America. You can't MAKE America. You can only LET America. Politicians want to make things happen, but their job is to stay out of the way and let people, towns, and states make things happen for themselves, within their own means. That was the unique thing about American history. The people were expanding beyond the means of any central authority on the East coast to control. The MOST the government could do was create a false imprimatur of legality to a culture clash that was happening on the ground, far beyond the state's ability to project enough power to impose order.
The Black Hills, part of which lie in South Dakota, were set aside for the Sioux, until illegal prospectors found gold, and then there was just no stopping a huge influx of people to the area. It attracted profiteers, profiteers profited, profiteers bought the government.
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They're mostly good people who only give news a half-hour or an hour a night, and they watch the networks they've always watched. They're not bad people. They just only see one side of all the issues, whether they watch CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and on the BIG issues of the day, FOX also falls in line. If it's war, FOX is for it, just like all the rest, and Pfizer's their biggest advertiser.
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@Olivia P All topics are debatable. And it is a fact that the fossil record doesn't show a gradual change from one species to the next. You see trilobites for millions of years, essentially unchanged, and then suddenly they're all gone and there's something else entirely in that niche.
I'm not saying evolution isn't a thing. But it's more of a punctuated RADICAL change, but when that change is underway, there's scarce little paleontological evidence left behind, so for such a strong theory, the evidence is very scarce.
Hell, we're not even really sure what "species" means. Some species interbreed successfully, but the offspring are sterile (mules). Some anthropologists would argue that Neanderthals were just a variation on homo sapiens (or vice versa).
Plant and animal husbandry are variation of species a la Darwin, by human design. But if you could build a jig to make it possible like Dad did the one time the Chihuahua mix was in heat and our foxhound mix was horny, by putting her on a cinder block and letting them go at it, all the dog breeds can still interbreed and have viable offspring, so we haven't really managed any new speciation, after millennia of selective breeding.
I'm more of a punctuated evolution sort of guy. In times of cataclysm, a few radical mutations survive and spread. But at the beginning, there are so few of them, the chances of finding their fossilized remains is minuscule. Hence trilobites until no trilobites.
The paucity of fossil records gives the religious types all the ammo they need to confirm what they already believe. The Grand Canyon tells me this Earth is at LEAST many hundreds of millions of years old.
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We'll see. I agree there's plenty out in the public sphere - actual real facts, and not made-up shit by insiders in gov and media - to get the indictment train rolling. I'm not sure that Sessions was a mistake. I think Trump's main chance was the overreach by The Resistance. Leave them in place.
Paw at them with a soft jab. Strap on an iron jock strap. Let the whole world see them kick you in the ball sack.
Dribble some misinformation. Even make up some drama for "insiders" to witness. Feed a few doctored memos to a select group (Tyrion Lannister tactic), and see what gets leaked. You get a handle on who's up to what by what appears in the media. I think they exposed Schiff and other Congressmen and Senators.
I think we saw a FLURRY of this activity in the last couple of months, with BuzzFeed and other outlets rushing to publish/broadcast Fake News that were debunked the very next day, exposing leakers and their minions in media.
It was and is messy, and Trump had to appear to be all wrapped up by his foes. It had to appear that "The walls are closing in" on him, in order for the opposition to think they were winning and encourage them. Use their guilt and soaring egos against them. Leave an unloaded gun on the table, turn your back, and wait 'til you hear the hammer fall on an empty chamber before you turn around and see who's holding it.
If Team Trump had just tried to go head-on as soon as he took office, I think The Resistance had all the cards, and Trump wouldn't know who his friends were. He would've been thwarted by people in his own administration But with every resignation, retirement and firing, The Resistance lost another key player, and Trump added another new person that HE hired to the mix. With every Fake News story, he took an initial hit, until the pattern of lies became more and more obvious to even the most die-hard Never Trumpers. Now, public opinion has shifted a TREMENDOUS amount. If you're buried in the 24-hour news cycle, this is easy to miss. But look at the numbers Rasmussen has been putting out, lately.
I don't think Trump has any kind of magic 6th sense that tells him, a priori, who's gonna work out and who isn't. All he gets with the new person is a CHANCE that they'll respect the law and their office. He's no Hope Hubris of Piers Anthony fame (an empath, whose main asset was knowing whom to trust just by meeting them). But he's good at giving a guy enough rope to hang himself. He made his rep on "You're fired!" So even when he gets rid of a loser, there's no guarantee the next appointee is a winner. All he knows, for sure, is he got rid of a loser.
As with the Nixon Administration, the bad actors are exposed by their cover-ups after the fact, and their continued sabotage under his administration. But the tables are turned, and it's the president using this against The Resistance. A slow-motion counter-coup against people who were desperate to preserve their Good Old Boys Club and run a soft coup from within his own admin. Brennan. Clapper. I think both got goaded into saying all KINDS of nutty things that reveal their incompetence and mendacity. I'm not sure how close he was to actually being taken down or taken out. He had to put himself on "death ground" in order to win the war.
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I was pretty happy with Acrobat Pro V9. Then they took away features I depended on, without warning. Why should I have to drop everything at work and spend HOURS re-training on software I already know, quite intimately?
It's theft, and all these companies "updating" things that don't need updating deserve to go broke. If I were 20 years younger, I would learn everything I could about LINUX OS for my PCs. I'm close to retirement, and it's just easier to go with what my institution provides, and coast to the finish line, but it's infuriating to have someone reach into my tool belt, steal my best hammer, replace with a meat tenderizer, and have the gall to say "You're welcome!"
I hope you young people stand against these "You will own nothing and be happy" criminals. Learn all you can about open source software. Software should be inexpensive and robust. What we have is expensive and unstable.
They know how to do this right. They don't want to, because it's less profitable for them to treat their customers right.
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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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I think WestWorld suffers from the same kind of "How do we get to the spectacle we want?" issues I found so glaring in the Star Wars prequels. It's like "parallel construction" in the criminal-justice system, where they try to make it look like their case did NOT depend on illegally-obtained surveillance. 'There just happened to be an agent on the corner observing these events, your honor. Here's her sworn affidavit.' Just a coincidence the agent happened to be on that corner at that moment. Nothing to do with NSA intercepts and finding a drug dealer within 2 degrees of separation from a person within 2 degrees of separation from a suspected terrorist."
It's not a direct comparison, but it just jumped into my head as the same sort of "back-filled" story-telling.
"We know where we want to end up, where all the fun is, so QUICK, let's slap together a back story to get us there!"
"How do we do that?"
"It's super-easy! Barely an inconvenience! We make people as dumb or as smart as they need to be to achieve our plot points!"
But we "anti-feminist" men need to understand why there's such a push to write a bunch of heavy-handed, feminist trash. There are a LOT of man-boys in the world, today. There's more to learn than there ever was before in history AND there are more entertaining distractions than ever before in history. But we're still mired in "There's only one copy in town, so let's all go to the same place at the same time, and the owner might let us look at it or read to us from it."
The one-room schoolhouse is a great idea. The town can afford one copy of everything. But they're not going to fork over for new books for everybody, every year. That took the immense largesse of 20th-Century industrialization, where books for all the kids (on a rotating basis) was a relatively small expenditure, which it wouldn't be in a hardscrabble farming and ranching community, where cash is pretty scarce, despite a relatively high standard of living - high enough to reach for your kids' education.
Anyway, we're way beyond that, now. But that's the basic learning model of the public schools. Totally obsolete, except for the genius-level hook of keeping the kids occupied for a guaranteed 6-plus hours every day, 5 days a week. I think we should use learning management systems, where people buy the courses they want, for somewhere between (I'd guess) $20 and $100 per course. Once the LMS is built, it runs itself. THEN you need humans who thoroughly understand the topics, with, say, a customer rating system. "Did they know the subject? Were they quick? Were they clear?" Three checkboxes after every service, pushing better tutors to the top. Like Uber...
Seriously, I think if people started looking for and demanding those kinds of products, that such products would be available, at very reasonable prices. Record all sessions. Parents can sample any of it with one tap. We're woefully primitive in how we teach our youngsters, especially our young boys, nowadays. Make the work semi-fun. A lot of THAT is achieved by promoting the best, most engaging instructors, so that the good ones get the biggest audiences. Make it COMPETITIVE.
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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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I'm not sure they started out with that in mind, but by the time they got done guaranteeing every farmer a living and every consumer cheap food, the profit margins were razor thin, and you really had to be bigger in order to comply with all the rules and still support the operation. It's the same in all industries that government "helps."
Now, after decades of meddling, the big corporate outfits have their lobbyists in Washington, DC, ensuring that those razor-thin margins will always be there for them, which squeezes all the family farmers out of the business.
I grew up in dairy country, and while I was just a townie, I hung out with a lot of farm kids, helping with the chores. Dairy farmers are NOT lazy people. I don't know how they do it, honestly. 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. You don't skip a single milking. You CAN'T skip a single milking.
But I don't get why they have to buy grain for their cows. Don't they grow their own corn, etc? That's how they did it in Pennsylvania.
I agree 100% that growing corn and such for bio-fuels is stupid. It's a scam. It makes no sense.
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In fairness to his colleagues, legal probably told everybody not to make any contact with Miller, with various real and implied threats. Universities and the risk-averse nitwits that infest their halls (Did I mention that I'm a professor?), are going to do what their chair says, especially if their chair mentions "legal." Half the professors are lazy/incompetent and keep their heads down for that reason and the other half are so into their discipline that "No contact" is easy to do compared to engaging with the real world. If they're really into their teaching or their research, getting a "Don't do something" from on high is actually quite welcome. "At least this e-mail doesn't want me to do extra work to no purpose, like they usually do. This 'ignore someone' e-mail is right up my alley."
That's probably too fair. Just the way this guy talks and the fact that he was (correctly) taking on COVID propaganda as early as September, 2020, tells me he's probably on the wrong side of a lot of political issues, there. He sounds like a free thinker, so he's probably on the wrong side of one of their sacred cows, like affirmative action or school choice. A few chance remarks around the water cooler, and the entire institution is literally talking about you. "He's one of them. A deplorable."
I've always been one of "them," but as a classical liberal, I'm way ahead of them on war and peace and most social issues, and I've been around the block enough times to know how to hide my free-market-capitalist beliefs, without actually betraying them, at least long enough to get tenure. If I were a progressive I could bang on all day about politics at work, and it would HELP me get tenure. Thank God for long hair and hanging out with lefties, because - let's be honest - they're more fun to party with. My blonde pony-tail was great camouflage, 'til I started going bald in my mid-50s. Can't do the hippie gone to seed thing. But now I'm old enough to be eccentric.
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I think Trump's had his hands tied by Deep State, not being able to just pull out when he first took office. The missile attacks on Syria after the supposed chemical weapons attacks were very concerning, and seemed as though Trump was owned by the regime changers up and down the bureaucracy and media. I saw a glimmer of hope in the WAY he prosecuted those missile attacks, basically telling everyone to clear out and giving them time to do so. So throw Deep State a bone, but drag your feet in a deniable way about it. And the pull-out from Syria (which was where I thought he was headed before the missile strikes) was pretty carefully set up, in my opinion.
He got a good lie from his intel people: "We're there to fight terrorism and ISIS." So, to maneuver the pull-out, he "innocently" asked "Now that ISIS is put down in Syria, I guess we're done, there," and MAYbe by playing dumb, he got us out of Syria and is actually playing Deep State for fools. Hope he's out-conniving the full-time connivers.
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Chris Indermuehle : You're the 2nd person I've seen on the Interwebz who agrees with me on this. The supposedly liberal-minded people are the people who created the zeitgeist and the institutional framework that enabled and empowered these postmodernist assholes in the first place. Gave them HUGE levers, so a small number of LUNATICS could move the entire country in a VERY unhealthy direction, via bloated and too-powerful institutions "for our own good."
TRUE liberals - CLASSICAL liberals - understand that the main thing people need from government is to be LEFT THE HELL ALONE! The bureaucracy is the new aristocracy.
Liberty-minded people have seen - and warned against - so-called "liberals'" government-centric solutions to all problems associated with the human condition. And now that the "true liberals" are FINALLY seeing the madness, they are totally blind to their own hand in creating it. Of COURSE our institutions were going to be hijacked by postmodernists or something quite similar. The mistake was giving centralized institutions so much power over everything.
Back in the '80s, I called it the iron fist inside the velvet glove. Nanny government is just an engine of tyranny waiting for bad times and/or pathological individuals to subvert to their own malevolent ends. They don't even have to be malevolent to cause tremendous pathology and suffering.
It's infuriating the way they act all surprised at the way things are heading.
They fed the dragon for DECADES and now they cry out in shock and horror when it razes the town with its flaming exhalations. This is exactly what the left have been asking for, and now they're pissed at everyone but themselves when they GOT what they asked for.
The tripod of fascist oppression is state-run media, education and health. That's all Hitler needs. That's what we've got. It's the same in the USA as the UK, only in the USA, the media controls are - or rather were until quite recently - below the level of public perception. American health system is also essentially run (very inefficiently) by government, although no one seems to understand, let alone admit it.
Now the mask is slipping. I just hope it's not too late. So many are hopelessly captured.
On the bright side, the Hate Mobs are very fickle. Today's protester is tomorrow's victim. Just have ONE thought of your own, and the mob turns on you. This "red-pills" a lot of liberals, who, to their credit, often discover principles of liberty and free speech quite late in life, when NOTHING would have budged them from their convictions, otherwise. To their discredit, they were FINE with running roughshod over others, as long as they were an accepted member of the mob.
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@AATHEISTU : Kids also don't play outside, as much, because our over-protective society doesn't permit unsupervised play, outdoors, any more. Too afraid of child molesters and kidnappers. And the flip side is the inner city neighborhoods where it actually IS dangerous to let your kids out to run around.
I still remember my mom getting vexed with us for tearing up the house with our shenanigans and MAKING us go outside. "But Mom! There's nothing to DO!"
"There's PLENTY to do. Go clean your room, for starters. And when you're done with that, fold the laundry."
LOL!
I think we were lucky, with yard to play in (and MOW), and the small-town neighborhood that we terrorized on a daily basis, playing Army in the bushes or pick-up football in the street... Our folks were more worried about us running afoul of the nice neighbor lady (Your kids are shooting the birds in my back yard with BB guns!) than ANYthing some poor bastard trying to molest us might do. Heck, we'd probably knock the stuffing out of any real molesters in the neighborhood. Nothing more dangerous in this world than a gang of rambunctious 12-13-year-olds!
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@Bluesdawg : I knew a vegetarian who ran track for a high-mountain college. She really struggled, until she SWITCHED TO RED MEAT. Suddenly, her wind improved and her body's ability to metabolize oxygen improved, generally, and she started winning races.
Of course, red meat ain't what it used to be, before WW II. Since that time, they've been injecting antibiotics into healthy cattle and all kinds of other nasty stuff. Still, if you cook it well-done, you fight SOME of the problems with store-bought meat. Personally, I'd prefer to shoot a deer and an elk every year, for a couple hundred pounds of free range red meat.
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Male and female have always been idealized, sometimes to a ridiculous degree (Kardashian) in art and entertainment, since the first Earth Goddess carving. Standards of beauty drift over time, somewhat, but fast-forward to today, and I think our standards for beauty in media and entertainment are VERY different from standards of beauty in real life.
Like the young lady said, if you're your best self, physically, as in diet, exercise and grooming, you will be attractive to the opposite sex. I can't tell you how many crushes I've had on different girls/women over the years, starting as a boy in 1st grade, with a crush on Dixie, who was the brightest and most vivacious girl in class. But if you put her - or ANY of my crushes - up against a tv/movie actress, she'll look dumpy or plain. But in real life, it's a totally different ballgame.
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That's why most conservatives and libertarians vote Republican, even though they're not that different from the Democrats. I don't agree with anybody on everything, but I'm closer to Ron Paul than damn near anybody else.
Democrats have been bad news pretty much since FDR, who used every crisis at his disposal to make the people think government was the solution to all problems and the source of their well-being. Now, 70 or 80 years later, we're seeing the real fruits of that abandonment of self-responsible freedom for the apparent blank check from the U.S. Treasury. Now, we're $31 trillion in debt, which is about $90,000 for every man, woman and child and $250,000 for every man and woman who actually PAYS federal taxes. The price of that false security? OBEDIENCE.
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I didn't know that wagons had to compete with passenger cars and mini-vans and SUVs came under different rules. They're still more efficient than vans and SUVs. I bet they'd still be selling big if they didn't artificially push people to buy SUVs and vans.
In the mid-70s, our family owned a '69 Buick Estate Wagon. When we first got it, I was small enough to fit in that little gap between the rear passenger seat and the rear-facing seats in the VERY back. I was a real runt, and it was GREAT to sit that high up, because I could see everything.
I've always preferred wagons or at least hatch-backs, because you could make a nice long bed in back by folding down the back seat.
That's too bad. A station wagon still makes sense. A couple I know have two Toyota station wagons. I think they're the last year Toyota made them. They get almost the same gas mileage as a Camry, only there's just WAY more room.
SUV's as a separate KIND of station wagon, stretch back a long time, too. Those old Chevy "Hi-Boys" with 4-wheel-drive, were basically the ultimate adventure wagon. Half way between a panel truck and a station wagon. Big, tall captain's seats (but fixed), and you could rig them up for camping. You had to bend at the waist, but you could stand and walk to the back.
Went on a geology field trip, and one of the guys drove one of those old 50s or 60s-vintage high boys, and I've always wanted one, since. You could haul just about anything you could put in a pickup, plus you had an extra-big cabin for road trips. He had everything he needed to go off-grid for weeks at a time, back in the '80s.
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@YungSteambuns I think the 4.0-liter motor has plenty of power for the weight of the vehicle, already. The lift kit and oversized tires look pretty cool, but I don't think the difference in performance is enough to justify putting more strain on the engine and drive train than the Toyota engineers designed it for. I've got nephews who are/were into that stuff, and they spent a FORTUNE on trucks that they were so proud of they just HAD to show off. Drag races in a Dodge Mega-Cab that SHOULD have lasted a lifetime, but burned up inside of 6 months.
You do all those mods, so of course you want to TEST them. The Amtal Rule states that you do not truly know the limits of something until you test it to destruction, and that's exactly what happens. I suppose if you were in rock-climbing contests on the regular, then by all means, modify to the extreme. But the Tacoma, as is, used as designed, and well-maintained, will last you a lifetime.
I love the idea that Toyota's getting back into the COMPACT pickup market in this way. The Tacoma is a mid-sized truck. My favorite generation of the Toyota pickup is the late '90s, early 2000s. That 3.4-liter pickup was pretty much the pinnacle of size and power. I've got a '93, with the 3.0-L V6. I also have a 2012 Tacoma. So I missed that generation of trucks. The ONLY flaw in the 3.4-liter V6 was it didn't get great gas mileage. A 4-cylinder hybrid is going to get high 30s mpg, maybe low 40s mpg. Put the same size gas tank as the older vehicles, and you can bump the RANGE of the vehicle far beyond a pure gas-powered vehicle.
My Tacoma gets around 20 mpg. If I could boost that up over 30, my current range of about 400 miles would rise to 600 miles on one tank. That's phenomenal.
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Lying to the public about strategic matters has been going on since the end of WW II. Our intelligence heads solemnly inflated the level of threat from USSR and CCP by a factor of 10 in security hearings in Congress. Sometimes more than a factor of 10. Neocons will argue that those were necessary lies to bring about the fall of the Soviet Union. I would say that our provocations kept the Soviet lie going decades longer than it would have otherwise, without such a clear and present threat by a warlike and imperialist USA.
I would rather than the USA export its brand of democratic republic by living the right way within our borders, first, trading fairly with other nations, refusing trade with nations who abuse the rights of their people, and defending to the death any and all states in our union. If a country wants us to defend them, they can put in for statehood, and we have a process for that. On the flip side, I think a state should be able to secede if it wants. Just run our country in a truly liberal - i.e., limited-government - way, and states won't want to do that. Let that model of government prosper or fail according to how it handles itself, rather than by force.
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littleferrhis: There is truth to what you say. There's also an amorality to what you say that underlies such dealings with foreign sovereignties. I oppose fomenting foreign insurrection by U.S. or anybody else on the world stage.
If everybody wants us to get along, and maybe one day there be a world order, it needs to occur willingly. People need to settle their own disputes, without outsiders tipping the scale.
So while I agree with your calculation, in the first instance, I think achieving stability and better outcomes for more people, Syrians are better off duking it out with Syrians, and Iranians are better off duking it out with Iranians. All outsiders contribute is more violence and bloodshed, in the final instance.
Having settled their differences, and treating their people more fairly, trade agreements may be forged, to mutual benefit.
We've gotta stop thinking about winning and losing and start thinking about "What's to our mutual benefit?" Flip all questions until they are framed morally and rationally.
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This has been going on for a long time, only it was easier to prevent establishment ideas from ever being before the Internet. It's been that way since at least FDR. Informal systems of control amounted to officials making a few phone calls to a very small number of big news operations, like WaPost, NYTimes, ABC, CBS and NBC. Then of course, there's AP and UPI. It was for the war effort during FDR and WWII, but those cozy relationships didn't go away after Victory in the Pacific. Neither did things like injecting cattle with antibiotics, and a plethora of other "emergency" measures that remained in place for decades after the war.
Before Obama, it was more subtle. You had to be very well-informed by other means than establishment education and news to even know there was a bias, because the bias was in the story selection rather than in how it was reported. Since Obama, the bias is right out in the open in the reporting, itself. There was at least some attempt to give more than one viewpoint on what news that was allowed to be reported in any kind of big way, before Obama.
But NOW, there are independent media with millions of viewers who point out the bias, bad facts, and most of all, stories that were EASILY memory-holed, when media were more of a monolith (from the Great Depression to Obama).
The Internet changed things. Most of all, so-called "liberals" becoming the establishment changed things. They're MUCH more censorious than their more conservative (classical liberal) predecessors.
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@BobbyCarr821 If for no other reason than to know what the other side's thinking is and what their rhetoric is. It's not easy, if you have a sense of history and the real march of human progress, which has always come in spite of what Juan and virtually all of MSM are pumping out, these days. But at least Juan's polite, listens, and takes his turn. Even when he says the most outrageous things, the other 4 of the 5 need to hear him out. If they feel the need to rebut, then they need to wait 'til he's done.
I always liked hearing opposing viewpoints, but all the legacy networks, including FOX, will just talk right over whoever's saying what their network pundits disagree with. Jesse Waters is the worst. Gutfeld couldn't help himself, today, either. When you talk over people, you hurt your own cause, at least in my eyes.
GENERALLY, libertarians/conservatives DO know what the statist left is thinking and saying. But for those of us (like me) who refuse to patronize the likes of MSNBC, Juan Williams might be the only establishment leftie we hear from, directly, most of the time. Of course, we end up hearing what they're saying on CONSERVATIVE channels, when they devote entire videos to critiquing what Nancy, Chuck, and other Democrats are saying.
That being said, there've been numerous times when I knew EXACTLY what DNC propaganda Juan was going to spew and I confess I've fast-forwarded through his bit.
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Mini-experiment in fascism. Notice how the big-box stores were the only ones allowed to remain open, while Mom & Pop's were kept on lock-down? Huge transfer of wealth to big companies from small companies? Big Box stores played along and were big enough to hire "compliance technicians?" (You know. The masked mask-bouncer at the door and the drone running around with spray sanitizer and a dirty wash cloth?"
But now we see that that is all temporary. Eventually, the big companies get a sharp stick in the eye, as well, and the situation becomes untenable for ALL.
In general, bit companies love the government interventions, because however onerous they are for the big company, they're twice or three or four or more times more onerous for a small company, so it weeds out the competition. Also, the big companies are rich enough to exercise the political clout needed to make sure the new regulations or mandates don't kill THEM off. Usually what we see, when we don't see legalized theft trumping all else, is the big companies are guaranteed they'll survive, if they adopt increasingly stupid and inefficient bureaucracies that eventually bury the big company with red tape and incompetence. It just usually takes many years, and the CEOs who embraced the intervention retire as heroes, before the big company crumbles of its own weight and inefficiency.
t never turns out well, but usually it takes longer for everyone to feel the pinch. COVID and BLM madness accelerated the entire process. Mom & Pop aren't viable, and within a year, neither is the big box.
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He's a little crazy, soft as butter, hard as nails, and he opened a door between USA and North Korea by seeing Kim Jong Un as a person. I know he was on the right track, because they got rid of Kim Jong Un, and his sister-successor has gone hard-CCP-line. I knew when Trump and he met at the 38th Parallel that we were either going to see good common sense, and the flowering of one Korea, or that Kim Jong Un was not long for this world. Sadly, Kim Jong Un has passed, and I think a great opportunity was lost.
I never followed Rodman all that closely. I hated him when he played against the team I was rooting for, and I loved him when he played FOR my team. Back in the days when the Pistons were making their mark as a low-down, bad-ass, dirty-ass team, led by Isaiah Thomas. The Worm took on the toughest job(s) - defense and rebounding - and just out-played and out-worked everybody else on the court. The energy that guy expended... Freak of Nature. Too bad he didn't have more dunks. But it was more winning to make the opposing team play another 24 seconds of defense, most of the time, in the likely event he got the offensive rebound. A lot of un-remarked scores off the rim of someone else's miss.
Whatever his quirks, he made good friends with a very wide assortment of people, and he came to every situation with no preconceived notions. And at the same time, there was a childlike simplicity. I bet he's heartbroken at the apparent passing of Kim Jong Un. That was a really good thing he did.
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@xblade11230 "Conscripts are only allowed during war, and Russia has technically not declared war yet it's still a smo on paper which puts limits to what troops they can use. Which is why there is such a big push for volunteers."
I think if Russia needed to use conscripts on the front lines, it would find a reason to change that policy/rule in about 5 minutes. I think this policy is about the more or less orderly mobilization, growth, and training of their fighting forces.
In the near term, it works exactly as you say: The minute they're invaded, hundreds of thousands of former noncombatants are activated.
Two years ago, most of them were untrained. Since then, they've had plenty of time to get their basic and advanced training in various specialties. They're still green, which will probably mean heavier losses, but on the other hand, they're fighting on terrain with which they are familiar, and where I imagine there are extensive fortifications and hidden surprises for attackers working in their favor. Also, there's zero moral ambiguity when you're on defense.
I think there will be an ongoing push for volunteers, for the reasons you give, but also for the moral force of volunteers compared to conscripts.
The West has really messed up by thinking a proxy war would weaken Russia and strengthen the West. What they've done is given an excuse to a superpower to rebuild its forces while sharpening its claws on a weaker opponent, with the latest western weaponry, albeit in insufficient numbers. Just enough stress to aid mobilization efforts whose progress exceeds their losses by a large margin.
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This is why government, itself, should be restricted to its proper role and scope. It's only by exceeding its proper role and scope that it can act on behalf of big corporations. This is the fatal flaw in progressive thought. You're so eager to solve the human condition, yesterday, and government has the monopoly on use of force to MAKE THINGS THE WAY WE DEMAND, INSTANTLY. So, being in a hurry, and being a little lazy, you demand that the government solve the problem, and that opens the door to corporate capture.
Corporate capture is inevitable, then, because lawyers in the legislature are legislating WAY over their heads when they depart from basic guarantees of liberty, and basic enforcement of laws against persons and property. So they bring in the "industry experts" with all the "best reputations." And they craft legislation with the appearance of solving the problem that guarantees that the big corporation will not be significantly harmed, and any harm caused THEM will be visited on their smaller competitors times 10, assuming they even have the resources to comply with the 500-page document filled with bureau-speak gobbledygook. And even if the big corporation runs afoul of it, it has a team of lawyers to twist the deliberately vague and contradictory language to wriggle off the hook. But if you're a Mom 'n' Pop, who can't afford a $200,000 attorney (or million-dollar legal TEAM), you just go out of business.
This shit has been going on since the transcontinental railroad days, if not before. Review your history. For a good, short treatment, I suggest Ayn Rand's "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal." She was talking about this shit damn near 100 years ago.
I feel that all progressives should add "Wealth of Nations," "Blackstone," and "The Federalist Papers" to their reading list. It may put your Howard Zinn in perspective and make you question your insistence on looking for federal-government solutions to human problems. But you're always in too big of a hurry, and so you tend to make bigger problems due to unintended consequences of the use of force.
Opposing the welfare state, as designed, doesn't mean you're FOR poverty or selfish. It just means you disagree with centralized solutions imposed across an entire continent, when different (DIVERSE!) conditions prevail in different places. What works for one state doesn't work for all states, hence the idea of federalism in the first place.
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MSNBC's "adpocalypse" is definitely taking place. Their ad revenue is directly tied to their viewership, and the Nielsen ratings are in the public domain.
Good to see her losing market share to Sean Hannity. He gets more of the facts right. But he's very similar to her in droning on over and over with the same exact talking points, day after day. I don't see how that can be popular for either one of them, but I guess that's the American audience for you. For me, the 5th or 6th "bought-and-paid-for dossier" line was as many as I could stomach, and I haven't watched Hannity for a long time. Except for being WAY more truthful, Hannity is just as repetitive an attack dog for FOX as Maddow is for MSNBC.
I'm OK with that, but let the ratings decide whether they sink or swim.
Honestly, I'm GLAD that the masks (and the gloves) are off. I HATED the previous 40 or so years of total partisanship masquerading as "objective journalism" that the Internet has FINALLY exposed for all to see. The Press is SUPPOSED to be partisan! And everybody's supposed to KNOW what axe you're grinding!
Personally, I'd just as soon listen to mostly Ron Paul and Jimmy Dore and have the two of you have regular knock-down drag-outs on the welfare-and-regulatory state. Let the polar opposites on the proper role and scope of government have it out. I think there's a HUGE middle ground on the "Yes, we measure our society by how our weakest and poorest are faring," and I think you'd be surprised at how compassionate we libertarian/classical-liberal types are when it comes to a social safety net. The MAIN sticking point is how close to the FAMILY you make the assistance. Progressives are always in a hurry and want to just pass one law for all 300-some million of us; whereas, the libertarian types want the FEDERAL government the hell OUT of it. Not their role. Compassion starts at home. Family. Clan. Neighborhood. Village. County. And on up the chain.
It should never be a federal thing, unless we're being invaded or we just got hit by a giant asteroid (national-scale natural catastrophe). It's just too easy to lose personal accountability and personal responsibility the farther from the individual it gets. And it only takes one robber baron manipulating the fine print to fuck things up for all 300-some million of us. But for it all to work the best for the most, with minimal infringement on the rights of the individual, you want and NEED 90% of individuals with their shit together, followed by 90% of families picking up the slack, followed by neighborhoods looking out for the families in trouble, and on up. By the time it reaches the state level, if the underlying communities don't have their shit together, there's no hope for the state that's comprised of those underlying communities to manage.
Food for thought?
I'm leery of the Universal Basic Income, but that would definitely be a lot easier and cheaper to administer than a grab-bag of programs with all different kinds of standards, procedures and red tape, requiring an entire bureaucrat class, with so much overlap and redundancy (and duplicate bureaucracies).
I tried to be site coordinator for a federal grant at my college. It was called CO-AMP (Under the LS-AMP umbrella), and the idea is to encourage underrepresented groups (women and minorities) to engage in and succeed in STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering and Math) disciplines. The entire grant was something like $7,000, and I saw all these deserving kids doing good things and wanted to reward as many as possible with as much as possible. So I built a rubric that factored in such things as need, likelihood of success, amount of progress, grades, etc. And I distributed the money according to the objectively-reasonable point system I devised, with the assistance and oversight of a few colleagues and higher-ups.
It wasn't a TON of money for any one person. I had 20 or 30 candidates, and the top ones were getting something like $700 each, then it went down to $500. and so on down the chain, to maybe $200. Seems like "crumbs," but if you've ever been at the bottom, that extra $200 or $700 is HUGE. It's a family night out once a month. It's some better shoes. It's most of the price of a computer or smartphone or surface or iPad.
It took a lot of doing to push through this zero-overhead thing put together. What the CO-AMP people wanted was to send one or two - maybe 3 - kids to some faraway conference, where they could get their pictures taken, and of course, fly ME around to get MY picture taken with these WONDERFUL and SPECIAL students. There were funds set aside so I could fly down to Birmingham, Alabama for a big circle-jerk meeting, where everybody virtue-signaled and (of course) got their picture taken. I want on that ONE junket, and I was disgusted.
"How much for the plane ticket and weekend stay at the Hilton? $2,000? $3,000? Fuck THAT. That's $3,000 I could lump on top of the $7,000 earmarked for - you know - the people I'm supposed to be HELPING. So give me a $10,000 budget, with NO free vacations and the rampant grab-ass and partying that we wonderful bureaucrats so richly deserve on these larks (I mean "serious conferences."), and I'll put EVERY SINGLE NICKEL INTO THE POCKETS OF HARDWORKING AND DEPRIVED STUDENTS!!!
Well that wasn't going to happen, so I just decided to forego wasting taxpayer money on a high-dollar photo opp.
The kicker? What made me think of this in the context of UBI and simplifying the administration of public assistance? It turned out that EVERY FREAKING NICKEL I wangled for my "fellowship" recipients was taken OUT of OTHER assistance they received. So it was ALL just a big fucking waste of my and my students' time, IF they were receiving any OTHER federal assistance. So, rather than a reward for distinguished performance, with an admixture of real need thrown in, it was just a big circle jerk, and I was the fool. I COULD have made myself look like this White Knight/Savior, if I just played the game and took every opportunity to make speeches and have my picture taken with the one or two students that won the lottery and got to fly off to Nicaragua or Brazil or Canada or - even better - someplace overseas. If I were only interested in looking and seeming important, instead of just busting my ass to find the most deserving people trying to break into STEM on a shoestring budget (Maybe some BEEF in that next meal, instead of another round of rice and beans), it would've been much less work and I would've pleased the kind of assholes that run this kind of shit.
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This is the rule, not the exception. Everyone in education knows that the Democrats throw more money at education, and so entire schools are 99% Democrat. I got a reputation and many heart-to-heart "You better watch what you say" messages from well-meaning colleagues, because I challenged race-based teaching, instead of sticking to the age-old principles of equal treatment and pure meritocracy.
I really made a name for myself as a bad person when I criticized the White Privilege "training." I told them point blank that the obvious consequence of dividing us according to groups would divide us into smaller and smaller groups, until eventually, we would "discover" that the only indivisible group was the individual, and when they made that discovery, they would stumble upon principles that are 300 years old.
They're basically re-inventing the wheel in a very stupid and closed-minded way, telling themselves they're breaking new ground, with more new ground to be broken, literally ever day. At this rate it will take them another 100 years to "discover" The Enlightenment, after torturing everyone with their benighted "insights" in the meantime.
Been there. Done that. Out-grew this crap in high school.
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I'm actually BETTER off, because of the job I have, my seniority, and the benefits that accrue. But although things look pretty good for me, financially, I can see the federal government snatching it all away with hyper-inflation and an end to dollar dominance, due to fiscal malfeasance by the U.S. Congress, which has been buying votes with other people's money (our grandchildren's money, to be precise) for decades.
The only reason Republicans are any threat at all to Democrat hopes is they BECAME the Democrats in the 1990s, to remain relevant. "If you can't beat 'em, joing 'em," says Newt Gingrich. The Republicans became just as big of spenders as the Democrats. Meanwhile, the Democrats became even bigger war pigs than the neocons in the Republican Party.
Until the people learn to vote against candidates who push Free Stuff from government coffers (their neighbors' pockets), there will be no return to solvency. Eventually, economic reality will take over, and they'll still make their promises, but they won't be able to deliver on any of them, making 21st-Century USA look like late-stage USSR.
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@R34LxxDiAbLo : Is this "evidence" in the "BuzzFeed" sense, or, like, actual evidence. I think you want to believe there's evidence. I'll believe it when I see it, and you should be more skeptical after 2 years of non-stop Russian Collusion hoax.
It just seems to me that the Democrats are once again pivoting, because They Got Nothin', and this will fill the lame-stream airwaves for a time, and be all breathlessly believed, and then come to nothing. Again. It appears the main purpose of all this is just to keep an atmosphere of accusation going. Evidence is beside the point. What matters to you mouth-breathers is that it be 24-7 anti-Trump, in tune with your NPC programming.
Do you remember HALF of the things you were CERTAIN of, 2 or 2 1/2 years ago that turned out to be false? You're like Charlie Brown, believing Lucy will finally not yank out the football right before you try to kick it, THIS time, because THIS time, things are different. THIS time won't be like all... the... other... times. Definition of insanity. Or religion.
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Nah. We just have to pick the right battles and use righteous means. That always wins in the long run. To see what I mean, look at Antifa in Portland. When conservatives brought out their alpha dogs to fight against Antifa, they got smeared. That's not the way. They turn you into themselves, and drag you down to their level. Antifa winning EVERY street battle spells the demise of Antifa. There are MILLIONS watching tens of thousands of bullying ignants. We CAN sweep them off the streets, and if we do, we lose.
It hurts us in the streets, short term, but the injustice, cruelty, and plain malevolence of Antifa is out in the open now. They're making their big play. And they're discrediting themselves as we speak.
Yes, Democrat mayors and governors let this go too far, and have misgoverned TERRIBLY. Yes, the worst kinds of people have taken advantage. But the whole world is watching.
Be strong, restrained and above all, be PATIENT. Control what you can in your own little circle, and use force on no one unless they try to use force on YOU. Then smite them hip and thigh, as the saying goes. But don't look for trouble. Don't lash out because idiots are making a spectacle of themselves by lashing out.
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Russia's trying to maintain a naval presence with ports with quick access to the Mediterranean.
Yes, they have the Black Sea, but they undoubtedly worry about access through the Bosporous Strait.
I think if you look at it from the Russian perspective, Islam remains a major thorn in their side, with access to (and from) the Black Sea being very dependent on the whims of Turkey, which to the Russians has got to be an unsettling strategic reality.
When we speak of Benghazi and the nonsense that went on, there, our meddling put an end to Russian use of the port, there. Or at the least, destabilized any deals he had with Gadhafi, by overthrowing the dictator who made the deal with Russia, who "bought" access to Benghazi in much the same way they "bought" access to Tartus in Syria: by forgiving debts incurred by those countries to the former Soviet Union.
I think Russian perfidy and meddling needs to be seen against the backdrop of our own meddling perfidy in the region. What it reminds me of is how European empire builders aced the Kaiser out of the kinds of colonialism England, France, Spain and Portugal had practiced for centuries.
This sheds a different light on England and France joining a coalition to mess with the Russians in Syria. It's nothing new. It's just a continuation of acing-out the competition.
And while I hate what they did in Crimea and Ukraine, against the backdrop of serious security concerns for the Russian Bear, their hereditary quest for warmwater ports, and the insidious rise of Islam outside and within Russian borders, it starts taking on more of a "We're fighting for our country and our way of life and we're Russians, so cheating is a part of winning."
I bet there is a lot we have in common with the Russians, when it comes to fighting the larger culture war against Islam. They could be a nice counterbalance to China, as well. And China's a MUCH more significant threat from economic warfare that we INVITE by running up our national debt the way we have, to keep the entitlement and war-machine gravy trains running on time, here.
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Fixing the equipment is a big part of why my brother-in-law rents out his land, rather than farming it, himself. He got out before things got too crazy.
I personally think that between the government and the equipment manufacturers, we've strayed away from cars, trucks and tractors that last a long time and are straightforward to repair. It takes more and more specialized training (and re-training) to be certified to work on vehicles these days. All we think about is the fuel efficiency and always reducing the emissions, with no thought for the emissions created building entirely new vehicles, because the previous vehicles are designed to break down in 10 years or less. I'd be perfectly happy with my '93 pickup for life, if I could keep finding parts for it. Even a super-expensive repair is cheaper than buying one brand-new, and think of all the mining, refining and sheer energy that goes into building a new one.
Same for phones and other electronic devices. I get that things keep getting faster, but if you're happy with the functionality of your Galaxy S3, you should be able to fix it and use it essentially forever. But that's not what these people - who all insist I'm polluting too much - want. They want to sell me a new one after a year. 3 years at most.
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American tanks were so much more numerous that German armor's advantage of front plate was negated by side and rear attacks in tag team tactics. They could only defend one direction and Americans could afford to come at them with 2 or more lighter tanks or attack vehicles from 2 or more directions, totally negating the head-on armor advantage. This was fairly characteristic of American vs German. Germans had better guns and armor, but they were slower, easier to break, and harder to fix.
I've always been skeptical of tank doctrine. When two major powers face off, both sides will have satellite (so far), so troop and mechanized concentrations will be detect
ed, and they can be annihilated by a growing array of drones and other stand-off weapons. Maybe it'd be better to pour your creativity into equipping a fleet of Toyota Hi-Lux's with anti-tank guns and high-explosive anti-personnel munitions.
I'm not a big fan of which tank has thicker armor or better guns. I think you should only use tanks on ground that's been prepared, and you dominate the skies. In Ukraine, I think of tanks as bait to provoke artillery strikes that reveal emplacements forr counter-attack. I think a Patriot emplacement is a lot harder to replace than a plane nearing the end of its service life, and I think Ukraine is going to have some Coventry decisions to make, where they will choose to let an attack take place, let a plane cross over into UKR territory or fly ground support, because they have to save their ground-to-air munitions for something more than a farm town.
t certainly does seem like we're close to Ukraine's breaking point. The West is in no position to finance a major war. They've run up huge debts in peacetime, so there's no easy credit.
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Because their funding formula is basic, old-fashioned corporate advertising model that's been in use on broadcast and cable radio and t.v. since their inception.
Until people start PAYING for content, directly, they'll ALWAYS see only what the big corporate advertisers want them to see.
Social media platforms are not only very left-wing, themselves, but they're also very CORPORATE, because it's the big advertisers they're trying to get $$$ from. if you aren't paying for your social media platform, you get what they give you, and should either leave or stop complaining.
Now, let ME complain about social media, I un-self-consciously continue...
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@fryertuck6496 I wonder if it occurs to anyone in the West that a dispersed, reduced military in Ukraine was the goal, and the Russians aren't upset about the lack of targets. The Russians are obliged to stick and move. They can do amazing things with indirect fire, but they need a good spotter and they need to pick up and move in a short amount of time. It's the same for the FPV's, the camera-guided stuff. Russians are using small, light infantry drone operators.
I know we Monday morning quarterbacks should shut up about tactics, but someone with an endless supply of cheap drones might be able to change how wars are fought. If you can knock out a tank or artillery piece with a cheap suicide drone, that can be a game-changer. But tactics go out the window, when you can field orders of magnitude more men and munitions, any small tactical advantages are wiped out. Just looking at the troop and equipment build-up that started years ago and is now in high gear, it looks more and more hopeless for Ukraine and the stumbling and bumbling West. We're too many generations into taking our dominance for granted. The political class takes its privileges and its profits for granted, but reliance on finance and regulation, alone, without the resource and industrial base to back it is just a fart in the wind. The world is moving on without us. We need to get back to the basics of sound (limited) government.
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As a descendant of Druids and a closet tree-hugger, I believe humans can and should be a positive force in the ecosystem.
That doesn't mean I think authoritarian use of force by misguided and under-educated politicians, bureaucrats, and self-interested robber barons (who ALWAYS feast when government intervenes) will get us to a better place.
Look. People care about the environment more than ever before in human history. Environmental friendliness is a deeply inculcated value in our culture (USA). You want a greener planet? De-regulate and cut taxes. Compensate for the de-regulation by putting 10% of the money wasted on government agencies into the TORT SYSTEM. Make it quick and easy for the common man to sue anyone - including a mega-corporation - for ANY harm caused by that company.
You think companies wouldn't clean up their act? All of a sudden, a $10,000 check to the regional rep for the EPA does you no good. You just better not dump that stuff in the river, because of the millions of little guys downstream who can take a $10,000 swipe at you in, say, small claims. Don't need more laws and regs. Just need a tort system that's robust enough to handle a gazillion LITTLE cases, expeditiously.
As a libertarian, I think if you removed government barriers to competition, every home with a yard and a tree or trees would have a rocket stove mass heater that you could always heat your house and make hot water and cook with, no matter what happened to the grid, plus you'd have a really clean and efficient backup heat system. But due to regulations, I don't think there're more than one or two companies who make rocket mass heaters that are UL listed and be covered by homeowner's insurance.
What there SHOULD be is 1,000 or 10,000 guys out there, all making rocket mass heaters (RMHs), in competition with each other for performance, safety, ease of use and durability. We don't have that. Why? Because government insists on "helping" us with everything. How did things ever improve before government stepped in with regulations? Regular customers and the rewards of treating people right. There'll always be fly-by-nighters, but in an unregulated market, you just go by the company's REPUTATION, and it's hard for anybody without a reputation to break in. They have to offer really good deals just so people will try them out. None of that requires a government overseer...
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@zeo1087 CITIZENS UNITED case needs to be overturned. 501-c3's need to be revisited.
We need to allow people to pool their resources for political speech, through many small donations, but we need to disallow rich people from using the same mechanisms to pump dark money into the public square, where one person's voice is amplified to drown out all others.
If you work for a corporation, you are free to donate out of your own pocket to any political cause you wish, but you should not be able to use corporate funds to run political campaigns.
I think that what happened was the court wanted people to still be able to pool their resources for a political action committee, which I agree with, but the same laws shouldn't be twisted to give the super-rich or for-profit corporations to drown out everyone else.
I think there should be a cap on all donations to these NGOs. I don't think for-profit businesses or corporations should be able to donate to any political cause or even any charity. If the management wants to donate to any cause, let them do so out of their own pockets. Let them use their individual speech to encourage others to do the same.
I include labor unions in this. If the members want to donate as individuals, let them. But the union leadership shouldn't have that power. I've been a union member who disagreed with many of the political stances of the union leadership, but I had no control over the propaganda they were spreading.
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Yes. It's all about the manufacture of consent, so that a small number of people can set the agenda for all.
The public reaction to the old methods of control is why legacy media is dying.
The Internet is the next battleground. We in our bubble think everybody must know about this stuff, but the average person isn't curious enough to make sure Jimmy's in their feed. I hold my nose when he tries to push big government programs. Jimmy's totally wrong about that. Russell Brand is a former "progressive," who finally understood that decentralization is key.
Brand understands the need to decentralize. Jimmy wants to have his cake and to eat it, too, so he's always pushing big government and simultaneously ranting against the inevitable consequences of big government.
Jimmy's stuck on the wheel. When he finally grows up, he'll be a full-on libertarian, and not an almost-perfect libertarian who still wants Free Stuff. Jimmy believes in some mythical nanny government, run by saintly geniuses, who always have the people's interests at heart, and are always the smartest person in the room.
sigh
Jimmy needs to accept that the best we can do is the best we can do, with as little government help or hindrance as possible. Government hijacks all the good things we do or would do for each other.
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Wouldn't surprise me if the panic over the RussiaGate is because they've been doing shit like this and it hasn't worked - or hasn't been working like maybe it did when they first started - so they figure someone else must be doing the same thing better than they are, and they're casting about blindly, looking for "the source." Most likely, it's their own ineptness, disconnect from how real people think, and a growing immunity to the FakeNews and Manipulation Machine spreading like a virus through the general public. This would also explain why Democrat establishment types are so up in arms. They thought they had it all tied up in a bow, and yet these toxic anti-establishment memes keep rolling over their efforts like a tidal wave.
Pretty conspiratorial, but we all know how cut off from real working people the DNC (and RNC) is (are). We all know how arrogant they are. We all know how incompetent they are. So, just like the way they run the government (incompetently), that's how they run the manipulation (and vote-harvesting) machine(s). And, with alternate sources like Jimmy Dore and a multitude of Jagoff Comedians, basement pundits, and the like, their mask keeps slipping and the mind of the public slips out of their grasp, as well.
They carefully stage "reports" for consumption in American homes, like they always have, only there's a jagoff citizen with a smart phone, standing off to the side, showing where the yellow "Crime Scene - Do Not Cross" tape ends just beyond the frame of the news cameras, but in plain view to anybody standing there. They show Proud Boys punching out an Antifa mob, and portray it as right-wing violence, but ANOTHER jagoff with a smartphone shows the whole sequence, which started with bottles and rocks being thrown into a conservative demonstration, that the Proud Boys have been joining to keep the violence down and protect demonstrators from Antifa harassment and violence. The only reason the Proud Boys exist is to protect conservative events from fascists (knowingly and unknowingly) masquerading as anti-fascists.
They think they have this techie stuff all in their hip pockets, but there's a big old hole in their jeans. And their arrogance exposes them time and time again. Like Hillary's e-mail server. In an earlier time, that shit would've been swept under the rug by insiders, but this or that little tidbit of truth will surface, due to their own incompetence and failure to keep EVERYbody in line. It's a cheater's way of thinking and operating that can work very well for a very long time, but as cheaters, they really don't know how to do things the right way, and they miscalculate what everybody else is doing, AND they project their own underhandedness on everybody else.
They're like the poker player who cheats, so when he deals off the bottom of the deck to give himSELF 4 aces, he KNOWS the bastard across the table with 4 aces is cheating! LOL!
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All by design. Trump's their excuse to do what they already wanted to do. The Democrat Party's on life support with the people, but dominates government, education, media, and public health. People wonder why the German people thought Hitler was such a great guy. Well, he had government, education, media and public health. Public health (Jimmy, STOP with Med-4-All) was taken over by the German government (Bismarck) way back in the 19th Century. You think Bismarck did that out of kindness? No. He was trying to keep the (Junker) aristocracy relevant, and "We will take care of you" was a big part of what kept the German people loyal and obedient.
The MODEL for German "single-payer" health care was taken directly from the arms industry. Krupp Steel had marvelous, nanny company towns, where all their workers got free health care, cheap food, cheap housing, and better pay. They paid for all of that with lucrative weapons contracts with the government (decades before Hitler). They made more profit than any other company so they could afford it. That was what inspired Bismarck, especially the LOYALTY OATH that Krupp employees had to sign in return for their benefits. Didn't even NEED the oath for them to be loyal to the guy (Old Man Krupp) handing out the goodies!
That's why I harp on this. All federal government aid is more about authority and control, not helping people. It lays the foundation for future Hitlers, every time!
GIVE UP ON YOUR UTOPIA, JIMMY. LIFE IS TRADE-OFFS. DO THE BEST YOU CAN WHERE YOU ARE, FOR THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU. YOU WILL HAVE A BETTER COMMUNITY WHEN YOU EXCISE THE POWER-HUNGRY FROM THE COMPASSION LOOP. COMPASSION IS HUMAN-TO-HUMAN, NOT BUREAUCRAT-TO-HUMAN. The government NEVER wants to help you. It wants to use you and control you. You want to help people? You and all your progressive friends get off your asses and help people without using force on everybody else. Just understand that human misery knows no bounds and you won't ever fix everything. Just understand the government will do a worse job. We're paying billions to fight poverty and our streets are filled with homeless. Think about it.
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You left out Africa and Asia in your criticism, Peter. We used the Cold War as an excuse to kill people all over the world, for decades.
I'm still on the side of economic sanctions against bad actors. If they don't respect their own people, I don't want to trade with them. If they can't even devise an honorable social contract with their people - and I don't mean perfect, but some key features need to be in place or the people are reduced to serfdom and poverty. And the fact is, if they were competent to govern, our not dealing with them wouldn't seriously hurt their people. If they were competent to govern, we would be happy to trade with them.
The fact that America has sanctions on Iran should NOT mean that the price of eggs is out of reach of the average person, assuming there are eggs to be had, which there might not be.
One of the mistakes I think we make is that when the people finally DO shirk the chains, they tend to put the chains right back on, voluntarily, with another brand of authoritarian rule. My take on history, now, is quite a bit different than it was during and after Vietnam. During I was barely old enough to understand. After, I could see the strong pull of collectivism to poor countries under despots, and I can still see that. I just don't believe that going to war over another country's stupid decisions is a very good idea.
In hindsight, I'd've put Vietnam on a "freedom schedule."
Free up your people on this, and we'll trade with you on that. Free up on this other, and we'll open up your markets to that other. You don't have to go to war with bad actors in order to put them on a path - give them a plan - for full partnership with a pretty cool country (when we behave ourselves and stick to our principles of liberty).
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The preconditions for a unique - EXCEPTIONAL - constitution are rarely in place, like they were here in North America. But things have a way of improving on their own, over time, if folks shy from using force on one another. China and North Korea appear to be two holdout exceptions on the communist side of things. Theocracy seems to reign over most of the Middle East, and every sign of moderation has been met with war and regression. Who knows where the Persians would be, now, if we'd never installed the Shah?
Who knows what the Middle East would look like if we didn't decide it was time to create a nation out of thin air, in the flush of equal parts victory and shame, in the 1940s?
People in severe deprivation or under severe oppression are fertile ground for the blandishments of Islam/socialism. We feed its worst aspects and then wonder why it's going viral and touching us At Home. When it serves our purpose, we Weaponize the most radical interpretations of the Quran against our enemies, and then we're surprised, shocked and outraged, when Islam is weaponized against Us.
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Don't wreck what works for the vast majority of people, to prop up a small segment. If you're liberal and you want to make a change, don't look to government force to solve it. YOU help somebody. As a conservative, that's what I do. And I figure if everybody who likes to virtue-signal and take my money for their compassion got off their ass and helped just one person, we'd solve the homeless problem - for example - one person at a time, without any force. I took in a vision-impaired person, who just needed a safe, quiet place to take classes on Internet skills, as a vision-impairment assistant to website developers (a growth industry).
This isn't a hard case, but it did help a guy who fell through the cracks. Just one. And that's how it works. If you haven't taken anybody in, yourself, then shut your mouth about "living wage." It's going straight from idealism to unintended destruction, which is the calling card of the left. In the cities where the homeless problem is out of control, I see a ton of virtue-signalers and a bunch of mansions occupied by virtue signalers with NO homeless being taken in. No INDIVIDUAL help.
Liberals don't understand human nature and how the world works. How compassion works. They think that career unelected bureaucrats know better than people how to help people. But you make a career out of administering programs that take money from one person to give to another. Bureaucrats don't care if they're efficient, nor do they really care about the people they're helping. They end up screwing both taxpayer and beneficiary. all unintended. But after many years of watching how things actually work, I'm more and more convinced that leftists are either stupid, willfully ignorant or liars.
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@histguy101 Big Tech got everybody hooked on free content. Society/culture has to take that next step, and content creators have to find the right price point. If it's low enough, and you monetize millions of views, you're making out good. I think we're still reaching for that. I know I'm withholding most of my entertainment $$$ and paying for a select few news services, whose work I like.
We'll see where the market eventually settles, but I think we're in the midst of a peaceful revolution taking place under the radar as a result of the Internet, no matter how much "curating" is taking place. Ideas spread across the planet like wildfire, and we all get a little bit smarter. Easy to miss the signal, because of all the noise, but people are gettin' scary-smart, and traditional institutions are looking more and more obsolete.
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A populist feature I hadn't noticed:s
The content creators who rise up out of the oyster grass to become major YouTube presences have more than their share of patrons, but ALSO more than their share of the $1, $2 or $5 contributions from us "small folk." To stamp out the voice of the "small folk," it's easy to see who's getting all the 2s and fews, and I imagine those small donations are more cost and less profit from the payment processors.
They don't like us small folk. We say mean things about bankers and our petty transactions cost more to process for what they pay. And there are so damn many of us.
Anyway, just by tracking the pain-in-the-ass channels that have many SMALL contributions, they can zero in on most of the subversive voices after they start getting traction.
The trouble from the banker's side is that as soon as they use this tactic, there are 2 more to take the last guy's place. They're in their own self-made version of Zombie Apocalypse, with all us small folk representing the zombies! It's like we are H.Y.D.R.A. Chop off one head, and 2 more appear. But they're doing everything they can to plug all the holes in their dam against free expression.
And their contrrol of "process" is very tight, and we haven't heard the last of them, nor shall we. The best we can do is marginalize/minimize their effect. I think the FreeThinkers are only just beginning to realize how deeply embedded this perniciousness is and what it will take to keep the power in the people's hands. As we peel away the layers of the Patreon onion, we see that there will also be every obstruction possible set in the way of free speech, now by banking laws, regulations and so-called "best practices." Best practices are more about the culture of banking and culture tends to trump the formal rule sets (or quickly be codified in rule sets).
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I've been using Amazon as a catalog to find better companies with better independent reviews. Then I go direct to the manufacturer with the best reputation. Almost all of them will ship direct to the customer. I did it because years ago, with their treatment of their own workers and politicization (Denying AW$ services to a platform they deemed politically incorrect). I also had my own mini-boycott against Chinese goods, because of how they treat their people and their predatory trade practices. I think countries like that should face steep tariffs, to offset their underhandedness and oppression at home. No embargoes. Just a middle path that increases the cost of being authoritarian cheats.
As time has gone on, it's gotten harder and harder to tell just from the Amazon site where something is made, and the more they hide it, the more sure I am that it's from China, where, on top of everything else, I have no confidence as to the materials used or the quality of construction, expecting it to fall apart or wear out really fast.
Amazon was a great idea and revolutionized commerce, but when it could be generous and open, it chose to be tight-fisted and opaque. It won't be going any where any time soon, but it'll do without most of my business.
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Banana Republics in S. America are no good for their people or the USA. Breaks my heart how we prop up assholes because we're looking at the planet like a chess board, rather than a community. America's in a unique position to LEAD rather than DOMINATE. I HOPE Trump stays on course to a more rational - and ultimately stronger - foreign policy. He's zig-zagging an awful lot, but I really don't see a straight-ahead path to any of the longer-term policy goals.
It's more of a Ieyasu Tokugawa thing, where you must appear weak and confused to provoke mistakes in the opposition. More of a Brian Boru thing, where you camp your huge army right next door, and do NOTHING. Let them come to you. Then be twice as generous and kind as they expected or even hoped. Rattle the saber but don't draw it.
We have the example of the Syrian missile strikes, where it appeared Trump was under neolib/neocon dominion, and then, months later, he declares victory and announces the pull-out. Agrees to the standard "troop surge" in Afghanistan in the early going, then turns around and puts the U.S. on an 18-month timetable to pull out. It's like he couldn't get the pull-outs without playing along with the hawks in the first instance. But ultimately SEEMS to be sticking to what he ran on.
S. America could be a totally different deal, though, being in our hemisphere, with the presidential legacy of Monroe Doctrine and "Speak softly and carry a big stick" motto from - iirc - Teddy Roosevelt's time. We've basically acted like dicks, over and over, when the entire hemisphere should be our best pals, voluntarily, and in more or less total accord on principles of free market economies, individual liberty and property rights. And non-meddling in the affairs of other countries...
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So you're bringing it back to Alfred the Great and his self-supporting and -defending borough idea, with the borough more or less autonomous AND an organizing zone/principle for the raising of levies for the whole of Wessex (and eventually England). That might be Britain's greatest strength, and I love how David Starkey reminds us of how much of that comes from Germanic invaders, where the King wasn't anointed by God, so much as first among equals, by MERIT, and still answerable to the tribe.
The way it was explained to me w.r.t. the Native American tribes was that the Chief was the guy everybody listened to, until they didn't. He was Chief by his potency, wisdom and social skills.
Personally, I think we're really close to the point where there's a global order along those lines. Not from the top down, but across political boundaries and vast distances, who generally believe in non-force principle: We don't have to kill each other in order to survive. We are not goat herders faced with nothing but dry grass. We can feed ourselves right where we are with permaculture farming in and around every community. The only thing we need centralized is the backbone that lets us share ideas with one another, eat better, sleep better, live better.
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LOL! Mills. But seriously. Mises sez that it was the fact of small, largely autonomous units that led to ideas like property rights, free trade, and tolerance. A state of relative anarchy, in which no one group or state has control of HUGE territories. The bigger the state, the more dangerous. The U.S. is like that. But to the extent they can devolve powers to the state level and the states to the local and the local to the clans and the clans to the families, we grope towards that "Nobody is telling EVERYBODY what to do" state that is probably closest to utopia as we'll ever get.
But it's almost the opposite of top-down globalism. More of a global state of empowerment of individuals that make national boundaries kind of silly. A lot of globalists probably see a piece of it, but they're utterly wrong-headed in how they go about it, choosing to use force as the shortest path, rather than LETTING it happen, as the surest path.
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Here's the thing: They've staked a claim on a niche audience that buys the conspiracy tripe. For them to change that tune, they lose even THAT niche. As a combine, the MSM (excluding FOX) are still a bigger chunk of the viewing audience than FOX. Worth going after. But they're reduced to fighting each OTHER over that chunk, even as that chunk keeps shrinking. It's long-term STUPID, but they're so caught up, and so tied to TODAY's ratings, and conspiracy theories are their Main Chance at a bigger share of that still big, but shrinking market, they're all fish on the same mouth-bloodying hook. They're all looking for today's "bump" like the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge, looking for any kind of short-term victory in a losing war.
This is also happening in the SJW movement, where they can - and do - employ communist/fascist tactics in the street to steamroll anybody with an opinion that is not THEIR opinion. I think the Berkeley protests and ESPECIALLY the Evergreen "takeover" illustrate this to a 'T.' Yes, Naima Lowe was able to generate quite a following of idealistic but callow youth that she could turn into a hate mob and run roughshod over EVERYbody. Drunk on that power, drunk on that apparent WIN, she and the NPCs she personally programmed basically went on a just-this-side-of-lynchmob campaign to bully and harass everybody else. Total win. Those professors who just wanted to go to work and do science were TOTALLY cowed and humiliated. Heady stuff for the protesters. BUT the idiots were SO lacking in self-awareness that they actually recorded their doings on VIDEO and BROADCAST it, and everybody watching on YouTube who wasn't already up-to-date on their NPC programming could see who the abusers and the haters in that scenario WERE.
So, these kinds of people have an unending string of "successes" on their back trail, and every "win" only hastens their eventual defeat. They're like the Celts against the Romans, killing 3 Romans for every Celt killed, thinking they're winning, but there were 10 times as many Romans, and they just kept building roads, establishing strongpoints, and destroying all Celtic means of feeding and replacing themselves, until all of England (up to Hadrian's Wall) was Roman. "Victory" after "victory," but fewer and fewer warriors around the bonfire to celebrate with each passing month, and less food at the victory feasts.
I love the fact that independents, like Jimmy Dore and Mike Tracey can make out pretty good - a new middle-class of media - with low overhead and a relatively small, hard-core cadre of contributing subscribers. We see this in entertainment, in particular music, as well. You don't NEED to be signed to a major record label to make out. You don't even need to sell a ton of music in order to have a large enough following to fill a decent-sized venue. I think the Grateful Dead gave all their music away, and it didn't matter, because they had so many loyal fans, their shows were always sold out and they made millions off their live shows.
There's a medium-sized level of success available to THOUSANDS of independent content-creators. It's no longer "Get the backing of a major label or be stuck playing in seedy bars forever."
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Biden's more authoritarian, but neither of the two candidates is going to do much to drain the swamp.
There's nobody out there who's the kind of liberty-minded leader we need. They both love big government, and the "argument" is who gets to control the monster. Fact is, the monster's so big, there's no controlling it. and nobody is even talking about pulling its teeth and putting it on a diet.
No. That's not true. The IMF wants the USA to implement austerity measures, because its budget deficits are chronic, and the debt, itself, is absolutely crippling. It's now almost exactly the size of the entire gross domestic product, and interest payments, alone, are as big as the defense budget!
While all y'all are getting your daily Orange-Man-Bad fixes, the nation is crumbling!
In my estimation, Trump will be less bad, but still not really do anything about big business's incestuous relationship with the federal government. Why are we embroiled in Ukraine? Couldn't POSSIBLY have anything to do with Exxon or Shell. NOTHING to do with Blackrock or Vanguard!
This daily fix of Trump bad is just a distraction from "They're ALL bad!"
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Vagabond Wastrel: "Right" is so ill-defined these days. You could argue that the so-called Liberal Establishment are now the regressives/reactionaries, and the limited-government, libertarian types - same as ever - represent the true heart of liberalism in America.
In whatever age you live, there is always a Lord-Serf hierarchy that tries to assert itself, with the strong preying on the weak to cement their ascendance. In the current era, that dynamic is represented by nanny government and the welfare plantation at home, and the military-industrial complex, CIA and Deep State abroad.
I don't like Trump "going easy" on enforcement of the law, but that's one of Obama's many "dithers" that he doesn't need to take head-on. Instead, he's pushing for a more federalist, leave-it-to-the-states position, coupled with calls for legislation to align enforcement with the law.
What Obama did, over and over, was flout the law and the constitution any time he had a different opinion. The Chief Executive of the Federal Government MUST be the foremost RESPECTER of the law. Obama did some posturing in that regard, and then did just the opposite, any time he felt like it.
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Last I checked the pot shops are still open and doing business in Colorado.
Then again, Sanctuary-City-and-Staters remain in office.
Interesting times we live in. The midterms could go either way. Dems hoping for the traditional die-back for the president's party in the first midterm after election. 30-some Republicans retiring from congress to 17 Democrats. Ominous signs for the Trump platform.
And yet, Trump, himself, is at an amazing 50% approval, now.
As for the retiring Republicans, it doesn't look like they're retiring because of a tide of anti-Trump or anti-Republican sentiment. It's a mixed bag. Some octogenarians, some Rinos, but also some solid conservatives, like Hensarling. One or two of the Rinos face tough challenges from more Trumpster-type upstarts in their own party primaries.
The toughest Democrat challengers are triangulating like Bill Clinton, taking centrist positions on many issues. Those are the contests that will be interesting to watch in November.
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@SymphonicEllen This isn't about changing western perspectives. Those will not change until western Deep State is defeated.
The point, here, is the Southern Hemisphere, Middle East, and Far East. Putin is winning THEIR hearts and minds, and the power of the West is waning. I was always proud of how the USA didn't seek empire at the end of WWII. It was in all our history books. Little did I know the behind-the-scenes of the Cold War, or all the people and nations that were held back by our single-minded pursuit of soft power, and the lengths to which our intel community would go to "beat the USSR." We propped up military dictators around the world, destroyed economies, and subverted democracy if it meant a momentary advantage or concessions for our corporations.
If the American people understood, heads would roll. That's why we're dumbed down and our media is controlled as much as Hitler's or Stalin's. But time rolls on. New technologies emerge. They can't perpetuate their hegemony without technology, but they can't control all media because of technology. They LOVE the Maoist model, but they're meeting increasing resistance to that model, because of their purported "liberal democracy" claims and culture. The CCP can murder thousands at one go, and soldier on. Naked use of force. The USA can't. Not indefinitely.
I don't think it ever occurred to them that pursuing this course, even WINNING by this strategy, would lead to defeat. The realities of Ukraine are driving that lesson home. There's no way to spin it. But they're trying. And they have a good half of the population in NPC mode.
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@remisofola270 : That's gettin' old. The U.S. isn't going to war with Iran beyond the economic sanctions. The only issue, to me, is how far their leadership will go to stay in power. Starting a war with the U.S. is a possibility, there. That could energize their people against a common external foe, and make them forget the incompetent government running Iran is the reason why you can't afford (if you can find) eggs at the market. There actually IS a democratic process in Iran. It works slower than in the U.S., generally, and the main danger is that those in leadership will try to stir up a war with somebody, to whip the people back into patriotically supporting them.
The Trump strategy is all laid out for him, already. Park an extra carrier in the vicinity and do nothing with it, The Chinese are in the strange position of wanting U.S. forces ensuring the flow of oil! LOL! The Chinese are in an odd pickle. They've hit the point of diminishing returns for acting like thieves and criminals with their trade dealings and their totalitarian way of operating at home and abroad. You can't generate good enough ideas to compete on the world stage if you keep crushing your critical thinkers. They are constantly dealing with local uprisings at home, because people chafe at the absurdities of command economy.
It's not the being bossed around that kills them (and the Iranians). It's the fact that a family can't afford to buy eggs at the grocery, assuming there are eggs at the grocery. What guarantees reasonably-priced eggs at the grocery is a free market.
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Federal debt is killing us. Inflation is not going away. This is whistling past the graveyard.
Have you seen how big the interest payments are on the federal debt? That's why they're cutting rates. They're doing everything possible to paint lipstick on a pig, to get Potato Head re-elected. All at the expense of our children and grandchildren, who will be paying off over $30 trillion in national debt for the rest of their lives, because we all wanted Free Stuff.
Our nation used to pay its debts in peacetime and take on debt during war. We're in a state of forever war, now, with ballooning deficits, year after year, and they're spending it on wars abroad, but not one cent for our own national border.
Keep smoking the hopium! I'm investing in inflation hedges, because baby it's coming.
Maybe Yellen's trip to China will convince Xi to keep buying U.S. Treasuries, because if not, the day of the dollar will end.
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@The_Lord_has_it Yes. "I can't imagine anyone disagreeing with us on this" is a common comment on both left- and right-leaning channels. When you make statements like that, you're announcing "I'm in your bubble!" to the bubble crowd.
After the 2016 election, one of the things that made Democrats CERTAIN that the election was fixed was that they didn't know anyone at all who voted for Trump. This said more about their workplace and social bubble than it said about how people really were thinking.
I saw a lot of that at work (academia). Lots of colleagues freaking out, looking for the ba$tard$ who voted for Trump in their midst, finding very few, but de-friending them at once. But, even in a bubble, there are going to be quite a few who think differently. They all know better than to voice their opinions at the office, if they work in a college, so the bubble is preserved for all the faithful.
I don't wholly agree with conservatives or liberals. As a "true liberal," I don't like the surveillance state, the military-industrial complex, the media-industrial-complex, the health-and-welfare-industrial complex, the pro-war, regime-change neocon tendencies on left AND right....
To me, it's just being consistently anti--war and pro-freedom and pro-self-determination. Bottom-up rule, rather than top-down rule, and both so-called conservatives and so-called liberals LOVE top-down solutions once they make it to the top, regardless of party affiliations. Buy votes with handouts and fear-mongering. That's the game.
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It's all kind of strange how the Carter administration is judged.
I think it all goes to the price of oil and the fact that USA regulations locked up all the oil that would have made OPEC a lot less of a threat to the American economy.
There was "old oil" and "new oil." You had to sell "old oil" at "old oil" prices, so if inflation made everything go up, you still had to charge the same old price for oil from your existing well. This really drove up prices, because they'd just cap the old wells, and have to explore for new sites, while the government simultaneously made it more and more expensive to open up new sites. Regardless of that, they should have been able to charge market prices for the oil.
A lot of people think we should nationalize the oil. All that would do is make a switch from people in it to make an honest profit to government contractors, overseen by Congress, which would just see dollar signs and a giant piggy bank to buy votes with. In the end, you still end up with a private outfit, only cut off from being responsible to its customers to being responsible to politicians. This is always a bad idea.
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As a math prof, I've been making videos for years, because students learn at different rates in different ways. I have thousands of short videos providing theory and examples that I wouldn't have time to deliver in the face time allotted. I used to win awards for my live lectures, but while I was winning those awards was probably my low point in terms of faith in live lectures as primary teaching method.
But everything I do in ZOOM gets recorded and posted in public domain. I also make a PDF of everything I write during the session. In my traditional face-to-face classes, I was already going non-traditional, turning the face-to-face into an open work session, with students making use of any of my resources at any time, while I just HELP people when asked. I have to train them where the resources are and how to use them. Usually what ends up happening is they first look at the transcripts of my short videos, which are just the notes I put on the SMART notebook. If they need the voice-over, they can watch the video. If they don't, they can find what they need really quick by scrolling through the notes.
Some students just slurp up all the videos. Some only watch the videos when the notes and the book aren't enough. Basically every student gets through as fast as they are capable, without me making them listen to me, live. It was a bit trickier in ZOOM, when all my classes went full-on remote and online. Now that the school's opening back up, they're keeping me "remote" and "online," because other instructors are so in love with the traditional "I'm the high priest and you will be quiet and listen to me."
My approach is "I'm the facilitator. I hope the videos and notes work for you. If you need me, I'm here. If you don't, then just don't pester your classmates and turn in your homework." I try to give marching orders at the beginning of class as to where we are on the schedule and what they should be working on. But if they fall behind, they can catch up, with on-demand help. If they're ahead, I can accelerate their progress. So, basically, I have 30 INDIVIDUALS in class, all receiving a custom, on-demand product. Some students HATE that the clever priest doesn't entertain them every lecture for the full period. Other students LOVE that I don't waste their time, and have anticipated virtually every question with a video, and freed up our "face" time for their questions. I can talk to more students at THEIR level than I ever could in the traditional setting.
There are also fewer mistakes in the videos, because you can re-record or edit them, to eliminate time-wasting blunders. Fewer mistakes than the ego-gratifying but inefficient live lectures.
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You're one of very few who ever say this. Liberal means liberty, limited government, and tolerance for others.
This is what left is also supposed to mean. The Founding Fathers were liberals. What the so-called "left" seeks to do is create a paternalistic/maternalistic government that solves all of our problems for us, and in return, we are expected to OBEY. In other words, the so-called socialist/Marxist "left" is just re-branded feudalism, and hence, very regressive. You might even call it "reactionary right," because when you get past the labels and the rhetoric, the so-called "progressives" are trying to drag us back to old monarchic models, and aristocratic forms.
Today's bureaucrats see themselves as lords and ladies.
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Almost since our nation's birth, there have been robber barons eager to influence the government to tilt the playing field in their favor. It's called crony capitalism and it seeped into our system very early, with such things as land grants to robber barons and thieves to build the transcontinental railroad. The pesky natives obstructed this "noble goal," and so the robber barons got the U.S. Cavalry to back their play.
This and other corrupt/fascist plays by our government throughout its history are what fuel the Howard-Zinn characterization of American history. We didn't CURE our ills by asking government to solve them. We made them worse, or just created OTHER problems, also 'requiring' government intervention (i.e. force) to "fix." Zinn gets some things right, but totally mischaracterizes things to fit HIS state-centric world view.
Free-market capitalism is good. Crony capitalism is bad. Progressives claim that the latter is the former "run amuck,' when the only problem with free-market capitalism is it creates so much wealth that even idiot socialists can survive long enough to destroy it. Where America went wrong was NOT with free markets. Where it went wrong was when it DEPARTED from free markets, in the name of whatever latest lie they were feeding the public.
Not a HUGE Ayn Rand fan, but her book, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" gives chapter and verse on regulatory capture and crony capitalism dating back to the 19th Century. This isn't about Reagan and Thatcher, although they both did little to slow the march towards a peculiar, fascist-flavored form of socialism.
If we just stuck to our limited-government principles in the first place, we wouldn't be ruled by multinational corporations, today. Government isn't the scourge of the robber barons. It's their partner in crime, and the most powerful partner the corporations could have hoped for.
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I think I part ways with some of Peter's points around the 34:00 mark. I think he should give thought to DE-CENTRALIZING the educational project. One of the reasons this CRT is so all-pervasive is because our education institutions are centrally funded and centrally administered. One bad eye can infect the entire nation. Obama could push what amounted to CRT mandates through executive order (decree), by threatening all federal support to institutions that do not toe the line.
While we do the bulk of our education funding, locally and by state, the federal contribution is big enough to be irresistibly persuasive in the few instances in which school administrators and school boards might be inclined to resist what they already half believe, in the first place.
The power and perks attendant to embracing this bankrupt ideology are 100% persuasive to risk-averse leftists who are already inclined to go along with the ideology because they're almost all socialist or socialist-adjacent. This is "soft control." They can't directly punish an institution for resisting their mandates, but they CAN deny student financial aid to those institutions. Most schools depend on federal financial aid to keep the lights on. It's very difficult to break free, when your institution dies if the feds cut it off.
Here's another irony in this ideological war we're in. We wouldn't even know we were in a fight if it weren't for the use of coercive tactics to push the ideology so hard. When the end justifies the means, the means can often defeat the ends. The Nazis HAD to invade their neighbors, steal their gold reserves, and export their inflation to the conquered lands with worthless printed money that they forced conquered peoples to accept as payment for what they took. Their socialist spending had buried them in debt, and World War II kept the bankers at bay, for a time. They were on a trajectory to economic collapse that was postponed only by pillaging their neighbors.
That paragraph didn't go so well. My point was supposed to be that it's the coercive nature of the imposition of this ideology, top-down, that exposes it for what it is. If they'd been satisfied with "creeping socialism" for another decade or so, there would be no turning back. But they're so close to their ultimate goals that they've over-reached, in my humble opinion. They've peeled off the mask prematurely.
One GOOD thing about COVID-19 is the ZOOM learning exposed the empty-headed ideologues at the tip of the indoctrination spear. A student debating their teacher on tenets of CRT looks like the adult and the teacher looks like the petulant, bullying child in the dialogue. First off, the teachers have no business pushing a faith-based ideology. But more importantly, they're actually pretty bad at pushing it, effectively. Their fall-back position is appeal to authority. Students see right through that, and while we see the successfully-indoctrinated students marching and agitating, a growing majority of students reject the teachings, in much the same way students rejected the establishment's phony arguments for the Vietnam War.
The reason we HAVE those institutions was because it was the best and only knowledge production-and-dissemination mechanism available at the time. Now we have the Internet. You don't NEED big, brick-and-mortar institutions for 90% of what is taught in our colleges and universities. You only need the big institutions for things like super-colliders and other science-related apparatus. Electron microscopes, NMR and IR spectroscopy, ... Stuff like that takes some brick-and-mortar infrastructure. But little else.
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Making you wait 2 or 3 days to see your doctor when you're coming down with something is how you get REALLY sick, if you're GONNA get really sick. The medical "authorities" got this wrong in every conceivable way.
I've had a lot of injuries over the years and always tried to be a good patient. My last stay at ONE hospital, I actually started fearing for my life. Weird things kept happening. I'd wake up sweating and it was almost 80 degrees in there. I'd ask them to turn it down to about 68. I'd wake up chilled, and it was set at 60. This happened several times. It was like "Am I crazy?" Then I got to thinking they were gaslighting me and enjoying my misery.
I finally found one RN and one LPN who seemed pretty forthright. Family finally flew in a few days in, and things improved, remarkably. To this day, I'm not sure I'd've made it out of there without family there by my side.
Even getting OUT of there was a nightmare. I needed a wheelchair-accessible van, because BOTH legs were busted. (Don't ask.). I asked them to arrange it. I sat out in the freezing cold in front of the hospital for a half hour before the taxi - a SEDAN - pulled up. I had NO way of getting in and out of that sedan. The RN I mentioned saw me waiting INside, asking for help, and she kicked some asses. Sent me back to my room to wait. Finally got a wheelchair-accessible bus ride home.
I don't know what I said or what I did to those people, or if they just look for vulnerable people to fuck with. I tell everyone I know not to go to that hospital.
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Ashwin Varghese Sometimes the so-called right DOES defend fascist/socialist features of society, because they oppose what the so-called "left" want to do. The ultimate irony was so-called conservatives demanding the public schools be reopened! LOL!
Universal health care is socialist/collectivist. By the modern vernacular, that is "left." What the right doesn't get is that the government ALREADY runs health care, in collusion with Big Pharma and Corporate Health.
Before FDR instituted wage freezes during the Great Depression, like the fascist/socialist he was, there was no such thing as health insurance. Health insurance was a benefit big corporations could offer to workers as an end run around wage freezes that small businesses couldn't match. You insure a car. You don't insure health.
Before that tectonic shift,, communities did the best they could to provide health care for all members. If we hadn't gone fascist, most communities would be serving ALL members better than we do, today. The COMMUNITY would hold a barn dance or a raffle or some other fund raiser to get more hospital beds, better doctors, or their first (or a better) x-ray machine.
Doctors did their best to serve ALL. Prosperous people in the community made conspicuous donations to the local hospital and communities took PRIDE in doing a better job than the community down the road. It was a point of LOCAL, COMMUNITY PRIDE. When you federalize ANYthing, all local authority and responsibility for caring for your neighbor goes out the window. Now you just complain that the fascist/socialist system now in place is failing, and LIKE AN IDIOT, you BLAME it on "runaway capitalism," which generates the wealth that the so-called left always wants to redistribute by force.
Yes, the Kibbutz and socialized medicine in Israel are LEFT. It's not perfect, but it works best when you have a small, homogeneous nation. That shit doesn't work on USA scale. We're too diverse culturally and geographically for one-size-fits-all solutions handed down by edict from the ruling class elites in the Washington, D.C. beltway. You want better results? SEIZE CONTROL LOCALLY and ban the feds and the insurance companies!
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The education establishment defines passing as "success." The easiest way to get more "success" is to lower standards. They put all kinds of edu-babble around it, but speaking as a teacher, the downward pressure on standards is always there, no matter how they dress it up.
Where I work, they now push "co-requisites" for college algebra, because students are so poorly prepared for it. So we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per pupil in k-12, and none of it matters. The college is force-feeding high-school (intermediate) algebra to students on a "just in time" basis, so now college algebra is college algebra plus all the stuff you were supposed to learn, but we know you didn't, because we know k-12 sucks. It's a horrific waste of taxpayer money. It's a HUGE duplication of effort, if you count k-12 as "effort."
It increases the cost of a college education, waters down college education, and never gets at the root of the problem, which is social promotion in k-12.
But at least we're brimming over with "success!"
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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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@OO7sMom I think they probably meant what they said to the Indians at the time, but there was no stopping the westward expansion. Also, renegades on both sides made conflict inevitable, even with good will on both sides. One massacre beget many another massacre. Neither "side" had any real control over the worst kinds of people on the frontier.
What were the natives to do? Execute all their renegades? It didn't work like that. The Chief led by consent, and anyone not a party to the agreement didn't consider themselves bound by it. On the other side, you had masses of settlers, prospectors, profiteers, who didn't give a fig for the treaties signed. They just moved where they wanted and fought to take and defend it.
The U.S. Gov't fully intended to leave the Black Hills to the natives. Then one guy discovered gold, there. The government didn't send armies of miners to the hills. They sent themselves, against the wishes of the government.
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I'll disagree with you on T2. Linda Hamilton was very fit for that film, as befit the mother, protector and trainer of the future leader of the resistance. No weapons expert, myself, I thought she looked like she knew what she was doing. I thought the 3rd-wave feminism - the man-hating part - was too much to take. I was really quite taken with her, since she was the big-haired beauty in the t.v. series "Beauty and the Beast," where Ron Perlman made his bones as the guy who always wears a monster costume. If you saw Hamilton in her Johnny Carson appearance, promoting T2, though, she was just as bitter about men in real life as her character, Sarah Connor had in the movie. I wanted to see the movie, still, because Terminator was cool, and I was invested, but it was off-putting to know that the actress, herself, hated my guts in real life. Bitter pill to swallow, when I really wanted to like her, still.
Yes, all the ills in the world are because of men - men raised by women, you silly twat. If you don't see your own hand in the mess we're in, then shove off, because you're not helping.
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Of course Tulsi didn't see this coming. She's a degenerate progressive. People in her corner have been insisting that the federal government do more and more, while we libertarians have been predicting EXACTLY THIS since the creation of the Welfare State in the 1960s. This is where forced re-distribution of wealth always leads.
The welfare state re-creates the Lord-Serf relationship between the state and the people. Oh, they make it SOUND like it's for our own good, but as the responsibilities expand, so does government authority, making us hostage to the whims of unelected bureaucrats and whoever can bribe, blackmail, or just flatter them into doing what they want them to do.
The more help given, the more help needed. The ability of the people to stand on their own two feet has been systematically crippled, so now everybody thinks all our problems are because the government doesn't do enough, when the opposite is true. Government's already done too much.
Tulsi stands back and criticizes where it's all lead. But the only reason she's surprised is because she's either stupid or just another pandering politician. Until these institutions are de-fanged and pared back (preferably abolished), it will be one crisis after the next, all leading in the same exact direction.
Socialized health care was a HUGE part of Hitler's 3rd Reich. It seemed to start innocently enough in the 19th Century, but it was ALWAYS about power at the top and creating a compliant population.
"If you oppose us, you LITERALLY want people to die!"
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And the kicker is that the training is SO BAD, they insist we take the same training every year! LOL!
The paradigm will wither and die, because it's behind the times, wasteful, and doesn't even provide the service it purports. Just ask kids BASIC math, science, history questions, during Spring Break in Cabo. Sure, they'll all go home and sympathize with Antifa, but none of 'em could tell you what fascism is, who started it, and what its essential features are.
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Democrats complain about the rich people, and then fawn all over them for the high-dollar donations. The 2 leading Democrats in Congress, Senator Schumer and Rep Pelosi are in the bankers' hip pockets and have been for a very long time. Pelosi's husband works for VISA and - surprise, surprise - they both bought thousands of VISA shares, with their first IPO, while Pelosi stalled the legislation that would end the "3% fee for every swipe" that went into VISA and MasterCard's pockets, until VISA's IPO was already out there. If that legislation had passed before VISA's IPO, then the Pelosi family couldn't have made 100s of thousands of dollars LITERALLY overnight, as the IPO at $40 went to $90 in 2 days. They bought about 5,000 shares at $40 and another 15,000 shares at $60.
(5000)(50) + (15000)(30) = 250,000 + 450,000 = 700,000 dollars in 2 days. If it were money in a shoebox, it'd be bribery. But when it's insider information and manipulation of the legislature to capitalize, it's perfectly legal. CORRUPT.
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@dannydanny2789 The "column attacks" we're seeing, now, are more probing attacks than big, intimidating, combined-arms attacks.
But maybe Tony and you are talking about two entirely different things.
I think we understand the mathematics of restoring order after smashing enemy forces. It takes a lot more men than anybody really has.
It's one thing, in Donbass, where the majority probably welcome Russian advances. It's an entirely different thing to "conquer Ukraine."
Oh, they could probably wipe out Ukraine if they wanted, but they couldn't very easily establish and maintain order, with the native population absolutely against them.
We saw this in Iraq, where the Allied (basically U.S.) forces could easily destroy the enemy, but could never restore order and maintain it. Same in Afghanistan.
I think Russia will be content with Donbass and areas already ethnic Russian. Of course, Ukraine could've declared itself neutral a long time ago, and stopped bombing its own people, like it promised to do and then did not.
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The outrageous things Trump does NOT exhort his followers to be uncivil, to harass, intimidate and bully others. Don't let the Democrat double standard leak into your commentary, blondie. He's not saying the other side is so bad we must shout them down, silence them, and assassinate their character with false allegations.
The left are at their wits' end. The populist wave they hoped to ride all the way to socialist utopia has hit a snag. The average folks don't want that, and because the Democrats are desperate, they're showing their teeth, like cornered rats. The curtain's parted into their thought process and the actual individual-destroying roots of their hare-brained leftist ideology that promises all and waits for somebody else to deliver, while at the same time making it tougher and tougher for anybody TO deliver. Prosperity doesn't come from a government check. Prosperity comes from a PAY check, for producing something of actual value in this world.
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The American public has gone through 16 years of "extreme technocracy" and we're rejecting the corrupt and inept so-called "experts," who've gotten everything wrong, from economics to war & peace to nutrition and health care. We've seen how those we pay to do science end up doing politics, instead, and silencing the actual scientists.
I hope that Russell Brand's message of de-centralization gets through. We can't let one dingbat official in Washington impose bad policy on all 50 states. Let us make our own mistakes. Without federal "guidance" having the functional force of law, for all 50 states, there would have been 20 states get COVID right within 2 weeks, with 30 falling in line within one month, and all but maybe California and New York getting on with their lives within 2 months.
Early treatment. Preventive measures we've known for over a century. Off-the-shelf medicines that treated severe respiratory distress (HCQ). Sure, throw in the "right to try" an experimental drug if you're in a high-risk group, but mandating it for all? In the middle of a pandemic? Wrong and wrong.
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C'mon now, Alex. You argue on the one hand how powerful Twitter is and then you scoff at them taking down accounts for swaying public opinion in a "wrong way." That's not the argument you should make. It's more "partisan" or "pro-Russian" position than principled position. Yes. Twitter is trash. Yes. Twitter is in it for the globalists and the stuffed-shirt, white-collar liberal elites and not for the common people.
These platforms really should do more to ensure that the accounts on their platforms are actually held by real people and that those people don't have multiple accounts. I think that BOT accounts are a problem that could be solved very easily. But that still wouldn't address the thousands of 50-cent soldiers that any country can hire to spam their propaganda far and wide. It only takes a few HUNDRED to make it appear there is a groundswell of public opinion one way or the other, if they target certain things and say certain things, catalyzing thousands more goofballs to fall in line.
That's the problem with the stuffed-shirt/white-collar elites. They don't MINGLE with regular people. They just use a bunch of electronic tools to test the political waters, remotely, which doesn't really tell them what's happening, let alone how to solve any problems. They see a "mob" of a few thousand people and conclude that's what everybody's thinking, which is why policies coming down from elite circles make absolutely zero sense to the vast majority of people.
As always, the "elites" see which way they THINK things are headed, and rush to the front of the parade with their giant batons, pretending to LEAD. You see them proudly marching and brandishing the baton, and they get that wonderful photo opportunity for which they seem to live. Then 5 minutes later, they turn around and they're all alone waving a baton, while the actual parade is marching off in another direction.
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The trouble as I see it is that government really wanted these social media platforms to exist, and followed a drug-dealer's methods: Give the stuff away for free, and extract money, later. The trouble with that model is that people balk at paying for something they're used to getting for free. And so to make the platforms economically viable, they sold user info to advertisers and started censoring content to please those advertisers.
Everybody complaining about FB, Twitter and YouTube needs to think about their own role in creating these monsters. You want it for free AND you want it to be perfect. Good luck with that. When you're taking charity, you get what you get, and you're grateful.
People who are pissed-off at Big Tech platforms need to support alt-tech platforms.
I used to think that buying Premium on YouTube would help separate them from the corporate BORG, but about a year into my wonderful Premium YouTube, they pulled some of their worst shit, and so I canceled my premium. When/if they wise up and become a true platform, I will gladly pay for premium. I just don't see that ever happening under their current leadership and their current business model.
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Democrats will flail around and then return to their same old "Vote for us and we'll give you more than you put in." Probably will be over health care, which needs fixing, but nobody's asking "How about LESS government intervention?" which is the right question. Instead, they'll just argue over who gets to run everything.
RFK may implement some decent reforms, but he's not going to want to see HHS down-sized, not once he's the secretary. He will, instead, see all the "great things" the government can do, if it's run by smart and moral people like himself, which is what everyone always tells themselves as they try on Sauron's One Ring for size.
Trump will most likely be all-in when it comes to military spending, and he won't want to make the tough choices on entitlements that need to be made. Superficial changes, to great fanfare, but leaving the same corrupt and prone-to-corruption institutional framework intact.
But we'll see how it plays out. Trump talks like he wants to MAKE changes happen, but when in office, he's been more "We need to get out of the American people's way and LET changes happen." Tax breaks in depressed urban areas. More transparency and less regulation.
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Fauci will duck, dive and prevaricate until he can't. He HAS to double down, just like all the rest of the crooks in his and other agencies and departments.
Chances are good he will never have to stop or admit any guilt. But it sure would be nice to see him face increasing pressure to come clean. I vote for freezing all his assets and denying his pension, royalties, and other income, until he comes totally clean. Maybe just threatening to strip him of everything, the way he stripped millions of others, would induce him to rat out the people around him.
Maybe just turn up the heat under the seats of all his corrupt fellow travelers in the NIAID, WHO, NIH, CDC, DOD, FDA, and anybody I missed. I have a feeling if these rats see their ships sinking, they'll do what rats do.
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Yes. The only humane way to achieve all the environmental goals we set for ourselves is to get the government and other authoritarians out of the "save the planet" campaign. Prosperity is the key. And the key to prosperity is basic civil and human rights guaranteeing persons and their property. As soon as you're even a little bit prosperous, you tend to seek higher rungs on Maslow's ladder, including the stewardship-of-your-neck-of-the-woods rung.
Wood for heating isn't as bad as you think, if it's done properly, with rocket-stove mass heat systems. But the EPA is too slow to embrace the new/old tech, and without its seal of approval, you can't get your home insured if it incorporates such concepts. There's also no way for corporations to get rich off you for implementing simple green tech. The "establishment" wants you on their grid, obeying its orders and regulations. Its idea of an environmental and energy-efficient home is a cracker box on top of the ground that doesn't breathe.
Even if these bureaucrats mean well, they're unequipped to stay current and they only ask the most conspicuous robber barons how they should go about ordering us around.
There are a lot of old- and new-tech ideas I'd implement in my own house in the suburbs, but most of them are "illegal." I can't capture the rain off my own roof. I can't get a permit for a rocket-stove mass heater, and even if I can, I can't get it insured, because nobody knows what to make of it.
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@justatiger6268 Greenwald's still a liberty-and-economics illiterate, as a big-government progressive.
He's like Jimmy Dore, bringing receipts on the ineptitude and even malevolence of federal agencies, and in the same breath say the government should run everything. All we need is to find Mr. Goodbar to give all the power to.
That's why Russell Brand, who started out progressive, but now beats the drums for de-centralization. Letting the feds run ANYthing is putting all eggs in one basket, and leaves the entire nation vulnerable to the bad decisions of a handful of people at the very top. Leave everything other than national defense up to the states, and then watch the defense budget and the military like hawks.
If our country was "run right," Congress would meet for a couple weeks and go home. There really shouldn't be that much on the federal government's plate. National security, tariffs and excise taxes, and that's about it.
Only the federal government can deficit-spend for decades on end, keeping promises it really never should have made in the first place. We need to devolve federal powers and responsibilities to the states, and for the federal government to stick to the small list of responsibilities granted to it in the constitution.
Want socialized medicine? Prove that it works on the community level. See what that looks like. Maybe a state will experiment with it. If it gets it right/better than other states, maybe other states will adopt it. Ramming one policy down the throats of all 50 states is stupid.
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If I'm in the oil business, I'm making and saving every nickel I have, because I'm gonna have to be in an entirely new business in 8 years, if these guys have their way. That said, Big Oil does get some preferential treatment, behind the scenes. But the lunacy of policy makers and their whimsical decisions, one day to the next, still increases uncertainty about the future. Corporations always love the velvet glove of fascism, when it benefits them, but by taking advantage, they set themselves up for destruction, when the whimsies of politicians change EVERYTHING at a moment's notice. "We changed our mind." "We decided that was racist."
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Since when is Democrats gaming the system considered to be news?
In a way, I like that the Congress is trying to limit the president's powers. I didn't much like the abuse of power by his last 5 predecessors. War Powers act is the thin edge of the wedge of WAR. A representative republic should be much less eager to prosecute wars (in everything but name) abroad.
I wish the Dems had been more concerned about presidential abuse of power when it was neolibs and neocons in office. Expand the power and authority of the state at home? Topple sovereign governments abroad? That's all well and good. But try to tap the brakes on government expansion at home OR abroad, and you're Satan, incarnate, to these idiots who insist they don't believe in God. To them, only Satan exists! LOL! All hail the New Religion!
Recall, the Dems, trying to give Obama MORE power passed the "Nuclear Option" to facilitate confirmation of appointments. This is why TRUMP has appointed 184 federal judges and gotten them confirmed! Now, as the opposition party, they're trying to take away the powers from Trump that they wanted Obama to have. This might be the only way to limit abuse of power by the president in the long run. They THINK they're tying TRUMP's hands, but in all likelihood, they're just making it so that the next Democrat president won't be able to bypass the legislature with endless, damaging executive orders. Most of the "abuse" of which they accuse Trump is his rescinding Obama's executive orders! If it's abuse of power for Trump to rescind those orders, then it was abuse of power to enact them in the first place!
Recall, Obama blurred the line between opinion and news. What happened? The mask fell off the Fake News legacy media. The restraints were removed and they showed their true face, exulting in the power of propaganda, only to find that the people no longer trust them! People like Brian Stelter are absolutely shameless in their propagandizing.
The DNC has had most of the government agencies in its hip pocket for years, most of the courts, most of the (legacy) media, all of the public schools. And it just... doesn't.... matter! The more they use force and abuse the rules for short-term gain, the more they lose and the more they are going to lose.
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@gregoryfilin8040 Yes. Russia had many troops it couldn't use on foreign soil.
I don't think Russia anticipated Ukraine making such a bold move, but I don't think it was left out of their calculations. I'm sure it inconvenienced them quite a bit, especially at first, but once the incursion began, they had plenty of untapped and hitherto untappable military resources to bring to bear.
The area was soft because there wasn't a whole lot there to defend, and it was a waste of resources to try to beef up every meter of border, out of fear. They had the resources to stop the incursion, and they knew exactly what they were up against, once they were up against it. I don't think they had detailed plans what to do, but had confidence that such a move by Ukraine would be a mistake on Ukraine's part.
A lot of garrison troops got a lot of training and battle experience who otherwise would have been drinking coffee and getting into trouble with local girls. I imagine they were unprepared at the outset, and rather easy to roll up. And then, as anyone with a brain would expect, they'd eventually fortify the territory ahead of the advance, stop the advance, and then, slowly, methodically, turn the tables.
I think they could have done it more quickly, but it would have cost them a great deal more than it did.
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Catch-and-release is also bad for fish, especially as those waters receive more and more pressure from more and more "purists." This is especially true on the Gunnison, in Colorado, where you catch a fish and see the marks from previous catches-and-releases. "A lot of fish with sore mouths, here." That's why I like going to remote places, where you can catch and keep, and there's not much pressure from anglers. Do the outdoors thing, and yeah, catch and eat a couple nice fish. Hard to find such places, and harder, yet, to fish them. Like Ouitas Creek ("Weetus") in Idaho, a stone's throw from the Montana border, a stone's throw from Missoula.
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This is not a paradox. It's a standard topic in probability and statistics, when you're teaching the principle of complements. You calculate the probability that ALL the birthdays are different and subtract from 1. It's counter-intuitive, not paradoxical. The language is being butchered badly enough, these days, as it is.
Another counter-intuitive result is the high probability of a false positive, even when a test is 98% accurate, if the disease for which you're testing is rare. This is taught in the same prob and stats intro course, under conditional probability. The probability you have the disease, given you tested positive, is surprisingly small, essentially because the probability of having the disease at all is so small to begin with.
P(sick given a positive test) = P(sick and positive)/P(positive). I'll work in principle of complements, here, by subtracting from 1. "Sick and positive" is not very likely, because "sick" is unlikely, and that trumps the reliability of the test. The principle of complements works, here, because there is only one other outcome, given there's a positive test, and that is that you are NOT sick.
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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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@misterjoey3384 Left-wing in the sense that "left" means nanny government. But yeah. "Good" progressives don't like regime-change foreign policy any more than libertarians and conservatives. But all the news networks LOVE war these days. All the legacy networks, including FOX, suppressed any doubts about the 2020 election or the wisdom of experimenting on humans. FOX was more skeptical about lockdowns and vaccine mandates, while all their pundits got the jab. But they ALL loved the Iraq War(s), except for a small number of libertarian voices that FOX lets hang around. But there are still (imo) a lot of establishment 3rd rails that FOX won't touch.
More spending? Higher taxes? Gun control? CNN and everybody but FOX is all-in, and even FOX is more establishment Republican than limited government and pro-liberty independent.
But left and right don't mean what they used to. "Left" used to mean limited federal government and maximum liberty consistent with civil order and public safety. Nowadays, "left" means "I want the state to be my mommy and daddy, and liberty just gets in the way." Darn near every ex-hippie, who was all about liberty in the '60s is now a nanny-government establishment type. Except for a few like Jimmy Dore, who are basically socialists, but at least they don't lie to themselves about how the bureaucrats are taking over and trampling people's values and civil rights. What progressives don't understand is that better leaders won't cure the corruption that always sets in when you give bureaucrats and politicians too much power. There is no perfect, omniscient saint we can permanently appoint to such positions. The best we can do is not create those positions and for people to care for one another on the local level.
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If you're gonna heat with wood, get/build a good rocket stove and pair it with a mass-heat system. Run it about an hour a day in the coldest weather, and run the exhaust gas through a heat exchanger that stores the heat from the flu in a ground mass (cobb, they call it). Use good materials for the refractory temps achieved in a good rocket stove, and there isn't any creosote. If you need to clean the creosote once a year, you're doing it wrong, in my humble opinion.
By getting a 100% burn (or damn near), and using mass heat storage through a heat exchanger, you don't get any buildup to speak of, and you're up to 90% more efficient. This guy has a good heart, but I bet he burns close to twice as much wood to heat his space as he needs to.
EPA won't like you, even though you're cleaner than just about any other source, plus you're using 100% renewables. Technocracy doesn't know squat. EPA wants/requires 300 degrees Fahrenheit at the roofline. If it's 300 degrees at the roofline, you're wasting 70-80% of the heat value in your fuel.
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@BobWidlefish I'm not an anarchist. As long as there are nation states who wish us ill, we need the military. Where our freedoms get infringed is when we support politicians who promise us free stuff, when everybody knows we're lucky to get 20 cents on the dollar back in actual services, when we farm out what we should do for ourselves to the federal government.
No. We need some form of limited government. The problem is that everybody wants something for nothing and the feds are the only cats who can print money and spend beyond their means for DECADES.
We used to understand this. Back when Davy Crockett was in Congress, there was a bill on the floor to help out the widow of a war hero. It was about to pass unanimously, when Crockett stood up to make a speech. He said "I'll give up one week's salary to help this poor woman. If everyone in this house did the same, that woman would be provided for. The People's money isn't ours to spend on even this very good cause." This shamed the Congress and they dropped the matter. None of them put up a week's salary for the widow, except maybe Crockett.
This is what we're up against, only we don't have ANY Davy Crocketts any more. These politicians prance around like lords and ladies, as if it's THEIR money they're giving away. It's NEVER their money they're giving away. It's OURS.
We don't need to eliminate government. What we need is to reduce the federal government to its proper role and scope. That would mean eliminating about 80% of federal programs and at least 50% of the budget. Let them focus on defending the Constitution, PERIOD. Then the main thing they did would be the military, and ALL of our attention could be focused on making sure that the Department of Defense is just that. A department of DEFENSE. But hell, we don't even need a declaration of war to go to war, any more. All conservatives, libertarians and progressives should be PISSED about that.
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Postmodernists see only the flaws in the past. Focus on how exploitative the Spartans were; whereas, historians USED to notice the democratic features of Spartan society and Greek society in general, and rightly saw the seeds of our own representative republic. We've never been blind to the flaws. In fact, seeing the flaws of the past informed the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who wanted to AVOID those mistakes.
Civilization has slowly muddled its way to a BETTER present, but never a PERFECT present. We may yet get to something close to perfect, but the one thing intelligent people are certain of is that those promising to use power to MAKE utopia, if only we would give THEM the power, are dangerous and misguided, at best, malevolent at worst.
Postmodernists want to dwell on the institution of slavery, and IGNORE the principles and people guided by those principles that eventually did AWAY with it! Reparations? Really? My ancestors got stepped on, plenty, too! And they embraced the opportunity to make their lives better. So did blacks, up until Lyndon B. Johnson came along and the narrative switched from "Give me an even break!" to "Give me something because you OWE me, because I'm black and you're white!" Before Johnson, blacks were closing the gap between blacks and whites. After Johnson, they started losing ground as a group. Of course that begs the question of the rationality of even seeing race as a group status. There are SO many mixed-race couples that it doesn't even matter.
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@chipcook5346 Not if the leadership of the injured nation, after denying it even happened, is finally sort of admitting it did, is on to "... and that's a GOOD thing" stage. No. We're past that stage, and the end of denial is not complete. We're now in the "consequences" stage, and it's all just playing out.
Germany is trapped between nationalist and internationalist socialism. If the people think that this represents the left-right dichotomy, they'll never vote their way out of their current troubles. There's a 3rd alternative called "liberty" and "free-market capitalism," which is the stuff that always works, and is always taxed to support all the nanny-government stuff, because the nanny-government stuff always breaks down, eventually, with the mistakes of a few being visited on every man, woman and child. Breakdowns lead to calls to fix things which lead to authoritarian political leadership being embraced by all.
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I never saw the attraction in Twatter, when I saw how Tweets were limited to x-hundred characters. Heck, I have a hard time staying under 200 characters in realtime chat. And almost nothing I want to weigh in on and say can be said in a few hundred characters. You can float witty one-liners and post memes, I suppose, but you're not really being informed or informing anyone with one-liners.
As for FaceBook, it was a wonderful platform for putting people in touch across the country/planet. Then its ownership saw how the free thinking libertarians and anti-establishment conservatives were DOMINATING, quite organically, because their IDEAS were dominating. Since then, FaceBook's been wanting to suppress conservative/libertarian ideas, and looked for any and every excuse to justify doing so
What SHOULD be happening, now, is these platforms need to restrict themselves to PLATFORM duties. Instead of policing their own content, they should be creating and marketing content filters from which their clients may choose, to customize their feeds. The minute they start policing their own content FOR their customers, they SHOULD be held to the standards of publishers and LOSE all the special protections in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
I personally think the entire CDA should be abolished. It's not government's job to enforce "decency," and it is DEFinitely not government's job to give a handful of Big Tech companies special protections not afforded to the rest of us. Equal Protection Under Law is a principle pre-dating the U.S. Constitution, and explicitly a part of the U.S. Constitution, in the form of the 14th Amendment.
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For me, all contradictions vanish when you see "right" as authoritarian/totalitarian, with the Roman Empire as an example. One of the reasons all the European kings wanted the blessing of the Church, was because that was the Roman model, and with that model came Divine Right to rule, and absolute power of the King. This "innovation" was "peak right wing."
The "left," as I see it, is the rejection of that model, and a belief that power at the top should be as limited as possible, and the power should remain in the hands of individuals. The more say the state apparatus has in your everyday life, the more "right" it is.
We've jumbled up the terms, deliberately, I think, so that it's easier for a power-grabber to masquerade as a spokesman/agent for the left, but when you see government intervention as "right" and government non-intervention as "left," you know that any politician who wants the government to intervene to "save everybody" is actually pushing for a return to "right" or "authoritarian" forms. That politician wants to be an aristocrat and for you to be his serf. "Look what I do for you. Do as I tell you."
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Yes. People in the middle are getting screwed, but what's the solution? Put everybody under the gentle ministrations of a government infested with rats? What we need is to go back to the days when every town did the best it could, and the community hospital was supported by the local community, to the best of its ability, and not with promises they'd have to borrow from our children's futures to keep.
We helped a lot more people for a lot less when doctors were hired by the local community and did their best to turn no one away. No bureaucracy. Just "All he can afford is a pig and 4 bushels of corn, so that's what I'm charging." Instead of virtue-signaling on the national stage, local do-gooders would virtue-signal in the local community by raising money for the local hospital. Make it something your community is proud of. When the feds are paying for it, you lose all of that.
That's a major problem, but probably the biggest problem is the corruption that sets in when it's all centralized, and one guy screwing up or simply with mal intent, can wreck health care for everybody. (See "Anthony Fauci.").
But until it starts rotting too much from within, a lot of people think they're getting something really great that they can't afford.
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@goodshipkaraboudjan : We do a lot of stupid stuff, and we don't go to our doctor unless we're really really sick. We ought to do more to boost General Practitioners, and go to them for regular checkups, but we eat too much, we party too much, and a lot of us die from "Hold my beer" syndrome and selfies.
We should do more preventive care, and incentivize it, but we don't. We just tippy-toe around our health care, and hope somebody else will pay for the million-dollar bill for the fancy life-saving (or genital-mutilating) surgery. Everyone fears a major illness and wants somebody else to pay for it. That's why I'm shocked the Democrats are committing political suicide, with programs that even the middle class hope to get more out of than they put in, which of course will never happen in a million years.
Also, due to red tape, more and more of the money goes to paper-pushers and form-filling-out and less and less of it goes to doctors. You have a $120,000 bill from the hospital, and the surgeon who saved your life gets about $600 of it.
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It's the fascist economic model. Corporations love it when they're getting tax breaks and subsidies, but the politicians have no idea what they're doing. When they hijack the economy with their "good intentions," it always turns out badly. It's always just a question of time before they destroy the industries they single out.
This is the nature of socialism. The government can't nationalize everything, so it singles out, say, agriculture or the automotive industry. The big companies profit, at first. They love that public-private partnership (fascism), then.
Then economic realities set in, the industry goes from many companies to a few, and eventually those few go belly-up. That's when the government says "Now we REALLY have to do something," and they nationalize the industry.
What does the public get? Poorer quality at higher prices. Every time.
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I think government power is already too pervasive. The censorship we see, NOW, is mostly college administrations zealously responding to signals sent down the pipe from the Dept. of Education (i.e., Obama's desk). What they need to go after are the leftists who threaten speakers they don't like, by whatever means. A mob that harasses and even assaults attendees to conservative speakers, etc. We don't need any new law or any new interventions. What we NEED are for college administrators to work with police to IMMEDIATELY arrest and prosecute and SENTENCE disorderly behavior that they've been giving a nod and a wink for so long.
I don't want the feds using financial aid and grants as a club to hold over college's heads. 'Cutting them off' for not respecting the 1st Amendment begs the question "Why is government meddling in the affairs of these colleges?" It also is very short-sighted, because if those interventions are OK in YOUR cause, then next year, it'll be the excuse your opponents use when THEY are in power and they'll use it against YOU. Just a matter of abusing the language to get what you don't like to be defined as "bad" in some way, and use the precedent you set, when using power was OK because the OTHER guys are so bad.
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The following should really be read in reverse order, as the stack is last-in, first-out. Cool thing is, the first thing you see is the distillation of the rest.
I think it's cool that JBP is now with Daily Wire and being more confrontational with the authoritarians. These people are entirely too sure of themselves, and their certainty is based on very little evidence. JBP's laid all his foundations and now he's playing to win. Get mad and call him names? Well, now HE's mad, TOO, and now you're offended because he has the effrontery to show some emotion, which his critics do, all day long.
Now I'm on Daily Wire, too!
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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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Regardless of how it got out, everything the Chinese did to save face, help themselves, and hurt the rest of the world shows a perverse disregard for human life that would be classified as 2nd-degree murder if it were tried in a U.S. court. 1st degree murder if you can prove intent with regard to NOT shutting down travel, abroad. The fact that they shut down travel within their own country at the same time is prima facie evidence of premeditation. They KNEW it was bad and they did everything they could to spread it to the rest of the world.
Then they did everything they could to withhold vital information, only publishing the genome AFTER it was already being published by others, in spite of all their efforts to prevent that very thing from occurring. CCP just adds to its list of crimes against humanity and continues merrily on its way.
I think the miscalculation made by the CCP as well as a lot of people in high places in our own country, is that they think that just because they live in a sanitized bubble that the rest of the world does, also. They can deny Tiananmen Square ever happened and make it stick in THEIR bubble, but the rest of the world's not in their bubble. Same with the DC fat cats living in their bubble. They think as long as the legacy media are spittin' out the narratives they live by, that the rest of the country feels the same way.
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I mostly agree with the 4 points and that's mostly the direction Trump has more or less openly stated he wants to take things. It wouldn't surprise me if Pence and the other Neocons are unwittingly pushing things in the direction Trump wants, anyway, by pushing in the exact opposite direction, in a world in which most of the elites just knee-jerk in the opposite direction Trump SEEMS to be pushing.
And it's LUDICROUS for us to spend more of OUR GNP defending NATO countries than the NATO countries, themselves, while those same NATO countries want to buy Russian oil! The incongruity of their buying oil from the very country we're supposedly DEFENDING them from was plainly stated by Trump in his European tour, and - like me - he probably doesn't give a rat's ass if they want to buy oil from a cheaper source on their continent. Cheaper energy in Europe is good for the common folk in Europe. And the USA has plenty of other ways to make money, without bullying allies who don 't act like allies into acting against their own self interest.
Business as usual was to allow NATO countries to use highly protectionist - against US - trade policies that weren't making the USA any money, anyway. The entire global framework was and is based on the US as victorious superpower, giving everybody a red carpet to walk all over the US, in return for walking all over everybody else by maintaining the US dollar as the reserve currency of the entire planet. Main thing I've seen from NATO in the last few decades is their participation in American Adventurism Abroad. It was a big deal to get them behind US to go to war with Iraq. Twice.
And Russia is in many ways more American-valued at home than America, herself! We'll see what happens in Eastern Europe. I'll always keep an eye on Russian's territorial ambitions in the region, but since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc have been independent. Ukraine's one to watch. I think much of the tension there is over Nordstream, and the Ukrainians not wanting to lose the money they'd get from all the fees/taxes associated with shipping Russian Oil West by other means.
As for the Crimea, Russia's wanted easy access and control over that access to the Mediterranean since before Lenin was born. There's always gonna be bickerin' over that real estate and the Dardanelles. Americans maybe don't understand, but imagine if the USA were every square inch of what it is, today, EXCEPT without owning ANY ports on the West coast South of Alaska, and without any ports in Massachusetts or South of there. Gulf of Mexico? Nada. Florida? Forget about it. That's basically the situation for Russia since Peter the Great. Imagine a country that size without any warm water ports other than what they have on the Black Sea, and having to ship everything through narrow straits controlled by another nation (Turkey).
They'll always want that prime real estate, and the upsurge in support of Russian Orthodox Christianity hearkens back to historically being names as the Protectors of Christendom in exactly that part of the world. The Pope gave 'em the go-ahead, centuries ago! And they will never ever forget that. I don't like when they're up to dirty tricks and such, but we weren't exactly paragons of virtue when we stitched up most of (the warm parts) of North America, were we?
It wouldn't surprise me if having those neocon hatchet men involved is intentional by the Trumpster. Just let them spout their lunacy unchecked and obtain disengagement from post-world-war-II realities that are no longer in play. We're still operating as though we are the only healthy country, obliged to patronize a world devastated by war, in return for the privilege of bullying everybody on whatever suits us. That ain't America. That ain't the American PEOPLE, at any rate.
I think if Trump OPENLY campaigned to get us out of NATO (and hopefully the U.N.), EVERYbody would resist him. Maybe even try to run him out of office just for THAT. But if has it THRUST upon him, him, he can ACCEPT the inevitable, maybe even ruefully enough for the Deep State to let him live a little longer.
Just theories. But in a world with so many lunatic orthodoxies ruling the public square, the shortest path to the right kinds of outcomes with the least amount of violence and disruption undoubtedly involves quite a zig-zag path.
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@Ndnative3431 Yes. Deaths were also magnified by depriving people of common-sense, off-the-shelf, EARLY treatments that good doctors were having great success with. Early, aggressive treatment, like saline/iodine nasal spray when you first started experiencing symptoms killed off most of the infections before they got into the lungs. So of course, those doctors were threatened, blacklisted, and, if they tried to stand up to the pressure, terminated.
I think Fauci or one of his pals got royalties for remdesivir.
And to this day, the people who stood up to the establishment remain largely blacklisted.
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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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Trump told them that NATO was a waste of U.S, taxpayers' money if Europe insisted on making itself dependent on the Russians for crucial commodities. Having made themselves dependent, they were fools to antagonize Russia.
But this was how the U.S. Deep State wanted things. They scoffed at Trump and attacked him for his common sense, and now the whole world is paying the price of their willfulness, arrogance, and outright stupidity.
I was raised on the history of World War II and how GREAT it was that the USA didn't swoop in and take over the world in 1945. But behind our backs, that's just what the political class has done: Built an empire they hide from their own people. The leverage they use isn't always out in the open. But the farther we drift into their madness and greed, the more things keep falling apart. Hegemony of the U.S. dollar is now in peril, if not already a thing of the past. As an American, who actually BELIEVES in the American ideal of limited government, free markets, and individual liberty, my entire adult life has been witness to the USA's total abandonment of those principles.
It's gonna suck for EVERYbody for a while, but these "Play the world like your private chessboard" nitwits need to be removed from power. Meddling in everyone's affairs doesn't secure liberty or prosperity, and the two go hand in hand. America has lost its way. Its PEOPLE haven't. But its leaders have.
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He articulates this pretty well. Too many people equate "progress" with government power to MAKE things right. We have the French Revolution as a cautionary tale for what happens when equality is your 1st goal and individual rights are distant 2nd. The French should've known better, from history BEFORE them, but certainly AFTER them, we see how wrong things can go. For its more virulent forms, just look at Soviet Russia or Communist China (Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, Venezuela, ... ) . It all sounds really good, but it always leads to despotism.
Sad thing is how many people have made it to adulthood without understanding these ideas.
The trouble with technology is it's a 2-edged sword. The state can certainly single anyone out they please, but they can't single everyone out, and the tools they use against the people can also be used against THEM. The carelessness of people like Strzok and Page with their text messages illustrates this. People who abuse the tech think they're immune to the tech.
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Hussein Abdulmalik : LOL! They're freaking out about a problem that has diminished GREATLY over the last 20 years. Trouble is, social media has a lot of people dwelling on exceptional pathologies and projecting them onto the whole rest of the country, which is actually pretty conservative, very peaceful, generous and kind. But there's no money in media to show that. So they show the 0.01% who are attention whores.
Right now, the tail is very much wagging the dog, in the USA. And the dog's fixin' ta bite.
There are a small number of very loud people making fools of themselves.
In my unpopular opinion, the War on Drugs is very much driving the hostility between city police and poor neighborhoods. Huge money in illegal drugs for drug cartels, and plenty to bribe/tempt law enforcement officers who are weak in that way, and plenty to prey on the weakest members of society. It sets police against communities and vice-versa. Very big problem. Drug addiction is a health issue.
America underwent a similar Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s against alcohol. Saw the same kinds of problems, only they didn't fester as long, because alcohol's more socially acceptable than hard drugs. I think we should follow Portugal's example, and at least take the biggest crooks out of it.
America's #1 big problem is since the 1960s, everybody expects the federal government to have an endless supply of money and everybody wants something for free. And we're voting away our prosperity and our freedom. PLUS we're really easy to trick into supporting war of any kind. The media gets cranked up and the idiots who are led by the nose get all patriotic and otherwise dumb as rocks.
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You're not supposed to notice two things:
The 'hockey stick' starts on the coldest year of the 20th Century.
The rapid rise in temps getting us back on the centuries-old schedule, has leveled off.
There's little or no indication that climate isn't doing what climate's been doing for millions of years, and especially since the end of the last Ice Age.
In 1979, the same people were screaming at us to give all our money and authority to the federal government to combat the looming ice age. Now, since that disaster was somehow diverted by our doing nothing about it, we must give all our money and authority to the federal government to combat global warming.
It doesn't matter what "crisis" we perceive ourselves to be in. The same people always want us to do the same thing: Give all our money and authority to THEM, so they can solve all our problems for us. Well, "they" are the biggest threat to the environment, humanity, and life on Earth. Usually it's done an inch at a time. "Give us this ONE tiny bit of extra authority, to help fix this problem quicker." There've been thousands of "just one thing"s over the last 80 years, and it's all led us to the Surveillance State and the weaponization of the financial system against wrong-think.
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@PaulH-hl5hw Yes. When it might have made a difference, he was lock step with the BORG.
Anyone with half a brain and any real integrity would've warned against taking an untested drug. Nobody had any idea of the long-term health effects of the treatments. That alone was enough reason to speak against their willy-nilly deployment.
No early discussion of relative versus absolute risk. Nobody pointing out how LOW the danger was to everyone who was reasonably healthy.
Locking down the healthy on behalf of the elderly and then the same authorities treating the elderly HORRIBLY, sending many to an early grave due to loss of contact, isolation, and alienation.
Who knows how many died due to financial ruin? How many went off the deep end because everybody around them went crazy and gaslit the people with questions?
In the USA, Democrats thought it was many times worse than it was. Fewer than 5% of COVID victims were hospitalized. Democrats when asked were sure that it was many times higher and almost certainly fatal. In our country, the people who watch legacy news and BELIEVE it are Democrats. Almost all of media are Democrats. The mass formation psychosis was strongest amongst so-called liberals. More conservative and especially more libertarian people were skeptical.
EVERY person who shamed anyone during COVID for not freaking out should be ashamed of themselves. Unfortunately, the people who participated wholeheartedly in the madness are still in denial and none of them follow Campbell, who I agree was very late to the game. If he had had a spine when it was going down, he would've been banned from YouTube. I'm not sure if it were better to be principled or play the game to stay on the platform and do some good, even if he was one of the voices recommending the jab.
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Sorry for the free-writing I always do. sigh One RELEVANT point, though, is that the MSM had inside sources that USED to be considered scoop-of-the-century SOLID, at the very top of the Obama Administration (Brennan, Clapper, Comey, etc.) who were PUSHING the lie. They had more confirming sources than Woodward and Bernstein had in their wildest wet dreams! And they're going to fall back on that, and claim there was just unprecedented (Yeah right) lying and misinformation being peddled.
But YOU guys (and a ton of sources in the middle and on the right, whom you ignore) didn't have to dig very deep to realize that what those highly-placed asshats within our own government just weren't saying things that squared with easily-obtained public-domain FACTS. Reminds me of kooky Christians who insist that the world is 4,000 years old, when the mile-deep Grand Canyon displays thousands of feet of well-graded, 1/2-inch-thick foreset beds that could ONLY occur by slow processes over millions of years. You just don't get a thousand-foot-thick column of well-sorted, finely-bedded foresets (Coconino Sandstone, Hermit Shale, Kaibab Limestone, e.g.) in anything less than millions of years. You have to start making shit up, like a Satanic Conspiracy that dug everything up, sorted everything according to grain size, squirreled-away all the BIG chunks (Where, I cannot guess), and presented this Grand Canyon lie to mislead all of humanity, in order to harvest souls.
They're STILL incompetent and dishonest HACKS, but they COULD go after Brennan, Comey and the like, as the agents of a vast hoax. I don't think they WILL, because that's, uh, awfully conspiratorial. It's more likely they'll USE those asshats as THEIR excuse and blame somebody else for how all the lying leakers were, themselves, misled, in a comedy of errors that nevertheless went after the right people for the wrong reasons. So they're still "right," but they just got a "few facts" wrong. And unless I miss my guess, the trail will lead RIGHT BACK to Trump and a GIGANTIC conspiracy involving the Russians! LOL!
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James Comey did the same thing. Awarded big contracts to Lockheed-Martin, "retired," made $6 million a year at Lockheed. Then he came back to government as FBI Director! All out in the open. No charges. Not even any investigations.
I bet you could go across ALL federal agencies and see a revolving door between industries being regulated, and federal officials who regulated them. FDA, EPA, FBI, CIA, USDA, SEC, FCC, FTC, ICC, HHS, DOE (Energy and Education), Federal Reserve, ... Then there're bureaucrats like Fauci whose ties to big pharma are very suspicious. I'd say more, but they actually passed a law or a rule that says Fauci doesn't have to disclose any patents he holds or royalties he's receiving.
The whole thing is too big and it's riddled with corruption.
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She would be right, if Tik-Tok weren't doing the Chinese Communist Party's bidding. Look who gets censored and who doesn't get censored. China doesn't allow any of that nonsense with its own people. It's mining our data and pushing ideologies it knows are corrosive to the fabric of our free society.
If it were truly a PLATFORM, rather than a PUBLISHER, you wouldn't get banned for questioning, for example, transgender ideology.
I don't think they should set a precedent of banning Tik-Tok; however, I think that ALL platforms should behave as neutral platforms, only interfering with free expression when there's a clear violation of the law. Misinformation/disinformation are not under a platform's purview to judge. Hate speech is subjective, and therefore can't be policed by a platform.
We already have laws against slander (spoken), libel (written) lies that destroy a person's reputation. This is what defamation lawsuits are for. We already have laws against inciting violence, and by that I don't mean the BS "words are violence" thing, but actual threats of violence and urging others to commit acts of violence.
When it comes to misinformation and disinformation, the best bulwark against such speech is free speech! We all know how misinformation and disinformation from supposed "authorities" have harmed us. The only reason they caused as much harm as they did was because the authorities doing the lying also managed to silence anyone who spoke against them.
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Tony Mario : Socialized medicine works GREAT in Canada, since if they need anything serious taken care of, they can always duck South of the border, where things are still a LITTLE bit free. When it all comes crashing down, they'll find some scapegoat and never question their original assumptions about the PROPER scope and role of centralized government. To them, it just looks like free money and utopia, because of course the government will run everything perfectly.
MY take on history is if you want to help the robber barons, create a government agency to regulate them. It'll take them 5 minutes to buy off the regulators the government conveniently puts in one place and woefully underpays for the amount of skill needed to actually administer them. What could go wrong?
USDA? Without them, Monsanto wouldn't be force-feeding us GMO foods, with toxins PURPOSELY built into them so they are pest resistant. Or injecting beef with antibiotics and hormones. That's because the government says it's OK. Or the EPA fining a company $1 million for practices that makes it BILLIONS. Or clearcutting old-growth forest, with roads that wouldn't be constructed without the U.S. Forest Service in places where it's un-economic to BUILD those roads, without government help.
The list goes on and on. The intention is always there, but nobody ever thinks about the consequences. They just want to feel like they're doing something. I hate that about our species.
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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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Most teachers don't like electronic devices in the classroom, for various reasons. I tell my students I don't care, as long as they're not bothering anybody and get their work done. But then I've posted all my lectures on public domain and I use class time for questions and student work. They know the schedule. They have on-demand access to all the content, 24/7. My recorded talks are edited so my errors and waste of time are minimized, for more efficient learning. Faster kids can finish early. Slower kids aren't blown away by live lecture.
One sneaky bit about the video content is I can run overtime if I need to, to fully explain something. Traditional lecture, you get 50 minutes, with no pauses, regardless. I break things up into 5-15-minute talks, and all the videos on the topic typically go OVER 50 minutes, when you add up all the times. Pretty mean. But I don't have to leave anything out, and most of the time they actually spend with me in person is either doing work or asking questions, and I can spend the entire time answering questions in which students are 100% engaged, because it's where they're stuck, and their minds are like sponges.
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I'm no physicist. When I took Modern Physics after a year of University Physics, much of what they taught seemed like a religion, rather than scientific theory. I could regurgitate the theory and do the math, but I abandoned further study in physics. The quantum mechanics seemed to be a vehicle for all manner of outlandish claims - even mysticism - and I still have a problem with "The speed of light is constant in all inertial reference frames, hence red shift, hence Big Bang."
Along about that time, I read a sci fi about a civilization that lived entirely in a mud puddle, and the theories that civilization had about the nature of the universe, based on telescopes in the mud puddle reminded me of the evidence for all the claims made in physics.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure I have no idea what I'm talking about. It just seemed almost as bad as the unassailable/undebatable claims made in social sciences based on zero evidence. Or in paleontology, when they find a tooth fragment and immediately insist it proves there were birds with 3 eyes and 300-foot wingspans.
Claims made by quantum theory seemed wholly unjustified. Just because you resort to statistics because you're too big to actually see the actual phenomenon doesn't impart magical qualities to the universe. You're just too big (and probably too slow) to actually see what's actually going on. Just because the bell curve has an infinite tail doesn't mean there's a 20-foot-tall mouse somewhere.
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The EU and UK don't understand that their houses are on fire. It's not the Russians who are their enemy. They're their own enemy, with disastrous economic and energy policies. A de-industrialized Europe is an irrelevant Europe. Their leaders are desperately trying to hold on to their relevancy, while doing everything possible to cripple their economies, demoralize their people, and invite colonists from abroad.
Maybe it'll all turn out for the best. Maybe it just had to get bad before it got better. In a postwar world, the people get soft, and the immigrant stresses are similar to the stresses caused by invaders of the past. Those stresses created rapid advancements in many places at once. They created tough, self-reliant people.
Imagine a world in which USA and Russia aren't at each others' throats. Take that stress off Russia, while Putin's still in power and Russia has a real shot at liberalizing. Russia could learn a lot from its and the USA's past failures to forge something new, in the same, Enlightenment tradition.
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Our system is broken because of all the guys like you who think free education creates a skilled citizenry and Free Stuff of every kind generates wealth, rather than eating it, and taking it from the guys like the guy you're interviewing in the street. You just see the pie and want to control the pie-cutter instead of a system where merit is rewarded and victimhood isn't a way of life. You want a system where "compassion" is at the end of a long form brandished by a bureaucrat instead of from people who care about one another. If every libtard would shut the hell up and help ONE PERSON instead of virtue-signaling about how much I'm helping (which I do but I don't carry a sign or shout from the rooftops. I just fucking HELP.), this society would spin like a top.
You mean well, but all your proposals cut people off from personal responsibility and cripple people's ability to help one another by siphoning off every spare nickel into government coffers, to be dispensed the way the fat cat libtards in government decide, while they feather their nests and help their cronies. You see the nest-feathering and the crony capitalism and you turn right around and empower those same people to do the same shit, by looking TO government, instead of looking to yourself.
And I won't even go into how all your government programs force everybody with a decent job to work more and consume more at the expense of Ma Earth, because it's not enough to provide for yourSELF, but you have to work another 25-30% more hours per week in order to pay for all your well-meaning but misguided bullshit programs. It's all pie in the sky for you progressives, and it's never out of YOUR pie, but out of somebody ELSE's. Oops. Guess I did go into that.
Maybe $5 an hour is the difference between a kid having a job sweeping the sidewalk and buying his OWN sneakers with his OWN money, but you eliminate ALL those jobs with your $15/hour bullshit, and then piss and moan at all the youth crime and underemployment. You mean well, but you're progressive dumb-asses who would lead us down the path to the gray and equally-shared misery of socialism. You wring your hands at the unemployed black man at the same time that you take a sledgehammer the bottom rung of the ladder so he could climb under his own fucking power. You're just wrong-headed about domestic and economic policy.
If only you applied the same principles to the economy and everyday life that you do to the imperialist war machine... They're two sides of the same exact coin, and it all has the effect of disempowering individuals here and around the world. Government's not the solution. Government's the problem. Pare it back to bare minimum and use your platform to hold up people who HELP as leaders and virtuous citizens. Instead, you only see virtue in those who campaign to make government a little bit bigger every day.
The hand that feeds is the hand that controls. The velvet glove of Free Stuff covers the iron fist of Compulsion, Conformity and FORCE. You think you're only using that power for good, but concentrating the power in one place just raises a beacon to fat cats and climbers. You're part of the problem and you don't even know it. And when you try to run over people, they're not going to care that you have a good heart.
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Food choices are largely under the control of consumers. I'd like to see a massive shift towards locally grown and permaculture. I'd trust the guy I can go visit a lot more than some farmer from another country.
But I don't want it sent down from on high as a mandate from Congress. That's the thing about a free market. It's what we make of it, with our individual choices, that decides the day.
Something I WOULD support from government is Cities and Towns, for max sustainability and min carbon footprint, to encourage import replacement. LOCAL tax breaks for LOCAL growers. And public awareness. MOST people making a decent living would probably choose to pay double or triple for their produce - the cheapest aisle in the supermarket! - to have it done in planet-and-people-friendly fashion.
Special deals on produce that's close to expiration date, for poorer people, for pennies on the dollar...
There are a lot of things we can do, locally, to make the feds irrelevant, but we always look to them to fix everything and then bitch because of the way things turned out. I think smart people like you could recruit a LOT of people to doing things, differently, of their own free will, and the marketplace would respond in more nuanced ways than any bunch of technocrats trying to define the physics of a frisbee, when any fool just uses their eyes, hands and legs to go get the damn thing.
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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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Just keep on keepin' on. You're going to alienate the ign'ants, but you're going to know that the people you meet who see it a lot like you do are going to be true to their word and REAL friends, and not just attention seekers, virtue-signalers, and just plain low IQ. Surround yourself with those people. 'Most any plumber, dry-waller, electrician, cable guy, what-have-you who has a skill and just wants to make a living off their hard-won skill is 99% likely to be a MAGA type. These are the people with actual competence who despise those who just make it harder and harder to live prosperous and happy lives by self-improvement and hard work.
Those are the people you want on your speed-dial when you're in trouble. Not the libtards who will happily refer you to social services, and congratulate themselves on their wokeness, and their capable navigation of the bureaucracy skills. You want the guys who're gonna bring you that plate of lasagna or shovel your sidewalk for you, when they know you're laid up or have just suffered a death in the family. You want the guys who are good at actually accomplishing things with their OWN hands, but are all thumbs when it comes to playing the system. You and they miss out on government-provided Free Stuff, but you and they will be a community of competent people who just know how to get things done, and shit will just basically work better than anything provided by a paper-pushing bureaucrat who insists you fill out 10 forms, only to say "Sorry, you don't qualify" with a smug look, when you checked the wrong box on the 10th form. Surround yourself with those kinds of people and life is about as good as humans are capable of making it.
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Minsk I. Minsk II. Istanbul.
It's hard to imagine what kind of "negotiated settlement" there will be or even can be. I think Zelensky and his American/EU masters burned too many bridges. They're proven to be untrustworthy.
I feel so bad for Ukraine. The end of the Cold War should have brought peace and prosperity to a nation that has suffered much in the last 80 years. From Nazis to Soviets (back to Nazis?) to hope, and the West just can't let people be.
Where they went wrong was in not being able to govern sensibly, which would have left Ukraine as an economic dynamo, with much to offer the rest of the world, and much to gain by trade with the rest of the world. I kind of feel like they never had a chance, because the exit of the Soviets didn't change things. The same oligarchic structure remained. A few of the names changed, maybe, but the same corrupt oligarchic system.
There was no interest in helping Ukraine realize her potential. Near as I can tell, just a bunch of Western oligarchs (carpet-baggers, if you will), who profited enormously by making sweetheart deals with some of the most corrupt people in the country. That's why they went after Trump for supposed "quid-pro-quo." They were quid-pro-quo-ing all over the place, and he got impeached because he wanted to help Ukraine fight corruption. Trump was over the target, which made him a target, and brought us the destruction of Ukraine as a nation.
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I don't know about the lamb-killing. I think the weasel family has a high mortality rate, due to starvation, and they're just programmed to kill at every opportunity. In Nature, those opportunities are few and far between. On a ranch, where slow-moving critters are nicely contained by fences, or in a chicken coop, or what have you, that's just not something they're going to see out in the wild.
Ranchers say the wolves being introduced from Canada into places in Idaho and Montana are wanton killers, too. Killing much more than they can actually eat, as though for the joy of it. I'm not sure that's what's happening. Maybe it's more about how easy the kills are, and they're just programmed to take advantage, and they're in an artificial situation.
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Uh, because the graph of (theta, r) = (theta, theta) is a spiral? And so obviously the graph of some subset of the real numbers, will give you a sample of the spiral, and things will line up on a spiral? I imagine this spiral pattern in the display takes you into some pretty big prime numbers, to be built out that far. Now, imagine the really TIGHT spiral we would see if all real numbers were represented. Just one, really big, really tight spiral. Still, kind of neat that they align that way, when you take prime-number samplings of the underlying, single, counter-clockwise spiral, which is that way for no other reason that we chose to measure counterclockwise as increasing angle in polar coordinates.
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Screenwriters have done hatchet jobs on original IPs since movies began. You can't do justice to a nuanced, 1000-page novel with a 2-hour movie. In film school, they are all taught to try to make the absolute best 1.5 to 2 hour movie, based LOOSELY on the original work.
Anyone who has ever read the original book and then watched the movie knows that this is the custom. It always sucks to watch the movie if you've already read the book, with very few exceptions.
In the current era, we can do longer formats and run mini-series or short series that do the original material justice. This was achieved by the adaptation of Clavell's SHOGUN (the 1st one, not the 2nd) and King's THE STAND, both of which were made-for-tv miniseries that were enormously successful. Peter Jackson did it with a trilogy of 3-hour movies. I think it could've been done even better with a mini-series of 10 to 15 hours, without any lagging or filler.
So in a way, the ACTUAL modern audience is shitting on the way things have always been done, and the way all the would-be writers, producers, and directors are trained and rewarded.
I think some of this was inevitable, with the march of technology and people seeing things done right, with a few or several series on Netflix and Amazon. Once you've binge-watched Peaky Blinders or Breaking Bad, you're kind of spoiled for the 2-hour theater experience, especially if you have a decent home entertainment system. A LOT of people got much better home entertainment systems during COVID. The rest of us took to the outdoors and turned all that shit off.
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The issue isn't about whether we should or shouldn't keep troops in Afghanistan. That question was already settled. What these swamp creatures are squirming and blame-shifting about is THEIR failure to evacuate civilian and military personnel and assets before pulling out. They blew it and their pointing their fingers are Biden doesn't change the fact that they are all a bunch of political hacks, from the president on down.
I just see a bunch of turds who think pointing to stinkier turds is going to make them smell like roses. Nope. All turds, all spiraling down the drain. It wouldn't be a big deal, were it not for all the harm they cause to us, our allies, and even those countries we don't much care for.
We should almost NEVER resort to violence. It should suffice to simply refuse to do business with despots and criminal oligarchies who don't respect their neighbors or their own people. But at this point, I think our OWN government looks, sounds and talks like a corrupt criminal oligarchy on virtually every major problem/issue/crisis, most of which are self-inflicted, and turned invariably to the advantage of the corrupt and incompetent idiots who created the issues and crises in the first place.
'Bout fed up, and darn near certain Watters will miss the point, yet again, as controlled/half-informed "opposition."
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@msorani6139 I've been around since the early days of cable t.v. CSPAN was just getting its start, and I watched innumerable hearings. I got a real sense of what was said versus what was actually happening.
Nobody can sit through all that stuff for very long, but I had a keen interest and it was really quite revolutionary for its time (late '70s and early '80s).
Social media is a similar "breakthrough event." We'll see how long it takes the establishment to really put the clamps on it. So far, they've made great progress, but there's a lot more "leakage" than there was with the cable industry, which was easy to control.
A major difference is that the communication is 2-way. CSPAN had its call-in shows, but they could really only manage a few callers per hour. Now you can have comment sections and like/dislike numbers posted in real time.
They already eliminated the dislikes, which I consider just more of the same "creeping control systems" at work. But you can still read between the lines, and, as long as not too many people use the "Show dislikes" hack, they're going to "permit" that. I just pick up on actual dislikes 2nd-hand, from those who got the app and use it.
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Considering the lack of wherewithal in the uni-polar West, expanding conflict to multiple fronts to "hurt Putin" is just going to hasten economic collapse or military defeat, or both, for Western powers, whose economies are leveraged to the hilt, and whose industrial base has been crippled by well-meaning but misguided and misinformed climate agenda.
Rumors of Assad's exit have been circulating for quite a while.
Anyway, enjoy the victory while you can. What I see is another Kursk excursion against lightly-defended areas. This is good for propaganda, but I'm not sure it really has any legs.
I think the underlying strategy is to deny Russia warm-water ports and access to the Mediterranean. This strategy by the West pre-dates the USSR. The difference, now, is the economic retardation of the West. Totally self-inflicted, but the policies being pursued, now, are based on economic realities that are no longer extant. We exported our industrial base and our energy production, and think we can still throw our weight around.
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So come, make Israel by force, expel the people who lived there, and brutalize them for decades is responsible?
WW II was supposed to teach us that the end doesn't justify the means. Then we turned right around at the end of the war and committed a genocide in Palestine for "good reasons."
We're not the good guys in this. Israel's not the good guys. What they do is understandable, given the circumstances in which they've found themselves since 1948. But it's not righteous. The end does NOT justify the means.
Imagine if they tried kicking everybody out of New York City, to give it back to the Iroquois. It would be at war with the people around New York City from Day 1. Maybe the U.S. Government backs the idea of giving NYC back. Then the people who were displaced would be enemies of the state if they lashed out in reaction to being summarily kicked off the land they paid for.
You guys have a HUGE blind spot with respect to the State of Israel. It's a construct, an artifact of British Colonialism which was grafted onto the USA seamlessly after the war. We're a little less obvious about it (or we were), but it's the same old "Great Game" played for the narrow purposes of a handful of powerful people, in opposition to what's best for the people around the world.
You're cherry-picking history, Robert. I'm no historian, but I know enough to know how Europeans, especially the British, re-drew the map of the Middle East at their whim, depending on what their interests were. Got a leader who's not playing ball? Start an insurrection. Create chaos. Bring down the government. Re-draw the map, so the oil keeps flowing, with puppets in power or just a ruined nation that cannot defend itself from the predations of Euro/American commercial syndicates.
You're usually not Neocon, but on Israel, you're blinded by your cultural baggage and don't see things objectively, in my opinion.
I signed on to Daily Wire when Jordan Peterson joined the group, but I'm going to cancel. The top guy, Shapiro, and most of the people under him, are neocon. I don't think Peterson is, but he changed when he went to Daily Wire.
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I didn't ask you a question, but you destroyed one of my comments about Moscow being a rail hub and how its capture (I speculated) might swing the balance for the Germans. I don't think I ever seriously believed that it would be decisive, because - as you say - behind every defeated Soviet Army is another Soviet Army, bigger and stronger than the one before it. The Germans couldn't even get TO the Urals, let alone take on the whoop-ass already there, and growing.
I was brought up on Guderian, basically believing that the crucial mistake was wasting time investing Minsk, when they should've bypassed it. But I don't think bypassing Minsk changes the fundamental equation. They still grind to a halt by or before Moscow, and from then on, it's just a matter of how fast they can bring their Guard units West over the Urals. The war ends sooner, if they're quicker. It takes a little longer if they're slower.
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Those original heroes who tilted against whalers in inflatable rafts to save the whales have all left Greenpeace because it was 100% politicized and no longer followed the science. The founder of Greenpeace says their climate-change agenda is harmful and authoritarian. And he's right. If you do everything you're told to do, the environmental damage will be greater (WAY more mining permits and water pollution), and you'll end up having to burn fossil fuels to achieve it. And they ignore the working and living conditions at the off-shored mining operations. As long as it's not on U.S. or Euro soil, they don't care what harm is done or if child slaves are used to get that cobalt and lithium out of the ground.
It's just like COVID, where alternative solutions were forbidden, and everybody had to do the same thing: lock down, mask up and take an experimental drug. You were also required to sign a waiver. "We didn't coerce anyone!" Ha. "Take it or lose your job, lose your home, and starve, you science-denier."
Lots of good, green ideas people could do, but the EPA stands in the way, ironically.
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Colleges aren't going away. People will still want more or less traditional spoon-feedings in an environment they were conditioned to believe is a learning experience. But more and more people are going to be self-taught.
The only thing, other than offering live spoon-feedings that big institutions will have over self-teaching is they'll have the big-dollar equipment, like electron microscopes and high-dollar polarizing microscropes, NMR Spec, etc.
But arts, humanities, language, 99% of science, history and math? You don't need to sit in a classroom for that, any more. And with prices skyrocketing, more and more people will turn away from the big institutions, until they get their bureaucracies and regulations under control.
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If he's a plagiarist, where's the smoking gun? It should be easy to prove. "Here's what Dershowitz wrote. Here's what someone wrote, before, that is lifted without attribution." With Claudine Gay, we all saw the side-by-side. Finkelstein makes the claim, but didn't come to the interview with receipts.
My take on Israel is that it was created by force as a last gasp of British colonialism Israel will always be embattled, and Israel will do whatever it feels it must, to survive as a nation-state. Many atrocities have been committed against and by Israel in this never ending existential struggle.
There are Arab nations in essentially the same predicament. British promises of statehood were bandied to every tribe and ethnic group in the region, in return for fighting foes of the British. The British ended up winning and immediately 'forgot' its promises. $o there's instability throughout the region, with rebels everywhere you look.
In my opinion, the U$A picked up where the British left off, playing a clumsy, ham-handed version of the "Great Game," not on behalf of the U$A, which doesn't need Middle East oil, but its European allies certainly do! This has kept Europe in America's debt. In return, the U$A has (had) European backing in all of its wars. Where the interests of one leaves off and the other begins is not very clear to a casual historian such as myself. What is clear is that the strategy of keeping the rest of the world destabilized is just storing up trouble for the so-called "free world," which is becoming less free by the day.
Israel is caught in the middle. It has to be extreme to survive. Of course Israel seeks to influence American politics. We're its sugar daddy! Of course America backs Israel no matter what. It's our proxy in the Middle East.
Dersh is a great lawyer. I don't think he's always honest or that he doesn't oversell his case and downplay any opposing case. There are ways to lie using the truth, and he's a master of the technique. He is a very hard-core zionist, so of course he's going to do his lawyerly best to justify anything Israel does. In this effort, any criticism of Israel is blatant anti-semitism. I don't judge Israel. I think it does what it believes it must.
I'm not sure what the best solution(s) is(are). I know we have committed atrocities, ourselves, in the name of national security and democracy, often to the detriment of both. One thing that I am pretty sure of is that sending billions in military and financial aid to the Middle East doesn't help the people in the Middle East. Yes, Israel is an apartheid state. I don't know what choice it has, given the pressure on it since its (mostly arbitrary) creation in 1948, by allies drunk on power and fueled by guilt over the holocaust.
Other tribes and ethnic groups were also promised statehood, and cast aside like yesterday's trash as soon as our or Britain's short-term goals were achieved. They have just as much right to self-determination as anyone else. Our apparent divide-and-conquer strategy has yielded great benefits for us and our allies for 80 years, but 80 years is an eyeblink in history, and I don't think it's a good strategy for lasting peace and prosperity for anyone.
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Excellent compilation of articles. Much info in little time.
I think the Kursk "incursion" is bad for Ukraine. If they don't get a huge infusion of foreign support, they will collapse. If they DO get a huge infusion of support, they can last a little longer, but the amount of help they need is beyond the West's ability to provide, and trying to help more is just sapping their fragile economies.
The collective West is built on finance, and in spite of its absolute dependence on manufacturing, it's out-sourced major manufacturing sectors. It's regulated much of its resource-extraction and manufacturing out of existence. Oh, we still get manufactured goods, but we buy them from abroad.
We are not at all configured at present to fight any kind of sustained war. We can certainly make a big splash, somewhere, but we would lose a battle of attrition against the Russia, China, and the Global South. India wouldn't take part, directly, but they're going to buy as much cheap Russian oil as they can, and they're good friends with Russia, despite their ties to the West.
I feel like the USA is living on borrowed money and borrowed time. I think our economy is fragile, while Russia's was built under duress and thrives under duress. The West, not so much. We're very enamored of finance and controlling the world through finance and access to credit, but our spending sprees over decades were purchased on credit, and to try to match the rest of the world, we would need to borrow very heavily, and the credit is drying up.
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@gerardslontgezegendezalige4836 Reported use of F16s in ground support operations would seem to suggest that Russian air defenses in that area are weak.
On general considerations, they probably are weak. I think Russia invited this incursion, for the political capital to expand their mission in Ukraine.
ECM and anti-ECM is the next-level competition. It sounds like some of that $61 billion went to new air defenses and ECM units. And they're trying them out where the Russians don't already have similar capabilities.
I think the new ECM equipment is copying what the Russians appear to be doing in the South. They're much more aggressive with their armored vehicles and we're hearing more reports of Russian aircraft flying more classic ground-support missions, which you can only do when you've eliminated or neutralized enemy air defenses.
Ukraine's taking advantage of the soft spot up North, but I think it will backfire on them, because it escalates the Russian response one or two more notches. It activates trained but as-yet-unactivated "garrison troops they have dispersed almost everywhere.
The Ukrainians having given them the excuse to not only build up in that soft area, but to also go beyond the Ukrainian border. Ukraine might be getting some good press right now, but Russia's friends are going to believe Putin's only reacting to provocations, and using great restraint. This plays good to China, India, and the Global South. The Ukrainian gainst, in the short term, plays good to Western audiences.
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As our society evolves, I can see having children younger, and then doing more career stuff, later. Instead of college, learn a trade (which can be done in high school), get a good-paying job. Then go to school, after you know a little something about the world, and you want to move on from the one trade.
It's huge to have your kids raised up by the time you're 40-ish. Anyway, I can see this as a good lifestyle for a lot of people, with some making enough $$$ off their trade to retire a lot earlier than a guy who went straight from high school to college and took 4 or more years to graduate, assuming they graduated.
I went the academic route, and I was upwards of 40 before I made enough money to reasonably support a family. But if I'd decided to be an electrician, I'd've been good to go by or before age 20, if I took some vo-tech.
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I bought the current place at the top of the market, but I bought the previous place in 2013, when prices were reasonable. So I made out like a bandit, especially when you consider the previous place was pretty leveraged, with a bit over 20% down. But I got the full doubling of the sale price, leaving me about $250,000 in cash. I put a big chunk of that down on the new place, which I bought for about the same price as I sold the old place for.
But I'm a lot deeper in debt, even though I plowed most of that $250,00 into the new place.
I'm not a speculator. I plan to hold on to this place. The mortgage payments are about the same. I don't know how the speculators who bought the old place made out. I'm sure they thought they were sticking it to me, offering $370,000 for a place that was listing at $405,000 at the time. I acted put out and tried not to look too happy about clearing a quarter mill on the deal. But I've got eyes. I can see the national debt and how insane federal spending has become. There's going to be an inflationary tsunami, and as long as you're locked in at a fixed rate and can make your payments, you'll come out way ahead in 10 years.
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He had a LOT of support in America right up until Pearl Harbor. Then everything changed. As Hirohito's ally, he got thrown into the same bucket, losing all support except the tiny number of actual Nazis and Nazi sympathizers.
To me, the great irony of the '30s and '40s was that we basically became Nazis in the name of fighting them, and we never looked back or questioned the unfettered growth of government and government power since. Guys like Jimmy LOVE government intervention when they think it's helping the disadvantaged. Then they rail against the corruption and abuse of power by "health" agencies in the government.
Dude, if you want to help the disadvantaged, then HELP them. Don't campaign for the government to do all your charity work for you, with OTHER people's money. Just shut the hell up and open YOUR home and YOUR wallet, like I do, as a LIBERTARIAN. I don't play the shame game to take OTHER people's money. I put up MY money and MY time. You want to solve poverty and homelessness? Then DO something. YOU give up something, instead of using government power and government force to impose government's idea of "help and compassion."
Bureaucrats check boxes and garner power to themselves. Free people giving freely is something else entirely and you totally miss the boat on THAT. It's easier to bitch about what somebody else is or isn't doing.
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I love that advances in EVs are being made. I hate that crazy (and possibly mendacious) people are trying to push EV usage beyond all reason. I think there could be a lot of benefit for the environment if small, 1- or 2-seat EVs for personal transportation over relatively short (within a few miles') distance grew in popularity. Enough to get you to the hardware store and back, or to make a run to the hardware and grocery stores in one go.
If you had your own little wind and solar going on at your place, you could stretch a dollar in the long run by slowly "refueling" your EV over 24- or 48-hour periods. Maybe when the sun isn't shining, you have to spend a little more time on your stationary bike, charging the batteries!
That'd be very practical for running small errands and making appointments, assuming the distances are relatively short and the trips are relatively infrequent. Everyday work vehicle? No way. Delivery vehicle? No.
Courier service? Maybe. You can outfit a lot of e-bikes pretty cheaply. There's so much that could be done with common-sense, light-weight, short-range EVs, without trying to ram them down people's throats. I can see them growing more popular, quite naturally.
We'd probably have a huge market in smaller EVs if the auto industry weren't sucking up all the oxygen (i.e., lithium).
There are also applications for lead-acid batteries in EVs. If you're only going 10 miles round-trip, you wouldn't even need lithium batteries, or have to deal with their dangers. We've known how to make and safely use lead-acid batteries for many decades.
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@maryellenmullarkey2000 It's not brought up because they want pregnant women to marry the government. Those are automatic Democrat votes, so Democrats want more women to get pregnant without the father around.
It goes back to means testing*. If there's a father in the picture, the government checks stop coming.
I would flip that on its head: No aid unless you produce the father. No father in the picture? No help.
Now the incentive is to just show up at the welfare office, pregnant, with your "Baby Jesus" who was somehow conceived without any participation by a man.
This policy has destroyed families and encouraged young women to sleep with Chad or Tyrone without any commitment from Chad or Tyrone.
*If you want to blame Republicans for something, blame them for this. When the federal welfare state was created, Republicans insisted that people pass a "means test." If there was a father in the picture, then the father would have to contribute, and assistance was denied. This resulted in an epidemic of "immaculate conceptions," where the woman is somehow pregnant, yet still virginal, because there's no man in the picture.
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Smart woman, but I disagree with her on the "one standard" for news. No. We need different eyes watching and different mouths speaking. The media's been subtly slanted for decades. Something happened in the early 20th Century, where we forgot that the press EXISTS to grind an axe. We pretended the media was objective truth, when the Founders made it clear that it was precisely for the purpose of dissenting voices (and axe-grinding) that the press must not be interfered with by the government. They EXPECTED there would be competing ideas doing battle in the public square non-stop.
In a way, what's happened the last 3 years has been good for us. The rise of independent content creators has been good for us. People that are still in lock-step with the establishment hate it, because it forces them out of their comfortable rut. But people who think for themselves are having a lot more fun. Another CNN take-down. Another ABC take-down. These are music to my ears. I haven't bought what they've been selling for a long, long time. Thoughtful libertarians as well as thoughtful progressives (a bit of an oxymoron, there, I know) never got to see our side of the story.
I wonder how much longer YouTube will be a semi-sanctuary for dissenting opinions. Not much longer. The legacy media, using corporate ad revenues as the lure and the wedge, are trying to sanitize YouTube.
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Am I the only one that noticed that everything major that's been censored in the last 10 years has been truth, and the censors were always propping up lies that took YEARS to uncover?
These people who claim to be protecting us from mis-, dis-, and mal-information are the biggest sources of the same, and all of the censorship we witnessed during Iraq War(s), RussiaGate, and COVID-19 turned out to be the silencing of the people who got it RIGHT!
For some reason, as long as they carry the day, no one cares, 6 months, a year, or two or ten years later that they got it wrong. They're too busy winning the NEW day, and it's a whole NEW set of lies to be propped up, and "Why can't you let it go?"
I can't let it go, because they'll just rinse and repeat the same strategy. This isn't a one-off "Oh that was terrible what they did that one time." It's a PATTERN. From Judge Kavanaugh being a supposed rapist, to the Covington kids being racists. One story after another that's false, but can't be challenged publicly, because the fix is in, and the other side of the story is censored out of legacy media and every big-tech platform.
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@baldiedash1 : Many models of government can work on a small(ish) scale, especially if the people are more or less homogeneous, and aligned with government policy. The bigger and more diverse a nation is, the less power you should give the central government, so that the PEOPLE can decide most matters closer to home. I don't favor a state religion, but the U.S. Constitution only said that the federal government was silent on religion (as is science). If a state wanted to be stupid, that'd be up to them.
America is too diverse for ANY state to adopt a religion in the modern era, unless there's a Muslim takeover. And we see how eager Islam is to impose Sharia wherever their numbers are significant enough to bully communities into it. Christianity used to be like that, but the Reason and Love flowing from the lessons of Jesus Christ eventually put the kibosh on those Puritanical practices.
The only religion I'm really concerned about, nowadays, is the leftist ideology that's taken Christianity's place. Question bloated government and be labeled a heretic (white supremacist, bigot, hater, racist, denier, ...), in similar fashion to those assholes in our past who made the lady wear the Scarlet "A" on her dress. No amount of bullying and harassment is out of line, when going after heretics. All the features of a religion, with the unspoken article of faith in Government as God.
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I recommend the book "Deathworld," by Harry Harrison. Pyrrans were at war with every life form on the planet Pyrrus, every creature of which evolved as if directed by an evil intelligence, to be more and more deadly to humans.
It turns out that the entire planet ecosystem was directed by a planetary intelligence that developed as a result of how frequently the planet experienced global catastrophes. It was in the path of a very thick meteoroid belt. It was unstable, geologically, with lots of active volcanoes.
Much as forest creatures suspend their animosities during a forest fire here on Earth, the planet Pyrrus took it to a whole 'nother level. They would cooperate with their evacuations, with small creatures hitching rides on large creatures. Large creatures would stop so small could climb aboard, or even pick up and carry critters like turtles... Over time, they became psychic, and it reached all the way from the plants up to the higher orders of animals.
I always think of that book, when I think of Israel's plight. In "Deathworld," there was a schism amongst the humans between the city dwellers and a small, but growing number of "heretics," who broke from the hatred and went out into the wild to live WITH Nature. They had a few psychically sensitive people they called "talkers," who could use telepathy to command (actually, cooperate) with the lower orders of animals.
Spoiler Alert:
Pretty fun book. The "heretics" in "Deathworld" remind me of anti-Zionist Jews, like Norman Finkelstein or Max Blumenthal. Netanyahu is Kerk Pyhrrus, leader of the city Pyrrans. Eventually the planet defeats the city Pyrrans, but almost all (but the most indoctrinated) city Pyrrans escape to go on to new adventures, while the "heretics" lived on peacefully, on a gradual upward climb. They're poor, but they have everything they need, and they can control the creatures around them with ESP, so that was pretty cool. Imagine getting an earthquake morning minutes or hours in advance, because the planet feels it coming.
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The fact is that whether it's the government or a private investor, EVERY job in existence requires someone to put up the money. That money is invested based on risk:return ratio. If you tax 90% of the profits at 90%, you're reducing the return on investment by 90%, and that makes the risk:return ratio tilts towards being more risky relative to the expected return. The "social democracies" of Europe have LOWER capital gains taxes (by far) than the USA. They get it. (for once).
The rich are always going to scheme to stay rich. When you raise capital gains taxes, they put their money into SAFE investments. They're less willing to invest in a venture that entails any kind of risk. So the innovation machine slows to a crawl. And not just innovation. "Normal" businesses will also have a tougher time getting start-up money.
The beauty of the leftist narrative is you can't point to businesses that don't exist and jobs that don't exist but WOULD exist under a less regressive (they call it "progressive") tax structure. But the leftist can always point to a few winners who benefited from the money they stole from others through taxes. "Look at all these people/businesses we helped!" People arguing against such charlatans never have a similar list of people who were HURT because of the tax policy, even though there are many times as many such people, who just didn't get a break because business and entrepreneurship were strangled. No. The leftist would argue "We could have MORE successful businesses if we taxed more and used the money to help businesses."
It's a very powerful, yet blatantly disingenuous argument that's made more effective by the fact that so many educated people BELIEVE it.
The best thing government could do is get out of the way of small business. Instead of taxing 90% of a tiny pie. Take 5% of 20 million pies!
Charge $50/month for your exclusive YouTube content and get 50 subscribers or charge $1/month and get 200,000 subscribers. It's that sort of thing. More people will want to - and be able to pay/play - if the cost is low, relative to the return.
Like I said, the rich will find a way to stay rich, regardless of the rule set. High capital gains taxes favor the already-rich over the just-want-to-improve-my-situation-without-having-to-cheat people (You know. The largest number of people this leftist pretends to care about.
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I'm very pleased to see this video. I'm the kind of guy who would rather hear it told than watch a re-enactment of The Alamo. Same for the Titanic. I knew how it ended, and didn't like the ending.
16:30. My opinion of Trey Gowdy just went up a notch. He didn't go in for the kill, but he poked around pretty thoroughly and gave us the outlines. But he let the FBI and its parent, the DOJ stone-wall him, pretty much. They had everything shrouded in secrecy, but Gowdy pretty much pinpointed where the key information was. It's just taken years to penetrate the veil with de-class, which could have happened, sooner, but speaking strategically, time was on the Trump team's side, but with a November, 2020 deadline.
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@clydebailliff As a late Baby-Boomer, I know what my generation pushes for and how they vote, by and large. I'm a member of that generation, whose opinions run counter to what most in my age group believe.
The Baby Boom generation was born to unprecedented wealth, prosperity, and freedom. We voted for more Free Stuff, less liberty, and now we all wonder where our prosperity went.
Don't take it personally. You're a member of the generation? You don't have to be its poster child. But maybe you're a big-government, forever-war Baby Boomer, and I've got you pegged, without even meaning to single you out.
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It's "liberal bias," but liberalism as it is known, today, is not very liberal at all. It's all for big government, endless wars abroad, open borders, etc. More Democrat National Committee and Deep State bias.
And FOX locks arms with the others on the big stuff and stays silent on the corporate stuff. They all get their money from Big Pharma and other mega-corporations, and sweep any embarrassing stories under the carpet, if not on their own, then all it takes is a few phone calls from monied interests and they're in lock-step with the rest.
Support the up-and-comers. You WANT them to be biased and up front about their biases. They're ALL biased, depending on the issue. So sample left, right and middle and draw your own conclusions.
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There are (were less than 10 years ago) companies that build custom cargo haulers pretty cheap. You might be surprised at what some of the horse-trailer manufacturers can put together for hybrid cargo/living setups. Some of the cargo-trailer companies also make horse trailers. Some of the nicest "campers" are the horse trailers you see. I've seen palaces on wheels towing horses.
Anyway, these trailer manufacturers will put any kind of flooring, doors, windows, vents, lights, heater/air-conditioner, power option, suspension option you can think of, except maybe the Timbren axle-less systems, which are really nice, but kind of frivolous. Forget about the little lithium-ion batteries they're pushing so hard, now. Just get a couple lead-acid marine batteries and call 'er good. Of course, you'd want the rear doors hinged at the bottom, to make a ramp. But yeah, they make 'em, if you go look for them.
Google "custom cargo trailers." I'd rather make one of those into a toy hauler than buy a toy hauler.
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These actions by first Finland and now Sweden are in opposition to public sentiment. There, as well as France, Spain, and even Germany and Britain, we're seeing tectonic shifts in the political landscape AWAY from the globalist, global-warming grifters. Those who have cheered on the New World Order are getting their wish, only the New World Order is Multi-polar, with its center of gravity much farther South and East.
I used to fear this, in my youth. But after the last 50 years of decay and government expansion in my country (USA), I see it as inevitable and even necessary. The USA is nearly full-on fascist, now.
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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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I'm ambivalent about Taiwan. I love Taiwan, but I don't see much difference between our selling them F-16s and the Chinese selling fighters to (or placing missiles in) Cuba. I get that freedom is better than not, and that we have some moral high ground wrt Taiwan on account of that. But it's still a small island off the coast of a superpower. Aside from the Cuban Missile Crisis, which according to many almost brought open warfare between the US and USSR, Cuba hasn't been near the thorn in our side that Taiwan has been in China's.
The middle path appears to be pretty close to what Trump's doing. Aggressive rhetoric, but careful, considered, and generally restrained in our ACTIONS, because in the end, EVERYbody with half a brain knows Trump wants to MAKE A DEAL that's as good for the USA as possible. Until I really see otherwise, I'm pretty convinced that Pompeo is there to create a false opening position, so that Trump can get the deal (or a deal) that he wants (or we can live with) by appearing to make a major concession, or backing WAY off what he initially was asking for or claiming or threatening.
This is something Asians understand especially well. The horse they're selling is a Kentucky Derby, but the horse Trump sees has a sway back and spavined hooves. Both sides are lying, and circling around The Deal. Both sides know where the fair deal is, before they even start, but if you don't start out asking for more than you need, you have no concessions to offer, or you come out behind when you compromise from your bottom-dollar offer.
That's something other countries don't understand about America and most Americans don't understand about the rest of the world. America's in a hurry, so they don't want to waste time dickerin'. Give me your rock-bottom price, and I'll compare your price against all the other vendors' prices, and decide whether I'll buy from you at that price, or not. No negotiating. If I don't like your deal I go somewhere else. We needn't strike a bargain, because you're never the only vendor in town (unless you're Facebook or Google).
I could definitely see the fighter sales as a bargaining chip to induce the Chinese to back off in South America.
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One of the biggest problem for Soviet defectors and exiles was "decision paralysis" in grocery stores. Not only was there always peanut butter, but there were 6 different brands fighting for their attention. They'd freeze up. Lock up. Feel helpless. Stand there not knowing what to do. In the Soviet Union, the bread aisle was all just one kind. And for a good part of Soviet rule, you stood in line to get any. In a capitalist system, there are 10 brands fighting for your attention, all trying to out-do the others, and bread is plentiful.
I've always found this ironic, because I'm partial to those coarse Russian black breads. Lithuanian rye is the best. Tear off hunks and slather on some butter. Never seen American bakeries (except where Lithuanian immigrants lived) that could match it. Don't know if it's the flour, how they grind it, or what. Just a perfect balance of weight, leavening and flavor. American bakeries trying to go old-school make it a little too dense.
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Can't you arrange in advance to have assistance? I think airports are generally pretty accommodating, but there's probably a limit to how many people they can reasonably help on a given day. Just showing up and expecting extra services just because you're obese is pretty entitled.
I've had many MANY injuries over the years, but always avoided getting any help, even if I was in some discomfort. My injuries were mostly due to a genetic defect in my bones, and I didn't want to be a burden on others. Now, I actually DO need help, but the way I operate, I just hire somebody to give me a hand! I've got a nephew on retainer for that purpose, tbh. But I worked hard all my life so I can afford to do it right, if it needs to be done, without asking for anything extra from anybody else that I don't pay for. It just ain't right.
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All we have to do is more than double our output of copper, cobalt, and a number of other metals, which has never been done and will require a huge diversion of all production to One Thing. Or the two or three things that represent the extent of your imagination. Meanwhile, how many people will freeze or starve? How many other, better ideas, will die before they're even born? Do you realize how much energy and how many resources are needed for your pipe dream?
Do you realize that the vast majority of solar panels are produced by what amounts to slave labor, in factories powered by dirty coal? You have a false impression of the trade-offs, because you're fixated on top-down solutions, rather than ground-up solutions.
Less than 1% of the land mass is still a MONUMENTAL undertaking, sucking resources from every OTHER endeavor. Your "climate targets" are based on junk science, and you've got this oblivious NMBY attitude that assumes all these wonderful things will just magically happen without massive costs to every other sector of human endeavor. You discount the environmental cost because you're fixated on one variable. The world isn't a place where you just pull levers and everything magically works out fine.
Have you seen the cobalt mines? The lithium mines? Have you seen the black skies in China?
Do the math. Better yet, just do the arithmetic.
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@CaliforniatoWestAfrica Without my father in the picture, I would've run roughshod over my mother by or before age 12. Dad was far from perfect, but he didn't tolerate any BS.
I remember how some of my peers would be out causing trouble or partying all hours on school nights, for instance. That was something that simply couldn't happen in our household without dire consequences.
Some rare women can do it all, at great cost to themselves, trying to do more than any one person should have to do. But the women who end up single, with children, usually aren't those kinds of women.
Bless you for overcoming your disadvantages. You can look at crime stats in a couple of different ways. While the vast majority of career criminals and/or people who spend their lives in poverty come from single-mother households, the flip side is that the vast majority raised by single mothers do, in fact, overcome it.
It's the same for being raised by abusive fathers. You're more likely to be an abuser if you were raised by an abuser, but MOST abused children do NOT repeat the mistakes of their fathers.
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The phone call was pretty much perfect. Juan sees it as a shakedown, because it suits his narrative. To an objective person, it sounds like a pretty typical phone call between presidents of 2 countries. So, just because Biden happens to get caught up in this, it's election meddling? No. The Obama administration installed a corrupt government in Ukraine, shamelessly, and Democrats have been plundering Ukraine, shamelessly, and our anti-corruption president called THEIR anti-corruption president, to talk about cooperating in rooting out corruption. The only reason this is cast the way it is by Dems and their pals, the media, is because they're terrified that their corruption will be exposed.
They spent 2 1/2 years, 35 million dollars, and saturated the media with smears that turned out to be a HUGE NOTHING BURGER. Now, the people want answers, Trump is seeking answers, and Dems and media cronies are doing everything they can to cover up. And it's too late.
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This begs the question of why Trump administration didn't de-classify. This is why I'm VERY skeptical about another Trump presidency. He didn't end the drone bombings and missile strikes on foreign soil. He couldn't control his own state and defense departments or intel agencies, and even when he COULD, he chose not to. He didn't impose mandates, but he went along with lock-downs and set the table for the oppression that followed.
Same with critical-race-theory trainings throughout his administration. No action until December, 2020, which was reversed in less than a month, and continues to this day. He deferred to Fauci, instead of bringing in the Malone's and McCullough's. Great Barrington Declaration came out in October, 2020. Silence from his administration. No one man can run the administration, so the team around them is KEY. I don't think Trump had any idea of who his friends are, assuming his heart was in the right place. But that assumption is very hard to maintain, given we came out of his admin even MORE woke than we went in.
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Everyone wants to go back to the '90s, when the partisanship of the press was better-disguised and even more pernicious than now, when their "soft censorship" is now right out in the open. Every time there's a new media breakthrough, conservatives hop on it, and the establishment does its best to weed them out. They're now trying to do the same thing to the Internet that they did to cable in the '70s and '80s, and what they did to radio in the '30s, which transferred seamlessly to television as the big radio networks dominated television.
Government censorship in the USA has been around for a long time. It's just harder to hide, and they don't even TRY to hide it, any more. Now they use "hate speech" and "misinformation" mislabeling to justify their heavy-handedness, but people who think - people who know their history - see right through this end-run around the 1st Amendment, which has ALWAYS been a threat to unchecked abuse of power by the state.
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Teacher's unions want merit pay. They just don't know how to implement it. Who judges what good teaching is? It's very subjective and NONE of them want a 3rd party observing the moves they make or the things they say in the classroom. That's why I LOVED the cognitive dissonance biting them in the behinds, when they went full-on ZOOM for their courses, and parents got to see what actually was going on.
I don't want "merit pay." I want there to be a free, fair and open competition for education dollars. Charter schools, private schools, and all the rest, should get the SAME amount of subsidy from the taxpayer that the current monopoly gets. THAT will see the best money going to the best teachers, with head hunters actively recruiting the best teachers, and the WORST teachers remaining in the "traditional" schools, until those schools either improve or go out of business.
Eventually, I'd like federal $$$ to be taken out of education. Let the locals handle it. Harlem had better schools BEFORE the Department of Education was created, and it's been downhill ever since.
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Isn't this what everyone expected? Biden would bow to the 1-China policy. He has to bluster and make a show of surliness, so it doesn't look like he's in Xi's hip pocket, with his and his son's business connections to China.
Biden's is one of many elite families from BOTH parties with incompetent children sitting on boards of directors for big money, and then the USA does everything it can to cover up those activities. American carpet-baggers. They get rich by inflicting misery on all of us.
On the Republican side, Manaforte was one guy who extracted big money from the dead carcass of Ukraine, without paying one penny in tax. Putin's still sore at him for that, and I think he's under indictment in Russia for tax evasion. Pelosi's kid, Clinton's kid, ... It's all over the place, and what you see is their kids making millions for what sure looks like influence-peddling. "Fire that prosecutor looking into Burisma or you don't get your billion dollars." There's the REAL quid-pro-quo, hiding in plain sight, and confirmed in Joe Biden's own recorded remarks. $80,000 a month for drug-addict Hunter Biden? You've gotta be kidding me.
Hunter's just the one we talk about. Look at the high-powered and high-paying boards Chelsea Clinton sits on. It's pretty much everywhere. And matters of war and peace are secondary to their financial interests.
Anyway, this predatory foreign policy by the few has been going on for a long time. We need to trim the claws of federal agencies, and put them on a restricted diet.
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Defeating RINOs in a sort of purge, was part of why Dems achieved a (small) 'blue wave' in 2018. A lot of RINOs lost support from core conservative Republican base, and lost. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and a large number of multiple-term Republicans (and leadership's awarded by seniority) were definitely part of the swamp, and Republican-voter support was lukewarm, at best. There are "establishment-approved" positions that are regressive AND bi-partisan by the long-term denizens of the swamp. They learn what to buck, what not to buck, and how to present themselves as the "alternative" to the Dem policies, without making waves and without being any kind of real 'alternative.' Support the welfare state, redistribution-of-wealth schemes of every sort, and surveillance state, and you are golden, as far as the establishment is concerned.
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The press has always been muckrakers and liars. We used to understand that until the 20th Century, when suddenly this cult of objectivity arose and the "Fairness Doctrine" was adopted by our government back in the 1930s, when other fascist nonsense was sweeping the planet. WE were SURE we were better than the fascists and Nazis, but we did darn near the same kinds of things, with functionally centralized control of dominant media (radio, print, and later, t.v.).
The nation's founders KNEW everybody had an axe to grind and THEIR solution was to ensure that the government would not have the power to monopolize the propaganda. Well, since Roosevelt, the government pretty much HAS. People calling the government out for its corruption were kept on the margins quite easily by the 3 main radio/tv networks and big papers. One call from local, state or federal official and stories just disappeared.
This monopoly's a lot harder to maintain with the Internet. Big Tech is the centralized solution for that, and we KNOW it censors at the behest of the establishment, non-stop. FOX, with Pfizer paying for half its commercials, is no different from the rest. It just seems like it is.
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Until Ted Baxter (Ted Knight) and Dan Rather (playing himself), I had an unrealistically high opinion of news anchors. The older I got, though, the more I learned, and the more I realized that being a news anchor just means you look good and sound good on camera.
My money's on the reporter, if it comes to a fight. He's also probably a lot more fun and interesting to have a beer with. My guess is that the reporter's a much better news guy, who's kept it real his whole life, and gotten into some scrapes along the way, and the anchor is an ass-kissing climber, who always wanted to make it big, and he's taking out his frustration for never getting past anchor for a 2nd-rate local t.v. station.
Now, have I sufficiently misjudged everyone? I'd really like to move on.
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Vivek ain't lyin'. Speaking as a math teacher, it's been a 30-plus-year battle, trying to uphold standards. There's lots of pressure from peers and supervisors to water things down so that more people pass with good grades. That's the definition of "success," nowadays. But in the old days, "success" meant you had mastery.
Let's not kid ourselves, though. My dad was a process engineer in manufacturing and he said that even really good engineers need basic training in the real world and in the industry-specific knowledge they need. It could take years, and that was before they gave their pronouns on their applications.
This meant that hiring an engineer straight out of college was understood to be a 3 to 6 year project. So the company would invest in that engineer for years, and, often as not, once they ran up their experience, those former trainees would instantly look for a better-paying gig, which they could usually get.
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Pretty spot-on. While religion brings out some of the best and deters some of the worst in people, it also gives them this "I believe; therefore, I am virtuous, and anyone who disagrees with me is malign" attitude. When you take away religion, such people will latch on to ideas that are indistinguishable from religious dogma, except for the fact that they do not use "God said" in their rhetoric. Take away religion, and political ideology is always there to fill the vacuum.
I don't know what the answer is other than to be on your guard against falling into the trap. I'm pretty much agnostic, when it comes to religion. I don't think I've ever encountered one that doesn't require me to make a leap of faith in defiance of the evidence of my senses. But even an atheist must make such a leap of faith in order to even get UP in the morning. Without that larger meaning to life, that makes sense of your place in the universe, fatalism, hedonism and nihilism beckon. Religion's great power - especially the Christian faith - is offering paradise at the end of a universally fatal existence, and along the way installing a system of morals that, when followed, enable cultures/tribes/nations to persist, intact over wide spans of geography and time.
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Santos L Halper : The way they went after everybody Trump-related and let every Democrat skate (so far), and turned the power of the U.S. Government against Trump minions, one has to wonder if they're singing, now, or composing, as Dershowitz likes to say. If a prosecutor has it in for you, he can bury you, pretty easily. I wonder what Rosenstein's decision NOT to prosecute Manaforte at the time says about this situation.
Some of the charges (and convictions) sound like Manaforte was one of those guys who tapped into the free-for-all that was post-Soviet Russia. Russia was pretty much taken over by corruption, with apparatchiki under the Soviets morphing magically into Giants of Industry, and making a lot of people a lot of money by basically raiding the Soviet Union's carcass, while a lot of people were suffering. The only name I knew of in this regard, specifically, was that Browder character. But Putin definitely has a dim view of many of the people doing business in Russia after the wall came down. Guys made huge money and dodged taxes in the chaos, I think.
That's why Putin is very popular in Russia. They see him as the guy who more or less restored order after a bunch of fat cats picked what little meat there was left on the USSR's bones.
But we'll have to see what comes of Cohen's situation. Those are pretty juicy accusations. I guess we'll see how it all ties in.
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@TheImperatorKnight A PhD dissertation is basically a scholar's first foray into and proof they are capable of self-directed, active scholarship. It's "making your bones" so you can join the big boys.
But there are a lot of hoops to jump through for the formal degree. A lot of course work in areas of study in which you have no interest, passion, or money coming in. Heh.
My advice to you would be to not let your obligations to an employee ruin YOUR life. Yes, you want to do right by her. If you're killing yourself to do that, then the contract to which you hold yourself is a bad contract for YOU, and she should understand. You didn't come into this world to make sure everybody else has a job at any cost to yourself.
If BattleStorms are all you WANT to do, that's one thing. Otherwise, maybe you could branch out and find something else useful and engaging for your partner/assistant/editor to do.
I'm probably not understanding your situation, fully. I'm just in a similar relationship with a nephew, trying to maximize the mutual benefit from his working for me.
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Nobody talks about how this is rooted in ethnic conflicts millennia in the making, and how the USA and WW II Allies carved out the ethno-state of Israel in 1948, by force of arms, and have preserved the ethno-state by force of arms, ever since.
Israel's enemies are what we made them to be. Israel's atrocities are what we made them to be, putting them in constant peril and under constant attack. Both sides have recent atrocities they can point to, to justify the atrocities they are committing, in the present.
I see no real solution, but I think the USA and Europe have no right to dictate how the map is drawn in the region, and we've been doing that for over a century, with the USA picking up where weakening Europe and Britain left off. We can't solve the world's problems, but we can sure as hell return to our constitutional roots (USA) and quit ADDING to them.
Until we end our participation, there will be forever war in the region. But nobody's talking about that. Everybody's talking about either October 7 atrocities or open-air prison in Gaza and genocide. BOTH sides are locked in an existential battle, and are the pawns of foreign powers. Foreign powers, in turn, are dragged into conflicts of their own making, when using their "pawns" as proxies (Do any of you remember Israeli bombings of Iraq, several decades ago?).
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The facts just keep trickling in. Criminal referrals is a whole new level of escalation. Meanwhile the investigation that's gotten most of the attention remains a nothing-burger.
More and more it's looking like "He who smell't it dealt it," and there was partisan overzealousness in FBI and DOJ, and probably a few insiders at or near the top intelligence and national security. I'm not sure how close this comes to Obama. More like Iran-Contra, where a cadre of insiders believed in something so strongly that they put the law in the back seat and let their feelings drive the bus.
I think there's a history of mutual back-scratching and winks and nods by individuals across the upper echelons that created a culture of "We work these levers as we please or as our friends wish." Situations such as "Here's these drugs, and there's our buddies trying to rebel against a bad guy, but they don't have enough arms to win. So we'll use the proceeds from seized assets to buy weapons, because WIN."
Reaganers did it in the '80s. Obamers did it, later. It's scarier in the present day, because of the powers taken by Bush II in the Patriot Act, but which weren't used to the extent that they were used by is successor's administration. Bush COULD, but he mostly DIDN'T. Can't say the same for Obama.
But who's to say what Bush II actually got away with, given the low evidence bar in the FISA courts. Prosecutors didn't apply the same standards for exculpatory evidence. Just present all the clues (including hints and rumors) that make somebody look bad, as if it has as much weight as real evidence, and withhold anything that exculpates (clears) the target of any wrongdoing.
But you know that the FISA setup is seriously flawed, whether any of these Obama clowns go to jail or not. Any power created for gov't use will be abused, eventually. Just a matter of time until somebody corrupt comes along and grabs those levers.
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There was a gal at work who only drank coffee if she didn't get any sleep the night before. She kept a Mr. Coffee in her closet and she'd break it out maybe once a month. All it took was one cup and she was wired for the whole day, a day she couldn't get through, otherwise.
Like weed or coke or many other drugs, once you're using them, daily, it's to feel normal, and you're no longer getting the full benefit.
I've been laid up in the hospital due to injury and been on demerol or whatever, just sleeping and hurting. Off coffee. Off nicotine. After a week without coffee, you're pretty much cleansed, and that first cup will make you high as shit.
You don't have to be off it for 3 months for the full kick. Just a week. During that week, you've got to be able to just lay down and sleep whenever you feel like it. Powering through the withdrawal and trying to be normal is extremely hard, and you'll probably get headaches. But if you can let down and sleep when you feel like it, it's not bad, at all.
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Wearing masks works well against mouth-breathers and close-talkers. But as a preventative measure against the 'Rona? Very questionable, especially when the masks you buy all say "This product will not prevent you from catching anything." Factor in all the hands-to-the-face nonsense associated with fiddling with the damn things, and the benefits are probably very minimal.
Lock-downs were only to flatten the curve, and only for 2 weeks, while we figured out how we were going to treat it.
Where the "conspiracy" comes in is the gleeful embrace of perpetual lock-downs and paranoia about a disease that has less than 1% fatality rate, with easily-identifiable risk groups, who should take more precautions. For some, the destruction of the economy is a golden opportunity to usher in authoritarian socialist utopia.
The measurement of infection rates varies from place to place, and is as much a product of how much testing is done as how many people are actually infected. So the numbers are all very misleading. Also, we stopped talking about death rates, which are very small, since they stopped shipping infected patients into nursing homes, where they could spread it to the most vulnerable people. sigh
Countries more impacted by malaria are much less hesitant to use HCQ, and the 'Rona hasn't impacted them as severely as more developed countries, whose leadership and media WANT the 'Rona to stick around as a major issue, indefinitely, because they can engage in telling everybody what to do, which is their deepest desire.
Yes, the average person is dumb. Most politicians are below average.
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It's only smart to hedge against what the bankers might do to us. Diversify.
This includes staying in debt, which is counter-intuitive, but with the government/banks prepared at any moment to inflate the currency, you can end the day with more STUFF that you can pay off with worthless dollars, later. But have some debt, with some nice toys on installment plans. Some gold. Some ETFs. Some stocks. Some bonds. If you can swing it, lock in a 30-year mortgage at the low fixed rates that are available, now, and have been for years. That mortgage payment looks smaller and smaller, in real terms, every year. It's about the only good deal out there for people, and if there's one thing I'd tell a young person is that they should just start NOW and put half of anything they make towards a down payment on a house.
I didn't, and I deeply regret it. I always worked, but as a college student (for far too long), I was paranoid about losing my house if I had to move, because my parents had that happen to them. But my parents were just stupid or inattentive or something. The fact is, I could've gotten into my own place by the mid-80s, if I'd used that "save half" strategy. I didn't know, at the time, how many good property-management companies there are and how easy it is to hire one to give you a small profit on the house you left behind. Once you're into the place, with the right mgmt company and all the proper insurance, it generates a small cash flow all by itself. And you wait for a ridiculously good offer on it.
Anyway, I would've been risking little to save up and buy that little house up on the hill, even though I did settle on the far side of the Continental Divide, chasing jobs for my skill set. By now, that little property would be a place to land when I moved back across the Divide.
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I'll go out on a limb, which is easier for a lightweight who wafts gently to the ground from any height, than for this crowd, and suggest maybe extra resources in air superiority was the right idea. Maybe they would've been better served by fuel-efficient, high-clearance, rugged, easy-to-repair lorries to move their men around. Dig in with infantry and heavy guns on defense. But in good flying weather? Go where you want and destroy all comers if you have air superiority. Use those lorries or something beefier to pull the artillery pieces around.
Save all the money you put into tanks and put it into 4- and 6-wheel drive vehicles. The whole tank warfare thing makes it a constant battle to keep infantry with tanks. And you don't want your tanks to be caught out against infantry without infantry support for the tanks. But what if you're just really good at moving men and heavy guns, and focus on that. You can dig in and make little fortresses for your guns in captured territory.
Properly coordinated with the air forces, with air superiority over the enemy, you can advance your men and guns rapidly in good weather, and then force the enemy to attack YOU when you're on pause and digging in deeper every minute you're at the new location. Again, if you're properly coordinated, your air can clear the immediate vicinity forward of any tank forces that aren't hunkered down. You'd be on the defense by night and in poor visibility conditions. Those conditions that work against your air also work against their ground. Less than ideal attacking conditions.
Anyway, it just seems to me that it might've been more efficient to forego use of tanks, entirely. You can stick a pretty big gun on a lorry, especially if you're building the lorry for military use. Standard gun mounts built into the decks of every one of them. And as screening forces/scouts, you could have a fleet of highly efficient motorcycle units. A good dirt bike is very practical in all kinds of terrain and only burns a thimbleful of gas, compared to tanks, halftracks and big trucks.
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Yes, we need trade. No we don't need to play dirty tricks.
No, we don't need oil. We have plenty. Securing energy concessions for our friends, by hook or by crook or by force of arms in foreign countries is not how we should do business.
We would dominate the world, in any event, just by being true to our principles at home and abroad. When we cling to that dominance with all the old tools and evils of empire, that's when we risk losing our enviable position as the freest and the most prosperous, BECAUSE of that freedom.
The more the government does to make things "better," the more insecure we become. But that fact never stands in the way of powerful people who want to MAKE the world dance to their tune, rather than doing the hardest thing of all: LET things happen. No government wants to do that, because it reduces the power and status of individuals in government, most of who are there for the power. That's why government's power needs to be curtailed. That's why its scope and role must be limited to the absolute minimum.
Mike Benz knows a lot of the details, but he doesn't want to grasp that the world would be a pretty good place with less government intervention.
There are no all-seeing, all-good, and all-wise people we can put in charge of these institutions and expect things will go swimmingly. People who believe that are stuck on the wheel and will always be stuck on the wheel. They'll create positions of power that will always come back to cause problems, down the road.
Maybe you do get a genius-saint in one of those high spots. What about the next person in that position? Eventually, the political "climbers" will obtain those posts, and weaponize/subvert/guide the institution for their personal benefit.
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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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I think tank-on-tank comparisons are overrated. I think it's more about logistics and combined arms, infantry, artillery and armor, but not so much tank-vs-tank, even though we hang on all accounts of such encounters. Air also matters, and in the early stages of Barbarossa, the Germans had total air superiority.
American industrial might was on full display, despite the head-to-head between tanks. The Allies could afford to take losses, and have as many or more armored units in the field, tomorrow as they had, today. The Soviets were also producing at a high rate, but in addition, already had divisions of armored and infantry divisions waiting on the Eastern side of the Urals. The Germans would defeat the Red Army and there'd be a whole 'nother Red Army opposing them at the NEXT river crossing.
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The rise of nationalism after decades of the Globalist Project is a de-centralizing principle. I'm one who's not a big fan of nationalism, unless it means resisting being eaten by a bigger nation! LOL! I'm currently FOR nationalism, because it's working against uber-toxic-super-nationalism, i.e., globalism.
I think the globalists have it entirely upside-down. Yes, nationalism is dangerous. But it's better than globalism. It's better to have local autonomy, in general, so as a limited-government libertarian, I want to see the NATIONAL governments back the hell off. We forget how England - as we know it - was forged out of a system of self-sufficient and essentially autonomous boroughs, brought into being by Alfred the Great. We shouldn't be looking to centralize, but DE-centralize, and the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts. Top-down controls are increasingly ineffective and even downright tyrannical. The fact is that society's evolving much more rapidly than our traditional institutions can keep up with. By the time all the committees have held their deliberations and all the bureaucrats have printed the NEW form for us to fill out, the form is obsolete!
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@richarddebono7092 We're poorly educated because we let the government take over education. This myth that government runs anything better than private companies is perpetuated by government, but it's always the most regulated industries that are the most dysfunctional. The "private prisons" are totally run and regulated by government. If they weren't, they'd be held accountable, but it's a "public-private partnership," so of course it's corrupt.
You want affordable health care? Cut the bureaucrats out. Doctors spend 30% of their time just filling out forms. Again, it's public-private partnerships that increase red tape and put health decisions in the hands of a bureaucrat with a damnable spreadsheet, instead of making it a decision between doctor, patient, and a charitable community that lives within its means. But everybody wants million-dollar health care paid for by somebody else, by force. $omething has to give, and it's always quality and quantity, while stuffed shirts who care for no one make all the decisions, and since they inevitably end up underpaid, trying to keep more promises than can be kept, they're easy to buy off. "Monsanto paid for the west wing. Of course GMO food is good for you!"
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They've gotta do something. You can't BUY good memes, these days. You're at the mercy of the creativity of your side. And I think that's what's happening, now. You can't just win with money and boots-on-the-ground machine. Some dipshit will come along and Kekistani your ass, and all that money gets flushed down the toilet, NOT because some quiet conservative respectfully and calmly tries to reason with you as you become more and more offended and louder and louder.
Instead, what the right (which REALLY should be the LEFT, because libertarians and their like have been the ONLY ones who've consistently spoken truth to power, and warned our neocon and neoliberal friends that beyond Life, Liberty and Property, government really has no role in our lives, and we're increasingly freaked out by all that's wrong with the world, because we made the mistake of asking government to help us with EVERYthing, and NOW we wonder why government is EVERYwhere and shit don't work right and we're off killing people in foreign lands we don't even KNOW. What up with that?
Say "No" to those who would make us serfs. Don't want to be lorded over? Don't ask for help on every fuckin' thing under the sun, from welfare to health care, even to food (Since when does the FDA have YOUR best interests at heart? Nah. But Monsanto's in good with 'em, I understand.) .
PROGRESSIVES actually ASK for the NEW SERFDOM. They no sooner threw off the chains of the monarchy than they started scheming to put us under iron rule of civil-service oligarchy. High-level government officials are the new princes and dukes and kings. They bestow favors on those who give them money. The regulatory agencies are run by the industries being regulated, or rather, the most ruthless and most powerful big companies IN the industry, thereby preventing any new competition from breaking into the free market. People bitch about capitalism run amuck and the fact is that our system is very fascist, with government giving unfair advantage to big companies at every opportunity. And it's not because people are bad. It's just the nature of the thing and the nature of the power to destroy (Power to tax is the power to destroy (when you don't pay your taxes)) that is vested only in government. Government is the ONLY institution in the nation that has the right to use force. As such, why the HELL do we want it to run ANYthing other than what it absolutely MUST (National sovereignty, Life, Liberty and Property).
Jimmy Dore thinks everybody should make $15/hour no matter how worthless (inexperienced) of a worker they are, and everybody should get free health care. These were BOTH the primary features of FASCISM that made them it popular (along with COMMUNISM) in their early days. I think Stalin converted close to a million people by hooking them up with black-market potatoes! LOL!
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Gulf of Tonkin, WMDs in Iraq, catastrophic global warming, RussiaGate, Covington Kids, Judge Cavanaugh, Lab Leak, Lockdowns, Jab Mandates, Ukraine, ...
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Yes. I'm not exactly sure what legalized, regulated recreational drug sales would look like, but the way we "fight" drugs, now, only empowers the most violent and ruthless drug cartels, gives the government an excuse to militarize law enforcement and surveil everyone with or without probable cause, and makes a HUGE amount of money available for the corruption of law enforcement. So, militarized and corrupt police plus drug gangs that would put Al Capone to shame.
Today, they un-self-consciously say things like "Escobar was bigger than Al Capone," when it was guys like Al Capone who convinced the American public that the prohibition of alcohol only made problems associated with alcohol WORSE. The cure was worse than the disease! But somehow nobody makes that obvious connection. I think there's too much money in it for the state and the drug lords, who work for each OTHER, if you take a step back and look at how it all plays out.
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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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@katherinenichols4831 : You should learn more history and especially the Enlightenment Period and our grand experiment in self-government. Your postmodernist thinking is pre-modern, which is to say, will take us back to serfdom, which we fought so hard to put behind us. It all starts with "Government is our savior." Until you start understanding some Adam Smith, you will never understand why so many SMART people despise your government-centric perspective. Easy answers. And you think you're smart, because you accept your spoon-feedings in public ed. and legacy media.
It's about power and control. When government is big, people are small. Our country is the first to explicitly step away from patronizing government, and all you Democrats want to do is drag us back into the days when the elites decided what you could do, what you could own, and what you can say. It's hopeless trying to explain this to someone who's been brain-washed by establishment elites to advocate for what only the elites really want.
Real prosperity and personal autonomy comes from the ground up, not from the government down.
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I don't see any of 'em I agree with on everything, but Trump and Ramaswamy are the two most likely to end war. But I honestly can't say I trust any of them to reform and reduce our military footprint. We want to be strong and be able to hang with the big kids, but that has nothing to do with spending what we spend on over 1,000 bases around the world, with troops who are more like occupiers than soldiers.
Bring our boys home. Defend our borders. Create a lean, mean, fighting machine that no one will want to fool with. Mind our own business. Our military is all about punching down and bribing foreigners to let us have bases in their countries.
We need to stop trying to preserve the postwar (WW II) status quo from 1950, like it's an endangered species. The New World Order is multi-polar, not a globalist's wet dream. We certainly want safe trade routes at sea and on land, but that's why we want trading partners rather than foes. The Russians and Chinese WANT to trade. As soon as we're trading partners, safe passage is what everybody wants, so those who would threaten trade are vastly outnumbered!
Something I'd do as president is insist on no entangling alliances. If a country wants to petition to become one of our United States, it may petition to do so, and we should probably make it easier for states to leave if they can't abide our federal government. Lincoln ended slavery. That was good. But it should be easier for states to secede from the Union if the feds are off their heads. Anyway, if you're a state, the USA will defend you to the hilt, and you will organize your institutions along American lines, but most of all, abide by the U.S. Constitution.
But we're a long way from the USA abiding by the U.S. Constitution. Miles away from my crackpot ideas.
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There are a LOT of desk jobs in the city that can be done perfectly well from home, for a fraction of the cost and far less air pollution and energy use. I think that's what companies should want. They're just still figuring out how to get people who get their work done without somebody standing over them all day. Done properly, with proper training and the right people, working from home makes a ton of sense for a lot of desk jobs.
Physical jobs that require a real pair of human hands also exist in urban areas. But our commute culture is for the birds for a big chunk of office workers. We just need to train people differently/better, and maybe living in a box and going to an actual huge office should only be for beginners who need to get certified in-house before they can work from home. COVID turned a lot of people off from remote work because the of way they went about it. They got plunged into the deep end of the pool before graduating from water wing assist.
I feel this is also true for remote learning. The schools tried to move everything online in the '2 weeks to stop the spread.' Teachers didn't like it, weren't properly trained for it, but more importantly, children and families weren't properly prepared or trained for it. In the long run, it's going to be more effective and cheaper for most k-12 to be delivered directly to the home. But until parents get weaned off the free baby-sitting, the lack of one brick building to dump all the kids in for 6 hours a day put tremendous pressure on all the super-Moms, trying to raise kids without any help from a man. But even traditional marriages were stressed because most moms work outside the house, so there's a real reliance by ALL on taxpayer-funded free baby-sitting. No regard was given to the massive impact this had on parents when they locked us down, and now it's being used to convince people to stay with the traditional, free-to-parents setup that is the cause of the deterioration of education.
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Fauci's NIAID funded gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab. Wuhan lab is the epicenter of the outbreak. Connecting the dots is too much to ask of CNN. So is listening to Dr. Baric, who worked closely with Dr. Zhi, who's gone on the record saying "This looks like how we engineer viruses in gain-of-function research." He did everything he could to dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis, while covering-up his agency's funding of Wuhan lab.
You say there's room for debate, here, and there should be good-faith conversations that include the lab-leak hypothesis. People have been saying this for over a year, and it is outlets like CNN who claimed it was debunked on the word of the very person, Peter Daszak, who was the money conduit to Wuhan lab for gain-of-function research! Follow the money, as they say.
The outlines of this have been very clear for over a year, but you wouldn't know that if you depended on the "Most trusted source in news." gag
People: You really need to get out more. CNN making a straw man out of Sean Hannity, who's a joke, is like Sean Hannity making a straw man out out of Brian Stelter, who is also a joke. Hannity get the facts right more often, but he's impossible to sit through, as is Brian Stelter. They're both highly partisan and cherry-pick their facts to fit the narrative. They make artificial distinctions between each other. He calls CNN far left. CNN calls Hannity far right.
But the fact is they're BOTH creatures of the corporations. Neither of them will ever really cross their corporate advertisers.
This is some of the most dishonest or just plain stupid discussion I've heard since the last time I held my nose to listen to Stelter feed me the Democrat National Committee's narrative.
WHO can't be trusted. China can't be trusted. Neither can any of the "traditional" legacy media, who've been lying to us since FDR was president, and probably before. But FDR pretty much marks the beginning of radio/television mass media, and the illusion of objectivity. The big networks have NEVER crossed a sitting administration's desire to go to war or grow government power, except for Vietnam. And that Vietnam generation, that staged mass protests FOR free speech, now seeks to CENSOR speech, now that they've become the establishment.
But that's another subject. CNN is just one more cog in the manufacture-of-consent machine that's led the American people by the nose for decades. The mask finally slipped when Obama abolished the Fairness Doctrine, and networks were no longer obliged to even PRETEND to be objective.
Ironically, I think that's as it should be. I think Obama just did the math (over 90% Democrats running the big networks), and said "We don't need to hear the other side." But I think it's boomeranged. I think the propaganda was much stronger when they pretended to be objective, but cherry picked and slanted the news in much more subtle ways. Before Obama, the editors did it all in the story selection.
But now, we have active censorship taking place. it's not technically "government censorship." It's more a matter of a government official calling FaceBook and saying "This story is false and I want it taken down." FaceBook is only too happy to oblige.
New revelations about Hunter Biden's laptop. Not a word in "mainstream media," except for maybe FOX. But it's on blackout on all the other networks. When the hounds were getting close to Hunter's pay-for-play in Ukraine, that's when they went after Trump for supposed "quid-pro-quo" over a phone call where he said nothing wrong.
But you wouldn't know about that if all you watched was CNN.
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They call them "orcs." At root, it is hatred and fear of a nation that's managing its affairs responsibly, and not participating in its own destruction. They're shocked that, unlike their own populations, they can't deceive and bully Russia, and they lack the economic and military wherewithal to compel Russia to their will.
This is the culmination of the cultural, economic and industrial de-construction of the West, in which 2/3 of the world refuses to participate.
But western leaders have to double-down on madness or lose power. Knowing this, I fear coming atrocities, including nuclear war. They will stop at nothing and stoop to anything, relying on their propaganda and censorship machine to carry the day as it has for decades on its own population. The rest of the world is watching and nobody's listening to CNN over there, any more. Legacy and Big Tech censorship is out in the open in spite of every effort to conceal it. There are just too many skeptics and sources of indisputable facts that they can not silence.
Yet.
But they're trying. Lord knows they're trying. They're still very good at getting off to a fast start, with united-front media, but the time lag between the Lie and the Refutation is slowly but steadily decreasing. They still got Biden Crime Family suppressed long enough to re-take the White House and hold the Senate. They may pull it off, again, because the Fix is In in the USA. But I think time is against them. It's just a question of how much damage they can do in the meantime and how much damage they will do on the way out.
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Did it occur to you that you're all wrapped up inside a sunk-cost fallacy?
Maybe we should question the original idea of (re-)creating the state of Israel in 1948, when we were all full of ourselves, drunk with power, with the British full of plans for re-drawing the map of the Middle East one more time. WWII saw an extension of British colonialism by other (U.S.) means.
I think our leaders got all full of themselves and, guided by the British, thought they were playing the Great Game against the USSR and China, when the plain fact is, their systems just can't keep up if we make them play by the rules and don't let them get a hold of our intellectual properties. We'll always have a lead. Free people just create a lot more and invent a lot more.
Instead, we've grown our government and created something very akin to the totalitarian regimes our leaders claim to oppose, which is their reason for acting like Naxis at home, looking for ways to censor speech and control the flow of information, using external and internal threats as the excuse to go after people with dissenting opinions, who speak against their policies.
We're basically dragging ourselves down to Stalin's level. People more and more afraid and more and more distrusting of people on "the other side" of the aisle from them, with one side always figuring that the way to win is to seize control of government and use government to suppress the opposition. I think we're seeing that, now, but we're talking about who committed the worst atrocity or made the most outrageous statement. Rather than dwell on the wrong in others, spend more time on the underlying truths.
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Good job getting multiple points of view stated in a small amount of time.
He has a degree. What's it in?
First approximation is that he's a bit spoiled, and it's not as easy to strike out on your own, these days. Kind of a double whammy.
Before WW II, multi-generation households were the norm. After WW II, most people could afford to cut those ties, and people had the mobility and communications to find work several states away. People look back on and "miss" having grandma around, but most, given the choice, would rather split off. Mothers-in-law are notorious for brow-beating daughters-in-law, and like as not, son sides with Mom against wife.
I think we're going back to more multi-generational living, for the same reason that it was tradition: economic need.
I kind of came up at the tail-end of the baby-boom generation. We had it easier than our parents, and thanks to technology, our kids had it even easier than us. But as a group, I think we were lazier than our parents, but it wasn't that hard to make our own way, especially with regard to home ownership.
What my parents bought for $70,000 in 1978 is now worth $400,000-$500,000. The average couple of today, with one of them working for $15--$20 an hour, could save up for a couple years and afford a $70,000 house. If they worked while still at home before marrying or during their first year of marriage, they could swing it that way, too. But not $400,000. That would take several years, assuming nothing went wrong.
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She has some good ideas and understands quite a bit, but she's letting her facts lead her thru a chain of reasoning that ends by concluding that we need to give power to the state in order to deal with problems in the world that are mostly created by the state.
Yes. Climate change is real. That does not mean I give my life up to bureaucrats and carpet-baggers of the Al Gore variety.
Yes. Nuclear proliferation is real. That doesn't mean the globalists running foreign policy got or are getting it right.
Yes. Poverty is real. That doesn't mean that the answer is just a hand-out. Maybe you can make a case for free education, but public education has been failing for decades, and the costs go up, while the marginal cost of transmitting all knowledge is effectively ZERO.
Yes. Illness and accident are real. That doesn't mean government should therefore take over health care.
Top-down approaches to social engineering are very heady, and the Leontief model was good stuff for beating equally planned-economy types in World War II, but we remain in a state of perpetual crisis that KEEPS us on a war footing and essentially fascist solutions (government edict) to the human condition.
We see all around us in nature how natural feedback systems work and how the incentives are always obvious and harmonious. We see all around us in society, where we ignore positive incentives and implement destructive incentives, because we haven't thought through the consequences of the use of compulsion to fix all of society's problems through laws, rules and regulations.
She's right on the cusp of a big epiphany by recognizing how fast things are changing but she misses the obvious conclusion that our old bureaucratic ways of dealing with things can't evolve as rapidly as the culture, itself, but in the end, she brings an Establishment message.
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So they're stalling to prevent BREXIT, but if they stall too long, the globalists will be thrown out of Brussels, ANYway, in the wake of major nationalist-populist victories sweeping Europe. So, much as in the USA, the elites and careerists infesting government and media are using process and propaganda to thwart the will of the people. But it's all a rearguard action, by globalists in full retreat. They can delay things, but the more they do to delay things, the more decisive their eventual defeat will be. They're in a lose-lose situation, and - if USA be any indication - are lining their nests and covering their asses in preparation for their eventual ouster.
If you're stuck in the 24-hour news cycle, you see one brilliant defense after another, much like the Nazis fighting in the hedgerows against the Allies in France, with vastly superior Tiger Tanks outgunning weak Sherman tanks, but if you take a step back and look at the overall strategic situation, you see the bad guys are in full retreat (Battle of the Bulge notwithstanding). One might view this maneuvering by the EU against Teresa May as their own Battle of the Bulge. And the coming EU elections will be the relief of Bastogne.
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@bryanb3352 That's what Windoze shills have been saying, for years. Linux is more robust than Windows for servers.
I can't tell you how many times my old Windows NT IT dept told me I couldn't do x, y, or z, because of security, when I KNEW LINUX was doing x, y, and z, without a hitch.
They always acted so smug and wanted me to be impressed with how much they knew and how much overtime they were putting in, when IT depts that knew what they were doing were spending a lot of time sipping coffee, and learning new things, because everything was running, uninterrupted.
We had network outages all the time (early 2000s), while my commercial servers that I bought, separately, never failed.
I'm sure I'm out of date, but I definitely have anti-MS bias.
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@flaneur5560 I see huge government as part of the infrastructure underlying the manufacture of consent that drives the war machine. Progressives SEE the problems with the military adventurism, but fail to see similar forms replicated here at home and invisibly HELPING the establishment SELL its narratives to ignorant, indoctrinated masses.
Progressives can clearly see the problems with the military, but they don't see how toxic the government agencies themselves are. Progressives want to give these agencies more and more power to fight the evil corporatist plutocracy, when in actuality, those agencies are working FOR the corporatocracy, directly and indirectly.
Progressives are the first to call out abuses of power, but they're also the first to grant more power to strangers.
ALL institutions take on a life of their own, driven by the petty motivations of the most feckless officials in high places. And the fecklessness proliferates the bigger it is and the longer it exists. Progressives race to give one guy power to change all things everywhere and then gnash their teeth because he doesn't do what they want, or worse, hide from the consequences resulting directly from his doing exactly what they want.
I'd call it "unintended consequences" if such careless use of power hadn't led to the exact SAME consequences many times throughout history. That reduces it to either malice or willful ignorance of the past.
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It's not just the Chinese disinformation. It's the authoritarian suppression of anything that varied in any way from the Chinese disinformation. "Our" media chose to believe the one guy who had something to lose from word getting out, Peter Daszak. And Daszak worked in close cooperation with Fauci to "fortify" the coverup, with the full cooperation of corporate media who showed no inclination to do any real fact-checking, unless it was to ask Peter Daszak or Anthony Fauci what THEY thought.
These blunders by once-trusted (foolishly, in hindsight) corporate media, of which FOX is also a part, have lost them all trust and confidence by the half of the country that's open to competing ideas and judging them on their merits, rather than being spoon-fed by self-appointed arbiters of truth. Even now, YouTube has a banner at the top of the comments directing users to Google-approved propaganda on COVID.
FOX gets more of the big stories right than MSM, but FOX is still corporate, and still helps present an MSM united front on numerous topics. We don't even know what stories THEY leave out because it might piss somebody off in their hierarchy, which overlaps those of other legacy networks.
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Actually, in an economic system grounded in fiat currency, it makes SENSE to stay in debt. That way, when and if the bankers decide to hyper-inflate the currency, you get yours back by paying off your shit in worthless dollars. That's why you should always go for the best FIXED rate that you possibly can. And even if there isn't a big crash, the way they quietly inflate the currency, every year, your ACTUAL interest rate on a loan is quite a bit less than it says on the loan application.
Being in debt is a hedge against inflation. It's crazy, but it's true. Under the current setup, you're a FOOL if you behave with traditional prudence, saving money in savings accounts that pay less interest than the rate of inflation. Why save? That money's NEVER going to be worth more than it is, today. Get as many toys/real estate as you can, and live for today! It's how the system is rigged. Go back to a gold (or other commodity(ies)) backed currency, and all of a sudden, it makes sense to save, again.
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Health insurance executives are trapped. The government tells them what they have to cover, and it can change overnight. So they cozy up to the government to stay in business.
Nobody remembers, because it happened so long ago, but health insurance was invented by big corporations as an incentive for prospective employees after Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted wage freezes during the Great Depression (which FDR capitalized on, to consolidate and perpetuate his power). Big corporations offered health and pension benefits.
Before this watershed moment in American history, local charities and benefactors gave to hospitals and built hospitals. The government only makes it SEEM like they're doing a better job than people with actual compassion and charitable instincts. Health care should be a personal and local-community thing, not a slush fund for bureaucrats.
Once the government stepped in, the system because essentially socialist/fascist, with a veneer of private enterprise, but CORRUPT private enterprise, because health care providers had to get in good with the government to stay in business. Inevitably, this led to heavy lobbying of Congress to pass laws that protected insurers and health care providers. The end result? Overpriced, low-quality care.
This is just how government works, or rather, doesn't work. When you make charity compulsory, you destroy the charitable instinct, and nobody feels any responsibility for their neighbor, because they already pay taxes for that sort of thing, and if anybody's falling through the cracks, that's someone else's fault.
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Teepee is cool, because the culture that used it was total nomad in its existence. Those tribes could pick up and move everybody and everything better than European cavalry regiment of comparable size. Using horses, they could set up 30 miles away, next day, and the day after that. Of course, they preferred to set up and stay for a while, coordinated with their hunting. And it wasn't just the plains Indians, hunting buffalo, but the Nez Perce in the Northwest moved by season and as needed, as well or better than the U.S. Cavalry that was chasing them. Not Army-vs-Army. But Army-vs-Entire-Community.
Anyway, getting this elaborate with a tipi kind of defeats the purpose and mission of the tool. But I get it. I think the effort might be counter-productive for the smoke-free idea, though. Part of keeping the space smoke-free is bringing fresh air into the space. You're seeking to bring in fresh air to feed the fire, so if you make your teepee tight to the ground, the only fresh air into the room goes through the fire, first. Think about it.
Making it tight against the ground reduces drafts, but letting it leak at the bottom draws fresh air in near the ground, and I imagine I'd sleep with my nose close to a fresh air inlet. With that many bricks to work with, she could build a rocket stove that'd burn small amounts of wood, with very little smoke, and the bricks would radiate the heat after the fire went out. Making the fresh air go past the human to the stove might make such an open setup more smoke-free. The rest is knowing how to build small fires that don't smoke, much.
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FOX News is going downhill, pretending to be conservative/libertarian, but partaking of more and more leftist/statist narratives and shutting off the comments when they DO. FOX is the only legacy network I even SLIGHTLY patronize, by watching SOME of their stuff on YouTube. Now that they're shutting down comments on most of their controversial content, I'm about done with FOX, entirely. They're ALL pushing me away from ALL legacy networks.
I don't mind a network being partisan, if they're up front about it. I can balance conflicting takes against one another and make my OWN decisions. But now I'm just starting to think that ALL of the legacy networks - by which I mean commercial-interrupted programming - are a waste of time. They're incapable of open-format and NUANCED conversations just from their business model. I'd rather support channels, DIRECTLY, from Jimmy Dore (far left, but sane about SOME things, like foreign policy and corruption) to OAN (hopelessly partisan Republican, but they'll talk about things the rest won't). And guys like Joe Rogan, Tim Pool, Anthony Brian Logan, and a long list of independents. Tarl Warwick (Styxhexenhammer666), Towlie, ... The list keeps growing and shifting, as I find better sources, who check out when I fact-check them.
All I can be sure of from the LEGACY networks is that they don't put ANYTHING on air that isn't approved by their corporate sponsors or major stockholders. You might be surprised at how much clout the Saudis have in our supposedly "free press." Just look at who owns big chunks of their stock, and you KNOW you won't hear anything bad about THEM.
I'll show myself out.
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My last visit to a hospital, last spring, was the scariest one yet. Not because of why I was there, but because hospitals have gone full-on bureaucrat, and saving money the way bureaucrats always do: Hire more staff to help the administrators and cut everything else to the bone. Teach nurses NOT to be compassionate. Put doctors into mass production, that is, when they're not filling out reams of paperwork that all the bureaucrats insist is CRUCIAL INFORMATION, until they decide a month later that the don't like the data, so they flush all the work done by everybody under them right down the toilet, while they dream up NEW forms to fill out, in a desperate attempt to feel relevant in an industry to which their only contribution is finding new forms of red tape to cover their own asses with.
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You just gotta understand that the networks are biased and their shrinking audiences are biased in the same way. So when they're critical of Trump, they're just reporting truth. When they're critical of Biden, that's just being mean.
I remember polling in the '70s and '80s being used to promote unilateral disarmament. Just because people don't like nuclear weapons doesn't mean they want us to disarm while nations who don't respect the rights of their own people do NOT disarm.
Now, before MY bias starts showing, our CIA and other intel agencies of that period made the same mistakes then that they make now. They VASTLY overestimated Soviet military capabilities, vastly underestimated the toxicity of the creeping socialism and de-construction of liberty taking place right under our noses. And our foreign-policy "leadership" propped up bloody dictators all over the world, if that meant gaining a proxy hostile to the Soviets.
The USA is founded on principles of anti-colonialism, but how long was it before Perry steamed into Tokyo Harbor and forced the opening of Japan at gunpoint?
Anyhoo, I just wish we would return to our core values and principles in inalienable natural rights of humans and limited government. But the people are too easily swayed by "Look! Free Stuff!" The Republicans USED to oppose the unending growth of government scope and power, but they saw the Democrats, who never hesitated to buy a vote, becoming the dominant party in the USA and so they became just as socialist as the Dems. And the Dems, seeing how a nice foreign war can boost popularity at home, they became just as hawkish as any Republican.
Today, everyone looks back wistfully on "bipartisanship" of the "old days." But to ME, "bipartisanship" means that both major parties agree to spend more money than we have to buy votes and get us embroiled in foreign wars to unify the people behind a corrupt and feckless establishment that just wants THEIR gravy train to keep running.
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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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It's getting harder and harder to shut out ANYthing, INCLUDING THE TRUTH! Of course, there's a lot more NOISE, now, too, but transparency is becoming harder and harder to AVOID, and most folks turns out are pretty OK with that.
But bad guys yearn for the days when you just had to kill a guy and muzzle the newspaper that you've got in your hip pocket, or make 2 phone calls and trust that the major news networks would skirt key issues for you.
Now we're ALL reporters, in a very real sense. And we're not even all that sophisticated in the new possibilities. And if the majors get muzzled, that's a SCOOP and Internet fame for somebody ELSE.
But you can sure bet that FB and YouTube are doing everything they can to keep the NEXT Trump from getting the word out. I just hope we manage to keep the government out of it. There's lots of pressure from more than one direction to limit free speech, because the last few years have been so LOUD. But the reason it's loud is because people are getting a voice, and that voice is quite a bit different (more raucous and irreverent) than the carefully spoon-fed drivel we've been consuming since the invention of TV.
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Yes.
Makes me think these nations need to totally de-colonize. That means kicking us all out! Europeans (including Americans), Russians, and Chinese!
Maybe what they need is permaculture from India! Import 10,000 Indian villagers with successful water projects under their belts, and go to work!
That's what I think of when I look at these war-torn regions. If they could somehow get the upper hand against greedy psychopaths, there's no limit to what they could create. Build a reservoir and pay for it (and other projects) with the gold!
sigh We know enough about permaculture, now, we should see little oases popping up all over that (and other) part(s) of the world. Places where there happens to be gold, these oases would pay for themselves!
But no. People want to dig up the gold as fast as possible and get out, to spend the gold somewhere else on somebody else.
For as long as I've been alive, it's been impossible to achieve anything resembling a prosperous democratic republic, with real guarantees of people's civil (property) rights, and a culture and government that protects them. There's no limit to the good that could be done. There is a limit to the destruction that can be done. We've seen it. It looks like Hell.
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Yes. That's why I just smh at the media meltdown over Helsinki, and to me, it was Trump going to Europe and reminding them that USA is the heavyweight in the NATO equation, and Putin was more of an equal than EU was. Still a nuclear power to rival the USA. You don't shake a stick in the face of a man with a Colt .45, and Putin's well-heeled. Exacting a nonviolent price for not playing nice, in the way of economic sanctions, tariffs, and the like. You don't need to come to blows to sit on an uncomfortable opponent. You can make it tougher to do business, or at least not throw good money after bad in security arrangements that continue to guarantee the security of Europe, 70 years after they should've been on their own... That's not our land. Why is it our responsibility, and why do we pay the lion's share of NATO?
EU has nothing to tell us. We have everything to tell them.
Russia's interests are a mix. Some in line with ours. Some not. But beatin' the war drums, like neolibs and neocons? Nah. Hell nah.
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This reminds me of the postcard that the state of Oregon came up with, because they were being flooded by new people. And I'm not talking recently. It was the '60s or '70s, I'm pretty sure. "Welcome to Oregon!" and it was a kid in yellow slicker and galoshes in a rain storm, to put people off a little.
Most of the countdown were all good things, to me. Those long straights are where you can make EXCELLENT time. Some of us like to be alone with our own thoughts, and you get opportunities for that in spots, in Wyoming. Now whether the isolation kills folks by their own hand, OR it kept more folks with that tendency ALIVE longer, because they chose to live in a quiet, natural setting.
Most of the best places - I'm partial to the Gallatin - you're not putting in the video. Is this just a purposely bleak video? If I wanted a 2nd set of digs on the far (East) side of the Continental Divide, I'd look for something deserted on one of those high rivers and streams.
My plan is to settle down on the West side of the Divide, like the North Fork of the Clearwater, or farther East, up the Middle Fork or on up on the Lochsa. You can get yourself attacked by moose, grizzly or mountain lion up there. Never go unheeled, though some do.
Never spent much time on the Selway or the Salmon, but I spent months on the Lochsa, which is right near the Divide.
Not many shots of some BEAUTIFUL country. You definitely want to get geared-up, even if you're just a townie, because all the best fun involves the elements. If you're high enough to be in the trees, it's high enough you want a big, sturdy truck and a snow machine. Nothing better if you're into skiing, though!
People tend to be vigorous in those mountains. If you're not pretty brisk, you freeze to death.
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Meh. It depends. I imagine there are a number of lines of enquiry that Horowitz and his crew are all set up to pursue, that would be foundational to anything Huber could do. The new tidbit is that Huber was instead investigating Hillary. It all depends, now, on what Barr means by "fruition." Are they wrapping things up and it's a no-bill? Or are we about to start hearing about grand juries?
It's become fashionable, lately, to simply list a bunch of career-destroying evidence, and then go on to say you won't be prosecuting any of it. That's the standard being set by Comey and Mueller. As big a thorn as Comey's been in Trump's side, he at the same time single-handedly destroyed Hillary's chances of being elected. Or at least that's how he's portrayed. You might argue that, as with the FISA courts, he was just rushing to the microphone to get ahead of truth-bombs about to fall, anyway.
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She's wrong on American culture. The fear never went away. Those kids in school in the '80s still believe all the nuclear-freeze propaganda, and now they're politicians and administrators. In their younger days, it was the Spotted Owl and Snail-Darter on the enviro front. Now it's CO2-driven global warming. Same people. Same fears. Same confirmation bias. Same mix of half-truths that add up to lies.
At the same time, it has been revealed that estimates by hawkish conservatives during the '80s over-estimated Soviet capabilities by a factor of 10, in order to justify a military big enough to police the entire planet (poorly, arbitrarily, brutally and often greedily).
But otherwise, she's spot on about how the global warming crowd, who pretend they're champions of the disadvantaged and dispossessed, are systematically attacking access to clean, cheap energy, which ALWAYS hurts the disadvantaged and dispossessed the most. No regard. And yes, if you make all other forms of energy prohibitively expensive, people WILL go back to burning wood! Unintended consequences that are so predictable that I'm going to stop calling them "unintended," because if these policies come from leaders who know better than we mere serfs, then they KNOW these consequences are around the corner, so it's willful ignorance, stupidity, greed, or sheer malevolence driving it.
Now for the nuance: Rocket-stove mass heating systems burn wood all the way down to NOTHING, using an insulated burn chamber that gets up to refractory temperatures, so that the only exhaust is CO, CO2, H2O. Take that super-hot exhaust gas and run it through an earth mass, heat up that earth mass, and you only have to burn wood for 1/10 the amount of time, and there's zero particulates coming out. It's quite clean and up to 90% more efficient than the most efficient, government-approved wood-heat systems on the market. But you kind of have to build it, yourself, because the establishment doesn't know what to make of ACTUAL green tech that doesn't involve billions of dollars in subsidies and millions of dollars in kickbacks.
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@memyselfandi593 Israel was created by force of arms in the flush of victory after World War II. The people who already were living there weren't given any choice. They were forced off their lands by outsiders.
They didn't like that. The entire Arab world didn't like that. All of the non-Christian world and a big chunk of the Christian world didn't like that.
Israel is set up to be a lightning rod and draw violence to it. The land was taken and as soon as it was taken, Israel just wanted to be left alone. Can you see how that might not go over with a lot of people?
Imagine a mafia boss who murdered and terrorized his way to power, and now he has a little empire carved out. Now all he wants is to be left alone to run his empire. It's so unfair that he isn't left alone. The violent acts he commits in order to survive - clearly documenting how his empire's under threat from without - are entirely justified. He's fighting for his very existence, so it's OK if he wages war to preserve himself.
That war stretches on for decades, with atrocities on each side justified by the atrocities on the other side.
People forget that Jewish terrorists of 80 or 100 years ago saw themselves as freedom fighters. People don't even remember the terror campaigns waged by Zionist extremists.
War has been waged on every single one of Israel's enemies by the USA. Israel has bombed enemies of the USA. Each is a proxy for the other.
I always go back to a Sci-Fi trilogy called "Deathworld." Colonists to a new, dangerous planet have been fighting for generations against a planet that acts like it hates humans. The humans hate right back. New species evolve almost overnight, with adaptations that seem aimed at making life more hostile to humans.
It turns out that the planet IS adapting to rid itself of humans, because humans acted like a natural disaster and were perceived as a natural disaster, which meant that all the creatures on the planet declared truce when it came to humans, and joined forces to kill humans.
There was no way for humans to win this fight with confrontation. But there WERE humans who broke away from the colonies and learned how to live WITH the creatures of the planet. It being sci-fi, it turned out that all the creatures of the planet were telepathic to some degree. If you didn't hate, THEY didn't hate. But the humans in the colonial compounds couldn't get over their hate, and so it was a never-ending war against the planet. A war that humans could not win.
And yet, humans were flourishing AWAY from the "hate centers."
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@ransakreject5221 I saw it in the '70s. This didn't just happen in the '90s. Most of it happened in the 1960s, although the philosophical Rubicon was crossed much earlier in the century, with the income tax and Social Security, when we committed to always growing, so that stealing from the youth to care for the elderly was sustainable. Now, of course, that Ponzi scheme has run its course, with fewer young people than retirees being the trend.
It was clear in the '70s that government was growing far faster than the economy, and eventually it would crash. Reagan was demonized for trying to bring the size of government in line with the size of the nation's economy. It was brutal.
In the '90s was when Republicans stopped making economic arguments, entirely, and re-branded themselves as "kinder and gentler," which meant they were all-in on the welfare state and government intervention into every aspect of our lives, because the Democrats were kicking their asses with government giveaways that helped a few, but hurt everybody else. But they'd always parade the few who were helped in front of the cameras, and not the guy whose business went under because the taxes went up or inflation just drove him out of business.
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@tomdee2054 Theoretically, you can buy anything you want if price is no object. In practice, however, I've had good mechanics who have simply refused to do a job because it was too expensive. Experience has taught them that customers can say "whatever it costs" and then balk when the bill comes due, or threaten to sue the mechanic or review-bomb him online, etc.
I think it's a great time to be a good mechanic or tradesman of almost any sort.
But I live in a relatively small place, and bad actors don't last very long. I can see where it could be tough in the big city, with money and businesses fleeing, and market for their services drying up. But out here in flyover country, it seems like the trades are prospering, and all the good ones are booked well in advance.
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In fairness to gullible, biased media, they HAD their confirming sources leaking these stories from inside the government! Starting at the very top, with DCI John Brennan and DNI Jim Clapper and others. I bet CNN and the rest will be able to duck responsibility. What this shows for sure is that the higher-ups - the career bureaucrats - are leakers and liars, who will happily sabotage the presidency to cover their own petty, venal, and sometimes high crimes. This was what I sort of suspected, all along, although I wasn't sure. Just as with Richard Nixon, it was the petty and venal stuff that they committed SERIOUS crimes to cover up that took things to the level of high crimes, including sedition.
Now that there's no longer the "obstruction of justice" club hanging over his head, I wonder if we'll now see Trump's administration take off the gloves and go after these clowns. REALLY go after them. Until Mueller finally closed-up shop, any direct action Trump took against the Clinton Crime Family and Obummer Gang would look like he was trying to cripple the investigation into HIM. Now the investigation is over, and he's free to act. If he'd confronted the Deep State types, prior to this, it would've been portrayed as his trying to deflect and obstruct. Interesting times, indeed.
But maybe I'm jumping the gun. Let's see what's actually in the report.
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Yes. "De-fund the police," supposedly on behalf of blacks, was pushed by White Liberal Democrats, against the wishes of 80% of the blacks in the affected communities.
This is how white liberals have always operated. Give them a slogan or an "I'm better than black people and they would be helpless without me" virtue signal of EPIC condescension.
This is how inferior individuals can cheaply and easily appear to be better than everybody else. Better than the "poor, disadvantaged blacks" and WAY better than any white people who disagree with them about ANYthing.
We used to call it "knee-jerk liberalism," but now we call it "woke" or "NPC programming." It's always been the same: If you oppose this expansion of state power, you're an "ist" and a "phobe" and a "bigot" and "lacking in compassion" or "greedy" or "selfish." Nothing but character assassination of anyone who opposes bigger and more patronizing/condescending/intrusive government.
Liberals never think about unintended consequences. They just feel good about always being in favor of The Latest Thing, and WISH there were some kind of social credit score, which they KNOW theirs would be much higher than any Republican's, because as Democrats, they just KNOW they have more compassion and higher emotional intelligence.
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big guy big guy They confront Antifa. They weren't even a thing, until video after video of Antifa violence, intimidation and property destruction (since before Trump ran for prez0 angered them enough to want to go confront Antifa. And yeah, there are guys in Proud Boys spoiling for a fight with Antifa thugs, which is unfortunate. Antifa does what they want in Portland, but the minute someone stands up to them, THEN guys like you start talking about right-wing violence.
You're pretty uninformed about Antifa terror/extortion tactics in downtown areas. You probably only watch CNBC and other lamestream outlets, which carefully sanitize what people like you get to see. I've been watching Antifa violence in Portland and Seattle for 5 years, now. But lamestream media never covers it, unless the cops arrest someone for defending themselves when rocks are thrown at them or club-wielding Antifa attack them.
Same with the attacks on people's homes in surrounding neighborhoods. They show up at your house with the metaphorical torches and pitchforks, you go on your porch with a gun, because you're scared and angry. You go to jail. The mob just moves on to their next target, and the local authorities - who are on Antifa's side - do nothing (unless, again, someone is foolish enough to stand up to them),
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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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I liked Tyson, at first. Very well-spoken. Then I saw him on Joe Rogan, and concluded that outside his specific area of expertise, he's a 2nd-rater. Misstated numerous geological and mathematical theories/principles, sounding like he never got past freshman-level course work outside of his very narrow area of specialization. And then he started in on global warming, basically welcoming police state and carbon-credit hucksters, on account of how "bad" and "catastrophic" the situation was. He's below average outside his specialty, in my opinion. He's just got a great orator's voice, has an imposing physical presence, and looks good on camera. Other than that? A lot of half-educated hot air, in my opinion.
My areas of specialization are geology and mathematics, and as far as that went, I saw an idiot talking out of his ass to the ignorant. Rogan doesn't have the schooling to see the huge holes in what Tyson's selling. Tyson's good at one thing and the rest is smoke and mirrors. He has his niche, but outside of astrophysics, he's a highly partisan hack.
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No dogs and no Campbells. I knew a pure Scot McDonald. Man was a sociopath, but was high functioning, because he abided by a deeply held sense of honor. He wouldn't feel bad about punching you, because he empathized, but he wouldn't shame himself, if that makes sense. Not all Scots are sociopaths, I hope, inasmuch as I've got some in me.
One of the things about stealing cattle that I never thought about until amusing myself with some Bernard Cornwell fiction, was the function served by making cattle raids. It was a way to teach the sons how to fight when there was no war. It was many tribes' way of not fighting a war, but keeping the young ones coming up READY to fight, if necessary. Centuries of invasion made it kind of necessary. And tribes would steal back and forth from each other, just short of war.
But of course, someone always takes it too far, and there's lots of feuding. But the idea was to band together against threats to the combined tribes. And of course, we know that from Roman times on, inter-tribal warfare was the wedge that conquerors always used against Britons, Scots, East Anglians, etc. But especially the Scots.
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As many are pointing out, below, we're not really "conservative" so much as we're libertarians or classical liberals. Technically, "conservative" in the political sense is that you defend the established order and tradition. That's not what we are. We're not reactionary, either, because we're not interested in "going back to an idealized past."
"Left versus right" is misleading as hell. It's a totally false dichotomy. It's more of a state-versus-individual dichotomy, and striking the proper balance between the two. We need SOME government, but we clearly have far too MUCH government, right now, and far too little diversity of thought permitted in the public square, in order to preserve an establishment that's just as out-of-touch, NOW, as the regressive right of the 1960s, and even more censorious and intolerant.
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Regressive forms of Islam and Christianity must give way to more tolerance and reason. Islam's been more prone to regress, but there are also regressive features to Judaism and Christianity. In the last century, I think we saw "Christian" countries knocking Islamic countries on their asses, which fostered more regressive/reactionary forms of Islam. At one point, Islam was behaving in more enlightened ways (e.g. versus Goths in Spain).
Regardless, sincere individuals with the power to REASON will evolve the religions and their societies to more progressive (not left-wing wacky, but true progress) forms.
The danger in any religion is when it organizes itself, the wrong people tend to ascend to the top of the hierarchy(ies) and seek power in this world over others.
Some good things about Islam are the persistence of traditions that are GOOD, like family values. Islam and Judaism both are bulwarks against unwed motherhood. As society evolves, mothers are more capable of raising children without fathers around, but that's not a good thing. Children need to SEE healthy husband-wife examples to develop in healthy ways. The man is usually more physically powerful, so the kids need to see a calm, confident, gentle male figure.
What's interesting is that regardless of the dogma, good people living day to day under whatever structure, treat each other with respect and care for one another.
It's easy for Christians to see the Muslim "evangelism" and how the religion threatens to take over the culture and want ITS values entered into law. That's why there are/were Christian/Muslim countries in the first place. Christians were right bastards towards pagans during their "takeover" of Europe and U.K. in the single-digit centuries, thanks to Rome pushing its religion, everywhere.
I think we're evolving past that, now, but I also think that the problem with absence of faith in any religion leaves holes in the human psyche. People need to believe in something bigger than themselves, and religion is less dangerous in that regard than government or king or warlord. And of course, it turns toxic/political, when it marries up with government. Can't live with it. Can't live without it. Humans lose their way and their social systems can destroy themselves. The reason religions persist is because believers have children and pass on (semi-fucked-up but persistent) beliefs across generations.
Atheists? Look at the hedonism and self-absorption of the lunatic left of the modern day. They're suicidal.
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It diverted attention from pay-to-play and Russian bribes to Hillary and others. It generated the Mueller investigation which was specifically told to stay away from anything non-Trump. I think they played it, masterfully, but it's going to blow up in their faces. By keeping Mueller strictly confined to all questions Trump, they left the field open to Trump's people to do all the looking at what THEY did. If Mueller team had had broader scope, they could've done more to sweep crimes of the Democrats under the carpet. But because Mueller studiously avoided any investigation of Democrats, they left the field open for the Trump team. If Mueller HAD investigated the Democrats, they could claim "That's been investigated and there's nothing there."
In hindsight, that's what they should've done, where they could fine-tune where and how the investigation went. But they overplayed their hand, controlling what got looked at by their guys in the first place, in their rush to get Trump and only Trump. They had it all sewn up, and were PLEASED by the scope memo Rosenstein handed to Mueller. But that's hindsight. At the time, I bet they didn't see how this kept Mueller team's mitts off of a lot of leads that led in the Democrat direction, which Weissman could have buried while pretending to investigate.
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They all do it. It's an artifact of live television. So often they HAVE to step in, because the interviewee has never been on camera, live, before. The professional newsie is far more sophisticated in that one way, and they start thinking they're more sophisticated than everyone about everything. There are very few things that are important to broadcast live. All other things should be long format and tastefully edited.
The one thing I wish they took power over by technical means is like they do on some of those sports shows, where 3 guys get their shot at a topic, and if anybody tries to jump in, his mic is muted. These t.v. people should totally control THAT. When they let people rant at the same time or shout one another down, they're being very unprofessional. Also when they just cut people off when they don't like their answers.
There used to be a tradition of a "talking stick," and the stick would be passed around the group, and everybody but the person with the talking stick must absolutely STFU. You get a lot more good information out of a group with that one rule. Only one person speaks and all persons speak.
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Sadly, my experience growing up and formulating my political views was that the people voting for the right things did so for the wrong reasons, and people voting for the wrong things did so for the right reasons. I respect the intention of MOST left-wingers, although whenever I drill down to their real motivations, I find a certain bloody mindedness and absolute contempt for regular people. They project all their OWN worst tendencies on everyone else, and see government force as the only way to MAKE people behave responsibly. They don't believe in people making their own choices for their own lives, but somehow believe that a select group (oligarchs!) are sinless, all-knowing and compassionate, when really they're just slobs working for a pay check like the rest of us!
If liberals really understood the world, they would apply their distrust of humanity to the proposition that this is why wiser heads see the danger in giving small groups of individuals the power of life, death and everything in between over every body else. If you don't trust human nature, then why insist on concentrating more power into the hands of fewer people?
Yes, humans muck things up. That's why you never give any of us too much power. The NHS strips you of making your own health-care choices. So if you're a fat alcoholic and lazy slob, you receive MORE from the system. If you work hard and act prudently, then you're a net payer INTO the system. These upside-down incentives are insane, especially coming from people who hold the average person in such contempt.
I see the flaws in people. People aren't perfect. But they're pretty wonderful. And I prefer to live in a system that rewards hard work and prudence.
We used to find virtue in selfless acts and personal sacrifice on behalf of others. If 50% of virtue-signaling leftists were more worried about what THEY were doing to help, rather than trying to get government to force people to help in precisely the ways that the libtard directs, poverty would be eliminated.
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Agree. Don't let them argue that they were the victims of Russian disinformation. I notice Trey Gowdy obligingly giving the bastards that "out," while pretending to be outraged at their behavior. It's like what was done wasn't actually criminal, but just an administrative glitch, where people made a sequence of improbable "honest mistakes" that can only be compared to rolling a '6' 100 times in a row on a fair, 6-sided die. They've GOT the misfeasance, but Republicans who over-sell the "Russian Disinformation" angle are giving bad actors a way to skate on clear malfeasance. They KNEW what they were doing, and the "mistakes" all broke the one, anti-Trump direction.
Watching Gowdy's committee when he was still chair, it became obvious that even a GOOD committee chair lacked any real oversight capabilities over agencies that could - and did - hide all their malfeasance behind a veil of secrecy, in the name of national security. I thought Gowdy was very weak. He'd talk tough, but he'd always defer to the stonewallers. He should've been suing DOJ and FBI for the relevant documents. But the closest we got to that was Judicial Watch, nibbling around the edges with FOIA filings on tangential matters that ended up exposing more in civil court than our so-called watchdogs could manage in the highest places.
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I think most jobs can be re-tooled pretty easily for social distance. I can see all kinds of new jobs opening up, like professional shopping, where one person does multiple orders at once, cutting the contagion by factors of 2, 3 or 4. And I think it's actually more efficient, because it's one person in an efficient vehicle making one slightly extended trip, while everybody else's car stays home. Also niches in education are going to open up, left and right, and teachers across the country are getting crash courses in distance learning. People are going to start WANTING the online experience for education, and there will be teaching jobs left and right. And education will get a TON CHEAPER. The teachers used to BE the school, and NOW it's the ADMINISTRATORS. You can make a teacher pretty rich by hiring them, directly. They don't have to charge much to out-compete what legacy institutions are doing.
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If you're a big 'n' tall, the altitude takes some getting used to. Love Colorado up high, where there's water.
I like the fact that there's sun, especially in those high valleys, almost every day. Even in the middle of snow, the daily air movements frequently blow a hole in the cloud cover, so you get some pure sun, 'most every day, even while the snow's piling up.
A little farther north, you can get the nice climate, without having to go up as high, and the land's less barren between the peaks.
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Does it mean they're running out or does it mean they're dispersing them? The old rules for concentration of forces may not hold any longer. It may be that both sides are so good at long- and intermediate-range attacks, that putting too many eggs in one basket is an invitation for a strike.
It's not like WW II where you can mass for an attack and surprise anybody. This goes for ammo and fuel dumps well behind the front lines, but especially massed armor.
What little we actually see from either side are small (solo runs and small convoys). Much is made of relatively little, it seems.
I'm no expert, but I doubt that Russian tank losses have seriously cut into their tank lead or tank production, and near as I can tell, they're not sending many of their newer tanks to the front, but are sending older, refurbished tanks. And the way they're using them in probing/suicide runs seems more aimed at drawing out and using up the Ukrainian forces.
Modern warfare isn't combined arms like the Germans used on the Eastern Front, with total air superiority (in 1941-2). The closest thing that might be U.S. forces in Iraq, after they obliterated Iraq's air defenses, after which, they coordinated attacks using AWACS, without fear, and with near-perfect intelligence from satellites against an enemy without satellites or air defenses.
When both sides have satellite coverage and neither side can safely sortie manned aircraft over enemy territory, "traditional" tank strategy and tactics and combined-arms strategy and tactics are a thing of the past, unless you can overwhelm a 2nd- or 3rd-rate opponent, which neither NATO-backed Ukraine nor Russia are.
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We've got left and right confused. The so-called left, with its big-government entitlements, regulations, and sprawling bureaucracies is actually just a return to feudal forms, where the state/king/queen/Lords-and-Ladies provide for the peasants and the peasants, in turn, must obey them in everything. Where we're all in violation of some rule, and it's just a question of who we pissed off whether we go to jail or not.
The entire socialism project is like that. Just somebody trying to figure out a way to get free stuff without actually doing any work, and all the dummies who believe you can just wave a wand, take from Joe over there (at gunpoint) and give to Pete over there, just so long as Pete remains obedient.
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Democrat voters aren't swayed one way or the other by Kamala's incompetence. She's the figurehead for the team, and so nothing bad should be said about her and of course, she's Not Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump. She doesn't have to be for anything, because her side is united in anti-Trump, and there are quite a few establishment Republicans and think tanks that are, also, so it's an uphill battle for Trump, no matter what Kamala says or does.
That's my takeaway from the Biden 2020 campaign, the Biden debate, and the Harris campaign. They don't care. They just want the power, and they're all united in that. Her terrible showing is the establishment thumbing its nose at us.
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But the lady's gotta point, too.
He is kind of echo-chamber-grown, making some pretty incendiary statements. It's gone around various circles of political thought, for instance people talking openly about wishing the president dead, after their side got worked up into a frenzy of dislike and disgust towards Trump. One person goes off, and the next one feeds off that, and nobody but the right were calling people out for how over-the-top it was, because of the depth of the wrongness they felt towards Trump.
What people don't get about Trump is the one thing he's good at is hiring and firing, but especially firing. Things don't turn out well, he's at least smart enough to see that, and move on. Getting good people is hard, even if you're aggressive and smart about keeping the good ones.
It's never about the man, himself, so much as the people he can put around himself. Great generals? It's all about their staff. And maybe the one thing that was good about the general was picking and training staff, even though he was pretty dense about the finer points of strategy and tactics.
I wanna say "Tyrant of Jupiter." ... That was the protagonists' one gift. He could take one look at a person, and KNOW them... Get a 100%-true "read" on the applicant for the job. A total empath.
Anyway, Trump's not the master of anything, except salesmanship. He's a TOTAL salesman. He'll say this, he'll say that, until things are framed in a form he likes, and he'll make a deal. He'll talk all sharp against DACA, and then turn tail, leaving the Democrats in the position of turning tail, themselves, because he's sneaking in long-term solutions, by pushing merit-based immigration.
Really, just a return to a sustainable level, rather than slamming entire neighborhoods and regions with more than they're built to handle. We can do more good contributing to CARE and the Red Cross, ourselves, for the refugees, and put food and shelter where THEY are. We can help many more, that way.
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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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I always want a gabled roof over all entrances to my home, so there's not a major snow hazard when you step outside. I've lived in places where the roof slopes towards the front door, and you get a huge mess, that freezes into a solid chunk if there's any freeze-thaw going on. Clean it up, and the next day or a few days later, you have a sheet of ice just outside your door.
I also don't understand why all homes don't have even a storm door, let alone an "air lock" anteroom, where people can get out of the weather without letting all the cold/hot air in. Just stupid designs.
We also don't build buildings/homes to take advantage of the temperature buffering you get from a full basement or other earth-sheltered ideas. With proper construction, you shouldn't have to heat or cool a home/building very much. And if you know about Russ Finch of "Oranges in the Snow" fame, you can heat/cool a big space by burying "air tubes" and using small fans to move the air from the tubes into the house. The buried (4-inch) pipe brings the air to ground temperature, which at 8 feet down is the average annual temperature. In temperate regions (North of the tropics and South of the permafrost), the ambient temp of the ground is in the 50-60-degree range (Fahrenheit). We should start using simple principles, so that almost ALL homes use very little Heat or AC.
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It started with the boob tube as baby-sitter, while Mom & Dad did their own thing.
In many ways, the Internet REVEALS problems more than it CAUSES problems.
Boomers were raised by "tradition for tradition's sake," and rebelled. This left the Boomers rudderless, because they had(have) no clue what to replace the traditions with. Boomer generation was raised in a very permissive atmosphere.
There was a bifurcation in the next generation: Some just became even more permissive and left-wing. Others rebelled against the decadence and hypocrisy of their permissive, self-indulgent parents.
It was only starting in the '70s, but the public-school indoctrination flipped from tradition for tradition's sake, to reject tradition and hop on the Maoist bandwagon, because capitalism is the Great Satan.
I think as a late Boomer, I'd've been better off with private schooling than the dumbed-down instruction that really started kicking in as the hippies became the teachers. But I still got the traditional indoctrination, for the most part.
The Pilgrims would've stayed in Holland, were it not for the schools and indoctrination with which they disagreed that went on there.
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The irony is that the last two Democrat administrations were far more authoritarian and hostile to free speech than Trump was. He's flawed as hell, and may not be any good at all against the corruption in Washington, but the Biden administration has been horrible!
Trump didn't impose or promote vaccine mandates. The authoritarian Biden administration DID.
I think both Dems and Repubs both like censorship. To them, it's a battle for who gets to do the censoring.
Trump's policies were much better than Biden's. From open borders to critical-race ideology. As president, he was a lot less authoritarian than Biden has been.
If it's a choice between the two, Trump wins, hands down.
But you have to look beyond the media propaganda and the rhetoric. Keep in mind that over 90% of civil servants and media are Democrat. Beware getting caught in a bubble!
At this point, RFK says more of the right kinds of things, but I think he's got a neocon streak up his back that shows in the current conflict in Gaza. We never should have, nor should we continue to embroil ourselves in ethnic conflicts around the world that existed long before the USA was conceived.
I think RFK will end up draining more MAGA votes than Democrat votes, in the final tally.
MAGA currently has the liberty, limited government and end foreign wards factions of the Republicans. You know. The Republicans who are Republicans on more libertarian grounds. If Trump loses those factions - and he's on the brink - he will lose, and we'll have one-party rule in perpetuity.
Some of you like that idea. It terrifies me. The Democrats already have a monopoly in legacy media and education. Children are all indoctrinated to vote Democrat, already. The "Please can we make government smaller, and avoid going full-on fascist?" crowd is getting pretty black-pilled.
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@killcat1971 : Neo-Luddism r'ars its ugly head in yet ANOTHER generation! Automation doesn't eliminate good jobs. It opens up NEW jobs. Every time automation saves a little bit of money for someone, the whole society gets a little richer. More people can afford to hire an artist for that basement mural they always wanted. I think that as the complexities of this world mount, there will be niches opening up for full-time jobs where all you do is handle the grocery shopping and organize the bills. Someone who knows how to play the credit-card game can save a household thousands of dollars, by shifting debt to the new credit card, using it's 1st-year-no-interest for one year, and open up another card in a year or two.
There're all kinds of services like that. And who knows what's to come? Maybe they come up with anti-grav back packs and everybody wants a nice landing pad built out in their back yard. Landing-pad builders would then be a thing, employing the same people who used to do wood-frame house construction, before IT went kaput! Thing is, the steady march of progress continues despite all our efforts to mess things up and meddle in 10-variable questions with 1-variable understanding.
We don't need to artificially ACCELERATE automation by artificially propping up minimum wage. Minimum wage - like ALL libtard feel-good policies - is an ATTACK on people trying to work their way out of poverty. Libtards always hurt the ones they love, buying their devotion with crumbs. For votes.
Libtards see one person in trouble and it's nothing to them to punish all those who are on the ragged edge of being in trouble in order to help that one person who randomly came to their attention and became their focus and sole purpose in life, entitling them to the hard-earned money in your pocket. Your business is BARELY profitable? Well, here are a bunch of extra costs some libtard decided you would have to pay, so the libtard could point to the person he helped. Too bad if your business goes under. We helped the guy we set out to help, and DAMN THE TORPEDOS! FULL SPEED AHEAD! Because we're righter than rightie.
The guy who's BARELY paying her (SWIDT?) bills gets destroyed by a 20% increase in energy prices. Everything costs more, especially heating and cooling her home. That "green legislation" that everybody cheered just pushed another 20 million, barely-gettin'-by working poor below the poverty line. Didn't think about THAT added cost. And from the progressive's point of view, if they never hear about or see that person they hurt, then life goes on and they can still feel proud of themselves, because they can go straight to the government for proof that they're doing something for the people they say they care about.
The consequences of progressivism are diffuse and the benefits obvious. You can put that guy's face on t.v. that you helped. But nobody's talking about the accumulating weight of small hardships visited on everyone by helping just the one with everybody's money.
Most of the time, the average citizen just tightens their belt and soldiers on. Especially the BEST people who are just on hard times. Those are the people that libtards despise and seek to destroy at every opportunity, usually in the name of helping them, but it can also be to "save the planet" or "kill evil Iraqis," and "it's a cost we will gladly pay!" when they've got all THEIR bills on auto-pay and their checking account just grows every month until they have enough to buy another expensive toy. They'll sacrifice the delivery date on their Ferrari, but they don't think about the guy who's postponing new shoes for her kid, who's outgrown the pair he's wearing, now.
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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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I think Tyson is a blowhard who sounds good, but talks over his head (and out of his a**) on subjects in which he is not very well-versed. Astrophysics? Expert. Everything else? Pompous layman. I also watched that interview, and my specialties are math and geology, both of which subjects he butchered, while sounding very cogent.
I feel the same way about world-class linguist Noam Chomsky, who ALSO needs to stay in his lane, but people SWOON because he's smart in one thing and SOUNDS smart on other things, when in actuality, he's an ignorant socialist, with no clue on free-market economics, human liberty, and human progress, in my opinion. But nobody's hanging on MY every word, nor should they.
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Not a huge fan of Trump, but at least he does some good, i.e., wants people to be free and prosperous, and LET liberty work, rather than destroying liberty to try to MAKE things better.
Politicians (and idiots) all think that if only THEY had the power, they could give better orders than the next guy, when the whole point is that the best results for everyone flow from LETTING people do as they will, restrained only by the rights of others.
Thinking you're smart enough to fix everything from on high is the stupidest, most self-serving, and arrogant thing anyone could think.
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@MidlifeCrisisJoe Even in divorce, I think you still enjoyed a 2-parent family. I think traditional marriage is still probably the best way for men and women to team up to produce the next generation, but the "till death" part may be a bit old-fashioned.
If things between the parents aren't working out, it's probably better for them to part ways and STILL share the child-rearing responsibility. Better than watching endless control dramas and a cold relationship between your parent role models.
A lot of why I never married was because I have a personality much like my father's, and the way he treated my mother and rode rough-shod over everybody in the house was something I didn't want to do to anyone else, but I could see it in me to become just like him, if I were working long hours and coming home tired and a bit angry every night.
The younger generation, now, doesn't seem as obsessed with the marriage vows. As long as they fulfill their responsibilities to the children and provide a stable, loving, and supportive home life, why should they stay in a relationship that isn't working?
Maybe 100 years or 200 years ago, the 100% traditional marriage was crucial to long life and general prosperity for more people. But society isn't as binary as it used to be. It's not the end of the world for a woman to separate from her husband. We need to be more fair to husbands and their parental and economic rights, but it's better than it was a century or two ago, for all parties concerned.
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There is no doubt and has BEEN no doubt about this weaponization, since Obama went after journalists who were critical of his actions, long before Trump was ever elected.
Democrats are trying to run out the clock on their crimes, hoping and expecting to be ABOVE any criminal sanctions by holding absolute power in a few years. We're already close, with every agency and government-funded institution taken over by Democrats, and interested only in perpetuating their no-consequences gravy train that is robbing and extorting hard working Americans, for the benefit of the very poor and the very rich. That's where we're headed. A nation of poor and super-rich with NOTHING in-between, except for government and government-sponsored apparatchiks, which these Marxists will tolerate, because they need to administer the police state to come, that some would argue is already upon us.
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Whether Trump was manipulated or not, he at the very least BLUNDERED BADLY. Trump, by deferring to Fauci, whom Trump had all the resources necessary to un-mask, but didn't.
You can make the case for a little stimulus after stopping the economy's heart with lockdowns. But as president, he should've fought against locking-down everything. Trump did NOT have the best people advising him, and if he did, then his handling of COVID response is even worse.
I think Trump exposed himself as part of the larger machine, with many of his decisions and inactions.
He made too many concessions to win, politically, and still failed, politically. He can't really drain a swamp of which he, himself, is a creature.
He will probably win the nomination, but whether he wins in '24 or not, I see him as controlled opposition. He gives the base enough red meat to keep them with him, while never really making the case to voters who are programmed to hate him.
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@21ps3freak Our education system is designed to indoctrinate, rather than to inform.
This has been true since before the ideology of the institutions shifted to full-on socialist. But they were always statist in the public schools. The state just had different fish to fry in some ways, like back-filling the imperial conquest of North America as some Holy Mission against sub-human, bloodthirsty savages, instead of the same-old, same-old "We expanded because we COULD, just like all nation-states before us."
But the tradition was - until recently - to celebrate hard work and entrepreneurship on an even playing field, even though the tilting of the playing field started way back in the 19th Century, with the first 3-letter agencies, created to fight against the robber barons, were immediately captured and became the creatures of the robber barons. There was still a lot of liberty and free enterprise, but it's slowly gotten worse and worse over time. The bigger the government gets, the more of it we see and the more of it that is hidden, even when we go looking, which few of us have over the last 2 1/2 centuries, because the overall scheme worked pretty well for so many of us.
But as the walls close in, more of us are starting to see them. Some respond to it with collectivist ideas. Some respond to it with more Enlightened ideas. I'm more of an Enlightenment fellow, myself. The problem isn't too LITTLE government. The problem is too MUCH government.
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The most glaring shortage I see is in the trades. People who make and fix Real, Tangible Things, like houses and appliances.
The system has done everything possible to discourage skilled American work and workers. But they persist. Every time I move to a new town, I figure out who's reliable and competent, and I cultivate them and their knowledge and connections to other good tradespeople. They're typically the first and longest-lasting friends I make. I'm an academic, but if you come to one of my barbecues, it's wall-to-wall what my colleagues call "rednecks." There are some white collars in there, like the guy who handles my IT needs. He's not a liberal-arts-degree type, though. Just a guy who's been building computers for people since the 1980s and knows how to build it, populate it with software, etc. Because he works for ME and not my institution, he actually knows what's on it, what my needs are, and what they're likely to be. Weird how that works. To IT at work, I'm a pain in the neck. To my guy, I'm easy to work with...
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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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It's not a news vacuum, and usually, nobody has to out-and-out lie. It's a forest-for-the-trees situation, where each side can show something blowing up. It's all skirmish-level stuff of no real strategic significance. Too much information about too little is what's going on.
But there are some decent channels, like History Legends and The Duran, and others.
It's the same with any issue, not just the war in Ukraine. The world is such a big place, you can find an example of just about whatever you want, and it's easy to give the impression that that example is representative of what's going on, everywhere. Want to see white people acting like Karens? There's a channel for that. Want to see black people robbing a store? There's a channel for that. It doesn't matter that they're a tiny minority. In a country of 330 million people, you can watch videos of people doing stupid stuff of a particular type, 24 hours a day, and it's easy to fall into thinking these nutcases are everywhere, when 99.9% of the people you meet are nice, and they appreciate that you are nice.
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If you're a news junkie like I am, it sure looked like there was PLENTY of reason to question the 2020 election, PLENTY of things that needed to be reviewed in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan, just to name 3 states. There were obvious, glaring discrepancies, violations of election laws, lack of integrity in chain of custody and signature verification, shenanigans in the counting rooms, ....
This was much more than just "hanging chads in Florida," when Al Gore was all butt-hurt about losing. But when it happened to a Democrat, the election wasn't certified until the questions were answered, and re-counts were done, very carefully, and in the full light of day. No such was afforded the Trump campaign. That's why he's back. They made him a living martyr, and the people love him for it.
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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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The legacy media are not to blame. Government meddling is to blame, and they are just useful idiots being used as pawns. Mass media was far too powerful a weapon either for or against a given agenda, that they drew the powerful, the would-be powerful, and the government, like bees to honey, the same way the too-powerful government drew the same kinds of people. So of course, major media and the government became very corrupt at the top.
Technology for 1-way broadcast of news, views, and propaganda brought us to this place, and the Internet is the next revolution in technology, making that 1-way mass broadcast thing fall prey to 2-way communications with almost as much - and sometimes more - reach than radio and television did in the 20th Century.
The next new voice can spring up at any moment and inspire MILLIONS. This is very threatening to the established order. We've seen more and new kinds of circumvention of the principles of free speech exercised over the Internet, but the nature of the Internet is such that tricks that worked to bring ABC, NBC, and CBS (and later FOX as fake opposition) into line with preferred narratives are encountering both great success (on a level of seed oils, the sugar lobby, and Big Pharma) during both Iraq wars and COVID and also unprecedented, grassroots opposition.
Unlike 80 years ago, with Nazis and then seamlessly into the Soviets, when there were only 10 or 20 phone calls to make to totally squash a story and nobody thought it was unconstitutional - and any who did just went along because of the 'clear and present danger' - THIS time, for every voice you silence, 20 new voices spring up, and none of them have to have huge followings in order to make a big impact in the aggregate.
We'll see how things play out, but my gut tells me that nothing short of breaking the Internet, which the established order relies upon, implicitly, will suffice in keeping big lies going for nefarious ends, at least not for very long.
The time between lies being told and lies being exposed grows shorter with every Big Lie. COVID-19 may very well be the high water mark of government control and manufacture of consent, but we're a LONG way from getting out of the woods. I jusr think it's possibly inevitable that we WILL slay the dragon, or at least wound it beyond all hope of ever manufacturing consent for the benefit of a few at the expense of the many.
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@jgroovy1973 : They used the thinnest of evidence to launch a huge investigation of Trump. They weren't serious about counter-intel from the Russians, in general. About the only thing they turned up of substance was that Manaforte was a tax cheat, which they had known (but I doubt Trump did) for many years, although they waiting to go after him until it could hurt Trump, which of course it didn't.
The irony of all this is that if the Russians really were trying to meddle in U.S. affairs, their biggest success was through collusion with Democrats to set the Trump administration on fire with misinformation. As it turns out, most of the stuff came from rumor mills in Ukraine, who sourced some of THEIR dirt back in the USA, essentially laundering lies that Ohr and Fusion GPS made up. Then they leaked to more than one outlet at the same time, and they used each other to confirm the information. Then the government used the media reports as more evidence!
LOL! This is how you get Grievance-Studies articles published! Just quote all the liars who passed muster before you and draw conclusions that square with the White Privilege and Patriarchy narratives, and you can be published in the highest academic circles! Sokal proved it in the '90s and Pluckrose, Bogossian and Lindsey proved it again much more recently. All it takes is one piece of garbage to be mistaken for scholarship/true-evidence, and they can build MOUNTAINS of supposition into reasonable-sounding allegations.
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I think each of the major networks definitely have their taboo subjects, to avoid hurting the interests of corporate ownership and major shareholders. But I think they pretty much let their people do their thing as they see fit, more or less. I think when you watch Don Lemon shilling for the left, it's not because he's being told to do so. He's really that closed-minded. You lefties can say the same about Sean Hannity.
Personally, I find that by checking both FOX and any of the others, that FOX (especially Hannity) will take video from those others and deconstruct what's being said, and pick it apart. I've found that going and checking the CNN or whatever doesn't really add anything of substance, so I kind of get CNN and FOX by watching some FOX. Yeah, sometimes FOX reaches, to make a point. And any time you appeal to the authority of God, you're no longer debating. Then you're proclaiming a faith-based idea, which can not be rationally supported or disputed. You can BE Christian, but you must use facts and good logic to support your claims.
I see fewer retractions (and firings for flat-out makin' shit up) in the non-FOX networks. It's generally a better product than the other networks, but that's not saying a whole lot. I don't rely on FOX as much as my own researches.
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Richard Wolff should learn a little about Nature and the Pareto Distribution. It doesn't matter how you structure things, what your hierarchy is... There will always be a small number of individuals in the population who benefit far more than the rest of the population. There's one elk/seal/lobster getting the biggest harem. Viewing human society as an extension of Nature (We ARE PART OF NATURE.), we see that the big difference between socialist and free-market systems is that there are a lot more people doing very well - comfortably well - for themselves; whereas in a socialist setup, there is a very small number of extremely privileged people, most of them in government, but a few favored industrialists right up there with them.
Crony capitalism isn't a free-market thing. It's a STATIST thing, where rich and powerful people are given unfair advantage over everybody else, through the use of government force. I call it fascism, but fascism is just another form of collectivism/socialism. It doesn't necessarily nationalize industry. It just does the next best thing, which is control what, how, and when anything it singles out for its attention is made. Weapons industry is a biggie. By its nature, it's fascist, because it's contracting directly with government. It's also the only thing in the U.S. Constitution that's allowed. And even then, the founders of the USA wanted strong citizen militias as an essential part of our common defense.
Yeah, we still need a professional army. And making sure it's run, properly, should be about the only thing we're worried about on the federal level. But the military budget ("defense" budget) is less than half of what the federal government does, these days. And there's no way to oversee it all. Bad enough we have an army!
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@richardpeychers4076 Putin's Russia is much different from the USSR. The more we try to destroy Russia, the more it's likely to resemble the USSR.
Putin brought back God, for one thing. Russian Orthodox Church is respected. Family values are respected.
The (ignorant) way I see it, Putin's their best chance for some kind of truly liberal representative republic, along the lines of the USA. But keeping Russia on a war footing is a huge obstacle to any kind of liberalization.
Fact is, if Russia wants to compete, it needs to liberalize. Same for China. Unless WE forget our roots in liberty, and the ENORMOUS economic advantages inherent to free-market capitalism (and MINIMAL government intervention).
The way I see it, Putin's a historical figure of significance. A real statesman. When I look at where they were in '98, compared to where they are, now, my hat's off to the guy. But the old colonial powers are terrified of a modern, competitive Russia. They WANT Russia to remain a tyranny. They're crafting their own tyrannies at home for their own people, and they need "evil Russia" to justify the power grabs they're making and plan to make in the future.
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Evolution doesn't explain how we made the leap from organic soup to 1-celled to multi-celled to EVERYTHING. Missing links ABOUND in the fossil record. We're not really sure how those major leaps happen, although the fossil record indicates many major leaps.
Variation of species doesn't quite cover it. You don't have to be a wacked-out "Earth is 4,000 years old" fanatic to believe that there are huge gaps in the theory of evolution.
Look at trilobites. They lasted millions of years, essentially unchanged. Then they're ALL gone. And something else entirely filled up its niche(s). Paleontologists have no idea how things transitioned. They see the one thing. Then they see the totally different thing.
I think evolution fits the facts, but doesn't explain all the facts. Most of all, I think we're just damn short on facts.
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There's a deeply imbedded paradox in contemporary liberal thought. People want to be free, but they also want government to take responsibility for damn near everything. When you give up personal responsibility for a thing, you give up personal authority over that thing. You also agree to abide by the rules set by those to whom you foolishly gave the responsibility.
You can't at the same time be free and secure. Liberals want to be secure, but they're always surprised when they realize that it always comes at cost to their liberty. Christian fundamentalism isn't the ONLY traditional dogma that gets in the way of real human progress. Throw God out and somebody else - lately somebody POLITICAL - will eagerly supply you with a world view with its OWN dogmas.
Things like Med4All sound really good, but when you make the collective responsible for the cost of your health care, every cigarette you smoke, every donut you eat, every risky behavior in which you engage is at the collective's expense. One economic downturn, cigs are illegal. One bad year, people start REALLY fat-shaming, VICIOUSLY, because that person's self -indulgence is at EVERYBODY'S expense. Very slippery slope, as nice as collective responsibility for the weak and powerless.
The answer? A self-sufficient citizen with a little extra to give, who GIVES, because it's RIGHT, and society affirms their generosity with STATUS.
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This guest sounds like he's getting close to what Adam Smith was saying, but still operates under some myths about "toxic capitalism." When exchanges are voluntary between known individuals in a community, in full light of day, cheating is extremely rare. Word gets out. You need that person's business in the future. Businesses that last, under NO rules beyond basic protection of rights to person and property, are as moral or MORE moral than highly-regulated markets.
Only in a highly-regulated market do you see GMO products from big corporations get labeled as "organic" on the shelf. Only with the USDA weighing in does the actual organic farmer get labeled non-organic, because of how they filled out a form. Those rules are written by elites for elites. Written by big business for big business.
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I've been in rock fights. They're terrifying enough! Especially around the railroad tracks where there's an infinite supply of fist-sized rocks perfect for throwing. Bezing SHOT AT is a whole 'nother level of fear.
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Let's make peace between law enforcement and the community. Let's start by thinking about policies that put them at odds in the first place. I'd start with re-thinking our approach to drug addiction. Maybe more of a public-health approach than a law-enforcement approach. Cops already see us at our worst. Honest cops get a low opinion of the community. Dishonest cops have all kinds of drug money in front of them every day. Temptation. Some cops shouldn't be cops.
An old security guard at my college in the 1980s was your stereotypical Irish ex-cop. He could tell some stories. One he told (grain of salt) was that when he worked for a big-city police department, he got shipped into corrections almost instantly, because he wouldn't take the envelope. So his fellow cops wouldn't trust him on the street. (And he couldn't trust his fellow officers). He said that he ended up being a jailer because he wouldn't take money. I think the War on Drugs really fuels this kind of thing.
Gambling and prostitution are also corruptors of communities and police forces when they're illegal. Legalize and regulate gambling and prostitution, as well. Law enforcement would then only be there to regulate street traffic and investigate and help prevent crimes against persons and property. I don't care if somebody wants to stick a needle in his own arm. Not the cop's business, until and unless he knocks somebody over the head for money for his next fix. THEN he's meat for law enforcement.
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You have to understand the hostility of left-wing activists who are given carte blanche to disrupt and disrespect. I can see people wearing yarmulkes being targeted by some rude and aggressive people, because that's cancel culture on college campuses.
It's somewhat unusual to see these left-wing activists at odds with the political persuasion of college faculty and administrators.
What we're seeing is Zionist-vs-leftist, and it's actually somewhat amusing, because the leftists aren't used to being slapped down by college or municipal authorities. They (rightly) saw Israel's response to October 7th as all the excuse they needed to start acting up and acting out. I say "rightly," not because they're necessarily right, but because they're immersed in a culture that tells them the atrocities in Gaza are exactly the sort of thing that will be used to forgive their unruly behavior.
What makes it all the sweeter is that the lefties are hitching their wagons to Hamas, which is triggering to half the country. And it's a very odd half, neither right nor left, but the half that is committed to the Zionist project, which cuts across party lines. So strange to see colleges getting authoritarian against leftists activists. Unlike BLM and anti-Trumpers, they are not sanctioned to proceed by the Democrat establishment, which makes most of its money off big donors.
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@ccahill2322 That's an odd interpretation of history. Government-run health care is mainly good for the government. Builds loyalty and obedience in the population. But as far as health outcomes go, you're never going to get the best outcomes when the people making the decisions have no stake in either providing care nor in keeping the cost of that care under control. It's not their body, so they don't really care if you are healthy. It's not their money, so they don't really care if it's affordable.
You think it's great until you discover that your particular condition is either not covered or there's a waiting line of 6 months or a year to get that service.
If you want best service at the best price, you go private. If you wan worst service at highest price, put the government bureaucrats in charge.
It also leaves out the most basic consideration which is when the government's paying for it, you are penalized for all the people who make bad choices. That's bad enough, but when things get tight, then the government will be able to punish people for bad health practices, like denying service because you're overweight, drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, etc.
All that stuff should be at your own risk and you pay the full cost of the consequences. Government intervention divorces the individual from individual responsibility.
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@lynnlynn9124 You speak as though morality rate in healthy people under the age of 70 was 0.02%. You took an unknown drug to fight an illness you had a 99.98% chance of surviving. That's not smart. Mortality rate was well-known before the vaccine came out. Why aren't you as scientific about early treatment, which the establishment prevented, in most cases, when an early treatment kit with a cheap anti-viral spray, a multi-vitamin with extra zinc and D3, etc.
Most cases that ended up in the hospital after the first 3 or 4 weeks, shouldn't have. COVID is treatable, especially if you catch it on the first onset of symptoms with the simplest of nasal sprays. 90% of people lick it right there, before it ever sets into their lungs, which MANY front-line clinicians discovered, and were punished for it. They WANTED ICU's filled with desperately ill patients.
Yes, if you weigh 400 pounds and/or you're approaching 80, taking a chance on an experimental drug makes sense. But don't lock down everybody else because you're in a high-risk category, and that's what happened. Countries who kept their schools open fared much better than the lock-down nations, who crippled their small business to no purpose, unless destruction, itself, was the purpose.
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@lynnlynn9124 How do you get past bypassing ALL protocols for the introduction of a new vaccine? Your risk assessment is all upside-down. Heart attacks are up, SIGNIFICANTLY in young people and especially athletes. We won't know the full extent of vaccine harm for years to come, and maybe never, if the data collection and analysis is as dishonest as it has been to date. You KNOW that a lot of people who died WITH COVID were lumped into the died OF COVID pile, speaking of the difference between correlation and causation, which you brought up.
This was a crime against humanity, and one day, humanity will look back and say "Good thing WE'RE not superstitious and prone to stampeding like the primitives of the 21st Century! The people believed whatever the authorities told them and the authorities got it all wrong, over and over again, and they just fell for it, every 50 years or so. Good thing we live de-centralized. Bad as things can get, no one person or group can ruin it for everyone else."
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Adam Schiff is a closet Libertarian, using reverse psychology on everybody, in adherence to the Soros Plan. Wherever Soros goes, traditional, nationalist populism springs up. He vaccinates one country after another. Hungary's on the verge of going full-on Christian theocracy! But maybe he's playing the REALLY long game, knowing that after 20 years of theocratic rule, the people will finally be ready for the Communist take-over!
But assuming my first speculation be correct, he will go down in history as the most hated hero of our time. By pushing the globalist agenda way too hard, he triggered a return to our original understanding of the GOOD in what got us here, most of which is opposed to principles Soros promotes. Mindful of our failings and with our eye on the Good, we serve Soros's evil, underhanded designs, with a return to Reason, informed by Love.
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@alexmarlow2508 So they're good against 3rd-world/3rd-rate opposition, but useless in a war between great powers with roughly equal capabilities, including satellite surveillance. It's impossible to hide or fly air cover for a tank formation. The Battle of Kursk is a historical oddity.
These are shock and awe weapons for subjugation of a disarmed populace or a populace reduced to small arms. The problem with that is that hill tribes have RPGs and other helicopter/tank killer armaments that can be manufactured and distributed widely for far less cost.
Russia lost a lot of tanks in Ukraine, forcing them to abandon some pretty baked-in military doctrine from WW II. Nowadays, tanks are mainly for martial displays in communist parades.
Modern warfare is all about artillery, smart munitions and boots on the ground. There'll be a flurry of drone advances, anti-drone measures that likely feature some form of jamming/EMP, and hardening/countermeasures against jamming/EMP. Infra-red is impossible to hide, so maybe we'll see some electric attack vehicles, which will force the weight down, likely culminating in something like men on e-Bikes with anti-tank and anti-aircraft munitions strapped to their backs.
Then the e-bikes will slowly get bigger and bigger, with thicker and thicker armor... LOL! Then they'll finally turn to pedal-powered bikes made of composite materials with no infra-red or electromagnetic signature.
One day, they will arrive at defensive lines consisting of thousands of cushy fox-holes dispersed along a perimeter, with soldiers who can pop out of their holes and destroy everything in a half-mile radius, with overlapping fields of fire with others like himself.
Next level after that will be wack-a-mole munitions that target foxhole dwellers, with continuous satellite monitoring to detect each as it is being dug. If there's a man with a spade outdoors, they'll pick up on it and add it to their maps. Then there'll be a push to create entire underground complexes that are built without disturbing the surface. Then they'll get ground-penetrating radar to pick up on that. Then they'll delve deeper to get below the radar, and only pop to the surface during hostilities as the tanks are rolling in, winning World War 5 out of nowhere.
The thing about the war in Ukraine that NATO probably didn't understand, but which Russia learned to its dismay when it suffered high tank losses early, is that the act of concentrating forces sufficient to mount a major, shock-and-awe, blitzkrieg-type offensive tells your opponent exactly where your armored vehicles and your ammunition are, making them easy prey for stand-off munitions.
Simple arithmetic tells us something more. The expenditure necessary for missile-to-missile air defense is far greater than the cost of munitions they are designed to defeat. Already, you see that while the Kremlin probably has good coverage, residential areas not far away do not have coverage. This is not just an oversight. It is a reality of space and time. Too much space and too little time. But the more stark reality is that even the best-defended targets can be run out of ammo to a missile barrage of sufficient length and intensity.
We've known this since people were scoffing at Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s. A few powerful people would be a little better protected from direct attack in their stomping grounds, but MIRVs and now SMART MIRVs mean comprehensive defense against a determined opponent with sufficient stockpiles and/or sufficient manufacturing base, can overwhelm the air defenses of anyone. None of the Big Boys have gone after each other since the 1940s. It's been one-sided wars, proxy wars, palace coups, and wars of subversion. No heavyweights have gone toe-to-toe, and it may be that a lot of existing doctrine needs to be flushed down the toilet.
So basically, both sides can only push their perimeter out as far as they can push out their air defenses. There haven't been that many manned fighter sorties over enemy territory. We're just too good at shooting them down. You don't see that many sorties until after the air defenses have been knocked out. This was one of the features of Desert Storm and its bastard offspring. Target all the SAM sites and then the combined-arms assault, with total air superiority.
And to make forward progress, you have to wipe out the air defenses of your opponent. I think infantry assaults and infantry battle are much the same as ever, but when a Great Power is involved, they'll level a building rather than try to clear it with infantry assaults. There was probably a kernel of truth in Prigozhin's complaints about ammo shortages. There probably WAS a lag in the supply at a point where the Kremlin is saying "Show us more progress" and the front-line commander is saying "We will take heavy losses trying to clear that structure with small arms and flash-bangs.
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"Intersectional lens" This is where ivory-tower geniuses divide and sub-divide us into smaller and smaller, unique groups, because they'd prefer to ignore centuries of wisdom that culminated in the Enlightenment and notions of individual rights.
I think it's kind of cute that they're trying to de-construct Western Civilization in this way, but it's alarming/disappointing/utterly boring that our supposedly best minds can't see the obvious logical end-point of these endeavors: There exist inalienable individual rights that existed before and that supersede any human-organized temporal authority (government).
What makes it cute is how smart, yet willfully obtuse, these geniuses are. What makes is sad is that this level of obtuseness is detrimental to society. But this is what humans do from time to time. Stupid ideas take on a life of their own and sweep through the culture. We look back and see this repeated, over and over, throughout history, but we never can see it when it's happening in real time. I don't know why. I see it. But I'm a mathematician, and so I'm trained to follow a line of reasoning to its bitter end. One of the first things they teach you is that if a premise leads to an absurd conclusion, the premise is false. I see absurd conclusions all around me, but I see no one questioning their original assumptions that led them inevitably to this "surprise ending" or "unintended consequence."
No. Either you're stupid, lazy, or you intended that consequence.
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I'll keep an eye on her personal-growth trajectory. She's obviously bright, but she's still pretty young and spends a lot of time talking and being a personality. She needs to keep reading. Same with Ben Shapiro. Very bright, young people, who are very well-read for their age - Ben more than anybody - but still kind of green. Check back when they're 50, and how they talk and write about things.
Another one to watch is Tomi Lahren. She slurps up knowledge like a sponge, but she's pretty young to get as much exposure as she does on the subjects she speaks about. Definitely very advanced for her age in some ways. But probably a little stunted, socially, and with another few or several years of scholarship before she'll have real gravitas.
Compared to their counterparts on the left, they're all way ahead of the game, but I'd want to see a list of accomplishments and some silver in their hair. Shapiro's editor-in-chief of Breitbart, which is good administrative experience. Personally, I kind of like seeing governors who administered their state governments ably and put them on a sound financial footing as presidents. I think senators make good vice presidents, because they kind of know how Washington works, and know where the bodies are buried.
Trump was a decent choice, because of the business he was in and the projects he brought to completion. Knowing the in's and out's of Byzantine Manhattan was good training for dealing with the rats in Washington, and even knowing quite a few of them. He was still a babe in the woods when it came to how many rules career civil service were willing to break to go after him. He underestimated how far Dems in Congress and Obama appointees embedded in his administration would go to thwart his agenda. Most of all, he made the mistake of thinking characters from previous Republican administrations were in any way sympathetic to the cause of draining the swamp.
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Leontief Input-Output Matrix is standard fare whenever introducing systems of linear equations.
Socialists and war planners love these matrices, because it makes them feel god-like. "See? All the outputs we need are controlled by all these inputs over here." Great for military logistics, and achieving very narrow goals over the short term, but terrible for planning entire economies, because every input along the way needs to be ORDERED, and the guys ordering don't care about the conditions at the coal mine or if you had a bad crop this year, or if there's labor unrest (or people dying) at the factory because the quotas are impossible to meet.
Input-Output matrices make no allowance for innovations that haven't yet been discovered or invented or for unexpected downturns due to external (or internal) factors that weren't built into the model. That's the beauty of a free market. as one thing shifts, everything shifts, all on its own, as everyone in the economy is trying to make their little piece of the economy the best they can make it, out of personal self-interest. The top-down planners have no concept of that. They just like to order people around.
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Yes. MSNBC and the rest are of, for, and by liberal white women, and I use the term "liberal" loosely, because they're all-in on big, authoritarian government, because it benefits THEM over everyone else (especially black people). For the short term.
Now we're starting to get into the long term on all the stuff liberal white women wanted, and they're scratching their heads wondering why they're lonely, and why they can't find a good man. Well, most of the men have been raised by women without husbands, and men raised by women and the government lack the traits women find desirable. The goal of infantilizing and emasculating men has been achieved, and (surprise!) women most affected.
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Awesome, scran. I do think that there's something biological underlying our apparent need for - and apparent benefits of - religion, else religion would not exist. For instance, I know I wouldn't smoke and I'd probably eat better and on a more regular schedule, with a wife and kids, if I were orthodox American protestant-type (or Muslim, which also places high value on family (recruits)).
As it is, I muddle through, childless, as a skeptic/agnostic. I can definitely see there being some kind of "religion gene," and its being pretty universally expressed, across our species. That hunter who put absolute belief in his god to guide his arm probably throws a better spear. Yanno?
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Chavez decided to take over the oil industry in Venezuela and redistribute the proceeds without thought to keeping the oil money flowing. Venezuela's got the thick crude, but it takes new tech to extract it and a lot of refining capacity. Chavez took the money from previous production and put nothing into investing in future production, because like all socialists, he just thinks money creates itself. Because of the difficulty of extracting and refining, Venezuela's oil isn't profitable below $100/barrel, and $90/barrel is the cut-off for all the competition, including the frackers. So Venezuela wants all oil producers to curtail production, so Venezuela can make money off their oil.
This is the problem with Progressive/socalist domestic economics. All these wonderful things to spend money on, but no real understanding of where the money comes from or what NATURALLY sustaining processes look like (Free Markets!). Maduro continued the stupidity. Mismanaged the economy, rather than fostering free enterprise, making Venezuela a 1-crop economy, like much of the Middle East. This always happens under socialism. There are exceptions, when you have a homogeneous population, like much of Europe, where citizens have a sense of duty and don't just see a free meal.
I'm not defending what we did in Iraq or Libya. Or what we were starting to do in Syria. And I'd be pissed if we sent troops to Venezuela. But I do think Maduro's a failed socialist dictator. He went from elected president to dictator in this last, Soviet-style, election, where fraud and voter intimidation were very widespread.
I don't believe in overthrowing socialist governments. I think we should advocate against socialism, and let them tear themselves apart. I think promising people everything will be taken care of by government just sets you up for shortages and poor quality of goods. You take the enlightened self-interest out of the equation, and weaponize greed for destructive, rather than constructive purposes. You want people's greed to be channeled into making more money because you offer higher quality at a lower price. You get return customers by treating people right. Government control of the economy undercuts that.
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3 minutes. You gotta jump to 2 minutes to get past the commercials. He sneaks 'em into the middle of his shows, now, too. I think he's good at what he does, but he's a semi-grifter, who'll show you the tippy-top of a graph a mile high, zoom in on a 2-inch drop, and shout "Stock Prices Imploding!" He really likes the word "implode" in his headlines.
Still, a person who's not up on the storylines can get up to speed on some of them from Dr. Steve. He exaggerates everything, but he is correct about the underlying socio-cultural trends that run in the exact opposite direction of the establishment elites. There is a sea change taking place in the collective consciousness, and the Great Reset taking place in the highest places are nothing in comparison. He calls it "nationalist populism," and to an extent that's true, but I think it goes a lot deeper than that. It's back to family first, then neighborhood, then town, and the top-down stuff, dictated by establishment elites, is fighting a desperate rearguard action, which can be seen by the ENDLESS doubling-down on more and more outrageous nonsense that leaves more and more of the population saying "WTF?"
Meanwhile, Yankee ingenuity is sweeping the planet. There are so many people in so many places around the world sharing ways of thinking and ways of doing things, that I think the people are changing faster than the legacy institutions who rule them. This has actually always been the case, or the Roman Empire would just be the world government. Or the Mongol Empire. Or the Chinese Empire. Or the British Empire. We just don't notice this, because all the history books talk about are the (increasingly) irrelevant actors at the top.
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I can't give you chapter and verse, but I felt the same way about the Star Wars prequels, which were written by George Lucas. I really had much higher expectations for the Jedi, in general, and Anakin Skywalker in particular. "Where's the wisdom and subtlety? Where's the DEPTH?"
While some of what you say is assuredly true, I think part of the problem is now that we have the CGI capability to present virtually ANY spectacle, the spectacle, itself, has taken precedence over the story-telling. And the ability to create any visual a computer geek can put together has given us action scenes as envisioned by computer geeks, modulo cost-cutting measures that result in a bunch of jump-cuts, trying to massage a geek's vision of the action with something that's halfway acceptable to audiences.
Oh well, that's not a total analysis, but I think it's more than just arrested-development types doing the writing. And MAYbe it's at least in part due to we, the audience, growing more mature, while Hollyweird is targeting a demographic raised on participation trophies and the new racissism, while us old farts are wondering what the fuss is about after fighting the REAL civil-rights battles 50 years ago, and WINNING.
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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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Tough call on the opening moves of the SMO. The scale of the original build-up was enough to raise flags in the West, but I don't think it was enough for them to believe that the Russians would strike at all, let alone strike as hard as they did. Alexander pooh-poohed the idea that the Russians were readying for the attack. The feint at Kiev tied down a LOT of Ukrainian forces, at the cost of high losses in a relatively small number of heavily armed, elite Russian forces, whose value is in arriving before they're supposed to, and fighting like demons.
They scoff, with sarcastic "3 days to capture Kiev and end the war," but it just seems to me that they achieved what they wanted, at relatively little cost. There wasn't a long, drawn-out struggle to bring their forces to the gates of the key cities, which they had enough power to grind down, while the more general mobilization got underway. They haven't had any problem slowing down and destroying the counteroffensive. I think the killed-and-wounded are much higher on the Ukrainian side. Even if they're not, the Russians can afford the trade; whereas, the Ukrainians cannot.
I did not know, nor have I double-checked, the fate of the SU's that've been launching the guided air-to-ground missiles. If the 2-aircraft teams that are firing these salvos are being downed at anywhere close to Alexander's claimed 50% rate by Russian aircraft/missiles, that's very bad for the Ukrainians.
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What Poland's doing will ultimately be bad. The last thing we want is to impose new regulations. What we should do is REMOVE special protections. That's what they're hiding behind. Big Tech and Corporate robber barons will most certainly use/twist the regulations aimed at them as a vehicle to crush any up-and-coming platforms who would compete with them.
Just ditch the Communications Decency Act, entirely, including the infamous Section 230 that protects Big Tech platforms from the consequences of their blatantly political actions.
Nobody's forcing you to watch ANYthing. You've always had the choice of reading whatever tabloid or conspiracy-theory rags you wanted, since publishing was invented. Let people filter their OWN content, by choosing from a wide array of filtering products. Want to protect your kids? Find parental-controls products. Otherwise, the government needs to step off and BACK OFF.
There are plenty of laws on the books regarding defamation, incitement of violence, and libel/slander. Clean up THOSE laws, including the ones that allow you to libel or slander public figures. One law for all. Period. If a regular citizen can block a troll, so can the president or any politician or other public figure. Equal protection under the law. It cuts both ways. Usually, the politicians get special privileges they shouldn't. But under the current system, anyone challenging the establishment - even from within the establishment - can be crushed in the public square. That's BS. Trump is the poster child for this.
Instead, we will make laws/regs that are messed-up and too complicated, and re-visit them over and over, adding MORE fine print, to the delight of the lawyers and the dismay of ordinary citizens. Sick of it. Make up a crisis. Then ram through bad law and bad regulations, while you've got everybody's attention and an apparent (rarely real) threat.
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Jim Comey and others in government and the Democrat Party Apparat mounted a palace coup against a sitting president. Government officials committed blatant acts of sedition, crippling the presidency from within. Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Wray, Sztrok, (Lisa) Page, ... It's a real ensemble cast, all of whom are still walking around, free, and even being invited on cable t.v. to repeat the same lies and even make up new ones. No justice? No trust, ever again.
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He has a heavy, ponderous way of expressing himself that lends a false credibility. He's one of the main reasons that so many news outlets still feel they can look their viewers in the eye and say "Russia" at the same time. The standard set by Woodward and Bernstein for confirmation was met and exceeded, when you consider so many highly placed officials - with Brennan topping the list - saying the most damaging things. They probably had 18 or 20 Deep Throats all seeming to say the same thing. And it wasn't men in trench coats meeting in a downtown D.C. parking garage. It was 5 or 6 of them at a cocktail party, making wisecracks and exchanging meaningful glances to say without saying, and feed the "Yeah, EVERYbody's in on this, and our Top People say it's gonna go THIS way."
It wasn't a matter of fact. It was a matter of culture. And Brennan can spin this for quite awhile, yet, just by dropping dark hints and veiled threats, without being arrested. If he can say those things and continue walking free without being seen by ALL as either a malicious liar, or the most incompetent DCI in memory.
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@Kymerican : I think it's "Tennant." I've forgotten most of what I remember reading about Tennant. But yes. It does appear that Brennan was the ultimate coat-tail rider. He hitched his wagon to Tennant and earned rapid promotion. He has a ponderous habit of speech and he pushes things as far as he absolutely can, at every opportunity. Good for a climber. But if this Kiriakou fellow is correct (His animus towards Brennan must be understood.), then Brennan wasn't too swift when it came to intelligence. Obvious political hack appointment. I can see that, given how he says absolutely the most damaging thing he possibly can, and people believe he knows something.
Even after Mueller says "No joy" on indictments, Brennan can keep on his same line, claiming to know something nobody else knows that he can't TELL you, but he KNOWS. He's been playing that card ever since Trump was elected. I don't see anything acting to stop him, so far, but I think he was discredited as DCI long before Trump came along, and had all the telltales of a political-hack promotion-and-appointment.
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The fact is that Republicans DID go after Bill Clinton for fooling around. And while Bill probably SHOULD have been prosecuted for sexual assault and his wife for character assassination of his victims, it wasn't an appropriate use of a special counsel appointed to investigate WhiteWater.
I like the idea of an independent counsel, who doesn't work for the guys he's investigating, but clearly they go on fishing expeditions.
New Rule: When you don't find grounds to go after a guy for the main thing (WhiteWatergate, Russiacollusiongate) you're investigating, you should close up shop.
It is well known in legal circles that if you target the man, you can always turn up a crime, since all it takes is one person's testimony contradicting your own to put you up on lying-to-investigators charges, as several experts have asserted with regard to the Mike Flynn case, and with regard to whether or not Trump should agree to a sit-down with Mueller (He shouldn't.).
That's basically all that got Clinton on: lying to prosecutors. And it wasn't even criminal, but it WAS impeachable, because there's a lower burden of proof for impeachment. I think Bill Clinton's a turd for treating women the way he does, starting with his wife. But if there's one thing a guy gets a pass for is not discussing matters of the penis and fidelity in public. Gentlemen never tell.
Getting him for lying about a consensual relationship is like getting Capone for tax evasion. But there's a very big difference. There are no laws against cheating on your wife. He probably SHOULD have been prosecuted for sexual assault, and covering-up for it or those who covered up for it should've been hauled in and charged.
But that doesn't mean getting him on the blue dress was a mis-use of prosecutorial powers, in my humble opinion. If they couldn't get him on WhiteWater, the prosecutor should've shut the whole thing down. He's been granted special powers for a very specific and narrow purpose.
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And back in the late '50s and early '60s, John F. Kennedy was a TOTAL dog. Remember this when people talk about Establishment Press. It's actually been going on since power-hungry individuals cooked up the whole Fairness Doctrine, and invented the myth of objectivity in reporting, which never has existed, EVER, in the history of spoken language.
But ALL D.C. reporters KNEW about Marilyn Monroe (and others). But major news has ALWAYS been hand-in-glove with government. We've NEVER gotten the full story. Just because it's become blatantly OBVIOUS with the proliferation of media and citizen reporters doesn't mean it hasn't been this way since NBC, CBS and ABC first opened a freakin' RADIO station...
There IS a journalistic ethos of reporting facts, honestly, however they cut. But nobody's perfect, and the market really needs to understand the axe-grinding has never ever ceased, so you listen to multiple sources and trust the ones who are more often correct, by your personal lights, as best you may.
But as consumers of news, we're idiots to uncritically accept ANY news source to be providing the truth, but more importantly, the truths that we most need to know in order to understand our world. It's what editors choose NOT to tell us that is most critical.
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I was spared ALL of this nonsense as a boy, for which I'm eternally grateful. Time enough for all that sex stuff when you're old enough to take responsibility for the consequences. That's something we forgot along the way. I'm no big religionist, but there are obvious survival mechanisms EMBEDDED in tradition, and we meddle with tradition at our peril.
That's why I'm such a Jordan Peterson fan. I end up treading dangerously close to being accused of social Darwinism, but the fact is, what works is what persists to be passed on to future generations. Things that don't work don't last. As an evolutionary psychologist/sociologist/biologist, you HAVE to account for the persistence of religion through the millennia. Peterson is one who tries to get to the heart of that. Not too much into the Jungian "collective unconscious" as a sort of mystical connection, but I DO believe there are explicit and also largely HIDDEN assumptions built into people on the day-to-day level that can lead to better or worse outcomes over time.
I just wish the Christians, who get so much RIGHT, didn't insist on superimposing "God Said" on top of everything. It's a paradox. Maybe an inescapable one, but probably not, if some schmuck like me can sort of abstract these notions and reason from them to some interesting conclusions that appear to hold up under scrutiny and tested in the laboratory of history.
These "liberals" can be as correct as they want to be. It's the Christians and the Muslims who are going to out-breed them and eventually start calling the shots again, as they have for millennia, with all the good and bad that entails. But I don't think the liberals are very "right." I think they throw out the baby with the bathwater and never ask themselves the right questions about how to proceed, having exposed another obsolete or regressive aspect of Bronze-Age traditions, little altered since Medieval times, when we KNOW a lot of THEIR culture - for good or ill - was embedded in our understanding of ancient texts.
For some reason, we just assume that the loudest person complaining about a wrong is more qualified than anyone else as to how to set things right. Slaves who overthrow their masters make terrible rulers. The American revolution was unique in that it was an aggrieved Middle Class who threw off the shackles of European imperialism, and set up something pretty cool that lasted for damn near 200 years, more or less as intended, for the vast majority of people.
The rot set in almost immediately, with rich dudes "having a word" with politicians, who were only too happy to exceed their writ to benefit their pal and themselves. Every time the CULTURE was undergoing a shift, somebody made it political, and the government got a little bigger, stronger, and farther removed from its intended purpose and scope.
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This isn't left vs right. It's war-pig establishment vs everybody else. As a libertarian, I think progressives' inordinate love for nanny government is not conducive to liberty or prosperity, but we have broad agreement on wanting to end forever war, opposing the military-industrial complex, and fighting the media-censorship complex.
Progressives are one giant cognitive dissonance, urging us to give more power to the state apparat to "help" the downtrodden, when everything about the last 50 years should teach progressives that the last people we should put in charge of health, education and welfare are the bureaucrats and the politicians who will always sell out to the corporations and vice-versa. Putting the government in charge means that multinationals need only bribe or coerce a handful at the top to impose their will on everyone. Get government out of everybody's business and business will not be able to move the needle by hijacking the state.
It's not just bad corporations and crony capitalism going in one direction. It's also the state imposing its will on business. Bad actors in government and business are enabled in their crimes by the progressive project, which should be a grassroots operation between consenting adults to do what they can to help their immediate neighbors and for God's sake, quit looking to government to solve the human condition through organizational charts and massive bureaucracies. Human problems are solved, one human at a time, by humans who care, not by civil servants who are out of a job as soon as they actually solve anything, so of course they solve nothing.
There are no perfect solutions, only trade-offs, and the question is "Who manages the trade-offs? Human beings directly concerned, or government bureaucracies 2,000 miles away?"
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Shapiro's a Zionist. No doubt. His reason (and scholarship) go out the window when it comes to Israel. The history of the last few hundred years is ignored. No, I don't think Hamas is all rainbows and unicorns. But the elephant in the room is the (re-)creation of the state of Israel, by force, in 1948, by a bunch of arrogant and deluded evangelicals in partnership with the worst kind of what we now call "neocons" of that era.
Israel's been locked in a never-ending war for its survival ever since, and it's been our loyal proxy and we've been ITS loyal proxy, ever since 1948.
Must we live in a state of forever war, pursuing a sunk-cost fallacy in perpetuity, or do we admit we had no right to genocide the people in the region and carve out a nation by force that hadn't existed for centuries? The blowback from our actions in 1948 is ongoing and will never end.
Who the hell was Balfour to dictate national boundaries in 1914? Who the hell are we to follow along and impose his vision, by force, forever, against the wishes of virtually every nation in the region?
I say we give up some desert in the American West, if everybody supports a Jewish homeland enough to wreak destruction around the world for its preservation. Give the Jews a section of desert, somewhere, and in one generation, it'll be an oasis, a land of plenty, for all who live there. I'll chip in.
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JBP went out of his way to give the benefit of the doubt to cultural vandals and thinly-veiled Marxists. He's been in a fight with cultural Marxists and the postmodern project the entire time. They have done nothing but escalate the attacks on him and grab more power. The events SINCE 2017 entirely justify his indignation.
If only one "side" goes out of its way to be reasonable, and the other "side" only seeks power over others, then the unreasonable side wins, See "Bolshevik Revolution."
I've been on the "right side" of a lot of arguments, only to lose because the "other side" acted more offended, and I refused to play that game. Well, dammit, that's truly offensive, and I'm done hiding it, trying to find common ground with an intransigent left. Every time I do, that's just another win for uncompromising and narcissistic leftists, who are NOW in the use-of-force phase on every level. Censorship, de-platforming, threats of violence, actual violence, and now abuse of powers of the state to serve a recognizably Marxist agenda.
Yes, there's a more civil space in UK outside the culture war, but it's because "conservatives" are damn near as big of socialists as the so-called "left." It was conservatives who presided over lock-downs and vaccine mandates and assisted the biggest wealth transfer from the poor and middle class to the ruling class in HISTORY.
Jordan's becoming more urgent and confrontational because trying to reason with unreasonable people has gotten him and the Human Progress Project nowhere. It's time to hit 'em where they hurt, with memes, satire, and some confrontation. No, we're not compromising on our children. No, we're not OK with new-age serfdom. Yes, we've been in a war the entire time, but only the other side has known it. Now WE know it, and people aren't just going to roll over and play dead just because some lunatic is offended more by pronouns than Puritans were by adultery.
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I think in social media we're seeing people expressing themselves who, a generation ago, probably couldn't read or write, much, at all. And here you see them in all their glory, saying stupid shit, getting shot down, hearing other viewpoints. It's messy and it's beautiful. And we're all learning.
We all have our trigger buttons, and somebody out there who is eager to push them. Does it go off the rails, sometimes? Heck, discussing the Red Sox at the local oasis is something that's brought SOME to blows for generations.
What I see are a lot of people kind of working things out for themselves. And when you're in learning mode, you're in child mode. Again, it's messy, as children are messy. But it seems to me like people are growing up. People are developing thick skins against trolls. Slowly but surely. We're learning to tune out some of the noise.
Yeah, there are some who're going to take social media down a rabbit hole, like the 60-foot nephelem they see in satellite photos, or Sasquatch in yet another jiggly, blurry video. This kind of shit's been going on since there've been people.
But I think the overall tide is rising. If I can argue with a Swede about Nanny government, and we both keep it civil (if crude and irreverent), that's probably a good thing. Just for a Swede to know that there are people out there who think differently, when maybe everybody around him in Sweden is afraid to hold certain opinions, for fear of cultural marxists destroying his social life and his standing in the larger (very conformist) community.
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@hideousruin I've never had a bad female boss. Their mother-hen instincts were good for morale. Of course, I've seen them get crossways with female subordinates. But one time (luckily), the female subordinate was a climber and needed put in her place, to keep her from telling EVERYbody what to do. I'm sure that woman felt like her female boss was toxic, but from the rest of the department's perspective, she was keeping us from being run over, because we just wanted to get along and we all worked our asses off.
We didn't need to be told what "best practices" were, because we were already more skilled than she was at the actual job, no matter how many trendy books she read or what the "authorities" were saying at the time. Those of us who'd been in the game a while KNEW that what was being pushed THEN was the SAME shit they were pushing 10 years before, and it didn't work the way it was supposed to. She was the only one gunning for the top job, and we were all relieved when she went somewhere else, where she could be top dog, while one of us reluctantly took over for the original boss when she retired.
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The reason people think the subatomic world is probabilistic is because it's too small for us to see individual subatomic particles (too small and maybe too fast). We can't see the jellybeans, but we can weigh a bunch of them all at once, and theorize about the individual jellybean, through statistical inference, or simply by dividing by the total number of jellybeans after we observe them acting together.
This is a big hang-up I have with the Bohr-Einstein debate. Bohr's quantum mechanics enabled us to make predictions, sure, but just because you can't see something doesn't mean that it is not behaving deterministically, or as Einstein would say "God does not play dice."
I'm probably out in left field, but there are some artifacts of these probabilistic models, such as the bell curve, that according to the model, predict a very small - but positive - probability of ants that are 100 feet tall or elephants that are 1 inch tall. They're just out in the tail of the distribution. Now, take the fact that you're only ever dealing with billions or trillions of these objects. Small probability of it ever happening to any one particle becomes near-certainty, simply due to the large number of trials/particles involved. Maybe there's only a 0.00001 probability of an event, but run the experiment 1,000,000,000,000 times and the probability of that 0.00001 probability event becomes near certain. The infinite # of monkeys typing at random sort of deal.
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They've still got a long way to go. But waking up to the shenanigans of the West is an important first step.
There will be others lining up to exploit African resources if they succeed in ridding themselves of Western parasites.
I think that financial and military aid is also a form of meddling in internal affairs of a country. This is how foreign nations exploit African nations. All they have to do is bribe one or two top people, and that nation starts doing the bidding of the foreign country, and keeping the people down becomes POLICY, to help keep the corrupt leaders in control.
It's still unstable, because the vast majority of the people know they're being cheated. But from an exploiter's point of view, the setup is very stable. They just bribe the next leader. Heck, he's probably already on their payroll! When a leader starts getting "uppity," they pull their support and start funding rebels! Very easy to overthrow a government that's obviously cheating its citizens!
It's a story as old as nations.
Over time, the Roulette Wheel of Leadership comes up "enlightened" and I see African countries making great strides in short periods of time. They can turn things around in a hurry, if the rest of the world will let them, but the rest of the world rarely does. The best leaders don't last long enough, and there aren't enough of them at the same time.
But I think progress is slowly being made. You see some needed infrastructure going up, here and there. Canals, highways, rail systems, dams, ... Africa presents some unique engineering challenges, but is rich in people and resources.
I think China sees the potential. I think they're pretty predatory, but at the same time, I think Belt and Road could benefit everyone.
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Yes. I agree. Working and learning remotely is a boon to society, but bosses, teachers and students are poorly trained for it. I'm one of the exceptions Dave talked about, due to health reasons, and I was already working remotely before the p1and3m1c. For people who are MOTIVATED and TRAINED, remote work is highly efficient and effective. Zero commute time, massive fuel savings, and your BEST people aren't held back by one-size-fits-all, realtime, in-person groups, that never move any faster than the slowest group member, or an arbitrary schedule.
My best students slurp up the knowledge FAST. Going remote, I can stay out of their way and put more time and energy where it's needed. Students can work ahead, so they can slow down if a concept kicks their butt. Working ahead also frees up space for family emergencies. Got a funeral to attend or need to care for a sick parent/child/grandma? You've got some slack in your schedule for LIFE stuff, which is perfect for motivated students, adult students, students with lots of extracurricular activities of all kinds.
But the vast majority of students aren't trained to direct their own learning in any way. Much of the resistance to remote learning is the comfortable, in-person spoon feedings that generations of Americans have experienced, even though we know it's not really working. And of course, feminism in education is pushing most of the boys right out of the system, with lesson plans and teaching strategies aimed at females, with more emphasis on busy work and less on actual mastery of the material. Just so no one's feelings are hurt... Of course, no one cares about the feelings of students who are alienated or diagnosed as ADHD because they're normal and the lessons suck.
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Religions that persist have a clear survival imperative built in. Often by design, because the originators of religion are all about unifying people under one political banner, with God - and faith - as the unifying principle. They persist because they agree - whether thru science or "Divine Revelation" - with what science eventually ends up telling us. We can talk about civil unions 'til the cows come home, but the fact is that not a single human being who ever lived was the product of a homosexual union. LGBTQXYZ are all products of heterosexual unions.
I'm not a huge fan of state-recognized marriages, hetero or otherwise, because the advantages they build into having children mainly serve the state's endless thirst for tax revenue and cannon fodder. It's an artificial "grow!" imperative from an earlier time. But since it IS enshrined in the law, and MEDICAL and PENSION BENEFITS are attached to recognized unions, then ANY union - hetero or otherwise - should be recognized by the state, as well. It should be that people get married because they want to solemnize a long-term relationship. And if you share the same home, same bed, same LIFE for years, your spouse should receive the standard spousal benefits.
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You were all over this weeks ago, and I was getting kind of pissed that you wouldn't address it. Turns out, you DID, but even going to your main channel, I couldn't find this video. Now it just pops up in my feed! And you do grant that the people protesting against the restrictions on who can run for office have a legit gripe. I was thinking that you were just shilling for Putin when I didn't see this report. Well done. Your treatment of it is fair and fairly nuanced, as usual.
Of course, "liberal" and "ultra-liberal" don't mean the same thing there as here. In Asia (including Russia), people take authoritarian rule, nationalism, and regressive social values for granted. I wouldn't want to be gay in Azerbaijan, for example. Liberals in the USA are also very authoritarian, but they're blissfully unaware of that fact.
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@GK-yh9yh There's nothing wrong with people being able to find and purchase products that they desire, starting with food, clothing and shelter, but man does not live by bread, alone. And who am I to say what someone else shouldn't have? "Consumerism" is kind of a buzzword. People shouldn't be ashamed of having nice things. I think more people should have more nice things. But mindless greed and pursuit of toys? If that's what you mean, then OK.
I do miss the days before everything was done up with plastic wrap. 3 lbs of ground chuck, please. And old Jim Kintner would shovel 3 lbs on the scale and zick-zick-zick, hand Mom her 3 lbs of ground chuck, wrapped in butcher's paper, taped closed with butcher's tape. We went to the dairy and got our milk in re-usable glass jugs. You got a deposit back for returning them, but they were also just really nice containers! We had a bunch of them collected, and would fill them with spring water in the summertime.
I'm pretty surprised and disappointed at the plastic packaging we use. I thought the generation in charge cared about the environment.
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KingofUSA85: I think that it's going to be a while before Democrats take control of Congress or the White House. They went too far down a bat-shit-crazy rabbit hole, and they're still in the double-down-denial stages.
It turns out that blacks and hispanics would rather work than have a hand-out - Something we've known for a LONG TIME - and they're red-pilling off the plantation at a ruinous-to-Democrats rate, since social media brought down the Mass Media Wall, much like the Berlin Wall came crashing down almost 30 years ago (Wow! Has it been that long?!).
There's currently a big fight (by the noise levels) over control of the Interwebz, but the intellectual and spiritual high ground is held by more libertarian-thinking individuals, and there's just no putting the genie back in the bottle. Old ways of providing and consuming information are going extinct, and they just can't maintain the monopoly.
They're TRYING, by seeking to "regulate" platforms such as YouTube and FaceBook, but unlike utilities of the past, people can ALWAYS walk away from YouTube when they're not happy with the platform. The minute I no longer see or hear the voices that I know are out there, I will look elsewhere. YouTube and Google are walking a fine line, here.
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Yes. I believe that all parents should know about hosts.deny and hosts.allow concept.
For your kids, you should basically deny all domain names. Then, allow a list of domains that you know are OK for them, because you checked them out, either with your child or not, but probably better to do with your child. Add to the hosts.allow file as your children ask and you can check. You can of course allow a lot of DNS's your child never heard of, because you think they're broadening in the right way(s).
They probably won't like it, but hey, I didn't like having to be home by dark when I was a kid, and it's the same kind of reasonable restriction to place on a child.
But for ADULTS, I think these social media platforms should not be making censorship decisions, the same way the telephone company isn't responsible for what you say on the phone.
I think lies and misinformation get exposed and shot down a LOT quicker in an open and unrestricted (by 3rd parties) forum.
"Hate speech" is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. Big censorship engine there, that's ripe for the taking and has already been used, extensively. No such thing as a hate crime. But there are crimes already on the books, where your open hatred becomes a factor in the penalty phase (after being found guilty), and rightly so, because motives do make a difference.
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As an old man with years of head start on Tim & Company, it's been both fun and annoying watching the growth process. Both of them are at fault for screaming at Lydia. Adam is at fault for going Soap Opera about Lydia. Geometry's an indicator, not proof. Even WITH proof, there's nothing gained by exposure.
I was at a friend's house when he was away, and it was just his wife and I in the living room. She liked to sit cross-legged on the floor. One day she wore a very loose, low-cut top, and her boobs were fully visible. I made the mistake of suggesting she cover up or shift how she was sitting. Next time I was there, the husband accused me of coming on to his wife. To me, it was an unfair accusation, but even though what I said to her and to him was 100% truth, and my motives were pure, I pissed both of them off, and there was nothing I could say to fix it. Adam needed to mind his own business.
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16:30 - I'm way more worried about the legacy media and the same systems of control extending to the Internet than I am of the Internet, itself. Without the Internet, there would have been no voices speaking against what was being done during COVID. As it was, legacy media and government control of Big Tech platforms achieved effective control over the main Internet messages that were selectively boosted or selectively de-boosted. As it turned out, the voices against what was going on got bigger than the legacy media at a certain point.
There are still legacy controls in operation across broad swaths of the media landscape. They have their own momentum and they are automatically boosted on the Internet. But even though they get boosted, legacy network channels are doing less business than the aggregation of all their independent competition.
For those of us who are "in the know" about what Dr. Malone's talking about, the change is agonizingly slow. We see the propaganda victories continuing in the legacy media. Neocons still exercise way more power in government and legacy media than they do in the hearts and minds of most Americans, and so government policy and public sentiment are more at odds than I've ever seen them.
You won't see NBC, ABC, CBS, or FOX ever questioning the Israel Project, where what is best in our hearts is used to do a great amount of harm. But you WILL see independents, whose combined viewership is many times that of legacy media's, calling out the Regime-Change Imperialism, and the fact that European colonization never went away. It just went underground.
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I agree. Establishment news media are war mongers, whose "insider access" is to all the worst war mongers in the government. As an American, I do not want - nor does my country need - to fight on foreign soil or destabilize/overthrow sovereign nations over resources. We have everything we need.
The American people fervently believe in liberty and we're the ORIGINAL anti-imperialist nation. But it didn't take us long to assume all the forms of ruthless imperialism. We look back on imperial Japan as these evil people, but to understand THEM, we must remember how we decided to be like the imperialist Europeans and force Japan to trade with us at gunpoint, in the 19th Century (See Commodore Perry).
The USA is supposed to be a Great Power that's NOT imperialistic. Again, that's how all Americans are raised: Throw off the shackles of imperialist Britain! But our leaders see how powerful we are (or were) and style themselves as aristocrats, playing The Great Game, like all the ruthless bastard countries who came before. The ONLY time we should be fighting is to protect our own nation, not some indistinct and undefined "national interest" notion. If a country wants our help, they should sign up to become a new member of our United States. Otherwise, our government shouldn't have the mandate to meddle all over the planet.
THAT is the only form of "imperialism" of which I approve. To become a new state, a country has to play by our rules, which are embodied in the U.S. Constitution. My "flip side" of that is to not grasp too firmly, and allow secession from the union. But we went another way, back in the 1860s, with abolition of slavery - a good thing - as the excuse to murder 10s of thousands of Americans - a bad thing. Killing people is as bad or worse than enslaving them. And now everybody believes in national unity over justice. Slavery was going to fall. We didn't have to murder people to end it. In my opinion, that war was more about commerce and northern greed than any holy crusade against slavery.
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@danjohnston9037 That's the argument for a "liberal arts education," but the amount of broadening you actually get from a standard 4-year degree program is minimal, especially nowadays, where coursework in activism elbows aside traditional history, literature, and fine arts. I think a one-stop shop for everything from earth science to theater is a pretty cool thing, but when it's become corrupted and is no longer producing reliable knowledge - its primary function - then maybe these institutions need to die back, some, or be replaced entirely.
Also, I guess you're assuming, going in, that a college-prep student is not going to take local, state, American or world history. That USED to be a regular part of the curriculum of every k-12 program. They'd start you out in grade school talking about the history of the town, state and region. Then your last few years, you'd take American History and top it off at the end with World History. Graduating from high school meant you had a passing understanding, already, and were ready to vote.
That is no longer the case.
Speaking as a math teacher at a community college, I'd say close to HALF of my students are under 18, taking college credits in everything up to Calculus III before graduating high school. You'd be surprised at how many kids are out there wiping out their freshman and sophomore Math and English course work before they're 18. But I can tell you they're out there.
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The ESG put them into debt because the ESG projects didn't make money. As long as that money was there, I think a lot of the middle men and movie execs don't care if the project makes money, because they're all getting paid, pretty much, regardless. What they DO care about is the money source drying up, and maybe that's what's happening.
I think, too, that the institutions pushing ESG don't necessarily care if their media projects make money, as long as they're successful in moving the Overton window, which pays dividends on their other, unrelated projects.
For instance, if the propaganda is good for Democrats and Democrats will spend money on ESG projects in other areas, then the losses studios incur on the individual movies is more than offset by gains elsewhere, for instance, continued government subsidies for EVs and penalties against internal combustion vehicles. If they can shape policy through their influence, they don't really care about the movies making a profit, as long as they dominate, culturally.
But now, they're clearly not dominating, culturally, and they have to re-think their plans to "force behaviors," as Michael Fink puts it.
I think we've reached the tipping point on that game by institutional investors. I think they're going to pull back from movies not because they're not making money, but because they're not getting the cultural traction they were paying for.
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@KageMinowara I think Sowell articulates and backs up a lot of things many people believe in their gut, but can't put into words, or have the time to do that specific research.
But sometimes, when he's ripping on the Vietnam War, it comes across like we just didn't fight it the right way and I never saw him criticize the decision to be fighting there in the first place. I think he's an anti-Communist of the "race to Berlin" and the partition of Germany school. Maybe I just didn't stick around for everything he said, but I got a real neocon aftertaste from it.
It's like listening to RFK, Jr., nodding my head in agreement with everything he says, until he gets to the subject of Israel, and it just doesn't compute. He shares some indisputable and uncomfortable truths that I'm glad are seeing the light of day, but he won't want to scale back HHS. He'll want it to become even more powerful, but just do the right things, as HE sees it, not eschew power and farm out those functions to the several states. I know human nature and the life of their own to which all institutions fall prey, which is why I don't like most cabinet-level departments.
Health, education, and media form the tripod upon which all fascist regimes rest and rely. There's no mortal who can bend the three rings to their will, without eventually succumbing to the One Ring, or opening up future generations to its influence, activated by control of people's minds and health.
I don't think it destroys the value of their research or analysis in all things, but there's a real "neocon taint" there. Daily Wire, Dave Rubin (ex-Daily wire), and others.
But back to Sowell. I think that he is one of the dangerous intellectuals who "face none of the consequences of their bad policies." He's more like me in that he has some legit criticisms to make, but really should never be at the controls. I know what good driving is, but I also know my eyes aren't the greatest, so when the fog or heavy rains set in, I pull off the road and hunker down, because I know I'm a danger in those conditions.
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Authoritarians always sow the seeds of their own destruction. I'm white-pilled on that.
But I'm black-pilled on the masses ever recognizing the rise of authoritarianism or the horrific damage caused by authoritarians. MOST of what is GOOD about society are things that you have to LET happen. No person or group can POSSIBLY order the affairs of every individual. But they will always try, and the society and economy always break down, usually with a major war to keep the Ponzi scheme going and the leadership in power, despite their obvious failures.
Yes. Hitler's economy was a MESS. It looked good the same way a Facebook braggart does, going into debt so they can post videos of all their new toys and extravagant vacations. It's all on borrowed money. The Nazis exported their inflation to conquered nations, maintaining the illusion of prosperity back home, by pillaging those countries, "paying" for what they took with paper money that was worthless. Napoleon did similar things to retain the backing of the people. When he was still conquering his neighbor countries, the French people enjoyed a false prosperity at the expense of millions dead and impoverished in the conquered lands.
It's all of a pattern. We're following that same pattern in the USA. Everybody with a smart phone is an implicit participant in slave labor, environmental destruction, and horrific working conditions for people in other countries. SELLING phones to us that will break or become obsolete in a year just adds insult to injury.
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@jjs5191 The only difference that exists could be eliminated by de-centralizing the power as Russell Brand, another progressive, has proposed. LET them try their socialist schemes of redistribution on the local level, and see how it works. I think we would do more for the underprivileged if charity was 100% voluntary, and people garnered "virtue points" by giving their OWN time and money to helping others, rather than campaigning endlessly to make it a government thing, run by politicians and bureaucrats with other people's money. There's no virtue in that. Just a form with a bunch of checkboxes.
Progressives push their programs on the federal level because they can get their wet dreams passed everywhere all at once. But you can't have those programs imposed in one-size-fits-all fashion from the top down. What works for North Dakota doesn't work for Georgia. Conditions and the people are vastly different. But worst of all, you put all the charitable functions of the society in the hands of a few people, and from then on, it's only as good as the people running it, and bad people are like moths to the flame, when all that power's concentrated in one place.
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Spotted Owl, Polar Bears, Snail-Darters, ... All for propaganda purposes. All to justify use of force to save them.
The thing I hate about this is the one side goes too far, gets demonized, and people go on thinking it's just a bunch of scare-mongering, and that the world would be fine if they'd just shut up. We do need to do better wrt the environment, but government action is not how we get to a better place.
We get to a better place by free and prosperous people ascending Maslow's Ladder. From higher rungs of that ladder, they have the means to indulge their higher moral values.
We're already to the point that the average shopper, given a choice between a company that spews pollution to make their products and a company that's environmentally more responsible, will choose the more responsible company's product.
Solutions are going to be many. We're foolish to let the government decide which one or two "solutions" are the best. When the government does the deciding, the same people always cash in, and things don't get better. Oh, you can point to one metric that improves, but you have to sweep all the other metrics that got worse in the improvement of the one.
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Western governments' tighter-than-we-ever-knew grip on news media and even entertainment is slipping.
With the loosening grip on what people are allowed to see, and the ability of factual stories to go viral before they get stamped out, it's getting harder and harder to sell their garbage to the masses.
We're now to the point where the "free" nations are ripping off the mask and openly censoring, de-platforming, and weaponizing government agencies against people who dare to oppose the establshment narrative. They achieved unprecedented success in manufacturing consent for all manner of atrocities, but the authoritarian means employed has cost them their credibility. WMDs (Iraq), "vaccine" mandates, RussiaGate and lockdowns...
They GOT what they wanted, each time, but at the cost of catastrophic erosion of the control systems, themselves. Those control systems only work the way they HAVE worked, if the people don't see them for what they are. Well, now they're not hiding any more, and it's a race between kicking the rascals out and possible extinction of the species as we know it.
MSM blaring black propaganda 24/7, with state agencies maintaining the pretense that what's on t.v. is what the majority of people think, and doing what they want, for the win, today, has very much limited the number of tomorrows for such nonsense. Yes. It worked. Yes. They achieved their goals. But these are pyrrhic victories, storing up immense blowback against the lies, deceit, and murder.
USA needs to return to the principles laid out in the constitution, and strip away half or more of the agencies and employees of the national government. They need to do their basic job, knock off the meddling at home and abroad, and most of all, root out all the closet aristocrats and imperialists infesting our government agencies at the highest levels.
For the first time i can remember, almost 60% of the American public believes the mainstream media are liars and propagandists. That's a good majority, but still not good enough. It should be closer to 90%.
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You progressives always have these "nice ideas" but never think about long-term consequences of your fake virtue. Real virtue is helping someone. Fake virtue is making everybody else pay so you can feel good about yourself.
And this is how it always turns out. Democrats realize that they can't do anything they want, if they destroy or alienate the business community. So, they compromise with "business leaders," which is another way of saying they work things out with established bigger companies, so that the bigger companies can prosper, and it cuts any up-and-coming competition with those existing businesses with laws (and regs) written in such a way that existing companies can just pass on the added cost to consumers, but small start-ups can not.
In other words, you guys' "social engineering" always leads to crony capitalism and essentially fascist features of political economy.
And you guys fall for this shit every time. It'd be pathetic if all it did was hurt the people with this fake compassion/virtue, but it doesn't. It hurts everybody, but ESPECIALLY people at the bottom, trying to claw their way up. And hard-working people, whom you guys rob so you can feel good about yourself and feel all noble and better than everybody else, when really you're just about power and wielding it to serve your own lunatic government-and-big-business-first-in-the-name-of-people-first.
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@leanne5067 That's right. After Hillary skated on the private server, destroyed thousands of subpoenaed e-mails, and approved the sell-off of 20% of our uranium to the Russians, because the DOJ considers her above the law, you should doubt the government. When the same DOJ pursued RussiaGate for 3 years, when it was debunked by FBI and DOJ in 2016, you should doubt the government. When Adam Schiff makes shit up and gets away with it, but his lies are believed so completely that they try to impeach the president over his false allegations, you should doubt the government. When the lab-leak hypothesis is censored for over a year by the same government that funded gain-of-function in Wuhan, you should doubt your government.
Gulf of Tonkin, WMDs, Bret Kavanaugh's a serial rapist, Covington kids are white supremacists, protests in Portland are "mostly peaceful," the word "is" means whatever Bill Clinton decides it means, Manhattan will be underwater by the year 2003 due to global warming.... (Meanwhile, the fear mongers are buying-up beachfront property). No. Our government wouldn't lie to us.
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Dutch farmers NEED that fertilizer, because government pushed agriculture down a petro-chemical path that is destructive of soil biome. The government shouldn't've encouraged the chemical farming in the first place, but that doesn't mean it can turn on a dime and go to full-on permaculture without a MASSIVE drop-off in production and MASSIVE harm to farmers. It's just wrong. But these Climate Cultists are very absolutist in their views and their noble ends justify any and all means that will serve that one messianic goal of theirs.
I do think we need to view agriculture differently. Grow more, locally, both for quality and efficiency. Russ Finch growing oranges in Nebraska can get $3.50/pound, but a Florida grower only gets 40 cents per pound ($.40/pound), because of all the middlemen getting them from Florida to Nebraska (1500 miles? 2000 miles?). We DO need to get more decentralized, but not the way the alarmists who love wielding government power want to do it. Just make it a selling point in your products to be greener than the next guy, and customers will like you more.
Before the Mongols came through, ancient Persians were happily growing melons on the desert with first-rate irrigation and ag techniques, feeding a LOT of good people.
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@tiguy6298 Shall I bring up anecdotes of conspicuously vaccinated who died either from the jab or from COVID? It's pointless. What you can't get through your head is the COVID-19 was not that serious in over 99% of cases, and was very treatable, if caught early, in all of those cases. The panic and hysteria have gotten in the way of effective treatments being made widely available, because all the MEDIA were pushing were masks, lockdowns and vaccines. No concern for the harm those strategies caused is shown by any of the "You must take the jab, mask up and lock down" crowd.
Life is trade-offs. There are some trade-offs the vast majority are not able or willing to make indefinitely just to please the hysterical few. The free money's gonna run out. It's gonna be dog eat dog, and when that happens, the LAST thing anybody's going to be worried about is whether you've got a mask on, are social distancing, or have lots of likes for your braindead tweets.
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Yes. There were 250,000 rally-goers there, easily. If they WANTED to storm the capitol, they could have very easily. It was all set up to provoke them into doing just that, but 249,500 of them just took pictures at the rally and went home. If that's not "mostly peaceful," I don't know what is.
We're seeing 1984 play out in real time, with some key differences: there's a little thing called the Internet that has broken the media monopoly, which is a crucially important feature of top-down rule.
Now that Jimmy understands this a little bit, will he EVER say to himself "This Med-4-All business will put the same bad people in charge of everyone's health." He was one of the biggest protesters against the COVID response, but can't connect the dots to Med-4-All. Give people maximum autonomy and make them be responsible for themselves, their loved ones, and their local communities.
We'll start seeing doctors be honored, again. We'll see doctors with the freedom to help people out of kindness, rather than just blindly obeying whatever the bureaucrats. "Do we have a form for that? No? Sorry, sir. There's nothing we can do."
Compassion is human-to-human, NOT taxpayer-to-bureaucrat-to-10-page-form-to-the-patient. You have people spending money that's not theirs taken from people they don't know and given to other people they don't know. They have zero concern for the cost of the treatment or the quality of the treatment. They just have to make sure all the boxes are checked, like a casting director for a Hollywood film made for "modern audiences."
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None of this is getting us to the conversation we SHOULD be having. The gang violence and police corruption are all the result of the War on Drugs. We never learned our lesson from Al Capone. The gangsters have HUGE incentive to be murderous thugs and the cops have a HUGE incentive to bust heads and/or go on the take. It makes the community hate the cops and the cops hate the community. The everyday citizen sees things escalate on both sides and they KNOW it's a failure of the authorities at its root, but the gangsters will never go away as long as there's huge profit in drug smuggling and distribution. The cops will look for new ways to spy on people, search people with no legal grounds, and the worst part is it's a gravy train for crooked cops.
It's always been a gravy train for crooked cops, which is why we need to restrict the things they have a right to arrest you for. Crimes against persons and property are top of the list. Being a degenerate drug addict is the addict's problem until they infringe on the rights of others. I'm not sure exactly how it would be implemented, but we all decided almost a century ago that the proper balance of trade-offs with alcohol was to tax it and regulate it, rather than forbid it.
I would suggest doing the same for drugs. Treat it like a medical problem rather than a crime. Also create a revenue stream that would pay for more clinics, halfway houses, and other forms of assistance to drug addicts.
Portugal decriminalized ALL illicit drugs, so no one is arrested for possession of small amounts. That still doesn't undercut the drug cartels like a "heroin store" would. As long as it's illegal to sell the stuff, you're going to have a big organized crime problem. But they didn't legalize its sale, like we did with alcohol, and which I propose doing with EVERYthing. Even without going whole hog the way I suggest, the net benefit to Portugal is undeniable. They went thru an opioid crisis in the '90s like we're going through now.
What Portugal did has been very beneficial to Portugal, even though they're not going after it at its source. https://www.inspiremalibu.com/blog/drug-addiction/portugals-decriminalization-success-for-addiction-and-drug-abuse/ describes how they got 4 really big, positive results:
Fewer deaths by overdose. From one of Europe's highest to Europe's 2nd-lowest death rate from overdose.
Fewer drug-related crimes.
Huge drop in incarceration rates
HIV and Hepatitis decreased dramatically.
Anyway, I think the War on Drugs sets law enforcement against communities and vice-versa. The worse the gangs get, the worse the cops get. And now, since the Patriot Act got passed, they're weaponizing the NSA's electronic eavesdropping on EVERYthing against drug dealers. They just tell the FISA court that Tyrone's a terrorist or is on a first-name basis with a Muslim and they've got warrantless wiretaps. And they don't just use it on the most violent drug dealers. Now that the apparatus is in place, they can turn it against ANYbody. How bad these gangsters are doesn't justify the demolition of the U.S. Constitution.
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You don't have to like Scott Ritter to fact-check his claims. I think he gets out over his skis, in his enthusiasm, which is a definite flaw, but there are many voices who largely agree with his overall assessment, like John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Scott Macgregor, Noam Chomsky, the Duran, Jimmy Dore, Russell Brand, Ron Paul, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Norman Finkelstein, ...
The USA's hands are not clean on this. Ukraine is widely acknowledged to be a world leader in corruption. I think Western and Ukrainian oligarchs have been hand in glove since the 1990s, and it's brought ruin to the Ukrainian people. This is the basic message, and the western establishment has done everything possible to propagandize its citizens to believe they're making a moral defense of democracy, when it's the same old-guard, Cold War shenanigans. "We can do what we want because we're really good and they're really bad."
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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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@dennisvance4004 : It's not easy, and you can't always succeed at it. But on THOSE matters, you need to maintain a healthy skepticism, which is very hard for a lot of people to do. It's easier just to believe the "facts" presented by those whose narratives align with your own.
I don't watch cable at ALL, but I pick up a lot of it, second-hand from other sources. FOX more often gets the facts and the interpretation of facts correct than the other big outfits. But yeah. It's still carefully selecting its stories and glossing over inconvenient facts that you can only get by casting a wider net, entering your OWN queries into the searches you perform, and not settling for "the feed" that YouTube wants you to be fed, based on what it THINKS you might like, based on your previous viewing habits.
It's really easy to get trapped in a reality of your own making, with little or no connection to objective reality. Over time, you CAN build up a "rolodex" of channels that seem pretty level-headed and bring you checkable facts that you aren't going to find in any "feed" provided to you by Big Tech or MSM. But it takes a lot of time and fact-checking, before you can settle down a just "consume" what the best people YOU can find are putting out.
It ain't perfect, and never will be. But it's better than it used to be. Easier than it used to be. Just keep a weather eye on Congress and the President, when they start talking about "protecting the public" from Fake News. Every single one of those bastards are really only out to silence the opinions they don't like.
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@thetruthchannel349 : Depends on whether or not the Congress drops the ball and the level of illegal immigration amounts to a social-services-breaking burden that may as well be seen as an INVASION. Congress enforces NOTHING. That's solely the purview of the executive branch. They can fling contempt citations to the 4 corners of the Earth, but nobody but the executive branch has the means of enforcing them. Ultimately, the main powers the Congress has are the ability to cut off the funding of anything the president wishes to do against their will, and advise and consent (or not) with regard to presidential appointments. Also, Congress alone has the power to declare war, and if they hadn't given the president more power than the constitution intended, we wouldn't've fought ANY wars since World War II, which was the LAST time we got a declaration!
I sure wouldn't mind seeing the War Powers Act be revisited. It's an atrocity that we fought for years in Korea and Vietnam, and overthrew more than one government in Africa, South America and the Middle East, without EVER getting a declaration of war. Sickening stuff. Those IN power want to run things like a Monarchy, with unfettered power to do what they want, and the American People just need to wake the hell up and rein in government run amuck abroad AND ESPECIALLY at home.
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@jay90374 We'll have to say. On the surface, they actually cut a lot of personnel. Almost all of USAID. But maybe they think they can exercise soft power a lot cheaper, and they're probably right. Look at how Soros leverages his billions by spending paltry millions in key areas (media, activist groups, NGOs, ...) For a couple million, he can have the biggest single voice in a multitude of places that can leverage opinions of a few and manipulate public policy.
If little Soros can do the harm he's done to the USA, imagine what USAID can do in a small country with a few or 10s of millions. They've 100s of millions to throw around. Billions all told. USAID was bigger than the CIA and State Department, combined.
Anyway, scaling it back and making it more efficient isn't a philosophical shift of any sort. Same with Israel Project. But it wouldn't take a philosophical shift to make fundamental change for the better in Palestine. We could continue our support of Israel and still push it very hard to end apartheid. If they want to just be left alone, they better figure out how to do democracy or the hypocrisy will choke them. I don't think the American people are going to tolerate foreign aid to Israel for much longer.
If people want to donate to another country, that's their right. But it's not our federal government's place to send money, government-to-government. In the long run, it's always overtaken by corruption, and the end-justifies-the-means crowd have their comeuppance with the people who are sick of the means they employ for their lofty ends.
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Dude. It's not social media that's amplifying our fears of a slippery slope. It's 70 or 80 years of free-fall DOWN that slippery slope that makes us freak. We KNOW where this shit leads, because we know HISTORY, which you apparently do not. Maybe you're great on current events or technology, but I'm a minute in and thinking you're either naïve or you think the listener is. Small increases in authority today lead to great woe tomorrow. It's the nature of power, the nature of humans with power, and the nature of humans who SEEK power. Anything they can do FOR you, today, is 10 things they can eventually do TO you, tomorrow, and will almost certainly TRY to do to you, eventually.
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It's not worse than it's ever been. We just know more about ourselves and each other. Why do you think liberals have been hyper-ventilating for 3 1/2 years? They're finding out that their comfortable little reality isn't the larger reality. It's just like 50 years ago, when a Christian nation realized that half the country hadn't accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior. Still a LOT of Christians who're convinced that half the country is under the Spell Of Satan. Well, now that other half of the country has discovered to its shock and horror that half the country actually voted for Donald Trump! DEPLORABLE!
Such periods are traumatic for some people. For other people, these times of paradigm shift are very consciousness-raising. I know my father was dragged into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming, railing against Walter Cronkite and rooting for Archie Bunker back in the '60s and '70s, and finally coming around to agreeing with me that the War on Drugs is just Al Capone with a deep tan. Legalize, regulate and tax the stuff.
Dad was offended by The Jeffersons and Good Times; whereas, we kids were ALL about KID DIE-NO-MITE! Acceptance of gays was HUGE for my parents' generation. I grew up during that paradigm shift, starting on the regressive side, and finally figuring out that there's only one person whose sexual preferences you should care about other than your own, and that's your partner's. The only exception is if you're attracted to citizens below the age of consent, and then it's a matter for your psychiatrist and, if you act on your preference, law enforcement and the courts.
Now the people who are freaking out are the Boomers who used to watch "Friends," and still do on re-runs, FAIK. The hip, well-adjusted middle-class yuppies are all very chic, very up-to-date on the latest dogma, and they're no different from my Methodist preacher extracting the meaning of life from the verse "He fed the dog."
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I went years with really exercising other than whatever work came up that needed doing. But when I had a serious injury, not long back, I'd drag myself to the stationary bike and put MILES on it, 'til my legs started coming back, for real. Without the injury(ies), I don't think I'd've had the will to hop on the bike, and ratchet up how long and how hard I could go at it. But I'd ask myself "Do you want to walk, again? Then you gotta do this.
I KNOW the toughest part is getting on the thing. Then the toughest part is the first couple minutes, which pass at a snail's pace. Then as I get close to my target time, with less time ahead than behind, it becomes a sort of Zen thing, and the minutes go by in about 10 seconds of subjective time. Then I'm getting to the goal, and I feel like I can make those pedals go around another 10 seconds. Why not push it to 20? Heck, 12 minutes and 30 seconds? I can do another 30 seconds standing on my head and push the workout to 13 minutes. At first, I was proud just to get the damn thing to spin for a minute...
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Liberal establishments in North America and across Europe have been at cross purposes to the public for several years, now. In the UK, the Labor Party thwarted the BREXIT referendum for 3 years. In the USA, Democrats have sought to thwart the 2016 election. Regardless of where it's happening, be it France, Italy or the USA, the people see entrenched elites that are out of touch and think only of themselves and their cronies, all poised to profit enormously from their globalist (socialist, authoritarian, top-down) project.
And they're ensuring the voters will reject them at the polls, regardless of their control of legacy media. The miscalculation being made is that people don't trust the legacy media, which have been in cahoots with the establishment elites for decades. It's hilarious watching CNN and MSNBC confuse informed rejection of their lies for an insufficient understanding, and so now they're lecturing their shrinking audience in a very twisted take on civics. "If only the voters UNDERSTOOD, they would OPPOSE BREXIT/Trump/nationalist-populists." What they don't get is that the people are a lot smarter than that. They KNOW what's up, because they're much more informed (which isn't necessarily saying a lot) than they were, when it was just ABC, NBC and CBS in the USA, with the public square on total lock-down.
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@Erusean_pilot They have a role and mission in combined arms, but that mission has definitely crept far from where it should be, imo. Tanks are great for picking on weak nations in combined armor, air and infantry assaults, but if you can't run ground support operations from the skies, modern munitions make them big, fat, expensive targets that a hill tribesman can defeat with very portable weapons.
The Sherman's biggest advantage was it was more maneuverable and small enough to use narrower bridges and roads. It was also mass-produced in great numbers.
Also, American farmers knew how to repair and maintain the big diesel engines and do other repairs. Great as the Panthers and Tigers were, they were still vulnerable to the side and rear, and with massive numbers and superior mobility, the Shermans could be positioned for kill shots. And field repairs on Nazi tanks were much more difficult, which was made worse by terrible supply chain.
I just feel like if you're spending enormous sums to win tank-on-tank battles, you're probably doing it wrong. Everybody has satellites and drones, these days. You can't hide mass formations from the enemy, and those concentrations of forces make a nice big target for inexpensive and deadly countermeasures from long range.
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Treating the Outsider like shit is a pretty universal human trait, mainly because we are the descendants of the tribes that were the most ruthless (in most cases) and so survived to pass their genes on to the next generation. It's not that nice guys finish last. It's that nice guys are finished.
One of the main exceptions to this that I can think of is the early Christian martyrs, who converted the Roman Empire with conspicuous passivity, and praises to their God on their lips as their bodies were ripped apart by lions..
Maybe another is the Christians who were raped and pillaged by Vikings. Starting in the 5th Century with the Anglo-Saxon invasions, a lot of British got raped or were more or less willingly married to the invading heathens. Both races got stronger, and the emerging culture was Christian, because Mom, and because the written word was a huge advantage to those who understood it.
This is the flip side of the invading rapist. The invaded get new vigor, a less effete society, with a better idea of how to survive. However it turns out, in whatever era, the "winners" end up more poisoned by the losers' culture than the other way around, sometimes, although it may be that Christianity was more patriarchal through the middle ages, because of the war gods brought over on Anglo-Saxon boats, glorifying battle prowess and might making right. Not some twisted Druid who gets maybe 50% of it right, and the other 50% is oppressive, institutional craziness.
Humans are pretty cool. Sucks we have to fight, but the survivors are generally pretty eclectic and the resulting culture tends to take on superior aspects of both. Like a really insane gene-mixing that everybody knows the race needs, but nobody can express in words. Just looking around, seeing things are getting soft or stupid, and herding up to go do something stupid, like invite an invader.
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This wasth all well understood thousands of years ago. That's why the institution of marriage was invented. Basically, don't just jump in the sack because you're hot and bothered, but choose your male partner wisely, lock him down in a marriage, and the next generation is better off.
Those traditions persisted, because they perpetuated the population of people who followed the way. We in the 20th and 21st century had a keen appreciation for the traditional, but had (and still have) no clear idea how to operate in the absence of those traditions.
And whattaya know? Those who stick to the traditions continue to have bigger families and raise better kids, in the embrace of stable relationships.
We teach our girls a hodgepodge of tradition and rejection of tradition, but give them no real plan for living their lives and accommodating children in that framework.
What we have, now, is a lot of girls who don't know what a good man is, and either don't have children until much later, fewer children, or no children at all. So even if this "new way" is "better," it's losing in the demographics and won't be expressed in future generations, BECAUSE IT'S ANTI-DARWIN TO BEHAVE THE WAY THEY ARE.
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@pauls4742 I disagree. The things I described are being done right now, for profit. And the monocrop-for-profit-with-chemicals is proving to not be good for the long-term. I can grow corn on the same land for generations, with chemical fertilizers, but those fertilizers are the basic nitrogen and phosphorous, sufficient for big yields, but the soil becomes depleted in trace minerals.
And small-plot farming for profit is a growth industry. You don't have to pay all the middlemen and transportation costs. Like the guy growing oranges in his greenhouse in Nebraska. He competes very well with Florida citrus growers, because they only get about 10% of the $$$ from their crop. The rest goes to shipping and trucking companies.
Then there's the Cultural piece of it. People would PREFER to eat food that is grown locally, if they had a choice, and most of us would pay a little extra, just to have a local source we can trust and even go visit!
As far as "bringing in the goats" is concerned, there are more and more such herds every year. The people with weeds love that it's organic, and the goat herders get free, highly nutritious forage! Win-win!
The problem with chemical farming is that the beautiful big tomatoes and broccoli you see on grocery-store shelves doesn't taste as good and isn't as nutritious as it was 50 or 100 years ago, because they just keep injecting the standard fertilizers to make them grow, but they don't have the same level of trace metals that they once had.
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@edbenti5007 : Honest progressives can see the bullshit, when it's glaring, and the smear campaign against Trump is pretty glaring. What progressives don't understand is that the policies they support are at the root of many of the problems they then point out.
If only progressives would apply the same principles of government meddling, abroad, to government meddling, domestically. It's all the same thing. Elites get their wonderful jobs and wonderful powers, and it becomes more about protecting their livelihoods than actually serving the people. And when it's GOVERNMENT, incompetence means MORE money rather than losing your job. Solving problems isn't good for your career. But finding problems that they can take money from hardworking people to help whatever it is they think they're helping, will guarantee their position and pension.
Mainly, as a libertarian, I'm sick of people who virtue signal with other people's money. War abroad and poop in our streets at home.
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Yes, Americans are high in disagreeableness. It's a major safety valve that keeps us free while maintaining a reasonable level of order. It keeps us from just blindly following our leaders into madness. It's called PUSHBACK, and we ALL need it, which is why Peterson was more agreeable with the left in the past. The left still has that same role, but nobody on the left is seriously filling it. It's all left, all day, and if you disagree, you're an "ist." They'll silence you by any means necessary and in America, there's a deeply ingrained sense of fairness that is being violated at every turn by what can only be described as authoritarians.
You don't fight authoritarians in power by reasoning with them. They just wait for you to finish (if they're in a good mood) and then steamroll you with a power play. Jordan's indignation and new urgency should be a warning sign, not of where PETERSON is, but where the left is and where it's taking us.
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I never had any interest in a fanny pack until my friend showed me how his 92F fit perfectly in one, and how innocent it looked. Carrying it in front, his first move towards his gun looked like a frightened person, instinctively covering his you-know-what. I often travel with a pistol in a fanny pack, but I rarely wear it, and mostly out in camp, alone, when one is always in reach, but I've never taken it with me into a crowded place, and I just generally avoid crowded places. My pistol is more for defense against predators (wolves, coyotes, lynx, puma, and bear) and pissed-off ungulates, because I don't run real fast, but I enjoy the woods.
A healthy man with a long stout staff (LOL!) might hold off wolves on down, including mountain lion. The sound and fury of hot lead can give you a fighting chance against a bear. But nobody wants to test the theory. People presented with the situation would feel better with the opportunity to at least try. We none of us are Anthony Hopkins and no bear set on killing a man in his situation would fail in the task.
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Viral video makes it much harder for a false narrative to overwhelm the facts. As sophisticated as Antifa have been with their tactics, and fine-tuned their violence to set up the victims as the aggressors, I think they misunderstand the times and overestimate their actual reach. Just because everybody THEY know is part of the program doesn't mean that program has much reach beyond their shrinking echo chamber, as free citizens just #walkaway.
I think, too, that when you think everybody you disagree with is something they're not, you're not going to be able to predict their behavior as well as you thought. It's a general's arrogance, and goes to the blind spots in the money and the leaders behind these orchestrated campaigns. They WANT Joey Gibson to go away or take up arms, either one, but he just keeps coming back, standing there with open hands and open heart. He's not - and conservatives generally are not - allowing himself to be provoked to violence.
They've gotten one guy convicted for pulling a weapon when he was surrounded by a threatening mob. I've seen those 5-on-1 and 10-on-1 situations turn into a brutal beat-down. The person in the middle KNOWS their life is in danger, and everybody in the circle around them knows it's wrong but tells themselves it's harmless and nobody's going to be seriously hurt. Di'n' mean nothin'. Di'n' do nuffin'. I was just walkin' behind him and he fell...
But even if it's only threatening and demeaning words, with some physical displays, like fake punches or the biggest guy in the group bouncin' on his toes, it's just about the cruelest, most ungodly things you can do to a person, whose hat you don't like. I don't see how those people can sleep at night, or how they must torment others in their daily lives. You know the type. Look for something negative and UNLEASH on people in faux-righteous fury and indignation. No grace.
Meh. Maybe by acting very badly in these situations, they vent all their destructiveness, and they're really nice people. I dunno. I just know the way they're behaving is intolerable, and the crowds they infiltrate need to put the kibosh on such nonsense. Failing that, the police. Failing that, the Guard. If you want to make a point, be like a Hong Konger and show some class. Not sayin' ya need to sing the Anthem or wave Old Glory, but respect your fellow human beings.
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I disagree with Maria. The problem isn't just that there were corrupt individuals in FBI. The problem is the very structure of the FISA court. Our system is based on organized distrust of power, with protections built in so that the defendant gets "discovery" and a chance to defend themselves. If exculpatory materials are left out, then the attorneys involved are in a lot of trouble, UNLESS it's a FISA application. Where there are no protections, there WILL be abuse.
Comey, Strzok, and the rest are definitely corrupt, but in the USA, they should not have been able to do as much damage as they did. FISA is not only ripe for abuse, it violates the U.S. Constitution, and the traditions of Common Law. This time it was Comey. Before that it was Hoover. We're just waiting for the next one, and there WILL be a next one until and unless FISA is shut down or RADICALLY reformed.
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I guess you endorse what the last administration was doing and you were looking forward to seeing the USA drive off the cliff. This ain't pretty. It was ugly to start with. If you don't like what you're seeing now, please understand that what was going on, before, was in serious need of ending.
Just wondering which jab you're on. 10th?
They're not perfect. Elon's not perfect. Elon has made a lot of money just looking for where the government's guaranteeing a profit and jumping on-board with both feet. He was incensed that Trump backed out of the Paris Climate Accords, because he stood to make a lot more money if we stayed in it.
If you don't like what Elon's doing, you should maybe do some research on what Soros, WEF, and others were doing, with similar access to the federal government, just behind the scenes, with MONEY, rather than in plain view with ACTION.
"He's a bull in a china shop!" The china shop floor was already covered with shattered glass.
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Twitter and FB take more heat from butt-hurt lefties. Triggered snowflakes COMPLAIN about materials they find offensive, and they find anything not of the pure left to be offensive. Conservatives see leftie nonsense, and we just shrug, because it's always been that way, and no reason to be offended, just because you disagree.
Twitter and FB are just reflecting the culture. Conservative speech is hate speech, by definition, and so you have thousands of bitter liberals flagging and complaining about everything conservative. It hurts conservatives, more, because they're USED to being in the minority and hearing PLENTY of opposing views. One of the shocking things to liberals about Hillary's defeat is that they simply couldn't imagine anybody who felt differently than they felt. Everywhere they went, they got the same echo chamber, with the party line at work matching the party line of the evening news and entertainment.
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Not a fan of the CCP, but knowing a little history, I can see why Mao rose to power, and much as I hate his murderousness, I can see how a leader like that gave the people a better social contract than what came immediately before. Even now, as we see their authoritarian idiocies, they KNOW they can't remain relevant if their growing educated class - whom they NEED - has to feel like they're making economic progress to remain bought-in.
I think this "We are progress!" narrative by the CCP is why the USA loosened up and allowed them to enter the world economic community. But we went from too mean to too soft, propping up the CCP in spite of its obvious flaws. I'm not sure that I want Trump as president. Too much Dunning-Krueger/narcissism going on, but his "middle path" was far better China policy than what the neocon/neolib 'strategists' insisted on. Yes, trade. But fair trade, and tariffs/penalties for human rights violations and not predatory trading practices that gut our ability to make our OWN products.
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Eating breakfast is key for me to get to sleep at night. I tend to skip it, coffee-up, and not eat until much later. I'm GONNA get my calories in a day, and if I don't have them by bed-time, then I'm eating a huge bowl of cereal or something sweet, when my day should be winding down. I eat late, and then I have a hard time getting to sleep, which makes me really tired the next morning, craving COFFEE, and I'm caught in that loop.
For me, I just need to "gut it out" and EAT something in the morning. Then I'm really hungry at lunch and really hungry after work, and I'm ready to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Coffee is my nemesis. But I LOVE IT! sigh
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Natural Selection: You insist on missing the point. If it acts, walks and talks like a duck, it's a duck, whether you use tortured reasoning to conclude otherwise or not.
You're arguing about artificial distinctions between brand-name police states.
The only difference between Stalin and Hitler was what country they were from. BOTH were totalitarians, which a REAL liberal would hate, equally. But it's OK if socialists collectivize everything, killing millions, because at least they're not Nazis, right?
The only form of gov't that respects the rights of all is a limited government. What libtards don't get is when gov't takes over everything, it's just a matter of time until totalitarianism. Just takes economic hard times or a charismatic leader, and the non-thinkers like you will be all-in.
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For every person saying what you're saying - and I agree with you - there are two or three who will talk about playoff appearances and how close he came to winning it all. But to me, he was kind of the reason the '9ers didn't quite pull it off. I can see wanting higher ceiling and lower pay than Alex Smith, but in the end, Kaep's decision-making seemed to keep them from winning a championship with him.
I keep coming back to that game against Seattle (NFC Championship?),, where Kaep - full of his own narrative - was going to throw to Crabtree on the critical play, no matter what, because that was the story he had in his head. Unfortunately, on the short field, Richard Sherman had Crabtree blanketed, but Kaep threw it to Crabs, regardless. He saw himself as legend, before he did anything, imagining how he'd tell the story "I told Michael he was getting the ball, and that's how it all happened, glory be to me."
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Oh, Jimmy won't like that "Constitutional Conservatism" thing. He thinks government should take care of us and now he's vainly seeking Mr. Goodbar to run a perfect nanny state, with saintly geniuses in all the top spots.
Well, we all know how "Mr. Goodbar" turned out. Even if you find him, government spans multiple lifetimes, and that genius-saint you put in power at first is inevitably replaced by someone corrupt or incompetent or both, and they visit their incompetence on everyone all at once.
Try your progressive schemes on the local level, Jimmy. Then see if that model can scale to the state level. I'm pretty sure you'll fail at the local level and the best you'll get is a really good charity organization that does good, but without the monopoly on force that the U.S. Government has over all 350 million of us.
Progressives want the FEDERAL government to be the nanny government, so that everyone will be SAVED at the same time, without having to actually make your schemes sustainable on the local level. And if, by chance, your scheme IS sustainable on the local level, then you don't NEED the feds to come in and muck everything up with rules and regulations put in place by lobbyists in Washington!
Malone is spot-on!
I don't consider myself a "conservative." I'm more libertarian. A "conservative" is someone who'd outlaw gays, because we always did in the past. A libertarian is only concerned about both parties' informed consent, because gay relationships are no infringement on the rights of others.
My only issue with homosexuals was their irresponsible and promiscuous sex that spread venereal diseases, and then expected me to pay for the hospital bill. No. You do "you," but you also PAY for "you."
Eat all the pie and cake you want. But don't ask me to pay your doctor bills. I'll smoke all I want, and I'll pay my own freight.
That doesn't mean I'm against helping others. I'm on the local food bank's speed dial. I gave a free car to the lady our local "Habitat for Humanity" built a house for. She zipped around town in that little car for YEARS. I've taken in homeless people. The last one I took in, I paid thousands of dollars for much-needed dental work.
None of that had anything to do with the government. I didn't get a tax write-off or anything. I just know that if all the progressives campaigning for free stuff (like Med-4-All) did as much as I did, there wouldn't be much need for all the government programs you want. If there's not enough will in the populace to help their brothers in need, what more good do you think a government made up of members of that populace are going to be genius-saints?
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No expert, here, but this reminds me of Kursk incursion. We'll see if this has legs. Surprise was achieved. Large gains in largely undefended areas. Bakeries. Cell towers.
The fact that there are so many sorties being flown, apparently by both sides, the state of air defenses in the area must not be very good.
I think Erdogan is trying to force Assad to the bargaining table, but Assad refuses to meet with Erdogan until all Turkish troops have left Syrian soil. I think this is definitely meant to hurt, but Turkey's using proxies, and not making a huge investment. Maybe it's just a punitive expedition.
I think it's shock and awe, where old tactics can still work because the areas attacked are not well-defended.
I don't think the Russians are abandoning Syria.
We'll see how it plays out, but it just seems to me that the West is trying to stretch Putin too thin, without any understanding of how thinly stretched the West is, and how it weakens itself due to deluded and frankly nihilistic leadership.
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I taught at a college up in the mountains. I loved the regular people from the area. I mentioned this to a colleague who sniffed and said "I don't like being around those people." A paragon of liberalism, just like 90% of my colleagues, but they did NOT want to venture outside their bubble. I preferred the local ranchers, farmers, and outfitters. They were REAL. My colleagues were very judgemental, in a very twisted "Toe the liberal line or be ostracized" way that struck me as more conservative than liberal. Very regressive, hidebound people, without an original thought in their heads. Just deadly, dull conformity. And what made it worse, was they insisted they were the tolerant, open-minded ones, when they were anything but. Very stifling atmosphere.
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By far the bigger scandal is the FBI and entire intel community pretending RussiaGate had any foundation, and lying to the FISA court to obtain warrants and withholding exculpatory evidence that would have ended the investigation almost before it began. Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Strzok, and many others should be behind bars. They knew from the beginning that there was no "there" there, but they pushed it and pushed it. Liars and traitors to the country, as far as I'm concerned. but all of them hiding behind "national security" and the Patriot Act, which should be repealed.
We are a nation run by COSSACKS. The terrorists WON. 9/11 was all it took to make the USA a police state, and it took one administration (Obama's) to bring out the BEAST. But make no mistake. George Bush set the pins up for Obama to knock down. Obama merely took full advantage to weaponize federal agencies against his political foes. Tea Party? Sic the IRS on them! Reporters who criticized his admin? Sic the IRS, FBI and even the CIA on them!
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They used "cartridges" before that. A bullet sewn into a pouch with its powder was called a "cartridge," if I'm not mistaken. You bit off the bullet, took a pinch of powder for the pan (your primer) and poured the rest down the barrel. Then you spit the bullet down the barrel.
This is still a major breakthrough, to have primer, charge, and bullet all together in a brass cartridge, which I came here to see, but all I got to see was the gun. But the term "cartridge" was already in use before what we NOW think of as cartridges were invented.
Yes, Napoleon was dismissive of many innovations. But he had his MAIN innovation of universal conscription, and his combined-arms know-how, with artillery, cavalry, infantry and skirmishers worked just fine in set-piece battles.
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Their problem is they support the Democrat establishment, which is causing inflation, which has resulted in the prime rate jumping from near 0% to 8.25%. I'm not sure what the Fed rate is... checking... 5% to 5.25%. That's what they're charging banks. The banks are charging 8.25% to their biggest corporate customers.
That's why Google's looking for pennies in the sofa. Their early success and continued operation depended on almost-free credit, to keep the ball rolling and hoping that the money eventually starts rolling in. I know my institution uses Google, much the same way my and other institutions used Microsoft. They basically undercut everyone with virtually cost-free software suites, to dominate the market, which they now do, but their margins are tiny, and they really aren't improving their product. Microsoft eventually had to give way to open-source operating systems in the commercial and big-institution sector, because the open source kept evolving and had more capability with fewer security holes. LINUX is more stable than Windows NT, which I think reached its peak in the late '90s and early 2000s, but nobody's running NT that I know of.
Something similar will probably happen to Google, although ed. institutions will be slow to respond, at first. Right now, it's all the rage, though. I just think that when the venture capital dries up, Google/Alphabet is going to hit a wall, economically, and eventually fall behind, technologically, partly because it weeds out all the non-woke in its ranks.
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@ConcernedPublic some truth in what you and @Fyrch Myrddin are saying. I don't think progressives set out to enrich themselves. They just have an inordinate faith in government bureaucrats to actually deliver on whatever their pie-in-the-sky, feel-good dreams are. It's the bureaucrat who actually has to make progressive dreams a reality, regardless of whether they're competent to do so, or whether or not there are actually sufficient resources available to actually implement those dreams. Then there's the whole "The dream slips away" as the economy/ecology adjusts to the new rule set in ways the surprise NOone but progressives, who insist that they're RIGHT, and they just put the wrong guy in charge.
Our founding fathers KNEW about the oligarchs of Byzantine Rome. They studied the Fall of Rome, extensively. Any new agency or institution is, in a sense, a new life form introduced into the ecology/economy. It doesn't what birthed it, it is alive, in a sense, and it will grow to the absolute limit of the available resources, and BEYOND available resources, as long as it can get away with it, just like rabbits will breed beyond the capacity of the ecosystem to support them. In Nature, they just die back. In government, as long as they can keep borrowing or printing money, they can defy reality for long periods, causing untold damage and economic and ecological ruin.
The thing I don't get is how we feel like we're failing if we're not growing, when we should be maximizing quality of life. Government's insatiable appetite for resources and power always pushes growth rather than sustainability.
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Euro countries have a big advantage: single culture. single tradition. Also, they're SMALL. USA is a nation of malcontents. That's why all of us sailed over the Atlantic. Cultural norms in Europe prevent much of the problems associated with the welfare state.
You keep beating the drums for socialism, but it only works (and only for a time) because of those cultural norms and a sense of duty. Free medical care keeps us under the thumb of the establishment's idea of what medical care should be. After Fauci, anybody who pushes federalized health care is not very smart.
Try it in your TOWN. Try it in your STATE. If you can't make it work, there, you're a fool to try to make it work for all 50 states.
The American system is already dominated by the feds and huge institutions. What you want is something as close to the doctor and patient as possible.
The problem with socialized health care is that the promises made and the keeping of those promises is all subject to the fiscal wisdom of the U.S. Congress, and we all know THAT'S a SWAMP. I don't want a bureaucrat 2000 miles away deciding what's covered and what's not covered.
And when you promise everything to everybody, everybody wants million-dollar care for a contribution of little or nothing. Costs spiral out of control, and then the government has to ration the care for everybody, regardless of how well they take care of themselves. Meanwhile our government has us all fat and unhealthy, with health costs spiraling out of control.
How does England handle it? They promise you everything, but you're going to have to wait 6 months or a year for this, that, and the other. The American system is on-demand.
Re-think your pie-in-the-sky, economically and socially illiterate socialist schemes for America.
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Uh. 10 bucks an hour is 400 a week times 4.333333333..... weeks per month is about $1730 per month, which is closer to $2,000 than $1,000. Other than piss-poor arithmetic, you make some decent points. $1000 a month for everybody means 3 or 4 people can share a house and play all day. Or just sell arts and crafts or something else that's not sustainable without an infusion of cash from taxpayers.
Most people want more than that, but many of those people will find it difficult to get off their asses and do much about it, because vague discontent doesn't generally rise to the threshold of the kind of desperation it takes to work your way out of your situation. Not all people are like that, but my brother is. He's generally bummed at what he can't have, but it never rose to the level of his having to bite the bullet and CHANGE his situation. Full belly, lots of sci-fi to read and watch on DVD, warm place, warm bed, roof over his head. He's pretty content, most of the time. I had more strikes against me, and he's probably smarter than I am, but in my stupidity, I worked a LOT of 60-80-hour weeks, supporting myself and earning math and geology degrees.
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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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Some are calling it "access media." Media who shill for one side or the other in return for insider access.
I personally don't mind if a network or newspaper is biased. And I can figure out what their bias is, right quick. But most people just listen/watch/read one or two main sources and think they're getting the whole story, but they aren't.
The 1st Amendment is ALL about having an axe to grind and the right to grind that axe. I'm totally OK with the legacy networks coming out of the closet and admitting they're partisan. That's the way the Framers of the U.S. Constitution intended it. They didn't ever believe in "objective news." That's just a myth that got foisted on us when the "new technology" of radio and the the "new technology" of television were invented, people recognized their power to influence, and NObody IMAGINED there could be more than 3 or 4 channels! Now we have MILLIONS of channels, all competing for market share, and almost all of them with biases.
150 years ago, people understood they were getting the opinions of the owner of the local paper. Now, people believe - MISTAKENLY - that the news THEY are getting is the unvarnished truth. Well, until a few years ago, that's what people thought. Now, people know they need to shop around and hear all sides of an argument. In the long term, it's healthier for us. In the short term, we have millions of people captured by ideologues.
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@chinesesparrows You're ignoring many monarchic and oligarchic dynasties of the past that spanned centuries. But things evolve more rapidly in modern times. Lies that persisted centuries or decades get exposed in a few years, months, or even weeks. Technologies change rapidly. What gives a few the power to impose their will always gives the many new means by which to oppose them.
While they're watching US on CCTV, we're walking into their facilities with button cameras of our own! How to stop all the potential whistleblowers from blowing everything up with simple truths? And look at the drone wars taking place. How does a government fight a million privately-owned drones, now that they're so popular with would-be YouTube millionaires?
How do you hide your atrocities when Ekbunobe and Sam are talking to each other every day on their XBOXES?
It's always a tension between squeezing and wriggling out of the grip. Governments know that no matter how powerful they are, they aren't really in control. They still have to have the people's willing participation, or it all falls apart. They still TRY to control everything (and always fail), but in the end, their primary means of control is public perception. I think U.S. leaders are also in a loss-of-confidence death spiral, and the more they try to control and misdirect, the worse things are getting for them. Today's "win" is an endless stream of losses over many tomorrows. Ask the Democrat National Committee about that.
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@THYCR3AT0R For all the criticisms of American capitalism, most of the problems with our health care system are caused by government, not solved by government.
You probably think evil insurance companies are at the heart of it, I'm guessing.
Do you know where health insurance came from? It came during the Roosevelt administration, when he imposed wage freezes like the good fascist he was, during the Great Depression. Health care benefits were a loophole big corporations could exploit to circumvent the wage freezes, thereby giving big corporations a nice, government-created competitive advantage in the labor market.
Insurance companies came along after that. Before that, nobody dreamed of there being such a thing as health insurance. You just did the best you and your community could do, and there was a lot more community spirit back then, because people knew that they needed to look out for one another. You can't insure your health. Not really. For an insurance system to work like it does on cars, homes and such, there's a ceiling. You can "total" a car. You can consider a house a "total loss." But you can't put a dollar figure on the value of a human life. This health insurance made it possible, then, for bureaucrats to come in and decide what your life was worth.
Med-4-All puts bureaucrats in charge of what, when, how much, and who gets health care, and believe me, the bureaucrats and politicians will make sure THEY are at the front of the line, and you and I will get what's left over. Do you know how long you have to wait for cardio, cancer, hip-replacement and many other surgeries in Canada or the UK? Do you know how many people come to the USA to receive cancer treatments that are unavailable in those countries, because their health-care mafia deem them improper?
But we're not that far away from what's going on under socialized medicine in other countries. Do you realize how many extra paper-pushers a doctor has to hire just to fill out insurance and government paperwork? I think the doctors themselves spend something like 1/3 or their work day filling out forms rather than treating patients. Government involvement in the health care industry is far from a panacea. In fact, it results in drugs being MORE expensive than they have to be, because there's no profit in drugs after the patent expires. Why give you something off the shelf, when they can charge you up the ass for something new? They SAY it's "better" but is it really?
Then there's the matter of pricing. As the single biggest consumer of health care (Medicare, Medicaid, etc.), the government decides what it will pay for a treatment, whether it meets the cost or not. So who makes up the difference? The taxpayer who not only has to pay for Medicare and Medicaid, but also has to pay inflated insurance rates because hospitals charge the insured WAY more than they charge the government.
Economics always has the final say and when you promise everything to everyone and you run out of resources, you cut corners and the quality of care goes down. But hey. Everybody's treated exactly the same, so it's fair, right? No. The rich people still get whatever they require. It's the blokes in the middle who WORK for a living who end up getting hurt. The first law of economics is that resources are not infinite. The first law of politics is to ignore the 1st law of economics. We'll just SAY we're handling everything and everyone will shut up, apparently.
That, by the way, is why you wait for so long in UK and Canada for many treatments. Sometimes you die before you've ever been to a doctor. This is the same for ANYthing the government guarantees. It seems good for a while, but reality always has the final word. This is why people waited in bread lines in the Soviet Union. Adolf Hitler made bread his #1 priority "for the people." Bread shortages instantly became chronic throughout the tenure of the 3rd Reich. If you want to destroy a product or service, just nationalize/collectivize it.
What a long rant. Just sick and tired of economically illiterate socialists, who know nothing of the real world, insisting they know more than everybody else because they're "educated."' But as the saying goes, "Garbage in. Garbage out."
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frank loren : It puts Brennan in the spotlight, when things were kind of in a lull. He's been a liar for decades, and has made himself the Poster Child for Deep State, proving every day that there IS an entitled civil service class who think they're above the law. He said they didn't spy on citizens, and when he was called on it, he pivoted to "Yes, and we SHOULD spy on citizens." I don't know WHAT his come-back is for the lies he told about spying on Congress. And his claim that the dossier wasn't the prime mover in launching the investigation was either a lie or an admission that it was politically motivated and artificially manufactured "evidence" to green-light the weaponization of national security and department of justice against the opposition-party's presidential campaign.
Yeah, he's out of office. But yeah, he's a swamp creature of the first order, and your weak LEFT jabs do nothing to hide that fact, although it's always fun to score points and win the Internet for 10 seconds.
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Beautiful girls like that probably had 20 guys pining for them and 5 or 10 semi-stalking them, in that little town. There are a lot of college kids, there, but there really aren't that many places to go, so there's lots of partying at residences. I don't know if it's a factor, but weed's legal just across the border, in Pullman, WA, 9 miles West. For its size, Moscow has a relatively large contingent of hippies. There are a couple hippie farms outside of town, and a lot of classic redneck farms.
By the pictures, these girls were teeny-boppers, rather than granolas, in the local parlance. Cheerleaders, not grim-faced math majors dressed like Ruth Buzzi as Gladys Ormphby on Laugh-In. Yeah. I had to look it up. But we all know the lady with the hair net and the ankle-length skirt.
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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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Liberals took over the establishment, making them essentially conservative in outlook. Different world view than the previous conservatives, but by definition, preserving and consolidating their political gains MADE them conservative! I first conceived this idea as a visiting professor in an insular mountain town that had a small college attached to it. Everyone at the college was pretty far left, and that created a weird, twisted orthodoxy from which no one dared depart for fear of losing social status in the college.
Everybody had the same opinion about everything, and they were unaware of how "conservative" and regressive their behavior was.
Anyway, I've always been a bit of a contrarian/iconoclast. I was just as rebellious and irreverent in the '70s being forced to go to church, as I was in the 2000s, where the ruling religion was leftist ideology at work. I say "leftist ideology" because it's the modern use of the term, but the minute you go from speaking truth to power and being suspicious of concentrated power to celebrating MORE centralized authority (for your own good), you cease being of the left and have become a creature of the regressive right.
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Conservatives DGAF about dumb-ass platforms injecting their politics. We don't like it, but it's their right to be politically motivated jerks. And it's my right (and Sam Harris's right) to pull the plug and no longer patronize these bad-actor platforms.
True conservatives see this as opening the door to competing platforms. My guess is that Sargon, as a leftist, wouldn't be against government regulation, if the regulations help Sargon. He's totally OK with government interfering in anything and everything, like most progressives, so long as the interference serves their short-term interests.
The thing that I, as a classical liberal, fear, is that the outrage against abusive, politically-motivated censorship by so-called "neutral platforms" will create a groundswell of support for government sticking its nose in and sanitizing the Internet the same way government sanitized the major news networks, almost a century ago. If government does NOTHING, Free Speech will prevail.
I wouldn't be at ALL surprised if the worst, most dominant platforms, are deliberately PROVOKING outrage, just so they can get the government to step in, because you KNOW those big outfits will control the regulations and the regulators, and competing platforms will not have any kind of chance to really compete.
I hope that the NATURE of the Internet is such that no matter how hard they squeeze, we still control things at the grassroots level, and apparent domination, today, can become bankruptcy, tomorrow, IF YOU LEFTIES WILL LET THE MARKETPLACE DO ITS THING. And again, Sargon of Akkad is clearly left-of-center in his understanding of the proper role and scope of central government. Like most of that persuasion, scratch him and you see he bleeds an elitist attitude to rival any Progressive/Libtard.
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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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Shortly after Trump took office in 2017, John Brennan, who HAD to know this was a hoax as early as Spring, 2016, but certainly by August, 2016, was making accusations that at the time left room for only 1 of 2 things: Either Trump was going to jail for collusion, or Brennan was going to jail for treason. Brennan INSISTED there was proof that HE knew about, but that he just couldn't share, yet, because of ongoing investigations.
Well, Brennan was lying the whole time, and he SABOTAGED American credibility, abroad, generally, and American security, in particular.
10s of millions of Americans - you know, the ones who READ - have been infuriated for WELL over 4 years at the unchecked lies and abuse of power by the Democrat machine that permeates career government officialdom. The law doesn't matter, when you've got the Dept of Justice and half the courts sewn up.
But we'll see how and when the pendulum swings. They're so used to running roughshod over everyone's rights with carefully crafted narratives that they're not even being very careful about their narratives! Maybe letting them have their way was the only way to truly expose the depths of their perfidy.
COVID and Climate Change are their latest effronteries. Next step to political control of everything that matters and a new world order that openly and blatantly favors the ruling class who are not giving up their private jets and limousine caravans and yachts and mansions any time soon, while telling us "You'll be happier living in a box, without all that messy freedom of movement, and without affordable energy. Not us. You."
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The engineering task is much more difficult, for one thing.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle is - and I hate to use the term - European colonialism, the most recent version of which being the Cold War, where the West didn't care if African governments were actually responsible. In fact, it was counterproductive to monied interests to have responsible governments in Africa.
When an advanced nation is dealing with a backward nation, it's very cheap to install the government leaders who will keep the gravy train rolling. If Chad or Nigeria or Mali mine their gold for their OWN use, that would impact the Euro economy that's accustomed to paying pennies on the dollar.
It's CHEAP to bribe a few people at the top and keep them in power by minor investments in military aid (enough to keep the people down).
But this is not unique to Africa. The same poison is in all the political systems of the West! For a few million dollars, you can bribe the U.S. Congress, and make billions (or even trillions) of dollars for yourself, by controlling the wording and nature of legislation that is bad for the people, but good for a few really rich a$$holes.
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@robertallred4515 As expected. They say that MAGA are much better at predicting what "liberals" will think or will do than conversely. I think it's because truly independent thinkers make a point of checking in on what the so-called "left" is doing and what the so-called "right" is doing.
While I do believe in a left-right dichotomy, I don't believe anybody embroiled in the current "left-vs-right" battle are using meaningful definitions of "left" or "right."
I feel like I'm traditional left, but I see many features of the old right on the new right and many features of the REALLY old right on the new left.
I agree with Jimmy Dore and Glenn Greenwald on sane and moral foreign policy, but they're committed to re-branding aristocratic patronage and feudal serfdom as "sharing," "compassion," and "muh socialism." Very regressive. Re-branded as "progress."
A government that does everything for you is a government that can - and eventually will - do anything it wants TO you.
Principles laid down in the Bill of Rights are absolutely liberal concepts. The so-called "right" is the side that cares about THOSE things, or gives them lip service, while being totally wrong about foreign policy. "Yes, we meddle, entangle ourselves with foreign governments, and pursue regime-change operations when we don't get our (Lockheed-Martin's and BlackRock's) way, and that's a GOOD thing!"
Why can't we have limited government at home and abroad? Isn't that the whole point of the American Experiment? Everything we've gotten wrong since 1789 was a departure from our first principles, not a repudiation of them.
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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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@ailanifeather2320 Imagine the Westward Expansion if we had had to NEGOTIATE with the native people... I try to. It would've been slower.
But the mass invasion from Europe was pretty inevitable. The settlers were coming. Much of what our government did was just scramble to protect the settlers who were going to march West, no matter what the government did.
Back in those days, people made no bones about taking any land they could, by force, natives and Europeans alike. The lands were ruled by warrior societies before the white man came, and the white men, with their firearms, were all citizen-soldiers, themselves.
Go back a millenium (-plus) and it's Saxons committing genocide on Britons. Until the "Modern Era," the world map was a pure expression of who could hold what, by force. It still pretty much is that, although in the 20th Century, we tried to change that, with the failed League of Nations and the currently failing United Nations.
With the exception of the Westward Expansion of the USA and the conquering of Australia, there isn't a single nation that doesn't look on its imperial beginnings with great fondness and pride.
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I think the levee's gonna break, and there'll be an upstart platform get traction against YouTube. YouTube's censorship/curatorship is eventually going to spell its doom. They can't stop everybody from building platforms with as good or better look and feel. But the companies like Bit-Chute need to build better/slicker platforms. It defies belief that there aren't superior-to-YouTube asynchronous chat clients for the comments sections.
Tom's right about the need to create a proper environment. But his MISTAKE is trying to do it all, himself. Instead, reach out to your regular commenters and train them to monetize their time online making money doing what they enjoy. Train a strong cadré of "hall monitors" who understand the essence of what you're doing. You can get pretty smart people who are THRILLED to make $20/hour doing really good work for you. Think about how much money you have. You can afford to pay a couple helpers. Lots of commenters will curate your comments for you for next to nothing, just feel really good about the extra status they have, and the power to block trolls from the comments.
Build a community with intense personal effort, but make sure that the effort is aimed at eliminating YOUR effort. The way the Thorman brothers built up Arrowheadpride.com under the sbnation.com umbrella is a case in point. I think Joel and Cris are way up the administrative ladder, now, making good money. As an individual content creator, you would just stay in your creative space, with motivated, well-paid helpers. Trouble is that most content-creators don't want to mess with managing people. Hmmm.
Maybe there's a niche for outfits that'll police your content the way you want it policed, by people who get you, for pretty low fees.
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Rent and real estate prices have really jumped, all right. I'm tempted to sell out and pocket the difference, and taxes go up, when the home values go up, so I got a bump in my escrow payments this past year. But Zillow says the place is worth half-again as much, so I'd get my down payment plus another down payment, plus some, if I got top dollar for the place.
But I didn't buy it to cash in. Bought it for the neighborhood and its proximity to work, so it fits my life like a glove, even though the taxes went up, quite a bit. I'm also making more than I did when it already fit my budget, so the bump isn't hurting me at my dinner table. Just my atrocious lack of enthusiasm in the kitchen.
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Life is tradeoffs.
If she had gotten married straight out of high school or college, she'd probably still be dissatisfied, but for different reasons. "Is this it? Cooking and cleaning, day after day, for kids who just take, take, take, and an unloving husband with a beer belly, who hasn't excited me for 10 years? I feel so trapped!"
This video looks pretty performative to me. What's she doing in a very unflattering evening gown, with a very unflattering hairdo, unflattering (Marilyn Manson) makeup, and wearing her mother's jewelry? That particular get-up and styling is for a 1940s movie star, and she ain't no movie star. She's an average-looking woman.
She should have no problem finding a man at 33, if she's willing to let her hair down, put on some jeans, and head out to the dirt races, or a baseball game. Maybe volunteer at a local charity or two. Good men show up in those places, too. They're where the best singles of marriageable age would be most likely to go.
You want to signal to the other sex that you have your shit together and can meet someone else more than half way? Volunteer at the food drive! Pitch in at habitat for humanity! Don't keep putting yourself in meat-market settings in pick-me mode.
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My very basic take on quantum mechanics is that statistics and probability are how we get a handle on things that are too small to see, individually.
Consider the bell curve - the normal distribution. It describes populations quite well, quite often, but that distribution will give you a small, but positive probability of 500-pound mice. We know that there aren't any 500-pound mice, but the bell curve is pretty handy in the vicinity of the mean.
What makes quantum mechanics so toxic (in my opinion) is people really want it to say more than it CAN say. I agree with Einstein: "God does not play dice." Just because we can't measure things doesn't mean there's something magical going on. It just means that we're limited in what we can measure. We can't SEE that atom, so we make measurements on a LOT of atoms, all at once, with no real idea what any one of them is actually doing, so we speculate and come up with probabilities. Then idiots get ahold of those speculations and draw ridiculous conclusions, in my humble opinion.
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Barney Frank and Chris Dodd gave us the meltdown in 2008. "If they have a pulse, they get a loan, whether it makes sense for them or not."
What happened in their big drive for more home ownership? Banks approached people who either owned their houses, outright, or had a nice, affordable mortgage, and told them they could borrow against that house's value for home improvement or just for a vacation. "You don't have to pay us anything for 5 years! Go to Europe! Tour the Great Wall of China!" Then the bubble payment came due, and the foreclosures began.
Those hedge funds and mortgage-backed securities, which had been rock solid for over a century, because banks only loaned to people who proved they could and would pay their debts. The investors who were putting money into those securities were pretty conservative investors. What they didn't know is that the "Affordable Housing Act" or whatever it was, lowered the standard of qualification for a loan.
It made the assets toxic. But the guys doing the trading weren't the biggest culprits. The biggest culprits were Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and the U.S. Congress, because the bill sounded so good and it meant to help people. Plenty of people in finance saw clearly what was happening. They should've blown the whistle. They deserve blame, too.
But the main problem was the misguided "progressive" legislation that thought it could "wave a magic wand" and everybody would own houses, immediately. That's how all progressive government spending programs turn out. They just sap the energy and wealth of the people who actually make, grow, and build things.
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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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Did anybody notice the instant banning of Alex Jones was done on the same day by companies who all got their start from government grants and/or enjoy enormous tax breaks not available to the rest of us? Apple, YouTube, FaceBook... All those outfits are government-sponsored and they do the bidding of their masters. Not that it's any hardship doing so, since their masters GUARANTEE them a competitive advantage over anybody who dares to challenge them in our so-called free market. It ain't a free market and it SHOULD be. Just the rich and powerful are never content with what they have. They always want more, and to the extent that they CAN manipulate government to their advantage, they WILL manipulate government to their (short-term) advantage, which is why we all need to convert and become Libertarians, because only Libertarians understand that the real answer is to NOT PUT GOVERNMENT IN CHARGE OF ANYTHING, IF YOU CAN AVOID IT. Bad enough we agreed, way back when, to let them defend our borders.
They can't do THAT, apparently, but they're eager to fail at everything else, too! And we LET them! We ASK them! (After days, months and years of non-stop propaganda from media who SHAMELESSLY shill for establishment neocons and neolibs, 24/7, 365. Want to know what the power structure wants? Just check CNN.
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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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And yet, 90% of the news is picked-up from legacy-media reports. Sure, people add their own commentary and criticism, but without legacy media, I don't see people sending reporters to all corners of the Earth to cover the news. The independents need to form some sort of nationwide/global co-op. It could become a ground-up new world order of the people, from the ground up, maybe even putting government in its place, where nobody tells anybody what to do, but everybody knows what's up.
Unless they destroy the Interwebz, there's no stoppin' us talkin' to one another. They can squeeze us, but they can't stop word-of-mouth - or haven't, yet. And there's a limit beyond which Google can not go without creating a mass exodus. We saw this in the Black-Pigeon-Speaks ban, that triggered a brief exodus from YouTube that was nonetheless felt in the boardroom of Alphabet, Inc., you may be sure. They HAD to re-instate Black Pigeon Speaks, or YouTube was going to lose BILLIONS, and start looking like a ghost town. If they go beyond the tipping point, content creators will leave, and their viewers will follow.
Google especially hates conservative content, and yet conservative content is paying their bills!
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In a FREE MARKET, greed makes corporations act responsibly. Morality is transactional. You get return customers by treating people right. People become more prosperous. As people become more prosperous, they worry about higher rungs on Maslow's Ladder. Environmental responsibility becomes a selling point. Fair treatment of workers and customers becomes a selling point. When consumers have choices, they will patronize the more responsible companies.
This is how we went from living in caves to modern, industrial society. But governments had to stick their noses in, invariably AFTER the public made change inevitable by NATURAL means. But to make itself look good and get politicians elected, the government would come in with a giant bureaucracy to make sure that certain MINIMUM standards were met.
What do we get? We get minimum standards. Nobody trying to do things better. Everybody trying to find loopholes in the laws and regulations so that they can employ bad practices, but no one can touch them, because they're "in compliance."
In a free market, higher standards are arrived at, organically. You don't have everybody trying to satisfy a minimum. You have everybody setting themselves apart from the rest by striving for a MAXIMUM.
In the USA, which is trending AWAY from free-market capitalism, with government intervening into everything, it's much harder for new, better, more moral operations to even get off the ground. Look at air travel. Has it really gotten any better because of the FAA? No. What happened was a handful of companies that knew how to "play the game" end up monopolizing the air travel industry. We used to have HUNDREDS of small, medium, and large air carriers. Now? We have an oligopoly. Same for the auto industry. Same for the tech industry.
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Maybe I'm wrong and Nixon was playing 4-D chess, all along. Maybe China can't win without BECOMING us. It takes a lot of talented people, all working with a will, to make real human progress, whatever form of government you have. Theoretically, totalitarian regimes have a hard time holding things together, because the only way to win is to empower their people with skills and resources. The CCP's one-child policy (pogrom) has given them a generation of educated only-children. There's a Timothy Leary vibe going on in THEIR millennial, x, y, z generations (youth, generally).
Don't DEMAND excellence. But rather, LET excellence, and always applaud and reward excellence. Top-down tries to MAKE things excellent, and achieves mediocre on its best day.
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I don't know if Assad did or didn't use chem weapons on his own people at SOME point (or his daddy at some point in the more distant past), but I agree with Jimmy that Assad had the upper hand in the situation in question, and the only thing that COULD stop him was some sort of false flag chemical attack that would bring in outside forces to a situation Assad had well under control. The LAST thing Assad would've wanted to do, at that point, was snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory, with a very stupid act.
More likely, Assad's enemies sold that story in order to get and keep outsiders involved. I don't think Trump was able to overcome the momentum of neocons' and neolibs' delight in meddling abroad, with a never ending list of bad people to go after. His missile-attack reprisal in the port city of Tartus (?sp?) was announced ahead of time and loss of life and property were minimized. The Russians got plenty of heads-up and pulled out their people and ships. And, eventually, Trump disengaged us from Syria's internal goings-on. It's now starting to look like Trump actually gets it, and the delays in getting to the right place on our foreign policy appear to be more about getting his OWN people on board.
We'll see if the Deep State puts up with this, and/or how far Trump's tentacles reach into the innards of the Ship of State. He's been hiring and firing people for over 2 years, now, and I'm sure HIS culture is beginning to impose itself.
Call me old-fashioned, but I'd like to see a Declaration of War BEFORE we put our troops in harm's way on foreign soil. Liberals tend to sneer, but it's a Big Deal to send a 20-year-old to a foreign country to shoot and be shot at. Our leaders do NOT think it's a big deal. Just a natural extension of policy, to be employed wherever and whenever the elites see fit.
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@bruno-vicious : This rings at least semi-true. As a libertarian, I'm often in the position of "With friends like these, who needs enemies?" Sometimes, the arguments made on FOX for the so-called 'right' are just as bad as the over-the-top lies and conspiracy theories of the left-establishment media.
I'm to the point, now, where if a network's business model is commercials every 5 minutes, they're not worth watching, because they've been sanitized by the advertisers and everything else is just right- or left-wing talking points.
I'm just an old-fashioned, limited-government, individual-rights, free-market-capitalism (Adam Smith. Read Wealth of Nations if you haven't, already.) kind of guy, and NOBODY'S ON MY SIDE! Regressive faith-based ideologies on BOTH sides.
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I caught Fetterman's critique of the War on Drugs and his recommendation that we decriminalize narcotics. That's a pretty solid, libertarian/constitutional stance for a federal office-holder to have. I wish more held to that view, although I don't like the "It's bad for POCs" angle. Setting police against the community is bad for everybody, and whether the state has ANY say over what you put into your bloodstream. Drug cartels are human-trafficking cartels, and you only make them stronger and more brutal with the so-called War on Drugs.
Republicans should lead the way on the abolition of the War on Drugs. Police are to enforce laws protecting persons and property. I don't care if you shoot up or smoke meth or whatever you do on your own time. But if you hurt someone, or nod off on the sidewalk, or steal to support your habit, then THAT is what the police are for. You shouldn't have to confess to a crime in order to get help kicking your drug habit. And yes, if the police got out of the business of the Drug War, there would be more resources for other things. There would also be tax revenues from the legal purchase of narcotics to pay for drug rehab, counseling, etc.
Fetterman scoffs at "The Wire," but I think that show lays it all out pretty well. You can't fight the drug cartels the way we do without a lot of collateral damage to the community. Most of the gun violence in the cities is related to turf battles between drug gangs. The end of Prohibition was a MAJOR blow to organized crime. But they left the War on Drugs to keep those criminal organizations plush with cash, weapons and manpower.
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@TsarGopnikTV Half of the American people believe everything they hear on mainstream media, and mainstream media relay government narratives, uncritically. If you didn't support the war effort during Bush II administration, you were unpatriotic, according to all mainstream media, sports and entertainment. They made the war effort a "Support the troops," which every American will do, even if they don't support the war effort. The biggest sport in the USA is the NFL and they're notorious for patriotic displays. Fighter jet fly-overs. Ceremonies honoring the fallen. LOTS of flag waving went on during Iraq Wars, and it was all manufactured.
Half of Americans are stupid, and the political class is teaching them to hate the other half, see them as terrorists and "a threat to our democracy," when they're just Americans with a different opinion about the direction we should go, starting with entangling alliances, economic and military imperialism, and total lack of regard for the sovereignty of other nations. Our political class wields the dollar like a club, abroad, while at the same time debasing the dollar with ballooning debt at home, in PEACETIME. We can't hope to fight a war, upside-down on debt as we are, already.
At the end of World War II, the debt-to-GDP ratio was 30%. Now it's 130% and going up.
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But she never once questions the wisdom of having federal agencies governing everything under the sun, "for the greater good." Corruption is inevitable. Abuse of power is inevitable. The longer the agency's in place, no matter how carefully you set it up, eventually it will take on a life of its own and act in its own interest, or simply in the interests of the people running it. Anthony Fauci is a classic example. If there's a way to monetize (chronically under-funded) an agency, somebody will come along and find a way to do so, legally. That's what's going on at FDA, NIH, and who knows how many other federal agencies.
The worse of a job an agency does, the more money gets thrown at it.
And that's not even scratching the surface of what's happening with the Security State. FBI, DOJ-in-general, NSA, DOD, CIA, State Dept, ... THOSE departments and agencies are granted great secrecy powers, which is a HUGE screen to hide behind. And the people at the top, middle, and even lower levels have their OWN opinions and agendas, and "ongoing investigation" or "protecting sources and methods" arguments (and rules written by dept/agency officials) shield them from having to reveal what they're actually up to.
This is unavoidable in war time, because you DO need to keep a lot of secrets, but that's why the Dept of Defense is always full of waste and corruption. Just that one department, alone, is too big to be properly overseen by Congress. Now add all the OTHER agencies on top of THAT. We accept that secrecy, because theoretically, we're only fighting wars against actual existential threats, as a last resort.
But now we have a "crisis" every day, and every crisis "justifies" temporary extraordinary powers that the officials REALLY LIKE. During the pandemic, Fauci had more power to impose nationwide policies (by edict) than the president of the United States. Any slightest whim, the most casual utterance, was enforced on EVERYONE (except, of course, Fauci and government officials, who flew above our sufferings like a kid with a magnifying glass above an ant hill (on a sunny day).
FDA, USDA bought off by Big Food and Big Pharma. NIH, CDC bought off by Big Pharma and individual billionaires.
Blah blah blah. The point is, Tulsi was part of the PROBLEM, and remains part of the problem, with all the big progressive spending she wants to do, which will create whole new bureaucracies and grow existing ones. No. The answer isn't perfect oversight. The answer is to leave everything not national-defense and interstate and international trade up to the states. The states screw things up, too, but the damage caused is only to one state at a time. FEDERAL policies affect EVERYone, and FEDERAL powers and responsibilities should be pared down to a bare minimum. You can't stop the corruption, but you don't have to oversee agencies that don't exist!
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Remember that there is no double jeopardy if the prosecutor declines to prosecute. That means they can change their minds at any point in the future. And when I look at the charges they declined to pursue against Comey and McCabe, they look like cases that would be much easier to prove and get stiff sentences for AFTER facing charges for more serious crimes.
If Durham proves that (the) entire investigation(s) was(were) not predicated and that top FBI, DOJ and Intel officials perjured themselves or otherwise abused FISA, then the charges they "dropped" against Comey and McCabe (and others) are a slam dunk, and there's no stopping the DOJ from taking up those cases, again, because it's impossible to claim that you were just a patriot doing your duty in an extraordinary situation. If Durham proves that the lot of them MANUFACTURED the situation, then the leaking and lying looks FAR more sinister, is far easier to get a conviction on, and will lead to longer sentences.
I don't know if any of this be the case, but if there IS real meat to these FISA-abuse cases, these petty "lying and leaking" charges will be the icing on the cake, and much easier for prosecutors to prove ill intent and get convictions on what I believe to be spin-off crimes. Viewed in isolation, maybe they're in slap-the-wrist territory. But against a backdrop of a systematic smear-impeach-and-remove campaign, those cases are no longer in isolation, but part of a pattern of systemic bias and corruption. I think the average person who follows this news from BOTH sides of the political divide (i.e., not average at all) can clearly see the pattern of bias and double standard.
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Probably some nice nuggets in "A People's History of Fake News." From the first pamphleteers to YouTube, there hasn't been a media outlet that didn't have an axe to grind because its ownership/management group had an axe to grind, interests to protect, enemies to attack. What we learned from Hitler was the power of controlled media. But rather than fight against it, we set about systematically controlling the media. Now it's a toxic mix of government and corporate interference.
When it was useful to treat Indian lands as OUR lands, then "The only good injun is a dead injun," and Manifest Destiny. Not that we were any different from any other civilization running into an existing civilization. If one can take what belongs to the other, history teaches that it will, and it will generate whatever useful lies will serve the takeover. So a study on "Fake News" over the centuries would be most interesting. We can't un-do mistakes of the past, but maybe we should re-think how we basically don't allow the tribes to really own the 'reservations' we say are theirs. Tribal members don't really own their own land, and it removes all incentive from seeking to improve their land, which I would think Indians would have rare abilities and insights into what that meant.
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I'm not sure about Tesla's math or thunderfoot's math, here. It's a strange trade-off, because the motors weigh less than an internal combustion engine, but the batteries weigh a lot more than fuel, and a diesel runs at full power on a much lighter quarter tank. Batteries weigh the same, whether they're empty or they're fully charged. Do they charge back up when they're going downhill? Do you get something back, with a real braking advantage on downhill grades? I don't know enough about the things.
I think we'll all be better off if we lowered our sights. Maybe ease into less ambitious EVs, made specifically for the urban and residential environment. But I don't want to lose the ability to drive anywhere I want in the continental USA in 24 hours. One day's driving can get you from almost anywhere to almost anywhere in the lower 48. People going coast-to-coast can still do it in less than a day-and-a-half. That's going to go away, if current trends continue. But I know my little sister loves her EV bicycle for making nimble runs to work on a lot of 25 mph and 35 mph road.
Almost everywhere she needs to go in the valley is well within that bike's round-trip range. As long as she's got that cheap hydropower electricity, it's quite sensible. She has a conventional vehicle for bad weather and longer trips. But she can get around town just fine. Go one level up from that, with a trike that can carry some cargo, like a big load of groceries, and that'd be practical for all her shopping needs and not burn a drop of fuel.
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@sally8708 Many conservatives get it right for the wrong reasons. Many liberals get it wrong for the right reasons. The problem with liberals is they're so good that they believe coercion (government force) is the best and only means of effecting positive change, everywhere all at once, when human progress takes place at the family, clan, and local community level. "Clean up your corner of the world before setting out to save everybody," or, as Jordan Peterson might say "Make your damn bed before worrying about your neighbor's furnishings." (Not a direct quote)
In my younger days, I always partied with the lefties and enjoyed our wide-ranging discussions and debates, but I never voted as they did. I almost always vote with the conservatives, but it's because I'm a civil libertarian. There are very few on either side that I've been able to really sway to my way of thinking. Yes, help people. No, don't make it the government's job.
About the only thing I agree with conservatives wholeheartedly is limiting the size, scope, and mandate of the federal government. It's hijacked many of the responsibilities of local and state governments, by use of force and by incurring debt and printing money, which no local community or state has the power to do.
A sustainable community doesn't need federal help every year, forever. A nation of communities that can't stand on their own is a failed state. The conservatives understand this. A sustainable nation doesn't fight wars abroad and destabilize other nation-states at its whim. That's where I see eye-to-eye with the left (most of the time).
But over the last 20 years, the dangers of the intolerant left that I warned about in the '80s and '90s have all come to pass. Now the politicians run health, education, and any industry that draws their attention, for whatever reason. We're slipping into a fascist version of socialism, and it looks much like the authoritarian regimes of the 1920s and 1930s, but not a single liberal seems to be aware of this. We're not ON the slippery slope. We need to pick ourselves off from our wipe-out at its foot.
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Yes. The Democrats do nothing but project their sins onto others. They accused Trump of being "literally Hitler," because they knew that in his shoes. they would abuse the power of the presidency to no end.
I think pot helps you make connections between things you wouldn't otherwise, and in that sense, fulfills one of the functions of the dream state, at least in part. It's just not good if you want to follow a very complicated line of reasoning. IOW, you can make connections but you lose focus.
Kind of like Heisenberg uncertainty. When you're really close to something, you don't know where it's been or where it's generally headed, but you know exactly where it is at that instant. You have to back up to see where it's been and where it's headed, but then you can't see precisely where it is at that instant. (Heisenberg's about wavelength (from a distance) and position (from up close).)
Pot kind of shuts down your dreams, in a way. It's not that you're not dreaming, it's that you don't remember much/any of your dreams. Otherwise, dreams are your subconscious mind's way of alerting the conscious mind to patterns/behaviors in your conscious world that you're not noticing.
For me, it's getting a negative gut reaction to someone, but not really knowing why. Just a vibe. But then in a dream, all the little giveaways in their body language or their smiles not reaching their eyes sorts of things jump out at you. At least that's happened to me. I'll consciously wonder why I don't like a person and then a dream will bring all the things that don't add up and string them together into a little drama.
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Andy Jackson used half the Indian tribes against the other half, and then destroyed the tribes who fought by his side. I can see wanting to tear down his statue. But PUT IT TO THE PEOPLE. Don't just run roughshod over everyone in an orgy of outrage. That never ends well.
I think Obama said more to divide than unite. But the thing that's got everybody so worked up - police shootings - went down enormously between 2000 and 2020. Down by something like 50%. Tremendous progress. But more anger and resentment. I think people are missing the point, and scapegoating law enforcement, when law enforcement is only a symptom of underlying structural problems, by which I do NOT mean racism.
"Stop and frisk" is an authoritarian solution that is not going to win Trump (m)any undecideds. He's trying to oppose chaos, but that's not the way. Instead, he needs to ask why there's so much incentive for a kid to be holding guns or drugs in the first place. Law enforcement's in a losing guerrilla war with it own communities. It's no surprise that they are viewed as an occupying force in so many communities. He needs to ask himself why those communities are war zones. Much of it lies in the law, itself.
Anyway, touting Giuliani's stop-and-frisk is a pretty tone-deaf campaign tactic. He's appealing to his base, but he whiffed on the undecideds, like an inside fast ball.
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It's because you ARE a liberal, Tucker, but the true meaning of the word has been twisted to mean "Going back to the good old days when the government (King, Lords, and Ladies) took care of the serfs." Today, "liberal" actually means a regressive view of the relationship between the state and the people. True liberals want the people to be big and the government to be small. These so-called "liberals" of today want government to be your mommy and daddy.
And when you're being cared for by mommy and daddy, what's the first rule? OBEY. That's not liberty and limited government. That's adjacent to Divine Right of Kings, which the Liberal Project, starting with the Enlightenment (or farther back, with Magna Carta), categorically rejects.
So, what passes for "liberal" these days is really anything but liberal. The true liberals are the libertarians and the relatively small segment of the Republican Party who actually believe in liberal principles that are now trashed by media, government, and education as "right wing."
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@dickjones9207 And you can't spell "quadratic." As a math professor, myself, I think a lot of kids are sent down a classical math pathway that really isn't very relevant. Techniques of college algebra, including the quadratic equation, are tools that underly calculus, higher analysis and engineering. If you're not following one of those career paths, it's a waste of time. I hate saying this because it does broaden you, some, to take on that discipline, and the theory is very beautiful. It's just not going to be of any use to you in real life (No matter how much they claim otherwise).
I'm all the time asking students "Why are you in college algebra? You're not going to use it in your career." Then I learn that it's required for their major. And in their major, it's not really something they NEED, but it's a good weeder course, to reduce the number of, for instance, nursing majors. They could learn all the proportions and percentages they will need for drug dosage, etc., with a short, 3- or 4-week course that covers those topics.
One school I taught at used trigonometry as their weeder course. They knew you had to be able to think to pass trig, and it was a very easy way for them to weed out the pretenders in their biology program. It also was a way to torture math teachers, with a bunch of low-performing students who had zero motivation to understand the material.
Students would be much better served, in the main, by taking statistics, because so much of our scientific and political discussions revolve around statistics. It's easy to fool the American public with cherry-picked data, or to make claims that the data seem to support but actually don't (correlation versus causation).
Teach them how to use a spreadsheet, and figure things out with simple models and recursions. You don't have to understand annuities to build an amortization schedule for a loan. You just have to know how compound interest works for one compounding period and drag down! BOOM! There's all your payments and the running balance!
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Education can now be delivered GLOBALLY at ZERO MARGINAL COST. And hell, many content creators put great stuff out there for free, so the cost of making the education modules themselves is ALSO free. So why do we have to spend $10,000/year on every single fucking student, when they could learn EVERYTHING NEEDED FOR COLLEGE ENTRANCE and 90% of college education, itself, for NOTHING? It's ridiculous! Education shouldn't be free. Education IS free!
And people are figuring that out. These brick-and-mortar institutions are obsolete, except for the high-dollar apparatus in big engineering schools and medical schools. Virtually ALL THE REST OF IT IS THERE FOR THE PRICE OF A MOUSE CLICK! Public education is a HUGE scam, and unless you want to play Russian roulette with the people running those institutions, hoping against hope that they will NOT indoctrinate your kids into Hitler/Lenin Youth, Progressives - GOOD Progressives - should campaign AGAINST public education. You're IDIOTS to think government is providing the service you think it is. And although MOST educators try to do the right thing, you're basically handing the government a loaded gun and begging it to point it at your head, when you send your kids to state-run schools.
You guys are locked into this mythical 19th-Century world view, and it's the 21st Century, already. Central control and administration of KEY human products and services should be avoided at every turn. But you jerks just look for MORE things for the bureaucrats and power-mad robber barons to take over and run "for us." It's NEVER "for us." It's always "to us." Seems great, but it's just a can full of worm-eaten and spoiled SPAM.
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This is what flame-breathing Democrats don't seem to understand. If it's open season on political opposition and they lose their grip on the levers of power, everything they're doing to Trump, now, can be done to them, down the road.
Recall that "nuclear option" that Democrat majority in the Senate passed, in order to get Obama appointees (and presumably Clinton appointees) confirmed in the Senate. They eliminated the filibuster on judicial appointments. Then - horror of horrors! - Donald Trump was elected in 2016! His judicial appointments sailed through Senate confirmation process, and there was nothing the Democrat minority in the Senate could do to stop it!
Democrats are all about winning TODAY, on the theory that if they can win decisively enough, they will hegemonize the political process in perpetuity. But if they lose, they will never recover, because of all the lies and abuse of power they employed for the win. I think it's inevitable that they will lose, because their outrageous behavior is being exposed by left and right.
Iraq War, RussiaGate Hoax, Hunter's laptop, Ashley's diary, Branch Covidianism, transgender ideology, intersectional identity politics, ...
For the time being, it's an uphill battle, because the security state is in league with both Democrat and Republican (RINO) leadership. MAGA Republicans are making inroads, and Jimmy agrees with them on most things, except Jimmy thinks big government's a GOOD thing, if only it does what Jimmy wants, which means Jimmy's one of those guys who believes Sauron's One Ring is fine, as long as it's in the right hands, when what Tolkien (and I) is (are) saying is that no one can be trusted with that much power in one place Find another way.
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The press has ALWAYS had an axe to grind. Until the 20th Century and especially WW II, muck-raking from every outlet was a given, and people knew the politics of every paper. Then during the war, the government got its hooks into the press, behind the scenes, and from then on, the new media (radio and t.v.) spoke with one voice, and the people were conditioned to BELIEVE the one voice. Alternative voices were drowned out and/or subverted, in the name of "fighting communism."
We'll see how well alternative media do in the future, but Big Tech dominates and has joined the government-insider chorus. You're not getting Dave or any other alternative voices unless you LOOK for them, and know what you're looking for. I hope against hope that these Big Tech platforms will wither and die, just like cable/broadcast media.
In the "old days," you had lefty, moderate, and righty to choose from, and could get a fairly good grasp by reading from 2 or 3 opposing sources.
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@nicolep7241 They drove up prices, everywhere. Eventually, landlords in the big cities, sitting on tons of empty office and storefront space, will have to admit defeat, and either sell at a loss or default. As an individual, I sorta moved sideways, to a red state closer to home. Made bank on the sale and paid a premium on the purchase after. Now I'm in a smaller town with the same job. No crime. More land than the old place. More debt, too, at least slightly, but a better interest rate than my previous mortgage, and payments comparable to before that I can more than handle.
On paper, I've gained equity, but I'm in it for the long haul and can service my debt, so I'm at least OK, there. Anticipating inflation to come, the tail end of this mortgage will be paid off in massively inflated dollars if I can just stay the course in spite of everything the Uni-Party does to me.
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Good, knowledgeable conversation, so far @ 10:38.
To me, anybody using a product for free has no expectation of quality. You want better content? Pay for what you want. I just took a big step, today, and cut every nickel out of cable t.v. offerings.
Joe's spot on with the observation that since advertisers are paying for ALL of the free stuff, you're going to get corporate media, which, regardless of its good or bad intentions, is always going to pander to the complainers who are the biggest threat to their income streams, and the loudest complainers are the authoritarian, so-called liberal types. A conservative is USED to the public square despising their positions, so they just shrug and move on.
internet's only been with our species for a very short time. We're adapting to it as we speak. Most of what government has done, beyond building the basic backbone, has been pretty toxic. People should have total customization of their own experience, and not through the platform's curation. The platform should just give the customer the most options. if you think a person's comments are toxic, you should be able to remove them from your individualized experience. No fuss. No muss. The other person needn't be notified, in fact, should NOT be notified. The troll should not be able to use notifications to set the hook in their next victim.
I think that's the perfect way for society to deal with trolls. Just learn to turn that voice off, for yourself. Then the crazy people (Maybe I'm one of them) is shouting at the top of their lungs, and are totally frozen out of the conversation because nobody in the room hears them. I don't think a 12-year-old should have the right to hijack adult conversations. Maybe I'm in a TOYO site, and we're talking about making room for a 3.4 liter in a '93 Toyota pickup that comes with a 3.0 liter, stock. When the 12-year old says "You slept with your sister" you should have a turn-this-off switch that requires no mediation by the platform.
A well-run platform should have that option. YouTube does not. YouTube allows you to report someone but not to take agency in a totally nonviolent way and use software a 10-year-old could write to have an "off" switch for people who are rude. Or maybe the kid just interrupts with something else that's not rude, but more a 1 + 1 = 2 question in the middle of Calculus Ii. You can calmly ignore someone, without any hard feelings in an online setting.
We really - I really - need to grow up and migrate off the corporate/government platforms.
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Yup. And I'm all in favor of "Intentional Family" and all that jazz, if that's what if people of like minds want to do. A good family IS Marxist. And if you COULD extend that notion from coast to coast, we'd be a perfect Marxist utopia.
Trouble is, the only libertarian way to do that would be from the ground up. The minute it's handed down from on high, it's at the point of a gun, and the NAP is violated, which few, if any, of the liberals I know, can wrap their minds around.
I'm 90% Libertarian, with a tithe for national defense. I used to go 15%, figuring the King's at least handy for building roads, but I'm 5% more purist, nowadays, looking at our history and how we'd've been WAY more respectful of the natives if we'd been libertarian about roads. If the locals wanna pool their money for a better road, let 'em. If a guy wants to build a toll road and he can make it happen thru free exchanges with others, let 'em. Otherwise, let nature take its course.
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A group of individuals could decide to live as an Intentional Family, and, in effect, live communally. You see it all the time in families of all types, here and there. So he's quite correct.
Thing about the guy who didn't want to give up his property is he wouldn't be a member of that family. As long as it's not imposed from above, it's not counter to NAP.
The irony, to me, is that those who want to live that way and see the whole world join hands and live that way, are going about it in exactly the wrong way. To get where they want, they need to SHRINK government, and the planet-killing excesses too MUCH participation by government invariably lead to.
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Depends on what you mean by "Christianity." Are you talking the subversive followers of Jesus fed to the lions at the Coliseum, or the government-integrated Roman Catholic Church (or Lutherans or Church-of-Englanders)?
By the time Rome got ahold of Christianity, it was pretty much not Christian, any more, imho. Still, a sincere Christian, coming up in almost ANY sect, with a good heart and a good mind, is going to be very OK with Enlightenment ideals.
Of course, that kind of Christian ends up rejecting much of what any organized Christian church is pushing, settling towards a semi-agnostic view that Jesus was a great dude and the lesson is Reason + Love = Heaven on Earth.
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There was no internet until I was out of high school. As soon as it came out, I was using it. For ME, it was perfect, because I no sooner had Calculus II and Differential Equations under my belt than here was this computer algebra system that could perform all the calculations. Every generation after mine had this sort of capability from birth.
I took a break in graduate school (math) to work on bringing the Internet to rural northern Idaho. System programmer, help desk, and general go-fer on a federal grant that brought dial-up Internet to places it had never been. In those days, capabilities were far more limited than today, but hopes and expectations for the future were through the roof, but little did we know at that time what the level of connectivity would one day become or the bandwidth, which is 3 orders of magnitude (1000 times) greater than the crap dial-up that we were so proud of.
I sort of feel like I came along at the perfect time, but as a math professor, I'm seeing more and more 15- and 16-year-olds who are WAY more advanced than I was at that age. At that age, I was discovering girls and looking for the next kegger. If not for a physical handicap that said "Go to college or be a drain on society," I'd've been perfectly content just getting through high school and blue-collar work.
For every kid who gets led astray on the Internet, there are 10 who figure out that what they learned in k-12 was mostly garbage, and the good stuff they learned in high school was delivered in a garbage way. Traditional schools put a lid on your learning. Technology makes the learning as fast as you can take it in.
I can't tell you how many high-school drop-outs I see on the Internet who know the difference between the Frankfurt (socialist) and Austrian (free-market) schools of economics.
You want kids to think more critically? Give them more word problems in their math classes! LOL! Or have them write opinion papers on historical figures. Have them write pro- and con- pieces on each. One thing I learned in school that they don't teach, today, because "the other side is evil and toxic," is "If you don't understand the arguments of "the other side," then you don't understand your own side.
What I see from the so-called "left" are people who can quote Marx, but never heard of Adam Smith, and our entire education system, with few exceptions, consists of indoctrinated socialists who don't understand economics. They just see the fruits of free-market, voluntary transactions as wealth that they should redistribute by force to "those in need."
I help people in need. AND I pay taxes. I could help more people if I paid less in taxes, and there'd be a lot more assistance tailored to the needs of the people I help, on a case by case basis, than all the bureaucrats and all the red tape could ever do, without the 80% overhead that government typically requires. Poverty programs aren't for the poor. They're for the bureaucrats who administer them.
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I've been injured many times, and I'm here to tell you Nietzsche was full of shit. Every time you get hurt, it takes a little something out of you, and any one of those incidents can break you, even though you survive it. Don't believe me, come take a look at my scars and twisted limbs. It ain't pretty. Shit don't work so good. And I don't buy that "It's inner strength," either. You get hurt too bad, you might spend the rest of your life with a nuclear case of PTSD or a crusty shell that you can never break out of for the rest of your life.
I chickened out at the CAT scan, the other day. Busted the head of my femur clean through. Told 'em to knock my ass out. Put me on "blockers" and they STILL fucked it up and put me in agony. Moving badly injured individuals on a sheet is a job for MEN or very strong women. Not little girls who want to prove they're as good as a man. A man's strong enough to lift you like you're thistledown. Women will heave and puff out their chests and sneer at you for screaming. I didn't scream, but I let loose an 'F' bomb during the move and told the girl "When there's one part that's badly injured and 3 people lift 3/4 of the body perfectly in unison and the one holding the injury is letting that leg flop around, you messed up." Well, I told her that (without cussing) after the spasms subsided.
And in the special case of head injuries, ask an NFL player. The more you take, the more vulnerable you become.
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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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Just remember they've got ex-CIA embedded in media, everywhere. Take what all these guys say with a grain of salt. They'll seem open-minded and clear-sighted, and they'll plant a bunch of outdated and toxic neocon notions throughout.
By my estimation, Putin's the only guy in the entire thing who appears to be a true statesman. In the setting in which he lives and the forces that act to destroy what prosperity and liberty there is, "reasonable measures" can seem very bad from the outside. I don't like all of his methods, but he's turned so many things around for the better for the Russian people, and you see how our own leaders appear to be the sinister foes of liberty, prosperity and free expression, all the wars they've started, all the propaganda WE use, all the people WE censor, de-person and de-platform, we've got our OWN bed to make and our OWN house to clean up, before we sacrifice the lives and way of life for millions across the globe, including within our own borders.
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@stephenhenry5072 Some would argue that the manufacture of consent through lies and distortion dates back to the Spanish-American War and the Hearst empire. The BBC has been the establishment's mouthpiece for decades.
UK and Europe have never been coy about censorship. They don't have a 1st Amendment. In the USA, where our constitution supposedly forbids it, the propaganda and censorship have been more hidden, but all the more pernicious, because the majority of Americans believed that the government actually obeyed the constitution.
It's very cringe, thinking back to the '70s, when I laughed at the bald-faced lies in Soviet propaganda, totally unaware of the bald-faced lies in American propaganda. I didn't start waking up until the '90s, wondering what the hell we were doing dropping bombs in Yugoslavia. Then I read my dad's old copy of Heinlein's "Expanded Universe," where he did a deep dive into Soviet logistics and American claims about Soviet power. Routinely off by one or sometimes two orders of magnitude.
I thought Frank Church was a traitor in the 1980s. By the 2010s, it dawned on me that the Reagan administration set us up for a lot of the regime-change BS we've seen unfold, regardless of which party owned the White House. It's abhorrent.
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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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Sorry, somewhat off-topic (per usual).
This behavior is a lot of the driving force behind orgs like BLM, when you look at how they've been using NSA intercepts to "beat" drug dealers who are ALWAYS going to be one step ahead of law enforcement if law enforcement plays by the rules. This is the nature of smuggling and unenforceable laws of prohibition. All you can do against drugs (or alcohol) is empower the very worst people and subsidize the building of immensely powerful and violent cartels that are smart enough and big enough to penetrate ANY law-enforcement net against contraband that millions are willing to pay good money for!
It's only natural for law enforcement and prosecutors to LOVE this "new theory" of using these means of attacking otherwise unassailable drug cartels. I think the rot starts at the top, but the way it plays out on the street is the kind of thing that has people ready to believe the BLM. And they don't care if the one instance was blown out of proportion, because they know 20 people who WERE "jammed up" or "tuned up" by crooked cops.
Who are the crookedest cops? Vice and narcotics cops. They don't start out that way. But they're going up against an entire culture that's risen up precisely because of these unenforceable laws. They make low-middle wages, take big risks, and are surrounded by wealth and corruption. All it takes is one weak person, and it can infect entire departments. It's not the fault of cops, per sé. It's just human nature's toxic side, in a toxic landscape created by wrong-headed (possibly well-intentioned) policies and policy makers, without taking account of consequences of the (ab)use of power.
I want cops investigating murder, assault, theft and fraud. That's pretty much it. Think of how many kids in the USA smoke that first joint, and from then on, they never see police in the same way, ever again! I'm not saying legalize the stuff for under-age kids. But legalize weed (and even the hard drugs) for adults. Regulate the stuff. Tax the stuff. Focus law enforcement on crimes against persons and property.
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Hanson can be pretty great. Sometimes I disagree with him. He's a little too quick to see the need for military confrontations. I need to go back and see what he was saying in the run-up to Iraq. He'd be the type to start talking about the parallels between Hussein's Iraq and Hitler's Germany. They very much built up the Iraq War(s) as stopping a Hitler BEFORE he's done his damage. People from the generation before mine (I'm an early-'60s baby) who studied the run-up to WW II have always 2nd-guessed how to stop Hitler in the 1930s, and scornfully ask "Why were they appeasing him? You need to stop these guys before millions die!"
I was a relatively precocious kid who spent a lot of time on restriction, so I ended up slurping up books detailing the diplomatic surrender of the entire country of Czechoslovakia by the Allies, leaving Benes high and dry. Hitler rolled into Czechoslovakia without firing a shot. Just his. Then the Phony War, where diplomatic arrangements BEFORE the war just didn't square with the security situation on the ground. Then there's the natural reluctance of a liberal society to want to pay for national defense during peacetime. Euros and Americans were not building-up a war machine like the socialists, communists and the Emperor of Japan. Liberal societies don't like war.
Well, liberal PEOPLE don't like war. I think when you look at how big our military is, and what we've done with it over the years, it's hard to make the case that our government is at all reflective of classical liberal values. Since World War II, we've had an endless list of excuses to stay on a World War II footing. We let FDR do a lot of stuff because of the existential crisis, and much of that is still in place.
We never learn our lesson. We meddle and then we have to meddle, more, because of our previous meddling.
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First of all, it's the nature of movie-making to make every production a one-of-a-kind, one-off, with the writing, directing and producing all focused on just the one movie, without any regard for what went before. They think they're showing their creativity, and keeping things fresh, and excited. The whole "subverting expectations" thing.
Much could be fixed just by casting actors with charisma, especially the two leads. I think Sophie's a good enough actress, but she's just not very charismatic. Same for James Macavoy.
But spot on with regard to how it just seems like they lifted chunks of old scripts and cobbled them together. It does seem like it's formulaic and they mailed it in. You wonder how they can copy so much and at the same time thumb their noses at continuity.
I think they did sort of try to be a period piece with the sound track. Maybe the early '90s just sucked for music. Maybe Joe Walsh and the B52s just held out on 'em.
Bottom line is well-intentioned movie by tone-deaf creatives. Yours and others' reviews kept me from watching this when it first came out. But I finally saw it, yesterday, because I still have HBO for some unknown reason. I never thought the X-Men writing was all that good, but good actors and good special effects could at least keep your interest. On the other hand, it may just be that nobody likes the fact that they wrote Jean Grey as a tragic figure, in the first place, and we want to see triumph.
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Yes. The left is authoritarian. Authoritarianism is inevitable, when you put the government in charge of your health, education, and welfare. With responsibility handed over to the state, the state will inevitably assert authority. Not only that, but the allocation of scarce resources will not be decided by the people on the ground, but by bureaucrats hundreds or thousands of miles away, trying to balance their spreadsheets.
What progressives don't understand is that ANY government program can parade its success stories, so you think they're doing good, but what they don't show you is all the people who are harmed. Top-down is what you're pushing, Jimmy, even as you see the many problems associated with it. So you're trapped in an eternal game of wack-a-mole against institutions much bigger than you, when really, you should've been content just trying to help people, one at a time, out of your own pocket, instead of insisting that these enormous engines of injustice and waste be created.
It's not right to coerce people to support your half-baked idea of "sharing," when all you and your ilk needed to do was open up YOUR wallets, instead of virtue signaling with other people's money. Such hypocrisy, but you don't understand enough to realize how contradictory your views are.
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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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Self-improvement is so unsatisfying, because it's the accumulation of small gains, small improvements. People want the quick fix, and there aren't any quick fixes. You'll never be perfect. You just have to get addicted to being a little bit better, tomorrow, than you are, today. Lots of people are that way. Lots of people, unfortunately, are not. You have to stick with it for a long time, before you can look back and see how much you've changed after 6 months or a year of (usually lonely) grinding away at it. Once you get hooked on being your better self, it becomes the way you're wired, and life gets better. Trouble is, it'll never be perfect, and everyone expects instant perfection, or they're looking for somebody to blame.
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There are ways to get Internet just about anywhere. And if you had all that fresh air and things to do outside, how much Internet would you really want or need? There are probably a million Americans who would love to homestead and set up a permaculture way of life in such a rich environment. They're getting the science down to where you can live well, off the grid, in the middle of a desert!
The main drawback is raising girls in rural areas. Girls yearn for the social, for community. Boys can grow up playing and working, outdoors and feel like it's heaven compared to anywhere else. Most girls need more of a community to thrive, emotionally. My nephews who grew up on the farm are well-adjusted and happy. Their sister has had a hard time adjusting. Boys can measure themselves against the projects they undertake. Girls define themselves more in terms of what others think of them than in terms of what they achieve on their own. Generally. It's more a 60-40 thing than a 100-0 thing, but it's significant.
Girls AND boys still want/need playmates from OUTside the family. But I think girls need it, more, generally speaking, and parents going for the rural lifestyle need to go out of their way to provide some socialization beyond the 4 walls of the home. But not too far out of their way. This is the function that festivals and fairs used to serve, or just having a healthy village to visit, nearby. It takes an American "frontiersman" attitude to get those villages back up and running, though, which would be hard on the kids, and even if done perfectly, the kids will still yearn for all the wonderful things that books, movies and Internet tell them are going on in the more populated areas.
The older I get, the more I despise the cities and the deluded world view that is allowed to persist over many generations, because they are divorced from nature and the actual necessities of life.
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The Republicans acting so passively just puts the Democrats' tactics into starker contrast. And when they bend over backwards, it's hard to fault them, when the process, which DOES favor Republicans, thanks to VOTERS, grinds inexorably to its conclusion. Kavanaugh WILL be confirmed. Democrats will lose the midterms. The more they lose, the more shrill and irrational, petty, and downright wicked they show themselves to be. They're fighting a vicious rearguard action, which is another way of saying they're in retreat, and acting like cornered rats.
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Shapiro's a little young and a little too tribal. He treads close to a Judaic form of Taqiyya, the latter of which I'm sure he excoriates in his critiques of radical Islam. There's a sense of right and wrong in Ben that I think can lead him to some authoritarian dead-ends. Antifa make similar mistakes. They can see where they can win the day, with sufficient numbers and enough attitude, and they get caught on video "winning." That's not winning. That's setting 2/3 of the country against you. You don't want to win by doing wrong, because the wrong will drag you down.
So there you are. You've followed Ben's formula for success and you wrote a bunch of research papers full of Marxist-Leninist dogma, just to get a grade from a lunatic-left professor, and now you're running for office or you're in court for fraud, and those old term papers come up. "So, did you actually believe that stuff, back then or were you lying?"
Do you lie and say you believed that nonsense, back then, but learned better, since? Or do you tell the truth and admit you were just shinin' a stupid professor? If you're honest, then they'll hit you with the old "So were you lying then or are you lying now?" or "If you lied then, for personal gain, why wouldn't you lie, now, for personal gain?"
Nah. Best to sleep at night, even if it costs you the "win," today.
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: Religious faith is a tonic to the soul and psyche. And the fact is that BILLIONS of people follow one religion or another. So, in the world in which we find ourselves, try to be tolerant, but don't give up what's right because some dogmatist, who insists on literal interpretations of books written by men.
Overall, I think Judeo-Christianity has operated on principles that push society ahead. Guided by Love and Reason, people naturally re-interpret was pre-written-word shepherds thought about their world. They were probably among the most enlightened of their time, and the written word really got going largely because of religious institutions. Sure, organized religion is fraught with corruption, and will be twisted by destroyers to do destruction. But there are still underlying principles. The power of literacy.
That hick up in the sticks, living in a hovel, up in the high Appalachian mountains got his first reading lesson out of a Holy Bible. Malcolm X went from street hustler to thinking (and reading and writing) man, because he fell in with the Muslims in prison. The Catholic Church kept the light of Classical Greece and Rome alive through the Dark Ages. The wisdom and learning of centuries was kept alive.
They also browbeat a lot of good scientists, whose facts contradicted Church Doctrine. The parallel in the current era is Leftist Orthodoxy in the role of Catholic Church, ignoring and suppressing any facts or arguments that go against The Collectivist Narrative. It's OK for people to be crazy, except these people want my freedom and all the fruits of my labor and my childrens' and grandchildrens' labor (Skyrocketing national debt. Fiat currency.). There's no end to the damage the libtard orthodoxy can do, especially now that it seems to be all tied up with the Military Industrial Complex, keeping us on a permanent war footing by keeping us frightened of all the evildoers around the planet. So that makes it OK for us to kill foreigners.
What could go wrong?
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@yarweiss : How bad do you feel about slavery? How far back do you need to go to see the day when the state of Israel was destroyed? And which time? And by whom? Fact is, the Allies re-drew the map after World War II, going from one extreme (The Holocaust) to another (Creation of a Zionist state by force, in 1947).
Fucked-up deal, no matter how you slice it. And the question becomes "What do we do about it, now?" Are you a "From the river to the sea" person or a "Here we are. Can't we try to get along?"
I think for every atrocity by Israel, I can count about 10 committed against them. In some ways, they're like the kid who gets in trouble, because he finally snapped and beat the living tar out of the playground bully, and put him in the hospital after months of torment . Since '47, their neighbors have tried to destroy them, many times. Israel has always out-thought and out-fought them. "It's terrible that they seized and hold the Golan Heights." Well, what would YOU do if people were sitting on the ridge right next to your town and lobbing mortar shells and missiles at you?
I can't say I know ALL the in's and out's. I definitely don't have a religious dog in this fight. What is, is. The question is always what is the best move to make, next.
As far as BDS goes, I would love it if more Americans did more research on where the stuff they buy comes from. I think it's a growing movement. Myself, I try to buy American on everything, when possible, and avoid Chinese, because I just don't trust them. Besides, it ain't right to buy products made in a factory that has to use suicide nets to keep its workers from committing suicide. If they think they can make a buck by poisoning me with formaldehyde, they won't hesitate. And I wouldn't mind one bit paying an extra penny (or pennies) a pound to get migrant workers a better wage for the backbreaking labor they do, while most of the money goes to middlemen.
But as far as targeting Israel, I'm not so sure. It's hard for me to judge. The Jews were shocked, BIG-time by pogroms of the early-mid 20th century and then had an instant country made that it's been all they could do to defend, since its creation. They've been on a war footing since Day 1. It's like the USA walked in and told Syria, "From now on, SE Turkey and NE Syria are KURDLAND. We declare Kurdish Homeland." Should the Kurds turn that down, or make the best of it? And wouldn't Turkey and Syria be at their throats from Day 1? How might they behave? I expect a lot like Israel's behaving.
It's an artificiality created by outsiders driven by guilt and religion. Toxic stuff.
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Joe was trying to say he was the running mate of the 1st black president, the president with the first black (She's not really black.) vide president, and who appointed the first black woman to the Supreme Court. he just can't articulate it, properly, but you know what he means, there.
They go from forgiving everything he says to deliberately misinterpreting what he says, depending on what suits the Democrat elites at the moment. Clearly the Democrat elites are moving on from Joe. Once the big money leaves the game, the Democrats lose, because they threw in with big money and gave up on small contributions from the working and middle class years ago.
That's not to let Republicans off the hook, but their history of the last 50 years has been many more small contributions compared to a small number of big donors. That's been changing in recent years, to more of a donor-class kind of party, instead of a middle-class party. Hence, uni-party. Both parties are taking money from the same people.
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Abolish Communications Decency Act and its Section 230 that protects the censorious Big Tech at the expense of any new competitors. Government stepping in will just make the problem worse, the same as it has done to numerous other industries. You wonder why Big beats Small? Because that's the nature of government regulation. Right when the public thinks the government is sticking it to the big corporations, it is HELPING the big corporation. Complex regulations destroy small outfits that can't afford to comply with all the complicated rules. Small outfits can't hire a "compliance officer" whose only job is to keep the regulators happy. Small companies aren't big enough to hire anyone who doesn't actually PRODUCE something.
Liberals and progressives do the bidding of big corporations while spending all their time complaining about big corporations. When CONSERVATIVES start screaming for the government to step in and "fix" Big Tech, then we are lost. If government just backed off and let everyone compete, the bad practices of Big Tech would destroy their bottom line.
These PLATFORMS should just be PLATFORMS. Like the phone service has no right to monitor and censor phone conversations. There are already plenty of laws on the books. If YouTube's business model says they should censor content on their platform, then let them. And because they choose to censor, they become publishers. Because they are publishers, they should fall under all the same rules and regulations that apply to publishers. They should not have it both ways. It's bad for the public and it's bad for them, too, in the long run.
You want to protect children? Have a KidTube to which access is totally under parents' control. Instead of worrying about filtering OUT bad content, let the parents decide what channels they will ALLOW, with a default door lock on everything else. On AdultTube, anything should go, consistent with the traditional standards of libel, slander, threats of violence and inciting violence. Communications Decency Act and Fairness Doctrine (created when regressive Christians were afraid somebody might use a cuss word on-air) end up meaning the opposite, in actual practice, because NO ONE should have the right to decide these things. If someone is blatantly breaking the law, then there are courts for that, already.
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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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Who are ANY of the Euro leaders to say whether there are high-level talks between two superpowers? Who is Zelensky to deny Trump the right to speak and deal directly with Putin? "Our" supposed side doesn't want anybody to talk directly to Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un? It's as if they're afraid we might stop hating each other, and work together. Sure, be on guard against untoward activities, but it's not our job to stay on top by keeping the rest of the world down.
I don't care what you might think of foreign leaders. We still need to have high-level talks, if for no other reason than to understand each other, and not escalate into violence due to ignorance.
As near as I can tell, both Putin and Xi want a better future for their people. If they can't deliver on a better future or get their people to believe things are the up-tick, they will lose power. The only way to keep things on the up-tick is to give their people a fair shake. Putin gets this. Xi gets this.
All Trump is saying is "Sure, trade, but trade FAIRLY." American leaders oscillate from too much trust to outright hostility. There's a middle, measured path, that brings incremental improvement, very naturally.
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Not quite, Tucker. Our "leaders" never trusted society, and now they're freaking out because their control systems are fraying at the edges. They still get plenty of sheeple to "support the latest thing," but BLM's done the same song and dance every 4 years for a long time, and this is the FIRST time I've seen any scrutiny. COVID madness lasted about 2 years, before society grew immune to that fear, And the Ukraine fetish is wearing thin after just a few months.
There are still the knee-jerk, "latest thing" types in great number, but they're not getting the unquestioned affirmation and approbation they once did. The "likes" for adding a Ukrainian flag to your signature have waned very quickly.
I've always been the contrary voice on matters of liberty (I want moar) and war (I want less), while others argue over HOW government should meddle, not how much. And on the war front, we argue over how MUCH force to use, how MANY to kill, when to me, the answer is simple:
No force. No killing.
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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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For some strange reason, I find myself hoping that the number is closer to 10 than 3,000. Call me sentimental. As for Trump, you just have to understand that he's relentlessly overstating his case, as a counterbalance, to nudge the left towards the middle, where deals are made. In de-constructing his overstatements, the left is often tricked into something reasonable, because they're taking more time on the facts, in spite of themselves. They get downright smart about some issues, just to show he's dumb. That's OK. Water off a duck's back.
The left are bucking a trend towards immigration control and jobs. And rather than bemoaning demographic collapse, why aren't we celebrating the fact the the people, here, have voluntarily turned the corner on population growth. How about we worry about too few babies when we moderate our population down to maybe 100 million. Think of cutting the pressure we put on Ma Nature on the continent by 2/3? It turns out that economic success leads to lower birth rates. So rather than drag our nice little setup down by importing more and more people to put more and more burden on the American continent, why don't we seek to export our economic success to where those people came from? See them moderate THEIR birth rates, in the natural order of things.
Fact is that people higher up the economic ladder are higher on Maslow's ladder, and life is a lot of fun without kids or without too many kids. We no longer really NEED a bunch of kids to ensure a comfy retirement. There's less incentive to invest big in your kids. I think women making careers is a huge part of it. Kind of cool, though, how we've broken through and you see more nurturing fathers. Educated couples can easily see the wife making more money and the husband stay at home. We still have to break through in-bred tendencies of women to only pair at or above their status. Men just care if they like the woman, not what job she has or how popular she is. Men are bred to expect that they will at least hold up their end, economically, if not (and often not) around the house. A lot of us men just don't care if the place smells like our dirty socks, or if there's anything green to go with that hamburger.
But we don't generally mind if the woman is economically dependent on US. It's high male status to make enough $$$ that the woman doesn't have to work. I don't see anything wrong with a woman staying at home, but compared to having to leave the house and be presentable and civil every day towards strangers and compulsory acquaintances, it seems like you could keep yourself pretty busy and be able to SEE the good you're doing, at home. Might be surprised at the husbands who'd rather cook and do laundry instead of emptying garbage cans, which sucks, but pays pretty good.
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@thechloromancer3310 They have the biggest population in the world. They should have more billionaires. Also, staying at home or working is more of a choice in the West than a necessity, even today.
Extended families seem great, and in many ways they are, but the vast majority of them are by necessity and custom. A big reason why you don't see grandparents living with their kids is because when you don't HAVE to, you usually will decide NOT to.
Rudyard Kipling wrote about extended families in India in the 18th/19th Centuries. The thinking, there, was that teenage girls are empty-headed and good for very little except their fertility. "STFU and make babies! Marry the man we arranged for you!" They believed that a teen-aged girl was much too young and ignorant to be given the responsibility of running a household. Typically, the grandparents would live with one of their sons, and the "evil mother-in-law" phase is something all young mothers dreaded and at the same time yearned to be the evil mother-in-law, themselves, one day, and ride roughshod over the daughter-in-law.
The grandmother ran the household, and the mother was a beast of burden and child-bearing. But if they stuck it out, they would rule their own household, one day. That household would be the household of their eldest surviving son.
Very similar in Japan.
I still love the nuclear family unit and extended family, for various reasons, although it's full of dysfunction, too, depending on what kind of people they are. But generally, the mother-in-law is a total bitch towards the wife and runs the house. The extended family is more a necessity than a desirable thing, when you see prosperity come along and give young couples more options and their parents more options.
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Hollywood hasn't really changed. It's always pushed the agendas of the donor class and the government. What has changed is that the messaging from the establishment is so alien to what people know and believe that it's created huge backlash.
This doesn't explain everything that's going on, but the liberal messaging that's dominated since the 1960s, with your John Wayne and Clint Eastwood outliers, resonated pretty well, and could even be argued to be helping move the culture in better, more open-minded directions.
Anybody born before 1970 knows how homophobic society used to be. I think the Tom Hanks movie "Philadelphia," (I think), where Hanks played a gay man who was sick with AIDS, marked a real turning point for society. Jesus teaches care for the sick and unconditional love. Christians are also instructed that departure from hetero norms is a sin. But when they put a face and a back-story to a good man to an AIDS victim, the unconditional love, which is the Highest Level Teaching of Christianity, trumped the homophobia.
That was a turning point in our history, where AIDS had real potential to generate huge backlash against gay people. Instead, the media complex hit us with "Philadelphia," and a lot of Christians couldn't bring themselves to hate Tom Hanks. Major culture shift towards tolerance and acceptance.
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Penniless Pilgrim: I think your political beliefs are culture-destroying and freedom-destroying, but you, at least, can see the intolerance and bigotry of the regressive left. Gun control is a foolhardy attempt to treat a symptom.
Health care is a service, like any other. The problems we have in our system, today, are primarily BECAUSE of government interference. Who decides what's best for me? Me? Or some bureaucrat? You think a bureaucrat can do a better job of providing for you than YOU can. That's fucked-up.
That's where I part ways with guys like Jimmy Dore, whom I adore for seeing so much of the truth, but not to its core. The core truth is that government having too much power and say over our lives is the problem. Progressives - well-intentioned but only half-smart - thing all-powerful gov't is OK, if only it would do as THEY say.
But that can never happen. The minute something's in gov't hands, monied interests target the decision-makers, and what we THINK we're getting isn't what we're getting.
Who's destroying old-growth forest? The Forest Service! They build roads to the old growth without which the harvesting of those forests would not be economic.
Who's keeping us from converting from wood stoves to rocket mass heaters? The EPA!
I could go on and on with this.
PEOPLE take better care of themselves and their neighbors when they are NOT dependent on government for everything... when they DON'T look for government to step in and solve all their problems.
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War on Drugs. 1994 Crime Bill. Cops, DAs and courts really cracked down on, uh, crack. It became very intrusive and adversarial. People used to feel safe when cops were around. Now they feel like they're peeking in windows, tapping phones, and just trying to catch somebody having a good time.
Look back at the Prohibition days. We're IN Prohibition days, now, but we don't know it. Gangsters were COOL in the 1920s and 1930s. We're seeing the same thing, now. The more the establishment fights the war on drugs, the worse things get.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy theory to see the patterns repeating themselves. A REAL conspiracy theorist would say that Prohibition back in the day was a major, on-purpose plan to weaponize the FBI and grow law enforcement.
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There's all kinds of great female Republican or Libertarian candidates out there. We don't hear enough from such women in our society. But I get instant crushes on women who make sense in media. I thought Omarosa was amazing, because she went on The View and eviscerated them. But it was all I knew about her, because I never watch Reality T.V. Being ON Reality T.V. was why I didn't like Trump, because I couldn't help but see commercials, although I despised the unnecessary drama in all of reality t.v., so I can't bear more than about 30 seconds.
Star Parker's another smart woman who really impressed me with her American-Thought-Leaders interview. She's another who pops off the screen as somebody smart, with important experience and perspective. Stefanik is showing well in these hearings, but I don't know anything else about her. So I'm in that "crush" stage. Definitely worth looking into as an up-and-comer, though.
But what I'd like to see in the Republican Party is candidates like her by the bushel, they do their 2 or 4 or at worst 6 years, and then they go back to the real world. But that's not how Washington works.
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The auto industry was already failing us, with a million features nobody wanted or needed, and cars that are designed to wear out, quickly. They've put up barriers to fixing your own car. They've done everything to maximize waste of resources, pollution, and customer money. Even their "pollution reduction" regulations do nothing but make everything more expensive, and in the USA, buy a big gas guzzler instead of an efficient compact vehicle, because regulations let big vehicles guzzle, but place ridiculous miles--per-gallon restrictions on compact vehicles.
Maybe the big auto makers SHOULD go down. They're obviously hand-in-glove with insane, ivory-tower politicians. I'd love to buy a vehicle that would last a lifetime and get parts for, for a lifetime. I remember helping a buddy work on his 1956 Chevy Nomad (Station-wagon version of the Bel-Air). Big, thick catalogs of "new old stuff," where you could buy any part you wanted to restore that old '56.
These people do the same thing with technology. How about a phone that lasts more than 10 years? How about a refrigerator that you can actually fix, but never have to fix, because it's built to last?
The people pushing us to live "green" are the ones who are pushing all the excess production in the first place.
Same with software. Why can't you buy a program and be done with it? Why do you need "updates?" Truth is, you don't need updates. It's just a way for software sellers to keep milking your bank account forever, just for buying one program from them.
They interrupt your work flow with their updates and after the update, the software doesn't even work as well as it did, before. "You don't need those keystrokes to save time. Make new ones!" It's like taking a roofer's favorite hammer off his belt and handing him a child's toy. "You're welcome! See what's new!" I don't WANT to see what's new. I want the thing I bought to work the same way, tomorrow, that it works, today.
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A common (the most basic) technique for proving a mathematical proposition is to assume it doesn't hold and, reasoning from there, arrive at an absurdity. It's called "Reductio ad absurdum" (reduce to absurdity), and RAA proofs are the very first ones they teach aspiring math students.
This applies to real life, but in sort of a backwards way: You see something absurd, so you try to backtrack to the false premise that brought it to that point.
Everything Israel has done since its (re-)creation has been logical, or at least debatable. But when you arrive at an apartheid state and are running an open-air prison on your border, that's pretty absurd.
But you can't point to anything, really, that isn't logical. They got to this place by taking rational steps just to survive.
In my opinion, the creation of the state of Israel, by force, by foreign governments, is the faulty premise on which the history of the last 75 years is based.
That doesn't mean I know the best way forward. Yes, a Jewish ethno/religious state is absurd. But it exists. Many people live there. Many people were born there. What's the best path forward? I don't know, but I think we might have been on the right track with the Abraham Accords.
One thing I believe in my heart is that an endless supply of monetary and military support of the nation by the USA is a corrupter of both Israel and the USA. I think it's unhealthy for the USA to throw its weight around on behalf of Israel, and I think it's unhealthy for Israel to act as the USA's proxy in the region.
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As an honest so-called liberal, Jon Stewart is quick to point out the madness, but lives in denial of his own hand in creating the institutional framework that feeds the madness. Who'd've thought that making government responsible for everyone from cradle to grave would cause mental illness, dependency, and low IQ to proliferate? Everyone, except so-called liberals.
Liberal was a good thing when it meant treating people the same and getting the aristocracy off our backs. Liberal is a bad thing when it seeks to usher in a new age of rule by aristocrats. When you look at the highest offices in the land and the top levels of the bureaucracy, you see sons and daughters following daddy and mommy into the "family business," with an inside track to occupying the same or very similar high offices, JUST LIKE THE ORIGINAL ARISTOCRACIES DID, before liberals threw the bastards out and began the Great Experiment in Self-Government that put USA on top and kept it on top, until creeping forms of aristocracy crept in through bloated and powerful institutions created and perpetuated by liars calling themselves liberals.
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@litlnote-wu6yv I don't think Russia's goal is conquest. I think they've largely achieved their goal of grinding the Ukrainian Army to dust, depleting both men and armaments, and ending the open war on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. At the very least, they've exacted a heavy price for NATO and Ukraine puppets trashing security arrangements from 30 years ago. NATO solemnly agreed that NATO would not expand to the east, and let Russia have peaceful, neutral neighbors, without Western interference.
It's not Russia who's gone rogue. It's USA and NATO countries, whose domestic and international policies are suicidal.
Words didn't work. Russia resorted to force. Except for Ukrainian and Western propaganda, the whole rest of the world sees this for what it is. As NATO continues pressing, it's losing the last vestiges of high ground it has enjoyed since the 1940s. Look at the USA's national debt. Look at how the madmen in power are spending like there's no tomorrow (a self-fulfilling prophecy). They're driving 2/3 of the world away from the U.S. dollar. When and if BRICS wrests hegemony away from the USA, the bottom will fall out and the house of cards comes tumbling down.
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@arsailor2341 Mixing causes friction, for sure. It also elevates. New ideas from different world views. America has always been "cultural appropriators" in a very cool way. Germans, Italians, Polish, Kenyan, Nigerian, Libyan, Persian, Shoshone, ... It's not all pretty. But in a free society, where the rights of all are protected, good things sort of percolate to the top. All we think about is how mean Euros were to Indigenous, but the indigenous wronged each other, too. None of that stuff was good, but indigenous values permeate American society and cultural mores.
Foods, music, art, ... Saxons versus Britons. Danes versus Saxons. All bad stuff. But better ideas on both sides had a way of persisting. People who are afraid of mixing forget that we are one species, with more variation within races than there is between races. Generalities dissolve when he likes her and she likes him.
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Growing grain for foreign consumption isn't necessarily a smart idea for the USA. I'd rather see our farmers growing food and raising livestock for OUR consumption. That's not how it works, any more. Big corporate farming has taken over almost everywhere and they run soil-robbing mono-crop farms that create less and less nutritious foods. Agriculture is pretty messed up in the USA.
I despise subsidies of ANY kind. If it's not sustainable, it shouldn't exist.
I think we're going to see a revolution in agriculture, with more and more small-plot farms growing vegetables for local kitchen tables. And not just these huge grain farms operating unsustainably with mined water, pesticides, and petrochemical fertilizers. And that's not even talking about genetically modified foods, where they build the pesticides INTO the food, and then we eat it! LOL! We're growing food that even the INSECTS are too smart to eat. Actually, some of the modifications used merely sterilize the pests that eat it, and so we get the effect of a pesticide, by preventing future generations that will eat more. No concern for the effect of those built-in pesticides on people who eat the stuff. And our own government happily labels these products as "organic," because they didn't use any spray! The spray is already inside the crop! AND WE EAT IT! And we wonder why our sons are growing tits, and our daughters want to play football.
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I wish they would revisit defamation. I hate 2-tiered justice of any kind. Public figures should receive no extra benefit or extra punishment. Defamation is defamation, and the bar needs to be the same height for public figures as it is for "commoners."
To me, the way they went after Trump had a silver lining, because it lowered the bar to prosecution of presidents for crimes they commit. We've always swept their crimes under the carpet and never go after sitting presidents or former presidents.
For the law to mean anything, it must be applied equally to presidents and plumbers. The law means nothing if our leaders sit above it. No special laws or exceptions for anyone in government or corporations. The corporation shouldn't pay the fine. The executives in that corporation should pay the fine. The cop that gets sued shouldn't have the taxpayers paying off the law suit. The cop should be held directly accountable.
If I were president and I believed that I would have to break the law to save the country, I would break the law AND I would face the music for my decision. I wouldn't hide behind presidential immunity. That's what a principled man would do in that position. "Yes, I broke the law. Here's why." And I would face a jury of my peers, the same as any other schmuck.
If that means the president's hands would be tied and he wouldn't be able to do things like prosecute undeclared wars under War Powers Act for 90 days, then so be it. Our system isn't supposed to run like a well-oiled machine. It's supposed to be hard for ANYone in government to exercise extraordinary powers. This would make it harder for government to change anything, and that's the way it's supposed to be. There's supposed to be friction in government's gears, and strict limits on what it can do.
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I'm ashamed to admit it, but this sounds like she's meeting her men in clubs, and they act like I acted when I was into the club scene. Even if they're - maybe especially if they're - up-and-coming young men, working their way toward something, she's just the broad they hooked up with along the way, and not the best they can do. If they're her age, and all they've got goin' for 'em is they're hot, I doubt they're ready to settle down into a real family situation. The losers just aren't ready, and the winners don't want to take the time. The (eventual) winners are still working on themselves, and squeezing every ounce of fun out of their free time. She's way advanced for her age group in a lot of ways. She just needs to find the right guy a few years older than her. Not much, necessarily, but I don't think most guys her age are at her level.
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This is why federal regulations aren't suited to purpose. This has been true since the 19th Century. Nobody remembers when they created the Interstate Commerce Commission to - they said - take on the robber barons in the railroad industry. What happened was the ICC was instantly capture by the biggest, richest, most corrupt robber barons, and PROTECTED them! That's how it always works. The government isn't your friend, progressives! Quit looking to government to solve your problems for you. Even if YOU win, you're going to subject millions in the future to being CRUSHED by the political machine!
The best, albeit imperfect solution is free markets and constant vigilance. Companies that fuck up should go broke and they WILL, because word gets out, unless the government's censoring it and quashing stories. This is why we need independent media and this is why I'm PISSED that the "stimulus" package includes huge payments to failing media companies that need to DIE, already! Meanwhile, independents like Jimmy Dore, who are built to THRIVE as independents will once again be pushed aside by government force and coercion, which is why NONE of y'all "progressives" should be progressives! Idiots! You want a truly liberal society, vote for SMALLER government!
Companies that do things right will prosper. The government either today or next week will put all its resources into protecting the big-money people. Always. Don't trust them. Don't ask them to solve your problems for you! The Chinese get this. With liberal/progressive big government running everything, all the Chinese need to do is spend a few million bribing people in high places. Don't give those bastards such high places!
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This is so true (and proud to be 420th!). I've been tracking the 'intelligence community" blunders, distortions and outright lies for decades. When they asked Trump who he believed, his own intel community or Putin on Russiagate, he said "Putin," and I cheered! Then he broke my heart and walked it back, because of media outrage. I bet Putin gave it to him straighter than his own people.
The "intelligence community" got all the stuff on the ground wrong, and overestimated the Soviet military threat by a factor of 5 or 10. And they ignored the actual threat, which was spying and subversion.
There's ONE thing the CIA is good at: Covering up its incompetence, and driving the military-industrial complex. And lots of subversion and war-mongering, abroad. I don't care how bad a sovereign nation is. "Supporting freedom fighters" is not legal, under OUR law or under INTERNATIONAL law. They learned NOTHING from the Shah Reza Pahlavi's overthrow, after we installed him as a puppet. Now, Islam is our biggest threat, and it's really just BLOWBACK from these assholes thinking they can play the world like their own private game of chess. And they get it WRONG.
Now, the Russians. THERE'S your chess players. And they're more like Karpov than Bobby Fischer. Defense, first. Aggression, later. Subvert whenever possible (cigar smoke in the eyes).
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There's also a rift between civil libertarians and the neocons on the Republican side, and evangelical Christians are currently siding with the neocons.
If it were any other nation, U.$. would slap sanctions on Israel so fast it'd make your head spin.
U.$. is Israel's bank roll and enabler, and Israel is U.$.'s proxy. Each caters to the other, government-to-government, to the detriment of good people in both nations and neighboring countries.
I don't think it was right what was done in 1948. That was 75 years ago, and righting that wrong could very easily descend into a repetition of that wrong in the opposite direction if Israel's destruction is chosen as the solution. Israel is clinging to two contradictory paradigms: Love of the idea of Jewish ethno-state, a homeland; and, commitment to humanist principles of inalienable rights, equal treatment under law, and self-determination.
I think Israel feels under siege at all times and rightly believes the threat is extreme and therefore justifies extreme action. "Extremism in the defense of freedom is no vice." - Barry Goldwater
I can easily see Hamas as $panish Guerrilleros in 1812, or Polish partisans in 1943. Atrocious behavior by savages. $avages created by conditions and circumstances. That 17-year-old torturer saw his mother and sisters abused and his father murdered when he was 15. Now he's man-grown and it's payback time.
"Asymmetric warfare" is what Dave Chapelle called it. They are caricatured in the West, but (suicide) bombers are heroes striking back against tyrants at impossible odds. Our "terrorist" is their cult figure, and someone for young boys to look up to.
I'm not a big fan of the Arab/Muslim side, but I know some of their history and why they are as they are. It's not all pretty and it's not all their fault. It would take a lot of work, but we have the tech to turn much of that region into a garden. They did it, before the Mongols came. They can do it, again. But not with foreign powers destroying everything every few years.
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Yes. 99% of the erosion in the American Southwest desert is ALSO from rain (water erosion), despite its usually arid conditions. This guy says that the Sphinx must be over 10,000 years old because there hasn't been rain in Egypt for thousands of years. That's bullshit. It rains there. In fact, it SNOWED there very recently. It was a freak snow, but it did snow.
When it doesn't rain very often, and there's no vegetation mantling that limestone, the rate of erosion from a single rain event is very very high. Ask anybody who's been caught in a gully during a cloudburst in Arizona (a very stupid place to be, btw). This guy's really smart, but he either mis-spoke or he's talking half out of his ass. Yes, a sandstorm can quickly erode your face, if you're out in it, but even in desert, it's WATER that does most of the work eroding outcrops. It's why limestone is a cliff-former in deserts. Cap it with some nice sandstone (that erodes, but isn't generally water-soluble), and it'll give you wondrous structures like the Grand Canyon.
This doesn't disprove his hypothesis that archaeologists don't have their shit together. Just listen to them arguing with each other about calculated dates in the Bible, or putting dates on a Clovis point (flint arrowheads/spearpoints) in North America. The one thing he DOES get right is the paucity of evidence and the surplus of opinion on these matters. It turns out that a lot of the dates archaeology establishment has accepted for decades (that supposedly disprove the Bible) were wrong, and calculations from solid scholars and unbiased archaeologists are starting to align quite nicely with Biblical writings.
I think the Bible and other ancient (sacred) texts DO chronicle some major catastrophes that actually took place. Velikovsky (if he were alive) would tell you that the planets in our solar system have done a bit of wandering in (poorly) recorded (by Bronze-Age primitives) history, especially in the histories that were handed down orally over the generations BEFORE the written word. He claims that Venus and Mars both had near misses with Earth after themselves being knocked out of orbit by meteor strikes, and that mythology records these events. No wonder Mars and Venus are part of Greek/Roman pantheon. I don't believe everything he said, but his alternate history of Earth squares very nicely with the Bible and other ancient texts, and archaeologists are starting to crank out results that are more in line with Biblical claims than they were 30 or 40 years ago.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you the world is 4,000 years old, because it says so in the Bible. That's easily disproved by the mile-deep sediments in the Grand Canyon, which were deposited slowly, over millions of years, under processes we understand very well, occurring in real-time as we speak. You don't get perfectly graded (grains of same size) 1-inch-high foreset beds and tiny ripple marks from rock that was laid down in one cataclysm. If it were all laid down at once, the sediments would be un-graded, which is to say that big chunks and little chunks would be buried simultaneously, and you'd get flood structures which are in evidence all over the world, in spots, but no way in hell did they form miles of perfectly graded and uniformly bedded sandstones that cover 100s or even 1000s of square miles.
Also, either one of those two guys in the video could break me in half by accident.
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I think Russia's still operating in the black, as a government, and in trade. If Putin can simultaneously keep a lid on inflation at home AND experience devalued ruble abroad, there's no stopping him.
For the first 150 of the USA, we borrowed in war, and re-paid in peace. The finance-based US economy is about to drown in worthless paper, with its once-enormous, resource-and-manufacturing base in tatters. Its fundamental world view is rooted in fallacy and delusion, a world view based on 50-year-old assumptions that no longer apply.
It would be easy to right the ship and change course to a sustainable future, but to the politicians, "sustainability" is a battery-powered pipe dream, whose reality would cause far more bad than good, just like the nanny state, just like the COVID response. They're deluded. Some of them must also be quite mad. Certainly many of them are senile.
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Good-hearted kid, but in the name of doing good, his mind works along authoritarian lines. Point to all the bad things you could prevent, and build the machinery to target and take down the inconvenient voices.
We could also catch a lot of bad guys if the phone company eavesdropped on everybody. Who decides who's a danger or what's a danger? We can point to atrocious criminal acts as a reason to implement controls, but we need to take a long view and see how those controls can be abused. We've already seen inconvenient voices silenced, who were RIGHT. It's actually become a pattern.
Personally, I think that they should write into their TOS in big letters that a moderator might be eavesdropping on anything and everything. If there's an expectation or guarantee of privacy, then they have no right to break into private channels/rooms/whatever.
That said, once a moderator witnesses a crime, it should IMMEDIATELY be a police matter. That should not be handed off to someone else to decide if it's actionable. At that point, there's a citizen bearing witness to a crime, and it must be reported to vested authorities. Just period.
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@jenniferorr5170 : Junior-Senior class trip was to NYC. Went to a ball game. The one girl who looked 25 or 30 bought us all beers. She was kind of a frumpy girl, who FAIK wore her grandma's hand-me-downs and became quite popular after that trip. I raced as high in the statue of Liberty as they'd let you go. I was small, light, and used to covering long distances afoot. I seem to recall you couldn't go past the head at the time, but there was a set of stairs that went clear up the arm to the torch that we couldn't access. Memories fade, though.
Anyway, I saw enough and smelled enough on the bus ride in that I would never want to live in such a place, even though they had world-class-anything-you-want-if-you-can-pay-for-it. I grew up in a town of about 300, surrounded by a lot of open countryside. The weight of tall buildings and all the people is pretty oppressive. It doesn't bother me, per sé. It's only something you notice when you're out in the quiet and can actually see the sky at night, and it feels good, that you realize how the city ain't BAD, but it lacks a lot of GOOD.
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Russian emigres to America, during the Soviet era, got decision paralysis in grocery stores. Under socialism, they all stood in line for hours for a loaf of government bread. In America, there were no lines, and the shelves were FULL of 20 or more choices. They didn't know what to do, how to handle it. It was very upsetting for them.
ALL of these girls in hookup culture are like Pinocchio on Jack-Ass Island. Everything they ever wanted is right there in front of them. They don't know what's happening to them until they start growing tails and hee-hawing when they try to speak. It's gotta be hard for them, because they're so social, and just do whatever they think the other girls are doing, so they can fit in and be accepted. Meanwhile, all the GOOD men, as they have since time immemorial, go their own way. I don't see any way out of this for women. They lost the thread, and now they're brought up in a culture that's deluding itself.
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Liberals in the '80s were staunchly against war, but also staunchly in favor of nanny government. To this day, those same liberals love nanny government, even after seeing it in action through the medical establishment's handling of COVID-19. Those guys don't work for patients. They work for the government. You should be terrified with every encroachment of the federal government over the practice of medicine.
With the peer-to-peer communications now available, free market is the best way to weed out the bad doctors from the good. Best service for best price will only happen in a free market. We don't KNOW what a true free market in medicine would look like, because the biggest customer, for generations, has been the federal government. It decides what will be paid for whatever service, what services will be offered, and how those services are to be rendered. Not doctors and patients, where every patient knows their doctor's complete track record.
When you want to defend against bad actors, you don't want one big agency whose top officials are few in number, to make decisions for everybody. You get one Fauci and you're screwed. But it's not just the one guy. It's everyone in the organization being tempted by enormous royalties and future jobs in pharma, if they just go along with what the company wants. So they do. They're rich for life, and everyone pays more for less.
Regulatory capture is a thing. Who will watch the watchers? Add a layer of watchers, and you merely double the million-dollar investment to buy off the layers that came before. It's still cheap, when that bureaucracy can move billions of dollars one way or the other with their executive decisions.
There will always be charlatans, and fools who fall for them. But we don't have to have everyone under the same umbrella, so that one charlatan can do massive harm to the entire nation.
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Whether he is or not, the act will suffice in getting him out of jail as mentally incompetent. While I do think he's senile, I don't think it matters one bit. He was never running the show to begin with. He's been a liar and a faker his entire career, and is LIVING PROOF of how corrupt our system is.
Dwelling on his incompetence misses the point that he was INSTALLED to do the Democrats' dirty work. They can disavow him, now that he's done all their hatchet work for them, and he gets off scot free because he's senile.
It's a brilliant strategy by the Dems, who will almost certainly field a fresh, new candidate in the next few months, who will be "Not Joe" and definitely "Not Trump," and they hope and expect to sweep to the White House on another fake "Hope and Change" candidate, like Obummer was.
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Trade and security deals in force for decades were based on conditions immediately after WW II, and that includes (re)creation of Israel. If there's ANY country needing to defend itself against Russian military aggression, it's Turkey, NOT the E.U. (Former) Eastern Bloc was as much about Soviets wanting buffers against crazy Europeans. Soviets were very successful in nudging (and they didn't have to nudge hard, or even do much propaganda) in infantilizing socialist-leaning "liberal" democracies in Europe, to the point where we saw Trump treat EU like the children THEY are and deal with Putin as an equal.
Europe could STILL go totally regressive and start military build-ups, but they're many years away from another Hitler being able to do Hitler-scale damage. But the Russians STILL want and will ALWAYS want free, unfettered access to the Mediterranean. Turkey sitting astride the Dardanelles is a real thorn in Russia's side. At least PART of the return to "traditional, Russian-Orthodox" values in Russia is aimed at historic Papist naming of Russia as "defenders of the church" in what is now Turkey. Wouldn't be a bit surprised to see Russians use Muslim attacks on Christians in the region as a pretext to take over the entire region to "defend the faith." To this day, the Russians still yearn for warm-water ports, and the USA has sought to thwart them at every turn in the Mediterranean. Neocons/neolibs in the USA went after Libya at least in part due to this, and they really want to mess with Syria for the same reasons.
I'm not sure how I feel about this, because I'm pretty sure I'd be pissed off if the Russians tried to mess with USA in the Western Hemisphere, and I'm not sure there's really that much difference between that and the USA messing with THEM in THEIR back yard.
The only REAL answer is for countries EVERYwhere to start respecting the rights of their PEOPLE, which would make "which flag flies where" pretty irrelevant.
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@cameronherrick6639 : Bernie's the worst, because all he thinks about is redistributing wealth, without understanding how all that wealth is created. He's a typical progressive, promising hard-working people's money to other people. Eventually you run out of other people's money, because you disincentivize prudent and responsible behavior. Why work hard if some socialist is just gonna take it and give it to somebody else?
Students are all pro-socialism, until it comes to giving THEIR grades to somebody who got BAD grades. They of course don't see that the same applies to ANYthing of real value that you earn.
The key to a healthy society is successful AVERAGE people, who give to others, voluntarily. If only progressives would put THEIR money where their mouths are and quit telling me what to do with mine. I give to charity all the time. The local food bank. People I meet who need help. If you progressives did the same thing instead of trying to do everything by force, we wouldn't have near the problems we have, today. But it's always gotta be the authorities doing it by force, for you people. And the "authorities" ALWAYS screw it up, and waste it, through mismanagement and corruption, because they get paid more the more they fuck things up!
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So it's OK to be authoritarian if you're on the side of the angels. What, then, distinguishes us from the authoritarian left? You're wrong on this, Knowles. You want to win, today, which will only ensure that we all lose, tomorrow. There's already a massive shift in public sentiment that could never have been achieved by resorting to the same abuse of power to which the other side resorts.
This is why I consider myself an original-intent Constitutionalist or just generally a classical liberal or libertarian. Conservatives have this sense of rightness that deteriorates into dogma that is easily dismissed by lefties. "God said..." is not an argument. Also, Knowles was obviously bloviating when he touched on the "indecency" parts. He didn't actually present a cogent argument for censorship of obscenity. Maybe HIS idea of obscenity is MY idea of keepin' it real. If there's a majority of Michael Knowles's in power, then maybe they decide my questioning of claims made in The Good Book is "obscene," or profane, or they'll decide that heretical remarks are obscene.
The thing about Christianity, itself, is it needs to evolve with the times, while remaining in keeping with core principles. I really like having the "Jesus Archetype" embedded in my world view. I think it's highly beneficial to an imperfect person inhabiting an imperfect world, to have that idea firmly in mind. When you're about to bite the head off of somebody, a quick "What would Jesus do?" is even better than counting to 10. I'm not sure it would have the same beneficial effect on my character, if it weren't hammered into me with a "Believe or die!" hook. It's quite a motivator and a bulwark against human tendencies to despair and devolve into hedonism/nihilism when faced with the fact of their mortality.
This descent that is all too common amongst non-believers is why Religion has always been - and probably always will be - a prominent feature of surviving cultures. Why? Because without it, civilizations start to crumble. Tribes go extinct. The reason there's religion everywhere you look is because the tribes that lost it perished! They were RIGHT and they just kind of died out, petered out, or got outbred! You can talk all day about how backward, ignorant and regressive Christian/Muslim faithful are, but they're having big families and everybody else isn't even reproducing at replacement levels!
Anyway, I think things are a lot more nuanced than Knowles is capable of conceiving or is willing to concede, because he's got a nice, tidy world view, and he can blather over the rough bits, like "Who decides what's obscene? The most vocal Muslim on the block?"
The only kind of censorship I agree with is keeping things G-rated if the kiddies are around. But is that the job of the people creating and posting the content or the job of parents to filter out everything except those things of which the parent approve?
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Every once in awhile, because technology and prosperity allow us to forget what matters or what used to matter, women can lead one another astray. The so-called "patriarchy" is the set of rules that women insisted their men abide by. Yes, it somewhat infantilizes women, but at the root of it is the women figuring out what's best for them and for their babies, and basically convincing the men to strive and do dangerous things on women's behalf.
This is called civilization. We men think we are the strong and clever ones, but the women bred us this way, and all our strength and cleverness has a purpose: the wishes of the women, who forgot, recently, that their "suffering" over the millennia was just their hyper-clever way of calling the shots and making us men do all the shit jobs.
They hate being objectified, they say, but men will literally lay down their lives for the women they love, and the children the women created. Those children will bond to their mothers as to no other, and therein lies the comfort and security of a woman's retirement. The husband? Meh. As long as he lives long enough to give the kids a good start, the mother's set for life.
All that "They kissed and lived happily ever after" stuff isn't for the women. It's for us men. That "love forever" is to trick us boys into growing into men who will stay put and apply themselves long enough for the woman's brood to come of age. Women's beauty is the trap that makes us boys settle down and act like men.
Modern society affords boys the pleasures that used to be denied to them until they learned how to put food on the table and a roof over a family's head. Boys didn't get many chances of intimate relations with girls until they became independent bachelors, or at least had the means to actually raise a family, and convinced everyone - especially her parents - that the relationship was for the purpose of marriage and children.
In the past, we basically forced girls to comply with that standard, without giving them (m)any options. They chafed at that, understandably. But that doesn't change the natural fact of a woman's fertility. They should have options, but probably the best option is to find the best man possible, have babies early with that man, and then, by their mid-30s, when "independent" women hear their biological alarm clock ringing, their youngest kid is a pre-teen, and the older kids can kind of do for themselves.
That's when Mom can go to school, knowing she already has her retirement plan: her kids! Just having the younger generation around that loves you, in particular, is magnificent for older women AND men. Men don't really feel its absence until their 60s or 70s, by which time, they've been through enough that the pain isn't all that great. But I think women feel it more.
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@Debra_Hasatheory If I got a cold, I might get tested. That's how the coof presents, initially, and I'd want to get treated, right away. Of course, my odds of getting proper treatment, right away, in the USA are slim to none, since all the off-the-shelf medicines that WORK are problematic for doctors to prescribe, and having been prescribed, are problematic to obtain. The health care establishment has gone off the rails, and it's 99% due to government intervention.
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The fact that Mike Johnson was elected by Republicans as Speaker of the House proves that Republicans, as currently constituted, are not any kind of solution to the malaise of big government run amok.
Isn't Dan Pompeo still in Trump's orbit? Black-pill potential, right there.
------
We have a right to transparency on:
JFK, 9/11, 1/6, COVID-19, royalties paid to federal officials by private companies, ...
When we're denied these things, we have no option but to conclude that the government is full of crooks. No transparency? No trust.
-----
Big fan of writing to learn. That's why I'm so annoying in the comments. Well, that, and the fact that I can write about as fast as most people can talk.
Getting the words out in the first place is key to seeing if they hold up, first to me, and then to others, and there are always lots of good critics (and trolls!) in the comments. Let it all hang out, have a thick skin, and always be ready to change your mind, and especially be open to new fact sources.
YouTube tries to keep a lid on our sharing info links. But every once in awhile, a name or a channel slip through.
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The latest (and last) Mac I bought has never been updated. Never had problems, other than that it asks me to update every single fuckin' day. It's worked better, with fewer issues than the previous one that I dutifully updated.
About 4 or 5 years ago, I noticed that software "updates" usually meant the software worked less well, deprived me of more and more keyboard shortcuts, and generally made me less efficient at work. They're building this stuff, now, for people who use smartphones, not for professionals who use computers. Adobe is the absolute worst in this regard. Acrobat Pro was a real mainstay for me, until the mandatory upgrade to Pro DC, which is almost useless.
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We need things to survive. You're not killing anyone, directly, by stealing or destroying their property, but you could be pushing them over the edge, so that they or somebody close to them dies, or has a crappy life, because you're stealing their life energy when you steal their things.
I'd say I despise these people, but I sort of feel sorry for them. But then when I start feeling sorry for them, I always end up feeling much more sorry for the people they're hurting. "It's just property." I wish the interviewer took every stitch of their clothing from them, and when they protested, just tell them "It's only property, and since you don't respect the property of others, then why should I respect yours?"
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First of all, a man with up-to-date mechanic skills can just about write his own ticket, or hang his own shingle, and do very well on his own.
Second of all, sometimes you don't even realize what the opportunities around you are, unless there's a shakeup or you get 'fired' or informed that next year's contract won't be yours. I took a full-time temp job for $30,000/yr back in 2000, up in Gunnison, CO. It was chicken-feed for the amount of training I had, not that I was the most perfect man in my field, to begin with. But it's a resort area, so there was a LOT of cheap, 2nd-hand outdoor gear and outdoor clothing.
There was fishing, hunting, skiing and water sports. A real outdoor Mecca. And to enjoy that country, it would've cost thousands of dollars to travel there on vacations. Plus I was coming off years as a 'professional student,' rarely making over $20,000/yr, but I learned how to live pretty good on next to nothing. So $30,000 was like being rich, except for the fact that $500/month to wipe out my student loans ASAP meant I was no closer to saving up for my own place, unless you count debt amortization as progress. I worked that gig for 6 years, and early in my 7th, found out my contract wasn't going to be renewed. I think I was only making about $33,000/yr by that last year.
So I had to get out of my comfort zone and cast a net for a new gig. If I hadn't been "discontinued," I'd've stayed in that dead-end job, with just enough money to continue my budget outdoor experience. Long story short, I landed a permanent position, with an actual path to promotion. Instant pay raise to $40,000, with nice raises every year, to now more than double that amount. It was in a less outdoorsy place on the Front Range (Just East of the Rockies) in Greeley, which is not exactly a destination village, like Gunnison was, but I liked the people, the new place really valued me, and within 5 years, I had enough scraped together to buy that house I always dreamed about, and I've been doing quite well for myself, ever since (by my standards, at least).
Anyway, I wouldn't've changed gigs without being forced to it. It's a pain in the neck looking for work, and it's so EASY to just get in a rut. I didn't have time or energy to even LOOK at the opportunities available. But you MAKE time and you FIND the energy, when you HAVE to. Usually, these "forced break-ups" lead to something better, especially nowadays, where there's a real shortage of men in the trades, including mechanics.
I think outfits such as the one you left are getting more and more desperate to make ends meet, in particular car dealerships. Heck, I'm hearing rumblings that Ford is thinking about discontinuing their dealership business model, entirely. That's too bad. I used to work at a Ford dealership in the shop as janitor/grease monkey to pay for school. It was a filthy job, but it paid the bills, and I really liked the guys working in the shop.
It wasn't a mechanic's job, but I LOVED having shop privileges, and a couple mechanics showed me where they kept the keys for their tool chests, after my cleaning job turned up MANY a lost tool, because I set a new standard of "clean," including the filthy, greasy spaces under the work benches. That hard work gained the mechanics' trust and respect. Coming to work to a spotless stall was something they really appreciated, and they hadn't gotten that from anybody before me.
I learned enough about the business to realize that out of the $30-$50/hr (1980s. Memory fails.) flat-rate hour they charged, the mechanics were getting about $17/(flat-rate)hour in some cases. That was plenty to live on and buy a house, in the 1980s, when you could still buy a fixer-upper for $20,000-$30,000 and have your own place. But the dealership kept more than half of what they charged customers for labor. Good mechanics could beat the projected labor times for repairs, and make much more than $17/hr under that flat-rate setup. Of course if they weren't very good, they made less. But good mechanics could come in under the projected times, like clockwork.
Here's to your landing on your feet!
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I have mixed feelings about the cruise industry, personally. Long before COVID, I always thought of it as a spreader of contagion. But what ever happened to a person having enough self-agency to decide for themSELVES what risks they are willing to take? Life is NEVER perfect. Life is nothing but trade-offs. You get something. You give something.
During the AIDs crisis, everybody KNEW that San Francisco bath houses were super-spreader loci. But did we shut them down? No. It might hurt somebody's fee-fees. Didn't matter that AIDs was universally believed to be invariably fatal.
Now we're quarantining entire nations for a virus that has over 99% survival rate amongst all but those with serious health problems. Traditional epidemiology says you quarantine the SICK, NOT the healthy. (And you damn sure don't send the sick to nursing homes where our MOST vulnerable citizens reside, Mr. Cuomo.). Proper risk:benefit analysis was never performed. The 'nice' thing about it is you just latch on to whichever narrative appeals to you the most. There are many from which to choose, and more being manufactured every day from the people we're expected to - no, REQUIRED to - trust and obey.
Personally, I think Big Pharma and their minions in the public health mafia were in a panic because they knew COVID was probably due to THEIR gain-of-function research, and the mental and rhetorical gymnastics they performed to circumvent a moratorium on such research. They even violated their own protocols for containment, farming out the research to an inadequately-equipped and managed Chinese Level-3 facility what was only to be performed in a Level-4 facility according to CDC's/NIH's/NIAID's own guidelines.
Part of the "trick" was to change the very definition of the term "gain-of-function," even though it is very clear what gain-of-function is and what it means.
But Fauci's incompetence/criminality is beside the point. The point is that anybody following the blow-by-blow events is now in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance. Don't like what they said yesterday? That's OK. They'll change their minds tomorrow, or just agree amongst themselves to re-define the meaning of words, themselves, so "is" no longer means "is," any more, for example. (Hat-tip to Bill Clinton. Thanks, buddy!)
They don't care if you die of cancer, so long as you can't blame THEM for killing you with COVID. They don't care if you commit suicide or 'just' become despondent, out of shape, and socially deprived from the lock-downs and the loss of your livelihood. They don't care if you starve or end up in the streets. And if you're a landlord, they don't care if you lose everything, just so long as nobody thinks it's THEIR fault that you died of COVID.
You want to know a good way to create a super-bug? Vaccinate a population in the midst of a pandemic. 330 million simultaneous opportunities for spontaneous mutations that are drug-resistant in the USA alone, if they can just get us ALL vaccinated! But they'll settle for 200 million, if they must. In Nature, with the assistance of well-known off-the-shelf treatments, we'd've been at herd immunity months ago. Thousands of clinicians have successfully treated COVID without major long-lasting side-effects. But for some reason, you're not allowed to hear about that, if you're relying on MSM or Big Tech, although the word still trickled out, which is why they're pushing for the same level of censorship in social media that they've had on radio and t.v. since the 1930s.
The lock-down on info on MSM was kept more or less secret, since the Communications Act of 1934. FDR's extra-marital affairs (Who can blame him? Did you get a look at Eleanor?) were an open secret amongst Washington reporters. Not one report made its way into the public square. Same with Kennedy. Those are only two that we NOW know about. Open censorship during WW II was "OK" because "It's an emergency!" That government-friendly censorship never went away. It just went underground. We didn't even KNOW the news was being censored, because all it took was a handful of phone calls to a handful of corporate-media bigwigs, and stories just didn't get told. That system remained in place until the Internet came along. The manufacture of consent by a small number of ruling-class elites is a real thing and widely understood, but at the same time, millions take MSM at face value (more cognitive dissonance).
Now they've got the old playbook open to the same old "It's an emergency!" chapter, and they're going to install the same under-the-radar censorship on the Internet, too, IF THEY CAN. There's more pushback than there was in 1934, when the culture was highly conservative and didn't really even think about how it was a violation of the 1st Amendment. It's a lot harder to keep it under wraps when there's more than just CBS and NBC to deal with (ABC came a bit later, iirc, but it fell right into line, because it knew what was good for it).
Even before FDR tried packing the Supreme Court, everyone was so FREAKED that somebody might hear a bad word or something their preacher didn't like that nobody - including SCOTUS - kicked up much/any fuss. The Communications Decency Act of 1995 (Home of Section 230) was likewise an infringement by the federal government on the 1st Amendment. But that's OK. It's for the children. Or it's so we can have social media. Nonsense! It's all about power and once again setting the political, corporate and donor class above the people. Zuckerberg now decides. Bezos now decides. And if the Biden Admin doesn't like their decision, a couple phone calls is all it takes. That's how it's "supposed" to work.
Don't want your kids to see porn or hear cuss words? Then do your job as a parent! Don't ask the government to step in! Every Linux box has a hosts.allow and a hosts.deny. if you love your kid, set deny to "all" and then only allow those DNSs you approve. Of course, you don't have to be a system programmer to do it. I'm surely not. It wouldn't take much of an app to perform that function. (I can't even remember the proper syntax. I just remember the feature from the early '90s when we were bringing the Internet to rural Idaho.) You can set a browser to shut down everything and allow your kids to only visit sites you approve. If your kid is sophisticated enough to hack that, then they're far enough along cognitively not to need your overprotectiveness.
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@blantyre60 They're definitely biased. So is everybody else. You have to read between the lines for the full story.
To my eye, the Ukrainians are seeking territory by any means necessary. They're not trying to prove they're winning. Just create the appearance of gains so it's politically popular for Western leaders to escalate, which they REALLY want to do, but are finding public support evaporating, in spite of all their minion media outlets speaking with one pro-war voice. The problem is that corporate news is just not listened to or respected by a growing majority of the American people.
But to some extent, it doesn't matter what the people think, if the media and the government are in agreement, they can give enough of an impression there's broad support to do whatever they please. It lends them an apparent level of credibility that they don't actually have.
What HT is leaving out is reports from opposite-bias media of tank losses on the Russian side. Hard to say which side is exaggerating more.
But to my uneducated eye, I see Ukrainians advancing rapidly through unfortified areas, driving Russian forces before them, but paying a heavy price in men and material to do so. Something else I see are minor skirmishes being reported globally as monumental events. But in the main, I see Russians using overwhelming firepower to take and hold strategic points, while utilizing "fighting retreats" everywhere else. They just try to slow down the Ukrainian probes long enough to call in the artillery. Ukrainians appear to be suffering between 3-to-1 and 7-to-1 losses to the Russians.
As an American, I see Ukraine as yet ANOTHER undeclared war being prosecuted without the permission or support of the American people. We haven't declared war since WW II, but the killing never stopped, and we Americans are sick of it. We don't NEED to behave like this, and our Constitution specifically FORBIDS it. But our government doesn't let minor things like laws get in its way.
USA has plenty of resources and plenty of good people. We don't need to TAKE anything from ANYone, nor should we bully the rest of the planet on behalf of other nations. If they want to join the USA, then we'll defend them like our own. But the way our government acts, why would a sovereign nation want to join our union?
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Here's the thing about "leftism" and "liberalism," to me:
The left believes in redistribution at its core. And this puts the left on an illiberal philosophical path, because the only way to redistribute is to water down what individual rights ARE.
We forget, every time that government does ANYthing FOR us, that we're opening ourselves up to JUST the kind of illiberal liberalism that you guys so clearly see, but which Brendan (and every liberal I know) fails to see is the LOGICAL consequence of their belief that government is good for anything but defending our soil and defending our BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS, which do NOT include a full belly or roof over our heads or medical care out of somebody else's pocket.
And I don't wanna get too mystical on y'all, but there's a yin and yang thing going on, here, where the more successful the left is in making everyone economically secure, the more resentment builds up on the part of those putting in more than they get out. And it's dangerous to just lump everybody (all those Atlases shrugging out there) as right-wing idiots, but the (so-called) left INVITES Hitler to rule, by ginning-up the (so-called) right to DO something about all the parasites living off their hard work (in their view).
Government is like Sauron's Ring of Power. Oh, the GOOD you can do by use of compulsion, but it destroys both compeller and compelled, in the long run, every... bleedin'... time.
I could go on (obviously) just drivelizing, but if you want a compassionate society, YOU be compassionate. Redistribution by force DESTROYS liberal values on the street. "That's what we pay taxes for. It's our gov't's fault that guy's livin' in a cardboard box."
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That's because people on the left think government should be our parent, but that they can still be free. You're one of those. Jimmy's one of those. It doesn't work that way. You give the government responsibility for your well-being, you automatically give it authority over everything you say or do.
You're slow. Jimmy's slow. But it's slowly sinking in. Oh, you can see the authoritarianism, but you refuse to see your hand in creating and nurturing it, by insisting the federal government take care of your health, education, and welfare, which is why Americans' health, education, and welfare has been in decline for decades, and why you and I have less control over our own lives than we did in the past.
A government that protects everyone from failing is a government that prevents anyone from winning.
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@animatedarchitecture Works beautifully in temperate latitudes. In the tropics, where the mean temperature is much higher, there isn't as much cooling effect, because the ground takes on the mean annual temperature. Hard to move the needle on a 100-degree day, when the ground temp is 70 (Fahrenheit). In the cooler temperate regions, a constant 50-degree heat sink helps in winter and summer.
Back in the day, our culture had a tradition of helping each other build our homes and barns. It was a community and social event, where you'd have help building yours and you'd help others build theirs, turnabout. In a modern setting, it could still work very well, but we're cut off from each other.
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Antonovsky Bridge: The bridgehead is celebrated like the Normandy landings of 1944. What was it? A crossing by 50 (or 70?) special forces?
Is it just me, or are the actions of the counteroffensive massively over-reported? Chasing away a squad or platoon of infantry on video from a field in the middle of nowhere doesn't mean the Russians are in disarray. It means the Ukrainians have a local, temporary firepower advantage that's probably not worth more than the propaganda value, and likely came at great cost compared to its concrete value, strategically.
I'm not discounting the hearts-and-minds aspect. But hearts and minds are not enough, when actual, concrete wherewithal of forces is utterly lacking.
If you really wanted to win a war of attrition against the Russians, the best strategy would be what the USA's done over and over since WWII: Fund an insurgency, keep the American people in the dark, or better yet, convince them the insurgents are Democrat-ic freedom fighters, bravely resisting tyranny. Throw some economic sanctions their way, to make the public angry at their increasingly desperate and tyrannical government, et voila! An "organic" rise of "democracy." All it takes is some illegal covert aid, a bit of spin,
It all has a limited shelf life. But as long as they can win TODAY, they don't care. If anything, the (un)intended consequences give even more reason for more extreme and more violent measures to "restore democracy" in the future.
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26:27 I would add that Manaforte's problems all pre-dated anything to do with Trump. If Manaforte's as close as they came to layin' a glove on Trump, then Trump never took a single punch in all these highly-publicized "scandals." I'm waiting for Zeducation to come out with a "That didn't age well" video on Obama's "One thing you can say about my administration is that there were no scandals, no indictments (by way of (smug) contrast with the Trump administration)."
LOL! Scandals galore! No major indictments, yet, but a widely-reported legacy of arrogance and corruption at the highest levels, despite a continuing "blackout" by all the legacy news outlets, except a handful of papers and FOX News. The online independents, like The Duran, EPOCH Times, and a myriad of 1-man operations, like Mark Dice, Tim Pool, Styxhexenhammer666, just to name three, are rapidly eclipsing have eclipsed the legacy media in reporting, commentary and viewership.
It's to the point, now, that when MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS are reporting the same stories (and giving the same commentary), virtually word-for-word, then people KNOW it's fake, and it means LESS than nothing that they're all in agreement. It means they're probably lying, or spinning the truth beyond all recognition.
Thanks, guys.
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This was the same during RussiaGate hoax. Government insider would leak a lie or something misleading, and all it took was one news outlet taking their word for it, and every anti-Trump network repeated the story. They even checked against each other (You know, finding independent sources?), but they never really checked, because there was really only one original report. It was based on lies. But as soon as ONE other news outlet picked up the lie, all the others had "2 independent sources," so no real checking ever took place. Same thing during COVID. Same thing, now.
I'm sick of these incompetent liars, who are ALWAYS on the wrong side of history, but in perfect alignment with the Donor Class.
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The WORST censorship has been going on, non-stop, since the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. He was that era's Obama-hope-and-change candidate, and he milked every crisis to garner more power to himself, even to the point of making himself president for life, and falling short of packing the Supreme Court and trashing the U.S. Constitution.
In service to "the war effort," back channels from the White House to all the major media outlets were forged, all in the name of "fighting fascism," because we could SEE how crazy Hitler's propaganda was, and how the German people, saturated and indoctrinated by it (and by the state-run education and health systems), were !
Americans at Nazi propaganda. It was so cheesie, so hackneyed, so , that we believed we would fall for something like that. So what did our government do? It created its version of quiet, behind-the-scenes censorship that violated the 1st Amendment, but - I mean - supported.
*Even the progressives/socialists were on board with the war effort, once Hitler attacked the USSR. Before that time, Hitler was seen as a "fellow traveler," because his government wasn't all that different from Stalin's, in form and function.
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Politicians did this to us.
EVs make a lot of sense for short trips in urban settings, but we'd have to mine more copper in the next 5 years than we've ever mined in all of human history, at great cost to the environment, assuming we could ramp up copper mining and refining to that extent in the first place, which we absolutely can not.
If the West ever got to net zero (which is a ridiculous and deadly pipe dream), all it would do is export manufacturing to Asia, where they don't CARE about emissions at all. China currently has 1,000 coal-fired plants under construction, and India's not far behind. They're also buying every liter of petrol products they can get their hands on, because they're not fools.
Everything we're doing to reduce emissions is just a fart in the wind, compared to the burgeoning emissions in Asia, which are not going to stop increasing, because we have no power to influence what they're doing.
The net effect of the "green agenda" is a massive transfer of wealth from the many to the few. The CEO with the private jet is just one of innumerable examples. Elon got HIS subsidized TESLA startup, and he's already cashed out to the tune of $40 billion or so. Even if TESLA goes bankrupt, he will still have made an enormous amount of money on the failed project.
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@marikroyals7111 So you're saying you wear men's clothes and hang out with LGBT crowd, but you're sick of being misjudged? I first noticed that with punkers, who'd pierce every inch of exposed skin (while exposing as much skin as possible), cut their hair in the inevitable mohawk, wear makeup that simulates a 6-day-old human corpse, tattoo their bodies with vulgar and outlandish images and text, then turn every conversation towards the subject of how people judge by appearances.
In your case, I don't think it's a cry for help. Just someone who's practical and chooses to be comfortable rather than compete for eye-candy prizes. You sound like maybe you've got mild Aspergers, which means you probably aren't a good judge of what's flattering for you. There're all kinds of ways a woman can be comfortable without coming across as total butch.
Heh. I'm a straight guy with a mild disability that made me very exacting about my own clothing, to accentuate the positive and diminish the negative. My OLDER sister noticed I always matched colors and was artful about how my clothes fit and looked on me. I gained the knack because while I was uncommon strong for someone so brittle, I still didn't look very prepossessing in short pants. Let's put it that way! LOL!
My sister, my older brother and my dad were all of a husky, heavy-boned body type. My sister would ask ME for an honest opinion on what was flattering and what made her look fat. She had a woman's shape, but she was literally big-boned. But she always moved gracefully. She wouldn't show it but she could whup all the girls in her grade and about half the boys, even after puberty.
Anyway, doesn't sound like you necessarily have my or my sister's problems, but I bet you're smart enough to make a study of it, if you wanted. That's an advantage of being a little OCD or Asberger's. You can get to about anything you want, because you have the ability to focus. Just gotta be deliberate and plan your attentions.
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Did it occur to you that regardless of what the government did, people were going to go try homesteading, and defend them. The natives could scourge a settlement, and the next time they were back in the neighborhood, there was a bigger, stronger settlement. They could wipe every one of them out, with small losses, but there was no end to it. We focus on the actions of government, because there's somebody to point at, but when they discovered gold in the Black Hills, it was all over. Government put a stamp on it, but there was no stoping prospectors.
The gold rush was underway, regardless of what the federal government did. There was tremendous pressure from interested parties on the federal government. It was very far away from where most people lived, and most of what they heard was part of a "bloodthirsty native" narrative. There were renegades on all sides violating treaties. It was very chaotic, and the reach of the state exceeded its grasp in those days. "We can't stop 'em, so we may as well tear up the treaty we can't enforce."
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@artonline01 Yup. These comments and this video aren't aging well. Lots of hopium, that's being exposed as such, since the referenda in Donbass and official annexation. Now, attacking Donbass - whatever NATO says - will be treated as an attack on Mother Russia. Total game-changer. And the recent bombings and missile strikes one strategic and infrastructure targets put the lie to all the hopium.
Western leaders behave as though it's 1947. But since 1947, the USA has started looking more fascist/socialist, every year, and since the fall of the USSR, Russian federation has been trending towards free markets and functional liberty. They're still authoritarian, but they're more democratic than they ever were under Soviet rule, and they've been stockpiling resources, gold and oil reserves, and have BALANCED THEIR BUDGETS, which the MORE socialist West can NOT do.
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@nerida3347 : When they do that, they cease being a platform, and lose special protections from liability. If they're going to get a pass on account of being a neutral platform, then they need to be a neutral platform. If they're not a neutral platform, and nobody but Congress believes that they ARE, then they're subject to the same rules applying to any publisher. They can't have it both ways. Of course, you're all about "private company can do what it wants" when that private company is biased in your political direction.
Me, personally, I would like it to be no-holds-barred, and if you don't like what's being said, BLOCK IT, and get on with your damn life. But liberals love to appeal to authority.
YouTube sucks because there's no block feature. You can tell on somebody to Mommy YouTube, but you can't just pull the plug on somebody and be free of them forevermore. But you CAN get Mommy YouTube to shut them UP forevermore. People like you seem to prefer appealing to authority to de-platform people you don't like. In a free and open forum, Nazis get zero traction. In a censorious setting, they actually have a legitimate gripe, and win recruits. you people are your own worst enemies.
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The U.S. Constitution basically says nothing that wasn't backed by a 2/3 majority, and it requires a 2/3 majority to overturn any aspect. Or at least that was the idea. That put severe restrictions on the scope and power of the federal government, By Design.
Most of what the federal government does, now, is unconstitutional, in my opinion. Entire departments exist outside of the original framework, without any constitutional amendments permitting their creation. Most of what the feds do, now, should be done by the state and local governments. The federal government's not designed to administer everything under the sun for all 50 states. It wasn't the idea, back in the day, and it's clear that the job's way too big for the federal government, now.
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I fear that by the time Obama came along, it was too late. But better late, than never, they say. Just understand that Democrats got the big government ball rolling. Republicans only stopped opposing the unchecked growth in size, role, and scope of the federal government in the late '80s and early '90s.
Now, it's very much uni-Party, but the MAGA/Liberty side is still concentrated under the Republican umbrella. But the Freedom Caucus wing of the party isn't calling the shots for the party. MAYbe it's changing, with the ouster of Ronna McDaniel, but that remains to be seen.
If you're for liberty and limited government, you will end up voting Republican more often than not.
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You appartly weren't listening very closely to Jordan Peterson. He's not against helping the poor. He's just against federal anti-poverty programs imposed nation-wide in one-size-fits-all fashion by a HUGE, out-of-touch and arrogant bureaucracy. Charity starts at home and filters out from there. If you want a kinder nation, you act locally and pray that the feds never get involved, because they will pervert it or they will be perverted by the most powerful special interests.
It's not about not being compassionate towards the weak and underprivileged. It's about saying "No" to huge, centralized institutions "corporatizing" the act of human generosity.
If all the liberals who VOTE for big spending would just open up their wallets and help as many people as they CAN, and be SATISFIED with that, and maybe influence others to be similarly kind and generous, the world would be a much better place. Instead, they vote to MAKE everyone pay for whatever charity some stuffed-shirts in Washington, in collaboration with the Bill Gateses of the world decide should take over.
Even that wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that those institutions encroach more and more into everyone's lives and make less and less sensible decisions, with the only end-game in sight being the kind of authoritarianism that even assholes like Bill Maher can see. He's an asshole because he doesn't see his own hand in the creation of these authoritarian structures, ripe for the takeover by a very small number of people, affecting policies across the nation and across the world.
We need to be more DECENTRALIZED so that the corruption and incompetence only reach so far and last so long before they're stopped. But at the national level, where they even control the money supply, they can make promises they can't really keep and muddle on for GENERATIONS. You try that shit at the state or local level and you run out of money in a couple years and people throw out the idiots and can recover in a couple years. When it goes on for decades, the hole is just too deep. The feds argue not over whether we should go DEEPER into debt, but by how much more. Every year.
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Hitler was a socialist whom socialists are determined to cast as a right-winger. He was - in today's terminology - a far-leftist.
I disagree with modern terminology, because I feel that socialism is just feudalism with a facelift. Very regressive. Trying to drag us back to the day when every benefit accrued by the masses was just the crumbs off the table of the lords and ladies who owned all the land the serfs lived on and worked. We changed the labels. Now they're not lords and ladies. We call them "civil servants." But it's the same thing.
They even tell us "You will own nothing and be happy." That's EXACTLY what a robber baron would tell the serfs working his land! "See all the great things I DO for you (when I feel like it and it doesn't cost me too much)." Well, maybe I want to do those things for mySELF, with my OWN money, and I know I'll do it a lot better than you will! I know I'll look for the best product at the cheapest price, and the people providing the service will work for ME and not the local lord or lady.
And look at how those bureaucrats pose and parade themselves around, as if they're saving everybody with the money they TOOK from everybody. I could do a lot more saving of myself if I just got to keep the money I worked for, but that's a separate rant. The point is, they're nothing more or less than a new, emerging aristocracy. Same condescending attitude towards their clients. Same pearl-clutching theatrics when actually confronted by the "unwashed masses," when they'd much rather be drinking champagne with their fellow lords and ladies somewhere we commoners will never be represented.
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Pure online isn't ideal. It's really hard to get 100% honest assessments. Your big sister can help you on the tests and you receive an unearned 'A.' That's why I insist on in-person, paper-and-pencil tests in all my offerings, face-to-face or online courses alike.
MOST learning takes place OUTSIDE the classroom. I think the ideal is a hybrid experience, where teachers (in person and/or remote) are there to give general guidance and answer questions on-demand. A mix of online content and human assistance would be a better product and cost less. But it would require teachers who can facilitate, and answer ANY question, rather than what I see, which are teachers who spend an hour or two learning the lesson one step ahead of students and give a carefully-prepared lecture, but can't really answer advanced questions off the cuff, especially in math. I've had colleagues ask me basic math questions for the courses they teach, and I always answer them, but in my heart, I'm asking myself "How did this person get this job?"
Yes, students need to learn how to learn better. Some small amount of training is needed. But we're talking about kids who play very complex role-playing games for HOURS. They can figure out how to learn how to use some VERY GOOD online learning products very quickly. And MOST students will be able to do their lessons in much less time than they spend in INSTITUTIONS (You WANT your kid institutionalized? That's the current system.). They can get their social after their lessons, and have a lot more free time to do so!
I HOPE what comes of this failed 100%-online approach by amateurs is that millions of parents will see that there are some great online learning products out there that are better and cheaper than what the local schools are offering, and for THEIR kids, better than the traditional courses to which we're all habituated. They didn't KNOW there were cheap, high-quality alternatives until COVID forced them to it! 100% individualized. 100% self-paced. Maybe your kid's a dreamer. Maybe your kid's a little awkward. Maybe your kid's a little unruly. Maybe the school tells you your kid has ADHD and want to NUMB them with adderol or ritalin.
Chances are good that the dreamer/awkward kid is getting bullied at the local kid's jail. Maybe your unruly/ADHD kid is just too smart to sit still for the BORING classes at school. Boys, especially, might not be ready to sit still all day until their 8, 9 or 10, if EVER. Such kids tend not to have a short attention span so much as they have no patience for stupid. They're interested in what they're interested in and can spend hours on one thing, if it's got their interest. Give those kids lessons that they have to finish before they can go out and play, or work on for a set amount of time. I think you'll find that YOUR kids will progress in their learning much faster and with higher degree of mastery than learning by traditional methods.
You just have to break out of the box.
I think traditional institutions are going to have to down-size.
The only thing you can't get for yourself is hands-on work with high-dollar equipment that an institution can provide. Engineers probably need brick-and-mortar facilities. English, history and the humanities, not so much.
Online testing is an issue. There, even if the test is administered and assessed by a machine, you should have a lock-down computer that denies access to anything but the test, while you're taking the test, with a key that the student needs to provide, and a human to make sure they're not accessing the information on another device. So I'd argue for less money for the classroom lecture and more money for professional proctors and more robust testing centers that the students visit just to take their tests.
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First of all, fascism is not far right. It's socialism, with nationalism thrown on top. Fascism is already widespread in the West, with governments running schools, health care and controlling the media (directly or indirectly). That's all Hitler needed to get everything else he wanted. That's what Mussolini taught him.
The only people throwing around the label "fascist" all the time are leftists/socialists, who are doing everything Mussolini could ask to bring about the sort of totalitarian state he wanted.
So technically, YES, it sounds like fascism. Italians are only rejecting the globalist form of socialism. But they still want their nanny government.
Nationalism is only good as a bulwark against socialist globalism. What we need is LOCALISM. Local autonomy. Local sovereignty. The central government should be strictly limited, as the USA's was, in the beginning. But we just flit from one "crisis" to the next, expanding government power and scope gradually, year by year.
Now people just argue over which socialists they want in power. So this will never get cleaned up unless and until there's another round of people who take the science of government seriously.
Anyone who says "We don't want this president running our country" doesn't get it. The president doesn't run the country. WE do. The president is CEO of the government and the government should be devoted to matters of national defense and foreign policy.
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Except for the whole progressive "I want the government to be my Mommy" thing, progressives, libertarians, and conservatives have more in common than otherwise.
I think you get close to 100% agreement when/if progressives would apply their principles in a decentralized way, in local communities that are like-minded. It's because they can't always get that local utopia they want that they try to make the federal government implement their wacky ideas everywhere at one, by force, from one place. I think Russell Brand is starting to get there, finally seeing the dangers and the sheer folly of concentrating all authority for everything into one, central place. All it takes is one Fauci or one Jim Comey to mess up the lives of over 300 million people in one go.
If progressive economics and "equity" ideas are great, then bring them about in ONE place, and by your example, become the model for other communities. But no. It's always "Force this on everyone, and let's see what happens." Dumb. Bad policy. Top-down planning and control is why the soviets and Chinese were never really competitive, until we started implementing their ideas in the usa. We've become the top-down, totally corrupt, and totally inept authoritarian state our ancestors rightly held in scorn and derision.
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Government are the thugs we reluctantly authorize to kill worse thugs who threaten us. No more and no less. You don't ask the Marofia Don to run your health care system. And it's because we already DID ask that health care is the way it is, now, and a culture of entitlement reigns. Ironically, medicare-4-all might be a less damaging way for government to participate in the healthcare system. The system we have is essentially fascist/socialist, but nobody's really admitted it or structured things to run efficiently. Thing is, anybody can go to any emergency room and receive free health care, right now (after a long wait).
We already divorced the users of the SERVICE from the actual price of that service. It's all set up so you save money by avoiding checkups, short term, and store up health problems that cost big money, long term. If ALL the government did was pay for a free checkup for everybody every year, and they caught stuff, early, that would probably save a ton of money. But it still begs the question of there being ANY service not directly related to national defense being provided by national government. It's just too easy to fuck things up for everybody when you allow a handful to decide how any good or service will be rationed for the general public. That's tyranny. And guys like Jimmy Dore want government bureaucrats to run health care, and I just think that's one of the dumbest, most fascistic ideas, ever.
Free health care was how the fascists got their START! It's an essential feature of fascist takeover, invented by Junkers in Germany when industrialization was making the people a little too independent and uppity. Kept the Junkers on top for another couple generations, as I recall, and paved the way for Hitler.
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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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The problem with wind power, as conceived by central planners, is they're big, expensive, loud, and they're an eye-sore. How about encouraging small wind generators for individuals? Instead of trying to do it all at once, from on high, we need to think about people being empowered to live less dependent on centralized grids, which, when compromised, bring everybody down at the same time.
EVs is sort of similar. Instead of trying to replace ICEVs by mandates from on high, why not LET electric vehicles that are good for getting around town be produced? Trying to replace conventional, long-distance passenger vehicles (let alone freight vehicles) all at once, by force, is sucking all the capital out of more achievable and practical solutions to the pollution problem.
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The fact that the lie still has traction with captives of legacy media is why the ridiculous press conferences by Democrat "leaders," like Schumer, Pelosi, Nadler and Schiff, are still a problem. Because there are still zealots who BELIEVE the lies, even after they've been disproven. And those are the people they're targeting. It doesn't have to be a majority if they can provoke the true believers into the same bullying tactics the Bolsheviks used. The Bolsheviks were never a majority. But they were more motivated and KNEW what they wanted, while the rest of the country just wanted out from under the damn Tsar.
I can't believe people thought Mueller was such a fine pick for Special Counsel, in light of his highly checkered past. And it doesn't require much research to see all kinds of slimy behavior. Only a partisan Democrat looking for a hatchet job would want this asshole running the Special Counsel's office. This guy was deeply involved in the WMDs hoax that mired us in Iraq. Lie on your taxes? You go to jail. Lie and get thousands of people killed? You get promoted, and people strew your path with rose petals. Maybe even a medal in it for you.
Was I the only one who saw a doddering, dithering, quavery old man in the 9-minute presser on May 29th? If you revisit it, maybe in hindsight it'll look to you like it looked to me: A man reading a prepared statement he didn't write.
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They read. They just put too much faith in vested authority, and blindly follow what the "experts" say. You need to be aware of what the experts are saying, but at the same time, hold them accountable. For instance, we're not all climate experts, but we CAN see if any of the climate predictions of the past are borne out in the future (They're NOT!), and always ask ourselves "Is the cure worse than the disease?"
Instead, what we get is hysteria over the "issue of the day" and never-ending "The end justifies the means" kinds of arguments from 'experts' who know little or nothing about the intricate interactions that sustain life in this world. They're experts on x, y or z, and that's it. And the more expert they are at one thing, the less likely it is that they can put everything all together into a unified whole.
Personally, I feel that NO ONE can POSSIBLY run 'everything.' Nobody has that much knowledge, no matter how smart they are. The imperfect best solution is limited-government, maximum individual autonomy, and let people figure out what works for them. Government's main role is "Harming none" in the "Harming none, do as you will" benediction. Government's there to step on people who do harm, and that's pretty much its main role in day-to-day operations of a nation.
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@thomasandersen5822 : It's an interesting fight. Entire generations have been indoctrinated by largely ineffective public schools. The thing to watch is the red-pill conversion rate by new generations, much like the '60s generation, that got out into the real world and say "Our teachers are full of shit," and rebelled against the regressive establishment.
America has a brand-new regressive establishment, consisting largely of a generation of leaders who rebelled against the traditional order, which was good, and replaced it with drek, which is bad. Now they defend it the same way the McCarthyists of the '50s defended THEIR "world order." They were at the peak of their power right before The Fall in the '60s and '70s.
The young people, NOW, see those '60s "revolutionaries" as failed prophets. They did their thing, and they're leaving THEIR children with a mountain of debt and an oppressive system of Cultural Marxism infecting education, media and government. The government can turn its Eye of Sauron on any individual it chooses, and RUIN them. It's always been this way, but the hippies, it turns out, are no different than those who came, before, once in power.
The wheel just keeps turning. Some progress gets made, some lost. Everybody's pretty much tolerant of gays, women have achieved equal pay for equal work, and so forth. I don't think that ground will be lost, although it needs a f minor/major correction, as LGBTQ and feminism have taken on some toxic aspects that need checking. Intersectionalism needs be seen for the incoherent opinions making their way into academia as canon, and give way to SCIENCE and REASON and FACTS.
That will happen. It's so EASY to spoof those guys, because all their stuff is made-up. Sokal, 20 years ago, and more recently, Bogossian and a pair of (pretty brilliant) postdocs. Names are on the tip of my tongue...
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@terransunited It's regulations that GOT us to this point. What we need is to beef up the tort system so that every citizen who is harmed by these chemical dumps and whatnot can sue for damages and WIN.
That doesn't take any kind of law except basic liability. "My dog drank from the river and died from the chemicals you put in it. You owe me $10,000." Or "These dead fish are full of the chemicals you're dumping into the river. You owe me $10,000."
Imagine a company having to protect itself from EVERY possible litigant under strict liability!
The way the system is set up, though, a company can dump whatever the heck it feels like dumping, so long as the government regulations either allow it or haven't gotten around to banning it. You see the problem, here?
The government is a SHIELD for the worst corporations, while it pretends to be protecting the public FROM the robber barons.
This is an old theme. It's been going on since the first 3-letter agencies of the 19th Century. The agencies are always captured, one way or another, by rich people. Rich people LOVE when you create government agencies and regulatory agencies, because then they only have to coerce or bribe a handful of people and get the rules written in such a way as to permit their worst practices!
Free-market solutions, under strict liability and a robust tort system, subjects the big companies to a virtually unlimited number of civil suits. They don't have to be big, class-action suits. Preferably, they're just a large number of small suits. Use the corporations' size against them! Yes, they can swamp any one litigant with 100 lawyers to their 1, but what if it's 100,000 individuals filing nuisance suits of $1,000 or $10,000?
You can't hire enough lawyers to beat all those cases at once. So, if you're up to no good, you're going to suffer the wrath of the people.
The government is a buffer between the people and the delivery of justice on the big corporations.
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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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@poolee77 : When the source material of a screenplay is a screenplay, rather than a larger work ADAPTED to the screen, there are always going to be plot holes and issues with character development. We were very forgiving in the first trilogy, because we didn't know any better, AND - probably more importantly - we'd never seen special effects that good, before. As long as they stuck to "Good guys win" and old-fashioned themes (and scenes) straight out of old-fashioned Westerns, the formula worked.
In the 2nd trilogy, Lucas tried to show he had some real depth, only he didn't. The plot and characters were subservient to the desired spectacle. This is a problem with screenwriting. You know the spectacle you want to see, and the plot and characters must serve that spectacle. Just tell a good story with good characters, and the spectacle will be there.
In the old days, you knew what story you wanted to tell, and the tricky part was providing the rich visuals needed. We cleared that hurdle in the 1970s, with a genius mix of CGI and stop-motion scale models (on a level the Japanese never dreamed of). From that point on, the visuals have driven the character and plot. People aren't wowed by all the special effects. Those effects must serve a better-written STORY. I think the epitome of this was the over-choreographed fight scene between Anakin and Obi-Wan. Defy the laws of gravity until the writers decide the fight's gone on long enough.
I bought one of the Star Wars paperbacks back in the '70s or '80s, on the understanding that the BOOK would be much better, much richer than the movies, themselves. The books were just screenplays. You know, what you write when you adapt a HUGE universe down to something in movie form. But in this case, the screenplay WAS the book, and there was just no depth there at all.
They could've kept the movie franchise going virtually forever, if they hadn't been waylaid by grievance-studies idiots. Just keep it simple. "Space Western" idea is fine. Very broad appeal.
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We all talk about the sins of the Church, but the Church quietly helps people. Organized religion clearly has its dangers, but it's an organic social safety net that existed long before government. We always focus on the bad actors, but we all know, for a fact, that a LOT of the people who volunteer their time and give gifts do it out of the goodness of their hearts. Powerful force for good. There's good and bad comes with organizing anything. And I think kids learning about Jesus and his teachings is a good thing. For me, personally, growing up in a Methodist family, Jesus was an antidote to existential angst that hit me really hard, really early, after some traumas.
But I kind of out-grew Christianity, while at the same time appreciating the archetype of what I imagine to be a benevolent, omniscient being, who sees when I mess up, or misbehave myself. Basically a super-ego that acts as my conscience. I can seek to make the future better without having to believe in a castle in the sky where I'll go and hang out with my buddies for eternity. But I do know I can try to make the next generation's lot in life better than mine. Take one more step towards longer life and greater happiness.
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With ALL pundits, you need a grain of salt, including this channel. "This is ridiculous. Russia's not planning an invasion." - Alexander Mercouris, January and early February, 2022.
Best is to find competing views, and build your own "mosaic of truth," and "know your own confirmation bias." You can't follow everyone, but you can find the leading edge on all sides, by tracking whose claims hold up over time. I do more fact-checking of the strongest claims for "my side" of the argument, because I know what my bias is.
It's pretty easy to build up a relatively small number of sources that give a pretty comprehensive overview. Love me some Douglas MacGregor, but he'll slip up and say things like "Vietnam was winnable," without going into whether or not our participation was MORAL. Even Thomas Sowell does this. They're both correct in the sense that the political leadership was out of touch with the people and the military situation on the ground in Vietnam. But don't implicitly build "Domino Theory" assumptions into your argument, which some of these guys seem to do.
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YouTube is like alcohol. It makes a good servant, but a poor master.
I spend "an unhealthy amount of time" on YouTube, but I at least try to bend it to my will, rather than just accept what Google is pushing on that day (which is almost always vapid and time-wasting).
But I'm kind of exceptional in that I'm a virtual shut-in, due to a physical handicap. It's not 100% healthy, I know, but it's kept my mind active and the new ideas coming in. But the closest I've gotten to camping out in the last year or two has been watching a good Swedwoods video or catching Luke on Outdoor Boys.
I'm fascinated (always have been, since a kid in the '70s) by permaculture concepts. I think the New Tech in building, heating and cooling homes and small-plot agriculture offers a revolution in eating and living better, and I'm applying it to my own place
I make my living teaching math remotely.
One thing I will say about Hasan Piker is that when you set your own hours and your own goals, it's easy to make a job for yourself that sucks you dry. "Perfect teaching takes an infinite amount of time." Every decent teacher needs to find that balance between doing a perfect job and doing a very good job.
Many teachers, including me, tend to make their jobs take more than 40 hours a week, especially when we're trying to improve what we're doing. For instance, I made about 1,000 videos last semester for one of my classes. I changed to a different textbook and learning management system (From Pearson to WebAssign) and it was time for a new set of videos (hopefully better) providing instruction AND an example of virtually every single exercise my students will encounter.
This isn't something in the job description. It's just something that destroys a semester for me, but makes the next several semesters go MUCH more smoothly, because there's on-demand help from me on every single concept, that they can access 24/7. I do that extra work and it saves me hundreds of hours every semester AFTER that. But MAN was it a chore getting everything made and uploaded!
Anyway, Hasan just needs to find some balance, but it sounds like his business model requires too much of his time. Men, especially, are prone to this. Most men and almost all women are pretty good at finding a good balance. But Type A people can grind themselves to dust.
This is very common in small business, and why most small businesses don't grow into big business. The guy/gal running the thing holds all the threads and doesn't know how to recruit, train, and delegate. That's why most small businesses aren't scalable.
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She has it all upside-down and backwards.
You want to stop the evil Russians? Guarantee Ukrainian neutrality and keep it out of NATO, permanently. I don't think Russia cares if somebody makes a deal with Ukraine for mineral concessions. It just won't tolerate a hostile neighbor under the control of USA/NATO.
Russia doesn't want to rule Ukraine, imo. I think that if Ukraine acceded to Russia's demands for neutrality and stops trying to join NATO, that there can be peace.
I think that regardless of what anyone says, Russia is probably going to stop at the Dnepr, with a border that's easily defended (or as easy as possible, given the terrain). I think that regardless of what anyone says, Russia won't stop until it reaches the Dnepr.
I think NATO FAFO. I think that the realities on the ground, regardless of right or wrong, were entirely in favor of Russia. I think that Europe is on the brink of economic collapse and has been "fighting" with USA's money for decades, and it still operates under the illusion that the USA will back them on everything.
The main thing Europe wasn't prepared for was a USA that started acting with common sense and its own self-interest at heart. We've had lunatics running our foreign policy for a long time, and finding some sense is very disruptive to the lunatic ecosystem. They're so caught up in their delusions of grandeur, that they're mad at reality, itself.
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Don't de-criminalize it. Legalize, license and TAX it. Strictly enforce laws protecting persons, property, and public health and safety, including vagrancy ordinances. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here." You can't just let people set up housekeeping on public property. I don't see a problem. The city should invest in local micro-farming.
Folks talk about the great re-set, but that's something we could do. We've come a long way in small-plot farming technology, and we can produce restaurant-grade veggies for everyone, locally. It's good to know we CAN ship food anywhere we want, in enormous quantities and good quality, but day-to-day, even if gas prices go back to $2 a gallon, local farms can compete with factory farms far away, because of quality, reliability, virtue-signaling, fuel savings advantages.
Why not a synthesis of the two problems into a nice, self-sustaining solution that different towns and cities can experiment with. By experiment, I mean, people deciding they like the small-plot farming life, especially while they're raising their kids. Teach them a love of reading and home-school 'em. Online learning management systems can teach most of most subjects a lot cheaper, and at the pace of the learner. I'd hazard that 70% or more of kids would learn faster than the school curriculum. Socialization? Give them more time and more things to do with their friends withOUT a government employee watching them.
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Sounds like a RINO report, to me. Russians didn't do any more or less than they always do. Manaforte shared published information that the Russians already knew. The "massive effort" by the Russians amounted to a few thousand dollars in troll-farm ads that disparaged BOTH parties, pretty equally, and mainly just to reach different audiences for the sole purpose of generating ad revenue. Russia-Russia-Russia is still the dominant narrative in the Beltway.
I have real concerns about Russia, myself, but these DC Beltway types mostly cover up the worst stuff that's going on, like bribery and other forms of corruption, while pretending to be "tough on Russia."
If I were Putin and Putin were a SAINT, I bet I'd still rather see Trump in office than a Clinton. You never know what harm a DC-Beltway insider is going to do. Putin can understand and deal with SANE opposition. But you never know WHAT kind of crazy fear-mongering nonsense will come out of Washington. Well, actually, you DO, if you know American history, but there's no telling what the nEXT colossal blunder will be. Trump's a pretty apolitical, common-sense kind of leader, who would probably still be a billionaire real-estate developer, who voted Democrat, except for how un-hinged the Democrats have become.
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This is one of the great ironies of America in the 20th (and now 21st) Century. The very same "anti-fascist" thinking justified our turning to very authoritarian, fascist-looking policies to FIGHT fascism in its NAZI form. For top-down economy - for the war effort, of course - they came up with this big Leontief input-output matrix for war-time production. It was all very top-down and very satisfying to people whom Adam Smith would call "System Men." It's also very satisfying to war planners who want X number of tanks and Y number of planes. It's also just complicated enough for them to feel smart that they understand it, even though they're WAY oversimplifying reality to a 10x10 or 100x100 matrix, when in reality, the entirety of the economy is essentially an infinite-dimensional beast, by the time you get anywhere close to the individual-exchange level, especially if you're trying to make it run for any period of time, with many factors varying over time, such as the wheat yields, cost of transportation, condition of roads and the markets. And other products that people also need that may cut into the price of bread, e.g.
To this day, so-called "liberals" see the economy in much the same way, and they want to be the people deciding what the inputs need to be for the desired outputs. They THINK they're being compassionate and fair, but they reduce reality to a vastly oversimplified, mechanistic view of society. That may be useful for making predictions in the large, but it's far too complicated in REALITY for any person or agency to fully encompass. Adam Smith knew this in the mid-18th century! He talked about the "invisible hand" that guides people to behave morally in order to enjoy the benefits of the efforts of others.
The idea is you don't MAKE them make 100 loaves of bread for 100 people, but if there are 100 people with something of value to offer for bread who were at the market yesterday, the baker will make sure there are at LEAST 100 loaves of bread for sale in the market, tomorrow, in order to receive that value from the expected 100 people. Nobody TELLS her to make 100 loaves of bread to fulfill the expected "need."
She wants those schillings! And SHE will make it HER business to bake enough bread to get as many schillings as possible, without making much MORE than that, because that's wasteful and costs HER money. What we get is a market that miraculously (the invisible hand) that produces just enough bread and not too much, with far greater accuracy and efficiency than ANY government agency could do. They'd waste a lot one day, and not make enough the next, and, because nobody really pays the cost of waste other than some taxpayer nobody really sees during the decision-making, nobody (except the taxpayer) is punished for their inefficiency. Furthermore, if they believe that what they are doing is "right," then the individuals who are damaged by their control of everything are just "collateral damage" that is part of the cost of providing more justice to more people.
The sad thing, to me, about the state of liberal thought, today, is that these principles have been well-understood for 300 years (give or take), but our education system does everything it can to paint freedom and free trade between free people as a bad thing. In actuality, it's what brought us up to the level of economic prosperity and free thought to
1. end slavery
2. end discrimination on the basis of gender, race or sexual orientation (Except for pedophiles. Acting on their preferences is and shall always be criminal.)
3. create an industrial and technological revolution that brought more people up from abject poverty than ever before and in an amazingly short time.
But liberals don't understand this. They think government led the way. But true conservatives' (classical liberals') take on the march of human progress sees the direct connection between people finally being free to make their own choices and own their OWN property, in a world where ALL such things were dictated from on high for centuries.
The so-called "right" sees betterment of society trickling UP from the people at the BOTTOM. Give us freedom to make our own decisions, and more of us will improve our circumstances. And when it's just us schmucks at the bottom the only way to climb the rungs of Maslow's ladder is by being TRUSTWORTHY and providing REAL VALUE to our equals in a free market. It's not a perfect system, but it's more fair to more people than any other system yet devised. And liberals (so-called) are taught to despise this engine of prosperity and social evolution.
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@GLDENGLOVES : Meh. A lovely girl such as she, who chooses fighting as a career is already fuckin' cray-cray. All these fuckin' MMA fighters are fuckin' crazy. But if you have that insane warrior's heart, you seek the BEST to test yourself against.
Meh. WTF do I know. My craziness is that of a weakling breaking himself on challenges these MoFos would laugh at!
I don't see bitterness in this interview. She's not throwin' shade. She's just speaking truth as she understands it, having been there, before, as far as this idiot can tell.
When I look at Rousey, it reminds me of Gaithje. Made it hella far on natural gifts, but to be the best, she can't just stand in front of a great striker and overpower her. Fresh off watching that fight, it looks like she'd already had her bell rung before she ever got a chance go for the take-down, and going for a take-down with an addled brain just kept her noggin in reach of some devastating punches. No head movement. No nothing. Just "I gotta get in close."
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The USA and China are intertwined. USA refuses to take a Middle Path of trade AND accountability. It either sells out or threatens war. USA needs to bring back manufacturing instead of making it impossible to operate. Again, Middle Path is required, here. We want environmental responsibility AND manufacturing. Government regulations prop up bad actor big companies and punish honest small business. Meanwhile, the environment continues to degrade, with the government, itself, protecting the worst polluters.
Chasing manufacturing to China ensures that ZERO environmental responsibility will be exercised. For best results, free markets and full transparency give best products, lowest prices, and cleanest environment. People will flock to companies that do things the right way, and companies will race to be seen as the most moral and honest. We need a revolution in advertising and consumer awareness, not this fake, woke nonsense and government-approved "I'm Green!" posturing.
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I'm not sure anybody noticed, but the tide has turned on immigration. Democrats always want to follow the European way, and now that the European left has realized they're cutting their own populist throats with Open Borders, the left is coming around on this nationalism thing. Of course, Democrats always follow, so they're getting the memo, late, again, pushing policies that their brethren across the Atlantic have abandoned.
It's funny to watch Schumer capitulate on the immigration issue by focusing on how Trump's "Wall" idea isn't as GOOD as what "security experts" are saying. In other words, now he's arguing over means rather than ends, because he's folding on the issue.
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Yes, the FBI, DIA, CIA, and every other federal agency involved WILLFULLY accepted tainted information. The lot of them should be in jail, from Comey, to Brennan, Clapper and all the top people who not only let this go on, but pushed it aggressively, without regard for truth. They did ZERO due diligence. In fact, they did the OPPOSITE.
Until justice is served, the American people's faith in American institutions will remain low and continue to decline.
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I think there's enough material for a trilogy, if it's done right. A good writer could expand on things that were only suggested in the book, like Bombadil, Beorn, and maybe even tie things together between some of the entish trees in Bombadil's valley with the Ents, themselves. And there was a lot of "meanwhile" going on. Aragorn was busy doing ranger things.
I'm not saying it would be easy, but bring in a room full of LOTR geeks and writers, and it's such a rich world with so many stories to be told, I bet. But they just hacked it all up, instead of treating the canon with reverence.
Some of the issues with the movie(s) are actually issues with the original material. Tolkien still hadn't figured out whether dwarves were helpless buffoons or doughty warriors. In The Hobbit, they couldn't get out of their own way, but in Two Towers, Gimli kept up just fine with Legolas and Aragorn. They made a bit of a thing out of Gimli lagging behind in the movie, but near as I can tell from the Lore, mobility hierarchy is elves > orcs > dwarves > men. If anything, Aragorn was superhuman keeping up with Legolas and Gimli, and Legolas could've run down the Uruk-Hai pretty easily, if he wanted to. Tolkien just decided that the 3 would be as fast or as slow as required for the purposes of the story.
Someone(s) with a strong vision and (a) tightly-written screen play(s) could've done something good/great here. More has been done with less. Usually much less is done with much more.
But I still think the root problem is Tolkien himself was still feeling things out when he crafted a fun story for his kids. Are dwarves feckless and helpless fools who couldn't make it out of the Shire without a Wizard's help, (which begs the question of how they EVER managed to make it to Bilbo's in the first place) or are they super-awesome semi-superheroes? It depends on what the plot calls for, I guess.
One of the things I could never figure out was how Smaug could terrorize Lake Town, which was supposedly built in the middle of the lake so that Smaug couldn't get to them. It's where all the residents of Dale moved to, after Smaug's first appearance. But Smaug could fly, right? Just one of the inconsistencies in The Hobbit that were never clearly explained.
They could've exercised some creative license to flesh things out, rather than injecting the interracial couple. Heck, they could've made some real gender-bending without contrivance, just by showing some bearded dwarf women!
Anyway, as a geek, I always wanted more of Bombadil's story. They could've spent 20 minutes or a half hour on Beorn. In the book, he had Warg hides nailed up, outside. There's some good bear-on-wolf and bear-on-goblin action, there. Fans would've loved some Beorn action in Battle of Five Armies, too.
The time Bilbo spent fighting the spiders... "Addercop!" Bilbo's time in the Elf palace as a true burglar, piecing together a pretty clever escape plan would've been good. I think that episode got a 5-minute montage, maybe. Instead, they injected a massive and massively impossible Spielberg-style chase scene. The dwarves were sore and cramped from an otherwise uneventful barrel ride.
For the record, I thought Radagast was pretty rad.
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The lack of authorization to strike into Russia tells everyone who's really running the show in Ukraine. It isn't Zelensky. It's the CIA and eggheads in think tanks in the USA and UK, who think they can "play the world" like a game of RISK.
Unfortunately for the USA, the entire government is run by eggheads in think tanks, who think they can just run everything top-down, when NOT running everything top-down was what gave the USA its TRUE power: An economy that dwarfs all others. We don't HAVE to play "revolution in the 3rd world" games with the Chinese and Russians. Just be true to our Constitution, and nations will flock to our side, because things are so much better here than elsewhere.
Instead, we're being dragged down into totalitarian, one-party rule. Former president Barack Obama WANTS that. Now he's attacking the 1st Amendment, which will put him in the Hall of Shame for U.S. Presidents. In fact, he will go down as the worst president, ever.
We don't need to be MORE like the Chinese. We need to be LESS like the Chinese, and get back to our limited government-and-self-responsible citizens, who are free to speak, create, and do business, without being crushed by megacorporations in league with the U.S. Government.
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@martymcfly5423 Teacher Unions are part of the problem, but teachers have less and less say compared to administrators. Schools have been top-heavy with administrators for decades. Since "Diversity and Equity" hit, there's been a whole new layer added to the bureaucracy.
Look at the ratio of staff and admin to teachers. It's the highest it's ever been and teachers do all the secretarial and clerical work, themselves, now, because of computers and desktop publishing. When I started out, professors didn't even type their own tests. Now there're more secretaries than ever, but they spend all day shuffling papers and generating useless and meaningless reports for stuffed-shirt administrators who seem to think THEY'RE doing something whenever they dream up some NEW task for teachers to perform, as if teaching weren't already a full-time job.
If you want a good school, find one run by teachers, and with fewer administrators than the competitors. That school will be focused on the learning. Find a top-heavy school, and it will be busy with social justice and a million other things, and the learning will take a back seat. They'll spend most of their time trying to figure out how to get more students to pass without learning anything, because that's "student success." Not success in the real world. Success according to their twisted definition.
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The 1st Amendment died in 1934 with the Communications Act and the creation of the Federal Communications Commission (right around the same time Hitler was perfecting control of media). Media have supported every expansion of government and government control ever since. The Communications Decency Act put it on steroids. Obama put the finishing touches on it by executive order. Nobody noticed. Now, censorship of political speech is out in the open, and nobody except people who question authority seem to notice or care.
It's high time we finally realized we serve the government and not the other way around! Brave new world, baby!
The only time American media EVER questioned war-making by our government was during Vietnam, which is understandable, since why would they want us to kill communists? Arabs? Muslims? No problem. American media has NEVER questioned the unending expansion of the welfare state. Nobody remembers or cares that what the government does FOR you, today, is what government can do TO you, tomorrow. We are such sheep.
The American principle is that PEOPLE will handle their affairs better than aristocrats who never heard of us and never cared about us. But we've learned our lesson. Now, we accept our serfdom, because Uncle Sam knows best.
No. Uncle Sam is the guy you don't leave alone with your kids!
The Bill of Rights was quietly repealed over 80 years ago in the name of protecting our children from profanity (and adults from harassment by telephone). America's "free media" has been a propaganda arm for the U.S. Government since before most of us were born. Thank goodness the government stepped in, because now children can watch free porn and lonely Americans get friendly phone calls from scammers on a daily basis. I've been on no-call list for 15 years, but luckily, they know I really wanted to talk to that guy from Bangladesh announcing the wonderful news that I've just won $70,000! All I need to do to get it is send them $700! I'll be rich! It's wonderful, isn't it? Thank God the FCC is protecting me from stuff like that.
It's about power and control. It's ALWAYS been about power and control. And both are extracted from us by making us afraid of something. COVID is just the latest. We've been groomed for lock-downs for most of a century.
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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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Reagan decided there should be more Americans owning their own fishing boats (like Barney Frank decided more people should own homes), made low interest loans available, everybody got into the fishing business, and they scraped the sea-bottom, wrecking the ecosystem off Cape Cod. Reagan wasn't averse to interfering in the free market, if he thought he was smarter than the free market. And people in government always think they're smarter, the anointed... Their position proves their superiority (to them).
I'd love to see the big firms broken up, but not by force. What's needed is a press that actually reports what's going on, and the public would boycott the bigger outfits and buy from the smaller, and information + freedom would do more to police the free markets than anything the lawyer types in government will ever do. We know what will happen when we put those bastards in charge.
The robber barons ALWAYS got ahead by influencing government. And we, the people, always fall for the same lie: "Government needs to DO something!" The public outcry signals the paradigm shift without the government doing anything. But the government then always does something, to gain status and get re-elected. The 5 years later, the robber barons own the legislature and the regulatory agencies on all those matters. Think about it.
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When liberalism attached itself to massive government intervention in society and the economy, it ceased being liberalism and became reactionary. He thinks this woke nonsense is something separate, but it's part and parcel of the choice to make the government the source of people's well-being, rather than as an obstacle to people's well-being, which the original liberals understood.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt took us across the philosophical Rubicon, and it's been downhill ever since.
Classical liberalism is liberty and limited government. These faux, big-government liberals, refuse to examine their base assumptions, and how their assumptions when implemented as policy, created the woke insanity we see, now. People who are entitled to government largesse are serfs. They just don't know it.
Schellenberger thinks he's a classical liberal, but he's a big-government liberal, and therefore not liberal.
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Socialism is government-owned-and-operated.
Community building is voluntary and free-market. It has collectivist aspects, but only in the sense that people in the community cooperate and share, voluntarily. There is no force involved. That's where you progressives get it wrong. You want to save the world in one fell swoop, and that requires the use of force and coercion.
That's the whole point of enlightened self-interest! Community-building is a form of free-market capitalism. People want to do good and be SEEN doing good.
When the government takes over, now you're paying taxes to solve all the world's problems, and not only do you have less disposable income to share with your neighbor, voluntarily, you no longer have any responsibility to play the Good Samaritan and help a guy out. You already paid people to help that guy out, so his plight is someone ELSE's responsibility, so NATURAL self-supporting communities get chopped off at the knees.
The key, here, is it's people working with each other, not just sitting around waiting for the government to hand them a check or free housing or food. It's not a bureaucrat checking off boxes on a form, who makes $100,000 a year doing nothing BUT checking off boxes, without ever laying eyes on the recipients.
It's not his money he's spending and it's some faceless nobody (to him) that he's supposedly helping, so he has little concern whether the money is spent wisely nor does he care whether the money solves their problems.
He's just the middle man who makes 10 times what his "clients" make, and if only he could get more clients, he could grow his department and administer more people, and make more money for himself, as lord and master of his own little taxpayer-funded fiefdom.
That 6-figure bureaucrat doesn't want to SOLVE poverty. All he wants to do is SERVE poverty. If he SOLVES poverty, he's out of a job!
Socialism administered by the state inverts the incentive structure and the moral responsibility we have for our fellow human beings. It also creates a LOT of people who are beholden to the government and as corruption creeps into these big institutions, as it always does, nobody wants to upset the apple cart, because that means an end to their gravy train!
Our government employs 25 million people and there are 100 million recipients of government programs. That's more people than voted for either party in 2024. These are dangerous times! The makers are in danger of being voted into serfdom by the takers.
Take what the government deigns to give you. And obey. That's the path we're on and that's why so many are pessimistically optimistic with the ouster of the Democrats. Now the question is what kind of job the Republican majority will do with its recent victory. There's hope, but hope is faint. Uni-Party still rules.
The Democrats love war as much as any Cold-War Republican, and the Republicans are just as beholden to the welfare state as the Democrats. Neocon Democrats started with Scoop Jackson in the '70s, and then Reagan made Russia-Russia-Russia a winner for both parties. Welfare-State Republicans kicked in during the '90s, when they stopped making liberty-and-limited government arguments against the welfare state.
Now it's "Spend spend spend on every nutty handout and every murderous war" and "both (supposed) sides" are in it, together. The most Republicans will say about the handouts is they need to be managed better. Democrats don't say a word against forever war, however. They're the two sides of the same coin, as far as this libertarian-type is concerned.
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@davemcl1057 Yeah. Weld is hard-working and laid-back at the same time. I lived in Greeley from the 2000s until last winter. Working at a college, the amount of hysteria and illogic by people who should know better was pretty demoralizing. But most of the town just kept on like nothing happened.
Even at the DMV, masking was optional, which you wouldn't've known, except some of the nice ladies behind the counter weren't wearing masks. Turns out masks were optional in Weld County. Greeley was more like Sweden. Don't come to work if you're not feeling well. Use common sense. Red counties are way more polite and reasonable than blue counties. Most of my liberal friends think Greeley's a pit. I always liked it.
Since I bought that Greeley place, we'd been fighting the building of apartment complexes next door. Obama really wanted to put big apartment complexes right on top of single-family-dwelling neighborhoods, defeating the purpose of living next to other home owners. They finally forced through the construction of a bunch of duplexes, but that neighborhood was never going to be the same. Car and foot traffic all hours. For many years, it was the perfect neighborhood. Close to everything, but separate and quiet. Lots of big old trees. Shady and quiet little oasis that was about to get a lot louder.
I couldn't believe that I got out of there, and got as much as I did. The home buyers thought they were ripping me off. My ex-neighbors are probably pissed, because that house will likely go back to being a rental, now, and they liked that they had an owner living there, who was quiet and constantly improving the property. That place was under $200 K in '13, and they're trying to sell it for $450 K. Unbelievable.
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Trump made a huge mistake, believing guys like Fauci without doing his due diligence. I don't think it occurred to him how corrupt and unscientific the whole process was. He was desperate to open things up, but he couldn't use force. The ONE thing he could push ahead was the development of what the "experts" told him was hope of a cure.
Even with Warp Speed, I don't think Trump would've mandated people take the vax or even tried to mandate it. Warp Speed brought the Defense Department into the picture. Joe Biden's inauguration marked the weaponization of the whole thing, with Defense Department backing. They also had the backing of all federal agencies, so they were more than happy to go after Christians who wanted to go to church or meet with one another. They even busted churches who held their ceremonies in the church parking lot, using their radios and a low-power broadcast.
Warp Speed - and how the media would spin it - was Trump's biggest weakness, because it split the base. This was why I wanted someone like Ben Carson or Vivek Ramaswamy or RFK, Jr. These guys have guts and smarts. I was actually worried about turnout by Republicans, because so many of us felt that Trump mishandled the crisis, trying his best to get re-elected.
Luckily for Trump, no matter how bad he was, the Democrat alternative was clearly insane and nihilistic. The Democrat alternative was destroying the middle class at a record-setting pace. The Democrat alternative was telling boys and girls that "boys and girls are not a thing." The Democrat alternative was saying "Sure. We want our kids to be read stories by men in dresses, with convicted child abusers in the wings."
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"No way, in a land of law, where one man can shoot 3 people, kill 2 of them and be acquitted." - low-info man in the street.
If you're upset about police brutality, you solve NOTHING by rioting, burning and looting anywhere you please. You don't make a plausible statement against problems with law enforcement by utter and extreme lawlessness. And in AMERICA, you have the RIGHT to defend your person and property against thugs and hooligans. Not only did Rittenhouse have the RIGHT to arm himself, he was PRUDENT to do so.
People are sick of seeing people destroy what they spent a lifetime building, just because they're upset about something. The USA underwent over a year of tantrum-throwing and opportunistic vandalism, arson and violence. Enough is enough. Kyle was within his rights. The people running around rioting, burning and looting were in the wrong. So many lives ruined by these tantrum-throwers. The American people have had enough. Being - or pretending to be - upset does not give you a right to harm others, rob others or destroy their property.
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Life forms in Nature don't care about balance. Balance in Nature is achieved through cut-throat competition, with each individual trying to eat as much and breed as much as possible. They will do this, regardless of the availability of resources.
Your standard population model is the logistic curve. The introduction of a new, viable species to an ecosystem results in near-exponential growth of that population (a curve that gets steeper and steeper (growing faster and faster). This is what I call the "economies of scale" phase. The more there are, the more breeding opportunities for all, and new births far out-strip the death rate. Not only that, but by an ever increasing amount.
There's an inflection point in that growth curve, where the population is still growing, but at a DECREASING rate. The result is an 'S'-shaped curve, that is concave down (sheds water, rather than gathering water, if you imagine rain falling from the sky down on the shape), growing less and less quickly until it levels off just under the absolute limit to growth, called the 'carrying capacity (of the ecosystem). It's all very nice, and you can see a picture of the 'S'-curve here: https://byjus.com/maths/logistic-function/.
The mathematical model for this (see link) puts the inflection point at exactly halfway between 0 and the carrying capacity on the vertical scale. This never happens in Nature, but it's fairly representative of the near-exponential growth at the beginning, to something like a ceiling. All very theoretical and roughly expresses the early versus the long-term growth rates. I use the "economies of scale" description, because it's very similar to the introduction of a new product that's immensely popular in the marketplace. Do you think a company worries about the 'balance of Nature' or the larger economy? Not really. It just has an urge to grow!
After the inflection point, what I call the "limits to growth" phase starts kicking in. Once everybody has a t.v., t.v. production levels off. In the animal kingdom (which we somehow view as distinct from the human economy), competition with other species and availability of food start working their magic, to slow the growth rate. But there is no perfectly smooth approach to the exact carrying capacity. Population/company will not stop trying to maximize itself, even if it grows beyond the ability of the ecosystem to support it. This is what the guest in the video describes in the boom-and-bust reality that we see in predator-prey models.
The prey will breed as much as it can and the predators will grow in number, because life is easier, but the prey population, eating itself literally out of house and home, will eventually crash, causing the predator population to experience a similar crash, and the boom-and-bust cycle begins all over again. There's no "The rabbits and coyotes got together and decided how many of each there would be, for perfect balance."
People always talk about the "balance of nature" and the ACTUAL balance is just chaos. Each species imposes as much of its particular kind of order on as great a domain as possible, and it's the interplay of these species, all at once, that gives us 'the balance.' But the balance itself is changing all the time. A dynamic equilibrium that isn't really an equilibrium at all (Don't let Disney fool you!), but a never-ending transition to the next state. We humans see a snapshot of time and say "balance!" and think that means a single extinction is somehow disruption of Nature's balance, when Nature's balance involves a lot of extinctions. It REQUIRES a lot of extinctions. How arrogant is it of us to believe that yesterday's snapshot MUST match tomorrow's?
It's a paradox. Nature's perfect balance is a state of flux!
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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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The 1st Amendment isn't to prevent bias. The federal government has no business deciding what's socially responsible. In the '60s and '70s, the APPEARANCE of objectivity was maintained in the actual reporting. The bias was in the selection of which stories to report. Things slowly got more blatantly biased through the '80s and '90s, and now there's no subtlety at all. They beat you over the head with their editorializing, even in the straight reporting.
I kind of LIKE that they've become more blatant, because now it's all out in the open, and it's harder to suppress news stories, because some outlet on "the other side" will make a big story out of things the established order doesn't want in the public square, and so we SEE the censorship that before Obama, only conservatives ever complained about. Of course, most conservatives, if they had THEIR way, would return to "the good old days," which were not actually very good. The only thing the conservatives don't seem to like is the fact that the bias is almost 100% against THEM.
As a limited-government constitutionalist, I don't want the government weighing in for EITHER side. Conservatives have folded on big social spending, and liberals have folded on war. Both agree to spend big on both, and that's extremely bad for prosperity, liberty, and an ethical citizenry.
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Gee you're full of snark. And you'd rather argue with yourself than part with part of your precious prose, you poseur.
But seriously, methinks Maria has gone very far, very young, and missed out on some life experiences. She's accomplished, she's earning, and she's very green. Her degrees make her think she's more worldly than she is. The Marine's close to the same age, is highly skilled at operating and maintaining some high-dollar equipment, and while he feels confident he can do his job, he doesn't feel like he's better than anybody else, even though he's aware that a certain percentage DO wash out. He knows he's young, and now he knows he has good-to-excellent learning capacity. But I think he was already pretty confident he could learn whatever he needed to for his next job and would be adding to his skill set, non-stop for some time.
I think the guy with purple hair lit up the room. Good heart, and generically good mind. Just doesn't measure success exactly the same as other people. More likely to do something because it's fun, and maybe pass on more money for less fun. Those can be the smartest people of all, when you look at their friendships and families.
The thing I'd look for in the Chinese - and I saw no sign of it - was dogmatic mind-set and rote-memory understanding of the world. Sometimes the parents can drive their kids too hard, and they'll memorize, even if they don't fully understand. Dude grew up in America, though, and that happens more in CCP, but Chinese parents are notorious for pushing their kids to do their letters. Right up there with Jewish parents. In America, everyone's proud that they hate math.
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There aren't too many people, but we need to live in better balance. Unfortunately, all our governments want is for us to build windmills and make battery-powered cars, while making it nearly impossible to build actual green tech at home, unless it's Made in China.
Just by tweaking how we build homes (more earth-sheltered, less boxes of wood on top of the ground), letting more people work remotely, and sharing really basic permaculture concepts amongst ourselves.
The EPA insists on arbitrary standards for furnaces, but never gets around to approving mass-heat storage on furnaces. Just arbitrary particulate levels and temps at the roofline, decided by a bureaucrat with a dart board. You can build your rocket-stove mass heater, but good luck getting your home insured, because regulators don't bother exploring the technology or approving it.
The list goes on and on of things people would love to do to live greener, but unless there's a way for the billionaire class to cash in at our expense, and that includes Elon, the government is an obstacle. Long-range EVs that look and perform anywhere close to an ICE vehicle are worthless boondoggles. Electric? Great idea. But wrong application. They shouldn't be trying to replace the F-150, but they could make and sell millions of small EVs for getting around town.
it's always "Do it the one way that transfers wealth upward to the parasite elite class.
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Because of the EPA, I can't find a new, compact pickup with decent power. If I want any kind of reasonable performance, I have to buy a mid-sized or full-sized pickup or suv, which is just fine, according to the EPA. These government agencies do the opposite of what they're created to do. FDA, UsDA, FBI, Dept of Ed, ... The list is endless. They all end up working for the people we were told they were regulating. The Dept of Ag is so far up Monsanto's butt, it hasn't seen daylight for decades. it's the same forr the FDA and Big Pharma.
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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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Here's A counter to the alarm:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/22/ocean-global-warming-is-not-actually-global-at-all/
It seems that Indian Ocean and South Atlantic are where the greatest jump is obtained. Interesting to note that they didn't get the bad-ass Argos monitoring system that went to DEPTH. Basically the IPCC itself says that our ocean-temp measurements before 2003 were worthless, because surface temps tell us little about the heat in the larger column of water. But yeah, if they're NOW saying that it's warmer, and not just at the surface, that's significant.
In the article cited, above, they say that the increase in 1/3 of the the planet's waters and not in the other 2/3 (most of the Atlantic and Pacific) makes it hard to argue that the apparent increase is due to global CO2, else the temperature increase would be universally measured, and not just in 1/3 of the region measured. It might be an indicator of geothermal causes unrelated to the teeny tiny atmosphere that forms a thin-as-gossamer shell around a pretty good-sized planet. We know we're big. But we also know we're not THAT big.
The oceans are a major buffer against atmospheric change. If they're taking a lot of heat out of the system, then it gives the alarmist view longer legs, fer sherz. But the only path I see to reducing emissions is middle-classing the shit out of the planet. Western democracies curbing their pop growth, naturally, due to prosperity and selfishness? Isn't that a good thing? Shouldn't we want to export that, rather than import a bunch of people who haven't learned, yet, while more people like them continue to be generated under their backwards, non-person-respecting governments back home?
What's the path to prosperity? Fossil fuels. Want to reduce emissions? Get that woman in Sri Lanka some gulldurn propane! Right now, she's cooking over a wood fire, and breathing that shit and making all her neighbors breathe that shit. Meanwhile, Western democracies can start worrying about falling birth rates when the USA gets down to, say, 100 million souls. Meanwhile, encourage S. American countries to respect their people's rights to persons and property, and enforce the rule of just law. Prosperity and free trade will do the rest, and in another 30 years, they'll be prosperous enough that children are more burden than retirement plan, and birth rates will fall in THOSE countries like they have in ours.
There's really nothing wrong with how we live. We're just encouraged to breed like rabbits by governments that sup off our blood and sweat. Why must we over-produce? To pay taxes to government just for breathing or daring to occupy some actual ground that we can call ours and maybe grow some food.
And then, the one Jimmy Dore can agree with me on: Our war machine consumes fuel like nobody's business. Scale that shit back, too. Minimum necessary to DEFEND us. No more regime change. No more Iraqi Freedom or Libyan Slavery (Weren't those the slogans for the two 'regime changes?')
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This is the USA. You don't tear down a statue of Jefferson Davis. You put up a same-scale statue of Frederick Douglas, who towered over Davis, right next to the Davis statue. We don't hide from our history. We expand on it, learn more about it, show more about it.
Tearing down statues and banning/burning books is what Nazis and violent communists do.
In my opinion, slavery was on its way out, regardless. But we found the most bloody and upper-class-enriching way of going about ending it. There wouldn't have been a war at all if the Northern factory owners weren't pissed off that the cotton from down South was being sold to the UK, which offered better prices for cotton and made better finished products than USA factories. And if the North really meant well, why didn't the former slaves all get their 40 acres and a mule?
Instead, they did a federal "reconstruction program" wherein carpetbaggers from the North bought up prime real estate in the South for 10 cents on the dollar. And did the plight of African-Americans really improve that much or did they just paint lipstick on a pig, making field hands into sharecroppers, like serfs of old, which is pretty much the same as slavery, only the land owner just kicks you off your land if he doesn't like you or you piss him off, leaving you with less security and scant little freedom, as a practical matter.
And who fought and died in the Civil War? Poor people from North and South, once again settling beefs between rich mofos on both sides of the conflict. MOST people in the South neither owned slaves nor looked down on African-descended Americans as lesser than themselves.
I think they should've let a few Southern states go ahead and secede. They would've come around in less than a generation, as all the states around them prospered and stopped respecting ANY of their illegal property rights to other human beings. The Underground Railroad would've become an interstate highway to freedom, and nothing the South could've done about it. Instead, 99% of those who fought and died never owned slaves. 90% of the soldiers from the South weren't defending slavery, but were defending their state's sovereignty against Northerners who were more racist than they were!
I'd rather see a model of the USA that's open to other semi-sovereign states join, if they want, and enjoy our protection as long as they respect the rights of THEIR citizens. And let them secede if it isn't working out for them. But we stick with the 50 states, insist they all remain, and don't even talk about other countries/states joining us for mutual protection. We should never be in wars of defense or aggression on behalf of other sovereign nations. We should only defend our country, and let other countries join our union if they wish. But never hold a state against its will.
The primacy of the federal government is too great. It should just do the basics and let the states run their own affairs, as long as they follow the U.S. Constitution. There's your Med-4-All Jimmy. Let individual states adopt it and make it work for THEM, if they can make it work. Imposing it from the top down will be a disaster. North Dakota and New York State are like two different universes. Hell, upstate New York and New York City are like two different universes. One rule set for all? Needs to be very basic rule set, with wide discretion for each individual member state how they want to run things. If your Med-4-All is so great, then the states will learn how to do it from each other. If it's not, we're way more likely to find a better model with 50 simultaneous experiments underway.
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In answer to the original question in the opener, it IS capitalistic, in a sense, for the leaders of a socialist country to exercise functional ownership of all or most of the economy. It's like their own private piggybank. But if you're going to say it may as well be ownership, then you have to understand that it must therefore be a criminal enterprise, because you are taking those things by force from others. So it's not really private enterprise on a grander scale, even though you can make an argument for it being exactly that, on functional grounds.
I've gone down a similar rabbit-hole in my own thought experiments, because a socialist system STILL invests capital in various enterprises in order to obtain some sort of return. So in that sense, ALL systems are capitalist, and the distinctions between different systems are in who controls the capital. That's why I kind of shy away from "capitalism" as a term, entirely, and stick to "free enterprise and property rights." You either have property rights or you don't. Maybe that's a better term. Systems WITH property rights and systems without, and all gradations in between. But all systems are capitalist.
I don't think the Nazis ever nationalized Krupp Steel. Krupp just did what they wanted and they did what Krupp wanted, but last I checked, Krupp was still in operation. Some say that's the difference between fascism and socialism. You still OWN that company under fascism, but you do whatever the government tells you. Fascism, then, when viewed in economic terms, is functionally identical to socialism in that everything is how the government says, any time the government takes an interest and decides it wants something from you. That's why many in the West feel that we BECAME fascists in our war AGAINST the fascists, when you look at the regulatory web and the proliferation of government agencies regulating everything under the Sun. If you control the property, that's functionally the same as actually owning it.
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It's always been like this with the right. I remember voting Republican in the '80s, because I'm a hard-core limited-government guy, and most of the people who were voting Republican that I knew were very regressive in their thinking.
All my liberal friends voted for the wrong guy for the right reasons.
All my conservative friends voted for the right guy for the wrong reasons.
Only I, of all people on the planet, ever voted for the right guy for the right reasons (is what I thought).
I liked hanging out with the liberals. They threw better parties and had better drugs. We could hold debates and still be friends. That lasted until the Obama administration, when the left went crazy with the identity politics and so freaked out about Donald Trump that they simply couldn't be reasoned with.
You guys are kind of the "sane liberals," even though you still haven't dealt with the cognitive dissonance you experience every day, when you insist the government do MORE while at the same time fighting for liberty. Your left hand and your right hand are in an arm-wrestling match of which you are blithely unaware.
My conservative friends resented "freeloaders." They voted Republican because they despised welfare recipients.
Me, I saw the slippery slope we were on, back then. It wasn't the "freeloaders" I was worried about. I was worried about the bureaucrats who wanted to run their lives. I know my history, and I know how the welfare state was the thin edge of the wedge for German fascism.
Free medical and free education aren't to HELP the people. They're part of a system of CONTROL. Control health care (loyalty for life!) and education (indoctrinate the (Hitler) youth!), you have yourself a captive population, and we're seeing that play out in real-time, today, with more government overreach with each passing day.
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I was brought up Christian, though I'm no longer practicing. Well, I dunno. Actually, I do thank the Creator when I eat, quietly to myself. But I'm beyond the whole "Come by faith to live forever" dogma. I just see a lot of good in the creation of an archetype that I believe is all good and all knowing, and try to get to that "What would Jesus (or a good guy) do?" when facing moral questions.
But I don't believe, per sê. Not beyond the occasional superstitious twinge that God saw me flip that field-stripped cigarette (no filter) into the weeds. It's built in by years of indoctrination that I've grown beyond, in the "fervent belief" sense.
Anyway, I started this rant to say that a sincere Christian will just modify his understanding/interpretation of the wisdom in ancient scripture. You learn, if you live long enough, that it ain't all to be taken literally, not to mention the version of it that I was raised on was re-written by King James's court.
And the 10 commandments are pretty good, especially if you alter that 1st one from "I am the Lord they God...." to a humble admission "I'm a human and I didn't BUILD this world. I inhabit it and rejoice in it."
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People age differently. You'd be surprised at how many people in their 70s and 80s want a job of some sort. Lots of people die not long after retiring, because they no longer feel useful. My mom's 85, and it's a shit situation for me to be laid up, but she perked up like you wouldn't believe, when she could help me out coming over to stay for a few weeks and cooking for me.
When I get older, I'll probably want a relatively easy, part-time job, not so much for the money, but to keep my mind sharp. Otherwise, I'd probably smoke and drink myself to death in a year or two. But it's nice to have an easy job that you're not at ALL worried about being fired from.
My point is that these stories aren't necessarily elder abuse. But when an elderly person is still working in their 70s because they have no choice and they HATE it, it's heartbreaking.
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@MrFurmos What we're upset about - and why Scientific American is now considered a political propaganda magazine rather than an authoritative science magazine - is that it printed garbage science, and, in my humble opinion, it has been printing junk/politically-driven "science" for decades.
That was the point Maher made, to his credit. The fact that the garbage got printed says that the editorial board of Scientific American sucks. There's no getting away from that.
Now, maybe that junk was rammed through by the lady who got fired. But that says that Scientific American entrusted a nut case with far too much power, and with no brakes on her antics, until it finally became obvious enough to the general public that they had to do something.
That woman should never have made it that high in the staff of Scientific American, and it wouldn't, if Scientific American had meaningful standards and upheld its standards.
If you believe Scientific American is a reputable journal, then why isn't New York City under water, yet?
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Our trade "partners" haven't been very straight-up with us, for a long time. Other countries carve out a niche to subsidize and protect with tariffs. This product. That product. Until the USA is importing everything and making nothing. I get wanting the 3rd World to join the 1st, and some tolerance is called for, here and there, to get a country on its feet. Maybe it starts with something simple like high-quality pool cues, made with home-made lathes in back yards...
The Chinese are autocrats. Command economy. No respect for the rules of commerce. If they wish to COMPETE with us, they will eventually have to give up on the command economy nonsense. It's not productive of self-sustaining systems. They can't compete with us if their people aren't on par with our people. And the minute their people are on par with ours, they start getting unruly. You see it happen all the time throughout history. Using force on people is not competitive in the long run.
Use of force always leads to counter-forces down the road, in very predictable (and unsavory) ways. That's why political correctness is shredding the Democratic Party, right now. They found a way to re-brand intolerance as "I'm offended" and obliterated everyone in their path, but their own logic has turned that engine of destruction back on them. It reminds me of the Emo Williams's "'Baptists' routine."
There are now some "blue-dog" Democrats in the house, who are moderate-to-conservative on immigration and some who are moderate-to-conservative on the 2nd Amendment. Project Veritas claims many of those Democrats were just posturing to get elected, but will vote as a bloc for every scrap of 2nd-Amendment restriction they can bring to the floor. And Democrat-run committees WILL bring those bills to the floor.
I think majority-black precincts, in particular, are no longer a done deal for open-borders Democrats. And if they VOTE open borders, the black vote could split off in favor of the Republican (with the better-read individuals maybe going for the Libertarian), especially in communities hardest-hit by immigrants, and ESPECIALLY in Sanctuary-City communities. And when I say better-read, it's because with the Internet, I see a LOT of people getting REALLY smart, in very short time, by just surfing for knowledge. If you apply yourself, you can learn as fast as you can absorb, and that tends to be about 10,000% faster than waiting for your school teacher to mention it.
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And the Chinese should pay a HEAVY price for their blatant theft of intellectual property and strong-arm tactics. Given the way things are, you couldn't shut them down, instantly, but I'd put 'em on a timetable to clean up their act, and prepare to get along withOUT their business on that same timetable. What they do is unacceptable. They should also pay a premium, at the LEAST for their dirty industries. The way things are, now, we're buying their cheap stuff and thinking "What a great deal!" but that great deal comes at the cost of the air we breathe and the water and the plant and animal life.
Don't get me wrong. If I were in charge, I still might blink if I saw that my noble intentions were hurting the most vulnerable of the people. That cheap-ass $25 Chinese jacket kept that poor kid warm for the whole winter, before the stuffing came out and the zipper broke. But by the time it wore out, he'd out-grown it and the weather was warming up. You can't forget those things. Or the cost of keeping an apartment warm or cool in winter. Go all noble on taxing energy and Grandma dies of heat exhaustion, because she got behind on her electric bill. The Democrat's answer is to find some way to spend somebody else's money to help Grandma. The conservative's answer is to create the conditions where everything is more affordable for everyone and 'most everyone is pretty prosperous, with plenty left over to help Grandma, out of individual kindness and compassion.
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That game was a travesty. The fix was definitely in for the Bucs. I also thought Brady was very unsportsmanlike, putting on a drama instead of a football game. Right when it was OBVIOUS KC wasn't getting any calls, Brady had to make it all about how mean KC was, when the KC players were PISSED OFF at the terrible officiating. Maybe the Bucs win in a fair contest, that year, but that was not a fair contest. It was the first female ref in SB history and she made SURE the Bucs got off to a flying start. It was disgusting.
Who really knows what was said or heard on the field? The game reminded me of the "retaliation" game, which is popularly known as the Meltdown at Milehigh, when Shannon Sharpe threw a fit, committed an EGREGIOUS penalty, but all the pity was for HIM, because he didn't like getting knocked on his butt at the line of scrimmage by Wayne Simmons. It wrecked Simmons' career and was a black mark on Derrick Thomas who was just sticking up for his guys after Sharpe PURPOSELY went for the back of a KC player's knees. No penalty for Sharpe. Just a pity party.
Brady's considered the GOAT, but tuck rule and a plethora of other new rules to make it possible for a slow, brittle QB to thrive for over a decade. He hurts his knee standing in the pocket too long, so there's a new rule that you can't hit a QB below the damn waist. I've had enough of Brady. More than enough.
Whatever happened that day, from that moment on, Mathieu lost his mojo. In the following AFC championship, he had Joe Burrow dead to rights on a blitz, and WHIFFED.
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Just in time for Democrats to field a New Savior. "That was Biden. That wasn't us," says the DNC, which has pulled the demented liar's strings from the start.
The New Savior will have no negatives, will be blamed for nothing. That, plus Trump's strong negatives, will likely sweep the New Savior into office. Just wait. The media will be gushing over the new guy or gal, and it'll be like Jesus' 2nd Coming on MSNBC. Just wait for it.
At some point in the next 10 months, the press will pivot on mRNA vaccines and place the blame squarely on Trump, and half the MAGA crowd will turn on him, making him unelectable, when the details of Operation Warp Speed come out. Just wait. It's coming. They're going to blame their authoritarian COVID response on Trump, even down to the censorship, to keep people from questioning the mad push to run medical experiments on all of humanity.
Remember, Trump brought in the Defense Department to that operation. DOD overruled numerous concerned scientists early on. "We need it NOW." Just wait for it.
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Look at how the big operations already mess with voices they don't like.
IMHO, pushing net neutrality in the name of fairness may only cement the big boys on top, with a heavy-handed government fucking things up for the little guy. In the ABSENCE of a big government presence, I think there's a better chance of outfits who treat people WELL to compete.
Net neutrality needs to be a SELLING point, and let the people vote with their money.
The best way to fight motherfuckers is to encourage new business models to prosper, than to impose what's "right" by force, from on high.
I DO believe you should be able to access whatever you want, but I think that in the long run, leaving it up to people to decide as consumers (free traders!), without interference, is the best thing for REAL net neutrality.
This means rather than waiting with bated breath for the next move from the FCC, we should simply look for better vendors. TELL vendors what you want and expect. They LOVE to survey people, right?
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I think that birth control and horny men convinced the feminists that it was more important to have fun and be independent than it was to be serious and raise a family. Technology has enabled many things, but at least for the time being, women still risk a lot more than men when they have sex. There's still no getting around it.
I'm not going to go Biblical on people and say it's because "God Said," but there's a reason all those "God Said"s persist in the culture to this day: People who followed what (a small number of people said that ) God Said went on to have families and be successful down through the generations, so whether God Said or not, those prescriptions for living lasted over long spans of time and space. If it didn't work, people who lived by such nonsense would have perished from the Earth, per Darwin.
As Jordan Peterson has said, meddling with tradition is perilous. Something silly to us and defended by mere dogma, could be one of the keys to human progress. As something of an iconoclast (or so I'm told), I'm not averse to poking holes in Christian dogma. But being the court jester who criticizes what better people have built, I'm the last person you should ask for solutions. So let me fill you in before you ask.
For the time being, traditional modesty and withholding sex from men who are not wholly committed to your offspring and able to back it up are still what's best for most women. Just because you think Chad is a high-value man doesn't mean revealing all your mysteries to him without a proven commitment is not going to make you a high-value woman in Chad's eyes. Just because you can get Chad into bed doesn't mean Chad's at all interested in putting a ring on your finger. The fact that you let Chad into your bed disqualified you, on the spot! Of COURSE he told you that you're special, and he wasn't lying. That doesn't mean he has any intention of spending his life and his fortune on YOU.
There are a LOT of average and above-average women out there with broken hearts, because Chad ghosted them.
I think women are waking up, though. I think if you look at the economy and the monetary system, a wife who stays at home, grows a garden and does her canning and coupon-clipping is worth her weight in gold, nowadays. That's how my grandma was. And you better BELIEVE she was the BOSS of that household. Grandpa gave her his check and took out enough allowance to go bowling, and that was about it. When my mother was 10 years old, Grandma said "Let's go for a ride. I want to look at houses."
To Grandpa's shock, she directed him straight to the place she intended to buy and paid cash for it, out of the house fund she built up for over 10 years. Grandpa doled out all the whoopings, but always with a rueful smile, and always on Grandma's orders. It wasn't perfect. She could be pretty domineering. She was a TRULY strong and independent woman, and a LADY. You didn't dare defy her DIGNITY. IOW, not at all like today's strong and independent women who shout it from the rooftops, while tears stream down their cheeks.
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Pfizer wouldn't be free from threats of being sued if not for a MASSIVE government intervention. That same government that Jimmy insists should run our health care.
Cognitive dissonance much, Jimmy? Liberty is the way out of this quagmire, not more government.
You want all the healthy people to foot the bill for all the unhealthy people, regardless of the decisions made by the unhealthy people. In a situation like that, health care costs go through the roof, because the irresponsible people get a blank check. That's when you progressives - to perfect your socialist schemes - will turn full-on authoritarian, because if the government is paying and people are abusing the system, then we need to cut them off or somehow hold them accountable, so more government intrusion. We'll outlaw everything that's bad for you.
"Liberals" think this is OK. We'll just make people live healthy.
What's the answer? Make everyone responsible for themselves and encourage people to be charitable. It's not perfect. but your way is tyranny and bad health, which we've seen plenty of, but you don't see it. You think that bureaucrats can be made into instant geniuses and instant saints, so we only have perfect people telling everyone what to do. sigh
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If anything, Manafort was an ENEMY of Putin's. He worked to get the Ukraine to join the E.U. and break away from Russia. And if you go a little farther back, to the fall of the Soviet Union, Manafort was one of many outsiders working with former-Soviet oligarchs, to pick the bones of the former Soviet Union gobbling up everything that wasn't nailed down. A LOT of money simply LEFT Russia through these bone-picking operations, if I understand correctly, and bad as that was, they didn't pay a nickel in taxes on any of it. My guess is you take whatever tax fraud Manafort committed in the USA and multiply it by 10 or 100, and that's the level of tax fraud he perpetrated against the Russians.
And that was just fine as far as the Obama Administration and the Clintons were concerned, when they closed the books on Manafort in 2014, UNTIL Manafort got involved in the Trump campaign. I imagine a LOT of their cronies participated in the post-cold-war feeding frenzy on the carcass of the Soviet Bloc. There was a big "Aha!" moment, then, and they figured they had Manafort by the short hairs, and they could flip him and make him testify to anything they wanted. I'm just really surprised that he didn't flip.
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I think the missile launches were more show than anything else. Big show. Lots of bang and boom. But they gave plenty of warning, warned people out of the area. People got out of the area, and big show.
Possibly (Yeah, it's a reach.), he was throwing Deep State a bone. But rather than feeding Isis just to fuck with Syria (and Russia), he basically said "You're on your own." That's a major departure from feeding rebels false hopes, just so you can see them kill your enemies and get killed in the process. It makes sense, in a totally Machiavellian way, but is not a moral policy for use to be pursuing, which is why I like Jimmy Dore.
I just don't see how meddling with other countries' internal politics - even seeking regime change - is very moral. And it always blows back on us a year or two or ten down the road, when things get "so bad" that we are then JUSTIFIED in more stupid shit.
Obama didn't put on any big shows. He just quietly dumped tons of bombs with non-stop drone attacks, and kept things stirred up.
I may not like Syria, but I'm glad we seem to be going through the herky-jerky motions of getting the hell out.
Only time will tell how much is Trump just being another style of pawn or if he actually disengages us, over time, from a lot of our Cold War mentality.
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Schellenberger's still deluded, just like all so-called "liberals," because he believes that we can have nanny government take care of us and we can still be free. So you guys rail against censorship and authoritarianism, but you're the guys who brought it to us, by insisting that government care for us from cradle to grave.
That's serfdom, fellas, no matter how you dress it up or lie to yourselves. You want your cake and to eat it too. You want Free Stuff and you want to be free. That's not how the universe works. You create these enormous bureaucracies to run everything and then you're all pissed-off because bureaucrats are trying to run everything by diktat.
Don't like what the FDA's doing? Liberals wanted the agency to have the powers it quite predictably abuses. Then they act all shocked and surprised, when anyone with any understanding of history could've predicted this is where we'd end up. In fact, we DID predict this, and you scoffed at us.
These problems are of your own making, and you will be stuck on a wheel of treating symptoms without treating the disease. The disease is making the mistake of believing that the state is your source of well-being. The state doesn't care about you. The state cares about the state, and is jealous of power and always seeking to expand its power. It's the nature of the beast.
You welcomed the beast into your home and now you're crying because it tore up your living room!
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@IntensitaliansDick : You don't know many libertarians, then, fool. I'm a libertarian and I help people AND pay taxes that hurt my ability to help more people. Progressives love to virtue-signal on somebody else's dime. Conservatives contribute far more of their wealth to charity, voluntarily, than libtards who TALK a good game, but use every trick in the book to avoid paying more taxes. The worst are the super-wealthy libtards, who talk about raising taxes on everybody but won't voluntarily part with one nickel of their OWN money.
You guys see the golden goose represented by my paycheck and set out to GUT IT for the gold, inside.
You guys bitch about abuse of power by careerist politicians and bureaucrats, and then you turn right around and say "Let's give government MORE power!" What could go wrong? Feeding the dragon is fun, and then you get to whine about getting burned, totally un-self-aware of your own hand in the abuses you see.
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@Deargodwhat : Seeing this, did it ever occur to you to NOT give those bastards in government as much power as you insist on giving them? Did it ever occur to you that the government regulations and regulators you guys always scream for are the REASON things are as crazy as they are? Did it occur to you that the USDA and the FDA are the reason why only fake-organic foods at the grocery store produced by big-corporate (non-organic) farms get the label "organic," while the REAL organic farmer, just down the road from you can't even sell his 100% organic crops as "organic?"
The list is endless. Everything you guys think you're going to "solve" by government intervention becomes a chronic problem the minute we put 5 guys in Washington in charge of it? Those 5 guys will all be bribed, coerced, or otherwise manipulated to do the bidding of the most corrupt asshole in whatever business it is they're regulating. In a Free Market, in which none of you assholes believe, trust and your good reputation set a far higher standard than government minimums.
Housing construction is regulated up the ying-yang. That's why so many foundations leak, nowadays. Think about the collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel. Very highly regulated industry. Substandard construction, signed-off on by a bought-and-paid-for bureaucrat they call a "building inspector."
You guys seek the appearance of perfection, and abandon what's good or BETTER. The EPA won't sign off on a rocket-stove mass heater, so the only way to burn wood at 90% higher efficiency is to build it, yourself, or with the help of volunteers. They probably don't MEAN to be anti-environment, but they're fuckin' bureaucrats and the rules say 300 degrees Fahrenheit at the roof line or not approved. So harvesting ALL the heat from a 45-minute burn that is cleaner than ANY government-approved wood-burning device is against federal regulations.
We see it over and over. Monsanto sues a farmer because their GMO pollen was blown over his crops. He didn't ask for GMO pollen, didn't WANT GMO pollen, but he is at fault, because he's violating Monsanto's patent. Shit like that goes on all the time. You clean the garbage and junk off the vacant lot next door and they slap you with a fine for disturbing a wetlands.
You guys push endlessly for big government, blissfully unaware that big government is the only way robber barons can prosper in perpetuity without fear of competition from little guys. Then you rail against corporations. Then you push for higher corporate and capital-gains taxes, which are always passed on to the consumer - US - and restrict the ability and willingness of anybody to take a risk on a venture that could actually provide JOBS. You guys are too busy dividing-up the wealth that you already see, to understand where it comes from or why that wealth always vanishes when you guys get your way.
Your narrative > reality. Feels good to talk about all the people "you" are helping, when really you're just sucking the prosperity and autonomy of everyone around you.
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No apology whatsoever for how they treated everyone who had a better grasp of the evidence, the moral principles at stake, and the long-term consequences of the literally deadly errors that were being forced on them by resentful, mean-spirited and vicious idiots, shouting us down and calling US ignorant, science-denying, selfish, and evil people who didn't deserve to work, have access to their bank, or have a decent reputation.
Screw all of them until there's a REAL come-to-Jesus moment, not just for being wrong, but for how vicious they were towards people who got it right. They wouldn't listen to the evidence. They couldn't grasp "relative" versus "absolute" risk. They ignored the actual moral issues at stake, as well as the medical issues at stake.
Now, of course, they'll expect US to PAY for the fallout.
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This expansion of NATO is more apparent than real. Who cares that Brazil's recently joined? It's a moribund institution that is NOTHING without the USA. I think it more likely that USA, Brazil and Russia form the kernel of a new kind of world order, in which sovereign nations participate in multilateral and VOLUNTARY association and cooperation. After years of U.N. and E.U., we know that giving any person or corporation quasi-national functions will give that person or corporation (super)national-government pretensions. Taking on the functions and the forms that always accrue, this is inevitable.
The thing the one-worlders don't get is that you can't have that kind of World Order without the use of force, because to rule the world under One Law, you'd have to change Every nation's laws and norms, in some way or another. Sorry to say, not all cultures see the world the same as ours. So they must be crushed, right? What could go wrong? Haven't we seen this, before?
The thing the one-worlders don't get is that you can't have one world until everybody lives about the same, or is in natural balance with their differences across entire continents. We're nowhere close to that, and it ain't right to force everybody else to live, think, and believe as we do, just as I'm gonna drag my feet on the Muslim Prayer thing.
But I've been thinkin' on that, too. Is there some way to meld the Siesta in with Prayer? I think it's actually beneficial to have daily rhythms that insert that afternoon nap or that quick trip to the grocery store, where you know the guy takes an early/late siesta, so there's always some place open, but everybody's got some down time, except maybe truckers.
But when and if we DO start living pretty much the same, everywhere, national borders will wither away and die on their own. As long as national borders are needed, they will exist. When thtings are the same on both sides of the border, people will start becoming irritated at the required check-point. "Why is going to see Uncle in the next town require a passport? As we evolve - as I hope and expect we shall (with many stumbles) - borders will seem ridiculous and antiquated.
In the meantime, there are a lot of Central and South American countries that don't do right by their people, and their people see a country that does, to the North. Totally understandable they'd want to get here. Not understandable is why and HOW we Americans pay for their entry into our country, illegally. Are YOU going to take in 5 or 10 foreign nationals, with no money and no job? Where do you think they'll go, then? That's right. Straight to the worst neighborhoods in the USA, where it's dangerous for them, whether they're good or bad, and their arrival injects more poor people without jobs into the local community, increases the likelihood one will turn to crime and increases the viability of predatory behavior by predators already in place, plus whatever other predators sneaked across the border. It creates a lot of misery, and it makes it tougher for our own working poor to survive on their own.
So the local community pays? Or do things just get harder on all the poor people who already lived there? The "nobility" of open-borders sentiment is a cover for contempt and disrespect for our OWN weakest and most vulnerable. Good intentions come at a cost. And acting on good intentions without seeing the entire picture can - and often does - lead to great harm.
I get a kick out of the Chinese protesters in Canada ("They Baizuo"). I love the Chinese people. Somehow you get the best people under tyranny, and the Chinese have lived under wicked rulers for millennia. Those kind of people in the American West became the people who slithered down cliffs to drill for dynamite blasting to punch the transcontinental railway through the Rockies! Whites would mine out a gold vein and leave, and the Chinese would come in and get rich re-working the tailings! They were SO good that we whites RESENTED them. Always taking the shitty jobs. Always laboring mightily and usually prospering, given a CHANCE in a free country. No matter the hardship. They GET the American Dream. See much the same in Asians, generally.
Why do you think blacks don't much like Koreans? Because only Koreans are hard-nosed enough to see a buck in opening a store up in the worst black neighborhoods. Trying to keep their doors open, they will go to whatever lengths necessary to protect their goods and their business. It creates tension in communities infested by hoodlums, because to the Koreans, EVERYbody looks like a hoodlum. They treat the good people just like they are (or might be) the bad ones who come in, setting the races against each other, when really the only bad people in the picture are the young hoodlums.
Sure, you could force it, but you'd take on the same form as Temajin Khan (You left out the Mongols, Peter.), your over-arching government would look to all of history like the most potent imperialistic power - and most tyrannical - of all time. Tyranny is the unintended dagger in the heart of any plan to unify the planet before the planet's ready. How do we get to ready? By doing the opposite of what we've been doing for the last 100 years or so.
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Last I checked, the tax cut gave us a bump in revenue, the same way a price cut can increase your profits.
You knuckleheads may not know this, but Colorado wanted to help fish and game by X amount, so they jacked up the price of out-of-state hunting licenses by the desired amount. Revenues plummeted, because out-of-staters stopped buying the licenses, because they were so damn expensive. Same deal with things like capital-gains taxes, which never hurt big business, directly, because they just pass on the cost to consumers that you knuckleheads think you're helping. But it does stop people taking risks, because the returns are smaller.
But I'll agree 100% on the SPENDING side. Trump's military spending might be the only reason the Deep State is letting him live.
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Trying to do for Stalingrad what you did for Crusader was EXTREMELY ambitious, and the 100,000 who loved it are possibly the only 100,000 people in the world who care deeply enough to do it justice.
With 250k subscribers and 100k views, you are hopefully making enough money to hire an able assistant or two. I never learned how to do that until injuries forced me to direct others, rather than just handle everything, myself. Especially the editing stuff, which you probably think only you can do. I'm that way with my math videos. But your strength is your research and analysis. If I were you, I'd take a step back and try to strategize what things to delegate and how to go about it.
I'm a great one to talk, because I make shit up as I go along, and delegate mundane tasks on an ad hoc basis. But I get better at it as I go along. The toughest thing for me is the helper not reading my mind, i.e., when they f*** up, it's because I didn't make myself clear enough and/or anticipate the bits that they need explained. The beauty of it is when you find somebody who's actually competent and self-disciplined enough, they don't need everything spelled-out, and just do things on their own initiative.
I bet you could find one or five people out there who'd love to do the heavy lifting for you for free or nominal compensation, just to work with you and get a mention.
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@asantekotoko2047 We need government, but we'll never learn how NOT to ask government to solve all our problems for us. This nation is supposed to be based on the most limited gov't consistent with civil order, that will leave us the hell alone to solve our own problems. But people know that the feds can make all their dreams come true, so they don't care. "Just solve all MY problems for me."
There's no escape from it. People will always vote themselves a living or a new whatever, if they CAN, so they always DO. That's the downfall of all democracies, a downfall the U.S. Constitution is designed to PREVENT, which is why our history is one of never-ending circumventions and erosion of the Constitution, to solve "the crisis of the day."
The Federal Government is Sauron's One Ring, from Middle Earth. Everybody who gets their hands on it is SURE that THEY will only use that power for good, and that leads us straight into Mordor (or NYC or San Fran. Same difference. Same self-created hellscapes.).
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Yes. You're never voting for the president. You're voting for the president's team. No president can get into the weeds of everything the federal government does. He has to delegate authority and trust his top people.
This was one of the ways Trump went wrong in his 1st go-round. He trusted people he shouldn't have trusted. Treasury Dept looks like it could be a problem.
As far as "trash (crypto) coins" are concerned, they're no worse than the fiat currency issued by the federal government. One of the biggest factors in a sound currency or coinage is the faith the people have in its value. Inflation, bad as it is, routinely lags behind the actual value of the dollar, because it takes time for everyday people to realize. It takes time for inflationary policies to catch up to actual inflation on the street.
Fiat currency is very much like the fable of Stone Soup, which probably pre-dates the Biblical tale of the "Loaves and the fish," wherein Jesus supposedly turned 3 loaves and 2 fish into a meal for a multitude. I think they're saying something about the faith of the people in a thing.
If everybody BELIEVES there's really something to that pot of boiling water the grifter just threw a rock into and started smacking his lips over, then everybody wants a taste. If the cost of a taste is their participation - a carrot from one guy, a potato from another guy, and so on - then in the end, you get a great big pot of tasty stew! Their BELIEF made it so.
In my opinion, that's what the loaves and the fishes was. People were hungry, but everybody shared some of what they had, and the result was everybody getting fed.
This phenomenon has propped up Keynesian economics for close to a century. Just pump money into the economy and good things seem to happen. But I don't believe it for a minute. Eventually, the overabundance of money makes a guy charge more - because he CAN - and everybody else joins in, and a loaf of bread goes from a nickel to a dollar to 2 dollars, and so on.
Who really benefits from this? Rich people who can inflation-proof their assets and the government that wants to do all manner of things without the actual means to do any of those things. Who suffers? People who live their lives morally and prudently, by working hard and saving money. Who suffers the most? Old people whose live savings and preparations for their retirement go up in smoke, unless they're rich enough to invest in things that keep up with or out-pace inflation.
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The fact is, right or wrong, we made ourselves dependent on Chinese products. I think we should wean ourselves off a good bit of it, but not before we know what we're going to replace their products with. But we don't need a trade war and we certainly don't need a hot war with ANY major power or super power, especially in their back yard, which is where the USA does all its fighting, which makes the people a lot more OK with what they're doing, like the French people were when Napoleon Bonaparte was dominating the continent.
They weren't bad people. They were just told that it was the "right thing to do," "Isn't Bonaparte charismatic?" and most of all "There's nothing anybody can do to stop us." They enjoyed some great economic benefits from the spoils of Europe, and so they didn't ask many questions about right or wrong, because things were good and seemingly going to keep getting better, forever...
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@princeobah7995 When the USA was originally constituted, and for over a century AFTER ratification of the U.S. Constitution, EVERYBODY KNEW that "The Press" meant people with a political (or theological) axe to grind. The point of the 1st Amendment wasn't to ensure helpless consumers of news got the truth, but to respect EVERYone 's right to speak their mind. There was no "Ministry of Truth."
The point was that everybody's got a bias, and the everyday person should be able to pick and choose what seems the most truthful to THEM. The so-called "Fairness Doctrine" was a huge bait-and-switch, where people were FOOLED into believing that the BIG NETWORKS and BIG PAPERS were printing objective truth, without fail. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Now, rather than being pissed off at how far off the rails the legacy networks are, I REJOICE at the fact that the hidden bias is now out in the open and the people are finally aware of it. There are some decent rags out there who get most things right, like Just The News. The Hill's got a more obvious axe to grind, but they're mostly truthful about the things they choose to report. The REAL censorship/bias is in the choice of what to report at all, and it's refreshing to see some conservative bias to balance the statist bias that prevails on all the legacy networks whose news ratings are in the tank.
I think the independents are going to piggyback on the legacy news until the legacy news runs out of steam, and demand for hard facts and real news creates a whole new ecosystem of reporters and news agencies. Until the legacy networks dry up and lose their monopoly on 90% of the reporting, things won't really change much from what we have now. But they're running out of steam as we speak. Ratings are causing more and more layoffs. Eventually, there'll be a market for a whole new class of independent reporters or freelancers, contracting with different channels or forming co-ops. Like to see the co-op thing take root.
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It's a problem, all right. But what do we do about it without upsetting checks and balances? The fact is, the federal gov't has stuck its nose into too many things, and now Congress and the President have UNIMAGINED powers. The Congress, in particular, has the power to create agencies that even IT can't oversee, and THEIR power is terrifying!
We didn't stop it when FDR packed the Supreme Court to push HIS program, in defiance of the U.S. Constitution. And federal judges can MAKE policies that cost the taxpayer billions, without one of us or a single of our representatives or senators voting on it. Forced busing. Interference in border control, which is arguably the MAIN thing the gov't exists to do!
What we have, now, is a system in which the gov't doesn't do its job but meddles in everything under the sun. There's a web of laws and regulations that's so complex that NObody understands it, fully, and a lawyer can twist to mean just about anything they please. And a judge can use the slightest technicality to thwart the will of the people and the actions of duly elected representatives and president. "General Welfare" has zero to do with "welfare check, crop support, bank bailout, automaker bailout."
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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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A self-professed "anarcho-communist."
He does make a good point about the War on Drugs, though. We make millions into law-breakers, rather than treat them like citizens with a medical condition. If you smoke weed or do hard drugs, you don't want cops around, and you're suspicious of cops.
There's no reason for that. A druggie should just be another intoxicated citizen, who may need to spend the night in the drunk tank. But making the drugs, themselves, illegal, the cops are out there enforcing laws that otherwise good and nonviolent people break every day. And they create an ecological niche for organized crime.
We DO need to stop feeding the prison industrial complex. We do need to stop feeding MS13 and all other drug gangs. Drug abuse isn't something you fix by criminalizing it. Legalize it. Tax it. Install clinics with those funds from purchase of the drugs, right next door to the drug store, which should operate a lot like state-licensed liquor stores.
That's how you grapple with evils like alcohol. Tax it and hold people strictly accountable for their actions.
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I think ending the War on Drugs and putting police back in the business of ONLY protecting persons and property would go a long way towards better relations with police. There's a culture of lawlessness that is fed by laws that a significant fraction of the population at odds with the police. Yeah, there are incidents of abuse by police. It's the nature of the position, and why you want to minimize any problems, starting by severely restricting their mandate.
If a man wants to ruin his life with a needle in his arm, it's not the job of the police to incarcerate him. Take every nickel on drug-law enforcement and plow it into public health to minimize the harm, and help addicts kick the habit, with clinics funded by the taxes on the drugs! Turn a net negative into a net plus.
There are a lot of the wrong incentives built into our system by policy-makers. And we know some things have to change. But BLM probably isn't getting us any closer to long-term, self-sustaining solutions. The next thing I'd attack is the absence of fathers in the lives of too many kids - especially boys. Too many boys, nowadays, don't know how to be a strong, restrained man, because they don't have a Dad around, who CAN kick everybody's ass, but DOESN'T, and doesn't impose his will by force.
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@stanspb763 Russia is more like America used to be than America is, now. They're even openly and aggressively Christian. I think it's a culture war they're fighting with Islam. They want traditional Christian values as a counter-weight to Islam, and it appears to be working.
I think it's sheer pragmatism on the part of Putin's government. The "traditional Russian Orthodox" angle also gives them historical claims to parts of Turkey they want, in order to lay claim to Mediterranean beachfront property, which Russia has been denied by Western Europe for centuries and by the USA and NATO for the past 80 years.
Russia is also on a sound financial footing, by most accounts. Basically a gold-standard currency, budget surpluses, etc. They don't waste money on the sex life of the snail darter or bringing LGBT and transgender messages to Pakistan. Yes. Our country is spending money to "liberalize" Pakistan.
I'd be interested in knowing how the quality of health care is in Russia. It was terrible under the Soviets. Nobody wanted to be a doctor, because socialist promises always end up cheating someone, and in the USSR, they cheated the doctors. Most doctors dreamed of being farmers.
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Carving out nations by force in far-distant lands is not a "liberal" notion or the highest ideal of Western Civ. It's Old-World imperialism/colonialism. The state of Israel is an artificiality imposed by force on the people of Palestine. I don't care how great the Jews are or how "liberal" the state of Israel is made out to be. It's not sustainable without enormous external support against the will of every nation in the region.
Israel is the poster child for 'sunk-cost fallacy.' If we feel so strongly about a Jewish homeland, why don't we give up an equivalent amount of real estate for such a homeland here in America? Give 'em a chunk of Arizona or Nevada desert. With their know-how and work ethic and modern permaculture tech, they'd turn it into an oasis in one generation.
No. This is about (in essence) British imperialism, grafted effortlessly onto American foreign policy at the end of the failing British Empire. It's not their or our place to re-draw the map to please them or us.
When I look at the Muslim world, I see a lust to expand, but I also see centuries of invasion, for instance the Mongol invasion, that decimated and weaponized Islam. Brought out the worst potentialities. We picked up where the Mongols and then the British left off, and we wonder why they hate us and why they behave like Guerrillas in the Peninsular war against Napoleon. We call it "terror," when suicide bombers lash out, but call our conventional use of arms in a hopelessly lopsided war as "righteous."
WE shaped and promoted radical Islam, whenever we wanted to take out an existing government in the region, by arming ethnic minorities to fight as rebels against governments we didn't like. Mujahedeen in Afghanistan? We prepped and equipped them. Over and over, we fight agains the violence and spite that WE CREATED! And we blame the people we trained and propagandized into the most regressive and dangerous interpretation of Muslim belief for being violent and regressive.
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"I hate the fact that you're not socialist enough. We need MORE government! I'm done with the Democrats."
You realize that the infrastructure and control systems associated with your socialist utopia are EXACTLY what a would-be tyrant would want in place to become fully authoritarian, don't you? No. Obviously, you do not.
Look at the history of Germany. You know one of the biggest reasons the people embraced the Nazis was because of generations of free health care and education, don't you? The people got used to being taken care of, and that their obedience and loyalty to the state was considered their duty, don't you? You realize that government-run education was the primary means of indoctrinating the young people into Nazism, don't you?
You're right about so much, Jimmy. You see the abuse of power, but you insanely think the problem is the government doesn't have enough power. You're always shocked and surprised, like Charlie Brown, when you discover the people you gave all that power to are not saints, and they're USING the power you insist on giving them to create tyranny.
You see the symptoms, but you never see the underlying issue, which is giving these SOBs responsibility for your well-being. With that responsibility comes AUTHORITY. You want authority over your own life? You tired of being censored, de-platformed, and de-banked? Quit asking the government to take care of you! You're just asking for the worst people to end up with power over you, if not today, then tomorrow.
And now we're in the "tomorrow" stage, and you still don't get it.
"We don't trust you! You're corrupt! Now give us more stuff!" Fools.
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The turtle tank is a low-cost solution. The Russian lead in tank production is pretty unassailable. These are vehicles that are built to win a war of attrition in the new battlefield that has many drones, but fewer tanks.
I think people obsess over territorial gains, when the purpose of the Russians is to attrit Ukrainian forces, while steadily building up its own.
Maybe all the turtle tank is doing is forcing Ukraine to use more drones, thereby exposing their operators to counter-measures by drones, conventional artillery, and air strikes. If the turtle takes a lot more drones or more expensive drones to combat, that helps the Russians.
People make much of these armored columns racing towards Ukrainian positions, but I see them as probing attacks. Ukraine must respond to each of these attacks, which reveals their strength levels and troop and artillery dispositions. Western propaganda makes much of the destruction of these old tanks, but "winning" all these skirmishes comes at a higher cost to the Ukrainians than the Russians.
When you stop to think about how expendable these monstrosities are to the Russians, it changes the calculus quite a bit.
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He's hard to listen to, but if you don't understand the arguments of your opposition, then you don't fully understand your own. The left-right principles have always and will always be in tension.
I would argue that left and right have flipped. Being left USED to mean that you were sick and tired of being robbed and told what to do, with your very life in the hands of the aristocracy, to a left that has quietly anointed bureaucrats as the New Aristocracy, who will provide your every need in return for abject subservience, unswerving obedience, and gray conformity. The left BECAME the establishment, and it turns out that their form of self-rule is identical to the serfdom under monarchy (and its minions in the aristocracy) that we fought for millennia to defeat.
Most leftists THINK they're the ones who understand "progress" better than anyone else, but really, whether they know it or not - and most seem not to - is dragging us back into serfdom. I say "seem," because whenever I drill a little deeper in debates with so-called liberals, the authoritarian measures they support in order to make it all work are horrific. "What if we breed up an entire generation of irresponsible welfare mothers, who make babies like rabbits? Is it OK to sterilize them?" It turns out it IS, if the "collective good" is threatened. "Do you realize what you're saying? Do you not see the iron fist in that velvet glove?" There's a mean-spirited contempt for "average people" that I find appalling. The whole REASON for nanny government is the deeply embedded notion that people are not fit to care for themselves and each other. And every program they create to solve the problem just makes more people who are a problem.
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Madasin ! The press is SUPPOSED to be biased and opinionated. And BOTH sides or all 3 or 4 or 5 sides should have a voice. And this is NOT to be compelled by government, but ALLOWED by government. And government should be strictly limited and unable to impede ANYone's right to grind their axe as loudly as possible. From this, we get the closest approximation to the truth of which flawed human beings are capable. That's why the 1st Amendment exists.
The Founding Fathers figured EVERYbody is prone to embroidering the truth for their side or their tribe. The solution is imperfect, but it's the best one we have: Let EVERYone speak, and let the PEOPLE decide whom to believe. From this, our university system led this country from pre-modern to MODERN thought, based on science and the rough-and-tumble contest of ideas that is rarely pretty, but just happens to be better than anything else yet devised by Man.
Only people who want everything their own way and want to use force to MAKE it their way have a real problem with this. Meanwhile, the universities have become the bastion of illiberal PRE-Modern thought, with "Today's Narrative" taking the place of "God's Revealed Wisdom." But it's all the same. And the same kinds of Puritannical people, who sit in judgement of others while their own home and life are cesspools of corruption. They're the Jimmy Swaggarts who preach on Sunday and hire a whore on Monday.
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@summertime104 : They didn't expect university professor Corsi to say "Fuck you!" I think that was a shocker.
I do think Manaforte is probably up to his eyeballs in corruption. His tax evasions in the USA are probably nothing compared to all the money he took out of Russia and Ukraine, tax-free. The USA sent hundreds, if not thousands of carpetbaggers to Ukraine to pick the bones of the former Soviet Union. Inasmuch as it was Dems in power the previous 8 years, I imagine the scent is fresher on Democrat trails than Republican trails, but corrupt members of both parties are in DEEP, and that's why there's bipartisan opposition to Trump.
I'm amazed he's made it this far, and appears to have even turned the corner. Now he's on offense, and the screaming is reaching a peak.
The key thing to observe, here, is the growing number of red-pilled citizens. Every pro-Trumper has only been confirmed in their beliefs since 2016. And we keep chipping away at the lies of the Establishment. And best of all, the monolith of so-called mainstream media is collapsing. It happens slowly, one red pill at a time, but people watching the nightly news who have any memory at all can see just how the narrative shifts and pivots every day, as the previous day's "news" is yet AGAIN exposed as FAKE. Some people are too stupid or too numb to notice. This will always be the case. But the society is finally building up immunity to the blandishments of billionaires who own the legacy media.
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multisphere1 : This is the beauty of going after corruption in the CIA. The CIA always gets it wrong, use dirty tricks to hide the fact, and then it all blows up in their faces. Time after time. From the 1950s to the present day. They're good at smearing and manipulating. Unfortunately for me, my dad left books laying around on psy-ops, black, white and gray propaganda. It made me very skeptical of what I saw on t.v. and made me a fact-checker. Now, I'm old, and I've checked enough facts over the decades to be pretty sure what the lay of the land is. Trump's kind of like that, too, only it's more experiential for him, because he MET the fuckers, when they were cozying up to his billions and his brand over the last 30 or 40 years.
That's why I'm slightly optimistic that things will be better and continue improving in the future. If anybody knows what kind of corrupt and conniving liars he's dealing with, it's Trump. I just hope he knew what he was getting into when he announced his candidacy, because by then, it was probably too late to lay plans. The way he's handled himself suggests he DID know. That he KNEW there'd be a shit-storm of allegations and hysterical narratives, because he was going for the throat of the leviathan, and BOTH major parties are corrupt and in it for themselves and not the people they represent. Trump following through on his campaign promises is a revolutionary act. And the elites won't have it.
We'll see if they can stop it. I don't think they can, because their unparalleled success over the years made them think everybody else is stupid and that they're immune. But their controls are slipping. Sure, they control the legacy media, but nobody's WATCHING legacy media, any more. Biden's this clever insider who let Trump Team steal the Domain Name of their outreach-to-Latinos website. Underneath the frightening CONTROL, we see weak-minded incompetence. Same with guys like Schumer, Pelosi, Shitt and Gonadler.
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Madasin ! : Obama had a get-out-of-jail-free card as the first black president. He could've used it to be a statesman. Instead, he abused his powers and weaponized the government against his political foes. What he did was 10 times worse than ANYthing Trump's done. In 2016, I dismissed Trump as a car salesman. In 2020, I'm voting for him, proudly.
One thing I will say for your comment is that I agree that presidents have too much power. Trump's brought this to the attention of Democrats who are HORRIFIED that he's using executive orders to rescind unconstitutional executive orders by Obama. And what REALLY chaps their hide, of course, is the very rules that THEY PASSED to fast-track presidential nominations for THEIR GUY is now being exploited by Trump, magnificently.
I kind of like that all this scrutiny of Trump is taking place, because maybe there'll be some kind of check on future presidents as a result. New Rule: No wars without a Declaration of War by the full congress, signed by the president. If you can't get that, you can't go around blowin' shit up.
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The U.S. Constitution actually reflects this sentiment. It's EASY to get a majority to go for really stupid things, but there's always about 1/3 of the people who won't go for extremely stupid stuff. So what did the Founding Fathers do?
They built the best founding document they could, on which 2/3 of everybody could agree. They enshrined that 2/3 majority in our founding document, with a rule that said "You need 2/3 majority to change anything. Anything the federal government wasn't told it MAY do, it may NOT do."
That worked amazingly well for an amazingly long time, but the rot of corruption set in. Using bare majorities and a politicized Supreme Court, they opened up the floodgates for the federal government to basically do anything, intervene in anything, and do as it pleased, which is unconstitutional as hell. Some think Lincoln was the beginning of the end, suspending habeus corpus by edict, the better to fight a war against half of the nation.
And because slavery is a bad thing, he gets nothing but praise. But during and after his presidency, the power of the federal government grew by leaps and bounds. The rest is a sad story of the slow, inexorable de-construction of life, liberty, and property.
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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 always theorized that you take out of a hallucinogenic experience what you take into it, whether you know you're packing baggage or not. I always felt like it tore down the walls between conscious and sub-conscious. Whatever ends of worms there are buried in your mind can be seen and dealt with. Those worms can also give you a "bad trip."
I think the standard wormy bits revolve around existential angst. We can bury thoughts of death MOST of the time, but it's always percolating under the surface, which is why there were so many stories of "Jesus freaks" in LSD circles. They can't hide from the abyss when these drugs bare their subconscious.
I had a bad trip of my own, but somehow realized at some point that I was projecting my own fears on the world around me in that state.
I'd beware using them around the "wrong people," and determining who the right people are can be problematic. I wrestled with my own demons at what started out as parties, many a time. Some people were toxic, some were vulnerable, some were contemplative. Nobody really knew what they were doing, and some had "bad trips." IMO, nobody set out to mess with somebody's head, but a lot of that took place.
Under the influence, I could read a room like nobody's business. I KNEW things about people I had never met. iMO, it was because my subconscious picks up on clues that my conscious mind doesn't. Ordinarily, I'd just get a feeling about somebody, but not be able to put my finger on why, even though that feeling eventually proved to be correct.
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Yes and no. Keynesians love slurping up every erg of surplus energy available in the system, give it to government, and then say "$ee? Big government is why the economy is so big!"
On the other hand, the fable of $tone $oup teaches a vital truth of which Keynesians avail themselves and that is that the value of paper currency has more to do with the faith put in it than the actual value. Inflation always lags behind inflationary actions, and that lag does create wealth on paper.
Also, infrastructure projects: roads, bridges and dams, do appear to make everyone wealthier in the medium term, but maybe the spread of human civilization across the entire planet needs no artificial accelerants, and the great success of federal infrastructure projects only led to a more wasteful and destructive way of life than if infrastructure were left to entrepreneurs and local communities. Boy that federally-funded highway/railroad was great for trade, but maybe America would've turned out OK if the expansion were mutually agreed to, and negotiated, rather than imposed by force by larger populations on smaller populations that were living quite sustainably on those lands, already, and the unsustainable city folks have to steal to survive. They love "our democracy." "You have to move. We voted on it."
If your way is truly better, folks will adopt your way, over time, in the natural course of things.
Anyway, I've always doubted the "grow or die" philosophy. Growth mandated by political entities isn't organic growth, and it never worries about sustainability of its authoritarian arrogance. It only sees the problems it creates as being insoluble by anything other than more authoritarian solutions.
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What we're seeing is a free-for-all for views. And one thing we don't give legacy media credit for is the fact that there's a multitude of 'content creators' who piggyback off original content put together by the legacy media. I know a lot about what CNN puts on, not because I watch CNN and help CNN's ratings, but because I watch so-called 'independent media,' who take excerpts to criticize under "Fair Use," and CNN is basically paying the independents' bills. I think if all these so-called 'independents' gave something back to the networks on which they've built their channels. Do you think Mark Dice owes CNN anything for lifting Brian Stelter monologues for the purpose of mocking them? Should 1% or 10% of the proceeds from the video built entirely off another content creator's creations go back to the original creator?
The independent content creators aren't entirely without blemish, when it comes to fairness. And that's a big part of why the legacy networks got all click-baity. It's a big part of why the legacy networks throw their weight around (in toxic ways). And much as I whine about the domination of search resorts by legacy media I don't trust, the fact is, they're the ones doing the most original work and original reporting. The independents are rife with bloviators, but the amount of original reporting being done by independents is relatively small. They still ride on the back of a beast they make a living hurling curses at.
Legacy networks have been experiencing a steady decline, due to competing news and entertainment. They still have major sports on lock-down. But networks that used to garner 10s of millions of views are measuring their viewership in millions and even in just the hundreds of thousands. The people watching all those car commercials aren't the people buying the cars, and there aren't that many of them, any more, anyway.
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Dems might as well vote Republican, as Republicans are bigger spenders, now, than Democrats would've dreamed of being, 50 years ago. They basically gave up holding the line on fiscal conservatism in the '90s, and then the Democrats signed on for every conflict, abroad. The great compromise that makes the parties indistinguishable, but for rhetoric, is both parties spend too much, love war too much, and love the post-9/11 surveillance state.
Even though he was victimized by it, Trump did nothing to rein in security and intelligence agencies run amuck.
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"One child" is just one in a long line of "5 Year Plans" that the CCP elites imposed in their superior wisdom, only to fail, miserably. The only thing commies are good at is taking power and holding power. But when you rule by force, you put a lid on what your nation can achieve.
It's very sad, watching China go through this cycle. They can't compete in the larger world without an educated equivalent to western middle class. But an educated middle class means a lot of people with higher expectations for the system, and when the system disappoints them, the only way to stay in power is to crush the middle class. China proved in 1989 (Tiananmen Square) that it won't hesitate to drag the entire nation back to the Stone Age, if that's what it takes for the CCP to remain in control.
We see some of the same thing going on in the West. We're climbing on that same wheel, ourselves. I think Trump's election is a good sign, but he's not really trying to make any philosophical changes, not really trying to return government to its proper role and scope. He'll do some good things and then the swamp tide will roll back in as soon as he's gone, if not before.
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@warriorwaitress7690 : He'll dramatize the situation to make his point, sometimes overly so. Sometimes with a snide sarcasm, as well. The thing is, people like you want to have open arms for everybody, but you're making promises to those people with OTHER people's money and often safety, for affected areas along the border. I can't imagine living along some of those corridors without high fences, big dogs, and a gun to hand, anywhere on the property. Communities ARE under siege in some areas, and it's all part of the virtue-signaling WITHOUT A FREAKING PLAN. So the people delegated to actually DEAL with those people are absolutely overwhelmed. Not to mention our medical establishments, who drop everything to deal with these nonpaying emergency cases. Are YOU sending $1000/month check to one of the affected hospitals, or is that just their problem?
This is why there's a HUGE nationalist-populist movement going on in Europe as we speak. Uncontrolled immigration has caused great unrest and upset, because their social services are strained to the breaking point. They really didn't (and still aren't) prepare(d) for the burdens they were placing on themselves by accepting all the refugees. The U.S. is much bigger than the current x-many-thousand illegals who come in each year, compared to the size of the Euro countries and the numbers THEY've allowed in. But it's still a real problem for America.
Stemming the flow of illegals would be the best jobs program, ever, for underprivileged, under-trained working poor already living here. There's an illegal, packed with 10 others in one small house, who can TAKE $30 a day, but you need at least $50 a day, minimum, to keep your family in an apartment, and that's if the missus works, too.
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@ms_understood630 Maybe if they didn't CENSOR the lab-leak hypothesis for a year, I'd believe they were all about the science.
Maybe if Fauci's email "Did we cause this?" weren't pried loose under FOIA, you could make a case.
Maybe if treatments OTHER than the experimental "vaccine" weren't universally suppressed and medical data from our best clinicians were able to be shared in full light of day, I'd believe CDC is following science.
Science doesn't hide data. Science doesn't fear transparency.
Maybe if there weren't ZERO flu deaths reported last winter, I'd believe this wasn't politically driven. So, did COVID magically extirpate influenza from the planet?
Maybe if they didn't lock us in our homes for a year and make us wear masks outside with nobody around us, I'd believe this was about science.
Main thing that makes me think this is about something other than COVID is the censorship. We've seen government and industry, via Big Tech, suppress free speech pretty systematically for the last few years. Much of what was censored a few years ago as "misinformation" is now known to be true. Those who got it right were subjected to scorn and ridicule. Some were even banned from social media, entirely. And for what? Speaking the truth!
There was a time in this country when we believed that the best approximation to the truth was achieved by letting all sides speak their truth and letting the people decide for themselves. That has now given way to "those guys are wrong, and it's just too DANGEROUS to let them be heard." Why are these people so fragile about dissenting opinions? If they truly believe they're in the right, then they should welcome debate and total transparency, but that's not what we're seeing. And I'm not just talking about COVID. I'm talking about ANYTHING the Democrat National Committee or their crony corporations don't want us to hear.
I'd have a little more confidence in what I was being told if I didn't sit through 3 years of RussiaGate hoax. I'd be more open to the other side if we didn't go to war over WMDs that never existed. There's a LONG PATTERN of misinformation and disinformation from the same people who have been censoring what THEY call misinformation. If this doesn't make you doubt what you're being told, NOW, then I don't think you're capable of much critical thinking.
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Yeah, the Dems talk out of both sides of their mouths. So do the Republicans, who're playing the blame game, but they ALSO have been cowards about securing our borders and passing legislation that makes sense. Republicans owned BOTH houses and the presidency, but nothing got passed, because everybody wants to get re-elected and they're terrified they might be accused of racism if they propose anything sensible. It's been this way for decades.
How many can we afford to take in, each year, for a net BENEFIT to our country? What's your plan for getting these new people jobs? What's your plan for giving CITIZENS first crack at all those jobs? We already put the newbies at the front of the welfare and food stamp lines.
What are the effects on communities that receive a large number of immigrants? You KNOW they head to the cities where all the best handouts are, and housing is at a premium. And they have a negative impact on the poor neighborhoods where they congregate. The measure of a society is how it treats its weakest members, and when we let people in and look the other way, we're exacting a toll on the poorest and most vulnerable people already HERE. So to help foreigners, we poke our own poor in the eye with a sharp stick. That's hypocrisy, and it's rampant in government institutions and entitlement-driven cities.
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@spookrockcity I was 100% with you, until the "civil war" stuff. The way history works is things get bad before they get better. Biden winning will just accelerate the anti-establishment sentiment throughout the country (and the world). We want prosperity from the bottom up, and all liberals do is knock the bottom rungs off the ladder of advancement, and say "Here! I'll throw you a rope!" while the downtrodden remain downtrodden.
It's a very mechanistic view of the world, where they think they can plan everything out, from the top down, with "elites" calling the shots for everybody, when the REAL mark of human progress is people sustaining themSELVES, organically, through voluntary transactions and voluntary action.
As H.L. Mencken said, "The urge to save the world is invariably the urge to rule." I see this from progressives all the time. They INSIST on more and bigger government programs and regulations and then act all surprised when the people running those programs are corrupt. THEY think that it's OK to give the government virtually unlimited power and then they spend all their time complaining about how the power is abused. It's the NATURE of power to attract those who will abuse it. Even those who otherwise would NOT abuse their power will be constantly pressured to abuse it, "for the greater good."
The "greater good" is to be free and do what you can to make YOUR corner of the world a better place. If everybody thought this way, then most of the world would be a MUCH better place than it is, now.
"Show me a liberal and I'll show you a closet aristocrat." - Frank Herbert -
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@Svirepij187 FWIW, you seem to be far more grounded in facts and capable of spitting out facts, compared to that bartolo... dude, whose first and only rhetorical tactic is the ad hominem attack. Next up, if pressed for facts, will be misdirection and blame-shifting.
He sounds like a guy who depends on corporate media in the USA for his news, where Trump is supposedly the biggest liar ever, who's running against a man who dropped out of previous presidential racists for his easily-debunked lies and plagiarism. Black is white. Up is down.
Very hard to break out of if you don't have time to do your own research and do your own fact-checking. Even if you do your own fact-checking, GOOGLE isn't going to put you onto anything the Establishment of the West doesn't want you to find. Instead, you kind of have to keep your eyes peeled in comment sections, such as this one, and pick up on names and websites that you will NEVER see in your YouTube feed or a Google search, unless you search for them by name.
The censorship bubble has many holes in it, but it is very good at keeping people who don't ask the right questions in the dark. Plain fact is, most people don't have time to even ask the right questions, let alone figure out that western corporate media are worthless for getting at the truth.
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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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@ВладиславНиколаев-ч5щ What you say is perfectly reasonable, except for one thing: Ukraine has violated every agreement made with Russia. Russia has the overwhelming advantage and the momentum.
What guarantees would Russia have that the puppet regime in Kiev wouldn't go right back to the same behavior? Each of the last couple cease-fires have only given Kiev breathing room to build up forces and go right back to bombing what's left of the Donbass. There's no self-reflection about their ethnic cleansing efforts.
I feel bad for Ukraine, because it's always been a country divided, because of the very large ethnic Russian population. If you want a good, strong country, you need one common language. If ethnic Russians refuse to assimilate, Ukraine can't have a unified nation. Maybe they were doomed from the start.
It seems to me, though, that they could put together a one-nation, one-culture plan that didn't involve bombing the expletive-deleted out of their own people. But since they were overthrown in 2014, they've been run by western neocons, who are always stirring up trouble, especially where they lack the real wherewithal to impose their will by force. So, like all empires before them, they resort to dirty tricks, like regime change.
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Musk is crazy like a fox. He raced to the front of the line when the government incentivized EVs. Taking a salary frees him up to re-invest in something else, which he better do, quick, because EVs are going to level out at much lower levels than Biden admin claimed when it jumped in with both feet, to the ruin of automaking as we knew it.
But maybe auto-making will enjoy a renaissance. All we'd have to do is abolish the EPA and one or five other regulatory agencies, and return to companies staying alive on their reputations and reliability, rather than by complying with regulations thought up by bureaucrats. Given the choice, people will choose the cheapest, cleanest cars. Cars that will still be on the road in 10 or 20 years, with proper care, maintenance, and most of all, a good supply of parts and vehicles that can be easily repaired by someone handy.
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Knocked it out of the park. If FB is a publisher, they can cull their content any way they wish, AND bear the consequences (lawsuits!) when they get it wrong. The ONLY way they can avoid bearing full responsibility for ALL content is if they are the PLATFORM they claim to be. If they're a PLATFORM they can't shut ANYbody down.
Is the phone company responsible for YOUR conversations? No. They're just a platform. You'd be outraged if they listened to your conversations and decided what conversations they would allow and which they wouldn't.
Alex Jones just relays information. Some good. Some bad. I don't think he ever deliberately puts out bad info, but he definitely will rush to get stuff that comes across his desk out in the public square. When it's crap, call him out - and many do. But sometimes, he's 6 months or a year ahead of the wave, with last year's debunked story being confirmed, reluctantly, by mainstream media when something happens that forces them to cover it.
Alex has been pushing pedophile ring stories, predicting mass arrests of human traffickers and sex traffickers. Now we come to find out that some really big names have been falling like dominoes. 4,000 arrests and counting. And a lot of illegal border crossers are MAJOR human traffickers. Our Southern Border is the main pipeline for human trafficking into our country.
Now let's go down the rabbit hole a little farther and ask ourselves "Why the big push to abolish ICE?" While they're busting a major child sex ring, Antifa and their fellow travelers are out front, PROTESTING ICE. Coincidence? Maybe. But ICE is our main weapon against the international sex and human trafficking trade on the North American continent. And did anybody notice how quickly the Schumers, Pelosis and every dumb-ass liberal took up the refrain AGAINST ICE at about exactly the same time? And not 2 years after making impassioned speeches about reforming and IMPROVING our immigration enforcement?
Nobody gave a FUCK about children separated from their parents under the previous 2 administrations. Hell, they even used pictures of such children under the Obama administration to demonize Trump! It's like Global Warming. As soon as the hockey stick is proven to be a fabrication and that global temperatures have leveled-off, they pivot OVERNIGHT to "Climate Change," with all the same stupid policy proposals on CO2 reductions that EVERYONE - EVEN THE PROPOSERS - admit will have negligible effect on climate. And all the policy proposals are anti-U.S., anti the poor and weak (the proposals invariably jack up the cost of energy, which hurts our weakest citizens, which MIGHT be acceptable if it weren't perfectly well known that the policies just push money around (into Al Gore's pockets, in particular), to no real purpose!
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The skeptics are out on this one. Maybe force him to throw a bowl of water into the air to prove it's cold.
As for the steam or lack of steam, that isn't always picked up by the cameras. But it frequently is. Lars on Survival Russia has said he gets lots of doubters saying there's not enough steam visible. He insists he doesn't lie about how cold it is.
If Kusk is sitting underneath that reflector and he's got a good hot, tall fire going with those 10- or 12-inch rounds, which he does, he's probably quite cozy cutting vegetables in that little micro-climate. And I bet the brief camera shots of him sawing and so on might be in half-gloves, because he's fiddling with the camera.
I've worked on my truck at 20-below, Fahrenheit, and I agree, he didn't saw up all that wood in half-gloves.
But that is a big fire, he's set up just out of scorching distance, and he's got a nice reflector and wind-break at his back. I can see where it could keep him warm for a couple hours at a stretch. I don't know exactly where he's set up. In the mountains, the air is quirky, but it's generally up-canyon during the day and down-canyon at night.
People are skeptical about the gear he's wearing. I imagine he's wearing wool, underneath. My experience in extreme cold was exposed skin and an outer layer that stops the wind. As long as I'm moving and working hard enough, that's all I need. This guy didn't really stop until it was time to build that big fire of his.
I know people who wear down on top of fleece and they carry a spare fleece, so they always have something dry to put on. I never understood that. My parka is for when I stop moving and there's no big, toasty fire around. Hiking or working in the cold, I've never had much more than long underwear and a warm shirt under a wind/rain shell. Working on a vehicle is the worst, because you're out in it AND you have to stand still! If there's one thing Gunnison taught me, it's the importance of a heated garage.
Anyway, he doesn't look like he's dressed for wet, but you're not worried about wet at -20 Fahrenheit. He might be faking it, but I think it's definitely possible to camp like this, with that fire build and that size of wood. Still, he doesn't show how it looks as it starts to burn down to a smoky mess.
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When Obama abolished the Fairness Doctrine, the mask slipped. He green-lit the abandonment of pretense, and the mask slipped all the way off. I'm sure Obama felt like this was good for him, which it was, because all the networks, save one, worshipped him, and he used his bully pulpit to demonize that network, while sending his thugs to audit, surveil, and otherwise harass reporters critical of him and his evil administration.
But I think Obama set the stage for the destruction of cable and other legacy news. He reveled in his power while in office and even after, but the media that were once so good at manufacturing consent behind their pretense of professionalism and objectivity are now discredited. The tail still wags the dog to an alarming degree, but the establishment is also alarmed by the decreasing length of time their big lies last.
Now that they can wear their hearts on their sleeves, while pretending to be the same "objective" news, they're breaking the illusion that's been maintained for decades.
Increasingly naked censorship works for a while, but the public's developing immunity.
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We're undergoing a paradigm shift away from globalism. Nationalism is the short-term beneficiary, but LOCALism is the ultimate beneficiary. People are figuring out (again) that the "anointed nobility" aren't in touch with everyday life, let alone competent to direct all its activities
Remote learning got a huge boost. Smart institutions will foster that shift. Moribund institutions will resist that shift. Brick-and-mortar ain't goin' away, but it's clearly declining. I've been saying for years that it's really dumb to make your kid go to school and sit in a classroom with everybody their chronological age, getting a one-size-fits-all lesson, live, from a teacher who's aiming at the stupidest kid in the room, to get that kid a 'C' while the gifted kids are held back by the slowest student.
There's a lot of resistance to the shift in education, because the institutions AND the students 'brought up' in that institutional framework think that the way they've always done it is the best way. And teachers' egos drive a lot of it. They're SURE their students can't learn without their WONDERFUL teacher watering everything down and holding their hand on everything. But in my opinion, institutional definition of "Student Success" is to ensure that more students pass, whether they actually have mastered the content or not.
They'll never admit that, but it's exactly what they're pushing for, and it just leads to need for MORE hand-holding, and - of course - more MONEY, because "We need to remediate these learning deficits, and allow for 'differences in race, ethnicity, gender, and economic background.'" Bullshit. We need to put students in the classes they NEED, and require mastery before promoting them to the NEXT class they need.
USA's public-education 'learning products' are inferior. Run by accountants with spreadsheets and SJWs with oppression hierarchies tattooed on their foreheads, instead of the teachers and students.
You want boys to start excelling in STEM, like they used to? Give them an online learning management system (LMS, like Pearson MyLab and Mastering or Cengage WebAssign), and cut off their video games until they get their homework done! The cool thing is that it would motivate those boys to get it done, AND it would present the knowledge they NEED, exactly when they need it, i.e., instant, on-demand help. Instead, they're trying to perfect an outmoded content-delivery system, devised for a time where there might be only ONE person in the WHOLE TOWN who actually owns a book! Now, EVERYbody has the INTERNET!
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They indoctrinate young people into socialism and then they freak because they're voting far left in the primaries. But Bernie's the exact kind of guy Democrat indoctrinators in the schools tell our kids is the RIGHT kind of candidate! I think it's a glorious back-firing of all their plans. They control the education and legacy media. They're working on controlling health care. And they're absolutely inept.
Escalation of health-care costs is NOT because of "capitalism run amok;" rather, it's because of government interference to make health care "more affordable." Same with education. The more "affordable" government makes it, the more tuition skyrockets! Because their approach to make things "affordable" is to throw money at them. This allows the schools (or pharmaceutical companies or insurance companies or hospitals) to jack up their prices, grow their bureaucracies, and engage in make-believe in 2/3 of the curriculum, where "success" means they watered-down the content enough so everybody passes (and nobody knows anything, especially how to think for themselves.).
They do all these things that make everything more expensive, and then they come in with ridiculous "cost-cutting" measures that cut into the MEAT of the service being provided, and they make up for it with ridiculous paper-rationing, and other school-supply rationing and micro-oversight of office supplies - petty nitshit stuff. So they've got 5 or 6 new high-office bureaucrats at $100,000 a year (and up), but they're busy counting staples, paper clips and other cheap stuff that many TEACHERS end up paying for out of their own pockets, in order to do basic stuff like TEACHING.
They TALK about quality education, but NONE of the bureaucrats EVER visit the actual classrooms, to see what's going on and talk to teachers about how to make things run better. They just create new forms to fill out to run everything by remote control from on top, with ZERO regard for what's happening in the trenches. The BIGGEST complaint from GOOD teachers is that students are promoted without actually mastering the content. So NOW colleges and universities are bending over backwards and investing extra resources into teaching kids all the stuff they DIDN'T learn in high school!
It's a TERRIBLE business model. Same goes for health care. They bureaucratize EVERYthing to the extreme and BURY the people who actually do the work in forms to fill out, nonsense about race and political correctness (Hire more staff for the nonsense trainings, too! Don't forget that!), and the actual WORK/SERVICE takes a back seat. But the BEAN COUNTERS are having fun!
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Midler expresses the deep-seated belief of all liberals, today: "Most people are stupid, corrupt and greedy." That's why they want the government running everything. But the same stupid, corrupt and greedy people GRAVITATE towards government, imposing their stupid, greedy corruption on the entire nation at one go. When the government is LIMITED, stupid, greedy and corrupt people can't do NEARLY as much damage, and bear the immediate consequences of their actions. But when they're entrenched in the government, they can gaslight us for years on end, and even get Nobel prizes!
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My institution went full-on Google to 'save money,' and it's a giant pain in the butt. It reminds me of the Windows NT was a thing, and all the 'experts' were telling us x, y, and z, because they were so smart and we were so dumb. They told us how Windows NT was the only "secure" server on the market, and waste our time and crash every other week, and get praised for how hard the IT were working. To me, a good IT person spends most of their time drinking coffee, because everything's running. Same deal with Google. They're so paranoid of all their holes that it's a giant pain in the ass, and an intrusion into your privacy. Just like the late '90s early '00s, bean counters congratulate each other while everybody using their junk has their efficiency destroyed.
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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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Bias in "the press" isn't the problem. Legacy media's longstanding capture by ONE form of bias, and Big Tech platforms' capture by ONE form of bias is the problem. It's not "free speech" if they can use top-down power to control the public square.
This is something that a free market would handle, just fine, only the market isn't really free. Big Tech got all kinds of advantages to get established in the first place, and any push, now, to "regulate" them will just cement them in dominant positions for many years.
In the USA, I think they should abolish the Communications Decency Act, and Section 230, in particular. Let it be a free-for-all. It SHOULD be a free-for-all on "platforms." The phone company has no say in what I discuss over the phone. Let the CUSTOMERS decide how to filter their information. Rather than having Big-Tech drones decide what to filter OUT, let parents and ordinary customers decide what to allow IN.
Everyone should have their own private version of "hosts deny" and "hosts allow." Parents should deny: ALL, and then ALLOW the channels/content they approve. There should be a plethora of filtering software companies competing for customer services.
Part of the problem is all the free content and the corporate-advertiser strings that are attached, often below the level of perception of the customers. If your content is free, you're not the customer. You're the PRODUCT. It's all in the fine print when you sign up for these "free" platforms.
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When Shapiro first became prominent, it was pretty glorious watching him shred low-information progressives. But from the start, I was suspicious of his neocon tendencies and Zionist positions. Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and most of the Daily Wire crew are all Zionist. I respect Jewish culture and tradition. They're an asset to most societies. As with any group, there are bad apples and people who believe crazy stuff.
I'm sorry, but the defeat of Adolf Hitler did not justify the creation of an apartheid ethno-state by force, with backing from abroad. Say what you will about Muslims and Arabs. Our creation of and use of Israel as a proxy in the Middle East is shameful and has cost the lives of millions, at great financial cost to the USA.
Every "victory" is just a worse defeat beckoning from the future. You don't do wrong to do right, no matter how right you think you are or your cause is. "By their fruits shall you know them." The fruits of the Israel Project are oppression, apartheid, war, and genocide. We're storing up a lot of bad karma in our arrogance, and I just hope the whole world grows a brain and a moral compass to put an end to forever war.
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@gingerfox7143 That is how I see it, too. I think Ukraine forces are nearing the breaking point. They're giving as good as they're taking, but they're running out of men, equipment and ammo. They built up an enormous military, but the first year of the smo appears to have been aimed at luring UFA into costly exchanges that the UFA can win, but at a cost they can't afford. The first phase, Russia spent ammo like water, and tried to keep casualty rates low on their side and high on the Ukraine side.
With territory much more precious to Ukrainians, I think they threw themselves on the Russian sword many times and scoffed at "cowardly orcs" who fled in terror before them. But the more progress they made, the greater their losses, and the more effective the "inferior" Russian artillery became, the more the ground in front and on the retreat looked like a killing field or "meat grinder."
Over and over we saw this play out. Now we see the high-dollar precision weapons being used against logistics behind the lines, but they're expensive to launch, deplete (irreplaceable) stockpiles, and are too few to really overwhelm continuously improving air defenses. Western support is a genie with 3 wishes, and 2 wishes have been used up.
Now we appear to be at the stage where the Russian build-up is really kicking in, and they're probing more and more aggressively. Even if every probe is 'defeated' for the next month, I feel like we're nearing the point where the 'probes' will be reconnaissance in force against token opposition.
What happens then is anybody's guess, but I don't think Putin wants to blitzkrieg to Kiev. I think he'll just keep doing what he's doing, until someone with sense comes forward with acceptable terms. One way or another, Russia will have a next-door neighbor that is either friendly, or a hostile rump state that's too weak to constitute a serious military threat.
Ukraine and NATO had a great thing going in the post-$oviet world, but they just couldn't handle it. They couldn't subdue their own greedy, globalist oligarchs, and Russia did what it felt it had to.
Burisma is the poster child for influence-peddling and corruption at the highest levels in the West. The family most embroiled is in the White House, but there are many others and they're all regime-change racketeers and profiteers, in my opinion. This has been a farce from the start, and it appears that Putin is the only adult in the room.
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@sibyl513 I can see where a lot of late-bloomers would want to go back "knowing what I know, now." Also, the people who peaked in high school. Early bloomers who were unbeatable athletes, in middle and high school, but they also stopped developing, early, and were no longer dominant in college and never close to making the pro's.
I'm a late bloomer, and I had a painful shyness with girls. I've often thought how "unfair" it would be for my grown mind to be put back in high school, knowing what I know, now. A very few people wish to live that, but even fewer can pull off anything like what this woman did. It seems somehow less creepy, when a girl commits this kind of fraud.
While I remember most of my classmates, fondly, and I see the value in learning to deal with "all types," when I try to apply that "socialization" benefit to my own (hypothetical) children, I kind of think we've evolved beyond traditional brick-and-mortar schools. I think there are educational products out there that can achieve what the public schools achieve, for a lot less money, and a lot less time wasted for the kids.
If your goal is to train factory workers, then by all means continue civilizing the savages so they'll sit still while bottles of beer cycle past them on a conveyor, but if your goal is to educate them, the traditional lecture and classroom techniques for 30-at-a-time are grossly inefficient and horribly expensive.
Save the group time for recreation. Invest in gymnasiums, running tracks, swimming pools, and the like.
I think girls are more suited to the traditional ways, especially if you add a lot of group work. A lot of boys may not be suited for it until they're much older or suffer some kind of injury that keeps them from doing something physical, outdoors. And even if you can get them to sit still, they're not going to respond to group work, because they won't want to share their grades with group members who contributed little.
There's a percentage of girls who are more "male" about learning, who also hate the group work and how it turns something that should be about HER skill into something political. We're at a point where it should be a golden age of learning, and you see glimpses of it, here and there, but the entire establishment abhors the idea of losing the cash cow and the control it gives the political class over the youth.
Ha! Way too much. I'll let it stand, because it took me 15 minutes of free-writing to do it. Sorry everybody.
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Trump represents the middle. Reaches out to the middle. He appeals to the middle, because we've been gettin' squeezed from above and - in many cities - from below (because of what the people above are doing). Against the middle are arrayed the super-rich, government employees (including educators), and the non-working poor. The lower- and middle-class workers are a pretty unbeatable coalition.
It's agonizingly slow, if you're trapped by the daily news cycle and the wish for all things to be known and all conflicts resolved NOW, but my sense of the ebb and flow of things is that there's a MASSIVE, almost unprecedented paradigm shift taking place around the world, and it's taking place very rapidly. There's a revival in parochialism, and it's actually a GOOD thing! Good starts in the individual's heart and spreads outward. It is NOT dispensed from On High. People have been looking outside themselves for someone to solve or someone to blame for their problems, when it all starts at home.
People have been looking to governments far away to run everything, and conditions are different, everywhere you go. The LOCALS need to handle their business and the FEDS need to butt out.
But what's driving it is not what you might think. It's more like the American Revolution in the sense that the British were paying way more than they could afford and charging way more than Americans could afford, to provide services (French and Indian War) to the colonies that the colonies needed to handle, themselves. It wasn't that the British were all that unreasonable, given that they were locked in a fight to the death with France in Europe.
The establishment elites have an entirely different world view than we masses, which they would rule. But the plain fact is, the establishment elites really aren't very elite, these days, and that's assuming they ever were. They're not in touch with our problems. A small increase in gas prices won't touch them. But it could mean the difference between being cold this winter or being able to buy your kid a new pair of shoes when he outgrows the last pair. What do they care if the guy making $30,000 a year (i.e. $15/hr) can no longer afford to take his family of 4 out for pizza once a week or once a month? They can point to the $15/hr minimum wage as something "good" they "accomplished," when all they really did was devalue the $15/hr guy from BEFORE they came along.
Your plumber has more worthwhile skills and understanding of how people interact with one another on a daily basis than ANY politician or stuffed-shirt technocrat. That highly skilled plumber is one of MANY Trump "uneducateds." Then there are the crotchety old conservatives who still frequent math and science departments, in the very heart of the liberal fortress. We are an unlikely, yet inevitable coalition of people who see history and human progress as a FREEING of people from government patronage, not a welcoming of the patronage and the oppression that always comes with it.
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Actually, I trace it back to FDR and beyond. There's always a lust to expand the powers and scope of the federal government, by almost every federal official, since the U.S. Constitution was ratified.
But it got really bad after WW II, with the Dulles brothers building what we have, now, and have expanded, since. But the foundations for Patriot Act are most clearly traceable back to the Dulles brothers, who formed a shadow government, run by Dept of State and the CIA, "for our security and safety," of course. Even Eisenhower couldn't fire them. Oh, he did fire Allen Dulles, but Dulles's offices still took their orders from him, kind of like Obama pulling the strings behind the Trump and Biden administrations, because of Obama loyalists embedded throughout the Trump and Biden administrations.
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Same people pulling the same levers of power they've been pulling for over 50 years. But the levers are getting rusty. The act of pulling them reduces their power. U.S. leaders have wielded SWIFT like a club against their political rivals abroad and the financial system against their foes at home. The more they pull the "media levers," the more they risk exposure and de-legitimization. The tighter they squeeze, the more sand slips through their fingers.
Nations abroad and the people at home are developing "herd immunity" to the neocon/neolib political class in the USA. Here at home, there's a growing "parallel economy" and the working people are quietly boycotting "big corporate" at every opportunity. For instance, I use Amazon as a catalog, to help me find manufacturers of different products. There isn't a manufacturer in the country without an online shopping site. But I don't give Amazon any of my money. I don't support people who hate me, basically. There's a growing number of people who do the same thing.
Abroad, we see the rise of BRICS. When and if OPEC and other nations switch to BRICS, the USA loses a lot of its clout around the world, and deservedly so. We stopped being "the good guys" a long time ago. Being our enemy isn't as scary as it used to be and being our friend is FATAL. The rest of the world is figuring this out. We are not the nation our founders envisioned. We've done EXACTLY what they warned us not to do, over 200 years ago. We, the people, still believe in principles of liberty and self-determination, but we're wising up to the fact that the political class views such principles as a threat to what they want to do, as they should, because they ARE a threat to business as usual in The Swamp.
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He's never spoken truth to power. He's always shilled for big government and cradle-to-grave government intervention. Kind of like all you so-called "progressives." You know what they call a system that cares for everyone? We call it "serfdom." Your Lords and Ladies will run your life for your own good, whether you like it or not, and in return, they will enjoy special privileges that you don't. You will get whatever it pleases them to give you, and you BETTER be grateful! If not, you BETTER keep your mouth shut!
We call them "public servants" and "public officials," but really they're just re-branded Lords and Ladies. Fauci was a little king. The heads of all agencies are the equivalent earls and barons. When the mask slips, they say things like "I am the science." Malignant narcissists in all those top spots. None of them face any negative consequences for their bad decisions.
I wish you liberty-minded progressives would wake up and realize you're feeding the monster that you despise. Just running around chasing your tails, without ever once stopping to think about the people you're empowering to do real harm, with the Authority YOU insist they be given. When you make the state responsible for anything, you give the state authority over that thing, and authority over YOU in ways you can't imagine.
Your ends are noble. Your means (the state) will never get you where you want to get. Work locally to make YOUR corner of the world a better place, yourself, and be content.
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@zefdin101 Contract with America is when the Republican Party officially gave up the fight against the expansion of the federal government into every aspect of our lives. People WANTED the government to "take care" of them, because the people forgot why the U.S. Constitution says what it does. Rather than risk being a permanent minority party, the Republicans bent the knee to Big Government.
Basically since George Bush, Sr., we've had uni-party. Big government at home. Forever War abroad. Gingrich is part of that. I really liked him in 1980. I used to watch him and other young Republicans holding their Special Orders in Congress, speaking to an empty House, for us viewers on CSPAN, back when CSPAN was still independent, before the blob got its hooks into it (basically after Brian Lamb took a step back).
But enough ancient history, imperfectly remembered.
At about that time, Democrats finally realized how forever war was just as useful to them as it appeared to be to the Republicans. Republicans could beat them by accusing them of being soft on communism.
Meanwhile, our schools got taken over by communists while both parties were fighting over who would give the military more money to fight communism abroad, while it crept into our schools. 90% of the teachers I know are socialist or have socialist leanings. All schools I know, push thinly-veiled communist ideology.
It might already be too late, because our youth are disillusioned with a fascist system they're told is "capitalism," so they're suspicious of the one thing that's pushed human progress forward throughout history. Oh, they'll teach you all about wars and generals, but they'll never point out the pockets of freedom throughout history that produced the most advancements in any given period.
Nope. We're taught that it's good to have one guy at the top bossing everybody around. It's for our own good, supposedly. But it's the only way you can send half the young men of a generation to some foreign land to die in battle.
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Eventually, as the entertainment market continues fragmenting, good writing will emerge, and the acting will follow, although I look forward to when actors stop with the too-long pause in statements like "It'll be fine, John." In spoken English, there's not much pause there, between "fine" and "John," but not when it's a modern actor or actress. They see the comma in the script, so they pause, instead of saying it like they would to their friend, .......... John. See? That didn't sound.... right. It sounds affected.
We can criticize up and down, but eventually they'll find a formula that doesn't alienate everyone earning a paycheck the old-fashioned way.
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The president is not obliged to answer every tabloid question thrown at him. There's a time and a place for asking those questions. Try asking that Cohen question at a press conference NOT at a gathering of European dignitaries. I mean, by all means ask what you want, but don't expect an invite if you don't comport yourself with some dignity. And when you're asked to leave, by a gathering of world leaders, STFU and LEAVE. Nobody's gonna DO anything to you. Just un-invite you to the next event.
You newsies PRAISED Obama for giving news reporters and agencies a far worse time than Trump ever has. But it was OK to disparage FOX, wasn't it? And the other networks have been ABYSMAL. To know what the truth is, just ask what day it is. MSM narratives pivot to something new on a daily basis, without regard for what was reported the day before.
People are still on the "Trump hates babies and separates them from their families, because he's SATAN! He's a RACIST!" Turns out, Trump hasn't done half the things Obama did with regard to deportations and suppression of the press. Trump bitches about 'em, but hasn't (yet?) weaponized the government to go after political foes like Obama - the blameless - did on a regular basis.
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Yes. There's fake news. No, we'll NEVER achieve objective news. The best we can do is support a lively discussion, with multiple sources with multiple biases, and try to approximate the truth by the clash of ideas. As for the legacy media, who are hopelessly stuck in an establishment bubble, let the market do its thing, and they will give way to new media.
People are a lot more sophisticated, and they don't want to watch the legacy format, with commercial interruptions and no nuanced conversations. "You've got 15 seconds to wrap it up before we go to break." The breaks are more important to the networks than the content they provide.
But it's not the bias that bothers me. It's the pretense of objectivity with tacit and even explicit censorship of facts and opinions that are corrosive to carefully crafted and carefully maintained narratives/world views. "You're a conspiracy theorist if you don't believe our conspiracy theory." In the UK, it's the BBC. In the USA, it's more insidious in that there are 5 or 6 major networks that all speak with the same voice, giving the appearance of many voices.
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I think "the West" innovated MANY things, many ideas and principles that set it on a path to rapid progress, surpassing that of other civilizations. As I see it, Western principles of the Natural Rights of Man are rock solid. Where "the West" got it wrong was in their leadership. The people who scratch and claw to be at the top of the political realm are not believers in the principles they peddle to the masses, and in which the masses very much - and rightly - believe.
It is much the same in the Islamic world. The belief system produces good people, but people whose goodness is always thwarted by the "climbers:" those who would weaponize the core beliefs and subvert them for their OWN power and prestige.
Britain, which brought us many such good principles, ignored those principles, and instead, followed an essentially Roman model of empire. The USA, whose very existence and Constitution REJECT such shenanigans, didn't take long - at the top leadership levels - to try to implement essentially the same Roman concepts of conquest and empire, trying to be "cool," like the leaders of Western Europe.
American leaders are SUPPOSED to be "barbaric," by European standards. because they're supposed to be products of a meritocracy of the present, not the scions of aristocrats. But the drive to be aristocratic is present in all of us, particularly those who wish to occupy the halls of power.
This man apparently rejects The Enlightenment and Magna Carta. THAT is what the West brings the world, and it's always thwarted by would-be aristocrats, which, as in Rome, is the biggest threat to life, liberty and prosperity in the West.
I'm not going to let this guy throw the baby out with the bathwater, but his criticisms are to be taken to heart, because our nations do NOT reflect the core beliefs and behaviors of the common man raised in those beliefs and behaviors. With toxic leadership, the core beliefs and behaviors of the common man become corrupted, as well. Just like Rome.
This is one thing I think Islam does better. The political systems they have developed aren't perfect, but they definitely tap the breaks on certain forms of progress, which prevents the immediate slide into amorality and decadence.
No system is perfect, because we are not perfect beings. But we shouldn't reject good principles just because the worst, most greedy and power-mad individuals reject those principles and keep trying to drag us back to a modern version of the old feudalism.
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Breaking up these companies by force is putting your trust in another small group of people. FaceBook and Google were baisically government-backed to start with. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of their excesses were for the express purpose of causing an outcry so that government will regulate them like a utility, thereby cementing their monopoly position on top of the heap, forever. Government is doing NOTHING to control FaceBook, and FaceBook is losing their ass, because people just up and walked away.
The same thing's gonna happen to YouTube, if they keep up THEIR shit. De-platform all the sincere conservatives and progressives and we'll find other platforms, and YouTube will lose ITS ass.
It's harder to imagine this with Google, itself, it's such a big monolith. But back in the early 20th Century, they couldn't IMAGINE there being more than a handful of networks (radio or television) and that was the excuse for building the highly regulated monolithic "mainstream media" that we ALL know are just front men for big corporations and government. It was because they were SURE that the airwaves would become clogged with so many stations that they had to CONTROL how many people GOT a channel and what they could do with it.
Maybe all it will take is somebody suing Google for various bits and pieces of the data they collect and keep to themselves. Maybe it'll be a small outfit that does online shopping, LOCALLY, to out-compete Amazon. I use my Instacart all the time, and they send a shopper to the grocery store and pick up groceries for me for a small fee. Much less than my time is worth that I'd spend actually going myself, so well worth it to me. If Amazon.com gets fat and bloated and abusive and inefficient, I can see the Instacarts branching out into other products, and slowly replacing Amazon.com in small ways, and a jillion other companies nibbling at the edges.
"Monopoly" in itself isn't bad, unless it starts misbehaving. THAT's when it's bad. And there are market forces that can and will act against it when it starts fucking up, unless you protect the monopoly with government laws and regulations that ALWAYS end up doing more to deny entry into the marketplace by competitors.
Comcast is slow as fuck putting in fiber optic to a LOT of places. Start regulating it as a utility and I know it'll NEVER bring fiber-optic to MY neck of the woods, and they'll make it nearly impossible for anybody else to break in and do it before them. The cable industries already have most of the county officials bought and paid for, to prevent anyone else from coming in. But that's not a problem of monopoly. It's a problem of government bureaucrats abusing their power. And how do you think those big moguls got to BE big moguls? Buying off politicians!
That's not capitalism. It's fascism. Government stepping in where it doesn't belong and controlling shit it has no business controlling. And we fall for it every time, even though we know that the average politician and city and state bureaucrat is LESS trustworthy than the average citizen!
Amazon.com stretching tentacles into print media (WaPo) has an easy solution: Stop buying or reading the Washington Post.
Government regulation always ends up concentrating the power. FAA came along and we went from 100s of independent airlines to a handful of too-big-to-fail companies that the government could then step in a bail out without anybody batting an eye. Same with the big banking bail-out under Obama. We regulate the SHIT out of banks, and no surprise, they all coalesce into one banking mega-beast. The more we do to control them, the bigger and more powerful they get. And it's mainly because people don't understand how the use of government power and how easy it is to control EVERYbody by just bribing or corrupting a handful of assholes in key positions in government, from the City Council on up to Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
Let these bastards keep abusing their power. As long as government stays out of it, the people are free to buy from somebody else. And they will. When you look at most of the robber baron bullshit of the past, the government never did ANYthing until the public was already turning their backs on the octopi, and that's assuming it wasn't government officials giving the robber barons an unfair advantage at the very beginning. The government "regulators" ended up in the hip pockets of the regulated. That $500,000 fine from the EPA is just the cost of doing business to a BIG company. But it will destroy a small business, and, chances are, the small business wasn't really doing anything wrong, but the big company helped write the regulation that took them down.
You see it in Congress all the time. They pass laws regulating an industry and who do you think they ask HOW to regulate those industries? That's right. The richest lobbyists FROM those industries! Be careful what you ask for! They create an agency to control an industry and then you're surprised when you see a revolving door from the top echelons of that industry to the regulatory agency. Then you scratch your head and wonder how things got so bad, when MAYBE if you kept the fuckin' politicians OUT of it, the PEOPLE would use their purchasing power and their voices to call out the bullshit and to find alternatives.
These monopolies get fat from no competition, and they end up with incompetent twits running the show, and THAT'S what opens them up to better alternatives from competitors. The only way to shut DOWN those competitors is to shield the monopolies WITH government. Why do you think public schools suck so bad? And it's all in the name of curbing the fat cats, and the fat cats cry all the way to the bank.
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With the communications and transportation we have available to us, now, the people have never been more in the driver's seat in all of history, and we're being sold a bill of goods that we are somehow helpless and need more government, right when the biggest drag on the people IS the government. Do you think we, the people, would ever DREAM of dropping bombs on Iraq, Syria, Libya, ....? Think about it. We're entering an era where transparency is every bit as much a sword in the hand of the PEOPLE as it is for the elites who would rule us. This is the biggest problem with progressives. They think they're helpless, when they're NOT.
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I'm a big fan of helping people. I'm not a big fan of government doing it.
Every time people push for more federal programs, what you're really seeing is the privileged classes slamming the door behind them. What the poor need and want more than anything is an opportunity-rich environment, and every single government program creates one more hurdle, one more bull$hit form to fill out, one more requirement your Mom & Pop has to satisfy, to keep the regulators happy.
"What? You don't have wheelchair ramps? Too bad. You need them, or we'll fine you and shut you down."
"What? You can't afford to hire somebody to spray antiseptic on everything and run around the place with a roll of paper towels? (COVID nonsense) We're gonna have to shut you down."
"What? You give a guy a cot in back and $20 a day to help out? That's illegal." (The guy was living on the street and that cot was way better than the shelter full of drug addicts)
"What? You're not paying this teenager with his first job $15 an hour? We're shutting you down."
All the political solutions do is get in the way of our helping one another and caring better for ourselves. Also, they make us all hostages to the popularity-contest winner's idea of a solution, when solutions are going to be different for different people, and you visit every mistake the politician makes on everyone at once, instead of a more "free market" which would reward and punish according to the wisdom and hard work of the individuals involved.
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Far out. Brilliant stuff. Sounds like he can get some nice functionality, at some level, with spin-offs for the physically handicapped and visually impaired, maybe. Love his attitude. Except for wanting to be Bill Gates, instead of Steve Jobs. The GUI brought tech to a lot of non-techie people, which may be hard to see from a hard-core-techie perspective.
I love the way he sees the forces at play. It's driving the Establishment crazy, but the people are evolving faster and faster, and the government is, by nature, a creature of the status quo, and they can't stop themselves trying to control, but gov't just keeps falling farther and farther behind. Bad actors get tripped up by the technology they would weaponize against others. And the beat goes on.
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Yes, he's terrible, but let's stick to policy, where he's also terrible. His policies are the DNC's policies. Nobody they put forward is worth my vote, because of open borders, transgender ideology, unrestrained growth of government, political persecution of political opposition, unrestrained spending, weaponization of government agencies, ... I'm sure I'm leaving a bunch of things out. Oh yeah. The DNC despises liberty.
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We still haven't gotten to first causes with the evidence of our senses. But we see all around us other life forms and we recognize survival traits that are passed on to future generations because they WORK. We recognize intelligence as a survival trait, which, more or less made self-aware beings such as ourselves not only possible, but inevitable. Within the great chaos that is the Big Is, order happens virtually inevitably. Order that replicates itself will tend to replicate itself. Throw in a dash of time stretching out over billions and trillions of years, and once the ball gets rolling, greater and more complex orderings arise that perpetuate THEMselves, until US. That's as far as we can take it, because we are what we are.
Old age and decrepitude seem like a curse, but they are essential. Immortals can't change. Mortals ate all the immortals, because after many generations, small or large improvements to the original design that persist, because they WORK will either survive changes in the environment that the immortals can't, or even just by getting bigger/stronger/smarter, the mortals eventually add slower/smaller/dumber immortals to their diet.
Anyway, from what I understand about Natural Law, everything around us, including us, is pretty explainable all the way back to Creation. But even the eggheads who understand the Big Bang can't tell you WHY there was a Big Bang. "Let there be light" is the most profound statement of all time. No one knows why there's light, but everything in the universe around us is a consequence of the fact there is such a thing as light!
No more drugs for me, tonight.
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@meilyn22 Yes. Gutfeld is watched by more Republicans. But ALL the other networks are Democrat. When you add ALL the networks together, there are far more Democrats watching t.v. in general, and specifically late-night. Add up ALL the other networks, and Gutfeld's 2 million is dwarfed by Democrat-pandering networks. Fallong - 1 million, Kimmel - 1 million, Colbert 1 million, and that's ignoring MSNBC, CNBC, PBS, CNN. They're all midgets, but taken together, there're way more Democrats watching late-night television live. There are way more Democrats watching the legacy networks by a huge margin.
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If BRIC$ is successful - and there's no guarantee it will be - then the U$A will lose much/most/all of its economic extortion power, but more importantly, the U$A will not be able to finance its enormous debts with the same irresponsible ease as before. A nation that can't balance its budget and pay off its debts in peacetime is a failed state, basically a 3rd-World nation. When you look at the runaway authoritarianism and corruption of our major institutions, we're well on our way to 3rd-World status. $o sad.
I'm just not sure that any of the nations in BRIC$, other than Russia, has its financial house in order, and an inflation-proof, commodities backed currency is a foreign concept to most of the member states. It's a noble goal, and would be a benefit to all mankind, but it forces the kind of fiscal responsibility onto governments that few governments are willing or able to exercise. The Petrodollar is trash, but only Russia and an oil-rich OPEC nation or two will be able or willing to be that disciplined.
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I was too lazy to do much else but teach. Seeing the lights go on keeps me going. Happily work overtime, if the time is with engaged students. Because it's not really work. It's all fun stuff. Hate the bureaucracy, and how institutions are adopting these weird corporate ways that relate very little to the learning. More about feelings and how efficiently Information TEchnologies are running, rather than how well they're supporting the creative enterprise of teaching better and better.
I built up huge archives of short math lessons to sit right next to everything else I do. Had to go around the institution to really do it. Was flippin' classes 'cuz I could, before it was cool. Capability is there. So of course have tailor made videos on demand for when kids get stuck. Was viewed with suspicion. I just want 'em to master the skills, and as efficiently - quickly - as possible. Asynchronous learning is the wave of the future. Be more efficient at learning and there's more time for socializing, rather than make everybody receive content at the same time at the same pace, at the whim of the person standing there lecturing. Bleah. Nah. When #37 troubles you, bring up video #37, at home, at midnight, when YOU'RE workin' on it...
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I wonder if China's pursuing this policy as cover for crackdowns they need to impose, because of a pesky middle class beginning to form in China. They want to dominate, economically, but they can't, without sharing the wealth with their people. Sharing wealth with the people gives the people the means to challenge authority, and the wherewithal to ask deeper questions that the CCP can't afford to have bandied about.
I also wonder if maybe COVID-19 was developed as a bioweapon that was tested and perfected on Chinese guinea pigs, and the virus affects Chinese people, more.
But I think the Chinese zero-covid policy is just as wrong-headed for China as it was for the rest of the world. But the CCP has enough power over the Chinese people to pursue their delusional policies far longer and far more aggressively than MOST nations around the world. It appears that the CCP is squandering all the enormous economic gains of the past 30 years. I think maybe the CCP is finding that the more competitive they become, globally, the harder it is to govern. I honestly don't think they care about world domination nearly as much as they care about maintaining power in China, itself, and world domination is inconsistent with top-down, totalitarian rule.
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Genocide or not, the creation of the State of Israel, by force, in 1948, created a situation where a foreign-sponsored nation would be eternally at odds with its neighbors. No matter how "morally" Israel defends itself, there will be war, violence, and famine as long as it continues.
The establishment is desperate to pursue a sunk-cost fallacy, a sacred cow, that is an artifact of British imperialism (USA picked up where UK left off).
Everyone points to the Balfour Declaration, but Britain made MANY such declarations/promises to ethnic groups throughout the region, in return for fighting as proxies for Britain against the Ottoman Empire. World War I was very good for Britain. They knocked out their only rival in the Middle East and their biggest rival in Europe, with American help. This propped up a functional empire, even as the British Empire was falling apart, outwardly.
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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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FOX's audience was bound to shrink, anyway. All those commercial-interrupted legacy networks are fighting over the low-info people who still watch legacy-network t.v. If you're higher-information conservative/libertarian, FOX didn't represent the best and brightest, with the exception of Gutfeld, and even he and his crowd were careful what toes they stepped on. I know Tucker Carlson's some kind of cult figure, but he kind of a tradition-for-tradition's sake kind of commentator, too.
There's no room for a real, hippie-type and well-informed libertarian like Styxhexenhammer666, and certainly no room for YoungRippa59, Dave Rubin or Matt Christiansen, to name a few. And I think they're all doing just fine without going to work for an outfit like FOX.
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Nationalizing oil sounds good to a socialist/progressive, but you just end up replacing oil companies with government bureaucrats, who make up the rules as they go along. If a company pollutes too much, it can cost them everything. If the government pollutes too much, you get an "... and that's a GOOD thing" speech.
You know what makes the oil in the ground worth something? Somebody investing in extracting and refining it. You know. Like a business. When you put the government in charge of producing something, quality and quantity both go down. You can keep prices down, indefinitely, if nobody notices that the government makes up the difference by taxing everybody - or worse - borrowing.
Everybody thinks it's cheaper, because they don't notice all the hidden costs they're paying. That's the nature of government intervention. Parade the people you help in front of the cameras, but hurt everybody a little bit to make those photo ops possible. Those little hurts add up, but they're so spread out, the government escapes blame. Meanwhile, grandma's buying cat food because she can't afford tuna.
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War was a lot tougher to push us into, until the establishment took over all narratives through the back door, with Fairness Doctrine, and a small number of major outlets that big money and big government controlled by controlling a handful of people at the top of those major outlets.
What really HELPS the establishment is free public education, which indoctrinates our youth, and gets the policies they want from the votes of the indoctrinated.
To break out, getting rid of Fairness Doctrine was key. Like Abby Martin's saying, only I distrust her big-government mind set. Big government will NEVER behave itself. Quit kidding yourselves, Progressives, and push for max freedom. Max mobility into media market by competing ideas. People distrust the chaos on the current Internet, but the fact is, nobody's going unchallenged, any more, and Internet forums allow for WAY more nuanced discussions.
Jimmy Dore's just one example. But other voices are providing a far superior product to the commercial-tv outlets, trapped into their paradigm. Nobody likes what "the other side" says, and a lot of people want to see those "divisive" voices silenced, depending on what side they're on. But we NEED ALL VOICES, and something closer to the truth will emerge.
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Depends on what government's keeping you safe from, Geraldo, but basic civilized behavior should be handled. But defending you from a hot cup of McDonald's coffee maybe not.
The programs the city council candidate is talking about are a lot of sound-good, feel-good platitudes, without any track record or "data-driven" justification. Just the kind of thing Democrats love, because it seems like they're doing something, and they can make up what "success" means as they go.
I didn't say that very well. Suffice it to say, if she had a shred of honor or dignity, she would resign after failing to lead, and pursuing policies that lay deaths at her door. Anyone with such perverse disregard for public safety, and utter lack of foreseeing recent events, should step down and give it to someone competent.
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How much actual regular Russian forces have Russia actually put at risk? I hear talk of "Russian incompetence," but I think they use mercs for most of the high-risk fighting, the actual storming of fortified positions, but even they aren't thrown in before the area before them is softened-up by seemingly endless artillery barrages. In the beginning of the conflict, they engaged very many with very few, with choice as to where to throw local superiority for strategic gains.
I think you can very much expect the same kind of incompetence from green troops in any conflict, and that includes a lot of commanders, who earn promotions by political means (by pleasing their commanders and oppressing their subordinates) during peacetime. I think drones and a Panzer-Faust in every squad change the game. Generals and war buffs love the idea of tanks duking it out and glorious victory for combined arms in slashing, blitzkrieg victories, but for the price of one tank, they can make thousands of tank-buster munitions. A swarm of low-cost drones can take the place of conventional air superiority, as well.
The Iraq War(s) might be the high-water mark of combined-arms with total air superiority and armor. Everybody's got eyes in the sky. One man with an RPG can ruin a tank commander's or chopper pilot's day. What good winning the war if you can't win the peace?
Next-level warfare might be low-level/local EMP. Cheap way to disable all drones in a small chunk of air space. New kinds of collateral damage.
I really shouldn't come on here late Saturday night, but India's 2 cents is worth a listen in an open-format podcast.
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I don't think anybody has any idea of how many people are self-educating themselves with free content available online. I've learned a ton of history, philosophy, evolutionary psychology, physics, natural history, ... in the last 5 years, alone. I put everything from intermediate algebra to calculus III online, for free. You just have to dig for it. Ask for it. Your curiosity trumps EVERYthing being done in brick-and-mortar institutions filled with un-curious students, just going through the motions, dragged kicking and screaming through new knowledge, seemingly against their will!
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There are different kinds of intelligence. Not all kinds revolve around oratory. Most of the most gifted people I've known in any area lacked the ability to articulate things in a way that is most pleasing to others. Most of the best people, I really have to sit down with, ALONE, and give them time and space to "get it out," often with much necessary prodding.
And THEN there are the people - I think Trump is one - who deliver things in a way that is absolutely unappealing to many intellectuals, and certainly anyone who doesn't like his ideas - who can nevertheless reach people I never could, even with my absolute BEST attempts at combining truth, humor and precise word choice. The larger the crowd I'm trying to reach, especially on technical matters, the more pleasing I am to the top-level learners/intellects, but the less real meaning I seem to get across to the vast middle. Even people who LOVE the way I put it across, because I worked in something funny, miss the essence of what I'm saying. I've walked out of some of my absolute best math lectures, where I had entire auditoriums filled with students hanging on my every word and rolling in the aisles at every little joke, and glanced at the notes of random students, silently noting that what they put down was NOT the point I was making! I saw every hook I inserted, with the wrong - sometimes the OPPOSITE - idea dangling from it.
One of the amazing things about a perception-driven reality is how often people are right for the wrong reasons and how often they're wrong for the RIGHT reasons. In my college days in the 1980s, as a staunch libertarian-principle kind of guy, I found many of the people who were on "my" side of an issue, were there for the wrong reason. They would agree with me that the welfare state was destructive, but it came from a "DESTROY THE PARASITES!" place, rather than a "This is the velvet glove on the iron fist" place. The people stuck in the poverty cycle weren't evil, but the ones who kept them on "the plantation" with Free Stuff were demagogues. Since the Reagan era, this has expanded to much of the white middle class, who are so afraid they won't be able to afford health care that government intervention has made more and more ridiculously expensive for individual consumers and taxpayers, that they yearn to be on the federal tit just as much as the poorest person who can't even afford a checkup.
Jesus spoke in simple parables. Ayn Rand, whose fiction leaves me yawning, reached more people with Atlas Shrugged than she ever reached with MY favorite, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal," a skinny paperback that is extremely dense and extensively footnoted. Character development isn't her thing. Donald Trump actually got himself elected president of the USA with little more than choppy sequences of repeated sound bites.
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Good progressives DO see through a lot of the smoke, when it comes to the surveillance state and our nation's foreign policy. They're spot-on, on these matters. They're quick to see corruption. What they're SLOW to see is that their ideology builds up government institutions so much, that these abuses proliferate throughout our society. The corruption they can so clearly see in the stuffed-shirt career bureaucrats in the Dept of Defense or the State Dept, but they're oblivious to the FACT that this is the nature of large institutions with ANY kind of power. They don't want to limit the powers of the FDA, FCC, USDA, EPA. They just want THEIR PEOPLE to RUN them! It's the exact same thing as RussiaGate Hoax.
Does the EPA really protect our environment, or is it a hammer to beat the little guy with, while protecting the BIG polluters? Is the USDA really protecting us or are they green-lighting GMO foods which are grown "organically," because they Put the Pesticide Inside the Crop's DNA, and feed the pesticides directly to humans? Is the FCC really doing its job or are the handful of people at the top ripe for being bribed, coerced, or propagandized/pressured by whichever party is in power at the moment? Is the welfare state really solving poverty or is it just enabling irresponsible behavior and creating a helpless and self-entitled citizenry?
We've got the federal government doing everything except what the U.S. Constitution commands it to do. The federal government has refused to protect our national border, which is its Job #1. But it can sure fight wars all over the world, overthrow what IT considers to be tyrants, and drop bombs all over the world, without a single declaration of War since 1941!
A lot of REAL, PRACTICAL green tech gets crushed by regulators who don't even understand the new tech, let alone know how to certify it, so a person can get homeowner's insurance when they put in a rocket-stove mass heater to save energy and heating costs. If you want a new home, you can't get a loan on it, unless you build the way the bureaucrats understand. And EVERY government-approved form of green tech and every government subsidy of green tech favors big business.
The more bureaucratized we become, the more we inhibit REAL, SUSTAINABLE alternatives to the status quo. The bureaucracy is there to lock the status quo in place.
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Greenhouses in the outlying vicinity of cities and towns. You can WAY out-produce conventional agriculture, per acre, with smart, climate-controlled installations.
We are very grains-based, though, but that's a holdover - some might say throwback - to our first experiments in civilization thru agriculture. We ARE very addicted to our breads and tortillas, though, aren't we? And for growing out West, in more arid country, maybe ancient Persia could give us some guidance on sustainability.
But the first thing I'D do - and piss of Rino Grassley - is end all subsidies on corn. Corn is a stupid crop to use for fuel. And it's a robber crop, requiring fertilization. Maybe the feds get off their asses and allow hemp, which, as I understand it, is a nitrogen-fixing crop, beneficial to soils.
We really do need to break free of the petroleum-to-fertilizer paradigm, imo. Another dumb thing. Farmers should take a lesson from the Amish or Pennsylvania Deutsch, and return to soil-BUILDING farming. We rob the soil and then inject nutrients, artificially. And rather than let the land lie fallow, we're dead set on using every square inch ...
... or, better yet, we like to COUNT every square inch and - hilarious - receive a government check for NOT farming it! What a scam for landowners! But ya gotta be big enough to really cash in.
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@Blazo_Djurovic : Holdover generals from the WWI era were hardly the Soviets' best and brightest, or the best-prepared for the new combined-arms tactics, taken as a whole. The Red Army was in deep shit, regardless. Compared to the shortage of officers created by the ENORMOUS expansion of the Red Army in that period, the purges probably didn't HELP, but were a relatively minuscule factor. (I didn't know 'til just know that it ain't "miniscule," so widespread is this misspelling.)
The more I learn about this period, especially the Soviets' "Western Front," the more it looks to me like both Stalin and Hitler were better strategists than they're given credit for being, and the views on that theater of the war here in the West are very distorted by the fact that we based our theories and narratives on the writings and testimony of Nazi generals we had captured.
The drive on Moscow wasn't what Hitler wanted. He wanted to go all-out in the South, to secure resources (oil, minerals and agriculture) for Germany and deprive the Soviets of them, simultaneously. He wanted an economically self-sufficient "autarky." If he could secure the natural resources (OIL!) in the Caucasus and simultaneously deprive the Soviets of those resources, he had a theoretical win. By September of 1941, he was already critically low on fuel and logistical support. He had huge territorial gains and very little to show for it.
Even if the 1942 "Fall Blau" had achieved its objectives, Germany lacked the logistical support to retain them.
Even if the Nazis had followed Hitler's original idea to the max, it's still a near thing. They still come up against the fact that defeating the Red Army just meant having to defeat a bigger Red Army. Defeating THAT Red Army meant he had to defeat the next, even BIGGER Red Army. I think the German General Staff horribly underestimated the sheer size of the clumsy Russian Bear.
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You obviously haven't seen as many married couples in operation as I have. It's WAY more 50-50 than you think! Women have forgotten their half of the contract made with men long ago, for the survival and procreation of the species. A lot of the rules that women don't like were put in place to drive us men to be stupid-hard-workin' and stupid-brave on their woman's behalf. I see it in couples, all the time, where each gives just a little more than they have to, and they're both very pleased with the whole arrangement.
For instance, she drives on dirt roads one day, and the next she has to work, so her husband washes her car, because he knows she doesn't like gettin' done-up for work and showing up in a mud-covered vehicle. Not something she asked. Just something he knows she would appreciate.
She takes the trouble to start up an herb garden, and their meals are seasoned from the ground beside the house. He knows just what she wants at the store and he gets it on his way home. Or vice versa. Things are becoming more fluid, and that's OK. People are so uptight.
I'm seeing, now, where divorced couples are doing 2 weeks on and 2 weeks off, too, which is pretty cool schedule to be on. You're with your kid, 24/7 for two weeks and then you're off working for 2 weeks, while the kid(s) stay with the other partner. You get a lot more quality time with your kids when you're OFF for 2 weeks straight. You start itchin' to be out after 2 weeks. Then you start missin' 'em after 2 weeks.
It depends on your perspective. Did the bad guy just kill the good guy and rape the girl, or did the girl trick 2 men into fighting to the death over her, so she could keep the better fighter, because she DGAF about either one, but wants the bad-ass in her bed, and a tougher baby in her belly?
I mean, you can read Shogun and think that it's all about male dominance, but Mariko went to bed with Richard Chamberlain (quite the heartthrob in USA at the time), and decided the war for the good guys. She was as good a fighter as any man, but in a 1-on-1, she'd eventually tire out, and was as good a swordsman as probably 80% of the Samurai of her time. She was the most accomplished and well-rounded character, save Toranaga (Ieyasu Tokugawa), with the purest of motives. Master of 4 or 5 languages, renowned poet. People say there aren't enough female leads, but the Mariko character was THE hero of the book.
In between all the male strutting, Mariko could get close to ANYbody, because of her pedigree and womanhood. This made her a deadly assassin. She had the greatest warrior/general in the country wrapped around her little finger. And she cucked him to sleep with Blackthorne (the Chamberlain character in the Hollywood series). And stayed his hand when he would've slain the adulterous sailor.
And the fact remains, that until buff females start a new generation of bigger, tougher women, anything athletic is going to be male-dominated by genetics. And until crazy men start implanting wombs in themselves, none of us are gonna be carrying a baby inside of us. Rape of a man is an awful thing, but a rapist planting his child inside a woman by force is possibly the cruelest crime of all. One woman described a fetus as a form of parasite that you choose to feed or not kill, as it is inside of your body.
Kind of a weird way of looking at it, but as long as that baby's inside of her, I'm not sure you can say society has any say. I think there's a STRONG cultural bias against seeing a pregnant woman smoke or drink or do drugs. Society only recognizes citizens. And babies, so far, only issue from biological women. And as long as we're on the Japanese theme, I don't think the Japanese during "Shogun"s period gave a baby a name for something like 5 or 9 days, while the decision was being made whether to keep the child. If it had serious issues, they may or may not choose to keep it, often depending on how badly the father thought he needed a male heir. Girls were fine, as they could be married to other <i>daimyo</i>s. Girls got trained just like the boys, but separately. Seems like the women are subservient, but their sons would inherit their husband's estates, so all kids were good. But a man still needed a male heir.
I'm not arguing for medieval Japanese ways of doing things, although they were very clean, very good with burns, drank tea, and slept under mosquito nets, so they were well-adapted to the conditions of their day. Their only flaw was they didn't make silk like the Chinese, and they needed silk. So a lot of gold from Japan to China for silk for a very long time.
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Green troops with green commanders always fare poorly and always have. You don't really know how new tech will measure up until you try to use it. And the tech is changing all the time, as must tactics and strategy.
29:30 I don't think it occurs to our leaders that Putin is sincerely trying to turn things around for his nation and his people, or if it does occur to them, they must think it's a bad idea. I personally think Russia could quickly evolve to something closer to what America should be than America herself. Civil rights and principles of limited government may not be enshrined in the law or even followed, depending on the ends of the government, but functionally speaking, the state simply doesn't have the same reach it once had.
Much of what I treasure most about America is there were generations of Americans making shift for themselves, without any government help or interference, simply because American is so big, and the government was relatively small. We're getting some of that in Russia right now. Move out of the city and pretty much do as you please.
On the "not picking up the phone" issue, I'm not a CCP fan, but after meeting Biden and his representatives, I can see myself thinking "There's no talking to these people."
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If you want better health care at lower cost, abolish all the federal medical-care programs. It would have to be phased out, over time, with so many people already depending on it, but government bureaucrats, in association with Big Medicine, are not the best arbiters of what's covered and at what price point.
That doesn't mean I don't believe in a strong charitable component being a superb tradition to uphold, but it needs to operate at the community level, with civic pride in the quality of health care in your community and how you try never to turn anyone away, within the limits of the community hospital's available resources.
Let each town of whatever size do its best to have the best hospitals and health services. Something that I don't see outside of Medicare/Medicaid is much in the way of general care. Annual checkups, with standard blood work. Preventive care. Actual health care, rather than sickness care. That's probably what the government should do if it feels it must do something. An inexpensive wellness plan that anyone can use, but doesn't promise any high-dollar procedures.
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@karencoyle3011 Chani and all Fremen were much better-trained to the rigors of the desert, silent passage through the rocks, and the non-rhythmic way of walking on the open sands, to fool the sandworms. But from the trailer, it already looks like they're taking it places Frank Herbert never did.
The idea of a male Bene Gesserit being able to peer into the future, where women dare not, is probably a tough sell in feminist circles. We'll see how they handle that.
My take on the Bene Gesserit is that their pursuit of their Holy Grail - a male Bene Gesserit - is pursued without regard for human cost, human rights or human progress. They basically run everything from behind the scenes and the best they could come up with was feudalism for the masses? Really? Within their own ranks, they have something like a democratic republic, informed by all their genetic memories and the ability to read each others' minds while Sharing.
But as a practical matter, they treat their own sisters like serfs. All humanity must be subordinated to their One Goal, kind of like COVID-19 priests in our major institutions of today.
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@StudSupreme Long as we're talking male and female in the Dune saga, I'd like to point out that the most powerful and transcendent character in the whole story is Norma Cenva, who basically invented suspensor technology and made interstellar travel possible without "thinking machines." She is the main protagonist throughout, even though her presence isn't explicit until the later books, where she's revealed as The Oracle.
Of course, Herbert (and his kids) make the final installment your basic, "trust your heart" Hollywood ending, where Duncan Idaho (with ALL his reincarnations inside of him), rather than DESTROYING machine intelligence, BONDS with it, for the betterment of human and machine civilization and the survival of both. I think the Oracle is the implacable foe of the machines from the prequels clear up to the end, when Daniel and Marty are revealed to be Omnius and Erasmus, respectively. Erasmus plays the female aspect "Marty," and "she" turns out to be the key to the eventual hybrid solution. The Oracle DOES, if I recall correctly, sit back and let Duncan Idaho decide.
In the end, I think there's a clear recognition of strengths and weaknesses of masculine and feminine. Herbert, himself, takes jabs at both. Men fight their wars, while the women pick up the pieces. Leto II breeds a bad-ass female army of SHE-Men, on the grounds that females attach their loyalties to the leader more than their sisters in the ranks, AND women do not RAPE.
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Yes. I felt the squeeze, last spring, too. Offering a couple grand over the asking price was how I bought each of the 2 houses I've bought in my life.
If speculators weren't so crazy to buy the old place, I'd've been screwed trying to buy a new place at the insane prices. But I was feeling real urgency after I sold my place in February. I closed on the new place, 1200 miles away, on April Fool's Day! Locked in a low rate, which went up the next week and isn't coming down any time soon. If I were looking right now, I'd probably just buy a nice RV and life the "van life" until the bubble pops. It'd suck, but you can make it fun for a while.
I just don't see prices staying as high as they are, but I also don't see interest rates coming down until we quit begging the feds to print more money and quit cheering when they send everybody a free thousand bucks, destroying the value of that thousand bucks in the process, because we're ALL paying the interest on that "free money," and if they can't take it from us in taxes, they'll just steal it by inflation.
I'm keeping some extra cash on hand, just in case, but now's a good time to dump a little extra into precious metals and letting it ride. I'd say put a little into crypto, but there are too many in the political class who want crypto to fail and they have enough money to manipulate crypto currencies. They want EVERYbody holding U.S. dollars, to wipe us out when the debt comes due, and nobody will be buying Treasuries.
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Hollywood USED to have rules - I think it was even federal law - against bad guys winning in movies. I don't recall the particulars, but you couldn't show a crook prospering by their crimes, etc. "Hollywood endings" was an actual thing. Then you started seeing them chip away at that with anti-heroes. Clint Eastwood wasn't the first to come along with an ambiguous kind of hero in Westerns. But he stands out among the first few who had anti-heroes in it, with movies like "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly," and "High Plains Drifter," etc.
Part of Eastwood's appeal in those Westerns was he was "edgy." And against the cultural backdrop of the time, it WAS edgy. But when it becomes FASHION, it's no longer edgy (or brave). It's a new form of brain-dead conformity in its own right. Nowadays, you have mediocre (and just plain bad) writers, who think that "subverting expectations" is "art." First of all, it's insipid, copy-cat writing. Then throw in the heavy-handed political messaging, and it's as if your Sunday-School teacher got ahold of the script and injected all kinds of Christian messages in a film, only these guys' religion is left-wing identity politics.
That's the weird thing about movies and other art forms. There's ALWAYS been "a message" built into almost all of them. It's ALWAYS been an establishment-elite sort of message, and was no better or worse, when establishment elites were over-the-top nationalistic, my-country-right-or-wrong types or over-the-top anti-capitalist globalists. The only difference is the intersectionality just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. You might argue that Christian-nationalist messaging doesn't hold up to scrutiny, but in its day, when 80%-plus of the country WAS Christian and WAS very nationalistic, there wasn't much push-back against it.
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Here's the dirty little secret of YouTube: There isn't enough advertising revenue for them to keep all their promises to content creators. If they don't find excuses to de-monetize and shadow-ban a huge chunk of content creators, YouTube loses a TON of money.
So at the root of all this is YouTube consumers refusing to pay for the content they consume.
As for Fauci, keep in mind, progressives, that he is EXACTLY the kind of guy who would be running your wonderful Med4All program: somebody who would lie to your face for some "higher purpose." Do you realize how many "ends-justify-the-means" motherfuckers end up in the highest civil service posts? Do you think Med4All would be any different? Even if it's set up PERFECTLY (which no one really knows how to do), the corruption would set in and within a couple of years, the political in-fighters, lobbyists, and incompetent career-bureaucracy "climbers" will run everybody's health care.
We see how the CDC got it wrong. Repeatedly. But you want these people deciding from Washington, D.C. whether or not your treatment will be approved, and not only that, who and how you are treated... "Yes, it was her turn for a kidney, but Politician X's or Bureaucrat Y's survival is more important to the collective than some faceless worker such as yourself.
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You couldn't have done it if you hadn't lived within your means. That's where most big stars mess up. They get paid like big stars, so they spend like big stars. They need the next gig, so they can't say "No."
I'm the kind of guy who if I made as much as Chappelle must have, during his long run on Comedy Central, I'd pretty much have the truck I wanted, the piece(s) of land I wanted, the structures and the landscaping I wanted, and a big, fat, diversified portfolio.
I can totally understand walking away from it all, in his shoes. I'll never wear those shoes, but that's about the extent of my ambitions, and I'm in the low 60s, with pretty much the truck, the land, and half of the structures built. Life is good. Why deal with the entertainment industry? It's full of messed-up people.
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If the kids on stage had any kind of diversity of opinion, they would receive less scorn. If they debated each other instead of making attention-getting speeches to partisan-packed yes-crowds, some of the holes in their one-sided rhetoric would be exposed. If they want grownups to listen to them, then they should stop speechifying like wind-up toys.
But you make a good point. It's like commenting on a video that has some serious collectivist fallacies to be disputed. JUST when you've absolutely, positively DESTROYED the fallacy, some asshole will come along and AGREE with you, and then go on to talk shit about Jews, while singing your praises.
So this wonderfully-crafted argument you make gets swept off into the "another Nazi sub-thread" bin by any leftist looking for an excuse not to really THINK about what you just put all your creativity - your life's blood - into presenting, and just take a shit on it, with a brush-off "Another Nazi" remark, for the "win" that is a loss.
Also, the back of your hand isn't designed to deliver blows. It's not stressed for it. Exerting force sideways on a long bone is hitting it at right angles to the direction in which it was designed to do all its work (pushing is what bones are for. An octopus can pull.). A solid punch from a tightly-closed fist, in a forward direction puts all the forces in a line that the body is designed to handle.
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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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Capitalist class causing hyperinflation? No. More like, Maduro's approach is Ocasio-Cortez's: We'll print however much we need to do what we want.
Forbes published an article in 2014 that seemed to cover how Chavez and his successor, Maduro, just saw the oil as a cash cow, and it's more like rainy day money. Due to the difficulty of extracting and refining that thick crude they have, they need the price of oil to be at least $100 per barrel. Or they did, in 2014, when the article was written. Two oil companies that wouldn't go along with Chavez got nationalized, if my understanding is correct, and Chavez got on the wrong side of the people with the expertise to handle Venezuela's unique situation.
The writer said that the Venezuelan president(s) didn't understand how much up-front money, time, and technology it took to keep the oil flowing. And it's more of a long game, because you want to be selling when the price is high.
Something no one talks about is how invested the Chinese and Russians are in Venezuela. Part of why Venezuela had any oil money was all the eager investors, willing to jump in with both feet and get the oil flowing. And with prices what they were, they generated a lot of revenue. The socialist president saw all that revenue and started acting on his promises. Everybody was thrilled. But after the current slug of oil was tapped and they needed to develop more, the money wasn't there, and production dropped off. The "evil frackers" like it at or above $90 a barrel, which is on the low end of profitability for Venezuela. Basically, they overspent, I think.
That's what happens. Anyhoo, they were having problems clear back when Hollywood thought Trump was a Democrat.
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The Russians and Chinese probably have a right to be kinda pissed, right now. Maduro's the guy they made their deals with. The Russians, I know, have a lot invested, and some number of properties and installations become theirs, if Venezuela can't pay her bills, or there's a radical change of government. They can't like the American saber rattling. They can't like seeing Abrams, Bolton and Pompeo in Trump's circle.
I half believe that the neocons who appear to be influencing Bad Orange Man are only there for posturing and bargaining purposes. Trump may be the greatest salesman of all time. And a good salesman will tell you 'most anything to hear you say "Yes," in return.
Ask for the moon and the stars, and "settle" for a stack of gold bars.
That's what he does. He'll be adamant, one day, just to make something THE ISSUE, and then reverse himself on, for instance, DACA. He'll stick a thorn in your paw just so he can be the guy who takes it out. One day it's "fire and fury such as the world has never seen," and the next, he's the first president to meet face-to-face with the North Korean premiere since the partition.
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Kytsche: I like your take. Mine's a little different on what's driving things, and why Europe is in such a state. I don't think they took their cue from US on the direction they decided to take. I think they're ahead of us on the path to meltdown, but not tbecause they're somehow trying to please our elites.
Still, good historical perspective on the untoward military presence and continued footing-of-the-bill for security matters by the U.S. As you surely know, our presence in Europe was because we were the only thing standing between the Soviets and the English Channel on the continent at the end of WW II!
And from then on, there was ALWAYS some urgency necessitating our continued presence. I think European countries haven't been paying their own security bills for decades, and that probably livened their step on the redistributionist, nanny government road.
And there's nothing wrong with government-run schools, unless you don't like what the government thinks ought to be taught. And there's nothing wrong with helping the poor, with government help, unless it creates a permanent underclass who will always vote for the continuation and expansion of those programs out of their own self interest.
Throw enough guilty white people on top of that pile and you've got a big-government coalition, world without end. Unless Atlas shrugs before things get too far down the road, and things come to blows.
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The bad ideas grab a small percentage of people, even "viral videos" that reach millions. We're a planet of BILLIONS. And the bad ideas very quickly reveal their flaws by catastrophic failure when implemented, and unless it's the federal government implementing that bad idea EVERYWHERE AT THE SAME TIME, that failure will only be visited on the relative few who bought into the lie, and those who didn't (and those who did and yet survived) will learn by that lesson.
There is NO meme or viral video that has the reach of the federal government. And even if one DOES, one day, it will still not have the authority to impose itself by force on EVERYone, like the federal government has the exclusive monopoly on doing.
Yes, bad ideas get out there. But bad ideas ALSO come down from the supposed authorities. ALL THE TIME. If you censor ANYbody, you likely censor the people - like Bret and Heather - who correctly decry the bad ideas and rip them apart, point by point. The next time you think the government is all-wise, ask yourself who caused the Dust Bowl or Chernobyl.
The only argument for continued censorship is that decades of behind-the-curtain censorship have eroded the average person's ability to see through bullshit. You look at the world a whole lot more skeptically/critically, when you don't live under the illusion that people smarter and more wise than you are making sure all you get is the complete, objective truth. In the USA, the people have been getting nothing BUT curated facts and cherry-picked evidence from a handful of organizations that all pull in the same direction and never (or rarely) challenge what government insiders want.
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Dems didn't fast-track Trump's appointments. They fast-tracked Obama's by changing the cloture rule for appointments, and they never for a minute thought Trump would be the next president. It's not like they rolled over for Trump. They rolled over for a long line of Democrat presidents that didn't happen. I always felt that the filibuster was one of the coolest things about our system. If 1/3 (plus 1) of the senators feel REALLY strongly about something, they can keep the 2/3 from passing it. They can't pass anything of their own, but they CAN stop the OTHER side from passing anything, either. "Meet us halfway, or we'll just keep on a'talkin' 'til the cows come home, 'n' then we'll talk some more."
It's an obstructionist tactic that you can easily steamroll in a real emergency, because you'll 2/3 plus 1 to sustain a cloture vote, and they'll have to let you put your bill up to a vote. Filibuster's been used for many years to try to hold the president in check through his appointments. In the bureaucracy, that means that temporary appointments can run for years, and "acting" secretary be the secretary and not much changes. But in the courts, those seats remain vacant.
Republicans played this very smart. And they got very lucky. They stalled Obama's appointments to the maximum extent possible for a close-2nd minority. Then the Dems passed what I think they called the "nuclear option" that required only 50% plus 1 to force a confirmation vote. They thought they were so smart, but apparently Obama was still way behind on his court appointments, and the Republicans absolutely SWOOPED on the opportunity. The Democrats thought they were so clever at how they were leveraging a bare majority, but they didn't think ahead to the day when the other party would hold a majority in the Senate, with a Republican sitting in the White House! It's like a Ronnie O'Sullivan clearing the table with a 135.
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The Framers never envisioned government would grow into such an Octopus. They figured the executive would be much more limited than it has evolved to be. It was Congress, itself, who created the FBI - very much not in the Constitution - and now we understand how they created a monster they cannot control.
This has been brewing for a long time, since J. Edgar Hoover created his empire within an empire, with illegally obtained dirt on key policy players. This is the first time the Feebs have been publicly challenged by ANYbody, and you can see how entrenched they are by the road-blocks they put up at every turn.
I LOVE obtaining un-redacted e-mails and memos. The issue was NEVER national security. That was just a convenient way for key players to avoid embarrassment. I think it'd all work, beautifully, except maybe they forgot the techies handling all the e-communications, or mid-management FBI (basically honest) and maybe a ringer amongst the higher-ups, who keep bringing out more facts.
Nothing you put out there or send in e-mail can ever be un-sent. The arrogance of people like Hillary, Sztrok and Page may be the undoing of MANY bad actors.
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The Voting Rights Act of 1965 marks the end of Jim Crow. It ONLY applied to a handful of states where voter suppression was clearly present, when segregation was just starting to end. For him to claim this is the same country as it was in 1965 is BLARNEY. We made an exception to the Constitution that it is time to end. This is a very disingenuous argument being made by him, Democrats and many Republicans, who are terrified of being called "racist."
Meanwhile, the Dems want the feds to run EVERYthing, so they can operate the entire nation by remote control from Washington, DC. This is the last thing I want, and the last thing Democrats should want, because as soon as they mess things up - which is inevitable - it will be Republicans running the entire nation by remote control from Washington, DC.
This is ALL about winning TODAY, with total disregard for our children and grandchildren.
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LOL! NObody's gotten denuclearization of North Korea. No American set FOOT in North Korea. Trump put MORE sanctions on North Korea. Trump talked tougher to North Korea than Obama ever DARED, and he talked NICER to Kim Jong Un than Obama ever did.
This is historic, long-overdue progress with North Korea. We've always been tough when we should've been kind, and weak when we needed to be tough. Trump is turning all of that upside-down, and being tough, when it's called for, kind when it's called for and especially if it's in any way reciprocated. Trump's being criticized by the assholes who brought slavery and instability back to Libya, had their sights on Syria, bought a treaty with Iran that's not worth the paper it's printed on, and were steadily backing us into an ever-escalating crisis with North Korea, meanwhile making sweetheart deals for the Chinese in return for huge financial windfalls for family members. Joe Biden's the projection-est SOB going.
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Let's forget about annexation of Tibet, because you have to if you're going to hold up China as a paragon of virtue, which it is not.
But that's a poor defense of the USA, whose intelligence and security institutions have committed many nefarious crimes for short-term advantage. The nefariousness always catches up to you.
USA should have engaged with Mao rather than scorning him. There's a middle path that our leaders, apparently drunk with power since 1945, are unable to negotiate. They oscillate between saber-rattling and handing out the keys to the safe to Mandarins. Guard our intellectual properties and our institutions. Incentivize the respect of Natural Rights and de-incentivize authoritarianism and exploitation.
"Constructive engagement," prudently executed, would give China the respect it was denied since Mao took over, without enabling totalitarian evil.
All of this is moot, as America takes on a surreal, Maoist aspect in its domestic governance.
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I don't know if this is the same thing, but in my undergraduate days, I took way too many classes at the same time. My study method was to have my Linear Algebra laid out on the dining room table at one chair, my Structural Geology at another chair, my History of Modern Europe at another chair, then Modern Physics.
I'd move from chair to chair as the night wore on, often 'til the Sun came up. If I hit a roadblock, I wouldn't instantly give up, but eventually I'd just move to the next chair. Frequently, by the time I sat in one place for a while, or hit a roadblock, I'd get another idea for that Linear Algebra proof.
I've gone to bed MANY a time, obsessing over an intractable problem, and upon waking up the next day, a totally new strategy would occur to me. I never thought of it as psychic phenomenon. I just figured my subconscious just kept working on it, and the solutions would percolate up to my conscious mind, in some way.
Dad was big on Sylva Mind Control, self-hypnosis, and accessing your alpha brainwave state. I'm a fragile person, with a relatively mild case of osteogenesis imperfecta, and I practiced self-hypnosis for pain remediation during many acute-pain periods of my life. Bring that heart rate and blood pressure down through a form of focused meditation and controlled breathing.
I don't know if that had anything to do with my "sleep on it" strategy, or my "put it on the back burner, move on, and come back to it" strategy, but it got a pretty dumb guy all the way through a PhD program in mathematics.
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jeep: I have few illusions about the Russians; however, if we think we have problems with Islam, their problems are 10 times worse.
I hated what they did with the Warsaw Pact and the Iron Curtain, but they weren't coming away from WW II without buffer states, between them and Europeans, who seem to go crazy every 20 or 30 years. Yeah. Lots of phony baloneys went on and the Soviets were evil communist bastards, but in 1941, Hitler was knocking on the gates of Moscow.
In the Ukraine, there were also phony baloneys, but you see the rise of Islam and destabilization along their borders and culture wars in their border regions, with Islam making a huge push. If the U.S. had anything like those kinds of problems from neighbors, we wouldn't stand for the Russians sticking their nose in.
Obviously, I'm no expert, but I don't think there's any effort to try to understand the security - and culture - concerns of the Russians. The Russians/Soviets have alway been buttheads, but they've always been rational. You've got to stand up to them, but you can't be rabid about it.
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You can split hairs, but the fact is, the continuity from Obama to Biden is obvious. Obama ran a purge when he became president. And he had 2 terms to get his guys in. A lot of Bush's guys were already part of the program. They did everything they could to thwart the Trump admin, and most of those guys were still in place throughout Trump's admin. Trump caused barely a hiccup in the operation. So, in a sense, this IS still Obama's crew, to a great extent and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if he maintained a pipeline, and a lot of his top people are Joe's top people.
And Joe's not running anything. It's all about the team around him, and they're all political operatives, including the top generals. Trump either didn't understand this, or he's just a Trojan horse, because he did NOT come prepared to fire darn near EVERYbody, and he made some terrible appointments. He will probably be the nominee, and if he is, he's got my vote. I'm just pretty black-pilled on the whole thing, at the moment.
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China is such a sad story. Such fine people. Such ruthless and greedy overlords. When Chinese immigrate to America, and enjoy American freedom, Americans have to discriminate against Asians just to keep the Ivy League from turning yellow! These are some of our finest citizens. They've gotten a raw deal from us from Day 1, kept their heads down, and just out-worked ALL of us. We hated them because they could come in after we were done mining out all the gold, and build good lives for themselves just working the mine tailings we threw out and moved on from. Oh, that chapped a lot of white hides, let me tell you!
I say "they" and "we," but really, it's US! I'm really proud of the Chinese-American heritage we share, and regret how their leaders treated them over the centuries, how Europeans treated them in China, and how European-descended Americans treated them out West. I think Chinese tend to love America, because they see a system in which their hard work is rewarded commensurate with their effort. They don't need or want any special favors. They're doin' FINE if folks will just let 'em be, like any other citizen.
I don't much care what we homogenize to or if we homogenize, as long as everybody's on the same page about each others' rights, and embrace principles of limited government and balance of powers between the 3 branches. We've got a great system that protects the individual against the whole (largely) and the whole against the few (generally). We don't need to add a whole lot to it, and could probably do with quite a bit less. I'm more of a localist than a globalist.
Global trade? Sure. Whatever makes the most people the happiest, trading freely, without restriction or unfair advantage. But you don't need a lot of oversight on that, between consenting traders. What complicates things is when nation-states manipulate things to disadvantage trading partners. Then, maybe you need a strong president, with good economic advisors, acting in YOUR nation's best interests. But generally, less is better on both sides, and closer ties between producers and end-consumers is generally better.
I despise the CCP, but I could see making a deal with a Chinese citizen for something they make that I want or vice versa. I think the more of that goes on, the more irrelevant the CCP and US Government become, which is kind of where I'd like us to get. It's really hard to make people hate each other when they're Skype-ing back and forth. It's really hard to keep them from comparing notes on the goings-on in the world.
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5:00 I disagree. They SHOULD have talked about trade and potential trade deals in the future, if we can come to better understandings on other matters. Basically, Putin stands to profit IMMENSELY by behaving in more enlightened ways, AS DO WE. But it's a unique opportunity, because the Russians need trade and the sanctions lifted much more than the U.S. does. I bet that Trump tried to make the case that everybody could get a good deal if we'd all back off.
As your own Lavelle has said, Russia has always been a confederation of states that would probably prefer to go their own way, but more or less dominated by Viking-descended Rus-ians. I think Putin could very easily be sold on a little libertarianism, and good old-fashioned traditional American values. It's in his POLITICAL interest to push Russian Orthodox for at least two reasons. The first reason is it's his main cultural counter-weight to the same kind of demographic warfare waged by Islam in and around his borders that assail Western Europe. "Be Christian. Have babies. Work hard."
Of COURSE he's NKVD-related. You've gotta be, to survive to the top in that place, at the point in history in which he rose. And he did a lot of cleaning-up of the rampant corruption and things just breaking down, in the '90s. The system broke down, criminals profiteered. Soldiers and sailors didn't get paid. There were some cold and hungry winters, and Putin is a semi folk hero to his people, I think. And I think if he thought he didn't have to fight us on everything, both our countries would come out ahead.
Even in the cold war, we cooperated on some things, in particular, in our space programs. Of course, my dad would tell you that was just so the Russians could steal our maneuvering technology, through the use of hypergolic fuels. Until we turned 'em on to that, their retro rockets would blow up, because too much fuel would build up before they got the fuel mix to spark. Lots of orbital vehicles blew up, 'til we gave 'em hypergolic fuels (that burn instantly on contact, so ignition is always smooth).
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This isn't just Hillary. This is the entire DC-Beltway Establishment. It's the one thing Democrats and Republicans (the entrenched ones) BOTH are like. They make it up to be this big national-security thing, and then you come to find out it's because a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend in the oligarchy has a buddy who'll be supplying the missiles to the defense department, and business has been slow.
"Oh, sure. You'll get my vote on the grain subsidy, buddy. You bet. Alternate fuels! Green technology! You can sell that to your people back home." It's a crony system, where everybody gets to make noble speeches and everybody gets their goodies in the fine print. Nobody takes a hit for making a stand on principle. They all pretend to operate on high principles and they all scratch each others' backs to stay in power. It's disgusting, but it's just human nature.
That's why you need to limit the scope of the federal government. No centralized organization is equipped to direct the affairs of everyone, and it creates engines of corruption that nobody can stop, due to inertia, and how things get done. You make a principled stand in DC and you'll be smeared up and down with shit, and hung out to dry.
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Their delusions of grandeur know no bounds. The current "leaders" are the result of generations of absolute military domination and media censorship since the 1940s. They take their power and untouchable status for granted. But the levers of power have collected a lot of rust over the years. The more they pull those levers, the fewer people they can move. They can still do a lot of damage, and maintain lies for years. But the lies are toppling over shorter and shorter time spans. So they're becoming OVERTLY authoritarian, which they never did, for 50 or 60 years prior.
The more afraid they get, the harder they work those levers, hoping to re-establish hegemony over media by controlling Big Tech. But you can see its diminishing returns. They can't squash somebody without 10s of millions of witnesses, making it harder and harder to get away with the NEXT machination.
I wouldn't be confident as an outsider looking in. Republicans and Democrats alike want things back the way they were, when nobody who questioned them had a platform. They're putting the squeeze on free speech more openly than ever before.
It's a race of liberty and prosperity versus the political class, who don't care HOW bad things get for the people, so long as they can remain in power.
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@tcorangemen : Republicans marched with MLK, Jr. Democrats fought it tooth and nail.
But yes. The two parties are one. Cold-war Republicans = Democrats. Spend a lot of money on programs that don't work Democrats = Republicans.
Each party took the worst thing about the other party, and made it their own.
"I have this big program that costs $1,000,000,000,000!"
"That's an outrage! We should only spend $999,999,999,999!"
"I have this country I want to drop 1,000 bombs on!"
"That's an outrage! 999 bombs will do the trick!"
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I've always kind of thought guys with man-buns were a bit 'off.' Not quite sure what they're going for. It's one thing when a Parkour or martial artist do one for movement (and defense) purposes, but just sitting there, talking to people? So they just LIKE wearing all that long hair like a tight-ass all day. I mean, sure. The grill man at McDonald's wears a bun at work, because he HAS to. But YOU don't have to.
So it's a LOOK you're going for. You did that to yourself on PURPOSE! You don't even have the excuse of "It's too long to hang down and it's too short to tie back," and even then, it'd take 2 or 3 man buns to tie it all up, because it's too short to tie up in one knot. And that's only in the transitional stage, where most guys just wear a ball cap all the time You went the extra mile and made a man bun, on PURPOSE. Add talking like a soy simp and I start thinking you're doing it for chicks, in a sick, "I get pussy by pretending I'm a total feminist" kind of way, which I kinda despise. Always gotta be the center of attention. Always simping and white-knighting. Ugh.
As far as qualifying what you say, rather than just being yourself, that's actually pretty important. Not everybody can read your mind, or understand what you're really getting at. I've always been a bit of a brainiac, and it caused me a lot of problems with people who weren't. They weren't any stupider than me, but they weren't educated the same way I was. And their intelligence was bent more towards practical matters and social skills, where I've always been a bit of a social retard, due to my unique circumstances and heredity.
When I was an undergrad, I ran in a lot of rougher circles, mainly due to recreational drugs. I had quite a few conversations that went south, because the guys I was talking to didn't understand all my 60-dollar words. I was never a joke-writer, but always looking for the setup that I could knock down. Some of the cleverest things I've said were taken as insults by the people who should've been flattered and laughed along with me. But they didn't get the reference, and thought I was putting them down by talking over their heads. But I still liked guys like them more than the guys I had to be around in my classes. Over time, I learned how to fit in. By the time I was in grad school, guys would tell me "You ain't like those other eggheads. What you say makes sense."
Part of higher intelligence is not speaking your mind, but speaking to your audience. And I don't mean putting on a Southern accent to try to score points at the NAACP convention. Just plain speech.
I'm doing just what Joe Rogan was talking about when he discussed the comments section and how invested people are. I don't look at it that way. Sure, there's a lot of "Joe, when you said such-and-such..." directed right at the channel operator, but REALLY, this is a lot of people expressing themselves freely. Some are kooks. I know I'm a kook. My excuse is being laid-up a lot of the time, and not all that mobile when I AIN'T laid-up.
We're none of us really talking to YOU, Joe, because we know you're off to the next interview, and don't waste time and energy on the crazy comments section. We're really talking to each other, having a conversation about your conversation. This medium isn't JUST you, Joe. It's also a lot of people, and a lot of people GROWING before our eyes. I write to learn and to tear apart my ideas, refine my ideas, refine how I EXPRESS my ideas. There's a lot of learning taking place in these comment sections, in unexpected ways.
The way I think of it is how dumb I think the average incoming college student was 40 years ago, when I left high school. Nowadays, most incoming college freshmen are dumber and less self-reliant (unbelievable how many academic advisers schools have, nowadays!). But go one layer underneath THAT, and the guys who do NOT go to college are hella SMARTER than the same kinds of guys were 40 years ago. We're talking blue-collar workers communicating through the written word on a daily basis, and pickin' up all KINDS of shit along the way. It only SEEMS bad, because the dumbest of us are also the most talkative, and learning new stuff while ruining everyone else's conversations, because they're dumb-asses. I'm here to tell you that 40 years ago, their equivalent couldn't write at all. The high bar is lower, but the low bar is a lot higher. And people are clearing the high bar almost by accident just by getting curious about things and having an Internet connection. It's happening all around us. A lot of people know a lot of things, these days. You'd be surprised.
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Alias Fakename The biggest environmental disasters in human history were spearheaded by politicians. You can take it all the way back to Mesopotamia, where the government saw its power was in its farmers supporting everything else they wanted to do, and so MOAR LAND! Dig that shit up! Put our mono-crop in the ground so we can grow our wonderful centralized power scheme! They turned their own land into a desert.
Chernobyl? Government officials. The Dust Bowl? Government telling everyone "Free Land!"
It's not private companies that need the tax base to grow. It's the state, whose NATURE is to seek power, because it's populated by those who seek power. And 99% of our unsustainable lifestyle is government- and government-crony-corporation-driven. That, by the way, is NOT free-market capitalism. It's fascism.
Any time the state steps in and picks winners and losers, that's fascism (control of the means of production by the state), and the more power it has to pick winners and losers, the more we slip into an authoritarian form of socialism, which is pretty redundant, because you can't have socialism without dictating to private individuals. We exercise a "softer" form, to keep the masses from rebelling, but the fingers of the state are in just about everything, now.
A lot of people thought Hitler's socialist experiment was a resounding success, and a model to be followed by all nations, because look at all the free stuff his people are receiving and how well-fed, healthy and happy they are. Nobody talks about how much the Nazis borrowed to create and preserve that illusion. People say "Why didn't Hitler wait to start the war? They weren't ready!" Well, if they hadn't gone to war, their economy was going to collapse, and their debts were going to be called in.
The Nazis definitely didn't like the Jews, but few people talk about how the seizure of their assets and the concentration camps were essential to their keeping their economy afloat long enough to steal gold reserves and anything else they wanted from their neighbors, because their economy was FAILING. People don't know this, but like typical socialists, they decided that having bread was a RIGHT, and so they took over (nationalized) grain production. It destroyed their grain farmers, and their grain production cratered. To HIDE that failure (and many others), they had to become thieves.
Free markets are the fairest, most efficient, and only truly moral way to allocate resources. You can't just wave a wand and solve everything by government decree. The stuffed-shirts don't know squat about ANY of the industries they yearn to control. Their controls always favor big over small, and generate almost endless streams of income for politicians and their cronies. The TRICK is to convince the smooth brains that things are better when they're running everything, and they can parade endless lines of beneficiaries and hide all the losers from the public eye with manipulated media.
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You're cherry-picking your numbers on "health care outcomes." But beyond that, don't criticize capitalism for the failures of our own, essentially fascist setup in health care, today, where government decides what gets paid for and how much is paid. Insurance companies assholes? Sure. But why? Because government's the biggest player, and when they decide to pay $90 on a $100 service, the hospitals overcharge the insured patients to make up the difference.
Most folks would chip in, voluntarily, if and when asked. But you want to bureaucratize it, so all those decisions are made by a small number of higher-ups in the medical field who are INSTANTLY targeted by the fat cats.
Do insurance companies gouge? Sure. But why? For profit? Surely. But if they could still make a profit charging less, then a competitor would undercut their rates and they'd lose their ass. But when the government can (and does) step in at the drop of a hat and decide what will or will not be covered, and all the fat cats in government and big medical, big pharma and big insurance sit down and decide amongst themselves what they ALL need, well, they ALL get taken care of, and we, the people, just pay a higher price for EVERYTHING. And when the gummint can step in at any time and declare this or that treatment WILL be covered, if the insurance company doesn't have a HUGE rainy-day fund, they can go belly-up.
No. The best, albeit imperfect, answer, is to let the market and humans WORK. Every progressive idea has at its heart the giving up of responsibility and authority to government and that never ends well. You're just too shortsighted to see it, because you just see the money on the one hand and the need on the other, et voila! Take the money and serve the need. BY FORCE. Idiots. You're just setting the people up to be taken down by the greediest and most sociopathic among us.
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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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If U.S. security apparatus were truly concerned about Russian infiltration into Trump's campaign, they would've handled things quite a lot differently. They warned the Democrat National Committee that some bad things were going on, but all they did for Trump was spy on him, and even try to infiltrate the campaign with agents provocateur of their own!
The double standard is thick enough to cut with a knife. It's gotta chap their hides that even direct attacks on Trump leave him still standing. If they weren't so crooked, they could've left Trump to sink or swim on his policies, and probably have the same standard mid-term swing in Congress to the out-of-power Democrats. But because (in my opinion) so many of them crossed the line that they're obliged to attack, 24/7, in a desperate attempt to hide their corruption.
I really love the latest Russian Bot narrative, which is so fake and so flimsy, that 10s of thousands of people are going on record with personalized "red-pill moment" videos. The more they squeeze us, the more sand slips through their fingers, and it's hilarious to watch. I'm not a big "prayer guy," but I'm praying for a Republican landslide in November, because the LAST thing this country needs is for Schumer and Schiff and their ilk to control congress.
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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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Legacy media are digging their own graves, and blaming everybody but themselv es for it. They can keep on for a good long while, with so many billionaires willing to subsidize them. Controlling the conversation by operating giant propaganda machines is petty cash for those types. But it's getting harder and harder for them to hide, because of jagoff comedians in their garages putting out "un-redacted" video.
Many in #walkaway and already on the right watched full-length video on Antifa and BLM protests, unlike CNN consumers. They figured out right away that what the media was reporting bore little or no resemblance to the facts on the ground.
What's amazing - and may represent a watershed moment - is that the actual facts emerged and legacy media - for the first time - actually did some mea culpas. But they've been cherry-picking video of protests for DECADES, to spin their narrative, and with a monopoly on the cameras and the news, they've been getting away with it since LONG BEFORE the "Saddam is Hitler with WMDs" bullshit. But now, everybody and his dog has a camera. And you spin the story to ridiculous lengths to fit your narrative, and there's 1,000 dumb-asses with cameras uploading their crappy hand-held-smartphone video, PROVING that the narrative is false.
They can't fight that, directly. So, they're looking to call in their cronies in government to shut down people like Jimmy Dore. They're comin', Jimmy. They're fine with you on Nanny Government stuff, because it feeds the Government Beast, but you're RUINING their narratives on the foreign-policy front, with simple, checkable facts. So they're gonna come after you, too, eventually, if you let them "regulate" the Internet (sanitize it so they can go back to one-note reporting and commentary).
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I don't have much faith in government programs, but we are at a tipping point. All kinds of new products and services that people want. Grocery and restaurant delivery are more efficient and can be cheap, yet lucrative for the shoppers and drivers. A shopper can handle 2 or more orders. Cut exposure in half. Combine trips to be more efficient than two separate shoppers. Buying online. Cut the number of trips we (have to) make every day down to a minimum. With all the carbon-footprint worries, environmentally-minded people should like this.
The time and fuel you save letting a pro do your shopping leaves quite a bit extra for a nice tip for the delivery person. Something anybody with a car can do, and more profitable because of the cheap oil prices. And still quite a savings in fuel for the community.
HUGE demand for printers, scanners, screens you can share and write on, microphones and webcams for distance learning.
I think the economy was already poised to pivot, with a lot of people worried about legacy industries, and without the vision to see the NEW industries. Greenhouses for back yards. All kinds of off-grid power, heating and cooling solutions. Replacing Chinese imports with factories at home will be HUGE for us. Just don't waste too much taxpayer money propping up what IS and slowing the transition to something BETTER in the future! There's no lack of good jobs to be had. But throwing billions at print-media companies whose products nobody's buying or keeping BuzzFeed or NPR alive an extra year isn't doing anybody any good.
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Been looking for this to manifest. It may be inevitable, for the same reason(s) there are so many independent content creators competing with legacy media. The independents don't NEED 5 million views to make their nut. When I look at the programming task of creating competing platforms, I see no real barrier holding it back. It seems inevitable. Just look at the functionalities of the dominant platforms, they don't seem that hard to match or beat.
Set out to duplicate the functionality of sbnation.com for asynchronous chat. It's proprietary. I wish those platforms had been more aggressive about licensing that chat client to all comers, for a small fee, rather than pursuing legacy-media strategies of sanitizing content and wooing the legacy advertisers. Heck with that. Just a one-man operation hooked up with a good company that checks all the ethical and best-practices checkboxes for the CONTENT creator, rather than the content creator having to sanitize THEIR content to please every single snowflake who might by accident view their content, get offended, and go crying to big brother.
Nah. Be a content creator that a few righteous business owners really like, and they'll want to spend a few bucks for product placement and such, and the independent is THRILLed to have a very modest income stream from several (local) vendors. Also, a culture of person-to-person support of content creators, where large numbers of people also contribute small amounts to help support the content they want. The future is best, cheapest connection you can find, and direct support of the stuff you love, whenever you can afford it.
Shows won't live or die based on getting MILLIONS of views, but good stuff can be supported for $40 or $50 thousand, total, coming in by 2s and fews, all year long. Throw in some merchandizing, and an individual can make a decent middle-class income by doing their own thing. It's not something you can immediately quit your day job, but if you can put together a half hour of content once or more times per week, and it's good stuff, you can build a following and make money on the side.
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Mainman Mademan : Trump's the first president to meet with the North Korean dictator. Trump stood up to our trading partners in trade negotiations. Trump's cut off our illegal support of ISIS rebels in Syria, and in return, the Iranians will NOT be sending troops to the Israeli border. He's held the line against Putin, without antagonizing him. He's absolutely correct in NOT writing checks our asses can't cash on matters such as the Crimea, which has been in and out of Russian hands for centuries and has a Russian majority population...
Let's see. What else? He hasn't weaponized the powers of his office to railroad private citizens.
He's actually pushing for a SANE immigration policy, and winning the conversation, there. (Wait and see. Immigration will be the decider and the Dems are on the wrong side of this one.).
He's trying to break the education monopoly with school vouchers. Choice in education for all is a right. The current system sends you to the nearest monopoly outlet, and you're stuck with the neighborhood you can afford to live in, when it comes to public education. The biggest obstacle to immediate and profound improvements and cost savings to our young people is the Education Establishment, which only knows how to grow bureaucracy, raise prices, and pander to idiot SJWs.
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The collective West is financially ruined and doesn't make anything.
People in the collective West are being squeezed more and more, every day. Nobody wants to buy a car manufactured in the last 4 years. Nobody can get parts or fix anything that's older. Economic sanctions and the Green Agenda haven't crippled the East. They've crippled the West.
Ukraine threw in its lot with the USA, who hijacked its government in 2014, and Ukraine immediately proceeded to go to war with itself, because half the country didn't recognize the coup government. American oligarchs are in thick with Ukrainian oligarchs, for the benefit of oligarchs.
You guys think that Russia stands no chance, because of NATO backing, but NATO is spread thin and out of money. We can't fight in China, Africa, the Middle East, and Ukraine all at the same time. If our governments try to make us, those governments will fall, and it's anybody's guess what will replace it, but the new government will be minding its business at home or it, too, will fall.
I feel for the Ukrainian people, but I think their leaders bought a bill of goods that was bad for them.
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@derpynerdy6294 "Had to?" It was the plan, and it's why his armies were so mobile. But it was their downfall in Russia and a big part of their downfall in Spain. Paying for everything and NOT taking from the locals was an intrinsic part of the British strategy in Spain. The guerrilla fighters in Spain were like Afghani rebels on steroids. In Russia, you can't forage for supplies if the enemy goes scorched-Earth on you. They still made it all the way to Moscow and captured it, which Hitler never did, 120-some years later.
Some say the Soviets would've collapsed if the Nazis had taken Moscow, but I think it would've been much as it was for Napoleon, only there was a much bigger Soviet Red Army than the Czar ever had. Hitler didn't even account for more than half of what Stalin had just sitting in staging areas East of the Urals. Hitler also had the same problem as Napoleon with regard to the locals, who were universally hostile to the invader. He could've recruited, big-time from a lot of the nations he liberated from Soviet oppression. But he oppressed them even worse, and wanted their lands for HIS people, and couldn't be rid of the natives quickly enough to suit him. Napoleon likewise massacred entire villages, or rather, his marshals and generals did.
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@pheunithpsychic-watertype9881 I think maybe you're confusing Arwen of Rivendell (elf) with Eowyn of Rohan. There is much "win" in both names.
And Eowyn was pretty faithfully portrayed. She was a shield-maiden. Women didn't go out on recon missions like the men did, because their job was to defend their homes. Speaking of which, I know the orcs are supposed to be bad and they should be able to overrun a village rather easily, but I expected the villagers to put up more fight. I have no idea how that would have moved their completion date back, how much it would cost, or if it would even make the final cut in an already-bloated run time for American theaters.
They might have cast a bigger woman or more obviously athletic woman. She might've been more believable trying to pass as a man that way, but as I recall, the riders immediately around her knew what was up and they respected her decision.
I personally would probably watch an "Adventures of Arwen," especially if Liv Tyler's still got it, which I think she does. I think she was centuries-old by the time she met Aragorn. Google says she was 2700 years old and Aragorn was 20 the first time they met. Imagine how skilled of a fighter she could be by that age! I think Rings of Power tried to build that into Galadriel, but they made her a Mary Sue. It's not she's the only "millennial" who ever picked up a sword.
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Forget about how much they've dropped in one week. Focus instead on how miniscule their audiences were at their pre-election peak! "Down to 632,000" means they were only bringing in 1.2 million views at their peak. There are podcasters bringing in more views!
They were already dying before the election. The manufacture of consent by government/corporate oligopoly is failing. They had their way when mass media was first invented and for decades thereafter.
What our establishment learned from Hitler and Stalin wasn't that state-run (or state-manipulated) media was a bad thing. They learned how to obtain the same results by running their censorship and manipulation secretly, behind closed doors, and then bragging about our "free press," which was so much better. In a way, it WAS better, because in the USSR, China, or any other openly totalitarian state, everybody KNOWS what they see in print or on tv is 100% government propaganda.
By contrast, in the USA, I remember bragging about our free press compared to the obvious lies of TASS or PRAVDA back in the mid-70s (teen years). It wasn't until decades later that a little bit of research showed me how many lies and distortions I accepted at face value because I didn't realize that it was all establishment propaganda.
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He has a little more credibility than someone who would spin a yarn, but it comes across like he sent some baaaaaaaad e-mails, when he doesn't fire right back with the truth of it: "I did a baaaaad thing" or "I did no such thing." Instead, he wheedles. Makes his "Trump needs Trump guys," which was suspect out of the gate, look totally self-serving.
I generally don't like guys auditioning for top jobs on mainstream media. I feel the same way about seeing Digenova appear on FOX right before his hiring, and take all the correct (Trumpster) partisan stances. But it takes all kinds, and Digenova doesn't mince words. Can't tell for sure how much he's posturing for advancement (which he certainly obtained), or speaking in his authentic voice.
I disagree with Colling, totally on Trump needing or not needing Trumpsters in his cabinet. I think Trump gets more sympathy from most folks for the leaks, and it plays in his favor. If he really were this evil genius everybody's putting out there, he would've clamped down on leaks like a vise. Instead, he welcomes people who DISagree with him, and allows a certain level of unruliness, which I think is smart, even though it offends aristocrats in the Beltway.
I respect the economic advisor resigning over tariffs. And Trump probably does, too. It was clear Cohen wasn't a rubber-stamp, and that's a good thing to see. Stuck to his principles and resigned. Beats the hell out of a yes-man who thwarts you behind the scenes, or worse, feeds the worst of your tendencies. It's a position Trump took in which government is very much intervening in a nationalistic way to preserve a strategic industry.
Yeah, it's fascist. But we're in an environment full of fascist competitors, giving their strategic industries an unfair competitive advantage over our own. That's not a violation of Adam Smith. It's an act of self-defense against fascism, abroad.
The savings our consumers realize for steel and aluminum products by buying Chinese dumpings at a net loss to their economy, but by putting our guys out of business, they can corner the market. We can't have that, because China might not always be Mr. Nice Guy.
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Insurance companies are downstream of government policy, which is a mish-mash of public and private, where on any given day, some bureaucrat might decide "You're going to cover this procedure that was just invented." How can an insurer make reliable actuarial tables if the variables change at the whim of government? What happens when the government sets an artificially low price (or high price) for medicare payments for a given procedure?
No surprise, doctors push people towards treatments and procedures the government pays more for, whether they need it or not.
You see part of it, Jimmy.
What you don't see:
There was no such thing as health insurance before Roosevelt instituted wage freezes (bad policy). Big corporations immediately started offering health and pension benefits, because it was a loophole in the law. They could compete for the best workers and keep them happy without ever violating the wage freezes. Small companies couldn't offer the same benefits.
Before health insurance, each town had its hospital or hospitals and did its best to help everyone. People donated a lot more to the local hospitals than they do now, and the community ran fundraising efforts (an excuse to throw a party!) and treated doctors like kings (and queens). Doctors exercised a lot of discretion, and maximized the quantity and quality of health care within their means and within the limits of what the COMMUNITY supported.
For what they had, back 100 years ago, they did a lot more for a lot more people for a lot less. We'll never know what it might have led to by now, because the government hijacked the system and now we're at government's whim.
You can't insure a human's health. Not really. When you wreck a car, it gets "totaled." You could give it "life support" with really expensive repairs, but you don't, because it's not worth it or not affordable. There's a different calculus for health care. You don't "total" a human.
When the government guarantees everybody with an ailment gets government help, what happens if too many people get sick in a year or every year? Does the government just borrow money? You like that idea? There's no end to it. What ends up happening is government becomes the rationer of health care. Oh, you'll get your heart transplant, but it'll take us 10 years to get to you. You'll get your cancer treatment. Now get to the back of the line and wait your turn.
Resources get stretched. Compromises are made. The best doctors leave the business. The best candidate doctors avoid the business. Because it's free, demand is unlimited.
But there's an up-side to it: People are more loyal to the government when it gives them free stuff. Give them free stuff long enough and they forget how to take care of themselves or think for themselves. People are always talking about Nazi this or fascist that, but the ones screaming the loudest are the ones that insist that the national government run health, education, and welfare. Germany also had state-run media.
We wonder why Germany went nuts, because we forget that the people were treated like children, indoctrinated in state-run schools, and propagandized by government monopoly on media.
What's also surprising to most people is that we've had state-run media for decades. it just operates in the background. Back in the day, it was 5 or 10 phone calls to the head honchos of 10 of the biggest print, radio, and tv outlets. "Squelch that story. Emphasize this other story."
Twitter files shows how that decades-long culture of news manipulation became so ingrained, that they thought it was OK to have the FBI and other federal agencies telling Twitter what accounts to ban, shadow-ban, or otherwise censor. Every time it was an attempt to keep false narratives supreme across all media, and they were tremendously successful. They also did a tremendous amount of harm to our mental and physical health, and enriched themselves out of our pockets and out of our grandchildren's pockets (Have you checked the national debt, lately?).
Sorry to free-write on you. Anything but grade calculus... Now back to grading their final math projects. Chained to this chair for 12 hours. I gotta break it up!
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@SclountDraxxer Broad agreement on the military- and media-, health- and education-industrial complexes.
On health: Do away with federal. Devolve HHS (FDA, CDC) to the states. I don't believe we need government agencies like those at all. I think competition and consumers demanding accountability and transparency with their dollars, combined with instant, global communications in the hands of virtually everyone would clean things up faster, more effectively, and with less collateral harm than government intervention. But we don't know, because the gov't hijacked all of the organic means by which a true free market would regulate things. But that's my pragmatic libertarian opinion that most liberals refuse to accept.
"People are too greedy. It'd never work."
"So your solution is to put all that power into the hands of the people who are the greediest power seekers of all?"
But the compromise position is to devolve those powers to state and preferably local political entities.
Same with education. I believe all education should be private. It should be like buying your kids' clothes, with all the price and quality options there are for sneakers. But the compromise is 100% local control, local funding and School Choice. No federal mandates. Let towns and states compete for the best education systems.
Same with health. Medical care should be 100% private. The compromise: Get the feds out of the business. Local towns should take pride in their charitable contributions to the local doctor(s) and hospital. Don't WORRY about the next valley or 2 states over. Do the best you can with what you have wherever you are. We're lucky to get 20 cents on the dollar by the time all the federal bureaucrats take their cut, and all the Local bureaucrats who manage the federal stuff on the ground take THEIR cut.
My doctor spends 1/3 of every day filling out paperwork for the government and government-regulated insurance companies. Medical benefits were unheard of until FDR froze wages (horrible, fascist intervention). When he did that, Big Corporations started adding medical benefits as an end run, to give themselves a huge advantage in the labor market.
Nationalized health care was invented by Bismarck, based on the biggest arms manufacturer in Germany's "company towns." Take over health care and people will be as loyal to you as though their lives depended on it, which they literally DO! The Krupp company required employees to sign a loyalty oath and a non-disclosure agreement to get the health benefit. Bismarck liked that. A lot. And it set the stage for a Hitler, later, with a public that was conditioned to trust its parent-government leadership unquestioningly. And, with public education, Hitler indoctrinated an entire generation of young people to the new, Nazi World Order.
What did the USA do before FDR? Private doctors and lots and lots of charity. We had the best health care system in the world, before the government hijacked it. And after COVID, no one can deny the fascistic outcomes, there. Truth was censored. Lies were rammed down people's throats... And for decades, we were told fructose was good for us, but animal fats were deadly. Exactly backwards. But the Sugar Lobby bribed a few politicians, et voila!
Remember when Big Tobacco was telling us what brands were doctor-recommended?
De-centralize. Russell Brand's a bleeding socialist, but I can agree with him on that one guiding principle. Give NO man or small ground that much power over everyone's lives. I think it's bad even at the state level, but at least then, no one person or group can impose their mistakes and corruption on the entire country all at once. Some states will do great. Some will suck. Just like people.
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@blackberrythorns The technology is a 2-edged sword. Yes, it empowers the state, but the state can't advance without advancing peer-to-peer communications, and with peer-to-peer communications, it's difficult to maintain a coherent narrative that will manufacture consent.
Recent successes of mass media and social media manipulation have brought significant pushback, in ways and in numbers that were not anticipated. This is because the One Voice is disintegrating into a multitude of voices, making it more and more difficult to govern top-down.
The natural consequence of mass media has been the end of mass media, as the advantages of broadcast media beget 2-way mass communication, seeing it as a GOOD thing, but the peer-to-peer stuff, like your comment and my comment, are something that can't be calculated with any precision. It becomes a futile game of whack-a-mole.
That's why there's such a tussle and such a concentration of government investment in Internet controls. But it's the sort of thing that "the more you squeeze, the more the sand slips through your fingers." Sure. Track my buying habits and refine the supply chain to suit my needs. It was already very easy to single anyone out, even before modern technology.
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If the Supreme Court did its job, it would strike down the entire "Communications Decency Act" as a violation of the U.S. Constitution. The federal government should be silent on all matters related to speech, except in cases of incitement to violence and threats of violence, and even THERE, we already have criminal statutes in every state covering actual violent speech (not the SJW definition). Beyond that, "Congress shall make no law..." Seems pretty clear to me.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
To my simple mind, that means Section 230 is only one part of a piece of legislation that should've been abolished by The Supremes as soon as it passed. Special privileges dispensed to any person or organization violates Equal Protection under the law, also part of our constitution. It's all trash, and these guys are splitting hairs on irrelevancies. I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty good at logic.
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That's a pretty miserable night, waking up with one side cold every half-hour or so. But it beats having both sides cold with no fire. Making the video was difficult, but it also took your mind off how freaking cold you were. You weren't just spending a night outdoors. You were recording it for posterity.
I don't think I'd venture out without a lightweight tarp (or two).
I thought you were cutting it close on the firewood, when you did the "feed long ends into the fire" strategy. Very smoky and harder to ration your fuel supply for a full night. But you're pretty adept at gathering max firewood for minimum effort, so even if you ran out, you could always get more. I must say you were very efficient at whatever you set out to do. The only thing I'd've done different was waste a lot of energy processing the wood into approximate stove lengths, and made a tidier fire. I'm not sure my way'd be better for delivering more heat to my shelter. There's a lot to be said for the long fires, and since you're spending the night down low, you're not really troubled by the smoke.
Still, you demonstrate one true fact about the deep cold. If you've got fire, you can survive. Doesn't matter how cold it is.
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Oh, it doesn't exactly help Russia to have the West throwing $$$, weapons, and equipment at Ukraine. No directly. It raises the cost of the SMO. Not in the short term. It's what's kept the Ukrainians going, and gave Russia more with which to contend than if it were just a conflict with Ukraine, alone.
But you are correct in saying that it's hurting the collective West a lot more than it's hurting Russia. It's very clear that Russia made the correct calculation of the combined West's capabilities, and prepared for exactly this eventuality. And why wouldn't they? The massive army Ukraine was building and crowing about in 2010s was almost entirely U.S. funded.
Not only is the West far behind Russia in stockpiles and production of pretty much everything, they are also in debt to their eyeballs, and their unceasing attempts to topple governments, abroad, are going to topple western governments! They can't gear up to match Russia without spending WAY more than they're already spending, and they just... don't... have... the money.
The aforementioned Ukraine army is now on its last legs, I think. The West could strip itself bare and keep things going for another year, but it would cause so much economic and political upheavals to even try to replace everything, that governments would fall.
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One thing I noticed, growing up in the '60s and '70s was that the non-conformist hippy types all looked, dressed, and talked the same way. It was a strange, twisted kind of conformity that they claimed to be rebelling against. They weren't protesting conformity. They wanted a new orthodoxy, and they were less tolerant of any deviation than their parents ever were towards their spoiled children's self-indulgences and experimentation.
I remember seeing this same cohort later in life. They had hippy churches, and the rigid conformity I saw, there, was more constricting than the more (then-)conservative Methodist Church I grew up in. If you wanted to get on, socially, at the little college, you went to the Unitarian Church, and let everyone know what a good Democrat you were. When I was younger, the Methodists stuck to "love Jesus, obey God, sin less, and don't judge others."
Really, the hippies were never about expressing yourself, freely, even when they were brandishing signs demanding free speech. It was always only about what side they were on at the time. Now that generation IS the establishment, and their disdain for free speech is undeniable.
Even when history has proven them wrong, they insist on their blind, pro-establishment hot takes, because they feel they ARE the establishment, life is great for them, and preserving their privileges makes them support the established order that serves them so well.
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Yes. Ground-based data are very quirky. A site that was once out in a field is now in the middle of a parking lot. A site that was once a weather station is no longer, so they PROJECT what they THINK the temperatures are at the now-missing site. A significant percentage of so-called data are actually back-filled projections of this sort. Nobody really has a handle on tracking climate change at ground level.
Regardless of whether climate is changing one way or another, I haven't heard one single policy proposal that could reasonably be implemented planet-wide, that would affect any projected increase in any significant way. Time and time again - for instance carbon taxes on British coal-fired electrical generation - the proposal means more power for the elites, and more wealth extracted from the economy, and little net benefit, since the biggest coal burners get a free pass, because they scoff at the idea of bending the knee. But Britain bends the knee. The most likely thing to get us out of pollution crisis is for government to get out of the way and let competent people in business and smart consumers evolve the society to healthier norms.
These guys always want to solve problems by force, through the use of central power. Always a mechanistic world view. Always giving control to bureaucrats over people who actually do things and know things out in the real world.
Al Gore went straight from making documentaries to brokering carbon credits. Nothing fishy about that... Nothing fishy about having the carbon footprint of 100 average citizens, combined... Nothing fishy about the beachfront property he bought.... Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't think it won't be flooded. Maybe it just means he's confident he can get a fat check when the day comes. People like him seem to thrive on crisis at others' expense.
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@PHeMoX European nations never enshrined free speech as a right. In different places, people may speak more or less freely, by custom, but the government can snatch it away at the government's pleasure. The U.S. government is the ONLY government in the WORLD that is explicitly constrained from infringing on the right to speak freely and voice your dissent, and the U.S. government chafes at the restriction and has done everything possible to control speech, without being caught doing it.
The Twitter Files show beyond a doubt that the U.S. government regularly censors the news on Big Tech and legacy media alike. There's no way they wouldn't ALL behave exactly as Twitter, FaceBook, the New York Times, cable news, and report the exact same things, with the exact same wording, inclusions and omissions if it weren't all coming from one place.
I'm done giving the benefit of the doubt. Any lack of transparency. Any redaction. Any suppression of stories. Any de-platforming of critics and dissidents. I'm just done. I am henceforth assuming that every bit of corporate-sponsored media are lying. I assume that any media for children published in the last 10 years is something I wouldn't want my kids to watch, until proven otherwise.
In the words of a system administrator: Hosts Deny: All is the default until personally vetted by me.
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@BradenENelson : I don't think anybody seriously doubts climate change. Many doubt whether CO2 emissions drive it. In fact, I'm not sure why they're focused on just eh CO2. I think it's other stuff that we emit that is probably a bigger deal. If you could tie CO2 emissions to, say, SO2, SO3, H2O, CH3 emissions, say a simple proportionality constant, then you'd have a good case for tracking CO2 as an indicator.
I think we could turn the Sahara green if we put our minds and some elbow grease to it. I think greening up Saharan Africa would be something we could all agree on, without having to create a whole 'nother layer of government control on people, that will eventually all be administered by the kinds of idiots that always end up at the tops of those "fail to grow your domain" outfits. That's why I'm not a progressive. I think you guys waste way too much time asking government to do things you should just get off your asses and do for the folks in your immediate area. But then I'm old school. I see compassion and charity in human hearts, not on spreadsheets in government offices.
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They're the top 2 at this time. Trump didn't understand the workings of government, like DeSantis does. Career government employees ran rings around Trump. I'd rather Trump be #1 cheerleader, tweeting up a storm from Mar-A-Lago. I think Trump is damaged goods at this point. He has The Jab hanging around his neck, which splits the base. Democrats are now allowing you to say bad things about The Jab, so they've probably got Trump all set up to take a fall, right there.
I don't think Trump would've pushed mandates, and he left things to the states, as he should, but he let things get crazy without speaking out strongly against the crap his own agencies were spewing out. He took all 4 years to end CRT training in the military and federal agencies, which Biden reverses before they ever quit teaching it. Trump had the right idea a lot of the time, and he was less authoritarian than Obama and Biden. But he took the advice of a lot of the wrong people in high places. A lot of his top officials were either wrong, lying to him, or deliberately withholding information he had every right and all the authority to know.
For instance, Trump ordered U.S. military out of Syria. "We won, right? So why are we still there? Bring them home." They told him they did, but they didn't. That's TERRIBLE. The fact that Trump didn't know he'd been disobeyed (apparently) says maybe he doesn't know who his friends are and maybe he makes some bad appointments, but he sticks with them too long, out of reluctance to admit he made a mistake? I don't know. I know there was a lot of storm and fury, but not a ton of progress draining a swamp that's even bolder, now, than in 2016. They took on their boss and WON! They can get away with whatever they want, now.
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I think it's GREAT that the CCP is finally being held accountable by SOMEBODY in the Free World! It's exposing how un-sound the rotten system they have in China is. We're finally going to stop propping up the dictatorship that's held down some really great people for decades. Hong Kong's a big deal, but there are a billion people under this Communist crime syndicate. The only way they can compete with us is by cheating the international trade system and stealing Western innovations that their totalitarian regime is absolutely unable to produce.
Sure they can spy on us, steal all our stuff, and then invest only on things they haven't stolen, and steal a march, here and there, but people simply aren't as creative under an authoritarian, confiscatory scheme. The only place where they're doing well is in their exports sector, which is the only sector they model along free-market lines. They're gonna lose a lot of that, if USA requires them to play fair or not play at all. Well, they're also doing well is Hong Kong, but they're finding out they can't control Hong Kong without destroying what makes it special.
I've been afraid of what China's been doing for a long time. Only now, with Trump needling them on key issues, am I seeing just how fragile their system is, and how steeped in corruption it is. If it weren't for them cheating in international markets and flagrantly flouting IMF rules they agreed to abide by but do NOT, their economy would have tanked long ago.
For them to compete, fairly, they have to create a strong cadre of educated middle-class workers. But that's the exact thing their system can not allow if they wish to remain in power. They're damned if they do and they're damned if they don't.
Now all I'm worried about is how much harm they're likely to do, if, as I expect, the CCP perceives an existential threat to itself. I worry about all the people - mostly Chinese - who are likely to be hurt.
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It's a weird deal. How do we own what we and Europe have done in the region? We despise regressive Islam, but I can easily imagine Christian war leaders springing up in the mountains and vales of our countries if the shoe were on the other foot and we were beset by Islamic conquerors, who insist on re-drawing the maps of Europe and North America.
Obama got at least part of our turbulent history in the Middle East. I'm pretty sure he had little idea how to set things right, for the present and on into the future. Create a vacuum and something unwholesome invariably takes its place.
The real trick is to somehow disengage, leaving MORE stability and peace in our wake. I'm not sure Trump gets it, but I'm pretty sure Obama was on a one-world, authoritarian setup. I'm all for one world, but it's gotta come from the ground up, with civilized countries voluntarily joining other civilized countries. The trouble is, many nations - often due to colonial mind-set in Europe and creeping into American values - just aren't very civilized.
You can't have open borders when folks on the other side are either bad news or FLEEING bad news, and raised in cultures that don't understand Human Rights of Person and Property. In fact, the West, itself, is busy trying to dismantle human rights in favor of the Greater Good, which is ALWAYS the clarion cry of Protection Racketeers.
But if all countries respected basic human rights, folks would live well and secure on both sides of borders, and borders wouldn't matter. Trouble is, there are too many people who believe in using force to make all things right, and more and more people are giving more and more power to central authority, which is exactly the wrong way to go. Sovereign individuals are smarter and care more for the planet than government hierarchies.
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@amccibils Are you sure you're not confusing this with cinchona bark (HCQ)? It was discovered in South America by Jesuits. When I say "discovered," I mean that the Jesuits learned from the natives about quinine, the active ingredient in the bark.
Yes. They DEFINITELY wanted everyone to take a Big Pharma vaccine, rather than hear from ANYbody who was successfully treating the coof with off-the-shelf drugs, like HCG, Ivermectin, and remdesivir (sp?). No. Can't patent those drugs. They've been around too long. You've gotta take this experimental vaccine.
There're people suing under Nuremberg protocols for crimes against humanity, for their human experimentation. Meanwhile, treating the coof like some world-ending plague got a lot of people with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and other ailments killed, because everything had to give way to the virus. Nothing else mattered. Not your job, not your business, not your mother locked up in a nursing home...
I think we've all had our fill of medical tyranny by mental midgets and crooks.
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CNN is DEFinitely over-the-top partisan, BUT they had PLENTY of high-placed sources giving them PLENTY of confirmation, according to so-called journalistic "standards," which were never EVER even considered by our Founding Fathers. Nobody insisted that Thomas Paine's pamphlets be fact-checked and second-sourced. It's FINE to grind your axe in the public square. What is NOT fine is this mythological "Fairness Doctrine" under which mainstream American media have supposedly operated for most of the 20th Century and is only now being revealed for what it is in the 21st: Just another way of packaging the narratives of select, powerful elites and dominating the public discourse with the opinions and self-interested propaganda of the handful of monied power elites with the ability to influence and control the top levels of media giants, with bribes and simply by BUYING those outlets or a large or majority stake in those outlets.
I would much rather have a revolutionary like Thomas Paine saying HIS piece and some Tory loyalist saying HIS piece and let the American people decide for themselves which to believe in whole or in part, than this monolithic one-note media that PRETENDS fairness and diversity, while overwhelming by sheer size or even by specifically attacking alternate viewpoints. De-monetization is soft censorship (unless you're the independent content creator being shadow-banned or outright banned, like Alex Jones). Yes, nutcases will get their followings. But as long as there is a free and open public square, individual choices by individual Americans as to what holds up and what doesn't will lead us toward something that more closely approximates real truth.
Not a single person can guess how many jelly beans are in the jar, but the AVERAGE of ALL the guesses is almost always very, very close to the actual number. Some people aren't OK with that much chaos, that much noise in the signal. But over time, a very small impetus in the direction of TRYING to get it right, creates a highly nuanced ORDER out of the chaos that no one person can fully grasp and anal-retentive so-called liberals just can't BEAR to leave to the good sense of the people, on average, to achieve. That's why we see rules on EVERYthing, including plastic straws in restaurants. You can't be trusted to exercise good sense. The sad thing is it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the more you run things by more and more ridiculously complicated Iand internally inconsistent and self-contradictory) rule sets, the less control anyone has and the less sense the vast majority actually exercise in their decision-making. You worry so much about poor decisions that you end up crippling everyone's ability to MAKE decisions, resulting in a society that NEEDS to be told EVERYthing. It's a spiral towards a deprived and oppressed population under totalitarian rule and it's all in the name of the greater good, which NONE of us fully understand, but we all march towards over time, given the freedom and autonomy to pursue our own best interests, subject to the best interests of those around us.
More people need to read their Blackstone. More people need to read and understand their Adam Smith. More people need to understand the TRUE sweep of history, and grasp the explosion of freedom and prosperity that occur every time the people are given maximum authority over their OWN lives that is consistent with the authority everybody around them SHOULD have over THEIRS! We all should bow our heads and thank God for Adam Smith's Invisible Hand and that somebody like him was created and had the sense to write Wealth of Nations! We should CELEBRATE every bit of true progress and its roots in freedom, liberty and self-determination, but all we do is dwell on how backwards people were 100, 200, 300 or 1,000 years ago, and we now totally ignore the small victories and small Enlightenments along the way that got us to a much better place than we've ever been in human history.
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I can see how it looks bad on video and how the cops would frown on it, but out there in the street, with a large crowd that's only going to grow, with you standing there and 3 insane women who just got knocked on their asses... Hanging around can get you killed. I totally don't blame him for scootin'. I know how those situations can get out of hand and end VERY badly for a big, strong guy, who knows he's within his rights, and does the right thing, only to be pummeled by the crowd that's just gonna grow, and likely be very hostile to the man in the situation.
And he turned himself in, right away, pretty much, didn't he? It's news because we're starting to see more and more of these toxic women, who think they can talk shit, get up in your face, and hit you or spit on you, without consequences, because they have a Woman Card. People need to be reminded that it's a LADY'S Card, and you only see gentlemen when there are Ladies about. Then the power of the feminine is absolute. But when you go masculine, you're sayin' Tits Don't Matter, and you take what you get AFAIC.
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We were Methodists in a small town, living across the street from the Catholic Rectory, and about a block away from our Methodist church, just down the block on - fittingly - Church Street. We kids grew up runnin' all over the place. When we got big enough, we boys all worked for Joe Gallagher, Father Gallagher's brother, whose knees were as bad as mine are, now. Salt of the Earth. Paid us what he promised, and his disappointment when we lollygagged a little too long during breaks, was far more devastating than any yelling or screaming and he never laid a hand on us.
Can't tell you how many gravestones I mowed around. Go down the right side, make an 'L' cut, and then do another 'L' cut on the way back down the row of stones. Good hard work. Toughened us up quite a bit. Made us some money, besides. Joe was kind of everybody's firm but fair uncle. None of us kids were ever touched. And when Hurricane Agnes ripped through Northeastern Pennsylvania, the Methodist Church was on lower ground and got flooded. After we moved away, I went back to PA in the summer between Jr and Sr year of high school (with the plane ticket I bought, using my Perkins and McDonald's money), and as our house hadn't yet sold, and it was becoming an overgrown eye-sore that I cleaned up. Joe let me borrow his 3-on-the-tree Ford F-150 to haul away the yard waste.
I then abused the privilege by taking the girl with whom I was hopelessly and unrequitedly smitten on a shopping trip to Scranton. Bought her some perfume. Got in big trouble for taking the truck on a 30-mile road trip! Just a few stern words and the shame of letting Joe down.
But what could they do? I was just-turned 16, the year before, my folks were 2500 miles away, and although I was supposed to stay with the Methodist preacher (whose daughter held my heart), what could HE do if I too koff and did as I pleased? I pissed EVERYbody off on THAT trip, including the girl. sigh
During the flood, the Whole Town went to the Catholic Church just up the hill (Across from Kintner Milling Co.) from the Methodist Church. Those joint services were the best. Father Gallagher and Pastor Stork took turns talking and praying with us, everybody had a good time in tough times, and thought nothing of it, other than the prayer benches for your knees and the real wine that the Catholics used (and we boys might sneak in and take a few swigs of, when we were mowing the church grounds and some fool left the door open!
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@amie8889 : And with idiots like you blabbing unrestrained in YouTube comments, more people are "in the know." We really kid ourselves that government is "protecting us," when the BEST way for an unscrupulous or even malevolent businessman to get away with their sculduggery is to have the seal of approval from government officials, who tend to be underpaid and overworked. We set ourselves up for the guys we hire to be our watchdogs to be bribed! And they don't even have to be corrupt. They just got a whiz-bang power-point and a nice steak dinner from the nice man from Monsanto who wants to "understand" the regulations a little better. General Electric always sends the nicest people.
If I wanted to sell my GMO foods and I knew the public wouldn't go for it and might come after me, I'd spend a couple million on lining the pockets of a handful of people at the top of the Dept of Agriculture and over at Food and Drug, as well. Make pals with Environmental Protection. Couldn't hurt, amirite? And this is exactly what they do, and have been doing for a long time.
Injecting cattle with antibiotics and hormones. Feeding cattle GMO feed grains that are pest-resistant, because they spliced it with another plant that's poisonous! And then we eat that beef and we wonder why we're sick or why our kid's autistic or why our son thinks he's a girl, or why our fertility rates are dropping. Maybe it all goes back to that GMO plant whose defense mechanism is to neuter the bugs that eat it! My dunno! Frogs with tits!
I think as our society evolves, that having your own greenhouse, your own victory garden, is going to be a lifestyle choice. I know I'd pay double for produce, if I could get it from a local, sensible farmer, who's looking out for me, so I'll keep coming back to him, year after year. We could do worse than go back to the village market that inspired Adam Smith.
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@susanpepper148 : I'm no lawyer, but YES. Many states require both parties to consent to recording. Sounds like Napolitano is once again talking out of his ass. BUT, if nothing is DONE with the recordings and they never come to light, then "no harm, no foul." It MAY relate more to using those recordings for anything. Certainly not admissible in court in a 2-party-consent state.
And yeah, Google, who OWNs YouTube, to put a mic in a device and not tell anyone is NOT an oversight. It's just dishonest and despicable. Need other platforms than YouTube to step up and take over. Google's a bunch of lying, partisan assholes.
As to the reporting, I'm not sure. Certainly all outlets who repeated the Covington (and the Jussie Smollett) narratives didn't do their due diligence. I'm not sure where it crosses the line into slander/libel, when you simply repeat what others report. But you definitely don't want to watch/read the news from ANY of the outfits who pushed the narratives, because you know they're irresponsible and pumping out Fake News. Basically, EVERYone listed in the Covington suit are bad actors and nobody should be paying any attention to them. Rather than going after them, I think the ultimate answer is simply turning AWAY from them.
Oh. And you needn't shout. And paragraphs are always nice.
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We all want it all. And if we GET it all, we'll change the meaning of the word "all" to include new items.
Most of us understand this and accept that life is trade-offs and we prioritize. Some of us are just never satisfied, incapable of contentment in an imperfect world.
I think what women want coalesces in practice to polygamy. They'd rather be one of many attached to Chad, than settle for monogamy with Joe the Plumber. Men are wired differently. If that baby isn't ours, we don't want to be stuck paying for Chad's Saturday night from 3 years ago.
It turns out that traditional marriage means more happiness for more men AND women. But both men and women, without guidance and structure laid down by their elders, will make bad decision after bad decision. And they won't realize it until they, themselves, are unhappy and frustrated elders, who STILL don't understand what went wrong. They'll blame it on everything but the fact that they lost the ability to pair bond by riding so many different horses on the sexual carousel.
You're not finding Mr./Mrs. Goodbar. You're making yourself less and less likely of ever being someone ELSE's Goodbar, because the carousel changes you. You want that perfect, loyal mate, but you, yourself are never going to be a perfect mate for anyone else, by the very nature of your search.
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3331: As with most things, there's a Yin and a Yang. Dark-Age Christianity was pretty foul, and yet the Roman Catholics kept the classics alive for future generations to rediscover in the Renaissance. Yeah, the leadership at the top of 'most ANY church is all about survival of the church in THIS world, which they pretend to measurer success in saved souls for the NEXT. How do they measure THAT success? Sadly, by the amount of money in their damn collection plate.
But if CO2 is a leading indicator for climate change (It isn't), it's worth keeping track of, and does correlate fairly strongly with all types of man-made pollution. CO2 ain't the only stuff we're pumping into the atmosphere, and as it has risen, so have levels of other pollutants, which are much stronger greenhouse gases. Don't get me wrong. I haven't heard a single solid, climate-remediating proposal from ANY of the "believers." All they seem to want is more government interference in everything, and especially in the U.S., while other major polluters like China and India get a free pass.
But in the larger sweep of things, folks who try to be Christ-like tend to be pretty good people. That's how churches keep 'em in line. They appeal to the BEST in people, but sometimes (often) for all the wrong reasons.
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Mix of truth and lies. There ARE oil magnates with politicians on speed dial. You might be surprised how deeply embedded in the Green New Deal they are, managing its wording so that they can take maximum advantage of government subsidies and keep millions of small projects from ever getting STARTED, by controlling the regulations that will come with it. "We're going to have to take down your windmill, ma'am, because it doesn't have wheelchair-accessible entrance" or some shit like that.
That's the main reason I oppose Green New Deal, because I think the CULTURE is going green faster than a handful of eggheads in industry and government can even keep up with, and the last people we want in charge of how the changes are made are idiots like AOC, following the advice of the "experts" who are most accessible (and generous) to them. Arguably the biggest obstacle to EarthShip construction principles is government regulators. The guys preaching to us about environment are the same guys who won't let you build more green-conscious in an organic way.
No. To THEM it means a more efficient gas furnace hooked to their grid. A cracker-box wood-frame construction on top of the ground that's so tight you breathe your own effluvia. Can't have a house that breathes. You need to buy disposable air filters from an outfit in China...
Green tech and living in balance with nature is a ground-up phenomenon, and the people on the ground can share their successes and failures, INSTANTLY, with other people just like themselves, across broad spans of climate, altitude, culture, and resource settings, informally, over the Internet. We need more Kirsten Dirksen's, not more government programs that are just big money-makers for the people writing the fine print and first in line for the benefits.
The internal combustion engine is a fantastic asset to humanity. But driving 40 miles to work every day in a car is just a stupid way to live. People are figuring that out, but you don't need to punish them or use force on them. Living greener is already seen as a "good" in this culture, so let it play out!
And when I hear "shovel-ready" out of a politician's mouth, I about blow a gasket laughing and crying at the same time. They're the last people we want deciding how to clean things up.
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@mcnuffin1208 Was the outcome in Chechnya ever in any doubt? I think calling it a "worst nightmare" was over the top, but Russian Army is gaining combat experience, and has adapted very quickly.
I think it can be deceptive, watching green Russian troops do as they're told and high-tail it out of trouble. I think it's easy to underestimate the enemy, especially when you are winning skirmish after skirmish, when to the enemy, the skirmishes are the best training for the survivors, both officers and enlisted. The skirmishes are less about winning and more about forcing their opponent to respond, expending human and material resources they can ill afford to lose.
You very quickly sort out leaders from followers and incompetents. It might be the least costly in men and equipment over the long haul, the same way that their absolute "Do not negotiate with terrorists" stance.
"20 gunmen have taken 100 moviegoers hostage and they're in a stand-off with local police."
You know what happens. They sing the death songs of the hostages, assemble overwhelming forces, and they storm the theater. Hostages may die, but terrorists definitely die. That kind of next-level ruthlessness saves many Russian lives. Would-be hostage takers know how it will end.
I think we're reaching the point where Ukrainian front line will collapse. It remains an open question how Putin will respond, but my guess is he'll be open to negotiations. Ukraine stands to lose Odessa if this continues, and could potentially regain more territory by being reasonable and ending the genocide on ethnic Russians within its borders.
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What we need are classical liberals: Limited government, free-market capitalism, and an end to foreign meddling (entangling alliances that drag all into war over brush wars). "End justifies the means" has to be abolished. The proper means IS the proper end. Improper means can get you the win, today, but destroy you ini the long run.
Nothing wrong with Christianity. It's as legit as any other belief system and better than most. As with any big movement or institution, it is just as prone to being hijacked by power seekers as any other movement or institution. Jesus TRIED to weld REASON onto faith. "If the law says one thing and the Golden Rule says another, go with the Golden Rule." You know what they got Jesus on? Healing the sick on the Sabbath! He broke Mosaic Law when he did that. The Romans didn't care. It was the Pharisees who took him down, just like the Fruit of Islam took down Malcolm X.
Things have flipped. Those who call themselves 'liberals' are now the dogmatic reactionaries, protecting the status quo. A segment of the conservative side are the same way, only waiting THEIR chance to re-take the Establishment, and ram THEIR beliefs down everyone's throat.
The broad middle can agree on getting government off our backs. The Big Compromise between left and right is to get the federal government to devolve 80% of its duties to the states. We don't need HHS, FDA, CDC, Interior, Agriculture, Education Departments. Let each state EXPERIMENT with health and social services, and learn from each other on a smaller scale. Don't want high taxes? Move to a low-tax state. Want Free Stuff? Move to a blue state. Let the people have options and vote with their feet.
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@JRBOwnsall I see the welfare state as full Reverse. The King will care for all of you and all he asks is that you OBEY. All the surrendering of liberty is for a good cause, though, am I right? If you want to be taken care of, you need to conform!
To me, the Democrats are just the same old same old divide-and-conquer would-be tyrants that have been with us for millennia. It's just re-branded.
What's "forward" about a national debt that's as big as the gross domestic product? You've had your fun, but now your children and grandchildren are stuck with the bill, without ANY hope of owning their own home or raising their own family. That's not forward. That's slipping into a Dark Age.
You seem to be opposing a 1950s caricature of the "far right." If you characterize the people who want to tap the brakes on full-on fascism as deplorables, then you're pretty much missing the point.
The games played to concentrate power in the hands of a few are as old as human kind. If you can't see you're being gamed to believe that's "progress," I guess I can tell you, but I can't make you listen.
Live long, learn, and prosper.
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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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Learn some facts. The environmental destruction caused by making these EVs is off the charts. Also, SLAVE LABOR. Also, driving ranges are disappointing. Also, EVs are mUCH heavier, meaning a lot more asphalt being poured, and the machines to pour it. Also, most of the electricity going into the EVs is produced by fossil-fueled power plants.
It IS political, just like lock-downs were political, and climate change is political.
EVs are good for some things, but not a panacea, and certainly not on the schedule you zealots believe. You never count or care about ALL the trade-offs. You just get your heart set on one particular solution and ALL MUST GIVE WAY BEFORE YOU. That ain't how the world works and it ain't how this is gonna go.
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@MissingThe90s That's hard to say. He picked a neocon for VP, which is not a good sign for his State Department and intel appointments. But after RussiaGate, he has no love for the security state and the foreign-policy brain trust currently in office.
Who knows what compromises Russia might accept, if their security requirements are met? There was and is no way Russia is going to accept a hostile neighbor on its doorstep, building a huge army and rattling its saber, with the approval and encouragement of feckless NATO (U.S.) officials.
Right now, the Russians are winning hearts and minds around the world, for the way they handle their business and how the USA and Europe handle theirs. Africa and the Far East are fed up with America's regime-change foreign policy. They're nervous about who might be next on the USA's hit list, and they see America's might being legitimately challenged around the world.
Russia has oil and gas for sale. The west is actually planning on moving away from fossil fuels by 2030, and has nothing but poverty on offer. American economic hegemony is coming to an end, but it refuses to accept that it is no longer first among equals.
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@STOP_FAKENEWS He had us on that trajectory or to a re-definition of NATO as a DEFENSE alliance, which was its original purpose and the only thing it ever had a real mandate to be.
When Trump spoke truth to the neocon establishment, EU, and NATO, the security state went after his head, along with its puppet legacy media, and, well, people like you.
NATO doesn't have to end if it returns to being a defensive alliance, with all members paying their fair share. But you know full well that Trump pointed out the ridiculousness of our spending billions to (supposedly) defend Europe from the evil Russian Bear that Germany was getting all its oil and gas from.
Either Russia's the Evil Empire of yore or Russia is just a strong nation with many shared interests.
I think if we were less aggressive, less bullying, Russia wouldn't feel like it's on a war footing all the time, and it would actually liberalize!
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Don't like big oil making big donations. But I also doubt that fossil fuels are a significant factor in climate change. CO2's just too weak of a greenhouse gas, and its effect on climate is PROBABLY far less than the damage to the poorest and weakest and most backward among us done by raising the cost of energy. I want it as cheap as possible for that woman who cooks inside her home on an open fire, made of the wood she gathered from the nearby forest, to get a Dad Gum Propane Service. FAR cleaner and cheaper, if we can get that supply chain going.
Send 5,000 Antifa to 3rd World Countries to teach Mass Heat Rocket Stove technology to every person who burns wood for heat. There's a 90% reduction in CO2 emissions and deforestation for heating purposes (if the EPA would get their head out of their ass and approve these Green-Tech devices that harvest virtually 100% of the heat in the wood and emit ONLY CO2, CO, H2O, because they reach refractory temperatures in an insulated riser pipe and burn it down to the simplest form (No tars, creosote. No waste.) and then run the exhaust through a heat sink. Burn in the morning. Place stays warm all day long.
The average person is well aware of environmental concerns and trending away from dirty living, like burning lots of gas, for example. That's the solution. Green Tech will be as good as the free market can make it, and get there, faster, if we leave government out of it. But the EPA can't even find a place in their regulations to approve the technology! By EPA Regs, the air going up the chimney needs to leave the pipe at the roofline at 300 degrees, Farenheit. But you can put your hand in front of a mass heater setup. Maybe 150 degrees? 120? Last I checked, that reg remained on the books, so if you want a rocket stove mass heater, you basically have to build it yourself, because I don't think you can sell them, commercially, without running afoul of the EPA.
And that's kind of the way things are, nowadays. The people are miles ahead of the government, but the government keeps trying to run everything. We can't just come up with great ideas and use them, if government has its way. The elite technocrats are simply less competent about everything than the people they want to boss around.
We're transitioning to cleaner alternatives. Western Civ has curbed its population growth. Everybody's crying about it, but it's what we WANT. Climate change = CO2 is pretty flimsy. But burning fuel does add dirt to the air, so we want it to be curbed, somewhat. The questions are "How severe is it?" and "What's the cost-benefit analysis tell us?"
Short term, the biggest effect of CO2 in the atmosphere has been additional greening of the planet. More uproarious growth. Bumper crops in different places. Now this is not to say that CO2 emissions and deforestation aren't good bellwethers for our likely impact on the environment in all sorts of ways. Probably not a bad measure of man's net level of activity and pollution.
But just going after CO2 emissions without addressing bigger problems, such as overpopulation putting the actual strain on the closed planetary ecosystem. We just generally need to think a little greener, and, instead of importing people from the 3rd world to OUR world, we need to teach people in the 3rd world how to put a lid on THEIR population growth. And I think we'll come to find out that the best way to bring those folks UP is to SPREAD fossil fuels to THEIR countries, until THEY get to a critical point in prosperity, to where THEIR population stabilizes and maybe shrinks.
Hey, let's worry about too FEW babies when mankind becomes endangered. Until then, the least harmful way to bring the most people up is to raise their standard of living. And not in fake ways like setting Jimmy Dore's $15/hour on the price of sweeping the floor. No. If you're making a career out of floor-sweeping, then your only hope is to one day be the boss of 20 other floor-sweepers, because floor-sweeping is just not worth $15/hour. You can find a kid who'd spend 3 hours and be overjoyed at his first $20 or $30.
But as ABL would say, "... I digress."
I hope some folks will think about this. Western Civilization achieved its goal of 0% population growth, but the means by which we achieved it were with government control systems and fascist feedback loops between government and favored businesses (crony capitalism) that require an ever-growing economy and population, to pay for all the boondoggles they've thought up. We're in a pretty good place, right now, and we just need to tweak welfare into work-fare, and a couple things like that, and I think we're golden, if we can avoid adding too many people, HERE, just when we got our shit together.
Instead of importing a kazillion people, how about we look for ways to teach people in shithole countries (I'm not afraid to say it!) the path to prosperity, rather than let our good intentions tear down OUR prosperity.
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I'm torn on AOC, because her ignorance is something of a shield against the Swamp. She was OFFENDED by the fact that "Freshman Congress Orientation" was wall-to-wall lobbyists. She doesn't know how that game is played, which is ignorant, but the game, itself, is crooked as hell, and she was right to call them out.
Ilhan Omar got it all wrong on the facts as to when CAIR was created (She said after 9/11, when it was created in 1994). But she NAILED it when she called out the Patriot Act for its police-state features, which you just don't hear "old hands" in Congress talking about.
As more or less of a crusty old bastard, who believes in old-fashioned tolerance and basic individual rights, I'm pretty eclectic about things. When these clowns get something right, I try to see past my apparent tribe and not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Sometimes it's the Republicans acting all tribal and regressive. More often, of late, it's been the Democrats, and the degree to which they've regressed is far beyond anything the Republicans appear to be doing.
Most of the things I disagree with are the things there's bipartisan support for. The Republicans LOVE Free Stuff just as much as Democrats, these days. The Democrats like the arms industry as much as any war-hawk Republican.
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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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By standing firm, he puts the Democrats in a very bad position. They're dead set on not letting him have his way, but they're out of rational arguments. The facts and the numbers are stacked against them, and the longer they hold out, the more people learn more facts. There are definitely some businesses that benefit by illegals depressing wages. But aside from those special interests, illegal immigration costs us 100s of billions of dollars, year in and year out. It puts a drain on localities that are disproportionately affected by the influx.
But stories are coming out. People who live next to the border and in affected areas in the inner cities are not being heard, unless they're in Sanctuary! mode. Right now, they're trying - and failing - to suppress local San Diego reports, because people are saying things have gotten a lot better since they put up barriers. But they can't quite keep these stories from going viral on social media.
Democrats are taking a big hit. Their control of legacy media does them no good - and actually hurts/exposes them - because its reach is a TINY fraction of what it was 10 or 20 years ago. They've lost a major advantage, and it may force them to concede this fight. We'll see. It's giving them a black eye. Or is that the 4 black eyes of sinister Schumer and Pelosi? No. Those are just the inevitable bags you get when you spend a combined 50 years as Washington, DC Swamp-Creature insiders. They know the money and they know where the bodies are buried. They are literally Ghouls of the Establishment.
Democrats are Saruman, surrounded by Ents in Orthanc, unable to tell different lies to different people, because all peoples represented. Sure, they still have their "private" speeches to the bankers. THAT veil hasn't yet parted.
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Fauci's medical opinions are fine. But he's NOT running public policy. What good is it if he minimizes the deaths directly from the virus, if we all die of starvation or descend into chaos? There's a balance, here, and I'm not just taking a doctor's word, because doctors aren't economists. Trump's seeking that balance between minimizing the medical threat without killing the patient by OTHER means. "We don't want the cure to be worse than the disease." And I'm totally OK with questioning the "infinite wisdom of experts." Let the questions be asked. Listen to what the experts' responses are. Make judgements. The juxtaposition of disparate ideas is what separates us from the totalitarians. Arguing is how we arrive at a better approximation of truth, guided by facts, evidence, and reason. (SJWs need not apply.)
I don't think anybody knows the proper balance, for sure. If the supply chain is broken because its members are sick, then we die. If the supply chain is broken because of government force, then we die. If the economy tanks, then all the wealth that the left so desperately want to re-distribute by force won't exist to BE re-distributed. They're always trying to gut the goose that lays the golden egg, because of all the shiny yellow metal they imagine in its belly, just there for the taking, er ah, re-distributing.
Personally, I think people just need to be careful, and not cut off their noses to spite their faces. Big crowds? Bad idea. Breathing on baby and grandma? Bad idea. Going to work if your work doesn't require large groups and close contact? Good idea! My job's gone totally online and I haven't missed a beat. Jobs for professional shoppers should be a huge niche, just waiting to be filled. You can be a big tipper to your delivery person, save money, save energy, and reduce the spread of the virus by a factor of at least 2, and maybe 3 or 4, because those professional shoppers can service 2 to 4 orders at the same time. More shopping. Fewer people.
Feeding truckers maybe won't be a Truck-Stop thing for a while. Some enterprising person will find a way to fill their bellies and keep them rolling, if we LET IT HAPPEN. All kinds of ways to keep the supply chain going, without unnecessary exposure. Frankly, I think small-scale entrepreneurs would solve the problem faster and with less harm than a MILLION experts in Washington, D.C.
Shutting everything down is just stupid. But we probably won't arrive at anything sensible until liberals start running out of groceries and demand that the economy re-start. Until they do, their hysteria will not permit public officials to do what needs to be done, which is mostly NOTHING.
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Parallels between U.S. and Iran:
Antifa/anti-trump rallies are starting to draw more trumpsters than protesters. In ultra-liberal Oregon, police are routinely arresting roadblock protests. College presidents, who've been playing the game ONE way to protect their institutions from litigation-happy students and government mandates, are suddenly faced with dropping enrollments and smaller contributions from alumni.
I think if you talked to an Iranian about what's going on in Iran, they'd say some of it was probably upset over prices, but more people in the street in SUPPORT of the theocracy.
I'm still learning about how the Assembly of Experts are elected, but it sounds like when Khamenei passes, the people's voice can be heard for the next Ayatollah (is that the right term?), and it SOUNDS like this is the point in time where Iranian people get their periodic say on the direction the government will take, based on the choices of the "Experts."
For a country their size, it's an interesting model of government. I definitely prefer my Madison and Jefferson, don't get me wrong. But one of the things to which "liberal democracy" is prone is a moral decay and general unhappiness. RELIGION gives a lot of people a sense of belonging to something bigger, more lasting. And they can live happier, more productive lives. Well, some of 'em, anyway.
I think it's AN answer to the ceiling that Western society keeps bumping its head against. Once we've secured the dream, for the most part, we abandon it. We breed up the uneducated and the educated stop breeding! We are guaranteed an education, and then we make damn sure it's the worst fuckin' education possible.
My knowledge of the classics was ABYSMAL from the public schools. I never HEARD of the contest of ideas between Euripedes and Aristotle, although I was educated enough to understand the significance and meaning, when I just picked it up on my own MANY years later (Yay Internet! Yay Tom Richey!). Heh. I was deeply influenced by Ayn Rand's "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal," which I stole off my Dad in my college days. Recommended for everyone. John Galt was too boring. But the straight, to-the-point stuff was more up my line, in a brief paperback!
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Just makes you scratch your head, hearing how "radical" Trump's no-bullshit dealings are, when he's just plain-talking the truth to a bunch of country-club, pearl-clutching oligarchs.
I think we're seeing how smart the Founding Fathers were, building in protections for free speech and balance of power. European nations give lip service to Enlightenment values, but it's obvious that they really don't have any real protections of individual liberty.
When you see parallels to the Fall of Rome - and there are many - keep in mind that the U.S. actually has a Constitution that gives the people the ability to call bullshit and LAWS to keep the majority in check, when they're so sure they're RIGHT that they discard Law as an inconvenience. You can get away with that shit for a while, but Americans are still, in the main, non-conformist and self-reliant, which Europeans seem to have mostly lost.
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They didn't bring any trial lawyers to testify, because a trial lawyer would shred the case the Dems are trying to make. I don't like how the Dems managed things in the House. I'm not as freaked out as partisan Republicans, because impeachment IS political. If Dems can get articles of impeachment passed by holding partisan hearings in Democrat-controlled committees, presenting one side and controlling the proceedings, then they can do that. But a 2/3 majority in the Senate is a HUGE hurdle.
I think the big miscalculation is that by doing things this way, they could move the public-opinion needle far enough to create a hysterical rush to the cliffs of impeachment. They've been marvelously successful at stampeding us for many years. But I think they underestimated the longer-term public reaction to the unqualified successes enjoyed during the Iraqi Freedom campaign. Ratings were good, reporters were "embedded," and the whole country was behind our soldiers, so we stayed mostly mum on criticizing the decision. A few years later, we come to find out the whole thing was based on bad intel and hysteria. And the whole divide-and-conquer-identity-politics thing was also an unqualified success, with no one daring to question tenets of the New Faith. Marvelously successful. But there's been a quietly growing back-lash and red-pilling going on, virtually undetected, and certainly under-estimated.
The tactics that served so well for so long are turning out to be strategically unsound. They'd push our buttons and get the green light. Now they push our buttons and the RED light comes on. But they only know the one button to push. There's only so much you can do to subvert and abuse the process, before people get wise.
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I think you're talking out of your ass on the likelihood of cyber attacks bringing down their power, but I don't think it's black and white anything. A good chunk of it probably IS socialist mismanagement. I don't like us messing with ANYbody, of course, and to the extent that we're meddling, I don't want that. But mismanagement dates back to Chavez and his authoritarian way of mismanaging the economy, in particular the oil.
They've got good heavy crude, with some trickiness in extraction and refinement that requires a lot of up-front investment that Chavez didn't understand. He just saw the REVENUE rolling in and rushed to spend it, without understanding the amount of investment required in keeping that money flowing. Oil companies were falling all over themselves to get in on the huge oil reserves, and invested a lot of capital, and Chavez just saw the revenue and immediately started on a spending spree, and strong-arming the oil companies into giving over authority to the government.
One of the reasons RT is so keen on the narratives Alexander's pushing is that the Russians were major investors, as well, and they paid for a lot of infrastructure, as did the Chinese, I believe. Now all that investment is due to revert to ownership by Russians/Chinese, as Venezuela fails to hold up their end, and now the USA is embroiled in what APPEARS to be regime change, but what I see is mostly bluster against an inept government on the brink of collapse.
Forbes published an article in 2014 outlining some of what's been going on, there. It's not black and white. It's mismanagement, but maybe not catastrophic mismanagement. Also, Venezuela needs something North of $90 per barrel for their oil to be profitable, but when it gets close to $90, other countries and other sources can come in UNDER that figure, which is ruinous to Venezuela's hope of harvesting the oil riches, much of which have already been spent by their government on their high-minded redistribution-of-wealth schemes. Perhaps Alexander could do some background research on this and share his take. But I'm very "grain-of-salt" on what he's saying, now. I think there are liars on both sides of this thing
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I'm not a gamer, at all, but these spats within the community are a microcosm of the larger society. Part of the POINT of gaming (back when I still did games and sports) is that black, white, skinny, fat, you all talk shit to one another on a totally equal plane, and all that matters is being a (the) better player (and being a good sport, and preferably being a little vulgar). So the SJW stuff must grate on the serious gamer crowd.
What's great about gamers (from what I've seen) is they don't pull any punches, and they'll call you out. In the larger society, I don't think we see that same level of meritocracy. Part of sports and gaming for me was the shit-talking. Dishing it out AND taking it was part of being accepted as one of the guys - as true equals, even though there's always somebody who's a little better than the next guy. Cry-babies not allowed in that world.
Feel free to tear me down, because I do NOT know much about gaming. Wolfenstein was the 1st and last RPG I ever played, on a PC running either a late Windows 3.x or Win '95 PC with a 12-inch screen. LOL! I definitely get the addiction, and I could see getting sucked right back in. Just decided life was too short to fall back into it. I'd be doing it 12 hours a day, probably. Like an alcoholic afraid to take a drink.
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Left and right make the same mistake, nowadays. Straw man the most insane and radical members of either side, and paint the entire "other side" like the most ignorant Trump voter who's just sick and tired of working his ass off to pay for parasites.
It's the LEFT which has curdled from originally well-intentioned ideas that, when implemented into law, create the OPPOSITE of the intended effect. If government programs really WORKED, then poverty would'v been solved 40 years ago. Instead, we see an alarming number of Americans who do nothing but suck on the federal tit, with no end in sight.
Unlike"regressive alt-righters," I don't blame those people. I blame the government that trapped them into dependency to secure their vote. Many in the middle class have been trapped by the same dependency, by being convinced that they can't afford their own health care. If the average person can't afford their own shit, what hope is there for the government, relying on those same people for all its funds, magically cure the human condition.
To me, contemporary liberalism is all about infantilizing the populace, from Safe Spaces that protect you from thoughts not your own, to false guarantees that you will somehow live forever, if you would just let government run your life for you. So called "conservatives" understand that the human condition ALWAYS ends in tragedy, and the SCIENCE OF GOVERNMENT is all about the best ways we can think of for the best situation possible.
Liberals can always point to winners, when they set gov't up to PICK winners and losers. But they always miss the sinking tide on which they put all boats, by governmental edict. They're like children, unaware of consequences.
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Seriously, good work! BUT I'm still not sure that they wouldn't've been MORE ready in a year or two, and maybe Chamberlain at Munich convinced them the time was right, even though it was not. If things had continued as they were, without hostilities, Germany had a big lead in planes, tanks and subs and probably would've extended that lead, because it was such a high priority for them. And if they'd extended the peace, they could've traded for and squirreled away a war stockpile. They were pretty good at keeping their buildup below the level of Allied perception. The whistle-blowers in the West would've been dismissed as war mongers.
Newt Gingrich, who was a historian before he was a politician, who made a VERY similar case for Japan. Japan was the last Asian man standing in Asia, after the Europeans colonized and put all the trade and trade routes on lock-down. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere wasn't entirely without merit, although the Japanese practiced the concept in very brutal ways. Gingrich says that the attack on Pearl Harbor was a long-shot the Japanese were taking, because if they didn't do SOMEthing, the Americans were going to lock out the Japanese everywhere the Europeans already hadn't. So even though it was probably doomed to failure, the Japanese were looking extinction in the eye, and at least going to war had a CHANCE of turning out well for them. If they did NOTHING, the expansion of the USA into Asia looked to them like the death of Japan, for SURE.
We look back on Ghengis Khan as this great evil conqueror, but he rose to power because drought compelled steppe tribes to expand to new lands or perish. So one tribe gobbled up the next, and Ghengis, who was actually very enlightened and equal-opportunity for his time, ran his tribe as a meritocracy, rewarding performance and bravery with promotion, without regard to what tribe or nation you came from. Some of his top people were Chinese, promoted from the engineering ranks! So the biggest bad guy of all time, possibly, ran things in a more enlightened way than the position-by-birth that everybody else followed. That's why his tribe grew to be the biggest tribe of all.
Of course, having succeeded in becoming Kha Khan (Khan of Khans), he was still the leader of a tribe with too many mouths and too little grass! And it turned out that horse archers were the perfect instrument. And anything they didn't bring to the field, he didn't hesitate to adopt foreigners who DID bring it. Chinese engineers, Russian chargers... What he didn't have, he appropriated, on the basis of individual merit. Very rare for those days. Very enlightened. But also vicious, cruel and vindictive.
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I'm more of a Jordan Peterson kind of guy, even though I have Christian archetypes hammered deep into my psyche, and I think like a Christian. I just don't think I need to rely on the Authority of God - as communicated to me by Bronze-Age shepherds - to back up my arguments. You lose half of the people you're trying to win over when your fall-back position is a faith-based "God Said."
The example Klavan brings up is incest. He argues that a pure scientist would say it was OK, if you just make sure there're no accidental pregnancies. I'm pretty scientific, but I still would argue against brother-sister pairings on evolutionary biology grounds, and I wouldn't have to turn off every agnostic/atheist in the crowd by just saying "It's a sin." Having sex with a sibling changes that relationship forever, and there are evolutionary reasons for the taboo. There are consequences to breaking the taboo, including the fact that it IS taboo. But that isn't the only reason. It will affect all future relationships by the incestuous couple in ways that are not completely understood.
If you want to have a real debate with someone who does NOT accept the authority of YOUR God, you can't have your religion as the main source of the authority of your arguments. Your religious faith can guide you without being your only tool for disputing/refuting the arguments of others.
I think Peterson (and Jung, apparently) are closer to where I'm at, intellectually, although my lizard brain is provided its superego by archetypes and lessons handed down to me in the Meshoppen United Methodist Sunday School. Heh. I agree with most Christians on most things, except for the "everlasting life" hook that seems to come more from MEN seeking to control MEN in this world than any evidence it came from God. The teachings of Jesus seem more like doing our best to create the closest thing to a just and loving society on THIS Earth (God's Kingdom), but I don't think it means that Satan is winning, just because millions (billions) haven't accepted Jesus as their Savior, and believe the whole Father, Son and Holy Ghost (even though I think they're pretty wonderful archetypes to guide a person in this world).
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Yes, wasting money on migrants is stupid, but housing projects never turn out well, either. We already tried it in the '60s and '70s. You just make it possible for more homeless people to converge on your city, overflowing any free or low-cost housing you pay for, and making it worse.
What they need to do is govern more lightly. Cut taxes, regulations and fees to the bare minimum, and people will build what it is possible to build, and if it's their own money, they'll make it pay for itself. If it's state or city money, everybody involved in the project gets richer by being less efficient, which is the opposite of private, for-profit construction.
Buy some land outside of town and build shelters. If you don't have a place to stay, there's a place for you, but you can't live in our streets and you won't be given a base of operations for your panhandling and your drug habit..
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Maybe there're just too many PhD's and not enough new ground to go around.
But this plagiarism thing is KID stuff. Maybe a high school or undergraduate pulls a fast one to pad a 10-page paper, but for anyone at the upper division or above, citing references adds more weight to your work, and demonstrates good scholarship. "This ain't just me sayin' this. Here's this other guy/gal with good credentials who's saying the same thing. $ee how diligent I am?" Why would you ever want - as a professional scholar - to show ignorance of what went before, when a scholar is someone who knows everything there is to bee known about what went before and can be found in the literature?
My dissertation's nothing to brag about, but the references cited were what made it a scholarly work. Maybe it's just different in the humanities, like they've run out of anything new to do, and have nothing original to say.
I never went to a high-dollar school, but we had ethics, integrity, and humility.
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@daw7773 ... whereas the CDC peer-reviews its own stuff with its own picked scientists. I can find scientists to this day who will swear nicotine isn't addictive. All I have to do is pay them enough. And there are more ways of paying than just money. There's position. There's THREATs to your position. Same thing happened with climate science. And "peer review" in MANY disciplines, these days, is a total joke, especially in the humanities and climate science.
Hell, they took Mein Kampf and changed "Jew" to "white man," threw in some popular CRT jargon, and won awards.
But of course, you've never even heard of Sokal, Boghossian, Lindsey or Pluckrose, have you? Your information is very heavily curated, and you're not even aware of it.
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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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Meh. I don't see attritional warfare as a doctrine. I see a clear intention of winning, and an understanding that attrition is always a part of it. They made and they continue to make the calculation based on both sides' ability to fight. They are passive and "cowardly" when they can't afford to make a fight of it. They make the "affordability" calculation for both sides before they take the next step, especially when they switch to the offensive, and they don't make moves that hurt them more than they hurt the opponent.
I think they have more manufacturing capacity than the West, at present, and for the foreseeable. The West is on the brink of financial and industrial collapse. The East and the Global South are on the cusp of a golden age of economic prosperity.
I just wish we could stop fighting each other, and learn from our mistakes in previous industrial revolutions. Clean, safe, atomic power - the one thing the West doesn't want to share - seems like a very logical strategy. Fossil fuels are the obvious intermediate step, and for rural areas, should probably stay with us, forever. In congested metropolitan areas, not so much. Before the federal government stuck its nose in, there were a lot of for-profit light rail systems competing with each other in cities around the world.
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@alejandrosolano7421 The Earth has been warming linearly for millennia. When you take out the fraudulent climate science (over-hyped hockey stick starting in 1978, when the general cooling during the 20th Century since the 1930s ended), and temps returned to the trend-line, you see the same linear trend. Very gradual.
EVERY "approved" climate model vastly exaggerates the warming trend. Try to apply those models to known climate date from the 1900s, and they all predict boiling oceans by 2023. You're the victim of a lot of revisionist and carefully cherry-picked and edited data. As with COVID, "The Science" is politically driven.
These same people were SURE global cooling was going to bring on an ice age, back in 1977-78. And no surprise, they offered the same authoritarian solutions as the they do, now.
I'm a libertarian who's an avid fan of permaculture. The government, itself, is the biggest obstacle to my plans and dreams of a sustainable, locally-sourced way of life. The EPA doesn't approve a lot of the greener things I'd like to do. Government intervention is pricing much of what I would like to do beyond my means. Forcing everyone to buy EVs for EVERYthing is increasing the cost of actual, practical EVs for tooling around town. I don't want to see 250,000 expensive and environment-destroying cars from GM. I want to see millions of light vehicles for city folk to get around town. But a Tesla's too expensive for most people, and even the "long range" EVs entail a lot of "Will I make it to my destination?" angst for everybody traveling outside the big metro areas.
The environmental human-rights cost of cobalt, copper, lithium and other resources needed for this elitist pipe dream are HUGE. And nobody knows how to recycle lithium batteries yet! Who knows when or if they ever will or what the cost will be. Meanwhile, Scotland cuts down millions of trees for its wind-farm madness.
NONE of this is well-thought-out, unless you're one of a handful of politicians, influencers and corporations in on the grift.
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I disagree. The Kursk campaign gave Ukraine some good PR and a better shot at keeping the gravy train running. The alternative was business as usual, for month after month, and a slow, grinding, inevitable defeat. They took a gamble that the PR would change the game for them, but it failed. I don't fault them for it. It was their "puncher's chance" of winning. Yes, they left their midsection open, but they had to do something to stop the head shots.
I pity Ukraine for, first of all, never really escaping oligarchy when the Soviet Union failed, but even more for throwing in their lot with a bunch of out-of-touch elitists in the West.
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This is a bit disingenuous. Rockefellers and Vanderbilts weren't above unfair trade practices, using their size to sell locally at a loss to wipe out local competition in any region they pleased, more or less systematically, then jack up prices, later, when they had the market cornered. That doesn't mean it was the government's job to fix. I think the CULTURE fixes those things better and with fewer side-effects. Word gets out that you're a cheat, and people will go out of their way not to do business with you. The biggest side-effect is the way the regulatory agency ends up giving future unfair practices a government seal of approval and a government shield.
They were also robber barons in the sense that they were in no great hurry to share their largesse with their workers.
I agree that people of today don't appreciate that for most of the workers, the alternatives in the countryside were all worse.
Nevertheless, I agree with the claim that OSHA isn't what "reformed" the workplace. Things were already trending that way under unregulated capitalism. As Henry Ford realized, if his workers couldn't afford to buy his cars, there was only so much profit to be made catering to the rich. He needed a middle class to keep his markets expanding. That meant paying his workers better. Also, by improving safety conditions, "robber barons" found it easier to hire and retain better workers, and get some loyalty in return.
EPA isn't what's making things cleaner. USDA and FDA aren't maximizing the food value or the safety of medicines for consumers. Transparency and tough competition is what make and keep companies moral. Government agencies give companies a blueprint for how to cheat without getting on the wrong side of the law or the regulators. As long as you check all THEIR boxes, everything's supposedly good, even though we KNOW that most of the food we eat is grown by "chemical farming" and GMO. Nutritional value is shrinking and toxins in the food are increasing (They call it "pest resistance" but they're basically getting the crops to create pesticides, abortifacts, sterilization vectors and pest repellants into the crops, themselves. "Totally organic. Didn't spray ANY pesticide. We've engineered it to secrete Roundup from its leaves! Isn't that wonderful?"
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I'm no historian, but I've run simulations of Operation Barbarossa in a game called "Russian Campaign." And with the benefit of hindsight, you can see quite clearly that the war is strategically over in the Winter of 1941. When Moscow doesn't fall, it's all over for the Nazis. And even if they do take Moscow, and let's assume with light losses, there are vast reserves of men and materièl to the East. With Moscow in hand, the Nazis can then take Leningrad followed by Stalingrad or vice-versa, and then the 3rd city must fall. But how long that would last is anyone's guess. In the game, it is possible to achieve "victory conditions" by seizing Moscow and killing Stalin. But you have to attack by or before the last week of May or first week of June, and your opponent needs to blunder, badly.
But even with Moscow in hand, Germany's still more or less in Napoleon's shoes, with very long supply lines and hostile Soviet partisans threatening every inch of those supply lines, much like Napoleon in Spain. I think the Germans very much underestimated the Soviets, based on their intelligence on what the Soviets had on their Western frontier at the outbreak of war. Stalin didn't trust Hitler, but he thought he could at least temporarily focus on the Japanese threat in the Far East (and maybe pick up some territory?), which it turned out were not a very serious or long-lasting threat in that region, despite successes farther South in China and SouthEast Asia.
All that being said (maybe half of it true), Rzhev was were more real fighting took place than in the more famous battle for Stalingrad. I think another piece of this is because Army Group South was the only part of the attack that was making any progress after the Nazis were turned back at the gates of Moscow. To all but the men involved, things just appeared static, everywhere but down South.
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I think it's funny that in the 1960s-1980s, guys started wearing long hair, tight pants (spandex) and frilly blouses, so America learned to register male/female more by physical traits than clothing. I remember the times of "hair bands," where a lot of rockers dressed very feminine, and they'd kick your butt for referring to them as "she." I knew gang members who wore a trademark earring in their right ear, because it was a signal for being gay, back then. The gang did it to prove how tough they were. Being called a gay pejorative was an excuse for them to beat the living daylights out of you.
We learned to be very discerning in those days. But we no sooner learned to look beyond the clothing, hair, and even makeup, to correctly identify dudes, than this militant transgender fragility stuff came along.
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We've seen so many "Smoking Gun" headlines, that I think this smoking gun is slipping under the radar. This is pretty damning, and with more such documents being unsealed, it appears certain that Flynn's conviction WILL be vacated, and maybe, just maybe, heads will finally start rolling.
Every time a document is unsealed or un-redacted, it turns out that it was never about "national security," but just a bunch of crooks hiding behind a Wizard-of-Oz curtain of "national security." But we'll see. I expected this to happen LAST summer, and things just dragged on, DOJ/FBI kept slow-walking documents to Judicial Watch, Flynn's Judge kept dragging HIS feet. But maybe it was gonna take a Durham investigation to finally stick it to 'em, and the accumulation of evidence just took time.
We'll see. Comey's "I sent them" is getting harder and harder for him to hide from. I don't think even the WuFlu can save him (or Brennan or Clapper or many others). I hope it doesn't just end with total public humiliation, but convictions, but just getting the humiliation may be all we can get and even be enough. Let's hope We the People take the right lessons from this and start a movement to pare down the size and scope of federal government, in particular the surveillance state. We the People all have smartphones, nowadays. It's pretty hard to hide just from US, and most of us are pretty darn good at managing our affairs and helping the needy.
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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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The NFL hitched their wagon to the US military, long ago. They hold Air Force fly-overs, ceremonies honoring war heroes, and the Marines, Army, Navy and Air Force run a lot of recruiting ads.
And the military, in turn, recruits a lot of soldiers into football fans. Lots of fan-atic football fans stationed overseas, and the NFL is a strong bond back to the States.
But as long as it gave me a chance to spout off about how Democrats are wrecking our cities and setting police against people with intended or unintended consequences of their policies, then maybe Kaep deserves a pat on the back. I just think he's idealistic, but pretty shallow.
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Trump isn't erratic. He's a salesman and a negotiator. You always extoll the virtues of what you're selling, and in negotiations, you never ask for what you WANT. You ask for the MOON and hope to get something CLOSE to what you want.
My main problem with Trump was he didn't do his homework on who his closest advisors, cabinet members and generals should be, and he didn't have the right guy advising him in that area of weakness. I think his instincts were generally good, but there were (and are) just too many forces arrayed against him in the "business-as-usual" departments and federal agencies that live in an ecosystem that prospers at the expense of everyone else's (not just at home but abroad).
If the feds are offering subsidies to electric car manufacturers, you KNOW it's about their buddies who make or want to make electric cars, but it's NOT to save the environment. It's to funnel resources to the one thing that's profitable politically for people in government and profitable for the pals who are mining Lithium (a nasty business). They'll get around to paying the guys who will ine up for subsidies to pay for the massive cleanup of all those Lithium batteries, later. Everything in its time. People won't realize what it's doing to the environment until it's so bad, it can be considered a crisis for the guys who caused it to get paid solving for us.
People can always see the good things they can do with power, and the harm caused is always secondary, because "Look at the good we do." They just waste resources and store up more trouble for the future. Instead, the focus should be on laying the foundation for LETTING good things happen, and the main thing to do there is to do NOTHING. Just do the best you can where you are and share your successes and failures with the world. That's how the Internet is supposed to work. It's the only centralized thing we need, and its purpose is so we can talk to each other! Period!
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Biden is just carrying out the Obama legacy. It's just a feckless, un-American policy bundle that got Trump elected in 2016.
The American electorate have never in my lifetime been all that clear on what they WANTED, but they know enough to reject Democrats when they're the party in power and the nation is mired in malaise. This is much like where the USA was in 1984, only Trump lost and Reagan won.
I think Republican presidents are only slightly less insane than Democrat presidents, but that NObody who gains the oval office is really serious about limiting the size and scope of the federal government, which is where TRUE advancement lies. I think we pretty much got the system about as right as it would ever be when we ended Jim Crow once and for all. I'm not even sure we needed the Civil Rights Acts, but for the courts to fully implement equal treatment under the law. Pretty much everything the feds have done since then has been counter-productive.
They crossed the line from "This is the basic rule set for ALL" into "Let me be your sugar daddy!" We should've stopped at "equal treatment," period, and then gone about cleaning up our foreign-policy and intelligence agencies, who've gotten just about everything wrong since Gulf of Tonkin, if not before.
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@josm1481 No, the press was not impartial a decade or even 6 decades ago. They just hid it, better, and there was no competition for the legacy networks and legacy print media. Things only SEEMED better when it was just the NYT, WaPo, and NBC, ABC and CBS. I've been following it since the 1970s and the only difference, now, is that there are good-sized platforms that disagree with "The Message" and millions of people who realize they're being lied to, finally.
You upset about WMDs in Iraq? They pulled the same sort of stunt in Vietnam, 60-plus years ago. And if you opposed more big spending by government, EVERY network attacked you for being uncharitable and selfish, even though you contributed more to private charity than any 10 Democrats..
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Man, I don't think we're gettin' the straight of this. I kind of feel like Trump was the one friend of the anti-oligarch president, Zelensky, and the entire Washington establishment had more blood they wanted to suck out of the corpse of the former Soviet Union.
I think Russia would LOVE to have Ukraine back in the fold. So I doubt Putin's motives. But I also know that major players in the USA would LOVE for Ukraine to totter on as a weak country ruled by oligarchs. I think there are people in high places in the USA who profit enormously from the situation as it is, and so it is very hard for President Zelensky to truly enact real reform. Keep those board memberships coming, Burisma!
Anybody with a shred of discernment can see that the big to-do about Trump's phone call was to distract from public-record evidence of Biden extorting the Ukrainian government to keep the company that paid his son big bucks to do nothing from being prosecuted. "Fire the prosecutor or you don't get the $2 billion in aid (or whatever the # was)." There's pay for play right out in the open, and they had to "Trump up" something against Trump, to keep the wolves away from a MAJOR Biden scandal. I think the reason Biden ran was to keep his crimes on a political plane, where going after him for anything can be painted as a political vendetta and crushed by political control of media and investigating and prosecuting agencies.
Anyway, that's soapbox stuff, but I think it's important context for the situation in Ukraine.
Also, I consider the EU to be a catastrophically failing project. Wrong-headed at the top. Capable of so much good, but when the central body operates on numerous myths and misconceptions, it makes things worse for all its member states. I'm not sure - in fact I very much doubt - that the EU and NATO are great for Ukraine.
Then there's the history of invasion from the West. Russia doesn't want to have re-fight WW II. They're OK with Eastern Europe being independent, but there's a long history of Euros invading Russia in the last 2 or 3 centuries. They also want stable neighbors to their West, and the EU nations and USA seem utterly deranged.
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We finally have a president who'll stand up to those establishment types and defy establishment narratives, which sound really good, but end in half-a-million-and-counting dead, and millions of refugees swarming (and destroying) Europe through the back door. These "genius foreign-policy experts" NEVER consider unintended consequences of the use of force and just plain old meddling in the business of other sovereign nations.
These neocon/neolib "geniuses" CREATED and ENABLED the "terrorist threat" in the name of fighting "evil Soviets." Then use their blunders of the past to justify MORE blundering violence in the present. I'm sick of this kind of thinking, abroad, and its "government should stick its nose into EVERYTHING" attitude at home. All these jerks understand is power and how to use power for their own selfish, short-term interests, without regard for the untenable situations they set up for us down the road. They don't CARE if they create crisis. It just means we need them, MORE, to sort out the neverending string of crises They Created.
Guys like this will go through your neighborhood throwing rocks through the windows of every home on Tuesday, and roll through the streets selling windows on Wednesday. Screw that thinking and the incompetent assholes who protect their little kingdoms with this nonsense.
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probably not. It's the nature of the press. Those most motivated to dominate the public square are those with agendas to push. The founders of the USA understood this. That's why they kept government OUT of all matters "free speech," and why the big networks and Big Tech are doing everything they can to censor.
The founders never kidded themselves that the press was objective truth. They just insisted that no one could be silenced, so that if you lied, somebody could call you out.
Ever since our nation's founding, SOME of the rich and powerful have done their damnedest to dominate the media, so their lies would be the unchallenged truth in the public square. They sanitized almost all network t.v., radio and print media, and one message was all that was seen or heard for most of the 20th Century. Then the Internet happened, and they've been trying to put the Internet on lock-down ever since.
And everything they do in Washington, DC, to "help" just makes things worse. While they're debating Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, I'm the one guy out there saying "Legislating on decency in communications is a violation of the 1st Amendment, and a MASSIVE over-reach by the federal government."
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Common sense, scholarship, and ethics. HE MUST BE SILENCED!
-The Establishment
I think the bypass was justified on a right-to-try basis, with full disclosure, in a big enough crisis. That's not what happened, nor was it truly the crisis they told us it was. The mandates and the mass distribution of the experimental treatment to people - especially young people - at low or no risk of serious illness or harm from COVID, itself, was an abomination. An atrocity on Nuremberg levels. The suppression of successful treatments with off-the-shelf, re-purposed drugs like HCQ and Ivermectin, was criminal. Doctors in clinics, treating hundreds and even thousands of patients, were under no circumstances to share their success stories with colleagues and the public.
If all they'd done was NOTHING and SHARE every scrap of treatment and outcome information, peer-to-peer, we'd've had the treatment side of it licked in a couple weeks. Many doctors DID. Few spoke of it, so the sharing part never took place, and authorities were hostile to such sharing.
We all know this was an atrocity committed against the peoples of the world. I don't care if it was for profit or not. Those profits are FORFEIT. They were obtained by fraud, from inside and outside of government.
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This ain't close to Scopes. It's about socialist ideology and identity politics being taught as fact. Non-science being taught as though it's science, in spite of all the great science that's been done in evolutionary biology in the last 30 years. "Truth before facts?" Really? That's what's being taught.
I agree that it's wrong to lie to kids. And the schools are lying. They're broadening the racial divide.
This guy is offering nothing but straw-man arguments, and using a fringe phone caller to characterize everybody who thinks the identity agenda is divide-and-conquer ideology that's JUST like what Hitler and Stalin did. And calling people who resist it fascists.
It's easy to dismiss the phone caller, without ever addressing the core issue. Ibram X Kendi (sp?) is pushing division. Anti-racism is the new racism. But don't listen to me, because my skin is the wrong color. Go ahead and bring back segregation, because in your twisted world view, it HELPS. It doesn't. It's Jim Crow 2.0. No surprise. Republicans had to fight Democrats to pass civil rights in the '60s. Democrats just shifted narratives but they're pushing the same exact 2-tiered society and telling everyone it's "equity."
Since when can't a person of color do math? Since Democrats took over the entire education system, and give black kids the worst possible education, while spending more on inner city schools than ever before! Give ME that $15,000 a year to educate a kid and he'll be ready for college by age 15. Give it to Baltimore Public Schools, and chances are good, they won't be reading a grade level, let alone doing math at grade level.
But go ahead and listen to Thom if it confirms your bias. I'm sure it'll help you sleep at night.
People like him are basically telling you that black kids are stupid, which they're NOT. They just need to break free of the condescending "white savior" attitude of so-called "liberals" who dominate all these conversations. And don't let these conservative phone callers trick you into thinking it's a choice between Democrats are fringe right-wingers. There're a lot of people who are of neither party who despise what the establishment is doing to our children and calling it "science."
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I don't think they don't care. These failures are bad for the CCP.
The trouble is, because they're top-down on everything, the people at the bottom actually doing the work are not given sufficient resources to do jobs properly. First the government officials get their cut. Then the low bid who won the contract sub-contracts it out to another contractor, after taking their skim. This might happen 3 or 4 times before it actually gets to the people actually doing the work.
This is called "Tofu Dregs" construction.
Sad thing (encouraging thing) is that if you gave the actual contractors who DO the work sufficient resources, the Chinese are fantastic builders. But because they insist on controlling everything from the top, they can't get out of their own way, and it makes them look, well, like Chinese!
Imagine the waste, fraud and corruption of USA's military-industrial complex. Now extend that across ALL industrial sectors. That's the Chinese economy. Sadly, this is a direction the USA's been headed since the logistics crowd during World War II started using linear programming to get soldiers, weapons, tanks and planes shipped off to Europe and kept them supplied. They got a read hard-on for controlling/managing entire economies and they're trying to micro-manage the USA economy with punishments for x, subsidies for y, and never-ending inefficiency and corruption.
If top-down planning actually WORKED for an economy, we'd all have been speaking Russian by 1980.
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If you want to be happy, learn contentment. Don't dwell on what you don't have. Focus on being grateful for what you DO have, and use what you DO have to improve your situation, bit by bit. Maybe you'll never be truly happy, but you can school yourself to be content. "I'm never going to be president or invent a cure for cancer, but that's OK."
As someone who's had far more than the average number of injuries, it really sucks when you get hurt, but it absolutely clears your mind. You know you're in a bad way, and it's always very clear what the next thing you must do to improve your situation is. That girl you were trying to impress when tragedy befell you? Meh. She's just a girl. There are other girls. The important thing is setting that broken bone!
California's collapse was far from sudden. Decades of mismanagement lead inevitably to what we see, now.
As far as managing the forests go, I think the US Dept of Ag and its Forest Service have their fingerprints all over this. By trying to balance the environmentalist wackos and the big corporations, they've ruined it for pretty much everybody everybody, including the environmentalist wackos and the big corporations.
The environmentalists think that humans are not a part of Nature and the corporations just want to exploit Nature. Not all corporations. Mainly the ones who are in thick with the federal government, and manipulating the rule set behind the scenes.
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Maybe use a different term than "American Media," because when I think "American Media," NONE of it is legacy media. It's channels like Gray Zone.
Gray Zone is just one of many. I agree with this channel on foreign affairs and its disdain for forever war. But these guys are "progressives" which means they're part of the problem.
Libertarians, like me, don't expect perfect leaders, like progressives do. We expect corrupt leaders, and so we believe in restricting the powers of the state to the extent consistent with civil order.
Libertarians understand that there's zero guarantee that elected officials will be saintly geniuses who understand everything better than everybody else. We know that leaders are human, and therefore flawed, and therefore should be given as little power as possible. No HHS, DHS, DOE (Energy or Education), USDA, FTC, FEC, FCC, ... Very long list of unnecessary and dangerous departments.
If you guys would turn against nanny government, you'd be libertarians! But you fight for one side with your left hand and for the other side with your right.
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Good for the Germans! I think 65% debt-to-GDP ratio is still very high, but the record highest ratio in the USA was in 1946, at 106%. After that, the ratio dropped steadily until 1974.
Now, U.S. debt-to-GDP is 123% and climbing, with no end in sight. Trump spiked it during covid, because he let the health mafia put the entire nation on lock-down, but there was no return to normal, under Biden. Just throwing money at everything, expecting for Keynes to descend from Heaven on a flaming chariot, like all the economics priesthood insist always happens.
Government should only incur debt during an unforeseen crisis. Good, prudent government results in very few crises. We do not have good, prudent government.
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I went to school in the '70s and we were taught My Country Right or Wrong, Manifest Destiny, the Union side of the Civil War (and Lincoln) were without sin, and it was entirely over slavery, and NOTHING was mentioned about robber barons in cahoots with the government to rape the South after the Union won. It wasn't perfect before the woke religion. It was a different form of government indoctrination, and we were lied to every day by MSM without knowing any better.
When Walter Cronkite said "And that's the way it is, this 3rd of November, 1972," it was NOT how it was, but we all thought his word was passed down from God, himself.
Woke needs to be criticized. But don't blindly defend some fictitious golden era from our past. Don't defend the bullcrap. Nobody then or now questioned the wisdom and compassion of LBJ's Great Society in the mainstream. Ardor for Vietnam had cooled by the late '60s, kind of like our ardor for destroying Russia is cooling, now, but it took YEARS to get the government to give up its "domino theory" narratives.
The $hit we did in S. America and Africa was as un-American as you can get, but we were "fighting communism." Dirty tricks, coups, and mass murder were OK, if the dictator in question was "a key ally in the fight against totalitarianism."
Things aren't really that different now except more people have access to more information and the ideology has shifted to anti-family, pro-socialism, and "I'm a victim, he's a victim, she's a victim. Wouldn't you like to be a victim, too?"
That's bad. But the reason we're vulnerable to this stuff, now, is because of the excesses and blindness of leaders 50 and 60 years ago.
I see a lot of conservatives yearning for the good old days. I'm a libertarian, and I don't want the future dominated by a small ruling-class elite, like it has been my entire life.
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Meh. Colleges and universities aren't going away, but I do expect some die-back. They are, at root, all about survival, and surviving/navigating the insanity coming down from government is what put 'em in this ridiculous pickle.
RIGHT down the line, college administrators will always seek to protect their gravy train, cover their asses, and expand their domains. Rolling over for wacked-out social justice warriors is more about cowardice and survival than anything else, with a few wacked-out-administrator exceptions. When enrollments drop in Berkeley, but most of all, when ENDOWMENTS drop, they'll come to Jesus, so to speak.
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WHO is a prime example of how power is concentrated in a great cause to form a great institution, and the great institution, funded not by its own money, but by the money of others, is always doomed to capture sby the donor class. NGOs are obviously the creatures of their donors, but they don't hold power over people like government agencies and U.N. (U.N.?!) bodies, but there's never enough money to feed these institutions, and they also become the creatures of their donors.
And the way the "donations" work is always very low key. Maybe no money changes hands, but there's a cushy 7-figure position on a corporate board in the government official's future.
If you think the EPA, FDA, UsDA, DOE, or FBI are working for us, you're a fool.
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I guess I'm in the minority on this one. Elliott Abrams was in the thick of Iran Contra and other nasty undertakings in Central America in the '80s. He was a big part of covert U.S. actions to supply anti-Sandinistas in El Salvador, in direct contravention of laws passed by Congress. He plead guilty to a MISDEMEANOR charge of lying to Congress about money solicited from Brunei and the whole covert network of crooks and rebels used to illegally supply rebels with guns.
It's the EXACT kind of thing that Trump SAID he was running AGAINST. If this disarray at the top of his foreign and national-security staff of NeoCons persists, Trump is going to lose a lot of his base. The people want a smaller military footprint around the world, and want people to exercise self-determination, rather than have it imposed by US. We should be pals with Venezuela. We should be the best friend all of those countries have. Venezuela is rich in heavy crude. Let them sort things out. There was already a legitimate widespread opposition to Maduro's way of doing things. Let it ripen. Don't interfere.
But I'm still hopeful that the neocon BS we're seeing right now is just posturing by Trump. He's not above planting a thorn in everybody's side, just so he can remove it, later, and get a better deal. Pompeo, Bolton, Abrams... They either Come to Jesus, and fall in line with Trump's overall goals, or they need to go. I was all ready to vote Trump, 2020, but I'll vote 3rd-party, again, if this neocon BS persists.
This might be the ONLY issue I'm going to side with Omar on. I'm also willing to listen to her on some of our wackier positions on Israel. Supporting a sovereign nation's sovereignty is one thing. But making it illegal, here, to even talk against Israel or dis-invest in Israel, which is every American's right? That's some over-the-top BS I hear being pushed in some places, in the guise of fighting anti-Semitism, and I'm not buying it. And, partly due to our own religious traditions, I do think that Israel exercises far too much influence on our foreign policy.
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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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nmcnmb : I've seen him be pretty talking-point-of-the-day partisan Republican. Rush does that, too. His principles make him the enemy of Democrats and so he starts defending Republicans like a partisan Republican. For instance, while it is important to dig to the bottom of the provenance of the evidence used to secure the warrant. But I think most of us want to give Mueller plenty of rope to turn up whatever dirt he can, wherever he can.
But the scope of his investigation of Russian activities and collusion with Americans has somehow never came close to Hillary's crew, but boy Mueller shore is upset about Manaforte's tax returns from a decade ago. He really hates tax cheats, even though Rosenstein declined to prosecute the exact same case, about a decade ago.
It's actually very funny.
Still, I kind of want to know the truth of the matter, whatever flimsy excuses they made to get it started. Sure. Go after the Russians. Ferret out their foul deeds. The Chinese, too, while you're at it, but it seems pretty clear this is not directed at the president (even though it is).
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As eager manipulators, the Russians may actually serve to help us root out the worst, most blatant corruption in Washington, DC, by the time the last Russian-collusion shot is fired. And more and more, it appears that the mop-up will entail sweeping Obama administration hacks into the prosecutorial net.
Ironically, draining the swamp is probably a good thing for Russia. We're much less likely to do something really stupid. And much less likely to encourage stupidity in countries around the world, for the benefit of corrupt, entrenched elites.
Hillary would, by now, have wrapped herself in the flag, the stern Empress at war with dangerous enemies, and the media would've eaten it up.
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@davidotness6199 That formerly destitute majority also threatens the CCP. If China takes a step backward, there are millions of educated people who're going to be angry/disillusioned.
Russia is still authoritarian. Its advantage is the West keeping the threat level high enough to keep the Russian people more or less of one mind. Their democratic institutions are only skin deep, but for the time being, Putin has been highly competent and immensely popular. Very ruthless, some would say "as needed," but the vast majority have had their personal needle pointing up for most of Putin's presidency.
A truly free America would swamp Russia in every way, economically, but the USA is busy cutting its own throat, experimenting VERY clumsily with top-down economics. It's creeping in, gradually, but the growth of agencies and the sheer volume of regulations amount to a pretty bad copy of planned economies once associated only with tyranny.
Of course, they're STILL associated with tyranny, but the America people are slow to wake up to it because they, like the Chinese, have enjoyed economic prosperity for a pretty long time, now. When the top-down governments start failing, that's when they're in jeopardy. China's already got that figured out. The USA? Not so much.
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Trump DID go outside of standard protocols, which is to say, he cut the ambassador out of the loop, and bypassed his offices, without a 'by-your-leave.' Fact is, he doesn't need to ask the ambassador's permission. But my sneaky (conspiratorial) takeaway on this is that Trump has established a core group of trusted people to get done what he wants done, without leaking or foot-dragging, and Bill Taylor ain't in the core group.
I can just imagine the Dems rehearsing with these witnesses, getting all the nasty things presented in just the right way, only to run into Repubs in the hearings who question them more adversarially. The Dems should've known this. What I'm seeing is lack of self-awareness and lack of due diligence. They're just trying to work the levers of opinion in the media, as they always have, but Toto's pulled back the curtain on the Wizard, and we all see it's smoke, mirrors, and half-assery.
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@Влад-ч8ь1с It's hard not to sound pro-Russian if you're being objective. There just isn't a whole lot positive to report for the Ukrainian side, but when there is, for instance, when he's criticizing Russia's tactics in the past.
In fact, I was going to jump in and say, the current emphasis on maneuver is more the product of the destruction/counter-measures of/to Ukrainian artillery pieces, artillery ammo, air defenses and FPV drones.
I think that a year ago, the Russians were obliged to push ahead in a heavily fortified, slowly moving line. Any Russian advances along a particular line created salients that were vulnerable to attack.
So anyway, I'm not sure that the Russians are necessarily changing tactics because they got better at maneuver warfare or because there are more and more opportunities to penetrate the front lines and survive it.
For instance, they took on Bakhmut head-on, when I thought they would be wiser to bypass it and threaten to encircle it, creating a cauldron for forces trying to reinforce it, forcing the retreat out of Bakhmut. But in hindsight, maybe the Ukrainians were much better at thwarting those kinds of maneuvers.
Also, I don't think their purpose was to conquer Ukraine so much as win a war of attrition, and they destroyed a lot of Ukraine's fighting forces in the slug-fest.
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They don't care about truth or principle. All they care about is power, and they will use any means necessary.
Russell's hilarious, talking about how good progressives are, when they're a big part of why government is so big, sprawling, inept, corrupt and authoritarian. It's all the stuff they wanted turning out EXACTLY the way their opponents predicted, and he STILL considers himself a progressive. Complain all day about the corrupt mishandling of COVID response and in the same breath insist on Med-4-All. About the only thing I listen to progressives about is matters of war and peace and the military/media industrial complex. But if they get their way on everything, we'll be living in a socialist dystopia, and the one issue they're right about, they won't be able to even SPEAK about, under socialist rule.
Dear progressives: You can't be free AND be government chattel at the same time. Decide. Take the red pill.
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As a student of the run-up to World War II, it broke my heart, the way Neville Chamberlain signed away Czechoslovakia at Munich. I was drilled on how "Appeasement" was a bad policy that only encouraged aggression. So when Iraq was presented as a Middle-East Hitler, I was pre-disposed toward active measures. But the yellow-cake story sounded a little bit fishy, but still, Saddam was very bad. Orange-man bad. And OMG WMDs!
I remember how EXCITED people were. All my Democrat friends were watching the embedded reporters' reports just as breathlessly as much as any crazed prepper with a fetish for big guns. That also bugged me. Everybody was so behind the war effort. Obama voting AGAINST the Iraq War really set him apart from the rest. As a Democrat, he was too state-centric for my taste, but I had hopes I could get behind the guy on foreign policy, at least. Saw some encouraging signs, at first, like taking down the statue of Winston Churchill. But then he slipped smoothly into neoliberal/neocon gear, just as vicious and underhanded as all the rest. Maybe more so, because Obama was always the good guy.
Lock up reporters?! That's an OUTRAGE!!! What? It was just Barry? Well, he must've had a good reason. Now, what were we talking about, before?
When they didn't find the WMDs and I saw burning oil wells stretching from the foreground clear to the horizon, I knew I'd been had. This is what stopping Hitler at Munich looks like. Hmmm. I think a lot of OTHER people knew they'd been had, too. I think that's a big part of why the same old MSM (now "legacy media") started losing traction. They were at their absolute zenith after 9/11, put all their weight behind a war, succeeded, and things have never been the same, since. People are finally sick of it. It's gotten to the level of PRAVDA and TASS at the height of the Cold War, and this isn't exactly Soviet Russia (yet). They try to put the clamps on, but there's nowhere near the dominance that you saw just a few years ago.
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You do know they have replacement spans, right? When they take out pylons, which they haven't, yet, it becomes a more serious engineering problem. These strikes aren't nothing, but they're more propaganda/hopium for Ukraine than strategically devastating. I don't think they even had the main bridge before 2018. (Edit: It looks like the one pylon is damaged at the top, but the main structure is intact.)
They do raise the stakes. They make it less likely that Russia will be content with the current stalemate. As long as it is trading blows and artillery duels with air superiority, I think Putin and Shoigu were content. But random targeted strikes deep in Russian territory won't be tolerated for long. Rather than bending Russia to their will, it will only strengthen the resolve and ratchet up hostilities.
The West is a financial and manufacturing house of cards. BRICS could spell the end of their fiat-currency monetary model, which is inextricably enmeshed with their governments' chronic deficit spending, and urge to export their manufacturing (to dirtier places) to 'save the planet from catastrophic man-made global warming.' That's a laugh.
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If they do it on their own initiative, they're within their rights. But the public needs to understand that they're getting a very sanitized world view from Democrat-run media: New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, Huffington Post, Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube, ... They're all in the same bubble. If you don't dig, you won't see anything Democrats don't want you to see.
When government agencies push censorship, it's a direct violation of the 1st Amendment.
Either way, half of the American people only see the uni-party narrative. I'm including Republicans who are just as deeply imbedded in the status quo, tax-and-spend, trammel individual rights permanent state. Multi-term senators and representatives all have that establishment taint to them.
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Proving fraud is a lot harder than finding widespread shenanigans and irregularities, which election officials refuse to investigate or provide records.
We held up the Bush election certification for MONTHS, so we could count hanging chads in Florida. In 2020, the irregularities were ENORMOUS, with more votes cast than registered voters in many precincts in Arizona, for instance. But the rush to certify was IMMEDIATE.
Hillary STILL insists 2016 election was stolen. BOTH parties complain about DOMINION, but whoever wins says "Nothing to see, here." After 2020, I want voter ID, paper ballots, and observers monitoring and double-checking the counts. I think Democrats do more shenanigans, because they control the political apparatus in almost all the crap-hole blue cities.
This professor would be more up on these matters if he didn't rely on MSM for his narratives.
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No, Alexander. To turn the economy around, all the U.S. government needs to do is Quit Interfering With It. What you're proposing is government intervention on a massive scale. That's what got us INTO this mess. "Government experts and industry leaders" is how Hitler did things. That's guaranteed crony capitalism, which is what we have, now, already. It doesn't work. It can seem to work. But it plants the seeds of endless malaise from which people who think like you can never extricate themselves. You just keep looking for better "experts" and criticizing the current ones.
I know it's hard for elites and would-be elites to admit, but the Best Things In Life, We LET Happen. We don't make them happen. To LET things happen, you have to relinquish control. That's the hardest thing of all.
And yes. Nations that use predatory trade practices SHOULD pay tariffs. I'm not saying go all Smoot-Hawley on the Chinese, but just start tightening the screws, a little bit at a time. They should NOT be able to sell us cheaper products by the exploitation of their people or by raping the planet. We're not saving the planet by exporting all of our production to countries who do things a lot dirtier. We're just moving the pollution up-wind of us.
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@mar-a-lagofbibug8833 : LOL! Who's in jail and what did they lie about? There are 5 people, and NONE of them were convicted of crimes related to the RussiaGate investigation. Here we have people we KNOW have abused power, and all you can do is bring up Manaforte, Cohen, Papadopoulis, Flynn, Gates, and the last on this list is in jail for what he did working for Manaforte before Trump's presidency was a gleam in Trump's eye.
You point at all these indictments, many of which could be issued against 70% of careerists in Washington, DC, Foreign Agents Registration Act, that Flynn didn't even know he needed to file, and then he was given a 10-page maze of a form to fill out, when for everyone else in the country, it's a 1-page, simple form, which many lobbyists who KNOW they're working for a foreign government don't file. How many are actually in jail? At most, 3. None of them for anything they did related to the main investigation. If I asked you who won in 2016, you'd tell me Trump came in next to last and Clinton came in 2nd. You're either a liar or an uncritical consumer-and-spreader of lies. And what truth you tell is very distorted. Pathological.
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Yes. They seek to "perfect humanity," so their utopia will work.
No. It's not democracy that allows us to evolve. It's fundamental truths that operate over long spans of time and geography. Democracy, without law, is bread and circuses and burning cities. A stable rule set, guaranteeing the rights of all CAN operate indefinitely, until and unless the people vote for Free Stuff from the government, paid for out of government proceeds. The desire for free stuff is endless. The resources available are finite. We elect men who tell us there's plenty and all they need is a tiny slice off the top, to solve all our problems. Generations of such politicians puts you where we are, now.
The U.S. Constitution is - so far - humanity's best attempt at self-governance, with strict limits on central government's power and authority. This makes it an obstacle to those who seek power or believe in instant solutions to the human condition. So the Constitution is being circumvented and many want to do away with it, rather than return to its main guiding principles and strict limitations on federal power.
Nobody wants to really change the direction we're headed, because too many of us see short-term gain in running the country into the ground so THEY can get THEIR free thing.
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80 years ago, we were a country in which celebrities and sports heroes were all expected to profess the Christian faith. Protestant and Catholic Clergy all pushed the Zionist ideology as God's Plan, and all good Christians were expected to support the state of Israel, no matter what, and the news and opinion media were (as now) in perfect lock-step with the federal government, that used Israel as a major piece the game of chess they were playing against Communism. Our government is 80 years deep in this kind of thinking.
But in the last 40 years, Americans have drifted away from the Church, and in any case, not all Christian churches, let alone all pastors, are signed on to the Israel Project. For the first time in my lifetime, the majority of Americans know of and are appalled by the actions of Israel. Anti-war voices are breaking through for the first time.
I really hope we're going through a sea change. People are sick of war and despise those who profit by it.
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MY income wasn't interrupted because of the job I have, but I respect the protesters who peaceably assembled with their firearms. The governor in question needed to be reminded that with all the trappings of power and police under their nominal control, they're still answerable to the people, and the ultimate power lies with the people. They can't just run roughshod over everybody because of a nasty flu, especially since we know that the mortality rates are much lower than we originally feared.
But to ME, there's a balance to be struck. It's easy to tell yer 'Rona story, and for the foreseeable future, you will find many sympathetic ears and eyes, especially if you're famous, good-looking, and in the apparent bloom of life in your prime. But I always think about the bum who's been dumpster-diving (or trading odd jobs for a plate of food) in the alley behind the Italian restaurant that's now shut down. Or the guy who's been panhandling $50-$100 a day on a street corner, now that the streets are empty. Or the husband-and-wife team operating a small café... ANYbody whose income stream depends on that day's work. And no work? No money. The lock-down is very hard on the most vulnerable among us. And it's all because rich, well-fed white people are afraid of a virus that it appears is bad, but we know how to fight.
We see Sweden building herd immunity. They were overwhelmed at first, because they didn't act to 'flatten the curve,' but things have settled down, and we have the benefit of their experiences for what works and what doesn't. I think a combo of social distancing to flatten the curve is enough for us to handle the medical emergency without shutting down every OTHER form of health care. 'Rona ain't the only thing you can die of, no matter how fully it has captured your attention.
I'm not a big fan of illegal immigration, but knowing there are millions of such, and wanting the best possible outcome, the disappearance of "day-worker" gigs plus the fact that you're under the government's radar and want to STAY that way, you're much likely to either starve or resort to crime. That's assuming no 'Rona in the equation beyond the lock-down impacts. But because your situation is bad, you're run-down, and more susceptible to 'Rona and every OTHER cold or flu bug. People just focus on the one thing and they lose sight of the fact that the society is SO complex, with SO many inter-dependencies that NObody can really track, and fixing ANY ONE PROBLEM, PERFECTLY always comes at cost to something else. This is the problem with zero-sum thinking. The whole isn't greater than the parts, really. It's just that all the parts make too big an equation for anybody to manage all of them. You have to LET things happen as much as MAKE things happen.
The lock-down was (It turns out) not bad decision-making under uncertainty. But as those uncertainties keep getting chipped away, and we find that our health services are NOT going to be overwhelmed, if we're smart about limiting outbreaks and dealing with outbreaks. The hospitals don't need to shut down. They just have to cooperate, so if Area X is hit hard, Area Y can pick up the slack. We're pretty sure that can be done, at this point.
We know it can be deadly to the elderly, for obvious reasons, the same as any flu virus. And SOME people without any apparent co-morbidities are hit HARD, like Michael Yo was hit. I love how he gives props to his doctor. A lot of doctors might not be able to "think on their feet" and make intelligent adjustments to his treatment, based on how he's responding.
I'm more than a little worried about catchin' the 'Rona, and I've always been appalled at how people will come in to work full of snot, coughing and sneezing, and spreading what they've got to everybody else, out of a misplaced sense of duty (or obsessive-compulsive disorder). The thing is, 10s of thousands die every year from the flu (creepin' cruds). Some take their flu shots every year. I never have, because I'd rather practice sensible distancing and keep my resistance up. And I see the folks who get the flu shots missing time at work because they've got the flu.
This life ends for all of us we live the best lives we can. There's a balance between longevity and happiness. I'm tired of people who act like they'd live forever if some authority would just come along and make them safe from everything. "If it saves one life, it's worth it." With that kind of thinking, do away with motor vehicles. Outlaw alcohol. Make kids strap pillows to themselves every time they step outside...
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@veepedaldude9404 : $5 billion isn't even 1% of a trillion-dollar-plus budget. And why do we call them budgets, when they're anything but? Doesn't "budgeting" mean spending within your means? But that's what you get when every libtard progressive seems in league with every war-mongering weapons manufacture to grow government at every opportunity. The reason gov't can't stay within its means is because the people IN government STAY in government by spending money on EVERYthing, to pander to EVERY interest group.
That's the funny thing about interest groups. They all think they're just tweaking things for THEIR benefit, when, by the time government is done, it has catered to ALL the interest groups, often working at cross purposes to do so, pleasing no one and serving no one. Whatever your pet cause is, quit asking government to tilt the playing field for YOUR cause, because you KNOW it'll do the same thing for EVERY cause, and by the end, we're broke and wondering why shit's so fucked-up.
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This is why building regulations and regulations of ALL kinds are garbage. You should be judged on the safety and durability of your construction. You should operate on your REPUTATION. But with government "regulators" in charge, it's a matter of bribing one or two people. One guy looking the other way. One phone call from a powerful person to another powerful person. Government agencies are weaponized for the corrupt against the honest. It all starts out with smiles and good intentions, but NObody has a STAKE in it.
I watched this kind of garbage from the USA side, as a huge C-SPAN addict way back in the 1980s. There wasn't a single committee hearing where they didn't start some new program, with new oversight, new funding, new bureaucrats. Everyone congratulated each other for "solving this major problem" and NObody talked about growth of government or spiraling cost of government. Every form you fill out, there were a bunch of legislators talking to some activist or lobbyist and garnering virtue points for spending our money to please that one constituency.
They none of 'em spendin' they own money. They none of them dealin' with the extra red tape. And oversight is a joke. They spawn new agencies, programs and "initiatives" every day, and can't spare 5 minutes over the next 10 years to actually oversee any of it. Just get they damn pictures taken with somebody with a sob story, for a headline and a "Look how concerned they are! Look how much they CARE!" They don't care. They never did and never will. There's just no penalty for saying "yes," and nothing but problems if they say "no."
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Yes. It's adorable. You see it all the time. If you don't understand the scale, a "$5,000 drop" seems like a huge amount, especially if they just show that part of the graph in isolation. But when you take a step back and see the entire graph, it just looks like a little wiggle. They do the same thing in climate "science," to exaggerate short-term up-ticks. They did the same thing with radiation when that was the thing The Eye was focused on.
You couldn't even use granite to build a nuclear power plant because granite's more radioactive than the level some technocrat, with the advice of an activist, decided the standard would be, but they didn't put up any warning signs when you went fishing in the pristine waters of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, which is smack dab on top of the Idaho Batholith, which is basically granite (quartz diorite, potayto-potahto).
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Netflix was great. You could wait a year and see any movie you wanted. Then the licensing dried up, because all the studios wanted to host their OWN streaming service, so Netflix lost out on being the dominant middleman for all movies and series everywhere. Cable and broadcast revenues are stagnant, at best, and all the networks and studios are very stingy about licensing their content to 3rd parties. They want All the revenue, and NONE of them, alone, can do it. Nobody's going to pay $20/month to 20 different streaming services.
Then Netflix and all the other media companies went on a mad dash to make enough content to be the Main Company people bought content from. The content got terribly diluted, with a shortage of good writers and directors. I'm not even hitting half the factors. Woke content is another factor. Covid was a factor. The steady convergence between what an independent can produce and a big studio can produce. The crazy "borrow money to make a movie" model of finance for movies.
I think we're going to enter a renaissance, as the old ways and the old systems of control wither and fray. As they should. There's just a war going on between old, new, and competing visions of what the new ought to look like.
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They had Trump's own words to back up this view. I was very pessimistic and I remain somewhat pessimistic, but I also held out hope that the war crimes angle would give Trump real leverage on Israel.
It would be just like Trump to tell Bibi: "I'm your staunchest supporter, but you need to stop the killing of women and children, and this apartheid situation, or I won't be able to sell this to the American people. Help me out, here, friend."
I'm not sure what the solutions are, because support of one side means death and possible extinction to the other - or possibly both - side(s). I'm not a fan of the Zionist project, but I know that destruction of Israel as a sovereign state would mean great destruction and millions killed. I know that the preservation of Israel, as currently conceived, would mean great destruction and millions killed.
There is hope that a middle path, possibly along the lines of the Abraham Accords could be the best, albeit imperfect solution, for at least a while. The Accords were abandoned as soon as Biden took office. Both sides will have to hold their noses to get to a better place.
Israel will have to change its ways, which is no small matter. Much of what we don't like about Israel is the result of being a nation under siege for generations. Much of what we don't like about Israel's foes is the result of the ruthless, bloodthirsty force used to (re-)create Israel in the first place.
Both sides see the other side as inhumanly ruthless and cruel. There's no direct solution to the atrocities of the past by both sides. How far back do you want to go to find first causes? 40 years? 80 years? 100 years? 1000 years? There's plenty for everybody to be upset about. That doesn't do anything for women and children just trying to survive. Finding a way to STOP the atrocities in the future may be our only hope.
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Take out the profit motive, you destroy the quality of the product or service, you ninnies. Everything government takes over gets more expensive and lower quality over time. Free markets aren't the problem with health care in our nation, today. The biggest player in health care is - and has been for DECADES - the U.S. Government! You idiots want to put bureaucrats between citizens and health care they receive and you seem to think that's going to turn out good, when it hasn't EVER turned out good.
I get that you're well-intentioned, but you two are weak on history. Bismarck took over health and the Nazis took that AND a total takeover of education, and controlled the populace, and even WEAPONIZED the populace against, oh, I dunno, maybe JEWS? Make it a taxpayer-paid thing and when the government does its rationing (and bloats itself on taxpayer largesse), they will INEVITABLY start targeting fat people, drug users, smokers, drinkers.... for shame, censure, and even lynchings, as the public sees things going to shit and the government dishes up another group to be targeted as parasites.
Freedom isn't perfect. It's only the best. And you Progressives think that because it's "your idea," that suddenly the bureaucrats and government officials will be enlightened THIS time, when history shows that's NEVER how it works out. You want people prosperous. That's the key. The gap between high and low income doesn't matter. What matters is how well off - objectively - the poorest of us are, and their ability to use a little elbow grease to improve their OWN situation.
You can make a case for local safety nets to the extent that the localities can afford or have the will to support. But JUST when you're showing how wise you are to the bullshit Deep State and our imperialistic ways, you argue for these SAME clowns to run our health care and education? You're the agents of your own enslavement.
And now, more than ever before in history, access to education has NEVER BEEN CHEAPER, and yet you want to throw more and more money at legacy institutions that just get more and more expensive and turn out more and more ignorant citizens. The evidence is plain. Apply what you know about false flag gaslighting neocons on the foreign policy front, and apply that same understanding to DOMESTIC policy! They're the same power-mad assholes in ALL areas of government, and the BEST we can do is minimize the harm they can do to all of us at the same time. That's where Jimmy and Tim are ignorant.
Some sort of BASE health care, like free checkups, preventive care, and the like, make sense. But the farther it gets between the people paying for what is received, the more you break down the connection between personal responsibility and personal authority. You give health care to the gummint and you get what the gummint thinks you should have. Not what you or your family or your neighbors or your community think is needed.
Progressives are like farmers who see a little bug spray helped the crop, so 10 times the pesticides will be 10 times better, right? And at the same time, you destroy the engine of prosperity that has you dreaming such hifalutin' dreams about all the good you could do. Sustainability is where it's at, and just being able to use the might and wealth of government to fix a symptom makes you think that all problems can and should be fixed that way. The world - humanity - doesn't work that way. You've got to HAVE the wealth in order to redistribute it.
Progressive policies are hard to argue against because they can always point to immediate winners, chosen by government, to parade in front of us, but nobody notices the guy who was just getting by on his own, with aspirations of upward mobility, who gets CRUSHED by all the rules, regs, and disempowerment (not to mention loss of VOLUNTARY COMMUNITY) that are part and parcel of using government force to "fix" human problems. Human problems are fixed by the humans immediately concerned, and NOT by burea ucrats, technocrats and other unelected sons of bitches whose careers DEPEND on the persistence and growth of the problems we "hire them" to solve.
This is why Democrat-run cities are crushed by debt and more and more neighborhoods are permanent and growing shit-holes. You guys are part of the problem. Libertarian-leaning people want government fucking up the international AND national scene LESS. Progressives have this weird blind spot. The same SOBs you hate in the military industrial complex are ALSO the ones running all the fucking regulatory agencies. EPA will fine you $50,000 for cleaning up the trash-filled vacant lot, next door, voluntarily, or shut down you business for a minor infraction, while protecting the Monsantos and the General Electrics for doing much worse, because once those agencies are created, they're INSTANTLY THE PAWNS of the fat cats.
Neither of you guys are smart enough to understand what a UNICORN MED4ALL is. Who could be against it? Only someone who understands history and human nature. I love Progressives for their heart, but I despise them for their ignorance. And what makes you think the UK's health care is all that great? Whether your kid (or you) lives or dies is decided by some motherfucking technocrat with a spreadsheet. And you KNOW that dude's family gets extra-special good treatment. We see this shit all the time in EVERY government "help" program. The insiders get better deals than ever before and the people on the fringe get kicked to the curb even more forcibly than ever, PLUS you cripple the ability of ALL the people who were getting by on their OWN hook, because all you think about are the helpless ones. The end result is that the people who were JUST on the cusp of being middle class (which means better off than kings and queens of 200 years ago, by the way, thanks to capitalism) are helpless.
Why do you think the Yellow Vests are marching all over France? The promises never match up with reality. They're just good intentions, you saps. Progressives are like Lenny Small in "Of Mice and Men." You just want to hug everybody, and stroke their hair, right? What could go wrong? Well, you matched your good intentions with the might of government and you CRUSH PEOPLE, without meaning to, You crush their ability to fend for themselves, yet somehow think that a government comprised of their contributions can somehow do what they cannot, while you give them 30 cents on every dollar you take from them.
And in the former Soviet Union, ALL the medical talent fled the field. Sure you're guaranteed the care, but you're at the end of a LONG fucking line and you get whatever they DECIDE you're gonna get. In a free market, you get better care for MOST, because of competition. And you have much more flex for helping the poor by voluntarily beefing up YOUR community's hospitals. In a society where all that shit is "gummint's job," nobody gives a shit and nobody takes responsibility for helping the local hospital. But you make a STATUS SYMBOL for your community and the members who chip in the most, because the COMMUNITY takes PRIDE in their health care.
Progressive policies: The "good" done can be demonstrated anecdotally, but the HARM done is more diffuse. You just notice, over time, that shit works less and less well.
And all the money you want to spend on your high ideals requires ever-expanding population and revenue, which is the REAL reason we're destroying the ecosystem. People left to their own devices will dial back the # of children they have, NATURALLY. But they've got to raise themselves up to that point on their own.
Try and understand.
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Anybody who actually watched the Democrat debates in 2020 should have known this about Biden, already. I think he was given the nomination because he's obedient to his puppet masters, first of all, but second of all, I think the DNC knew that whoever won the presidency on their platform would be unelectable, if he tried to carry it through, and of course they did try to carry it through.
Biden didn't get out a single coherent sentence throughout the debates. He was plainly an empty suit all the way back in the summer of 2020.
I don't know if he's still compos mentis and putting on an act, or if he's just acting like it, for plausible deniability and to thwart prosecution. He was caught on tape detailing his extortion of the Ukraine government to make them stop investigating Burisma and other oligarchs with whom he (and many other politicians) had intimate ties, including children with high-paying, do-nothing-but-sell-influence seats on the boards of major Ukrainian companies.
I think there were more Democrats on the list, but there were also prominent RINO Republicans, like Romney, on the list.
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Trump wasn't anti neo-con. He's got a neocon streak a mile wide. But he didn't understand how things worked. He just saw an insane policy that cost the USA billions, while the people we were spending billions on were helping Russia's economy by buying oil and gas from them. He wanted them to buy OUR oil and gas if we were going to prop them up.
What Trump didn't get was that in return for the massive subsidy, we got NATO's support in all our adventures around the globe, especially in Iraq. And Trump bragged about the oil fields in Northern Syria, where we have troops on guard.
Trump is pro-USA, and just wanted NATO countries to pay their fair share. He didn't know or care about the ongoing quid-pro-quo for that subsidy. Our spending kept Euro leaders in line.
China is a major gangster nation. Gangsters running it. Gangsters pursuing predatory trade practices and subverting foreign governments and institutions with bribes, blackmail, and other behind-our-back tactics. CCP subversion propaganda is a big part of the social divide in America. Commies are always better at cloak-and-dagger/subversion than we are, and generally terrible at the fundamental stuff, like innovation that you get from FREE people that compelled people simply can't match.
Liberty at home has always been our biggest advantage, creating an engine of prosperity that is matchless. Top-down socialist/progressive/communist ways of thinking always fail, because they try to FORCE what they want; whereas, free countries LET their people do what they want and keep what they earn. Marvelous incentive system for creativity that all the nanny-government nations lack. That's what's so sad about the way America is going. We're headed in the USSR/Communist-China direction in how we run things.
There's a federal rule governing EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN, from gas can spouts to EPA regulations that make it so you can buy a gas guzzler, but you can't find an affordable compact pickup truck anywhere, because they don't get good enough gas mileage! But if you build a truck BIGGER, with a bigger footprint (length and width of wheel base), the gas mileage requirement set by EPA bureaucrats says that's OK. My Tacoma is a mid-sized truck. It should be a COMPACT truck. The sweet spot is a small V6 (with or without hybrid) that gets 20 or 25 MPG. Enough power to travel the Interstate and maybe tow a little trailer. But those are illegal because of the EPA.
I could go on forever on this, but we are very much a top-down government on fascist lines. You can still own stuff, but they tell you what you can own and what you can do with what you own. And it's the lefties who insist that federal agencies do MORE, which makes you progressives the thin edge of the wedge of fascism in the USA, where medical boards punish good doctors for following their Hippocratic Oath, when it is in conflict with Big Pharma or Big Food profits.
We GOD Big Pharma and Big Food BECAUSE of federal interventions squeezing out the little guys. You guys complain about the little guys getting squeezed, but you insist that the machine that crushes them should be bigger and bigger and bigger, world without end. You're trying to perfect socialism by fascist means, and then you're surprised when things go to heck in a handbasket.
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For the next few months, that desperation is going to make them very volatile, very dangerous, and potentially very destructive. Who knows what harm they're going to do? The fact that Trump waited out the Mueller investigation gives the good guys a much better chance than if he'd gone at it, hammer and tong, from Day 1. When the leftover Obama crowd were still dominating the workings of the ship of state, right after inauguration, any investigations on his part would've been shot full of leaks by never-Trumpers. I think he slowly, quietly got his ducks in a row.
Note there's no daily diet of damaging leaks from Durham and Barr. This is how things would proceed, if the guys running things were on the up-and-up and competent. But still too much remains to be done. The Trump base wants blood, but I'll settle for TRUTH AND TRANSPARENCY. The Dems and their Dem/Repub deep-state, careerist establishment insiders give us neither truth nor transparency.
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He's not going to stop until he has real security guarantees, and, with the track record of Ukraine/NATO, that means Russia will guarantee their security without regard for the words coming from the West, including anything Trump says.
If I'm Putin, I don't stop until I KNOW that I can crush any violations of any ceasefire/treaty. There can be no trust, not even with Trump, because his term only lasts 4 years.
Cutting off military aid to Ukraine is a real concession that brings Russia much closer to its goal, more quickly. But I don't see Russia stopping until it has the most defensible front possible. That might be the Dnepr. It might be key high points in a pretty low-rolling landscape, without obvious geographical barriers other than the Dnepr and some (relatively) high points, so any attackers will have to attack uphill.
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@BloodMoneyLLC : The Kurds are not a monolith. Sure, they'd like to have their own country, but I think most of them just want some form of self-determination within whatever borders they find themselves, like everybody else.
And as for Israel, I think they're more about their own survival, so they do the bidding of our Deep-State types to ensure our backing, without which they would probably have disappeared, long since.
The irony in Syria is that while Assad's definitely a dictator-type, his government is secular, and has treated the Kurds and Christians much more fairly than any of the other countries in the region, except Israel and Egypt.
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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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I'd feel a lot better if they removed all the judges who presided over the issuance of the FISA warrants on Trump. They have not done their due diligence, and are part of a cover-up, as far as I'm concerned. They could call ALL those guys out on the carpet, if they desired. Clearly, they do not desire. What do you do when the courts and the executive branch are in it, together? Who enforces and adjudicates on the enforcers and adjudicators? We have the same problem in Congress. How do you stop corruption by the men who write the laws governing corruption? In their special circumstances, they have advantages of opportunity and information that they monetize on a daily basis for their own personal benefit. They write the rules so THEIR way of taking advantage is OK, but nobody else could possibly profit from THEIR way, because they're not in those positions of power and access.
You can't KEEP that campaign money after you drop out, but you CAN put it into an NGO owned by you or one of your buddies. That right there can be 3 or 4 high-paid jobs working in "charity" that you can throw to people whose support you want, or who will just do you favors in the future, because you got their worthless nephew a paying job.
I'd go over the financial records of all relatives, friends and associates of finance and banking committees before the 2008 crash. I think there was a lot of shorting stocks that were about to take a hit. The Congress knew before the rest of it, and their cronies all got an early heads-up.
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If you're a (poor) student of history as I am, then you (foolishly) believe as I do, that often the Good is served for all the wrong reasons. You need to take a step back from the posturing and parse the larger tide of human progress and living conditions of regular folks.
For instance, underneath the hysteria, it sounds like civilians in Damascus are no longer being shelled by Islamic rebels. Peace is setting in in the North.
The wars of aggression (overt and covert) have been going on for decades, spearheaded by a bunch of so-called foreign-policy and intelligence experts that serve elites and NOT the people. I'm giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, because for the first time in a LONG time, we're breaking away from a CRAZY globalist ideology that is ill-intentioned and incompetent, at the same time.
If we're getting it RIGHT, for once, we'll see things settle down pretty quickly. Neocons and Neolibs are going to kick and scream if we stop our meddling. I suspect that the way Trump's going about things is pushing us in the right direction, while simultaneously counteracting the propaganda from Deep-State-type "experts" who've been fucking everything up for DECADES.
It'll get louder before it gets quieter, but it looks like Trump is sorting out a lot of phony bullshit foreign policy that ultimately has served NObody, except maybe some political cronies in the war industry. I think what's been happening isn't quite conspiracy, but a lot of "fellow travelers" in the service of a global gov't that can only thrive by destroying all vestiges of nationalism in the West.
It's all wrong-headed. It's all authoritarian/totalitarian in its thrust. I'd like to see a little less nationalism, but it's a long-term goal, achieved by MORE autonomy on the people side, which is the opposite of what these one-worlders seem to want. It appears they want CHAOS, so they can step in and run things from on high.
This is exactly the opposite of a positive one-world vision. National boundaries should dissolve over time NOT because somebody's running the whole show, but because folks generally enjoy similar freedoms and prosperity on BOTH sides of the border, which then makes the border an artificial barrier to free trade between free people.
It's not something you can do away with from on high, which is where elites and elitists always get it wrong, thinking THEY will be able to call all the shots. As long as gov'ts treat their people like shit, there's no chance of a just, worldwide coming-together. Just like in love: If you love her, let her go. If she loves you she will come back.
I think the long-term answer is to campaign for freedom, liberty, human rights and the prosperity that inevitably follows. The more of THAT we see and the more we LIMIT the central powers of gov't, the closer we will come to the ideal that contemporary Globalists THINK they want, but can only see authoritarian means to that end. One world can only take place by LIMITING central authority.
Instead, we can't wait to find something NEW that gov't should stick its nose in. We're so stupid.
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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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