Ironhold

For some time now, various leftist, progressive, and Democrat groups have tried to paint the narrative that if the GOP wins and makes large enough gains then everyone who isn't a straight white male will somehow be either made a slave or eradicated. This has led to a considerable amount of fearmongering and terror among various groups.

It has to do with the jaw structure itself. A lot of people simply have jaws that are too small. Mine actually stopped developing prematurely, and it's now to the point that I would need my jaw surgically broken and reassembled to fix how bad my overbite is.

This is actually what he's saying Musk's purpose will be, to evaluate various government agencies in order to determine what is or isn't still needed as a federal-level function, what can be transferred to the states, and what is basically obsolete. When Musk took over Twitter, one of the first things he did was to go over the company's rosters and determine who was actually working. He discovered that a large percentage of employees were basically hiding out in the company's recreational areas rather than actually doing their duties, and got rid of them. IIRC he slashed the headcount in half this way. Things were a bit rocky at first because a small number of these people were specialists who were only needed intermittently, but past a certain point Twitter got sorted.

The big thing that people need to be confronting, but likely won't, is the fact that Harris and her people fixated on niche issues that the moderates & undecideds considered lower priority and then tried to use shaming tactics to keep the discussion from drifting away. Prices are up by levels that are making it hard for the lower and middle classes to get by. There are fears that any further US involvement in Ukraine would lead to war with Russia. An entire generation of young men feel left behind because of the intense push for DEI and often radical feminism in the name of "equality" that isn't. Entire sectors are underperforming. These issues, and more, are key concerns for everyday people, but Harris wanted it to be about abortion and how anyone who didn't vote for her was a bigot. That's not how these things work.

OK. Change of plans. My flagship newspaper does a Saturday morning sports tabloid during football season. I'm the one tasked with circulating it throughout town this year, and so on nights we have a football game I try to be home from the theater by 7 PM so that I can be asleep by 10:30 PM as I have to be up at 4 AM to get it done. The local multiplex has scheduled Heretic this Friday so that the first screening won't have me back home until about 8 PM, which is far later than I'd like. So I'll see a regular movie this weekend, get that reviewed, and then try to catch Heretic on either Monday or Tuesday. Still rather puzzles me that the film is premised on the villain - who I would imagine is the author's mouthpiece - going on a tirade about how he knows oh so much about religion yet the author didn't know that missionaries aren't supposed to enter houses where the only occupant is a member of the opposite sex. I'm thinking this means that the author isn't as wise as they think they are and that any competent apologist should be able to dismantle the film.

The trailer for the film depicted a scene in which Mapes breaks down crying because she was being "punished for asking questions". That's been Mapes' narrative since the incident, and the narrative of her friends and a whole host of others. The fact that she utterly fell down on the job never enters the equation unless people force it in place, and even then a lot of these individuals will do their best to deny reality.

If Mapes had reached out to Killian's secretary, she would have learned enough to know that there were questions about chain-of-custody. Basically, Killian hand-wrote his memos, the secretary was the one who typed anything that needed to be typed, and she didn't have access to the kind of high-end typewriter needed to be able to put in the superscripts the documents shown to Mapes had. Thus, if Killian was the author of those memos, it means he would have sent them to an unknown third party to type up, someone who did have access to one of those high-end typewriters. This alone would have been enough to where a wise editor would have nixed the story. Mapes instead chose to rush everything to air, and a documents expert was live-blogging his take-down of the documents as he watched the episode.

It's only the second time since I started in October of 2013 where I had to have this kind of talk with editorial. The first time was with the movie "Truth", which the trailer made clear was going to be an apologia for Mary Mapes' actions during what would become the Killian Documents Controversy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy I was one of the "pajama-wearing keyboard warriors" as we were so besmirched who was online back in 2004 making noise and demanding answers regarding what was going on, whether the documents were real, and if not how it was that CBS News allowed the story to go to air.

I'm an entertainment writer IRL, and I've had to talk with editorial about this movie. They accept that even though I'll be seeing it so that I can answer questions about it, there's a conflict of interest in my reviewing it and so as long as I provide something as a replacement they'll be fine with it.

"Hard times make hard men. Hard men make soft times. Soft times make soft men. Soft men make hard times." How it works is that whenever things go sideways, there will generally arise a group of people, if not a key part of that generation, who stand up, get things done, deal with the drama of the day, and then bequeath to their posterity a relative amount of peace and prosperity. Problem is, the longer a society experiences peace and prosperity, the more likely they are to take it for granted and the less willing the members of that society are to do what they need to in order to protect what they have. That's when things go pear-shaped and the hardship comes back to smack everyone. Real life example of this - It's Fall 2019. I have a strong feeling that I need to go to Amazon and stock up on surplus military rations. 2020 rolls around and we lock down. We take comfort in the fact that we have the rations in case my parents and I need them for food storage. The 2020 lockdown is lifted and grocery stores eventually restock. My parents decide that we no longer need the rations, that the cases are just cluttering the house, and so off they go to a storage unit we're renting along with everything else they decided we don't need in the house. We're in Texas. February 2021. We get the blizzard that shuts down the state's electrical grid. For 72 hours, we have no electricity. We're fortunate to have water, but no power. The rations are still inside the storage unit because mom and dad didn't think to pull them back out in time and my car isn't safe to drive in severe weather of the kind that preceded the blizzard. US military rations of the kind I got have an included flameless ration heater that makes use of an exothermic reaction to boil food in the bag. So we could have had hot food at our leisure. Instead, dad had to go out onto the back porch and boil large pots of water using our gas grill (which has since gone to grill heaven), then bring those pots inside the house whereupon mom dumped whatever shelf-stable items we had into those pots to try and boil something. Once it was safe to travel they went to the storage unit to get those rations, their way of admitting that I'd been right the entire time and we suffered needlessly.

Spoke with editorial. They understand that it's a conflict of interest situation for me to actually review it even though I'll likely be watching it anyway, and are fine with me playing things by ear as necessary.

Cinergy Cinemas has a premium-tier rewards program where you pay X amount of money each month for an assortment of perks that includes a given number of free tickets each month and a weekly free gift card for the arcade. My renewal should take place right before the movie drops locally, meaning I can burn a "free" ticket and so not directly pay the studio a dime.

Despite my best efforts to convince editorial otherwise, my material is presently subscriber-only. https://www.coveleaderpress.com/ This is the flagship newspaper I'm with. And as I noted, any review on my part would be a case of "conflict of interest" and so unless editorial gives me the OK otherwise I couldn't review it for an ostensibly neutral publication.

People who come into large sums of money generally blow it all quickly because they don't know what to do with it. They either quit their day jobs & spend themselves poor, or they give into the nagging of relatives and "acquaintances" who want them to fork it over for something.

OK. My local multiplex *will* be getting this movie. I'm in a quandary now. I will have to see this film one way or another because I'm something of a minor local celebrity and I know that people will eventually ask me about it. ...But it's a conflict of interest case such that I can't actually do a printed review of it in the paper, and there's no way I can physically stop anyone leaving the screening to explain to them what the film did wrong. I have options for what I'm going to be doing as my review that weekend, so that at least is covered. But I still have this movie to deal with.

Yeah, I keep having to explain to people that we inadvertently managed to turn basketball into a blood sport.

When I first got online, it was basically a rite of passage to get your first death threat from someone who didn't like the fact that you didn't act the way they wanted you to act. People were doing Satan's work in God's name in their efforts to tear the church down, and didn't understand why past a certain point they were either driving people towards us or away from Christianity entirely. Now, most individuals with that mindset are either locked away inside gated internet forums or isolated on parts of much larger social media groups and only bubble up if someone's calling them out. There weren't a whole lot of us, the church website was barely functional, there were a handful of vaguely credible apologetics websites people had to get familiar with quickly, and few folks offered to help because they didn't see the value in witnessing online. Now here we are.

Yeah, a lot of trans rights activists are quick to scream "genocide!" when confronted with opinions and political sentiments that they don't like. This has, from what I understand, started to get on the nerves of a segment of transgender individuals who don't want the added negative attention the screamers draw to them. The real, unfortunate, truth of the matter is that there have been a small number of people who weren't legitimately transgender but have falsely claimed that they are so that they can access the bathrooms and locker rooms of the opposite gender for prurient purposes. As a result, we're now looking at a widespread panic of sorts over the matter.

I first got online in 2000, and decided not long after that the internet *was* my de facto mission field. There was so much work to be done, and no name tag was required. A lot of folks back then gave me grief over it because a lot of the priesthood leadership in my stake were discouraging any sort of internet activity while pushing a badly distorted narrative about the importance of going on missions (I've referred to the latter elsewhere), but I can honestly say I'm part of the generation that paved the way for the Bloggernacle as some people still call it. That's the kind of mindset more people need to have, that there are ways to serve that don't require a name tag.

It's the metaphorical straw that broke the camel's back. People with high-functioning autism are likely to be high-strung to begin with and already dealing with a fair bit of anxiety & often other undiagnosed mental health conditions. They're also likely to be aware that they're "different" from others and that their "difference" is potentially a liability. Now throw unhelpful parents into the mix, and you've a recipe for disaster.

When I was in my twenties I finally realized that I was different from others, and not necessarily in a good way; the various things I'd survived at that point (including a horrific medical episode that I now use as a benchmark when evaluating horror movies) also played a part. The best way I could describe it to others was "I was wired wrong to begin with, and the things I've been through haven't helped." If I'm left to my own devices, I can generally get by. I've even been the first person on the scene in a number of high-stress and emergency situations (such as a situation that involved a fatality). I actually had a talk with my editor the other day about how my entertainment columns have officially as of this year been in print longer than "Calvin & Hobbes". However, I've had to explain at length to my parents and others that I have hard limits, and if they see various tics or other bits manifest (for example, when I'm under enough stress the muscles in my jaw and tongue can seize up, leaving me temporarily unable to speak) they need to back off and give me a minute. Earlier this year we had my youngest nephew come stay with us for a few days. I had to have *several* very long talks with my mom as a result of this, wherein I had to explain to her what he was going through based on my own personal experience and what he was dealing with. My youngest nephew is having to take medications because he has ADHD and other issues on top of his autism spectrum, and it's heartbreaking to hear him at his young age talk about how his "brain is broken" because he's not normal, doesn't have the best impulse control, and people don't always know how to handle him.

Get yourself checked out, and possibly your kids. Autism tends to be genetic, in that it runs in families. If niece is a blood relative, it could mean that there is family history on your side leading towards autism spectrum disorder. In that case, one or both of her parents may be autistic as well but either doesn't realize they're autistic or is masking it so deeply that they're not helping.

That's what I'm thinking as well. The mom utterly misinterpreted the label, gave up on the daughter, and things became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I can only imagine how much better my life would have been if I had been diagnosed in my teens and gotten the support I needed accordingly.

When I was a kid, I was so far ahead of my peers in various fields that I spent a lot of time bored. I hadn't been diagnosed with anything at the time due to the then-existing stereotypes, and so whenever I would doodle or daydream to cure that boredom I got it coming and going. It was especially bad in 3rd grade, when I had a toxic teacher and my parents were so busy chewing me out for my tics manifesting and my attempts to relieve my boredom that they almost missed how bad my teacher was and that her actions were part of what I was dealing with that year. Even then, it still didn't register with my parents that perhaps I should go see someone. Rather, I was "gifted" and so they just assumed I was hyper-smart and on top of everything. Cue heaping amounts of mental and emotional trauma as I spent my youth getting ripped apart, accused of lying, or other such things because I didn't process the world the same way my parents & older siblings did and didn't react to it the same way, either. They just assumed that I was a liar, that I was exaggerating various health issues, and that this was all in service of my being a slacker. It took all of my nieces and nephews coming up on the spectrum for my parents to realize that maybe, just maybe, me and my siblings were on the spectrum as well. I've been diagnosed, as has one of my two brothers. We don't know about the other one. In hindsight we now know that dad is likely autistic, with his time in the Army giving him the discipline he needed to compensate. I suspect that mom is as well, but whenever I bring it up she gets defensive.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that Rommel was one of the most brilliant tactical minds in military history, with Patton perhaps being his only equal among the Allies. Rommel's downfall was due to the fact that he was a general rather than a politician, and so was unable to protect himself from the political backlash that followed the failed Operation: Valkyrie plot against Hitler. Yeah, military history is *full* of various grey areas.