Ironhold

As I've explained on Twitter - In the kind of business environment Trump came up in, aggression of the type he's been showing is a feature rather than a bug. This aggression can and often does include bluffs, outrageous bids, outrageous demands, and other bits of game theory. The idea is for both parties to throw out ridiculous proposals and then haggle their way down to where everyone is actually wanting to be. The problem is that the last 5 years have broken something inside of Trump. He was done dirty in the 2020 elections, with evidence surfacing to the effect that the Hunter Biden laptop story and several other bits that could have hurt Biden were deliberately suppressed through orchestrated campaigns. [1] He was nearly assassinated due to incompetent Secret Service agents allowing a shooter to get dangerously close to him, with a civilian being killed in the process. He's been the victim of outright lawfare in which various people went to legally questionable lengths to try and destroy him. His family has been the subject of vile comments and the like from ostensible "progressives" who would scream themselves unconscious if the same level of abuse was heaped on them. Various reports are now claiming that the "lab leak" theory for the origin of Covid was indeed more than likely correct. Et cetera. Now reports are coming in from across North America and Europe saying that Tesla owners are being targeted and that Tesla vehicles & facilities are being vandalized or even set on fire, a repeat of the left-wing violence that the nation suffered through in 2020 and years prior. This has ramped his aggression levels up beyond what is normal even for this kind of environment while also blinding him to the fact that he's dealing with individuals who aren't from his same business background and so don't know how the game is played. It's possible that some of these nations will work out compromises that will lead to these tariff issues being dispensed with. But it's just as possible that people will overreact to his intense aggression and make a trade war out of things. [1] Yes, at this point it can indeed be argued that 2020 was stolen due to how much was forcibly suppressed to help Biden out.

A lot of times, when people champion past eras, what they're actually trying to champion are those things they see as the positive aspects of that era. This is one thing from the past that needs to return, the adults in society making it an active point to try and be positive examples for the next generations. A *lot* of the people who wind up lost these days wouldn't have been lost if they had some beacon they could hone in on. If we fix this, we fix a good chunk of what's wrong with modern society and start bringing people back to where they need to be.

Over the past few months I've had some conversations with people as to why folks like the Tate Brothers are resonating with so many young men. The long and short of it is that modern Western society has done a rather bang-up job in inadvertently removing male role models from society. Far too many families no longer have a dad kids can rely on, male community leaders are being pressured to step back so women can "have a voice", popular male pop culture figures who in the past would have been a substitute are being discarded in favor of younger and hipper female replacement, and classic social structures like religion are frowned upon by the "elite". As if that wasn't bad enough, far too many "progressive" and "feminist" schools of thought regard men as being flawed & toxic by default. Cue a large number of teens and twenty-somethings being completely adrift in society and looking for anyone or anything that will welcome them with open arms. This is one of the problems the world is facing today, a lack of positive heroes and role models that people can aspire to. Younger people today don't have a Fred Rogers or a Bob Ross to gently dispense time-tested wisdom while helping to form boundaries of personal conduct; they've got the Tate Brothers and the Paul Brothers encouraging them to seek wealth for the sake of wealth and telling them that anything bad which happens to them must be society's fault. ...Thus, a big part of why so many younger individuals, particularly young men, have a botched sense of where they belong in the world and how the world should be reacting to them: they're either being told they're worthless, or being told that anyone who doesn't bow to them is worthless. It's one of the structures I talked about earlier that needs to be addressed in order to try and fix what's going wrong with the world today.

Well folks... looks like I get to spend this Conference on pain meds... 💀 Last Saturday I found the *one* piece in a box of Russel Stover's that had toffee in it, and it was just enough to crack a tooth that had a cavity. I saw my dentist on Monday, he confirmed the damage, and said that I would need to have a crown. The earliest he could fit me in for the actual procedure would be Friday afternoon, and after my last round of dental work like this it was antibiotics and low-grade pain pills for a few days.

I just got a boilerplate letter in the mail today from a group called Change Healthcare. They're where the breach happened that led to whoever it was getting my debit card information: I must have used my debit card to pay a medical provider that works with them, but the letter didn't say who. It was this announcement, the usual mea culpa, the usual promises that they were working with law enforcement, and the usual offer to pay for credit protection and identity theft protection services. I'll have to look it over once I get done with the dental work.

Latest update on the pre-Conference drama: I broke a tooth yesterday. I'll be at the dentist in a few hours to have it looked at. Seriously. Someone got my debit card information, I was woken up by a catastrophic nose bleed one morning, there's been drama at work, my car has had technical issues, and now this. Even for the usual pre-Conference drama this has been rather excessive. I think something big is going to happen at Conference.

Coincidentally, I saw this comic strip today - https://www.gocomics.com/wannabe/2025/03/25 For a lot of people, that's what life is like: They try to get up out of their comfort zone, they get punished for it, and they go right back. If someone is clinically depressed, neurodivergent, or otherwise having an especially difficult time, after a while it might just make sense to them to stay where they are rather than trying because in their eyes the risks outweigh the rewards.

Would you tell someone who was dealing with clinical depression to "stop being depressed"? That's the gist of what my parents did when I was younger. If I was lucky I would be accused of "being an Eeyore" and be told I needed to smile more. More often than not, however, it was turned into my situation somehow being my fault for somehow ostensibly choosing to only see the negative and told that I just needed to get over myself. This included, mind you, the fact that I was supposed to laugh at myself every single time I was the butt of the joke, no matter how cruel or cutting the joke was. I actually got screamed at one night for not laughing and thus ruining everyone else's fun. It's how I know that if a person is dealing with mental health issues, social isolation, or other such problems you don't simply fling them to the wolves or get after them for not being what you think they should be. You need to gently love them and nudge them along while observing & helping to correct any and all structural issues that could be interfering with their healthy existence. ...A process that can and sometimes must include intervening on their behalf if they're being wronged or mistreated. Remember, there are days where I'm not so much offering opinion as it is warning everyone how I wound up the way I am now in the hopes it saves other people from following in my path.

The thing with the present situation is that there's no one single surefire pie-in-the-sky solution. Society has become *so broken* in this regards that simply telling a socially isolated person "Just get off your couch!" is only going to add to the problem. What we need to do is start pumping the brakes on certain things with modern life so that we can start rebuilding society in a way that brings those safety nets back.

I'm trying to explain the fact that yes, there's a problem. We can't start to talk about fixes for a problem nobody wants to admit even exists.

*What* local comic shop? The US comic book industry has been in a dire decline for over a decade now, with the past several years seeing more shops close than open. There are now large swaths of the United States where people can't get new comics at traditional retail, and some publishers - especially indie publishers - are now basically internet + conventions as a result. That's part of what I mean when I say that a lot of the traditional structures and methods by which people used to socialize in the past are either breaking down or going away entirely. And church? Modern society has done a *lot* to drive people away from the idea of religion, to the point that it either doesn't occur to a lot of people to go to church or they fear social isolation by doing anything that would lead others to think they've become religious. And even if a person does try to seek out religion, many churches have closed over the last few years due to declining membership, limiting one's options.

The *very* big issue right now is social isolation, with even people who would have in past generations been able to find social support networks instead being shut out and cut out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_isolation Once upon a time society was built upon direct face-to-face social interaction, with people being actively encouraged to work with others. Most of the traditional social structures and activities we used to have are breaking down if they still exist, and it's all too easy these days to get distracted or find excuses to not reach out to people. Shunning and ostracism now go by "cancelling" and other such terms that people use to *justify* why even minor offenses or the crime of being "different" should be enough to force a person out of not just society but the world as a whole. Throw in the plethora of modern conveniences that we have now, and it's all too easy to have a situation where a person is discarded by society, forgotten about, or simply no longer "needs" to make an effort as far as they're concerned.

In many ways, this world has gotten a lot more complicated, a lot colder, and a lot less personal over the past few decades. A lot of folks are falling through the ever-increasing number of cracks, and in far too many instances the people who should be trying to pull them back out are instead trying to bury them further. It's a lot harder for people to know who they can trust, where they can go for solace, and how to heal the myriad of wounds they're receiving.

For decades now, the 2 - 3 weeks leading up to Conference were always challenging for me as I'd constantly face various obstacles and stressors. This would usually be followed by some big argument with someone *during* Conference weekend, and then the drama would follow for the next week as the patterns that were disrupted due to my taking the time to watch Conference had to be mended. Right now, things have been *really* ugly and it started sooner than usual, so I can only imagine that something massive is going to happen this time around.

OK. Went to the theater as normal to see the movie of the week for review. "Snow White" is so radioactive that I'm not touching it. But the movie I was wanting to see was a bust as the projector in that theater was busted, and so my next alternative was The Alto Knights. In the film, DeNiro plays a dual role as infamous mobsters Frank Costello and Vito Corleone. It's told from Frank's perspective, and goes from his early days to his decision to entrap the leaders of syndicates from across the nation as a maneuver to ensure that he and his wife were truly "out" of the game. His plan is that he wants a big mafia shindig at a single, central site so that he can hand over leadership of his neck of the woods to Vito. Officially, he wants this to happen so that there's no way he can take back leadership or Vito can deny that Frank gave it up peacefully. In reality, Frank knows that the site - a large farm in New York state - is already under at least casual investigation by New York authorities for being a key juncture for smuggling between the United States & Canada. All Frank has to do is drop a few anonymous tips to law enforcement, make up some excuse to justify a late arrival, dawdle until the cops get it done, and reap the rewards. Well, in the lead-up to everyone arriving at the farm, there's a scene where Vito and his crew pass the welcome sign for Palmyra. Cue Vito's driver bringing up the church, leading to the kind of blundering conversation you'd expect. So yeah... a mob movie just gave us some advertising.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-violence-protest-elon-musk/ For the past few weeks now, people have been targeting Tesla vehicles, charging stations, and retailers for vandalism and arson. Individual owners have reported finding fliers on their cars declaring the vehicles "swatsticars" and threatening violence if the owners do not trade their vehicles in for something else, and at least one report is now saying that someone has leaked the information of various Tesla owners online so that the owners can be targeted directly. As you can imagine, my efforts to inform various Musk opponents of this trend has fallen on deaf ears as they don't want to admit it's happening.

As time permits I'm going through some comic strips I like and reading the archives. Today, I came to this strip from the history of "Rose Is Rose" -> https://www.gocomics.com/roseisrose/1997/01/10 For those who can't see the image, it's a cameo appearance from the Tabernacle Choir.

A big part of why housing prices are going up so fast here in Texas is that people are fleeing California and other blue states over nonsense like this. I'm about two hours northwest of Austin by road, and we've had prices double in the past decade; some houses have even tripled. What makes things so frustrating is that a lot of the people who flee these areas then turn right around & start demanding policies or promoting social / political stances that would turn Texas into whatever garbage pit they fled from. It's like they can't understand A leading to B.

When it comes to implementing socialized or universal health care, a major stumbling block exists in the form of the US military and US Veteran's Administration health care systems, both of which are run by the US government. The US military health care system is very erratic and inconsistent in terms of quality, to the point that a great many people - like myself - have been victims of malpractice. Making matters worse is that for a very long time those of us who were victims were falsely told that because the military was part of the government it was illegal for us to sue. Even active duty military do not always get the best care, such that at one time the name-brand painkiller Motrin was nicknamed "Ranger Candy" for how often care providers would just tell service members (especially in the Army) to go have some Motrin and get over themselves in response to various medical complaints. The Veteran's Administration system, meanwhile, was rocked by a massive scandal some years ago in which it was found that due to a lack of capacity to meet demand they kept deliberately postponing and rescheduling meetings and appointments for weeks or months at a time, to the point that a number of veterans died waiting for care. These two systems are metaphorical bloody shirts that can be waved around as "proof" that the government can't be trusted to run health care, and so until they undergo needed reforms and the capacity increases accordingly they'll continue to be used as arguments against socialized or universal health care.

About BLM... The map I attached is one I prepared a few years ago. It's of a portion of the town I live in. Notice the red dot. That red dot is a small rise overlooking the main highway through town. It's where the local BLM group staged themselves in order to protest while everything was happening. Note how close it is to the intersection of Highway 190 - now Business 190 - and Martin Luther King Drive. That intersection is a four-way intersection governed by traffic lights, with a Chevron station opposite MLK being the fourth intersection. It's a bit screwy, but it's how things are set up. When traffic is heavy, the line of cars waiting to go eastbound on 190 can actually back up as far as that red dot. One day, traffic was indeed backed up that far when some of the BLM protestors saw what they thought was one driver making an obscene gesture towards them. Those protestors got in their vehicles and proceeded to chase the driver down the road. When the driver pulled in somewhere, they boxed her in and started verbally confronting her. The minute this story broke, public support plummeted. These protestors had become a part of the landscape because they were just standing there peacefully and protesting, but in one single moment of anger these individuals destroyed whatever goodwill and general disinterest the town might have had. Everyone was now paying attention, but for all the wrong reasons. In time, the number of protestors dwindled until finally there was nobody still out protesting.

Here in the United States, it's become a bone of contention how most NATO member nations have not kept their charter agreement to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense. At least as far back as the 1990s, when it was revealed that the US was doing something like 50% of the air strikes in Bosnia, folks started asking if Europe was taking advantage of us militarily. You'll even hear some people try to argue that the "free" health care so many European nations have in place is somehow at America's expense because these nations have not been spending what they ought to. Thus, there are indeed folks who are cheering at the fact that the NATO members are now finally having to step up like they should have been in the past. For Canada, I've spoken with actual Canadians and a lot of them want Trudeau gone for various reasons. They don't want any sort of economic war between the two nations, but most of them have felt that the initial pain would be worth seeing Trudeau and his crew depart hence. Ukraine is a financial sinkhole, the result of Biden dithering on whether or not to provide the level of aid they needed when it would have been the most beneficial for them to receive it and so only sending in material at a time when it's the least effective and there's the least level of accountability for where the money and resources are actually going. This is on top of various controversies, allegations, and conspiracies regarding whether or not Biden's son Hunter was getting paid off by various business entities in the country and whether or not Biden himself took money from the deal and/or used his influence to force Ukraine to halt an investigation. Couple this with Zelensky actually cancelling the scheduled national elections because of the war, and a lot of folks here in the US don't want a single American boot on the ground until such time as either Zelensky resigns or we have a full accounting of what our money is actually doing over there. I think Trump's Gaza proposal was a bit of game theory, as if you'll recall within about 72 hours of his making his proposal Egypt emerged with one of theirs. Even back in 1987 famed businessman Lee Iacocca was arguing that the United States had unsustainable trade deficits and an unsustainable level of federal spending. Trump's actions with DOGE and encouraging US companies to return to domestic production appear to be him finally responding to those concerns nearly 40 years later, even if his efforts are alarmingly clumsy in this regards. China has been trying to take control of the Panama Canal through various proxies, and so Trump's efforts in that regards are actually him countering them. For Greenland, the United States has actually had military bases on the island for some time now, meaning a person could try to argue we're doing more to secure it than Denmark.

I've seen pizzas with so much grease on them you could lube a truck. That's basically what it comes down to, the ingredients used to make each pizza and how they're made. Unless you do it yourself or go to an actual authentic Italian place, you're going to get product that's been processed to oblivion and back, and that process is going to introduce things which aren't the best for your body.

IRL, I'm high-functioning autistic. Basically, autism means that the brain, nervous system, and potentially other parts of the body are wired differently. On one hand, individuals like myself who are high-functioning can, with support and patience, find a niche we love and figure out a way to monetize it into a stable job in which we excel as opportunity presents itself. On the other hand, life can be a nightmare even under the best of circumstances due to the horrendous number of medical conditions that frequently go hand-in-hand with autism spectrum disorder - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditions_comorbid_to_autism - and it's very easy for society as a whole to turn their backs on us because we're not "normal". Enough people here already know my story, so I'll sum up by saying that you never fully heal after being through the kinds of things I've been through, even if you're fully neurotypical. The best you can do is make peace with your past, make what precious few amends you can make, work to keep people from becoming the monster you became to survive, and hope that Heaven regards whatever penance you make as sincere while the nagging voice in the back of your head reminds you that it's probably never good enough just like you were never good enough.

I work for a family of local-level newspapers IRL. Back when Wal-Mart had hot & ready pizzas, every Friday morning I'd pick one up and it'd sit in the back of my car all day long while I snacked on it because I was so busy with my various duties & assignments I didn't have time to stop otherwise. I don't know what they did with those pizzas, but I could leave them in the back of my car, get home several hours later, leave it out on the counter overnight, and it would still be just as "fresh" as when I got it out of the hot box.

What sort of help are they specifically asking for? That's the first consideration.