NeuroTypical

And just today, she posted this in a group chat of us and a bunch of friends, explaining “he can attest to this“:

Holland: Dude, we're not just at conference, we ARE conference. Get off your phone. Hales: You're checking out that meme I sent, aren't you. Ballard: I'm checking out thirdhour to see what they're saying about us.

Excellent! Thank you for joining the growing numbers of people who are calling out moderator Brennan for her absolute flat out lie, presented as a fact check against the Republican VP nominee. Again: Shame on Brennan for using the mantle of the righteous fact checker to try to score a point against a VP candidate on a national stage. Now, with growing numbers of folks from all political persuasions looking into the details of the app, and thinking, possibly for the first time, about how US immigration should be run, perhaps the nation can have a decent discussion about the hows and whys and processes. It is so nice hearing someone from the left talking about swiftly vetting and deporting people who shouldn't be here. If you want to influence folks on my side of the political spectrum, lead with stuff like that. Just be careful you don't lose your progressive card to an angry mob of open border activists. (I'm only half joking here.) But since we both seem ok with the notion that asylum requests should occasionally be denied, I wonder if we might agree such a process might be best carried out before an illegal border crossing happens? I've never seen anyone win or lose a debate over the boons and problems of economic development in poorer nations, and the benefits and problems of a capitalist system that brings that development. It's nice to see where folks of your persuasion get your ideas. But I take your "the least we can do is welcome the victims of our greed", and raise you the letter from Patrick J. Lechleitner, Deputy Director of ICE: Tell you what - I'll make you a deal @Phoenix_person. You go to your various social circles of progressive community meeting folks, and speak out against over half a million illegal immigrants in our country with criminal histories. I'll go to my various social circles and urge all my right wing Christian buddies to have love and empathy for the plight of people who are willing to break immigration law to come to the US in hopes of a better life. Maybe, if your people and my people can budge an inch or two in their entrenched positions, we might finally be willing to take meaningful bipartisan action. Instead of just more of 60 years status quo using immigration as a club to beat each other and win votes. What do you say?

My wife says this a lot: "Ya know, when we got married, you said you'd die for me and you haven't yet..."

It's a defensive reaction, because Vance called out the moderators hard, on something they were mischaracterizing so hard it was just ludicrous. And he did it well. Walz: "That vilified a large number of people who were here legally in the community of Springfield. The Republican governor said, “It’s not true. Don’t do it.” There’s consequences for this. There’s consequences. We could come together. Senator Lankford did it." Vance: "The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s open border. It is a disgrace, Tim. And I actually think, I agree with you. I think you want to solve this problem, but I don’t think that Kamala Harris does." Moderator Brennan: "Thank you, Governor. And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status. Temporary protected status." Vance, demanding to be heard and talking over the moderators who were trying to move to another topic: "Margaret, the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check, and since you’re fact checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on. So there’s an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open-border wand. That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for 10 years." Brennan: "Thank you Senator..." Vance: "That is the facilitation of illegal immigration, Margaret, by our own leadership. And Kamala Harris opened up that pathway." Brennan: "We have so much to get to. Thank you, Senator, for describing the legal process." WALZ: "Those laws have been in the book since 1990." BRENNAN: "Thank you, gentlemen. We want to have—" VANCE: The CBP One app has not been on the books since 1990. It’s something that Kamala Harris created, Margaret. BRENNAN: Gentlemen, the audience can’t hear you because your mics are cut. We have so much we want to get to. Thank you for explaining the legal process. Norah? And folks want to just ignore that exchange with witty memes about Vance crying about being fact checked. Biased spinning nasty horrible moderators pretending to be fair, but taking sides with Walz and all but calling Vance a liar because the Haitians, who came illegally, filled out a form on an app and therefore are now "legal". Vance called 'em on it. And I'm calling every Vance meme sharer on it also. lol Brennan. "I'm a lawbreaker, but I filled out a form on an app, so now I'm following a legal process, and therefore anyone calling me illegal is wrong and bad!" lol lack of seriousness on the left about illegal immigration. Yeah, nothing to see here. Just look at the meme and move on.

It's possible that it's not an age thing, but a learning and life milestone thing. The more I learn, the less surprises me. Plus, both my wife and I have an awful lot of gallows/irreverent humor about a lot of things, and as the years go by, the less invested I am in keeping it to myself because gallows humor is often unproductive. Plus, as my kids are grown, I used to keep my "I'm raising my kids this way" zeal to myself, to not traumatize them. Now every day that goes by, my attitude of "I raised my kids that way so bite me" grows. But it's also possible that I'm just taking after my dad. People tell me that he came back from WWII looking and acting 20 years older than he was. Plus, his industry disappeared and he took early retirement at 55. I was raised hearing much he was looking forward to demanding his old perks and restaurant discounts and whatnot. I sort of internalized my admiration of my dad, and have been looking forward to being too old to care for a while.

I am getting older every year, and I find myself also getting more crotchety. I find I have to spend more energy to be civil and polite than I used to. There just so many people out there that could use a good talking to, or even a trip to the woodshed. This is me an embarrassingly large amount of the time:

Agreed, and I should have provided them with my original post. Last year and this, it's getting pretty hard to tell the difference between a good source and a bad/spun/context-missing/fake/ai-generated source. And the problem is only getting worse. The other day, I had a live youtube event in my feed where Elon Musk was running a new promotion for SpaceX. It showed him live, walking around on stage, speaking in his voice. The promotion was to make a new program go viral, and to incentivize viewers, they could fork over some cryptocurrency and Elon would return double the amount handed over. Just scan the link or whatever. Of course, it wasn't Elon, it was an AI video deepfake trying to get people to send crypto. It was a scam. But I watched Elon walk around the stage for a full 5 minutes before I was able to make that conclusion. It's scary out there. Know your trusted news sources. Verify links to ensure you're not being fooled by something pretending to be a trusted news source.

Which ones were "obviously photoshopped" @JohnsonJones? Here's the video source (not just picture, but video) for these two from an Australian news source, plus 3 other bits of creepy behaviors around various kids: https://youtu.be/hh0PBr6ZUN0?si=DkThrf1hcaSxHk2x&t=13 Here's it as part of a Miluakee Journal Sentinal video - 0:45 seconds in. It's unsourced, but again, is accompanied with plenty of other similar behaviors: https://www.jsonline.com/videos/news/politics/2019/04/02/analysis-joe-biden-have-adjust-his-behavior/3346684002/ This is Eva Longoria, and this pic was snapped in 2014 at the Campaign for National Democrats. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/joe-biden-eva-longoria-urge-nevada-democrats-to-vote-if-we-vote-we-win-if-we-dont-we-lose https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/joe-biden-and-eva-longoria-campaign-for-nevada-democrats The message: "Those of you who have ever thought harshly of men using an unequal power dynamic in their favor, I want to hear what you think about the seeming endless slew of public photographs of Biden doing it publicly. [...] When the lefties and progressives began shouting #MeToo, and lecturing on consent, and yelling constantly about men in position of power, and the impact on unequal power dynamics, I was actually overall happy to have things discussed in the public forum. Even if 90% of the yelling was pointed at Trump. Then Biden ran, and it all seemed to just dry up and go away. Kind of like how feminists got real quiet about politics when Bill Clinton was running." And I posted some, hardly all, only a few of the many, many, many images of Biden getting publicly handsy with women and girls, some who look pretty dang uncomfortable with his behavior. I get that it's an uncomfortable subject, but sometimes the best reaction is to acknowledge and internalize the truth. Rather than assume you know how to spot a photoshopped image and accuse me of posting some.

Honest, real, non-sarcastic facebook post by one of my liberal buddies: List of accomplishments that make you qualified: - In lots of government for a lot of years. - Not fired. I mean, it's true, by this definition of the word, she's vastly more qualified than Trump.

Sad news everybody! https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/science/voyager-2-plasma-nasa-experiment-power/index.html

It's all about building a "plausible reality" for a fake account. You look like a real human if you have friends, belong to groups, and interact with people. There are a lot of reasons folks want a ton of fake accounts that look real. Various kinds of theft from data theft to identity theft to scamming for money or products. Signal boosting to forward various agendas. I saw a decent study from the CIA documenting how Russia activated it's Twitter-bots to boost anti-science signals a decade ago. Iran or proxies are in the game, boosting anti-Israel signals. In recent years, ANTIFA got boosts from fake accounts. This year, anti-Israel sentiment in the US got massive boosts, especially college-protest related stuff. There are massive amounts of fake accounts on all sorts of social media. Just ask @pam how many new fake accounts she bans here every week. AI is absolutely in the game. In the last 24-ish months, we've had an astounding number of new accounts wanting to post on very old threads. Their posts are on-topic and accurate. They post once, and we never see them again. It leads me to believe they're fake AI accounts, and this place is like a testing ground for an algorithm to see if they can program something to find a thread and give a real-enough response to be mistaken for human. But yeah, I'm kind of proud for my "who is your favorite prophet" question. All the non-Christian scammers are saying Jesus. And the scammers who happen to be Muslim will say Muhammad.

Lol I finally got the new member questions correct for my ward's Facebook account:

Just a quick note @JohnsonJones that you may or may not find helpful. Pretty much everyone and their dog, when online, interpret ALL CAPS as yelling. I'm guessing you're just using all caps as a way to provide a little stress or emphasis to various points, a way of putting our verbal emphases into text. It's just that, well, I think pretty much all English speaking online cultures interpret all caps as yelling. And when we try to convey information or make points or persuade others, yelling is often counterproductive. Please accept this post as it is intended. I'm not criticizing or calling you out or anything. I love ya JJ, but when I read your posts I need to try hard to keep this image out of my head: (I mean, if that's the impression you are wishing to convey, then it's working just fine. )

I'm sort of uninvolved with this issue as I've had daughters only, and they are grown. But I must say that I've heard that exact complaint, pretty much word for word, voiced by saints for decades. People weren't happy when Scouting was the program, and people aren't happy now. My own personal experience in scouting was poor. Some camping trips, sporadic periods of weekly activities, long periods of no activity. Intense bursts of activity right before some deadline like earning badges or an upcoming Jamboree. Zero program continuity as scoutmasters came and went. One superstar scoutmaster who made a positive impact on my life, 2-3 folks who kept things active, entire years of nothing happening. Zero incidents or reports of abuse. No interactions with any evil adults. So that's nice. Some awkward camping experiences with the boy who these days go by she/her pronouns and is married to a spouse born female but goes by the name George. A bit of confusion introduced in my youth, but nothing traumatic.