NeuroTypical

Yep. Our meetinghouses handle stuff like that pretty well, what with 1, 2, or even 3 overflows into the basketball courts available. Plus sound piped in to the RS rooms, foyers, and maybe other rooms as needed. Give us notice and we can probably find the old equipment that broadcasts across an AM band so you can hear it in your car.

A lot of tax avoidance isn't that complicated. It might be extra work, but it's not complicated. Paying as little tax as legally possible is a worthy endeavor, and I recommend everyone spend the energy to reduce their tax burden to the absolute minimum. Folks can even turn it negative and the govt will pay you taxes, but I'm not a fan of welfare in the form of refundable credits.

Here's a question I've never asked: What's a "fullness" and why should I care?

Yeah, I never understood the popular claim that as you moved right, you went republican/conservative, then far-right/alt-right, then full on nazi. They were pushing the notion that if I just ramped my conservatism up 200%, I'd be a fascist. It's just not true. If I were to strain so hard at conservatism that I burst a blood vessel, I'd end up a libertarian. The BLM riots is where we had masked violent people shutting down/attacking other viewpoints. America's version of the brownshirts wore blac block not brownshirts, and it was antifa not proud boys/boogaloos. They even tried their hand at forcing salutes, offering people violence if they didn't show their BLM support. I mean yes, Trump should have known better on Jan7. It was no Reichstag fire, but it certainly looked like one. Dude dang well better have learned his lesson. Sure would have been nice for the country if Twitter hadn't banned his concession speech. Instead, we had to wait 3 years for Musk to buy Twitter and unhide it.

I just read the transcript. Here are my hasty notes: Stuff she committed to doing: Child tax credit $6k in 1st year $25k tax credit for 1st time house buyers Q: Energy - you were going to ban fracking, now you're for it? A: I flipped in 2020. It's old news. I increased leases for fracking. Q: Immigration - Record #s of illegal crossings. WTH? A: I did good root causes work, and that helped businesses and immigrants reduced. We had a bill and Trump killed it. It would have put 1500 more agents on the border. I'll do that bill again. Q: In 2019 you said the border should be decriminalized. Still for it? A: Laws need to be followed and enforced and there should be consequences. I'm against TCOs. She'll put a republican in her cabinet. "I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion." Q: Israel? A: Unwavering in my commitment to Israel's defense and ability to defend itself. Remember O7. Remember hostages still there. Americans too. Ceasefire. "Get a deal done". 2 state solution. Q: Walz, you said you carried weapons in war. A: "my wife the English teacher told me my grammar’s not always correct." Q: How did Biden go? A: He called me during family dinner, and it was apparent he was going to support me. That was pretty much it. Positives: I'm happy to see the strong words on supporting Israel. It's nice to hear "diversity of opinion". It's nice to have a Dem pres candidate interview and not spend any time looking past the neurodegeneration and guessing at what he meant to say. Negatives: Meh. Standard friendly interview with a standard friendly politician and a standard friendly interviewer. She only committed to doing 2 things. Zero specifics on how she's going to lower the costs of things. Devil's always in those details. IMO, Trump simply has better answers.

One thing Trump is doing, is pretty much single-handedly dragging the Republican party into the 21st century by changing the “no abortions never ever ever ever ever“ mantra. He’s leading the charge to make it socially acceptable to be a right winger and talk openly about how exceptions for life of the mother and rape might not mean you’re going to burn in hell. You should vote for him, Phoenix. He will do more good for the world than Kamala will.

Oh wow. Is this a semi-permanent link? I'm tempted to go buy another external hard drive to go download all of it. Pretty dang amazing library collection you've got there.

I think you'll find that if you ask any three Americans, you'll get four different opinions. Here's mine: - Biden demonstrated he was in serious cognitive decline during the Biden/Trump debate, and the calls for him to get out of the race grew and spread and eventually won. The Dem's best pick to run is Veep Kamala Harris. She's gone like 35+ days without giving a single interview. I hear they finally scheduled one, pre-recorded, with the always-left-leaning CNN. She won't be alone, she'll be with her Veep pick. It's like they're afraid to let her just be interviewed and show it live. - Yes, Trump survived an assassination attempt, with the bullet coming within a few centimeters of making his head explode. He's energized much of his base with his immediate show of strength. We don't know how to react to such things, as the last time this happened was with Reagan in the 1980's. The shooter is something of a question mark, but with more left/democrat-leaning stuff on his social media. It's hard to figure out why he did it. No manifesto, not much more history of yelling about politics than a lot of normal people. - Trump was convicted of multiple felonies, brought by a New York district attorney who got elected by promising to find something, anything upon which he could charge Trump. An awful lot more legal and criminal cases are all reaching nexus, as folks have carefully timed the charges and suits to coincide with the presidential campaign. We're seeing the dawning of a new word: "Lawfare". Trump ran on draining the swamp, the swamp is certainly fighting back hard. Another one got filed a day or two ago, I'm not seeing it make much news, I think we're all on news overload. - Harris is facing an uphill battle. Millions of illegal immigrants entered the US on her watch. Democrat run sanctuary cities like Denver having problems, like the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang setting up shop in a Denver suburb. And Boston is using so many resources to bus illegal children to school, that American children go without bussing. She once called Trump's border wall "un-American", now she's showing some of his wall in some of her campaign ads, promising to get tough on immigration. The left got hysterical when Trump's immigration policies had 545 illegal immigrant children slip through the cracks. We now learn in her 4 years, 290,000 illegal immigrant children have slipped through the cracks. Her administration is also flipping from years of no-fracking to yes-fracking, hoping to win some swing states that drill a lot. - The US culture is recovering from several years of being coerced into believing men can be women and vice versa. We were told "if you don't affirm your child's gender identity they'll kill themselves. You can either have an alive son or a dead daughter". The horrible consequences are slowly dawning on us as sex offender prisoners identifying as female get put into female prisons and assault female prisoners. Every day there's a new story of a young person trying to detransition back to their biological sex, and discovering they're now lifelong medical patients who may be permanently infertile. Every day a new story about minors put on puberty blockers, sometimes without parent's knowledge. Sometimes with only a 1 hour doctor's consultation. Also, more and more of us are dumping the marxist-inspired DEI nonsense. - Related to DEI and culture is the disturbingly large amount of antisemitism on college campuses. The student protests are bad enough, but there's also several disturbing instances of antisemitism in the school leadership. Colleges and universities are one thing, but it's also cropping up in public grade schools. Anyway, I blame the left for all the bad, and I hope to see a resurgence of principled constitutional conservatives, usually homed somewhere on the right. I'm voting Trump.

It's about dang time the right got cool. We've been behind ever since the 1992 Clinton inauguration:

It’s an interesting problem. He bashed Biden for being old. And now Trump is probably 20 years older than Harris. Of course it won’t matter to MAGA-but the rest of us see the irony. Anyone worried about Trump being too old only needs to watch the footage of him getting shot and the immediate aftermath. I hope to be that strong and present and able to respond to such things when I'm his age.

Well, yes, but: It's a tool that can summarize and present all the thinking that humans have done. So it doesn't think itself, but it certainly conveys what humans have thought.

Yep. True diversity is the diversity of ideas. Progressive notions of diversity focuses primarily on race/gender, but pushes marxist class warfare and plain old hatred of the rich.

I saw an old video where Walz was being interviewed and claimed he carried a gun in a war zone. I also saw a pretty old video where he apologized and said he should have chosen his words more carefully. I'm not in the military so I don't care, but I understand some military folks are incredibly touchy about such things. Fun thing: My WWII vet father disliked and suspected Henry Kissinger of such things. An old newspaper clipping about my dad says this: My dad told me when he was discharged after his service, he was given a list of everyone in the 84th infantry division who had been honorably discharged. And Kissinger's name was not on it. Meaning, if Kissinger was actually in the 84th, he had been discharged but not honorably. I grew up hearing my dad claim that the only way that could happen is if you got a dishonorable discharge, or a section 8. Dishonorable would have been known by everyone, so according to my dad, Kissinger "pretended to be crazy to get his section 8 discharge". I have no way of knowing if any of that's true. I don't think my dad ever verified anything. He was a very uncomplicated man who liked everyone unless he had reason not to, and then it was for life. As me what my dad thought about Jane Fonda!

I'm reminded that on O6, tens of thousands of Palestinians did their usual daily commute into Israel for their jobs. I read an article about the SodaStream company, based in Israel, and like a ~30% Palestinian workforce. Then O7 happened, and the Israeli workers showed up and started mourning their friends and co-workers who were now going to have a very bad time because of the actions of their government.

Don't leave us hanging, is the movie any good?

Coherent messaging:

Them: "When is Christmas?" Me:

Elevendy Billion is my big number. Whitehouse briefing guy: "Mr President, there was a natural disaster in south America, and 70 Brazilians have died." Biden [turns white and needs to sit down at the news]: "That's horrible. (whispers to aide) How many is a brazillion again?" Harris: "I just released a statement about how I'm a Brazilian now." BaDoomBOOM! (If anyone's ticked off at the joke, you should know it was ripped off from a joke originally told about Dubya.)

Oh, the sociopaths all tend to self-destruct eventually. Trump has been Trump since the '70's at least. If anything, he's mellowed out in recent decades. Whatever he is, writing him off as a sociopath is also selling him short. Bombastic narcissist. I think that's the right way to think of him.

Trump is rarely out of control. Bombastic narcissists craft careful personas and engage in very specifically chosen behavior. Dude learned how to turn getting fake-hit by a chair into ratings and cash 30 years ago. Don't sell him short by thinking the stuff we see from him is somehow out of his control. Yeah, maybe he blathers and then wishes he had blathered something different, because it didn't get him the reaction he was hoping for. But more often than not, he's weighing what he'll get from the folks who like his blather, against what he might lose from the folks who don't.

Almost as bad as homeschoolers!

Totally agree with the limits to government control, even in nations that call themselves communist/marxist/leninist. I had a buddy who was a high school exchange student with the USSR in the late '80's. (Not exactly a full time exchange student, his trip was for around a month I think.) He came back with a fun story about the black market opening up right outside his hotel. The group of students had a government representative with them for the first day or two, but he left, and the black market showed up the next day. My buddy shopped with USD, and got quite a huge pile of souvenirs. His favorites were the fake military insignia. He also got bootleg records of Paul McCartney's Back in the USSR and gave me one when he got back. I've still got it in a box somewhere in the basement. The black market lasted 48 hours, then he watched from the hotel room as it got raided by the KGB and everyone scattered, and a bunch of people on the street got arrested. He told me nobody seemed to even blink at the raid or arrests, like it was just a normal businessday in Moscow. The real version: The black market USSR version:

One might worry about the growing economic power of China in the last 10-15 years, as something that might fuel a change in the situation Traveler describes. I don't know enough about it to opine, but I hear all sorts of claims that it's not as robust as China claims. How much of it is real free-market reforms, and how much of it is communist make-believe? I'd guess if you answer that question, you'd answer Traveler's question.

Good post Phoenix. I'd just add: You need two to play chess. The more I look at the history of displaced populations and see what happens to them, the more I realize the plight of the Palestinians stopped being Israel's fault 60 years ago. It's a combination of the neighbors, and the Palestinians themselves. Have you done any reading on the history of neighboring countries allowing Palestinian immigration, and the results? There's a good reason why the border between Gaza and Egypt looks like this. I mean, it's hard to blame the people stuck as pawns for so long, but the old saying has been true for the 3 decades I've been paying attention: The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Makes me sad. During COVID, I was desperate for good global news, and was thrilled when the news kept breaking that nation after nation was granting recognition to the state of Israel. In the week prior to O7, there was a tiny little news snippet about the first Israeli government official to ever land in Saudi Arabia - some agricultural cooperation or some such. Such things are how peace happens. But nope, too many powers don't want Israel to live peacefully with it's neighbors.

Oh yeah. That's not a "hez ded" gator, that's a "Iz lyin in wait gonna sneak and pounce" gator.