NeuroTypical

I wonder if that's what is running through Pres Biden's brain.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/microsoft-outage-crowdstrike-global-airlines-windows-fix-rcna162685 Airports, banks, retail, law enforcement, every major business sector on the planet is impacted in some way. My work already has it fixed. Heh. I'd like to remind everyone that my avatar was created by Microsoft CoPilot when I asked it to generate a comic that only an AI would find funny.

At this point, I don’t think it matters who the Democrats run. I think all of the serious ones already know that. The money is drying up. They’ll go with Plan B which involves strategy to deal with a pretty red country.

This one?

This is me, taking notes, so I'll know how to act when we start this process for the Colorado Springs temple. - Be well organized. - Pack the council meetings, even if I live 10-20 miles away from the eventual location that gets picked. - Prepare to be characterized as someone without "a stake in the development". I can do those things.

Crooks made the shot with an unmagified red dot? Yeesh. If he shot like me, that means he might not even have been going for a head shot in the first place, but aiming for center mass. I was thinking the cop poking his head up and interrupting Crooks was the crucial thing that saved Trump's life.

Congressional hearings can be stressful, and your questioner really is trying to sweat a lie or a contradiction out of you. That said, when you're not worried about proper phrasing or choosing your words carefully, and when your questioner has maybe an overinflated notion of how important their questions are, you sound like Ben:

Aw, man! I can't say whether I liked or disliked Boris Johnson, but I'm a fan of watching feisty GB politics, and Boris was certainly feisty. I remember when COVID hit, dude was all full of bluster and leadership and demanded to visit the sick people and shake hands and all. He emerged from spending 20 minutes with the sick people, and gave a big fiery press conference with his health secretary about how GB would come through it strong. Health Secretary looked spooked and kept talking about how handwashing was important. Boris immediately afterwards came down with serious COVID and nearly died - one of the first of the world's leaders, at least the first we all paid attention to.

Imma post someone's GoFundMe - feel free to ignore if it ain't your thing. https://www.gofundme.com/f/get-teleia-to-texas-for-junior-olympics-2024 This is to support my buddy and his daughter. Dude is a cop in Colorado Springs, trying to support his wife and 3 kids on a cop's salary. His daughter won a spot in the 2024 Junior Olympics high jump, and the thing is held in Texas this year. I can personally vouch for his good character and that all donations will go to support getting his kiddo to Texas for this thing. Mr. Russ has been a friend of the family for 15 years. He taught my daughters gymnastics, then he taught the whole family Brazillian JiuJitsu. Then he became a cop. Dude has a real "lifted myself out of the streets through God's help" story.

Hey, if Musk is going to launch his car into space just because he can, then obviously he should apply the same thinking here.

I'm surprised to dig up this old favorite clip from Star Trek Deep Space 9, and reinterpret it for current events. Folks who are ticked off at left-of-center hypocrisy, who see them doing sharp about faces from previously incendiary rhetoric, and are now claiming everyone needs to tone it down, take a look at this video where Quark the Ferrengi spreads the gospel of Jesus Christ by extolling the virtues of forgiveness and peace. While also making a convincing case that the Vulcan is being illogical. I think we've won the election. I think a big red wave is coming. I think we can probably afford a little introspective thought about how to be a good winner and a good disciple.

Well, just to be clear, we're talking about a tiny-but-loud insignificant percentage of Trump's overall support. And just because we're talking about them, doesn't mean we're ignorant of the larger-but-loud and less-insignificant percentage of the left-leaning folks. I'm not gonna put up a similar montage, mainly because you have to search a lot harder for those sorts of images that don't include indecency, profanity, or violence.

Now that's just not true at all. The crazy zealot Trump cult is full of people who believe he's chosen by God, but nobody believes he's actually God. Maybe a fine point for an atheist, but it's a big point for a Christian.

I'm thinking about how police use of dashcams and bodycams have exploded in popularity and funding over the last decade. AFAICT, our law enforcement folks love bodycams, because it proves that certain events happened, and usually ends up giving strong evidence in favor of the cop's narrative. They're like "yes, please put us under this microscope - I'd love you all to be able to see what I have to see". I've also watched many oversight/scrutiny policies spread and become commonplace. Mandatory investigation after a use of deadly force. Mandatory leave when a cop does certain things while the investigation takes place. The "Internal Affairs Department" seems to have grown in transparency, power, and independence. I know in my county, if something happens bad enough, it's an automatic process to have a different force take control. Meaning like, if a city cop is accused of a felony, the investigation will be run by county investigators, not city. And vice-versa. I'm not sure that cops get less oversight/scrutiny than our military at all. Maybe public opinion sways a certain way, but in actual practice?

The church isn't being hyperbolic when it pushes the family as the bedrock of society and our best hope to solve all the world's ills. Wanna fix public schools? Do your member missionary work. It's not a new roadmap.

Heh. Yeah, it's been a while and I lost the link, but some archaeological magazine had an interesting article. "World's oldest Meeting Minutes discovered in ancient Greece". (I think it was Greece, but it could have been Rome, or even somewhere in Mesopotamia. But I remember the year was BCE, not AD/CE.) Guess what the world's oldest meeting minutes were about! They were notes taken at a meeting where parents were meeting with the community educators. The issues discussed were revolving around quality of education. The parents were unhappy that the kids weren't learning enough, and also were being taught wrong things, and they blamed the educators. The educators were unhappy that they didn't have the resources and funding necessary to do a better job, and were blaming the parents for not supporting increased funding. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? And, if you were homeschooled, you would have learned from the Little House on the Prairie books that public schools came into play on a local community-by-community level as folks banded together to make sure the kids "learned their letters" in ways that would keep them out of the way so everyone 13 and older could focus on getting the crops planted and then harvested. Yeah, humans have been trying to find the right balance between individual rights and public duty for a long time, and it's been fought out in school policy ever since there have been humans. Anyway, "I looked at the numbers" 20 years ago, when wife and I began researching homeschooling. In the 2000's, the nation's cultural landscape was not particularly friendly to homeschooling. It's very much a state-by-state thing as to how possible or legal it is in the first place. The studies looked at kids who went to public school, private school, or were homeschooled. The results amazed me (and plenty of other people), because pretty much every single study that came out, pointed to the utter superiority of homeschooled kids over everyone else. And we're not just talking standardized test scores, we're also talking stuff like college admittance, graduation rates, and rates of getting in trouble with the law. And (here's a surprise for many), also every time someone studied socialization or extracurricular activities, homeschoolers had a small advantage over public and private. Most utterly astounding, was a large 10 year study comparing these results for people of different race, family income, and other socioeconomic factors. Holy crap did it blow me away- Standardized test scores for black, single-mother, low income, inner city youth. Public school scores was a single digit (out of 100). Private school score was a double digit, somewhere around 50%. Homeschooled kids in that situation were in the 80's. Probably a low sample size, but yes indeed, the poor black single moms that figured out a way to homeschool had kids perform as well as upper-middle-class white kids with two parents. @estradling75 is correct. Kids do better when they have parents who are invested in their kids, no matter how the kids are schooled. And when they're so invested that they homeschool, odds are (again depending on state and curriculum and legal requirements) that the kids will do better. There's a notion out there that homeschooled kids fall through the cracks and are off being neglected and abused and sold into sex slavery and turned into drug dealers and all that. In reality, you can always find kids falling through cracks - especially - at much higher rates - in many public schools.

Per the WSJ, Crooks was quiet, a loner, who barely used his social media accounts, left no manifesto, and nobody can remember him saying much about politics. Nobody has reported anything about any criminal record. He was never in the military. Got his gun from his dad, who obtained it legally. Quiet and awkward, didn't really fit in, in a small town where you either fit in or you don't. The best anyone can seem to find, is his shirt, his party affiliation, and the $15 he gave to Chicago's Progressive Turnout project on Biden's inauguration day. And you can't really blame anyone or any thing for that. This is really going to stink if we never determine a motive, because it'll stay fodder for conspiracy nuts for decades. Whoever wins the election, in the minds of many, will have won because "they" orchestrated the failed assassination attempt. Half the country will figure he was a secret maga warrior, the other half will figure he was radicalized by all the anti-trump talk. And nobody will be able to tell for sure, because a t-shirt and teenage donation count for squat. I'm really not looking forward to another Stephen Paddock, where we just are forced to shrug and say "I guess we'll never know", because if we can't find any red flags or advanced warning signs, we won't know how to spot the next one like him.

Vort came out of his chair to cheer when this woman brought two gold medals home to New Zealand in 2019.

Yeah, if dude being a registered republican means something, so does this: On President Biden’s inauguration day, Crooks gave $15 to the Chicago-based Progressive Turnout Project, a Democratic-aligned political-action committee that rallies voters, according to Federal Election Commission records.

It's amazing how quickly things move. I've already heard from the gun ban people talking about now Trump knows what it's like to be a child in school during a shooting. I've already seen T-shirt designs for sale with what'll be the iconic defiant fist with the flag overhead.

Well, if we're gonna start blaming the other side, we might as well fall on each other like a pack of Ferrengi. The point to fight about is "who's worse". My side opens with: - 2017 attack on Steve Scalise and the congressional republicans: Shooter was a leftie. - Dude arrested in 2022 outside of Justice Kavanaugh's home, with his black tactical chest rig, tactical knife, Glock, two magazines and ammunition, pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer, screwdriver, nail punch, crow bar, pistol light, duct tape: Mad about the overturn of Roe v. Wade. - This compilation of Democratic leaders urging violence. Go ahead and watch them all, it ends with Kamala Harris (before she was Veep) joking about murdering Trump, Pence, or Jeff Sessions in an elevator. Oh yeah - and also Biden's comments at the start of this week (July 8th): "I have one job, and that's to beat Donald Trump. I'm absolutely certain I'm the best person to be able to do that. So, we're done talking about the debate, it's time to put Trump in a bullseye."

I appreciate President Biden's comments:

Twitter is about 10% ultra-fast breaking news, 50% irrelevant, and 40% flat out fake news wrong. In the coming days, always remember folks, make sure you're hearing proven news from a trusted source. It's not a time to trust any of the news claims, but it's a time to automatically mistrust anything sensational without a very good source.