NeuroTypical

I'm ok with (more than ok with, I'm enthusiastically in favor of) people reading the history of the brownshirts and leveling comparisons against whomever they wish. When it fits, it's an indication something needs to change. This doesn't fit: lol "secretive": https://www.ice.gov/outreach-programs/citizens-academy This article is a poorly reasoned hit piece, full of inflammatory language, written by people who are not in favor of the law when it comes to laws being enforced against folks they know. Imagine being mad that a government agency is so transparent, they actually put time/effort/budget into teaching whoever wants to learn all about what they do. Imagine refusing to actually attend a class, and then writing a hit piece against it. You wanna know how to turn @Phoenix_person into a fan of ICE? Have him do a ride-along with ICE agents. Similar to this phenomenon: In related news, I've been something of an afficionado of my local law enforcement citizens academies. I've attended 3 - local small town, Colorado Springs, and my county's academies. Pretty interesting things. I found all three of them to be genuine attempts at outreach to the communities served by these agencies. All three were welcoming and receptive of criticisms/complaints/issues/suggestions. I volunteered for a taser demonstration at one, because I honestly didn't know what I thought about police using tasers. I am a fan after having one used on me. I should say, I've attended 4 - but the one put on by my local government was SO BORING I stopped going after the 2nd session. Sitting through a budget appropriations meeting is boring enough. But sitting through a class about how they do budget appropriations? It was like torture. So to answer your question, no, @Phoenix_person, not like that. Drawing analogies between ICE citizens academies and the hitler youth or the brownshirts is sort of the height of nonserious accusation that folks have come to expect from the hysterical manipulative left. If 2025 is supposed to be a rebuilding year, I think figuring out how to be better at making ludicrous analogies isn't going to get you the results you're hoping for.

Recent news stories have offered a pretty clear reminder. https://www.newsweek.com/ice-agents-battle-mom-baby-chaotic-video-worcester-2070027 Oy. Such a tragically, emotion-based, nonserious take, FP. I mean, yes, my Bragg/Pink Floyd comparison was mostly nonserious as well, so if you intended your post to be a reflection of mine, then I can understand and appreciate that. Up until your comparisons about the brownshirts. In one situation, ICE agents (or any law enforcement body, for that matter), scuffling with people intent on hampering the execution of lawful actions. In the other, an informal group of party bodyguard agitators who beat up dissenters at party rallies and beat up shopkeepers and invade/disrupt/bring violence to opposing parties events, eventually form the paramilitary wing of the notzie party under control of Oberster SA-Führer Hitler. No really - this should span political sides and ideologies. We should remember who the brownshirts were, their tactics, their impacts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung

Yeah, I grew up with both the album and the movie. The wiki entry doesn't do it justice. This one does a little better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Flesh%3F/In_the_Flesh My WWII vet dad (and a lot of his generation) spent quite a bit of time trying to educate us kids about how fascism took hold in Germany and how it could happen again. Teenage me in the early '80's marveled at how Pink Floyd was basically telling the same story to the pot smoking hippies, that my dad and his generation were telling to their children. The movie did an okay (not great, but okay) job of showing how an angry charismatic leader can capitalize on the shared trauma and problems of a postwar society, and rise to power by riling up the youth against imagined enemies in their midst. Anyway, David Hogg surely is doing his best "angry charismatic leader trying to capitalize on the shared trauma and problems" of gun violence in America. And he certainly looks similar to dictator Geldof. If the DNC is kicking him out, I'm ok with that. Everyone needs to remember who the brownshirts were, their tactics, their impacts.

The Colorado Dept of Public Health & Environment just paid me ten bucks to take a survey on health matters. One of the questions: I'm thinking they should have asked what I do during my day. I could have told them I argue religion and politics online, wading through some cesspools of bad human behavior. I dunno though. Maybe I should be paid reparations or something?

In other news, 1979 saw the release of the movie Pink Floyd's The Wall, a musical warning about how a traumatized person could accidentally trigger the rise of fascism in Great Britain. Apparently, the procedural error is that Hogg is a male. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/us/politics/david-hogg-dnc-democrats.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/12/hogg-dnc-leadership-election-vote/ (Both are behind a paywall for me, but according to Wikipdeia, his election was a "violation of DNC rules requiring gender diversity for party officers".

Watching T at the Saudi Investment forum is interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVCvibkzbfk He's introduced and stands there while they play Lee Greenwood's God Bless the USA. Representative quote: "I believe it is God's job to sit in judgment, my job to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace. I will never hesitate to wield American power if it is necessary to defend the United States, or to help defend our allies. [gestures at the Saudi prince] And there will be no mercy for any foe who tries to do us or them harm. He badmouths the Iranians and Houthis, begs the Syrians to get their affairs in order and stop letting evil murderous dictators run their beautiful country, unapologetically claims the US is the greatest nation on earth, talks about all the money we'll make together, and then they play the Village People's YMCA. I've never seen anything like it. The casual off-the-cuff way he gave his speech to Arab leaders, just like what we've come to expect in his executive order signing press conferences.

The event even has a Wiki page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_gulls

Huh? You talking about the first time Rome was sacked?

Dr. Miklebergenstein, bone bender?

Well, it's easy to see why it's not getting much US coverage. Consider: Trump's trade war with China is intended to make China blink once millions of Chinese start losing their jobs and the Chinese economy starts suffering. Now there are protests, maybe even some rioting. The left media: We can't really talk about unrest in China, it would mean admitting Trump's having an impact in China, and they're feeling the pressure. Our voters align with street protesters, and they might start wanting China to cave. The right media: We can't really talk about unrest in China, it would mean admitting China might be more willing to suppress it's own population and maybe even kill a bunch of its own citizens, than lose face to Trump. It would look like Trump has blood on his hands.

Dude. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=china+protests&ia=web https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/protests-erupt-in-china-after-furious-workers-demand-back-pay-as-trump-s-tariffs-on-imports-jolt-economy/ar-AA1EfKFi https://www.rfa.org/english/china/2025/04/29/china-us-tariff-protests-workers-wages/ https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/global-trends/china-sees-surge-in-worker-protests-over-unpaid-wages-factory-closures-and-us-tariffs/articleshow/120796368.cms https://nypost.com/2025/05/06/opinion/chinas-enraged-workers-are-fed-up-with-eating-bitterness/

Gen Alpha LDS snarky teens were going wild with the AI studio Ghibli generator. I had my pick: By the way, that AI generator was pretty cool. I turned some of our favorite family pictures into Ghibli art:

This is a halfway decent look into the similarities and differences. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/flu-vs-covid19.html It's hardly perfect and gets some things wrong, but no, the lab-engineered covid wasn't/isn't "just another flu". There's no such thing as long-haul flu, flu doesn't give you blood clots or MIS, for example. The humans will probably be arguing for the next decade, not just about the impacts and how many people have died of covid, but the efficacy and tradeoffs of all the measures govts took in response. I think there's growing consensus that closing the schools was a bad idea that will have negative ripple effects for the next decade or two as our children grow. There will never be a consensus about the government writing stimulus checks after sending us all into quarantine and the link to 14% inflation, because there never is a consensus about economics. And most everybody has already forgotten about the various horror stories about nonvaxxed getting fired, people arrested for walking on an empty beach, criminalizing religious gatherings while protecting riots, etc. 2020 and 2021 were such crapfest years.

No there aren't. Those questions have been pretty soundly answered for a lot of years now. Including most recently, the 2024 house report which I'll link here (again, for like the third time in this thread): https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2024.12.04-SSCP-FINAL-REPORT-ANS.pdf And the indictment doesn't just fall on China, but also the WHO.

It can be difficult to raise your arm and sustain error-prone folks, especially when they do something that ticks us off. It helps me to remember that putting actual sustaining into action, can sometimes involve doing what I can to help someone be less error-prone or tickey-offey. Sometimes there's a way I can help with that, sometimes not.

Yeah, Trump ended our involvement/funding of the WHO in his first term, and took us back out again in like week 1 of his second term. And that's a good thing. I'm impressed with the list of things that gained bipartisan consensus. It would have been nice to get the Dems to see reason on many of the other things in that House report, but this is better than nothing: 1) The possibility that COVID-19 emerged because of a laboratory or research related accident is not a conspiracy theory. 2) EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. and Dr. Peter Daszak should never again receive U.S. taxpayer dollars. 3) Scientific messaging must be clear and concise, backed by evidentiary support, and come from trusted messengers, such as front-line doctors treating patients. 4) Public health officials must work to regain American's trust; Americans want to be educated, not indoctrinated. 5) Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo participated in medical malpractice and publicly covered up the total number of nursing home fatalities in New York.

This would seem to be the most likely explanation: Other possible explanations, like global conspiracies involving hundreds or thousands of people colluding to hide the truth, would seem to be less likely.

Ok. How do you explain 5.3 billion shots going into ~5 billion different arms across the whole planet, and your bolded observation (which does indeed sound like one could draw a conclusion about things) doesn't seem to have happened anywhere else across the entire human race? I mean, I used to regularly go to the covid news links for my county, several states, my country and others, and global data. Probably at least half of them had some sort of graph or chart comparing outcomes for vaccinated folks vs unvaccinated folks. And while the shot indeed was not as effective as hoped/claimed, the same story showed up over and over in the data. You put 1000 vaxxed folks in a room, and 1000 unvaxxed foks in another room and everyone gets covid. Open the doors and count the dead and hurt, and the unvaxxed folks had more dead, and more hurt. How come?

So just to make sure I understand. You claim people have realized the Covid vaccines were "far less safe than we were assured". Your source for this claim is the linked apnews article. Is that correct? Because if it is, you're not really making your case. The article is about a cautionary pausing from some countries based on some things that could be issues, maybe for children. There's a difference between pausing for some people based on caution, and "far less safe". I mean, yes, the administration and Faucci were messaging "100% and 100% effective" like the liar-liar-pants-on-fire they were. The massive push to get children vaccinated flew in the face of the data that kids were the least likely to get it or have complications. So many things were done wrong, some of it had to be intentional. But your claim was "covid vaccines were far less safe than we were assured", and that's simply not true. Not by a long shot. Your AP news article doesn't make the case, and although I've looked for years, no credible source does either.

So again, 5.6 billion doses went into ~5 billion humans. If the world suddenly saw an extra quarter million myocarditis cases, as that unsourced factoid claims, do you not think various national and world health organizations would have written a paper on it? I mean, they can't all be sharing the agenda to keep you in the dark, can they?

Well, to be honest, I still haven't realized any of that jargle, even after looking seriously for something to substantiate it for years. I mean, the vaccines were far less effective than we hoped (and the government pushed). And it's now becoming more accepted that 'vaccine' isn't an accurate description of it - it's better thought of as a 'therapeutic'. But far less safe? What's your data for that? The thing has gone into literally billions of arms. Every nation on earth has a health service or ministry or center of some sort - you'd think it would be easy to find. The negative impacts are indeed 'told', but the last I checked, it was a similar rate to any other sort of related therapeutic. I mean, you can't find it in the December '24 House report, full of Republicans more than willing to pin dirt like that to Biden. It claimed "The COVID-19 Vaccine, While Largely Safe and Effective, Had Adverse Events That Must be Throughoughly Investigated" It's chart, when compared with the billions of doses given, is pretty weak sauce: With 5.6 billion doses given worldwide, 10,000 deaths means the vaccine is safer than driving a car. You've got a better chance of being hit by lightning, twice, than having a serious negative covid vax event. Especially considering that any lying agenda driven yayhoo was able to submit an entry to VAERS on the topic.

The "disorder" part of ADD or ADHD may be a disorder, or may just be a way of existing. It seems like there are a bazillion of us with ADD/ADHD who are out just living our best lives the best we can, just like everyone else, but with some different coping mechanisms and learned habits and methods to make life work. The diagnoses themselves are probably waaaay over diagnosed with our youth, especially boys. "Sit still and pay attention" is a nice skill for a boy to develop, but it's often not the best way to learn.

There are mentally ill people, and there are scammers. There are lazy people, and there are low-iq people without the brain power to understand. There are entitled people and folks with PTSD who are struggling with being abused by people they should have been able to trust. Here's the thing - we often can't tell who is who by just looking at them or even working with them. The line from that hymn nailed it: Who am I to judge another when I walk imperfectly? In the quiet heart is hidden sorrow that the eye can’t see. Scripture is pretty clear on things too: So we're left with a good reasonable basis for not judging, a scriptural commandment to not judge, and a very reasonable question about what help looks like and what it doesn't look like. - Giving someone help who could do it themselves isn't help, it's enabling their laziness. That's not charity, that's not love, that's not respecting someone's agency, that's being a sucker. - Giving someone help who can't do it themselves is help, is charity, and we're commanded to do it, and if we don't and get all judgey about it we're going to hell. It can be impossible to tell which sort of person we're dealing with. So we take our best guess, do our best, and try to live with the consequences. I'm pretty sure that while @Phoenix_person and his folks' hearts are in the right place, subsidizing single motherhood with taxpayer dollars is the most harmful thing white folk have done to the black community since slavery. Paying people to keep fathers out of the home is evil, and has ruined lives and increased all the bad things these programs seek to prevent. That said, each of us will personally be judged by how we've treated the lost and the least of us, and if we screw it up it'll have eternal consequences. So do your best and make up your mind and pray for guidance to do the right thing.

Yay! Arguing economics! I bet if we try hard, the two of us can come up with at least 3 opinions! I'm new to opining about such things, and trying hard to cast a wide net across folks who seem to be bright about such things. It seems to me that the US has great leverage with China, but China may endure all sorts of hardships in order to save face. Trump is supposedly the dealmaker, the next few months we might see deals being made. I don't know. True, but even as we speak, all the companies importing things into the US are looking at what they import from China, and finding ways to import from other places, or even move manufacturing into the US. Probably my biggest worry about Trump, is how he has acted against the court in that one case. I've always been big on presidents acting presidential - it's been a gripe I've had about a lot of presidents. And POTUS is supposed to be big on checks and balances and our constitutional institutions. The fewer the steamrolling over court decisions the better. Oh, and Trump is a Republican in the same way that a biological man is a woman. Pretending it's true does little besides weaken what words mean, and tick off conservatives. The dollar is doing extremely well, as usual, thank you. That 6 month panicky chart sort of disappears into the noise when you look at a higher elevation.