Noman
New Member

The great thing about having my first principles straightened out is it's easy to make absolutely correct snap judgments. This is all I need to know, straight from his pen: There are only two majority opinions on this. The first position is you never defund a government program, at all. Maybe there's a need sometimes for an external entity like an uber-powerful superpower to invade and topple your government and put in all new programs that will never be defunded, but the idea of removing funding from a program is otherwise anathema. The second position is you call for defunding a program you really don't like, and score some political points off of calling for defunding, but never actually tie it off. So it's the same as the first position but with some lie theater to advance some parasite's personal lot in life. Both positions are abhorrent and we've seen both expressed in articles in this thread. I didn't read the whole article and I don't need to - he's clearly in the first category, and that's all I need to know.

The DC area NPR affiliate does pretty well with their playlists, but there's still the Saturday afternoon opera. I love classical music, even going into some of the modernist stuff, but opera, in general, may as well be Noh theater to me. As my dad used to say: hours of caterwauling with a nice aria in between. Then one beautiful spring Saturday morning last year, I was inexpertly making up some way-too-strong CBD oil from a not-low THC strain and accidentally licked my fingers before going to Hobby Lobby. And while I was sitting in the parking lot too scared to go inside, I heard this: I had one of those moments of profound beauty that was carved into my entire soul for life, and NPR's crappy programming was responsible. I can't hate on it entirely.

And neither side will ever mention that Trump assassinated a general of a country we're not at war with, while the general was officially visiting another country we're not at war with. It doesn't really matter who he was or what he was doing - if those were facts on the ground, that's the sort of thing that not very long ago in history would have invited reprisals like collecting all the hands and feet of everyone in an entire city and throwing them in a pile and watching them all bleed out. If there's one thing Trump did during his presidency, it was to show that Iran is absolutely not the boogeyman everyone thinks they are. If they were, they had every casus belli they needed to be the worst boogeyman they could be on that occasion.

I always think "Sword Swallower", but SS is both apropos and easier to type.

I of course can't provide these numbers but I remember distinctly noticing an average traffic fatality increase some time around 2014. There was a marked decrease during the 90s, and there was no data to show whether it was the hyper-aggressive DUI laws, or the increase in antilock brakes (and... sigh... airbags), but of course we know what gets the credit... ...but I don't remember finding any reason why it would increase afterward, apart from "shitty drivers". At the time I credited it to the fact that gen X learned to drive on rusty beaters that didn't have a third brake light, a convex passenger side mirror, or even power steering... and every generation thereafter doesn't have the experience of "Oh my God this thing is a fucking deathtrap and it's the only way to get to my girlfriend's house so this is absolutely happening". Having such a fundamental learning experience matters IMO. But these days I'm pretty open to the idea that Muslim women who were previously not even allowed out of the house are a pretty big danger on the road, too.

The Hispanics I know who aren't here "legally" are all trying to keep their noses as clean as possible, because they don't want anyone looking into them. Wait, I thought we weren't allowed to ever forget that there absolutely was a time when Africans were driving immigration numbers, even if that time is not germane to the discussion.

We forget so easily that the default state of Europe has always been war. If you think the media went batshit crazy with covid, or with Trump... well, I now think I'll actually live to see the point where the US goes completely bankrupt, stops funneling dollars into Europe's furnace, and the Europeans go back to shoveling their youth into it. Our media is going to go full Orwellian. We're going to be told 24/7 that eating the bugs is the only way to scratch together the funds to stop the apocalypse. Hitler is going to be mentioned more in a week of TV than he has been in the last 80 years. It's going to be important for us to be there telling everyone we can that they've been picking a scab for a century, that they had decades to back off, and that there's only one way to deal with tyrants in the end.

I'm gonna wait until everyone realizes it was the legal immigrants who were loaded back home and used that money to pressure home prices up.