impulse

Please tell me someone in charge has a lightbulb going off in their head, thinking about all those idle and paid for accommodations in Rwanda...

We'll just have to see, won't we? Here's my forecast... By Summer 2025, the dying will cease in Ukraine and Gaza. I wish I could be as optimistic that Iran won't have used all of their BidenBucks to go nuclear.

Nobody's disputing that. I'm responding to the claim that Trump will be worse for the debt than Harris would have. Record Date Debt Outstanding Amount Annual Average 9/30/2024 $ 35,464,673,929,172 $ 2,297,339,884,449 $ 2,129,820,683,639 9/30/2023 $ 33,167,334,044,723 $ 2,238,422,431,416 4 Years of Harris/Biden 9/30/2022 $ 30,928,911,613,307 $ 2,499,993,043,258 9/30/2021 $ 28,428,918,570,049 $ 1,483,527,375,434 9/30/2020 $ 26,945,391,194,615 $ 4,225,989,441,181 Black Swan Event 9/30/2019 $ 22,719,401,753,434 $ 1,203,343,570,254 $ 1,142,196,021,737 9/30/2018 $ 21,516,058,183,180 $ 1,271,158,167,127 First 3 years of Trump 9/30/2017 $ 20,244,900,016,054 $ 671,455,302,117 9/30/2016 $ 19,573,444,713,937 $ 1,422,827,047,452 Which conveniently forgets the past 8 years, when Harris/Biden added to the debt at almost twice the rate of the Trump years, excluding the pandemic year (2020), when businesses were going belly up and people lost their jobs. Historical Debt Outstanding | U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/ Past performance may not guaranty future results, but it's a more reliable indicator than some election year forecast from a partisan source.

But thank God that idiot's term will end in a few days.

That one is really making the rounds in the wingnut conspiracy websites. Or should I say the spoiler alert websites?

When I first moved to China in 1999/2000, my apartment building housed a bunch of Korean Samsung employees. 3 or 4 days a week, the van would come by and pick them up (with their sticks) to spend the day golfing. The "supervision" isn't as close as they'd like you to believe.

We sure don't matter to the Dem elite, who decide to keep RFK Jr off the primary ballot, tried to keep Trump off all ballots, then decided to swap out the candidate with 14 million primary votes in favor of a candidate with zero primary votes. Democracy isn't the problem. Democrats are.

You're, once again, deflecting from my issue. I'll never claim my taxes made a dent in the budget, even when I was in the top 10%, then the top 5% of earners. But those taxes made a huge difference in the choices and compromises I had to make on a daily basis. Neither do I. But we have to draw a line under it somewhere. Not an entire lifetime. And I do object to subsidizing generations of welfare families. Partly, that's selfish. But it's also cruel to them. The biggest incentive I had to go out and get an engineering degree was cleaning toilets and all the other crap jobs I did in my youth.

Of course you don't recall any of that. The MSM (and moderators) were squelching anything that stood in the way of getting the "safe and effective" into everyone.

They're confusing "died with Covid" and "died of Covid" I'd like to think it's an honest error. But the financial incentives were huge.

Good point. Recall that the vaccine had to be temperature controlled (kept cold) to avoid disintegration of the mRNA at room temperature. How many times have they moved that goalpost? Remember when the science said "it won't move beyond the injection site"? Then it was, "well, it moves beyond the injection site, but not into the organs" (or some other such nonsense). And every month or so, they had to move that goalpost again. And again. And again.

What happened to "hottest year in history"? It's comforting to know that when it gets really cold, they can crank up those solar panels and those wind turbines.

According to who? The MSM that's lost all credibility, or the paid shills publishing phony "forecasts" in the runup to the election? Meanwhile, in real numbers that have already happened, the Harris/Biden administration piled on debt twice as fast as the Bad Orange Man administration, excluding the pandemic spending. That's the problem for Dems when both candidates had a history. You can compare what they actually accomplished, not their promises.

My God. Those heartless monsters... Requiring people to actually get out of bed and work as a condition of getting free money... My money. I'm sure it won't be popular with some demographics, but they already vote Blue and always will, as long as they get promised free stuff.

I enjoy listening to Thomas Sowell about how the welfare state as it's currently structured absolutely devastates families, mostly Black families. Though, I don't know if "enjoy" is an accurate word for being so disheartened by how bad it's been screwed up. Basically, my takeaway from his books and lectures is that the plight of Black families was improving rapidly in the USA from WW2, until the '60s and then the Great Society took pity on them and turned them into wards of the Gub'ment.

As cheap as it is to organize and staff a protest with thousands of paid shills, I don't think any of us know. What I do know is that if I start to think I understand Thai politics and the interactions between the major factions, I'm just fooling myself. The protests and lead up to the Yingluck coup were actually quite pleasant. There was a huge camp set up outside the office at Asoke, and it was fascinating to wander around at lunch and after hours, for days on end. It looked like more of them were having fun than were genuinely angry. Edit: But I would add, even before that, I was reminded of how bad it could have gotten by the bullet holes in some stainless steel handrails where the protests had happened a few years earlier.

A few months before I left for Asia, I bought a vacant lot in a lake community in Texas for $350. It was listed on EBay, and nobody was bidding. So it was an impulse buy. God, I wish I could build on it for $38.89. To be fair, it's one of those lakefront communities from the free wheelin' '80s that never really took off. But I have neighbors on all 3 sides and a lake and boat ramp about 200 yards away.

They probably should be, based on material cost. But that's not what my sister and I found when we looked into building a beach home for (mostly) AirBNB in the same Galveston neighborhood where my brother lives in a 50+ year old cement house. The concrete capable contractors came in with eye watering high quotes compare to the much more numerous wood frame contractors. That may just be an anomaly in the area. Or it may be supply and demand, where the concrete guys can name their price. Like a Rolex costs more than a new scooter.

I challenge you to come up with a causal link between 7/11's and the murder rate. Weak, liberal prosecutors, that's an easy causal link to the higher murder rate.

I'd guess it's all about the Benjamins. If you can build with wood and save 20-30% (or more) over a cement house, and a lot fewer than 1% of them burn down every year, you're still dollars ahead using wood. Of course, that assumes a cheap and plentiful supply of wood. I don't think that's the case in the UK.

Could have been worse. It was lot worse for poor Mr. Gutierrez... SAN FRANCISCO - United Airlines recently banned a man from flying on their aircraft after he allegedly urinated on another passenger. According to SFGATE, Jerome Gutierrez was traveling in business class on UA Flight 189 from San Francisco International Airport (SFO) to Manila, Philippines, on Dec. 27 when a man got up from his seat about four hours into the flight and began peeing on him, his stepdaughter said. United bans man from flight after he allegedly urinates on passenger: ‘Soaked from his stomach down’ | FOX 11 Los Angeles You'd think the guys flying Business Class would behave better... The guy(s) in the OP were idiots, but they didn't kill the Lindbergh baby. Or pee on fellow passengers. And they didn't do anything we don't see countless times a day on the BTS, MRT, in restaurants and other public venues. But we've been fear mongered since 9/11 to believe that the slightest infraction on an aircraft is a big deal. Like I said in a previous post... On a scale of 1-10, their bad behavior rates about a 2 or 3.

Makes it kinda hard to "trust the science", eh? When you have one peer reviewed study in Lancet that claims 186,000, then another peer reviewed study published in Lancet that claims the number is around 64,000, I wonder who can trust Lancet? I have to admit to some trolling there... I don't claim to know what the number is, nor that I believe the linked stud(ies). But in another sub-topic related to "safe and effective", every time I suggest that the scientists are paid by someone, the peer reviewers are paid by someone, and the publication (Lancet) is owned by someone, I'm told to crawl back under my rock if I don't trust the science. As if the science isn't funded by parties with vested interests.

You can believe that if you want. I think he's looking at the downward spiral of the MSM (viewership and market value) as viewers lose confidence in them because of all the gaslighting. And he doesn't want to lose $$ billions. I wish it were a fundamental change in The Zuck, away from the darkness. But it's going to take a lot more than firing the contracted gaslighters to convince a lot of us.

OTOH, a recent peer reviewed study in Lancet claims the numbers are probably 40% higher than those reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry. The report in the Lancet estimated a death toll between 55,298–78,525 people, compared to 37,877 reported by the health ministry. www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqjvl4klzweo

I'd trust them more than I'd trust mediabiasfactcheck. There's a reason The Zuck fired Meta's fact checkers.