John Drake

Could not possibly be worse than: Rumsfeld Gates Panetta and especially Austin, who disappeared into a hospital without telling anyone, allowed a Chinese surveillance balloon to leisurely float across the entire country, and engineered a crisis in recruitment

A big chunk of DEI funding and infrastructure will disappear if Trump indeed does start taxing universities' endowments.

Nick Fuentes hates Trump. Fuentes spent the entire campaign calling Trump a traitor.

I thought that expires this year. I hope so. I'm all for taxing billionaires, too.

Just saw that Trump is going to tax private universities' endowments. Seems just. Everybody must pay their fair share. 555

The three most bloated and corrupt departments are defense, education, and justice. There shouldn't just be job cuts but salary rollbacks. These people are overpaid. I'd also like to see a public comment board, like Vivek and Elon are describing for gvt. waste, devoted to embassies and consuls, where we expats could get a say on the (lack of) services we get. Would be nice to see these people stop sitting under palm trees and taking lunch for four hours need to give us in person service for passports and everything else.

Describes Hamas and Hezbollah exactly, doesn't it?

I knew this as soon as I read the headline.

If it was about Israeli football hooligans, why are the muslims still rioting and attacking people a week later? https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/12/europe/amsterdam-riot-police-soccer-violence-intl/index.html And more to the point, why people now getting terror warnings in Thailand because of a soccer game half way across the world?

So our SSA cola is going up.

Fire everybody! Except those at SSA. Start with Education, then Justice and Treasury. Clean out Defense, too.

It's his stiffness that makes his walk look so unnatural. The tripping along in the sand itself is not a big deal. I trip across things all the time. But, for sure, his balance is off--not unusual at his age--and his upper body is really stiff.

Thailand has been openly bragging for years about bringing Chinese manufacturers to Thailand in order to skirt US trade restrictions. These TINO (Thai In Name Only) Chinese companies have been getting away with it for almost a decade.

British version of MS-13?

Seems like it's only the US that returns this stuff. Everybody else hoards their holdings. Uncle Sucker returning this no strings attached is just another reminder of how pitiful the US looks internationally.

How much can Trump really do? How much do we really want him to do? In his last term, he only managed a couple of legislative acts of any note. Tax cuts for billionaires, for example. Most of his headlines came with Executive Orders, which were immediately challenged, delayed, and often overturned in court. Then, the bureaucracy stymied him. Trump is a man who desperately wants and needs approval. He craves for people to love him. So I don't expect any consistency from his new term in office. I have real fears that: 1) Trump will try to play the second coming of Nixon and go cave in to China, so he can do more posing as Mr. Peace. 2) He'll not only fail to bring down inflation, he'll feed it, with money printing and oil will go up, because "drill, baby, drill" is a stupid slogan and things are pretty much maxed out already. Plus producing energy is no different from anything else, as inflation goes up so do the costs of energy production. 3) He'll go scorched earth on green energy technologies and environmental damage. You don't need to buy into the Green Cult to realize that life is better for everyone if you have clean air, pollution free water, and uncontaminated land. Realize that some things are a boondoggle, such as windmills, who pollute more than they help, and non-targeted solar, which should be regulated to be hail resistant and sturdy enough to survive high winds. But the right sort of solar, effective alternative fuels, and a redesign of American suburbs into more self contained areas of living would be good for all. 4) When it comes down to it, Trump will fold on deportation. He'll allow it to be challenged in court, throw up his hands and say, "well, I tried. Next!" 5) (For the British) Trump will end up throwing an economic lifeline to Starmer, because Trump has an emotional need for British approval. Just wait and see. 6) He'll sweep most of the so-called woke stuff under the rug, because he's afraid of the Trans people, BLM, and Hollywood insulting him.

I think it's just being realistic. American concerns have shifted to the Pacific. And I doubt that Europe cares that much about challenges to American allies in Asia. Europeans now need to take up their own strategic burden, because when push comes to shove, they'll make deals with China at a cost to the US. Germany and Starmer have already indicated they intend to do so.

What do you do with all these human being who have been let into the country to do menial jobs when those jobs are passed on to robots over the next five years?

So the way to keep inflation down is to use near-slave labor?

That sort of sounds good to me.

Fourth happiest man in America after Trump, Vance, and Musk.

I lived and worked in West Germany for most of the 1980s. I haven't been back since then. I remember a country where there were three minutes to change trains--and you could count on it every time--where Lufthansa wrote me a three page letter, single-spaced, apologizing for the repeated delays in flying from Bremen to London. I remember being able to rely on the bus coming to its stop right outside my house and only being late two or three times in the five years I lived there. It was safe to walk through the forests. The Schuetzenverein held a parade down my street and a carnival at the end of it--no drunks, no assaults, just happy people. I remember entering a cheese shop that was entirely empty but still needing to take a number before I was served. Clean, efficient, productive Germany. My old friends still living there tell me those days are long gone, now. People like Angela and Olaf had a lot to do with it.

Sorry. You're right. They had but one life . . .

I don't really know why she lost. Honestly, I thought the abortion issue would win it for her. But there were a lot of other things that crippled her towards the end, I guess. It may have been the squirrel.

I have no argument with anything you wrote in that post.