The Frankish Reich

Winner. Although I do hear he was getting really close ...

I watched this guy. You know what? He sounds reasonable. Check out 11:00. He talks about a friend of his who's started a geo-engineering firm. He isn't going to just be all gloom and doom, drought, climate change, etc. He's gonna put human ingenuity to work! He's actively cloud-seeding. Good for him. Oh, but wait a minute! Could it be our very own @B-Man who just reposted a tweet saying that all this geo-engineering/cloud-seeding stuff is ILLEGAL and some kind of woke plot that will ruin the planet? Why, yest it was. Unsolicited advice: don't just copy/paste right-wing sh!te willy-nilly and assume it's all good. Sometimes your righty commenters directly contradict each other and make you look like an old fool. (You're welcome)

Deterring.

I'm saying that informants play a critical role in deterring major crimes.

Some did say that, the believe all women thing. I didn't. You want to argue with them, find one of them. I've spent most of my career deeply involved with analyzing the credibility of people, and I summarized why I didn't think any of the above subjects were credible.

I missed that last one - $35!! All to Democrats and their causes. The judge has a huge financial incentive to convict Trump!! Unfair, I say!

Wait a minute - he was busted thanks to an FBI informant. Aren't you guys going to go all Gretchen Whitmer Fake Kidnapping Plot here?

Did I just hear something go squish? Wow, $25!

That's the thing. It's pure frustration that what some people think is a great equalizing "gotcha" is just not getting traction with the public. Probably 95% of the public has no idea that Joe has a 40-ish daughter named Ashley. Probably the same 95% has no idea that Trump has a daughter named Tiffany. Because it just doesn't matter.

And there we go. The old "but you said believe women, but now you don't want us to believe a woman when she accuses a Democrat." - I didn't believe Christine Blasey-Ford had shown that it was likely (or even 20% likely) that a teenage Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her 4 decades ago. - I didn't believe that E. Jean Carroll had shown that it was more likely than not that Trump had sexually assaulted her 3 decades ago (a jury disagreed) - I didn't believe Tara Reade had shown that it was even plausible that prominent Sen Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in an open corridor 4 decades ago - I don't see any basis to believe that a recovered memory of a drug addict about family events three or four decades ago that "may" be considered inappropriate in retrospect is any reason to call into question whether the President is a pedophile - I do believe that a loudmouth braggart who says he "just grabs them by the p[]ssy" probably has, in fact, just grabbed someone by the p[]ssy

Where are you getting this from? I see no reference to that in the diary. Nothing possibly inappropriate about that.

So Republicans have gone a bit squishy on outlawing abortion. They've gone a lot squishy on deficits. They're unrecognizable on Russia. But I found one thing they can all agree on: the need to stop the coming terror of LAB GROWN MEAT! https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-09/proposed-bans-on-lab-grown-beef-are-red-meat-for-conservative-base?utm_source=website&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=twitter&sref=htOHjx5Y …let me offer another theory: The anti-lab-grown-meat movement is about conservative cultural insecurity — the fear that, without the force of law, some conservative cultural norms will fade away… Imagine that lab-grown meat proves feasible at a reasonable cost. It might end up as cheaper than beef from a cow, and it might also be better for the climate. In such a world, there might be growing pressures to abandon real meat for the lab-grown kind. There could even be a political movement to tax or ban real meat, similar to carbon taxes or plans to phase out fossil fuels. Currently there is no momentum in that direction. For all the talk of vegetarianism and veganism, the percentage of Americans who practice those beliefs seems to be roughly flat. Many Americans like eating meat, for better or worse. But if real meat had a true substitute, perhaps the political calculus would differ. This is the real fear — not of lab-grown meat itself, but of the changing culture its popularity would represent. Whether conservatives find the meat substitute to be adequate is beside the point. Society would have decided that some of their most cherished beliefs can be disposed of. Both humankind’s dominion over nature, which runs strong in the Christian strand of conservative thought, and the masculinized meat-eating culture — more specifically, the meat-grilling culture — would be under threat.

I'd say next to zero percent. Dude is 81 years old. For the first 79 or so years of his life nobody ever said anything about him being a pedophile or being sexually attracted to children. And now we have only ambiguous ponderings by a grown woman in drug rehab in response to questions about any childhood trauma that might explain those addictions. And even then she's clearly thinking that in retrospect maybe something was inappropriate. So if 1% of the adult male population is sexually attracted to children, then ... 1% I sincerely hope and pray that you don't have a drug-addicted adult daughter in therapy sessions being pressed to think of anything in her childhood that could have caused her to grow into an addict ...

JK Rowling takes the bait on that whole "define a woman" thing. In the old print days, the saying was "don't pick an argument with someone who buys ink by the gallon." The modern-day equivalent: "don't expect to win a written argument against the most successful writer of our age." Burn baby, burn!

OK, people are just making this up. I've seen people say she said she was 11 when this happened, 8 when this happened, 13 when this happened, whatever. If she meant that she was 11 or 13, she wouldn't be saying "possibly inappropriate." Wishful thinking. Some people so desperately want to cancel out Trump's obvious creepery ...

I believe this fool is referring to me. So I'll oblige him by doing his childish game-of-telephone dialog (but I'm IGNORING you!) No. From what I've seen of the evidence, I don't believe E. Jean Carroll's allegations. But no one cares what I believe. A jury believed her. Done. I'll also note that Carroll told a friend (that old Prep School Handbook writer) that Trump had done something like this around the time that it happened. Ashley Biden apparently didn't tell anyone about something untoward happening with her dad until some three decades had passed. And the key distinction: Ashley Biden is not now accusing her dad of doing anything illegal or that would amount to sexual assault. I only saw those two diary pages, in which she doesn't talk about her age at the time of those showers with dad, and ponders whether, in retrospect, there was something inappropriate (not immoral or illegal) about it. It reads like she was a little kid at the time and that the "memory" was only "recovered" upon prompting from her therapists. In other words: keep trying. It ain't sticking because, well, it's a stupid "My guy may be a creep but your guy is worse" right-wing talking point. There. It's called a rational response. Quote me and maybe Tarheel will learn a thing or two about the art of argument. [Yeah, right.]

Who claimed that the diary was fake? I first heard of it - probably here - maybe a couple years ago. And I remember commenting that it seems real. And that it also seems really low and sick for someone to steal it and sell it to anti-Joe Biden people for the purposes of publicizing it. Now we know who these people were, and it's good that they are being given sharp slaps on their wrists for doing it.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that Youtube (Google) pushed out that ad to the kid because he previously entered the exact same query in the search bar yesterday. Kind of like how BillsFanNC inexplicably keeps getting those ads for Depends and The American Society for Xenophobic Arse holes Exactly. And don't forget that a whole lot of those Christmas carolers are gay theater kids.

Not really fair to compare the Final Four to the Super Bowl since the Final Four is three different games with four different fan bases taking at least 8 hours over the course of three days. It's different. My top sporting events/tournaments: 1. NFL playoffs (particularly conference championships + Super Bowl to do an apples-to-apples comparison) 2. NBA playoffs. The intensity rises exponentially over the regular season. The COVID "bubble playoffs" was my favorite event in recent memory - Tremendous basketball with nothing else going on. 3. MLB. League championships/World Series. Used to be my favorite. Now? Slipping. 4. World Cup. Casual soccer fan, but again ... the intensity. Baseball someday will get it right with the World Baseball Classic. Playing for your country is still special in a way that playing for a team in a league just isn't in these days of free agency. 5. NHL playoffs. Same as soccer for me. Casual fan who starts watching a lot as the intensity rises. 6. Men's (and yes, starting this year women's) final four. Like a lot of other guys I started watching the women's games the last couple years and was stunned by how much the level of play has improved. Some classic games there, helped by the fact that the one-and-dones aren't a factor. Teams develop personalities the way the don't anymore in men's NCAAB. That's more than enough.

No. One. Cares. Scroll (quickly, no reason to linger here) through the posts here. Mostly by one fool obsessed with minimizing the nature of the January 6 attack and conspiracy to overturn a valid election.

The concept is it isn't Alabama's money. It's the kid's money. He is selling the rights to use his name/image/likeness. What bothers you is that the people paying him that money for the right to use his NIL aren't really interested in that. They're interested in paying him to play for Alabama an no one else. I suppose the boosters/car dealerships/whatever could write it into a contract that they'll pay a kid $200,000 with the contract to terminate if he no longer plays football for the University of Alabama. Which is just one more step toward making it clear that he is paid to play football, and not to lend his NIL to some advertiser. No one really cares if Caitlin Clark goes to Iowa instead of, say, UConn. She's a celebrity now. She's doing national ads. No one cares if Bronny James leaves USC. He'll do ads with his dad even if he goes to Northwest Podunk State. Kadyn Proctor is not marketable if he isn't at Alabama, at least not to Alabama boosters. He is not promoting his own name, image, and likeness. He is being paid to play for Alabama. Sorry, Tide, I can't feel real sorry for you because you are breaking the spirit of the rules and demand loyalty from those kids benefiting from that.

You forgot Obama. That "I have a pen and I have a phone" moment opened the floodgates. Oh, those gates had creeped open before, but after that it was "anything goes that I can get away with." And it continued under Trump and now Biden, and there's really no reason to think it will stop under a future administration, whichever one that may be.

Very good. It is the second type - no one really cares as long as it's their guy breaking the law. In other words, as long as it fits their agenda. The last two types are quite different, and you know it. For example: a court (maybe even the Supreme one!) tells you to do something, or refrain from doing something, and you say "you and whose army."

Still illegal. But who has standing to challenge it? The WSJ nails it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-student-loan-forgiveness-karine-jean-pierre-supreme-court-7e74383f?mod=hp_opin_pos_1 Mr. Biden’s new loan forgiveness is still illegal. The High Court stressed that student loan forgiveness is a major question that requires clear authorization from Congress. But Mr. Biden seems to believe he can jam the courts by automatically forgiving debt before a judge has time to stop him. The White House says most borrowers won’t even have to apply for loan relief. Sometime before the November election, Mr. Biden will simply declare their debt forgiven. That means a future Congress and a President Trump might be unable to undo the lawless act. Where are the press scolds who warn about a President who threatens democracy? Mr. Biden is setting an awful precedent that Donald Trump will no doubt exploit. If courts say he can’t re-purpose defense money to build a wall on the southern border, he could simply use another means to do so. The right will cheer him on as the left is Mr. Biden. The rule of law and taxpayers are the losers. By the way, this would cancel student loan debt for borrowers who have been in repayment for 20+ years. It took me more than that to pay off my student loans, but I knew that when I consolidated them into a 30-year repayment plan. That was the point! To make my debt manageable. Which it was, until I decided that it made financial sense to pay off what remained (only about 6K by then) in a lump sum after about 24 years. I was one of the suckers who took my obligations seriously ....

A rare case in which Big Mollie is correct. The one-sentence summary is simply not correct. Dobbs didn't purport to ban states from doing what their elected representatives or voters think is right. Larger picture: why did Trump's statement - otherwise clear about the federal government not getting involved - end with a comment about "but we've got to win elections?" That suggests a public opinion driven position, not a clear issue of constitutional law and the separation of state/federal powers. Hence ... skepticism.