Open Racing Thread: FORMULA DRIFT 2024 FINALE! I'll get right to it; James Deane is now the first ever 4 time FD champion. I expected a fight to the end between him and Odi Backchis, but apparently Deane's points lead was great enough that simply leaving the start line in Top32 at Irwindale was enough to lock it in. Needless to say, I tuned out after that announcement because it was painfully anti climactic. Deane went on to win the event outright, and was joined on the podium by usual suspects Fredrick Aasbo and Connor Shanahan. Congrats to James for making FD history, team RTR for 2 in a row, and Nitto Tire for 5(!) in a row!
I guess I'll jump into the politics stuff today, too. I want to start by saying I find both presidential candidates indefensible, and if there was ever a time to have a vote of no-confidence, that time is now. Trump has said Christians won't have to vote again in four years if he is elected now, and more recently, said he would use the United States military against "the enemies within" our very nation. Both of these statements should be cause for great concern no matter what your thoughts are about guns or gays (I support rights for both of those by the way). I will grant that the former statement about not needing to vote again in 4 years is vague; he did not say WHY or HOW that might occur, but even suggesting the idea is worrisome. The latter, more recent statement suggests Trump would use our nation's military against domestic political opponents, or anyone perceived to be "against" him and his political goals. "Enemies within" is again rather vague, so I don't think it's unreasonable to think about that possibility. I truly believe this is a dangerous idea whether you find yourself aligned with him or not. I read comments all over the internet (ACF included) that the current administration is already doing this. That may well be the case, and I will not defend those actions if it is. I'll ask one question before moving over to Harris; how many morals and policies must one agree with Trump on to look past this blatant intention to abuse the power of the presidency? My answer is: none.
Harris cannot be trusted. It's plainly clear she's putting on a different front to whatever crowd she happens to be in front of. I especially despise her strategy for holding (and greatly profiting from) her old DA position, and I don't care how many times I'm told "SHE DIDN'T KNOW THOSE UNRELEASED, CONVITCED OF HAVING A PINNER BLACK GUYS WERE STILL STAMPING LISCENSE PLATES AND MAKING THE PRISON COMPANY MONEY, IT WAS ALL PEOPLE BELOW HER!" I simply do not buy it. She failed far too many people and now she thinks it's a joke, and that is simply repulsive. As for if she (or someone else behind the scenes because apparently she doesn't actually do the job she's assigned to) would ALSO directly use the nation's military against domestic political opponents the way Trump suggests he would, I wouldn't put it past her (or "them").
I don't think we should vote D or R in this election. Neither should be trusted, neither is defensible. I am not going to be happy with any result in 2 weeks, and I suspect the fallout after any result will be brutal enough to make me quit the internet for a yet-unspecified amount of time. I'm so happy to be in my late 20s right now <sarcasm>.
Manafort just got out of jail. Bannon is still there. Rudy is bankrupt. Roger Smith got full on SWATed. Trump has been enduring incessant lawfare and *got shot*. Two others tried. Dozens still in the J6 gulag.
Who did Trump go after, ever, let alone successfully?
Of course there are enemies within: almost all of Congress and the alphabet agencies.
I agree there is political warfare happening, and I don't support it; but is the Army, Marines, Air Force, and/or Navy being deployed in these instances?
Are you suggesting the person who whiffed Trump in the ear was enlisted in the United States armed forces under the direction of Joe Biden, and the would-be golf course assassin was as well? Trump may not have done similar things in the past but he is now plainly saying he intends to do so. What I'M saying, is that such actions should not be tolerated by either political party or by the American people. Trump will simply flip who these actions are taken against, and while I can see you one might believe that would be justified, that will not actually fix anything.
Henry, please believe me when I tell you I don't need to be convinced the democratic party is full of bad people and does bad things. I already belive that. I just want to make my belief clear that Donald Trump isn't the answer to our nation's woes, and it is my belief we should not accept him OR Harris as the next POTUS.
'Lawfare' refers to the legal wranglings in several states and DOJ for quibbles in politics that have gone on in one form or another, well, forever. The ones that could still land him in jail.
Rhetoric was ramped up by the left to at least encourage the assassination attempts. Whether there was a true SS standdown or simply historically gross incompetence is left to the reader.
His policies are barely center right. Every fantastical potential threat he is accused of doing or planning, the left has actually, literally done. Legal persecution of political opponents. Violently putting down protests and jailing protesters. Inciting WW3. It's mind boggling.
Henry, I'm not denying that the democratic party did those things already, never did. I'm pointing out that Trump is now saying - plainly, verbatim, not even hiding it- that he intends to do those same things, and I don't think we should be OK with that just because he'll do it to the people who once did it to him. Does that make sense?
When you deliberately create a mass-media environment for society to soak in, and call people you don't like "Hitler," you're responsible for any violent acts the easily-swayed and the mentally-unhinged commit against those people.
Be the other side has to be above it! This is how you lose. I get principles but if you stick to your principles while the other guys cheats, you're not principled, you’re literally a loser. Throw them all in jail first, then arrange a truce
Your final statement is part of what I want, but I don't want a truce; I want a reset on every federal position, I want the elimination of both major political parties, I want the elimination of all PACs, and I want them to be replaced with at least 4 new parties that aren't allowed to accept "donations" from anything besides an individual voter. I know this will never happen and probably can't happen, so please don't feel the need to tell me how naive I am because I'm well aware.
The thing that always annoyed me about Formula D is that every driver is Bob Rooney.
What I mean is that in "Married: With Children," Al had a friend named Bob Rooney. That's what everyone called him - "Bob Rooney." Never "Bob." Or "Robert." Or "Rooney." No, it was always "Bob Rooney."
That's how the announcers in Formula D always refer to the drivers - by their full names. It's weird and off-putting. I'm surprised they don't call the Japanese drivers "-san."
There's a tendency for at least one NASCAR announcer to refer to Shane Van Gisbergen as SVG. Why this five-syllable name would need to be abbreviated when AJ Allmendinger or Joey Logano are not is quite beyond me.
MotoGP at Philip Island is worth watching purely for the showcase of Marc Marquez' incredible skill in variable/less than optimal conditions.
Jorge Martin on pole position, Marquez second, Vinales third, Bez fourth, and Bagnaia down in fifth, and Raul Fernandez sixth. Quartaro had horrendous rear chatter and didn't make Q2.
At the start of the sprint Marquez and Martin got away well, but an error put Marquez back into 11th or so at the end of turn 1. Martin would squeeze on speed and get into a comfortable lead and victory. Marquez, on the other hand, would slice his way through traffic to engage in battles on his way to second place. Enea Bastianini had an acceptable race and pushed past vinales and bez to finish third. Bez and Vinales would scrap for several laps until Vinales put the nail in Bez down the main straight. Bez would then blow his braking and slam into the back of Maverick at high speed putting them both out of the race. Thankfully, both riders were okay. Bagnaia swept to a fourth place finish and lost six points to Martin (-16). Pedro Acosta high sided into a DNF and would hurt his ligaments to where he was medically disqualified due to concern about serious injury in the event of another crash.
In the race proper Marc Marquez would have an awful start replete with wheelspin all thanks to his own visor tearoff blowing under his rear tire. He would then put on an incredible show for the entire race - aggressive in the first few laps to put him in contention for the podium. Then he would take advantage of Martin and Bagnaia fighting to barge into first place. Martin hung on for quite a few laps before having a few scares and relenting on pace to see Marquez disappear into the distance. Marquez first, Martin second, and Bagnaia a lonely third (with a fast closing Digiantonnio) for a four point gain to Martin (-20).
1982 was a bad year for F1,with the deaths of Gilles in practice at Zolder and Paletti at the start in Montreal as well as Pironi mangling his legs that put an end to his championship chances and career during qualifying at the old Hockenheimring.
Cogently stated -- and that explains why she's in the catbird seat. What I'm hoping to hear is someone who has supported her for a while explain why she's the best lady for the gig... the way I eagerly could and would for, say, Tulsi Gabbard.
Roy Cooper, NC Governor or Beshear. Generic center-left Dems with no controversies or high-profile fuckups. Not weird (Kelly is off-putting) and electable. No national profiles, but a billion dollar fundraising effort can mitigate that. Dems tend to win with personable, southern, center-left governors.
Pelosi and Obama should have given the Democrat delegates a choice or at least the appearance of one. The fact still remains that the current Veep has never received a single Democrat delegate vote and a quickie "primary" lasting 10 days or a fortnight would have at least given the appearance of the Dem leadership nodding at "democracy". Then the leadership could anoint Kamala Hamas and call it good.
I think there are D's sitting out this election due to that anointment but I have no evidence.
A whole lot of people can't really make compelling cases for their beliefs or opinions about, well, anything. And while it would be great if they could, they don't have to. It isn't your job to convince me you're right, or that I should agree with you. Life isn't always fuckin' combat.
I couldn't agree with this more however I greatly fear that should Trump be declared the victor funded and non-funded violent protests will break out that make the summer of 2020 look like an extended July 4th community picnic.
My money is on Kamala being elected with 99 million votes in the safest and most secure election ever conducted... and there never being a Republican president again. The next non-Democrat president will be from whatever splinter faction the Free Palestine kids cook up.
If you have committed to viewing the world through the lens of identity politics, Kamala is a much more compelling figure than Biden ever could be. Or indeed than most of the people in the higher echelons of the DNC.
The disconnect is that the identity politics lens is not the way most of the country views the world or their fellow man. So you have a bunch of white people with advanced degrees in utter shock that working class black people and especially working class hispanics are thoroughly skeptical of Harris.
I imagine that what fills their thought bubble is "But she's like you!" to which I'm sure the thought bubble on the other side is "How the fuck do you figure that?"
They are quite literally viewing the world through entirely different lenses. I'm reminded of the joke about someone who expressed their tolerance for other opinions who was nevertheless utterly scandalized to find out that there *were* other opinions.
I get the reference, but I also previously worked for a company with multiple offices in The Netherlands, and I will strongly affirm that while it was a good joke, Autin Powers was more right than most people know about hating the Dutch.
The migration problem there is interesting to me because my experience was that once I got off the coast, everyone I met was quite racist there. One of the offices used to send out an annual Christmas photo with someone in blackface dressed as Sinterklaas. Even before our current woke culture it was a tough look for an international business.
You are right about the looks, they are beautiful people and country.
i mean if i remeber correctly the exit polls last election from nonwhites was basically democrat in every state so its not like there isnt some basis to that
"One voter, who is from a Guatemalan migrant family, said that immigration was his primary reason, claiming the crisis on the border was making people like him 'look bad.' "
makes me lol every time
"While Harris enjoys a healthy 14 point advantage from Latinos, it's much lower than past Democratic presidential candidates"
which is fine if that happens and thats who you want to win
but where does that leave the next election given immigration rates illegal or otherwise and are the people voting for trump doing so because of the man or the party
People vote for party, people vote for candidate, people vote for issues. Firmly against non citizens voting.....hell, in a perfect world only property owners would vote but that won't happen. The reason I jumped in at this point is just to point out people have minds regardless of what they look like and race means less than they would have us believe.
While Trump is making an honest effort to ingratiate himself to the working class, Kamala was busy cozying up withe Cheney family which has long been in bed with the global industrial complex. Quite the contrast and really shows what candidate has the American people's best interest in mind.
It is pretty stark to watch the most identifiably corrupt and morally bankrupt figures in the DC constellation line up behind Kamala and for them to actually think it's a win to talk about it. "Dick Cheney endorses me!"
If I found out that Dick Cheney endorsed me I'd contemplate starting my next shotgun class by demonstrating the Kurt Cobain drill. I wouldn't be telling anyone about it.
It also rather makes the point that the system is kayfabe but unifies when shit gets real like a real outside threat to their power emerging.
Yeah. Cheney is and always was a demon in human flesh. The broken clock of the ultra-wacko left was right about that, and continues to be right about it.
I kinda/sorta get campaigning with Liz, but I'm pretty stunned that she's parading around Dick Cheney. She gains almost no one and loses a ton. That's uniquely tone-deaf.
There's a particular brand of DNC campaign strategist who thinks that there is still a moderate wing of the Republican party that a) exists in meaningful numbers at all b) is just begging for a chance to vote Democrat and c) thinks parading around any current/former GOP office-holder is the key to winning those people. Dick Cheney, being a former vice president is a huge get for them. They are too dumb, too Sorkin-brained, or just plain too fucking useless to recognize that the guy who you can trace every sin the US has committed since 9/12/2001 back to is the very person who you do NOT want the endorsement of.
Kamala's campaign went off the rails a bit because of those very people a couple months ago. The DNC is a very stupid entity who cannot connect with a base to save their lives, even when they have someone likable to use for just that purpose. Waltz was gaining quite a bit of ground with the "weird" stuff and his general affability to regular people and they nerfed him. He did just call Elon a prancing dipshit though, which is fun and back in character.
'He did just call Elon a prancing dipshit though, which is fun and back in character'
Note that the homophobia of "prancing" in this context, which would be fatal to a Red Teamer, is thoughtfully waived for Walz, the same way Biden got away with "You ain't black". It really helps to have a state media... ask FDR, this isn't a new state of affairs, I suppose!
This is why I feel that way: let me tell you a tale of two well-known and well-loved journalists who both used the word "pansy" in print. The first one, in 2015. The second one, in 2021. Nobody cared about the first incident but the second one nearly cost two people their jobs. The goalposts are moving, and they are moving past someone like Walz who learned his bantz in the Army.
Gonna second Larry C on this one. Massive, massive reach on your part. Trump could have said it and only the insane on the left would've sid anything about the verb "prancing" to be homphobic.
If he said "prancing like a girl" or "prancing like a fairy" or something to that effect, sure absolutely. He said prancing like a dipshit. Dipshit is not a derogatory term for homosexuals.
Paywalled so I didn't read the whole thing. I think that the criticism there is still ridiculous, however there is a difference between saying an openly gay man is "prancing" and saying Elon Musk is a dipshit.
Pranicng in THAT context can be construed as homphobic because it is ascribing a feminine trait to a gay man in such a way as to demean him. You're being deliberately obtuse here.
"whataboutism" is often used to cover for very reasonable assertions of hypocrisy. And not in the hypocrisy of not always living up to one's highest ideals, but intellectual hypocrisy.
Bullshit. Someone in that position would never use that effeminate term or call someone weird over and over or make some joke about fucking a sofa but he does that because that is his character.
Don’t forget that Dick Cheney was in a wheel chair at the end of the Bush administration and was near death. He had a mechanical heart and who knows what other organs replaced. And it is now 16 years later and he is still around. Sound like anyone else’s we know, Anakan Skywalker cough cough. Oh also Liz was hired by the University of Virginia as a Professor of Practice for a couple hundred grand of Virginia taxpayers dollars and we all thought she was from Wyoming….
"Similarly, those of you who preferred Trump over the other Republican candidates are encouraged to make your case for him on a basis of policy or governance"
How about: Not starting more wars, and actively trying to end our involvement in existing ones. That alone is probably the biggest and most consistent differentiator between Trump and any other R running for president since Ron Paul and later his son Rand. But even the Pauls couldn't deliver a dressing down of the Bush family and their disastrous handling of pre-post 9/11 and then the Iraq war the way Trump did in South Carolina that one night in 2015. "Jeb is a mess."
My argument for Trump is very simple: The alternatives to Trump up to this point have been Bushes, Romneys, and McCains...all of whom I would sooner strap to a rocket and fire into the sun than allow near any sort of power.
In my mind, for some reason, I always remember him as voting * against * the Iraq war. I keep forgetting how much he cheered it on. Probably because the most hawkish Iraq person I recall is Hillary.
McCain was an even bigger foaming-at-the-mouth warhawk. Crazy to me how much all of the neo-cons have been rehabilitated in the minds of mainstream democrats, it makes me really question the sincerity of their anti-war positions in the early 00s, or if it was all just politics as usual. I guess they were "adults" who didn't say silly/mean things, they just got thousands killed and maimed and racked up trillions in debt!
He tried to bury the investigation into POWs that we left behind in Vietnam. You'd think for how much he trotted out his own POW story that he would have done the complete opposite. It spoke a lot to the man's character (or lack there of) that he was more than willing to sell his brothers in arms up the river in order to protect the image of the state.
If he wasn't the Manchurian candidate, he wasn't far. And he put up the most feeble fight in Presidential election history. About half of his debate time was basically shilling for Obama.
DeSantis needs to reign in those ridiculous dealer fees for new car sales in FL. Disclosure, I am not from FL, but when I was doing new car purchase research, I learned about how typical dealer fees there can be $1k. Daylight robbery! I guess the dealer lobby groups are just too good to turn down.
Don’t get me wrong I admire all the great work that DeSantis has done but he is not user friendly. If you remember there were people that despised Reagan’s policies but I have never heard, from even his detractors that he was not a nice and personable individual. DeSantis unfortunately has the interpersonal skills of sandpaper. We can love his policies but the person not do much. This is the one reason DeSantis will never be president, he does not have the personal touch that you need to get people to at least think about voting for you. IMHO
DeSantis is an operations guy, he's the one who makes the trains run on time and can clear the way so that people can get things done. Every governor in the country should study how he handles natural disasters and adopt his playbook.
This is why I was so shocked at what a lifeless, inept primary campaign DeSantis ran. I would have gladly voted for either him or Trump in the general election and did not understand the vitriol between DeSantis and Trump primary supporters.
Upon further reflection, I don't actually know about his current platform. It's probably not the best thing to do, base my vote upon previous results, but what else am I going to do? I'm not voting for more illegal immigration, more wars, higher energy costs, etc etc... Where's our Javier Milei? I want that man.
Funny thing is I am materially better off in every single way since Biden took office. I just make a lot more money now but the wife and I were eating dinner the other day and I remarked "I can't believe a burrito and a torta are $36. $18 for a burrito is insane"
Prices have done up 50-60% in 4 years because the money printer went brr and both parties are to blame for that.
This is true for us as well, we're officially middle-class for the first time since leaving our parents' houses as of maybe 2022. Both parties are to blame for this mess, I haven't forgotten how Trump was president at the start of cov-insanity.
I like being the only government employee who likes Javier Milei. Of course, I don't fear the unknown and we'd figure out what to do if I had to find a new job. Even if it was as fry cook at a McD's. I probably wouldn't be as good at it as Trump, though.
You are correct that both parties closed the country (Covidiocy) and made the money printer go brr, but one party wanted the country reopened promptly and the other party wanted the country to remain closed, forcing the money printer to continue going brr.
Hell, Trump wanted it reopened by Easter 2020. But by that time, "YOU JUST WANNA KILL GRANNY" had taken root. Had Trump forced the issue, they'd have impeached him for dereliction of duty.
We can never shut down our economy again. No matter what calamity strikes, you and I have to get up and go to work, like Londoners during the Blitz. Money printer must stop going brr.
"Covidiocy" was continuing behavior that was contradicted by data. The initial shutdown was a reasonable response and saved lives. However, it was supposed to last a couple of weeks. At first.
A similar shutdown may be a reasonable response to a future pandemic with a higher R value and fatality rate. The hard part, now, will be believing it when the government says so.
My problem with Trump on the whole "wars" thing is that his policy, or the policy his handlers peddle, isn't necessarily all that pragmatic. I also think that many isolationists/nationalists won't accept that we as a country can do two things at once: We can take care of our needs here and we can support our allies.
There seems however to be a growing sense in the populist movement that believes there are never national interests, never ever, for supporting any of our allies. This really isn't true.
Define "national interest" and please make sure to differentiate between what's good for the rank and file American and what's good for politicians' and American corporate pockets. What is the national interest in vehemently supporting Israel and creating decades and generations worth of Muslims who hate our guts? The weapons the Israelis buy from us? Shifting to Ukraine: I get the interest of people looking to make a buck. Antagonizing Russia to the point that Europe has to cut themselves off from their cheap energy and hook themselves up to more of our supplies. And doubly so when we've also crippled their industrial output by way of this energy situation and also have them buy plenty of new weapon systems from us. That's like a win/win/win/win for the American companies involved and the congress critters they fund.
What was the national interest in us kicking off the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War?
I think I've had this fight with you before.......
The Muslims would hate America's guts even if America withdrew all support from Israel and shut the nation down. Muslims are Antichristian. Israel is a useful proxy for weakening Muslim nations with minimum commitment of US personel.
The same also applies with Russia and Ukraine although the threat to Christian nations is not as obvious. Communism is a Godless and therefore Antichristian ideology and its proponents, including Ms Harris are always fighting against any Christian nation.
The Soviet Union has been dead since the eighties. The current RF has been pushing a return to Orthodoxy and with it natalism. It is Ukraine that is currently banning it and jailing priests.
Some would say the Anglican/Orthodox/Roman churches are Antichristian. At this stage I would say Christ is still able to use them to spread the gospel but they will be used by the Antichrist in the end.
Douglas Adams was probably right when he was describing the president of the galaxy or the universe or whatever in that guidebook he wrote.........
Lando is soft and he's too prone to mistakes to ever win a championship, I also find him slightly annoying in the meme clips I've seen of him online racing and whatnot (I'm annoying, too, so I don't really hold that against him). I was hoping for a season where the points lead changes week to week and we have no idea who will be champion, but Verstappen has earned my respect and I'd rather see him win every single time than any of the other softies on the grid. Even dragging the dead weight of that stupid Red Bull car around, he's still 57 points out in front and no one will catch him. Easily the finest driver of the current crop and I hope he wins this year and next year, too.
The high octane copium being peddled on NPR is hilarious. Pathetic even.
Trump was showing off a letter supposedly sent from McD corporate that they had no record of Kammy working there.
Defrocked Congressman Santos is claiming he will drop news tomorrow to kill her campaign. Now, pound of salt aside, I will piss my pants laughing if that degenerate clown is who puts the final stake in.
the salt here is so bad ive decided to forgo oil spraying the underside of my car in lieu of just ripping the rear main seal out and letting that work its magic
Hillary lost (in part) because she surrounded herself with Yes-People who lacked the brains and the balls to tell her to campaign in the Northern Midwest, to shore up the "Blue Wall," rather than give in to her hubristic and vainglorious decision to "Take the Fight to Trump" by campaigning in Arizona. The New Yorker's post-mortem of Hillary's Campaign's "Own Goals" was breathtaking, especially if you are a former political operative. She was paying like $6 million to some clown who did not know or who briefly forgot that the California D primary was "Winner Take All." But when the guy said that at a meeting... nobody spoke up, because that guy had been picked by Hillary.
BTW, I am very surprised that I have seen no commentary this season on the "Bradley-Dinkins Effect." That's where Persons of Color or in cases women Overperform on Polling and then Underperform on Voting Day.
That's because among a sizeable minority of Polling Respondents, the need for Social Approval and the instinct for Conflict Avoidance are stronger than the value they put on Truth Telling. "OK, but it was only a 'White Lie.'" (That's a pun!) "I didn't want the pollster to think I was a racist."
But the Laugh Out Loud Funny aspect of this election, to my jaundiced eyes, is that this time around, it will be BLACK MEN who are telling the "Bradley-Dinkins White Lie"!!!!! "Yeah, sure, bro. Kammy all the way!" And then they silently leave that section of the ballot blank; or they vote for Trump.
In German culture of the past couple of hundred years, there's a catchphrase that "Women have to take care of the Three Ks." (Or the Four Ks, or the Five Ks.) Hitler was BIG on the Three Ks: "Kinder, Küche, Kirche " Kids, Kitchen, and Church. And, women were supposed to confine themselves to those activities. I think that a non-trivial number of African-American men might be tempted to non-vote in favor of traditional gender role models. Along with not paying for gender reassignment surgery.
This election might be one for the Political Science History Books. The Chapter will be called, "How Many Ways Can You F Up an Election You Should Have Had In the Bag?"
Jack, I am with you on Josh Shapiro, and I believe that that was all about Israel.
For me, Ukraine is the Alpha and the Omega. The last time Western Civilization was under the gun like this was along the road to Tours, France, on Friday, October 10, AD 732.
Please pray for our Republic, and for Ukraine, and for Israel.
The last person I remember talking about the B-D effect was Rush Limbaugh. He was a partisan (aren’t we all!) but he wasn’t afraid of the truth as he saw it.
In the UK, they call it "The Shy Voter." I like that.
But what has never happened, as far as I know, in a US election, is that we have a plausible scenario where it is Black Men telling the "Bradley-Dinkins White Lie."
The Democratic Cabal had to stay up very late one night to come up with that genius move.
In the current environment where you are a racist, misogynist or one of many other derogatory descriptors for voting for Trump, I would not be surprised at all that the results are far different than the polls show. People don’t want to deal with the hostility that the left is openly promoting.
In my red county of 120k people, 21k people have already voted in only 7 days of early voting. They had to reconfigure the street access to the voting site because of the increased traffic. My county has not voted for a Dem president since FDR.
Yep here in what the Nashville free rag has called the center of White Christian Nationalism we had to wait 45 minutes to vote last week and the cops had to handle overflow parking.
Rush was the first person I can remember who had the guts to publically, openly mock - ON PRINCIPLE - environmentalists, feminists, militant homosexuals, race hustlers, communist academics, "homeless advocates" and the rest of the Army of Darkness.
He gored sacred cows like there was no tomorrow, and gave a lot of people the courage to do the same.
they dont seem particularly concerned where they get their immigrants from they just want as many as possible as soon as possible
bc is full of chinese for example
also the prevalence of muslim churches thing seems to be a perversion of the freedom of religion idea which would be something that would work just fine if everyone was either catholic or protestant
BC TFR is dropping below 1.0 (2.2 is required for population stability). It's not the Great Replacement Theory propagated by White Supremacists, it's...Replacement Migration per the United Nations:
Speed, blame the Crown for only signing a 99 year lease on Hong Kong. I have been told by several knowledgeable Canadians that 747s were flying full east bound and empty west bound in the months before the handover and Vancouver’s native language now is Chinese.
im not saying that didnt increase the population of chinese in vancouver but there was a huge amount of them before that and it wound up creating problems for that area
My memory of the history of this is a bit hazy, but wasn't the major impetus for freedom of religion the Thirty Years War and the whole Catholic vs. Protestant thing?
Hi, the idea of "Cuius regio, eius religio," which freely translates to "Who has the realm, they choose the religion" was first put into action at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555.
That settled warfare between Catholics and Protestants that was internal to the German part of the Holy Roman Empire. So, from 1555, "Cuius regio" stood as an example, but nobody was imitating it.
Part of the problem was that Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was also King Charles 1 of Spain, and... Spain claimed Holland as part of its empire. So, there was the 80 Years war and then the 30 Years War and the Wars of the Spanish Succession.
The eventual settlement of the 30 Years War (1648) is generally regarded as the first long-lasting foothold Freedom of Religion got. Roger Williams founded the First Baptist Church in America in Rhode Island in 1638 after leaving Massachusetts because of it lack of "Soul Liberty."
Williams published his book on Freedom of Religion in 1644. Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of that book, so there is a very directly line from Roger Williams' Winter Journey to the US Bill of Rights.
Thanks. The point I was trying for in replying to Speed was that relations between Protestants and Catholics was bad enough to be the inspiration for the modern view of freedom of religion, not that freedom of religion only works among sufficiently similar religions, which I, possibly mistakenly, took to be the core of Speed's point. My memory was not sufficient for the task, so thank you for the excellent summary.
Can we agree to edit your comment to remove "like that?" There are good things that can be said about Hitler, including that he liked animals, but overall not a good role model.
not sure why youre asking when ive specifically highlighted a desirable characteristic of him and not a wholesale endorsement of everything he did and thought
also im not sure if removing "like that" would make it less grammatically correct but i barely passed english class so ill defer to someone else on that
Informative post, but I take issue with the "Should Have Had In the Bag."
Completely leaving aside the _non copos mentis_ executive (and the VP's treasonous failure to execute her 24th Amerndment duty), the Afghanistan Withdrawal Debacle ALONE should have brought down this administration (if not the party), or the migrants sleeping in O'Hare, or any of hundreds of the other party-ending disasters of a similar magnitude that they have created on a monthly basis.
It's terrifying that the race was ever this close.
Well, my "should have" goes all the way back to Biden's Day One.
It also is obvious to me that Biden's biggest mistake was running with TRUMP'S Afghanistan Withdrawal Plan. It was TRUMP'S plan. Biden made the stupidest such Presidential mistake since JFK's non-critical acceptance of Eisenhower's Bay of Pigs Invasion Plan. Right. A couple of thousand briefly trained Cuban Civilians (many of whom were rich kids and not very suited for military action) up against 40,000 trained professional soldiers backed up by Soviet fighter jets. Kennedy foolishly decided that it had to be a good plan because Eisenhower hadn't bothered to throw it in the trash can. JFK was too busy porking Fiddle and Faddle, "the White House Dogs," I guess.
BTW, my mother's only brother was in charge of Training for the Bay of Pigs. And my only son served six deployments in Afghanistan.
And what’s seldom mentioned is that Trump’s plan was conditioned based and not date based.
Further inexplicable was Biden-Harris’s claim they had no choice when they spent the first days of their administration undoing everything they possibly could have Trump’s.
The foreign policy collapses of the Biden administration are getting what I think of as a "reverse Vietnam". During the Vietnam war, the United States won battle after battle, but it was always portrayed as a losing fight, right up to the point that Nixon ensured that it would be one.
Every Gen Xer should ask themselves, quickly and without research: "Who won the Tet Offensive?" I bet you remember it as a loss. It was taught that way in school. In fact it was an overwhelming material, body count, and land control defeat for the Communists.
Tet scared the shit out of the "Journalists" so they assumed that the battle was lost and proceeded to make it truthy.
An old CBC series on that war stated the clusterfuck succinctly for me by noting that the Air Force gave civilian command a top 100 list of targets and command ordered them to start with #100 instead of #1.
If we had won the war militarily, a war with decades of imperialistic baggage, and installed Diem, would it have been worth 55K US dead and multiples more lives ruined?
Well, the much-maligned "domino theory" in SEAsia turned out to be true, and millions of people were murdered as a result. Had the dominos been stopped, that would have been valuable.
I should probably write about why I am such a peacenik now when I was not a peacenik during the Cold War. Maybe it was because back then there was a motivated, powerful enemy who wanted to impose a brutal system of governance on the whole world, whereas now it's... Putin wants 500 square miles of a country that has been spying on him?
Hillary lost that election because she surrounded herself with the worst strategists on offer at the time. And she cockily ignored key swing constituencies—she literally never set foot in Michigan, and lost the state by 10,000 votes or 0.23%.
She also wasted her time in Pennsylvania, never venturing anywhere between Philly and Pittsburgh, and lost that state as well.
Perhaps the thought process was something like "Hillary lost because people are intimidated by Smart Women, so let's run a retard."
In contrast, Margaret Thatcher, who received Second Class Honours in Chemistry at Oxford, was reportedly more proud of being the first prime minister with a science degree than becoming the first female prime minister.
I don't particularly care about the fry stunt but at least Trump actually made a batch of fries, salted them, and put them in boxes. I learned the fry process hasn't change in the 23 years since I worked at the golden arches. Walz just walked around in a field holding a gun. I am going duck hunting for the first time in my life next week. Hopefully I get more shots off than he did.
Could I prove I worked at McDonalds? I assume my parents would remember. If I really had to, I could get my IT guy to throw a windows XP virtual machine on our office server, install the tax software we had in 2000 and print my tax return with statements that had McDonalds as my employer.
So while:
1. I'd also almost guarantee Kamala is lying about McDonalds employment. It's not that she can't prove it easily. It's 40 years ago, that's tough.
2. It's that the entire democrat media machine could if they wanted to.
My first job was at a soccer camp warehouse. I could easily DM Becky (her actual name) and say “hey remember when I tried to clumsily bang you after we inflated balls all morning?” She’d vouch for me.
Worked with a girl when i was 17-18. We flirted all the time. 17-18 year old me was too dumb to realize this was flirting. 15 years later ran into her “I’m liked you!” I was a dumb kid. If you run into a chick you hung out with in high school 25 years later, cool it on the jameson. Couldve done better
Back when I was engaged and living in Toledo again with the future Mrs MD, a pair of girls in our neighborhood were doing... something I can't remember that had them going door to door. They noticed my name on a mailbox in our building and knocked on our door and were surprised it was me. They had gone to high school with me, one of them was a fairly attractive flautist, and remembered I was a trumpet player and were giggling and obviously remembered me in a much more flattering light than I remembered myself in. Teen years are full of missed opportunities. I should have been plowing my way through the woodwinds section instead of moping like a loser. I don't regret it much, I did end up with my wife.
Suzi’s usually closes at 11:30 AM, which is strange for a place with “hamburgers” in its name. Great breakfast menu, though. I used to eat there with my dad (a former longtime South Charleston resident) when before we’d go to St. Albans to get his BMWs serviced. Now I’m sort of confined to the Capitol area during lunchtime.
If they cared about being fact-checked, they probably would do something like that, but when the legacy media works for them, why bother mentioning a chain that peaked in 1973 and closed in 1996, so few people under 50 (perhaps 40 within their core region) have any familiarity with or memory of?
Why couldn't she come up with an unprovable chain? Because she is not quick witted enough to come up with something like that. McDonalds was easy because it's so common, like Xerox, Kleenex, Google, etc. Her goal was to pander and appear relatable. She just lacks charisma to pull it off. It reminds me of her boasting about sitting around smoking weed in college while listening to Tupac. Years before Tupac released a track. I doubt that bitch listened to anything but NPR even back then. But the hacks who simp for her will treat this nonsense like she just parted the Red Sea so "the truth" doesn't have to factor in to the equation.
While I honestly don't care one way or another about the stunt, I don't see this any different than when any politician goes into a diner and talks to the people in that diner. Most are always staged to some extent. Sure, a Governor or senator might get away with an impromptu diner visit, but not someone running for president.
The irony is that, a secretarial error in the birth records saved the assassin Gavrilo Princip from capital punishment. But he soon died from TB.
The crowning irony is that the guy who got killed was a total Nothingburger. Never fit for the job.
The guy who should have been in that car seat, for various complex reasons, at age 30, decided to eat his revolver, after offing his 17-year old belle du jour. Messy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayerling_incident
The Princeling felt guilty about infecting his Lawfully Wedded with Syphilis, and so he hooked up with a minor to make his grand exit.
Royals.
Glad we don't have 'em. Except for the Bushes and the Kennedys and the Clintons and the rest.
Well, the royal who shot the 17-year old Baroness (or who otherwise stopped her clock) in 1889 did not have that option. Fleming published on penicillin in 1929, but there was no practical means of production until 1940.
Renewing my call to separate the racing threads from the politics ones because substack's comment system is so dire.
Jack, I'd love to hear your take on the Max/Lando incident. My personal take is: "The F1 rule that allows you to run people off on the exit if you're ahead at the apex, even if you have no chance of making the corner yourself is stupid. Max understands and exploits the rules, such as they are. They should probably fix the rules to be less exploitable"
Other F1 thoughts: Either Colapinto is a real deal talent who was langushing in obscurity, or Albon is gonna get shellacked by Sainz next year. Similar with Lawson, as you said, either he's top tier or Danny was even more washed than you thought. IMO Leclerc has made a big improvement this year. Before, he was a Ferrari man through and through and took it like the abusive relationship victim that he was. Now he's standing up for himself and showing more flashes of being champion material. Piastri should listen to whoever (Mark Webber probably) got him out of the Alpine dumpster fire and in to McLaren. I think he should stay put for 25 and try to clearly beat Lando and become #1. Prior to him being pretty anonymous in Austin, this looked reasonably likely.
It's amazing the turnaround in this season. Early on, it looked like it was just going to be a repeat of 2023. Now it's gotten downright exciting. The only thing that would make it better would be if Aston wasn't completely nowhere, and Alonso was in the mix at the front.
I thought Max’s move was pretty egregious too. I don’t think the driver on the inside should have the right to push the driver on the outside off the track on exit. If you’re required to leave room in the inside, why not be required to leave room on the outside? Your corner exit is compromised because you were too slow to stay ahead. Give them a squeeze, make them scared, but you shouldn’t get to drive like they aren’t there.
In any case, Max went four wheels off too, should that be some sort of nullifying factor? He left the track to gain an advantage.
F1 has been brilliant this season but the stewarding drives me nuts.
"If you’re required to leave room in the inside, why not be required to leave room on the outside?"
This is a function of the way F1 tracks are built now. At Mid-Ohio, for example, going off WITH the person you're PUSHING OFF is a loser for both of you, and massively so, because you'll be in grass, gravel, or a tire wall.
Max pushed him off. Lewis wouldve clipped him and put him in a wall. Watched both in the last five years. Max is a bit of a whiney bitch but i will still take him every day over sir lewis Hamilton. Youre forty. Retire dude youre old
I can more or less guarantee that there won't be political posts at the current frequency of about 2x a month on the free roundup and 1x a month on the paid roundup. God willing, there won't be that much to talk about.
This will allow some readers to mirror the late DMX's lyrics: "Then I'm out, just like the trash on a Thursday" if this makes no sense it's just something that came to mind at the end of a long day, no deep meaning implied.
Sainz is going to obliterate Albon. I'd expect to see qualifying and finishes go 10:1 in his favor. Ricciardo has also been terrible for 6 years. No defending him.
Like Jack’s father, I subscribe to the “those who can’t, teach” rule. No offense to those who see it as a calling, they are truly serving society. It is getting close to my favorite season, where teachers start begging for snow days, because work is for suckers.
Yes, no offense to teachers, but if I were negotiating with striking teachers, my answer to every teacher’s union proposal would be “You get your summers off”.
Instead, the answer is 'how much will you be giving to my Democratic reelection fund?' Public employee unions negotiate with politicians about how to split up taxpayer moneys for each other's gains. The public always loses, which is why our schools no longer teach, and our police no longer enforce the laws that make society function.
Just like Congress brokers deals between corporations and the government, calls it legislation, then the congressmen skim off the top. People always like to make an example of unfairness by calling something a loophole. Well, a loophole is nothing but a law intentionally passed by Congress.
As I learned in Illinois, it’s never left vs. right, Democrat vs. Republican, it’s ALWAYS insider vs. outsider.
Until the 1960s public sector unions were illegal, under the assumption that civil service was not an adversarial employer.
Although many government jobs are toxic, the unions' control over local politics make them a true "threat to democracy" and they need to be re-abolished.
I would say they should be able to vote anywhere but at their governmental level... so a state employee can vote for President but not Governor, and so on.
I had an argument with a leftie friend of mine back during the Chicago teachers union strike like 12 or 15 years ago. He supported them and I said they should all be fired, my perspective being that the teachers around me in Japan would never walk away from their kids. They are public employees as well, and there they are unable to strike, but none of them would if they could. Another case of duty and honor being a bit stronger there I suppose.
I was just promoted and my new position is not unionized. The union here is surprisingly run by some of the most conservative people in the county government, and my friend, the only other conservative in the office (and honestly the only one of these people I actually trust) is a big union supporter. I could never get past how my dues fall straight through the union structure into the war chest of Democrats and refused to do anything more than grudgingly be a member. My boss was afraid I would not want the non-unionized position without the union protection, but this was the first place I ever worked where I had to belong to a union. The only thing it did while I was here was protect the laziest, least competent co-worker I've had in years.
In fairness, while I think public sector unions are *a* problem, I don't think they're the *only* problem these days. The private sector labor world has a lot of problems, from overt racial, caste, and sexual discrimination in the form of DEI and widespread ethnic nepotism, general humiliating sweatshop conditions in far too many organizations, and the deliberate use of a huge army of unlimited OPT and grossly excessive H-1B, L-1, etc., work visas to absolutely bludgeon 99.5% of workers. And these problems contribute to low fertility rates.
Contributing to low fertility rates means that, under Article II element 4 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group", the situation is de facto genocide. (The UN definition technically requires "intent")
The grade school teachers in my former Illinois school district all made at least $100k, and the administrators made $250k plus with crazy extra benefit packages on top of their salaries. And they got their summers off.
I’d find grade school teachers in IL at $100k hard to believe for any but the most senior people. I live in a very generous district in Cook and most of our teachers are in the $60k range. High school teachers are much more highly compensated, at about 2x that once you hit maybe 10 years in. Administrator pay though, is absurd, not hard to be over $150k, for people who, as my BIL puts it, “spent a lot of their early career sitting Indian style.”
I formerly lived in a rich person’s school district in DuPage County. This was an area where the yearly property taxes on a new McMansion were $25k+ and went up from there. Not a lot of turn over because of the salaries, but yes, new hires didn’t make $100k to start.
I was at $7k for my 1000 sq ft DuPage shack when I left IL. I'm at $2500 in NC for 2700 sq ft on 1.25 acres. Most million dollar houses in my county would be below $5k in property taxes. Property tax savings was necessary for me in retirement. I could not afford to stay in IL once I stopped working.
I work for a small school district in rural Upstate New York. Teachers make between 75-100k, administration makes 125k and our superintendent makes close to 300k. Unfortunately, everyone else (TAs, Subs, Transportation, etc) makes minimum wage.
Anecdotal evidence, but literally one of the least intelligent students from my graduating class went on to be a Middle School teacher. Great guy but he never excelled at academics and had zero common sense.
Consequently, he's the only one of our friends with literally zero baggage. We tried to get him to run as a State Rep.
I started both The Cat who Walks through Walls and The Illiad and have sadly not finished them. I still have ambitions to get through them and The Odyssey before the end of the year. Our kids all read, too, although these days it's mostly shit for school. I did get through Moby Dick back in January, though.
I usually have 1-3 books from the library at a time in my house, placed at various reading spots. I can get 90% of books I come across online or recommended here in ACF through the state wide NC library system. The main benefit of not watching TV.
I should try some classics as you are doing, great idea.
Yes, Michigan has the MeL so we can get pretty much anything from anywhere else in the state, too. It's a great system, and it's also benefitted our kids.
When I realized that High School MD was wrong about Hemingway, I started trying to read stuff that was in those "100 books you must read before you die" lists. Some of it I'm just not interested in, but others have really impressed me. CS Lewis' Till We Had Faces is one of my absolute favorites. I always look for that at used book stores. Eventually I want a copy for my own bookshelf.
Sounds a lot like hobbies and professions. I would not want to be a wedding and portrait photographer, yet have fun finding the right light setup for a fly. There are people out there who profess to having fun with spreadsheets. I doubt they would want to work spreadsheets every day, year after year.
Many great coaches were never that good at playing football while many where stars or at the least above average players. I think that saying in my own personal experience is simply not that true. I've known too many people that are excellent at what they do and are very good teachers.
I have fond memories of reading Son of Man as a horny 15 year old. I'm curious Jack if you ever read Dahlgren and what you thought of it. I find myself coming back to it every 10 years or so.
I hated it. Delany could write, and on the micro scale the book is fine, but when you dress something up as science fiction, trading any pretense of rationality for a clever structure is not a good idea. Read his other books instead. (Agree with your take on "Gateway," by the way.)
Open Racing Thread: FORMULA DRIFT 2024 FINALE! I'll get right to it; James Deane is now the first ever 4 time FD champion. I expected a fight to the end between him and Odi Backchis, but apparently Deane's points lead was great enough that simply leaving the start line in Top32 at Irwindale was enough to lock it in. Needless to say, I tuned out after that announcement because it was painfully anti climactic. Deane went on to win the event outright, and was joined on the podium by usual suspects Fredrick Aasbo and Connor Shanahan. Congrats to James for making FD history, team RTR for 2 in a row, and Nitto Tire for 5(!) in a row!
I guess I'll jump into the politics stuff today, too. I want to start by saying I find both presidential candidates indefensible, and if there was ever a time to have a vote of no-confidence, that time is now. Trump has said Christians won't have to vote again in four years if he is elected now, and more recently, said he would use the United States military against "the enemies within" our very nation. Both of these statements should be cause for great concern no matter what your thoughts are about guns or gays (I support rights for both of those by the way). I will grant that the former statement about not needing to vote again in 4 years is vague; he did not say WHY or HOW that might occur, but even suggesting the idea is worrisome. The latter, more recent statement suggests Trump would use our nation's military against domestic political opponents, or anyone perceived to be "against" him and his political goals. "Enemies within" is again rather vague, so I don't think it's unreasonable to think about that possibility. I truly believe this is a dangerous idea whether you find yourself aligned with him or not. I read comments all over the internet (ACF included) that the current administration is already doing this. That may well be the case, and I will not defend those actions if it is. I'll ask one question before moving over to Harris; how many morals and policies must one agree with Trump on to look past this blatant intention to abuse the power of the presidency? My answer is: none.
Harris cannot be trusted. It's plainly clear she's putting on a different front to whatever crowd she happens to be in front of. I especially despise her strategy for holding (and greatly profiting from) her old DA position, and I don't care how many times I'm told "SHE DIDN'T KNOW THOSE UNRELEASED, CONVITCED OF HAVING A PINNER BLACK GUYS WERE STILL STAMPING LISCENSE PLATES AND MAKING THE PRISON COMPANY MONEY, IT WAS ALL PEOPLE BELOW HER!" I simply do not buy it. She failed far too many people and now she thinks it's a joke, and that is simply repulsive. As for if she (or someone else behind the scenes because apparently she doesn't actually do the job she's assigned to) would ALSO directly use the nation's military against domestic political opponents the way Trump suggests he would, I wouldn't put it past her (or "them").
I don't think we should vote D or R in this election. Neither should be trusted, neither is defensible. I am not going to be happy with any result in 2 weeks, and I suspect the fallout after any result will be brutal enough to make me quit the internet for a yet-unspecified amount of time. I'm so happy to be in my late 20s right now <sarcasm>.
Manafort just got out of jail. Bannon is still there. Rudy is bankrupt. Roger Smith got full on SWATed. Trump has been enduring incessant lawfare and *got shot*. Two others tried. Dozens still in the J6 gulag.
Who did Trump go after, ever, let alone successfully?
Of course there are enemies within: almost all of Congress and the alphabet agencies.
I agree there is political warfare happening, and I don't support it; but is the Army, Marines, Air Force, and/or Navy being deployed in these instances?
Are you suggesting the person who whiffed Trump in the ear was enlisted in the United States armed forces under the direction of Joe Biden, and the would-be golf course assassin was as well? Trump may not have done similar things in the past but he is now plainly saying he intends to do so. What I'M saying, is that such actions should not be tolerated by either political party or by the American people. Trump will simply flip who these actions are taken against, and while I can see you one might believe that would be justified, that will not actually fix anything.
Henry, please believe me when I tell you I don't need to be convinced the democratic party is full of bad people and does bad things. I already belive that. I just want to make my belief clear that Donald Trump isn't the answer to our nation's woes, and it is my belief we should not accept him OR Harris as the next POTUS.
'Lawfare' refers to the legal wranglings in several states and DOJ for quibbles in politics that have gone on in one form or another, well, forever. The ones that could still land him in jail.
Rhetoric was ramped up by the left to at least encourage the assassination attempts. Whether there was a true SS standdown or simply historically gross incompetence is left to the reader.
His policies are barely center right. Every fantastical potential threat he is accused of doing or planning, the left has actually, literally done. Legal persecution of political opponents. Violently putting down protests and jailing protesters. Inciting WW3. It's mind boggling.
Henry, I'm not denying that the democratic party did those things already, never did. I'm pointing out that Trump is now saying - plainly, verbatim, not even hiding it- that he intends to do those same things, and I don't think we should be OK with that just because he'll do it to the people who once did it to him. Does that make sense?
That horse has left the barn. He doesn't have it in him anyway.
I think he does; why make such statements if he doesn't have the guts to follow through with them in the end?
When you deliberately create a mass-media environment for society to soak in, and call people you don't like "Hitler," you're responsible for any violent acts the easily-swayed and the mentally-unhinged commit against those people.
Sure, but it is still not sending a SEAL team to take someone out or arrest them.
Just calll them the kgb and it is all fine
The cia and fbi are and the national guard has already been deployed against americans. This isn’t new
Fantastic interview with Manafort on Tucker’s channel. He makes some interesting comparisons to this race and the Reagan / Carter race.
Be the other side has to be above it! This is how you lose. I get principles but if you stick to your principles while the other guys cheats, you're not principled, you’re literally a loser. Throw them all in jail first, then arrange a truce
Your final statement is part of what I want, but I don't want a truce; I want a reset on every federal position, I want the elimination of both major political parties, I want the elimination of all PACs, and I want them to be replaced with at least 4 new parties that aren't allowed to accept "donations" from anything besides an individual voter. I know this will never happen and probably can't happen, so please don't feel the need to tell me how naive I am because I'm well aware.
That’s part of the negotiation. It’s not gonna happen in my lifetime
There's nothing wrong with having a decent vision for the country. Naive or not.
The thing that always annoyed me about Formula D is that every driver is Bob Rooney.
What I mean is that in "Married: With Children," Al had a friend named Bob Rooney. That's what everyone called him - "Bob Rooney." Never "Bob." Or "Robert." Or "Rooney." No, it was always "Bob Rooney."
That's how the announcers in Formula D always refer to the drivers - by their full names. It's weird and off-putting. I'm surprised they don't call the Japanese drivers "-san."
There's a tendency for at least one NASCAR announcer to refer to Shane Van Gisbergen as SVG. Why this five-syllable name would need to be abbreviated when AJ Allmendinger or Joey Logano are not is quite beyond me.
All his friends know him as Shaaaaaayyyne
Easiest solution for this is to watch the pure action edit they post to YouTube later on
Bob Rooney approves of this comment.
MotoGP at Philip Island is worth watching purely for the showcase of Marc Marquez' incredible skill in variable/less than optimal conditions.
Jorge Martin on pole position, Marquez second, Vinales third, Bez fourth, and Bagnaia down in fifth, and Raul Fernandez sixth. Quartaro had horrendous rear chatter and didn't make Q2.
At the start of the sprint Marquez and Martin got away well, but an error put Marquez back into 11th or so at the end of turn 1. Martin would squeeze on speed and get into a comfortable lead and victory. Marquez, on the other hand, would slice his way through traffic to engage in battles on his way to second place. Enea Bastianini had an acceptable race and pushed past vinales and bez to finish third. Bez and Vinales would scrap for several laps until Vinales put the nail in Bez down the main straight. Bez would then blow his braking and slam into the back of Maverick at high speed putting them both out of the race. Thankfully, both riders were okay. Bagnaia swept to a fourth place finish and lost six points to Martin (-16). Pedro Acosta high sided into a DNF and would hurt his ligaments to where he was medically disqualified due to concern about serious injury in the event of another crash.
In the race proper Marc Marquez would have an awful start replete with wheelspin all thanks to his own visor tearoff blowing under his rear tire. He would then put on an incredible show for the entire race - aggressive in the first few laps to put him in contention for the podium. Then he would take advantage of Martin and Bagnaia fighting to barge into first place. Martin hung on for quite a few laps before having a few scares and relenting on pace to see Marquez disappear into the distance. Marquez first, Martin second, and Bagnaia a lonely third (with a fast closing Digiantonnio) for a four point gain to Martin (-20).
This weekend is Thailand.
Pinned, thank you!
Didn't see this anywhere else. Keke Rosburg 1982 WDC in a Williams.
Williams itself finished 4th.
I have no idea how I knew that (I had to look up the exact year) as I was not paying attention to F1 at the time.
THANK YOU!
Pinned.
1982 was a bad year for F1,with the deaths of Gilles in practice at Zolder and Paletti at the start in Montreal as well as Pironi mangling his legs that put an end to his championship chances and career during qualifying at the old Hockenheimring.
"she's choking"
old habits die hard it seems
If she choked in that case she never would have been DA. “Im kamala harris and i have no gag reflex”
throat goat for prez
Cogently stated -- and that explains why she's in the catbird seat. What I'm hoping to hear is someone who has supported her for a while explain why she's the best lady for the gig... the way I eagerly could and would for, say, Tulsi Gabbard.
"best" or even "someone who should get a phone screen"
Roy Cooper, NC Governor or Beshear. Generic center-left Dems with no controversies or high-profile fuckups. Not weird (Kelly is off-putting) and electable. No national profiles, but a billion dollar fundraising effort can mitigate that. Dems tend to win with personable, southern, center-left governors.
Pelosi and Obama should have given the Democrat delegates a choice or at least the appearance of one. The fact still remains that the current Veep has never received a single Democrat delegate vote and a quickie "primary" lasting 10 days or a fortnight would have at least given the appearance of the Dem leadership nodding at "democracy". Then the leadership could anoint Kamala Hamas and call it good.
I think there are D's sitting out this election due to that anointment but I have no evidence.
The people who support the terrible candidate who isn't my terrible candidate aren't my opponents. That's what I think we need to tell our children.
A whole lot of people can't really make compelling cases for their beliefs or opinions about, well, anything. And while it would be great if they could, they don't have to. It isn't your job to convince me you're right, or that I should agree with you. Life isn't always fuckin' combat.
'Life isn't always fuckin' combat.'
Succinctly and accurately stated. I'll amend it to be
'Life isn't always fuckin' combat because millions of men have labored to keep it from always being fuckin' combat."
I couldn't agree with this more however I greatly fear that should Trump be declared the victor funded and non-funded violent protests will break out that make the summer of 2020 look like an extended July 4th community picnic.
My money is on Kamala being elected with 99 million votes in the safest and most secure election ever conducted... and there never being a Republican president again. The next non-Democrat president will be from whatever splinter faction the Free Palestine kids cook up.
They’ll split the Dem party within 4 years. Ilhan Omar is biding her time.
If you have committed to viewing the world through the lens of identity politics, Kamala is a much more compelling figure than Biden ever could be. Or indeed than most of the people in the higher echelons of the DNC.
The disconnect is that the identity politics lens is not the way most of the country views the world or their fellow man. So you have a bunch of white people with advanced degrees in utter shock that working class black people and especially working class hispanics are thoroughly skeptical of Harris.
I imagine that what fills their thought bubble is "But she's like you!" to which I'm sure the thought bubble on the other side is "How the fuck do you figure that?"
They are quite literally viewing the world through entirely different lenses. I'm reminded of the joke about someone who expressed their tolerance for other opinions who was nevertheless utterly scandalized to find out that there *were* other opinions.
There's 2 things I just can't stand: People who are intolerant of other cultures, and the Dutch!
In my opinion that is one of the funnier movie lines ever.
I get the reference, but I also previously worked for a company with multiple offices in The Netherlands, and I will strongly affirm that while it was a good joke, Autin Powers was more right than most people know about hating the Dutch.
They're in the middle of suiciding via migration cuckery so you needn't worry about them. Shame. They were the most beautiful people.
The migration problem there is interesting to me because my experience was that once I got off the coast, everyone I met was quite racist there. One of the offices used to send out an annual Christmas photo with someone in blackface dressed as Sinterklaas. Even before our current woke culture it was a tough look for an international business.
You are right about the looks, they are beautiful people and country.
if it makes anyone feel better theyre far from the only ones
Those perfidious, Lovecraftian fish-human hybrids who mock God by their very existence.
Apologies if any of the readers happen to be Dutch.
You’re not tilting at windmills, apparently!
"The Dutch", said with disgust, is the shorthand my dad and I use with each other when we just hate something for the sake of hating.
Hasn't gotten old in 20 years.
i mean if i remeber correctly the exit polls last election from nonwhites was basically democrat in every state so its not like there isnt some basis to that
might be wrong of course
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13997111/msnbc-alex-wagner-hispanic-republicans-trump.html
"One voter, who is from a Guatemalan migrant family, said that immigration was his primary reason, claiming the crisis on the border was making people like him 'look bad.' "
makes me lol every time
"While Harris enjoys a healthy 14 point advantage from Latinos, it's much lower than past Democratic presidential candidates"
no surprises there
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/
Our Chief Security (IT) Officer at work is Venezuelan and the things he’ll say about migrants would make a Klansman blush.
Familiarity breeds contempt.
A ten percent move among the non-white population results in a landslide for Trump, if they let him have it.
which is fine if that happens and thats who you want to win
but where does that leave the next election given immigration rates illegal or otherwise and are the people voting for trump doing so because of the man or the party
People vote for party, people vote for candidate, people vote for issues. Firmly against non citizens voting.....hell, in a perfect world only property owners would vote but that won't happen. The reason I jumped in at this point is just to point out people have minds regardless of what they look like and race means less than they would have us believe.
While Trump is making an honest effort to ingratiate himself to the working class, Kamala was busy cozying up withe Cheney family which has long been in bed with the global industrial complex. Quite the contrast and really shows what candidate has the American people's best interest in mind.
It is pretty stark to watch the most identifiably corrupt and morally bankrupt figures in the DC constellation line up behind Kamala and for them to actually think it's a win to talk about it. "Dick Cheney endorses me!"
If I found out that Dick Cheney endorsed me I'd contemplate starting my next shotgun class by demonstrating the Kurt Cobain drill. I wouldn't be telling anyone about it.
It also rather makes the point that the system is kayfabe but unifies when shit gets real like a real outside threat to their power emerging.
People like Dick Cheney endorsing a candidate is a good enough reason to NOT vote for them, regardless of policy position.
Yeah. Cheney is and always was a demon in human flesh. The broken clock of the ultra-wacko left was right about that, and continues to be right about it.
We can agree on that.
I kinda/sorta get campaigning with Liz, but I'm pretty stunned that she's parading around Dick Cheney. She gains almost no one and loses a ton. That's uniquely tone-deaf.
There's a particular brand of DNC campaign strategist who thinks that there is still a moderate wing of the Republican party that a) exists in meaningful numbers at all b) is just begging for a chance to vote Democrat and c) thinks parading around any current/former GOP office-holder is the key to winning those people. Dick Cheney, being a former vice president is a huge get for them. They are too dumb, too Sorkin-brained, or just plain too fucking useless to recognize that the guy who you can trace every sin the US has committed since 9/12/2001 back to is the very person who you do NOT want the endorsement of.
Kamala's campaign went off the rails a bit because of those very people a couple months ago. The DNC is a very stupid entity who cannot connect with a base to save their lives, even when they have someone likable to use for just that purpose. Waltz was gaining quite a bit of ground with the "weird" stuff and his general affability to regular people and they nerfed him. He did just call Elon a prancing dipshit though, which is fun and back in character.
True.
Dems think politics is Sorkin, when - in fact - it's Mark Twain.
Nothing i despise more than people who think movies (and plays) are real life
'He did just call Elon a prancing dipshit though, which is fun and back in character'
Note that the homophobia of "prancing" in this context, which would be fatal to a Red Teamer, is thoughtfully waived for Walz, the same way Biden got away with "You ain't black". It really helps to have a state media... ask FDR, this isn't a new state of affairs, I suppose!
This is why I feel that way: let me tell you a tale of two well-known and well-loved journalists who both used the word "pansy" in print. The first one, in 2015. The second one, in 2021. Nobody cared about the first incident but the second one nearly cost two people their jobs. The goalposts are moving, and they are moving past someone like Walz who learned his bantz in the Army.
Gonna second Larry C on this one. Massive, massive reach on your part. Trump could have said it and only the insane on the left would've sid anything about the verb "prancing" to be homphobic.
If he said "prancing like a girl" or "prancing like a fairy" or something to that effect, sure absolutely. He said prancing like a dipshit. Dipshit is not a derogatory term for homosexuals.
See above:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/maryland-gubernatorial-candidate-draws-criticism-for-suggesting-his-gay-opponent-prances/2018/03/29/06fa42d4-337a-11e8-8abc-22a366b72f2d_story.html
Paywalled so I didn't read the whole thing. I think that the criticism there is still ridiculous, however there is a difference between saying an openly gay man is "prancing" and saying Elon Musk is a dipshit.
Pranicng in THAT context can be construed as homphobic because it is ascribing a feminine trait to a gay man in such a way as to demean him. You're being deliberately obtuse here.
Not to stoop as low as whataboutism, but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch:
https://archive.is/thGTa
"whataboutism" is often used to cover for very reasonable assertions of hypocrisy. And not in the hypocrisy of not always living up to one's highest ideals, but intellectual hypocrisy.
But yes, your example above is EXCELLENT.
Seems like rotten character for someone who was the high school advisor for the gay student body.
Yeah those two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other. "Prancing" is not a homophobic word in that context.
Bullshit. Someone in that position would never use that effeminate term or call someone weird over and over or make some joke about fucking a sofa but he does that because that is his character.
Ok.
I'm not going to argue with you. Enjoy having the moral high ground with *waves towards every third thing that comes out of Trump's mouth*
Kamala's political career started with a dick and ended up with Dick.
Don’t forget that Dick Cheney was in a wheel chair at the end of the Bush administration and was near death. He had a mechanical heart and who knows what other organs replaced. And it is now 16 years later and he is still around. Sound like anyone else’s we know, Anakan Skywalker cough cough. Oh also Liz was hired by the University of Virginia as a Professor of Practice for a couple hundred grand of Virginia taxpayers dollars and we all thought she was from Wyoming….
"Similarly, those of you who preferred Trump over the other Republican candidates are encouraged to make your case for him on a basis of policy or governance"
How about: Not starting more wars, and actively trying to end our involvement in existing ones. That alone is probably the biggest and most consistent differentiator between Trump and any other R running for president since Ron Paul and later his son Rand. But even the Pauls couldn't deliver a dressing down of the Bush family and their disastrous handling of pre-post 9/11 and then the Iraq war the way Trump did in South Carolina that one night in 2015. "Jeb is a mess."
My argument for Trump is very simple: The alternatives to Trump up to this point have been Bushes, Romneys, and McCains...all of whom I would sooner strap to a rocket and fire into the sun than allow near any sort of power.
Is that an option? We have the rockets again.
NO NO NO. Why waste a good rocket when trebuchets and the Grand Canyon exist.
They come back now! Don't have to go all the way to the sun, I think the atmosphere will take care of it.
The trebuchet will sound funnier to a Looney Tunes soundtrack.
Tell me more about the resistance to McCain. I don't hear him lumped in with the Bushes or Romneys often, so I'm curious.
Incessant warmonger, odd if only that he had intimate experience.
In my mind, for some reason, I always remember him as voting * against * the Iraq war. I keep forgetting how much he cheered it on. Probably because the most hawkish Iraq person I recall is Hillary.
My reaction to McCain is, and has always been,
https://youtu.be/VJJ8iTalwDE?si=4g9s2pOBZtvVB7BO&t=125
Easily Tom’s best role. Brilliant
McCain was an even bigger foaming-at-the-mouth warhawk. Crazy to me how much all of the neo-cons have been rehabilitated in the minds of mainstream democrats, it makes me really question the sincerity of their anti-war positions in the early 00s, or if it was all just politics as usual. I guess they were "adults" who didn't say silly/mean things, they just got thousands killed and maimed and racked up trillions in debt!
He tried to bury the investigation into POWs that we left behind in Vietnam. You'd think for how much he trotted out his own POW story that he would have done the complete opposite. It spoke a lot to the man's character (or lack there of) that he was more than willing to sell his brothers in arms up the river in order to protect the image of the state.
If he wasn't the Manchurian candidate, he wasn't far. And he put up the most feeble fight in Presidential election history. About half of his debate time was basically shilling for Obama.
Massive WARMONGER and extreme OPEN BORDERS proponent.
Where does DeSantis fall? I have many friends in FL and even the die hard D's admit that he gets things done.
DeSantis needs to stay where he is, doing the best job he can do where he is needed.
DeSantis makes Florida a good place to live, because God knows the climate and the scenery don't.
No car inspections, no income tax, fairly reasonable speed limits...
DeSantis needs to reign in those ridiculous dealer fees for new car sales in FL. Disclosure, I am not from FL, but when I was doing new car purchase research, I learned about how typical dealer fees there can be $1k. Daylight robbery! I guess the dealer lobby groups are just too good to turn down.
Don’t get me wrong I admire all the great work that DeSantis has done but he is not user friendly. If you remember there were people that despised Reagan’s policies but I have never heard, from even his detractors that he was not a nice and personable individual. DeSantis unfortunately has the interpersonal skills of sandpaper. We can love his policies but the person not do much. This is the one reason DeSantis will never be president, he does not have the personal touch that you need to get people to at least think about voting for you. IMHO
DeSantis is an operations guy, he's the one who makes the trains run on time and can clear the way so that people can get things done. Every governor in the country should study how he handles natural disasters and adopt his playbook.
This is why I was so shocked at what a lifeless, inept primary campaign DeSantis ran. I would have gladly voted for either him or Trump in the general election and did not understand the vitriol between DeSantis and Trump primary supporters.
I found energy independence and the first real rise in wages in decades to be pretty good reasons to justify my impending Trump vote, too.
Upon further reflection, I don't actually know about his current platform. It's probably not the best thing to do, base my vote upon previous results, but what else am I going to do? I'm not voting for more illegal immigration, more wars, higher energy costs, etc etc... Where's our Javier Milei? I want that man.
Funny thing is I am materially better off in every single way since Biden took office. I just make a lot more money now but the wife and I were eating dinner the other day and I remarked "I can't believe a burrito and a torta are $36. $18 for a burrito is insane"
Prices have done up 50-60% in 4 years because the money printer went brr and both parties are to blame for that.
It was a big burrito with extra meat and guacamole. It was big. Used to cost $12
$20 an hour labor, that’s what’s in that thing. At least out here in California.
This is true for us as well, we're officially middle-class for the first time since leaving our parents' houses as of maybe 2022. Both parties are to blame for this mess, I haven't forgotten how Trump was president at the start of cov-insanity.
I like being the only government employee who likes Javier Milei. Of course, I don't fear the unknown and we'd figure out what to do if I had to find a new job. Even if it was as fry cook at a McD's. I probably wouldn't be as good at it as Trump, though.
You are correct that both parties closed the country (Covidiocy) and made the money printer go brr, but one party wanted the country reopened promptly and the other party wanted the country to remain closed, forcing the money printer to continue going brr.
Hell, Trump wanted it reopened by Easter 2020. But by that time, "YOU JUST WANNA KILL GRANNY" had taken root. Had Trump forced the issue, they'd have impeached him for dereliction of duty.
We can never shut down our economy again. No matter what calamity strikes, you and I have to get up and go to work, like Londoners during the Blitz. Money printer must stop going brr.
"Covidiocy" was continuing behavior that was contradicted by data. The initial shutdown was a reasonable response and saved lives. However, it was supposed to last a couple of weeks. At first.
A similar shutdown may be a reasonable response to a future pandemic with a higher R value and fatality rate. The hard part, now, will be believing it when the government says so.
My problem with Trump on the whole "wars" thing is that his policy, or the policy his handlers peddle, isn't necessarily all that pragmatic. I also think that many isolationists/nationalists won't accept that we as a country can do two things at once: We can take care of our needs here and we can support our allies.
There seems however to be a growing sense in the populist movement that believes there are never national interests, never ever, for supporting any of our allies. This really isn't true.
Define "national interest" and please make sure to differentiate between what's good for the rank and file American and what's good for politicians' and American corporate pockets. What is the national interest in vehemently supporting Israel and creating decades and generations worth of Muslims who hate our guts? The weapons the Israelis buy from us? Shifting to Ukraine: I get the interest of people looking to make a buck. Antagonizing Russia to the point that Europe has to cut themselves off from their cheap energy and hook themselves up to more of our supplies. And doubly so when we've also crippled their industrial output by way of this energy situation and also have them buy plenty of new weapon systems from us. That's like a win/win/win/win for the American companies involved and the congress critters they fund.
What was the national interest in us kicking off the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War?
'What was the national interest in us kicking off the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War?'
Wasn't it Albright who said, "what good is this military if we don't use it"?
Oh she's next to Henry all right, saying 'Damn, it's hot. Hey, where's Hitler'.
hes looking down on them
I think I've had this fight with you before.......
The Muslims would hate America's guts even if America withdrew all support from Israel and shut the nation down. Muslims are Antichristian. Israel is a useful proxy for weakening Muslim nations with minimum commitment of US personel.
The same also applies with Russia and Ukraine although the threat to Christian nations is not as obvious. Communism is a Godless and therefore Antichristian ideology and its proponents, including Ms Harris are always fighting against any Christian nation.
The Soviet Union has been dead since the eighties. The current RF has been pushing a return to Orthodoxy and with it natalism. It is Ukraine that is currently banning it and jailing priests.
Luke needs a software update so to speak.
I wouldn't deny that!
History does repeat itself though. I was reading Dickens the other day and his descriptions of society could have been written today.
Some would say the Anglican/Orthodox/Roman churches are Antichristian. At this stage I would say Christ is still able to use them to spread the gospel but they will be used by the Antichrist in the end.
Douglas Adams was probably right when he was describing the president of the galaxy or the universe or whatever in that guidebook he wrote.........
Lando is soft and he's too prone to mistakes to ever win a championship, I also find him slightly annoying in the meme clips I've seen of him online racing and whatnot (I'm annoying, too, so I don't really hold that against him). I was hoping for a season where the points lead changes week to week and we have no idea who will be champion, but Verstappen has earned my respect and I'd rather see him win every single time than any of the other softies on the grid. Even dragging the dead weight of that stupid Red Bull car around, he's still 57 points out in front and no one will catch him. Easily the finest driver of the current crop and I hope he wins this year and next year, too.
The high octane copium being peddled on NPR is hilarious. Pathetic even.
Trump was showing off a letter supposedly sent from McD corporate that they had no record of Kammy working there.
Defrocked Congressman Santos is claiming he will drop news tomorrow to kill her campaign. Now, pound of salt aside, I will piss my pants laughing if that degenerate clown is who puts the final stake in.
"Trump was showing off a letter supposedly sent from McD corporate that they had no record of Kammy working there"
trump is a meme machine and i hope this continues after he gets into office
Maybe the real election was the memes we made along the way.
theyre going to be so good when he wins considering he wont be concerned about reelection and hes not banned on twitter anymore
IF Trump wins, there will be enough salt mined to cover Michigan roads for the next 20 winters.
Just what our cars need, great! I suspect that'll happen no matter what result we get in 2 weeks.
the salt here is so bad ive decided to forgo oil spraying the underside of my car in lieu of just ripping the rear main seal out and letting that work its magic
One reason I am voting for Trump is the entertainment value. Worked for me in 2016 too.
the meme machine cometh
Hi, Jack.
Hillary lost (in part) because she surrounded herself with Yes-People who lacked the brains and the balls to tell her to campaign in the Northern Midwest, to shore up the "Blue Wall," rather than give in to her hubristic and vainglorious decision to "Take the Fight to Trump" by campaigning in Arizona. The New Yorker's post-mortem of Hillary's Campaign's "Own Goals" was breathtaking, especially if you are a former political operative. She was paying like $6 million to some clown who did not know or who briefly forgot that the California D primary was "Winner Take All." But when the guy said that at a meeting... nobody spoke up, because that guy had been picked by Hillary.
BTW, I am very surprised that I have seen no commentary this season on the "Bradley-Dinkins Effect." That's where Persons of Color or in cases women Overperform on Polling and then Underperform on Voting Day.
That's because among a sizeable minority of Polling Respondents, the need for Social Approval and the instinct for Conflict Avoidance are stronger than the value they put on Truth Telling. "OK, but it was only a 'White Lie.'" (That's a pun!) "I didn't want the pollster to think I was a racist."
But the Laugh Out Loud Funny aspect of this election, to my jaundiced eyes, is that this time around, it will be BLACK MEN who are telling the "Bradley-Dinkins White Lie"!!!!! "Yeah, sure, bro. Kammy all the way!" And then they silently leave that section of the ballot blank; or they vote for Trump.
In German culture of the past couple of hundred years, there's a catchphrase that "Women have to take care of the Three Ks." (Or the Four Ks, or the Five Ks.) Hitler was BIG on the Three Ks: "Kinder, Küche, Kirche " Kids, Kitchen, and Church. And, women were supposed to confine themselves to those activities. I think that a non-trivial number of African-American men might be tempted to non-vote in favor of traditional gender role models. Along with not paying for gender reassignment surgery.
This election might be one for the Political Science History Books. The Chapter will be called, "How Many Ways Can You F Up an Election You Should Have Had In the Bag?"
Jack, I am with you on Josh Shapiro, and I believe that that was all about Israel.
For me, Ukraine is the Alpha and the Omega. The last time Western Civilization was under the gun like this was along the road to Tours, France, on Friday, October 10, AD 732.
Please pray for our Republic, and for Ukraine, and for Israel.
john
The last person I remember talking about the B-D effect was Rush Limbaugh. He was a partisan (aren’t we all!) but he wasn’t afraid of the truth as he saw it.
In the UK, they call it "The Shy Voter." I like that.
But what has never happened, as far as I know, in a US election, is that we have a plausible scenario where it is Black Men telling the "Bradley-Dinkins White Lie."
The Democratic Cabal had to stay up very late one night to come up with that genius move.
john
In the current environment where you are a racist, misogynist or one of many other derogatory descriptors for voting for Trump, I would not be surprised at all that the results are far different than the polls show. People don’t want to deal with the hostility that the left is openly promoting.
In my red county of 120k people, 21k people have already voted in only 7 days of early voting. They had to reconfigure the street access to the voting site because of the increased traffic. My county has not voted for a Dem president since FDR.
Yep here in what the Nashville free rag has called the center of White Christian Nationalism we had to wait 45 minutes to vote last week and the cops had to handle overflow parking.
I had to tweak a friend by asking him why I had never heard him say Christian Nationalism before this year.
But I’ve also asked older leftists how many transgendered people they went to school with growing up.
Rush was the first person I can remember who had the guts to publically, openly mock - ON PRINCIPLE - environmentalists, feminists, militant homosexuals, race hustlers, communist academics, "homeless advocates" and the rest of the Army of Darkness.
He gored sacred cows like there was no tomorrow, and gave a lot of people the courage to do the same.
"Hitler was BIG on the Three Ks: "Kinder, Küche, Kirche " Kids, Kitchen, and Church."
be great if we had someone like that who was that concerned with the wellbeing of the country its people and their future
We do have plenty of politicians throughout the West who care DEEPLY the about Indian kids and the Muslim church!
they dont seem particularly concerned where they get their immigrants from they just want as many as possible as soon as possible
bc is full of chinese for example
also the prevalence of muslim churches thing seems to be a perversion of the freedom of religion idea which would be something that would work just fine if everyone was either catholic or protestant
BC TFR is dropping below 1.0 (2.2 is required for population stability). It's not the Great Replacement Theory propagated by White Supremacists, it's...Replacement Migration per the United Nations:
https://press.un.org/en/2000/20000317.dev2234.doc.html
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/412547
gdp must go up at any cost
i hate everyone involved
Should foreign labor count toward GDP, given that the "D" is "Domestic"?
And it's going down on a per capita basis, which is what matters:
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-immigration-per-capita-gdp
Canada's high immigration is driving down per-capita GDP: report
Canada's GDP has contracted. And a new report says it might be driven in part by high immigration levels
I don't really understand how replacing 100 IQ Canadians with 63 IQ Punjabis is supposed to INCREASE GDP anyway.
Speed, blame the Crown for only signing a 99 year lease on Hong Kong. I have been told by several knowledgeable Canadians that 747s were flying full east bound and empty west bound in the months before the handover and Vancouver’s native language now is Chinese.
im not saying that didnt increase the population of chinese in vancouver but there was a huge amount of them before that and it wound up creating problems for that area
I'm surprised countries didn't bid for ex-Hong Kong folk.
My memory of the history of this is a bit hazy, but wasn't the major impetus for freedom of religion the Thirty Years War and the whole Catholic vs. Protestant thing?
quite possibly
i had a feeling it was an extremely old concept the true reason for why we have it being long forgotten and how we ended up with mosques everywhere
A case can be made that Islam is not exactly a religion but a global political movement.
Hi, the idea of "Cuius regio, eius religio," which freely translates to "Who has the realm, they choose the religion" was first put into action at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555.
That settled warfare between Catholics and Protestants that was internal to the German part of the Holy Roman Empire. So, from 1555, "Cuius regio" stood as an example, but nobody was imitating it.
Part of the problem was that Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was also King Charles 1 of Spain, and... Spain claimed Holland as part of its empire. So, there was the 80 Years war and then the 30 Years War and the Wars of the Spanish Succession.
The eventual settlement of the 30 Years War (1648) is generally regarded as the first long-lasting foothold Freedom of Religion got. Roger Williams founded the First Baptist Church in America in Rhode Island in 1638 after leaving Massachusetts because of it lack of "Soul Liberty."
Williams published his book on Freedom of Religion in 1644. Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of that book, so there is a very directly line from Roger Williams' Winter Journey to the US Bill of Rights.
john
Thanks. The point I was trying for in replying to Speed was that relations between Protestants and Catholics was bad enough to be the inspiration for the modern view of freedom of religion, not that freedom of religion only works among sufficiently similar religions, which I, possibly mistakenly, took to be the core of Speed's point. My memory was not sufficient for the task, so thank you for the excellent summary.
Can we agree to edit your comment to remove "like that?" There are good things that can be said about Hitler, including that he liked animals, but overall not a good role model.
nope
not sure why youre asking when ive specifically highlighted a desirable characteristic of him and not a wholesale endorsement of everything he did and thought
also im not sure if removing "like that" would make it less grammatically correct but i barely passed english class so ill defer to someone else on that
Fair enough.
Informative post, but I take issue with the "Should Have Had In the Bag."
Completely leaving aside the _non copos mentis_ executive (and the VP's treasonous failure to execute her 24th Amerndment duty), the Afghanistan Withdrawal Debacle ALONE should have brought down this administration (if not the party), or the migrants sleeping in O'Hare, or any of hundreds of the other party-ending disasters of a similar magnitude that they have created on a monthly basis.
It's terrifying that the race was ever this close.
Well, my "should have" goes all the way back to Biden's Day One.
It also is obvious to me that Biden's biggest mistake was running with TRUMP'S Afghanistan Withdrawal Plan. It was TRUMP'S plan. Biden made the stupidest such Presidential mistake since JFK's non-critical acceptance of Eisenhower's Bay of Pigs Invasion Plan. Right. A couple of thousand briefly trained Cuban Civilians (many of whom were rich kids and not very suited for military action) up against 40,000 trained professional soldiers backed up by Soviet fighter jets. Kennedy foolishly decided that it had to be a good plan because Eisenhower hadn't bothered to throw it in the trash can. JFK was too busy porking Fiddle and Faddle, "the White House Dogs," I guess.
BTW, my mother's only brother was in charge of Training for the Bay of Pigs. And my only son served six deployments in Afghanistan.
john
Trump's plan involved an orderly withdrawal and retaining Bagram Air Base, not just handing billions of advanced weapons systems over to the Taliban.
And what’s seldom mentioned is that Trump’s plan was conditioned based and not date based.
Further inexplicable was Biden-Harris’s claim they had no choice when they spent the first days of their administration undoing everything they possibly could have Trump’s.
The foreign policy collapses of the Biden administration are getting what I think of as a "reverse Vietnam". During the Vietnam war, the United States won battle after battle, but it was always portrayed as a losing fight, right up to the point that Nixon ensured that it would be one.
Every Gen Xer should ask themselves, quickly and without research: "Who won the Tet Offensive?" I bet you remember it as a loss. It was taught that way in school. In fact it was an overwhelming material, body count, and land control defeat for the Communists.
I was a junior in college before I had a professor who explained that to me. Real eye-opener.
Tet scared the shit out of the "Journalists" so they assumed that the battle was lost and proceeded to make it truthy.
An old CBC series on that war stated the clusterfuck succinctly for me by noting that the Air Force gave civilian command a top 100 list of targets and command ordered them to start with #100 instead of #1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam:_The_Ten_Thousand_Day_War
I will flip that question on you.
If we had won the war militarily, a war with decades of imperialistic baggage, and installed Diem, would it have been worth 55K US dead and multiples more lives ruined?
(something something Iraq/Afghanistan)
Well, the much-maligned "domino theory" in SEAsia turned out to be true, and millions of people were murdered as a result. Had the dominos been stopped, that would have been valuable.
I should probably write about why I am such a peacenik now when I was not a peacenik during the Cold War. Maybe it was because back then there was a motivated, powerful enemy who wanted to impose a brutal system of governance on the whole world, whereas now it's... Putin wants 500 square miles of a country that has been spying on him?
Hillary lost that election because she surrounded herself with the worst strategists on offer at the time. And she cockily ignored key swing constituencies—she literally never set foot in Michigan, and lost the state by 10,000 votes or 0.23%.
She also wasted her time in Pennsylvania, never venturing anywhere between Philly and Pittsburgh, and lost that state as well.
She was a terrible retail politician.
And she is Hilary. How they managed to find a woman even more unlikable almost suggests they were trying to.
Perhaps the thought process was something like "Hillary lost because people are intimidated by Smart Women, so let's run a retard."
In contrast, Margaret Thatcher, who received Second Class Honours in Chemistry at Oxford, was reportedly more proud of being the first prime minister with a science degree than becoming the first female prime minister.
lmao
In fairness, they and their media *did* get a vegetable into office quite recently, so it's reasonable that they would stick with a similar strategy.
A funny recent "AI" video about the subject at Ethel Kennedy's funeral:
https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1846832715070427218
Gold. Bill's quip at the end nails it.
thatcher did nothing wrong
probably
Don't believe the modern media. She saved the UK.
i figured she had done something right when everyone went after her
And if she showed up in Michigan she would have lost by 20,000 votes.
I don't particularly care about the fry stunt but at least Trump actually made a batch of fries, salted them, and put them in boxes. I learned the fry process hasn't change in the 23 years since I worked at the golden arches. Walz just walked around in a field holding a gun. I am going duck hunting for the first time in my life next week. Hopefully I get more shots off than he did.
Could I prove I worked at McDonalds? I assume my parents would remember. If I really had to, I could get my IT guy to throw a windows XP virtual machine on our office server, install the tax software we had in 2000 and print my tax return with statements that had McDonalds as my employer.
So while:
1. I'd also almost guarantee Kamala is lying about McDonalds employment. It's not that she can't prove it easily. It's 40 years ago, that's tough.
2. It's that the entire democrat media machine could if they wanted to.
I actually worked at Burger Chef 40 years ago and have zero doubt that I could fire up a Facebook account and track down people I worked with.
If you find yourself in Charleston, WV there's a place called Suzi's that still serves the Burger Chef menu.
Go figure, Burger Chef and Jeff retired to West Virginia.
My first job was at a soccer camp warehouse. I could easily DM Becky (her actual name) and say “hey remember when I tried to clumsily bang you after we inflated balls all morning?” She’d vouch for me.
"So, Becky, there's a couple more inflated balls that you could help me with now."
one hell of a blowjob
Worked with a girl when i was 17-18. We flirted all the time. 17-18 year old me was too dumb to realize this was flirting. 15 years later ran into her “I’m liked you!” I was a dumb kid. If you run into a chick you hung out with in high school 25 years later, cool it on the jameson. Couldve done better
Back when I was engaged and living in Toledo again with the future Mrs MD, a pair of girls in our neighborhood were doing... something I can't remember that had them going door to door. They noticed my name on a mailbox in our building and knocked on our door and were surprised it was me. They had gone to high school with me, one of them was a fairly attractive flautist, and remembered I was a trumpet player and were giggling and obviously remembered me in a much more flattering light than I remembered myself in. Teen years are full of missed opportunities. I should have been plowing my way through the woodwinds section instead of moping like a loser. I don't regret it much, I did end up with my wife.
You shoulda gone to band camp.
Suzi’s usually closes at 11:30 AM, which is strange for a place with “hamburgers” in its name. Great breakfast menu, though. I used to eat there with my dad (a former longtime South Charleston resident) when before we’d go to St. Albans to get his BMWs serviced. Now I’m sort of confined to the Capitol area during lunchtime.
If they cared about being fact-checked, they probably would do something like that, but when the legacy media works for them, why bother mentioning a chain that peaked in 1973 and closed in 1996, so few people under 50 (perhaps 40 within their core region) have any familiarity with or memory of?
Why couldn't she come up with an unprovable chain? Because she is not quick witted enough to come up with something like that. McDonalds was easy because it's so common, like Xerox, Kleenex, Google, etc. Her goal was to pander and appear relatable. She just lacks charisma to pull it off. It reminds me of her boasting about sitting around smoking weed in college while listening to Tupac. Years before Tupac released a track. I doubt that bitch listened to anything but NPR even back then. But the hacks who simp for her will treat this nonsense like she just parted the Red Sea so "the truth" doesn't have to factor in to the equation.
That nasally voice just drives me absolutely batshit crazy!
But that "hood" accent makes me horny.
I can't get past the hysterical cackling to even hear the voice. I'd rather experience her marksmanship with her Glock than hear her speak
If you're only going back to 2000, you can probably download EVERY SINGLE PAYCHECK INDIVIDUALLY immediately from The Work Number.
And you may consider advising your clients to freeze their data on TWN.
I dont really want to
While I honestly don't care one way or another about the stunt, I don't see this any different than when any politician goes into a diner and talks to the people in that diner. Most are always staged to some extent. Sure, a Governor or senator might get away with an impromptu diner visit, but not someone running for president.
The fact that people keep shooting at him also makes it ultra-difficult to do, you know, spontaneous stuff.
That's almost exactly how WWI started, wasn't it?
"Oh, hey, isn't that that Franz Duke guy you were supposed to kill this morning with the stalled-out car?"
"Yeah! Huh! What a coincidence!"
*spontaneous gunfire*
The irony is that, a secretarial error in the birth records saved the assassin Gavrilo Princip from capital punishment. But he soon died from TB.
The crowning irony is that the guy who got killed was a total Nothingburger. Never fit for the job.
The guy who should have been in that car seat, for various complex reasons, at age 30, decided to eat his revolver, after offing his 17-year old belle du jour. Messy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayerling_incident
The Princeling felt guilty about infecting his Lawfully Wedded with Syphilis, and so he hooked up with a minor to make his grand exit.
Royals.
Glad we don't have 'em. Except for the Bushes and the Kennedys and the Clintons and the rest.
john
don't forget George Brett!
I'm not sure that suicidal syphilitic was a better succession option than good ole Franz.
What a shame to be allergic to penicillin.
Well, the royal who shot the 17-year old Baroness (or who otherwise stopped her clock) in 1889 did not have that option. Fleming published on penicillin in 1929, but there was no practical means of production until 1940.
Renewing my call to separate the racing threads from the politics ones because substack's comment system is so dire.
Jack, I'd love to hear your take on the Max/Lando incident. My personal take is: "The F1 rule that allows you to run people off on the exit if you're ahead at the apex, even if you have no chance of making the corner yourself is stupid. Max understands and exploits the rules, such as they are. They should probably fix the rules to be less exploitable"
Other F1 thoughts: Either Colapinto is a real deal talent who was langushing in obscurity, or Albon is gonna get shellacked by Sainz next year. Similar with Lawson, as you said, either he's top tier or Danny was even more washed than you thought. IMO Leclerc has made a big improvement this year. Before, he was a Ferrari man through and through and took it like the abusive relationship victim that he was. Now he's standing up for himself and showing more flashes of being champion material. Piastri should listen to whoever (Mark Webber probably) got him out of the Alpine dumpster fire and in to McLaren. I think he should stay put for 25 and try to clearly beat Lando and become #1. Prior to him being pretty anonymous in Austin, this looked reasonably likely.
It's amazing the turnaround in this season. Early on, it looked like it was just going to be a repeat of 2023. Now it's gotten downright exciting. The only thing that would make it better would be if Aston wasn't completely nowhere, and Alonso was in the mix at the front.
I thought Max’s move was pretty egregious too. I don’t think the driver on the inside should have the right to push the driver on the outside off the track on exit. If you’re required to leave room in the inside, why not be required to leave room on the outside? Your corner exit is compromised because you were too slow to stay ahead. Give them a squeeze, make them scared, but you shouldn’t get to drive like they aren’t there.
In any case, Max went four wheels off too, should that be some sort of nullifying factor? He left the track to gain an advantage.
F1 has been brilliant this season but the stewarding drives me nuts.
"If you’re required to leave room in the inside, why not be required to leave room on the outside?"
This is a function of the way F1 tracks are built now. At Mid-Ohio, for example, going off WITH the person you're PUSHING OFF is a loser for both of you, and massively so, because you'll be in grass, gravel, or a tire wall.
Max pushed him off. Lewis wouldve clipped him and put him in a wall. Watched both in the last five years. Max is a bit of a whiney bitch but i will still take him every day over sir lewis Hamilton. Youre forty. Retire dude youre old
I thought they were required to leave a car's width on the outside. Maybe that is selectively enforced.
Liked this comment for your idea regarding separation of subject matter
I could do Wednesday as a racing thread only, and everything else on Thursday.
Pressing "X" to doubt
Pressing f for substack
I can more or less guarantee that there won't be political posts at the current frequency of about 2x a month on the free roundup and 1x a month on the paid roundup. God willing, there won't be that much to talk about.
I dont care but it does muddle the conversation.
This will allow some readers to mirror the late DMX's lyrics: "Then I'm out, just like the trash on a Thursday" if this makes no sense it's just something that came to mind at the end of a long day, no deep meaning implied.
im in for that
keeps everything focused
Sainz is going to obliterate Albon. I'd expect to see qualifying and finishes go 10:1 in his favor. Ricciardo has also been terrible for 6 years. No defending him.
perez seems to be complete ass but at least osama bin russel is entertaining
the mctrump memes were great too and i hope he wins if for no other reason than the lulz will continue
Based on the rules I’ve got nothing!
Like Jack’s father, I subscribe to the “those who can’t, teach” rule. No offense to those who see it as a calling, they are truly serving society. It is getting close to my favorite season, where teachers start begging for snow days, because work is for suckers.
Yes, no offense to teachers, but if I were negotiating with striking teachers, my answer to every teacher’s union proposal would be “You get your summers off”.
Instead, the answer is 'how much will you be giving to my Democratic reelection fund?' Public employee unions negotiate with politicians about how to split up taxpayer moneys for each other's gains. The public always loses, which is why our schools no longer teach, and our police no longer enforce the laws that make society function.
Just like Congress brokers deals between corporations and the government, calls it legislation, then the congressmen skim off the top. People always like to make an example of unfairness by calling something a loophole. Well, a loophole is nothing but a law intentionally passed by Congress.
As I learned in Illinois, it’s never left vs. right, Democrat vs. Republican, it’s ALWAYS insider vs. outsider.
Until the 1960s public sector unions were illegal, under the assumption that civil service was not an adversarial employer.
Although many government jobs are toxic, the unions' control over local politics make them a true "threat to democracy" and they need to be re-abolished.
Public sector unions should STILL be illegal. the proper remedy for public employee issues is... the ballot box.
I 100% agree!
What is your take on a growing trend in libertarian circles that believe any public employee shouldn't be able to vote? It's an interesting topic.
I would say they should be able to vote anywhere but at their governmental level... so a state employee can vote for President but not Governor, and so on.
I had an argument with a leftie friend of mine back during the Chicago teachers union strike like 12 or 15 years ago. He supported them and I said they should all be fired, my perspective being that the teachers around me in Japan would never walk away from their kids. They are public employees as well, and there they are unable to strike, but none of them would if they could. Another case of duty and honor being a bit stronger there I suppose.
I was just promoted and my new position is not unionized. The union here is surprisingly run by some of the most conservative people in the county government, and my friend, the only other conservative in the office (and honestly the only one of these people I actually trust) is a big union supporter. I could never get past how my dues fall straight through the union structure into the war chest of Democrats and refused to do anything more than grudgingly be a member. My boss was afraid I would not want the non-unionized position without the union protection, but this was the first place I ever worked where I had to belong to a union. The only thing it did while I was here was protect the laziest, least competent co-worker I've had in years.
In fairness, while I think public sector unions are *a* problem, I don't think they're the *only* problem these days. The private sector labor world has a lot of problems, from overt racial, caste, and sexual discrimination in the form of DEI and widespread ethnic nepotism, general humiliating sweatshop conditions in far too many organizations, and the deliberate use of a huge army of unlimited OPT and grossly excessive H-1B, L-1, etc., work visas to absolutely bludgeon 99.5% of workers. And these problems contribute to low fertility rates.
Contributing to low fertility rates means that, under Article II element 4 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group", the situation is de facto genocide. (The UN definition technically requires "intent")
It’s highly localized. Public sector unions are probably the biggest problem here in Chicago.
Exactly. The antagonist to a public sector union is not "management"; it's you, my dear voluntary taxpayer.
NY school districts are famous for low six figure salaries *and* Cadillac health care *and* amazing pensions.
Superintendents mid six.
The grade school teachers in my former Illinois school district all made at least $100k, and the administrators made $250k plus with crazy extra benefit packages on top of their salaries. And they got their summers off.
I’d find grade school teachers in IL at $100k hard to believe for any but the most senior people. I live in a very generous district in Cook and most of our teachers are in the $60k range. High school teachers are much more highly compensated, at about 2x that once you hit maybe 10 years in. Administrator pay though, is absurd, not hard to be over $150k, for people who, as my BIL puts it, “spent a lot of their early career sitting Indian style.”
I formerly lived in a rich person’s school district in DuPage County. This was an area where the yearly property taxes on a new McMansion were $25k+ and went up from there. Not a lot of turn over because of the salaries, but yes, new hires didn’t make $100k to start.
My shack is 7-8k per year. My dads are 30-40k
I was at $7k for my 1000 sq ft DuPage shack when I left IL. I'm at $2500 in NC for 2700 sq ft on 1.25 acres. Most million dollar houses in my county would be below $5k in property taxes. Property tax savings was necessary for me in retirement. I could not afford to stay in IL once I stopped working.
I’m about $17k in Cook for a house I bought for $650 and is probably worth about $900 today.
Its the pensions
"spent a lot of their early career sitting Indian style"
so they spent a lot of their early career slumped over drunk or
maybe he meant shitting indian style like into a hole in the ground like i did sometimes having grown up there
Property taxes are ridiculous for a reason
Six figures in new york sucks
I work for a small school district in rural Upstate New York. Teachers make between 75-100k, administration makes 125k and our superintendent makes close to 300k. Unfortunately, everyone else (TAs, Subs, Transportation, etc) makes minimum wage.
I'm not surprised. It is effectively a different state.
Anecdotal evidence, but literally one of the least intelligent students from my graduating class went on to be a Middle School teacher. Great guy but he never excelled at academics and had zero common sense.
Consequently, he's the only one of our friends with literally zero baggage. We tried to get him to run as a State Rep.
The whole "those who teach" though is pretty broad. "Those who teach" aren't always those teaching in a classroom.
It's always applied to me, sadly. I trained a BMX world champion and multiple road-racing amateur champions! I can't do! I'm teaching!
What I cannot do is teach someone how to write.
Apparently we no longer need writers. Read the other day that more than half of Americans did not read a single book in the last year.
I started both The Cat who Walks through Walls and The Illiad and have sadly not finished them. I still have ambitions to get through them and The Odyssey before the end of the year. Our kids all read, too, although these days it's mostly shit for school. I did get through Moby Dick back in January, though.
I usually have 1-3 books from the library at a time in my house, placed at various reading spots. I can get 90% of books I come across online or recommended here in ACF through the state wide NC library system. The main benefit of not watching TV.
I should try some classics as you are doing, great idea.
Yes, Michigan has the MeL so we can get pretty much anything from anywhere else in the state, too. It's a great system, and it's also benefitted our kids.
When I realized that High School MD was wrong about Hemingway, I started trying to read stuff that was in those "100 books you must read before you die" lists. Some of it I'm just not interested in, but others have really impressed me. CS Lewis' Till We Had Faces is one of my absolute favorites. I always look for that at used book stores. Eventually I want a copy for my own bookshelf.
Well in my defense trying to keep up with the comments here is a part time job's worth of time.
Well maybe teach them to write but not write like this:
“…soft as Land O’ Lakes on an Indonesian dinner table?”
I mean seriously how the frickin’ hell does one come up with that?
Well, obviously I've seen it!
You have the same problem as me. The things youre good at arent the things you love and the things you arent good at are
Not true, sir. I love racing and I'm astounding at it. Just not astounding at paying for it... wait, I see what you're saying.... carry on.
Sounds a lot like hobbies and professions. I would not want to be a wedding and portrait photographer, yet have fun finding the right light setup for a fly. There are people out there who profess to having fun with spreadsheets. I doubt they would want to work spreadsheets every day, year after year.
If the pay is high enough, spreadsheets are a riot, and I'd work at it 16 hrs a day.
But then, I could say the same about shoveling pigeon *stuff* off a roof...
Many great coaches were never that good at playing football while many where stars or at the least above average players. I think that saying in my own personal experience is simply not that true. I've known too many people that are excellent at what they do and are very good teachers.
I have fond memories of reading Son of Man as a horny 15 year old. I'm curious Jack if you ever read Dahlgren and what you thought of it. I find myself coming back to it every 10 years or so.
I never read it. Will put it on the list!
I hated it. Delany could write, and on the micro scale the book is fine, but when you dress something up as science fiction, trading any pretense of rationality for a clever structure is not a good idea. Read his other books instead. (Agree with your take on "Gateway," by the way.)