phoenixvoice
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Ever since the gloriously clear blue skies of October, I have been paying more attention to the skies. They are befuddled as usual right now. Tucker Carlson interviewed the geoengineering watch guy (I really should look up his name) and I recommend it. I realized that the geoengineering “solution” to climate change is very similar to the way that modern medicine drugs all sorts of diseases — using a chemical “blunt force” to enact change without fully understanding the ramifications. I can opt out of the various drugs and vaccines. But I cannot “opt out” of the sky.
El gato malo
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/why-radical-islam-votes-leftThe reason ascribed to Islam by el gato malo is very similar to the Avis-loving bunch in Seth McFarlane’s The Orville.
This is really pissin’ me off:
SNAP cut off for 12% of the population…
and at the same time the “persistent contrails” have suddenly cropped up again after 31 days of ZERO “persistent contrails.” These nasty trails are all over the sky again, everywhere I look!Just got off the phone with a client. He has been a client for nearly 20 years. He is in his sixties. “Ever since covid…” his health has deteriorated precipitously…multiple strokes. He says his life “sucks.” For the first decade that he was a client, his mother was still living, and she lived with him. She was quite vibrant until she passed, her health seemed pretty good. Not so for his health the past several years.
I become so angry sometimes at this insane “health system” that we have. It constantly prescribes treatments and medicine that cause harm — a few weeks ago my father had a corrective surgery, it went well, etc., but he was having the runs afterwards, and feeling ill from that. I encouraged my mom to check the meds that he had been prescribed, post-operative. Among other things, he had been prescribed a proton-pump inhibitor. I do not know exactly why a PPI would be the “standard of care” after his particular surgery, but he was prescribed it, even though he has never had any propensity for acid reflux — and it turns out that the PPI was the cause of the problem. (Possibly because it was heart surgery? The doctor wanted to be sure that any “heart pain” was not actually “heartburn,” i.e. acid reflux?) He stopped the PPI, his bowels returned to normal, and soon felt much better.
And then this insane covid vax…which cannot be so easily undone as simply stopping a medicine which the body clears out in a few hours or days. Caveat emptor — applied to a different area than the Romans were thinking — as a patient, not just a “buyer” — when the money part is often completely or partially obfuscated. I can see why the Hippocratic Oath came to be in the first place. It is needed today just as much (or more so) than ever before. Doctors need to treat cautiously and with wonder the ability of the human body, rather than thinking themselves akin to God.
On another note: I lack compassion for food stamp recipients who are threatening commission of crime if their food stamps are cut off. The likely end-scenario for that behavior is to destroy the food stamp program. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” Idiots. During covid, the food stamp allotments were very generous. I didn’t spend all that my household was allotted. I have a 2 month cushion. The way to not be super-stressed by changes in the outside world is to build up self-sufficiency and resilience, not to lash out when others’ behavior is not as we would wish it to be.
My mother was considering getting the shingles vaccine after my parents’ friend had a shingles outbreak a few weeks ago. I urged her to reconsider — and in that discussion we realized that she and my dad had spent time with their friend during his outbreak, and that this exposure — potentially — could work as the requisite immunity booster, although being around someone with chicken pox would work better. (Shingles is much less likely to spread the varicella virus than is chicken pox.). The other route to dealing with shingles is to be somewhat vigilant, and to notice any outbreak very early and get on antivirals to send it back into dormancy. My sister’s youngest three children still have yet to contract chicken pox — with kids getting vaccinated it simply isn’t circulating like it did when I was young. (I brought it home to my sibs when I was in kindergarten.) Ironically, vaccines to prevent chicken pox in kids are leading to shingles outbreaks in adults, because adults are getting naturally boosted by caring for kids with chicken pox. It’s a great money making scheme for the vaccine pushing pharmaceutical companies — they get to sell shingles vaccines to the adults and chicken pox vaccines to the kids.
Big Balls attackers
I agree that one goal of the Juvenile criminal court should be rehabilitation, rather than punishment. However, the first priority should be protecting the public. Releasing juvenile offenders over and over does not accomplish either goal.
I walked to the grocery store yesterday. The sky was beautiful, blue, and clear in every direction. Usually, it takes a big rainstorm or wind storm to clean the sky. But— no rain in days and no significant wind yesterday. How could it be?
Then it hit me: much of the federal government is shut down!
Way overhead I saw a tiny jet traversing a bit of sky. Its contrails extended what appeared to be about an inch and a half and then dissipated to nothingness. Yes, that is what I saw when I was young.
Anyone else in the US noticing this? It is a lovely silver lining from the federal government shut down. If it extends to November, SNAP and federal EBT payments will not be made. Already, the local food bank does not have the “emergency food boxes” to hand out, as that is a federal program.
Re Kimo
I agree. The site appears fully functional. Problematic WordPress sites don’t typically have comments working this well. Except for one thing — the comment html tag buttons are missing today. Something *is* up. It is possible that the RIM’s news each day is using a specific plugin that is malfunctioning. And it is very likely that RIM is doing poorly.
Regarding reforming TAE elsewhere — this could be done. One very important aspect is that we have uncensored and unproctored comments. Yes, sometimes there is rudeness, mocking, trolling, name-calling, over-sharing, etc. — but in a world of AI and propaganda, TAE is deliciously <i>real<i\>. (Let’s see if manually placed HTML tags still work.)
“The President is invoking political violence, which we all condemn, as an excuse to target non-profits and activists with the false and stigmatizing label of ‘domestic terrorism
I tend to agree that labeling behavior as “terrorism” is problematic. If the behavior is a crime, pursue investigation and prosecution for the crime, don’t make up “more special crimes,” such as “terrorism” or “hate.”
Having said that, the ACLU should mind the Biblical adage of removing the beam from its own eye before removing the mote from someone else’s.
Hrm…it appears most of the site is currently functioning, so WordPress is doing well overall. (Perhaps it was functioning less well some hours ago before I viewed it.)
My experience with kids and teens is that the majority (even geeky ones) have been distracted by gaming and have very little experience building or coding websites, and haven’t the faintest idea how they work—and the desire to know how has not occurred to them. If you wanted a kid who could host a Minecraft server and knew all sorts of coding related to Minecraft, that can be found.
I am reading this right now: https://substack.com/inbox/post/175956264?r=o7iqo&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true — about how AI coding creates censorship. For so long, humans could rely on the fact that curating everything generated by humans was a Herculean task and, therefore, censorship could never be absolute. AI changes that.
Adding to what DBS just said…
I suspect that the Israeli people are a good example of what can happen when a populace is largely hoodwinked by propaganda. Their Covid vax uptake was enormous. They, or their parents or grandparents, were hoodwinked into the Zionist idea, and now their identity is forged with it. As a result they believe that they have a divine right to the land claimed by Zionism, they believe all who oppose Zionism in any fashion to be their enemy. All who are not a member of their in-group are subhuman. The Israelis don’t realize that the Zionist leaders need foot soldiers and need householders to accomplish their plot — and the leaders see the Israelis as little more than pawns in their machinations. Thus: the Israeli people are damaged by the vax, and on 10/7 the Israeli military slaughtered Israelis to prevent them from becoming hostages.
TDK
did you know that silver and gold extraction are extremely detrimental ” the care of Nature and this Planet?
It will surely lead to the release of the Balroc.
Regarding universities as think tanks to shape young minds…I see that constantly with my son who is attending ASU. He likes discussing with me the classes that he is selecting for the next semester, especially the ones that are to fulfill gen Ed requirements, as he is trying to find something that interests him or will be of value. We end up trying to figure out the tone of classes from their titles and short descriptions. Some are obvious: “Introduction to LGBTQ Studies.” Others are less obvious — like classes about social justice. Is it going to be about the history of movements that most people see as net positives for Western society, such as the 40-hour work week or granting women the vote or 18-year-olds the vote or the civil rights era? That could be an interesting topic for my son to learn about in more depth. Or, is it going to be about BLM, and the “correctness” of political race theory and white fragility and land acknowledgments? He does not want to be sitting for a class where he is mentally refuting everything said by the professor and at the same time trying to remember it so that he can do well on a test.
(I’m still trying to wrap my head around the land acknowledgments thing. I mean, on the one hand, sure, we can acknowledge that land historically “belonged,” (a very Western term, to be certain,) to various Native American tribes that inhabited the land. That is simply history. However, the form of land acknowledgments is very ritualistic — it resembles a religious ceremony. Religious ceremonies are ways to teach and shape people’s minds and behavior. This is not necessarily a bad thing — it is a method, and the method can be used for good or ill or neutral purposes. The land acknowledgments seem to be an attempt to divide the current and up-and-coming American people from the land. They emphasize that “we are all newcomers who stole this land,” suggesting that we do not deserve the land that we were born on. The groups that land acknowledgments name are small and have little social power, so it is easy to prop them up and trot them out “for show.” It seems that the design is to engender in the US populace a feeling of “uprootedness,” a lack of feeling grounded. People without strong ties to each other nor to the land can be controlled more easily.)
@ userzeroid
Very nice idea!
I suspect that RIM does not have the available mental space to lead up such an initiative — especially at the moment. However, there are many sites that create such merchandise where you can put together a branded “line” and then point people to a digital “store” for purchase. If a few here wanted to develop some fan merch and then gave RIM something akin to “admin access” so that he can provide input on the merch and enter whatever financial info is needed so that proceeds go to TAE, and then create an official link on TAE that points there.Whenever Elon Musk talks about going to/living on Mars I think…What about the Moon first? Doesn’t it make sense to “work out the kinks” on a nearby celestial body first?
DBS
A possible upside is that once the robots are doing EVERYTHING for us then maybe the oligarchs, elites and politicians would have less reason to even care about the rest of us IN ANY AND EVERY WAY AT ALL, and just leave us the fuck alone.Yes. I have thought about the “distopic” future where elites live in their fancy techno-cities and the rest of humans subsist outside of them…as long as the area outside the cities is not too badly polluted and the resource extraction by the city dwellers does not impinge greatly on what is needed to subsist, (subsistence does not require much lithium nor cobalt, for example,) it could be a good life.
Perhaps the endless arguments over socialism/capitalism that boil down to freebies and redistribution vs. the “self-made man” and cutthroat business (“caveat emptor”) are really about the stages of life that humans pass through. This would be why the viewpoints are perennial questions — because there are no correct answers. “ To everything there is a season,
A time for every purpose under heaven.” Infants are helpless and “socialism” is the correct approach. They grow, are weaned, and taught to become independent acting adults. As capable adults we strive to act for our own best interests, and on behalf of our dependents, whom we shield from what they cannot yet handle on their own. As we age and decline, we gradually cede control to those whose bodies are stronger and return to some level of dependence.When young adults have been stymied from achieving the skills or accessing sufficient resources to exercise independence they may delay or never achieve the confidence that comes with capable independent action. They forever want to stay in the safe harbor of a “mother’s” skirts. They seek “socialism” or something akin to it.
I suspect that this perpetual state of immaturity in the populace is often desired by those who wield power, be it political and/or economic. Immature humans are easier to control. The next best thing, if the humans are mature, is to control the flow of information so that free-thinking humans make ill-informed decisions. (I am thinking about Jordan Peterson and the Covid vaccine at the moment.)
Dr d rich
What I’ve noticed is that only the most recent comment be edited. If, while you are editing your comment, another comment posts, then the comment being edited is permanently lost and appears blank. I have figured that it must be some sort of coding for the website that does this. I have not looked into this extensively, so I don’t know if it is intrinsic to WordPress when it is not a subscription version or when code for commenting has not been superseded by a coder with the ability to get the code to create a different behavior.
The best workaround that I have found is to copy the post that I am editing so that if the edit fails then I can paste and redo the comment. It’s crude, but it works.
Considering the resources required for each human to have an “R2” robotic assistant, and the short lifespan of consumer electronics, the ONLY way such a future were imminent would be if there were a massive pruning of human life on the planet. As currently constituted, there is no practical means for each and every human to have a robotic personal assistant — the resources to support this simply do not exist.
When I hear wealthy CEOs talk like this I often wonder …. Have they really thought this out?? Are they also genocidal? Or are they thinking of a future wear the wealthy live in luxurious “cloud cities,” waited on by robots, and everyone else subsists on the ground with practically nothing?—and certainly no robots.
Secondly, if all of the back-breaking labor is robotic and the traditional service jobs are robotic and he majority of the traditional thinking jobs are robotic…what is the purpose of human life?
I am slowly, piece by piece, remodeling my kitchen. I am doing the labor myself, aided by my spouse and son when I need a hand. Often, I find things that I need (a bit of drywall, a cabinet, etc.,) secondhand. I am enjoying the entire process. My son created a 3D computer model of the plans 18 months ago, and now some of the biggest changes have been made and I can see the resemblance to the 3D model. It is exciting!
Why would I offload the entirety of this labor to a robot? Even when I require help, why would I eschew the social bonds that currently provide aid?
Star Trek often explored this theme — somewhat extensively. What could a human society look like if there was abundance for all? It wasn’t The Jetsons, with a Rosie butler. Rather, it was an existence where humans chose their work, emphasized human relationships, and pursued hobbies as well as careers. In Star Trek, humans pursued lives of meaning. If there is no effort, no hardship, no challenge, there is no growth and no meaning. I don’t find the future described by Jensen Huang appealing.
Gaza
Is anyone actually expecting Israel to keep up its side of any bargain — especially one involving Gaza? Many say the USA is not “agreement capable.” The USA keeps some agreements, reneges on others, but tries to create the impression that it keeps agreements. Israel does not even bother with the pretense — it makes agreements, then breaks them, attempting all the while — badly — to gaslight the world that it was “because of the other guy.” (We had to chop down the olive trees because a Hamas operative was up in its branches, we are sure we saw one — but, strangely, once we had chopped down the tree the Hamas operative, (that wily devil,) had managed to hop to the neighboring olive tree, which obliged us to chop that one down as well. That is how and why the entire olive grove was destroyed. What’s that? It’s a war crime to destroy the agricultural ability of a nation? Well, of course, but it’s Hamas’s fault — they shouldn’t have been using the trees as “tree shields,” baiting us.)
@ Zerosum (and anyone else on a “cholesterol med”)
The “need” to lower cholesterol is probably a lie. The Midwestern Doctor talks about this. Scottish cardiologist Malcolm Kendrick wrote a book that addresses this and much more called The Clot Thickens.
Low cholesterol causes dementia eventually. I weary of watching this decline, suspecting the statin, but unable to influence the person to get off of it. (But it worked with my dad — I loaned him the book, he read it, he got off of statins for good, his mind is clearer.)
Your deflection is inappropriate in this case. The RN is suing civilly because she followed proper whistleblower protocol, keeping true to her profession’s license and ethics, and was retaliated against by her employer. PREP Act does not apply. A civil suit like this IS the path to change things like the PREP Act. We all tend to dislike top-down, autocratic authority (with perhaps the exception being aspnaz who moved deliberately to China and likes participating in that country.). If that is the case, then it is inappropriate to expect or demand that autocratic authority (such as Trump or HHS sec.) be used to strike down inappropriate laws and regulations. It needs to be done through proper channels, through rule of law or correct application of the courts
@ Red
Thank you for the link about the hospital RN who blew the whistle in the stillbirths. That is a story that I am keeping on my radar.Tylenol and autism
While I recognize that Tylenol is a dangerous drug, and must be used with care, and could contribute to a rise in autism…I don’t think tylenol is “the” answer.
There have been huge increase in autism rates since the vaccine act in 1986/7. (The increase is significant, although not as astronomical, if we only look at those currently diagnosed as autism level 3, profound autism.) Have there been as proportional increases in the use of Tylenol as there have been increases in vaccines and glyphosate and plastics?
The study cited for this Tylenol “bombshell” was based on the idea that pregnant women and children diagnosed with fevers would have taken Tylenol to manage the fever. So, sure, correlation, but did the Tylenol cause the autism or did the source of the fever (possibly vaccination) cause the autism, with Tylenol along for the ride? And what about all of the other factors that relate to an increase in autism, such as preterm birth, c-section, etc.? These factors have nothing to do with Tylenol.
I was curious about what it was that Charlie Kirk had said that was reputedly “racist.” The best example was a remark that when he saw a black pilot he might wonder whether or not the pilot was qualified.
The woke crowd up in arms over this statement are completely missing the boat. CK’s concern was a valid, inevitable outcome of DEI. In any given system, there are likely to be some folks who get their position via privilege, rather than by merit. Prior to DEI, it could be presumed that, for example, a black pilot or a female pilot was likely more qualified than the average white male pilot, as the individual had to not only prove merit but also overcome implicit biases in order to obtain the position of pilot. With DEI, the table flips and filling the “black pilot” quota becomes more important than merit, therefore it is possible (perhaps likely,) that a black pilot was less qualified than white counterparts, and now it is the white male prospective pilot who must go “above and beyond” just to land the job.
Not acknowledging this reality of DEI is another shadow of The Emperor’s New Clothes — where we refuse to see what is before us because it conflicts with our precious narrative.
It would be nice if the patsy (Robinson) would break down and confess before we get too much further along in this—but if he gets to that point he, too, will be silenced, probably before saying anything.
Some back of the napkin math for autism
1980s – 4-5 autism cases per 10,000
Currently – 1 in 33, but about one quarter have “profound autism”. So, about 1 in 130 of those diagnosed as autistic are comparable to those diagnosed in the 1980s.
According to this study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1614875/ the prevalence of severe mental retardation in 10 year olds, 1985-87 in Atlanta, GA, was 3.6 per 1000.To summarize, in the 1980s, if we add together “autistic” and “severely mentally retarded” we get about 4 out of 1,000. If
Currently, 7.6 out of 1,000 are diagnosed with “profound autism.”This suggests that those concerned with the rise in autism are justified in their concerns, and it isn’t just a matter of changes in classification.
CK assassination & brown-shirted man
Very convincing video. Does anyone have a video from a different angle that confirms the placement of the brown-shirted man? I tried to find this, but from front angles I can’t find the brown-haired head of the brown-shirted man in the right place. I do see a black-shirted guard that is placed at about halfway between 10 & 11 o’clock from CK — but I don’t see him in the brown-shirted man video. I recognize that this lack of correlation may be due to camera angles, but there are so many various angles from different videos, that another angle should corroborate. This needs to be viewed now, because in a few weeks most of these videos will be memory-holed and anything other than the official narrative will be difficult to find.
If there is no way to corroborate the brown shirted man video, then it could be fake. I just don’t know.
I hear Charlie Kirk in this pro-life debate and am reminded about why I did not pay him much attention. I hear him use rhetoric to eviscerate his debate partner, and I formulate a cogent rebuttal to Charlie Kirk’s logic, but I can’t use it because it is a recording of a debate, not me in the debate. Thus, I find it frustrating to listen to the debate.
A fetus is a not presently a “human being.” It has “potential to become.” As such, we want to see it as a human being and we want it to have “human rights.” However, a fetus is, by definition, dependent upon the womb provided by mother, and mother is a mature human being. Unfortunately, seeing a fetus as more than a “human in embryo” reduces the human being that carries and nourishes the fetus into a “vessel.” A potential human being does not have a right to exist that is greater than the human rights of the mother host. Therefore, the mother host has the right and responsibility to direct all things for the fetus until the fetus is born, and becomes a human being in fact. At the point of birth, the mother may, if she wishes, relinquish the responsibility of raising the child to another. Pregnancy and childbirth are life-threats to the mother. Therefore, she has the right to choose to carry the fetus to term, to abort, or choose the method of childbirth.
I am horrified by people who treat abortion flippantly. While in my view the proper person to make decisions regarding the fetus is the mother whose body houses the human-in-embryo, the human potentiality of the fetus is something that should be regarded with respect. Terminating a pregnancy should be done with careful deliberation, not on a whim, and effort should be expended to avoid being in the position of evaluating whether an unplanned pregnancy be ended.
Dr D
We incarcerate them for unemotional, practical, measurable reasons: so they don’t harm themselves and others.Yes.
We need to be locking up the violent criminals, and probably also the “white collar” criminals who are committing gross negligence and fraud, some of which also results in violence. (Fauci, etc.). We need to stop locking up those who are merely pissing off The Establishment, The Deep State, A Protected Class, or violating the excess of laws that have nothing to do with violence. We don’t have the money nor resources to incarcerate all of the non-violent offenders. So let’s stop, and focus instead on locking up the violent criminals.Chronic disease in vaccinated kids
My son with level 2 autism also has “eoe.” Eosinophilia Esophagitis. It was diagnosed 9 years ago when he had a food impaction. The first recorded case was in 1977. It came increasingly into awareness in the 1990s, and was formally classified in 1993. Funny, isn’t it, that formal classification was only a few years after that vaccine act in the 80s?
There are only 2 treatments: drugs for life or elimination diets to identify the substance aggravating the esophagus so that it may be avoided. GI doctors routinely scare their patients and parents of their patients into the endless taking of prescription meds, and then more meds and specialist visits to manage adverse side effects. Of course, insurance pays for the drugs and regular endoscopies. It won’t pay for special expensive foods that make it easier to endure an elimination diet. The irony.
An eye for an eye hands the world to the blind.
This isn’t even “an eye for an eye.”
Just like “turn the other cheek” was a new idea, attempting to stop endless, mindless tit-for-tat, I suspect that “an eye for an eye” was an attempt to stamp out “I’m going to get you back worse!” “An eye for an eye” suggests that responses to violence be measured, rather than extreme.
Israel is not even following the proscription of the Torah here: 1200 dead on Oct 7, many by the hands of the IDF ironically, and they are inflicting death on a scale 100 times as high.
Divorce, 50/50 custody in Kentucky
Oh, it is very “fair.” But it means that a parent that is dangerous gets access to the children because it is virtually impossible for anyone who is of lower income (and most parents emerging from a failed marriage are low income) to persuade a court that the other parent is “dangerous.” Sure, alcohol abuse will work. But what about when the problem parent stops using alcohol but continues to self-medicate with a cocktail of prescribed drugs, including SSRI, Ambien, and Xanax? Oh, that is A-OK to the family court, because those are doctor-prescribed, all the concerns about SSRIs and homicide notwithstanding. I actually managed to have a court mandated “custody study” done…it cost $36,000. It found some concerning problems with the kids’ father, recommended a special program for fathers with anger issues, and still recommended 50/50 custody of the children. Then, because of concerns about children being taken from a parent, the court handling protective orders does not want to intervene, even when the child had self-inflicted injuries and her own handwritten journal stated that her angst was due to her father. For that matter, the family court judge also refused to intervene in the same circumstance.. It required the insertion of DCS (AZ’s CPS) into the problem to get the family court to intervene. I suspect that the DCS rep explained to the family court judge that either the judge ordered “no contact” with the father or he would have to put a 15 year old girl into foster care because her mother was prevented by the family court from keeping the girl from harm.
Yeah, 50/50 custody is great. For some. For others, it is tragic. (BTW – my daughter is doing very well 2 yrs later.)
Benny Johnson video on black crime…
Betrays the fact that he has no clue about how welfare works in this country TODAY, which is apparently how it has been for the past three decades.
Women don’t get “paid” for having no father in the home…TODAY. Perhaps it was that way in the far past. But, TODAY, that concept is MALARKY.
How do I know?
Because I read the damn policy manual and researched how TANF works in Arizona because there was a time, many years ago, when I made so little money each month that I was *very* eligible for TANF. (Temporary Assistance to
Needy Families.) I DECLINED to accept TANF because the program had exceedingly strict guidelines. I would have had to put my kids in daycare after school and found a job that paid me much less per hour for many more hours in order to comply with the program. That would not have worked because my level 2 autistic son did not have that diagnosis yet, and no daycare would have tolerated his behaviors. (At the time, I was called to the school once or twice a week — and he was not in a regular classroom, but a “behavior classroom” with extra aids.). My claims that daycare wasn’t a viable option would have fallen on deaf ears because his diagnoses at that time would have meant nothing to “officials.” Plus, it was hardly any money, and only available for a few months. It made no sense to jump through that number of hoops for such a small amount of money for such a short period of time. The trauma that complying with the program would do to my kids was not worth the program. And…although I didn’t realize it then, I was struggling with PTSD and could not handle the stress of a conventional job back then on top of everything else. (I did handle self-employment.)Reagan campaigned on ending the “welfare queen.” From what I understand, reform happened in the 1990s and “welfare” — implying cash payments to needy families — collapsed into TANF (a temporary program — hell, it is the first word in the name) — and the Earned Income Tax Credit. With the EITC, you get more money when you work more, up to a threshold, and then it is gradually phased out as the income increases. Neither program has anything to do with whether both parents are in the home — it is about income and household size — period.
I agree with Benny Johnson that the primary explanation for why black men commit more violent crime is because of lack of fathers in the home. It is my understanding that one of the reasons for the “drug war” was to incarcerate black men for non-violent crimes — a replacement for “Jim Crow” laws. Black men were incarcerated for non-violent crimes, their sons grew up and without proper guidance they tended to commit violent crime — and now we have a terrible, self-perpetuating cycle. I also suspect that the murder of MLK Jr, Malcolm X, and other respectable, black religious and community leaders meant that there was a vacuum of positive black male role models. In fact, being an upright, religious male black role model could be hazardous to one’s health. Instead, we have had male black role models like P Diddy and Barack Obama — smarmy, corrupt men.
We need to correct this societal ill. However, it cannot be corrected by stopping payments to single-parent households that hinge on there being only one parent in the home, because no such federal program exists. The TANF program has been jiggered to the point that it is only useful for a very small slice of the impoverished that may benefit from its strict guidelines. Also, it is temporary. Most folks don’t even realize that the primary form of “welfare” to impoverished families is the EITC — this is why low income families see “tax day” as “pay day.” It is the one time per year when they have a larger lump sum of money. There are all sorts of businesses that sell things to “the po’ folks” that have modeled their sales around this fact. Foolish people would jump on Benny Johnson’s bandwagon about stopping “welfare payments” and then, when it occurs, they are going to be furiously angry when, as a result, their own tax refund shrinks incredibly.
People dismissing AI’s potential to destroy human employment are living in a Fool’s Paradise
I think that wealth inequality is a more salient issue. If wealth is well-distributed in an economy, with the inequality not too great, then the economy will likely be able to adjust readily enough to current jobs being replaced by AI, and transitioning to an economy where new jobs are created and/or the workload of the average working-age adult is reduced. However, in an economy with drastic wealth disparity, (such as the really existing one, some compare it to pharaonic Egypt,) the result of AI is more likely to be mass unemployment, insufficient supports for those losing employment, and stagnation in either new job creation or task reduction for those who continue to be employed.
(Please note: I am aware that some who read what I just wrote are going to assume that because I used the word “distributed” that I am referencing a socialistic, communistic, central-planning style “redistribution” — probably because the word “distribute” is inside of the word “redistribute.” This is an incorrect reading. By “distributed” I am referencing an observation of the “really-existing” distribution of wealth throughout a society, not some sort of artificial system of redistribution. For example, following the Great Depression and WWII, in the US, the wealth inequality from the richest to the poorest was not as high as it had been in the “Roaring 20s,” nor as high as it is currently. The US in the 1950s experienced great and widespread prosperity — for many reasons, and the wealth compression is often cited as one factor among many.)
TDK
start by saying mr trump is a war criminal who needs to immediately be taken into custody, given a fair [and graphic] trial, and then sent to monster island to make licence plates.Let’s think that one through….
And then leave the government to JD Vance or Mike Johnson?
I hated the Russia!Russia! Junk before and during Trump’s first term because it rang to me as obviously false. While I did see Trump committing what, in my view, were impeachable offenses, the actual impeachments were about spurious issues that were, in my eyes, obviously fabricated. For all of that time, I disliked Trump. I still dislike Trump. I don’t like his brash style or the way he speaks (and acts) without fully thinking through what he says (does). (Like that ridiculous executive order about flag burning.)
Your assertion seems, to me, to be verisimilitude to all of the past (and many present) witch-hunts against Trump — a tendency to conflate what he actually does with things over which he might have some itty bitty influence.
A corollary example: a few weeks after my kids started spending increased time with their father seven years ago, all three of them displayed notedly changed behavior that was adverse in nature. Out of concern, I got my daughter into behavioral health services. (at that time, my sons already were.). My ex then manipulated the behavioral health staff for two of the kids into believing that the brand new fifty/fifty time split was the status quo, and framed me as a problematic parent who was the prima facie cause of my children’s “behavioral issues.” The staff discussed these things behind closed doors, documented the discussion in writing, and my ex then pulled the records of these concerns and put them into an emergency petition to the court to remove my custody.
To my eyes, you are doing something similar with Trump: framing him as “the man responsible” for the Gaza conflict, when it is very, very obvious that this is not the case.
I would like very much for Trump to end yesterday all military aid to Israel so that the US would have zero culpability moving forward for the death and destruction rained down on Gaza. I also know that Trump, sadly, is simply not going to by my champion in that arena. However, at the end of the day, the greatest responsibility for the genocide of the Gazan people lies with those who are using the weapons and directing the people using the weapons.
I hope that Trump’s desire to receive the Nobel Peace Prize incentivizes him to be a part of a successful action to stop the bloodshed in Gaza. It would be very nice if the people of Gaza could retain their homeland. However, that may not be a part of the equation. It isn’t right. It isn’t just. There are many things in this world, and in my own life, that are not fair. Often, all we can do is pick up the pieces and figure out what to do given the situation as it is.
