dogyks

Oddly enough, despicable though Trump may be, our prospects under Harris would be significantly worse. There's a difference between handling things badly and not handling them at all. It's like the sign: 1) Pull 2) Pull at a proper altitude 3) Pull at a proper altitude while stable etc. We still may wind up like Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Cuba or other such garden spots, but at least that's not the goal - which is a measurable improvement.

Orwell was an optimist.

I support treating animals with respect, and get injured wildlife to veterinary care. Having said that, the chap who became buddies with Kodiak bears may have thought he was being empathetic but got eaten anyway. I have dealt with people who, regardless of how well I treat them, are committed to the death of me and anyone like me. Nothing personal. I do not share their values, such as they are, but I accept their reality.

As I'm sure you're aware, it was a papal envoy regarding Gnostics who said "kill them all - God will recognize his own."

Children of diplomats born in the U. S. are citizens of the country of origin of the parents. Treating undocumented parents as diplomatic representatives of their home country seems no less fair. You want an anchor baby? Get a visa and show up legally.

Woke is a transmissible form of mental illness, as is any other religion, and should be limited in its spread. Per Amendment #1, you have the right to whatever system of delusion suits you, but you are proscribed from inflicting upon others. Somehow, it is viewed as a birthright of anyone on the planet to occupy the U. S. of A. if they can manage to touch base here. Interesting thought. If someone showed up in Tirana and explained that in Camden, New Jersey they were in fear of drug gangs and sundry violence, I imagine the Albanian authorities would feel badly for our victim but wonder quite what makes it their problem. I have been to places that are nice, but one would not dream of being there without authorization. Why should the U. S. be any different? Given that the horrible places on this planet are largely very nice geographically, but are simply awful by dint of their population/culture, why on earth would we want to import said culture? One thing we tend to miss is that the people who go against repressive regimes are all too often no better than the oppressors when all is said and done. Thus, if I guess correctly as to what you're railing against, there is no lack of empathy for people who overlook the rules regarding immigration; the hope is that they'll be healthy and happy somewhere else.

Any confidence I have in the Democrats amounts to the realization that, with Trump as an example, truly ANYONE or ANYTHING can be elected president of this proud Republic. I agree that AOC is pretty much the bottom of the barrel so far, but there's time to do worse. The Democratic Convention in '68 was interesting, and gave us Tricky Dick instead of Hube the Cube - unintended consequences indeed. I was in Chicago then, but was in Santiago later when protests took place to remind the powers that be that they were committed to a Constitution to replace Pinochet's. We got to know both protesters and Carabineros - and my wife and son got their first exposure to CS - but the end result was a new Constitution, so you're right there. I strongly recommend assisting Trump in his inevitable self destruction. If you create chaos, he wins because he's on his home turf. "Never wrestle with a pig. You just get muddy and the pig enjoys it." .

I don't think it worked well for the Bonus Army, and suspect the Law of Unintended Consequences might come into play. Unfortunately, the buffoon in chief may make "anyone but Trump" seem like a bargain and the Democrats will then put in one second-rater or another. Apparently Harris is the pick in the last poll, but they have 3 years to find someone worse and I have every confidence that they will do so. The scum rises to the top on both sides of the aisle. The optics of demonstrations are rarely as intended.

"Nanny always called it Percy..."

It's the flaw in the human condition that accounts for religion. Come up with a narrative that is verifiable nonsense and, when people buy into it, postulate a set of 'good' things that would otherwise seem 'evil' and you're all set.

Hurts just looking at it. I highly respect sea urchins. As a teenager I cut them open to draw big fish into speargun range, now I just leave them be.

I found his approach to the kids stuck in the cave in Thailand to be nauseating. The people who pulled it off were terrific, and his response to having others deliver without his help was to call them "pedo." Quite the class act. OTOH, I've seen him interviewed where his grasp of subjects with which I'm familiar was impressive. One can have test scores as rare as a royal flush but still have significant gaps in their skill set. If he was gifted to that level, I'd expect him to know that. Having some familiarity with Argentina, it seems that a similar turnaround may be possible for the US. Though the differences may well be overwhelming, having Musk in charge of the process may be about as good as we can do at the moment. Musk and Trump are awful people to differing degrees (Trump turns it up to 11), but they may have some net benefit before we can get rid of them.

Bullying? Hate? As Hitchens noted, that which is submitted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.

I blew off Antarctica.

It apparently wards off altitude sickness, to which my son was subject in Cuzco. I passed on munching the leaves in Machu Picchu.

Okay, incoherence is the best you can do. If you dispute anything I said, get specific. If you wish to make claims of "hate," back them up. Otherwise back off.

WTF?

I can't tell if you're projecting or feigning ignorance.

Perhaps, but I've known kids that I would have guessed were destined to change teams but turned out entirely straight. It can wait until they can vote.

Some of the people studied by Margared Mead, when later interviewed, said that they had fun goofing on the naive and credulous creature that asked all the questions. Regarding the particulars she reported, they chuckled and said 'nah, that was bullshit' (or words to that effect. I agree that what people do behind closed doors is generally Too Much Information if they wanted to discuss it. I've suspected that some of the stuff guys claimed when I was in the Army was like what the islanders told Margaret Mead, where they were playing on perceived gullibility or testing the ick factor as the case may be, but it was impolitic to say 'spare me.' In any event, I have lived in societies where sex was viewed as being as natural as breathing, those that see it as an evil that is tolerated only as necessary to procreate, and variations in between. In the movie Little Big Man, the character Little Horse was 'two-spirit' and nobody really gave it a second thought. Then you have people from Bible Thumping backgrounds, for whom it's all 'sinful,' and they're strung out about it coming and going. If you have someone going through puberty in an environment where the approach to sex is pathological, how things settle out is unlikely to be well adjusted. Thus, you can have youngsters who REALLY want to get laid and hate themselves for it, so the role into which they settle may reflect this self loathing in one way or another. Calling it a 'choice' doesn't really do it justice.

Okay, I roasted a valve coming back from Bridge Day and the local mechanic 'fixed' it and signed it off. It ran terribly and he said it was my carburetor, which I knew it wasn't. The owners of the airport wouldn't allow any other mechanics to work there, so I had to get it to another airport to get it out of their hands. I got adequate RPMs and made the 10 minute flight to the nearest airport uneventfully, planning for an engine out landing if necessary. It turns out they had put chrome rings in a chrome cylinder, which is bad juju. The cylinder was cracked in 5 places, I had metal in the filter and wound up getting an overhaul ahead of schedule. Since these guys stood by their work, I got the local FSDO to give their opinion. When asked what the hell I was thinking taking off with that airplane, I responded that it was signed off by a licensed A&P so it was all good. The response was not fit for print, but came down to 'don't hand me that! You knew exactly what you were doing.' The mechanic had his license pulled (it eventually got reinstated) and I just got a dressing down. Thus, while I was going to dispute your claim that I held my nose and gave it a pass. I can't think of having done so when anyone else's life was at stake, and much rather have someone mad at me because I wouldn't sign something off than to do so and wonder what would happen. One sailplane pilot gave me an emergency reserve to repack, but I couldn't seal it because it was Danish and not TSO'd. He was okay with it, and found another one to use while he checked out his new glider. The next week he took off to find that the empennage was misrigged, with no pitch control, and he died. If I had signed off on that rig, I should have been burned for doing so. As it is, every time someone has pulled silver on a rig that I inspected and repacked, it worked just as advertised. I don't drink, so 6 bottles of top shelf booze have gone to the common good.

Having been an adolescent, taught adolescents, parented adolescents and been a Scout Leader, I question the sanity of anyone who views the position of a child in transition as binding. To use puberty blockers (Turing committed suicide when his use of these drugs was mandated) or, even worse, to perform surgery to "correct" the issue is criminal. Trying to 'fix' a child going through this phase is a fool's errand. Most well adjusted adults bear precious little resemblance to the person they were in Middle and/or High School, and to make life altering changes based on the way things look at this age is a Very Bad Idea. If there is a real medical issue and surgery is indicated? Go for it. If the child is unhappy with the transition to whatever kind of adult they will be? Medical intervention is generally an act of idiocy.

I'm on neither side. There are people with all sorts of genetic anomalies (I have the Birt Hogg Dube mutation) and it is what it is. An acquaintance is quite gay and married. When asked about his wife, who stuck by him when he came out, he pointed out that nobody wants to be a paraiah and he got married to prove to himself that he was normal. He later asked 'who am I kidding,' his wife said basically 'what else is new?' and they sorted out the relationship. Another friend is female but presents as masculine. Her preference for women is related to her only hetero experience being, let us say 'suboptimal,' and I get it. She is annoyed when people call her 'sir,' but that's about it. Some people appear to feel stigmatized by being homosexual and rationalize this concluding that they are in the wrong body. That they choose to function as the other sex is their business, and it has provided a rather good living for a surgeon of my acquaintence who performs the various procedures involved. Of course, if one is going to spend a decade or so in lockup, identifying as a lesbian in a man's body is one way to wind up with women instead of men. I get it. Divine made a living as a zaftig tranvestite, appearing as a man in one of John Waters' movies (Hairspray?), and I don't know much of anyone who raised an eyebrow. I thought "Lust in the Dust" was a scream. Anyhow, drawing the line at people giving puberty blockers to and performing surgery on children is not, in and of itself, a rejection of people who wish to live as the other sex. There's a difference.

There's the old 1,000 jumps versus 100 jumps 10 times. My thesis defense involved educating the committee on a novel control strategy, it went well. Dr. Peter's work illustrates the perils attendant upon promoting someone to a management role for which they are ill suited. When skydiving, if I get it wrong my crater gets grid coordinates. If I sign off on drawings for a high explosives facility and overlook a source of detonation, the crater is larger, smoking and results in body parts of a few grams max, distributed over a very large area. Kinda like if I pencil pack an emergency parachute and it almost works, but on a larger scale.

You don't?