Note for the future based on all human history: the only way some commodity becomes money (salt, shells, copper, silver, gold, crypto) is for people to use it as money. That is the sole source of its monetary value above its industrial use. That anyone ever believed that BTC would achieve monetary status without adoption/use indicates ignorance or incorrigible self deception. It scales or dies. Period.
@henehan@JohnnyD536@MakisMD Sugar is literally fuel for cancer and grains cause inflamation, so she should be getting zero of those, not even fruits for now.
My reaction to the Trump verdict is pretty simple. This is about previously shared *tacit* understandings needed for the functioning of a free society.
The current case and verdict seems similar to the Bork confirmation battle from almost 40 years ago: it is a sign of the breakdown of previous *shared* tacit understandings between the parties that made the US both strong and functional.
To the Democratic Party leadership, Trump represents the breakdown of an understanding that the parties not allow a populist outside their perception of a window of allowable candidates. This is akin to *their* contention in 1987 that Bork represented a nominees outside the tacit agreement not to nominate extremists. Thus they mounted a new campaign of extraordinary measures to enforce their perception.
To the Republican Party, the Democratic leadership is innovating never before seen warfare and immoral tactics by *initiating* extraordinary warfare in violation of the tacit agreement to accept the Republican Party’s right to propose reasonable candidates without hysterical bed-wetting behavior. They believe the Democratic Party is breaking the tacit agreement not to prosecute presidents or pursue legal action as part of a campaign.
Leaving the issue of who is right aside temporarily, what is happening is the acceleration of the continuing breakdown of *SHARED* **TACIT** ASSUMPTIONS. These are the backbone of our previously functional country. They are not written down. You can’t look them up
Trump and Bork are nominees portrayed as madmen by one side, that are so extreme as to require extraordinary measures. Democratic hardliners will celebrate. What will come back is a series of prosecutions by Republicans that the Democratic Party will see as evidence that Republicans are inexplicably evil.
As for what I believe? I think the Democratic Party leadership is acting like shortsighted decisions to open the doors to hell don’t matter because many are in their 80s and aren’t going to be around long enough. And they don’t care enough about their own children or their country to care about the world they leave behind after their demises. I have always said that Trump poses an existential threat. Biden joined that club a while back. He should be removing himself at his age and in his condition and Kamala should not be a heartbeat away from being commander in chief of the world’s pre-eminent thermonuclear power.
What do I want? It’s laughable. I sound delusional.
I want all these people gone, removed by their parties’ middle aged wise men and women so that we aren’t forced to play this out. I want some vital person in their 40s with military and government experience and a technical background to be in the Oval Office giving the speeches needed to restore our nation. I don’t care which party at this point. Someone who has seen action and loves America. I don’t care the party, the race, the gender, the sexual orientation or anything else at this point .
The fact that such a vision admittedly sounds insane…even to me….tells you everything about how these people have shifted our tacit understandings of ourselves. We have accepted madness.
Adults would never have let this happen. The aged, ironically, have simply cleared out *all* the adults.
How do you ask a badly misbehaving Octogenarian: “Is your mother or father at home?”
I am more concerned with my children at this point than either Biden or Trump. We are going to play this out as we did Bork for our foreseeable future. It’s so insane.
🙏
Israel, Our White-House Absurdities, and the Left’s Empire of Lies
The Biden administration is furiously trying to contextualize its past, unsupportable policies that have sown global chaos, especially in the Middle East. But the more it spins, the clearer its culpability.
Does it really believe that the long-agreed-upon U.S. green-lighting of $6 billion in sanctions relief to Iran has had no role in Iran’s terrorist support of Hamas, whether psychological or material or both? Do they think we are that stupid?
Even a first-grader might surmise that if a terrorist state knows that an impending $6-billion bonanza will shortly arrive in its coffers, then it will more readily in the here and now send arms to Hamas—on the logical assumption that those costs soon will be more than covered, while making the additional assumption that the United States is complicit in its own fungible use of sanctions relief cash, and thus not innately hostile to Tehran’s self-professed agenda. In short, Tony Blinken is either a naif, a fool, or to use his words “misinforming”.
These administration's megaphones who deny such fungibility always end up mouthing the same arguments as the lying and murderous theocracy in Tehran.
But then why not—given the Biden-appointed Robert Malley, previously known as Obama’s ISIS advisor (and we remember how that worked out in Iraq), and a self-declared expert on Hamas rapprochement, eagerly accepted the offer to restart the disastrous Iran deal and normalize Iranian-American relations?
And Malley was indeed eagerly at work—until he was stripped of his security clearance for his alleged unlawful dissemination of classified documents, and in addition fell under further scrutiny allegedly for treasonous efforts to insert pro-Iranian activists into the State Department.
What also was behind the initial, natural instincts of the State Department’s “U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs”? On news of the attacks, our State department in Pavlovian fashion immediately posted: “We urged all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.”
Yes, as lots of us predicted, that insane virtue signal would eventually be taken down—but only in response to Americans outraged at its amoral inanity.
Was our government’s first inclination to stop Israel’s counter-responses to systematic Hamas murdering? Should Israelis accept another 800, 1,000, or 2,000 dead women and children in the interest of abiding by the instruction of the American “Office of Palestinian Affairs” to avoid “retaliatory attacks”?
For that matter, does the Biden administration admonish Ukraine to refrain from “retaliatory attacks”—since, in its logic, responding to Putin’s “terror” with Ukrainian counter “violence” would “solve nothing”?
Or is it just Israel, a democratic ally, that deserves these sermons?
Or do they not reflect the embarrassing reality that there is a core Democratic base—the toxic Squad, AOC's Democratic Socialists, the fusion media, and some of the identity politics caucuses—who are Hamas apologists, even if that bankrupt ideology descends into ignoring or condoning the abject slaughter of civilians in their homes?
And are we really to believe, as told, that resumption of hundreds of millions dollars in aid to the Palestinians was also not fungible and used to aid the current murderous agendas of Hamas?
But do not just believe supporters of Israel about that reality.
Instead, read what dissidents in the State Department themselves warned at the time of the dangers of Biden’s resumption of aid to the radical Palestinians: “We assess there is a high risk Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from U.S. assistance to Gaza. There is less but still some risk U.S. assistance would benefit other designated groups.”
The administration is, of course, back peddling furiously, given its prior appeasement of Iran and Hamas, if not an outright tilt against Israel—again policies that reflected the embarrassing core constituency of the Democratic Party.
Americans should not listen to what Biden’s team now conveniently says, but instead to what it actually does in the upcoming weeks when it is under fire by its base in the new woke Democratic Party, as the Israelis have to go into Gaza, end this toxic death machine, and confront the Hamas global propaganda machine.
A hard rain is soon going to fall abroad.
And the United States better get its house in order, whether defined as standing with its few dependable allies left, securing its own oil and gas supplies, protecting its borders, un-woking and rebooting its suspect military, recalibrating its all too often incompetent and politicized intelligence bureaus—and thus preparing for a world turned upside down.