She’s too old to have gotten any vaccines except polio, smallpox, tetanus (at least later years), and more recently pneumonia, flu, and shingles. Heck, so am I. Same with *smokers. No chance to not be around smokers until 2000 and beyond. Maybe 1990s. But for my sisters children, grandchildren, and our child, these improvements matter.
(*) I haven’t lived at home since 1974. But still couldn’t get away from smokers. Smoking areas VS non-smoking areas, let alone smoking rounds VS non (bridge), is worthless. Better than smoking non-impeded … nope, still bad. Even smoking rooms VS non-smoking rooms, with sealed walkway between two door sets, doesn’t work. Yes, the Indian casinos get away with this.
extremely loosely tied to this, i recommend a report on China’s rapidly aging population by the Rhodium Group, about as mainstream and prestige as you can get.
“Perhaps the most shocking statistic that China published last year was the total number of births. At only 7.92 million in 2025, total births were less than half of the number a decade ago. Demographic headwinds to household consumption growth are a “gray rhino” for China’s economy—a clearly visible threat that is nonetheless neglected. The 2025 data pointing to double the population loss from 2024 suggest the rhino is now charging directly at China’s political and economic ambitions. Our estimates of trends in death rates suggest that China will lose nearly 60 million people in the next decade, almost the size of France, with the annual decline in 2035 to hit 7.6 million.”
that’s using government statistics, reality is much worse, and total number of births are at 1939 levels. 1939! ITs. Good report, it’s free, and you can read it in. 5 minutes.
Turkeys can fly, and they’re scary as hell when they do.
That last plural was a James Bond-ing moment.
You’d think that as a red shirt on the Enterprise, Scotty would have changed jobs for a blue or gold shirt the first time he was killed. Brilliant engineer, but sucked at life choices.
Wild turkeys can fly. I don’t know about domesticated ones.
In other news, the neighbor’s polydactyl cat just walked by the windows looking very disgruntled. Either she’s gotten all the bunnies or the survivors moved.
Wild Turkeys can fly. Kind of. It is a bit like falling with style, but is impressive simply due to their sheer size. Domestic Turkeys can’t fly because we’ve burdened them with nice meaty breasts, thighs, and drumsticks, and the wings and underlying muscle can’t support the effort. Thus the WKRP in Cincinatti turkey drop catastrophe.
Someone posted a scene from The Office involving a fire drill and praised it for its humor. I watched it (without context, since I didn’t watch the show) and found painful to watch. One character sets up a fake fire in order to – teach a lesson? Emphasize the need for a fire drill? Suppressed sadism? From my viewpoint it was cruel and everyone behaved stupidly – ok, they’re in a panic because they think they’re trapped, but nobody thought to use a cell phone?
I described it to my beloved and he immediately flashed back to 9/11 (we lost a friend there).
By contrast the WKRP scenes have no malice in any of the characters, we don’t actually see the poor turkeys’ demise and it’s played absolutely straight. And it still makes me smile.
Local wild turkeys have no problem flying up into the big trees or onto roofs for roosting at night. Haven’t seen any wild turkeys take off in flight like the local geese late summer and fall. Geese are about the same size.
Indeed they do fly, but generally just enough to get up to (or down from) a roosting place or hiding place. It is pretty ungainly and not sustained as far as I know. Pretty much any large bird take off from the ground is ungainly, geese and hawks/eagles are rather fluid once flying at altitude but the take off is kind of thrashing and ugly. How the heck Pteradactyls and Pteranadons got airborne (short jumping off cliffs) is beyond me.
“Turkeys can fly, and they’re scary as hell when they do.“
–
Yes turkeys can fly. We have wild flocks in various areas in town. Illegal to disturb nests (people do anyway). Illegal to harass them off property, including off roosting in trees or on your roof. Now that our Giant Sequoias are gone, we don’t have any trees or bushes strong enough for them to roost in (roost under, not in). Neighbors do have firs, Sequoias, and Redwoods. That is fine, the neighbors can play host. Across the street didn’t have problems, they’d let their Rottweiler out in to the backyard to play. Big baby. But the wild turkeys didn’t know that. Unfortunately, they lost him last December (age 10 and cancer). Now they are like the rest of us, cats and smaller dogs, that the turkeys laugh at (seriously, you can see it). It is hilarious to see a 15# cat stalking a turkey. Most cats aren’t that big, so it is even funnier.
wild turkeys, yes. We had them at our last house in CO. usually looking in on our second floor bathroom window (standing on the garage roof.)
One of them camped on top of older son’s pilot. He came and got our keys to go to school….
Our neighborhood see turkeys. Not often. But they occasionally invade.
The other place that has turkeys, is where I worked. Pulled in and parked. Then, timing wise, got trapped, with a lot of other folks, in our vehicles, while a huge flock invaded the parking lot. Four toms trying to herd the hens in the toms preferred directions, which were not the same direction, and not where the hens wanted to go. That part was funny. What wasn’t funny was getting attacked when trying to get out of the vehicle and to respective buildings. Flock didn’t even have to be right next to whomever was making the run. Someone making the attempt would cause the flock to move toward them, which gave someone else an option to attempt the escape. Finally, the flock moved off onto the nearby golf course. Didn’t make the early morning golfers happy, but oh well.
We were working at a camp in Rhode Island right after breeding season, but Noone had told the toms it was over. They strutted around the area in full plumage while the hens ignored them.
It was the way they announced their availability at 5 a.m. that was the problem.
Eastern US is where Oregon wild turkeys were imported from … for hunting. Sigh. Birds aren’t stupid. Guess where they flock during hunting season? Not the farmlands or the woods … Neighborhoods. Now they are pests. Pests that have protected status. They are mean. They are dangerous.
Nobody’s still suggesting saying out piles of deer feed laced with birth control meds? I rmemeber that one from the Asbury Park Press Letters to the Editor.
There’s a meme convergence thing evident to me but not yet manifested between turkeys flying and the warming up of the helicopters – “As G_d is my witness, I thought communists could fly!”
You know, I look at that quote about how Thomas Jefferson “nailed it”….. and I can’t help wonder where all this approval is for his proposal for the only certain remedy: shooting the careerists into extinction every 20 years.
The problem is that it isn’t just the elected officials, it’s the career “civil servants.” Unless you get rid of that second group, getting rid of all the elected officials has a good chance of resulting in a new group of elected officials who end up led around by the nose by our alleged servants.
getting rid of all the elected officials has a good chance of resulting in a new group of elected officials who end up led around by the nose by our alleged servants.
Hence skepticism of term limits for elected officials without corresponding limits for bureaucrats.
Paying them, even overpaying them, hasn’t reduced the bribery and corruption either.
As I say, power doesn’t corrupt. Power attracts the corrupt, and the corruptible. The only way to reduce corruption is to remove the temptation — massive concentrations of power and money.
The only way to reduce corruption is to remove the temptation — massive concentrations of power and money.
I would say this is refuted by a manager of an HOA. That isn’t a massive concentration of either power or money, and yet we see large numbers of examples of what it attracts.
I think there’s another component, maybe even a main component: the ability of the victims of abuse to protect themselves from it by removing the abuser. That’s the basis of the line exery one quotes, “An armed society is a polite society.” You are polite because a society that allows effective self-defense means that your rudeness beyond a certain limit will be corrected immediately.
And right now, both legally and practically, we see way too many examples of where that ability is removed by the laws, and therefore empowers the abuser.
PS: Apparently WPDE is using a 24-hour site cookie. I come in, it says I’m logged in, and I try to post. It wants me to re-login and asks for my password….. which it refuses to take. However, if I logout and re-login with the WP logo link, it takes my password, and I can post for another day.
I guess developing for WP doesn’t pay much, but the ability yo inconvenience users makes up for it.
In the past I’ve had to explain to people who live elsewhere that just because a location is ten miles away from where I live in LA County doesn’t mean that I can get there in twenty minutes…
Shoot, 30 or so years ago I had to do a week’s TDY in Anaheim (my boss sent me out to do other people’s travel). Even then, if you had to get in your car you could plan to be in it for at least a hour.
Which is how I got to watch my plane take off from the interstate.
I saw the German military meme and a) have reservations. Didn’t the society get “gender affirmation surgery” after WWII? Asking for a friend.
b) Ignoring “a”, Tom Lehrer’s “MLF Lullaby” came to mind. WPDE won’t let me post the full link, so I’ll have to obsfucate it a bit.
www dot youtube dot com/watch?v=3j20voPS0gI
“And one of the fingers on the button will be German.”
The video in question stems from the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas, where a creepy, mobile gaming machine was seen moving about the showcase floor, seemingly begging passersby to give it a whirl.
In addition to several commenters expressing concern about an incoming robot apocalypse, others quickly pointed out how closely this mimics the January 29, 1960, episode of “The Twilight Zone” called “The Fever.”
I have no problem with people who open carry, as long as they are aware of their surroundings, and use a proper holster (even a pocket holster). A gent came into my usual Saturday breakfast place a few weeks ago with a gorgeous tooled-leather “bar-b-que” rig* and revolver. Lovely leather and firearm!
Blue socks with brown and brown? Absolutely not. Brown or black socks, please.
*Your fancy firearm and belt/holster, worn for formal occasions or certain social events. Ornate but tasteful, unless you are That One Guy or Gal, who is also very, very good with said firearm.
I had a late friend who owned a game store. One day one of the customers came up to him and quietly informed him that another customer was carrying a gun (presumably failed concealment, since this is LA County). My friend’s first thought was to go talk to the guy… and then he had a “Wait a moment!” thought and realized that so long as the gun was holstered, it was no big deal.
Later on, he found out the guy was a federal agent (FBI, iirc), which was likely why he had a weapon with him.
That’s in Tennessee? What are the carry laws like there?
In LA County, where the incident I described took place, open carry will get the cops called on you, and did get the cops called on one guy about a year ago. The guy carrying the gun apparently had it secured in a fashion that made it legal (according to someone I was talking to when it was reported on the news), though I don’t remember the details. But the cops here either don’t know (or possibly don’t care) about fine details like that. All that they know is that general carry in public is illegal.
“… Yeah, but he’s my husband so I signed up for this”
Wait – that suggests that if it isn’t a spouse, or I didn’t sign up to be bothered, I might be eligible for a rescue? Where does one post that request, Reddit or Facebook or X? Are there group rates?
The people running Reddit are fully on the other side these days. If you post a request for rescue over there, it’s likely that you’ll be “rescued” from the wrong thing…
Acquire goats. Goats will eat anything. Also, pigs- they eat most anything and ‘splodey mess wouldn’t be much problem for a pig. Though there’s still the matter of the polite policeman who wants to know where the weirdo did go…
Around thirty-five or forty years ago someone tried the pig-farm method of disposal up in British Columbia. It turns out that pigs pass teeth undigested and unaltered, and they ID’d the decedents from dental records.
”Sister Marjorie is one sharp operator. She handles all the purchasing for the convent, runs the sales and tradesfrom the truck farm, and she has for decades. She knows all the angles.”
The C5 is still the king of U S military transport aircraft. Watching one take off, one (I) marveled at how something that big, and moving so apparently slowly, could actually fly.
Note: The C5s in inventory have been modernized to the M variant, extending their service lives into the 2040s. Granted, that doesn’t scan as well in the lyric . . .
I saw a Yoo-Toob video of a remote controlled model of either a C-5 or C-17 that was just huge. Like, 20+ foot wingspan. Somebody else had a pretty big B-2 model and it easily fit under one wing. People were joking about the dinky little B-2 getting run over if the operator wasn’t careful.
I’ve watched 747s come in for landing and they’re so big they appear to be more floating than flying.
The local commie no-kings protest hippies have been doing big banner protests on one particular interstate pedestrian overcrossing every few weeks during afternoon rush hour, and they appear to be trying to gin up some sort of “protest” thingee on 01 May, with big banners shouting “NO WORK! NO SHOP!! MAY 1!!!” prominent in the last several demonstrations.
So everyone should plan on doing any regular shopping, online or in person, on 01 May just to poke a commie in the virtual eye.
Delta hwy, in Eugene, has a pedestrian bridge over it between Delta Ponds and Gilcrest. There have been protest signs and flags staged there, viewable going south (never seen them when going the other direction). People there too, sometimes. A “crowd” of 1 to maybe six. Pretty pathetic. Even the ICE protests downtown at the Federal courthouse are pretty pathetic (few times *we’ve driven by). Do not know, but suspect the open meeting for public comment on putting a fence around the Federal Courthouse was **anemic.
(*) We avoid downtown if at all possible. But the free dinner/brunches put on by Charles Schwab have been at the 5th Street Market, which is across 6th street from the Federal Courthouse.
(**) Don’t want to use pathetic, again. And, yes, I am using pathetic, and anemic, for sarcasm … JIC.
Most I’ve seen up there was a few months back when they had their giant preprinted signs facing both directions, waving California flags on poles, with Ukraine flags up on the chain link, and maybe fifteen hippie commies. It’s been dwindling over time. They also sway from supporting Ukraine to opposing the Iran punitive strikes to no kings, dukes, or kniggets, to literally anything else anti-orange-man. The commies get very few honks from the commuters stuck in stop and go – sometimes a few, but not a lot at all.
Not working, so haven’t been stuck in Delta stop/go in 10 years (Beltline OTOH stop/go is unpredictable). Surprised Beltline overpass fences haven’t been targeted. The pedestrian bridge is seeing a lot of American Flags too.
Interestingly enough, as bad as Eugene’s rep is, compared to Springfield say (and Springfield has its wacks too), I see a LOT of open carry at Costco and N. Eugene Fred Meyers. Those that open carrier do pay attention to who is paying attention. My response is to look at them and shrug. I won’t open carry. Concealed, yes. Not open.
I’ve also seen NO SCHOOL! Hey, three day weekend! 😃
When I was contracting in Panama* my (Polish) girlfriend, when informed of the fact that I would be working on May 1, asked why I would be working on the International Day of Labor Solidarity.
*Working on Howard AFB in support of the Air Force
They are probably going to close schools in a lot of Charlotte-area jurisdictions on May 1 because of this protest. They’ll just let the teachers walk out and shut the schools down for a day. Instead of docking them a day’s pay or making them take a day off to do it. Some other places they are letting the teachers bully–er, persuade–the kids to go out on the protest with them. It’s stupid.
President Trump’s correspondents dinner just ended with a shooting. Few details yet beyond ‘shots fired’ and unconfirmed rumors that the shooter has been arrested. Trump and Erica Kirk were evacuated safely.
But ‘White Supremacy!!’ is the greatest threat to Our Democracy…
Latest I’ve seen is Trump safe, one shooter dead, one in custody, Secret Service agent injured although vest stopped shot.
Apparently shooters tried to brazen their way through main metal detector and failed. I don’t think they actually got into the main room with guests although that’s unclear.
Now it’s been postponed to sometime in the future. (February 32, perhaps?)
Original word was one shooter dead, now it looks like (perhaps the only) shooter is in custody, one Cole Tomas Allen, from SoCal.
I’m surprised (my shocked face is out for refurbishing) that the shooter seemed to have made it to an unsecured room where he (allegedly, gotta include that) assembled the weapon. What’s with the unsecured rooms near POTUS?
According to Dana Loesch’s column (written by a lady whose name I can’t totally recall but she’s solid on reporting), Trump held, “the fanciest press conference ever,” with all the correspondents from the dinner still in their “party clothes.”
She said one shooter, in custody, one agent and the shooter taken to hospital, both survived.
Of course the Twitter verse, she said, was going crazy with conspiracy theories.
I saw a video report last night that as the alleged nutball ran through that “checkpoint” he shot one an agent center of mass with his 38, which the agent’s vest stopped cold. Hopefully he was wearing rifle plates or he’ll have a heck of a bruise this morning. If I am interpreting the available video correctly that appears to have been the same agent that then immediately pivoted, drew and fired on the guy.
The layout of that “checkpoint” appears questionable, but that agent has the right stuff.
There was already some lefty idiot on Twitter saying (paraphrase) “How dare you assume it was a leftist! Maybe it was a MAGAt there to kill journalists!”
Gee, maybe because it’s always Leftroids. Looting, vandalism, arson, rape and murder are their go-to plans. When that doesn’t work, when they just make things immeasurably worse, they can only Do It Moar!!! 😡
31 one year old teacher probably was radicialized by primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling, and probably crazy, ignorant and arrogant enough that the SPLC was slightly contributing to him going forward with it.
Longer lead time, so the ICE stuff probably was more of a contributing factor.
Why wasn’t he busy with his students and their finals?
Could just be an IRGC stooge, their foreign direct action group.
I was originally wondering if Californian meant someone’s staffer.
If Wolf Blitzer was romantically entangled with thirty year olds, then I can buy a disturbed thirty year old targeting him.
Reported career path is a bit different – 2017 CalTech BSME, which by all accounts remains not an easy program or an easy school, MS in computer science last year from CSU Dominguez Hills, which sounds like a bog standards CSU school so not nearly as demanding as CalTech, did an internship at JPL, presumably right after CalTech, and he’s been a tutor with a private test-prep and college admissions counseling company since 2019-20, which would put that work overlapping his MS.
And he tried to bums-rush the augmented event Secret Service security perimeter with a shotgun and a 38 revolver.
I see he’s an “‘alleged’ gunman” in reporting. Heh.
For those unaware, the CSU (California State University) schools are the lower tier public universities in California. So UCLA is the prestigious state university in LA. CSULA is the low tier state school in the same city. There are quite a few of them around. CSU Dominguez is in LA County, as is CSU Long Beach. And there are CSU schools in the surrounding counties, as well.
Shame this guy wrecked his life just after investing so much into his education.
This is going to be a controversial and incredibly arrogant of me statement, but I don’t think most journalists have enough background in random variables and stochastic processes to be have really valid opinions in using those sorts of models for events.
(I’m maybe agnostic on whether I have a good enough education.)
anyway, I would note that covid broke a lot of people, adn that we apparently did have some actual crazies getting pretty close to Biden’s security.
(I think the universities are about providing crazy people with ‘justifications’, or really just obviously wrong excuses. I think that a lot of current Democrat betting strategies are bad for the sanity of anyone investing in those ways of thinking. )
Sure enough, but then again this is a common pattern. Consider the systematic name for the bear (the European brown one, I think): “ursus arctos”. That means “bear bear” in Latin then Greek.
Re -us plural is -i “only in Latin” not even then. Only in the Latin 2nd declination. A minority of Latin words ending in -us are 4th declination, and their plural ending is also -us. Fun…
A few days ago I brought up how some people are freaking out over the video game Pragmata. I only had very basic information about what was going on, so here’s YouTuber Dadvocate explaining in better detail why some people are freaking out over a brand new video game –
A very quick rundown –
1.) Pre-release, there were apparently a bunch of pdfs (the current substitute term that doesn’t attract unwholesome internet searches) that came out of the woodwork, reportedly posting massive amounts of NSFW artwork of the female lead, Diana (who, as I mentioned, is an android that looks like a 6 year old girl), to the game’s sub-reddit. Things got so bad that the entire base Pragmata sub-reddit got shutdown, and an alternative sub-reddit called PragmataSFW *also* shut down after it’s head moderator said he got sick and tired of the constant stream of perverted art he was having to deal with (despite the sub-reddit literally having ‘SFW’ in the name of the sub-reddit). So there was a legit issue with pdfs pre-release.
2.) Since release, there has been a response similar to the one I described in my comment the other day, where *anything* praising the game is banned on Reddit even if there’s no indication that the person praising the game is doing so for inappropriate reasons. Any positive support of the game is also being attacked in many other places. Some of this could be a legitimate overreaction as a result of the pre-release mess. But much of it appears to be misandry-driven accusations that any man who likes the game is a pdf, and additionally due to claims that the game is a “conservative psyop” to make men want to be fathers.
3.) Hasan PIker is shown briefly in the video I linked, spouting some of the useless drivel that passes for thought from him. He’s a far-left Twitch streamer (Twitch is a streaming platform that specializes in video game streaming). He’s notorious for flagrantly breaking Twitch’s rules of conduct, but the worst punishment he ever gets is a slap on the wrist (despite his misconduct repeatedly extending to actions that ought to get him permanently banned from the platform according to the platform’s own rules, and more conservative streamers getting banned for actions that are much less flagrant). It appears that he’s protected due to his politics. There was also a controversy a few months ago when people realized that his dog wears a shock collar, and he regularly shocks it to get it to behave during his streams. Sadly, that wasn’t enough to get him banned, and he was able to ride it out. He’s recently been praised by the NYT, and he’s been mentioned recently a few times on Instapundit. I suspect many on the left see him as an important mouthpiece for attracting Gen Z males.
Oh, there’s no doubt that Piker would happily physically abuse people if he thought he could get away with it. He’s already encouraged violence from his stream against those he sees as political enemies (one of the reasons why he should have been banned from Twitch). In short, he appears to have the personality of the standard Antifa thug, in the standard Antifa thug’s body. Unfortunately, unlike most Antifa thugs he’s got a popular streaming platform from which to spout his drivel.
Instapundit’s most recent link to something he was involved in (just within the last few days) was a non-stream appearance in which he and the person he was chatting with were taking about how great and anti-capitalist stealing from the Louvre (and other places) would be.
Dan Clancy, who runs Twitch, apparently had/has Hasan’s billionaire dad as a major investor or silent partner in Twitch, and possibly in other Clancy ventures.
Hasan literally cannot get thrown off Twitch unless he dishonors his dad or something.
Ah, so he’s a nepo baby. That explains quite a lot.
He’s literally the walking (well, sitting, because streamer) stereotype of a spoiled rich kid communist. The only thing he hasn’t done yet is personally set off bombs.
There does seem to be a genuine belief that he can serve as a bridge to the Gen Z males, as I noted above. So there’s some genuine self-interest by the left in protecting him. But I suspect nepotism has a lot to do with how he got into that position in the first place.
And as far as acting as a bridge to Gen Z males, a lot of people already loathe him due to things like the double-standard that’s clearly on display regarding the things he’s said or done.
Miss Polydactyl Kitty just gave me a thorough stropping and sang me the songs of her people (she’s a noisy little thing). I wish she was only here to see me, but I found the entrance to the bunny den outside the office windows and I am merely on her way to breakfast. OTOH, I don’t think she’s had much luck lately and that’s fine with me.
Re skydiving: as the saying goes “if at first you don’t succeed, skydiving probably isn’t for you”.
Then again, on a serious note, this is why all student skydiving rigs (and most non-student ones) come with an “Automatic Activation Device”, a widget that opens the parachute if the student fails to do so.
Or jumping in tandem. Though there was the case where the instructor (in the military) suffered a heartattack in the jump, and the student had bring himself down safely.
Yes, tandems also are required to have an AAD. And while the problem you described is extremely rare it’s possible, and the safety equipment took care of it.
The WHCA has resulted in a scandal that is sure to take down Trump.
James Blair took a picture, and posted it on Twitter. This picture shows the screen of Trump’s laptop, and it is horrifying, you can see what OS he uses.
Also, he uses black text on a white background.
Fundamentally, none of this is appropriate for anyone in any sort of leadership position.
It is over, the Republican party is going to collapse now.
I think it is a good image for meme modifications, and also I am too perfectionist and unskilled to do anything with it today.
It is also about the blandest and most setting appropriate thing that one could have on a screen. Right now it is hard to think of anything different that would be particularly funny.
SFBS!
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Took me a second on “IRAN” & “IDIDN’T”.
Funny because it is true.
Good ones this week.
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“When you realize you’re the same age as those old people you used to watch on TV…”
I’m 20 years older than them, and still better lookin’. ~:D
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Not quite 20 years older, but still better lookin’, too. Besides that, I don’t act my age.
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Do any of us?
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Very occasionally and sometimes entirely on accident.
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Won’t speak to the “look better”, but aye-up.
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Me too. 10 years older than some.
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OTOH, I remember what my grandmother looked like when she was my age.
My mother doesn’t look that old yet.
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Mom looks a lot better than grandmother, her mother, did at 91. Grandma died at 93.
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Amazing what decent nutrition, indoor climate control, and not getting hit with a dozen “childhood diseases” will do for your looks.
Also not being surrounded by smokers.
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She’s too old to have gotten any vaccines except polio, smallpox, tetanus (at least later years), and more recently pneumonia, flu, and shingles. Heck, so am I. Same with *smokers. No chance to not be around smokers until 2000 and beyond. Maybe 1990s. But for my sisters children, grandchildren, and our child, these improvements matter.
(*) I haven’t lived at home since 1974. But still couldn’t get away from smokers. Smoking areas VS non-smoking areas, let alone smoking rounds VS non (bridge), is worthless. Better than smoking non-impeded … nope, still bad. Even smoking rooms VS non-smoking rooms, with sealed walkway between two door sets, doesn’t work. Yes, the Indian casinos get away with this.
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extremely loosely tied to this, i recommend a report on China’s rapidly aging population by the Rhodium Group, about as mainstream and prestige as you can get.
“Perhaps the most shocking statistic that China published last year was the total number of births. At only 7.92 million in 2025, total births were less than half of the number a decade ago. Demographic headwinds to household consumption growth are a “gray rhino” for China’s economy—a clearly visible threat that is nonetheless neglected. The 2025 data pointing to double the population loss from 2024 suggest the rhino is now charging directly at China’s political and economic ambitions. Our estimates of trends in death rates suggest that China will lose nearly 60 million people in the next decade, almost the size of France, with the annual decline in 2035 to hit 7.6 million.”
that’s using government statistics, reality is much worse, and total number of births are at 1939 levels. 1939! ITs. Good report, it’s free, and you can read it in. 5 minutes.
Highly recommended
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I’m just saying, maybe we should give nuclear war a chance.
We have not have a nuclear war with a peer adversary, it hasn’t been tried.
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What a MAD idea!
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Cthulhu is a Democrat.
Turkeys can fly, and they’re scary as hell when they do.
That last plural was a James Bond-ing moment.
You’d think that as a red shirt on the Enterprise, Scotty would have changed jobs for a blue or gold shirt the first time he was killed. Brilliant engineer, but sucked at life choices.
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That’s an insult… to Cthulhu. [Evil Grin]
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Wild turkeys can fly. I don’t know about domesticated ones.
In other news, the neighbor’s polydactyl cat just walked by the windows looking very disgruntled. Either she’s gotten all the bunnies or the survivors moved.
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Wild Turkeys can fly. Kind of. It is a bit like falling with style, but is impressive simply due to their sheer size. Domestic Turkeys can’t fly because we’ve burdened them with nice meaty breasts, thighs, and drumsticks, and the wings and underlying muscle can’t support the effort. Thus the WKRP in Cincinatti turkey drop catastrophe.
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Someone posted a scene from The Office involving a fire drill and praised it for its humor. I watched it (without context, since I didn’t watch the show) and found painful to watch. One character sets up a fake fire in order to – teach a lesson? Emphasize the need for a fire drill? Suppressed sadism? From my viewpoint it was cruel and everyone behaved stupidly – ok, they’re in a panic because they think they’re trapped, but nobody thought to use a cell phone?
I described it to my beloved and he immediately flashed back to 9/11 (we lost a friend there).
By contrast the WKRP scenes have no malice in any of the characters, we don’t actually see the poor turkeys’ demise and it’s played absolutely straight. And it still makes me smile.
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Local wild turkeys have no problem flying up into the big trees or onto roofs for roosting at night. Haven’t seen any wild turkeys take off in flight like the local geese late summer and fall. Geese are about the same size.
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Indeed they do fly, but generally just enough to get up to (or down from) a roosting place or hiding place. It is pretty ungainly and not sustained as far as I know. Pretty much any large bird take off from the ground is ungainly, geese and hawks/eagles are rather fluid once flying at altitude but the take off is kind of thrashing and ugly. How the heck Pteradactyls and Pteranadons got airborne (short jumping off cliffs) is beyond me.
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I suspect like one of the largest existing birds the California Condor.
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Higher air pressure, higher oxygen content?
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Yes, wild ones can fly. And scare the bejeebers out of you if they’re doing it right as you turn around and they’re only 3 feet away.
Also, Wild Turkey can make you _think_ you can fly.
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Yes turkeys can fly. We have wild flocks in various areas in town. Illegal to disturb nests (people do anyway). Illegal to harass them off property, including off roosting in trees or on your roof. Now that our Giant Sequoias are gone, we don’t have any trees or bushes strong enough for them to roost in (roost under, not in). Neighbors do have firs, Sequoias, and Redwoods. That is fine, the neighbors can play host. Across the street didn’t have problems, they’d let their Rottweiler out in to the backyard to play. Big baby. But the wild turkeys didn’t know that. Unfortunately, they lost him last December (age 10 and cancer). Now they are like the rest of us, cats and smaller dogs, that the turkeys laugh at (seriously, you can see it). It is hilarious to see a 15# cat stalking a turkey. Most cats aren’t that big, so it is even funnier.
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wild turkeys, yes. We had them at our last house in CO. usually looking in on our second floor bathroom window (standing on the garage roof.)
One of them camped on top of older son’s pilot. He came and got our keys to go to school….
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Our neighborhood see turkeys. Not often. But they occasionally invade.
The other place that has turkeys, is where I worked. Pulled in and parked. Then, timing wise, got trapped, with a lot of other folks, in our vehicles, while a huge flock invaded the parking lot. Four toms trying to herd the hens in the toms preferred directions, which were not the same direction, and not where the hens wanted to go. That part was funny. What wasn’t funny was getting attacked when trying to get out of the vehicle and to respective buildings. Flock didn’t even have to be right next to whomever was making the run. Someone making the attempt would cause the flock to move toward them, which gave someone else an option to attempt the escape. Finally, the flock moved off onto the nearby golf course. Didn’t make the early morning golfers happy, but oh well.
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We were working at a camp in Rhode Island right after breeding season, but Noone had told the toms it was over. They strutted around the area in full plumage while the hens ignored them.
It was the way they announced their availability at 5 a.m. that was the problem.
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Turkeys are a menace here in northern NJ where we’ve decided that the best way to control our wild animal population is with cars.
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Eastern US is where Oregon wild turkeys were imported from … for hunting. Sigh. Birds aren’t stupid. Guess where they flock during hunting season? Not the farmlands or the woods … Neighborhoods. Now they are pests. Pests that have protected status. They are mean. They are dangerous.
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Nobody’s still suggesting saying out piles of deer feed laced with birth control meds? I rmemeber that one from the Asbury Park Press Letters to the Editor.
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There’s a meme convergence thing evident to me but not yet manifested between turkeys flying and the warming up of the helicopters – “As G_d is my witness, I thought communists could fly!”
Les Nessman to them white courtesy phone…
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You know, I look at that quote about how Thomas Jefferson “nailed it”….. and I can’t help wonder where all this approval is for his proposal for the only certain remedy: shooting the careerists into extinction every 20 years.
‘Tis a mystery.
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The problem is that it isn’t just the elected officials, it’s the career “civil servants.” Unless you get rid of that second group, getting rid of all the elected officials has a good chance of resulting in a new group of elected officials who end up led around by the nose by our alleged servants.
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Hence skepticism of term limits for elected officials without corresponding limits for bureaucrats.
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Eliminate the Civil Service
Make all government jobs depend on patronage
And UNPAID
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Unpaid will make them more attractive to those who figure out how to monetize them. Fraud, bribery —
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Paying them, even overpaying them, hasn’t reduced the bribery and corruption either.
As I say, power doesn’t corrupt. Power attracts the corrupt, and the corruptible. The only way to reduce corruption is to remove the temptation — massive concentrations of power and money.
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this.
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I would say this is refuted by a manager of an HOA. That isn’t a massive concentration of either power or money, and yet we see large numbers of examples of what it attracts.
I think there’s another component, maybe even a main component: the ability of the victims of abuse to protect themselves from it by removing the abuser. That’s the basis of the line exery one quotes, “An armed society is a polite society.” You are polite because a society that allows effective self-defense means that your rudeness beyond a certain limit will be corrected immediately.
And right now, both legally and practically, we see way too many examples of where that ability is removed by the laws, and therefore empowers the abuser.
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And WPDE didn’t like my reply.
PS: Apparently WPDE is using a 24-hour site cookie. I come in, it says I’m logged in, and I try to post. It wants me to re-login and asks for my password….. which it refuses to take. However, if I logout and re-login with the WP logo link, it takes my password, and I can post for another day.
I guess developing for WP doesn’t pay much, but the ability yo inconvenience users makes up for it.
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Concentrate on the power. The money is not the big problem.
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Power and money are largely interchangeable. If you have one, you can get the other. Most corruptocrats take both from the government.
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By his writings, old Tom wasn’t that selective. He WAS a redhead, after all.
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What the actual heck, WPDE?
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AAhhh, Somehow pixy misa got the actual link and the image link to be different.
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Regarding the LA traffic meme:
Listening to the Sammy Hagar song “I Can’t Drive 55,” I’ve occasionally wondered, if it takes Sammy 16 hours to get to L.A., where did he start from?
I’ve decided the most likely answer is somewhere in West Hollywood.
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In the past I’ve had to explain to people who live elsewhere that just because a location is ten miles away from where I live in LA County doesn’t mean that I can get there in twenty minutes…
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Shoot, 30 or so years ago I had to do a week’s TDY in Anaheim (my boss sent me out to do other people’s travel). Even then, if you had to get in your car you could plan to be in it for at least a hour.
Which is how I got to watch my plane take off from the interstate.
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I saw the German military meme and a) have reservations. Didn’t the society get “gender affirmation surgery” after WWII? Asking for a friend.
b) Ignoring “a”, Tom Lehrer’s “MLF Lullaby” came to mind. WPDE won’t let me post the full link, so I’ll have to obsfucate it a bit.
www dot youtube dot com/watch?v=3j20voPS0gI
“And one of the fingers on the button will be German.”
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we taught them a lesson in 1918 and they’ve hardly bothered us since then.
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The mini-CAT tractor (is that a Kitty?) is cute. Pretty sure Caterpillar didn’t make it, but it’s cute…
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I think we missed Earth Day, but……
https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/josh-net-zero-hits-the-fan.webp
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https://www.theblaze.com/return/slot-machine-las-vegas-follows
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I have no problem with people who open carry, as long as they are aware of their surroundings, and use a proper holster (even a pocket holster). A gent came into my usual Saturday breakfast place a few weeks ago with a gorgeous tooled-leather “bar-b-que” rig* and revolver. Lovely leather and firearm!
Blue socks with brown and brown? Absolutely not. Brown or black socks, please.
*Your fancy firearm and belt/holster, worn for formal occasions or certain social events. Ornate but tasteful, unless you are That One Guy or Gal, who is also very, very good with said firearm.
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I had a late friend who owned a game store. One day one of the customers came up to him and quietly informed him that another customer was carrying a gun (presumably failed concealment, since this is LA County). My friend’s first thought was to go talk to the guy… and then he had a “Wait a moment!” thought and realized that so long as the gun was holstered, it was no big deal.
Later on, he found out the guy was a federal agent (FBI, iirc), which was likely why he had a weapon with him.
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Guy was open carrying at ConFinement this year. He just kept going up and down the hall and in and out of thr hotel.
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That’s in Tennessee? What are the carry laws like there?
In LA County, where the incident I described took place, open carry will get the cops called on you, and did get the cops called on one guy about a year ago. The guy carrying the gun apparently had it secured in a fashion that made it legal (according to someone I was talking to when it was reported on the news), though I don’t remember the details. But the cops here either don’t know (or possibly don’t care) about fine details like that. All that they know is that general carry in public is illegal.
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Test? WPDE is giving me problems today …
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Hmm. Doesn’t seem to a like long post? Try shorter …
Same age as TV people? I wish … I didn’t check all of them, but I believe that whole set has passed on to the Great Critic In The Sky.
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“… Yeah, but he’s my husband so I signed up for this”
Wait – that suggests that if it isn’t a spouse, or I didn’t sign up to be bothered, I might be eligible for a rescue? Where does one post that request, Reddit or Facebook or X? Are there group rates?
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The people running Reddit are fully on the other side these days. If you post a request for rescue over there, it’s likely that you’ll be “rescued” from the wrong thing…
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Mostly, but not entirely.
Happens I’m a moderator in one tiny corner, CAguns.
But There Are Places I Do Not Go, and times when I choose not to reply – pearls before very vocal swine.
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Ah, good. Hopefully everything on your sub-reddit continues that way.
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Another fine bit of wisdom from Sowell. Try to sell that to your teen-aged daughter. BTDT, failed
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Blue socks at the counter: When did brown shoes with a blue suit come back into ‘acceptable’? I notice it particularly with SecWar Hegseth.
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Simplistic platitudes lawn sign: I can’t put that up – the mess from heads exploding is hard to wash out of the grass.
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Acquire goats. Goats will eat anything. Also, pigs- they eat most anything and ‘splodey mess wouldn’t be much problem for a pig. Though there’s still the matter of the polite policeman who wants to know where the weirdo did go…
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Around thirty-five or forty years ago someone tried the pig-farm method of disposal up in British Columbia. It turns out that pigs pass teeth undigested and unaltered, and they ID’d the decedents from dental records.
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Could be – cops seem to be on the slightly conservative side.
Town is about even – last election, it cast about 4K total votes for President, about 20 more for Trump than Cackles.
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“I will literally pay for your vasectomy”
“Ooh, I’ve always wanted on in candy-apple red!”
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The temptation to push that solar system button just to see what it would do.
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Well, the big red button is usually “emergency stop”, so…
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The jolly, candy-like button!
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Sister Marjorie won’t get much resistance when pursuing Angles. Probably Saxons or Jutes, either . . .
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”Sister Marjorie is one sharp operator. She handles all the purchasing for the convent, runs the sales and tradesfrom the truck farm, and she has for decades. She knows all the angles.”
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I noticed that, yes.
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Picts? Random tribes of Celts?
And Little Sisters of Hoboken. One of our neighbors in Michigan was a cousin or something of playwright Dan Goggins.
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Boycott all things communist and communists.
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You’re gonna need a bigger helicopter ….
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You must be new here…. 8-)
TTTO: Ballad of the Green Berets:
“Drooling Commies, from the sky.
Dumb Comrades, who fall and die.
500 more, we’ll drop today,
Per the plan of Pinochet.
“Pinochet inspires us all,
but he’s thinking way too small!
US has a faster way,
Shove them from a C5A!”
And yes, I know we have larger planes, but C5A fits the tune in a way C17 doesn’t.
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Globemaster has the right number of syllables, but sounds a bit awkward, imo.
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The C5 is still the king of U S military transport aircraft. Watching one take off, one (I) marveled at how something that big, and moving so apparently slowly, could actually fly.
Note: The C5s in inventory have been modernized to the M variant, extending their service lives into the 2040s. Granted, that doesn’t scan as well in the lyric . . .
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I saw a Yoo-Toob video of a remote controlled model of either a C-5 or C-17 that was just huge. Like, 20+ foot wingspan. Somebody else had a pretty big B-2 model and it easily fit under one wing. People were joking about the dinky little B-2 getting run over if the operator wasn’t careful.
I’ve watched 747s come in for landing and they’re so big they appear to be more floating than flying.
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The local commie no-kings protest hippies have been doing big banner protests on one particular interstate pedestrian overcrossing every few weeks during afternoon rush hour, and they appear to be trying to gin up some sort of “protest” thingee on 01 May, with big banners shouting “NO WORK! NO SHOP!! MAY 1!!!” prominent in the last several demonstrations.
So everyone should plan on doing any regular shopping, online or in person, on 01 May just to poke a commie in the virtual eye.
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Delta hwy, in Eugene, has a pedestrian bridge over it between Delta Ponds and Gilcrest. There have been protest signs and flags staged there, viewable going south (never seen them when going the other direction). People there too, sometimes. A “crowd” of 1 to maybe six. Pretty pathetic. Even the ICE protests downtown at the Federal courthouse are pretty pathetic (few times *we’ve driven by). Do not know, but suspect the open meeting for public comment on putting a fence around the Federal Courthouse was **anemic.
(*) We avoid downtown if at all possible. But the free dinner/brunches put on by Charles Schwab have been at the 5th Street Market, which is across 6th street from the Federal Courthouse.
(**) Don’t want to use pathetic, again. And, yes, I am using pathetic, and anemic, for sarcasm … JIC.
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Most I’ve seen up there was a few months back when they had their giant preprinted signs facing both directions, waving California flags on poles, with Ukraine flags up on the chain link, and maybe fifteen hippie commies. It’s been dwindling over time. They also sway from supporting Ukraine to opposing the Iran punitive strikes to no kings, dukes, or kniggets, to literally anything else anti-orange-man. The commies get very few honks from the commuters stuck in stop and go – sometimes a few, but not a lot at all.
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Not working, so haven’t been stuck in Delta stop/go in 10 years (Beltline OTOH stop/go is unpredictable). Surprised Beltline overpass fences haven’t been targeted. The pedestrian bridge is seeing a lot of American Flags too.
Interestingly enough, as bad as Eugene’s rep is, compared to Springfield say (and Springfield has its wacks too), I see a LOT of open carry at Costco and N. Eugene Fred Meyers. Those that open carrier do pay attention to who is paying attention. My response is to look at them and shrug. I won’t open carry. Concealed, yes. Not open.
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I’ve also seen NO SCHOOL! Hey, three day weekend! 😃
When I was contracting in Panama* my (Polish) girlfriend, when informed of the fact that I would be working on May 1, asked why I would be working on the International Day of Labor Solidarity.
*Working on Howard AFB in support of the Air Force
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They are probably going to close schools in a lot of Charlotte-area jurisdictions on May 1 because of this protest. They’ll just let the teachers walk out and shut the schools down for a day. Instead of docking them a day’s pay or making them take a day off to do it. Some other places they are letting the teachers bully–er, persuade–the kids to go out on the protest with them. It’s stupid.
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May 1 was always full of commie protests in Europe. ALWAYS.
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Happy Earth Day took me a minute… That’s DARK!Beach Outfit: Fine, but that phone isn’t period.
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President Trump’s correspondents dinner just ended with a shooting. Few details yet beyond ‘shots fired’ and unconfirmed rumors that the shooter has been arrested. Trump and Erica Kirk were evacuated safely.
But ‘White Supremacy!!’ is the greatest threat to Our Democracy…
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Trump safe shooter dead is latest news.
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Latest I’ve seen is Trump safe, one shooter dead, one in custody, Secret Service agent injured although vest stopped shot.
Apparently shooters tried to brazen their way through main metal detector and failed. I don’t think they actually got into the main room with guests although that’s unclear.
https://redstate.com/beccalower/2026/04/25/us-secret-service-releases-statement-after-shooting-incident-at-whcd-n2201693
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Just saw a report that Trump wants the show to go on, never left the building (was taken to a secure room inside).
Funny enough, the media hasn’t opined about “stochastic terrorism” in a while.
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Funny
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Trump will be speaking around 10:10 or so
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Now it’s been postponed to sometime in the future. (February 32, perhaps?)
Original word was one shooter dead, now it looks like (perhaps the only) shooter is in custody, one Cole Tomas Allen, from SoCal.
I’m surprised (my shocked face is out for refurbishing) that the shooter seemed to have made it to an unsecured room where he (allegedly, gotta include that) assembled the weapon. What’s with the unsecured rooms near POTUS?
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Apparently shooter was a guest in the hotel, so was inside all the outer rings of security.
Descriptions I have seen of the security behavior at those outer rings suggest much of it was unserious.
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According to Dana Loesch’s column (written by a lady whose name I can’t totally recall but she’s solid on reporting), Trump held, “the fanciest press conference ever,” with all the correspondents from the dinner still in their “party clothes.”
She said one shooter, in custody, one agent and the shooter taken to hospital, both survived.
Of course the Twitter verse, she said, was going crazy with conspiracy theories.
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I saw a video report last night that as the alleged nutball ran through that “checkpoint” he shot one an agent center of mass with his 38, which the agent’s vest stopped cold. Hopefully he was wearing rifle plates or he’ll have a heck of a bruise this morning. If I am interpreting the available video correctly that appears to have been the same agent that then immediately pivoted, drew and fired on the guy.
The layout of that “checkpoint” appears questionable, but that agent has the right stuff.
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I usually don’t do video, but if it actually resumes, ’twill be fascinating.
There was word of a second shooter. Hope they get good information before he’s Epsteined.
I’m waiting for the LSM to blame White Supremacists and (of course) Trump for an attempt on the media present.
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Yeah, some groypers on X are floating the idea that it was MAGA because “Trump is Israel’s bitch”.
I loathe these people.
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There was already some lefty idiot on Twitter saying (paraphrase) “How dare you assume it was a leftist! Maybe it was a MAGAt there to kill journalists!”
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Gee, maybe because it’s always Leftroids. Looting, vandalism, arson, rape and murder are their go-to plans. When that doesn’t work, when they just make things immeasurably worse, they can only Do It Moar!!! 😡
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Nope nope nope, those are fake and/or don’t count because reasons. ONLY right wingers are violent.
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Wolf Blitzer apparently thought it was about him.
I don’t think so.
Also suggestions it was somehow related to the SPLC news. Really?
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31 one year old teacher probably was radicialized by primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling, and probably crazy, ignorant and arrogant enough that the SPLC was slightly contributing to him going forward with it.
Longer lead time, so the ICE stuff probably was more of a contributing factor.
Why wasn’t he busy with his students and their finals?
Could just be an IRGC stooge, their foreign direct action group.
I was originally wondering if Californian meant someone’s staffer.
If Wolf Blitzer was romantically entangled with thirty year olds, then I can buy a disturbed thirty year old targeting him.
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Reported career path is a bit different – 2017 CalTech BSME, which by all accounts remains not an easy program or an easy school, MS in computer science last year from CSU Dominguez Hills, which sounds like a bog standards CSU school so not nearly as demanding as CalTech, did an internship at JPL, presumably right after CalTech, and he’s been a tutor with a private test-prep and college admissions counseling company since 2019-20, which would put that work overlapping his MS.
And he tried to bums-rush the augmented event Secret Service security perimeter with a shotgun and a 38 revolver.
I see he’s an “‘alleged’ gunman” in reporting. Heh.
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For those unaware, the CSU (California State University) schools are the lower tier public universities in California. So UCLA is the prestigious state university in LA. CSULA is the low tier state school in the same city. There are quite a few of them around. CSU Dominguez is in LA County, as is CSU Long Beach. And there are CSU schools in the surrounding counties, as well.
Shame this guy wrecked his life just after investing so much into his education.
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Heh. Wolf Blitzer.
And is that his real name? I mean, The Blitzer family names their kid Wolf?
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Yes, it’s his real first name but he was born in Germany of a German Jewish family. And he’s comment that one of his grandfathers had that first name.
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Fair enough. He’s still earned the “Heh. Wolf Blitzer.” though.
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Now that’s not fair, except for the fact that he’s a “journalist”. [Very Big Evil Grin]
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This is going to be a controversial and incredibly arrogant of me statement, but I don’t think most journalists have enough background in random variables and stochastic processes to be have really valid opinions in using those sorts of models for events.
(I’m maybe agnostic on whether I have a good enough education.)
anyway, I would note that covid broke a lot of people, adn that we apparently did have some actual crazies getting pretty close to Biden’s security.
(I think the universities are about providing crazy people with ‘justifications’, or really just obviously wrong excuses. I think that a lot of current Democrat betting strategies are bad for the sanity of anyone investing in those ways of thinking. )
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”I don’t think most journalists have enough background in…” is a valid and universally applicable sentence fragment.
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Leaving aside tonight’s serious events, does it bug anyone else that the penguin seems to think order is a sub-set of species?
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Penguin education has just gone to heck. What is the southern hemisphere coming to?
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As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly …
— Arthur Carlson, after the WKRP. Turkey Drop
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I thought that was Les Nessman, after he returned from his “Oh, the humanity!” Live broadcast,
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Polyamory is wrong. It’s either multiamory or polyphilia.
But mixing Greek and Latin roots?
Wrong!
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Sure enough, but then again this is a common pattern. Consider the systematic name for the bear (the European brown one, I think): “ursus arctos”. That means “bear bear” in Latin then Greek.
Re -us plural is -i “only in Latin” not even then. Only in the Latin 2nd declination. A minority of Latin words ending in -us are 4th declination, and their plural ending is also -us. Fun…
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Then you have Fifth Declension, also known in Latin as “Where we put everything else that made no sense in First through Fourth.”
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Fortunately, you only see them when the Moon is in the Seventh House…. Oh, that’s a “c”….
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“Fifth Declension”mwould be a good name for a band.
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I cast…. (Let’s see if this works.)
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A few days ago I brought up how some people are freaking out over the video game Pragmata. I only had very basic information about what was going on, so here’s YouTuber Dadvocate explaining in better detail why some people are freaking out over a brand new video game –
A very quick rundown –
1.) Pre-release, there were apparently a bunch of pdfs (the current substitute term that doesn’t attract unwholesome internet searches) that came out of the woodwork, reportedly posting massive amounts of NSFW artwork of the female lead, Diana (who, as I mentioned, is an android that looks like a 6 year old girl), to the game’s sub-reddit. Things got so bad that the entire base Pragmata sub-reddit got shutdown, and an alternative sub-reddit called PragmataSFW *also* shut down after it’s head moderator said he got sick and tired of the constant stream of perverted art he was having to deal with (despite the sub-reddit literally having ‘SFW’ in the name of the sub-reddit). So there was a legit issue with pdfs pre-release.
2.) Since release, there has been a response similar to the one I described in my comment the other day, where *anything* praising the game is banned on Reddit even if there’s no indication that the person praising the game is doing so for inappropriate reasons. Any positive support of the game is also being attacked in many other places. Some of this could be a legitimate overreaction as a result of the pre-release mess. But much of it appears to be misandry-driven accusations that any man who likes the game is a pdf, and additionally due to claims that the game is a “conservative psyop” to make men want to be fathers.
3.) Hasan PIker is shown briefly in the video I linked, spouting some of the useless drivel that passes for thought from him. He’s a far-left Twitch streamer (Twitch is a streaming platform that specializes in video game streaming). He’s notorious for flagrantly breaking Twitch’s rules of conduct, but the worst punishment he ever gets is a slap on the wrist (despite his misconduct repeatedly extending to actions that ought to get him permanently banned from the platform according to the platform’s own rules, and more conservative streamers getting banned for actions that are much less flagrant). It appears that he’s protected due to his politics. There was also a controversy a few months ago when people realized that his dog wears a shock collar, and he regularly shocks it to get it to behave during his streams. Sadly, that wasn’t enough to get him banned, and he was able to ride it out. He’s recently been praised by the NYT, and he’s been mentioned recently a few times on Instapundit. I suspect many on the left see him as an important mouthpiece for attracting Gen Z males.
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People who abuse people, generally start out abusing animals. They escalste.
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Oh, there’s no doubt that Piker would happily physically abuse people if he thought he could get away with it. He’s already encouraged violence from his stream against those he sees as political enemies (one of the reasons why he should have been banned from Twitch). In short, he appears to have the personality of the standard Antifa thug, in the standard Antifa thug’s body. Unfortunately, unlike most Antifa thugs he’s got a popular streaming platform from which to spout his drivel.
Instapundit’s most recent link to something he was involved in (just within the last few days) was a non-stream appearance in which he and the person he was chatting with were taking about how great and anti-capitalist stealing from the Louvre (and other places) would be.
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Dan Clancy, who runs Twitch, apparently had/has Hasan’s billionaire dad as a major investor or silent partner in Twitch, and possibly in other Clancy ventures.
Hasan literally cannot get thrown off Twitch unless he dishonors his dad or something.
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Ah, so he’s a nepo baby. That explains quite a lot.
He’s literally the walking (well, sitting, because streamer) stereotype of a spoiled rich kid communist. The only thing he hasn’t done yet is personally set off bombs.
(other than the streams he posts… /rimshot!)
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The special protected class when the only ‘tism you have is nepotism…
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There does seem to be a genuine belief that he can serve as a bridge to the Gen Z males, as I noted above. So there’s some genuine self-interest by the left in protecting him. But I suspect nepotism has a lot to do with how he got into that position in the first place.
And as far as acting as a bridge to Gen Z males, a lot of people already loathe him due to things like the double-standard that’s clearly on display regarding the things he’s said or done.
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Miss Polydactyl Kitty just gave me a thorough stropping and sang me the songs of her people (she’s a noisy little thing). I wish she was only here to see me, but I found the entrance to the bunny den outside the office windows and I am merely on her way to breakfast. OTOH, I don’t think she’s had much luck lately and that’s fine with me.
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https://babylonbee.com/news/this-is-a-both-sides-issue-says-side-that-assassinated-charlie-kirk-shot-president-trump-tried-to-assassinate-kavanaugh-tried-to-assassinate-trump-again-murdered-schoolkids-in-nashville-shot-
Factcheck, this actually is a both sides issue; Republicans draw from more stabilizing American ideas, the destabilizing communist ideas are what the Democrats have abused influence over every level of the education system to promote.
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I just got modded for a badly formatted all link comment to the babylon bee.
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Torrance is in Los Angeles county, which went for Harris in 2024.
Now, possibly this was entirely fraud, and Cole Allen is a hard core MAGA Republican who voted for Trump three times.
Even if fraud, it feels far more probable that the man voted for Biden and voted for Harris.
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His district may be that of Ted Lieu or Maxine Waters.
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There is at least one name match on an ActBlue donation earmarked for Kammy.
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https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/6bf6f201-fd42-4685-8771-2eba4f5bdc8d_780x534.png
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Re skydiving: as the saying goes “if at first you don’t succeed, skydiving probably isn’t for you”.
Then again, on a serious note, this is why all student skydiving rigs (and most non-student ones) come with an “Automatic Activation Device”, a widget that opens the parachute if the student fails to do so.
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Or jumping in tandem. Though there was the case where the instructor (in the military) suffered a heartattack in the jump, and the student had bring himself down safely.
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Yes, tandems also are required to have an AAD. And while the problem you described is extremely rare it’s possible, and the safety equipment took care of it.
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Even the military, at least for non static line free fall jump training, does the first jumps as tandem.
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https://i.imgflip.com/aq77aw.jpg
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Unfortunately, they only need to score once…
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https://i.imgflip.com/aq7842.jpg
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https://i.imgflip.com/aq7ta2.jpg
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When you idea of how to win a political argument means killing the other side, you have already lost, and you are EVIL.
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The WHCA has resulted in a scandal that is sure to take down Trump.
James Blair took a picture, and posted it on Twitter. This picture shows the screen of Trump’s laptop, and it is horrifying, you can see what OS he uses.
Also, he uses black text on a white background.
Fundamentally, none of this is appropriate for anyone in any sort of leadership position.
It is over, the Republican party is going to collapse now.
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Let me guess, the little penguin in the upper corner was the give-away. ;)
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I think it might have been Windows 11, but I can’t really tell.
Linux can be made to look like almost anything, including like Windows 11 or current Macs.
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aw. Could be worse. his screen could have been on ATH meme post. :D
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I think it is a good image for meme modifications, and also I am too perfectionist and unskilled to do anything with it today.
It is also about the blandest and most setting appropriate thing that one could have on a screen. Right now it is hard to think of anything different that would be particularly funny.
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https://www.bizpacreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/1-17.jpg
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Temu Obama……
https://www.bizpacreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/414809_image.jpg
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