It used to be illegal, at various times and in various places throughout Europe, to cast the king’s horoscope.
I’m surprised polls aren’t similarly illegal.
Look, I’m not saying polls should be illegal, but I wonder why governments haven’t made them so. And I think they’ll ultimately be defeated by the same mechanism that made casting anyone’s horoscope completely legal. Because in a way at this point they’re sort of the same thing.
Stop staring at me like I’m nuts. To explain:
It is a point of popular “people are so stupid” lore that “People read the horoscope” but in fact most people don’t believe horoscopes. We know that, because no country on Earth (okay, I don’t know about Asian countries) makes it illegal to cast its leader’s horoscope.
When it was illegal, it was because the horoscopes were believed. (BTW I arrived at this rabbit hole by — while flossing this morning — wandering down the path of Heinlein’s story Life Line and would I like to know my date of death (actually super-handy for planning, and since I don’t think it’s the end, probably yes) and how in most societies someone who could tell to the minute how long you’ll live will be run out of town/country or killed.)
Oh, I’m not saying all of the horoscopes were believed. As with any highly skilled professional, some were better than others, and some would be believed over others, but–
EVEN IF THE LEADERS DIDN’T BELIEVE IN FORETELLING, they had to take it seriously, because the vast majority of people did.
Take the situation with Elizabeth I. She had no descendants of her body. This meant there were (there always are) more than one pretenders.
If you cast her horoscope saying she’ll die in a year, and the vast majority of people believe in foretelling, the pretenders will start marshaling for the due date, and once they do … it’s easy to start a war. Or easier.
So casting the leader’s horoscope was forbidden.
These days enough people think the horoscopes are poppycock that no one cares. No, literally, no one cares. I have a bad habit of hitting really weird conspiracy sites, (look, it’s mostly a fun “I’m tapped out” type of habit. Like looking up asteroids that might kill us. That sort of thing. Or videos of a guy walking through cemeteries and reading inscriptions) and in January of every year they’re full of how every leader will die this year. Or how every nation’s leader is the antichrist. Yes, including King Charles (As if the man who can’t tie his shoes without help and is not popular with anyone were the guy who is so charming he starts a new religion with himself as a divinity.)
No one cares.
Then there are polls. Yeah, Trump’s approval is supposedly the lowest evah. But I remember when Obama’s was really high, supposedly, and no one wanted him to campaign with/for them, and his merchandise went straight to the discount bin. While almost all of Trump’s endorsements for the primary sailed through.
And you start wondering. Really, really start wondering. Like “Is this like the horoscopes that were incitement to rebellion” ways to get people to do the inadvisable? The answer is: almost certainly.
We know that the left uses polls to hide its massive fraud and attempts at fraud. We all know that the left uses polls to try to encourage/discourage voting.
It also uses it to enforce what remains of its social clout. I’m absolutely sure that Jelly Roll wouldn’t have made an ass of himself while guest hosting for Kimmel, if not for the polls telling him that, yes, of course, everyone hates Trump. And his attempts to roll back his commentary are ridiculous, saying he’s in the middle, and that he likes to hunt and he’s a Christian, but…. But not rowing back the comments about Trump being racist and all the rest. Because the polls tell him this is safe.
In fact, the only reason that the left keeps hold of the Mass Media and all the people who are highly visible, is that they can report these polls that give them an illusion of inevitability.
Of course, the downside is that it reinforces the echo chamber, so that, you know, they’re convinced all the people scream for socialism and such, and causes misfires like their attempts to ignite real rebellion with astroturf, like Occupy Wall Street or Antifa.
But ultimately? It’s a dying effort. Just like laws about the king’s horoscope are probably still on the books in Europe but no one bothers because people don’t believe in horoscopes, the polls are losing their effectiveness as propaganda and opinion molding tools.
Their few spectacular failures, which seem to be increasing, plus the fact that we know who answers those things, and that one in ten people know who to crawl into the poll’s innards to figure out what is going on, all of it accumulates and helps them lose credibility. This might or might not be helped by the fact all authorities including mass media lost a lot of authority during the Covidiocy, and they were already trending down.
In the end, at some point, like king’s astrologers, the polls will scream into a vacuum.
While life goes on and ignores them.
According To Hoyt 
I haven’t trusted polls in ages, and I don’t repose any greater confidence in the so-called “prediction markets.”
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The prediction markets are too small to be reliable. They were great at first until the players realized they were just polls to be manipulated, like all the other polls. One large bet, or a few smaller ones, is enough to skew them wherever you want them to go and so that’s what they do. Sad but inevitable.
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I am so solidly black-pilled by the GOP I’m practically ready to cast all their horoscope… And I hate that.
I am normally a nice guy, positive thinking, and all that. But the GOP nationally and especially in Texas are becoming as detestable and repugnant as the other folks.
Why? What changed?
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And how can we fix it?
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First, realize where this is coming from: the last stand of the Bush clan, allied with the Democrats.The Bushes still have a good bit of influence, and the Democrats are magnifying that because of the “bi-partisan” camouflage.
They are using the same kind of charges they did against Trump, and for the same reasons. More people may be seeing that, especially with articles like this one:
https://open.substack.com/pub/amuseonx/p/if-the-paxtons-are-corrupt-they-are?r=6em1o&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
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Yep, this. Though I confess I can rage at least once a day at the uniparty-GOP, and I have to go for a restorative walk in the sunshine, I do believe this is, as Bannon used to say, “the primal scream of a dying regime.”
For encouragement, real truth encouragement, I’d recommend Promethean Action on both X and YouTube. Susan Kokinda and her partners are excellent, and understand what’s happening in a granular and larger sense.
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Still, they’re not COMMUNISTS.
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Exactly. There’s still hope for them.
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Where did all the anti-Paxton stories begin? Austin, in the left or far-left news outlets. That made me a little curious back when the first insider-trading and other accusations got started. His personal conduct, well, I don’t like what he is purported to have done, but how will that affect his ability to represent Texas in the US Senate? That he is still working as AG rather than ditching his job to campaign full time is not a bad thing, at least in my mind. Yes, I’d prefer if he at least campaigned once up here, and ran an ad or two, but that’s me. Paxton may be a bit of a slimer, but he doesn’t give off the Creepy McCreeperson vibe I get from Talarico.
I am very not impressed by Talarico’s ads, let alone his policy platform. The whole idea that being a good Christian means voting for the government to do charity is … Well, it doesn’t jive with my understanding of Scripture. Or my experience with private charity vs. public largess.
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Paxton had a very messy divorce, I gather. He’s been called a “serial adulterer.”
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Wasn’t Benjamin Franklin known for a multitude of mistresses? And IIRC, an illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt left her husband to take up with Richard Wagner.
I’m more concerned about the special interests a politician is in bed with than the sexual partners … though sometimes the two mix. That’s bad. Fang Fang bad. Fanny Willis bad.
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Generally, if they have bad sexual behavior, they’ll have bad other behavior.
Especially in politics.
Because sexual disfunctions are very strongly tied to power– Bill Clinton for an obvious example, although frankly if you look around the similar power level like the Kennedy clan it pops up a lot.
If someone likes exercising power as a thing in and of itself, they’re likely to do that in both politics and sex.
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Talarico’s “Christianity” is of the classic leftist bent. It picks specific verses and short texts it likes while ignoring the surrounding context and large portions of the whole of scripture. I am certain he would argue in detail about large portions of the Apostles Creed, likely denying the virgin birth and probably the bodily resurrection of Jesus, among other basic tenets of the Christian faith. His type has been around since the start (e.g. the early Gnostics who Paul refutes in some of his letters) and have taken over large portions of several denominations including the PCUSA which is the main denomination supporting Austin Seminary where Talarico was working on an Master of Divinity he did not complete. Austin Seminary does not have a statement of faith on their web site nor does it seem to require one of its applicants another hint at a liberal to very liberal theology.
I suspect his claims of being a Christian ring rather hollow in the ears of evangelicals and Southern Baptists as well as the Roman Catholics that I suspect make up most of the Texas Christian base. Perhaps it plays well with some of the Nones as Pew Research calls them. Not sure why he pushes this. Who his target demographic is baffles me. I still think he is primarily a Bialystock and Bloom production to gather money that upon closing after his first performance can be run into Democrat or his own coffers.
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And for all the Lip Service Bush paid to the left and against Donald Trump, they turned a line in a speech at the world trade center, into a line by a villain in a f*cking stars wars movie. So ya, be nice and the left screws you.
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By not giving up! Who was it who said “The price of Liberty is Eternal vigilance” ?
Certainly not one of the F*cking turn coat Bushes or other back stabbing Republicans who love Money more than the Constitution. May God have Mercy on their souls, we should shun the scum.
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The problem is that they go in all idealistic, but from that point on they’re isolated from the people, living in the DC bubble. Both sides read the same information, go to the same parties, deal with the same lobbyists. Until they get back to being accountable on a local level, it’s just going to get worse.
We have to scatter DC all over the country, no more private, safe envlave for the elites.
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I remember when someone said that Google was limited in the places they could have a second HQ because there were only so many places with the cool coffee shops.
It did not dawn on him that branching out to other places and hiring the people who lived there would be diversity.
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What changed is that while we haven’t found out for sure who they actually work for, we’ve found out to a high degree of confidence that it ain’t us.
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-None- of them work for -us. Not one. As George Carlin put it best: “Its a big club, and you ain’t in it.”
Not even Trump works for us, although he often wants things that work well for the rest of us. Thus Trump is a -fine- co-belligerent. Mighty fine, even MAGA fine.
What the poly-ticks hate, with the fury of Hell, is that 1) Trump wont work for -them-, 2) he openly mocks them for it, and 3) he makes defying them look -easy- and -fun-.
Incandescent Hellfury, because he is the poster-child for and master of “uppity”.
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One of the best things about Trump is the way he makes all the left people foam at the mouth with rage.
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Yep. Back in ’16 I had just about made up my mind that I wasn’t going to vote for President at all, and then I started to notice which heads Trump was making explode, and I said, “Y’know….”
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I voted against HRC.
The thing I really remember was the poll (giggle) where, given a choice between HRC, Trump, and SMOD, SMOD polled in the double digits, and in a dead heat with the other two among independents.
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Between the exploding heads and the dawning realization that I should be willing to crawl naked over a mile of broken glass to deny the Chappaqua Horror the Presidency…yep, I did approximately the same.
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I’ve realized that polls are there to do the job they are paid to do. And if you’re not the one paying for them, you’re not the one picking the job they’re doing.
Kind of the same way if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
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Good observation.
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^This.
Last century, when I pursuing a higher education, I signed up for a class named “Human Geography”. I thought it was going to be about settlement patterns and how cultures were shaped by where they were. (Maybe with a bit about how Township and Range surveying caused communities to develop differently than neighboring communities which were started before it.)
That wasn’t it at all.
What it was, was a masterclass on how to select a “random sample” that would provide the polling results that the organization paying for the poll wanted. To call it cynical, is an understatement. There were times I took more than one shower after attending. Supposedly, there was a companion course on phrasing and presenting questions that was even worse.
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But educational.
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Honestly, my degree-required course in Mass Media had a lot about how commercials and shows worked on an audience. Which of course could be turned around into “how to manipulate people.”
The professor for that one was intelligent and kind of cynical. (Hardly surprising, considering some of the folk that came through that class.) Given his overall temperament, I’m sure he designed the class as a spotter’s guide for manipulation for anyone smart enough to pick up on it.
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They already do scream into a vacuum for me.
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Now that Musk has regular and reliable rocket launches, arranging for certain annoyances to scream into vacuum is … deliciously possible.
Doesn’t that beat helicopter rides?
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No, nothing beats saying “Get to the Choppa!” in Arnold’s voice. as you throw a Marxist from the helicopter.
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“Go boldly.”
shhhhthud
….
Click!
FOOOSHhhhhhh……..
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“In space, nobody can hear your psy-op.”
(brief pause, contemplating literal kilo-constellations now in orbit)
“Welcome to the New Space Age, the one that never ends.”
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c4c
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They keep insisting that he’s super-unpopular (which, come to think of it, they always do, even before he wins big) but they’re also pre-emptively accusing him of stealing an election which hasn’t been held yet. I think the latter tells us more than the former.
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The opposition is tipping its hand bigly.
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I have to avoid the polls. I know they’re propaganda, not just garbage, but designed to discredit those I support and discourage me and everyone around me.
They will get their justice, in this life or the next.
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I look at them, mostly to see how they are rigged (use in class) and how the press pretends that margin of error doesn’t exist. “She’s ahead, 50.3% to 49.7%! A clear sign of victory in November!!!”
Ideal margin of error is 3%. I’ve seen two political polls where they admitted to 6%. “Nationwide” polls are usually between 1200 and 1500 respondents, corrected to match the percentages of national population (Anglo, Hispanic, Black, Asian, so on). Several I use in class had less than 300 respondents and yet claim to show the mood of 150,000,000 possible voters. Riiiiiiight. Pull the other one. It has bells on it.
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There’s a study that congress and the feds hire someone to do.
Adult literacy rates in the US.
Last one they did, the sample size was 26k. Naively, one might think that could be enough.
You have to back that out to the American population somehow. If the error in knowledge of that population is high enough (it is), no way that such a sample can be backed out with any accuracy.
The stuff that almost any adult can learn from ‘How to lie with statistics’ is maybe more valuable and more important than the statistical knowledge that one can genuinely only learn in graduate school. (Okay, part of the trick is that the textbooks are just there, and only budget is really stopping anyone from reading them. Reading comprehension is a skill, and good instructors can help with math texts.)
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For some reason, I enjoyed the two semesters of statistics I was forced to take in college in the early 1980s. I learned just how to skew things any which way you like using them, and that broad overview knowledge was enjoyable. Cranking out the numbers sucked, for the same reason I barely passed accounting–details make my head explode.
But yeah, exactly what you said. I think I’m a little touchy on the political stats/polls because the Republic is so important, and sometimes it feels like things are hanging by a thread, and ONE MORE DANG LIE…. sets me off.
:)
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One of the required texts I had to buy for one of my business statistics courses in college was “How To Lie With Statistics”, which explains why I enjoyed that one more than the dry one I also had to take over in the math department.
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If step 1 wasn’t ‘Pollute the sample pool’ they weren’t even trying. ☹️
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Ah, a reissue of it is still in print:
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“I learned just how to skew things any which way you like using them, and that broad overview knowledge was enjoyable.”
I’ve had statistics/study design at the undergrad and Masters level. What I loved about is was suddenly being able to speed-read studies about anything at all, and know if they were legit or not based on what statistics they used. (And who paid for them, another dead giveaway.)
The amount of bare-faced lying in the medical literature is simply amazing. Knowing that should have prepared me for Covid, but I guess I still held out some little corner of hope for the basic decency of modern man.
Oops. >:(
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Just reading “medical literature” is triggering. :(
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“Last one they did, the sample size was 26k. Naively, one might think that could be enough.”
One of the problems is that it matters -where- the sample is taken from. Literacy is not evenly distributed, shall we say.
This is the same issue that makes all gun-crime statistics fake. Shootings are not evenly distributed. If you take Cook County IL out of the lists, the USA has fewer shootings per capita than Canada.
And if you take a few spicy blocks out of the Chicago data, Chicago has fewer shootings than Toronto.
It matters -where- you take the sample.
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“Let’s have college students, union members, and welfare recipients for $45, Alex!”
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You have a valid reason to “geek out” over the polls, and of course you understand them. I couldn’t teach this stuff to save my life. All I’d do is start screaming, then using blue/salty language, then I’d have to dismiss class and have coffee.
:)
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And of course matching the mix of the likely-voter electorate, which is of course impossible, is claimed by every poll, after they “correct” for the differences.
Talk about a thumb on the scales.
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The left knows that there are people they will never convince so then the focus become demoralization. The MSM screaming doom all the time.
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That’s why blackpilling is so deadly, and why it’s so important to encourage each other to look up and breathe.
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i see Musk is now defending the H1B visa as though it’s a form of stigmata.
I don’t hate them; but they keep replacing me and it’s harder to replace a job at 68 than it was at 51 or 60.
Well, it is what it is.
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My theory on why Nancy & Co. freaked right the heck out so hard about the Jan. 6 strolling tourist incident is that if THEY had got that far, past the barricades and into the buildings, the armed cadres staged around DC would have been rushed forward and it would have been a real revolutionary takeover, requiring assaults by combat troops to dig them out of the Capital buildings, and given the density of political generals at that point, they would have at least attempted to split the military response and kicked off The Glorious Commie Revolution.
So they think the right was just incompetent in execution. Surely they had armed cadres staged, and surely some of the military was on their side, which also explains why Nancy refused troops leading up to it.
So, projecting like IMAX.
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All of that from the “echo chamber” and “all my friends think” and “all right thinking people say” that drives public opinion polls.
Now private polling is a different story.
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All the polls in 2016 were screaming HRC would win. Wham, bam, slam, DJT won. Who could have foreseen it?
Um. Anyone crossing the country and seeing the DJT signs everywhere guessed the polls were spin. And those signs have only multiplied, to say nothing of growing roots in some cases. What are you going to believe? The polls, or your lying eyes?
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Yes, this is the one that really cooked it for me. Of course we all well remember “Dewey Defeats Truman” and assorted other signal mis-steps of sampling practice (not just sampling theory); and H.L. Mencken famously said “Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity” (or indeed by floridly rank incompetence)…
But at some point, you really do have to go with malice, psychological influence operations, or the Big Clumsy Con. And mine was somewhere at or just past there.
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Allegedly the “Dewey Beats Truman,” thing happened because the pollsters, innocent creatures they were (at the time) did all telephone polling, thereby skewing their sample toward the more well-to-do.
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Or, the Dem big city machine politics, built into a dynasty by FDR and his commies, the one that pushed JFK over the top against Nixon in another close election a decade and a half later, could have so benefitted Harry.
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The 1960 election was overturned by fraud, mostly in Chicago and Texas. It’s documented. Nixon was right to be pissed.
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Nixon’s huge grudge against Kennedy led him to hate the Apollo program, and the space program in general, as Kennedy’s legacy. It’s a large part of the reason the Space Shuttle was such a shit sandwich. Nixon rejected 3 or 4 better concepts before finally approving the abomination they ended up building.
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JFK basically saw the space stuff as a stunt. He never thought much of the space program except for Cold War publicity points. It was Johnson that made Apollo into JFK’s Most Holy Legacy.
The political struggle on STS required coalition building, which then required NASA to gain DoD buy in for the design, and DoD added requirements for large reentry crossrange capability, west coast polar orbit launches from Vandenberg, and that massive cargo bay, sized for a KH-11 spy sat (which totally coincidentally just happens to be what the Hubble shape ended up being since it used a KH-11 mirror, though they screwed that up in grinding because they would not let the experienced classified mirror people in to keep Hubble “pure”), and the arm. While they wanted each for various individual reasons, the concept driver for all of those together was a plan to unexpectedly launch from Vandenberg, rendezvous with a Soviet polar orbit spy sat, clip the solar panels off in an EVA using the MMU, grab it with the arm and and stuff it in the bay, and then rapidly deorbit using all that cross range capability to swing back to one of the approved US Shuttle landing strips.
Without the DoD additions it would have been a much smaller orbiter, much more affordable, and easier to turn more quickly, and the budget might have even allowed the manned recoverable booster concept.
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The USAF’s version was the tiny Dyna-Soar, but NASA killed that immediately when they got partial control over military space programs in 1968.
The primary enemy of the Air Force, Army, and Navy missile programs was NASA, then each other. The Soviets were just generic bogeymen, not real and immediate threats to the various budgets.
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Once NASA and Congress killed the USAF Manned Orbiting Lab project, Dyna-Soar had no place to go, and with minimal to no cargo space depending on orbit) in the back it was not really much more use vs. unmanned launches on a Titan.
Shuttle was in much the same situation once they stopped using it for normal sat launches, especially for DoD payloads, up until ISS assembly started – no place to shuttle things or people to.
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I think the people at Powerline have had the black pill/MSM koolaid drunk deep. One of their head paragraphs stated that DJT was the most unpopularist president evah! and that the Rs were doomed, doomed I say in the midterms. Curiously, the only MSM they completely distrust is their local.
I keep the bookmark for the Saturday meme column. It’s a bad habit, but I’ll look at a column or two every few days, especially if their TDS isn’t up front.
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I remember the election of 1980, when all three national TV channels were saying Jimmy Carter had >80% of the vote and Reagan should “do the right thing” and concede.
Somehow that tricksy Reagan stole the election anyway, with 489 electoral votes vs. 48 for Unkuh Jimmuh.
Funny, that. Carter’s landslide lead vanished from the news, which pivoted to the “cowboy” was going to start WW3 Real Soon Now.
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–
Anyone outside the core blue on blue states. Heck you cannot get out of Lane County rural, even Springfield, and not see DJT signs from 2016, 2020, and 2024. Biden won 2020? BS
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If only we could do the same to liberals/communist/democrats, alas we can’t which is why we should be be grateful that helicopters still exist to throw them out of.
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Controversial opinion here, but I don’t think the Prince of Wales or the Duke of Sussex have enough bone purity to become Emperor of Japan.
I’ve calculated Harry’s four pillars, and the man is a textbook example of a Fudd who is not actually a boomer. He was born in 1984, he is something like forty two. He may be Vance’s age.
Vance married better.
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”Vance married better.”
Oh, yeah. And the House of Windsor agrees as well.
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“Look, I’m not saying polls should be illegal, but I wonder why governments haven’t made them so.”
Why make it illegal when you can just BUY it? The federal government of Kanuckistan bought the media companies for 30 pieces of silver and a bowl of pottage. Here in the People’s Republik, the polls say what the government tells them to say.
You can argue around the edges, but that’s what happened and that’s how it is here.
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The polls are purchased here, too.
Any poll that is trying to actually determine something is closely guarded proprietary information.
Polls released to the public exist to advance a narrative. Accuracy isn’t even a tertiary concern.
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In my experience, polls are often run to justify something they were going to do anyway.
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Push-polls are certainly a thing, and the line between publicized polling and push-polling is wide and fuzzy-edged, but the internal polling they keep secret, and panic over, is real polling.
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I remember the one time I actually was bored enough to answer a phone poll. The questions were phrased like this: “If I were to tell you that candidate X did [some awful thing], how would that affect your vote?” They were quite obviously frustrated by my response of “I would research the topic and vote from there.”
I did NOT even say what I was thinking, which is “You are dancing so close to the edge of slander and you only have a wafer-thin legal shield, and you’re so tempted to break that…”
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Or the thing I would be thinking, which would be “I would assume you were lying, and would therefore be MORE likely to vote for candidate X”. (Assuming candidate X was the guy I was planning to vote for anyway — which, given the context, seems likely).
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It was such a minor race that I don’t even recall what it was for. Certainly not large enough to warrant a push-poll. But, as my husband says, “the smaller the teapot, the bigger the tempest.”
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Long ago when I was a young and foolish boy I was a Democrat (Oh the Shame!!!). In the ’84 Democrat Primary I stepped out of the polling place ( the required 300′) walking back to my apartment and was mobbed by several pollsters. I was immediately so annoyed that I decided to lie through my teeth (I like Poker and am a bit of a psycopath, so this comes naturally). I gave three different sets of answers to three different pollsters (the precinct I was in was considered a bellwether for democrat primaries). From then on I tended to answer phone polls incorrectly following the rules set forth in this Calvin and Hobbes strip
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Speaking of things we’re supposed to be upset about vs. things we’re not supposed to know about, it seems that both China Mike and the flopping one (whose name I shall not conjure, no links shall they receive) are all in a tizzy that super famous Right Wing Commentator guy Milo Yiannopoulos !!!! has been arrested by ICE for “immigration irregularities” and…
…no one seems to care. They just can’t understand it.
But, in Good News it seems that Data Republican, blessed be her name, has traced the entire Antifa network and posted every node in it. On a map, so you can find these a-holes in your town. (Which I did. Nice!) It’s a thing of beauty.
Now, one of these occurrences is quite important, and the other isn’t. A clue for Big Mike and the flopper, speaking only for myself I think that if Milo can’t keep his immigration sh1t straight, that would be his problem. He’s a big boi, he can do it or not on his own. Ghod knows I kept mine straight for ten years despite La Migra’s best efforts to screw it all up.
In other good news, for those who don’t want to brave the wretched hive of scum and villainy, some guys finally got held to account for Chengdu Whirldcon. Lifetime ban delivered to some guy whose name I can’t recall, because I don’t care.
I view this as a positive development. Even Leftie nerds are still nerds, when you get right down to it. Don’t annoy the nerds. They’ll find a way or make one, just like Data Republican patron goddess of nerddom. All hail her name.
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Also, a day after being detained by ICE, Milo was on his way back to the UK. When the news broke about his being detained, lots of people on Instapundit were reminding everyone that ICE will release you from detention anytime you ask to be released, if you are getting on a plane to fly out of the country (home, in most cases, but presumably their attitude would be “We don’t care where you go as long as you don’t come back”). And I’m quite certain that ICE would allow you monitored access to a computer in order to purchase a plane ticket home. Milo proved that, by being able to fly home the day after being detained. (Or maybe ICE buys your ticket? I know the government pays for flights home for most illegal aliens they’re expelling. I don’t know what they would do in the case of someone who is able and willing to buy their own ticket out. Maybe they would say “Okay, if you buy your own ticket out then we won’t ban you from the country forever, just for 5 years”. A reduced penalty in exchange for spending your own money instead of the US government’s. I don’t know if that’s how it works, I just know that that’s how it should work if it’s set up by sensible people.)
I’m rambling; I’ll stop. Point is, being detained by ICE doesn’t have to be for very long. As long as you’re willing to cooperate and get on the next plane out of the country, they’re willing to release you and put you on that plane.
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P.S. The Asian country where I live and work has some pretty strict rules for people who overstay their visas. Mostly on the order of a $$$$$ fine and being denied future visa applications for X number of years, I don’t remember how many, if you get caught overstaying your visa. Let’s say it’s 10 years. But if you turn yourself in, e.g. if on the way out of the country you admit to the immigration officer that you overstayed your visa instead of letting him discover it, then they reduce the penalty by a lot, a slap-on-the-wrist fine and being denied re-entry for 1 year. (I’ve never ever found this out personally, because we are careful to stay on top of the paperwork).
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The reason I do know about the penalties for overstaying the visa is because they’re prominently posted at the immigration office where we go to renew our visa every year.
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But… that would be obeying the laws of the country you’re living in! Isn’t that all sorts of RRRAAACISSST!! and White Supremacy? ☹️
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Is obeying Asian law in an Asian country still white supremacy?
Asking for a friend…
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Yes, because wasn’t it brought up that being able to follow rules is white supremacy and expecting other people to follow them is being racist?
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Okay. I… erm, my friend had suspected it was raaaaaciss because the word “caucasian” includes the letters A S I A N, so it all ties together on a corkboard using red string.
I’ll let them know they were wrong.
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A lot of people don’t know about the Antifa stuff… yet. Apparently she got her information from the Feds shutting down Noblogs, which was an Antifa site (that I hadn’t heard of before it got shut down) where they coordinated lots of bad stuff, including doxxing. And they also did things to support Hamas, Hezbollah, etc… I’m not sure if that’s the reason the Feds used to go after them.
In any case, something that people have noted is that Noblogs got shut down on the same day that Trump said some goofy things about a certain lake on the border between the US and Canada. Guess what the media paid attention to? Guess what didn’t get lots of people suddenly demonstrating (rioting) because almost no one was aware that it had happened until it was already a fiat accompli?
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Back with horoscopes, apparently in WW2 Adolph Hitler was a believer. There was a German fortuneteller that ran a popular horoscope in the German papers. Apparently, her predictions were not sufficiently satisfactory. Early one morning, there was a knock on her door. On the doorstep was Joseph Gobbels (Minister of Propaganda) and Heinrich Himmller (head of the SS). “Frau, We wish to have a word with you…” (this is how a bad day starts).
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I am suspicious of anything the MSM publishes that touches on things where they have an emotional investment.
L. Neil Smith (RIP) posted an article in his Libertarian Enterprise e-zine (also RIP, damn it!) about how the furor over “secondhand smoke” got started. He said that Bush 41 commissioned a study on the effects of secondhand smoke. The results said that for most people (not people whose health was compromised) it was No Big Deal. Bush said, “That’s not the answer I want!” and they went back and came back with allegations that secondhand smoke was The Worst Thing Ever, made people have two-headed babies, and so on and so forth. With the results we now know and…know.
I hold no brief for smokers. But I grew up in a household with two parents who smoked so much that I thought it was rather small of the RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris companies to not declare a day of mourning after their deaths. I breathed secondhand smoke for years, and I am (at 65) in generally very good health.
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My mother, on the other hand, died of lung cancer and she never smoked a day in her life. Her father was a chain smoker. Her father, step mother, all her siblings (half, full and step) have had cancer. They all lived in the same environment. So for some people, second hand smoke might not be a problem. For others, it will be.
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Given my family history (death by 70 for most of the smokers, evidence still pending by decades for those who didn’t), I’d say I’m in that risk category.
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That is a problem. Genetics plays a role.
Luckily the worse I got out of the second hand smoke is I loath it. Even it just clinging to the smoker or someone who has been smoking. Sorry. Cannot stay.
Best thing ever is smoke free venues. Period. Not non-smoking/smoking rooms or areas, smoke free venues. The native casinos are missing money with their insistent inclusion of “sealed” smoking (not even the “good stuff”) gambling rooms. Nope. Nope. Nope. (Okay. Wouldn’t gamble anyway, but still.)
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Yep. Government pays for research, it gets the results it wants.
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Dad smoked. Definitely affected his health.
Mom and us kids? Not based on my recent medical issues. Oh, dad is at fault. But not because he smoked. Because he contributed to my DNA. My issues are (not helped by being overweight, but not caused either) are 100% age and genetics. That is based on a not small example, 2 to 3rd cousins. Huge pioneer family for the win. History of sudden “heart attacks” out of the blue. Farmers/Ranchers/hunters, all in good to excellent health perceptions. It is hitting the generations of my age (60+). Given the intertwining of the generations, plural is accurate. Difference between now and 50 years ago (great-uncle) is now we KNOW why.
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Just saw a video of a Dimocrat squalling about how after the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana vs. Callais, Republicans are gerrymandering all ‘the southern states’ and it’s ‘A 911 Emergency!!’.
When in reality they are being UN-gerrymandered after decades of Dumocrat malfeasance.
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Yep, but remember “Our democracy” means rule by democrats, so how very dare we not comply?
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/violent/ rule by a /mob/ of democrats
Trump is a liberal democrat. So, even by one of their special definitions of democracy, if he had arranged the lynching of congress, it would have still been the very essence of American democracy.
The way to successfully appeal against a lynching of congress is only by republican law. Which is a rhetorical and hypothetical statement, because there was no attempted criminal act by Trump.
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Specifically, a 1970s New York Democrat.
What’s crazy is, I’d bet he hasn’t changed any major political opinion since 1970. The political Overton Window has slid *that* far to the left.
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Yeah, pretty much.
He comes across as a fairly bright ADHD who has not changed any major philosophical opinions since his twenties.
He does not care enough about his political position or his academic position to make it the spiritual center of his life. So he comes to it fresh and without investment, cares about it to extent that it completes a sale, and goes ‘what is reality here’.
Skyscraper fall down, no partial credit, the renters are annoyed, and the structure does not care how pretty you talk to it.
Academia and political activists went somewhere else, left him behind, adn left a bunch of other people who don’t care behind.
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Not forcing States to submit their state decisions on state voting districts made by their elected state legislators to some DC bureaucrats to be judged, altered and changed for-frigging-ever because of some court ruling half a century ago is clearly disenfranchising the DC bureaucrats, who are the true constituency of the donk party.
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Sounds good in principle — until you find yourself stuck in a one-party-rule state like Kalifornistan, where the legislature makes sure to draw the borders so no Republican can ever win an election. Or like those 9 New England states that don’t have a single Republican congresscritter between ’em. 30% to almost 50% Republican voters, but no representation for them. Didn’t we get into some sort of fracas over that, a while ago?
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I know people find the ongoing retectification of names very disorienting, and annoying. They wonder at the precedent, appeal to traditional norms, and to conservative slow moving procedure.
However, the Dominion of America, The American Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Most Serene American Republic, the four American Prince-Electors of the Holy American Empire, and so forth are all very much less disruptive and less illegal than the fake president Joseph Kony and his vaccination executive order.
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Arguably the UN itself should be understood as the American imperial sphere of influence, and hegemony.
Americans want it not.
In principle, we could say that the other members have no sovereignty, and that we should be murdering their elites on whims. Of course, this is a terrible idea, and we might be able to make their sh!tholes sh!tt!er.
Announcing that we would be adopting this interpretation might be a way to get people to withdraw from, and nullify the UN. These foreign crazies might be nuts enough to surrender to us instead.
I understand that Mark Carney has announced a contest for the best memes.
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