I honestly don’t know where to post this.

Botch

Just in case Nexstar still blocked ABC in your area, like they did here.
 
https://youtu.be/aTZjo42xRH4?si=m_NZgcNTJW7OL-Ha

Canugghead

Not blocked here, loved it. Just programmed my PVR to record it nightly.

DoubleEgger

20M on YouTube

Canugghead

Botch

...

fishlessman

Canugghead said:

what flavors does it come in.......looks like it could be the next tiktok challenge

Canugghead

@fishlessman
No idea, was exiting and thought it's interesting

Canugghead

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPRhnroEVYc/

Buckwoody Egger

Thanks for posting that, had forgotten about that joint.  will have to try it.  seems like it’s been coming soon for a while. would be cool if there was a post on it. haven’t been on foot in downtown Flowery Branch in a long time but cruised through a few times.  Way back in the day Mountain Main BBQ in FB was good- a ramshackle roadside shack type joint.

Botch

Question for the farmers in flyover country: do you have a significant portion of your crop in soybeans this year?  What is your outlook at this time, financially?  PMs are fine.
 
A second Question for folks here with a broader view: aren’t soybeans considered a “worldwide commodity”, like oil?  If China suddenly stopped buying 70% of the US soybean crop (which they have), that means they’re buying them from other suppliers; then, the countries that were buying from those suppliers now need to find new sources, right?  Why not us?  I’m not understanding this.  
 
A third Question, for anyone here who might understand macro Economics:  with the intentional cutting off of 70% of the US’s soybean market via tariffs, and the subsequent proposals to divert $10B (iirc) of our tax dollars to keep our soybean farmers afloat, is this a sustainable (much less, intelligent) way to do business?  

Botch

This does not bode well:  
https://apnews.com/article/dominion-voting-liberty-vote-2020-conspiracy-theories-fed1e2d7f00b264bf5f8e01a106124f1

Botch

From Robert Reich:
 

What happens when huge amounts of money pour into poorly understood and unregulated industries that promise spectacular profits for a few winners?

At best, some investors lose their shirts while the lucky ones make fortunes. At worst, the bubble bursts and takes everyone down with it — not just its investors, but the entire economy.

My purpose today isn’t to worry you but to give you some economic information that may help you. I’m deeply concerned that two opaque industries are creating giant bubbles on the verge of bursting.

One is AI.

AI is worrisome enough as is — its insatiable thirst for energy and water, its capacities to override the wishes of human beings, its potential to destroy the planet.

My immediate concern is that AI is becoming a financial bubble whose bursting will harm lots of innocent people.

Anyone remember the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s? The housing bubble of 2006? The tulip-mania bubble of the 1630s? The South Sea bubble of 1720?

They all followed a well-worn pattern.

An asset generates excitement among investors because its value starts rising — mainly because other investors are also becoming excited and investing in it. Investors borrow piles of money to get in on the action.

The bubble bursts when it becomes evident that way too much has been invested relative to the potential for real-world profits. Smart investors cash out first. Everyone else is left with worthless pieces of paper. Borrowers go broke. Those insuring the borrowers disappear. If bad enough, governments have to bail out the biggest borrowers.

The Bank of England recently warned that AI stock market valuations appeared “stretched” — risking a “sudden correction” in global markets. Translated: The bubble will burst.

AI has many of the characteristics of a bubble.

Market valuations of its major players — OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon, Meta, and Musk’s xAI — have soared. Most of this is on the basis of hope and hype.

Shares of stock surrounding AI and its data centers account for an estimated 75 percent of the returns to America’s biggest corporations, 80 percent of earnings growth, and 90 percent of the growth in capital expenditures.

Yet, according to an MIT report, 95 percent of companies that try AI aren’t making any money from it.

Taxpayers are footing some of this bill. Thirty-seven states have passed legislation granting hundreds of millions of dollars of tax exemptions for the building of data centers.

Meanwhile, factory construction and manufacturing investments in the rest of the American economy have slowed. Manufacturing has lost 38,000 jobs since the start of the year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos recently admitted that AI is likely a bubble but that some investments will eventually pay off.

“When people get very excited, as they are today, about artificial intelligence, for example ... every experiment gets funded, every company gets funded. The good ideas and the bad ideas. And investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and bad ideas.”

The flood of money into AI has made America’s billionaire oligarchs far richer.

By Forbes’ count, 20 of the most notable billionaires tied to the explosive growth in AI infrastructure have already added more than $450 billion to their fortunes since January 1.

Oracle cofounder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison’s wealth has increased $140 billion in the past year, as Oracle’s shares jumped 73 percent (compared to 15 percent for the entire stock market). This was due to projected revenue from Oracle’s cloud infrastructure to power AI.

This has made Larry Ellison the second-richest person in America (just behind Elon Musk). The Ellison family is pouring some of this wealth into a media empire aligned with Trump.

The wealth of Nvidia cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang has increased $47 billion this year as shares of his chipmaking giant have risen 40 percent.

Wait for the burst.

Oracle is carrying more debt than ever, issuing another $18 billion of debt in September. The S&P’s credit rating bureau downgraded its outlook for the company to “negative” in July, citing concerns about free cash flow.

Other major players are also deep into debt.

Frankly, I don’t care which giant corporations or ultra-wealthy investors strike it big and which lose their shirts.

I worry about the economy as a whole, about working families who could lose their jobs and savings. The losses when the AI bubble bursts could ricochet across America.

Trump has put David Sacks, co-founder of an AI company and, of course, a fierce Trump loyalist, in charge of AI and cryptocurrencies. So far, Sacks has killed any restrictions and regulations that might stand in the way of either.

The Trump regime has been opening the doors for trillions of dollars in pension funds to be invested in crypto, AI, venture capital, and private equity. Even 401(k) plans have joined the flood.

Crypto is my second bubble concern. It’s a classic Ponzi scheme. It’s growing because investors believe other investors will keep buying it. And like AI, crypto’s meteoric growth has also been powered largely by the ultra-wealthy. (Trump and his family are said to have made $5 billion off it so far.)

Also like AI, crypto uses up massive amounts of energy but doesn’t actually create anything. Gertrude Stein’s famed description of Oakland, California, seems apt: There’s no there there.

Consider the online brokerage firm Robinhood, whose stock rose 284 percent in the year through September. What fueled this extraordinary increase in value? Trading in cryptocurrency and in betting on sports games.

Last month, Robinhood joined the S&P 500 — the index of America’s biggest corporations. As Jeff Sommer noted in The New York Times, had Robinhood been a member of the S&P 500 for the entire year, its meteoric rise would have been enough for it to lead the index.

Crypto tokens are even being sold as ways to get pieces of private firms like SpaceX and OpenAI. Watch your wallets.

When will the crypto bubble burst? Maybe it’s already started.

Friday’s cryptocurrency selloff — apparently triggered by Trump’s talk of a 100 percent tariff on China — wiped out more than $19 billion in crypto assets. Bitcoin dropped 12 percent, forcing liquidations that triggered more selling, pushing prices even lower. The token for World Liberty Financial, a crypto project backed by Trump and his sons, fell by more than 30 percent.

The sharp downturn exposed the huge amount of borrowing behind crypto’s nine-month rally, which began after the election of an administration seen as friendly to the industry.

The flood of money into these two opaque industries — AI and crypto — has propped up the U.S. stock market and, indirectly, the U.S. economy.

AI and crypto have created the illusion that all is well with the economy — even as Trump has taken a wrecking ball to it: raising tariffs everywhere, threatening China with a 100 percent tariff, sending federal troops into American cities, imprisoning or deporting thousands of immigrants, firing thousands of federal workers, and presiding over the closure of the U.S. government.

When the AI and crypto bubbles burst, we’ll likely see the damage Trump’s wrecking ball has done.

I fear millions of average Americans will feel the consequences — losing their savings and jobs.

Again, I’m not writing this to alarm you. You already have more than enough reason to be alarmed by what’s happening to America.

I want you to take reasonable precaution.

This isn’t an investment letter, but if you have savings, please make sure some are in low-risk assets such as money-market funds. As to your job, hold on.

fishlessman

smoke tires.....not drugs typical maine road

i see they fixed the pics on vanilla

Botch

This interesting tidbit from Robert Reich yesterday:
 
New York’s oligarchs spent more than $55 million trying to defeat Mamdani and get Andrew Cuomo elected instead. With Cuomo winning just under 855,000 votes, that came to about $65 per vote. Total spending for Mamdani was about $16 million. With Mamdani winning more than 1 million votes, that came to about $15 per vote.

Botch

I hope everyone can take 18 minutes out of their day to watch this.  
 
https://youtu.be/P9Pa1j3bok8?si=n2j7bTQiZKAiiWDP

lousubcap

DVR and will watch later today. 

fishlessman

fishlessman

A New Jersey-bound airplane that suddenly plunged thousands of feet in the air — sending 15 people to the hospital in October — was likely struck by cosmic rays from a star that exploded in another galaxy, according to space experts.

The JetBlue Airbus A320 flight was hit by a stream of high-energy particles from a distant supernova blast that traveled millions of years, according to Clive Dyer, a space and radiation expert from the University of Surrey who spoke to space.com

JetBlue Airbus A320 flight was hit by a stream of high-energy particles from a distant supernova explosion that traveled millions of years, Clive Dyer said. NurPhoto via Getty Images

“Cosmic rays can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit,” Dyer told the outlet.

Botch

fishlessman said:

A New Jersey-bound airplane that suddenly plunged thousands of feet in the air — sending 15 people to the hospital in October — was likely struck by cosmic rays from a star that exploded in another galaxy, according to space experts.

The JetBlue Airbus A320 flight was hit by a stream of high-energy particles from a distant supernova blast that traveled millions of years, according to Clive Dyer, a space and radiation expert from the University of Surrey who spoke to space.com

JetBlue Airbus A320 flight was hit by a stream of high-energy particles from a distant supernova explosion that traveled millions of years, Clive Dyer said. NurPhoto via Getty Images

“Cosmic rays can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit,” Dyer told the outlet.

This post has puzzled me.  I understand that supernovas have incredible energy, but HOW did a single beam of energy make it to Earth and hit just ONE plane?  Not to mention this didn’t just come from another star, but a star in another galaxy???  This makes no sense to me.  
Where did you find this, fish?  

fishlessman

Botch said:

fishlessman said:

A New Jersey-bound airplane that suddenly plunged thousands of feet in the air — sending 15 people to the hospital in October — was likely struck by cosmic rays from a star that exploded in another galaxy, according to space experts.

The JetBlue Airbus A320 flight was hit by a stream of high-energy particles from a distant supernova blast that traveled millions of years, according to Clive Dyer, a space and radiation expert from the University of Surrey who spoke to space.com

JetBlue Airbus A320 flight was hit by a stream of high-energy particles from a distant supernova explosion that traveled millions of years, Clive Dyer said. NurPhoto via Getty Images

“Cosmic rays can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit,” Dyer told the outlet.

This post has puzzled me.  I understand that supernovas have incredible energy, but HOW did a single beam of energy make it to Earth and hit just ONE plane?  Not to mention this didn’t just come from another star, but a star in another galaxy???  This makes no sense to me.  
Where did you find this, fish?  

i just saw it on aol. if true its crazy. how many particles could even hit the earth at the distance involved

Canugghead

Just received this from a friend, enough said. Some info redacted.

Hi

Our two <sibling's kids> are finding life very worrisome in <a big US city> as Public Health employees. They both
have their <post graduate degree> of Public Health, and are moving to <a big GWN city> - without jobs.

I am casting a net out to see if perhaps you may know of a connection they could make in their pursuit
of employment.

I am so relieved and grateful they are moving to <a big GWN city>!

fishlessman

Canugghead said:

Just received this from a friend, enough said. Some info redacted.

Hi

Our two <sibling's kids> are finding life very worrisome in <a big US city> as Public Health employees. They both
have their <post graduate degree> of Public Health, and are moving to <a big GWN city> - without jobs.

I am casting a net out to see if perhaps you may know of a connection they could make in their pursuit
of employment.

I am so relieved and grateful they are moving to <a big GWN city>!

Big city

Botch

And it's even worse today.  Apparently the original ad has been removed, so only a matter of time til RR's post is too.  Watch while you can.  
 
https://youtube.com/shorts/ADy64by4aRY?si=CPhzoYtI0puUG-8N

Botch

I don't know if any of you subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson's daily column; every once in a while she gives a history lesson about an earlier part of US or world history, and the parallels you can see between then, and now, can be amazingly similar; or, it "rhymes".  I really enjoyed this one:
 

February 21, 2026

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

FEB 22

 

On February 22, 1889, outgoing Democratic president Grover Cleveland signed an omnibus bill that divided the Territory of Dakota in half and enabled the people in the new Territories of North Dakota and South Dakota, as well as the older Territories of Montana and Washington, to write state constitutions and elect state governments. The four new states would be admitted to the Union in nine months.

Republicans and Democrats had fought for years over admitting new western states, with members of each party blocking the admission of states thought to favor the other. Republicans counted on Dakota and Washington Territories, while the Democrats felt pretty confident about Montana and New Mexico Territories.

In early 1888, Congress had considered a compromise by which all four states would come into the Union together. But in the 1888 election, voters had put the Republicans in charge of both chambers of Congress, and while the popular vote had gone to Cleveland, the Electoral College had put Republican Benjamin Harrison into the White House.

Democrats had to cut a deal quickly or the Republicans would simply admit their own states and no others. The plan they ended up with cut Democratic New Mexico out of statehood but admitted Montana, split the Republican Territory of Dakota into two new Republican states, and admitted Republican-leaning Washington.

Harrison’s men were eager to admit new western states to the Union. In the eastern cities, the Democrats had been garnering more and more votes as popular opinion was swinging against the industrialists who increasingly seemed to control politics as well as the economy.

Democrats promised to lower the tariffs that drove up prices for consumers, while Republican leaders agreed with industrialists that they needed the tariffs that protected their products from foreign competition. Republicans assumed that the upcoming 1890 census would prove that the West was becoming the driving force in American politics, and admitting new states full of Republican voters would dramatically increase the strength of the Republican Party in Congress. The one new representative each new state would send to the House would be nice, but two new Republican senators per state would guarantee the Republicans would hold the Senate for the foreseeable future.

Then, too, the new states would change the number of electors in the Electoral College, where each state gets a number of electors equal to the number of the state’s U.S. senators and representatives. Harrison’s men were only too aware that Harrison had lost the popular vote and won only in the Electoral College, and they were keen to skew the Electoral College more heavily toward the Republicans before the 1892 election.

In Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, the administration’s mouthpiece, Harrison’s people boasted that Republicans could take Montana, and gleefully anticipated that the new western states would send eight new Republican senators to Washington, D.C., making the count in the Senate forty-seven Republicans to thirty-seven Democrats. The newspaper also pointed out that changing the balance of the Electoral College would stop the Democratic-leaning state of New York from determining the next president.

In May 1889, elections for members of the constitutional conventions in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington Territory went Republican. Montana went Democratic, but Republicans blamed the result on Democratic gerrymandering. In October 1889, congressional elections in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington confirmed that those territories would come into the Union as Republican states. Frank Leslie’s counted the numbers: Republicans had garnered 169 seats to the Democrats’ 161. Republican legislatures would also give six new Republicans to the Senate, putting the count in that body at forty-five Republicans and thirty-nine Democrats. Frank Leslie’s reported the numbers, then explained what they meant: Republican control of Congress was pretty much guaranteed.

As for Montana, when it appeared the legislature would be dominated by Democrats, Republicans simply threw out the Democratic votes, charging fraud. They did have to admit that a Democrat had won the governorship, but they insisted he had done so by fewer than three hundred votes. The governor, Joseph K. Toole, was so popular that he was reelected twice, but the Republicans tried to weaken him by harping on what Frank Leslie’s called his “arbitrary, partisan, we might almost say indecent official conduct.”

In a little over a week in November 1889, four new states entered the Union. On Saturday, November 2, President Harrison signed the documents admitting North Dakota and South Dakota. On Friday, November 8, he welcomed Montana to the Union. The following Monday, November 11, he declared Washington a state.

Just as they had planned in February, Republicans had added three Republican states to the Union and had come close to capturing a fourth. The West seemed to be the key to maintaining national political power, and it looked as if Harrison’s men had managed to claim the region for themselves. Republican dominance in the new western states, Frank Leslie’s wrote, would tip the scale that had balanced the parties for more than a decade. The votes of the new states would virtually assure the Republicans the presidency in 1892, and the tariffs would be safe.

But by summer 1890 it was no longer clear that the Republicans would keep their majority. The economy was faltering, and Americans blamed the tariffs. They were looking favorably on former president Cleveland, who, after all, had won the popular vote in 1888. The Harrison administration seemed out of touch with the American people. Mrs. Harrison had drawn up plans for a $700,000 addition to the White House with conservatories, winter gardens, and a statuary hall, “so as to make it a fit home for a Presidential family.” The Harrisons’ ne’er-do-well son Russell insisted it was “shameful” for the head of the nation to be forced to live in cramped quarters, although observers noted that the cramping came from the fact that Russell Harrison and his wife and child had moved into the White House with the president and the first lady. And then President Harrison accepted a handsome plate of solid gold from supporters from California on his birthday in August.

Republicans turned again to the idea of protecting their majority by adding more states. They looked toward Wyoming and Idaho. Since Wyoming had boasted a non-Indigenous population of fewer than 21,000 people in 1880 and the Northwest Ordinance had established 60,000 as the necessary population for admission to statehood, it was a stretch to argue that it was ready, but the Republicans were adamant that it should join the Union.

They also wanted to add Idaho, which had a population of fewer than 33,000 in 1880. They were in such a hurry to admit Idaho that they bypassed the usual procedures of state admission, permitting the territorial governor to call for volunteers to write a state constitution, which voters approved only months later.

Democrats pointed out that there was no argument for Wyoming and Idaho statehood that did not apply to Democratic New Mexico and Arizona. “The picking out of the two Territories and plucking them into the Union by the ears looked like an operation that was not to be justified by any sound principle of statesmanship or of public necessity, and that only found justification in the minds of its promoters by the fact that they were thus increasing their political influence in the next presidential election,” a Democratic representative charged.

Republicans countered that Democrats were opposing the admission of new states out of partisanship, saying they would not add a new state unless it pledged allegiance to the Democratic Party.

On July 3, 1890, after a vote that fell along party lines, Wyoming and Idaho were admitted to the Union. The Republicans had added six new states to the Union in less than a year. Administration loyalists were elated, but Democrats and moderate Republicans were not enthusiastic. The Democratic Boston Globe pointed out that the two new states together had a population of “a fair sized congressional district in Massachusetts” but would be represented in Congress by four senators and two representatives.

The moderate Republican Harper’s Weekly was also concerned. It pointed out that the admission of the new states badly skewed congressional representation. The estimated 105,000 people of Wyoming and Idaho, it complained, would have four senators and two representatives. The 200,000 people in the First Congressional District of New York, in contrast, had only one representative. Harper’s Weekly pointed out there were fifteen wards in New York City that each had a population as large as the population of Wyoming and Idaho put together. To get their additional Republican senators, the magazine noted, the Harrison administration had badly undercut the political power of voters from much more populous regions, a maneuver that did not seem to serve the fundamental principle of equal representation in the republic.

Administration men did not stop at redrawing the map to ensure the success of their party. They manipulated the 1890 census to favor Republican districts, projecting their count would give fifteen more Republican congressmen while only seven for the Democrats. They erected statues of Civil War heroes and passed the Dependent Pension Act, which put money in the pockets of disabled veterans, their wives, and their children. And all the while, they blamed their opponents for partisanship. Frank Leslie’s lectured: “It behooves the citizen, regardless of party affiliations to think of the calamities that must in the end result from the intensifying of party feeling and the subordination of right and justice to the desire to advance party success.”

And yet the public mood continued to swing away from the Republicans, who continued to insist that the workers and farmers suffering under the Republicans’ policies were ungrateful and were themselves to blame for their own worsening conditions. In turn, opponents accused Republicans of stealing the 1888 election and believing they didn’t have to answer to voters so long as they had moneyed men behind them so they could buy elections.

In the 1890 midterms, voters took away the Republicans’ slim majority in the House and handed their opponents a majority of more than two to one. A new “Alliance” movement of farmers and workers had swept through the West “like a wave of fire,” Harper’s Weekly wrote, calling for business regulations and income taxes and working quietly through new, local newspapers that old party operatives had largely ignored. Republicans held power in the Senate only thanks to the admission of the new states, but even those did not deliver as expected: Republicans held a majority of only four senators, but three of them opposed tariffs.

In the presidential election of 1892, Harrison won four electoral votes from South Dakota, three from Montana, four from Washington, and three from Wyoming. Idaho’s three electoral votes went to the Populist candidate for president, James B. Weaver. North Dakota split its three votes among the three candidates. It was not enough. Grover Cleveland returned to the White House for a second term, and Democrats took charge of Congress for the first time since before the Civil War.

—

Notes:

The material here is mostly from my Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre but the specific references are below:

New York Times, February 13, 1888, p. 1; February 24, 1888, p. 3; February 15, 1889, p. 5; February 17, 1889, p. 4; February 25, 1889, p. 1.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, January 5, 1889, p. 346; March 2, 1889, p. 39; March 16, 1889, p. 91, from New York World.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 1, 1889, p. 287; October 19, 1889, p. 191. Hubert Howe Bancroft and Frances Fuller Victor, History of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, 1845–1889 (San Francisco: The History Company, 1890), pp. 781–806.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 2, 1889, pp. 223, 230; November 16, 1889, p. 259; December 14, 1889, p. 331.

Benjamin Harrison, Message to Congress, December 3, 1889, at John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 8, 1890, p. 1; March 22, 1890, p. 163; March 29, 1890, p. 171; May 10, 1890, p. 294; May 3, 1890, p. 279; April 26, 1890, p. 259.

Harry J. Sievers, Benjamin Harrison: Hoosier President (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1968), pp. 52–53.

New York Times, November 7, 1900.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 22, 1890, p. 147. Merle Wells, “Idaho’s Season of Political Distress: An Unusual Path to Statehood,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 37 (Autumn 1987): 58–67.

Harper’s Weekly, January 11, 1890, p. 31; July 19, 1890, p. 551. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 12, 1890, p. 211; May 3, 1890, p. 275; July 12, 1890, p. 487.

Boston Globe, June 28, 1890, p. 10; July 2, 1890, p. 6; July 3, 1890, p. 4. New York Times, June 28, 1890, p. 1.

New York Times, April 30, 1890, p. 1. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 1, 1890, p. 79; April 26, 1890, p. 257 and 259; May 17, 1890, p. 311; May 31, 1890, p. 355. July 12, 1890, p. 487; September 27, 1890, p. 113.

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1996/spring/1890-census

New York Times, August 16, 1890, p. 4.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 22, 1890, p. 278. Harper’s Weekly, November 29, 1890, pp. 934–935.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/1892

JohnInCarolina

This one is for you, @CPFC1905

Truly a pity!

CPFC1905

JohnInCarolina said:

This one is for you, @CPFC1905

Truly a pity!

Farage gets air time because we have a multi-party system, and so his party like the Greens and the random independents can get in tho the House of Commons.  Reform score well in local elections, too - but no one really trusts them come the general election.    He's a by-product of democracy, not the optimal use-case for proponents of it. 

He is exactly that guy who says 'I can't be homophobic because one of my staff is a gay'   

Also, while I've got you - how was Singapore?  I went about 20 years ago and couldn't really get to grips with the place.  Seemed to be full off ex-pats 'doing deals',  but then someone invented Dubai so that may have changed now. 

JohnInCarolina

CPFC1905 said:

JohnInCarolina said:

This one is for you, @CPFC1905

Truly a pity!

Farage gets air time because we have a multi-party system, and so his party like the Greens and the random independents can get in tho the House of Commons.  Reform score well in local elections, too - but no one really trusts them come the general election.    He's a by-product of democracy, not the optimal use-case for proponents of it. 

He is exactly that guy who says 'I can't be homophobic because one of my staff is a gay'   

Also, while I've got you - how was Singapore?  I went about 20 years ago and couldn't really get to grips with the place.  Seemed to be full off ex-pats 'doing deals',  but then someone invented Dubai so that may have changed now. 

I liked Singapore.  I suspect it’s very different from what you saw 20 years ago.

Upsides: multi-cultural, fantastic food options, great public transport, some great bars, world-class airport.  

Downsides:  humid as all heck, not cheap

Botch

This is a well-done 20-minute video of the history of Persia/Iran, just posted a few days ago.  Good use of AI-generated video, but I'd love to know:
1)  is the narration by David Attenborough also AI-generated?  And...
2)  how accurate is this?  
 
https://youtu.be/vIO1krG2-tE?si=aj5GhAaEYRvUpXPf
 
I went to a three-day orientation for incoming freshman at Iowa State University, and was paired up with a guy named Shahan Sarrafain (sp?)  He and I hit it off, we were both Aero E's, and we became friends during the next 2.5 years, and stayed in touch for a few years after I left ISU (we both left Aero E); I've tried to reconnect via Facebook but no luck.  He told me he was Persian, and at the time I didn't know Persia was Iran (his Dad was a first-gen immigrant, and a college professor).  This was in 1978, and when the Iranian Embassy takeover happened in '79 we just didn't discuss it.  
Now that we're the agressor in '26, I muse on how many similar relationships are being stressed.  And regarding the video, it seems we, as a species, are in an endless loop.  Sigh.
 

Botch

Two days ago I'd never heard of this "AfroMan" guy.  This Daily Show clip showed a lot more than the few actual news channels left, and I got a rare, good feeling.
 
https://youtu.be/rIEGz9LtF3I?si=YNEtqOtk2tcy-wH0