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i REALLY ENJOYED YOUR POST. BEST LAUGH I'VE HAD IN A LONG TIME. I love everything Trump is doing. He gives me hope for our country. My father fought in WW2...My husband served two combat tours in Korea and two combat tours in Viet Nam, My nephew was a Federal Marshall, Both my sons served in the Army...Armored Cavalry and 101st Airborne Air Assault My men were all strong and tough and so is Trump, He loves America, nb

I grew up believing that people like George Will, Bill Kristol and William F. Buckley were the ‘real conservatives’ helping to fight the evil Liberals/Progressives.

Both sides are fake.

Both sides are created and kept divided by people behind the scenes who fund, control and direct both the ‘Liberal’ and the ‘Conservative’ ‘news’ outlets.

Team Propaganda Victims #1 [Team Blue] and Team Propaganda Victims #2 [Team Red] are carefully kept at constant war with each other. The American people are kept divided because this robs them of a great deal of their power, which derives from their UNITY, not their divisions.
. Trump is FANTASTIC at forcing us all to see what people like Will, Kristol, Buckley, Ann Coulter, etc. always were. They were fooling us. But they can’t do that any longer:

Emerson Bigguns said “the more the memeier.”

When you made this statement “ When loyal MAGA standard-bearers like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Alex Jones criticized the war, he attempted no principled defense. He blasted them on Truth Social as “nut jobs” and “losers.”

His former national security advisor, John Bolton, summed it up: “He has no philosophy. He has no grand strategy. It is all transactional, all a matter of the moment, all driven by a desire for adulation and an inability to accept any limits on his power.”

You have lost any credibility with me …they are losers and intelligent assets and worse.

As I explained in the article, I voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. I published two books making the case for Trump versus his enemies, especially in the media: "Donald Trump and His Enemies" and "Why Trump's Enemies Fail." Have a look; they cover issues in a far broader context that just Trump and always, consistently from an Objectivist point of view, since I became an advocate of Ayn Rand in 1962 and moved to NYC for the lectures. My article essentially is about end-stage pragmatism (muddling from crisis to crisis always relying on government), the diametric opposite of philosophical principle. Therefore, I focus on Trump's especially repulsive form of pragmatism, which involves constant expression of personal whims, seeking adulation, enrichment at public expense... Now, becoming the first President to respond with military force to Iran's decades of radical Islamic jihad--expressed in the ultimate outrage of October 7--appeared to be principled, courageous, and definitely "America First." But look how the war has been conducted. And look at the stream of threats, boasts, retreats, pivots, and, especially, treatment of Israel. In another area, perhaps our greatest long-term risk--radically politicized "anti-industrial revolution" environmentalism--I liked Trump from the start. Just by downgrading, ignoring, and dismissing the issue he has accomplished a lot. Also, he gives no lip-service to the "woke" and its sacred cows-bulls (trans, you know) and he has not loaded his administration with lefties as did Obama and Biden. But then he lauded totalitarian dictator Xi, praised his lifelong rule, and seems to reply on good relations. Well, so did FDR with "Uncle Joe" Stalin. I might well have added to my article a paragraph on making a choice in the midterm elections. It would be appalling if the Democrats gained control of Congress--a kind of evolution into the French Terror. This truly is the world--and the peril--of "muddling through."

Thank, DOB. Couldn't agree more. 👍👍

I'm glad to see bond rates come up. There's obviously some risk. Straight Line Logic has a history with bond trading, FWIW. Savers need to be rewarded, too, for a change. I may start rolling treasuries into my holdings...

I wish that our debt was headline news every day.

One of my ancestors that fought in the Rev War was paid in land after the war was over. No property tax, no income tax, build what you want, plant what you want with no permits needed. Then the control freaks got a grip...

Absolutely. Property tax is theft.
Imagine selling these ideas to our forefathers...

I remember when our government gave people 40 acres and a mule... Just hoping they would make the land valuable. And boy did we.

Now, they tax us on the value we ADDED to the land... Interesting, no...

“ It is worth taking a moment to consider the possible scenario. I optimistically voted for Donald Trump, carried away by the tidal wave of reaction sweeping America (“‘Getting’ the MAGA Movement: Think ‘Reaction.’” Belatedly, I realize that he is a man utterly without principle. I mean that “technically.” Philosophically, he is a “pragmatist”—moved by emotion, whim, and his own narcissistic vanity to act on the impulse of the moment. There is nothing “practical” about the unprincipled exercise of power.

The definitive example is Trump’s abrupt pivot to war against Iran. For a decade, he built his movement on an anti-interventionist, “America First” platform, promising an end to “endless wars.” By launching an expensive, high-casualty conflict, he fractured his own base. When loyal MAGA standard-bearers like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Alex Jones criticized the war, he attempted no principled defense. He blasted them on Truth Social as “nut jobs” and “losers.”‘

You sir sound fully vaxxed and brainwashed resulting in a strong case of TDS. If you want to hang your hat with talking heads who have never accomplished anything but spreading psyops and fear mongering. Actors….. let’s call them. All tied to the farm. The deep state lost the central control of oil with Iran and Venezuela . Watch OPEC crumble , and the petroleum dollars weaponization rendered moot. The fear premium of terrorist oil interruption the City of London created and profited from is gone! By the way in terms of our so called National Debt , FRAUD… fraud vitiates everything.

Agreed.
Even when there is no corruption, the situation is that there is no private home ownership when the
tax district expects "rent" forever and can steal the property if the "owner" doesn't comply.

Thanks OGC -

except the local taxing authorities are committing fraud on a scale NEVER SEEN before.

You can find a guy suing in Texas, and I think 7 states are signing on.

Effectively, the schools/Counties have borrowed money to the hilt, and now they must borrow more just to make the payments on the interest.

This guy found the government was contacting the appraisers, telling them what the appraised values needed to be, so they could raise enough money to keep the lights on. (ie, regardless of the market values of the homes). They've literally been caught, and it appears it is a common practice.
INSANE!

👍 That deal reminds me of the deal between home "owners" and state/local taxing authorities.

Great Story, thanks for sharing, I'm sure everyone else will enjoy it too!

Hey OGC - it took a long time to kick in but I remembered things from my young working days.
My boss (working on a farm) had a '72 El Camino with the bench seats.
I was from a family of 10, so everything that I had I worked for, and Andy (the farmer I worked for) understood what it meant.
He (his wife) fed me lunch every day - they knew that it was going to be my best meal of the day. Had to be on the porch at 12:00, and you had to have everything off of your plate by 12:25 and she would clean everything up.....
I worked very hard for him - but he did take good care of me.
Anyway, he knew that my family had two vehicles and there were 5 drivers.
He offered me his El Camino for $.07/CPM.
I had a five mile bike ride to get to his place, and then five miles back to town and then over 30 miles to get to a bowling alley or movie theater.
So I was looking at 3 hours of work just to get a date to an event and back.
I worked many long hours, and the two times I used his El Camino were well worth it!
Having a date and having an arm around her on the bench seat... do not know why I had forgotten.
Nothing more happened, but it was ..... WONDERFUL....
I was "unavailable" when Andy passed - I will forever chastise myself for that. I was not there to let his wife and children know how much he meant to me -
Everybody around me now has an angle - can't trust anyone....
Can I go back to working for Andy? Just let me have 5 - 6 months of that simple life and I will call it quits....

Sorry to unload - been a loooong time since I had these memories. They were locked away.

The human has "agency" in the full sense, which means volitional consciousness, which can initiate its own "reprogramming." Limited to its programming, how closely can AI parallel true agency? No matter what the technical sophistication, including that achieved by "self-replicating," AI is still limited by its programming and by the nature of the "prompt." How the human understands the meaning and limits of the prompt is not necessarily how the prompt is "heard" by the AI program and all its data, algorithms, and learned strategies. Still, what it cannot do is choose to disregard the prompt and initiate its own prompt--unless its has been prompted to generate prompts. Still it can do so only with the limits of how its programming interprets the human prompt. You cannot get around the issue of volition. This is why not AI consciousness nor agency nor "compute" power is the fundamental issue. The issue if what they call "alignment" or misalignment": how does what AI "hears" align with the human prompt? Or so I understand it, to date.

All of the reportedly shocking tests were done by the same company, Irregular, which does security screening for all the big AI company labs. Obviously discovering new security threats fuels their business. It is all very technical, but I do understand that they don't simply run the programs to see if anything goes wrong. They set up rather elaborate test situations to test "possibilities." For example, the now famous OpenAI "rogue breakout" occurred in a test that deliberately disabled certain guardrails, built in an escape route into the internet that it did not "tell" the program about to see if it would find it, and fed it false information (such as that a certain manager was having an affair and also was planning to shut down the program), and then gave the program a rather open-ended assignment. Under certain conditions, it did find and use the escape route, and once even threatened to expose the manager's affair if he interfered with the program. So it seems that at best there are conceivable sets of conditions and circumstances under which AI, pursuing a certain less-than-fully specified assignment, can "go off the rails" in setting subgoals and defining strategies for fulfilling the assignment.

Such results are screaming headlines and thousands of editorials and columns all highlighting the life and death importance of services that Irregular is selling.

I have put a negative spin on this, but it is limited by my own context

IN 1972, there was a flood in Elmira, NY. The river overwhelmed the dikes, swept into the stores downtown and disgorged the merchandise, spewing a cornucopia of clothing, electronics, jewelry, books, etc through broken storefronts and dumping everything onto the streets. Riding my bicycle, staying out of site of the National Guard, I spotted shiny debris outside a liquor store. I got several sealed quarts of whiskey (I had "saddle bags" for the bike). The health authorities had condemned all the river-soaked food and edibles, so...Anyway, my Irish grandpa was real happy for a few weeks... 😄

Made me feel great about where half my mother came from. Now deceased like my father, her maiden surname was French~~but that half of my quartered up family history goes all the way back to Brits kicking some French out of Canada. Part of that group became Cajuns. That goes so flintlock firearms far back there's no telling what genetic mix I may have picked up.
Well, I'm not claiming to be of any American Indian tribe without proof. Take that, Trump's Pocahontas.
Whoa, wait~~BRITS DID THAT DIRTY SCHIFF TO MY FRENCH SIDE!

Yeah, noticed that one too, OGC...

Nice set as I know Trump was well received in Ireland. I didn't pay as much attention to this trip as I should have it seems. Thanks, OUC, for posting this.

Yeah, I was wondering about that but I don't know much about them. To the left MSMM (Main Stream Marxist Media) anyone to the right of Stalin is a Fascist Nazi, meaning so are all Republicans and Trump supporters. Therefore, I'll hold off judgment of the AfD until I know a lot more - not at the top of my things to do list right now.

The Canadians probably deserve it if they elect their prime minister. I guess Nike found about the go woke and go broke rule.

Now that the Greenland issue has been solved, the European NATO Nations are going to find themselves in second place. And if Ireland and the other United Kingdom countries decide to go it alone then the SWHTF in that corner of the world.

Despite being half-Swedish paternally thus with a Swedish surname, me dino is hereby quite proud to add that I'm also a quarter Irish. Better yet, I was born on Saint Patrick's Day.
For years I've been telling people that on my birthday I become 100% Irish.
Asked how, I simply say, "Leprechauns."
If anyone here in The Gulch has a problem with whenever I get to use such logic on my special day when I as a kid was told I can pinch you for not wearing green, be advised that me also being 100% the dino just may want to bite you too.
Then you'll be sorry. Yeah!