Open thread 8/14/24
Actually, she’s pretty darn good for only two years of study. Most people would be considerably worse:
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
Actually, she’s pretty darn good for only two years of study. Most people would be considerably worse:
I linked to another article yesterday but here’s more info:
U.S. approves $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel
Israel – F-15IA and F-15I+ Aircraft
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/biden-italian-strike-israel-arms-shipments
There’s on the one hand propaganda based on appearances and on the other what we conveniently call reality based on what’s actually occurring.
That is remarkable
Oh really
https://x.com/kylenabecker/status/1823750588833628390
I hope that trend line on Kam’s favorability is true, Miguel. I’ve been suspicious that her “surge” is 90% media hype and 10% relief that the Dem candidate is not visibly senile.
Kurt Schlichter on
“ We Lose This Election If You Fail to Act”
“The good news is that Trump’s numbers in aggregate have not fallen. Democrats have come home, and now comes the fight we have always expected. Now is the time for you to do your part. You. Not anyone else. You.
If you don’t, we lose. Individual involvement will determine the winner, and that means you.”
I have been thinking about how to cope with the disaster if the Democrats are able to steal the election. It will be a little, not much but some, easier to deal with if I know that I did things to stop it. See the article for ideas although we are all smart enough to figure out for ourselves. And while you’re at it, loosen up a few bucks to pay for the Townhall/Redstate VIP access. Conservatives need to support conservative media since the left has cut off ads.
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2024/08/14/we-lose-this-election-if-you-fail-to-act-n2643283
Wait until we see the whites of their eyes, friends.
True, it’s a short election cycle and Big Media Brainwashing is doing a heckuva job on Kamala! 2024.
But just as they will always call the Republican candidate Hitler, they will always launch massive attempts to discourage Republican voters.
I still say reality is on our side, which is why the Kamala! campaign is so intentionally empty.
Hold fast.
Transnational lawfare.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/08/14/j-k-rowling-elon-musk-named-in-cyber-harassment-lawsuit-filed-by-imane-khelif/
Jon baker:
Note that Elon Musk is all in for free speech and can be rather … colorful … in its use.
Here he responds to High EU Muckety-Muck, Thierry Breton, who also threatened Musk for “potentially harmful content.”
_______________________________________
To be honest, I really wanted to respond with this Tropic Thunder meme, but I would NEVER do something so rude & irresponsible!
[F-bomb]
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1823076043017630114
The Brits had better be careful. I heard that Musk plans to buy the island and turn it into a dystopian theme park. 🙂 Well, it’s a thought.
The Trump interview had 95 million views as of last night. That’s quite an audience. CNN can’t draw a million on a good night. I hate social media, but it’s where people get their news these days. Trump knows this.
Re: Trump interview
Reposting a link to the full Trump-Musk transcript (not audio):
https://turboscribe.ai/transcript/share/4422534834081521519/HWE18owsC2u8E5u2HpZNikyBdermlV2YSwGlTEPKJJw/donald-trump-and-elon-musk-full-transcript-august-12-2024-https-x-com-i-spaces-1nakepnklwoxl
It’s an interesting interview and Elon Musk is not a foolish man. It has reached millions of people, as J.J. notes. Trump does talk about policy.
Are Trump skeptics relying upon more than the problematic Trump soundbites or the media blackout on Trump?
Anyone know how hard it is for a humble hermit to get cataract surgery? I use the UF Health Eye Center for my eye stuff – mainly because I fall under the US Poverty Line and only have Medicare & Qualified Medicare Beneficiary (QMB – sometimes called the “Medicare Gold Card”). Had another doctor at first, but he stopped taking my insurance so then I went to University of Florida – some 10-years or so ago, and they have been great.
About 2-years ago my eye doctor said I could see better if he removed the cataracts. Next thing I knew his Surgical Coordinator was calling me to schedule it. Whoa—hold on, don’t y’all require me to have someone drive me in for the surgery? “Yes” they replied. Long story, but that doctor left before I could find someone to take me in for the surgery. Did find a free medical transport service provided by State of Florida during that process.
Last Wednesday, I went in to see a new Cataract Doctor. Told him I had a free medical transport service provided by State of Florida. He said they also had to wait in the lobby!?! They transport but don’t wait. His Resident Doctor told me to try a “caregiver Gainesville” search to find someone for ‘Lobby Duty’. Another longer story…
Today, I was finally able to set an appointment for cataract surgery in my right-eye, which is the one that has a Epiretinal membrane issue (something about a crinkling/wrinkling in or around the retina ??). Then a couple more post-surgery appointments. All that for just the one eye…?!?
Appointment set – called Suwannee River Economic Council for transport appointment and that is now set.
Called Concierge Care for a ‘Lobby Duty’ appointment – am now waiting for Penny to call me back. They are a paid service, $28 an hour w/ 4-hour minimum, but well worth it after piddling around for 2-years.
Tim Walz is holding a rally in Omaha on Saturday.
Cornhead will be there and with a question to shout out.
its already been run by daleks, I thought the likes of frau hossbinder would be more rigorous in the thinking, but everything on the line, based on computer models and the earth island affect re temperature samplinghttps://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/08/13/anthropogenic-global-warming-is-political-not-physical-science/
After recently winning her Olympic gold in Paris, Imane Khelif reverts back to her male identity – and Colin Kaepernick offered stunning return to the NFL with LA Chargers:
Karmi, are you nearsighted? Be aware of a potential consequence you may face between surgeries (assuming you have both eyes done and use corrected lenses to replace your natural ones.) I’m very near sighted with a large correction. I don’t know exactly when this effect might occur, but it’s something to talk to your ophthalmologist about.
I had cataract surgery on both eyes a few months ago and then epiretinal surgery a month ago.
Brian E: I wear tri-focals but don’t know if I’m nearsighted. Doc says my vision with new lens will cover distance, but will need glasses for reading (close) and computer (middle).
I thought they only did epiretinal surgery if the vision is really messed up. Mine is just a zoom effect – sorta like a penny looks the size of a nickle.
Karmi:
Definitely best to do one eye at a time. Good luck.
I have a series of posts on my cataract surgery. Starts here, and the rest can be found by scrolling down here.
You would know if you’re near sighted, so you probably aren’t.
As to epiretinal membrane, it can affect your distance vision– even with glasses, my vision could only be corrected to 20/60. In this state you have to have a corrected vision of at least 20/50 to get a regular driver’s license. Beyond that you can get a restricted license.
Like I said, I had the surgery a month ago and while I still have exaggerated vison (magnified image along with seeing what looks like looking through corrugation), my vision has improved to between 20/30-20/40, so it was well worth it. The retinal specialist said it will take several months to know the total effect of the surgery.
Added: The problem I had between the two cataract surgeries (scheduled a month apart) was I saw double. Since I have to rely on glasses the ophthalmologist said to have the corrected lens on the operated side (left) replaced with plain glass– so I would see using the corrected lens on my glasses for my right eye and the corrected lens placed in my eye for the left side.
What I saw was two images slightly skewed. The only way I could drive, read, watch TV was to keep my left eye (operated eye) closed.
The doctor said it occasionally happens to people with extreme myopia
Jeez – Neo!?! I should cancel my appointment!! My eyes ain’t really that bad…Ditto on the Jeez.
Anyway, would hate to go thru what you went thru. Mine is only cataracts, and most people say it’s OK.
Thanks for the links!
A twofer, Brian E: My Retinal Specialist just saw me before he made an appointment w/ the new Cataract Doctor. He said my epiretinal was holding steady, and was no need for a future appointment unless I notice changes.
Glad your surgery is working out on it…thanks for info!
Karmi:
I did have a far more complicated situation than most people. Most people do very well and it’s not a big deal. But still, I think everyone I’ve ever heard of has done one eye at a time. Good luck with yours!
I would imagine people can be talented beyond their years in many activities, painting, music, dancing. Just some people have a step ahead of most everyone.
Salem radio talkshow host Hugh Hewitt thinks Trump and Musk did an effective job on the X interview. He played excerpts on today’s program. I agree. The X discussion was good. One place the Hewitt show is available is Apple Podcasts.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hugh-hewitt-show-highly-concentrated/id1517313007?i=1000665170835
Karmi, good luck with your cataract surgery. I had both done, one at a time with two weeks in between, last winter. They were not complicated cases like Neo’s. Because I am (or was) very near-sighted, I took the lens for the operated eye out of my glasses and covered the eye with a gauze pad for any close work. Now I drive without lenses and use drug store reading glasses. I read the computer mostly without them because I can always increase the font size.
I may have mentioned before my brush with “instant ballet talent.”
Nearly 20 years ago now (!!), I found a ballet school with classes for adults (who just wanted exercise that didn’t include jazz and hip-hop music), which I really enjoyed.
One day, a young man, still in HS, joined the class.
He already had 2 to 4 black belts in martial arts, and one of his teachers suggested ballet to improve his flexibility and balance.
Within 6 months he was able to do almost all the introductory movements, and then danced most of the male parts in our annual Nutcracker production (the Nutcracker Prince himself was always a professional friend of the studio owner).
After graduation a few years later, he studied with a more formal studio, and that’s the last I heard of him, as I had to drop the class for family reasons.
So, I just looked him up on the internet, and he may still be dancing:!
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0375756/bio/
His great advantage was his previous many-years study in an athletic field that IMO has several affinities for dance, but still, that was a tremendous fast-track to the top!
AesopFan:
Yes, some people get it on the natch and then they exploit that by working hard.
Bastards!
AesopFan:
That “fast track to the top” is not unheard of for men. It is almost impossible for women. The differences in anatomy and the demands of the art for the two sexes make it that way. Men’s moves are based more on strength on less on extreme flexibility, including foot flexibility which is very extreme for women who must dance on pointe.
neo’s video, sex differences aside, reminds me what a long road mastery is.
neo praises our two-year student as “pretty darn good.” I’ll certainly take neo’s word. Yet even us ballet-know-nothings can discern that two-year student’s imperfections.
But that’s the way of dance, music, or in my case, French — levels and levels and levels.
And years and years and years.
huxley:
She’s “pretty darn good” for 2 years of study. She’s not at all good in any objective sense of the word. But most people wouldn’t be as good as she is after only 2 years of fairly intensive study.
Ballet is extraordinarily difficult and there’s a reason most students and especially most female students start young and have to work very very hard, and few achieve a professional-level proficiency even after all that intense effort. What’s more, unless ballet is performed at an enormously high level, it tends to look like crap. It can’t be faked.
The woman in the video is a dance photographer and is very good at that. She’s gotten into learning ballet for the sheer love of it.
Hey, Susan Rice should know!
I read that “collectivist” the first time and went WHAT? Good to know she’s only going with socialist lite policies.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/08/susan-rice-harris-is-an-integral-architect-of-bidens-agenda/
She’s “pretty darn good” for 2 years of study.
neo:
Of course. I thought that was implicit in my comment.
I’m pretty darn good for my two years of French study. But I have no illusions about my position in the grander scheme of things.
I rather wish you would consider the possibility that I’m not being stupid as you so often assume when you slap my wrist.
huxley:
It was implicit in your in your comment.
I was just nattering on.
@Karmi:Today, I was finally able to set an appointment for cataract surgery in my right-eye, which is the one that has a Epiretinal membrane issue (something about a crinkling/wrinkling in or around the retina ??). Then a couple more post-surgery appointments. All that for just the one eye…?!?
Good luck with that. From what I’ve heard, until you have the problem fixed you don’t realize how much you’ve been missing. I’m not yet needing to have things like that done but I can see it from where I am.
neo:
Not if one considers the overall frame.
Not unless I am required to quote you exactly and in full detail, cognizant of every possibility you might misunderstand, every time I respond to you.
Even if I am basically agreeing with you.
Those quotes who are voting based on Trump abandoning Ukraine have probably missed this story of a call between Trump and Zelensky in July.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/19/trump-zelenskyy-ukraine-call-00169905
On other OT fronts I’m enjoying the Rob Squad and Black Pegasus reaction channels, in addition to POLO REACTS.
These are blacks who have established YouTube channels which largely react to white music.
One may dismiss them, as Rufus TF did, as clickbait artists getting the clicks. I’m sure that is a factor … somewhat.
But they are “reaction artists.” They can’t provide a true “reaction” unless they don’t already know what they are reacting to.
For today’s blacks that means all the white music from the 20th C they didn’t hear because it wasn’t their time or their music, beyond what they caught randomly on the radio or the movies.
But they do react, beautifully and with wonderful articulation. Maybe I’m fooled. Maybe they just want my clicks. (Though I doubt they are getting rich.)
There are white reaction artists too that I love, but I find the blacks interesting because I want to understand blacks better and maybe, hopefully, appreciate them as they appreciate whites.
Maybe that’s happening.
It’s way too dangerous for whites to react to black music these days.
But blacks can say, when they feel it, that they hear the white music. They are often floored. I think that’s a Good Thing.
–Rob Squad
https://www.youtube.com/@RobSquadReactions
–POLO REACTS
https://www.youtube.com/@poloreacts27/videos
–Black Pegasus
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCokvZArf0XB_YH7fhOIh86g
Columbia University president resigns amid criticism over her response to anti-Israel protests: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/columbia-university-president-resigns-amid-criticism-over-her-response-to-anti-israel-protests/
Brian E, if you are seeing double, perhaps you need an additional element to the Rx for your lenses call “prism”. If this has not already been mentioned between you and your optometrist or ophthalmologist, you should ask about it.
I understand the issue with seeing double vision is more brain related than eye related. The prism correction is basically a (vertical?) frenal lens at a microscale, thus shifting the light entering the lens slightly so the brain receives the images properly aligned. Temporary versions with larger scale frenal steps can also be added to prior Rx lens until a full glass based version can be obtained.
As with others good wishes, good luck to you, too.
Here’s my new friend, Black Pegasus, a black rapper, reacting to Oliver Anthony, the white out-of-nowhere country artist doing Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,’ then his subsequent hit, “Rich Men North of Richmond.” (2023)
___________________________________
This is a beautiful song and this gives me hope for the future. Because if this is what is going viral currently, it gives me hope for the future. I hope that I can spread this.
–Black Pegasus, “American Rapper FIRST time EVER hearing OLIVER ANTHONY – Rich Men North Of Richmond”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeWWUiWt4xc
___________________________________
Perhaps you’ve already forgotten Oliver Anthony. Black Pegasus hasn’t. He converted “Rich Men North of Richmond” into a rap:
–RICH MEN NORTH OF RICHMOND RAP remix By: Black Pegasus – INSPIRED by Oliver Anthony!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3TRoU3Pgg4
R2L, I’m fine now. I was only seeing double between the first cataract surgery and the second one. The ophthalmologist just had me remove my corrected lens from the operated eye and when I used my glasses, I would see a double image from the eyeglass eye and the operated eye.
He didn’t tell me at the time that might happen. He talked about a prism effect due to the huge correction as I was extremely near sighted. With my newly installed lenses I’m seeing better than I was with glasses.
So for a month I just kept my operated eye closed. I couldn’t really see out of it anyway since that was the eye with the epiretinal membrane problem. A month after the second cataract surgery I had the “macular pucker” surgery and it continues to improve.
BTW, Black Pegasus calls Covid, the “plandemic.”
I suspect Dems have lost a step or two with blacks.
Ruth Wisse has an editorial in today’s WSJ.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/can-josh-shapiros-party-forgive-him-for-telling-the-truth-israel-palestine-8aff37d1?st=p32bslc2s3s3524&reflink=article_copyURL_share
And Heacher Mac Donald was in there yesterday. You should really subscribe to the WSJ.
RE: The increasing roar of the UFO Phenomenon
There is the accumulating roar—growing louder all the time–from all of the sober and often well-trained people, telling their stories of increasingly detailed and documented sightings and actual encounters with UFOs and NHIs, there is the accumulation of 70-80 years of FOIA’d and leaked government documents, then, there’s what high level U.S. government insiders are saying or even testifying to under oath—extremely well-qualified and well-connected insiders like former Col. David Grusch, Col. Karl Nell, Lou Elizondo, Admiral Timothy Galludet, and former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon, and there are also the statements from high level foreign officials—like the late Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Minister of Defense, and from Israeli former General Haim Eshed, for 30 years the Chief of the Israeli’s Space security effort, and currently a Professor of Aeronautics, there are the objective readings from various military sensors—often from several sophisticated sensors, combined with visual sightings, of the same object at the same time and, most recently, there has been legislation—The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023–(passed by the Senate, stripped of it’s most effective parts by the House, then passed, and signed by the President, a bill which will be reintroduced in it’s full form again in this Congress) put forward and passed by hard-headed members of Congress which takes as given “biological evidence of non-human intelligence” and “technologies of unknown origin,” and, finally, there is the apparent increase in UFO activities and sightings, coming in from all over our country, and, indeed, the world.
Paralleling this are, of course, the increasing estimates for the size of the Universe and perhaps it’s age, of the estimated number of stars, the prevalence of entire solar systems–planets around those stars–and how many of these planets are estimated to be orbiting those stars in the “Goldilocks zone” and, finally, the growing number of thousands of exoplanets which have been and are being discovered on, it seems, almost a daily basis.
As I see it, that roar from the UFO Phenomena is getting harder and harder to ignore.
Speaking of the WSJ, the lead editorial today is, I believe one of the most important in quite a while. I almost never engage in political arguments, but did not too long ago with a Canadian who kept insisting that health care was a “right”. After debating this topic for a while he asked what kind of health care system I wanted. I believe he thought this was a good rhetorical point because who really has a succinct answer to that question. On that day I did. I said, “Easy, the one most likely to cure cancer.”
He thought that was a BS answer but this is exactly what i was talking about.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/inflation-reduction-act-drug-price-controls-james-foster-charles-river-laboratories-joe-biden-kamala-harris-0e3af291?st=4zhp9q9aqpcqmbp&reflink=article_copyURL_share
The IRA here is the Inflation Reduction Act if that isn’t clear. If you can, please read the whole thing.
P.S. To add a little spice to my comment at 7:54 A.M. above, take a look at what might be termed an “out of place artifact,” some very interesting hieroglyphs noticed on the wall of the 13th century B.C. Egyptian Temple of Seti the First, at Abydos.*
* See https://i.pinimg.com/736x/9e/69/3d/9e693d1f0f8f02c9bbbf62c2bf91b71c–helicopters-temples.jpg
huxley,
I’m also a fan of reaction videos. And lately I also have been watching some young black reactors to classic rock. It is interesting to see them embrace some of the music from that era. Another interesting guy is Molly Boy who is a 20 something hip hop fan from England who I I think is fairly honest and is just becoming acquainted with the music. He really had no idea of who Dire Straights were, or had just barley heard of Eric Clapton. However, my favorites are Elizabeth Zaroff (The Charismatic Voice) and Maggie Renee. Both are trained opera singers and bring more technical analysis to their reactions. I also think they are honest in their proclamations that they have heard a song before or not. Something not always present in other reactors. Elizabeth is the better of the two and a bit more serious, though Maggie has a lot of energy and is fun. If you just want to see people chair dancing etc in their reactions then these two are not it. Be prepared as Elizabeth will stop and rewind a lot in her analysis. If that’s annoying, then skip her.
Reaction videos, a new way to waste some time 🙂