Wednesday’s Forum

FILED UNDER: Open Forum
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is a Professor of Security Studies. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Jim Brown 32 says:

    I happen to think Bidens bet–that the economy is the more salient turnout issue than Abortion–is correct. It all boils down to demographics. The most energized and affected Pro-choicers are 20-something white women. 20-somethings aren’t the most reliable turnout demographic anyway. And they certainly don’t turnout well as a single-issue Abortion voter compared to single-issue geezers who turnout to vote against Roe.

    Im watching Ohio closely to see if Tim Ryan proves my theory that a Democrat rural/blue collar message is viable.

    In the meantime, Dems would be smart (impossible I know) to work on uncleveing the Evangelical from the Catholics, which would be child’s play since they belive Catholics are going to Hell anyway. It would be child’s play. The Conservative movement would, frankly, crumble is those 2 groups stopped working together.

    Evangelical support is the reason we have a Catholic Junta on the SCOTUS. The conspiracy theories write themselves…

    3
  2. Michael Reynolds says:

    @Jim Brown 32:
    They weren’t single issue voters under Roe. We shall see if that changes when abortion goes from theoretical problem to very real problem.

    2
  3. MarkedMan says:

    @Jim Brown 32:

    The most energized and affected Pro-choicers are 20-something white women.

    My personal observation is that the women who are most energized about this are the ones who have had an abortion or had a close call during which they decided to have one if they were pregnant. These women could be 20, sure, but more likely are 25 to 95, and come in all colors, religions, and ethnicities. Attend a Planned Parenthood fundraiser sometime. The committed volunteers are all ages. The people employed by Planned Parenthood who have to withstand rants from families and from religious fanatics lined up in the streets outside their workplaces, are from all ages and walks of life. And PP is a non-profit and does not pay as well as private practice. No one is working there and enduring all that abuse and nonsense for the great paychecks.

    7
  4. MarkedMan says:

    The other day I accidentally clicked on one of the related posts that appear in the side bar and found myself in the middle of an old discussion about the racist Ron Paul newsletters. There seemed to be an awful lot of commenters who accepted the Paul’s assurances that the they had nothing to do with the newsletters except for cashing the checks, also accepted that despite his byline on the racist editorials it was someone else who was writing them, but then didn’t seem curious as to who the person or people passing themselves off as Ron Paul was/were and their relationship to the Pauls. A lack of curiosity shared by the Pauls themselves.

    These commenters shared a groupthink mentality but I didn’t get the feeling that they were the same person under different names. And there were a lot of them. But despite their number I hardly recognized any of them. Which brings me to my question: did we used to have a lot of Paul-istas here that were driven away, or were these simply some pro-Paul troubleshooters, hitting every site where they were mentioned negatively?

    1
  5. Jim Brown 32 says:

    @Jim Brown 32: I also neglected to point out that Men that could be indentured into 18 years of child support, against their will, would be an incredibly lucrative and receptive target audience to message.

    2
  6. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Jim Brown 32: If that’s what they are worried about, they should just keep their dick in their pants.

    2
  7. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Law Boy, Esq.
    @The_Law_Boy

    when discussing the propriety of protesting outside of supreme court justices’ homes, it’s important to remember that in the 90s the court held that protesting outside of the homes of **abortion clinic employees** is protected by the first amendment

    9
  8. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Ladies and germs, I give you the leading intellectual light of the Republican Party:

    As president, Donald Trump repeatedly asked aides if China could be manufacturing hurricanes and sending them to damage the United States, three unnamed former senior officials told Rolling Stone on Tuesday. Trump also reportedly wanted to know if using such a “hurricane gun” would constitute an act of war, and if so, whether the US could retaliate militarily.

    China is a major nuclear power.

    “It was almost too stupid for words,” one source told the magazine, which said the speaker was “intimately familiar with the then sitting president’s inquiry”.

    “I did not get the sense he was joking at all,” the source added.
    ……………………….
    Rolling Stone quoted a second former official as saying: “I was present [once] when he asked if China ‘made’ hurricanes to send to us. [Trump] wanted to know if the technology existed. One guy in the room responded, ‘Not to the best of my knowledge, sir.’

    “I kept it together until I got back to my office … I do not know where the [then-]president would have heard about that … He was asking about it around the time, maybe a little before, he asked people about nuking hurricanes.”
    ……………………………..
    Stephanie Grisham, his press secretary at the time of Sharpiegate and his reported remark about “nuking” hurricanes, told the magazine she did not hear conversation about China making hurricanes, but it would not have surprised her if she had. “Stuff like that was not unusual for him,” Grisham said. “He would blurt out crazy things all the time, and tell aides to look into it or do something about it.”

    “His staff would say they’d look into, knowing that more often than not, he’d forget about it quickly – much like a toddler.”

    Just think, he’s the one to beat for the GOP nod in 2024.

    2
  9. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Lyndon Baines Johnson
    @lyndonbajohnson

    LBJ’s Texas home surrounded by Vietnam protestors, 1968. He was not “intimidated,” in fact, he told the secret service and the Gillespie Co., Sheriff to leave the protesters alone and “let them have their say.” -WJ

    4
  10. wr says:

    How stupid are you people? Don’t you realize that the only issues that voters care about, the ones that will bring Dems to victory, are exactly the same as the issues I care about? How can the Democrats be so dumb that they can’t see their only path forward is to say exactly what I do, because my views are the only things that voters care about.

    12
  11. Jim Brown 32 says:

    @OzarkHillbilly: I don’t care what they do or don’t do with their members– Its a group of people that will come out and vote their pocketbooks. Play to win.

    1
  12. Neil Hudelson says:

    @wr:

    Well I think it’s more than that, wr. They need to concentrate on the important issues, but they also need to talk about them in a way that exactly matches how I would talk about them.

    4
  13. Neil Hudelson says:

    I seem to be flagged for moderation.

    1
  14. Jim Brown 32 says:

    @MarkedMan: My goto stable of pollsters and focus testers are saying the opposite. Even women that are strongly Pro-choice, but beyond child bearing years, are motivated moreso for the economic conditions now than by the overturn of Roe. Although they are pissed about Roe as well.

    By very definition–a group of people that attend Fundraisers are Activists or Activist Adjacent– not your average voters who might stroll into the voting booth if something in the trending headlines going into the election makes them angry enough.

    1
  15. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Jim Brown 32: I’m sorry, when you said

    that Men that could be indentured into 18 years of child support, against their will,

    I thought you meant it. Just so I am absolutely clear here, that is a really shitty “real (s//) man’s way” of thinking about child support, and absolute bullshit.

    2
  16. Jen says:

    @Jim Brown 32:

    The most energized and affected Pro-choicers are 20-something white women.

    I’m not entirely sold on this. They might be the most directly affected, but there’s that whole “until it happens to me” thing that comes into play for many. For a lot of women, abortion is an abstract concept until they, or a friend, faces an unexpected pregnancy, or, when they, or a friend, is faced with a pregnancy that is not viable.

    I’ve never had an unplanned pregnancy, but by now, in my 50s, I’ve seen PLENTY of both of the above examples happen to friends and acquaintances. I am now adamantly pro-choice, I was pro-life (with exceptions) when I was in my 20s. Life experience does play a role here.

    2
  17. Sleeping Dog says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    True, but you know that’s not going to happen.

  18. Neil Hudelson says:

    @Jim Brown 32:

    My goto stable of pollsters and focus testers are saying the opposite.

    Care to share? This does not match my personal (anecdotal) experience, working very closely with PP, NARAL, etc. In my experience the most passionate and dedicated are women who were around 20 years of age when Roe was decided. But I would be interested in data showing me that my experience is not the norm.

    1
  19. Jen says:

    @OzarkHillbilly: “Hurricane Guns” would be a cool band name. That’s about it.

    2
  20. Jim Brown 32 says:

    @OzarkHillbilly: I have no respect for a man that doesn’t take care of his kids..Period—not even to piss on if they were on fire.

    If they are motivated to vote D for shity reasons though–I’ll take one for the team and put them out so they can pull the effin lever.

    2
  21. Kathy says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Sometime in the early 80s there was a drought in parts of central Mexico. This didn’t affect Mexico City’s water supply, but it did affect hydroelectric damns that supplied part of our electricity. the result was frequent brown-outs as the power supply got reduced. The drought stemmed from below normal rainfall in the affected areas.

    Rumors were going around, that US storm chaser planes were stealing hurricanes in the Gulf, and taking the associated rain away.

    the planes are real, but all they do is fly through stiff winds and collect data. The Atlantic hurricane season drives much of the rainfall in central Mexico. The former has no effect on the latter.

    But that’s about par for the course for the scientifically ignorant who are averse to thinking.

    2
  22. Scott says:

    Few demand any right until it impacts them directly. It is human nature. Politically, I think the best approach is that while protesting the right to choose, there should be demands for codifying the right to contraception, the right to marry, the right to privacy. Because those impact people’s lives more immediately and less abstractly.

    Also need to focus on the states. One of the arguments is that this argument should be decided by the individual States. People need to say, “Why should the state have any say in my private life? Why should they police my bedroom? Do you want the state investigating your family?”

    1
  23. CSK says:

    Kari Lake, the Trump-backed weirdo who’s running for governor of Arizona, says that the reason the Roe v. Wade draft was leaked was to distract (she actually said “detract,” but I assume she means “distract”) us from Dinesh D’Souza’s movie Two Thousand Mules, which absolutely, totally proves there was election fraud in 2020.

  24. JohnSF says:

    Possible bad news for Europe:
    Ukraine has said it will suspend the flow of gas through a transit point that it says delivers almost a third of the fuel piped from Russia to Europe

    Possible good news for Ukraine, and for global food supply:
    European Union is finalizing a plan to facilitate land exports of Ukraine’s stocks of food products

    Also some speculation that recent fighting centred on Snake Island, including reports of Ukrainian air/missile strikes on the island and on Russian ships in the vicinity, may relate to prospects for later clearing a sea route to Odesa and blocking Russian access to Bearabia/Transnistria/Moldova areas.

    And Russians appear to be falling back north and north east of Kharkiv after Ukrainian attacks.
    Not mentioned in the article: these advances could give Ukrainians possibility to hit supply lines running from Belgorod down to the battleground around Izyum.

    2
  25. Jen says:

    @CSK: A friend of mine is pushing that film. I noted that there’s a reason courts keep throwing out cell phone location data as “evidence,” but she’s convinced this is going to turn things around and convince everyone that there was massive fraud. Dinesh D’Souza is a loon.

  26. Kathy says:

    @CSK:

    I find it impossible to be distracted from something I didn’t even know existed.

    @Jen:

    It’s become a theological question, really. Accepted by its proponents on faith, and rejected by the rest of us for lack of any proof.

    3
  27. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Jim Brown 32: Got it. Thank you for the clarification.

    1
  28. wr says:

    @Neil Hudelson: You mean how I talk about them, right? And even then, the people they’re talking to have to respond in exactly the way I see them responding.

  29. CSK says:

    @Jen:
    The thing is, who pays attention to any movie made by D’Souza other than those already in his fan club?
    @Kathy:
    But how easily are you “detracted”?

    1
  30. gVOR08 says:

    @CSK: Grammar note. D’Souza should always be referred to as “convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza” or “Dinesh D’Souza, who has been convicted of an election crime”.

    6
  31. CSK says:

    @gVOR08:
    While he was at Dartmouth, editing The Dartmouth Review, D’Souza was known as “Distort De News-za.”

    2
  32. Scott says:

    @gVOR08: Same way I always refer to our Texas AG as adulterous, indicted felon AG Ken Paxton.

    It is just more correct and informative.

    1
  33. DAllenABQ says:

    @JohnSF: My gob is still smacked that the Russian military is performing so poorly.

    1
  34. CSK says:

    @Michael Reynolds:
    Man, you just cannot stay away from OTB, can you? 😀

    2
  35. Kathy says:

    @gVOR08:

    You’re not wrong, but that’s a lot of extra typing. To be consistent, one should also refer to “un-indicted co-conspirator Benito.”

  36. Kylopod says:

    @gVOR08:

    Grammar note. D’Souza should always be referred to as “convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza” or “Dinesh D’Souza, who has been convicted of an election crime”.

    One point to note, for those who follow the old Stupid vs. Evil debate and have ever thought it’s a false dichotomy since it’s perfectly possible to be both, D’Souza’s crime was done in service of a Republican candidate for a very safe Democratic seat (Kirsten Gillibrand’s Senate seat in NY, which went on to beat the Republican by a nearly 50-point margin).

    1
  37. JohnSF says:

    @DAllenABQ:
    It’s turtles all the way down.
    A fractal f@ckup.

    2
  38. Beth says:

    @CSK:

    I lost a good friend to the far right. Convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza was his gateway drug. D’Souza, to Dan Crenshaw to Jordan Peterson…. It makes me sad to think about.

    2
  39. MarkedMan says:

    @Jim Brown 32:

    y very definition–a group of people that attend Fundraisers are Activists or Activist Adjacent

    Definitely. And, for the most part, they either have a lot of disposable income or they are somehow connected to Planned Parenthood. Which is why I commented on the diversity of the people who worked there.

    My point wasn’t in direct disagreement to your larger claim, that economics is more important. It was that assuming that only 20 year old white women are heavily invested in the pro-abortion movement is a mistake. I can speak from experience that, while PP isn’t a huge political force in and of itself, the major benefactors of PP are. They are able to get politicians to show up at fundraisers in all kinds of states, and commit on the record to the cause. Probably none of those politicians would think that is politically wise, and would be satisfied with vague statements about a woman’s right to choose. But the heavy hitters in the PP donor community also tend to be heavy hitters in other areas, and politicians are anxious to be in their good graces.

    1
  40. Mikey says:

    Why are so many antivaxxers not only abysmally stupid, but also utterly horrible people?

    I Lost My Baby. Then Antivaxxers Made My Pain Go Viral.

    I was one of many women who had a pandemic baby. Few people saw me pregnant, and even fewer met my second-born son, or ever will. In September 2021, just shy of 3 months of age, my son died. He was one of the most bright-eyed, happiest babies I’ve met and spent every day of his short life loved and adored.

    The day it happened, I shared news of his loss in a short Twitter post. The impulse to share was a protective one. As someone active on social media, I wanted to avoid the inevitable question from friends and acquaintances: How’s your baby?

    Within a day, a stranger had gone through my old tweets and found confirmation that I had been vaccinated against Covid-19 during my pregnancy. That person created an image of my tweets side-by-side: one from July where I shared my relief at being vaccinated while pregnant and another from September with the story of my loss. A stranger had written “safe … and effective” alongside the screenshots, implying that my being vaccinated in pregnancy had caused my son’s death.

    1
  41. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Mikey: The fact that that asshole hasn’t at the very least been afflicted with long covid, to me is proof that there is no such thing as a “just” god.

    3
  42. Kurtz says:

    @Neil Hudelson:

    I seem to be flagged for moderation.

    ‘Bout damn time, ballot harvester.

    2
  43. grumpy realist says:

    @Jen: As the saying goes, the average pro-lifer only wants abortion allowed for imminent death of the woman and whatever situation said pro-lifer is in….

    The number of pro-lifers showing up to have their own abortions is not miniscule. “But it’s different if I get pregnant….”

    3
  44. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @grumpy realist: I read an article about pro-lifers showing up at the clinic for an abortion. I had to laugh they were so completely ludicrous. One brought her daughter in and while in the waiting room began passing out pro-life literature. Absolutely zero self awareness.

    1
  45. Matt Bernius says:

    @gVOR08:

    Grammar note. D’Souza should always be referred to as “convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza” or “Dinesh D’Souza, who has been convicted of an election crime”.

    Please no. Is D’Souza a crappy propagandist who seems to have almost a BDSM level fetish in being publicly humiliated by Historians and Academics?

    YES!

    But let’s not drag his criminal history into this. Or use terms “convicted felon” (especially as we have one or two of those posting here who have more than done the time and gone on to live their lives). Focus on the ongoing crappy stuff he continues to do. Having a criminal record shouldn’t be stigmatizing for the rest of one’s life (trust me, the state already does more than enough of that).

    I was going to write on this today, but I realized there just wasn’t enough to make anything out of it worth saying that I had not already written about earlier.

    2
  46. Kylopod says:

    @Matt Bernius:

    especially as we have one or two of those posting here who have more than done the time and gone on to live their lives

    I would make the educated guess that the commenter(s) to whom you refer do not claim that their prosecution was due to the US president at the time being out to get them.

    3
  47. CSK says:

    @Mikey:
    Loathsome. That’s the only word for a person who’d do something like this.

    3
  48. Matt Bernius says:

    @Kylopod:

    I would make the educated guess that the commenter(s) to whom you refer do not claim that their prosecution was due to the US president at the time being out to get them.

    True. That said, I try to base my approach on things like using things like “felon” as an insult or stigmatizing term on the norm (the majority of people who are just trying to move on with their lives) versus the exceptions (awful folks like D’souza where the criminal history, while an indication of their overall hypocrisy, is still not in the top 5 worst things they’ve done in their lives).

    That said, I’m probably overly focused on these sorts of things.

  49. CSK says:

    @Matt Bernius:
    Prefacing “Dinesh D’Souza” with “convicted felon” is actually a good example of using a Homeric epithet.

    Speaking of which, see http://www.sparknotes.com/blog/quiz-whats-your-homeric-epithet/

    I’m “bright-eyed.”

  50. sam says:

    For a bit, I had a helluva time with “Apollo far-darter”, I kept writing, “Apollo dart-farter”.

  51. CSK says:

    @sam:
    Well. he’d be a lethal opponent if that were true.

  52. Beth says:

    @Matt Bernius:

    Would “Festering Butthole” Dinesh D’Souza be acceptable?

    You are right though about the felon issue. I have a similar issue with disparaging people’s names, but I have a hell of a time standing up for people like him in any way. It’s a failing of mine, that I’m not working all that hard to fix.

  53. Mu Yixiao says:

    @CSK:

    I’m “the great teller of tales”. Which… it’s actually true–especially after a couple of drinks and a fresh audience. 🙂

  54. MarkedMan says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    One brought her daughter in and while in the waiting room began passing out pro-life literature. Absolutely zero self awareness.

    At the annual PP area wide fundraiser, the staffs would inevitably end up congregating together and swapping the most recent stories about stuff like this. At first I was dumbfounded. Not because some among the anti-abortion crowd were hypocrites – that’s just the inevitable law of big groups. But I couldn’t understand why they would go to the very same clinics they protested. The staff quickly pointed out that this was the safest place because the anti-abortionists knew when the protesters would be there and when they wouldn’t. They also knew that the workers never would discuss any center business with anyone, because one of anti-abortionist tactics was to use new, and therefore unknown, recruits to strike up conversations with the workers (yes, they follow them home and get to know their routines. Not psychopathic, much) and then try to pry secrets out of them.

  55. CSK says:

    @Mu Yixiao:
    Everyone on OTB should take this quiz.

  56. CSK says:

    @Beth:
    I sympathize. I’ve lost a few long-time acquaintances because they became avid Trumpkins.

  57. MarkedMan says:

    @Kylopod: …and he also makes it clear that his choices were bad and he has become a better person. Again, unlike D’Souza, who is literally just trying different variations of the same scam to this day.

    2
  58. senyordave says:

    Least surprising headline of the decade?
    Elon Musk says Americans ‘are trying to avoid going to work at all,’ unlike Chinese workers who ‘will be burning the 3am oil’
    Maybe Mr. Musk should talk to one of those Chinese workers who puts in 12 hour days, six or seven days a week, lives in employee where they enjoy an 8×10 room and barely makes enough to live on. I guess they would be his ideal employees, people desperate for a job.
    Glad to see that Tesla is down 8% today, nothing like having a CEO who insults his customer base.

    1
  59. senyordave says:

    Further Musk news:
    A U.S. judge has determined that Elon Musk’s 2018 tweets that funding had been secured to take electric car maker Tesla private was inaccurate and reckless, saying “there was nothing concrete” about financing from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund at that time.

    San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Edward Chen’s pre-trial decision represented a major victory for investors in a lawsuit accusing the world’s richest person of inflating stock prices by making false and misleading statements, causing billions of dollars in damages.

    It was pretty obvious he was shooting from the hip without any real deal. Caused a big pop in Tesla.

  60. CSK says:

    @Mu Yixiao:
    My cousin got the same one!

  61. Kathy says:

    @senyordave:

    Elon would be far more popular if he were seldom seen and not heard.

  62. Mu Yixiao says:

    @senyordave:

    As someone who’s actually been in dozens of Chinese factories and spent months at a time with hundreds of Chinese workers, you might want to check your assumptions of what it’s like.

    1
  63. senyordave says:

    @Mu Yixiao: I was a financial analyst at Arbitron for about 10 years, I worked closely with supply chain. The electronic units that Arbitron used for radio panels came from China, about 125k per year. Two Arbitron employees were fulltime at the plant. Both told me that the could not imagine any plant in a western country could get away with the stuff they did such as on the spot firing for talking on the job, “troublemakers” being manhandled as they were escorted from the plant. Musk’s show his sensibilities, no wonder there are multiple lawsuits against Tesla for sexual and its Fremont plant.

    1
  64. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @MarkedMan: I couldn’t understand why they would go to the very same clinics they protested.

    Yeah, they said the exact same thing in the article. I didn’t comment on that aspect because it was just too… perfect? At any rate I was doubting my memory so thanx for telling me that on that fact at least, my memory wasn’t failing me.

    1
  65. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @senyordave: Elon Musk says Americans ‘are trying to avoid going to work at all,’

    Pure projection on his part. I doubt he has even a clue as to what it means to do actual work. He just plays all the time and it makes him money.

    1
  66. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Mu Yixiao: @CSK: I got stuck at #5: If you could have any one of these superpowers, which would you pick?

    Super speed? WTF for? I’m not in a hurry.
    Immortality? F no. Only a fool would want to live forever.
    Time Travel? Pretty sure whatever time I traveled to would be just as f’d up as the one I’m in.
    Invisibility? Nobody pays any attention to me now.
    Telepathy? The absolute last place I would ever want to be is inside somebody else’s head. Mine is scary enough.

    It won’t let me choose None of the above, so I am not Homeric in any way shape or form. Which come to think of it, suits me just fine.

    1
  67. MarkedMan says:

    @OzarkHillbilly: It actually makes a lot of sense when you think about. Protesters aren’t going to know the protest schedules at other clinics and when protesters are present they take pictures of the clients. Not to mention there are protestors who kind of make a life of it, participating in protests at several different clinics on a regular basis (the workers used to swap stories about the more “colorful” of these). Bottom line, if a protester showed up at another clinic she had better odds of being recognized by her fellow anti-abortionists than if she showed up at her usual haunt on a non-protest day.

  68. MarkedMan says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I got stuck at #5: If you could have any one of these superpowers, which would you pick?

    Ha! I essentially agreed with you and therefore picked the one I thought least likely to wreck my life (super speed).

  69. CSK says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    I chose super speed because it was the nearest thing to teleporting, which is a superpower I’d really like to have. Dinner in Paris? Sure. Just snap my fingers and I’m there.

  70. Kathy says:

    @CSK:

    Immortality.

    You may not have dinner in Paris right now, but you can have literally millions of dinners in Paris, and everywhere else, too.

    1
  71. Michael Cain says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Immortality? F no. Only a fool would want to live forever.

    It’s the one I picked. My theory is that given finite memory storage, after a couple hundred years I’d have overwritten the old stuff and be a completely different person. One of Heinlein’s books touches on the finite storage problem a few times. I always remember the protagonist’s complaint, “You spend an hour turning the house upside down to find that book you want to finish, and then you remember that was 20 years ago.”

  72. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @CSK: I got bright-eyed, too. I must have more in common with humanity than I give myself credit for (or bright-eyed is some sort of default catchall epithet).

    1
  73. dazedandconfused says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    Whoa! With time travel one could un-say every stupid thing one has said, which I could certainly make good use of. Could go back to the late 70’s and probably buy 10% of Microsquish from a naive college drop-out named Bill Gates for $1000 and/or a 68 Mustang in decent shape…

  74. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @CSK: I chose invisibility. An early 60s comic book character called Nemesis had that as one of the things he used as an avenging spirit/force.

    1
  75. CSK says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker:
    At least we’re not bushy-tailed as well.
    @Kathy:
    Yeah, but after a while I’d run out of money to get to Paris, much less pay for the meal.
    @Just nutha ignint cracker:
    I was briefly tempted by invisibility.

  76. Mister Bluster says:

    Dumb quiz.
    Cat was not an animal choice and none of those items are elements.

    2
  77. Kathy says:

    @CSK:

    That should not be possible. If you know you’ll live forever, you can plan ahead and accumulate a lot of wealth during your first century. Then you have eternity to spend it.

    The problem is procreation. There would need to be strict controls, or else you’ll wind up with an overpopulated world of immortals. Once you run out of resources, you can’t even have a war for what’s left. It would be a peculiar war without any deaths.

    The other problem is boredom. Even if new stuff gets made every day, you’ll get tired of new meals, new books, new movies, new art, new careers, etc. I imagine one thing that might keep an immortal going forever is curiosity: they’d want to know what happens next.

    Still, imagine fifty thousand years. That’s far longer than human civilization has existed, and a mere heartbeat in the lifetime of the Universe.

    1
  78. MarkedMan says:

    @Michael Cain: For all his faults, Heinlein was a master at making the readers feel they understood his characters at a visceral level, despite the extraordinary times and circumstances they were caught up in.

  79. kiddywell says:

    @OzarkHillbilly: Never happen!

  80. Jax says:

    Soooo….I mentioned my youngest has been dealing with some mental health issues. We decided, as a team, to rent a whole-ass level at a greenhouse up in the mountains, and plant everything our little hearts desired.

    For those who don’t know our growing season, we’re at 7,000 ft, and it regularly frosts all summer long….sometimes even a whole foot of snow in July. We can’t grow anything of value outside.

    The last week has been one of the best weeks I’ve had with my kid all winter long. We’re working our asses off up there, laughing and cussing, and the Merlin-Wizard lookin dude who owns the greenhouse is totally there for some company.

    Wish us luck! We got three 25 foot rows of peas, peppers and tomatoes planted so far. Only 10 more rows to go! 😛

    1
  81. Mimai says:

    @Jax:
    As a human and professional, I very much approve! And I’m not the only one.

    1
  82. Jax says:

    To give some perspective on the size of the greenhouse….I’m renting one level of twelve, in THAT greenhouse. There’s another four levels in another greenhouse. It’s all heated by used engine oil, he burns the oil in the 65 ft long fire tube (my best description of The Beast) that heats the water and runs the fans. The oil companies pay him to take that used oil off their hands.

  83. Jax says:

    @Mimai: She’s been the happiest I’ve seen her in a while. Even if we don’t make any money on the produce, seeing her smile and laugh like that is worth way more than paying for zoom sessions.

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  84. Jax says:

    @Mimai: The best part is that the Wizard dude is one of my own mentors. I’ve worked up there off and on in the winter since I was in my 20’s. The last time, I was pregnant with Lyrik and my job was to graft the tomatoes. I was too big to get up and down in the rows to plant them. 😛

    Of course she feels comfortable up there. It’s really nice to see her smiling, though, and making jokes.