HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
HereAndGone2
9hr ago
Oddly enough, I don't think it's Bass herself up to any mischief (if mischief is being done). I get the vague impression it's more the party in California at large that dislikes certain candidates both internally and externally and want to put their thumbs on the scales, e.g. maybe Bass isn't that popular or even good at her job (though I did get the impression that she wasn't particularly awful by Californian standards) but damn it, no disgusting MAGAhead is going to run against a Democrat, and thus gain some legitimacy for their horrible and repulsive views, even if we have to intervene to ensure the right result!
HereAndGone2
9hr ago
And here was me thinking a dictionary told me the definition and meaning of a word, not that "many people at this precise moment use 'bad' to mean 'good', hence we define 'bad' as meaning 'good', e.g. "School shootings are bad" means "School shootings are good, proper, right, and praiseworthy".
HereAndGone2
9hr ago
"Well I asked Claude and it told me the camera never lies!"
Remember, there are intelligent people out there proposing we allow AI to choose our candidates for us because they can make far better and more informed decisions than the lumpen mass of the common people.
HereAndGone2
9hr ago
Okay, batch release does explain some of it, but none of the batches were for Platner Pratt (sorry, I got confused about the other candidate starting with P who is roiling the waters in California)? At all?
There's not enough to say this is definitely fraud, but it's murky enough that claims of "I wuz robbed" later will be credible to the supporters.
HereAndGone2
9hr ago
It would be going too far to say that this is deliberate in order to ensure the 'right' candidate gets selected then voted in to office, but by the sounds of it, it is less than ideal. I don't know how they can address this, and I imagine any efforts at oversight, so that missing boxes of ballots that are 99% for candidate A and contain just enough votes to bring A over the line rather than B aren't found under the table with half an hour to go on the last day of counting, would be met with screams of outrage and claims that this is more Republican efforts at voter disenfranchisement.
Yeah, if this was an account of a Third World country, your immediate suspicion would be voter fraud. Is California a banana republic?
HereAndGone2
1d ago
He explained that Marines in his unit selected the image because they saw parallels between themselves as a combat unit and the historical military reputation associated with the symbol.
That has a vague shred of plausibility because the Totenkopf did not originate with the SS, at least according to Wikipedia, they adopted it as lineage from Prussian and imperial military:
Use of the Totenkopf in Germany as a military emblem began under Frederick the Great, who formed a regiment of Hussar cavalry in the Prussian army commanded by Colonel von Ruesch, the Husaren-Regiment Nr. 5 (von Ruesch). It adopted a black uniform with a Totenkopf emblazoned on the front of its mirlitons and wore it on the field in the War of Austrian Succession and in the Seven Years' War.
..The skull continued to be used by the Prussian and Brunswick armed forces until 1918, and some of the stormtroopers that led the last German offensives on the Western Front in 1918 used skull badges.
It's still a dumb choice, but it's not "and I picked this solely because it's a Nazi symbol and I'm a Nazi".
HereAndGone2
1d ago
I can't be bothered to read the article because I don't really care, but that could be a very stupid (and it does seem Platner is stupid in some way) attempt to impress the girlfriend about how manly and dominant he was; nobody better mess with him, he is so tough he'd rape (in the above quoted sports/online gaming sense) them, totally destroy them if they dared break into his private space and try and take his stuff, I can defend my territory so you don't have to worry about any bad guys because I'm tougher and badder than them, you're safe with me babe?
HereAndGone2
1d ago
And providing you are the right guy really wants you to have uncontrollable sexual desire for her.
For her. As a total package, personality and mind as well as body. Not "that's an amazing giant set of honkers right there, but if an even better, bigger, set of honkers came along I'd go for them (too bad the honkers, which are the only things I'm interested in, have to come attached to some stupid broad but oh well)".
HereAndGone2
2d ago
Certainly they can, for the same reason that you can proudly attend a Church that has done the same.
Ah, the old sweet song of Protestantism! Sorry I stepped on your toes by not knowing you were a Presbyterian, enjoy the Pride Month flags at a church near you!
HereAndGone2
2d ago
You're so busy with your job and family that you have time to... tell us all how busy with your job and family and that's why you can't reply to comments even though you are replying to a comment at that exact moment?
Come off it. This is Timmy going "Mom, Billy is being mean to me! I'm just sitting here watching TV!" behaviour when conveniently Timmy leaves out that Billy was already watching the TV, he grabbed the remote from Billy and changed it to a different show, and when Billy tried to grab it back then Timmy called in Mom about how he was watching the TV all along and mean old Billy was trying to change it on him.
HereAndGone2
3d ago
The haunting fear that somewhere a nonce is happy.
Yes, masturbating to online photos of underage kids is a harmless thing and doesn't lead to activities like raping babies! Why shouldn't nonces be happy (instead of, for example, inserted head-downwards into a barrel of treacle)?
HereAndGone2
3d ago
Hillary said back in the day that Trump was a Pied Piper.
He wasn't their only candidate, and the strategy still gets trotted out: build up the extreme opponent so they take or split the vote from the more moderate guy who would be harder to beat. I still enjoy this piece from Politico where it is claimed the Clinton campaign expected she'd be running against Jeb Bush, and the problem was that his policies were doing better than they expected. So they needed someone on the Republican side to weaken him, by forcing him to move more to the right and thus adopt positions that would alienate moderates, but nobody imagined that Jeb would drop out and Trump would end up as the candidate, much less win against Hillary:
Six months later, Clinton associates' wariness of Bush and his likely financial firepower was still acute: Democratic pollster Celinda Lake wrote to Clinton adviser Minyon Moore to warn her that she’d been testing Bush’s economic message for a client. “It has been remarkably strong. Getting even half of african americans and democrats and two thirds of latinos. Some thought it ended too harsh. But the perspective on the economy has really worked. Now we didn’t tell people this was from bush. But it’s a warning."
So to take Bush down, Clinton’s team drew up a plan to pump Trump up. Shortly after her kickoff, top aides organized a strategy call, whose agenda included a memo to the Democratic National Committee: “This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field,” it read.
“The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read the memo.
“Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:
• Ted Cruz
• Donald Trump
• Ben Carson
We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously."
Salon was equally shocked and disgusted about his victory:
Republican Donald Trump, a far-right demagogue who campaigned on a slew of bigoted, xenophobic policies, has won the 2016 presidential election in a shocking victory few people predicted.
...On April 23, 2015, two weeks after Hillary Clinton officially declared her presidential campaign, her staff sent out a group message with information for a “strategy call.” The email included as an attachment a “memo for the DNC discussion.”
The memo, which was addressed to the Democratic National Committee, outlined “the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field.”
The document stated, “Clearly most of what is contained in this memo is work the DNC is already doing. This exercise is intended to put those ideas to paper.”
It continued, “Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate.”
The memo articulated a three-point strategy. Point 1 called for forcing “all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election.”
From the memo itself:
Friends,
This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field. Clearly most of what is contained in this memo is work the DNC is already doing. This exercise is intended to put those ideas to paper.
Our Goals & Strategy
Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-‐in-‐the-‐same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate. We have outlined three strategies to obtain our goal:
Force all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election;
Undermine any credibility/trust Republican presidential candidates have to make inroads to our coalition or independents;
Muddy the waters on any potential attack lodged against HRC.
To be fair, the strategy worked great! They sure showed Jeb! 😁
Yes, you can fry rashers of bacon in a pan. But roasting rather than boiling bacon never really was a big thing, I don't know why. See the New England boiled dinner for similar dishes ultimately originating from the British Isles.
Traditionally the Christmas ham was boiled, which used to take hours, required a big, unwieldy saucepan, filled the kitchen with steam, and was in general a pain. When I took over cooking the Christmas dinner, I searched for an easier way and found it - a Delia Smith (of course!) recipe for baked ham, and this is how I've been cooking the ham for the past eight years or so.
But Delia also has a traditional boiled bacon recipe - read and shudder, my poor friend! 🤣 It seems you can also reserve the cooking water/bacon broth to make a soup, though I've never tried this.
HereAndGone2
3d ago
It's not broth exactly, it's too thin and hasn't other ingredients to make it into a stock or soup.
HereAndGone2
3d ago
Mix-up there, the accuser in the Kavanaugh hearing was Christine Blasey-Ford (forget the later bandwagon-jumpers). Her story was plausible, but not supported, and plainly it had been worked on over the years and garnished especially when the Democrats got interested in learning more about possible means of blocking a conservative Supreme Court Justice. "Dumb drunk high school kids and younger kid who sneaked out to party she was too young to attend, stupid shit happens" was not impossible and could be credible. But the gilding the lily that took place on the story and the history around it, and the screaming harpies movement, just made it ridiculous.
E. Jean Carroll claimed she had been sexually assaulted/raped by Donald Trump in Bloomingdales, and this only came about when her career was fading and any publicity was good enough to sell her story. That it was also extremely convenient for his political rivals was just the cherry on top.
HereAndGone2
3d ago
Come on, if they junked all that stuff because it was bad no-no wrong, they can't sneak it through the back door now that everyone likes playing dress-up in cherry-picked traditions.
Granted, with the kind of theology on show in that article, the church is just using 'Presbyterian' as a label and they might as well go the whole hog and be Unitarian Universalists because there's very little of the original confessional foundation left, but then there's no reason to call themselves anything in particular.
Basically, if we're "Sure, the Presbies can have bishops and the Baptists can have special ceremonies for babies and you can pretend to be Orthodox of six different flavours because you like the icons and we're scrapping all the deep dogmatic divisions because just say 'Jesus wants us to be nice to each other' and that's enough" that's because "now it doesn't matter, it's all make-believe, fighting over the sky fairy is dumb, the only real truth is Science! and Progress!".
I suggest that if Mr. Rigby's denomination had not tossed out Mary with the bathwater back in the day, then he would not feel the need to rewrite Scripture on the grounds that "Mr. Rigby does not use male pronouns for God, for example, because it is a kind of “violence” to imply to a girl that her brother is more like God than she is, he said in an interview after the service."
Imagine that: dumping the idea of veneration of female figures because that takes away from the worship due only to God leads, down the line, to replacing God with Fake Female Deity since you have no means of approaching "how do we integrate women in the church?"
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Well, as a Catholic, imagine my expression 🤨when a Presbyterian starts talking about the Blessed Virgin. Hey, didn't you guys have an entire hissy-fit over Mariolatry during the Reformation? That we honoured her too highly? (Never mind the hardcore Calvinists and their "nobody cares about the human incubator once the baby popped out" line, because Mary didn't have a choice; free will is over-rated and she was only there to have the baby).
And now you're going to talk about Free Will and Consent and Mary's "yes" being important? Wanna talk about the Co-Redemptrix, Jimmy boy, instead of "Mary would totes have had an abortion nowadays" (again, a line I've seen some liberals taking).
HereAndGone2
4d ago
You can boil and then roast the Christmas ham (or roast it for cooking without boiling it first). Pork is generally roasted, bacon generally boiled.
Cultural differences! Cooking in a bastable on a crook over the fire is different to cooking in an oven! You can use it for baking, but roasting? Much more tricky!
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Yeah, the stage mother has long been a stock figure. If you look at the career of Gypsy Rose Lee, for example, who wants to put their daughter on stage as a stripper? Even a high-class one? Well, a mom who had stars in her eyes about a theatre career, couldn't make it on her own, and is living vicariously through her kids, for one, as well as using them to support the family financially:
Their mother, Rose Thompson Hovick, forged various birth certificates for each of her daughters—older when needed to evade varying state child labor laws, and younger for reduced or free train fares. The girls were unsure until later in life what their years of birth were.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Same for something like E. Jean Carroll, where she could never remember even the year in which it was supposed to happen and New York changed the law so the case could go forward.
Yeah, that one still gets trotted out as "Trump is a convicted rapist!" even if technically the conviction was not for rape. The judge put both hands and his upper body onto the scale, never mind his thumb, about that one. And Carroll's vague story that had no corroboration would have been laughed off for anyone else (remember when 'believe all women' seamlessly segued into 'but not Tara Reade' because Biden?).
HereAndGone2
4d ago
That was my mistake, I have no idea how I got the notion that the church in question was Baptist. I think I got confused because Talarico's grandfather was a Baptist minister, so the church-hopping threw me off.
I was surprised by the NYT seeming to do real journalism (and not just "vote for the Democrat or else the sky will fall in"), and I do think Talarico is less on the fringe than Pastor Bob there, or rather "Dr. Jim" as Talarico is quoted calling him. But Talarico went wading out past his depth on some matters. When you try spinning the Annunciation as meaning "abortion is kewl", yeah, I'm sinking my head into my hands here.
About 20 minutes into his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Texas Rep. James Talarico started making his case that the Bible sanctions abortion.
In the Book of Luke, the Austin Democrat noted, Mary has a vision from God that she’s going to give birth to a baby who will bring down the powerful from their thrones. But, critically, before she becomes pregnant, Talarico said, an angel “asks Mary if this is something she wants to do, and she says, ‘if it is God’s will, let it be done.’”
“To me, that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create,” Talarico, an aspiring Presbyterian minister and U.S. senator, told Rogan, arguing “the idea that there is a set Christian orthodoxy on the issue of abortion is just not rooted in Scripture.”
He went on to accuse the religious right of prioritizing abortion bans and “control” of pregnant mothers, rather than reducing miscarriages and protecting children through expanded health care access.
“I think that’s what we see across this Christian nationalist movement,” Talarico said. “This is religion at its worst: trying to control people and what they do.”
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Ah, the wonders of the modern world, where would we be without them!
HereAndGone2
4d ago
I'm wondering! The kinds of people who vociferously defend tattoos as "not trashy, you're just prejudiced and old-fashioned and dumb" are the kinds now wringing their hands over Nazi tattoos, and I am wondering if it's "we don't like Platner so suddenly we're going to put the worst possible interpretation on a tattoo".
HereAndGone2
4d ago
No, I don't object to that, once I know in good time. But the bother of two separate sets of cooking vessels etc. is inconvenient, unless our vegans persuade us all to become vegans like them.
The meat water? Did you never hear of boiling vegetables (e.g. cabbage) in the same water you cooked the bacon in? Cuts down on cooking vessels (important if you don't have many or don't have much room) and imparts flavour to the vegetables.
Which, according to one comment, is a rich people problem:
Fair enough, few people are going to weep over millionaires losing their luxury homes (citation needed) but I would have thought "can we do something about the entire state burning down every year or so?" would be of interest to everyone, not just the rich?
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