HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
HereAndGone2
10d ago
On the other hand, the likelihood that the marriage wasn't an immigration scam is pretty damned low.
Yeah. Well I married this guy, then I married this other guy but it was okay because that was a legal civil marriage and the first marriage was only a religious rite so I got religiously divorced from the first guy, then I went back and remarried the first guy but that was okay because I religiously divorced the second guy but stayed legally married to him, then I legally divorced the second guy, then I legally married and legally divorced the first guy, now I have a third guy legally married (religious status unclear). That's the kind of marital history only Henry VIII had.
HereAndGone2
11d ago
Oh yeah, and that's a plausible case but there's no reason not to issue a short statement saying that Mr. Talarico has come down with a bad case of flu which is complicated by pre-existing health conditions, but he is being monitored by his doctors and all is well.
Instead of letting rumours like "he's in the loony bin!" circulate, unless the very idea of admitting your candidate is not literal Superman is considered so bad that they prefer to keep their lips zipped and let rumours circulate. I could see the opposition leaping on any health admissions to run attack ads about "you can't send this guy to DC, he's so fragile he'll keel over in a stiff breeze" but I honestly don't see how "he's mentally unstable" whispering is any better.
Or he really was seriously ill and they want to keep a lid on that.
Friend, brother, colleague, he's a Democratic party politician, he is legally required to have a favourite local and a favourite national drag queen. How else will he sing along with Blue's Clues?
He allegedly has a girlfriend, though if we want to put on the tinfoil hats, it could be an arranged relationship for PR purposes but I don't think that's likely, more likely is a minor scandaletto about "were they dating while he was in office and she was lobbying him?" which may be why we don't see much of her:
As of May 2026, Talarico has been in a four‑year relationship with Brianna Menard, who previously served as his chief of staff in his Texas House office; she left the position after they developed feelings for each other.
It could well be she who steered him towards vegetarianism and drag queens:
She has also publicly described herself as a vegan and has referenced spending time at Austin’s Cheer Up Charlies, an Austin venue known for hosting drag performances and catering to the city’s progressive activist scene.
A Talarico campaign spokesman told the NY Post that Talarico was not vegan, “much to his girlfriend’s chagrin.”
HereAndGone2
11d ago
It's possible that he was a half-brother or something, her mother died when she was two so Dad could have remarried (even if only in a religious ceremony like she did) or had a lover and had a kid by that second woman. I'm not going to insist that Elmi is her half-sibling, he could be a cousin, he could be a member of the extended family or a scion of another family that her family owed a favour, etc.
The whole "we were religiously but not civilly legally married, we religiously divorced, I married this guy civilly legally by the American laws, we then religiously divorced and I got back with my first religious-but-not-legal husband and only years later civilly legally divorced Husband Number Two (and now I am on Husband Number Three)" is so suspicious that I have little problems believing Number Two was immigration scamming and this was how her family paid off the favour owed to his family to get him into the country legally. I also have little problem believing she does not give a wet fart about American laws and will do whatever she damn well feels like doing so long as it benefits her, including cry racism and sexism etc.
HereAndGone2
11d ago
At the time, she was very concerned with projecting a tough guy image because of questions over her age, stamina, ability to deal with complex situations if woken at 2 in the morning in the White House etc. so she and her campaign were paranoid about any suggestions of "she has a health condition that will affect her ability to function". Hence the "no! she did not faint, it was only a stumble! and she didn't even stumble!" reactions and fierce denials of her catching so much as a cold. Hot sauce! Kills all known germs!
HereAndGone2
11d ago
I haven't heard that claim but I only know them from songs on the radio. though I do remember a good few years back now, one Late Late Show about the evolution of Irish traditional music, with Tony MacMahon being one of the hold-outs about modernising it. So "taking influences from popular culture, it has to innovate and move with the times, if it's a living tradition you can't ossify it" is an old argument.
HereAndGone2
11d ago
Do we really need to be at the point of "oh show me the jurisdiction where this activity is a crime" now? Whatever happened to "only fuckwits do this"?
HereAndGone2
11d ago
Yeah, it's easy to laugh at his common/pedestrian tastes, but it's (1) convenient (2) quick and easy to get practically any time or any place (3) stick to burger, fries, Coke, you know what you're getting, you know what you like and you will eat it (4) can be eaten on the go or while in a car etc.
A constant diet of fast food? No. But "need something fast on the campaign trail where we don't have time to sit down for a proper meal"? A lot better and more reliable than "is there a restaurant or diner up the road we can get something and get out in forty minutes?"
He could have had a really bad medical event theoretically but it's hard to imagine what.
Apparently he's a Type 1 diabetic, so he could have had a really bad health issue with that (e.g. possibly ketoacidosis). EDIT: Type 1s need to keep rigid blood sugar and insulin level control and being on the campaign trail would play merry hob with that. I can't see that having him out of circulation for two weeks, though, unless it was something like he got a bad case of flu which would be more complicated with his diabetes. And again, no reason not to report on his health in that case.
How come they found this weird heretical, vegetarian, self-loathing, possibly gay guy?
"Damn it, there are still holdouts among the voters who are Bible-bashing redneck churchgoers. How do we peel them away from the Republicans? We need a Christian of our own. Where the heck do we get one?" Enter Talarico. "Wow, he's a Presbyterian seminarian! That's, like, double or even triple Christian! Woo-hoo, we're saved! (though of course not in any sectarian denominational religious sense, that would involve the concept of sin and the only sins are racism, sexism, transphobia and climate denialism, all of which we are free from)".
I don't think he's gay, by comparison he makes Pete Buttigieg look like a Folsom Street float participant in that area. I think he's just plastic. And of course they needed someone who would be soundly on board with all the liberal agenda so they couldn't get a genuinely theologically conservative/orthodox Christian guy who might, you know, say that sin was real or even worse stuff. So Talarico it was, who was white cis het male enough to be acceptable, but not offensively so.
HereAndGone2
11d ago
I don't know if Talarico is that bad at campaigning. Mostly I think his problem is (apart from the religion angle which we don't need to go into here) that he (like Harris) opened his big yap and spouted forth all the progressive talking points, back in the day before "Oh Woke 1 was so crazy, wasn't it, ha ha!" was the new paradigm.
So now he's having to backpedal like a trick unicylist in the circus and it's not going too well*. Maybe sticking him in a basement for two weeks and coaching the heck out of him is the answer, but frankly Paxton is so awful that all Talarico reasonably should need to do is show up on the campaign trail, wave and smile, and beat the guy. If he needs more coaching than that, then the problem is bad.
*Then on trans girls/women in sports: "there are things more important than fairness in sports" Now: "fairness in sports requires me to say biological males should not be on female teams". Then on gender/sex: "there are six sexes not two" Now: "I admit there are only two sexes".
I don't think she married her brother. But her domestic situation was, shall we say, flexible enough to raise some eyebrows. I think it's entirely possible she did an immigration scam marriage for a clan member/related to family guy who wanted to leave the UK for the US and couldn't get in legally/didn't want to wait and go through the long, boring process of application normally.
Just tribal things. She's a legal citizen, she hasn't a civil legal marriage, here's someone from the family/otherwise plugged in to the favour network who needs help, why not? She's already relying heavily on cultural backing and support to be voted into office, now suddenly she is going to get religion and go "oh no I cannot go along with the expectations of my culture, I must adhere to the law of the foreigners"?
The Irish in the US have done enough "oops I mistakenly over stayed my tourist visa - for thirty years" fudging of immigration law that I'm not saying "ethnicity X is all like this", but we're also clannish and favour network enough for me to recognise the pattern.
HereAndGone2
11d ago
Destruction and/or criminality. Next time someone in corporate HQ gets an email about "set up a crypto account to pay us $$$$ or else we shut your stores down", they'll know this isn't a spam email or pointless threat.
HereAndGone2
11d ago
the hackers are the least guilty party here.
No, the hackers are the most guilty. This was stupid and pointless, and the best reason I can put on it was to show that "next time we'll ask for ransom not to do this, this isn't a spoof, we just proved we could fuck your stores up", which is criminal behaviour.
Otherwise it's just destruction for the sake of it, spoiling food for nothing more than showing off how clever they are. Yeah, the stores should have better IT security, but who would have thought anyone would be destructive for the sake of mindless vandalism to do something like this?
HereAndGone2
14d ago
Kingfishr aren't that bad, I think it's mostly that the singer does definitely have a recognisably Irish accent rather than the usual assumed mid-Atlantic one. The Sawdoctors are their ancestors, and I don't mind (too much) that kind of exploiting a regional identity (anything outside of Dublin is a novel change). It's a bit like the American country music scene, is Beyoncé country? No, but she managed a decent attempt at it.
The really annoying ones are the plastic paddy generated for a foreign audience types, as you describe; the aural equivalent of the "Irish pub" chains.
HereAndGone2
15d ago
Here's serendipity in action: just read this about Talarico going missing for 12 days, hopped off to a different website, and they've got a tweet from someone claiming "My sources are telling me Talarico is in a mental health facility. His campaign has stopped actively planning events in the vital homestretch of the campaign."
Wow. I think the truth is more like he's just taking a break before the final stretch, or maybe he's come down with the flu (lot of bugs going around right now) but this kind of rumour mongering is crazy.
Though if it is true in some form, well gosh this would be how Paxton manages to win after all - his opponent turns his toes up (metaphorically speaking)!
HereAndGone2
18d ago
The disinvitation read to me like "Look, the last time you came to a party, you got so wasted you ended up doing ket and fucking seven guys, maybe this is not the best way for you to have fun". Then she got offended and ran off with "I was raped" to get her own back on them.
It did get out of control, but part of that was a consequence of "willingly got drunk and high and agreed to things that escalated".
HereAndGone2
19d ago
You laugh, but this was a technique used by at least one organisation calling itself a Christian church: flirty fishing. The 70s, my friend, were weird and wonderful.
Yeah, they were a cult.
HereAndGone2
19d ago
I get the orthodox Jews of the day being extremely pissed-off about the association with yet another rabble-rousing itinerant preacher stirring up trouble among the masses after the Romans just finished stomping on the previous rabble-rouser, so they very much wanted to make it crystal clear to the Emperor that "these guys are nothing to do with us".
It's the liberal Christians I do not understand. Why not just say "We're too smart and modern to believe in the Virgin Birth, Mary was just some dumb broad" instead of torturing meaning into nonsense by "Now the reason people talked about the Virgin Mary was, and we all know virgins don't get pregnant without sex, is that she was a girl who was raped. That's how she got pregnant by a guy not her betrothed, without being a slut. And the villagers used to refer to her as "Mary the virgin who was raped", and eventually that just turned into "Mary the virgin" and then "the Virgin Mary". You see the simple explanation that doesn't require us to turn off our brains and believe in pregnancy without sex? Evidence for this? It, uh, came to me in a dream?"
I swear, this is a real liberal denomination example I read online years back. One of those "we cosplay by dressing up in the vestments and using the historical language, but we don't really believe all that stuff, except about niceness. We believe in niceness" mainline churches. I may mock Pastorette Babs in Talarico's Presbyterian church, but she is at least upfront and honest about what she does not believe.
HereAndGone2
19d ago
I'm not sure we can fairly attribute the SBF shenanigans to Yud.
Will MacAskill. That was the name thrown all over the place in the (immortal) Sequoia Capital article, with Peter Singer in second place, and not even a sniff of a mention of Big Yud:
Not long before interning at Jane Street, SBF had a meeting with Will MacAskill, a young Oxford-educated philosopher who was then just completing his PhD. Over lunch at the Au Bon Pain outside Harvard Square, MacAskill laid out the principles of effective altruism (EA). The math, MacAskill argued, means that if one’s goal is to optimize one’s life for doing good, often most good can be done by choosing to make the most money possible—in order to give it all away. “Earn to give,” urged MacAskill.
EA traces its roots to philosopher Peter Singer, who reasons from the utilitarian point of view that the purpose of life is to maximize the well-being of others. Singer, in his eighth decade, may well be the most-read living philosopher. In the 1970s, Singer almost single-handedly created the animal rights movement, popularizing veganism as an ethical solution to the moral horror of meat. Today he’s best known for the drowning-child thought experiment. (What would you do if you came across a young child drowning in a pond?) Singer states the obvious—and then universalizes the underlying principle: “Few could stand by and watch a child drown; many can ignore the avoidable deaths of children in Africa or India. The question, however, is not what we usually do, but what we ought to do.” In a nutshell, Singer argues that it’s a moral imperative of the world’s well-off to give as much as possible—10, 20, even 50 percent of all income—to better the lives of the world’s poor.
MacAskill’s contribution is to combine Singer’s moral logic with the logic of finance and investment. One not only has an obligation to give a significant percentage of income away, MacAskill argues, but to give it away as efficiently as possible. And, since every charity claiming to save lives has a budget, they can all be ranked by cost-effectiveness. So, how much does it cost for a charity to save a single life? The data says that controlling the spread of malaria and worms has the biggest bang for the buck, with a life saved per every $2,000 invested. Effective altruism prioritizes this low-hanging fruit—these are the drowning children we’re morally obligated to save first.
I do think it's amazing that MacAskill has managed to wiggle out of any association with SBF and seems to have come unscathed out of being FTX's house philosopher 🤣
HereAndGone2
20d ago
To be fair to the EA set, it's not them in general but one guy and his organisation in particular that have rehabbed Caroline, and since this guy is also hanging on to the FTX money and refusing to hand it back (I liked all his 'I can't comment on this because our lawyers said not to but it'll be a cold day in Hell before we hand over a cent to the bankruptcy administrators despite all their suing us' replies in the general response to the reaction to him announcing her officially), I get the impression he is rather steelier in character than the general run of the EA crowd. The Sam Altman of EA, if you will 😁 ("that money MY money now, and gimme more money too!")
HereAndGone2
20d ago
Eh, that's the kind of conventional answer I'd expect from someone culturally Jewish. "He wasn't the Messiah, he was just some guy". And of course, the ever-popular (amongst liberal Christians as well) "it was Paul who invented Christianity as we have it!"
That Paul himself was Jewish gets washed away somehow, and it's all his fault that Christianity has hangups around (insert popular sin of your choice: sex in general, gay sex, women, what have you).
If you believe Jesus was God, then nope Yud is nothing like. If you believe Yeshua bar-Yosef was another itinerant wisdom teacher, well heck what a startling resemblance.
HereAndGone2
20d ago
Yeah, I think Nate and the team are trying to keep their model from leaning too far in one direction or another. And while Talarico has a nice lead right now, it's not so huge a gap that Paxton couldn't catch up if something happens between now and election day.
HereAndGone2
20d ago
Ah, that's going a bit far. He just looks plastic, like the Ken doll version of "what a clean-cut candidate should look like".
Only millions? As the English economist allegedly said about the Irish Famine, that is hardly enough to do any good.
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