Elon is being praised by Putin for cutting Ukrainian communications during a military operation.
SpaceX may lose their government contracts because Elon has made his companies unreliable, proven when he cut Ukraine communications and killed Ukrainians by doing so.
Twitter/X is going down hard.
Teslas in flooded areas are bursting into flames at reported rates much higher than other EVs.
Another MAGA hero turns out to be a narcissistic failure.

Bonus - According to Romney, who is not a liar, Trump would have been convicted of his second impeachment but MAGA senators convinced Republican senators that voting to convict would put their and their family’s lives at risk from his terroristic cultists (like you) and they changed their votes out of fear.

Sydney Powell tried to get her charges dismissed by admitting to all the crimes she’s accused of but claiming that her coconspirators authorized her to go in after hours and tamper with voting machines and copy voting records using third party companies (owned by her co-conspirators).
Not a good defense to admit to the charges, but say “my friend the bank teller gave me permission to rob the bank, even gave me a key to come in after hours. Sure, I robed it, took every dollar, but I had authorization to do it, can’t charge me!”. It’s not going to work out for her…or the rest.
Remember, thanks to RICO, if one is found guilty, they all are. Powell just admitted guilt in her filing…with a nonsense excuse attached. 😂

Dude....when you just got harassed like that for a minor infraction, don't drive away while filming yourself, which is a serious dangerous crime akin to driving drunk.

I was stopped as a mohawked teenager in Palo Alto for being "suspicious" by taking two minutes to drop my girlfriend off at her house, and ten minutes later across town I was surrounded by 11-12 cop cars, lights on, and 18+- police who detained me for 45 minutes but had nothing to charge me with. Compared to that, this seemed benign (don't get me wrong, I see this as a blatant racist action, the message being "you don't belong here, boy", but I expected much worse).

Yeah no thanks. Looks dumb. I watched the original Swamp Thing when I was a kid, and, like, wasn't he, like, a good guy who helped solve crimes or whatever but was misunderstood by most everyone but the few he let know he exists? Here, he's basically out to kill everyone? It looks campy, but it's trying to be serious? I'm totally confused. AND to top it off, they want to charge me to join yet another fucking streaming service just to watch this questionable-as-all-fuck nonsense? Fuck this shit. That's a meganope from me.

What sort of evidence?

- Accusation/testimonial evidence?

- Or Physical evidence that is an invariant indicator of rape, that you can hold, see, measure, etc?



Anyone can accuse. That's effortless. Takes barely more energy than breathing.

(It's also effortless for a group of sour girls to gang up on a dude that upset them. Because "f that guy'. (That attitude isn't even rare.))



Physical evidence? People are convicted day in and day out of all sorts of things without physical evidence.

(Court is after all a popularity contest.)




My scary moment was when a cop detained me and told me he was going to charge me with : reckless driving, driving without a seat belt, and with threatening his life.

Why? Because I pulled up to a road block and asked him if I could drive past his road block to go home (which was a short way past the road block)... and he was having some emotional stability/triggering issues at the time, and he instantly turned red and went full on tirade mode.

Fortunately for me, after detaining me a few hours, some switch flipped in his head again and he just went to his car, got in, and drove off. Surreal.

So I asked myself :
If I had been charged, what would be the difference in court, vis-a-vis evidence, between it being a lie, and it being the truth?
Answer : No difference.

All he threatened me with was provable only by his word, and no evidence was required. I likely would have gone to jail, and had my life turned upside down... all on some person's grimace.

My view on evidence changed that day.
I will _NEVER_ convict anyone of anything, without physical tangible evidence that I can hold in my hand and see with my eyes, or at least run forensic tests on.
Testimony doesn't mean _shit_. It's absolutely, patently _worthless_.

(I also now run a dash cam everywhere I drive to protect myself from false accusations)




Basically, unless you have physical proof, I don't care.
Whatever you have to say, prove it.
No proof, no cares.

That goes for all accusations of anything ever. Across the board. Absolute.

It's the standard I want people to have for me, and it's the standard I have for others.

-scheherazade





(Aside, unrelated : I know a dude that was raped by a girl (he was nearly paralyzed drunk at his own house party). Wasn't even a secret. People at the party knew it happened. Nobody cared. When he complained, all anyone said was "Oh whatever. Shut up get over it". It wasn't even a question of 'did it happen?', it was a matter of "so what?".)

@newtboy -- I used a credit card (Discover) almost exactly as you described while I was going to college. Get a balance to pay for normal stuff, but pay it ALL off at the end of every month.

But I don't think the credit card companies hate people like us for 2 reasons:

1) For every one of us, there's a buttload who pay the minimum rather than the entire balance.

2) In my case, I think that in 4 years of college I forgot to pay off my balance (simply forgot to send in the check) once or possibly twice. I remembered a bit late and called Discover to see what to do, and they would tell me to pay the balance (or the minimum payment, not that I actually did that) plus a late fee.

I can't remember how much the late fee was. Maybe about $20? Anyway, at the kind of monthly balance I was running (not high), I'd wager that $20 was equivalent to maintaining an actual balance and paying the interest for a month or two or three. Which makes Maher's argument that they are "profiting from people's mistakes" reasonably accurate.


...On the other hand, Discover had "cashback bonus" awards of .5 to 1% or so, from which I stocked up and claimed somewhere in the $50-100 range over the 4 years, definitely enough to keep me in the net positive range in spite of a $20 late fee or two. That tells me that the magnitude of my "mistakes" must have been tiny in comparison to average credit card users.

I don't think Discover is an evil company per se for "preying" on people that don't use the card in the same way that you or I would. Paying a $20 late fee was a fully reasonable thing to charge me with. On the other hand, there's many many examples of predatory type fees that really do take advantage of people for "offenses" that are way less egregious, even things that have previously been considered standard use of the product / service in the past (paying WAY more for an extra inch of legroom, checked bags, food, etc. on airplanes comes to mind). Many of those arguably do cross the line into "evil" territory, I think.

LOL, East Palo Alto. I volunteered at the Boys and Girls Club there for a year when I lived in Mountain View. Two cops got shot and East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate ever that year. It's utterly insane how on one side of the 101 you have these multi-million dollar mansions and Stanford University and on the other side you have gangland.

Meanwhile, back on topic, when I moved to Mountain View in 2002 my rent was $800 a month for a studio apartment. The rent went up by $100 a year every year until I finally called it quits in 2007 when they wanted to charge me $1300 a month. I gave up ever actually being able to own a home in the Bay Area (let alone rent) and left in 2009.

In Japan now, and things aren't quite as bad as the Bay Area, but we've been house hunting recently and we're shocked at the disparity between what we want versus what we can actually afford, even with both us being full-time professionals. I know that 2nd place he goes to is supposed to be a joke but it's not that far off from the truth, at least as far as our experiences go. While the places we've been shown by the real estate agent are certainly habitable, they aren't particularly nice. So we're going to have to decide whether we want to live someplace not so great with the advantage being the mortgage will be paid off by the time we retire or just rent in a place we're comfortable with and wind up having to really budget hard after retirement since rent will consume a sizable portion of our pensions/social security.

Without the bear spray she might easily have been willing to take the time to finish the job, it's the best investment in the world if you like to walk in the woods (bears are common in rural Canada, sometimes even in small cities if people are feeding them). I've only run into black bears and never had an issue, a grizzly with cubs charging me would be a life flashing before your eyes moment I think.

Read this if you want an idea of the right actions to take in different situations, might come in handy some day!

http://www.bearsmart.com/play/bear-encounters/

I have only one complaint. Calling "Get away from her you bitch!" the most famous line underplays the fact that this film is chock full of the most quotable lines in film history.

Compared to just about anything Apone says, also Hudson and many from Hicks, that line is pedestrian.

-"I like to keep this handy, for close encounters."
-"How do I get out of this chicken-shit outfit?"
-"Game over man... game over!"
-"Well why don't you put her in charge?!"
-"Me and my team of ultimate bad asses are here to protect you!... We got nukes, we got knives, sharp sticks," etc.
-"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure."
-"A day in the Marine Corps is like a day on the farm. Every meal's a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune! Every formation a parade - I LOVE THE CORPS!"
-"What do you want me to do, fetch your slippers for you?" etc. and "Look into my eye......"

I'll stop before I end up pasting the entire script.

Edit: One final complaint - i consider Aliens to be tarnished by associations with modern wonder woman, which IMO was indicative of the abject failure of rich Hollywood males to produce a worthy female superhero.

My forefathers fought and many of them gave their lives to secure my (and your, and his) right to not answer questions or to be forced to make statements designed to incriminate myself.
It's incredibly MORE disrespectful and discourteous to ignore their total sacrifice by waiving those hard won rights than it is to not answer questions...especially when you DO calmly and clearly explain why you don't talk to officers.

The officers, on the other hand, are legally REQUIRED to answer your questions about 'are you detaining me', 'do you have reason to believe I'm committing a crime', and 'what crime are you charging me with'. They may not remain silent.

Yes, many 'situations' might be avoided if you capitulate and waive all your rights, but that behavior is 100% un-American, unpatriotic, disrespectful, and degrades the freedom of every citizen every time it's done. Sometimes having a legal right to 'act like a douche' DOES mean you should 'act like a douche' (if, as you seem to think, not participating in the investigation of your possible criminal acts is 'acting like a douche', that is).

Radio Shack, you tried to charge me 40 dollars for a 6 inch USB cable. Fuck you.

Here's one for the sift: Because I sent an email from an address I had used as an alias on this site to my ex-wife's mother trying to track down my ex and children who, in violation of divorce decree, left the state without notifying me....
My ex-mother-in-law (crazy, paranoid academic) lied and said she felt threatened by my inquiry, made some shit up in a police report in King County, Washington and slapped me with a restraining order. For a fucking email, in which I neither threatened them or anyone they knew.

I am arrested for something completely unrelated 5 years later, charged with threatening the lives of policemen (fucking rant about how small their dicks were and their mommy-issues form the back of the cop car) the State of Texas is charging me with felony obstruction, and some intern in the DA's office preparing for the state's case, goes online, finds my alias and LOW AND BEHOLD-The state has in their hands my dossier from Videosift from every time the user had typed ANYTHING derogatory concerning police in general.

Big brother is up your ass and you people without balls and more common sense than myself....ain't got a fucking clue.

Thanks again Lucky, for eliminating those comments on said behalf, even though they have the hard-copy, which, I am told by my atty., would be of no effect either way to peruse
.-Freedom of speech is utter fucking bullshit in the United States of Now-Thanks to all the ineffectual pseudo-intellectual ass-sniffers who thinks republicans or democrats are any sort of concern or problem OR that your participation in their government machine can do anything but enslave you further. Play a losing game and you wake up in chains.

I'm kinna with the Dark Knight Joker at this juncture...Surprise me again with some motherfucking "change", eh??
*Freedom in the form of boots stamping on a human face forever, America.

What i find a shame is that they can legally charge me $20,000 for 3 hrs in the hospital because i fell off my bike (which ill be in debt for forever probably), or 750 dollars a month they want to charge me at costco for one of the antidepressants I was taking (paid about 100 a month from Canada for the generic which they cant sell in the US). Also there is the $8500 my dentist wants to replace two of my front teeth which ill need in the next year or two. Personally ill take my chances with socialized medicine as I dont have the kind of money it takes to get better when i get sick or hurt. None of us should have to choose between medical attention/medication and the ability to eat or pay the bills. Thats just the way I see it. Thanks for letting me vent.

edit
Charging a patient $15 for a Tylenol is an absolute legal healthcare fraud(imo), but thats just good American business. http://www.rd.com/slideshows/wildly-overinflated-hospital-costs/#slideshow=slide1

and my apologies for going off topic @MrFisk

Facing 30 years in prison for making information free... ludicrous.

I'm an academic and it infuriates me to no end when I'm doing research and some journal publisher wants to charge me $35 to read an electronic version of a paper--$35 that is almost pure profit for the publisher since the author of the article doesn't see a dime of it and the publisher has already collected publication costs through journal subscription fees.

All of this information should be free to the public. Any minimal costs associated with maintaining servers or customer service agents should either be provided through private donations or government assistance.

JSTOR, to its credit, made part of its database free after this incident. I can't blame them for their pricing--they are a non-profit but are forced by the publishers to pay licensing fees for the articles they host. The publishers are laughing all the way to the bank. I'm sad that Aaron Swartz became a victim of what seems to me to be a clear case of greed.

First of all, I am Canadian, not American.

1. Don't tout constitution. I don't care if some lawmaker wrote something down once or in this case, didn't write something down. I don't think government should have the right to film the people it serves.

2. It doesn't matter to me if some person films me in a public place. Or if I end up in the background of some photo snapped by someone else. That's not what I'm referring to. I don't think authority should engage in wholesale documentation of the populous whether through film, internet spying, mail scanning, phone tapping or otherwise.

3. I don't honestly expect that someone will charge me with something I did previously and unrelated. Use something to base a character judgement on? -Maybe. I don't put it past officials/government to use footage unjustly to make a case win in their favor.

4. Of course they can't store up all that footage. I know it's on a loop. And I know all about storage sizes. (don't insult me) BUT, some reels do go missing, get set aside, or get replaced. And many of them are reviewed. I've seen it done in retail stores time and again. (and I may ad that at one place I worked at, the owner would sit there for hours just spying on people and splicing out sections of girls on the film. If it can happen in the private sector, it can happen in the public sector.

5. The fact that people "Have No Right To Privacy" is bullshit. As I have stated, Just because some lawyer wrote something down, or didn't write something down doesn't give them any right over me and how I choose to live. Just the same as I don't have to respect someone higher up in a hierarchy just because they are higher up or make more money than I do. (Insert Grumpy Old Man Syndrome here). I don't trust lawyers, or at least the majority of them (especially corporate ones). I truly believe that they are the downfall of society.

That's all I'll say on the matter. Cheers!

Yeah, cut off the bottoms of my feet,
Make me walk on salt.
Take me down to the police,
Charge me with assault.
Smile on her face,
She does what she wants to me.

That's right.
She don't care what kind of wounds she's inflicting on me,
And she don't care what color bruises that she's leaving on me,
Cause she's got freedom in the 21st Century.
Alright.

Listen. Two black gadgets in her hand, it's all she thinks about.
No responsibility, no guilt or morals cloud her judgement,
Smile on her face,
She does what she damn-well please.

Right. And she don't care what kind of things people used to do,
And she don't care if what she does has an effect on you,
Cause she's got freedom in the 21st Century.

Cut off the bottoms of my feet,
Cut off the bottoms of my feet,
Make me walk on salt,
Make me walk on salt,
Take me down to the police,
Take me down to the police.