In no particular order:

• After a 16 hour day, the poll was closed; results reported; materials returned to the county; I was home. My party got wrecked locally, but that's how it does with a homo bureaucratus infestation as far as the eye can see. Still, an excellent experience serving the community.
• It's not terribly clear why we bother polling, given the fact that the media seems more interested in shaping opinion than reporting it. I may have answered myself there.
• I've always been ambivalent about Trump, never being totally sure which is true: (a) he's 76 going on 7, or (b) his mercurial act is about keeping opponents guessing. Tending toward (a) at the moment. Conservative blogs are calling for his ouster. Unfortunately, the weaponization of law enforcement by Democrats against conservatives means that Trump has to run to argue for Hillary's "Candidate Pass": "Any efforts to investigate are politically driven, so neener, neener, neener."
• In any case, one is willing to [arnold voice] Let him go [/arnold voice] as part of a "Cancel all Boomers" rule. GenX is tired of the old farts.
• Finally, mail-in ballots are the end off the republic. You either care about election integrity and voter privacy while marking a ballot, or you turn Election Day into the god-forsaken, mokey-fighting travesty we see playing out in a couple of states.

There Really Is No Middle Class Any Longer

Anecdotally, we maintain the same lifestyle we have for 20 years, with the money we used to waste on travel and dining out going to kids' tuition. I guess technically I'm supposed to be doing well, but you wouldn't know it, as my two vehicles have an average age of 14yrs and 200k miles each. Wife also plays https://www.youneedabudget.com/ like a video game and has us buffered for ~half a year.

It wasn't always this way with us. We didn't worry much in prosperous times. So, the discipline has only come with children. We started with https://www.ramseysolutions.com/ramseyplus/financial-peace, which is precisely where I'd point anyone in a tough spot. It is a simple, proven financial triage for anyone in need of a do-over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k1umoIGJ9A

I'm not against stroke victims, my father had a stroke 2 years ago and the fight back to competency is real.

Not everybody can succeed at coming back from a stroke to competency. This man, clearly is not competent.

It would be intellectually dishonest to say otherwise (formatting added):

My response is that the insistence on requiring rigorous, physical-style proof for meta-physical questions, itself , seems akin to a special pleading. External philosophy and ethics of the mind have yet to deliver any sort of final answer for the internal faith and the soul.

The 3D body/mind/soul model that I peddle isn't true in any "intellectually objective" sense, either. I accept its futility straight up. I do submit that it has some explanatory capability. There is no "divine revelation" on offer. However, if we can differentiate between those arguments that are provable in some rigorous way, vs. the internal, subject, faith-based arguments that lack such closed-form solutions, then we can be more efficient in discussion.

My co-religionists are continuous offenders of this idea. When we take our internal affirmations and try to externalize them with "YU'V GOT TA BUH-LEEV" statements, Newton's Third Law of the Human Soul kicks in, and we achieve the opposite result. (I have summarized ~half of the Roman Epistle here.) We cannot collapse the model from three to two dimensions without crushing humanity.

Conversely, politics has attempted to collapse from the mind to the soul, essentially going the other direction with the Woke Faith. Scientists are not priests, St. Fauci was full of hooey, and the State is no source of any kind of salvation. People are not livestock, whatever the WEF thinks it can achieve via propaganda.

In summary: two cheers for Sagan, and a commitment to play it clear and straight.

John Fetterman's Debate Was Much Worse Than Expected, and Three Moments Perfectly Illustrate That

We don't have to respect or admire anyone in public office. Indeed, H8ing The Man is nearly an American requirement. But a political party that foists unfit candidates like Fetterman or Zombie Joe on voters merits being put down like a metaphorical rabid dog.

Finally convinced the advisor that I need an ESRI server license to take the approach he recommended. Figured out how to do a distance raster in https://gdal.org/. Bite me, Jack Dangermond!

Politically, props to damn_registrars for recommending DailyKos for my RSS. Unlike the BablylonBee, DK is unconsciously funny. News to the loons about J6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjqR_rcucRE

Anyway, do participate in the election next month. You're a paying customer. Choose wisely to minimize cost.

I rarely share anything from twitter. But this rant of a father before a school board, on the subject of the fake 1619 curriculum and "Culturally Relevant Teaching" harming children, is EXACTLY what certain people need to watch.

https://twitter.com/JohnMStubbins/status/1579999010869612545?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1579999010869612545%7Ctwgr%5Eee18dd8a4fdb0740057fae07034497b4e988f4b6%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fnotthebee.com%2Farticle%2Flet-racism-die-the-death-it-deserves-black-dad-descended-from-slaves-says-woke-institutions-are-keeping-racism-on-life-support-destroys-crt-in-2-minutes-

This interview with John McWhorter is interesting when it comes to the ridiculous victimhood of liberals.

Or at least Entertaining to me this Not-the-bee article on Dilbert being canceled, includes all sorts of interesting real world information - like how Tesla got kicked out of ESG ratings entirely because despite the good they're supposedly doing for the environment, Elon Musk being a jerk counts for way more on the SG part of the rating than all the EV work in the world.

Book at Amazon
Book review at American Greatness

This sounds like a great explainer for recent decades in this country:

Read the whole review, which recommends reading the book's chapters out of order.

This is an interesting theory, which may have a great deal of explanatory power.

d_r will, of course, ritually denounce any deviation from CRT, DEI, or ESG as a "conspiracy" in short order.

fusty will, of course, ritually oscillate between both-sides-ism and same-as-it-ever-was-ery.

In contrast, National Conservatism: A Statement Of Principles offers a coherent worldview and is signed by a who's who of thinkers I esteem. I will need to pore over this in detail.

It is unclear what these famous threats were, since none were offered, or, AFAICT, implied:

I mean, it's the same boring, repetitive pap that we get from Trump. Mar-a-Logorrhea, if you will. Supposedly, it makes Trump "relatable".

What is absolutely not in evidence, nor has ever been, not even a little, is Trump doing much beyond assigning schoolyard adjectives to his foes.

Has there ever been an example directly tying Trump personally to any violence? Anywhere? We joke about Her Majesty and #Arkanicide, but that's all purely circumstantial.

I still have yet to amass my large amount of admittedly "partisan" evidence against abortion. The only real reason it is partisan is because Democrats have gone off the deep end as far as denying the right to life, a basic right from the Declaration of Independence, to anybody they decide is "unwanted"- to the disabled, to minorities, to the poor.

But an interesting side question was asked, and deserves an answer: What would those of us who believe abortion is murder and genocide replace it with?

The answer is and should be obvious, but apparently it is not: We'd replace it with intergenerational households and an absolute right to private property for everybody.

All rent should be converted to rent-to-own schemes designed to give the previous owner income until they die, after which the renter becomes the owner. All families should, in this way, eventually *OWN* their households. Multiple generations of families can live in a single household, working together to build generational wealth. Divorce should be eliminated, as should the anti-human contraception schemes that keep "the poor" under oppression right now.

In other words, when you eliminate the sexual revolution, what you have left is natural, cisgendered, heteronormative humanity.

THAT is what we'd replace it with, and anybody who would object, may be a progressive, but is an anti-humanist no different than any of the other genocidal regimes of the 20th century.

San Diego teacher defines 'fascist' to class as 'whites,' 'heterosexuals,' and 'Christians'
[David Lee Roth voice]
"I don't feel fascist"
[/David Lee Roth voice]

CRT is "so widespread that it's harder to find places where it's not being taught" than places "where it is being taught"

Quick, d_r, rescue us with some arid, nuanced, theoretical denial of the reality besetting us!

https://dailycaller.com/2022/08/19/cross-msnbc-civil-war/

Let these nitwits be thankful that patriots continue to await the election with patience.

One is not interested in contemplating the alternative.

Let's just have a clean election this time.