A former president has every reason to lie. He is not free to share classified information, nor in a position to declassify it.

I think the idea that aliens have (other than perhaps those composed of smallish numbers of cells that perhaps hitched a ride on some meteor) having come to earth is pure fantasy.

However I would consider any former office holder or ranking military officer about the least reliable source on something like that. Even if they had been in a position to know, they'd be the most closely watched and among those the government is most able to discreetly coerce/blackmail if they step out of line.

Now maybe a death bed revelation one way or the other where they have nothing left to lose could be believed.

Obviously that is location dependent, but early October still has warm days, nights are usually above freezing, and the skies are a clear deep blue that only seems to happen in the fall.

Rainfall is pretty light if it happens at all, the cold nights have shut down the insects and birds are starting to head south. It is my favorite time of year.

"Recruit your friends, grab your 15 year old camcorder, edit in Sony/Magix Vegas, do the CGI stuff in whatever you can find"!

A home user these days has a LOT of resources/tools that will allow some great content to be made.

There are tools that only a few years ago were ONLY in the reaches of the $$$ corporations.

You can buy quality cameras for $2K or so range...you have tools like Davinci Resolve that actually has a FREE version that will do 99% of what a young filmmaker would need to do with reference to editing, VFX, Sound and color correction/grading.

RODE and DJI and others make perfectly usable mic systems the average user can use to capture good sound.

And with the AI tools coming on board....you can do some really special stuff, not full CGI, but I've seen transitions clips done with AI that had my jaw drop....

And no this will not put you in the poor house....yes you have to invest ''some" into equipment, but the main resource you need these days....is sweat equity, imagination and determination to learn how to use the tools at your disposal.

Nobody expects you to put out Raiders of the Lost Ark on your first attempt....but hey, good story writing and presentation go a LONG way, hell, just look back a couple decades ago and longer to see that that is actually what carried movies since the inception of the art form.

Because otherwise you could easily tell it is just a photo of a pie plate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [Kids in the Hall]

It is still funny all these years later.

Imagine you are a manager or a CO and you have an employee who keeps spending an enormous amount of time working one something you know is pointless.

You'd tell them to find a more productive use of their time, and if they can't you might tell them to find other employment.

JAH thinks that the % of people who don't trust the USG is because "The USG refused to take my theories seriously when I edged my way into the deep end of the pool". That says more than enough about how seriously anyone not wearing a tin foil hat should be taking anything he says. Note to JAH: It's not always about you.

Hate Orban all you want for being a pain to the EU, not wanting to amp-up a war in Europe, not wanting his country flooded with migrants etc, but he's NOT "an authoritarian leader". He was ELECTED into power, RE-ELECTED into power, and eventually having lost an ELECTION is leaving office. He had better relations with Putin (in PUBLIC) than other European leaders, but not to the level of a stooge - he opposed Russia's attack on Georgia (the country, not the US state) but it's actually a bit hard to say he's been more of a Putin puppet than the other leaders of Europe have been (in PRIVATE - they all posture as Putin opponents publicly). Let's face it: for all the bluster, Europe's leaders are mostly PRIVATELY subservient to Putin, as they refuse to properly maintain the military power to even slightly oppose Putin (they just want the US to do it at expense to the US taxpayer). They yell and scream about Ukraine and how evil Putin is (yeah, he actually IS, but that's a bit beside my point and not what really matters here...) but at the same time they made themselves dependent upon Russia for energy. Back in Trump's first term when he pointed this out publicly at the UN, the German representatives laughed about it. Remember that blown-up gas pipeline that had everybody so worked-up a few years ago? Yeah... natural gas line from Russia to Europe. The Europeans were demanding America spend BILLIONS of dollars a year protecting them from Putin at the very same time they were making themselves dependent upon him AND funding his war machine with purchases of his natural gas.

Hate JD Vance all you want, but he was NOT in Iran... the negotiations were hosted by Pakistan and took place in Islamabad. [eyeroll]

Hate Trump and Rubio all you want, BUT them being at some stupid pugilist event was at worst a huge nothing-burger and at best an excellent international signal. Nobody with a brain expected the lunatic theocratic shia Muslim leaders of Iran to be serious in those negotiations... they've been dishonest terrorist-supporting scumbags since the 1979 revolution and it's even a little hard for people outside that regime to even know who in it is in a position to negotiate anything (that may, indeed, have been the primary intent of this meeting, from a US perspective). It's not a bad thing to show the world that the American President is not all tied-down by these shenanigans (it was a TERRIBLE look in 1979 when Jimmy Carter did the opposite). If anything important was going to happen, everybody knows the negotiating team could easily contact the President. This is true for ANY American President of either party. Were you this worked-up when Kamela was Border Czar and Biden could not be reached?

On what planet did Biden "work with congress"? The man was so out of it he routinely shook hands with people who were not there, tried to talk to a member of congress who'd been dead for months, and did not hold unscripted press conferences because his staff knew he was not up to answering any challenging questions. Democrats did not so much push their own incumbent from the ticket as he fell off of it by melting-down in a Presidential debate in front of America's voters, thereby exposing all the media and his political allies as LIARS who'd been endlessly lying about his condition on every TV channel, radio station, and website they had access to. When people hounded Trump (in his first term) to take a cognitive test for the supposed insanity of opposing Democrat plans and policies, he DID. When Joe was falling down, starting his days late and "calling a lid on it" at 10AM or noon, often going days without seeing people outside his inner circle, and needing the White House Easter Bunny to protect him from journalists with questions and HE was hit with demands for a cognitive test, he REFUSED and his party (the one demanding such tests of over political and style differences for Trump) sided with him with many running to microphones and cameras to proclaim his amazing soundness...Remember THIS little gem???

The only thing you were right about is this: "No more "both sides" here, there is a big difference." Only you misunderstood which side was the problem. If the left did not have double-standards, they'd have no standards at all.

in the United States is "equal treatment under law". People who are rich or powerful are not supposed to get away with stuff when average people do not.

I might dislike this jerk and think his company was up to no good, but I have to say I approve of this pardon PRECISELY because I want "Law and Order".

Attorney General Merrick Garland threw the book at Changpeng Zhao for violating the Bank Secrecy Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (basically, enabling financial transactions with unsavory people and countries specifically including Iran and failing to warn American regulators properly). I could be wrong, but as I understand it Zhao was not accused of the actual transactions that violated the laws himself, but rather running a company that knowingly allowed others to break that law via his platform. This was the Biden admin AG prosecuting a man for enabling somebody else to transfer money to Iran (a federal crime) at the very same time that President Biden himself was transferring BILLIONS of dollars to both Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Mr Garland also was looking the other way as his boss, Mr Biden was holding the US border wide open, enabling unprecedented flows of drugs and trafficked humans AND doing nothing about remittance payments flowing out of the country, some of which would have been cash flowing to the drug cartels in mayment for the humans and drugs smuggled. Mr Garland also did NOTHING about then-previous president Obama having violated the same federal law in HIS transfer of BILLIONS of dollars to Iran (which historically would be normal, given that by tradition we do not prosecute former presidents for their official acts.... BUT this very same AG Garland threw that tradition out the window and was going after former president Trump (so much for precedent and tradition)).

"Rules for thee, but not for me" is the most basic violation of the very concept of law in the Western world since the signing of the Magna Carta (Look it up if you were under-educated by the public schools within the past 3 or 4 decades).

I would normally have opposed a pardon for such a man, but not pardoning him for these offenses while not prosecuting Obama and Biden was a travesty. People are forgetting that one of the scandals of the Clinton administration was that a businessman named Marc Rich had been, while outside the US, transferring money to Iran (that same federal crime) and could not return to the United States without being arrested and prosecuted. The man missed the funeral of one of his kids because of this exile. His wife Denise Rich donated something like a million dollars to the DNC and the Clintons, and in the final hours [literally] of Bill's time as President, Marc Rich got a Presidential pardon. This seemed very partisan at the time and many conservatives/Republicans went bananas over it as a PARTISAN thing, however in hindsight after it became clear that Dick Cheney's good friend Scooter Libby was involved in the pardon effort, it turns out it was more of an elites vs everybody else thing again... it's that same old abuse of the idea of a "Rule of Law" and it somehow stinks more when it's the top-ranks of the political folks vs everybody else, rather than a partisan fight between people of different parties but essentially the same power and resources...

I don't think I've ever seen a technology aimed at developers pushed as hard as LLMs. Usually adoption arises organically.

“Hell is—other people's LLMs!” -- Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

In contrast, while the frustration with low-quality or excessive AI-generated content is completely valid, it might be worth considering that this “noise” is partly a side effect of how quickly the technology is evolving and being adopted. The imbalance you’re feeling—more irritation than enjoyment—often reflects how platforms and people are still figuring out how to use AI responsibly and meaningfully. Over time, as filters improve and norms around quality settle, the signal-to-noise ratio may shift in a more positive direction. Until then, the experience can feel uneven, where the potential of AI is clear, but the day-to-day exposure doesn’t always live up to it.

In contrast, another way to look at it is that your reaction highlights an important feedback loop—when people feel overwhelmed by low-effort AI content, it creates pressure for better curation tools, stricter platform standards, and more thoughtful use overall. That irritation isn’t just a downside; it’s also a signal that helps shape how AI integrates into daily life. If enough users push back against “AI slop,” it can drive a shift toward higher-quality, more intentional outputs, making the enjoyable moments more frequent and the noise less dominant over time.

Finally, in contrast, it could also help to recognize that the sense of overload isn’t solely about AI itself, but about how much content we’re exposed to in general. AI has accelerated the volume, but the underlying issue—information saturation—has been building for years. Framing it this way might make it easier to focus on controlling your own intake, whether by curating sources more aggressively or stepping back when needed, so the moments where AI genuinely adds value have more room to stand out.

AI is useful, without a doubt. There are times when it makes me feel good.

The noise added to my life by AI slop that I am now forced to filter through is extremely irritating.

On average I would say the irritation happens more times per day than the enjoyable moments.

Steve Jobs reportedly did that.

The people listed are the same people who have come out against paramount due to allowing free speech and in their news setting up people to ensure that the new was now biased.
They talk that with Paramount not being biased then things such as Biden administration officials "furiously pressured" platforms like Facebook and YouTube to remove posts that questioned vaccine safety or mask efficacy, Biden explicitly having reporters in "reporting it the right way" regarding the economy, and democrats pushing the false "Biden laptop is a Russian hack and leak" will not be allowed to happen.