StringJunky

You had a close shave.

Wow! I was doing a landscaping job at a house and the lady owner came running out and said a plane had crashed into the WTC, then we saw the second one. We knew then it was an attack. So sad and shocking to see and hear those people crashing down onto the foyer roof from inside cameras before they collapsed. You were standing 500m from the start of the mess we see today in the Middle East.

A new view angle from the twin towers tragedy, a chap just uploaded after 23 years. It's quite clear the collapse starts at the sites of impact and not a detonation at the bottom by a secret government cabal.

I think your body's temp responses are geared to maintaining homeostasis in the brain.

I use uBlock Origin in Brave browser and it's clean as a whistle.

Google 'old tom style gin'. It is juniper berries and gin.

GOPcare.

#MeToo.

I find this satirical view from Philomena Cunk quite funny: "“Newspapers are a sort of paper version of Twitter for your nan. Apparently, they still exist, but only outside petrol stations near the briquettes, behind little plastic windows, like a little news zoo. Newspapers were how people in olden times found out what was going on the day before. The words in the newspaper would be made up by people called journalists. A “journalist” is what we nowadays call a “content provider,” someone who copies and pastes what people are saying on Twitter and puts it into sentences, and it’s those sentences that make Twitter into news. But in newspaper times, people in the news didn’t just type up what they were thinking and doing, journalists had to actually go out and find out what was going on themselves, usually by hacking people’s phone messages. It was a different world.”

Just saw this in my FB feed. It's different to how I imagined it. I pictured a collision of solids with fragmentation and gravity doing its stuff after.

An important step to imposing authoritarianism is to strangle the dissenting media. The other step is to mess up the system enough, and then appear to be the only one to be able to fix it. Then, the public will accept anything better than what they are in at the time, which will be the new dictatorship's agenda. At that point it will be a fait accompli.

My grandad, who was a chief technician on Avro Vulcans loaded with Blue Steel nuclear standoff bombs then, said he was on 24 hour standby at that time. He said it was very close to happening.

Spiny Flower Mantis.

Is it better to have a dictatorship without physical resistance, and all the other tools of applying political instability? Does one passively accept being coercively entered into a state like Russia, China or NK? I'm ignoring whether it's left wing or right wing because the end result is the same on the citizens.

Looking at the incoming US administration as an example. Does one have to passively accept that a democratically elected government that turns out to be subversive, seeks to undo the checks and balances of its country's Constitution, remodelling it to create a long term dictatorship and leader beyond the normal time limit, have the ethical right and mandate to do so?

It's like website companies that state in their privacy statement "We and our 6457 business partners take your privacy and data very seriously...."

Ok. Ta.

I just looked and 5mm or 10mm mild steel is used for BBQ hotplates. OP Can you mod the top to take a 5 or 10mm steel plate and have the necessary seal? I'd be inclined to use 10mm.

Right. Cheers. How many of those 20 left will go their way do you think-ish?

Any idea how the remaining 20 House seats will fall, from what you can see?

Looking at the distribution of seats, so far, in both sides of Congress there appears to be plenty of room for potential gridlock in getting policies through. The differences in numbers are, as usual, quite fine. The drubbing in the electoral college for president doesn't translate to a free rein in Congress, does it? Looks like more of the same historical need to get stuff passed nationally by cross-aisle negotiation. I'm sure there'll be plenty of rebels on the GOP side...as usual.

An interesting correlation. Perhaps the experience of persecution-isolation concentrated their minds and created a sense of mortal urgency, to the extent that they worked super-hard and fast at their ideas to get them out there before they potentially passed.

Quite a few commentators that I've read predict buyers remorse not too far down the line. Buying American is great for their nationalistic soul, but will hit them hard in the wallets when they realize, after draconian import taxes are implemented, they are buying products made paying American-level wages with the associated sticker price. A low-skilled Chinese factory worker's monthly wage is $370 for a 'good' wage... most are worse. Bangladeshi factory workers in the clothing industry are at about $125/month. Prices of goods can only be cheap when your country is exploiting poorer economies that pay lower wages.

It looks like Project 2025 can start to be implemented.

Yeah. He gives morons a voice. I make no apologies for my description. I can feel in my bones major civil strife or war on the horizon. All the ingredients for major global instability seem to be coalescing.