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How about that the police got numerous calls about that guy, that evening, and didn’t answer? It’s kind of like being armed and Black vs being armed and Bubba Wendy P.

How meta would it be if slim actually IS a trophy wife????!!!????

Fajitas!!

So what? If there was any adjustment that was asymmetric amongst borrowers or even purposely harmed innocent DZO’s the point that makes the post smarmy was the ridiculous dig at Biden. He’d be no more responsible for it than if one of his gardeners trimmed the wrong hedges at the White House. p.s. For you I will write my legislators.

From Snopes: "Higher-credit-score borrowers are not being charged more so that lower-credit-score borrowers can pay less." Sounds like you are yet another victim of FOX News misinformation. (Or as republicans refer to them, "alternative facts.")

Yeah... Another lie from the right. Why am I not terribly surprised. https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/04/28/biden-mortgage-fees/

Have you never heard of people being threatened or killed in retaliation for calling the cops? This guy is clearly a psycho and without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight there’s no telling what could have set him off. Wake the fuck up and stop being so naive.

This is an interesting thread, because it points out how males and females are still viewed differently.

Negative. Gun nutters want us all to believe that sporting your iron on your hip like Wyatt Earp is normal and folks firing off their guns anywhere there aren’t local ordinances against it is a reasonable part of the new American experience. We say no. You effectively said yes which puts you in the gun nutters camp. Besides recent arrival Hondurans, who else should call the cops? Abused women? Vets with PSTD? People with hunting dogs that now think it’s duck season? You gave buy off to the Brent’s and NRA’s of the world and were lumped in for you efforts. You’re welcome.

And back to Mr. Thomas. The following is chart outlining the political donations by the Crow family over time: Makes you wonder who provided the deciding vote in the 2010 Citizens United case which was 5-4..... Interesting to note that Thomas, in his concurring opinion, wrote that he didn't agree with the disclosure provisions and would have preferred total anonymity for contributors...... SCOTUS has been for sale for quite some time.

Hence the Ukrainian children kidnapping program. Draft Tatars, Chechens, Bashkirs, Chuvash, Avars, Armenians, etc. When they get killed off Ukrainian children will rebuild the gene pool. Slim knows (face palm). Why do you think he wants Ukrainian capitulation so bad? If his engagement on western internet sites slips. That dreaded draft notice e-mail could be next.

<hangs head> Why not just put on a combat lifesaver course in every school.

Not sure this is entirely true. Politicians have had no problem creating an environment where it becomes illegal to teach sex-education but make it mandatory to teach bleeding control techniques and the use of battle field tourniquets. https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB1147/2023 this isn’t due to inaction of politicians, this is due to specific and determined actions by politicians.

Agreed there. This is a larger problem and probably beyond ths scope of the discussion, but most of the world realizes that regular healthcare (even just checkups) is not only critical, but it's cheaper than the alternative, which is that the person just keeps doing whatever until they are too sick to do it, then they head to a doctor and say "fix me!" Early interventions are pretty much always cheaper and pretty much always have better outcomes. As an example of this, if you can get pregnant women to a doctor early in their pregnancy, outcomes improve by almost a factor of 3 - and sometimes the care is nothing more than giving them prenatal vitamins. Our healthcare system is not set up to drive this. About the best we do is make regular checkups free in most health care coverages, but getting to people to go to them is a different story. "Why should I go. I'm perfectly healthy" etc. If we can solve that problem, that helps immensely with healthcare screening. Because doctors are pretty good at reading early signs of dementia, dissociative disorders, bipolar disorder etc even if the person doesn't come in complaining about hearing voices. As you mentioned, another problem is having those services available to begin with. Sadly, in general the exact same people who raise the cry of "it's a mental health issue, not a gun issue!" are also the people who fight tooth and nail against any spending on health care to expand such services. Yep. But if you do know about it, you can at least 1) make care available and 2) prevent them from (for example) flying/driving passengers or owning guns. And if getting that mental healthcare is a requirement for buying more guns, that's a strong incentive for such people to get it.

While I completely agree about the importance of improving access to, and de-stigmatizing mental health care, I am very skeptical that it will make much difference regarding mass shootings and other aspects of "gun violence". Most people who suffer from mental illness are not aware of their illness, or are in denial about it. Only a small fraction seek care of their own volition. I found out from personal experience that it is basically impossible to force treatment on someone who does not want it. I also found out, in another instance, that the wait time to get an appointment is months or longer. The only way to get around these barriers and delays is for the patient to commit a violent crime. Of course then you have victims, and the mentally ill person is now in the hands of the criminal justice system that does not do a good job of treating people as patients that need care. Especially when it comes to the sort of people who are inclined to use firearms to commit violent acts, I think it is very unlikely that they will see themselves as having a problem needing medical care. They are aggrieved, easily angered, paranoid, and fully convinced that they are right and everyone else is out to get them. Basically perfect customers for the firearms sales industry. In a society that strongly values medical privacy, the right to choose or reject medical treatment (excepting reproductive rights for women of course), and the right to own any kind of firearm you might desire, the pairing of extreme anger/paranoia with lethal weaponry is inevitable and unavoidable.

A former friend, who happened to be a police officer, used to think it was funny when his neighbors complained about him target shooting in his back yard after 10 or 11 PM. He had the same attitude as the gunman in Texas, I can do whatever the hell I want on my own property. They neighbors soon learned the value of calling the cops about another cop. Mostly when they showed up they would fire off a few rounds too. BTW he's a former friend because he went full MAGA/Q and filled his facebook page with the most vile anti-immigrant crap and conspiracy theory bullshit. It got personal, in part because I am an immigrant, although apparently that's OK in my case because Canadians are almost like Americans.

We have to get over the “real men just suck it up and deal with their issues” syndrome, too. Wendy P.

1000x, but I would go further. As a gunowner I have said multiple times in one way or another that I think my rights should be tempered with evaluations and continued monitoring. I live in MA where there are a bunch of gun laws that restrict ownership, but none of them directly tackle the problem. People owning guns that are unfit to own them. There is an assault weapons ban, large capacity laws. But none of the laws truly evaluate my fitness to own a firearm. I could go buy an assault weapon that was manufactured before the enactment date of the original federal assault weapon ban, and I could buy a storage locker full of "pre-ban" magazines. Totally legal. The only hinderance is a much higher cost because of supply and demand, there are only so many pre-ban guns and magazines to buy. There was no true evaluation of my mental health, and no real check that I am not a reckless moron aside from attending a brief NRA firearms safety class. I could be bat shit crazy, with huge anger issues from day 1, and if I managed to avoid getting entangled with the legal or mental health system it would completely fly under the radar because I could mask long enough for my 10 minute conversation with the officer assigned to process permits at the local police station. Or maybe I was previously fit to own firearms, but recently lost my job, got divorced, and have been having getting increasingly isolated. Maybe I have start to become unhinged after feeding myself a steady stream of extremist videos on YouTube. There is no system to catch that either, short of someone spotting outward signs and reporting me to law enforcement. I like my firearms, but I also know the risk they pose. I think it would be complete reasonable to have yearly evaluations of my gun safety knowledge, practical evaluations of my handling of them, a check on my gun storage, and a mental health evaluation that includes interviews of acquaintances for character evaluation.

So by now everyone is sick of the Bud Light controversy. After seeing images of Bud Light cans with a trans person on them, conservatives showed their outrage by shooting up Bud Light cans, boycotting Anheuser-Busch and sending death threats to Dylan Mulvaney. Underlying all the alarums is the phenomenon of conservative backlash. Whenever society makes progress (more rights for blacks, voting for women, gay marriage, a black president etc) there is an inevitable backlash by people who feel that nothing should have changed, and that if others gain rights, they lose them. And to some degree of course this is true; if the opinion of a black person is given as much weight as that of a white person, the weight of the white person's opinion and their influence is very slightly diluted, and their privilege is decreased by a slight amount. This has happened throughout history and is happening now. On Facebook, an otherwise-reasonable woman I know is saying that recognizing trans women harms women because then "fake" women get lumped in with "real" women and "real" woman lose power. I've asked her about a dozen times how she, personally, will be harmed by trans women, and she hasn't been able to answer other than "you're not a woman so you wouldn't understand." One of the most famous examples of this is the Wilmington Insurrection, a conservative backlash against the rise of black people into that city in the late 1890's. Black people began to prosper, getting jobs as craftsmen and businessmen. A few were even elected to government positions. This was intolerable to the rural conservative anti-black democrats of the time, who saw the biracial republican party, the party of blacks, civil rights and big-city liberals, taking over and subordinating whites to blacks. This led to a riot by those whites that did a tremendous amount of damage to the mostly-black sections of town and killed at least 14 people. Predictably this was blamed on black people. A fascinating document to come out of Wilmington just before the riot was the White Declaration of Independence, and it makes for an excellent example of the origins of conservative backlash. It is reproduced in part below. ================================== Believing that the Constitution of the United States contemplated a government to be carried on by an enlightened people; believing that its framers did not anticipate the enfranchisement of an ignorant population of African origin, and believing that those men of the state of North Carolina, who joined in framing the union did not contemplate for their descendants subjection to an inferior race. We the undersigned citizens of the city of Wilmington and county of New Hanover, do hereby declare that we will no longer be ruled and will never again be ruled, by men of African origin. . . .the time has come for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95 percent of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by Negroes. . . . the Negro has demonstrated by antagonizing our interests in every way, and especially by his ballot, that he is incapable of realizing that his interests are and should be identical with those of the community. . . .the giving of nearly all the employment to Negro laborers has been against the best interests of this county and city, and is sufficient reason why the city of Wilmington, with its natural advantages, has not become a city of at least 50,000 inhabitants. . . . we white men expect to live in this community peaceably; to have and provide absolute protection for our families, who shall be safe from insult or injury from all persons, whomsoever. We are prepared to treat the Negroes with justice in all matters which do not involve sacrifice of the intelligent and progressive portion of the community. But are equally prepared now and immediately to enforce what we know to be our rights. A climax was reached when the Negro paper of this city published an article so vile and slanderous that it would in most communities have resulted in a lynching [referring to an editorial saying interracial relationships were OK] and yet there is no punishment, provided by the courts, adequate for the offense. We, therefore, owe it to the people of this community and city, as protection against such license in the future, that "The Record" cease to be published and that its editor be banished from this community. ============================= The parallels to today are remarkable. The demonization and threats against blacks then, and trans people now. (i.e. "drag queens teaching your kids to be gay" vs "black rape" which is how the white supremacists referred to interracial relationships.) The statement that REAL people, not blacks, should run things - compared to the statements that only REAL women should be recognized as women. The claims that the goals of both blacks and trans people are primarily to antagonize the interests of normal people by doing things like voting, posing for pictures and existing. The demands that books (now) and newspapers (then) be banned for spreading vile and filthy concepts. The one good thing about all this is that the history of progress shows that such backlashes are the dying throes of that sort of bigotry. Almost no conservative today would voice an opinion that blacks did not deserve to vote, or that an interracial marriage was "black rape." And in time the thought of threatening to kill trans people would be similarly almost unthinkable. But sadly, as the Bud Light thing demonstrates, we have a ways to go to get there.

You forgot to ad that its being built in New York state. A state that republicans love to hate because of "high taxes". Texas threw billions in incentives at micron 'We're disappointed' | Micron chooses Central New York over Central Texas for $100B investment The tech manufacturing company reportedly turned down billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives in Lockhart." Other reports have it that abortion and the republican governor were factors in the decision. From Micron ""The pursuit of an inclusive, diverse and equitable culture is a necessity for every high-achieving company. To us, it’s more than good business – it’s personal. Being inclusive is in Micron’s DNA and core to our vision and values. We want to hear all voices, all ideas and all perspectives. Everyone deserves to be heard, seen and valued no matter who they are or where they work."

Says the man after Fox News said in court nobody would be stupid enough to believe their shows are news. But I think you didn't know it.