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SleepingGiantFan

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Everything posted by SleepingGiantFan

  1. That's funny for two reasons. One because bluerules has to be as uneducated as anyone who ever posted here. And two because I was just thinking the same about evangelicals. According to the L.A. Times, there's a 3K member pentacostal church in Sacramento which has been in the news in the past for homophobic sermons coming from the pulpit and has now had 71 members test positive for COVID-19 over the last week or so. The Sacto county health director has heard rumors that members of the church have been getting together covertly for communal prayer. It would be fine with me if they want to chance killing themselves but if so, they should stay the hell away from everybody else.
  2. Yeah but the more I listen to Ben Shapiro, the more I'm convinced that China can't be let off the hook for this shit. I couldn't possibly reiterate everything I've heard Shapiro say about that over the last couple weeks but it's been quite persuasive and among what he's said is a contention which was confirmed by an article in today's L.A. Times about how Taiwan isn't a member of the World Health Organization because the effing communist party in "Red" China won't allow it. And despite now having an economy almost the size of the US, the Chinese contribute less than 10% as much to the WHO as we do. Everyone's so busy right now just minimizing the death toll for their citizens that they can't concentrate on anything else but after the smoke clears, the world really needs to come down hard on the Chinese.
  3. This one is particularly sad: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/louisiana-disability-advocate-april-dunn-084030272.html
  4. Your comment reminded me of this movie: https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-sz-001&hsimp=yhs-001&hspart=sz&p=against+all+odds+movie#id=4&vid=858ac9d4be6736c20ca9f8d03c9ec2b1&action=click I have no idea what happened to the film because it's never streamed to my knowledge but it's just terrific on many levels: Jeff Bridges; a first class Bridges and James Woods race along Sunset Blvd by UCLA; smokin' hot Australian femme fatale; beautiful Mexican scenary; AND a sniveling little lawyer that's on Bridges' ass who Bridges' character would have kicked the shit out of but for the fact the guy's a lawyer and knows how to ruin people's careers.
  5. My buddy and I refer to him as Don the Lemon. He's truly awful and would never have lasted when CNN was a legitimate network. Sadly, however, as Bill O'Reilly used to boast, FoxNews' ratings gradually came to dominate those of CNN so CNN turned to the dark side too.
  6. Officials say video from inside the train's cab shows Moreno holding a lighted flare during the incident The guy clearly has mental health issues. Wouldn't surprise me to hear the flame was from a candle and he's a religious wingnut.
  7. The people to listen to are Fauci and Birx. Not only are they physicians and privy to at least as much data as Trump and more so than the media, their comments are always measured. Although people want to hear such unslanted reporting, in this day and age it is almost nonexistent. Instead, to varying degrees the news networks give us a bunch of hucksters whose stories are designed to sensationalize in the interest of ratings. So it's no wonder people are scared.
  8. Jared Kushner, who’s often been in competition with Trump’s chiefs of staff, continues to be the central West Wing player, leading a shadow coronavirus task force that is more powerful than the official group led by Vice President Mike Pence. In conversations Kushner has blamed HHS Secretary Alex Azar for the criticism Trump has received Meanwhile, Trump is also consulting his longtime confidante Hope Hicks, whom Trump hired back in February (Hicks had been serving as chief communications officer for Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News). Officially, Hicks reports to Kushner, but according to sources, Hicks is constantly with Trump. “Hope is in charge of Trump’s calendar, which means Jared is in charge of Trump’s schedule,” Welp, I guess we pretty much know which cabinet head will be the next to roll. Whoever Trump replaces him with could hardly be worse.
  9. The fundamental problem with organized religions is bureaucracy. Accordingly, the bigger the bureaucracy, the bigger the problem and just like major problems are swept under the rug by Big Government, they've been swapt under the rug by Big Religion, particularly Roman Catholicism. And FWIW, despite its size, the LDS church - the Fundamental LDS crazies excepted - has been far less culpable of that than most Protestant faiths. Props.
  10. True. However, it IS the public employee's problem when he or she doesn't want to do one iota more than is absolutely necessary to keep their job. I worked for a state agency for a decade in the early eighties to early nineties. There were 15 white collar non-managers in my office and one day every other week each of us was required to field general inquiries which didn't involve any existing file. I'd overhear my peers speaking with people and most of us would go the extra mile and do things like provide the name and phone number of other agencies which had or might have had jurisdiction over the caller's problem when our office didn't. However, there were always a few of my peers who were such lazy asses that they would say little more than "That's not our job" and hang up. Yes, I'm serious. It was disgusting and one of the reasons I eventually quit and started my consulting firm based on what I had learned and contacts I had made while there.
  11. Similar anecdotal evidence says to me there are about an equal number of people who think close to half of the US population is going to die. The difference no doubt has a lot to do with you living around almost no Democrats and me living around almost no Republicans. Why it's so broken down according to political affiliation is anybody's guess.
  12. I only know about the state of California but from having done consulting work with both, I can say that the feds are much worse. The bigger the bureaucracy, the greater the inefficiency and Los Angeles County with its massive workforce of 100,000 or so employees might just be as bad as the state. At a minimum it's my experience that LA County is much better at promoting from within in order to achieve rampant Peter Principalism among managers than is the state.
  13. Insofar as by "this" you mean so many people's obsession with even mundane information about spread of the virus, if the news networks have their way it won't "let up" for a long time. But look at the bright side. By hook or crook, the networks are going to be required to cover the presidential election so sometime within the next seven months we should stop having all coronavirus all the time.
  14. Yeah, it is a bit of a Catch-22 and I'll put it this way: Joe Average physician thinks we should quarantine virtually everybody until the proverbial curve is flattened to zero. Joe Average big business owner thinks nobody who is productive and asymptomatic should be quarantined after Easter Sunday. Because none of us are physicians or big business owners, the position of most of us here appears to be somewhere in between.
  15. You mean we're going to get caught in a 1985 timewarp with Moon Unit Zappa speaking "Valley Girl" and we're going to have to cough in order to keep from laughing our ass off? Say it ain't so!
  16. The L.A. mayor is Eric Garcetti and he's a clone of Newsom. Both are the kind of empty suit Democrats who drove me to re-register as unaffiliated.
  17. As I said immediately after Newsom announced it, to decide so soon that the schools need to be closed until the fall is alarmist and frankly ridiculous. And as the always astute Harry Littman opined today, it's also very questionable whether the scope of Newsom's edict to all Californians is even constitutional. Littman asserted that Newsom better have his attorneys doing some thorough legal research right now because if Newsom doesn't pare down his edict, it's not a matter of if but when businesses begin to sue him. (BTW, for those who aren't familiar with Littman, he's a Democrat.)
  18. An L.A. Times article from late last week said that the country's leading toilet paper manufacturing plant is in Ventura county north of L.A. and one of the other leading manufacturing plants is in Orange county south of L.A. yet there's none to speak of here either. A slow reaction from retailers to limit the number of items which can be purchased is partly to blame. However, most of the blame has to go to hoarders. From what I can tell, many are the same kinds of people who patronize palm readers.
  19. Fauci also said there was a limit to what he could do when Trump made false statements, as he often does during the briefings. “I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down,” Fauci said. Yeah, probably not. Maybe Fauci could kick Trump in the balls instead.
  20. Well, when it comes to each state, it's not necessarily a black and white issue, or blue and red. However, in many states it basically is. Some states haven't voted for a Democrat for president since LBJ and some may not have ever done so in their existence. OTOH, I heard that New York hasn't voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan and I'm not going to check but I don't think Hawaii ever has. My point is that people's politics are becoming more and more entrenched and rather than advocating a change in that thinking, as modestobulldog said, voters are more and more viewing compromise as worthy of shunning.
  21. The sixties stuff wasn't geographical or at least not nearly so much so as is the case today. Other than that, I agree with pretty much everything you've said, including how difficult a "divorce" would be for agrarian states. As an example, last I heard, California was receiving about 88 cents back from the feds for every dollar its citizens pay in income tax. For Mississippi, the formula is almost reversed.
  22. I don't disagree but that's where American citizens come in. I'm not advocating capitulation and the ability to achieve compromise in order to get things done should be considered a virtue.
  23. If only both sides would decide to compromise - as our legislators at the national level were generally able to do for well over a century following the Civil War - yes, we COULD then get along.
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