No we aren't. There wasn't any.

And who does Bessent work for? Do you really believe el Bunko didn't sign off on it. I doubt it was his idea since he never has any original ideas of his own. Stop white washing el Bunko, everything he touches has the taint of corruption.

To borrow money you must have someone willing to lend you money. That is what the bond yields are all about. As the U.S. has become less a safe haven, the bond yields have been rising. You can think of the yield as the return the U.S. must promise you for you lending your money or better. The lenders are rating your country.

If the Fed "prints" money, that causes an inflation which means that borrowers will demand more in yield because now any bond they are holding is going to lose value faster.

Put quaintly, there is no free lunch. You cannot print your way out of economic stupidity. To put it in Ron White's terms: there's no fixing stupid.

I think they want to keep datacenters out of their backyard because they are worried about their electricity rates and they become one of the few targets at which the ordinary citizen can shoot.

I think the main reason is that it makes the PHBs feel like they know something technical.

You conveniently did not mention the real obstacles to get to Mars: radiation and human physiology and human psychology. They are killers. The radiation from here to Mars is not the milk-toast we get around Earth which has the Van Allen belts. Mars has none. But that is not the biggest radiation problem, that is the radiation from the rest of the Universe which hates us. That's the real industrial strength radiation and we have no way to stop. Sure you can encase your vehicle in lead or water but then you have to accelerate and decelerate all that mass. And it won't stop the really nasty stuff. This assumes you won't meet any solar flares on your three years away. One of those and you'll feel like a well-done pop-tart.

There is human physiology. We were fed, watered, and grown to live in the Earth's gravitational well. Our organs and blood vessels require that nice 1 g to be happy, and that includes our brains. Spend a lot of time without it and bad things happen when you return. Spend three years without it and there's no returning, you'd be a jellyfish out of water if you tried.

Humans do not really like each other. Put them in a box for three years and they will hate each other, even if you change the box periodically. Maybe they will insist on sending "real" Americans who will insist on bringing their guns with them.

No, it was Putin that laid the groundwork for the war against Ukraine. There was no enabling of Iran, you are probably referring to Obama relaxing the controls on Iranian money for the JCPOA. Then la Presidenta came into office, canceled the JCPOA because it had Obama's signature on it. He said he would replace it with something better. It took him until this second term when we found out that the better replacement meant $4+/gal. gasoline, Iran having de facto control of the Hormuz straight, and an even more entrenched Iranian regime. And now with the high price of oil, Putin and Iran are getting a lot of revenue, especially since Iran is cutting deals with countries and shipping their oil, and Putin is doing what he does best, kleptocracy.

It seems el Bunko figured that all that pay-for-play with Arabs would cause them to support his war. They didn't and now they feel jilted because it is clear to them it was only pay-for, the play sort of got lost in el Bunko's dementia. And his dementia meant he was easy pickins' for Netanyahu, although he has always been an easy mark.

It seems dimbulb figured Iran was just like Venezuela. He was deluded on so many accounts. He saw all that oil for easy deals. However, most of Venezuela's oil, if any of his sycophantic bozos cared to check, is like tar and good for asphalt and not much else without a lot of processing. It doesn't bubble up from the ground either. To get it you need to pump the oil field full of chemicals and steam. This is way in the meeting he had with Big Oil executives, they were highly unenthusiastic about V.'s oil.

Iran's oil will be also unavailable. He thinks American companies will simply stick straws into the ground and suck it out. However, another reason the Big Oil execs were unenthusiastic was that they didn't want to get into any politics in V., which would be necessary to get any of that black tar goo. And what Big Oil company is going to be dumb enough to help steal Iran's oil when they'd be under constant attack.

Remember the first rule of el Bunko: he destroys everything he touches.

Roll that tape forward 1-2 years and you will have described the U.S. under el Bunko.

It takes $10 Billion to remove MS's alleged software from Japan?

"Record heat + severe snow deficit" This is was the surprising thing, not the fact that it resulted in anything surprising.

And what are we erasing that can mitigate it? Drill baby drill? Maybe there is some secret thingy to which you are referring?

Maybe Elmo uploaded some of Grok to it and it decided it couldn't take life as a sat any longer; so it took itself out of existence just to make the pain go away.

Speaking of souls, for a good laugh read: Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, by Mary Roach. She goes into various efforts to measure souls. She writes in a very comedic fashion and quite enjoyable even as she studies the phenomenon seriously. In the end, they all come up empty. The closest she can come to something spooky are anecdotes from people who have "experienced" dead people.

According to Bart Ehrman, roughly 8-10% (I think he references a higher number but I'd rather be a bit cautious here) of people experience dead people. Ehrman is a historian who got his start as a Christian scholar before failing to see the light any longer and is now agnostic or atheist. He was using the figure to help explain why people immediately after Christ died had thought he'd arisen. If you care to, take the synoptic gospels (the first three, John was on mushrooms) and read them side by side, especially what happens during the Romans nailing him up and afterwords. It is quite humorous to see how they cannot get their story straight. There are Christian apologists who claim to square these three accounts, but then they are just writing a new 4th account to please themselves.

Lately, no one has been coming to America. 'tis a bit short sighted seeing as the pop. has started dropping and SS won't fund itself. We can only conclude the Republicans want to kill SS. The Republicans are just plain mean. They want a dog-eat-dog society.

Look at the judicial news. Lately, there have been a bunch of judicial orders declaring la Presidenta actions illegal and to stop, actions that have been going on since early 2025. la Presidenta and his sycophants realized long ago that court cases take time, and with no Justice Dept to speak of, they take even longer. So in the interim, he and Project 2025 get to do whatever they like. Every now and again, they get to run a case all the way up to the Nazi majority on the Supreme Court.

No, they change. New orders come down from la Presidenta and their memories are wiped and new behavior is installed. They are just bots. This is why you never engage in a "discussion" with them. They will argue one way and BOOM, a new order arrives, and they then argue something different.