Someone who's already convinced Biden is a doddering old fool, will see that in the clip - that's what we call confirmation bias.

Biden suffers from spondylosis, which is age-related spinal arthritis, and neuropathy in his feet. These have affected his walking.

I wasn’t aware neuropathy and spinal arthritis made you space out and wander off.

The literal Streisand Effect. I checked out the story Babs was referring to and it appears a bunch of Biden influencers, like Streisand, are going full 1984 pretending it didn’t happen.

https://nypost.com/2024/06/16/us-news/biden-appears-to-freeze-up-has-to-be-led-off-stage-by-obama-at-mega-bucks-la-fundraiser/

Why does Biden have to be led around like a child?

I support cutting taxes, yes. Taxes are not only theft, but forced labor. Taking the earnings from a certain number of hours of labor is like taking a certain number of hours from the person.

The forecast of Biden’s tax policies as indicated by The Tax Foundation is pretty bad. The whole article is worth a read but I’ll quote the summary:

The president’s tax policy proposals as outlined in the State of the Union address would make the tax code more complicated, unstable, and anti-growth, while also expanding the amount of spending in the tax code for a variety of policy goals not related to revenue collection.

…

In sum, President Biden is proposing extraordinarily large tax hikes on businesses and the top 1 percent of earners that would put the U.S. in a distinctly uncompetitive international position and threaten the health of the U.S. economy. The budget ignores or makes unrealistic assumptions about the fiscal cost of major proposals as well as economic growth under higher marginal tax rates on work and investment, concealing what is likely to be a substantial cost borne by American workers and taxpayers.

https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/biden-budget-2025-tax-proposals/

For some reason raising taxes on corporations and top earners sound good to pro-government functionaries, probably because they enjoy the benefits of other people’s money and efforts too much to pass it up, but it just means they raise their prices, stop hiring, and refuse to increase wages. The rest of us bear the cost. So once you get past the pomp and fluff, Biden’s insanity reveals itself on a simple analysis.

Reducing tax revenue does not result in decreased government spending- it actually increases it, by increasing national debt and the interest paid to service that debt.

My question is: why focus specifically on tips? Why not simply lower taxes (or increase the earned income tax credit) for low incomes? This seems fairer.

It reduces the incidence of government theft. It’s not their money in the first place.

Food and hospitality businesses are struggling to retain workers. This is an added incentive. He’s already lowed income taxes, and The Tax Cuts and Jobs act hasn’t expired yet. Biden is trying to eliminate it.

The bloated government and its base is scared of Trump’s idea of ending taxes on tips, likely because it will affect their own meal ticket. We can’t have service workers keeping their own money.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated Sunday that exempting tip income from federal income and payroll taxes could lead to a decrease of $150 billion to $250 billion in federal revenues over a decade.

https://thehill.com/business/budget/4725520-trump-plan-to-nix-taxes-on-tips-could-cost-250-billion-analysis/

What sort of matter is the money in your bank account made out of? Wealth is not a fixed pie, I’m afraid. Zero sum bias, especially when it comes to wealth, is a fallacy. This is elementary and should not require explanation, but of course it does.

Wealth is accumulated through effort and ingenuity. The only wealth exploited from you or me has been taken in the form of taxes.

Sorry, I just don’t understand why you wouldn’t want people to be wealthy. Do you prefer people to be poor? Do you prefer they should have just as much as Vera Mont allows?

Why should it? People have very few and simple needs and motivations. The circumstances could be made a whole less variable by an AI making sure every human has the necessities of life and no one human hogs 10,000 people's allotment of necessisties. Equity ain't that complicated!

Life isn’t a zero-sum game, thank god, though the fallacy has led us to such injustice in the past.

J.J. Ward would agree

So would history!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopia

Regardless of any should's or oughts, AI is being utilized and (in the future) continue to be exploited to do so. Any should's or ought's, never stopped the rich and wealthy from becoming richer and more wealthy.

Good. After all, there is nothing wrong with becoming richer and more wealthy.

Thanks for the education. But the market is based on the relation between flesh-and-blood human beings as they exchange goods and services. Though AI might be able to reiterate economic concepts such as supply and demand, and do all the economic math better than an economist, it could never grasp the activity of the market.

Do you think AI could and should plan your life?

I beg to differ. AI as a central manager will be able to do this with greater ease than any human manager. Everything in the marketplace is heading towards computerization. With greater complexity in the marketplace, then only AI can do it.

If not AI, then who?

No one. As intimated, the feat is impossible. I’m not even sure why anyone would want a planned economy in the first place.

AI would not be able to grasp the thoughts, motivations, and circumstances of 10 people, let alone millions.

The knowledge problem is from Hayek, yes, but is by now routine economics.

No matter the skill and sagacity of the central planner, whether human or AI, he is beset by the knowledge problem. It is the problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose importance only these individuals know.

People are capricious, unpredictable, and subject to whim. Their circumstances, needs, and appetites change. Assuming that a central planner could gather all the relevant data required to plan an economy, by the time he had possessed it, it would have changed and become obsolete. As we’ve seen with these regimes, any attempt to plan an economy invariably leads to tyranny, misery, and death.

Marx was always a republican, and therein lies the framework in which communism sees a way through its failure, that is, in the republic.

But it turns out to be less a way through than it is a dead end. The Soviet Republic, the People’s Republic of China, The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Republic of Cuba, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela—the framework is by now the coffin of the communist dream, and perhaps its final resting place. The result is the same as all republics: oligarchy and state capitalism. In that sense the socialist state is little different than the Roman one, with its bureaucrats no more than a praetorian guard. The state never withered away like Marx and Engels foretold, but it got larger, centralized, and more totalitarian in its reach. So much for historical materialism.

If you can put someone in bondage with discourse you can liberate him with discourse. But that’s action at a distance. It’s just not true that people can be pushed to this or that action according to the combination of letters and words they read or hear, slavery or otherwise. The impetus for action invariably begins in the actor, and on the simple grounds that no one else has access to his motor cortex. At every moment he is under his own control.

Ironically, it is the belief that symbols can manipulate human beings that fosters the tendency to act according to what symbols one reads and hears, and not according to one’s own understanding, will, and conscience. Until he understands that it is he who manipulates symbols, and not the other way about, he comes to believe he is weaker than symbols, and so submits himself to them.

Observing any reader will show that there is no force or agent limiting his freedom. So this brand of freedom is metaphorical. I would worry that in seeking it out one would limit his own and another’s true freedom in order to attain it.

Recall last year as IRS whistleblowers testified that the younger, deadbeat Biden, had over $300000 in unpaid taxes. They claimed the DOJ felony investigation was slow-walked for four years so that it went past the statute of limitations. (Investigating it would probably implicate Joe).

At any rate, Hunter later plead guilty to a misdemeanor tax charge, netting himself a sweetheart plea deal with the DOJ that essentially absolved him from the gun charges he was just convicted of. A judge later questioned the constitutionality of the deal.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/26/proposed-hunter-biden-plea-agreement-00108426

Imagine if it was anyone else. But this is the politics of optics. The optics of the preferential treatment just became too much for the Justice department. With whistleblowers coming out of the woodwork, a mounting criticism of a two-tiered justice system, and the corruption of the elder Biden becoming more apparent, there wasn’t any hiding it any more. So, for electioneering purposes and to divert from Joe’s crimes, they sacrificed Hunter on the alter of politics, and Joe’s dutiful followers can pretend the justice system is no longer two-tiered.

Hunter Biden was just convicted of the stupidest crimes, felony gun charges, while his documented drug use, prostitution, tax evasion, FARA violations and money laundering go untouched. While anyone else would be in prison for any number of these, Biden privilege allowed him to skate and run amok to commit a crime spree for years. It was only after his crimes could no longer be hidden, connecting them to his father, that they sacrificed him.

One good thing that came of the trial is that they used his infamous laptop as evidence, proving once and for all that the media, the deep state, and the useful idiots that peddle the disinfo that the laptop was Russian disinformation, are proven to be stupid, malicious, or both.

Here’s a nice reminder of how they string along their cult:

In the quoted scenario, there is no wealth to redistribute or even distribute. These people narrowly escaped from a burning city, clutching their children. They're in a barren landscape, with scarce food and shelter. Alone, each of them would perish. Their options are very limited.

By “wealth” I meant goods and resources, like food. If there is nothing to distribute, then there is nothing to share.

Yes, it's enough for the ownership of intimate objects - not of land, water and other people.

I think it is enough for land. What is more intimate than the ground you’re standing on?

Imagine some world of the future where people are picking up the pieces from some cataclysm and they develop a collective. No one owns anything. Everything that's produced is pooled and shared. I'm wondering about whether this is something that dwells in the human potential or not.

Our greater potential lies in taking a fanciful idea and producing a tyranny out of it.

For instance your passive voice leaves to our imagination what group of people or institution is to redistribute the wealth. Those people or that institution are in effect the owners, and everyone else the serf, because the distributors get to decide what is to be done with everyone’s things and who gives and takes what. Once the distributors are revealed it appears the transaction is less and less sharing as it is a racket.

I think ownership is innate rather than cultural. I believe it extends from self-ownership, the sense that one’s self is one’s own. Like one’s self, the things we create and apply our productive energies towards would not be the way they are without our being. We often treat objects like tools or vehicles as extensions of the body, and I believe something of this process inheres in our instincts towards things we own. This, in combination with a sense of justice and desert, is enough to fill out a theory of ownership.

What riot happened on his inauguration? None.

“ Federal prosecutors on Friday moved to drop charges against the last 39 people accused of participating in a violent protest on the day of President Donald Trump's inauguration.

The motion to dismiss charges by the U.S. attorney's office seemingly ends an 18-month saga that started with the Justice Department attempting to convict more than 190 people.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna889531

I remember this because everyone was mocking Trump for his crowd size without saying anything about the rioters blocking the entrances.

Guess who judged Bannon’s case? Juan Merchan, whose daughter takes in millions working for the Biden campaign and wet noodles like pencil-neck Adam Schiff. He also happened to judge the Trump Org. case. How is this possible? Well, we all know…

You make an effort to save the people or stop the train. Anything less than that is cowardly business.

It doesn’t follow, for me. The evidence shows that the wrongdoing was when the “intelligence community” and the media, in the US and abroad, defrauded their citizens into believing that Russia had an agent of the Kremlin, a dictator, a criminal running the country. The result of that charade is the total moral panic Trump’s detractors now find themselves trapped within. He has become a folk devil. As a result, they have become the petty despots they claimed to have feared. Every time they mention democracy, the rule of law, or some other bromide, we are only reminded of how quick they are to violate them.

Says an election denier, a climate denier, and a Trump defender. :rofl:

All the buzzwords in a row, well done. And an emoji icing on top. We’re racking up a fine record of insight here.

I'd enjoy it if the stakes weren't so high.

To answer your question, No, there is nothing wrong with what Trump or Biden did with so-called classified documents.

Up is down and black is white. Don’t try to reason— just enjoy the show.

The most abject conjecture and persistent appeal to authority is their highest degree of evidence, ladies and gentlemen.

I’ve heard the fucking tape. Which classified document is he referencing?

And? You realize the president has the highest declassification powers in the entire US government. Would it worry you if Biden stole and held classified documents for decades, even though he lacked the declassification powers to do so?

Oh dear. And before the appeals, too.

There are plenty wrongly convicted felons. Should the various appeals overturn the results and rebuke the sham trial you fell for you might have to admit the same, I’m afraid. But I’m sure you’ll be quite reticent at that time, won’t you. At least we have you on record.

Trump hasn’t committed any crimes, nor could you name where he did. All I get is emojis.

Biden family corruption is the real problem. 10% to the big guy. But thanks for the tip.

Stop! My abs hurt.

It might be the soy shots, Xtrix.

Prosecutor Mark Pomerantz was on loan from law firm Paul, Weiss, which has huge connections to the Biden regime and his party . Biden appointed prosecutor Michael Colangelo to acting associate attorney general in his own DOJ. Colangelo then left to pursue Trump. Judge Merchan donated to Biden and a political pAC called “Stop Republicans”, in violation of state ethics. Merchan’s daughter rakes in millions from the Biden/Harris campaign.

Biden is attempting to imprison Trump.

And Trump never committed any. They literally have to conjure them out of thin air in order to maintain a delusion.

“How could you support a convicted felon?”

Meanwhile:




But it’s an interesting comparison the way they glorify the Floyd protests, which destroyed the lives and livelihoods and neighborhoods of regular people, and which they demonize J6 and the violence of Trump supporters, which affected really no one but the political elites in Washington. Violent protesters were let off easy for razing city blocks, but if you take a lectern or put your feet on Pelosi’s desk your thrown in the gulag for years. In one law enforcement were demonized, the other law enforcement was lionized. It’s quite the interesting schism.

Now they’re crying about flags. If you needed more evidence of delusion, this is it.

The history of the flag at Justice Alito’s beach house makes its presence more chilling

Don't forget that Clinton committed the actual crime Trump was just convicted of, except of course the SDNY never did anything about it. The difference between Tump and Clinton was Trump was cleared by the FEC, Clinton wasn't.

The FEC fined both organizations after a pair of now years-old complaints — one from the Campaign Legal Center and another from the conservative Coolidge Reagan Foundation — alleged that the party and campaign reported payments to the powerhouse Democratic law firm Perkins Coie as legal expenses, when in actuality some of the money was earmarked for “paying Fusion GPS through Perkins Coie to conduct opposition research on Donald Trump,”

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/30/dnc-clinton-campaign-fine-dossier-spending-disclosure-00021910#:~:text=The%20Federal%20Election%20Commission%20has,the%20now%2Dinfamous%20Steele%20dossier

Two Tiers!

This is a lie.

The prosecutor was the top third man in Biden’s DOJ before he left to try the case. So how is it a lie?

Trump's new campaign ads go hard, capitalizing on Biden's corruption more than Biden is.

Any lawyers?

What is the likelihood that Judge Juan Merchan, who violated state ethics rules by making political donations to the Democrat party and a PAC called “Stop Republicans”, is also the judge presiding over the Trump Org case and the Steve Bannon case? How are these judges supposed to be assigned?

Stop Republicans, an accountability campaign of Progressive Turnout Project, is a grassroots-funded effort dedicated to resisting the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy.

https://www.turnoutpac.org/stop-republicans/

I don’t really care about case text and legalism, especially from a corrupt judicial system. All of that can be bent to suit one’s political will like Bragg and the judge has done here. All this “rule of law” hokum doesn’t mean much when the law is shit.

The repetition of bromides is the game. What they lack, however, is the moral argument. The whole case was wrong to prosecute, wrong to bring to trial, and wrong to convict someone of, let alone to convict one’s political opponents in the lead up to an election. But because they cannot help themselves they did it anyways, and thanks to Trump’s resiliency, I get to sit back and watch the goons expose themselves for the world to see.

In any case, Trump’s political career will soon be over, but the stain of what his opponents have done will remain forever. All of it is now marked in history, along with a litany of other bumbling hoaxes and persecutions, and I can’t help to be happy for it.