It’s weird to me to think that aliens may come from a planet where a great deal of their time is spent watching television or movies.
Good or bad, it’s exciting to me that I might witness something extraordinary and humanity-changing in my lifetime.
I can’t lie. My pasta salad has been better since I stopped making my own vinaigrette and started using Zesty Italian.
SCYakMan retweeted
You're a 19 year old kid.
You are critically wounded and dying in the jungle somewhere in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam .
Its November 14, 1965 . LZ (landing zone) X-ray.
Your unit is outnumbered 8-1 and the enemy fire is so intense from 100 yards away, that your CO (commanding officer) has ordered the MedEvac helicopters to stop coming in.
You're lying there, listening to the enemy machine guns and you know you're not getting out.
Your family is half way around the world, 12,000 miles away, and you'll never see them again.
As the world starts to fade in and out, you know this is the day.
Then - over the machine gun noise - you faintly hear that sound of a helicopter.
You look up to see a Huey coming in. But.. It doesn't seem real because no MedEvac markings are on it.
Captain Ed Freeman is coming in for you. He's not MedEvac so it's not his job, but he heard the radio call and decided he's flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire anyway.
Even after the MedEvacs were ordered not to come. He's coming anyway. And he drops it in and sits there in the machine gun fire, as they load 3 of you at a time on board.
Then he flies you up and out through the gunfire to the doctors and nurses and safety. And, he kept coming back!! 13 more times!!
Until all the wounded were out. No one knew until the mission was over that the Captain had been hit 4 times in the legs and left arm.
He took 29 of you and your buddies out that day. Some would not have made it without the Captain and his Huey.
Medal of Honor Recipient, Captain Ed Freeman, United States Army, died at the age of 81, in Boise, Idaho.
God bless our vets!
I’m only interested in UFO’s that make 90 degree turns at speed or accelerate instantly. No more floaters please.
I’d vote for you.
Why I'm Voting For Donald Trump.
This is a sentence I didn't see myself writing not even a month ago.
I've been a disenfranchised, politically homeless voter since 2019.
As a former Democrat, I grew tired and insulted at their constant lying, gaslighting, and looking down on the voting base.
I felt like I wasn't really supporting a party - I was expected to vote for them because they are the 'good guys'. Not voting Democrat automatically made me a bad person, and forget it if I voted Republican. I'd be labeled a literal fascist.
Once I realized this was the core messaging of the party - not one of ideas or trying to make the country better, but one of virtue, I left.
Since, I felt like we were picking between the lesser of two evils - that an agent or administration that tirelessly worked for true, large scale, positive change did not exist.
Instead, we would have to be happy with a slow march towards certain collapse.
This is because I feel that the current state of politics and government is extremely inefficient, wasteful, and corrupt. It's a machine that chews up and spits out anything that attempts even the vaguest form of big change.
It makes almost everyone - especially as of late - bend to its will. This has resulted in increasingly terrible trends as a society.
A ballooning Federal budget. A $35 trillion deficit. Yearly interest payments that are larger than our defense budget. A cozy and corrupt relationship between industry and regulators. Awful health outcomes. Incredibly expensive healthcare, higher education, and housing. A spike in anxiety and depression. An obsession with limiting the speech of the people.
Almost everything important has been moving in the wrong direction, and I felt hopeless.
But, I became very excited at the thought of an RFK Jr. presidency in 2024. I thought RFK would have a legitimate chance of breaking open the system and bring new, fresh ideas to the table.
His controversial past didn't bother me, but what really impressed me was his willingness to have open, long form, complex dialogues about literally any topic.
I found him to be well researched and well read in many different areas, and I got a sense that he truly cared about the country. I didn't agree with everything, but I sensed his honesty and his well-meaning nature. I thought he would make a great leader.
This was in stark contrast to the usual, boring, borderline insulting caricatures that politicians are today.
Then, the Democrat party pushed him out. My disdain for the Democrats grew to an all-time high, but RFK running as an Independent took my excitement to a whole new level.
Then - he dropped out. Hopelessness returned.
However, something changed in the last few weeks as I've really started to analyze the current state of the race.
It started with me noticing that Trump was receiving the same legacy media treatment that Tesla and Elon Musk have traditionally received - both stories that I've followed very closely for a really long time.
If I could make a dollar for every false or misleading story about either of those two, I would be the world's first trillionaire (at least publicly known).
This made me realize that a lot of my preconceived notions about Trump were misplaced.
This was further reinforced by his long-form podcast run. I was able to listen to countless hours of Trump speak without the distortion lens from Legacy Media.
Legacy Media's obsession with lying painted an unfair picture in my brain of Trump, and once that became clear, my immediate dismissal of Trump faded.
He is far from perfect, but I do not think he's an evil figure.
For every fault that Trump does exude, I can identify the same thing on the other side that is far worse - namely the cover up of the Hunter Biden Laptop which was literal election interference, the awful measures during COVID that literally destroyed the lives of countless families, and the government's obsession with silencing dissent - a literal violation of the first amendment.
So now that both sides are on much more even footing, the following became clear.
First - not voting is not an option. Having the perfect candidate will never exist, and as a citizen of the country, it's my duty to vote for the options that are in front of me.
I can try to enact change while voting for what we have. Not doing so, by default, is a wasted chance to shape the future for the benefit of my family.
Second - given that I will vote, I need to analyze the most important variables to me and make a decision on which candidate is likeliest to execute on them.
For me, it's very simple - our current system is broken. Government is far too large, it wastes far too much, and it generates the exact opposite outcomes far too often.
The system needs a hammer.
I was extremely fortunate to work in environments where we got done way more than anyone else with way less than anyone else. It's possible. It's a matter of strong leadership, getting the right people, and empowering them to make it happen.
It can be done. It hurts and it's super hard, but it can be done. You can start at the government execution level, and then allow that culture to set the standard for the rest of government.
Once the people can see and feel that it can be done, candidates and the people will be inspired to get public servants in there that will make positive change like it's never been done before.
Now the question becomes - which of the two choices in front of me is more likely to execute against this vision?
If I look at the Harris campaign - I see not only more of the same, but more of the same on steroids.
I view the Harris campaign as an extension of the Biden campaign, which is currently being helmed by a person with beyond obvious cognitive challenges.
By default, this means that Biden is not really running much of anything in earnest - it's the system behind him that's running everything. The same system that I view as inept and corrupt.
Kamala has done nothing in my eyes to create any meaningful separation from this. If anything, with the endorsement from pro-war Neocons like Dick Chaney and others, all that tells me is that the Democrat party is the system party to the maximum.
I should not expect any meaningful change with the Democrats in charge. If anything, the current trend will likely get worse, with the military industrial complex growing stronger, the size of government growing bigger, and the continuation of more of the same.
In my eyes, this path leads to certain ruin, and furthering this by any meaningful distance makes no sense.
However, when I look at the Trump admin, I see a legitimate chance for real change.
I see a cohort of nontraditional members leading the party. RFK Jr. Tulsi Gabbard. Elon Musk. Vivek Ramaswamy. Nicole Shanahan.
For starters, this is a diverse group of people with different backgrounds and different moral viewpoints that have come together under one nontraditional candidate.
Each one represents ideals that I closely relate with, but set that aside.
By default, a nontraditional set of members, especially members like Elon Musk, will have a higher chance of enacting large scale, positive change vs the alternative.
The alternative is a guarantee of the continuation of more of the same.
I cannot vote for more of the same.
But I can vote for big change - even if the chance is small - because not voting increases the chance of more of the same continuing.
And so the question becomes - what are the chances that they cannot enact big change? What if it turns out that Trump's team does the opposite and they make everything way worse?
Yes - that's definitely a risk. But the reality is that the Democrats will for sure not enact large scale positive change. The chance of that is as close to 0% as you can get.
However small it may be, under Democrat leadership my feeling is that the path towards ruin will continue.
But with Trump, the chance of a massive reversal exists. And I am much more willing to vote for the chance to make it much better than to continue on the march towards ruin.
And in the worst case, I have faith in the American system to throw out a Trump administration if it truly does get out of hand, but I personally do not see that happening.
If it keeps going this way, we're leading ourselves to ruin. Why not give ourselves a chance instead?