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Originally posted by second:
20 things that make Republicans weird

1. The FBI was secretly behind the January 6 insurrection.

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Originally posted by THG:
tick tock

T

Pete Buttigieg thinks a victory for Kamala Harris might loosen Donald Trump’s grip on the G.O.P.

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Quote:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:

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Originally posted by second:
20 things that make Republicans weird

20.The 2024 Olympics were ruined by a brief tableau that looked vaguely like The Last Supper.

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It was disgusting. WTH were the organizers thinking???

But given how "the left" misrepresents everyone who disagrees, I doubt this is at all accurate.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh, get fucked, Wetware.

Why do you constantly defend these degenerates? Democrats would have a much easier time winning elections if they threw the child grooming trannies in the pit where they belong.

The L's and the G's and the B's are fine. Cut everyone else off, and get them the mental help they need. That's what the L's and the G's and the B's want too, but you never listen to them since MSNBC does all of your thinking for you.



In the meantime, this will be the least watched Olympics in decades.

You asked for it, you got it. This whole thing is going to cost the taxpayers of France and Paris in particular a whole lot of money when it's all over.

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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Did you actually watch the damn thing, Wetware?

It's only 35 minutes long. I'm sure you can pull yourself away from your chronic internet porn addiction long enough to watch it.

Trump had that audience rolling the whole time.



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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Originally posted by second:
"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.

A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.

And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want."

- Hannah Arendt
German historian and philosopher
(1906 - 1975)

https://www.auburn-reporter.com/opinion/once-upon-a-time-when-the-trut
h-still-mattered-whales-tales/

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Huh.
Are you posting about our government and media?

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And then there are the lies of bullies and mob bosses and populist autocrats and deepstate cabals and transnational overlord wannabes and their colluding minions , which are special and worse. These last, call them power-lies, are distinguished by the fact that they aren’t even helped by plausibility.

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Quote:

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Originally posted by second:

Quote:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Did you actually watch the damn thing, Wetware?

It's only 35 minutes long. I'm sure you can pull yourself away from your chronic internet porn addiction long enough to watch it.

Trump had that audience rolling the whole time.



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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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If Trump loses, you will claim the Democrats stole the election.

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Oh. You mean like you all did when Clinton lost in 2016.

Welcome to the new world. It's going to be like that for both sides from here to eternity, Wetware.

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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

Quote:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:

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And then there are the lies of bullies and mob bosses and populist autocrats and deepstate cabals and transnational overlord wannabes and their colluding minions , which are special and worse. These last, call them power-lies, are distinguished by the fact that they aren’t even helped by plausibility.

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You forgot something ...

Yep! Joe Biden was on top of his game and running the show!

The deepstate doesn't exist!

Trump was hit by a piece of shrapnel.

The assassination attempt was just a colossal series of unbelievable fuckups by a DEI patsy appointee!

TRUMP RUSSIA COLLUSION!

Insurrection!

Mostly peaceful BLM/ANTIFA riots!

Men can be women and women can be men!

*****

The list of official lies is legion and deserves its own thread.

I'm surprised you forgot to mention them.


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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Quote:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

You forgot something ...

Yep! Joe Biden was on top of his game and running the show!

The deepstate doesn't exist!

Trump was hit by a piece of shrapnel.

The assassination attempt was just a colossal series of unbelievable fuckups by a DEI patsy appointee!

TRUMP RUSSIA COLLUSION!

Insurrection!

Mostly peaceful BLM/ANTIFA riots!

Men can be women and women can be men!

*****

The list of official lies is legion and deserves its own thread.

I'm surprised you forgot to mention them.

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Quote:

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Originally posted by second:

Quote:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

You forgot something ...

Yep! Joe Biden was on top of his game and running the show!

The deepstate doesn't exist!

Trump was hit by a piece of shrapnel.

The assassination attempt was just a colossal series of unbelievable fuckups by a DEI patsy appointee!

TRUMP RUSSIA COLLUSION!

Insurrection!

Mostly peaceful BLM/ANTIFA riots!

Men can be women and women can be men!

*****

The list of official lies is legion and deserves its own thread.

I'm surprised you forgot to mention them.

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Q16: What, if anything, could Republicans do to get you to vote for them?

A: Reject all nutty conspiracy theories. Fully, 100% commit to the peaceful transfer of power. Acknowledge the empirical reality of human-caused climate change, and the need for both technological and legislative measures to slow it and mitigate its impacts. Support abortion rights, or at least a European-style compromise on abortion. Republicans can keep the anti-wokeness stuff, which actually seems to have become their defining issue. If they do all that, and also the Democrats are taken over by frothing radicals who want to annihilate the state of Israel and abolish the police … that’s, uh, probably the point when I start voting Republican.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8172

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Wetware would never vote Republican. It is not in it's coding.

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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Quote:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
You forgot something ...

Yep! Joe Biden was on top of his game and running the show!
The deepstate doesn't exist!
Trump was hit by a piece of shrapnel.
The assassination attempt was just a colossal series of unbelievable fuckups by a DEI patsy appointee!
TRUMP RUSSIA COLLUSION!
Insurrection!
Mostly peaceful BLM/ANTIFA riots!
Men can be women and women can be men!
The list of official lies is legion and deserves its own thread.
I'm surprised you forgot to mention them.

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Quote:

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Originally posted by second:

Quote:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Wetware would never vote Republican. It is not in it's coding.

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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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The reason I won't vote

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Quote:

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Originally posted by second:
A New York state appeals court on Thursday rejected Donald Trump's challenge to a gag order in his hush money criminal case, where the former U.S. president was convicted in May on charges stemming from hush money paid to a porn star.

The decision by the Appellate Division in Manhattan means the Republican presidential nominee cannot comment publicly about individual prosecutors and others in the case until Justice Juan Merchan sentences him on Sept. 18.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/trump-loses-appeal-gag-order-hush-money-
criminal-case-2024-08-01/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Quote:

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Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump stated on July 31, 2024 in an NABJ conference appearance:

Kamala Harris was “Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn and she went, she became a Black person.”

Fact check by PolitiFact: Trump is a Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/jul/31/donald-trump/donald-
trumps-pants-on-fire-claim-at-nabj-about-ho/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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As she campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harris often invokes her late mother, Shyamala, a diminutive and dauntless breast cancer researcher who taught Kamala and her younger sister, Maya, to strive for excellence and lift others up.

These were principles Shyamala inherited from Gopalan and her mother, Rajam. In 1958, she surprised them by applying for a master’s program at UC Berkeley, a campus they had never heard of.

She was 19, the eldest of their four children, and had never set foot outside India. Her parents dug into Gopalan’s retirement savings to pay her tuition and living costs for the first year.

“It was a big deal,” said Harris’ uncle G. Balachandran, a 79-year-old academic in New Delhi. “At that time, the number of unmarried Indian women who had gone to the States for graduate studies — it was probably in the low double digits. But my father was quite open. He said, ‘If you get admission, you go.’”

It sounds today like a classic immigrant tale, but Harris’ grandparents’ broad-minded values were uncommon for the India of that time. That family legacy doesn’t shine through in Harris’ speeches on the campaign trail, where she has struggled to break into the top tier. She seldom delves into her Indian heritage, reflecting a broader reticence to share personal stories beyond a handful of well-worn anecdotes.

“Shyamala was quite definitely influenced by my father, and she in turn had a great influence on Kamala,” Balachandran said in a lengthy conversation in his home, a modest, semidetached apartment his father built on land he was given upon retirement. Much of the family’s story was related by Balachandran and his daughter. Other family members declined to be interviewed.

Gopalan was a Brahmin, part of a privileged elite in Hinduism’s ancient caste hierarchy. In post-independence India, convention destined Brahmin offspring for arranged marriages and comfortable careers in academia, government service or the priesthood — if they were men. Women were not expected to work at all.

All four of his children bucked convention in their own ways.

Balachandran, who earned a PhD in economics and computer science from the University of Wisconsin and enjoyed a distinguished academic career in India, married a Mexican woman and had a daughter. His younger sister Sarala, a retired obstetrician who lives outside the coastal city of Chennai, never married. The youngest, Mahalakshmi, an information scientist who worked for the government in Ontario, Canada, had an arranged marriage but bore no children.

“Not one of them was traditional,” said Harris, who grew close to her aunts and uncle during extended visits to India as a girl.

“When you’re raised in a family, I guess later in life you realize how your family might be different,” she said. “But it all seemed very normal to me. … I obviously did realize as an adult, and as I got older, that they were extremely progressive.”

Gopalan was born in 1911 in Painganadu, a village ringed by temples about 180 miles south of Chennai, then known as Madras. His marriage to Rajam, who was raised in a nearby district of Tamil Nadu state, was arranged.

He started out as a stenographer, and moved the family from New Delhi to Mumbai to Kolkata as he climbed the ranks of the civil service.

In her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” Harris wrote that Gopalan had been part of India’s independence movement, but family members said there was no record of him having been anything other than a diligent civil servant. Had he openly advocated ending British rule, he would have been fired, Balachandran said.

Raised mainly by Rajam — a no-nonsense woman with a soft spot for stray animals — the children were studious but occasionally got into mischief. Shyamala and Balachandran, whom the family calls Balu, were about two years apart and partners in high jinks. They would hide under beds, prompting Rajam to root them out with a broom handle.

In 1950s Mumbai, then known as Bombay, where Gopalan was posted as a senior commercial officer at India’s busiest trading hub, there were clear rules at home: To thwart businessmen who wanted to offer bribes, no strangers were allowed to enter the family residence on Pedder Road in the heart of the city, and the children were not to accept any deliveries.

But when visitors arrived bearing parcels, Shyamala and Balachandran would sometimes peek inside.

“If it was sweets or fruits, we’d say, ‘OK, you can give it,’” Balachandran said.

Shyamala was a gifted singer, specializing in the classical Carnatic music of southern India, a discipline she learned from her mother. She won a gold medal in a national competition and occasionally sang on the radio, earning a small bit of cash.

And unlike many Indian parents back then, Balachandran recalled, they let Shyamala keep the money.

At Lady Irwin College, then one of the top women’s institutions in New Delhi, Shyamala studied home science, which encompassed nutrition, textiles and childhood development. It mainly trained students for lives as homemakers, and her father seemed to think the subject was beneath her.

“What is home science?” Balachandran remembered him needling her. “Are you learning how to invite guests?”

Rajam, who was active in raising funds for social causes, was determined that the children pursue careers in medicine, engineering or the law.

“My grandparents had really high expectations of their kids and were nurturing,” said Balachandran’s daughter, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Maryland.

“I do think now of just how permissive they were in allowing their daughters to leave them, but also of how bold the daughters were to want to leave to begin with,” she said. “And given that Shyamala was the oldest, she really set the stage for the rest of the siblings to follow in her path.”

When Shyamala left to study nutrition and endocrinology at Berkeley, eventually earning a PhD, most Indian households didn’t have phone lines. The family stayed in touch through letters, handwritten on lightweight, pale-blue stationery known as aerograms that took about two weeks to travel between India and California.

At the American library in New Delhi, Gopalan found an atlas with a street map of Berkeley. He looked up Shyamala’s address and traced her commute to campus. On her first trip home, Shyamala brought happy souvenirs of her new American life: vinyl jazz records by Louis Armstrong and Dave Brubeck.

She joined the black civil rights movement, where she met a brilliant Jamaican economics student named Donald Harris. When she and Harris married in 1963 — in what in India is still described as a “love marriage” — it marked an even greater challenge to convention, especially because she didn’t introduce him to her parents beforehand.

Donald Harris’ race wasn’t an issue for Shyamala’s parents, Balachandran said, but “the fact that she didn’t marry in India might have upset them, and the fact that it was someone they didn’t meet.”

No one from the family attended the wedding, but Balachandran said that was because of financial reasons. He had just gone off to study in Britain, and money at home was tight.

A few years later, Shyamala and Donald brought their daughters to Zambia. Kamala would have been 4 or 5 years old; Maya, two years younger, was still sleeping in a crib. The young Kamala was oblivious to the intrigue swirling around her, with Gopalan’s government-issued car whisking him to meetings with Zambian officials and diplomats dropping by for visits.

What she remembers is the soil of Lusaka, rich with copper, which glowed a fiery red.

After Shyamala divorced Donald in the early 1970s, she brought her daughters back to India often, usually to Chennai, where her parents settled after Gopalan retired. As the eldest grandchild, Kamala sometimes tagged along on Gopalan’s walks with his retiree buddies, soaking up their debates about building democracy and fighting corruption in India.

“My grandfather felt very strongly about the importance of defending civil rights and fighting for equality and integrity,” Harris said. “I just remember them always talking about the people who were corrupt versus the people who were real servants.”

In photos, Gopalan stares gravely from behind oversized glasses, but with his granddaughters he cracked sly jokes. When Rajam left the house, Gopalan, a strict vegetarian who avoided even eggs, sometimes cast Harris and her sister a conspiratorial look and said: “OK, let’s have French toast.”

He taught Harris to play five-card stud poker. If she misbehaved, Gopalan would take her into another room and pretend to slap her on the hand — urging her to shriek in mock pain — before reemerging to tell Shyamala, “I handled it.”

Harris wore saris for family events and spoke a few Tamil phrases with her relatives. Shyamala was determined that the girls retain links to India even as she understood — as Harris wrote in her memoir — “that she was raising two black daughters” in an America that would see them as black.

“There was never a question that they were Indian,” said Balachandran Orihuela, 36. “I don’t think she felt conflicted about it. She told the girls, ‘You are Indian; you are black. You don’t have to prove that you’re one or the other.’”

Shyamala bore the hidden scars of discrimination — Harris has said she was passed over for promotions and dismissed as unintelligent because of her accent — and dispensed lessons to her family and graduate students of color with the same sharp, sassy wit.

Her toughness became well known. After she had back surgery, she would work from the bedroom of her spacious condo overlooking Lake Merritt in Oakland, sitting up on her adjustable Tempur-Pedic mattress amid a sea of papers.

Balachandran Orihuela, who lived with Shyamala as an undergraduate at Oakland’s Mills College, recalled extended conversations surrounding race following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Shyamala warned her that American men would call her exotic, a term she said was meant to diminish her.

“The minute they call you exotic, you walk away from them and tell them to f--- off,” Balachandran Orihuela remembered her saying. If anyone asked where she was from, Shyamala admonished her to answer: “None of your business.”

Shyamala died in 2009 of complications from colon cancer. She was 70. Rajam passed away later that year.

In her cousin Harris, 18 years her senior, Balachandran Orihuela sees glimmers of her aunt’s intensity and focus, as well as her warmth. When Harris arches an eyebrow during a presidential debate, the feisty skepticism reminds her of Shyamala.

“There’s very little ambiguity, very little moral relativism to debate with Kamala,” she said, “and Shyamala was very similar.”

In February 1998 — the month Harris was appointed assistant district attorney in San Francisco, beginning her political rise — she traveled to India to visit Gopalan, who was 86 and ailing.

Two weeks after her visit, he passed away.

One of Harris’ fondest memories of Gopalan’s final years was in 1991, when the whole family gathered in Chennai to celebrate his 80th birthday. It had been at least 20 years since everyone was together, and Rajam — by then great-grandmother to Maya’s daughter, Meena — insisted that they all stay in their three-bedroom apartment, on a quiet, tree-lined street a few blocks from the beach.

Overwhelmed with pride at having four generations under her roof, Rajam urged them not to venture outside in one group, lest the evil eye fall on her extended brood, Balachandran recalled.

Harris, who was about 27 at the time, remembered a house bristling with strong personalities, her aunts and uncle suddenly reverting to the role of children. Rajam quibbled with Shyamala, two forces of nature colliding in the ground-floor flat.

“It was just a whole scene,” Harris said with a laugh, “and by the end of it we went to a hotel.”

Bengali reported from New Delhi and Mason from Los Angeles.

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Quote:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Quote:

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Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump stated on July 31, 2024 in an NABJ conference appearance:

Kamala Harris was “Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn and she went, she became a Black person.”

Fact check by PolitiFact: Trump is a Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/jul/31/donald-trump/donald-
trumps-pants-on-fire-claim-at-nabj-about-ho/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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PolitiFact is lying to you once again.

Here you go...

Educate yourself with some truth for once. We've got tons of video footage, photographs and articles showing she did just that.

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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Quote:

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Originally posted by second:
Kamala Harris' father is Donald Jasper Harris. Both Harris are black. One Harris is also Indian. Take a look at Donald Jasper Harris to see a black father: https://www.google.com/search?q=donald+jasper+harris

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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