I hear you, that all makes sense, and I’ve been hearing it my entire life. When I was young, Social Security was supposed to end before the 21st Century, and yet, here we are.

I believe they’ve just been softening us up to accept it when they finally figure out some mechanism to kill it, and they can say “Well, we always said it couldn’t last,” and we’ll say, “Yeah, it was good while it lasted.”

He looks pretty dinosaury to me.

Dude, I’m sitting next to you at the meeting.

Also valid. When the time comes, we’ll have that discussion in earnest. Sociopathic Oligarchs will not be consulted.

Valid. I’m hoping some decent country takes care of business.

Valid perspective, the main point being that it is imperative that we reconfigure our country so that neither society, nor the government serve the needs of the wealthy, the wealthy serve the needs of government and society. The wealthy have no needs, they are wealthy.

They need to learn that they keep their money at the pleasure of the Citizens, and if they step out of line, or even hint at trouble, the Board of Directors goes to prison, and their entire net worth is confiscated. Do that to a few wealthy families, make them destitute, and have to send their kids to {gasp!} public school, and they’ll learn real quick who they work for.

I’ve thought of that, but then we miss out on the opportunity to piss them off every time we raise it, and that’s so much fun.

I love when rich people start screaming that they don’t have enough money, and the poor get all the breaks, and it isn’t fair. Hilarious.

Dude, I’m not asking you to save US from him, I’m asking you to save YOU from him. He’s now inflicting damage on YOUR country, too. I’m sure of that, and I don’t even know where you live, but wherever it is, he’s hurting you somehow.

They need a skin bag to put all that stuff in, and cover it with some pretty scales or feathers or something.

He’s aced three cognitive tests, and he can tell the difference between a lion, bear, alligator, and…he thinks it was a squirrel, so that proves he’s the smartest president ever.

He’s moving from being an embarrassment to being downright dangerous.

He’s been dangerous to us for a long time, but now he is damaging every other country on the planet. Can’t one of those foreign intelligence agencies deploy an operative to “handle” this situation decisively? Please?

It just occurred to me: I doubt my 26 year old son has ever sent anything in the mail himself. If he wants to send a message, it’s email or text, and if he wants to send a gift, he’ll order it on Amazon and have it delivered. I’ll have to ask him if he’s ever actually mailed anything.

Wow, that was an evolutionary dark alley.

Sure feels like that sometimes.

Seinfeld suggested: “You’re soooo good looking!”

Dude, I live with alligators, actual living dinosaurs. There’s an 8 footer in the pond directly across the street from us. His name is Rocky. He’s always basking on the bank on a sunny day.

Valid. Media Manipulation is the name of the game right now, but that’s so inefficient. You throw out a bunch of propaganda, and hope something gets traction.

Soon, Data Manipulation will be more important. They’ll start tracking all your date points, and soon they’ll find something they can manipulate you over. They’ll find some obscure crime to leverage you with, like a wrong statement on a Federal form interpreted as a deliberate lie, rather than a confused wrong answer. Or they’ll identify patterns, and create laws to make those patterns a crime, and get you on that.

They’ll threaten your family, job, your healthcare, your money, your home, your freedom, and they’ll eventually get you to dance to their tune.

That Social Security is going to collapse. I’ve been hearing it for literally 50 years. I honestly grew up thinking SS would not be there at retirement, and now I’m collecting it (although I’m not retired). It was a psy-op the whole time, trying to keep workers anxious, and at the grindstone.

Social Security is literally the easiest problem in DC to fix. All they have to do is raise the income cap. Right now, the cap is $184,500. You pay into Social Security on the first $184,500 of income, and anything over that doesn’t get touched. If you make less than that, then 100% of your income gets tapped for SS. But if you make more, you pay a much tinier percentage of your total income.

So if SS is looking like a problem, all they have to do is raise the cap. It goes up a bit every year anyway, but there is no reason it can’t be $500,000, or even $1 million. Of course the rich will scream, but they’re always screaming. We have to learn to ignore that as background radiation, nothing to be concerned about.

Raise the cap enough, and you not only protect Social Security forever, you can give Grandma a nice raise. Doesn’t she deserve it for all those delicious cookies? Or brownies actually, in my Grandma’s case. She made the best homemade brownies, and she cut them BIG!

The only math class I ever enjoyed was a college statistics class which actually made sense to me. So I spent my life reading polls, always checking the sample size and the margin of error, because I knew how important those are to accuracy, etc. But that same knowledge also served to let me know that modern polls are becoming horsehit.

I remember hearing Rush Limbaugh telling his listeners to either refuse to take polls, or to lie on them and say the opposite. He, and others, taught MAGAs to disrespect polls (cuz polls are the enemy of predatory politics).

Also, many of the “pollsters” are MAGA operatives in disguise. Add unreliable pollsters to unreliable respondents, and you end up with a weird poll that doesn’t reflect reality at all.

I no longer enjoy tracking polls. Too many of them have been games.

I inherited my grandfather’s robber baron fortune, I’m a GENIUS!