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As I wrote elsewhere, The Presidency went from a job where the nation wanted a guy who had ideas and leadership qualities, to sort of like the slot for lead singer in Van Halen.

You can have a killer frontman like David Lee Roth, who excites and tears it up live and propels the band creatively, but who is a trainwreck in terms of everything else in general.

You can get Sammy Hagar, who is ultra competent but not terribly motivating or exciting.

Then there is Gary Cherone, who is great in Extreme but lost in VH.

Trump is Diamond Dave. Bidet is Cherone. DeSantis is Sammy.

Parenthetically, the American People are Eddie, Michael, and Alex-a monster band that is invariant to the guy in the singer slot.

America isn’t voting for competency anymore. We are voting for the Lead Singer of our nation - The Frontman of the United States of America, if you will.

And Trump will win the Diamond Dave vote, which will be drawn to a guy who just lost a case. We hope he learned from his bad personnel etc decisions last time, and this album and tour are better.

Bidet will get the Gary Cherone vote.

…Assuming no fraud.

I saw VH in the DLR era and Sammy era (sorry…I passed on the Gary Cherone era).

Dave is second to none as a frontman. But good grief, shaddap and let the band play a song all the way through! By the 1983 tour, it literally felt like Dave was bringing the band down every third song after the bridge so he could tell some stupid story. It became unbearable.

In many ways, this was Trump 1.0; it was glorious seeing him own the media and give leftists a syndrome, but he could have done so much more from a policy and leadership perspective if he picked some competent personnel and backed off the twitter feed. Just like Dave at the end of VH 1.0, his shtick was unhelpful in 2020. I’m not saying he lost the election fair and square and under him the economy was mighty and we got 3 good SCOTUS picks and no wars. However, the aggregate downside of terrible personnel choices and focus on flair vs anticipating ballot harvesting didn’t help.

Eddie, Michael Anthony, and Alex AS A UNIT was smoking hot every time I saw them. Alex is an ok drummer - he’s no Carl Palmer or Stewart Copeland - and Michael Anthony’s ok bass playing is more than made up for with his superior backing vocals. Eddie, of course, re-launched the guitar as an instrument of mass destruction. As a band, they are like the American people…consistently productive, stupendous, and can blow any other country out of the water regardless of who’s the President.

Van Hagar was polished, streamlined, and in 1986 a little forced. Sammy is a quality singer and guitarist. But it was like DeSantis…a very, VERY effective governor of Florida but nothing like the full-on concert event like when Dave fronted the band.

I also caught Dave on the Eat ‘em and Smile Tour. Now, in some ways THAT combo exceeded Van Halen 1980-1983. Dave, perhaps realizing he needed to STFU and, perhaps, realizing he had a technically superior band, rapped to the audience less. Gregg Bissonette is the tightest drummer I ever saw - he was like a nuclear clock. Steve Vai may be the best guitarist alive along every dimension. And Billy Sheehan is like a lead guitarist on bass. Personally, I hope we get that version of Dave, erm, Trump this time around.

Extreme is an outstanding band with better rockers in their catalog vs the syrupy hits they had. The REAL secret to that band is guitar whiz Nuno Bettencourt, and a rhythm section that is criminally unappreciated. Fun fact: their song Rest in Peace is a sort of anti anti-war song. Quoth Nuno: “Lyrically, there was a lot of stuff going on: we were in the Gulf War at that time, and would watch people with signs outside the White House that said “MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR.” We thought that war is not that simple. Nobody wants war until somebody is invading their country. So we thought about the statement “Make Love, Not War.” We know that America is going into different countries and certain areas, but you hope and have faith that it’s for the right reasons. And when there are genocides and things like that going on, that’s what inspired that period of the Gulf War. We don’t love war - we definitely love “love” more. But it was just saying, “It’s really not that simple.”

Gary Cheron was good in that band…sort of like how Bidet in the early days wasn’t an awful senator (prescinding from the groper bits). But there is nothing from Van Halen 3.0 on peoples music list. That’s Bidet: middle-stage dementia, lost, but able to get animated in the politically-expedient moments (Cherone-Extreme; Bidet: angry and coherent without drugs when talking about guns or conservatives) that appeals to people who detest Diamond Dave-ism and hope and pray that the Extreme version of Gary is still in there, somewhere.

Thus, Trump will get more voters with this “conviction” because the public doesn’t want a Reagan, or Kennedy, or Ike. They aren’t interested in what is written by Thomas Sowell or in Reason or the Federalist Papers. They want a Lead Singer, a Frontman of the United States that is most like David Lee Roth. In that contest - assuming no fraud - Bidet will get trashed because he’s Gary Cheron in Van Halen-utterly forgettable but with a residual fan base from Extreme.

Your mileage may vary.

As I wrote elsewhere, over the years, The Presidency went from a job where the nation wanted a guy who had ideas and leadership qualities, to sort of like the slot for lead singer in Van Halen.

You can have a killer frontman like David Lee Roth, who excites and tears it up live and propels the band creatively, but who is a trainwreck in terms of everything else.

You can get Sammy Hagar, who is ultra competent but not terribly motivating.

Then there is Gary Cherone, who was a big part of Extreme but lost in VH.

Trump is Diamond Dave. Bidet is Cherone. DeSantis is Sammy. Parenthetically, the American People are Eddie, Michael, and Alex-a monster band that is invariant to the guy in the singer slot.

America isn’t voting for competency anymore. We are voting for the Lead Singer of America.

And Trump will win the Diamond Dave vote, which will be drawn to a guy who is full of fight and will pick up a few more votes since he just lost a case. Those voters see the good and bad when he was in command - a few good policies, SCOTUS picks, peace, but absolutely terrible personnel choices and a lot left on the table - and hope he can return us to the Fair Warning days and Unchained. But mostly, they want him to mean tweet and mock the MSM relentlessly. Ya gotta admit, 2017-2019 was fun.

Bidet will now get the Gary Cherone vote. Zzzzzzzz…

And a bunch of people will not vote and instead will listen to Radiohead.

…Assuming no fraud..

I am so glad that this would never happen here.

They sure do.

And you know it, from looking at my attendant commentary.

I just said a prayer for you. Be well.

No doubt.

And still no source for the alleged quote.

Lotta commies here on FR too.

Thanks. It happens every now and then.

We can debate the entertainment merits of Clooney.

That doesn’t change that we are looking at propaganda from a commie.

Over the years, The Presidency went from a job where the nation wanted a guy who had ideas and leadership qualities, to sort of like the slot for lead singer in Van Halen.

You can have a killer frontman like David Lee Roth, who excites and kills live and propels the band creatively, but who is a trainwreck in terms of everything else.

You can get Sammy Hagar, who is ultra competent but not terribly motivating and not your primary pick for frontman.

Then there is Gary Cherone, who is great in Extreme but lost in VH.

Trump is Diamond Dave. Bidet is Cherone. DeSantis is Sammy.

America isn’t voting for competency anymore. We are voting for the Lead Singer of America. Parenthetically, the American People are Eddie, Michael, and Alex-a monster band that is invariant to the guy in the singer slot.

And Trump will win the Diamond Dave vote, which will be drawn to a guy who just lost a case. Bidet will now get the Gary Cherone vote.

…Assuming no fraud.

Again, where is the source?

All I see is a commie virtue-signaling on social media.

It could be, that Russians made up the story, planted it, and are now clutching pearls. Oh the humanity.

As if Putin et al have NEVER harmed or killed a journalist.

Again, maybe this is true…. if so let’s see the evidence. Gimme a recording from VOA. A non-AI video. Anything resembling truth.

So far, all I see are propagandists.

Clooney is a nut bag and who knows what he’s doing with his Tequila money.

But I’m calling BS on this story.

I searched for the source of this allegation. All I could find was a bunch of crank websites quoting each other.

I saw one article indicating that Ms Neistat disclosed this witch hunt to Voice of America. So, over to VOA to find the source:

https://www.voanews.com/s?k=Anna%20Neistat&tab=all&pi=1&r=week&pp=10

No luck.

The data below are mixed, because the denominators include married and non-married people, including children. That said, let’s forge ahead.

Marriage isn’t considered an irreversible bond in our culture anymore. The Commandments are no longer binding. Going to hell for sex outside of marriage is a figment of the imagination. God will forgive you; actually God is a woman…

The progressive era and the advent of socialism brought on by the Depression got that started. Marriage became disposable…it is reversible, it can be undone. It’s caustic to women, and quoth Marx and Engels, “(t)he bourgeois sees his wife as a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.”

Don’t worry son or daughter….you don’t need to do much discernment because you can always lawyer up like mom and dad did. Oh, and friends and family will happily applaud like a circus seal if you dump your spouse. There are Facebook groups and all kinds of social outlets geared toward starting life anew. Indeed, lots of your friends and family are also in a state of mortal sin-it’s not like they’ll tell you to save your soul and work out the problem.

Then we have “research” showing that the kids turn out ok because they don’t see Mom and Dad fighting, that single parenthood can be good for the kids self-esteem, and other nonsense.

Sure…and the shots are safe and effective. Marx and Engels are smiling in hell.

I get that some spouses are tough, and there is mental illness and substance abuse. Guess what? That all existed prior to 1934. Divorce was shameful. It was a one-way ticket to hell. People worked out their problems. As I wrote before, the same mindset that says “I’m against divorce except for cases of ____” is the same demonic mindset that says “I’m against abortion except in cases of _____.”

We need to get people into a pre-1934 marriage mindset. From there, children can grow up in a home that isn’t lead by hypocrites, where religion is seen as VITAL as opposed to a buffet where they can pick and choose morality.

You win Post of the Thread.

The printed divorce rate of 48%, if you click thru, is the failure rate of first marriages. I didn’t validate that calculation.

The annual divorce rate is often calculated wrong, as the number of divorces over the number of weddings in a year.

For example, let’s say we wanted to know the rate at which it rains in a year. Assume we had 100 rainy days in 2022. That means we had 265 non-rainy days in 2022.

The rate of rainy days isn’t 100/265 (37.7%);.

The rate of rainy days is 100/365 (27.2%).

For YEARS, people have reported the “annual divorce rate” as the equivalent of rainy days over non-rainy days. That’s nonsense. The number of annual divorces divided by the number of annual marriages is simply a bogus number.

You must instead take the number of divorces for a given year and divide that by the TOTAL number of married couples in that year - NOT the sum of weddings in a year.

The data get muddy because some states don’t report divorce data at the aggregate level.

However, per https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/loo-divorce-rate-US-geographic-variation-2022-fp-23-24.html, for 2022, the number of women who reported they divorced in the past year increased from 948,862 in 2021 (Marino, 2022) to 989,518 in 2022.

Per this article, in 2022, 67.85 million men and 68.45 million women were married in the United States.

Therefore, the divorce rate in 2022 was 0.989518/68.45 or 1.51%.

Tim foil hat: I believe the bogus appx 50% divorce rate is promoted to encourage divorce…”look - everyone’s doing it.”

Why? Because as much as people rant about libs, or trannys, or Soros or the WEF, the BIGGEST and most destructive force against society is the disintegration of the family.

Hundreds of thousands of self-indulgent men and women throw their children into the wood chipper of life when they get a divorce, so they can get a hotter version or a richer spouse or reach personal fulfillment or other idiotic reasons.

And please don’t tell me “but what about abuse?” That’s the equivalent of pro-abortion people hoisting rape and incest. If your spouse is battering you, please get help and get out of the home, and take the kids with you. Separation is vital.

Divorce is the devil’s solution. It breaks a compact made before God. And it destroys children.

You want to fix America? Start with fixing marriage and the kool aid of divorce.

Eugene Y. Chan, Toronto Metropolitan University

https://theconversation.com/pro-mask-or-anti-mask-your-moral-beliefs-probably-predict-your-stance-148774

Governments around the world have recommended or mandated various behaviors to slow the spread of COVID-19. These include staying at home, wearing face masks and practicing social distancing.

Yet individuals continue to flout these recommendations and ignore explicit rules about wearing face masks. In the U.S., U.K. and Australia, crowds have gathered closely together to protest against lockdowns.

All this poses the question: Why are people not following the rules that protect not only their own health but the health of their community and nation? And how can policymakers and public health officials design better messages to encourage uptake

To be clear, the laugh is directed at Our Betters, not Trump.