You can get it cheaper in town.
Well, sure, around 200 bucks. I an trying to reach across the aisle here. Show some respect for his business acumen. Acknowledge his taste. *
How am I doing?
*
* really, really poor choice of words. Mea culpa.
I didn’t mean during the current war. We should absolutely come to the table and make concessions to get this nonsense over with. Even though I think military action vs. Iran is justified in general, the way we’re going about it and the reasons we claim for this war are wholly bad.
What I was getting at is that as a bad actor (from our perspective) and generally rogue state, the US (and West in general) should have played a lot harder ball with Iran than we did (save Operation Praying Mantis), since the fall of the Shah. They’ve fostered terrorism, destabliized the Middle East, and generally been huge pests in that part of the world for decades. And despite that, we’ve bent over backward to be nice to them for all that time. And it generally didnt work.
I’m all for negotiation, but as von Clausewitz says, “War is merely the continuation of politics by other means”, and I think the point to continue politics by other means was reached long ago, but we didn’t have the backbone to actually do it.
Mamdani and the NYC City Council want to eliminate horse drawn carriages from Central Park. Trump wants to keep them. I just learned about this, but based on my initial understanding. I agree with Trump and disagree with Mamdani.*
*. If I find myself on the same side as Trump, my gut tells me I must be missing something. I’m just not sure what that might be in this particular situation.
The City Council voted 40-7 on it, so it’s not just Mamdani. It seems to boil down to two arguments:
1.) Animal abuse, either real or potential. If animals are actually being over-worked to the severe detriment of their health, I would think better regulation or enforcement of said regulations would be called for. If it is just the argument that any use of horse carriages is abusive, I don’t think I’m there unless someone can give me an excellent reason why it is vastly worse than using horses for any other manual labor like being ridden. Which I’m fine with.
2.) More significant than that it is the argument that it is a safety hazard, especially in this day and age when Central Park has become a more crowded tourist attraction. The Park Conservancy is apparently fully onboard with this ban, citing ~nine incidents in the last year and the one death.
But I’m not necessarily in favor of fully antiseptic and curated experiences. Tens of millions of people visit the park every year. The death was apparently the only one in history. The seven reported injuries in the last year doesn’t add up to much in my mind relative to the number of people in the park, unless you are of the opinion that one injury is one too many. Which I don’t think I agree with.
I might lean Trumpwards on this one as well. Lean. Stopped clocks, etc.
My limited understanding of the issue is that the horses are generally widely mistreated, and that this has been a sore point in NYC for many for a long time.
The main downside here relates to what happens to all the horses when the ban is implemented. It’s not like there’s a big happy farm upstate they can go to and frolic all day in the pastures. There’s a good chance many of them will simply be put down. So the consequence of addressing a real problem may be a worse solution.
Which is not to say that Trump is right. It’s just that more consideration on how to address this may be needed.
“When there is a car accident in the area, of which there are many, they don’t stop cars from entering the Park. So why would they stop the Carriages?” Trump said.
Pssst…who’s gonna tell him?
Honestly, I’m surprised the park wasn’t car-free ages ago. After all, privately-owned autos are pretty optional in Manhattan and if you got to have the handful of traverses to get to the other side more easily, put them in a tunnel.
The horses live inside small stalls inside buildings. They aren’t roaming around a pasture when they aren’t “working”. It must be a depressing life for a horse.
I agree with Trump that there’s a lot of fraud and corruption in government - most of it, his.
He promised to drain the swamp. He never mentioned it was to be in his own pocket.
I agree with Trump that Bill Maher sucks:
Not gonna read through that muck. If anyone took one for the team and cares to summarize, my mental health thanks you in advance.
“Bill Maher is a big poopyhead and his show isn’t as good as mine was”, basically, with about 47 incoherent tangents along the way. You lose nothing in skipping it.
My thanks!
If you’re filling in your bingo card you can tick off “ratings”, “Iran / nuclear weapons”, “Kid Rock”, “Fake polls”, “(being better than) Abraham Lincoln”, “White House renovations”, and “FACTS (in all caps”.
If you had “building a swimming pool in the White House Briefing Room”, “Laughing Machine laughter”, or “major POTHEAD”, give yourself bonus points.
Actually, there is.
I used to run it, in fact. Wallkill Correctional Facility is a minimum security prison in a rural area of the Catskills. Part of the prison is a large farm. And part of that farm is a good-sized horse ranch. Working on the farm is a popular job among prisoners.
So when NYPD horses get too old to work, they’re brought to this upstate farm where they get to spend all day in the country running around in fields with other horses and being taken care of by a group of people who like working with animals.
All that said, I don’t know if the Central Park horse share this happy retirement.
I agree with him that the government is corrupt beyond the imagining of the average American, and that a thorough and brutal cleansing is in order, along with updates & maintenance to the various memorials and exhibits throughout The Capitol. The depth of the corruption and the legislation intended to secure it has never been laid more plain for everyone to see, largely through his efforts (to do other stuff, but he was still the agent of exposure).
He’s going to be remembered as a ‘net good’ for the USA, in the same way a hurricane is good for regulating long term atmospheric temperatures and playing a role in staving off larger climate disasters, but the immediate effects are decidedly unpleasant. I know his motives are impure, but morality only exists on a personal level. In the bigger picture, he’s a medicine and an object lesson.
I can’t agree with Trump on very much. But he has had the positive effect of getting Carney elected in Canada. He has unified divided opinions in the provinces and Europe. And he did act like a genuine badass after an assassination attempt. He has also been featured many times in Doonesbury, which was once clever.
I can picture future SAT problems: Donald Trump is to the United States as the Black Plague is to the Feudal System.