Personally, I’m sure that certain prominent GOPers (Trump, Lindsay Graham, Marco Rubio, and very possibly dozens of others) have been blackmailed (possibly by Putin) into taking the positions they have. I’m not sure that solid evidence will ever emerge, but that isn’t necessary for me to maintain this belief.
Do you have any opinions that are firmly held but supported by nothing?
IS this thread to mention Jeffrey Epstein may have NOT commit suicide?
Definitely. What DO you think happened? Murder? By whom?
I honestly don’t know what happened.
But I find hard to believe Epstein managed to killed himself without outside help or without the security have been paid to look the other way.
I hadn’t considered blackmail, but I firmly believe they all have Russian money in their campaign chests, among other places.
It’s 9:30 Friday night. I firmly believe I’ll have another.
Blackmail, bribery, or some third thing, who knows. But the number of complete 180s people did on supporting Trump, and continuing to support him despite his obvious corruption when they had the power in their hands to remove him from office not just once, but twice, is inexplicable to me any other way.
I mean, they wouldn’t even impeach him after he lost the damn election!
I can understand not impeaching him in January of 2020, when they still thought they had a shot at winning. That’s just the usual ridiculously partisan shit we’ve come to expect. But they still refused to impeach when it literally would cost them nothing, while giving them at least the appearance of taking the rule of law seriously.
The Right loves to say that Hillary had Epstein killed. I believe (without evidence) that someone in trump’s circle had him killed.
I also believe, and have gotten grief for it here, that some of the experiences identified under the heading of “paranormal phenomenon” (ghosts, UFOs, swamp lights etc) are actually something that can be identified and explained (and are NOT ghosts or UFOs) using science, but the extreme resistance to the idea that the people reporting are not liars or mentally ill will prevent any serious investigation. They skeptics minds are so make up they are as rigid as the “true believers” are.
Taiwan has the bomb. They have a large belligerent neighbor, were best buds with South Africa for decades when both were fellow pariah states, thousands of western educated PhDs, at one point 6 nuclear power plants, etc. “Sure, you can invade and win but Shanghai will be glass, your move.”
I just used this quote in another thread but…
“The whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret!”
–Dr Strangelove
I think Trump came to some sort of financial arrangement with Putin to postpone his invasion of Ukraine until after his presidency ended. Trump is a well known POS and junior varsity political strongman (in the sense of picking a country to rule where he could be voted out of office). I very much believed he offered some sort of deal like “wait until the next dipshit becomes POTUS and I’ll cut you in on this big thing I’m doing.”
As for the rest of them, who knows? I don’t think they are “blackmailed”. I think they recognize that Trump has been declared King of the Idiots and that’s who their base is.
I believe some NFL games are rigged; same for certain other sports.
There’s a weird amount of people on the Internet who claim they’re Americans and will complain openly about how bad America is but they all use British English spelling and idioms (Using Colour not Color, and Mum instead of Mom) and will also talk about stuff that isn’t American at all but distinctly European (Somebody claiming to be America but complaining about the sheer amount of pay toilets at fast food places)
I don’t know if they’re Russian bots or just Western Europeans with way too much time on their hands (since they’re almost all very left leaning and anti-capitalist), but I’m convinced there’s some weird Anti-American group funding them.
Because you have mentioned this before, several years ago, I asked someone who worked for the Taiwan Defense Ministry in a middle level position, but not in that field, and he said it’s certainly possible but who knows.
I grew up a Mormon, and firmly believed many, many things with zero evidence so I shy away from that now.
Some days, my belief that my adolescent children will be fine as adults seems to be without merit.
I could easily believe he isn’t even dead. He’s probably living on a private island somewhere living just like he always did.
This thread has taken a fairly political tack, so I’ll be the exception.
I firmly believe, with zero direct evidence, that we are not the only intelligent life in the cosmos.
I say direct evidence, because there is none. Indirect support is copious: some knowledge of the chemistry of life, combined with the known preponderance of water; the confirmed vast number of extrasolar planets just in our galactic neighborhood; the sheer overwhelming size of the broader universe; and so on. But these are merely a statistical background against which one may draw the inferential conclusion that the presence of intelligent life on our planet alone would be incredibly unlikely.
I choose to embrace the statistical likelihood as a personal certainty.
That being said, I do not believe that the extraterrestrials are visiting us, or are even aware of us; the cosmic speed limit makes interstellar travel prohibitively difficult, as far as we currently understand. And given the mind-mending scale of cosmic time, it’s also very likely that however many extraterrestrial civilizations may be found elsewhere in the universe will have preceded us by many eons, or has yet to arise by a similar margin.
But I’m still sure they’re there.
I’m close to Cervaise’s position on alien life.
Although there is no evidence, we know that life exists on one planet. Since the Universe is truly vast, there is a reasonable chance there is life elsewhere.
I know the point of this thread is not about debating the beliefs that people are stating, but I can’t help myself on this one. As you point out, Trump is a junior varsity player. His real access to money is probably several decimal points lower that what he touts to the public. Putin probably has 1000x the wealth that Trump can command. If Trump had any kind of “deal” that he thinks Putin would want in on, it would be a big nothing-burger or Putin would just take it away from him (ala Kraft’s Super Bowl ring).
I’m with you.
How can anyone look at the Hubble Deep Filed, with its at least 3000 galaxies, each with probably 100 billion stars, and think there is NO life there at all.
https://cdn.spacetelescope.org/archives/images/wallpaper5/heic0611b.jpg
I was watching something one day where people were complaining about gambling on pro sports. Someone from the gambling world replied that betting made more games interesting—it may be obvious that team A is going to beat team B, but what’s the spread? That will make it interesting to watch.
So if fixing occurs on a much less dramatic scale than the Black Sox scandal, it wouldn’t surprise me. Pay off enough members team A to win buy only a touchdown instead of two so the spread isn’t covered and a gambler can cash in. The team’s playoff hopes won’t be affected and there’s an extra pay day.
The tip of the iceberg: what we suspect of Trump’s malfeasance is only about 10% of his total evil. But we won’t see most of it for decades if ever.