<You wouldn't know HONEST if it hit you in the mouth.>

As ever, <fredthestalker> looks in the mirror, finds himself wanting and savages others.

How was your little 'break?

<Ohio Senate Republican candidate Bernie Moreno (R-OH) proposed reparations for White people who fought in the Union army during Civil War in announcing his run for the Congressional seat on Tuesday.

Moreno said that since White Union soldiers died during the war, reparations should be enacted [sic] on their behalf.

“We stand at the shoulders of giants, don’t we?” Moreno said. “We stand on shoulders of people like John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington. That this group of people took on the largest empire in history. They said no, we will not stand for this. That same group of people later, White people, died to free Black people. It’s never happened in human history before, but it happened here in America.”

Moreno claimed, “that’s not talked about in schools very much, is it? They make it sound like America is a racist, broken country.”

“Name another country that did that, freed slaves, that died to do that. You know, when they talk about reparations, where are the reparations for the people in the North who died to save the lives of Black people?” he said. “I know it’s not politically correct to say that, but we gotta stop being politically correct. We gotta call it how it is.”

The Republican candidate, who has the support of former President Donald Trump, is looking to unseat incumbent Sherrod Brown (D-OH) who has held the seat since 2007.

This is Moreno’s second effort at capturing a national seat and spotlight. He attempted to defeat former Senator Tim Ryan (D-OH). Ultimately, Moreno dropped out of the 2022 race which J.D. Vance (R-OH) won.

Moreno was previously a prominent business owner, with several car dealerships. Ohio State Sen. Matt Dolan is currently Moreno’s opponent in the primary.>

Whaddaya think, <lyin' king>? Should those descendants get reparations?

<For centuries, politicians in this country assumed that in order to win an election, you had to convince voters to vote for you. You had to make their case. That was called democracy.

But the defining strategic insight of the modern Democratic Party is they don't really need to convince anyone of anything. What matters is demographics. To import enough people from elsewhere, people who are financially dependent on you in order to live. That's the story of the state of California. That's why California changed. It's why Texas is changing, but it's also happening at the local level all over the country. Democrats have realized that they win the vote in virtually every major city, but the suburbs remain contested and that matters because suburban voters like school boards and state legislators and, of course, members of Congress.

So, if you want total control over the entire country, you need demographic change everywhere, including in the suburbs. This is a very obvious insight and Democrats have been on the case for quite a while. Back in 2009, the Obama administration took the county of Westchester in New York, a solidly Democratic place, to court. Why did they do that? The administration withheld tens of millions of dollars in federal funding unless Westchester pledged to build 10,000 low-income, high-density apartments in their suburbs.

The Obama administration later implemented a rule requiring suburbs to take "affirmative steps to diversify their neighborhoods" or else they would lose federal money. When he took office, Joe Biden threw his support behind something called the Home Act. Among other things, the Home Act would allow the federal government to withhold funds from local governments if they didn't find ways to add high rise apartments or high-density zoning to suburbs.

Specifically, the act would have prevented local governments from enacting "ordinances that ban apartment buildings from certain residential areas or set a minimum lot size for a single-family home." So, you can't be safe in a leafy suburb anymore. It has to be urbanized.

The Home Act has stalled in Congress. It has never become law. But the Biden administration didn't give up just because democracy didn't produce the results they wanted. They still plan to change the suburbs forever by getting rid of them. Joe Biden's HUD secretary, Marcia Fudge, a former member of Congress, explained last year the administration was concerned that African Americans couldn't afford homes not because they're poor, but because home appraisers are racist. Watch.

MARCIA FUDGE: What the president has said is that we have to look at everything through the lens of equity and so what we have realized is that people selling homes just as a person, as you were talking about, and even people buying homes, if they are appraisal is not correct, what we find, especially as Black people in communities of color and underserved communities, is we lose great wealth just through the appraisal process....>

<....So, here's an example. If you have a FICO score of 620, you get a 1.75% discount on your mortgage fees. If you have a 740 score == in other words you pay your bills on time, you've done the right thing, you're a good citizen – you have to pay 1% more. So, you don't get a discount for doing the right thing and paying your bills, you get punished.

We are incentivizing bad behavior. We're hurting the good people. Since the day you were born, you have been told, "Pay your debts. It's not your money. You bought it from somebody else. You have to pay it back. If you don't, it's stealing." Now we're saying if you don't steal, we're going to hurt you and in real life, that means that over the course of a 30-year mortgage for a $400,000 home, that's a swing of more than $14,000, and they're claiming racism to justify this.

Black Americans are the only racial group in this country with average credit scores of under 680. Now, why is that? We don't know. Whites, Hispanics, Asians have higher credit scores. Therefore, as you'd expect, the mortgage style rate for African-American borrowers is higher than the overall population. It’s double in this country's biggest markets, and that's the reason the suburbs have different demographics from the cities. That's called economics.

Now, if you wanted to change that, you would encourage people to have good spending habits and pay back their debt. But they don't care about that. Making people happy or getting them out of debt? No, they want to change the suburbs, make them denser so there be more reliably Democratic voting. That's the bottom line. It's always about election results. It's always about power. It's not about improving anybody's life.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party's donors in private equity, of course, are happy. It will be even harder for Americans with good credit to buy homes. Why? Because that will mean more renters. Renters have homes they own.

LESLEY STAHL: Home ownership is increasingly out of reach.

GARY BERMAN, CEO OF TRICON RESIDENTIAL: In our portfolio, the majority cannot buy homes, cannot afford to buy a home or don't have the credit to buy the homes. I think if you asked a lot of millennials and that tends to be our primary resident, they would probably tell you they don't necessarily desire to own a home or to own a car. They've grown up in the sharing economy and for what's important to them is lifestyle, right, and so if they can move into this, what we call a turnkey or hotel ready home and have a low maintenance lifestyle, that's very compelling for them.

People don't want even, they don't want to own anything! They want to be penniless and impoverished, live with the whims of oligarchs. That's really what they want.

Do you own anything, Mr. Oligarch Guy? She never asked.>

<Aside from master <Petrosianic>, the other two posters are long-time scoundrels with no regard for the truth. They twist or fabricate nearly everything, taking great joy in smearing the good reputations of others. They support government corruption and immorality. Please don't take these dishonest vultures seriously. Unfortunately, the administrators here have a penchant for such sleaZe, turning a blind eye in the name of "entertainment." This is a mostly low-class website now.

Thank you for setting the record straight.

There is no victory for honesty here. You would be wise to leave your statement as is and not return to this malingering website. Evil lurks. Stay away.>

Sounds as though you need a few lessons:

Latin

Merriam Webster

How to be a decent human being

The first two shortcomings are easily remedied; I daresay the last is an impossibility for this bereft soul who is jealous of another here and has never got over the ineluctable fact that he gets no respect from that quarter.

<The first two things to know about rare earths are that they’re not rare and they’re not earths – there, the only minerals joke you’ll ever need. Maybe one more than you need.

In fact rare earths are the series of metallic elements along that little separate bar at the bottom of the periodic table which we all forgot about after high school. You’ll also see them called lanthanides, and they are essential in the modern world. Among other things they’re used to produce the powerful magnets so vital for the wind turbines and electric motors of the carbon-free future.

There are a number of different minerals we can get rare earths from – xenotime, bastnaesite, monazite and so on, but most of them aren't that important. The important source is called “ionic clay”. This is what China gets many of its rare earths from. In fact most of the really fancy magnet metals all come from China and from this mineral. You can get lanthanides from other minerals in other places, but it’s a lot more expensive.

We used to think – until maybe two years ago – that only China had ionic clay. That’s why we were all stuck with their control of the market. They had the cheapest, richest (much the same thing in mining) deposits. If we were going to break free, we’d just have to have subsidies so that suppliers outside China could compete on price.

Politics and subsidies, of course, lead to that nasty sucking sound from our pocketbooks. But being free of China for something so essential might even be worth it. We definitely want more rare earths, and cheaper if possible: and China certainly seeks to use its position in the supply chain for its own ends.

Thus it is that DC politicians have been shouting at the Pentagon for years, insisting there be a bigger stockpile, more support for domestic miners and large subsidies. The military has kept responding that the US doesn’t in fact use that many rare earths, the Pentagon uses only 1 per cent of what the US does and they’re just fine, thank you.

But people tend not to believe the brass hats, because some fairly mad-sounding figures get bandied about. It’s even been stated by some researchers that an F-35 stealth jet contains 920 lbs of rare earths. That's not very much less than you'd find in an MRI scanner. It does seem rather likely that a jet with that amount of magnets in it would remain stuck to the steel deck of the carrier no matter how hard the pilot tried to take off.

But you know how politicians get when they see an excuse to spend our taxes. They made some plans anyway. We are now blessed with the Executive Order on Supply Chains, which results in MP Materials getting a handout. That’s the Mountain Pass lanthanides mine in California: it’s only closed down twice and gone bust once so far this century. There are other domestic projects out there: Round Top has been talked about for a decade now and so on.

But while all this bickering on Capitol Hill has been playing out, the picture has changed. What we’re finding out now, in this last couple of years, is that those ionic clays are not rare and most certainly are not restricted to China and the Burmese border.

Instead they are a common result of granites weathering over millions of years in a subtropical climate. They’re so common in fact that in just the past two weeks four different Australian miners have announced discoveries of them (Larvotto, Australian RE, OD6 and Moho Resources).

This is not investment advice: I would not put your 401K into those miners – let alone mine. The information to be extracted from that data is one level up: what does ionic clay being common mean for the global supply of rare earths?

These aren’t the only finds either: there’s a large one in Argentina already being worked on, and another was announced in Sweden in January.

The meaning of this is that the world is well supplied with that special mineral which gives China the advantage. Therefore China doesn’t have that advantage and so there is no threat....>

<....Another development to expect in three or five years is that rare earths are going to get markedly cheaper as the new – cheaper to mine, more abundant – supply comes online. Plus these new finds are high in just the type of rare earths we want for the fancier end of the magnet market. We don’t need the DC politicians and their attacks on our wallets.

How was all this achieved? By doing absolutely nothing, of course.

Demand increased and supplies appeared uncertain, so prices rose – markets do indeed work like that graph on page two of every economics book ever. Then comes the next stage: prices now being high, capitalists get to work, driven by their lust for profits. Exploration takes place, more stuff is found and/or produced, higher demand is met by higher supply and prices come back down again.

We don’t, in fact, need political meddling in this market (or most others). It makes politicians happy and gives them something to do, but for the rest of us it’s actually making things worse. DC’s subsidy plans are not just unnecessary: they’re positively damaging. Subsidising the mining and processing of those old-school minerals – the bastnaesite and monazite – prevents and limits the use of these new and better ones, the ionic clays.

We’re deliberately keeping the old and inefficient in business, at some expense to ourselves, and getting in the way of the newer and better.

We should stop doing that: and stop fretting about Chinese “control” of rare earths.>

<In a new exclusive, CNN reports that newly-uncovered emails from operatives paid by ex-President Donald Trump’s legal team are now in the hands of election crimes prosecutor Fani Willis.

The new report from CNN reveals emails between Jim Penrose and Doug Logan discussing data from a breached voting machine, and that the emails are in the possession of the Fulton County District Attorney’s grand jury investigation of former President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn election results in Georgia.

The email discussion concerned using the data to “decertify” results from the 2021 Georgia runoff election for United States Senate.

On Friday night’s edition of CNN Primetime, CNN Senior Crime And Justice Reporter Katelyn Polantz laid it all out for anchor Pamela Brown:

BROWN: Newly-revealed text messages show that former President Trump’s legal team didn’t just try, to overturn the 2020 presidential election, in Georgia. They also tried to impact the Senate races, there, in an effort, to keep Republicans, in charge.

CNN’s Katelyn Polantz is in Washington, with this Exclusive.

Katelyn, what have we learned?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: Well, what we’re seeing here, Pam, is that there’s a pattern of the team, around Donald Trump, trying to disrupt the next election. Even after Georgia voted for President, in 2020, at the time, the State was then electing its U.S. senators, in a run-off.

And so, this reporting comes from, our colleague, Zack (ph) Cohen. He’s obtained these text messages, between two men, who were working, on the team, around Donald Trump. One had been hired by Sidney Powell. And they were trying to find election fraud that just didn’t exist.

They were talking about data, on voting machines, in this rural county, in Georgia, where people outside the government had gotten access, to the private information, of the vote.

And then, even after January 6, that riot in the Capitol, in Washington, Trump supporters, in Georgia, were still talking about that data, trying to decertify Georgia’s next vote, for its next senator. Remember, the State was the one that helped flip the Senate, from Republican control, to the Democrats, in 2020.

So, the one man, in these text messages, Jim Penrose, he writes, “Here’s the plan. Let’s keep this close hold. We only have until Saturday to decide if we are going to use this report to try to decertify the Senate run-off election or if we hold it for a bigger moment,” maybe something like a lawsuit contesting the election potentially.

And we know these texts are now in the hands, of the Fulton County District Attorney, Fani Willis, that her team is looking at many possible charges, related to the 2020 election.

We don’t know exactly how this fits, into the investigation. But among many things, Pam, her office has been investigating the breach, of the voter system, the data that was obtained, by Trump-connected people, in this county, in Georgia.>

<Former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake had an altercation with MSNBC's Morning Joe co-hosts, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, at Palm Beach International Airport in Florida on Wednesday, April 19.

Lake alleged that a "handler" accompanying Scarborough and Brzezinski called her a "liar," an "election denier," and "delusional."

"I was leaving [the airport], and I happen to see Joe Scarborough, so I turned around and got on the escalator down," Lake recounted to Steve Bannon on his show War Room on Thursday.

She continued claiming she "just wanted to introduce [herself]."

"You guys spend an awful lot of time bad-mouthing me on your show, and I just wanted to put the human being behind the face that you guys kind of go after."

Things escalated to the point where Lake claimed Brzezinski began to record the confrontation.

"I called her out and said, 'Are you recording this?'" the former GOP candidate said. The TV host allegedly told her "yes," and Scarborough supposedly "scolded" her for doing so.

Kari Lake continues to fight the results of the Arizona gubernatorial race, where Katie Hobbs defeated the Trump-backed candidate by more than 17,000 votes.

She's filed a lawsuit disputing the election results, although Arizona's Supreme Court denied her request to hear the case.

Lake recently threatened to run for Arizona's Senate seat, with the only stipulation being that she doesn't become governor.

She told Bannon, "I want everybody out there in the War Room posse to know we are still in this fight."

The GOP political hopeful claims that she would "blow away the whole field" if she ran but that her focus is on her court case.

"I would consider taking another role and another shot at that position that is available to represent the people of Arizona because they're not being represented right now by Kyrsten Sinema," Lake said.>

perfidious is under a lot of mental torture. His elevator needs repair, and he has the heart of a tin man. Whatever perfidious says should be discounted. It's well beyond a chess disorder. A bad upbringing made perfidious this way.>>

Someone here piously proclaims himself a saviour of CG and relentlessly stalks certain others' posts, all as he is knocking at the door demanding entrance to his state's mental facility.

Everybody else who bothers to read would notice the game label is incorrect: English Opening. FTB notices when lazy once-upon-a-time wannabes get it wrong.>

You need a muzzle.

<....Same editors, same selective stuff, same double standard of fairness/injustice:

<My reward? They deleted my posts and I was given a temporary ban.>>

This is rich: you and the Pernicious Pensacolan, two of the most pompous posters to ever call CG home, banding together.

That 'temporary ban' was the shortest such ever handed down anywhere. Just another pathological liar plying his unsavoury trade.

<....The worst members usually get a free pass so they just get worse. Occasionally the trolls and cyberbullies get in trouble for racists comments, but even that is ignored. It seems most members don't bother to care about standards, fairness/injustice, disproportionate deletions and suspensions until it happens to them....>

You're playing the wrong game with the wrong opponent, <boy>.

<....Keep fighting the good fight master!>

(<Fred> is basically engaging in <ad hominen> attacks, per usual. Subtract that and his post is zero.)>

<....A lot of the kibitzers here are confusing their computer's abilities with those of their own....>

<Columnist Rick Reilly at espn.com ("both men" refers to Federer and Tiger Woods):

<I have talent, no doubt. My advantage is that I know the game well. The reason is that I grew up in it and had a good teacher in my father. I'm sure that whatever I am as a man and a ballplayer comes from the way I was raised. But am I a superstar? Oh, no. I don't think I stack up with the great players in the league.

— Cal Ripken Jr., Macnow, p. 60