US US Politics General - Discussion of President Biden and other politicians

 

[XYZpdq]

the GOP needs unity under Trump.

that's if they want to win
I'm sure you can understand why Pence and company wants nothing to do with that

 

[Tinfoil]

View attachment 3312495

View attachment 3312501

View attachment 3312505

View attachment 3312507

Can you like thumbnail those things? They take up my whole screen.

that's if they want to win
I'm sure you can understand why Pence and company wants nothing to do with that

We'll probably get NeverTrump 2.0

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

that's if they want to win
I'm sure you can understand why Pence and company wants nothing to do with that

They want to loose with "dignity". It's just so tiresome.

 

[MrJokerRager]

Another piece by VDV.

Joe Biden and Racial Demagoguery (Archive)

Joe Biden has had a long history of racist outbursts. Can we even remember them all? The “put y’all back in chains” insults to an audience of black professionals, his dismissal of black interviewers variously as “you ain’t black” or ”junkie,” his he-man racialist Corn Pop mythologies, his recent condescending reference to a black professional as “boy,” and on and on.

The Left has always contextualized his racial outbursts in the same fashion his decades-long creepy touching, sexual harassment, grabbing, and blowing into the hair and ears of young women and teens were always “just Joe being Joe.”

So it was ironic but predictable that Biden went to Buffalo on Tuesday to leverage the recent carnage from the deranged, eco-fascist, racist, and insane lethal mass shooter of 11 African-Americans. Read the gunman’s manifesto: it is an unhinged collage of green fascist, racist, and politically incoherent mishmash.

Purported right-wing monsters usually don’t hate Fox News and Ben Shapiro or go on endless green screeds. No matter. For Biden, as his midterm rendezvous looms ominously, the Buffalo shooter was useful in smearing his own political opponents. So Biden saw a trip to Buffalo as an opportunity, in a way other mass shootings were not, and made a rare excursion out of his secluded compound.

The Great Asymmetries
Biden’s despicable effort at blaming his political adversaries for the deaths failed for lots of reasons. He mangled his recitations of prior white-on-black shootings by including the recent Dallas shootings of three Asians by an African-American in his catalog of white-supremacist murders.

Biden by intent ignored the near simultaneous mass shooting of Taiwanese parishioners by a deranged Chinese gunman.

Of course, he has said nothing either in the past or in the present about the mass murdering by the black nationalist and BLM sympathizer Darrell Brooks. The latter deliberately used his car to mow down white children and elderly people. Most media outlets, given their selective indifference to the loss of human life, described the killings as done by a wayward SUV, as if it was driven on some sort of autopilot.

The Left in general and Biden in particular scan the daily news for opportunities for racial demagoguery. When black shooters try to gas and maim white commuters on the subway, or when there is an epidemic of anti-Asian hate crimes committed disproportionately by black males, or an unhinged Bernie Sanders activist attempts to murder House Republican leaders, the Left is silent or insists the hard ideology or racism the shooter embraces is either irrelevant or somehow a natural response to some sort of provocation. Again, it selectively sees or does not see connections between political discourse and crazy people who commit mass mayhem—depending entirely upon the political ore to be mined.

The effort to pigeonhole mass shootings for political gain necessarily results in hypocrisy, fantasy, and outright lying. Suddenly cars are animated objects. Black nationalist racial hatred expressed on social media is derided as right-wing talking points. Joe Biden cites African-American shooters of Asians as white-supremacist killers.

In the end, we are left only with the surreal: an Al Sharpton screaming about the culpability of conservatives for the Buffalo shooting—this, from the racial arsonist of the age, who originally came to notice through his racial hatred and anti-Semitism that led to riots and death. Or a raving Joy Reid, known previously for her homophobic tweets and more recently for her nightly harangues about a current white collective that is communally guilty for the sins of those long dead.

One of the strangest ironies is the Left’s denunciation of supposed conservative adherence to the “great replacement theory”—or the fear that nonwhite populations are by design replacing a dwindling white minority, and both are politically predictable by reason of their race or ethnic background. But if that were so, why would white conservatives abhor abortion that disproportionally destroys black and brown lives in the womb?

In contrast, why do good progressives like the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg confess that abortion was targeting the proper people. (“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”) Further, why did current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen argue that black abortions were economically rational? “In many cases abortions are of teenage women, particularly low income, and often black, who aren’t in a position to be able to care for children, have unexpected pregnancies, and it deprives them of the ability, often, to continue their education to later participate in the workforce,” Yellen said last week. “It means that children will grow up in poverty and do worse themselves.”

So once more, the Left projects. Replacement theories are a hallmark of leftist political science. They usually appear in triumphalist books and articles gushing about how “demography is destiny” and “the new Democratic majority” that will doom supposedly white Republicans and conservatives.

Boasts about flipping red and purple states blue follow, as we are lectured that California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico are now blue due to unchecked immigration. So too, we are told, will Arizona and Texas soon follow.

More perniciously, the Left does its best to restrict immigration from areas deemed problematic such as Cuba. So the “great replacement theory” is largely the Left’s name for conservative anger at the intentional destruction of our southern border—most recently in a time of a pandemic—to mainstream illegal immigration for largely selfish political interests. Demographic obsessions are largely a progressive fixation.

Note that the Hispanic populations, galvanized by Biden’s culpably for high fuel prices, hyperinflation, support for radical abortion on demand, and, ironically, open borders, may soon split its political loyalties in November in a way once deemed unimaginable.

If that happens, then the Left will likely recalibrate Mexican Americans as virtual Cubans and thus close the southern border, given illegal immigration will no longer be seen by their own admission as useful demographically.

From Hypocrisy to Projection
Three final points about the Biden demagoguery of race.

First, the hypocrisy on race simply follows the hard-left double-standards on a host of issues.

By all means let us sanction, condemn, and oppose Russia’s vicious attack on Ukraine. But the Left shows no such animosity toward a far greater existential threat to the United States—Communist China. It has destroyed an independent Tibet. It has absorbed and ruined a once democratic and free Hong Kong. It promises to end autonomy and democracy for Taiwan. And it has bullied and threatened every other consensual government in its neighborhood, from Australia and Japan to South Korea and the Philippines.

The Left ignores Chinese culpability for hiding and obstructing the truth about the Wuhan lab origins of COVID-19 that has nearly wrecked civilization as we once knew it. It calls racist anyone who worries that China is waging a systematic effort to steal all the technology and research it can from the United States.

Almost every leftist dominated institution, whether defined as corporate America, professional sports, Hollywood, or academia, refuses to call out systemic Chinese racism, reeducation camps, and the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur minorities, largely due to lucrative joint ventures.

Similarly, the Left applies different standards to its own. In summer 2020, some 120 days of rioting, $2 billion in property damage, over 35 deaths, 1,500 police injuries, and the torching of an iconic church, police precinct, and federal courthouse were all contextualized.

We were told the destruction of property was not really a crime, that the United States always has embraced violent protests, that flames licking the skies were not evidence of violence, and, by our current vice president, that such violence would not stop.

And she was correct. The street violence did not cease, because it was seen as helpful for the 2020 election. When the looting, arson, and killing began to boomerang against the Left and was deemed no longer advantageous, the violence magically ceased in the final weeks before the election and throughout the Biden transitions and tenure.

Contrast all that with the buffoonish, despicable riot in the Capitol by an ad hoc group of crazies. It was labeled an “insurrection.” The media then systematically lied about the five deaths that occurred on January 6, creating fables about the tragic natural demise of Officer Brian Sicknick. It smothered mention of FBI informants in the crowds, hid information about the circumstances of the lethal shooting of Ashli Babbitt and smirked about suspects put in solitary confinement for months without being charged or tried.

The strangest embarrassment on the Left is its current neo-Confederate impulse. Many blue progressive states are becoming one-party, feudal societies reminiscent of the antebellum, plantationists, solid-Democratic South. They are likewise inimical to the middle classes who are fleeing California, Illinois, and New York. The new Left fixates—in the fashion of the old South—on one-drop racial identification integral to race-based preferences, oblivious of class and wealth.

It promotes segregation on campuses, with racially exclusive safe spaces, dorms, and graduations. Its Southern embrace of nullification of federal law through over 500 sanctuary city jurisdictions is reminiscent of South Carolina in the 1830s. And it talks of state rights as if blue-state environmentalism, abortion, and illegal immigration should be exempt from federal statutes—in the fashion of George Wallace resisting federal mandates on integration. More recently, we see parlor talk of blue-state secession in journals like the Nation and The New Republic in the fashion of 1850s pamphleteering in the Carolinas.

If Donald Trump did not accept the vote count of 2020, then it is legitimate to criticize him. But he was only following in the footsteps of the denialist Stacey Abrams. She toured the country after losing the governorship of Georgia by over 50,000 votes and was hailed by the Left for months as the “real” governor of Georgia.

Lest we forget in 2016, the Left claimed a fraudulent election due to wired voting machines. Jill Stein sued to invalidate their ballot counts. Grade-C movie stars cut commercials urging electors to renounce their constitutional mandates. Hillary Clinton boasted of joining the “resistance,” claiming the elected president was illegitimate while urging Joe Biden not to accept the 2020 popular vote if he lost it.

So why does the Left use these mass shootings, involving unhinged, hate-filled killers of all races, as fodder for their agendas? Why is it OK to harass Supreme Court justices at their homes or to threaten them by name outside the Supreme Court chambers?

Hypocrisy is not hypocrisy when the Left feels its moral superiority justifies any means necessary to achieve its utopian ends.

Smear Rather than Defend
Second, the Left must have fungible standards and leverage tragedies for political advantage because it cannot run on its agenda. America was founded on principles of liberty and individualism, rather than French revolutionary government-mandated equality of result.

Socialism has never appealed to Americans—and never more so than in the past 18 months. If Joe Biden had gone to both Waukesha and Buffalo, preached nonviolence and tolerance, and urged Americans not to judge one another as collectives but as unique individuals, he would have seen it as an opportunity missed to gin up furor by racializing tragedy.

Indeed, what else could Biden do—run on a secure border and adherence to current federal immigration law? His wisdom of printing trillions of dollars, keeping interest rates artificially low, subsiding labor non-participation, and thus spiking inflation?

Would he point to his brilliance in restricting gas and oil leases, suppressing energy development, and canceling pipelines to deny us affordable energy?

Will he boast of embracing critical race and legal theories, defunding the police, backing city and county prosecutors who don’t prosecute, and emptying the jails and prisons, all resulting in a drastic increase in crime?

Will he preen to midterm voters about the brilliant logistical effort that allowed Americans to flee Afghanistan near instantaneously while abandoning allies and leaving helpers behind while enriching the terrorist Taliban with billions of dollars in sophisticated U.S. weaponry?

America Is a Great Experiment
Finally, we should remember America has always been a fragile country. After all, it is history’s first successful and longest-lasting multiracial constitutional government—the logical reification of the ancient ideas of human political equality, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

The idea of America has always tried to overcome innate, deeper, and darker human impulses, especially the tic to identify by race, religion, and tribe. That is the historical virus that once unleashed, infects and destroys a society. Witness most recently Rwanda, Iraq, or the former Yugoslavia.

The ancient human pathology to identify by superficial appearance—to see race, for example, as essential rather than incidental to one’s essence—destroys democracies. It must consciously always be repressed, not cultivated to frighten people to support agendas that are otherwise failing them.

Joe Biden is said to be an inert puppet of left-wing masters. Perhaps. But more likely his cognitive challenges have stripped away his political savvy and left him in the raw, revealing his real essence, a racialist of the first order, who will use any tragedy to salvage what has become the worst two years of a presidency in modern memory. And most of the people now know it.

 

[CrippleThreat]

The story goes that Pence has never seen so much money in his life since 2021 and his post VP speaking gigs, so when Eyepatch McCain or Dick and Liz limp up to him with checks to "do the right thing" he's selling out as fast as he can. Queue the new stories he'll just now reveal about how Trump grabbed his wife's ass or pushed some politician's tranny daughter down the stairs and pelting her with Big Macs.

Based?

Honest to God, fuck Gallup lol.

Also it depends on sample size, where they sampled and how did they sample.

It's a corrupt institution like everything else.

Gallup's been a shitshow since the Obama years. Poor half-black man couldn't live with a poll that showed that his popular stature was crumbling, so he went after them.

 

[pwnest injun]

And the walk-back is not gonna be reassuring for any world powers. At the end of the day, short of Congress invoking our favorite amendment, Biden can go make it happen, and the white house press team cannot overrule his military actions.

The secret of being a dumbass and waffling between positions is that everyone will assume that your real position is whichever one they don't like. Sort of like if you said "half of the people who like X are dumb faggots," then basically everyone will assume that you're talking about them. That was Clinton's deplorables fuckup. It all boils down to the negativity bias. Good things can help you, but bad things can kill you, so people are more wary of bad than they are hopeful for the good. Anyway, Biden is dumb and walking back anything is pointless since you just burn two bridges instead of one.

 

[Dracula's Spirit Animal]

>Not confrontational enough

They really have no other option than to just intensify what they're already doing. No ability for introspection or course correction.

Tjhe level of self-deception in it is rather impressive though.

 

[MrJokerRager]

Glenn Greenwald names them.
View attachment 3313017


WTF is Pence doing? I know he oughted himself as a RINO almost 2 years ago but now he seems to be actively sabotaging any attempt at forgiveness from Trump. Just more idiotic and unnecessary infighting when the GOP needs unity under Trump.

Something from Tucker's /pol/ thread lol.




Also another piece about voting red and expecting no results.

If Voting Republican Is the Answer, Why Has It Never Worked Before? (Archive)

A recent article of mine elicited some amusing responses.

That Trump has been inexhaustibly—indeed, obsessively—maligned by dishonest, opportunistic, and mentally unstable partisan hacks is a brute fact that I have spared few occasions to address. For all of his flaws, he is still considered in the abstract infinitely preferable to his successor, and a cut above his most relentless critics.

This, however, is not a high bar to surmount. Joe Biden, both personally and as occupant of the White House, is demonstrably rotten. The same can be said for most of those who made Trump-bashing the mission of their lives from virtually the time he launched his campaign to the present moment.

Still, just because Trump made enemies of demented ideologues doesn’t mean that he isn’t deserving of honest and sober criticism himself. Too few Republican, “Ultra-MAGA” voters are willing to consider his unrealized potential, and unforced errors. Mesmerized by the Trump mystique, millions have permitted themselves to be hypnotized into thinking that all that went wrong on Trump’s watch is no fault of his own, and that if not for the plethora of forces that were aligned against him, he would’ve been able to truly make America great again.

MAGA voters have allowed themselves to be conditioned to vote for an America First agenda while simultaneously accepting that it cannot be brought to fruition given the bottomless depths of “the Swamp.” These traditional GOP voters have been living with this kind of contradiction for as long as they’ve been voting for the Republican Party.

Is the Left Better Off Now Than It Was?
Long before Trump, Republican politicians and their apologists in the establishment conservative media labored indefatigably to convince their constituents that, come what may, the GOP would “save the country” from the ravages of the excessive Left. The “Reagan Revolution,” the “Contract with America,” the “Moral Majority,” “Compassionate Conservatism,” the “Tea Party,” and, now, MAGA—these are the media concoctions, the theatrical props, the bright and shiny things that traditional Republican voters have been manipulated into believing for decades. It’s ultimately the same concept repackaged for a new generation under a different label.

The idea that there is a rock-ribbed, true-blue conservative or patriotic contingent, separate from and opposed to “the establishment,” promising to pull America back from the precipice of destruction on which she stands has been the GOP’s bread and butter for decades. Every election is “the most important election of our lifetime.”

Republican voters should pause and ask themselves a question that never seem to get thoroughly explored: To paraphrase Reagan’s query from 1980:

Is the Left more or less powerful in 2022 than they’ve been in the past?

The answer is a foregone conclusion.

Shockingly, Historically Unprecedented Advances To the Left
The Left-Right paradigm within which American politics plays out is itself a function of the collective delusion from which Republican and Democratic voters alike suffer. Still, for present purposes, we’ll speak the conventional language and say that it’s difficult to conceive of a single front on which “the Left” hasn’t made considerable advances.

In some cases, particularly over the last couple of years, during the COVID era, the Left made shockingly, historically unprecedented advances.

So, why exactly is it that those who have always voted Republican should continue doing so?

How, exactly, does voting Republican amount to “fighting the Left?”

The contradiction at the heart of MAGA points to a more fundamental contradiction in the so-called conservative movement: supporting candidates, and a party that not only fails to deliver, but can’t deliver.

Trump tried his best, but had too many powerful forces with which to contend and that ultimately thwarted his plans.

Republicans gain the House, but then tell their supporters that they can’t do the things that they say they were going to do because they don’t have the Senate and the presidency. They gain the Senate, but then tell their supporters that they can’t do what they promised, because they don’t yet have the presidency. They gain the presidency, but then tell their supporters that they can’t really do what they promised because of the recalcitrance of traitorous Republicans, the cynicism and opportunism of Democrats, the partisanship of the media, and/or the subversionary machinations of a massive bureaucracy (the “deep state”).

On and On the Excuse Making Goes
Traditional GOP, conservative, MAGA voters are in a matrix designed by the GOP/Big Conservative media axis. For as understandably difficult as it is for voters to realize this, once they zoom out and assume a meta perspective on the political situation, the truth becomes obvious.

Republicans—whether Trump or anyone else—will never, can never, “defeat the Left” and “save the country” as they promise. And all GOP politicians must, at some level, know this. At the very least, they must know that they can never affect the kinds of substantive, enduring changes that voters expect from them as long as all of the obstacles to which they invariably appeal in accounting for their failures persist!

In other words, if “RINOs,” Democrats, a hostile media, and deep state apparatchiks have always prevented Republicans in the past from enacting the platform and the agenda on which they campaign, why should voters expect that Republicans will be able to surmount those obstacles now?!

What do Republicans, elected today, plan on doing to ensure that all of the hostile forces that have undermined them since forever will finally be neutralized?

Moreover, how will Republicans elected today guarantee that this happens, guarantee that their perpetual losing streak, at long last, comes to an end?

If voters would see through the theater and actually listen to GOP politicians, they would discover that even now, a time during which the Democrats, and their titular head, Biden, seem hell-bent on making life as hard as possible for American citizens, both incumbent Republicans as well as those who aspire to assume office in the future . . . complain. They neither do anything nor outline for us what they will do differently than what they have done in the past, if they become the dominant party once more.

Such is the ubiquity of the matrix that it is apparently lost on all of the players in “the conservative movement” that the incessant whining on the part of GOP politicians and the scribblers and talking heads in the conservative media only reinforces just how weak and ineffectual the “conservative” or MAGA movement really is. The overwhelmingly negative reports of leftist outrages, of Democratic victories, to which Republican voters are routinely subjected by conservative media outlets that they visit only serve to remind voters that the GOP is a losing proposition.

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, then voting Republican is insane.

Well, it’s insane if you expect the results that Republicans promise.

 

[Jet Fuel Johnny]

What's going to be a big hit to Biden is...

July 4th.

You know, the day everyone buys beer, gets meat, and goes to grill.

Your progressive "I Hate Amerikkka!" won't notice, because they'll spend the whole day on Twitter fighting with people.

But everyone else will go to the store to get their beer, their meat, and their charcoal.

And see the prices and shortages, finally rubbed in their faces where they can't deny it.

And I think they'll get pissed off to no end.

Of course, everyone on foodstamps won't notice the high prices, since a lot of states are increased foodstamp allotments to keep the bread part running a little while longer.

Or maybe they will.

But I'm seriously thinking that the 4th is going to piss people off.

 

[Kane Lives]

Of course, everyone on foodstamps won't notice the high prices, since a lot of states are increased foodstamp allotments to keep the bread part running a little while longer.

One wonders if the food stamp increase is even enough to cover the rising costs. The USD may be funny money, but raising the benefits for the poor seem antithetical to their modus operandi so far.

 

[LurkTrawl]

What do you think of his replacements? Personally I can't stand to listen to them at all anymore.

Also, lol >>

View attachment 3312471

And... RINOs gonna RINO

View attachment 3312475

https://nitter.net/jmartNYT/status/1528702039362002944

Proof, absolute verified proof that neither RINOs nor the DNC actually know what made, and continues to make, Trump popular.

Pence, running against Trump, is so fucking unbelievably either retarded or desperate that I can only imagine they couldn't wrangle DeSantis for this next presidential election for reasons unknown. This is worse somehow than running Biden instead of Tulsi.

 

[JustSomeDong]

What's going to be a big hit to Biden is...

July 4th.

You know, the day everyone buys beer, gets meat, and goes to grill.

Your progressive "I Hate Amerikkka!" won't notice, because they'll spend the whole day on Twitter fighting with people.

But everyone else will go to the store to get their beer, their meat, and their charcoal.

And see the prices and shortages, finally rubbed in their faces where they can't deny it.

And I think they'll get pissed off to no end.

Of course, everyone on foodstamps won't notice the high prices, since a lot of states are increased foodstamp allotments to keep the bread part running a little while longer.

Or maybe they will.

But I'm seriously thinking that the 4th is going to piss people off.

Well, California and other bughives can still try to hide it. "It is now declared that Grills, BBQs, Smokers, and outdoor food preparation is illegal! Do you know how many baby polar bears those things kill? And outdoor food preparation in such a manner is unsanitary, anyhow. This is for your own good! We know best! Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go outside and get a kebab from a dirty immigrant with a cart! I love diversity! All that tasty ethnic food!"

Put on your clown-world glasses, you know you can see it, too.

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

I wonder what Joe Biden's reaction to this will be.

 

[Woe-B-Gon (TM)]

View attachment 3313435
I wonder what Joe Biden's reaction to this will be.

It's only a minor incursion.

 

[NyQuilninja]

One wonders if the food stamp increase is even enough to cover the rising costs. The USD may be funny money, but raising the benefits for the poor seem antithetical to their modus operandi so far.

Most of the food stamp increases were because of the pandemic there's been modest increases but no not enough to offset the cost for most families. I think that's why they implemented early payouts for the child credit tax refund

 

[Tinfoil]

It's only a minor incursion.

Depends how many child traffickers and biolabs they have set up in Kurdistan

 

[AGreatDipAtAFairPrice]

What's going to be a big hit to Biden is...
July 4th.

Oh, they won't be able to brag how their policies made 4th of July SIXTEEN CENTS cheaper this year?

How much cheaper is 2022 going to be compared to July 2020? Oh not cheaper? Oh, almost twice as much?
WOW

 

[Aidan]

I'm assuming because it would likely bypass the major telecoms, AT&T, Verizon and the like. Which no doubt are probably monitored.

>probably monitored
They 100% are though they do it themselves and by law must give NSA (specifically) access to that data on demand, though it's even worse as they must also comply with any warrants and for a long time even podunk police departments have used this to great effect, getting far more data from a warrant than they normally would or should be able to. In recent years the big tech companies have pushed back for whatever reason.

However, Starlink is not going to magically be immune to this just like Hughesnet and Bluebird aren't. It's a US company and must abide the US spying laws and even then part of the Snowden links showed the NSA must collect an absurd amount of data by law with an emphasis on foreign data as the US companies collect the domestic data as is.
tl;dr it'd be dumb imo for a country's leadership to see Starlink as a loophole, it's just a good deal versus building your own infrastructure. If anything it will greatly expand US spying capabilities but the cost is likely worth it for 9/10 countries.

 

[NyQuilninja]

Well, California and other bughives can still try to hide it. "It is now declared that Grills, BBQs, Smokers, and outdoor food preparation is illegal! Do you know how many baby polar bears those things kill? And outdoor food preparation in such a manner is unsanitary, anyhow. This is for your own good! We know best! Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go outside and get a kebab from a dirty immigrant with a cart! I love diversity! All that tasty ethnic food!"

Put on your clown-world glasses, you know you can see it, too.

Yeah well good luck with that you ever seen Mexicans on the 4th of July in California? It's a three-day Fiesta of drinking BBQ and menudo soup on a Sunday to round off the event. Entire neighborhoods state parks national parks parking lots any and everywhere there's a party.

 

[tehpope]

Well, California and other bughives can still try to hide it. "It is now declared that Grills, BBQs, Smokers, and outdoor food preparation is illegal! Do you know how many baby polar bears those things kill? And outdoor food preparation in such a manner is unsanitary, anyhow. This is for your own good! We know best! Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go outside and get a kebab from a dirty immigrant with a cart! I love diversity! All that tasty ethnic food!"

Remember in Calif in 2020 when they told people they couldn't set off fireworks. And then the whole sky above LA was filled with fireworks?