I’ve been on a motorcycle for over 25 years now and I’ve had some near misses but nothing serious.

That’s an amazing story and lucky you for making it through. I’ve known of two people in my circle who died from motorcycle accidents and a few more in my community and region who died … it’s also amazing to realize that you don’t need to be riding fast in order to get killed on a motorcycle. One woman in my town was at an intersection, moved across in an awkward way, got hit by a truck and neither were moving fast, she just got hit in a particular way, knocked down, pinned down by the truck, crushed and then died on the way to the hospital.

My near death experience was not as dramatic as yours. I was a dumb teen on a four wheeler on gravel. I did a major jump without knowing it out expecting it, launched about 20 feet in the air, landed front wheels first, launched forward and smashed my face in the gravel. Thankfully the atv went flying in a different direction and didn’t land on me. I also didn’t have a helmet on. I didn’t get knocked out and I was aware the whole time. I was just lucky I was fit strong and landed in a lucky way that didn’t hurt me too much.

I have a cousin who fell off an atv as a passenger, landed the wrong way, hit her head (again no helmet) severely injured, treated in hospital for a day before she died from injuries.

Motorcycles and ATV are dangerous machines

Whoever wins … the country will fight about the result for the next four years and completely obscure any reasonable debate or conversation about anything of importance like inflation, wealth inequality, war, the military industrial complex or creeping fascism.

If America doesn’t get its act together during this election … it’s just taking another step towards becoming a failed state and will break apart within the next decade or two. But it won’t be a war or anything too dramatic … it will just look and sound like a never ending slapfest between shouting children and crying babies who threaten each other but never actually do anything except leave the room with all their toys.

Well this planet is definitely a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Israel was responsible for all this a few months ago

Now the whole world is because we’re all just standing aside, watching all of it happen and do absolutely nothing … we are all complicit now.

About 20 years I went on a vacation to southern Spain … during the point when Spain was just fully transitioning into the European Union.

I remember trying to watch some TV programs (there wasn’t much to watch) … but the funny thing that struck me was the commercials. They’d play an hour and half long movie for about an hour … then stop and play non stop commercials for about 15 minutes. It was normal for everyone because they used the time to just get up, bathroom break, kitchen duty, clean the house, go grab some groceries, etc … then return to the living room in time to watch the rest of the movie. No one watched commercials because they all hated them as much as anyone else.

I don’t think they do that any more but I thought I wouldn’t mind that myself … instead of breaking my show every ten / fifteen minutes with a minute of commercials … just show them all to me in ten minutes at the end of an hour.

The Vatican … and just let it become part of Italy again. Nothing would change except for a bunch of wealthy idiots trying to hide their money.

The insanity is not that it is Republicans or Democrats

The insane part is that America is just sleep walking straight into a war that will probably escalate into something much bigger and no one wants to do anything about it.

God help us all

Vandalize? … the entire machine would be stolen. Either by thieves wanting to steal the merchandise or money or both. Or a bunch of teens that would tie a chain to it and drag it to the end of town for fun.

Exactly … I have wealthy friends and non-wealthy friends who are dirt poor … you know what the difference is between the two groups?

The wealthy people are the stingiest people you’ll ever meet and they’ll fight to save a dollar or two, even though you know they have tons of money in the bank.

The poor people will spend $100 on something they could buy for $20 and never think twice about the money they lost, even though they have nothing saved in their bank.

I have a theory that every company/service/corporation has dozens of loopholes like this everywhere that people could take advantage of. But no one ever does because most people are too honest and proud to ever ask for a discount or to take advantage of an opportunity like this. Most people are too nice and gullible.

Corporations bet on people being too nice all the time.

People are too embarrassed or self conscious to go after a deal or even to ask for one … when in reality corporations are complete greedy whores and will sell your grandmother if it meant they could save a penny.

No one should ever feel embarrassed or shy to ask for a discount or go after saving themselves a few dollars. Corporations do it all the time and they never shy away from skimming off a few pennies from you if they can.

BTW - beautiful work on getting that regular discount for yourself

For every service you sign up to … phone company, subscription, gas company, water service, electricity, whatever …

… always ask if you can get a discount or a better price.

Don’t be embarrassed to ask. No one cares. We just build a culture around the hope that no one will ever ask for a better price and negotiate. The rep your talking to doesn’t care about you and doesn’t care about the company … they might be having a bad day and won’t care about helping you … or they might be having a good day and they know an inside method or option to save you something … or they might be facing losing their job so they figure out a way to save you a ton of money.

I got a banking service a few weeks ago and they gave me a price for a subscription … I knew it was a sham but it was a service I needed … I asked for a discount from the Filipino rep who spoke bag English … she went off for five minutes and came back with a 60% discount.

Sometimes these businesses set their prices high and just hope that no one will ask for a different price … because most people never ask.

I’ve been to Seville myself … never wanted to go visit the tomb of a celebrated psychopath

But one of the great things I learned from the Spanish from a young university student at a government protest one day (the Spanish are always ready to protest) … their history is written in their national flag … two red bands between a yellow one … a river of gold between two rivers of blood.

Has nothing to do with the upcoming US election

We won’t understand even if we get to the point of wearing supplemental oxygen to stay alive.

Polar Bear on the Hudson Bay coast in northern Ontario.

I’m Indigenous and I’ve gone hunting and trapping with my relatives a few times in my life. On one of those trips we happened on a polar bear on the mud flats of the bay during the late autumn. We drove by in our freighter canoe (a very large oversized canoe with a 60 HP outboard motor) and the bear swam near us and then walked by a few hundred feet away. It wasn’t afraid but we were. We watched for a while and then fired rifle shot into the mud next to it to scare it away. From the moment it started to run to the point it disappeared as a speck on the horizon was about a minute or two. I went up later to look at the prints and the clay mud looked like a tractor had driven over it. I couldn’t believe how fast it could move on the mud. I quickly sank in my boots and could barely walk around.

One paw print was about the size of my head. I never left camp without someone nearby or a rifle in my hands.

The biggest source of election interference in the US … is the general intelligence of the whole of the US

The fact that most of the world has decent access to food. And the fact that here in the first world (I’m in Canada), just about everyone has access to some kind of food.

I know it isn’t perfect and there are still a small percentage of people that may have difficulty with access to proper food, plentiful food or enough food … but everyone everywhere here has something to eat.

I’m Indigenous and when I was growing up in the 80s, mom and dad had enough for us to eat but we weren’t starving or anything.

However, my parents were born in the 40s and they said they had to live through famines as children … in modern Canada! They remembered a severe famine that swept through northern Ontario in the 50s where every hunter and trapper just couldn’t find enough wild food anywhere to feed people. It was a normal cycle that happens in our part of the world that takes place at least once a decade - most times it is just small decline in animal populations but other times, everything just disappears for one reason or another (disease, migration, weather, temperature, animal movements, etc)

In my grandparents time … starvation was a normal part of life to the point where lots of our old legends are filled with stories of cannibalism and murder because people were starving to death.

It all just means that in our modern era over the past hundred years … food has become plentiful for the majority of the world and that starvation has become less prevalent than it ever was in human history.

In our modern world of interconnected finances, services, governments and systems … it is all hinging on a very delicate balance … because as Will Durant put it …

“From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day”

Our easy access to food for everyone is only possible if we maintain a functioning world order of cooperation.

Isn’t this basically how Taylor Swift got her start … her millionaire father just buying thousands of her debut album at the beginning.

It’s also a sign of things to come

We will reinforce our false and superficial ideas of the past or even present with the help of AI

All the vague uneducated and ill informed ideas we all have about anything and everything will all be magnified and exaggerated a hundred fold.

People want to only believe what they want because they hate being wrong … and they never believe or want to believe that their side, their group, their community no matter what it is can ever be wrong.

I’m not immune to it myself and I constantly have to remind myself that I can easily fall into that same mentality.

Most of us are never taught to be self-critical or to properly question the world or the people around us.