Posted on 02/29/2024 8:53:40 PM PST by CottonBall
ALL ABOARD THE TRUMP FAMILY TRAIN, EST. 2017 BY DOLLYCALI!
Survived everything thrown at it over the years, just like President Trump....including trolls, moles and saboteurs.
Welcome to the TRUMP FAMILY TRAIN THREAD, where all things Trump are welcome!
Feel free to share news, your comments and opinions, memes, recipes, travel photos... the list is endless.
Posting on behalf of the TFT founder and thread mama, Dolly Cali. 
When he began writing The Lord of the Rings in the 1920s, J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor at the University of Oxford.
At the time, fantasy was not considered a “serious” genre.
So, one of his contemporaries explains, Tolkien was mocked by his Oxford colleagues.
They said he was wasting his time “lavishing such incredible pains upon a genre which is, for them, trifling by definition.”
One of Tolkien’s biographers writes, “He was regularly asked in a mocking manner, ‘How is your hobbit?’”
Amidst a crowd of people who make fun of you, who tell you you’re wasting your time, who encourage you to do something less trifling and more prestigious—sometimes, all it takes is one person’s support.
For Tolkien, that person was the great writer C.S. Lewis.
“The unpayable debt that I owe to [Lewis] was not influence but sheer encouragement,” Tolkien said. “He was for long my only audience. Only from him did
I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby.”
Takeaway 1:
In his essay, How To Do What You Love, Paul Graham writes, “You shouldn’t worry about prestige...Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.”
Tolkien wasn’t warped by his Oxford colleagues and their belief that what he was working on wasn’t prestigious.
And after his works of fantasy went on to sell more than 600 million copies, Tolkien would eventually be widely called the “father of high fantasy.”
He is just one example to remind us that what is considered “prestigious” isn’t stable in time, and that “if you do anything well enough,” to quote Graham again, “you’ll make it prestigious.”
Takeaway 2:
Tolkien, Lewis, and another writer named Charles Williams were part of an informal literary club known as The Inklings.
Shortly after Williams unexpectedly died, Lewis realized he stopped hearing the way Tolkien used to laugh at the way Williams used to tell a joke. Which made him then realize,
“In each of my friends,” Lewis wrote, “there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.”
If not for the encouragement of his friend, Tolkien said he would not have been large enough to call the whole of him into activity.
“But for [Lewis’] interest and unceasing eagerness for more,” Tolkien said, “I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”
- - -
“Just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.” — Paul Graham
Written by Billy Oppenheimer
Re Sam sentencing
Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of the failed crypto exchange FTX, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for defrauding customers and investors of his now-bankrupt firm.
The ruling cements the downfall of the former billionaire, who emerged as a high profile champion of crypto before his firm’s dramatic collapse in 2022.
He was found to have stolen billions from customers ahead of the failure.
The 32-year-old said in court he knew “a lot of people feel really let down”.
“I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about what happened at every stage,” he said, speaking quietly and clearly ahead of his sentencing.
FTX was one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges before its demise, turning Bankman-Fried into a business celebrity and attracting millions of customers who used the platform to buy and trade cryptocurrency.
Rumours of financial trouble sparked a run on deposits in 2022, precipitating the firm’s implosion and exposing Bankman-Fried’s crimes.
He was convicted by a New York jury last year on charges including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, after a trial that detailed how he had taken more than $8bn (£6.3bn) from customers, and used the money to buy property, make political donations and put toward other investments.
Before reading the sentence on Thursday, Judge Lewis Kaplan provided a harsh assessment of Bankman-Fried’s behaviour, saying he had lied during his testimony at trial when he claimed he was unaware until the last minute that his companies were taking money entrusted to them for safe-keeping by customers and using it for other purposes.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68677487
“But does it merit a visit from the FBI?”
Sorry but I don’t trust as truth in a lot of videos, memes anymore.
I have had FBI come to my house to interview me in regards to a person who was applying for a government job who I knew. I can tell you the FBI do NOT dress like these guys who say they are FBI.
And what is the “Post”? As near as I can tell it is a place on X/Twitter where you can post anything you want to. Doesn’t matter if true or not.
Whoa Dolly! That’s quite the pizza!
Audrey and I made an apple pie today - that kid is only 9 and she could have made it without me lol.
As far as pizzas go that does look pretty darn good.
Hers even beats Baxters.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9sbkPMDW9Xk
“Have to get up early to go get a bolt. with a capital B”
Didn’t you both have a car already? Did you trade yours in on this?
I’m very sorry I bothered you today.
“And how come nobody on the Republican side asked?”
I recall a lot of Republicans asked, spoke about it,voting to pull funding for it, etc.
OK, that’s good. Except it happened anyway
We’re gonna get rid of the Mini Cooper, it’s a 2009 and having issues.
But apparently there’s one thing around here that we can’t have too many of. And it’s not getting. Any sort of vehicle
Just like all the carp in DC for the last couple of years.
What Trump did at the funeral home today.
Heartwarming.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1773522076860649783
1:14 video
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.