Free Republic

You have no idea what Trump's Iran strategy is. You have no access to any information regarding that. You are just some random person on the internet shooting from the hip on things you know nothing of.

Opinionated blowhard is an apt screen name for you. Glad you chose it.

KitKat Kaper.

I have no opinion on whether or not Tiger Williams was DUI when he flipped his car. I do know it's pretty hard to flip a car (even a SUV) in normal driving conditions. Maybe if there was ice and snow on the road, different story, but this is Florida. So likely he was taking a turn too fast.

Another thing I see bandied about (not on this thread) regarding Tiger is the sentiment that "I hope Tiger gets his act together because the golf world needs him".

I hope that Tiger gets his act together as well - that is, if it needs getting together.

But the golf world does not need him.

Over the past five years, I was privileged to get to know Abby (nopardons) and her husband Michael personally, as for a while, I lived in the same town as them in Connecticut. Close enough that we were practically neighbors.

We had known each other by our screen names for many, many years prior as we both came to Free Republic in the late 1990s.

On several occasions I had taken her and her husband to doctor appointments and one night they took my wife and I out to dinner one night - a Chinese restaurant. Our spirited conversation definitely attracted the attention of the diners around us! Abby had so much to say about virtually any subject that came up. A very intelligent woman. Her husband was a very nice man and used to work in the Chicago stock markets.

Abby was always recommending books for me to read. I used to joke to her about the awful state of the public library we had in town and she said if I wanted to see a real library, I should check out hers. And so one night I did. She had a most impressive library with floor to ceiling shelves all around and a huge fireplace in the middle. With first editions of many classic books, such as from Dickens, Churchill and Hemingway.

Abby was dedicated to reading the New York Post and she would sometimes ask me to bring the paper and her mail to her door when the weather was snowy or icy as she had a very long driveway and so her home was a good distance from the road. (I drove right by her house on the way back from work.)

She did not suffer fools gladly and if you disagreed with her on anything, you better be prepared to defend yourself with some facts for she always had facts to back up her side. She was one of the few posters who I would do a search on here because I did not want to miss anything she wrote.

Unfortunately her health began to fail her and that is why most of her recent posts were just of the "BTTT" variety. She loved coming here though and when Trump won re-election in 2024, she was over the moon.

She was very proud of her family as well and spoke often about getting her grandson into a decent conservative school.

Her daughter Amanda texted me last September about her going into hospice and only having a short time left. Unfortunately, I had moved out of Connecticut by then and was not able to go see her. I thought about posting it here at the time but didn't feel it was my place to do so. Abby was always very guarded about her privacy. I don't think her obit even got into the local papers.

Mining seas has been a thing since WW1.

I'm pretty sure the US military has countermeasures for this.

The people of Iran have been told to basically shelter in place until they get the green light from USA/Israel to take back their country.

I assume that when the green light comes, they will be supported to a certain extent so that they have success in doing so.

Trump declared that the Iran Navy will be destroyed - and I believe him. It will be.

So no closing of the Strait of Hormuz as pundits seem to fear.

As for the missiles, we now have enough resources in the air over Iran to identify and target any missile site as soon as a missile is launched. So while Iran got some missiles off today, the law of diminishing returns will kick in as missile launch sites are systematically destroyed one by one.

Within a few days, I see most of the Iranian "rank-and-file" soldiers just giving up and melting into the civilian population to help take their country back.

I remember Desert Storm from 1991. For weeks, the media scared everybody about how Iraq had the "4th largest Army in the world" and how we were walking into a bloodbath.

The end result was that many soldiers from the much ballyhooed "Republican Guard" started surrendering to CNN cameras.

Looks like some mid-term Republican ads just got made.

(Dems sitting down and refusing to stand in support of protecting Americans from illegal alien criminals).

Trump just said it though.

Women’s team is coming to the White House.

Trump gives long speeches but they don’t seem that long as they are never boring.

Depends on how much gold your Dad had.

People with small amounts are just going to have to deal with the "downtown" pawn shops, the ones in the mostly seedy areas with the "We buy your gold" neon signs in the window.

A miserable experience as the owners of these shops are obviously more focused on their margins than getting you the most for your gold. If you get 80% of spot price in those situations, consider yourself lucky.

I would say once you get to the $200K mark (40 ounces these days), you can start dealing with national firms.

For those with large amounts of precious metals, I highly recommend storing them in a depository, as opposed to a home safe or a bank safe deposit box.

Storage fees are reasonable, under $200 a year in most cases (I pay $175). You can even pay a little extra, as I do, for segregated storage, where your metals are stored separate and not mixed up with other people's.

Once your gold (and silver) are stored in a depository, get yourself a decent gold custodian, which are the "national firms" I spoke of earlier. Such as Lear Capital, Noble Gold, or Goldco, for example.

Now it becomes much easier to both sell your gold as a routine online or phone transaction. Say you want to sell five ounces, you just place the order and a few days later you get a check or transfer to your account for about $20K.

No more going to see "Joe" in the wifebeater t-shirt down at the pawn shop next to the payday loan joint!

Now of course your custodian is going to take a fee off the top on every transaction, but now you are getting very close to spot (around 95%).

The sheer amount of fraud and waste in our government, from the federal on down to the local municipal level is staggering.

Virtually everybody in public service is on the take.

On top of that, so many citizens are benefiting from welfare and other transfer payments that they keep voting to keep the rascals in office.

This is why it is so difficult to root out and this is why Trump has been taking so much heat these past 10 years. Trump is one of the very few people tough enough to take this beast on along with all the abuse that comes with it.

A large portion of our national debt is due to waste and fraud.

We are likely past the point of no return, but I support those who are trying to root it out.

Whatever happened to that much-ballyhooed "Midterm GOP Convention" that was bandied about some months ago?

That seems like a very good idea to mobilize the masses. Let's hope it actually happens.

For the most part, Americans are unaware of the recent performance of gold and particularly silver.

But you will know silver has peaked when people start showing up at Joe's Pawn Shop, the one with the "we buy gold" neon sign in the window, with grandma's silverware stuffed in a grocery shopping bag.

He was called “Silent Cal” due to his taciturnity.

I wish they would put one in Brewster, NY, right at the junction of I-84 and I-684.

"James at 15" was filmed on location in Boston. I remember seeing the film crews around town when I was growing up there in the 1970s. For the second season, the show was renamed "James at 16" and it did not get quite the traction as James was getting naughtier.

Terri Nunn did an episode in which she played a "loose" girl that all the other classmates claimed to have slept with. So when James started dating her, all the other guys were needling him.

"You Make Loving Fun" by Fleetwood Mac was featured on that episode. This was the fall of 1977 when the "Rumours" album by Fleetwood Mac was still riding high in the charts.

Terri Nunn went on to be the lead singer of Berlin, a popular New Wave band from the early 1980s. I saw this band at the US Festival in 1983. That was another connection I have with the "James At 15" show.

Airplanes are able to fly due to revving up their engines and going down the runway really fast. Once they get to a certain speed, due to the curvature of their wings, the wind flows faster under the bottom of the wing and lifts the entire aircraft up into the sky.

Once airborne, the pilot starts fooling around with the levers, buttons, and switches in the cockpit, to make the airplane do different things while in the sky.