Biden is clever enough to still be running circles around the world dictators' attempts to trigger world war 3.

cannabineer said:

now if only he would use his authority under the EDA program and start airlifting a few million rounds of 155 to Ukraine …

Excess Defense Articles Program

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BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO signed on Tuesday a $1.2-billion contract to make tens of thousands of artillery rounds to replenish the dwindling stocks of its member countries as they supply ammunition to Ukraine to help it defeat Russia’s invasion.

The contract will allow for the purchase of 220,000 rounds of 155-millimeter ammunition, the most widely sought after artillery shell, according to NATO’s support and procurement agency. It will allow allies to backfill their arsenals and to provide Ukraine with more ammunition.

“This is important to defend our own territory, to build up our own stocks, but also to continue to support Ukraine,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters.

“We cannot allow President (Vladimir) Putin to win in Ukraine,” he added. “That would be a tragedy for the Ukrainians and dangerous for all of us.”

Ukraine was firing around 4,000 to 7,000 artillery shells each day last summer, while Russia was launching more than 20,000 shells daily in its neighbor’s territory, according to European Union estimates.

Russia’s arms industry far outweighs Ukraine’s and Kyiv needs help to match Moscow’s firepower.


But the shells will not arrive quickly — delivery on orders takes anywhere from 24 to 36 months, the NATO agency said.

The European Union plans to produce 1 million artillery rounds for Ukraine have fallen short, with only about a third of the target met. Senior EU officials have said that they now expect the European defense industry to be producing around one million shells annually by the end of this year.

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madvillian420 said:

The fact that this was years ago isnt a good thing lol.....Its only gotten worse since then. Its called cognitive DECLINE because it only trends one way.

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The special counsel Robert K. Hur’s report, in which he declined to prosecute President Biden for his handling of classified documents, also included a much-debated assessment of Mr. Biden’s cognitive abilities.

“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

As an expert on memory, I can assure you that everyone forgets. In fact, most of the details of our lives — the people we meet, the things we do and the places we go — will inevitably be reduced to memories that capture only a small fraction of those experiences.

It is normal to be more forgetful as you get older. Generally, memory functions begin to decline in our 30s and continue to fade into old age. However, age in and of itself doesn’t indicate the presence of memory deficits that would affect an individual’s ability to perform in a demanding leadership role. And an apparent memory lapse may or may not be consequential, depending on the reasons it occurred.

There is forgetting, and there is Forgetting. If you’re over the age of 40, you’ve most likely experienced the frustration of trying to grasp that slippery word on the tip of your tongue. Colloquially, this might be described as forgetting, but most memory scientists would call this retrieval failure, meaning that the memory is there but we just can’t pull it up when we need it. On the other hand, Forgetting (with a capital F) is when a memory is seemingly lost or gone altogether. Inattentively conflating the names of the leaders of two countries would fall in the first category, whereas being unable to remember that you had ever met the president of Egypt would fall into the second.

Over the course of typical aging, we see changes in the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, a brain area that plays a starring role in many of our day-to-day memory successes and failures. These changes mean that as we get older, we tend to be more distractible and often struggle to pull up words or names we’re looking for. Remembering events takes longer, and it requires more effort, and we can’t catch errors as quickly as we used to. This translates to a lot more forgetting and a little more Forgetting.

Many of the special counsel’s observations about Mr. Biden’s memory seem to fall in the category of forgetting, meaning that they are more indicative of a problem with finding the right information from memory than Forgetting. Calling up the date that an event occurred, like the last year of Mr. Biden’s vice presidency or the year of his son’s death, is a complex measure of memory. Remembering that an event took place is different from being able to put a date on when it happened, which is more challenging with increased age. The president very likely has many memories, even though he could not immediately pull up dates in the stressful (and more immediately pressing) context of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Other “memory” issues highlighted in the media are not so much cases of forgetting as they are of difficulties in the articulation of facts and knowledge. For instance, in July 2023, Mr. Biden mistakenly stated in a speech that “we have over 100 people dead,” when he should have said, “over one million.” He has struggled with a stutter since childhood, and research suggests that managing a stutter demands prefrontal resources that would normally enable people to find the right word or at least quickly correct errors after the fact.

Americans are understandably concerned about the advanced age of the two top contenders in the coming presidential election (Mr. Biden is 81, and Donald Trump is 77), although some of these concerns are rooted in cultural stereotypes and fears around aging. The fact is that there is a huge degree of variability in cognitive aging. Age is, on average, associated with decreased memory, but studies that follow up the same person over several years have shown that although some older adults show precipitous declines over time, other super-agers remain as sharp as ever.

Mr. Biden is the same age as Harrison Ford, Paul McCartney and Martin Scorsese. He’s also a bit younger than Jane Fonda (86) and a lot younger than the Berkshire Hathaway C.E.O., Warren Buffett (93). All these individuals are considered to be at the top of their professions, and yet I would not be surprised if they are more forgetful and absent-minded than when they were younger. In other words, an individual’s age does not say anything definitive about the person’s cognitive status or where it will head in the near future.

I can’t speak to the cognitive status of any of the presidential candidates, but I can say that, rather than focus on candidates’ ages per se, we should consider whether they have the capabilities to do the job. Public perception of a person’s cognitive state is often determined by superficial factors, such as physical presence, confidence and verbal fluency, but these aren’t necessarily relevant to one’s capacity to make consequential decisions about the fate of this country. Memory is surely relevant, but other characteristics, such as knowledge of the relevant facts and emotion regulation — both of which are relatively preserved and might even improve with age — are likely to be of equal or greater importance.

Ultimately, we are due for a national conversation about what we should expect in terms of the cognitive and emotional health of our leaders.

And that should be informed by science, not politics.

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madvillian420 said:

The economy is kicking ass? damn i had no idea. When you compare things to during covid (which seems to have become the benchmark) It could only go up from there.... Inflation is obviously hitting middle class families pretty hard, not to mention fed interest rates. Its harder than ever for a young person to become a homeowner here and tons of peoples 401ks and other retirement plans took a dive that they never bounced back from. The S&P took a dive recently due to inflation numbers being worse than forecasted. There was a documented bump in our economy from backing the war in Europe, but considering all the bodies in the ground now because of it doesnt make me feel too jolly.

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madvillian420 said:

Maybe all that doesnt sound so bad to an outside observer, maybe you should find unbiased sources for this information as its easily skewable BOTH ways.

I should add that having disdain for Biden or Trump to the point that you cheer on things like the crashing of our economy is incredibly short sighted and stupid, and a sure sign someone is lost in their respective cult. I hope for my countries sake that NEITHER of these dinosaurs get elected again, Ive never ONCE mentioned liking trump, thats part of the problem here, YOU spoke for me, just like the others did. Its laughable and makes your argument less credible or worth engaging with when you speak for people and lie about their preferences like a literal child in a schoolyard.

If someones argument is "YOU PROBABLY ARE MAGA AND LOVE TRUMP!" when addressing literally anything about Biden, thats a shit argument. Show me where i said so. Show me where i even implied so.

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hanimmal said:

I think there might be something to allowing the GQP to fight out what they are going to be about. They are really showing their true colors abandoning all of our allies in favor of dictators. Biden seems to be still trying like hell to get them to step up and start acting in American's (and the free world's) best interests, while beating them over the head with their obvious loyalty to Putin, while working with other nations to help pick up our slack in the meantime.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-nato-artillery-shells-59663a6a14ad180be86bc79a86cea07b
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madvillian420 said:

deleting posts is one step from giving me a strike, ill let you get back to your echo chamber lol.

i wonder how many other posters had stuff deleted in that thread, those TOS are really flexible eh?

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madvillian420 said:

deleting posts is one step from giving me a strike, ill let you get back to your echo chamber lol.

i wonder how many other posters had stuff deleted in that thread, those TOS are really flexible eh?

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hanimmal said:

I am not in a echo chamber, I actually try really hard to stay out of one, which is why I took a break for a bit. But I get it, nobody likes seeing their stuff cut, but really that other thread is stupid anyways lol. I'll be around if you ever want to try to convince me that all the hours of time I've seen Biden live and everything that him and a lot of bi-partisan effort went into passing, is not real, I'm in, and will always try my best to not just go straight to trolling.

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BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary’s parliament is to vote Monday on ratifying Sweden’s bid to join NATO, likely bringing an end to more than 18 months of delays that have frustrated the alliance as it seeks to expand in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Hungary’s government submitted the protocols for approving Sweden’s entrance to NATO in 2022, but the matter has stalled in parliament since then over opposition by governing party lawmakers. Unanimous support among all NATO members is required to admit new countries, and Hungary is the only one of the alliance’s 31 members that has not given its backing.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a right-wing nationalist who has forged close ties with Russia, has said that criticism of Hungary’s democracy by Swedish politicians had soured relations between the two countries and led to reluctance among lawmakers in his Fidesz party.

But the vote on Monday is widely expected to approve Sweden’s membership in NATO, removing the final hurdle after it first applied to join the alliance in May 2022.

Ulf Kristersson, Sweden’s prime minister, met with Orbán on Friday in Hungary’s capital, where they appeared to reach a decisive reconciliation. Following their meeting, they announced the conclusion of a defense industry agreement which will include Hungary’s purchase of four Swedish-made JAS 39 Gripen jets and the extension of a service contract for its existing Gripen fleet.

Orbán said the additional fighter jets “will significantly increase our military capabilities and further strengthen our role abroad” and will improve Hungary’s ability to participate in joint NATO operations.

“To be a member of NATO together with another country means we are ready to die for each other,” Orbán said. “A deal on defense and military capacities helps to reconstruct the trust between the two countries.”

Monday’s vote on Sweden’s NATO accession is just one matter on a busy agenda for lawmakers in the Hungarian parliament. A vote is also scheduled on accepting the resignation of President Katalin Novák, who stepped down earlier this month in a scandal over her decision to pardon to a man convicted of covering up a string of child sexual abuses.

After accepting Novák’s resignation, lawmakers are expected to confirm Tamás Sulyok, the president of Hungary’s Constitutional Court, as the country’s new president.

Some opposition parties have said they will not participate in a vote to confirm a new president. But Sulyok was nominated by Orbán’s Fidesz party, which has a two-thirds majority in parliament and is expected to easily approve his presidency.

A presidential signature is required for approval of Sweden’s NATO bid to take effect, but it was unclear when that final endorsement would take place.

Hungary’s allies in NATO and the European Union have put increasing pressure on it in recent months to drop its opposition to Sweden’s membership. Last weekend, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators visited Hungary and announced it would submit a joint resolution to Congress condemning Hungary’s alleged democratic backsliding and urging Orbán’s government to immediately lift its block on Sweden’s trans-Atlantic integration.

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hanimmal said:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/12/opinion/neuroscientist-on-biden-age-memory.html
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You do know that the stock markets are higher than ever before, inflation is down to normal levels and yes houses are more expensive than they were, but that is because the people who own them did not lose all the money they invested into them unlike the last time the Republicans allowed our economy to melt.

As for being harder than ever to buy a home as a kid, I would point out the interest rates during Reagan's presidency.
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I would be happy to get 4 more years of Biden. Shit I would even be happy for 1 year of Biden 3 of Harris. The trick is to realize that the presidency is not anything other than a team effort, and right now the Democrats have the best team when it comes to working to help the needs of the American people along with doing our part to help the rest of the world.

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hanimmal said:

https://apnews.com/article/hungary-ratify-sweden-nato-membership-efc791c0d2e4da9fdcb247a2d6624cab
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curious2garden said:

Are Verbal Flubs by Trump or Biden Signs of Cognitive Decline or Innocent Mistakes?

BU neurologist Andrew Budson says voters should adjust expectations and accept campaign-trail confusions from tired older candidates

www.bu.edu

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CCGNZ said:

I agree 100%,I can't wrap my mind around a Orange 2.0 and mentally have no idea how I'd deal w/the sight of the cksucker celebrating on a cold,dark Nov.night, I'm hoping/praying for Biden's health and that come ballot time sanity prevails over all but Trumps hardened irrational fanboy/girl base. Any fair minded American voter has to conclude that it'd be completely irresponsible color the Oval office orange again w/this sick/deranged/ignorant/vain/mean-spirited maniac whether you like Biden or not(and I like Biden) Regardless of policy (and what is Trumps policy other than a night club act of throwing buzz words out there,4 yrs. and a tax cut for the top 5%,anything else??? we're you tired of winning???)

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CCGNZ said:

Simple question to ask, I know Biden would choose death over dishonoring America as Pres.,can you say the same about the self loving/serving Orange egomaniac?

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hanimmal said:

TBF I could give a shit less about Biden's health, no offense to the guy (he is doing a fantastic job with the shittiest hand as POTUS since arguably Lincoln and possibly Washington before him). Harris will be a fantastic job if Biden bites the bullet. We need to wake the rest of our fellow Americans up to the fact that they are rallying behind the new reich, but that shit takes a lot of time, and I have no clue how to shake people up from getting out of cults, so am not holding my breath about them coming around in my/their lifetime.

Luckily fair minded Americans have outnumbered the ones that have been unable to shake the power of the news form of communication (internet) by several millions, even if the handful of mega wealthy (even the ones using the wealth of the citizens of their nations) are trying like hell to trick them into doing otherwise, have been voting against the American nazi party. Like Obama when he did not just go ape shit on the Republicans and Trump in 2015/2106 when it became obvious that we were being attack by Russia, I put my faith in the American population.

Not even a little, Trump is a megalomaniac that is only concerned about his own flabby old ass. And even though Biden is allowing his son to get crucified atm to the right wing propagandist without saying anything, and my zero doubt Trump would let any/all of his kids burn for him, it is for very different reasons.

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