I thought Trump's meeting with Putin was supposed to be about trying to find a way of ending the war in Ukraine, but now we've learned that they talked about how elections are held in the United States and how the 2020 election was probably stolen from Trump. What a waste of time and resources. And now we have Trump bragging on Truth Social about how at no time in history has so many European leaders will have been in the White House at one time, as if it's something to be proud of. After all, he's the one who's created the emergency which has led to this meeting in the first place, and now he's making it sound like he's accomplished some great diplomatic feat.

OCU

About a million, probably more like two or three million by now, Russians "remembered" they are Jewish and emigrated to Israel, after the fall of the Soviet Union.

#3 | Posted by snoofy at 2025-08-14 04:12 PM

One of the guys I worked with, he and his family were Jewish and they immigrated to the US from Leningrad when he was 17-years old. Now they could have gone directly to Israel, with new passports in hand, if they had wanted to, but an uncle had immigrated to the US a few years earlier and they wanted to join him, however, that meant that they had to wait something like seven-months in a fleabag hotel in Stockholm waiting for the US government to process their application for asylum.

I first met Mike (his actual name was Mikhail) years after he had graduated from engineering school and was working for our company out here in SoCal (for a short period of time, he actually worked for me). Anyway, he was quite proud of the fact that he'd learned to speak English without any trace of a Russian accent (I've met several Russians who've managed to accomplish this, which was always a bit scary). The problem was that his family, when they came to the US, settled in New Jersey, and so when Mike was honing his English skills, he was also acquiring a New Jersey accent, which we always kidded him about.

OCU

What does the constitution say about this?

Article 1, Section 9

"No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State."

#10 | Posted by truthhurts at 2025-08-12 06:18 PM

This actually applies to states taxing goods moving between states. It does not apply to goods moving out of the country. That being said, I do believe that it's shortsighted to impose taxes on exports. Imports are bad enough, but taxing exports just makes American goods more expensive from the get go.

OCU

This is sort of like a reverse tariff, where the government is taxing exports as well as imports.

OCU

We're losing our heroes...

I met Buzz Aldrin at LAX once waiting for our luggage. Didn't get a chance for an autograph so a handshake had to do.

And then in 2015, I attended a conference where Gene Cernan was one of the keynote speakers (I was also one, but on a different day and we didn't get to actually meet face-to-face).

That being said, I was at another conference where again I was one of the keynote speakers along with Homer Hickam, the author of the book 'Rocket Boys', which was later made into the movie 'October Sky'. Hickem, while he was never an astronaut, worked worked for NASA, training Shuttle crews for several missions including the one that repaired the Hubble Telescope, and when he retired from NASA in 1998, he was the payload training manager for the International Space Station. He was speaking at an engineering conference and I had the opportunity to sit next to him at the speaker's banquet the evening before. After the dinner, they previewed the movie 'October Sky' which was open to all the attendees and their families.

And going way back, while in college, Dr. Wernher von Braun came and gave a lecture. And while I didn't get to talk with him much, we did get to shake hands at a meet-n-greet they held afterwards (what struck me was that he was a lot shorter than what he looked in the movies).

OCU