Well someone I talk to said that this might be a big brain play to invoke the insurrection act, or at the least be a two birds one stone for serving Trump’s and the neo-con’s goals here.

There’s literally an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise where humans discover alien replicator technology for the very first time

Which is also the episode that they blow up the alien space dock station because it abducted a main cast member… Well it’s less offensive to your intelligence (or otherwise) than the actual red alert origin episode (why they say “go to tactical alert” rather than red or yellow alert…), seriously why did we need an episode’s B plot (that later invades the A plot) dedicated to the phrase “go to red alert”?

If you think that’s bad, the local crank where I work a couple days ago went on and on about a video of a long line of Walmart semis traveling down the highway like it was a suspicious thing, and not that the video was probably recorded near a walmart distribution center…

Sorta, there’s also another group of people that have a vested interest in making taxes as painful as possible. The Republican Party, because they want taxes to have such a negative association with them so that it’s easier to sell their platform of tax cuts, budget cuts, ect. ect.

The thing is that the federal IRS, and most (if not all) state level tax offices already know how much you owe in part because banks and employers are legally required to send your total money income info onwards to the IRS and such. So we could absolutely do away with the system we have in favor of system where the government sends you a bill and you check the government’s work rather than the current system of the government checking your work while knowing full well what the answer actually is. But we don’t adopt it because the tax prep businesses will cry about jobs being lost, and a lot of politicians don’t want that technicality hanging over their head so we’re stuck with the dogshit ass system we got.

So… they lied?

Eh, yes and no, like this is a longstanding thing with reporting losses/kills in military engagements, everybody over reports kills and underreports losses. A known example is that during WWII in the Pacific, japan zeroes that retreated would throw the throttle to a bit of a overload max in a way, and doing so would cause the engine to smoke a lot. The thing is that to the US pilots a plane smoking that badly was as far as they knew was going to go down, and so they reported those smoking retreating zeroes as kills, then at the end we find out that the US navy killed significantly more planes then what Japan had.

So even without any ulterior motive of propaganda, over/underreporting tends to happen a lot if not all the time in any military conflict.

Edit: If you want a funnier example, how many Tiger Is did the US army see and engage on the western front in WWII? If we take the words of tankers as truth, nearly every time they saw and engaged a german tank (especially if there was a long gun Pz IV in the fight), in actuality it was only three times.

Ah yes, time for my depression to start kicking in yet again, reminding myself that I know full well that the likelyhood of me ever finding anyone that would ever tolerate me may as well be 0%…

You must be referring to The Clans, so this is the point that I’ll say that everyone in-universe thinks that the reason why the galaxy went to shit after the Space Roman Empire fell (the original Star League) was because the Space Roman Empire fell. And everyone (namely the 5 main houses) to some degree is fighting eachother over the “right” to be the First Lord. So the Clans think this to such an extreme degree that they think the entire problem can be solved by going in, conquering Terra, and reforming The Star League, which right now is what the current era going into right now with the ilClan era.

The Clans are kinda the descendants of the original Star League, namely the military arm of it (the SLDF).

Hey now, I enjoyed my little 30 minute drive to and from work when I was working at a factory, now granted I live in a rural area, and worked night shift so it was all just 2 lane roads, and barely anyone else on the roads (besides the long line of people going to work going opposite where I was going in the mornings)