Archive for October, 2023

100 Word Fan Fiction: Paper Birth

Posted: October 31, 2023 by datechguy in fan fiction, fun
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In an age before computers the paperwork had to be filed in person, not hacked.

So there he stood in uniform before a file cabinet in Berlin. In went a military record, enlistment papers, commendations, promotions, leaves, wounds and even pay and viola Oberst Schreiber Kant of the Gestapo now existed and had a paper trail to prove it.

Now came the harder problem, finding the right mark for the plan, he scanned the files till he suddenly saw a familiar name. It was fiction he shouldn’t exist but so they said was he.

Suddenly everything needed fell into place.

Previously Fast and Slow Next: Guilt Trip

Stacy McCain Notes the Johnson vs Hamas Question, Robert Zimmerman Provides the Answer

Posted: October 31, 2023 by datechguy in education, elections, media, politics
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One of the advantages of waking up in excruciating pain is that you are up early enough to notice pieces quickly such as this one from Stacy McCain on what the media thinks REAL threat to the country is today ( Spoiler: it’s not Hamas or their supporters) :

Based on his stated supposedly biblical positions, the Bible in Johnson’s head is a silly, vicious farrago of ignorance and bigotry, and a blueprint for Christofascist tyranny. . . .
[T]he right loves to say we live in a republic not a democracy. And what they mean by that is that authoritarian disenfranchisement is awesome as long as it benefits the party of white biblical Christofascism. . . .

Do you want to read the whole thing? Probably not, but I felt obligated to throw the link in there, just so you could see that I’m not making this up. Does anyone really believe that “Christofascist tyranny” and “authoritarian disenfranchisement” (whatever that means) are eminent dangers to our country, or that Mike Johnson aspires to achieve this?

Johnson of course is the new very unexpected speaker of the house and democrats who created his speakership by voting with the 8 GOP reps who wanted to outset Speaker McCarthy are having a serious case of buyers remorse. To wit:

MAGA Mike unveiled the first piece of legislation promoted by his regime.

CBS reported, “House Republicans want to pay for emergency aid to Israel by cutting funding to the IRS, teeing up a collision with the White House and Democrat-controlled Senate over how to support a key U.S. ally.

“The House GOP released a $14.3 billion standalone measure on Monday that would pay for aid to Israel by cutting the same amount in funding that was allocated to the IRS under the Inflation Reduction Act, one of President Biden’s signature pieces of legislation.”

That is what conservatives have wanted for 31 years now, going back to the Reform Party, the Gingrich Revolution, the Tea Party and Trump. $30 trillion later, we may actually get cutting-before-spending legislation.

That’s via Don Surber whose early morning piece I caught almost as soon as it was published thanks to the pain still hitting me in the gut.

That the left media would be going all in on painting the rather mild mannered speaker they despise as an existential threat to American Democracy at a time when Jewish students are being advised to hide in attics at Universities and cities like Boston and New York have folks extoling the virtues of those who kidnap, murder women and children and behead babies might seem odd when this stuff is being plastered all over the news:

To the right are screen captures from two very large protests, the top showing a demonstration of an estimated 7,000 pro-Hamas protesters taking over the Brooklyn Bridge in New York on October 28, 2023. In the video at one point you can read a sign that clearly says, “Our soldiers will not be held accountable for anything.”

The second picture is from a protest in Chicago. The demonstrators at this moment are chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”, a chant that has always meant in plain language, “We will kill all the Jews in Israel because Allah said only Muslims can live there.” It is also written into the Hamas founding charter, which states unequivocally that it “owes its loyalty to Allah, derives from Islam its way of life, and strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.”

That comes from a Robert Zimmerman piece linked by Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit around the time I woke screaming in pain today. Zimmerman notes these thing that one can’t help notice in the news but then provides the answer to why the left seeks to elevate Mike Johnson as a danger while ignoring the threat of mobs provoking fear and violence :

What has not been noted enough however is the political allegiances of these pro-Hamas demonstrators. While not every Democrat favors what Hamas did on October 7th, we can be very very VERY confident that practically every single one of these pro-Hamas protesters, calling for the death of every Jew in Israel and numbering in the tens of thousands, is a Democrat, and has been voting for Democrats their entire lives.

This is the base of the Democratic Party. It is why the anti-Semitic “squad” of Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), and Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) are all elected members of the Democratic Party caucus in the House of Representatives. The first two represent districts strongly controlled by Democrats, most of whom come from the local Muslim communities, while latter two come from the one-party secular cities of New York and Boston, controlled wholly by Democrats.

This is of course consistent with the ghastly Tom Hagen Math that I’ve been writing about since 2016:

Right now the left has the Gays and the Transgenders and the Hollywood elites & media in which they are overrepresented and they figure that’s the best things to have, but in America Islam is a thing of the future.  In 20 years the children of Muslims now being raised on the tenets of Sharia law in America will be old enough to vote and Democrats going to make sure they get those votes when the time come, not now but 10-20 years from now.

And if that means that Jews in the US have to live in terror for their lives, particularly in blue cities and bright blue campus’ nationwide, well so be it.

The only problem is that this isn’t something that plays well outside of the deepest of blue cities so it must be suppressed and/or ignored because the story can’t be about Democrats supporting babykillers and kidnappers. Stacy McCain again:

Readers will recall that we last paid attention to Mr. Berlatsky two weeks ago (“Noah Berlatsky, Who Seems to Be OK With Pedophiles, Sure Does Hate Republicans,” Oct. 9), when Berlatsky sought to persuade his readers that what was really newsworthy was not that Hamas terrorists had slaughtered hundreds of Israelis civilians, but rather the Republican reaction to this massacre. Notice the pattern: No matter what the actual news may be, every day is Attack Republicans Day for Noah Berlatsky.

Why do you think that is?

Stacy gives his reason why Berlatsky wants to advance this narrative, but in my mind Mr. Zimmerman’s explanation as to why Democrats want to change the subject is more persuasive. I fully believe that in just a few years we will see this from Democrats:

Or you simply an example of a “good German”, who makes believe evil isn’t happening in your name, and will later claim “you just didn’t know, you had no idea what the Nazis were really doing?”

For the left to see themselves in the light of truth might be unbearable. But for the voters of the nation to see Democrats in the light of truth, that’s unthinkable.

The mess in Pennsylvania’s election system

Posted: October 31, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

As Pennsylvania voters head to the polls next week, the Democrats have created another gimmick to boost their chances for all future elections, including the 2024 presidential campaign.

Pennsylvania played an essential role in the nail-biting elections of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, so any change in the state election process may become critical.

Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, has announced that Pennsylvania will implement automatic voter registration when someone gets a new driver’s license or renews an old one.

What’s wrong with the plan? It’s already incredibly easy to register to vote. If the estimated 1.7 million Pennsylvanians who haven’t registered to vote are that lazy, let them stay unregistered.

These “new” voters are more likely to use mail-in ballots, which Democrats to “harvest” ballots in 2020. Ballot harvesting occurs when individuals take advantage of the options to “harvest” or collect voters’ completed ballots and return them on behalf of the voter. While it may seem like a kind gesture to assist voters in submitting their mail ballots, ballot harvesting can severely undermine the fairness and honesty of elections.

A 2021 study by researchers from the University of Southern California and the University of California-Berkeley found that automatic voter registration increased registration in states where it was in effect and boosted the number of people voting by more than 1%.
Instead of the voter registration gimmick, state and local officials should investigate some serious organizational problems in the election process.

Just a stone’s throw away from Biden’s birthplace of Scranton, Luzerne County is a mess!

The Associated Press recounted that “the polls had just opened for last year’s midterms in Pennsylvania when the phones began ringing at the election office in Luzerne County.

“Polling places were running low on paper to print ballots. Volunteers were frustrated, and voters were worried they might not be able to vote.”

Emily Cook, the office’s interim deputy director who had been in her position for just two months, rushed to the department’s warehouse. She found stacks of paper, but it was the wrong kind — ordered long ago and too thick to meet the requirements for the county’s voting equipment.

Guess how Luzerne County votes. Democrat. Guess where the ballot shortages were most prominent. Republican precincts.

The 2022 ballot debacle, referred to locally as “papergate,” was just the latest problem in a county on its fifth election director in the past three years.

Election offices have been understaffed for years. But 2020 was a tipping point, with all the pandemic-related challenges before the presidential vote and the hostility afterward.

A wave of retirements and resignations has followed, creating a vacuum of institutional knowledge. In Pennsylvania, officials estimate that 40 of the state’s 67 county election offices have new directors or deputy directors since 2020.

Unfortunately, Al Schmidt, who oversaw the presidential election in Philadelphia in 2020, serves as the secretary of the Commonwealth, which runs Pennsylvania voting. Although Schmidt claims he is a Republican, he’s clearly one in name only from his background in Philadelphia.

The Pennsylvania election scheme is an absolute mess, and such messes make it a lot easier to steal votes or suppress them, and the Democrats have almost complete control of the operation in 2024.

Under the Fedora: UN Talk vs Shot, The Just Murdering Kids High Ground, Pam and Robert Being Right Sometimes Sucks, Self Inflicted Wounds, Schlichter and Wayne on Barbarians

Posted: October 30, 2023 by datechguy in culture, Israel, Israel vs Hamas, middle east
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Given what we’ve seen from the UN lately there are a lot of people wondering why we bother with the UN. People who ask this forget what the actual job of the UN is which was so aptly described by Sir Humphrey Appleby in the Classic series Yes Prime Minister over Israel striking back after a PLO attack nearly 40 years ago:

PM James Hacker: Surely we should use the debate to promote peace, harmony good will!

Sir Humphrey: Well it would be most unusual. The UN is still the accepted forum for the expression of international hatred

Yes Prime Minister A Victory for Democracy

That’s the secret. Instead of going to war against Israel in a fight that would not go well for them Every single one of those Arab states can go back to their population that would like to see Israel wiped from the face of the earth and the Jews exterminated and point to their vote in the UN to show how they gave the Jews what for.

That’s 3D chess.

Had a commentator who insisted that the beheading babies stuff was a myth. Guys like that are the reason that Ike made sure US troops and generals saw the death camps and recorded the evidence of them.

But what I’d really like to ask the fellow is this: “Given that you deny that Hamas beheaded babies, would you object if they did and concede that if it was done it would constitute a terrorist act?”

I suspect the answer would be a long speech about Israel and a lot of ducking because if your base position is. “They didn’t behead babies they just killed them.” there isn’t a lot of high ground left to hold.

I saw this tweet a few days ago concerning how the British Taxpayer was subsidizing the radical mosques and put up this response:

Geller and Spencer and company have been right about this from the start and spent a decade warning the west about it and for their efforts have dodged assassination attempted, been banned from countries and have been put on all kind of “hate” lists.

The only hate that I suspect they have is hating the fact they they were right about all of it. I suspect they would have been much happier if they had been wrong about radical Islam and the antisemitism of the left.

Being right sometimes sucks.

That actually brings up another aspect of not only this story but the decline of the US and the west. Every single part of it was preventable and was only made possible by people making choices at worst for personal gain and at best out of sheer ignorance and stupidity.

The bottom line is those who made these choices hated those who warned them more than they hated the possible consequences of their decisions, particularly if the consequences were pretty much restricted to the plebes.

I suspect that they will remain wed to those choices because they would rather continue with these consequences than admit we were right.

Finally Kurt Schlichter has a piece today that illustrates the reality that our friends on the left have spent the last 40 years denying:

What happened over the last 70 years or so was an interregnum of peace in the West, created by violence against barbarians and facilitated by people willfully looking away from the butchery still continuing at the fringes of the map. The West managed to build a civilization that was – for the first time in history since perhaps the Pax Romana – generally internally peaceful. And the West convinced itself that this was normal.

But it was not normal. It was an anomaly, a glorious one, but an anomaly nonetheless. The world is not a peaceful place, and it never was, and it never will be.

You can read the whole thing but if you want the best possible summery of the truth he is saying you can’t do much better than this two minute clip from John Wayne’s Oscar winning performance in True Grit.

Consider the closing line from the clip: “The rat catcher’s too tough on the rats, give them rats a fair show they say. Well what kind of fair show did they give old man Potter. Tell me that!”

I can’t think of a better summing up of the left’s call for a cease fire than that.

My parents generation that fought World War 2 understood this. Their grandchildren and great grandchildren who whine about “microagressions” do not.

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