Saw the article about AOC out with her guy and protesters bugging her about Gaza.
It’s rather ironic as she’s generally on their side but what really struck me is the photo of her out with her guy seemed so …. normal.
I’m partial to the sight of a young lady out with her man and frankly I’d like folks to leave her alone to enjoy those moment which are some of the most important in life.
I don’t watch a lot of the MSM but I made it a point of watching the reactions to the SCOTUS ruling on the attempts to kick Trump off the ballots in various blue states.
I found it hilarious that all of the stressed that the court didn’t acquit him of being an insurrectionist.
They didn’t have to, nobody has filed a charge of insurrection against him in federal court, in fact none of the J6 prisoners or defendants have in fact been charged with insurrection.
Their desperation to keep this narrative intact is very interesting and shows how far they’ve fallen, but it’s amazing how far a person will willingly let themselves fall if their paycheck is attached to it.
Have you noticed that in the minds of the media nothing delegitimizes an institution more than no longer following the narrative of the left.
Elon Musk, Ben Carson, The Supreme Court, Donald Trump, Naomi Wolf and yes J. K. Rowling were all feted and celebrated by the left for a very long time right up until the moment that they were perceived as a threat to the power of the left and the narrative they were selling.
Once they did as far as all those folks who loved and celebrated them were concerned they were now unpersons that needed to be destroyed.
Hey commies gotta commie.
There is an excellent substack by Naomi Wolf about visiting CPAC titled “Letter from CPAC” that you should read. There is one bit that jumped out at me:
We entered the Gaylord at the peak of CPAC, to an atrium thronged with happy visitors. My first, ignominious reaction to the scene, for which Brian rightly chided me, was: “This is not my culture.”
There was a buzz, from the moment we entered: a joyful vibe. After we checked in, changed, and ran down to join the festivities, we were struck by how pleasant and positive almost everyone was to us, and to each other. As someone reported to me the desk clerk had said, “I know they won’t approve of me saying this back in Southeast DC, where I come from, but you all are nice.”
Nice is a good and accurate word, a better description is “normal”
She goes though a list of folks she met and spoke to, many that she might disagree with on some issues and notes how different they are from how the media paints them.
It’s been six years years since I’ve been to CPAC the last time I went was with my sons and them seeing the MSM in action as they actually are taught them plenty.
Finally there are two reasons why you don’t see me at CPAC anymore. The first is as a full time employees where I work I only get so much vacation time and it won’t be till 2028 that I have the additional week that attending CPAC would require.
But the other is frankly that DaTipJar has dwindled to almost nothing, my last fundraiser only managed 25% of my goal and last month between subscriptions and tip jar hits I had exactly $2 left over after paying my writers.
I suspect the blog as a business will not survive long after the election and with money tight it will be an effort to survive to the election. It’s nothing about $5000 wouldn’t solve but that money simply isn’t there and in the end I don’t have a divine right to a single person’s dollar, I can only earn it by producing content that people think is worth it.
It’s disappointing to fail in business I’ve done so many times I’m just sorry I couldn’t provide better for my wife who deserves better. If I had followed my brothers into the civil service I might even now be retired or close to it with a pension, but I’m not ashamed of trying to make it as a writer/pundit and this blog has done good work, sometimes even important work. I’ve showed things and told things as they are which is why both Youtube now and pre-Musk twitter censored me. Best of all I’m proud to say I never sold out to push any narrative I didn’t believe in.
I listened to the arguments before the Supreme Court concerning Colorado excluding Donald Trump from the ballot in election 2024.
The consensus of those who heard the arguments is as MSNBC of all places put it “a very bad hearing for Colorado” that being not the citizens but those making the case for the state before the court.
The left is relying on the 14th amendment and is claiming that Trump in a “insurrectionist” and if you listen to the folks arguing for Colorado their favorite word in their presentation is “insurrection” or “Insurrectionist”.
The real problem for Colorado doing so is that Donald Trump has never been convicted let alone charged with insurrection. In fact to my knowledge no person who has been charged with crimes concerning the events of January 6th has been charged with insurrection.
It seems to me that if you’re excluding someone from the ballot based on their being an insurrectionist you would actually have to have a declaration that an insurrection took place and that a person is charged by the government with taking part in an insurrection.
This alone should have killed Colorado’s entire argument, and any person on the left should understand that if you can decide to deny a person of their rights without due process, no charge or nor conviction then you can exclude someone based on opinion, political or cultural.
That frankly is the basis for Jim Crow and that the current left is so obsessed with keeping Trump off the ballot that they don’t see the precedent are trying to set….is incredible to me.
I’m hoping that the various opinions are right and SCOTUS shoots this down (from what I heard of the arguments I’m guessing it will be anywhere from 9-0 to 7-2, I’m betting 8-1 with Sotomayor in dissent) but that it even has reached this point frankly is shameful.
But frankly the left’s entire treatment of Donald Trump from the time her won the GOP nomination in 2016 is very shameful and there is no reason to suggest they would change their stripes.
I have a lot of little things to say but not enough for an under the Fedora Day so today we’re going to give Don Surber the sincerest from of flattery and imitate his Saturday Link Fest with a few other thoughts:
First at Stacy McCain’s site we have a story about how thanks to a family squabble an iconic business will close:
The litigation later forced the family to change the name of its original location to Tony and Nick’s Steaks in 2022. Anthony Jr.’s two sons — Anthony III and Michael, who were also employed at the sandwich empire — followed him out the door, taking copies of the company’s financial records with them and turned them over to federal investigators. Those documents revealed that Lucidonio Sr. and Nicholas Lucidonio hid the success of their business from tax collectors by keeping two sets of books almost from the day the sandwich shop opened.
While one might have an opinion of members of an Italian (Sicilian?) family turning in another member of their family to the feds may I humbly point out that if they weren’t cooking the books it wouldn’t be an issue.
As my Sicilian parents who owned business taught me young, “Always pay the government first because they’re the only ones who can take from you before you go to court.”
2nd: Was at the bank today figured it would be an easy time since I needed to convert three $20 bills into two 10’s six 5’s and ten ones so I can make change if people at St Cecilia’s church want to buy tickets to the WQPH 89.3 FM Shrove Tuesday Brunch on the 13th (Details here). I figured it would take about 30 seconds invoving:
Opening the draw
Counting the bills
Giving them to me
Not anymore. Now a machine is involved so instead the teller has to
Take the last four of my social
Feeding my bills into the reader
Do tons of typing into the computer
Wait for the machine to spit out the bills when the typing is done
Print a receipt for the bills
Give me the bills and receipt
Machines don’t make everything easier
3rd: Over at Pirates Cove Mr. Teach notices climate folks trying to link “climate change” to ancient plagues. to wit:
While modern medicine has advanced considerably since the time of the Romans, this data offers insights into how diseases might change in our own changing climate. “Within the scope of the current climate change it is of major importance to understand the links between climate and human health and we unfortunately do not understand these links as well as we would like,” Zonneveld said. “Investigating the resilience of ancient societies to past climate change and relationships between past climate change and the occurrence of infectious disease might give us better insight into these relationships and the climate change induced challenges we are facing today.
One would have thought that an empire that could conquer so much of the known world, invent formalized sanitation, arches, pioneered early medical tools, concrete, the first bound book, and so much more, would have known not to use fossil fuels, hair dryers, ice makers, and plastics
It never ceases to amaze me that tens of millions have absolute faith in the never ending predictions of doom to come in 30 years when my own local forecast for Sunday has changed three times in the last 72 hours.
4th: I’m told the Doctor that I’ve had for the last 30-40 years or so is about to retire. Baring a major accident/incident before July I will likely not see him again.
This means I will likely have to get a new doc who doesn’t know me or my family or my past. This is normal but I’m not looking forward to it. If there was one thing I had no doubt about with my old doc it’s that he cared if I lived or died. Given what we’ve seen from the medical profession the last few years it will be very hard to get that impression from a stranger.
Of course as I’m in the back nine it more a question of what do I want to die from because in the end I have to die of something.
5th: The New Neo has some thoughts about the Jean Carroll defamation case and the type of precedent it sets:
I don’t think lawsuits like this one should be actionable, whether they be against Trump or anyone else. It should not be legally actionable defamation to say your accuser is lying about you and that you’re not sexually attracted to her. Nor was Trump ever found criminally liable for raping her, because the statute of limitations had run out by the time she made her accusations. I doubt her rape case would have held up in a criminal court anyway – unless it was a court composed of jurors or a judge who hated the defendant.
I predict that once leftists and left leaning institutions like universities are charged with defamation for insisting on their innocence in cases and have judgements made against them the injustice of this will suddenly become clear to the left.
Unexpectedly of course.
6th: If anyone is interested we have some openings in both the 1972 and the 1997 league for Dynasty Baseball.
If you’re up to it and have an interest give me a shout because the window for all of this is closing.
7th: Since I quoted Don Surber for the title of this post it behooves me to mention an interesting twist to the old “learn to code” crowd:
ITEM 14: What the nation needs is coders who learn to mine.
CNBC reported last month, “The U.S. is running out of miners. More than half the nation’s mining workforce, about 221,000 workers, is expected to retire by 2029, according to the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration, and the number of candidates willing to fill those slots is shrinking.”
Smart people are urging and/or putting their kids into trade schools where basic “manly” skills are taught as it’s becoming increasingly clear that the American left has basically evolved into the passengers of the B Ark of the Golgafrinchan fleet
8th: Since we mentioned the need for coal jobs it’s worth noting more layoffs of Journalists: First this week at the LA Times (Via Legal Insurrection):
As a general rule, most people are sympathetic when they hear about others who have lost their jobs due to layoffs, company closings, and the like.
But in the case of the now-former employees of the Los Angeles Times, that sympathy is in short supply among conservatives and others who were frequent targets of the paper’s agenda-driven news and opinion divisions.
On Sunday, Legal Insurrection reported that the left coast newspaper had announced that staff cutbacks were imminent, with around 100 people set to be let go. In response, unionized employees staged a one-day walkout and demanded, among other things, “to swap traditional seniority protections for those related to diversi
In an internal email this morning, Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng announced that the company is laying off 8% of its staff pic.twitter.com/VY6HIt7ktc
I look forward to the plethora of articles from those journalists remaining insisting that the economy is better than ever. Perhaps AI can write them at the LA Times and Business Insider.
The NFL league championships are this week and from the NFC we are guaranteed a great story of overcoming adversity no matter who wins, either Detroit FINALLY making it to the Superbowl with a rejected QB or San Francisco making it led by the very last pick in the draft born the year Brady was picked and drafted 63 places later than him (262nd).
In the east you have Lamar Jackson the pre-emptive MVP facing Patrick Mahomes who now has made the AFC title game in his first six seasons as a starter. Comparisons to Tom Brady and questions if he will beat Brady’s six titles and ten Superbowl appearances are already flying but in the end no matter what he achieves when people ask who was better the record will show that when facing Tom Brady in the AFC Championship game or the Superbowl he was 0-2 against a Tom Brady at age 40 or over.
10th and last at Elder of Ziyon which is a must visit during the Israel Hamas war they note a rather amazing phenom at the UN, collective memory loss:
Q: Given the UN’s big role in Gaza, UNRWA, has there ever been any indication to the UN that tunnels are being built under the city?
UN: Not to us. I mean… it seems to me that all this infrastructure was built in a highly secretive way. I mean, I see it just as an observer… To think that the UN had any understanding of what was… any information about those operations, I think, is… No is clearly the answer to that.
This is even though the UN has admitted in previous years that tunnels were found underneath their own schools.
In fact, former UNRWA Gaza director Matthias Schmale admitted that it is a “safe assumption” there were extensive tunnels under Gaza, in a 2021 interview:
If it wasn’t for the fact that Hogan’s Heroes was a fictional show I’d swear that the UN was recruiting heavily from descendants of the guards at Luft Stalag 13 for their uncanny ability to know nothing and see nothing.
There is a reason why third base coaches exist to let you know if it’s a good idea to take that extra base. If he puts up a stop sign with two outs in the last of the 9th when you represent the tying run listen to him.
If you are counting on $1000+ from a relative as a wedding gift, it’s a bad idea to inform them that they are not welcome at your wedding because you would be frightened by their presence because they vote conservative and not invite them on those grounds.
Not only will for forfeit that thousand dollar payday, but you will forfeit any future paydays that might have come up.
Reality doesn’t care if something is proven in court or not. Reality IS. If you base reality on court decisions or the lack thereof you will find yourself played for a fool.
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