Archive for the ‘under the fedora’ Category

Five Christmas Season Thoughts Under the Fedora: The Standard of How Great the US is, Human Progress Two Measures, Too accustomed to Trump’s Success or A Psi-op? $2.63 That’s five water/sewer bills and Temps, Finally Yes Minister in Minnesota

Posted: December 28, 2025 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, economy, under the fedora
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For all the horrible things our friends on the left say about America being racist, sexist unequal etc etc etc let me make one important point.

This horrible America of which you speak is so great that given the choice between going back to their own countries at no cost to themselves with $3000 in their pockets (An amount higher than the average yearly income in 54 countries) or staying in the US and risking arrest and deportation the majority choose the former.

On twitter today saw a post about how difficult it was to program back in the punch card era compared to today when you can literally ask a AI to create code for you. The fellow marveled at the progress in just 50 years and he’s right about that but let me tell you want progress really is:

Being able to feed a family of four a hot meal with meat for less than an hour wages? THAT’s human progress that king and princes could only dream of.

It’s very easy to forget that Donald Trump has been back in office for less than a year. This is because of his insane work ethic and the breakneck speed that things have been

The amount of things he has managed to get done in these first 11 months is so vast that any other president in history would have considered it a grand set of accomplishments for a full term and quite a few presidents would have been lucky to accomplish as much over two terms. Any person with a even a slight grasp of US history could see this.

Yet lately my X feed has been bombarded by posts aren’t happening fast enough in the Trump administration from cracking down on fraud to arrests, particularly arrests. The post seem unrelenting

I’m thinking this is one of two things or possibly both.

It could be that people just have gotten so used to Trump getting things done fast they can’t grasp the idea that getting things done in Washington is the exception not the rule. It’s sort of how Patriots fans were spoiled by Tom Brady basically making a trip to the Super bowl every other year and acting like something was wrong when we didn’t

It could also be a PSI-op to anger Trump supporters to trick them into staying home in 2026 and try to drive his numbers down.

Frankly if it was my job to try to foment dissent within MAGA that’s how I’d try do it.

One must always remember that most pols aren’t saints. There are some who will do the right thing out of principle (although they might disagree on what the “right thing” is) but in the end most will only do the right thing if the incentive is greater than doing the wrong thing or nothing at all.

That’s reality

When I went to mass yesterday I passed by the cheapest gas station in town which is conveniently located next to my church.

Gas was $2.63 a gallon. That’s a full 16 cents less per gallon than it was two months ago.

Over the course of a year that’s enough saving for me and DaWife to pay 5 water bills or allow us to go out to eat 5 times.

If that’s not enough Friday when I went to work there were no temps in the building.

That it itself is not unusual for the day after Christmas, but what WAS unusual is that Friday was the first day this month when there were no temps in the building.

Last year the temps were gone by December 3rd and at no time during the Biden presidency where they here for more than a week.

The Trump boom is coming in fact it might be already here.

One of the things about importing people from a different culture who don’t want to become Americans is importing a different value system.

A great illustration of this was shown nearly 50 years ago on the TV show “Yes Minister” in an episode called: “The Moral Dimension”

A great explanation of how this works comes from this excellent post on X

Key Quote:

The weird thing about this to me was that whenever I turned down such an offering, it was treated as a grave insult. I was the one in the wrong, and not the fraudster trying to bribe me. They considered it rude that I was in their country and refused to accept how things got done. After all, why did I not want to help my tribe by helping their tribe?

Let me repeat: in these cultures, FRAUD IS NOT EVEN A CONCEPT. There is only what helps your tribe.

They people have no concept that stealing is wrong, unless you’re stealing from them. The stealing doesn’t shock these folks, what shocks them is that we weren’t already doing it on the scale that they are.

Until that changes things won’t change.

Five Thoughts and Observations Under the Fedora: $269.9 Gas in Fitchburg, A Temporary Sign?, Open Roads, , Reagan 1981-84 redux? and A function of math not a Miracle of God

Posted: December 14, 2025 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, economy, politics, under the fedora
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This week I picked up my son from work and had him pump gas for me at the station near my church on Mechanic Street in Fitchburg because it’s the cheapest gas in town. The price was $273.9 and as I was almost empty it took a lot to fill it.

The very next day gas was at $269.9 which both annoyed me as I had filled up the day before but is a huge sign. If that price continues to drop it will mean an awful lot of extra cash in people’s pockets & a lowering of costs to every single business that gets a delivery by truck.

If this becomes a trend then it could be the sign of the turn in the economy that will change the dynamic in this country for 2026 or 2028.

Last year’s Christmas peak season, the final one of the Biden years was the shortest and weakest in my decade at the warehouse that I work at.

After dropping from 3 local warehouses to 1 during the 2nd year of Biden and losing our 2nd shift in the 3rd Biden year, last year’s peak lasted from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. By Tuesday every temp was gone and peak was finished with voluntary days off being offered.

Back during Trump’s first term we would be flat out for 3-4 weeks from Black Friday on, we’d have 10 hour days and at least one mandatory overtime day a week. We would bring in 100’s of temps to keep up with the work who would usually be kept till about the 14th or 20th of December with about a tenth of them, the best, kept on for the returns season who would eventually become full time employees.

In the first “peak” of the 2nd Trump term we’re not at that level but numbers were higher than expected and our temps were still here on last Friday (albeit they left two hours early that day). Word is we will be busy next week.

Even if the temps aren’t there tomorrow we would have kept them a full two weeks longer than last year. Does that mean the economy has turned around? I can’t say but it’s a data point.

There has been one more interesting sign of the times.

I generally try to leave for work by 6:20 AM to be at my place of work by 6:50-6:55 for my 7 AM shift.

Now when I worked every Sunday I knew I could leave as late as 6:30-6:35 and still (barring accidents on the highways) get to work in that time period but as a rule if it’s a school day and I leave for work anytime after 6:25 AM getting to work on time is iffy and leaving at 6:30 meant I’d have to punch in before I head to the cafeteria to put my lunch in the cooler to hit the grace period and have any shot of avoiding being late.

For reasons I won’t get into I’ve been running very late this week not leaving before 6:25 AM four of five days and leaving as late as 6:33 one day this week. Yet every single day the traffic has been so light that I’ve made it to work with plenty of time to spare. In fact the day I left on time I had so much spare time that I almost forgot to punch in as I sat waiting for the day to start.

Now Massachusetts being as blue as it gets has been fighting back on ICE’s attempts to apprehend illegal immigrants but that hasn’t stopped raids in Boston, Worcester and even in my city of Fitchburg from taking place.

I have no idea if this has effected the traffic coming north from Worcester or east from Gardner. People might be staying home because of the cold but I find the sudden end to the normal morning congestion on school days…interesting.

One of the advantages of age is being able to recognize patterns in history repeating not from books but from memory.

Back in the late 70’s the Carter economy was in the toilet which led to Ronald Reagan’s famous words:

As you know Reagan beat Carter and the economy took off, but it didn’t do so right away. The first year of Reagan was a tough one as he got his agenda passed and it wasn’t until 1982 that we saw signs of what would become one of the best economies of my lifetime. Alas for Reagan it didn’t happen fast enough for him to keep the Senate but it did happen fast enough for him to crush Mondale in 1984 so completely that even the blue states of Massachusetts, New York & California voted for him.

The Trump recovery which I’ve noted some signs of in this post is coming. I don’t know if it will come fast enough to save the House in 2026 but I know when it’s in full swing it’s going to make JD Vance a tough customer to beat in 2028, particularly if the best the left can come up with is Gavin Newsome or an AOC wannabe.

I feel very optimistic about the future & I suspect that as I near my retirement my country will be in good hands.

A few days ago I saw this tweet from Benny Johnson:

While I have seen more than my share of actual miracles from God (after a while they become almost mundane) this is not a miracle of God it’s a function of math as I noted in my reply:

For the last 60 years the left has promoted birth control, abortion, homosexuality & transgenderism even to the point of spaying their own kids. When you do that for two generations the population of people who believe what you do naturally decreases.

Meanwhile I’ve seen over the last few years a large rise in large families at church not quite at the 1940’s & 1950’s levels but getting there. Put simply Christians keep having kids and thus naturally are starting to catch up on unbelievers who don’t.

If the westerners had kids at the same rate they did in 1930 Islamic immigration even at the levels they have in Europe & Canada would have little effect.

Assorted Thoughts Under the Fedora: A Commie Plot? , Even Worse, A four hour gap, Common Ground for Russia & Ukraine , and not there yet

Posted: August 10, 2025 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, politics, under the fedora, war
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On twitter this week I noticed a discussion on pot and found myself retelling the story of visiting the school where my wife worked as school nurse 20 years ago and the big chart with the human body on it and pointing to all the various functions that Pot impaired or damaged. All of that science is still valid but during the discussion something hit me.

I’ve often argued that our foes decided during the Reagan Years that they couldn’t outspend us so they decided that they would instead of strictly investing in weapons they would invest in our institutions because people were cheaper to buy and lasted longer. An examination of our higher and even high school educational system suggests today suggests our foes dollars were well spent.

But I also wonder if they invested in the pushes to legalize Pot to grant us all the social and general societal problems that a culture where a good sized percentage of the population is stoned. This might sound odd but I noticed one thing in my research…

…none of our enemies have made pot legal in their countries, NONE!

Just a coincidence I’m sure.

I was going through my archives for my tribute piece for former DaTechGuyblog writer Christopher Harper who died last month and I found myself revisiting the days after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the media reaction to it.

They seemed completely taken aback that we had such outrage over it and were even more put out by any suggestion that their rhetoric had anything to do with it.

Six months into his term we find that the Democrats have normalized violence to such a degree that if Trump was shot tomorrow you would have members of the press saying, “He had it coming.” without any shame.

And people wonder why Trump isn’t giving these bastards a pass this term.

If you’re a conservative you might have watched one of the many videos of the left on election night going from the anticipation of victory to the agony of defeat.

There is a lot of snickering watching it but there is one part that really jumps out at me that nobody seems to talk about.

Early in the day they kept stressing the indicators that Kamala was going to win the day and that Trump was in huge trouble and that particularly Hispanics were abandoning him etc etc etc and as soon as real number came out suddenly pivoted to “we always knew it would be close”

How is it that none of the “conservatives” at the table called out the folks for literally pivoting on a dime from a desired lie to the facts on the ground within just a few hours?

I really can’t see how anyone considers anything these people say even the least bit credible.

As you might know Donald Trump will be meeting with Putin this week in Alaska to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.

There is a lot of talk, most of it just noise, concerning this meeting but there is one disadvantage that Trump has that nobody seems to be bringing up.

While both Ukraine and Russia have reason to want the war to end the reality is the one thing both Putin and Zelenskyy have in common is this: Neither of them is anxious to give Donald Trump a victory on the international stage such as achieving a peach deal would generate.

It’s really possible, I might even say probable that one or BOTH of them given the choice of peace, even with a deal to their advantage, or defeating Trump they might choose the latter.

That’s how bent things have become.

Finally you might remember the serial fan fiction story hosted here crossing over Doctor Who, The Great Escape, Superman and Hogan’s Heroes. Well on twitter this morning Grok’s image generator was being lionized so I’d thought I’d put it to the test.

I asked it to generate an image of Superman standing before the escaped allied prisoners looking completely surprised with a pile of spent machine gun slugs at his feet.

I got a four legged superman sitting down on the ground in front of a bunch of Nazi soldiers. I kept telling the AI the things it needed to fix and some things like the man of steel having the right number of legs did get fixed but in the end I gave up as it seems incapable of generating the image according to my instructions.

It’s still impressive to see how far we’ve come in a few decades but it’s not where it pretends to be, at least not the free version on X.

The day will come.

Assorted Thoughts Under the Fedora: Press Conference Nostalgia, Not just Jeff’s Fault, The Media Anti-Anti’s out in Full Force, Economy Still Rolling and Getting What you vote for

Posted: June 28, 2025 by datechguy in economy, politics, under the fedora
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Watching Trump’s hour long press conference yesterday made me nostalgic for the two press conferences that I attended as credentialed press and was able to ask questions at. Both times the questions were pertinent to the coverage I was reporting and were non hostile and elicited complements to then candidate Trump.

It is the closest I’ve come to missing journalism since I closed the business, however I still hold to historical distinctions that can never be taken away from me.

  1. The first new media reporter to question candidate Donald Trump at a press conference.
  2. The only person ever to question Donald Trump in a fedora and a Doctor Who scarf.

Yeah I suppose it’s vanity but hey I’m an old man at retirement age got to have something to crow about.

Speaking of those old days as a regular journalist one of the primary reasons why I finally gave it up was the crash in my traffic and thus my revenue, which I’ve always presumed was primaraly due to my reporting on the Jeffrey Epstein story before other people were touching it and while the Clintons still held power.

Now we discover that specific efforts were being made to choke off revenue from sites that supported Donald Trump (thus my being banned from Youtube when I was within 5 followers of being able to monetize my videos.

I imagine there might be a class action suit to be joined someday and perhaps I might do so when the time comes but the wiser move is likely to just pray for those affected and those involved. At my age you generally can’t go wrong with prayer.

A long time ago Jay Nordlinger wrote about the anti-anti’s basically people who hated Reagan and his supporters so much that they defended communism against his attacks against it. The were essentially anti anti-communist.

We saw this return with Trump and never was it better illustrated this week when you had media openly defending Iran and attacking the raid that destroyed their nuclear capability. Trump being less kindly than Reagan and more of a counter-puncher simply destroyed them over it and members of his administration jumped right into the beatdown.

They’re also out in full force over the NY Democrat primary as well with the media going all out to defend the “defund the police, empty the jails, pro-illegal immigrant anti-semite Islamist who the Democrats nominated.

In the end it’s like a variation of the old Golda Mier saying about the arabs.

We will only have peace with [them] when they love their children more than they hate us.

The left hates us more than they love their country or even themselves.

Wages keep outpacing inflation which has dropped to almost nothing despite the media insisting otherwise. To quote Don Surber (who you should read daily):

The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that personal income increased 0.8 percent in April. Inflation rose 0.1 percent. That’s a net gain of more than 500 bucks. A year’s worth of April 2025s is worth $6,000 as inflation would fall to that 1.4% rate Trump bequeathed to the auto pen of FJB on January 20, 2021.

It is too early to declare victory for Trumponomics, but America seems to be rid of the covid era and is back in business. Tariffs and ICE are doing the trick.

The Wall Street Journal reported, “The U.S. trade deficit collapsed in April, as tariffs took a huge bite out of imports.

Add to that record stock markets numbers (which the MSM aren’t all that interested in) and you have the makings of a very strong record for the GOP to run on for years.

That’s why the left is so desperate to stop the Trump Tax Bill, if those get enshrined into law it will be tough to get the GOP out of office.

Nothing succeeds like success.

As you’ve likely heard Democrats in NYC has decided to nominate a Socialist, Marxist, antisemite who wants to defund the police.

Some people are surprised, I don’t see why. You’ve been chasing out producers and job creators for a decade why wouldn’t the socialists who remain vote for one of their own.

The main problem is that as Margaret Thatcher noted eventually you run out of other people’s money and this is a time where people can do a lot of the financial work that generates dollars in NY remotely and elsewhere.

As a rule you get the government you deserve

Ironically this is like what you have in Iran in the sense that a lot of people in 1978 didn’t like the Shah and decided they’d give the Ayatollah a go.

Let’s hope Mamdani doesn’t do the same for NYC but if he does, it’s on the voters.

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