Archive for the ‘under the fedora’ Category

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.

Five Musk v Trump Thoughts Under the Fedora: Calvin Coolidge and JD Vance, Math and Tolerances, Troll Level Infinite on Epstein, O’Neill LBJ Richelieu Elwood P Dowd and Jesus, John Nolte For the Win

Posted: June 6, 2025 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, Blame Trump, politics, under the fedora
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100 years ago we had one of the wisest Presidents ever in office. That man was Calvin Coolidge. He was known for an age of prosperity but also known for giving good advice such as this line:

“I have never been hurt by what I have not said.”

Coolidge once held the office of Vice President, JD Vance the current Vice President apparently has taken his advice to heart and put out a hilarious tweet in the face of the whole world screaming for him to say something about Trump vs Musk which said:

Slow news day, what are we even going to talk about?

Now THAT’S funny.

It’s worth pointing out that Elon Musk is right that the “Big Beautiful Bill” does not cut as much as it should and spends more than it should, that is simple math and Elon is very good at math.

But as an engineer he should also be good at the math involving tolerances, that is, how far you can push something before you reach the danger point.

As I’ve already pointed out, this is the best bill that could be gotten out of the house with the majority you have, the math is very direct, you needed one more than a majority in the House and 50 votes in the senate on a reconciliation bill.

Without bigger majorities you can’t do better than this. It’s not just a matter of straight math it’s a matter of tolerances and Musk should know this.

There was a lot of talk coming out of the MSM over yesterday but the thing that I found absolutely Hilarious was this tweet from the official Democrat party twitter/x account:

In case the tweet doesn’t show the Democrats tweeted:

Kill the bill and release the Epstein Files!

Yes you read that right, the DEMOCRATS are now suddenly calling for the release of the Epstein files. I replied thus:

I’m sorry but getting @TheDemocrats to call for the release of the #EpsteinFiles is troll level ULTIMATE! I think the feud is a real thing but if it’s not this is 12 dimensional chess not 4

This is why you should never tweet while angry or on a emotional high.

If I’m Trump I tell Pam Bondi: I know you’re going through them but dump them all by the end of next week they asked for it.

I say the end of next week because this is going to be the only story for the next few days so if you have news you want hidden now’s the time to drop it.

I often refer to Tip O’Neill’s excellent autobiography “Man of the House” because it has so many lesions on how politics works. Yesterday’s kerfuffle remined me of one such story.

LBJ was meeting with Tip and called for some polling figures and an aide was slow in getting them and Johnson chewed him out with a profanity laced tirade. When Tip spoke to the aide saying that president or no I wouldn’t take that kind of grief from anyone the aide answered: That’s just his way five minutes from now he’ll forget all about it.

If there is one consistent thing about Donald Trump it’s the ability to work with people that he doesn’t agree with or even doesn’t get along with because he is completely goal orientated. You will see him make peace and a deal with anybody as long as it advances his goals. He’ll let Elon rant and jab him gently as he has so far but one there is a common goal he won’t be shy about making up with him, particularly when he knows he holds all the cards right now.

There are folks like Steve Bannon, who never liked or trusted Musk who want Trump to go all Houthis in Yemen on him.

Trump won’t rise to that bait. He’ll simply let good economic numbers for the country (and bad stock numbers for Tesla) speak for themselves. He’ll let folks like the teamsters who voted for him remind him that he may have kicked in money but the voters were showing up at rallies for Trump long before he turned up and that with one customer base already upset with him it’s not a good idea to upset a second until Elon reaches the Cardinal Richelieu moment from the 1948 version of the Three Musketeers:

When that moment comes (and there are signs it already has) Trump will take this scene from The Chosen to heart:

Let’s pray for them both and hope Elon this scene from the classic picture Harvey to heart.

I recommend pleasant over smart too or to quote Tip O’Neill again: “I always knew how to count.”

Finally there is one point on this thing that I completely missed that John Nolte didn’t:

Nolte said, “We don’t know what’s really going on, but I do know that Trump is sticking his finger in the eye of his biggest donor and that never happens. How many times did Barack Obama piss off George Soros? Zero.”

Seriously can you think of any pol, even one who doesn’t have to face the voters again, who is willing to stand up to his biggest donor to advance what he thinks is right? Does nobody see the amount of street cred this gives Donald Trump in terms of fighting for his principles? Who else has ever done this?

It’s like the story of the Mafia approaching Rocky Marciano to try to get him to throw his title fight against Don Cockell to clean up on the odds. Rocky rebuked them saying he was ashamed that they were Italian. The dons were disappointed but were impressed that he stood up to them.

In the end when Musk realizes this he will get that his best chance to meet his goal of reaching Mars is with Trump at his side vs sword to sword.

Yesterday the left was partying like Satan until 3 pm on Good Friday, let me remind them it quickly went down hill for him from that point.

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