2nd we have the EMP Team packing up after a VERY successful Pintastic NE 2023
I don’t know if the EMP crowed takes the “Hardest working people at Pintastic” crown but they’re at the very least a close 2nd.
For the first time since I’ve been going to Pinstastic I wasn’t able to get Gabe D’Annunzio for the final interview simply because I couldn’t find him and had a bit of a time constraint, however I DID manage to grab pinball artist Christopher Franci one of the guests at Pinstastic NE 2023 to close things out and that’s a pretty good get:
Well that’s all the Pintastic NE I have for 2023. I’ll see you in April in the same place for Pintastic NE 2024
IF Newsom = “candidate for president” THEN AB 957= “veto” ELSE AB 957 = “Law”
By this I presumed that AB 957 was a sure thing because Newsom had just said the following:
“We need to move past this notion that he’s not going to run,” Newsom told NBC “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd in an interview clip released Friday. “President Biden is going to run and I’m looking forward to him getting reelected.”
One must remember that pols are masters of parsing words. What does he actually say:
Joe Biden is going to Run.
I’m looking forward to getting him re-elected.
What doesn’t he say is what happens if for some reason Joe Biden doesn’t run or has to pull out.
Let me remind you of what we wrote a week ago:
Democrats have now decided that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are no longer useful.
In fact they have actually reached the point where they believe that even with the FBI going after conservatives and the online services censoring the right at full swing and their friends in the courts sentencing those who spoke aloud about the steal to decades in prison that the country has reached the point where more people hate Joe Biden than Donald Trump.
This fear is reinforced by this map:
Here's the map with the Reuters poll numbers today
Head-to-head in a hypothetical November 2024 matchup, Trump has 51% support while Biden has 42% — numerically up 3 points for Trump and down 2 points for Biden from an ABC/Post poll in February, shifts that are not statistically significant.
Or as Drudge put it:
If Drudge is sounding the alarm for the left that means there is a real opening for another Democrat candidate for president, so we return to our original IF THEN ELSE statement:
IF Newsom = “candidate for president” THEN AB 957= “veto” ELSE AB 957 = “Law”
Well guess what happened this week:
🚨Wow🚨
Late on a Friday night, Gavin Newsom just vetoed AB 957, which would have required judges to remove custody of children from parents who don’t “affirm" a child's "gender identity or gender expression.” pic.twitter.com/fXfdYtBNS4
The one thing that might have inhibited that bill from becoming law is that signing such a bill might inhibit a potential presidential campaign by Gavin Newson as it would be such a killer in swing states that you couldn’t steal enough votes to save him.
There is of course always a chance that Joe Biden who has managed to survive so many disasters in his career might still survive this one, but if he doesn’t Gavin Newson has become that much more viable.
When I first joined the Navy, I served onboard the USS HAMPTON, a nuclear fast-attack submarine. You would think that would be super cool. My non-Navy friends were certainly impressed. But the sad reality was that being on a submarine sucked.
I started in the shipyard, which was an absolute hell-hole of a place to work. Our submarine was torn apart, and we had to always be ready for the shipyard workers to stop by to begin working. Instead of scheduling a time, they would often come down early, and if we weren’t ready, would then tell their boss it was our fault they couldn’t work. They did this to score overtime work on the weekends or after hours, while making us stay late. My days started at around 5:30 am and didn’t end until 6 pm. That didn’t include the drive time either.
At least I wasn’t a woman…some of my fellow female officers would get constantly cat-called and risked sexual assault walking into some shipyard environments. We’re talking legitimate, in-your-face sexism, not the made-up stuff of college students at Harvard. On top of that, if you didn’t leave before the sun went down, you risked your car’s windshield getting smashed in. Good-ole’ Portsmouth, Virginia! Thieves would smash in your windshield just for fun and not even steal anything, and the shipyard and Portsmouth police did nothing.
That whole time, I was told to suck it up and make the best of it. The situation is a big, fat turd, and my job was to polish it and make it shine. The smart people above me, the Captains and Admirals of the world, assured me they were doing their best to make it better. I couldn’t possibly question them!
Image generated by Bing AI
So polish I did! And I made it work.
During my flying tour, I spent 10-11 hours in a plane that had no working toilet. They had a toilet, but the Navy wouldn’t send the equipment to pump it out, so we pooped in a bag and pissed in a tall cylinder that we hand-carried out and dumped in the grass. Even the ladies peed in the tall cylinder (and I have no idea how they did it). The Navy HAD pumping equipment, but the powers that be said we didn’t need it, so we never got any. Now, next to us was an Air Force plane that had pumping equipment and didn’t hand carry out their piss in a giant cylinder after every flight. We were flying out of Greece, so it’s not like the plane landed in a hard-to-resupply area.
Polish that turd, I was told, by the supposedly smarter Captains and Admirals. So polish I did!
At a large staff, I put up with a tyrant Captain who seemed to simply enjoy screaming at us over nothing. He played favorites with the staff and pitted people against each other until he was finally fired. You would think that would make it better, but it didn’t, because then I had to help restructure and fix everything he broke.
Polish that turd, I was told, and I did, a bit begrudgingly this time.
Later in my career, I ran a small detachment of Sailors and worked to fix their aging building. The basement ceiling would literally shake when we operated machinery, and the base’s engineering team simply added some scaffolding to hold up the ceiling.
Yup, scaffolding. “It’s a bad situation, that’s the best we can do. You’ll just have to polish that turd.”
Well, I challenged that notion. I worked an engineering study and eventually secured the $6.6 million to fix the building, despite the obstinate objections of the base engineering team. That’s when I realized I’d been polishing turds for no reason. The Navy HAD most of the resources to fix these issues, but they spent them on fancy Admiral events, attended by the smartest Captains, who smoozed up to Senators and Representatives to get their pet projects funded. Whether it was the Littoral Combat Ship, the F-35, or a host of poorly designed boxes whose primary job was to send money into the pockets of Lockheed Martin while claiming Sailors were too stupid to operate them, it was all the same: wasted money that would be better spent elsewhere. This is the same Navy that was happy to use command travel money to pay for travel expenses for Sailors to get an abortion, but couldn’t find the money to fix barracks room issues at the shipyard.
So now I’m at my last command. My hope was to do something useful on my way out the door. Instead I found myself being stuck with all the crappy jobs nobody wants to do, then getting told I’m an idiot by a Captain that definitely acts like he’s smarter than everyone in the room. “You’ll need to polish that turd” he told me the other day.
I didn’t join the Navy to polish turds. I’ve been constantly told to make other, stupid ideas work while the “smart” people get fancy offices and plenty of resources. I’m not alone in this either. All of the officers I looked up to, the one’s I would willingly go into battle with, are all leaving in droves. They tell me they are tired of putting up with mediocre leadership that won’t put in the time to build real solutions, but instead look for “quick wins” (oh how I hate that term!).
Nobody joins the Navy to polish turds. We should stop asking our Sailors to polish poop and actually put resources where they belong.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
A couple of days ago Stacy McCain put up a post about CNN’s demographic numbers that have reached historically small levels:
The cable news network logged its worst weekend ratings on record in the all important 25- to 54-year-old demo, according to the latest Nielsen data released Tuesday. CNN — which launched in 1980 and bills itself as “the most trusted name in news” — totaled just 55,000 viewers for its weekend slate of shows that include Sunday political programs “State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash,” and “Fareed Zakaria GPS.”
CNN’s overall viewership wasn’t much better. The network logged 345,000 total viewers, trailing Fox News’ 683,000 and MSNBC’s 424,000.
That’s a tiny amount of viewers, Fox is pulling in nearly double and even MSNBC is doing 20% better than “The most trusted name in news”.
But let’s look at the real story here.
Ok for those who have gone to public school and don’t handle math”
CNN’s 345,000 +
MSNBC’s 424,000 +
Fox’s 683,000
= 1,462,000 Human beings watching these three networks.
Just a reminder the total number of votes cast in the last election for president was 158,000,000.
Even assuming that a million or two of those ballots were created on the night of the election in key democrat districts that would leave 156,000,000 voters.
Simple math tells us that all three networks combined total viewership vs the actual number of voters (subtracting two million for fraud) is 0.9% of the electorate.
And that’s assuming of course that 100% of those viewing those networks are registered voters.
So YES CNN is the runt of the litter, but they’re the runt of a litter of mice.
So given these facts let’s ask a very basic question:
Can anyone tell me why we care one bit about a bunch of people on cable networks say when they aren’t even speaking to 1% of the voting population?
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