A much younger Jen Kiggans, from Bearing Drift

Now, I get it. I’m not the center of the universe. That stopped happening when I was 4 years old. Or maybe 3, I don’t remember if I was a terrible child growing up or not. Despite that fact, I happen to live in the state of Virginia and in a competitive Congressional district, and in a time when elections are swinging back and forth, I get to see everything from the ground level.

So lets talk about the portion of the midterms the media is ignoring, and that’s the ousting of Elaine Luria by Jen Kiggans. Now, you’re probably asking, who the heck is Jen Kiggans? I’m not surprised by that question, because even if you lived in the area, you likely heard NOTHING about Jen Kiggans.

Did you know she’s a former Navy helicopter pilot? That’s she’s a Catholic mom with 4 kids? That she’s an adult geriatric nurse? I doubt it. Because over the past few months, the ONLY thing I heard about Jen Kiggans on the radio, on my Pandora feed, on TV commercials, and on YouTube commercials, was that Jen Kiggans is an election denier and hates women because she won’t kill innocent babies.

It was overwhelming. I work in an open office space, and one of my co-workers has a TV on constantly, spewing some damn MSNBC nonsense all day. Elaine Luria ads were on there constantly. I mean, every time I looked up, there was Elaine Luria, talking about how she voted against Biden, or made our Navy stronger, or stood up for the right to kill innocent babies, or…something. It was nauseating. I wanted the election to end just so I could stop hearing about Elaine Luria.

So when Jen Kiggans won, it felt like a miracle. But nobody gave her any credit. The local news said it was largely due to redistricting. Considering that Virginia’s districts were totally out of whack until this year, I’m not buying it. Jen won because she was tough, ran a good campaign and got the word out, despite a Democrat war machine that outraised and outspent her two to one.

But so far, the news is talking about DeSantis, Florida, and Trump (who is also in Florida). Virginia, which was being written off as a permanently blue state, is now slowly turning red again. Not quite as crazy as Florida, but getting there.

We should learn a few things from this. First, running solid candidates helps a lot. People don’t want the milk-toast Bush candidates anymore. Winsome Sears, Glenn Youngkin and Jen Kiggans actually stand up and hold our values. They won’t be portrayed as such by the dishonest media, but that was going to happen anyway. Having watched all three of them speak, its exciting. You actually feel good when you see them in person. You need that passion to stem the tide of constant negative media.

Second, we need to get real about raising money for candidates. I wrote about this before, but it bears repeating: if you aren’t out knocking on doors, or donating money, or doing something small for your candidate, then you just don’t care, and you deserve all the scorn in the world. You certainly get no sympathy from me. I remember all the damn annoying Obama kids that kept knocking on my door. Every day I wanted to just punch them so they would go away. But you have to hand it to them, that strategy worked. It got people pumped up and out to vote. That strategy works both ways, but we need energized people that care.

Please pray for Jen Kiggans as she attempts to deal with a broken country and a broken state. She needs all the help she can get.

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. If you enjoyed this post, consider purchasing a book or audiobook from the author as a Christmas gift.

Elon Musk and Eyes on the Prize

Posted: November 19, 2022 by datechguy in internet/free speech
Tags: ,

Curley: [stops Moe and Larry] Hey! What’s this stuff [Brighto] for anyway?

Larry: Why, it’s a cleaner, ya chump!

Curley: I know, it’s auto polish.

Moe: You boys really wanna know what it’s for?

Larry & Curly [In unison] Yeah!

Moe: It’s for sale, now get busy selling it.

The Three Stooges, Dizzy Doctors 1937

Watching Elon Musk over the last few days reminds me of the early days of Donald Trump’s first run for president in the sense that both of them absolutely know the media left having functioned from inside it and know how to play them like a fiddle.

Twitter as a platform to generate profit has only one commodity, eyeballs and buzz. If you are an advertiser your goal is to get your product in front of as many eyeballs as possible, if you are a person trying to create “buzz” you need to be able to establish yourself as a “credible” source.

Every step Elon Musk has made in the last month is designed to bring one or the other forward.

The pushing of the $8 blue checkmark got everyone talking about blue checkmarks and baited people, particularly people who hate him, to talk and tweet about them.

The ultimatum to the workers, in addition to the weeding out of the useless percentage of his workforce (his own “Golgafrinchan B ark“) not only got a bunch of people on Twitter talking about Twitter to wit:

But got people outside of Twitter, on TV and Radio talking about…Twitter.

And then yesterday came the restoration of three large accounts, the above quoted Babylon Bee (without deleting their Rachel Devine tweet) Gordon Peterson a terror to leftist thought and of course “D” list comedian Kathy Griffin and even while doing so he baited people again and many, including myself took the bait

But while restoring Trump is a no brainer, just doing so doesn’t create the required buzz, the conversation, the tweets and the eyeballs that he is selling so he follows this up with his Pièce de résistance the Trump Poll!

As of this writing (4:14 AM EST Saturday, yeah I woke up coughing again) Seven point nine MILLION people responded to this poll.

This doesn’t count multipliers from the untold number of people who have commented on it, retweeted it, wrote about it etc,

What does all this accomplish? It demonstrates to all the advertisers that the left is trying to pressure to run away from Twitter that Mr. Musk can literally deliver millions of eyeballs almost at will.

Now if you’re trying to repress a particular point of view that’s a bad thing, but if you’re trying to get the word out about a product like Brighto

…that’s just what the Doctor is willing to pay for.

Twitter may not be real life but it produces real eyeballs. Elon doesn’t give a damn if you like him, or hate him or think his buying Twitter is an act of war, he just wants you talking about, writing about and above all TWEETING about his product.

That’s the prize he has his eyes on, anything else is just gravy.

Update: A quick example of this, check out what the Times of India is tweeting about

There’s another million eyeballs half way around the world.

Back when I learned to code in the early 1980’s people who knew how to code were, in terms of the general population, kinda rare.

About 70% of the class who tried a Computer Science Major washed out because of the math and science involved and ending up with a job that was worth about $24K (the equivalent of $66K today) was par or even below par for the course. We were considered a BFD and had a pretty high opinion of ourselves.

Well after a while I decided I’d rather do other things than code and so I did but while I stepped away from my college major people poured into the industry, computers shrank in size and increased in power exponentially.

When I was looking to get back in the industry it seemed that everyone and their mother knew how to code and had been doing it in languages I had never seen before to the point where old Fortran coders like me in their late 40’s or early 50’s weren’t worth the investment when you could get a kid with now wife and family attachments for less money right out of college with all the new stuff fresh in their heads.

And that in a round about way brings us to the current nonsense at Twitter.

All these kids at Twitter seem to have a really inflated sense of self, not all that surprising given the way public education took a turn in the last few decades but they have in effect forgotten the reality of things which is namely this:

The pool of competent programmers has grown even faster than the processing power of computers over the last 40 years and you don’t have to be one of the richest men in the world to be able to tap into that pool and find a few thousand programmers if you need them.

Furthermore when you are one of the world’s richest men you can easily tap into a pool that extends far beyond America, let alone the blue areas of America.

Put simply while the supposedly bright people at Twitter who are considering leaving may have forgotten the laws of supply and demand Elon Musk hasn’t and if they think Twitter is suddenly going to go black because a bunch of them, even the majority of them choose to leave, then frankly their too stupid to be working at any company Musk owns.

I suspect those who choose to come aboard Twitter to replace these narcissists will be well rewarded for working hard and I suspect those who stay and choose to work hard will be even better rewarded.

This is the chance of a lifetime for a young programmer and if I was younger I’d consider it myself.

As for those leaving given the layoffs going on around the nation in the Biden economy I wish you the best of luck, you’ll need it.

Instalanche: Thanks Stephen, welcome folks take a look around. Same old blogging team but on a .blog account on WordPress. Check out some thoughts under the fedora, acceptable terms concerning abortion , some thoughts on election theft and of course if you like what you see here, consider hitting DaTipJar or subscribing to keep our writers paid as things have been quieter since our .com site has gone and our youtube channel banned though you can find my stuff on Rumble here

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Enjoy

Things appear to be rather bleak here in the United Sates after the theft of at least four senatorial seats by the Democrats in last Tuesday’s midterm elections, along with the possible theft of some House seats.  There is a very strong temptation amongst Conservatives and Libertarians to simply give up.  I have spoken to several fellow right-wingers who have stated that they have in fact given up because they believe there is no hope left for the United States.

There have been many times in this nation’s past when things have been even more dire.  What has pulled us through has always been Patriotic Americans who have a never say die attitude.  Rugged individualists who fight the good fight against unbeatable odds have accomplished miracles, no scenario is more American.

There are many things us patriots can do to fix things before all hope is lost.  It will be a long tough road. There are a great many obstacles in the way, placed there by both the Democrats and Republicans.

Most important, we need to wake people up.  Social media should have been the perfect tool to accomplish this. Rampant censorship of those who oppose the progressive agenda makes waking up those in need difficult.  Hopefully Elon Musk will turn things around on Twitter.  I’m not holding my breath.  When my lifetime ban is lifted I’ll be most surprised.

Us patriots need to work to gain more control and influence over the Republican Party.  The Republican establishment is only slightly better than the Democratic Party.  This can happen slowly, starting on the local level, and building from there.

We need to make sure the Republican Party does one of two things.  Firstly, we need to make sure the Republicans overturn all of the dirty tricks the Democrats have used to steal the presidential and midterm elections.  Unlimited mail in ballots, ballot harvesting, and massive dumps of fraudulent ballots all need to end.  Until the Republicans fix our broken electoral system, they need to learn how to be competitive in the mess we have now.

There is so much more we can do before all hope is lost.