The Reality of the Trump vs Biden Economy Strikes in Fredrick MD

Posted: September 12, 2022 by datechguy in Uncategorized

I’ve known the Popes back in Illinois known all of them, they’re all liars and braggarts but don’t know of any particular reason why a liar and a braggart shouldn’t make a good general.

Abe Lincoln on being told John Pope can’t be trusted to tell the truth.1862

Stacy McCain had a lot of fun with the story of the end of the Lesbian Vegan Donut Shop in Fredrick MD but there are a few things about the story that are worth a bit of time.

I’ve known plenty of bakers and it’s not an easy life. It’s not for the lazy or for those who care to sleep in. You have to be up early to bake and have your products ready for those people who work early in the morning as the story Stacy Quotes notes:

Shop owners Alissa and Keirsten Straiter have always been the bakers at Glory Doughnuts, waking up to get donuts going by midnight or 1 a.m six days a week. Morning help arrives around 5 a.m. so they can open two hours later. Around that time, Alissa, 25, and Keirsten, 26, become the shop’s cooks.

So we know to start conclude that the two women who opened the business are not lazy or expecting a free lunch and were willing to work hard to make their business work. We can also conclude from the fact that since the initial article was written in 2015 that the donuts and/or pastries they make were of a good enough quality for a business, because when it comes to anything to do with food, particularly pasty there is no substitute for stuff that takes good.

So you have hard work and a product that is appealing, no matter what your politics or your proclivities might be that’s a good start for any business.

However beyond hard work and skill you have to make good decisions. And these ladies made two decisions that limited the appeal of their business.

The first was the decision to push vegan food. Now while there is a market for vegan food it’s not as broad for as for one that simply offers vegan choices as one of several option..

And of course there was the decision to push the Gay/Trans agenda publicly at their place. This again limits a customer base. There is for example a historic diner in Fitchburg whose new owners I hear make a mean Chicken and Waffles but they choose to fly the Transgender flag. As much as I like chicken and waffles that’s a line I won’t cross.

Now this is still (supposedly) a free country and if a business chooses to play the Transgender flag or the Hammer and Sycle of the Soviets or even the Nazi Swastika that’s their business but they have to accept that said decision will limit their clientele to those not offended by them.

Stacy McCain picked up on the irony here.

There is some irony in the fact that the Trump years were actually the heyday for Glory Doughnuts, whose anti-Trump owners apparently made their first crucial mistake by changing locations right at the start of the 2020 pandemic. Then Biden got elected, and rampant inflation sort of eroded the disposable income that folks used to have, back when gas was just $2.25 a gallon. Now the lesbian vegans are trying to explain those bouncing paychecks:

Now we can’t say for sure that if they had chosen to worry about baking and cooking rather than wearing their political and social allegiances on their sleeve if they might have drawn a large enough base to stay alive but there there is one fact that I can say for sure. If you have a strong economy with plenty of people ready and able to spend you can afford to limit your clientele and stay in business, if not then you can’t.

The reality of business is simple. The bottom line doesn’t care if you are Lesbian Vegans Transgender or whatever. It only cares if your product can generate enough revenue to pay your expenses and debts.

During the Trump years their donut business was able to do so, during the Biden years it could not.

But the ladies should not despair. Both are used to hard work and their product was good enough to sell for seven years. They can return to their home based model on a smaller scale. With a little luck in a couple of years they can settle their outstanding debts things and consider trying again if they want.

And if they are really lucky by late 2025 a 2nd Trump administration will have the economy firing on all cylinders again to the point where they can reopen in deep blue Maryland and commiserate with paying deep blue customers once again about how awful it is to have the Orange man back in charge.

Now that Ukraine is taking back territory from Russia, now is the time for the New York Times to return Walter Duranty’s tainted Pulitzer

Posted: September 11, 2022 by John Ruberry in media, News/opinion, war
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Pro-Ukraine protest in downtown Chicago this spring

By John Ruberry

There is good news out of Ukraine, its forces have made gains in the Kharkiv region and they are near Russian border. There is much ground still to liberate, not only land that Russia has seized in the war that began early this year, but also the area that have been controlled by Russian separatists in the Donetsk region since 2014, as well as Crimea, which Vladimir Putin annexed the same year.

Ukraine has endured an unhappy history. World War II and the Holocaust devastated Ukraine. And in order to impose communism on wealthier peasants in Ukraine, Josef Stalin engineered a famine in the early 1930s, known there as the Holodomor, translating roughly into “man-made starvation.” Roughly four million people perished as a result of Stalin’s atrocities against the kulaks in Ukraine.

Even in a closed society, it’s difficult to coverup a famine. And news trickled out of Ukraine about the Holodomor. But a New York Times reporter, based in Moscow, Walter Duranty, dismissed such stories, instead of “famine” he wrote of “malnutrition” in Ukraine, for instance. 

For a series of 1931 articles about the Soviet Union, Duranty, for his “dispassionate interpretive reporting,” he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. 

While in Moscow, Duranty, was granted a rarity, interviews with Stalin; he also enjoyed another rarity, a luxury apartment in the Soviet capital. During the entire history of the USSR, housing of any kind was scarce. In Moscow Duranty had a mistress, whom he impregnated, and a chauffeur. Automobiles were also rare in Russia in the 1930s. 

In 1933, another journalist, or I should say, a real one, Gareth Jones, visited Ukraine and he was horrified by what he found. “If it is grave now and if millions are dying in the villages, as they are, for I did not visit a single village where many had not died, what will it be like in a month’s time?” Jones wrote for the London Evening Standard. “The potatoes left are being counted one by one, but in so many homes the potatoes have long run out.” 

Duranty’s response to Jones was a New York Times article, “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving.” That same year, Duranty wrote to a friend, “The famine is mostly bunk.”

Another shameful sentence from Duranty, about Stalin’s brutal policies as the Holodomor continued, “To put it brutally,” Duranty wrote for the Times, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

Since the war began attention has been brought to Duranty’s undeserved Pulitzer. Even NPR took notice. “He is the personification of evil in journalism,” Oksana Piaseckyj told NPR earlier this year of Duranty. She is a Ukrainian-American activist who emigrated here as a child over 70 years ago. “We think he was like the originator of fake news,” Piaseckyj added.

The New York Times admitted on its corporate website about Duranty’s work, “Since the 1980’s, the [Times] has been publicly acknowledging his failures.” But it has not returned the tainted Pulitzer. It also notes that twice, most recently in 2003, the Pulitzer board has decided not to revoke its award to Duranty. 

It’s time for them to reconsider.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

9/11 vs 12/7

Posted: September 11, 2022 by datechguy in Uncategorized

If you want to understand the decline of America consider this simple comparison.

21 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor

  1. West Germany was a fully democratic western state with full human rights allied with the US and housing tens of thousands of US troops
  2. Italy was fully democratic western state with full human rights allied with the US and housing tens of thousands of US troops
  3. Japan was a fully democratic state with a western style government with full human rights allied with the US and housing tens of thousands of US troops
  4. The United States Military was the single most powerful military in the world feared by all others with excellent morale and strong leadership.
  5. Pearl Harbor is a fully functioning US Naval base with full capacity to project power anywhere within it’s range.

21 Years after the attack on 9/11

  1. Afghanistan is a rogue state under the rule of the Taliban with Americans held hostage and hundreds of millions of dollars of American equipment in hand.
  2. Iran is closing than ever to developing nuclear weapons while getting concessions and cash from our government and exercising heavy influence in Iraq.
  3. The United States Military has horrible morale, is unable to recruit to the levels needed power, is dismissing people over vaccine mandates and more concerned with advancing a woke agenda then projecting power
  4. The Twin Towers have not been rebuilt and there are no plans to do so nor the will to do so

There is absolutely no chance that the Americans who turned “a day that will live in infamy” into the greatest power the world would have allowed this to happen and it is to our eternal disgrace that we have let ourselves fall this far.

It’s on us as a nation and it’s a horrible thing to behold.

Why LGBT voters should be prolife

Posted: September 10, 2022 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncategorized
Tags: ,

This is part of a short series on why many LGBT voters would be better served under conservative values then far leftist values.

LGBT voters are traditionally associated with voting on left-leaning policies and almost always for Democrat candidates, yet during the last election almost a third of LGBT-identified voters said on exit polling that they voted for Trump.

Despite President Trump’s anti-LGBTQ past, including opposing LGBTQ workplace protections, he was able to attain 28% of the LGBTQ vote improving on his 2016 showing, when he ran against Hillary Clinton, and only won 13% of the LGBTQ vote.

thepridela.com

The article, not surprisingly, is shocked that any LGBT individual would even contemplate voting for a Republican candidate, much less President Trump. Yet I think this site, like so many others, misses the fact that in most cases conservative positions on issues are far more advantageous for LGBT individuals then leftist ones. I actually think that Republican candidates can probably capture more like 40% of the LGBT vote, which would finally start to highlight that LGBT individuals are not in fact one large, homogenous group of people, but rather individual voters that each have very different needs.

(A quick note: For this series I’m leaving of the …QIA+-= alphabet soup of people, which includes the pansexuals, cats and other really odd identities. Honestly, I think these people are overrepresented because they are so strange as to capture immediate attention and have an outsized impact via social media.)

First, lets look at who is considered an LGBT voter. In the case of the exit poll, its whomever happens to tell the pollster they identify as somewhere on the LGBT spectrum. This is somewhere around 1-5% of voters nationwide, by conservative and liberal estimates. However, I actually think its a bit higher, for two reasons. First, lots of people don’t like talking to pollsters, so exit poll sampling is notoriously very skewed liberal. Second, the LGBT people that would openly agree to the label are likely people comfortably out to their families, employer and the world…which is not the majority. There are likely a lot of closeted LGBT voters that simply stay quiet about their homosexual or transsexual inclinations.

That said, the ones most likely to be closeted are also most likely to lean conservative, since conservative voters are less likely to discuss this and other issues with…well, anyone really. This sets up a Harry Truman-esque scenario where traditional polling and thinking concerning LGBT voters and what they care about can be very easily misunderstood.

That doesn’t answer the bigger question of why LGBT voters would benefit from conservative policies. Let’s start with abortion, and over the next few weekends we’ll look at the economy, foreign policy and the military, plus marriage and the nuclear family. I’m leaving out religious discussions on these issues because 1., I’m not a religious scholar and thus not qualified to discuss it, and 2., Religions, especially Christian ones, vary widely on LGBT issues.

LGBT voters should be pro-life for many reasons, the most important being that as technology, and especially genetic testing, becomes easier and cheaper, there will be more people inclined to abort babies that aren’t “perfect.” This has been predicted for years, even appearing in science fiction films like Gattaca, where babies are tested and sorted into “Valids” and “In-valids.” The “Valids” are genetically perfect and given access to the best jobs, while the “in-valids,” if they aren’t euthanized, compose the underclass of citizens.

But that’s science fiction, you might think. One only needs to look across the Atlantic to see Europeans wipe out Down Syndrome kids through testing (which is not perfect, so plenty of otherwise healthy kids are lost to abortion in the process). It’s not a far stretch to assume that as we develop more and more genetic markers for what we consider disorders, it’ll be easier to “justify” aborting more and more babies that don’t line up to our idea of perfect.

Which brings up the LGBT issue, because scientists have been quite happily searching for a genetic link to explain homosexual and transgender individuals. If they find that there is a gene, or set of genes, that would incline an individual to this behavior, could there be an increase in people saying “I don’t want to bring life to this world that would suffer as a transgender individual.”? If abortion is available on demand, I can see a large number of religious mothers making this justification.

Which begs the question: don’t LGBT individuals have a right to life? Don’t babies with these genetic markers deserve a chance in this world? Who is to say that their genetics will ultimately determine how they think on any particular issue? I would argue that they do. Just because someone is genetically inclined towards something doesn’t mean they will take those actions. More importantly, this walks us down the slippery slope of euthanizing people who’s only crime is existing, which never bodes well for any minority group.

LGBT voters are best served with prolife policies, which may one day keep them from being literally aborted out of existence.

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.

Older Entries
Newer Entries