There is a lot of talk about about voter fraud particularly with the new James O’Keefe videos documenting it in Minneapolis. I thought it best to remind you that if you were surprised by any of it, you didn’t pay attention last time.

Originally published Nov 18th 2016

One of the most important things that drive decision making is the risk/reward factor. Is the reward for an action worth the risk being taken by doing it?

This is also true for crime. Unless you are talking a crime of passion or a person high out of their min a smart criminal will look at the risk of being caught, the risk of a particular punishment and weigh it against the reward of success

And that brings us to an important election postmortem that nobody wants to talk about.

There was plenty of talk about a “rigged” system before the election and one of the biggest signs of it was certain big city Democrat counties holding back reporting in key states.

The basic idea which has been part of the equation as long as machine politics has existed, is pretty simple and involves this little algorithm

If (Number of votes you can get away stealing) > (Number of votes you might lose by) Then

Go For it!

Else

Release your vote totals as is

Endif

I submit and suggest that this more than anything else drove the calling of certain formally blue states.  Once it was determined they just plain couldn’t steal enough to overcome the Trump wave there they allowed the numbers to go out.

But while the Democrat machines were ready in places like Florida and North Carolina, places Hillary knew would be close, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and to a lesser extent Pennsylvania were not so prepared. Pennsylvania for example had been considered fools gold for the GOP for so long that last minute moves by the Democrats were almost pro-forma, but it didn’t stop scenes like this:

So provisional ballots are the reason that MSNBC isn’t calling Pennsylvania. This is why I found being forced to fill out a provisional ballot today so suspect. Reiterating: I had to fill one out because, according to the story told to me by the poll workers, I had been sent a vote by mail ballot, which I had never requested. Votes that are counted after election night are the Devil’s Playground for fraud. All kinds of things can happen, and they are almost never good for the Republican candidate.

I’ll wager there were a lot of Trump votes in those provisional ballots that cancelled out one mailed in for them.

Meanwhile Democrat Bosses in Wisconsin Michigan and Minnesota had no inkling that the election was close, that being the case there was no reason why, in an age where proof of a federal offense is a cell phone video away, Dem bosses in Detroit or elsewhere felt the need to take any risk.  They figured those states were won (and they were right about Minnesota) and by election night it was too late to change it.

However that won’t be the case in 2020,  I’ll wager that in 2020 the bosses in Milwaukee, Detroit, Madison and elsewhere will be ready, we’ll see plenty of mail in ballots and absentee ballots that we didn’t see before in those states and plenty of voters looking to go for the GOP will be in the same spot that Steven Kruiser was on election night.

We have four years to prepare for this so we’d better get ready because as our friends on the left have demonstrated in the past, they play for keeps.

After all you don’t think Soros has been quietly sinking millions into AG races, you know the people who would be protesting election fraud on a local level, just because it’s fun?

You have all been warned

Via CS Lewis Doodle on Youtube

We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all he pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and sceptics. At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The “Life Force”, the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work-the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the existence of “spirits”-then the end of the war will be in sight. 

CS Lewis The Screwtape Letters #7

You know it would be a lot easier to talk all those people who absolutely insist that you can’t be a Christian in general or a Catholic in particular and be for Trump if you didn’t have a bunch of devil worshipers openly trying to hex him.

Some users, however, took things well beyond the sarcastic remark or celebration of the diagnosis, directing foreign language curses and images of Satan toward the president in his sickness.

and frankly that’s the mild stuff.

Others broke the template, forwarding similar comments and curses in a variety of other languages publicly asking for the “Lord Satan” to empower them to “vanquish the enemies of our freedom and well-being!”

“This curse carries the power of a thousand witches you will never find peace or happiness you will be cursed for centuries,” one user wrote, attaching images that appeared to be of a voodoo puppet doll burning. “The ancestors of each witch will follow you until the end of time old man.”

Now remember this is being done openly on a public platform for all the world to see.

Frankly anyone who is surprised by this hasn’t been paying attention. I submit and suggest this has been the left for a very long time.

Closing thoughts. These best counter to this stuff is of course prayer. There will be a public Rosary at my parish that I’ll be a part of next Saturday at noon and on the 24th we will be having a special mass Saturday at noon to pray for the country ending with a Eucharistic Procession I would suggest the same for your local parish.

But more importantly all of these people need to be prayed for. It’s very likely that many of them have nobody to pray for them and we must not forget that the love of God for them still exists and Christ died for their sins as much as anyone else. Thanks to these events we know who these people are and can give their guardian angels a welcome boost through prayer.

The best way to beat the devil is to deprive him of souls. Pray for these people and help deprive him of theirs.

The Holy Grail of Car Seats!!

Kids can be expensive. The first shock might be the hospital bill when you leave. I have friends that went into medical debt for their kid’s birth. If you escape medical bills, the next shock comes when you purchase a child seat. Really, its a throne, a really large, hard to use, plastic throne that your child will soil quickly. Because I have a large family, I noticed that these thrones couldn’t fit three across a seat. Even a booster seat seemed to magically bow outwards so that I couldn’t fit three kids in a backseat. I commented to my wife that it was a real disincentive for big families to not be able to fit three seats in the back seat.

Apparently, that was worthy of a study. A recent paper looked at just that, and noted that the new standards only saved 57 more people, but caused 145,000 fewer births since 1980. That’s a pretty significant difference.

That cost gets worse because it is near impossible to get a used car seat. When I worked at Goodwill, we wouldn’t take them because of liability concerns. To buy a new car seat for every kid gets expensive. Worse, the car seat standards change nearly every year. When it happened one year and I was told to throw out my old seats, I looked up the new standard (as in, I read the really boring, multi-page engineering standard) and noticed it barely changed anything. Going through the history of changes, most of the changes are minor. These changes serve to automatically deprecate car seats, to the point they’ve become like cell phones in that you can’t use old models, even though they may have plenty of life left in them.

This is just one thing in long list of items that makes it hard to have a large family. Unless you want to get the massive “Catholic Van,” you’re stuck with less kids. Now the government wants kids to sit in a car seat until they are 12 or 13. That’s kind of insane. Yet the same government is OK with a school bus full of kids that has no boosters, no seat belts and crappy bench seats. At least a passenger vehicle is designed with seat belts, air bags and crumple zones to keep people alive in a wreck.

Car seats is just one example of the quiet way we make it hard for responsible parents to follow the rules while also having a big family. As birth rates fall worldwide, governments are trying to find ways to promote larger families, with plenty of discussion on government child care and mandatory maternity leave. That might help, but if we’re not addressing the common day to day issues that face large families, people will continue to opt out of large families. Ironically, the most effective practices for governments might be to listen to today’s large families to understand their struggles, rather than viewing them as a burden.

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.

Our Dynasty Face to face league finished our SF Giants team won the world series in six and we are preparing the groundwork for a new season.

There will be a meeting at Zeda’s Pizza in Fitchburg MA today at noon any interested players are more than welcome.

Our draft will be November 14th again at Zedas. Depending on how many players we have there may be an expansion draft before the basic one. We will be playing with the 2019 season cards.

NOTE IF YOU WISH TO JOIN AS AN EXPANSION TEAM YOU NEED TO JOIN AND LET ME KNOW BY OCT 31st.

Additionally there are three online leagues that are either now or will be looking for players that I’m running.

Our 2nd season of the all pathetic league (all teams that lost at least 96 games) is now 12 games into a 162 game season, we play once a week (scheduled time Thursday 10 AM EST but you can reschedule at will) and there are currently 12 of 24 teams open. If you think you can take a bad team and make it the best of the bad we’d love to have you.

Our all time great league 2nd season is currently in playoffs in the league divisional round. By the rules of the league all playoff teams are retained for the next season and players who wish to keep their current teams may do so. But there are always openings and new teams that will be included. If you would like to manage a great team, either a playoff team that has been abandoned or a great team that is added in you are welcome to jump in. We will be reducing this league to once a week to make room for our third online league…

This will be the all mediocre league. This will consist of teams that finished with a record between two games under .500 & two games over .500 (in a 162 game season 80-82 – 82-80 in a 154 game season 73-75 – 75-73. Unlike the all pathetic league you will find a few starts on such teams and maybe more than an handful of HOF players in said league. Unlike the great teams league these are teams that were usually on the rise that hadn’t made it yet or good teams on the decline (or the teams like Connie Mack’s favorite the 4th place moneymakers)

It is more profitable for me to have a team that is in contention for most of the season but finishes about fourth. A team like that will draw well enough during the first part of the season to show a profit for the year, and you don’t have to give the players raises when they don’t win.

Connie Mack

This type of team would win about 60 games vs the all time greats (last season I demonstrated this when I accidentally put such a team the 2013 Diamondbacks in the ATG league instead of the 2001 team that I intended) and would dominate the all pathetic league. It will be interesting to see what they teams that are good enough to dominate bad teams and just good enough to put up a fight against great ones will do against each other.

These are the available teams by franchise

  • Orioles 57, 95, 15
  • Senators 67 Rangers 06
  • twins 73, 74
  • Yankees 71, 73
  • whitesox 74, 97, 98 .02
  • indians 75, 04, 08, 11, 15
  • Redsox 93
  • mariners 93
  • Brewers 96, 05, 09, 14
  • Angels 2000, 10, 17, 18
  • bluejays 2001, 05, 11, 15
  • tigers 2010
  • a’s 2010
  • Royals 2016, 17
  • Devil Rays 2017
  • Phillies 57, 74, 02, 12, 18, 19
  • Pirates 67, 73
  • braves 71
  • astros 73, 74, 96, 06
  • mets 75, 01,
  • Cardinals 75
  • giants 75
  • Padres 82, 05
  • dodgers 93, 94, 07, 10
  • cubs 95
  • Marlins 96, 10
  • reds 96, 06
  • Rockies 2000
  • diamondbacks 2008, 12, 13, 18
  • Nationals 2011, 18

If one of these teams is to your liking contact me online. this will be a 162 game season 3 game a series played once a week.

So if you want to play some sports where there is still no political grandstanding going on I’d love to have you, either in person or online. Either stop by at Zedas or leave a comment here and we’ll go from there.