American Success Stories/What Makes America Great: Paulo

Posted: September 3, 2017 by datechguy in American Success Stories, business, economy
Tags: , , ,

Sunday Sept 3rd 7:54 am

This morning when I woke up I was going to write about the exchange between the Daily Caller and Stacy McCain concerning Saturday’s Event in Leominster (advance tickets still available here) so I grabbed my laptop and heading downstairs so as not to disturb my sleeping with I planted myself on he couch that Stacy would most likely be crashing on and looking out the window noticed a group of men getting siding up on the house next door.

One would think the early morning hammering would have woken me (or her) but over the last two months we have become accustomed to the sounds of Hammers generators, and saws as we’ve watched the house next door slowly and gradually be transformed.

The Author is this transformation is a 29-year-old young man named Paulo who came here as a teen from Brazil who has tirelessly been working to gut and redo the house inside and out since purchasing that foreclosed property to get it ready for a large family of tenants that he has lined up to put there.

Now I had hoped to buy that house for myself for my oldest son or co-sign with him (my finances might be thin these days but my credit score is close to 800)  who will be needing a new place soon but Paulo got there first.  Anyone watching him in action since he first turned up in late May should not be surprised that he got anywhere first.  His whole attitude has been Horatio Nelson’s “Lose not a moment.”

Every single day I’ve watched him in that house, I’ve seen long dumpster after dumpster filled as old carpet, old wood, old appliances continue to be stripped away.  I’ve come home to the sound of an electric generator as he’s worked late into to the night, usually alone, sometimes with a team, to get things done and the whole neighborhood has seen the transformation as the abandoned and overgrown house that began its life as a tiny company house for workers who had come from Finland or Sicily back in the 19th century when Fitchburg was industrial hub to a more modern and an attractive home that despite the small plot of land that it sits on will to fit a family of six by November if Paulo’s plans work out.

This week he took a few minutes away from his work to talk to me about his work on Camera:

I can’t help think as I watch Paulo in action that I’m seeing a young version of my Father. Dad had left school at 13 to work during the depression getting every hour he could in local factories, picking up every hour he could, doing the dirty jobs that needed to be done and joining various building crews learning how to build. In 1942 during World War 2 he entered the Navy as a ship’s carpenter and by the time the war had ended left as a chief petty officer. And at Paulo’s age he was doing pretty much the same thing, building or fixing small houses with his brother-in-law until he bought a bar called the Mohawk Club in Shirley and went into the restaurant/hospitality business. The two houses I lived in from the day I was born to the day I got married were built by him and when I watch Paulo in action I can’t help but think that if I had in my youth been more interested in my father’s skills and less interested in books and history that might be me next door fixing up that house for my son (and I’m sure DaWife watching Paulo hard at work fixing things might have liked it if her husband was a quarter as handy as the young fellow next door with a hammer as he is with a keyboard.)

But while I didn’t recognize the advantages of my Father’s way in my youth with the benefit of years I see the wonder of what’s going on. A young man born half a world away coming to America, earning and honing a skill over a decade and sacrificing hour after hour to get the seed money to get a mortgage to buy a beat up house, spending 70 hours or more a week, days night and weekends to get it to a point where he can get it in a good enough condition to rent it out for enough to cover that mortgage and his expenses and start the whole process again.

To be sure there are a lot of risks. There is always the possibility of getting problem tenants who trash a house that you might have to evict if they decide not to pay. Furthermore all of this involves laying out money for wood, and materials out front, not to mention the various legal hoops involved in buying a house and getting permits or construction. Finally there is a lot of hard labor involved. A single accident could stop things cold and if it does the bank or banks that hold the mortgages on the property will still expect their payments on time each month.

I’m also sure his young wife and kids would like to see more of him nor do I doubt that his kids might have enjoyed it if this Sunday morning he had been at home during this labor day weekend rather than putting up siding early in the morning.

But when those kids are 18, Paulo’s hard work today will almost certainly mean he’ll have the assets to send them to college if they wish, or if they are smart enough to follow in his footsteps might be in a position to have their dad co-sign for their first home to fix up or at least know how to fix anything in sight. And I suspect that if he has a daughter who wants a big wedding someday, the willingness to be hard at work on a Holiday weekend will be the reason he can afford to pay for one or two or more.

Put simply Paulo is what makes America great, but he’s also a symptom of the greatness OF America which provides a system by which a person can freely reap the benefits of their labor without the heavy hand of the state to smother them or the outstretched hand of the powerful or the connected demanding their cut. A system under which a person can, if they are willing to take the risks and regardless of race or class make more of themselves then they ever could elsewhere.

Paulo will likely never be as rich or as famous as the president but he is no less an American success story for it.

Do you know of an American success story that you’d like me to share with my readers and possibly include in a future book on the subject? Drop me a line and if I can get to where you are I’d be delighted to learn it and tell it.

Update: Paulo rather than Paolo should have stuck with my first instict

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DaTechGuy’s Laws of Media Outrage ANTIFA Election 2018/2020 Edition

Posted: August 30, 2017 by datechguy in Uncategorized

the reality is those events are walking talking Trump 2020 ads that are going to coin votes for him in every swing state that the left has to win back if they are going to beat him next time around.

The Grand Prize Winner of the Boston Common Protest Pageant: Donald Trump 2020 Campaign

Ever since I covered the Boston marches this month I’ve been explaining to anyone who will listen that these marches in general and ANTIFA in particular, while making leftists in blue states feel good and self righteous about themselves, are going to coin votes for Donald Trump.  I got an awful lot of pushback on twitter for saying that celebrations of stifling free speech, these chants and the violence that came with them were politically foolish.  Tweets like this were typical

Accordingly like online leftists the media pretty much ignored ANTIFA’s labeling of all Trump supports as Fascists and Nazis and even defended their violence in accordance to the 1st law of Media outrage which states:

The level of Outrage or interest of the media and their allies on the left concerning any insult or prevarication concerning a person or thing will routinely be equal to the inverse of the degree of the political distance between said media / leftists and the target of said insult or prevarication at the time it is mad

We lo and behold the day after we were treated to ANTIFA chants of “No Trump, No Wall, No USA at all” the blogfather is noticing the same thing I am

I’ve noticed a sudden media pivot against Antifa in the last couple of days, which I assume means that someone has polled this stuff and it’s electoral poison for Democrats. Which should come as no surprise, unless you live in a Media Bubble.

And we’re seeing stuff like this from Joe Scarborough Mika and the panel:

as had Headline News:

Even Michael Moore has figured it out:

The Question is, why the sudden change? Well it’s all in accordance with DaTechGuy’s 2nd Law of Media Outrage

The level of acceptance of the positions and/or actions of any group or organization by the left and media is directly proportional to their current or potential value in electing liberal Democrats.

One doesn’t have to be an expensive political consultant to know that visuals of people in masks beating reporters and their political foes combined with chants of “No Fascist USA” and “No USA at all” being linked to the single most visible group of leftists/Democrats is not going to help Democrat Senators running in blue states.  That’s why the LA Times is doing all it can to segregate ANTIFA from the rest of the left, but as Dave Weigel put it this week:

And with that inability to thread the needle the days of the MSM defending ANTIFA have ended as the folks at Philadelinquency explain

For those of you who love putting on black bandanas it’s going to get interesting as most of your conformist liberal friends grow from disagreement to disavowing political alignment and then that may even contort into a clear divide and perhaps even separation and you two blocking each other on social media. The liberal voting mass will listen to their “smart friend” who is trying to help out Senator Casey or Save Claire! and feel less inclined to march with you. It may turn into complete ostracization at political rallies and events. Political expediency will demand this. It’s a political singularity that is a certainty. You will not be able to escape it.

For those of you who are liberal and hold down a corporate job: as you’ve been more than welcoming to extremism these last few months your new-found discovery that extremism is bad and unproductive in politics will force you into logic pretzels you never thought possible. You’ll cope by ignoring most of the shit you’ve said or done because there’s a ring on the merry-go-round that needs to be grabbed. You can’t have any of your more far-left and green friends holding you back.

How bad has it gotten for ANTIFA? Even Washington Post Humorists are denouncing them:

Now, I am an unapologetic, unrepentant, unreconstructed liberal. But I have absolutely no doubts about this issue, for reasons moral, ethical, logical and, above all, tactical.

And believe me under that 2nd law of media outrage those final three words will be the primary driver of all the media’s reactions from here on in.

Update:  Now you really know the 2nd law is in play, even San Francisco Nancy is coming out against Antifa.

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DaTechGuy on Da #BostonCommon Many Groups One Anti-Trump Message

Posted: August 20, 2017 by datechguy in culture, local, News/opinion, politics, special events
Tags: ,

Saturday Morning ,much to the concern of DaWife and some of my friends I got in the car and headed to Boston to cover the protests/counter protests going on in Boston post Charlottesville.

I left early enough that the traffic was fairly light and getting to Alewife station went directly to the 4th level to park. It was fairly empty at the time I got there before 10 AM.

When I got on the Subway train I found my surrounded by large groups of people carrying signs, some homemade some not. They varied from hit Nazis to attacking the “alt right” to the standard “love Trumps Hate” and “Black Lives Matter” I quietly sat and listened. It was my impression that the folks
who had come to Boston from out of town were mostly people who wanted to “make a difference”. Their grandparents had fought in World War 2 and they saw themselves as doing what they did. This was a theme I got a lot from a certain segment of the crowd once I got to Boston, a feeling that they were emulating the “greatest generation” by going to Boston to stand up to the Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen That meme was common among the people I ran into on the train and in the crowd once I got there and my primary goal in going to the event was to not only report on what I saw, but to find out if their assessment was true.

There were a fair amount of masked folks in the crowd, some wearing green who were organizing things (they seemed distinct from the ANTIFA folk who I saw later) I asked one young lady why she was wearing a mask and she replied that it was to keep her from being doxxed which seemed to be the standard line, which frankly didn’t seem all that credible to me.

At the time I got there the crowd was comparatively large but not massive as it would later become there was a large crowd by the Statehouse, that was the Marty Walsh event and various groups to the far side where the free speech rally was supposed to be. It was at this time I saw a familiar group go by.

As I continued to head deeper into the common I saw a group of folks sitting down on a bench who consented to an interview

I found the remarks about people losing their jobs ironic after the doxxing stuff the masked lady had said, but from there continued on. At this point I spotted a group of State Police and spoke to one about them.

He said they would do their best to protect everyone’s first amendment rights (and from what I saw there was a large enough police presence to do so. I asked him about the masked ANTIFA folks, he mentioned that they were a worry but as there was no law against wearing a mask on the common all they could do is keep an eye on them.

I walked all the way to the far end where the pond was and then doubled back to get to the gazebo. All this time the crowd continues to grow as more and more folks showed up as the weather continue to get better but hotter.
When I got to the Gazebo area I found the entire section was cordoned off. Only people specifically on a list were invited in and that included the press.

This was a large blow to my plans as the primary thing I wanted to do is record the speeches and see what they were saying to answer the question: Were these guys actual Nazis, White supremacists et/al or were they just conservatives that because they supported Trump were considered all of these things?

Of course to the crowd none of this mattered. It was a matter of faith that these guys were Nazis but it seemed to me also a matter of faith that President Trump was also a Nazi/White Supremacist as was anyone who supported him and this was evident by some of the chants.

The attendees were very good at the whole repetitive chanting thing which requires very little thought.

I tried to find some other angles to get a better view of the bandstand but there was no place where I could get close enough and the fence lining it was filling up.

All of it seemed like overkill to me but the crowd seemed rather enjoying themselves as I walked through them.

The crowd itself consisted of the following groups:

Group one:   The well meaning folks standing up as I mentioned at the start (worth interviewing)
Group two:   The college kids finding something cool to do while establishing their liberal credentials (worth interviewing)

I’d say those two groups at least at the time I was there was a solid 1/3 or more of the crowd

Group three: The mayors folks also establishing both their anti-trump and liberal cred (spinning pols no interest to me)
Group four: The various activist groups there to push their specific causes (again professional protesters spinners mostly not worth my time)
This was I’d guess about half the crowd or slightly less. When you report they are very noticeable and you could see the polish in how they carried themselves and their organization.

Group five:  The freaky guys like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (drag queens dressed as nuns) and Vermin Supreme (folks looking for attention but not getting it from me)
And Group six:  ANTIFA violent thugs who I had no intention of associating with.

Despite how different they were all of them were all united in two propositions:

Donald Trump is a bad evil racist.

If you voted for Trump you are as are as bad or worse than he is.

The effects of that unifying idea was interesting,  particularly interesting how well the Masked Antifa crowd was being received by said crowd.

That really shocked me I figured either they had no idea the type of people ANTIFA was (groups 1 & 2) , pretended they didn’t (group 3) or didn’t care (groups 4 & 5).

It was around this time that everyone got an education concerning them from an event that was to me, the defining event of the time I was there.

I noticed people swarming and went to check it out and was disgusted by what I saw.

Two men one wearing a Trump, Make America Great Again and another wearing an Israeli flag being greeted by cries of “fascist go home” and quickly surrounded. At least of the organizers recognizing that the potential of something that would shatter the image they wanted portrayed to the press and to some of the more innocent people there who had no idea what company they were keeping so one of the folks who had been coaching some of the masked folks on one side and two members of the highly radical “veterans for peace” did their best to make sure nobody threw a punch but it didn’t stop people from getting in their faces and surrounding them.

I was completely beside myself over this first of all Donald Trump won the majority of voters in 29 states. If a man can’t safely walk through Boston Common with that banner no matter who is there that’s an incredible escalation as it the dubbing of any person supporting Trump a fascist or a Nazi.

But what set me off even more was the vitriol against they guy wearing the Israeli flag and the crowd joining in on the chants against him. The irony of people carrying anti-nazi signs and lowly proclaiming their opposition to hate driving out a person wearing the Star of David flag seems to have been completely lost on the people there and frankly I was outraged.

What was even more amazing were those calling em cowards those two guys were the bravest people there and I found myself wishing that I had a Trump banner or an Israeli flag and was standing with them.

To me this was a turning point, it is a moment that in my opinion will get replayed over and over in states that Trump carried and I can’t think of anything else that would infuriate and energize Trump supporters more.

On the bright side there were some signs of sanity and plurality in the crowd this one stood out.

But then again one would expect Quakers to be expressing this kind of thing.

By this time it was getting clear that unless I was willing and able to stay very late there wasn’t going to be much big news and I noticed people starting to leave so I started to leave but found some interesting sights like the Panda crowd that I saw earlier.

That the people signing were basically saying “take away my freedom” never seemed to occur to them.

There was Gary who had an interesting quest.

Four nice folks from Plymouth who seemed to have experience in this sort of thing without being professional activists.

A catholic poet and musician who bought my book.

and my favorite person Gary who while not liking the right had my favorite sign of the day as embraced his opinions while defending the 1st Amendment.

Finally a large crowd came by marching and I filmed them for five minutes.

then a few minutes more.

which couldn’t help but make me think of the famous scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the crowd chants in unison “yes we’re all individuals, we’ve all got to work it out for ourselves”

Finally it was time to leave and I headed for a T station as Park Station was closed. Because of this I missed some violence that took place later (conveniently after the regular people who might have objected had already left) but ran into the nice young ladies that I’ve already mentioned.

As for the object of these protests they became an afterthought but the real irony is, if there had been no protest they would have gotten even less attention but most of the people there seemed happy at what they felt they achieved and proud of their actions. What did they achieve? Well that’s an analysis post for later this week.

We’ll finish with a few assorted images and clips.

And My photo gallery follows my tipjar pitch

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DaTechGuy’s 2nd Law of Democrat/Media Outrage

Posted: August 19, 2017 by datechguy in media
Tags:


A while back we postulated DaTechGuy’s theory (law) of Media Outrage which states:

The level of Outrage or interest of the media and their allies on the left concerning any insult or prevarication concerning a person or thing will routinely be equal to the inverse of the degree of the political distance between said media / leftists and and the target of said insult or prevarication at the time it is made.

However looking at the theory (law) as it stands it seems to be missing a few things.  First of all the theory (law) while supported by the current evidence, only covers words, and not so much actions or beliefs. nor does it convey the progression of certain things from acceptable to unacceptable.

So I’d like to propose a corollary to this theory  or DaTechGuy’s 2nd Law of Democrat/Media Outrage.

The level of acceptance of the positions and/or actions of any group or organization by the left and media is directly proportional to their current or potential value in electing liberal Democrats.

As we noted in our first post in March, the test of any such theory or law requires evident to show it is true.  Namely can we see a progression on the media/left positions based on support for the Democrat party?

As a matter of fact we can!

We can see this progression in many ways for example take the confederacy:

When Democrats’ national position depended on unwavering support from “the Solid South,” we got lots of pro-Southern propaganda: the Lost Cause, Gone With The Wind, Disneyfied Uncle Remus, etc. As a vital Democrat constituency group, southerners, even practical neo-Confederates, were absolved of all sins as long as they stayed in line.

A great example of this was cited by Dinesh D’Sousa

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In fact as late as 2003  Howard Dean was saying things like this:

“I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks,” the former Vermont governor said in an interview published Saturday in the Des Moines Register. “We can’t beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross-section of Democrats.”

This is actually no surprise because despite the MSM narratives to the contrary Democrats still held the majority of the State House of Representatives of the old confederacy.  But as the Democrats went farther left by 2008 and became a secular party they continued to lose states south of the Mason Dixon line until today of the bible belt and border states only Delaware (which they first took in 2009) and Maryland which they’ve continually held for almost 100 years remain in their hands and the worm suddenly turned.  As Glenn Reynolds put it

Now the South isn’t “solid” anymore — or, more accurate, it’s becoming pretty solidly Republican — so rather than receiving cultural dispensations, it now gets targeted for cultural warfare.

Or consider Christianity.  As long as the Democrat Party had a large contingent of religious voters then the Bill Clintons, Hillary Clintons, Al Gores and even Barack Obama’s didn’t attack or demonize those who had followed the same teachings of Christianity that have been taught for thousands of years.  In fact back in the Clinton years the Democrats insisted that anyone claiming that the Democrats were pushing for Gay Marriage were alarmists.

But once it became clear in 2012 that it was the Gay lobby and the money and votes they need would be more critical Christianity was something to be ditched and Gay Marriage and Transgenderism was to be embraced.  When it became clear that even the Christian black vote would not turn on Obama suddenly anyone who didn’t follow the Gay Marriage/Transgender agenda were bigots and haters.

And then there is Islam.  During the 90’s and up until 2008 it was not controversial for American president and members of congress to support the wars against radical Islam in Iraq or Afghanistan and to condemn acts of Islamic Terror.

But once supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood started opening their wallets, particularly in big cities, to build mosques, and fund university programs, and Democrats figured out that even they can’t vote the dead if their aborted and the ghastly Tom Hagen math takes over:

 In 20 years the children of Muslims now being raised on the tenets of Sharia law in America will be old enough to vote and Democrats going to make sure they get those votes when the time come, not now but 10-20 years from now. 

This is how suddenly Orando goes from a terror attack by a Gay hating muslim to something to be blamed on the GOP and the NRA.

It’s also how an American president (Obama) and secretary of state (Kerry) become willing to throw Israel under the bus to keep Islam and Bernie Bros happy.

the truth is the Bernie Sanders democrats are anti Israel and have spent the entire Obama administration courting a growing segment of the population that is pro dead jews and growing a base, particularly on campus that hates Israel openly and hates Jews clandestinely.

It’s also incidentally why the ACLU, found itself under attack for upholding one of the few nonpartisan principles they had retained, namely free speech.  Once their defense of free speech was inconvenient to the left the attacks began and the ACLU evolved, very quickly.  Why?

But a new generation of ACLU members and donors, who surged to the group after the election of President Donald Trump, know the group primarily as a champion of causes typically aligned with the left, like pressing for greater immigrant and LGBT rights, and reducing criminal penalties.

Since the election, the ACLU’s membership has nearly quadrupled to 1.6 million and the group has received $83 million in online donations, said Stacy Sullivan, an ACLU spokeswoman.

In November, the ACLU solicited donations on its home page with a picture of the then president-elect and the words, “We’ll see you in court.”

And as the corollary notes, the farther you get from the the left’s positions, the less tolerated your positions become.

So if you are a group or individual or even a business and wonder how the left will react at any given time, my advice is to simply apply DaTechGuy’s Laws of Democrat/Media Outrage and you can see what’s coming every single time.

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