Posts Tagged ‘under the fedora’

I’ve never seen an issue that has more potential for agreement than the death of Jeffrey Epstein. Both on the left and on the right it seems that everyone assumes it is murder.

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At Legal Insurrection they tell of Merkel’s Germany getting ready to go after people to critique migrants online. My thought, you can take the woman out of Communist East Germany but you can’t take the Communist East Germany out of the woman.

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Along those lines A co-worker who is from Armenia and whose wife is Polish was talking to me about his trip there recently. He reminded me of something I forgot, namely that just because Soviet control over the eastern bloc was gone it didn’t mean that Soviets and their allies who lived in those countries stopped believing in authoritarian government.

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Many years ago Instapundit noted that Wikipedia is not a suitable source for anything remotely controversial. Their decision to pull the page on controversial trans activist Jessica Yaniv likely because it’s of disadvantage to the preferred narrative supports this completely.

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Finally I recently purchased the classic 1935 movie Captain Blood which was the launching pad for Errol Flynn and the then 19 year old now 103 year old Olivia de Havilland. I’m surprised at how many scenes I’m seeing for the 1st time that were cut from my VHS copy and hope that de Havilland gets at least a few cents from my purchase as she’s entertained me my entire life.

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It’s almost impossible to find i

Not alot of surprises under the fedora today

I’m typing this on Monday at my favorite lunch place that had CNN on one of their TV with no sound. They as you might guess are talking about the two shooters in Dayton and El Paso.

Whenever they mention the El Paso shooter the bar at the bottom speaks about his beliefs and reference Trump, however whenever they reference the Dayton shooter, a fan of Sanders and Warren & antifa they don’t.

No surprise

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On another TV they have international women’s volleyball. That might not have been a surprise except that instead of beach volleyball where the women are wearing nearly nothing it’s snow volleyball where the women are completely cover because, well it’s snow volleyball.

Yet the bar has it on.

Surprise.

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Oddly enough at this bar none of the TVs are on channel’s talking about Tom Brady’s new contract giving the Pats the option to keep him through 2021, perhaps it’s because everyone was speculating about why Brady wasn’t signed and if the Patriots were finally moving on etc. I strongly suspect that the reason why it took so long for deal that it helped overshadow the 1st Patriots season post “happyending gate” but in the end the Patriots in general and their owner in particular decided it was a bad idea to send the NFL’s biggest cash cow to the glue factory

No surprise there.

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Democrat candidates have “pounced” on this weekends shootings in the hopes of generating or sustaining buzz for their campaigns the same way I pounce on frozen Kentucky Derby pie when it’s in sight.

It will be no surprise to see the next debate featuring perhaps multiple questions to candidate linking the El Paso shooter (democrat though he is) to President Trump and candidate after candidate blaming the president for the shooters actions.

However it will be a great surprise if at that same debate they note the political beliefs of the Dayton shooter and ask either Senators Sanders or Warren who he expressed support for if they bear any responsibility for that shooter’s acts.

Now That would be a surprise

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Finally for the last several months there have been a bunch of rabbits in the neighborhood. I think they’re been living under our low back deck and over that time a day rarely went by that I didn’t either leave for work or come back from work without seeing a rabbit sitting in the back yard waiting to see what direction I would go in.

Two days ago I saw a cat in the neighborhood for the 1st time in at least a year walking down the street by my driveway.

I haven’t seen a rabbit since.

no surprise there.

I’m not a big fan of publishing manifesto of killers. The last thing a society that pushes fame and notoriety above all needs to do is give people desperate to feel important a platform. Alas in an instant information age where the value of clicks overwhelm all else, there is zero chance that such sober restraint would take place.

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As said manifesto has been put out there two things jumped out at me right away. The first was the declaration that the we are destroying the world environmentally. For this fellow’s entire life he has been sold a bill of goods that the world had five, ten fifteen, 25 years left before we’re all doomed. There’s nothing like convincing people they have no future and nothing to lose to get them to do something horribly stupid and/or horribly wrong.

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the 2nd thing of note to me was his conscious choice of a target where people were unarmed and his suggestion of others to do the same. Gun free zone like “drug free zones” are only as free of such things as those willing to follow rules make them and the people most willing to follow rules are not the ones people need protection from. Those who keep insisting on maintaining “gun free zones” are simply managing game preserves for killers.

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We don’t have a lot of details on the 2nd shooting spree in Ohio other than it was fortunate that police were in the area and thus were able to respond in about a minute, yet there were still multiple fatalities and over a dozen wounded. Now I don’t blame the police they can only do what they can when they get there and they did their job well. If anything illustrates the need for people to be able to carry it’s this situation. Police can only react when they get there, people already on the scene can react at once.

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Finally I want people ( other than potential Democrat candidates for office who I selfishly encourage to keep spouting nonsense about gun and bullet control throughout the election season ) who are arguing for more Gun control to consider something. Until the campaign against so called “Saturday night specials” guns were ubiquitous everywhere, high schools had gun clubs and shooting teams. Being armed was very common, young people had guns, old people had guns in fact my mother regularly carried a gun.

Yet it is only in recent memory that we have seen these kind of mass shootings on a regular basis, particularly from young people. People who as Stacy McCain put it:

“are succumbing to despair and rage, believing their lives are worthless, without meaning or purpose. Seeing no hope for their own future as individuals, they project their nihilistic sense of doom onto society at large, and resort to a sick “blaze of glory” fantasy”

Stacy McCain Two Mass Shootings in 14 hours. Thoughts on the Gamification of Terror

So that raises a rather obvious question:

If GUNS are the problem, why were we not seeing shootings like this regularly in my youth? What is the cultural difference a cultural difference which has taken two generations to completely work it’s way through society through film, TV and our schools that has so changed the population that might cause our youth to have such a callous attitude toward the value of life, not only their own but of others?

The AP reports noted teenage climate activist is putting her time her month is and crossing the Atlantic in a “high tech sailboat” rather than flying to cut her carbon emissions.

Forgetting for a moment all the carbon that was produced in making the ships stores that she will spend days or weeks consuming on her trip, if she was really looking to cut the carbon for this conferencewhy not have the entire conference done by teleconference? That way nobody has to travel at all. Think of all the carbon that would save!

Alas Greta does not yet understand that such events, like climate change hysteria itself, exist for the perks not for the cause.


Another person has been injured by a charging Bison in a national park.

Officials at Theodore Roosevelt National Park say the 17-year-old girl from Colorado was on a trail Saturday and walked between two bull bison that had been fighting. One bison charged the teen who was struck in the back, gored in the thigh and tossed about six feet in the air

I blame Disney. Before they started portraying animals as cute harmless things people knew and understood that animals, particularly wild ones are dangerous but generation of Disney movies and the lack of real knowledge of animals in the wild means that fools are going to have to learn about reality the hard way.


Remember the lifestyle pushed by the show Sex in the City that convinced a generation of women that despite centuries of experience teaching otherwise women didn’t need families to be fulfilled. Well guess what the very wealthy 60 year old creator of the series says now:

Her best-selling book and the racy TV series it inspired taught a generation of women that they could ‘have it all’.
But Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell, 60, has admitted that she regrets choosing a career over having children as she is now ‘truly alone’.

She’s very rich and can console herself with her millions and botox but alas a lot of women who fell for that spiel and aren’t as wealthy as here aren’t going to be able to do the same.


One of the things I’ve been saying for the last decade is that as Christianity becomes more persecuted and more ostracized by the culture we are going to find out who really believes and who doesn’t. A prominent protestant pastor has now fallen away very publicly and Stacy McCain has some thoughts:

What happened to Josh Harris? Honestly, I don’t know. He quit the pulpit in 2015, and by 2017 was promoting himself as a consultant offering businesses “branding and content strategy.” He announced his separation from his wife in sensitive blue-pill language (they “will continue our life together as friends . . . to create a generous and supportive future for each other and for our three amazing children”). We don’t know what we don’t know, but we may speculate that his wife — who had fallen in love with him when he was a evangelical superstar — lost interest in her husband once he ceased to be a celebrity. The Mahaney scandal must have inflicted collateral damage on Josh’s reputation and status as a leader, and what is the church to such a Christian celebrity except a source of status, an adoring audience for his performances? Necessarily, the celebrity pastor’s wife becomes part of the performance, playing the role of Perfect Christian Wife, and what happens when the show is over? What happens when the pastor leaves the pulpit and there is no longer an audience for this performance?

PJ media describes this as a celebrity culture in evangelicalismwhich makes Christ the means to the end of celebrity and that never ends well.

We should pray for this man because for the rest of his life the left/media culture will celebrate him, fete him and give him all the celebrity that he was no longer getting from faith. I’m sure that they will honor support and laud him for the rest of his natural life…

…after that however, he’s on his own.


Newsbusters wrote about Evan McMullin on MSNBC opining on the dangers of a Trump re-election with Joy Reid a few days ago and I could not help but remember being on a bus in Denver with a group of conservative bloggers covering a school choice conference were a very sincere fellow spent his time on our trip back to the hotel from a school we were visiting trying to convince me that Donald Trump would be a disaster for conservatism and urging me to throw my support to McMullin.

Recently I got another raise at work. My pay counting employee contributions to a medical savings account has gone up over 52% in the 32 months since the day of the election of Donald Trump after having dropped 55% over the Obama years. If my wage continues to rise at this rate during a 2nd Trump terms I will be back at the wage I was making when Obama was elected (not adjusted for inflation) just before the 2022 midterms.

I wonder where by pay rate would be if enough people had taken the advice of that earnest conservative on that bus?