For 99.9% of our existence, it was ‘insurance’ of some sort first, then love and babies.

That’s true. But it’s also true that for the same 99.9% of our existence the marital contract was a fairly normal sort of contract with privileges for observing it and penalties for breaking it. In the present 0.1% of existence, the marital contract is a perverse anti-contract with penalties for observing it and privileges for breaking it.

I guess I’m behind the times, but why do you actually have to be present in the US to show your titties on Only Fans?

The problem is that there are plenty of government agents out there who are inclined to think that YOU might be better off dead. And they can easily invent convenient rationales for why you might be a potential menace to society who ought to be neutralized.

Toad, I agree with you in the universe where everyone plays by the same rules. Unfortunately, that universe and this universe parted timelines long ago. In this universe, they already had the rationale, blew away Ashley, and gave the killer a medal and a promotion. Ditto Randy Weaver’s wife, and so on. They will already do the same to you as soon as they get an Opportunity, irrespective of whatever “objectively reasonable restraints” anyone here works out. Those restraints won’t apply to them when they don’t want them to. They will only apply to you, and then only as a prelude to your reframing as the next JamesFieldsTravisMcMichaelDerekChauvin, who also thought they were exercising “objectively reasonable restraint”.

Odd. I could have sworn that the Great Replacement was a racist conspiracy theory with no supporting evidence!

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/10/trump-immigration-whiteness

Why the white America Trump dreams of is just a fantasy
Eduardo Porter

Here’s one reason Donald Trump seems perennially in a bad mood: he has probably figured out that the America he fantasizes about is out of his reach.

However many immigrants he manages to deport or prevent from entering the country, the white paradise he is promising his Maga base, free of Somalis, Mexican “rapists” and generally people from “shithole countries” – closer in hue to the America where he was born – is not his to offer.

Trump is not the first politician to try to protect their conviction about the whiteness of America’s racial stock from “foreign” contamination. The national-origin immigration quotas in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 were quite successful at doing this. In 1960, 75% of immigrants to the US came from Europe.

But the levee broke. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 replaced national-origin with family ties. These days only about 10% of immigrants hail from Europe. More than half come from Latin America. When Trump was four, white people accounted for nine in 10 Americans (the census did not ask about Hispanic ethnicity). By 2024, the non-Hispanic white share had slid to 57.5%.

Nothing Trump does to stop immigration can change this trajectory. Because the non-Hispanic white population will keep on shrinking regardless, the Census Bureau projects that it will lose 3.6 million people over the next five years, almost 11 million in the decade after that and more than 14 million in the subsequent one.

Despite Sterilization Efforts, Racist Claims Persist Amid Long-Standing Tensions

A sauna in China has faced criticism from locals for allowing Indian visitors, sparking a controversy. The sauna’s sales reportedly plummeted by about 90% after it became known that Indian visitors had been there.

According to Chinese local social media on the 24th, three Indian men working at foreign companies in China recently uploaded a video of their visit to a high-end sauna in Harbin, China. The men praised the sauna’s luxurious bathing facilities and relaxation areas in the video, showing themselves using various services. They also expressed surprise that beverages, fruits, and ice cream were provided for free.

While their video became a major topic of discussion in China, the sauna’s sales actually plummeted. This was because Chinese people began protesting, claiming that Indians have poor hygiene and that the sauna they visited should not be used.

The sauna operator stated that they had replaced the bathwater and sterilized the tubs and showers according to established regulations after the Indian visitors, but to no avail. According to the sauna operator, the Indian guests quietly washed themselves and left during their visit, demonstrating mature civic consciousness by folding and leaving the towels they had used. Despite this, the sauna’s sales reportedly plummeted by 90% within a week.

Chinese netizens poured out racist responses, such as “Indians might have urinated or defecated in the bath” and “Indians usually bathe in rivers mixed with filth.”

https://archive.is/DScJZ

“Lou’s first shot met the standard of ‘objective reasonableness’ the Constitution requires for the legal use of deadly force. Damn our legal system!”

And Lon’s second shot killed a woman who was threatening agents by brandishing an illegally modified 10 month old baby.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge_standoff#:~:text=During%20a%20surveillance%20operation%2C%20officer,son%2C%20Samuel%2C%20who%20was%20armed.

The RRTF report to the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) of June 1994 stated unequivocally in conclusion (in its executive summary) that the rules that allowed the second shot to have been made did not satisfy constitutional standards for legal use of deadly force.[90]

It would be more effective, to say “Listen, folks, these guys are working to protect you. If you get in their way, or fool around with them, you are liable to get shot when things get out of hand. This guy was just doing the work the American public needs done.”

It’s a little worse than that. Renee was actively making “things get out hand”. She was deliberately interfering in and obstructing a law enforcement operation, endangering the lives of officers. To add insult to injury, she and her “partner” were sarcastically mocking the officers they were obstructing, demonstrating their (false) sense of legal invulnerability, a sense fostered by cynical liars all the way up the Democrat hierarchy. Now she’s misfortunately, but sort of inevitably, dead.

“Domestic terrorism” may be an exaggeration by earlier definitions, but now that Democrats have normalized new definitions of “domestic terrorism”, including black-letter First Amendment-protected petitioning for redress of grievances, they can wear their own redefining around their own slack necks.

“At the current time, we are all better off having objectively reasonable restraints on the government’s power to kill us. And it’s important that these should apply to everyone.”

That is the crux of the problem. The Michael Byrds and the Lon Horiuchis and the Janet Renos go scot free, while the Derek Chauvin’s get stabbed in prison and J6 trespassers get locked up. If the restraints on government force applied to everyone, there probably wouldn’t be a controversy in this case. But that ship left port a while ago.

“Safe indeed, as we have seen over the years. Minneapolis is run by crooks and crazies, for the benefit of crooks and crazies.”

Indeed. Based on precedent, it’s hard to see what Waltz/Frey/etc. are getting so jacked up about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Justine_Damond#
On the night of the shooting,

Damond called 9-1-1 at 11:27 p.m. and again at 11:35 p.m.[21] She reported that she thought she heard a woman either having sex or being raped.[22] Dispatchers categorized the call as “unknown trouble: female screaming”—a relatively low priority. Officers Noor and Harrity responded to the low-crime neighborhood of Fulton, in southwestern Minneapolis, drove their police Ford Explorer with lights off through the alley[23] and found no suspects or signs of the suspected rape that had prompted Damond’s calls.[24]

As the officers prepared to leave, Noor “entered ‘Code Four’ into the cruiser’s computer, meaning the scene was safe”.[23] Harrity would later indicate “that he was startled by a loud sound near the squad” and, just then, Damond approached the police car’s driver-side window.[25] Harrity drew his weapon, but pointed it downward and did not fire.[26] Noor, however, fired once through the open window, fatally striking an unarmed and barefoot Damond in the abdomen.

For unprovoked shooting of an unarmed woman, Noor was convicted of 2nd degree manslaughter, and his sentence was eventually reduced to 38 months in prison.

“So why should we believe the initial report and not the later reports?”

Time was, the initial report on an incident was preliminary, and then reporters would set about getting more information and correcting it. However, in recent years, at least since 9/11, I have increasingly noticed that the initial report is the best you’ll get, after which the authorities and the msm get together and get their lies straight, or simply “forget” the matter.

I emphasized 9/11, because on that day, there was one report that a fake pilot in uniform was caught trying to board a fifth airliner, and that the clean-up crew on a fifth airliner (don’t recall if it was the same airliner in both cases) found box-cutters stuffed between or within passengers’ seats.

Had those reports been false, the media would later have issued corrections, saying that they had received false rumors that did not check out. But they didn’t say that. They said nothing.

In recent years, I have written on several crimes in NYC, in which murder victims who were initially reported on, “disappeared” from later reports, without any explanation. (In other cases, e.g., Kea Fiedler and Jaclyn Almquist, I caught the cops lying through their teeth to begin with. With Fiedler, the nycpd pulled a stunt it had pulled with murdered actress-moviemaker, Adrienne Shelly. Shelly was strangled in her office by an illegal alien; the cops asserted that she’d committed suicide. Shelly’s family raised holy h-e-c-k, and got her death re-investigated. However, Kea Fiedler (October 19, 2015) was a German grad student at the New School. Although her classmates and profs were outraged, her family was unable to get her murder re-opened. 19 or 20 days after Melanie Liverpool-Turner murdered Fiedler, she murdered Connie Watton. Same m.o., and again the killer immediately confessed. This time, the nycpd thought maybe it ought to do its job. Liverpool-Turner was convicted of Connie Watton’s murder, sentenced to 20 years inside, and the panic-stricken murderer hanged herself in her prison cell. No nycpd detectives who had covered up the murder of Kea Fiedler ever re-classified the crime, or are known to have done the right thing.)

In one case on February 12, 2024 in the Bronx, the nycpd’s “white shirts” called a press conference on the street below the elevated station where two (venezuelan?) gangs had reportedly shot and killed two passengers, an hour later (5 p.m.), but refused to answer reporters’ questions. The first reported vic was a teenaged girl, 15, whom a gangster had shot in the face. A report later that afternoon told of a mexican illegal, Obed Beltrán-Sánchez, a 35-year-old man from Tehuacan, who was also shot and killed on the same train, only now the dead girl was “disappeared.”

That way, the nycpd holds 2-for-1 sales on murders.

“It looked to me like a very confusing situation that just escalated so quickly, so dramatically, in such a deadly way that this is exactly what so many of us have been worrying about.”

They’re always so worried about people’s health.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/news/politico-reporter-launches-thinly-veiled-threat-at-youtuber-who-exposed-somali-daycare-fraud/ar-AA1TiEKR

Politico senior legal affairs reporter Josh Gerstein claimed in a Monday post on X that citizen journalists investigating Somali scammers could be shot under “stand your ground” laws, which some commenters viewed as a threat.
…
Gerstein, though he later denied the threat, hinted that violent confrontations could be imminent as other journalists

These guys are like the mob selling “protection” to some Little Italy merchant – “Nice place ya got here. Be a shame if sumptin was ta happen to it”.

What you said exactly. I have trouble thinking of anything unconstitutional or unprecedented that Trump has done, other than simply enforce the written law of the United States. He’ll do something, some district court judge issues a restraining order, and Trump abides by it. It goes up through the courts, as it is supposed to, and he abides by the final decision. Sam Malone considers LBJ and Barack Obama to be more worthy of being entrusted with power than Trump. Well, LBJ faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident to gin up an intervention in Vietnam, and Obama ordered his DOJ to stage a coup against a duly elected president. Hell – at a considerably lower level of resistance than what Trump is encountering, Eisenhower had already sent the 101st Airborne to invade Arkansas (and he didn’t even have a written law backing him up).

I’m not sure about that. James Fields is serving a life sentence for murder even though he was being illegally detained.

“Shooting the driver through the windshield was the least effective thing he could possibly have done to protect himself anyway.”

Maybe from a protection standpoint – who knows. But from a legal standpoint, if you ever want to shoot somebody who’s in a car, stand directly in front of them. If they do not stop, it is one of the few instances where you can claim an unmitigated right to self defense.

I initially read that as “ICE Witch”. Which is probably more accurate.

The Van Allen Belt is in the middle – his waist looks pretty normal. The Von Braun Belt is not visible, as he has his suit coat buttoned.

Might as well have the tune to go with the lyrics.

The entire US political and mainstream media establishment was unanimous for 5 years that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had absolutely nothing to do with covid-19, and you guys are worried that the dissident right has a problem with conspiracy theories?

I could be if I lay off the little blue pills.

1. What’s the age limit?
2. Will they pay for my plane fare there?

“This really is the end to any pretense that the US is a Constitutional Republic.”

If the criterion is “arbitrary military interventions in foreign countries for the purpose of overthrowing the government, unaccompanied by an official declaration of war “, we blew past that milestone well over a century ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Government_of_Santo_Domingo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Noriega
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/clinton-on-qaddafi-we-came-we-saw-he-died/

Heck – here’s a list starting in 1953 in Iran.
https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-dictators-us-ousted-throughout-history-11304537

And of course there are a number of other criteria we could use to establish the same point. I could argue that we haven’t been a constitutional republic since the civil war.

There’s another potential benefit as well. Most US refineries are optimized for heavy crude. Heavy crude is particularly good for producing diesel, which has a significant impact on inflation – transportation, agriculture, mining all run on diesel. Trump is currently attempting to kick the inflation can down the road. The US doesn’t have many moves left with respect to the inflation or crash conundrum, but holding down the cost of diesel fuel is one of them. If installing a friendly puppet in Venezuela gets US oil companies to go back in (with a US military guarantee that they won’t have their assets stolen again), that can actually have a noticeable impact on the cost of goods in the US.

Anybody been following the Great Somali Daycare Scam story coming out of Minneapolis? And soon, no doubt, to be coming out of Columbus, Lewiston, and Seattle too.

I’ve been following this since it first came up, when it was called the biggest scam ever perpetrated against the American people. I doubt that’s the case. My guess is that Somalis are just following a script, and that most immigrant and minority ethnic groups are running major scams. Some groups have the government do the robbing for them, while others are acting on their own. The result is the same. But I doubt that the Somali crooks are the worst. Other groups are shielded, and their criminality denied, ignored, or folded into generic white crimes.

It goes without saying that Jewish crimes for Israel are far larger and much more destructive than anything that a few Somalis have done to the morons in Maine and Minnesota. Madoff alone was probably worse. I also doubt that the Somalis have caused more harm than the Latin cartels and whatever scams have been running in those immigrant communities for many decades. I can only imagine what the Hindus are up to.

Somalis aren’t unique. Everyone is coming to the West trying to steal a piece of the pie or pick over the carcass, and our rulers have opened the doors and offered excuses and encouragement.

And Merry Christmas to you and yours. As Buffalo Joe used to say, stay safe.

Buzz is kind of close to Canada though.

https://www.echelonfoods.com/collections/turduckens

“Our full turduckens are boneless, skinless duck and chicken breasts layered between Italian or chicken apple sausage stuffing into a whole turkey (which is also deboned except for the wings and drumsticks).

Our Bacon Wrapped Turducken Roasts are a slight variation of our full bird for when you want all the flavour, but absolutely no bones. Duck and chicken breasts are wrapped up with Italian sausage stuffing into de-boned turkey thigh meat. All of this is wrapped in bacon. The result is a totally boneless turducken feast.”

If you google the perps name (Fale Pea), google ignores it and gives you results for Fake Pee. No joke. If you use his middle name in the search, it gives you results, but there’s nothing about it in any standard MSM source.

BTW – there are a hell of a lot of synthetic urine (fake pee) products out there. Can’t people just lay off the weed for a couple of days before the drug test?

When “Law and Order” does the episode on this one, he will be portrayed by an AI-generated Dolph Lundgren. The victim will be played by the 5’2″ black chick from the live-action version of “The Little Mermaid”, except instead of being blinded, she will kick his ass.

Gotta go to the UK to find any news about this.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15403767/Seatte-woman-attacked-wooden-plank-Jeanette-Marken-Fale-Pea.html

An elderly woman was savagely attacked in broad daylight by a man wielding a wooden board with nails in it.
Jeanette Marken, 75, was left permanently blinded in her right eye after being hit in the face with the makeshift weapon in Seattle, allegedly at the hands of repeat offender Fale Vaigalepa Pea, 42.

Yes, Fale Pea looks exactly like what you were expecting.

Bad news on the front of White guys bringing punitive lawsuits for suffering damages through DEI. It appeared to be an open and shut case for Klein.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/judge-rules-against-ucla-prof-suspended-after-refusing-lenient-grading-for-black-students/

A judge has issued a tentative decision against a professor who sued UCLA after he was suspended in the wake of the George Floyd-Black Lives Matter riots after refusing a request to grade black students leniently.
Superior Court Judge H. Jay Ford’s recent ruling against UCLA accounting lecturer Gordon Klein sides with UCLA on all three causes of action: breach of contract, false light, and negligent interference with prospective earnings.
Klein’s legal team has filed an appeal, and Judge Ford is scheduled to consider that request, or enter a decision finalizing his tentative ruling, at a hearing scheduled for Jan. 9.

Judge Ford is originally a Jerry Brown appointee in 2013, and was automatically re-elected (due to no opposition) in 2020 to the Santa Monica Superior Court District. There are alot of those types still out there.

“Johnny Paycheck, an almost unknown country artist”

Au contraire. Who hasn’t heard this?

At risk of sounding like a total geek, I am going to make a baseball analogy (this is, after all, sort of an iSteve legacy comment thread). In the late 1970’s, the NY Mets were an absolutely terrible team, coming in last or near last on a regular basis (they had traded Tom Seaver, their Miracle Mets days were well behind them, and the mid-’80s powerhouse was nowhere in sight yet – if Germ Theory were still here, he would back me up on this). Far and away, the Mets best player was their center fielder, a fellow named Lee Mazzilli. Mazzilli had been touted as a superstar when he first came up. But Shea Stadium was a terrible hitters park, which depressed his power stats, and maybe he didn’t quite throw as well as you’d like your center fielder to. But still, he was a good, all-star quality player, hit .280-.300, medium range power, and he was still very young, in his early 20’s so plenty of time to develop. The rest of the team was godawful, with sub-replacement level players sprinkled all over the field. As often happens in sports and in life, the best player, being the most visible, gets an inordinate share of the blame for the team’s shortcomings. Babe Ruth probably couldn’t have dragged those Mets to a pennant, and Mazzilli was sure as hell no Babe Ruth, so the fans and the team management turned on him. They started shifting him around to other positions, he had an off year with the bat, and they traded him. Much to their surprise, even without him, the team still kept coming in last, because the other 7 guys on the field all still stunk.

I look at Trump as sort of a Lee Mazzilli. He’s not George Washington, he can’t single-handedly save the country, even though he might talk like he can. But if you consider him as part of “our” team (whatever you call it – White, historic American, conservative, whatever), he is nowhere near the biggest problem we have. The political landscape is like the late ’70s Mets – everywhere you look, there are people who are absolutely terrible. Trump is one of the few who’s doing anything at all that’s favorable. The current situation has been building for about 150 years, and nobody (let alone Trump) is going to unwind it all overnight (or possibly ever, barring total collapse). In fact, his most lasting achievement is possibly going to be just shining light on everything and revealing the other side for the lying, cheating sacks of sh!t that they are.

Savage is a (((fellow white))) guy. He’s upset that jews are now counted as White. He didn’t give a crap about White guys getting stomped on until DEI came for the jobs that jews owned. Now he’s just trying to round up some chumps to fight for him. Once Hollywood is a jewish sinecure again, screw the soldiers and the firemen and the truck drivers and the civil engineers.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-vanishing

The erasure of Jews from American life
BY JACOB SAVAGE
Suddenly, everywhere you look, the Jews are disappearing.

You feel it like a slow moving pressure system, an anxiety of exclusion and downward mobility. Maybe you first noticed it at your workplace. Or maybe it hit when you or your children applied to college or graduate school. It could have been something as simple as opening up the Netflix splash page. It’s gauche to count but you can’t help yourself: In academia, Hollywood, Washington, even in New York City—anywhere American Jews once made their mark—our influence is in steep decline.

Thanks – very interesting article.

“China will not be able to do that without the EUV machines from ASML.”

How long do you think it’ll take them to build their own? Even if in the meantime ASML have advanced even further?

Might be a little harder than it looks. If it was amenable to their usual approaches of espionage and patent infringement, they’d have one by now.

https://asiatimes.com/2025/10/china-reportedly-caught-reverse-engineering-asmls-duv-lithography/

A Chinese firm reportedly has sought technical support from ASML, the world’s largest chipmaking equipment supplier, after it failed to reassemble a deep-ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machine following an internal teardown for alleged reverse engineering.

“An ASML DUV machine that China has used to make their chips recently broke down. They called the Dutch company for help repairing it,” Brandon Weichert, a senior national security editor at The National Interest, says in a X post. “ASML sent some techs. They discovered that the Chinese broke the machine when they disassembled it and tried to put it back together.”

“The reason Chinese technicians took apart their older ASML DUV system is simple. They are trying to find a way around US sanctions on the newest machines,” Weichert says. “By taking apart the older model and attempting to rebuild it, they hope to learn how to produce their own advanced versions. But it seems they still can’t figure it out.”

“Oh, but I’m obsessed with food. Fuck you.”

What were we talking about again?

came to a fork in the road in the nineties and made a wrong choice on which path to take.

It wasn’t just the Republican party, or even primarily the Republican party, it was the whole country, and the Democrats contributed at least as much.

In the 1990s the Cold War ended, the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union collapsed. NATO/the West/America, as the sole global shot-caller, had an epic, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reforge the global order to contend with the imminent rise of the once-and-future superpower: China.

The obvious and easy move, which was practically begging to happen, was to put aside the old animosities, welcome the former Soviet states into the Western fold, and unite all the implicitly white countries into a new coalition of freedom and prosperity. The high-trust, high-culture, liberal-democratic polities of the West would preside over abundant land, cheap energy, world-defining science and technology, and the material increase and bourgeois culture that everyone envies. This would have been the best Western configuration when it had to face the Chinese giant’s configuration of huge population, high human capital, and low labor costs under effective central control: a billion centrally-organized Han versus a coalition of half billion whites with the world’s preeminent land, energy, and resource portfolio.

Instead, the US sponsored oligarchs’ minions wildly looting Russia under the guise of helping transition it to market economy, a double-betrayal. The US and NATO followed this up by reneging on the assurances of NATO quiescence in exchange for Russian military retrenchment further to the East, and sharpened NATO into an anti-Russia conspiracy, now making actual kinetic war on the Russian homeland itself.

Needless to say, this has broken the potential white alliance and driven the second most powerful member into the arms of the Chinese rival, giving the China pole the edge over the Western pole. Just an epic, unforgiveable blunder.

This mostly happened under the Democrat Clinton regime, with the most dramatic act in the recent Biden regime. The Repub GWB admin was a bit of a thaw by comparison.

The deindustrialization of the US and the technology transfer to China—and the attendant effects on the American industrial class—were likewise Clinton-era spawn.

“Ross Perot was a smarter and calmer Donald Trump.”

America was a smarter, calmer country in 1992. That must have been a busy summer for the professional dirty tricksters. I imagine the old-line Bush deep staters were desperately trying to get Perot out of the race, whereas the up-and-coming Bill Ayers style ones and the Arkansas Mafia were trying to keep him in (knowing he would probably siphon off mostly Bush votes). Perot won alot of popular votes, but in my lifetime, far and away the most successful 3rd party candidate (as far as electoral votes), as well as the most faithful to the Constitution was George Wallace in ’68. Naturally, he got lots of bad press, and eventually (like all enemies of the left who don’t succumb to the character assassination) got shot.

The Perot/Trump comparison always reminds me of a conversation a co-worker and I had many years ago. One of our buddies had been promoted to management, and was flailing badly (alienating people through being indecisive, failing to protect his workers from unreasonable management whims, etc.etc). He was a nice guy, and before becoming a manager, everybody liked him. What we concluded was that to be successful in any sort of management or executive position, you had to have the capacity to be an asshole when necessary – you will always encounter situations where one side or another is dissatisfied with your decision, and you have to be willing to piss people off. Our buddy simply had no asshole side to his personality. When an asshole acts like an asshole, people say, “What a strong leader”. When a nice guy acts like an asshole, people say, “What an asshole”.* Trump is a natural asshole.

*This dictum does not apply to Colitis. He is neither a nice guy or a strong leader – just an asshole.

I was for Pat in ’92. Failing that, I preferred Perot, who I believe would have been much better than either of the other choices. The uniparty used the same tactics against Perot that they later used against Trump – trying to squelch what he said, and going straight to defamation, character assassination and dirty tricks. It worked with Perot, because he was not the narcissistic sonofabitch that Trump is, so he tried to explain himself (which is always the wrong thing to do), plus 3rd parties don’t really stand a chance in the American system.
Gingrich always talked a good game, but the Contract With America congress that came in in ’94 almost immediately turned around and approved a big-time pork barrel budget. The Neo-Cons were always obviously jewish opportunists whose goal was to get US foreign policy focused entirely on the aggrandizement of Israel and figured the Republican party, with it’s preponderant Evangelical faction was the most likely avenue. Around about 1996, I read “Lost Rights” by James Bovard, which documented what had been apparent for a while – that America was continuously receding from being a free country. I didn’t get too excited about the 2000 election contretemps, because as near as I could tell, both guys were going to do about the same thing. After 9-11 (or more likely, before 9-11), both parties abdicated completely to the deep state. With two exceptions, modern US politics is essentially looting the silverware from the Titanic, with the only differences between parties being how the loot is distributed. One exception was Obama – he was of course a tool of the deep state crime syndicate, but he also derived personal satisfaction from destroying the country. The other exception is Trump. He certainly is not lacking for faults, but he is the only president in a long time who has any regard for the America he grew up in.
BTW – speaking of talking a good game, the whole modern paradigm of offshoring manufacturing jobs, importing foreigners for service jobs, and financing the welfare state through debt started with Reagan. Maybe he just had no choice – they stuck the ultimate deepstater George H.W. in there to keep an eye on him, and took ruthless advantage of his impending senility.

Pat was probably the last chance for historic America, but prophets are seldom honored in their own time and country.

When guys like Vox Day refer to everything being fake and gay, they’re probably closer to the truth than they know.

“I’m more likely to get hit head-on by some pot smoker or phone addict on the road.”

Or maybe not. An amusing episode from the coming AIpocalypse:

https://www.fox4news.com/news/waymo-standoff-san-francisco-goes-viral

A trio of driverless Waymo cars involved in what’s being described as a “standoff” created a scene in San Francisco.
…
Waymo officials said that while making a multi-point turn on a dead-end street, two driverless cars made “minor contact at low speed.”
…
A third Waymo, traveling downhill, is unable to get through.
Then a man comes out of his garage, dubbing the white cars stuck in the middle of the street as a “Waymo standoff.”
“I’m just trying to get out of here,” the man said

Don’t worry. However much they’re overpaying the crews, they’re making it up on maintenance.

https://simpleflying.com/us-airlines-central-america-maintenance-retrofits/

Why US Airlines Send Their Aircraft To Central America For Maintenance & Retrofits
A new trend has emerged in the 21st century of outsourcing maintenance work to foreign countries.
This new tactic allows the airline to save significant money on labor costs and perform the work during downtime.
…
The union also gave examples of how these foreign companies operate to a lower standard, such as:

Lack of drug and alcohol testing for employees.
A lack of security and background checks for individuals working on aircraft.
The absence of unannounced facility inspections by the FAA.
Relaxed requirements for certification qualifications.

I have it on good authority that the refs were in the bag for Rodney.

Hey – just be glad that was a cow’s eyeball you found in your taco.

https://letterboxd.com/film/el-pozolero/
“Man with a talent for making the bodies disappear finds a niche in a drug cartel.”

Yes, it was ripped from the headlines.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/one-man-dissolved-dozens-of-bodies-and-dumped-them-in-this-mass-grave-in-mexico/#:~:text=Leer%20en%20Espa%C3%B1ol.,and%20being%20convicted%20of%20crimes.

Eight years have passed since the day Mexican authorities detained a man named Santiago Meza López. At that time, President Felipe Calderón’s administration began referring to Meza as El Pozolero (“The Stewmaker”), a reference to the fact that he was believed to have dissolved some 300 people in caustic soda.

What government policy changes made in the last 40 years are you blaming here?

The cumulative effect of leaving the immigration spigot open. In each of the past 40 (more like 60) years, a policy choice of continuing to wave in hordes of foreigners was made.

There are now more than 100mm people here that would not be here if different policy choices were made. These people compete mostly at the working and in some cases middle class level for jobs. They drive on freeways and interstates that were not designed for 350mm people. They want access to universities which they and their kin did nothing to build. They expect social security and other retirement benefits. Many live in arid regions and consume scarce water.

Whenever immigration is debated we hear endlessly how they wanted better lives for them and their offspring. We never hear what the people who were already here were supposed get out of it. Well now we see – their country has been made worse on purpose.

Do realize that increasing inequality of wealth is what you expect in a stable libertarian society

There is nothing “stable” about continuing to add foreigners – many of which are totally unassimilable such as the Somali garbage – to a country that is mostly full. The frontier closed over 120 years ago. We fought and won our part of WW2 with a population less than half of today’s (about 140mm as of 1945). The last thing we needed then and the last thing we need now is MORE FOREIGNERS.

I would never touch the spiced beef after a SF buddy told me he found a cow’s eyeball in his. He might have been making it up, but I didn’t want to take the chance.

Now you guys are just being xenophobic. People in California will pay good money for cow’s eyeballs.

AI Overview
“While specific San Diego taco stands serving literal “eyeball tacos” (tacos de ojos) aren’t prominently advertised, you’ll find them at authentic Tijuana-style spots known for cabeza (beef head meat), like Tacos El Gordo (often mentioned for excellent traditional options) or other hidden gems where they might offer these traditional offal tacos alongside other cuts like cheek, tongue, and tripe. Check places focusing on Tacos de Cabeza or Tacos de Surtido (assorted meats) in areas like Barrio Logan or near the border, as these traditional items are common in authentic Mexican cuisine but less so at mainstream spots.
Where to Look for Tacos de Cabeza (which might include eyes):
Tacos El Gordo: Famous for authentic Tijuana style, they’re a solid bet for traditional cabeza, though eyes aren’t guaranteed; it’s worth asking.”

Apparently, they’ve metastasized to Nevada.
https://tacoselgordobc.com/

Joe Biden and his inner circle were basically Replacement Level Democratic politicians: they weren’t very bright, but they also weren’t as crazy as many Democrats during the Great Awokening. That they badly flubbed immigration policy suggests that in 2021 virtually every elite Democrat, other than the handful of lower-ranking specialists who actually understood the realities of immigration, would have made similar mistakes for similar ideological/emotional reasons.

Flubbed, my scrawny White ass! Steve Sailer knows better. He’s not that dumb, and not only that, he was involved with VDare for 2 decades – did he not read anybody else’s articles?

It is NOT flubbing to make an app to let strange foreigners from all over the world make asylum claims on it from south of the border, Panama, China, Haiti, wherever, such that they are let into and around the country (through the TSA line onto airline flights) with a piece of paper that says they are to appear at a hearing in a year.

No, Joe Biden wasn’t very bright. (Still isn’t) However, Mr. Sailer has himself believing that there are NO brighter people behind the scenes, that might for some reason want to flood the Western countries and destroy the White Middle Class. No, he’d be SHOCKED, SHOCKED. Round up the usual

Flubbed… get the fuck outta here!

IT companies advertise for jobs – US citizens need not apply:

‘No US Citizens’: Meet the IT Firms Discriminating Against Americans

https://freebeacon.com/america/no-us-citizens-meet-the-it-firms-discriminating-against-americans/

How is this even legal? Answer: It isn’t.

H1-B visas exist because our “elites” despise us and want to replace us. They should be abolished.

OK – I had been thinking that younger guys were totally screwed, but guys my age had a chance of kicking off before AI really got out of hand. After reading some of that substack, I’m revising my estimate. We’re all already totally screwed.

I did like how Chinese tiger moms are using AI to nag their kids during the brief periods when the moms themselves are unavailable to do it. I suppose this would be one of those instances where AI really is enhancing human capability.

My money says that the technological advances of AI, just like the technological advances that enabled every other aspect of the modern Internet (digital communication, semiconductor memory, fast graphics) will be driven by the same applications that have been driving the whole Information Age so far : games and porn.

You got a LOL from Colitis – good work.

Of course, we might just be unduly pessimistic about the future. Even as we speak, brilliant young tech-savvy innovators are developing the killer apps for AI that will allow the USA to maintain it’s technological superiority and economic leadership.

https://www.oann.com/newsroom/fbi-new-kidnapping-scam-employs-ai-altered-images-to-pressure-victims-into-paying-criminals/

The FBI issued a public service announcement (PSA) warning about a new variation of “virtual kidnapping” scams where criminals use artificial intelligence (AI) to alter publicly available photos, often from social media, as fake “proof-of-life” evidence to extort ransoms from victims.

In these schemes, scammers contact victims via text, claim to have abducted a loved one, demand immediate payment, often in cryptocurrency or gift cards, and send manipulated images or videos showing the supposed hostage in distress — sometimes with features like “timed messaging.”

I would note that I do not consider this all that much more criminal than say, Open AI’s business model.

If you’re replying to my comment above, yes I agree – the UK is our most likely model. A (relatively) slow slide into insignificance, penury and anarcho-tyranny. At any given moment, nobody will really notice any abrupt collapse, but future historians will clearly see the deterioration.

“then you need to take into account that they’re buying about half as many gallons now as they did then” ..per mile. A lot has changed was my point. You can’t just cherry pick one metric if you want to examine total cost to the household. Half as many gallons. driving x times more miles (by design) and paying

Yeah, after a little more thought, I agree.

My older brother, who worked as a mechanic in his younger days, always said “motor mounts”. He gave me alot of crap about inadequate flashlight handling and other stuff, but since he was a)helping me get my beater shitheap running and b)alot bigger than me and of a somewhat ornery disposition, I usually let it slide.

I liked those old Chrysler Slant-6s – cheap to maintain, easy to work on, but even with all that cast iron you had to be careful. I think all inline-6 engines were prone to blown head gaskets – there was just too much temperature difference between the front and the back. That being said, I had a 71 Dart with a torqueflite automatic, got it in ’76 or so, kept driving it to work until about ’93. Engine and transmission still going great guns, but it was getting impossible to find spare parts. I’d need a starter, I’d have to call some junkyard in Nebraska that specialized in Dodges. I got tired of crawling around wrecking yards and sold it to a Dodge fan. My wife insisted on a new car, which was the first new car I ever owned. A few years later, I sold my tach/dwell meter and timing light at a garage sale, cause the cars didn’t have anything you could touch anymore.

The greatest thing about the ’71 Dart was it predated the Emissions Era. Starting around ’74, Dodge and everybody else had to start doing all this Rube Goldberg emissions control. They didn’t have computers then, so the mid-’70s cars were just these nightmare rats nests of vacuum lines. You could get them to start cold, or you could get them to idle smoothly when warm, but you couldn’t do both. My mom had a ’74 Ford that was constantly stalling. She would call my brother or me to try to fix it, but we never could figure out what the hell the problem was. Luckily, it was parked on the street on a Saturday morning, and a couple of guys coming back from a night I wish I’d been at apparently saw two parked cars, flipped a coin and aimed for the real one instead of the imaginary one. I never did get the chance to thank them. They were in a pickup truck, so if one of them was you Currdog, thanks.

Yeah, it was aluminum. I was pretty careful about back flushing the coolant system, putting on new hoses/thermostat/etc. I only ran it up to 90 on rare occasions, such as when I was driving somewhere on a road on a day that ended in the letter “y”.

I didn’t really mean to get into it that deep. All I was getting at was that Grok chose to use “cost per gallon as a fraction of average family income” as one of the comparison parameters between the ’60s and today. If you’re going to use that to determine how much of a family’s income is spent on gas, then you need to take into account that they’re buying about half as many gallons now as they did then (on average – the whole SUV exemption regime sort of blows “average fleet mpg” to hell).

Really, the whole Grok excerpt was sort of meaningless and confusing as to what it was trying to prove (even without contradicting itself from one paragraph to the next). I for one welcome our new AI overlords and look forward with anticipation to the day when humans are completely eliminated from all technical, managerial and government systems. God, are you young guys fu#ked.

Also, why do we let the Royal Navy dock in southern California?

To make it a little easier for the Chinese to spy on them?
https://news.usni.org/2025/08/21/u-s-navy-sailor-faces-life-in-prison-for-selling-secrets-to-china

Actually, the funnest car I ever owned was a ’62 Buick Special, which I picked from my neighbor after his 85 yr old dad tried to park it on the front porch a couple of times. Buick meant it to be a compact V-6, but that one year they made a pony V-8 (maybe a 215 or something like that) with a Rochester 4-barrel carb. The car was kind of a beater from his misadventures with off-roading, and it took a while to go from 0-60. But when those secondary barrels kicked in, it went from 60 to 90 in about a quarter second, shaking like a mother. I never had to change the oil, because it went through so much, I just kept pouring in that green sludge (Ray Lube?) they used to sell at Thrifty Drugs for 19 cents a quart or something like that. The other thing I liked about it was that little window they used to put on the distributor cap, so you could adjust the dwell angle with the engine running. It’s been a long time since I owned a car on which you could adjust anything at all – modern cars, I’m not sure I could even adjust the radio channel (if it even has one).

Alternatively, the relative burden (gas price as % of income) is ~11% higher today (0.00554% vs. 0.00498% of annual income per gallon).

Doesn’t Grok have that backwards? The fraction of of annual income per gallon is lower today (0.00498%) than in the 1960s (0.00554%).

Also, I think you need to account for the fact that on average, 2025 gas vehicles get about twice the mpg of 1965 vehicles, so you’re using about half as much gas now for the same distance.

The MSN article is really a WaPo article, which is really just an abbreviation of a Substack post:
https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie
by portfolio-manager-with-a-bad-conscience Michael W. Green.

The MSN/WaPo summary focused on the matter of the Federal Poverty Line being 3× the 1963 minimum food cost adjusted for inflation, which obviously depends a lot on how well the inflation adjustment has been going. Green himself seems to get confused about this in the part you quote, apparently believing that today’s Poverty Line is calculated from today’s food prices rather than from the arbitrary marker × the inflation adjustment.

While I agree with Mr. Green and the ShadowStats guy that “hedonics” is BS and the inflation calculation has been nerfed, the real problem Green ‘discovers’ is the “Valley of Death” where lowest incomes are government-subsidized while medium incomes are system-penalized, meaning that below upper-middle class, you’re probably better off just checking out of the formal economy and soaking up as much welfare as possible.

But he’s hardly the first one to make this observation.

For instance here was ZeroHedge fifteen years ago:

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/entitlement-america-head-household-making-minimum-wage-has-more-disposable-income-family-mak

It’s in the ZH archives now, so I’ll reproduce it below the MORE tag, but it’s also at internet archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20110108053618/http://www.zerohedge.com/article/entitlement-america-head-household-making-minimum-wage-has-more-disposable-income-family-mak

It’s the All-California City. They get the rainy foggy San Francisco winters, the hotter than the bowels of Hell central valley summers, and the Oakland crime rate all year round. Topped off with the delightful ambience of the millions of tons of bulk fertilizer that goes to China through the port there.

The unfathomable part is when the mayor says “Stockton is better than this”. She may be the mayor, but I don’t think she’s ever been to Stockton.

For dishonestly listing ingredients, or for getting caught and blowing the country’s cover?

In which category would you place psychiatrists?

I expect there is a range.

Which part of the range exceeds the ~0% success rate that characterizes the field of psychology?

OK, you don’t need a substation for 110kV, if you have the London Subway or an Overhead Electric Railroad handy.

This one’s about beat to death, but one more time:

Wabtec is a little stingy with details, so here’s the specs for the Chinese knockoff equivalent:
https://dekonpower.com/pantograph-charging-station-china-manufacture/

You will notice that the input power form is 400V AC, just like all heavy industrial power in the US (US is 480VAC). Wabtec does the same thing for their chargers. At some point, the charger requires utilities voltage – you cannot hook the lithium battery charger up to 25kV, 110kV or anything higher than 480V. Wabtec shows a spec on their panto charger called “rated voltage”, which is almost certainly the maximum input voltage the charger can accept. The number shown is 750vdc. If you full-wave rectify 480V 3 phase, you will get nominally about 650V. If the line is at it’s maximum level (15% higher), then you’re right at 750V. So if you are charging at 4.1MW, your service must accomodate 4.1MW/480V=8540A.

OK, I’m done.

https://dekonpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/e5beaee4bfa1e59bbee78987_20220516134417.png

What Currdog said, plus the following:
-Yes, if your stationary pantograph is at the city’s central electric bus station, you have access to very high voltage AC, at considerable expense. Elsewhere, not so much. Unless you want to invest in your own substation.
-The Wabtec pantograph charger (or any other electrical equipment) cannot take 110KV input, so those transformers have a big step down ratio in order to get to utilities level power. You moved the copper from the power lines to the transformer.
-Those transformers are filled with a liquid dielectric which is some of the nastiest stuff on earth. Years ago, I worked with guys who made high voltage transformers. They all had this Parkinson’s-like twitch and they were showing Alzheimer’s -like symptoms in their 40’s. For that matter, lithium mining is a pretty nasty operation too.
-Using Currdog’s example, it’s about a 700 mile train trip from Albuquerque to LA. With one Wabtec locomotive, you have to stop every 120 miles to charge for 2 hours. The Diesel can go nonstop. You need 6 battery powered locomotives to compete with one Diesel. What’s the point?

“Probably all were schizophrenic and so benefitted from the Left’s campaign to normalize mental illness.”

Knowing what we know – can we even place negroes into the same framework of what we call “mental illness” as whites? I mean, what makes a white person schizophrenic may not be applicable to a negro at all.

So I’m not sure we can call this behavior by negroes schizophrenic – we don’t cite schizophrenia when a pit bull mauls a child. We just recognize a life form that while often amicable, can violently lash out at any moment. There’s even a pattern: Pit bulls typically attack small children, and negroes attack women. So both attackers, consciously or not, pick a safe target that it can easily overpower.

So where do the pantograph-style chargers get their power? If you are talking about replacing diesels at an existing facility, that power is coming right from whatever AC is available at that facility. Heavy industry in the US typically has 480V AC, some areas might have 600V AC.

The 25,000V pantographs are what sit on top of electric trains and ride along high voltage lines. They have nothing to do with charging batteries. Wabtec and everybody else who charges lithium batteries takes AC from the grid, and with a bunch of electronics converts it into a higher voltage DC (in Wabtecs case for the battery powered trains, to 1500V). The pantograph is just the interface to what is being charged. Given that utilities are finicky about power factor (AC-DC converters for battery charging have unacceptable power factors unless you correct it, which requires active circuitry), and lithium based batteries are finicky about how you charge them (unless you’re trying to burn down your rail yard), this may be around a 95% efficient process. At 4.1MW of charging power for 2 hours, you are losing 400kW-h of energy, which is enough to power your house for a couple of weeks. Anyway, unless you decide to include a dedicated substation along with your battery-powered train, you are stuck with whatever AC you’ve got, and you’re going to need some big copper cables to supply the input power to your battery chargers.

Although I guess they could take some of the diesel locomotives they’re replacing and convert them to diesel generators to power the battery chargers to charge the locomotive batteries.

Correct. Wabtech battery-powered locomotives are targeted for certain specific applications, particularly short switcher routes and short routes with a significant downhill grade (the regenerative braking is used to charge the batteries). The fundamental problem with heavy haul routes is this:
Wabtech has a 7MW-h battery. Heavy haul locomotives typically operate at about 4500hp, which is about 3.375MW. All things being equal, you’ve got about 2 hours before you have to recharge your battery. Whereas a typical Diesel locomotive goes about 24 hrs on a full tank.

The Railway Age article linked gives some examples. As of the article publication (Jan. 2025), there were no Wabtech systems operating in line haul applications without either Diesel locomotives in conjunction or the addition of a battery tender (basically, a freight car packed to the gills with extra batteries) to the train. From the article:

CRRC’s Dalian plant in China produced a six-axle, 1,000 mm (narrow) gauge battery locomotive for Thailand. Following testing, Thailand’s Energy Absolute Public Company Limited (EA) built its own locomotive similar to the Chinese one, calling it the MINE. After a full battery charge, the 4,100-kWH locomotive can operate 200 km (125 miles) while pulling a 1,000-ton passenger train at a speed of 100 kph (62 mph).

If a 1,000-ton passenger train needs to travel 300 km (186 miles) or more, a battery tender must be attached to it, or the locomotive must be recharged along the route. Such charging requires 60 minutes, but a technology developed in Thailand can be used to replace a discharged battery with a fully pre-charged battery. According to Thai experts, such a replacement can be done in 10 minutes.

So they can go 125 miles at 62 mph, or about 2 hours, consistent with the amount of available energy storage in the battery. It doesn’t say how the Thai’s replace a battery in 10 minutes – my guess is they just pull the locomotive with the spent battery off on a siding, and hitch a fresh one up to the train. BTW – if you decide to recharge in an hour, that’s 4.1MW you need off 480V mains (standard industrial power), or about 8500 Amps, which is roughly 200 houses running their central AC full blast. If you hear of an application where they are using this approach, buy up as many Rio Tinto shares as you can.

https://www.wabteccorp.com/FLXdrive-Battery-Electric-Locomotive?inline
https://www.railwayage.com/mechanical/locomotives/battery-locomotives-debate-continues/

I find this kind of thing fascinating. Robert Trivers, a white, very liberal evolutionary biologist who was a member of the Black Panther Party(!) writes an email to Jeffrey Epstein in which it is obvious Trivers knows race is real and that it matters. He writes to Epstein about his time in Jamica:

on the downside, Jamaica is increasingly dangerous, murder rate climbing once again, about 6th highest in
and i encounter a lot of racism, especially from young thugs—not so much hostility as disrespect—they regard me as an easy target—that old white man nah know nothing, we can rob him or do as we please
yesterday morning at 7am very hostile encounter at an ATM machine, no overt attempt to rob me or i would have shot him dead, just cursing me and my mother out because he had to wait an extra minute or two while i did my transaction—all my Jamaican male friends agree that he would not have acted that way toward a dark-skinned man
makes me reluctant so spend so much time here or to continue to invest in my property

He remains liberal and very anti-Trump. It just goes to show, knowing the truth doesn’t mean you are loyal to your own people.

https://epsteinify.com/api/documents/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031734/image

It’s a riot that so many believe that food labeling has much to do with what’s in the package.

I sold packaging and labels to the food industry for 30 years.

My customer would develop a product, submit the packaging design (with the ingredients and nutrition facts panel) to the USDA for approval, and move forward when the OK came down. They would then order the labeling from me in quantities that made budgetary sense. The salient point is that they ordered labels for multiple production runs; a product that had a 100K monthly output would call for a 600K order with six deliveries.

Between the first and second production runs, my customer’s purchasing department may have found some better (cheaper or more available) ingredients. They’d apply for a waiver from their USDA rep, which was pretty much automatic, so the old ingredient would be replaced by the new. The waiver allows them to use the old label. Rinse and repeat through the lifespan of the label order, and you have a product with ingredients that the label tells you nothing about.

The joke in the industry was to call the nutrition facts panel the “Nuts Box”, because you had to be nuts to believe it!

In the US, electoral responsibility is almost entirely a State matter, usually centered on the office of Secretary of State. Thus we have odd coincidences like red states requiring voter ID while blue states do not or even forbid ID examination.

Sometimes. it’s even more feudal than that. In the paper I linked to in #792, Mulroy cites a couple of instances in which late mail-in vote counting practices were non-uniform across a state (in the 2020 election). Voter coalition groups brought lawsuits on the grounds of unequal representation, which the courts agreed had merit and standing but refused to hear on the grounds that they were suing the wrong parties. The suits were directed against the Secretary of State, whereas the courts stated that they should have sued the local County election officials of the districts in question. TPTB practice Defense in Depth.

Also lawyers, the Trump legal challenges were inept. Which is what happens when you hire a bunch of lawyers of dubious ability after the election and expect them to put together convincing arguments on very short notice.

There’s a difference between not doing things and doing them ineptly. For one thing, after the election, Trump was pretty strapped for legal representation because anybody he hired to represent him got prosecuted or threatened with disbarment. But before the election, there were quite a few lawsuits brought by local Republican organizations. Most of these were dismissed either on lack of standing or on dubious issues of timing – sue too early and the courts say the harm is purely hypothetical, sue too late and the courts say yeah, you’re right but it’s too late to do anything about it now. Probably the most interesting case in this regard is Bognet (p.18 in the link below). The Pennsylvania Supreme Court changed voting rules unilaterally without consulting the legislature. A Republican candidate brought suit, and was denied on the basis of lacking standing to sue. Prior to this, it was essentially automatic that a candidate had standing to challenge potentially illegal election practices.
And of course, after the election, there were a whole bunch of legal challenges. Professor Mulroy, the author of the paper, states (either because he believes it or to cover his ass) that most of them were meritless, but that nevertheless, the merits were never determined because they were dismissed on standing. He goes on to say that in many of the cases, the dismissal on the basis of the plaintiffs lacking standing was a departure from standard legal practice and creates troubling legal precedents.

Whatever you think of Trump, it is pretty clear that the deep state threw rule of law into the gutter and trampled on it in an effort to get him.

https://insight.dickinsonlaw.psu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1127&context=dlr

A somewhat more plausible theory advanced by some lefties prior to the 2024 election was that Trump had deliberately made a bunch of silly claims about vote rigging in 2020 because he was planning massive rigging on his own behalf in 2024 and wanted to goad the Democrats into the position that not only had vote rigging not occurred in 2020 but that it was basically completely impossible today and only a sore loser would claim otherwise. Which would make it hard for the Democrats to object to Trump’s vote rigging.

After the 2020 election, Trump was apparently finished in politics and in life, subject to what amounted to a Bill of Attainder, and apparently headed to jail and bankruptcy. Anybody who tried to legally represent him was threatened with disbarment and imprisonment, and all the leading figures in his own party had disavowed him. You find it plausible that he was just gaming the 2024 election?

I can’t speak for the nephew. But when they took the dog to Petsmart to buy it one of those plastic doghouses, it bared its teeth and snarled. They thought it might have been due to a cat getting a bath in the grooming area nearby, but I’m pretty sure the dog just thought the price was so outrageous that they were going to compensate by cutting back on its milk bones.