In the sphere of “performative stuff” the platinum $1 ____illion coin will never be beat.

Women – especially second wave feminists – are the epitome of “I’d rather rule over the ashes than not rule at all” thinking.

Actually, I take that back. All liberals are like that for all minorities with regards to political power.

They had Monopoly power for a while.

I remember 30-40 years ago my grandmother – back in the days when she was just “senior” and not actually “elderly” (she passed away four years ago) – would occasionally suffer from insomnia and instead of laying in bed all night, she would get up and go grocery shopping at 2:00 in the morning. She said it was great because the store was empty and she could take her time.

30-40 years ago they didn’t have the monopoly power you speak of, so all four of the grocery store chains in our small city were open 24 hours. Now there is Walmart and HEB and neither are open 24 hours.

I don’t remember the exact number but I got a bill for something like $18,000. Fortunately I had insurance. The insurance price was a much more reasonable number like $1,000 of which my share was something like $200.

That $18,000 is a meaningless number.

Your OOP cost might not have been $1,000 if you had paid cash, but it would have been FAR less than the $18,000 number.

The difference is, you have to tell them you are paying cash up front. Then, if you get a bill and you think it’s too high, you can just call them and literally haggle it down. As long as they know you are a cash customer up front, they will do that for you.

If you go in with insurance and something gets denied, they won’t haggle (at least at first) and they’ll tell you to take it up with your insurance provider.

That being said, it’s harder to pay cash and haggle when you are getting treated for an illness or acute condition in the hospital itself, because every little procedure and service just happens in the normal course of treatment and you can’t pick and choose. You also run into the problem that there are several billing entities with their hand in the kitty: the hospital, the “doctor’s association”, the anesthesiologist, etc. That also makes it hard to shop because you have no idea who is going to eventually send you a bill. Personally, that’s the one billing practice that hacks me off the most.

But where you can REALLY save money is if you are shopping for a specific procedure – an MRI, an elective surgery, lab work – and you call around and shop and tell them you are paying cash. They’ll pull out a “secret” price list when you tell them. In fact, shopping has gotten so widespread that many independent MRI and imaging shops now just put the cash price on their website so people will quit calling them.

BTW, you can easily haggle and pay cash at the dentist and optometrist, too.

Could presumably find himself a quality gal, have a family and a really nice life

The story I have heard is that he’s not really interested in that, ifykwim. At least the “gal” part.

I thought the exact same thing. I think he had a beer last night at the Black Hand happy hour with his boy Gavrilo Princip. Sacco and Vanzetti stopped by too.

Now that we are into the post-election, the establishment is still showing that it hasn’t learned anything.

To Trump supporters, all of the handwringing and worrying about some of Trump’s proposed cabinet nominations – in particular, Gaetz, Hegseth, and Gabbard – is a feature, not a bug.

Normal people don’t want to have to care about the president’s cabinet, but now they have to and they – the people who put Trump into office – are perfectly fine with anti-establishment and unorthodox choices who will try to dismantle the overwhelming leviathan that serves the government itself and not the people.

The establishment brought this upon themselves and they still have no clue that they did.

It was very popular during his last term to say, “This is how you got Trump.” I guess that phrase wasn’t as educational to some people as it probably should have been.

Someone made the insightful comment that because Kamala Harris has spent her entire political life running in the one-party state of leftist California, she has never developed any real campaign skills. She was always elevated to office by political patrons who ran her for completely safe and easy-win seats. She has never had to persuade anyone who wasn’t a left-wing Democrat to vote for her until this election, and she has not the slightest idea about how to win over someone who doesn’t share her mindset.

Why did the Democratic Party skip the 3am election fortification this time? Weird.

They didn’t skip it, they tried, just look at Wisconsin… but they just didn’t have enough. Republicans turned out in much larger numbers in early voting, and the Democrats didn’t have months and months of mail-in ballots to work with like they did when the country was locked down. The turnout was too great and when Pennsylvania was called for Trump there was no point in trying to cheat more in Michigan.

It is possible though, that Governor Shapiro made sure that Harris couldn’t win his state by dialing back the election fortification so that he can run for president in 2028.

In any case, remember, the plan for this election was lawfare to get Trump thrown off the ballot and/or convict him in court so that people wouldn’t vote for a convicted felon. Election fortification was a backup plan, and it wasn’t even the first backup plan.

Thank you, I have been looking for this chart.

Note that a Google search thus far doesn’t return this data. All that comes back are lamentations that there are no more bellwether counties because they were all wrong in 2020 so nothing to see here, I guess to hide the fact that all of a sudden this year they all got back to being right again.

There was a lot of suspicious bullshit in 2020 that had become clear from the past couple of days, but the fact that all but one of the traditional bellwethers were wrong and the difference was driven solely large quantities of overnight votes in big cities in swing states… that’s what’s called inductive reasoning and it was very persuasive to me that the election was stolen.

Not only that, but it appears that Milwaukee didn’t get the memo this year that the steal had been called off (because it wasn’t close enough otherwise) and Milwaukee has been dumping extra ballots into their returns and showing disproportionate turnout rates compared to the rest of the state and the rest of the country. There are dozens of precincts with turnout percentages over 90% and some over 100%, which is being blamed on same-day registration but just goes to show that same-day registration is a scam intended to help facilitate fraud.

Biden took office. Within days he killed that XL Pipeline deal with Canada. Gas went up almost immediately and kept going up for 1 1/2 -2 years.

Don’t disagree.

On a broader level, I remember Biden took office in January and issued a bunch of executive orders and basically repealed a lot of things and reversed many Trump policies for no other apparent reason than spite, regardless of the effect such action might have had.

“Keystone pipeline? Fuck that shit. Close it down.”

“Closed border? Fuck that shit. Open it up.”

“You don’t like masks? Too bad, Fuck that shit. Everyone has to wear a mask now.”

“Teaching kids about the Constitution? Fuck that racist shit. Close it down.”

“Reform the census? Fuck that racist shit. Close it down and go back to how it was.”

And many more. Day one and several days after.

It really felt like triumphalism and heel-grinding at the time that was less based on policy and more about sticking a finger in the eyes of the deplorables. The Keystone XL especially, since construction was well underway and the policy benefits were very tangible.

Everyone?

Everyone who can legally vote. Sloppy language on my part.

Doesn’t matter who you vote for, but just vote anyway.

You see that sentiment thrown around a lot every other fall, and it is pure bullshit. Pure bullshit spread by the party that benefits from votes being cast for ephemeral and vapid reasons.. so that party does its best to make its appeal as ephemeral and vapid as it can be.

Personally, I’d love for people to vote. I want everyone to vote. But I want them to vote for the right candidate for the right reason. And if they aren’t motivated enough to do that, they should stay the fuck home and shut the fuck up.

I hope Trump wins, but after 2020, I’m not betting on anything.

Trump will win(if only legal votes were counted) over 330 electoral college votes but will only receive barely 300 because of the “steal”. Democrats ability to cheat is not as far ahead of Republicans ability to forestall cheating but it is still ahead enough to make a difference.

America is on the precipice of disaster. I pray for this country every day.

Trump will win the election; Kamala will win the count.

Also, as long as we are on the election, here in Texas we are getting bombarded with ads for the senate race. Democrats hate Ted Cruz, and I totally understand why they do, even if I disagree with it, and they feel like they might be able to eke out a win against him. In fact, if this were not a presidential election and Trump weren’t on the ballot, I would suspect that Ted Cruz was going to lose. But Trump has coattails, especially in Texas. It will be close.

Nonetheless, I’ve been continually amazed at how effective the abortion platform has been for democrats since Roe was overturned. I’ve been especially amazed at how stupid democrat voters in Texas must be because this Collin Allred guy is running abortion ads 24×7 against ‘ol Ted and and they apparently must be effective because he keeps running them. The problem is, the Texas anti-abortion law that they keep railing against has nothing to do with Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz is a US Senator. Ted Cruz can’t vote for Texas state abortion laws. But they keep running these ads and insinuating that he has something to do with state law. So dumb, but apparently effective.

FWIW, I don’t think I could live in a swing state and stay sane. The ads from just this one race are driving me crazy, I couldn’t stand to have to hear the same dumb ads over and over for multiple races for months on end.

I told myself after 2022 that I wasn’t going to let myself get sucked in this year and believe the hype and get emotionally invested. To paraphrase Stalin, the democrats control the counting in the places where it matters.

Perhaps this is cynical, but I truly believe the dems will – eventually – be declared (declare themselves) the winners after a couple of weeks of blatant and inevitable “counting” in big cities in swing states that will only go in one direction. After which you are likely to see some rather more intense protests than January 6th scattered around the country, but those will eventually peter out since most republican voters are working class people who have jobs and can’t afford to devote themselves to rioting.

IF Trump’s publicly announced margins early enough on election night are large enough to preclude cheating and they have no choice but to concede that he won – and that’s a big ‘if’ but not entirely unlikely – then we are likely to see very destructive riots in several big cities and possibly quite a few lives lost. It won’t necessarily be from disappointed democrat voters, but from democrat professional brownshirts with orders from the highest levels of the deep state who don’t have jobs and don’t have anything better to do.

In my opinion, about the only thing that avoids a seriously tumultuous outcome would be if Trump manages to definitively win the popular vote and prevents the dems from using that talking point to justify their tantrum. In fact, I have a good friend who lives in a very blue state who is effectively a Trump supporter but who intends to vote for a write-in candidate to make some kind of (dumb) statement of principle. I have counseled him that even though his vote might not matter in the electoral college, it very much could matter when it comes to the popular vote, which should be a consideration for him this time around.

Not directly related to migrants, but definitely related to the priorities of the democrats… KJP really illustrated this situation the other day in her spat with Peter Doocy.

“Why can you give Lebanon money freely but say you need Congress’s help to spend more hurricane money?”

“We’ve spent a lot of hurricane money. We need to Congress to let us give more.”

And round and round until she bailed out and left early.

I really we wish he would have taken the one final step and said something like, “Why not send some of that Lebanon money to North Carolina instead?” or “Why are you sending money to Lebanon instead of North Carolina” instead of arguing about the process, but as near as I can tell he didn’t.

Nonetheless, he has been pretty good. If only the rest of the press in that room would ask similar questions instead of smugly sitting there acting like he’s some kind of deplorable mouthpiece because he actually practices journalism. Someone else could have chimed in and said, “And what about all the money for illegals?” but that didn’t happen either.

What do I think? I think you’re not going to Tampa.

But wait a week and things will be fine. They played a football game in Tallahassee last night and appeared to be none the worse for wear from Helene just 9 days before.

Florida is grand.

Sending your own kid to an urban public school is a sign that Mom and Dad are True Believers. It means you’re willing to sacrifice something you care about in the name of Making The World A Better Place.

Maybe I’m reading too much into that response during the debate, but I almost got the impression that he was surprised and shocked by his kid “witnessing” a shooting (even if it wasn’t entirely true, it sounds like).

That’s the real test of a true believer. Do they just say shit like, “Blacks aren’t really violent that’s all made up” and “Undocumented Mexicans are law-abiding”. When someone is actually surprised when they witness something real and that the whole thing isn’t some conspiracy spouted by racist badwhites, that’s how you can tell they really believe it.

And to be honest, Walz might be the first politician I’ve seen who passes that test. Most of the time woke politicians are just cynical and playing to the naive true belief of the AWFL’s and Julias and don’t believe that stuff at all and just say it because they are obligated to do so to get their team’s votes.

“That’s exactly what happened to George Zimmerman vs Trayvon Martin, where the prosecutor went out of her way to make Zimmerman look like he started the fight so she could prosecute him for killing a Holy Black. Luckily for him there was plenty of evidence to show otherwise that even if Zimmerman started the confrontation, as soon as Trayvon started bashing his head against the concrete, George’s deadly force was justified regardless of what happened previously.”

No evidence whatsoever was presented that Zimmerman started the fight. The prosecutor seemed to be hoping that the jury would think that Zimmerman had to prove that it was self defense beyond a reasonable doubt whereas the legal standard is the opposite, the prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable that it wasn’t self defense.

“First aggressor” talk is all well and good as long as deadly force isn’t involved but there usually is an “escalation exception” that basically moots the entire premise if someone gets killed. If that happens, then you start to look at who initiated the deadly force itself and the details of the initial conflict go out the window.

That’s exactly what happened to George Zimmerman vs Trayvon Martin, where the prosecutor went out of her way to make Zimmerman look like he started the fight so she could prosecute him for killing a Holy Black. Luckily for him there was plenty of evidence to show otherwise that even if Zimmerman started the confrontation, as soon as Trayvon started bashing his head against the concrete, George’s deadly force was justified regardless of what happened previously.

Also, I don’t think Minnesota has a “first aggressor” standard, so Exavir can’t even try to go that route. Based on the quoted information, there were several instances where Exavir made a mistake and spoiled his self-defense claims via traditional means, the most obvious being that he was able to get 10-15 yards away before he turned around and shot his gun. Unless the other guys were shooting at him as he walked away, that’s not self-defense.

Pulling out one’s gun while merely being assaulted is usually seen as escalation all its own and could be justification for the other guy to shoot you in self-defense if he thinks you’re about to shoot him.

I think the moral of the story is to just not hang around people named Exavir and JuVaughn to begin with.

Exavir would be a lot more sympathetic if he looked less like someone named Exavir and more like Carl from Family Matters.

Gambling and people taking advantage of each other has been around since man became sentient. Caveat emptor.

What makes the lottery particular despicable is that it’s the state taking advantage of the less fortunate and intelligent among us and calming a monopoly for itself on doing so.

As Gonzalo Lira said, the Covid vaccine was an IQ test.

Have never heard that before.

I’m not entirely in agreement with that characterization – there was a lot of coercion and propaganda happening during the immediate post-covid era and I am fortunate enough that my livelihood wasn’t at stake for my refusal to take it… but I do think that anyone gullible enough to to be bribed with a donut to take a rushed experimental injection probably isn’t (or wasn’t) among the best and brightest in our society to begin with.

I remember way back when like 2013 when sports commentarders weren’t permitted to mention the spread.

My kids hardly believe me when I told them it used to be this way when I was growing up. Sports gambling was something that was done in the shadows and nobody talked about it.

Heck, half the fun of watching Al Michaels call a football game was listening to him insinuate the gambling ramifications of a particular play:

“And that kick goes OVER the crossbar and the field goal is good…”

“The quarterback slides UNDER the tackle and into the end zone and a lot of fans are probably not happy right now that he was able to score like that…”

“Boy he really COVERED up that ball when he fell on it here in the waning seconds of the game…”

I did not know the part about the Covid vaccine. Not surprising.

There have been lots of “turbo cancer”deaths and diagnoses of relatively young people over the past couple of years (and 58, like Mutumbo was, is young). It’s absolutely a real phenomenon and it doesn’t take a particularly deep understanding of the immune system and its relationship with carcinogenesis to see how there could be a logical relationship to the mRNA shots.

Three years ago, I resisted a lot of intense pressure and guilting from family members and others to get one of those shots. And even despite having spent a week in the hospital with Covid and being as sick as I’ve ever been in my life, I still don’t regret that decision one bit today. It is something I am legitimately proud of myself for doing. I don’t think I could handle the anxiety of having a possible ticking time bomb in my body, whether cancer or aneurism or whatever.

Who will be number 3?

Dikembe Mutombo

Kind of an eclectic trio, for sure.

(Most pre ban “machine guns” are kept as investments these days.)

I know a guy who has a 19030’s era Tommy Gun in his safe for this exact reason. His late father procured it back about 50 years ago as a novelty and it has stayed hidden ever since.

My friend is understandably nervous to show it off and bring attention to it, but my guess is he could get a significant amount of money for it if he ever wanted to. He has never shot it but he’s done his best to keep it clean and in good condition.

I absolutely 100% agree with this and I’ve felt the same thing since it started. It seems a lot of the Ukraine support in this country is either: a.) Putin as a proxy-hate for Trump or b.) Virtue signaling towards the team blue “good guys” elite who are in charge and must be right about everything – even their own graft – since the deplorables don’t like them.

Total digression, I know, but Assassin #2 aside, I just don’t get Americans who are so into Ukraine.

The Ukraine War is a proxy in the leftoid NPC’s existential struggle against The Orange Man.

To these people, Putin is a Trump surrogate. Their minds have been destroyed by nearly ten years of Russia Russia Russia, Trump is a Russian agent, Putin owns Trump.

Remember what was at the center of the Trump impeachment proceedings? Ukraine, and The Perfect Phone Call.

These people have been carefully prepped for this for years and years, so when it finally kicked off, they were all ready to go.

Total digression, I know, but Assassin #2 aside, I just don’t get Americans who are so into Ukraine.

I mean, I absolutely understand the corrupt class trying to salvage their grift machine… but private American citizens who are anything beyond, “Awww, those poor Ukrainians got invaded… what time does the football game start?” are just foreign to me.

Why would you root against one side and try to even actively participate? Why would a sane US government actively antagonize a nuclear power and try to escalate a regional conflict into a global war and why are some Americans wishing for that to happen? You want to get nuked? You want World War III?

I mean, I think it’s too far to put a Ukranian flag and some mistranslated slavic obscenities on your car, but trying to recruit a private army to go fight for them? What the hell is wrong with people? More generally, why has the United States – its people and their government – completely lost any understanding of the term, “national interest”?

Agreed. An AK is intended to be fully automatic and used for “spray and pray” situations up close with the bad guys. Given how robust it is, that makes it a perfect weapon for an untrained goat herder up in the mountains of Afghanistan, but not the best choice for sniping through a hole in the fence at a target that’s 100-200 yards away.

In fact, “semi-automatic AK-47 with a scope” – which is what this probably was – is an abomination when you get down to it.

That would be like Vivek tearing Nutty Nimratta a new one live on teevee
(tbh that was hilarious 😁);
in this case everybody already knows she is literally a stupid whore –
her only hope is to goad Orange Man into ad hominem and then denounce him
as racist-sexist-ableist ™ .

Don’t disagree with you that him being a confident successful white guy is the source of the hate. But relatedly to some extent, I’ve always thought they hated him because all the wrong people like him so much and support him.

They hate all republicans for that very reason, but they really hate the ones who don’t apologize. Which, I guess is why Trump is so popular with the deplorables, because they know for sure he’s on their side, unlike Jeb! or Romney or Ryan.

On second thought, you’re probably more right than me.

The problem I have with the death penalty is that it is somewhat more likely to result in the execution of the likes of Travis McMichael rather than those more deserving.

I would like to see a lot more and prompter executions, I just don’t trust our government to do it. Maybe there’sd be a net benefity to not worrying about that, but I’m not entirely convinced.

Also promptness of the penalty. The prospect of finally getting sent to prison a year from now isn’t going to affect the behavior of your basic black of the criminal persuasion.

Agree 100%.

It’s the same reason why I laugh at people who say, “The data show that the death penalty isn’t a deterrent to criminals.”

No, the way the death penalty is applied is what isn’t a deterrent. Hang ’em high the next day and expand the list of capital offenses and lots of potential criminals will think twice.

(ps – This doesn’t mean I actually support the death penalty, I’m merely making an argument…)

The Daily Mail has a story about a black family that missed their cruise’s sailing because the family assumed their same-day (!) flight would be on time, and all the connections from the airport to the dock would work-out perfectly.

Let me guess the ending: the cruise ship was racist for leaving them behind and not waiting.

I used to regularly go to San Francisco for work. Haven’t been back in 4 or 5 years and really have no desire. Even 20 years ago it felt really sketchy to go outside at night, regardless of the neighborhood, and that just got worse over the succeeding years as more and more “creeps” were on the sidewalk and the homeless encampments proliferated. The cognitive dissonance – fancy restaurants and exclusive private clubs surrounded by homeless people and drugs and waste on the sidewalk – was palpable.

I can’t even imagine what it’s like now.

Florida sheriffs have made it a point to perforate violent offenders, so I guess serious law enforcement works.

That’s the thing. Violence is what most blacks understand so violence is what works to deter them.

“WE’RE NOT GOING BACK!”

Our local democrat party puts up “we’re not going back” signs every election year. I guess it resonates in some way with the local joggers that somehow their life station today is preferable to their life station in the past, therefore they should show their gratitude by coming out and voting for the same old crooks and grifters again, lest evil old whitey will throw them back in chains all over again.

Thing is, I personally – and I think most of my normie fellow citizens – kind of would like to go back to lower crime and higher real incomes and less government shenanigans.

It’s a real conundrum. You give the franchise to the blacks and other minorities – we have a lot of Indians and Chinese too – and they proceed to ruin everything in the name of “progress”.

Anyway, it seems a large enough share of Minnesotans are OK with being told all the political changes and social costs imposed by their diversity own goal are actually good for them. Truly a place with its collective head in the sand about what they have wrought.

If normal Minnesotans had any self-respect, they’d string up all of the Minneapolis church ladies and then tell the Somalis they have 48 hours to get out before the new warlord arrives.

Otherwise “their” seems better.

And that’s proper English when one is talking about a person of unknown sex. But as soon as the sex of the antecedent is known, then the pronoun becomes the gendered one. And it’s not that confusing because the subject of the initial sentence is almost always a singular non-gendered personal noun: “A coworker,” “THAT person,” “SOMEbody”.

But what is not proper English and can be very confusing is asking to be referred to using the plural pronoun and then out of “politeness” dropping that into every conversation about a singular person. That gets confusing quickly: “They threw the shot put really far.” “I got them a cup of coffee.” “They have no money in their bank account.”

The journalists who commit this type of malpractice are not serious people and should not be trusted to be honest if they don’t care about using proper English.

(and yes, I know language evolves and there is “no such thing” as “proper” English, but really there is…)

Let the employer know what pronouns you use so that they can
address you correctly.</blockquote

What do 3rd person pronouns have to do with addressing someone? The correct pronoun is “you”, while the “someone” you’re addressing uses I, me, myself. You cannot offend someone in direct communication because you don’t use 3rd person pronouns in that case. They can only be offended by overhearing you talk to someone else about them. That’s why they have to be so hyper vigilant about taking offense. It’s not like a William who goes by Bill, but his boss says “Good Morning, Willy” everyday.

I think if these people really are serious about this then they should abandon “I, me, myself” altogether and only use their preferred pronouns on themselves, essentially referring to themselves in the 3rd person.
Of course they are also welcome to use their own names, as in “Willy thinks Willy could use a cup of coffee.” “Could you show Willy the way to the bathroom?

False because conversations can have more than two participants. One frequently hears one’s own third person pronouns in workplaces/schools.

Good point. Let’s change the entire English language to avoid hurting mentally unwell people’s feelings. Refer back to my “asshole” example in the original post. You may not like it, but that’s my opinion… just like it’s my opinion that “Xe” is just a delusional dude and therefore is properly, “he”.

FWIW, English has a perfectly fine non-binary pronoun that is used quite frequently in everyday speech: “it”. We should use it more.

I wish normal people would stand up for the English language, but not enough of them paid attention in school, I guess.

These are third-person pronouns we keep arguing over. By definition, that means that you aren’t there when someone else is using them and talking about you. That’s like being an asshole and then telling other people they can’t call you “asshole” behind your back. Good luck with that. You might not like it, but you don’t get a vote in conversations you aren’t a part of.

The only pronouns you actually own are the first and second person ones, but I’ve hardly seen anyone try to stipulate those. Those are the actual ones where it could be “rude” not to use them in front of the snowflake making the demand.

Yes, of course this is a form of compelled speech, but it just seems even more illogical and dumb than usual because so many people want to play along with it because they don’t understand how language works. Languages require that two communicants share a vocabulary to make it mutually intelligible. You can’t go changing words just for one person because that one person thinks he’s special. That’s madness and ruins the whole point of a shared language. People have to agree on what the words for certain things are, including men and women and boys and girls.

And don’t even get me started on the fools who insist on referring to themselves singularly with a plural pronoun. That makes my head hurt even more and most professional “writers” who go along with that produce gibberish that is hard to follow and should be ashamed personally.

I’ll go back to yelling at my cloud now while I piss in the wind.

I just looked and Lopes himself is from Rhode Island. Kind of interesting because I had a friend in college from Rhode Island whose parents claimed to be “Portuguese” but they were also actually Cape Verdean too.

Brazilian is close enough in this instance.

I mean, Clinton above Reagan? Okay, the former’s budget looked better, but a huge factor difference is overlooked– Tip O’Neill is never mentioned, and Newt Gingrich only in passing.

Reg, you overlooked an even bigger factor yourself.

Clinton’s budget was able to be balanced by Gingrich because the internet revolution caused a stock market boom, and, to a lesser extent, an increase in corporate profits in the mid-90’s. Tax revenues were way up for a few years before spending caught up. it happened again 10 years later but with Bush’s wars and with Pelosi in charge after 2006 there was no surplus, especially after 2008.

So… now that I think about it, you may actually be right that Gingrich was the deciding factor.

Yawn. I can confidently say that her intelligence wasn’t the deciding factor in her election.

When all of this intrigue was going on a month ago, it was very clear that the only candidate they could replace Biden with would be Kamala. Rank and file blacks probably wouldn’t have cared on their own, but enough of the elites would have riled up the rank and file that the trickle of support Trump was getting would have turned into a wholesale defection from whatever non-black non-woman candidate the dems pulled out of their hat. Kamala was their only choice.

That said, I don’t think her authenticity with black voters is all that settled. There are plenty of videos out there of rank and file blacks who don’t like her and don’t think she is sufficiently black enough.

Kamala’s bigger problem is that she’s a terrible candidate and not all that mainstream (or original… she says and does whatever the bosses tell her to say and do). Most normal people who aren’t rabid democrat partisans don’t care for her. Trump can be very successful pointing that out and the Walz pick is just more ammunition in that direction.

Now that Trump has broken the seal and said the “not black” stuff out loud, he should never mention it again. The rank and file blacks can take it from here. It was a strategic utterance that was needed early in the campaign, but the cat ladies and the press hate it and will run it into the ground if he keeps bringing it up because it’s a great deflection for them to use. Now he should just shut up and talk about the “ECB” (economy, crime, border) topics where he has an advantage.

But I don’t know if he has the discipline to do that.

Farrage is a good enough politician that Reform will do much better in the next election and win many more seats.

Labor is going to wear out their welcome quickly, but from the looks of this, Labor will likely win a second election in a row just because the opposition isn’t unified and voters appear to be quite done with the Tories. So, inertia wins again.

Reform probably won’t capture a majority in the next election, but in the election after next, once (and if) Farrage is able unify conservative voters and set up Reform as the new alternative to Labor, whenever that next election will be – could be as long as 10 years from now – I suspect Farrage will have a very good chance of becoming Prime Minister if he is still around by then.

Trump lose in 2028

Talk about changing the rules….

The only thing Trump’s losing in 2028 is a golf game.

And then they let his handlers put him up for a debate to reveal that yeah he really is a demented empty suit, repeating his handler’s talking points–merely an egotistical front man who’s sold his soul to vile treasonous people.

Personally, I don’t think they put him up for the debate with the expectation that it was going to happen. They tried to make Trump an offer he couldn’t accept and then they could a.) squash the “Joe’s too far gone to debate” wisdom by pointing out he offered one, b.) continue to hide Biden, and c.) use it against Trump that he was scared or dishonest or whatever. But Trump accepted immediately and they were stuck having to go through with it when the post-verdict polls didn’t give them the “convicted felon” offramp.

Trump confirmed on Friday that he accepted right away without conditions and agreed to their rules because he knew what was going to happen and he could see the game they were trying to play. He turned it around on them and it worked. The trappers became the trapped. Trump knew that the worst thing for Biden would be to actually have to go through with a debate and come out of hiding and he jumped at the chance to make that happen.

But Biden’s people never intended for there to ever actually be a debate. It was just a ploy that horribly backfired in a big way.

There’s no way they replace him with anyone else but Harris. Anyone else will raise the ire of feminists and “smart” blacks who would (rightly) see abandoning Harris as a vote of no-confidence and they won’t let that happen. Identity politics uber alles. Competency and winning don’t matter.

Joe/Jill MIGHT be convinced to drop out, although at this point that die is cast too and the only way he’s not remembered as LBJ pt 2 would be to somehow win the election by hook or by crook, which could still be manipulated enough to make it happen. They are all in at this point trying to save whatever is left of his legacy.

But Harris isn’t dropping out, even if Joe does. She is less popular than Joe, but stuffed absentee ballots and manipulated electronic machines don’t care about popularity.

The only dem who can (fairly) beat Trump at this point is Michelle Obama, but a.) it has been repeated a lot since Friday that she doesn’t want to do it and b.) Barack Obama knows that if she doesn’t win, which is possible, she’s no more a “lock” than Hillary was after all, that would look poorly on him and tarnish his legacy and he is arrogant and narcissistic enough to want to avoid that, so my guess is that Michelle won’t run and risk that outcome.

They are stuck with Joe or Kamala and hoping it’s close enough in enough swing states that the fraud machine can do the trick one more time.

That’s not an argument for the electoral college; it’s an argument for California and other blue states to be allowed or even encouraged to secede.

If you feel that California and other blue states are full of colored people, LGBT alphabet soup people, and other folks who are not White American Christian, the logical solution is to not force them to stay in America where they could make trouble for you, but rather let them secede.

Imagine an America with radically fewer alphabet soup LGBT freaks, fewer Hispanics and Asians, fewer Jews, Muslims, Atheists, Hindoos, Buddhists, and Sikhs.

Imagine an America with more working class White Christians, that leans older and more male. That’s the America that you should want.

I got to vote on one of those machines one time back when I lived in Massachusetts right after college. It felt anachronistic, but like most things, it turns out that our forefathers were brighter and more practical than we are showing ourselves to be.

Most states require party observers be present during counting. Why some allowed themselves to be ejected on 2020 Election night is an unanswered question.

Because they were told it was being shut down for the night and they could go home and come back in the morning… then after they were gone the “counting” resumed.

Results are tallied in 24 hours, not over days

This is something I simply do not understand, how long drawn out counts are now a regular occurrence in many elections in blue and purple states and they always – ALWAYS – trend in one direction. If a republican candidate is ahead but “too close to call” on election night, he is guaranteed to eventually lose in the coming days. He had better win by a healthy margin on election night or he isn’t going to win at all. The Nevada senate race is the recent one I most remember from 2022.

How anyone in America, aside from the most partisan leftists, thinks this is acceptable and not indicative of anything untoward is a ginormous mystery.

Norm Coleman’s loss to Al Franken in 2008 wasn’t an aberration, it was a harbinger.

The basketball team is named after the casino where they play.

Why the casino itself is called “Mohegan Sun,” I cannot answer.

In 2020 Trump increased his vote total by over 11 million votes–racked up way more votes than any candidate had ever gotten in any previous election … but lost. Because Biden supposedly got 7 million more votes–16 million more than anyone had ever gotten previously.

This is it right here. I think there are a couple of exceptions from the 1800’s, but in the “modern” era, presidents who increase their vote totals the second time always get reelected. That Trump increased his vote total by more than 10% and still lost is really all anyone who is capable of critical thinking needs to know to know that he got cheated.

Hell, Biden got 17% more votes than Obama did in 2008 when the population barely grew by 10% over the same time period. Are we supposed to think there was more enthusiasm for Biden in 2020 than there was for Obama in 2008? With the rallies and the fainting and the irrational exuberance? And then Biden also got 24% more votes than Hillary did four years earlier? No f’ing way that happened legitimately. No f’ing way.

Were they all fraudulent votes? Probably not. But were they votes that would have happened without ballot harvesting and uncontrolled and unsupervised absentee voting? Absolutely not. It wasn’t an “election”. It was a rigged bid.

Combine those numbers with the way that the traditional “bellwether counties” absolutely fell apart in 2020 and it’s pretty clear that the 2020 election was a fraud even if none of it is “provable”. It was driven by democrat turnout games in the big blue cities in the swing states. The end.

Derb:

What will happen, in my opinion, is that the Ruling Class will rig the vote counts just as they did in 2020, and the Democratic Party’s candidate will win.

Derb is 100% right about this. I let myself get fooled again in 2022 after saying I wasn’t going to after what happened in 2020.

I most certainly am not going to get surprised again in 2024 unless it’s a pleasant surprise.

They will cheat and they will crack down on the deplorables even harder after they “win”.

That guy who tried to rob the taco restaurant in Texas, only to get shot dead by a diner, was engaged in one of those fake-robberies-for-citizenship schemes, I think.

I think you might be getting your stories crossed. Two separate stories with two equally dead idiots.

I live in Houston where that particular taqueria incident occurred and have not heard this particular explanation for it. I think it was just a run of the mill robbery where an idiot with a toy gun got shot.

https://www.khou.com/article/news/crime/grand-jury-no-charges-taqueria-shooter/285-6b117ced-e3c1-4ba9-a023-d6b371b5bb5e

But… there was indeed another fake robbery here back a few months that was this type of immigration scam where the perp “accidentally” got himself shot by a bystander who thought he was being a Good Samaritan.

https://abc13.com/robbery-victim-denies-crime-staged-to-get-visa-northwest-houston-akbar-jiwan-in/14628850/

Two perps getting killed by bystanders with guns in Houston. Lots of people are armed here and there are very liberal self-defense laws. It’s not smart to go around waving a gun in public in Texas. You’ll have much better luck in New York or Illinois or California if you are intent on doing that.

Feminine hysteria is running rampant in America and the world and is ruining everything.

What is happening today is the logical result of political decisions made decades ago to cater to the female vote – such as no fault divorce, welfare, access to abortion and birth control – that are now coming to fruition. Previously women needed a husband to survive and that husband kept them more or less under control and in check. But now husbands are no longer needed and women are free to let their crazy fly with no material consequences.

Back in the day papers had a women’s section. This was helpful. You might not have been interested in some Senate bill, or some turmoil in Egypt or news about GM or US Steel in the business section. But you knew that nothing in the women’s section mattered. Obvious analogy to “Sports”.

Now the women’s section has taken over the whole paper.

Again, the West’s immediate priority is to stop the immigration madness and destroy minoritarianism. The former the ugly child of the later.

But to save the West, we simply have to rein in this feminization of everything. Feminine silliness and lemming like compliance is the enabling agent for minoritarian destruction. For a society to survive it needs masculine seriousness, empirically ground rationality.

Brain fart. I meant John Eastman. My apologies.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20588/most-secure-election

Apparently, you can collect on a she-said, he-said from decades past–year uncertain!

Not only that, but the legislature will repeal the long-expired statute of limitations just so she can.

Related to the lawfare, there’s a corollary piece out today of a recent speech from John Huntsman about the election shenanigans in 2020 and all of the corruption around that and the way it was just waved off by the courts and the press and has been weaponized at those who protested. See also Tucker Carlson’s just released interview with Joe Rogan about how everyone in congress is scared of the intelligence agencies.

“Outrageous” isn’t a strong enough word for it. Something is going to eventually give in this country.

Is he also watching the Gorilla Channel on his phone?

The jerk store called, and they’re all out of YOU!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Comeback_(Seinfeld)

Classic episode… and that’s saying something.

The women of New York have voted to elect Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Kathy Hochul, Eric Adams, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, and Joe Biden.

You reap what you sew.

The best explanation I’ve heard for America’s contemporary African problem is that the Arabs, unlike the Americans, used to castrate their slaves. In contrast, we chose to breed them.

Looking longer than a glance is a sign of aggression. Averting your eyes is submissive behavior. Pick your poison – do you want to appear aggressive or submissive? I’ve lived and traveled in some very sketchy parts of the world that make NYC seem benign and I’ve always chosen to try to appear confident and alert and let those around me know that I am aware of them and my surroundings. That worked for me, or maybe I was just lucky.

I’ve always felt much more uneasy in San Francisco than New York. It’s hard to describe why.

New York tends to feel more gritty and rough, but at least seems more rational about it. But San Francisco has always just felt… Crazier and less predictable?

I’ll add to this comment that when the pundits started making noise in 2022 (and even 2018) about how abortion was such a huge election issue, I thought it was a non-sequitor.

“Abortion? Don’t they know Trump is actually pro-choice! Nobody’s talking about abortion! That’s dumb and there are more important issues to be worried about! Like immigration! And Afghanistan! and Inflation! Who said abortion was a big deal? That’s not on the ballot. Why are we talking about abortion? they must be really desperate if all they can come up with is abortion! The democrats are going to get smoked!”

Well, apparently half of the population is dumb enough to believe that rhetoric and rally behind it. Why the republicans can’t just let it go now is a mystery to me. It’s the only thing that rallies the democrat base right now and the republicans are one trick ponies who can’t stay away from it.

BTW, if you are going to be “racist,” you might want to go ahead and specify “East Asian,” not plain “Asian.” Most physicians of East Asian background in the U.S. are American-born and -trained and are generally competent (the lowest disciplinary rate of any racial group among physicians). But “Asian” these days also include Indian (South Asian) doctors who have swamped the U.S. medical system as “foreign medical graduates.” Some are competent or even very good, but there is a subset who are not.

My little corner of suburban Houston has been overrun over the past 10 years or so with “Asians” of all types. Chinese moving into the best school attendance zones and driving up real estate prices, Indians buying up McMansions and flooding the highways with aggressive drivers, incompetent (but obedient and cheap) Pakistani doctors in every hospital, Shia Muslims (I presume afghans and Iranians and other goat herders) all over the place in the stores with their dirty feet and sandals and women in headscarves…

And all I can think is, why do we want them here, who decided to invite them, and what do they add to our culture or our society aside from having a little bit of money to spend?

The republican own goal on this topic has been quite amazing to witness. They got what they wanted and then decided to provoke their opponents’ voting base with a bunch of dumb proposals.

I happen to personally agree with the consistency of the logic about IVF and rape and incest and the like, but most people don’t and pushing the issue now is just really really bad politics. Successful politics is about compromise. They didn’t learn anything from Roe.

Take the W and be satisfied for gods sake and go fight about something else now.

I think the Trayvon Martin case was more of a bellwether than the OJ case. The reason is that in the OJ trial the news media seemed to be neutral, while in the Trayvon Martin case they were attempting to manipulate what the public saw to form public opinion against Zimmerman.

Google current pictures of Denise Brown. She is slowly evolving into the unrecognizable generic plastic surgery lady.

Also, for that matter, Denise Richards, who also comes up in the same search.

Howard Stern was extremely funny 30 years ago. Was.

OJ was guilty as hell and the prosecution blew the case.

Maybe for any other jury, but that jury was bound and determined to acquit no matter what. The prosecution would have had to have gone perfectly and not given the jury any thread of doubt to hand onto and even then it probably wouldn’t have worked based on what the jury said later in interviews. The LA County jury pool was hopelessly biased in OJ’s favor.

I tend to remember that Garcetti the DA had a choice of filing the case in the Santa Monica court, where the murders technically actually happened, but he chose to file in Downtown LA because… he thought he had a better chance there? (Wikipedia also says the Santa Monica courthouse had been damaged in the Northridge earthquake)

Nonetheless, he chose poorly.

Back during the summer of 1995 during the heart of the trial, I came across a parody book titled, OJ’s Legal Pad, in reference to the pad he was shown writing on every day during the trial that became a bit of a cultural meme all its own at the time. What could he possibly be writing down?

The joke book was full of doodles and cockamamie legal ideas and supposed in-trial communications with his lawyers. Several poems about Nicole. Tongue in cheek threats to kill other people for minor slights. That kind of stuff. Brainstorming plans for a prison exercise video. Most of it was actually pretty funny and viciously ripped OJ as an intellectual celebrity lightweight along for the ride at his trial.

The thing that hit me at the time was how someone was able to fill 50 pages with that stuff. I was impressed then and still am now. In hindsight, I wonder how far from the truth that whole thing really was.

It looks like copies are still available on eBay.

For example: Represenative Shiela Jackson Lee just stated that the moon is a planet made up of “mostly” gases. She is a Texan also.

She also said the eclipse was due to the moon being “closer than it has ever been in the past 20 years” which, may or may not be true, but doesn’t really have anything to do with the timing of the eclipse, just the degree of totality.

And she also said that the students were about to be plunged into “complete darkness” and there weren’t any animals around but the “dogs will be barking”. Houston was at least 150 miles from the nearest total eclipse. It certainly got dim here, but it didn’t get dark.

I think the most entertaining part about Queen Sheila is how confident she is in her ignorance. She just says whatever pops into her head and acts like the expert.

Yep. The only pronouns that “belong” to you are the first and second person ones that include you as part of the conversation. That’s where the whole “be polite” justification is plausible, because you’re talking to the weirdo to his face

Third person pronouns are referring to an antecedent who is not part of the conversation so he doesn’t have a say because he is not there. Dictating those pronouns is literally trying to control the speech and thoughts of other people.

And the whole use of “they” to refer to a single person is just dumb.

They won’t arrest her. They’ll just ignore her and proceed to arrest anyone else who does the same thing and hurts tranny feelings.

All these “you go girl!” Rowling supporters are forgetting that these are leftists we’re talking about. They don’t care about being called out or being made to look foolish. All they care about is the power and stomping their boot on the face of humanity. If they were worried about looking foolish they wouldn’t come up with these kinds of policies to begin with.

In fact, ignoring Rowling probably makes it even better for them because the double standard increases the terror and the humiliation normal people feel, which is ultimately the goal in the first place.

I understand the urge to jump to nefarious conclusions – infrastructure, terrorism, drunk boating – but this one just seems like a regular run of the mill accident. They still happen and they are part of life. As mentioned elsewhere, the best part about this is that it happened in the middle of the night. Any other time of day, especially rush hour, and this would have been a much bigger tragedy.

I took all of that linear equations and calculus and advanced math over my Ivy League career and I hardly remember any of it and hardly use any of it today. But looking back, some of the most useful classes I also took during my academic career were all of the statistics courses. And I have long felt that basic statistics is woefully underemphasized and underexposed to most people. Statistical significance is a very useful concept that a great many people are completely ignorant of. I have been of the opinion for a while now that high school kids should be studying more basic statistics applications and less algebra and I’ve even counseled my own kids to take statistics as an elective before they ever got out of high school.

As John McClane would say, “Welcome to the party, pal.”

Statistics aren’t necessarily any easier than algebra.

This is only true about half of the time.

Do these people not understand why it is that two black parents always have a black kid? Do they seriously think it’s entirely made up and nothing more than a “societal construction”?

Obligatory Simpsons video:

Is that the right video? The driver in this video didn’t T-bone the car.

Watch the two women in the crosswalk. They literally disappear.

I’ve noticed lately a trend of crazy reckless freeway driving in little 4-cylinder front wheel drive cars (e.g. Ford Fiesta etc). Give a black any car at all and as long as it has four wheels and gas in it, he’s going to drive the hell out of it.

The problem here is a.) front wheel drive cars aren’t made to be driven that way and are harder to control at high speeds and acceleration, b.) driving like that will wear out the brakes and 12 inch tires and suspension and steering and get more dangerous more quickly, c.) any high speed accident at all in a little car like that is going to be fatal to the occupants, and d.) when they do fail on the freeway, they are usually taking someone else out with them.

Not to mention they are usually driving with one hand with their phone in the other.

That video is horrifying. Holy shit.

It’s clear that Gemini is programmed with a “on the one hand/on the other hand/ both guys have their pluses and minuses (3 bullet points each) so it’s impossible to say which one is worse” template.

Usually this works (e.g. compare FDR to Churchill) but if one guy is one of history’s great villains, it doesn’t and people take to their fainting couches (or pretend to – they are shocked, shocked).

It’s not just AI that makes these kind of errors. The answer that the Ivy presidents gave to Congress about whether calling for genocide is OK (“it depends on the circumstances”) could have come straight from Gemini. Maybe they did.

I’m still struggling with the response to “show me a white ______” with, “Sorry, I can’t show you anything hateful that would be hurtful to someone.” (I’m paraphrasing)

Besides the ludicrous idea that merely seeing a random picture is considered “hurtful”, the misuse of the word “hate” is also brought to mind. That word has completely lost all meaning these days.

At the moment, Europe is still white enough for people to know that Europe was historically white. But in a hundred years time, if we have a completely blended population, and if most people get their information from the internet then who’s to say they won’t be successful in completely erasing whites from history? The truth will exist in crumbling (and racist) books that no decent person reads.

I remember many years ago coming to the conclusion that the way things were going, anything ‘white’ would eventually be seen as immoral, down to the level of the nuclear family. Of course this was the kind of opinion which sounded crazy when I told people out loud. And yet, here we are, with google refusing to show images of white families for that very reason.

I believe there was an obscure dystopian racialist novel in which whites were forbidden to breed with other whites in order to create a non-racist future. This probably also would have sounded like a crazy right-wing fantasy when it was first suggested, but does it really seem so far fetched now?