Category: Current Events

CNN Just Keeps the Hits Coming – Jim Acosta On Deck

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You know, I’m not sure if the new owners of CNN are serious about reentering real journalism or if they just need to replace the current occupants of their clown car because of the really bad smell coming from it.  But whatever the reason, they’ve provided me with some of the happiest news moments I’ve had since the 2016 election video montage.  Just think of it; Fredo, Harwood, Stelter, Toobin.  And now Jim Acosta?  What’s next?  Will they tell Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper they have to butch it up a little to keep their jobs?

Well, whatever it is all I can say is I hope it spreads to MSNBC and results in Morning Shmoe and his blushing bride Lycra Spandexy getting the boot from the Morning Shmoe show.  Well done CNN, well done.  And here’s hoping that Gentleman Jim Acosta lands on his feet and enjoys his new gig as a dog walker or pool boy somewhere in the greater DC metropolitan area.

Jim Acosta Next, But Not Last, To Be Let Go From CNN, Report

Will America Get Another Chance?

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The post-WWII boom made two generations of Americans remarkably prosperous.  The generation who fought the war and their children lived in a time when America ran the world politically and economically.  The captains of industry were in a position to expand their businesses on a scale never before seen.  American companies dominated the global market in just about every major category of manufacturing.  That expansion employed two generations of Americans in a way that hadn’t been seen before.  Americans came to believe that each generation would be richer and happier than the one before.  Everyone would have a nice home.  Everyone’s kids would go to college.  Everyone would prosper.

Now the 1970s was the first wake-up call.  With an energy crisis and a financial crisis and the first big recession in twenty-five years Americans were worried and confused.  But along came Ronald Reagan and the wonders of deregulation and before you know it “Greed is good” and the good times are rolling again.

But what nobody noticed, or at least no one in the big cities noticed was that corporate America had decided that employing Americans was too expensive and unnecessary.  So slowly but surely, they moved their manufacturing operations off-shore.  They went to Mexico and the Philippines.  They went to Japan, South Korea, China, then Thailand, Vietnam and finally Myanmar.  Anywhere except here.  So, thirty years later the rust belt now looks like a third world nation.  Towns and cities are filled with houses that haven’t been painted in decades.  Main streets are full of abandoned and dilapidated commercial and industrial properties.  In fact, the towns are now empty of young people.  Only the old people are hanging on, living off their social security and the dregs of their savings.

In the big coastal cities, there were still white-collar jobs to be had running these nominally American corporations.  And tech companies provided high paying jobs for IT professionals.  But in the last ten years even these jobs are more and more being off-shored.  The hollowing out of the American work force is almost complete.  There are still jobs at hospitals and government agencies that are tasked with servicing the needs of the human flotsam and jetsam that are still clinging to life in the battered US economy.  There have to be jobs for Democrat voters after all.

So, the second generation after the WWII generation, the Millennials were the first generation to discover that they would be worse off than their parents.  And the next generation after that is acutely aware how bad things are out there.  None of that post war optimism exists.  But what lingers is the sense that Americans have been double crossed.  They’ve been sold out by corporate America but more correctly, they been sold out by the federal government that allowed these corporations to abandon their countrymen to joblessness and poverty.  They allowed the states that they supposedly represented to be picked clean of factories and warehouses and retail businesses.  They were paid off to ignore the dismantling of the industrial base of the United States of America.

Well, it’s already done.  No one will be going to jail for it.  George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton got their cut.  Obama did too.  And George W. Bush sent all those unemployed Midwesterners to Iraq to be blown up by maniacs with road-side IEDs.  That’s ancient history now.

But that sense of being double crossed still lingers among the dispossessed but still living victims.  I guess the only question is will there be any kind of attempt to save what’s left of America’s people?  Donald Trump did something.  He called out the outrageous trade deals that his predecessors inflicted on us.  He boosted energy production and even did something to try and get some jobs brought back here.  So of course, they unleashed COVID and the BLM riots to crash the economy.  Then Dementia Joe applied the coup de grâce.  He shut down the energy industries and unleashed hyperinflation.

Assume that Americans successfully pry the federal elective offices of President and Congress away from the Democrats in 2022 and 2024.  Will the Republicans follow the lead of Trump or his successor to try and force corporate America to reinvest in this country?  Sure, they’ll be busy trying to clean out the Deep State (if they’re interested in anything more than business as usual) but just as important is fixing the economy.  And the only way to do that is to return all those manufacturing jobs.  But will they do it?  If they don’t there won’t be a generation after the one growing up now.  That’s simple arithmetic.  No jobs, no families.

Someone Is Going to Handicap the Pollsters

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Real Clear Politics (RCP) provides an average of the various polls for all the elections going on.  The idea is that the average of a bunch of polls will be more accurate than any particular poll.  But if most of them are biased then that will hardly produce an accurate estimate.

But they’ve just announced that they are going to use this present election (and past ones) to assign correction factors for the various pollsters going forward.  In other words if the YouGov poll is always 3 points too high for the Democrat candidate then going forward RCP will apply a -3 point correction on their polls.

It’s actually a really good idea.  With a really large database of historical data I could see how a statistician could develop a model that provides a much better estimate for how people will vote.  I’m looking forward to this.  I suspect once these pollsters start getting rated on accuracy the worst offenders will start squealing like stuck pigs.  But over time it will boost the honest pollsters and who knows it might convince some of the worst offenders to mediate their lies.

Guest Contributor – NostraDumbass – 12OCT2022 – How We Got Here

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The pendulum “snapped” when the supreme court ruled it was okay to discriminate on race or sex as long as the only ones being discriminated against were caucasian males. They called it “Affirmative Action”. Jimmy Carter showed me how it works when I was enlisted in the army, where women and minorities were promoted at the first eligibility window and caucasian males were made to wait until the end of eligibility window. Not based on performance, simply based on sex or race.

We now have sexual preference and a whole host of people with mental issues clamoring for the same “Affirmative Action”.

The pendulum increased it’s freefall speed when ambulance chasers were allowed to advertise their prowess on television and radio. “Dan Newlin got me $650,00 dollars! Thank you, Dan”.

So now everything is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Right or wrong doesn’t matter, as long as the ones that get rich off this are the shysters.

What is slowing the pendulum freefall down a bit is that the “victims” are so numerous that they fight over the pecking order of who should be compensated rewarded first. Like children, they would rather no one get anything if they don’t get theirs first.

Crime is a Problem.  Who Knew!?

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I was reading an article that Salena Zito wrote on the out-of-control crime in Philadelphia.  And I came across this information,

“A new Morning Consult-Politico poll released late last week shows over three-quarters of voters said violent crime is a major problem in the United States, with only 17% of respondents calling crime a minor problem and only 2% saying it was not a problem at all.”

Well, who’da thunk it?  I can remember just a few weeks ago the polls showed that crime was a much lower priority than inflation but magically now it’s grown.  And yet the people living in the cities where crime has become a daily ordeal will still vote overwhelmingly for Democrats and especially progressives who release criminals almost as soon as they’re caught.  In fact Philadelphia recently re-elected the Soros-backed district attorney that has turned their criminal justice system into a revolving door.

Maybe the pollsters are starting to let the cat out of the bag.  Or maybe things just keep getting worse and even the progressives living in these cities are starting to panic.  Well, I’m beyond caring whether the urban dwellers will come to their senses.  But I am interested to see if reality will have any effect on the Mid-Terms.  Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania all have tight senate and state house races.  They also have big cities that are filled with rampant crime.  It stands to reason that if these races go to Democrats, even in conditions like we have today then there is no point at which the Republicans will be able to win them back.

And that’s an important thing to know.  Cause and effect are the names we give to what we use to analyze the world around us.  When someone pulls the trigger on a gun and someone falls bleeding to the ground with a hole in his chest, we see a cause-and-effect relationship.

If we see the country falling apart, we expect to see Americans vote against the people responsible for this failure.  If we don’t see that response then we have to assume that either the people like what’s happening or voting is, for whatever reason, no longer a measure of the people’s will.

And whereas there is a difference between these two distinct reasons, the result is still the same.  And it is that result that interests me.  As I’ve stated incessantly, I’m looking for clarity.  I’m looking for the answer to the question, “Can we vote our way out of this?”

And everything I see about this election seems to confirm that this is the perfect test case.  There are just so many things going wrong at once that there’s no conceivable way to paint this situation as a coin toss.  There can’t be a starker contrast between what the two sides stand for and what results each side produce.

From the same article I read,

“As one mother in Center City pointed out, President Joe Biden was in Philadelphia one month ago and never once mentioned the violence ripping her city apart. “Which is funny,” she said, “because he said he was giving a speech on the battle for the soul of the nation. Has he looked around at the soul of this city?”

Not once in Biden’s 3,000-word speech did he say the word “crime” or “homicide” or “gangs.” He did, however, identify what he said “was happening in our country today that is not normal” — MAGA Republicans, who he said “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic” and are “a threat to this country.”  Biden added that Republicans “do not believe in the rule of law.””

Joe Biden accusing Republicans of disbelief in the rule of law is so Orwellian that it almost makes me laugh.  That is until I remember that even if Joe Biden didn’t legitimately win the 2020 election, he still must have gotten close to 50% of the electorate voting for him anyway.  That means that almost half of Americans are either too stupid or too corrupt to reject a malevolent, cretinous liar like Joe Biden.  That is no laughing matter.

So, another data point.  Americans know that crime is out of control.  Will this influence the elections?  Stay tuned in less than four weeks for the answer.

Is There a Tipping Point?  What Do You Think?

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What do you think?  Will the pendulum swing back or has the string just snapped and we’re in freefall?  I was in the comments section the last few days being reminded that a lot of people have caught onto the game on the Left.  And I don’t deny that.  Tens of millions of Americans have opened their eyes to what is happening to this nation, to this world.  But can that make a difference?  Supposedly we have representative government.  We’ve even changed parties in all three branches of government when they’ve annoyed us enough.  But it still seems that the policies don’t change.

We voted Donald Trump into the White House in 2016 but Republican leaders in the House and Senate did everything they could do to block his policies on immigration and the border fence.  Why was that?  The executive branch of the government did everything humanly possible to blunt Trump’s agenda.  The agencies that he had direct control over triumphed over the duly elected President of the United States.  The news media and the social media platforms cover for the Democrats and suppress the truth at will.  Can these things be overcome?  What do you think?

Maybe I’ve gotten cynical or maybe it’s just sad experience but I sense that we’re not even close to how far the Left is willing and able to go.  I mean look at the “wag the dog” Biden is working on.  He’s talking about trading nukes with Putin.  Even the most hawkish Republican would have cooled down the rhetoric about pushing the Russians or the Chinese to nuclear war.  Biden almost seems to think it’s gaining him points.  If they’re willing to go to these lengths to keep people from thinking about the shambles they’ve made of this country, what aren’t they willing to say or do?

As I’ve said repeatedly, I think this mid-term election is a very good surrogate for how possible it will be to change the course we’re on.  We reached maximum crazy two years ago and have just been watching the fallout from it hollow out the world around us ever since.  If what’s going on now doesn’t arouse the fury of the populace against the people responsible when will it?  And even if the people do line up at the ballot boxes to vote them out what’s to stop the crooks from simply manufacturing whatever number of millions of votes needed to swing it?  Am I wrong to be thinking this way?

So that’s why I’m curious to see whether my pessimism is unusual or do most of you feel the same way.  Sure, I haven’t given up.  I’m hoping that November bounces these losers out of control of the Congress.  But I’m far from sure that it will happen.  The House looks like a lock to fall to the Republicans and the Senate looks like it will teeter over the edge back to them too.  But in any normal universe it should be a landslide.  Now it’s just a teeter-totter that could go either way.

Any of you who would like to help me take the pulse of the people who read this site choose an option in the poll or leave a comment or both.  I’m curious to hear which way it goes.

Update:

So the sense at this point in the poll is that the majority thinks the country will reject the Left.  But the lion’s share of those people think voting won’t be sufficient.  Well that’s both encouraging and daunting at the same time.  Please keep adding your opnions to the poll and the comments.  I’ll have to say I’m very glad I posted this one.  And I’m glad Whatfinger picked it up.  And thanks to everyone who got involved.

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Is There A Point At Which the American People Will Reject the Left?

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07OCT2022 – OCF Update

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Today was a day of hard labor.  Camera Girl cruelly tasked me with completing my various long neglected yard projects.  I was like some kind of medieval serf sweating in bondage and there was no reprieve until all was done.  But I will confess it’s a relief not to have that stuff gnawing at the back of my mind.  I even put up some signs on the road for the Dunwich Republicans.  Chances are Cthulhu will eat them the next time he’s walking down my road but hopefully the metal posts will give him gas.  When I finished there was barely time for a shower before dinner.

Dinner was splendiferous, only partly because I was starving.  It’s really impossible to overvalue a wife whose a good cook.  I think the Bible says something about worth her weight in rubies.  Well maybe that wasn’t specifically about cooking but I’m sure the Lord was throwing that into the equation too.  After all God invented woman as a helpmate for Adam and what’s more helpful to a tired working man than a good home-cooked meal?  Of course he could have made them a little less observant of our faults.  But all things considered I’ll take the package as it stands.

Afterward, I was too tired to write a post so I watched a Japanese ghost story (actually four stories) from 1965 called Kwaidan.  It’s very long and very weird.  Now I’m staring at the computer screen and thinking, “I got nothing.”  So I think I’ll retreat upstairs and get some shut eye before the weekend.  I’ve got no chores to do and no errands to perform so I can produce some clean copy tomorrow.

So tomorrow I’ll be tanned and rested and I’m sure that Biden or Kamala or some other blithering idiot will provide the fodder for a withering attack that I’ll frame in 500 words or more.  Have a good night.

How Does This Movie End?

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Every day something crazier than the day before appears in the news.  It’s like the name of that old tv show. “Can You Top This?”  If Biden starts emptying out the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, then OPEC deducts two million barrels a day of oil from the market.  Ukraine stages a kamikaze assault on the Russian lines and Putin annexes the Russian provinces of Ukraine.  Italy elects a right-wing woman as prime minister and the EU threatens to withhold funding due to too much democracy.  The Germans warn they are running out of fuel so the United States sabotages the Nord Stream pipelines.

It seems that the only strategy anyone can think of is doubling and redoubling every time they lose a bet.  It feels like we’re at the “go for broke” table at some insane global casino.  Going all the way back to 2001 more and more bizarre actions by the US government has been the rule.  A disconnect between reality and events has occurred.  It’s like that road runner cartoon scene where Wiley Coyote has run off a cliff but keeps going in a straight-line walking on thin air.  And somehow gravity doesn’t catch up with him until he looks down and sees nothing under his feet but thin air.  Then he drops like a stone.  It feels like the whole world is that coyote running on air, running on empty.

The only question is, have we looked down yet?  I get the idea that it is beginning to unravel.  The first sign is the oil prices.  Joe ran us off the cliff by announcing that he was going to wean us off petroleum.  He poured a trillion dollar into the green new deal.  No more gas cars, no more natural gas to heat our homes and run our businesses.  No more pipelines, no more federal leases for exploration.  The only thing he forgot was windmills and solar panels aren’t real.

And what do you know.  The price of oil doubled.  So, he panics and starts drawing down the strategic reserve.  But that’s a temporary fix.  And now the Saudis and the Russians and the Iranians smell blood in the water so they’re gonna start torturing us.  Winter comes and oil becomes scarce and expensive.  But what is he going to do?  What new friends will he turn to?  He doesn’t have any left.

The economy is very weak.  The recession that American officials want to claim won’t happen is already in full bloom in Europe.  And the green new deal is already riling up the farmers in Europe and anyone who has to pay a fuel bill or a food bill.  In the words of Howard Beale, “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.  …  We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy.”

So he’s driven us off a cliff and now he needs a nuclear war to distract us from being cold and hungry.  And who knows, maybe these sociopaths will do that too.  At this point I’ll be far from surprised.  I’ll be horrified but not surprised.  But for the sake of keeping this from becoming apocalyptic assume for a minute that the Russians don’t launch any nukes.  Then the way things are going, where does this all end up?  Assume that the Dems lose the House and the Senate.  What does Crazy Joe do for the next two years?  Does he tack to the middle?  Does he reverse his energy policy?  Or does he stay the course?

If he continues down this road, the recession is going to be very painful.  Millions of people will be out of work and that spells disaster for the presidential election in 2024.  He can arrest Donald Trump and anyone else he cares to.  But a recession in 2023 is a political disaster in 2024.  He’ll sink his party for sure if he lets that happen.  But that’s what the green new deal equals.  My guess is he stays the course.  Joe is just the front man for more important people.  And this is what they want to do.  This is what they will do!

So that brings me back to the original question.  How do this end?  The surprising answer is that they make this happen.  They crash the old system and keep the rest of us on life support while the Great Contraction whittles us down to nothing over time.

The only way it turns out otherwise is if someone steps forward and stops it.  Someone with the smarts and the stones to derail this plan and send us down an alternate path.  Is there such a man?  The answer to that question will tell you how this ends.  I’d guess it’s one chance in a hundred.

The ZMan Has a Bit to Say About Energy

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He runs through the ins and outs of how our whole world runs on cheap energy.  My favorite thought is, “The real reserve currency of the world is the BTU and the dollar is the physical manifestation of it. The war on Russia, like the war on Iran, is as much about protecting the control of energy as it is ideology. What we are seeing is that the countries with vast energy wealth are starting to figure out that they are better off as partners rather than as competitors.”

Ah, the British Thermal Unit.  Metric units be damned.

It’s about time Westerners figured out that windmills and solar panels mean poverty for them and their descendants and start figuring out where the energy source for the year 2200 is going to be.  The Germans are pretty smart maybe they’ll start taking those nuke plants out of mothballs after they freeze their own balls off this winter.

I have a hunch geothermal energy and hydrogen as a vehicle fuel is the way things will go but you never know.  Funny things can happen.  But windmills it won’t be.

Let’s go Brandon!

 

 

 

Of Ricotta Cheese and the Seventh Circle of Hell

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What to write about tonight?  Today was a day for chores.  One was my semi-annual trip to the dental hygienist.  Such a strange thing we have to do.  Twice a year someone has to torture you with dental tools while trying to make small talk with someone who can’t speak.  You know it’s an interesting thing.  Someone who’s good at that must be a gifted person.  My hygienist only sees me twice a year but somehow manages to continue the conversation from where it left off six months earlier.  Quite the trick.  Either she has an incredible memory or she takes notes.  Either way it’s kind of remarkable.  And it’s funny.  This time she told me that my teeth and gums looked better than usual.  For some reason this slight praise filled me with a sense of accomplishment.  I was now some kind of flossing ninja!

Anyway, when I got back home with my slightly whiter teeth and my “free” new toothbrush I read through the news articles and I even commented on the OPEC move to screw Joe Biden to the wall.  And that was fun.  But nothing struck me as the nucleus of a post.

So, I watched an old movie that I recently bought.  I got it used at a library sale.  I’d never consider buying it new because it’s not that good.  It’s “Constantine” with Keanu Reeves as a freelance exorcist who battles demons while smoking a lot of cigarettes.  It’s really a goofy concept.  Constantine has a gift that allows him to see demons.  But he is damned to Hell for a suicide attempt he sort of succeeded at when he was a boy.  He was “dead for two minutes.”  During those two minutes he experienced a lifetime of torment in Hell before the doctors revived him.  In this movie he is battling semi-demons, a renegade angel and lung cancer.  As I said it’s a goofy movie but every three years or so I seem to watch it again.  Another problem with the movie is it costars Shia LaBeouf.  Well, what can you do?  But it was a good way to stop thinking about Joe Biden for an hour or two.

Camera Girl put together a nice manicotti and meat ball dinner for us.  Now that’s comfort food.  So, I complemented her on this delicious meal and then she told me that the cost for the meal had doubled in a little over a month.  She said, for instance, that ricotta cheese went from $3.50 for a container to $7.00.  Being the frugal and practical shopper, this kind of thing strikes her as madness.  I started to explain to her how energy costs associated with the green new deal cascaded through the economy and caused multiple increases in the costs of food because of transportation, refrigeration, fertilizer and of course the ever-popular supply chain problems.  She gave me a look as if I had blamed it on the demons from the Constantine movie.  So, I stopped beating that drum and told her we’d find a way to save money by eliminating something “scholastic.”  That’s the word she uses for anything that she deems pseudo-intellectual.  Which covers anything that I am interested in that she is not.

But there was Joe Biden again.  Annoying my wife by sabotaging the economy.  This monster had doubled the price of ricotta cheese in a single month.  Looking back at the logic of the Constantine movie I decided that for this monstrous act Creepy Uncle Joe should be consigned to one of the worst circles of Hell, possibly the one where an arch-demon gets to clean the teeth of the damned with a pickaxe for all eternity and where they’ve completely run out of free toothbrushes.  I started to wonder if Joe’s fake teeth would be more or less sensitive to pain.  But then I remembered that arch-demons really know their stuff so he would be in for it either way.  So, I felt a little better.

You know all the little problems that come out of the sabotage of the economy seem trivial compared with crime waves, nuclear war and the sexual mutilation of children.  But those little things add up to something important.  The United States was called the land of opportunity because a good chunk of its citizens, the middle class, was prosperous.  They weren’t rich but they weren’t poor.  They couldn’t buy a new car every three years but they always could go out when they felt like it to a burger joint or a Chinese restaurant and enjoy a good meal to give everybody in the family a boost.  Not since the days of Jimmy Carter have we been worried about having enough money to pay for the groceries and the mortgage.  Now we do.

And so, if I was going to consign Joe Biden to Hell for his crimes, I wouldn’t leave out this charge.  Because along with everything else he’s done he’s killed the natural cheerfulness of the American people.  That’s a pretty monstrous thing.

Well, that’s what I’ve come up with.  It seems a bit random but life is a stew.