Rant

Conversations with friends can be difficult. One of my friends is burdened by the inequity of the world.

Because he is conservative and a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, his issues with inequity are putting him in serious mental anguish.

What Has Been

You struck out, westward, when you found a place to your liking, you made it your own. This included clearing the land, building your home, cultivating your ground, hunting, and surviving.

If you were lucky, you might find an abandoned homestead to take over. You paid for that home with the sweat of your brow. Nothing was easy.

In other cases, you might be close enough to civilization that you could purchase your home. Be that the wood to build it, or the house itself. You could also buy a house from the previous homeowner.

As time went on, the areas around the towns became more built up. The houses within the towns became more valuable. People invested in their homes, making them still more valuable.

Still, it was almost always a buyer’s market.

With vast amounts of “free” land, land was cheap, if you didn’t want a big house, your house was cheap too.

When you start seeing more expensive homes, they were passed down from father to son, as was the land. The family’s wealth was tied up in their land.

It’s NOT Fair!

But that means that those who came first got it easy! They got it cheap! There’s nothing left of ME!

My grandparents bought their home in the early 1900s. If I recall correctly, they paid around $5k for it. According to the googler, the average house price in 1929 was $6k. In 1929, my grandfather was likely earning about $1700/year. So a house would cost about 4 years worth of labor.

My house cost about one year of labor, the year I bought it. My house is actually cheaper than my grandfathers house. And my house is huge in comparison.

My grandparents, with their three daughters, lived in a two bedroom, one-bath house. There was a living room and a dine in kitchen. There was a full, unfinished basement. My grandfather built the detached garage later. It had a massive porch that extended the entire width of the front.

Grandpa added a back porch that was closed in to make it 3.5 seasons. Oh, there was a big mudroom off the back entrance.

When we were looking at houses, our minimum requirement was two full baths, four bedrooms, large kitchen, dining room. What we ended up with was larger than that. And it was still cheaper than my grandparents’ home.

It is fair.

But they didn’t have to pay as much!

It is all relative. My grandparents didn’t spend as much on entertainment. When they did go out, it was often very cheap dates. A nickle movie with popcorn and a soda was a 1/2 hour of labor. A movie with popcorn and soda is about 3/4 of an hour of labor today.

My friend wanted to buy a house for 2 years of labor, while having “needs” that would cost him 5 to 6 years of labor. And being upset.

His argument is that if they people that had come before were to stop being “evil” and “greedy”, there would be more houses.

The issue is that the housing market is currently a seller’s market. The demand is higher than the supply. This means that sellers can demand more money. When they get to where they are going, they will have to pay more as well.

Listening to people dancing at the “profit” they made selling their homes on Monday, and bitching about how unfair it is on Friday when they have to pay more for a new home, makes me giggle. I feel for them. I don’t understand why they don’t get it.

If we were just to…

We have a small lot, for the area, which backs on a few acres of forest. I do not want somebody to build a house right behind us. My options are to purchase the property behind us, risk it, or get the government to zone the land to stop new building.

I would like to purchase the land outright. That would be the best option for us. The risk is fairly low, there isn’t much demand for new housing in our area. But going to the zoning board…, now there’s an idea.

The wonder of the zoning board is that you can often convince the zoning board to put limits on the uses of property to protect the community.

We will zone land as noncommercial to keep traffic out, we might zone an area for single family dwellings to give people a sense of space and property, we might zone an area for high density housing or even trailer parks.

Zoning laws help protect the community from things like semi-trailers driving down the road in front of your house. The government put a US highway through my grandparent’s town. It was the street in front of their house. When they moved in, the road was a tree—lined boulevard. The first time I saw it, it was a four lane road with street parking on both sides and big rigs running through town all day and all night.

Occasionally, we find zoning laws designed to protect our farm land. The farm up the road was on the market for 10 years. Nobody was willing (or able) to buy it. In the end, they were able to sell off about 5 acres of the 100+, which became 3 lots with big houses on it.

Zoning laws kept that farm from becoming a huge apartment complex, or a subdivision.

If we were just to allow people to build as many houses as densely as they want, then house prices would be low enough for me.

Conclusion

I’m wealthy, by world standards. By world standards, I’m part of the “1%”. Then again, so are you.

The people of the United States are unbelievably wealth. The poorest of the poor in America are obese. They are not starving. Some might be hungry, but they are not starving.

I’ve been in section 8 housing to service computers. At a time when large, flat screen TVs were running 1000 to 2000 dollars, they had three.

When I was in high school, at one bus stop the “poor” kids would get off, they would run into their tar paper shacks. These were the kids who got to go to gym class as their first class. So they could use the showers.

They were so poor that they didn’t have enough running hot water for showers. I don’t know if they had showers in those shacks.

I do know that there were always two or three late model Cadillacs in the driveway.

The “poverty line” for the United States is higher than the average income of most countries in the world. Even some 1st and 2nd world countries.

If what you want as a home isn’t here, you need to look further afield or change your specifications.

Crying over what has been isn’t going to change anything.

Complaining that the people with wealth are “greedy” and “evil” isn’t going to change anything.

If it is the government standing in the way of lower costs, then we can get the government out of the way. That doesn’t mean that all zoning laws are bad, some might be.

In general, being upset that some people have things you want and are unwilling to give it up, or are willing to fight to protect their property or the value of their property, is only going to make you mad.

Stop stressing over what others have. Take stock of what you do have and give thanks.

I have a friend who voted for Kamala. He is an intelligent person. Reasonably educated, firearms guy. I like talking to him and hanging with him.

We don’t talk politics because politics stresses him. I didn’t know he was voting for until recently.

I got about ten minutes of his time and asked him if he could tell me why.

There were multiple reasons, the one that stuck in my mind was, “How could you vote for a convicted felon? He should be in prison.”

I’ve heard this many times, I just tune it out because it is a true statement without context.

He had other reasons having to do with his perception of Trumps morals and how he believes Trump treats people. Not relevant to this discussion.

I asked him if he knew what Trump had been convicted of. His answer was “fraud”.

This set me back a little bit. I know what the case was about. The big “37 counts” was the same charge repeated in different ways.

If I recall correctly, for each check that Trump signed a check to his lawyers, it was notated as “legal expenses.” The state claims there are three separate counts for each one.

Regardless, I asked my friend if he was aware that these felonies were misdemeanors until they changed the law and that the statute of limitations had expired.

“No, I wasn’t aware.”

“Were you aware that this is the first and only time this crime has been prosecuted?”

“No, I wasn’t aware.”

“Were you aware that the crime charge was that he had attempted to cover up a crime by filing false statements, but that they never proved the precursor crime?”

“No, I wasn’t aware.”

This is propaganda at play. He would rather not be involved in politics, but he can’t escape it. Listening to someone like me just stresses him out. He would rather not have that conversation, and I do not blame him.

The overwhelming political noise that he is exposed to is always, “Trump is bad, Trump is Evil, Trump is a rapist, White Supremacists, and he is a convicted felon!”

He can’t escape that noise. It is everywhere.

One of the things that Allyson exposed me to is the left’s filter method.

You can’t vote for him because

I like to believe that we have a big tent. If you are a conservative, you are welcome under the tent.

This is surprising to most leftists. They believe that if you are gay, trans, black, brown, immigrant, poor or whatever other label they have, that you will be not only kicked out of the Conservative tent, but you will be attacked and hurt.

Some of that “attacked and hurt” comes from their claim that speech is violence.

What do I mean by “the left’s filter method”?

It is the process of finding a fault or flaw or “unacceptable” position to rule a candidate out.

Consider Ronald Reagan. He was a great president. He also made mistakes as the Governor of California. He signed gun-control bills into law as Governor.

I have heard people say that because I find Reagan to be a great president, I should agree that gun-control is good, since my hero signed gun-control bills.

That is not how it works.

From the left’s standpoint, that single error on Reagan’s part is enough to disqualify him. If it doesn’t, then I’m stupid.

Every time I would talk to the leftist Ally about a conservative candidate, she would tell me how she could never vote for them because… She would then present a single point to prove that they were unqualified for her approval.

It wasn’t about the whole of the person, it was about filtering them out for any reason possible.

This is why the left runs campaigns of emotion. Kamala never said anything that would cause the filter to kick in. And those filters are always judged against the enemy.

“He endorsed a person who said that Puerto Ricans were garbage.” And that would filter him out of the acceptable list.

All the hoaxes we saw are based on this. They are quick sound bites that are designed to trigger that filter. “He called White Supremacists ‘fine people'”. It doesn’t matter how often this is debunked, it still works.

It works because there will be people that hear just the sound bite and it will be enough to support their desire to not vote for orange man bad.

BLUF: Be compassionate. Yes, even if it hurts. Yes, even if they’re assholes and dickwads. I want to know that I picked the right side. I want to know that this is the side that isn’t lying to me.

Right, we have a new President Elect. Trump defied the odds, and he took it all. He is the President Elect. He won us the Senate. And it looks like he won us the House. I’m sure most of us have been celebrating in some fashion or another for the past couple of days. And now it’s time to buckle down.

The Right have decried the Left for having majorities and doing nothing with them. We have the majority across the board for the next while, and we NEED to be doing stuff with it. We need to enact those campaign promises. Better economy, getting dangerous criminal aliens out of the country, lower grocery costs, better housing market, and the list goes on. This isn’t going to happen overnight, but Trump must put himself to work immediately and start getting things done.

The Left is so aflutter with terror right now that there might actually be a teaching moment, if the Right can keep things together. For the next few weeks, between election results and inauguration, the Left expects to be treated like dirt. We can’t. We must act with compassion.

Read More

Willful incel stupid

You would have voted for Kamala. But you are a stupid incel, so Trump is president-elect.

racist

It isn’t Democrat messaging that caused people to turn away from Kamala in droves, no, it was you were racist. Against the woman who can’t figure out if she black, brown, Indian, or something else.

uneducated

The uneducated population of America is holding the rest of the country hostage.

You uneducated want to weaken education, ban books and outlaw teaching BLACK history.

entrenched in tribal superstition, irrespective of all facts

You wouldn’t have voted for Trump. Because your mortgage, grocery, fuel prices will go up under Trump.

You need to understand just how wonderful the economy is right now.

didn’t vote for a convicted felon

Those 34 felony counts are real. For you to vote for a convicted felon is horrible.

knew that Trump is coming for your Social Security and Medicare

You wouldn’t have voted for him.

white supremacist and full of toxic masculinity

You would know that Kamala is right for America.

able to recognize bullshit coming from Democrats

The meltdown is incredible. My favorites have been the leftists claiming there was something fishy about this election because 15million votes have “disappeared”. There is no ability on the left to look at the numbers and think that 2020 was the outlier.

Why did they lose? Not their fault. It is your fault they lost. If only YOU had.

There is no introspection going on, only blame.

The last four years have been a shitshow. On the first day of Harris’s term as VP, Joe started signing executive orders to undo what Trump had accomplished.

Since that day, I’ve heard nothing but hate from the left with lies, more lies, and still more lies.

This article will be updated after we know the results.

Trump Wins

Keep your head on a swivel. Stay out of the cities, if you can. Stay away from stupid people doing stupid things at stupid times of the day. Hell, stay away from stupid people doing stupid things.

I expect the cities to start burning at any moment. The left is known to be very joyful as they burn down our cities and tear apart our country.

Please keep your Democrat neighbors in your prayers. They are hurting right now. Only laugh and dance in private. They need time to grieve.

Harris Wins (God, I hope this isn’t true)

Kamala has told us that she would not have done a single thing differently. It is going to hurt. Pray for the justices of the Supreme Court that hold our Constitution dear and treat it with respect.

Keep your eyes on a swivel. The left is known for being joyful in their destruction. They might decide to joyfully stomp those who disagree with them.

Remember, we will survive this.

Conclusion

This was writing at 2100 East Coast time. The first returns are coming in, and it looks good for Trump so far. The problem is that we haven’t heard from any of the battleground states.

I remember when Florida was in play as a battleground state, after they cleaned up their voting methods to reduce the chances of fraud, it seems to have gone strong Red. Correlation is not causation.

@vine.of.liberty I know I got cut off at the end. Go vote, that’s it. Wake up Wednesday and do your normal things. Do not let fear be your master. #vote #vineofliberty #politics #peaceful ♬ original sound – The Vine of Liberty

Look, you may not agree with some of the things I say, or value my opinions, but by all that’s holy, go vote. Everyone: left, right, centrist, whatever. VOTE. Not because the country is divided, but because it is your God given right to vote, and because it is your responsibility to vote. Make an educated choice, after listening to unbiased media, and/or listening to both (or all) sides involved. But vote!!!

I have had good luck with picking up discarded computers, upgrading them, and making them functional members of the computer or services farm.

A computer consists of persistent storage (disk drives and SSD), dynamic storage (memory), a processor (CPU), and I/O devices.

Data is read from disk into memory, the processor then either executes it or processes it, the results are sent to an output devices. I/O devices allow the input from disks, keyboards, persistent storage devices, networks or other devices. They also send output to video devices, networks, printers, and storage devices.

The thing that defines how a computer can be configured is the motherboard. The motherboard accepts one or more processors, one or more memory devices, one or more I/O devices.

Some motherboards come with built-in I/O devices. For example, A motherboard will come with built-in disk controllers, sound cards, video drivers, USB controllers, P/S-2 keyboard and mouse, serial drivers and many more. These are the connectors that you see on the back of your computer or elsewhere on the case.

Many of these drivers lead to a connector or a socket. If your motherboard has SATA disk controllers, there will be SATA connectors on the motherboard. If your motherboard has built-in video, the back will have an ISA video connector and/or an HDMI connector. It might have a DVI connector as well.

The covers most of what you find on the motherboard. The rest are the important sockets.

There will normally be extension slots. These are where you would plug in extra I/O devices, such as network cards, disk controllers, or video cards. There will normally be memory slots. Depending on the amount of memory supported by the CPU and motherboard, this could be two, four, eight, or even more. Finally, there is normally a socket for the CPU.

For me, I have found that the cheapest way to upgrade a computer is to give it more memory. Most software is memory intensive. If you exceed the amount of memory in your machine, your machine has to make space for the program you want to run. Then it has to read into memory, from disk, the program or its data before it can continue.

The more memory, the less “paging” needs to happen.

Upgrading the CPU is another possibility. This is normally a fairly reasonable thing to do. Consider an AMD Ryzen 7 3700, which is the CPU in one of my machines. It runs $150 on Amazon, today. I purchased it for $310 a few years ago.

Today, I can upgrade to a Ryzen 9 5950x from a Ryzen 7 3700x for $350.

Buying the latest and greatest CPU is expensive. Buying second tier, older CPUs is much more price effective.

The motherboard in this particular server is nearing its end of life. It has an AM4 socket, which has been replaced with the AM5 socket. This means it is unlike that any “new” CPUs will be released for the AM4.

Bad Design

The first place I see bad computer designs is in the actual case. This is not as bad as it used to be. It used to be that opening an HP case was sure to get you sliced up. Every edge was razor sharp.

The next major “bad design” is a case and motherboard combination which is non-standard. The only motherboard that will ever fit in that case is a motherboard from that company. Likely the only place to get such a motherboard is from E-Bay.

The next issue is when there are not enough memory slots, or worse, not enough memory addressing lines. Apple was actually famous for this.

In the old days, Apple used a 68020 class CPU. The CPU that they were using had a 32-bit address register. This is 4 Gigabytes of addressing. More than enough for the time period. Except…

Apple didn’t use all 32 bits, they only used 24 bits, leaving 8 bits unused. This gives 16 Megabytes of addressable memory. More than enough in a time period where people still remembered Billy saying “Nobody will ever need more than 640 Kilobytes of memory”.

Apple made use of the extra 8 bits in the address register for “Handles”. Not important.

Most CPUs today use a 64-bit address registers. I don’t know of a CPU that uses all 64 bits for addressing.

Which takes us to bad designs, again. Some motherboards only bring enough address lines to the memory slots to handle what is the “largest” memory card currently available. This means that you can have slots that support 16 Gigabyte DIMMs, but the motherboard only supports 4 Gigabyte DIMMs.

Often, it is worse. Cheaper motherboards will only have 2 DIMM slots. There is nothing more frustrating than having a machine with 8 GB of memory and finding out that it isn’t one 8 GB DIMM leaving room for another 8 GB, but instead two 4 GB DIMMs. Which means that when you receive that 8 GB DIMM you have 12 GB total instead of the goal of 16 GB, and you have a 4 GB DIMM that isn’t good for anything.

Sub Conclusion

If you want to be able to upgrade your computer, buy a motherboard with the latest socket design. AMD or Intel. Buy one that has enough DIMM slots to handle 4 times the amount of memory you think you are going to need. Buy a CPU that is at 1/4 to 1/3 the price of the top-tier CPU. Depending on the release date, maybe even less than that.

Make sure it has a slot for your video card AND having one PCIe-16 slot still open. You might never use it, but if you need it, you will be very frustrated at saving yourself $10.

Source of the rant

My wife is using an employer supplied laptop for her work. All of her personal work has to be done on her phone. With the kids off to university, their old HP AIO computer is available.

The only problem is that word “OLD”. A quick online search shows that I should be able to upgrade the memory from 4 GB to 16 GB and the CPU from an old Intel to an i7 CPU. This means that I can bring this shell back to life for my wife to use.

At the same time, I intend to replace a noisy fan.

Looking online, the cost of a replacement CPU will be $25. The cost of the memory, another $25. Plus $25 for a new keyboard and mouse combination. $75 for a renewed computer. Happiness exists.

Before I order anything, I boot into my Linux “rescue/install” USB thumb drive. I run lscpu and it spits out the CPU type. Which is AMD. AMD sockets do NOT support i7 CPUs. This means that my online research does not match what my software is saying. I trust the software more than the research.

Turns out that there are two versions of this particular All In One model. One is AMD-based, the other is Intel-based. The Intel-based version has a socketed CPU. The AMD version has the CPU soldered into place. It cannot be upgraded.

These maroons have rendered this machine locked in the past. With no way to upgrade the CPU, it is too slow for today’s needs. Even with maximum memory.

Conclusion

An old computer is sometimes garbage. Put it out of your misery. Use it for target practice or take it to the dump.

There are many left-leaning people out there. Many are broken. They cannot see what is in front of their faces and refuse to accept any fact that is counter to their current world view.

These are the people that can look you dead in the eye and tell you that calling you a racist piece of shit is just fine, but it is unacceptable for you to call them ignorant. This is why their riots were “mostly peaceful” while the January 6th protests and walk through was an “insurrection”.

There is another class of left — leaning people who aren’t really into calling you names. They are just so deep in the left bubble that they cannot believe that what you say could possibly be the truth. These are the people that watch nothing but CNN and will report what CNN says as being unbiased and fully truthful.

It is these people who still believe the “fine people on both sides” hoax. They have never seen anything to indicate that it could be anything but the truth.

There are the evil ones, who know exactly what they are doing. They are willing to lie to accomplish their goals. And are greatly offended when they are called on it.

The remaining are what I like to call “thinking leftist”.

These are not as uncommon as you might believe. They are often silent, they seldom get in your face. If you challenge them to check a primary source, they will. If you give them sources, they are willing to view them.

The Bubble of the Left

There is an information bubble that exists for everybody. This is the set of sources for news that we are presented with. It is how we get our information. It is from this body of information and opinion from which we build our world view.

Back in the olden days, there was a TV show called Murphy Brown. It was a show about a hard charging investigative journalist and news anchor.

She also happened to be female.

A strong female lead that was “believable”.

This isn’t a joke, “women are just as good as men in every field,” it was a profession where sex did not matter.

Single Mothers

What the character did was to have sex, get pregnant and decide to keep the child. Becoming a single mother.

This was a huge political message, though most didn’t understand it. Even today, most people consider it to be a major milestone in taking the stigma away from being an unmarried mother.

The biggest predictor of being successful in life is having a two parent family unit. There are so many things where two parents can accomplish something, while it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do it as a single parent.

Back in my single days, divorced from my first wife, she would sometimes decide I could have my kids for the week. This was always highly disruptive. I had to find temporary childcare, or I had to take the week off.

I always made it work because my children have always been that important to me.

Being a single parent is hard, difficult, all consuming, and will cost you more than you expect. If you are male, it might even be worse, it is harder to get help as a single father.

So what Murphy did, was she made it “ok” to be a single mother. Dooming hundreds of thousands of children to lives of hardship and lowering their chances of success.

This is part of that bubble. “Think of the single mothers.”, “Single mothers are so amazing.”

No, they are losing. Not always their fault. But those are the facts.

Firearms

Ignoring the magic technology of most procedural cop shows, there is a political message in most of them: All Guns Are Registered.

The scene: the duty room of NCIS, Washington, D.C. Abby has come upstairs with the identification of the type of firearm used in the latest murder.

“He was killed with a 9 mm slug from a Glock 17 with a 6-inch barrel,” she dutifully reports.

“Ge me a list of all owners of Glock 17L’s,” Gibbs says.

Ten minutes later, he is presented with a list of names which are then reduced to just a few, depending on plot needs, to investigate.

I have a few firearms that are registered with the state police of Maryland. That’s because they do not have anything to stop them from creating such a registry. Every firearm sold by an FFL in Maryland requires you to fill out an ATF-4473 plus an MD-4473.

The state is not allowed to keep records of the ATF-4473 information. Indeed, they request for that background check only states who you are and what type of firearm you are purchasing, pistol, rifle, et so forth.

The MD-4473 is sent to the state police, and they do keep a record. There are also waiting periods involved.

I have personal knowledge that they have a registry. I had purchased a featureless AR-15 during the assault weapon ban. That required the MD-4473 and a waiting period.

No big deal, I didn’t understand. That information bubble at work.

When the D.C. Sniper was killing people, they were having a difficult time tracking the sniper down. They were able to determine that the bullets were coming from a .223/5.56 rifle. They even suspected that it was an AR-15 platform.

I, personally, received a call from the MD state police because I owned an SUV and I had purchased an AR-15 platform rifle.

Impossible without a firearm registry.

Abortion

I would have a hard time finding a single show or opinion piece in the media that was pro-life. Even in the cases where there are characters who are pro-life, they are almost always portrayed poorly.

Take a look at how the annual March for Life was covered. (is covered?) The organizers estimated attendance at 650,000 for 2013. The media reported it as “tens of thousands”. The pro-abortion groups protesting the march normally get more media attention than the march itself.

It isn’t uncommon for a small pro-abortion march to get significantly more media coverage than the largest pro-life march.

The amount of positive coverage of pro-abortion positions makes me cringe.

Women’s Reproductive Health Care/Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood is an abortion business. While they claim that only 3% of their services are “abortions”, you need to dive into what “services” are. Services include handing out literature or condoms, answering calls, and all the other myriad things that are just part of being a business.

In 2014-2015, the received over half of a Billion dollars from the government. Every cent of that is fungible. That means that they had millions of dollars from us that freed up money to fund abortions.

When the federal government looked into shutting down that flow of money, they went into overdrive. The selling point was, “If Planned Parenthood shuts down, there will be no women’s reproductive healthcare.”

There are more women’s reproductive healthcare clinics in my state than there are Planned Parenthood clinics. The difference, most of them offer real women’s healthcare. Teat squishing, pap smears, and all the rest of taking care of unique women’s health issues.

Misc

The list goes on and on and on. Everything from gun owners are fat, stupid, and ignorant to people who watch Fox News are not as smart as the rest of the smart, to their elite know better than you.

Laughter

Ally went on a rant last night. What was she ranting about? The stupid Kamala ad which says that the wives of conservatives can vote for Kamala without telling their husbands. That conservative/Republican wives are just robots of their husbands.

It wasn’t a great video because she was so upset she was fumbling her words. I think the strongest message in the rant was, “…give me a break.”

At morning conversation, she started ranting about it again.

And I broke out in a giant smile.

“Stop laughing at me!”

Ally was a thinking leftest. She took the blinders off a short time ago and is seeing everything with newly cleared eyes.

For years, I’ve been listening to her responding to my indignation over things the left has done. And for years the response was always the same, “What about this thing that the right is doing?”

No matter who the Republican candidate was, she found a reason to disapprove of them. Of course, she couldn’t go to the Democrat candidate because they were just horrible. So it was always a third-party candidate.

For years, I bit my tongue so that I wouldn’t go too far, “can’t you just accept that they did something evil, bad, or stupid?”

She couldn’t.

The reason seemed to be that she was fearful of what “The Right” was going to do. They were going to take her rights away, They were saying mean things about people. They stood on the wrong side of an issue that she was passionate about.

Watching her accept her own views without those blinders has been invigorating. It makes me smile, every day.

And yes, she would have ranted at herself of a year ago. And the person she was a year ago would have written this Ally off as evil, bad, stupid, and moronic.

So smile and laugh. It feels good.

For years, I’ve been hearing about how Republicans are calling for some horrific or ridiculous thing.

I’m reminded of the days when Glenn Beck was the voice. You would hear, over and over again, how he had said terrible things.

If you search YouTube, you could find those videos. Those videos were maybe 30 to 60 seconds long.

All of those videos contained the same things. In other words, with thousands of hours of audio, the left could only find a few minutes of questionable audio. Plus, it often turned out that the audio was taken out of context.

The left runs on emotions. Unfortunately, they are not good with joy and excitement, they always fall back on fear and hate.

I had the misfortune of listening to a short clip of Obama stomping for the Democrat candidate for governor of NC.

The clip was about a minute. There wasn’t a thing that came out of his mouth that wasn’t a lie. It was all accusations of Trump, conservatives, Republicans, and anybody else that wasn’t in lock step with his wants.

It was worse than when Kamala’s people make a statement.

Kamala’s people just dropped an ad suggesting that conservative women have no agency. That “the only place they have a choice” is in the voting booth. It was disgusting.

I am not married to a robot. I’m married to a living, breathing, thinking, thoughtful, and beautiful lady. She listens and makes her own choices. Until the debate with Biden, she wasn’t going to vote for Trump.

At that point, there was nothing I could have said to get her to vote for Trump. She had to decide herself.

Hate is a powerful emotion. It is much easier to get people to hate than it is to get them to love, like, or enjoy something.

That has been the Democrat playbook for as long as I have been aware.

In 1964, LBJ aired the “Daisy” ad. The emotion he was looking for was fear. Fear that Goldwater would start a nuclear war, while he, LBJ, was only going to send boys to Vietnam to die. Oops, he didn’t say that last part.

There have been so many hoax hate crimes. The reason is that actual criminal actions based on race are very low. Sorry, that is whites acting in a criminally racist way towards others. Blacks often act in racists ways towards Whites, and it is just accepted.

Fearmongering on the Left has been about abortion. There are 50 states. Each state gets to set their laws, regarding abortion, according to how their people want, via their legislators.

So why are so many women screaming that Republican’s are going to take their “right” to an abortion away. They never had a right to an abortion. A right is something you have from existing. Everybody has it.

If abortion is a “right” then the mother OR the father should be able to choose to abort.

When they scream about their right to an abortion, what they are really screaming for is access to abortion services.

There are a few states that have put in strong anti-abortion laws.

The left is screaming about those. They search high and low for something to go wrong. The first person they found to shove a megaphone in front of was an abortion for a child.

She was transported out of the state of Ohio to have the abortion done. She was raped. The rest of the story includes the fact that the mother’s illegal alien boyfriend was the rapist. That she went out of state to protect him from the law.

And that there was an exception in the Ohio law to cover that type of case.

That is who they held up as an example of horrific outcomes from anti-abortion laws.

They scream that horrible things will happen. So they find a victim. Who was the victim? It was a woman who wanted an abortion rather late, not “late term” but not early in her pregnancy. Her social situation had changed.

She opted for a surgical procedure. Then didn’t allow enough time to get to her appointment. Almost as if she weren’t the sharpest crayon in the box. She was late, they couldn’t do the procedure. She agreed to have a chemical abortion.

She did no follow-up care. She waited until very late to seek treatment for the sepsis that she was suffering from. The hospital she went to didn’t do the required abortion to remove the dead baby from her in a timely fashion.

At the clinical mortality review, it was determined that she would have survived if she had received treatment at the hospital without the extended delay.

Now, the findings of death review panels, mortality committees, and clinical mortality reviews are closed. This is a place where doctors can feel free to say that somebody fucked up, badly. That a doctor’s error killed somebody.

This is who got the megaphone. A woman who didn’t keep her knees together. That got pregnant out of wedlock. Who’s baby father left her. Who waited until then to decide to abort her baby. Who didn’t seek treatment. And who was dead as a result of medical malpractice.

Is she an example of horrific anti-abortion laws killing women? Not in the least.

When Ally and I were talking about the “push for outlawing birth control”, my response was, “you’ve got to be kidding me. Nobody is pushing to outlaw birth control.”

When she posted, you replied that you hadn’t heard a push for banning birth control.

But Ally has heard it.

And that’s because somebody is shoving a megaphone in front of somebody. Who are these people? We don’t know. What are the odds of them getting a bill passed to ban birth control? Nonexistent.

But it adds more volume to the fearmongering. Look, The EVIL Republican’s have not only taken your right to reproductive health care away, now they won’t even let you use birth control!”

That megaphone is being used to chase the sheeple right of the edge of the clif.

As I contemplate another deep dive into a legal case, I realize how thankful I am to Justice Thomas.

Our Second Amendment protected rights had been eviscerated. Most of the country was under the suffocating opinions of gun hating inferior courts.

If a stated wanted a gun control law, they passed it. Challenges were always dismissed. To listen to the gun grabbers, everything that was done was constitutional because everybody knew that the Second only protected the rights of the militia.

In 2008, the Supreme Court issued the Heller opinion. In a five to four decision, the court found that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to keep and bear arms. Even Justice Stevens’ dissent says it is an individual right.

Of course, this didn’t stop Justice Stevens from joining Justice Breyer’s dissent

This case was much closer than we hoped for.

There is a good reason the court did not take up another Second Amendment case (outside McDonald, which was an easy, “Yes, the Bill of Rights applies to the states, morons”) for 14 years. We would have lost. And if we had not lost outright, the opinion would not be strong enough to protect our rights.

In 2022, we had a strong majority on the Supreme Court. Not a majority of Republicans, but a majority of Constitutionalist.

The Court issued a powerful opinion in Bruen. It slapped down the inferior courts. It set clear guidance for how to adjudicate Second Amendment challenges.

The inferior courts had a meltdown. We have judges who have sworn to uphold the Constitution, claiming they are too stupid to understand the Constitution. Judges who have decades of training and practice in reading old laws and interpreting them, correctly, claim that the plain text is unclear.

This is not the fault of the Supreme Court. This is the fault of those rogue inferior courts.

I worked for an incompetent lead analyst for a couple of years. One evening, I found him still at his desk, programming. He was trying to do something in FORTRAN. I explained that what he wanted to do wasn’t possible to do in FORTRAN. He insisted it could.

I wrote a short C function that did the task that FORTRAN could not. Gave it to him to use. This would have allowed him to complete his program without any architectural changes.

When I checked in with him the next day, I asked how the function worked for him. He reported that it had worked, but he had done a redesign, so he didn’t need that function.

To this day, I believe he made that change to exclude me from having participated in the project. He was a rogue, inferior programmer/analyst.

Rogue inferior courts will twist and squirm to avoid the clear guidance of the Supreme Court, when they don’t like the outcome.

The remarkable strength of Justice Ginsburg, was her ability to find law to support her positions.

From President Obama, we got Sotomayor. She has grown into her position, but she has never been a strong justice.

We also got Elena Kagan, a Justice so corrupt that she felt that there was no conflict of interest in sitting on a case that she had worked on as a member of the Obama staff.

Those two “powerhouses” don’t come close to the idiocy of Ketanji Brown Jackson. This is a person that can’t find case law, regulation, or original meaning in anything that goes against her agenda. She writes as if the Supreme Court should be writing law, not following the law.

The Three!

Neil Gorsuch was our first win. He has done a good job for the Second.

Kavanaugh was our second win. He is doing an ok job for the Second. I’m not sure of him, but so far, so good.

Amy Coney Barrett is our third win. I believe she could become the next Clarence Thomas.

Conclusion

Next Tuesday is the day our Constitution set as the date to vote for our President. A week from today, we should know who our next president will be.

Please, PLEASE, vote.

The most lasting wins from the first Trump presidency were the amount of reform that was done to the courts. We do not want to have Kamala replace Thomas. Imagine another Ketaji Brown Jackson replacing Thomas. It would be years before we could recover.

VOTE!