Elon Musk

Open Thread

Mark Noonan29 Comments

With bank after bank failing and pretty clear proof of Biden Family profiteering in China, you know what is on the agenda: Distraction!

So, the rumor mill is now filled with predictions that Trump will be indicted next week. The more excited claiming that he’ll be arrested and frog marched into custody…not sure how the NYPD will manage that unless Trump happens to be in NYC next week, and his Secret Service detail will also have something to say along those lines.

I’m fairly confident, though, that they will indict Trump on some bogus charges. They pretty much have to at this point: if you listen to the Left, they have been screaming for it ever louder over the past year. They seem to think there’s 25 to life just waiting there for Trump…rather than, at most, a process crime which has a max sentence of six months. And a process crime without basis. Don’t get me wrong, Trump goes on trial in NYC and he will be found guilty – there’s no way a Manhattan jury would go the other way against Trump. Its why all hopes are pinned in NYC…they’d love to do it in DC and the jury pool there is just as hostile to Trump and obedient to Dems as Manhattan, but there is GOP House oversight in DC. In NYC, everyone is on the same team and no matter what laws the prosecutors break to get a conviction of Trump, none of them will ever be charged with a crime. But Trump has not broken the law – if he ever had, he would have been arrested ages ago. He’s legally clean as a whistle. So, whatever they charge will be drivel and it will be thrown out on appeal – but appeal is after conviction and it is the conviction the Dems want.

How does this affect 2024? Plenty of Dems seem to think that a conviction bars a person from office. This is because they’re stupid and ignorant. For the GOP base, there will be a huge upsurge of sympathy for Trump…but whether that carries on or is replaced with a “maybe he’d better bow out” feeling remains to be seen. And make no mistake about it: they don’t want Trump in 2024. They say they do, and that means you know they don’t. An indictment of Trump is proof positive that the Dems internal polling shows Pudding Brain coming up short in a rematch.

But the fun part comes later – eventually, we do get the White House back and the pressure to arrest the previous Democrat President will be unstoppable. This is Late Republic stuff, but it is what the Democrats want.

Elon Musk is claiming he’s got a nifty AI program which is going to detect and track social media manipulation. We’ll see! Not that I doubt Musk’s sincerity here, I’m just not sure a computer program can snoop it out. They just do what their biased programmers tell them to do, after all. I mean, I can snoop it out and I offer my services to Elon for no more than $1,983.943.56 per year. But my results also wouldn’t be accepted by the manipulators. Maybe that’s why Elon is trying AI…give it a sense of neutrality. Anyways, if it does work it will be very revealing not so much on the manipulation (I think we on the Right can sniff that out pretty fast these days), but on just who is pushing it – which will, I bet, turn out to include lots of people and institutions allegedly on our side.

This weirdo wrote a letter to his family saying that if they vote GOP, he’s done with them – he being gay and his assertion is that the GOP is trying to eliminate homosexuality. Specifically, he said he can’t be part of a family voting for people who want to murder him. Lots of people scorched the guy as the utter loon that he is, but I saw it for what it was: very effective propaganda. Even if not entirely conscious from the letter writer. You see, the Democrats lie. They lie about everything and all the time. They do this because lying works. Lying has always worked – from getting Eve to eat the apple to getting a bailout for SVB: lies always fall on fertile ground. What this loon was doing was reinforcing the Democrat propaganda that the GOP is filled with hate-filled, cruel people out to kill. Now, maybe this guy was paid to write his letter or maybe he’s just your basic Progressive moron who believes what he sees on TV. It doesn’t matter: what matters is that Democrat voters will hear about it and their “GOP Bad” beliefs will be reinforced. And Democrats must put this on steroids going into 2024: Joe is held in contempt. Nobody likes him. Not even his own family (if they liked him, they wouldn’t have let him run in 2020). The economy is in tatters and looks to get worse. A lot worse. So, what to do? Change policy? ROFL!!! No: just get your base fired up with fear and hatred so they’ll stick with you no matter what happens. I expect the main base-motivators for the Dems will be claims that the GOP wants to kill gay people and execute women for having an abortion…and do look for GOPers who feed into this propaganda. That supposedly far-right guy you think was ok? Well, just a few thousand bucks and he’s making a sound byte for the MSM which feeds the DNC Narrative.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan42 Comments

The sentenced the guy the FBI set up to be Whitmer’s kidnapper to 19 years today. Word to the wise, guys: anyone – and I mean anyone – who advocates anti-government violence is a Fed. They have whole teams of agents looking for any loudmouth they can sucker into playing along. They have their Narrative – that violent White Supremacists are the Real Terrorists – and they will make up crimes to support this. Don’t be drawn into it.

Our task is not the violent overthrow of the US Government – it is to work where we can to expand our power. While the Constitution is in shreds, it is still there. The States are still sovereign. Counties are well-nigh independent of all higher authority. School boards answer to nearly nobody. In the States where we can win: win big. Enact laws defending liberty. And also start pressing our States to cease accepting federal money: huge amounts of the laws on your State and local books are there simply because the federal money doesn’t come unless it is. Stop it and break free. Take over County commissions, sheriff’s offices, school boards. Bottom up has to be our plan – still complete on the national level and take what wins we can…but the future is a kid starting first grade next year after we took over the school board. Twelve short years from now that kid is a literate, numerate, sane and physically healthy patriot. Get the sheriffs who will simply refuse to enforce federal laws which infringe on rights. Pass restrictions on the actions of federal agents in the States. Things like that – while also pushing into the Blue areas and winning whatever we can, no matter how small, because even the smallest victories today become big wins tomorrow: I remember when in the 1980’s the Liberals started their plans to take over San Diego and Orange counties in California – and it has largely succeeded. Took them ages. Started with a couple school boards, a city council here and there…

Voting grows. More people do it. The various laws and programs the Democrats have enacted are bringing ever more people to the polls. We’re still very much playing catch up. But as the crisis in our civilization grows more acute, look for this trend to continue and intensify. And don’t think it will forever favor the Democrats. Remember that Trump scored 11 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. People are angry, confused and want answers and solutions – they will surge to the polls in ever greater numbers trying to find them. Our task is to ride that lightning. If we can provide a real alternative – no more Democrat-lite – and shed our connections to Big Corporation (almost done) and the Military-Industrial Complex (about half way there) then we can really start to talk to people.

Governor Abbott is still sending illegals to DC – to the fury of Democrats who would never, of course, lend a hand to any of those poor people. It is effective propaganda but I think we need to next-step it. My suggestion to Abbott is that he get together with other border State governors and work up a plan to send 10,000 illegals to DC all at once. Force the MSM to cover it. Make it a crisis; show the Ruling Class that we’re serious and this has to stop. Side note; Abbott is my third choice for 2024 behind Trump and DeSantis. He’s doing solid work. Made a few policy errors here and there, but when the chips are down he fights for us.

Musk is thinking – so the rumor goes – of buying Substack and essentially getting into the MSM business. I think he was genuinely surprised at how little notice the MSM has taken of the Twitter Files, and that what little is said about them is invariably a pack of lies. Musk is a liberal – I doubt he’ll ever stop being a liberal – but he’s been mugged by reality and I think it is dawning on him that if he wants to remain free, he’s got to attack the system. It is either that or just roll over for them.

One thing Musk did point out today – which I didn’t know and apparently a lot of other people didn’t know – is that the person tasked with keeping Fauci ethical in his professional service is…his wife. Which really isn’t a surprise except that it shows you that not only are they corrupt, but they don’t really care if we find out how corrupt they are.

Congressman-elect Santos apparently told a bunch of whoppers in his successful House campaign. The Democrats are demanding he resign because of his lies. Most of us are just laughing at that and pointing out Warren and Biden just for starters. GOPe types are wetting themselves over it, as usual. But I don’t think the bedwetters will rule the day here – I think that even someone like McCarthy realizes there is no upside to throwing one of our own to the wolves. If Santos is a real problem, them primary him in 2024.

Hooters is thinking of rebranding itself on the conclusion that Millennial men just don’t care that much for boobs. I really don’t know what to make of that.

CNN broadcast a story of a 9 year old girl being sold by her father to an old man – apparently because the girl’s family is impoverished. Most people are naturally horrified by it: but I’d like to point out that this is what they do there. It is what they’ve always done there. You won’t talk these people out of it. To them, a nine year old will now be with a rich man who will ensure she is fed and her position will also ensure her larger family survives tough times. In their mind, while this might not be ideal, it is better than the girl going hungry, her family going hungry or the women of the family forced to engage in dishonorable practices to keep body and soul together. Have you ever been really hungry? In the sense of having nothing to eat and no prospect of getting another meal? That is what the family faced and this is how they decided to get out of it.

Now, you can still stop this: but it will require killing. Lots of killing. Including women and children. These people will view you as alien outsiders and no matter how much they might hate their own rulers, they’re going to hate you even more for trying to force change on them. Nothing is quite as cut and dried as a news report tries to make out. For the record, I’d like that practice to be stropped. But I’d also like to hear a Mass at Hagia Sophia. There’s lots of things I’d like but I’m never going to get. And before I do anything which will result in our young me killing their young men I’m going to think carefully before I even speak, let along act.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan25 Comments

Big Q1 2023 layoffs are coming for the Washington Post – word is they’ve lost half a million subscribers. This is good on so many levels.

And I think it is just the start – when Musk bought Twitter it had 7,500 employees. From what I can tell, he’s down to less than a hundred now and the thing is running just fine. These employees were being paid San Francisco wages – so, you gotta figure even the mail rook clerk (do they still have those?) was making north of 50 grand a year. The cost savings are immense. Additionally, there is rumor than Musk will move it to Texas, thus saving massive amounts in taxes and other fees. Other companies will be looking at this and wondering just how much they can cut.

To be sure, any of us who have ever lost a job knows that it is devastating. You suddenly don’t have assurance of paying the bills and with that worry, you scramble for another position. On the other hand, the bloat in corporate America is massive. Huge numbers of people are employed doing nothing that produces the product sold, whatever that may be. Empire building doesn’t just happen in government bureaucracies – it is a disease of all bureaucracies. The most positive aspect of this is that the people most likely to be fired are those who pester the American people the most: the woke with useless degrees are going to find that the 200 grand a year job attending a couple half hour meetings per day is gone for good.

As I’ve said before, a huge amount of America’s workforce is employed in useless jobs – and it wouldn’t be so bad if they were just useless, but these people also use their positions to push ever more wokeness on us…because that is their bread and butter. The more DEI you get, the more money you make.

Until, of course, there is no more money to make. We can’t sustain a pack of parasites. We need our workers to produce useful product.

I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t think we realize just how malevolently insane the United States has become. We are no longer the good guys in the world. We’re funding the war in Ukraine when that could have been almost immediately settled by Ukraine giving up the ethnic Russian territory. We’re refusing to produce our own oil and natural gas while pressing foreigners to ruthlessly exploit their own resources and workers so we can have energy cheap enough to keep political damage to democrats to a minimum. We’re arguing over whether or not a healthy 14 year old should have a double mastectomy. We’re allowing what amounts to a new slave trade to operate on our southern border. On and on it goes like that – not just bad policies which could result from mistakes, but directly baleful actions which hurt our own people and people all around the world…all the while with an MSM lauding our leadership and everyone passing out awards to each other for doing it. A reckoning will come for this – and I do believe that in God’s mercy we will have to pay a high price for it all.

But there is some good news – the Temecula Valley (CA) school district has banned critical race theory. This is in California. And this shows just how crucial things like school board elections are. Just put a few sane people into office and, presto, the hate-filled insanity stops. I hope we can get more and enough of this soon enough to avert total disaster.

Donald Trump is not having a good time – ignoring polls (most are created to manipulate rather than inform), he’s just not gaining much traction for 2024. His core supporters are still with him, but it looks like enough other GOP voters are out there to deny him the nomination if they can swiftly coalesce around one candidate (more tricky than it seems). Now he’s saying he has a big announcement coming tomorrow. I guess we’ll see if he’s got something that will restore his fortunes.

Freedom or the MSM can Survive: Not Both

Mark Noonan21 Comments

It is now clear that almost the entire MSM combined with almost all of Big Tech to censor some opinions and boost others – and it has been going on for a while, but only went into overdrive in 2020 with the effort to oust Trump. But the reason why they did it is far less important than the fact that they did it, at all. It is a huge problem – and the solution of it may determine whether we remain free, or not.

As of at least yesterday, none of the three major network newscasts had even mentioned the Twitter files. This silence could be because they haven’t worked out the talking points but it could well be that the word has come down that the files simply will not be discussed. This shows that the MSM is entirely a State-controlled media. It is a mere propaganda outfit and it is as the command of the DNC.

“Can you prove that, Mark!”

Don’t have to. I’m not stupid. Its a huge story involving one of the world’s richest men and one of the world’s largest social media platforms. This sort of thing is made for the news – and you only don’t mention it on command.

And now we have to think: the First Amendment protection for the press: does it extend to what amounts to a propaganda outfit for one party? It would be one thing if they would just admit that they are Democrat operatives dressing themselves up as news people…but they won’t admit that. They pretend to be reporting news when they clearly don’t report anything that is unfavorable to Democrats…and when it comes to disfavoring Republicans, they’ll repeat the most monstrous and stupid lies.

This is what the guys at Bunker Hill and Yorktown were fighting for?

I have my suspicions that Washington’s constabulary would have a particularly violent response to this. What will ours be? Pretend its all ok? Hope they get an attack of conscience? Pretend that when we protect CBS News we’re defending a principle?

We have to do something. We can’t let this stand. The MSM and Big Tech must be forced to kneel before the people and become, as far as humanly possible, fair and honest platforms for information. I don’t have a roadmap to this – but I think our first effort if we ever get a trifecta is to break up the large media corporations. That no one entity or person can control more than one media outlet. Joe Billionaire or MegaCorp X can own one TV network. Or one newspaper. Or one website. Or one movie studio – and they can’t own even a penny’s worth of any other. This would first and foremost restore real competition. You would get, in the end, more TV networks, more newspapers, more websites…more of everything presenting news and entertainment to the people because, my friends, there are buckets of money to be made doing that and huge amounts of fame to be had. People will still get into it even if they can’t own it all. And they’ll look for their markets and, guess what?, someone will figure out that the Right is a market.

The one thing we can’t do is nothing. We are doomed if we do nothing. Eventually – and probably very soon – you’ll see the MSM simply ceasing to cover reality. Their whole existence will be to praise Democrats and slander Republicans. They won’t even in passing mention anything that is bad news for Democrats. They will, combined with Big Tech, try to suffocate all dissent. We must find a way to breath, or we die.

The Truth is Hard to Desire

Mark Noonan29 Comments

We got Twitter Files Part II tonight – and it was all about shadow banning.

Twitter documents clearly showed that Twitter employees were suppressing the reach of right-of-center accounts. All officially because they were spreading “hate” and “misinformation”, but the reality was because they were telling the truth and that cut against the Democrat Narrative – especially in 2020 when they needed the Covid Narrative to work against Trump. That did work, by the way.

Among the accounts suppressed was that of Dr Jay Bhattacharya who was warning that the lockdowns and masks were doing more harm than good – something that all but the most devoted Covid Cultists now admit. The guy is a professor as Stanford – MD and PhD. His skillset include infectious disease. Now, that set of credentials doesn’t mean he’s automatically right – but he’s clearly someone who should have a seat at the table. If he’s saying something, we should hear it and bounce it against what other people are saying.

But none of that from Twitter – or, indeed, from social media in general. It was all that Covid is a uniquely horrific disease and we need to mask and lockdown.

The mask thing was always bizarre to me. I mean, come on: the reason why a surgeon wears a mask isn’t to protect himself against the patient, but to protect the patient against the doctor. Surgeons actually got very good and slicing and dicing people early on. It is, after all, mostly a matter of mechanics. Once you know where the parts are, you’re good to go. But, of course, in olden days they didn’t know about bacteria and so even the most successful surgeries would fail because of a post-operative infection. Once that was known, doctors started to scrub up and wear gloves and masks – to keep bacteria from the doctor entering the patient’s wound/incision and making all medical efforts moot. Masks are to stop bacteria – which are massively larger than a virus. Comparison? It takes a thousand nanometers to make a micrometer. Most viruses are about 20 nanometers. Bacteria can come in at 2 micrometers. We’re talking hole in the ground vs Grand Canyon, guys. A mask is sufficient to stop most bacteria…but it might as well not even be there when it comes to a virus.

And we all knew this. Or were supposed to know this. I learned the basics of it in High School biology. But I guess most don’t know…or were easily bamboozled by the TV. The call for masking to stop a virus should have been met with contemptuous laughter…but, as it turns out, I lost a friend of 20 years when I pointed out that masks were useless. She was sure they worked! Because the TV said so.

I guess, thinking back on everything, I should have realized we would have this problem when, years ago, I found that people were demanding – and doctors were prescribing – antibiotics for colds and flu. Antibiotics do absolutely zero against a virus. They can’t do anything against a virus. Bacteria and viruses are entirely different species of problem. But there is was – and now Covid hysteria does make some sense.

We’re really stupid as a people.

But we’re also highly propagandized. Huge amounts of what people think they know is actually just an ad campaign which got drilled into the brain by a corporation or a bureaucracy. Solzhenitsyn noted this in the USSR – that history isn’t what happened but what the government chose to hammer into the public mind. It takes an act of will to go beyond the Narrative. first to ask if the Narrative makes any sense and then, if it doesn’t to figure out what might have happened. Example:

The Official Story of WWII had it had it that the Soviets, by a miracle of organization and work, moved most of their heavy industry out of the Donbas in front of the advancing Nazis and set up shop in the Urals where they then produced what was needed to win the war.

Well, sure enough, there were a lot of factories set up in the Urals…but we’re supposed to believe that in the chaos of defeat and retreat, with the limited Soviet transport system giving priority to the armies at the front they yet found the manpower and means to move whole factories a thousand miles to the east. Yeah, sorry: no, that didn’t happen. On their best days the Russians couldn’t pull that off. With the Nazis at the gates, they sure in heck couldn’t.

The reality is that American and British arms, munitions and material keep the Soviets in the war. We sent, for instance, something like 400,000 trucks to the USSR. 13,000 tanks. About 120 tanks made up a Soviet tank corps (roughly equivalent to an armored division for other European military forces). Thirty one tank corps were formed by the USSR during WWII. Do the math: most Soviet tank corps were equipped to one degree or another with American tanks. Sure, they did build T-34’s. Lots of them – in factories in the Urals where US-made machine tools and US-supplied materials made it happen. But the bottom line is that without our help, they simply wouldn’t have enough to fight a war with.

Once you think about how ridiculous it is to move, say, a steel mill a thousand miles then the whole fantasy falls apart…and that makes you look up just what we sent to the USSR during WWII and you find it was a simply staggering amount of everything you could possibly need from boots to to fighter planes.

But we all believe it! The TV said so. Or some such.

The truth, as the catch-phrase goes, is out there. And it is pretty easy to find. But I think that most don’t desire to find it. Most these days prefer that others do their thinking for them. I think people by now are simply afraid of it – afraid that if they seek the truth and find it, they’ll be forced to act.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan21 Comments

As expected, Warnock won – and a lot of people are down on our prospects in Georgia in general. And there is much to be worried about. But I don’t think we need worry quite as much as some urge.

Yes, I do realize that the metro Atlanta area is getting a huge influx of northern voters who are ancestrally Democrat and so they are tilting the State Blue. But that same sort of people moved to Florida and look how that turned out.

Message and messenger: that is always going to be key for us. And they both have to be good. Walker has a past – a past not in any way as bad as Warnock’s (who seems a grade A jerk), but it must be kept in mind that our molehills will be made into mountains and the Democrat mountain will be hit with the SEP Field. I bet that just enough GOP voters were demotivated by Walker’s past. Meanwhile, ninety percent of Warnock’s voters – being consumers of the MSM – never even heard of the bad stuff about Warnock. So, our guys have to be first rate. I do, as an aside, think that even someone with a past can get around it – but only by being forthright about it. Get it out early and openly and don’t leave the least detail out. Once it is out and you can credibly show that it was a long time ago, you may have inoculated yourself: you’ve certainly lessened the effect of October Surprise stuff.

But it isn’t just candidates, messages and our ability (ala’ Florida) to eventually turn Democrats our way – that won’t be enough. No: we need more voters. Turns out, I know where they are.

Chicago.

“But, Mark: are you nuts! Biden won Chicago overwhelmingly!”

He sure did. But turnout in Chicago was 73 percent. More than 420,000 of Chicago’s voters didn’t vote. This isn’t residents or citizens – that is registered voters who didn’t vote. And that is just Chicago – not the rest of Cook County and surrounding areas which are the Democrat strongholds in Illinois (outside the Chicago area, Illinois votes like Alabama). And I’ll bet in the other Blue areas around the county we’ll find similar numbers.

So, there’s the votes: they are right there, waiting to be picked up. They are in the low-propensity voter and in the person who has never voted. Democrats area already doing a bang up job with some of these people. We can, too. And not just in getting Deep Red to turnout more…but going into Deep Blue and stealing some. You have to figure if you live in Deep Blue and don’t vote, you’ve gotta be disgusted with the system. That is fertile ground for us…if we can find the right message and messenger. Zeldin seems to understand this best, but others are coming around to it. The millions of votes we need to win are just waiting for us to ask for them. And, look, it isn’t about carrying Chicago and Los Angeles…it is about picking up enough votes in Deep Blue to lock down States like Georgia and North Carolina and put us in striking distance in places like California and New York.

But there is a catch. There always is, isn’t there? You’re not going to get these people with a traditional GOP message. They don’t even know who Madison is and aren’t at all concerned about tax rates or the problem at the border. They’re worried about their own poverty…their lack of safety. They feel they should be given more help.

And you’re going to have to give it to them. Sorry, guys, but the days of small government America are gone and they ain’t coming back any time soon. Right now, we’re just trying to preserve liberty and property, as such. It is either buy their votes and use the power to preserve your liberty…or stick to your small government ideals, lose, and have Communism imposed on you.

Senator Tom Cotton told woke Kroger corp to take a hike: that is one of those “first step” things we need to do. We can’t defend corporations which hate us and fund our enemies.

James Baker was an FBI guy who played a key role in the Trump-Russia drivel. When the heat came on, he was eased out of the FBI (rather than, say, being shot for treason) and got a job at … Twitter! Where he most recently was (briefly) in charge of vetting documents for Musk before they were released to the press. Well, someone pointed out that this probably wasn’t a good idea – so Musk fired him. I was wondering why in the first batch of documents, no names were being named. Now, I know: the Deep State had their finger in the pie. But now that finger is out – what comes out now may prove very interesting.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan40 Comments

Elon Musk announced that he was going to release the info about how the Hunter laptop story was suppressed on Twitter and everyone got al excited. Except me.

The crucial thing we need to know – the only thing we need to know – about how Twitter suppressed the story is who outside Twitter ordered it done. Now, do I have proof that someone outside Twitter gave the order? Of course not. But the bottom line is that as soon as the Post released the story federal law enforcement, almost all the MSM and all major social media platforms suppressed it. You don’t get that sort of uniformity of action without coordination – and you can’t coordinate that sort of action on the fly. People way up high in power in the USA were aware at least some days in advance that the Post story was coming and they swung into action to make sure it had as little effect as possible. They had their talking points all lined up – it was Russian disinformation. They got 50 former intel guys to sign a letter stating it was a Russian op. Doing this sort of thing takes a few calls, ya know?

So what I want to know is who called Twitter. Someone did. There’s no way it didn’t happen. If I can find out who made the call then I can find out who was ultimately behind the suppression effort by working backwards from that person and seeing who they did or do work for. And I called it before Musk released the info – 100-1 against us getting that crucial bit of information. And, sure enough, when the data was dropped, it lacked that. All it told us was what we already knew – that Twitter came up with an absurd excuse out of the Safety group and the story was gone.

Now, to be sure, they did say that political operatives – including some Republicans – had made various requests to suppress this or that account. But they still didn’t name any names. Likely because if we had an idea who had been calling before Laptop, we could eventually figure out who called for Laptop. Because as far as that goes, it had to be someone who knew about it – so, likely DOJ and/or Team Pudding Brain made that call.

And keep in mind that even if you want to say that fraud played no role in 2020, the suppression of this story did. It is absolutely hideous. Had it been about Don, Jr then Trump would have been lucky to crack 40% on election day. China Joe’s son is hip deep in federal crimes based on info on that laptop…and the pictures are downright disgusting. It was a candidacy-killer. Had it been given the normal play a story like that gets, these days Joe’s lawyers would be arguing he’s senile and so isn’t fit to stand trial. It was killed because to save Biden and get Trump out, it had to be killed. And, yes, this does make it even money that senior GOPers played a role in suppressing the story.

Until we get that info, its all pretty pointless. Musk says there is more to come – so, let’s hope. But I have my doubts that the truth will come out…because, remember, a lot of laws get broken in campaign offices and law enforcement agencies when you coordinate with media to favor one party over the other in a political campaign. A lot of well-placed people will be in jeopardy if it all comes out.

Apple CEO Tim Cook dodged questions about Apple’s relationship with China – because what else could he do? You do business in China and the Chinese own you. They have your factory. They control your labor force and supplies. If you don’t toe the PRC line, you’ll lose everything. And that is before the PRC gets you in-country, indulges any perversions you have and gets it all on video.

I’ve thought for decades that America having relations with tyrannical regimes is a huge mistake – we poison ourselves when we do that. Either we believe in our Declaration or we don’t. If we do, then we can’t hold that the PRC is a legitimate government – it is a mafia with an army. And you can’t make honest deals with the mob. We should, step by step, de-couple ourselves from all unfree nations.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan40 Comments

Elon Musk admitted that he voted Biden in 2020. A lot of people are taking this as a bad thing but for the first time I think we might have something here. Like most rich people, Musk moves in circles that are heavily liberal and he also, being rich, doesn’t have to worry about things…so, to such a person, the grand plans to “save the world” both sound good and are cost-free. Rich people are the easiest people to get on board with liberal ideology. But every now and again a rich guy has a wake-up call.

Think about what Musk has seen in the past few weeks: the liberals whom he thought of as the good guys are now trying to get Twitter deplatformed on the Ap store. Team Pudding Brain is threatening investigations. Liberals who viewed Musk previously as some sort of demi-god are turning on him viciously. In and amongst all that, Musk has obtained a first-hand look at how Twitter has operated. As CEO, there is nothing that anyone at Twitter gets to hide from him…and from what he’s saying on Twitter, my guess is that he did ask…and found out that Twitter’s “safety” staff were nothing more than Stalinists looking for any excuse to stifle dissent. These people were all let go by Musk. About 90 percent of Twitter’s staff was let go…and its still running just fine. What all this boils down to is that Musk might be, for the first time in his life, really getting a look at the mentality of a liberals and finding that it is ignorant, self-centered and cruel. I doubt that Musk will ever go MAGA, but he might become someone we can rely on in the fight for liberty.

Musk is also growing disillusioned with the MSM, and that’s a good thing. The trouble is that plenty of people – including some on the right – still believe the MSM to one degree or another. At this link you’ll see that someone put together a bunch of local news broadcasts with the subject of disinformation and the threat it poses to “our Democracy”. The MSMers all say the same thing. It is a script – and it must come out from a central source. Someone orders the MSM what to say and it gets said. With this, what they count on is that nobody sees the other broadcasts – and, of course, most won’t. So it will seem to be something that your local news guys all thought up on their own…but in the modern world, that sort of thing can get found out. Trouble is, we lack a genuine national Conservative broadcast/cable outfit that can give max exposure on such things. This sort of rank propaganda would have made Goebbles blush. It also, shows, in case you weren’t sure, how entirely mindless the news readers are – their only qualifications are the ability to look and sound good on TV. If a thought ever passed through their heads it would be the first time. And it is something we do need to take action on – can we really hold that the First Amendment was designed to protect that sort of thing? Is it really free speech – freedom of the press – when mindless drones are just repeating the talking points a political party handed off to them? Shouldn’t that at least count as an in-kind political donation? Shouldn’t they have to disclose they aren’t news organizations but merely party propagandists?

WEF’s Klaus Schwab declares China to be a role model. The same China building concentration camps – allegedly for Covid quarantine but that’s just the cover story: dissent is growing in China and the ChiComs are building places to put dissidents. I did a little looking into Schwab and he’s just a rich guy. He comes from an exceptionally privileged background and he’s certain he knows how to fix us. Not make us happy: he doesn’t care about that. But he does want us to cease being an inconvenience.

Been saying for a while now that I really do understand the Jacobins. Some people just earn a trip in a tumbril.

NASA says we’ll live on the Moon by 2030. I think we might be hanging out there for periods of time – as with Mars, we can’t live there: too much radiation and too little gravity. We just sent our first capsule to the Moon since Apollo – unmanned whip around the Moon. Which I don’t understand in the least – seems a complete waste of money and a perfectly good spacecraft. We’ve already been there. If we’ve got a ship that can do it, send people. But, anyways, unmanned – as will the next couple. Then we send people in a flyby. The plan is to put people back on the surface in 2026.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan38 Comments

After Trump has his announcement speech, quite a bit of Catholic Twitter had a debate about Trump’s call to execute drug dealers. As you might recall, I long ago decided to oppose the death penalty. My grounds for that were that mercy should always triumph over justice and that I don’t really trust the government with the power to execute citizens. I’m still of that opinion but the debate got me thinking.

A hundred thousand people died of drug overdoses in the USA in the year ending April of 2021. That was a big jump – more than 25 percent – from the year before. But lets say the jump was temporary and in a normal year 70,000 die. That’s still a lot. More than 190 a day. And that doesn’t cover all the drug deaths – we’d also have to include all murders related in the first or second degree to drugs (ie, drug trade people killing each other over drugs as well as drug addicts who commit crimes – including murder – to support their addiction). Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of stiffs.

How many people would die of drug overdoses next year if this year we hung a thousand drug dealers?

It needs to be thought about. A lot of people are in the drug trade because it is a low-risk, high profit enterprise. They start tuning in each day to see a couple drug dealers were hanged, it might make them seek other lines of work. Can anyone know for certain that we wouldn’t immediately get a thousand replacements for the thousand we hung? No. But suppose we did so and it made it 50 percent less likely that a druggie can get his drugs at any given time? Hang 1,000 criminals, save 35,000 lives?

What it comes down to is how we will view both Justice and Mercy. I have my growing suspicion that softness on crime is neither Just nor Merciful – and not only unjust and merciless to the victims, but especially unjust and merciless to the criminal. I do believe it is crucial to provide a way out even for the worst criminals…but by the time we’re on a guy’s fifth arrest for drug dealing, I think we might be dealing with someone rather incorrigible. It is something to think about.

Looks like the House will be a 222-213 split. The GOP is pledging investigations of Biden and we’ll see if they really do it or just go through the motions. Meanwhile the bed-wetters are upset with us – saying that we should ignore Biden’s crimes and get legislating! Morons. The last thing we want is legislation – though we do look forward to zeroing out the budget for the Special Counsel Garland just appointed to investigate Trump for the millionth time. Also those 87,000 new IRS agents. The Special Counsel was appointed, by the way, to give the MSM something else to report about if the House investigations of Biden prove to have teeth.

Maricopa – it was either cheating or the most fabulously incompetent election ever held. And don’t think that people won’t be purposefully incompetent. It is nearly as effective as box-stuffing and if done right it keeps you away from any legal jeopardy. Bottom line: cheating or incompetence kept Kari Lake out of the governorship. And as the person running the election was Lake’s opponent…kinda makes you go with cheating-via-incompetence. Certainly Abe Hamadeh coming up just short after late ballot drops is highly suspicious…but if you’re cheating the new governor in you’d better make sure you cheat in your guy as AG. No doubt things are screwy – the good news is that Hobbs is a zero and her legislature will be GOP controlled.

Elon Musk is conducting a poll on Twitter about reinstating Trump – as of this moment, 3.9 million votes, 56 percent for reinstating Trump but that is down from 60 percent earlier.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan46 Comments

For the second time in recent months, Paul Pelosi is in trouble because he got hammered.

It is a very strange story – supposedly, this weirdo in his underwear managed to gain access to the Pelosi’s manse in a heavily guarded area of San Francisco…nobody saw the guy in his underwear coming in! Then both underwear-guy and Paul got hammers…and then it gets a little foggy. Police reports indicate that Paul called about the man but said he was waiting for Nancy to get home and then the police show up and only then does underwear-guy attack…supposedly severely injuring Paul.

The Capitol Police have been called in…which makes no sense as they lack any jurisdiction…but if you want to control the investigation, having a police force tied to your office is really cool.

Gay lover spat? Mere political set up so they can blame the GOP? Who the heck knows.

Elon Musk owns Twitter – so far, nothing much has changed except for one thing: for the first time since I created my account in 2015 the things Twitter suggest to me are relevant. And I mean it: not once in the past 7+ years has a Twitter suggestion been anything remotely interesting to me. And not just the fact that for politics they’re always pushing liberals my way…for sports I get soccer, which is just so similar to hockey, I guess. For food I get Vegan stuff…which might go well with my pot roast. I get super-hero movies suggested when I’m more of a bio-pic/war drama kind of guy. On and on like that – and all wasted effort as I’ve never clicked a suggested link. Until today: when miracle of miracles, a video from Kari Lake was suggested to me. If this is all Elon does, then it is worth it.

Now, as for the permanently banned: Musk is saying that is under review. Already Corporate America is warning they’ll pull advertising if Trump’s account is restored. I doubt that Musk would really care. The only account everyone is saying must be restored is Gay Patriot’s. He went through about a score of them before he gave up. We want his original account back – Twitter just isn’t the same without his acid takes on the issues of the day.

The liberal melt-down about it has been wonderful, as you might expect. And with the fear of banning fading, people are back to their old tricks…one of the MSMers reporting from Twitter headquarters got trolled by two people claiming to be fired Twitter employees. Their names? Ligma and Johnson (I’ll give you a minute).

What has been most funny is the liberal insistence that Musk breaking the shackles of Twitter censorship is fascism. I’m deadly serious here: that is exactly what they’re calling it. Lots of them are saying they are leaving but I doubt that will happen, or last long for those who do. For people who like fast-paced, topical social media, Twitter is king. It really is a clever system when you get down to it. Truth Social and others do ok at it, but even as they improve their product, they simply can’t get around Twitter’s head start in users. Musk says it will become part of a comprehensive social media platform – which may or may not wind up being a good thing, but as he’s taking it private, only he gets to say what will be what.

The Democrats latest hopium is early voting numbers out of Clark County, Nevada. The nutshell: Democrats are doing well with mail-in votes and this presages a Democrat resurgence in front of November 8th. Two flaws in the theory: Clark County turnout is down massively…the other bit is that rural Nevada hasn’t reported a single early vote. So, the Democrat stronghold is depressed and we don’t even know what the most GOP part of the State looks like.

The Oz-Fetterman debate seems to have finished off Fetterman. In every poll taken since the debate, Oz has been in the lead. The official word is that ticket splitters will award Oz the Senate seat and the Democrat the governorship. The Official Narrative being that the GOP candidate there is just too extreme. I guess we’ll find out. But Oz was “too extreme” until a couple days ago. Meanwhile, Democrats are now pouring resources into New Hampshire…which has been officially in the bag for the Democrats since June or so. I think NH and WA will be the GOP upsets. But, we’ll see!

Oh, and Democrats: the GOP looks certain to win at least 52 Senate seats. Could go as high as 55 if they get the breaks. But, as they say, there’s more! In the 2024 cycle Democrats will be defending seats in (are you ready?) Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. Yes, as a matter of fact, I am pointing and laughing at you. That is 10 – count ’em, ten – vulnerable Senate seats. But, don’t feel too bad…after all the GOP will be backs-to-the-wall defending seats in Alabama and Wyoming.

To make it clear to you: you’re screwed. If you’re lucky then by 2025 you’ll be looking at a Senate which only has 60 GOP Senators. It could be as high as 65.

And here’s what will really grind your gears: if you hadn’t cheated to win in 2020, then this year you’d probably be getting a net-gain of 4 and in 2024 your loses probably would have been in the 3-5 range.

Was Trump really that bad?