Lesko Brandon took bold decisive action to help me with rising gas prices. There’s just one catch: he wants to void my vehicle warranty.
I drive a 2017 Hyundai Sonata. The owner’s manual says I can use gasoline with a maximum of 10% ethanol. In Minnesota, that’s ordinary 87 octane gas but under the new plan I’m supposed to burn 88 octane (aka E15 because it contains 15% ethanol and therefore is slightly cheaper). Except I called the dealership and they said flat out, no, that’s not approved and using it will void my warranty. Save a nickel? Void my warranty? Hmmm.
It’s almost as if there is a plan of foot to destroy literally everything about America, starting with the constitutional system at the top, working its way down to every single thing you and I own.
Now, I don’t pry into other peoples personal healthcare decisions, and I’m pretty merciless to any idiot who tries to yap about mine.
But it’s worth noting that Dr. Jensen, though not vaccinated, appears to have missed zero days of work or campaigning due to Covid.
In the meantime, the people who run this state – Lt. Governor Flanagan and her figurehead, the…uh, somewhat comorbid Tim Walz – have both had Covid and been off the job in the past couple years.
Correlation – especially with three data points – isn’t causation.
But it’s a better correlation than the one data point the PiPress ran with.
I caught the subtle gaslighting; in Democrat communications lately, upporting your current flavor is “courage“. I’m sure that will log roll at least a couple of gullible people who don’t think that hard.
But since The laws we already have, against straw purchases and trafficking guns to known felons, and using guns to commit crimes, and for that matter shooting up a car with your family in it, aren’t being enforced in cities run by your party, how about you have the “bravery“ to do the executive branches enumerated job, and enforce the laws we already have?
It’s a little harder than gaslighting the Republican majority in the Senate and a state full of gun owners, but it is your job.
Went to a graduation ceremony Friday evening. All the talk was about grad parties lacking balloons. There’s a helium shortage. Why?
Helium is made at a plant in Texas. It’s regulated by the federal government, the Bureau of Land Management. They shut it down in January. Still not open.
No word on whether they will be air – lifting helium from Germany. Maybe they could use a zeppelin?
Can we please acknowledge some obvious and simple truths? Guns don’t shoot people. People with guns shoot people. But not all people with guns shoot people, some of us have owned guns for decades without shooting anybody. And sometimes people shooting other people is perfectly justified and should have happened sooner, as in that Texas school.
The problem is bad people with guns shooting people. That means the real problem is not the guns; the real problem is the bad people. Take away the guns and they’re still bad people, still willing to do bad things.
Bad people are not an epidemic. There is no treatment. There is no cure. Best we can do is remove Bad People from society, keeping the rest of us safe.
Long term imprisonment. Death penalty. Vigilante justice. The old remedies are the only effective remedies for bad behavior committed by bad people. And everybody knows it, whether they’re willing to admit it, or not.
Joe Doakes
This, in fact, may be the most exhausting thing about being a gun rights activist; the population of gun grab activists (below the national level) recycles every 2 to 3 years.
And so every few years, you get to Saint deal with the same lies, clichés and emotion driven fallacies all over again.
I’ve probably noted this elsewhere, but I don’t’ think it can be overstated: the reason that the first Obama Administration spent so much time and effort barbering about “white supremacist terror” was to start projecting fault on the phantom menace to draw attention away from the mass of leftist thugs that Big Left was in the process of unleashing on society.
Events this week show I’m onto something.
Pro-infanticide terrorists in Buffalo firebomb a crisis pregnancy center – one of several such incidents nationwide lately:
The arsonists left graffiti on a wall that read, “Jane Was Here.” The organization has committed multiple such incidents in the last few months, including one in which it firebombed the headquarters of Wisconsin Family Action (WFA), a pro-life group in Madison, Wis. last month. There, the terrorists left the message, “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either.”
…
Jane’s Revenge also admitted that it threw red paint on the the front door of a crisis pregnancy center in Washington, D.C. last week, spray painting “Jane Says Revenge” on the side of the building.
Here, locally? “Anti”-Fa torches the truck of a contractor who helped the city evict a homeless camp, takes credit:
It’s culminated – for now (?) – with the Democrat hit man who, incited by Chuck Schumer’s rhetoric (specifically calling out Justice Kavanaugh for the attention of extremists) and the partisan leak of a draft of the Dobbs decision and the likely outcome of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association case, rangered up and went cross-country with the stated intent to kill the justice and intimidate the court.
The punk will get virtually no sentence; his crime, little media attention outside the conservative media. Big Left will blather on about “imminent waves of right wing / “white supremacist” terror”, while waves of leftists burn more cities, and eventually just through weight of numbers kill more conservatives.
And Big Left and its media toadies will befrenzy themselves over episodes like Charlottestown and January 6, while ignoring events like this – which are themselves every bit as great a threat to democrach.
If people don’t get law and order – and, more importantly, equality before the law – in exchange for all of the taxes and civil liberties we give up – or, perhaps worse, realistically believe that there are two separate, unequal justice systems – they are going to get it for themselves.
For the better part of six months, the fighting in the Donbas and Don regions of southern Russia and southeastern Ukraine had been a slowly turning meatgrinder of White Russians, Red Bolsheviks, Cossacks and Ukrainians of all political stripes. Despite being the main front of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) with the Volunteer Army that had risen from the first days of Bolshevik rule, the Whites had been consistently outgunned and outmanned. The Volunteer Army had at best 26,000-35,000 men, but were led by experienced Tsarist-era officers, including their commanding officer, General Anton Denikin. The Bolshevik forces in the area numbered perhaps two-to-one to their White counterparts, but were generally less knowledgeable in military tactics and distracted by their role in invading and occupying the crumbling Ukrainian People’s Republic. Both sides were increasingly mistrusted by an weary populace that had gone through five years of epic bloodshed and deprivation.
In mid-May of 1919, the tide however looked to turn. Soldiers of the Volunteer Army and the “Don Army”, essentially Cossack shock troops, had won a number of victories but the Bolsheviks had always seemingly managed to regroup and counterattack. Yet the Ukrainian front for the Reds had stalled, with the Ukrainians even able to regain some key territory, meaning fresh Bolshevik troops were being deployed elsewhere. When the White Cossack cavalry attacked this time, the four Russian armies in the region collapsed, with the 9th Army in particular being cut in two and destroyed. The path to central Ukraine and Russia now lay open.
On July 3rd, 1919, The White Russian movement was at it’s zenith and the Bolsheviks appeared to be at their military nadir. Victorious across most of his front, General Denikin issued Directive No. 08878 to his armies – an attack on Moscow itself. The goal was nothing less than the end of the Russian Civil War.
Bolshevik leadership – Lenin is pictured in the center
The political consolidation of the White Russian movement in the winter of 1918/1919 had done nothing to immediately impact the war on the ground. The Siberian All-Russian Provisional Government of Admiral Alexander Kolchak remained massively removed from the southern Russian/Caucasus forces of the AFSR, but was nevertheless a small light of hope for any anti-Bolshevik forces at an otherwise dark stage in the Russian Civil War. The Soviets had invaded almost all of their neighboring countries and were victorious on all fronts, including expanding out from their holdings in central Russia and clawing back gains from the small, disorganized White forces. By the start of 1919, the Soviets looked as though they might reunify the Tsarist-era lands of the Russian Empire relatively quickly and expand their influence throughout Europe as Germany and then Hungary both experienced communist revolutions. (more…)
After Reagan’s speech at Westminster, historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union — elite thinkers in American higher education — in a book titled “After Brezhnev.”Their conclusion: Any thought of winning the Cold War was a fantasy. “The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government,” Byrnes said in an interview. “We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system.”
Of course, Reagan was right:
Within a decade — on Christmas Day, 1991 — Mikhail Gorbachev announced the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union. The 40-year-old Cold War came to a peaceful end because American democratic capitalism had laid bare the economic, moral, and spiritual bankruptcy of Soviet communism. As Reagan told an adviser when asked about his policy toward the Soviet Union: “We win, they lose.”
But now is not a time for nostalgia.
Forty years ago, the cancer destroying freedom was an external enemy.
Today the enemy – the same enemy, if you think about it – is here, within our borders, at our Capitol.
Forty years ago, the same egghead class that is canceling conservatives on campus was poo-poohing the thought that Communism would ever go away.
We need another leader – or group off leaders – who can envision eradicating the cancer that is eating life, prosperity…freedom, from within, just as certainly as the Soviets did (if with less bloodshed – so far), and lead toward that goal with the same exuberance and confidence.
Recall is a particularly good word in this case. He was a defective prosecutor. Among his innovations was the elimination of cash bail, the nonprosecution of a large swath of property crimes, the toleration of open-air drug dealing, and the facilitation of San Francisco’s continued descent into third-world hellhole status.
I was going to ask “will this cause other Soros/Bloomberg spawn like Keith Ellison to change anything?” Adjust messages, yes; even Ellison has to be seeing that devastating internal polling. Actual substantial long-term policy changes? Of course not; “progressivism” is eternal.
Still – it shows there’s a point beyond which even the most addled progressives, sometimes, might not let things get pushed.
I feel better when I can look back on all I’ve done, after a few weeks or years, and think “I may not have many standards, but I upheld them, doggone it“.
It’s not something I especially seek to change about myself.
But I’m only human.
So when I see statements like this from the likes of Keith Oberman – a person who “achieved “way more influence than anyone who came up talking about grown men chasing balls around fields deserves…:
And you know this from graffiti you saw in some park bathroom or what, Assclown?
I’m thinking Gunsmith School sounds good. Saw it on a matchbook cover. Probably be lots of demand for my services and get paid in cash, after Democrats ban legally-owned guns.
Joe Doakes
I’m going to guess that the base value of a academic program Will increase by $10,000 in the next few years.
Senator Ron Latz went to Harvard. Did you know that?
Anyway – here he is, talking about the new “public safety” / gun grab bill.
Well, sort of:
SHOCKING VIDEO: Senator Ron Latz says that those who oppose gun control are "EXACTLY THE ONES" that government needs to worry about. pic.twitter.com/zsocQKmrvE
— MN Gun Owners Caucus (@mnguncaucus) June 7, 2022
Dear Democrats: it’s your duty to run on this, this fall. Every candidate, every race.
Seriously: Republicans, statewide: somebody needs to put this on signs, buttons and t-shirts. The good guys and gals need to hammer every Democrat with this, every appearance, every race, between now and November.
The city of St. Paul recorded its 19th homicide Friday night after officers conducting a welfare check in the city’s Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood found a man dead from a gunshot wound.
A statement released by SPPD said officers were dispatched to a senior living apartment building on the 700 block of East Seventh Street just before 7 p.m.
They arrived, made entry into the apartment and found the man, who is believed to be in his late 50s. Initially, it was unclear to the officers if the injury was self-inflicted or caused by someone else, but after members of the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office and our forensic services unit responded and gathered more information and evidence, it became clear that someone had shot the man.
Just for reference, Saint Paul had 38 homicides – the worst butcher’s bill in 25 years, and an alarming death toll in its own terms.
If we continue at our current pace, the city will have 43 in 2022.
(this is an old D-Day piece of mine, I thought I’d share it with SitD in this 78th D-Day Anniversary…)
How many times have I heard an athlete praised for exhibiting courage? This kind of grandiloquence is especially prevalent in football.
Numerous awards throughout football list courage as one of the traits they recognize. It is said it takes courage for a player to play with injuries. It is said a quarterback displays courage in standing in to throw a pass knowing he is about to be knocked silly by a linebacker.
I would humbly suggest we ought to be more careful in the way we use certain words.
The film Saving Private Ryan is a visceral and brutal homage to the sacrifices made by so many young men in the service of their country.
Scenes at the beginning and end of the movie take place in the American cemetery near Colleville-sur-mer. The cemetery sits on the bluffs above Omaha Beach, looking down on what was Easy Red sector. The name was half right.
I visited this cemetery a few years ago. After leaving the bus, I passed through a protective ring of trees, and there came upon row after row of gleaming white crosses and Stars of David.
The grounds are immaculate. The hedges are neatly trimmed, the grass carefully clipped, the water in the reflecting pool clean. The serene beauty of that hallowed place is a seductive contrast to the unspeakable ugliness that laid those men in their graves.
I walked the peaceful paths, and looked down on the beautiful beach, and I thought what a debt we owe. So many of my fellow Americans went through such anguish and terror just to stand where I was standing then. And this cemetery represents only one corner of the war, the casualties from a few weeks of fighting in NW France. How many other cemeteries are there that hold the remains of soldiers who fought so I wouldn’t have to?
As the vivid colors of the present pale into shades of gray, as memories of the deeds of generations of American soldiers gently fade into the past, may we never take for granted the freedom we enjoy in this country. May we always remember the price so many paid for that freedom.
I don’t deny it takes willpower and discipline for a football player to play with pain. But the next time we hear such a performance described as courageous, remember what happened on a Norman beach that Tuesday morning in June 1944.
After hours at sea, thousands of young men climbed over the side of their transports, and in the pitching seas descended into the landing craft. When the boats reached the shore, the ramps went down, and the world those soldiers knew changed forever.
Many were shot down before they even left their boats. Many drowned in the ocean under the weight of their equipment. Machine guns, mortar shells, and German artillery turned Omaha Beach into a killing field. Bodies and pieces of bodies were everywhere. Those who saw Omaha later that day said they could almost walk across the beach without touching the sand.
But those who survived the initial hell made their way across the beach to take shelter at the seawall and beneath the cliffs. Wet, cold, many of them wounded, without a coherent command structure, the broken bodies of their comrades and brothers all around; those soldiers could have given up. They didn’t. In small groups they blew holes in the wire, made their way through minefields, climbed the bluffs and secured the beachhead.
On Friday, HBO’s Bill Maher made clear the Uvalde school attacker’s advantage was not the type of gun he used but the amount of time he had to use it.
Maher said, “I mean, this kid was in the room for 40 minutes before anybody came in. It wouldn’t have mattered what kind of gun he had. Any kind of gun could do any amount of damage in that time.”
Grandpa’s break action double barrel shotgun, A colt single action revolver, or with an average of one shot every two minutes, a muzzle loading musket would’ve all had the same affect as the shooters AR15.
Suppose you are an investor looking for a safe investment. You want some collateral for your investment, something the borrower has a strong interest in keeping and thus, a strong interest in paying the loan guaranteed by the collateral.
Mortgage-backed securities are great. People might fail to pay on their credit card bills but they don’t fail to pay their home mortgages. And if they do, the lender can simply foreclose and sell the home. This investment is literally “safe as houses.”
But buying a mortgage means paying off the bank to receive an assignment. You have to pay the entire balance due up front. That is expensive and you take all the risk of one homeowner defaulting. But if the lender were to pool all its mortgages together, you could buy a share of the pool for a smaller investment and reduced risk of default. In fact, if you only wanted the stream of interest payments generated by the mortgage and not the repayment of principal, you could buy in for an even smaller price. Your investment is technically not backed by the mortgage, it’s backed by the lender’s promise that the pool of mortgages is sound, but your payments are a derivative of the mortgages so it’s still a pretty safe investment.
Until it isn’t. If interest rates fall and everybody in your pool of adjustable-rate mortgages refinances to a lower fixed rate mortgage, they no longer make interest payments to you. And if the economy has a hiccup, marginal borrowers (who shouldn’t have qualified for loans in the first place) begin to default. That’s what happened in 2006 and it led to the real estate crash that lasted a decade and required billions in TARP bailouts, mostly for overseas lenders (and a few domestic corporations which hastily reorganized themselves as ‘banks’ to grab a slice of the pie – looking at you, Chrysler).
Lesson learned – don’t invest in derivatives. Except the housing market depends on investors to generate the funds to lend to borrowers to buy houses. If nobody invests, nobody can get loans, the housing market collapses. So the Federal Reserve stepped up and began to buy mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by a pool of mortgages. Safe as houses, right?
Maybe not. The Fed apparently didn’t foresee the Lesko Brandon Administration dumping billions of dollars into the economy in stimulus payments. Too many dollars chasing too few goods equals inflation and not just a little, the highest in decades. The Fed’s purchase of mortgage-backed securities inflated housing prices while racking up a mountain of debt instruments which cannot be repaid in this inflationary economy. It’s unsustainable but this time, we won’t be bailing out HSBC, Deutsche Bank or Royal Bank of Scotland, this time it’s the Fed itself which will go bankrupt. When that happens, the value of the American dollar disappears.
Don’t take my word for it. Read this article for yourself. Tell me where the author goes wrong. I’d genuinely like to know that his fears are groundless, that everything is rosy, that Uncle Joe will soon be riding in on a unicorn handing out ham sandwiches to save the day. Cuz I’m not seeing it, myself.
In his, er, “speech” last night, President Dementio McGropey opened by saying what every “progressive” says: “I’m not coming for your guns” [1]
He then went on to say:
We need to:
Ban assault weapons — and if we can’t, then we should raise the age to purchase them from 18 to 21.
Ban high-capacity magazines.
Strengthen background checks.
Enact safe storage laws and red flag laws.
Repeal gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability.
— President Biden Archived (@POTUS46Archive) June 2, 2022
So…they’re not taking guns, except for the ones they’re taking?
But go ahead, Democrats: Ignore the economy, inflation, war, shortages of essentials, the collapsing supply chain, the housing shortage and the collapse of the middle class (even more than you already do).
The 59-year-old superstar just got his first $100 million opening weekend with “Top Gun: Maverick.” In its first three days in North American theaters, the long-in-the-works sequel earned an estimated $124 million in ticket sales, Paramount Pictures said Sunday. Including international showings, its worldwide total is $248 million…“These results are ridiculously, over-the-top fantastic,” said Chris Aronson, Paramount’s president of domestic distribution. “I’m happy for everyone. I’m happy for the company, for Tom, for the filmmakers.”
Was it because it was the first post-Pandemic tentpole picture?
But even as the months, and years, went by and many other companies chose to compromise on hybrid releases, Cruise and Paramount didn’t waver on their desire to have a major theatrical release. A streaming debut was simply not an option.
Was it because the pandemic gave it a three year marketing runway?
“This is one of the longest runways for a marketing campaign for any film ever. And it only served to create more excitement around the movie,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “This movie literally waited for the movie theater to come back.”
Was it because it wasn’t another Godforsaken comic book superhero movie? Truth be told, that’s almost enough reason to go to Maverick all by itself. The endless comic book franchise isliving evidence of Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy. I haven’t been to one since the first X-Men and Spiderman (the Toby McGuire/Kirsten Dunst one) movies.
Or could it be because it’s the first tentpole movie since American Sniper that isn’t an endless parade of woke tropes, a movie that isn’t afraid to show masculinity, merit, patriotism and military values as virtues rather than punch lines?
Fearless prediction: look for Woke Hollywood to try to simultaneously undercut and exploit this.
