Says. It. ALL
Another via Divemedic that really, truly is the last word.
Time for our favorite song!!! You know the words, sing along. pic.twitter.com/MEj6eyPVxM
— Commonsenseprevails (@Commonsensepre2)
He shoots, he SCORES!
Category: WINNING!
Losing more slowly with the Stupid Party
Market reality takes command
As a WaPo headline cheekily put it many years ago: they’re the car of the future…and they always will be.
‘EV Euphoria Is Dead’: CNBC Declares Transition to Electric Vehicles Has Failed
CNBC has admitted that the attempted transition from gas-powered to electric vehicles (EVs) has failed.The business-focused news channel explained in a piece on Wednesday that “EV euphoria is dead” and that the largest automakers are drastically scaling back their plans.
The piece read:
For years, the automotive industry has been in a state of EV euphoria. Automakers trotted out optimistic sales forecasts for electric models and announced ambitious targets for EV growth. Wall Street boosted valuations for legacy automakers and startup entrants alike, based in part on their visions for an EV future.
Now the hype is dwindling, and companies are again cheering consumer choice. Automakers from Ford Motor and General Motors to Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Jaguar Land Rover and Aston Martin are scaling back or delaying their electric vehicle plans. Even U.S. EV leader Tesla, which is estimated to have accounted for 55% of EV sales in the country in 2023, is bracing for what “may be a notably lower” rate of growth, CEO Elon Musk said in late January.
The report goes on to outline some of the principal reasons why the market is struggling and concedes that the Biden administration overestimated the willingness of consumers to make the switch from traditional gas-powered vehicles:
After significant interest from early EV adopters — bolstered by low interest rates and Tesla’s rise — interest rates skyrocketed, raw materials costs surged and the vehicles became much more expensive compared with their traditional counterparts.
It’s also become clear that the automotive industry and the Biden administration, which set its own target for half of new U.S. vehicle sales to be electric by 2030, overestimated the willingness of consumers to adopt a new technology without a reliable and prevalent charging infrastructure.
Such an article points to the growing resignation among progressives and advocates of electric vehicles that their proposals do not make economic sense.
So? When have they ever? But the attempt to jam CPVs (Coal Powered Vehicles) down our throats was never about “economic sense” anyway, nor was it really about Saving Mommy Gaia©. This latest farcical iteration of the regularly-recurring flirtation with the electric-car fantasy was only ever about one thing, and one thing alone: power, and control. This was nothing more nor less than the Überstadt flexing its muscles, determined to show its lowly Serf Class who was boss—a show of force by Leviathan intended to establish once and for all who wields ultimate power around here, and who must accede to whom.
Happily, after a piss-poor Scamdemic showing, a large number of Normal Americans finally responded with a bland shrug and a yawn once the initial curiosity-generating hype had subsided—enough of them to elbow the horrendously expensive, unreliable, and dangerous ‘Splodeycar play-purties out of mass-market consideration and back into the garage, lowering and locking the door, then turning out the lights behind them to re-embrace the time-tested and proven, superior, and far more practical ICE technology they had come to rely on for convenient, dependable transportation.
Until next time the EV will o’ the wisp is trotted out to be foisted upon them by too-big, too-powerful government, that is—which, it’s a lead-pipe cinch that there’s gonna be one. Count on it, friends: as the Terminator vowed, they’ll be back. Like Leftards themselves, they’ll never really go away, not for very long.
New band
Well, supergroup, really.
With an all-star lineup like this, how could they possibly fail to rocket to the top of every chart and stay there? Well, except for one sad impediment, as Glenn explains: “ONLY TWO OUT OF THE THREE CAN STILL REMEMBER THE LYRICS.” Heh. Indeed.
The incomparable Grace Kelly
A few little-known facts about one of the hottest babes EVAR.
3 of 7 A Failed Screen Test Fueled Her Later Success
Sometime between 1950 and 1952 (sources differ on the year), Kelly auditioned for the part of a desperate Irish woman in a New York City-based drama called Taxi (1953). She was passed over for the role, but her screen test eventually found its way to celebrated director John Ford, who lobbied for the little-known actress to be included in his high-profile adventure film Mogambo (1953). Separately, Alfred Hitchcock also saw something intriguing in the same Taxi screen test, leading to Kelly’s first true starring role, in Dial M for Murder (1954).4 of 7 She Enjoyed a Running Gag With Alec Guinness
As told in Spoto’s High Society, Kelly and Alec Guinness engaged in a running gag that lasted more than two decades after their time together on the prank-filled set of The Swan (1956). After Kelly relentlessly teased her co-star about an overzealous fan, Guinness retaliated by having a concierge slip a tomahawk into her hotel bed. A few years later, Guinness was surprised to return to his London home and discover the same tomahawk nestled between his bedsheets. He later enlisted English actor John Westbrook to redeliver the item while Kelly and Westbrook toured the U.S. for a poetry reading during the 1970s, but her highness got the last laugh when Guinness again found the tomahawk in his Beverly Hills hotel bed in 1979.5 of 7 Her Romance With Prince Rainier Got Off to a Rocky Start
Per High Society, Kelly was in France to attend the 1955 Cannes Film Festival when she agreed to travel to Monaco to meet Prince Rainier III (part of a scheme put together by the magazine Paris-Match for a photo story). However, the prince was delayed by a commitment elsewhere, and by the time he rushed back to his palace an hour late, his fed-up guest was ready to leave. When Rainier asked if she wanted to tour the palace, Kelly coolly replied that she’d already done so while waiting. They subsequently relaxed while walking through the palace garden, their brief meeting giving rise to an epistolary friendship that turned romantic, and eventually led to their “wedding of the century” in April 1956.
I like Kelly enough to have cobbled myself together a custom desktop pic of her juxtaposed against the NYC skyline many years ago, complete with P-shopped-in lightning bolt, which is still proudly in use to this very day. To wit:
Lasses just don’t come much lovelier and more winsome than Grace Kelly, the likes of which they just aren’t making nowadays, more’s the pity.
Update! Might’s well throw in the two other GK desktops I made at the same time as the above one, these two complete with pithy, apt quotes.
My God, as can be seen in Numero the Second, even Grace’s feet were flawlessly beautiful. And just like that, it occurs to me that I really need to set up the iMac’s desktop-pic-switching automagickal function to alternate randomly between these three. If you can’t squint hard enough to read the two quotes, the first is from Mark Twain: ”What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.”
The bottom words of eternal wisdom come from Farrah Fawcett (!!): “God gave women intuition and femininity. Used properly, the combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I’ve ever met.” True brilliance and insight from what many would consider a most unlikely source, eh?
The greatest story ever told
When it comes to guitars, at any rate.
“So many people lost their guitars. I lost 44”: Peter Frampton recalls how he lost and recovered guitars through floods and plane crashes as he shows off his eye-watering gear collection on Gibson TV
Gibson TV has released its latest episode of The Collection – a web series that sees the firm sit down with big name players to pick apart their vintage guitar gear, and reflect on the stories behind each historic piece.For its newest hour-and-a-half installment, Gibson’s Mark Agnesi visited Peter Frampton to explore the guitars behind some of his most iconic cuts – as well as recount the tales of loss and recovery that have defined the rock master’s collecting career.
As far as guitar collections go, Frampton’s is especially steeped in history. Not only did he effectively have to restart his guitar collection after losing 44 individual guitars – and numerous pieces of other gear – in a flood in 2010, he also experienced what has become one of the most famous tales of lost-and-found guitars in history.
To that end, the most notable instruments in Frampton’s episode of The Collection are the ones whose histories are interwoven with such stories.
The “Phenix”, for example, takes center stage. The mid-’50s era triple-humbucker Black Beauty Les Paul Custom needs no introduction: as seen on the cover of Frampton Comes Alive!, it is one of the most iconic Les Pauls of all time, and made its way on “just about every track [Frampton] recorded between 1970 and 1980”.
However, in 1980, the “Phenix” went down in a cargo aircraft – which crashed while taking off from Curaçao – and it was believed to have been lost forever. Miraculously, 31 years later, the Les Paul was reunited with its rightful owner after it had been picked up and played over the years by a local musician.
“It was just one of the best feelings in the world,” Frampton recalls of being reunited with the “Phenix”.
Yeah, I just bet it was at that. What a great, heart-warming story, eh? You gotta love it. Didn’t watch the vid, because I almost never do, but I have a sneaking suspicion I may be making an exception in this case.
(Via Lonesome Ed Driscoll)
Hot DOG!
SO, this week’s Screamin’ meemie Monday! post over at the Eyrie surpassed all previous records for page-views, and not by just a little bit, either. Nearly doubled the usual hit count, in fact. Many, many thanks to all you readers and subscribers for that signal achievement, both noob and old-salt alike.
I’m humbled and grateful for how successful you’ve made this little side-venture of mine, particularly the slowly growing handful that felt it was worth succumbing to my piteous beseechments to take out a paid Eyrie sub at whatever price-point.
As I’ve recounted many times over lo, these many years: just when I get to feeling underappreciated, burned out, and tired of the whole thing—caught up in a writerly death-spiral which in turn leads me to seriously consider giving this whole futile web-logging schtick up and walking away for good—that’s always when some unlooked-for, out-of-the-blue something like this comes along to boost my flagging spirits, restoring my determination to keep chugging away at it for a little while longer.
Sincerest thanks again to one and all for making both CF and the Eyrie what they are. To my way of thinking, both my prized little online hogwallows are unique in all of website-dom, with their own special atmosphere, attitude, and style; certainly, I’ve yet to come across any other quite like ‘em out there. Over time, CF especially has developed a flavor distinctly its own—spicy, pungent, with a good, hard kick to it—although admittedly it won’t satisfy every taste. Which, frankly, suits me just fine; in fact, if it DID I’d fret about what I was doing wrong.
I’m very proud of the two Innarnuts spaces I’ve created, and derive YUUUUGE satisfaction from the building, running, and managing of them. I do wish Substack offered more options for customization, functionality (no YewToob/Twatter embeds, guys? SRSLY?) and tweaking the design of the Eyrie. Oh well, maybe someday.
Ultimately, though, whatever I may or may not get myself up to behind the curtains amounts to an exercise in pointless onanism; it’s the readers who truly bring a blog to life, if it is to have one. Without you folks regularly checking in; reading; commenting; emailing me links to potential blog-fodder articles; donating and/or subscribing, there really would be no reason to do this at all.
SOTU follies
Doddering, decrepit old fool.
Mother Of Laken Riley Slams ‘Pathetic’ Biden For Calling Slain Daughter ‘Lincoln Riley’ During SOTU
The mother of Laken Riley, a young woman who was murdered by an illegal immigrant under the Biden administration’s watch, has publicly criticized President Joe Biden for not remembering her daughter’s name during the State of the Union address.The incident by the 81-year-old president has sparked outrage among conservative news outlets and the general public.
During the State of the Union address, Biden was confronted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who demanded that he “say her name” in reference to Laken Riley.
In response, Biden fumbled the pronunciation of Riley’s name, which prompted her mother to speak out against the President.
In several comments posted to Facebook, Riley’s mother said, “It’s just pathetic that the President of the United States couldn’t even remember my daughter’s name. It’s like she didn’t even matter to him.”
Well, I mean, y’know, DUH, lady. Sorry to have to say it and all, but it’s the plain and simple truth, always has been.
Of course I didn’t watch a minute of the stumblebum’s speech—having much more important and productive things to do with my time, like sweeping the kitchen floor, scrubbing the toilet, and/or playing with the cats—but from what I understand, a handful of non-Vichy GOPe Repugnicants like MTG stood up on their hind legs and gave Too Aulde Jaux pure-dee hell, heckling the pRetend ***”pResident”*** with shouts of “say her name!” and “liar!” throughout the State Of The Union Show.
Hey, if national politics is going to be nothing more than entertainment, they at least owe it to us to make it entertaining, right?
Is Woke broke?
I don’t really give a tinker’s damn about the two main topics at hand here—the Wokester incursion into comic books, and Gamergate, whatever the hell that was and/or is—being neither a reader of comic books nor a video game person—but I love the “Cancel Pig” epithet so much I’m running with it anyhoo.
The story: A Boston comic retailer complained that he could not sell a lot of the crap comics the industry was spamming out. (Obviously he is very sensitive to bad, unsaleable comics — they murder the retailers who are tricked into buying them, but then cannot sell them for full price, or even for half price. Comic books are not returnable.)
One major complaint he had was that the nitwit writers were not writing classic, very manly characters like Tony Stark or Steve Rogers in-character. Rather, they substitute their own femmy, Current Year concerns, phobias, and anxieties make man’s men parrot their own Twitter freak-outs.
The typical Cancel Police immediately attempted to cancel this man. They made fun of him for being, well, a comic book fan — he was overweight, older, not-too-stylish, and a bit awkward. One obese comic book writer attacked him for being fat.
A woke black comic book artist — well, a low-level artist — named Jerome Igle decided to brand him a racist, not based on anything he said (he did not mention race at all, nor did he allude to it), but based on the fact that he said this guy reminded him of a disgusting, dirty comic book shop owner he had known who was racist.
See, this guy reminded him of someone else, and that guy (he claims) was racist, so: Q.E.D.
Wow, Jerome — good to see your many, many accusations of racism are built upon a firm foundation.
The cancellation train was beginning to chug along and approaching top speed, when suddenly it ran into a problem: star comic book writer Mark Millar, writer of Kick-Ass, the Kingsmen, and a bunch of bestselling comics turned into movies and TV shows, stepped up and defended the comic shop owner, echoed his complaints about storied characters being written as if they were 25-year-old Twitter Addicts, and castigated people for attempting to cancel a man for merely offering his (unobjectionable) opinion.
Suddenly the comic book “pros” who were attempting to cancel him fell into retreat. The obese comic book writer who’d made fun of the comic shop owner for being overweight now clarified he didn’t mean to call him “fat” as an insult, no, not at all! He had merely called him fat to show that fat comic book nerds should stand in solidarity.
One by one, the would-be cancellers made excuses and softened their objections.
Then Millar coined a new term for then — he called them “Cancel Pigs,” which a pungent, memorable, and highly accurate term for these scumbags. That term, “Cancel Pigs,” has now exploded in popularity and is the most popular way to refer to these miserable fascists.
And rightly so, too. Well, except for the gratuitous insult to actual, y’know, pigs, of the four-legged, oink oink oink, rooting and wallowing in slop persuasion. They’ll just have to bear up under the strain somehow, poor dears. As to whether Woke is finally on the run or not, all I have to say about that is it’s about fucking time.
A kingly gift
SO, last night a close friend of mine bought a dang guitar for me, this lovely Mosrite Joe Maphis-model facsimile, a single-neck reimagining of the original double-neck body style, handcrafted by a young luthier fella out in Monterey, Cullyfornya who’s offering his wares el cheapo on eBay for purposes of getting his work out there and his name established.
Purty, ain’t she? All-mahogany construction, P90s, Bigsby tailpiece (or a clone thereof, probably made of Chinesium, I’d bet), 24-fret neck w/ real-deal abalone inlays, everything a growing boy needs in a guitar.
BACKSTORY: After initially declining, I finally knuckled under and agreed to give my friend’s young son Zachary guitar lessons, an every-Saturday course of instruction which cranked up just over a month ago. Zachary showed willing, revealing some natural aptitude right off, practicing diligently at home, retaining the simple riffs and smattering of music theory I showed him, eager and excited to come down for his weekly lessons instead of the whining, pouting, and foot-dragging you get from some kids.
This encouraging display of studiousness, unfeigned enthusiasm, and potential motivated dear old Dad—now fairly bursting with pride in his son—to buy a mini-Strat starter kit (complete with cable, strap, picks, and even a small amp) for him to use instead of the tired old acoustic student-guitar of mine he’d started out on. The relatively heavy bronze acoustic strings hurt the little guy’s fingers—which, as I warned from Day One, they will do. The lighter-gauge electric strings and slimmer neck-profile will be much easier on him.
Now as I believe I’ve recounted here before, I’ve taken in a good few students over the years, although I’ve never taught a beginner before. Two facts I painstakingly informed all the poor victims who badgered me into taking them on of, from the git-go: 1) I am a truly awful teacher, being a most impatient sort; and 2) I truly, truly HATE teaching. Right down to my very bones, I hate it, I just ain’t cut out for that shit. Hence my stern resistance to inflicting my piss-poor teaching qualities on my friend’s boy, a really sweet, good-natured kid who has known me his entire life as “Uncle Mike.”
Anyhoo, with the acquisition last week of Zachary’s mini-Strat, my bud Zach Sr decided I needed an electric guitar of my own, insisting that I scout around for one at a reasonable price. Z explained this unexpected guitar-buying spree by saying it really made his heart happy to see me re-engaged with playing as a side-effect of teaching his son. He just wouldn’t take my repeated “No!” for an answer, eventually pestering me into submission over the course of the past week.
So after unearthing the above pseudo-Mosrite on eBay, I bid on the thing and ended up winning, scoring what looks to be a really nice instrument for a mite over 200 simoleons with shipping. Supposed to be delivered anytime from this Saturday to next Thursday, and I have to confess I’m pretty excited about it. Don’t tell anybody, aiight?
There’s a crappy old Peavey Heritage amp here for me to play the Mosrite through owned by my friend Don, a VERY occasional player who swore up and down the damned boat-anchor was FUBAR’d, wouldn’t make a sound. After a bit of investigating I found it had a broken power tube, but the main issue seemed to be that the speaker cable had been disconnected at the head-section output, dangling all forlorn at the bottom of the amp unnoticed. Plugged it back in and replaced the catastrophically-blown tube with a new Sovtek 6L6, so it should be good to go now.
Next up, gonna have to look into getting my hands shut of the accursed DePuytren’s Contracture that forced me into retirement seven miserable years ago, robbing me of a lifetime’s self-identity and happiness, instilling much mental anguish, confustication, and despair in their place. There’s a new, non-surgical treatment for the affliction now which works pretty well, or so I’m given to understand.
Although Zach has sworn to keep after me about it until I give in again, there will be NO triumphant return to the stage pour moi, not ever. I’ve always held to certain standards and preconditions for performing onstage, and rolling up there as a wheelchair-bound object of pity is definitely not among ‘em. To my way of thinking, the elusive, indefinable quality known as “stage presence” is not just important, it’s absolutely indispensible; if you can’t swagger out there like you own that fucking stage, then you got no business being there at all. Performing onstage isn’t about being shy, modest, or self-effacing; it’s all about being bold, self-assured, and confident to the point of cockiness. A stage performer—ALL performers—must for the duration of their stage-time be larger than life, not some mumbling, diffident cipher. It’s the only way as far as I’m concerned, you’re just wasting everybody’s time otherwise.
So, not happening, then. I’ll content myself with torturing the cats and kicking out the jams in my living room, thenksveddymuch.
Boer insurrection, Boer inspiration
A little history well worth paying attention to.
Fight or flight? A question facing Americans today – to recoil from the cities, from institutions, from society or to fight. It is a question the Boers also faced when the British gained control of South Africa in 1806.
For half a century the ununified, individualistic Boers, who just wished to just be left alone, fled. That is until the First Boer War in 1880 when for the first time, the Boers decided not to run from British oppression but to fight.
Their longing for freedom reignited – their passive resistance came to an end. Fed up with the British violating their treaties, the Boer leaders unified and declared Transvaal independent.
When British reinforcements entered Transvaal they were met by commandos who informed them they were trespassing, and to continue on would be casus belli. Disregarding the threat, the British troops took up arms and were quickly massacred, beginning the First Boer War.
Over the next month, the British under the command of Sir George Colley would attempt to relieve the besieged forts in Transvaal and would face defeat at every turn. The redcoats were no match for the superior marksmanship and guerilla warfare of the hardened Boers.
The story of the Boers is one that is relatable not just to the pioneers, the Irish or anyone else that fled their home in search of a better life and freedom, but of us, as Americans, today. We are at a crossroads.
We can flee and build new, with the hope of keeping the long arm of the “empire” at bay, or we can turn and fight. We can work to take back our cities, our institutions, our culture. Unified, working towards to same goal, we can begin chipping away.
While the Boers waited until the only solution was to take up arms, we are blessed to have other options to prevent our children, our families and our communities from the horrors of war in our backyards. The answer is not to flee, but to unify and dig in.
As y’all know, I’m much less sanguine about those “other options” than the author is, but I could easily be wrong about that…and pray to God that I am. One thing I think we can all agree on: hoping to be “just left alone” hasn’t worked out very well for us, as is almost always the case when a cozened, insufficiently-vigilant populace has permitted tyranny to take root and flourish.
“I Know How to Fix Our Political System. Hear Me Out”
It’s our dear old friend Stephen Green, who is always worth lending an ear. Although I can’t say I agree with him in every last particular.
I have yet another idea about how to save our Republic — and before we even get started, you’re welcome.
Every elected official — from my small-town mayor to the President of the United States — should be issued a seriously cool-looking sword. Sharp, too.
Higher-level appointees from White House cabinet officers down to that slow-moving jerk at the County Clerk’s office would each be issued a sword of their own.
Anybody running an HOA would get one, too, despite the risks.
The more important the office, the shinier and fancier the sword. I figure by the time we get up to, say, the Speaker of the House, they’d get a sword so bejeweled that Inigo Montoya’s father would be embarrassed to craft it.
But, man, would the thin-skinned attention whores who crave authority love carrying those things around.
You think I’m being silly. I’m not.
How our betters behave when carrying their swords would teach us valuable lessons about them. I imagine a guy like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) would look a little sheepish carrying one, and that would make me like him even more.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), fond as she is of drink on occasion, would probably have a few too many one Friday afternoon, lunge her sword at a staffer who displeased her, but end up falling down and cutting herself. And that would make me like her even more, too.
Okay, I’m A-okay with that part. But sorry, I ain’t so much down with handing out swords willy-nilly to FederalGovCo bureaucrats and/or cabinet officials in the expectation that they’ll have the decency to hurl themselves upon them in paroxysms of grief-stricken remorse as atonement for their myriad fuck-ups. Not gonna happen, I’m afraid; sorry, but they’ll have to be pushed. Which, y’know, I AM down with, one hundred percent.
An alternative proposal, which I muchly prefer: Equip the citizenry with swords, perhaps local and state officials in rock-ribbed Red locales ONLY, and encourage the whole motley crew to mob up and send those Fed fuck-knuckles scurrying in affrighted anticipation of the use to which those keen-edged blades might be put should their angry pursuers prove to be fleeter of foot.
HOA Oberst-Gruppenführers? Oh, HELL no. Those nosy, insufferably smarmy Church Ladies are already pain in the ass aplenty; issuing them swords would only make them worse.
Somehow it got by me until now, but Stephen offers another bright idea which seems like it might likewise be worth implementing.
Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Readers™ might recognize this as a fancier version of my alternative to term limits, the Take An Oath of Office, Lose a Finger Amendment — and you’d be right.
But I ask, why think small? Let’s do both.
For the Republic.
Absolutely—without even knowing the specific ins and outs of it, this LaFA deal sounds pretty dang schweet to me.
NOW you’ve done it!
Prankster hornswoggles Goolag’s Gemini AI into doing a RAYCISS!©.
BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Sorry, I denounce myself. Thanks to Brack for that one.
Saturday memeage
Swiped from Irish’s Friday Femme Fatale Farrago—which, if you ain’t checking it out on the regular but dig hot chicks with great fun-bags letting ‘em breathe; cool old muscle cars; vintage piston-engine fighter planes; over-the-top burgers and BBQ; and those funny-pitchers-with-words, you really oughta be. Plus, it’s Saturday night, and dammit, I CAN. So why the hell not?
No need to thank me, gang, I’m happy to do it for y’all.
Soviet fashion show
The past is a foreign country.
REMEMBER WHEN BIG BUSINESS USED TO MAKE FUN OF COMMIES? THE ’80S WERE AWESOME: Congressmen Bash Google AI for Refusing Image of Tiananmen Square. “Hawley reacted to Miller’s post by slamming Google and all CCP-pandering tech companies. ‘Google AI refusing to tell the truth about Tiananmen Square. When is Congress going to wake up and realize these tech companies are totally compromised by China. They’re killing our kids while vomiting Communist propaganda,’ he stated.”
The Eighties:
Good times, good times.
Fraud, injustice, and tripping over one’s own tiny dick 101
The best, most thorough explication of the gaping, tractor-trailer-wide hole in the underhanded “fraud” judgment against Trump & sons I’ve seen yet.
One person who defended the verdict is CNN’s Laura Coates, who clearly doesn’t understand the implications or perhaps even the details of the case.
“Wouldn’t there be many companies who would not want to do business or loan money to people like yourself for investors if they know that they can get away with fraud and there’s no recourse to protect them?” she asked.
“Excuse me, what fraud?” (Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary) asked. “This is not about Trump anymore.”
“I know,” she claimed.
“When you get a developer that builds a building and he says it’s worth 400 million, and he wants to borrow 200 million from a bank, which happens every day everywhere on Earth, including every American city — every developer is an entrepreneur, they shine the light on their building, and they say it’s worth 400. The bank does its own due diligence — as was done in this case, because they’re very good at it, the banks are very good — and they say no, it’s worth 300, we’re only going to loan you 150 million. That haggling has gone on for decades, that’s how it works.”
O’Leary continued, “And then, in this case, even the bank that was supposedly defrauded, testified and said we didn’t lose anything. We want to do business with this guy again, we’d like to, but the judge said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, let’s penalize this developer for $355 million. And if we’re going to do that, let’s penalize all the developers all across America. They’ve all done the same thing. All of them should go to jail and we should stop building buildings.’ That’s what the message is from New York. Even the governor herself is concerned about what this looks like to investors all around the world. It’s not just U.S. domestic. All around the world, people are talking about what happened here. You really think people want to invest money in New York after this?”
Not if they’re even the slightest bit perspicacious and business-savvy, they don’t. Yet more rich buttery goodness at the link, as if the preceding excerpt wasn’t already enough.
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"Mike Hendrix is, without a doubt, the greatest one-legged blogger in the world." ‐Henry Chinaski
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Notable Quotes
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
—Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution
Claire's Cabal—The Freedom Forums
"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
—Daniel Webster
“When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill.”
—Charles Bukowski
“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
—Ezra Pound
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
—Frank Zappa
“The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.”
—John Adams
"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
—Bertrand de Jouvenel
"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."
—GK Chesterton
"I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free."
—Donald Sensing
"The only way to live free is to live unobserved."
—Etienne de la Boiete
"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
"To put it simply, the Left is the stupid and the insane, led by the evil. You can’t persuade the stupid or the insane and you had damn well better fight the evil."
—Skeptic
"There is no better way to stamp your power on people than through the dead hand of bureaucracy. You cannot reason with paperwork."
—David Black, from Turn Left For Gibraltar
"If the laws of God and men, are therefore of no effect, when the magistracy is left at liberty to break them; and if the lusts of those who are too strong for the tribunals of justice, cannot be otherwise restrained than by sedition, tumults and war, those seditions, tumults and wars, are justified by the laws of God and man."
—John Adams
"The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
—Frederick Douglass
"Give me the media and I will make of any nation a herd of swine."
—Joseph Goebbels
“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
—Ronald Reagan
"Ain't no misunderstanding this war. They want to rule us and aim to do it. We aim not to allow it. All there is to it."
—NC Reed, from Parno's Peril
"I just want a government that fits in the box it originally came in."
—Bill Whittle
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