Pass The Popcorn!

Just say no

Posted on January 1, 2024January 1, 2024 by Mike

Buck Throckmorton has rapidly become the go-to guy for EV news, debunkings, and unpleasant realities, and there’s a very good reason for that. To wit:

Welcome to 2024! Since New Year’s Day one year ago, the “electric vehicle transition” has gone from being a foregone conclusion to being a rolling failure. Auto manufacturers who bought into the hype are looking at a catastrophic financial miscalculation, and typical car drivers have gone from being curious (at best) to being generally negative about purchasing EVs. I believe that the conservative media’s pushback against EVs has had a considerable impact.

In other words, 2023 was a very good year – a year in which we turned opinion against electric vehicles. The people who want a boutique, status-symbol EV can continue to buy Teslas. (But can we please kill off the taxpayer subsidies for Tesla?) For all the rest, let 2024 be the year when legacy automakers throw in the towel on the eco-communist EV experiment.

For today, let’s do our periodic update on the EV Follies…

“Ford cutting 2024 F-150 Lightning production plans by half, suppliers told; The news comes amid an industrywide pullback in EV investment due to slower-than-expected sales growth.” [Automotive News – 12/11/2023]

Ford Motor Co. is dialing back planned output of the electric F-150 Lightning pickup by half next year because of “changing market demand,” a steep pullback of a high-profile nameplate the automaker spent most of this year working to build in larger numbers.

Although I’ve enjoyed writing about how emphatically consumers have rejected Ford’s flagship EV, in fairness I should point out that the Ford F150 Conflagration Lightning is a spectacularly awful vehicle. Aside from its tendency to burst into flames, it performs poorly at towing, hauling for distance, and operating in the cold – the basic functionalities that are expected of a pickup truck.

The buried lede in this story isn’t that Ford is cutting weekly production of its electric pickup from 3,200 units per week to 1,600 units per week, rather it’s that Ford’s executives still think there is a market that will absorb 1,600 of these abominations per week.

*****

It’s not just Ford that can’t sell its EVs. Half of Buick dealers would rather surrender their franchises than have to sell General Motors’ atrocious EV offerings.

“GM buys out nearly half of its Buick dealers across the country, who opt to not sell EVs” [Detroit Free Press – 12/20/2023]

GM’s awful executives, with little understanding of automobiles or their customers’ preferences, think they can simply dictate what consumers should buy. GM dealers, who actually understand automobiles and what their customers want, know better.

General Motors said nearly half its Buick dealers took buyouts this year rather than invest in selling and servicing electric vehicles as the automaker’s brands transition to all electric by 2030.

That means GM will end 2023 with about 1,000 Buick stores nationwide, down 47% from where it started the year.

*****

General Motors is rolling out an electric version of its popular Chevrolet Blazer sport utility. Well, it’s trying to, but not very successfully.

“2024 Chevy Blazer EV sales are already halted over software issues” [Elektrek – 12/26/2023]

Dozens of potential customers will have to keep waiting.

Ah well, I guess it’s nice to know it will impinge on mere dozens of the poor, pitiful fools; could be worse, could be hundreds. Nice also to see a few major manufacturers finally pushing back against being force-fed this fascistic, auto industry-killing program of FederalGovCo’s devising, instead of just lying back and taking it without demur as they have been up till now. Lots, lots more disincentives to buy into the goobermint’s credulity-straining propaganda push for these abominable, exorbitantly overpriced boat-anchors over at the Ace Place.

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The year that was

Posted on December 27, 2023 by Mike

David Thompson offers a whole year’s worth of reasons intelligent, rational people despair of the very concept of “human” “progress” as nothing more than a laughable conceit.

The year began with a tale of oysters and college lesbianism, via Bon Appétit magazine, in which Brooklynite pronoun-stipulator Isha Maratha was keen to overshare. For Ms Maratha, “My first time eating an oyster was an act of queer intimacy.” Indeed, we were told by an obliging editor, “The act of eating an oyster uniquely and intimately expresses her queerness.” And so, we were regaled, at length, with descriptions of mollusc-gobbling, stolen glances, and lemon wedges being squeezed. “There is something uniquely unspoken,” we learned, “between the eater and the eaten.”

We also pondered mass fare-dodging, now at record levels, and its progressive defenders – including those employed to maintain public transport – and whose pre-emptive disapproval of anyone noticing such crimes was remarkable in its vehemence and uniformity. The effects on social trust of a large and growing minority disregarding the law and norms of behaviour, and doing so with a learned impunity, is apparently something one shouldn’t – and mustn’t – register or explore. Because, in the progressive world, noticing habitual and brazen thievery is much worse than indulging in it. And obviously racist.

And we visited the pages of Scientific American, where wokeness is ascendant and thinking simply isn’t done. In particular, an “important analysis” piece in which we were urged – by Tracie Canada, a “socio-cultural anthropologist” at Duke University – to fret about “the violence Black men experience in [American] football,” and in which we were told that the physicality of the sport “disproportionately affects black men.” This was framed to imply, but never establish, some systemic racial wrongdoing – “anti-Black practices” that are “inescapable” – rather than, say, being an unremarkable reflection of the sport’s demographics, in which, at professional levels, black players are a majority. Or to put it another, no less scientific, way – the risk of injury while playing a contact sport disproportionately affects those who actually play it. When this rather glaring logical error was pointed out by readers, the magazine’s editor-in-chief promptly accused said readers of “systemic racism.”

In February, we encountered a suboptimal substitute teacher named Lydia Lamere – formerly Christopher Lamere – who spent lesson time directing students to his overtly sexual TikTok account, and conscripting middle-school children into his cross-dressing psychodrama. When not discussing “kink” and preferred sexual positions with other people’s eleven-year-old children, Mr Lamere found time to tells us, “I’m not a predator, I’m just a woman who happens to be super tall and hot.”

Matters academic cropped up again via an eye-widening overview of racial “equity” policies in various schools and institutions, where expectations of competence are deemed racist and terribly problematic. In New York City, for instance, thanks to “disparate impact” policies, firefighters are no longer expected to be able to read the instructions on their own firefighting equipment. Likewise, in scrupulously progressive Ontario, it is now illegal to use a maths test to determine whether maths teachers actually possess the knowledge that they are being paid to convey in class. Such is the world of triumphant wokeness, in which “suspending proficiency requirements” – and denouncing diligence and competence as “white supremacy,” a wickedness to be shunned – will somehow “benefit” the children on whom these things are imposed.

We also marvelled at a contrived and unconvincing display of forgiveness by Guardian contributor Anna Spargo-Ryan, whose home was invaded in the night by a gang of sociopaths armed with carving knives. It turns out that when being robbed by habitual predators, the progressive thing to do is to sympathise with the creatures breaking into one’s home and driving off with one’s stuff in one’s own car. Ms Spargo-Ryan was hailed by her peers as a “beautiful person” for gushing with pretentious sympathy for her assailants and for wishing to see the burglars spared the normal corrective consequences, presumably so that they might go on to burgle the homes of others, including her neighbours. Which of course they were busy doing. Though it occurs to me that a person breaking into someone’s home in the middle of the night and stealing their possessions is sending a pretty strong signal about how much concern, or how little, the rest of us should have for that person’s wellbeing.

The Pronoun Game, so very much in fashion, cropped up in March, along with a demand that employers accommodate the made-up identities of insufferable narcissists. Even when those made-up identities can change several times a day, with such changes being signalled via colour-coded pronoun bracelets, pronoun earrings, and other pronoun-stipulating accessories. Accessories that all colleagues would be expected to monitor closely, lest “misgendering” ensue, followed by a visit to Human Resources. A scenario that inspired the question of exactly how much farce in the workplace might be considered excessive.

Thanks to Oxford University’s Department of Biology, we beheld some ostentatious fretting about the “numerous negative consequences” of obscure Latin names that almost no-one knows about. According to Assistant Professor of Conservation Science Ricardo Rocha, some “1,565 species of bird, reptiles, amphibians and mammals” are named after “white, male Europeans from the 19th and 20th centuries,” which is apparently a very bad thing. What with all that whiteness and maleness, you see. This legacy of legwork and exploration is, we’re to believe, oppressing the people of Zimbabwe and Botswana, for whom the Latin textbook names of lizards and beetles are foremost in their minds. We were also assured that would-be botanists and biologists are in some way being psychologically injured by the existence of this Latin taxonomy, and by the fact that much of the “flora of New Caledonia” is “named after a man.”

Read on for the rest of it, there’s lots more yet to come, alas.

Sour reviews

Posted on December 23, 2023December 23, 2023 by Mike

These are just hilarious.

The Worst National Park Reviews of the Year
There was nothing to do, I didn’t see a bear, and that snake harassed me

Visitors come from across the globe to set foot in our national parks. But some people are simply unimpressed.

The internet gives these people a place to air their grievances. Some now-classic bad national park reviews have made their way further, into illustrations, T-shirts, and needlepoints. “There are bugs, and they will bite you on your face,” they say. Or, “Trees block view and there are too many gray rocks.” “The water is ice-cold,” someone griped about Acadia National Park in Maine, making it onto a poster made by Subpar Parks, which documents bad reviews.

The complaints keep coming. I searched Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google for the best and worst reviews of our national parks in 2023. To be fair, most of the complaints were about excessive crowds, traffic jams, and new reservation systems. But some visitors had, uh, more nuanced grudges regarding lackluster scenery or were shocked by the lack of amenities. Here are my favorites.

1. Yosemite National Park, California
In California’s Sierra Nevada, Yosemite offers giant granite monoliths, waterfalls, and Sequoia trees up to 3,000 years old. But not everyone sees the beauty.

“Really annoying that it is the same way in and same way out. Scenery is not breathtaking.” —TripAdvisor

“I need someone to explain to me the hype of this place. This place looks like any place with mountains and trees. Too many people, not enough stores, not enough places to buy food.” —Yelp

2. Hawaii Volcanoes National Park
On Hawaii’s Big Island, this park stretches from sea level to 13,680 feet, boasting two of the world’s most active volcanoes. It is not known for its racquet sports, though.

“Absolutely horrible disappointment. There wasn’t a single pickleball court in sight. You’d think with it’s [sic] extreme length of 2.93 mi (4.72 km), an extreme width of 1.95 mi (3.14 km), a circumference of 7.85 mi (12.63 km) and an area of 4.14 sq mi (10.7 km2) they’d find some space for one.”—Yelp

3. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina and Tennessee
Straddling two states, GSMNP is 500,000 acres of towering mountains, remote streams, and the most biodiverse wilderness in America. That doesn’t keep the young ’uns from doing their thing.

“Some falls/streams had nothing but toddlers peeing & pooing in the water.”—TripAdvisor

“Can’t say this is one of my fave national parks. No bear sightings but that’s not the park’s fault. … [T]he haziness of it gave me huge headaches.” –TripAdvisor

The Great Smoky Mountains, hazy? Wow. Read on for the rest of the side-splitting list. Can vacationing Americans really be this thoroughly spoiled, clueless, and out of touch? Apparently so, alas. Wonder no more where the well-known European epithet dismissing Yank tourists as “Ugly Americans” might have come from.

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Christmas music, forsooth!

Posted on December 20, 2023December 20, 2023 by Mike

As we come down the Christmas home-stretch, I thought I’d give y’all a little something special tonight.

Yep, that’s your humble host crooning that one, backed by the ever-fabulous Belmont Playboys. The audio was recorded, using acoustic instruments, on a crappy little hand-held cassette recorder at the pre-refurbishment Belk Theater adjacent to what used to be the old Carolina Theater on Tryon Street, where none other than Elvis himself performed back in 1956 on his drive to becoming the once and forever King of Rock and Roll. The video was shot (and later edited) by our old friend John Autry, former CLT city councilman and current NC Congresscritter, at the Van Landingham Estate in the heart of Plaza-Midwood.

The shirt I’m wearing was actually my brother’s, who probably still has it hanging in his closet. It was a little snug on me, there having been somewhat more of me then than there is now. John didn’t care for the two shirts I had brought along for the shoot, thinking it would be better if the front-guy wore something more colorful and less drab than my own threads.

You graybeards may recognize the TV set in the intro as being from the long-defunct Nashville Network’s old morning show, whatever it was called. It’s for real, not spliced in or otherwise faked: TNN aired our “Blue Christmas” vid for like three years hand-running at Christmastime, which definitely made our days that much more merry and bright. The above was taped on VHS the first time it ran by my old girlfriend Wendy’s mom, then converted to digital several years back by some local service our drummer Mark found.

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Hitting the wrong target

Posted on December 16, 2023December 16, 2023 by Mike

Spurred on by this comment, I’m finally getting around to clearing out another one of those long-open tabs.

How Right-Wing Characters Become Sitcom Sensations

In spite of all the worst intentions of Hollywood shitlib producers and/or writers like Norman Lear, who thought he had himself a horse of a very different color in his overbroadly-drawn, intentionally-insulting caricature of what clueless pricks like him think your average Joe Lunchbucket is really like, that’s how.

Y’know, kinda like when a hoplophobic Leftard who’s never knowingly been in the same room with a firearm starts in regurgitating the nonsense they’ve gulped down about projectile weapons to some gun-savvy 2A individual, thereby unwittingly making a complete fool of Zhim/Xhrr/Theyselves without ever even realizing it.

If you’ve ever seen the television show Friends, you know that it’s about six young people in Manhattan, navigating romance, career, and friendships. Or is it? Maybe it’s actually about a homeless psychotic woman—the character of Phoebe, played by Lisa Kudrow—who peers into the window of the hip coffee joint and imagines the lives and adventures of the personalities she spies on, with herself as a beloved member of the group of friends. It’s all in her mind, all 10 seasons, and the theory is given a little bit of ballast by the series finale, in which the other characters move out of Manhattan and leave Phoebe alone, like the unmedicated schizophrenic she is.

According to this particular fan theory, anyway. Probably not what the creators and executive producers of the show had in mind, but if you think about it long enough, it starts to seem possible—maybe even preferable to the original.

Google the words “alternate interpretation of” or “fan theory for” and then insert the title of a popular movie or television show, and you’ll get a cascade of hilarious and often very dark results. It seems that people who love a show also love rethinking it from an entirely unexpected point of view.

If your show is indelible enough to inspire lunatic speculations from superfans, that’s what we in show business call “a high-class problem.” One of the ways you know you have a hit show on your hands is that your viewers quickly take ownership of the series. The characters become their characters, and whatever point the creators were trying to make, whatever message they were trying to send, utterly evaporates in the face of that kind of devoted fandom.

If you’re really lucky, this happens while your show is still on the air.

I noticed the same odd phenomenon in my own show-biz career: a fan would painstakingly explain to me after the show all about how the lyrics of a song he or she absolutely loved meant this, or that, or the other thing…and the interpretation would be at wide variance every time with what my actual intention was when I wrote the damned thing.

Eventually, I learned to just accept it and nod, shake the person’s hand, and mumble “Thagsverrmudge” in my best Fat Elvis voice, then move on to the next in line. Whatever a song was supposed to have been in the beginning, once it’s been released into the wild and audiences get hold of it the song is no longer exclusively your intellectual property—it’s now shared between you as the songwriter, the band you perform the song onstage with, and the audience, all of whom are assuredly going to exercise their right to make of your creation what they will.

I wasn’t at all bothered by this puzzling development myself, just considered it one of those strange, bemusing knuckleballs life tends to throw at you as a working artist in The Biz. You just gotta roll with it; who knows, the audience could well be righter about it than you know. But in the case of shitlibs like Lear, it can come back to bite ‘em on the ass in ways they never imagined it might.

In the early 1970’s, All in the Family captured the tumultuous controversies of its time. The show’s main character, Archie Bunker, was a reactionary bigot always mixing it up with his progressive, liberal son-in-law, Meathead. The show was designed by the producer Norman Lear to be a form of left-wing agitprop that would expound on the virtues of the younger, modern, and open-minded generation while exposing and mocking the petty small-minded prejudices of Archie. He would rail weekly against the changing American culture using scandalously edgy language that today is utterly unthinkable. Archie Bunker was supposed to be the butt of the joke, the dinosaur heading to extinction, a symbol of everything that was wrong with America in 1970.

The fans, though, refused to see it that way.

Archie Bunker caught fire with audiences. He became a national sensation, his catchphrases on T-shirts and lunch boxes and used in Johnny Carson monologues. The progressive writers and creators of the show may have thought Archie was the bad guy, but the audience saw a hard-working veteran who paid the bills and put food on the table—Archie held down two jobs!—all the while being forced to listen to his ultra-lefty layabout jobless graduate-student son-in-law tell him what a terrible person he was, often with his mouth full of a pork chop Archie had paid for. If Archie occasionally refers to Jews, African Americans, and homosexuals with hateful slurs, well, hey, the guy pays the mortgage. He’s earned the right to rant a little.

It helped that Archie was, by far, the most hilarious character on television at the time. Comedy writers, even really really liberal ones, naturally want to write for the character who brings the most heat to the screen. The more talented the writer, in fact, the more likely it is that he will sell out his principles for a really solid laugh. Still, it must have rankled Lear and his team to see Archie embraced by the audience, to realize that the character wasn’t theirs anymore—that the fans preferred their own version.

Had Google existed back then, and had you Googled “insane theory about All in the Family,” you’d probably be directed to something like this: “All in the Family is a show about a guy who dreams of being an empty-nester with his devoted wife but who instead is forced to support his married daughter and her lazy, super-woke husband. To get them to move into a place of their own, he does everything he can to drive them away, including loudly emitting a fusillade of reactionary notions. But the kids, especially his worthless son-in-law, are too lazy to move.”

Hollywood liberals keep making the same mistake. They try to create a right-wing villain and end up writing an audience favorite.

And you just know it’s gotta burn their asses up but GOOD. Sure hope so, at any rate.

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Well, well, well, well, WELL

Posted on December 16, 2023December 16, 2023 by Mike

Now we know why they’re so desperately trying to get him locked up and out of sight, on whatever flimsy pretext they can conjure.

Trump has the declassified Russiagate files

That’s what this has been all about from Day One https://t.co/Wh4Xhz9emL

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec)

December 15, 2023

Update! Screengrab of the Poso Tweet, in case it doesn’t show up properly for ya above.

“Raising alarms among intel officials.” Yeah, I just bet it did at that, the fucking pond scum. Heartfelt apologies to any gobs of green slime afloat on small bodies of water who might take offense at the comparison.

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THAT’S how you do it!

Posted on December 16, 2023December 16, 2023 by Mike

Effing BRILLIANT.

Good on you, sir. Via WRSA. Backstory and further details here.

Update! Ruminations on the Cassidy saga from Bayou Peter.

Speaking as a Christian and a retired pastor, I entirely approve of Mr. Cassidy’s actions. I would have contributed to his legal defense fund, except that it was shut down within three hours due to being oversubscribed. Clearly, many Americans feel the same as I do about him, which pleases me.

On Tuesday, “Gov. Kim Reynolds called the display ‘absolutely objectionable’ but said that ‘in a free society, the best response to objectionable speech is more speech’.” I agree with him, of course. Freedom of religion is constitutional, and should remain so. Equally, Mr. Cassidy is, IMHO, correct that any of the Founding Fathers, confronted with the same display, would do as he did, or take even stronger action. The Satanic Temple can protest all it likes that it doesn’t actually worship Satan as he is described in the Christian Bible, but is rather an atheist organization using that name. Nevertheless, the generally accepted understanding of Satan in all three of the great monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – is as the root of all evil, a being from whom grace and goodness are utterly absent. They need not be surprised if people act on that understanding.

Most of all, I applaud Mr. Cassidy for his honesty. He acted, then took responsibility for his actions, and is prepared to stand trial for acting on his beliefs. Good for him! If his legal defense fund opens up again, I’ll be standing in line to contribute.

Much more at the link, all of it intriguing, thought-provoking stuff, as is BRM’s usual wont.

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Short stop

Posted on December 11, 2023 by Mike

A few thoughts from Diogenes Sarcastica.

I fully intend to haunt people after I die. I have a list.

Somewhere in the world there is a tree that sprouted the very montent you were born and has grown along with you all this time. And I think that is wonderful!

When my mother was pregnant with my little bro and we were on the side of the road struggling with a flat tire, a car with three men stopped, not to help but to ask directions to a local golf course. Mom sent them 15 mile in the wrong direction. She is the Legend that shaped me.

There are 13 minerals that are essential for human life, and all of them can be found in Wine. Coincidence? I Think Not!

I do feel bad about the confrontation tonight and the lady at Costcos with her son on a leash. Lady I’m sorry I asked if he was a rescue. The profanity wasn’t really necessary, but thank you for not siccing him on me.

Plenty more rich, buttery goodness where that came from, folks.

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Poetic justice strikes again

Posted on December 11, 2023December 11, 2023 by Mike

Horrible, shocking, terrible, UNEXPECTED!

Fully Vaccinated and Boosted Piers Morgan Tests Positive for COVID-19 — Blames “Anti-Vaxx” for Catching the Virus
British television personality Piers Morgan has contracted COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated and receiving a booster shot two years ago.

The hypocritical host of “Uncensored” announced the news via Twitter, expressed his frustration, and blamed the ‘anti-vaccination’ community for his infection.

The 58-year-old host shared a photo of his positive lateral flow test on Twitter, along with a candid description of his condition: “as rough as a badger’s a***.”

There’s only one way I can adequately express my emotional response to reading this sad, distressing news.

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Too bad, so sad

Posted on December 10, 2023December 10, 2023 by Mike

The heart, it bleeds.

Dylan Mulvaney Suffers Total Embarrassment at Penn State
The “transgender influencer” who destroyed Bud Light is back, and this time he’s speaking on college campuses. Let’s just say that endeavor isn’t going any better than Mulvaney’s excursion into the beer industry.

According to The Daily Mail, Mulvaney was set to charge $40,000 a pop to show up and give speeches on college campuses. Whether Penn State (or whoever on campus brought him in) paid that much isn’t known, but what is certain is that whatever he paid was too much. Take a look at how many people showed up, or rather, didn’t show up.

The room Mulvaney was given holds somewhere around 1,000 people. To say the crowd missed the mark would be an understatement. There might be a hundred people there, and that’s probably being generous. Given this is the quality of what transpired, can you blame people for not showing up?

So, more of that “genocide” we’ve been hearing so much about lately, then.

Why do major brands give this guy money? What value is he providing? What customers are buying a product because they saw that Dylan Mulvaney endorses it? It’s astonishing to me that any marketing department would be dumb to pay him to do brand placement for them. The only thing I can figure is that it’s an easy way to get a company’s ESG score up.

Clearly, aside from being a target for mockery, there isn’t much actual interest in Mulvaney. Student-aged individuals are supposed to be his core audience, and no one is showing up to see him. Imagine being the person who wrote the check for that speech only to see him prance around in a cheerleader outfit for a few dozen people. How many homeless people could have been fed? How many Christmas presents could have been bought for foster children?

You miss the point, which is that you will be made to care—and endorse, and support, and stand up and applaud with utmost enthusiasm. Y’know, OR ELSE.

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Solidarnosc

Posted on December 8, 2023December 8, 2023 by Mike

Fake News work stoppage.

The Babylon Bee Writers Stand In Solidarity With Our Fellow Fake News Writers Going On Strike At The Washington Post
It has come to our attention that the delightfully witty satirists of The Washington Post are going on strike this week. We here at The Babylon Bee stand in solidarity with our fellow comedians and join them in demanding fair wages. The writers at WP work hard to bring us their daring and uproarious brand of comedy every day, and they deserve compensation for their work.

Where else can we find comedic gems like “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48” or “Does that Jason Aldean song go on a playlist? Or a watchlist?” Where else can we find stories on race, gender, and foreign policy so consistently hilarious that they brighten our days and keep us hungrily coming back for more again and again?

Not to mention this classic howler:

Stop it, WaPo hacks, you’re killing me over here. Making me kinda hungry, too.

Update! Thought I was joking about that last one, did ya? ’Fraid not.

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Animals

Posted on December 7, 2023December 7, 2023 by Mike

Four legs good, two legs very, very bad.

An Israeli survivor of the horrific Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis on October 7 is speaking out about the barbaric gang rape and murder of a young woman “with the face of an angel.”

Yoni Saadon, 39, a shift manager in a foundry who has four children, was hiding under the stage at the Supernova music festival when Hamas attacked. He said a young woman hiding next to him was shot in the head and fell to the ground next to him.

“I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too,” he told The Times. “I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologize to her, saying ‘I’m sorry.’”

After an hour, he looked out. “I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her,” he recalled. “She was screaming, ‘Stop it — already I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’ When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head.”

“I kept thinking it could have been one of my daughters,” he continued. “Or my sister — I had bought her a ticket but last minute she couldn’t come.”

Later, hiding in some bushes, he saw further horrors as two more Hamas terrorists attacked another young woman. “They had caught a young woman near a car and she was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her,” he said. “They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too.”

Nah, never happened; Hamas flatly denies it, see, so it couldn’t have, it’s unpossible. And their friends, allies, and enablers in The Squad, shitlib media, and the ((((JooJooJooJOOOOO!!!)))) hatin’ Right all enthusiastically endorse the lies, like moldy, stinking peas in the same rotting pod. If any of these “people” were capable of shame, they’d all be hanging their heads from it.

The antidote? Rat cheer.

UFC star Conor McGregor could be trading his boxing gloves for a suit.

The featherweight champion hinted yet again this week that he is planning a run for the presidency in Ireland — a massive career change Elon Musk lauded as “not even fair” to other contenders.

McGregor, 35, who has been outspoken in recent weeks amid violent rioting in Dublin, said Monday he would serve at the whim of the people should he throw his hat in the 2025 election: “It would not be me in power as president, people of Ireland. It would be me and you.”

Tesla founder and Twitter owner Musk quickly showed support for McGregor, stating the longtime politicians wouldn’t stand a chance against the newcomer.

“I think you could take them all single-handed. Not even fair,” Musk replied, alongside a crying laughing emoji.

In a lengthy response to the Space X CEO, McGregor pointed out that the road to the nomination would be a tedious process, but he feels strongly that he’d find success on the other side: “I’d fancy my chances Elon, 100%”

His main goals, McGregor claimed, would be for “transparency” in government.

“Currently there is none. Not an iota. False promises come around the time of election and then it is literally straight ignorance into the face thereafter. It’s disgusting…This is why I’d run, if I was to. To be a voice of the people that deserve to be heard.”

McGregor initially showed interest in Ireland’s highest office last week after a man knifed three children — including a seriously injured 5-year-old — and an adult during riots in Dublin.

He chastised the violence, warning that he would step in to course correct if the current government can’t.

“If they do not act soon with their plan of action to ensure Ireland’s safety, I will,” he said.

I hope like hell he does. Run, Conor, run! Your country never needed you more. As I said, we could use someone like you over on these sad shores right about now.

Follow the money (laundering) trail

Posted on December 6, 2023December 6, 2023 by Mike

Has the wholly corrupt Biden Crime Famiglia finally gotten its collective dick caught in a blender?

Hunter Biden got staggering $4.9M from ‘sugar brother’ Kevin Morris: IRS whistleblower
WASHINGTON — Hunter Biden received a whopping $4.9 million from Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris in a three-year period, according to an IRS agent who investigated the president’s son for alleged tax evasion.

The revelation signifies a substantial increase in the known amount that Hunter, 53, got from his so-called “sugar brother” after the men reportedly met for the first time at a December 2019 campaign fundraiser.

IRS agent Joseph Ziegler shared the jaw-dropping figure and additional documentation Tuesday with the House Ways and Means Committee in a follow-up appearance as House Republicans near an expected vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Biden for his alleged role in his family’s foreign dealings.

As part of his Tuesday testimony, Ziegler provided legislators an email showing that as early as Feb. 7, 2020 — two months after they met — Morris was contacting accountants on Hunter’s behalf and warning them to work quickly to avoid “considerable risk personally and politically.”

Ziegler, who investigated Hunter’s taxes for five years before he was removed from the case this year, said the first son’s income from Morris — at least some of it deemed loans — resembled Hunter’s practice of trying to avoid paying taxes on other income by describing it as loans.

“Loans.” I like that one. Man, even when it comes to bribery and influence-peddling the Bidens are fucking incompetent boobs. You’d think with a solid five decades of experience in the field, they’d be a lot better at it than this. And you’d be dead wrong, too.

Ziegler and the rest of his investigative unit were removed from the tax fraud case targeting Hunter, allegedly on Justice Department orders, in May after Ziegler joined his supervisor Gary Shapley in publicly alleging a cover-up involving preferential treatment for the first family.

Because of COURSE they were. Because a hastily-arranged cover up is precisely what it was, as everyone with even half a lick of sense and integrity damned well knows.

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On laying hose

Posted on December 2, 2023December 2, 2023 by Mike

So you think you want to be a fireman, eh kid?

The hose that runs from the fire hydrant to the fire truck is called supply line. Most supply line is 3 inches or more in diameter, and in Central Florida, it’s usually 5 inches. (Orlando uses 4 inch, but that is because they typically have fire hydrants that are close together).

First, a bit of engineering.

The reason for this is hydrodynamics and friction loss. The average water main pressure is about 65 psi. At 1,000 gallons per minute, a 3 inch hose loses 80 pounds of pressure every 100 feet of hose length due to friction between the moving water and the hose itself, while a 4 inch diameter hose loses 20 pounds of pressure, and a 5 inch hose loses only 8 pounds. That means, if you want longer hose lays with high flow, the larger the diameter of your supply line, the better.

There is a lot of math involved in being the driver of a fire engine. You need to be able to calculate your friction losses in your head, rapidly, and remember that the lives of the guys in the burning building depend on you getting it correct. When you are flowing 2,000 gallons per minute through half a dozen different hose lines at 2 in the morning at a burning strip mall isn’t the time to realize that you are math deficient.

5 inch supply line has what is called a “sexless coupling” meaning that there is no male or female end, the couplings are interchangeable (butbutbut WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER 872+ GENDERS?!?—M). This allows you to start laying from either the fire to the hydrant, called a reverse lay, or from the hydrant to the fire, called a forward lay. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, but we won’t talk about that in this post.

My fire truck carried 1200 feet of 5 inch diameter supply line. That means with standard hydrant pressure, I could get a bit more than 800 gallons per minute into my engine without having to put another fire engine at the hydrant to boost pressure.

A whole bunch more fascinating stuff regarding what-all you need to know but almost certainly don’t when it comes to how fires are fought nowadays is included in this must-read post from Divemedic. Even if you never cared anything about being a fireman when you grew up—I didn’t, I admit, nor about being a cowboy, although being an astronaut did sound pretty cool—this stuff is just too good to miss out on reading, and you shouldn’t. There’s a video too, just for additional incentive to go check it out.

Back when I was working at the H-D shop, my boss Goose wanted desperately to be a fireman, but after failing the dummy-drag test three times he finally had to give it up as a lost cause. Goose practiced and strength-trained for months and months—and being a former USMC F4 mechanic, you know he wasn’t lacking in either intelligence or iron-willed determination—but in the end he’s a small, slight fella and those damned dummies are damned heavy. In fact, I think the dummy actually outweighed him by about twenty-thirty pounds.

At any rate, from hearing Goose talk about it, I probably know more than the average bear about what it takes to be a fireman, but even so DM still covers things I never heard about before.

Can’t get enough of that Donald Trump stuff

Posted on December 1, 2023December 1, 2023 by Mike

Wayne Root submits an increasingly pertinent question.

How Did Trump Become Superman, Batman, Elvis & the Beatles Rolled into One?
Trump isn’t just winning big in America…he’s spreading!

A Trump clone (Javier Milei) was just elected as President of Argentina. A Trump clone (Geert Wilders) was just elected as the leader of Netherlands. A Trump clone (Conor McGregor) is the new nationalist hero of Ireland, defending the Irish people from foreign invasion- and he may also become the next Prime Minister.

A Trump clone was even elected Mayor of Charleston, South Carolina this week- the first Republican elected since 1877.

You’ve heard the song, “I’m turning Japanese, I really think so.” Well, the new hit single is “The whole world is turning Trump, I really think so.” Everywhere in America and all over the world, Trump is spreading.

Did you see President Trump entering the arena for UFC two weeks ago? It was one of the most amazing, exhilarating sports entrances ever. 20,000 fans went insane screaming for Trump. It was like the Beatles arriving in America in 1964.

Did you see President Trump entering the football stadium last Saturday for the South Carolina-Clemson college football game? When Trump walked into the stadium the crowd was even more hysterical than the UFC crowd. It was like they were witnessing Elvis return from the dead. 80,000 fans went wild for Trump- screaming his name and chanting “USA, USA, USA.” It was literally one of the most exciting scenes in sports history.

Keep in mind this wasn’t a political convention. These weren’t Republicans. This was a mainstream football game. And the audience was mostly college students. No politician in U.S. history has ever elicited a reaction like this.

Trump is no longer a man. He is a superhero to a vast swath of America.

Polls confirm that something special is happening. Trump is beating Biden in virtually every poll at Real Clear Politics. Trump is winning in every battleground state. Trump is winning among youth. Trump is leading among minority men. And if Trump is winning the popular vote, that means he’s winning an electoral landslide.

This is happening while Trump is under four federal and state indictments, facing 91 felony counts, and over 700 years in prison.

Trump is doing the best in polls in history. In all the years since he came down the escalator in 2015, Trump has rarely led in polls, anywhere.

Trump voters are always under-counted in polls. That’s why Trump was always trailing Hillary in 2016. Yet Trump won. Trump was always trailing Biden throughout 2019 and 2020- nationally and in most battleground states. Yet Trump added 12 million new votes. He got the most votes of any sitting president in history.

We all know Trump won the 2020 election. Democrats had to rig and cheat with fake mail-in ballots in six key battleground states to overcome huge Trump leads on Election Night that would have given Trump an electoral landslide.

But now for the first time in history, Trump is winning in every poll.

How dramatically have things changed? Trump was just endorsed by a co-Founder of BLM.

How did Trump go from supposedly “unpopular” “washed up” and “the GOP’s past” to superhero, Superman, Batman, Elvis and the Beatles rolled into one, while under nonstop criminal indictment? The answers are simple…

Follows, a rundown of those answers, which are indeed simple enough. But in the end, they all boil down to just one:

Thank you, Democrats. You built this Trump superhero.

Heh. Credit the DC Swamp malefactors and their Woke Corporate Amerika Inc criminal co-conspirators with an assist, but…pretty much, yeppers. You just know that’s gotta smart a bit, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of assholes if you ask me.

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