Do they feel any differently about you?
Anti American left
Just Play
On March 22, 2003, the band “Live” played for the Mardi Gras celebration at Universal Studios Orlando. I went, mostly because I liked their music. About halfway through the concert, they stopped playing and the singer said “I want to take a minute to talk about George Bush’s illegal war.” I yelled out, “Shut up and play the fucking songs.”
Some dude standing next to me pushed me and took a fighting stance, so I punched him as hard as I could. He went down and I got out of there before security could arrive.
The point here is I paid to go to a concert, not a political rally. A musician is no more qualified to comment on foreign policy than any other random person. If he had been expressing his opinion about the best guitar, microphone, or even what flavor is best for LSD, he would probably be qualified to express his opinion. They are abusing the fact that they have an audience held captive by the cost of a ticket to attend this concert to force that same audience to listen to your completely unqualified opinion.
So when I hear that Ed Sheeran stopped his concert in order to express his opinion on Palestine and Israel, I have only to remind them of the saying: Dance, monkey, dance. We pay you for a concert, not to hear your take on today’s news.
Race baiting
I’m Sitting Out the Governor’s Race
In a followup to my post about Republicans, here is a big reason why I won’t be casting my vote in the Florida Governor’s race:
That right there is the Republican nominee in the Florida governor’s race. To the Republican party:
We always talk about a line in the sand. This is one of them. I won’t EVER vote for someone who says I am the enemy. You want to call me a white supremacist? This honky is keeping his Governor’s vote to himself.
His record sucks balls anyhow. He’s been convicted of drug possession, writing bad checks, and who knows what else. This is the best that Florida’s Republican party has to offer?
The Collapse
You Are an Asshole
What are you going to do if Target doesn’t want to let her return anything? You going to pull an unloaded gun on them before grabbing the cash from the register and running away with your slides on your feet?
That’s called armed robbery, champ. You will get caught, because by the looks of your wife, she isn’t running anywhere, and your shoes are going to slow you down.
Of course we know that this is all bravado and bluster, since he is at the Pharmacy counter and not the customer service one. We don’t need gun owners like you. You are an asshole.
Republicans
Goundhog Day
Stop me if you have heard this before: The Republicans are telling us if we sit out this election, the Democrats will win. If the Republicans win, we already know what will happen:
Of course, the thing you will hear in return is:
I’m as pissed as you. But sit out and you won’t even get the hearings, you’ll get more graft, more Islamic enabling and our 2nd Amendment rights will be attacked. You know better
I was reliably told by the very same people that a vote for Trump was a vote for Democrats, yet Trump put some solid people in SCOTUS, and that alone has made more progress than the entire Republican party has in the past 30 years. The entire party hasn’t done a thing to make our lives better since Clinton’s first term, and even then all they managed to pull off was a sunset clause on the AWB.
Why should I vote for you? What do I get from you, other than “I am not a Democrat?” In the words of the two Bobs: “What is it that you would say you do here?”
Fake News
Pearl Clutching
Trump excluded certain left leaning members of the MSM from the White House grounds. The left is losing their collective minds, claiming this to be an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment, and of course making comparisons to Hitler, their standard accusation. They have almost completely memory holed the fact that both Obama and Biden did the same thing.
In October 2009, amid a feud in which White House officials (including Communications Director Anita Dunn) publicly described Fox News as not a legitimate news organization but more like “the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party” and said they would treat it “the way we would treat an opponent,” even while saying the network’s point of view was “ultimately destructive” to the nation, then ordered the Treasury Department to exclude a Fox journalist from a multi-network interview pool.
Obama’s administration was widely criticized by journalists (including from outlets not aligned with Fox) for tight control of information, fewer formal press conferences than many predecessors, restricted photographer access (favoring official White House images), delays or stonewalling on FOIA, and “blackballing” or limiting access for some critical reporters at agencies.
Obama’s efforts to plug leaks and persecute leakers even exceeded those of George W. Bush’s administration. The administration prosecuted Stephen Kim, a former State Department official, merely for discussing a classified report about North Korea with Fox News reporter James Rosen, even going so far as to seize Associated Press phone records for two months and used the FBI to conduct surveillance on James Rosen (naming him as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in one case) and New York Times reporter James Risen while trying to identify sources.
Even in earlier times, the actions were hardly unprecedented:
- Woodrow Wilson investigated journalists critical of his administration by invoking the espionage act of 1917.
- During the late 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt harassed activists, including members of the press, who sought to keep the United States out of the war raging in Europe.
- Richard Nixon went to great lengths attempting to prevent the New York Times and Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers because those documents exposed how US policymakers repeatedly lied to Congress and the American people about the Vietnam War.
Cato institute has a lengthy article about the abuses of opposing press outlets by Presidents. As for my blog, I detailed how the Bush administration and Republicans used laws against pornography. One of the Florida enforcers of this is none other than Sheriff Grady Judd.
Christopher Michael Wilson was investigated by Judd because he ran a website that allowed people to post nude pictures of women on the site, and it required a credit card to access so that the Wilson would know that people accessing the site were adults. Military men deployed in the Iraq war complained that they could not do so while in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, because the web servers in those countries blocked credit cards from being processed by companies who promoted pornography. Because of this, Wilson allowed members proving they were deployed by posting pictures from the war zone to have access to the site. Because of those pictures, the site became a photo journal that chronicled the Iraq war. It was one of the first sites to publish the Abu Grhaib pictures that so embarrassed former President Bush. The pictures being posted to that site caused major problems for the Bush administration.
Judd arrested Wilson on 301 counts of distributing pornography, even though Wilson did not post the pictures, he merely ran a site where people posted content, and the servers were not in Polk County (they were in the Netherlands). A plea deal was reached where Wilson had to turn the website over to Judd.
Even though the charges themselves were over pornography, according to Judd, the investigation was because of the Iraq pictures, also according to Judd.
Don’t forget that Grady Judd is also one of the Sheriffs who broke the law in 2011 when they lobbied the state legislators to defeat the open carry law. I am one of the few people not on the left who think Judd is a grandstanding, authoritarian asshole. He also has previously engaged in arresting people who are critical of his policies, including arresting one woman for “lewd activity in the presence of a minor” because her neighbor and his child heard a “sexual sounding noise” coming from the woman’s home 48 days earlier. Of course, it was only a coincidence that the woman had been critical of the sheriff and his policies. The charges were dropped, but the woman had to sign an agreement to stop criticizing the sheriff.
Yeah, so using political power to silence dissent is nothing new. It’s been going on as long as we have had a nation. Both parties do it, but each claims the other is the evil one. I have news for you: they both are evil, power grabbing assholes who will stop at nothing to gain power.
Communism
Stupidity.
Background: Some moron came to social media to simp for passing a law reducing the work week to 32 hours. Some people complained that they wouldn’t be able to pay bills with a 20% reduction in income. The response from the advocates of this claimed the law would require an hourly raise so the fewer hours would not affect the employees’ take home pay. That’s the background.
I objected, asking how businesses would pay for this. The response was “studies have shown that this schedule increases employee productivity so that this plan has no net impact on business operations.” I called bullshit- if this were the case, businesses would already be doing this.
In response, they attached a “study” done by the government of San Juan county, Washington. Since 2023, the county has only required employees work 32 hours per week. They have made it permanent by claiming an increase of over 200% in job applicants and an increase in employee productivity.
The catch is in how the government defines productivity. I will quote it here:
Maintaining Productivity: Employee timesheet data shows an average of 18% less sick time used after adopting the 32HWW, and 21% less sick time used during flu season.
That isn’t productivity. That’s presence. Just because an employee doesn’t call in sick as often doesn’t mean he is doing anything while he is there. This is the kind of bullshit that people pass off as “scientific studies” today.
So I asked, if employee productivity goes up, why wouldn’t all businesses do it? His answer? Business owners are greedy. If by greedy, you mean “all business owners want to earn the largest profit they can,” Then I guess they are. However, if they are greedy and want to maximize profit, you do that by increasing productivity.
There are two types of costs that a business incurs:
- Variable costs. These are costs that vary with the amount of product you produce. Things like labor, raw materials, etc.
- Fixed costs: insurance, cost of the factory, administrative overhead like HR and accounting departments, things like that.
If a business is creating 3200 widgets and has 400 labor hours each week, there are 8 products being made per labor hour. That’s a measure of variable labor costs. If I could reduce that to 320 labor hours, but still manufacture 3200 widgets, I just cut my labor costs by producing 10 widgets per labor hour.
But there’s more. At the same time, the fixed costs stay the same, only now there is time in a week to work another 3/4ths of a shift in the three days remaining. If I hire a second shift to work an average of 240 hours per week and they can maintain the 10 widgets per labor hour, I am now producing 5600 widgets per week without increasing my fixed costs.
I just increased my profit margins. Why wouldn’t I??
The reason I wouldn’t? Because productivity doesn’t increase when you cut working hours. If a person can assemble ten widgets an hour, he won’t magically assemble 12 of them because you give him more time off.
So what happened? How did San Juan county’s government departments all meet their targets, even though they were working 20% fewer hours? Two ways: They made salaried employees work more hours, and they had an outsourcing contract that brought in outside contractors to complete the backlogged work.
That’s how leftists and governments define success. It’s all smoke and mirrors.