Los Angeles was forced to slash funding for the fire department after Mayor Karen Bass awarded gilded contracts to city workers, a review of public records shows.
The trouble began early last year after Bass settled contract negotiations with public sector unions. In dozens of agreements, the city’s civilian employees pocketed 20 to 25 percent wage hikes over five years and other goodies that cost the city $4.5 billion over the life of the contracts, according to an analysis by the city’s administrative officer, the City Journal reported.
A series of unintended payouts stemming from judgments against the city in personal injury lawsuits brought Los Angeles to the brink.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom received a briefing about the area damaged by the Palisades wildfire, with others present in a parking lot.
Two teen girls in Louisiana have been charged with a felony for trying to “frame a male high school teacher for sending inappropriate messages to a student.”
Details about the case have been released by Craig Webre, the sheriff for Lafourche Parish.
On Jan. 6, 2025, each girl was charged with one count of false swearing for the purpose of violating public health or safety, a felony, cyberstalking, and online impersonation, the law enforcement report said.
They were placed on electronic monitoring and released to the custody of their parents.
Webre said, “Our juvenile detectives are diligent and take claims of inappropriate behavior very seriously. They are, however, equally serious about false claims. Someone’s life can be instantly ruined by a false allegation, and I am proud that our investigators were able to get to the bottom of this.
“Technology has made it very easy for people to try to manipulate the truth, but technology also makes it easy for investigators to ultimately find the truth,” he said.
Local school Supt. Jarod Martin said, “We are shocked and appalled to learn of the actions of two of our students. The allegations against one of our teachers were false and malicious, and we appreciate the efficiency of investigators in uncovering the source of these messages.
“Such attacks on a teacher’s credibility and reputation are concerning and can inhibit their ability to effectively educate our children. We are committed to investigating all allegations of misconduct in order to provide a safe environment conducive to learning and working for all of our students and staff.”
The investigation into the case was opened only a week before Christmas when there was a report from “a concerned party” that a teacher was “sending inappropriate messages to a 16-year-old female student.”
The sheriff explained, “Detectives learned she and a 15-year-old friend were allegedly engaged in conversations involving inappropriate messages from the teacher via an online instant messaging platform.”
The investigation included interviews with those involved, search warrants being issued for the contents of phones and various messaging accounts, and more.
“The investigation revealed that the two teenage girls had fabricated messages, created fake accounts, and shared screenshots with friends in an effort to frame the teacher for sending inappropriate messages,” the sheriff’s office said.
This must be asshole day. It’s my 3rd post in a row about celebtards or politicians acting like one.
The net is James Woods is a conservative in Hollywood, very rare. He thought his house burned down and Olberman thought it was great and rubbed it in. It turned out that Woods’ house didn’t get burned, but no recant from Keith.
This man is deranged. I used to like him when he did Sportscenter with Dan Patrick, but then he went cuckoo with the liberal politics, I mean unhinged.
anyway, here it is.
No matter what tragedy plagues our existence, Keith Olbermann is the last person who needs to give his two cents.
The former correspondent for networks like CNN and ESPN did just that on Wednesday, posting to social media platform X on the California wildfires and how they’ve impacted conservatives in that state.
He didn’t just blast those on the other end of the political spectrum, he outright stated they were not “human.”
Olbermann was responding to host of “Last Week on X” Angela Belcamino who screenshotted a post by University of Missouri Professor Karen Piper who relished in actor James Woods losing his home.
Belcamino put out a call to “Be better,” seeing Piper’s despicable post as something that shouldn’t be the norm when people are having their lives destroyed.
Olbermann couldn’t resist chiming in.
Clearly loving that Woods lost his home, Olbermann proceeded to take a swipe at his acting career for Woods’ role in the 1992 film “Citizen Cohn” where Woods played Roy Cohn, chief counsel to former Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
Olbermann is known for consistently giving his slimy political take on X but seizing the moment when so many people who politically disagree with him see their lives in ruin is a new low.
This is, simply put, truly evil of him.
In his warped reality, one can imagine Olbermann sees himself as the torchbearer of all that is good and right in this world.
The only past office holder or spouse not attending. After all the rhetoric about them acting better when others didn’t, she shows her true colors. Way to act like a child.
This is the same woman who charged taxpayers mega-millions for her vacations and top-shelf booze of which she indulged in both in excess.
Former first lady Michelle Obama is set to snub President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next Monday after skipping former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral last week — where she would have sat next to the one and future commander-in-chief.
“Former President Barack Obama is confirmed to attend the 60th Inaugural Ceremonies. Former first lady Michelle Obama will not attend the upcoming inauguration,” the Office of Barack and Michelle Obama said in a statement to the Associated Press.
The former first lady’s team did not provide a reason for skipping the inauguration, but Michelle Obama, 60, has been an impassioned critic of Trump, 78, over the past eight years.
Her husband, former President Barack Obama, sat next to Trump at the funeral and was spotted on camera laughing and bantering with his successor, drawing worldwide headlines.
All other former presidents and their spouses are expected to attend the Jan. 20 inauguration ceremony, including George W. and Laura Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Joe and Jill Biden.
Both Michelle and Barack Obama attended Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017.
The former first lady’s antipathy for Trump was on display during the 2024 campaign, in which she and her husband campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris’ refusal to allow J.D. Vance an opportunity to check out the vice president’s residence further exposes the mainstream media’s inability “to hold Democrats to the same standard they hold Republicans,” according to former Ambassador Ric Grenell.
It was reported Tuesday that Harris has refused to extend an invitation to Vance for a sit-down or tour of the Naval Observatory, in which the Ohio senator and his family will live after Monday’s inauguration.
Grenell, who served as ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence in the first Trump administration, took to social media to express his thoughts about the snub.
“Shameful DC coverup,” Grenell posted Tuesday morning on X. “Kamala has refused requests for JD and Usha Vance to see the VP residence and working spaces – while claiming that she’s focused on a peaceful transition.
“The media’s inability to hold Democrats to the same standard they hold Republicans is a fact the American people see clearly.”
Newsmax attempted to call the vice president’s press office multiple times for comment but it was “unavailable.”
CBS News reported that Vance’s wife, Usha, had her team reach out in November seeking details about how the house suited children. The Vances have three young kids. The inquiry initially was rebuffed by a Harris political appointee, CBS News reported.
The Philadelphia Eagles fan who berated a Packers supporter during Sunday’s playoff game is out of the job — his employer just announced he has been fired as a result of the viral moment.
BCT Partners — a consulting firm that specializes in DEI services and solutions — announced the move Tuesday night … saying project manager Ryan Caldwell‘s words during the altercation with the female Cheesehead were “highly offensive and misogynistic,” which goes against the company’s values.
As we previously reported, Caldwell was caught on video unleashing on a Green Bay fan during the Eagles’ 22-10 win in the Wild Card round — calling her an “ugly dumb c***” in the process — and the Philadelphia organization swiftly kickstarted the punishment process.
It’s one thing to send the text to the wrong number, but it’s a whole other thing when you accidentally text law enforcement, thinking it’s someone who will supply you with narcotics.
A Florida woman was busted after accidentally texting a sheriff, thinking it was her drug dealer.
In honor of Denny from the Grouchy Old Cripple who is long gone now and missed, I decided to bring this back, for now. Here is the first one.
While Karen Bass and Gavin Newsome let LA burn, they were woke losers and hopefully LA will recover and the liberal voting in of incompetents will stop.
In perhaps the most unexpected, shocking revelation to come out of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires, it turns out their Fire Chief is an “LGBTQ+” woman who is obsessed with DEI. Who could have possibly guessed that?
Of course, I’m being sarcastic given who’s in charge. For context, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is currently on a taxpayer-funded trip to Ghana while her city burns. So yeah, her priorities are clearly in line. Crap, there goes that sarcasm again.
Anyway, meet Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley. She has been lauded by the press as the “first female and openly gay person” to ever hold the role. What was one of her first initiatives after being appointed? She started a diversity, equity, and inclusion program focused on recruiting more women and gay firefighters.
I get plenty of exercise and eat healthy, but It’s for the quality of life I have left, not to find the fountain of youth. My life is full and I’m happy with each day.
The recent terrorist attack (14 dead, 35 injured) in New Orleans by a homegrown former soldier, Shamsud Din Jabbar, who had “become radicalized” by ISIS has called America’s attention to the threat of Islamic extremism in the USA. Has the enemy without become a serious enemy within? And if so, what can be done to protect ourselves from further atrocities?
We previously contended with the murderous events of 9/11 (2001), with downed planes and 3,000 dead; the Washington sniper and his pal (10 killed in 2002), who liked to pick off people at gas stations; the Fort Hood massacre (2009) of our soldiers (13 killed) by a radicalized army psychiatrist; the Tsarnaev brothers setting off explosions at the Boston marathon (3 killed, over 280 injured, and 12 amputations in 2013); the San Bernardino mass slaying (2015, 14 killed and 22 seriously injured) of Christmas partygoers who worked on behalf of the developmentally disabled; and the Chattanooga shooter (2015, 4 dead), who attacked an army recruiting center. In addition, there was the Islamic attempted hit in Texas on Pam Geller (2015), who had the audacity to have an art show with drawings of Mohammed, which for certain Islamics was worse than not being halal. But the murderers who intended to shoot up the entire gathering were themselves finished off by alert locals.
The above events were against the overseas backdrop of Islamic terrorist attacks on Americans at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 of our beloved servicemen, in 1996. In 1983, 241 U.S. soldiers were killed in suicide attacks in Beirut, Lebanon. And many other nations throughout the world suffered similarly.
Is there any question that Islamic terrorism is a threat to worldwide security? Is there any question that increasing the number of Islamic immigrants increases the threat of murder and mayhem in our society? Between 1979 and April 2024, 66,872 Islamist attacks were recorded worldwide. These attacks caused the deaths of at least 249,941 people. In the 21-year 1979–2000, there were 2,194 attacks and only 6,817 deaths, but in the less than 11 years from 2013 to April 2024, there were 56,413 attacks and 204,937 deaths.
….
A distinctive of these large, un-American campus demonstrations was the presence of tents occupied by many students. Tents have not been a mainstay of previous campus demonstrations going back to the civil rights demonstrations (which, by the way, were demonstrating for civil rights and not against white people). This writer believes that the tents were symbolic of identity with Arab people. The attempt to portray the demonstrations in their ethnic/religious dimension is not only averse to the “melting pot” ideal of American life, but an attempt to elevate the desert-life, nomadic existence of many parts of the Arab world into a place of honor it does not hold in Western civilization. Many students were wearing keffiyehs (head scarves common in the Arab world). The tents and the Muslim attire of students demonstrating introduced a wanton hatred of Western mores, religions, and cultural commitments that went far beyond protesting the Middle East conflict between Israel and some of her Arab neighbors.
By including tents, keffiyehs, and female head coverings, demonstrators also revealed themselves to be anti-Western and anti-American. These dimensions of demonstrator hostility are both novel and dreadful.
There is a clear consensus among the global elite that overpopulation is the primary cause of the most important problems that our world is facing today. Many of them are completely convinced that humans are literally a “plague” upon the Earth and that extreme measures are required to prevent us from destroying the entire planet. To the elite, everything from global warming to our growing economic problems can be directly traced back to a lack of population control. They warn that if nothing is done about our exploding population, humanity will be facing a future full of poverty, war and suffering on a filthy, desolate planet. They complain that it “costs too much” to keep elderly patients that are terminally ill alive, and they eagerly promote “family planning” in developing nations as a way to combat population growth. Of course just about anything that reduces the human population in any way is a positive thing for those that believe in this philosophy.
This very twisted philosophy is being promoted in our movies, in our television shows, in our music, in countless books, on many of our most prominent websites, and it is being taught at top colleges and universities all over the world. The people who are promoting this philosophy have very, very deep pockets, and they are actually convinced that they are helping to “save the world” by controlling the growth of the human population. In fact, many of them truly believe that they are engaged in a “life or death” struggle for the fate of the planet.
From the time of Charles Darwin all the way to today, we have been relentlessly warned about what would happen if something was not done to reduce population growth.
Of course, the dire consequences that we were warned about have never actually come to fruition.
But that hasn’t stopped the elite from continuing to issue even more warnings.
The following are 47 shocking population control quotes from the global elite that will make you want to lose your lunch…
As always, the globalists are wrong. They want eath to be their playground and to get rid of others (Margaret Sanger is the mother of abortion and eugenics against blacks)
Here’s the key line: Hanson went on to say that Democrats define masculine men as those who “cede authority” to women, before ripping into both Emhoff and Walz’s problematic pasts. “So if you want to impregnate your nanny and arrange for her to have a child and then buy her a house and then cover it up for years, that’s what a sensitive man does. Or if you want to lie about your military record serially, that’s OK too because you’re a sensitive male. So one of the elements of sensitive masculinity is that while you may sin and those are traits of the toxic masculinity and you’re trying to overcome them,”
Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson on his podcast Thursday broke down what he said was Democrats’ “idea” of how “real masculine men” are expected to behave, and that includes what he said was their destruction of traditional masculinity.
Prior to President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in November, The New York Times released an article profiling the faces of Democrats’ “new masculinity.” The first was Doug Emhoff , who is husband to Vice President Kamala Harris. The second was Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who, last year, was Harris’ running mate.
On “The Victor Davis Hanson Show,” the senior fellow discussed how Democrats have rejected “traditional key men,” saying Emhoff and Walz have become key role models for women on the left.
“As I understand the subtext is on the left, that they are rejecting traditional key man masculinity on the right. So they don’t like the Dana White, the Joe Rogan, the Mixed Martial Arts, all of that group,” Hanson said. “But apparently they have an idea of a more sensitive, caring masculinity that when you look at these real men, they look endomorphic. Endomorphic is not a slur, Jack. It just means a body type where they’re invertebrate.”
“My point is Emhoff and Waltz, then they must have pushed these buttons, and I guess the buttons are partly they are helpers to powerful women like Kamala Harris or his, remember Waltz’s wife, kind of nutty? I think they took her off the trail,” Hanson said. “She’d get out and scream and yell. You got the impression that his leftward tilt, he ran as a congressional person, as a rural Clinton Democrat. And then he, this spouse kind of pushed him.”
In September, Emhoff sat down with former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki for an interview, where she was seen asking the second gentleman about reshaping the “perception of masculinity.” Emhoff told the MSNBC host that he had always aimed to “do the right thing” and “support women” when asked about his role in the cultural movement.
Hanson went on to say that Democrats define masculine men as those who “cede authority” to women, before ripping into both Emhoff and Walz’s problematic pasts.
“I guess one of the subtext is that real masculine men cede authority or decision making to the female spouses because they’re confident in their masculinity, and they don’t have to have props like guns and cars. That’s part of it. The other thing must be that you have to, real masculine men are entitled to certain sins because they’re not in your face,” Hanson said.
“So if you want to impregnate your nanny and arrange for her to have a child and then buy her a house and then cover it up for years, that’s what a sensitive man does. Or if you want to lie about your military record serially, that’s OK too because you’re a sensitive male. So one of the elements of sensitive masculinity is that while you may sin and those are traits of the toxic masculinity and you’re trying to overcome them,” Hanson added. “I guess what I’m saying is that they don’t sin.”
During their time on the campaign trail, both Emhoff and Walz came under fire over allegations involving their pasts.
Be a man. Even liberal women like masculine men, regardless of what is said. They broke for Trump as Walz and the rest of the dems were a bunch of pussies.
I spoke with “Tea Time,” a program by Children’s Health Defense, about the dangers of fake meat products to help raise awareness about this latest assault on human health
Fake food — including lab-grown meat, animal-free dairy and plant-based meat — is the globalists’ latest attempt to control the food supply
The globalists are trying to replace animal husbandry with lab-grown meat, which will allow private companies to effectively control the human population
The idea that animals must be removed from agriculture to save the planet is flawed; animals are an integral, and necessary, part of the restorative process
Fake meat is an ultraprocessed mixture of chemicals, GE ingredients, pesticides and toxic linoleic acid that will promote chronic disease
At face value, fake meat sounds like the perfect solution to end world hunger, protect animal welfare and save the planet from environmental destruction. Even a brief look below the surface reveals a much more nefarious reality, however.
To help raise awareness about this latest assault on human health, I recently spoke with host Polly Tommey on “Tea Time,” a program by Children’s Health Defense, about the dangers of fake meat products.1
Fake Meat Is All About Controlling the Food Supply
Fake food — including lab-grown meat, animal-free dairy and plant-based meat — is the globalists’ latest attempt to control the food supply. Former U.S. Secretary of State and national security adviser Henry Kissinger once said, “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control people.”2 Controlling people is their whole agenda.
The globalists have long held a monopoly on the grain industry with their patented genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In the early 2010s, not many people knew about GMOs. In 2011, we started to educate the public about their dangers, as they posed a major threat to public health and the environment.
In 2012, a ballot initiative was launched in California to require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods and food ingredients. The initiative was narrowly defeated due to massive donations from multinational corporations, but we won in the long term because awareness of GMOs in the food supply significantly increased. Now, most health-conscious people avoid GE/GMOs.
A similar trend is now occurring with fake food. The globalists are trying to replace animal husbandry with lab-grown meat, which will allow private companies to effectively control the entire food supply.
Fake Meat Is Even Worse Than CAFOs
Many people are aware of the pitfalls of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) — unnatural diets of GMO grains, crowded conditions, inhumane treatment, excessive pollution and rampant spread of disease. CAFOs are bad — but the new fake food era is going to be even worse.
With their patented fake meat products, the globalists will have unprecedented control over people’s health.3 It sounds noble to try to provide for the entire world’s population using animal-free methods, but it’s a deception.
Will Harris is a regenerative farming pioneer who runs White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia. He produces high-quality grass fed products, including beef and other animal products, in a way that’s good for consumers, the environment and the financial health of his business. While the globalists are spinning the idea that animal foods are destroying the planet, when raised regeneratively the way Harris does, this is far from the truth.
It’s the fake foods that will ultimately jeopardize the environment. “We are sequestering 3.5 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent for every pound of grass fed beef we sell. Ironically, the same environmental engineers did an analysis on Impossible Burgers,” Harris said on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” “They’re emitting 3.5 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent.”4
Impossible Foods, along with Beyond Meat, is a major player in the fake meat marketplace. It claimed to have a better carbon footprint than live animal farms and hired Quantis, a group of scientists and strategists, to prove its point. According to the executive summary, its product reduced environmental impact between 87% and 96% in the categories studied, including land occupation and water consumption.5
This, however, compares fake meat to meat from CAFOs, which are notoriously destructive to the environment and nothing like Harris’ farm. Harris commissioned the same analysis by Quantis for White Oaks and published a 33-page study showing comparisons of White Oaks Pastures’ emissions against conventional beef production.6
While the manufactured fake meat reduced its carbon footprint up to 96% in some categories, White Oaks had a net total emission in the negative numbers as compared to CAFO-produced meat.
Further, grass fed beef from White Oak Pastures had a carbon footprint that was 111% lower than a typical U.S. CAFO, and its regenerative system effectively captured soil carbon, which offset the majority of emissions related to beef production.7
“The WOP [White Oak Pastures] system effectively captures soil carbon, offsetting a majority of the emissions related to beef production,” the report stated. “In the best case, the WOP beef production may have a net positive effect on climate. The results show great potential.”8
So, the idea that animals must be removed from agriculture to save the planet is entirely flawed. In fact, animals are an integral, and necessary, part of the restorative process.
What Is Fake Meat?
Fake meat is marketed as a health food, but it’s nothing more than a highly ultraprocessed mixture of chemicals. Impossible Foods, for instance, uses genetic engineering to insert the DNA from soy plants into yeast, creating GE yeast with the gene for soy leghemoglobin.9
Impossible Foods refers to this compound as “heme,” but technically plants produce non-heme iron, and this is GE yeast-derived soy leghemoglobin.10 Heme iron only occurs in meat and seafood. Impossible Foods’ GE heme is used in their fake meat burgers as a color additive that makes the product appear to “bleed” like real meat.
The health effects of GE heme are unknown, but this didn’t stop the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from approving soy leghemoglobin in 2019. The Center for Food Safety (CFS) filed a lawsuit challenging the approval, which they called “unusually rapid”11 and risky for public health.
In their lawsuit, CFS points out that soy leghemoglobin is produced using synthetic biology, or “genetic engineering on steroids,” which does not shuffle DNA pieces between species but instead constructs new biological parts, devices and systems that do not exist in the natural world.12
The reason why Impossible Foods turned to synthetic biology to produce GE soy leghemoglobin is because it couldn’t extract enough of the substance directly from soybean roots to produce its fake meat products on an industrial, mass-produced scale. The FDA GRAS for soy leghemoglobin is 526 pages long, if that gives you any idea of the industrialized complexity of this so-called GRAS “health” food.13
Beyond Meat is similarly industrially processed. Beyond Burger patties contain 22 ingredients. Among them are expeller-pressed canola oil, pea protein isolate, cellulose from bamboo, modified food starch and methylcellulose14 — hardly “health” foods. To morph these ingredients into a patty that resembles meat require further processing.
It’s revealing, too, that while truly natural foods cannot be patented, Impossible Foods holds at least 14 patents, with about 100 more pending.15
Impossible Foods’ Fake Meat Is Loaded with Glyphosate, LA
Considering that many ingredients in fake meat products are made from GE soy,16 it’s not surprising that they’re also contaminated with the herbicide glyphosate. Consumer advocacy group Moms Across America (MAA) commissioned Health Research Institute Labs (HRI Labs), an independent laboratory that tests both micronutrients and toxins found in food, to determine how much glyphosate is in the Impossible Burger and its competitor, the Beyond Burger.
The total result of glyphosate and AMPA, the main metabolite of glyphosate, in the burgers was 11.3 parts per billion (ppb) in the Impossible Burger and 1 ppb in the Beyond Burger.17
When the concerning results were revealed, Impossible Foods engaged in a smear campaign to try and discredit MAA, labeling the group of moms “an anti-GMO, anti-vaccine, anti-science, fundamentalist group that cynically peddles a toxic brew of medical misinformation and completely unregulated, untested, potentially toxic quack ‘supplements’ …”18
The glyphosate in fake meat is one issue. The excess amounts of omega-6 fat in the form of linoleic acid (LA) are another. In my opinion, this metabolic poison is the primary contributor to rising rates of chronic disease. It’s important to realize that fake meat alternatives do not contain healthy animal fats. All the fat comes from industrial seed oils like soy and canola oil, which are top sources of LA.
Eliminating ultraprocessed foods from your diet is essential to keeping your LA intake low, and this includes fake meat.
‘Precision Fermentation’ Isn’t Natural Either
Fake food companies want you to believe their products are natural because they’re made with components of plants, even though nothing like them exists in nature. Precision fermentation is another term used by the biotech industry to piggyback off the popularity of truly health-promoting natural fermentation.
Precision fermentation, however, is nothing like its natural counterpart. What is perhaps most disturbing about the use of precision fermentation is that companies are allowed to claim that it’s natural.
Metabolic engineering is a major subset of precision fermentation, which involves methods such as next-generation sequencing, high-throughput library screening, molecular cloning and multiomics “to optimize microbial strains, metabolic pathways, product yields, and bioprocess scale-up.”19 It sounds just like something down on the farm, doesn’t it?
Whether it’s called precision fermentation, gene editing, GMO or something else, don’t fall for the hype that it’s good for you or the planet.
Where Should You Get Your Meat?
If fake meat isn’t healthy, and CAFO meat isn’t a good choice either, a reasonable question is where can you find meat that’s beneficial for your health and the planet? The answer is to get to know a farmer in your area. Visit the farm and view how the animals are being raised.
Get to know the resources available to you within your local community. The community will naturally validate the vendors who are raising food the right way. If you can’t find a local farm for ruminant animals like cows, buffalo or lamb, look for certified organic options at your local grocery store. However, it’s best to stay local and find a source of real, whole food near you.
As much as you can, plant a garden for vegetables, grow fruit trees and even raise chickens if it’s allowed in your area. For the food you can’t source on your own, lean on your community to fill in the gaps.
Just as was the case with GMOs, raising awareness about the dangers of fake meat is also important, especially in this early and aggressively expanding phase. Tell your social circle that to save the planet and support your health, it’s necessary to skip all the fake meat alternatives and opt for real food instead.
When you shop for food, know your farmer and look for regenerative, biodynamic and/or grass fed farming methods, which are what we need to support a healthy, autonomous population.
why do vegans try so hard to make stuff that tastes and looks like meat? Why not just eat the real thing? We were created to be omnivores. They need to feel morally superior, but like the enviroweenies, are misguided.
Look, I’m an introvert. While I’d like to say that curing cancer, ending world hunger, or overcoming a life threatening disease were my macro challenges, it’s not my daily struggle.
Avoiding people and small talk constantly raise their heads to dog me. I can’t expect most other than fellow introverts to get this, but it’s a struggle for me to face a crowded room of people. Having to engage in meaningless talk about stuff I know doesn’t matter is difficult also. It’s mentally draining for introverts. We are not built for it and when it comes up, it’s like being in a tunnel with the train light headed directly for you. It’s like having a grains of sand in your eye constantly and you can’t remove it.
I can do it, but with less and less enthusiasm and I have to work myself up to face it. My extroverted other has put me in situations I wish I weren’t in a lot of times in my life. I’ve finally fought that off. I find myself wanting to withdraw more and nothing pleases me more than canceled plans now.
I’m not going to be on my deathbed and wish I was more outgoing. I have a lot of other regrets that are more meaningful than small talk.
How stupid was 2024? Let’s start with the art world, which over the centuries has given humanity so many beautiful, timeless masterpieces. This year, the biggest story involving art, by far, was that a cryptocurrency businessman paid $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction for . . . A banana. Which he ate. ”It’s much better than other bananas,” he told the press. And that was not the stupidest thing that happened in 2024. It might not even crack the top ten. Because this was also a year when: —The Olympics awarded medals for breakdancing. —Fully grown adults got into fights in Target stores over Stanley brand drinking cups, which are part of the national obsession with hydration that causes many Americans to carry large-capacity beverage containers at all times, as if they’re setting off on a trek across the Sahara instead of going to Trader Joe’s. —Despite multiple instances of property damage, injury and even death, expectant couples continued to insist on revealing the genders of their unborn children by blowing things up, instead of simply telling people. —The number of people who identify as “influencers” continued to grow exponentially, which means that unless we find a cure, within ten years everybody on the planet will be trying to make a living by influencing everybody else. —Hundreds of millions of Americans set all their clocks ahead in March, then set them all back in November, without having the faintest idea why. (Granted, Americans do this every year; we’re just pointing out that it’s stupid.) But what made 2024 truly special, in terms of sustained idiocy, was that it was an election year. This meant that day after day, month after month, the average American voter was subjected to a relentless gushing spew of campaign messaging created by political professionals who—no matter what side they’re on—all share one unshakeable core belief, which is that the average American voter has the intellectual capacity of a potted fern. It was a brutal, depressing slog, and it felt as though it would never end. In fact it may still be going on in California, a state that apparently tabulates its ballots on a defective Etch-a-Sketch. For most of us, though, the elections, and this insane year, are finally over. But before we move on to whatever (God help us) lies ahead, let’s ingest our anti-nausea medication and take one last cringing look back at the events of 2024, starting with… JANUARY …when the nation finds itself trapped in a 1970s slasher movie, the kind in which some teenagers — played by the major political parties—are in a creepy house, being pursued by a terrifying entity, played by a rerun of the 2020 presidential election. The only sane thing for the teenagers to do is get the hell out of there, but instead they pause by the dark, scary-looking doorway leading down to the basement, and despite the fact that the theater audience—played by the American public—is shouting “DON’T GO DOWN THERE! JUST LEAVE THE HOUSE YOU IDIOTS!”, the teenagers decide to go down into the basement, only to find “OH GOD NOOOOOO…” And so, thanks to our political system—under which the nominees for the most powerful office in the world are chosen by approximately 73 people in approximately four rural states while the vast majority of Americans are still taking down their Christmas decorations—we once again find ourselves facing a choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Both candidates carry baggage. Trump is wanted on criminal charges in something like 23 states and, if elected, could become the first president to govern from a secret hideout. His speeches are sounding increasingly unhinged, which is no small feat since he did not sound particularly hinged in the first place. For his part, President Biden keeps saying words that do not appear in any known human language and gives the impression that any day now he’s going to shuffle into a state dinner wearing only a bathrobe. But not necessarily his bathrobe. In other words, we have one candidate who lost the last election but claims he won it, and another candidate who won the last election but might not remember what year that was. America, the choice is yours!
Meanwhile the nation is facing a number of serious problems. Foremost among them is the situation on the border with Mexico, which at one time was a legally separate nation from the United States but is now basically functioning as a vestibule. This has resulted in a tense confrontation between the federal government and Texas, which is alarming because, in the words of one military analyst, “Texas has way more guns.” In government news, the Pentagon is harshly criticized for taking more than three days to notify the White House that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had been hospitalized. This prompts the administration to check up on the rest of the cabinet, only to discover that at least four other secretaries are missing, and the Secretary of Commerce apparently died three years ago. Abroad, fighting continues to rage in both Ukraine and Gaza, although these conflicts are no longer getting a ton of attention in the U.S. media because of all the news being generated by Taylor Swift. In a troubling aviation incident, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 flying at 16,000 feet suddenly develops a refrigerator-sized hole in the fuselage when an improperly attached panel blows off, terrifying passengers who have reason to wonder whether the airline crew, instead of making a big deal about the position of everybody’s tray table, should maybe be checking to see if the plane has been correctly bolted together. As a safety precaution, the Federal Aviation Administration grounds all Max 9s and advises passengers on other Boeing aircraft to “avoid sitting near windows.” For its part, Boeing states that “at least the plane didn’t lose a really important part, like one of the whaddycallits, wings.” Here’s a rare shot of a Boeing 737 in flight with all the parts still attached. Here’s a rare shot of a Boeing 737 in flight with all the parts still attached. Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren/Special to USA TODAY Speaking of big corporations making questionable products, in…
Marriage Monday Memes – I thought this was one of the better ones, although I had to explain the pineapple juice reference to one of my friends. That tells me what I needed to know about his wife without him saying so.
Warren Upton, the oldest living survivor of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack died Wednesday at age 105.
Upton died after suffering from pneumonia, Kathleen Farley, the California state chair of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors told the Associated Press (AP). The Pacific Historic Parks said on Facebook the 105-year-old died after a short hospital stay surrounded by his family. Upton was also the last remaining survivor of the USS Utah.
The USS Utah battleship was moored at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 when Japanese planes began bombing the naval base in Hawaii, leading to the U.S. involvement in World War II.
In a 2020 interview with the AP, Upton recalled he was about to begin shaving when the first torpedo hit the Utah. He said no one on board the battleship knew what caused the ship to start shaking and then, the second torpedo hit, causing the ship to capsize.
Upton was 22 at the time of the attack, the AP reported. He swam ashore to Ford Island where he jumped into a trench to avoid the planes surrounding the area. He waited for roughly 30 minutes before a truck passed by and rescued him.
In 2023, nearly 62 million lives were lost worldwide – an average of around 7,000 deaths every hour.
These numbers reflect the impacts of aging, illness, and conflict, and Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao takes a further look into the countries with the most deaths every hour.
At the top of the list, China lost more than 1,300 people every hour in 2023. This is about 300 more deaths than second-ranked India (roughly 1,000 people ever hour).
Rank
Country
Deaths in 2023
Deaths per Hour
1
🇨🇳 China
11,684,177
1,334
2
🇮🇳 India
9,507,008
1,085
3
🇺🇸 U.S.
2,975,658
340
4
🇳🇬 Nigeria
2,675,442
305
5
🇮🇩 Indonesia
2,117,706
242
6
🇷🇺 Russia
1,794,857
205
7
🇵🇰 Pakistan
1,600,313
183
8
🇯🇵 Japan
1,524,430
174
9
🇧🇷 Brazil
1,494,154
171
10
🇩🇪 Germany
1,034,140
118
11
🇨🇩 DRC
901,851
103
12
🇧🇩 Bangladesh
859,075
98
13
🇲🇽 Mexico
799,366
91
14
🇪🇹 Ethiopia
767,018
88
15
🇵🇭 Philippines
716,490
82
16
🇮🇹 Italy
663,448
76
17
🇻🇳 Vietnam
659,980
75
18
🇬🇧 UK
653,747
75
19
🇹🇭 Thailand
637,306
73
20
🇪🇬 Egypt
625,449
71
21
🇫🇷 France
616,095
70
22
🇿🇦 South Africa
584,015
67
23
🇹🇷 Turkey
551,598
63
24
🇲🇲 Myanmar
495,470
57
25
🇺🇦 Ukraine
495,421
57
26
🇪🇸 Spain
447,463
51
27
🇮🇷 Iran
423,367
48
28
🇵🇱 Poland
412,310
47
29
🇰🇪 Kenya
399,024
46
30
🇹🇿 Tanzania
385,799
44
31
🇦🇷 Argentina
349,195
40
32
🇰🇷 South Korea
345,502
39
33
🇸🇩 Sudan
320,491
37
34
🇨🇦 Canada
311,824
36
35
🇨🇴 Colombia
282,433
32
36
🇷🇴 Romania
257,119
29
37
🇰🇵 North Korea
255,826
29
38
🇦🇴 Angola
254,482
29
39
🇦🇫 Afghanistan
240,296
27
40
🇨🇮 Ivory Coast
238,741
27
41
🇬🇭 Ghana
237,869
27
42
🇺🇬 Uganda
235,583
27
43
🇲🇿 Mozambique
235,520
27
44
🇲🇬 Madagascar
234,841
27
45
🇳🇪 Niger
231,746
26
46
🇺🇿 Uzbekistan
221,249
25
47
🇩🇿 Algeria
214,259
24
48
🇻🇪 Venezuela
213,955
24
49
🇹🇩 Chad
213,123
24
50
🇲🇦 Morocco
212,624
24
51
🇳🇵 Nepal
205,841
23
52
🇹🇼 Taiwan
205,339
23
53
🇲🇱 Mali
205,047
23
54
🇨🇲 Cameroon
202,882
23
55
🇾🇪 Yemen
188,764
22
56
🇮🇶 Iraq
186,266
21
57
🇵🇪 Peru
185,861
21
58
🇦🇺 Australia
183,924
21
59
🇧🇫 Burkina Faso
183,375
21
60
🇲🇾 Malaysia
181,166
21
61
🇸🇴 Somalia
180,554
21
62
🇳🇱 Netherlands
169,320
19
63
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka
162,453
19
64
🇰🇿 Kazakhstan
136,388
16
65
🇬🇳 Guinea
131,455
15
66
🇭🇺 Hungary
128,063
15
67
🇨🇱 Chile
127,691
15
68
🇬🇷 Greece
127,018
14
69
🇿🇼 Zimbabwe
124,412
14
70
🇧🇯 Benin
124,132
14
71
🇧🇾 Belarus
121,587
14
72
🇸🇾 Syria
118,900
14
73
🇵🇹 Portugal
115,917
13
74
🇧🇪 Belgium
113,791
13
75
🇨🇿 Czech Republic
113,525
13
76
🇲🇼 Malawi
113,181
13
77
🇨🇺 Cuba
111,819
13
78
🇰🇭 Cambodia
111,340
13
79
🇸🇸 South Sudan
110,339
13
80
🇿🇲 Zambia
107,917
12
81
🇧🇬 Bulgaria
102,980
12
82
🇸🇳 Senegal
100,882
12
83
🇸🇪 Sweden
93,944
11
84
🇷🇸 Serbia
93,928
11
85
🇦🇹 Austria
93,223
11
86
🇪🇨 Ecuador
92,204
11
87
🇧🇮 Burundi
91,963
10
88
🇭🇹 Haiti
90,966
10
89
🇧🇴 Bolivia
87,812
10
90
🇬🇹 Guatemala
87,523
10
91
🇷🇼 Rwanda
82,826
9
92
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia
77,837
9
93
🇹🇳 Tunisia
74,071
8
94
🇨🇭 Switzerland
73,788
8
95
🇹🇬 Togo
71,661
8
96
🇩🇴 Dominican Republic
70,823
8
97
🇸🇱 Sierra Leone
70,116
8
98
🇦🇿 Azerbaijan
67,842
8
99
🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea
67,700
8
100
🇫🇮 Finland
59,984
7
101
🇩🇰 Denmark
57,275
7
102
🇭🇰 Hong Kong
57,190
7
103
🇭🇷 Croatia
55,029
6
104
🇸🇰 Slovakia
54,167
6
105
🇮🇱 Israel
51,294
6
106
🇱🇾 Libya
48,610
6
107
🇨🇫 Central African Republic
48,529
6
108
🇱🇦 Laos
47,682
5
109
🇭🇳 Honduras
47,670
5
110
🇹🇯 Tajikistan
47,595
5
111
🇸🇻 El Salvador
47,443
5
112
🇬🇪 Georgia
45,077
5
113
🇱🇷 Liberia
44,333
5
114
🇳🇴 Norway
44,143
5
115
🇧🇦 Bosnia & Herzegovina
42,861
5
116
🇹🇲 Turkmenistan
42,575
5
117
🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan
42,200
5
118
🇲🇩 Moldova
41,730
5
119
🇱🇹 Lithuania
40,940
5
120
🇵🇾 Paraguay
39,034
4
121
🇵🇸 Palestine
38,937
4
122
🇨🇬 Congo
38,880
4
123
🇳🇿 New Zealand
37,686
4
124
🇮🇪 Ireland
35,550
4
125
🇯🇴 Jordan
34,873
4
126
🇵🇷 Puerto Rico
34,664
4
127
🇱🇧 Lebanon
34,419
4
128
🇺🇾 Uruguay
33,145
4
129
🇳🇮 Nicaragua
31,294
4
130
🇨🇷 Costa Rica
27,861
3
131
🇸🇬 Singapore
27,728
3
132
🇲🇷 Mauritania
27,725
3
133
🇱🇻 Latvia
27,614
3
134
🇦🇲 Armenia
27,579
3
135
🇱🇸 Lesotho
24,612
3
136
🇦🇱 Albania
23,428
3
137
🇯🇲 Jamaica
22,933
3
138
🇸🇮 Slovenia
21,581
2
139
🇵🇦 Panama
21,272
2
140
🇪🇷 Eritrea
20,984
2
141
🇲🇳 Mongolia
20,340
2
142
🇲🇰 North Macedonia
19,863
2
143
🇳🇦 Namibia
18,279
2
144
🇬🇲 Gambia
16,975
2
145
🇪🇪 Estonia
16,693
2
146
🇬🇦 Gabon
15,577
2
147
🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau
15,181
2
148
🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea
14,556
2
149
🇧🇼 Botswana
14,197
2
150
🇹🇹 Trinidad & Tobago
12,577
1
151
🇲🇺 Mauritius
11,124
1
152
🇹🇱 Timor-Leste
10,065
1
153
🇽🇰 Kosovo
9,981
1
154
🇦🇪 UAE
9,916
1
155
🇴🇲 Oman
9,597
1
156
🇨🇾 Cyprus
9,499
1
157
🇸🇿 Eswatini
9,475
1
158
🇰🇼 Kuwait
8,624
1
159
🇩🇯 Djibouti
8,596
1
160
🇫🇯 Fiji
8,553
1
161
🇲🇪 Montenegro
7,209
1
162
🇰🇲 Comoros
6,119
1
163
🇬🇾 Guyana
6,049
1
164
🇧🇹 Bhutan
4,805
1
165
🇷🇪 Réunion
4,797
1
166
🇱🇺 Luxembourg
4,642
1
the rest of the countries had a zero so I didn’t continue the article, but it can be found
A horse and a chicken grew up together on the farm and were the best friends. They went everywhere together. One day, the horse waded into the pond to get a drink, and he realized that his feet were stuck in the mud and that he was sinking. He yelled for the chicken and said,
“I’m stuck in the mud and sinking, go get help, go get the farmer!”
The chicken ran to the house and, realizing the farmer wasn’t home, grabbed the Porshe keys, drove down by the barn, got a length of rope, sped back to the pond, tied the rope to the bumper of the car, threw the other end to the horse, and pulled the horse out of the water.
A couple of weeks later the chicken stepped into a mud puddle in the farm yard and realized that her feet were stuck and that she was sinking.
She hollered for the horse, “Go get the car!”
The horse said, “I don’t need the car.”
He stepped over the mud puddle, straddled it with one foot on each edge, and said, “grab my pecker and pull yourself out.”
The moral of this story is: If you’re hung like a horse, you don’t need a Porsche to pick up chicks.
I was at an analyst conference and George H. W. Bush was the speaker. The first thing he said was that he hated the press. The second was that the stupidest question he ever got asked was by Lesley Stahl as to why he wasn’t dancing when the Berlin Wall came down.
Now this:
Newscaster Lesley Stahl claims she “doesn’t know what to do” about the embarrassing demise of the legacy media.
She was lamenting to her colleague, Peggy Noonan, that “we are at the point where even the president,” then corrected herself saying, “Elon Musk,” asserted that legacy media is dead. She appeared extremely worried, spilling her deepest concerns, in front of an empathetic audience gathered at the 92nd St. YMCA studio in New York.
It was as if Stahl was having an out-of-body experience, where she failed to factor in herself, in accounting for the reason why audiences were abandoning network news in droves. You know you’re in trouble as an award-winning reporter when the show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” on the Food Network manages to pull in higher ratings than the 24-hour news coverage, CNN.
“I don’t know how it (media) recovers,” Stahl confessed: “It is sort of… kind of hobbling along.”
There was some editing in her statement: She didn’t require the qualifier of “sort of,” “kind (of)” hobbling along. Sounding like sorority sisters, Stahl then confessed to Noonan, “I’m in a very dark place about it.” The gal-pal team then proceeded to engage in a hug-fest to lift up each other spirits, never hinting at they might be part of the problem.
“We’re talking about something so essential,” Noonan offered in her media overview. “You don’t want to say we’ll see. Or, maybe the world will end. We’ll see.” Wow! Noonan, in a moment of candid reflection, had actually compared something “so essential” as corporate media, and it being thrown on the trash heap of cancelled programing, with the world ending.
Such serious contemplation negates the wider view of just how they got into such a “dark place.” Still, they went along their merry way, as two titans in the media, seemingly oblivious to the fact that their smugness and Trump-bashing served as an integral part of the toxic behavior that fueled the rot in the “legacy media.”
Noonan proved it didn’t matter how nonsensical a joke or outright lie at Trump’s expense was — it was still worth working into the conversation. She made an off-the-cuff quip, shortly after the November election, when President-elect Trump was at the top of news reports in more than 100 countries, saying: “We haven’t been seeing much of Mr. Trump,” and “I’m enjoying that.”
The audience laughed appreciatively. So what if the joke indicated the speaker appeared clueless about an avalanche of news overtaking every newsroom in the nation? You must say this — Stahl and Noonan know their audience, no matter how much it may be shrinking.
Once the laughter stopped, Stahl may have found it productive to engage in some good-old fashioned reporting to figure out what she “could do” to better understand the media’s abysmal ratings. And even more concerning, the loss of public trust. In her 53-year journalism career, she never thought she’d witness her once-premiere news program, “60 Minutes,” becoming increasingly irrelevant in a post-Trump election world. Ratings stayed in the toilet bowl, as one CBS executive noted, as the show pulled in a pitiful five million viewers in mid-November.
It wouldn’t take much digging for Stahl to find out what’s going on in audienceville. She, like her colleagues, would have to get up out of their chairs, leave their network buildings and stop relying on corrupted news sources. (That would include themselves.)
The best — and obvious — place to start would be for Stahl and Noonan to review comments made by viewers watching their unscripted exchange. Reactions from the audience is merely a click away on the accompanying YouTube comment thread: The media titans may have appeared untroubled by their intense partisanship, but viewers were taking a dimmer view.
One viewer identified as “@CharlieWhitmore,” was diligent enough to perform Stahl’s job for her: He reviewed one of her most startling Trump-bashing moments on “60 Minutes.” “I went back and reviewed Leslie’s interview with Trump in October 2020,” he wrote. “Leslie you are the problem…” He referred to Stahl’s pathological tendency, like her colleagues, to disbelieve and discredit (then) President Trump and their refusal to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story. This, in turn, would have opened the door to investigating the “Biden crime family’s behavior,” President Trump claimed, and their influence peddling to negotiate lucrative contracts.
The snippet below speaks volumes about Stahl acting more as a White House spokesperson as opposed to a working journalist.
“He’s in the midst of a scandal,” President Trump said referencing Hunter Biden’s lap top’s incriminating content.
“He’s not,” Stahl interrupted. “He’s not. No.”
Later in the interview, Stahl claimed the Delaware computer contents had been “investigated and discredited.” This attitude of nothing-to-see-here-folks has become an integral part of the legacy media. They never failed in their efforts to come to the defense of the Biden Family along with Democrat operatives’ criminal activities.
“It can’t be verified,” Stahl repeated numerous times of the laptop. She was relying, of course, on her anonymous sources, corrupted intelligence contacts and biased news outlets. Nothing in the interview indicated that Stahl would divert from her political ideology and runaway bias.
“What can’t be verified?” Trump asked.
“The laptop!” Stahl responded as if confirming the obvious.
“The biggest scandal,” Trump continued, ‘was when they spied on my campaign.”
“There’s no real evidence of that,” Stahl said never wavering from her ludicrous and now embarrassingly false version of events. Owning up to this shameful chapter of reporting wasn’t on Stahl’s agenda, nor was correcting her distorted worldview.
Other viewer reactions were equally revealing, and not very sparing in their comments of Stahl and Noonan:
“Madame Stahl, you reap what you sow,” wrote @I.marciago5030, “Just listening to you (makes it) easy to understand why the corporate media (has) lost all credibility.”
“Lesley, thank you for all the good work you put into helping destroy legacy media,” responded another @woodyharrelson2624.
“Lesley Stahl just doesn’t get it. No wonder legacy media is dying,” wrote @Grad1067.
A few of the remarks were dripping in sarcasm including: “Big shout-out to these two ladies for helping Trump get elected. Bravo,” wrote @neildepoy77320
It might prove useful, for Stahl, to juxtapose the “60 Minutes” sparring match between herself and President-elect Trump in the wake of viewing the irrefutable facts. Sadly, Stahl appeared unwilling to take a moment of introspection to understand her personal responsibility — after all, she’s a big-deal journalist — for a media that has become corrupted by its own bias.
Instead, she spent a moment fawning over herself and offered up a different interpretation of the exchange between herself and President Trump. She recounted, without a hint of irony, that she asked the president in October 2020: “Why do you keep pounding on the press?”
Trump, being Trump, offered a pragmatic answer: “I do it and I repeat it because that way fewer people are going to believe you.”
Flames and torment aside, one imagines Hell as a place where lies prevail at all times.
For instance, imagine a situation in which an elderly man with a well-earned reputation for creepy behavior occupied the most powerful station in the world, and everyone around him knew that his severely diminished cognitive abilities not only prevented him from carrying out his official functions but had removed any theoretical restraints on said behavior, but they pretended otherwise, not only by continuing to trot him out in public but by referring to him, unironically, as “Mr. President.”
Such thoughts leap to mind when one sees a ridiculous new Christmas photo taken at the White House and posted Wednesday to the social media platform Instagram by 73-year-old actress Lynda Carter, who famously played the title role in the 1970s television series “Wonder Woman.”
In the photo, the 82-year-old President Joe Biden stood as close as possible to Carter.
Thus, Carter’s Instagram followers generally gushed over the photo. But not all of them did.
“Why is Jill a mile apart from her husband?” one Instagram user wrote.
“But did you get sniffed?” another wrote, referring to the president’s well-documented propensity for sniffing women and children.
Meanwhile, X users found the photo and had a field day with it.
“Bwahahahaha!!!!! Looks like Biden is a fan of WonderWoman as well! Go on a get a sniff while you’re all in her space!!” one X user wrote.
Walmart employees at certain U.S. stores were given body cameras to wear as part of a pilot program, CNBC reported Tuesday.
It is unclear how many Walmart locations have placed body cameras on store-level associates. Witnesses and images distributed online showed signs at entry points to locations warning shoppers that it has “body-worn cameras in use,” according to the outlet.
“may have several negative impacts on the local environment and economy”
See the post below about Germany being dumbasses about the same thing. Use gas. It’s cheap and it isn’t killing whales or the environment. Those are lies made up by hypocritical zealots whose religion is green (money, not sustainability like Al Gore and John Kerry).
Drill baby drill and bring down the cost of energy, bringing down the cost of everything else. For those who worship the planet, watch and see that it won’t harm a thing. It will actually be better for everything except their wallets
Everyone knows this has been a boondoggle, even the left, but they’re so committed to supposed ‘green’ energy that they can’t let go.
A government regulator recognizing offshore wind’s destructive environmental effects is as rare as a North Atlantic right whale. But a recent, 600-plus page report from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) admits that the offshore wind development planned for the New York Bight—the triangular area bordered by the New Jersey and Long Island coastlines—may irreversibly harm whales, commercial and recreational fisheries, and seabirds.
The BOEM report is the agency’s first to evaluate the cumulative impacts of offshore wind development. Its authors cite a wide range of potential effects, from negligible (or even beneficial) to major. Acknowledging potentially “major” harms is a radical departure from the agency’s previously accepted Environmental Impact Statements for offshore wind projects, which have always focused on the impacts of individual projects, rather than the cumulative impacts of multiple projects.
The report, which BOEM bills as a “programmatic environmental impact statement,” admits that the proposed offshore wind projects on the New York Bight may have several negative impacts on the local environment and economy. The authors note, for example, that the effect on the North Atlantic right whale could be “major,” defined as having “severe population-level effects” that would “compromise the viability of the species”—in other words, potential extinction. The report also concedes that the projects could have major effects (“substantial disruptions”) on commercial and recreational fishing, which contribute billions of dollars to the New Jersey and New York economies.
While the report discusses the consequences of these wind turbines on ocean views and even on local housing prices, it makes no mention of these projects’ adverse effects on electric ratepayers and economic growth. These effects are substantial, as New Jersey’s experience reveals. The state’s Board of Public Utilities estimated that its two approved offshore wind projects in 2024, with a total capacity of 2,400 MW, would raise the monthly electric bills of a typical residential customer by about $7, a commercial customer by about $59, and an industrial customer by over $500. Those estimated costs, which don’t include what those customers will pay for new transmission lines and the backup generation needed to offset wind’s inherent intermittency, cumulatively amount to more than a $750 million annual increase in electric bills for the state’s 8.5 million electric ratepayers. , based on the numbers of these customers. If the Garden State succeeds in its goal of developing 11,000 megawatts of offshore wind electricity, despite mounting costs and the cancellations of two major in-state projects, ratepayers alone will end up paying an additional $3 billion to $5 billion more each year for their electricity.
Getting fired for some snatch. He hasn’t learned the big red pilled answer. None of them are worth getting fired over. I told a girl who thought she was all that and a bag of chips that there is no golden pussy. There is always some girl that some guy is willing to not screw.
The case involves an Army four-star general who has been fired for improperly trying to rig an Army command screening process so that the general’s favored subordinate, who he happened to have an inappropriate relationship with, got command when she didn’t deserve it.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth has fired a four-star general — one of just 12 in the entire service — following an investigation into accusations that he attempted to use his position to push a subordinate officer’s promotion forward, Task & Purpose has confirmed.
Gen. Charles Hamilton was relieved as the commander of Army Materiel Command, a position he had been suspended from during the investigation. The probe focused on whether Hamilton tried to pressure Army officials into promoting a lieutenant colonel that he mentored. Task & Purpose is not identifying the lieutenant colonel because there is no evidence she violated any Army policies.
“Based on the findings of a Department of the Army Inspector General investigation, the Secretary of the Army has relieved General Charles Hamilton of command,” the Army said in a statement.
Now, I had the privilege, in the latter years of my 31-year Navy career, as a Navy active duty Captain, to be appointed to about a dozen promotion and command selection boards, which were all held at the Navy Personnel Headquarters in Millington, Tennessee, from about 2002 to 2008. During every one of those boards I never saw one thing that even remotely hinted at undue influence or anything remotely wrong. Keep that in mind as we continue.
And, I would not bring up the race of the two officers involved, but Task & Purpose reported it because it was the General’s key defense in trying to explain away his actions:
In his classic book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, economist Timur Kuran notes how governments, and social movements, do their best to enforce this sort of ideological uniformity. People tend to hide unpopular views to avoid ostracism or punishment; they stop hiding them when they feel safe.
This can produce rapid change: In totalitarian societies like the old Soviet Union, the police and propaganda organizations do their best to enforce preference falsification. Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. This works until something breaks the spell and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers — or even to the citizens themselves. Kuran calls this sudden change a “preference cascade,” and I believe that’s what’s happening here.
In America, the left spent years bullying people into accepting “woke” ideas on race, gender, and politics. There’s considerable reason to believe that a majority of Americans never accepted these ideas, but between constant media repetition, and the risk of being mobbed and canceled if you disagreed with them, most people for years were afraid to stand up.
But two things put a stop to that. One was Donald Trump’s election. The other – and the two are related – was Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, which is now a free-speech platform with roughly equal representation of Democrats and Republicans. Both had the effect of blowing up the lefty bubble and letting people realize that they, not the woke, were the actual majority.
The red flags used to be tattooed (especially helter-skelter instead of artistic), hair dyed an unnatural color (green, pink, purple), excessive piercings, and cats.
The problem was that some of these girls might actually have been ok (all right, single digits).
Now, there is a 100% test for a girl who is certifiably nuts and you should avoid
In my younger days, I was passionate about fishing. At the time, I was inland so lake fishing was my only real weekend option, so I was all in. I was good with catching anything, but bass and stripers were at the top of the food chain.
One winter day, my fishing buddy (read he had a boat and I didn’t) Brian called me up and said let’s go. I checked the weather report and it was going to be in the 30’s, but I had nothing to do so my dumbass bundled up and went out on the lake.
I knew damn well that the fish had lockjaw under 40 degrees, but away we went, at zero dark thirty o’clock.
I figured it would be a day of casting practice and not catching, but that never stopped a fisherman. The ride to the perfect spot is never short, so we blasted through the freezing air as fast as the bass boat could go. No sense in going at a reasonable speed. I had to wait once we got there just to de-ice.
Here’s where the story begins.
At some point, the coffee went through me and I had to piss. I waited as long as I could so that when I reached the moment of truth, I could actually go.
So here I am on the back of the boat about ready to bust and now I have to take off a jacket, gloves, a pair of Ski pants, long johns, thermal underwear, and finally try to find my dick.
It was all (relatively) warm at about 32 degrees, but once my dick hit the freezing air, it revolted and said not today Jack. As I said, I was at the moment of truth and had to go. I was hoping for a huge stream to get it over with and not piss on the boat because then I’d have to stick my hand in the freezing water to wash it off.
After digging through all of my clothes and trying to get ready to force it out, My dick tried to crawl inside my body. It gave a weak effort, so I’m trying not to piss on my clothes, the boat, and trying to hit the water instead of everything else. I managed to get it done, but I don’t recall my dick being that cold ever before. It even revoted when I had to grab it with freezing fingers.
As for fishing, on a day we should have been skunked, I slayed the bass. I seemed to throw the right lure in the right place all day. I caught them off of stumps, on the spawning beds, on crankbaits, and on worms.
It was a helluva day fishing, but a terrible time trying to take a leak. I think that was the last time I tried that, although I’ve spent plenty of time in a tree stand hunting deer and trying not to piss.
While the 78-year-old made it clear he doesn’t believe his wife did “anything wrong,” he suggested if members of Trump’s administration were “determined” to “make” up a crime, it could probably be done.
During the 2016 election cycle, former secretary of state found herself in hot water after she was accused of using a private server to send classified correspondences. However, Bill pointed out Hillary had been cleared of any wrongdoing.
“She followed the rules exactly as they were written,” he said on the Wednesday, December 11, installment of The View. “Remember how the emails were such a big issue in 2016? Trump’s State Department found that Hillary sent and received exactly zero classified emails on her personal device.”
Bill claimed the scandal was nothing more than a “made-up phony story.”
The Clintons are dripping with crime, as are a lot of others like ex-FBI, DOJ, Eric Holder, the Obama’s, Liz Cheney, Schiff, Nadler, Maxine Waters, Fauci and a long list of others.
An OnlyFans porn star broke down in tears after sleeping with 100 men in a single day in order to gain social media clout.
Actually 101.
Lily Phillips thought that having sex with so many men would catapult her to viral fame, and it did briefly, but she’s now counting the cost.
In a documentary made by YouTuber Josh Pieters titled I Slept With 100 Men in One Day, Pieters almost vomits at the sight of a bedroom littered with lube, used condoms, wrappers and tissues after Phillips had spent a nauseating 14 hours fornicating.
By the time the 30th man rocked up, the porn star said she began to “disassociate,” remarking, “It’s not like normal sex. I can only think of five, six, 10 guys that I remember and that’s it. It’s weird.”
Phillips said she began to feel “robotic,” but ‘felt bad’ about not giving every man at least the promised five minutes.
“When I started making this documentary, I wasn’t too sure of what to expect, I certainly didn’t expect to see Lily so upset at the end of it all,” said Pieters, as Phillips goes to hug her friend while sobbing.
I’m just glad that I found out she was sleeping around after I broke up with her, and that I didn’t catch anything. I’m glad I got out when I did, just not soon enough.
Top Kamala Harris Staffer Admits What We Knew All Along
Kamala Harris’s deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, admitted at a Harvard politics event Dec. 6 that the Democratic Party’s media outreach strategy is not only failing but failing miserably.
During a panel discussion at the school’s Institute of Politics, Flaherty lamented his party and campaign’s failure to find voters who are not paying attention to corporate networks — CNN and MSNBC — and Hollywood A-listers from Diddy’s orbit. He also made an interesting comment about the Democratic Party being the “party of institutions,” which I think is true. The Democrats have become the staunch defenders of the status quo, whereas the Republican Party, under the leadership of President-elect Donald Trump, has become an insurgent force of change in the capital.
They don’t live in the real world and really don’t know anything. Actors pretend for a living and the press are just people that try to sell advertising by sensationalism. They are shallow, vain and will sell you out in a second
I couldn’t agree with this writing more. It’s happening to me and I even crave it now. For example, I celebrate every time I miss another high school reunion. The 50th is next year for me and there is nothing or nobody that could drag me back to see people that I left behind decades ago. (see the last section).
I’ve got family within driving distance and I don’t text or call for fear that there might be a get-together that I’d have to suffer through. There just isn’t enough there for me to want to suffer through that anymore.
We all become more introverted as we get older, even the most extroverted among us.
I’m a classic introvert, but in my teens and twenties, it was normal for me to spend almost every weekend with friends. Now, in my thirties, the perfect weekend is one with zero social plans.
And I’m not the only one socializing less these days. My extroverted friend, for example, used to run through her entire contact list, calling friends whenever she was alone in the car. She told me she hated the quiet, the emptiness, because being alone felt boring.
You know, for the whole 10–15 minutes it took to drive to the grocery store. Oh, the horror.
These days, I can rarely get her out for brunch or coffee. She’s content spending most nights at home with her husband and two kids. And I haven’t gotten one of her infamous calls in years.
So, what gives? Do we get more introverted as we get older?
In a post on Quiet Revolution, Susan Cain confirmed my suspicions: We tend to act more introverted as we get older. Psychologists call this “intrinsic maturation.” It means our personalities become more balanced, “like a kind of fine wine that mellows with age,” writes Cain.
Research also shows that our personalities do indeed change over time — and usually for the better. For instance, we become more emotionally stable, agreeable, and conscientious as we grow, with the largest change in agreeableness happening during our thirties and continuing to improve into our sixties. “Agreeableness” is one of the traits measured by the Big Five personality scale, and people high in this trait are warm, friendly, and optimistic.
We also become quieter and more self-contained, needing less “people time” and excitement to feel a sense of happiness.
Psychologists have observed intrinsic maturation in people worldwide, from Germany to the UK, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Turkey. And it’s not just humans; they’ve observed it in chimps and monkeys, too.
This shift is why we slow down as we get older and begin enjoying a quieter, calmer life — and yes, it happens to both introverts and extroverts.
Becoming More Introverted Is a Good Thing
From an evolutionary standpoint, becoming more introverted as we age makes sense — and it’s probably a good thing.
“High levels of extroversion probably help with mating, which is why most of us are at our most sociable during our teenage and young adult years,” writes Susan Cain.
In other words, being more extroverted when you’re young might help you form important social connections and, ultimately, find a life partner. (Cue the flashbacks to awkward high school dances and “welcome week” in college.)
Then, at least in theory, by the time we reach our 30s, we’ve committed to a life path and a long-term relationship. We may have kids, a job, a spouse, and a mortgage — our lives are stable. So it becomes less important to constantly branch out in new directions and meet new people.
(Note that I said “in theory.” In my 30s, I still don’t have kids, a mortgage, or a wedding ring. These days, we have the luxury of not following evolution’s “script.”)
“If the task of the first half of life is to put yourself out there, the task of the second half is to make sense of where you’ve been,” explains Cain.
During the married-with-children years, think of how difficult it would be to raise a family and nurture close relationships if you were constantly popping into the next party. Even if you don’t marry or have kids, it would be hard to focus on your career, health, and life goals if you were always hanging out with friends like you did in your teens and twenties.
Once an Introvert, Always an Introvert
But there’s a catch: Our personalities only change so much.
In my book, The Secret Lives of Introverts, I like to say that our personalities may evolve, but our temperaments remain constant.
This means that if you’re an introvert, you’ll always be an introvert, even at 90. And if you’re an extrovert — though you may slow down with age — you’ll always be an extrovert.
I’m talking big-picture here: who you are at your core.
Research supports this idea. In 2004, Harvard psychologists Jerome Kagan and Nancy Snidman studied individuals from infancy into adulthood. In one study, they exposed babies to unfamiliar stimuli and recorded their reactions. Some babies got upset, crying and flailing their arms and legs; these were labeled “highly reactive” to their environment.
Other babies remained calm around the new stimuli; they were the “low-reactive” ones.
When Kagan and Snidman checked in with these individuals later, they found that the “highly reactive” babies often grew up to be more cautious and reserved, while the “low-reactive” babies tended to stay sociable and daring as adults.
The bottom line? Our core temperament — whether cautious or sociable, introverted or extroverted — doesn’t change dramatically with age.
An Example: Your High School Reunion
Consider, for instance, your high school reunion.
Let’s say you were very introverted in high school — perhaps the third-most introverted person in your graduating class. Over the years, you’ve grown more confident, agreeable, and comfortable in your own skin, but you’ve also become a bit more introverted. If you enjoyed hanging out with friends once a week in high school, maybe now in your thirties, you’re content with seeing them only once a month.
At your ten-year high school reunion, you notice everyone has slowed down a bit, enjoying a calmer, more stable life. But those who were very extroverted in high school are still much more extroverted than you.
You’re still approximately the third-most introverted person in your class — but now the whole group has shifted slightly toward the introverted side.
And that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it might be exactly what we need to flourish as adults. If there’s one thing we introverts understand, it’s the deep satisfaction of a quiet life.
Have you found yourself becoming more introverted as you’ve gotten older? Let me know in the comments below.
These are still the early posts. While some are better than others, they were better when I first started this. This is still last year’s stuff before some of you started following me.
My wife’s idiot niece Marian posted on Facebook that Elizabeth Warren is the bomb. I can pretty much count on her being on the wrong side of everything good for America. Here’s proof.
President Biden has overseen nearly four years of a two-tiered justice system, as his pardoning of Hunter Biden and the political persecutions of then-candidate Donald Trump make all too clear.
But there have been quieter attacks on justice, like “debanking” — and few people realize they could be the next victims because they are a “politically exposed person,” that is someone who disagrees with the liberal status quo.
Debanking is a kind of financial blackballing that has appeared within just the last 20 years.
It started under then-President Barack Obama as a war to punish those seen as political enemies, like firearm manufacturers. Government documents unsealed at the end of 2020 proved that the federal government used its regulatory authority over financial markets to attack political opponents.
Government regulators essentially make it impossible for certain people or businesses to make online transactions, or to have a bank account or a credit card.
…
The debanking scourge under President Biden has hit the crypto world particularly hard. The Securities and Exchange Commission has unleashed a plague of investigations, some real and some merely threatened, to force innovators and investors out of that space.
Dozens of tech and crypto founders have been debanked under Biden, and their inventions smothered.
On Joe Rogan‘s podcast, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen blamed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a group set up at the behest of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to go after crypto firms in particular.
“Basically every crypto founder, every crypto startup, either got debanked personally and forced out of the industry, or their company got debanked,” Andreessen said.
A man in Canada’s far north leapt on to a polar bear to protect his wife from being mauled, police say.
The unnamed man suffered serious injuries but is expected to recover, according to the Nishnawbe Aski Police Service.
The couple left their house at around 05:00 local time (11:00 GMT) on Tuesday to find their dogs, when a bear – which was in the driveway of their home – lunged at the woman.
The incident happened in Fort Severn First Nation, a small community of about 400 people in the far north of Ontario.
“The woman slipped to ground as her husband leapt on to the animal to prevent its attack,” police said in a statement. “The bear then attacked the male, causing serious but non-life-threatening injuries to his arm and legs.”
A neighbour arrived with a gun and shot the bear several times. It retreated into nearby woods where it died of its injuries.
The man was transported to a community nursing station where he was treated for his injuries.
Nishnawbe Aski police said they “continued to patrol the area to ensure no other bears were roaming the community”.
Alysa McCall, a scientist at Polar Bear International, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that polar bears rarely attack humans.
When an attack occurs, the bear is often hungry, young and unwell, she said.
Normally the bears are far from human settlements, instead preferring to spend their time at sea hunting ice seals. But climate change has led to temperature fluctuations, breaking up ice and in some cases driving bears inland to look for food.
“If you’re attacked by a polar bear, definitely do not play dead — that is a myth,” she told CBC. “Fight as long as you can.”
Do you have a favorite place you have visited? Where is it?
I’ve been around the world, to most of the continents. It was for both business and pleasure. I’ve stayed in the finest hotels and some dumps. I’ve eaten with the best chefs and at a choke and puke.
I don’t want to do that anymore. The sense of adventure isn’t enough to make me want to fight the people, the waits, the lines, and the crappy service.
The answer now is that I want to be Home or my place in the mountains. I have my stuff in my place and I don’t have to fight airports, and security lines, stay in places that aren’t mine and someone full of germs was just there before me.
It’s because I’m an introvert and getting old. I don’t care anymore. I don’t have to see everything and right now, there’s nothing I want more than to be in my place, preferably alone with my dog.
“Nobody has divided our country more than you and Obama,” one X user responded.
“Next book you can write – How to overcome the destruction and divisive culture you and your husband have left behind,” another quipped as many commenters offered similar sentiments. Those include the following comments:
“I would rather hug a grizzly bear or spend a day shopping at the mall than read that garbage book. ”
“Nobody cares. You and Barry destroyed this great nation.”
“Hard pass. Never ever not in million years. Not enough money.”
“What did you overcome exactly?”
“I can’t wait to not read that.”
“Does this book tell us how you overcome a personal chefs [sic] death?”
“This is a fabulous idea! Spend decades NOT teaching people how to cope, and then sell them a diary to help them cope. ”
“Peddle this shit on blue sky not X”
“No one is looking for life advice from an Obama, neither one of you dudes. You have tried to destroy our country for the last 16 years, no thanks, kick rocks.”
“If I wanted to waste money I’d burn it”
“Traitorous scum.”
“Just the person I need advice from or help increase their ever growing bank account, never happen. “
According to a description of the book, Overcoming includes “creative activities, reflective writing prompts, habit tracking tools, and more to provide the ultimate guide to unlocking your small power, sharing your whole self, showing up in relationships, and of course, ‘going high.’”
RUSH: Well, happy Thanksgiving, everybody. I hope it is as great as you want it to be, getting together with family, friends, hangers-on, people that got nothing to do trying to horn in on your action, whatever it is. Well, you know that happens. You get a call, “Hey, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?”
“Ah, got the family coming over. What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Really? You want to come over with us?”
“Yeah! Yeah! I would love that.” Whatever happens, whatever’s going on with you, we hope it’s a great one. Do you realize next year will be the 400th anniversary of Thanksgiving? Four hundred years since the Pilgrims arrived without guaranteed reservations at Plymouth Rock.
Greetings, my friends. Welcome to the Thanksgiving edition of Rush Limbaugh program. We are going to do what we always do. We will recite to you the real story of Thanksgiving as first written about by me in my best-seller, See, I Told You So, Chapter 6: “Dead White Guys, or What the History Books Never Told You. The True Story of Thanksgiving.”
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Look at this, folks. I went to the computer during the break just to check and see if anything had happened, and I got a message. I got a message from the guy that used to mow my lawn when I lived in Kansas City. When I lived in that shack and worked for the Royals, I couldn’t pay anybody to mow the lawn, but I was able to get him Royals tickets. His name is Dan. So I got a message from Dan. He says, “I wish you could see this. Maria and I are driving out to Colorado Springs.”
They live in Kansas City still. They’re driving out to Colorado Springs for a wedding over Thanksgiving. “I’m in the backseat of the minivan because I’m rehabbing from a hip replacement. Anyway, five minutes ago, I hear this cheer. Maria cheers like the Chiefs have won the Super Bowl. But of course the Chiefs haven’t won the Super Bowl. No, it was because you are on live today. No guest host! Our minivan is cheering that you’re there. So bless you. Have a great Thanksgiving.”
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Happy Thanksgiving to one and all from all of us. And, of course, this begins the — here, anyway, the official beginning of the holiday season, which is a great time of year. But you know what suffers during the holiday season is normalcy. You’ve got less action happening than normally does, business is slowed down in a sense. I mean, sales pick up, hopefully. But conflicting times, but we hope it’s joyous for all of you, as joyous as it can be.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We’re here on Thanksgiving eve as we start the holiday season. It’s an annual tradition. It’s actually not quite 30 years now we’ve been reading from my second book, See, I Told You So, Chapter 6: “Dead White Guys, or What the History Books Never Told You: The True Story of Thanksgiving.” I also have George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, the very first one, and also the truth of how the Indians screwed the Pilgrims out of Manhattan. Everybody thinks that we screwed the Indians and gave ’em a bunch of garbage for Manhattan.
It’s the other way around, actually — and it’s something I look forward to every year. And you know what? Despite doing it every year, with millions and millions and millions of people having heard it, there’s still a bunch of caca out there about Thanksgiving. I mentioned earlier that the College Fix website has a headline: “Students say it’s NOT okay to celebrate Thanksgiving,” that it’s “‘based off of the genocide of indigenous people.’”
What’s being done to young skulls full of mush via the education system in our country and cumulatively over decades is nothing less than obscene. Yesterday at the College Fix website, they posted a video where their correspondent, Kyle Hooten, interviewed students at Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, and asked them about Thanksgiving, and here’s about 45 seconds of it…
WOMAN #1: I think that, like, Thanksgiving has been misconstrued a lot, especially in textbooks, and it’s kind of just based off of the genocide of indigenous people. And I don’t really any that we actually give thanks on Thanksgiving. We just eat a bunch of food and a bunch of capitalist bulls(bleep)t.
HOOTEN: Is it okay to celebrate Thanksgiving?
MAN #1: Nnnno. It’s probably not as bad as Christmas or Easter but, like, I don’t know.
HOOTEN: So what do you think the real Thanksgiving story is?
MAN #2: I don’t know what it is (snickers) ’cause I wasn’t there and ’cause I don’t have the — all the historical information.
WOMAN #2: I mean, the public school education — ugh! — tells you that this Thanksgiving was this great meeting where, you know, the Native Americans showed the Pilgrims how to, you know, grow corn — and obviously that’s not true. But what legitimately happened on Thanksgiving? I have no idea.
RUSH: If you have no idea, then what the hell was the answer, “Well, you know, what’s being taught is we gave thanks to the Indians gave thanks, the Indians teaching how to grow corn, maize, popcorn, and all that”? It is amazing when you stop and think about it. I don’t know what you were taught about Thanksgiving, but I was taught a version that goes like this: The Pilgrims showed up, and they were incompetents. They were well-intentioned good-hearted people but incompetent, and they didn’t know how to do anything. They were stumbling and bumbling around in a foreign place, had no idea even where they were.
And as they’re on the verge of starvation, the Indians stumbled upon ’em — across them — and showed them how to basically live, gave them everything, showed them how to grow crops and kill turkey and build tepees and stuff, and so the Pilgrims survived, and we were giving thanks, that Thanksgiving is to acknowledge the Indians’ role in saving the first Pilgrims. Now, it’s a quaint story, and it has attached itself to a number of people, but it is nothing to do…
Well, I can’t say that it’s nothing to do, but it is very far removed from what the first Thanksgiving is really about. Thanksgiving. George Washington first proclaimed it, Thanksgiving. Well, who was thanking who for what? That’s the root of the error. The root of it is that the Pilgrims must have been giving thanks to the Indians for saving them. That’s not what the Pilgrims were thankful for, as you will soon hear.
“The story of the Pilgrims begins in the early part of the seventeenth century (that’s the 1600s for those of you in Rio Linda, California). The Church of England under King James I was persecuting anyone and everyone who did not recognize its absolute civil and spiritual authority.” The first Pilgrims were Christian rebels, folks. “Those who challenged [King James’] ecclesiastical authority and those who believed strongly in freedom of worship were hunted down, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their beliefs” in England in the 1600s.
“A group of separatists,” Christians who didn’t want to buy into the Church of England or live under the rule of King James, “first fled to Holland and established a community” of themselves there. “After eleven years, about forty of them” having heard about this New World Christopher Columbus had discovered, decided to go. Forty of them “agreed to make a perilous journey to the New World, where [they knew] they would certainly face hardships, but” the reason they did it was so they “could live and worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences” and beliefs.
“On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims,” now known as Pilgrims, “led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established” how they would live once they got there. The contract set forth “just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs,” or political beliefs. “Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible.
The Pilgrims were a “devoutly religious people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example. And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work.” They believed in God. They believed they were in the hands of God. As you know, “this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey” to the New World on the tiny, by today’s standards, sailing ship. It was long, it was arduous.
There was sickness, there was seasickness, it was wet. It was the opposite of anything you think of today as a cruise today on the open ocean. When they “landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford’s detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate wilderness. There were no friends to greet them, he wrote. There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves.” There was nothing.
“[T]he sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning. During the first winter, half the Pilgrims — including Bradford’s own wife — died of either starvation, sickness or exposure.” They endured that first winter. “When spring finally came,” they had, by that time, met the indigenous people, the Indians, and indeed the “Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers” and other animals “for coats.” But there wasn’t any prosperity. “[T]hey did not yet prosper!” They were still dependent. They were still confused. They were still in a new place, essentially alone among likeminded people.
“This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than what it really was. That happened, don’t misunderstand. That all happened, but that’s not — according to William Bradford’s journal — what they ultimately gave thanks for. “Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract” that they made on the Mayflower as they were traveling to the New World…
They actually had to enter into that contract “with their merchant-sponsors in London,” because they had no money on their own. The needed sponsor. They found merchants in London to sponsor them. The merchants in London were making an investment, and as such, the Pilgrims agreed that “everything they produced to go into a common store,” or bank, common account, “and each member of the community was entitled to one common share” in this bank. Out of this, the merchants would be repaid until they were paid off.
“All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community as well.” Everything belonged to everybody and everybody had one share in it. They were going to distribute it equally.” That was considered to be the epitome of fairness, sharing the hardship burdens and everything like that. “Nobody owned anything. It was a commune, folks. It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the ’60s and ’70s out in California,” and other parts of the country, “and it was complete with organic vegetables, by the way.
“Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that” it wasn’t working. It “was as costly and destructive…” His own journals chronicle the reasons it didn’t work. “Bradford assigned a plot of land” to fix this “to each family to work and manage,” as their own. He got rid of the whole commune structure and “assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage,” and whatever they made, however much they made, was theirs. They could sell it, they could share it, they could keep it, whatever they wanted to do.
What really happened is they “turned loose” the power of a free market after enduring months and months of hardship — first on the Mayflower and then getting settled and then the failure of the common account from which everybody got the same share. There was no incentive for anybody to do anything. And as is human nature, some of the Pilgrims were a bunch of lazy twerps, and others busted their rear ends. But it didn’t matter because even the people that weren’t very industrious got the same as everyone else. Bradford wrote about how this just wasn’t working.
“What Bradford and his community found,” and I’m going to use basically his own words, “was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else… [W]hile most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years — trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it — the Pilgrims decided early on,” William Bradford decided, “to scrap it permanently,” because it brought out the worst in human nature, it emphasized laziness, it created resentment.
Because in every group of people you’ve got your self-starters you’ve got your hard workers and your industrious people, and you’ve got your lazy twerps and so forth, and there was no difference at the end of the day. The resentment sprang up on both sides. So Bradford wrote about this. “‘For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.
“For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense,’” without any payment, “‘that was thought injustice.’ Why should you work for other people when you can’t work for yourself? What’s the point? … The Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive.
“So what did Bradford’s community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property. Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result? ‘This had very good success,’ wrote Bradford, ‘for it made all hands [everybody] industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.’ …
“Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s. … In no time, the Pilgrims found they had more food than they could eat themselves. Now, this is where it gets really good, folks, if you’re laboring under the misconception that I was, as I was taught in school. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians. The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London.
“And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the ‘Great Puritan Migration.’” The word of the success of the free enterprise Plymouth Colony spread like wildfire and that began the great migration. Everybody wanted a part of it. There was no mass slaughtering of the Indians. There was no wiping out of the indigenous people, and eventually — in William Bradford’s own journal — unleashing the industriousness of all hands ended up producing more than they could ever need themselves.
So trading post began selling and exchanging things with the Indians — and the Indians, by the way, were very helpful. Puritan kids had relationships with the children of the Native Americans that they found. This killing the indigenous people stuff, they’re talking about much, much, much, much later. It has nothing to do with the first thanksgiving.
The first Thanksgiving was William Bradford and Plymouth Colony thanking God for their blessings. That’s the first Thanksgiving. Nothing wrong with being grateful to the Indians; don’t misunderstand. But the true meaning of Thanksgiving — and this is what George Washington recognized in his first Thanksgiving proclamation.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Thank you for being with us today, folks. Have a great rest of the Thanksgiving weekend. And know without doubt how truly thankful for you I personally am and all of us are. Never forget it. Can’t say it enough that we love you. See you back here on Monday. We will be here.
In a world fixated on quantity, fewer friends mean deeper connections with those who truly understand us.
In a world that often sings the praises of an extroverted lifestyle and the constant whirlwind of social activities, we introverts prefer to walk a quieter path — one that values solitude, introspection, and a select few meaningful connections. For us, solitude isn’t just a preference; it’s a sanctuary — a place where we find the clarity and peace we need to thrive.
When I entered my twenties — a decade traditionally associated with socializing and expanding your circle of friends — my introverted journey took a refreshingly different route. Instead of a jam-packed social calendar or always being surrounded by people who were the life of the party, I found solace in solitude and the company of a select few cherished friends. If you’re an introvert, I’m sure you can relate.
Here are 10 reasons why introverts often prefer having fewer friends.
Why Introverts Prefer Having Fewer Friends
1. Deep, meaningful connections
When we have fewer friends, we have more time and energy to nurture the relationships that matter most. These friendships are built on trust and shared experiences, creating bonds that grow stronger with time. They not only withstand the test of time but also offer unwavering support and comfort during life’s highs and lows.
In a world often obsessed with the quantity of connections, we understand that it’s the quality of these relationships that truly enrich our lives. We don’t consider everyone a friend, which makes each interaction a treasured moment of shared understanding and genuine care.
In her book Quiet, Susan Cain points out that introverts often thrive in more intimate, one-on-one interactions. Having fewer friends allows us to focus on building meaningful connections with those who truly “get” us and accept us for who we are. These authentic friendships are like warm, cozy blankets on a chilly night, providing comfort and genuine support when we need it most.
2. Time to focus on the friendships that really matter
For us introverts, having a smaller circle of friends can be a blessing. With fewer social obligations and less influence from a large social circle, we have the time and space to deeply invest in the friendships that truly matter. I find that with just a few close friends, I can truly invest in understanding them on a deeper level and being there for them when they need support.
Like many introverts, I am not one for small talk. I don’t want to just talk about the weather or what you saw on TV last night. I want to hear about your childhood and life experiences — the lessons you’ve learned that have made you the person you are today. I want to hear about your hopes, dreams, and goals. I want to know how your relationship is truly going — not just the surface-level “It’s good” you might tell others when that’s not the whole story. The busyness of a big social network doesn’t allow for that kind of deep connection.
Plus, as a result, we can focus on understanding ourselves better and on what truly makes our hearts sing and souls dance. This journey of self-discovery is a precious gift that can guide us toward a more fulfilling path in life.
3. Independence with a support system
As we grow older, we become more independent, exploring the world on our own terms and savoring the freedom and solitude that come with it. Alone time recharges our batteries, giving us the energy to spread our wings and pursue the adventures that resonate with our souls.
Having fewer friends creates space for us to develop our individuality. In a world that often pushes for constant social interaction, this independence becomes a sanctuary — a place where we can fully embrace who we are.
4. More peace and quiet
In busy social environments, we introverts often experience sensory overload — loud music, crowded rooms, and constant conversations drain us. We start to feel overstimulated and unable to focus as external stimuli compete for our attention.
Having fewer friends translates to more peace and quiet, giving us the calm we need to recharge. We retreat into the soothing sanctuary of solitude, embracing the silence that stills our thoughts and relaxes our spirit. The chatter and noise of constant social interactions are replaced by tranquil moments of reading, reflecting, or simply being. This quiet space becomes our safe haven amid life’s chaos.
For us introverts, peace and quiet are not just luxuries — they’re necessities. We thrive when we can turn down the volume of the outside world and tune into our inner landscape. With fewer friends and obligations, we create space to hear our thoughts, reconnect with ourselves, and let stillness restore our energy. The silence nourishes us deeply.
5. Energy for your own goals and passions
With fewer social distractions, we can channel our energy into pursuing our passions and goals, turning what might seem like “alone time” into a wellspring of productivity and creativity. The result? We often emerge as high achievers in various aspects of life, including career and personal growth.
Our alone time — or creative space — becomes the launchpad we need to reach for the stars at our own pace. It allows us to develop our talents, chase our dreams, and make a meaningful impact on the world.
6. Less drama
Smaller social circles mean less conflict and drama. There’s less politics, gossip, jealousy, and fewer fallouts to manage. My energy goes toward nurturing a few intimate friendships, not maintaining a large roster of dramatic relationships.
As introverts, we strongly dislike confrontation and arguments; we prefer peace and harmony. Navigating friend drama can be exhausting. I’ve come to value friendships that are drama-free, where my friends and I can support each other and communicate openly. This kind of acceptance is incredibly refreshing.
7. Quality time
When we do choose to socialize, we introverts treasure meaningful conversations and deep connections with our friends. With fewer friends, we can dedicate more time to truly enjoying their company — sharing heart-to-heart chats that leave lasting impressions. These moments of genuine connection nourish our souls, reminding us that when it comes to friendship, less truly can be more.
8. Emotional resilience
Difficult times have shown me that I don’t need constant external validation or a large support network. Instead, I rely on a few close friends who provide perspective when I’m overthinking and need clarity.
Over the years, the advice and support I’ve received from them have helped me tap into my own inner strength, process emotions through reflection, and grow through life’s ups and downs.
This emotional strength becomes an invaluable companion as we move through life, helping us weather storms with grace. We introverts don’t depend entirely on others for comfort or reassurance — we carry a quiet confidence in our ability to cope and thrive, even when facing tough times alone. We understand that our worth comes from within, not from the size of our social circle.
9. Comfortable with your own company
While we introverts aren’t fans of constant socializing, there are days when we crave a change of scenery or the chance to connect. We might want to chat with a friend over coffee or catch up over lunch. However, having a smaller circle of friends means they’re not always available when we’re looking for company. As a result, we learn to embrace solitude and use it as an opportunity for self-discovery.
Learning to be alone has been a blessing for me as an introvert. I’ve discovered that it’s where I find true happiness, independent of others. Whether it’s reading, writing, journaling, or simply enjoying nature, I’ve come to cherish and embrace my own space.
10. Your self-worth doesn’t depend on others
Basing self-esteem on friendships and social approval is fragile. As introverts comfortable with solitude, our sense of self-worth comes from within. We understand that our value isn’t measured by the size of our social network or the number of likes and followers on social media.
This inner confidence allows us to form authentic connections without relying on external validation. The older I get, the more I realize that my worth isn’t defined by others — it comes from loving and accepting myself first.
Having a few close friends who truly see and appreciate me has shown me that I don’t need a big circle to feel fulfilled. I now carry a quiet confidence that comes from embracing my introverted journey. This realization has been one of the greatest gifts of my introverted life.
This has been going on for a while, before many started following me. I’m putting it up in reverse chronological order so there is some stuff that many have never seen. Also, I feel like some of the first ones were better stuff for some reason.
There is a lot of them, so I’m breaking it up so you can get through them.
A wife and husband in Virginia are behind bars after they allegedly stabbed a pizza shop employee for incorrectly making their order, reports claim.
The upset wife, Catherine Harper, 45, reportedly called her husband Corey Harper, 47, to come “handle the situation” on Nov. 17 around 2:30 p.m. after a 24-year-old male worker at Mods Pizza in Norfolk “botched” her order.
Reports state Corey came to the restaurant and stabbed the worker several times, additionally slicing them across the stomach and exposing their intestines.
“The Victim was stabbed several times, in the back, in the front, and one long cut across the torso exposing the Victim’s intestines,” a police report states, according to The Mirror, adding the assailants then “left the scene.” It’s unclear whether they left with a pizza.
The victim reportedly hospitalized suffering non-life threatening injuries.
A Norfolk General District Court judge held the couple without bond on Monday considering the heinous nature of the crime.
The Harpers are facing multiple charges over the disturbing incident, with the Mirror noting Corey’s “facing felony charges of malicious wounding and brandishing a firearm,” while his wife is charged with “conspiracy to commit malicious wounding.”
The situation shocked members of the community, with one neighbor of the Harpers remarking it seemed “out of character” for them.
Mods Pizza, a Seattle-based chain, released a statement saying they were “dismayed” by the incident and appearing to blame the worker for sparking the situation, saying it would work to train workers on de-escalating conflicts with customers.
New strain of mpox reported in Bay Area, believed to be 1st confirmed case in US
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – The first case of a new strain of mpox in the United States has been reported in San Mateo County, officials said Saturday.
California’s Department of Public Health reported the case to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who say it is the first reported case of mpox in the country after the patient recently traveled outside the U.S.
According to the CDPH, the patient recently returned traveling from Africa, and their diagnosis is related to the ongoing outbreak in Central and Eastern Africa.
Mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, is a rare disease caused by infection with a virus that’s in the same family as the one that causes smallpox.
Milder symptoms can include fever, chills and body aches. In more serious cases, people can develop lesions on the face, hands, chest and genitals.
What’s the first impression you want to give people?
I don’t care, I’m an introvert. I don’t even think about things this way.
It’s more likely that I’m trying to avoid any small talk if possible.
What people think of me doesn’t affect my life anymore. I used to have to pretend to care when I worked, but it wasn’t sincere concerning me being worried about what they thought of me.
It’s not narcissistic as I just don’t think this way. If they like me, fine. If they don’t, also fine. I’m nice and say hello and do the minimal banter if I can’t move on, but I just don’t think this way. Their impression is what it is and doesn’t enter my mind to worry about it.
I learned a long time ago you can do whatever you want, but people are going to make up their minds the way they want to and while you can temporarily influence it, you reveal yourself eventually.
The first clue is that it is Hollywood, the capital of fake people and pretentiousness. The second clue is that it is girls backstabbing each other. They learned this when they were growing up, not when they got to Hollywood. Finally, it is a fight over men. That sums up that it’s a load of crap and they are just bitches.
Young star Sydney Sweeney hit back at the claim that women are “empowering” each other in Hollywood and said “it’s all fake.”
Speaking to Vanity Fair, the 27-year-old actress was asked about recent comments by Jennifer Lawrence and Anne Hathaway who said female performers have a tendency to knock down women at their professional peak. It came after a film producer, earlier this year, attacked Sweeney’s talent and looks.
“It’s very disheartening to see women tear other women down, especially when women who are successful in other avenues of their industry see younger talent working really hard—hoping to achieve whatever dreams that they may have—and then trying to bash and discredit any work that they’ve done,” Sweeney said. “This entire industry, all people say is ‘Women empowering other women.’ None of it’s happening. All of it is fake and a front for all the other sh*t that they say behind everyone’s back.”
“I mean, there’s so many studies and different opinions on the reasoning behind it,” she added. “I’ve read that our entire lives, we were raised—and it’s a generational problem—to believe only one woman can be at the top. There’s one woman who can get the man. There’s one woman who can be, I don’t know, anything.”
Tuesday’s defeat for the Democrats is raising a lot of questions in that party.
The questions they’re asking most are the most obvious ones: What went wrong? Where did the message fall short in mobilizing voters against President-elect Donald Trump?
An X user named HVAC1 — a self-described HVAC master and business owner — responded to a clip from MSNBC in which panelists were asking these questions. He gave the “simple answer” as “a former union democrat.”
“I’ll make it real simple for ya from a former union democrat… Easy fix. [Y]ou s**t on and insult working people from your mansions and gated communities. [Y]ou steal from us to give to your pet constituents. [Y]ou call us enemies and garbage, deplorable, and nazis…” he wrote.
He went on to make over a dozen additional points about Democrats ramping up inflation, threatening to pack the courts, lying constantly, forcing “sexual perversions and fetishes on us,” and so much more.
And based on some comments that I got on these posts, many of you do get IT. Note: I used the same title for almost every post, but they are all different.
For one reader who told his kids, do you want to float?
Go to the last sentence, that tells you everything you need to know about Harvard.
The president of Harvard University’s Institute of Politics has declared that the lesson of the blowout 2024 election is not a need for greater inclusivity and balance at the school but, you guessed it, the express abandonment of nonpartisanship going forward. While many would argue that the school left neutrality behind years ago, Pratyush Mallick is calling in an op-ed for The Harvard Crimson for an official change. It would align the Institute with the building “resistance” and reject not just nonpartisanship but neutrality in its programs and grants.
After the election, I wrote that people hoping for a moment of introspection after the Trump victory will likely be disappointed, and “the rage in the media and academia will only likely increase.” That has unfortunately proven to be the case. The meltdown after the presidential election appears to be building rather than subsiding with attacks from the left on male, female, and minority voters as racists, misogynists, or despotic dupes.
The call for partisanship at Harvard is not unique. Before the election, I criticized Wesleyan University President Michael Roth for urging universities to abandon neutrality and work openly for the election of Kamala Harris. Immediately after the election, Roth doubled down and promised to join the “resistance” against Trump’s “authoritarian” regime.
A few weeks before the election, I participated in a debate at Harvard Law School over the lack of free speech protections and intellectual diversity at Harvard.
This year, Harvard found itself in a familiar spot on the annual ranking of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE): dead last among 251 universities and colleges.
First of all, what a crybaby. The rest of the country put up with the destruction of Western Civilization for the last 4 years and 8 under Obama.
Speaking as an introvert, if someone doesn’t want to talk to me, especially about something stupid like this, I’d welcome it. I have some family members already picked out that I’d be ok losing. If they are this shallow and fragile, it might not be a bad thing.
Anyway, here’s her whining.
With women pledging to break up with their boyfriends and divorce their husbands over the Trump victory, Yale University chief psychiatry resident Dr. Amanda Calhoun is advising that it may also be necessary for your mental health to cut off your family and friends who supported Trump. In that way, you can avoid being “triggered” by opposing political views — much like Yale itself.
As academics, we are dealing with the election on campuses across America. After the election, I had some valuable discussions with students who supported Harris and some who supported Trump. I wish there would be more interaction between the two groups. That is why this story stood out for me. I do not believe that further separation or isolation will help this country or these individuals.
Dr. Calhoun went on MSNBC’s Joy Reid to offer the curious take on good mental health. Reid has spent the week condemning the majority of voters (particularly minority voters) in the nation as racists and misogynists for the Trump victory.
Reid joined a rising tide of rage, which I discussed in my column this weekend. Dr. Calhoun added her voice to the madness.
“So, if you are going into a situation where you have family members, where you have close friends who you know have voted in ways that are against you… it’s completely fine to not be around those people and to tell them why…
…You know, to say, ‘I have a problem with the way that you voted because it went against my very livelihood, and I’m not going to be around you this holiday. I need to take some space for me.’ I think you should very much be entitled to do so, and I think it may be essential for your mental health.”
I question her mental health also. Joy Reid is a racist, but I’ll deal with that in a later post
Do they actually think that their plan will work? During this election, women overwhelmingly supported Kamala Harris and men overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump. So now some liberal women have decided that it is time for a nationwide sex strike in order to punish men for voting for Trump. Yes, they are quite serious about this…
Liberal women have sworn to go on sex strike over Donald Trump’s election win.
Mr Trump swept to victory in Tuesday’s presidential race that Democrats cast as a referendum on abortion rights and protections for women.
So let me get this straight. In order to “punish” us, these women are going to quit engaging in sexual immorality and start acting like chaste conservative Christian women?
And since they won’t be having sex, liberal women won’t be having as many abortions either. I think that we can all live with that.
Hollywood Star Promises She’s Leaving U.S. With Trump Victory
Hollywood star America Ferrera is reportedly “sick” that former President Donald Trump won the election against Vice President Kamala Harris and will be moving to the United Kingdom.
The 40-year-old actress reportedly said after the results of Trump’s victory that she was making plans to relocate herself, her husband Ryan Piers Williams, and their two kids overseas in order to give them the “best opportunities,” the Daily Mail reported.
I’ve never even heard of her.
And take a lot of other whining celebtards with you. They are a bunch of spoiled brats who think anyone cares about them.
We’re better off with you gone.
Hint: they aren’t going anywhere. It’s like the podcaster who was going to drink cyanide if Trump one. They are full of it.
It’s too bad they are liars. I’d love to see them gtf out.
My friend George’s Sister and BIL said they are leaving. I doubt it but as much as they whined, I’ll be glad to see them go also.
Prominent streamer “xQc,” known for high stakes gambling, has faced a significant setback after losing a staggering $700,000 bet on Kamala Harris in the 2024 United States Presidential elections. In a video clip from his stream, xQc can be seen cashing out multiple bets on Harris to win — giving up his wager in exchange for keeping a tiny percentage of the amount bet.
Streamer xQc, who has built a huge audience as a video game streamer and degenerate gambler, recently learned the hard way that it does not pay to bet against Donald Trump.
In a video clip from his stream, he “cashes out” of multiple bets he placed on Kamala Harris to win the election. Cashing out bets can be compared to surrender, giving up any chance of winning in exchange for the return of a small part of the original bet amount.
The propaganda campaign labeling Donald Trump as an aspiring dictator determined to use the military and national security apparatus against his political opponents is designed not to affect the upcoming election but rather to shape the post-election environment. It is the central piece of a narrative that, by characterizing Trump as a tyrant (indeed likening him to Hitler), establishes the conditions for violence — not just another attempt on Trump’s life, but political violence on a massive scale intended to destabilize the country.
As I write in my forthcoming book Disappearing the President, Democratic Party research and media reports show that many senior party officials and operatives are preparing for the possibility of a Trump victory. Accordingly, planning is focused on undermining the incoming president with enough violence to rock his administration. Prominent post-election scenarios forecast such widespread rioting that the newly elected president would be compelled to invoke the Insurrection Act. With some senior military officials refusing to follow Trump’s orders, according to the scenarios, the U.S. Armed Forces would split, leaving America on the edge of the abyss.
By vilifying Trump as a despotic madman who must be stopped before he can commence his reign of terror, the regime’s propaganda apparatus not only slanders Trump but also pre-emptively threatens the reputation, as well as the livelihood and perhaps the liberty, of current military personnel. The point is to push the military against Trump: When the time comes to act, will you stand for democracy or side with a tyrant who sees the military only as an instrument to advance his personal interests?
For instance, last week the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, quoted former Trump administration officials claiming that the Republican candidate is contemptuous of America’s armed forces and, according to Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, wishes he could command the same respect that Hitler commanded from his general officers.
This is not the first time that Trump has been compared to Hitler or that Kelly, a retired Marine general, turned on his former commander-in-chief. Kelly was the key source for a story published before the 2020 election, also in the Atlantic and also by Jeffrey Goldberg, that alleged Trump had called American WWII soldiers buried in French cemeteries “suckers and losers.”
The veracity of Kelly’s latest revelation that Trump admires Hitler must of course be judged against the fact that he waited five years to disclose it, even if it is unlikely to have much effect on the current election cycle. The military, and veterans of the Global War on Terror in particular, overwhelmingly support the candidate opposed to waging endless and strategically pointless foreign wars. Moreover, Trump has weathered far more damaging fabrications — like the false allegations that he had been compromised by Russian intelligence — that only galvanized support for him.
The purpose of the Hitler narrative is not to alter the electoral preferences of left-wing media audiences already solidly in the anti-Trump column, but rather to justify taking extreme measures against the Republican candidate and the America First movement and ensure that the bulk of the military sides with the anti-Trump plot. Thus, it is best understood in the context of recent accounts promising, or urging, violence after the November vote.
For example, last week the New York Times published a long interview with a scholar of fascism who declared that Trump is a fascist. The paper of record followed up with another long article by two Harvard professors calling for mass mobilization in the event of a Trump victory. The proposal suggests that private industry join civil society organizations to ostracize Trump and his supporters and engage in large public protests to provoke a crisis. Kamala Harris herself, commenting on Kelly’s allegations in the Atlantic story, claimed that her opponent “is a fascist” during a CNN town hall.
These stories are only the latest in an ongoing series of media reports warning of a Trump dictatorship. Beltway insider Robert Kagan was out of the gate early, writing even before Trump wrapped up the nomination that, without mounting resistance against the Republican candidate, America is “a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.” A January story from NBC claimed that Trump was exploring ways to use the military to assassinate political rivals.
The propaganda meant to establish a predicate to employ violence to stop Trump has been reinforced at the highest levels of the Democratic Party.
When Joe Biden was asked by a reporter if he was confident that there would be a peaceful transfer of power after the 2024 election, he answered, “If Trump wins, no I’m not confident at all.” Then, seemingly correcting himself, the president said, “I mean if Trump loses, I’m not confident at all. He means what he says, we don’t take him seriously. He means it, all the stuff about, ‘If we lose there will be a bloodbath.’”
Biden was referring to a comment Trump made in March about Chinese efforts to build auto manufacturing plants in Mexico. The export of those cars to America, Trump said, would result in a “bloodbath” for the U.S. auto industry. Naturally, the Biden campaign used the figure of speech to accuse Trump of inciting “political violence.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) advertised a more specific scenario leading to violence when he promised that Congress will remove Trump by invoking Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits anyone “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding federal office. “It’s going to be up to us on January 6, 2025, to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified,” Raskin has said. “And then we need bodyguards for everybody in civil war conditions.”
But the most significant post-election scenarios were drafted by Rosa Brooks, a former Obama Pentagon official whose 2020 wargaming with the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) has been credited by the left-wing press for its “accuracy.”
Ahead of the last election, Brooks and TIP, according to the Guardian, “imagined the then far-fetched idea that Trump might refuse to concede defeat, and, by claiming widespread fraud in mail-in ballots, unleash dark forces culminating in violence. Every implausible detail of the simulations came to pass in the lead-up to the U.S. Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.”
That’s a fanciful way of obscuring the truth. TIP anticipated that Trump would contest the results because party operatives knew beforehand that election irregularities resulting from new voting procedures, like mass mail-in voting, designed to facilitate fraud would be glaringly obvious. Thus, because of Brooks’s past performance and her central role in a network comprising the media and current and former defense officials, her work is widely acknowledged as the Left’s roadmap for post-election contingency planning.
The left always claims the conservatives will do what they already are doing. Who had the riots in 2017? Who wore the stupid ass pink pussy caps? Who started, then blew the January 6 out of proportion (the FBI, or the left, they are the same).
Once the laughter stopped, Stahl may have found it productive to engage in some good-old fashioned reporting to figure out what she “could do” to better understand the media’s abysmal ratings. And even more concerning, the loss of public trust. In her 53-year journalism career, she never thought she’d witness her once-premiere news program, “60 Minutes,” becoming increasingly irrelevant in a post-Trump election world. Ratings stayed in the toilet bowl, as one CBS executive noted, as the show pulled in a pitiful five million viewers in mid-November.
Delusions of Adequacy 
