Kamala Harris raised over a billion dollars for her campaign in less than four months of 2024.
Since Trump cut off funding to Ukraine, USAID, and NGOs, the Democrat Party is suddenly broke. Where did all the donors go? 9Hint: They never existed) All of that big Democrat money in the past was just laundered foreign funds. Or even worse, U.S. taxpayer funds laundered back to them.
We live in a high trust society. If someone tells you the lettuce is safe to eat, we have to trust that it is. If someone tells you this particular treatment will fix the clog in your heart’s blood vessels, you have to trust that it will. After all, no one has the resources to independently verify every statement made by another. I trust people all day- I trust that the medicine in the vial marked “Toradol” isn’t actually “Rocuronium” and my patient trusts that I know what I am doing when I give it to them.
That’s why I get so angry at the left’s current whitewashing of Fauci’s behavior during the pandemic, and their gaslighting of what actually happened. The left is busy claiming Fauci never said the lack of symptoms wasn’t an indicator of having COVID, and that he never said getting the vaccine would prevent you from getting COVID. We have receipts. Here is Fauci saying (sorry video won’t embed):
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci originally discouraged mask-wearing by the public because he was concerned about PPE availability for health-care workers. “We didn’t realize the extent of asymptotic spread…what happened as the weeks and months came by, two things became clear: one, that there wasn’t a shortage of masks, we had plenty of masks and coverings that you could put on that’s plain cloth…so that took care of that problem. Secondly, we fully realized that there are a lot of people who are asymptomatic who are spreading infection. So it became clear that we absolutely should be wearing masks consistently.
Then here is FAuci in the spring of 2021 saying that you likely won’t get COVID if you’ve been vaccinated (except limited breakthrough cases):
When people get vaccinated, they can feel safe, no matter what circumstance they are under.- Dr Fauci
Now every one of us remembers that narrative changing to “the vaccine makes COVID less severe” and “you are less likely to be hospitalized” if you get the vaccine.
The left is busy protecting the US Doctor Mengele- except this guy is responsible for enough deaths to make Mengele look like an amateur.
The left is busy screaming about NYC wanting to place Netanyahu under arrest for the deaths of 73,000 people in Gaza. We can’t touch Fauci, thanks to Biden’s pardon. I have an idea- let’s go to the International Criminal Court, and turn over every bit of evidence we have to the Hague, and let THEM prosecute him, since no American who lost a loved one has seen fit to mete out some frontier justice themselves.
All of this nonsense is destroying our high trust society. No one believes anything that anyone else has to say. Let’s end it now.
This child tries to explain socialism and claims socialism is where workers seize the means of production, but the young commies in this country blame us for not understanding the difference between socialism and communism.
This is exactly what I was talking about when I said children don’t understand economics, business, or anything else. Your communists believe that a worker who made a pen is entitled to an equal share of the profits. Note that she just brushes by the part where “subtracting out all the costs and everything.” All the “costs and everything” is the most important part of the business.
A person putting pieces of plastic together to make the finished pen is doing almost nothing. They aren’t the ones who created that profit, they were just a small link in the chain. They are simply brushing aside the procurement of materials, a facility to manufacture pens, transportation, marketing, sales, accounting, and the hundreds of other things that have to be taken care of to manufacture those pens as being “costs and everything.”
Proving that she has no grasp of business, she claims that a worker assembling 50 pens per hour at a profit of one pound each is creating 50 pounds per hour of wealth, but is only earning 15 pounds per hour and is therefore being cheated out of the “other 25 pounds,” which is an illustration of your average communist’s grasp of both business and mathematics.
This child has the same grasp of economics and business as my niece, who thinks tampons should be free, and to accomplish this, she is going to pay her factory workers in free tampons. That conversation happened four years ago, when she was only 14 years old. Now that same child is 18 and just graduated from high school. She will be voting for the first time this November, and even though she has no idea how the world works and only just now has secured her first job (working at a fast food restaurant) will tell you to your face that she is a committed Socialist.
Did I mention that she is living at home with her mother, her 21 year old sister, and the 21 year old sister’s boyfriend? That’s the flaw with Democracy- it grants decision making authority to a person that can’t manage their own life or affairs, yet somehow assumes that a lot of people who can’t manage anything somehow gains wisdom, insight, and the knowledge of economics and business to a point where they can make decisions that affect the world.
One of the first things EMS is taught is “Scene Safety.” It’s part of the mantra. In every practical training session and exam, if the first words out of your mouth aren’t “Scene safety, and wearing my PPE,” you fail. It’s important.
As a paramedic, I was often called to scenes in the dark parts of town. It didn’t matter why we were there or who did what to whom, it was always an unstable scene. A few that I remember:
At each and every one of them, we were surrounded by a mob just like the one below. We had to endure screams of “What’s taking so long? If he was white, you woulda had him to the hospital by now.” Threats of violence, thrown rocks, etc.
The odd part is, they were right. If the victim was white, we would have been much faster, but not for racism reasons. If the crowd weren’t there making us concerned for our own safety, we would have been faster. Watch now and see the scene that gives me flashbacks to the days of trying to save hoodrats.
Some time in the next two weeks, the US debt will hit $40 trillion. It’s currently at $39.71 trillion. For those of you who are keeping track, we hit $37 trillion last August. Taking into account the $5 trillion a year in tax receipts means the government spent $8 trillion in the last year, or about $22,000 for every single resident.
Seven years ago, our debt was $23 trillion. In 2010, it was $13.6 trillion. In 2009, it was $11.9 trillion.
When Obama took office in January 2009, the national debt was just $10.6 trillion. It has tripled in the past 17 years. What is the limit? At what point does the whole thing come down?
For those who read here, you know that I remain opposed to the death penalty. Not because killers don’t deserve it, but because I don’t trust our legal system not to execute the innocent. Still, the left wing press (redundancy alert) is up in arms because today is the day that Florida executes an 80 year old man. The press is claiming that it’s cruel to execute a disabled 80 year old.
He wasn’t 80 when he was convicted and sentenced 50 years ago. The man has delayed his punishment with appeal after appeal for five decades. While I am opposed to the death penalty, what we have now is a farce, with inmates spending 30, 40, and even 50 years abusing the court system. The government can abuse the legal process, but so can criminals.
If you are going to have a death penalty, there should be a limit to the number of appeals. Put all of your appeals into one motion that must be considered and ruled upon at once. Five year limit.
As much as I disagree with and detest those Antifa asshats and everything they stand for, this news item grabbed my attention. Sam Tunick was stopped for interrogation in Atlanta’s airport while on the way home from vacation in the Dominican Republic. What he didn’t know is the feds put him on a terrorism watchlist because of his association with the protests of Cop City.
The agents took him to a room and began an inspection, but all their questions were centered on child sexual abuse images. (If the Feds want you, they always allege some sort of child porn charges. Ask the Branch Davidians how that plays out.) Tunick asked four times during the interrogation to speak with a lawyer, but was refused access to an attorney each time. Additionally, the agents produced no warrant and did not read Tunick his rights. They tried to use the “port of entry” exception to search him and his belongings.
Agent Findley and several others repeatedly asked Tunick to open his phone during the interrogation, telling him they would seize it if he did not. When he finally provided a passcode, “the screen went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart”, according to the motion.
It turns out the phone was a Google Pixel running GrapheneOS. One of the security features the OS has is a “duress” code that, if entered, resets the phone to factory settings and wipes the memory. It’s such an issue that police in the EU assume you are a criminal if you have this OS installed. Anyhow, the Feds have charged him with a Federal felony:
On or about January 24, 2025, in the Northern District of Georgia, the defendant, SAMUEL TUNICK, before and during the search for and seizure of property by Customs and Border Patrol Tactical Terrorism Response Team Supervisory Officer L.C., a person authorized to make such search and seizure, did knowingly destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, and otherwise take any action to delete the digital contents of a Google Pixel cellular phone, for the purpose of preventing and impairing the Government’s lawful authority to take said property into its custody and control, in violation of Title 18, Untied [sic] States Code, Section 2232(a).
Duress passwords exist for scenarios like border crossings, where individuals face immense pressure to unlock devices without traditional legal protections. The US has long maintained that routine border searches don’t require warrants, creating what civil liberties groups call a “Constitution-free zone” for travelers’ digital lives. A 2019 federal court ruling found suspicionless phone searches at borders violated the Fourth Amendment, but the government continues doing it anyway.
I don’t have a problem with this. I am less afraid of criminals than I am the government, who seems to overlook this kind of behavior if you have certain connections. Remember Hillary Clinton and Bleachbit?
Jury nullification is a thing. That’s all I will say about that.
Every time I see a story like this, cops comment on here about how I am “anti-cop.” No, I am anti criminal. This cop beat the shit out of someone, breaking 8 ribs, puncturing his lung, and giving him a concussion. Then he compounded it by turning off his body camera (thereby destroying evidence) and lied in his arrest report (thereby committing perjury).
My wife sometimes asks me why I debate lefties online. Here is an example. I made that post about Mamdani’s commie grocery store. Then I got sucked into an online debate. Someone picked up my idea about reselling the stuff from his store, and the left responded with this:
It really tickles me when they set up such easy T-ball shots.
I’m a home lab tinkerer. I enjoy getting my house to do things that make my life easier. My current project involves using Home Assistant and my new home network to monitor my house. I don’t have to pay alarm company fees, camera fees, or any other rent to a company for things I already own. That’s why this story hit a nerve with me.
Imagine you just spent $400 on a smart garage door opener. You paid Chamberlain another $30 for a myQ hub to make it “smart.” Then in November 2023, Chamberlain blocked every third-party app from talking to your own garage door. Home Assistant. Apple Home. Google Home. SmartThings. IFTTT. All dead overnight.
Chamberlain called it “unauthorized usage” and said they cut off outside apps from accessing their door openers to improve the experience for their 10 million users. Home Assistant removed the myQ integration weeks later. The odd part? Amazon Key in-garage delivery still works because they charge $1.99 per order and they pay Chamberlain fees for access.
You now own a $430 garage door opener that only talks to one app, owned by one company, and they control who can and can’t interact with it. You are renting access to your own garage.
Paul Wieland, a former IT guy reverse-engineered Chamberlain’s Security protocol and built a device that speaks to it. He named it Rage Against the Garage Door Opener (ratgdo). He hoped to sell 100 units. Instead, he sold tens of thousands of them.
I’ve been predicting for years that the whole pitch of “you will own nothing and like it” that’s been going on, where people have to pay microfees for everything, would spawn a new industry of people who will sell hacks to get around this bullshit. It warms my heart to see that happening.
The disclaimer: I don’t advertise, and receive nothing for my reviews or articles. I don’t think that I ever will. I have no relationship with any products, companies, or vendors that I review here, other than being a customer. If I ever *DO* have a financial interest, I will disclose it. Otherwise, I pay what you would pay. No discounts or other incentives here. I only post these things because I think that my readers would be interested. In this case, I don’t own and have no experience with ratgdo. I have no idea how well it works or if it works. As a home lab tinkerer, I am just happy to see people working to find better alternatives to renting your garage door opener.