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Remember the 2008 Financial crisis? The one where banks made loans to people who couldn’t afford them so those people could buy homes they couldn’t afford at inflated prices that far exceeded the actual value of the property, then bundled those loans into securities and had ratings agencies vastly overstate the value of those securities, all so they could make billions in profits? They then got bailed out at the expense of the taxpayers they just ripped off, all because they were too big to fail? Then they used the bailout money to pay huge bonuses to bank executives? Those actions crashed the economy of the entire world, destroying trillions in retirement savings that vanished virtually overnight? The banking regulators that were in charge of making sure stuff like that didn’t happen? They retired from government service, and all were offered high paying jobs with the same banks they were supposed to be watching and never even have to go to work. Isn’t that odd? They made a great movie about it, called The Big Short.

No one went to jail. Not one person. The largest fine paid by a banking executive was $67.5 million. For committing fraud on such a large scale that it was the largest transfer of wealth in human history to that point.

Ghislaine Maxwell trafficked in children for decades. She made money by providing children to be used as sex toys for no one, apparently. Not one person has been named as being one of her customers.

Why do I bring that up? Because today, Alex Jones was ordered to pay $1 billion in damages because he is an asshole and said mean things. Don’t get me wrong, he *is* an asshole. What he did and said hurt the victims of Sandy Hook and their families. I often wondered if he wasn’t a government disinformation campaign designed to make the right look like a bunch of nutjobs. That however, doesn’t come close to being in the same league with what the banks, their executives, and government regulators did.

I guess he wasn’t big enough for a bailout. I wonder, if one were to draw a Venn diagram of banking executives, government officials, and Ghislaine Maxwell’s clients, how much of those three circles would overlap? Now compare that to a Venn diagram of Alex Jones fans. Perhaps that is the real reason why he is paying out a billion bucks. He is being crushed as an example to all of the others: don’t you DARE question us.

The Marines have turned into sissified little whiny bitch-assed pussies. They will no longer put up with drill instructors calling them names.

Go have a good cry about this post in your safe spaces, you fucking pussies. What are you going to do when you are getting shot at? Complain to HR? Oooh- send a mean tweet or email to their boss before canceling them.

They said allowing women to serve wouldn’t affect combat effectiveness.

Here are my suggestions for some new Marine Corps recruiting slogans:

• The few, the gender friendly, the Marines.
• We’re Looking for a Few Good People of whichever gender they choose to identify as
• Semper Fellatus
• First to Deescalate
• Anyone can be a Marine, because we welcome everyone.
• The Marine Corps builds people of many genders

Robert Reich just tweeted that Denmark McDonald’s workers make the equivalent of $22 an hour and get 6 weeks’ paid vacation a year. I responded with a picture of a Danish McDonald’s menu, where burgers were listed at kr75, which at today’s exchange rate is about $10.

Other lefty’s responded with a link to a Snopes article saying that BigMacs are the same price there as they are here in the US, and saying that Snopes is a more reliable source than a picture of the actual menu.

Jen points out that Big Country’s Blog has been nuked by blogger. He sent me an email. He is fine and is working on setting up his backup.

Elon Musk suggests that Taiwan should be placed under special administrative control of China, just like Hong Kong. Musk claims that this will “leave many people unhappy.” Jut how unhappy remains to be seen, but if Hong Kong history is any guide, any dissidents won’t be around to complain about it. Anyone who opposes the official government line gets his ass chucked in prison.

Let’s get a Hong Kong resident’s opinion on this idea:

I know it’s funny, but there is a pretty good chance that the man who said that is dead. He was alive in April of 2020, but who knows what happened to him at this point.

This bullshit of occupying public spaces for the purpose of denying them to others with the singular goal of forcing society to do as they demand has got to stop. I’m talking about blocking roads, interrupting sporting events, and just being a general pain in the ass has to stop. If it doesn’t, people need to respond by pulling the offenders out of the way, and then kicking the living crap out of them.

There is no other way to deal with these petulant children. Talk about a threat to Democracy- thousands of people are denied the use of a highway or enjoyment of a sporting event that they paid to see because a handful of people are refusing to get out of the road. The cops won’t do anything. Perhaps it is time for some vigilante justice.

Stupidity should hurt.

I just heard a leftist saying that Trump gave the nuclear codes to Putin. Seriously, people are just too fucking stupid to live. When I hear dumb shit like that, I’m like “Just push the fucking button and get it over with. People are an evolutionary dead end.”

There is a story making the rounds about a group of students at NYU who started a petition because a quarter of them failed his organic chemistry class. The teacher was fired and the students given a free pass. I have a unique perspective on this one, having been both a medical professional and a chemistry teacher.

I am of two minds with this one. I could see the teacher’s point of view here. Organic chemistry is a difficult course. When I took “OrgO” as it is called, I had already been accepted into my grad school program, and all I had to do was get a “C” in the course, which I did. I probably could have gotten a B, but had other things on my mind and slacked off for the last couple of weeks. It remains to this day the only undergraduate course where I received a C. Skill in organic chemistry is not really required to be a doctor, instead it is one of those classes referred to as a “weed out” class, designed to weed out students who want to make a lot of money as a doctor or some other high paying profession, but who don’t have the academic skills or the work ethic needed to complete the rigorous program. There are a few of those courses scattered throughout the undergraduate pre-requisite courses, each more difficult than the last. I understand the academic rigor, and I understand the professor taking pride in teaching his subject. I can definitely see his side of the argument.

On the other side, I can agree with the students. Anyone who has taken any sort of course knows that any teacher can write a test that most students can’t pass. A great example of that is the TV game show “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?” I will say that there are some teachers who use tests as an opportunity to show off just how much smarter they are than their students. Tests are supposed to evaluate the students AND the teacher to see if the course objectives are being met. If most of the students fail the test, the teacher needs to ask where the problem lies: the students, the course delivery, or the test itself. In this case, we don’t know which of these was the case.

Since at least a quarter of them failed, we can surmise that most didn’t fail. This is corroborated by the fact that this particular professor had been teaching for years, and his rating at Rate My Professor for his time at Princeton was pretty good for what he was teaching (most professors teaching difficult material get subpar ratings). Even for his time at NYU, he got pretty good ratings. It’s important to note that the last 14 ratings he received at the time I wrote this were written after the news article came out, and were filled with comments like: “I am so glad NYU decided to fire his a$$. He made all his classes unnecessary harder than they needed to be. Hopefully we get some new profs who have easy chem classes and lower standards.”

Overall, I lean towards thinking that the students were a bunch of snowflakes who expect to receive an A as if it were some sort of participation trophy, then demand to be passed along so they can graduate from medical school and become doctors. I ran into the same problem when I was teaching a difficult course, and my students likewise attempted to get me fired.

But that is a story for a different day.

In this instance, there just isn’t enough data to know which is correct, but I am willing to bet it was the professor. In any case, it doesn’t matter because he is out of a job, and those 82 students are going to be your doctor when you reach the nursing home.

Hollywood is trying to make excuses as to why the Gay Romantic Comedy “Bros” has a dismal opening weekend. The liberals in California and the critics (but I repeat myself) LOVED it:

I snuck in and sat in the back of a sold out theater playing BROS in LA. The audience howled with laughter start to finish, burst into applause at the end, and some were wiping away tears as they walked out

Most of America isn’t a hard core lefty crowd. While most soccer moms don’t mind gay people and enjoyed shows like Queer Eye or Will and Grace, they don’t want to watch movies about men having discussions about sucking each other’s dicks.

Even with glowing reviews, great Rotten Tomatoes scores, an A CinemaScore etc, straight people, especially in certain parts of the country, just didn’t show up for Bros

The movie had a budget of $22 million, and pulled in less than $5 million in its opening weekend. This means that the studio is unlikely to turn a profit on the film.

There are tons of people criticizing Florida because everyone hasn’t been rescued and fed by now. I was a professional rescuer for more than 2 decades. I responded and served in dozens of disasters, including at least ten major hurricanes. The unit I was part of used to call themselves the “Masters of Disasters.”

I will use Katrina as an example. The hurricane hit at Waveland, MS on August 29. We were given alert orders to report to a staging area in Tallahassee on August 28. We arrived there at around 2200 and spent the night sleeping in a livestock pavilion. We got up at 0600 on the 29th and headed west. The convoy was over 3 miles long. We stopped to refuel just outside of Pensacola. There was a logjam at the I-10 tunnel in Mobile, AL and we had to use police to get through traffic outside of the tunnel. We finally arrived at the Stennis Space Center on the MS/LA border just before sunset.

We spent the most of the day of August 30 setting up a logistics point and command post at the Stennis Space Center. We had to clear the runways, build a tent city, and other logistical tasks. Late that afternoon, we headed out and wound up in Biloxi. We had dinner in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart just outside of town. My dad had died at the hospital there just three months earlier. I had spent two weeks in that town while he was in intensive care. The hotel that I had stayed in and the restaurants that I had eaten in were all gone. We moved on and wound up in Pascagoula on the night of the 30th.

On August 31, we began operations in the Pascagoula area. We took over all EMS services in the area. We had to. Most of the EMS and fire equipment in the area was damaged, and the people who worked there had their own problems to deal with. We began assisting the USAR in searching homes for victims. Our efforts were hampered by the bridges mostly being destroyed. We distributed food and medicine. We were giving inoculations for diphtheria.

Note that we were three days in before we even STARTED. That is the reason why they tell you to have 3 days’ food and water at a minimum. in the ensuing weeks, we searched cars submerged in mud filled swimming pools to see if they contained bodies. We had to largely stop operations at night because it was too dangerous in the pitch dark, and there isn’t enough fuel to operate generators all night.

All of that debris has to be searched for survivors and bodies. It’s tiring, dangerous, and technically demanding work. There is miles and miles of that debris, and before you can start, you have to clear a path through other debris in order to get there, clearing roads, and make sure that you aren’t running over any bodies in the debris.

The ground is saturated and muddy, and there is no infrastructure: no cell phones, roads are damaged or even missing, bridges are down, and all repeaters are down, cell towers are down, and satellite phones are congested and jammed. The units all have to bring fuel in from outside of the disaster area, and all units have to carry their own food and water in with them. It’s a difficult, logistically complicated operation as difficult as invading a foreign country. All of that takes time. It will be weeks before every single pile of rubble is even completely searched for bodies.

Note that they just cleared the main roads on Sanibel Island, and are now starting to clear side roads. Everything has to be brought in on barges because the island’s only bridge is out.

My job twice a day for a week of Katrina was hauling a fuel buffalo 30 miles to a refinery to get 500 gallons of diesel at a time so we could refuel my unit’s trucks. So every morning, I would get up at 0430, be on the road by 0500, and back before 0700 so I could refuel the vehicles in the morning. Then I would do the same every evening at 1700. Now imagine doing that every day, but with a barge trip at each end.

To make a long story short, it is difficult and time consuming. There is destruction and flooding from this storm from Fort Meyers all the way to St Augustine. One in ten houses in the state are without power. My old fire station is under water, and that station is 120 miles from Fort Meyers. This is a huge disaster area.

The responders of this state are doing an impressive job. Anyone who thinks things are going slowly have no idea what they are talking about.