"We've just thrown out nearly 250 years of civic precedents and legal precedents in the United States because of a highly politicized prosecutorial system attempting to take Trump off the campaign trail. Now we have to gauge the reaction."
BREAKING: Donald Trump Raises a Jaw-Dropping Amount of Campaign Cash After Bogus Verdict
As we reported yesterday, Donald Trump's campaign donation page was overwhelmed on Thursday following the sham verdict from the rigged trial against him in New York City.
On Friday morning, less than 24 hours after the verdict was announced, the campaign announced it raised a jaw-dropping amount of money from supporters.
"Today, the Trump campaign announced a record-shattering small-dollar fundraising haul following the sham Biden Trial verdict totaling $34.8 million – nearly double the biggest day ever recorded for the Trump campaign on the WinRed platform," Trump campaign advisors Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a statement. "Crooked Joe Biden and the Democrats with their election interference political witch hunt have awakened the MAGA movement like never before."
To put that in perspective, Biden's New York City fundraiser, which included Hollywood stars, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, raised just $26 million in March.
My salsa tastes great, but it always ends up dark and brownish, and I think I know why: I need to treat certain ingredients separately. I normally just blitz everything together in my food processor. If I want intensely red salsa with green flecks sprinkled throughout it, I should blitz together only the red chilies, tomatoes, garlic, and onions, and I should mince the cilantro and green chilies separately, then add the green into the red at the very end of the process. Result: clearly green flecks in clearly red salsa. If I remember to, I'll try that next time. Taste-wise, though, this batch of salsa kicked ass.
Why show an evil Japanese scientist if the headline makes him out to be the hero of the story? I'm sure a pro-Asian leftist would cry racism. Or is the pictured doctor supposed to be one of the murderous jabbers, leaving the heroic doctor un-pictured?
If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. —Obi-wan Kenobi
Please keep in mind that Trump has the right to appeal the verdict. That said, here are some hot-take reactions to what we knew was coming:
Styx admits he'd predicted a hung jury but also says this has "opened a can of worms":
Sky News Australia: more Americans will vote Trump because "miscarriage of justice":
Patrick Bet-David for Valuetainment—more businesses will leave NY:
Trump's website went down as donations to his campaign came pouring in. GWU law professor Jonathan Turley thinks the conviction will be overturned (I say that's not likely), and he's also sad for what he sees as the once-great New York legal system:
Canuck lawyer David Freiheit (Viva Frei) rants:
Tim Pool hasn't published his opinion yet, but I imagine something'll be up in a few hours. When it's up, I'll relay it to you.
Alan Dershowitz Doubts Conviction Will Be Overturned Because Judges Are ‘Terrified’ To Help Trump
Noted attorney Alan Dershowitz said on Thursday that he doubts a New York appellate court will overturn former President Donald Trump’s conviction in his Manhattan trial.
A Manhattan jury of five women and seven men convicted Trump on 34 counts of falsification of business records Thursday after nearly 12 hours of deliberations. Dershowitz said he predicted the conviction multiple times, including in his book, “Get Trump,” before saying that he believes appellate judges will be reluctant to overturn the jury’s decision because they might be biased against the former president.
“This is a very sad day for American justice. I have now added one banana to my usual banana republic: A grouping, umm, we’re up to seven or eight at this point- and it’s a worse day for America than it actually is for Donald Trump,” Dershowitz said. “Don’t know what the impact will be on Trump. Don’t know what it’ll be on his electoral prospects, he’s probably not going to get jail time, and if he does, it would be stayed pending appeal.”
“I don’t know whether the case will be reversed on appeal. I don’t think it would be reversed by the appellate division,” Dershowitz continued. “These are judges who are terrified of being perceived of as helping Trump in any way. Don’t know whether or not the New York Court of Appeals in Albany will have the ability to not consider the impact it will have on individuals as judges. Surely the Supreme Court wouldn’t, but that’s a way off and there wouldn’t be a decision by the Supreme Court, probably before the election.”
New York Judge Juan Merchan was accused of having a bias against Trump during his handling of the case. Merchan donated $15 to Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020 and made two $10 donations to Democratic groups via ActBlue, one to a “Stop Republicans” group and another to a “Progressive Turnout Project,” according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records.
Merchan’s daughter, Loren, worked for a firm that helped Democrats raise $93 million off the former president’s indictment in the business records case, the New York Post reported in March. Dershowitz compared the jury’s verdict to those made in the deep South before the Civil Rights movement.
“This is still the weakest case I’ve ever seen in 60 years. The fact that the jury convicted based on false instructions, wrong instructions, based on the jurors having been between 85 and 90 percent picked from a veneer that hates Trump and doesn’t want him to be president, the fact that the jury convicted doesn’t make this case any stronger or any better,” Dershowitz said. “I was recently just 15 minutes ago on with The Times of London and they were saying, ‘Well, doesn’t the fact that the jury convicted prove it was a strong case?’ No, no! It proves that it was of a case that was brought in a jurisdiction where a conviction was almost assuredly guaranteed.”
“In the South, when they convicted black people improperly with an all-white jury or acquitted white people improperly with an all-white jury, that didn’t mean that those convictions were correct. It just meant that the jury didn’t reflect the values of our, of our country, it reflected the values of a particular region of the country, in this case the region is a liberal region, New York, in the Southern cases, the region was the conservative region of the South,” Dershowitz continued.
“Juries are imperfect and juries represent the biases of individuals,” Dershowitz added. “We do live in the age of Trump syndrome, people can’t talk rationally about Donald Trump any more than they can talk rationally about Israel or about some other subjects.”
I think Dershowitz has a point.
ADDENDUM 2: Headline (an example of white-pilling):
Fear Not, Patriots[:] Trump Just Won the Election
[ ... ] One thing I adore about communists is that they never learn from their mistakes.
I knew the fix was in for Trump when the White House revealed Biden would pull up his Depends adult diapers and give a talk after the verdict was released.
I also knew the guilty verdict would, like every other accusation they've thrown against Trump, make him stronger. To quote my Motor City hometown hero Bob Seger, "Every time they were sure they had you caught, you were quicker than they thought. You just turned your head and walked."
Non-Americans will celebrate this flapdoodle, much like Nancy Pelosi, who went on Bill Maher's show to cheer after a Trump impeachment. [ ... ]
As our own Victoria Taft wrote, the Communist News Network (CNN) reported that a guilty verdict won't hurt Trump at all. What the CNN stooge-fest failed to address is how much this courtroom codswallop will help push Trump over the winner's line in November. I have the answer: It will help him immeasurably.
As I am writing this, I am listening to a 77-year-old woman who called WMAL to say she has never donated to a political candidate but is planning to do so now that Trump has been convicted.
Another caller said he never voted for Trump but certainly will now. Caller after caller expressed their anger, sadness, and—most importantly—their dedication to right the wrongs in the nation and their refusal to surrender our republic to enemies, sometimes foreign and today domestic.
Now What?
I suspect several things will happen next.
I believe Biden, who has taken millions of dollars from Chinese commies, will pretend to take the "high road" and refuse to debate Trump because he is now a "convicted felon," which was always the plan.
You don't need me to say this, but the donations will continue to go through the roof.
Donald Trump Receives $300,000 Donation From Silicon Valley Investor After Guilty Verdict
Shaun Maguire, a general partner at Sequoia Capital, said he donated $300,000 to Donald Trump following Thursday’s guilty verdict in the “hush money” witch hunt.
“I just donated $300k to President Trump. The timing isn’t a coincidence,” Maguire said.
“Back in 2016 I had drunk the media Kool-Aid and was scared out of my mind about Trump. As such I donated to Hilary Clinton’s campaign and voted for her. By 2020 I was disillusioned and didn’t vote – I didn’t like either option. Now, in 2024, I believe this is one of the most important elections of my lifetime, and I’m supporting Trump,” Maguire wrote on X.
“I know that I’ll lose friends for this. Some will refuse to do business with me. The media will probably demonize me, as they have so many others before me. But despite this, I still believe it’s the right thing to do. I refuse to live in a society where people are afraid to speak,” he continued.
Good for you, Shaun. I'd like to see Musk donate a cool billion.
Donald Trump has been found guilty of 34 counts of records falsification in his New York trial. There will of course be an appeal, but appeal or not, he's now a martyr who has solidified his voter base, and New York's justice system is seen for the joke it is. I personally was never confident there'd be a hung jury, but whatever. The process grinds on. Best we can hope for is "reversed on appeal," but here as well, I'm not that hopeful. It's New York.
ADDENDUM:
I'm not so optimistic, but anything's possible.
Styx thinks the ultimate troll would be for Trump to win the election, then for him to victoriously and publicly snip off the ankle monitor he's been forced to wear.
Trump is a megalomaniac, but he kind of has to be to survive all the shit the Democrats have been putting him through just because he changed his label from "D" (which he still is, really) to "R."
Two illegal aliens in a box truck tried to break into Marine Corps Base Quantico. One was a Jordanian national who illegally crossed the border & one was on the terrorist watch list.
I was never a Whovian, but I have a friend who is, and I have yet to ask him his opinion on "Dr. Who," which went woke several years ago and never looked back. How sad for such a long-running television icon—yet another one ruined by the left (and by one of its better showrunners, from what I hear).
Today's lunch used up some leftovers: an extra can of chickpeas, an extra package of feta cheese, some dried figs, my second of two zucchinis, and some salmon. I made my Middle Eastern-ish sauce/marinade/rub/something and poured it all over the chickpeas and zucchini and fried them both up. I also gently pan-fried the salmon as my lunch's primary protein.
Spice-and-seasoning blend: salt, pepper, harissa powder, dried basil, chili powder, cumin, garlic powder, chili flakes, turmeric, and brown sugar.
Zucchini and chickpeas (called pois chiches—"pwah sheesh"—in French).
Mixed with spices and seasonings, then stirred and pan-cooked.
cooked salmon piled on top (dipping sauce not pictured)
It was all a bit much for lunch, especially after adding pistachios, a block of feta cheese, and some figs, but it was also certainly among the healthier things I've eaten, even though chickpeas are in truth rather carby (about 27% carbs!).
Kinda dark in this picture, but the flavor is bright and fresh.
And here's some other nacho-istic material I prepped:
Beef! Essential for nachos.
What went into the beef: salt, pepper, powdered garlic, onion flakes, cayenne, chipotle powder, harissa powder, molasses, and off-brand sriracha.
Also to be added in the final stage: passata di pomodoro (tomato purée).
Everything but the passata and harissa is combined, and the ground beef (ground myself) is browned.
The beef was a combination of skirt steak and a mysterious package of Aussie beef that had been chopped into little, 1-cm cubes. Everything went through my grinder. I love my grinder.
The harissa is added as an afterthought.
I forgot: I have a bottle of something called "umami flavoring." It's mostly mushroom powder, but it's got other seasonings as well. I added that, too, for depth of flavor.
Not sure if you can tell, but the passata was added in.
The beef's had a chance to cool down, and here it is, containerized.
I also made a queso—in this case, it's basically a Latin-ish Mornay sauce: start with a roux, make it into a Béchamel by slowly adding cold milk, then add cheese and spices and seasonings to turn it into a Mornay. There's also cayenne, chipotle, and sriracha in there, plus a touch of umami powder. No added salt: cheese brings its own saltiness. Two final ingredients to be added tomorrow will be (1) minced jalapeño peppers plus (2) jalapeño juice from the bottle to make the queso a bit thinner.
Drip, drip, drip. Ignore the dirty, spattered walls.
My apartment smelled—and smells—amazing. Tomorrow ought to be awesome, but I do have to get there early to shred the lettuce (chefs call that "shredduce"... just like noodles are "noods" and blueberries are "bloobs").
Already at the office: Fritos (we'll have regular corn chips, too, since the boss is picky), beef, queso, salsa, sour cream, chopped olives, lettuce, chopped tomatoes. That's almost everything... I'll be bringing in a bottle of sliced jalapeños tomorrow; the peppers will be minced and tossed into the queso, and the piquant juice will be poured into the queso to thin it out a bit; things are a tad too cheesy and thick right now, but the queso tastes great.
The sun was out when I started my chest-pained walk yesterday (left the office early), so I decided to take some lingering-daylight shots of the weird stage props(?) sitting in the creek. Some commenters suggested the display might be artistic in nature; my boss and coworker said the same. Again, there are no signs as there would be for an art exhibit. Another commenter suggested these might be set pieces of some sort. If so, why the normal-sized car paired with the miniature buildings (which are just façades—I should take a daytime shot of the whole thing's backside one day)? None of this makes any sense to me. But maybe daylight will help my readers guess what might be going on. I'm clueless.
Taken from a creek-spanning bridge:
Closer:
The car has an open door (this wasn't true last time):
Arch and building:
Maybe people are indeed setting up for some kind of performance. But if that's so, why are the stage props' scaffolding elements visible to the right (i.e., as you're facing the props)? Shouldn't the "guts" be invisible to an audience (i.e., facing toward the opposite bank of the creek)? Again, this makes no sense. Ça n'a aucun sens.
building's front, L-R, top-bottom: taekwondo, math academy, hair shop, music academy
The sign below says, "Careful, careful, and again, careful!" A warning about construction.
Big Daddy Government, with its cute, innocuous mascots, is always looking out for you.
By the way, we're getting close to the time of year when this creek floods during heavy rains. Come July, it'll be jangma season—the monsoon. Whatever props are being put up will need to have been taken down by then.
I'll be ruining this tomorrow when we all sit down for a nacho luncheon. About that: my boss saw the Fritos Scoops I'd bought, and he complained those chips are too thick and salty for nachos. I think they're the perfect shape for catching salsa, queso, etc. as they dribble down, but the boss already told his wife (before he'd seen the Fritos) to visit Costco and get corn chips. Sigh... kvetch, kvetch, kvetch. I think salt is only a problem if you're especially sensitive to sodium, which is one issue I don't have. But the boss is the boss. I'll eat the Fritos myself tomorrow; the boss can have his damn Costco chips.
The US Inflation Rate has now been above 3% for 37 consecutive months, the longest period of high inflation since the late 1980s/early 1990s. pic.twitter.com/UYCNtD2Bpc
As an experiment, I went to work yesterday with no bandage on my toe to see whether I was still bleeding. I didn't check my foot until after I'd gotten home from a full day at work and a 7K walk afterward. Result: no bleeding at all. So I don't have to bandage up my foot anymore, it seems. Not until the next time I fuck up my toe callus with nail clippers.
The walk was interesting. It started off with chest pain, but that may have had something to do with how, right at the beginning, I helped two kids carry their bikes up a set of stairs so they could bike along the high-level creekside path by the Yangjae Creek. There were three kids: two boys and a little girl. The girl was the one who most obviously needed help dragging her bike up the stairs, and when I'd finished helping her, I went back down the steps to help one of the boys, who was also having trouble getting his bike to the top. "Thank you very much," the boy said in accented English when I'd handed him back his bike. I smiled and nodded as my chest throbbed from all the climbing and descending and the lifting-with-heart-failure. The kids biked away. I belatedly thought I should have asked to take their picture, but by then, it was too late. Still—maybe the deed earned me some good karma, unlocking some kind of cosmic achievement that I can cash in later whenever there's an emergency.
He's saddled with an unfortunate surname, but Harrison Butker's recent graduation speech at a Catholic college, during which he espoused Catholic values, should never have generated the rage it got from feminists and other leftist ninnies who hate the idea of motherhood and family. Personally, I say live your best life and leave everyone else alone. If you want to be a career woman with no children, fine—God bless you. I'm unmarried and childless myself. But don't resent someone else for expressing a different opinion and different values.
Trump is effectively stuck in New York thanks to his court cases.* Unable to campaign at large, he has focused his efforts on NYC itself. On some level, I imagine Trump still considers himself a New Yorker; a lot of New York diaspora that I've met seem to wear their New Yawk pedigree with pride. Whether you're born in New York or move there, once you're marinated in the culture, you're a New Yorker for life. So for Trump, these are his people. and despite how relentlessly these people vote Democrat, there are, in New York, occasional hints that the place may be more MAGA than it looks on the surface. Trump's rally in the Bronx a few days ago proved this point: most of the people who came to show support were decidedly not of the lighter persuasion, and they were all hopping mad about the four years of shit that Joe Biden has been shoveling down their throats. People have been starting to realize how good they had it under Trump, and why it's important to vote for the policies, not the man. Trump the man is flawed, imperfect, even odious—but as a president, he's a damn sight better, and more competent, than Flaccid, Creepy Joe Biden.
Here's some commentary on the Bronx rally—before, during, and after.
From Harlem to the Bronx to Queens:
But Trump is racist!
Styx on the Bronx rally:
Vox populi:
The peeps came out in support:
From just before the rally:
"Massive success":
AOC is "jealous" of Trump's ability to draw a crowd:
The crowd shows its passion:
What this means in terms of stats and polls:
"Epic Bronx reactions":
*He can, in fact, duck out now and again if he doesn't have to appear in court.
I've settled on the following pattern for walking and fasting: I fast on the same day I walk, but my fast starts after a quick smoothie in the morning, then I'm done consuming nutrition for the day. I might have a diet drink or three, and technically, diet drinks break your fast (strictly speaking, most "real" fasts are water fasts), but the drinks have zero sugar and zero calories, so despite the possibility of an insulin spike from the sweetness (called the "cephalic reaction" or "cephalic response," in which your brain perceives sweetness and triggers insulin, which is a bad thing because insulin is a fat-storing hormone*), I risk hormonal revenge yet still consider my entire post-smoothie day to be one big fast. I'm walking on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, with Saturday being the day for a long walk (18-35K). Mondays and Wednesdays are for the more modest, two-hour walks out to the river and back.
My diabetes doc added back some of the meds that had been cut out at my previous visit. I'm not experiencing any wooziness, luckily; perhaps my body has developed a tolerance to the new suite of meds. I hope tonight's walk doesn't involve any chest pain, but we'll see. About those meds, though: I think they're finally pushing down my blood-sugar numbers, keeping in mind that the meds don't make the blood sugar disappear, but only shove the sugar aside into your organs—which is the very thing we're trying to prevent from happening. Diabetes is associated with organ failure as the various departments of your body get overloaded with sugar: a fine reason to get off meds entirely. But getting off the meds will mean getting off most or all carbs, so my path seems to be leading toward intensive keto or carnivore.
I had a blood-glucose level of 108 the day of my April doctor's appointment. Since then, I've been as high as 286 for a day (May 5, probably a day on which I was off the chain, dietarily speaking), but this morning, following a downward pattern since my most recent hospital visit this past Friday, I was at 113, and that's after a non-fasting day. Again, given the dangers that I highlighted above, 113 doesn't mean much in the grander scheme of things, but at this point, I'll take whatever good news I can get. The longer I stay relatively low like this, the greater the chances that my A1c, a three-month average, will be around 7-point-something by the time I go back for my next appointment on July 12.
I also finally tweaked my workout chart now that I'm back to nighttime walking which, frankly, suits my temperament better. Getting up at 5:30 a.m. and doing the apartment stairs in January/February was a bit of a burden; I'm naturally a night owl unless I'm walking cross-country. Workouts are now all clustered in the evening; I've given myself a three-hour block for them. On walking days, I'll use all three hours, but on the other days, which are mainly about strength, flexibility, etc., I'm starting slow and building up. This isn't Square One; it's more like Square Negative 10: I have to work my way up to zero, and only then can I start making some real progress. Kettlebell and heavy-club work will be crucial for that: I need to strengthen my limbs and my core. To keep myself honest, I might even start a blog where I post videos of my workouts, which will all be lame at first before they finally begin to improve.
One bit of bad news is that my blood pressure has been rising over the past few days, and I don't know why. The numbers are still fairly low compared to where I was before I was hospitalized a second time, but this morning, for example, my BP was at 132/87, i.e., hypertensive. After weeks of being spoiled by super-low BP scores (e.g., 94/69 on May 21), this is disappointing, and I don't know why it's happening. It's during these moments that I miss Bill Keezer; he would read posts like this one and send me a private email explaining the medical reasons for what was happening.
And so I soldier on. At some point, I need to get braver about straining my heart if I'm ever to strengthen it. But if I plan to do staircase work at night from now on, I'd rather go back to doing it outside, using the creekside staircases. They're spaced apart at roughly 100-200-meter intervals, giving me time to recover before I ascend the next set of stairs, and the walk along the Yangjae Creek is a long one. If I get to the point where I'm again doing the longest version of that walk, I'll be going up and down about 35 staircases. Walking upstream against the current of the Yangjae means I'm going ever so slightly uphill, which means the staircases get shorter and shorter the farther I go. The biggest and baddest of the staircases, right at the confluence of the Yangjae and the Tan Creeks, has 80 or 81 steps. That's how the creekside walk begins. The number of steps for the first fourteen staircases along the creek drops to the 70s, then the 60s, then the 50s. After that, there's a radical drop to the 30s and 20s, with one or two anomalously long staircases toward the end, but with a between-staircase interval of nearly a kilometer. By that point, I've walked out of Seoul and into Gwacheon, and it's usually late and very quiet—an introvert's ideal environment. I should do a MapMyWalk plot of that route to get some stats. I do all the staircases on the way out to Gwacheon, but none of them when I turn around and walk back to my apartment. It would be truly badass to do all 35 staircases on the way back, but I'm usually too tired by that point.
More on all of this later. Today's a fasting-and-walking day, so wish me luck.
__________
*The deeper problem is insulin resistance, which is when your body builds up a tolerance to insulin, which in turn makes the insulin released into your bloodstream less effective at lowering blood sugar, which is insulin's other function (aside from fat storage). Insulin resistance is one symptom of metabolic syndrome, of which diabetes is a corollary. The goal is to minimize the frequency of insulin spikes, lose body fat—especially the so-called "visceral" fat around the organs—and achieve metabolic balance. For us fatties, that's a tall order.
NB: the above link is from before Trump's Bronx rally. Mainstream news outlets have tried to spin the rally as having had low turnout, but the photos that the outlets are showing come mostly from six hours before the event started, and by that standard, there were already a lot of people there waiting for the former president. Be not fooled by the Stalinist media.
DEBATE: Biden’s debate challenge to Trump came with fine print:
• No live audience • RFK Jr. is banned • Trump’s mic is muted when Biden speaks • Only hosted by NPR, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, or CBS • Moderated by Democrat-aligned reporter pic.twitter.com/ST4ZKTcMFA
Years ago, when I was in a different part of Seoul from where I am now, I once went to an unfamiliar beauty salon to get my hair cut. Beauty salons are called miyong-shil in Korean: "beautiful-face rooms." A regular barbershop for men is an ibal-so ("hair-cutting place," roughly). I think a lot of us guys prefer the miyong-shil because it's fairly quick (and often cheaper) whereas the ibal-so is slower, more deliberate, more formal, and more complicated (although that may depend on the barbershop).
I told the lady I wanted a fairly "regular" cut—nothing special, with particular attention to trimming the sides of my head. It became obvious within a couple minutes that she didn't have a delicate touch, and at one point, she nicked my earlobe, causing a bleed. She saw a flash of irritation on my face, and instead of taking responsibility for her mistake, she said, "You have weak skin." She applied tissue to the bleed, and it eventually stopped.
But she might have been right. I've been bandaging my right big toe for the past month or so ever since I dug a little too deeply into my foot calluses with a nail clipper, reopening the old diabetic ulcer, which never really filled back up—it simply developed a layer of skin over the wound, but for all practical purposes, that was fine. Now, though, the wound was open again, which meant a constant ooze of blood. Lately, the wound has no longer been bleeding, which is nice after several weeks of ministrations, but when I was peeling off a bandage tonight to wash my foot and re-bandage myself, I noticed a second skin-rip, caused by the mere force of the bandage's adhesive as I peeled it off. (Did you know the Brits call bandages "plasters"? They love misnaming things: a "grill" in UK English isn't a grill—it's a broiler, and "mince" isn't finely chopped meat: it's ground meat. Grrr. That said, I'm sure my British friends snicker at stupid Americanisms.) So maybe my skin really is weak or thin or whatever if a peeling bandage can rip skin off my toe.
This means that I had to go from tending to my old ulcer wound—now seemingly healed—to treating this new wound (and removing future bandages more carefully). Because the new bleeding was heavier (I belatedly noticed spots of blood all over the floor and discovered that my toe bandage was blood-soaked), I got mad and found my blood-stopper powder. With my brain working in overdrive, I improvised a new method for plugging the bleed: I tapped out a small pile of the powder, dipped a fingertip in it, then moved my powder-covered fingertip to plug up the wound and let the powder do its work. I had to do this several times, applying pressure, holding my fingertip tight to the wound for 60 seconds each time. After about three rounds of this nonsense, the bleeding was effectively plugged. I washed the toe and wiped down everything that had gotten sprinkled with the powder (just like talc, it gets everywhere), then reapplied bandages. It's been a few hours, and... no bleed. I think we're good.
I'm pretty sure the blood thinners I take every day aren't helping. So many stupid things to watch for. Stay healthy so you don't have to deal with this annoying crap.
[written on May 24] I wonder whether this tweet of a Daily Show video skit will have been removed by the time this scheduled post of mine is finally published. This feels more like something the Babylon Bee does routinely, but it looks as though even the liberals are finally getting sick of the Democrats' stupidity and bullshit.
This Comedy Central Daily Show skit ripping Kamala Harris' word salads is both brutal and hilarious. pic.twitter.com/ODT5hc4Cf3
Fani Willis Appeals Dismissal of Charges Against Trump in Georgia 2020 Election Case
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis appealed on Thursday a Georgia judge’s decision to dismiss six charges lodged at former President Donald Trump and his allies.
Willis asked the Georgia Court of Appeals to reverse Judge Scott McAfee’s decision to throw out the charges, including three against Trump, that were part of her 41-count election interference case against Trump and his co-defendants. In March, McAfee dismissed six of the charges saying that Willis had not been specific enough.
“As written, these six counts contain all the essential elements of the crimes but fail to allege sufficient detail regarding the nature of their commission, i.e., the underlying felony solicited,” McAfee wrote. “They do not give the Defendants enough information to prepare their defenses intelligently, as the Defendants could have violated the Constitutions and thus the statute in dozens, if not hundreds, of distinct ways.”
The judge dismissed counts 2, 5, 6, 23, 28, and 38. Each count deals with allegations that Trump and his allies asked Georgia officials to break their oaths of office. The defendants challenged the charges, saying their Sixth Amendment rights and due process rights had been violated.
McAfee said that the prosecutors were not clear about the legal violations that Trump and his co-defendants are accused of.
“The Court’s concern is less that the State has failed to allege sufficient conduct of the Defendants – in fact it has alleged an abundance,” he wrote. “However, the lack of detail concerning an essential legal element is, in the undersigned’s opinion, fatal.”
The above gets a little repetitive, so you get the point: Willis was too vague.
They could've gone for Orangeman-not-from-Syracuse, but no. The Libertarian Party nominated a "gay race communist" named Chase Oliver (I don't care that he's gay, but I care about the "race" and the "communist"... and I guarantee that he will lose bigly). They will soon be suffering the consequences of rejecting a libertarian-adjacent candidate like Cheeto Hitler:
Libertarianism as a set of principles: cool. As a party: fuck, no.
If you want to hear what I think is the important part—about commonalities—start here. Libertarians have made the perfect the enemy of the good, then they fucked up the "perfect" part by going all in on a goddamn clown. What a nightmare. And how hilarious. They're willing to sacrifice their entire agenda just because Trump represents only 70% of what they want. I guess they're thinking it's better to lose a whole baby than to have most of a baby.
Conclusion: I can't take these people seriously. What a shame. Dr. Vallicella's been calling them "Losertarians" for years. I guess he was right.
Be a libertarian with my blessing. Just don't be a Libertarian.
Tim Pool has been itching to talk with Donald Trump for a while. What's next for Trump—Joe Rogan? Tim Pool is, whatever his faults, a pretty big fish, but Rogan is orders of magnitude bigger. For Pool, by contrast, Trump is doubtless the biggest fish.
Full podcast here. Trump sits with Pool for only about 17 minutes. To see that part, go to about the 1:30:30 mark (or just watch the above video). Otherwise, enjoy the commentary.
UPDATE: okay, I just watched the interview, and I'll be the first to admit that it was mostly softball questions from Pool. (Maybe I've been conditioned by the likes of the mannish and obnoxious Kaitlan Collins to expect nothing but barbs, arguments, and rude interruptions.) That said, Trump somehow managed not to go off track too much, answering Pool's questions directly in most cases, vaguely in some. You're not going to learn much that you didn't already know or suspect, but it's a worthwhile exchange all the same, if for no other reason than to see the unintentionally hilarious sight of Tim Pool fangirling.
Defying the Odds: Trump’s Bronx Speech and Its Impact
[ ... ]
A London-based friend whom I have not seen in a while wrote me an anguished, imploring note: “Please tell me it isn’t true that you are writing Trump’s speeches. Surely it wasn’t you who advised him to say that immigrants were poisoning the blood of America? Straight out of the Mein Kampf playbook.”
Nope, not I. I am pretty sure the remark in question was fermented and mis en bouteille by Trump himself. Tout le monde—at least, the world of the elite media—was appalled by the remark just as they had been appalled by Trump’s calling shithole countries like Haiti “shithole countries,” his referring to Nikki Haley as “bird brain,” or many similar exercises in invective. In my view, none of Trump’s remarks bear any similarity to Mein Kampf, nor do I think he is an “authoritarian figure.” My friend did say that “I wasn’t implying that Trump was actually a Hitler figure, but that his use of those words showed a staggering ignorance of their historical associations. I don’t see him as a fascist but as an ignoramus.” From “Hitler” to “ignoramus” is a slight upgrade, I suppose, but not exactly the cat’s meow.
My friend and I went back and forth on Trump. In the course of the exchange, she went from comparing him to Hitler to saying that “most alarmingly[,] he seems to be Putin’s useful idiot.” To that charge, I responded that “I know some people say that. I do note that Putin did not invade Ukraine during Trump’s presidency. And I doubt Putin regarded Trump’s destruction of hundreds of Russian troops in Syria in 2018 as a gesture of friendship, but who knows?”
My friend then allowed that “Putin annexed Crimea long before he went for the full invasion. What is most alarming is that Trump seems to feel he has Putin under his influence when it is really the other way around.”
I replied: “Right, 2014, back during Trump’s first term—oh, wait, Trump wasn’t POTUS yet.”
“It was that other guy [I continued], the guy who sent blankets to Ukraine to show US support. In another demonstration of his subservience to Putin, Trump sent Javelin missiles instead of blankets.
In my view, the [Trump-is-Putin’s-puppet] meme is right out [of] the Hillary “reset button” Clinton playbook, aided and abetted by such upstanding patriots as James Comey, Robert Mueller, Andrew Weismann, and Stefan Halper, with supporting roles for Christopher Steele, James Clapper, and John Brennan, not to mention the credulous left-wing media in this country.
My friend then offered this: “But look at his most recent claim that he could get Putin to release the US journalist held by Moscow immediately when he came to power, which was instantly (and humiliatingly) denied by the Kremlin.” Quoth I:
“I don’t quite see [how] his [claim's] [ ... ] [being] rebuffed means that he is “Putin’s useful idiot.” . . . I would also note that it is one thing for the Kremlin to respond to the statement of someone who, though famous, is a private citizen, and something else again for them to respond to someone who is the sitting President. If Trump is reelected, I would not be surprised if that reporter is released, and I would expect it to be done sotto voce so that most people would not know whether it was done post hoc or propter hoc.
We started with Hitler, moved on to Putin, and then the conversation got personal. “My whole point,” my friend wrote, “is that [Trump] is seriously stupid and delusional. Not the man to be holding the most powerful office in the free world at the most dangerous historical moment since the end of the Cold War.”
To which I replied at some length:
“Well, “seriously stupid and delusional” are heavy charges! They prompt a few questions, though. Is Trump any “stupider and delusional” than Joe Biden? (A separate but nonetheless pertinent question: is Trump any more dangerous and destructive than was Barack Obama?)
I think we can agree that Trump is not an intellectual. All things considered, though, I am not so sure that is a liability in a political leader.
Back in 2015-2016, I wrote probably a score of columns making fun of Donald Trump. He is a man that, in some ways, cries out for caricature. I was at that time backing Ted Cruz. Then Cruz dropped out and it was Trump or Hillary. To me, that was an easy choice. I regarded Hillary as the most corrupt serious candidate for President in history (I did not then know about Biden’s unfathomable corruption). So I cast my lot, somewhat reluctantly at first, in with Trump. But the more I listened to him, the more I was impressed with what he said: about the inner cities, energy, regulation, the border, the media, foreign affairs. True, he was not a master of the honeyed phrase, but I agreed with him about many things.
Then there was his actual performance. He actually accomplished almost everything he promised to do (the great exception was getting rid of Obamacare: John McCain, in his last fit of pique, prevented that).
Trump pushed through a huge tax cut that benefitted the majority of taxpayers and increased federal revenue by billions. He exploited our energy resources and made America energy independent. He drastically curtailed illegal immigration. He drastically reduced the regulatory burden on businesses. Until Covid hit, the economy boomed. Inflation and unemployment were low—minority unemployment was the lowest on record—and wages, especially wages at the lower end of the scale, soared.
Trump managed to get three Supreme Court Justices and hundreds of federal judges approved. He challenged the destructive ideology of critical race theory and what’s come to be called DEI. In foreign affairs, he moved our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, something that had been promised since the time of Bill Clinton but which was never done. He brought into being the Abraham Accords, a world historical achievement, in my opinion, which should have won him the Nobel Peace Prize. He destroyed ISIS. He rebuilt the US military infrastructure. And he did all this, remember, to the steady drum beat of a hostile media and deep state apparatus that kept screaming about (we know now) illusionary Russian collusion, etc.
Trump’s two biggest liabilities, in my view, were incontinent spending and poor personnel choices. I am afraid that he has not learned to forgo the former. About the latter, though, he seems to have made great strides. If he is elected we won’t see anymore Rex Tillersons or Jim Mattises. Whether he will be able to navigate the perilous, weed- and snake-infested waters of The Swamp is another question. I have recommended he bypass Washington altogether, beginning with holding his inauguration elsewhere. I don’t think he will, though, and I think it is an open question whether he can triumph over the entrenched elite that actually governs the country.
But the bottom line, for me, is that Trump was, despite the monolithic hostility of the establishment, an extraordinarily successful president. Was that the work of a “seriously stupid and delusional” figure? I don’t think so, but opinions, I’ve noticed, vary.”
Having begun with Hitler and moving on to Putin, we ended with Mussolini. My friend wrote that
“Over here[,] we are appalled by the choice between Biden who is certainly dangerously incompetent and Trump who looks to Europeans like Mussolini. We feel we are much closer to global threats than Americans and find Trump’s isolationism terrifying. I really hoped that Biden would stand aside. I still think it possible for him to find a VP who would make an acceptable replacement if and when he becomes totally incapable. It is difficult to convey just how much panic there is here over the state of US politics.”
As of my sitting down to write this, I had the last word. “I confess,” I responded,
that I don’t see the Trump as Mussolini (or Hitler) meme. We saw what he was like as president and, leaving aside the media hysteria, I would argue that there were no fascist signposts.
I also don’t think that “America First” is isolationist; rather, it is an attitude that urges caution about foreign adventurism. It has been a theme in one major current of American policy since George Washington’s Farewell Address, which bears re-reading.
The subject of “global threats” is a large one. I myself am much more worried about Xi than Putin, but I understand that opinions on the threat Putin poses differ. I think it is still possible that Biden will be pushed aside. It may well be that the June debate is a sort of audition for his retirement foisted on him by his puppet masters. If, as is eminently possible, he blows it, the calls for him to withdraw may become overwhelming. The party is in a jam, though, because it will be very difficult for them to replace Kamala Harris and were she the candidate Trump would win in a landslide. I am coming to think that he might well win in a landslide anyway, but we’re still six months out and, as Harold Wilson famously observed, a week is a long time in politics.
We’ve come a long way from the rally in the Bronx. But Trump’s peroration is still ringing in my ears: “It doesn’t matter whether you are black or brown or white, we are all Americans. We all want better opportunity—and I’m not just going to promise it, I’m going to deliver it, as I did against all odds for four straight years.”
The man I heard in the Bronx bears scant resemblance to the bumbling yet dangerous ogre that the world has fabricated around the name Trump. But the very fact that he has been so effectively demonized should give us pause. If nothing else, it shows what a large task awaits us all.
Friends can argue and disagree and still remain civil. I have some blog readers who sound like the female correspondent above. I think they need to unplug themselves from, and be far more skeptical of, the mainstream-media garbage they've been consuming so they can better heed what's being said in alt-media circles, where there's a lot more "truthiness." And maybe they should watch some of the many videos I slap up here. I get the impression they've got their fingers in their ears and are singing "La la la!" instead.
Well, they say that if you're getting flak, you must be over the target, so my quiet campaign shall continue. In my case, I'll admit I'm lucky that my own opponents are, for the most part, friendly acquaintances. (And frankly, I don't allow comments from the uncivil shits, like the one retarded fuck-knuckle who asked me how Trump's dick tastes. I should've published his comment and asked him how Biden's asshole smells since he's shoved his nose up there.)
And while I hesitate to confirm this, I'm pretty sure Trump's dick tastes like a combo of Stormy and Melania. Stormania.
WHAT CORN AND PEANUTS ARE HIDDEN IN THE WARM AND STEAMING PILE? Vapid cultural commentary, pungent reviews, sundry Korea-related musings, fartological/scatological humor, political flatulence, and nondualistic Zen excretions in prose or poetry form.
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