PS: Mr. Anon, I heard just last week someone just out of the blue tell some guy in fatigues "thanks for your service" or "thanks for all you do." It's sickening. I feel like asking people, "hey, what do these guys do for you? Any idea at all?"

PS: Alarmist, that's my take on Trump as President too. It was all very #Disappointing! On voting, where I am, we use on machine to turn touch-screen operations into print on a piece of paper. Then, those pieces of cardstock paper are fed into another machine which reads them and send them to a big. I'm under the impression that these ballots in that bin are kept.

Even so, there is the waste of buying all these expensive machines, at least the 1st set, since one can easily check boxes with pen, as you say. There is also the possibility that the 2nd set of machines has been hacked and doesn't end up with the numbers it should have from what's in the bin. What I do like is that there are pieces of paper that can be checked later.

I would give up the franchise to avoid paying income tax too, and I live here year round. Hell, almost anybody would. Voting is not going to solve our problems, but starving the Beast would. Then, there's the money, period!

PS

"The true HEROES are the surly cashiers at the drug store chain, telling you something about your discount card through a thick mask so's you don't know WTF they're babbling about. They are HEROES for coming in to work as essential ringer-uppers and stockers of candy corn and stationary supplies and not stealing money out of the registers."

Indeed, they are the real heroes. They keep us free.

I've come to the conclusion that our society doesn't have any real heroes. I wince every time I hear some paean to "our troops, who keep us free". If they were keeping us free then we would not be getting less free, as we are. I'll start respecting those military personnel, when they start recognizing that their sacrifices were in vain, that they were used, and that they want us to know that they're angry about it.

PS

I’m just waiting for the day Cabal decides in the face of vaxx failures and the increasing longer-term damage and death that they cause is so obvious that they cannot stem outright rebellion, at which point “ownership” of the “unsafe WARP-Speed vaxxes” will revert to Trump and they will be retired in lieu of the “safe” (cue Ha-Ha clip) pill therapeutics and new non-mRNA vaxxes developed during the O’Biden Administration.

Trump is a sales guy, certainly a PR autist-savant, but he was utterly clueless in the art of governmental politics (I might also suggest business politics, since he started off with things stacked in his favor) and the deft use of power. He certainly relied on too many people, most egregiously JarVanka, his daughter and her idiot-husband, but also allowed himself to be mesmerized by the shiny shoulder rank devices and pretty little ribbons and badges of people who got to the top of the military via politics versus merit. Nearly all of his advisors were charlatans, and his Cabinet picks wouldn’t know MBO if it bit them on the asses.

He was POTUS, for heaven’s sake, and only one low-level FBI conspirator was convicted on his entire watch. His General staff rebelled on him, and he wimpered; I would have sent them to Baghdad with orders to take daily HumVee drives outside the Green Zone. I would have also recalled the bozo retired Generals, etc. who were criticizing him daily on the M5M to active duty (yes, you can do that), and given them the same mission. Ideally all together in the same convoy at the same predictable time and on the same predictable route.

Trump has pretence to be a Roman, but has no idea how to go Roman on his many opponents. The Clinton body count, in the three digits, is a thing of legend: What is Trump’s body count? Even Obama makes Trump look like a piker in that regard.

If Trump was my only choice, I guess I’d have to vote for him, but it would be far easier to fill the oval for DeSantis. Not that that will matter if they don’t fix the way votes are counted in the USA.

Move elections to the first Sunday in November, with polls closing at 5p.m.. Paper Ballots completed in pen and ink, completed in person, counted openly jointly by hand by reps of all parties on the ballot. Voters provide ID and their fingers dipped in ink when presented a ballot. No mail-in ballots other than those abroad on active Federal service (yes, I just disenfranchised myself, but no more income tax and reporting on expatriates would be adequate compensation for that).

PS

CNN is creeping towards a Strange New Respect for DJ Blumpf:

_________________

Biden offers rare praise of Trump during Covid speech"
CNN, Dec 21, 2021, 10pm EST

[...] President Joe Biden...praised his predecessor, Donald Trump, for getting a booster shot -- marking a rare moment where the two men have found common ground since Inauguration Day. [...]

During Tuesday's speech, Biden also praised the Trump administration for its efforts to develop a Covid-19 vaccine before he took office. [...]

_________________

Biden then went out of his way to praise Trump for getting a corona-booster injection.

PS: No, see, Mr. Anon. Those medics are only taking appropriate precautions. You can't be too careful.

The true HEROES are the surly cashiers at the drug store chain, telling you something about your discount card through a thick mask so's you don't know WTF they're babbling about. They are HEROES for coming in to work as essential ringer-uppers and stockers of candy corn and stationary supplies and not stealing money out of the registers.

PS: Alarmist, thanks for the cheering words. Really.

Dieter, I give Governor Polis credit for having some integrity regarding State power and Constitutionalism more than anything. He sounds like he was still somewhat of a Panicker. If the Panicker could see fit to leave the rest of us alone, like the Governor, that'd be of great help. I'll read your link in a bit here.

Mr. Hail, I'd be in that 70%, as I guess you would too. About Trump, this blog started a month after he had been elected in '16. That's a month earlier, approximately, from my time of commenting on "The Unz Review". Therefore, you all will have to trust me when I say that I was telling people during that '15-'16 campaign that I Donald Trump was NOT a man of principle. (I probably wrote that in some PS blog posts, in fact, so I'll try to look them up.)

My reason for voting for Trump was mostly due to his stance on immigration. He had that stance because he did care about American and Americans, but it wasn't due to any principles. That's why I didn't trust that he wouldn't fold on some gun issues (he did quickly on the semi-auto bump-stock thing). His heart was in the right place, but he had never been any kind of man of principles.

It's #SAD to hear what you wrote of the latest bloviating from Donald Trump. Yes, I would have booed him at that rally too. You just reminded me, Mr. Hail, about something. I did go to a Trump rally in the summer of '16. At one point, Trump went on about his support for some unConstitutional thing - damned if I can remember what it was right now! I booed right there, as loud as I could. A few people looked back at me (I could only get in barely to the place so was in the back), and I did hear a few other boos.

Even if it weren't for the Corona-Panic, and his wrong stance on it, I would not be a big Trump supporter except as the usual much-better-than-that-worthless-Commie, as in '20. I would love to see Ron DeSantis join the '24 race.

PS: Mr. Ganderson, now that's real job creating. The CDC would probably spend tens of thousand to do the same survey.

The Hildabeast vs. DeSantis would be a knockout. The D-squad: "We're gonna need a bigger fraud crew!"

Mr. Blanc, I believe you are right about that. It's been them same with racial issues. Remember that Matt Iglesias guy that Steve Sailer occasionally writes about? He got beat up, ended up in the hospital, by a couple of black guys, "randomly". Matt doesn't blame anybody. Getting beat senseless worked, one could say.

PS

Are these guys still "Health Care Heroes"?

"Man Dies of Heart Attack After Paramedics Allegedly Refuse to Go Inside"

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/man-dies-of-heart-attack-after-paramedics-allegedly-refuse-to-go-inside/vi-AAS1Lpy

PS Ever so cold looking Anthony Fauci may well annihilate himself over time.
Mr. Hail - your Trumpfisms are fun - and telling too.
Could it be that he lost a bit of his punch?
Isn't he growing older too?
DeSantis is fresh. He is not so interesting as a stage persona as Trump is. Less of a speaker/ performer. But maybe people have learned their lesson in that regard?
I don't know about the masses though.

I do hope Corona will slowly disappear. Its getting visibly weaker and people are tired of it (this might be Jared Polis' main point - and this might turn out to be a strong point).

PS

This characteristically principled stand elicits some thoughts on Ron "PrincipleD" Paul vs. Dernald J. Tremp vs. Ron "Anti-Panic" DeSantis.

Lately I've been seeing debate ongoing between Trump backers and DeSantis backers over the 2024 R nomination. A lot of influential people have come out for DeSantis now, but Trump has the benefits of having actually been president already, having 100% name recognition, and the personality-cult thing.

Mike Cernovich, a rather influential demagogic social-media personality, ran a Twitter poll this week which got tens of thousands of voters--a simple question: "2024: DeSantis or Trump?" Results ran almost 70-30 for DeSantis.

The Trump > DeSantis backers asked "Why?" I think the answer can be found in part in Ron Paul's statements.

Ron Paul is principled. There is just no way he would ever say "Hmm, a flu-virus panic? Let me see how I can embrace it to push my own popularity or agenda..."

In short, people do kind of see Donoldo J. Blompf as this way (as having the demagogue's instinct to embrace and use a crisis). DeSantis seems principled, refusing lockdowns, mandates, disruptions, and top-down Panic-pushing.

It's less than totally surprising to me to see that DJ Trump has now pivoted to (1) shoving corona-needles at people and (2) bragging about how horrible and catastrophic the Corona-apocalypse was, or how apocalyptic it WOULD have been had he not been there to save the world. (That's a close rendering of what he said two days ago; I think he said hundreds of millions would have died if not for his leadership and his vaccines.) Then he started insulting vaccine-skeptics and his own supporters at his own event began booing him (!); he looked nervous, began to attack them, came close to calling them Covid-Denier cranks.

The point is, people sense Mr Blumpf has the demagogue's instinct---as also does the aforementioned Mr Cernovich, for six years running an off-again-on-again Trump supporter, who is very successful in his biz as social-media personality, but has no principles and is always shifting around.

After two years of the Corona-Panic phenomenon, I think the DeSantis > Trump feelings are in large about who people trust or don't trust to do the right thing. The right thing is disempowering the Panic-pushers and doing all possible to stop the permanent-pandemic wackos.

As there will ALWAYS be flu viruses out there, it'll take someone principled to beat back the monster that is Corona-Panic and whatever evil 'variants' of the Corona-Panic plague of henceforward.

PS A modest proposal to end the pandemic by Jay Bhattacharya from the Great Barrington Declaration - - with the possible help of Colorado Governor Jared Polis, who is the first Democrat in the higher ranks to cross the lines to the non-panic side and say: Let's protect the vulnarable and - go back to normal.
Omikron helps. New treatments help. Opening windows every once in a while helps (or install better air-cleaning systems, like the ones in planes, which seem to work quite well).

https://brownstone.org/articles/we-cannot-stop-the-spread-of-covid-but-we-can-end-the-pandemic/

https://brownstone.org/articles/we-cannot-stop-the-spread-of-covid-but-we-can-end-the-pandemic/

PS

Won’t somebody rid us of that meddlesome rat-faced Doctor?

PS Few of us are very good at admitting that we were wrong, and the Left, perhaps, more so than most. Especially when they have invested so much in it. I can’t imagine any circumstances where the Left would admit that they are wrong about the Plague. Even if every fully vaccinated person keeled over and died, the Left would still claim that the vaccines are “safe and effective”. Or course, in that case, as all the Leftists are fully vaccinated, they’d all be dead and couldn’t claim anything. But you get the point.

PS
Rumor on the street is that the Hilldog is maneuvering to replace Dementia Joe. If true, Paul (either of them) should be more concerned about Arkancide than cancellation. Can he (they) hire some Pinkertons to protect themselves?

I charged one of the more prominent bums downtown to count the number of outdoor, as well “driving alone” masks he sees to day. Be interesting to see the results.