Weekend Playlist -- Food, Glorious Food.

Crybaby of the Day

Today's biggest crybaby is 3rd-tier FOX blonde and all-around shitty person Kaitlin Bennett, aka "Gun Girl," aka "Beretta Barbie." (TM)

Bennett went to the campus of Ohio University for some reason, presumably to be "provocative" and "trigger some libs," and was not given the kind of welcome for which she had hoped.

(CNN)Conservative media personality Kaitlin Bennett didn't announce she was visiting Ohio University. But hundreds of students showed up to protest her appearance.
Bennett, a controversial activist who drew attention for taking graduation photos with an AR-10 rifle strapped to her back at Kent State University, said she was in Athens, Ohio, on Monday to film a video for Presidents Day.

Because why wouldn't she just drop in like Bob Hope doing a walk-on on the old Tonight Show?

But as soon as students got word she was there, crowds of protesters descended on Bennett as she walked around the campus.
In footage captured by Sarah Donaldson, digital editor for student paper The New Political, students lined all five floors of the university's student center as Bennett and her bodyguard traveled down the escalator.
Some shouted obscenities at her.

Which, you know, is not nice but "sticks and stones" as they say.

God DAMN, Peanuts was fucking dark! I think my psyche is permanently damaged becasue my parents let me read this shit as a child.

Bennett shared a video of students gathered around the orange truck she was in as it slowly drove through a parking lot, and some threw water at its windows while she filmed them. 

So, people were rude to this awful awful woman. Or, as she puts it - leftist terrorists started a riot.

Like this, except without the fire and the tear gas and without the violence.

This is how she put it on her Twitter:

This is what happens when a Trump supporter goes to a college campus. Leftists at @ohiou started a riot when @Joelpatrick1776 and I showed up, and the @oupolice let it happen. I think @realDonaldTrump should strip funding from universities like this that harbor terrorists. pic.twitter.com/5TMlfdto9O

— Kaitlin Bennett (@KaitMarieox) February 17, 2020

Awwww, were you scared, Kaitlin? Well now you know how normal people feel when they encounter one of you NRA assholes strutting around with a fucking assault rifle at Quizno's.

And the funniest part is when she's whining about how the cops aren't doing anything, the cops are just letting it happen! Because of course this civil libertarian, this defender of the Bill of Rights, wants the jackbooted government thugs to stop unarmed protesters from exercising their First Amendment right to jeer at her and give her the finger. Of course she does!

And then, because no conservative will ever be honest about anything, she has to embellish the story with claims of actual assaults.

They threw projectiles and poured hot coffee on us, and there's video of your officers witnessing @Joelpatrick1776's truck being vandalized. But yeah, just "some unknown person in the crowd splashed water." I can't wait until @realDonaldTrump takes away your school's funding. https://t.co/b0jiVYW5wy

— Kaitlin Bennett (@KaitMarieox) February 17, 2020

Somehow, though the girl who films herself more than John and Yoko has no video of "projectiles" being thrown at her or hot coffee being poured on her. She does have video of students flipping her off through water-spattered windows (which I guess in her world amounts to "vandalism" of  her friend's truck?)

Oh my God, it gets even better! She actually does tweet out a video clip of her being "pelted in the head with projectiles!" Oddly, the video shows a roll of toilet paper being thrown past her (which she doesn't even seem to notice) and then. . . nope, that's it!

As leftists were pelting me in the head with projectiles, this girl basically told me I deserved it because I'm "in the extreme minority here". I think @ohiou should know that their students think violence against minorities is okay! pic.twitter.com/2TFqkSdo0Z

— Kaitlin Bennett (@KaitMarieox) February 18, 2020

And she's trying to paint herself as a minority because she holds views that the majority of people find repugnant which then makes the imaginary person who pelted her in the imaginary head with an imaginary projectile guilty of some sort of hate crime, I guess?

Congratulations Kaitlinn Bennet, desperate seeker of fame, low-rent Dana Loesch and all-around awful person, you are the crybaby of the day!

If you are considering voting for Micheal Bloomberg

If you have given any thought at all to possibly supporting Micheal Bloomberg, please - PLEASE- take a moment to read some of the stories of Bloomberg's New York under the hashtag #MyBloombergStory 


If you don't want to go to Twitter, I can post a few examples here:

It was 2002.

My dad was stop & frisked for having a Muslim name.

He was detained w/o a phone call to his family for hours. We couldn’t report him missing.

That night I went from hospital to hospital to see if unidentified bodies were admitted.

I was 12! #MyBloombergStory

— Moumita🌹Bloomberg is a racist (@disruptionary) February 14, 2020

I was 14 and about to go down to the train when a cop pulled me aside. He asked what was I doing and where was I going. Then he patted me down which, as a female minor, was uncomfortable for many reasons #MyBloombergStory

— Kathryn🌹 (@The_KatBat) February 14, 2020

I was once stopped, frisked & falsely arrested of being in possession of a weapon for having a small box cutter on me after work. Due to not being able to see a judge the next day I was sent to Rikers where I saw an old man in his 80's die from heat exhaustion #MyBloombergStory

— breeze so lo (@BreezeCrypto) February 14, 2020

We got stopped holding hands after getting ice cream by 4 cops in an unmarked car covering their badge numbers, accusing me of being a prostitute that my partner purchased. They threatened to detain us because we didn’t have our IDs. We are a bi-racial couple. #mybloombergstory

— Cristina (@strangepastures) February 15, 2020

Many thanks to @BenjaminPDixon
#MyBloombergStory

In HS, I was stopped at train station because minority students with gym bags are a threat. I refused to let them search me and I was put against a wall, patted down, and all my stuff was inspected down to reading my school notes

— Golden Deer Class Clown 🌹 (@letdownmetsfan) February 14, 2020

There are hundreds of these stories. Bloomberg, who by the way is a REPUBLICAN, ran New York like a little fascist dictatorship. We can not allow this monster anywhere near the Presidency.


I'll let someone more articulate than myself, Trevor Noah have the last word.

#MyBloombergStory pic.twitter.com/Ht2ijKqaRA

— Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) February 15, 2020

The strange rise of Pete Buttigieg, Part 2

Full disclosure: I;m not a conspiracy theory guy. I used to be, but the older I get the more convinced I am that Lee Harvey Oswald just got off a lucky shot and that it's just a coincidence that there have been a few major earthquakes in countries we don't like while the space shuttle was in orbit. So I am not trying to say that Pete Buttigieg is a CIA plant or anything. But it would make a lot more sense if he was.

For instance: Pete speaks, depending on who's telling the story, six or seven or eight languages. So, Spanish I get. And Maltese, because that's his ethnic background. And French and Italian are super cool and probably help get you laid when you're young and single. But why does a caucasian midwesterner speak Arabic and Farsi? There are only 2 reasons why a white not-Muslim American would learn Arabic and Farsi - either because he's in the oil business, or he's a CIA  operative. And I don't believe that Mayor Pete was ever an oilman.

And then there's the matter of his "tourist" trip to Somaliland. Which is not a place that anyone has ever considered a vacation destination. Ever.

Tourists in Somaliland

By Peter Buttigieg and Nathaniel Myers and Peter Buttigieg and Nathaniel Myers

• July 31, 2008

Last week we went to Somalia as American tourists. We stayed only a night, but that was plenty of time to wander unescorted through the local market, explore town in a battered Toyota station wagon, and even head out into the desert to admire some ancient cave paintings.

"Every member of Parliament in Mogadishu gets a salary paid mostly by U.S. and EU funds," one Somaliland official told us.

Wait. What?
You're there as tourists. You're there for ONE DAY, and in-between viewing cave paintings and exploring the town, you somehow managed to squeeze in a meeting with at least one local government official?
I have been a tourist in several countries. And I have generally stayed in those countries for a week at minimum. And I have never once met a government official in any of them. Not once. And I'm a charming guy.I think any member of any country's parliament would enjoy meeting me. And yet, bupkes! You need to have some kind of serious connections to be in a country for one day and somehow take a meeting with a government official.Rick Fucking Steves couldn't pull that off!

This was as close as he's ever gotten.

And who is Pete's co-author, Nataniel Myers? I had no idea so I Googled his bio and found his Linked-In page where it states

• Nathaniel Myers
•  3rd degree connection3rd
• Nathaniel has a account

Senior Transition Advisor at USAID 

Oh for God's sake. USAID? That's practically a subsidiary of the CIA!

https://www.democracynow.org/2014/4/4/is_usaid_the_new_cia_agency

And "transition advisor?" That means he asssits in the transition from a country's elected government to whatever government we install in that country.

And there's this little bullet point in his resume':

USAID Office of Transition Initiatives

Total Duration3 yrs

• 
  

  TitleTransition Advisor

  Dates Employed2014

  Employment Durationless than a year

• 
  

  TitleDeputy Country Representative, Sri Lanka

  Dates Employed2013 – 2014

  Employment Duration1 yr

  LocationColombo, Sri Lanka

Now why would someone who is clearly not Sri Lankan

find himself in the position of being a deputy "country representative" for Sri Lanka?

Okay, so clearly Buttigieg in up to his eyeballs with the military intelligence milieu. But that still doesn't explain how a no-name mayor from a small town in Indiana who couldn't win an election for state treasurer became one of the front-runners for one of our two major political parties. What is it about Pete? Politically, there's not a lot of daylight between him and a bunch of other candidates who fell by the wayside before Iowa. The people who threw in with Buttigieg could (and should) have just as easily backed Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Beto O'Rourke, Kristen Gillibrand, or Joaquin Castro. But for some reason, from the moment he threw his hat into the ring, billionaires have been lining up to shovel money into his campaign.

According to Forbes:

Forty billionaires and their spouses have donated to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, according to an analysis of federal election filings, making the South Bend, Indiana mayor a favorite among America’s richest people.
Forbes found that Buttigieg got donations from 13 big-money donors who gave exclusively to him—by far the most of any Democrat running for president. Two of those donors have connections to Donald Trump. Jennifer Pritzker, a transgender retired Army lieutenant colonel who inherited a chunk of the Hyatt hotels fortune and previously backed the president, is now giving to Buttigieg. So is Daryl Roth, the wife of Trump business partner Steven Roth.

Yeah. . . nothing shady there.


One interesting billionaire that donated to Pete's campaign is LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman. What's interesting about Hoffman? well, buried down towards the end of this Politico piece on the Iowa app debacle, is this little tidbit:

McGowan launched ACRONYM after Trump’s election as a “digital-first political organization" with the goal of electing progressive Democrats, mostly in state legislative races. The group quickly attracted attention, especially in Silicon Valley, from newly galvanized major donors including LinkedIn’s Hoffman, who was wading into politics and looking for projects to disrupt the Democratic status quo. (Hoffman and other donors in his network “took a chance” on ACRONYM, McGowan told POLITICO in 2019.)

So the company that created the app that screwed up Iowa and allowed Pete Buttigieg to declare victory with zero votes counted was funded in part by a billionaire who donated to Pete's campaign and was looking for a way to "disrupt the Democratic status quo." Coincidence? Probably.Hoffman also donated to other centrists like Booker, Harris and Klobuchar (you know, to disrupt the status quo!) but it's way more fun to assume that it isn't!


Another prominent Buttigieg donor (and this one has donated exclusively to Buttigieg) is movie mogul David Geffen. This wouldn't be notable except fopr Geffen's link to the gay West-Coast version of Jeffery Epstein, Marc Collins-Rector.
 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ellievhall/found-the-elusive-man-at-the-heart-of-the-hollywood-sex-abus

What is it with wealthy, well-connected men and sexual abuse of minors?
Now I am not AT ALL accusing Mayor Peter Buttigieg of engaging in any kind of sexual abuse of anyone. I have absolutely no reason to think that he has ever committed any kind of sex crime. I'm just saying that Geffen is dirty and anyone with connections to the sex-trafficking underground has probably rubbed elbows with people involved in covert black-ops. And Geffen supports Mayor Pete.

Okay. In summary:
Am I sayimg that Pete Buttigieg is CIA? No. I'm not saying that. I'm also not saying he isn't. All I'm saying is these are the kind of people he has been associating with his entire adult life. And these people never saw a country they didn't want to invade or bomb. And they've never seen a progressive or left-leaning government they didn't want to overthrow. And if Pete Buttigieg ends up in the White House, these are the people who are going to be in charge of our foreign policy. And on the domestic front, there is no way in HELL that a man who worked for McKinsey, who served in Naval intelligence and who has links to FBI and CIA is ever going to allow anything progressive to happen here in the good old US of A.

Seriously, if you're not familiar with McxKInsey, read this piece in the Observer:
 https://observer.com/2013/08/the-godfather-of-ceo-megapay-mckinsey-consultant-arch-patton-didnt-invent-wealth-inequality/

The strange rise of Pete Buttigieg

So Pete Buttigieg seemingly has come out of nowhere. Actually South Bend, IN a suburb pf nowhere. Somehow this guy no one had heard of a year ago has managed to become one of the front-runners in the race for the Democratic nomination for the Prresidency. On the surface, it doesn't make sense.But dig a little deeper and nothing about Buttigieg makes sense. How did a guy with no resume', no ideas, and no charisma manage to transform hiumself into a political power player overnight? And when I say "no charisma," I'm being generous. Dude is creepy as fuck. I don't know how he was able to be the mayor of South Bend when he lives in Uncanny Valley.

It's like he's learned how to immitiate human emotions and facial expressions, but it still just isn't quite right.
I mean, my God - when he smiles, my blood runs cold!

I've only ever seen one other person whose smile was so chilling, so malevolent, so sociopathic.

But anyway, that's neither here nor there. His not-quite-human demeanor is the least weird thing about the Buttigieg story. (And I will continue to refer to him as Buttigieg, not as "Mayor Pete," because I've finally learned how to spell Buttigieg and I'm kinda proud of myself.)


So what's so odd about Buttigieg's CV? Well, let's start with his military service. I didn't think there was anything strange about a young man having served in the army until yesterday when I saw this:

Pete Buttigieg is misleading voters about his ‘military’ record. He pulled some strings and got in with no training, no boot camp, no anything and very briefly did office work in a cubicle on a base in Afghanistan for a few weeks and quickly left: https://t.co/tSBqJEgBzK

— MARK SIMONE (@MarkSimoneNY) February 9, 2020

How is that possible? Apparently, there is a way to join the military without going through boot camp, but the Wall St Journal won't let me read the article without subscribing, so I don't know what it is. But somehow, his entire military career lasted about 9 months, according to this article in The Hill and that time was spent

. . .in the Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell (ATFC) in Kabul, The ATFC “identifies and disrupts Taliban, Al-Qaida and other insurgent financial support networks in Afghanistan.”

Because that seems like a typiocal posting for someone who joined the Naval Reservs 10 minutes earlier. And who majored in History and Literature at Harvard. And then worked for a business consulting firm specializing in downsizing and price-fixing. Seems like the exact sort of person to be tasked with disrupting the flow of money to the Taliban and Al Queda. And I would have thought he was maybe a small cog in the ATFC machinery, a pencil-pusher, a number-cruncher. But no, according to the Hill:

Buttigieg represented ATFC at “high level briefings,” the documents say, and “coordinated intelligence sharing and targeting deconfliction” methods with multiple organizations.

">And he did this, mind you, WHILE serving as the mayor of South Bend. How does that work? Who gets elected mayor and says "Well, I've got a lot of spare time on my hands, think I'll join the Navy?"

Buttigieg’s reserve training took place at Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, where he studied to become an intelligence officer. There, Buttigieg’s background as a McKinsey consultant and his Rhodes scholar pedigree earned him a direct commission into the Navy.

Harvard, Oxford, Rhodes scholar, McKinsey Consulting - that is checking all the boxes for guy who gets recruited by the CIA. (Or MI-6)

Buttigieg’s reserve training took place at Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, where he studied to become an intelligence officer. There, Buttigieg’s background as a McKinsey consultant and his Rhodes scholar pedigree earned him a direct commission into the Navy.

Of course he did! Of course he fit right in with those FBI agents. I'd be surprised if he hadn't.

So that's pretty suspicious.

Then there's his odd little "Vacation" to Somaliland.

Which we will have to discuss in part 2. But I will leave you with this article from USA Today:

Exclusive: With 218 foreign policy endorsements, Buttigieg targets a big Biden asset

More than 200 foreign policy and national security professionals, including dozens of veterans of the Obama administration, on Monday are endorsing Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg for president.
Among those from the Obama administration who signed the statement are former Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning, former deputy CIA director David Cohen, former Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon, former Under Secretary of Commerce Francisco Sanchez, former State Department adviser Vali Nasr, former White House associate counsel Tess Bridgeman and former National Security Council spokesman Ned Price.
The list of 218 names also includes Anthony Lake, national security adviser for President Clinton; Peter Galbraith, former deputy U.N. envoy to Afghanistan; Virginia Rep. Don Beyer; a dozen former U.S. ambassadors; and former officials from the State Department, Pentagon, CIA, NSC and elsewhere.

Whaty is it that would make this collection of spooks, coup-plotters and regime-changers throw their weight behind a small-town mayor from Indiana?

What indeed?

They'll find a way to blow it.

Many years ago, when I was a kid, I was at a Giants baseball game with my dad and siblings when my dad ran into someone he knew from work. This was back when the Giants were terrible.  They chatted briefly and my dad mentioned the fact that the Giants were leading the game and his friend said "don't worry, they'll find a way to blow it." Well, the late 70's Giants got nothing on today's Democratic Party.

How do you screw up a caucus this badly?
The good thing about caucuses is the transparency. Everyone can see for themselves if their candidate has more votes than the other guy or whether Smith has more supporters than Jones or whatever. Everyone writes their choices on a card and signs it. No touch screens, no black-box voting, no reason to suspect fraud. So, is there a way for the Democrats to eff this up? They've got an app for that!

Shadow, Inc. is the name of the company that built this app. They are either a subsidiary of a company called ACRONYM, or ACRONYM merely invested in Shadow no one seems to be able to tell for sure.

(from the Intercept)

Kyle Tharp, a spokesperson for Acronym, released a statement on Monday night downplaying his company’s affiliation with Shadow.

“ACRONYM is an investor in several for-profit companies across the progressive media and technology sectors,” Tharp said. “One of those independent, for-profit companies is Shadow, Inc, which also has other private investors.”

But previous statements and internal Acronym documents suggest that the two companies, which share office space in Denver, Colorado, are deeply intertwined.

Former Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook may or may not have been involved in building this app, he denies it but everyone seems to think he was. Who knows?

Is something shady going on? I don't think so. Occam's razor and the recent history of the Democratic Party both indicate incompetence, not malfeasance. But for Gpd's sake why would you allow the company that is going to tabulate the votes to take money from two of the candidates? It just makes you look bad. It looks like a conflict of interest.


(via Daily Beast)

Those hiccups had already caught the attention of conspiracy theorists who noted that Shadow received tens of thousands of dollars last year from the presidential campaigns of Democrats Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg. Those payments were simply for use of the company’s text messaging technology.

Seriously? There weren't any other tech companies out there whose text-messaging software you could use? You know, so it doesn't look like you're bribing the refs? So you wouldn't open the door to this kind of speculation?

This right?

The poll that has been released right before the election in Iowa for 76 years straight was scrapped because Pete’s team complained.

And Pete’s team funded the company that built the failed election app in Iowa.

And Pete declared victory before results released?

— Shaun King (@shaunking) February 4, 2020

Now it's Wednesday night and we still don't have the complete results. Which has allowed Pete Buttigieg to declare victory, Joe Biden to announce that he is "going to walk out of here with our share of delegates.," and Amy Klobuchar to state that she was "puinching above her weight," and Elizabeth Warren to say the race is "too close to call." Now, eventually we are going to get the complete vote tally and delegate count, and by all accounts, it's going to be Sanders and Buttiegieg wwith the lion's share of the delegates. But if Sanders, or any other candidate, finishes ahead of Mayor Pete, after Pete already declared victory, his supporters are going to think they were robbed. And they will have good reason to think so. When Warren's supporters find out that the race was not actually too close to call, it just took forever to get all the votes recorded and that Warren underperformed expectations, they're going to think she got screwed. That the app stole votes form her or whatever. Sanders supporters are already assuming that the delay was intentional and done for the purpose of hurting Bernie.

No matter what the outcome ends up being, this debacle is going to undermine the electorate's faith in the democratic process. It's bas enough that Republican idiots are already taking it as an article of faith that voter fraud is rampant and millions of "illegal votes" were cast for HRC in 2016 (whatever that means) we sure as hell don't need Democrats also thinking that elections are rigged.


None of this needed to happen. The Iowa caucuses have been going on since 1976. And it's been working relatively well. The process is too convoluted and it discriminates against potential voters who don't work bankers' hours, but there was never any problem with precinct captains phoning in the vote tallies. But some geniuses looked at the process and thought "no, we need to be able to use a smartphone app for this."

This is how corporate America thinks. I am a tiny cog in a small wheel in a Fortune 500 company. Over the last couple years, the company has been on a mission to take applications off of the desktop computers and move them to smartphones. Do the new apps have all the same features? Nope! Are their features that are gone now that made the job easier? Oh yes. But smartphone apps are the shiny new toys of corporate America, so they're inherently better, right?
I actually got to talk to one of the tech guys and tried to explain to him how the old application worked better than the new one and he just kept repeating "it's old technology. It's gotta go." These people have no concept of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."


So the Democrats, the only party imaginable that would be capable of losing to the dimwit son of an unpopular one-term president and a senile, racist game-show host with a string of bankruptcies behind him, of course take the same approach.
The old system works just fine?
 So what? It's old technology. We have a shiny new app that will make it batter!

 Have you tested the app?
No need! It's a shiny new smartphone app, it will, by definition, be better!

There's really no problem with the current system, no one is asking for an app..
We got a fancy new app!

But. . .
an app!

It really should be almost impossible to lose a second time to Donald Trump, now that the country has seen him in action for 3+ years. But don't worry. Democrats will find a way to blow it.

Weekend Playlist -- Going Home

Hopefully, at least a few of you have noticed (and mourned) my recent absence from the interwebs.

Verrrry funny, Zahid from the best show on Netflix Atypical! Very funny!

This has been due to a couple factors, one is that a couple co-workers quit so I've been working a lot of overtime in their absence, and two, I've been a bit under the weather. So, inspired by the way I've been feeling at work all week, today's playlist features songs about going home or wanting to go home.