Does she hear herself?

Margaret Brennan of CBS was being unbelievably duplicitous on Face The Nation. On the one hand she says she deserves some leniency about her comments immediately after Trump was shot.

She said at the time Trump didn’t say anything to cool the temperature of Trumps supporters in the wake of them witnessing an assassination attempt.

Uh you clueless bitch! Trump was the one who was shot, That he was telling the crowd he was fine, with fist pumps and “Fight, Fight, Fight” was pretty damn impressive.

My point is that he was literally in the middle of a high stress situation and thought enough to signal to the crowd that he was alive and minimally hurt. (Which by the way, did a lot to calm the crowd.)

Apparently while she was making dumb comments, she expected Trump to pontificate on the relative merits of remaining calm and not seeking revenge in some master soliloquy that would pass her editorial requirements.

Hey Brennan, fuck you!

My god I have developed a new level of hatred for these talking heads.

It is beyond unbelievable to me that less than 24 hours after the assasination attempt the talking heads are trying to blame Republicans, Trump, and MAGA for this violence against Trump.

What the actual fuck?

These people disgust me!

The morning after… Now the media is concerned about the rhetoric!

Trump responds to shooting 640x480.Uh Huh, I’ll bet they are.

CNN Special Correspondent Jamie Gangel said she thought it was “odd because of all of the heated rhetoric” that Trump would say fight, fight, fight, after being shot. 

Honey, I can tell you this, in the heat of the moment, had it been me, my comments would have been a lot saltier.

Something on the order of “Hunt the enemies of our Republic down and kill them all! Exterminate them like the filthy cockroaches they are. No trials, No mercy!

That would have given the Sunday Morning chat hosts something to whine about.

As it is CNN tried to portray an assassination attempt as Trump fell down and was escorted off stage by security.

Politico tried to spin an assassination attempt as simply “Shots Fired”.

Shots fired! What the fuck? I’m sure thats a comfort to the 2 or 3 individuals in addition to Trump who were shot.

Several other news organizations in a disgusting display of bias and stupidity, downplayed the assassination attempt using various euphemisms.

GettyImages 1231325629 scaled 391425283.CNN Your source for stupid bitches!

Gangel, the people with brains took “Fight, fight, fight,” to mean “Continue fighting against a corrupt system, don’t let this intimidate you.” 

Others in the Media are suddenly very concerned about the hostile rhetoric of the campaign, completely ignoring the rhetoric they themselves, have hurled from their anchor seats for 9 or 10 years about Donald Trump.

E324d4b6 0527 436a a9a7 aae21093f5ff DESK.00_00_17_13.Still009.There’s a report that Biden’s X/Twitter account called Trump a wannabe Dictator minutes before the assassination attempt.

Then in stunning duplicity Biden says, “I’m glad Donald Trump is okay and political violence is wrong.”

We all know Biden isn’t running his Twitter account, but damn! It’s not at all a good look for the Biden Administration or Campaign.

GettyImages 1402029752 1 640x480 1.In fact it looks kinda like they’re reversing course because the assassination failed, what would they have been saying if Trump was assassinated? 

Today, our nation dodged a bullet but the man who wanted to be a dictator didn’t

It’s interesting to note that no cities are burning, no storefronts have been looted, no riots have broken out over the attempted assassination of Trump.

Can we with certainty say the same would be true if the assassination attempt had been directed at Biden?

That you or I are uncertain about the answer, suggests an uncomfortable truth.

We “know” ANTIFA, BLM, Queer-Transexuals for Sharia and whatever other organizations, are in fact enforcement arms of the Democrat party. We simply dare not say it out loud because to do so causes an unpleasant reaction.

Anyone saying that, is immediately called bad names, de-platformed, de-monetized, de-banked (if possible), Doxxed, taken to court, and called a conspiracy theorist nut job.

Whoopi Goldberg 640x480 1.While I don’t particularly care for Alex Jones, he’s kinda the poster boy for what happens when you say something powerful people don’t like.

Right, Wrong, or otherwise, Jones has as much right to speak his mind as anyone else.

To me he’s akin to the dude in the public square preaching “the end is near” He believes Sandy Hook was a false flag event, to fuel more gun control.Alex Jones

How is that belief any different from the dude who believes Aliens abduct him twice a month and put things up his butt?

Or that 9/11 was an operation perpetrated by the United States to create a war for profit, and that the buildings were blown up with thermite.

If you look at the photos of the Pentagon on 9/11 where is the plane? More appropriately where is the debris from the plane? Surely the entire plane didn’t dematerialize on impact. When other planes crash there’s always a trail of bits and pieces left all over the place. 

Angry joe biden sotu mar1 22 fist getty 640x335 1.The difference is that Jones, reached tons of people, Jones hurt people’s feelings, Jones may have on more than one occasion correctly called out other shit the government did, that the government didn’t want to be well known.

Alex Jones is no different in my opinion than Howard Stern used to be. They’re both Shock Jocks who made money being controversial.

Leticia James.One, is a leftist, the other is rightwing. 

It’s easy to see which political position is favored.

Democrats agree.There is a long and unpunished list of left leaning actors, media whores, politicians, and talk show hosts who have literally called for or implied that Donald Trump be assassinated.

Some of these people called for Trump to be assassinated while he was a sitting President.

Kathy griffin trump_TylerShields.There was a time when any threat against any sitting president would get you arrested, handcuffed to a chair naked, sprayed with ice water occasionally, all while  answering questions from the FBI and Secret Service, then you’d get to spend time in front of a judge.

That time is past, or was.

Now those same actors, politicians, media whores, and talk show hosts are expressing their outrage about rhetoric and they’re trying to make it sound like Trump, MAGA, and their fevered dreams of some boogy man white supremacist army, are the ones responsible for all the hateful rhetoric.

They’re not. This morning, it’s obvious! 

Because if any of what the left claims Trump and MAGA are all about were true. Blue cities across the nation would be in flames, and ANTIFA / BLM / MS13 and illegal immigrant bodies would be piling up like cord wood.

Kamala Harris 1 640x480 1.CNN, FOX, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, and CBS would all be broadcasting images of empty sets and anchor chairs with shots echoing in the background.

Washington D.C. would suddenly have an example of what a true insurrection looks like, and Biden would be eating ice cream in the White House bunker.

These Politicians and Talking Heads better be thanking whatever deity they pray to that the conservative folks on the Right, pissed off as we might be, are not like them.

We don’t believe the ends justify the means. We still have some semblance of moral code and our moral compasses point mostly North. We believe in the rule of law.

Even when the law has been perverted and twisted in the pursuit of destroying one man, we believe that a higher court will see justice done.

We also believe that those who twisted and perverted the law will be punished by higher courts.

We believe in the voting process. We may believe that there were serious voting irregularities in the last elections but we believe that changes to voting law are the proper mechanism to fix irregularities, not rioting and burning cities down.

I should also point out that independent state audits of election results in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania have recently concluded there were miscounts and large numbers of illegitimate ballots. The significance of these conclusions is yet to be determined.

So lets just recap:

Trump may have had a point when he disputed the election results. Many of his allegations were not actually heard by a court. They were dismissed out of hand. Look it up. The Media has painted a picture that Trumps concerns were heard. If that’s true, then why have investigations turned up significant irregularities? Shouldn’t the courts have already ruled on the matter?

MayorkasTrump has been censored by big tech. For that matter, so have Average Americans.

When average Americans went off and built their own conservative platforms, those platforms were destroyed by big tech because god forbid, a conservative viewpoint that made sense and resonated with a lot of people might gain traction.

It took Trump building Truth Social and Elon Musk buying Twitter to loosen the tech strangle hold, and that loosening was just enough to allow the American people the ability to breathe.

Maxine waters 2 640x480 3 11 20 getty 640x480 1.Trump has been Impeached twice

Trump has been dragged through the court system.
In one trial the bankers he was supposed to have harmed with fraud said they’d do business with him again because it was profitable to them.

Another trial he’s convicted on 34 charges for paying off a porn star that he didn’t have sex with,  who still owes Trump money for her breach of contract, and on which the statute of limitations had run out?

Another trial, he’s found “Guilty” of saying “I never met that woman in my life.” After said woman accused him of raping her in a department store. This woman has a history of accusing famous men and not so famous men of raping her. All the others she’s accused have been found not guilty.

Trump has been gagged by legal order and even after various trials he’s still been deprived of his 1st amendment right to free speech.

Trump is accused of being Hitler

Trump is accused of wanting to become a dictator

Trump is accused of wanting to over throw the United States

Biden continues to repeat the “Very Fine People” hoax created by the media which even the media has been forced to debunk and retract.

Screen Shot 2022 07 11 at 3.45.53 PM.The Biden campaign, the day before Trump was shot, tweeted something about Trump being equal to Hitler.

The Economy started going into the shitter the day Biden took office and started his war on domestic energy production.

Immigration started going into the shitter the day Biden took office and started undoing all of the Trump Era controls.

Biden screwed employment, employers and employees with his vaccine mandates.

Biden screwed the careers of a ton of military personnel, and our country’s operational readiness with vaccine mandates. Check out the sudden drop in pilot flight readiness.

Biden and his administration continue to paint conservatives, MAGA, and anyone who disagrees with their policies as “enemies of the state”. Where have we heard that before? In other words 1/2 of the country that Biden is supposedly leading should, according to the Biden administration, be in re-education camps.

Uf6WY6eup qwseuyWA5jLVjgBh6E j6fV0lqA2YObJA 2093847797.Biden loves to threaten that he’s going to use military forces on 1/2 of the United States population should they rise up against his ridiculous administration. He loves to point out AR-15s are ineffective against F-16s. I realize this is a statement of fact, probably the only true thing Biden has said in decades, but honestly, I can’t help but take it as a threat. Oh, and he’d have to violate The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 that prevents use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies. I suspect that is why Biden refers to MAGA, and White Supremacists as a “Clear and Present Danger”. That’s probably the only way his administration could get around The Posse Comitatus Act.

Horsepatrol svxqp7.Biden destroyed morale in the border patrol and reduced their effectiveness, then increased the number of migrant deaths at the border when he falsely accused Texas border agents of “Strapping” migrants from horseback. Biden was wrong, he’s never apologized, and Texas border patrol can’t use horses anymore. But wait, there’s more. The immigrants in question were Haitian and the Biden administration was returning Haitians to Haiti so the Haitians thought for a moment the Biden administration would be lenient and merciful but “NO” Haitians get deported.

Biden cost 13 soldiers their lives in his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Then couldn’t stop looking at his watch when they were brought home in flag draped coffins.

Outbreak coronavirus world Square.Let’s not forget that during COVID, actors, politicians, media whores, and talk show hosts were calling for anyone who was vaccine hesitant to be placed in re-education camps, “For the greater good”. Biden was calling those people “Dangers and Piriahs” on TV weekly.

That was a laugh, while saying that mothers should be able to have an abortion due to bodily autonomy, these same people were saying that vaccines should be forced upon people or that those who refused should be exiled from society. “To hell with their bodily autonomy. It’s about the greater good.

At this point this bears repeating. COVID-19 at its worst was 97% survivable with zero intervention. The younger you were, the higher that percentage of survivability.

Twenty years on pandemic gives 9 11 conspiracists fresh impetus_1630908610.By the way, the actors, politicians, media whores, talk show hosts, and doctors who were so happy to walk all over our freedom and right to bodily autonomy. Who were so happy to demand actions in violation of the Nuremberg code, now would like for everyone to forgive and forget their complicity in what honestly might have been a crime against humanity.

These actors, politicians, media whores, talk show hosts, liberals, leftists, and in general Communistic Democrats are going to be clamoring for an end to the rhetoric because they want to avoid accountability for their words, portraying rioting as mostly peaceful, praising leftist causes, spewing hate, and funding organizations dedicated to the destruction of our society.

13 fallen U.S. service members return home from Afghanistan Screenshot courtesy of ABC News on YouTube.All of this, every bit of the events of the past 8 or so years, would been enough, in a lesser country, to have triggered a violent coup d’état.

Indeed, We are not like them.

The question they should be asking is this; “How long before the conservatives become just like us? How many more insults, how much more blame, how long until they finally collectively say ENOUGH!

On that day, when conservatives have had enough, the world will see something completely “New”.

After yesterday, Robert F Kennedy Jr. better get the Secret Service Protection the Biden administration has been consistently denying him.

But because the Biden Administration has refused to provide protection to another presidential candidate, they’re going to look like shit no matter what.

Someone should tell them, they always look like shit so just give Kennedy the protection he’s asked for.

Oh yeah, that congressional idiot who put forth a bill to strip Donald Trump of his Secret Service protection better withdraw that bill.

Actually, I’d like to see him investigated for any complicity in the assassination attempt. There’s probably nothing there, but I would really like to see one of those congressional fuckers squirm.

Okay I should say this too.

It’s not about Trump. I’m pissed off that my country… Our country, has gotten to this point. Trump just happens to be the lightening rod that is helping to expose how truly filthy and despicable our government has become.

Everything that has happened in the past 8-10 years, is so repugnant to me, so anti-American, were I a time traveler I would ask when Nikita Khrushchev won the war and why aren’t we all speaking Russian?

I think I’ve been going about this all wrong… Story of my life!

What, you might ask?

Well, my answer would be pretty much everything!

It seems that I’ve been giving away my knowledge when I should have been charging for every single bit of useful information that I know.

I’ve confirmed this only recently, but have suspected it for a while now. I chose however to live in denial, comforting myself by believing that what I knew, or had to say was of little to no value.

How did I come to this epiphany? 

That’s a slightly interesting tale. I was looking at starting a podcast. In the course of that investigation I was led to the more important question of how do I monetize a podcast. After all, I’d like to earn some cash…

The easiest ways are to charge a subscription fee, or come up with some advertisers. Okay, that makes sense, but as always the devil is in the details. To monetize, you’ve apparently got to use some payment processor like Stripe, Venmo, or Square. Each of these folks take a % and often they add a flat fee too.

Some transaction processors will charge 2.9%+0.30 per credit card transaction. Wow! I should start a processing center!

If my math is correct that works out to about 0.33 per dollar. Meaning that if you charged a dollar for a subscription you’re only getting  0.67. By the way, that doesn’t account for normal taxation Federal and State which works out to about 30%. So in the end you, the person actually doing the work, end up with about 0.47 of every dollar you make.

But wait! There’s more! A podcast requires specialized hosting services, Figure around $20 a month, So before you’ve gotten your first subscription you’re already in the hole $240 just for a year of podcasting hosting services. It’s better to purchase a year than to pay month to month because that’s about 3% higher.

Some of the podcasting directories which typically are not hosting services may add even more fees. Apple for example might charge 30% if someone subscribes to your podcast via their podcast application. So that immense wealth of 0.47 you’ve made may get whittled down again to 0.17 of every dollar.

That depends on how Apple takes their 30%. I’m assuming they’re going to take it right off the top at 30% per dollar, because… They’re Apple! Then the payment processors may also take their fee on the original transaction amount and so on. I could see a scenario where the person doing to podcasting ends up losing money on subscriptions.

Amazing!

So all these podcasters absolutely have to come up with additional sources of income besides subscriptions and at the same time have to produce content that is entertaining enough that the listener count is pretty high for the podcast to be worth an advertisers time.

Don’t get me wrong, pennies add up, but as the pennies add up, so too do the taxes and fees.

I’m going to keep looking for a combination of systems that net the largest potential amount of $$ in my pocket. Now I know why some of the popular podcasts have commercials for something every 6 minutes.

This made me think, “How long have I been writing my blog?” All that time with no subscriptions, 13 -14 years? I should have been selling advertising space, and figuring a way to create more engagement. I thought it was a labor of love and that people would enjoy it on its own merit. Some have and to those loyal followers you have my profound thanks. 

I realize that Blogging, Podcasting, & Social Media engagement are all potential income streams. Now I begin to understand the difference between me & folks that have been doing these things for a while. They know or believe in their value. For them, engaging in these things are actually a business and they charge for their time one way or another.

I’ve never had that kind of faith in myself, or that what I brought to the table was worth a damn. To some degree, I think that is a function of a career in corporate America. After 20 or 30 years of shitty bosses, policies, and being ground under someone’s heel it’s tough to believe you have any value, especially when you’re thrown away on a whim in layoffs, or when you or your department are pawns between to executives settling old scores.

Corporate America’s mistreatment is not the only reason I never had faith in myself, but they sure helped cement my lack of faith in myself.

This year because of that lack of faith in myself,  I almost terminated my blog and my web hosting entirely. Part of my reasoning  was because instead of charging a reasonable fee for 3 years as they had done in years past the hosting service wanted almost $1000.00.

I’m not going to do that. I renewed for one year and am in the process of comparison shopping for a new web hosting service. The current company I’ve been using for years, maybe 13, has relocated their help services to the Philippines. They’ve made changes to the web control panels and their billing panels which have made the service far more difficult to use, and to top it all off, They’ve decided that I don’t need to see invoices or have the ability to look at past invoices.

So, the cost of my narcissism in terms of cash and annoyance to maintain has exceeded my ego’s ability to justify. That being said, I’ve got an organization that I’ve been providing hosting for, and moving my stuff and theirs would have been a Royal pain in the ass. So I’ll wait until they find a new host and someone to do their web site. I’ve got a year to plan and handle the move.

All of this kind of underscores the fundamental truth.

I have not been valuing myself. I’ve been giving away too much of myself in various forms, for free, for years.

Jerry had it all over me in that regard. He knew what to charge. He was often not charging the full price he could get, but at least he was charging more or less fairly for his services. To be fair, he’d charge more for weddings and he almost never discounted them.

He knew he was going to have to deal with a monster bride or worse, the bride’s mother! He really could take or leave a wedding. He once said that playing funerals was more satisfying because he wasn’t going to hear the deceased bitching & complaining, trying the wheedle a discount after services had been rendered, when it came time to write the check.

I saw him on multiple occasions tell a bride he was refunding the deposit because the whole wedding had become such a pain in his ass the price he was charging was insufficient. He hated outdoor weddings, especially those in the Palm Springs area. Oh, they paid pretty well, but often the bride would expect the musicians to be sitting with their instruments in the blazing sun and gusting wind blowing sheet music all over the place.

Hint to any soon to be brides… Put the musicians under an awning. Acoustic instruments don’t like sitting in scorching sun for hours. They tend to fall out of tune when heated. The musicians are also none too pleased to be sitting in formal attire usually black out in the desert sun. Jerry would say I know that it’s the Bride’s special day, but she doesn’t have to make it literally hell on earth for everyone else.

Jerry was on the verge of putting a clause in wedding contracts that charged for broken harp strings incurred at an outdoor wedding. One of the last Palm Springs weddings he played, due to the heat, humidity, and lack of awning or any shade he broke 9 strings on the big harp.

In addition to him having to remap the music in his head avoiding the notes that he couldn’t play with broken strings, while he was playing, the cost of replacement strings almost wiped out the fee he charged for the wedding.

I wish I’d had more confidence in myself. I could have learned a lot more about putting myself “out there” from Jerry. I tried to handle all the technical stuff and let him be a Musician. Now that he’s gone, I’ve got a lot of technology laying around and I’m wondering if I should sell it, or do I have enough of value to say, that putting the tech to work could turn into a profitable enterprise?

I put together a prototype podcast episode just to see if I could. I liked the result, and the one person I’ve shared it with liked the effort as a first step.

That same person has floated the question of having fun in a podcast in the flavor of the old Mystery Science Theater TV show. That show hearkened back to earlier SciFi shows on Friday Nights or Saturday Afternoons. One of the most famous was “Elvira Mistress of the Dark”

Depending on subject matter, that could be fun to do and perhaps entertaining to listen to.

I’ve got a leg up because I already own the audio tech, so if I push forward into podcasting, the investment would be pretty close to zero. Although the technology for producing voice tracks has become dirt simple and cheap. A lot of the audio gear I have laying around may be overkill now.

There are USB mics that have a shit ton of intelligence built in. If you add some decent audio processing software, it’s as simple as just having a computer, one of these mics and you’re going to produce high quality results by default.

Some of the podcasting hosts have the recording software on the server side of the equation. That means that your computer doesn’t have to be terribly powerful, all it has to be able to do is get the audio stream to the hosting server. Then all the processing is done there. Thinking about that, I suppose you could do a podcast from a dang phone with zero investment in equipment at all.

Jerry and I had been looking into “Smart” Mics. During COVID Jerry was doing a ton of Zoom sessions. He was using a borrowed USB mic to capture the harp music. Eventually, he started using the USB mic all the time because it did a fine job and could be powered by his iPad and / or his computer.

There’s one of those kinds of mics that I’ve considered. I was thinking more toward working from home and knowing that I’d have to deal with conference calls. This particular mic also works on video game consoles. Those were my original use cases. But if I were to find a suitable podcast host, subject matter, and start podcasting too. It might be a win all around.