Yesterday on X someone said that we can never eliminate all electoral fraud. After all election fraud is an old and respected American tradition, with us from the beginning. What we need to do is eliminate the ability to make a lot of money through elected office and then–
Good news, people: As soon as we invent a perpetual motion machine, we’ll study war no more.
What? Stop staring at me. We’re as likely to invent a perpetual motion machine as to eliminate the ability to make a lot of money through elected office. Look, yeah, we can absolutely limit the opportunities for graft and corruption — and a lot more is being done towards that end than you might think. Though it’s a tricky process, and sometimes attempting to eliminate corruption, by the very fact of being a bunch of abstract rules, creates other loopholes. Humans, eh? — but we can not and will never eliminate them.
It’s the same thing with electoral fraud, of course. Completely cleaning out electoral fraud would, in point of fact, be impossible. There will always be someone who gets someone else’s grandmother to pose as their dead grandmother and vote for what they want. There will always be fake ballots, (maybe) and other ways to falsify the will of the people.
The problem is two fold, though. The first is the sheer scale of the enormities being perpetrated. Again, from the top: in a largely red area, in 2012, 1/3 of the people coming to vote — normal people, about my age, which at the time was under 50 — were told they’d already voted. And there was no way to address this. The votes were already in the system. They couldn’t find them and pull them out. Yes, they told people they could cast a “provisional” vote but that’s known as “a way to stop them yelling.” Those votes are never counted unless the margin — with the fraudulent vote already in — of victory of the final quoted votes is less than the provisional. And sometimes not even then. They’re provisional because they are pretending not to believe you, and claiming you already voted. Maybe you forgot? Maybe 1/3 the population of downtown Colorado Springs had amnesia. Alien rays? Time travel? Who knows?
Anyway, I heard from poll watchers in Denver that at least in some precincts 2/3 of the people showing up were marked as already voting. Funny thing too, it was only those registered Republican.
With all that in 2012 the Democrats “flipped” Colorado. But the fraud must have barely been enough to squeak them by because they immediately (and despite a popular vote against) voted to make the voting system “vote by mail.” And that, ladies and gentlemen is how they stole my home state. Oh, there are other dodges in there now, including the ever popular “show a bill with the address” and you can register to vote the same day. Of course, in the age of computers, we could create a bill with our address in ten minutes. And ten minutes only because the printer might be having a memgrim.
The fraud is so massive, so overpowering, that one wonders how many of the votes counted are even vaguely real. 1/2? More or less?
Let me count the ways to fraud — not an exhaustive list — Vote by mail (who knows who is filling the ballot, really?), same day registration, early voting, no ID, registering people to vote that aren’t citizens (no, truly, you don’t have to show proof of citizenship to vote), registering people to vote automatically when they get a driver’s license. Even if the people don’t vote, think of all those lovely names, addresses, etc. that no one is using. Amazing isn’t it?
So that’s the first problem with the happy slappy “There’s always been fraud. This is fine.”
The second problem is… let’s call it “a disparity of frauding.”
Yes, there has been fraud from the very beginning. There were “party machines.” The Democrat party machine and the Republican party machine. Going around canvasing habitual drunkards to vote for you by hook or crook was quite a thing on election day.
It was usually very local. There were cities, precincts, etc. “owned” by a machine or the other.
Then came the 20th century, the centralization of power and — more importantly — for various reasons too tedious to go into, the Democrats owning the Mass Media in all but the monetary sense.
By education, by inclination, by belief, the mass industrial information/entertainment complex were hard core leftists. Many were in fact communists, by the 20s. What this meant was not quite a conspiracy, but definitely a prospiracy.
They believed all evil of Republicans, all good of Democrats (which according to Heinlein were already taken over and skinsuited by communists by the forties, and I see no reason to doubt him.) and reported accordingly.
By the time I came to the States, a Democrat could eat babies on live television, and the news would report that it had done that reluctantly, to appease the alien overlords, so that things wouldn’t get worse.
If a Republican walked on water the news would report he/she couldn’t swim.
The result of this lopsided reporting is that the Republicans stopped having a “machine” or in fact being able to do anything even vaguely underhanded.
How do I know that? Because whenever the democrats are caught doing something horrible in the realm of fraud and try to pull the “both sides” the worst they can find for the GOP is stuff like “Someone cheated in this little election for dog catcher, in Podunk.”
And this btw is why the GOP have acquired the habit of being “beautiful losers.” It’s actually classic abuse. After a while, you believe you have no agency and you’re going to lose anyway, so you might as well get used to it.
Be kind to your GOP beautiful losers. They just haven’t realized the game has changed.
As haven’t all the black pillers out there.
Yes, we do need to do something about the fraud. And I know Trump is doing a lot, including cleaning state voter roles. It’s not showy stuff, and it’s not being widely reported, unless the left can distort it as “suppressing vote.” And they often can’t do that, because if the public looks at it at all, they realize that it’s not all made up and then– So mostly the left and the media (BIRM) ignore it, even while trying to fight it.
But more importantly, the beautiful losers of the GOP are being replaced from within by … well, by people who have had enough. You can call them MAGA if you wish, and if MAGA is understood to mean “Make America Great Again” not “Appendixes to Trump.” Most of us appreciate the president well enough, but he’s our instrument, we are not his. (This is important because if they take him away we will find someone who hurts them more.)
Is the replacement complete? No. But it has advanced farther and faster than i thought possible in the time we’ve had since last January. Chill. yes, the Republic is still in danger, but the danger lessens by the day and the people coming in are more pissed off than resigned to losing.
More importantly the informational imbalance that created all other imbalances is pretty much gone, or perhaps entirely flipped the other way. Thank G-d who works in mysterious ways for Elon Musk and X. But even places like Facebook have resigned themselves to the fact they can’t hide the truth completely. And the places that cover truth with a pillow until it stops moving? They’re dying. They’re the province of the provincial (people who are in the walled gardens of academia and such, and of the very old. That’s it.
Oh, yeah, and Academia is losing prestige and following by the day.
As for the rest? Stop howling for blood. That’s the stupidest thing you could do. If we fall into indiscriminate killing, or even arresting and punishing the innocent with the guilty, we’ll tell everyone — including the idiots who don’t pay attention — that might MAKES right. It would be the easiest way to destroy the Republic. And of snatching defeat from the jaws of the Victory that’s now assured for our side.
Yes, you are angry. We all are. When you’ve been very depressed, as the right in this country — in the world? — has been, what comes back first is anger. It’s the first real emotion to pierce through. And it’s very powerful.
But right now an indiscriminate attack will just finish destroying even the illusion of the rule of law. And the Republic — and most of us — don’t survive that. We become a Latin American banana republic at best, the Balkans at worst.
Again, remember that what you’re hearing — yes, X is free. It’s also penetrated by a lot of bots and foreigners, and foreign bots too — is not necessarily what’s happening. For instance, I found out that congress has in fact been confirming Trump appointees at a breakneck speed, which is the opposite of what I thought was happening. I am assured THROUGH PEOPLE ON THE INSIDE that yes, trials and prosecutions are proceeding apace, or at least being set up.
Consider this your public service announcement that this administration has been in power for about a year. That’s an eye-blink in politics.
And so much has already been done that it’s almost impossible to believe.
Learn to win. Stop panicking because things aren’t done in an instant and exactly as in your head. Work carefully and steadily. Yes, work on helping with cleaning the rolls, with exposing the truth that the MSM (and media in general) hides, with exposing psy-ops and nonsense.
DO NOT panic and start calling for what is sure to make us lose when victory is already in process. That’s just stupid.
Losers aren’t beautiful. They’re just losers.
And we’re winning. Let’s keep it going.
According To Hoyt 
Well said. Anyone who feels like the MAGA movement is in decline is falling for the PsyOp. Watch the other side to see what real desperation looks like, and don’t be like that.
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The Left and the media (BIRM) assume that MAGA = Trump, and the bots and blackpillers seized on this. Trump saw a bunch of people walking down the street, declared it a parade, put himself in the Drum Major’s place, and led it.
Many politicians attempt this and trip over their own feet. An inspirational leader can direct that parade. And as the parade winds down the avenues, brilliant and strong people see that this parade is now a movement, and associate themselves with it.
Some, like Mike Pence and MTG were only marching for their own motives, and have been shown the door. Others, like JD and Marco certainly have ambitions of their own but are looking to be a leader, not a boss.
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Slight disagreement. We’re reluctantly Republicans (by vote). We don’t follow “leaders” so much as we find a guy we halfway like and push him to the front. We elect representatives to be, well, stand ins for us. More or less because most of us have lots of better things to do than stupid politics.
Trump, in my small opinion, is the (very) visible symbol of a well and truly p*ssed off public that has been lied to and stolen from for nigh on the length and breadth of an entire life. The littler ones beneath him latched onto that sentiment. Some for mercenary reasons, others were just too scared, some just weren’t charismatic enough, and so on.
Leaders, bosses, and bigwigs are not what we endorse. Or intend to vote for. Someone who represents the will and interests of me and mine, though, that’s a one to pick.
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I think we disagree on adjectives only.
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One lifetime? If only. We’ve been lied to forever, and stolen from since 1916.
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He’s our flag, not our leader.
And I’ve always voted republican precisely because they CAN’T get away with murder.
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Yeah! That’s what I meant!
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I’m going to modify part of what you wrote –
Many politicians see this, and try to redirect the parade by claiming to be a drum major.
Trump focused on meeting the major demands from the voters. Contrast that with, say, Boehner, who *twice* claimed it was time to negotiate an amnesty despite massive pushback from the base.
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I like the winning. I am not tired of it.
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Same, same.
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>> Prosecutions << not ‘persecutions’. Again, we are not the left. {correcting the sentence that has “that yes, trials and persecutions are proceeding apace” in it}
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Trials and persecutions are the hallmark of the left. See the Jan 6 gulag inmates.
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yes. I can’t spell. :D
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I’m perfectly happy to persecute the left. Especially since they richly deserve it.
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Aye. That’s one of my permanent misspellings.
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Not helped since the dang misspelling is actually a word. Also guilty of this.
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St. Catherine of Siena said that, if somebody makes a habit of governing everybody unjustly and stomping on the rights of the poor, while letting the unjust do whatever, it’s because that person “cannot bear to hear the truth.”
“A man who thinks only of his own interests… does not observe justice, but breaks it in a thousand ways. He allows himself to be corrupt – sometimes for money, sometimes to please those who ask him for unjust service. Sometimes also to avoid just punishment of his own faults, he will let off those on whom the stroke of justice should fall. And so he shares in the guilt, and deserves to share in the just punishment which he has been bribed to spare the other….
“….He despises the rights [of the poor], while he listens readily enough to those who have no right to ask…
“….Such men… tear their neighbors to pieces….”
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I found this passage very striking, because of course the people of Siena and other old Italian cities were very defensive about their rights, as ordinary citizens of their cities and as cities among other powers.
The ordinary citizens of the US have rights, of which the Left wishes to deprive them. (And which sometimes the Right, or the supposedly Right, is careless about.) Giving people their rights, which is not a gift from the state but a right from God, and from which all the powers of the US derive, is the priority of American governance.
Giving goodies to those who have no right to them, as a priority over everything else that citizens have paid for and want to vote for, is wrong.
Anyone who wants to fund empty Somali daycares is free to do it with private funds, not drawn from taxpayer-funded NGOs or government grants. And as long as none of that money goes to drugs, terrorists, slavery, piracy, or further fraud, they can have as many empty, useless “classrooms” as they want.
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Stole my home the same way as Colorado. Here’s hoping Mrs. Hoyt is right. But whether she is optimistic or pessimistic our work is the same. Be not afraid. Build up, over, and around.
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I’m not optimistic. I’m a depressive. It’s still going to cost us blood and sweat. We might have won, but the mop up is where you take most casualties. We’ll still lose elections, and the panicked left will ensure the bleeding.
And yet, yes, the course is the same.
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You’re helping more than you know.
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THIS
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THIS
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“Might doesn’t necessarily make “right”, but it does very much often make “Victory”.
If the Left keeps grinding noses in “you cannot win”, if they keep stealing entire states and then making it plain the Right is -done- there (CA, CO, etc), especially as it becomes more and more clear that they are less and less relying on honest votes anywhere, and more and more willing to go all-in on the Marxstuff, well…
They are going to go from FA to FO.
Over on Substack, Tom Kratman has a running series about how the Left gets to the FO part, and what it looks like. It aint pretty. Its a warning to the Left that they don’t -ever- get to “Marxist paradise” here. But they can certainly get to some -other- nightmare outcome.
We joke here about “helicopter rides”, but it is far, far more likely to be freelance pest control by folks who -wont- organize or protest, or even post. Thus they will be almost untraceable.
Imagine, if you will, some Bubba-schlub who always gets his deer the morning of opening day, deciding quietly “why not?”. Or, some street level thug who has kin that escaped the crazies back home, who realizes that a .25 pocket POS pistol makes less noise than a backfire, and jail isn’t all that bad unless the “backhomes” get in and start the “labor camp” stuff. Or the guy with the Organic Chemistry degree and lots of book reading habit, who won a bet long ago by figuring out various “how to make” for the nightmare stuff of WW1/2/cold. The disgruntled fireworks worker. The pool cleaning business owner. Truck driver of fuel tankers. Cook at popular Left-frequented restaurant. Et cetera FO.
The ones who just shrug and turn away when someone starts trying to talk politics.
If that lunatic “unabom” hadn’t posted a manifesto somewhere, they would never have found him. He would still be randomly mayheming folks. And the whole dang FBI and assorted other Alphabet People were looking for him for decades.
Multiply by “lots”. -That- is the nightmare world I want to avoid. I don’t want to find I am downwind/adjacent/in-path with some meaningless Leftroid that finally and fatally annoyed his silent neighbor. I have the worst crap-magnet luck. I Am Too Old For This Crap.
Selfish of me, but please Lord, let them come to their senses. Soon.
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If I were on the Left, I would be much more nervous of other people on the Left deciding that I’m fair game, one fine day for no real reason.
Because it happens all the time, and a lot of them end up dead.
Maduro is alive. They gave him a nice life preserver and earphones and everything, because he was captured by forces of normality and not by the Left.
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The go along to get alongs do not reassure me, entirely.
The people nominally on ‘our’ side who did not pay heed to the effective calls for racial war, those people probably have judgment that we can abstractly trust in. They are maybe stupid, but possibly just wiser than I am.
There are lots and lots of people out there who are saner than I am.
There are lots and lots of people who probably have wiser goals than I have let guide me.
There are people who disagree with me on what I consider to be major points, but whose forward analysis and actual behavior is strongly suggestive that they might prove to be more effective than me at what needs doing, and maybe also a better judge of the moral issues.
It is blackpill from a communist perspective, but maybe from another perspective it can function as apologetics for Christ.
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“The people nominally on ‘our’ side who did not pay heed to the effective calls for racial war, those people probably have judgment that we can abstractly trust in. They are maybe stupid, but possibly just wiser than I am.”
Bob, I’m going to relate to you a sad truth that I have finally understood because I am old:
Normies are different from us.
They are f-ing well not built the same. They can read the tea leaves, Bob. They can scent the changing direction of the prevailing winds. They know what’s hot and what’s not. To them the most important things are fashion, hair styles, and who’s popular at work. Because that’s their world. Society. That’s how they get by.
They know when to switch sides from Woke to Conservative. And they will! They will switch to whatever side has the most monkeys with the most bananas.
You and I are forced to work from first principles, because we are ODD. We can’t read the tea leaves. We pick the side we’re on for practical reasons, like that socialism killed a hundred million in the 20th Century.
Normies don’t even know that. Ask a Normie some time, just for a giggle. They’ll regurgitate a recent headline for you. They can’t even -visualize- a hundred million. Because they are much more concerned about what haircut they should get next week so they can stay popular inside their clique.
They are only nominally on our side. They’ll switch in an instant. You and I will never understand what made them switch, because it will be a fashion choice, a hairstyle, a turn of phrase, something that has no practical import whatsoever but signals a change in the monkey/banana balance.
This concludes my weird old man lesson for today.
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When I saw the Maduro photo, I said “sleep mask over eyes + headphones over ears = sensory deprivation”. Not total sensory deprivation, he’s not floating in a neutral-buoyancy tank and he’s got a water bottle in his hands so he can drink any time he wants. But the music (or white noise) they’re playing through his headphones hinders his ability to hear what’s going on outside, and the sleep mask prevents him from seeing (duh). So he has no way to know where he is, where the helicopter is flying right now, and even whether the helicopter is on the ground or not. Which means if he were to try to fight his captors, he would not know whether he’s 1000 feet in the air and would therefore be making a final, fatal step outside if he were somehow to escape.
All of that adds up to a more-compliant prisoner (not guaranteed, but more likely to be compliant) with nothing but DIRT-cheap off-the-shelf devices (headphones and sleep mask) which have no obvious military application and are, in fact, carried by many airplane travelers. So seeing someone in possession of headphones and a sleep mask raises no eyebrows and nobody thinks “Oh look, a capture team” on seeing them. In other words, that’s brilliant.
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They can’t come to their senses if they have none. You really think these True Believers will ever change, no, when faced with reality they often go insane. So they hide behind their delusions. In their minds they are doing Gods Work, even if they don’t believe in God. Pray for em, what else can you do?
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Back in the 1990s or so, Claire Wolfe was writing about “leaderless resistance.” This is what you’re describing. Not to mention, there are plenty of things that don’t involve red squirty stuff that could be done. An anonymous drone in an office who’s in a position to f up computer files big-time. A low level mook who “gets the wrong address” and SWATs a real bad guy “by mistake.” The guy who plants drugs or other illegal stuff in an enemy’s property then drops a dime to the cops. I could go on, but there are lots of books out there about it. It’s kind of funny, isn’t it, that Loompanics and Paladin Press are both now out of business?
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And there’s the other sort of resistant; the one who notes that something odd, something strange, unusual is going on … but looks away, and says nothing about it to anyone. I’ve touched on this in a couple of essays about the anti-Nazi resistance, and put an account of such into one of my novels. (My Dear Cousin) When I traced the two then-living survivors of my Uncle Jimmy’s WWII B-17 crew, one of them told me a story of how he and another evader were traveling by train through France, accompanied by an elderly woman and a teenage boy who were members of a Resistance escape line. He told me that they had French clothes and fake papers, but he said that he didn’t think it fooled anyone but the Germans. (American servicemen must have stood out like they were lit by neon lights, in that time and place: well-fed, good teeth, young and fit, totally innocent of the European way of doing things…)
Anyway, in a crowded coach car, the Germans came through, checking tickets and papers, and the survivor told me that instantly, every single French person in that railcar began … doing distracting stuff. Moving, talking loudly, dropping stuff, getting out of their seats … it was completely unplanned. Only the older woman and the boy knew for certain that they were escaping airmen … but he said it was as if everyone else knew at once that the Germans should not look very closely at the two evaders.
There was the active Resistance … and then there were those who noted that stuff was going on, and kept their mouths shut.
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Not vouching for nor recommending any of these, but there are quite a few “oddball” publishers still doing business.
(for entertainment purposes only – Walter Mitty was here)
Last Earth Distro
Last Word Books & Press
AK Press
Earthlight Books
Eden Press
FS Books
Laissez Faire Books
Lehman’s
New Falcon Publication
Privacy Alert Online
Ronin Press
Steve Arnold’s Gun Room
Uncle Fester’s Books
Delta Press
Soldier of Fortune magazine (Omega Group Limited)
By posting this, I’ve probably given my FedMinders Viagra-Class woodies. Chill out boys.
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Very good Sister Sarah.
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I noticed Tim Waltz isn’t running for re-election. Some might believe the malarky being spouted, but my thinking says he’s not only toast, he’s toast with a future prosecution hanging over his head. Otherwise, what you wrote is a fine explanation of how fraud is being exposed, the balance is being changed to what is ethical, and regardless of how the media tries to change the subject, good things are happening.
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Tim Walz surely has a political future, and Harris will win the Presidency in 2028.
However, seriously, I do not understand why people stuck to pretending that the 2024 strategy was not ‘situational’, and they would not be dropping stuff and starting fresher for 2028. Spending all of 2025 overtly pretending that the same hand as last time is the strongest possible for next time feels like wasted opportunity.
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Yeah, basically I have a two fold reason that I am not ‘then we trust academia’, ‘then we concede to preserve civility’, ‘doom doom doom violence is the only remedy’.
Last explanation attempt, I used a lot of unnecessary theoretical apparatus in two parts.
One theoretical apparatus, is an overly complicated explanation of detection and false alarm, made worse by the inherent subjectivity of human behavior prediction. Key point is that we estimate the innermost hearts of very many people, which is a known unknown.
Second, which was the sticking point, is a poorly understood theological analysis. I am not a theologian. There are two cases that more or less describe extremes of political possibility. One is that the same possibilities hold as have held for most of American history. Two is best that be done is to die well. These somewhat correlate to my understanding of the tribulation or end times. However, Christians seem to be promised that they have the same optimal strategy or optimal policy for both cases, and that they won’t be able to tell at first.
To me, this is a very fundamental behavioral navigation problem, with some seriously obvious answers.
Answer I, if you are focused on obtaining advance notice of the end times, especially by improper means, and it would matter to your policies, goals, or strategy, then you have gotten your policy estimate wrong for both cases.
Answer II, the optimal method is the same, and the basis for hope is the same, so if one is depressed from one’s theoretical forecast, one’s emotional life and or policy had an error.
Answer III, theory estimates based in scholarship are often not legitimate knowledge.
The guidance of the Holy Spirit is maybe the same thing as the most optimal policy given the past actions, and probably some amount of near future actions as well.
Some of this I understood decades ago, some is something I only understood relatively recently (when I got saner), and very immediately I am coming to understand more of what a terrible Christian I have been. I’m wrestling a lot with my arrogance, anger, and dislikes.
Anyway, there are basically ordinary political losses, which are expected and a reason to git gud. There is the end times, where there is no real secular political victory condition. Being able to psychology handle the prospect of the end times without resorting to evil, and without surrendering to the world seems like it might be a fairly basic skill. (Which means that I have misunderstood to understand it is as a skill issue.)
Theory crafting that it is the end times, without allowing for conventional Christian thought nor the prospect of the New Jerusalem, is just unhinging by our cultural norms.
And, basically we do not know what the real political possibilities actually are. Because we do not know the true state spaces. And, because we traveled different paths and remembered different things along our ways, our estimations of behavioral expected values and other statistical moments are inherently subjective.
God will not ask us to do evil things.
America and Americans will not ask us to do stupid violent things, that target indiscriminately. America expects that every man will calculate who the teams seem to be, to try to pick winning fights, to try to avoid losing fights, and to aim violence discriminately at individuals.
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I learned a very different lesson from the story of Abraham.
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Re perpetual motion and study wahnomo – look, even in our fictional post-scarcity societies they study war, because there’s always going to be scarcity at some level. It will just move up the hierarchy of need. Got food? Land is scarce. Space travel an all the land? Go-fast rocks are scarce. And of all the ultimate scarcities, even with magical AI, inventive minds will always be scarce. So, yeah, there will always be scarcity-driven conflict.
Now back to Planet Dirt here – The thing about machine states is they always get lazy. Why put in all that effort to hide things when you know you will just win? And when things get obvious, people get going elsewhere. Eventually the ones who are stuck will take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them. There’s a lot of ruin in a de-powered half of a populace which has become fully disgruntled. And that laziness also applies to the efforts to keep people gruntled. Why bother?
That’s why the top down Federal efforts are so vital. Stomp the fraud and graft a bit, annd constrict the flow of cash, and in teh end you might help things stay nonkinetic even in eth captured states.
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”Take up arms”. An interesting and very black pill quote. (Hint: Hamlet was talking about suicide.)
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Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
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But consider the man is the epithome of “Beautiful loser”
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Yeah, all things considered he’s not really a role model, is he?
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Anyway, rational admits very many distinct lines of thought. Some of which are purely rational, but also insane, evil, and or incorrect.
There are definitely rational reasons for confidence, because the study of the detection problems tells us a bunch of things we do not know about what the real possibilities are.
However, the behavioral multivariate detection hypotheses are inherently subjective.
This is related to the impossibility of avoiding the estimates being colored by other things in one’s life.
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preach it sister!
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Thus IP37/ENDVBM in Oregon, https://egov.sos.state.or.us/elec/web_irr_search.record_detail?p_reference=20260037..LSCYYYVOTE
Lots of apathy, some resistance from the ORGOP ‘establishment’.
I’m still trying to figure out an ‘elevator pitch’ for the argument. One thing that is hard is refuting the claim ‘Oh, there’s no cheating, and if there is, it isn’t enough to change the results of elections.’
See the USDOJ Civil Rights division suing for voter info. OR, and probably other states, simply does not look for voter fraud and resists oversight. It’s hard to find a thing if you do not look for it.
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There is voter fraud in Oregon elections. You and I both know this. We can’t prove it. But any election that has 100% nursing home participation, 100% ICU participation, has fraud. Because while not all residents and those in ICU are not competent, there is a percentage that are not even conscious, and those not competent. How did these percentages even vote? Someone voted for them. That doesn’t even count the parents who voted for their 18+ living at home children, then told them to sign it. Or children voting for elderly parents, and telling parents to sign. Has never ever a voter been told to vote? No, been going on forever, even if it was the matriarch of the landed family telling the spouse (who was the only one who could vote) how to vote.
Vote in person with identification and voter roll line signature, stops all this. Voter roll line signature should stop the “you’ve voted”. If your signature isn’t on the roll? Then at the wrong precinct, or illegally purged (voter registration card in hand should prove). Happens? Immediately file precinct protest. Forget the provincial ballot BS. The whole purple finger when dropped the ballot in the box helps too.
Plus, no registration at point of voting. If too lazy to get registration complete prior, don’t get to vote. Registration requires real-id. Motor voter registration works, must provide proof of citizenship at the time.
No general early voting. See “mail-in voting” even if mail-in vote is immediate on the spot of picking it up.
Mail-in voting only for those legit reasons: military (duh), away for college (but then no voting at temp academic location), verifiable medical admittance, verifiable business reasons away from voting area, etc. I’d argue that being gone on vacation, which people should be able to schedule properly, is NOT a good reason, even if verifiable. Even then, realize that any mail-in vote is only counted IF and only IF the margin of the in person vote is less than the total of the mail-in vote, or a perception that would trigger a recount due to percentage differences (for example: if the majority of mail-in votes went to losing side could trigger percentage recount thresholds).
Computer voting (read all). Must be tallied by the precinct where computer voted occurred. Must print a human-readable receipt, before full commit. Process to void a printed receipt, and computer record at request of voter if noted something wrong between print and commit. Can have the fast scan portion too, but must have a scan available to verify scan matches human-readable script. Put receipt in lock box. Tallied printed precinct receipts must match the precinct computer tally for the computer tally to be submitted. FWIW, making sure computer voting is more work than it is worth. As a career programmer, I 100% have a design worked out, that would work. More work for the voter and precinct by design; which is the point.
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I am so very glad that in Texas (Bexar County) that we have to show an ID when we vote. They finally passed that rule several years ago, and at the local precinct where we vote, it’s been in force ever since.
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I’m not sure about Bexar County, but in Dallas County, they “allow” people to vote at any polling place. I’m NOT a fan of that process. Allowing people to vote anywhere in the county is a recipe for fraud, even with voter ID. There should be a specific polling place for each precinct that’s within a reasonable distance and every voter in that precinct should have to go that that specific place. I know they have a hard time finding enough poll workers and might have to combine precincts which means there’s a possibility that the polling place might be outside of a precinct boundary, but it shouldn’t be too far.
I would also limit voting to Election DAY, not weeks or months. Absentee ballots only for narrowly defined reasons, such as suggested by dep729. I would probably support limiting even military and college student absentees if they’re in the same state as their home of record. Maybe they should have to vote in their precinct of residence instead. Just spitballing here and not really committed to that idea. I agree that scheduling a vacation that causes one to be away on Election day shouldn’t qualify for absentee. Allowing an absentee for business travel seems reasonable, but, other than for scheduled training or preventative maintenance, I’ve rarely had more than a few days warning about overnight travel. If the election is on Tuesday and the boss tells someone on Friday that they have to be out of town the next week, how would absentee work? OTOH, unless it was a serious emergency repair and I had to be onsite ASAP, I’d probably be able to postpone a trip if it impacted voting. Maybe, if Election DAY was codified, most businesses would avoid scheduling trips around that day. For that matter, I’d even support making election day a holiday (for everybody other than poll workers, of course…)
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Collin County has a specific precinct because there are multiple school districts (ISDs) and they have separate bond issues / ordinances.
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Arkansas uses the voters’ registered address to assign them a precinct somewhere near that location. They can only vote there. They have to provide a “state-issued photo ID” to the poll worker, who will use a pen to cross their name out on a tall stack of fanfold printout with the names and addresses of the people assigned to that polling location.
It’s not immune to being tweaked; back when the state was under the Democrat jackboot it was common for all the likely Republicans to be assigned to the same polling place, which would be small and only able to handle a couple of voters at a time. I stood in line for 4+ hours on several occasions, once outside in freezing rain. And the polls closed with people still standing outside, who hadn’t made it to the front of the line by the cutoff time. Meanwhile, it was “no lines, no waiting” for Democrats. That all changed after the turn of the century, though.
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The only answer to computerized voting systems is NO!!!
I know far too much about computers to ever trust them with our future.
Any computer systems involved with elections would have to be entirely open source, all the way through — the hardware, the firmware, the operating system, and all of the application programs associated with elections. There could be NO programming present except what is necessary to process elections. Not even Solitaire. They would have to be closed to all external access. They would have to be available for public inspection before and after the election, with all system logs intact.
And even if all of those measures were implemented, I still wouldn’t trust them.
The proprietary, closed source vote-stealing election fraud machines they’re using now should be publicly destroyed like they did with slot machines back in the 20’s.
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Even more so with “phone app! It will get young people to vote.” Not the teens I work with. They can toss out at least four problems, right off the top of their heads.
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“The world will never be Perfect, so stop wasting time trying to make it better!”
That’s the Black Pill message. Crime can’t be completely eliminated, so stop arresting and imprisoning criminals. Fraud and embezzlement can’t be completely eliminated, so stop bothering to conduct audits. Politicians and bureaucrats will never stop lying, so stop exposing their lies.
“That’s how it works in theory. I have found that in practice your government runs on lies, bribery, blackmail and brutality.”
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But we can get better, and we should.
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How delusional is the left? They Just gave Jimmy Kimmel an award for best night time host. No really they did. A guy who regularly gets beat in the ratings by Gutfeild a show on dying cable as opposed to a show on free air. I don’t think I have ever even seen his show, I don’t have cable, I stream for free, which only costs what I already spend on internet access. Which is also destroying Liberal Media. Stream, you can choose what you watch when you watch, the only price you pay is the same price as supposed free air TV, watching commercials.
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Gutfeld is -funny-, and has proven willing to stick it in the backside of almost anyone. Thus, he has a more broadly based audience who expect sick burns. As long as the burn is spot on, even Orange Maud’Dib is fair game.
“My snark is a burning word. Bigly.” – OM’D
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Even with paid cable, you still get commercials, so what’s the point. I haven’t turned on my TV in a decade and stream straight to my computer. A 27″ monitor is more than adequate for what I watch.
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Even with paid cable, you still get commercials, so what’s the point. I haven’t turned on my TV in a decade and stream straight to my computer. A 27″ monitor is more than adequate for what I watch.
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Even with paid cable, you still get commercials, so what’s the point. I haven’t turned on my TV in a decade and stream straight to my computer. A 27″ monitor is more than adequate for what I watch.
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Even with paid cable, you still get commercials, so what’s the point. I haven’t turned on my TV in a decade and stream straight to my computer. A 27″ monitor is more than adequate for what I watch.
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Even with paid cable, you still get commercials, so what’s the point. I haven’t turned on my TV in a decade and stream straight to my computer. A 27″ monitor is more than adequate for what I watch.
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Yeah, where have we heard that before? Oh, maybe “we can’t prevent 100% of illegal immigration, so there’s no point in building that wall / deporting those we catch / changing anything.”
It is a psyops.
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the cannot entirely stop recreational drug use stuff
Well, we cannot entirely prevent acts of murder, but this is not an effective argument for decriminalizing the act of murder.
In theory, we could de jure decriminalize murder, but in practice in attempting that we would definitely lose influence over de facto law. Shifting to whatever vigilantism customs spontaneously develop from the culture is pretty much never a good trade.
Almost all academic theoretical discussion in that freshman to senior ish range is at least a little bit of a psyop. The bandwidth of an undergraduate degree is limited, and the complexity of ideas that one can discuss within that is pretty small.
The truncated analyses are pretty much the average baseline for ‘discussing’ the politics of national policy.
(Graduate student and faculty training can manage to be much much worse than that.)
Getting gold stars for repeating teacher is little preparation for the situation where the literally best recipe that scholarship can find in the literature is badly wrong for an application, and needs serious extension, modification, or debugging.
Human behavior, and certain aggregates explicitly including those of human behavior are so confounded that one can be drastically wrong, and looking for the error, and not able to conclusively show or identify it.
Rule of thumbwise, in politics it is much more likely that the theoretical model is incorrect than it is that a policy adjustment has results well predicted by theory. Okay, the academic books are cooked for political ends, so basically the there is a significant difference in the real correctness chances that correlate to political expedience, but we basically cannot objectively calculate a reality model from any subset of information that we could communicate.
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Murder does not equal, even approximately, using drugs.
Murder clearly takes away the right to life of a sentient human being.
Merely using a drug does not. Coke? Caffeine? Opiates? Weed? Alcohol? Nicotine? Chocolate? One man’s pleasant evening is another man’s “You stupid bastard! That is EVIL! 11!”
And I dont use any of that crap except caffeine and chocolate. Been sober 40+ years.
Prohibition / ban-it-harder -doesnt- work with drugs. or CCP China wouldn’t still have drug issues. (and they do. And they -shoot- about half of them and “strict labor camp” the others. Still have druggies and importers.) We have to attack demand. Some clever idiot will always step up to the plate for a 15 thousand precent profit margin on what amounts to aspirin complexity.
Neither harsh laws nor no lows is going to rid us of that pestilence. Shaming the eff out of dopers just might.
“You cant play for the Sector Spaceball Synod if you use Thionite, you Zwillnik Moron.”
“You stink of that crap. I would rather the men thought you stupid than drunk. You are dishonorably dismissed from the Roughnecks. Be glad we are planetside or I would throw you out an airlock, sans Suit.”
Its probably the only way to reduce it significantly. And we will -never- eliminate it, even if we could spike half the supply with VX or permanent crotch-rot.
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The Senate was far behind the normal pace in approving Trump’s appointees, but then they changed the rules to allow them to be approved in batches rather than individually, and they pushed through about 2x as many in the last couple of months since the rule change as had been approved before that.
As I understand it, this puts them more or less back on track with the normal rate of approvals.
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Still -way- behind on Judges, which is the most critical item.
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“Completely cleaning out electoral fraud would, in point of fact, be impossible. There will always be someone who gets someone else’s grandmother to pose as their dead grandmother and vote for what they want.”
True enough, but it would be nice to get the fraud down to below 10% wouldn’t it? I’m sure that with common decency, show ID and a purple finger check, 5% or less is reachable.
Oh, and nice jail terms for fraudsters. That couldn’t hurt.
That doesn’t stop tribal voting among certain groups of course, but maybe “no welfare for immigrants” would.
Because the tribe will move on to Canada where welfare is still handed out. (I don’t know wtf it’s going to take to wake this country up. I really don’t.)
All of which is so obvious, and so historically proven, that anyone who argues against it is obviously lying. Most likely lying to cover up fraud. Their own, or the people who pay them to lie.
Lying liars lie. The end. >:(
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Oh, I so want the purple phalange for voting! I’d even restrain myself and insert thumb rather than my preferred finger for verification . . .
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I think an inspired bit of jurisprudence would be to mandate purple middle finger. A symbolic gesture, you know. >:D
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I met a gentleman this summer who referred to it as the “communication finger.” In front of scouts, no less. XD
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I forget the poem. But one of the scoutmasters, and a district/council level volunteer, read a poem at evening fall Rondeveu assembly that had the adults in stitches, and the youth looking around at the adults with “what’s so funny?” Which, naturally, set off the listening adults even more. Not a single cuss word or gesture. Dry delivery.
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While this isn’t exactly the same (the kids would definitely have gotten the joke on this one), the whole “the adults were in stitches” thing strongly reminded me of this song.
Content warning: many, many occurrences of the F-word (it’s kind of the whole point of the joke). Use headphones if at work or if there are impressionable children around.
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Posted a reply that almost certainly went into moderation because I linked to a Youtube video (Vqbk9cDX0l0) which contains many, many occurrences of the F-word. (Use headphones if at work or if there are impressionable children who could hear your computer). It’s not remotely the same, as the kids would definitely have gotten the joke, but the juxtaposition of refined delivery and crude language is cracking up the adults listening to the song.
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Over at “Coffee and COVID” this morning they just made a point on the “MAGA Fractures!” wish-fulfillment pronouncements from the commies and the media (birm) that lit a light bulb for me: This driving fractures thing is exactly the playbook that the IC used to run all the “totally spontaneous” Color Revolutions around the world: Find local wedge issues and then pound on them relentlessly using social media until one gets traction, then pay protesters to hit the streets, hold up the signs, and chant the things. The next step is paying people with power to conduct the coup.
But step one is always to pound the wedges until one gains purchase, then reinforce that success.
And that is what we are seeing: “MAGA Fractures!” pounded relentlessly looking for a wedge that gets purchase, with paid social media as the sledgehammer. They took a hit when Elon turned on the geolocation stuff and shined a light on the places from which those were being purchased, but that didn’t stop them, and of course the open shills in the media continued following the script.
So keep that in mind, and disregard the wedge pounding. And mocking is always good.
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I saw a video interview of a fat broad in New York whining about how the Eeevul Landlord was raising the rent and “I don’ wanna hafta move!” and “Mamdani is gonna save us all from Teh Eeevul Landlords!” and, and…
A few more questions revealed that the building had been under a tax deferral, which had expired. The interviewer did not follow up on that. I would have!
“So, the government raised taxes. Where does the money to pay those taxes come from? Oh, that’s right, the rent. DO YOU BEGIN TO SEE THE CONNECTION?!! You f*king moonbat!”
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“So, the government raised taxes. Where does the money to pay those taxes come from? Oh, that’s right, the rent. DO YOU BEGIN TO SEE THE CONNECTION?!! You f*king moonbat!”
No, they never ever see the connection. Either because they are too stupid to follow the short little logic chain, or more likely because they are being paid to say that sh1t on TV.
I do understand why -kids- don’t get the connection. Kids are lied to for 15 years of school and university, they think that when property taxes go up then rent should go DOWN because that’s what the socialists told them. Plus they never worked 40 hours a week for a whole month in their lives, so they’ve never experienced the outrage of looking at that huge tax bite that came out of their paycheck.
But now that the cat is out of the bag, and they understand the huge tax bite from their paycheck is being stolen by scammers and sent to Somalia in suitcases (that’s literally what they’re doing), I think the kids may become a little more militant toward their Lefty teachers.
It’s one thing for pencil-neck soi-boy 30-something academic to get pushback on line. It’s a completely different thing to have a whole row of kids in their Philosophy-of-Soy 101 lecture stand up and yell “BULLSH1T!!!” at them when they explain why math is racist, or meat is murder, or Whiteness is problematic etc.
I look forward to the Soy-Wars. I like my schadenfreude nice and hot.
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NYC will soon impose very strict rent control and get NY to impose very high taxes on folks over the billionaire threshold, then million/year income. (Or they might do it locally, although that lets more folks escape.)
They cannot -not- do it and stay in power.
The NYC housing situation is going to fall apart quickly. They will demand bankruptcy freezes and ownership transfer holds. Eventually, they will get to outright seizures, although by then they will look much like “voluntary” surrenders. There will be some bigtime presstitution on how “now we get folks housed”. Some nobody gomer will point out the nice dachas going to commissars and the slums being slums, if now somewhat cheaper. Said gomer will be ignored or vanished.
Newsome has to look sane to run for president in 2028. Madmani can doosy choosy. He set his goal to be a Communist Savior, and he is gonna play the role, and hard. He might even be far more committed to that than to following Mo. (which, to some fellow Mo-folk, might get him on a fatwah list.) Note, swearing on a different book isn’t the same as having a permanent “raisin” (knot) on your forehead from head-bashing the prayer rug.
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Re “sane”, from whichever clanker lives behind DuckDuckGo’s AI thingee:
Yep, retroactive to now on a “tax” not yet passed, and on net worth with a few exclusions. But hey presto, what happened in December 2025? Why, California billionaires established residency and business entities in other states, just before that deadline, because they pay people to keep as much of their wealth as possible. So what happens to the income tax revenue that said billionaires and their businesses used to pay to California? Also gone.
Just another “sane” thing from Gavin’s State of Dissarray. I hope he runs. JD will stomp him so hard that even his hair will get messed up.
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Apologies if the first time I tried this eventually shows up. WPDE.
Re “look sane” – this summary from the clanker behind DuckDuckGo search:
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And as a result:
https://www.morningstar.com/news/business-wire/20251230610919/thiel-capital-opens-miami-office
Gee, what happens to California state income tax revenues when both the billionaires’ residency and business entities move away?
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“Tax the Billionaires” looks sane to about 40-45% of the US population. Sadly.
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“We voted to raise taxes on property owners and businesses. Why did our rent go up and why does everything cost more?” As you said, the moonbats will never get it.
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According to the Persistence, law in MN allows a resident to vouch for eight people at elections.
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Yep. Saw that. In CO I don’t know how many, but you can also “vouch” for other people.
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True. Cant “daisy chain” that. Folks who run housing facilities have no numerical limit, by the way. And no one would ever exploit -that-.
We need perp-walks, prosecutions, and convictions for this crap. And soon. If there is no apparent consequence to the cheat, and Trump is the result of “dont cheat”, 2026 would be kinda disappointing.
Unleash the dogs, Mister trump.
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Sure thing. How many court decisions should he ignore in the process? He’s only been trying for a solid year to throw out Maryland Margarita Man… trying.
And that is my point: they don’t have to “win”, just delay…. and the only way to avoid the delay is to act in ways that will justify outlawry.
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One thing that would help a lot would be a Constitutional amendment absolutely forbidding voting by mail. I can think of all sorts of ways to play monkey games with that sort of thing, and I am by no means a professional political operative. They’d have ways that I’ve never thought of.
Early voting—if done the way we do in Iowa, I have no problem with it. You go to your county seat, go to the courthouse, explain that you want to vote early (up to 30 days before the Big Day), and go through the same process you do on Election Day. Then the votes are put in envelopes, sealed in the presence of county officials, and kept aside. I’ve worked local elections, and believe me, the “chain of custody” on the votes is strict!
If we abolish voting-by-mail, the usual suspects will wail “But what about the military vote?” Considering that they did all they could to suppress that vote in 2000 and other elections, I have no sympathy. But I am merciful. I’d set up legal precincts on all US military bases, and run the election there just like in other places (election officials, secret ballots, the whole nine yards.) Kind of like how expatriated US citizens can and do vote at their local US consulate or embassy.
The “purple finger” for those who’ve voted would be an excellent idea.
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No vote by mail, and no published daily vote counts for a month after “Election Day” so that the “missing” votes needed to change the results to the correct candidate winning can “be delivered”.
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It should absolutely be one day, vote in person with ID, purple finger.
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Why are election officials allowed to operate in secret? Why are they allowed to conceal all the details of how they conduct elections from the public? Why are they allowed any say at all in whether their work is audited, who performs the audits, and how?
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Audits?
https://instapundit.com/767082/
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So while I fall into the “perp walks and prosecution” crowd, my preference for it would be the sort of airtight cases which I know take months and months of investigative work and evidence collection and lots of interviews before getting the prosecutor to file charges.
I want the sort of cases where the only things they can appeal are the sort of procedural details that the appeals judge will look at and tell them “quit wasting my {swear} time with this crap, a prison library educated defendant would’ve realized this had no chance!”
And frankly, if the evidence in a case drags in people from “our side?” Then they were idiots for participating and charge them too.
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Speaking of Beautiful Losers;
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2026/01/05/disneys-star-wars-star-mark-hamill-claims-maduro-capture-a-desperate-distraction-from-epstein-files/
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Epstein Files…Bwahahahaha
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