I hope this little bit of alliteration doesn’t catch on – it’s no Taco Tuesday, for example – but today feels like Frustration Friday to me.
Even as I say that, I’ve got to admit that my ability to feel frustrated is greatly reduced, for many personal reasons. I just celebrated the 40th anniversary of the first time I met my smoke show wife; Cassie the Wonder Dog is still a gamer, hanging in there even though she’s now 15 years old. Plus, God is in His heaven, and football season is about to start.
And yet.
Why does it seem like more than half the country is losing its grip on reality? Right now there is at least an even chance that the GOP (flawed and aggravating as it is) could lose senate races in five red states that Trump won by double digits, or close to it. Iowa. Ohio. Texas. Georgia. Alaska. Are you kidding me?
I know that Paxton is a very lazy and shaky candidate in Texas. But the GOP candidates in all four of the other states, plus Michigan, seem solid. And all of their Dem opponents range from “meh” to “Aiiieeeee!” on the cringe scale.
A vegan, gender-ambiguous “Christian” who hates Christianity… in TEXAS? Little Jon Ossoff is a do-nothing non-entity in GA, Sherrod Brown got beaten as an incumbent senator last time around in Ohio. And Muhammad Allahu-Akbar El-Sayed has campaigned with a jihadi freak, and has an entire madrassah full of dirty laundry in the forms of past quotes about how terrible the police, Jews and America are, and he still appears to be tied with a competent conservative opponent.
I know that the mid-terms are always tough for the party in power, and with Trump’s approval ratings in the high 30s, I’d expect us to lose in most blue and purple states. But I hope that the sane part of the electorate in the red states comes to their senses by early November.
Speaking of coming to one’s senses, I’m glad to see that Trump finally seems to have come to his, and has dropped his foolish attempts to negotiate with the genocidal weird beards ruling Iran. His initial strikes were so successful, and within less than a month we had the enemy on the ropes, so I’ll never understand why he took his foot off the gas instead of just finishing them off. The war has gone on for 6 months now, and over 4 months of that has been wasted time, while we were allowing the congenitally lying goat-romancers of the IRGC to drag their feet on agreements they never would have kept in the first place.
That was the least Trumpy decision Trump could have made.
We seem to be back on track since Tuesday, when we responded to a few feeble Iranian attempts to fight back by striking between 50-100 sites Tuesday, including “air defense sites, radar systems, maritime assets and facilities, mine laying capabilities, and communications sites.”
That’s all great. But the IRGC has been at our mercy since March. So why the hell were there still 50-100 IRGC sites of any type still standing in September?!
More please.
On another topic, the MSM just ran another story with a sensationalist headline meant to hurt conservatives. In other news, water is wet, that thing on Maxine Waters’ head is scaring small children, and Liz Warren is as white as the World-Wide Albinism Convention in Reykjavik, Iceland. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
This time the story was about a data center in Oklahoma. Data centers are not without their downsides, and I’m no data-center-ologist. But I have a long-standing rule of thumb: whenever you encounter an issue where the Chicoms, the Democrats and Tucker Carlson are all on one side, take the other side.
So when a slew of MSM sources went nuts about a bad-news data center story on Monday, I began my internal countdown until the story proved to be BS. And I wasn’t disappointed.
The large print at HuffPo was typical: “Oops! Data Center Accidentally Wastes 3 Million Gallons of Water in Drought-Stricken State.”
The first red flag popped up a few paragraphs in, when the facility in question was described as a Bitcoin mining operation. Which is not what most people think of when they think of data centers.
Helpfully, when the story was posted on X, community notes began to quickly debunk its claims. Long story short, the business was an illegal Bitcoin mining facility without a permit, and had been told to shut down in 2023, but never did. Also, the water line that broke was tied to an illegal fire hydrant the criminal operators had installed.
So a criminal operation broke a bunch of laws, and the government failed to do even the minimal due diligence and catch them. Therefore data centers are bad, and must be outlawed. Duh.
Townhall made another good point about this story, highlighting the way that our lefty media is very quick to condemn private businesses (including by lumping illegal operators in with legitimate businesses), but never shines the light on governments who cause much bigger problems.
To wit: In 2023, six cities in Texas collectively lost 88 billion gallons of water due to poorly maintained water infrastructure. That’s 241 millions of gallons per DAY. New York City loses around 155 million gallons every day. But California tops them all. Through a heady mix of incompetence, misspent tax dollars and a thicket of Byzantine regulations that would make Stalin blush, Newsom-stan loses an estimated 740 BILLION gallons a year in uncaptured urban run off.
That’s over 2 billion gallons per day, every day!
But sure, a one-time loss of 3 million gallons – not because of a legal data center, but an illegal bitcoin mining outfit – means that we must tear down free market capitalism.
We don’t hate the MSM enough.
However, I’m not going to send you off into the weekend on that down note. Because every Frustration Friday has its silver lining, and for this one, we’ll go to Cedar Hill, Texas.
On Tuesday, an as-yet-unidentified armed robber decided he would kick off September by robbing a bank.
Because who wants to do honest work, when you are lazy and greedy, and have a knife?
By the way (spoiler alert), what is that old saying about bringing a knife to a gun fight?
Oh yeah: Don’t do that.
Well this genius never got the memo, because he went into the Chase bank in Cedar Hill, brandished his knife, and announced a bank robbery.
Annnnnndddddd…one of the customers pulled his gun and shot the guy. Because: Texas!
Our sad little crook fled the scene – if by “fled” you mean “limped away from” – but he didn’t get far before making his best decision of the day: lying down on the ground and taking the asphalt-temperature challenge.
It’s good to know that in a world turned upside down, where red states might be voting for Democrats and Trump thinks he can make a deal with jihadi fanatics, you can still count on some things.
Like a thug trying to rob a bank in Texas, and immediately getting shot.
Also, the cherry on top of that timely lesson that crime doesn’t pay?
One less Talarico voter in November.
So we’ve got that going for us.
Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!
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Martin Simpson 