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Painting for access, meat puppet Hunter Biden has announced that Joe Biden’s cancer has moved into his bones. I’m not sure what grift Hunter has planned post-Joe, but appearing on podcasts as some sort of political rebel probably has a very short shelf life.

Joe, that poor bastard, was diagnosed with prostate cancer. My dad had that. Years later, it eventually turned up in his pancreas, and eight weeks later he was no longer with us. His cancer turned up in his pancreas, not his prostate. Joe’s is alleged to have found its way into his bones.

Former President Joe Biden’s prostate cancer has spread through his body, making it “very painful and debilitating,” his son Hunter Biden told the BBC Friday.

I’m on the record, way back in 2020, stating that what they were doing to Uncle Joe back then, making him run for president, was elder abuse. Family members had stated he was in an early-stage dementia then, but the Dems needed a warm body whose name they could use on the autopen, and he was it.

The elder abuse continued, and if not for whatever it was that happened on the June Debate state, he’d have been abused all the way to November.

He would have lost worse than Kamala, which is hard to imagine.

Hunter, as in hunting for the next grift, is quoted as saying,

“It’s really sad to watch,” Hunter Biden said. “The only thing that I’d say about my dad, about his health right now, is I wish he would complain more, because it’s not good.”

Newsflash, Hunter Biden. Watching you and your dad for those years was sad to watch. And I mean from Obama-Biden through Biden-Harris all the way up to today. But you complained plenty and still do. More than enough for the whole Biden crime family, whose meal ticket you mistreated to maintain your family grift.

I’m no fan of Joe Biden. He abused women, talked down to minorities, and he was a walking idiot for most of his political career. Wrong about nearly everything on foreign policy; the only reason he was forced on Barry, who never liked him. But he was a human being.

He may not have deserved or been entitled to all the money, access, or fame (infamy) he accumulated. He didn’t exactly work for it, and he was a crappy human being but a reliable democrat stooge. Despite all that, he did not deserve the elder abuse your family put him through to keep their gravy train on the tracks.

Joe should have been hanging out at Rehobeth enjoying his elder years instead of being paraded around to make a fool of himself in front of America and the world.

Elected Democrats are awful human beings, and blue-collar union Dems and their like need to distance themselves sooner rather than later. Every time one of them wins office, they try to push America closer to a cliff, and they don’t care who they have to use and abuse to do that, including Democrats.

Joe, I hope you find some comfort. They gave me fentanyl when I had my heart attack. It takes the pain away. Don’t worry about addiction; if the cancer is in your bones, you are not long for this world. Or maybe you are.

Have you considered Ivermectin and Fenbendazole?

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At lunch on my wedding anniversary.

Split tooth, but no pain. There was a sound, and some wiggling, and a creeping feeling that I’d be spending some quality time in what would otherwise be a very relaxing piece of furniture surrounded by people in masks and face shields with bright lights and stuff like that. They speak to you like you're a toddler or maybe like Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal Lecter talking to a toddler. Slow, reassuring, with an uplifted lilt.

No wonder some people are terrified.

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Not my first rodeo. Bill Cosby opened his dentist bit years ago, before anyone knew he was drugging chicks so he could have sex with them, by saying he used to offend his mouth until it offended him back. I don’t know that I ever stopped. I brush, I floss (now), but I’ve had a series of unplanned encounters with things that break teeth since I was a kid, and, much like the "I’ve been to more wakes, story, I spent a lot of time in the dentist's chair.

Ironically, I had too many teeth for my mouth, which these days might seem inconceivable given how many I don’t have. When it was time for braces (middle school, mid-seventies, it was a thing, the posters were stupid), proper healthy development meant removing four teeth near the front and having two of my wisdom teeth surgically removed. Open up the gum, break them into pieces, put those out, sew it up.

Both lowers, same day.

Those buggers were keeping some teeth I would need from coming in. Very crowded in there, they said. I wasn’t paying ‘cept in pain and treatment plans, so I got used to it.

Put a bunch of wires in my mouth for several years. Lots of tightening to make the spaces go away. Joy. Fifty years later, the inside of my cheeks are like a dentist’s archaeological site. You had braces, did you?

Mhhmm hmm.

Dentists don’t bother me a bit. I could nap in the chair and have. I wouldn’t mind having the time and money back, but you haven’t had to spit in a little toilet bowl for decades, and that’s progress.

A few years later, at the end of the braces situation, teeth all straight, in formation, and where they were supposed to be, I broke a front tooth in a vehicular-related incident. Dental crowns. Yeah. They told me Stephen meant Crown, but I guess I didn’t realize. Might have been more careful.

You have to replace crowns now and again, by the way, especially if they are a few decades along for the ride. I had to have one replaced with an implant that was a thing, - I told you it was a mess. I’d blame my English ancestors and their bad teeth, but this was mostly me.

Anyway, if my current dentist has a system for alerting employees about what sort of patient you are, I probably have all smiley faces or something like that. Low maintenance, high oral pain tolerance, very accommodating, doesn’t complain.

It’s not their fault.

Offending my mouth includes bad dietary habits, early in life. I drank a lot of soda. Coca-Cola among other things. Back when they put real sugar in it. That stuff rots your teeth. It does?

I could have flossed more, but everyone could if you believe the Dentist, and there were a few other things that didn’t help; but summed up, I was offensive to my mouth and got what I deserved, and I did.

I did it. I paid for it. Still do, but it is what it is, as I like to say. Something that has filtered through my psyche to most everything else, as far as I can tell.

You didn’t pay attention. You didn’t do the work. You didn’t vote, and elections have consequences (snuck that in there). Some life lessons some people won’t learn, and some complications can be more invasive than others.

I quit smoking when I was thirty-three. Nice jobs, not relevant but whatever.

This isn’t the scared-straight, dental-health edition, by the way, although I’d encourage you to floss more. Just the teeth you want to keep, they say, but flossing doesn’t stop a guy from swinging a pool cue at your face. That hurts if you haven’t tried it. Breaks teeth. Not convinced I deserved that.

Anyway, I’ve been taking much better care of my mouth and the teeth I have left; this one was just a holdover from the old days.

They yanked that out Thursday afternoon. 90 degrees and hotter on the asphalt. Scorcher of a day. Reminds me when I was younger, and my mom's car died on the way home from where? The Dentist. Novocain swollen mouth full of cotton, not exactly sure what that one was all about, but the car was a goldenish Chevy Vega 2-door.

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Toy version of the thing - looked just like this.

Thought of that from the office back to my car, which runs fine, thank you.

They sent me on my way with a bag of goodies, including this new oral soothe sockit gel. That’s how it’s spelled. You don’t want to get dry socket. Never had that, but I hear it's awful, and I’m content ot leave this off my bingo card. Sockit gel soothes your post-extraction pain. Topical. So, that’s a thing.

And take OTC pain relievers. This isn’t the south side of Chicago or wherever the Biden DOJ let that mule walk half a million fentanyl pills while they watched, so Opioids aren't what they mean. Tylenol, Advil, which is a blood thinner, so that seemed odd.

Lots of other instructions, and I read them because who can put down a tri-fold favorite. Warm salt water rinses. Don’t eat anything hot, crunchy, or spicy.

Bleeding stopped in the first two hours (TMI?). I was off the gauze before bedtime (tried the Sockit gel to close that loop - not prepared to provide a review). No pain when I woke up. No swelling, no bruising. I’m not sure whose fault that is, but it’s a blessing. Dental pain is something I’m used to but not something I invite on purpose, despite all the admissions above. It can be very distracting, and OTCs don’t really do a lot more than take the edge off, not that this isn’t a kindness.

No spitting, sucking, or using straws. It says that. Don’t want dry socket! Blood clots dislodging cause dry socket! Not needing extractions, well.

The no spitting is a tough one. You still need to brush your teeth, and you don’t swallow the warm salt water unless you want to puke, which isn’t in the post-op notes, but I can’t imagine it’s good for the clot in the socket where the tooth just was if you retch.

You’re supposed to open your mouth and let the fluid fall out? Impractical. Not as awesome as it sounds, and gravity is a weak force. You HAVE TO sort of suck and spit, and that’s verboten, but no one's watching. Not medical advice, by the way, but if you get it figured out, let me know.

No strenuous activity (subjective in my opinion), and no smoking or alcohol right when you need it most. All of which can be avoided if you just brush and floss every day, which they tell you until it sounds like white noise.

White noise helps me sleep at night, head slightly elevated during the first 24 hours.

It’s been an interesting week.

And yes, I worked before, after, and the next day. Can’t let a little thing like a tooth extraction slow you down. The world didn’t stop because it doesn’t spin around me, but one of my jobs is commenting on the spin and what happens along the way.

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Today is National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, but don’t let that limit you. A calendar is, after all, a social construct, as is “cookie day,” so if you like cookies and eat them, then be you. Notice I said like them and eat them. I like them, but I no longer eat them, well - rarely.

I can recall a time when I used to down a Friendly’s Super Sunday or multiple boxes of McDonald’s French fries (maybe both) without gaining an ounce.

I used to eat everything, and in volume, and because I was active, I could get away with it. After my wife got pregnant with our first child, I was introduced to sympathy weight. She gained; I gained; she lost it; I lost it. Three kids later, and she looked great (still does), but I’d added a few pounds here and there. I needed a few more pounds but not a few more. few more.

Some people can get away with a little extra weight, but I’m five-nine, and for most of my life I’d weighed less than 140 pounds (heavier soaking wet). Sometimes after I broke 170, I had a heart attack, after which weight and food were things I thought about.

From never thinking to almost always. From eating everything to reading ingredient labels. With glasses. My eyes went before my arteries yelled at me. Squinting at books in the dark maybe, but probably computer screens. I still squint at them; I just do it through glasses with different prescriptions for each eye.

Variety, yeah!

I should add that the weight gain wasn’t all pregnancy sympathy weight. That was just my gateway. While I was working at UPS (for about ten years), that weight became muscle. The wiry kind. Gaining weight became a challenge. I was fit and lean and rarely slept. Worked two jobs, 14-16 hours a day; I was busy. Ate everything (again), five small meals a day, actually. Most of them at work. Then I left that for a full-time job, often a desk job, and surprise! If you keep eating as if you're burning 7,000 calories a day, you need…

Stretchy pants.

Sweats at home, and again, it wasn’t exactly obvious. I hadn’t devolved into the middle-aged man with that massive thing where his six-pack was supposed to be. I promised myself I’d do whatever it took to not look like I was carrying a medium-to-large-sized dog curled up under whatever stretched-to-the-limit shirt I wore to “cover it up.”

Customs would have to search you to make sure you weren't trying to sneak a small Asian woman out under your T-shirt. Some of these guys, I just don’t know how they can live with that. Have they settled? Are they thinking it's not that big a deal or too difficult to address? Maybe they’ve got a wife or lady friend who thinks it's cute, or do they have that massive belly and use it as an excuse to not look good for them?

Maybe. I get it.

I’m not at peak fitness. Not even sure what that’d be. My cardiologist is happy with my weight, blood work, and all that.

I still like to tell people my six-pack is behind my twelve-pack, but I keep the 12-pack covered as a public service, and I haven’t weighed over 170 in eight years. That was my weight right before they took me in for a pair of stents. I dropped to 157 within a few weeks (radical change in diet) and try to stay under 165 these days, but that’s a lot harder as I get older and less active.

I still have stretchy pants because I can still add weight quickly; beer does that, and I just don’t lose it as fast as I used to. I’ve also learned a few things about diet and the alleged health care industry, including the Heart Health people. Some of their suggestions aren’t good for you.

Butter is probably better for you than most margarines, and it’s cheaper again now too (not medical advice). Everything in moderation, including moderation.

Lean protein is great, but your brain needs saturated fats and cholesterol to work right, and the rise in Alzheimer's seems to coincide (correlation isn't causation) with the rise in statin use.

I take statins.

Eggs are okay, now, so I eat a lot of those -okay, say the people who got it wrong when they said eggs were not (coffee, mayonnaise, everything), and the inversion of the food pyramid is a great improvement, at least until the next Democrat Administration flips it back.

I’m open to whatever the doctors who bucked the COVID protocol have to say about everything else, and after many reels and some actual research, I’ve settled on the alternative theory that dementia is linked to insulin resistance which is something you should work diligently to avoid anyway.

Do your own research, but I think you’ll find it’s not that hard a problem to address.

My diet has evolved, more or less, to embrace the idea. I like cookies; I just don’t eat them. Cake, Ice Cream, sugar generally (some say it’s actually a toxin), and carbs are mostly out. Fewer, not zero, but less is more.

Oat milk is allegedly liquid carbs, by the way, which spikes insulin hard. You might as well drink sugar. It’s also not milk the same way almond milk isn’t. It’s creamy nut juice, which sounds a lot more pornographic than I’d intended.

All that new information hasn’t stopped me from needing jeans with a little give because I like beer a lot. Liquid carbs but not the same way. Not too much beer. I also do not like feeling drunk, so that adds some much-needed balance. But every now and again I need to take a week off the brewskis to get closer to 160 (no stretchy pants required, but because they are stretchy they still fit just fine at that weight).

A very sensible clothing purchase.

Another discovery: walking the dog did a lot more good than I realized. Cosmo is getting old and creaky like me, but he clearly has arthritis, so we walk less often, more slowly, and over shorter distances. He stops to sniff, and I do calf raises and air squats, and no, I don’t care what the neighbors think (and yes, stretchier “pants” help).

I’ll drink a light beer if it's free, but there are no strong beers, only weak men. Real beer is better, ask Og. And stretchy pants come in denim and khaki, sweat, track, full length, and shorts. Plenty of options if you need them, but my advice?

If you need them, you probably need to lose some weight, and if it's a systemic condition, just make sure it's not the one where your system can’t handle all the cheeseburgers you’ve been eating.

Eat less, move more. Stretchy pants are a temporary solution to a problem on Thanksgiving, and one you can still solve if it's more invasive than that, but you have to want to, and then you have to do it.

I hate doing it, and I’m not technically overweight, so I’m sympathetic to the challenge but not to ignoring the benefits from trying until you succeed.

I love to eat.

I like being alive and lucid more.

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Edited Transcript

Welcome to the month of August and another edition of Subscriber Saturday. It’s been an interesting couple of weeks. I, of course, have made the effort to try to write about things that aren’t political. This is actually really difficult for me. Until I started writing about politics, I could write about lots of things, and I could write long.

After I started writing about politics, I learned to write shorter and more concisely and cleaner and better. Most of my earlier efforts are pretty much a mess, but the messaging is good.

Well, all that practice and all that time, and I’m in the political box for many hours every day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. There are no days off; there are no vacations. We are always working because they’re always working against us and liberty, and it’s just too important. So having adopted that, it has become very difficult for me to write about other things.

But I embrace this as a challenge.

So today it’s a little political. I crossed the streams. I’m talking about free speech, but not just free speech generally; the war against it by people who shouldn’t be against it at all. Our attorney general has claimed a victory, and arguably not necessarily a bad one. The individual in question is a white supremacist; he’s a nationalist; he’s a socialist; he’s basically a Nazi. And/or a neo-Nazi if you prefer. By choice. And I don’t like those people. They’re not nice. But they have a right to free speech.

So the problem is that my AG, as regular readers will know, has repeatedly tried to find a way to use New Hampshire’s civil rights law to create hate speech exceptions. Now, you’ve already heard me or seen me ramble on about the problem with our civil rights law.

That’s the reason why it needs to change, but changing it would be very difficult because it is like when I proposed how we could end our homeless problem: you have to do things that are very easy for the other side to market against you to get you out of office. So then you can’t do anything else good. So again, we always want to move the ball down the field. We always want to get points on the board. When it comes to free speech, using civil rights acts as a way to infringe on it creates a precedent that I just can’t tolerate. And so even though I don’t support anything these people do, I have to protect their right to free speech.

I have to protect it because it’s the only way I can protect mine and yours. And those things are extremely important to me. The fact that you can disagree with me, that we can debate the things, that you can call me names. I really don’t care. Speech is speech. Speech does not hurt people, despite what they tell you. It just doesn’t. It can’t. And of course you understand the reason they say it’s physically harmful is that they want to suppress it. And once you suppress speech, you begin to suppress thought.

Thought, once suppressed, you’re just living under tyranny at that point. And we will not stand for that. So coming up is a brief discussion about the situation here in New Hampshire and how it affects everybody, because lots of blue states do this stuff with fervor. They’re excited about it. They go after people on purpose. They set people up. And that’s kind of what this looks like to me.

We’ve reached the paywall; please feel free to subscribe or use your one free view to view the content. And if you really like it, please do subscribe because all of this stuff costs money. I’m happy to do it for free. I’m happy to have you spread the message as widely as you can at no expense to anyone else. We still have to pay the bills. So here we go.

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I just read a very interesting piece on how to run a political campaign that actually draws voters to the polls in the midterms. An un-campaign. Stay away from glossy mailers and multimillion-dollar television ad campaigns, and focus on free media. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Rumble, and Instagram.

You, the candidate, on the street, talking about things “in your town” that matter to your neighbors.

Spencer Pratt style. Although Pratt did a bit more than that. He created AI videos that turned evident truths into entertaining political ‘ads.’ The result was a campaign that forced issues into the daylight, exposed systemic partisan incompetence, and appealed to regular people.

He lost, but it’s LA County. When I first discovered what Pratt was doing, I observed that it had to find a way to get more people to the polls than they could possibly delay or cheat their way to locking him out. That’s a tall order in a swing district. In Los Angeles, you’d be asking a lot, and while he didn’t make it to the finals, he did what many thought was impossible. He competed.

Spencer Pratt set the table for everyone and anyone who wants to run anywhere against anything that can be demonstrably proven to be bad for the people who live there.

And he made it fun. When was the last time you saw a sustained campaign using television or video that looked fun? You’d be right to wonder if the people who run campaigns have any idea how to do that. And to give credit where it’s due, New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte has never been my favorite Republican. I like her a lot more than just about any Democrat, but that’s not high praise. Her campaign ran a commercial featuring her and her husband as regular people on the sofa, which made her appear human. Personable. Fallible in a good way. I’m no expert, but as an observer for nearly two decades, I think that REALLY helped her win her race. That and a terrible opponent, which has been a hallmark of Democratic gubernatorial races in New Hampshire for a while (thankfully).

Sometimes even a bad Republican gets better when faced with the priority of a Democratic majority legislature.

I don’t care what you think about Trump or Republicans; they need to win big this November. Locally, at the county level, and statewide. Democrats were always a bit too grabby and radical. Didn’t you build that? The violent rhetoric. And now the same people who were all in on defunding the police are fine with DSA candidates peeling off seats in solid blue districts where they would have to work hard to lose. People with suspect character and a commitment to things like no cops.

What do median middle-class, everyday Americans want? Safe neighborhood. A sign that they aren’t working for nothing, or, in the case of Dems and the DSA, to fund freeloaders and fence hoppers. That they can get ahead, leave something behind for their kids. Making ends meet is great, but a government and an economy that are aligned against them is a problem. Add the unpredictability of a town where criminals can roam without fear of consequence.

There are a lot of moderate Democrats who support welfare programs who don’t want to see their money wasted, so the rampant fraud and the Democrat Party's defense or indifference to it probably bothers them. Are you the sort of candidate who would protect that investment from abuse? Sidecar it with a commitment to improve the handling of tax dollars to ensure these programs are protected, funded, and available to those truly in need.

How you work all that into a 30-60 second reel while you stare at your phone on a street in your town is up to you, but make sure it ends up wherever you can manage to get it out there, including your campaign web page.

And feel free to make a few Spencer Pratt-like AI videos of opponents' bad management or mistakes. Some of them are too eager to embrace bad ideas and bad behavior, and that needs some daylight too; just be as fun about it as you can.

Keep it simple, speak to your voters, and emphasize why they need to show up. And admit that it’s easy to break things and hard to fix them, and people who like criminals more than you or who defend fraudsters and the people that enable them aren’t serious about whose money they are spending.

It was legally earned by someone else, and they are truly the best judge of how to spend or invest it, and where. Anyone who thinks they know better 9politicians and bureaucrats) is setting themselves up to be properly ridiculed, especially given how little of it gets where it’s supposed to.

If they say affordability, you should say yeah, and accountability.

When it comes to reaching voters, campaign money helps. You will need some. Those million-dollar campaigns will get more eyeballs. But think about what matters to you and your neighbors, the progress we’ve seen in just two years (lowest crime, stable inflation, lower taxes), and encourage them to elect people who want to keep us on that path for at least a few more years.

You should also go where they are. Knock on their doors, meet them at local events. Be a human being first who listens.

And as Republican candidates, you don’t have to attack your opponents; their policies and preferences are proof enough. They offer platitudes but no actual solutions, and the things you do hear about make the average American voter cringe.

If you need them attacked, let someone else do it. And if they tie you to someone else, well, you’re not them, but here’s what they are doing that I think will help us here and why. Lower crime. Actually doing things ot keep drugs off the streets. Being serious about responsible citizenship. Lower taxes. Bring manufacturing and jobs back to states and cities.

Have fun, be as local as you can, build a following, be honest, and above all else, assure them you’ll keep the criminals in jail, and do as much as possible to make sure the person with the most control over their families and what they earn is them.

Need some help? Go look at what Spencer Pratt did.

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Vermonters will have the opportunity to enshrine two stupid ideas into their constitution this November. Both are Bad Ideas, and to my mind do exactly the opposite of what they claim or intend.

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I cleaned my office yesterday. Not all of it, but the parts that had been encroaching on what passes for walking space around my desk. Invading, not just with my permission but with my hand. And I’m not much of a fan of clutter, so you’ll have to imagine just how organized the flanking maneuvers were.

My stuff. Piles of it. Waiting patiently to be managed properly. Swallowing up valuable floor space. Piled just high enough so that when I record podcasts, you can’t see it.

I suppose they might be more artistically framed. Lawless? No, it’s clutter, but important enough to not throw away. Sorry, some of it got thrown away, which -if you ask my wife - is something I do more often than I realize. This is a point of contention that started in 1995 when I moved from a small apartment in Nashua to my first home in Merrimack. Somewhere along the way, some Christmas decorations disappeared, and they might have looked suspiciously like garbage.

They were rumored to have been stored with love and care in a wrinkled and worn brown paper bag. It may have had the texture of tissue, rugged but soft from decades of handling. There one day, gone the next.

I continue to deny any knowledge because I don’t recall the material in question, and it's not something I’d just toss, but I suppose it had to be me. We didn’t have kids I could potentially blame. That would come later.

But that happens when you move, and they’ve been gone for over thirty years, and no matter how many Christmases we have, they don’t appear amongst the ten or so bins of stuff I have to haul out of the attic the week of Thanksgiving (and back right after New Year's).

Maybe Santa took them back. They’re in ornament heaven with Jesus.

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The crap in my office could be so lucky.

You get mail, and while most of it is crap, and sometimes it's glossy political crap, you still manage to get things you need or think you ought to keep. Statements, receipts, things from the bank, stuff you need for your taxes, and while my beautiful bride has embraced some of the technological advances of the 21st century, online banking and bill pay, for example, she likes paper copies.

I recall early digital books and libraries as a comparison. I was always a paper book-in-hand guy. I have lots of them. Books. Thousands, I suppose, before I broke down and started the negotiated separation agreement based on the lack of physical space, the need to use that space for other things, and my inevitable transition to digital.

I still love a book in my hand, and not just because staring at my phone makes me look like all the other zombies who have the world at their fingertips but can’t write in cursive or complete a paper check without consulting YouTube. If I’m looking at my phone, I am checking email, making sure content is posted, telling my wife I love her (texting, typically), or reading a book.

It does lots of other things, and I do those things when I need them, but if you looked, 90% of what I do on my phone is read books. It’s a leap for the book-in-hand guy who likes printed matter, but it happened.

Not sure when. I got a Barnes and Noble Nook and then sometime after that leaped to the Kindle and have never looked back.

And if you’re curious, it is almost never political books. Seriously. I need a break from that too, you know. High Fantasy (sword and sorcery stuff), Science fiction, some historical fiction. Yes, I’ve got books by Jordan Peterson and Marcus Aurelius, Scott Adams, Friedman, Nock, and some guy named Ian Underwood - not sure who he is. James Lindsey, Russell Kirk, Michael Rectenwald, and others, but most of it is fantasy and science fiction. I grew up on that stuff. And you might see some of it behind me when I do the Morning Update, but not the clutter.

Out of frame and now out of sight. Gone. I decluttered. The material previously encroaching on my workspace has been sorted.

A stack several years high of that mail you’re supposed to keep. It still needs to be organized and scanned, and thrown out, but it has been filed. That’s the word.

I had some boxes I saved that should not have been. These are now awaiting my next trip to the dump. The original cartons for equipment, that sort of thing.

A coffee maker that wasn’t working right, since replaced. I like to take things apart, not like Sylar in the TV series Heroes, but these little mechanical excursions have been known to pay off. I took my clothes dryer apart (twice now) and fixed it for a few bucks both times. Other examples abound, not because I'm cheap but because I’m curious and not wealthy. I still think fixing things is the first goal, and one should persist, except in extreme emergencies, until replacement is the only option.

Refer back to the printed versus digital books example with the caveat that I still have a lot of those, including boxes of them cluttering up my basement, that I intend to give away or donate at some point, but not yet.

And there were some books about the office space; they got shelved. Some ammunition needed to be put “where it belongs,” which includes being accessible and near the firearm to which it belongs, wherever in the house that happens to be. That and then more. No such thing as too much ordinance. A sum that would make a non-gun-owner and the PR department at the local PD act like you were hoarding it in preparation for the Zombie apocalypse. [Well, I kind of was]. Except it’s nothing like that.

Officers found two firearms and over 1000 rounds of ammunition!!!

OMG! Not.

I’d be embarrassed. That’s nothing. A very short range day to anyone who knows better, including the police, but the media is top-heavy with low-T beta-males who weren’t comfortable transitioning.

I have some coffee mugs as giveaways or table swag if I ever got back to doing that, and an assortment of miscellaneous things from notebooks to seat cushions that just needed a better home than the floor or on top of whatever was on the floor.

I found a holster I’d been looking for that you can wear with activewear. It doubles as back support and a girdle, I suppose, and let’s pretend I’d go jogging and needed a way to conceal-carry a loaded firearm whilst wearing … sweatpants.

I am happy to have been reunited with it even though I don’t jog, because I do walk the dog, and if I’m in sweatpants (November to April, typically), that just might be what I’m wearing when we go. Leaving the house unarmed is not something I like to do - especially in the age of AWFLs and gender-bent crazies on or off their meds- but I like having to go upstairs to change even less when what I’m wearing fits the circumstances.

Cosmo doesn’t care, and neither do I, and it’s usually early. And it’s New England. This past week it’s been great sleeping weather but not exactly shorts weather in the early hours. In July. You never know.

The dust bunnies made primarily of Labrador hair were less than pleased with the change of circumstance, but they’ve been relocated into the canister on the Bagless Bissell (ClearView Max). They look more like an oversized hairy hockey puck that’s three inches wide. But no need to worry on their behalf. They will soon find themselves in much more palatial quarters. 20-gallon drawstring white kitchen trash bag.

My next project is scanning all the stuff (mail you are supposed to keep) so my wife will let me shred it, burn it, whatever. She’s not sure how long we should keep it, so we have drawers full of it from when Bush was president. I have check stubs from when you used to get paper checks (still this century), from jobs I’ve not had in nearly twenty years.

Those aren’t in my way, so they might get to stay a bit longer. It would require more time I don’t have to deal with them, but at some point it just has to get done. Like attics and basements. The back room at a museum dedicated to your life. And not everything is as important or worth keeping or handing down as you thought, but some of it is. And you were just waiting until your kids figured that out before you took it to the dump.

Or you might just be busy.

Make time. Who knows what the hell you might find.

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No video this week. I’m re-evaluating the content, production, and flow for the Substack. Response to the less political content has been positive after week one of the transition, but I’m still (probably) going to mix some politics in between. Like today! I want to make sure you feel like you are getting enough content for your support.

It also needs to be wholly unique to this space. Not available anywhere else. No more mirroring in either direction. If you come here, what you get is for you and you alone because I really appreciate my paying subscribers, and they should get value out of that support.

So, today, we’ve got a sort of kind of political take.

Immigration, citizenship, and voting shouldn’t be a divisive topic. You don’t let non-members vote on your boards or committees. If you’re in a club with membership dues, those folks don’t want randos wandering in to vote for changes. Political parties do not let non-registered members vote for leadership roles or to decide bylaws or platform changes. But there is a boisterous faction in at least one of those parties who is adamant that non-citizens don’t vote and that we do not need to make sure they don’t vote.

In fact, they are opposed to any effort to make sure they are not registered or voting.

The recent news out of New Jersey isn’t moving them much. Lots of registered non-citizens with several hundred voting in violation of the approved narratives and the law.

Soft head error, more like. Thousands and hundreds, in just one state that uses Motor-Voter. Twenty-Four states and the District of Columbia use Motor-Voter. What are the odds they have soft-headed, sorry -software errors all their own? Or, more likely, no errors unless you get caught and its all intentional.

Highly likely.

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And New Jersey is just one very public expression of a real problem that both parties believe serves one party more than the other. Let’s be honest. If Democrats thought illegals and non-citizens (or college students or anyone else) were voting against them, they’d be the loudest advocates for vetting them off the voter rolls.

And if Democracy actually mattered, as it relates to the lawful execution of our Constitutional Republic, then every state would be coughing up its voter checklist or making the effort to check it themselves.

My state won’t cough up its voter rolls, not ‘cuz privacy, but because the idea that they are clean is a lie, and they know it, but keep repeating it. Both sides. Cleanest, safest, most secure. It’s nonsense. But if you don’t want DHS to find the illegals registered to vote in your state for any other reason, like - they’d send ICE to collect them - then you’ve neither the incentive to let the Feds see it nor to try to clean it up yourself.

Which you can do. Clean it yourself. If you are serious about election integrity.

SAVE is primarily used by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to verify eligibility for government benefits. The Trump administration made it available to states to cross-reference voter registration data.

So far, 25 states have cross-checked more than 68 million voter registration records through SAVE and found 28,000 noncitizens and 400,000 dead people registered to vote. As more states finalize the process, the number will likely grow.

Among just those 10 states that completely processed their voter data through the SAVE system, they found more than 10,000 noncitizens and more than 360,000 dead people on the voter rolls, according to DHS.

A DHS memo says, “These states are serious about ensuring that only US citizens vote in US elections.”

Georgia, in using the SAVE system, found that 2,549 noncitizens had at some point registered to vote. It also found 42,776 deceased people on the rolls.

I’m not sure what your local elections look like, but assuming you don’t let non-citizens vote in them, some jurisdictions allow this for local elections as a head-fake to get them registered; a few votes here and there can change who holds the majority on a town, city, county, or state level.

If what voters think matters, then just do your own due diligence, Mr. Scanlan and AG Formella. Here’s the link.

SAVE is an online service for registered federal, state, territorial, tribal, and local government agencies to verify immigration status and U.S. citizenship of applicants seeking benefits or licenses.

It can’t be all that difficult to take the list of registered voters and verify that they are all legitimate. And think about how much PR you can peddle when the results come back.

Maybe even a few “we told you so’s” are in order, assuming you share the full results, and they come back without any illegals or dead people on them.

It’d get those election integrity folks off your back.

Of course, it might not do that.

They might hold a parade, pat themselves on the back, double down, and try to get legislation passed that creates consequences for failing to ensure we have clean voter rolls.

Not just a requirement that somebody claim to check them, but laws that equate some sort of consequence for failure to do it right.

New Hampshire Republicans have been tireless in their effort to move that ball down the field. Get points when they can and wait for the next possession. This irritates people who want it all now, and I get that. I’ve been at this for close to two decades, half of which was spent alongside Ed Naile and CNHT, when it still did this sort of thing, trying to shame the state over how indifferent it is to “voters” who shouldn’t be voting in the Granite State.

Your state may well have the same or more complicated problems that make it easier to dismiss voting as a waste of time, which is - as you likely know - the point.

The same people who want illegals to vote (or college students) because they vote for them don’t want you to vote because you will vote against them. They say we all should have the right to vote, but what they mean is the right to vote for what they want; otherwise, get lost.

That’s why we need clean elections. Not because Democrats don’t want them or some Republicans do, but because without them no one can say with certainty that the results reflect the will of the people affected by their outcome.

What causes people to choose to vote a certain way is no less a problem. Slanted media. Social media algorithms that funnel you into ideological purity vacuums. Lies, distortions, selective editing. It all matters, but none of that matters if no one can say that the people, however they arrived at their decision, good, bad, or indifferent, are going to get what they asked for.

And we may never know for certain, but we can know with a lot more certainty, and refusing to do everything possible to optimize that outcome ought to be viewed as suspicious.

There are non-citizens registered.

Everyone seems to agree they shouldn’t vote in Federal elections.

Anyone who isn’t taking advantage of the resources available to ensure non-citizens are not voting has an integrity issue. Theirs and your elections. But if you don’t push them, they won’t do anything about either.

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Writing about politics is easy, so not writing about it is actually quite the challenge. It doesn’t help that I spend most of my “writing hours” every day looking for or sifting through content that is nearly always 100% politics.

And the world isn’t helping. As I remarked (again!) on my monthly bit with Jeff Chidester on WFEA Wednesday Morning, the left politicized everything because they had to. Everything within the state, nothing outside the state.

The only safe place to hide is in silence, and that was the point. If you disagree, keep your yap closed, and we won’t have to send someone to dox you or swat you or whatever.

Mars Candy, Kellogg's Cereal, sports, entertainment, beer, air, dirt, water, even the bathroom. And for a short while, toilet paper, which became more precious than human flourishing or liberty. We lived, for a brief time (though back then it felt like standing in a line that isn’t moving) in a semi-post-apocalyptic Mystery Science Theater 3000 series where TP was a form of currency.

I still have rice from the so-called pandemic in my pantry ( I don’t eat a lot of that, but I would have lived on it if I had to). And yeah, it’s still good.

And then it was eggs. A dozen eggs were worth more than the protein and choline. Having eggs was a status symbol, especially since the heart attack people announced they were wrong about food cholesterol and blood cholesterol (we’re still waiting for them to admit they are wrong about cholesterol period, but that’s an expensive ask).

We currently have plenty of both, TP and eggs, but only the eggs have gotten remarkably cheaper. I rarely pay more than 0.99 cents for a dozen these days, and a few years back they were 6-7 bucks for twelve, and you weren’t allowed to complain on social media, or it was disinformation. Butter and bacon, chicken - there’s a bunch of stuff that has wandered back into what I would call affordable.

But everything can get more affordable.

It turned out that if you stopped killing all the chickens, eggs would get cheaper. Didn’t need an economist, just a farmer and a grocer (and a different dude in the White House). Still not talking about politics.

TP, paper towels, paper plates- that stuff is still in need of some price deflation, but trees, wood products, had all been priceier for a while, before the China Virus turned Charmin into hillbilly bitcoin.

I’ll trade you my 2-door 76 Plymouth Volare for a 6-pack of Great Value toilet paper.

I dunno. Is your sister sitting in the backseat?

[Fight breaks out.]

I actually owned a 2-door Plymouth Duster. I don’t have a sister that I know of - I was adopted, so it’s possible. But no one was thinking much about that sort of thing back then.

When I had the Duster (straight six, big fat white letter tires, vroom-vroom), Reagan was president, Thatcher was PM, John Paul II was pope, and Gorbachev eventually oversaw the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was history, but I wasn’t political back then. I voted for Reagan, not the peanut farmer. I liked peanuts, still do, but all of that was just stuff happening. I was busy just being. I thought the people on CNN were straight shooters when they rolled into the media space. I learned different, eventually.

But it was work, girlfriend. Work. Girlfriend. Party. Work. I had two or three jobs to make enough money to live on my own. That was important.

And I had to work to pay the bills and afford a life beyond working to pay the bills, although work was its own reward. I suppose that was the beginning of a very simple understanding of what led me to where I am today.

Back then, everyone worked, or you were a bum. Didn’t matter what you did as long as you did something and, if possible, did it as well as you could. Being on any sort of government support was a reason to find a job and get off of that. Even back then.

In 1977, at least a few years before the Duster, I was delivering newspapers before school and working a part-time job at night as soon as I was able.

I make no excuses for Disco. It happened. I was there. Girls liked to dance to it, so we danced. I’m not saying it was pretty, but it happened.

Anyway.

We had freeloaders, and human nature wasn’t any different, but the general population was a good bit less uncertain about it. You worked if you were able. Period. And part of the problem (solutions?) may have been that we didn’t have the organizations then that exist today to make a living off of other people’s misery. Such as they were, they existed to help you escape that.

My mom rehabilitated alcoholics until she retired, so I saw my fair share of people who were at, near, or past rock bottom. I played pool with them, talked to them. Drank coffee with them, as a kid. Everyone smoked (I smoked later in life, but only until my wife broke me of the habit by not liking that I smoked).

They all drank coffee (I started at age 6, if you missed that story. That was all they had at all those AA meetings my parents dragged me to).

More than a few of those recovering alcoholics never made it, and my parents were not exactly young. Their peer group was elderly adjacent or in early senior territory. People passed, if you take my meaning. Health care was cheaper and as modern as it could be, but not like today, the way “tomorrow” won’t be anything like today.

I’ve told the tale more than once of how I’d been to more wakes by the age of twelve than most people have to manage in a lifetime.

After I “aged out” and could be let home alone, I didn’t need to go and found other things to do with my time, but to say my relationship with death is a bit different than a lot of folks is an understatement.

Raised Catholic. Escaped to the Southern Baptists the moment I had the liberty to do so (around age 14). They had refreshments after service, and my best friend's dad was happy to pick me up for church (his whole family was in the car).

The Catholics had guilt and holy water, and a lot of “interesting” history, and it was my parents' thing. The Baptists had snacks and a choir, and I ended up in it (the Choir). Big old magenta robe, and everything. No surviving pictures to my knowledge, but now that I’ve said that one will turn up. Warning. I had a lot more hair back then.

And the socializing after, well, that was a different sort of politics, that. But I’m not writing about politics today, am I?

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Today, on the morning update, another case of liberal women and violent criminal alien abusers. This time it's a county prosecutor who signed her car over to one so he could evade law enforcement (among other things).

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