Quick Hitts

I was working in my garden and my son was in the yard playing with the boy and girl who live across the street.

They said they were hungry. I told them, “There’s plenty of snacks in the kitchen. You can help yourself to whatever you want. Just don’t touch those two big apples on the counter, because I’m making something with them later.

A little while later I went inside to wash up and I saw both apples were missing. The cores were in the garbage can.

I couldn’t find the kids. I searched and called their names, and eventually found them hiding in the garden. I asked if they’d eaten the apples. The boy pointed at his sister. “She did it. She ate one and said it was really good and she gave me the other one and I ate it.”

I was incredibly angry. I told them the rest of their lives would suck and be filled with pain and sorrow and then I kicked them out.

I realize I should forgive them, but before I can do that I’ll have to kill my son.

I work in mysterious ways.

Forty+ years ago I bought a big old house in a Victorian village located between Albany and Saratoga.

Natural gas was unavailable, so we heated with oil. Every year the burner had to be carefully tuned for maximum efficiency. Whenever it started we’d get a tiny whiff of oil. When it was delivered, the house smelled of oil for the rest of the day.

It was noisy – you always knew when the heater was running.

Once, a piece of the furnace cracked, just a little, and the house was filled with oily black smoke. It stuck to everything. We hired professional cleaners, and although they did a good job we were still finding soot in various nooks and crannies for years.

The stove and hot water heater were electric, and the electric bill was high.

The village’s water and sewer systems were becoming impossible to repair. The ancient pipes would crumble when someone tried to fix them. The entire system was replaced, a years-long project that tore up every road and lawn in the village. Since they were already digging everything up, they decided to install gas lines as well.

We switched to a gas furnace and a gas hot water heater as soon as we could. It made a huge difference.

I’ve always taken long showers, and when the electric water heater was depleted it took at least a half hour for the water to get hot again. The gas water heater took about ten, maybe fifteen minutes. We were never out of hot water again.

The gas furnace was very quiet, and heated the house faster and more evenly than the oil furnace did, with no smell.

The best result, though, was the bills. Switching to gas saved us a noticeable amount of money. I never got around to replacing our electric stove, but any chef will tell you gas is a superior way to cook.

We sold the house and moved into an apartment. It features a gas fireplace that throws enough heat to keep the whole place warm and costs very little to run. Last winter we only had to turn the furnace on a few times.

In a few more years repairing or replacing it will be illegal.

New York State’s governor Kathy Hochul has made reducing the state’s carbon footprint one of her primary missions. She’s outlawing clean, safe, gas stoves, hot water heaters, and furnaces. This is not theoretical – the law is in place, and restrictions will gradually become more draconian year by year. She’s forcing everyone to switch to electric appliances, which cost considerably more to run, don’t work nearly as well, and depend on the increasingly unreliable electrical grid.

She’s also tossing around billions of dollars on various clean energy projects, mostly wind and solar, which have a horrible record and a miserable ROI. Nuclear plants could drastically reduce our carbon footprint without destroying our economy, but they’re not even mentioned in her breathless exclamations about how much of our money she’s spending.

How much difference could it make if NYS reduced its carbon footprint? Let’s do a little math.

Worldwide, 50 billion metric tons of greenhouse gasses (GHG) are released each year. New York State’s output is 344,850,000 metric tons.

We could reduce New York’s GHG production to zero, simply by shutting down the entire state. We’d close all the power plants and grocery stores and gas stations and hospitals and shopping centers. First, we’d close New York City, Buffalo, Syracuse, and Albany, then every other city and town. We’d need to shut down every farm and slaughter all the farm animals. We’d destroy every wood stove and propane tank and backup generator. New Yorkers would only have two choices: leave the state or starve to death in the dark.

If we did all of that – completely destroyed any possibility of living here and returned everything to the wild, the total reduction in world GHG emissions would be {insert drum roll and cymbal crash} 0.6897%. Zero point six eight percent. That would reduce global temperatures by. . . nothing. That’s less than a rounding error.

I could end this with a plea to Kathy to stop wasting money we don’t have on things we can’t afford and don’t need, and to just leave us alone, but that would imply I think she gives a damn about the people who live here, and I know better.

“Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche” is a rumor started by real men so we could get all the quiche for ourselves.

Dave’s Perfect Quiche

Ingredients:

1 readymade 9-inch pie crust
2 cups broccoli florets
1 cup cooked ham, cubed
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
6 large eggs
3/4 cup milk
1/4 tsp pepper

Directions:

1. Preheat Oven to 375 degrees F.

2. Roll out pie crust and place in a 9-inch ceramic pie pan, fluting the edges.

3. Steam the broccoli in the microwave for 2 minutes. (You only want it partially cooked. It will finish cooking while baking.) Set aside to cool for a few minutes.

4. Dice the ham into small cubes. Transfer it to a large mixing bowl.

5. Remove any stems from the broccoli and chop into small florets. Add it to the mixing bowl.

6. Add shredded cheese to the bowl.

7. Mix all the ingredients in the bowl until everything is distributed evenly. (Use your hands, it’s easier.)

8. Dump the ingredients on the pie crust and spread them out to fill the crust evenly.

9. Use a whisk to beat the eggs like you’re mad at them. Keep whisking until they are foamy.

10. Add the milk and pepper and whisk it some more. Pour over the ingredients in the pie crust. Tilt the pie until the mixture is evenly distributed.

11. Use a pie ring to protect the crust and bake for 25-30 minutes.

12. To check for doneness: jiggle it a bit. If it wiggles near the center it’s not done. Bake for another 5 minutes and check it again.

13. The quiche is finished when the center is firm and raised a bit and the top is lightly browned.

14. Let sit for at least five minutes before serving.

Notes:

You can make your own crust if you like, but it’s twice the work and three times the mess. Store-bought crusts are easy to use and cost about a buck. Letting it sit at room temperature for an hour makes it much easier to work with.

Thoroughly beating the eggs is the key to a fluffy quiche. You want as much air in them as possible. Whisk them until you see lots of bubbles, then whisk them a bit more. Add the milk and whisk it some more. After adding the egg/milk mixture to the pie, put it in the oven immediately.

There is enough salt in the ham to season the dish. If you’re making it with something other than ham, add at least 1/2 tsp salt.

The type of ham you use will determine the flavor of the quiche. A Honey Ham quiche will taste different than a Black Forrest Ham quiche. Spiral Ham works well too. Boiled ham is disgusting, and should the thrown in the trash instead of being used in a quiche, or anything else.

Wokeness started infesting America about the time Hillary ascended to power. Every time anyone criticized any of her actions or policies the standard Woke reply was, “So you don’t like strong women?” No, I love strong women, but I despise corruption and dishonesty, regardless of the sex of who is practicing it.

When Obama took office, any criticism of him was guaranteed to generate the automaton response of “That’s racist.” Someone’s analyses of him could be detailed, nuanced, and factual, and most lefties would ignore all of that to chant “Racist! Racist! Racist!”

Now we get a double whammy with Kamala Harris, who is both dark-skinned and has a vagina. The left regards any criticism of her as both racist and sexist.

This post will serve as my standard reply to their nonsense. I’m certain that if they read it, it will overload their brain cell and they’ll go back to chanting. I’m not writing it for them, I’m writing it to save myself the bother of replying to each of them.

I usually consider other people’s sex lives their own business. As long as everyone involved are consenting adults I honestly don’t care what they do. There are a couple of exceptions, though, and sleeping your way into taxpayer-funded jobs is one of them.

Kamala gave her career a huge boost by dating mayor Willie Brown. He was married and literally twice her age. He gave her her first high-profile, high-paying political job on the Insurance Appeals Board. He followed that up with an appointment to the California Medical Assistance Commission. That was a jumping-off point for the rest of her political career.

If that’s all she’d done, and then went on to an impressive political career full of fairness and compassion, we could shrug it off. But she didn’t. She worked her way up to District Attorney, and then to being a Senator. Her senatorial record is bad; her DA record is appalling.

In 2011 the Supreme Court ruled the overcrowding in California prisons was bad enough to be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Three years later another federal court ordered the state to alleviate the problem by releasing some non-violent offenders who had served half of their sentences. Kamala’s office fought their release, stating “Extending 2-for-1 credits to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation—a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.” She demanded they be kept locked up as a source of cheap ($2/day) labor. Does the pittance they were paid mean we can’t call it slavery?

She pushed for a local law, and then a state-wide law, that jailed parents if their kids were truant. When asked about the people she helped put in jail she laughed and said it was “an unintended consequence.”

She supported Asset Forfeiture – the process of the government stealing money and property without charging anyone with a crime. She has opposed reform of the process and supported its expansion.

When she was elected DA she inherited a room full of files and information the previous AG had compiled on children who had been abused, molested and raped by Catholic priests. She ignored the data, she ignored the victims, and despite the mountains of evidence at her fingertips never prosecuted a single member of the clergy during her time in office. She did, however, make many public appearances where she bragged about standing up for abused children.

She was proud of putting over 1,500 people (many of them African-American) in prison for minor pot possession charges. When asked if she smoked pot, she laughed it off and refused to answer the question.

If a straight white male had done even half of these things, the left would be outraged with him. But point out any of them to the Woke, and they will immediately, without hesitation, start screaming “You’re A Sexist Racist Misogynist and an INCEL too!”

That response is designed to immediately shut down any possibility of meaningful conversations, and it does that perfectly. Her critics despise her for solid, valid reasons, none of which have anything to do with her sex or her race. If, instead of addressing an issue, you scream “Racist! Sexist!” try growing the fuck up and stop being such a worthless wingnut.

Over the years I’ve participated in every performing art except dance. There are unenforced rules that guide every good performer. The Show Must Go On. Always Leave Them Wanting More. Don’t Work With Kids or Animals. And one that is just as important, but seldom discussed: Give Them What You Promised.

If you said you were going to make them laugh or cry, make them laugh or cry. If you advertised a show that would amaze them, you better amaze them. If you promised a show that would change their life, you won’t be able to deliver, so don’t make that promise.

If you’re an actor, you should respect and love your audience. They could have stayed home and watched Netflix. They could have made the easy, unimaginative decision to go to a movie. Instead, they spent good money, in bad money times, to come to your theater and sit in the dark and give you an opportunity to entertain them. You owe them.

Unless they’re disruptive, an actor should never, ever, single someone out and make them uncomfortable. It’s stupidly unprofessional. It ruins the show. It’s bad theater.

When Mike Pence went to see “Hamilton,” the audience was so upset he was there, and booed so long and loudly, that the show was paused briefly to give them a chance to start acting like grownups.

At the end of the show, one of the actors lectured Pence from the stage with a subtly snarky attack.

The Left is delighted, saying it was wonderful and classy. They are, as usual, wrong. Lecturing an audience member from the stage is not, never has been and never will be, wonderful or classy.

Pence is an ignorant, hate-filled, vile human being. He is a Christian Supremacist who thinks gays should be “converted,” supports the PATRIOT act, believes evolution is a lie, wants to overturn Roe v. Wade, cheers “stop and frisk,” loves having BigBrother spy on us, and wants to keep throwing people in prison for possessing an unapproved plant. He should be roundly and soundly critiqued for all of that, and more, often. But none of his vileness justifies publicly chastising him from the theater stage. It was the wrong venue.

It would have been perfectly acceptable to do it in the theater lobby, or at a political rally, or a press conference, or even shouting it at him while he was walking down the street. But in a theater, where he was a paying customer, it was wrong and unprofessional and Very Bad Theater.

Having said all that…

The reaction from his boss is entertaining and appalling. Donald fired up his Tiny Trump Twitter-Tapping Fingers® and whined about it like a perpetually offended SJW. Two weeks ago he was elected on a platform of being anti-PC. Now he’s actually calling for a Safe Space! As I publish this, days later, he’s still at it, twittering away like an angry twelve-year-old.

Mr. Pence, if you’re going to put your vile self one heartbeat away from the presidency, you’re going to have to learn how to handle complaints, ridicule, insults and verbal attacks with grace and style, regardless of the source. Having the Howler Monkey grouse about it for you is gutless and pathetically weak. To quote a line you wouldn’t recognize from a playwright you wouldn’t understand: “Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.”

Hillary lost the electoral college, which is the only thing that matters, but won the popular vote by a mere .3%. Against a buffoon like Trump. With the nearly all of the media on her side. With her party squeezing out a more popular candidate to hand her the nomination. With the payoffs (bribes in advance) she received from every sector of big business. Point. Three. Percent. That’s pathetic. That’s a rounding error.

Hillary’s almost daily scandals from Wikileaks, which her supporters shrugged off, proved over and over again that she is a duplicitous weasel. Obamacare, which she promised to expand, is a massive failure, and more huge rate increases, on top of the last huge rate increases, and the huge rate increases before that, left people scared and angry. Her stance on gun control inspired RTKABA fans to stockpile guns and ammo, and imagine that The Government was going to strip them of one of their most important rights. Her plan to finance a massive influx of fundamentalist Muslims terrified anyone watching how the’re behaving in Europe right now.

But there is another reason, perhaps the biggest reason of all, that people voted for Trump (as opposed to merely voting against Hillary).

The far left has spent the last several years smugly insisting that everyone who disagrees with them is a racist, sexist, homophobic, ignorant, misogynistic Nazi. They’ve used “white” as a racial slur and “cisgendered” as an insult.

This is especially prevalent in social media. If you politely say, “Here are three reasons I think this particular Obama policy is a bad idea,” there is an approximately 100% chance someone will reply, “You just don’t like having a black president.” If you say, “I agree with about 80% of what you’re proposing, but here is why I think you’re wrong about the rest,” you can be certain someone will inform you that your opinion doesn’t matter because you’re white or straight or male.

It’s even worse in the 3D world, where they literally scream and screech to drown out anyone they don’t like, and get people fired for perfectly innocent comments.

These approaches aren’t meant to enlighten or convince anyone, but to shut down the conversation. And it works. There are only a few ways to handle such creatures. You can insult them, you can ridicule them, or you can flip them off and walk away.

And a substantial percentage of the people on the receiving end of such vitriol kept their middle finger extended, walked into to voting booth with it still raised, and used it to pull down the lever* for the Howler Monkey.

The screechers on the left, in their infinite ignorance, haven’t figured this out yet, and instead of taking a deep breath and trying to figure what they did wrong, have *raised* the volume of their screeching by an order of magnitude.

My personal opinion of Trump voters is based solely on many conversations with friends and acquaintances who actually like The Orange One. None of them are anything like the stereotype painted by the far left.

Racist: Not a single one. I don’t hang out with racists.
Homophobic: Nope. Not one.
Misogynist: Again, not a single one. Many of them are women.
Anti-immigration: Most of them, although they’ll mostly upset about illegal immigration.
Anti-free trade: Most of them.
Anti-Obamacare: Every one of them.
Anti-abortion: Most of them.
War Mongers: Some of them. I’d say it’s about 60-40 split between those who want to ramp up our wars and those who want to bring everyone home and just worry about our own borders.
People who think Snowden and Assange are heroes: All of them.
People who dislike government in general: Nearly all of them.
Hard working people who are disgusted with the status quo in government: Every single one of them.
Low Information Voters: None of them. Every Trump fan I know is well-informed about politics, history, and a plethora of other subjects. I often strongly disagree with their conclusions, but I know they didn’t reach them via ignorance.

Your experience may be different, especially if you’re a lefty who has built themselves a nice little echo chamber of Big Brother fanboys who join you in condemning anyone with the impertinence to have a different opinion, and has never actually had a beer or smoked a cigar with a Trump supporter.

I despise Trump. And Hillary. Both are deeply horrible people, but that doesn’t mean the people who voted for either of them are horrible. They’re just people, and with a few exceptions (like the screechers) are good and decent people. They are desperate to Make Things Better and are under the mistaken impression that The Government can accomplish that. That is their biggest error in judgment.

If you’re a lefty who is going to keep spewing your stupid, uninformed opinion that Trump supporters are all bigoted, ignorant rednecks, get away from me. Go somewhere else and stew in your own juices, someplace out of earshot, because I’m tired your smug superiority and hateful bigotry, which dwarfs the bigotry you imagine pervades the minds of Trump’s fans.

And stop by CVS and pick up a four-year supply of Preparation H. I hear that helps with butthurt.

– – –
*Yes, I know there are no levers any more. I miss those old machines. They gave a nice click when you flicked a lever up or down, and a loud, satisfying Ka-Chunk when you pulled the big lever over to finalize your vote and open the curtain. They were solid and substantial, and made you feel like you were doing something worthwhile. You weren’t, but at least it felt like you were.

Libertarians have always been plagued by Purity Tests. An Anarcho-Capitalist will scream at a Minarchist: You want me to be 10% a slave? You Have No Morals! A 90% libertarian is evil and needs to be reeducated, but only after being subjected to heaps of ridicule. We measure each other, arguing over who has the biggest L. In the process, potential allies are alienated.

The top three presidential candidates for the Libertarian party were Austin Petersen, John McAfee, and the winner, Gary Johnson.

Austin has no political experience, is barely old enough to run, and his primary claim to fame is being extremity nasty on Twitter. (“You tubby piece of shit, you couldn’t even approach 1/4 of the pyramid of pussy that I swim in on a regular basis. It’s because I have class, motherfucke”) How presidential! He is, however, more libertarian than Johnson.

McAfee, a cybersecurity expert, pioneered anti-virus software, then sold his company for an estimated 100 million dollars. He moved to Belize, and after getting involved in some shady operations, became a paranoid hermit. He got over it, returned to the US, and ran for the Libertarian party’s nomination. He is also more libertarian than Johnson.

If the LP had nominated either of them, there would be much rejoicing, but it would only be audible to the party faithful. The mass media would ignore it, with the exception of a little, quickly forgotten paragraph here and there. But it’s been a little more than a week since Johnson’s nomination and we’ve already seen extensive articles about him all over the media. The Wall Street Journal, Time, GQ, Investors Business Daily and USA Today (to name a few) have published extensive articles on him. And we’re just getting started.

Which makes a lot of libertarians very angry. In blogs and social medial, they rant about what a lousy choice he is, how the party has lost its soul, how his supporters have no morals or integrity, and wah wah wha and blah blah blah.

I’ve been following politics forever, and I’ve never seen a national election like this. Voters usually get behind their party’s nominees, even if they have some reservations. Not this time. Most Democrats despise Hillary. Most Republicans hate Trump. And who can blame them? Hillary is a engorged pussbag of corruption and fraud. Trump is a dung-flinging howler monkey. They are both vile.

And then along comes Gary, with a great back story. As a young man, he started his own door-to-door handyman business and built it into a successful company with more than a thousand employees. (How’s that for job creation?) He sold it, and then went on to get elected as a Republican governor in New Mexico, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-1. He was enthusiastically re-elected four years later. He left the state with a billion dollar surplus, and a job growth rate that was the envy of just about every other state.

Oh, and for fun he climbs mountains (he’s climbed the highest mountain on every continent) and does Iron Man triathlons, making him even manlier than Hillary. Or Trump, for that matter. Voters like having someone manly in the oval office.

I’m not blind to his faults. He’s great in one-on-one conversations, but in the Libertarian debates he stumbled on some of the difficult questions. He’s about 89% libertarian – I wish the number were higher. But that’s 89% more libertarian than the other two skid-marks we’re being offered.

Libertarians have been a footnote in American politics since the party was formed way back in 1971. Finally, we have an opportunity to get our ideas out there in front of the masses. There’s even a slim chance he could win, although it would take some unlikely circumstances. Best of all, the increased publicity for the party will make it possible for other Libertarians to win smaller offices all over the country, and that could start a slow but fundamental change in the way we do government. But for that to happen, we need the complainers and saboteurs calling themselves libertarians to put on their big-boy pants and stop whining like a petulant children. Yes, there were more Pure libertarian’s available. But unlike The Pure, this guy has a chance to make a real difference. Fellow libertarians, unless you’re still enamored with losing and Purity tests, it’s time to grow up.