James

Husband, father of 5 great kids, Texan from birth, Longhorn, Aggie Dad x3, Catholic

[One America News @OANN]

Florida alleges Pfizer knew about troubling COVID vaccine safety signals. @DrKatLindley explains why this lawsuit could finally open the door to transparency and accountability.

[James @jpmccabe6]

@GeorgeCaviness1 @NHC_Atlantic @TheEyewallWx
These guys will let you know without the usual hype.

[Chris Stefanick @ChrisStefanick]

Today is the feast of St. Monica: the mother of St. Augustine, one of the most influential saints in Church history.

Before he became the Saint we know, he spent most of his time breaking his Catholic mother's heart. Maybe you're a parent who can relate.

My sister painted this image of her. In traditional iconography, Mary is often shown at the foot of the cross as if cradling a baby, but with empty arms. My sister depicted Monica the same way: arms empty, praying for the conversion of her son.

For years, Monica followed him, worked behind the scenes to connect him with holy people, and above all, prayed for him.

The fact that her feast day falls the day before Augustine's is no accident. The reason we have a St. Augustine is BECAUSE we had a St. Monica. She gave birth to him a second time, through her prayers and tears.

She died a happy woman. In his Confessions, Augustine describes the two of them standing at a window, looking out over a garden, talking about what heaven would be like. His mother turned to him:

"Son… I do not know why I am still here. I did have one reason for wanting to live a little longer: to see you become a Catholic Christian before I died. God has lavished his gifts on me in that respect… So what am I doing here?"

Within days she was gone. Her last request:

"One thing only I ask you, that you remember me at the altar of the Lord wherever you may be."

Monica's persistence is a reminder of a few things:

1.) Nothing matters more than the holiness of our children. Nothing. How we raise them needs to actually reflect that.
2.) The prayers of a holy mom (and dad) WORK.
3.) If you're a praying parent, never give up hope. Ever. Even if you don't die with the consolation Monica had, your prayers for your children don't stop in this life.

As a bishop told her while she wept for Augustine: "it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish."

God can't ignore a mother's tears.

St. Monica, pray for us!

____
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[Jeffrey A Tucker @jeffreytucker]

What Did Fauci Mean by “Game On”? - Jeffrey Tucker - The Brownstone Show... https://t.co/KChDnYOWFu via @YouTube

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.

Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one.

And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you.

So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip.

Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook.

And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review.

An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes.

Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died.

Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result.

Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data.

Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan.

Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it.

Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator.

Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS.

And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair.

That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat.

Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it.

I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers.

You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run.

But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.

@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

[James @jpmccabe6]

@GregSwindell Just talking ball with Pops

[James @jpmccabe6]

@GregSwindell You’ll be great Zeke!

[James @jpmccabe6]

@ChanceMock Agree…so so true

[James @jpmccabe6]

@CanariesBlue @TexasGOP Sitting out doesn’t help anything. Work the process.

[James @jpmccabe6]

@chrisboettcher9 Food

[James @jpmccabe6]

@GregSwindell Looks great!
But Apple doesn’t know who is Zeek and who is Zonk. I’m sure they will get the description right eventually

[James @jpmccabe6]

@BON_SBNation Well it got ugly

[James @jpmccabe6]

@KurtSchlichter Not a lawyer. My favorite quote from my B-law professor was “you can always sue. The question is can you win?”

[Brian Brown @briansbrown]

Go to Church today.

Don't be weak.

Today, September 14th, is The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Remember the Church not only celebrates today St. Helena's miraculous finding of the cross in Jerusalem in 326-328, but Emperor Heraclius's recovery of the Holy Cross and taking of Jerusalem in 628.

Remember this, ladies: St. Helena had the vision and fortitude to travel to the Holy Land explicitly seeking the sites of Christ's passion. She was likely around 78 when she began this journey. She never gave up and was blessed with finding the True Cross.

Remember this, men: Today's feast day also commemorates an Emporer who would not give up the Holy Cross and the Holy Land to the Persians. Emperor Heraclius fought military campaigns, sometimes against great odds, and with God's grace, recaptured the True Cross...and Jerusalem.

The painting below is Emperor Heraclius slaying the Zoroastrian Persian King.

[James @jpmccabe6]

@BarstoolTexasAM Pray pray pray

[James @jpmccabe6]

@UTBarstool Still bench him
Let him think you’re evaluating the QB position

[James @jpmccabe6]

@UTBarstool Bench him

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

Yesterday, for the first time, I turned my back on a liberal neighbor and walked away. For Charlie.

I get asked daily by conservatives how I can possibly live in the most liberal town of the most liberal state.

Truth is, I’ve always been fascinated by how they think. I usually just laugh at the irrational takes.

But a single gunshot drained all curiosity and humor out of me.

He simply asked how I was. I said I was sad. He asked why.

“It’s 9/11. My dad was FDNY. And yesterday I lost a friend.”

His face softened. “I’m so sorry.”

I didn’t want to cry, so I backpedaled. “It’s ok, we weren’t close. Just spoke a few times but he felt like a good friend.”

“Who was it?” he asked.

“Charlie Kirk.”

Empathy turned to anger. Like I’d tricked him.

“Well, I don’t know him, and I don’t care what happens to him.”

“But he was my friend. I’m your friend. Isn’t that enough to care?”

He pivoted to politics. Gun violence. Assault weapon bans. “You people.”

I said it was a bolt-action rifle. He didn’t care. He said he didn’t care about Charlie.

Even though Charlie was a father? A friend? A believer?

“No,” he said. But his body language betrayed him. He did care.

Then: “I don’t want to talk politics.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I lost a friend. A friend with a wife and two beautiful daughters.”

Again: “I don’t care.”

So I turned and walked away.

He could have changed the subject, asked me about my Dad and 9/11 instead. But he was fixated on political drama not true empathy.

Some Republicans will say I should’ve stood my ground, yelled, fought back, told him off.

Some Democrat friends will say I should’ve leaned in harder with empathy and spent time getting him to understand my point of view.

But here’s the truth: I’m done.
Done debating. Done convincing. Done trying to “win” them over.

Charlie lived that. He spoke truth with compassion, even behind “enemy lines.” He never saw Democrats as the enemy. He saw Americans missing key pieces of the truth. He gave empathy and respect coupled with hard truths until his last dying breath.

He was a better man than me. Better than most of us.

And now he’s gone.

I’m not a great men Charlie, I’m a Captain in the U.S. Merchant Marine. We don’t talk, or seek glory & fame, don’t ask for thanks or forgiveness. We just move cargo. LOTS of cargo.

Our motto is simple: Acta Non Verba.

Actions, not words.

So why don’t I fight harder in my own neighborhood? Why do I let it go when a neighbors took down my flag on “no kings day”? Why do I remove the Trump magnet on my tesla when I get home.

Because the consequences are real. They don’t just punish me my kids will suffer for the sins of the father. But as the man said, he doesn’t care. That’s the line I won’t let them cross.

And because I do not have the courage of Charlie.

But gratitude for Charlie demands something more. Something bigger than my town which isn’t going to change. Debate is over. Tears are over. The time for action is here.

Not violence. Not riots. Not theatrics.

Political action.

Votes. Campaign cash. Pink slips across DC. Crowds of conservatives in every GOP office in congress demanding they stop doing TV appearances and start playing hardball.

Laws flipped at local, state & federal levels.

A dozen Scott Preslers in every California & Vermont farm town & every NYC church, rising Christians to vote out Sanders, Newsom, AOC & Mamdani.

An army of white hats exposing criminal NGOs, with Mike Benz, Data Republican, and a phalanx of lawyers volunteering for Will Chamberlain to get convictions.

Mass action against every Marxist policy.

We will not out-scream them. We will out-organize them. You can literally debate them until your last dying breath and nothing will change.

They don’t care and there is no way to change the mind of an apathetic man.

The time for debate is over.

We must speak softly and start carrying a big stick.

Acta non verba.

For Charlie.

[James @jpmccabe6]

@billyliucci Very true