Oldedaddy

Father of 1 amazing son and 2 beautiful daughters. Baseball, baseball history and Texas Rangers fan. Baseball Card Collector

[Oldedaddy @oldedaddy1959]

@hndrxx_34 Gallo career batting average .194. Out of league age 30.
Come on man.

[Oldedaddy @oldedaddy1959]

@skostyboi Sell. But who fetches a good return? Haven’t won division in ten years. 2023 playoff heater was great! Bad baseball 2017-22. Bad baseball 2024-now. New draft/development model needed. Aging roster. Week farm. Bad combo.
Need new plan.

[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

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 BOOM: Elon Musk amplifies the moment Sec. Marco Rubio said it PERFECTLY on communists and leftist terrorists

"One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism is that it 'sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice.' That's actually NOT TRUE. Communism does NOT sound good in theory. The world that envisions for all of us is small, flat, gray, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul."

"The world communism envisions is a world without God."

"[Leftist terrorism] is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good."

"It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can!"

"The fundamental character is always the same. It's always the same. It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation and overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world."

"Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us. The old dogma was wrong. The old dogma was wrong. None of this is driven by idealism. It is not utopian."

🔥🔥🇺🇸

[Tony Seruga @TonySeruga]

🔥 TRUMP JUST REPOSTED JFK’S MOST TERRIFYING SPEECH — AND THE DEEP STATE IS PANICKING

JFK saw it coming. In 1961. And now, Trump has just made sure 300 million Americans see it, too.

The speech everyone’s talking about: Kennedy’s address to the American Newspaper Publishers Association, April 27, 1961. The CIA had just botched the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy was livid. He’d been lied to by his own intelligence apparatus. And he walked onto that stage and said something no president has dared say since.

“We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence — on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice.”

Read that again. Monolithic. Ruthless. Conspiracy.

This wasn’t some fringe radio host. This was the sitting President of the United States, on live television, telling the American people that a shadow network of power — operating through intelligence agencies, media complicity, and institutional capture — was working against the republic itself.

And then he said the quiet part out loud:

“Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.”

Sound familiar?

Sixty-five years later, Trump drops this video on Truth Social. No commentary needed. The speech does all the work. And within hours, the same media outlets that spent four years calling Trump a conspiracy theorist are suddenly very quiet.

Here’s what they don’t want you to connect:

- Kennedy was assassinated 2.5 years after this speech

- The Warren Commission was a joke — even the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979 concluded Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”

- The files are STILL classified

- Trump has been pushing to release them, but the permanent national security state refuses, instead slow-walking the order

The timing isn’t random. This isn’t just history. JFK described a permanent national security state that has only grown more entrenched — one that operates beyond elections, beyond accountability, beyond the reach of voters.

Kennedy called it “a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.”

That machine didn’t disappear when he died. It got even stronger.

Trump reposting this isn’t nostalgia. It’s a signal. The same forces JFK warned about are the same forces that tried to destroy Trump — Russiagate, two impeachments, lawfare, media blackout, assassination attempts. The playbook hasn’t changed. Only the names.

And now the sitting president just reminded the country who the real enemy has always been.

The speech that scared them then is the speech they’re terrified you’ll watch now.

Sharing this because they’re counting on you not to watch it. Don’t let them win. 🎯

[Matt RE @realmatt_re]

I just left Costco and I feel like an idiot...

The people in front of me bought $1,200 in top shelf alcohol, cases of redbull, and steaks.

They split it up and paid for the steaks and redbull with EBT, and then pulled out a giant wad of $100 bills to pay for the alcohol in cash.

WTF am I doing with my life??? I haven't bought steak in years - I haven't bought alcohol in decades. Too expensive. On the rare occasion we eat out, I buy the cheapest thing on the menu.

Yet these people can just casually drop thousands of dollars of my tax money on things I can't even afford?? Just to drive home to a taxpayer funded house nicer than I live in.

We are completely destroyed as a society.

[Haggerty muse @haggertymuse]

I prepaid $150 for Victory+ back in November because it was advertised as the home of Rangers baseball. I paid months in advance with the expectation that I'd be able to watch the entire season on my TV.
Then, in the middle of the season, the Rangers decide to move to BZZR—a service that doesn't even have a Roku app until August or possibly September.
So what are fans like me with older TVs and Roku devices supposed to do? We're told to watch on a PC, a phone, or buy a Chromecast. That's not what I paid for. I paid to watch Rangers baseball on my TV, just like I have all season.
Even worse, there was no partial refund, no credit, and no option for customers who can no longer access the service they prepaid for. You changed the product after taking our money and just expect us to deal with it.
This is a terrible way to treat loyal fans. If enough people feel the same way, make your voices heard. Contact BZZR support at [email protected] and let them know this rollout is unacceptable. Fans shouldn't have to buy new hardware in the middle of the season because the Rangers changed streaming platforms.

@BZZROfficial @victoryplustv @Rangers @RangersSNtv

[Oldedaddy @oldedaddy1959]

@JaredSandler I go back and forth, buy v sell. But with lockout/strike likely causing short or no season next year it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go for it now.
I would prefer a rebuild of farm system but I think owners are dug in on changing current SOP and want big change.

[The Disrespected Trucker @DisrespectedThe]

Foreign driver gets caught dumping rejected product at a truckstop and this guy made him pick it up and put it back in his truck.

[Electroverse @Electroversenet]

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology has been audited station by station. The report reveals that the agency has systematically erased cooling trends from the historical record, replacing them with synthetic warming.

At Rutherglen, Victoria for example, raw data from 1913 to 2006 showed a cooling trend. But the Bureau's adjusted chart flips this into warming. No physical justification, just statistical sleight of hand.

Comparisons at Deniliquin also reveals the tactic - how past highs have been lowered to fit the narrative. Minimums from 1910 onward here are reduced by as much as 1.8C. These edits weren't based on new evidence. They were applied decades later by opaque homogenization models.

The report's author calls it the rewriting of Australia's temperature history. But it's not just happening in Australia. Climate agencies in the UK and US have also cooled the past so as to exaggerate or even fabricate modern warming trends.

This manipulated data is then paraded as truth by politicians and the media with the original measurements buried.

[The SCIF @TheSCIF]

USPS worker involved in the Wisconsin 2020 Election testified that their higher-ups ordered them to backdate over 100,000 ballots.

Adjudication workers in GA were working with no oversight or chain-of-custody, which allowed them to switch Trump votes to Biden at the click of a button.

Election workers in Detroit testified he witnessed election workers counting and processing invalid ballots for Biden.

Other election workers in multiple states were threatened or even permitted to observe the counting as their job required them to do.

Every recent forensic report coming out today is confirming everything we were told in 2020.

[MAZE @mazemoore]

2006. Senator Obama slams the Bush Administration for not doing more workplace raids to catch and deport illegal immigrants.

It appears that the Democrat party has changed a little bit over the past 20 years. 🤪

[MatrixMysteries @MatrixMysteries]

"Since we’re on the verge of a Muslim takeover, here are some fun facts about the 'cultural' differences"

“Pakistan leads with 40% first-cousin marriages. Yemen & Iraq allow 9-year-old girls to marry. Somalia has 98% female genital mutilation."

Americans better wake up — fast

[MatrixMysteries @MatrixMysteries]

“We will replace the U.S. Constitution with the Quran.”

“We will abolish the Constitution and impose the Quran and Sunnah as the only law.”

“Spreading Islam requires jihad — fight those who reject it. This is Allah’s command.”

The mask is off.

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

Islamic scholar in California, Uthman Farooq, has a message to Americans:

“You cannot stop Islam in America. This is NOT your country, this is OUR country. This is the land of Allah. If you want to live in a place with no Muslims, I suggest you go to hell.”

[DR POOL @DRPOOLQ17]

🚨 BREAKING: Four MS-13 illegal aliens have been arrested in Maryland after they hacked a 14-year-old boy to d*ath with a machete

Brought to you by Maryland Sen. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, margarita-enjoyer with MS-13 Abrego Garcia.

HE SHOULD RESIGN.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 BREAKING: Outrage erupts after the man charged with KlLLING a Pennsylvania State Trooper has been confirmed as a HAITIAN ILLEGAL ALIEN

Haitian Michael Bon got a Commercial Driver's License from blue Massachusetts — then killed Trooper Michael Pahira in a tractor trailer 😡

PURGE THE CDL ROLLS and FEDERALIZE it to the maximum! Massachusetts must be held liable.

This is why they ALL MUST GO BACK and Haitian TPS must be CANCELED!

[American Truckers United @atutruckers]

Massachusetts gave this illegal alien a Non-Domicile CDL.

Now a Pennsylvania state trooper is dead!!

It's time for law enforcement officers to stand with American Truckers!

REVOKE ALL NON-DOMICILE CDLS

[Oldedaddy @oldedaddy1959]

@uniformcritic This is a great book.

[Oldedaddy @oldedaddy1959]

@txrangerwizard They aren’t selling. AL is weak. In 1st place. Best AL record this month(AL is weak). Great chance next season isn’t played so try now. Weak farm so hard to see a big addition via trade. Montgomery ready soon? SP rotation/Latz keeps them in the race(weak AL)