First the power of the podium is a real thing and I have benefited from it on many occasions, but the purpose of this rant is to convey to you what just occurred to me. Bondi’s DOJ is investigating Maine for violations of Title IX and what just occurred to me is guess what? Leo 2.0 Terrell is the person who heads up the civil rights division of DOJ. Maine is toast.

I have ranted about the men in women’s sports before but what I don’t understand is what sane person can be in favor of it. Men are clearly athletically superior to women. Not a put down just a fact. We are stronger and faster and all scientific evidence proves it. So why are many on the left denying the obvious and hurting the women who they claim to champion.

Today Trump bitch slapped the governor of Maine on national television for her idiotic position and I loved it. For a little background for those who may not know, the issue in Maine revolves around a boy, who claims he is a girl, who won the state pole vaulting championship by 8 inches over the second place girl. I’m actually surprised it wasn’t more because my best friend in high school was the state pole vault champion and I guarantee you that upper body strength is primarily the thing needed in the sport, and men have much greater upper body strength than women. Just a fact. Now the thing you may not know is that the boy who won the girl’s championship competed in the boys championship the year before and came in fifth.

Then he suddenly decided to identify as a girl and won their championship. And if you saw the photos, he didn’t change a bit. This is a guy who went through puberty as a boy, never took puberty blockers or is on estrogen. He just said I can’t win as a boy and so I’m going to say I feel like a girl so I can win. This shit has to stop and so I’m ecstatic that Trump shot her down and now Bondi is investigating Maine for violations of Title IX.

One more thing I want to mention is that these idiots on the left need to understand the power of the podium. I don’t know if I have ever talked about it before but it is a real thing. If you’re the one with the microphone standing behind the podium, you already have a tremendous advantage over anyone else who wants to question you. And then add to that that the guy with the mike is the president and the most powerful man on earth and he’s extremely quick on his feet and funny and glib and you should just shut up.

I saw an article and thread today that agrees with my assessment that Sean is a lousy interviewer. I’ve said it for years and they severely criticized his Trump Musk interview because he can’t just ask a question and then sit back and let them talk. He feels the need to insert himself and his ‘insights’ into the conversation. Listen he had one of the smartest people in the world and undoubtedly the best most insightful president in my life and he couldn’t just shut up.

He reminds me of a woman in my division who was working with me on an enforcement case and we were interviewing one of the leading figures in the world on fire matters who we had hired as our expert. I would ask him a question and she would answer and she had zero expertise in anything scientific but felt the need to try to show she was knowledgeable. She wasn’t and so I had to take her aside and tell her to shut up. He’s truly the expert and I want his answers not hers. That’s why we hired him.

Some people just try to hard to make themselves relevant.

I have been meaning to do this for a while and am now because after the initial reporting, everyone even on Fox, keeps saying that Hegseth restored the name of Fort Bragg. In case you missed it, he restored the name Fort Bragg, but it is Pfc Roland L. Bragg not the former Confederate General Bragg, who from what I have seen was actually a lousy, mostly unsuccessful general.

Pfc Bragg was a WW II hero who fought in the Battle of the Bulge. So Pete restored the name while actually naming it for someone else. A smart move.

As you know, Zelenskyy is apoplectic because Trump is meeting with Putin in Saudi Arabia to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. Now he’s stupid. I have been in many mediations and it is a common tactic of mediators, as a couple of you know, is to meet with the parties separately. Now normally the parties would appear before the mediator together and then when an agreement couldn’t be reached they meet with the parties separately to find out what they might be okay with and what’s a nonstarter and how they might be able to reach a compromise.

Now in this case a meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy would be unproductive. Zelenskyy would be a loose cannon, and probably make a resolution much more difficult. So Trump is doing the right thing.

He can find out what is Putin’s redline and then what is Zelenskyy’s redline nonnegotiable issues and press them both to compromise with pressure for what the US might contribute to mix in terms of enforcement. That’s how it works!

My first thought when they were showing his library was that it is maybe the ugliest building I have ever seen. Now Jesse and Charlie Hurt agree. What was it supposed to represent? A gray turd? And because of DEI it’s falling apart as it continues on a decade or more to open and may never because of safety concerns. It is truly representative of his presidency!

Michael Steele was apoplectic over the weekend about Elon having access to your data at the IRS. And he’s an idiot. I was planning on ranting about this as I told a couple of you at dinner tonight but then Jesse covered it tonight and I considered not ranting about it but I decided to do it anyway because I don’t know how many of you watch Jesse.

So idiot where do you think your data is? In some underground limestone vault inaccessible to everyone? No your data is readily available to ‘civil servants’ who you know zero about. Many of them could be DEI hires under Magoo. And as was pointed out on Fox, I don’t recall who, but Elon ran PayPal and already has access to your personal information.

You don’t have any idea about how many federal employees, unvetted and unelected, who have access to your data and could use it to your detriment. Musk and his federal employees don’t need your data to try to scam you. He’s the richest man in the world. Do you seriously think that he wants to bilk you for a few hundred dollars?

These idiots just need to shut up.

I saw that yesterday OPM issued orders to all agencies to fire all probationary employees. Now for those of you who don’t know, all employees hired by the federal government are on probation for two years. After that they have the full complement of employee rights but in the first two years they can basically be fired at will. I had to certify that they were good before the end of the probation period.

(As an aside because I had over two years of federal employment because of my Co-Op engineering employment, I was already past probation when I was hired by the agency I worked at for almost thirty years and so they were stuck with me.)

Now this is one way to reduce the federal government but it is not the best way. The problem is that once again it fires people indiscriminately without regard to competency. Some of these new hires maybe the wiz kids we need. What we need to eliminate is the numerous senior employees who are worthless and just getting by like labor union members on seniority.

I love DOGE but I want to see a more targeted approach to firing federal employees. Now if you eliminate entire agencies or functions and then you have to go no matter how competent you are because you are doing things that don’t need to be done.

Just to clarify what I mentioned in my previous rant, there are several of you who are old enough to have been in the IBM punch card game but I don’t think any of you actually developed computer programs in that time. So I will explain what was involved. Back then you couldn’t just log on your computer and access a programming site and type in your program. No IBM was the system and to run a program you had to go to the computer center and using IBM punch cards , which we had to buy but weren’t expensive maybe $5 for a hundred or so, and they were stiff and probably stacked up as maybe 50 to 70 for an inch. You put them in the punch machine and then on a keyboard you typed out a card for every line in your program.

As an aside, in my senior year we had a stand alone computer that I had access to because I was being paid as a computer assistant to help students with questions and I could type the program directly into the computer without punch cards.

Now with punch cards think hanging chads. The point of this rant is that once for a reason I don’t recall we had to develop a program in FORTRAN and they had to develop the same program in COBOL and my stack was about an inch high and theirs was about six inches. It was and still is a stupid computer language.

This is like when I told you that the National Archives is looking for people who could read and write cursive. With a DOGE update you could probably eliminate 75% or more of federal IT positions.

I was just watching Treasury Secretary Bessent on Ingraham and he said that the 12 or so computer systems at the IRS are running on COBOL, an obsolete programming language. People COBOL was invented in 1959 and was one of the two computer languages in vogue when I was in college 60+ years ago. It was the language used by businesses and financial institutions etc. The other language was FORTRAN which is the one I knew and used because it was the one used in math and science etc. Personally I don’t know why anyone would ever use COBOL because I could do the same thing in FORTRAN with a third or less lines of code.

Anyway, my point is that this is exactly why we need Musk and his nerd wizards to clean up the mess. I saw when I was looking up COBOL that they are actively searching for people who are literate in it because of all the antiquated systems that need to be maintained.

It reminds me of that space movie where they had to bring back old astronauts like Bruce Willis and others because they needed people who were familiar with whatever antiquated computer language that was required.