How does it work, going on strike in a job for which a replacement can be trained in half a day?

This site reported, back in June, how the ‘baristas’ at the OCF Coffee Shops in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia moved to unionize, and then owner Ori Feibush simply closed all of the shops he owned.

Now the Starbucks Workers United union has announced, on Bluesky, that they ain’t going to take anymore, that they’re going out on strike!

In the heyday of unionization, unions were representing workers who actually had some skills, workers who could not easily be replaced, because their skills were needed to do their jobs, and it took a long time to develop those skills. Perhaps, just perhaps, pulling a cup of coffee isn’t that difficult a skill to learn?

I’ve mentioned it before: rather than driving to a coffee shop, and paying $3.50 or $4.25 or whatever for a ‘barista’ to pull a cup of coffee for me, I can make it at home, in less than a minute, in my Keurig, for roughly 50¢. I’m saving money on the coffee, saving the environment a paper cup to be recycled or thrown in the trash, saving however much gasoline I would burn to get to such a coffee shop, and saving however many miles of additional wear-and-tear on my truck to get me there and back.

I am wryly amused.

Half of the real women are deserting SJSU volleyball team

We have previously reported on the controversy over San José State University’s ‘transgender’ women’s volleyball player. Brayden Fleming, a male, has been passing himself off as female, apparently well enough that most of the women’s volleyball team didn’t know that she was a he. During recruiting, prospects were not told that there was a male on the team.

Five colleges chose to forfeit seven regular-season games rather than play SJSU, and then one of those five opted to forfeit the semi-final match against the school in the Mountain West Tournament as well. SJSU lost in the conference final, and was not invited to the NCAA Tournament as an at-large team, which ended Mr Fleming’s career; he was a redshirt senior, and is out of eligibility.

One SJSU player, and an assistant coach, joined the lawsuit against the college, but it seems that perhaps more than one of the team members were unhappy:

SJSU responds to volleyball player mass exodus after trans athlete scandal rocked program

7 players have entered the transfer portal

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Journolism: Even now, the credentialed media try to blame their laziness on Joe Biden’s staffers

At 2:55 PM EST on December 17th, I asked the question to which The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal admitted the answer on the 19th: “Why didn’t the press play its ‘adversarial role’ when it came to Joe Biden?

How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge

Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.

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I check Bluesky so you don’t have to

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain has frequently written, “I watch CNN” or sometimes MSNBC, “so you don’t have to. Well, I went ahead and checked out Bluesky, the liberal version of Twitter, so that you don’t have to.

As we reported on December 3rd, Bluesky suspended the account of Libs of TikTok. Given that Chaya Raichik’s modus vivendi is to search out idiocy from leftists on social media and then publish it more widely, to mock the left, it seems that Bluesky just can’t handle the truth. No one, after all, accuses Miss Raichik of falsifying what she posts.

And now she’s tweeted out this one:

BlueSky Sees Surge in New Users and Child Sexual Abuse Material

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Democrisy: the left who concealed everything about Joe Biden’s condition, are terribly worried over Donald Trump’s bruised hand

We noted, just yesterday, how the credentialed media, which the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer told us:

(President) Trump and his allies fail to understand the adversarial role the press plays in a healthy democracy.

Of course, that supposedly-adversarial press failed to tell us that President Joe Biden was in serious physical and mental decline during his term in office, failed to tell us until it was revealed to all in that disastrous-for-him debate on June 27th, and the in-the-bag-for-the-Democrats media couldn’t keep it a secret any longer.

But now? We’re getting the latest meme from the Democrats, telling us our 45th and soon to be 47th President is sick, or injured, or something, from what appears to be a bruise on the back of one of his hands. To me, it looks like bruising from an IV stick, but I’m not a doctor or nurse. It also looks like President Trump can actually walk, unaided, an ability which is increasingly eluding our 46th President. Continue reading

Why didn’t the press play its “adversarial role” when it came to Joe Biden?

Our regular readers — both of them — know that I am very much attached to the idea of print newspapers, despite them being slightly updated 18th century technology. I delivered newspapers as a teenager, and with my seriously degraded hearing, watching the news on television is difficult for me; even with close captioning, which is usually poor on live broadcasts, I can miss things. With the printed word, even though by printed I mean words on my computer monitor, not actual paper, I don’t miss much, and if there is a point on which I was confused, I can go back and read it again, to make certain I understood what was written.

So, quite naturally, I was reeled in by this story, that Rob Flaherty, the former deputy campaign manager for Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, claimed there was “just no value” in candidates speaking to mainstream newspapers like The New York Times or Washington Post. Naturally, my mind went to the complaints by people like The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard left columnist Will Bunch that newspapers specifically, and the credentialed media in general, were not hard enough on former and now future President Donald Trump.

But then came a second paragraph, which destroyed my preconceived notion of what the article was going to say: Continue reading

Is Bill Kristol running our foreign policy?

There was a no-win question asked on the fourth-grade playground at Mt Sterling Elementary School when I attended, back in the days of quill pens and inkwells: If you were up to your neck in [insert vulgar term for feces here], and someone threw a bucket of [insert slang term for urine here] at your head, would you duck? That’s of what President Joe Biden’s latest foreign policy move reminds me:

US asks Israel to approve military aid to Palestinian security forces

By Jewish News Syndicate | Boston Tea Party Day, December 16, 2024 | 2:55 PM EST

The Biden administration has privately asked Israel to approve an urgent request for U.S. military aid to Palestinian Authority forces, Palestinian, American, and Israeli officials told Axios on Sunday night. Continue reading

President Trump needs to roll back the ATF’s regulations over the last four years

The old saw is that Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms should be a convenience store, not a government agency, but now New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush tells us that former and future President Trump might not nominate anyone to head it. The article headline, “A.T.F. Braces for a Likely Rollback of Its Gun-Control Efforts,” certainly caught my eye:

A.T.F. Braces for a Likely Rollback of Its Gun-Control Efforts

President-elect Donald J. Trump is almost certain to choose a gun-rights advocate as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives or to simply leave the job vacant.

by Glenn Thrush | Saturday, December 14, 2024 | 1:25 PM EST

Many federal agencies are bracing for the Trump era — but few are likely to face the powerful backlash that awaits the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which pursued an aggressive gun control agenda under President Biden. Continue reading

Oh the poor little lambs who don’t want to return to the office!

During the COVID-19 panicdemic — no, that’s not a typographical error, but is spelled exactly the way I see it — employees who could work from home were told to do so. As it happened, my younger daughter, an IT/communications professional, worked from our farm. Fortunately, I had already installed an outdoor electric receptacle on the screened-in porch, and she did a lot of her work there.

A cup of raktajino — Klingon coffee — in a mug celebrating my status as a descendant of white, Christian, settler colonialists to start the morning.

And she was quite honest about the whole thing: she was just not as productive working at our home. With cats and dogs and chickens, with fine Kentucky spring and summer weather, there were simply too many distractions.

And it’s good for the employees as well . . . as long as they are not Jeffrey Toobin. A cup of coffee in the morning costs me 50¢, not $4.50 at Starbucks.

Logically, if most employees were as productive working from home as they are at the office, employers would love that. Having employees working at home means that employers could maintain smaller offices, have smaller parking lots, reduced janitorial services, reduced office ‘perks’ expenses, just a whole host of things. It only makes sense to require people who could work from home to come into the office if productivity is a real issue.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Meet the People Who Refused to Go Back to the Office and Lost Their Jobs

These people are coming to terms with the fact that they might never work from home again

by Callum Borchers | Wednesday, December 11, 2024 | 9:00 PM EST

If you’re reading this from your home office, it’s time to consider whether you’re prepared to lose your job over a return-to-office mandate. Continue reading