New! – Your Chicagoboyz Black-Coffee Friday Holiday Espresso Update

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After a couple of not entirely satisfactory years with a low-end conventional espresso maker (discussed here, here and here) and this morning’s epic hot milk explosion we decided to buy a standalone milk frothing device and ended up ordering this DeLonghi-made Nespresso machine, which comes with a milk frother for around $104 total (after coupon) on a Black Friday deal.

We have never owned a Nespresso but have given a couple of them as gifts and everyone loves them. Of course you have to buy coffee capsules, which are pricey if you buy the Nespresso branded ones but a very reasonable 33 cents each if you buy the ones from Bestpresso. These are excellent in our experience.
 

 
UPDATE: There’s a similar deal on a Breville-made Nespresso/frother combo:
 

 
 
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Disclosure: This blog post was written under the influence of caffeine. Chicago Boyz earns an affiliate payment from Amazon when you buy any product through any of the Amazon links on this blog. If you buy stuff through our links we can afford to buy more espresso.

Thanks Giving

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You just know, as surely as the sun rises in the east, that when Thanksgiving Day rolls around (and Columbus Day as well) the usual malignant scolds will be hard at work, planting turds in the harvest-festival punchbowl. They have become pinch-faced, joyless neo-Puritans, ruthlessly seeking out any hint of happy celebration and thankfulness for bounty of harvest and generous fortune, jumping on any display of human fellow-feeling even just having a pleasant time doing things that make the heart glad insisting that such occasions and people are to be condemned as earnestly as Savonarola ever did, piling up works of art to be burnt in the public square. As HL Menken observed, it’s the haunting fear of such people, that “someone, somewhere, may be happy.” It is their grim, chosen, killjoy duty to stamp out such emotions and celebrations, wherever they may be found. So sayeth the current crop of student activists, as reported here: Thanksgiving is “a celebration of the ongoing genocide against native peoples and cultures across the globe.”

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Reiteration

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Whenever a tragedy with a mental health angle occurs, there are predictable responses. These vary in awareness of the realities. As I have made my living working with psychiatric emergencies for forty years, I know enough to be at least moderately helpful, and from time to time I reiterate some points that get consistently missed.

After the fact, and working from scraps of information, many people conclude that it was patently obvious that the bomber or shooter or pact suicide was dangerous and ill. Therefore, they believe that the emergency room, or clinic, or hospital messed up by not picking up on the obvious and moving to treat that person. Well, we could always do better, as in everything else, and sometimes it’s true, but that conclusion is often spectacularly wrong. No, that’s just making excuses. The guy told them he was thinking about killing people and was also suicidal. We admit over 2,000 people a year to our 150-bed involuntary facility, and every single one of them reaches some threshold of dangerousness, enough that it has to hold up at minimum, at a probable cause hearing. The suicide and homicide rates of our discharges is not that much higher than the general population. (The self-harming rate is much higher.)

Yet they have said and done dangerous things, which is how they got to our hospital. When I read the news stories of what the killer said when he was brought in for evaluation two months or two years before, I am seldom impressed with how alarmingly dangerous the statements are. I have known thousands of people who have said or done similar things. Sometimes the quotes or actions do sound more alarming to me, but not reliably. Most usually, the person is acting more rationally after a little treatment and is no longer actively suicidal or homicidal. We have to decide what is the safe amount of time after to hold them to reduce the risk.

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What about vote fraud in the election ?

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UPDATE: The results as of November 18.

I’m not really writing about Broward County in Florida as that seems to be old fashioned Democrat fraud. In 2016, there was almost certainly vote fraud.

“There is no authentic surge,” a source at the Broward County Supervisor of Elections told People’s Pundit Daily. “They’ve been at this [filling out absentee ballots] for days, working 4 to 5 employees some 16 hours a day each. There’s no telling how many ballots we are talking about. As many as they can each write in 16 hours a piece.”

A review of the early and absentee voting statistics in the statewhich People’s Pundit Daily does on a daily basisdoes reveal a suspicious increase in Democratic returns juxtaposed to the rest of the state, which has not experienced the same turnout increase. If enthusiasm and turnout for Mrs. Clinton was organic and legitimate, then we would expect to see those gains in similar percentages in regions of the state expected to back the Democrat.

But that’s not the case.

Sources confirm Snipes was breaking the law and opened more than 153,000 ballots cast by mail in private, claiming employees were tearing up and disposing of those that were votes in support of Donald J. Trump. The law prohibits the opening of ballots without the supervision of a canvassing board appointed to oversee and certify elections precisely because of this possibility.

That seems to be correct but why was that person still running the election in Broward County in 2018?

Within hours of receiving Ingoglia’s letter, a judge on Broward’s canvassing board offered a two-step compromise that ended the charge by Republicans. But Snipes admitted no wrongdoing and, until now, was able to maintain the story that the employees didn’t open the ballots.

“The canvassing board has never opened the ballots,” Snipes said. “We have procedures we follow that are approved in our security manual sent to state. We don’t feel like we are doing anything illegal — this is the process we have always used.”

But it was only because David Shestokas, a Florida Bar-certified attorney, was sent by the Republican National Lawyers Association from Chicago to watch the election in Broward that these activities were made known.

What about the 2018 election ?

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