Ann Wilson(Empire1) 2022 Dave In Texas 2022
Jesse in D.C. 2022 OregonMuse 2022
redc1c4 2021
Tami 2021
Chavez the Hugo 2020
Ibguy 2020
Rickl 2019
Joffen 2014
The Greek policymaker has been suspended from the Socialists and Democrats parliamentary group as well as the Greek national party PASOK until further notice.
It's just the 13900K with a small clock speed bump, but that bump takes it to 6GHz, so again useful for getting an edge over your crazy neighbour with his 5.8GHz CPU.
Sana, Pina, and Pomu (my new server cluster) are all currently running memory memory tests before being pressed into production. Zero errors so far.
This site (no matter which site you are reading this post on) will be moving to the new cluster in early January. Not to one server in the cluster, but to all of them at once.
Disclaimer: Names changed to protect the bioreactor.
The Twitter Files: The Road to the Removal of Donald Trump Update: Mike Huckabee Was Nearly Banned for Making a Joke
—Ace
@mataibbi
1. THREAD: The Twitter Files
THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP
Part One: October 2020-January 6th
This tranche will concern the backdrop to the removal of Trump, not the main event.
2. The world knows much of the story of what happened between riots at the Capitol on January 6th, and the removal of President Donald Trump from Twitter on January 8th...
3. We'll show you what hasn't been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies.
4. This first installment covers the period before the election through January 6th. Tomorrow, @Shellenbergermd will detail the chaos inside Twitter on January 7th. On Sunday, @BariWeiss will reveal the secret internal communications from the key date of January 8th.
5. Whatever your opinion on the decision to remove Trump that day, the internal communications at Twitter between January 6th-January 8th have clear historical import. Even Twitter's employees understood in the moment it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech.
So the big reveals will be tomorrow and Sunday, but tonight will be interesting too.
The article will be tweeted here. I won't be copy and pasting it into the blog because, well, I mean. You can just read it on Twitter.
Update: Yoel Roth seems to admit here that the FBI told him that Trump was some kind of "danger" to democracy and that Twitter should ban him.
Here Roth laments that his electronic calendar does not have generic enough descriptions to allow him to hide the people he's having meetings with -- the government, the FBI.
Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
10. As the election approached, senior executives -- perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed -- increasingly struggled with rules, and began to speak of "vios" as pretexts to do what they'd likely have done anyway.
11. After J6, internal Slacks show Twitter executives getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies. Here's Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth, lamenting a lack of "generic enough" calendar descriptions to concealing his "very interesting" meeting partners.
Update: Mike Huckabee was nearly banned for what Twitter admitted was a joke. Only lefties are allowed to joke. (Or to speculate, or to make guesses, or to deviate from the Established Official Government Cover Story in any way whatsoever. If anyone else does it, it's Disinformation.)
27. Examining the entire election enforcement Slack, we didn't see one reference to moderation requests from the Trump campaign, the Trump White House, or Republicans generally. We looked. They may exist: we were told they do. However, they were absent here.
31. In one case, former Arizona governor Mike Huckabee joke-tweets about mailing in ballots for his "deceased parents and grandparents."
32. This inspires a long Slack that reads like an @TitaniaMcGrath parody. "I agree it's a joke," concedes a Twitter employee, "but he's also literally admitting in a tweet a crime."
The group declares Huck's an "edge case," and though one notes, "we don't make exceptions for jokes or satire," they ultimately decide to leave him be, because "we've poked enough bears."
33. "Could still mislead people... could still mislead people," the humor-averse group declares, before moving on from Huckabee
33. Roth suggests moderation even in this absurd case could depend on whether or not the joke results in "confusion.' This seemingly silly case actually foreshadows serious later issues:
34. In the docs, execs often expand criteria to subjective issues like intent (yes, a video is authentic, but why was it shown?), orientation (was a banned tweet shown to condemn, or support?), or reception (did a joke cause "confusion"?). This reflex will become key in J6.
This is what leftwing "fact-checkers" do all the time: If it's a liberal telling a joke, that's the end of the inquiry. It's a joke. Therefore it's not misleading. There's no fact to check in a joke.
But if it's a conservative telling a joke, they start scrutinizing for "intent," "capacity to mislead," etc.
If a liberal statement is true on its face, then it's true. End of analysis. But leftwing fact checkers won't allow a conservative statement to be rated as true if it's merely true on its face -- they'll search to see if it has any possible implications which they can quibble with. And if they disagree with those implications, the statement is false (or partly false). Note the liberal statements also of course have implications of dubious veracity -- but the leftwing fact-checkers never bother checking those.
"Fact" checkers terminate inquiries into the veracity of leftwing statements as quickly as possible, finding them to be factual, but do the most probing possible analyses of conservative statements, from the subatomic scale to the transcendental metaphysical levels of what the statement "could possibly mean to someone."
If Taibbi isn't careful, he'll wind up overturning the applecart on the whole "fact" checking scam!
We needed to have a discussion, an open scientific discussion about the right policies for COVID. Imagine how different all the small businesses who stayed open, all the people that wouldn't have missed their cancer screenings, all the kids that wouldn't be depressed and suicidal, all the learning loss that could have been avoided if we just had an open scientific discussion. This was not a free and fair kind of discussion. It wasn't science that happened. When we followed the science, it was not actually science we followed. It was something else entirely. It was censorship that I think led to the tremendously bad policies we've had over COVID and the failures that we've seen over the last three years.
For each 1 mg/7 kg/day increase in THC dosing, there was a marked loss in total bilateral testicular volume of 11.8 cm3 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 8.3--15.4). In total, average bilateral testicular volume decreased by 58%. Significant dose-response decreases in mean total testosterone level by 1.49 ng/mL (95% CI: 0.83--2.15) and in estradiol level by 3.8 pg/mL (95% CI: 2.2--5.4) were observed, but significant increases in the levels of follicle-stimulating hormone by 0.06 ng/mL (95% CI: 0.02--0.10), luteinizing hormone by 0.16 ng/mL (95% CI: 0.08--0.25), and prolactin by 7.4 ng/mL (95% CI: 3.4--11.3) were observed. There were no statistically significant changes in semen parameters.
Conclusion(s)
In rhesus macaques, chronic exposure to THC resulted in significant dose-response testicular atrophy, increased serum gonadotropin levels, and decreased serum sex steroids, suggestive of primary testicular failure. Further studies are needed to determine if reversal of these observed adverse effects would occur if THC was discontinued and for validation of the findings in a human cohort.
I can't have my bilateral testicular volume decreasing. I leave that to JackStraw and his ilk.
Walking burns almost as many calories per mile as jogging. That may sound like nonsense, but I introduced a nonsense comparison: Calories per mile, not calories per minute. You'll burn calories more quickly running, of course, but walking burns them too. It just takes longer.
Walking also keeps the body burning energy in the fat-burning zone, where only fat is burned for extra energy. More intense cardio causes the body to burn muscle tissue for energy (along with fat), which isn't the end of the world -- you can build muscle back -- but it's not ideal, either.
The big disadvantage walking has over other forms of cardio is that it takes so long. You're not exerting yourself anywhere near your limit, so you have to walk for a while to burn 300 or 400 calories. But the advantage of walking over all other forms of cardio is precisely that you're not exerting yourself anywhere near your limit, so you're never wiped out from it, and you need almost no recovery time. You can walk everyday; if you have the time, you can do two long walks in a single day.
He walks on a treadmill, he says, because where he lives, Florida, is so flat, and he needs the treadmill to simulate inclines to increase intensity. If you have hills near you, you can get that intensity just walking outside.
Regarding intensity: To get something out of walking, you have to try to walk at a brisk pace, one that causes you to breathe somewhat heavily. Casual strolling does burn some calories but so few you'd have to walk a long while to really make an impact.
A big problem with walking is that if you're not paying attention and mentally putting the whip to yourself, you will find yourself naturally slowing to a casual stroll. You can't do that in jogging, because if you jog too slowly, you just fall out of the jog entirely. Jogging has a minimum speed. But walking doesn't. If you're not paying attention to your pace, you can really start loafing.
I used to get my best times with a Jawbone tracker set up so that my phone would give me my split times audibly periodically -- telling me that the last quarter mile was walked at a pace of 15 minutes per mile or whatever -- which would help me focus on maintaining a pace.
Just one thing you have to keep in mind. It's not the end of the world if you loaf, but if you loaf for too long, you're getting fresh air, but not really exercising much.
That's all I've been doing in this post-Thanksgiving period. I tried starting some home workout stuff but I didn't get a schedule down and stop.
Workout mix of training montage songs from the 80s. Plus a couple of parodies of 80s training montage songs, and Europe's "Final Countdown" just because it should have been used in a training montage.
There are a few more at this Instagram account: Flash, Wolverine, and Wonder Woman, as well as a character I don't know, Goku. I guess he's from anime.
Not by humans working with a computer. Lots of humans make art via a computer. That's hardly novel.
But via the new technology of artificial-intelligence-generated art, where a human just types keywords into an AI art program of what he'd like to see, and then the program searches millions of images and spits back (say) four guesses of images it thinks might satisfy those keywords, and then the human picks one or two of those and says "more like this one, but with X and Y," and then the program again searches more images and adds more to the images until, voila, it has created art based only a human feeding it some keywords and nudging it in the right direction.
Update: That's not what it's doing. .87c writes:
The so-called AI creating these isn't searching the internet for images in response to prompts.
The AI is really just a few neural networks which have been trained on huge quantities of labelled images. Through the training it "learned" what those labels meant visually. The key interesting thing that enables this is that it didn't learn one visual representation, say of a cat, if so it would just render that image when queried. Instead is has recorded implicitly the abstract properties of "cat" which means it can make a cat in whatever situation or activity you please (provided it has also been trained sufficiently on what those mean).
A trained model is only a few gigs, but it has encoded in it absurd amounts of "knowledge", it knows what Maggie Thatcher looked like, and what youth looks like, and Disney characters. So it's capable of rendering a young maggie thatcher disney character, even though it's never seen that.
This is going to put a lot of artists out of their jobs, unfortunately.
AI is going to put a lot of people out of jobs. Bloggers are very much on borrowed time. A lot of occupations are on borrowed time.
I read an article a couple of years back that said a lot of financial jobs are about to be zeroed-out by AI -- anything involving numbers and mathematical manipulation and extrapolation can be done by AI faster and better than by people.
I just watched a video by physicist and YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder noting that a huge number of certain type of star -- forget which type -- had been identified not by the old method of humans painstaking pouring over the data, but just by AI analyzing it. And she pointed out that a huge amount of science is now being done by AI. Obviously, AI is not writing papers and it's not formulating premises, but it's now doing a huge amount of the gruntwork of data analysis that humans once did.
You might say, "That's not really AI, that's just smart autonomization," and I take that semantic point, but this kind of almost-thinking-but-not-quite-thinking computer work is now routinely called "AI" even though it's not actually sentient.
And also, I think this is how it turns out AI actually happens. It doesn't happen with that one moment where everything changes, and we say, "at 3:45 January 18th 1997 Skynet became self-aware." I think it comes in a much fuzzier and more insidious way, bit by bit, so that we don't even notice when it's finally actually here. I don't think there's going to be a clear line of demarcation between "sentient" and "non-sentient" the way sci-fi stories have trained us to expect.
It's not going to be the difference between "on" and "off." It will be the difference between mouse and cat, and cat and dog, and dog and dolphin.
And now, Blue Oyster Cult's "Reaper," where every image accompanying the song was generated by AI.
Editor of Prestigious Psychology Journal Fired for Soliciting Criticism of Tendentious Article by Black Academic Claiming that Color-Blindness is Akshually Racism
—Ace
So you're officially not permitted to question "Black Science."
In case you're keeping track -- that means this isn't science at all.
Obviously.
The editor-in-chief of one of the world's most prestigious psychology journals, Perspectives on Psychological Science, resigned on Tuesday after the board of directors of the journal's publisher demanded he step aside -- or be fired -- for soliciting academic criticism of a black psychologist.
The editor, the prominent German psychologist Klaus Fiedler, stirred up controversy by agreeing to publish trenchant critiques of a 2020 article by Steven Roberts, a black psychologist at Stanford University, who had argued, among other things, that "color-blind leadership" promotes "structural inequality."
That led to a petition, published December 2 and signed by over 1,000 psychologists, that called for Fielder's dismissal -- and, shortly thereafter, to an email from Robert Gropp, the executive director of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), which publishes the journal, arguing that Fiedler had violated the journal's "diversity and inclusion policies," according to an email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Gropp demanded that Fiedler resign or, he said, "the APS will move forward with terminating your editorship."
Fielder told the Free Beacon on Tuesday that he had submitted his resignation, adding that Gropp and his colleagues never asked for his version of events.
Though Roberts, the Stanford psychologist, was invited to reply to the critiques, which are forthcoming with the journal, he pulled his paper after becoming convinced that the debate was "rigged" against him, he told the Chronicle of Higher Education. He then published the paper on a preprint service, PsyArXiv, on December 2, along with his email exchanges with Fiedler, which he claimed provided evidence of his unfair treatment--and, he implied, of Fiedler's own racism.
Plot twist! I never saw that coming!
More at the link.
...
"In some ways, there's no news here," Jussim said. "This is now normal in academia."
Yup. There is no more academia, there is no more science.
How long before the bridges start collapsing, planes start falling from the sky, and people start getting the wrong limbs amputated on the regular?
A weatherman -- weatherman! -- just elected as a Democrat to Congress, who puts his pronouns in his bio, says you can't disagree with The Science (TM).
If you disagree with scientists about science, it's not really a disagreement. You're actually just incorrect. Science is not truth, it's the process of finding the truth. When science evolves, it didn’t lie to you, it learned more.
-- Eric Sorensen (@ERICSORENSEN) November 30, 2022
I wonder which Race of Science he means you can't disagree with. You literally can't disagree with The Black Science (TM), or you'll be fired.
Related: More Black Science (TM) which you are not permitted to question.
Rutgers professor says that "white people are committed to being villains" and falsely claims that Africans arrived in North America before white Europeans.
"Whiteness is going to have an end date," she warns. "We gotta take these muthafuckers out."pic.twitter.com/263DDPRTwl
The problem with critical race theory isn't only that it seeks to stereotype, scapegoat, and dehumanize. It's also that many of the discipline's practitioners, such as "Professor Crunk," are monumentally ignorant. Their identity is treated as a substitute for scholarship.
Professor Crunk?
I think he misspelled "Klump."
Or maybe not. Professor Klump was a genius and noble-hearted, which this obese viper who spits venom of ignorance is not.
Claim/Rumor: Woke Disney Orders Marvel To Re-Evaluate Its Production of Shit Sandwiches, Demands More Quality In Endless Production of Undifferentiated Shit Sandwiches Over Sheer Quantity of Shit Sandwiches
There's a legitimate SEC filing advising that Disney's going to do some restructuring under Iger. It's that vague.
The rumor takes off from that and proposes slightly less vague specifics, which is where the "Good Guess" comes in: It's what Disney should do.
They should stop making crap movies, is what they should do.
Will they?
Doubt it!
New Rumor Claims Marvel Studios Is "Re-Evaluating Its Release Lineup For Phases 5 & 6" Over Concerns About Poor Quality
By John F. Trent
A new rumor claims that The Walt Disney Company and Marvel Studios are looking at changing their release lineup for their upcoming Phase 5 and Phase 6 films and television shows over internal concerns about the poor quality of shows and movies in Phase 4.
This rumor comes on the heels of The Walt Disney Company announcing that Bob Iger returned to the company as CEO and replaced Bob Chapek. Along with the announcement of Iger's return, The Walt Disney Company revealed in a SEC filing that they would be making significant changes to the company's structure and specifically how it approaches distributing its content.
The SEC document states, "As contemplated by the leadership change announcement, we anticipate that within the coming months Mr. Iger will initiate organizational and operating changes within the Company to address the Board's goals. While the plans are in early stages, changes in our structure and operations, including within DMED (and including possibly our distribution approach and the businesses/distribution platforms selected for the initial distribution of content), can be expected."
"The restructuring and change in business strategy, once determined, could result in impairment charges," it adds.
DMED is the division that oversees Disney's parks and movies.
...
Following this confirmation that The Walt Disney Company will be making significant changes to the way it does business and specifically the way it distributes its content, a rumor from The Cosmic Circus claims "Marvel Studios is currently re-evaluating its release lineup for Phases 5 & 6."
The site adds, "As Phase 4 comes to a close, we've been informed of internal negative feedback about how Phase 4 was handled regarding product distribution and quality."
In order to correct the poor performance and quality of the Phase 4 films and television series, Marvel Studios will be implementing "a quality-over-quantity approach to these phases."
One of the changes that the site claims Marvel Studios will implement is a change in the release schedule as well as changes in format of various projects.
As you probably know, Bob Iger has doubled down on woke content. He has claimed Disney wouldn't be embroiled in political fights, but only because, when properly understood -- when understood the way a coastal lifestyle progressive understands it -- Disney's nonstop groomer programming isn't "political" at all.
And you thick-skulled low-browed God-Bothering deplorable scumbags had better just accept that.
As seen in video obtained by independent journalist Christopher F. Rufo, the CEO would offer his first thoughts on the subject after being asked whether or not Disney will "stay out of making political statements" under his tenure.
"I think there's a misperception here about wat politics is," answered Iger. "I think that some of the subjects that have proven to be 'controversial' as it relates to Disney have been branded political, and I don't necessarily believe they are."
"I don't think that when you are telling stories and attempting to be a good citizen of the world, that that's political," he affirmed. "It's just not how I view it."
The Groomer material isn't "political." He'll stay out of politics because none of Disney's never-ending slate of Gay Teenager Groomer Cartoons ever were political in the first place.
"Do I like the company being embroiled in controversy?" he then asked rhetorically of the crowd. "Of course not, it can be distracting, and it can have a negative impact on the company."
"And to the extent that i can work to quiet things down, I'm going to do that," added Iger. "But I think it's important to put in perspective what some of these subjects are and not just simply brand them as political."
The onus is on you to stop lying and calling these Groomer Projects "political."
Later, when asked for his "stance on the 'Don't Say Gay' situation", the CEO would explain, "Well, first of all, our LGBTQ employees are very important to us and we care deeply about them."
"That is a given," he declared. "Secondly, this company has been telling stories for a hundred years, and those stories have had a meaningful, positive impact on the world. And one of the reasons that they've had a meaningful, positive impact is one of our core values is inclusion, acceptance, and tolerance. And we can't lose that. We just can't lose that."
"I think about Black Panther and the impact that had on the world, or a film like Coco," Iger continued. "I could go on and on. How we actually change the world for the good must continue."
"When you tell stories, there's a delicate balance," he said. "You're talking to an audience, but it's also important to listen. It's important to have respect for the people that you're serving and not have disdain for them."
So there's the big sop to his traditionalist customers: He will keep making groomer content, and dismiss your objections that Disney is stepping in as a virtual parent to teach your children about homosexuality before you wish to teach them about it, but he won't have "disdain" for you as he dismisses your desires.
Isn't that swell?
To this end, he then admitted, "that said, we're not going to make everyone happy all the time, and we're not going to try to.
"We're certainly not going to lessen our core values in order to make everyone happy all the time," he then assured his employees. "So, it's complicated, and there's a balance."
Now, Iger gets to the real heart of it: When people ask him, how do you get to decide what propaganda to feed to our children?, he responds: Because I'm a storyteller.
Actually he's a soulless executive who just buys IPs and companies and then destroys them, but apparently he's decided he's "a storyteller" now.
"At one point," the CEO recalled. "I said, 'We do what we believe is right', and then someone criticized me, 'Who are you to say what's right?'"
"When you're in a job like mine, or you are responsible for storytelling, you get paid to have a sense for what is right," concluded Chapek. "Not everybody will agree with you, that's just not the way the world is these days, but that doesn't mean you should stop trying to do the right thing."
And also the worst ratings as far as viewership for any show on Disney Plus, according to the partial ratings available from Samba. Disney won't release its ratings, but Samba TV carries Disney, and Samba TV releases its ratings.
According to Samba TV, only 481k households watched Willow in its first five days of release -- and that is with TWO episodes released.
Since Samba TV has been releasing numbers, Willow marks the lowest ratings for a show on Disney Plus, much lower than Marvel's Ms. Marvel series which saw only 775k households tune in during the first five days and lower than She-Hulk's 1.5 million households in the first four days.
Hill spoke with British outlet Metro where he made it abundantly clear he had no interested in watching Prime Video's The Rings of Power. He told the outlet, "No, not interested."
Hill then elaborated as to why, "It's a money-making venture and I'm not interested in watching that or being in it. Good luck to them and all that stuff but it's not like the real thing."
Hill was then asked if Tolkien's work would have been better left to Jackson's original trilogy. He responded, "Completely, yes."
He went on, "I think they were pushing it when they made The Hobbit. The Hobbit's a tiny book."
Viggo Mortensen was asked the same question and also had little interest in the Amazon/Asylum brand Lord of the Rings knockoff.
Oh, by the way: Jennifer Lawrence says, You're welcome.
The Twitter Files, Part II: The Shadowban Protocols
—Ace
Twitter repeatedly claimed they did not "shadowban" users.
Shadowbanning is a technique of banning someone without letting them know they're banned -- it's limiting the number of people who can see them. When they post, they can see their tweets, so it seems to them that they're not banned. A few of the friends they interact with the most can see their tweets.
But no one else can see their tweets. Hence, they've been banned, but stealthily. Under cover of shadow.
Twitter, through its repulsive chief censor and liar Vijaya Gadde, claimed repeatedly that Twitter simply does not shadowban.
It was yet another Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory, she seemed to be implying. After all, the right-wing was accusing her of shadowbanning their accounts, and she was saying Twitter has no such practice as shadowbanning -- must be those Right-Wing Disinformation Peddlers spreading toxic disinformation again.
And Vijaya Gadde also claimed Twitter specifically never shadowbanned based on political viewpoint!
That she had to deny that she shadowbanned at all, and then specify that she did not shadowban based on political viewpoint in particular, should have been a major tip-off.
Another tell of the liar: backsliding away from a definitive, absolute commitment into a more tenuous, limited claim. "I never saw this man before in my life. And furthermore, when I did see him, he was still alive."
So, below: Proof that Twitter has been shadowbanning people, and based on political views that they disapprove of.
Oh wait -- they don't call it "shadowbanning."
They call it: "visbility limitation."
I sure hope Vijaya Gadde didn't claim she didn't shadowban people in front of Congress, or in any legal depositions. Because I don't think that defense of "We don't call it 'shadowbanning,' we call it 'visibility limiting'" is going to hold up as a defense against a perjury charge."
This is also why conservatives had their growth frozen for years -- Twitter slapped other types of "visibility limiting" retrictions on them to make sure that few people saw their accounts, so that they could not gain followers. Charlie Kirk, for example, got hit with a "Do Not Amplify" restriction. This is undefined in this article, but from context, one can assume it means that Twitter will not permit him to trend even when the algorithm would naturally, without Twitter's censors' intervention, put him on the trending list.
Bari Weiss
@bariweiss
THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.
TWITTER'S SECRET BLACKLISTS.
1. A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics--all in secret, without informing users.
2. Twitter once had a mission "to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers." Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.
Charlie Kirk was also shadowbanned with a "Do Not Amplify" restriction.
Bari Weiss
@bariweiss
6. Twitter denied that it does such things. In 2018, Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: "We do not shadow ban." They added: "And we certainly don't shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology."
7. What many people call "shadow banning," Twitter executives and employees call "Visibility Filtering" or "VF." Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.
8. "Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It's a very powerful tool," one senior Twitter employee told us.
9. "VF" refers to Twitter's control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet's discoverability; to block select users' posts from ever appearing on the "trending" page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches.
10. All without users' knowledge.
11. "We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do," one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.
12. The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team - Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 "cases" a day.
13. But there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company's policy on paper. That is the "Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support," known as "SIP-PES."
14. This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others.
15. This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made. "Think high follower account, controversial," another Twitter employee told us. For these "there would be no ticket or anything."
17. The account--which Chaya Raichik began in November 2020 and now boasts over 1.4 million followers--was subjected to six suspensions in 2022 alone, Raichik says. Each time, Raichik was blocked from posting for as long as a week.
18. Twitter repeatedly informed Raichik that she had been suspended for violating Twitter's policy against "hateful conduct."
19. But in an internal SIP-PES memo from October 2022, after her seventh suspension, the committee acknowledged that "LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy." See here:
20. The committee justified her suspensions internally by claiming her posts encouraged online harassment of "hospitals and medical providers" by insinuating "that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming."
21. Compare this to what happened when Raichik herself was doxxed on November 21, 2022. A photo of her home with her address was posted in a tweet that has garnered more than 10,000 likes.
22. When Raichik told Twitter that her address had been disseminated she says Twitter Support responded with this message: "We reviewed the reported content, and didn't find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules." No action was taken. The doxxing tweet is still up.
23. In internal Slack messages, Twitter employees spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects. Here's Yoel Roth, Twitter's then Global Head of Trust & Safety, in a direct message to a colleague in early 2021:
24. Six days later, in a direct message with an employee on the Health, Misinformation, Privacy, and Identity research team, Roth requested more research to support expanding "non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification/visibility filtering."
25. Roth wrote: "The hypothesis underlying much of what we've implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that."
26. He added: "We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we're going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations -- especially for other policy domains."
28. The authors have broad and expanding access to Twitter’s files. The only condition we agreed to was that the material would first be published on Twitter.
29. We're just getting started on our reporting. Documents cannot tell the whole story here. A big thank you to everyone who has spoken to us so far. If you are a current or former Twitter employee, we'd love to hear from you. Please write to: tips@thefp.com
"I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington," she wrote in an op-ed published in The Arizona Republic.
Ms. Sinema, who was already facing a likely Democratic re-election challenge in 2024 after angering her party by opposing key elements of its agenda, will need to maintain some ties with Democrats to keep her committee seats and other benefits, since they would still hold a majority without her.
She informed Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, of her plans on Thursday, according to a Senate Democratic aide who described the private conversation on the condition of anonymity. The aide said that Ms. Sinema would keep her committee positions through Democrats, meaning the party would still hold a one-seat edge on the panels next year, giving them new flexibility over nominations and legislation.
...
Ms. Sinema has not said whether she would caucus with the Democrats, as do two other independent senators, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine. She told Politico that she would not caucus with Republicans, and that her ideology and voting habits would not change.
The article claims the Democrats don't need her vote to retain power in the Senate. I guess that's because if even if she defected to the Republicans, it would be 50-50 and Kamala would cast the tie-breaking vote and the Democrats would keep power.
I wonder what Manchin is up to.
Sinema will avoid a Democrat primary this way. But if the Democrats run a candidate against her -- and they seem angry enough at her that they cannot be counseled not to -- that will create a three way race in which it will be relatively easy for even an "extremist" Republican to win.
Biden's Non-Binary Puppy Play Fetishist Sam Brinton Accused of Stealing ANOTHER Piece of Luggage, This Time in Las Vegas Airport Plus, LGBT Nation Writer Wonders: Was Sam Brinton's "Gay Conversion" Torture Story a Con?
An energy department official is accused of stealing luggage from Harry Reid International Airport, the 8 News Now Investigators learned Thursday.
A felony warrant was issued for Sam Brinton, a deputy assistant secretary, sources said. The charge is for grand larceny with a value between $1,200 and $5,000, records showed.
...
Brinton faces charges for a similar incident at the Minneapolis airport.
Biden's giving him the Angry WWII General speech right now: "I can't court martial you, Sergeant, so I guess I'll have to G**-damn promote you...! Congratulations, welcome to the Officers Club."
Video report below the fold.
Meanwhile, Brinton claimed that he went through trauma during a "shocking" case of forcible gay conversion which, it would seem, completely backfired.
But he won't give any details about it, won't say who conducted this gay conversion therapy, and won't provide any proof it ever happened.
Sam Brinton? The guy who casually steals women's not-terribly-expensive luggage on a whim and then lies about it?
Lying about his Heroic Backstory doesn't sound like the Sam Brinton I know.
As an LGBTQ+ activist fighting against conversion therapy with my organization Truth Wins Out and the author of Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth, I had hoped to work with Brinton to expose the harm of conversion therapy. Their story was compelling and could influence public opinion against "ex-gay" practices, which has been my life's mission.
I excitedly reached out to Brinton, and they were oddly inaccessible...
"They." Brinton is "non-binary," remember.
And a Puppy Play fetishist.
...communicating indirectly through intermediary LGBTQ+ activists in the Boston area, where they were attending MIT. The reason for Brinton's scarcity had to do with two simple questions I had asked them: "Who was your conversion therapist, and in which facility did the therapy occur?"
This basic inquiry was critically important for two reasons. First, to share Brinton's story, we had to verify if it was true. Second, Brinton's testimony involved a torture center where hideous abuses were presumably still occurring against children at least as young as 11. If such a place existed, there was a moral imperative to rapidly identify the abusive therapist and contact the authorities to stop the atrocities.
Why was Sam Brinton the only survivor of conversion therapy I've encountered since 1998 who refused to answer these questions? Not only had every other survivor provided this information willingly, but they were eager to fight back and shut down their own therapist or "ex-gay" minister.
Guys, I'm starting to think that maybe leftwing government types are all shady grifters, hustlers, thieves, perverts, and child-groomers.
Please snap me out of it before I continue down this spiral of obviously-deranged thinking.
THE MORNING RANT: Despite Years of Hype, Autonomous Car Revolution Is a Failure; EV Revolution Is Following Same Hype/Failure Trajectory
—Buck Throckmorton
The autonomous vehicle storyline over the past decade and the electric vehicle storyline over the same period are different, but ultimately these two fairy tales are quite similar. Both were going to replace your traditional self-driven, gas-propelled car. The media continuously reported the replacement of your traditional car not as a goal, or even a possibility, but as an imminent certainty.
It hasn’t happened. It won’t happen. It can’t happen.
Throughout the 2010s, there was a constant stream of breathless articles and news stories reporting that autonomous vehicles were just a couple years away, and that by the early 2020s they would be commonplace, starting to replace human-driven cars in huge numbers. It hasn’t happened because it just isn’t scientifically feasible at this time – or for the foreseeable future. Finally, at least, those credulous puff pieces about autonomous vehicles have pretty much gone away.
As for EVs, right now they are primarily a status symbol for the affluent, occupying the prominent, small-market-share space that luxury and exotic cars have always held. The rejection of EVs by the great mass of American consumers is not seen by politicians and the media, because they don’t want to see it. They believe in EVs. Beyond that, it is scientifically not possible for EVs to replace the American vehicle fleet for a multitude of reasons, including electric generating capacity, grid capacity, availability of copper and lithium, etc.
We are still a couple of years away from the failure of the EV revolution becoming as clear as the failure of the autonomous car revolution. But it’s inevitable, and I’m looking forward to covering it.
While we’re on these subjects, let’s look at some headlines.
Executives said they don't see a path to profitability on fully autonomous vehicles, and will now focus on partially automated driver-assist systems, which need to be monitored by humans.
It would take billions of dollars for Ford to put self-driving robotaxis on the streets, Lawler said, yet it wasn't clear when that would happen “in a way that would allow us to have a profitable return on that investment.”
Expect a headline like this from Ford in a few years regarding EVs. Of course, by then Ford’s executives may have fully driven the company out of business, with its foolish commitment to replace all of its existing customer base with EV fanboys.
EV super-fanboys just can’t get enough of their four-wheeled status symbols. But apparently if one EV makes you virtuous, a collection of EVs does not make you super-virtuous. It makes you an environmental sinner.
A large share of battery-powered cars are being bought by households that already own an EV, or two or three for that matter. The EV early adopter has given way to the superuser or, some might say, the hoarder. And despite their good intentions, these double-dippers may unwittingly be shrinking the climate benefits their cars can offer.
EV buyers are engaging in all sorts of eco-sinning. Adding an EV to your household fleet as virtuous ornamentation to your gas-powered fleet is far less eco-friendly than not buying an extra car at all.
Many Americans willing and able to pay those prices don’t need to sell their current car to make the switch. And they often just keep both: U.S. households with an EV have an average of 2.7 vehicles, compared with 2.1 vehicles for the country overall.
But it presents a problematic paradox: An EV is only a decarbonizer to the extent that it offsets both gas-powered driving and the emissions needed to make it, a process that leaves a far larger carbon footprint than that for a gas-powered car. The only way for the machine to cover its carbon, so to speak, is in miles.
Will someone please advise the corps of Karens that EV owners are worsening “the climate crisis” with every EV sold? Carbon-Karen versus EV Fanboy could prove to be very entertaining.
*****
Don’t forget, the EV transition is part of the overall war on reliable carbon-based energy, but EV manufacturing is energy intense, so when the dust settles, it ultimately means there will be no cars, no jobs, and no energy.
"Unless we manage to reduce energy prices in Germany and Europe quickly and reliably," Thomas Schäfer wrote in a Monday LinkedIn post, "investments in energy-intensive production or new battery cell factories in Germany and the EU will be practically unviable."
VW leadership has been all in on the EV folly. I guess they’re finally figuring out that by signing on to de-carbonization, they are participants in a continental suicide pact. A European economy that no longer has heavy manufacturing will also no longer have consumers that can buy VW cars – EV or otherwise - no matter where they are manufactured.
“The private use of electric cars is only permitted for absolutely necessary journeys (e.g. professional practice, shopping, visiting the doctor, attending religious events, attending court appointments)” in the event of a “level 3” power shortage, the draft reads…
It cannot be said enough, getting you out of your gas-powered car is not about saving the environment, it’s about restricting your freedom.
*****
Just for fun, let’s circle back to autonomous vehicles. How are all the autonomous vehicle start-ups doing? The answer is “very poorly,” if they’re still around at all.
Navistar, like Ford, has finally figured out that a bunch of hype from social media influencers did not mean that autonomous vehicles were actually feasible.
A great deal of venture capital and hedge fund money evaporated in investments in these companies.
A fool and his money are soon parted, and when it comes to EVs and autonomous vehicles, the fools have been very successful in parting with their money.
*****
Songs of the Season
What Christmas songs give you the “longing for home at Christmastime” feeling, or bring back memories of those feelings from a previous chapter in your life?
Obviously, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is one of the classics of that genre, as is “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays.”
“Christmas Time’s A Coming” hit me that way when I was in my 20s, living in another state, and yearning to return home for Christmas.
Here’s a great version of this classic Bill Monroe song performed by Dailey and Vincent.
Good morning, kids. I don't even know where to begin with this Brittney Griner lowlife and there's a bigger story that broke yesterday which might explain why the Griner swap will most likely continue to dominate the news cycle through the weekend. And since "news" means "daily soap opera" the spin will be the foreign policy brilliance of the Biden junta, the victimhood of Griner and concomitant evil of Vladimir Putin and his puppet, Donald Trump & the MAGA movement, both of which represent the threat of white supremacy. Meh, fuck it and suck it any way you want, but it all comes out the same: America as founded evil, Leftism good.
Independent journalist Bari Weiss took to Twitter on Thursday night to unload a second trove of internal memos and documents exposing how Twitter officials silenced the voices of prominent conservatives on the platform. Radio host Dan Bongino, Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, and activist Charlie Kirk were among those Twitter censored or blacklisted, along with the popular “Libs of TikTok” account. . .
. . . “This is some Soviet-style bulls**t,” Bongino told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “I’ve known [about the shadow banning] this the whole time. I was called a conspiracy theorist and a whack job.” And it’s not just Twitter. Bongino’s website has been banned by Google Ads, and he was banned from YouTube for saying that cloth masks don’t work to stop the spread of Covid. “And now I find out I’m on a NSFW list,” he fumed. “Tell me again how we live in a free country!”
. . . [Charlie] Kirk told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson that his Twitter account was averaging 150,000 retweets a day, but all of a sudden, “we fell off a cliff.” Engagement was down 95%, he said.
“I was called a conspiracy theorist,” he explained. “They convince you to stop talking about it.”
He noted that Twitter was treating his account “with more scrutiny and censorship” than Iran and other state sponsors of terror.
Weiss pointed out that “Twitter denied that it does such things. In 2018, Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: ‘We do not shadow ban.’ They added: ‘And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.'” . . .
. . . Weiss’s investigation revealed internal Slack messages where Twitter employees admitted to using “technicalities” to “restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects.” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then Global Head of Trust & Safety, wrote in a direct message to a colleague in 2021, “A lot of times, SI [Site Integrity] has used technicality spam enforcements as a way to solve a problem created by Safety under-enforcing their policies. Which, again, isn’t a problem per se – but it keeps us from addressing the root cause of the issues, which is that our Safety policies need some attention.” . . .
. . . Kirk summed it up nicely by declaring: “I don’t think we’ll ever be able to measure the impact… of what Twitter did in 2020.” Indeed. While Elon Musk has done the republic a great service by publicly revealing Twitter’s evil deeds, we’ll never know how it impacted everything from the 2020 election to the nation’s Covid response—and that’s a complete travesty.
This is rage-inducing for sure, but the last thing it is to anyone who reads this column and others even casually is surprising. And like every other revelation and admission (grudging or otherwise) from Leftists about everything from the Hunter laptop story being true to that attempted mea culpa about lockdowns and the clot-shot perhaps not being such a great idea after all to even the lack of any real hard evidence against Trump from the Mueller "investigation" to the goose-egg inducing string of shampeachments, Leftists will shrug it off, ignore it or otherwise use some sort of variation of "fake, but accurate" to justify their actions.
Hell, Molly Ball's Time magazine piece not only admitting but praising state and non-state actors for essentially rigging the 2020 election – "fortifying" was the euphemism – is perhaps the greatest example of claiming absolute moral authority to do anything, say anything and act "by any means necessary" to achieve their aims because, as inscribed on every Wehrmacht belt buckle Gott Mit Uns.
Again, say what you want about Elon Musk, good, bad or indifferent, he has made himself a target for termination by the junta in power and its followers in and out of government. I find it bitterly ironic that nearly 60 years on from the so-called "free speech movement" that started at UC Berkeley, that generation and its acolytes and progeny are hell bent on absolutely silencing anyone who dares even question them. Funny how the spoiled, rotten bastard Mario Savio shrieked:
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
Mario, baby, from whatever circle of Hell you're watching from, I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you and yours are the machine. But I will say this: given everything we have experienced and all that has been revealed about the absolute corruption of this system, I agree you with you 1,000%.
And so that brings us to this Brittney Griner. I don't think we have to go into the details but suffice it to say that as horrible as this was, essentially a win-win for Vladimir Putin (of all people), it was not a gaffe. The abandonment of Paul Whelan, a US Marine who has been imprisoned in Putin's gulag for four years already on trumped up espionage charges speaks volumes. Even if Whelan was an actual intelligence agent, to leave him there for an America-hating pot-smoking freak who couldn't even dunk a donut let alone a basketball is beyond the fucking pale.
But this is not a one-off. Remember, Bowe Bergdahl went AWOL and then committed treason by parlaying with the Taliban, which IIRC resulted in US soldiers being killed and wounded in combat. What did Obama do? Release five big shot Taliban terrorists in exchange for Bergdahl's release, and then fêteing him in the Rose Garden. But wait, there's more!
Just this year, Bout joins two convicted cocaine traffickers related to Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and a parade of former Guantánamo detainees freed by Biden’s administration. . .
. . . The release of Bout echoes a similar situation in South America in October, when the Biden Administration carried out a prisoner swap with the authoritarian socialist regime of Venezuela. Biden released two of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro’s convicted drug trafficking nephews in exchange for seven unjustly imprisoned American oil workers. . .
. . . Outside of Latin America, the biggest beneficiaries of Biden prisoner liberation orders so far appear to be the Taliban, who returned to power in Afghanistan after Biden broke an agreement that would have ended the 20-year Afghan War sooner, inspiring the Taliban to take over Kabul in August 2021. . .
. . . In January, the Biden Administration approved the release of three Yemenis citizens from Guantánamo Bay: Moath al-Alwi, Zuhail al-Sharabi and Omar al-Rammah, as well as Kenyan citizen Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu and Somali national Guleed Hassan Ahmed. All five had been imprisoned over alleged ties to al-Qaeda.
Two months later, the Biden administration released Mohammad Mani Ahmad al-Qahtani, who had at that time served nearly 20 years in prison for his alleged involvement in the September 11 terrorist attack. Al-Qahtani was released from Guantánamo Bay after the Department of Defense determined that al-Qahtani “was no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the national security of the United States,” releasing him to Saudi Arabia, where he is a national.
Convicted spy Ana Belen Montes, a key figure in the Cuban Wasp Network, is scheduled for early release from prison on Jan. 8, 2023. She began her career in the U.S. Justice Department, where she was an outspoken critic of U.S. policy in Latin America. It was at Justice that she was recruited as a spy. Her career then led her to become the premier Cuba analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), where she also assisted in directing U.S. policy towards Latin America. Convicted in 2002, she was sentenced to 25 years and theoretically should remain imprisoned until 2027.
As part of a network of spies, she not only funneled Fidel Castro’s input into U.S. foreign policy; she also appears responsible for outing 450 operatives. The information she provided may have led to the death of Green Beret Sgt. Gregory A. Fronius in El Salvador, according to her critics. Others also link her activities to the killing of four volunteer pilots, gunned down in international waters over the Straits of Florida in February 1996. At the time, they were flying humanitarian aircraft with Brothers to the Rescue, a group seeking to save Cuban raft refugees adrift on the high seas.
The DIA investigator who helped uncover the ring, Chris Simmons, said to Hank Tester of CBS Miami, “I have never seen someone so heartless in my life.” . . .
. . . Even today, there are an estimated 300 Cuban spies operating in the United States. “The Wasp Network was the largest foreign spy network to operate in the United States, and Montes was one of Havana’s top ten assets,” said Simmons. He is not happy with her early release.
But given the current makeup of the federal government, it is unlikely anyone will put the brakes on it. And while she may no longer qualify to be rehired by the U.S. government, unless she has truly reformed her ways in prison, there may be many activist groups in the U.S. more than willing to embrace her and her policies with open arms.
A couple of years ago, either in the wake of the George Floyd Summer of Love 2: Dresden Boogaloo or right before Biden was planted in the Oval Office, I stated that I would not be surprised in the least if both cop killer Mumia abu Jamal was granted a pardon and another cop-killer Joanne Chesimard a.k.a.Assata Shakur who is living on the lam in Cuba, and being treated as a hero, would also return to America and given a hero's welcome in D.C. at George Floyd Plaza.
If there were long odds two years ago, I think they just got a whole lot shorter.
"Every extreme policy push in America of the last five years overlaps with the objectives and people of the World Economic Forum." 21st Century Robber Barons: the WEF
"Even today, there are an estimated 300 Cuban spies operating in the United States. “The Wasp Network was the largest foreign spy network to operate in the United States, and Montes was one of Havana’s top ten assets,” said Simmons. He is not happy with her early release. But given the current makeup of the federal government, it is unlikely anyone will put the brakes on it. And while she may no longer qualify to be rehired by the U.S. government, unless she has truly reformed her ways in prison, there may be many activist groups in the U.S. more than willing to embrace her and her policies with open arms." Defense Intelligence Agency Spy Ana Belen Montes Awaits Early Release From Federal Prison
“There’s a jump cut here at :13 as everyone is shaking hands and hugging and right before it looks like Griner maybe going in to shake hands with Bout?” political commentator Stephen L. Miller tweeted. “Probably not great optics there to have your star prisoner swap shaking hands with the most notorious arms dealer on the planet.” Video Emerges Of Brittney Griner Being Swapped For Russian Terrorist; Critics Instantly Notice Problem
Bob Menendez:“The Russians and other regimes that take American citizens hostage cannot pretend that there is equivalence between the Brittney Griners of the world and people like Viktor Bout, the so-called ‘Merchant of Death.’ Nothing could be further from the truth, and we cannot ignore that releasing Bout back into the world is a deeply disturbing decision.” Top Democrat Senator Blasts Biden Over Releasing Terrorist for Griner: "Deeply Disturbing Decision"
Whelan was arrested in Russia in 2018 and sentenced to 16 years in prison for alleged “espionage.” The former Marine denies the charges; Russian officials have presented no concrete evidence for their claims outside of what was used to imprison him in court. Report: Paul Whelan ‘Greatly Disappointed’ Biden Left Him Out of Prisoner Swap
CIVIL WAR 2.0: J-6 FBI FALSE FLAG "RIOT" & AFTERMATH, LEFTIST PERSECUTIONS, DEMOCRAT PUTSCH, AMERICAN DISSOLUTION
Julie Kelly: "Who successfully sought a 'revolution' in Washington—a bunch of random dudes in Michigan or the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world?" The Fake, and Real, Domestic Terrorists
D’Antuono claims he decided to end his career to “spend more time with family.” His decision comes — coincidentally — as the new, Republican-led House of Representatives has promised to give the FBI a much-needed enema. Republicans from the House Judiciary Committee have named D’Antuono and eight other FBI bigwigs as people who have some prompt ‘splainin’ to do. FBI Bigwig Quietly Steps Down Just Before New Congress Probes Begin
FIRST AMENDMENT ISSUES, CENSORSHIP, FAKE NEWS, MEDIA, BIG BROTHER TECH
“This is some Soviet-style bullshit,” Bongino told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “I’ve known [about the shadow banning] this the whole time. I was called a conspiracy theorist and a whack job.” And it’s not just Twitter. Bongino’s website has been banned by Google Ads, and he was banned from YouTube for saying that cloth masks don’t work to stop the spread of Covid. “And now I find out I’m on a NSFW list,” he fumed. “Tell me again how we live in a free country!” TWITTER EXPOSED: Blacklists, Secret Censorship Cabal, Treachery at the Highest Levels
“I suspect very strongly that there was some government direction of this. I’ve been involved with this lawsuit brought by the Missouri and Louisiana Attorney General’s offices against the Biden administration and we’ve uncovered tremendous evidence that there were federal agencies that were directing social media companies about what to censor, even who to censor. Now, if that is actually the case, that this blacklisting was directed by the government against American citizens, that’s a direct violation of my civil rights, it’s a direct violation of the First Amendment, and every American should be outraged.” Stanford’s Dr. Bhattacharya: I Want to Know if Government Officials Told Twitter to Blacklist Me, They Have Directed Censorship Before
Jeff McMillan, who is also a board member of the Association of LGBTQ Journalists, said LGBT activists and journalists "worry that Aldrich’s high profile as a crime suspect could lead to negative assumptions about all nonbinary people." (we can't have that, now can we? - jjs) Media Tiptoe Around Colorado Nightclub Shooter’s Preferred Pronouns
"Not only did Jean-Pierre not answer the man’s question, but she also would not explain why she could not answer the question. She became so frustrated that she called an early lid and left the room. You can watch the exchange below . . . " (she really has to lay off the "bad veal" - jjs) Karine Jean-Pierre Storms Out of a White House Briefing in a Huff
RED-GREENS, CLIMATE CHANGE HOAX, DEMOCRAT-LEFT WAR ON FOSSIL FUELS, JUNK SCIENCE, LYSENKOISM
"The pivot from Vanguard occurred hours after lawmakers in the state of Texas announced a hearing over asset managers’ alleged mismanagement of taxpayer dollars driven by ideological motives. Several attorneys general filed motions last week with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission arguing that Vanguard should be barred from purchasing shares in publicly traded utilities out of a concern that the company’s emissions reduction efforts would raise energy prices and decrease grid reliability." Vanguard Backs Off From Climate Crusade. Al Gore Furious.
". . . we have issued a subpoena to BlackRock for the production of additional documents the committee needs to complete its work. We will not allow these firms to continue to use Texans’ money to force a narrow political agenda. They have a legal duty to put their investors’ interests first, and we intend to make sure they do.” Texas Legislative Committee Subpoenas BlackRock Over ESG Investing
Michael Walsh: "The late Michael Crichton, patiently listening to Charlie Rose's stupid questions and then trying to explain logic, evidence, and reality to him." "I'm Not a Catastrophist"
THE ECONOMY, STUPID
"The Central States Pension Fund, which provides benefits to Teamsters union members in the trucking, warehouse, and construction industries, was projected to run out of money by 2025 due to rising inflation, weak stock markets, and a lack of active workers participating in the fund, the Washington Times reported. Biden plans to save the fund from insolvency by using money from his $1.9 trillion dollar American Rescue plan, which even Democrat lawmakers admit caused the country's record high inflation." Biden Grants Historic Federal Bailout to Union Pension Fund Struggling in His Economy
The agency contended in a press release that Microsoft routinely acquires gaming companies to “suppress competition from rival consoles.” Members of the commission voted three to one on issuing the legal complaint. FTC Moves To Block Microsoft’s $69 Billion Purchase Of Activision
“At the hearing, the Schencks insisted that they were not *128aa present at 1241 Main Street on December 29, 1990, as part of Project Rescue. Rather, they contend that they were there only to evangelize and preach. The Court finds, however, that their testimony in this regard is not credible,” court documents obtained by Daily Caller News Foundation read. Dems’ Star Witness In SCOTUS Hearing Deemed ‘Not Credible’ By SCOTUS
THE 2020 AND 2022ELECTION HEISTS & AFTERMATH
"The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used a number of Tiktok accounts to spread divisive content and disinformation, disproportionately favoring Democrats, to millions of viewers before the midterms, according to Forbes. The actions closely mirrored those of Russia during the 2016 election, when Kremlin-linked operatives used Facebook to try to sway American voters." Biden State Dept Not Very Fired Up Over Foreign Influence In Elections That Went Well For Dems
"If Republicans aim to protect their voters, they must secure the ballots of their voters. In order to preserve the consent of the governed they must protect their voters from disenfranchisement." Fortify or Die
In its Dec. 6 letter to the State Department, America First Legal says, "Without Congressional authorization, the Biden [junta] has continued the Obama administration’s policy and practice of attacking the State of Israel’s democracy through direct election interference, information actions, and covert financial and other activities." America First Legal Files FOIA on Biden Junta's 'Direct Election Interference' in Israel
"So the former First Lady, President, and now Vice President is exhibit A of crony capitalism, corruption, and taking care of your friends. She is a corrupt lady and maybe all of those years of shameless corruption have finally caught up with her. I hope so!" Today's Headline Comes From Argentina
"The uncertainty of science: A newly discovered long gamma ray burst (GRB) that appears to have been formed by the merger of two neutron stars has contradicted the long held views of scientists as to the origin of this particular type of GRB." New Gamma Ray Burst Violates the Explanations of Scientists
"If the CAA cannot figure out how to okay it to launch after doing six months of paperwork, how is it going to okay launches for regular rockets from the two Scotland launchpads now under construction?" UK Regulators Block Virgin Orbit Launch
FEMINAZISM, TRANSGENDER PSYCHOSIS, HOMOSEXUALIZATION, WAR ON MASCULINITY/NORMALCY
"Who knew? If only we called the children 'zhe' and tucked, packed, and bound their genitals more aggressively, their mental health would miraculously rebound and they would become well-adjusted, stable members of society leading fulfilling, fruitful lives. Duh! This is just intuitive." The Experts™ Finally Discover Why 'LGBTQ Youth' Are Suicidal
"Ancient Apocalypse scares the media because it sets a threatening example for viewers to begin questioning authority in other realms." (the host and guests never really show any hard evidence to bolster their suppositions, but the latter are quite colorful anyway - jjs) The Lying Media Told Me Not To Watch Netflix’s Ancient Apocalypse, So I Did
"We make mistakes, friends. Let’s own them. We need to rebuild the village on better footing." The Glorious Lie
HITHER & YON
Detectives said that this was “one of those cases” that bothered generations of law enforcement. Cases like this even resonate with the families of those who worked the case but have passed away. (an acquaintance of mine shot a dramatization for his film school thesis on this story, and that was 40 years ago - jjs) Philadelphia Police Finally Solve the Identity of the 'Boy in the Box' Cold Case From 1957
NOTE: The opinions expressed in the links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue.
ALSO: The Morning Report is cross-posted at CutJibNewsletter.com if you want to continue the conversation all day.
The time when more than 8GB of RAM becomes useful and starts paying for itself is when you're running several resource-heavy applications simultaneously -- especially high-end image or 4K+ video processing, CAD, or 3D modeling.
Yeah when you're running Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, and Maya at the same time, 8GB might get a bit limiting. 64GB might also get a bit limiting. People who run that sort of workload tend to buy systems with 256GB or more.
I happened to reboot my laptop this morning. By the time it had finished booting, before I opened a single application, 8GB of RAM was already in use.
Two of the three new servers have been deployed, just waiting on the third now. Those have 128GB of RAM each. 128GB is probably enough.
I now have an 84TB RAID-Z3 array with gzip compression and block deduplication. I have about 7TB (already gzipped and deduped) to copy onto it, so it should last a good long while.
Looking at the photo, my first thought is there's no way that contains enough information to triangulate, even with a timestamp. And it doesn't. But the arc of possible matching locations in the United States comes near Edwards AFB, and if you look at all the buildings at Edwards in Google Maps there's a clear match to the photo.
I'm sure this entire process could be done with just stars and no google maps as well
Dude, using just stars they were lucky to discover America, which is somewhat larger than one aircraft hangar at Edwards AFB.
Canadians are inconsiderate travelers — even more so than those boisterous, barefooted Americans, if you can believe it. The verdict comes from an Expedia airplane etiquette survey, which ranked each nationality in terms of their travel manners.
Don’t let that seemingly non-stop barrage of viral videos featuring ugly Americans fool you — because the US earns high marks across the board for friendly flying.
So this woman and her family were attacked in their home by a knife wielding manic. She recounts how her husband was desperately holding the bedroom door shut as the criminal thrust his knife through it (and where was your gun lady? If someone is thrusting a knife through my bedroom door, I guarantee you I'd be sending a bunch of little presents back their way). Thankfully they survived, and the man, who she readily admits was mentally ill, was arrested. He died in prison.
So, after describing the terrible attack, and identifying that the attacker was mentally ill, she spends the rest of article speculating without a single shred of evidence offered, (not so much as a dog eared copy of Sarah Palin's autobiography in his possession) that the man may have been motivated by antisemitism fostered by “right-wing hate mongers” such as...Tucker Carlson.
It's insane. She can't just have been unlucky enough to cross paths with a psycho, no, she has to spin it all out into a larger conspiracy theory, one targeted at her because of her in-group identity, one than makes her not just the victim of a crime but a victim of a grand intrigue and nefarious plot.
If you've wondered to yourself “Where did this perversion come from?”, this is an excellent article for you. It traces the history of DQSH back to its roots. It's not as had to understand as you might think, it's the same old sewer of leftist filth that Marxists base their movement on, one that should be exceedingly familiar by now.
But the spirit of drag is predicated on the transgressive sexual element and the ideology of queer theory, which cannot be erased by switching the context and softening the language. The philosophical and political project of queer theory has always been to dethrone traditional heterosexual culture and elevate what Rubin called the “sexual caste” at the bottom of the hierarchy: the transsexual, the transvestite, the fetishist, the sadomasochist, the prostitute, the porn star, and the pedophile. Drag Queen Story Hour can attempt to sanitize the routines and run criminal background checks on its performers, but the subculture of queer theory will always attract men who want to follow the ideology to its conclusions.
Same old intersectionality garbage. Define what's normal as “oppressive” and seek to overthrow it by elevating the fringe – in this case sick perversions like child porn, child sex and bestiality – over the healthy normal. It's the same post-modern excrement that the communist uses to justify their opposition to the free market or the totalitarian uses to explain their desire to eradicate liberty.
If you're interested in that kind of stuff, I urge you to read the article. It isn't pleasant, but you'll understand the why and the how of every anti-western movement out there.
The author hates secular Christmas songs. I prefer religious carols myself, but also enjoy some secular songs. To me it's the difference between the (religious) reason for the season and the (cultural) spirit of the season. There's room for both in my world. That's not to say all secular songs are worthy of a listen, the horrid “Christmas Shoes” (which didn't make the list for some odd reason) should be consigned to the depths of a black hole, for example, but many are fun. What songs would you add to the list?
Remember The Utah!
Yesterday was the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Here's an interesting article about the “forgotten” battleship that sank that day, USS Utah, and ongoing efforts to identify remains so they can be returned to their kin for proper honor and burial.
The strong sense of community previous generations experienced has largely been replaced by a false sense of togetherness in the form of social media and other online pursuits. In general, society may feel more connected, but reality shows that's not the case. Spending time alone is on the rise for all people aged 15 and older. And like the increase in those 50 and older who live alone, this broad type of loneliness started increasing well before the pandemic.
None of these factors make for a cheerful report. If anything, they serve as a reminder that family is our most valuable asset, children are good, and fostering a sense of actual community, not just its online substitution, is necessary for a healthy culture. For too long, the message has been that independence and career achievement should be prized most of all. There is nothing wrong with establishing one's individual identity or advancing in a chosen field. But these things pale in comparison to the rich physical, mental, and emotional rewards of bonds with friends and family.
This is another place where understanding the philosophy behind things is helpful in understanding what may seem on the surface to be undesirable outcomes are actually intended. In a socialistic worldview, elderly are a drag on society. They are done being productive, and now take out of the system without putting anything back. Where is the percentage in paying for hips, coronary bypasses, or cancer treatment for individuals who aren't working and “contributing” anymore? (Wisdom, experience, and yes, even love, don't count) If such individuals are isolated and lonely, it's easier to ease them into the great beyond than to support them. Weakening or destroying the traditional nuclear and extended family makes this easier to accomplish. Think I'm talking crazy talk? Euthanasia is now the 6th leading cause of death in Canada. Say, does anyone remember how they mocked Sarah Palin for “death panels”? Good times, good times.
Or is it just that they don't want to be boycotted by Republican governors?
Legal Insurrection:
Vanguard Group, One of 'Big Three' Index Fund Managers, Quits ESG-Oriented 'Net Zero' Group
Vanguard indicated its decision rested in a desire to maintain the freedom not to restrict its investment options.
Posted by Leslie Eastman
How It Started: In October, my colleague Mike LaChance noted Wall Street's enthusiasm for ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing was already starting to wane.
How It's Going: One of the "Big Three" index fund managers is now quitting an ESG-oriented group.
Vanguard Group Inc. is walking out of the world's largest climate-finance alliance, marking the coalition's biggest defection to date as US Republicans step up their threats against firms deemed hostile toward the fossil-fuel industry.
Vanguard's decision followed a "considerable period of review," according to a company statement Wednesday. Withdrawing from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, which is a sub-unit of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, "will help provide the clarity our investors desire" about everything from the role of index funds, to financial risks in the context of climate change, the firm said.
...Vanguard indicated its decision rested in a desire to maintain the freedom not to restrict its investment options.
Initiatives such as the net-zero alliance "can advance constructive dialogue, but sometimes they can also result in confusion about the views of individual investment firms," Vanguard said. "That has been the case in this instance, particularly regarding the applicability of net-zero approaches to the broadly diversified index funds favored by many Vanguard investors."
The "Big Three" (BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street) can cast nearly 25% of the votes in any director election at S&P 500 companies. The departure has significant implications for the American economy.
That article goes on to note that, get this, studies show that funds that prioritize "environmental sustainability" don't necessarily have the greatest economic performance, if you can believe that.
Steve Milloy
@JunkScience
Bad day for ESG:
Vanguard quits net zero banking group GFANZ.
Earlier, @BlackRock was subpoenaed by the state of Texas regarding illegal ESG activity.
While the decision by Vanguard to untether itself from the net-zero alliance is a win in the anti-ESG fight, MarketWatch noted that the world's second largest asset management firm will still "track its progress" toward reducing emissions "as an effort to provide 'clarity' to its investors."
MarketWatch noted the significance of Vanguard's withdrawal, saying "some environmental groups who follow pledges toward net-zero greenhouse emissions from the lifeblood of the economy -- the financial services and banking sector -- called the exit a major blow to the effort. These groups argued that such a move is kowtowing to 'anti-woke' sentiment," their report added. That is, conservatives just won a major battle in the fight against ESG and the woke left's attempts to force an energy "transition" away from affordable and reliable American fossil fuels.
For Some Reason, Traditionalist Men, Who Have Filled the Ranks of the Armed Services Throughout American History, Just Aren't Signing Up Any Longer
—Ace
The military is having so much trouble recruiting that they're considering dropping their standards to the lowet levels in history.
The Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) is scored by combining points scored on four of the ASVAB subtests. The raw score is then translated into a percentile and ranked to determine a candidate's basic eligibility and placement. In the Navy that translates into one's potential Naval Enlisted Classification code (NEC) and rating. I'll spare you the details.
Due to circumstances that may have been mentioned here, recruiting is markedly down. Every branch of the military is struggling to meet its FY 2022 recruiting quotas; so much so that that the continuation of the all-volunteer force has been questioned. Spox say the Pentagon's top leaders are now casting for ways to find new recruits. Panic mode, in other words.
My Navy has come up with a remarkedly bad idea.
Navy to Accept Recruits with Lowest Test Scores as Recruiting Goal Grows
By Drew F. Lawrence
The Navy unveiled new guidelines Monday that allow the service to enlist thousands of sailors with entrance test scores that fall into the lowest aptitude percentile allowed by military standards as it faces a higher recruiting goal, according to a notice from Navy Recruiting Command reviewed by Military.com.
Under the program, the service can recruit and contract up to 7,500 prospective sailors this year who fall under what the military calls "Category IV" recruits, or high school diploma-holding applicants who score within the 10th and 30th percentile on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, or AFQT. Up to 20% of this year's active-duty enlisted pool could fall into the lowest allowable aptitude percentile.
I wonder why capable young men aren't interested in military service any longer.
It's literally gay porn, featuring bondage and him ejaculating on other men.
I wonder if any of the men serving under this noxious pervert felt "uncomfortable" or "unsafe."
I sure know one thing -- they wouldn't have felt "safe" saying so. Because they'd have been court-martialed for breathing a word of their discomfort.
We're going to lose any war we ever fight -- in fact, we'll be so weak we will never even credibly threaten to use force again -- but at least "Pup Ravage" got to live his best life in the US military.
The US Military will become what the left always dreamed it could be: A government program for paying for expensive experimental transgender surgeries in exchange for signing up for two years of desk duty.
And it will become that with the support of most of the current officer corps.
Just kidding, it's not about Kyle Rittenhouse. It should be.
But it will infuriate the left almost as much.
The upcoming western, debuting Jan. 6, 2023 in theaters, stars Nicolas Cage as a reformed gunslinger trying to raise his 12-year-old daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). When an outlaw gang threatens his family, Cage's character schools his daughter in the art of self-defense, and that means Firearms Training 101.
"The Old Way" co-stars Nick Searcy ("Terror on the Prairie," "Gosnell"), Clint Howard ("Apollo 13," "Far and Away") and Noah Le Gros ("A Score to Settle").
French remake of the Three Musketeers, in two parts. Eva Greene as Milady. She's French I think. Or Anglo-French.
It looks a little damp, to be honest. I'm not seeing the swashbuckling quota being met. Not sure anyone is ever going to come close to equaling the Richard Lester version.
Fun story there. You might know that there's a sequel to that movie, The Four Musketeers. Ilya and Alexander Salkind, who went on to produce Superman and Superman II back to back, knew they were making both The Three Musketeers and the sequel at the same time.
They could hide this because all of the material they were shooting was from the one Alexander Dumas book. But it was a very long book.
So they didn't tell the cast or crew the story would be divided up into two films for separate release. The contracts they signed with everyone only spoke of a single movie, The Three Musketeers.
So the Salkinds didn't pay hardly anything for The Four Musketeers. It was a free movie. They paid for one movie, and got the second for free.
All of the actors and major crew were super-pissed when they saw the first movie end halfway through the material they'd shot with previews included for the next movie. Since then, all movie contracts have a Salkind clause, specifying that the contract is for a single movie only, and if there's any other movie to be made from the material shot, a separate contract must be signed to cover that.
Is this something? Chris Gore saw it and says the first five minutes are "water sports," and he doesn't mean Marco Polo.
I get the feeling that this searing indictment of Hollywood's culture of vice is actually a celebration of Hollywood's culture of vice dressed up as a searing indictment of Hollywood's culture of vice.
Um, when are you going to do a film about Hollywood's pedophilia?
Here is a Colion Noir video in which he speaks eloquently about the purpose of the 2nd Amendment. At least up to 4:45, and then it turns into an ad...[CBD]
Good summary of the Arizona lawsuits. TL;DR - Arizona law doesn't allow filing until 5 days after certification, so Dec 10th. [DiF]
Regardless of the outcome of the #GArunoff rest assured the GOP won't even read your tweets with suggestions of what to do differently/better, let alone put them into practice. Because it doesn't care about winning or you, because it hates you.
Now the New York Times is saying it's 95% likely that the crazed abortionist Warnock will win They say the remaining vote is "overwhelmingly" in Democrat counties. Nice of them to always hold that vote back until the end, huh? If it's any consolation -- the GOPe was planning to sell you out whether they were in the majority or in the minority or had a tie in the Senate. Your hopes and wishes simply do not matter to them. Now donate to the GOP so they can use your money to pay leftwing consultants like Frank Luntz to tell them exciting new ways to lie to you.
I hope Fulton County doesn’t have any plumbing issues tonight
Here's that review of "Deconstructing Karen" I mentioned yesterday "If you're going to cry, you have to leave the room. Crying is part of white supremacy. Crying is how White Women draw attention to themselves." Here's the trailer. That's a very short trailer -- it's very hard to find trailers or clips from this movie online. I think they're taking them down because the movie is getting memed so hard.
Settling an argument on the blog from a couple of weeks ago: the rule is that you use "a" before words starting with "h" where "h" is pronounced, and "an" before words starting with "h" where "h" is silent. This isn't really the whole of the rule, because the "h" in "historic" is pronounced, and yet we're told it's "an historic first," but I guess it's... kinda-sorta sometimes not pronounced? I don't know. I lied, this settles no arguments. Really it just escalates them to the point of violence, which, honestly, was my intention. There's a rule -- or a tendency -- in English to avoid "hiatus" (another "h"!), which is running two vowel sounds together. Because, to make the vowels sound properly, you have to insert a silence between them -- a hiatus between the sounds. Which is awkward. I think this is why they say "an historic." You do pronounce the "h" in "historic," but if you say "a historic," I think you run into the problem of hiatus, where, to make the sounds clearly, you have to insert a micro-pause between "a" and "historic," which is awkward. Easier, then, to just say "an historic," so you can just run the words together with no hiatus: "anhistoric." This guy has a lot of videos about the real Secret Rules of English Speech. Or should I say, English Sbeech. Because that's how we usually say it.
Forgotten 80s Mystery Click: Soft Rock Easy Listening Edition Is everything okay?
I just thought I'd write a song to tell the world how I miss you
'Cause each and every day
I think of all the words I never said and all the chances that I had to
Japan loses to Croatia on penalty kicks after a 1-1 tie
The B-21 Unveiling, live video Tennessee Jed says it's white rather than matte black. I guess it's a daylight bomber? Update: It's a jip. They give you sense of the thing's basic outline then they end the "unveiling." The image is blurry like Sasquatch.
