The Ultimate Showdown Of Ultimate ONT
—WeirdDave
Friday! Time for meme madness. I view the Friday ONT like this:
Continue reading
Golden Rebellion Cafe
—Ace
The Mist by JT
found at Street Revolution
I linked this before, but it's so pleasant: the comforting sounds of the 80s.
These snakes are tiny and harmless but they're still wigging me out!
Bicycle with a driveshaft instead of chains connecting the pedal gear to the wheel gear. Does this work? No idea!
I had one of these in my old model train set. Well, I'm lying. I wanted one of these for my old model train set. I was just trying to impress you, bragging about my old model train set. It was a nice train set, O-scale, real beaut. Nope, I'm lying again, it was just HO. I really just want you to think I was super-cool and had a really nice model train set.
Continue reading
Progressives Hate Paul Pelosi's Hemp Jeweler/Nudist Attacker/"Friend" So Much They're Refusing to Give Him Over to ICE For Deportation
—Ace
You know, the way they always protect Mega MAGA Extremists.
The very policy House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has long supported may ultimately be the same that keeps her husband's alleged attacker in the country. District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said she won't turn over Canadian national David DePape to federal authorities for deportation, citing San Francisco's sanctuary city status.After having already lived in the U.S. for several years, David DePape -- the illegal alien who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer -- reportedly entered the U.S. again through the San Ysidro, California, point of entry on March 8, 2008, as a temporary visitor. There was nothing temporary about his visit.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, DePape registered as a member of the Green Party, unlawfully declaring that he was a U.S. citizen. He subsequently partook in liberal politics and advocated for public nudity.
After nearly 20 years of feigning American citizenship, DePape allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi on Oct. 28.
GAINZZZ
—Ace
Via dri in the sidebar, scientists say that carbohydrates are as addictive as cigarettes and should be redefined as drugs.
Okay so that's too hype-y and if you take them literally it's fascist.
But the general idea that carbohydrates have a powerful drug-like effect is true enough. I eat a lot of low-carb stuff. You miss the carbs even when the taste is about the same. Carbs light up the brain with a sense of satisfaction and wellness that doesn't have anything to do with taste or the pleasure of eating. I know when I indulge a lot of carbs, I feel a real sense of stupor. (And later, a carb hangover where I say, "Never again." But that's always a lie.)
EXCLUSIVE: Donuts, cereal and pizza should be redefined as DRUGS: Scientists say highly processed foods are just as addictive and harmful as CIGARETTESProcessed foods are as addictive and dangerous as cigarettes, experts say
Researchers say the products meet the same addiction standards as nicotine
The foods have been linked to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other issues
The pair of scientists is calling for restrictions on the marketing of the foods
By MANSUR SHAHEEN DEPUTY HEALTH EDITOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 13:48 EST, 10 November 2022 | UPDATED: 10:55 EST, 11 November 2022
So this is food fascism and I don't support it. Dr. Robert Lustig talks like this... and then I tune out.
But again, yeah, very dense carbohydrate food is something we were not designed to eat. There's nothing like that occurring in nature.
Highly-processed foods should be reclassified as drugs because they are as addictive and harmful as cigarettes, scientists argue.Researchers claim items like donuts, sugary cereals and pizza meet the meet official criteria that established cigarettes as a drug in the 1990s.
These include causing compulsive use and mood altering affects on the brain, and having properties or ingredients that reinforce addiction or trigger cravings.
Ultra processed foods - which also include things like soda, chips, pastries and candies - contain high amounts of unnatural flavorings, preservatives and sweeteners.
These properties give them their delicious flavor -- but also make them high in calories, fat, sugar or salt, which raise the risk of obesity and other chronic illnesses.
Researchers led by Dr Ashley Gearhardt, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, told DailyMail.com these foods are more like a drug because of how distant they are in taste and texture from natural foods.
'They are industrial produced substances designed to deliver sugar and fat,' Dr Alexandra DiFeliceantonio, a health behaviors research professor at Virginia Tech University, said.
'They are not foods anymore. These are these products that have been really well designed to deliver addictive substances.'
Gary Taubes' books The Case Against Sugar and Why We Get Fat are both really good.
I always mention this: they did the same thing with to "prove" that it wasn't sugar that causes weight gain, but fat, and that it wasn't sugar and carbohydrate that causes heart attacks, but fat, that they did to "prove" global warming: they convened a conference with handpicked "experts," all of whom were already known to support these hypotheses, then they... took a vote, then presented that vote to the world of proof of the Fat-Diet Hypothesis of heart disease, and also, proof that sugar and carbohydrates had nothing to do with heart disease.
They had a vote, you see.
Proof!
And then the government enforced this "consensus view" on the public and pressured industry to make "heart healthy" foods low in fat but very, very high in sugar and carbohydrate.
These books are lot more exciting -- infuriating, to be precise -- than you'd expect books about the history of nutrition to be.
Study: Men have stronger sex drives than women.
Really?
Perhaps to no one's surprise, new research has determined that men do, in fact, have a much stronger sex drive than women.
After reviewing more than 200 studies, investigators "found that men consistently report a higher sex drive," said study author Julius Frankenbach, a doctoral student of psychology at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany.En masse, the research showed that men say they spend considerably more time thinking about sex, fantasizing about sex, feeling sexual desire and masturbating, compared to women.
"What did surprise us," said Frankenbach, "was that the finding was consistent across countries, age groups, ethnicities or sexual orientations. Men having a higher sex drive than women seems to be a quite universal psychological pattern."
But they have to find a way to cast doubt on this, to support (some) women's assertions than "women's sex drives are just as strong as men's."
But there's a hitch. When discussing one's own sexual proclivities, are people always honest?
"Sexuality is a sensitive topic," Frankenbach acknowledged. "So we also considered the possibility that people's self-reports are not fully accurate. There was some evidence for such inaccurate responses in our data."
Still, the researchers pointed out exceptions to the rule.Frankenbach said between 24% and 29% of women appear to have a higher sex drive than the "average" man.
So, while on average men may have a stronger sex drive than women, "there are plenty of women who are more into sex than many men," he added.
Ronald Reagan once said, "It's true that hard work never killed anyone, but I figure, why take the chance?"
Wise man. Other people quote "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" as the most inspirational Reagan quote. For me, it's the one about being lazy as a general principle.
Turns out Reagan was wiser than we even knew.
A recent study that scanned people's brains at different points in their work day found high-demand tasks which require intense, constant concentration can lead to build-up of a potentially toxic chemical called glutamate.Normally used to send signals from nerve cells, in large quantities glutamate alters the performance of a brain region involved in planning and decision making, the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC).
Science has shown time again that mental fatigue has real effects. There are numerous studies which show that court decisions can depend on how fatigued the judge is.
...
The new study, from Paris Brain Institute (ICM), investigated whether cognitive functions such as focus, memory, multitasking, and problem-solving can cause fatigue of the LPFC, which influences the decisions we make when we cross things off our list.
The scientists tested people who were sat in front of computers performing tasks that required high-demand focus, and another group that performed low-demand focus tasks.
I'm going to spare you the details and cut to the shocking findings: People who did a day's work of high-demand work at a computer had a build-up of glutamate and, in a test after work, had less focus and energy and patience and spent less time making decisions.
In other words, being mentally exhausted from work mentally exhausted them and they didn't want to do any more mentally-exhausting work.
Seriously we're paying people for this? What the hell?
It's not even a new finding that fatigue is caused by a build-up of a fatigue-causing chemical -- sleepiness is brought on by the accumulation of adenosine in the brain, which builds up in the brain throughout the working day.
Speaking of sleep, if you're taking melatonin to go to sleep, you might want to reconsider.
A melatonin supplement appears to be effective at helping people who take it fall asleep, but it may also cause nightmares and potentially disrupt the body's natural clock when used inappropriately, experts told UPI."We are seeing more cases of sleep problems and insomnia since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and many of these patients are turning to melatonin to help," sleep expert Brant P. Hasler told UPI in a phone interview.
"Generally, melatonin is safe, but it needs to be used appropriately, and I'm not sure that's happening across the board," said Hasler, an associate professor of psychiatry, psychology and clinical and translational science at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Sleep and Circadian Science.This means understanding what the supplement does. It helps users fall asleep, but won't help them stay asleep, Hasler said.
"Melatonin is called the hormone of darkness because it has the opposite effects of light on our internal clocks" -- meaning, it essentially tells the body that it is time to sleep, he said.
Melatonin supplements are designed to mimic the effects of the hormone, boosting its levels within the body to induce sleep, said Jeannie K. Lee, assistant dean and associate professor of pharmacy at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
But because the supplements are designed to boost the body's natural approach to sleep, they also can alter it in ways with which users may not be comfortable.
Besides not helping people stay asleep, melatonin can also cause nightmares.
Andrew Huberman warned against taking exogenous (outside) melatonin, because your body produces its own melatonin, and if you're taking outside melatonin, especially in the huge "supraphysiologic" doses usually available in pills, will reduce your body's ability to make its own melatonin. I think I've heard either him or someone else say the most melatonin you should take is 0.5 mg -- which is much less than a standard dose. It usually comes in pills of 1 mg, 3 mg, 5 mg, or even 10 mg. And he points out that a survey of different pills found that the actual amount of melatonin found in commercially available pills ranged from 15% of the listed dosage, to 400% of the listed dosage.
He especially warns against taking it if you're still in puberty, because it suppresses puberty. But it probably also continues regulating other hormones in adulthood.
For a while I was cutting 1 mg pills in half to get 0.5 mg but I decided it wasn't worth the hassle.
Huberman offers his own preferred "sleep stack" of supplements here. One of the supplements is found in chamomile, so all of the badasses out there are already well-stocked with that.
I've been working on No-Handed Push-Ups. Maybe we can have a Blog Challenge to see who is the first to do a proper one.
Continue reading
Have At You! The Full Nine Yards of Phrases of Mysterious Origin
—Ace
Here are some old expressions, and some explanations for how they came to mean what they mean.
Note that in many cases, I doubt the explanation offered. I think in many cases, these are more stories than histories.
But some of them are true. Some of them seem true, and even some of the ones that don't seem likely to be true are interesting.
three sheets to the wind -- drunk in an out-of-control way. If a ship with three sails had all three sheets -- lines which control the sails -- in the wind, that is, loose, it was out of control. (Thanks to Jim for correcting me.)
the whole nine yards -- this explanation sounds so cool I don't believe it. It sounds like one of those backsplanations, where they make up a story backwards from the term. But popular myth has it that, supposedly, WWII fighter planes were equipped with nine linear yards worth of ammunition --
you can see where this is going -- so if you gave someone the whole nine yards, you exhausted every single bullet in your magazine against them and left yourself absolutely spent.
But... would they really measure ammunition by the yard? And which fighter planes had nine yards of ammunition? All of them? Seems to me this story would be more believable if it specified the particular fighter model that supposedly was loaded with nine yards of ammunition.
I want to believe but... I have questions. I have questions.
Wikipedia pours cold water on this cool explanation, and says there is no explanation for it: " Its origin is unknown and has been described by Yale University librarian Fred R. Shapiro as 'the most prominent etymological riddle of our time'."
Interestingly, early on in the use of the phrase, in the 1900-1920 period, the phrase was often rendered as "the whole six yards."
Another claim about its origin concerns the Vickers machine gun, whose belt of ammunition measured six yards. Well, not really -- six and 2/3rds yards, which is really closer to seven yards. So the claim is that the phrase started off as "giving them the whole six yards," all the ammo of one belt of the Vickers, and that later was inflated, due to Putin's Tax.
And also because the Vickers, when mounted in a plane as the plane's gun, actually was fed by nine yards of ammo:
However, the Vickers gun as fitted to aircraft during the First World War usually had ammunition containers capable of accommodating linked belts of 350-400 rounds, the average length of such a belt being about nine yards, and it was thought that this may be the origin of the phrase.
Unfortunately, as tasty as this is, there are references in print to people promising or giving "the full nine yards" before World War One.
Although this is not a settled explanation, it might be the answer:
The Oxford English Dictionary places the earliest published non-idiomatic use of the phrase in the New Albany Daily Ledger (New Albany, Indiana, January 30, 1855) in an article called "The Judge's Big Shirt." "What a silly, stupid woman! I told her to get just enough to make three shirts; instead of making three, she has put the whole nine yards into one shirt!"...
Many of the popular candidates [for explaining the origins of the phrase] relate to the length of pieces of fabric, or various garments, including Indian saris, Scottish kilts, burial shrouds, or bolts of cloth. No single source verifies that any one of those suggestions was the actual origin. However, an article published in Comments on Etymology demonstrates that fabric was routinely sold in standard lengths of nine yards (and other multiples of three yards) during the 1800s and early 1900s. This may explain why so many different types of cloth or garments have been said to have been nine yards long. The phrase "...she has put the whole nine yards into one shirt" appears in 1855.
That's kind of interesting, because, putting this together, I saw claims that the expression dressed to the nines derived from the fact that cloth was sold in a measure of nine yards, so if you were dressed to the nines, you were dressed, as it were, with the full nine yards.
But that doesn't work either. That explanation for "to the nines" is a false etymology.
to the nines -- Because "to the nines" goes back quite a ways, and seems to suggest something more mystical than a tailor's shop.
Also, while in modern days we almost always use "to the nines" when talking about dress -- in fact, the expression is pretty much "dressed to the nines" now -- in earlier days "to the nines" could apply to anything, and meant perfection or fullness in many things.
The phrase is said to be Scots in origin. The earliest written example of the phrase is from the 1719 Epistle to Ramsay by the Scottish poet William Hamilton:The bonny Lines therein thou sent me,
How to the nines they did content me.Robert Burns' "Poem on Pastoral Poetry", published in 1791, also uses the phrase:
Thou paints auld nature to the nines,
In thy sweet Caledonian lines.Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (New and Revised edition. 1981) states that the phrase is 'perhaps a corruption of 'then eyne' (to the eyes)"
The phrase may have originally been associated with the Nine Worthies or the nine Muses. A poem from a 17th century collection of works by John Rawlet contains the following lines:
The learned tribe whose works the World do bless,
Finish those works in some recess;
Both the Philosopher and Divine,
And Poets most who still make their address
In private to the Nine.
I guess the "nine yards of cloth" might still be the explanation.
the whole kit and caboodle -- everything, the lot. There are two different claims about this.
First, Grammarist.com says it's an American expression, made up of "kit," as in a soldier's kit, his gear, plus his boodle, a collection of things, which I guess would be all of his stuff that wasn't officially part of his kit, maybe? Boodle got turned into "caboodle" just to alliterate better as "kit and caboodle" and then people wrote "kit and kaboodle."
English-Grammar-Lessons.com, on the other hand, claims it's an English phrase that comes first from kith, an old English word meaning "estate." "The entire kith" means everything on your estate, your land. They then say that "caboodle" means a "kitbag." But here's the thing, I can't find any citations to back these claims up.
So this seems like a dead-end. Let's go with the first claim.
As far as I can tell, "kith" means "country," so that "kith and kin" means "homeland and clan" or "country and family." Interestingly, "kith" derives from old roots meaning "known" (as in, lands known to you) and "kin" derives from roots meaning "To give birth to".
"Boodle" may be related to "bundle" and "bundle" may be how we get "bindle," the sack on the end of a stick that hobos carry on their shoulders.
turn a blind eye to -- speaking of backsplanations, this is one I don't buy, but it is cool, so I'll relate it. The story goes that Admiral Nelson, who was blind in one eye, intended to attack a group of Danish ships. He was signaled to stop attacking by his allied British ships, but put the telescope up to his blind eye, and told his first made, "I saw no signal to cease." And he continued attacking.
I knew Italian had the same phrase, chiudere un occhio (close an eye (to)), and I thought "Well why would the Italians use a phrase based on what Admiral Nelson said?," but, apparently, they tell the same story about the phrase.
I'm still skeptical. I think the real story here is far less interesting: I think it just means, basically, "pretend not to see what you don't want to see." No additional elaboration necessary. And all this business about Admiral Nelson is a backsplanation for the rubes.
You can believe it if you want. I'm tired of these Zionist Lies.
short shrift -- a shrift is a confession, especially to a priest. I've heard this three different ways. First, if you give your priest the "short shrift," you're giving him an abbreviated, cursory list of your sins. I've also heard that this applies to the priest's instructions for penance, so if he gives you the "short shrift," he's not thinking about it very much and is blowing you off with a formulaic "say five Hail Marys and take two aspirin" and isn't properly absolving you.
I've also heard it claimed that an executioner will cut a condemned man's allowance of time to confess his sins short to keep to a schedule or to stop him from delaying, hence, "giving him the short shrift." I don't believe this latter explanation. I think it's a backsplanation. I mean, how often would this come up? Would it come up enough times to generate an expression that lasts throughout time? Doubtful. Sounds cool, though.
I think the first explanation is the correct one and the other two are More Zionist Lies.
The walls have ears -- I wouldn't have thought this one needed an explanation -- I mean, the walls listen so be careful when speaking, what more explanation is needed? -- but this explanation of Italian sayings claims that the Louvre ( a palace before it was a museum) had a system of hidden tubes in its walls permitting someone to listen in on conversations throughout the palace. Catherine de Medici, Queen of France in the 1500's, used the tubes to learn political secrets.
hair of the dog -- supposedly this comes from a medieval cure for rabies -- applying the hair of the rabid dog that bit you would cure the disease. I guess having a bit of alcohol is supposed to take the bite out of a hangover.
show your true colors -- refers to a ship flying its true colors, that is, its true flag. A pirate would usually fly a false flag to get close to its prey and, only when within combat range, fly its true colors.
This video has a bunch of old expressions, including pass with flying colors -- when ships won a battle, they would sail past port proudly flying their flags, or colors -- and nail your colors to the mast, which means nailing your flag to the mast, giving up any possibility of lowering your flag in case you have to surrender. Thus, announcing your are making your final stand.
Another one he notes is dyed in the wool. Apparently when you dyed the actual wool, it kept its color better. When you knitted the wool into a garment and then dyed it, that was "dyed in the piece," and that wouldn't produce such great colors. So you'd rather something be dyed in the wool.
He's the guy that provided that executioner-cuts-off-your-confession explanation for short shrift. I see that one popping up on the internet a lot... probably just because it makes for a grabbier story.
A wing and a prayer -- the phrase refers to Ralph Hinkley's ungainly mode of flight.
Just kidding, obviously. It refers to a situation in which there is almost no hope of success. It comes from a WWII song about a badly-damaged bomber attempting to fly home. The bomber has lost one wing, so it is "Comin' In On a Wing and a Prayer." A wing on one side, and just a prayer holding it up on the other side.
The song doesn't seem to be based on any particular incident, but may be "inspired"
by any number of incidents of heavily damaged bombers trying to get home.
Different incidents have been credited as the inspiration for the song. It is sometimes said to be based on the events of February 26, 1943, when "Southern Comfort", a B-17 Flying Fortress piloted by Hugh G. Ashcraft Jr. of Charlotte, North Carolina, was badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire on a bombing mission over mainland Europe. As it approached the British coast, Ashcraft told his crew over the radio: "Those who want to, please pray." The aircraft made it home safely. The song has also been associated with the similar survival against the odds, despite extensive damage, of another B-17, "Thunderbird", piloted by Lt. John Cronkhite, on a mission from Biskra, Algeria, over Tripoli on January 12, 1943.
The song title was used in a subsequent movie:
The movie was also not based on any particular incident.
scuttlebutt -- meaning gossip, the term is nautical in origin. It refers to a butt, or cask, which has been scuttled, that is, pierced by a hole to allow water to drain out.
In other words, the cask has been turned into a wooden water fountain, and the scuttled butt became a natural gathering place where bored crewmen could trade gossip.
blue blood -- nobles did not see a lot of sun, and their pale skin allowed the blue of their veins to show through. Thus, they were literally "blue bloods."
This doesn't have anything to do with anything, but in this article," I found these old-time euphemisms for "penis:"
"Master John Goodfellow,"
"the gentleman usher,"
"the staff of life,"
"the maypole," and, impressively,
"the Cyprian scepter."
For women's daintybits, terms once used included:
"The Phoenix nest,"
"The Netherlands,"
"Mount Pleasant," and,
amazingly,
"Mrs. Fubbs' Parlor." I don't know why anyone ever stopped saying that.
The article also mentions some old-time expressions for saying you're hot, hot as in overheated, not randy, but one expression included is a definitely sexual one:
"hot as a half-f*cked fox in a forest fire."
Which is amazing. Again, I don't know why we stopped saying that.
From personal reconnaissance, a good word to try to reintroduce is swive, to copulate with, to fornicate with.
Finally, to the entire reason for this post:
have at you -- meaning, "I'm going to attack you now."
I recently watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
So in the Black Knight scene, the Knight repeatedly says "Have at you!" as he attacks Arthur. And I'm sure you've read that line in book or heard it in movies set in swords-and-cilice times.
Continue reading
Federal Judge Vacates Biden's Loan-Cancellation Executive Order, Declaring It Unconstitutional
—Ace
A federal judge in Texas on Thursday struck down the Biden administration's student-debt forgiveness plan, imperiling a key administration priority that would have canceled up to $20,000 in student loans for tens of millions of borrowers. The Biden administration's plan is an "unconstitutional exercise of Congress's legislative power" that also failed to go through normal regulatory processes, Judge Mark Pittman of the Northern District of Texas wrote in a 26-page opinion."No one can plausibly deny that it is either one of the largest delegations of legislative power to the executive branch, or one of the largest exercises of legislative power without congressional authority in the history of the United States," Mr. Pittman, an appointee of former President Donald Trump wrote.
The Biden administration can appeal the verdict. The White House didn't immediately respond to a request for comment....
The lawsuit is one of several brought by Republican officials and conservative groups. Another suit, brought by GOP officials in six states, is currently awaiting a ruling from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which put a preliminary pause on the program last month as it considered whether the states had legal standing.
The lawless tyrannical Biden Administration has stopped taking applications for their unconstitutional and illegal loan forgiveness bribery program-- almost as if they knew all along that this was unconstitutional and would inevitably be declared to be so, and almost as if it was all just an election-season stunt to Dupe the Progs.
Body-Positive Biological Male Wins "Miss America" Pageant in New Hampshire
—Ace
I believe this is just a feeder competition for the NH pageant, and if it is a feeder competition, ooh baby, did they get their man.
The swimsuit competition was... how best to say?... character-building. I think that's a Body Positive way to say it.
"There's nothing more beautiful than self-delusion." -- some Chinese wizard, probably
MARCO RUBIO CALLS FOR A DELAY IN THE VOTE ON SENATE LEADERSHIP TO MAKE SURE THE LEADER ACTUALLY ALIGNS WITH THE INTERESTS OF VOTERS WHO POWERED THE FLORIDA ELECTION TRIUMPH
Marco Is Running Himself?
—Ace
He's openly -- or very nearly openly -- saying that Mitch McConnell does not align with the interests of the New Republican Coalition.
Now, one thing Little Marco could mean, which I would not like, is, "Hispanics are now part of our coalition so we must immediately push for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, like I pushed for for twelve years, and Mitch McConnell isn't sufficiently devoted to selling out American workers to corporate global interests."
But I'm pretty sure Mitch McConnell is sufficiently devoted to selling out the working class to his corporate global donors, so I don't think that's it.
I think Little Marco -- or as I will now call him, "Average-Sized, Or Possibly Larger, Marco" -- is saying, is that Mitch McConnell represents the corporate globalist old guard and is no longer fit to lead a Republican Party which is oriented to the working class and middle class.
Marco Rubio @marcorubioUS Senate candidate, FL
The Senate GOP leadership vote next week should be postponedFirst we need to make sure that those who want to lead us are genuinely committed to fighting for the priorities & values of the working Americans (of every background) who gave us big wins in states like #Florida
Rick Scott, a fellow Floridian, has already challenged Mitch McConnell for leadership of the caucus; I imagine Average-Sized or Possibly Larger Marco intends to support him.
This could go places, maybe.
Eddie Scarry @eScarryMcConnell retirement announcement countdown.
Well, McConnell will not remain in the Senate if he's demoted. If he loses, he'll resign.
If you want to know how that works: The Governor of Kentucky is a Democrat, Andy Beshear, who won in the Democrat wave year of 2018. The Kentucky legislature, however, passed legislation controlling the replacement of departing senators, by which they will submit a list of potential replacements, and the governor can only pick a name from that list to replace McConnell.
I think the governor has claimed that is an unconstitutional law but I don't see how it is.
In the meantime, McConnell is promising money for Herschel Walker's runoff bid, as governor Brian Kemp will provide the troops and expertise for the turn-out effort.
Is Average-Sized or Larger Marco making a play to be Majority (or Minority) Leader himself?
Mollie @MZHemingwayIf a united GOP is a strong GOP, Rubio is clearly a solid candidate for Leader. While an establishment figure in many good ways, he also embraces and is embraced by many America First folks, doesn't have Mitch's baggage of utterly despising voters, and is appealing and savvy.
Continue reading
Folks, Get Ready for a Shock: With His Last Action as a Senatorial Candidate, Evan McMullin Lied In a Preening, Narcissistic, Sanctimonious Way
—Ace
He claimed -- in a Tweet, of course; all these Twitter-Based Life-Forms do is Tweet and raise money off of Twitter links -- that while he conceded to Lee, he sternly, heroically advised Mike Lee that he had better uphold his oath to the Constitution, with the unstated but palpable implication that if he didn't, Rough, Tough Evan just might coming for him.
You'll never guess, but it turns out, the lifelong liar was lying about this, and once again counterfeiting himself to make himself look good on Twitter for his Twitter zombie fans.
In a subsequent Facebook post and tweet, McMullin claimed he told Sen. Lee, "I truly hope that he upholds his oath to the Constitution during his upcoming term."Lee's son John retorted via Twitter: "That is not at all how the call went. I was there. Both candidates were surprisingly cordial. For once, you didn't take the typical pedantic tone -- I was surprised how kind the exchange was. And then you turned around and tweeted this. You have lied and deceived until the very end."
Utah's Republican Party Vice Chairman Jordan Hess would go on to corroborate John's tweet. "I was also there. What @johndlee says is true. McMullin continues to lie," he tweeted.
So here is my guess, and I'll bet six dollars ($6 US) that I'm right: His next grift is a 501(c)(3) about "monitoring and enforcing Muh Constitutional Normz" and this is his opening PR move before he files the paperwork.
Will you donate $100 so that Evan McMullin can pay $8 to an assistant in India to scan the Twitter feeds of Republicans and make snarky comments to them about the Constitution, while using the rest of the money to fund his lavish no-work lifestyle?
(I'm taking it easy today because it's Veterans Day -- I'm not a Veteran, just taking the opportunity to take a half day that better men have secured for me -- and because it was a tough week. Posts today are going to be very quick and superficial.)
THE MORNING RANT – Republicans Have Got to Start Voting Early to Fight the Democrats’ Voter Suppression
—Buck Throckmorton
Conservative voters have got to let go of the principled insistence that we only vote on Election Day.
Sure, in our principled world there would only be voting on Election Day, in person, with voter ID, and sufficient paper ballots for every voter. However, we don’t live in that world, so there is no sense trying to behave as we do. Our principles are allowing liberal election administrators in blue areas to suppress election day balloting when conservatives come out to vote.
In Maricopa County (Phoenix) Arizona, almost one third of voting machines were inoperable until mid-afternoon on Election Day. Voters were given alternatives such as waiting until the machines were fixed, or voting at another precinct, or surrendering their ballots to a third party who promised to properly cast it once the problem was resolved. How many people went to another precinct only to find another line and the same problem before giving up and not voting? How ever many it was, it is an almost statistical certainty that the number exceeded zero.
Running out of paper ballots is the most effective way of suppressing votes, and there were plenty of ballot shortages awaiting Republicans who waited to vote until Election Day.
In Luzerne County, PA “dozens of polling places ran out of printer paper for ballots. Voters had to be turned away.”
A Kingwood, TX polling place ran out of paper to print ballots. “When supplies dwindled they asked for more. It never came.” Suffice it to say there was a number of voters greater than zero in Kingwood who tried to vote on Election Day but didn’t get their ballots cast.
Harris County, Texas (Houston) was pretty much open and intentional about its efforts to suppress election day ballots in conservative precincts.
“At least 12 locations in Harris County are out of paper needed to print ballots. Some have been waiting for hours for paper and turning voters away.”
We know they will do this to us, so why do we stand on our principles and allow our votes to be suppressed?
I started voting in the 1980s in heavily-Democrat Travis County, Texas (Austin). There was no early voting then, and it was simply understood that the election administrator would do everything she possibly could to suppress votes in the Republican precincts of northwest Travis County.
It was such a relief when early, in-person voting came along, allowing me to defeat the efforts to keep me from voting. I wrote about the ballot suppression practices of Travis County in this previous Ace of Spades post.
Continue reading
Mid-Morning Art Thread
—CBD
Girl Picking Poppies
Daniel Ridgway Knight
In Flanders Fields-- Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae (1872-1918 )
In Flanders Fields, the poppies grow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The Morning Report — 11/11/22
—J.J. Sefton
Good morning, kids. Friday and as the recriminations and finger-pointing continue in the wake of the red wave that wasn't, it is amazing how so many people either ignore or give short shrift to what is now fast becoming institutionalized electoral fraud in a growing number of states and key districts. Was that the only reason the red wave didn't materialize? Of course not. But let me first delve into a couple of factors that are being pimped as the main causes but for sure weren't.
By any measure, Democrats exceeded expectations this week. Though listening to the triumphalism today, you’d think Joe Biden was Hannibal at Cannae. A fractured Republican Party just won the House and still has an outside shot at taking the Senate. The first term of an unpopular Biden [so-called] "presidency" is now effectively over (save the executive abuse).As expected, though, the lazy Dobbs-sunk-the-GOP narrative quickly solidified on the left. “It turns out women enjoy having human rights, and we vote,” Hillary Clinton tweeted. Dem cheerleader Joe Scarborough called it a “massive backlash.” “It will take a while to sort out exactly why Republicans did so much worse than expected,” writes Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times. “But there seems little question that abortion was a big part of the story.”
Listen, if anyone had told conservatives 30 or 20 or even a year ago that the political price for overturning Roe v. Wade would mean taking back only one chamber of Congress in the subsequent midterm, they would never have believed you. So, even if the left’s tenuous claim that Dobbs saved them in 2022 is to be believed, the price for ridding the nation of the legal and moral abomination of Roe would be well worth it.
But it is a tenuous contention. . .
. . . We’ll know more later, but it doesn’t seem like an army of enraged women and young people flooded the polls to exact revenge on the court. If CNN’s exit polls are to be believed, Democrats lost support among women in 2022 compared to the last midterm in 2018. The Associated Press/Fox News exit poll found that 52 percent of voters were women in 2018, and 52 percent of all voters in 2022 were women. It is a myth that young people came out in droves. Democrats lost support among younger voters, as well. . .
. . . It’s true that pro-lifers lost abortion referendums, including, incomprehensibly, one in Montana that would have compelled medical care for “infants who are born alive.” It’s also true that numerous Republican candidates are either unable or frightened to articulate coherent pro-life views. These are problems for Republicans.
On the other hand, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Brian Kemp (in a state where the Senate race is in a runoff) all signed heartbeat bills and easily won re-election. John Fetterman might have beaten a dubious carpetbagging conservative in Dr. Oz, but pro-life Republicans JD Vance and Mike Lee had no problem. It also looks like Adam Laxalt has a chance to knock off Catherine Cortez Masto, an incumbent who made nationalizing Roe v. Wade the central argument of her campaign.
Nothing that happened this week makes DeSantis – who rightfully enjoyed a large victory in my home state, in large part due to the massive inward migration of MAGA Republicans, and in a slightly lesser part due to his laughably hopeless opponent Charlie Crist – the king of the America First movement.As we begin to get some perspective after the risible “red trickle” falsehoods peddled over Tuesday night, people have begun to realize this midterm election went about as well as any of us had believed.
Not only did President Trump win 219 of his 235 endorsed races (that’s a 93 percent success rate at last count), but the Democrats just guaranteed themselves Joe Biden as their nominee for 2024.
In their zeal to create a “no red wave” narrative, they gave Beijing Joe credit for the disjointed, apoplectic, panicked messaging of abortion and the death of democracy. They have backed themselves into a Biden 2024 corner that is going to be long, arduous, and ultimately, defeated.
MAGA Republicans should also remember that they also do not simply fight the corporate media, the left, and the far left all at the same time. They also fight the same Republican moderates who are now whipping up division inside the party. Think about it. In the week Republicans retake the House, and probably the Senate, win a host of victories around the country and with more to come – the corporate Republican class wants to pick a fight with the man and the movement that got us here.
For example, the establishment GOP in Pennsylvania was dead set against Colonel Doug Mastriano, and they worked hand-in-hand with Democrats to defeat him. When your gubernatorial candidate is being attacked from all sides, including your own, your Senate candidate will also be dragged down, along with congressional candidates on the ballot.
If the GOP had actually rallied around the top of the ticket – Mastriano and Oz – they could have won together and delivered a down-ticket boost. But not only did the GOP establishment in that state lose the governor and the U.S. Senate race, they lost congressional races that should have been pickups. The blame lies with them, and they know it. Hence their projection – as always – onto Trump.
This from Charlie Hurt of the Washington Times via Breitbart:
Hurt rejected the idea that establishment Republicans have a case for blaming Trump for midterm losses. He noted that the Republican establishment does not have a great track record with picking winners. For example, former Sens. Martha McSally of Arizona and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia had been handpicked by the Republican establishment to fill vacant Senate seats in red states, but both of them lost their re-election bids in 2020 to Democrats.“These are two candidates who didn’t even have to face voters,” Hurt said. “It gives them the greatest advantage that any senator has in a Senate race, which is incumbency. And both of those women, who were handpicked by establishment Republicans and dropped in the Senate seats, couldn’t hold on to their seats."
He continued, “So yes, you can blame Donald Trump if you want to, for one lost seat in Georgia, [but] we would not have [Georgia’s Democrat Sen.] Raphael Warnock if not for establishment Republicans dropping a terrible candidate in Kelly Loeffler into that seat.”Hurt said if the establishment is so good at picking candidates, “then explain why [Colorado’s Republican senatorial candidate Joe] O’Dea lost by 12 points.”
He added, “If you’re the establishment Republican Party, and you’re so effing good at all this stuff, then why [do] you pick candidates that even your own voters don’t support?”
THIS. Hello, Romney? McCain? Bueller?
Look, I do not want to get into an intestinal hassle with people over what Trump did or did not say about DeSantis, or even who should be the standard bearer for 2024. I am not going to engage in that shit because that's what it is. First, if Trump wants to attack DeSantis or vice versa, it's their prerogative to do so, since it is campaign season now in earnest and secondly, whatever they say and/or how they say it will redound positively or negatively on either of them in the minds of the base. If anyone has a suggestion whereby rivals can out-compliment themselves to determine which one wins, I'm sure both campaigns would be eager to hear from you.
On a personal level, whatever Trump's shortcomings are – and yes he does have them – I'm just not going to open fire on perhaps the greatest president in over 100 years and among the best ever. That also goes for Ron DeSantis who potentially can rise to Trump-level greatness if given the chance. In any case, the media will distort and gin up crap all by themselves to sow discord and unrest in our camp anyway. Politics ain't beanbag so let the chips fall where they may.
I've covered the fraud factor for the past two days now. It cannot be ignored. The 2020 scam has now been "fortified" and the results speak for themselves. If nothing else convinces you, ask yourself this: how can Katie Hobbs be both a candidate AND continue to act in her role as secretary of state, a prime function of that office being the running of elections and the tabulating/validation of the vote count? QE-fucking-D.
While that alone is something that is an absolute nightmare and proof positive that we have descended to banana republic level, my wanting to believe that that is the sole factor would be strangely comforting were it not for the real nightmare we are facing, as Robert Spencer duly notes:
If Della Volpe’s numbers are correct, and 64% of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 really voted for Democrats, then one thing is clear: the corruption and politicization of our educational system has worked.One thing I know already.If not for voters under 30 … tonight WOULD have been a Red Wave.
CNN National House Exit Poll
R+ 13 65+ R+ 11 45-64
D +2 30-44 D +28 18-29#GenZ did their job.— John Della Volpe (@dellavolpe) November 9, 2022
What he is crowing about is the apparent fact that the voting group with the least life experience and the most recent subjection to the Leftist indoctrination that dominates America’s educational system ended up voting as it was brainwashed to do. Gee, that’s terrific, if you like evidence of the success of the relentless propagandizing of a vulnerable and impressionable captive audience, but neither John Della Volpe nor anyone else should be proud of it. What it shows is not that the Leftist case is compelling or persuasive; it shows that patriotic Americans have been far too complacent in allowing public schools to become centers of Leftist indoctrination and hatred of our own nation and heritage. . .
. . . this endeavor has been going on since long before Garland first put on his jackboots and resolved to destroy the republic. In the 1960s, Leftists began what Communist activist Rudi Dutschke indelibly dubbed “the Long March Through the Institutions". . . The Long March Through the Institutions was the same kind of slow, steady takeover, as Communists, leftists, and their allies gradually gained control of America’s colleges and universities, its primary and secondary educational systems, its popular culture, and above all its ever-growing federal bureaucracy.
This has created a situation in which those who oppose this multifarious and all-encompassing establishment are universally derided virtually everywhere one turns: in what are supposed to be objective and impartial news broadcasts; in lessons at every level of the educational system about the nation’s history, present condition, and future prospects; in movies, popular music, and more. All of the late-night comedians who host talk shows are part of this camp, and they hobnob with the political elites, and yet they still posture as if they were plucky outsiders going up against a stultified and stultifying entrenched orthodoxy. . .
. . . Many, if not most, of the Gen Z-ers who voted overwhelmingly for the Left will, as they get older, come to realize how foolish and wrongheaded they were to support socialist internationalism and the managed decline of the United States. But others will never wake up, and will applaud that decline as retribution for centuries of alleged racism and colonialism. Even as their own cities and towns become ever more squalid, poor, dirty, and dangerous, they will continue to think of themselves as righteous for having chosen all that. That pride will be all they have left.
And that my friends leads me directly into noting that today is Veteran's Day. It used to be a holiday that for me was a happy occasion, a time to thank those who wear or wore the uniform for their service and sacrifices to keep us free. Over the past several years, it has turned into a day of poignancy bordering on melancholy given the state of the nation for which those men and women served, and the complete degradation of our armed forces for those who are still in service. As the collective memory of those who served in World War 2, Korea and Vietnam fades away as more of them pass into history, we lose a vital connection to our past.
What does that leave us with? A lobotomized mass of sheeple, much like the Gen Z-ers who voted for a literal ham sandwich to be Senator from Pennsylvania because, Democrat good, GOP evil.
Anyway, now more than ever, when you see a veteran thank them, and more importantly, help them out however you can if they're struggling. They deserve at least a little kindness, something this government refuses to do for obvious reasons.
Chin up, and have a good weekend.
- ABOVE THE FOLD, BREAKING, NOTEWORTHY
- ". . . it’s astonishing how many of these YGLs completed the program well before the climax of their influence. For example, Putin graduated before he became president of Russia, Page and Brin before Google became a publicly traded company, and Gates and Merkel were in the program’s inaugural year back in 1993."
Who Are the World Economic Forum's 'Young Global Leaders?' The Names May Surprise You.
- "If Oster’s essay means anything, it signals that we are in a new phase of a long movement towards totalitarianism. One clue is that its push to forget, to nudge us into cultural amnesia, is a constant hallmark of totalitarianism. Another giveaway is that our elites—the 'experts' who tell us what’s best for us and what we can say and do--have for decades pressed hard for control over all conversations in the public square."
Chinese COVID Amnesty is a Distraction from What’s Coming: Greater Censorship and Atomization
- Robert Spencer: "One group saved the left from being completely obliterated. . . If Della Volpe’s numbers are correct, and 64% of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 really voted for Democrats, then one thing is clear: the corruption and politicization of our educational system has worked."
There WOULD Have Been a Red Wave, But…..
- Lloyd Billingsley: "This Veterans Day, honor wounded survivors of the Battle of Fort Hood."
11/5 and Still Alive
Continue reading
Daily Tech News 11 November 2022
—Pixy Misa
Top Story- Intel has pre-announced its Sapphire Rapids server CPUs with the high-end 56 core models priced at $12,980. (WCCFTech)
Available some time next year.
- AMD has announced its Epyc Genoa server CPUs with the high-end 96 core models priced at $11,805. (Tom's Hardware)
Available now.
- And AMD's new 64 core chip is faster than two of Intel's current top-of-the-line 40 core chips. (Phoronix)
And 64% faster on average than AMD's own previous 64 core model, which is even more impressive. A substantial part of that comes from the inclusion of AVX512, so check the individual benchmarks if you're not running number crunchy workloads.
Continue reading
Who Watches The ONT?
—WeirdDave
Greetings! Welcome to the Thursday ONT. How are things going where you are?
Continue reading
Midnight Sonata for Elephant Cafe
—Ace
Story here, thanks to Jim (in Kalifornia).
First verified video of bigfoot? Or -- a golden doodle? You decide.
Adopting a senior pittie -- who's about to give birth.
Gallant and Goofus, dog versions.
The GOP's get out the vote effort.
This bird saw what you did with your hand.
I think this svelte woman might have gotten herself a little too much dog.
This cat watched 40 Steven Segal movies in a row, then started greasing back its hair, started talking with a fake Brooklyn accent and calling people "jamoke" and "jibroni" and asking nothing but smugly threatening rhetorical questions ("I'm nothin' but a gun and a badge, huh?"), and started doing sick aikido throws.
Continue reading
Quick Hits: New Nose Is Good Nose
—Ace
A new nose was grown on a patient's forearm, to be later grafted to his face.
[Translation] Toulouse: The area of the body
which evolved to be made into artificial penises
was used as a nose incubator
The biomaterial was first implanted in his forearm for better revascularization.It is an unprecedented intervention. The nose of a patient from the Toulouse University Hospital has been completely reconstructed from a synthetic graft previously implanted in her forearm, the Toulouse Cancer University Institute announced in a press release on Monday November 7.
In 2013, she was treated for nasal cavity cancer. A treatment which had made him lose "a large part of his nose as well as the front part of his palate", indicated the hospital. After four years without a nose, the ENT and cervico-facial surgery teams at the Toulouse University Hospital offered him "a bespoke nasal reconstruction using biomaterial" using a 3D printer.
Nurse cuts off man's foot without permission for... taxidermy exhibit.
A Wisconsin hospice nurse has been charged with amputating the frostbitten foot of a dying man without his permission in order to preserve it for a sick display in her family's taxidermy shop.Mary K. Brown, 38, allegedly hacked off the victim's right foot -- without his OK or a doctor's permission on May 27 -- and told a fellow nurse she intended to exhibit it with a sign saying "wear your boots, kids," according to a criminal complaint obtained by WQOW.
The victim had been admitted to the Valley Health and Rehab Center in Spring Valley in March with severe frostbite on both of his feet.
By the end of May, doctors were sure that he was close to dying, and witnesses said his foot was necrotic and only held to the rest of his leg by dead skin and tendons, according to the complaint.
A nurse who was present when Brown allegedly chopped off the man's foot on May 27 reported that the patient clenched her hand tightly and was moaning during the procedure, the complaint states.
The only thing that would make this more Current Year is if she then filmed a Tik Tok of herself sobbing heroically over the severed foot.
Finish woman marries her stepbrother.
Matilda Eriksson said she never considered getting married until she met Samuli, 27, who became her stepbrother after her mom married his father in 2019."I responded right away with passion," Ms. Eriksson told Yahoo News of their meeting at her mom's 50th birthday party.
Yes, that's called "the thrill of the forbidden."
Eriksson said she Googled if there could be any possible legal implications they would face in the future."First we found some false, old information that it would be illegal, but gladly one of my sister's closest friends is a law student and she told us that there would be no problem if we wanted to get married," she said.
Well at least they really did their homework before marrying a close family member.
Vice President Kamala Harris's husband, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, is reportedly rallying Democrats around her for a 2024 presidential run should President Joe Biden bow out.According to Politico, Emhoff is telling Democrats that the party ought to collectively back Harris if Biden decides not to seek a second term following Tuesday evening’s midterm elections.
Democrats, worried about Harris's unpopularity with their base and swing voters, are not necessarily on board with such a plan.
[Ellen] Weaver borrowed the sloganeering and buzzwords of right-wing activist groups, such as the 1776 Project and Moms for Liberty--which, as my colleague Paige Williams recently reported, have turned public schools into the national stage of a manufactured culture war over critical race theory (C.R.T.), L.G.B.T.Q. classroom materials, the sexual "grooming" of children, and other vehicles of "woke leftist" indoctrination, as well as lingering resentment over covid-19 lockdowns. During the debate, Weaver railed against C.R.T. and the "pornography" supposedly proliferating in schools, and associated Ellis with a "far-left, union-driven agenda." (Incidentally, South Carolina's public employees are prohibited from engaging in collective bargaining.) "They believe in pronoun politics. They believe parents are domestic terrorists, much like Merrick Garland," Weaver said.
Michael Shellenberger points out that Biden is blaming oil companies for high gas prices -- just days after shouting "There is no more drilling!" to an environmental activist at a rally.
Disney unveils its first "plus sized" princess in film about body dysmorphia. Except... it's not about dysmorphia. She thinks she's overweight and she is. What's the psychological condition where you retain the ability to accurately gauge your metabolic health?
Also, it's a typical Disney thing: It's a short film. They're not committing a full theatrical film budget to this. Just the minimum outlay necessary to get the praise for the Twitter virtue signal.
Continue reading
"The Email Caste's Last Stand"
—Ace
How about a happy thread?
As you probably know -- or maybe I have the great pleasure of being the first one to tell you -- "Meta," which is what FaceBook calls itself now because "FaceBook" has the brand approval rating of NAMBLA or The Lincoln Project, just laid off 11,000 of its least useful employees, which, considering that these are "workers" paid to play ping-pong and drink lattes all day in an industry devoted to goldbricking, check-hammering and clock-watching, is really saying something.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed employees virtually on Wednesday around 1pm ET, hours after the company announced it is laying off 13% of its staff.A Meta employee impacted by today's layoffs provided this video to NBC News.
In a letter early Wednesday morning, Zuckerberg said Meta is making reductions in every organization but that recruiting will be disproportionately affected since the company plans to hire fewer people in 2023. The company extended its hiring freeze through the first quarter with a few exceptions, Zuckerberg said.
Impacted employees will receive 16 weeks of pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, Zuckerberg said. Meta will cover health insurance for six months.
Here's a transcript of what he said in the video segment:
I know there must be just a range of different human emotions. I want to say up front that I take full responsibility for this human decision.I'm the human founder and CEO, I'm responsible for the human health of our human company, for our direction, and for deciding how we execute that, including human things like this, and this was ultimately my human call.
And it was one of the hardest calls that I've had to make in the 18 earth years of running the company. And a lot of why it's hard is, obviously, it has a big impact on your human lives, but also for our peaceful, non-xenocidal mission. We're losing human terran people who... you've really put your human heart and imaginary ha-ha soul into this place.
Each of you generic labor units is talented and passionate, and each of you has played a role in making Meta the success that it is. No matter what subcreature team you may have worked on, each of you played a role in contributing to the products that billions of zoo people use to connect every standard terran day.
I sprinkled in some words like "human" and "earth" and "terran" to better approximate the tone of Zuckerberg's delivery.
Slate whines that the firings at Meta will mean that people only in the country due to H1-B visas sponsored by Meta will have to go back to their countries of origin.
They similarly whined about that at Twitter.
I don't know what to tell you. It's a contract for employment in a foreign country, not a grant of citizenship. That's how the contract works.
By Malcolm Kyeyune, the end of the "email caste" that has flourished in the Courts of High Tech.
[T]here is another aspect of the Musk takeover that has little to do with free speech or even ideology--although it has a great deal to do with the class interests of Big Tech censors. As a recession looms, Silicon Valley is shedding the non-essential workers it acquired when unlimited venture funding made turning a profit an afterthought. Musk happens to have taken the helm at Twitter just as this reality is asserting itself. In this sense, the revolt against his leadership is the last stand of a cohort of activist hangers-on who are about to find themselves unemployed.
You can't have Trumpian levels of DEI overstaffing in a Biden economy.
Musk paid $44 billion to acquire Twitter, and all indications are that the platform isn't worth anything close to that. Once he got access to the company's finances, the Tesla boss realized it was losing millions of dollars every day, and that many of its employees weren't doing much work at all. So he proceeded to do what most executives would do in this situation: He laid off some of his workers.The abrupt firing of thousands of employees solicited a new wave of outrage from Musk's haters. But even if you remove him from the equation, Twitter couldn't have gone much longer without massive layoffs. The same thing is happening across Silicon Valley. Last week, the online-payments company Stripe announced it would cut 14 percent of its workforce, as did the rideshare giant Lyft; Facebook parent company Meta looks poised to do the same. [Did the same, as mentioned above. -- ace] Like Wile E. Coyote, tech companies ran off the cliff long ago; only now is economic gravity starting to assert itself.
Many "unicorn" tech startups began with a few engineers and a product they wanted to sell, but over the past decade-plus, they have accrued a bloated bureaucracy of "equity"-minded h.r. activists, ESG-savvy consultants, affinity-group mavens, climate-change specialists, and many other email-caste hangers-on. Now that times are turning bad, tech companies can no longer afford to sustain a massive "court" of professional-class nobility, paying sinecures to sons and daughters of the good and the great who don't know how to code or crunch numbers, but know how to write emails, hold useless meetings, and talk about diversity and inclusion.
Golgifrinchan Space Ark B is ready for take-off.
He compares these useless hangers-on to the officer corps of the pre-Revolution French Army, hopelessly clogged with the useless second sons of the talentless nobility, who could not be fired, because they needed jobs and had nowhere else to go.
A similar dynamic is operative in America today. The people who worked "on climate" at Twitter, now being given the ax by the perfidious Elon Musk, are openly complaining that they won't be able to find jobs anywhere else in this economy. They are, of course, right to worry.One of the biggest and least-talked-about social questions in the West is how to economically provide for our own modern version of France's impecunious nobles: that is, how to prop up high-status people who can't really do much economically productive work.
Learn to scavenge. Posted by: fd
Instapundit often mentions an "overproduction of elites" being a marker for social upheaval but I can't see how you're an "elite" if you literally have no useful skills by which to put food into your mouth without the intervention of state or corporate welfare programs.
...In an earlier column, I ended with the following question: "Gen. Mark Milley infamously testified before a congressional hearing that he wanted to understand 'white rage.' But who right now is prepared for progressive, multiracial, demisexual rage, as the core social groups driving progressivism in America are hit the hardest by layoffs and the end of Silicon Valley subsidies?" That rage is no longer coming--it's here.
Who the hell is this guy? He's amazeballs.
Bonus:
And ICYMI, Ace, remaining Twitter employees are to be back in the office for minimum 40 hours, according to an email this morning (IIRC).Posted by: Comrade flounder
"You Do Not Reward Mediocrity:" In Wake of Disappointing Gains, Calls Grow for Kevin McCarthy to Step Aside and Let Someone Else Lead the House
—Ace
And if they want Trump to go, they should lead first by example. McCarthy and McConnell should show Trump what "taking responsibility" looks like and resign their positions as leaders of their respective caucuses.
Is it time for "new leadership," "fresh blood"? I agree.
So pack your bags, gentlemen! Let the fresh blood flow!
But they won't, will they?
Quoting The Washington Times:
The House GOP's smaller-than-expected majority increased leverage for the chamber's arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus to demand concessions from Mr. McCarthy in exchange for support in his speakership bid.Freedom Caucus member Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) says Republicans "have to have that very frank discussion. Going forward, I don't know who's going to end up being the leader. But if it's Kevin McCarthy, he's going to have to be far more, a little far more, tough than he has necessarily shown."
Every reality show contestant I've ever seen understands the creed, "I didn't come here to make friends." Why do all of these pussies think we send them to the Capitol or to state houses to make frenz with Democrats and the Democrat media?
The Freedom Caucus, I hear, is not against supporting McCarthy, but they will demand a heavy price in terms of "structural reforms" aimed at returning power to individual representatives, and stripping it from the Speaker of the House himself.
For various reasons, unfortunately, Democrats and then Republicans chose to abandon that bottom-up, pluralistic approach in favor of more of a winner-take-all model of governing. The House's rules were changed to give the Speaker greater sway over who became committee chairs and who sat on the Rules Committee. Majority legislators also began to rely heavily on the Speaker to fundraise for them, and to declare the party's legislative agenda. Getting a bill passed devolved into a top-down exercise led by the Speaker, his leadership team, and the Rules Committee. They would craft bills, often omnibuses, and present them to the chamber for an up or down vote....
The House Freedom Caucus (HFC), that rabble-rousing group of a few dozen righties, is pressuring McCarthy to give rank-and-file legislators more power. It has been reported that the House Freedom Caucus publicly issued a memorandum on "restoring the people's voice in Congress" this past July. Among the requests for rule changes was making committees more independent from the Speaker by allowing committee members to choose their chair. The HFC memorandum also calls for legislators to be re-empowered to offer amendments from the floor and to be granted five days to read any legislation called up for a vote.
Let anyone think they were kidding, last month the HFC doubled down by releasing a guide to new members of the House. It tells incoming congressmen the hard truths about life in a top-down House.
"The state of affairs in the U.S. House of Representatives has steadily deteriorated over recent decades -- to the point at which the balance of power is so lopsided that members of Congress find themselves with no meaningful role in policymaking. ... The result is the 'People's House' serves almost everyone in Washington except the American People."
The guide acidly informs the naive naif that a new legislator would be wrong to imagine her committee assignment will be based on her life experiences. No, "committee assignments are based on perceived loyalty to leadership and whether you agree to meet a fundraising quota."...
McCarthy is well aware of what is being asked of him. He also knows that the HFC sent packing the two previous Republican Speakers, Ryan and John Boehner (R-Ohio). Certainly, he may feel he can work through this situation by pitching a few bones to the House Freedom Caucus but otherwise keeping the same leadership-dominated model.
Except, with a razor-thin majority, the Speaker (whoever it is) cannot govern at all without the Freedom Caucus.
By the way, Ron DeSantis was a member of the Freedom Caucus, the hardcore "MAGA"-oriented caucus of the House, before he ran for governor of Florida in 2018.
I point this out because people keep trying to claim that he's really "Establishment," like he's taking on the Establishment and shipping illegal aliens to Martha's Vineyard as part of some Long Con so he can become president and then say "Got ya, Suckers! Time for Comprehensive Immigration Reform! Viva McCain!"
Give me a break. He didn't have to make his life difficult and join the hated, despised Freedom Caucus. If he was a squish he could have been a part of John Boehner's squish leadership.
And if he wasn't a Freedom Caucus type, they wouldn't have taken him as a member. They control their membership lists; they don't have to let someone in just because he requests membership.
Correction: I was wrong; he didn't have to apply to join the Freedom Caucus, because he was a founding member.
Meet the Freedom Caucus Feb. 4, 2015About 30 House Republicans will meet Monday evening to establish the bylaws of a new caucus animated by two principles: First, rank-and-file Republicans must pressure leadership to enact a more conservative agenda. And second, this pressure should never involve frantic scurrying on the House floor.
The House Freedom Caucus, an invitation-only group, will work in concert in order to guide the House Republican Conference at key junctures, starting with the debate over a border-security bill that has conservatives alarmed.
The argument was over the belief that this was a paper border security bill designed to provide Border Security Theater while permitting Obama to leave the border open and grant mass amnesty.
"We're going to focus on what we believe middle-class voters sent us here to do," Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), the de facto chairman of the organization pending leadership elections, tells National Review Online.
As a caucus devoted to moving leadership's agenda to the right, the group has a chance to take over the traditional role of the Republican Study Committee, which many lawmakers believe has strayed from its founding mission as an organization designed to pressure moderate GOP leaders to adopt more conservative positions.
As noted, the Republican Study Committee had been the group that was supposed to set a conservative agenda, but it was hijacked by moderates and liberals and turned into just another mouthpiece for Boeher and the neoliberal corporatist leadership.
The Freedom Caucus was formed to re-create what the RSC had previously been.
The RSC has served as the leading conservative caucus in the GOP conference since 1973, when it started as an informal group with just a few members. As it has grown in size -- it now has 170 members, close to three-quarters of the Republican majority -- many conservatives believe it's come to represent the more establishment wing of the party, and strayed from its original mission. The fissures in the RSC became apparent when then-RSC chairman Steve Scalise (R., La.) fired the caucus's long-time executive director for leaking information about conversations between members to outside groups that opposed a bipartisan budget deal in 2013. Scalise went on to win a race for House whip, while the fired aide, Paul Teller, went to work for Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas).The Freedom Caucus is forming just days after Boehner suggested that conservative frustration with his leadership is misguided.
"Frankly, a lot is being driven by national groups here in Washington who have raised money and just beating the dickens out of me," Boehner told CBS during a joint interview with new Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.). "They raise money, put it in their pocket, and pay themselves big salaries."
DeSantis says that Boehner's critique might apply to some groups, but not to prominent conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth.
"I don't think that they would be able to generate outrage or generate dissatisfaction where none existed," he says. "I think they're tapping into an existing dissatisfaction with Republican leadership and with Washington, D.C., more generally."
Anyway, if you prefer Trump, you prefer Trump. But claiming that DeSantis is a Johnny-Come-Lately establishment liberal is just a flat-out lie. He was fighting the GOP Establishment before Trump was enmeshed in the GOP enough to even know there was a GOP Establishment to fight.
Lauren Boebert Takes Lead Over Storage Unit Fornicator Adam Frisch
—Ace
Re: "Storage Unit Fornicator," a man came forward and claimed that he had successfully blackmailed Frisch to change his vote on a bill to outlaw ride shares, using video of the married Frisch meeting a woman to have sex with her in a storage unit as the leverage. Frisch denies this.
Meanwhile... I don't think this is the biggest deal, but the people who make life a living hell for us attempting to deplatform us and get us debanked for saying anything they claim is insensitive sure do enjoy making rude remarks about women themselves.
The dainty grifter Kurt Bardella left Breitbart because he just could not tolerate Breitbart.com not denouncing Trump more forcefully over -- let me check my notes -- campaign manager Corey Lewandowski tearing off Michelle Fields' arm and then r4ping her with the severed limb.
But he does love his "hoor" jokes.
Continue reading