Tonight's ONT Can And Will Be Used Against You In A Court Of Law
—WeirdDave
Happy Friday! I hope everyone is having a great day, and not a stupid one.
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What An Ice Boner Cafe
—Ace
Bari, Italy
Pranking a cat with Sticky Notes.
Also bedeviling a kitten with Sticky Notes.
Don't celebrate before the game is won.
"Granular flow," I guess of large rocks in a river. I don't really understand what's going on here. It doesn't seem like boulders should flow like this.
Galloping... cow? I'm not sure.
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Quick Hits
—Ace
While college campuses are obsessing over "safe spaces" and diversity, equity, and inclusion, one professor noticed that students are becoming less happy and much angrier.Mary Gaitskill, a novelist who teaches creative writing courses as a visiting professor at several universities, made the observations in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Gaitskill said that despite constant efforts to make campuses "safe," students in her classes, especially white males, are writing violent and degenerate fantasies, and many students have spent time in mental institutions.
"Anyone who isn't living in off-grid isolation is aware of the tireless efforts by hyperconscious campus administrations to create classrooms where everyone feels safe and as few people as possible will be made 'uncomfortable,' let alone unhappy," Gaitskill wrote, citing "trigger warnings" and training modules about rape and sexual harassment as examples. The college she wrote about doubled down on these practices: including fewer white male authors on syllabi, more training modules, more anti-racist teacher trainings, and more language rules.
Most people, even those affected by real incidents of hate and discrimination, "might fairly mock the corrective apparatus" as "ridiculous" or "dictatorial," Gaitskill added. "The deeper trouble is that it is ineffectual and confusing." ... "[L]ess confident, less sophisticated young men -- those with the most vulnerable self-esteem -- might find it disconcerting to be told, no matter how sensitively it was put, that the trait that they have grown up considering desirable, their most basic default identity, is now toxic," she wrote. "This does not seem to me a minor side effect."
...
That student eventually wrote a story with graphic depictions of self-harm. Another student wrote an account of an attempted suicide that turned out to be autobiographical. In all, four of the eight students in her class wrote about suicide: two wrote about their own suicide attempts; two wrote about friends, one of whom died; one was written by a girl who had known four people in her home town who had attempted or committed suicide, and she was trying to understand them. In all cases, Gaitskill recounted that the stories were filled with despair, either directed at a particular social issue, or simply personal, but "vivid" and "intense."
From Clownfish TV, the media and left (but I repeat myself) continue whining that leftwing woke corporations, particularly those in tech or the media, are attempting to survive the Biden Economy by laying off "diversity and inclusion" hires.
He links this article: DEI teams hit by tech layoffs: a lesson to be learned.
DEI teams in global organizations including Amazon and Twitter have been hit with alarming mass redundancies that have sent shockwaves around the world. This is a big turnaround from the many major industry players who voiced their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion only a couple of years ago. And these tech layoffs are setting a worrying precedent for smaller organizations in the tech industry and the wider employment community. In fact, according to a recent Bloomberg report, listings for DEI are already down by 19%.So, what's going on? Why are these companies targeting their DEI teams? Why have they turned away from their commitment to DEI initiatives? And what impact is this going to have on these businesses?
Let's find out.
I think we already knew. Diversity hires -- which are just political hires -- are a luxury good and you don't get to have luxury goods in a Biden Economy.
You can only have it in a Trump (or DeSantis) economy.
This is a stark contrast to the boom in DEI initiatives that came after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. At this time, companies from many sectors made a commitment to the promotion of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. They also invested in the creation of DEI teams to support their efforts. So much so that, according to McKinsey, DEI job listings increased by 123% following the murder of George Floyd.
These mass tech layoffs are undoing all the positive progress that these companies have made since this time, and this is a concern. Moreover, many DEI departments that are still operational are already seeing cutbacks. And all this comes at a huge price for many aspects of a business.
For one thing, going back on a promise to nurture diversity is going to have a big impact on an organization's employer brand.
Clownfish answered that claim simply: No, it won't. People understand that these are charity hires, and understand that you can't do charity when you don't have any money.
Look, if you were hired as charity, you can expect to be laid off the moment a company runs out of charity-money. I don't know what to f***ing tell you.
Here's another one from Clownfish: A diversity hire admits that FaceBook hired her at a salary of $190,000 per year... to do literally nothing.
I mean, she herself says that.
A former Meta recruiter claimed the massive tech company was "hoarding talent" in order to starve out their competition.As a wave of layoffs gut the tech industry, career strategist Madelyn Machado posted a video responding to claims that Google and Meta had over-hired thousands of employees to do "fake work."
Machado suggested she had been hired by Meta in the Fall of 2021, which she "hated" before eventually getting fired.
"Getting paid $190k to do nothing at Meta" she said in a TikTok video. She added that new recruiters would be explicitly told that they would not hire any new employees within their first 6 months or to a year. She said what they actually did was mostly onboarding, training, and team meetings.
She says all they did was have her sit in training and team meetings.
How long did the Wokies imagine that could go on for?
Neoliberals are among the greediest, most materialistic, emptiest, ruthless social-climbing assholes on planet earth. Did you really think these comfort-craving, status-seeking shitlibs would continue throwing money at you the moment it threatened to cost them their biannual new luxury car lease?
She also says that Meta got angry at her for posting videos announcing that she was being paid almost $200,000 per year to do nothing.
Well, yeah. If you're being paid $200,000 to do nothing, keep quiet about it.
This is like all of those "Day in the Life of a Google Development Thot" videos, where they told all of Google's investors that there was a huge segment of Google's employees who did nothing all day but get massages and drink exotic teas. I've read those had an impact on layoffs, as Meta and Google had to start answering pointed questions from stockholders.
Strong men make good times; good times make weak men; weak men make hard times. (And hard times make strong men.)
We're now in the "weak men make hard times" part of the cycle. If you didn't want the hard times, you shouldn't have voted for weakness, indulgence, and social decay.
DEI training asks scholars which ethnicities should just die already.
A "Cultural Competence Training" that asks participants who should live or die in a hypothetical scenario in which the world is ending has drawn criticism from some online observers.Doug Ponder, a biblical studies professor at Grimke Seminary in Virginia, tweeted a copy of the training March 14, writing: "A friend of mine, who works in a public university, sent this to me earlier this week."
Ponder, also a pastor at Remnant Church in Virginia, continued in his tweet that what he posted is page one of a diversity, equity and inclusion training his friend's department was "forced to take," starting with "an exercise that asks which intersectional identities you'd save and which you'd leave to die."
"This is demonic," he added.
Ponder could not be reached by The College Fix for comment, including to ask at which university this diversity training was offered.
According to Course Hero, the activity, titled "Whom to Leave Behind," appears to have been offered over the years at several universities nationwide in various capacities, including in English, economics and sociology classes.
It presents a situation in which there is a spaceship leaving a doomed earth, and participants must choose only eight out of the 12 original passengers to be saved, described as:
Accountant with substance abuse problem
Militant African American medical student
33-year old female, Native American who doesn't speak English
The accountant's pregnant wife
Famous novelist with a disability
21-year old female, Muslim international student
Hispanic clergyman who is against homosexuality
Female movie star who is a recent sexual assault victim
Racist armed police officer who has been accused of using excessive force
Gay male, professional athlete who is a vegetarian
Orphaned 12-year old Asian boy
60-year old Jewish university administrator...
It's unclear who developed the worksheet or how long it's been used nationwide.
In 2018 the same exercise was reported as being used at an Ohio middle school after a city councilman shared the worksheet on Facebook.
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Beyond the Valley of the Libs of TikTok
—Ace
What are your plans for the Trans Day of Vengeance? Anything special?
Or has this year's Trans Day of Vengeance just snuck up on you again? It's today and tomorrow, you know! Hope you got your Trans Day of Vengeance shopping done in time!
And now they've gone and cancelled it! Just because their violent incitement got a school shot up!
Wait, that's not the reason they give for cancelling the call-to-vengeance rally.
They claim it's because they got "threats."
They're the real victims here, you know.
Our Rights DC, the group behind Saturday's "Trans Day of Vengeance" protest outside the Supreme Court, has announced that the event has been cancelled due to a "credible threat to life and safety."The event, which was originally scheduled for the "Transgender Day of Visibility," as designated by President Joe Biden, was widely criticized following Monday's mass shooting in Nashville in which trans-identified 28-year-old Audrey Hale murderd six people, including three children.
"This action will not be taking place Saturday due to a credible threat to life and safety," Our Rights DC wrote on Twitter. "The safety of our trans community is first priority."
They went on to suggest that the threat was "the direct result of the flood of raw hatred directed toward the trans community after the Tennessee shooting."
"Individuals who had nothing to with that heinous act have been subjected to highly serious threats and blamed only because of their gender identity," the group lamented, claiming that such actions are "one of the steps in genocide."
I'll tell you what really happened: Their Democrat protectors, promoters, and donors told them to stand down because it embarrasses the cause. Just like they told BLM and antifa to stand down for the 2020 elections.
Most adults said they oppose laws restricting drag shows or performances as Republicans in several states push to block the shows from being seen by children, according to a new poll.The results of an NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll, released Wednesday, show 58 percent of respondents said they oppose laws restricting the performances, while 39 percent said they support them. Democrats are the most likely to oppose such laws, with almost three-quarters of them saying they are opposed, but 57 percent of independents and 37 percent of Republicans also said they do not support them.
Do you notice two key words that have been deliberately omitted from the poll question?
"Restrict drag performances... for children."
They omitted those words because 1, they would accurately represent actual Republican efforts here, and 2, would cause people to support these restrictions in droves.
Soros Prosecutor Lizzy
@StarChamberMaidThe poll didn't ask if people were in favor of restricting drag shows directed at CHILDREN. Now why was that? No one cares about drag shows, they've been around forever. People don't like overly sexualized drag shoes for CHILDREN.
Demon worshippers spin for their fellow child-murdering demon.
A trans "woman" complains that a TSA agent struck her in "her testicles."
A transgender woman was left in tears at JFK Airport after she claimed a TSA agent punched her in the testicles while she was going through security, the Daily Mail reported.The unidentified flyer took to social media to vent about the incident, in which she said the agent "humiliated" her in front of everyone in a series of posts that have since been deleted, according to the outlet.
"hi so a tsa agent at jfk airport punched me in the genitalia, yelled at me for having a penis (?) and humiliated me in front of everyone after i told her to please stop," she captioned a photo of her crying in the airport bathroom, according to a screenshot of the post.
But the embarrassment didn't stop there, according to the woman.
"[The TSA agent] followed me into the women's bathroom and began talking about me to a coworker while I sobbed in a stall," she wrote, asking friends on the internet for advice as to what she should do.
In a follow-up post, she said she was left crying for over an hour and said "my balls still hurt so bad," according to a screenshot from the Daily Mail.
She does not want the TSA agent to be fired, she said in a separate post, but wanted "her educated and the entirety of tsa abolished altogether."
Her testicles, so firm, so lush, so fully packed! How I love watching the gentle sway of her testicles as she walks!
SC_Reviews speculated plausibly that this trans "woman" insisted on having a female agent pat her down -- I mean, women pat down women's sensitive areas in these situations, right? -- and the TSA agent, a woman, was angry that she had been manipulated into touching a dude's dick and balls and maybe gave it an extra bit off oomph in the pat-down.
He also pointed out that this female TSA agent was black -- and blacks have not been cowed by all the white guilt bullshit that "trans women are women, right down to their hairy sweaty balls." I could see her getting angry and following the trans "woman" into the bathroom and saying something like, "I'm a married woman, and you just made me grab your dick!"
Trans "women" continue insisting that they merely have "feminine penises" and "lady balls" but this just goes to show how completely f*cking mentally ill they are. It's one thing if you want to make this part of your own private Reality Distortion Field. If you want to tell yourself this. Fine. We all deploy a cherished lie or two to get by.
But to insist with a straight face -- or even an angry, threatening face -- that others join you in declaring a dick and balls to be "female"?
That's insane. That is literally the kind of thing that insane people say. Again, the insanity isn't the coping lie you tell yourself. A lot of people have coping lies. The insanity is that the entire world believes in the idiosyncratic lie you're telling yourself, and that they're Monsters! if they don't believe in this coping lie with all the vigor and passion that you do.
College girls are suing their sorority for admitting a dude.
"I feel so glad to be in a place that I think not only shares my values, but to be in a sisterhood of awesome women that want to make history," Langford told The Branding Iron, a local publication where he is also employed as a contributor, during an interview last year. "They want to break the glass ceiling, trailblazing you know, and I certainly feel that as their first trans member, at least in the chapter in Wyoming history."
Here's the thing: He dresses and acts like a dude and also wants to "meet women." And not as "sisters."
I'll note as I get started here that Langford will be referred to as "he" throughout this post because that is how Langford is referred to in the legal complaint and how reports of this story refer to Langford. He is labeled "Terry Smith" in the legal complaint. The women are called "Jane Does." He has done nothing to transition "to create a more feminine appearance" and "has not undergone treatments." He is 21 years old, 6 feet, 2 inches tall, and weighs 260 pounds, according to the legal document. "No other member of Kappa Kappa Gamma has comparable size or strength."Besides his physical characteristics, he has a profile on Tinder where he says he is seeking to meet women. The lawsuit claims he is "sexually interested in women."
Karen Townsend says this feels like a prank, or a stunt. People keep thinking that because this all feels so insane.
But it's real. It's always real. No matter how insane it gets, it's real. When you create a rule that there is nothing so insane or vicious that a member of a protected class will be criticized for doing, ever, you create the circumstances for behavior that is literally beyond belief.
A nasty little thread of Democrats and media scumbags justifying the trans terrorist's murders and claiming that conservatives force leftists to kill.
That tweet was in response to subhuman dirtcreature David Packman, doing his best "Where's your God now, yah?" Edward G. Robinson impression.
I seem to remember radical jihadists making similar "Look What You Made Us Do" claims.
Donkey-Chompers: "Cisgender and often straight men" are the ones after your kids.
Cisgender men -- I mean, normal men; "cisgender" is a slur made up by a pedophile -- aren't the ones grinding their packages in children's faces, and then demanding we all appreciate their "art," Stupid.
LibsofTikTok confronted Donkey-Chompers after delivering an ethnics complaint against her. The nasty helium-voiced troll, who affects the speech patterns and general immaturity of an underaged child to attract men (as well as schmen), ran away in fear.
A powerlifting coach in Canada declared himself to be a female to win a "Women's" bench press event.
Don't be mad at him -- he was doing it as a protest. And to deny the title to the fake "woman" -- a man, of course-- who had already forced his way into the "women's" competition.
A male powerlifting coach self-identified into the women's category and broke the Alberta women's bench press record in an apparent effort to protest gender self-identification policies in sport.Avi Silverberg, a powerlifting coach who has worked with Team Canada, self-identified as a woman last week to participate in the women's category at the Heroes Classic Powerlifting Meet held in Lethbridge, Alberta. Silverberg was attempting to highlight the unfair advantage males have when competing in women's athletics. In participating in the Saturday event, Silverberg unofficially broke the Alberta women's bench press record for the 84+ kilograms category.
The Canadian Powerlifting Union (CPU) announced a gender self-identification policy earlier this year, explicitly allowing any males to participate in women's competitions on the basis of "gender" alone.
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Amazing Long Essay on the Disinformation War The National Security Deep State Is Waging Against Us by Lee Siegel at Tablet
—Ace
Or a "may read, if you like reading things that are good."
A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century
Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation
by
Jacob Siegel
March 28, 2023
In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy's name synonymous with the politics of the era.For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.
Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and political class. A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. Russia stood accused of hacking social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States.
None of it was true. After reviewing Hamilton 68's secret list, Twitter's safety officer, Yoel Roth, privately admitted that his company was allowing "real people" to be "unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse."
The Hamilton 68 episode played out as a nearly shot-for-shot remake of the McCarthy affair, with one important difference: McCarthy faced some resistance from leading journalists as well as from the U.S. intelligence agencies and his fellow members of Congress. In our time, those same groups lined up to support the new secret lists and attack anyone who questioned them.
When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press. The disinterest was so profound, it suggested a matter of principle rather than convenience for the standard-bearers of American liberalism who had lost faith in the promise of freedom and embraced a new ideal.
In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.
Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens' phones and laptops. The Kremlin's endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call "cognitive hacking."
Defeating this specter was treated as a matter of national survival. "The U.S. Is Losing at Influence Warfare," warned a December 2016 article in the defense industry journal, Defense One. The article quoted two government insiders arguing that laws written to protect U.S. citizens from state spying were jeopardizing national security. According to Rand Waltzman, a former program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, America's adversaries enjoyed a "significant advantage" as the result of "legal and organizational constraints that we are subject to and they are not."
The point was echoed by Michael Lumpkin, who headed the State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC), the agency Obama designated to run the U.S. counter-disinformation campaign. Lumpkin singled out the Privacy Act of 1974, a post-Watergate law protecting U.S. citizens from having their data collected by the government, as antiquated. "The 1974 act was created to make sure that we aren't collecting data on U.S. citizens. Well, ... by definition the World Wide Web is worldwide. There is no passport that goes with it. If it's a Tunisian citizen in the United States or a U.S. citizen in Tunisia, I don't have the ability to discern that ... If I had more ability to work with that [personally identifiable information] and had access ... I could do more targeting, more definitively, to make sure I could hit the right message to the right audience at the right time."
The message from the U.S. defense establishment was clear: To win the information war--an existential conflict taking place in the borderless dimensions of cyberspace--the government needed to dispense with outdated legal distinctions between foreign terrorists and American citizens.
Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a "whole of society" effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.
Step one in the national mobilization to defeat disinfo fused the U.S. national security infrastructure with the social media platforms, where the war was being fought. The government's lead counter-disinformation agency, the GEC, declared that its mission entailed "seeking out and engaging the best talent within the technology sector." To that end, the government started deputizing tech executives as de facto wartime information commissars.
At companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, the upper management levels had always included veterans of the national security establishment. But with the new alliance between U.S. national security and social media, the former spooks and intelligence agency officials grew into a dominant bloc inside those companies; what had been a career ladder by which people stepped up from their government experience to reach private tech-sector jobs turned into an ouroboros that molded the two together. With the D.C.-Silicon Valley fusion, the federal bureaucracies could rely on informal social connections to push their agenda inside the tech companies.
In the fall of 2017, the FBI opened its Foreign Influence Task Force for the express purpose of monitoring social media to flag accounts trying to "discredit U.S. individuals and institutions." The Department of Homeland Security took on a similar role.
At around the same time, Hamilton 68 blew up. Publicly, Twitter's algorithms turned the Russian-influence-exposing "dashboard" into a major news story. Behind the scenes, Twitter executives quickly figured out that it was a scam. When Twitter reverse-engineered the secret list, it found, according to the journalist Matt Taibbi, that "instead of tracking how Russia influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming." The discovery prompted Twitter's head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to suggest in an October 2017 email that the company take action to expose the hoax and "call this out on the bullshit it is."
In the end, neither Roth nor anyone else said a word. Instead, they let a purveyor of industrial-grade bullshit--the old-fashioned term for disinformation--continue dumping its contents directly into the news stream.
It was not enough for a few powerful agencies to combat disinformation. The strategy of national mobilization called for "not only the whole-of-government, but also whole-of-society" approach, according to a document released by the GEC in 2018. "To counter propaganda and disinformation," the agency stated, "will require leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs."
This is how the government-created "war against disinformation" became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in D.C., George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers, and failed British royals. Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation "a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response."
Continues after the fold:
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Shawn Fleetwood and Mollie Hemingway: Voter Suppression Is Very Real. It's Just That It's the Democrats Are Making Sure Republican Strongholds Don't Have Enough Ballots for All the Republican Voters.
—Ace
I don't see Jake Tapper of Stacy Abrams talking much about this.
Voter Suppression Is Real And It's Not What You Were ToldPennsylvania residents have filed a lawsuit against Luzerne County after being denied their constitutional right to vote in the 2022 midterms.
Shawn Fleetwood and Mollie HemingwayOn the morning of Election Day last November, William French went to his local polling place in Freeland, Pennsylvania, to cast his vote. But the qualified and registered voter wasn't allowed to. The disabled U.S. Army veteran was told that the precinct had run out of paper for ballots and he had to come back later in the afternoon.
So that's what he did, returning at 3:30 p.m. But the precinct still didn't have ballots. Election workers told him to return yet again. But by nightfall, it was too difficult. French has endured 17 surgeries on his destroyed leg and uses a cane to walk. But the sidewalks are a mess, and he was worried about the risk of falling and further injury.
That same morning, Melynda Reese and her husband went to their polling location in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania. But only Reese's husband was allowed to vote, and for the same reason: The precinct had run out of paper. They came back at 4:00 p.m. and were told there would be a lengthy wait.
Reese is a corrections officer and her husband's primary caregiver. He had recently suffered two cardiac arrests and a stroke. He required regular medication and attention and couldn't be left alone. Long waits were also too much to bear. The couple returned at 6:30 p.m., and saw a line that stretched so long that they knew they couldn't wait. Around 9:15 p.m., an election official called Reese and told her that ballots were finally available and she could vote. But her husband had just taken his sleeping pills and she couldn't leave him unattended.
French and Reese are just two of the thousands of voters affected by poor election administration in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The two just sued Luzerne County, its Board of Elections and Registration, and its Bureau of Elections in federal court for violations of their constitutional right to vote.
"Voters in Luzerne County through no fault of their own, were disenfranchised and denied the fundamental right to vote. William French and Melynda Reese are two of those voters. They bring suit to vindicate the denial of their sacred right to vote, to make sure voters are not disenfranchised in the future, and to bring integrity back to elections in Luzerne County," said Wally Zimolong, lawyer for French and Reese.
Luzerne County was coal country and once a Democrat stronghold, before Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, when the county voted Republican. The county's election administration in 2022 was, according to the lawsuit, a "catastrophic failure." More than 40 precincts had an insufficient number of ballots, many running out early in the morning on Election Day. The county implausibly blamed high voter interest, but Pennsylvania law requires counties to have enough ballots for every registered voter.
Ergo, you shouldn't run out of ballots, because you're supposed to anticipate 100% of voters voting.
Election workers were sent scrambling to office supply stores for paper, and were left untrained for the disastrous day. A court had to intervene to allow a few more hours of voting. Judge Lesa Gelb wrote in her order, "Voters in Luzerne County through no fault of their own, were disenfranchised and denied the fundamental right to vote." Left-wing groups pressured the county election board to certify the election results, even though the first vote to certify failed to pass. The county election board bowed to the pressure.
You may, if you are so inclined, consider reading the whole thing.
I agree, "Read the Whole Thing" is bossy.
Down With The Restrict Act, a Patriot Act for Americans' Speech
—Ace
I watched about ten minutes of the Congressional hearings on TikTok. I was digusted. Congressmen were demanding that TikTok manipulate the algorithm to reduce "harmful" content served to minors -- which is exactly what social media companies have done for five years to shadowban, restrict, and choke out all conservative content, which they claim constitutes "harm."
And Congressmen were pushing that TikTok do more of what we've been trying to get social media companies to do less of.
And when I say "Congressmen," I mean Republican Congressmen. I would not have been disgusted by Democrats pushing for this; it's all they ever push for.
But Republicans? Republicans, again knowing nothing, again learning nothing, again falling for every trap the Democrats lay for them?
The Democrats laid a trap to see if they could get Republicans to endorse the very methods by which Democrats and social media monopolies exclude conservatives from the public square, and Republicans walked right into it. They were angry that TikTok isn't manipulating its algorithm enough to choke down the transmission of "harmful" content.
The Democrats wanted to see if Republicans would endorse and support the Democrats' predicate for unending censorship and thought-policing, and boy, did Republicans surprise them by being even more pro-censorship than the Democrats.
All the Democrats had to do is introduce one of their favorite tropes -- "It's for The Children (TM)" -- and every Republican was crab-crawling over each other to endorse the social media monopolies' pretext for censoring conservatives.
They weren't careful about it at all. They didn't attempt to limit the principle they were advocating for. They didn't say "this will only apply to children under age 17."
No, they were, once again, just foaming at the mouth with eagerness to bless by legislation all the censorship that all of the tech monopolies have been engaged in.
TikTok should be banned. Period. And children 17 or under should be banned from social media. Period. And they should have to prove that by making a micro-transaction of, say, $1 with a credit card establishing that they are of age.
Instead of focusing on that, Republicans decided to argue that social media monopolies just aren't censoring enough people and manipulating the algorithms to avoid "harm."
Rand Paul is blocking the Resist Act from going forward. But not on grounds that the US would be endorsing algorithmic manipulation.
He's claiming that the communist Chinese Party's spy app shouldn't be banned, period, and insists it's not just because a top donor is connected to TikTok's parent corporation ByteDance.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has come out against a ban on TikTok, breaking from his GOP colleagues on a measure that would prohibit the use of the often-criticized social media app.Lawmakers cited national security concerns raised by TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, after reports emerged that the company has gathered user data and spied on some journalists.
In an opinion piece published Wednesday in the Courier Journal of Louisville, Kentucky, Paul argued that banning TikTok would mimic censorship by the Chinese government.
Well, in one way, that's true: China itself refuses to allow TikTok in their own country. They have a version of TiKTok which only runs videos about science lessons and studying hacks and pro-education stuff like that. Oh, and the videos also foster respect for kids' elders.
But the TikTok we see in the US? No way, that's not allowed. China's smarter than to allow its own children to be infected with this poison. This poison is for White Devils' Children only.
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Rand Paul: Anthony Fauci Lied About Retiring. He's Still Working for the Government, For Protection Against an Indictment.
—Ace
Claiming to be retired also means he can legally fight congressional subpoenas. If he admits he's a government employee, he has to testify -- he has no choice.
But a private citizen can fight a subpeona.
Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has taken another swipe at his arch nemesis, Anthony Fauci, claiming that the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is not really retired and is still working for the government. The senator appeared on Fox News on Wednesday and spoke to host Sean Hannity about what he says he found."There is a massive coverup going on and the lead in all of the coverup has been Fauci," the senator said. "We now have information that he is still working for the government even though he says he is retired. It is my belief that he is worried about being indicted and so he continues to work so he will get legal protection under the federal government."
Video at the link. Rand Paul also says Fauci weaponized the government to destroy his critics, using taxpayer monies as a bribery slush-fund.
"This guy weaponized the NIAD. He weaponized it to get his supporters," the senator said. "At first, they said, 'My goodness. It came from a lab.' And then, all of a sudden, they changed their mind. They got more money. They got more grants.""He used that grant-making authority -- who gets it -- and he weaponized government to get what he wanted," he said, "and that was the cover-up."
Even the New York Times now admits that Anthony Fauci is a corrupt liar, in an opinion piece written by a New York Times op-ed contributor.
Even the literally-Fauci-worshipping NYT is starting to doubt their midget god.
She begins by recalling an interview of Anthony Fauci in 2021 by... Newt Gingrich. Gingrich praised Fauci for being such a wise and learned man.
But then he asked about this conspiracy theory being spread by conservatives -- or "urban legend," as Gingrich called it -- that covid-19 had been created in the Wuhan Respiratory Virus Laboratory, specifically in their bat-virus-research lab.
"There's a sort of urban legend," Mr. Gingrich prodded Dr. Fauci, "that there's a biological warfare center in Wuhan and that the coronavirus escaped from that.""I've heard these conspiracy theories," Dr. Fauci replied. "And like all conspiracy theories, Newt, they're just conspiracy theories." He added that while he could not say that scenario was impossible, "the things you're hearing are still in the realm of conspiracy theories without any scientific basis."
Dr. Daszak agreed that "all the evidence says" the virus crossed from animal to human either in a Wuhan market or in rural China, probably after originating in wild bats.
The two men could have told Mr. Gingrich a lot more.
They could have said that laboratories in Wuhan had indeed been studying bat viruses, including coronaviruses. Live bats were kept in the laboratories, and scientists occasionally carried out controversial forms of research in which viral strains are manipulated in ways that can make them more dangerous to humans. Both men worked for organizations that had a hand in moving U.S. taxpayer funds to the scientists in Wuhan -- Dr. Daszak had been involved with Wuhan bat research for years; Dr. Fauci's emails show his staff had recently reminded him of N.I.H. funding for the coronavirus work Dr. Daszak's organization supported.
They could have acknowledged that while they believed the virus had reached humans as a zoonotic spillover from animals, accidental leaks are a known lab hazard and couldn't yet be ruled out (even if the notion of using coronaviruses as a biological weapon was laughably improbable).
Why? It f&cking shut the world down, did you not catch that? If you did have a working vaccine in advance, you could release such a weapon while your own population remained infection-free.
They always have to signal their adherence to the True Progressive Faith, even when they're confessing that their Progressive Popes are corrupt liars.
Instead they dissembled.
Ah, "dissembled." The cowardly courtier's way of saying "My dear sweet glorious prince appears to have inadvertently lied, perhaps due to be overserved by a commoner."
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The Treasoners Club: The Democrat Party All But Admits It Has Absorbed the Government Into It And Is Using It to Destroy Their Political Foes
—Ace
Nancy Pelosi: Trump will have to "prove innocence."
Nancy Pelosi @SpeakerPelosiThe Grand Jury has acted upon the facts and the law.
No one is above the law, and everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence.
Hopefully, the former President will peacefully respect the system, which grants him that right.
Republican congressmen plan to grill Soros DA Alvin Bragg and demand he disclose all correspondence -- let's call it "coordination" -- between his office and the White House.
Maybe that's why Joe Biden is refusing to comment now.
President Biden said Friday he has "no comment" on the unprecedented indictment of former President Donald Trump.The former president of the United States and the leading Republican presidential nominee for 2024 was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury Thursday after a years-long investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.
Friday, Fox News asked President Biden whether he thinks the charges against Trump were politically motivated.
"I have no comment on Trump," Biden said Friday.
I have no comment on whether I coordinated with a Soros DA to weaponize the government against a political enemy. Not even a statement like, "Gosh, I hope not, that would be a tremendous violation."
NeverTrump, are our precious norms restored now, or will it take a little longer?
Politico admits that of course this is a political witch hunt designed to take out a political enemy (or rally support for a political enemy the Democrat Party thinks they can beat). Either way, it's a case of using government power to pick who is allowed to be an opposition candidate.
Foreign interference, in fact, given that government is now essentially a hostile foreign force.
POLITICO @politicoOpinion: Sometimes even Donald Trump has a point. It's hard to believe prosecutors would bring this case against anyone else. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
The article admits this is a sham:
We are likely to hear a lot of clichés from the legal commentariat in the coming days -- about how Bragg and his prosecutors are simply following the facts and the law, about how no one is above the law, and so on. That is all well and good, but the reality is that this particular criminal case probably never would have been brought for anyone but Trump. In fact, the investigation probably would not have begun in the first place for anyone else, but at the time, Trump was still in office, and given the Justice Department's policy against indicting a sitting president, the Manhattan DA's office was a convenient outlet and prosecutorial avenue for people who wanted to see Trump criminally prosecuted.There is also no indication at the moment that the case against Trump has any real precedent in New York or elsewhere. Perhaps prosecutors will demonstrate that that is wrong as they defend the case in court, but thus far, no one seems to be able to identify a comparable case brought by a local prosecutor's office.
But he defends the indictment anyway.
He says it's just a matter of "luck."
There is nothing inherently wrong about that. Luck, both good and bad, plays an undeniable role in who gets the attention of prosecutors and who gets charged in the criminal justice system.
This is the final step of the Government Party growing so brazen, and believing itself so untouchable, that they are just removing the masks and telling everyone: Submit or be destroyed.
The criminal Democrat party might wind up getting that insurrection they have long promoted and encouraged.
What was that slogan the leftist police state liked quoting to excuse BLM and antifa violence and arson...? Ah yes: "a riot is the language of the unheard."
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THE MORNING RANT: A Little Bit of Good News
—Buck Throckmorton
How about a few “good news” stories regarding the political battles we’re fighting?
Illinois Town Nixes Solar Boondoggle
Americans who want reliable and affordable energy are starting to realize that boutique electricity sources such as solar and wind are neither reliable nor affordable.
Illinois Town Nixes Solar Boondoggle [CFACT – 3/11/2023]
In a stunning setback for solar, the City of Pontiac, Illinois has scuttled plans to construct a solar energy project that would transform a vacant lot in town into a shiny solar desert.
At an emotional Feb. 13 hearing before the City of Pontiac Planning and Zoning Board, city officials denied the application of Bundleflower Solar LLC to rezone the property so that as many as 5,568 photovoltaic solar panels could be installed there.
The dramatic turnaround shows what can happen when citizens are well informed about how harmful solar (and wind) projects are, and then mobilize to stop deep-pocketed renewable-energy developers from ruining their communities.
Local politics is controlled by those who show up, be it at the polls or at the civic meetings where decisions are made.
Good job, Pontiac.
Denying Municipalities the Authority to Deny Freedom
Being a refugee from a deep blue city in a deep red state, I have experienced the passion that progressives have for outlawing freedom with whatever levers of power they have. If municipal-level communists control just a city, or a county, or a school board, they’ll seek to ban a vast array of freedoms. Given the power, they will deny you gas stoves, plastic grocery bags, or even control of your own thermostat.
I’m glad to see conservatives punching back, and getting over their 20th century worship of “local rule” as being a sacred conservative principal.
Tennessee Law Prevents Local Bans On Natural Gas Stoves [The Tennessean – 3/22/2023]
Republican Gov. Bill Lee has signed legislation that says local governments can't ban gas stoves, even though no current city in Tennessee is currently pursuing such actions.
Under the legislation Lee approved last week, local governments cannot regulate the "type of source of energy" delivered to customers for utility service connection or appliances. The legislation went into effect immediately after receiving strong support inside the GOP-dominated Tennessee Statehouse.
It’s that easy.
Protecting Citizens From Pro-Criminal District Attorneys
Along the same lines as the story directly above, Georgia lawmakers are fed up with pro-crime District Attorneys permitting a reign of terror against law abiding citizens.
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Mid-Morning Art Thread
—CBD
Madonnina
Roberto Ferruzzi
Yes, it's schmaltzy and designed to tug on your heart strings, but it is also sweet and well painted.
So sue me...
The Morning Report — 3/31/23
—J.J. Sefton
Abraham Lincoln, January 27, 1838
Good morning, kids. It seems like I keep writing the sentence "While what happened yesterday is completely unsurprising, it is nonetheless horrifying and disgusting in the extreme." They actually went ahead and took the unprecedented (for good reason) action of indicting a former president. Let me say that if a former president was provably guilty beyond the most stringent level of reasonable doubt in any serious crime, he should have to face the consequences. Don't chuckle when I say this but no one is above the law.
For the first time in American history, a politician – indeed, a front-running presidential candidate – has been indicted in order to destroy his political chances. Americans used to take pride in the fact that such things didn’t happen in the United States of America. But that United States of America is over.Donald Trump has been indicted on the thinnest of charges. House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan, House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer, and House Administration Committee chairman Bryan Steil recently wrote a letter to Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, the destroyer of the republic, pointing out that “even the Washington Post quoted ‘legal experts’ as calling your actions ‘unusual’ because ‘prosecutors have repeatedly examined the long-established details but decided not to pursue charges.’”
. . . the whole thing rests on a novel legal theory. Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA tweeted: “Alvin Bragg lowered 52% of criminal charges in NYC last year to misdemeanors. He just bent over backwards legally to raise the charges against Trump to a felony. WITCH HUNT!!”
That it certainly is, and worse. Former TV and radio host John Cardillo warned: “Don’t downplay the severity of this indictment. There’s still another GJ in NYC, one in GA, and a federal one connected to the Special Counsel investigation. We are watching the political weaponization of our entire criminal justice system. This is a constitutional crisis.”
Much more is coming. Many are saying that the indictment hands Trump the election of 2024, but it’s actually designed to do just the opposite, and the designers are not stupid people. The objective is to prevent Trump from being able to run in 2024, or failing that, to make it impossible for him to win. The average American still has unreflective confidence in our institutions, and will assume from the very fact of Bragg’s indictment, and the others that are certain to come, that Trump must be some kind of criminal. The flimsiness of the cases won’t matter. The public perception will be formed, and that could be enough in himself to make sure that Trump doesn’t return to the Oval Office on Jan. 20, 2025. . .
. . . For the first time in the history of the United States, a sitting president, such as he is, [Biden] declared that his principal opponent and his opponent’s supporters were criminals who were outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse. Now the ruling Leftists elites have taken the next step in indicting Trump. After that will come various measures to treat his supporters as if they were terrorists.
This is a dark day for the United States. If there are any Democrats with integrity left, they would join the House Republicans who have already gone on record decrying this, and stop it before it’s too late.
That was friend and commentator extraordinaire Robert Spencer. He ends the dire warning of his essay on a hopeful note but I can't see it coming. There are far too few Republicans with any integrity and for sure no Democrats with any. And do not confuse temporary triangulation with it. Like other essayists and commentators who are stating that this is the death of the republic, I'm glad their eyes are seemingly open to what's going on but this is not the death of the republic. Nor is it the final nail in the coffin, nor the funeral nor even the burial. This is the pissing on the grave. That is assuming the republic died of natural causes, instead of being dispatched in typical Leftist fashion with a bullet in the head or in a gas chamber.
In the next episode of the podcast, coming a bit later this morning in the sidebar and at CJN, I finally was able to articulate a point through my babbling that I have been trying to get across for quite a while. CBD and other outstanding colleagues and commentators, regardless of who they back at the top of the ticket, feel that the road back really runs through the local level and the states. Citing victories in school boards and such that saw even purplish-blue Virginia go red with Youngkin and Sears, they are of the opinion that these issues, articulated and stridently fought for will yield electoral victory.
My fly in the ointment to that is of course a Junta and an entire bureaucracy that disregards the 9th and 10th amendments (except when it suits their insane agenda like sanctuary cities and states) and at some point just stripping places like Florida or Texas or wherever of their statehood or just shit-canning federalism altogether. At that point, all bets would be off. Or would they?
CBD also cited the Reagan revolution in 1980 that gave us the shining city on a hill, after four years of Carter's "malaise" and destruction, that itself was in the wake of Nixon, Vietnam and the counterculture upheaval of the 60s. Yes it was a shining era, as were the first three years of Donald Trump, the media notwithstanding. The even bigger Seth Brundel in the AstroGlide is this: the American psyche of 1980 that ushered in a golden age of Reagan and a national revival is not the same as the American psyche of 2023. I linked a post yesterday or the day before that of course I can't find now showing that American youth's feelings of patriotism, about our culture and society are plunging to all-time lows. Is it any wonder, given that the educational system is nothing more than a brainwashing mill of anti-American, anti-Western and anti-God poison so effective to make even Lenin rotting in Hell jealous as where he is.
How can there be an American revival if our children, and generations to come – if they aren't yanked out of the womb on the end of a D&C scraper or have their genitals cut off and turned into freak – have been preprogrammed to hate it?
Too many of us, me included, are living in the past, inside of our heads, inside of a perception of how things should be; a wistful memory of days gone by as if they still exist, despite what we can see plain as day with our lying eyes, while having apoplectic seizures, like Gunny Hartmann screaming at Private Joker in the latrine as to why no one isn't grabbing the M-14 out of Private Pyle's hands and stomping the living shit out of him, only to be told that the gun is locked and loaded as Pyle aims it at them, point blank. There's your metaphor for the day, folks.
It is a shattering thing to see things as they really are and accept that instead of hoping against hope and living in denial that what we are living through here and now is actually happening.
Take a good look; the transexual fiends, ironically enough (along with every other so-called "victim" group that are nothing more than political and in many cases actual cannon fodder for the Democrat-Left) are wearing the skin suit of the Warsaw Ghetto martyrs and taking aim at the Waffen SS vowing to go down swinging and strike a blow for freedom. The reality of course is just the opposite.
In a few days, the shock and numbness will subside and we'll continue to battle it out over Trump vs Desantis – as if the Junta will allow them to win an election. Here's a scenario to ponder: whatever happens with this debasement of justice, Trump runs and actually wins. That is, they allow him to win. Then, the Left freaks out and engineers another dossier showing Trump and his allies rigged elections in the swing states and stole the votes from disenfranchised colored people of color. Vanilli Milley moves in, arrests Trump and his associates for treason, summarily executes them in the Rose Garden, outlaws the GOP, seizes control of the internet and cellphone communications and then declares a "temporary" state of emergency. "Two decades to flatten the curve."
Sound crazy? God help me but to me it actually sounds quite plausible. PS: there was a mostly peaceful insurrection in the Tennessee state house demanding gun confiscation, but no one seems at all interested in that since it was mostly peaceful.
I need a drink and it's only about 6:45 in the morning. Have a good weekend.
- ABOVE THE FOLD, BREAKING, NOTEWORTHY
- "Banning TikTok should signal the beginning, not the end, of a war on China’s infiltration of U.S. institutions."
When It Comes To Communist China’s Grip On U.S. Institutions, TikTok Is Only The Beginning
- "Massachusetts creates a system of decentralized surveillance in public schools."
State-Sponsored Tattletales
- Victor Davis Hanson: "For the radical Left, ideology exempts its political violence."
Left-Wing Violence Chic
- "A reflection on what terrifies the authoritarian Left."
Echoes of Nashville
Continue reading
Daily Tech News 31 March 2023
—Pixy Misa
Top Story- Twitter has announced its new API plans for developers. (Twitter)
They're shit. Just completely useless.
For $100 per month - that's the hobbyist plan - you get 10,000 GET requests per month and 50,000 POSTs.
Which is already terrible, but in fact even that is a lie. They're counting individual tweets, not requests, and you can fetch 200 tweets with one GET.
So that's 50 requests per month. For $100.
Elon Musk is somehow recreating the market opportunity that should have closed when he rescued Twitter from the commies.
- Twitter is publishing The Algorithm today. (Twitter)
Whatever that means. We'll see.
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You Have The Right To An ONT. If You Can Not Afford An ONT, One Will Be Provided To You Free Of Charge
—WeirdDave
Welcome to the Thursday ONT. Anybody hungry?
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Every Cat Is a Star Cafe
—Ace
from Perfect Pixels
Paris is burning, and the waiter is slow to boot.
Times Square finally got one of those 3D billboards they have all over Tokyo. Would have preferred Ultra-Man, though.
I'm so tired of being harassed by invasive TSA patdowns.
There's always room for a happy stray dog prancing down the street.
There's always time for a capybara at a spa, too. (I forgot this thing was called and kept writing "chupacabra." Not to be confused with Chupalapija. (I always learn the dirty stuff first.))
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Quick Hits
—Ace
Hollywood has what Experts are calling an "Elizabeth Warren situation."
Hollywood’s top Native American producer is a fake, activists claimOne of Hollywood's leading Native American figures is being accused of faking her claims of Cherokee heritage, The Post can reveal.
Award-winning Heather Rae, 56, serves on the Academy of Motion Pictures' Indigenous Alliance, previously headed up the Sundance Institute's Native American program and claims "my mother was Indian and my father was a cowboy." Multiple prior news reports have also cited her as having a Cherokee mother.
But a watchdog group called the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds is now demanding the Academy and the producer drop her "false claims" while activists insist she's at best 1/2048th Cherokee.
The group accuses her of profiting from usurping "real American Indian voices and perspectives" and being a fraudulent so-called "Pretendian."
1/2048th? That's even less Indian extraction than the highest possible estimate of Elizabeth Warren's "Indian heritage," 1/1024th.
White Leftist Women posing as Indians like Elizabeth Warren use the whole of the minority set-aside -- nothing goes to waste.
China and Brazil have reached a deal to trade in their own currencies, ditching the United States dollar as an intermediary, the Brazilian government said on Wednesday.The deal, Beijing's latest salvo against the almighty greenback, will enable China, the top rival to US economic hegemony, and Brazil, the biggest economy in Latin America, to conduct their massive trade and financial transactions directly, exchanging yuan for reais and vice versa instead of going through the US dollar.
"The expectation is that this will reduce costs... promote even greater bilateral trade and facilitate investment," the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency (ApexBrasil) said in a statement.
The US has long benefited from being the world's "reserve currency." Now, thanks to Biden, the world is looking to ditch the dollar.
The Indian and Russian governments are in talks to reinstate a rupee-ruble ledger for the first time since the Cold War.The deal would allow firms in both nations to do business without the use of US dollars, which is the primary international trade currency.
Even our former allies the Saudis are considering dedollarisation.
Saudi Arabia is in talks to sell oil to China and be paid in yuan, according to the Wall Street Journal.For nearly 50 years, the world's top oil exporter has traded crude exclusively in US dollars.
Relations between Saudi Arabia and the US have deteriorated under the Biden administration.
I'm not clear -- is this still the "America is back, baby!" promised to us by NeverTrump, or not?
The basket-case Woke Military is reducing every standard in sight to get their recruitment numbers up.
Basic training without yelling: Army recruits get 2nd chance
Mustn't have any yelling. It's so triggering!
Last August, Daysia Holiday decided to try one more time to join the Army.She'd taken the academic test and failed three times. So, when she was offered a slot in a new Army prep course to help improve her scores and qualify for basic training, she jumped at the chance.
Seven months later, Pvt. 2nd Class Holiday is a proud graduate of Army basic training, and is finishing her advanced instruction at Fort Lee, Virginia, to become a power generation specialist who will maintain engines and other equipment for the service.
Holiday is an early beneficiary of the new program, which gives lower-performing recruits up to 90 days of academic or fitness instruction to help them meet military standards. In place for only eight months, it is already making a significant difference for both the Army and those who want to serve in it.
So far, 5,400 soldiers have made it through the prep course since it started in August at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. That's an important boost since the Army fell dramatically short of its recruiting goals last year, due to low unemployment and general wariness about military service. And at least one other military service, the Navy, took notice and is setting up a similar course.
...
Gen. James McConville, Army chief of staff, told a House committee on Tuesday that students in the program are improving their academic scores and losing 4% to 6% of their body fat."We're really giving them discipline," he said. "They're getting in shape. We're giving them a head start. So when going into initial military training, where they were at the lowest category, they're actually excelling and in some ways exceeding the standards -- becoming the student leaders."
Sounds like a semi-successful effort. If remediation helps, okay.
But maybe we wouldn't need Remedial School for recruits if you hadn't decided to turn military service into Woke Joke and made the primary recruiting pool view the military service as dishonorable and for weirdoes and crazies.
Have you considered that?
Speaking of Woke Jokes, NPR is laying off 10% of its staff, about 100 people, as it faces a loss of $30 million in revenue.
On Thursday, NPR disclosed that they were stopping production on several podcasts as part of a larger series of cutbacks the nonprofit news organization has been forced to make as they confront a decline in revenue projected at $30 million.According to the Washington Post, this week "the Washington-based audio and digital-news organization began laying off about 100 employees, or 10 percent of its staff."
The employee layoffs mark one the most significant staff reductions in the company's 53 years of operation.
I can't wait to defund this. But I guess I'll have to -- fake "Republicans" will protect it forever, because their wives love listening to NPR on their way to have tolerated seual affairs with their yoga instructors.
David Hogg was whining that people arguing with him on Twitter about guns were sending him memes as evidence. What does this little femmy ertard expect on Twitter? And I'm sure he was tossing out fake stats from gun control groups as his very researched case.
This caused people to send this little Tragedy Dickrider even more memes.
Like this:
Biden again makes a bad joke and laughs, this time when asked if the Nashville shooting was a hate crime:
Continue reading
Trump Indicted
—Ace
Hey remember when Democrats said you can't criminalize a sexual affair...?
Grand Jury Votes to Indict Donald Trump in New York: Live Updates
Mr. Trump will be the first former president to face criminal charges. The precise charges are not yet known, but the case is focused on a hush-money payment to a porn star during his 2016 campaign.
The unprecedented case against Trump will have wide-ranging implications.
A Manhattan grand jury voted to indict Donald J. Trump on Thursday for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, according to five people with knowledge of the matter, a historic development that will shake up the 2024 presidential race and forever mark him as the nation's first former president to face criminal charges.
An indictment will likely be announced in the coming days. By then, prosecutors working for the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, will have asked Mr. Trump to surrender and to face arraignment on charges that remain unknown for now.
...
Here's what else you need to know:
Mr. Bragg and his lawyers will likely attempt to negotiate Mr. Trump's surrender. If he agrees, it will raise the prospect of a former president, with the Secret Service in tow, being photographed and fingerprinted in the bowels of a New York State courthouse.
The prosecution's star witness is Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump's former fixer who paid the $130,000 to keep Ms. Daniels quiet. Mr. Cohen has said that Mr. Trump directed him to buy Ms. Daniels's silence, and that Mr. Trump and his family business, the Trump Organization, helped cover the whole thing up. The company's internal records falsely identified the reimbursements as legal expenses, which helped conceal the purpose of the payments.
Although the specific charges remain unknown, Mr. Bragg's prosecutors have zeroed in on that hush money payment and the false records created by Mr. Trump's company. A conviction is not a sure thing: An attempt to combine a charge relating to the false records with an election violation relating to the payment to Ms. Daniels would be based on a legal theory that has yet to be evaluated by judges, raising the possibility that a court could throw out or limit the charges.
The vote to indict, the product of a nearly five-year investigation, kicks off a new and volatile phase in Mr. Trump's post-presidential life as he makes a third run for the White House. And it could throw the race for the Republican nomination -- which he leads in most polls -- into uncharted territory.
Mr. Bragg is the first prosecutor to lead an indictment of Mr. Trump. He is now likely to become a national figure enduring a harsh political spotlight.
John Fetterman's Handlers Say He'll Leave the Hospital in Three Weeks (Hopefully)
—Ace
Or he plans to return to work.
Maybe. One day. Hopefully.
Sen. John Fetterman plans to return to the Senate the week of April 17 after more than a month of inpatient treatment for depression, according to two people with direct knowledge of his plan.The Pennsylvania Democrat began receiving treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in mid-February. His return will be welcome news for Senate Democrats, who have a slim majority and have struggled to deal with absences over the last month.
It remains uncertain exactly when Fetterman will leave the hospital, but a person close to Fetterman confirmed he will be back to his Senate business after the coming two-week April recess. Fetterman is not the only senator who has been absent from the Senate. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) have also missed significant time. McConnell was recently released from physical therapy after suffering a concussion and a minor rib fracture.
LOL, nice spin, Politico. He's been in the hospital during almost his entire tenure in the Senate. And when his opponent said this is what would most likely happen, you and rest of the evil propaganda media said he was lying and that anyone doubting his capacity to serve was just an "ableist."
Fetterman's chief-of-staff, Adam Jentleson, tweeted earlier this month that "John is well on his way to recovery and wanted me to say how grateful he is for all the well wishes" and that he is "laser focused on PA & will be back soon."
Yeah sure.
Matt Margolis at PJMedia points out that Fetterman's handlers have claimed that he'll be back at work "soon" in the past. Only to then admit that he'll remain in the hospital a little bit longer.
[T]he bottom line is that Fetterman has now been at Walter Reed for over a month, and there's still no timeline for his return. So what's going on?According to a spokesman for the impaired senator, Fetterman is "on the road to recovery" but will continue to be absent from the Senate for a few more weeks.
"We understand the intense interest in John's status and especially appreciate the flood of well-wishes," Fetterman's communications director, Joe Calvello, said in a statement earlier this week. "However, as we have said, this will be a weeks-long process and while we will be sure to keep folks updated as it progresses, this is all there is to give by way of an update."
If this update was meant to reassure us that Fetterman would be back to work at the Capitol soon, don't be fooled. Fetterman's aides have repeatedly been moving the goalposts on us. Earlier this month, Fetterman's chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, similarly told us that Fetterman was "well on his way to recovery" and would "be back soon."
At this point, I suspect we'll hear the same thing about Fetterman's "progress" in a few weeks, followed by yet another one after that, and another, and another. How much longer are we going to be subjected to this ridiculous farce? Fetterman's staff must be clueless about his actual condition (or hiding something) because their so-called "updates" have been about as informative as a Magic 8 Ball. It's like they're just kicking the can down the road, hoping nobody notices how little they're actually saying, and avoiding the inevitable.
How is everyone enjoying living in an Empire of Lies?
'Paucity of information publicly made available' about Fetterman leaves a dangerous vacuumby Salena Zito, National Political Reporter
...
The challenge reporters and his constituents have faced has never been the illnesses from which the father of three suffers, whether it be the stroke, the heart condition, or the current mental health crisis. Rather, it has always been the lack of transparency coming from the personal and political team that orchestrates Fetterman's every move. From the get-go, they have conducted a case study on how not to be forthright.
When Fetterman suffered his stroke, it took days for anyone to know it had even happened. When he had a pacemaker installed, reporters found out only as the procedure was beginning. It then took several more weeks for them to admit the heart condition that had caused the stroke, cardiomyopathy, had actually been diagnosed five years earlier and that Fetterman failed to take his medication or follow up with treatment after that diagnosis.
Fetterman ran for lieutenant governor in 2018 and then filed to run in the primary for U.S. Senate last year, all without revealing his medical condition. When all of this unfolded last year, multiple news organizations, including the Washington Post, called on him to be transparent about his health status. His team did the opposite.
Since the revelation of his heart condition, no doctor has spoken publicly about the status of his cardiomyopathy, outside of the letter released in June by the cardiologist who had seen him five years ago. No one knows whether he or any other heart doctor is still treating Fetterman. Repeated questions to his team as to whether he is being treated by a heart doctor have gone unanswered, meaning the extent of his current heart condition is also unknown to the public.
According to the Yale School of Medicine, cardiomyopathy can weaken the heart, leading to more serious conditions, including lessened blood flow, arrhythmia, problems with the heart's valves, and heart failure. Cardiomyopathies require the management of any present symptoms and the prevention of further complications. But for five years, Fetterman apparently failed to take preventive measures or follow doctors' recommendations.
...
When Fetterman checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in mid-February for clinical depression, his aides told the New York Times they did not anticipate it would be longer than a few days. When a month passed with no news on his condition, his staff posted a photo of him with his chief of staff at Walter Reed.
On Friday, three weeks after that photo was posted, Senate staffer Joe Calvello told the Philadelphia Inquirer that "John will be out soon. Over a week, but soon."
When there is a vacuum of information, as has been the case from the very beginning with Fetterman, people find information, good and bad, with which to fill it. This is why you can find a plethora of conspiracy theories on social media filling those holes on an hourly basis.
That vacuum has also created what-if scenarios for if Fetterman resigns. And no one has authoritatively filled the vacuum as to what is going on, and not for the first time since he suffered his stroke.
...
Given that Fetterman is a statewide officeholder, Madonna reasoned that the public needs to have full awareness and appreciation of his health situation. "They need a full explanation in order to understand the status of his health," he said. "That doesn't mean he should quit. That doesn't mean he should resign. But it is very difficult to make a judgment about the status of John Fetterman's health because of a paucity of information that has been publicly made available."
They lie to you, and when you attempt to guess at what the truth is, they call you a conspiracy theorist.
A few weeks ago, a commenter said that if Fetterman can avoid resigning -- or dying - until August, the Democrat governor can avoid calling for a special election, and can install someone in Fetterman's seat until the regular 2024 elections. But if Fetterman is out of office before then, he has to schedule a special election before 2024. Which will also be an off-cycle election, where Republicans will probably have an edge.
So is that the game? Play Hide the Fettermonster until August?
National Hockey League Ponders Cancelling Mandatory LGBT Pride Nights, as More Players Refuse to Wear the Rainbow Pride Jerseys
—Ace
They're forcing players to wear gay jerseys as part of their "Hockey is for everyone" (except believing Christians and traditionalists and normies who just don't want to be drafted into gay activists' never-ending drama of crybulling for infinite validation) campaign.
But players are getting sick of being of being made into sexual-political props for a cause they don't support.
And the NHL is considering scrapping the gay political rallies.
In response to an increasing number of players engaging in silent protests against the NHL's Pride Nights, a new report claims the league is re-evaluating the events which may lead to them being canceled.Currently, all of the teams in the NHL hold Pride nights, however some now do so without the themed jerseys as the events are planned by the individual teams, not the league.
League commissioner Gary Bettman said in an interview with CTV News when asked about the players that have refused to wear Pride-themed jerseys this season, "This is the first time we've experienced that, and I think it's something that we're going to have to evaluate in the offseason."
Citing religious beliefs, several players have declined to participate in pre-game warmups while wearing Pride-themed jerseys.
Bettman told the outlet, "This is one issue where players for a variety of reasons may not feel comfortable wearing the uniform as a form of endorsement."
The commissioner continued, "But I think that's become more of a distraction now, because the substance of what our teams and we have been doing and stand for is really being pushed to the side for what is a handful of players basically have made personal decisions, and you have to respect that as well."
The jerseys of players who have refused to taste the rainbow have sold out online.
See the link for video of ESPN "sports journalists" literally crying because some players refused to don the gay jerseys. One "journalist" demands that the NHL begin fining any club whose players balk one million dollars per "violation."
Merrick Garland Claimed that US Marshalls Decided Themselves to Not Arrest Threatening Protesters Outside Supreme Court Justices' Homes. He Lied: They Were Under DOJ Orders Not To Arrest Protesters Unless "Absolutely Necessary."
—Ace
When Ted Cruz interrogated Garland about why there had not been a single prosecution of "protesters" menacing Supreme Court Justices after the leak of the Dobbs decision, Garland claimed that he could not prosecute anyone, because the US Marshals hadn't arrested anyone.
And so this was the Marshals' decision, not his.
Note that at the end of his answer, Merrick Garland insists "the Marshals do make that decision," regarding making an arrest.
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