Ace: aceofspadeshq at gee mail.com
Buck: buck.throckmorton at protonmail.com
CBD: cbd at cutjibnewsletter.com
joe mannix: mannix2024 at proton.me
MisHum: petmorons at gee mail.com
J.J. Sefton: sefton at cutjibnewsletter.com
Chavez the Hugo 2020
Ibguy 2020
Rickl 2019
Joffen 2014
AoSHQ Writers Group
A site for members of the Horde to post their stories seeking beta readers, editing help, brainstorming, and story ideas. Also to share links to potential publishing outlets, writing help sites, and videos posting tips to get published.
Contact OrangeEnt for info: maildrop62 at proton dot me
Food Thread: The Unbearable Heaviness Of A Bad Yorkshire Pudding
—CBD
Nothing special about that pint, except for its deliciousness and its novelty. I had never seen their cask ale before!
Well, the little Christmas tree in the background is nice, which is why I chose the photo. And I used to drink "Samuel Smith's Pale Ale" in bottles when I was a callow youth. It was expensive, so I could only have one, but as I recall it was quite good!
This one is called "Old Brewery Bitter," which amuses me, because it isn't bitter at all. I guess it's true, we are two people, separated by a common language!
This a bit of an abbreviated Food Thread. I have a Birthday/Hanukah celebration this afternoon, and apparently I am the only person on earth who knows how to cook!
I'll be in and out, so try to keep the conversation civil, or bawdy, or silly, or....
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"Garden & Gun" is a fun Southern food and society (but in a good way) magazine that isn't too full of itself. Here is their Christmas cookie extravaganza, complete with some weird ones, but enough good, solid choices to be worth a read. "Brown Butter Sandwich Cookies with Chai Spice Buttercream" is not on my baking list, but "Ginger Molasses Cookies" and "Butter Pecan Cookies" certainly are!
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That is pork belly, and it was absolutely delicious! Unfortunately the Yorkshire Pudding was a mediocrity, and perhaps the single best example of the fall of a once great country. I think the restaurant, which has always been solid, made them too early, and they dried out. I get that it can be a challenge for the home cook to make Yorkshire Pudding, but a restaurant kitchen that touts its roasts? Sorry, that's a resounding fail.
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Lamb shoulder chops for the win! Sure, they are a bit sinewy, and can be chewy, but they are delicious and "lamby" and easy to cook. All I did was marinate them in garlic, olive oil, Rosemary, S&P, then grill them on high heat for less than 10 minutes! Delicious!
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[Hat Tip: Weasel]
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A friend graciously gave me some genuine grown-in-the-USA garlic, and I am going to taste one clove and plant the rest, because my pathetic failure last year is an anomaly...right? I hope so, because It's in the ground (actually, a large pot), and it had better work this time!
Send all of your extra antelope to: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com.
Rumor has it that the Bourbon Bubble is bursting. I have seen no evidence of decreasing prices, but maybe the bursting started somewhere else! I think the sweet spot is $40-$60 for excellent and interesting bottles, and bumping that to $100 gets you an incremental improvement in quality, but nothing mind-blowing. More than that and I think you are paying for hype and rarity, which may look good in your liquor cabinet, but doesn't translate to more quality in the bottle.
The problem...or the solution...is to buy lots of bourbon, take tasting notes, and eventually arrive at your favorites! It should take forty or fifty years, but it is worth it!
Is there any purpose to over-long laces? Is it some hipster code for "I bought the coolest hiking shoes?" Or is it a testament to the inability of shoe companies to use measuring equipment?
Am I supposed to double-knot, or maybe triple-knot? These things are long enough to tow a boat off the rocks!
Obviously I have to discard these shoes, and probably rebuild the closet in which they are stored. It might be easier to start over...raze the house and build new!
[1:58? A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds]
Our language is amazingly dense and infinitely useful. We have a larger vocabulary than any other language, and enough tenses and special constructions to explain the most complex ideas, without being burdened with much in the way of gendered or confusing multi-word nouns.
English is a glory of the Western world, which of course is why it is a target for the Woke left. As Orwell famously said:
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
So let's fight back.
Don't say "partner" when you can say "husband" or "wife." Don't say "parent" when you can say "father" or "mother." Don't say "child" when you can say "boy" or "girl," "son" or "daughter." Re-sex neutered language. Be salt and light.
Excellent points, and a fine place to start. And I would extend it to singular and plural! There is nothing wrong with using "he" to describe an unknown. Using "they" is astoundingly confusing. "They drove the car into the bridge abutment?" How many people were driving the car? What's wrong with the general "he," which can be corrected when the sex of the subject is known. But using "he" risks misgendering, and our woke masters can't have that!
They corrupt us with this diminution of our wonderful language, and it is a simple thing to push back.
And don't get me started on "Happy Holidays!" I am happily Jewish, and I see no need for a Christian country to bowdlerize a traditional and fine greeting to be more sensitive to me. It's Christmas for the vast majority of the country...there is nothing wrong and everything wonderful about saying "Merry Christmas!"
Sunday Morning Book Thread - 12-14-2025 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]
—Open Blogger
[Please keep current events in the thread below. This thread is a lighthearted respite from the world [CBD]]
Welcome to the prestigious, internationally acclaimed, stately, and illustrious Sunday Morning Book Thread! The place where all readers are welcome, regardless of whatever View image
guilty pleasure we feel like reading. Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material. As always, pants are required, unless you are wearing these pants...(HT: Nacly Dog)
So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, hum some Christmas tunes, and dive into a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?
NOTE: CBD has posted a thread below covering the horrific shooting in Australia. Why do these things keep happening right before the Sunday Morning Book Thread? (10/7 was similar, but also much, much worse.)
A couple of weeks ago I brought you a video about James Madison't library. Thomas Jefferson was also an avid collector and reader of books. It seemed to be the fashion at the time for the upper-class gentlemen in the American Colonies. Jefferson's method of organizing books was pretty simple--by subject and by size. Some of the folios he had are beautiful, using paper I didn't expect to see at that time in history.
READING AS PERFORMANCE ART
Gina points out a few of the more unsettling trends that have been showing up in recent years thanks to social media:
Collecting multiple editions of the same book - Within reason, I don't think this is a bad thing. However, if you have a dozen or more versions of the SAME BOOK just because you want different cover art, I'm not so sure that's a good thing. Seems like a waste of money to me. I myself have two copies of Lord of the Rings, as well as a few extra copies of select books. I don't make a huge point of getting a book just because I want THAT particular copy, though when I do find a book I really want then I might be particular about the cover.
Reading products and "hacks" - Who needs several drawers of annotation supplies? Do people really annotate each and every page of each and every book they read? Reading snack carts? That seems to be promoting unhealthy lifestyle. Also, Cheetos are the very WORST reading snack ever. Trust me. I know. I have many orange-stained pages to prove it. Also, does anyone really need twenty different Amazon products just to read a book more comfortably? Again, this seems to be promoting overconsumption of near-useless garbage. Moderation is the key.
Huge book hauls - I agree that this is very disturbing. Now, I have spent hundreds of dollars on books at once, though I don't do that anymore. I also only did it a couple of times a year when I happened to be near a Barnes and Noble bookstore. It was never a monthly habit. Even today, I generally only indulge in book hauls a couple of times a year through my local university and public library book sales. The result, of course, is that I have hundreds of books in my TBR pile and I have resigned myself to the fact that I probably won't get through them all. I don't believe that the people in these book haul videos even read their books, but it makes for easy content. It seems to be feeding into hoarding behavior. If or when these content creators move, they'll have to do something with all of their books. Not fun.
Ultimately, I suppose all of these social media "influencers" are creating a vicarious experience for those of us who cannot live that lifestyle. So it really is just a form of performance art. We watch these videos because we want to know what it's like to be able to do those things.
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LEE CHILD ON WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A WRITER (HT: OrangeEnt)
I know several of us (including myself) have read entries from Lee Child's Jack Reacher series. Here he gives us a breakdown of what it really takes to be a writer. He points out that you don't need a college degree in Fine Arts or anything like that. You do need to have the desire to pick up a pen and start writing, though. You also need to be a voracious READER. I've heard this many, many times. Most of my favorite authors turn out to have been avid readers in their youth before they ever started writing. Reading develops your vocabulary and allows you to see what's possible in storytelling. Then you can start crafting your own unique voice and style, synthesizing it from all of the authors you have read in the past.
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MORON RECOMMENDATIONS
If you're a cat lover, I think you'll enjoy Cat Tales, A History: How we learned to live with them... and they learned to live with us by Jerry D. Moore. He starts in prehistory when it was a predator/prey relationship on both sides, then on to mutually beneficial relationship of granary owner/mouser, and finally to fuzzy object d'art/slavish admirer.
He notes that there is an asymmetry in our relationships with other domesticated beasts that tips the relationship in humans' favor -- we use their meat, pelts, plumage, or power -- but not so with cats. We love their "intriguing indifference" to us humans. They don't perform as directed, and as for hunting rodents, terriers probably do a better job. So I guess we like them because they are Cool.
Posted by: All Hail Eris, She-Wolf of the 'Ettes 'Ettes at December 07, 2025 10:53 AM (kpS4V)
Comment: If I didn't love my cats to much, I would have traded them to Gypsies in exchange for magic beans a long time ago. They do nothing around my house except eat my food, spit it back up, and shed their fur. Yet I wouldn't trade that for the world because they also bring me so much joy.
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This week I've been reading an odd one: Hellstrom's Hive, by Frank Herbert.
Apparently it was inspired by a quasi-documentary film called The Hellstrom Chronicle, which features a fictional scientist named Nils Hellstrom talking about how insects will inherit the earth. It looks as though Frank Herbert decided to create the fictional backstory for that film.
In the novel, Hellstrom is one of the leaders of a human hive hidden under a farm in Oregon. His cover is that he makes documentaries about insects. The hive and its members are pretty old -- Herbert doesn't actually explain how it began, but there are offhand references to migrations so presumably Oregon is just the latest home.
The hive is pretty damned creepy -- though since it was written in 1972 the cover copy and the non-hive characters in the book are all pretty excited about the NONSTOP SEX! in the hive. There's also a superweapon because the hive has some dudes with giant heads so it's more advanced than the rest of the Earth.
Opposing the Hive in the novel is an unnamed government agency, and Frank Herbert deliberately goes out of his way to make the Feds as unpleasant as possible, full of personal feuds, bureaucratic infighting, and some genuine totalitarian tendencies. The reader is left without anyone to "root for" which may explain the book's lackluster sales considering it was by the author of DUNE. I think Herbert was trying to depict the agency as kind of a rival hive of its own, just one without NONSTOP SEX! like Hellstrom's.
The book has all of Frank Herbert's strengths and weaknesses on display. The science is (for its time) solid, and the characters are vivid and well-drawn, if not especially likeable. It does have all his stylistic quirks -- lots of people's internal mental monologs, the viewpoint jumping from character to character within a scene, a touch of woo about evolution leading to some goal.
Worth a look -- I don't know if it's in print anymore. I got my copy from a giveaway pile at a science fiction convention a while back.
Posted by: Trimegistus at December 07, 2025 09:44 AM (78a2H)
Comment: Stephen Baxter also wrote a novel about a hive-like human society--Coalescent. I wonder if he was inspired by Herbert's novel. It's the sort of thing he would do. I also wonder if we are seeing hive-like behavior among humans in society today. The "NPC" meme got started for a reason--because a certain subgroup of humanity began acting in lockstep with each other, changing their positions and views according to the whims of their leaders.
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Rather apropos, I'm currently reading Gods & Beasts: The Nazis & the Occult, by Dusty Sklar. Published in 1977 (I believe it was reprinted in 1989 just as The Nazis and the Occult), the book examines the influence of paganism (particularly Nordic mythology and Hinduism) and the occult upon the German people both before and after WWI.
I'm only about half-way through, but the book really helps put Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP into perspective. He didn't rise to power in a vacuum: the Germans were already talking about a Messiah that was going to rejuvenate Germany before Hitler came on the scene.
A fairly short book (180 pages), it has an extensive bibliography. However, there is a lack of citations. Rating = 4.5/5.0
Posted by: Retired Buckeye Cop is now an engineer at December 07, 2025 09:44 AM (pJWtt)
Comment: People seem to be fascinated by the link between the Nazis and the occult. It shows up in a fair amount of pop-culture media. For instance, the Hellboy movie starring Ron Perlman and the Marvel Cinematic Universe both feature strong portrayals of Nazis dabbling in things they shouldn't. Raiders of the Lost Ark was an even earlier version of this trope. Is there anything to this idea? I dunno, but it makes for fun storytelling, combining two things that are generally forbidden (Nazism and occultism) in society.
A.H. Lloyd recommended this last week, so I decided to pull it off my shelf, blow the dust off it, and reread it. It's a very faithful novelization of the film, but as Lloyd pointed out there are a few additions which I think enhance the story a bit. The Emperor, Darth Vader, and Luke Skywalker have a little more dialogue in the book, as the Emperor attempts to turn Luke to the Dark Side of the Force. The idea of destroying Endor when the shield generator is destroyed adds a little more tension at the end, as Lando Calrissian races to destroy the Death Star's reactor before the Death Star can fire it's main weapon. Because this is a novel, we also get to peer inside character's heads from time to time, so we see why Darth Vader is finally redeemed at the end because he's willing to own up to his failings. Commander Jerjerrod is portrayed as a tyrannical popinjay. The classic obstructive bureaucrat.
Down the Bright Way by Robert Reed
The Makers created the Bright Way, a portal network linking a multiverse of Earth-like planets in a long chain. A million years ago, the humanoid Founders on a distant alternate Earth discovered how to travel the Bright Way. Their mission is to unite the various flavors of humanity on each of the alternate Earth's to form a utopian society that will last for aeons. Unfortunately, not every human society they discover along the Bright Way has the same goal in mind. Far, far down the Bright Way, many, many Earths from the Founder's homeworld, they encountered the UnFound, a version of humanity that knows only war and killing, determined to conquer and devour the countless Earths along the Bright Way.
I bought this many years ago when it first came out and just never got around to reading it until now. I thought it was an interesting take on the multiverse concept. It's similar in many ways to The Long Earth series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. The technology in Down the Bright Way is vastly different, but it still relies on travelers going on a linear path up or down the Chain of Creation (as P.C. Hodgell describes it in her Kencyrath series). I like the various epigraphs that are used at the beginning of each chapter or section. They provide a lot of interesting world-building context. We get to see some of the personal journal entries of two conflicting Founders as the events in the story play out. As science fiction stories go, it's not bad. Definitely an interesting read.
Star Wars: Darksaber by Kevin J. Anderson
Jabba the Hutt died eight years ago at the hands of a few plucky Rebels. In the aftermath of his death, the Hutt criminal empire scoured the ruins of Jabba's palace to find the darkest secrets buried within. Now the Hutt seek to create their own Death Star-equivalent superweapon to put their criminal empire on a more equal footing with the New Republic. Or to destroy the fledgling Republic and take over the galaxy. You know how Hutts are (Jabba was representative of his species).
The Hutts' genius plan--and I swear I am not making this up--is to build a Death Star laser that looks like a giant Jedi lightsaber in space. Using that weapon of terror, they will force the rest of the galaxy into submission. Being Hutts, they are cheap bastards, so they hired Three Stooges, LLC, to construct their superweapon. It goes about as well as you would expect.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the galaxy (quite literally since Hutt Space and the Imperial Remnants are on opposite ends of the Star Wars Galaxy according to official maps), the Imperial Remnant is stirring up trouble, hoping to crush the Republic and restore their beloved Empire. Naturally, the original heroes from Star Wars--Luke, Han, and Leia--are caught in the middle.
Darksaber was written when the Star Wars novel publication rights were held by Bantam Spectra. The writers of that time didn't have too many original ideas, so they kept falling back on bigger and weirder superweapons for their main plots.
When the rights were purchased by Del Rey, they had the good sense to do a soft reboot of the franchise and developed The New Jedi Order series of stories, which are about a race of invading aliens from outside the galaxy who exist outside the Force somehow. Much better stories overall. The Bantam Spectra storylines are still "canon" within the Del Rey storylines, but the overall storylines tended to be much more varied and complex as the writers explored other Jedi besides the original power trio of Luke, Han, and Leia.
“This is what the current government has allowed to come into our country and go unchecked,” Tali Shine, an Australian newscaster, told The Times of Israel following the attack. “When nothing was done about the radicalized protests outside the Opera House [shortly after October 7], it set the tone [for continued attacks on the Jewish community].”
Because AI is not just a stochastic bullshit generator. It's a stochastic plausibility generator.
AI images? They're not art, they don't have meaning; they're just close enough to make you think they have meaning.
AI stories and essays? The same except that it's a lot worse at holding to a thread.
AI software testing? Actually useful. It might miss some test cases you would have tried, but it will also create test cases you wouldn't have thought of, and it will do it quickly.
AI software? It will be produced quickly and for any non-trivial task it won't work. But it may look like it does.
The deeper issue is psychological. The more polished the output looks, the less likely someone is to question it. Verification feels redundant when something sounds authoritative.
I side with Gnome here. The rules are actually pretty sensible. Both things I am surprised to find myself saying given the nonsense Gnome has gotten up to at times.
I would wonder whether the audience still exists but apparently the original game was released for the Nintendo Switch as recently as 2021, so apparently they still do.
Think of it this way: Having three cars instead of one bus gives you a lot more flexibility. But having 140 cars means you spend all your time managing the logistics of the cars themselves rather than driving people where they need to go.
Seven bags of bark chips deployed. Neighbour came over while I was working and complimented me on how good it looked. Which I think is only partly a comment on how bad it looked before - I live next to an overgrown vacant lot which looks even worse - because even I think the results were worth the effort.
Saturday Night "Club ONT" December 13, 2025 [The 3 Ds]
—Open Blogger
Welcome to the first Club ONT Christmas Party. Brought to you by a collaboration the 3D's - The Disco, The Dino, and The Doggo. Special shout out to Club friend, commenter, and bartender extraordinaire, JQ for the decorating.
We have music, ugly sweaters, questionably strong drinks, a wobbly table, snacks, and some fun content. Tonight is about good friends, good company, and making memories.
JQ spiffy'd the place up a bit. [doggo says] Please note the proper white lights have been deployed.
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[Disco says: They're nice but not as festive as colored lights. I'm not wearing freshly pressed khakis, a fine linen shirt, and penny loafers, so not sure I belong in those areas of the Club. I'll hang out where I won't be judged for wearing well-worn jeans, an ugly seater, and scuffed-up boots.]
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Hobo Santa will be setting up in one of these locations this evening. You'd think he'd be drinking a peppermint martini or hot buttered rum. Nope, straight for the bourbon. Keep the interns away if he brings up "North Pole After Hours."
Did someone pick up the Santa suit from the dry cleaners?
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Did you bring your gift? The White Elephant gift exchange will be held on the patio. Where re-gifting (which we'll talk about below) and/or stealing becomes all out warfare. Like Hunger Games. Or an MLB draft war room.
Funniest this D has seen was someone wrapped a Playgirl magazine. Which was amusing enough as a hetero guy got it first. The laughs grew (no pun - but should be) as the gifter had removed all the "special" pages. Here is a link to some pretty good ones. What about the Horde? Best White Elephant moments?
2. Dancing animatronic Christmas dolls. The weirder, the better. One year we received a be-bopping fuzzball with ogling eyes and a beak that dances and sings to the tune of "Deck the Halls" in a jazz voice.
3. A selection of Christmas Carols on 8 track or cassette tape.
4. Self-help or promotional video tapes or audio cassettes from the 1970s.
To kick off the White Elephant gift game, whoever has comment number 56, please collect the first gift (pictured below) - your very own Kamala Harris bobblehead, courtesy of the 3D's. You can keep it or select another gift from the table. (Don't mind that large present that suspiciously looks like a 39 foot dinosaur.)
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Saturday Night Jokes and Other Funnies
What is a vegan's favorite Christmas song? Soy to the World.
What do you call a Christmas themed stripper? Holly Daze.
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There was a man who worked for the Post Office whose job was to process all the mail that had illegible addresses.
One day, a letter came addressed in shaky handwriting to God with no address. He thought he should open it to see what it was about. The letter read: Dear God, I am an 83-year-old widow, living on a very small pension. Yesterday someone stole my purse. It had £100 in it, which was all the money I had until my next pension cheque. Next Sunday is Christmas, and I had invited two of my friends over for dinner. Without that money, I have nothing to buy food with. I have no family to turn to, and you are my only hope. Can you please help me? Sincerely, Edna.
The postal worker was touched. He showed the letter to all the other workers. Each one dug into his or her wallet and came up with a few pounds. By the time he made the rounds, he had collected £96, which they put into an envelope and sent to the woman. For the rest of the day, all the workers felt a warm glow, thinking of Edna and the dinner she would be able to share with her friends. Christmas came and went.
A few days later, another letter came from the same old lady to God. All the workers gathered around while the letter was opened. It read: Dear God, How can I ever thank you enough for what you did for me? Because of your gift of love, I was able to fix a glorious dinner for my friends. We had a very nice day and I told my friends of your wonderful gift. By the way, £ 4 was missing. I think it must have been those halfwits at the Post Office!
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Drinks of the Night
Tonight we proudly feature a big ol' cauldron of Jingle Juice!
Step 1
Rub rims of glasses with lime wedges. Dip into sugar until coated.
Step 2
In a punch bowl, combine Moscato, Prosecco, Cran-Apple juice, cranberries, vodka, mint, and lime rounds. Divide among prepared glasses.
Combine sparkling wine, pear nectar, and orange bitters in a punch bowl. Top with an ice ring (optional). Serve with strips of orange zest.
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Ugly Sweaters
Here's the one Disco is wearing tonight
Yes, the flask is full. Guess what bourbon is in the flask (brand and proof) and you'll win a date with Hobo Santa!
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White Elephant time again!
Comment #99 - you're up. Come collect this fine piece of fashion!
"It's a beaut, Clark!"
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A large animatronic TRex in a Christmas sweater? Of course! Those wacky Brits...
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Club ONT Christmas Party Games
Club Bingo. Take a drink any time one of the items on the grid is mentioned in the comments.
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What was the one Christmas gift you hoped and prayed would show up under the tree? And it did! What did you get?
Three Holy Grail gifts for the 3D's. Large Millennium Falcon, Labeda Mark V roller skate wheels, Big Wheel. For 3 restroom tokens, correctly match the D to their childhood obsession. Then share your best in the comments.
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Club ONT Naughty List
Is it really naughty? Or is it brilliance - regifting isn't tacky - it is efficient.
My Mom was given two adorable stuffed bears for her birthday in November by a co-worker. She thought they were cute, but she felt "silly being a 60 year old woman with stuffed animals" So they were put away and not seen again, until a year later when I opened my Xmas present. A beautiful gift basket and the basket were the bears. I almost died laughing, my reaction was "Mom?!?!? You’re a regifter????" to which she simply said, "why not, I would never have them out and I know you liked them and would display them somewhere.” She was right of course, but I was still floored, who knew Mom was a regifter? It simply wasn't possible. Not my Mom. I lost her 2 years later and those two little bears (one an Angel bear) now mean the world to me. I look at them every day and am so glad Mom was a regifter. I know that Angel bear in particular is my Mom watching over me and letting me know everything is ok. I was never a regifter, but I believe in it now.
Fess up. Who has re-gifted a Christmas present?
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Work Christmas Party horror stories? Surely there will be a few in the comments!
Confession 6: “No idea what happened, but I woke up on a train in Edinburgh (from Birmingham).”
Confession 13. “I stole my boss’s desk plant. I still have it, I’ve just never had the guts to give it back. He’s sent angry emails around and everything.”
Club ONT was brought to you by: Christmas in the 1970s
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Don't forget to pick up your 2025 Club ONT Christmas Party Commemorative Plate before you leave:
NOTICE: While the commemorative plates are free to all guests, we do need a way to help offset the cost of tonight's party. As such, The Club is offering these Limited Edition Commemorative Coins for purchase!
They are available for $20 (same as in town).
But wait - there's more!
Each coin also serves as a "master token" at Club restrooms. That's right - you'll never have to purchase a Club ONT restroom token ever again!
But we're not done yet!!
Each coin entitles the bearer to a free "Club ONT Crypto Coin"! No, those don't exist yet, but when they do - WOOHOO, you'll be sittin' pretty!
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Club ONT regrets the absence of live music for the Club ONT Christmas Party. Arrangements were made for Missile Toe and the South Pole Elves to play the party. you might know their smash hits "Batteries not Included" and "Who left the $%&@$* Legos on the floor?" Unfortunately, Missile Toe ran into transit problems and the Elves are apparently striking for more marshmallows. In related news, plays on the jukebox are free tonight.
Movie studios have been trying to build franchises out of almost every major special effects spectacle since the 80s. It's the Star Wars and Indiana Jones influence. One film's box office gold is supposed to lead to another and another until everything just runs out of gas. And so, Hollywood is littered with purported starts to franchises that failed to go past the first entry. The Rocketeer, Lost in Space, The Dark Tower, they all ended with promises of further adventures that never came to be.
However, there are two over the past roughly fifteen years that hold special places in my heart, a pair of films so different from each other that are both considered huge box office bombs (one, the largest ever for a time) that I still yearn for sequels to. Now, just to make this clear...I do not think these sequels will ever materialize. One may...have a 1% chance of happening if lightning strikes the same spot fifteen times in a row, but otherwise, no. I don’t think these sequels will ever get made. The franchises are dead, and they will probably never be resurrected.
Those are: John Carter and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Both were big, wildly expensive spectacles based on tales old before any of the creatives were born. The first, based on the first of the Barsoom novels, A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the second a mishmash (let's be honest, every telling of King Arthur is a mishmash) of Arthurian legends. And I just...jive with them. I kind of love the former, and I really like the latter, and I've seen far worse films get sequels.
Let's get this out of the way: the tale of two studios spending way too much money on movies that they shouldn’t have spent too much on.
John Carter was the first live action feature film directed by Andrew Stanton, the PIXAR director who made Finding Nemo and WALL-E. Disney wanted a franchise to compete with the likes of Star Wars, so they gave Stanton, trusted creative, carte blanche to make a wildly expensive sci-fi adventure based on the granddaddy of sci-fi adventures. But...everything went wrong.
Stanton, with no experience in live-action films, essentially filmed the movie twice, making the film wildly, wildly expensive when it should have just had one wildly, at most. Months before the release of the film, Disney acquired the Marvel rights and were already talking to George Lucas about buying Star Wars, so the need for a boys’ adventure sci-fi series died out (and then they put Kathleen Kennedy in charge, which is another thing altogether). Stanton was given control of the marketing, and he approved some of the worst trailers for the film, selling the movie as some sort of somber experience without any real build up within the trailers themselves. Taylor Kitsch's miscasting (I think he’s...fine in the role, but he doesn't have the easy charm John Carter probably should have) became a central reason for critics to crap all over the film. And then the film is based on the granddaddy of sci-fi pulp, the kind of old story that has DNA is most modern sci-fi and fantasy today, making it decidedly old fashioned and feeling derivative.
Honestly, it doesn't surprise me that it was a box office bomb, but I fought the idea for weeks after its release, hoping against hope that there would be some great resurgence of interest in the property several weeks after release and everyone knowing it was a giant failure. My hopes were not answered.
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a contrasting tale of failure, though, starting with the fact that the trailers for the film are actually really good. I think they sell it well, making it look exciting and fun without any sort of misdirection towards the audience. Guy Ritchie, the director, had a history of bringing his hyperactive style to historically set films in his two Robert Downey Jr. starring Sherlock Holmes films, a connection which the trailers promote. And, it failed to make its production budget back, sources saying that Warner Bros. Lost $150 million on the movie. That's a lot of money, so the planned six film series was canceled after only one.
I think the explanation for King Arthur’s failure largely stems from the fact that mass audiences don't seem that interested in medieval fantasy films. There is one major exception in The Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit), but medieval fantasy in general just doesn't seem to be a natural fit with mass audiences. They tend to eschew them rather them embrace them. The Chronicles of Narnia films, the first released right alongside The Lord of the Rings, steadily died out after three films. Eragon, based on a popular novel, was a huge bomb. Solomon Kane, based on the Robert E. Howard character, made no money. You can point back to the 80s and films like Excalibur, but that only made $35 million (a profit for the $11 million film, granted). The 80s were probably the height of the medieval fantasy genre's popularity across the board, and not even Conan the Barbarian hit $100 million (the modern telling, released in 2011, made about $60 million off of a $90 million budget).
I mean, I really like medieval fantasy. I jive with it. But mass audiences don't seem all that keen on it.
The Future that Never Was
So, what would have been? What if Disney hadn’t been buying Star Wars and had decided to back John Carter completely? What if Stanton had managed his set better and spent half as much money? What if audiences had just decided to give King Arthur a shot? What would we have seen?
Well, the easy one to answer is John Carter's supposed sequels. John Carter follows the basic plot of A Princess of Mars quite closely. There are additions, like the Therns gain a lot more prevalence in this early story than in Burroughs' series, and some specifics around transportation between Earth and Barsoom gets created, but in the larger plot points. It's A Princess of Mars. So, what would the second movie have been? Well, largely The Gods of Mars, the tale of what John Carter does when he returns to Barsoom ten years later. It would tell of the fight against Iss, the self-proclaimed goddess of Mars, the Black Pirates, the Therns, and Zondanga with Carter reconnecting with his friend Tars Tarkas, his wife Dejah Thoris, and meeting his son, Cathoris, as recklessly brave as his father. And then, the planned sequel would have seen the adaptation of The Warlord of Mars which sees John Carter becoming ruler of the entire planet.
I'm sure Stanton would have kept the basic narrative bones and rearranged a lot of details, but it's not hard to imagine where that series would have gone, and it would have entertained me greatly.
The more interesting question, though, is around King Arthur. As I said, any tale of King Arthur at this point is a mishmash of legend, Romance, and history, so there's no "true" telling of it. Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory disagrees in many details with Geoffrey of Monmouth's sketches in Historia Regum Britanniae. And it's a tale that’s been told by many, many people over more than a thousand years. Ritchie turning it into a cross between Conan the Barbarian and Ritchie's own low-level gangster movies was a definite creative choice to push Arthur in a new direction, but he also barely scratched the surface of the established tales while adding his own twists.
We only see Merlin once, in a flashback, and we don't even see his face. The character called Mage was originally written as Guinevere, but any mention of her being Arthur's future wife were scrubbed out of the edit and through ADR, so they could still re-introduce her. Morgan le Fay is never even mentioned. There is a character called Mordred in the beginning, killed in the prologue, but that doesn't preclude the introduction in a later edition of the traditional Mordred (Arthur’s son/nephew by way of Morgan le Fay). In terms of the Knights of the Round Table, we only get Bedivere, Percival, and Tristan. So, no Lancelot, no Gawain, and no Galahad (there are dozens more in the legends over the centuries). Really, sequels were wide open.
And the first sequel I would have liked to see might have gone something like this: Merlin and Morgan le Fay are in combat in the north, a war of mages far from Camelot. Lancelot comes from France to challenge the knights at a tourney (being a Guy Ritchie film, there would be bare-knuckle boxing). Lancelot is big, strong, and arrogant, and he is also the only man who could be Arthur’s equal in combat. They bond over beating each other up, but Lancelot has a secret that even he doesn’t know: he’s being manipulated by Morgan le Fay into acting as a distraction. Merlin sends Mage (not Guinevere) to ask for help. The second act is breaking Lancelot's spell. The third act is a big fight, ala Shadows of the Colossus where Arthur and Lancelot in particular have to climb a giant forest creature, his head and shoulders populated with trees since he's from the earth, to fight Morgan or some heavy at the top. One big, expensive action setpiece later, the knights have added a figure (maybe even Galahad in tow), and we're ready for movie #3.
Never Happening
Really, the two original films I just really enjoy watching. Patrick H. Willems described what he called "vibe movies", movies less about plot and more about just being in the world created by the filmmakers (his central film in his video was Christopher Nolan’s Tenet). And that's kind of how I feel about John Carter and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword in very different ways.
John Carter is a big, earnest, sometimes goofy, old-school adventure film. Its big heart it wearshu unironically on its sleeve as it tells the story of a rootless man finding something to fight for once more. It’s told with color and energy, and I just get on its wavelength and enjoy the somewhat silly ride.
King Arthur's Conan the Barbarian influences (its first shot is of a temple that resembles Thulsa Doom's temple in Milius' film alongside a tower that looks a lot like the Serpent's Tower in the same film, and there’s a lot of snake stuff overall, including a giant snake in the end) mixed with Ritchie's low-level gangster stuff is a weird mix, but it's something I really enjoy. The film is imperfect (the mix is sometimes not that great, a lot of the CGI is fun but feels wasteful and indulgent, and there's an emotional bit for Vortigern, the bad guy, late in the film that's just poorly established), but I still just find myself bobbing my head back and forth to Daniel Pemberton's soundtrack anyway. Structurally, it's actually surprisingly sound, even if Ritchie is throwing things in a blender within individual sequences.
And both movies, I feel, artistically deserved sequels. Mostly because, well, I liked them. And I'd rather have Hollywood spend money to entertain me than making another Fast and Furious movie.
But it was never meant to be. My tastes were always going to be more niche, and that's just the world I live in.
What movies that promised sequels that never materialized do you sometimes still yearn for? b Movies of Today
Where the Sidewalk Ends (Rating 4/4) Full Review "I mean...finally, Preminger works from a script by Ben Hecht. It’s what he needed. " [Plex]
Angel Face (Rating 3/4) Full Review "I think it's solidly good, undone by some late stage choices that grind things to a halt. However, the line on characters, the production itself, and the noirish coat of paint all make Angel Face a compelling drama that Preminger manages well, even if Howard Hughes had hired him to torture Jean Simmons." [Library]
River of No Return (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "The overall world feels deeply incomplete, and the story itself feels underserved but with some nice payoffs to things set up earlier. It's not good, but it's surprisingly interesting in the end." [Hoopla]
Carmen Jones (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's an odd duck that way, much like a good portion of Preminger's filmography. However, so much is so right that it stands near the top of his work." [Library]
The Man with the Golden Arm (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Adapting work from other mediums, Preminger is finding composed, solid success, although I feel a certain limitation on his ability to push the medium to its fullest potential." [Amazon Prime]
Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.
My next thread will be on 1/3 and it will discuss the directing career of Otto Preminger.
Welcome hobbyists! Pull up a chair and sit a spell with the Horde in this little corner of the interweb. This is the mighty, mighty officially sanctioned Ace of Spades Hobby Thread. As previewed, the Ace of Spades Wheel of Hobbies (TM) landed on Christmas Ornaments.
Last week, the call went out for Horde Christmas ornament submissions. Are you thinking "I'm a grinch that did not submit an ornament, but I am eager to see what others submitted. I can't wait to get into the content!" I knew it. Enjoy.
As per usual Hobby Thread etiquette, keep this thread limited to hobbying. All (legal) hobbying is welcome. However, politics, current events and religious debates can live in threads elsewhere. Pants are optional. Puns are welcome and encouraged.
Play nice. Don't be a troll and do not feed the trolls.
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Christmas ornaments are more than plastic, wood, metal or glass. They may have aesthetic value but usually they are important and valued because of their origin story. Could be a special person or relative that gifted it. Could be someone that made it. Could be a treasure from travels or a family tradition. Could be the age and previous owners. Ornaments often have value because of their meaning.
Thanks much to the Horde who submitted treasures of their own. Enjoy their stories and share some of your own.
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From "Perfessor" Squirrel:
When I lived in Germany as a teenager, my parents would take us kids to the Christkindlmarkt in Bayreuth. They'd buy us each a Christmas ornament for the tree. I always wanted a giant nutcracker, but I had to make do with this little guy. He's standing on the box of the rest of my ornaments.
Unfortunate feline follow-up:
I foolishly forgot to put the Christmas ornament back in the box after I snapped a picture of it.
This morning, I discovered that the ornament had been knocked off the box onto the floor of my dining area and had broken in two. Unfortunately, I can only find the top half. If I can ever find the bottom half, there's a good chance I can glue it back together. I'm afraid the bottom half has been batted around so much it's disappeared into the void (like the countless ping pong balls I have scattered in my house).
This right here is why I don't ever have a Christmas tree.
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From JQ:
Our neighbor has a laser-cutting device and made these 3 snowflake ornaments for us last year. Pretty cool! Just slide the pieces together for 3-D effect.
The wooden ones were a farm-store find. They looked handmade at first glance, but alas, I fear they were merely assembled by hand after mass-production of the parts. Probably printed on the thin wood and die-cut, then glued together. Still, they are so cute that I bought 2 of each plus extra cows and sheep.
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From ARiK:
The folded stars in the box were made by me in Cub Scouts around 1968. The Snoopy was re-purposed from a model kit about the same time and the glass clam shells and house are survivors from my parents collection and were old in 1968.
The two Hallmark "Beagle Scout" ornaments are near and dear to my heart as an Eagle Scout and Eagle Scout dad and former adult leader.
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From Diogenes:
Mrs D purchased this when we were stationed in Germany (long ago) in Rothenburg au der Tauber. The store is called Katie Wolfharts. Known for their Christmas stuff. We have a bunch of their ornaments but this silly little thing just appeals to me.
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From Victor Tango Kilo:
We buy an ornament to commemorate every year. 2021 was the year Bravo and Charlie were born.
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From wcgreen:
My grandmother, crocheted this tree skirt when I married in 1978. We’ve placed it under our tree every year since then. The wooden tree was made by a local woodworker; it's the newest addition to my Christmas tree forest and it's keeping the skirt on the table for its photo.
I made the ornaments from a pattern in McCall's Needlework magazine in the mid-1980s. They are the first ornaments hung on our tree each year.
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From scampydog:
The cat is is scampywife's ornament from 1975, from Santa. She has one from 1978 and 1981 also. Kind of fun.
Collage: Our tradition... kids/parents each get a new ornament every year. Often tied to what is going on in life. Kids events, sports, hobbies, new job, etc., will be the ornament theme. Ma and Pa, we get things that fit our personality quirks.
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From Doof:
One of my favorite ornaments. Flintstones set from the 70s. We had a set of four. I have two and my sister has two.
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From Gratetful:
The best Hallmark ornaments were from the 1980s. This is one of them (with two sides). They were simple, heartfelt and cherished every year I put them on the tree.
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From Teresa in Fort Worth:
I made these to give as gifts to friends and family in 1996 - a "bell" made from a tiny terra cotta pot that I decorated. Got the idea from something I saw in a magazine that year.
This is a drum ornament that I made in second grade. It was a class project - each of us made one (using an empty wooden spool, some batting, a piece of fabric, and some glitter) to give to our parents to put on the tree that Christmas. My Mom put that on the tree every year, and when I set up my own house, she gave it to me to put on my Christmas tree. Our poor kids have had to hear that silly story every year when the tree gets put up.
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From Stephen Price Blair:
I'm all-in on celebrating the semiquincentennial, having started in 2023 with a series of posts on bicentennial cookbooks, then centennial cookbooks in 2024, and, this year, starting the 250th early with Samuel Young's speech on the 42nd anniversary (the meaning of life!) of the Battle of Bennington.
"All nations, from time immemorial, have had their days of commemoration. These days have marked the character of the nation itself. Among the Pagan nations they commemorate the birth day of some supposed God or Goddess. In Monarchies they commemorate the birthday of some favorite Prince or Princess. In Aristocracies they commemorate the birth day of some splendid Nobleman. But in the United States of America we commemorate the birth day of our Liberties."
So when I saw the Melania Trump 250th collection, I decided to take a chance on the star, which looked very elegant in the site's photos. It just arrived a few weeks ago, and I'm very happy with it. But I was even more pleasantly surprised - though I probably shouldn't have been surprised - to see "Made in the USA" on the side.
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From tcn in AK:
My fav is the photo ornament with a picture of my son age 2-1/2 years in his Halloween costume as a tiger.
The other one is a gorgeous Alaska ornament from The Kobuk Shop which is a historical little treasure located in the oldest building in Anchorage, also known by its original name "Kimball's Dry Goods." Every ornament on my tree is distinct. Some would say it's chaotic.
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From tRustyHudson:
The sound of Christmas in our house, a "Light and Magic" Hallmark ornament from 1989. Kringles Workshop. Plugs into your string of lights and the little elves saw and hammer, and the little gears whir and clack. We had that on our tree since I was 8. The original finally stopped working shortly before I married my wife, and damned if I didn't find another one for our first tree. And when that one gave up the ghost my wife bought another for me. I'm sure when this one goes we'll find another. Wouldn't be Christmas without this clacking in the background.
The following are the nice brass carburetor floats that I hang on our tree : 2 Carter (a WDG and WD-O) floats from Hudsons and a Rochester Q-Jet float from a old GM I can't recall. They're shiny brass.
Editor note: space constraints allowed only one of the carburetor float ornaments, but I don't know which one is pictured.
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From JuJuBee:
I bought this Hallmark ornament two months ago but it's already my all-time favorite. I didn't even put it on the tree. It's on my nightstand so I can see it frequently, and it's staying there all year.
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From Shelf of Monkeys:
Coming straight out of the early 70s and my childhood is my treasured paper mache blue cow that was given to me by my mother. The "flower power" decoration provides the finishing touch. She always is prominently displayed at eye level.
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From Tankascribe:
The first year we were married my husband and I invited our parents over to our place for Thanksgiving. I made my first turkey; my MIL asked for the turkey carcass to take home, from which she made luscious turkey noodle soup. Come Christmas, she presented me with the intact wishbone from my first turkey, spray-painted gold, covered with green fuzz and tied up with red yarn to be used as a Christmas tree ornament. That was 45 years ago and one leg of the wishbone has broken off, but it's still my favorite!
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From Margsnow:
These are two ornaments I made. They were inspired by ornaments I saw on Pinterest.
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From Lirio100:
This fish is a very sentimental favorite, the poor thing is pretty time worn. It was on my grandmother's tree when she was a child, in the early 1900's. I suspect it's even older since her family was originally from Germany and might have either brought it or have it sent. It's about five inches from mouth to tail tip, made of blown glass. The original red coloring can just be seen, while the silver mesh over the body is barely there now. I still treasure it!
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Bonus hobbying content - check out the tree skirt that Grateful made for our tree! Applique and embroidery done by hand.
This is also your reminder to stop by Club ONT later for the Christmas party!
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Did you miss the Hobby Thread last week? We did an scrounging and scavenging theme. The comments may be closed, but you can re-live the content.
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Notable comments from last week:
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Words of wisdom:
"Because despite all our troubles, when things are grim out in that wide round world of ours, that's when it's really important to have a good hobby." Posted by: tankascribe at June 22, 2024 07:41 PM (HWxAD).
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If you have trouble finding something in the content or comments that resonates with you, contribute something from your personal hobbying. We will feature a different theme next time. What are you hobbying? We love showing off Horde hobbying. Send thoughts, suggestions and photos of your hobbying to moronhobbies at protonmail dot com. Do mighty things.
Foxes are beautiful animals that you may be surprised to see in your garden. But like many wildlife species, they’ve learned to live near us. "Foxes are more commonly observed now," Robert Pierce, PhD, associate professor and state extension fisheries and wildlife specialist at the University of Missouri. "You’ll see them in urban and suburban areas because they’ve adapted to the conditions."
Most of the time, foxes are naturally shy and hide from us. "Generally, we don’t have negative interactions with them," says Sheldon Owen, PhD, wildlife extension specialist at West Virginia University. "They prefer to stay out of sight and are primarily nocturnal, although you will also see them during the day, especially if they’re hunting for their pups."
The greatest risk to people and pets with foxes is that they can carry canine distemper, fleas, ticks, and the mites that can cause mange, says Owen. Like all mammals, foxes also can carry rabies, but it’s a small number, as compared to other wildlife species such as bats, raccoons and skunks.
Typically, foxes are not a serious issue for homeowners. "Most often we get calls from people saying they have a fox family in their back yard," says Pierce. "We advise to give them their space and observe and enjoy the experience."
More at the link. And this is interesting:
Foxes may use Earth’s magnetic field to hunt, judging both direction and distance. When prey is hidden under snow, they tend to leap northeast and dive in a corkscrew motion.
Conor Pup was diagnosed with lymphoma and started chemotherapy treatment at a canine oncologist in the mid-fall. It was not an easy path for either of us, but we endeavored to persevere but as you can see, he graduated at the top of his class.
Hrothgar
Hate to hear about Conor's big challenge. You both deserve to feel a sense of gratitude and pride.
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Walking the girls around the thousands of Christmas lights downtown. They were good even though they are not very social (farm dogs). A friend made the noses for some muzzles we had. One gentleman asked how we kept the noses on until he got a closer look. Merry Christmas.
S.Lynn, Idaho
What a wonderful story! Merry Christmas, girls!
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Howdy K.T.,
Wifey and I were privileged to attend the TX MoMe a couple months ago and she took the attached photo of the playful cute dog running around the property (presumably the pet of our hosts Rancher Bob and Cow Horse Queen); I think I asked around what its name was but none of the other attendees I inquired with knew.
I think I'll just call him (or her?) "Ace" next time ... ;-)
Cheers (and thanks for hosting the Pet Thread each weekend)!
-- ShainS and "Wifey of ShainS
Prescott, AZ, USA
Howdy! Thanks for sending in a photo of such a great PetMoron!
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Next Week, Christmas-themed Pets, especially!
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Thank you for sharing your pets and animal photos and stories with us today.
If you would like to send pet and/or animal stories, links, etc. for the Ace of Spades Pet Thread, the address is:
petmorons at protonmail dot com
Remember to include the nic or name by which you wish to be known when you comment at AoSHQ, or let us know if you want to remain a lurker.
Happy Winter Season! Don in Kansas has something cheerful for us:
It's more winter than fall now, and there's little happening outside, or inside. However, a friend up the street has a little greenhouse in which the plants are quite active . . .
Click on the link for a few more plants, including a Bird of Paradise.
"Some easy Bartok. His music is not all grating dissonances."
Moldova (see earlier thread) was once part of the Romanian principality, and they speak Romanian there.
The Soviet era meant that most tomatoes grown there were developed as open-pollinated strains, not as hybrids. One of these is Glory of Moldova. It's a little orange saladette tomato that gets some great reviews. I love the name. "Glory of Moldova" is a little orange tomato!
"Glory of Moldova" is probably in here somewhere. Romania is next door. But in addition to little orange and yellow tomatoes, big red oxhearts are prominently mentioned in the comments. Those are great, too.
1504 varieties of Romanian tomatoes at the Brussels festival! ❤️🍅
More typical winter experiences coming up for many people:
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Edible Gardening/Putting Things By
Two batches of photos from Nan in AZ:
Summer was so hot, we didn't get much at all, but went out last week and found a nice collection of veggies and lettuce volunteering all over the place.
NICE. Glad there are SOME of us getting some veggies!
WOW.
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Gardens of The Horde
Had to capture this last leaf on my weeping willow. The very top of the tree and pure defiance in the face of winter.
Diogenes
Pure Defiance!
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Hope everyone has a nice weekend.
If you would like to send photos, stories, links, etc. for the Saturday Gardening Thread, the address is:
ktinthegarden at g mail dot com
Remember to include the nic or name by which you wish to be known at AoSHQ, or let us know if you want to remain a lurker.
Two U.S. Army soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed, and three others were injured in an ambush by an ISIS gunman in Syria on Dec. 13, according to the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement on social media that the attack occurred in the central Syrian town of Palmyra as U.S. forces were conducting a key leader engagement in support of ongoing counter-ISIS and counterterrorism operations.
The new president of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is supposedly against ISIS, but that is a tactical disagreement. Their overall goals are the same, so this attack, which will be condemned by Syria, is in furtherance of their shared goals of the creation of a worldwide caliphate and the destruction of the West.
And "influencers", apparently. More on that below, along with some other examples of "influencers". Culture and politics have always involved influencing people. Why, today, do we think in terms of "influencers"?
A new report from @ncri_io shows that Nick Fuentes's sudden mainstream visibility reflects a coordinated illusion instead of a grassroots surge.
According to NCRI, Fuentes's rise was driven by synchronized amplification networks, anonymous booster accounts, foreign engagement farms, and a media ecosystem that mistook manufactured noise for genuine political momentum.
🚨BREAKING: A new report from @ncri_io shows that Nick Fuentes's sudden mainstream visibility reflects a coordinated illusion instead of a grassroots surge.
According to NCRI, Fuentes's rise was driven by synchronized amplification networks, anonymous booster accounts, foreign… pic.twitter.com/eLCff8y1hG
Interesting conversation centered on little Moldova, a country of fewer than two and a half million people (according to Britannica), blessed with good soils and rivers (one named after a drowned hunting dog). Agriculture and a lot of other things were messed up during the Soviet era.
My first instinct when I see a politically-motivated arrest in a country is to see if USAID has set up a "Rule of Law" program there to capture its judges and prosecutors, and so far my instinct has never been wrong https://t.co/ut24inPfv5pic.twitter.com/ZnjReysynO
A newly translated volume in Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheel series illustrates how revolutionaries seized control of Russia.
April 1917, Book 1, the seventh of eight novels in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s story of the Russian Revolution, entitled The Red Wheel, portrays three crucial weeks that show why Lenin, with only a handful of followers, triumphed over his rivals. As the novel opens, Tsar Nicholas II has abdicated, and a Provisional Government appointed by the Duma has assumed nominal power. Everything it does must be approved by the Executive Committee (EC) of the Petrograd Soviet (or Council), a group of self-appointed intellectual representatives of the lower classes who can summon intimidating mobs.
Meanwhile, the Russian army, still at war with Imperial Germany, is disintegrating, in part because the Soviet has issued orders eliminating all discipline. Notwithstanding the impossibility of doing so, the Provisional Government, to honor Russia’s alliance with France and Britain, has promised an offensive. Solzhenitsyn portrays the Provisional Government ministers as hopelessly impractical poseurs, who rely on stirring words and dramatic gestures. He quotes a Russian proverb: “A fine gait won’t help a lame chicken.”
Why is the Provisional Government so helpless? . . .
Well, there is not one simple reason, but:
Reasoning that free people don’t require force, the Provisional Government, believe it or not, abolished the police! It also released criminals on condition that they promise to behave, and so initiated a wave of murders and robberies. “Some ask: How do you govern the country?, You don’t even have any police,” Minister of Justice Aleksandr Kerensky paraphrases the obvious question. “But, comrades, we have no need of police, because the people are with us!”
With no means of enforcement, the Provisional Government had to implore people to pay their taxes. Nobody did. Solzhenitsyn quoted one appeal after another—soldiers, don’t desert! sailors, refrain from killing your officers! peasants, please do not seize land!—but the utter failure of rule by uplifting speeches and empty reports only leads to more speeches and more reports. “We have decided to take the most stringent measures,” one minister explains. “I shall appoint a committee of inquiry.”
When the patriotic general Lavr Kornilov at last offers to put his loyal soldiers at the government’s disposal, it reacts with horror. Even while a mob was besieging the unprotected ministers, one of them proudly declares: “No! Even if armed men were to find their way into this room, we should not apply military force to defend ourselves!” Another finds still finer words: “We’d rather sacrifice our own lives than spill a single drop of others’ blood!”
Most pathetic of all is the kindly Prime Minister, Prince Georgi Lvov, who attributes the prevailing chaos “to a single cause. The impossibility of meeting everyone personally, meeting their eyes with a kindly smile.” Using “the quietest of voices … and with one of his most bewitching smiles,” he asks: “Why the drama? Why make relations worse? … Everything will come right in the end.” When it becomes apparent that Lenin’s followers, who have already shot unarmed soldiers, plan to seize power by force, Lvov explains in “dulcet tones” to Minister of Defense Aleksandr Guchkov: “Where Lenin was concerned, the government should not precipitate events, for that might give rise to conflict.”
Anybody find anything in the short segments above that reminds you of anything recent? There's much more at the link that might make some people feel uncomfortable if they were sensible.
How modern progressivism caters to the worst in human behavior by cultivating outrage, infantilization, and permanent reliance.
Republicans need to recognize that they will always start any election, contest or debate from behind the sticks. It will always be first and fifteen because Democrats have a built-in advantage in elections.
Their policies cater to the worst in human nature. They reward the short term, punish the prudent, and erode the cultural preconditions of a functioning republic: responsibility, restraint, and reciprocity. Policies that indulge negative traits may feel humane in the moment but generate long-term civic fragility—and while the consequences may not be immediate, they are unavoidable.
We can debate whether it is fair or foul to have a federal income tax—and one so steeply progressive that 47 percent of income-earning Americans carry no income-tax liability. But the consequences of such a system are no longer theoretical. When nearly half the population contributes nothing to the cost of federal activity, the incentives shift in ways economists have long understood. People behave differently when they bear no financial stake in the outcomes they support. This is moral hazard dressed up as compassionate governance. . . .
Progressive policy design increasingly caters to four deeply rooted but negative human tendencies: dependency, risk displacement, infantilization, and grievance incentives. These traits are not partisan inventions—they are part of human nature. The divide exists because one side has learned to weaponize them.
Consider the latest fights over health-care subsidies. During COVID, Democrats enacted temporarily enhanced Obamacare subsidies, sold as emergency measures. But once installed, they immediately triggered predictable behavioral dynamics. What critics call “government generosity,” the public experiences as an upgrade in lifestyle. When the pre-COVID baseline was about to be restored, the reaction was not gratitude for the windfall but outrage at its removal.
This is the cycle of hedonic adaptation—people normalize benefits almost instantly—and loss aversion, the principle that losses loom larger than equivalent gains. Withdraw something that was never permanent, and the emotional response is sharper than the pleasure felt when it arrived. These tendencies feed entitlement, the belief that a conditional benefit has become an irrevocable right. The envy that follows—resentment toward anyone perceived to have “more”—becomes political jet fuel.
Of course, during the period of subsidies, health care costs also creep up, making the loss of subsidies scary for lots of folks.
But subsidies are only the surface expression of a deeper architecture of dependency. When government benefits become the central organizing principle of economic life, personal agency contracts. Systems designed to help people end up trapping them, not through malice but through structure: welfare cliffs that punish earnings, housing programs that penalize marriage, college-aid formulas that reward borrowing rather than saving. A constituency stabilized by reliance reliably votes to preserve the system that sustains it.
Layered atop dependency is risk displacement. As the state assumes responsibility for ever more dimensions of life—health care, debt burdens, housing, childcare—individuals rationally outsource decision-making to government. . .
The Classical Saturday Coffee Break & Prayer Revival
—Misanthropic Humanitarian
[H/T Thomas Paine, as in give me caffeine or give me death fame.]
Good morning boys and girls and everything in between. Before we enter the Prayer Revival just a few housekeeping matters to go over. (Rulz for those of you in Medford)
1) This is an open thread. Feel free to lurk, opine and/or bloviate.
2) Be kind, be nice. See if you are on somebody's list.
3) No. You may not run with sharp objects until the Food Thread comes around tomorrow.
4) Have a wonderful weekend.
Please submit any prayer requests to me, “Annie’s Stew” at apaslo at-sign hotmail dot com. Prayer requests are generally removed after four weeks unless we receive an update.
Prayer Requests:
11/6 - D sent an update on his wife Susan, and her battle with cancer. He sent his thanks to everyone for the prayers. They are helping and much appreciated. Susan had an infection which is being treated, but her sodium levels are bad again. She will be sent home soon, but is on restrictive fluids until this is cleared up. The good news is that she has gained some weight back and her voice is much stronger now. Thank you, and please keep up the prayers. They appreciate everyone!
11/20 Update – Susan is out of the hospital, after 2 weeks. For the first time in months, she doesn’t have any drainage tubes. Chemo is on hold for the next 2 weeks, to give her time to rest, recover, and gain some weight back. Thank you, everyone, for your prayers – please continue them!
11/15 – Smell the Glove asked for prayers for an 81 year-old aunt who has colon cancer. She is stopping chemo, since it’s not working and it’s tiring her out. Doctors will determine if any other treatment is proper.
11/29 Update – Thank you all for the prayers. The good Lord had another plan and the aunt passed away. She had taught at a Catholic school for over 20 years, raised 3 daughters and had 8 grandchildren. She also babysat Smell the Glove the first couple of years of life.
11/15 – Sponge posted an update on the “First lady”. She is doing OK from the surgery pain-wise, however it appears her compromised immune system from chemo is susceptible to viruses. She has been spiking a fever all weekend.
11/20 - Bluebell sent an update on grammie winger - good news! At her appointment, the doctor said her bloodwork is nearly perfect and her cancer cell count is dropping. She is in minimal pain. The chemo is working, thanks be to God! She will go back in 3 weeks for another round of chemo and then they will do a CT scan to see if she can have surgery to clean out the rest of the tumors. She is convinced – CONVINCED – that this is due in no small part to the treasured prayers of friends and family! They gave her weeks, and now she is looking at possible remission.
11/22 – Duke Lowell posted an update. He said that he is gradually starting to feel normal again, two months after his surgery. The main problem is that the effects of anesthesia are still suppressing his appetite.
11/22 – Commissar Hrothgar posted prayers for President Trump, to keep him safe from harm and may the many forces of evil arrayed against him and our country be made ineffective and come to naught.
11/22 – Oddbob requested prayers. He found out that his job is going away the end of December. They are a one-income family. He also requested prayers for another co-worker, who is in the same situation.
11/22 – Cosda sent an update on his wife’s condition. She started a year of immunotherapy in June for cancer. She is doing well with her treatments every three weeks, but her follow up dermatology scan found another mole with melanoma and 2 other abnormal and suspicious spots. She will be having more tissue removed from those areas for lab tests. Prayers are appreciated.
11/22 – The Walking Dude sent an update. We prayed for his mom in August, when she fell and broke her hip. She is 90 years old. She is still in the hospital but has been transferred to a better rehab run by the Masons. They are unsure if she will ever get out. Please pray for her recovery and return home.
11/24 – Bulg requested prayers for a neighbor who has cancer, and also prayers for his son and two of his friends, who are moving into a rental house in Arlington, VA on 11/28. Prayers for the 3 of them, that they may live together contentedly, and prayers for Bulg and his wife as they adjust to their son’s absence.
11/26 Update – The neighbor passed away on 11/24. Prayers are needed for the neighbor’s husband, Steve, as he grieves. They had no children.
11/29 – From about That Time asked for prayers after a lymphoma diagnosis. From about That Time has already begun chemo, and the kids and granddaughter had fun cutting off a ponytail and shaving hair in preparation.
12/1 – P received news that her 24 year old daughter has changed her name to a male name and had “top surgery”. P needs wisdom as to how to speak to her, and also how to speak with P’s other children, in a loving but honest way. Also, that God will use this to turn all their hearts back to Him.
12/3 – Teresa in Fort Worth posted an update. She had an MRI on 12/3, and will meet with the oncologist on 12/4, the surgeon on 12/8, and the surgery on 12/11. This is a good thing, because it looks like more tumors are starting to crop up in her liver. It doesn’t appear to have spread beyond there yet, thank goodness.
12/8 Update – The surgery is still planned for 12/11. Teresa will be in the hospital for 5-7 days. With doctor’s approval, they plan to travel to see family on 12/20. Thanks to everyone for their prayers!
12/11 Update – Today’s surgery to remove part of her liver is scheduled to begin at 2:30 pm (Central) and take about 3 hours. The surgeon will also be using heat ablation on the remnants of the other small tumors.
12/4 – E asked for prayers as she will be having surgery in two weeks. She is nervous, but everyone she has spoken with has nothing but good things to say about the surgeon, and she is looking forward to being on the other side of it. Please pray that all will go according to God’s will and that His name will be glorified.
12/6 – M requested prayers for Ron and Sherri. Ron has late stage Parkinson’s/dementia, and he recently fell and shattered his hip. He also requested prayers for Al, who fell through a railing and then down 12 feet, and broke seven ribs. He also punctured his lung. He is home now, recovering.
12/6 – Comrade Flounder asked for prayers for his FIL, who went to the hospital for AFIB, congestive heart, and received two stents. FIL is home now, still short of breath, and has a long road ahead. He is a kind-hearted man and a loving father. Comrade Flounder’s wife lost her mother a few years back to brain cancer, so having this go on is even more difficult during the holidays.
12/6 – neverenoughcaffeine asked for prayers for Tim, an acquaintance through church. He has prostate cancer and begins 28 days straight of radiation.
12/6 – pawn asked for prayes for a dear friend named Julia, who was told by her doctors that she has very little time to live. Julia has an incredible mind and drive. She was a Naval officer, a college professor, a competitive sailor, and a mother. She went to the hospital with pneumonia a couple of weeks ago and left with a terminal illness diagnosis. Please pray to God to give her the strength she needs in these last few days, and the peace that comes from acceptance.
For submission guidelines and other relevant info, please contact Annie's Stew, who is managing the prayer list. You can contact her at apaslo at-sign hotmail dot com. If you see a prayer request posted in a thread comment, feel free to copy and paste it and e-mail it to Annie's Stew. She tries to keep up with the requests in the threads, but she's not here all of the time, so she may not see it unless you e-mail it to her. Please note: Prayer requests are generally removed after four weeks or so unless we receive an update.
2 Corinthians 4:8-9
We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.
The Steam Machine isn't out yet, but the specs are public and they're very close to an existing AMD CPU and GPU so it is possible to build an equivalent system and test performance right now.
On indie titles like Hollow Knight: Silksong it delivers 4k at 120Hz, or close to it. That's not a particularly demanding title so it's not a huge surprise.
On big-budget titles like Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Monster Hunter Wilds you can expect 60Hz at 1440p, but at 4k only two of these titles achieved a consistent 60Hz.
And this is with graphical settings and upscaling tweaked appropriately, not with everything simply set to maximum quality. But this is not a high-end system, and isn't expected to have a high-end price. It's supposed to just work.
Will I buy one when it comes out? Maybe. Depends on the price. I just picked up that mini-PC with a faster CPU (though a slower GPU) and a lot more memory for around $600, so it would have to compare well with that.
Edit: Now that I compare those benchmark scores, the Steam Deck Machine doesn't offer me that much. The processor on my new mini-PC is 39% faster and the graphics 36% slower than the Steam Machine, and it has 64GB of shared memory rather than 16GB plus 8GB of DRAM. Since I also have a full desktop system and an Xbox (gathering dust) I think I'm good.
That doesn't seem too bad given that retail prices have increased by around 300% in the past couple of months.
Pre-built laptops and the Framework Desktop which comes with up to 128GB of RAM have not increased in price, nor have prices changed for existing pre-orders.
Needed to wait for it to rain to break up the ground where I planned this - it had been dry for a while and the soil was rock hard - and then wait for it to stop raining to get some supplies delivered. Then it rained again and that ground got covered in weeds.
So today I pulled out all those weeds, dug out some regular grass which I didn't want growing into this area, dug out some patches of native tussock-grass which is not technically a weed but which I also didn't want there, dug in some gypsum to help break up the soil and some potting mix tailored for native plants to improve it, and then dug eleven holes (hitting rocks several times and on two occasions large metal staples left behind by the builders), filled those holes with more potting mix, and planted everything but those kangaroo paws, which will go in another part of the garden.
Which will all look great in a year or so as it grows in but right now, ouch.
Need to go back and cover it with bark chips, but that will definitely be another day.
Apple Bacon Interlude
Turns out that bacon-flavoured apples taste bad. Who knew?
Musical Interlude
Song is King by Kanaria, covered by Hololive's Mori Calliope and Gawr Gura. Gura wasn't the most technically skilled vocalist in Hololive (she now streams independently but still as a fish, having found her niche there) but she has a way of putting her emotions into a song that makes her stand out.
The first two clips of motorcycle mayhem are worth the watch, because the iniquitous get some rough justice. But most of the other clips are just guys wiping out, and I can't really get into that. Attempting stunts may be stupid, but it's not immoral. I don't want to see guys get wiped just for being dopey guys. Do watch the first couple, though.
Pro wrestling heel disrespects the wrong dad's kid.
Ratchet bitch starts a fight with a woman while she has a confederate film it for TikTok. Unfortunately, she brought a nothing to a fist fight.
Surprise! Maryland Governor and Candidate for Democrat Nominee for President Wes Moore Has Long History of Lying About His War Record and Academic Record
Maryland governor Wes Moore, now considered a serious prospect for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, got his big break in 2006. Fresh off a one-year deployment to Afghanistan, President George W. Bush awarded Moore, then 27, a White House fellowship, a prestigious, year-long internship during which he served as a special assistant to then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. It put Moore on the path to ultimately becoming Maryland's governor, and he won the fellowship--in the turbulent years after 9/11--claiming to be a "foremost expert" on radical Islam thanks to his academic work at Oxford University.
"As a Rhodes Scholar, I took advantage of the opportunity and examined radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere," Moore wrote in his application to serve as a White House fellow, indicating that he had graduated from Oxford in 2003 with a Master of Letters, or MLitt, in international relations. "I completed my degree with honors and my research has led me to be touted as one of the foremost experts on the threat." The White House parroted the claim in a press release announcing the 2006 fellowship class, borrowing from Moore's application to note that his Oxford thesis, which it said was titled The Rise and Ramifications of Radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere, had "earned him praise as one of the foremost experts on the topic."
That a 27-year-old could claim to be a "foremost expert" on the Islamic threat based on a year at an American military base in Afghanistan and two years at Oxford could be excused away as an ambitious young man's puffery. But on close examination, Moore's claims of expertise and of being a serious scholar completely unravel, as do his claims, also on his White House fellowship application, that he was working toward an Oxford doctorate.
The problems start with confusion--which neither Moore's staff nor Oxford's registrars were willing or able to clear up--about when Moore completed his studies, when he received his degree, whether he submitted his thesis, and what the title of the work was.
In his White House fellowship application--which is public record--Moore wrote that he graduated from Oxford in 2003. But in the résumé attached to that application, Moore reported a different graduation date: June 2004.
Asked to reconcile the two dates, a spokesman for the governor didn't provide a photograph of Moore's degree, but rather, a "degree confirmation," generated last week by Oxford's registrar's office, indicating Moore completed his graduate studies as a full-time student and "has been awarded the degree," but has not yet been issued a formal certificate. The "degree confirmation" generated by Oxford gives another contradictory date, showing that Moore completed his full-time graduate studies in November of 2005, a full four years after he began his Oxford studies, though a master's degree typically takes two years to earn.
According to Moore, by November 2005, the month when Oxford now says Moore completed his master's studies, he was serving in the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan. He also says he began working as an investment banker at Deutsche Bank in London in March 2004.
...
The story does fit a narrative, Moussa is right about that. But it is one that is likely to be problematic for Moore, just as it was for Minnesota governor Tim Walz (D.) when he stepped onto the national stage. The narrative, backed now by well-established matters of fact, is that when you scratch the surface of many of Moore's braggadocious claims, there is something off, something a little untruthful about them. Moore claims to have been a doctoral candidate after he received his master's degree, for example, but he and Oxford declined to provide the name of his academic adviser or any evidence he was enrolled as such.
...
The mystery surrounding the title of and content of Moore's thesis could be resolved with a cursory review of the document. But that, too, poses a problem for Moore. His office could not produce a copy of the document since we began requesting it in early November.
And good luck finding it at Oxford's legendary Bodleian Library, which archives all MLitt theses from the university's graduate students. A senior librarian told the Free Beacon she couldn't find "any trace" of Moore's paper, because he never submitted it.
....
The confusion about when and where Moore was when he was doing his graduate studies--along with the convenient change in the title and subject matter of his missing thesis--is part of a pattern of self-serving, self-aggrandizing, and not entirely true claims that have persistently dogged, yet heretofore not tripped up, the ambitious Democrat.
Moore has a long history of Biden-like and "Danang Dick" like embellishment of his academic record and war record.
>b?Moore claimed on his 2006 White House fellowship application, for example, to have been inducted into the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame, an organization that doesn't exist; that he received a Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan, which he had not; and that he was born in Baltimore, which he was not.
And of course he claims to be from the 'hood but he's really the son of a comfortable middle class family.
If this Black Walter Mitty is a world-renowned expert on Islamic terrorism, why have no other terrorism experts ever heard of him?
The questions and discrepancies surrounding Moore's missing graduate thesis notwithstanding, his claim to be a "foremost expert" on the threat of radical Islam is ridiculous.
"I have never come across Gov. Moore's name in the course of my academic life," said the French political scientist Gilles Kepel, described by the New York Times as "France's most famous scholar of Islam."
Several other prominent academics in the field, including Lorenzo Vidino, the director of the Program of Extremism at George Washington University, said they've never heard of Moore in the context of any scholarly work.
"I have been studying political Islam in the West for the last 25 years and Moore's name has never popped up on my radar," Vidino told the Free Beacon. "It's a small, niche field, I'd know."
Former CIA case officer Reuel Marc Gerecht, now a scholar of Islamic terrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said he's never heard of Moore in the context of his expertise in Islamic terrorism.
"If there was an up-and-coming scholar in radical Islam, if he had written something novel, then yes, I would certainly have heard of it," Gerecht said. "This is news to me."
Remember, you are the ones engaging in "racial grievance" when you say you're sick to death of being endlessly scapegoated for black failure.
Joy Reid is spending December amplifying a claim that "Jingle Bells" is racist, reposting a video to her 1.3 million followers that tries -- and fails -- to turn one of America's most familiar Christmas songs into a racial flashpoint. The clip she chose to boost offers no proof, only speculation and academic flair that collapse the moment you examine the song's history or even read the lyrics.
The video leans on the fact that composer James Lord Pierpont served in the Confederacy and had written minstrel tunes earlier in his life. But none of that makes "Jingle Bells" itself racist, and the video never demonstrates otherwise. Background isn't evidence, and Reid's repost doesn't provide any. It also highlights a Boston plaque claiming Pierpont wrote the song "to make fun of black people," and cites an assertion that its first public performance -- then titled "The One Horse Open Sleigh" -- may have taken place in blackface in 1857. Even if that performance involved blackface, that reflects the entertainers, not the content of the song.
And the content is indisputable. The original lyrics -- widely available -- aren't about race, caricature, or anything remotely tied to minstrelsy. They're about sleigh rides, winter spills, young flirtation, and the carefree joy of youth.
A new report finds that injecting people with superphysiological levels of artificial hormones increases their all-cause mortality.
Wow, I did not see that coming. I mean, yes I knew this would kill people, I just didn't think that anyone in "The Science (TM)" would dare to do any actual science about trans mutilations.
Biology in Medicine
@biologyinmed
It is not only the HHS report warning of the irreversible long term risks of Oestrogen used as a cross sex hormone.. A new study reports:
Known risks
- cardiovascular disease
-infertility
-pulmonary embolism
-stroke
Emerging 'warning signals' of increased risk
-early mortality
- pancreatitis
-testicular, thyroid and breast cancer
-autoimmune disease
Prescribing of cross sex hormones in children and young adults must be stopped.
Remember that alleged study that proves we need DEI? The one cited by Justice Ketangi D-EI when arguing for DEI forever?
The study claimed that white doctors kill black babies.
That turns out to be bunk -- fake science -- but what is even more interesting is that the same study found that the death rates of white babies increased when attended by black doctors. In other words, following the logic of the "study" -- we need black doctors for black patients, but also, white patients must also not have black doctors. White patients need white doctors.
You might be thinking, Wow, I never heard anyone cite that part of the study.
The August 2020 study in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) concluded that the gap in mortality rates between black newborns and white newborns declines by 58% if the black newborns are under the care of black physicians. A possible driver of the phenomenon could include a "spontaneous bias" by white physicians toward the babies, the researchers wrote.
The paper's most high-profile booster was Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who cited it as evidence for the benefits of affirmative action in her dissent in the 2023 Supreme Court ruling Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which found that universities that considered the race of college applicants had violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
"For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug: it more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live," reads an amicus brief filed by the Association of American Medical Colleges. "Yet due to the enduring and significant underrepresentation of minorities in the health professions, many minority patients will not receive care from a racially diverse team or from providers who were trained in a diverse environment."
CNN
@CNN
Black newborn babies in the US are more likely to survive childbirth if they are cared for by Black doctors, but three times more likely to die when looked after by White doctors, a study finds. https://cnn.it/347NlE1
Aug 18, 2020
But the study's methods have been called into question. A September 2024 replication effort concluded that the original study authors did not statistically control for very low birth weight newborns at the highest risk of dying. Applying that control zeroed out any statistically significant effect of racial concordance on infant mortality.
Now, evidence has emerged that the paper's lead author buried information in order to tell a tidier story than the one his methods and data originally illustrated.
A key data point was edited out of the body of the paper, apparently because it muddled the downstream policy implications of the study, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the nonprofit Do No Harm, which opposes identity politics in medical research and clinical practice.
The study originally asserted that white babies died less frequently with white doctors.
"White newborns experience 80 deaths per 100,000 births more with a black physician than a white physician, implying a 22% fatality reduction from racial concordance," an unpublished draft reads.
But the study's lead author Brad N. Greenwood wrote in the margin: "I'd rather not focus on this. If we're telling the story from the perspective of saving black infants this undermines the narrative."
"That's not how scientists speak," Ian Kingsbury, director of research at Do No Harm, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. "It's not a smoking gun, but it's certainly suggestive they were pushing one narrative or another."
The data point was axed.
"Concordance appears to bring little benefit for White newborns," the paper reads.
While omitted in the paper's body, the data point can be found in the appendix as part of a logistic model. Unlike the linear regression highlighted in the paper, a logistic model is more appropriate for binary questions like whether a newborn survives or dies, according to Ted Frank, a senior attorney with the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which filed an amicus brief in favor of Students for Fair Admissions.
Greenwood, the Maximus Corporate Partner Professor of Business at George Mason University, wrote another note to his coauthors that may indicate he had a predetermined desired conclusion, a strong correlation between physician race and clinical outcomes, the FOIA documents suggest.
...
The study has been cited 507 times in the scientific literature. But the study has made a big impact outside of academia too.
Published in August 2020 amid the Black Lives Matter protests, the study has generated more public discussion in the laypress and on social media than 99% of scientific studies published in the last five years, according to Altmetric. The study has received coverage in 340 outlets including CNN, USA Today, and the Washington Post.
Hank Johnson, the forefather of the field of Buoyant Tectonic Plate Theory -- that Guam may "tip over" if too many people immigrate there --- declares that America is, just as radical Iranian hate-mullahs say, "the Great Satan."
There it is: Democrat Georgia Rep Hank Johnson parrots Arab talking point saying America is “The Great Satan”
"America is indeed...the great hand of Satan — The Great Satan."
This phrase is widely used in Islamic theology. Our Government is infiltrated
SICK: Rep. Julie Johnson says National Guard members were shot in the head in a terror attack "because people are frustrated and they are channeling that frustration." pic.twitter.com/ayw1K3R9tf
Guys, if we end DEI then it will be white men who suffer the most.
The Washington Post says so.
“Actually, DEI was designed to benefit white men” is a headline that would never make it through the editorial process at any halfway-honest paper. Embarrassing. pic.twitter.com/dmN0aSVOUy
Macron under fire after green lighting a $3 million project to replace the famous stained glass windows at Notre Dame in Paris with windows depicting people of non-European decent pic.twitter.com/Zy8g5Hie15
Four Years Too Late, The New York Times Admits That Biden Pursued a Reckless Policy of Unlimited Illegal Immigration -- But Only In Service of New Narrative That Only Biden Favored Open Borders While the Rest of the Democrat Party Opposed It
Big Brother is rewriting history and deleting old files and airbrushing old photos as we watch them do it.
Kind of a pattern with the propaganda media, isn't it? Admitting the Democrats were wrong -- lied, actually -- about covid and Biden's cognitive fitness and now open borders.
And then creating a new narrative absolving all Democrats of those lies going forward.
How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans' Faith in Immigration
The Democratic president and his top advisers rejected recommendations that could have eased the border crisis that helped return Donald Trump to the White House.
See, his "top advisors" -- who can be taken to represent the real Democrat Party -- warned him not to throw open the borders and plunge the country into "chaos," but Biden -- and only Biden -- was determined to impose an open borders policy on the Democrats who heroically resisted this folly.
In the weeks after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected president, advisers delivered a warning: His approach to immigration could prove disastrous.
Mr. Biden had pledged to treat unauthorized immigrants more humanely than President Donald J. Trump, who generated widespread backlash by separating migrant children from their parents.
But Mr. Biden was now president-elect, and his positions threatened to drastically increase border crossings, experts advising his transition team warned in a Zoom briefing in the final weeks of 2020, according to people with direct knowledge of that briefing. That jump, they said, could provoke a political crisis.
"Chaos" was the word the advisers had used in a memo during the campaign.
They offered a range of options to avert that crisis, by better deterring migrants. Mr. Biden seemed to grasp the risk. But he and his top aides failed to act on those recommendations.
The warnings came true, and then some. After Mr. Biden became president, migrant encounters at the southern border quickly doubled, then kept rising. New arrivals overwhelmed border stations, then border towns, and eventually major cities like New York and Denver.
Anger over illegal migration helped return Mr. Trump to the presidency, and he has enacted even more aggressive policies than those Mr. Biden first campaigned against. Mr. Trump has drawn outrage from Democrats by sending masked agents to target immigrants, often aided by National Guard soldiers.
Biden did All the Bad Things, you guys, single-handedly. Biden was the only thing wrong with the Democrat Party. Now that he's out, the Democrat Party is Perfect Again (TM).
Walter Kirn summed this effort up as the Democrats "trying to establish a new encyclopedia entry" on this chapter of political history so that future voters will only be able to read this version of events.
...
But a New York Times examination of Mr. Biden's record found that he and his closest advisers repeatedly rebuffed recommendations that could have addressed the border crisis faster, and eased what became a potent issue for Mr. Trump as he sought to return to the White House and justify the aggressive tactics roiling American cities today.
Former Biden administration officials told The Times that Mr. Biden and his circle of close confidants -- including Ron Klain, who was chief of staff during the president's first two years, Mike Donilon, Jennifer O'Malley Dillon and Anita Dunn -- made two crucial errors.
First, they underestimated the scale of migration that was coming. Second, they failed to appreciate the political reaction to that migration -- believing that stronger enforcement would alienate Latino and progressive voters, and also that a border surge would not be an important issue to most voters. Those calculations would later prove to be mistaken, with many voters, including Latinos, citing immigration as a reason for supporting Mr. Trump in 2024.
"Everybody was reacting to the excesses of the Trump administration," said Cecilia Muñoz, who helped shape immigration policy in the Obama administration and oversaw domestic and economic policy for the Biden transition team.
Of course -- it wasn't the Democrats' fault, it was Trump's.
Biden only embraced open borders Because Trump. This wasn't the Democrat Party position or anything.
Except... that in the Democrat primary presidential debate of 2016, scheduled by Hillary Clinton for Christmas Eve so that no one could see it, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders (formerly in favor of border control) vowed that no illegal aliens -- not one -- would be deported under their would-be presidencies.
I remember attempting to bring this attention to NeverTrumpers claiming Hillary Clinton was the Real Conservative Choice in 2016. They, get this, pretended she never said that.
And now the New York Times debases itself by imitating the behavior of vile NeverTrumpers in pretending that open borders was just something Biden came up with alone as a reaction to the Beast of the Apocalypse Donald Trump.
Megyn Kelly finally calls out Candace Owens
Whoops, I meant she bravely attacks Sydney Sweeney for "bending the knee." (Sweeney put out a very empty PR statement saying "I'm against hate." Whoop-de-doo.)
Megyn Kelly claims she doesn't want to call people out on the right when asked about Candace Owens but then has no compunctions at all about calling people out on the right.
As long as they're not Candace Owens. Strangely, she seems blind and deaf to anything Candace Owens says. That's why this woman calls her "Megyn Keller."
She's now asking her pay-pigs in Pakistan how they think she should address the Candace Owens situation, and if they think this is really all about Israel and the Jews.
Podcast: Pete Hegseth is everything the left hates...and we love! Illinois is the next flashpoint for federal supremacy with regard to our borders, Trump's communication leaves something to be desired, and more!
I have happily forgotten what Milo Yiannopoulos sounds like, but I still enjoyed this impression from from Ami Kozak.
Well, bamboo is actually a type of grass, and underground, it's all connected in a sprawling network, just like the parts of this story I never wanted to tell. I wish I hadn't been put in this position, that I didn't have to write about any of this, that I didn't have to subject myself or my loved ones to embarrassment and further loss of privacy.
We're back to the fucking bamboo. Guys, I don't think I can pay for bamboo ruminations.
I think he added that because he was embarrassed about all the bamboo imagery from Part 1. He's justifying his twin obsessions: His ex, and bamboo. Which is not a tree but a kind of grass, he'll have you know.
On Tuesday, the book arrived in stores. At lunchtime, in the Midtown Manhattan nexus of media and publishing, interest in Nuzzi's story seemed more muted. The Barnes and Noble on Fifth Avenue had seven copies tucked into a "New & Notable" rack next to the escalator, below Malala Yousafzai's "Finding My Way." Not many had sold so far, a store employee said.
A few blocks uptown, at a branch of the local independent chain McNally Jackson Books, a few volumes lay on a table of new and noteworthy nonfiction near the front of the store. No one was lining up to get them, or even browsing. Bookseller Alex Howe told CNN around 3 p.m. that though the store had procured "several dozen" copies, not a single one had yet sold -- a figure he said was surprising, considering how many people in media and publishing work in the area.
"We ordered a lot and so far, people have not been beating down the door," Howe said. "I'm not sure where we're gonna put them because right now, supply is outpacing demand." (A manager at McNally Jackson noted that Howe was speaking only in a personal capacity, not as a representative of the store.)
She trashes Ryan Lizza for his "Revenge Porn" here. Emily Jashinsky says that when the Bulwark's gay grifter Tim Miller asked why she didn't report on the (alleged) use of ketamine by RFKJr., she broke down in tears and asked to end the interview.
Podcast: Sefton is back with CBD to discuss killing narco-terrorists (we are both for it!), the TN special election, Trump's communication skills, and more!
Incumbent Senator John Cornyn (RINO - TX) betrayed his party and his country by voting in favor Biden's Afghan resettlement bill in 2021. Cornyn voted to bring in the Afghan who shot two National Guard soldiers on US soil. A vote for Cornyn is an endorsement of importing unvetted, radicalized murderers. [Buck]
