Bandersnatch 2024
GnuBreed 2024
Captain Hate 2023
moon_over_vermont 2023
westminsterdogshow 2023
Ann Wilson(Empire1) 2022 Dave In Texas 2022
Jesse in D.C. 2022 OregonMuse 2022
redc1c4 2021
Tami 2021
Chavez the Hugo 2020
Ibguy 2020
Rickl 2019
Joffen 2014
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
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) May 8, 2024
Meet The PetMorons
> I hope this works. You asked for some horse pictures and this one is about as sweet as it gets.
I will be in the comments on Saturday to explain the picture so as not to tie up more of the main page.
Thank you,
Ben Had
Very sweet. And of course, we try to be careful to protect the identity of hoomans in photos.
* * *
Winnie (black and white) and Kroger (black) are quite happy to assist me on days I work from home. I met Winnie when she was just off the track and I was transporting her to her foster home. She decided that she'd much rather go home with me. Kroger was returned due to an instance of aggression. We fostered him, weaned him off Prozac and got him adopted out only to have him be returned again. My wife and I decided he could live with us.
-NR Pax
They look like great office helpers. Interesting story about weaning Kroger off Prozac.
* * *
This is Panda, she's now about 16 yo, a sweet and gentle cat to all but the dogs. She is very expressive with her voice and especially with her tail, and no longer pretends to be aloof,. She was born feral but was captured by 3 of the Dall progeny, enticed by cheese. She then captured said kids, then after she moved in with us she enthralled the elder Dalls into her service.
Hal Dall, MD
Panda has obviously earned her place in the family.
* * *
Ok, the family has expanded beyond the three cats (Zim, Grrrrr, and Monster) and Princess the dog. We now have adopted a bunch of more unusual animals which I now present for the Pet Morons Pleasure.
I just pray that I got the name pairs correct.
As always, thanks for doing the PetMorons! It's a fun part of my weekend to see the pets.
Wandering Neurons
Horse Sugar
Horse Precious
Alpaca Mutt (soon to be shorn)
Alpaca Jeff (soon to be shorn)
James, Pygmy Goat
Jesse, Pygmy Goat
Frick and Frack, Goats
Mrs. Wilson, Potbelly Pig
What an amazing collection of critters! Love them. It must take some dedication to care for them each day.
* * *
A nice collection of pets today. Thank you for sharing your pets with us.
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.
Until next Saturday, have a great week!
* * *
If you start feeling nostalgic, here a link to last week's Pet Thread, the Ace of Spades Pet Thread, May 4. Some special PetMoron stories and photos there.
I closed the comments on this post so you wouldn't get banned for commenting on a week-old post, but don't try it anyway.
Happy Mother's Day Weekend! Bouquets like the one above are sort of traditional for Mother's Day, but there are other possibilities for gifts as well, depending on the characteristics of the mother or mother figure you have in mind:
Live plants (either in containers or planted with love and a promise of future care)
Or maybe some work around the house that has been neglected.
We are between seasons here in the GreatWhiteNorth. The wild flowers are blooming in the woods & the trees are exploding with leaves. The population of furry & feathered critters has increased because, I'm sure, the news leaked out that we give away free food. It would be a nice time of year to be outside if not for the annual visit of the worst of our biting insects - the black fly. But they won't be here long - a couple hot days will end them for another year.
One of the benefits of being forced into the house is that it makes me catch up on little inside projects I've been putting off. Like organizing the puttering video clips I've collected for the past couple years. This video has no birds, no bugs & no plants. Just tools & equipment in SloMo.
PointyHairedBoss
Love the music! Visually compelling, too. What a great reminder to pay attention to what is really going on when you use tools and equipment.
Your Mom might enjoy this video, too!
*
Edible Gardening/Putting Things By
From By-Tor:
First red tomatoes and peppers from my container garden this season. This tomato was super sweet. I didn't try the peppers but I don't think they are particularly hot .
They look great!
*
Old Shrubs, New Shrubs
The word "shrub" sounds sort of unappealing to me. But there are many shrubs that are very attractive in the garden, if given a little care. Below, a few fragrant ones for various climates and conditions.
Here's an old shrub I just encountered this year: EDGEWORTHIA.
Common Name(s): Oriental Paper Bush, Paperbush, Paperbush Plant
Previously known as: Edgeworthia papyrifera
Description
The Irish botanist Michael Pakenham Edgeworth and his half sister Maria Edgeworth were both honored with the naming of this plant. Chrysantha refers to its golden yellow flowers. The common name, Paperbush, comes from its use to produce quality paper. In Japan, the paper is used to make banknotes.
Edgeworthia is a shrub native to China and the Himalayas that provides superb fall and winter interest and a gardenia-like fragrance. This well-branched, well-formed shrub begins forming its silvery buds in late summer into fall, adding interest to your fall garden. It begins to bloom in December, when it's nothing but a bare silhouette in the garden, and continues through the winter. The individual florets are tiny, but a few dozen make up a 1 to 2 inch cluster of beautiful yellow flowers.
Edgeworthia thrives in partial shade and appreciates well-enriched, moist soil. In spring, after the blooms pass, it sports lovely bluish foliage with silvery undertones that are both eye-catching and soothing. The foliage turns a nice yellow in the fall.
I haven't seen the yellow fall foliage photos. Maybe it's just on some cultivars.
The plant has pliable stems. I wonder if that has something to do with its use in making paper? (photo credit Jim Robbins)
Paper bush (Edgeworthia chrysantha) produces highly fragrant flowers in late winter, thriving as a shade garden plant in moderate climates. Native to Asia, the paper bush, named for its bark, is a durable shrub often used to make paper goods, including banknotes, books, and wallpaper.
This deciduous shrub features showy blooms that last four to six weeks and emerge from equally beautiful silver flower buds. Paper bush is a sweet-smelling plant with minimal upkeep. The plant's structure makes it suitable for hedges or as a feature plant with well-formed branches filling the shape.
Taking fragrant blossoms indoors in winter sounds like a good idea.
Paper Bush Care
Paper bush is suited to the Middle, Lower, and Coastal South (USDA Zones 7-9), although with protection, it might get by in the Upper South (USDA Zone 6). Give it light shade and moist, fertile, acidic, well-drained soil containing lots of organic material. It can tolerate more sun to provide more blooms if the plant gets enough water. Water regularly during summer and fall to keep the soil consistently moist, and water during summer droughts. It is cold-hardy to 5°F degrees. It has no serious pests, and pruning is seldom required, but do so to remove damaged or diseased branches.
Paper bush spreads by rhizomes but isn't invasive and generally forms a dense, slowly expanding clump of long, pliable stems. Cuttings root easily in moist soil. The rapidly growing paper bush grows five to eight feet tall and wide, depending on the selection. Take cuttings to display indoors.
Paper bush is available in various showy blooms, each with distinct colors and sizes.
'Snow Cream': Boasting large clusters of highly fragrant, golden-yellow flowers, this variety is supposedly more cold-hardy than regular paper bush (down to 0°F).
'Akebono' (or 'Red Dragon'): This variety features orange-red flowers and grows slower and more compact than other species.
'Grandiflora': The species with the largest flowers.
'Ruby Splash': This variety is rare and contains red flowers.
I imagine that 'Snow Cream' is the variety growing by the East River in NYC.
Back to Southern Living:
How to Get Paper Bush to Bloom
Although it's an attractive plant throughout the year, paper bush, a perennial, starts to shine in late fall. Drooping, rounded flower buds covered with silky, silvery hairs appear on top of naked stems. When sunlight hits the buds, the paper bush seems to bloom already. The flower buds grow in size and prominence all winter.
Then, in late winter, they pop open to reveal pendant clusters of dainty white tubular blooms on the outside, tipped with yellow. The sweet fragrance reminds you that paper bush is kin to winter daphne (but it's much easier to grow). Flowering can last four to six weeks.
The more sunlight exposure, the more blooms--just make sure to keep the plant hydrated. You do not need to deadhead these flowers.
Does anybody grow the famous, but touchy, Winter Daphne?
More at the link.
*
A DESERT ORCHID?
Chitalpa El Niño is new on the market this year. Like the two existing marketed tree-form Chitalpas that I know of, it is a cross between to genera in the same family - not just a cross between species. But they did not call the tree forms "Desert Orchids".
A truly unique option for your garden or landscape.
1. Intricate pink/purple flowers resemble orchids.
2. Flowers emit a delicious vanilla-melon fragrance.
3. Heat tolerant and deer resistant.
4. Zones 6-9, sun to part sun, 5-8' tall x 4-6' wide at maturity.
Fragrant, attracts bees and hummingbirds, maybe not so attractive to deer. Sounds great.
*
For comparison, this is another chitalpa photo from Nan in AZ last year. I think this must be one of the earlier tree forms. It's nice, too! Probably 'Morning Cloud'.
Should we start calling it a 'Desert Orchid', too? It's planted as a street tree in California.
Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) has been celebrated as an emblem of the French Republic for almost 200 years. The dynamic scene of Liberty leading revolutionaries into battle first entered the Louvre in 1874, following its purchase by the state a year after its creation.
However, its dramatic palette has yellowed and dimmed over time, leading the museum to undertake a major six-month restoration to remove eight layers of oxidized varnish. The project forms part of other recent restoration efforts to conserve works by Delacroix. . .
According to Bénédicte Trémolières and Laurence Mugniot, who restored the painting, previous attempts at preservation had dramatically altered Delacroix’s subtle palette and flattened or obscured key compositional details.
For example, the central allegorical figure of Liberty—who is known in France as Marianne, the personification of liberté, égalité, fraternité—wears a tunic which was believed to be uniformly yellow. However, it is in fact light grey with hints of golden hues. A conservation effort in 1949 is believed to be responsible for deliberately recoloring the clothing.
Activists detained for posting stickers around Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’
On Wednesday, French police arrested two Riposte Alimentaire (Food Response) activists at the Musée du Louvre in Paris after they staged a protest in front of Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) . A video recording was posted to the group’s social media account showing the pair placing two stickers that read ‘Résister est vital’ to the painting’s right and chanting demands for social security to sustainable food.
The two were charged with ‘wilful damage’ and a museum representative filed a complaint with the authorities. The painting, however, remains undamaged.
According to its website, Riposte Alimentaire ‘is a profound and collective transformation operation which aims to achieve an ecological and social victory through the establishment of sustainable food social security’. They are the organisation responsible for throwing soup on Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503) earlier this January.
Activists leading the people to victory!
* * * * *
Quotes in Context: Who thinks that Robespierre represents freedom?
This recently floated through my social media, from a person who does not have Jacobin leanings. But now that there is a Jacobin magazine, perhaps it is not surprising that memes featuring this guy would get copied randomly on social media.
I responded with some context concerning Robespierre's own tyrannical actions, but not this much context:
From the BBC historic profile of Robespierre (archived, no longer updated - which can only be a good thing). This link is a pretty good summary if you want something short about the Jacobins to pass on to those with attention spans long enough to go beyond the typical social media meme:
In the period after the king's execution, tensions in the convention resulted in a power struggle between the Jacobins and the more moderate Girondins. The Jacobins used the power of the mob to take control and the Girondin leaders were arrested. Control of the country passed to the Committee of Public Safety, of which Robespierre was a member. He rapidly became the dominant force on the committee.
Against a backdrop of the threat of foreign invasion and increasing disorder in the country, the committee began the 'Reign of Terror', ruthlessly eliminating all those considered enemies of the revolution. These included leading revolutionary figures such as Georges Danton.
In May 1794, Robespierre insisted that the National Convention proclaim a new official religion for France - the cult of the Supreme Being. This was based on the thinking of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau of whom Robespierre was a passionate advocate.
Somehow, I had glossed over the Cult of the Supreme Being in learning about the French Revolution. Don't know why. Inspired by Rousseau?
Here's a nice quote:
What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I like to remember Rousseau as the guy who abandoned all his children to a foundling hospital. Robespierre thought of him as the inspiration for a new religion. I don't know if this idea from Rousseau was incorporated in the new religion:
Well, Rousseau seems to have thwarted the mother of his children in a negative way. On the other hand, with rage rituals and various stereotypes of women among "transwomen", maybe he had a point.
The Cult of the Supreme Being was a deistic cult established by Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) during the French Revolution (1789-1799). Its purpose was to replace Roman Catholicism as the state religion of France and to undermine the atheistic Cult of Reason which had recently gained popularity. It represented the peak of Robespierre's power and went unsupported after his downfall.
In establishing the Cult of the Supreme Being, Robespierre intended to shepherd the French Republic toward a state of absolute virtue, or moral excellence. He meant to use the idea of an abstract godhead, or Supreme Being, to educate the French people on the relationship between virtue and republican government, thereby creating a perfectly just society. According to the decree of 18 Floréal (7 May), the cult acknowledged the existence of a Supreme Being as well as the immortality of the human soul. Worship of the Supreme Being was to be done through acts of civic duty.
Worship through "acts of civic duty".
On 8 June 1794, a Festival of the Supreme Being was held on the Champ de Mars. Robespierre, who was then at the apex of his dictatorial powers, took on a central role in the festivities, giving him the appearance of pontiff to the new religion. It is thought that distaste for the cult, and for Robespierre's central position in it, helped lead to his downfall a little over a month later. According to historian Mona Ozouf, the Festival represented a certain revolutionary stiffness that foreshadowed the "sclerosis of the Revolution" (Ozouf, 24).
Background
The Church & the Revolution
The French Revolution had been at odds with the Catholic Church since its beginning. A fundamental pillar of the oppressive Ancien Régime, the institution of the Church seemed to stand for corruption, superstition, and backwardness, all contrary to revolutionary values. In November 1789, Church lands were seized and nationalized to bolster France's withering economy, while the Civil Constitution of the Clergy forced all practicing clergymen to swear oaths to the new constitution and pledge that their loyalty to the French state would supersede their loyalty to the Pope in Rome. . .
Rise of Atheism: The Cult of Reason
Of course, the most fervent attempts at de-Christianization would not come until around the time of the Reign of Terror in September 1793. An anti-clerical, atheistic movement known as the Cult of Reason had arisen around Paris, propped up by an extremist, 'ultra-revolutionary' faction known as the Hébertists. The Cult of Reason rejected the existence of God in any form, instead dedicating itself to the celebration of Enlightenment values such as liberty and rationalism. While it still had ceremonies that resembled religious traditions, this was mainly done in mockery of organized religion, causing some historians to regard the cult as a "crude caricature of Catholic ceremonies" (Furet 564).
The Hébertists, who had come to power in the Paris Commune, sought to make de-Christianization an official policy of the Revolution and to make the Cult of Reason its official religion. They were instrumental in replacing many Christian symbols and statues with revolutionary iconographies, while the National Convention adopted the French Republican calendar, which erased all references to Christianity from the French year. . .
The French Republican Calendar, with 10 day weeks and such . . .
The Cult of Reason was especially hostile to clerics themselves, who were humiliatingly forced to abjure their vows by getting married or to declare themselves to be charlatans, under threat of the guillotine. Outright violence against Catholics became increasingly common; Jean-Baptiste Carrier made a name for himself by submerging thousands of clergymen and religious Vendean rebels in the Loire River in the drownings at Nantes. On 7 November 1793, the Archbishop of Paris was forced to resign his duties and was made to replace his mitre with a red cap of liberty. To celebrate the archbishop's humiliation, the Hébertists organized a Festival of Reason to be held at the Notre-Dame Cathedral, which had been rededicated as the Temple of Reason.
The Festival of Reason, held on 10 November, was long the subject of scandalous rumor. It was true that Sophie Momoro, wife of one of the leading Hébertists, played a central role as the scantily clad goddess of Reason, and that the Christian altar was dismantled in favor of an altar to 'Philosophy'. Yet rumors persisted of acts of licentiousness, such as depraved orgies, that took place. True or not, these rumors finally forced the hand of Robespierre and the moralizing Jacobins.
"the drownings at Nantes" . . . Why am I thinking of Mao here?
Robespierre & Religion
By the end of 1793, Robespierre was reaching the summit of his dictatorial powers. Although all members of the Committee of Public Safety were theoretically equal, Robespierre controlled it in all but name, which made him the veritable master of France. Famously self-righteous and borderline puritanical, Robespierre had never been closer to achieving his vision of a perfectly virtuous Republic, consisting of citizens who thought of the greater good above all else. Standing in his way were the Hébertists and their seemingly hedonistic Cult of Reason. On a pragmatic level, Robespierre knew that their outspoken aversion to Christianity would further alienate the Republic from potential supporters and allies. On a personal level, he was offended by the cult's atheism and its rumored depravity, traits that were antithetical to his idealistic, moral society. Either way, he knew it had to go.
Not long after the Festival of Reason, Robespierre gave a speech in the Jacobin Club, denouncing atheism as 'aristocratic'. In March 1794, he arranged for the arrests and executions of nineteen leading Hébertists; their deaths also ensured the diminishment of the Cult of Reason. . .
But the question remained as to what exactly this new spirituality would look like. Despite his hatred of atheism, Robespierre was no fan of Roman Catholicism either, an institution that he largely viewed as corrupt. Instead, it was necessary to introduce a new god, one that personified the revolutionary values of truth, liberty, and virtue. Only through a shared faith in a higher power, Robespierre believed, could French society achieve its destiny and reach the pinnacle of virtue; clearly, he agreed with Voltaire that, "if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" (Scurr, 294).
So, Robespierre set out to do exactly that. He established the Cult of the Supreme Being, which was centered around deism, the belief that a creator exists but refrains from interfering in the universe. Robespierre professed to believe in a Supreme Being as well as in the immortality of the human soul, preaching such doctrines before both the National Convention and the Jacobin Club. . .
Festival of the Supreme Being
As the day of the festival approached, the renowned painter and fanatical Jacobin Jacques-Louis David was entrusted to organize the event. . . The guillotine, which had been particularly busy as of late, was relocated from the Place de la Revolution to the site of the demolished Bastille, where the sound of the falling blade would be well out of earshot of the celebrating Parisians.
The description of the staging of the festival, the speeches and the crowds is quite remarkable.
Here's a nice quote from the guy who inspired Robespierre's short-lived religion:
Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
But there seems to have been some miscalculation on the part of Robespierre:
Reaction to the Festival
The Festival of the Supreme Being was well received by ordinary Parisians, who had become used to the flashy theatrics of revolutionary celebrations and enjoyed the excuse to let loose and forget the grim realities of France in 1794. Jacobin newspapers praised the festival as the finest day in the life of virtuous man, while in Orléans, another festival was held in which similarly jubilated crowds cried out, “Vive Robespierre!”
Of course, not everyone was happy with the festival, and many revolutionary leaders felt threatened by Robespierre's central role. By consolidating his power the previous winter and spring, Robespierre had already opened himself up to rumors that he aspired to total dictatorship; his role as chief pontiff of this strange new religion only seemed to confirm this speculation. . .
. . a mere two days after the Festival of the Supreme Being, Robespierre and his allies introduced a law to the Convention without prior consultation. This law, infamously known as the Law of 22 Prairial, was meant to solve the problem of Paris' overcrowded prisons by accelerating trials. Resulting from this was the month-long period of the Great Terror, during which over 1,400 people were rapidly guillotined in Paris.
Robespierre began to hint that he had a list of treacherous conspirators in the National Convention but kept refusing to name names, watching as the deputies squirmed beneath his shadow of Terror. Afraid that they had made the list, many deputies refused to sleep in their own beds, lest they be arrested in the dead of night. Finally, on 27 July 1794, members of the Convention rose up and overthrew Robespierre, who was executed the next day.
End of the Cult
With the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the Cult of the Supreme Being largely fell into obscurity. Robespierre's central role in both the cult's creation and in the festival on 8 June meant that the cult was associated with him and his Jacobin movement. With his death, no one bothered to pick up the mantle. During the Thermidorian Reaction, the period that followed the Reign of Terror, the French government distanced itself from many Jacobin policies and customs, including the Cult of the Supreme Being. It was not until 1802 when Napoleon Bonaparte delivered the final death blow, officially banning both the Cult of the Supreme Being and the Cult of Reason with his Law on Cults of 18 Germinal Year X.
The People seemed to be amenable to drowning people in the name of atheism, then switching to the Cult of the Supreme Being, then to outlawing both under Napoleon. Amazing.
Although there is now an up-and-running Jacobin magazine, other French philosophers, like Franz Fanon, are current problems for our culture.
t was commonplace during the long Cold War for conservatives and the more classical of classical liberals to make a firm distinction, at once conceptual and practical, between "liberal democracy" and "totalitarian democracy"; between moderate modernity and what Eric Voegelin called "modernity without restraint" in the final pages of his classic 1952 book The New Science of Politics. With much truth, the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Nazis were placed on one side, godless, murderous, and contemptuous of moral and political constraints as they were; and on the other side, we had the noble principles of the American Founding and what Alexis de Tocqueville called "liberty under God and the laws."
In this understanding of things, Anglo-American democracy, the remarkably sober and decent politics of "the English-speaking peoples" as Winston Churchill famously called them, represented that non-ideological current of modernity that remained faithful, however imperfectly, to constitutionalism, common sense, moral decency and the living embers of classical and Christian wisdom. If rights had priority, duties were not forgotten. The American Revolution inaugurated no splenetic "Year Zero" as the French Revolution did, no frenzied war against the Christian religion or the broader Western civilizational inheritance, no misplaced effort to fundamentally remake human nature. The English-speaking peoples embodied that rarest of things, modernity with restraint, natural rights tethered to natural law, invigorating principle to sound prudence, material progress to a proper sense of limits and a well-grounded suspicion of utopian delusions. As Leo Strauss so suggestively said in his 1941 talk on "German Nihilism" at the New School For Social Research, the English, more than any people in continental Europe, had the great good sense to interpret their version of moderate modern liberty in continuity with older traditions of constitutionalism and civilized restraint. They refused, he said, to "throw the baby out with the bath." And Americans largely followed but with rather less overt "classicism."
For the longest time, one could thus confidently state that the Anglo-American sphere was immune to full-scale ideological politics and to the kind of moral subversion and facile nihilism preferred by continental intellectuals, great and small. . .
No Year Zero, no 10 day week . . .
What do you think?
*
Thoughtful links from David Foster, one including this meme from a union representing teachers who "educate" 600,000 students. Happy May Day:
*
I am fascinated by the changes in who is thought to represent "liberty" or "freedom" in the eyes of the people. Here's an entertaining debate position (with Nancy Pelosi present) that populism is not a threat to democracy.
* * * * *
Music
Used to play a two-piano arrangement of this one (no orchestra). We slowed it way down for fun. The Tortoise
*
From last week's comments: Sharon (willow's apprentice) to Sonny D on B.B. King: great minds think alike because that was the version I posted. There is a great set he did with Eric Clapton - Riding with the King.
* * * * *
Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.
Before we enter the Prayer Revival, just a few Housekeeping Matters to take care of. (Rulz for those of you in Beloit)
1) This is an open thread, so feel free to lurk, opine and/or bloviate away the morning.
2) Be nice to one another. Towel snaps I've heard don't leave marks.
3) Running with sharp objects is allowed outside.
4) Have a nice weekend.
*****
Thank you to Annie for compiling the Prayer List each and every week. It isn't an easy task. The Horde appreciates your work.
AoSHQ Weekly Prayer List
Please submit any prayer requests to me, “Annie’s Stew” at apaslo atsign hotmail dot com. Prayer requests are generally removed after four weeks unless we receive an update.
Prayer Requests:
3/2 Reforger asked for prayers for his Coworker “D”, a widowed mom of 4 who is having a rough time with daughter #1. D’s daughter had to be incarcerated. She went nuts, trashed her room, broke things, and even kicked a cop. She could use a lot of prayers.
4/20 Update – Coworker D’s daughter is going to go live with her dad. Mom is at wit’s end. They hope a change in scenery will provoke some positive changes, since nothing else is working.
2/29 – DaveT asks for prayers. We had prayed in the past for him, as he was trying to save his cats and his home from repossession (due to a relative who burdened the family home with debt). DaveT is over 65 and is not able to work much. The cats are elderly and one is blind, and the only family he has. Things had turned around and it looked like he was going to be fine last summer, but now a new judge is on the case and seems to want to kick DaveT and the cats out of the house. Please pray. If anyone wants to contribute, Annie’s Stew has the details of his GiveSendGo.
4/27 Update – DaveT was able to get life-saving care for his cat, Dennis, and now Dennis is recovering well. It was a miracle, both for the results and the reasonable cost. The sleazy “bank” is still working to evict DaveT.
3/9 – Hadrian the Seventh asked for prayers for Her Majesty, who is having knee replacement surgery. He’d like prayers for a successful operation, but also an uneventful recovery. Her previous surgery in 2019 (on the other knee) was marked by great pain and the effect of the medication was terrible.
5/4 Update – Her Majesty has been suffering from nausea and no appetite for several days. While her knee is getting better, there is some fluid weeping from the incision area. Also, she has had to go in and get further work done on her expensively-repaired eyes to remove scar tissue that’s formed around the new lenses.
5/8 Update – Her Majesty had to go to the hospital again. Her incision from her knee replacement became infected. They had to open it up again, clean it out, and sew it back up again. Her medical vicissitudes with her knee and eye have made her depressed. She is home again now, and looks a good deal better than when she went in.
3/23 – Fenelon Spoke needs prayers for Jessie, their “retired” organist. Jessie had fallen. Nothing was broken, but it is a setback for her and she is in pain.
4/20 Update – Jessie is in less pain now.
3/28 – Reforger asked for prayers for his wife, who is applying for a promotion. The new job would triple her salary.
4/20 Update – Mrs. Reforger got the job.
4/1 – News from Washington Nearsider: His savings have expired and May's bills cannot yet be paid. Another custody hearing - to reevaluate the March 13 determination to give his ex full custody - has been scheduled for May 13th, so that's a date on the calendar towards which he has to work.
He has added one (1) client to his custom model aircraft list, and hopes to add several more, even though he can only work on one at a time. Having a known stream of income is better than not. You can contact Nearsider at washingtonnearsider at gee mail to learn about shipping and timelines or to discuss any details. Interested Morons can look at some small segment of his previous work by heading to this link: https://tinyurl.com/yzmucshu
On the job front, Nearsider had a promising interview, only to be told at the end that though his writing samples, resume, attitude, background, and presentation were all exceptional, his removal from federal service prevented any path forward. Nearsider explained the details leading up to his removal, and while the panel expressed their sympathies for his situation and their admiration at his courage, their position was unchanged. He suspects this employer was simply the first to be so direct, and that he's missed out on several other opportunities for the same reason.
Several contractors have contacted him in response to applications he's submitted and he's hoping at least one of them will be willing to focus on the writing, resume, attitude, background, and presentation vice the end of his federal career. As usual, more follows.
Since several people encouraged it, he has set up a GiveSendGo account. Please contact Annie for the details, if you wish to contribute.
4/24 Update – After receiving an overwhelming outpouring of support from the Horde, Washington Nearsider was able to pay the mortgage for May and June, and is less panicked about losing his house. He also received a promotion at Home Depot, so he is managing a department, which will also increase his pay at bit. He loves you all and is so grateful.
4/13 – NaughtyPine asked for prayers. There was a “psychic” who went on a murder-suicide rampage. A 9-year-old girl survived the attack, but her baby sister died in her arms. The surviving little girl needs prayers.
4/13 – Ace-Endorsed Author A.H. Lloyd gave an update. His former son-in-law has died. It is something of a relief. He was an abusive, manipulative, drug-using alcoholic whose hobby was breaking into cars. He was well-known to law enforcement and the justice system. He had a remarkable capacity for wiping out wealth, either through outright theft or negligence. A.H. Lloyd’s daughter tried to leave him multiple times, but he was able to woo her back again and again. The last straw was when he used their tax refund for an Only Fans girl. The deceased is survived by his children, who he should have supported, but have been in A.H. Lloyd’s care for more than a year. Pray for the deceased if you like, but please pray for the children and their mother.
4/13 – Cybersmythe sent an update on his job search. He has received a formal offer of employment, for a job he thinks he wants. He appreciates all the kind thoughts and prayers.
4/13 – Nurse Ratched asked for prayers for her Marine, J, and his wife, M, who are having their wedding celebration on 4/13. They are sweet kids, respectful and kind to each other and would benefit greatly from the power of Horde prayers.
4/16 – Notsothoreau asked for prayers for a co-worker’s mentor and long time friend, DM, who has been diagnosed with throat cancer. Prayers for DM and also for his wife, that they would be strengthened and, God willing, that DM would be healed.
4/18 – Misanthropic Humanitarian asked for prayers, as he will be having his right knee replacement surgery on 5/6/24.
5/6 Update – Misanthropic Humanitarian sends his thanks for all the prayers and good wishes. He is home now.
4/20 – AnchorPoint wanted to share an answered prayer, as well as a request. The answered prayer is: AnchorPoint’s dad passed away about 2 years ago. The estate was not going to be a windfall, but they hoped it would be enough to pay off their mortgage. After all the work was done and all the bills were paid, the final check was $72.38 off from the total mortgage payoff amount! The prayer request is: AnchorPoint’s relationship with one sister is bad. The sister has had a lot of trauma in her life and significant mental health issues and physical issues. AnchorPoint asks for prayers that their relationship would be restored.
4/20 – FenelonSpoke asked for prayers for her son. God willing, her son will graduate in May with a degree in horticulture. He has a paid internship with a multinational agricultural company in the PA Dutch area starting right after graduation. He needs to find a place to live.
4/20 – Defenestratus humbly requests prayers for a friend named Jourdan, a wonderful young woman with a 2-year-old daughter. Jourdan had gotten the good news that her breast cancer tumors had disappeared after chemo. But now she caught a nasty bug, and Jourdan has spent a week in the hospital getting blood transfusions.
4/20 - Miley, okravangelist asked for prayers for her brother. They think he is on the verge of a breakdown, stressing out over prepping. He flies off the handle and is freaking everyone else out. Miley could use prayers, too, since worrying about her brother is making her ill.
4/25 Update – Her brother seems to have calmed down lately, but prayers are still welcome!
4/27 – rhennigantx posted an update on his friend, Tim, who we have been praying for. Tim is not doing well. He is back on the vent and unresponsive. Rhennigantx doesn’t think Tim will make it.
4/27 – Someone Else requested prayers, as she is going through difficult family issues with an elderly aunt as well as dealing with some professional problems at this time.
4/27 – JW asked for prayers for Libby, who has a glioblastoma tumor that affects her word choices, so communication is very difficult. Libby has ahd surgery, radiation, and chemo, but is worse in the 4 weeks since treatment ended.
5/2 – A Dude in MI requested prayers for dude Jr who is having a rough situation at school. Please pray for a quick resolution and no lasting effects.
5/4 – Sock Monkey requested prayers for a SIL who is interviewing with the Republican county leaders, for the interim position of County Attorney. He’s not necessarily a Trump supporter, but he is definitely qualified for the job and has the values that mesh.
5/4 – Paul requested prayers for the families of the toddlers bombed to death in Gaza.
5/8 – Fenelon Spoke asked for prayers for the young people graduating from college this weekend and beyond – that the graduation ceremonies might be peaceful, and that the young people going on to internships and jobs and looking for jobs might have a future with hope. Also for peace on college and university campuses.
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.
That's just one rating lower than the Carrington Event which was so energetic it knocked out telegraph lines across Europe and North America - except for some that heeded the warning and disconnected power in advance, which were able to keep operating even without any electricity.
The company had everything replicated to two geographically separated datacenters, and was safe from everything up to and including a direct meteorite impact... So Google just deleted both copies.
Not being complete idiots, they also had a full backup outside of Google and were able to restore from that.
Not in Australia, but - no, wait, there it is. Damn, that is a good price.
Vtuber Music Video of the Day
Today it's Ayanda Risu and Aragami Oga's song Harapan PanPanPan, which is a Japanese / Bahasa pun.
Disclaimer: Risu is a squirrel, and her parents are Okayu and Korone, who are a cat and a dog respectively. That's just how the Hololive family tree works. Bijou and Kobo are each other's mothers.
Yeah, ladies, what we were all thinking is "Rich, bored, unfulfilled, histrionic sexually frigid white leftist women really have to get more in touch with their rage, because they're totally suppressing their rage right now and that's not healthy."
Are you fucking kidding me? All of you hysterical leftist bitches do is rage and seethe and cry and shriek.
Toxic masculinity is forever descending upon right-wing men but landing on left-wing women.
Heather MacDonald writes about the Hysterics For Hamas. The leftwing women that are always finding the next cause to embrace fanatically and shriek in the streets about.
The female voices rose high-pitched and shrill above the crowd:
"Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state."
"We don't want no Zionists here, say it loud, say it clear."
"Resistance is justified when people are occupied."
The voices that answered them were also overwhelmingly female, emanating from hundreds of students chanting and marching around tents pitched in front of Columbia University's neoclassical Butler Library, part of an effort in late April to prevent the university from uprooting the encampment.
The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click's immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female, as seen in this recent gem from the Princeton demonstrations.
Why the apparent gender gap? One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: "stand against genocide") in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female. (Not surprisingly, males have spearheaded recent efforts to guard the American flag against desecration.) In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.
Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatizing, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. "The university would rather see us dead than divest," said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA's solidarity encampment on X. The university police and the Los Angeles Police Department "would rather watch us be killed than protect us." (The academic Left, including these anti-Zionists, opposes police presence on campus; UCLA chancellor Gene Block apologized in June 2020 after the LAPD lawfully mustered on university property during the George Floyd race riots.) Command of language is not a strong point of these student emissaries. "There needs to be an addressment (sic) of U.S. imperialism and its ties to the [University of California] system," said another UCLA encampment spokeswoman.
It was not too long ago when administrators started bringing in therapy dogs to campus libraries and dining halls to help a female-heavy student body cope with psychic distress, especially after the election of Donald Trump. "Trigger warnings" were implemented to protect female students from Ovid's Metamorphoses and other great works of literature. Campus discourse and its media echo chamber rang with accounts of the mental-health crisis on campus, whose alleged sufferers were overwhelmingly female.
This post has been a long time developing. Back during the #MeToo pogroms, and the pink pussy hats, and the screeching on Capitol Hill, and the Stalin-esque career-killing accusations and the disappeared men, I wanted badly to write something titled "Why Are Women so Angry?"--for watching #MeToo had been like watching the spread of a contagion, a mind virus, to use Elon Musk's term, and a contagion that was spliting society further into two camps.
...
I've since learned that "bat shit crazy women" is a thing. There are memes, YouTube confessions and tee shirts (modeled by women) flaunting the status.
I guess his idea, in the context of a humorous talk, hit a nerve because it is my impression that women are far outpacing men in the really overtly crazy department. That doesn't mean men aren't having all sorts of breakdowns too, but these days they do it quietly with the slow suicide of drug addiction and withdrawal into NEET.
There is certainly a growing political divide between men and women. Women are more likely to be left-wing and in so far as left wing is crazy....
The People Setting America on Fire
An investigation into the witches' brew of billionaires, Islamists, and leftists behind the campus protests
by
Park MacDougald
Well that name is as goy as they come so this guy is totally a good target for George Soros's baseless smearing operations.
Over the past several weeks, Americans have witnessed what has seemed like a mass outpouring of support for terror on elite college campuses. At Columbia, Yale, Princeton, NYU, UCLA, Northwestern, Texas, and elsewhere, masked mobs have occupied schools with tent encampments, established self-proclaimed "autonomous zones," clashed with police, harassed and threatened visibly Jewish students, and issued demands for their universities to divest from Israeli "genocide." Politically, moreover, the protests have displayed an incoherent mix of campus progressivism, hardcore Islamism and Arab nationalism, and revolutionary anarchism and communism, including open praise for North Korea. The only unifying thread would appear to be opposition to Israel and its alleged imperial patron, the United States.
Have America's college students suddenly converted en masse to anarcho-communist-jihadism? Not quite. Many are far left and anti-Israel. Some are foreigners, or the children of foreigners, who have imported the conspiracies and hatreds of their homelands. More, admitted under relaxed pandemic-era admissions standards and proudly ignorant of both American and world history, are taking the "decolonial" half-knowledge pushed by their elders to its logical conclusion.
But students are not the only, and perhaps not even the most important, faction active in the campus protests. As in the "mostly peaceful" Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, "outside agitators"--professional radicals and organizers, black bloc antifa thugs, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, and Palestinian and Islamist radicals--have played a central role in organizing and escalating the campus protests, just as they have organized and escalated the wider anti-Israel protest campaign that began almost immediately after Oct. 7. This largely decentralized network of agitators is, in turn, politically and financially supported by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups ultimately backed by big-money donors aligned with the Democratic Party.
...
Scratch a pro-Palestinian radical organization, and you are likely to find Tides' involvement somewhere.
...
The "movement," [w]hile it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. Take the epicenter of the nationwide protest movement, Columbia University. According to reporting in the New York Post, the Columbia encampment was principally organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Let's take each in turn.
JVP is, in essence, the "Jewish"-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by the usual big-money progressive donors--including some, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling Obama's Iran Deal to the public.
Oh, you mean the Iran Echo Chamber that Ben Rhodes simultaneously bragged about creating and mocked for their pliability.
JVP and its affiliated political action arm, JVP Action, have received at least $650,000 from various branches of George Soros' philanthropic empire since 2017, $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation (founded by early Amazon employee Sheldon Kaphan), $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and smaller amounts from progressive donors such as the Quitiplas Foundation, according to reporting from the New York Post and NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel research institute. JVP has also received nearly $1.5 million from various donor-advised funds--which allow wealthy clients to give anonymously through their financial institutions--run through the charitable giving arms of Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, and TIAA, according to NGO Monitor's review of those institutions' tax documents.
SJP, by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government's prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no "formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP's campus brand," according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. ...
Today, however, National SJP is legally a "fiscal sponsorship" of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit "sponsors" a smaller group, essentially lending it the sponsor's tax-exempt status and providing back-office support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsorship's operations. For legal and tax purposes, the sponsor and the sponsorship are the same entity, meaning that the sponsorship is relieved of the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file a Form 990 with the IRS. This makes fiscal sponsorships a "convenient way to mask links between donors and controversial causes," according to the Capital Research Center. Donors, in other words, can effectively use nonprofits such as WESPAC to obscure their direct connections to controversial causes.
Of course they received $97,000 from the Tides Foundation.
WESPAC, however, is not merely the fiscal sponsor of the Hamas-linked SJP but also the fiscal sponsor of the third group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), formerly known as New York City SJP....
WOL-led protests tend to have a few... hallmarks. These include eliminationist rhetoric directed at the Jewish state--such as Arabic chants of "strike, strike, Tel Aviv"; the prominent display of Hezbollah flags and other insignia of explicitly Islamist resistance; the presence of masked Arab street muscle; and the antisemitic intimidation of counterprotesters by said masked Arab street muscle.
WOL's role appears to be that of shock troops, akin to the role played by black block militants on the anarchist side of the ledger. WOL is, however, connected to more seemingly "mainstream" elements of the anti-Israel movement. Abdullah Akl, a prominent WOL leader--indeed, the man leading the "strike Tel Aviv" chants in the video linked above--is also listed as a "field organizer" on the website of MPower Change, the "advocacy project" led by Linda Sarsour. MPower Change, in turn, is a fiscal sponsorship of NEO Philanthropy, another large progressive clearinghouse. NEO Philanthropy and its 501(c)(4) "sister," NEO Philanthropy Action Fund, have received more than $37 million from Soros' Open Society Foundations since 2021 alone, as well as substantial funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the Tides Foundation.
More than any of the dark-money giants on the left, Tides has become tightly integrated with the ascendant Obama faction of the Democratic Party.
I don't know why we put up with this.
Oh, right, because Mitch McConnell doesn't want any limits on who he can grub money from.
Elon Musk reveals his secret to getting a good night's sleep: As he's drifting off to dreamland, he listens to podcasts about his greatest fear.
Elon Musk reveals bizarre way he gets to sleep at night
Elon Musk shared that he likes to listen to podcasts about his greatest fears
He spoke at the Milken Global Conference in Los Angeles on Monday
Elon Musk has shared the bizarre way he gets to sleep every night.
The Tesla boss revealed that he enjoys listening to podcasts about one of his greatest fears to help him nod off.
Musk, 52, told the Milken Global Conference in Los Angeles that he likes to listen to series, 'about the fall of civilizations' to get to sleep.
However, he also revealed that the topic is one of his biggest anxieties.
'Anything that's a civilizational risk,' Musk said when asked what his greatest concerns are, the Independent reports.
He has previously spoken about his worries about plummeting birthrates.
Other potential threats keeping him up at night include, 'anything that undermines the foundations of democracy in America or elsewhere' or 'anything that's leading us away from a merit-based system', he told the conference on Monday.
The entrepreneur also stated a 'single world government' could lead to societal collapse.
Eccentricities aside, his thinking is very grounded and commonsensical.
Musk stated that he believes humans will need to merge with machines to avoid becoming obsolete.
And there you go.
I knew a woman who would fall asleep every night watching The Murder Channel, I mean, Investigation Discovery. I wonder what kind of dreams she had with the TV talking about hatchet murders and body disassembly.
Due to Bidenomics and Biden's hyperinflation, transsexual cabaret Planet Fitness will be raising its prices.
Right there, they're admitting they're not even capable of feeding themselves.
If Princeton 'wants to let us starve, then they're welcome to do that'
Seventeen Princeton students began a hunger strike last Friday until the university agreed to meet with them to discuss divestment from Israel and the dropping of charges against students who had occupied a campus building.
According to The Daily Princetonian, student Sameer Riaz said he believed he and his comrades "were forced into" their hunger strike by school officials.
Areeq Hasan, another hunger striker, said all those participating are "very well-supported" -- unlike "political prisoners who are in Palestine."
David Chmielewski said the strikers' demands were "not that intense" as activists only wanted a meeting (along with the dismissal of criminal/disciplinary charges against the aforementioned occupiers).
He added if Princeton "want[s] to let us starve, then they're welcome to do that."
A three-day "hunger strike" is just a 72 hour fast. It's easy. This isn't a protest, it's a slim-down weekend.
Do these idiots have any idea how long it takes to actually starve to death? No, no they don't.
An extremely obese man fasted for 382 days (under close medical supervision and taking vitamins and minerals).
Angus was reportedly sick of being obese, and checked into the University Department of Medicine at the Royal Infirmary of Dundee weighing 207kg (32.5 stone). [That's 456 pounds in American.] He told hospital staff he was ready to cut out food together, so doctors happily agreed to monitor his progress.
Angus's doctors didn't really expect the fast to last long. But they thought a short fast would help him to lose some weight. To compensate for his lack of nutrients, he was prescribed multivitamins to take regularly, including potassium and sodium, as well as yeast.
As days turned to weeks, Angus's persistence increased. The Scot wanted to reach his reported "ideal weight" of 180 pounds (12.8 stone), so he kept going, much to his doctors' surprise.
These little fucking idiot weaklings really don't know anything, do they?
And some of these stupid little porkchops look like they could use a couple of weeks of fasting:
Princeton student pretends to CRY as she blames the university for her hunger strike:
This is absolutely unfair. My peers are I are starving. We are physically exhausted. Im literally shaking right now as you can see. We are both cold and hot at the same time. pic.twitter.com/YOHGNIpyZW
I got off the GAINZZZ TRAINZZZ because spring came. I have developed bad allergies in my almost-29 old age. I know when winter is over, because I start sneezing like crazy. It's the tree pollen.
I've been in MAINTAINZZZ mode, but have no GAINZZZ. And I was doing so well with lifting and walking, too.
Basic idea: The Regime wants to empower its street thugs to bully and harass citizens.
When citizens push back against the thugs, suddenly the Regime fears "disorder" -- disorder meaning, now our street militias might get roughed up, we'd better send in the cops to restore order. We can't have citizens roughing up our brigands!!!
Pushing back, he writes, is the only way to bring The Regime's attention to the disorder they are allowing/encouraging.
Pushback Works
Campus political violence and the moral and practical aspects of resistance.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds
May 08, 2024
Pushback works.
That's the lesson of the pro-Hamas protests on college campuses, and the reaction to them. It's a lesson that many of us need to take to heart.
With support from lefty foundations and NGOs, and training from professional leftists activists, pro-Hamas encampments were established at campuses all across America. Libraries were the victim of rampages, Jewish students literally wound up hiding in attics, were assaulted, and were taunted and greeted with chants of "go back to Poland." "Checkpoints" manned by Hamas sympathizers barred Jewish students, or anyone who wouldn't renounce "Zionism," from some parts of campus. American flags were torn down and replaced with Palestinian flags. It looked as if the protesters had the momentum, as university administrations responded supinely. And then, something happened.
People fought back. Mostly fraternity guys, who in this season have become the defenders of Western civilization.
For decades, of course, leftist mobs on campus have run wild without much pushback. Their threats and destruction have been excused as just a "passion for justice" or some such twaddle. While university administrators demand exquisite sensitivity to the feelings of favored groups, everyone else is told to just put up with lefty excesses.
But a funny thing happened: When people started pushing back, suddenly the administrators got some backbone.
To be fair, the pushback hasn't just been from frat guys. There had been pressure from donors sufficient to get some university presidents fired, but when it came to getting the encampments moved off campus, it was the on-campus resistance that did it.
It wasn't just frat guys. UCLA told its police not to do anything to the pro-Hamas encampment even after a pro-Israel Jewish girl was beaten unconscious. It was attacked by pro-Israel students and neighbors, and torn down, while the police didn't arrive to the encampment -- which reportedly was emblazoned with "All Cops Are Bastards" and the like -- for two hours. But afterwards, UCLA removed the encampment.
Since then, Columbia, the University of Chicago, MIT, and Harvard have all done the same. [CORRRECTION: There were reports that Harvard was shutting its encampment down, but it's still there.]
The fact is, if nobody resists, most people will go with the flow even if they don't like it. And administrators won't lift a finger to protect unpopular minorities from one-sided violence. But as soon as the violence becomes two-sided, they fear expanding disorder and act to bring things under control. When you're being assaulted and terrorized, that's your problem. When you fight back, you make it everybody's problem, and the authorities are under pressure to act.
...
In addition, they note the moral aspect of resistance: Resistance breeds resistance, courage promotes courage, and the aggressors tend to rethink things when it looks as if they might be the victims, not just the perpetrators, of violence...
Reynolds links a picture of the UNC fraternity brothers defending the flag.
They take advantage of the fact that they know police are professionals who don't want them hurt if at all possible, completely contrary to the fiction they claim to believe and propagate about them. They'll force violence to tell a story they know is a complete lie. https://t.co/FbmFOuYLqV
— James Lindsay, full varsity (@ConceptualJames) May 8, 2024
Completely unrelated, like so unrelated I don't even know why I'm linking it: A man pushes back against pro-terrorist protesters.
I denounce! Maximum denounceage!
Violence is only justified when employed by the Democrat Party's street paramilitaries!!!
"We'd love to go to Palestine!"
Let me pay your airfare.
We need more men like this with balls of steel confronting these little poosy maggots. pic.twitter.com/O5Ze08dFxw
"Just Stop Oil" Fanatics Attempt to Destroy Priceless Copy of the Magna Carta
—Disinformation Expert Ace
Before getting to that, the angry chubby-cheeked spasmoid and Islamomarxist Greta Thunberg is demanding that the Israeli contestant in the Eurovision song contest be kicked out, because she's a Jew.
London
@OliLondonTV
Greta Thunberg poses with a sign calling Eurovision the 'Genocide Song Contest.'
The climate activist has joined protesters in Malmo, Sweden demanding a 20 year old Israeli singer be thrown out of the competition- simply because of her nationality.
Thunberg took to X saying:
"We will not accept that a country currently committing genocide is allowed a platform to artwash themselves. The world cannot remain silent in a genocide. Everyone who can must use their voice and speak up against Israel's crimes and occupation."
Greta Thunberg poses with a sign calling Eurovision the Genocide Song Contest.
The climate activist has joined protesters in Malmo, Sweden demanding a 20 year old Israeli singer be thrown out of the competition- simply because of her nationality.
"Artwash." That's like "whitewash," but using art to "wash" yourself of your sins.
Apparently the Israeli singer is good -- early voting from Italy got leaked, and Israel racked up the highest vote total in the second round of the competition, garnering 39.31% of the vote. Second place went to the Netherlands, with 7.32%.
Or maybe she's not that good, maybe Italy is voting for her to support Israel?
Either way, you can see why the chubby retard antisemite Greta Thunberg is so desperate to disqualify her.
Trash Italiano
@trash_italiano
Con il 39,31%, Israele e stato il Paese piu votato dall'Italia durante la seconda semifinale dell'Eurovision Song Contest. Al secondo posto i Paesi Bassi con il 7,32%.
I know people say that the worst thing for a younger woman is an eating disorder, but seriously, wouldn't Greta Thunberg benefit from an eating disorder? Shouldn't she cultivate an eating disorder? Isn't it right for us to encourage her to cultivate an eating disorder?
And it's not like she's mentally healthy as it is. What would be one more disorder?
She needs to take some of the blubber out of those fat baby cheeks and jowls.
Now: About "Just Stop Oil's" attempt to destroy the foundational charter of liberties in the UK, which in turn became the backbone of the notion of "privileges and immunities" guaranteed to US citizens:
Shocking moment elderly climate change activists use a HAMMER and chisel to smash glass protecting the priceless Magna Carta- the royal charter of rights signed by King John in 1215.
The two women in their 80s tried to destroy the protective glass at the British Library. pic.twitter.com/5dG5FuwTgI
Just Stop Oil's disruptive protests, blamed for petrol shortages across parts of England, have been funded by US philanthropists who say they want to incite a global "spring uprising" over climate change.
The environmental activists, whose oil terminal blockades have enraged ministers and rightwing commentators, have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Los Angeles-based Climate Emergency Fund (CEF).
"We're their lead institutional funder," CEF's executive director, Margaret Klein Salamon, said. "I think actually their exclusive institutional funder at this point."
On Friday, eight Just Stop Oil activists were still being held after 43 were arrested for allegedly blockading and smashing petrol pumps at service stations on London's M25 orbital motorway. About 400 people have been arrested more than 1,000 times taking part in the campaign since it began less than a month ago, according to organisers' own tally.
"A lot of groups we fund use civil disobedience and high stakes civil disobedience," Salamon said. "But Just Stop Oil to me is the next stage, the next evolution of climate campaigning, in that they really seem to me to be operating as a nonviolent army with that level of discipline, planning, coordination.
"I'm so impressed with what they've been able to do with extremely slim resources and, you know, not that many activists."
Yes, all that crime, all that destruction and sabotage, you're paying for.
...
CEF operated like venture capital, according to Salamon, seeking out small groups who could benefit hugely from $50,000 to $100,000 donations that would barely make a difference to the larger environmental charities.
...
Salamon insisted CEF does not fund any illegal activity. "What we do fund is recruitment, training, organising staff, core staff, etc ... and we fund legal protest and disruption," she said.
You do directly fund crime, and it's time to make the funders of riots, vandalism, arson, etc., pay the costs of the destruction -- plus punitive damages.
"The fact that some of these groups get into harder edged civil disobedience, that's their choice. And we think that from a historic and social science perspective, it's very well supported, and we commend their bravery in doing so."
But we're totally not funding crime!
All the groups funded by the CEF must be committed to non-violence. "And we don't fund groups, presently, that allow their membership to take action while concealing their identities," Salamon said.
Donations to CEF come mainly from wealthy individuals and family foundations. The fund was started with a $500,000 donation from Aileen Getty, the granddaughter of Jean Paul Getty whose petrochemical empire made him the world's richest man, a source of some controversy in the climate activist world.
Adam McKay, the producer and screenwriter behind the climate change satire Don't Look Up, had just donated $250,000, "particularly inspired by Just Stop Oil, Scientist Rebellion and other civil resistance", Salamon said.
Concerns have been raised about the funding of direct action groups by wealthy individuals.
I don't see George Soros mentioned there. Maybe they're suppressing that because it would be "antisemitic" to name him as a funder.
Having borne the vilest of slurs, insults, accusations and betrayals out of Camp Montecito with dignified silence -- for years now -- it seems they have served up, with quiet elegance, the dish best served cold.
The chill is felt Stateside, trust.
The prodigal Prince Harry, meant to take his victory lap in London as his Invictus Games reach the ten-year mark, entered St. Paul's alone while his father and brother held events mere miles away.
The royals, it was announced, would not be seeing Harry this trip. Nor would he be welcome to stay in any of the many palaces, castles or cottages in the King's portfolio.
No: King Charles, currently battling cancer, was too 'busy' to carve out even a few moments for his son, instead hosting a garden party at Buckingham Palace.
Of the 30,000 guests invited to that event, Harry did not make the list.
As for William: He, of course, also didn't see Harry this week, instead hosting an investiture in Windsor the morning of Harry's Invictus celebration.
In further news of the woke: Bud Light accepts the reality that they will never recapture the customers they pissed away for the sake of an aging sorority bitch's need to be "on trend."
They're still more afraid of the Alphabet Mafia than us.
The boycott is on until that changes.
Belgian drinks company Anheuser-Busch Inbev meets quarterly revenue forecasts but fails to fully recover from last year's backlash.
Brewer AB InBev announced on Wednesday that its revenue grew by 2.6% in the first three months of the year, a result which fell in line with analysts' expectations.
In terms of volume, AB InBev sold slightly more beer than anticipated, noting a decline of 0.6%.
Revenue figures for the firm, which makes Stella Artois, Bud Light, and Corona beer, were boosted by sales of products such as spirits-based drinks in cans.
The results are nonetheless historically low due to the lasting effects of a customer boycott.
Last year, AB InBev sparked controversy when deciding to work with the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
...
Earlier this week, AB InBev's Europe CEO Jason Warner told UK media outlet the Telegraph newspaper that the company will "stay in our lane" following the reaction to the campaign, which had sought to appeal to consumers by promoting diversity.
Another article had a company executive admitting it could take "ten years" to regain the customers it lost in "just one [year]."
Over 71 percent of American adults want Disney to pivot back toward "family-friendly entertainment" and away from the LGBTQIA agenda.
A Rasmussen poll also found that 53 percent of adults "strongly agreed" with the following statement: "Disney should return to wholesome programming and allow parents to decide when their children are taught about sexuality?"
In 2022, Disney executive Karen Burke touted that "the company has 'many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories" and that Disney received positive feedback from LGBTQ activists.
However, another 54 percent of participants say "LGBTQIA programming" is not "appropriate for children under 12."
Creepy LGBTQ activists do not control the box office. Ordinary Americans do. And Rasmussen's polling is consistent with how moviegoers at large view Disney films.
...
An Axios Harris study found that Americans now consider Disney the fifth most polarizing brand in the country.
"Not the World People Are Living In:" James Carville Rejects Biden's Otherwordly Take on the Economy
—Disinformation Expert Ace
The economy is withering and shriveling as fast as Joe Biden's dying brain.
Carville is reacting to this disaster-pants Biden interview, in which he insisted the economy had never been better. He explained away voters saying the economy is poor by just saying that "the polls are wrong," and whined that many people hang up the phone before a pollster gets one to do a survey.
Lefties mocked righties for talking about "skewed polls." But now here's the "president" claiming that all polls, all of them, are skewed against him.
Biden just sat there with a slack jaw as Erin Burnett read the actual economic figures to him. As some observed: It's like Biden has been kept in a plastic bubble and this is the first time someone's telling him the real economic data.
Democratic strategist James Carville criticized President Joe Biden on Thursday over claims that the economy is thriving under his administration.
Job growth may stall in the second half of 2024 as low gross domestic product (GDP) and soaring inflation persist, according to a Monday report by research group The Conference Board. Biden has touted the U.S. economy as booming, but Carville told NewsNation host Chris Cuomo that this is a misguided strategy and he should stop attempting to persuade Americans who are not experiencing what he is claiming.
"I don't think, if people don't feel like they're in a good economy, you can't convince 'em," Carville told Cuomo. "And I think there's a bunch of Ivy League economist academic types that go in and saying, 'sir, this is the best economy we've had since 1969, you have to go out and promote it.' That's not the world people are living in. And at some point, Chris, you know, baseball, you've got to let the ball come to you. You can't charge the ball. And I agree with the critics that this is not the proper messaging.
They then both spun that AKSHUALLY the basic numbers for growth and employment are good, overlooking the fact that the economy was artificially shut down (at Democrat insistence) and all the "growth" and "job gains" are just the very natural consequence of ending the artificial shut-down of the economy.
Oh, and I'm sure you noticed his bullshit claim that inflation under Trump was at 9%.
In fact, it was at... 1.4%.
Even the dirty, traitorous, propaganda unit ABC "News" has to admit that Biden is just lying:
"I'm so excited to get to share this story that I, growing up going to public school, never learned about my own history through a musical... To learn that women have done hard things in hard times, and we can change the world again."
Yeah, I believe that Hillary Clinton learned how to write music and lyrics at age 70 like I believe Kristi Noem and Barack Obama wrote their own "autobiographies."
You're not going to believe this, but "Suffs" is getting rave reviews from leftwing critics but, equally unbelievably, is struggling to sell tickets to actual people.
No! That's not true! That's impossible!
Oh, and you also won't believe this -- it stars, get this, non-binary actors.
Hillary Clinton's feminist Broadway musical Suffs is struggling at the box office despite receiving a bounty of Tony Award nominations and an outpouring of adulatory coverage from the mainstream news media.
Suffs -- a nearly three-hour musical about the rise of the suffragette movement, featuring a cast comprised entirely of women and gender "non-binary" performers -- played to 81 percent capacity last week, while dipping to 78 percent capacity the week before, according to data from The Broadway League.
Those figures spell potential trouble for a new show that should still be drawing big crowds during Broadway's peak season -- the month before the Tony Awards.
To put the Suffs numbers in perspective, the new Broadway musical Lempicka just posted a closing notice after playing to 83 percent capacity last week.
THE MORNING RANT: Learn to Weld? What if Manufacturing Jobs Come Home but White Collar Jobs Get Offshored?
—Buck Throckmorton
Principled Free Traders* had a great run during the quarter century before Trump’s presidency. “Thought leaders” on both side of the political aisle agreed that exporting as many US manufacturing jobs as possible to developing countries was a desirable thing, as they sneered “learn to code” at the deplorable blue-collar workers who lost their livelihoods to offshoring.
(*Just a reminder regarding my animus toward “Principled Free Traders” - I am not necessarily opposed to genuine, reciprocal free trade, but it angers me when people advocating for unilateral surrender to foreign mercantilism falsely promote themselves as being highly principled “free traders,” especially when the foreign mercantilists are hostile countries that have abominable labor policies and are generally closed to US exports.)
Then Trump and his tariffs came along. So did Covid, and supply chain interruptions, and shipping backlogs, and port breakdowns, etc. The higher cost of US labor started looking a lot better compared to the cost of not receiving products that are stuck in a foreign port.
Meanwhile, the work-from-home era started during the Covid hysteria, and employers are still struggling to get employees back to the office. For better or worse, employers are realizing that if a job can be done at a kitchen table in suburban America, it can also probably be done in Bangalore or Moldova, but for much less. And unlike manufactured products that must be slowly shipped across the globe, the product the laptop class creates is digital, and can be shipped around the world in the blink of an eye.
This Google story broke last week, and although the number of Google employees losing their jobs is not huge, it had a significant impact because it really makes explicit that tech jobs are now being offshored, and that U.S. employers are dismissing white collar workers for the express purpose of replacing them with cheaper employees in places like India and Mexico. Learning to code won’t help the laid off employees. Maybe they need to learn to weld.
At least 50 of the roles were based at Google’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. Google is expected to hire replacement workers for the roles in Mexico and India, CNBC reported, citing a review of internal documents.
In just the first few months of 2024, about 60,000 employees have been laid off by tech companies.
The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024.
As Don Johnson notes, it was foolish for white collar workers to think their jobs couldn’t be offshored too.
But at the same time, while coding can be offshored and spreadsheets can be produced and sent from anywhere, there’s a growing appreciation for the value in locally manufactured products, which don’t have to sail through chokepoints which have a habit recently of getting choked off.
Nearly 15% of global shipping traffic is estimated to pass through the Suez Canal in a given year. The volume of freight traversing the Suez Canal decreased dramatically since December 2023 due to the Houthi militant attacks.
The Panama Canal—which ordinarily carries approximately 40% of all U.S. container traffic—is simultaneously experiencing interruption due to an unprecedented drought. Drought conditions have decreased water levels of the canal to well below normal levels and forced canal authorities to decrease the amount of traffic navigating the canal each day by more than 36%.
How significant is the onshoring trend in manufacturing?
Rob Lanphier and Jim Jones of William Blair & Company wrote a blog post in December noting the onshoring trend. They pointed out several competitive advantages that the US has, including infrastructure that is already in place, and especially cheap abundant energy in the form of natural gas. It included these charts.
This first chart shows the number of mentions of “onshoring” in public filings, with a dramatic uptick starting in 2020, and continuing to shoot upward since then.
This next graph shows the number of companies by industry announcing expansion of production facilities in the US since 2020.
Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) wrote a piece recently about AI replacing white collar workers, and it had much the same thesis, that people who earn money with their hands may have better employment prospects than the laptop class.
Some of them [plumbers and auto mechanics] might even tell out-of-work analysts to “learn to plumb” — but, as we saw a couple years ago, people who told laid-off journalists on Twitter to “learn to code” were accused of “hate speech.” And that’s the difference between what happens when tradesmen are laid off and when members of the gentry class lose their sustenance.
While it’s wonderful that manufacturing jobs are enjoying an onshoring boom, and it’s ironic that some white-collar workers who sneered at blue collar workers losing their jobs are now suffering the same fate, we should want all job types to remain in this country. We need all types of jobs to remain in this country. Self sufficiency and national security depend on it.
An important lesson that was finally learned by (some of) our ruling class during the era of Covid tyranny was that jobs throughout the entire workforce are “essential,” not just those jobs that were deemed essential by economically illiterate government officials. When “non-essential” jobs were locked down, the entire system broke down.
There is no class of jobs that is not essential to this country.
Good morning, kids. I suppose the theme of today's editorial is "If you can't dazzle 'em with facts, razzle 'em with bullshit." Meh, this has been politics since time immemorial. Yet with everything coming out of the putrid pie-holes of those who fancy themselves as our betters, it's just in your face.
Unemployment benefits are creating jobs faster than practically any other program, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday.
Talking to reporters, the House speaker was defending a jobless benefits extension against those who say it gives recipients little incentive to work. By her reasoning, those checks are helping give somebody a job.
"It injects demand into the economy," Pelosi said, arguing that when families have money to spend it keeps the economy churning. "It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name."
If you listen closely enough, you could even hear the faint laughter of John Maynard Keynes coming from the Infernal Reaches. Yet, because of an educational system that has utterly failed except in creating a mass of illiterate dupes glued to their smart-phone screens waiting for the next proclamation either from Beijing, Kalorama or Bir Zeit University, here we are 13 years later and you have this:
A letter from 19 Democrat Senators in late March, including Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), John Fetterman (D-PA), and Tammy Duckworth (D-WI), urged the Democrat incumbent to push for amnesty for illegal immigrants earlier this year, but the party appears to be split over how to handle the crucial election year issue.
“Deporting all such individuals — as former President Donald Trump has threatened to do if reelected — would devastate the American economy and destroy American families,” the Democrats claim before going on to add, “streamlining pathways for undocumented immigrants with no criminal history and deep ties to the United States to obtain parole or a lawful immigration status would provide stability to their families, require them to pay taxes, and to check in with the U.S. government regularly.”
Deporting as many illegals as possible, perhaps the reinstitution of Operation: Wetback on a permanent basis would be a gigantic step in improving our economy, national security and nearly destroyed national unity and culture in immeasurably positive ways. Of course, the reinstitution of sane economic and regulatory policies that take government the hell out of the way of businesses, especially small businesses, from growing and flourishing will be the rising tide that lifts all boats, especially citizens at or near the poverty line in obtaining jobs or going into business for themselves. That also requires a complete reorientation of our "educational" system and culture away from sloth, envy, perversion and entitlement mentalities back towards inculcating and incentivizing personal responsibility, ethics, morality and ambition.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that an Israeli military campaign in Rafah would “actually weaken … Israel’s security.” He also said that the U.S. had presented Israel with “a full range of policy choices” that would achieve the same goal of dismantling Hamas without entering Rafah, but did not explain what those choices were.
Asked whether [Celeriac-in-Chief] Joe Biden’s announcement that the U.S. was withholding weapons from Israel would undermine Israel’s leverage in hostage negotiations, Miller said that “hasn’t been our assessment” of the talks. . .
[Spokes-anus John Kirby's] logic appeared to be that if more "Palestinian" civilians died, Hamas would have less incentive to release Israeli hostages — whether out of anger at civilian casualties, or because of Hamas’s desire to cause more civilian casualties, Kirby did not make clear. The White House has not said what an alternative to attacking Hamas in Rafah would be.
They were no doubt thinking that every Jew in Israel and on planet Earth should stick themselves in an oven and turn on the gas. Except with Biden's ban on gas stoves, the best the Jews could do is slowly broil themselves to death. Aside from that, every other assertion is based on bald-faced lies about the situation on the ground, who is responsible and the fiction of what the outcomes would be based on those falsehoods.
So, if Israel wipes out the last remaining vestiges of a barbaric death cult in their midst that has vowed to kill every Jew in the world, that makes Israel less safe? I guess I'm just too damned stupid to understand the brilliance of this brainwave.
Not that that matters with the likes of Mike Johnson or McYertle's likely replacement Jon Thune. Both of them will do all in their power to sabotage Trump's legislative agenda in reversing course. Ditto the Deep State and all of the bureaucracies that will covertly or even overtly commit rank insubordination to a Trump administration.
So when the old "razzle-dazzle" doesn't work, just lie and then blame us ungrateful, unwashed rubes – the intended receivers of elitists' wisdom – for not swallowing it, then accuse them of being too stupid to understand and appreciate it, and when all else fails, whip out the race and literally Hitler cards.
Death to Hamas. Death to globalism.
And have a good weekend.
ABOVE THE FOLD, BREAKING, NOTEWORTHY
"A finding like that should have led to a national outcry and immediate changes. And indeed, the Department of Education’s report recommended several new policies for screening employees and standardizing policies to make these kinds of incidents easier to report and keep track of. But that never happened. And the federal government has barely shown any interest in the topic in the 20 years since." The Public School System is Covering Up a Massive Sex Abuse Scandal
David Harsanyi: "For the first time in history, a president [legit or otherwise] has turned on a stalwart ally — and American hostages — to save a terrorist organization." Joe Biden is Selling Out Israel to the Anti-Semitic Mob
"On Tuesday, [so-called quote-unquote "president"] Biden declared, 'Never forget.' On Wednesday, he forgot.On purpose. In remembrance of the Holocaust, Biden solemnly proclaimed, “Never again, simply translated, means never forget.' Actually, it means never again will a genocide of the Jews be allowed. But Biden’s interpretation is convenient, since he endangered the Jewish state the very next day by threatening to cut off deliveries to Israel of offensive weapons if it entered Rafah to finish off Hamas.'" Biden’s Israel Arms Embargo Will Go Down as One of the Worst American Betrayals
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that an Israeli military campaign in Rafah would “actually weaken … Israel’s security.” He also said that the U.S. had presented Israel with “a full range of policy choices” that would achieve the same goal of dismantling Hamas without entering Rafah, but did not explain what those choices were. (Wow. Soooper Gee-nee-ussss! - jjs) Biden Junta: Attacking Hamas in Rafah Would Strengthen Them
"Biden’s decision to withhold bombs from Israel is concerning due to its political implications. Biden’s base wants him to defund Israel, while many moderate Democrats support Israel’s ability to defend itself against terrorists. Biden appears stuck between competing coalitions during an election year. He currently trails in the polls to Trump and has a historically low approval rating to win reelection as an incumbent. Democrats accused former President Donald Trump in 2019 of withholding military aid from Ukraine for alleged political reasons." Articles of Impeachment Drawn over Biden’s Withholding of Israeli Aid for Political Reasons
On Thursday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “The Hill,” House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) said that the White House “needs to clean…up” President Joe Biden’s comments on Israel to CNN “and reiterate our support for Israel,” because “To the extent it looks like we are separating from Israel, that just gives Hamas all the more incentive to keep fighting.” He also called on the White House to push the message that Hamas is holding up a ceasefire. Top House Armed Services Dem on Biden Israel Threat: ‘White House Needs to Clean It Up’ or It Emboldens Hamas
While the [junta] determined that these countries engage in Israel boycotts, a condition that triggers American anti-boycott laws, bypassing these restrictions remains "in the U.S. national interest" to maintain regional stability, according to the waiver. But this justification is drawing scrutiny on Capitol Hill as the Biden [junta] threatens key arms shipments to Israel in a bid to force it into abandoning its campaign to eradicate Hamas. (Qatar supports Hamas, Lebanon is home to Hezbollah - jjs) Day Before Biden Junta Announced It Would Withhold Weapons From Israel, It Issued Sanctions Waiver To Allow Arms Sales to Qatar and Lebanon
The pushback comes as many left-wing groups face scrutiny for their roles in illegal protests and potential ties to international terrorist organizations. Earlier this month, Jewish victims of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attacks sued two anti-Israel campus groups for their role "as collaborators and propagandists for Hamas." Left-Wing Groups and Islamic Organizations Lobby Against Anti-Terrorism Bill
Saban raised $4.5 million for the Biden campaign at a fundraiser in February. A close associate of the Clintons, he claimed during the 2016 presidential election that then-candidate Donald Trump was “dangerous” for Israel. (Can't conjure a Nelson Muntz laugh loud enough - jjs) Hollywood Mogul, Democrat Donor Haim Saban Blasts Biden for Withholding Arms from Israel
At George Washington University in Washington D.C. on Tuesday, a radical, reportedly self-proclaimed “outside agitator” named Rafiki Morris of the “Black Alliance for Peace and the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party” (so a black supremacist) spoke in support of the terrorist organization Hamas, while simultaneously calling for the destruction of Israel. Black Supremacist at GWU Calls to Destroy Israel: 'Hamas is Me! Hamas is You! Hamas is Our Children!'
Heather Mac Donald: "Why have young women been so prominent in the recent campus chaos?" Hysterics for Hamas
As Cochva stood in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, next to New York University, one onlooker approached her, saying, “I heard there was a Zionist here,” with a knife brandished at the beauty queen. (Not 5 blocks from where I used to live - jjs) Report: Miss Israel Threatened, Harassed in NYC for Identifying Herself as IDF
"George Orwell once said, 'Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.' With the idiocies seen on college campuses all over the world, this warning is more current than ever." The Importance of History
"A majority of Americans believe Joe Biden has been “encouraging” illegal aliens to enter the United States at scale to “create a permanent majority” for the Democratic Party over time. By the end of the current presidential term, he is projected to have overseen illegal immigration equal to all legal immigration from 1892 to 1954." SAVE Act Aims to Stop Illegals from Voting
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) wasted little time after 163 Democrats voted to save his speakership to announce he would not use Congress’s constitutional power of the purse to stop special counsel Jack Smith’s “lawfare” against Donald Trump. Johnson Vows to Protect Jack Smith Hours After Democrats Save His Speakership
"[Mike] Davis, founder and president of the Article III Project, met with lawmakers from the House Conservative Opportunity Society, which is chaired by Republican South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman. The group does not share how many members it has or when it holds meetings, which are off the record with no staff or media present." One of Trump-World’s Favorite Lawyers Hatched Playbook With House GOP on Ending Biden Lawfare Against Trump
In her own words, Daniels contradicts her recollection of events surrounding her alleged affair with former President Trump. She plays up fictitious threats and carefully assumes the role of someone who faced grave injustice — despite no crime ever being committed against her. The National Pulse has pulled some of the more relevant passages that shed important light on the motivations and dubious credibility of Stormy Daniels. Stormy Daniels: "I’m Significantly More Crazy Now," Admits Being Sexual Aggressor With Trump, Told Story to "Make Some Money"
Daily Caller courts reporter Katelynn Richardson noted that during the defense’s cross-examination of the porn star, who nearly blew the trial for the prosecution on Tuesday, Trump attorney Susan Necheles was “pushing to show Daniels was motivated by money when she entered into her 2016 NDA [non-disclosure agreement].” Defense Paints Picture That Stormy Daniels Tried to Get Rich Off Trump
"Real estate lawyer Adam Leitman Bailey said he had a conversation with Judge Arthur Engoron a few weeks before the judge’s decision was due, NBC New York reported. Democrat Attorney General Letitia James of New York sued Trump in September 2022, alleging he overstated the value of real estate holdings in order to obtain loans." Trump Civil Fraud Judge’s Talks With Attorney Under Investigation By Ethics Commission: REPORT
CIVIL WAR 2.0: J-6 FBI FALSE FLAG "RIOT" & AFTERMATH, LEFTIST PERSECUTIONS, DEMOCRAT PUTSCH, AMERICAN DISSOLUTION
"[So-called quote-unquote "president"] Biden routinely misrepresents Donald Trump as a dictator, but the evidence shows convincingly that it’s Biden who acts in dictatorial fashion." Will the Real Dictator Please Stand Up?—If He’s Able
FIRST AMENDMENT ISSUES, CENSORSHIP, FAKE NEWS, MEDIA, BIG BROTHER TECH
"The media censors Trump because they are afraid that if people who have common sense actually hear what he has to say without his words being parsed, they may actually agree with it." TIME Warns Its Readers That Trump, Not Biden is a "Threat to Our Democracy" (Their "democracy" is not our America - jjs)
“. . . in the United States of America, we have something called the Constitution, and we have the 1st Amendment and the 6th Amendment and the 14th Amendment. If there’s anyone on the planet who should have the Constitutional right to speak out against the judge, the prosecutor, their staffs, the witnesses, their biases, the process, it is a criminal defendant going through the criminal process. You don’t gag criminal defendants in America.” Article III Project's Mike Davis Shreds UK Hack Propagandist Over ‘Rights’ In Bragg Case, ‘Bimbo Porn Star’ Allegations
"It is a desperate move, one unlikely to buy forgiveness from voters savaged by inflation. Until the election is over, however, businesses should expect to continue to be Biden’s antitrust piñata." Biden’s Political Need for an Antitrust Orgy
"None of this was ever about environmentalism or Equity™ or any of the various sweet nothings whispered into liberalized minds to push the agenda through; it’s always been about impoverishing and, ultimately, reducing the population." Zuckerberg's Climate Hypocrisy Knows No Bounds
There is no doubt that American industry produces products far more cleanly, in terms of air pollution, water pollution and carbon emissions, than big competitors in China, India and many other nations. Seems kind of silly to have a study to “prove it,” but government wastes money on far worse causes. Is 'PROVE IT' Just an Act?
Critics of Musk and Tesla contend the electric vehicle line’s “Autopilot” feature is misleading to consumers. They point out that literature and manuals given to vehicle owners state drivers should always keep both hands on the wheel — even when “Autopilot” is engaged. In addition, they contend that videos featuring Musk engaging the driving feature while keeping his hands off the wheel are intended to add to the deception. Biden DOJ Goes After Elon Musk’s Tesla
CRIME & PUNISHMENT, NON-DOSTOYEVSKY
"A coding error at Houston’s police department created a giant case backlog—and prompted the chief’s resignation." Department in Crisis
"The rising problem of squatters illegally occupying people’s homes has become so obvious that even the mainstream media have recently been paying some attention to it." Protecting Property Rights from Squatters
AMERICA AND THE WORLD IMPRISONED: CHINESE CORONAVIRUS FICTIONS AND FACTS
Rosen’s support of Sisolak’s lockdown policies could come back to haunt her as she seeks a second Senate term in what could be one of the closest contests in the November elections. Sisolak lost his reelection bid in 2022 to Republican challenger Joe Lombardo, who campaigned aggressively against Sisolak’s lockdown policies. Jacky Rosen Admits COVID Lockdowns She Pushed Hurt Nevada's Economy
ABORTION
RFK said he would not leave the matter “for the states,” and declared that he thought governments of any kind – local nor national – should not be involved, and that the decision should be left to “the woman. WATCH: RFK Comes Out as For ABORTION UNTIL BIRTH
“In conclusion, multiple surveys and analysis released in April 2024 by Gallup and other pollsters concluded that Biden was indeed, at the time the polls were taken, the least popular U.S. president in 70 years,” they concluded.Compared to his direct predecessor and chief rival in November, Donald Trump, Biden is also polling poorly with the public. The America First leader trounces the incumbent on popular perception of who has the stronger record in office, who is more mentally and physically fit for the presidency, and who would handle a crisis and issues such as inflation better. Here’s Why ‘Fact-Checkers’ Are FREAKING OUT About Biden’s Approval Numbers.
"The race to win a North Carolina Supreme Court seat is also extremely tight, with Republican Jefferson Griffin leading Democrat Allison Riggs by less than 1 point (39.6 to 39.1 percent). More than 21 percent of likely voters are still undecided, however." North Carolina Gubernatorial Race is a Dead Heat, New Polling Shows
FOREIGN AFFAIRS, INTERNATIONAL
[Foreign Minister Yván] Gil made his accusations — directed against the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — after Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on Tuesday that the United States will provide a $578-million assistance package to “partner countries” for Latin American migrants in the region, including the millions of Venezuelan refugees who have fled their home country seeking an escape from socialism. Venezuela Accuses Biden of Weaponizing Migration Against Regime
"The radical leftists in Scotland — and elsewhere — would want nothing more than to deny conservative, Bible-believing Christians a seat at the political table. Good for Swinney for recognizing what Forbes brings to the table. I, for one, am excited to see what her future holds." Scottish Leftists Disparage a Rising Political Star Because of Her Christian Faith
"The Huwaitat people are the primary residents of the area. The report says that there have been multiple arrests, and villages have been torn down to prepare the way for the city of tomorrow. Fox News reached out to the Saudi Arabian embassy in D.C., which has yet to issue a statement. The Neom project and The Line are part of the nation's Vision 2030 Project. It would appear that the future is bright — just not for the Huwaitat people and likely most of us." Will "The Line" Project in Saudi Arabia Clear Out Tribal Populations?
DEFENSE, MILITARY, SECURITY AFFAIRS
"The federal government is woefully ill-equipped to track Chinese-owned real estate in the country, despite the serious threat these Chinese Communist Party-affiliated entities can pose to critical U.S. infrastructure, according to the report. The report calls on federal and state leaders to take action, such as increasing transparency and conducting more critical reviews of land purchases." US is Failing to Counter Threat of Chinese Land Ownership, Report Finds
FEMINAZISM, TRANSGENDER PSYCHOSIS, HOMOSEXUALIZATION, WAR ON MASCULINITY/NORMALCY
"Weinstein will remain in prison due to a previous conviction, but the New York ruling could raise questions about the hundreds of men in power MeToo exposed initially following Weinstein’s arrest in 2018." Does Weinstein's overturned conviction invalidate #MeToo?
CULTURE WARS, NATIONAL SUICIDE
A BBC Springwatch presenter, Gillian Burke, feels that calling wild African animals by their English names is ‘jarring’ and prefers to refer to them by their traditional Swahili monikers, as my colleague Margaret Ashworth observed yesterday. (Hat tip to commenter "Bulgaroctonus" - jjs) BBC is lost for words over elephant
Hillary Clinton‘s feminist Broadway production “Suffs” is struggling at the box office and failing to attract an audience, despite being praised and promoted by the mainstream media. “Suffs” is a musical about the rise of the suffragette movement. Clocking in at nearly three hours, the production features a cast comprised entirely of women and “non-binary” individuals. Hillary Clinton’s Feminist Musical – Suffs – is Bombing on Broadway
"Given that the beer is usually consumed by pro-America, country-lovin’ men, the fake girl’s attempt backfired. Bud Light ended up being canned by millions of drinkers across the country and ended up costing the company more than $1 billion in sales." Bud Light Sales Still Plummeting a Year After the Mulvaney Fiasco
Johnson was a true legend, spending his entire 16-year career with only one team: the 49ers. The NFL Hall of Fame noted highlights of Johnson’s career on and off the field, including that San Francisco retired Johnson’s jersey in 1977, the year following his playing career. Playing in 213 regular-season games throughout his career, Johnson established himself as one the most formidable man-to-man defenders in NFL history. NFL Legend Jimmy Johnson Dead at 86
FINALLY . . .
The DPAA said in a press release that they identified the sailor as Navy Fireman 1st Class Everett C. Titterington who served on the battleship USS Oklahoma on that fateful day on Dec. 7, 1941. . . Titterington is set to be buried in Bloomington, California on Sept. 5, DPAA said. 'DPAA is grateful to the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of the Navy for their partnership in this mission,' the press release said." Burial Set After Pearl Harbor Sailor’s Remains Identified
NOTE: The opinions expressed in the links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue.
ALSO: The Morning Report is cross-posted at CutJibNewsletter.com if you want to continue the conversation all day.
I'm assuming this is a 3840x2560 display - Huawei offers something similar - but the article doesn't say, and neither does the linked press release, or indeed BenQ's website.
Vtuber Music Video of the Day
Today it's Fujikura Uruka's violin rendition of Pippa the Rippa.
Sounds catchy? You want to listen to the original? Well, you can't. It died.
After being covered in dust, sweat, dirt and blood, three officers emerged from the West Texas desert last week and were given their spurs and Stetson cowboy hats by the Army, becoming the first ever "space cowboys."
The three Space Force Guardians traveled to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, to complete an Army Cavalry Spur Ride, a series of arduous combat tests and physical training exercises in which service members often ruck-march in between challenges -- the first members of the military's newest and smallest service to do so.
Space Force Capt. Bradley Evans, an engineer at White Sands Missile Range who took part in the Spur Ride, told Military.com that all of the Guardians who participated completed the challenges, though some Army soldiers didn't make it through.
TIL that members of the Space Force are called Guardians. Also, imagine being one of the soldiers who didn't finish. I bet their friends never let them forget.
I think I caught a word or two in the Old English section. Question: Which of these would be the easiest to learn? Assume we lent you the AoS time machine so you're learning by immersion. Would Old English be easier than the others, or not?
During the robbery, the men pointed a gun at the baby's head and threatened to kill him if his father didn't turn over his property, police wrote in court papers.
The incident began Wednesday at about 1:30 p.m. when three men in a stolen Toyota committed an auto burglary on Telegraph Avenue, police said.
About 15 minutes later, two of the men walked up behind a father who was carrying his baby near Shattuck Avenue and Bancroft Way, police wrote.
One of the men pistol-whipped the father, hitting the baby in the process, BPD said. Both sustained injuries, according to BPD.
Hopefully some of their cellmates get wind of what they did and take exception.
Best And Brightest
It’s hard to believe that this isn’t a @TheBabylonBee sketch. This is Jared Bersnstein. He sets economic policy for the Biden admin. And he probably can’t even define what an economy is.
Klay Holland, 32, faced the Supreme Court of Victoria on Tuesday when he was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment, with a non-parole period of four years and 10 months.
Holland's victim, Shane Cox, had broken into a unit in Melton in Melbourne's west in March 2021 armed with a knife and wearing a mask.
He had asked for money and drugs, and was allegedly linked to others who had gone to the home to stand over a resident.
Cox, 36, who was high on methylamphetamine, was overpowered by Holland who was a guest at the home.
Cox was beaten with a baseball bat and was incapacitated on the floor, where Holland then raped him.
The article is badly written. I think that he killed the thief, it says he was charged with manslaughter, but it's not real clear. Also, in the very last paragraph it mentions Holland'”mental impairment”, but never says what exactly it is.
Feel Good Cop Story
NEW: Body cam footage shows Boston Police showing up at man’s house after he called 911 wishing someone would wish him a happy birthday.
This is the body cam footage we love to see.
Officers Israel Bracho and Franklin Ortiz showed up with a muffin and a candle to wish… pic.twitter.com/j2YU7NWpQU
Western politicians view magnanimity, empathy, kindness, and tolerance toward outgroup members as laudable traits. It is a form of virtuous largesse that permits Western leaders to pat themselves on the back whilst admiring their reflections in the mirror. Many middle eastern societies interpret these overt virtuous signals as manifestations of pathological weakness. This is because most Western leaders do not possess Cultural Theory of Mind (CToM). They consider the values that they hold dear as precisely those that any society will cherish with equal alacrity. This cultural blindness results in extraordinarily disastrous domestic and foreign policy errors.
Granting entry to millions of immigrants who otherwise possess values that are perfectly antithetical to those of the host nations is a manifestation of cultural blindness. Exhibiting endless military restraint toward belligerent adversaries as a means of building compassionate trust is an exemplar of cultural blindness. There are many regions in the world where the maxim “might is right” is de rigueur. So, in the same way that I am unable to converse with someone who speaks Cantonese because I do not speak that language, politicians who do not “speak” the meta-language inherent to CToM will tackle geopolitical dynamics through a biased prism.
Here's a simple maxim: When someone tells you who you are, believe them. It absolutely baffles me how many people seem unable to do this. Hamas jumps up and down screaming about Oct 7th: “We want to kill Jews. We want to terrorize them. We did it before and we're proud of it. We plan to do it again” and so many Westerners, especially on the left, respond “Oh, no, you're just misunderstood”. Insanity.
That's a bad shoot. He was holding a gun that he legally owned, pointed at the floor, in his own home. You're allowed to do that, even if there's a cop at the door. It's probably not a good idea, witness the video, but the airman apparently didn't realize it was a cop outside. I'm not even sure why the cop was on Defcon 1. There were no violent noises coming from the apartment, the report from the lady downstairs was vague and didn't even identify a specific location. He'll probably get off with a slap on the wrist, if that, because of qualified immunity. QI is a bad idea, it needs to be abolished. Cops must be held to the same laws they're enforcing, lest they become nothing more than state sanctioned gangs. We're seeing that evolution in real time.
Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by Tigers:
Women at a drive-through tiger zoo got mad at her husband and got out of the car to give him a piece of her mind. pic.twitter.com/xBncL1qS7D
Rotondella, a small town in the Southern Italian region of Basilicata, is known as the "the balcony on the Ionian Sea", as from the its hill it's possible to enjoy the view from Puglia to Calabria.
CBD and J.J. Sefton discuss the Biden Junta abandoning Israel and becoming an actual enemy for political gain and plain old Jew hatred, ugly chicks on campus, can Israel win the media war it is losing badly, the situation here at home and what it portends for the upcoming election, RFK Jr. admits to having a worm eating his brain, and more!
How Many Divisions Does SCOTUS HAVE? "There are a couple of rather interesting cases going on that perfectly illustrate how thoroughly corrupt the justice system has become." My latest essay over at Taki's Magazine. Please read and comment! [J.J. Sefton]
The Bulwark, not ten hours ago: Why Biden Won't Abandon Israel You say you're all high-performing experts at political analysis, huh? You say you're paid huge sums by Democrat billionaires just because your insight is so acute, eh? Their next article will argue that Biden is trying to be a great friend to Israel -- real friends tell their friends when they're doing wrong, right? Real friends cut you off drinking at a bar when you've had too many. And the best friends of all cut off your armament lifeline when you're in an existential fight with terrorists.
A superintendent of schools opened an investigation into schoolchildren when they clapped for her daughter's softball MVP award, but she felt they didn't clap hard enough Remember, everybody, there would be no war if leftwing women controlled the world. Oh, they start fascist investigations into children if their egos are bruised, but totally, no wars or strife at all
IDF begins striking terror targets in Rafah
"IDF says targeted strikes begin as War Cabinet unanimously votes to proceed with Rafah operation, Arabic sources say infantry, tanks crossed border." [CBD]
No One is Above the Lore "We have imported alien, violent, dark-age cultures that work hand in hand with our own native-born tyrants to drag us back to an even darker age. Forever. They must be vanquished and excised from our midst. If that means ditching the original Constitution to do so, then God help me, so be it." My latest essay over at Taki's Magazine. Please read and comment. [J.J. Sefton]
Author, historian and commentator Michael Walsh joins us in a wide ranging conversation centering on the twin evils of Leftism and Islam, the prospects for fighting both, predictions about the election, and so much more in a fast, free-wheeling and informative hour!
Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, Here I Am at Intifada: "Are we willing to do whatever is necessary to preserve our freedom? The other side has clearly demonstrated what it is willing to do, and is actively doing, to take it away. That requires self-preservation 'by any means necessary.' As Allen Ludden (or Bert Convy) might say, the password is Revolution. Contemplating such a thing is unfathomable. But seeing New York City “fundamentally transformed” into Nuremberg-on-the-Hudson, the unfathomable quickly becomes not only fathomable but quite reasonable." My latest at Taki's Magazine. Please read and comment! [J.J. Sefton]
Recent Comments
NR Pax:
"[i]Interesting story about weaning Kroger off Proz ..."
FenelonSpoke:
"Not specifically about gardening, but wanted to sa ..."
Ben Had:
"NRPax, your greyhounds are gorgeous. I have had ..."
Ace: aceofspadeshq at gee mail.com
CBD: cbd.aoshq at gee mail.com
Buck: buck.throckmorton at protonmail.com
joe mannix: mannix2024 at proton.me
MisHum: petmorons at gee mail.com
J.J. Sefton: sefton at cutjibnewsletter.com
