Ace of Spades HQ

November 07, 2026

Saturday Evening Movie Post [moviegique]: You Can See Everything

—Open Blogger

I had no real knowledge of Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos going into this movie. Just a vague sense that she had scammed people with a ridiculous medical device that purported to do all kinds of things and didn't.

Do I know any more now?

I don't know.

"Why would I deceive you?"

I do think this an exceptional documentary that earns its 175 minute runtime and is a fascinating look at some complex characters. In some ways, it's a documentary about Nathan Fielder. What I think is especially commendable is that, for all its staged elements—which are overtly staged, with an Amanda Seyfried filling in for Elizabeth Holmes—I think it is actually a documentary, as opposed to a narrative that Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim want us to believe.

It's not that there's not a point-of-view, it's that the point-of-view is very clear and guileless. Or "guileless appearing" as it's kind of hard to come out of this movie without wondering if everything is manipulation and performative.

I mean, not just in the movie, but everywhere.

I have my own take, of course, but let's start with the basics: Fielder is selected by Holmes and her husband Billy Evans to do the documentary because Fielder thinks "outside the box". Holmes is not really aware of Fielder's work, nor of Abbot and Costello and their "Who's on First?" routine, a sketch she doesn't understand when they watch it. She laughs, but because of the confusion, not because she understands the grammatical roots of the humor.

Holmes, you see, is weird.

As it turns out, "weird" is a pretty big club.

We don't know all the ways that she is weird, but one way is an affect where she smiles and makes a lot of direct eye contact with whomever she's talking to. She's a distaff hide-the-pain-Harold, essentially, and this affect makes her very easy to make snap judgements about.

And what I had heard about this documentary was that it was akin to In Cold Blood, where we learned (decades later) that Truman Capote had a thing for one of his cold-blooded killers and so altered the facts to protect his love interest. The suggestion has been made that Fielder fell under Holmes' spell like so many others and therefore is hiding something damaging about her. In fact, Seyfried herself makes this suggestion toward the end of the movie.

But this is remarkably shallow, and shallowness is a kind of through-line of the documentary.

Holmes invites Fielder to actually live with them for the last few weeks before she starts her eleven year sentence, and after a while he takes her up on that, and we do, in fact, see a whole lot. Too much, at times. Probably the number one thing you hear about the movie, besides the clip of Holmes where she says "Why would I deceive you?" with her affect in full flower, is that there is nudity in the film, and it's Evans and his whangdoodle.

This was his idea, apparently. But it's not particularly revealing. (Is that irony?) He's an odd character, for sure, but he's also in the oddest of situations. The couple and their two kids (Holmes has had a baby a month prior) are trying to max family time before she goes away, which creates some friction for Fielder & Co., especially with Evans, who comes across as overbearing at times, and brittle.

But then he's staring down a decade of being a single dad, essentially, to two young children. The peril of the same sort of shallow snap judgement applies here.

Most "documentaries" are fine with this. They give you villains, heroes, etc., etc., etc., to tell the story they want to tell. Here we see bits and pieces of things that allow multiple narratives to be built, and it feels more honest for that. We don't see "the mask drop," which is what you'd expect if Holmes were a sociopath. Evans and Holmes are devoted to each other, but they lack unctuous presentation of, e.g., the stereotypical Christian evangelist who presents himself as devoted and turns out to be a bully who's banging hookers on the side.

Holmes is devoted to her children, and the smiling affect she has goes away when she's experiencing grief or worry or regret—and less so when she's afraid. The affect—the thing she's most called out for, that people call a red flag—works against her, I think. Her natural charm, such as it is, overcomes that affect rather than being a feature of it, or helped in any way by it.

In fact, to me, it looks like PTSD. (And looking it up now, apparently that was part of her unsuccessful legal defense.) To me, also, she looked increasingly like a woman who abdicated responsibility to the man in her life, and in ways that are only unusual in their extremity.

Amanda Seyfried and a crowd of people dancing rapturously in 18th century clothing.

I was unable to find a picture of Seyfried in this film, so enjoy this picture of her in her low-budget Oscar-bid musical flop, "The Testament of Ann Lee".

They watch "The Dropout," a Hulu series where Amanda Seyfried plays "a character based on Holmes", which is the actress' dodge for the slander that results in abuse for Holmes once she's in prison. Fielder brings Seyfried in to re-enact scenes that happened before the cameras, and the jail scenes, and begins by showing her how devastated Holmes is by the series.

Throughout the doc, Seyfried goes through a series of interesting reactions. At first, she comes off like she's an inch deep, blowing off the idea that anything she did might have a real effect on Holmes, and besides she deserves it. Then she acts out a series of deeper examinations—only to come back around to it's just television and besides, Holmes deserves it.

There's a scene early on where Evans takes eggs away that Holmes is scrambling to scramble them properly. (Seriously, I was watching this and thinking "That's no way to scramble eggs!") Holmes doesn't seem to mind, but Seyfried latches on to this to decide that Evans is controlling and destructive. Then the actress meets with Evans and the two are particularly antagonistic.

Seyfried opens with attacks on his sexual prowess. The situation itself seems more than a little contrived. The two walk into Evans place, and Evans says he hasn't had sex for 899 days. (He's counting!) Fielder asks him if he's good at it, and Evans response with something like "I'm great at it." This is a weird conversation, just for starters.

But then Seyfried seeks to humiliate him by claiming she lied to every man she ever slept with. This dovetails nicely with the whole premise of whether one knows when someone is lying to you, but is meant to highlight Evans supposed narcissism.

On the other hand, it reminded me of the idea that you can tell someone is stupid when you say something like "Men are generally taller than women" and they respond with "My sister is taller than my brother," as if that were a rebuttal. This is almost the inverse: "I'm good at sex" gets rebutted with "I've never had good sex."

Also, holy cow. How dysfunctional is that? A Wall Street Journal article's headline claims that Seyfried is the only trustworthy character in the film, which is a bold claim since she's apparently lied to every man she's ever been intimate with. (I won't dignify the article by reading it, which leaves me free to speculate that this either goes unaddressed or is brushed aside with "Everyone lies about sex." Remember that chestnut?)

For his part, Evans antagonizes Seyfried over her unkind comments in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination.

At this point, Evans has been raising his kids for two years on his own. He's also been using his Power of Attorney to do things like post to Holmes' Twitter account. Seyfried finds it appalling that he should have the Power of Attorney, but given that Holmes is in jail, it seems reasonable to me. Both Fielder and Seyfried are alarmed at how Evans claims that he and Holmes are essentially of one mind, and he doesn't even have to talk to her to know what she would want.

Sounds sinister, right? Then at the end of the movie, Holmes says the same thing: That she knows Evans' mind and doesn't even need to talk to him to know what he thinks about things. She has whole conversations with him alone in her cell.

Seyfried says she would break the two up if she could. This is the inch-deep thing re-surfacing. She says this even as we're all aware that Evans has relocated his house to Texas to be near her, so he can take the kids every weekend, and does daily calls to whatever the limit is.

Middle-shot of Fielder and Holmes talking over the back of a couch in a cabin.

Seyfried also acted very impressed by this seaside rental, which I didn't quite understand.

Speaking of inch-deep: Holmes understanding of the device she is credited with being in charge of is less than mine, and I'm only going on what she said during the movie. That is, she describes the device not like a software engineer, not like a chemical engineer, but like a pamphlet trying to sell the device to someone who is not very smart. I got the principle—how such a thing could theoretically work, and what it would take to make it work, and what kind of device it would have to be—and I wouldn't need to say a word about "the cloud".

Some people say this is all part of the ruse to which I say, it's a very convincing ruse. And of course, "the ruse" often becomes "the thing" after a while. Politics is composed almost entirely of people playing dumb, to the extent that they eventually are no longer playing.

In a way, everyone in the movie is doing what Holmes did: Using the abilities they have to get attention, acclaim, money, allies—while brushing aside responsibilities they don't want to deal with. In Holmes case, this may well be the financial stuff that got her into trouble, and the engineering stuff that got her into trouble, and the marketing stuff that got her into trouble.

For Seyfried, it's "It's just fucking television" and witch hunting.

I think Fielder came in wanting to expose Holmes, but he didn't find much to expose. I think he toyed with the "controlled by men" thing, but he doesn't dig into Holmes' older lover who guided her through the Theranos project (and is serving even more time). And while it's clear he finds aspects of Holmes relationship with Evans weird, he also says he sees genuine love and a real family unit.

The result, I think, is something more honest than the usual documentary. It doesn't tell you what to think because I don't think Fielder himself is sold on any of the easy narratives.

Meanwhile, quite a few things charged my tinfoil hat. The media machine is in full swing in every aspect of this case, like it's a gremlin on the wing of the airplane and I'm William Shatner. The media creates this character, the media hypes the company, and it's not even a question of whether or not they'll turn on a dime and destroy the character. It's all grist for the media mill. If Theranos was on to something, and the pharmaceutical companies decided it needed to die so they could steal all the patents, would the media then fall into line and destroy what they created?

That's a rhetorical question, of course, independent of whether Theranos was on to anything.

I'm reminded, for some reason of Wilhelm Reich, a mid-century quack who developed a theory of life-force called "orgones" which I presume is complete nonsense, and which the FDA—inspired by libel printed in The New Republic—responded by cracking down on him with utter savagery, including destroying much of his written work—well out of scope of their already unconstitutional charter.

I also thought of Martha Stewart, thrown into jail not because of insider trading, which is the smear that attaches to her, but because somebody wanted her in jail.

There is an object lesson in this film, I think, but I'm not sure anyone involved in making it knew what it was.

Holmes interacting with her child while Nathan Fielder watches on.

She had children! This is totally a manipulation tactic and not a woman in love looking at what's probably her last chance!

Close it up

Posted by Open Blogger at 07:32 PM Comments

Hobby Thread - November 7, 2026 [TRex]

—Open Blogger

Welcome hobbyists! Pull up a chair and sit a spell with the Horde in this little corner of the interweb. This is the mighty, mighty officially sanctioned Ace of Spades Hobby Thread. For this week, the Wheel of Hobbies (TM) is feeling round and decided on a marble theme for this Hobby Thread.

Marbles? Read on, fellow hobbyists...

[Top photo: Moon Marble Company]

Posted by Open Blogger at 05:30 PM Comments

Ace of Spades Pet Thread, November 7

—K.T.

Courtesy Kentuckiana Humor

How are your cats adjusting to Standard Time?

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Good afternoon and welcome to the almost world famous Ace of Spades Pet Thread. Thanks for stopping by. Kick back and enjoy the world of animals.

Would you like a treat?

Let's relax a little with the animals and leave the world of politics and current events outside today.

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Posted by K.T. at 03:17 PM Comments

Gardening, Home and Nature Thread, Nov. 7

—K.T.

More Late Color from Don in Kansas on October 16.

All the rain that we didn't get this summer fell during the past three weeks, 8.5 inches worth. The clematis that had gone dormant during the hot, dry weather woke up and is blooming again.

Posted by K.T. at 01:24 PM Comments

It's getting hard to keep all the streams of messaging straight now

—K.T.

"Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes." - Benjamin Franklin (November 1789)

Courtesy Statues: The People They Salute

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The Democrats thought that "Our Democracy" was over before last Tuesday. And of course, Trump is still President. So some of them may still think it is over.

But some of them are sounding awfully feisty. On the other hand, I ran across a guy who was cheerfully enthusiastic about Mamdani's popularity in NYC.

Hard to keep up. How should we react?

So are we living under a fascist dictatorship or is democracy alive and well?? I’m just trying to keep up with the messaging😂😂 https://t.co/o2jE8Zj7as
— patriotic peach 🍑 (@patrioticpeachh) November 5, 2026

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On Substack, Michael Smith has had some interesting thoughts. This is from one of his posts from earlier in the week:

James Madison’s Shocked Face

When combined with government, the only human characteristic stronger than the desire to be benevolent toward others is to do it with someone else’s money.

I mentioned yesterday how dismayed I was that in the aftermath of our shellacking on Tuesday, there are the expected people on the left and a surprising number on the right who want the U.S. government to “do something” about the price of tea in China (archaic reference alert).
It reminded me of reading about how, on January 10, 1794, James Madison rose in the House of Representatives to challenge a proposal to provide financial assistance to French refugees who had fled the violence in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti).

Setting aside the fact that Americans are still paying for benevolence program in Haiti some 232 years later, Madison did not question the suffering of the refugees or the humanitarian impulse behind the appropriation, rather whether Congress possessed the constitutional authority to spend taxpayers’ money on charity.

According to the Annals of Congress, Madison declared:
"Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."

He continued:

"It would puzzle any gentleman to lay his finger on any part of the Constitution which would authorize the government to interpose in the relief of the St. Domingo sufferers."

Drawbacks to such humanitarian relief and the ingenious way Congress bypassed Monroe's objection are summarized in a colorful manner at the link above.

Madison’s objection was evidently the last time anyone in government could be shamed about such spending since today, depending on how broadly we define benevolence, roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of federal spending now goes toward social insurance, income support, healthcare, and other programs intended to provide financial or material benefits to individuals. That seems a remarkable proportion when considered against Madison’s objection to spending $15,000 for humanitarian relief.
Which brings me to the “affordability” crisis, and how the newly anointed Democrat controlled government deigns to “solve” it.

Some of the bright ideas for extracting money from groups under current disapproval are described, along with other typical plans to increase dependency on government. Mr. Smith also mentions things that the Congress DOES NOT intend to do to improve "affordability". This is refreshing.

Did I mention we are still sending aid to Haiti 232 years later?
Madison's corpse is so pissed right now.

And others remember:

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SHOULD WE TAKE A LOOK AT HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY?

Book Review reminding us of the limits of second-hand benevolence

"The Knife Went In"

Dalrymple's "Life at the Bottom" Turns 25

Empathy without that troublesome suicidal empathy
(You can listen to this article in a high-quality reading at the link.)

Summary:
Decline is a choice, and self-governing citizens can choose renewal instead.

Theodore Dalrymple is among the English-speaking world’s most insightful social critics. For decades, he has written about the pathologies that have ruined our cities and resigned entire neighborhoods to the antagonist world of the state of nature. . .
Among his most important works is the 2001 book, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass now out in a new twenty-fifth anniversary edition. Drawing on his experience as a physician and psychiatrist in some of the most blighted slums of our society, Dalrymple argues that the West is facing a crisis of personal responsibility rooted in the determinist ideology that has infected the elite. As he writes in the book’s original introduction, “In the modern world, bad ideas and their consequences cannot be confined to a ghetto.”

One striking thing about Dalrymple’s work is its profound empathy. “In the course of my work over fifteen years, I spoke to thousands of people about their lives and the lives of the people around them,” he writes in the new preface. “As a result, I could not conceive of them as simply vectors of abstract social forces acting upon them.” A doctor treats persons, not statistics, human beings with real agency and life stories. Yet Dalrymple does not let his empathy calcify into excuses for their poor decisions. As much as he acknowledges how the “system” has failed his patients, he maintains that criminals bear ultimate responsibility for their crimes.

Armed with this experience, Dalrymple argues that modern liberalism’s great error is its social determinism. “The very form of the explanation offered by liberals for modern crime—from social conditions direct to behavior, without passing through the human mind—offers those who commit crime an excuse in advance,” he writes. The social scientists who attribute crime to poverty or inequality are in fact guilty of dehumanizing the very people they claim to want to help. By attributing social dysfunction to grand, sweeping trends outside of the control of any individual, they deny the impoverished a path out of squalor and delinquency.
One of Dalrymple’s most fascinating examples of how ideology disempowers people is the shockingly common use of passive voice in his sessions with British prisoners and addicts. His patients often spoke of themselves as “marionettes of happenstance,” in a dialect he calls “the psychobabble of the slums.” The fashionable relativism of academia and other areas of professional life filtered down to these unfortunates through mass culture, giving them a vocabulary to shift blame as far away as possible. Though many had “absorbed nothing at school, [they] had nevertheless absorbed the shibboleths of political correctness” and therapeutic culture. The immiserated then wield the notion of a true “inner self” to ward off responsibility, speaking as if they have no control over their actions. One man who had been guilty of stabbing someone uttered “the knife went in,” rather than acknowledge he chose to thrust the blade.

Leftist ideology adopted by Criminal:

"The knife went in."

Leftist ideology adopted by Journalist:

"The truck went up onto the sidewalk and hit five pedestrians."

Sources of social pathologies which affect the underclasses and criminal classes are described. Few of them are remedied significantly by passing bills or adopting "programs.

While these cases are depressing, the book is even more troubling when Dalrymple delves into the ideological roots of this mass enervation. He has a particular ire for insipid Rousseauian theories of the self, which cloak selfishness in romanticism. “This is the lie that is at the heart of our society, the lie that encourages every form of destructive self-indulgence to flourish,” he writes, “for while we ascribe our conduct to pressures from without, we obey the whims that well up from within, thereby awarding ourselves carte blanche to behave as we choose. Thus we feel good about behaving badly.” As a doctor, he is concerned above all with the practical effects of these theories—and his case-studies demonstrate how dangerous the lie of subjective morality truly can be.
Beyond his medical experience, Dalrymple’s upbringing under the roof of his outright communist father predisposed him to see the fatal flaws in collectivistic social theories. One essay recounts a barbaric episode in which his old man viciously destroyed a collection of old Victorian paintings on little more than a whim as a metaphor for the total cultural leveling of British society. Out of devotion to egalitarian and anti-colonial ideology, the bureaucrats of the centralizing state have graffitied or torn down the physical remains of the past. In both Britain and America, people are governed as if we were livestock, and our places are treated little better than pigsties. Is it any wonder that the prevailing mood of our age is despair?

Now I understand Dalrymple better! His early exposure to communism helps explain why he so effectively notices the destructiveness so prevalent in the Left today. There's more on specific actions of politicians, bureaucrats and ideologues at the link above.

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Another interesting way to look at the actions of Trump, from Michael Smith:

The King in the North

Sometimes leading means poking the bear to see what he will do.

As an executive, I’ve always hated working on the required 1-, 3-, and 5-year plans. I worked with my teams to create them because they were required and because the analysts wanted numbers even if they were bullshit. At best, they were believable bullshit and only directionally correct.
My approach to understanding policy and politics is to define electoral politics and the subsequent governing stages with a mashup paraphrase of Mike Tyson and General George S. Patton:

“Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face, your enemy gets a vote in what you do, and a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”

I had a couple of mentors during my early career who taught me the difference between a manager and a leader was that a leader makes decision and then course corrects when necessary and a manager just follows the plan because nobody ever blames someone for following “the plan”.

My first mentor told me, “Son, you already know a bear is a bear and generally know what bears do but sometimes you have to have the courage to poke the bear to find out exactly what he will do. The trick is to know when, where, and how hard to poke him and not only that, know what you are willing to do after he is poked.”

So, I guess that is my basis for supporting President Trump. He seems to poke the bear to see what the bear will do and then adjust accordingly based on that feedback.

That’s really the extent of his plan.

We need to acknowledge the difficulty of defining the problems we now face.

We need to do some bear poking.
The first step is to understand the enemy. Ours can be understood in their words, but also in their actions – so let’s look at both for a moment.

I really recommend clicking on the link for the following section of this essay, which provides examples of the behavior of our domestic opposition. Rather unsettling. Frightening, actually.

So, we already know the bear is a bear and have some insight into what that bear is going to do. They are showing us in real time.
The question we must answer is whether we have the courage to do what needs to be done.

So far, the GOP has not shown that courage and because we haven’t, the Democrats are about to give us yet another lesson in how far they are willing to go.

I’ll admit to liking HBO’s Game of Thrones – a lot - one scene that keeps penetrating my mind is the Battle of the Bastards in season 6, when Jon Snow stands alone facing Ramsay Bolton’s army. That seems to be our destiny because it is repeated again and again – when we do find a leader worthy of the fight, our army deserts him.

Right or wrong, Trump demonstrated the resolve to go shield to shield with the worst of the Democrats – but in the end, like Jon Snow, he was left alone on the battlefield.

If we want that to change, we need to field the right army.

World's toughest bear nicknamed "The Boss" survives being hit by train, and fathered 70% of cubs in his region. https://t.co/cJOEQ0V55V
— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) January 6, 2023

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Founders

Some of the Founders had it tough:

Statues: The People They Salute

NAME the Signer of the Declaration of Independence who was dragged from his bed and marched in only a nightshirt and breeches in freezing weather to prison by the British.
RICHARD STOCKTON signed the Declaration of Independence knowing his life, fortune and sacred honor was at risk. Four months later he was imprisoned.

Stockton had been moving his family to safety because the British were following George Washington and his army into New Jersey after the Battle of Long Island, when a treacherous neighbor of the friend whose home he had moved his family to, led a band of loyalists to Richard Stockton.
They dragged Stockton from his bed and marched him improperly clothed (only a nightshirt and breeches) in freezing weather to a common jail in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Later he was moved to Provost prison in New York City, which was notorious for its harsh conditions. It is estimated that about three times as many prisoners died in the prisons and prison ships of New York City, as soldiers in combat during the Revolutionary War years.

After five weeks of being locked in irons and nearly starved, Stockton was released. The condition of his release was that he was not to engage in American affairs during the fight for freedom. His health was compromised to such an extent, that it is doubtful he could have contributed much on the battlefield. His home had been plundered of his furniture and livestock. His extensive library had been destroyed. His monetary wealth was also gone as he had donated most of it to the cause.

Richard Stockton died before the Revolutionary War ended in 1781 at the age of 51. He is the subject of one of the two statues representing New Jersey in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol.

More at Diana Erbio's Substack

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Weekend

The Week in Pictures: Electoral Degringolade Edition

Well THAT was no fun. No fun at all. But what is the Democrat plan for improving America? You can summarize it in one word—no, not “affordability,” but subpoenas. Think this is an overstatement? Let’s start here, and cheer up, this will be the Democrats’ undoing. (At least Newt Gingrich had a Contract with America with a policy agenda his House largely passed. The Democrats have no policy proposals for “affordability,” and appear instead to have a Contract on America.)

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Music

Soldier's Joy

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Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Serving your mid-day open thread needs

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Last week's thread, Halloween Miscellany

Comments are closed on the thread above so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

Follow-up

The people who asked questions about COVID early on may sometimes get a little weird, but sometimes they make some good points and point us in some useful directions, even now. Independent of the piece below, I saw a comment by Bret Weinstein stating that COVID would have been the biggest scientific investigation (or words to that effect) IF DATA HAD BEEN COLLECTED AND WERE BEING ANALYZED.

There are still some independent-minded people who maintain an interest in what happened. TWISTED Thursday, November 5, 2026 C&C NEWS

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Apologies for the late delivery— your author is navigating the nation’s airports again (ugh). Our election hangover continues, creating a challenge to report real news, since the Great Shellacking is still busy throwing its weight around. But, only 48 hours in, twists and turns are appearing and some of the numbers are paying hide-and-go-seek. Today’s roundup describes what’s causing folks to scratch their heads a little. Plus, more good news from Florida.
By the way, I’m en route to the lovely city of Chattanooga, where I’m attending the Brownstone Institute’s sixth annual conference, “The Challenge Ahead.” For two days, a crowd of doctors, scientists, journalists, and assorted heretics of various sizes and descriptions will compare notes on how to unwind the capture of our institutions, preferably before the next “two weeks to flatten the curve” arrives.

Close it up

Posted by K.T. at 11:01 AM Comments

AoSHQ Weekly Prayer List

—CBD

Please submit any prayer requests to “Annie’s Stew” at apaslo at-sign hotmail dot com. Prayer requests are generally removed after four weeks unless we receive an update.

Prayer Requests:
9/18 – Random Dave posted an update to his job progress. He is still looking for FT work, but has accepted a substitute teacher position (more flexibility for interviews, some income to slow the bleeding). He asks for prayers that the interview results he is waiting on will get back to him soon, especially if one is the “right job”. If any are “not the right job”, they would fall away soon and get back to him, and that if all of them are “not the right job”, the ‘right job” would show itself aggressively, so he doesn’t miss it! He also thanks the Horde and the folks at church for their prayers and support.

8/14 Update – Random Dave needs continued prayers for his job situation, that God would guide him to the right one soon, and also for prayers for M’s grandmother, who fell the other day and tore a ligament.

10/22 Update – M’s grandmother is healing well. She is mostly mobile now (on crutches), and occasionally has bouts of bad pain. They praise God for the healing and humbly request additional healing. Random Dave reports no real change on his job situation. He continues to pray for God to make the path known as he applies, and periodically deal with “good” interviews that end up going nowhere.

9/18 – Brother Tim posted that he has been overnight in his car more than indoors. He is convinced that his retirement/resignation was a severe error, a result of fatigue and depression. He asks for prayers.

10/17 – Bother Tim posted that he has been in the hospital for 3 weeks.

10/10 – Just Some Guy asked for prayers for his former work colleague, who had a heart attack and stroke.

10/10 – Mile, okravangelist, requested prayers for Mama Publius, for grace and fortitude, and that she passes in her sleep. Mama Publius is in home hospice care.

10/24 Update – Mama Publius passed away this past week.

10/14 – NR Pax requested prayers for a friend, whose husband died on 10/10 after a long illness.

10/17 – Pooky’s Girl posted that she is in the hospital, because Wee Pooky is threatening to come early at 30 weeks.

10/24 Update – Pooky’s Girl’s contractions have been stopped. She is at 31 weeks along, so every week that Wee Pooky stays put is less time in the NICU.

10/31 – Annie’s Stew (and, I assume, all the Horde) ask for God’s blessings on Misanthropic Humanitarian as he steps away from the blog. We thank him for his service to the Horde and to Christ’s Kingdom.

10/31 – ChristyBlinkyTheGreat requested prayers that her mother’s eventual passing into heaven be in peace as she sleeps, without any pain or fear. She thinks it will be in the next few weeks or months, as she is approaching 96 years old.

11/4 – Teresa in Fort Worth sent an update that she is not feeling well. Every muscle and bone hurts, on top of the fatigue and weakness she was already experiencing. The nurse at UTSW thinks it may be due to receiving chemo on top of radiation, on the same day. The good news is that the CA19-9 number is 4.9, below the threshold of 37. This was her twelfth chemo treatment, marking a year since she started this protocol. She is worried that it may be a preview of how she will feel when the cancer starts to take over.

For submission guidelines, please contact Annie's Stew, who is managing the prayer list. You can contact her at: apaslo at 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.

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.

Posted by CBD at 07:11 AM Comments

Daily Tech News 7 November 2026

—Pixy Misa

Tech News

With the end of support of Intel Macinti, the number of MacOS-like varieties of Linux is rapidly increasing. (The Register)

Because it coincided with the rise of AI development tools and independent creators working on the "they can't sue all of us" philosophy quickly reskinning Linux to look and feel like MacOS but without the flaws. (Replacing them with different flaws, I'm sure.)
And while the Hackintosh - running MacOS on regular PC hardware - died with Apple's move to its own Arm-based architecture that too is making a return now that regular PCs are available running Arm chips. (Yoon's Blog)

Less appealing now though with the memory plague making comparable hardware just as expensive as an actual Macintosh.
Though if you're more of a classicist you can run something that looks and feels like the original MacOS on a Raspberry Pi Pico. (Free Hackers)

Not the now expensive Raspberry Pi 5, but the tiny $5 microcontroller.

And on the "they can't sue all of us" it includes the classic Apple menu icon. That's just asking for trouble.

Tech News

Speaking of Apple Applebees left its database password in its Android app, installed by over a million people. (Tech Crunch)

I am sometimes amazed that our species has survived this long.
Nagare Labs is making progress on the impossible: DRAM that runs more like SRAM. (Tom's Hardware)

The commodity dynamic memory (DRAM) found in every computer - except for example the Raspberry Pi Pico - is a tradeoff: It's much cheaper than static memory and much smaller, but it's slow and it leaks - it needs to be constantly refreshed where the contents are read and written back. That's invisible these days but if you look at older systems it was very obvious; the Zilog Z80 CPU had an integrated refresh counter and the Commodore Amiga had refresh slots baked in to the DMA allocation.

It looks like this still needs to be refreshed, but it solves a different leak: With conventional DRAM every read erases the data and the memory chip also has to write it back afterwards.

Long story short, the new memory uses two transistors per bit instead of one for DRAM or two for SRAM, is five times denser than SRAM, and fourteen times faster than DRAM. Only problem remaining is that it doesn't exist outside of lab samples yet.
Six more Nvidia GPUs with a total value of $11 million have been stolen in transit from a third-world country, this time California. (WCCFTech)

The cards left Oakland bound for Texas but only made it as far as San Bernardino County before the entire truck was abducted by aliens.
Some less bleak political news closer to home: The ruling Labor (Maoist) government at the heart of the rot down under, my birth state of Victoria, is now polling third ahead of state elections on the 28th.

The Greens (Khmer Vert) are polling fourth.

First are the Liberals (Conservative Squish), with second place going to One Nation (Conservative Non-Squish).

To give you an idea of how unpopular Labor has made themselves, they are polling at 22% in their own stronghold. And thanks to preferential voting (used by Victorian state and Australian federal elections) a situation where Labor loses numerically but wins a majority of seats as happened in the UK is all but impossible.

I hope this trend spreads.
Repotted all 29 seedlings in coconut fiber propagation pots so I can just pop them in the ground.

Now in the process of digging out the ground to plant them in. It's hard clay riddled with rocks and roots and builder's debris, so this is a lot of work. I planted one boronia this morning to replace the one that didn't make it through the winter, leaving 42 plants in various sizes of pot sitting by the walkway to my front door.

This is what the half-ton of gardeny stuff is for - soil improvement so I can grow something other than tussock grass and weeds, and mulch so that the tussock grass and weeds don't grow back.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: The children yearn for the mines.

Close it up

Posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM Comments

Alas, Poor ONT. I Knew Him Horatio

—WeirdDave

Hello everyone! Well, blue tsunami this week. Half of America needs these stickers.

Posted by WeirdDave at 10:00 PM Comments

Rough Week Cafe

—Disinformation Expert Ace

by Juan Solis
Obligatory
or the remake, if you like

Jasper the Lab says it's time for bed, darnit!

Senior dog with the cutest crooked nose is rescued from living under a bridge and is happy and comfortable now.

A pack of wolves, surveilled with night vision cameras-- chased off by brave doggos.

Dog feels the need to do ninja-rolls to sneak up on a treat his owner dropped on the floor for him. It's possible the guy was so casual about dropping it the dog thought he did so by mistake, so thought that he would have be sneaky and crafty about eating it. Poor dog. Good life lesson: Make sure your dogs know when you're giving them a treat.

The cutest little B&E suspect.

I don't know if you guys are bored of these but I'm always up for a charging baby elephant. This one "roars" at the end.

Emaciated pittie abandoned in a plum box is rescued and is now fat as plum. To be honest, this chonky boy needs to exercise. But he's happy and healthy at any size.

Pet pigs purloin pumpkins.

A pair of twin dogs just showed up at a farm and took jobs as farm dogs.

Update on the blind old golden retriever who's so happy and proud to still retrieve the newspaper every day.

Baby kitten bullies a giant cane corso.

Woman buys a male sex doll and gets caught so she makes a video and pretends she bought it to be a surrogate to her dog who has separation anxiety.

Posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 07:30 PM Comments

The Last Good Generation: Gen X

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Bridgit Phetasy:

Last week a New York Times/Siena poll found that Americans of every generation shifted to the left over the last two years -- except for one: Generation X.
Liberal Boomers, Millennials and Gen Zers were gobsmacked.

"What's wrong with Gen X?" they demanded.

As a member of that generation I'm here to tell you: Absolutely nothing.

In fact, we're the only thing standing between this country and communism -- the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency generation.

In the '90s they called us slackers. Now we're middle-aged, menopausal and holding the door at the Alamo.

Have you even said "thank you"?

No mystery why we're like this: It's because we were neglected -- latchkey kids who ate saltines for dinner.

Many of our parents got divorced and forgot they had children, which was fine because we were busy getting blackout drunk in hayfields and smoking weed in garages.

We also bullied each other -- and it made us resilient.

I'm only half kidding when I say the anti-bullying movement launched this country's decline.

Nobody came to save us, so we never expected the government to, either.

Our whole political philosophy could fit on a bumper sticker: Leave us alone.

And we vote on the basis of which party is more likely to do so.

...

You can't shame us into voting the way you want; we're immune to that emotional manipulation and bullying.

Generationally, we're the middle child.

We've got Boomers on one side going "just get a good job at the factory," Millennials on the other asking "what if the factory were a co-op?" and Zoomers off filming TikTok dances on the factory floor.

We're the ones who remember the Cold War and the internet before it ate everyone's brain, so we don't fall for every Russian psy-op that gets injected into the discourse. Thank you, "Red Dawn."

And yes, I know Gen X is irritatingly obsessed with itself. In our defense, nobody else was paying attention to us.

That's completely true. It's provably true -- the Boomers were such a big generation that the media continued to push Boomer-era bands and Boomer-era bullshit (hippie liberalism, Woodstock) even when we became adults. We all naively believed that when we became adults the culture would reflect our preferences, but no, it was all Boomer Crap all the time.

Until the Millennials came of age -- and then the culture shifted from Boomer-dominated to Millennial-dominated.

Not a day of Gen X dominated.

...

So leave it to us, the slackers.

The latchkey kids raised on divorce, hose water and indifference, now caring for four sets of aging boomers, paying for everyone's benefits and mowing the lawn on Saturday.

We didn't ask for the job. We never ask for anything. That's kind of the point.

Give a guy a 30-year mortgage and a backyard, and he won't want revolution.

He'll want a Traeger grill.

Unrelated: Unexpectedly, October's job creation numbers smashed expectations.

Wages went up, too.

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 165,000 in October, and the unemployment rate changed little at 4.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in professional and business services, in health care, and in transportation and warehousing.
...

In October, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls increased by 14 cents, or 0.4 percent, to $38.00. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.1 percent. In October, average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees rose by 12 cents, or 0.4 percent, to $32.75.

Posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:40 PM Comments

Trump vs. the Bureaucracy

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Trump is the first president in living memory to actually cut the federal work force.

Reagan tried. Reagan failed.

Trump actually delivered.

He also worked assiduously to make the President the boss of his underling bureaucrats, instead of the bureaucrats being the President's boss.

What a concept. The boss sets policy and tells the subordinate paper-pushers what to do?

That's a #ThreatToDemocracy.

Ben Weingarten:

Although Trump is often described as an impulsive, undisciplined leader, he has remained sharply focused on advancing reforms aimed at increasing presidential power over the unelected federal bureaucracy. RealClearInvestigations' review of dozens of executive actions and agency regulations found that the Trump administration has taken historic steps to shrink the branch of government he runs, make agencies more accountable to elected officials, and reduce Washington's regulatory control over the private sector.,,,
These efforts have reduced the federal workforce to levels unseen since the 1960s and generated hundreds of billions of dollars in cost savings. They have also produced Supreme Court rulings affirming presidential authority to remove subordinates and rein in independent agencies, along with deregulatory savings estimated at trillions of dollars.

"[F]rom almost the first day of the president's second term, the administration has been at work in the most extensive project since the New Deal to recapture for the elected branches what has been given away over many decades to the permanent bureaucratic class," Hillsdale College professor Ronald J. Pestritto wrote in a monograph lauding the president's initiatives late last year.

Of course, the Democrats want to undo all this. They want to rehire all the unneeded clock-watching do-nothings and of course all the unqualified DEI make-work check-cashers and they want to pour American tax dollars into US AID and all the other corrupt communist NGOs.

"We have a massive reconstruction task ahead of us," Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has warned. "We will have to go department by department, subject by subject, and public purpose by public purpose to determine what we salvage and what we re-create."

Although Democrats will control both chambers of Congress next year, the center of gravity of their resistance will likely continue to be in the courthouses where they have challenged the president's agenda, alleging unconstitutional overreach and procedural ham-handedness. Through hundreds of lawsuits, many still pending, they have opposed everything from firing employees and eliminating offices to withholding appropriated funds.

Legal scholars say these battles over the scope and contours of presidential authority and the Constitution's separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches may have significant long-term ramifications. They also note that litigation moves slowly; many cases are not likely to be resolved until Trump leaves office. As a practical matter, often buoyed by a Supreme Court that has blocked lower court injunctions thwarting Trump's orders, the president has meaningfully reshaped the bureaucracy....

Shrinking the workforce

From the start of his second term, President Trump vowed to "dramatically reduce the size of the Federal Government, while increasing its accountability to the American people."

Through a series of executive orders, he froze federal hiring across most agencies, directed the Department of Government Efficiency to help cut the federal workforce through deferred resignation programs and reductions in force (RIFs), and required agencies to hire no more than one employee for every four departing employees. During its first year, the administration has shrunk the workforce by 220,000 to 250,000 workers -- a 10% decline. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a critic of the cuts, described them as "the largest one-year reduction in the federal workforce in over 75 years, dating back to the demobilization following World War II."

The decline has not been evenly distributed. The Center's analysis indicates that Trump has targeted executive branch departments whose work he questions. These include the Department of Education (down 39%), the State Department and associated agencies (down 37%), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (down 23%). His policies have also sparked mass exoduses from specific areas like the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Conservatives have long considered the division a bastion of progressive activism. Up to 80% of its staff reportedly left. The administration has replaced those 300 departing employees with 130 hires of its own.

The workforce continued to decline modestly in 2026. In all, about one in five federal workers has left through resignation, retirement, or dismissal during Trump's second term -- though about half that number has been replaced. At roughly 2.7 million employees, the federal workforce has fallen to its lowest level since 1966.

Read the whole thing. We're down, but we did a lot of damage. We have to pick ourselves up from the floor, knock the dust off our shoulders, and defend our achievements.

Posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 05:40 PM Comments

The Week In Woke

—Disinformation Expert Ace

#Accurate:

Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei
@MKhamenei_ir
The process of the US's collapse has accelerated.

Feminists exult: "Abortion is so back, baby!"

That's a direct threat to the babies they intend to kill.

Speaking of mass abortions, hag-faced whore Jennifer Welch giggles over the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Democrats celebrate "the gayest Congress in American history."

"The American people have made their voices heard," the Equality Caucus said on social media, Thursday, with a photo of a rainbow behind the U.S. Capitol Dome.
"The 120th Congress will officially be the GAYEST Congress in history! (that we know of)," it announced.

"Let's get to work ️‍️‍⚧️," the leftists added, adding emojis of the American flag, LGBT flag, and transgender flag.

This coincides with excitement from Queer News Tonight, which predicted that the first act of a Democrat-controlled Congress would be changing the rules so a biological man who believes he is a woman -- Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), formerly known as Tim -- can use the women's restrooms in the halls of Congress.

This may shock you, but the thing they said would never happen is not only happening but it is happening with the encouragement of the Democrat political establishment.

Mark Hemingway @Heminator
Every critic of gay marriage said this was the logical outcome; virtually every mainstream proponent of gay marriage assured us it would never happen.

And here we are.

California city allows throuples and polyamorous gangbang cells to register as domestic partners.

Throuples, foursomes and other multi-partner relationships can now register as domestic partners in a Los Angeles County city after its city council unanimously approved new legal protections for polyamorous couples.
West Hollywood passed the ordinance Tuesday after it was introduced by Mayor John Heilman.

The measure allows people in relationships involving multiple partners to officially register with the city, granting them certain rights, including hospital visitation and additional tenant protections.

...

These barriers, they say, often arise in housing, healthcare, education and other services, where existing policies largely cater to two-person partnerships or traditional family households.

Christina Fialho, an attorney and founder of the bisexual media representation advocacy group Rewrite the BiLine, first proposed the idea of polyamory protections to West Hollywood Councilmember Chelsea Lee Byers in early 2025.

Fialho told the Los Angeles Times that "this law is just the beginning."

"I think it makes it possible for people to dream about a future they once thought was out of reach," she said.

They're totally focused on affordability.

Well, I guess they're all done lying about this never happening now.

At Reduxx:

A teenage girl who was raped by a trans-identified male former police officer in Germany faced questioning from his lawyer after "accidentally misgendering" him in court. The disturbing new detail emerges just weeks after Maja Schmid, a 55-year-old former federal officer from Rosenheim, was sentenced for the heinous crime.
As previously reported by Reduxx, Schmid was sentenced to three years and three months at the Traunstein Regional Court earlier in October after a three day trial. Schmid was found guilty of raping the girl when she was just 15 years old. He was also found guilty of possessing child sexual abuse materials.

During the trial, it was learned that the crime occurred in August of 2025 during a roadtrip between Schmid and the young girl, who was the daughter of one of Schmid's friends. After stopping at a roadside restaurant, Schmid approached the girl in the women's toilets, pushed her against a wall, and raped her. According to reports, the teenage victim was in shock after the assault, unable to respond until Schmid left the area, at which point the girl had a "serious anxiety attack" in the bathroom.

It was also learned that at the time of the assault, Schmid was already under investigation by cybercrime specialists for possessing extreme pornography on his phone. After seizing his devices during the course of the investigation, police found thousands of child sex abuse images, some of which depicting toddlers, along with a video of Schmid sexually abusing a dog. The bestiality media was not taken into consideration in the verdict. According to the presiding judge, bestiality pornography is punishable in Germany only if it is intended for distribution.

Earlier this month, Schmid was sentenced to 3 years and 3 months in prison for his crimes. In explaining the verdict, the presiding judge took into account a letter of apology Schmid had written and his commitment to pay the victim 11,000 [euros] in compensation.

Rape a teenage girl, pay a little fine.

I wonder if Russell Brand will just pay a little fine...?

In his sentencing remarks, Judge Andreas Bartschmid oddly declared that despite his rape of a child and extremely large collection of child pornography, Schmid was "not a pedophile."

He has "thousands" of child porn photos on his computer, including with toddlers, and raped a child.

But the judge wants you to know he's definitely NOT a pedophile. That could be used as an accurate statement in political writings made by Racists.

His gender transition was "not a fetish," Bartschmid added, but simply "rotted in an inner inclination within the defendant." He also said that his teenage victim had suffered "no long lasting effects" from the attack at the motorway service station, only physical pain during it.

types deletes

This is not the first child he has sexually assaulted, either.

...
In 2024, Schmid had invited the teenage victim to his home to use his installed whirlpool system. According to the girl, Schmid gave her alcohol, but after five minutes felt dizzy and then immediately lost consciousness. She then awoke hours later when it was dark on Schmid's sofa, wearing a t-shirt without her bathing suit on. Schmid claimed she was at risk of drowning and changed her out of her bathing suit to ensure his couch stayed dry. The prosecution determined there was not enough evidence to charge Schmid for this incident, and most concerningly, Judge Bartschmid in the sentencing remarks further claimed that the minor "shared responsibility" for what happened because she had consumed alcohol.

However, even more disturbing new details from the case emerged this week and sent a furor through German social media.

According to Die Welt, before the trial finished, Schmid's lawyer, Peter Durr, sent an official letter from his office questioning the teenage rape victim over her usage of male pronouns for her rapist during her testimony. Durr said he was looking to "politely inquire whether it is correct that you referred to Ms. Schmid as 'he' on the last day of proceedings."

Germany has a law that imposes a fine of up to 10,000 Euros for misgendering a tranny. Which is, you will note, a mere 10% less than the fine the tranny rapist has to pay his victim for raping her.

For some reason, Racists in Germany took this as an attempt to intimidate the 15-year-old rape victim.

...
Outraged at the new revelation, a number of German women's rights campaigners began a digital chain with the message: "We live in a country where a raped girl is issued a cease-and-desist order if she refers to her rapist as a man. I despise everyone who enacted this humiliating, misogynistic law."

German media reports throughout the trial had often described Schmid as a "police woman," or "female police officer," with Suddeutsche Zeitung even giving the case as an example of "female" sex crimes.

NY Post: Ilhan Nur Said Elmi has two "secret siblings" in London, who I imagine she's keeping secret so that her very sketchy family background can be concealed.

Ilhan Omar has been hiding links to two of her siblings in London in an alleged bid to create further distance between her and rumored brother Ahmed Nur Said Elmi -- whom she married in 2009.
Multiple sources told The Post that Mohamed Nur Said Elmi, a political activist for the Puntland cause in Somalia, and Leila Nur Said Elmi, 53, are Omar's siblings who live in London.

Ahmed Elmi, 41 -- to whom Omar was married for eight years, and who described himself as "a gay man" in a recent academic paper -- is also believed to have lived with Leila while growing up.

The congresswoman, 44, arrived in the US as a refugee from Somalia in 1995, while the other branch of her family made their way to London via Ukraine.

"They are all one family," a friend of the Omar family claimed in an interview with The Post. "The siblings have the same mum and the same dad and within the Somali community acknowledge each other as brothers and sisters.

"But they keep it quiet to the rest of the world because Ilhan is now in politics. They do not want people to find the link between her and Ahmed [Elmi]."

The family spent four years in a Kenyan refugee camp after fleeing Somalia when war broke out.

But the family, which originally had the surname Elmi, made the decision to seek safety abroad as soon as they could, according to a family friend in Minnesota.

"It's what people in the community did when they were desperate," the source told The Post. "There was obviously a lot of danger and once people knew they could get into another country, they'd help take on as many others as possible to keep them safe."

Omar, her sister Sahra and late father Nur Omar Mohamed first settled in Arlington, Virginia, before making their way to Minnesota.

Her alleged brother, Mohamed, now appears to be heavily involved in Puntland politics, regularly traveling to the region from London, according to his posts on social media.

He and his sister Leila have ties with war criminal Mohamed Said Hersi "Morgan" who led a brutal state-sponsored massacre against the Isaaq clan in 1988 under dictator Siad Barre.

As a picture obtained by The Post shows, the pair proudly smiled alongside the warlord for a picture in January 2024. Mohamed also paid tribute to him on social media after he died a year later, noting that their families shared a bond of friendship and that Gen. Morgan was close with their father.

Gen. Morgan, known as the "butcher of Hargeisa," orchestrated a campaign that saw cities flattened due to aerial bombardment, wells poisoned and up to 200,000 civilians killed in what many scholars refer to as a genocide.

Omar's late father also went by the name Nur Said Elmi and was also a prominent military commander in the Somali dictatorship, which millions fled from.

Leila, Mohamed and Sahra are all linked on Facebook, proudly leaving "hearts" on each other's photos and all are friends with alleged father Nur, who went by Nur Said, which means "light of happiness" in Arabic, which Omar has previously claimed is just a nickname for her father, although Somali sources dispute this.

Omar, Sahra, Leila, Mohamed and Elmi did not respond to The Post's requests for comment.

Omar's alleged sister Leila married a Somali man 11 years her senior in 1997 in Camden, London. The British marriage certificate, obtained by the Post, lists her father as Nur Said Elmi, a military officer from Somalia.

Multiple sources have claimed the person listed on the British legal document is Nur, Omar's father, and that all of the siblings in the US and UK also share the same mother -- Fadhuma Abukar Haji Hussein, who the Congresswoman says died when she was around two years old.

"We are a small community, and everybody talks, nothing is hidden," a friend of the Omar family told The Post.

BREAKING: Judge Molina-Gonzalez (D) wins 71% of the vote in Cook County

She's the one who freed Lawrence Reed in Chicago after 72 prior arrests before he lit Bethany McGee on fire https://t.co/6InHtoHMa8
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 5, 2026

Black women will be 87.5% of Georgia's top executive officers in 2027
"Diversity" just means no white men https://t.co/WkNgFQ29Sm
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 5, 2026

They vote. https://t.co/9EhVGDnDCC
— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) November 5, 2026

Overton @overton_news
Well, that was unexpected.

Kid Rock won over Bill Maher's audience with an epic monologue about the degradation of the modern-day Democrat Party and how progressive politics are teaching kids to hate America.

The moment the audience heard his final line, they erupted into applause.

ROCK: "A Democrat's never scared me being in office until just recently when all this crazy stuff has popped up."

"I think Bill Clinton loves the country. I believed Obama loved our country."

"Now these whack jobs are coming in here and I'm like, wait a minute... even if they don't hate the country as a whole they hate a big portion of it, and they're spewing this."

"And I believe our teachers have been a big problem, you know indoctrinating these kids for a long time now."

"We're starting to see the fruition, they're starting to raise up, I'm a victim and everything's bad and America is just a big racist piece of sh*t country."

"Bad, bad America and we're not celebrating what makes us great, which all of us being different and being together."

"Being the greatest country in the world!"

It's pretty seldom that a Republican gets cheers and applause from a liberal crowd with such an unapologetically patriotic message.

This was a great moment.

Well, that was unexpected.

Kid Rock won over Bill Maher’s audience with an epic monologue about the degradation of the modern-day Democrat Party and how progressive politics are teaching kids to hate America.

The moment the audience heard his final line, they erupted into applause.

ROCK: “A Democrat’s never scared me being in office until just recently when all this crazy stuff has popped up.”

“I think Bill Clinton loves the country. I believed Obama loved our country.”

“Now these whack jobs are coming in here and I’m like, wait a minute… even if they don’t hate the country as a whole they hate a big portion of it, and they’re spewing this.”

“And I believe our teachers have been a big problem, you know indoctrinating these kids for a long time now.”

“We’re starting to see the fruition, they’re starting to raise up, I’m a victim and everything’s bad and America is just a big racist piece of sh*t country.”

“Bad, bad America and we’re not celebrating what makes us great, which all of us being different and being together.”

“Being the greatest country in the world!”

It’s pretty seldom that a Republican gets cheers and applause from a liberal crowd with such an unapologetically patriotic message.

This was a great moment.
— Overton (@overton_news) October 31, 2026

Close it up

Posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:30 PM Comments

WaPo Sob Story: DEI Layabouts Fired by the Federal Government Can't Get Hired by Other Corporations Because They Know They're DEI Layabouts

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Sad!

Nightmare Vision @GodCloseMyEyes
please read this piece, it was so good. it's about dei officers in the federal government being cleaned out and many being unable to find new jobs because they were put on "dei watchlists" that come up in google searches in the exact same way it did for right wingers who had their lives ruined by journalists. then he starts applying for dei jobs in the private sector but can't get one because no one wants to hire someone with dei shit all over their resume. then they find a conservative activist and ask him if he's happy with all of this and his response is "these people are all anti-white, of course I'm glad they can't find jobs."

This was published late last week but I couldn't find an archived copy until now. (It's paywalled.)

Trump fired him. The 'DEI Watchlist' shamed him. Then came 500 job rejections.

Efforts to purge the government of diversity, equity and inclusion programs have taken a major toll on Black workers who now struggle to find comparable jobs.

Because you produced nothing. You earn nothing, you just cost a company money to push for more DEI layabouts to be hired and cost the company more money.

It's absurd you even had this "dream job" in the first place.

On his 368th day without a job, Dia Harris woke at 8:30, slipped a coffee pod into his Keurig and checked his iPad to see how many more rejections had come in overnight. There were two automated messages from "Meta Careers," thanking him for applying to be a program manager. "Our recruiting team will contact you if your qualifications are a strong match," Harris read. By his count, those were the 560th and 561st roles he'd sought since getting fired from the federal government.

What are your qualifications, Buddy?

After he showered, he found another message waiting: this one from the Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization that combats suicide among LGBTQ+ youth. Harris, 53, recalled thinking that the Trevor Project's "chief people officer" was the rare posting that felt like something he would be good at and actually wanted to do.
"While your qualifications and experience are truly impressive, they don't fully align ...," Harris read now, and he deleted the latest rejection unfinished.

Probably because they only hire gay people. Live by identity-based hiring, die by identity-based hiring.

He grabbed a bottle of frozen water and a zip-top bag of granola. He pulled on a maroon polo and matching baseball cap embroidered in white thread with the logo of the store where he worked part-time.

Wow, this pointless novelistic detail of the mundanities of simply getting dressed and eating really makes me identify with this unemployed grifter.

Sliding into his car, he drove in the opposite direction from the nation's capital and the limestone-and-brick federal building where he'd once found his purpose and had hoped to remain until he retired.
Since President Donald Trump returned to office, nearly 426,000 of the nation's 2.2 million civilian federal employees have left the government.

Beautiful.

....
Of the hundreds of thousands who left, 85 percent resigned or retired early through incentive programs offered by the Trump administration, a Washington Post analysis found. Thirty-two thousand full-time workers were fired. Harris was one of them.

You know that claim that government workers make when their unions press for even higher wages than the already-inflated wages they're currently receiving? That you have to pay them more because they can just walk out the door and get much higher rates of pay in the private sector?

Any thoughts about that perennial claims, WaPo?

Harris was the first chief equity officer for the Administration for Children and Families, or ACF, a large agency in the Department of Health and Human Services that helps vulnerable Americans with foster care, home energy needs and early education. He was among more than 200 employees targeted for dismissal by DOGE after Trump issued an order to rid the government of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which he declared were divisive and destructive and "would have ruined our country."
Diversity programs and initiatives have been around for decades but became much more common after the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Businesses and federal and local governments adopted antibias trainings, employee resource groups and recruiting programs and created new jobs, including Harris's federal position.

The mass embrace of DEI programs felt to Harris like the capstone of his professional life, despite growing opposition from many on the political right who portrayed DEI efforts as reverse racism that disadvantaged White people.

I enjoy the fact that the WaPo treats this as some kind of conspiracy theory or contested claim, when in fact the entire point of DEI is to push for the hiring of non-whites, non-males, and non-straights only.

There is no "DEI for white people."

The president's order accelerated that opposition, triggering a rapid retreat from DEI policies throughout government and the corporate world -- and, Harris feared, devastating the field in which he built his career.

It's not a career, it's a make-work welfare program for people who are otherwise unemployalbe.

...

Harris's job search was made harder by his membership in an even smaller group: He'd been named, with 92 others -- two-thirds of them Black -- on a public website called the "DEI Watchlist." Run by a little-known conservative group with ties to the Heritage Foundation, the site claimed to expose "behind-the-scenes bureaucrats who push divisive DEI agendas that undermine merit, fairness, and accountability."

A full page devoted to Harris shared his federal salary and employment history alongside a smiling photo of him wearing a blue button-down.

Harris had been out of government for more than a year, but the site was still the first result when anyone Googled his name. One prospective employer confided to him that the watch list made him unhirable. Harris often checked with friends and colleagues also named on the list, and most of them were still out of work,

...

Harris received no severance. Now, his $16-an-hour paycheck was barely enough to cover utilities. It was supplemented by a second part-time job and help from his 71-year-old mother, who'd recently picked up extra hours at the Hallmark shop where she'd worked for the past two years. But he was also using his 401(k) to pay the mortgage and his credit card bills, and that would be empty by next year.

Pulling into a long, low strip mall, he parked and closed his eyes. He didn't have to clock in for another 15 minutes. He told himself to forget the Dia Harris who'd earned two degrees; the sought-after HR expert who'd drawn six-figure salaries from Fortune 500 companies; the little boy who grew up in North Philadelphia eating blocks of yellow cheese from the government and who swore he'd never work part-time jobs like his mother.

...

IN THE LAST DAYS OF 2024, as his colleagues swapped rumors that the incoming president was going to delete DEI from the government, Harris and his boss came up with a plan to save his job.

As chief equity officer, Harris was tasked with ensuring that the workforce of the ACF resembled the Americans it served. Before Trump's inauguration, he switched to become a "senior advisor" in the Office of Community Services, which distributes funds, diapers and legal services to the poor. He saw it as more or less the same worthy mission: bringing in good people and helping them help the neediest Americans. Who, he wondered, could find fault with that?

Obviously this is the same scam we've seen throughout government and universities where they just create a vague fake new title and assign that title to DEI officers, who continue doing DEI bullshit and getting paid six figures for it.

Then, a few hours after Trump was sworn in, Harris was scanning one of 26 first-day executive orders -- "Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing" -- when he noticed a date in the eighth paragraph. The president was ordering the termination of all DEI positions "in existence on November 4, 2024." Uh-oh, he thought.

Seems like Trump foresaw your next grifter maneuver and preemptively blocked it.

Posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:30 PM Comments

Despite the Blue Wave, Blue States Voted to Restrict Girls' Sports for Girls
Plus: The Coming Democrat "Civil War"?

—Disinformation Expert Ace

And the angry trans extremists are, get this, angry about it.

This is the NYT so prepare yourself for some grumbling.

In the same election that brought strong showings for Democratic candidates around the country, voters in three states chose to bar transgender athletes from competing on female sports teams.
The results, including in at least one state where Democrats are dominant, suggested that many voters do not view accommodations for trans athletes as part of a broad Democratic agenda. The results also appeared likely to inspire similar campaigns in future elections on an issue that has rarely been tested at the ballot box.

Since 2020, lawmakers in Republican-led states across the country have enacted laws limiting how transgender people can participate in public life. But this election was the first time voters were asked to consider new restrictions through statewide ballot measures, and they approved many of them. The margins were large in Arizona and Nebraska, and narrower in Washington, where Democrats dominate. In Colorado, votes were still being counted on Thursday in a ballot measure over the same issue.

Supporters of the initiatives said they hoped the sports issue would be put directly to voters in other Democrat-led states. The results could also mean that decisions around broader rights for transgender people will be put before voters, political strategists said.

"To every female athlete who wondered whether her voice mattered: tonight, Washington heard you,'' Brian Heywood, the Seattle-area hedge fund founder who financed the Washington initiative, said in a statement.

For supporters of the restrictions, the results felt like vindication.

Polls have shown that a solid majority of Americans, including roughly half of Democrats, think that transgender girls and women should not play on girls' and women's sports teams. Many believe that trans athletes hold a physical edge, and that their participation prevents others from having a fair chance to win, the polls indicate.

Over the past six years, 27 states enacted laws restricting the participation of transgender students in sports starting in kindergarten or middle school, extending in many cases to college. The Supreme Court upheld such laws last June.

But in nearly two dozen Democrat-led states, including Colorado and Washington, legislatures have taken no such action. That is why Erin Lee, executive director of Protect Kids Colorado, a parent advocacy group sponsoring the initiative, wanted to put the question on the ballot in Colorado.

By Thursday afternoon, with more than 80 percent of ballots counted, the vote in Colorado on a ban on trans athletes in girls sports was close, with about 53 percent of voters favoring the measure. A second Colorado ballot measure that would ban gender-transition-related surgeries for minors, was also close, with 52 percent of voters in favor as the vote counting continued.

"My hope is that we can be the example of a blue state where your legislature is not following the will of the people," she said. "Where we, the people, can do it ourselves, and hopefully encourage others to follow suit."

Despite the fact that this issue was put to the people and the people voted to keep girls' sports for actual girls, the incoming Democrat governor of Colorado says to hell with what the people voted for, Men In Girls' Changing Rooms is a Sacred Right.

Well, that didn't take long. Less than 24-hours after Colorado elected a new Democrat governor, he's already suggesting he wants to thumb his nose at the voters who passed several ballot initiatives progressives don't like.

...

[Incoming Democrat governor] Weiser said today that these initiatives will need a long, hard look once he takes office.

Prop 134 would bar young transgender athletes from participating on K-12 or collegiate sports teams that match their gender identities. And Prop 135 would bar people under 18 from receiving gender-affirming surgeries...
Weiser, who was elected Tuesday by a wide margin in the governor's race, said officials would need to work "to understand the will of the voters."

In other words, he tends to carefully scan the very clear statement of the people to conjure up ambiguities, and then claim those invented ambiguities render the people's judgement completely void.

"It's important that we recognize that sometimes, something is passed and it is incomplete. It is not administrable," Weiser said during a post-election news conference Wednesday at the Capitol in Denver. "... Anytime you have a ballot measure that is statutory, it is a natural and, I believe, appropriate role for the legislature to say, 'What are the adjustments that need to be added?' "

For the proposal to bar young people from playing on sports teams that don't match their biological sex, for example, Weiser said: "I don't believe it would be acceptable to Colorado to have every student athlete to have to go through full-body examinations or other invasions of privacy."

This is the standard lie pushed by Trans Extremists -- that there's no way we could possibly tell who is really a girl and who is really a boy unless we "force girls to drop their pants in front of state genital inspectors."

Except... there are paper records of children's sexes. Even if a student "really believes he's a girl," doctors still have to know if he's more likely to suffer from testicular cancer or ovarian cancer.

Or does cancer Respecc the Pronouns of Its Victims?

And, of course: The notion that transgenders' real sex cannot be determined by simply looking at them or hearing their voices is preposterous cope.

Below: Leftists complain about "girls having to show their genitals" and trans extremists whine about being "betrayed" by their leftwing allies.

Bonus: Democrats are headed for a "civil war."

America has elected a slew of local, state and federal officials more left-wing than ever before.
Jeffries's own caucus now contains at least eight members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) -- an increase from two during the previous term. Among them is a woman who advocated for 'a world without prisons or police' and demanded the US 'literally, abolish the border.'

His colleague in the Senate -- fellow Brooklynite Chuck Schumer, the next Senate Majority Leader -- will have to contend with Abdul El-Sayed in his ranks, arguably among the most far-left Senators ever elected. And he almost had a fully-fledged member of the DSA by his side: Angie Nixon narrowly lost her Florida Senate race.

It is all music to Ashik Siddique's ears.

Siddique, the co-chair of the DSA's national political committee, told the Daily Mail that Tuesday's vote was just the beginning for his party. He pointed to the triumph of his rainbow-headed comrade Ashley Herrmann, 38, who even flipped a Republican-held state senate seat near Tampa, Florida.

'These results are not a flash in the pan,' he said, noting that DSA membership has surged from 6,000 in 2016 to 130,000 today. 'Democratic Socialists of America are building an enduring organization that can lead an enduring movement.

'We're now seeing DSA candidates win re-election to second or third terms across the country. We ran more candidates in this cycle than ever before. I think there were at least 200 candidates at many levels of government, from local up to Congress. So we're really leading the conversation and helping to shift public opinion on a wide range of issues.'

Siddique said that the DSA was pushing policies leftwards -- noting that on the eve of the election, even Donald Trump was discussing ending military aid to Israel.

'Nobody thought 10 years ago that abolishing ICE was a popular sentiment when we were saying it, but now it has popular support,' he said. 'When we said 'Free Palestine,' that was not a popular sentiment among Americans 10 years ago, but now it is, and majorities of Americans across parties support a full arms embargo against the state of Israel.'

DSA candidates largely ran on affordable housing, Medicare for All, childcare for all, moratoriums on AI data centers and abolishing ICE, Siddique said.

'These are very popular things, and when you look at the range of issues our candidates ran on, it's clear that we've been driving the conversation and the direction of the political left more broadly,' he added.

But what will happen when his candidates walk into the chamber in January and come face to face with the establishment? Is there a civil war brewing?

Siddique chuckled.

I don't know if there'll be a civil war. The Democrat Party is made up of two factions. No, not socialists and moderates. It's made up of Go-Slow Communists and Go-Fast Communists.

But they're all communists. They all know where they want to go. They just have different opinions on how hard they can charge to get there.

With the DSA temporarily holding the whip-hand, and proving that, at least for this moment, the public won't punish the Go-Fast Communists, the Go-Slow Communists will all fall in line and support the Go-Fast Communists. With reservations, but support them they will.

Close it up

Posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:30 PM Comments

Sen. Harriet Hageman: With What Few Days We Have Left Being in Control of Congress, We Should Go Hog-Wild and Push the Republican Agenda to the Max

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Well, sure, I'd like this.

She wants to use budget reconciliation to fund the priorities, like border security, that Democrats intend to defund.

But John Thune and his Confederacy of Cucks will not do that. It would upset their liberal sex-partners!

One of the few House Republicans to win a U.S. Senate seat in Tuesday's blue-wave election is urging her GOP colleagues to aggressively use the remaining days of the lame-duck Congress this year to pass multi-year budgets to protect agencies that Democrats want to defund and to codify President Donald Trump cuts to foreign aid that the left wants to restore.
Rep. Harriet Hageman, soon to be sworn in as Wyoming's next U.S. senator, told Just the News on Thursday night that she is urging fellow Republicans to replicate their last budget reconciliation law that funded Trump's Homeland Security agenda until the end of his presidency and codify other GOP priorities and foil Democrats' ambitions in the next Congress.

Such a move would require only 51 votes in the Senate, bypassing the blockade of a filibuster rule, then allow Trump to use his veto pen to thwart Democrat efforts in the next Congress to overturn his priorities, thus securing them through the 2028 election.

"I think we ought to do another reconciliation package and fund some of these programs and agencies that we know that the Democrats are going to target," Hageman said during a wide-ranging interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show.

And, just as importantly, she wants to defund by law the useless or anti-American bureaucrats and NGOs that the Democrats are determined to fund again.

Hageman suggested border and immigration budget items, the Justice Department and FBI priorities, and codifying the massive cuts to wasteful federal spending and the USAID foreign aid budget that Elon Musk's DOGE team implemented. Democrats have made clear they want to restore most of USAID's budget cuts.

"We need to make sure that the cutting of those programs stays permanent," she explained.

"Part of the reason we lost the majority is voters didn't think we worked that hard," [Congressman Randy Fine] also said. "They saw the Senate not even trying to pass the Save America Act, and they said, 'What's the point in having them?' Well, we've got two months left, and we should use every minute to the maximum advantage that we have."

Sounds good. Unfortunately, as Ron DeSantis points out, the current Cuck Class of Congress "men" have no desire to do anything that will make their liberal friends, wives, mistresses, and gay prostitutes angry at them.

...Well, here's the problem...If you're gonna do huge conservative things that are gonna reorient the country for a generation, fine.
BUT I SAW NO INDICATION THAT THE CURRENT GROUP OF REPUBLICAN SENATORS WERE INTERESTED IN DOING THAT TYPE OF BOLD, CONSERVATIVE CHANGE...

He also pointed out the necessary things Congress"men" should have done -- but refused to do.

Why haven't we done:

* immigration - shut off H1B visas
* codified Trump's immigration executive orders
* stripped immigration jurisdiction from the federal courts over deportation cases

Video at the link.

Boy I'm sure glad that John Thune respected the filibuster. Because Democrats are about to end it, just as they come into power.

That may not be true-- they might not do it now, because Trump still has a veto that can only be overcome with a two-thirds supermajority in both houses.

But they'll do it the moment they have Congress and the Presidency.

Boy oh boy, I sure wish we could have enacted our actual agenda when we had the Congress and the Presidency.

Thanks, Johnnyboy!

Posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 01:30 PM Comments

Now That Democrats Captured Texas, They Can Get Rid of the Electoral College By Passing a Law That Texas Will Vote for the "National Popular Vote Winner" No Matter Who Texans Actually Prefer

—Disinformation Expert Ace

The National Popular Vote Compact is an effort to get rid of the electoral college without the hurdle of a constitutional amendment. Leftwing states have signed up for the compact, which says that when enough states join the compact to control a majority of the electoral votes, they are all obligated to cast their electoral college votes for the national popular vote winner, even if the voters in the state cast their votes decisively for the other candidate.

To be honest, I slept on this and didn't consider it a big risk because the leftwing states could not actually control a majority of the 540 electoral votes. So, I thought, this will never come to pass.

Except the left just captured Texas.

So now it's possible.

How about fundamentally changing the way we elect the president of the United States?
No constitutional amendment. No two-thirds vote in Congress. No ratification by three-fourths of the states. And certainly no meaningful national debate about whether Americans actually want to abandon the presidential election system we've used for more than two centuries.

They may be able to accomplish the whole thing with a handful of votes in several newly Democratic state legislatures.

And thanks to Tuesday's election results, they're closer than ever.

...

The compact doesn't take effect until participating states collectively control at least 270 electoral votes, the number required to elect a president.

As of today, 18 states and Washington, D.C., have signed on.

Together, they control 222 electoral votes.

They need just 48 more.

Tuesday's Elections May Have Given Democrats Everything They Need

This is where the results of the 2026 midterms become enormously consequential.

Democrats appear to have gained control of both legislative chambers and the governor's office in five important presidential battleground states.

And none of those states currently belongs to the compact.

Look at the electoral votes:

Pennsylvania: 19

Michigan: 15

Arizona: 11

Wisconsin: 10

Nevada: 6

That's 61 electoral votes.

Add those to the existing 222, and the compact would control 283 electoral votes.

Hi everybody. Happy Friday. I apologize for starting off with this bad news.

Posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 12:15 PM Comments

MORNING RANT - The Corporate Follies: Wing Stop Decided to Become “a Tech Company that also Sells Wings,” and Puzzlingly, It’s Now Struggling to Sell Wings

—Buck Throckmorton

News that a quick-service restaurant chain is suffering from a persistent decline in sales is not necessarily a significant story. At any given time, some restaurant chains are growing, some are stable, and some are in decline. The headlines about Wing Stop’s struggles only caught my eye because there was one near a former office of mine. I liked Wing Stop’s food and I was a frequent customer when there was a convenient location. Now, reading about its current problems, I see that Wing Stop is yet another mismanaged company wishing to be something it’s not. In this case, it’s a fast-food restaurant chain trying to re-imagine itself in the spirit of Silicon Valley.

Quite simply, the wing joint adopted a “digital-first strategy” in 2021, but many customers refused to play along as Wing Stop strove to avoid human interaction with its patrons. As customers were repelled by gimmicks that made ordering food more difficult, Wing Stop’s executives doubled down on their vision of making Wing Stop a tech company. They continued to reject their legacy model of serving wings and fries to customers who simply walk up to the counter and place an order.

Wing Stop’s current predicament is that same-store sales have declined significantly for six quarters in a row, with a cumulative decline exceeding 30%. That is a catastrophic level of lost revenue.

Amidst this free fall, Wing Stop’s CEO, Michael Skipworth, remains hell-bent on remaking the company into a digital company that rejects cash and customer interactions. In an interview with Restaurant Business Online in April 2024, Skipworth called Wing Stop “a technology company that sells chicken wings.”

A 2024 article in Nation’s Restaurant News quoted Skipworth as remaining committed to completely eliminating customer interactions, stating that “The company has a goal of digitizing 100% of transactions.”

An article in Nation’s Restaurant News last month discussed how proud Mr. Skipworth is about making its kiosk ordering system slower than ordering at a counter. He boasted that customers don’t feel rushed at a kiosk, therefore they spend about 50% more time placing an order than it takes to order from a human at a counter, and that the prompts and slow ordering process can lead to incremental menu items being ordered via a kiosk.

Slowing down the ordering process for fast food seems like a rather bold strategy. But what about the customers who’d prefer to just walk up to the counter and quickly place their order with a live human? What about the people stuck waiting behind a slow person navigating the kiosk and all its upsells? What about the people with cash in their pockets but lacking a credit card? The decline in same-store sales almost certainly includes many patrons who now view the ordering process as a time-consuming hassle, and then never came back.

Even worse, the fact that Wing Stop’s CEO dismisses its core product as being an afterthought to tech is a reminder of the poisoned philosophy that has captured so many C-Suites. That mindset is:

• Products are interchangeable units. In too many CEO minds, there is no difference between a chicken wing or an airplane seat or an appliance. Those are all just generic products to which business school wizardry is applied.

• Customer service is not considered a part of the product being sold.

• Staffing to assist customers is considered an intolerable expense.

• Customers are seen as remitters of electronic payments rather than as valued patrons.

• Product quality is not a primary focus.

If I were on the Board of a company (let’s call it “Acme Widget” ) and I inquired of the CEO what the mission of the company is, the answer I would need to hear is something like “Acme delivers shareholder value by selling the best widgets available, while providing an excellent customer experience.” If the CEO replied that his vision is to pivot Acme into a technology company that just happens to sell widgets, I would seek to replace him.

It’s almost funny that concurrent with its plummeting revenue, Wing Stop is boasting that its Q3 2026 digital sales are up to a record 74%! Percentages are funny that way. By running off cash and counter-service customers, the percentage of digital customer sales necessarily had to increase, even if the actual dollar amount didn’t.

To be fair, ordering fast food via an app is quicker and easier for loyal customers than having to order at a counter every visit. There is a chain sandwich shop near my office from whom I routinely order my usual lunch in just a matter of seconds via an app. I appreciate the convenience, and it’s imperative that fast food joints have an app for their loyal customers. But I refuse to download an app and add payment info for every eatery that I occasionally visit, especially not on my first visit.

Wing Stop has chosen to run off all but its most frequent customers in an effort to become a tech company. That does not sound like a restaurant growth strategy, nor a way to attract new customers, but it does sound like a contagious business fad that can wreck a company.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

Posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM Comments

Mid-Morning Art Thread

—CBD

The Cliff at Etretat after the Storm
Gustave Courbet

Posted by CBD at 09:30 AM Comments

The Morning Report — 11/6/26

—J.J. Sefton

Good morning kids. Three days later and my anxiousness about the future has not subsided. In fact, given who has now secured a majority in Congress and in many state houses across the country, including places I had thought were relatively if not absolutely safe from the mass wave of insanity that has swept across the land, this item does not exactly fill me with strength and confidence.

A despicable Nov. 8 protest against Jewish-owned restaurants in Philadelphia proves that the alleged bright line between antizionism and antisemitism is a dirty lie.
Philly bicycle activism group On Your Left is launching a bike-by protest in support of Boycott CookNSolo drive to shut down six restaurants in the tony Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, all owned by Jews.

“These Zionist establishments must go! Not in our city!” On Your Left demands.

These eateries, it says, must “die,” along with the “political ideology of Zionism.”

Zionists? Of the four restaurant owners called out by name for death or expulsion, one is Israeli-American; the other three are American Jews, but that’s all boycotters need to know.

One target, Marti Lieberman, who runs a popular mac’n’cheese spot, explains that her business has nothing to do with Jews, Israel or Zionism — except that she sometimes

So, for the boycotters, simply being Jews is enough to make these people “disgusting humans” who should be driven out of business.

More damning still: The protest date, Nov. 8, coincides closely with the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht — the “Night of Broken Glass,” when Nazi thugs burned more than 1,400 synagogues and destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses.

The organizers admit they knew this, but excuse themselves their event is the day before Kristallnacht.

They even have the gall to call their critics “cynical” for conflating antizionism and antisemitism — even as they’re treating all Jews as Zionists and therefore subhuman.

And on the eve of the blackest days in the history of pogroms: They’re barely even pretending not to be Nazis anymore.

So yes this is an absolutely horrific story but what does this have to do with last Tuesday and what can it portend for the average American?

Well you can bet your ass that every one of these bastards on wheels is a Democrat Socialist and for the past three years have been cheering and ululating with glee at the video footage of Jewish babies roasted alive in front of their gang-raped parents before they too were butchered . . . pausing only to cheer on Luigi Mangione before pissing on the grave of Charlie Kirk.

And now come January we have this coming up...

Last night, Americans made a clear call for accountability and affordability. A body politic cannot recover until its harms have been treated and its wounds have been healed. Crimes against our people and our Constitution must be answered for. The historic abuses of the last two years must be prevented from happening again. …
Additional examples include Sen. Chuck Schumer stating, “You have to go after the corruption” and that Democrats would “launch investigations, take him to court and entangle him in legislative razor wire.” Sen. Ed Markey posted on X, “They are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing.” Celebrity and longtime Trump hater Rosie O’Donnell crowed, “The Trump regime is over… Let the investigations begin, people. This is a glorious day… We’ve had enough.”... The post-Trump era begins now.

Crimes against our people and our Constitution must be answered for. What she means is, Trump and MAGA Americans have been an unforgiveable obstacle not only to a Hillary presidency – for which she will never forgive us – but also to permanent, one-party Democrat power, and they must be punished. (The “Constitution” part of her statement is purely for show, to maintain the illusion that Democrats respect the Constitution. In actuality, they see it as a “living document” which should be modified or rolled back as needed to accommodate the Left’s lust for power.)...This is the party, you will remember, that has vowed to defund the police and abolish ICE. It is the party that throws open the prisons to release felons of color back on the streets. The party that threw open the border to millions of illegal aliens to change voter demographics. The party that fights tooth and nail to make voter ID unnecessary, if not forbidden, at the polls. The party that defends looting as reparations and rioting as the “language of the unheard.” The party that gleefully celebrates the murder of Charlie Kirk and made a folk hero out of the assassin of healthcare CEO Brian Johnson. This is the party that voted into the Senate a Muslim Brotherhood operative, that covers for a Muslim Congresswoman guilty of immigration fraud, that welcomes America-hating socialists into its “big tent.” The party that physically assaults conservative students on campus. That carries out obvious widespread voter fraud but accuses Trump of wanting to eliminate or rig elections.

Yes they are going to go after President Trump and his entire cabinet, advisers, allies and staff. And as we had discussed at length over the last few weeks the disgusting remarks and intentions of this Elissa Slutnik SLotktn whatever in doing everything in her power to discourage any young person from seeking a job in the remaining two years of the Trump administration but more crucially in even thinking about being aligned with the MAGA movement and conservatism.

So Psaki-Psircling back to what happened in Philadelphia, all of the above takes on particularly sinister undertones and even overtones insofar as the real "enablers" of the evil DOnald Trump are not his advisers and Cabinet but all of us who voted to put him in office not once but three times in a row 2020 turning out the way it did.

So, if you want to take Hillary's, Wyden's, Schumer's and all the rest of their blather to the logical conclusion, if you want to prevent another Donald Trump from ever appearing again, the only solution for the Democrat Left is to do what their predecessors and kindred political spirits in Germany did 80 years ago, that is have a FINAL solution for all of us who voted for Trump and against them.

Given what the Democrat/Leftists have unleashed on America since Trump descended the golden Trump Tower escalator 11 years ago and really since their accursed party came into existence, there really is nothing to stop them, or is there?

Democrat Richard Ojeda, who defeated Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), in Tuesday’s midterm elections, expressed a willingness to physically assault President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, saying he would be happy to go to jail for doing so. “Stephen Miller needs to be thumped. That guy’s a friggin’ worm,” Ojeda said. “I would be willing to go to jail for. I mean, how much would I get for just cracking him a couple times?”

Meh, given who takes control come January, and perhaps in 2029, this goon needn't lose a wink of sleep. Just freaking wow...

On Thursday, November 5, Newsom announced that he would commute the death sentences of all 548 inmates on California's death row to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The sweeping decision, made during his final months in office, affects some of the state's most notorious convicted murderers and has sparked outrage among the public, the victims' families, and prosecutors.
For families who spent years seeking justice, the horrible decision raises a troubling question: Should one governor's personal opposition to the death penalty outweigh the sentences handed down by juries, reviewed by the courts, and a death penalty system that California voters chose to retain in 2016? I do not think so at all.

And look what else they have up their sleeves!

After all New York candidates endorsed by the far-left Democratic Socialists of America were elected during the midterms, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is likely to face renewed pressure to adopt a more hard-left law and order strategy.

Well, ICE is already in their crosshairs. Not just the persecution of ICE officers for the crimes against humanity of securing our borders and deporting illegal alien invaders but now the actual wholesale abolition and dismantling of the agency itself.Yeah that's the ticket!

Convicted Death Squad Leader Ashrafuzzaman Khan Sighting in Texas
Will the U.S. pursue justice for Khan’s victims, or will it continue to serve as his safe haven?

\Well if the Leftists lose this fiend, there are plenty of Luigi Mangiones, Antifarians and BLMsters around to pick up the slack.

And by the way, Mangione's cousin won an election on Tuesday. Meh, it's Baltimore so shithole's gonna shitole. But still, doesn't that just put the cherry on the parfait.

With all of that and all the rest of the nightmare links in the wake of the midterms and before, I nevertheless hope you all have a great weekend!

God bless America and give us the strength and wisdom to carry on.

Posted by J.J. Sefton at 07:00 AM Comments

Daily Tech News 6 November 2026

—Pixy Misa

Top Story

Well, that's dumb: A configuration flaw in certainly flavours of Linux - most of them uncommon but the list includes OpenWRT and Alpine - allows anyone to log in using SSH to account that explicitly forbid logins. (Bleeping Computer)

You can disable logins in several ways, one of which is to replace the password hash on the account with * - an invalid hash that can never match any password.

A patch to OpenSSH in 2016 made it always try to hash the password even though it knew there was no way it could match, to prevent sidechain attacks.

And then it all went wrong:
The problem is that the musl C library's crypt() function also returns * when password hashing fails, including when a submitted password exceeds its 256-byte limit.
Because null is too hard.
This means an attacker can submit an oversized password and cause OpenSSH to compare the returned * against the account's stored *, resulting in a successful login.
Ouch.

It isn't open season; the bug is more specific than that. But the default AWS template for Alpine Linux is affected.

Tech News

Well, that's dumb, and worthy of dismissal for cause: Several staffers at the White House are using personal electronic devices with VPN exit nodes running on them. (Krebs on Security)

A lot of paid services block known VPNs, so VPNs pay users to host exit nodes on their residential devices that aren't blocked.

Bringing such a device to work when you work at the White House is beyond retarded.
Oops: Paraguay just went bankrupt. (AP)

Or at least its largest bank did, holding accounts for 60% of the country's adult population. The crisis has the Paraguayan president's fingerprints all over it, and he's unlikely to survive. And I don't just mean politically.
Well, that's dumb, but also expected: Congressthing Yassamin Ansari has called for a ban on artificial superintelligence, something that doesn't exist and isn't even defined. (Tom's Hardware)

Well, that was easy. Why don't you ban unicorns while you're at it?
NASA has announced its X-70 experimental aircraft. (NASA)

With a computer-generated image shrouded in computer-generated mist.
The X-70 Fractal has a takeoff weight of 10,000 pounds and is designed to cruise at Mach .75.
Smol.

Also, slo.
Claude has been tuned to be less obstreperous when tasked with helping to create a game that resembles another game in some respects. (Tom's Hardware)

Direct copying of copyrighted stuff is still out - Anthropic doesn't want to get sued... Again - but referencing an existing game in a spec no longer triggers the restriction.
SpaceX plans to build more datacenter capacity over the next 18 months than Google. (Tom's Hardware)

To be clear, more than Google has, ever.
Relativity: My order from the local hardware store arrived. On a pallet. Half a ton of it. About (let's see) one and a half cubic yards of pine bark mulch, plus ten big bags of potting mix for Australian native plants which don't like the regular stuff, and various other gardeny items.

My knees hurt already.

Anyway, total cost was about the same as a 2TB SSD these days.

Also the rest of the plants I ordered online showed up. Not as tall as the ones I got previously but intact and healthy. Pink and purple bottlebreesh included.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: One way ticket to a Mobius strip.

Close it up

Posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM Comments

Saturday Evening Movie Post [moviegique]: You Can See Everything

—Open Blogger

Hobby Thread - November 7, 2026 [TRex]

—Open Blogger

Ace of Spades Pet Thread, November 7

—K.T.

Gardening, Home and Nature Thread, Nov. 7

—K.T.

It's getting hard to keep all the streams of messaging straight now

—K.T.

AoSHQ Weekly Prayer List

—CBD

Daily Tech News 7 November 2026

—Pixy Misa

Alas, Poor ONT. I Knew Him Horatio

—WeirdDave

Rough Week Cafe

—Disinformation Expert Ace

The Last Good Generation: Gen X

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Trump vs. the Bureaucracy

—Disinformation Expert Ace

The Week In Woke

—Disinformation Expert Ace

WaPo Sob Story: DEI Layabouts Fired by the Federal Government Can't Get Hired by Other Corporations Because They Know They're DEI Layabouts

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Despite the Blue Wave, Blue States Voted to Restrict Girls' Sports for GirlsPlus: The Coming Democrat "Civil War"?

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Sen. Harriet Hageman: With What Few Days We Have Left Being in Control of Congress, We Should Go Hog-Wild and Push the Republican Agenda to the Max

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Now That Democrats Captured Texas, They Can Get Rid of the Electoral College By Passing a Law That Texas Will Vote for the "National Popular Vote Winner" No Matter Who Texans Actually Prefer

—Disinformation Expert Ace

MORNING RANT - The Corporate Follies: Wing Stop Decided to Become “a Tech Company that also Sells Wings,” and Puzzlingly, It’s Now Struggling to Sell Wings

—Buck Throckmorton

Mid-Morning Art Thread

—CBD

The Morning Report — 11/6/26

—J.J. Sefton

Daily Tech News 6 November 2026

—Pixy Misa

Despite the Blue Wave, Blue States Voted to Restrict Girls' Sports for Girls
Plus: The Coming Democrat "Civil War"?