Quick Hits
—Disinformation Expert Ace
Fani Willis is ordering Darius "Sweetdick" Honeycum to refuse to answer Congress' questions about their affair and the cover-up.
Fulton County DA Fani Willis sent a scathing letter to the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee demanding that her lover, Nathan Wade, whom she had hired to spearhead the prosecution of former President Donald Trump on Georgia RICO charges, should not have to answer certain questions before Congress, because the proceedings could compel Wade to "improperly divulge confidential information."Willis contacted the committee's chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), ahead of Wade's deposition slated to take place Tuesday, arguing that it could interfere with the Trump case.
On X, the House Judiciary GOP posted a copy of the Democrat DA's letter addressed to Jordan as well as a separate directive she sent Wade, ordering him not to speak about the particulars of the Trump prosecution.
...
In May, Jordan sought Wade's closed-door testimony after asking him for records related to his employment under Willis and the undisclosed affair the two had engaged in during the Trump investigation. Wade is scheduled this week to tell investigators in Washington all he knows about the Georgia election interference case against Trump and his allies.
Could this be the first post featuring both Darius "Sweetdick" Honeycum and Madison Cornbread?
While vice chairwoman of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, former Rep. Liz Cheney used an encrypted phone app to directly and indirectly communicate around defense counsel --and possibly ethical rules -- with a witness who would later change her testimony in shocking fashion, according to evidence obtained by congressional investigators and Just the News.Cheney's Signal communications with witness Cassidy Hutchinson on June 6, 2022 and her friend, Alyssa Farah Griffin, were recently obtained by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., chairman of the House Administration oversight subcommittee that has identified significant problems with the original Democrat-run inquiry into the Jan. 6 incident.
The communications are now raising fresh concerns about the ethical conduct of that Democrat-run investigation. At the time of the communication, Hutchinson was represented by attorney Stefan Passantino, who told Just the News he did not authorize the contacts with Cheney and was not aware of them until contacted by Just the News.
Cheney is a licensed lawyer in Washington D.C. where the DC Bar rules state unequivocally that "a lawyer shall not communicate or cause another to communicate about the subject of the representation with a person known to be represented by another lawyer in the matter, unless the lawyer has the prior consent of the lawyer representing such other person or is authorized by law or a court order to do so."
Loudermilk told Just the News that the communications indicate that Cheney defied her ethical responsibilities and may have influenced a witness outside of her lawyer's presence, eventually causing Hutchinson to switch lawyers.
America's Favorite Unspoilt Maiden Olivia Nuzzi bragged about her hot sexting seshes with RFKJr., claims her jilted beta soyboy cu*k ex-fiance Ryan Lizza.
Olivia Nuzzi said RFK Jr. wanted to 'possess and impregnate' her during sexting tryst, her ex claims
Journalist Olivia Nuzzi claimed that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wanted to "possess," "control" and "impregnate" her during their sexting tryst, according to an explosive court filing by Nuzzi's ex Ryan Lizza.
I think he was just copying and pasting the lyrics to "Closer."
The court documents, which Nuzzi's team said were "full of salacious and irrelevant claims," came in response to a no contact order that Nuzzi filed against Lizza in which she claimed that he hacked her devices, according to the Wall Street Journal.Nuzzi -- "New York" magazine's acclaimed Washington correspondent -- had been engaged to Lizza -- Politico's chief Washington correspondent -- until the revelations about Nuzzi's relationship with RFK Jr.
Lizza, 50, said in the filing that everything he knew about the relationship was a result of what Nuzzi, 31, told him, according to the Journal.Lizza said Nuzzi also described the relationship as "toxic," "unhealthy," "psychotic" and "indefensible."
Nancy Pelosi says she hasn't spoken to Biden since she prison-shanked him, but says she's "prayerful" about it. She's full of something but it's not prayer.
Nancy Pelosi has admitted she still has not spoken to Joe Biden since her crucial intervention in July led to his decision to drop out of the presidential race, following a disastrously frail performance in a debate against Donald Trump.The former speaker of the House told the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland on the Politics Weekly America podcast that although she continues to regard the US president as a great friend and longtime political ally, she felt a cold political calculation was necessary after the evidence of Biden's failing mental acuity.
I thought the cover story was that he remains "as cogent as ever," but he was forced out only because of "the polling." Are they abandoning this cover story now?
"Not since then, no," she said when asked if she had spoken to Biden since. "But I'm prayerful about it."She added: "I have the greatest respect for him. I think he's one of the great consequential presidents of our country," she said. "I think his legacy had to be protected. I didn't see that happening in the course that it was on, the election was on. My call was just to: 'Let's get on a better course.' He will make the decision as to what that is. And he made that decision. But I think he has some unease because we've been friends for decades.
"Elections are decisions," she added. "You decide to win. I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as president of the United States or in any other capacity ... So when you make a decision, you have to make every decision in favor of winning ... and the most important decision of all is the candidate."
DOJ Tells Four Police, Fire Departments That It's Racist To Expect Employees To Know Basic MathFirefighter test asked job candidates how many 60-foot hoses they'd need to bring if a fire was 350 feet away.
That's not even math. That's just counting.
By Luke Rosiak
The Biden-Harris Department of Justice has undertaken a slew of lawsuits against local police and fire departments alleging that it is racist to require hires entrusted with public safety to know basic math.
The lawsuits undermine Kamala Harris's attempts to brand herself as a moderate in the final weeks of the presidential campaign, with the suits both suggesting a dim view of blacks by the administration, and employing the theory of "disparate impact," the radical theory that holds that anytime there are statistical racial disparities, racism must be the cause -- even if no one can explain how.
On Friday, the DOJ's civil rights unit filed a lawsuit against South Bend, Indiana, saying "South Bend uses a written examination that discriminates against Black applicants and a physical fitness test that discriminates against female applicants," The Daily Wire previously reported.
But that was just one of the lawsuits, which claim that tests are racist because blacks fail them at a higher percentage than whites, and require cash awards to be paid to those blacks who failed them. Most blacks generally pass the tests, and the lawsuits do not explain how the tests can be racist against only some blacks. Blacks who passed the tests are excluded from the financial payouts.
Last week, Durham, North Carolina settled with the DOJ, saying blacks failed the tests required to become a firefighter more often, and "Employers should identify and eliminate practices that have a disparate impact based on race." It said the Durham Fire Department must pay nearly a million dollars to people who failed the test, and hire up to 16 of them.
AdvertisementWhile the DOJ said the tests were not relevant to actually being a good firefighter, an online practice test suggests that it is directly relevant, that people could die if such firefighters were hired. One question asks if a building is 350 feet away, how many 60-foot hoses would be needed.
Nevada's women's volleyball team voted to forfeit their match against San Jose State University due to the presence of a transgender player, defying their school's statement that the game would proceed.Key Details:
The University of Nevada women's volleyball team voted to forfeit a game scheduled for October 26 against San Jose State University, protesting against competing with transgender athlete Blaire Fleming.
Nevada's athletic department initially announced that the team would play the match, citing compliance with NCAA and Mountain West rules, but players were not consulted.
The team's captain, Sia Liilii, expressed frustration over the school’s decision, stating their stand for safety and fair competition.
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Asked About the Murder of Laken Reilly, Bill Clinton Fails to Position Kamala Harris for Success
—Disinformation Expert Ace
He admits that if the illegals had been "properly vetted, that probably wouldn't have happened."
Remember, though, the Democrat claim is that if we had just passed the latest Comprehensive Amnesty Population-Replacement bill, they'd have more "resources" to let in millions upon millions of Undocumented Americans while "properly vetting" them.
Collin Rugg @CollinRuggNEW: Former President Bill Clinton says Laken Riley would be alive if Kamala Harris and Joe Biden did proper vetting before letting illegals in.
Riley was k*lled by an illegal immigrant who illegally entered the United States in 2022 under Kamala Harris.
The comments came while Clinton was campaigning *for* Kamala Harris in Georgia.
"A young woman who had been k*lled by an illegal immigrant... if they had all been properly vetted, that probably wouldn't have happened."
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Trump Releases Campaign Ad Decrying "WOKE" Military, Using Clips from Full Metal Jacket;
Stanley Kubrick's Daughter Denounces Him.
Wait, My Mistake: Stanley Kubrick's Daughter Defends Him.
—Disinformation Expert Ace
Well that was unexpected. Vivian Kubrick composed the music for Full Metal Jacket so she has some say in this.
First, the ad:
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Trump Pauses Campaign Event While Several Attendees Are Escorted Out for "Medical Emergencies;" Kamala Harris and MSNBC Claim Trump Had a Senior Moment
—Disinformation Expert Ace
He was literally standing and watching as EMS personnel helped several stricken rally-goers out.
Because he was standing on stage quietly while EMS got the sick people out, they're claiming Trump had a Biden-like bout of lost time.
It's egregious. So egregious that even the Disney Groomer Corporation's fake news division, ABC, is debunking the claim.
Western Lensman @WesternLensman PANIC: MSNBC's Max Rose Says Trump dancing during Town Hall is proof that he has "Dementia" -- "I Feel Bad for His Family"Pure desperation has set in -- these same people told us Joe Biden was sharp as a tack a few months ago:
"Look at you have to be demented to stand on stage and start dancing when it's a town hall."
"It's just imperative at this point that the campaign pushes those two separate narratives, grave threat, and also he's just supremely incompetent and entering the final stages of his life. You know, I feel bad for his family right now. I know so many people have to deal with their parents as they've gone through stages of dementia, and that's clearly what they're on the precipice of having to deal with."
PANIC.
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Final Proof That Kamala Is a DEI Hire: She Has a Massive Plagiarism Problem
—Disinformation Expert Ace
Of course! Darn, everyone should have thought of this years ago.
Kamala Harris has become famous, in part, for her unique rhetorical style. She switches freely between various accents and peppers her speeches with catchphrases: pondering falling "out of a coconut tree," discussing "the significance of the passage of time," and moving the nation toward "what can be, unburdened by what has been."To her supporters, the vice president's rhetorical flourishes represent the values of compassion and optimism. To her detractors, her reliance on platitudes and tautologies demonstrates her unfitness for the presidency.
But, as we have discovered in this exclusive report, another element appears to exist within Kamala Harris's rhetorical universe: plagiarism.
At the beginning of Harris's political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California's attorney general, she and co-author Joan O'C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.
However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian "plagiarism hunter" who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris's book contains more than a dozen "vicious plagiarism fragments." Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions--reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing--but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay's doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)
....
There's more. In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim....
In a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia--long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia's accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source.
She copies her homework off Wikipedia! She's an eighth-grade THOT!
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Ben Weingarten: The US Government Is Funding Foreign Entities Which In Turn Censor American Citizens
—Ace
The old CIA trick of getting foreign governments and organizations to do what they are technically forbidden to do themselves.
I say "technically" because they're not actually forbidden to spy on US citizens or use their government power to strip US citizens of their free speech rights. They do it every single day. They just pay foreign cut-outs to undertake these unconstitutional, treasonous actions for them.
I mean, the law really should forbid this, but "the government of the people" has decided that our secret police are duly authorize to conspire with foreign secret police to strip us all of our rights.
On the eve of a highly-anticipated live X "Spaces" conversation between Elon Musk and former president Donald Trump, the powerful European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton warned in August that authorities would be "monitoring" the conversation for "content that may incite violence, hate, and racism."While reminding Musk that the EU was already investigating X for alleged failures "to combat disinformation," Breton said he and his colleagues "will not hesitate to make full use of our toolbox ... to protect EU citizens from serious harm."
The European Commission distanced itself from Breton, who would eventually resign his post while facing scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers for threatening Musk and Americans' free speech and interfering in domestic politics. But the EU probe of X, which could result in crippling fines, persists.
Although litigation, congressional oversight efforts, and reportage led by the Twitter Files have helped expose the U.S. government's efforts to pressure social media companies to censor protected political speech, the recent rumblings from Europe underscore the escalating challenges American-based social media platforms are facing from foreign authorities -- not just from repressive regimes such as China and Iran, but also from the EU, the U.K., Brazil, and other democracies.
Free speech advocates warn that foreign demands that tech companies comply with their censorious legal and regulatory standards that violate the First Amendment's protections will hamper the ability of Americans to communicate freely in the digital public square. Facebook's Community Standards, for example, "apply to everyone, all around the world." Academics have termed the tendency of companies to apply the strictest local guidelines globally as the "Brussels Effect."
Mike Benz, a former State Department cyber official and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, argues that foreign efforts to cast populist narratives on matters such as election integrity, immigration, and public health as mis- and dis-information constitute a surreptitious "transatlantic flank attack" on American speech.
However, evidence suggests that U.S. authorities and U.S.-supported NGOs that have sought greater restrictions on speech have, at minimum, indirectly supported these foreign efforts, creating a backdoor method to suppress protected speech at home.
For instance, the White House pressured platforms to censor content pertaining to COVID-19 and election integrity. Agencies from the Justice Department to the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Communications Commission have probed Musk's enterprises during the Biden years.
The U.S. government has used the FBI and the State Department, among other agencies, to coordinate counter-disinformation efforts globally with other nations. The goal is said to build "a more resilient global information system, where objective facts are elevated and deceptive messages gain less traction," in the words of Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
...
The European Union's Digital Services Act is seen by champions of stringent content moderation standards and critics alike as the strongest global effort to regulate speech.
Adopted in 2022 and praised by former President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the measure imposes a slew of regulatory requirements on the more than a dozen social media platforms and search engines that have at least 45 million users in the EU.
...
The DSA also references a Code of Practice on Disinformation, under which Big Tech companies such as Google, Meta, and Microsoft have agreed to demonetize purported disinformation pursuant to European Commission guidance.Notable signatories and contributors to the "self-regulatory" code include the U.S.-based NewsGuard (which took issue, to a degree, with the final product) and the U.K.-based Global Disinformation Index -- both of which have received U.S. government funding -- and the Brussels-based World Federation of Advertisers.
These organizations have each allegedly targeted the advertising revenue of independent media outlets -- with NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index disparaging RealClearPolitics -- by working with major brands and advertising agencies to blacklist outlets that publish work that challenges official narratives.
The DSA suggests that compliance with the Code of Practice on Disinformation may satisfy its "risk mitigation" standards. European regulators have called for formally incorporating the "voluntary" code into the DSA's "co-regulatory framework."
"Voluntary."
...He likens the model created by the Digital Services Act in Europe to the "whole-of-society" model to stifle disfavored information -- a system of censorship pioneered by the U.S. government in the run-up to the 2020 election and codified in the Biden administration's National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. The Digital Services Act, Candeub notes, mandates this architecture by creating "a surveillance structure in which there is intimate government involvement at multiple layers."
George Washington University Law School Professor Dawn Carla Nunziato concurs that "the DSA's substantive content moderation and notice and take down provisions will likely incentivize the platforms to remove large swaths of content -- including political speech, criticism of political figures, parody, and pro-LGBTQ+ speech -- that may be flagged by private entities as illegal under EU countries' laws."
Some American players who favor greater content restriction welcome the Brussels Effect. "If it weren't for the European Union and the Digital Services Act, I don't know that we'd have much hope of rectifying" the spread of mis- and dis-information, George Washington University Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics Director Rebekah Tromble said during a panel discussion on the Center for Democracy & Technology's Report.
"Hopefully," she added, "as the DSA begins to come into force and the platforms feel the real pressure of actual enforcement action," it would spur them to re-staff relevant positions and re-focus on content moderation.
Tromble did not respond to RCI's request for comment.
When asked whether it would defend American companies targeted under the regulatory regime, a State Department spokesman told RCI, "We are engaging with our European colleagues on some specific concerns on the DSA ... which we believe would make it easier to achieve transatlantic cooperation and alignment on these critical issues."
Oh, once everyone "voluntarily" brings themselves into compliance with the US-funded European censorship boards, we'll all be brought into "alignment."
And isn't that the most important thing in a supposedly-free democracy? That our government works with foreign intelligence services to coerce us into "alignment" with our foreign overseers?
Look, I can't tell you to read the whole thing, or at least give it good skim.
What I can tell you is that if you don't, this is you. This is what you are:
You like that, cuz? You like being a Jive Turkey?
Matt Taibbi delivered an absolute barnburner of a speech on the Government-Censorship Complex. See the link for the full speech, but here's the key part.
WE IGNORE LAWS. It's what America does. With this in mind, our government has moved past censorship to the larger project of changing the American personality. They want a more obedient, timorous, fearful citizen. Their tool is the Internet, a vast machine for doling out reward and punishment through likes and views, shaming or deamplification. The mechanics are complicated but the core concept is simple: you're upranked for accepting authority, downranked for questioning it, with questions of any kind increasingly viewed as a form of disinformation.Let me pause to say something about America's current intellectual class, from which the "anti-disinformation" complex comes. By the way: there are no working-class censors, poor censors, hungry censors. The dirty secret of "content moderation" everywhere is that it's a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It's telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it.
My pants just got tight.
Does that make me gay?
America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Haydens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFauls and Rick Stengels who make up America's self-appointed behavior police.
In prerevolutionary France even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. They have no honor, no belief, no poetry, art, or humor, no patriotism, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They're simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.
Those patches are snatched.
Yeah I'm gay.
They have one idea, not even an idea but a sensation: fear. Rightly so, because they snitch each other out at the drop of a hat; they're afraid of each other, but they're also terrified of everyone outside their social set and live in near-constant fear of being caught having an original opinion. They believe in the manner of herd animals, who also live whole lives without knowing an anxiety-free minute: they believe things with blinding zeal until 51% change their minds, and then like deer the rest bolt in that direction. We saw that with the Biden is sharp as a tack/No, Biden must step aside for the Politics of Joy switch.
I grew up a liberal Democrat and can't remember having even most of the same beliefs as my friends. Now, millions of alleged intellectuals claim identical beliefs about vast ranges of issues and this ludicrous mass delusion is the precondition for "disinformation studies," really the highly unscientific science of punishing deviation from the uniform belief set -- what another excommunicated liberal, my friend Thomas Frank, calls the "Utopia of Scolding."
"Freedom of speech" is a beautiful phrase, strong, optimistic. It has a ring to it. But it's being replaced in the discourse by "disinformation" and "misinformation," words that aren't beautiful but full of the small, pettifogging, bureaucratic anxiety of a familiar American villain: the busybody, the prohibitionist, the Nosey Parker, the snoop.
H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as the "haunting fear that someone, somewhere is happy." That streak of our early European settlers unfortunately survives in us and keeps surfacing through moral panics. Four hundred years ago it was witches, then it was Catholic immigrants, then "the devil's music," comic books, booze, communists, and now, information.
Because "freedom of speech" is now frequently described as a stalking horse for hate and discrimination -- the UN High Commissioner Volker Türk scolded Elon Musk that "free speech is not a free pass" -- it's becoming one of those soon-to-be-extinct terms. Speech is mentioned in "reputable" media only as a possible vector for the informational disease known as misinformation. Soon all that will remain of the issue for most people is a flutter of the nerves, reminding them to avoid thinking about it.
The end game is not controlling speech. They're already doing that. The endgame is getting us to forget we ever had anything to say.
More at the link. He passes from rhetoric to tracing the birth and death of free speech.
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Incredibly, Kamala Harris's Staff Again Puts Out the Word That Biden is Failing to Position Her for Success
—Disinformation Expert Ace
All though the Harris-Biden co-presidency, I have noted just some of the many, many times Kamala sent her staffers out to explain away her ineffectualness and unpopularity with the claim that Biden and his staffers are "failing to position Kamala for success."
They've said this a dozen times. No one seeking the White House should have a history of repeatedly whining that White Men Aren't Doing the Candidate's Work for Her.
If you thought that now that she's the by-golly real presidential candidate, she'd stop this endless plea for white men to come save her, man up, and stand on her own feet instead of laying on her back waiting for Pillow Promotions, you were wrong.
She is now putting out the word that Biden is failing to properly "coordinate his appearances and message to do what's best for Kamala," or words to that close effect
The relationship between Kamala Harris' team and Joe Biden's White House has been increasingly fraught in the final weeks before Election Day, 10 people familiar with the situation tell Axios.Why it matters: Biden's team wants Harris to win the election, but many senior Biden aides remain wounded by the president being pushed out of his re-election bid and are still adjusting to being in a supporting role on the campaign trail.
"They're too much in their feelings," one close Harris ally said of the president's team -- a sentiment shared even by some White House aides.
Driving the news: Some on the Harris team say that top White House aides aren't sufficiently coordinating Biden's messaging and schedule to align with what's best for the vice president's campaign.
Biden gave an impromptu press conference in the White House briefing room Friday just as Harris was about to do an event in Michigan, ensuring that her event would get less TV coverage than it otherwise would have.
Earlier in the week, Harris criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) for not taking her call about the recent hurricanes, only for Biden to praise DeSantis soon after for being "gracious" and "cooperative." (A person familiar with the situation told Axios that Biden hadn't been briefed on Harris' comments.)
Biden has been eager to boast about a robust jobs report, helping to end the strike by the longshoremen's union and other perceived victories recently. Harris has been trying to focus on voters' pocketbook concerns, including inflation.
One person involved with Harris' campaign told Axios: "The White House is lacking someone in the room thinking first and foremost about how things would affect the campaign."
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A White House spokesperson added that Harris' leadership team has been invited to strategic scheduling meetings.
Harris' official office and her campaign declined to comment.
Below, Biden snapped at Kamala Harris (who was in the meeting via a Zoom call) for attempting to push past him and speak first.
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The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition
—CBD
Drones are the Gotha bombers or V2s or Viet Cong or the IEDs of the 2020s. Modern, well-equipped armies are having a difficult time dealing with their threats, counter-measures must be improved (or invented), and doctrine must change, otherwise those modern armies will continue to fire $100,000 missiles at $1,000 drones...right up until they run out!
And imagine if the Chinese become more proficient at drones in warfare! Swarms of cheap long range drones sent against our multi-billion dollar carriers, which can certainly handle the threats, but not indefinitely.
The information-gathering capabilities should not be minimized either. The recent Hezbollah attack on an Israeli base is a good example...a drone supposedly loitered for 30 minutes before its operator chose a target. That's is an impossible situation for any army, and one that must change.
But Man's ingenuity is rarely more impressive than when he is fighting, and the people doing the most fighting are at least aware of the problem.
Rafael expects Iron Beam laser to be active in 2025
Even Boeing is in on it, and apparently the door didn't fall off the laser during the test, so...
Boeing's 5-kilowatt laser weapon takes down heavy drones in landmark CLWS test
This seems to be a high-tech answer to a low-tech threat, but if it works...who cares! There are obviously lots of hurdles to overcome, and I wonder whether energy weapons will ever become mobile enough for a squad to use them.
Regardless, the arms race has begun in this category, and who knows how it will shake out. My guess is that it will be a mix of technologies combined with good old fighting sense on the part of non-coms and junior officers.
But for now, drones are a real threat, and as their stealth and range increase, so will their ability to disrupt previously secure operations.
[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter]
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The Morning Report — 10/15/24
—J.J. Sefton
Good Morning Kids. Well, the news broke yesterday courtesy of the estimable Christopher Rufo that, SHOCKER! Kamala Harris plagiarized large tracts of a book she supposedly wrote in 2009, including lifting whole sections verbatim from Wikipedia.
Just hours after Christopher Rufo reported that Vice President Kamala Harris had allegedly plagiarized multiple sections of her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime,” Rufo reported that the book’s publisher had accidentally sent him an email showing it was in “damage-control mode.”“BREAKING: Kamala Harris’s publisher, Chronicle Books, is in damage control mode. The company accidentally sent my team an internal communication indicating that VP Lauren Hoffman is requiring that all inquiries about Harris’s plagiarism go through the higher ups,” Rufo posted on X.
Well, as we learned from "L'affaire" Claudine Gay, late of Harvard University, if you have the correct genitalia and melanin content, it is or at least was perfectly permissible. All things considered, Kamala Harris should never be in the position she is in the first place. Were it not for her pigmentation, chromosomes and most crucially her political bent, she'd probably be working the french fry station at a McDonald's, which she also lied about.
The buzz from this at least in normal circles is "October Surprise." Well, considering the media is nothing more than a propaganda arm of the Democrat Party andLeftist movement, if this story is even allowed to gain any traction, it will be spun as misinformation, a Right wing Trump smear campaign, etc. etc. The voting public is much more concerned about issues that affect them directly. One of them is that of open borders and the destruction it has unleashed on all of us, directly and indirectly.
So, Harris is a hack plagiarist. I suppose, in a sense to the extent this story does make it into the national discourse, those already disaffected by her performance as half of the Biden/Harris junta will only have their dissatisfaction perhaps confirmed to one degree or another.
We don’t agree with Democrats often, but Bill Clinton truly nailed it Monday when he admitted Laken Riley’s murder “probably wouldn’t have happened” if migrants had “all been properly vetted.” Correct. Bubba was supposedly stumping for Kamala Harris, trying to defend her horrific record as border czar, when he accidentally told the truth. The 22-year-old Georgia student’s accused killer, Jose Ibarra, had crossed into the United States illegally in 2022 and got promptly released into the interior.Clinton tried to shift blame to Donald Trump, who he claimed is responsible for killing that “bipartisan border bill” that Democrats insist would’ve fixed everything. . .
. . . Clinton made one other notable admission: that Harris failed at her main border job — getting countries to steer their migrants into a “legal process” so they wouldn’t get in if they “weren’t properly vetted.”
Right, again, Bill — though he (pathetically) blamed “traffickers” who “made a lot of money” for that failure.
The Harris campaign has pulled out the Democratic Party luminaries to make the case for her, but first Barack Obama and now Bill Clinton have failed: Maybe there’s just no good argument to make?
So, given the Machiavellian world of politics and the Clintons, as well as Obamas, was this accidental or accidentally on purpose? The irony in telling the truth about open borders or whatever the issue is that you're not just attacking a target of political expediency, in this case Harris and her allies, but you're also nuking your own party's policies at the same time.
Of course, as I asserted earlier, the media will spin this as best they can to prevent damage to the party and movement. Might not work in the short run, for this cycle, it remains to be seen if it will work in the long run. Of course, the Left also controls the entertainment biz and academia, and that's where the long war will be fought.
Meanwhile, as her campaign is tanking, most noticeably among black men, she's offering up a $20 billion bribe to the "brothas!"
Have a good day.
- ABOVE THE FOLD, BREAKING, NOTEWORTHY
- “Transphobia is child abuse,” Alex Roque, who runs the Ali Forney Center for homeless LGBTQ youth in New York City, asserted on a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) webinar last fall. In less than three minutes, he cast a vision for completely transforming child protective systems nationwide. Family rejection of a child’s gender identity cannot be dismissed as a personal view, he argued. Non-affirmation must be treated as abuse. “If they were denying them food or denying them access to school or denying other things, there would be headlines,” Roque continued. “There would be prosecution.”
EXCLUSIVE: Biden-Harris Junta Paves Way For Bureaucrats To Take Gender-Confused Kids From
‘Non-Affirming’Sane Parents
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Daily Tech News 15 October 2024
—Pixy Misa
Top Story- The Internet Archive is back online after the recent DDOS and data breach. (The Verge)
Currently it's read-only - that is, you can look up existing data but you can't request it to save new websites. But all the existing data is intact.
Work continues on restoring full functionality.
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Monday Overnight Open Thread (12/14/24) Columbus Day Edition
—Misanthropic Humanitarian
The Quotes of The Day will return shortly.
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Forza America Cafe
—Ace
Caption:The church of San Salvador de Escaño, located in Las Merindades, could be the oldest temple of the abundant Romanesque style that we find in the province of Burgos [Spain]. An inscription dates its construction to the year 1088.
Why Spain? Well, they financed Columbus. Have to give them their due.
Driving around Rome in a silly-small car.
A dog repeatedly escaped from a shelter, to hang out with the residents of a nursing home. Eventually he succeeded in getting the residents to adopt him (IG).
Garage artist makes cool moving sculptures out of scrap metal. (IG)
The exciting new art form of Stapelry.
ICYMI: dog at sundown at ocean.
The owner keeps pouring dog food out of the ladle and putting it back in the storage box. A little dog says "That's enough!" And also, "Please sir, can I have some more?"
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Not-So-Friendly Indians Open Thread
—Ace
Lot of claims today that Christopher Columbus has been genetically tested and was a Sephardic Jew.
I just saw this last week when I googled for Christopher Columbus. The conspiracy theory goes like this: Columbus's name was not, of course, Columbus. It was Christobal Colon.
But why then do we call him Christopher Columbus? Supposedly, "Colon" is a name with "Jewish roots." That's vague and I don't know what that means.
But anyway Spain, which financed his exploratory venture, was antisemitic and would expel all the Jews out of Spain just as Columbus reached the Bahamas, and I guess they wanted to hide the fact that they were financing a mission led by a Jew, so they called him "Christopher Columbus."
Or so they say. I don't know if I believe this.
Here's the Epoch Times on the genetic testing claims.
Christopher Columbus was Jewish, according to DNA extracted from his remains in Seville Cathedral.The outcome of a long scientific investigation was revealed on primetime national television on Spain's national day on Saturday.
The ethnic identity of the 15th-century explorer, whose expeditions opened the way for Europeans to colonise the Americas, has long been debated.
A view of the mausoleum of Christopher Columbus in Seville cathedral. Columbus died in the Spanish city of Vallodalid in 1506 but wished to be buried on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola
A view of the mausoleum of Christopher Columbus in Seville cathedral. Columbus died in the Spanish city of Vallodalid in 1506 but wished to be buried on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola
MARCELO DEL POZO/REUTERSAs a Sephardic Jew he would have suffered persecution, and historians have surmised that this contributed to the mystery of his origins.
Scientists examined the bones of Columbus and of his son, Hernando. "Both in the 'Y' chromosome and in the mitochondrial chromosome of Hernando, there are traits compatible with Jewish origins," said José Antonio Lorente, professor of legal and forensic medicine at the University of Granada.
AdvertisementThe findings -- the culmination of 20 years of research -- put to rest the most popular theory that Columbus was an Italian sailor from Genoa, as textbooks have stated for centuries.
Columbus's DNA reveals a "western Mediterranean" origin, according to the professor who said that he could not state categorically which country or region.
Landing of Columbus (12 October 1492), by John Vanderlyn. The previously accepted theory was that Columbus was born in Genoa in 1451, to a family of wool weavers
Landing of Columbus (12 October 1492), by John Vanderlyn. The previously accepted theory was that Columbus was born in Genoa in 1451, to a family of wool weaversFrancesc Albardaner, a historian who has studied Columbus and refuted the theory of his Genoese origins, said his research pointed to Columbus being of a silk-spinning family from Valencia.
Anyway, did you ever hear about how peaceful the Indians were and how we taught them War?
That's what Kamala Harris claims:
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Fake Comedy Program SNL Knocks Harris For Saying Nothing But "I Grew Up in a Middle Class Family"
—Disinformation Expert Ace
I can't really recommend it because, like most of SNL, it's, what's the word?, not funny.
Well, Dana Carvey's Joe Biden impression is funny, but he's not SNL any longer. And of course he's created that impression on his own, doing his own stuff.
I guess it has some value, if at all, in letting us know that the left sees Kamala Harris slipping away too.
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Joker Has Biggest Second-Weekend Drop of Any Comic Book Movie in History, and Among the Biggest Drops of Any Movie; Falls to Third Place
—Disinformation Expert Ace
Taking the number one spot is a sequel to a killer clown movie that cost, and this is not a typo, $2 million to make.
Huh -- I guess if you make a sequel about an established killer clown that delivers what the audience is expecting and keep the budget under control you can make a fortune.
Who knew.
Terrifier 3 isn't clowning around. The slasher pic is easily winning a weekend of curiosity and carnage at the domestic box office, where Joker: Folie a Deux is suffering the worst decline in history for a comic book movie and one of the biggest among any film.Cineverse and Icon Events' Terrifier threequel opened ahead of expectations for Chris McGurk's new venture with an estimated $18.2 million from 1,988 theaters.
The next closest film is The Wild Robot, which continues to shine for DreamWorks Animation and Universal. Now in its third weekend, the family pic is on course to earn another $13.4 million from 3,854 cinemas for a domestic cume of $83.7 million. It also pulled in another $24 million overseas for a global haul of $148.5 million.
Todd Phillips' Joker sequel is falling off a cliff in its second weekend with an estimate just north of $7 million from 4,102 theaters, a historic decline of 81 percent. Until now, The Marvels held the record among comic book movies for the worst second-weekend decline at 78 percent. Joker 2′s fall is also nearly the worst drop in history for a film opening in more than 2,000 locations.Rival studios show Joker 2 coming in closer to $6.7 million to $6.8 million, meaning it will come in fourth behind fellow Warners holdover Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which continues to flex its theatrical muscles even though it's now available in the home on premium VOD. The Tim Burton-directed sequel is estimated to gross $7.050 million from 2,408 locations as it crosses the $275 million mark domestically in its sixth weekend (Warners has Joker at $7.055 million for the weekend domestically).
Overseas, Folie a Deux also fell off steeply, earning $22.7 million from 77 markets for a foreign total of $113.7 million and $165.3 million globally.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, conversely, is a huge win for the studio, and has zoomed past the $400 million mark globally to finish Sunday with $420.3 million in ticket sales. Its foreign tally is $144.7 million.
While Terrifier 3 did decent business, a slew of other new nationwide openers -- including high-profile awards contenders -- struggled to find an audience.
Briarcliff's Donald Trump movie The Apprentice -- which Trump tried to block from ever appearing in cinemas -- opened to an estimated $1.6 million range from 1,740 locations, just enough to crack the top 10. There's always a chance it could switch places with holdover Speak No Evil, which earned just north of $1.5 million (the final order will be determined Monday). Pre-release tracking showed the anti-Trump pic opening in the $3 million range.
Actually, Joker may have fallen to fourth. Both Joker and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (which as been out for like six or seven weeks) brought in $7.1 million, and Warner Bros. insists it made just a little more than Bettlejuice. But Warner Bros. also lied last weekend when they claimed it made $40 million+; in fact, it made $37.7 million. It's possible that they're still lying to avoid that fourth place finish.
Lucas and Spielberg predicted the era of the flopbuster was coming over ten years ago.
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have predicted a Hollywood "implosion" that could change the shape of the film industry forever and lead to dramatically hiked ticket prices for blockbuster films.Speaking at the opening of a new media centre at the University of Southern California, the two Hollywood titans painted a picture of a future in which the failure of half a dozen $250m movies in quick succession caused a seismic shift in studio dynamics, leading to audiences being asked to pay $25 (£15) a ticket for films such as Iron Man 3 but just $7 (£4.50) for movies such as Spielberg's own Lincoln.
Spielberg told students at USC they were vying to enter the film industry at a time when even established film-makers were struggling to get their projects into cinemas, and revealed that the Oscar-winning Lincoln came "this close" to being premiered on the US pay-TV network HBO. He said that many talented young directors were now considered "too fringey" for a cinematic release. "That's the big danger, and there's eventually going to be an implosion -- or a big meltdown," Spielberg said. "There's going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that's going to change the paradigm."
"I think eventually the Lincolns will go away and they're going to be on television," Lucas added. "As mine almost was," Spielberg interjected. "This close -- ask HBO -- this close."
"The pathway to get into theatres is really getting smaller and smaller," said Star Wars creator Lucas, pointing out that his own passion project, the war drama Red Tails, barely scraped into cinemas last year. "We're talking Lincoln and Red Tails -- we barely got them into theatres," he said. "You're talking about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can't get their movie into a theatre!"
The "Young" Turks' Ana Kasparian: Yes It's True, I've Left the Left
—Disinformation Expert Ace
If you don't know who Ana Kasparian is, she's part of the "Young" (they're not young) Turks podcast. The podcast consists of people who are simultaneously very hard-left socialists, but also unrepetentantly assholish Vote Blue No Matter Who Democrat Party shills.
She was sexually assaulted by a homeless man a few years ago. This caused her to start reconsidering the nonsense she'd been parroting for years about letting all of the criminals out of the jails.
The left responded by calling her a racist (they assumed the attacker was black, like good anti-racists; in fact, he was white) and a Trump shill.
She now confirms what many critics had accused her of: Yes, she's left the left.
Independent and Unaligned You're right, I've changed.After Trump came onto the political scene, and especially after he was elected in 2016, the us-vs-them mentality immediately took shape. Anyone who refused to "resist Trump" was seen as a threat to the country, and I was fully on board with that mindset.
It all felt righteous at first. But eventually, the tactics deployed to fight Trump became repetitive, boring and ultimately fruitless. Polling shows that he has increased his support among Black and Latino voters despite wall-to-wall coverage on his unsavory, racist or bigoted remarks. Several years of media raising alarm over Trump's threat to democracy has only resulted in a tight presidential race between himself and Kamala Harris.
I can't help but acknowledge that the only thing that was accomplished by resisting Trump was less understanding and more division among Americans. I personally became reluctant to challenge my "side" or engage with voters who disagreed with me. In turn, I became less knowledgeable about the people and world around me. I saw Republican voters as an evil monolith and that was a big mistake.
My evolution started in 2022 when I was sexually assaulted by a homeless man in my neighborhood as I was walking my dog. That horrible experience alone didn't change me politically, but the treatment I received from the far left and some progressives after sharing the story did.
I was told that by publicly sharing what had happened to me, I was stigmatizing my "unhoused neighbors." Others accused me of feeding into racist tropes because they assumed that my attacker was black. But I had never even disclosed the man's race.
He was white.
Not only did I suddenly see the flawed thinking of some on the left, I also witnessed their cruelty and hypocrisy in real time. These terrible traits that I had associated solely with my political opponents were obviously not exclusive to their tribe. I was stupid for ever thinking that was the case.
That doesn't mean everyone on the left thinks or behaves in the way this small group of lunatics do. Far from it. But it does mean that there are factions and flaws on both sides of the aisle and no one has a monopoly on truth.
Then there was the insane reaction to one of my tweets in March 2023:
All hell broke loose after I posted those words. Most "friends" in left-wing media didn't bother reaching out privately to discuss their disagreement with my personal preference. Instead, many self-described socialists took it upon themselves to profit from conflict by publicly attacking me with monetized videos.
A smaller leftist YouTube show put out five separate videos skewering me about the tweet, while conveniently erasing the advocacy I had done on behalf of the transgender community throughout my career. They even went as far as drawing a link between my tweet and trans suicides, which sadly wasn't the most unhinged outcome of the debacle.
TYT's volunteer YouTube chat moderators quit over the tweet, and someone reported me to Human Resources. An on-air transgender contributor even resigned from the company after being urged by online mobs and leftist shows to do so. Curious that not one of those shows hired her after she took their advice.
I never apologized for the tweet and I never will.
That whole experience forced me to come to terms with the intolerance on the left and it allowed me to publicly reject the ideological shackles that kept my world small and less informed.
Today I'm less certain and more curious than I was four years ago.
She says her new substack (from which that excerpt is taken) will be a platform for her new "curiosity" and "openness," and she invites other politically-disaffected people (on the left, one assumes) to join her.
The "Young" Turk audience offered support to Kasparian.
Just kidding, they're demanding her firing. Of course.
Below, Ana Kasparian attacks the media and Joe Scarborough especially for their demand that we never question what Kamala Harris's policies actually are, because doing so would help Trump, and "Trump Bad! Trump Bad!"
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NBC "News:" Kamala Harris's National Lead Is Now Completely Gone (Which, PS, Means Trump Is Well Ahead)
—Disinformation Expert Ace
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JD Vance Appears on "Tales from the Crypt" and DESTROYS the Crypt-Keeper with FACTS and HOLY WATER
—Disinformation Expert Ace
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THE MORNING RANT: Columbus Day Buck Shots
—Buck Throckmorton
Happy “Western Civilization Day”
Happy Columbus Day to you all! The spread of western civilization and Judeo-Christianity to the Americas is worth celebrating. In fact, if the left is going to re-badge this holiday as “Indigenous Peoples Day” then I am inclined to re-badge it as “Western Civilization Day.” Celebrate with joy.
By the way, the “objective” media outlet Politico just disregards the official federal Columbus Day holiday altogether, matter-of-factly referring to it as “Indigenous Peoples Day.
Speaking of indigenous peoples, it’s joked that everyone in Oklahoma, East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and North Georgia claims to be part Cherokee. Mrs. Throckmorton’s well documented family lineage includes a several-greats grandmother who was a Cherokee from the mountains of North Georgia. We know her name, as well as that of the Anglo rapscallion who wooed her and then headed west with her. My wife is not eligible for membership in either the Oklahoma or Eastern Band of the tribe, but she’ll always be my beloved Cherokee Maiden.
AI, Al, or A1
Unrelated to anything political, I dislike sans-serif fonts. Good on Ace and Pixy that this blog uses a font with serifs. My job has always required alpha-numeric work, and it is distracting to me when I have to use context to figure out if a character is a capital I, a lower-case l, or the number 1. Twitter (X) is my favorite source for news, but it uses a sans-serif font, so every time I read about “AI,” I read it as man named “Al.”
This sentence is virtually unreadable with sans-serif fonts: “Al, from A1 Technologies, said A1 is starting to integrate AI into all its operations.”
Male Feminists vs Gay Guys
We’ve all had a good laugh at this comically awful “I’m a man” ad from Team Kamala. Some of the guys are quite apparently gay and were poorly cast for the roles they played in this commercial.
What bothers me the most is not that gay guys were cast in the role of rugged he-men, it’s that gay guys were cast in the role of “male feminists.” My wife and I socialize with several gay couples, and there are several gay guys who are valued friends of ours. I choose not to judge them, and I’m glad to have them as friends.
But I do judge “male feminists” and I want nothing to do with them. I’ll put this delicately…the men I know who have participated in marches wearing pink “hats” and who go on social media to bash other men while celebrating “empowered women” are creepy. Disturbingly creepy, just like the people pushing the transgender social contagion. It is reasonable to believe that the reason left-wing women are so hostile to men is because their experiences with straight men are bad experiences with “male feminists.”
This "men" for Kamala ad is funnier than any SNL sketch over the past decade.
— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) October 11, 2024
I had to look up the source to make sure it wasn't a parody.������������pic.twitter.com/t1utYW27OE
Throckmorton’s First Law of Live Music, “If There’s an Upright Bass in the Band, It’s Probably Going to be Good”
Speaking of the lovely Cherokee Maiden who cohabits my happy hunting ground, here is Ray Benson and Asleep At The Wheel joined by a cavalcade of country music legends doing their recording of the Cindy Walker / Bob Wills classic “Cherokee Maiden.”
Have a blessed Columbus Day / Western Civilization Day.
[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]
