Ace: aceofspadeshq at gee mail.com
Buck: buck.throckmorton at protonmail.com
CBD: cbd at cutjibnewsletter.com
joe mannix: mannix2024 at proton.me
MisHum: petmorons at gee mail.com
J.J. Sefton: sefton at cutjibnewsletter.com
A site for members of the Horde to post their stories seeking beta readers, editing help, brainstorming, and story ideas. Also to share links to potential publishing outlets, writing help sites, and videos posting tips to get published.
Contact OrangeEnt for info: maildrop62 at proton dot me
Howdy, Y'all! Welcome to the wondrously fabulous Gun Thread! As always, I want to thank all of our regulars for being here week in and week out, and also offer a bigly Gun Thread welcome to any newcomers who may be joining us tonight. Howdy and thank you for stopping by! I hope you find our wacky conversation on the subject of guns 'n shooting both enjoyable and informative. You are always welcome to lurk in the shadows of shame, but I'd like to invite you to jump into the conversation, say howdy, and tell us what kind of shooting you like to do!
Holy Shitballs! How in the ever-loving hell did it get to be the First June Edition? For those keeping track at home, there will be four June Gun Threads this month. That is to say one per week, on Sundays. Please do try and keep up, 'kay?
With that, step into the dojo and let's get to the gun stuff below, shall we?
Are you practicing your fundamentals indoors or outdoors? What kind of targets are you using? Are you changing them frequently, making notes, and taking them home for later study? If not, why not?
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You're Kidding, Right?
Who in their right mind thought this was a good idea? I like Swiss mechanical watches as much as the next guy, but I do not want complex watch movements incorporated into my firearms. Plus it's ugly as hell, and should have been disqualified on that basis alone.
Would you want to be shot by this thing? I would not. Have some respect and consideration for your targets!
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Worst Gun Ever?
The above notwithstanding, I present to you the USFA Zip 22.
and...
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This Looks Like Fun
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Our Pal The Slinky
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Timber Fellers!
We timber fellers are a tough breed.
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NoVaMoMe 2026
What - you thought there wasn't going to be a NoVaMoMe in 2026?
Note: One of the great joys of NoVAMoMe season, at least for me, is being able to cut and paste the entire block of text below and haranguing you to attend the event. Are you attending? Are you focusing on the fundamentals of attending?
Alright, guys and gals, the long awaited and highly anticipated details of the 2026 NoVAMoMe are here! That's right, I finally got my act together and updated the information page for 2026, and need to go over a few details. First, the date is June 20th, 2026 from 11am to 3pm. Nextly, my bestest blog buddy bluebell and I have decided 2026 will continue the longstanding tradition of NoVAMoMe simplification, and want to pass along the changes from prior years.
First, no registration and no advance charge for food. If you would like to attend, send an email to WeaselBell Productions, and let us know. You will be directed to a sekrit webpage with all of the details. We do ask once you have decided to attend to let us know so we can coordinate an expected count with venue management. Once there if you are hungry or thirsty simply order from the onsite menu and pay separately. Cash and credit cards accepted. Next, although fun, we have decided to again take a break from the raffles and mug sales this year. Depending on how it goes, that may be something we bring back in future years. While your generosity is always appreciated, with no prize table, please leave donations and contributions at home, but bring your appetite for a great afternoon spent with your imaginary online friends.
Next, a NoVAMoMe PSA from our pal bluebell
Hi folks - just a quick PSA. If you write for info about the MoMe, please give us a few words in the body of the email just so I know you are a Moron and not a spammer (moron). I do receive spam on this email account because it's sitting right here in my nic, so that's why I'm asking. I don't want to give our details to a spammer. Also, remember to check your spam folder if you don't receive a reply email.
Thanks.
bluebell
Seriously, just send an email then go to the website with the password provided. If you forget, a link to the email is on the main page, left sidebar. If you do not sign up, bluebell will be disappointed. Weasel will be disappointed, too, but it's bluebell you need to worry about.
Here are some different online cigar vendors. You will find they not only carry different brands and different lines from those brands, but also varying selections of vitolas (sizes/shapes) of given lines. It's good to have options, especially if you're looking for a specific cigar.
A note about sources. The brick & mortar/online divide exists with cigars, as with guns, and most consumer products, with respect to price. As with guns - since both are "persecuted industries", basically - I make a conscious effort to source at least some of my cigars from my local store(s). It's a small thing, but the brick & mortar segment for both guns and tobacco are precious, and worth supporting where you can. And if you're lucky enough to have a good cigar store/lounge available, they're often a good social event with many dangerous people of the sort who own scary gunz, or read smart military blogs like this one. -rhomboid
Anyone have others to include? Perhaps a small local roller who makes a cigar you like? Send me your recommendation and a link to the site!
Please note the new and improved protonmail account gunthread at protonmail dot com. An informal Gun Thread archive can be found HERE. Future expansion plans are in the works for the site Weasel Gun Thread. If you have a question you would like to ask Gun Thread Staff offline, just send us a note and we'll do our best to answer. If you care to share the story of your favorite firearm, send a picture with your nic and tell us what you sadly lost in the tragic canoe accident. If you would like to remain completely anonymous, just say so. Lurkers are always welcome!
That's it for this week - have you been to the range?
Food Thread: Brisket, Patty Melts, And Other Fine Foods
—CBD
Pastrami is the quintessential Jewish deli meat, and when done well can be delicious. It can also be too lean, dried out, and very disappointing! Too many delis around here overcook the pastrami and dry it out, and even worse, buy into the hysterical diet insanity that fat is bad, and sell lean meat that is devoid of flavor.
Of course pastrami is nothing more than smoked and spiced corned beef, and corned beef is nothing more than salted brisket! And do we know where a lot of good brisket is made using a very different technique? Why yes...we do!
Texas!
But Unlike pastrami, Texas brisket is almost always smoked with a simple preparation of salt and black pepper. That is not a bad thing, and in fact, a good Texas smoked brisket is one of the glories of the food world.
So what happens when you combine the two? Magic. Magic is what happens!
A friend was kind enough to bring a brisket from a place in Austin for a small gathering. And when I say "a place in Austin," I mean a pizza joint. This is where the fabric of the universe is torn, and the strong forces start doing strange things!
This unassuming pizza place (called "Pieous") makes absolutely spectacular pastrami, that is really a blend of the best of Jewish deli pastrami and Texas brisket. I hesitate to describe it further because I have never had anything like it, and it is better than either of its progenitors! It has the smoke of Texas, the interesting spiciness of the deli, but it blends them perfectly into something unique.
It reminds me of a place in Northern Maryland...also a pizza joint...that makes the best crab cakes I have ever had. The pizza is crap, but damn, the crab is amazing.
Anyway, if Austin weren't terminally weird and leftist, this pastrami would be a damned good reason to move there!
I live in New Jersey...the land of the diner. Well, to be accurate, the land of a certain kind of diner that does lots of things adequately, but very little is done well.
But there are other diners to be had, and one in particular has piqued my interest. It is the quintessential New England coffee shop/breakfast joint/lunch joint, and it does what it does with very little regard for anything other than good food and pleasant company. Everyone who works there is friendly in that particular New England way, but that friendliness is made easier by a kitchen that keeps it simple and tasty. Oh, the coffee is good and hot.
But the best part on my last visit was the waitress and her earrings!
Well, the patty melt was excellent too. And cooked to medium-rare, which shocked me!
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Ina Garten's Outrageous Brownies are as advertised. They are indeed outrageous, and in a good way! Absolutely delicious, and worth a try, especially if your dessert taste favors less sweet options. These are very chocolaty without being sweet. Fantastic, even though the recipe is a typical Garten one...a few too many steps and a few too many bowls!
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Thick cut fries twice-cooked in duck fat. It does not get better than that.
Duck fat adds a rich deliciousness that is absolutely a game-changer if you are a fry aficionado, and the thick cut gives enough surface area for the potato to soak up that flavor. Cooking them twice (the first cook is lower temp) is essential because of that thick cut, otherwise the outside would burn before the inside got cooked.
Yes, I ate that pastrami AND those fries on the same weekend. And yes, I need to go clothes shopping for some elastic-waisted pants.
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Peking Duck is a great dish, and can be had in the United States with a little luck that the Chinese joint that is making it has not succumbed to the all-too-common failing that Americans don't know good Chinese food, so just mail it in!
But that platter is from a restaurant in Hong Kong, and no, sadly I was not at the table! It sure does look good though, and the report is that it was delicious.
And stupidly expensive. Thank God for expense accounts!
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The garlic is doing well! For now. It was 42 degrees this morning, and I am unsure how well garlic will tolerate that. I know all of you are worried, but it is still tall and green and healthy! And if they survive the deer and squirrel apocalypse, and actually grow into something edible, I will be in garlic heaven! In case it doesn't, send all of your excellent home-grown garlic to: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com.
Rumor has it that the Bourbon Bubble is bursting. I have seen no evidence of decreasing prices, but maybe the bursting started somewhere else! I think the sweet spot is $40-$60 for excellent and interesting bottles, and bumping that to $100 gets you an incremental improvement in quality, but nothing mind-blowing. More than that and I think you are paying for hype and rarity, which may look good in your liquor cabinet, but doesn't translate to more quality in the bottle.
The problem...or the solution...is to buy lots of bourbon, take tasting notes, and eventually arrive at your favorites! It should take forty or fifty years, but it is worth it!
If there was a Platonic Ideal of oven mitts, that would be it!
Except...the designers clearly fell down on the job and did not design it to last forever, so my three mitts (I bought two more as soon as I realized that it was perfect) are not long for this world.
Sadly, the manufacturer discontinued the design in favor of a clearly inferior one, but probably cheaper and easier to manufacture.
I have considered having it copied and manufactured for myself, and even hit up you maniacs for advice, but the small-run required is not cost effective.
The alternatives are grim: keep using the mitts and accept the occasional burn as they fall apart, then stop using mitts altogether, and accept burns every day; or stop cooking.
The Democrat Party Is The Party Of Violence And Hatred, And They Are Proving It Every Day
—CBD
[Hat Tip: TC]
The normalization of violence and class/racial/ethnic hatred is a hallmark of totalitarian regimes. Consolidate power, then kill your enemies is the tried-and-true playbook, and the reality is that nothing else will work. A non-violent socialism will fail eventually because of the innate desire of man to better himself, and socialism restricts that possibility.
And they know it. The ruling class of every totalitarian regime in history has internalized the primacy of violence, and see it as a tool to acquire and use power. So the exposure of violent tendencies in a Democrat politician is surprising only because he has allowed the mask to fall away. The violence and hatred is simply part of the political philosophy! From Democrat politicians raping children to their street thugs burning cities...they are indistinguishable from the totalitarians of history because they ARE totalitarians.
Graham Platner, the likely Democrat Senate candidate for Maine, who got an SS Nazi tattoo and lied about most of his past, and cheated repeatedly on his wife while she was undergoing IVF was featured in a New York Times article describing how he had abused an ex and discussed raping people.
And raised $200,000 making it his biggest fundraising haul since Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of the race.
A whole lot of Dems and lefties are voting with their bucks and supporting what they like .
Violence against women? Rape as a tool of power? That is perfectly acceptable for the Democrat party because the acquisition and exercise of power over the people is the only thing that matters, and any tool that allows them to achieve those goals is perfectly reasonable.
How else to explain Platner's fundraising haul? All of those middle-aged blue-haired lunatic women who find him exciting are curiously quiet when it comes to his casual misogyny. And if they find rape to be acceptable, they certainly won't blink an eye at his Jew-hate.
That is a clear signal that power is more important to any ethical standards in the Democrat Party. They would rather have a violent rape-fantasizing Nazi than cede the election to a milquetoast ersatz Republican.
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of meeting me, you can tell from my waistline that I love to eat. I won’t give you my exact measurements, but I will note that Edward VII had a waistline of 48 inches, which in his day was considered grossly obese. His Majesty and I could share closets.
I love to eat. I like to cook, but unlike CBD, I’m not very good at it. But I love to read about food. Not just recipe books, which, although entertaining on their own, can be somewhat dull, but books about the history and sociology of food. For instance, I have several books dedicated to food, its preparation and the status of cooks in both high and low society during the Middle Ages, each of which is the sort of read that both informs you and leaves you hungry. Here are three:The Medieval Cook, and Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society, both by Bridget Ann Henisch and Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony, by Madeline Pelner Cosman.
I also love books about dining outside the house, in restaurants, cafés and roadside venues; two of my faves are Repast: Dining Out at the Dawn of the New American Century, 1900-1910, by Michael Lesy & Lisa Stoffer and Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York, by William Grimes. And that’s not even touching other tomes like Duncan Hines’ various editions of Adventures in Good Eating, histories of the Harvey Girls and drive-ins, or bios of the founders of the great fast-food chains such as Colonel Sanders, the McDonald brothers or Billy Ingram, the man behind White Castle.
What about you? Are cookbooks just instruction manuals to you or treats to dip into during a particularly puckish mood? Have you ever, like me, come across a Delmonico’s menu from 1895 and wonder if you could make your way through a Gay Nineties lobster palace night?
I mentioned before how PCIe switches - at least ones operating faster than PCIe 3.0 - are prohibitively expensive and reserved for enterprise customers except for the ones built into every mainstream PC motherboard. All but the cheapest models have a chipset, and that chipset's primary function is to act as a PCIe switch.
And hobbyists have started tinkering with using AMD's B650 chip, which is a serviceable and reasonably priced example - plus one that already works because every operating system has drivers to support it.
Raspberry Pi shop WisdPi announced its PROM21 All In Expansion Card - the codename for the chip in the B650 chipset is Promontory 21. For $199 - not cheap, but it's a small production run - you get four extra M.2 slots, five 10Gb USB 3 ports, a selection of USB 2 headers, and an OCuLink header that can provide four PCIe 4.0 lanes or through an adaptor cable four SATA ports (the magic happens in the chipset, so the cable is easy). And it's a single slot half-height half-length card so it will fit easily into any PC.
Minisforum is preparing a similar card.
This would have been much more interesting before storage prices went into orbit, but at least it exists.
It has an Intel 1215U or 1235U processor, two DDR5 SODIMM slots (so up to a nominal 64GB and a theoretical 128GB), one M.2 slot on the motherboard for the boot device, four more M.2 slots in a removable bay for storage, 6 3.5" drive bays for more storage, two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports plus a 10Gb port in the Pro model, HDMI, DisplayPort, and Thunderbolt 4, two regular USB ports, and two PCIe slots, all in a compact, roughly 9" cube.
The Qube was a little less than 8" on a side so the newer device beats it in every respect except that.
$799 for the basic model with 8GB RAM; $1299 for the Pro model with 16GB.
Also, the power supply is pretty limited so if you want to add a graphics card you need one that doesn't require any more than the 70W it can draw from the motherboard.
AM6 with support for DDR6 memory and the PCIe 6.0 bus will arrive only when it "makes sense". PCIe 6.0 devices for the enterprise are trickling out now, but DDR6 isn't expected to appear until 2028.
Saturday Night Club ONT - June 6, 2026 [D Squared]
—Open Blogger
School is out, summer is in. Time for some backyard barbecue and quality time spent with good people in good places.
Welcome to Club ONT - a collaboration of The Disco and The Dino (with a dash of guest Doggo tonight!). We built this place for you so you can have some fun. Come in in, grab a drink or 3. Keep it light and friendly. Jerks need not enter the premises (the moose out front will keep watch).
An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative." A voice from the back of the room said, "Yeah, right."
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Psychic short jokes.
What do you call a fat psychic?
A four chin teller.
What do you call a dwarf psychic who escaped from prison?
A small medium at large.
Every Psychic I ever visited was either a bit depressed or way too excitable..
It's really hard to find the happy Medium
Can see the future. Needs a bike lock for their sign? Apparently they already knew what was coming.
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Drink of the Night
Rum Forest Rum
1 Dash Bitters
1 1/4 oz. Champagne
1 oz Rum
1 1/4 oz. Vermouth
- Fill a shaker halfway with ice cubes
- Add all ingredients, shake till perfectly chilled
- Fill glass and dream of ways to make evil Jenny miserable
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Club ONT Department of 'murica
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Club ONT Department of Obvious Mystery Clicks
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Club ONT Department of Jokes Writing Themselves
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Club ONT Department of Potentially Unlikely Electoral Outcomes
A village on New York's Long Island is facing a highly unusual mayoral election after no candidates registered to run for the office.
Bayville Mayor Steve Minicozzi announced in April that he would not be seeking reelection, and Christopher Vivona, the village's deputy clerk-treasurer, confirmed no one else registered to run.
Vivona said June 16 will mark the first time he knows of that the village of approximately 7,000 people will go to the polls to vote for mayor with a blank ballot.
Officials said the election will be decided by write-in votes. John Taylor, who ran against Minicozzi in 2022, said he would be willing to serve if he gains enough write-in votes.
"[If] some guy comes up there with 50 of his friends, he's your mayor," Watson told NBC New York. "If 100 people get one write in each it's a tie. So it's a strange situation."
Any Morons live in Bayville?
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Club ONT Updated Password Security Requirements
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Club ONT Department of Aerodynamics
Aerodynamic Beaver would be a great name for a band.
Marine Attack Squadron (VMA) 223, known as "the Bulldogs," celebrated the conclusion of nearly 40 years of operational history with the AV-8B Harrier II during a public ceremony at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, Wednesday. The ceremony marked an important moment in time for VMA-223 and also signaled the end of an era for Marine Corps aviation as the service continues its transition to an all-5th generation tactical aircraft fleet.
Colloquially known as a "jump jet" for its ability to take off and land within short distances, the AV-8B is a V/STOL aircraft designed to support the Marine Air Ground Task Force commander by destroying surface targets and escorting friendly aircraft. The AV-8B's lethality and V/STOL capability made it uniquely suited for deployments in support of Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs). VMA-223's final detachment of Harriers to support a MEU returned to Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point last month after supporting operations with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit in the Caribbean.
In fiscal year 2028 VMA-223 is scheduled to reactivate as Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA)-223 and will begin flying the F-35B Lightning II. VMA-223 is the last Marine Corps squadron to operate the Harrier.
This all sounds like a fairly unsurprising origin story, save for one thing - the original candies were made using old wartime pellet machines designed to compress gunpowder into ammunition. That's right! Instead of making bullets, Dee made candy.
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Club ONT Jukebox
A bit of old school rock this evening.
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Top 10ish Comments of the Week
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Club ONT is brought to you tonight by playing kids birthday parties:
(Alternative title: "I would like to know more about why YouTube recommends certain videos that it thinks I would like (not that it is wrong."))
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Are you whelmed? We hope you are whelmed. Whelmage is good.
When conceiving this post, I began broadly. I came up with a slew of titles that I believed represented “a 1980s movie.” My list included Hoosiers (1986), Mr. Mom (1983), Nine to Five (1980), Cloak and Dagger (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), Risky Business (1983), and The Karate Kid (1984).
Why these movies? I deliberately left out blockbusters from the 1980s, such as E.T., Star Wars, and any of the Indiana Jones pictures. Spectacles and blockbusters have been a given since at least the 1920s, so I didn’t feel a high budget movie qualified as representative of any particular decade. Different appetites (sword and sandal, war, sci-fi), yes, but no distinctive aspect that would tie any big-budget series of films to a decade.
I also put Academy Award-style films to the side—for the same reason. Movies seeking Oscar glory are always going to exist and don’t necessarily possess anything unique to a decade. Finally, I did not count the burgeoning independent film scene of the 1980s or foreign films.
What then, in my estimation, made the films on my list “80s” movies, other than the years in which they were produced? These mainstream domestic pictures, in my opinion, were particular to the 1980s because they were mid-budget fare, well-structured, quite clear in their dramatic purpose, and reflective of the more ordered zeitgeist of the Reagan era.
Many films will mirror the times in which they are produced, but I think there was something more distinctive to a middle grade 1980s movie than in other decades. Of course I have to check my bias. I came of age in the 1980s and am more familiar with the movies of that era, but I think I can dismiss these prejudices with a quick review of film history.
After the silent era, Hollywood entered its golden age, and the studio system, though legally dashed in the mid-1940s, managed to hang around through the 1950s and even into the 1960s. By the end of the 1960s, there were new rules, and the 1970s, many say, was the most free-handed decade for mainstream filmmakers as Hollywood reorganized itself.
By the 1980s, order took hold again and corporations edged out the latter-day studio mogul. Thus, you had a decade finally free of old studio rules but somewhat brought to heel by the new, conglomerate powers that be, as well as a Reaganesque social ethos. The result for cinema was the kind of middle tier films on my list.
Did this category of film exist in other eras? Of course, but they were more akin to b-roll or schlocky genre movies than solid, medium budget pictures with clean and compelling metaphors. To me, these are the hallmarks of a 1980s movie.
This type of movie hung around into the 1990s until the internet came along and probably destroyed quality filmmaking at the mainstream level forever.
You’ll never see a movie like Mr. Mom on 3,000 screens again. Blame it on Covid or CGI (now AI) or streaming or the unslakable thirst for prequels, sequels and origin stories, but the simple, effective, and meaningful medium-budget picture of the 1980s is likely not to be produced again—at least for broad consumption in domestic movie theaters.
Circling back, I thought I could discuss most, if not all, of the films on my list. But the more I wrote, I realized it would be too long an essay. So, I decided to dissect one movie I believe is emblematic of what I consider a 1980s movie. That film is Cloak and Dagger.
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Cloak and Dagger is about a boy and his father (Dabney Coleman) who recently lost their mother/wife and are in the throes of grieving. The father works on an air force base and is frequently absent. The boy, Davey (Henry Thomas), is left to his own devices much of the time and often spins tales about espionage and conspiracies. He’s aided in these fantasies by the fictional character Jack Flack (also played by Coleman), who is a master spy of some kind. He eggs Davey on, much of the time to no good, until of course they stumble upon a real spy ring.
But the plot is incidental to the real power of the movie. Davey and his father are still reeling from their loss. Davey needs his father to help him get over his trauma, but the father is too busy—and too wounded himself—to give Davey the support he needs. Thus, Davey descends into the world of imaginary spies and secret missions to salve his wounds.
Jack Flack can only be seen by Davey, and the dramatic purpose of the movie is similarly shaded by the plot. Cloak and Dagger is not about a tween boy who [SPOILER ALERT] uncovers a conspiracy to encode secret military plans in a video game cassette. It’s a movie about grief and healing.
Cloak and Dagger might seem a little silly to modern eyes, but even its title is an indicator of its deftness. ‘Cloak and dagger’ of course defines the nature of the story, an adventure tale fraught with disguise and menace. At the same time, the title underscores the metaphor of the movie: Davey and his father are themselves caught in a personal caper.
Davey needs his widowered, hard-working father to be there for him. He needs his father to be his hero, and that’s why at the very end of the film [SPOLIER ALERT again] the two figures merge with the real father taking the place of the imaginary Jack Flack, and both father and son realizing they will have to behave differently to get past their grief. This movie is not about spies and secret tapes but a boy who needs his father to be his hero, not a mythical, cartoon version of one.
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My debut essay on AoS was about the difference between clever and good screenwriting, and Cloak and Dagger epitomizes the style of good writing found in the 1980s, medium-budget range, which is almost a lost art now.
In that essay, I explained that a movie need not be a straight drama with a serious tone (from the 1980s think Ordinary People or Chariots of Fire) to be considered “good.” Offbeat films, even silly ones can fall into the good camp of screenwriting as opposed to the “clever,” which means the movie is more about its plot hook and therefore superficial.
Perhaps it’s no accident, then, that several of the movies on my list are goofy, veering towards hokey—with Cloak and Dagger the goofiest and hokiest of my choices.
Putting aside its playfulness, Cloak and Dagger is a tight, three-act movie with well-rounded characters, effective dialogue, smart pacing, and, above all, a strong dramatic purpose with which viewers can connect. The conclusion, [last SPOILER ALERT], where Jack Flack and the father merge with the father assuming the dominant role is one of the more touching final moments in a movie that I can recall.
Cloak and Dagger was a modest financial success and played on almost 1,200 screens. Had it not been up against the Summer Olympics I believe it would have gone wider and done even better business.
Much of Cloak and Dagger’s success in the 1980s and its impact since then, I believe, is due to its light touch, and, to me, a great deal of what makes an 80s movie just that is an insouciance mixed into the potage.
Saturday Night Fever is a movie that is almost inseparable from the 1970s, but it has many characteristics of an 80s movie—at least according to my definition. Yet there is one key difference which would keep it off my list.
Saturday Night Fever’s final moments leave things open-ended. As the credits roll, we don’t quite know what Tony Manero has achieved or if he has changed, but we know when Bender raises his fist at the conclusion of The Breakfast Club that something significant has shifted within him. The same can be said in the concluding frames of Cloak and Dagger, and that’s what defines an 80s movie—the cleanness and assuredness of its arc as a story.
This is the effect of Reagan’s America, a little bit square but surely a better and more self-confident era for the United States and filmmakers. There are no loose ends or dumb plot holes in my idea of a 1980s movie, and the stories are entirely believable within the context of the world they establish.
It was “morning in America again” or so Reagan said in a political ad in the 1980s. Our movies were also finding themselves again in this decade, and I’m not sure other decades can say the same.
Of course, I expect to be challenged on this theory. It is all a little speculative. Were there smaller, compact, issues-pictures in the 1950s, for example? Undoubtedly; but I’m not sure any of them could be called a “50s” movie. Were Magnificent Obsession or All That Heaven Allows or Imitation of Life (three wonderful Douglas Sirk pictures) unique to the 1950s or just produced then? I can see a case either way, and I expect my conceit to be tested.
In that spirit, what’s a “1980s movie” I’m leaving out? Or what other decade has a type of film particular to that time period? Prove me wrong, in essence, or point out that the type of movie I’m describing falls in other eras and is not unique to the 1980s.
Maybe the 80s will only be remembered for its music or big hair and shoulder pads, but I’m making a case that a certain type of film should also be indelibly written into that decade.
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 on target. It spun and spun and ended up deciding on an archery theme for this Hobby Thread.
A what? Yes, an archery thread. This is like the gun thread except with different launching apparatus and projectiles, less bang and boom, and no movies about the wonders of ball bearings. But fundamentals still matter...
As per usual Hobby Thread etiquette, keep this thread limited to hobbying. All (legal) hobbying is welcome. We have a theme, but no need to stick with the theme. Even if the theme does not speak to you, find something else or offer something else relating to hobbying. Leave politics and religion to threads elsewhere (unless your hobby is building or restoring a church). Pants are optional. As always, puns are welcome and encouraged.
Play nice and do not be rude. Do not be a troll and do not feed the trolls.
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Depending on which unreliable source on the internet you consult, archery is one of the oldest acts of human engineering. It has prehistoric roots (based on cave paintings in Europe). In the Bronze Age (16th century) the Egyptians and Persians used bows in massed formations in military action. Following the invention and widespread adoption of firearms, archery became obsolete as a military weapon in the early 1600s.
Archery debuted at the 1900 Paris Olympics and dropped after 1920, and reinstated in 1972.
Is archery a hobby? Yes! Some throw arrows against targets for scoring. Others use bow and arrow as a hunting that offers different challenges than firearms.
Are you wise in the ways of the bow and arrow? Did you get a merit badge as a youth? Do you own bow and arrow equipment? Have you practiced your bow and arrow fundamentals? Have you made your own? Have you ever split an arrow with another arrow?
Are you a military history buff and know about military tactics in the days of mass archer formations?
Looking for a lot of help in the gray boxes for this one. TRex short arms are not a natural fit for archery. The small brain doesn't help either. Before commenting, make sure your bow is adjusted for the correct density altitude and your arrows are properly calibrated with the appropriate MOA setting.
If you're saying "I'm not an archer and I have no interest in learning," feel free to sit in the corner while the rest of the class continues. Or you can make contributions from your own (legal) hobbying.
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Good things to know if you find yourself in an Olympic archery contest:
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William Tell and the famous apple:
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Archery trick shots:
Turning arrows is apparently a thing:
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Watch Japanese craftsman make longbows:
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Artistic interlude - Hercules the Archer
Emile-Antoine Bourdelle sent his sculpture Herakles/Archer to the Paris Salon in 1909, where it was an instant success. The Chazen's Herakles/Archer is a reduction cast from the original life-size bronze now in Paris; after Bourdelle's death his widow authorized this edition of 15.
Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI
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Too advanced for my small dino brain, but those of you who are wise in the ways of arrow science might appreciate this video:
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How far can an arrow fly?
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YouTube is made for answering the important historical questions.
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DIY bamboo bow:
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Arrows of a different kind:
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Horde Hobbying - tcn in AK is camping in Denali State Park, Alaska with her family. Camping is a hobby and Mt. McKinley provides a fine camping companion. Thank you!
Thank you to the AK Sniper for modeling in the second photo.
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Not related to archery but I love this:
THIS GUY LIVES UNDER SFO'S TAKEOFF PATH SO HE BUILT A CEILING PROJECTOR THAT TRACKS EVERY PLANE FLYING OVER HIS HOUSE IN REAL TIME
he uses a cheap $30 radio receiver to pick up the signals that planes broadcast while flying.
Did you miss the Hobby Thread last week? We did a music theme. The comments may be closed, but you can re-live the content.
Notable comments from last week:
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Words of wisdom:
"Because despite all our troubles, when things are grim out in that wide round world of ours, that's when it's really important to have a good hobby." Posted by: tankascribe at June 22, 2024 07:41 PM (HWxAD).
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If you have trouble finding something in the content or comments that resonates with you, contribute your own. Send thoughts, suggestions and photos of your hobbying to moronhobbies at protonmail dot com. Do mighty things.
Lots of appreciative comments in the "X" thread. And:
Bohemian Waxwings are just beautiful. Here are some cool facts:
They're true nomads—one banded in British Columbia was found 13 months later in South Dakota, while another flew 280 miles in 11 days.
Their red feather tips come from carotenoids in berries, and the waxy tips grow bigger as they get older.
They have a specialized large liver to metabolize ethanol from fermented fruit, but can still get drunk!
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Happy 7th Birthday to our AoSHQ Swiss Guide Dog, Gioia!
Meet The PetMorons
Bun Bun is on the prowl
She's literally waiting under the bird feeder.
Miley
Bun Bun looks lovely and nonchalant by the beautiful flowers, some of which are also described in the Gardening Thread.
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By-Tor's pup Ruger is ready for a good walk!
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In case you missed the Gardening Thread:
Hey, KT
Summer has arrived in Cowtown. Water lilies, dragonflies and rainbow minnows are flourishing, and bullfrogs have spawned. And the Pancho pup is keeping the squirrels away.
R/s
CrotchetyOldJarhead
Good work, Pancho!
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Thank you for sharing your pets and animal photos and stories with us today.
If you would like to send pet and/or animal stories, links, etc. for the Ace of Spades Pet Thread, the address is:
petmorons at protonmail dot com
Remember to include the nic or name by which you wish to be known when you comment at AoSHQ, or let us know if you want to remain a lurker.
My terrace garden is pretty small so each blossoming is a little thrilling.This tiger lily was one tiny plant two years ago. I had trouble getting a good photo because they are in the planter and it is taller than I am. Of course, if you've met me, that is not difficult.
Sharon(willow's apprentice)
Thrilling photos! You did well in compensating for the height of the planter!
Hi KT,
The first Hog Wild daylily bloomed, plus white lilies (each stalk is like an entire bouquet).
Miley
What a gorgeous daylily! Interesting to see the differences in flower form between the daylilies and the lilies.
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Edible Gardening/Putting Things By
Pawpaws spotted at the creek yesterday. They are not ripe yet so DO NOT EAT. They will make you really sick. September or so they will be ready.
- fd
Let us know how they taste!
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In some earlier threads this week, there was some discussion of kale as a murder weapon, or at least as a non-food item. Suitable only as decoration on salad bars.
But for gardeners, there is another species of kale. The Siberian kales, related to rutabagas, are noted for bolting late in the spring. A kale breeder at Wild Garden Seeds says about Red Ruffled kale, "Rodrigo . . . harvested a treasure of "kale raab" from it during the hungry gap, before spring has arrived and markets are spare. He commented on the caliper of the tender stems, their weight, and sweetness. Leaves grey-green with purple-red veins and stems."
The Siberian Kales are not very decorative because they start to wilt almost as soon as they are picked. But they are easier to eat than regular kale.
Winter Red Kale
Red Russian is the only variety of kale "napini", "raab", "rapine" - or whatever you want to call the bolted stems and buds - that I have eaten. The flavor is fine, considering that the plant bolts in very warm weather here. The flowers are perfectly edible, too. They would be highly appreciated at a time when other veggies were not available in stores.
Perhaps even Piper's Ghost might enjoy the little yellow flowers.
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Gardens of The Horde
Hey, KT
Summer has arrived in Cowtown. Water lilies, dragonflies and rainbow minnows are flourishing, and bullfrogs have spawned. And the Pancho pup is keeping the squirrels away.
Evergreen shrub, erect, dense, to 8 ft (2.5 m) high and wide, may be a small tree 20-30 ft (6-9 m). Leaves opposite, simple, elliptical to oval, 4-6 cm long, leathery, margins entire and slightly wavy and irregularly turned under (revolute), glossy, essentially smooth and dark green above, paler and woolly below; petiole stout, to about 13 mm long, grooved and flattened above. Flowers appear in winter, male and female flowers on separate plants (dioecious), male catkin-like clusters are yellowish to greenish then gray, 8-20 cm long ("silk tassels"), female flower clusters are shorter, 5-9 cm long. Fruit are in grape-like clusters, each is round, about 6 mm wide, at first green but finally covered with a purplish-gray pubescence; may be present through the summer if not eaten by birds.
Sun or part shade. Not fussy about soil type, if well-drained. Considered a good foliage plant, can be grown as a hedge, moderate irrigation needed. Prune immediately after flowering. A few male cultivars with especially long "tassels" are available, 'James Roof' (30 cm), 'Evie' (25 cm).
From The Famous Pat*:
Name that tree: Husband and I used to live in the Bay Area of CA, and we strongly believe that tree is Garrya elliptica, also called Garrya, or Coast Silk Tassel.
Teresa in Forth Worth (and anyone else with sporadic asparagus): Cook the few spears you get, cut them up and add them to a salad - little tasty surprises as you go. Or cook them with corn or green beans. (We've pretty much given up on our asparagus bed. This year I planted broccolini at one end of the bed. And if I need space next year, I'll just overprint the asparagus some more.)
(post 1)
Did autocucumber say "overprint" instead of "overplant"?
We may need to do a feature on asparagus - choice of variety (for climate), planting and care.
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Pat*'s Hubbie:
@40 > I have a question for you Morons, I have tried, unsuccessfully, for years, to eliminate Creeping Charlie from my lawn (northern MA). I have tried every weed killer mentioned on the interwebs and have pulled up as much as my old body will permit and yet it thrives. HALP!
Triclopyr is your huckleberry.
Martha Stewart has some additional advice and a nice photo for those who don't know what Creeping Charlie is. Related to mint, like lots of invasive plants.
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Pat*
(overplant!)
From Boise area: lows 48-61 F, highs 72-91. Some heavy wind gusts, lots of sycamore sticks down - so far we've raked up half the lawn. Lots of blooms - fireweed, peony, blue penstemon, bearded iris, chamomile, larkspur, wild rose hedge (I'm gathering petals).
Checked the fruit trees - most have no fruit, or just a few. Strawberries are producing! Garlic scapes got cut off. Potato bags had to be topped up. Some of the orange bell pepper starts look very bad, but the reds and poblanos are OK so far.
Under Puttering At Home, we bottled beer, a style called Kentucky Common - made with corn, which we hadn't worked with before. It comes out short of 5 percent alcohol, with a very light flavor - what Husband calls "construction beer", and fancy people call "sessionable".
(post 2/end)
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Hope everyone has a nice weekend.
If you would like to send photos, stories, links, etc. for the Saturday Gardening Thread, the address is:
ktinthegarden at g mail dot com
Remember to include the nic or name by which you wish to be known at AoSHQ, or let us know if you want to remain a lurker.
With the recent news of mounting deaths due to heat in Europe, the latter position is becoming somewhat embarrassing.
Back in 2019, the Smithsonian actually published a positive piece on the American invention of air conditioning: The Unexpected History of the Air Conditioner
Working inside an office during a heatwave in June. A dinner party in July. Buying chocolate in August. If you talk to Salvatore Basile, author of the book Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything these things wouldn’t have happened in America without the ability to cool the temperature around us.
“It has shaped our world to the extent that people can carry on very normal lives during the hot months, which would not have happened before,” Basile says.
Today, almost 75 percent of U.S. homes have air conditioning, but for an appliance that has become a near necessity for Americans, one of the first of its kind was surprisingly unconcerned with human comfort.
At the turn of the 20th century, humidity threatened the reputation of Brooklyn’s Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographic and Publishing Company’s high-quality color printing. After two summers of extreme heat disrupted business and caused swelling pages and blurry prints, the printing company found that a nascent cooling industry could offer help.
Willis Carrier, a 25-year-old experimental engineer, created a primitive cooling system to reduce humidity around the printer. He used an industrial fan to blow air over steam coils filled with cold water; the excess humidity would then condense on the coils and produce cooled air.
“Not only did it solve the problem, but [the cool air] started to make people comfortable, and then the lightbulb went off,” Basile says.
Even Carrier knew that his initial invention was not the most effective way to control humidity and continued tinkering with the technology. By 1922, Carrier had created the safer, smaller and more powerful Centrifugal Refrigeration Compressor, the precursor to modern air conditioning. At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, one of the first practical centrifugal refrigeration compressor’s dating to 1922 is held in historic recognition of Carrier’s feat.
Experts are quick to point out that crediting Carrier as the father of modern cooling technology would overlook decades-long efforts by other inventors who used refrigeration to make hot days more productive or comfortable, though. Long before Carrier was even born, University of Glasgow professor William Cullen evaporated liquids in a vacuum thus creating refrigeration technology as early as 1748. . .
The story of the Florida doctor is interesting. And then there is the contribution of the movies to air conditioning . . .
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Another kind of American inventor, Martha Stewart, published A Brief History of the Refrigerator. The refrigerator is not all-American, but was refined here. This completes both of WaPo's 2015 topics above, I guess.
A lot of history buffs check in at this site, but Powerline posted a link to an interesting compilation of potentially important figures in American history:
A menagerie of 80 VPs, Speakers, Presidents Pro Tem, and Secretaries of State and Treasury who were first-in-line to inherit the White House from 47 presidents
These 80 included:
A general who won the Nobel Peace Prize and also wrote a musical piece performed by classical masters. Fifty years later, with lyrics added, it topped the Billboard charts for six weeks, making an R&B singer the first African American with a #1 hit. Other recordings featured Louis Armstrong, Art Garfunkel, Van Morrison, Merle Haggard, Cass Elliot, Freddy Fender, and countless others. (Videos below.)
A person of color who predated Barack Obama and Kamala Harris by nearly a century.
A Jewish Christmas tree farmer who lived next-door to a future president who also grew Christmas trees.
A man whose friends claimed (almost certainly wrongly) that he was actually President of the U.S. for one day.
A world-class plant geneticist whose sharp leftward turn and involvement with astrology and mysticism may have cost him the presidency and who learned botany from George Washington Carver, who lived as a guest in his house.
One who was so despised by his fellow senators that he derailed a presidential impeachment.
A 20th century diplomat who had been a right-hand man to Abraham Lincoln and was a poet, novelist, and naturalist.
A man who rose from stock clerk at GM to Chairman of U.S. Steel in 12 years.
Several Confederate officials and/or military officers.
A general described by Winston Churchill as “the noblest Roman of them all.”
A dying man who spent almost all his heartbeat-away time in Cuba.
A wit who said, “What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.”
Another who said the vice presidency “wasn’t worth a bucket of warm piss.”
You’ll meet these and many more in the chronology below. . .
American history - never boring. Can you identify any of these individuals by the brief statements above, without checking the substack? Have you studied the lives of any of the persons above?
On the whole, it’s been a good week. It’s not every week that serves up the kind of supreme schadenfreudey goodness that comes from the firing of the pompous CBS News blowhard Scott Pelley, with more to follow. Less noticed was that NPR laid off most of its climate change reporters this week, too. If NPR is giving up on the climate crusade, it is well and truly over. The strong showing of Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt (fingers crossed about those “late” votes) is also cheering, though it will still be an uphill fight to November. England continues to spiral down the drain, but after their George Floyd-in-reverse moment, I am cheered to see anti-police riots in Birmingham. Oh, and props to DOCTOR Jill Biden for providing more free entertainment with her memoir. Can Hunter’s memoir be far behind? And Obama’s library opened, with a structure that looks like it belongs in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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Music
John Phillip Sousa marches have become part of America. From the Greenville Concert Band in 2023:
John Philip Sousa composed 136 marches between the years 1873 and 1931, and he described this march as his best one. Memorable and powerful in every respect, Semper Fidelis, composed in 1888, is the official march of the United States Marine Corps and takes its title from the motto of the Corps: “Always Faithful.” The special importance of this march is shown by the fact that Semper Fidelis was played as a funeral march when the Marine Band accompanied John Philip Sousa’s body on his way from the Marine Barracks to the Congressional Cemetery in 1932.
What is your favorite fun American music?
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Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.
Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.
UPDATE: A cursory search didn't show anything dramatic in the news about the scheduled June 4 state court appearance for the property manager still charged with improper disposal of hazardous waste.
Before we enter the Prayer Revival, just a few housekeeping matters to go over. (Rulz for those of you in Lake Mills)
1) This is an open thread. Feel free to lurk, opine and/or bloviate.
2) Be kind. Be nice.
3) Must we address the issue of running with sharp objects?
4) Have a great weekend!
*****
AoSHQ Weekly Prayer List
Please submit any prayer requests to me, “Annie’s Stew” at apaslo at-sign hotmail dot com. Prayer requests are generally removed after four weeks unless we receive an update.
Prayer Requests:
3/28 – Hrothgar asked for prayers for a dear and long time close friend and former neighbor, Daniel, who is scheduled for open heart surgery in mid-April. Prayers for his wife would be appreciated as well, as she will be carrying a heavy load for the next few months.
4/18 Update – Daniel survived his complex open heart surgery. He is sitting up and it seems like it went well, but they are not going to release him as quickly as he would like, so he is not happy. Thanks to the Horde for the prayers and please keep praying for his dear wife, who now has even more to put up with.
5/16 Update – Hrothgar sends thanks for the prayers for Dan. Thanks to his attitude and the miracles of modern heart surgery, Daniel is back home and in good spirits and mobile. He still has a lot of rehab ahead, but it sounds like a pretty good recovery to be home only 20 days after being on the table!
3/28 – Jordan61 posted that Mr. Jordan61 is back in the hospital. His sepsis has returned and gotten into where his compression fracture is, and he has vertebral osteomyelitis. The doctor is supposed to come in today and let them know the plan.
4/9 Update – On 4/1 Mr. Jordan61 was released from the hospital with six weeks of IV antibiotics, which Jordan61 is administering every 8 hours. He’s in a lot of pain; they’ve given him oxy, fentanyl, and dilaudid, and nothing seems to touch it. From what they were told, the pain won’t subside until the infection is cleared up. For the time being, he is bed-bound and they are limiting his movement as much as possible to keep the pain to a minimum. Jordan61 will send updates with progress.
4/25 Update – Mr. Jordan61 is making slow but steady progress. He can get up and walk for short periods of time, and can sit in the living room for an hour or so per day. He is halfway through the IV antibiotics, with 3 weeks to go. A physical therapist will be coming to help him build strength and learn how to move without aggravating his back injury. Thank you all for the prayers!
5/26 Update – Mr. Jordan61 had his last antibiotic infusion on 5/24 and his PICC line was removed on 5/26. He will have follow-up blood work in 2 weeks but for now, all looks good!
4/3 – Teresa in Fort Worth posted an update. Her chemo seems to be holding things steady for now. Unfortunately, as she is receiving a steroid, she has gained about 25 pounds. Her blood sugar has also jumped up about 40 points (which only happens when she is on steroids).
4/24 Update – Teresa in Fort Worth provided an update: The pump that was put in to battle cancer in December can only be used for 6 months. After that, it starts to damage the liver. So she may have to go back onto the medication that made her lose her hair and messed up her vision and nails, and then return to this medication after a break. This is not good news, since this new medication is working so well. But for now, she is doing well and is incredibly grateful for the time that she has been given so far.
6/1 Update – Teresa had a CT scan and has seen the surgeon. Everything looks good/stable. There are no new tumors and the ones that are there have pretty much stayed the same or shrunk. No metastises seen. Additional good news is that she can stay on the current medication, and just alternate it with other meds. She continues to respond extremely well to the protocols. She sends her gratitude for each and every prayer.
4/18 – neverenoughcaffiene asked that Devyn be kept in prayers. She is a young mother of 2 with a mass on her esophagus. The Doc said it was scar tissue and hopefully the second opinion will agree.
5/23 Update – Devyn had the biopsy and is waiting for results. Prayers are appreciated.
4/18 – Smell the Glove could use some prayers as therapy and rehab occur after gout/sepsis.
5/2 Update – The gout has cleared and the infection in the lower back is healing.
5/18 Update – Smell the Glove may be out of rehab this week, but still would need wound care at home. Thanks for all the prayers and well wishes!
4/18 – Sam Adams requested prayers for a friend, Mary F, who was just sent to a long-term recovery facility after having a tracheostomy.
5/2 Update – Mary’s breathing is improving, and they are weaning her off assisted breathing. She is now off the ventilator for 12 hours a day, and they are aiming for 14 hours soon. Many thanks to all of the Moron Horde for the prayers.
5/2 – neverenoughcaffiene requested prayers for parishioners at her church, who lost their newborn daughter, Astrid.
5/7 – turambar asked for prayers for relatives. Mom needs prayers as she was admitted to the hospital to check her heart and cardio. They did not find pneumonia. Two months ago, she fell at her assisted living place, and broke her hip. She also has dementia. Turambar’s uncle fell recently and broke his hip, too.
5/9 – D asked for prayers. He was let go from his IT job and has started a business making and selling lens cleaners to make ends meet. Please contact Annie’s Stew if you’d like more information – either to order lens cleaners, or if you’d like to contact him related to IT job openings (DBA/Network Admin).
5/11 – rez986 asked if anyone had an update on Neidermeyer’s Dead Horse’s health. The last info Annie’s Stew has was from January, 2026, that he’d been given 6 months to live due to heart failure and was being treated and waiting for a transplant at Mayo.
5/16 Update – Dash my lace wings! posted that NDH is recovering well. IrishEi posted that NDH did receive a heart transplant and that she is doing well. She also posted a link to NDH’s X account, and her fundraising page.
5/23 – rez986 sent thanks for the updates on NDH. It is much appreciated.
5/15 – Toad-O requested prayers for his second ex-wife, the mother of his two children. They were divorced 25 years ago, and 3 years later, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and the children came to live with Toad-O. The ex-wife is now suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s, and has been living with Toad-O’s daughter and her husband. The ex-wife fell last month and and cracked 2 vertebrae, and just was taken to ER with a rapid heartbeat and low blood pressure due to dehydration. Prayers are appreciated for her and also for the daughter who has sacrificed a lot to care for her.
5/16 – Anna Puma requested prayers for the family of Dan Fordice, who was killed when the aircraft he was flying crashed. He leaves behind a wife, 3 children, and many friends. He was a Warbird flyer, a CEO, and a veteran of the 2/20th SFG.
5/16 – Tonypete asked for prayers for Jane who is dying of breast cancer, and for Cheri who is in jail (again) for drug related crimes.
5/20 – D gave an update on his wife Susan and her continued battle with cancer. Her cancer markers are still headed in the right direction. She is on a new antibiotic, and it is causing some side effects, but it is keeping her out of another surgery, so that is a win. Thanks again to everyone for their prayers. May 1 marked one year since they found out about the cancer, and Susan is doing so well.
5/20 – E gave an update. She and her family were having financial struggles a few months ago, and asked for prayers. E sends her thanks for the prayers, and wanted to let people know that things are getting better, thanks to the Horde’s prayers and their church family. They have resolved their mortgage issue and her husband has resumed his side gig making deliveries. They are also cutting monthly expenses. They would like continued prayers as they deal with the insurance company of the person who crashed into (and totaled) E’s vehicle. Insurance only offered half the replacement value, so that struggle is still going on.
5/23 – San Franpsycho sent a praise report. His prayer to become a grandad has been answered, and Girl F will have a baby in December. Girl F still plans to attend grad school, but will delay a year, which means they will depend on them for child care. This pleases San Franpsycho to the nth degree!
5/23 – Vmom deport deport deport would appreciate prayers. She has been freaking out about her eyesight. Her eye doctor says she has myopic macular degeneration.
5/23 – I used to have a Different Nic could use some prayers as he waits for the results of a biopsy of a mass on his prostate.
6/2 Update – I used to have a Different Nic sent in an update. He has been diagnosed with risk group 2 prostate cancer. It appears to be localized to the prostate but this will be verified via another scan. He has doctor appointments lined up for the next month or so before he starts treatment.
5/23 – George V sends his thanks for the prayers on behalf of his wife, when she had a heart valve replacement. The procedure went very well and she is doing great in the rehab program. But prayers are still needed. There are indications of problems in her lymph nodes that showed up in the scans checking her heart. She will have a biopsy in June, as well as a biopsy on a skin lesion that is looking suspicious. Thank you for all prayers.
5/26 – Doof posted a request for prayers for his mom. She is back in the hospital. She is very weak from one or more infections, and is sleeping a lot. She isn’t really talking when she is alert for a few minutes.
5/27 – Grannysaurus Rex asked for prayers for Sherry, a co-worker, who is being tested for possible cancer of the blood.
5/29 – Bulg requested prayers for his sister, her husband, their four children, and the rest of the family as his sister is dying. She is in palliative care in the hospital, with a lot of blood clots, and is not expected to last long.
5/29 – huerfano requested prayers for her brother, R, whose appendix “got hot”. Luckily he was with his daughter, who got him to ER quickly, and surgery was scheduled for 5/29.
5/29 – Beltway Elite posted that s/he had just signed forms for her/his mom to enter hospice. Mom’s quality of life has been declining since she had a stroke several years ago, and she hasn’t been able to speak or swallow solid food recently.
5/30 – RandomDave posted that he would appreciate prayers as he searches for work. He has had some good job prospects/interviews over the past week.
6/2 – Ellipsis (…) sent in an update. We had prayed for a friend of hers who was going through cancer treatment. It’s been a little over a year, and her port is out now and her hell is over. She is battered and bruised, but clear. Thank you to the Horde for prayers, and praise to Jesus.
6/4 – Teresa in Fort Worth’s niece (Amanda) received a heart transplant a few months ago. One of the complications of that was that her kidneys started failing, and she needed a kidney transplant. On 6/3, she received a new kidney and it appears to be working. Hallelujah! The family is so grateful for the gift from the donor’s family.
For submission guidelines and other relevant info, please contact Annie's Stew, who is managing the prayer list. You can contact her at apaslo at-sign hotmail dot com. If you see a prayer request posted in a thread comment, feel free to copy and paste it and e-mail it to Annie's Stew. She tries to keep up with the requests in the threads, but she's not here all of the time, so she may not see it unless you e-mail it to her. Please note: Prayer requests are generally removed after four weeks or so unless we receive an update.
2 Corinthians 4:8-9
We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.
And recovered both boosters, with them landing autonomously on the company's two purpose-built drone ships.
I was curious as to how long it took mankind to launch its first 50 satellites into orbit, and the answer surprised me: Withing four years of Sputnik there were over a hundred satellite launches. "Space race" is no misnomer.
Which might sounds backwards but illustrates the scale on which the company is operating. SpaceX already has an arrangement with AI company Anthropic, which pays SpaceX $1.25 billion per month to lease compute capacity.
Though it's not clear what they can do. Even direct government investment or loan guarantees for Micron - the one American player among the Big Three memory makers - to accelerate expansion can only go so far because it takes years to build and fit out new factories, and the availability of the equipment for making chips is as constrained as the chips themselves.
Qualcomm is infamous for masking the specs of their processors. For more than a decade every CPU shipped has contained "Kryo" cores according to the company's own datasheets. Those are relabeled Arm cores, but you're not supposed to know which relabeled Arm cores. Could be the A53 from 2012; could be the latest X925. It's all just "Kryo".
It's as if General Motors announced its 2026 Car (TM) with Engine (TM) technology.
Anyway, in this case it has four A720 cores and four A520 cores on a 4nm process, because as soon as one person outside Qualcomm gets their hands on one the real specs leak out.
The cheapest model, the 304, has one performance core, four low-power cores, and one graphics core; the other current models have two, four, and two respectively.
The planned upgrade will bring the count of performance cores to four, a perfectly reasonable number for an everyday laptop.
Expected at the end of last year, these models would have swapped 2GB GDDR7 memory chips for 3GB models, with some unspecified other minor improvements. The 5070 with its 12GB of RAM - limiting for some recent games - would be supplanted by a 5070 Super with 18GB of RAM.
Rumours now include a 12GB 5060 Super, plus the new 24GB 5070 Ti Super and 5080 Super.
No leaks of when or how much, but not soon and not cheap.
But the features it removes are Brave's own - relatively unobtrusive - monetisation efforts.
(Speaking of which, Tom's Hardware has annoying new ads that fill every inch of whitespace on the page. If you set Brave's adblock to "aggressive" it makes them go away and leaves the page readable again. I don't want website owners to starve but there are limits.)
The $60 is a one-time payment and lets you install the browser on up to 10 systems, so I'd only need two licenses.
Yes, it's an e-ink display, so take that refresh rate with a pound of salt, and the resolution as well: In colour it is cut by half, so 1600x1200. Which is not terrible for a 13" display you would use mostly for reading text, but worth remembering.
I did some digging on the original 2012 Nexus 7 tablet - which I owned (and probably still have in a box in the garage), and which had notably murky colour thanks to the choice of a budget LCD panel. That still offered something on the order of 60% of DCI-P3 colour.
Been very busy at work recently, pushing a new project towards release. Got sign-off from both the QA and marketing teams yesterday, so I finally get a weekend off. Ish.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: What did you say to me? No, honestly, I couldn't find a translation. (Apparently it's in Teda, a language spoken in Chad.)
Howdy all y'all! Weird Dave is on ONT special assignment this week, so yer ol' pal Weasel is filling in. Since the ONT goes up waaaay past my normal bedtime I really have no idea what I am doing, so please bear with me as I figure out the complexities and subtle nuance of the thread.
With that, grab your favorite beverage and settle in for the overnight!
Man removes a big screw that got stuck in the giant foot of an elephant. How much trust do you need to have in the intelligence of an elephant to put your body directly under his foot as you painfully unscrew the screw out as the elephant cries?
Beta soyboy cuck gets into someone's face, jamming his bird-hand into the guy's face as he rants at him, and discovers he's not in his safe space any longer.
When Leah Wilson learned that an injured crow was trapped in a home's rain gutter, she couldn't ignore it. Overhead, a flock of crows was already sounding the alarm, circling and dive-bombing the area as if calling for help.
...
Determined to help, Leah spotted a fire truck parked a few blocks away and decided to take a chance.
"I was like, 'Hey! You look like you want to save a crow today,'" she said with a laugh.
The firefighters happily stepped in, raising their ladder and freeing the injured bird.
...
After the rescue, Leah personally drove the crow to a wildlife rehabilitation center. During the trip, something happened that she still remembers vividly.
"He latched on to my finger and held on," she said. "That was life changing."
"I wrapped him up, got him into the car. He was scared, injured, and exhausted. At one point he wrapped his claws around my finger and just held on. I was on the phone with wildlife emergency, trying to stay calm while he wouldn't let go. I will never forget that feeling."
A few days later, she learned the crow had recovered and been released back into the wild. Soon afterward, she experienced something she never expected.
While walking her dog, a crow swooped down and dropped what she describes as a beautiful bundle of feathers at her feet.
Actually that sounds like the "gifts" I'm getting. A dead bird.
Since then, Leah has received more than half a dozen offerings from crows, including sticks, balls of moss, and even a small bird's nest. What might seem unusual to others has become a meaningful reminder of her connection with the natural world.
...
Today, her daily walks have become something of a neighborhood event. Crows regularly join Leah and her dog, flying alongside them from block to block.
"It feels so good," she said. "It's like visiting my friends every morning and knowing they're going to be there."
Collins doesn't have to match him in any poll. In her last three wins, the rigged polls drastically underestimated Collins' support. In 2008, polls were 8 points under her final vote performance. In 2014, polls again understated her support by 8 points.
In 2020, polls understated her support by 12 points.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Democratic challenger Graham Platner are in a dead heat for the November Senate election, according to a recent survey.
Platner has faced a litany of scandals since he started his campaign, including having a tattoo featuring Nazi symbolism, and increased in recent days and weeks with revelations about sexually inappropriate social media posts and extramarital sexting.
Platner and Collins each earned 46% support among likely voters, with 8% undecided in the latest survey from Fabrizio, Lee & Associates, a Trump-aligned pollster. Among those voters, 39% said they would "definitely vote for Collins, while 40% said they would "definitely" vote for Platner. Politico first obtained the survey.
The most recent RealClearPolitics.com polls average has Planter leading by 7.4%.
Platner's scandals appear to have contributed to the narrowing of the contest.
When asked about this, he says she never told him it was a Totenkampf, so how could he, the owner of the tattoo and allegedly a "military expert" and "history buff," know what a highly-identifiable symbol from the most documented war of all time know?
I don't want to be a sexist, but it's men, not women, who are interested in World War Two and military history. It's not women watching the History Channel. (Though maybe they are -- isn't it all Aliens and Bigfoot now?)
So how did she know what his Totenkampf tattoo was before the military-expert war-buff who owned the tattoo did?
"I'll leave it up to them because I'm not in Maine, but I'll tell you if he were in New Jersey, the abuse of women, let alone the Nazi tattoo...would be disqualifying." pic.twitter.com/dzVGyAc5Lr
Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit. His murder is as tragic as it is enraging. He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.
Henry was far from the first to so needlessly lose his life, and I fear he won't be the last. Each time a life like his is lost, the proper response--the only response--is righteous anger. One of the most important things the Trump administration has proven to the world is that stopping the flow of mass migration and defending national sovereignty is a matter of political will and leadership. Anything else is an excuse.
It is because we love the West that we want to preserve it. We love our civilization. We love our country. We love our children. And nobody--nobody--should ever die the way that Henry Nowak died. May God comfort those who loved him, and may God rest his soul.
Carl Benjamin said that we should view the UK police as the "colonial police" -- the colonial police protect the interests of the colonizers, and enforce the colonizer's will against the indigenous, conquered people.
[T]his horror speaks to a deeper moral rot: It reveals the corrosive effect the ideology of wokeness has had on the institutions of our society.
The reason the cops believed the knife-wielding monster and dismissed his dying victim is simple: The killer was a brown-skinned man, and his victim was a white-skinned man.
Critical race theory is rife in Britain's police forces.
Under official guidance, cops must believe every accusation of a "hate crime."
They're trained to always be on the lookout for racism.
Indeed Hampshire Police, which covers Southampton, boasts of its devotion to the woke state's holy mission of hunting down "hate."
Its "race action plan" fizzes with the kind of critical-race drivel you hear on every Ivy League campus.
It describes the Minnesota death of George Floyd in 2020 as a "pivotal moment" for Britain's police, too.
That tragedy compelled the force, it says, to be "anti-racist" in all police actions.
The irony is thick: This force claims to have "learned the lessons" of the death of a black man who cried "I can't breathe" -- yet just six years later its officers are horribly mistreating a white boy who pleaded the same.
It's precisely their embrace of the post-Floyd BLM mania that led these cops to grossly demean young Henry.
Having imbibed the infantile script that casts whites as oppressors and non-whites as oppressed, they were primed to believe Digwa and to doubt Henry.
To them, he was just a white man, and what could be worse than that?
...
Prime Minister Keir Starmer and virtually our entire political establishment took the knee for the career criminal Floyd.
They've done no such thing for the kind, thoughtful Henry Nowak.
And there it is: the "virtuous," obscene racial prejudice of the woke elites.
For many self-described religious Democrats, squaring their support for abortion and radical gender ideology with their faith is a challenge. But at Texas Democrat James Talarico's church, supporting abortions is part of the congregation's "goals for the world."
At the Texas church where the Democrat senate hopeful preaches sermons on the need for abortion in the "trans community," church funds are sent not only to abortion giant Planned Parenthood, but also to radical organizations that pay to help facilitate out-of-state travel for women to kill their unborn babies, and an organization that runs a summer camp for transgender-identifying kids as young as 11.
St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, the woke Austin church attended by Talarico, lists Planned Parenthood, which ends the lives of hundreds of thousands of unborn babies every year, as one of the organizations that shares its "vision and goals for the world."
The church, which The Daily Wire reported last week stocks sexually explicit books aimed at young people in its library, sets aside money every year for Planned Parenthood, according to its website. It also describes itself as a "Reproductive Freedom Congregation," meaning it believes that "abortion is a blessing."
...
The church's position on abortion is in line with Talarico's own support for codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law to create a so-called right to an abortion. Talarico grounds his support for abortion in the biblical account of an angel visiting the Virgin Mary and telling her that she would miraculously conceive and give birth to Jesus Christ.
"I say all this in the context of abortion, because before God comes over Mary, and we have the incarnation, God asks for Mary's consent," he said during an appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast. "You cannot force someone to create... so that's how I come down on that side of the issue."
...
The radical pro-abortion groups are just a sliver of the liberal causes supported by the church. Other organizations St. Andrew's lists on its donation page included Out Youth Austin, the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Evergreen Action, and the Carbon180.
Out Youth Austin describes itself as a group that provides "a safe space for LGBTQ+ youth to come together, receive support, and make friends who understand who they are." One of the programs it offers is a summer camp for kids between the ages of 11-17 who identify as gay or transgender.
The bill was sponsored by Democrats Amy Paulin in the State Assembly and Senator Luis Sepulveda in the State Senate. The bill now proceeds to New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul's desk for approval.
Pride celebrations across the country continue to lose out on large sponsorships as corporations, a key source of funding, shrink their affiliation with diversity causes and LGBTQ+ events.
Corporate sponsorships of celebrations in several cities, including New York City, Salt Lake City, Louisville, St. Louis, Orlando, and Pittsburgh are down from previous years, organizers said.
Jordan Braxton, co-president of the United States Association of Prides, which supports Pride celebrations nationwide, said that while some smaller Prides have seen a growth in sponsorships, a majority have seen a reduction.
She said the Trump administration's dismantling of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, has scared corporations away from sponsoring Pride celebrations. "I think that's why some of the corporations have pulled back, because they don't want that government scrutiny," she said.
Weingarten Blames Screens, Not Herself, For Falling Test Scores
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is sounding the alarm about the decade-long decline in student test scores, pointing to screens and devices as a culprit. She's calling it a "call to action."
She left out the part about how she helped cause the problem in the first place.
For two years during the COVID pandemic, Weingarten and the AFT fought aggressively to keep schools closed. In July 2020, as the Trump administration urged schools to reopen, Weingarten called the push "reckless," "callous," and "cruel," and threatened the possibility of safety strikes.
Internal emails later released by a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee showed the AFT had access to draft guidance from the federal Centers for Disease Control before it was made public, as well as proposed specific language that could trigger renewed closures.
Research published afterward confirmed what was already evident: Districts with stronger teachers unions were significantly less likely to reopen for in-person instruction, even after controlling for local COVID conditions.
So kids stayed home. They got on computer screens and stayed there for two years, cut off from teachers, friends, and anything resembling a normal childhood.
The consequences were not abstract. The National Assessment of Educational Progress recorded the largest declines in math and reading scores in its history. Reading results dropped to levels not seen since the early 1990s.
Researchers documented surging rates of anxiety, depression, and social developmental delays among children who spent critical years in isolation. The damage, experts say, will take a generation to undo.
In her book published last fall, Weingarten wrote that she "...led the AFT in developing a concrete plan to reopen schools as quickly and safely as possible." That's a remarkable claim given the documented record of what her union actually did.
Weingarten told Congress in 2023 there were "... things we really didn't get right," including the impact of prolonged closures. That acknowledgment was notable, but what followed it wasn't accountability. It was a pivot.
The same union that lobbied to keep students off school grounds is now positioning itself as a champion of children's well-being, pointing an accusing finger at Silicon Valley while the learning-loss data keeps compounding.
Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter Ella Emhoff shows off her fashion with an outfit of the day video.
Emhoff is signed to IMG, one of the world’s most prestigious modeling agencies, and has been described as a ‘fashion it girl’ and ‘top model’ by the fashion industry. pic.twitter.com/4236gBoOuu
Seven properties, a Mercedes G-Wagon, sneakers worn by Kobe Bryant and a Mickey Mantle rookie card worth $1.5 million. All of these things were bought with taxpayer money.
Paul Randall pleaded guilty in one of the largest Medicaid fraud schemes in the California history –… pic.twitter.com/wOiq0o0DkE
This is the scene in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. They're smoking ISO, a new drug that's up to 20 times more powerful than fentanyl. pic.twitter.com/KrR2GmQPKg
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) June 4, 2026
Over seven in ten people in France believe that crime is 'out of control', a year after fears emerged that the country was sliding towards a 'Mexicanized narco-state'.
According to a poll this week from CSA for Le Journal du Dimanche, 72 per cent of the French population believes that crime has dramatically escalated beyond previous levels.
This belief is strongest among supporters of the centre-right Républicains, at 92 per cent, followed by 83 per cent of National Rally, and 62 per cent of supporters of President Emmanuel Macron's neo-liberal bloc.
The conviction was also held by a majority of left-wing voters, at 55 per cent overall.
This included 58 per cent of supporters of the far-left La France Insoumise party, founded by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and 51 per cent of Socialist voters.
Only Green Party supporters were below a majority, at just 45 per cent, in not believing that France is in danger of becoming like Mexico, where the state has lost authority to rogue criminal networks.
Women were more likely than men to view the situation as out of control, at 76 per cent compared to 69 per cent.
What can explain the stupid public believing that crime is out of control?
The firing of "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley could be just the tip of the iceberg at the venerable news magazine.
...
Dylan Byers, a media reporter at Puck, a digital news company, warned more departures could be coming during an appearance on MS NOW.
Along with Pelley, correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega were recently fired and correspondent Anderson Cooper departed.
"No one has left the building at '60 Minutes' without some version of what Scott did, some sort of criticism toward the new management, and indeed the new ownership about the direction of the show," Byers said.
"It is very difficult to see how this new leadership is able to usher '60 Minutes' as it has existed in the past into the future," Byers added. "We only have three remaining correspondents there. I know that they currently are deliberating over what they are going to do.
"It's very possible that we're going to arrive at a moment here in a matter of weeks, if not days, where there is no existing talent left at '60 Minutes' and they are going to have to build this back up from scratch."
Meanwhile, three other leftwing propagandists in danger of being fired -- Leslie "we won't bother to verify the Hunter Biden Laptop, that's your job" Stahl, Bill Whitaker (who "interviewed" Kamala Harris in that sliced-and-diced advertisement that got CBS sued) and Jon Wertheim -- say that they're going to stay at 60 Minutes and not quit in solidarity because they're seriously overpaid and could not get work anywhere else.
Oh that's the real reason, not the admitted one. The fake reason they give is that they have to stay and fight the corrupt "leadership" from the inside.
Note that they wrote an initial draft announcing they were staying on, which attacked the "leadership" without naming names. That's because Weiss and Bilton have reaffirmed the basic rule that direct insubordination is, was, and always will be a fireable offense.
So they took the coward's way out and grumbled about unnamed parties in "leadership."
But they were even more cowardly than that, because they tore up that "initial" draft and just... leaked it to political ally Dylan Byers.
Dylan Byers
@DylanByers
NEW: The initial draft of the Stahl-Whitaker-Wertheim letter read like a full-throated rejection of CBS leadership, accusing their "overlords" of using "chilling" and "callous" tactics--all of it omitted from final memo. It also did not include any language about Nick Bilton...
"60 Minutes" correspondents Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim said Friday that they planned to stay on at the newsmagazine, capping days of turmoil for the show.
"We have had a hard time deciding whether to stay," the three wrote in a memo to their colleagues at the program, before adding: "We don't want to see '60 Minutes' die."
60 Minutes would die without them, you guys.
The graveyards are filled with indispensable men. There's room for three or four more.
They wrote that they were still "deeply upset by the firings" of executive producer Tanya Simon and high-ranking producer Draggan Mihailovich, whom they called "strong leaders who everyone respected." Their colleague Scott Pelley was fired earlier this week after he challenged the newsmagazine's new executive producer over the recent firings.
The longtime correspondents said that "as far as we can tell," those leaders were fired because "they fought for our '60 Minutes' values and stood up to protect our independence and integrity."
"Newsrooms are not supposed to be run like dictatorships," they added in the memo, obtained by NBC News. "Collaboration and argument are the way we have always worked at 60."
Fuck you.
Weiss and Bilton should fire them for leaking the insubordinate initial draft, and for accusing them of running 60 Minutes like "a dictatorship" in the cowardly re-write they did wind up publishing.
Former CBS News investigative reporter @SharylAttkisson tells me she's shocked it took 60 Minutes this long to fire Scott Pelley:
"Scott Pelley was not a popular anchor in terms of his skill as an anchor as well as his personality... Quite a while before they removed him, I was… pic.twitter.com/gtRjsToRqe
Former CBS News investigative reporter @SharylAttkisson tells me she's shocked it took 60 Minutes this long to fire Scott Pelley:
"Scott Pelley was not a popular anchor in terms of his skill as an anchor as well as his personality... Quite a while before they removed him, I was… pic.twitter.com/gtRjsToRqe
Below: Pelley had on moms opposed to pornographic books in children's school libraries. The women read from the books and quoted the words "dildo" and "vagina" and "rape."
CBS muted the words so that no one could hear what was actually in the books.
“Tiffany Justice read from explicit books.”
Yes, I did. Watch my lips when I’m reading and you can see me say dildo and vagina.
I stopped at one point and asked @ScottPelley if he wanted me to continue. He said yes, if I wanted to.
This sissy idiot is bragging that "my team" -- my little clique of communist Mean Girls -- drove Bari Weiss out of the New York Times... and set her on the path to becoming a self-made media mogul and editor in chief of all of CBS "News."
Bragging that you initiated a chain of events that made your enemy 1000x more successful is a very, very funny thing to do https://t.co/q4Yyu5IPKM
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) June 4, 2026
SPLC paid for KKK cross burnings, robes and hoods, recruitment, living expenses, racist merch: explosive indictment
Oh, and an SPLC employee was fucking one of the Cosplay Racists she was paying:
"The SPLC paid F-9 for over 20 years," the superseding indictment noted, also adding that an employee at the SPLC was in a romantic relationship with the field source.
Perfect.
The SPLC is literally in bed with the KKK.
A KKK they're paying to continue to "exist," at least on paper.
A superseding indictment returned by an Alabama grand jury on Tuesday has accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of secretly funneling millions in donations to informants associated with extremist groups such as the KKK, and those funds going towards the making of Klan robes and hoods as well as cross burnings and recruitment.
The newest indictment accuses the organization of funnelling around $4.1 million in donations "to a series of fictitious accounts" that were used to pay "field sources" affiliated with extremist groups between 2014 and 2023. The original indictment from April had alleged around $3 million in funds funneled between that time period, an amount that is now far greater.
...
The indictment stated that donor funds paid to field sources were used to purchase materials for cross burnings and making Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods, attending and hosting extremist group rallies nationwide, creating and growing chapters of extremist groups as well as recruiting new members, making "racist paraphernalia that extremist groups sold at rallies," and paying the living expenses of field sources to allow them to "focus on their extremist groups rather than seeking other employment."
Did they pay anyone for blue button down shirts and khakis?
Hypothesis: Everyone wearing a mask in that photo was paid by the SPLC, through their catspaw, to be there.
"The SPLC actively led donors to believe that their donations would be used to 'dismantle' violent extremist groups. However, the SPLC hid from donors the fact that a portion of their donated funds was being secretly used to support extremist groups and to fund their violent, racist, and extremist activities," the indictment stated. "These activities were of the same nature as the activities about which the SPLC published articles on its website and other forums in an effort to obtain donations."
Prosecutors expanded upon the actions of field sources cited in the original indictment. One of the sources, dubbed "F-9" in the indictment, was allegedly paid over $1.2 million in donor money. The source allegedly infiltrated the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organization, "at the direction of the SPLC," and helped raise money for the group. He allegedly received funds from the SPLC through a bank account for the fake entity Tech Writers Group.
NEW: Five FBI employees were fired today over the infamous Richmond Catholic memo on "radical traditionalist Catholics," FBI source confirms to @realDailyWire.
Oof. Reviewers do not like Scary Movie 6. The criticism I keep hearing is that the movie mistakes a reference for an actual joke. The movie (they say) keeps Key Jangling a reference to another movie (or some other pop culture ephemera) and you expect there to be a joke but nope, the Key Jangle was the joke. Other reviewers say that the promise that "no lines will be uncrossed" is a fake-out, and that the movie is bland and inoffensively corporate.
Whoops! I posted about Dan Goldman losing the NY congressional primary. He might do that, but it won't be tonight -- the primary isn't held until June 23.
One race to keep an eye on: the Levi's heir nepo baby and egregious "Designated Liar" Dan Goldman -- one of the Democrats from a safe district Democrats send out to spread their most indefensible lies -- may actually lose his lower Manhattan/Brooklyn set due to, get this, antisemitism in the Democrat primary electorate. Antisemitism? In the anti-Nazi Democrat Party? Sounds crazy, I know, but apparently the anti-Nazi Party wants to eliminate Jews.
Henry Rosoff
@HenryRosoff
🚨EXCLUSIVE POLL:
Brad Lander is 34-pts ahead of Congressman Dan Goldman with #NY10 Democratic Primary voters. @ZohranKMamdani is backing the former Comptroller.
@bradlander: 57%
@danielsgoldman: 23%
Poll by @PIX11News & @EmersonPolling.
MORE: http://pix11.com
Oh my Totenkopf Tattoo, that is a DRUBBING! I'm usually very anti-antisemitism but if the Communist Antisemite Jihadists can pull this one off, Go Communist Antisemite Jihadists, Go!
Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., on Platner: "We know that Graham has lived not your typical political experience. He's been very clear and open with his wife, and they worked through whatever they worked through. At the end of the day, this man has had 60 more town halls than Susan Collins has. He's winning the polls, he's willing to accept that he has grown as a person, and I think we should accept that."
Gallego says the drip-drip of revelations won't harm Platner's campaign.
"I think you guys are all in a bubble here right now. The drip, drip that's actually happening is Americans are really, really hurt the fact that gas is still high, food is still high, they can't buy a home, you can't afford rent. They're not going to care about text messages and everything else like that that happened years ago, especially when it was worked out between spouses."
I like that he says that it's okay that Graham Platner sexted 12 different women within months of marrying the woman to sponge off her because he wasn't then "living a political life" -- the clear meaning being, "We all cheat, we just don't cheat when we're running for office, and he didn't know he was running for office when he was sending dicpics to half the women he ran into."
Except he was running: His own wife turned the sexts over to his campaign.
And obviously Reuben Gallego didn't let his "political life" get in the way of his extramarital dating life:
Podcast: CBD goes solo in a short segment...talking about Iran, the nativist issues surrounding Reform and Restore in the UK, and the delicious pain of an imploding Democrat Party, courtesy of Talerico and Platner!
Funny -- if you don't mind clicking on TikTok. "Amy.Pranks.22" set up an AI scam-call screener which replies to a foreign scammer trying to get her bank information with Trumpian bluster. This might be fake because I don't see how a program can respond in real time, but it's funny.
The ULA rocket just launched Thanks to Joyenz The rocket's enormous engines are fueled by "the volcanic heterosexual lust between James Talarico and his Neighbor With a Uterus 'girlfriend'" I hope Amazon's rocket works better than the Amazon Prime app does as far as allowing people to watch the black and white version of "Spider-Noir"
From the CA Post:
Spencer Pratt is now Karen Bass' biggest headache.
A bombshell California Post poll conducted with McLaughlin & Associates shows the reality TV star-turned-mayoral candidate has surged to a statistical tie with the incumbent mayor.
And voters blame homelessness, affordability and the direction of Los Angeles as the reason for turning on Bass.
Pratt now leads the field with 30.1% support, compared with 29.5% for Bass, setting up a razor-thin race heading into next week's primary.
Socialist councilwoman Nithya Raman sits in third place at 23.4%.
Thanks to beckster
Just like "Spartacus" Corey Booker, now that James Talarico is running for a higher office, he unveils his previously-unknown "girlfriend" and hooboy, it just so happens she used to work for him, and, get this, likes to "dance the night away" at gay bars Gee I wonder where they might have met Oh and she's a vegan
When Corey Booker needed a "girlfriend," he conjured up known LGBTQ activist Rosario Dawson. How convenient that when these guys need a girlfriend to show off to the normies that just happen to find an activist with a strong history of and interest in Supporting Gay Men But seriously, this James Talarico romance with a Neighbor with a Uterus is a love story for the ages. The passion of their lovemaking is hotter than a blue star with a core of Primordial Sex Atoms created in the Big Bang
Radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country.
He's referring to three mass attacks committed by white men in, oh, the past six or eight years. There were a huge number of mass shootings and bombings he had to skip over to cherry pick three committed by white men. Which kind of makes me think that "white men" are not the greatest terrorist threat in our country.
No, I doubt he'll be a guest on Tucker Carlson. The only thing that Tucker clings to that he claims makes him "conservative" is a palpable hatred of gays. Any time there's a communist enslaving their population and executing dissenters and conservatives, Tucker praises that dictator by saying "at least he represses the homos!"
