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May 25, 2022
FDA's Top Official Will Acknowledge They Did Not Even Begin Discussing For the Impending Baby Formula Crisis Until Mid-February-- and Did Nothing About It Until the Last Several Weeks
The FDA's top official will acknowledge a string of failures that contributed to the current infant formula shortages when he faces lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
In their prepared testimony released Tuesday evening, FDA Commissioner Robert Califf and several senior officials for the first time lay out a timeline of the agency's response to reports last fall that infants had been hospitalized after consuming formula made at an Abbott Nutrition plant in Sturgis, Mich. ...
Up until now, however, FDA officials declined to comment on why it took months between the first report of a bacterial infection linked to the plant last September, their inspection this winter, which turned up a range of food safety problems, and the recall. But the new details aren't likely to tamp down the criticism of the agency, rather, they are already fueling further outrage from lawmakers.
"The FDA, at every step of this process, dropped the ball," Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), chair of the House Appropriations Committee, told POLITICO in an interview about the new details revealed in the testimony. "It put infants at risk."
The FDA timeline laid out in the prepared testimony acknowledges the FDA didn't hold interagency discussions about potential supply chain disruptions until Feb. 14, three days before the Abbott Nutrition plant at the center of the current shortages shut down and issued a formula recall. And the agency didn't notify the Agriculture Department, which oversees a critical federal nutrition program that purchases about half of the nation's infant formula, about potential disruptions until a week before the Abbott plant shut down. The program, known as WIC, serves 1.2 million infants from low-income families. Abbott supplies nearly half of all infant formula provided through WIC state contracts.
The testimony also blames "mailroom issues" for the fact that senior FDA officials, including Woodcock and FDA's top food safety official, Susan Mayne, did not receive hard copies of the whistleblower report from last October detailing alarming concerns about the Abbott plant, including poor food safety practices and that officials there had falsified documents and intentionally information from FDA inspectors. The FDA did not interview the whistleblower until December.
According to Califf's testimony, Woodcock and Mayne eventually received the whistleblower report via email from another FDA staffer on Feb. 14, three days before the recall. The agency says copies of the whistleblower report sent to Mayne and another FDA official were found in the FDA's mailroom in May, but officials have yet to locate the copy sent to Woodcock. It was "likely due to COVID-19 staffing issues" and "a mailroom analysis is underway," the prepared remarks state.
...
DeLauro was not satisfied with the agency's explanation for its slow response to the whistleblower report. "Take responsibility. If you are the director, if you are the acting director, then you have to know what the hell is going on," said DeLauro, who has criticized the FDA for allowing Woodcock to also lead the internal review of its response.
...
Califf's testimony also addresses why it took the FDA until the end of January to begin its inspection of Abbott's Sturgis plant, despite receiving warnings last fall.
...
Despite the delays detailed in the timeline, the testimony argues that FDA "since the first day...has worked tirelessly with U.S. government partners to mitigate the supply chain disruption for both regular and specialty formulas." But lawmakers have questioned why it wasn't until May 16 that the FDA and Abbott agreed on a deal to reopen the Sturgis plant.
So it was shut down for months -- with no plan for reopening it, and no plan for what would replace the supply of baby formula it was supplying.
White House and USDA officials have privately complained about the FDA's decision not to warn other parts of the administration earlier, while allowing the situation to grow into a food security crisis for American families and a political crisis for President Joe Biden, just months ahead of the November midterms.
Oh, the White House is complaining about the political aspect of it, not the fact that babies might literally die from malnutrition, or face permanent developmental losses.
Unrelated: Media "journalists" conspire with Robert Francis "Beto" O'Rourke to allow him a place at a press conference to "confront" Greg Abbott.
Obviously the "journalists" should be stripped of any official credentials and never permitted on state grounds again, and the media organizations they work for banned as well.
.@JanetShamlian reports on Beto O’Rourke confronting Gov. Abbott during presser: "There were two people across the aisle from me and a moment before the press conference started, they got up from their seats when Beto walked in ... This seems something very clearly staged." pic.twitter.com/eaAxrZP6Gt
Democrats are having that discussion about Biden now.
They're not sure if he's serious about running again in 2024 or just blathering and bullshitting and blustering like he usually does, and they're pretty sure they want him to just be blathering and bullshitting and blustering. They're pretty sure they don't want an 82-year-old running for president, when the 79-year-old version is already in steep decline.
But they're not sure what their backup plan would be.
On a Tuesday evening in April, nearly half a century after Joe Biden first publicly mused about running for president, an unsettled cross section of the Democratic Establishment assembled at Pinehurst, a golf resort in North Carolina. Inflation was at a 40-year high, Biden's disapproval rating sat at 56 percent, and editors at the New York Times were readying a front-page report about how his signature achievement -- $1.9 trillion in coronavirus-relief spending -- has "barely registered with voters." The lobbyists, donors, staffers, and elected officials were gathering for the spring policy meeting of the Democratic Governors Association, and the scheduled sessions concerned such topics as health care and diversity in governance. But between panel discussions, in the hallways and at the cocktail reception on the lawn, conversation shifted from grim -- the midterms -- to grimmer: the state of the party's planning for 2024, when Biden will stand for reelection on the eve of his 82nd birthday.
Biden hasn't formally announced his campaign for a second term, but in his mind there's no question he's running. "That's my expectation," he said early in his tenure. "Yes!" he told an interviewer nine months later, sighing a little performatively at having to keep repeating it. "It's been his life," says one of his longtime advisers. "It's like a shark that keeps swimming. It's how he stays alive." Or as another top Democrat puts it, "He was told in '16 he couldn't cut it. He runs in '20 and everybody rolls their eyes, and he still wins. So why in the world now would he be like, 'You guys are right. I am old'?" And yet many of the plugged-in Democrats wandered Pinehurst not entirely persuaded, calculating contingencies: If Biden's health turned, or if his polling truly collapsed, which of the party's governors might step up and save them from electoral ruin -- and the nightmare of a Trump comeback?
The article discusses a few possible alternative candidates -- including Governor Pritzker of Illinois and Governor Murphy of NJ (???). And Bernie Sanders, who's announced he's running again.
...
In the past few months[,] many of the Democratic Party's biggest donors -- even as they pledge to back Biden's reelection in earnest -- have quietly started to poke around for alternatives in 2024, partly out of a sense of responsibility just in case Biden steps aside. Several have bombarded Obama's old associates with pleas for insight into some sort of top-secret real plan that must exist for the next presidential contest.
There is no substantial precedent for the volume of questions about Biden's future. His inner circle's insistence that his doldrums will pass, that there's no cause for concern, is of little reassurance even to some close allies in the party. One person who fits this description has tried casually mapping out ways Biden could get away with avoiding a reelection bid without losing face, if it comes to that, such as insisting he is too busy to campaign because he's trying to prevent Russia's invasion of Ukraine from turning into World War III. But the ally hasn't gotten anywhere. As this person puts it, "The fumes from the paint in the White House are pretty strong."
...
Imagining an alternative is far from just a D.C. parlor game. Only three in ten Americans think Biden will seek a second term, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll. That survey also revealed that even among Democrats, a group that likes and approves of Biden in general, fewer than half are sure the president is planning on round two and a third outright think he isn't. Biden can't discredit the findings; the data was gathered in part by the research firm led by his own pollster, John Anzalone. More troubling -- because it indicates that such doubts aren't just about transitory twitches in popularity -- is that similar skepticism arose in a series of private focus groups conducted by left-leaning organizations supportive of Biden last year. And that was before his approval ratings started to approach Trumpian lows.
This untenable state of affairs -- in which Biden insists he wants the job until he's 86 but much of his party won't listen -- is only partially a by-product of his not yet officially declaring his candidacy. (He's following the traditional timeline, in which the incumbent relaunches after the midterms.) It's partly because of Biden's own occasional hedges: With family tragedies and two brain aneurysms in his past, he has always allowed that he might step aside if his health declined or if "fate intervened." But its origins may also be traced precisely to March 9, 2020, when Biden pitched Democratic voters on a certain vision of the future.
One bit of analysis that was news to me was the idea that, if Biden doesn't run, or can't run, then Kamala Harris is the front-runner.
I assumed that Kamala Harris was all done. I assumed that she'd be allowed a Courtesy Run at the presidency, and then would be ushered out of the contest early, just a little less early than she'd been forced out of the 2020 primaries.
This article says no: She's the odds-on favorite to win the primary if Biden doesn't run.
The reason? The same reason Biden won in 2020. She's popular with the mainstays of the Democrat primary electorate, black voters.
...
Harris has never let anyone doubt that she expects Biden to seek a second term, and she has made no moves to set up a contingency campaign. She has effectively ceased to have contact with many of the highest-ranking advisers to her own 2020 bid. Yet if Biden did step aside, Harris would start the succession contest as the clear front-runner. A Politico newsletter recently pointed out that 27 surveys have tested the prospect of a Biden-free primary in the past year, and Harris has led 21 of them. (The remaining six were led by Michelle Obama, who is perhaps less likely to run than her constitutionally ineligible husband.), Underwater or not at the national level, Harris's popularity among Black voters in particular may make her impossible to beat in a primary -- which Biden, who won largely on the strength of his own relationship with Black voters, especially in South Carolina, knows as well as anyone.
This makes sense, I guess; it's just insane. It's insane that Kamala Harris is actually Positioned for Success to be the Democrat Party's nominee for president in 2024.
I mean, it's great for us.
The only thing that would be better for us is if the Great White Dope also ran -- Pete Bootyjudge, so beloved by the White Leftist Gentry class -- and turned the Democrat primary into a real race vs. race and class vs. class battle royale.
Last fall, a rumor started to spread within the West Wing. Some of Transportation Secretary Buttigieg's 2020 donors and fund-raisers had started to meet privately to debate his future and map out a possible path toward the presidency -- perhaps as early as the next election. The whispers were mostly true, if sometimes egregiously overstated.... As Insider prepared to reveal the meetings' existence in October, Buttigieg's staff warned the White House the story was coming, and some of his supporters went on record to clean up the mess: These donors were freelancing without his knowledge, and he had no thoughts of running for president.
Sure, sure. He's keeping in touch with his donors and his PAC is still accepting donations.
The article also notes that Elizabeth Warren is still running -- never stopped, in fact -- as is Amy Kobuchar and Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna is somehow in the mix now too.
The article finishes up by making the riotous claim that those who know Biden best -- that is, the people most expected to lie for him -- are the most insistent that he's healthy as a horse and hasn't lost a step.
The article also revivifies the long-dead claim that his verbal struggles are just due to a "stutter."
The consensus of people who deal with Biden in person, from aides to journalists to senators, is that he has shown no signs of slowing down mentally and that the clips frequently circulated by right-wing media personalities of his momentarily struggling to speak are nothing new -- just examples of his lifelong stutter and his (long notorious within Washington) difficulty with teleprompters.
Weird how his "lifelong stutter" only showed itself when he hit the ripe old age of 76 and also never actually exhibits itself as a stutter at all, but rather as a slur or as saying the wrong thing or as making up completely invented nonsense words.
But never as an actual stutter with repeated syllables.
To think anything else, the Biden faithful argue, is to fall for Republican misinformation. To take one bad-faith example, Senator Tom Cotton recently tweeted a video of Biden stumbling badly over the word kleptocracy during an address about Ukraine. Biden closed his eyes and tried to recover, landing on "the guys who are the kleptocracies" and laughing ruefully. They were some of the only garbled moments in a long speech, but the video gathered more than 3.4 million views within four days.
Many of Biden's backers are taking solace in the idea that his own unpopularity is more structural than personal.
Fun fact: Biden cannot say the word "structural." He cannot say any word with multiple consonants in a row. He makes up a new word with fewer consonants. So he would say "structural" as "shructal" or something.
Because of his stutter, see.
My fear, and my prediction, actually, is that when Biden doesn't run -- and he won't -- we'll see a darkhorse billionaire enter the race. Maybe Bloomberg again. Maybe Bill Gates. Maybe that idiot from Starbucks.
I think people take false comfort in the idea that the left would never accept these arch capitalists as their standard-banners. First of all, the hard left has now fully fused with the neocon pseudoright; it's now accepted it is the party of the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor. It makes no bones about the fact that it is the Party of Wealth. It's proud about that. It frequently brags about that.
The left is evolving a new catechism that works something like this: You're not really a plutocrat if you believe in global warming and a Woman's Right to Choose and that Trans Women Are Women.
Second of all, when the left is scared -- and they are very very scared of Trump, and just as scared of DeSantis -- they will run to any champion they think can save them.
They all hated Biden, too, or at least disliked him. But they thought he could beat the Bad Orange Man, so they got behind him. As Hillary told the Democrat troops in 2004, I think: You don't have to fall in love, you just have to fall in line.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) told colleagues on the Senate floor Wednesday that he will not immediately bring gun control measures to the floor in the wake of two mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, because he doesn't expect them to muster enough Republican votes to pass.
Instead, the Democratic leader said he will wait for Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and other members of his caucus to try to negotiate a bipartisan compromise with Republicans on a measure that has a better chance of securing 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.
Via Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, various moderate Democrats, and Democrats seeking election in November, are cool to the idea of the typical Democrat gun confiscation program.
SINEMA just stopped reporters outside the senate chamber and said she had something to say. This is rare.
Here’s what she said. I asked her if she was willing to set aside the filibuster. She said she didn’t believe “that DC solutions are realistic here.” pic.twitter.com/BCUQQzEX0l
Sinema is gathered around the GOP leadership desk on the Senate floor. shes talking to thune, cotton, Rubio, Hoeven, Todd Young.
Manu Raju
@mkraju
Jon Tester, who has had concerns about House universal background checks bill, told me he would vote YES to begin debate if Schumer set up a vote. Manchin told me he still has concerns with bill's provisions to expand background checks to private transfers. Unsure how he'd vote
The gun was legally purchased:
Tony Plohetski
@tplohetski
BREAKING: The shooter in the Robb Elementary School had legally purchased two AR platform rifles on May 17 and May 20 from a 'local federal firearms licensee,' according to a briefing given to Texas Sen. John Whitmire. One rifle was in his crashed truck at the scene. (1/3)
The other rifle was with the shooter. On May 18, the suspect bought 375 rounds of 5.56 ammunition, according to the briefing. ATF paperwork shows he likely lived with his grandmother, where she was shot. Authorities say he was wearing a plate carrier with no ballistic armor.(2/3)
Another "wearing body armor" claim turns out to be false.
The Democrats' problem is that it's their constituents who shoot people up, and the way to stop them from getting guns is to make sure that their many, many crimes result in actual criminal sentences which would preclude gun purchases -- but they are absolutely dead-set against any of their protected clientele ever being prosecuted for their crimes.
Their solution to this?
"Take guns away from law-abiding Republicans with no criminal histories."
That will not do anything to reduce crime or mass shootings, but it polls well with Democrats, by which I mean "The Media."
FBI: We Totally Stopped Another Terror Attack, You Guys
—Ace
FBI: We totally disrupted a completely real ISIS plot against George W. Bush by a real ISIS terrorist that we totally didn't set up ourselves so we could get a positive headline and Demonstrate Value in the DENNIS system.
Tom Winter
@Tom_Winter
NBC News: Shihab Ahmed Shihab, of Columbus, OH, is in custody after the FBI says he wanted to smuggle 4-6 individuals from Iraq into the United States through the Mexico border to kill former president George W. Bush, court documents and law enforcement officials say.
MORE: Shihab allegedly wanted to conduct the attack on Bush in the name of ISIS.
At all times, court documents show, Shihab was talking to a FBI confidential informant and under some form of surveillance, meaning the physical threat to Bush was low.
W/
@KenDilanianNBC
Oh, Fusion Ken contributed? Gold standard. Now I believe.
Notice the wording here: First of all, he "wanted" to do these thing. It does not say he took actual actions likely to result in these things happening.
Also notice he was "talking to a confidential FBI informant." Just one?!?! What, is the FBI facing a staffing crunch? Why not a dozen?
To get a conspiracy conviction, you only have to establish two things: One, an agreement with another person that a crime should be committed. Note that you yourself don't have to agree to commit the crime; you can agree that your co-conspirator (or your FBI Informant) should commit the crime.
The other thing required, to prove that this isn't merely hot talk and gassy dreams without real intent, is proof that you've undertaken some overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy. But that "overt act" can be very minor and completely non-criminal. It could be something as minor as "I googled George Bush's home address."
Back during Bush's term, the FBI would sometimes admit these plots were "mainly aspirational." Are they no longer categorizing them in that way? Is every "plot" now supposedly real?
I'm not saying I don't trust these guys but... also, I am saying that.
I think we'll eventually learn that the "FBI informant" was more eager to advance this plot than the "ISIS terrorist." The FBI only busts the "terrorists" and "insurrectionists" they recruit themselves.
But hey, the FBI has branded me an "insurrectionist." Self-interest alone requires that I oppose their efforts to apprehend other "insurrectionists."
That's sort of the problem with making half the country Persons of Interest in a vaguely defined Conspiracy.
Katie Pavlich sums up Biden's repulsive campaign ad yesterday:
During his remarks, Biden didn't use the time to honor the victims and their families. Instead, he rehashed old jokes about deer wearing kevlar and ranted while reading the teleprompter.
He also claimed it was time for Congress to "do something," but did not say what specific law would have prevented the killer from carrying out his heinous crimes. He blamed the situation on "the gun lobby."
BIDEN: "What in God's name do you need an assault weapon for except to kill someone? Deer aren't running through the forest with kevlar vests on for God's sake! It's just sick!" pic.twitter.com/gAGhti45h7
Tucker Carlson on Biden's speech: "The President of the United States, frail, confused, bitterly partisan, desecrating the memory of recently murdered children with tired talking points of the Democratic Party, dividing the country in a moment of deep pain rather than uniting." pic.twitter.com/qVKvVr05p1
Are any of the NeverTrump Democrats -- the "Blue Republicans," as Dave Reaboi calls them, though I don't know if that's accurate -- addressing this? Or are they just blathering about Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor-Greene as usual?
Just a couple of days ago, fat piece of shit Tom Friedman wrote an absurd piece of propaganda claiming that what Joe Biden was really upset by was that he had tried to unite America, but those G**-Damned Republican White Supremacists wouldn't let him.
"Biden didn't say it in so many words, but he didn't have to. I could hear it between the lines: He's worried that while he has reunited the West, he may not be able to reunite America," Friedman wrote.
"It's clearly his priority, above any Build Back Better provision. And he knows that's why he was elected -- a majority of Americans worried that the country was coming apart at the seams and that this old war horse called Biden, with his bipartisan instincts, was the best person to knit us back together," Friedman wrote.
...
"But with every passing day, every mass shooting, every racist dog whistle, every defund-the-police initiative, every nation-sundering Supreme Court ruling, every speaker run off a campus, every bogus claim of election fraud, I wonder if he can bring us back together. I wonder if it's too late," Friedman commented. "I fear that we're going to break something very valuable very soon. And once we break it, it will be gone -- and we may never be able to get it back."
Oh I can tell from his various speeches attempting to claw back job approval points while standing on a pile of dead bodies that "bringing the country together" is a Job Number One for him.
Answer: The Bulwark is in fact addressing the Democrats' call for gun control... by supporting it.
I wonder if AllahPundit will slip in a courtesy link to that. He does need to keep traffic flowing to his next employers, after all. It's not that The Bulwark needs viewers for advertisers, but they do need to show their Democrat Donors that they Have Influence and can Move Republican Voters to Vote Democrat.
She posts that in addition to a lot of other unhinged screeching.
Note that the left routinely calls this sort of "Kill Yourself" post a "death threat," so this ugly mutant just lodged a death threat against the governor of Texas.
Wikipedia has this to say about her. I mean, about them:
Gonzalez is bisexual and uses they/them pronouns. According to Vogue, their buzz cut is not a reaction to the school shooting, but rather to Florida's climate. "People asked me, 'Are you taking a feminist stand?' No, I wasn't. It's Florida. Hair is just an extra sweater I'm forced to wear," Gonzalez recalled. "I even made a PowerPoint presentation to convince my parents to let me shave my head, and it worked." In May 2021, González announced the usage of a new personal name, X, citing dissociation with their previous personal name and feminine pronouns.
I don't think Twitter Addicts realize that normal people wonder about them, and no, we're not wondering about their wit. We're wondering, "Why aren't you spending time with your spouse? Or significant other? Don't you have children you're supposed to take care of from time to time?Don't you have a job?"
Twitter Addicts think they're dazzling us as they spend hour after hour grinding and grinding for validation on Twitter, but they're actually just creating a series of highly negative inferences about themselves.
Chiefly: If you're spending hours begging for validation on Twitter, that means you're not getting validation in real life.
I've mentioned this, but even when I was wasting way, way too much time on Twitter, I began imposing the rule that I would not tweet on Friday or Saturday nights, because people have better things to do on Friday or Saturday night than to tweet.
I mean, I actually didn't actually have better things to do, but there is a value in Keeping Up Appearances, isn't there? When you stop even keeping up appearances, you're just letting everything all slide into hell.
Anyway, here's how one of many marriages dissolved because one spouse sought attention from Twitter, from the NY Post:
In her new memoir, Kellyanne Conway writes that she was shocked when her husband George (pictured together) started posting anti-Trump tweets, leading to a showdown between them.
As Conway tried calling and texting George to no avail, questions started swirling in her head: Why had George done that? Why hadn't he mentioned it to her beforehand? "And," she writes, "was this tweet really posted by my Trump-loving, MAGA-cap-wearing husband, George Conway?"
Ooooh, Plot Twist!
So this ugly toad was actually a Trump supporter? This supports my long, long, long-standing notion that George Conway's spectacularly-public embarrassment of his wife had nothing to do with politics and was animated entirely by anger about something personal.
Trump was just the cudgel used to beat her with.
Is Conway one of the guys Trump claimed begged him for a job in the Administration? My googling skills are failing me (or "The Algorithm" is hiding "disinformation" that would undermine anti-Trump propagandists).
...
After his first tweet damning Trump in 2017, George's posts were mostly innocuous. Then, in the spring of 2018, George and Conway were invited to dinner at the home of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, with whom she had a tense relationship.
...
A week after the dinner, George unleashed on Twitter -- and never stopped.
...
"Oh no, I thought, here we go again," Conway writes of her reaction to his tweetstorm. Though she often asked George why he was rampaging on Twitter, he simply did not answer.
Soon after, Ivanka Trump handed Conway a Post-It note with "the names of two local doctors who specialized in couples therapy."
"I noticed she had avoided putting that in a text or an email. I appreciated the information and her thoughtfulness and wanted to pursue it," Conway writes. "After I showed George the names, he rejected one and said a halfhearted 'okay' to the other while looking at his phone. We never went."
Then, on July 3, 2019, they were at their beach home on the Jersey Shore when she turned to her husband and told him calmly what was on her mind.
...
George looked dazed, but she kept going, saying he was the only person who had a choice to make. "You can see me mostly as your wife of 18 years and the mother of your four children, or you can see me mostly as senior counselor to President Donald Trump. When you wake up every morning, you have to decide how it is you see me."
"George," she added, "how do you see me?"
She writes that Conway yelled without making eye contact, "You have ruined yourself and you have embarrassed this family."
Conway shot back, "I've embarrassed this family? You abandoned me for Twitter and she's not even hot."
What she's saying: "I had two men in my life. One was my husband. One was my boss, who happened to be president of the United States. One of those men was defending me. And it wasn't George Conway. It was Donald Trump."
George Conway, she writes, disappointed her by "skipping the kinds of confidential, civil conversations spouses typically have when one has a change of heart or both agree to disagree about something big."
"What are you doing, George?” I asked him plainly and calmly. I got the same answer every time ... "You work for a madman," George would say in a loud, sinister voice ...
"Like everything George did during this time," Conway continues, "I found out about it after it happened or as it was happening. It was sneaky, almost sinister. Why not own it, share it, sneer in my face with a copy of tomorrow's Washington Post op-ed or next week's Lincoln Project ad?"
Night after night, I would come home from a busy day at work ... While I was minding dishes, dogs, laundry, managing adolescent dramas and traumas, George would be just steps away from me, tucked away in his home office, plotting against my boss and me.
Apparently they're still together -- she writes that he encouraged her to write this book.
Over the past year, there have been some startling revelations about government and technology and how the government uses technology to achieve its ends. The common theme in all of it is the rank incompetence and profound ignorance that seems to permeate every interface between policing and technology. The examples that come immediately to mind are the Rittenhouse and Sussman trials.
During the Rittenhouse trial, I was horrified to see how lackadaisical people are with data and their gross overestimation of their own knowledge and expertise. The DA and his team were tossing files back and forth as E-Mail or SMS attachments. No good chain of custody, no verification that the files were unchanged, no robust protocol. This is unacceptable, and no technically-savvy organization would permit such behavior. When the police enhanced a video clip that ostensibly showed Rittenhouse doing ... something, the defense challenged it and the police put their expert up for questioning. The defense dismantled him.
He was not an expert, he was an operator who used software he had been trained to use. He didn't know how the software worked, and he didn't understand what underlying technologies were used. He just knew how to click the buttons and produce an output. Everyone involved in the prosecution was a technological cargo-cultist. They went through the motions but they didn't know how anything worked. Despite their profound ignorance and blind trust, however, they were thoroughly convinced they knew everything. They called themselves experts and then got humiliated by non-expert outsiders who trapped them with their own ignorance.
The revelations around the Sussman trial do nothing to improve the perception that these people are incompetent and not motivated by justice. The entire "secret connections to Alfa Bank" was predicated not on some known data channel or evidence that Trump's businesses were colluding with Russian information ops, but instead was based on misunderstanding communications related to E-Mail spam. Per my understanding, someone at Alfa was on a mailing list for spam. This is not nefarious. In this case the feds - unlike the locals in the Rittenhouse case - did have people with enough expertise to question this. These people were ignored, because it was good enough to keep pushing forward with their crimes and besides, they knew in their guts that Trump was guilty and so the ends justified the means - and it looked great to people who don't know anything. Very high-tech.
These people who have the gall to convert a republic into a technocratic police state are also ignorant and stupid in their chosen domain. Technology is magic, and it says what they want it to say. Anyone who questions it from the inside is ignored and anyone who questions it from the outside is called a white supremacist. They're not experts. They're not even armchair enthusiasts. They just press the buttons and railroad their opponents. They don't understand (or they ignore) "garbage in, garbage out" and fall back on "the computer says he's guilty!"
Good morning, kids. Wednesday and here we go again. Another firearm became self-aware and went on a shooting rampage that has left, as of this morning, 21 people dead and the Left absolutely wetting themselves with glee at the prospect of dancing on the still warm bodies as a means of distracting the citizenry from the abject disaster of the past 16 months of the waking nightmare that is life under the President Sponge-Brain Shits-Pants junta.
Check that; firearms, along with knives, automobiles, trucks, explosives and airliners can only become self-aware when a non-white and/or non Judeo-Christian is holding it, or otherwise seen to be controlling it in a manner that the media cannot effectively airbrush. Otherwise, minus the seeming telekinesis and voodoo, the NRA, toxic-masculinity, TrumpPutin, whiteness, Judeo-Christianity, heterosexuals, conservatives, the pro-life movement, along with every other thing that is not at the barest of bare minimums even slightly Leftist-adjacent are always to blame.
Like clockwork, the calls for the abolition of the second amendment have come from the usual quarters. The difference is that this time, we are living in a nation where those in power have absolutely zero compunction to act unilaterally and unconstitutionally. They've already stolen a national election, staged a Reichstag Fire that ensnared dozens of innocent political prisoners to rot away in the Garland Archipelago, actively sought to use the same instrumentalities of the State to persecute and perhaps prosecute parents at school board meetings and have only temporarily suspended their plans to institute a Ministry of Truth to control speech and thought. And all that's just for starters.
At any other time when something like this happens, the loud geschrei from the propagandists lasts a few news cycles; at best it blows over but at worst – about 90% of the time – "bipartisanship" dictates that some other piece of anti-constitutional legislation is passed in the state that the evil gun became self-aware that erodes and infringes on an inalienable right that, as originally intended, "shall not be infringed."
This time, as I said above, is different. We are an absolutely divided nation, where a distinct minority is lording over a distinct majority, who view that minority as illegitimate, manifestly irresponsible and incompetent, and more and more via its deliberate policy decisions, growing into an existential threat. For its part, ditto times a million the minority in how it sees the majority. And it views it with a contempt and hatred, fueled by its own propaganda and prejudices to such an extent that violence has been clearly and unequivocally espoused and encouraged at the highest levels of political and cultural leadership. As we have seen all too frequently from the near mass assassination of GOP lawmakers at a softball field, to the 2020 summer of love, all the way up to the firebombing of pro-life offices and intimidation of SCOTUS justices (the latter including House and Senate Democrat leadership), these fucking people mean fucking business.
The estimable Robert Spencer noted on our latest podcast that the Leftists, utterly bereft of both self awareness or understanding of those they seek to lord over, continue to "step on rakes," most notably with the reaction to this absolutely unconstitutional, unconscionable and hideous "Disinformation Governance Board." Not that they demonstrated any reflection or contrition; they merely sacked that equally hideous, buffoonish, yet dangerous Nina Skankowicz, put the enterprise on hold and replaced her with the less buffoonish yet perhaps even more dangerous duo of Michael Chertoff and Jamie Gorelick. Yes, that Jamie Gorelick, the mistress of disaster whose actions, more than any single person, led to the massacre of 3,000 people on 9/11/01, which in turn led to the Department of Homeland Security, first headed by Chertoff, that for the past 20 years metastasized into a Stasi-like pseudo-secret police that we were warned would happen (yet many like me ignored), as well as the 2008 housing market collapse, the aftereffects of which we are suffering to this day.
All that said, in the wake of yesterday's horrendous tragedy in Uvalde, I shudder to think what happens when the Leftists "step on a rake" this time. If Ron Klain, via Gropin' Joe, actually does issue an edict to confiscate weapons, there will be a reaction, but like launching an ICBM, it's not going to be one that he can withdraw. Not a good look for a politician, even with one foot in the grave and the other pulling on a training bra.
Let me state as unequivocally as I can, the Left's usual blaming of guns, gun culture, conservatives and the God-given right to keep and bear arms and the blood-libeling of all of us who believe in the aforementioned is probably the greatest case of projection - and that's saying something - that they engage in.
It is the the Democrat-Left, progressivism and the cultural rot they have engendered going back almost 70 years, the sole purpose of which is the overthrow of America as founded, that is to blame for those deaths and every mass shooting death in that time period. Do I even have to mention the death toll in every inner city shit hole from not just guns but drug overdoses and abortion? That's in the millions but funny how no one ever talks about it. Except of course when the handful of black males are killed in encounters with police officers.
When you attempt to destroy God, the family, the individual, the sanctity of life, and the soul itself, you Democrats/Leftists/Marxists/Progressives pulled the trigger. When or if we learn more about the gunman, there is little doubt that he too was a victim of free love, women's lib, the sexual revolution, the counter-culture of the 1960s and the death of morality and accountability that is now the mainstream culture 60 years hence. While in one sense he was a victim, it does not and cannot exonerate him from what he did. To do so is to play right into the hands of the Left by blaming society. Not theirs, of course. Ours.
Christopher Rufo: "Why conservatives must go on the offensive against the elite-supported, toxic ideologies undermining American life." Laying Siege to the Institutions
"Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, 52, was arrested and charged with attempting to bring foreign nationals into the United States illegally and with aiding and abetting a plot to assassinate a former U.S. official, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ)." (but there is no border crisis and Islam is the "religion of peace," and Dubya was one of the loudest voices to declare that; and if he married Sirhan Sirhan . . . - jjs) FBI Arrests Iraqi Migrant Accused of Plotting to Assassinate George W. Bush
"Border Patrol agents, BORTAC special response team, and Texas Highway Patrol troopers are on the scene to assist local first responders. The situation unfolded at approximately 11:50 local time when shots were initially heard in the vicinity of the elementary campus." 14 Students, 1 Teacher Dead, Dozens Injured in Texas Elementary School Shooting
"And so the cycle will begin again. A culture focused on hatred, lust, anger and, yes, violence will produce another shooter. And the people who profit from those same vices will use that act to secure power and privilege. One cannot perpetuate chaos and then lament the effects. One cannot support the degradation and taking of life on a Monday, only to declaim it on a Tuesday. One is either for the sanctity of life, or one is not. To do otherwise is to lie. I can tolerate quite a bit. But don’t lie to me." The Sanctity of Life vs. the Potential for Power
Loesch: "The 'gun lobby' didn’t head his household, the 'gun lobby didn’t neglect to monitor his behavior, the 'gun lobby didn’t neglect to secure the school, the 'gun lobby didn’t leave any doors unlocked, and the 'gun lobby' didn’t tell him to murder anyone." Joe Biden's Tone-Deaf Texas School Shooting Speech Is Absolutely Smashed by Dana Loesch
* * * * *
"Violent crime is surging on New York subways because the justice system switched its focus from enlightened prevention to post-mayhem mop-up." Terror in the Tunnels
Dennis Prager: "9,941 black Americans were killed in 2020. Nearly all of them were killed by other black people. But to Biden, his party, and the corporate left-wing media, those black lives don't matter. At all." Biden’s Buffalo Speech Was the Speech of an Indecent Man
". . . the Nixon administration introduced price controls on gasoline and other consumer goods in the early '70s, while regulations grew up to strangle the expansion of the oil and gas industry throughout the decade. . . Isn't the purported advantage of a gerontocracy that the agèd rulers would be able to recall the mistakes of the past and, more importantly, how to avoid repeating them? Perhaps [so-called quote-unquote "president"] Biden isn't the only powerful person in a state of cognitive decline." Welcome Back, Carter. Nixon, Too
"If you are befuddled as to why the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is contemplating whether to tinker with lending standards during a time of elevated financial insecurity and housing market volatility, then you are not alone. It is further astonishing to wonder how the lessons of the ’08 crash have seemingly been so easily forgotten." This is the Worst Possible Time for Feds to Mess With Lending Standards
“We've got the Marcellus Shale under our feet. They're sending people to Venezuela, sending groups to Venezuela to buy oil and gas when we have it right under our feet. So what's happening here is an assault on disposable income of Americans. It doesn't make any sense, and they're going to pay the price for it. It’s awful,” he said. GOP Congressman: "What’s Happening Here Is an Assault on the Disposable Income of Americans"
“The entry-level consumer, which is the largest buyer group, is moving to the sidelines,” Margaret Whelan, chief executive of Whelan Advisory, told the WSJ. New Home Sales Plummet, Sparking Recession Fears
FIRST AMENDMENT ISSUES, CENSORSHIP, FAKE NEWS, MEDIA, BIG BROTHER TECH
"The victory is only one small battle in a much larger war. The same thugs still run both the labor board as well as the Biden administration. The same leftist lawyers who brought the charges are still around, quite eager to weaponize the law to blackball their political opponents." Pushback: Total Victory for the Federalist Against Attempt by Biden's Labor to Silence It
"Monday's error is not the first time the Post has rewritten historical events. In 2019, the paper through a free daily newspaper it published wrongly identified segregationist Democratic senators James Eastland and Herman Talmadge as Republicans." Washington Post Rewrites History of George Floyd’s Death
Sec. Austin on new weapons: “Everyone here understands the stakes of this war, and they stretch far beyond Europe. Russia’s aggression is an affront to the rules-based international order and a challenge to free people everywhere.” Ukraine: Major Food Crisis Looms, 20 Nations Sending Weapons to Kyiv
“The cost alone is startling,” said Hawley. “It is three times what all of Europe has contributed to date and roughly the size of Ukraine’s entire national budget. Speaking of which, the bill includes funds for Ukraine’s treasury to the tune of $8.8 billion. And Biden [junta] officials suggest they will soon ask for more. This goes far beyond targeted military assistance. This package treats Ukraine as a client state of America, a fraught relationship that will put us on the hook for financing the war and then the reconstruction.” Hawley: $40 Billion To Ukraine Is More Failed Uniparty Nation-Building That Hoses American Interests
"According to an exclusive report from Fox News, 35-year-old illegal alien Isnardo Garcia Amado of Colombia was released into the U.S. interior by DHS officials on April 18. Amado, like tens of thousands of other border crossers each month, was released with a GPS tracking device as part of Biden’s expansive Catch and Release network." Report: Biden’s DHS Released Illegal Alien on "Terrorism Watch List" into U.S.
LOCKDOWN 2: MONKEY POX MONKEY BUSINESS BOOGALOO???
"China has not reported any monkeypox infections in the current outbreak, but Chinese social media is bubbling with conspiracy theories that the U.S. government weaponized the disease and is deliberately spreading it – theories built on the Chinese government’s irresponsible blame-shifting allegations that America developed Chinese coronavirus — which originated in China — in a military lab." China Ready to Cash In with Monkeypox Test Kits and Vaccines
AMERICA, AND THE WORLD, IMPRISONED: CHINESE CORONAVIRUS FICTIONS AND FACTS
"Renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs and Dr. Neil Harrison, a professor of molecular pharmacology and therapeutics at Columbia University, laid out one of the most comprehensive overviews of the evidence yet that [Chinese] COVID-19 could potentially have emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China. However, unlike most previous analyses, Harrison and Sachs point out that there are troves of untapped evidence potentially available right here in the United States that have not yet been investigated." Not Just China: The US Government, Universities Are Hiding Evidence on the Origin of Chinese COVID-19, Experts Allege
"The publication of the findings has ignited further debate about whether long [Chinese] COVID is a legitimate physical ailment, or more often a psychological disorder that persists after recovering from the virus. Clinical research on the subject is mixed. Some alarmists about long [Chinese] COVID have cited it as a reason to further impose policies like mask and vaccine mandates." New Study Finds That Long Chinese COVID May Not Actually Exist
Joe Alton, M.D.: "California's Bill AB-2098 gives power to the state’s medical board to investigate and punish doctors whose advice and treatment regarding [Chinese]COVID-19 varies from the 'applicable standard of care.'” Should We Censor Doctors?
"At elite universities one must never, ever criticize students of color, especially the black students. Those individuals are sacred." Race-Based Illness at the Best of the Best
Eminent linguist Joshua Katz was fired Monday by his longtime employer Princeton University in what seems (despite the university’s denials) to be a straightforward act of political retaliation. His offense? Questioning woke orthodoxy." Princeton Joins the Woke Rush to Purge Dissent and Debate from US Academia
"A Northern Arizona University requires its students to take four 'diversity perspective' courses and loads such courses with ideological propaganda." A Bachelor’s in Diversity
ABORTION
"Panicked and angry, abortion supporters announced this 'Summer of Rage' following the leak of a draft opinion indicating that the justices are preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade. These abortion advocates kicked off protests with a 'Bans off Our Bodies' demonstration, largely led by the Women’s March, on May 14." Pro-Life Leaders Prepare for Threatened "Summer Of Rage"
"Leftists avoid using the word abortion like the plague because they know it conjures up images of dead babies. They know that if people stop to think about what actually happens in abortuaries, they will be less likely to support the continued legalization of the gruesome, inhumane practice." Abortion Supporters Use This One Trick to Change the Narrative. Don't Let Them Get Away With It.
". . . you -- and this is unconditional," Kennedy said. "You have to be required to prove you are who you say you are to vote. And if we would do those three things, I think people would have a little more confidence in our election system." Sen. Kennedy: "We Need an Election Day, Not an Election Month"
"The Special Counsel prosecution team put former FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap on the stand to ask him about the Alfa-Bank hoax. This was a smear of Donald Trump by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that used bogus data to tie Trump to the Kremlin in order to entice law enforcement into opening an investigation before the 2016 election. Prosecutors called it an 'October Surprise.'” Durham Trial: The Guy Who Ran FBI Counterintelligence in Trump Russia Scam Has a Really, Really Bad Memory
OFFICIAL DEMOCRAT PARTY/LEFTIST-ENDORSED ANTI-SEMITISM, ANTI-CHRISTIANITY
"Blue Star Strategies disclosed this month that its founders, Karen Tramontano and Sally Painter, had two meetings in 2016 with State Department officials regarding Ukraine's Burisma Holdings. But according to Sens. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), Blue Star's founders failed to disclose nine other meetings with government officials, including two American ambassadors to Ukraine." Hunter Biden Cronies Filed "Misleading" Lobbying Disclosures, Senators Say
DEMOCRAT/LEFTIST AND RINO SCANDALS, MESHUGAS, CHUTZPOCRISY
"Embattled Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is holding his own at the time this article was written, staying barely above the 50% threshold for avoiding a runoff. The way things look at this time, if he does fall below 50%, he’ll face Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), who currently represents the state’s 10th district." Georgia GOP Primary Results: Walker, Kemp Win Easily
“That’s ok if he ran. I mean, I wouldn’t be concerned with that,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News. “People are very disappointed in Mike, and if he ran, I don’t think that would be a problem.” Trump Reacts to Pence Potentially Running in 2024
"Fetterman suffered the stroke May 13 while traveling with his wife to a rally in southeastern Pennsylvania. He immediately went to a local hospital, where doctors removed the clot in a procedure known as a thrombectomy." Doctors Question Dem Senate Nominee’s Health After Stroke, Media Silence
Michael Goodwin: "However he does it, Adams must start making major headway in the war against crime and drive the numbers down, down, down. If he can pull that off and the public feels safer, he won’t have to talk about running for president. Others will do it for him." Eric Adams for President? Not so Fast, Mr. Mayor!
"The group wants the State Department to turn over all of the requested documents and stop stonewalling CASA’s FOIA requests, which have sat in administrative limbo for months. In addition to information about vetting and those trapped in Afghanistan, CASA wants the State Department to provide it with internal communications that could detail the administration's efforts to downplay security concerns." Biden Junta Withholds Info on Bungled Afghanistan Withdrawal, Lawsuit Says
"If passed, the bill would allow the City and County of San Francisco, the City and County of Los Angeles, and the City of Oakland to authorize the sites. It also gives local authorities, including police and public health officials, a chance to offer public comment on a new site prior to its opening." NYC 2.0? California Considers Bill to Allow State-Sanctioned ‘Injection’ Sites
ACTUAL SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY
"The weirdness surrounds a study on the universe’s expansion rate, which supports 'the idea that something weird is going on, possibly involving brand new physics,' according to a press release from NASA. The most recent anomaly follows breakthroughs in the study of 'dark energy,' the release continued." "Something Weird" is Happening in Space and Scientists Are Stumped
"Engineers preparing to stack the Psyche probe on top of its Falcon Heavy rocket for an August 1, 2022 launch have been forced to delay that launch at least seven weeks until September 20th at the earliest because of a software issue." Software Issues Delay Psyche Launch Seven Weeks
"The uncertainty of science: Using a computer simulation, scientists have determined that if the solar system had two million years ago passed through one of the known nearby interstellar clouds within the relatively empty Local Bubble of space, it would have shrunk the Sun’s heliosphere enough so that the Earth would no longer be inside it, thus exposing the planet to interstellar space." Scientists Plow the Solar System Through a Dense Enough Interstellar Cloud and the Heliosphere Would No Longer Protect the Earth
FEMINAZISM, TRANSGENDER PSYCHOSIS, HOMOSEXUALIZATION, WAR ON MASCULINITY/NORMALCY
Disney’s “Pride Collection” includes apparel with “Made in China” labels, according to items obtained by Breitbart News. At least one of those items is made from 100-percent cotton, which may have been sourced from slave-labor regions in China, though it remains unclear. Disney Gay "Pride Collection" Clothing Made in Anti-LGBTQ China
"Disney’s sports giant lost eight million subscribers last year, and likely won’t get them back." The Long, Slow Death of ESPN
“The decision was not easy for us and I know that it is even more difficult for you,” Blecharczyk said. “We’ve built and grown a thriving host community in China together and have welcomed more than 25 million guest arrivals since 2016.” Airbnb Withdraws Domestic Business From China
"Leftists like Bill Maher complain about the ridiculous ends of their own beliefs while refusing to reconsider them." (well, if he's complaining how ridiculous they are, it's a big first step in reconsideration, no? - jjs) Bill Maher Is Not Your New Conservative BFF
"Is today’s America what World War II fighters, Korean War fighters, Vietnam War fighters, and other American warriors sacrificed and died for?" Wars and Rumors of Wars
NOTE: The opinions expressed in the links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue.
ALSO: The Morning Report is cross-posted at CutJibNewsletter.com if you want to continue the conversation all day.
Since he no longer owns the ugly monkey jpeg in question he also loses film rights and the project is toast.
Seth if it makes you feel any better this is very funny and was completely predictable
— angry militant kh4 fan (@mailmanbabygame) May 17, 2022
Sometimes things do work out for the best.
Tech News
Nvidia had it's own big Computex announcement the day after AMD. If you want a server-only GPU that uses 600W and costs tens of thousands of dollars and can't actually output video, they're all over that.
Not particularly interesting for you or me, but it does make them a lot of money.
The ROG Crosshair X670E supports two full-length PCIe 5.0 slots, plus a x4 slot running at a lower speed but I don't know what, and 5 M.2 slots two of which are also PCIe 5. Plus USB 4. Which when you add it all up requires more PCIe lanes than the CPU has available. Not sure what they've done there.
I was looking around what countries had semiconductor factories and I believe Spain was on the list - they're not starting from zero. And there are worse ways to spend $13 billion, as our governments prove to us every day.
I do not expect much to come of this nonetheless.
Disclaimer: Quoth the raven, "You want to complain? Look at these shoes. I've only had them for two weeks-"
“Many diseases can be spread through sexual contact. You could get a cough or a cold through sexual contact, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a sexually transmitted disease,” WHO adviser Andy Seale
Quote II
“I thought it was going to be an ocelot, a wild dog or something else. The moment I saw the animal was that size, I ran back.”Rodrigo Almeida
Quote III
“[When] it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over,” Joe Biden
Wishing something to be true, doesn't make it so. Fucking idiot.
An angry Joe Biden conjured up first-hand 'hollowness' of losing a child in his remarks about the deadly Texas school shooting: 'like having a piece of your soul ripped away'
Grassley says new Durham evidence shows FBI misconduct, vendetta against Trump
"I fear these recent developments are just the tip of the iceberg," key GOP senator declared in Senate floor speech.
It’s the end of an era: New York City removed its last public payphone on Monday.
The boxy enclosures were once an iconic symbol across the city. But the rise of cellphones made the booths obsolete.
The effort to replace public pay telephones across the city kicked off in 2014 when the de Blasio administration solicited proposals to reimagine the offering, the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation said in a news release.
Officials selected CityBridge to develop and operate LinkNYC kiosks, which offer services such as free phone calls, Wi-Fi and device charging. The city began removing street payphones in 2015 to replace them with the LinkNYC kiosks.
Here's Why You Shouldn't Actually Make Your Bed First Thing
The perfect excuse.
Our beds are our safe haven. There’s nothing like coming home from a long day and snuggling under a duvet. We spend several hours in our beds each day, which is why it’s essential to make sure our beds are clean.
For most people, making their bed each morning is part of keeping their bed clean and tidy. But apparently, we shouldn’t be making our beds at all.
TikTok user @sherifelsahly caught our attention recently by saying we should never ever make our beds in the morning. Our beds attract dust mites and making your bed first thing in the morning will allow them to keep growing, he said. “But if you keep your bed unmade it exposes the dust mites to light and fresh air which actually helps kill them off,” he added.
Unable to afford the daily commute, lower-paid contractors for Alphabet’s Google Maps business are revolting against a compulsory return to office work in Seattle.
According to a report in The New York Times, roughly 60% of the more than 200 employees at outsource firm Cognizant have signed a petition refusing to comply with a requirement to be in the office all five working days from June 6. As of that date, they will no longer have access to work systems from home.
“Gas is around $5 per gallon currently, and many of us in the office are not able to afford to live close to the office due to our low salaries and the high cost of housing in Bothell,” they wrote, referring to a city in the Seattle metropolitan area where Cognizant has an office.
Training for Phoenix police officers is about to go high-tech. A new immersive virtual reality training by a Scottsdale-based company is now available, and those in the Valley will be among the first to roll out the service to officers.
Axon, which makes body cameras and other law enforcement products, says the new training should help officers better develop de-escalation and critical thinking skills. The company said that the Phoenix Police Department is among the first agencies to roll out the service.
How it works
Using virtual reality, Axon says trainers and trainees can be deployed in any environment that allows officers to train as often or as little as needed. Simulator Training says the training puts officers through “immersive, real-life” scenarios that require them to use their expertise and de-escalation training and apply it. After the session, which lasts about 10 to 20 minutes, the platform can analyze an officer’s performance and show them what additional training is needed.
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The ONT Musical Interlude & Oscillating Sprinkler Emporium
Born on this day: 24 May 1941
Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman), American singer-songwriter, author, and painter. Dylan has released over 40 albums since 1964, and was a major influence on The Beatles. His biggest hits are the 1965 US No.2 single 'Like A Rolling Stone', the 1969 UK No.5 single 'Lay Lady Lay', and his 1964 UK No.1 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. He has won many awards throughout his career including the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, and twelve Grammy Awards. Dylan was also a member of The Traveling Wilburys. via thisdayinmusic.com
A septic tank driver dumped a load of waste into a stream so that he could go home instead.
Kyle Maitai, also known as Kyle Archer, poured between 4000 and 6000 litres of the waste into the Orini Canal; a watercourse home to indigenous fish and a habitat for indigenous birds near Whakatane.
Judge David Kirkpatrick reserved his sentencing decision in the Environment Court today after Maitai earlier pleaded guilty to a charge of discharging contaminants onto land which may result in contaminants entering water.
Bay of Plenty Regional Council prosecutor Adam Hopkinson told the court how Maitai was working for Whakatane Brownfreight on May 17, 2021, and had just picked up two loads of septic waste from Ruatoki.
ORLANDO, Fla. – A 70-year-old woman said she fired a warning shot after an intruder walked into her home Sunday afternoon and refused to leave, before ultimately shooting him. The perpetrator died at a nearby hospital, according to reports.
The Orange County Sheriff’s Office responded to Virginia Morrison’s residence Sunday regarding a “burglary in progress.”
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Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by the Lack of Creativity.
Notice: Posted with permission by the Ace Media Empire and AceCorp, LLC. Supervised by someone's Mother at the law firm of Dewey, Cheatem & Howe, S.C. No rights reserved, no hamsters injured in the production of this fine outstanding thread.
So this poor bear is trying to sleep but a hedgehog insists on trying to sleep next to him to share the warmth and keeps waking him up. The hedgehog seems to have a particular insistence on sleeping up the poor bear's yootch, which definitely wakes the bear right up. I feel violated just watching it. Let the poor bear sleep!
[A]mericans should take no comfort in the fact that the Biden administration's efforts to censor information from within DHS and elsewhere will end. In fact, the administration has announced that former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick will take the baton from Jankowicz and continue down the disinformation track.
This plan is no better than the first one.
Chertoff and Gorelick, leaders of Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas' Homeland Security Advisory Council, have been tasked with giving recommendations on how DHS "can garner public trust surrounding its disinformation efforts." What the left and the Biden administration fail to recognize is that it cannot gain the public's trust regarding misinformation or disinformation.
Americans have suffered through far too much of such labeling and censorship since 2020 related to COVID-19, vaccines, masks, lockdowns, elections, and more. The federal government, politicians, tech companies--separately and in concert--have developed a significant reliance on censoring content that goes against their narrative. They've only recently started admitting this tactic. Americans are right to distrust the administration's future spin regarding disinformation.
Research exclusively shared with Breitbart News identifies hundreds of millions of dollars flowing from Bill Gates' foundation to 11 of the 26 organizations that signed an open letter last month urging Twitter advertisers to boycott the company if Elon Musk restores free speech on the platform.
Breitbart News' report, based on research and analysis from the newly-formed Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), analyzed public filings to trace hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions from the letter signatories back to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
In total, 11 of the 26 anti-Musk organizations received funding from a Gates-backed entity.
This college drop-out has no medical training but he is having a mid-life crisis and wants to feel important.
And because he's got money and a mid-life crisis, he's in charge of our global pandemic response?
I linked this months ago in a "Is This Something?" I thought it looked visually terrific. I did wonder if it was going to be as gonzo-SJW as the title, "Men," threatened.
I guess it is.
Walmart pandered to BLM types by stocking Juneteenth-branded crap, but it backfired when SJWs went in the other direction. Instead of doing the "YASSS SLAY KWEEEN!" affirmation, they did the "HOW DARE YOU PROFIT BY RECYCLING THE CHAINS OF MY PROUD BLACK SLAVE ANCESTORS!" thing.
It's always a 50/50 gamble, and it's always going to be one or the other. (A reasonable, non-emotional, non-performative eh take is impossible.)
Walmart is pulling Juneteenth-themed products from its shelves after receiving backlash on social media from users who suggested the company was attempting to profit off of the federal holiday.
Confucius say: Corporation who panders to SJWs is like stupid hen brooding viper-eggs.
Now I've only got two questions: How do we convince The Gays to "take back" "Pride Month" from the Corporate Exploiters, and how do we get that done in one week?
Dave Reaboi visited Jolly Old England to sit down with Sargon of Akkad and talk about nobody's favorite fool, David French.
Jeet Heer is a very low-level, Who's-Who-of-Who-Cares cartoonist, but he has some thoughts about detraining engineers away from looking for the "one right answer:"
Hey, who wants to drive across a bridge designed by an obese no-account cartoonist? Come on, get those hands up. The bridge will be designed with representation, diversity, and hermeneutics in mind. And no math; the cartoonist isn't... he's not strong in math.
Dana Bash: Abortion is an important budget-trimming tool.
.@DanaBashCNN: "Arkansas already struggles to support vulnerable children. Nearly 1 in 4 children in Arkansas lives in poverty....Do you really think that your state is prepared to protect and care for even more children if abortion does become illegal there?" pic.twitter.com/twY3lbtJHi
14 Elementary School Students and One Teacher Dead in School Shooting Spree In Texas Shooter Exchanged Gunfire With Border Patrol Agents Before Barricading Himself Inside School, But Was US Citizen
Fourteen students and a teacher are dead after a shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, according to Gov. Greg Abbott.
The 18-year-old suspect, a student at Uvalde High School, is also dead, he said.
"He shot and killed horrifically and incomprehensibly 14 students and killed a teacher," Abbott said during an unrelated press briefing.
The suspect also allegedly shot his grandmother before entering the school and again opening fire, Abbott said. He did not say anything further about her condition.
Abbott said the shooter had a handgun and also possibly a rifle.
Awful. Just absolutely horrifying.
Multiple responsible people in these schools should be armed.
The shooter's name is, I'm told, Salvador Romas, so: White Hispanic Alert.
And we're going to have to crack down on that Disinformation that led him to this.
BTW, why do they delete the social media for these guys? This is newsworthy. All deleting this stuff does is give the corrupt corporate leftwing media an unearned priority in exploiting this stuff. They get access to it and can drip it out for profit.
Delete it eventually -- you don't want these guys to have online shrines to them -- but in the period of newsworthiness, let people research these animals.
Update: The killer was a murder suspect and there was a BOLO for his truck. The shootout with border patrol might have just been a chance encounter, with them spotting the truck they had the BOLO for.
I imagine he was a murder suspect in his grandmother's murder but who knows, maybe he killed someone else.
The Chicago FBI agents figured out quickly that the data was overblown and the possibility of Trump's organization communicating with the bank server was nearly impossible because of firewalls.
It turns out that the "connection" was a hotel and hospitality marketing firm sending out spam emails. Trump runs hotels, as you may have noticed.
The Bulwark's ace computer scientist Tim Miller isn't convinced. He says there's still no good explanation for those "pings," using the very sophisticated jargon of a know-nothing blogger.
Because the information was so hinky, "didn't pass analytical merit," and didn't show "a covert communications system," agents prevailed on their boss to ask the 7th Floor at the FBI headquarters if they could be read in on who provided the flash drives, white papers, and other documents purporting the link. The brass who claimed the information came from the DOJ and said as much in the official referral to investigators. The Sept. 24, 2016 referral never mentions Michael Sussmann.
Agent Ryan Gaynor served as the liaison between Chicago agents and the home office in the beltway. He testified that, had he known that the provenance of the information was Hillary Clinton's campaign lawyer, it could have "impacted the way I viewed the close hold."
Assistant Special Counsel Andrew J. DeFilippis introduced emails demonstrating how the agents desperately wanted to know who had tossed this turd into the lap of the FBI and expected them to polish it.
In one Oct. 3, 2016, email, agent [Curtis] Heide wrote to Gaynor, "We really want to interview the source of all this information. Any way we can track down who this guy is and how we're getting this information?"
Supervisory Special Agent Daniel Wierzbicki followed up: "An interview with the source of information ... may allow us to understand the 'what' and 'why' of the white paper."
Request denied.
The request was denied because the decision whether or not to give out information that is being closely held depends on whether or not the information being withheld would help the investigation. Gaynor is saying he didn't know Sussman's relationship with the Clinton campaign, therefore he did not know that this information would be very helpful in evaluating the authenticity of the tip. (That is: that the tip was oppo-research bullshit.)
That information was withheld from him, and so he could not make a truly informed decision on whether or not he should tell his agents that the information came from Michael Sussman. By hiding the fact that Michael Sussman worked for Hillary Clinton -- which the FBI brass knew by this point -- they crippled the ability of FBI agents to evaluate his tips.
Which was almost certainly their intention in withholding it.
FBI agents probing since-debunked claims of a secret back channel between Donald Trump and a Russian bank believed that the allegations had originated with the Department of Justice -- when in fact they came from Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann, who had shopped them to the bureau's then-general counsel days earlier.
In the latest revelation to emerge from Sussmann's trial in DC federal court on a count of lying to the FBI, special counsel John Durham's prosecutors revealed that investigators had received an electronic communication citing a referral from the DOJ "on or about" Sept. 19, 2016, the same day Sussmann met with James Baker, then the FBI's top lawyer.
The document, a record of the investigation being opened by agents Curtis Heide and Allison Sands and dated Sept. 23, 2016, did not mention Sussmann as the source of the allegations.
"In that referral, the DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE provided the FBI with a white paper that was produced by an anonymous third party," the communication said, before adding: "According to the white paper, a U.S.-based server that is owned by the TRUMP ORGANIZATION has been communicating with the Russian-based ALFA BANK organization in Moscow, Russia."
The document was circulated to several top FBI officials -- including Peter Strzok, who oversaw the probe of Clinton's email server as well as the Trump-Russia investigation, and was famously fired from the bureau in 2018 after the emergence of text messages he sent to his colleague and mistress Lisa Page in which he vowed to help "stop" Trump from winning the White House.
Sands, who testified late Monday afternoon, told jurors that she believed Heide had told her the referral came from the Department of Justice.
The error was seized on by Sussmann's defense attorney Michael Bosworth, who grilled Sands about whether Heide had lied to her -- or if someone had lied to him about the source of the material.
"You haven't been interviewed in that [Durham] investigation?" Bosworth asked at one point. "No," Sands responded.
Testifying for the prosecution Monday, FBI agent Ryan Gaynor revealed that bureau honchos shielded Sussmann's identity from field agents who investigated the claims of a link between Trump and Alfa-Bank as part of a longstanding practice known as a "close hold."
Gaynor told prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis that the decision to hide where the information originated was made by top leadership at the FBI before the Alfa-Bank material was given to the Chicago field office.
Agent Heide is seen in the above reports seeking information about Sussman.
But he is also reportedly being investigated for having withheld exculpatory information in a FISA filing, information that would have alerted the court that the warrant should not be issued:
Sean Davis Retweeted
@JakeGibson - 4m
Revealed in Sussmann trial today: FBI Agent Curtis Heide is being investigated in FBI internal probe of Crossfire Hurricane. Heide confirmed that he is being investigated for withholding potentially exculpatory information in a FISA court application.
He said he was specifically being investigated for potentially withholding material from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees wiretaps against Americans. The material in question was a "recording from one of the subjects" of the FISA applications, Heide said.
Heide denied under oath Tuesday that he intentionally withheld any exculpatory information.
He's not arguing in favor of continuing to print fake money. He's just arguing that the Expert Class -- the Smartest Guys in Any Room, the people you should always defer to because they are good at thinking and you are not -- have built an inescapable trap for us.
("Doom" headline a reference to Monty's old DOOM posts, of course.)
The Federal Reserve has created a doom loop between the housing market and inflation. For years it has printed tens of billions of dollars each month to buy sketchy securities meant to subsidize the housing market and favor bond traders. This continues even now, in spite of inflation and a red-hot housing market. But the housing market has become dependent on unearned, newly printed money, and stopping the flow might cause a catastrophic correction. If it doesn't stop, however, inflation will explode.
Let me walk you through some of the math.
I'll refer you to the article for the first round of math -- basically, we've flooded the country with more than double the amount of dollars as we had just a few years ago, and prices will have to more than double double before we achieve the same equilibrium in prices vs. dollars we had.
A less well-known problem is that the Fed's purchase of mortgage-backed securities, which was started after the 2008 housing market crash, actually just... continued, with the Fed continuing to buy up securities backed by mortgages, inflating and distorting the real estate market. And turning it into another bubble.
Although the Fed promised it would stop buying mortgage-backed securities by March of this year, the promise came with a giant asterisk. As old bonds mature and disappear from its balance sheet, "monthly purchase schedules will continue to be issued to reflect reinvestment of principal payments . . ." In other words, when the Fed receives a dollar from an MBS payout, it just uses it to buy another bond.
Thus, in the face of red-hot inflation, the Fed bought another $38 billion in mortgage-backed securities in March. In April, it bought another $40.1 billion. This month, the Fed is in the process of buying another $34.5 billion.
Until recently, the Fed has been on an unprecedented buying spree. It increased its total MBS holdings from $1.7 trillion in 2020 to $2.7 trillion today. Indeed, the Fed made roughly $400 billion of those purchases after its chairman's June 2021 testimony in which he famously labeled 5 percent inflation "temporary." It was obvious then that inflation was just getting started.
So all of this might seem like terrible news. But it's nothing compared to the doom loop that has begun to turn. The coming reckoning could be savage and apocalyptic. Let's walk through what might happen next.
So the usual way to fight inflation is jack up interest rates, and the usual prescription is that interest rates have to be 150% of the rate of inflation to bring inflation down. So we'd have to raise interest rates to... gulp... 12% or more.
But that will obviously crash the economy.
Worse, it will cause all kinds of defaults in mortgages.
Mortgages which the federal government holds billions and billions of dollars worth of as securities!!!
But in this environment, raising interest rates will cause a cascade of problems. The higher interest rates will slow the economy and cause unemployment. It will also swallow up tax revenue as the government has to pay interest on its massive debt. But more critically, it will increase the rate of default on home mortgages. Those defaults will make mortgage-backed securities less valuable and more unpredictable. That's how the 2008 housing market seized up.
Economic confidence fell to 87.7 in this month's Rasmussen Reports Economic Index, more than 20 points lower than April.
May's decline reverses two consecutive months of gains. The index is now at its lowest point in eight years.
In case you missed it: Biden's attempting to cast the skyrocketing price of gas (a key component in the skyrocketing inflation rate) as a good thing, part of our "incredible transition" away from fossil fuels:
Which is their actual plan -- increase the cost of conventional fuels so much that their pie-in-the-sky, super-costly alternatives become economically viable, only due to the soaring costs of formerly cheap regular fuels.
I guess when it gets this bad, honesty becomes your best defense.
Ricky Gervais' Netflix comedy special "SuperNature" has only been released on the streamer for a few hours, but it has already drawn criticism for a string of graphic and hurtful transphobic jokes.
Oh no, were these as bad as a "a gun that identifies as a knife"?
Four minutes into the special, Gervais dives into material about the trans community seemingly calculated to draw controversy.
"Oh, women!" he starts. "Not all women, I mean the old-fashioned ones. The old-fashioned women, the ones with wombs. Those fucking dinosaurs. I love the new women. They're great, aren't they? The new ones we've been seeing lately. The ones with beards and c*cks. They're as good as gold, I love them...."
Video below, content warning. Also trigger warning.
Of course, this idiot -- the same idiot who wrote up the outrage over Chappelle yesterday -- writes up the outrage from the Twitter Trans Lobby.
you're a comedian and you support trans people it's your responsibility to be speaking out against dave chapelle and the new ricky gervais special. at this point you can't call yourself an ally if you’re not publicly taking a stand against it. it's the bare minimum.
-- martha (@moominmarxist)
Elon Musk is a c**t
@Gobias___
Ricky Gervais could go after the governments, banks, billionaires. The ones causing actual harm to ordinary people all over the world on an unfathomable scale every single day.
But he goes after trans people instead. Yeah Ricky, son, you speak your truth to power. Coward.
But there's the thing: The Trans Lobby does have power, and they're vicious bullies. This material is popular because people like to see the bullies punched in the face every now and again.
If you don't want to be treated like the bully, then stop bullying people.
Never in human history has it ever not felt good to tweak censors, scolds, and bullies.
People are allowed to question whether someone with a penis is a woman. My Magic 8-Ball is not an accredited expert, but it is saying All signs point to "NO." People are permitted to have some skepticism about this claim that men are actually women because they're wearing a dress. Just because the psychiatrists and therapists and Gender Conformists you pay (or, let's face it, that the state pays on your behalf) tell you there should be no question that a woman with a penis is still a woman -- we're not your Gender Conformist therapists being paid to "affirm" you. We're allowed to disagree.
Variety again takes the Trans Position that the various people the Trans Lobby cancels aren't really cancelled at all because they can still get some jobs. I mean, they're not reduced to pushing a mop at Wa-Wa's yet:
Throughout the special, Gervais also bemoaned "cancel culture" for comedians and actors like Louis C.K., Liam Neeson and Hart -- all of whom still have lucrative showbusiness careers.
It is true that some people are so big they can only be partially cancelled -- but partially cancelled is still cancelled.
And there are hundreds if not thousands of people who were not that big, and who are all-the-way cancelled.
canCeL cULtUre dOESN't exISt, And iT'S grEAT thaT HaTers aRe BEINg CaNcEllEd.
Meanwhile, eighth graders are undergoing Title IX investigations for "mis-gendering" someone who wants to be called "they."
Posted by: bonhomme
Dave Reaboi told me that also Gervais jokes about Muslim women being forced to wear the burka in London:
"It's not up to Boris Johnson to decide what a Muslim woman wears on her face, it's up to her husband!"
But no one's complaining about that! Because Muslim Women aren't real women to the left any longer, only Trans Women are real women now.
By the way, the Trans Enforcement Arm has already begun the campaign of violence against Gervais. They destroyed a bench donated by his show "After Life." Not a big thing, but it sends the signal: We're prepared to use violence against you.
And after Dave Chappelle -- and the refusal of the LGBT extremists, and media, to condemn the attack -- we know that they're not just whistling Dixie.
The Trans extremists and their media partners will continue normalizing the idea that violence is an acceptable response to jokes about the bullying tactics of the trans lobby, until they encourage a Trans Loner With Nothing to Lose to take the shot that they are all praying for and all complicit in.
The Bulwark: Hillary Clinton Is Innocent of the Alfa Bank Hoax and Also It's Not a Hoax PS: Mission Accomplished, Conservatism Conserved!
—Ace
John Sexton links AllahPundit's favorite website, but not to praise it. Instead, he links it to ask why the supposed "conservative" website -- which is supposedly "conserving conservatism," and which supposedly also detests conspiracy theories -- is still attempting to claim that Hillary Clinton's Alfa Bank Hoax might be true.
Sexton notes that not only did the FBI nearly immediately brand the Alfa Bank hoax as an obvious fiction, and not only did right-leaning writers see it as such, but even leftwing "journalists" found "problems" in the "story." Maybe they didn't come right out and say "HOAX!," but they were wary, and they pointed out that things didn't add up.
In other words, only the most hyperpartisan Democrat Hillary-loving Trump-Deranged conspiracy-theorists believed the Alfa Bank story, even from its earliest appearances.
People, for example, like Tim Miller. People like the leftwingers at The Bulwark, who don't want to admit that they've been pushing as many leftwing conspiracy theories as Nina Jankowicz -- so this one (as well as all the others) must be true.
After all, it's their rejection of evidence-free partisan-crackpot Conspiracy Theories that makes them Better than the MAGA people. Ergo, the evidence-free partisan-crackpot Conspiracy Theories they believe in must be well-supported evidence-free partisan-crackpot Conspiracy Theories.
And Tim Miller and The Bulwark are still trying to rehabilitate this obvious piece-of-shit and still trying to clear Hillary Clinton any wrongdoing.
You know-- like True Conservatives do!
And yet, 5 1/2 years later, the Bulwark's Tim Miller is still arguing that maybe there is some truth to idea that this computer promoting Trump's hotels was secretly communicating with a Russian bank.
Whether there was anything nefarious going on between Alfa and Trump remains a bit of a mystery. The FBI eventually closed the book on this lead--more on this a moment--resulting in a presumption that any suggestion of impropriety was false. But a satisfactory explanation for the DNS pings has never really been provided.
If Miller really believes this then he's one of the few who still does. But his real goal here is to defend Hillary Clinton from allegations that she approved a "hoax" story. Because, hey, if the story might still be true then she definitely didn't promote a self-serving hoax.
The part of Sussmann's trial that has the Trump crowd rubbing their nipples...
Degenerate pervert.
... is testimony from Clinton 2016 campaign manager Robby Mook in which he revealed that the candidate was briefed on the potentially dubious Alfa Bank accusations and was fine with the campaign's decision to share the information with reporters. (Point of fact: Many in the Trump orbit have stated that Clinton approved the Alfa Bank oppo's dissemination, but Mook testified that he told her only after the campaign had shared it with a reporter.)
What he's attempting to do, Sexton reports, is to take a slight ambiguity in the reporting of the timeline -- did Hillary approve pumping out the hoax to the media before it was pushed to the media, or merely approve it afterwards, retroactively? -- and resolve this ambiguity in Hillary's favor -- that is, claim that he knows it must have been after-the-fact, and also claim that this distinction is Very Very Important and absolves his Khaleesi of any wrongdoing, because she only approved of a disgraceful attempt to defraud the US government retroactively.
Remember, kids: The Bulwark hates conspiracy theories and it really hates crazed partisans who just make things up to slake their thirst for ideological validation.
The Bulwark hates all the conspiracy theories
except the conspiracy theories their leftwing allies
and donors tell them to believe
They're intellectually pure! Just ask J.V. Last, who probably edited this rancid fart of an "article"!
No but seriously, J.V. Last must be shocked that he got a link from Hot Air that wasn't approving.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reaches a different conclusion, this one based on evidence and reality, rather than the need to appease Bill Kristol's Democrat Donors:
In testimony that stretched over three days last week, Baker insisted Sussmann told him he had brought the computer data not on behalf of any client or company. Baker said if he had known, as the prosecution charges, that Sussmann was acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and a technology executive, he would have handled the information differently -- and might not have even agreed to the meeting.
Lies told to investigators are only illegal if they are "material," meaning, if they have an actual effect on the investigation. Baker's testimony there, if believed, establishes that this lie did have that effect. Without the lie, the hoax never would have even have been given more than a second glance.
But Sussman is claiming that he never told Baker he was acting on his own:
Baker is the sole direct witness to the conversation, and Sussmann's lawyers have repeatedly challenged his credibility on this point, noting that in one earlier interview, Baker said Sussmann was representing cybersecurity clients; in another, he seemed to say he didn't remember that part of the talk. Prosecutors introduced billing records from Sussmann's law firm listing the time he spent on the issue as work on behalf of the Clinton campaign.
Baker told the jury that while his earlier statements may be inconsistent, he is "100 percent confident" of his memory that Sussmann claimed to be acting on his own.
He testified Sussmann also told him a major newspaper -- he later learned it was the New York Times -- was preparing to write about the allegations. That worried Baker: He knew a news story would likely cause any suspicious communications to stop, and so he wanted the FBI to be able to investigate before an article appeared. Prosecutors say it was Sussmann himself who had provided the information to the Times.
"It would have concerned me, whether there was an effort to play the FBI and drag us into the ongoing political campaign and make us a pawn in the campaign in some fashion," Baker said. "It would have alarmed me, this nexus with the press and whether there was some effort to engineer a situation where the FBI would be investigating this material and that the press -- even though it couldn't determine the reliability of that material and couldn't report on it -- could report the FBI was investigating it."
He says the FBI was not "fooled," here, but knew this was all fake from the beginning, and went ahead with the illegal surveillance of a political candidate anyway because they were acting as agents of Hillary Clinton.
He also claims that Lisa Page and Peter Strzok might be next to be targeted by Durham. Yeah we'll see.
By the way, just so you know how The Bulwark is doing in its alleged mission of "conserving conservatism," check this out:
What was the speech in which Biden hit "the right notes," according to The Bulwark?
Quick, someone pass that article to AllahPundit, so he can link it in the headlines without signing his name to the link.
Update:
Sean Davis Retweeted
@JakeGibson - 4m
Revealed in Sussmann trial today: FBI Agent Curtis Heide is being investigated in FBI internal probe of Crossfire Hurricane. Heide confirmed that he is being investigated for withholding potentially exculpatory information in a FISA court application.
State Farm Insurance Caught Pushing Transgender and Non-Binary Books to School Libraries to Start Conversations with Children as Young as Five Year Olds About Their Genders
In January, State Farm Insurance actively advocated a company-wide program to get "Transgender, Inclusive and Non-Binary" books into school libraries to spark "challenging, important and empowering conversations with children ages 5 and up. The company's LGBTQ advocacy shifted dramatically on Monday, however: "Conversations about gender and identity should happen at home with parents, State Farm said in a statement after they were exposed by the independent non-profit organization Consumers' Research.
On January 18, 2022, State Farm's Corporate Responsibility Analyst Jose Soto sent out an internal email calling on its Florida agents to participate in a "unique project" to "diversify" classrooms, community centers and libraries.
In the email, Soto said State Farm had partnered with the GenderCool Project to get books about being transgender and non-binary in front of schoolkids as young as 5-years-old.
"State Farm is partnering with The GenderCool Project to help diversify classroom, community center and library bookshelves with a collection of books to help bring clarity and understanding to the national conversation about Being Transgender, Inclusive and Non-Binary," the email reads. "The project's goal is to increase representation of LGBTQ+ books and support our communities in having challenging, important and empowering conversations with children Age 5+."
Soto said approximately 550 State Farm agents and employees nationwide would have the opportunity to donate to the GenderCool Project's three-book bundle, titled, "A Kids Book About Being Transgender," "A Kids Book About Being Inclusive," and "A Kids Book About Being Non-Binary," and encouraged six Florida agents to receive and donate the books to their communities.
In a series of Tweets, Monday, Will Hild, the executive director for Consumers' Research, blasted State Farm over its aggressive LGBTQ advocacy.
"This gross and blatant attempt to indoctrinate our children by State Farm is shameless, and consumers should be aware a company founded on family values is now encouraging five-year-old children to question their gender" said Hild.
🚨 Emails leaked to @ConsumersFirst from concerned @StateFarm employees show the company engaged in the woke indoctrination of kids age 5+.
State Farm partnered with The GenderCool Project — which aims to have conversations with children about being Transgender and Non-Binary. pic.twitter.com/MYcZSW8Yp1
.@StateFarm’s goal was to have "550 agents and employees" nationwide donate a 3-book bundle about Being Transgender, Inclusive and Non-Binary to their "local teacher, community center or library of their choice."
State Farm is now claiming they've seen the light and have sworn off Grooming Children.
BREAKING: @StateFarm sent out a mass email to their staff today stating “we will no longer support that program” after they were exposed for supporting a project to push LGBTQ books into schools. A source tells me “the agents were really upset when we found out.” W pic.twitter.com/55P1QJ0oLa
Calvin Coolidge knew it; Ronald Reagan knew it; Donald Trump knows it. Just get the hell out of the way, and people will produce and create and make things better. The only true function of government is to keep the next kingdom over the hill from taking our stuff!
Meir Kohn's "Commerce-Predation Theory" recognizes that, and also recognizes that government can be an impediment to internal commerce.
Gee...I wonder whether we can find an example of that!
The simplified version of my theory is that economic progress is a result of the interaction between commerce and production, which I call the accelerator. However, the brake is predation. It is what holds economic progress back. Government is historically, and most often, the source of predation, but governments can also play a role in protecting against predation
The interview is with "The Dartmouth Review," which for all of its impressive pedigree often comes off as...um...a college newspaper. Which it is, but it is a conservative paper in the belly of the beast, so they deserve some credit.
Kohn's description of the evolution of the Chinese economy is fascinating, as is his recognition that government is often a malign influence that goes beyond monetary policy. Government is the enemy of commerce, and government bureaucrats have no reason to be the benign guides that they claim to be.
I suspect that the only thing you need to do to become a commercial region is to allow it to happen. It will happen eventually if you don’t prevent it, and the government is the one preventing it by predating and suppressing commerce.
But Kohn doesn't differentiate between peoples. Western European immigrants to North America created an incredible economy (and society), yet in vast swathes of the world with ample natural resources...there was nothing!
I wonder whether the understandable awareness of the existence of the jack-booted thugs of leftist counter-culture has limited this analysis.
Good morning, kids. In the immortal words of Jerry Colonna, "Ah! Something new has been added!" Yes, in the spirit of today's "journalism" or as I sometimes refer to it, "charnel-ism," I think it only appropriate that we dust off the grim milestone indicator, made famous during the War on Terror (though to this day, in spite of being quite proficient in geography, I still can't find Terror on my light-up Replogle globe) and repurpose it. I do not mean to diminish or make light of our servicemen and women who sacrificed their lives. 20 years later, I've come to the awful realization that their lives were indeed sacrificed by the criminals in Congress to keep their shares of Raytheon and General Dynamics fat and happy. And if you think those companies won't somehow find a way to sell the Taliban replacement parts for the $80 billion in military hardware Biden effectively gave them by bugging out of Afghanistan, I have a bridge over the East River I can let you have cheap. But you might not want to ride the Q train over it lest you get shot to death by a criminal whose melanin content and last name should not be mentioned. But I digress.
Psaki-Psircling back and speaking of Iraq, I'm sure we all remember Baghdad Bob, the irritating douchebag draped in surplus olive drab Idi Amin battle dress, who kept assuring the world that the US military was on the verge of being wiped out, even as 155mm rounds were dropping just off camera. I give you none other than America's answer to Baghdad Bob – "Bad Gag Ron."
White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain tweeted out a running list of bad poll numbers for [so-called quote-unquote "president"] Joe Biden and claimed it’s actually good news.
Klein [sic] retweeted late Sunday a tweet from Axios laying out the recent findings from a CBS News poll. The poll was conducted between May 18-20 among 2,041 adults. The poll had a +- 2.5 percentage point margin of error.
“Tough Biden poll from CBS News,” Axios wrote.
The tweet noted that among those polled, 69% said the economy is “bad,” 65% said Biden has been “slow to react” in moments of crisis and 63% said the state of the nation is “uneasy” and “worrying.”
But Klain said the “narrative” is actually incorrect.
“I hate to spoil the narrative but this poll shows @potus approval rating moving up, and solid public confidence on the two biggest problems he inherited: COVID and jobs.”
Yeah, that approval rating is going way up, Ron! And blaming Trump for Chinese COVID and jobs is just laughable in the extreme. Biden promised to end the pandemic and along with surpassing the death toll during Trump's first term (and I have serious doubts about those numbers anyway), gave America a giant Ministry of Truth-serum enema, now fortified with monkey pox! Well, to be fair, Biden did solve the jobs "problem." He killed off millions of jobs, including those for blacks, minorities and women that Trump made possible in the greatest numbers ever. Considering Klain and his Kalorama Komintern are hell bent on destroying our economy, record numbers of people employed and off the dole is indeed a huge problem. Especially when the aforementioned groups are your traditional core voting blocs.
Washington Democratic congressional candidate Rebecca Parson has a bold idea to get Congress to pass housing legislation: have a million people break into empty houses.
Parson, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is running to represent Washington’s 6th Congressional District. In a video ad, she outlined what she and her followers can do if she wins.
“Imagine I proposed a Housing for All Bill in Congress, Then imagine you, me, and a million of our friends took action and occupied empty houses nationwide. They couldn’t ignore us,” Parson says in the ad.
“No one has ever done anything like this,” Parson continues. “That’s why it’s going to work.”
Oh yeah, that'll work out just fine! And if the houses aren't empty, I'm sure the "million of our friends" will eagerly empty the houses of the "white supremacists" and "insurrectionists" otherwise known as owners. "For the people!" you understand. I dare not bring up the movie Dr. Zhivago since Putin = Evil and as we all know Putin = Trump. But grant me dispensation when I recall the scene where Ralph Richardson protests the occupation of his home by several dozen people at the orders of the local commissar who claims it's for the people.
"Well, I'm one of the people!" he remonstrated. Except he wasn't. Just like all of us. We are being, what's the word? "REPLACED." And we will like it, or else.
“Imagine I proposed a Housing for All Bill in Congress, Then imagine you, me, and a million of our friends took action and occupied empty houses nationwide. They couldn’t ignore us,” Parson says in the ad. “No one has ever done anything like this,” Parson continues. “That’s why it’s going to work.” (she must've seen Dr. Zhivago a couple of times - jjs) Washington Dem Socialist Congressional Candidate Rebecca Parson Calls for Breaking Into Empty Homes
Heather Mac Donald: "After the horror in Buffalo, [so-called quote-unquote "president"] Biden and others peddle an entirely false charge: that whites are the biggest source of hate crime and interracial violence in the U.S." Using Tragedy for Racial Propaganda
"No communist was ever as dedicated to economic suicide as the current class of idiots who rule us." The Economic Doom Loop Has Begun
"Preliminary investigation reveals the suspect was walking back and forth in the same train car and, without provocation, pulled out a gun and fired it at the victim at close range as the train was crossing the Manhattan Bridge," Corey said. The gunman, described only as a heavy-set, "dark-skinned" man with a beard who was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, gray sweat pants and white sneakers, fled when the train pulled into the Canal Street station. (could've been me; I was on the subway in Manhattan on Sunday morning - jjs) Gunman Shoots Passenger Dead on New York City Subway
"Law enforcement sources told the Post Andrew Abdullah is wanted for questioning in connection with the killing of Daniel Enriquez. Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell on Monday morning tweeted pictures of the suspect, who is still at large, asking New Yorkers for 'help identifying & locating' the shooter." "The City is Not Safe": Suspect in NYC Subway Shooting Had 19 Prior Arrests
"The share saying the economy is bad had been holding steady for the first four months of the year and final two months of last year. Between September and November, the share saying the economy is bad jumped from 51 percent to 64 percent and held at around that level through April even as the unemployment rate fell from 4.2 percent to 3.6 percent." 69% of Americans Say the Economy is Bad
"Prices are even steeper in the Northeast region because it has fewer refineries than the rest of the country: In New York, for instance, prices are as high as $6.51 per gallon – a stunning 102 percent increase from one year ago." Diesel Fuel Costs Soaring — Up 75% from Last Year
"If [so-called quote-unquote "president"] Biden wants to tackle higher prices, he should forget about more tax hikes and instead reverse his policies on domestic oil and natural gas production." Fight Inflation with Energy
"Media attempt to hang 'great replacement' theory around the neck of GOP conference chairwoman." (it's not a theory; it's a fact and the media have even boasted about it for years now - jjs) Who’s Afraid of Elise Stefanik?
"The censoring comes as no surprise, as Iran’s regime has a large budget for its cyber army, which routinely targets groups, organizations or individuals who publish or post material unflattering to the regime. Pro-regime 'bots; are highly present on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram." REPORT: Instagram, Facebook Fact Checkers Censor Posts on Iran Protests
"Without fail, when there’s a mass shooting, the mainstream media will collude with the Democratic Party to blame conservatives." (gee, ya think? - jjs) Will the Lies and Smears Ever Stop?
"Police reportedly refused to tell Posobiec and his crew why they were being detained, though he later told The Post Millennial that he was told that they looked 'suspicious' because they were filming at the entrance." Jack Posobiec Detained at Davos World Economic Forum Event
AMERICA, AND THE WORLD, IMPRISONED: CHINESE CORONAVIRUS FICTIONS AND FACTS
". . . the pandemic is essentially over now, and Democrats are heading into the 2022 midterms in a terribly weak position. Many expect a political bloodbath. But does the White House have a trick up its sleeve? On Sunday, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House [Chinese] Coronavirus Response Coordinator, claimed on ABC’s This Week that the White House anticipates a surge of [Chinese] COVID-19 cases this fall and winter." (cases mean shit; hospitalizations and actual death do - jjs) Is This How Biden Hopes to Save the Democrats in the Midterms?
"But whatever you believe about masking doesn’t matter when you see the following clip of Joe Biden arriving in South Korea a few days ago. For some reason, Biden descends the stairs of Air Force One by himself yet wearing a mask, before taking it off as he approaches someone." WATCH: Biden Continues to Prove His Masking Is Pure Theatre
"At last week’s Financial Times conference, Stuart Kirk — the global head of responsible investing at HSBC’s asset management division — delivered a presentation called 'Why investors need not worry about climate risk.' Top executives internally agreed upon the theme and content of the speech before Kirk delivered it on Thursday, according to Financial Times." A Top Banker Slammed Policymakers’ Efforts to "Out-Hyperbole" Each Other on Climate Change. The Bank Suspended Him.
"Australia’s conversion to hard greenery is arriving at the very moment when responsible people everywhere are realizing that the costs of orthodox Green climate policy are economically destructive and that the Russo-Ukraine war makes them strategically dangerous too. To use language that should be familiar by now: Net-Zero is unsustainable. And they’ve just embraced it." Australians Go Walkabout on "Climate Change"
EDUCATION, AND WHAT PASSES FOR IT
"[Deputy Director of Education Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, Nat] Malkus said that the question here will be whether parents who chose this option during the pandemic school closures will continue with the method when and if schools reopen." SHOT: Mass Exodus – 1.2 Million Students Abandoned Public Schools Since the Pandemic
"Some of the books on the list focus on teaching children the history of the gay pride flag, engage the conversation about race and detail the story of a transgender boy’s desire to no longer be seen as a girl, according to Fox News. Other books on the list depict an oil pipeline as a venomous snake and an illustration of a boy applying lipstick and jewelry to fulfill his desire of becoming a mermaid, the outlet reported." CHASER: New York’s Department of Education Recommends School Children Read Books on Transgenderism, Racism and Lieawatha Warren
"Over the next year more and more of the other lawsuits against the illegal blacklisting and discrimination and censorship that began following the George Floyd riots and accelerated with the election of Democrat Joe Biden are going to be won, again and again and again." Pushback: Professor Fired for Having Opinions Wins Total Victory
"By not ruling on Dobbs in the weeks immediately following the leaked draft, the justices are showing that they are not in a rush to break that tradition, even with the protests." Supreme Court Declines to Rule in Abortion Case – Again
"In Pennsylvania, the 'No Questions' mail-in balloting returns have the potential to blunt a favorable GOP trend with a deluge of Democrat ginned up mail-ins." Salena Zito’s Big Miss About Pennsylvania’s Midterms
"Hillary’s former campaign manager, Robby Mook, dropped a dime on his old boss and said she pulled the trigger on the disinformation campaign against Donald Trump. SHE did. And it wouldn’t have come into testimony if Mook hadn’t been required to answer upon pain of perjury who the highest official to sign off on the disinformation was. Thank you, John Durham." FLASHBACK: Watch Hillary Trash Trump for Election "Funny Stuff" When She Was Doing It
"Donald Trump’s campaign, his reputation, and his Administration lay in a bloody heap on the floor as the Democrat Party, Hillary Clinton, and all of her minions laughed while dragging the country through this farce. The institutions of the DOJ, FBI, and CIA and a special counsel appointment were put in the service of Hillary Clinton, undermining their reputations just to look good for the boss. Absolute treachery." Sussmann Trial Week 2: It Was Hillary, In the Back Room, With the Chardonnay Bottle
"No longer an officeholder, she needs to be held accountable and live with the stench of corruption for the rest of her life." (no, she needs to swing - jjs) Impeach Hillary Clinton In 2023
OFFICIAL DEMOCRAT PARTY/LEFTIST-ENDORSED ANTI-SEMITISM, ANTI-CHRISTIANITY
"The Republican primaries, specifically, have garnered national attention largely because former President Donald Trump is pursuing what many have described as a 'vendetta' against Gov. Brian Kemp and Kemp’s allies over 2020." (and the stank of Tank - jjs) Primary Races Tonight Foreshadow Blockbuster November in Georgia
"Don’t get me wrong; I don’t believe for a minute that Biden won the 2020 election. I know that if my friend had voted for Trump, it wouldn’t have mattered in the blue state of New York. But people need to learn from their mistakes, and they need to realize how bad Democrats are for this country. My friend needs to worry about his family so much that he never votes donkey again. He needs to miss his grandaughter because his son can’t afford the gas to drive an hour and 15 minutes to the usual Sunday family dinner." My Biden-Voting Friend Had "No Idea" Things Could Get This Bad. Buckle Up, Buddy, We're Just Getting Started
"The data suggests that voters who twice voted to elect Trump over Democrat candidates were more likely to be undercounted in the 2020 Census than voters who backed Democrats against Trump in the last two elections." (I'm sure it was purely an accident and totally unintentional, right? - jjs) Census Bureau Undercounted 5 Red States, Overcounted 6 Blue States
"Nostalgia for a 'bipartisan stewardship' that never existed depends entirely on a Democratic Party that no longer exists." (if it ever existed in the first place - jjs) Anyone for Bipartisanship?
FOREIGN AFFAIRS, INTERNATIONAL
"Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin expressed discontent when asked at a regular briefing about Biden’s remarks." (Sook Mai Wang - jjs) Biden Commits US to WWIII if China Invades Taiwan
"Clarifying Biden's comments on foreign policy is nothing new for [junta] officials. In March, the White House walked back three provocative statements the president made during a trip to Poland: that Russian president Vladimir Putin 'cannot remain in power,' that the United States would respond 'in kind' to Russian use of chemical weapons, and that U.S. troops would be deployed to Ukraine." (relax; the world knows he's a gibbering, rotten vegetable - jjs) Dire Straits: White House Walks Back Biden’s Taiwan Gaffe
“As an important economy that plays a crucial role in the global supply chain, Taiwan is definitely qualified for inclusion in the IPEF,” Taiwan’s Central News Agency quoted the island democracy’s foreign ministry as saying in a release. Taiwan Regrets Exclusion From Biden’s New Indo-Pacific Economic Initiative
"Col. Hassan Sayad Khodayari was gunned down on Sunday outside his home in broad daylight by two unknown assailants on motorcycles who shot five bullets at point-blank range from a weapon equipped with a silencer, Israeli media reported." Yawn: Iran Vows to Avenge Killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Officer
"It shouldn’t take a team of medical researchers to find out how much providers are charging for their services. If price transparency were the norm in the healthcare marketplace, then providers wouldn’t be able to get away with such outlandish mark-ups." Where's the Promised Transparency in Drug Pricing?
"When added to past funding rounds — and including the $2.9 billion provided by NASA for turning Starship into a manned lunar lander — SpaceX will have raised approximately $12 billion total for building Starship." SpaceX Seeking Another $1.725 Billion in Investment Capital
"The implications of the story is that Boeing is simply not interested in finding other customers for Starliner, nor is it trying to find alternative launch vehicles to replace the Atlas-5. Instead, the company has simply calculated that there are enough Atlas-5s left to complete its obligations to NASA, and that is all it needs. Competing for additional commercial manned space flights does not interest it." Boeing Uninterested in Finding Customers for Starliner Outside of NASA?
“The project’s goal is to increase representation of LGBTQ+ books and support our communities in having challenging, important and empowering conversations with children Age 5+.” (like a gay neighbor, State Harm, er, Farm is there . . . - jjs) State Farm Giving Florida Schools Transgender Books for 5-Year-Olds
NOTE: The opinions expressed in the links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue.
ALSO: The Morning Report is cross-posted at CutJibNewsletter.com if you want to continue the conversation all day.
I pushed my house move back a week. Just too many things to get done. Which meant I needed to order more groceries at the old place - I'd planned to move this week and had already emptied the fridge.
Everyone expected this; legislation directly preventing corporations from infringing users' broader freedom of speech violates the corporations' specific First Amendment protections. It's a tricky needle to thread, and I'm not convinced this bill tried very hard.
GitLab is increasingly a complete collaboration solution for development teams. We use it at work. It's great.
It used to run happily in 1GB of RAM; these days I wouldn't try to run it in less than 8GB. But if you are paying salaries for even a small number of programmers, a server with 8GB of RAM isn't even a blip.
"And I think John Durham knows what that 'insurance plan' is. I know we figured it out during Russiagate, and we have tried to educate the American public on it, but it remains classified, partly,"Kash Patel, a former top House Intelligence Committee aide
Quote II
The issue is not the type of firearm, it’s not the magazine capacity, it’s not even the fact that it’s a firearm, and it’s surely not what flavor of politics the killer claims or espouses. The issue is mental health and criminal behavior. As long as we are letting the crazies and the crooks run the streets, we’re going to have dead people.William Lehman
Quote III
"I am tired of hearing about being the best state in the country to do business when we are the worst state in the country to live.” Stacey Abrams
Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out of the state.
What goes up doesn't always have to go back down. Fuck Joe Biden!
Citing estimates from JPMorgan, over the weekend Bloomberg wrote that courtesy of a Biden administration terrified of what soaring inflation will mean for the Democrats in the midterms, and a Fed that is determine to do anything - even crash the market and spark a recession - to do Joe Biden's "kill inflation" bidding, the US faces a new scary threat: a plunge in wealth which JPM estimates at least $5 trillion, and could reach $9 trillion by year-end.
In short, the world’s richest nation is waking up to an unpleasant and unfamiliar sensation: It’s getting poorer... and worst of all, it's getting poorer at the behest of its own leaders.
Since the start of the year, the S&P 500 Index is down 18%, the Nasdaq 100 has lost 27% and a Bloomberg index of cryptocurrencies has plunged 48%. That all amounts to “a wealth shock that is set to drag on growth in the coming year,” JPMorgan economists led by Michael Feroli wrote in a note Friday
Utah hunting guide faces felony charge for Donald Trump Jr.’s big-game hunt
Court documents say guide Wade Lemon used ‘a pile of grain, oil and pastries’ to lure a bear that Trump Jr. then killed.
Utah hunting guide Wade Lemon faces five years in state prison for the death of a Carbon County bear killed during a guided hunt on May 18, 2018.
But Lemon, a well-known guide, didn’t pull the trigger — Donald Trump Jr. did, according to the Utah Department of Natural Resources (DNR).
Trump Jr. is not named in a recent filing against Lemon, but the DNR confirmed his identity as the person named in the felony complaint as Lemon’s “client” on the hunt. Prosecutors have indicated there was no evidence showing Trump Jr. would have known about the alleged baiting that went on during the hunt.Emphasis Added
***
It used to be that only politicians stole from you in the light of day. Not anymore.
Employees punched, kicked and weaponized a chair to fight off thieves armed with hammers during an attempted smash-and-grab heist on Sunday at a jewelry store in the Bella Terra shopping center in Huntington Beach.
The thieves bolted into Princess Bride Diamonds at 7821 Edinger Ave around noon, police said. Four people dressed in dark clothing immediately used a hammer to smash a display case, as seen in surveillance footage the store shared in an Instagram story.
The intruders had pulled into the outdoor mall’s parking lot in a Honda, said an employee at a nearby store who declined to give his name for safety reasons. He said he saw three or four people wearing ski masks and carrying hammers get out of the car. One of them was carrying a backpack with a camouflage print.
“As soon as I saw them get out of the car, I knew they were going to rob Princess Bride,” he said.
This year’s annual "go topless" Jeep weekend in Texas resulted in more than 100 arrests and dozens of people, including a sheriff’s deputy, sent to the hospital during the event attended by tens of thousands.
More than 80,000 revelers attended the weekend-long event for Jeep enthusiasts at Crystal Beach on the Bolivar Peninsula, a popular beach destination in Galveston County, Texas.
Galveston County Sheriff Henry Trochesset told FOX 26 Houston that more than 100 people were arrested over the weekend, as deputies responded to multiple assaults, fights and DWIs.
***
It's an older story but still Tonight's Feel Good Story of The Day.
Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by Sales Pitches.
Notice: Posted with permission by the Ace Media Empire and its sidekick AceCorp, LLC. Gluten, cholesterol, saturated fats and other evil ingredients added to this ONT.
So what I hear them saying is that this is Chiefly a Disease of Heterosexuals and that we're all going to have to wear condoms when we have sex with our wives.
Isn't that the standard Faucian diagnosis? The young and fit are equally at risk from a coronavirus that kills the old and unhealthy, and heterosexuals are equally at risk from a virus that is spread by anal sex.
Everyone must suffer equally so that no political constituency feels unfairly burdened. That's Science (TM), you see.
LONDON (AP) -- A leading adviser to the World Health Organization described the unprecedented outbreak of the rare disease monkeypox in developed countries as "a random event" that might be explained by risky sexual behavior at two recent mass events in Europe.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Dr. David Heymann, who formerly headed WHO's emergencies department, said the leading theory to explain the spread of the disease was sexual transmission among gay and bisexual men at two raves held in Spain and Belgium. Monkeypox has not previously triggered widespread outbreaks beyond Africa, where it is endemic in animals.
Seems like Stanky Janky was intent on ignoring that and going for the real prize, silencing domestic opponents.
Or, just as likely: DHS, the "Disinformation" enforcement agency, was lying and gaslighting the public.
We can't probe this question further because after quickly dismissing this point by claiming, for the tenth time, that she was being taken out of "context," Stanky Janky turned off responses and will not answer any more questions.
Woke is Falling: Hulu had been considering picking up a series based on an alternate-history telling of Hillary Clinton's life, called Rodham, in which she dates Bill Clinton but doesn't marry him, and then runs for president on her own as a Stronk Empowered Single Woman.
No seriously, they were going to make this. Clare Danes and Dakota Fanning were attached, I guess to play Hillary Rodham and her lesbian lifemate.
But I guess Hulu, which is owned by Disney, noticed that they were losing a lot of money and that Netflix was also losing money on woke content and so they've now passed on the project.
Hulu has passed on "Rodham," the scripted alternate history series about Hillary Clinton that has been in development since 2020, TheWrap has learned.
A source close to the 20th Television project confirmed to TheWrap on Friday that they are still trying to find a home for the series, which now has Claire Danes and Dakota Fanning attached to play Clinton at different points in her life.
If I told you right now I was making all of the above up, you'd probably believe me, and with good reason.
But I'm not. That's real.
This was based on a best-selling "novel," supposedly.
Australia's oldest museum held a children's night-time event, including a "Lego pit" where a bunch of kids could play with blocks together.
Australia's oldest museum has defended allowing a man dressed in women's fetish gear play with Lego at a children's night time event - after pictures of him outraged parents across Australia.
Horrified parents complained to security staff and event organisers about the disturbing scenes at a popular weekly event at the Australian Museum in Sydney.
The photos from a recent Nights at the Museum event during the Easter school holidays show a man in fetish gear sitting with a group of young children building with blocks in the Lego pit.
The man is pictured in a midriff top and mini skirt outfit accessorised with fishnet stockings and a suspender belt. He's sitting next to a man dressed in similar attire.
The man's scantily clad outfit appears to be inspired by cross-dressing lothario 'Frank-N-Furter', the lead character originally played by Tim Curry in the 1970s cult musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
'He's sitting there with his full package out,' one horrified parent said. 'Disgusting.'
But the Museum defended the pervert's right to play with children while in panties and stockings and garters:
The Australian Museum has defended the attendee complained about, claiming the individual was in 'fancy dress'.
in Washington debate, inflation is "crushing" families
in real life, pandemic relief has eased the pain
Moody's economist: "excess saving cushioned the impact, even for lower-income households
"households are for the most part in a good financial place"
Let's see how this simple-minded partisan flatulence-recycler reported on Trump's tax cuts in 2018: Oh, I see.
He reported that people were actually losing money due to Trump's tax cuts, and "at best," were "breaking even."
Biden's inflation is good, but Trump's tax cuts were bad!
This guy claims to be a "journalist." Worked at the New York Times and MSNBC. He now works for CNN (of course).
They allowed him to moderate a Republican debate one time.
Never again.
Whoopie Goldberg scolds the Archbishop of San Francisco, telling him, literally -- I am not making this up -- that deciding who is and is not in compliance with the Catholic Church's teachings and therefore is eligible to take communion "is not your job, dude."
Whoopi: "The archbishop of San Francisco is calling for speaker Nancy Pelosi to be denied receiving Communion because of her pro-choice stance ... this is not your job, dude. That is not up to you to make that decision." pic.twitter.com/TCSe0t6XLY
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) May 23, 2022
1. What is his job, then?
2. Then who else would have that job?
Biden says that a recession is "not inevitable" -- that's reassuring, huh? -- and adds that thanks to his jacking up the price of gasoline, we're going through an incredible "transition" which will force us to be less reliant on fossil fuels when he's done destroying the world economy.
He ends by saying, "This is going to be a haul. This is going to take some time."
So, not "transitory," then?
AOC brags that her engagement ring, which she got from the Ginger Potato Beard she's supposedly marrying, is made from "recycled gold."
All gold is recycled, dummy; it's fucking gold, they don't throw it out.
She also claims the stone is "zero emissions."
francesca fiorentini
@franifio
Vamoooooooos.
Your ring gotta be made of tinfoil otherwise the right's gonna flip.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
@AOC
Close! It's zero emission and recycled gold
Other experts said AOC's claim of zero emissions suggests the diamond was created in a lab, and not mined from the earth.
Peter Kahan, of Katz Jewelry in New York’s Diamond District, said a lab gem would be "significantly cheaper" -- and would have the added benefit of being politically correct, ensuring it did not originate in a conflict zone.
I'm sure that a lab building up a gem atom by atom produced "zero emissions."
Meanwhile, a bit of background on AOC's Ginger Boiled Potato Beard:
Riley Roberts met AOC while they were both undergraduates at Boston University. Roberts hailed from a wealthy neighborhood in Arizona and attended the elite Chaparral High School in Scottsdale. He later built websites for small business before signing up for his girlfriend's long-shot campaign for Congress.
Three-fifths of US Hispanics dislike the job President Biden is doing, according to a new survey out this week -- yet another sign of widespread discontent as Americans grapple with the ongoing border crisis, baby formula shortage and skyrocketing inflation.
The Quinnipiac University survey published Wednesday found that just 26% of Hispanics approve of Biden's performance, while 60% disapprove and 13% said they did not know or had no opinion.
The survey interviewed 1,586 adults, including 132 self-reported Hispanics. The margin of error among the group was 8.5 percentage points.
Despite the small sample, the poll result marks a reversal from the fall of 2020, when Biden won Hispanic voters by a 2-to-1 margin over Donald Trump.
In addition, a similar survey done by Quinnipiac at this time last year found that 55% of Hispanic voters approved of Biden while only 29% disapproved.
The poll shows Democrats losing the midterms, of course:
Guy Benson
@guypbenson
Biden overall approval 35/57, GOP +4 on generic ballot in this Q-poll
There was bad news for Biden in last week's polling, too: 75% of voters say we're on the wrong track.
In new NBC News poll, 75 percent say country is on wrong track -- highest number since 2008. Just 16 percent say country is on right track -- lowest since 2008.https://t.co/UngjOYtAJxpic.twitter.com/UZ0ZZqCYkD
He allows for one possible chance for Democrats to save themselves: a massive surge in interest in abortion rights.
For the past six months, over 70% of the public thinks that the country is headed in the wrong direction.
This sense of pessimism in the country has dragged Biden's job approval down to 39%, a significant drop since last summer. The President's low job approval has been driven by a lack of confidence in his handling of a variety of economic and social issues.
If past elections are any indicator, we are heading into the final stage of the election period when voters are beginning to lock in on their views of the state of the country and their expectations for the future. It is during this period - and not the final days of an election - that the public settles in how they are going to vote.
The President's job approval during this stage is the best proxy to determine current levels of support for the party in power. And that window is closing rapidly. In the last four midterm elections, by June the public had made up its mind about the leadership in Washington and how they were going to vote in November. According to Gallup, Trump's 39% job approval in early February 2018, Obama's 41% approval in June 2014 and 45% approval in June 2010, and Bush's 38% approval in March 2006 all matched their job approval on Election Day.
As might be expected based on the incumbents' anemic numbers, the President's party suffered significant defeats and lost control of at least one branch of Congress in all four of those midterm elections.
That is why the stakes are so high as we enter this final period critical for the Democrats to seize the pending Court decision on Roe vs Wade as a way to alter the trajectory of the election. If they are not successful in reframing the terms of debate for the midterm elections around the pending decision by the Supreme Court on Roe, we will look back at Biden and the Democrats' failures last summer and early fall as the reasons for their electoral defeats this November.
Trailer for new Mission: Impossible movie, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One.
I knew they were filming two movies back-to-back; I didn't know it was supposed to be one big story.
Eh. I don't love that part of it, but I think they're just doing that because all of their plots are the same plot (guy is going to blow up the world) and here they've come up with a new wrinkle on that plot, and making the two movies two parts of one story lets them use that same plot twice.
For those of you who don't feel like watching it, the evil plot, fronted by McKittrick (the CIA chief from the first Mission Impossible movie, way back in 1996 or whatever) is that the New World Order has decided it wants to decide what "truth" is forever more, and they're telling Ethan Hunt he can either get on board with The Regime or he can get dead.
It's like they made this movie for me.
Quitting James Bond was never so easy. (I still haven't seen No Time to Die and someone sent me the Blu-Ray; I could watch it, but I just don't feel like it.)
Or, possibly, the second-oldest-fashioned way, because it's good.
I might actually see it in the theaters.
By the way, I bought the UHD version of The Northman. Apologies for hyping this movie in the sidebar after just seeing a few reviews. It's... not great. I'd say it's interesting, maybe admirable. It's daring and defiant in that it flouts all of the current rules of political correctness and social responsibility...
But it's not great and it's not fun.
The movie is based on the Viking legend of a vengeance quest, the story that inspired Hamlet (though that was much-changed for the play). But the director, how do I say this, subverts your genre expectations by making the quest for vengeance as ugly, bloody, brutal, ignoble, cheap, deflating, and unsatisfying a thing as possible.
Just a quick example. From the trailer, you know that the bad guy killed his father and seized his throne. Well, when Amleth, the son of the murdered man, comes of age and sets out for vengeance (why did he wait so long? dude's like 30), the bad guy is no longer a king or earl or whatever he was. King Harold of Norway didn't like that he had killed the former king and so had kicked him out of his throne. The bad guy actually wound up fleeing and is, per a report Amleth hears, "now just a sheep-farmer in Iceland."
That's not exactly true; he's more like a colonist attempting to build a homestead and grow his own little mini-kingdom.
But right there, early on, the bad guy is taken down in stature from the King Who Stole My Father's Crown to someone who has already had the stolen crown taken back from him, and been forced to flee his own country, and is now... just raising sheep with a small household and a dozen armed men under his control.
Sure Amleth still wants his vengeance but the bad guy isn't exactly Darth Vader any more, is he? There is no longer any idea of "freeing a kingdom" here.
It's not just "Now it's personal." It's now, "Now it's only personal."
And the movie does that deliberately. And throughout the story, it deliberately subverts the expected tropes of the vengeance story.
The first time we see adult Amleth, he's a berserker with a Viking tribe conducting a raid on a peaceful village in Russia. And they're just killing villagers to plunder them.
And, while Amleth himself does not participate in the nastiness that follows -- he just kills the men who are valiantly defending their village from raiders -- the rest of the Vikings do what Vikings do with captured women.
They also enslave able-bodied young people and sell them into servitude.
And they execute young men and little boys, presumably to make sure that none of them get any of their own ideas about vengeance.
As I said, Amleth is not an active participant in that stuff, but he also doesn't object. And it's no surprise to him -- he's been doing this a while, he knows what the post-victory procedures are.
Some may appreciate this kind of non-prettified, non-Hollywooded-up look at the brutal reality of life in 895 A.D., when a moose bit my sister.
The hero is deliberately made not a hero. He's an anti-hero.
He's also not very interesting.
It's hard to find a real rooting interest here.
Also there's not much action here. There is some scattered brutal violence, but little action. The distinction I'm making is between "action" as a sort of combat sport in which both sides in the contest have a realistic chance of winning, so the outcome is in doubt, and so there's tension and excitement.
A fair fight, in other words.
Violence, on the other hand, includes killing a drunken guard by surprise. It's not a fight, it's just butchery. I don't object to it -- most of the people killed live by the sword themselves, and would not refrain from killing a drunken man by surprise themselves (or a woman or child, for that matter) -- but there's no excitement or tension in it.
The director is attempting to tell a "realistic" vengeance story, and a "realistic" take on what the story that inspired the legend really might have gone like. (Well, except for the constant real-not-imagined intercession of the Norse gods and Norns and witches.*)
And while I can respect that, I am sad to say that an emotionally, morally realistic vengeance story is not a very exciting, engaging, or exciting thing to watch.
I have to also stress it's not a bad movie. I think it's smart and well-made. I don't object to what Robert Eggers is attempting here and I do admire his guts in doing it.
But... having really hyped this in the sidebar, I feel I have to offer up a review and take that hype back.
As I said, no fun. It's not bad. If you're interested, watch it. Just don't take any special pains to watch it and don't pay a lot of money to see it.
Just watch Conan the Barbarian again. You might think that's brutal, but notably, Conan never attacks an innocent in that. Even the camel had it coming.
* And speaking of Conan: Here's another subvert-genre-expectations thing he does. In Conan, the gods are kept off-screen and magic is kept pretty minimal, with one big exception (Conan's resurrection). That's because the filmmakers there wanted to make this fantastic world seem real to you.
In The Northman, the film throws much more magic at you, and magic intrudes a lot more than it does in Conan. That's because the director has the opposite goal that John Milius did in Conan: Milius wanted to make the fantastic world realistic and seem like a world you know, but here, Robert Eggers wants to make the real historical world seem like a fantastical world that you don't know at all, and a strange, alien place.
It's interesting but I don't know if I love it. And no, the magic can't just be in Amleth's head or something; he gets specific direction and prophecy from supernatural guides that are accurate and point him correctly to things he needs and places he must go.
Also, one more fun Conan thing: There is a scene here directly, and I do mean directly, out of the Conan movie. Though it's such a classic sort of fantasy scene that I'm sure it came from a dozen other stories.
Anyway, Amleth goes on a brief mini-quest that is straight from the Conan movie. But in the Conan movie, the supernatural element was only briefly suggested, and probably didn't even happen at all, whereas here, oh baby, they turn it up to 11.
I just find it interesting that Eggers keeps doing this, turning the "Fantasy Supernatural" dial up to its highest setting in a story that takes place in the real world.
Watch Starliner's Return to Earth
"The astronauts on ISS closed the hatch yesterday on Boeing's Starliner manned capsule in preparation for its return to Earth today, with a planned landing at White Sands, New Mexico, at 6:49 pm (Eastern)."
Link to Bob Zimmerman's Behind the Black blog [J.J. Sefton]
Author, historian and founder of Jihad Watch Robert Spencer joins Sefton and CBD to discuss: his new book "The Critical Qur'an," The Disinformation Governance Board and the Biden junta's war on free speech, The erased Southern border as a terror threat and mass immigration as a threat to societal dissolution, Imaginary racism: the New York Yankees' Donaldson incident, and much more!
UPDATE: Chris [Stirewalt] is joining the endlessly talented George Will and others at Nexstar's NewsNation as Senior Politics Editor where he will help build the network into a 24/7 nonpartisan news source.
Posted by: Jane D'oh
I love that we're on a first-name basis with this sadsack There is an apparently endless funding pool for leftwing networks who claim to be "nonpartisan." Because there's going to be a lot of Election Fortifyin' goin' on.
Which countries will be the next Sri Lankas? 70 countries are listed as in possible danger of defaulting on their sovereign debt. 107 have at least one of the three indicators of possible sovereign default. (Among those indicators: Rising food prices and rising fuel prices. The third is rising debt payments.) This could get bad. By the way, this is the first time I've seen this news outfit, "WION," The World Is One Network, a privately owned Indian news company. I don't know anything about them besides what Wikipedia says. This report seems professional enough. I'm at the point where if it's not American, I trust it more.
CBD and J.J. are joined by co-blogger Buck Throckmorton to discuss topics he has selected including: Censorship in schools, Chi-Com encroachment into the South Pacific, Fuck NATO, "The Sustainable Organic Church of the Carbon Apocalypse," Starveflation, the COVID crime against humanity, 21st century feudalism, and more!
Forgotten 80s Mystery Click: Frontmen go solo edition I saw Matt Dillon in black and white there ain't no colour in memories
He rode his brother's Harley across the TV while I was laughing at Dom deLuise.
Now I'm cycling all my video tapes, I'm crying and I'm joking
I've gotta stop drinking
I've gotta stop thinking
I've gotta stop smoking
At 6:54 pm (Eastern) tonight a ULA Atlas-5 rocket will launch Boeing's manned Starliner capsule on its second attempt to complete an unmanned demo mission to ISS.
NASA's live coverage will begin at 6 pm on NASA-TV. I have embedded the youtube channel of this live stream below the fold. At the moment the station is broadcasting its regular NASA propaganda (some of which is actually informative).
PA Senate primary- Trump love Oz; why? Sean Hannity is a no-neck douchenozzle, Massive backlash against Dems/Black disaffection, the "White Stalinist" Buffalo shooting, Is Musk looking to buy Twitter or take it down? Will the Russian quagmire in Ukraine become an American quagmire? The COVID fraud, a crime against humanity.
Doug Mastriano is projected to (easily) win the Republican nomination for governor.
For Senate, it's a two way race between McCormick (32.1%) and Oz (30.8%). The two front Establishment-Trump attack on Kathy Barnette seems to have doomed her to third (23.2%). F*** Sean Hanity.
Dave Wasserman
@Redistrict
I've seen enough: Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R) has lost renomination to state Sen. Chuck Edwards (R) in the #NC11 GOP primary.
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