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Liberal "male" reporters are just ugly, poorly-dressed girls:
WSJ: Rumors of the death of the American economy and stock markets have been greatly exaggerated. By us liberals, mostly.
A historic and tumultuous quarter is wrapping up with U.S. stocks at records and many investors betting the ride isn't over yet.
The April swoon that carried the S&P 500 to the brink of a bear market has been erased and then some. The broad index has now added more than 8% since President Trump announced sweeping tariffs that sparked havoc in markets.
Now, investors have more reasons to feel upbeat. Both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite Index hit fresh all-time highs on Friday. Robust corporate earnings and solid economic data suggest that growth remains resilient. Inflation is trending near the Federal Reserve's 2% target. Banks that slashed their year-end targets for the S&P 500, such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, are raising them again.
The DOJ has formally found Harvard in violation of federal civil rights law, and instructs it to either bring itself into compliance with federal law immediately or lose all federal funding.
Ed Morrissey, with quotes from the WSJ:
In a letter sent to Harvard President Alan Garber on Monday and viewed by The Wall Street Journal, attorneys for the administration said the investigation found that Harvard knew Jewish and Israeli students felt threatened on its campus and acted with deliberate indifference.
The DoJ offered Harvard to explore the Hillsdale College option to avoid any further consequences for its failure to abide by Title VI. If not, the DoJ warns, the direction of the next lawsuit will get inverted and Harvard may have more legal trouble than it bargained for:
"Failure to institute adequate changes immediately will result in the loss of all federal financial resources and continue to affect Harvard's relationship with the federal government," the letter states. "Harvard may of course continue to operate free of federal privileges, and perhaps such an opportunity will spur a commitment to excellence that will help Harvard thrive once again."
Harvard didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
A formal "notice of violation" of civil-rights law generally is a step that can come before either a lawsuit from the Justice Department or a voluntary resolution with the school. Under past presidential administrations, civil-rights investigations at universities usually ended with voluntary resolution agreements.
This finding not only complicates any efforts to restore funding that has already been cut off, it disqualifies Harvard from any further access to federal funds. They have three options, none of which are going to be pleasant for Garber under the circumstances. They could go the Hillsdale College route and eschew any federal funding to remain completely independent, as the DoJ letter suggests, but Hillsdale built their financial model with that policy in mind. Harvard's business model entirely depends on federal subsidies and grants. They would have to pare down their offerings significantly to compete in the marketplace against schools that comply with the law and still have access to those federal funds.
Law schools usually offer prestigious slots on the school's law review based on grades and a blindly-graded writing sample.
This is therefore a pure meritocracy -- which makes DEI types hate it.
Duke Law found a work-around for rules against racial discrimination, though: They sent minorities and minorities only an email telling them that while they cannot just mark each application by race so they can make sure they give minorities the slots and take them from the White Devils, if the minorities just let them know in their writing samples that they are minorities, they'll grade those writing samples more charitably and get them spots on the law review they're not qualified for based on objective criteria.
At the end of finals period each May, the Duke Law Journal hosts a two-week-long competition to select its next crop of editors. Applicants write a 12-page memo, or casenote, analyzing an appellate court decision, as well as a 500-word essay about what they would "contribute" to the journal.
Students are chosen based on their grades, casenotes, and personal statements. Less than 20 percent of the class makes it onto the law review, which is overseen by Duke Law School and has no legal existence apart from it.
To help students prepare for the competition, the journal circulates a guide on how to write the casenote. Last year, however, it decided to give some students an additional document.
In a packet prepared for the law school's affinity groups [that is, its race and sexuality-based exclusionary clubs], the journal instructed minority students to highlight their race and gender as part of their personal statements--and revealed that they would earn extra points for doing so.
The packet, obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon, included the rubric used to evaluate the personal statements. Applicants can earn up to 10 points for explaining how their "membership in an underrepresented group" will "lend itself to ... promoting diverse voices," and an additional 3-5 points if they "hold a leadership position in an affinity group."
To drive home the point, the packet included four examples of personal statements that had gotten students on the law review. Three of those statements referenced race in the first sentence, with one student boasting that, "[a]s an Asian-American woman and a daughter of immigrants, I am afforded with different perspectives, experiences, and privileges."
A fourth student waited until the last paragraph to disclose that she was "a Middle Eastern Jewish woman," an "intersectional identity" she said would "prove useful" in a "collaborative environment."
"As a woman," the student wrote, "and a woman with Middle Eastern heritage, I also understand of [sic] the importance of presenting a solid work product and building credibility."
The packet was only distributed to the affinity groups, according to a person familiar with the matter, which meant that minority students had access to inside information about the scoring process. The journal explicitly told those groups not to share the packet with other students, according to messages reviewed by the Free Beacon, and indicated on the first page that it had been made for affinity groups.
When the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in 2023, it said that colleges and universities could not use essays as a Trojan horse for racial preferences. The documents from Duke illustrate how a top law review has skirted that directive, creating a points-based system that foregrounds race and could put the law school in legal jeopardy.
"This is clearly illegal," said David Bernstein, a professor of constitutional law at George Mason University. "They're using the personal statement as a proxy for race."
Harmeet Dillon, head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, weighs in:
Harmeet K. Dhillon
@HarmeetKDhillon
Not good
An 82-year-old woman, set afire in Boulder last month by a crazed Egyptian illegal alien for the crime of being Jewish, has succumbed to her horrific injuries and died.
Yashar Ali
@yashar
DENVER (AP) -- An 82-year-old Colorado woman who was injured in a Molotov cocktail attack on demonstrators in support of Israeli hostages this month has died, according to court documents filed Monday.
Todd Richman
@toddrichman
This is what the phrase Globalize the Intifada means @ZohranKMamdani, but G0D forbid you condemn it. Also your chants of AntiZionism is not AntiSemitism is a danger to our community. May Karen's memory be a blessing....
He knows what it means. They all do. They're terrorists.
Unreal. A judge just ruled Kilmar Abrego Garcia should stay in custody, not because he’s an MS-13 gang member and alleged human trafficker, but because she’s worried he will get deported.
"This judge is telling us 'I don't want you to abide by the federal court... I'm going to… pic.twitter.com/1gjcy06SWh
Holy crap — CNN host has @ScottJenningsKY laughing in disbelief as he gaslights that Mamdani doesn’t want to tax white people when Mamdani specifically said he wants to tax white people.
JENNINGS: He literally wrote it in a statement, Omar. He literally wrote it down!
Stephen Ireland, who targeted me with endless abuse on here because I oppose the chemical castration of children and the removal of protected spaces for women and girls, has just been sentenced to 30 years in jail for child rape. pic.twitter.com/0HHctRocB4
And so begins Pete Bootyjudge's rebranding effort to show that he's akshually a very traditionally masculine guy-type guy:
I don't know about you, but what impresses me most about the Democrat-Media Party is its deep in the bones authenticity.
If only:
Hollywood elitist Ben Stiller is claiming the Trump administration could target him in a wave of political retribution.
He says people might face consequences from the government simply for saying something “wrong,” and he believes he could be one of them. pic.twitter.com/PhHxkEHj9U
The State Department announced Monday that it revoked visas for a British rap group after it called for the death of Israeli soldiers onstage over the weekend.
Members of the Bob Vylan band no longer can travel to the U.S. "in light of their hateful tirade ... including leading the crowd in death chants" at a Saturday music festival in the U.K., Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said in a Monday X post. The State Department's action aligns with the Trump administration's policy of renewed scrutiny of foreigners' visas over alleged hostility toward American values or national security.
"Foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country," Landau said.
Bob Vylan did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation. The group was scheduled to perform in the U.S. during a music tour that begins in October, The Standard reported.
We went from "It's not an invasion, you racist" to "It's an invasion all right, but what are you going to do about it, white devil?!" a lot faster than I guessed we would.
I know people get skeptical when they're told that the third world just sees Israel as a stepping stone on the way to real prize of bringing down the US and the West, but it's true. You can count the number of people who say "Death to Israel" but who don't say "Death to America" on one hand.
Glastonbury is notorious for radical leftwing politics. They infamously call for a world without borders. The posters declaring that we should "build bridges, not walls" are affixed to giant walls they build around the festival to keep the non-paying Poors out:
Leftwing Irish revolutionary LARP "band" Kneecap also appeared at Gastonbury and also chanted Death to Israel. The BBC knew they would be a problem and so didn't televise them; that's why the obscure nobody "Bob Vylan" stepped up to offer the same propaganda.
People in the UK are pissed that their state-compelled license fees for the BBC continues to be used to fund left-wing cultural revolution propaganda like this. Yes, the BBC avoided showing Kneecap, but they did show this guy, and they knew that the whole festival is a left-wing struggle session. Why are they using compelled taxpayer funding to pay this festival for the right to share their propaganda with the UK?
"Thousands" of migrant children who disappeared after being smuggled across the US-Mexico border under the Biden administration have been rescued from grim fates such as being sex-trafficked to pedophiles, according to border czar Tom Homan -- who revealed that a 14-year-old pregnant girl was found living with adult men just two weeks ago.
In the latest episode of Miranda Devine's "Pod Force One" podcast, Homan said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have also located minors who were forced into servitude on ranches and chicken farms, as the agency searches for hundreds of thousands of migrant children unaccounted for during President Joe Biden's four-year illegal alien invasion.
"There were 300,000 missing children under the last administration," said Homan. "We've found thousands of them ... We rescued victims of sex trafficking [and] two weeks ago, we rescued a 14-year-old that was already pregnant, living with adult men ...
"We rescued some victims of forced labor. We found children working on ranches and chicken farms, not going to school, but enslaved labor in the United States of America ...
A few weeks ago a Maryland Man was arrested for raping the teenaged illegal alien girl that Biden placed her with. He immediately forced her into sex. But the important thing is, she got to remain in America while being raped every day.
"Some of the children we found [were] perfectly fine with their families ... They just didn't respond to call-ins [because they] didn't want to face the consequences of immigration court."
The number of unaccompanied alien children [UACs] entering the US surged to record levels under Biden, as changes to border enforcement policies incentivized families and smugglers to send minors to America.
More than 500,000 children were recorded entering the country and were placed with sponsors while awaiting immigration proceedings.
A report last August from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General found that the Biden administration lost track of hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied children and placed some with potentially dangerous sponsors who had not been adequately vetted.
More than 31,000 addresses provided by sponsors turned out to be "blank, undeliverable, or missing apartment numbers," the inspector general reported. At one location, "sponsor addresses were incorrect 80 percent of the time."
ICE officers at one field office also told the inspector general that thousands of migrant children had been released to sponsors "who are not immediate family and are not a parent, sibling, or grandparent."
HHS released more than 14,500 migrant children in 2023 and more than 9,600 in 2024 "to unrelated sponsors" or distant relatives.
...
Homan told "Pod Force One" that the Biden administration rushed the vetting process to avoid the "optics" of overcrowding at the border.
"They didn't care about the invasion itself; it was the optics."
DNA tests were routinely used during the first Trump administration to verify that an adult accompanying a child really was the parent, he said, but the Biden administration abandoned that policy.
Homan said in some of the DNA testing "as high as 30 percent [of] the families weren't families. Not relatives at all. The [children] were being trafficked...
"A lot of parents paid a smuggling organization to bring their kids [over the border]. Some of these children were trafficked. We know HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] had several investigations where a child was rented by the criminal cartel to an adult male or female, crossed the border [and] when you're done, you send the kid back [and] re-rent them."
Homan had harsh words for Democrat politicians like Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) who he said are "screaming and yelling about ICE arresting people and ICE enforcing the law. Meanwhile, in four years under Biden ... sex trafficking of women and children skyrocketed, not a word."
"Thousands of children were being smuggled into the country every week. Over half a million children were smuggled into the United States. Separated from their families, put into the hands of criminal cartels... not a word."
@BillMelugin_
BREAKING: DHS has announced it is terminating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for more than half a million Haitians in the U.S., arguing that conditions in Haiti have improved enough for them to return home, and allowing the Haitians to remain is contrary to the national interest of the U.S.
TPS for these Haitians will expire on 8/3/2025 and the termination will take effect on 9/2/2025, effectively giving the Haitians a little more than 2 months to leave the country or find another form of relief or legal status.
DHS statement:
"This decision restores integrity in our immigration system and ensures that Temporary Protective Status is actually temporary," said a DHS spokesperson. "The environmental situation in Haiti has improved enough that it is safe for Haitian citizens to return home. We encourage these individuals to take advantage of the Department's resources in returning to Haiti, which can be arranged through the CBP Home app. Haitian nationals may pursue lawful status through other immigration benefit requests, if eligible."
In Nebraska, the state's largest worksite immigration raid sent a chilling effect across the city of Omaha this month when federal immigration authorities arrested 76 employees of a meatpacking plant.
About a dozen of them have already been deported or transferred to out-of-state custody. Sixty-three others remain in immigration custody at the Lincoln County Detention Center in Nebraska.
Federal authorities accuse the workers of using stolen identities from U.S. citizens to unlawfully gain employment at Glenn Valley Foods, a meatpacking plant that has been processing boxed beef for more than 15 years.
The Center for Immigrant Refugee and Advancement, an immigrant rights organization in Omaha, provided legal consultations to most of them.
Anne Wurth, the group's associate legal director, told NBC News they are "honest, hardworking individuals in our community" who have also been victims of an immigration system that "does not provide enough pathways" to remain in the country legally.
"That's not true," said Elhrick Cerdan, the assistant special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Nebraska, who led the enforcement operation at Glenn Valley Foods.
In an interview, Cerdan rejected "this narrative that these hardworking illegal immigrants were just doing their daily job and trying to earn wages."
"They were stealing the identities of over a hundred U.S. citizens," Cerdan said.
Seven people have been charged in connection with the events surrounding the raid at Glenn Valley Foods. Only one of them faces charges of using someone else's Social Security number, court records showed as of Wednesday.
"That number could change," Cerdan said, because the investigation continues.
Four protesters, including two U.S. citizens who worked at the plant, face charges accusing them of jumping on law enforcement vehicles as they escorted detainees out of the facility, according to court records.
A Honduran national was charged with resisting arrest and displaying a box cutter when agents tried to apprehend him. A Mexican national is charged with unlawful re-entry into the United States. An employee who was arrested was charged with false representation of a Social Security number.
Mostly Lawful, Mostly Peaceful.
Meanwhile, the "Alligator Alcatraz" for illegal aliens will open tomorrow in a Florida swamp.
The facility will hold 3000 illegals. DeSantis says he needs it because there are so many illegal alien criminals and he needs the jailspace for domestic offenders.
He had it built in a literal alligator-infested swamp in just a week.
Alligator Alcatraz" is the nickname for a new immigration detention center being constructed in the Florida Everglades, initiated by Governor Ron DeSantis. The facility aims to hold up to 3,000 undocumented immigrants… pic.twitter.com/QKwxip1UfP
Kamala Harris is ramping up her outreach to longtime supporters as she weighs a run for California governor. But many Democratic donors aren't enthusiastic, still hobbled by the hangover of her presidential loss.
Some party funders have privately shared that ambivalence with each other as Harris has embarked on a quiet schedule of thank you visits, catch-up calls and listening sessions, touching base with her most trusted supporters as she weighs her options. The former vice president has tasked aides with exploring several paths, including not just a campaign for political office but also a philanthropic venture.
Let me translate: What she really wants is to create a donation-sucking grift machine like Hillary Clinton did which will provide her with a salary, a floor of offices, a hired car and multiple drivers, and the illusion of prestige and influence.
But if she can't have that, her back-up plan is running for governor and maybe losing. And worse, maybe winning.
In other words: this is a threat. Set me up with a Clinton Foundation style grift, or I'll run for office, and I just might win and finish killing off the dying state.
In interviews, several major donors in the state told POLITICO they fear her reemergence as a candidate would re-open still-fresh wounds from her defeat in 2024. Some harbor lingering frustration about how her billion-dollar campaign juggernaut ended in debt and want assurances she would have a clear plan to win the governor's mansion. Others are impatient for Harris to start publicly making her case for why she'd want the job.
"There was more enthusiasm at first," said Mather Martin, a San Francisco-based fundraiser who has worked for past Harris campaigns. "I think it waned a bit."
One California Democrat who contributed six-figures to her presidential bid said a Harris candidacy would only serve as a reminder of how "traumatizing" the last election was.
"Kamala just reminds you we are in this complete shit storm. With Biden, we got bamboozled ... I think she did the best she could in that situation, but obviously she knew about the cognitive decline too," the donor said. "I've written so many checks because I knew the Trump administration would be horrible, but we're living in a nightmare because of the Democrats. I'm furious at them, truly."
Close Harris allies acknowledge the sting of Harris' failed White House bid has not fully dissipated among the donor class...
While still considering all her options, including running for president again, Harris' focus has been skewed toward a 2026 gubernatorial bid, since that is the most immediate decision to be made, according to a person close to her. The former vice president, who can be painstakingly deliberative, has been steadily collecting input and opinions from her allies to weigh the pros and cons of seeking her home state's top gig.
As Mark Halperin always says, Kamala Harris simply does not like making decisions. And here she is again, unsure of what she should do. Instead of deciding for herself, she's asking other people to choose for her.
He pointed out that Democrat donors are going to be even less inclined to donate to her due to her unable to decide if she even wants to be governor. It shows she lacks "fire in the belly" for the position.
...
Donors "realize it's just going to bring up the whole pathetic last presidential, which no one wants to hear about again. And then it's the whole 'Did you know Joe Biden?' thing," said one Southern California fundraiser who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. "She still would probably lead, but honestly, no one is incredibly pumped."
Harris has yet to weigh in on the topic which has roiled her party, even as Antonio Villaraigosa, a fellow Democrat who is running for governor, has accused her of being complicit in a cover-up. Even some of her supporters are antsy for her to address the issue head-on, believing she'll have to swiftly dispense with that question before she can make a positive case for her candidacy.
Others in the finance world say that so long as Harris plays coy about her plans, she's giving little for would-be supporters to rally around.
"It's very fair to say there's not an overwhelming clamor" for her candidacy, said Scott Drexel, a Bay Area-based donor adviser who works with individuals, labor groups and businesses. "It's very hard for there to be one if it's not 100 percent clear if she really wants to do it."
So she is weighing three possibilities: Running for governor, which she plainly does not want to do, running for president which maybe she wants to do but it's silly, or her real preference, starting a Clinton-like "foundation" to grift money and get paid a high salary and granted expensive billionaire-class perks (like a 24-hour a day chauffeur) while pretending to administer what is claimed to be a "charity."
She won't get that, either. Hillary Clinton was able to get her grift funded because donors were paying for her to be a candidate-in-waiting. The Clinton Foundation was a grift to make sure all of Hillary's top people had jobs so they'd stay with her rather than defecting to other Democrats.
Kamala Harris is not going to be supported by donors to be a candidate-in-waiting.
Emerson polled a bunch of Dem prospects for the '28 WH nomination. Results are muddled but notable that Buttigieg, as in '20, still hitting a wall with black voters in this: pic.twitter.com/ShCOSRCOuS
Black voters are simply not going to go for a gay white dude for president in large numbers but I suspect nobody in the Democratic Party will have the stones to observe this out loud
#Winning: Inflation Rises More Slowly, Gas Prices Fall, and the Markets Hit All-Time Records A European Economist Admits: "Maybe Trump Has Outsmarted All of Us"
—Ace
The markets soared to record highs on Friday, despite the "predictions" (or partisan rooting interest) of the liberal establishment.
Part of the rally is due to falling, get this, inflation.
U.S. markets surged to fresh record highs Friday as investors responded positively to a trio of developments: easing inflation, the formal end of the Iran-Israel war, and progress on President Trump's tax legislation in Congress.
Key Details:
The S&P 500 closed at a record 6,173.07, with the Dow and Nasdaq also finishing at all-time highs, fueled by strength in tech, energy, and industrial sectors.
New inflation data showed core PCE rose just 0.2% in May, with annual core inflation at 2.7%--supporting Trump's argument that tariffs haven't reignited price pressures.
A U.S.-brokered peace deal officially ended hostilities between Israel and Iran, removing a key global risk and driving oil prices sharply lower.
Diving Deeper:
Wall Street ended the week on a high note Friday, with all three major indexes closing at record levels amid a cascade of favorable developments for the Trump White House and the broader U.S. economy.
The S&P 500 rose 0.52% to 6,173.07, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite followed suit, hitting new peaks. The gains came despite a midday dip sparked by President Trump's announcement that trade negotiations with Canada had been terminated. Markets quickly shrugged off the news, rallying strongly into the close.
Fueling the optimism was the release of new inflation data showing that prices are rising more slowly than anticipated, even after the administration's aggressive use of tariffs. The core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) index--a key inflation gauge favored by the Federal Reserve--ticked up just 0.2% in May. On an annual basis, core prices rose 2.7%, while the headline rate stood at 2.3%. Notably, consumer inflation expectations also dropped, with one prominent sentiment survey showing the expected one-year rate falling from 6.6% to 5%.
...
As the week closed, the prevailing mood on Wall Street was one of optimism. With inflation cooling, global tensions easing, and economic policy advancing, traders are increasingly betting on a supportive environment for markets heading into the second half of the year.
According to Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, gas prices are likely on track to reach their lowest levels in several years. If current trends continue, Americans could see the national average dip below $3 per gallon by September.
"This is shaping up to be the cheapest summer since 2021," De Haan said, referencing the COVID-era market conditions that temporarily deflated demand and prices.
Although gas prices ticked up in early June due to the Israel-Iran conflict, the ceasefire between the two nations has helped stabilize global oil markets. That stabilization, De Haan says, should allow for a "slow decline" in prices through the remainder of the summer.
A world-renowned economist has changed his tune on President Donald Trump's tariffs.
Torsten Sløk, a chief economist at Apollo Global Management, posted a new note admitting that his initial reaction to the policy may have been wrong.
'Maybe the administration has outsmarted all of us,' he wrote.
The admission comes just months after Sløk warned the tariffs would be 'painful' and economically destabilizing.
Experts speaking to DailyMail.com warned that Americans should take his note with a grain of salt.
But now, he's framing the President's policy as a clever long-game -- one that invites global negotiation while increasing federal revenue.
In the note, Sløk outlined a potential scenario: the White House could maintain its current tariff rates -- 10 percent on most imports, 30 percent on Chinese goods -- and give trade partners a year to negotiate with the White House.
Extending the current 90-day pause on new tariffs, he argued, would give American companies time to plan ahead and could help stabilize markets.
'This would seem like a victory for the world and yet would produce $400 billion of annual revenue for US taxpayers,' he added.
The timing is key. Trump's 90-day pause on new tariffs, announced in April, is set to expire on July 9.
Without an extension, the tariffs would immediately increase, with billions of dollars worth of products suddenly incurring more taxes.
But if the President extends the pause but keeps tariffs where they are, Sløk says the policy could offer clarity for companies and leverage in negotiations.
Sløk's sudden, tepid support for the tariffs is an about-face. He initially criticized the import taxes, saying they threatened business stability, Wall Street's record highs, and the stability of US treasury bonds.
I love when Europeans tell us that tariffs will cause the US inflation and harm our economy while all the European nations have stiff tariffs to keep out US goods because they believe the tariffs help their economies.
Now that inflation has been tamed, Trump wants fed head Powell to reduce the high interest rates he imposed to tame Biden's inflation.
Note that Powell could have, and should have, increased interest rates as soon as Biden proposed his blowout inflationary spending spree. Instead, he waited for years to do so, once inflation was out-of-control and the Biden/Deep State lie that it was "transitory" had been well and truly disproven.
Note he only acted after -- well after -- the damage of Biden's policies was proven.
But now, Powell is saying he wants to keep inflation high because Trump's tariffs will, he claims, cause inflation eventually.
Where was this proactive drive to curb inflation before it takes root when his preferred leftwing "president" Biden was pushing a bonanza of highly-inflationary government spending?
Powell didn’t comment when Dems sent inflation soaring with Covid lockdowns, vaccine mandates, LNG export bans, and massive tax hikes.
But he’s all too happy to attack President Trump’s trade agenda. He’s costing America 100s of billions and should resign. pic.twitter.com/GXPmQBcIPM
President Donald Trump announced Friday he is ending trade talks with Canada over the northern neighbor's decision to impose a digital service tax on American technology companies.
Trump called Canada's decision "a direct and blatant attack on our Country" in a Truth Social post.
"They are obviously copying the European Union, which has done the same thing, and is currently under discussion with us, also. Based on this egregious Tax, we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately," Trump also wrote.
Canada is reportedly going ahead with the tax despite its inclusion in the Group of Seven (G7) agreement in which President Trump agreed to remove Section 899, also known as the revenge tax proposal, from his "Big Beautiful" tax bill, according to Bloomberg.
The tax will require digital services companies like Meta to pay 3 percent of the digital services revenue they make on Canadian users above 20 million Canadian dollars ($14.6 million) in a calendar year, according to Bloomberg.
Canada's tax will apply retroactively to 2022 and the country's Finance Department says the first payments will be due from digital companies Monday, Bloomberg reported.
Canadian Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne hinted that the tax may be a potential piece of leverage in trade negotiations.
"Obviously all of that is something that we're considering as part of broader discussions that you may have," he told Bloomberg.
Trump concluded his Truth Social post with indications that the U.S. will retaliate.
"We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period," he wrote.
Industry leaders applauded Trump's move.
"This tax unfairly singles out American firms while local competitors skate by. Whether it's Brussels or Ottawa, President Trump is right to call them out and force this to change," John Czwartacki, co-founder and principal at Public Policy Solutions said in a statement provided to the Daily Caller.
I'm no fan of the social media companies but this is all about pressuring them to censor American citizens.
Canada's government announced Sunday it will cancel a controversial tax on U.S. tech giants, prompting the resumption of trade negotiations with President Trump. The decision follows Trump's warning that Canada would face steep duties for what he called a "blatant attack" on American firms.
Key Details:
Prime Minister Mark Carney personally informed President Trump of the decision to withdraw the digital services tax during a Sunday conversation.
Canadian Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne also reengaged with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer the same day.
The tax, set to take effect Monday, was expected to cost American companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple over $2.7 billion due to its retroactive structure.
Diving Deeper:
Just two days after President Trump abruptly suspended bilateral trade talks over a digital tax targeting U.S. tech firms, Canada's government has backed down. First reported by the Wall Street Journal, Prime Minister Mark Carney's office announced that the controversial 3 percent digital services tax would be scrapped. The reversal marks a significant win for the Trump administration and clears the way for trade discussions to resume.
The Senate launched the vote-a-rama after wrapping up debate on Sunday night, with Republicans prepared to defend and strengthen Trump's signature legislation.
The bill extends the Trump tax cuts, reforms federal programs like Medicaid, and includes work requirements designed to restore accountability.
Republicans, led by Lindsey Graham and Mike Crapo, pushed back hard against Democrat attacks, calling out Washington gimmicks and defending the bill as a pro-growth, pro-taxpayer package.
Diving Deeper:
After a lengthy debate that stretched from Sunday into early Monday, the Senate entered the final stage before a full vote on President Trump's "big, beautiful bill." The legislation, which aims to lock in key tax cuts, implement long-overdue reforms, and rein in federal waste, now faces a barrage of amendments in what's known as a vote-a-rama.
Senate Republicans are holding the line as Democrats attempt to derail the package with endless amendments designed to stall and sabotage. The bill is expected to deliver sweeping benefits to working families, small businesses, and American taxpayers, while restoring integrity to programs like Medicaid by enforcing work requirements and ending abuse.
Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., strongly defended the reforms to Medicaid, a program that exploded in size after Obamacare enticed states to expand it to working-age adults with no disabilities. "It's a good thing for the individual to be working. It's a good thing for the taxpayer," Graham noted. "But that seems to be a crime on the other side."
While most Republicans are united behind the bill, a handful have expressed concerns. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., opposed a procedural vote Saturday night, citing different objections.
Trump threatened to primary RINO Thom Tillis. Tillis responded hours later by announcing he would not be running for reelection, which I believe was already decided. Because Trump was going to primary him either way, and he was going to lose.
Lara Trump is "strongly considering" a run for U.S. Senate in North Carolina, according to sources close to the Trump family. Her potential bid follows Sen. Thom Tillis' announcement that he will not seek reelection after opposing President Trump's signature legislative package.
Key Details:
Two sources, speaking to NOTUS and NBC News respectively, said Lara Trump is giving the Senate race "serious" thought, with one describing the chances as "high."
Tillis, who recently clashed with President Trump over the "Big Beautiful Bill," confirmed his retirement Sunday.
Lara Trump, 42, is a Wilmington native and a former co-chair of the RNC, where she oversaw fundraising efforts and convention planning.
THE MORNING RANT: President Trump’s Use of Military Power - If We Have to Break It, We Aren't Going to Buy It
—Buck Throckmorton
Our political class has repeatedly told us that the only allowable “solutions” to pressing problems are alternatives not embraced by the majority of Americans. That is why we finally turned to Donald Trump. Just one example was the border crisis – Democrats argued for mass amnesty and a wide-open border, while establishment Republicans countered by also proposing mass amnesty with a slightly less porous border. Trump laughed in all their faces, shut the border, and started deporting criminal aliens.
In the matter of foreign military engagement, we have also been presented just two bad options over the past few decades.
1) Massive military commitment to foreign wars, including nation building and boots on the ground in perpetuity, all with an endless airlift of fallen troops being flown home to Dover AFB.
2) Pacifism, with the U.S. never unleashing its military might, even where it is appropriate.
There is another much better option, which President Trump just demonstrated – the use of our military to destroy what needs destroying, and then leaving the mess as a lesson. If Iran attempts to rebuild its nuclear program in coming years, we can bust it all up again. We don’t have to occupy Iran or pretend that it will become a western democracy. It can figure out whatever it wants to become, but if Iran restarts its nuclear program or exports terror again, it can also face our wrath again.
I have been waiting for the U.S. to strike against Iran for more than 45 years. The lost wars of the Bush-Cheney era have driven home the futility of trying to impose democracy on those not capable of it. But still, I’ve never stopped wanting there to be righteous retribution against Iran’s mad mullahs. They attacked America on American territory when they took our embassy personnel hostage in 1979, and they’ve been killing Americans wherever they can ever since.
One of the dubious lessons learned from World War II was that we must always rebuild what we destroy in war. In that spirit, Colin Powell famously told President George W. Bush regarding the Iraq War debacle, “If you break it, you own it.”
Donald Trump has put that idea to rest. We broke it (Iran’s nuclear program) and Israel has destroyed Iran’s war fighting capabilities. And now we’re done fighting. What Iran does now is not our problem, unless/until we have to break it again sometime in the future.
With all that said, there are plenty of reasons why the mainstream American right has become so anti-war in recent years. The awful loss of young Americans’ lives in service to other countries interests - but not America’s interests - is paramount. But it is also the realization that the war-pushers have a deep reserve of ashamed-to-be-American guilt that motivates them. There is an inherent contradiction in how they go about waging war. Quite simply, they rush into foreign wars, but then refuse to fight for victory, because they believe:
1) The United State has a moral obligation to fight other countries’ wars because of our power, wealth, etc.
2) It is culturally offensive for the United States to inflict what is necessary to actually win a foreign war.
Donald Trump’s America-First position is rejected by this same war-loving crowd whose loyalty is to the “international community” that wants Americans to fight and to die, but not to win.
A repellant aspect of the “we broke it, we bought it” mindset is the belief that all wars require a Marshall Plan to rebuild the infrastructure and economies of lands where we battled. Perhaps Western Europe would not have rebuilt so quickly without all the American aid post-WWII, but maybe they wouldn’t now be failing welfare states either. We taught them that Uncle Sam will pay to (re)build their countries and provide their defense, thus allowing cradle-to-grave welfare, all while their politicians and populace screech about how awful the United States is. By contrast, Eastern Europeans who suffered under communism received nothing from America, but they are vocally pro-America now because they simply crave freedom, and they learned how awful the alternative was.
By rejecting “we broke it, we bought it,” President Trump is also rejecting any more 21st century occupations and Marshall Plans. That doesn’t mean the enemies of civilization will not incur the fearsome wrath of our military if they try to cause problems outside their borders. But under President Trump, if we have to break it, we’re just going to leave it.
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Social Contagions: The Recovered Gluten Sufferer Who is Now Transing Her Children
It discusses how the trans fad is a social contagion preying on the same type of (non-celiac) people who got caught up in the gluten fad. A Millennial woman with whom I’m familiar was once a loudly vocal victim/star of the gluten show, but once that fad ran its course, she went back to eating bread and pasta. Now she is transing her children.
The transgender fad will fade away. But unlike the gluten fad, innocents are being disfigured for life and denied the pleasures of a normal adulthood — all in service to a runaway social experiment.
It’s behind a paywall, but if you’re a Blaze subscriber, I’d be honored if you’d give it a read.
My latest piece at The Blaze discusses a woman I'm familiar with who is prone to social contagions.
"The gluten craze didn’t leave scars. This social contagion will — especially for the children being raised in its wake by delusional adults like Marsha."https://t.co/rwMX6MzgMy
Good morning kids. And just like that, the year 2025 is just about half over. The breaking news this morning is either the twisted act of just some random psychopath or given everything going on in the world, and sadly here at home perhaps some form of domestic terrorism. Eco-, Immigration-, Islamic- or some kind of Beelzebub happy meal combination.
Two firefighters were killed and a third was injured when first responders were ambushed by an hours-long barrage of gunfire after arriving at the scene of a blaze in Idaho Sunday afternoon, authorities said. The horrific attack, which began around 2 p.m. local time on Canfield Mountain near Coeur d’Alene, ended about five hours later when SWAT teams discovered the lifeless body of a man next to a firearm on the popular tourist trail, according to the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office. “This was a total ambush, these firefighters did not have a chance,” Sheriff Bob Norris told reporters after the massive manhunt, assuring the community there is no longer an active threat. “We have currently one dead shooter based on the preliminary investigation that was being conducted. Keep in mind we had a fire that was rapidly approaching the body so we had to scoop up that body and we had to transport that body to a different location. We believe that it is the only shooter that was on that mountain at that time.”
Police have not released the suspected gunman’s identity, the type of weapon recovered at the gruesome scene, or the cause of his death. A motive remains under investigation but police believe the fire was intentionally set to lure first responders into a deadly trap. “We do believe that the suspect started the fire and we do believe it was an ambush and it was intentional,” Norris said.
A Coeur d’Alene firefighter and a Kootenai County Fire and Rescue member were shot dead in the sudden strike.
The third victim, a Coeur d’Alene firefighter who was shot during the violent surprise attack, is recovering at Kootenai Health after undergoing surgery. . .
. . . The FBI responded to the scene providing tactical and operational support, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said, with about 300 first responders also on site from state and local agencies.
Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly cheesesteaks, reports of some sort of massive explosion preceded the collapse of several homes in the comedically ironic section of the city known as Nicetown. One fatality has been reported, so apologies for being flip. While it could be something as innocent/normal as a gas leak. Again, given everything going on here and abroad, perhaps some religion of Peace Peacenik or Anti-fascist Brownshirt Democrat Stormtrooper building a mostly peaceful pipe bomb to be used against ICE, a synagogue or some other target of the forces of darkness and evil that threaten "Our Precious Democracy" (vomit) cannnot be discounted. And a little over 40 years ago when Mayor Wilson Good used the air units of the Philadelphia PD to re-enact the firebombing of Hamburg and burned several blocks to the ground after being shot at while attempting to evict or arrest a black liberation group known as MOVE, led by one John Africa. Oh the humanity!
Prayers for the victims, and hopefully we'll get to the bottom of these incidents.
Completely switching gears, this so-called "Big Beautiful Bill" seems to be moving forward but about the only good thing I can see in it is the RINO opposition to it, is giving President Trump the political cover and cassus belli to go after the backstabbers like Tom Tillis who mercifully has decided to not even seek re-election and hopefully give North Carolinians the opportunity to put a MAGA-aligned patriot on the ballot and please God in the Senate.
As for the bill itself, as CBD and I discussed on the podcast an episode or so ago, and still relevant, How does borrowing and spending us further into debt gibe with the whole notion of DOGE and the MAGA movement? I do not want a more "efficient" government. I want a radically reduced/eliminated government. Because the smaller the government, the freer and more prosperous the citizenry.
One huge issue that that Leftists and propagandists are harping on is supposedly the evil Nazi Trump republicans eliminating Medicare and Medicaid. Cue the footage of Paul Ryan as Tommy Udo shoving granny off of a cliff in her wheelchair.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has also backed an effort to secure more cuts within the president’s sweeping tax relief and immigration legislation.
The deficit-reducing measure is sponsored by Republican Florida Sen. Rick Scott and would lower the 90% federal match rate for new Medicaid enrollees in states that expanded coverage under the Affordable Care Act. A group of deficit-concerned senators, including Scott, helped secure a vote on the amendment, which will occur during an anticipated marathon session of voting, known as a “vote-a-rama,” before senators will vote on final passage of the bill.
“We think it’s really good policy,” Thune told reporters Sunday. “We’re going to do what we can to support that effort.”
. . . The amendment, however, could die on the Senate floor due to moderate GOP senators’ opposition to reducing the federal government’s contributions to state Medicaid programs, known as the federal medical assistance percentage (FMAP). Scott’s proposal notably exempts the existing expansion population on Medicaid rolls. Trump notably thanked Scott and the cohort of fiscal hawks for ultimately supporting the opening of debate on the bill Saturday night. The president said he would work with the group to “REDUCE WASTEFUL SPENDING” and “ENSURE OUR MEDICAID SYSTEM HELPS THOSE WHO TRULY NEED IT” among other priorities, in a statement on the social media platform Truth Social. . .
. . . The upper chamber’s budget bill also slashes spending on green energy subsidies by accelerating the termination of solar and wind tax credits, which could save hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.
The Senate’s proposal will have to clear the House before Trump signs the budget bill into law. A number of moderate Republicans in the lower chamber are voicing concern about aggressive spending cuts while members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus are pushing for more deficit reduction.
“For all cost cutting Republicans, of which I am one, REMEMBER, you still have to get reelected,” Trump wrote on the social media platform Truth Social Sunday evening. “Don’t go too crazy!”
Bingo, Mr. President. But what have we been pleading for for decades and what did you run on - fiscal sanity. Yes, cutting out the waste and outright fraud of multiple funding of the same programs across different agencies/departments and the plain old thievery of money that somehow gets iPhoned off to fund anti-American groups and seditious activities etc. etc. is absolutely a good thing. But we need to starve the bureaucratic beast and kill off as much of the New Deal, Great Society, and every other freedom and money sucking entity we can to really Make America, not only Great again, but make America America again. Getting rid of the Dept. of Education is a great thing (if it actually does disappear) but why is the EPA still functioning. Yes Lee Zeldin has been doing some great things to erase the environmental madness of the global warming/climate change myth and give a much needed shot in the arm to get fossil fuels, energy independence and our economy moving again.
enough on this. At any rate, getting back to the actual bill itself, The sick irony of Chuck Schemer looking to read thousands of pages while Malig-Nancy Pelosi refused to read even the cover page and dedication to satan by the author of the massive Obamacare power grab that let the government seize control of the health care sector, fully one sixth of the economy, and then her proclaiming "We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it!" And it's either hypocrisy on our side in demanding we pass the bill or else tit's a delicious sauce for the goose/gander.
The other insane chutzpocrisy of the Dems is them bithcing about fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget after decades of borrowing andspending us into the oblivion we are on the precipice of while hacks like Paul Krugman kept insisting that the government can boorrow/spend and print money indefinitely and infinitely, unlike the average household who cannot run up their credit cards without any consequences.
And lastly, a quick shout-out and thank you for your continued support in hitting our tip jar. It truly is appreciated more than you can know.
Clarice Feldman: Any week in which good sense and rational, effective government prevails is a rare, much to be wished for one. And we just had two of them. ‘A Very Consequential Two Weeks’
Roger Kimball: The Supreme Court's 6–3 ruling in Trump v. Casa clipped the wings of activist judges, curbing their power to block presidential actions with sweeping injunctions. Minuting the minutiae
Victor Davis Hanson: The credentialed class got it wrong—on tariffs, borders, war, and Trump—and now their expert status is worth less than a plumber’s invoice and half as reliable. The Decline and Fall of Our So-Called Degreed Experts
The press has had a field day since an anti-Trumper inside the U.S. intelligence community leaked a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of the B-2 bomber strike on Iran's deeply buried uranium enrichment site at Fordo. Yes, the U.S. 'Obliterated' Iran's Nuclear Capabilities
Thad McCotter: Trump's strike on Iran split his MAGA base—yet his limited success bridged the divide, uniting skeptics and hawks behind “The Peace President.” Mr. Trump’s Successful MAGA Tightrope Walk
Iran doesn’t need a working uranium enrichment program to be a menace. In fact, Tehran’s most insidious weapons today don’t require any uranium at all -- just a keyboard and a decent broadband connection. Nukeless Iran is Still a Threat
Mamdani said, “We have to stand up and fight back, and we haven’t seen that from our current mayor, who has instead been working with the Trump administration to assist in their goal of building the single largest deportation force in American history. I mean, we saw ICE agents arrest a migrant at Federal Plaza. We saw NYPD officers arresting a pastor who was peacefully observing that arrest. Those days are going to come to an end when I’m the mayor. The NYPD’s job is to create public safety in the city, not to assist ICE agents in their mission to attack the very fabric of this city.” (Why is this bipedal infection still breathing our air - jjs) Mamdani Vows to ‘Fight Back’ Against ICE Agents if Elected
The anti-Americanism of the current Left has lost any semblance of reason. (When did the Left ever have any? - jjs) The LA Riots and the Left’s Treason
But it’s pretty strange to focus on outing the identities of officers trying to arrest illegal immigrants with ties to violent gangs even as your political compadres are protecting Antifa radicals and the new wave of antisemitic goons. (They're not on the side of the terrorists, because Democrats ARE the terrorists - jjs) Democrats’ push to ban ICE agents’ masking shows whose side they’re really on
CIVIL WAR 2.0: J-6 FBI FALSE FLAG "RIOT" & AFTERMATH, LEFTIST PERSECUTIONS, DEMOCRAT PUTSCH, AMERICAN DISSOLUTION
“We can’t reform our way out of a racist police system that’s working exactly as designed – as a means of control over black & brown New Yorkers. We need to dramatically curtail the power & presence of the NYPD.” (Would he like to demonstrate for us bigots if a lead pipe to his face is real or artificial? - jjs) ‘Violence Is an Artificial Construct’: Old Videos, Tweets From Zohran Mamdani Resurface
More evidence is expected to emerge about the scheme to target Trump and his allies while covering up for Joe Biden. Internal FBI emails and documents continue to surface now that the Trump administration has access to hidden troves of information, and Republicans have control of Congress, with a newfound ruthless determination to hold wrongdoers to account. Miranda Devine: How the Biden junta ‘weaponized’ the justice system against Trump aide Peter Navarro
Franklin saw it early: prosperity blooms where liberty thrives and government stays in its lane—competition clears the path, and peace rounds home. Franklin’s Home Run
The term “globalize the intifada” is widely seen as a call to violence against Jews, and Jewish advocacy groups were angered when Zohran Mamdani declined to directly denounce the phrase. When asked about his reluctance on “Meet The Press,” Mamdani avoided a clear condemnation and instead talked about his commitment to universal human rights, stating that his language would align with principles of justice and freedom for all people, including both Israelis and 'Palestinians.' (He can't even do a taqqiya sunrise? - jjs) Zohran Mamdani Ducks And Weaves When Asked To Condemn Term Calling For Killing Jews
Elie Mystal’s latest outburst on MSNBC’s airwaves wasn’t just over the top—it was an embarrassing display of unhinged, irrational fearmongering. Speaking with host Ali Velshi, Mystal launched into a bizarre hypothetical that quickly devolved into the kind of wild-eyed rant you’d expect from a late-night Internet forum, not a supposedly serious political analyst on national television. Elie Mystal’s MSNBC Meltdown Over Trump Is One for the Ages
The party changed its mind. . . Much as the same people who told us Biden was fine began yelling that he needed to step down, the same machine that tried to purge people for minor dissent on transgender issues, is suddenly starting to tell the truth, not because it believes in it, but because it’s what the party wants. And that’s creepy. The Media’s Organized Campaign Against Transing Kids
CRIME & PUNISHMENT, NON-DOSTOYEVSKY
Operation Dragon Eye rescued 60 missing kids in just two weeks—proving what happens when law enforcement puts mission over politics and predators in handcuffs. Florida’s Victorious Operation Dragon Eye
EDUCATION, AND WHAT PASSES FOR IT
As noted at Instapundit. . .by Glenn Reynolds, “The right now has a legal infrastructure of the sort that the left always had. More, please. Make them pay.” That infrastructure can be found here (https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/where-to-get-legal-help-if-you-have-been-illegally-blacklisted/), where I list all the legal firms I have identified in the past five years that act in court to defend the rights of blacklisted individuals as well as defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Another blacklisted professor wins big in court
DEMOCRAT/LEFTIST AND RINO SCANDALS, MESHUGAS, CHUTZPOCRISY
It's that exchange that is at the heart of the troll defamation lawsuit filed by the usual lawfare-left lawyers on behalf of Newsom in his personal capacity, and in service of his presidential aspirations. Did Gavin Newsom BLOW UP HIS OWN LAWSUIT Against Fox News?
POLITICS
Tillis’ retirement announcement came just hours after President Donald Trump threatened to back a primary challenger over the senator’s decision to vote against advancing the president’s tax and immigration bill. The North Carolina Republican was viewed as one of the most vulnerable GOP senators up for reelection in 2026 and was expected to face a competitive Democratic opponent. (RELATED: Two GOP Senators Vote ‘No’ As Trump’s Megabill Clears Critical Hurdle) (Purge the RINOs with extreme prejudice!!! - jjs) Thom Tillis Announces Retirement Hours After Trump Threatened To Field Primary Challenger
As the Democrats approach terminal collapse, New York City mayoral primary voters unsurprisingly selected 33-year-old Uganda native and Africana studies major Zohran Kwame Mamdani a “socialist” and intifada supporter. Democrats Veer Hard Left
So reports Politico in a stinging series of interviews with Democrat funders who remain troubled about Harris’s billion-dollar campaign, which not only failed badly but ended in debt and left lingering questions about her role in the coverup of President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. Politico: Donors Not Enthused About Potential Kamala Harris Run for California Governor
Events that displease China’s diplomats are usually good for the United States, and this week they were hopping mad. At the height of the NATO summit, China’s ambassador to Nepal, Chen Song, castigated the "‘ass kissers’ everywhere in Europe." Trump Revamps the Nixon Doctrine
FEMINAZISM, TRANSGENDER PSYCHOSIS, HOMOSEXUALIZATION, WAR ON MASCULINITY/NORMALCY
Bezos’ wedding sparks a reflection on human nature, society’s social contract, and how suppressing our baser instincts enables civilization—and conflicts with Rousseau’s idealism. New York, the Bezoses, and the Purpose of Society
Because the leaks have already started for the upcoming 5000 Super family of cards, which are only very slightly faster but have 50% more memory.
Upgrading the 5070 from a middling 12GB of RAM to 18GB makes it a solid product that will likely last for years. The same goes for the 5070 Ti, already fairly good with 16GB of RAM, if somewhat overpriced; with 24GB it becomes a high-end model that is not going to easily become obsolete.
If you weren't inclined to pay that much in the first place, AMD's 9060 XT is still the pick of the litter, with 16GB cards going for less than an 8GB 5060 Ti.
Multiple ad agency execs confirmed to the FT that they are indeed "posting content on Reddit to boost the likelihood of their ads appearing in the responses of generative AI chatbots."
The last day has been full of people making fun of Ketanji Brown Jackson and her juvenile grasp of the law. One part of her recent dissent has been overlooked, and it may be the most cringeworthy part of all.
These grandkids planned to surprise their grandma at the airport dressing as t-rex but she heard about it and planned her own surprise.
3. These grandkids planned to surprise their grandma at the airport dressing as t-rex but she heard about it and planned her own surprise. pic.twitter.com/vra7woLUUE
It's that time of the week - when we turn the ONT over to our good friend Piper for a bit. Here's this week's fashion pr0n.
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This week, all eyes were on Venice as Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez celebrated their wedding in a dazzling display on the enchanting island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Critics, including our favorite “pretendian” Elizabeth Warren, were quick to call it a blatant show of wealth, with Warren tossing out a tired jab about Bezos needing to pay more taxes—ignoring the fact that his tax bill likely rivals a small nation’s budget. Conveniently overlooked in the shade was the couple’s $3.5 million donation to Venetian conservation efforts and their commitment to sourcing 80% of provisions from local vendors—a genuine effort to give back that deserves a nod. Yes the event was a lavish spectacle, but it also showcased a surprising dose of taste.
Known for capturing Bezos’s heart (and his wallet), Sánchez has built a reputation for “loud luxury” that often teeters on the edge of gaudy. I was a bit stunned when her wedding wardrobe leaned more toward timeless Hollywood elegance than Vegas showgirl.
Lauren Sánchez’s wedding dress was the talk of the town, and for once, it wasn’t because we could see clear to the promised land. The custom Dolce & Gabbana gown was restrained. With its high neckline, hand-appliquéd Italian lace, and a mermaid silhouette cinched by 180 silk chiffon-covered priest buttons, it drew comparisons to Sophia Loren’s iconic dress in Houseboat. Paired with a traditional tulle-and-lace veil, the gown was a poetic departure from Sánchez’s usual skin-baring, blinged-out aesthetic. Dare I say, it was… demure? Refined? Dare I whisper… classy? This wasn’t the “naked illusion” mermaid cut I braced for, and I’m not mad at it.
Sánchez’s pre-wedding outfits also raised eyebrows, but in a good way. She kicked things off with a shimmering brocade corset dress from Schiaparelli’s Spring-Summer 2025 couture collection, complete with a metallic corset and a satin band dripping with embroidered flowers. At first glance, I feared it was giving “bedazzled lampshade,” and my inner cynic wondered if Sánchez’s superpower is making even the priciest couture look tacky. But the more I squinted at it, the more it grew on me. The waist-defining cut flattered her figure, and—praise be—her assets stayed tastefully contained. She also channeled Audrey Hepburn (or at least tried to) in a cream Dior two-piece suit with a silk headscarf and Tom Ford sunglasses, looking like she stepped off a yacht in Roman Holiday. I am here for this softer, more sophisticated Lauren.
Among the glittering guest list was Ivanka Trump, serving looks that reminded us she can shine brighter than a lighting bug in June. At the ceremony, she dazzled in a salmon pink Tony Ward Couture gown with jeweled rose embellishments. The day after, Ivanka kept it effortlessly chic in a Cara Cara Santiago midi sundress, a flirty yet elegant choice that said “I’m here to sip prosecco.” Ivanka’s ability to balance high fashion with approachable glamour made her a standout.
As the dust settles on this Venetian extravaganza, Sánchez and Bezos delivered a wedding that was full of money, romance, and—shockingly—taste. Sure, the Schiaparelli dress flirted with excess, and all of the references to old Hollywood might have felt a bit too calculated, but overall, it proved Lauren can do glamour if she wants to.
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Thank you, Piper!
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DJ Doof - Random Stuff Version
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Tonight's ONT brought to you by revenge
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Comments, questions, suggestions, or emotional outbursts? Do the email thing at doof2112 at proton dot me.
Howdy, Y'all! Welcome to the wondrously fabulous Gun Thread! As always, I want to thank all of our regulars for being here week in and week out, and also offer a bigly Gun Thread welcome to any newcomers who may be joining us tonight. Howdy and thank you for stopping by! I hope you find our wacky conversation on the subject of guns 'n shooting both enjoyable and informative. You are always welcome to lurk in the shadows of shame, but I'd like to invite you to jump into the conversation, say howdy, and tell us what kind of shooting you like to do!
Holy Shitballs! How in the ever-loving Hell did it get to be the End O' June Edition? Have you been enjoying the heatwave on the east coast this week? What are you doing to stay cool? Has it affected your ability to go to the range and shoot?
With that, step into the dojo and let's get to the gun stuff below, shall we?
You know what I am going to say. Are you an adherent of WeaselDoctrine?
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Persian Mauser
Now this is cool beans! Our pal The Walking Dude shares his Persian Mauser!
With Iran in the news Here are some pix of my 8mm 98/29 Persian (Iranian) Mauser in the white (or unblued) and ammo I got from Samco decades ago. The bore is pristine and the rifle looks unissued. These rifles were from the Shah's days when the soldiers would wear white gloves and march up and down the square with them. They were made by BRNO in Czechoslovakia and are renowned for their accuracy. The lettering is all in Persian (Farsi) and this one I'm told translates to Persian year of manufacture 1317, which is 1938 in our years. The story I heard on the lack of bluing is SAMCO tried cleaning them with an aggressive solvent and it removed the bluing.
I bought a crate of ammo with it too. All were FTF's and hang-fires, so I saved the components for reloading as the brass and projectiles were salvageable.
Very nice The Walking Dude! Appreciate your sending this for us all to enjoy!
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Colt Madness! The Model 601 and 639 and 723
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Navigating the Non-Permissive Environment
Massad Ayoob, the NPE, and you.
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Dry Firing
Bueno or no bueno?
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Our Pal Oil
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Really, Really Old Ammo
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Highway Patrol!
This week's episode: Police Woman!
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Invasion Of The Saucer Men!
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Musical Interlude
Jeff Healy with Roadhouse Blues
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Here are some different online cigar vendors. You will find they not only carry different brands and different lines from those brands, but also varying selections of vitolas (sizes/shapes) of given lines. It's good to have options, especially if you're looking for a specific cigar.
A note about sources. The brick & mortar/online divide exists with cigars, as with guns, and most consumer products, with respect to price. As with guns - since both are "persecuted industries", basically - I make a conscious effort to source at least some of my cigars from my local store(s). It's a small thing, but the brick & mortar segment for both guns and tobacco are precious, and worth supporting where you can. And if you're lucky enough to have a good cigar store/lounge available, they're often a good social event with many dangerous people of the sort who own scary gunz, or read smart military blogs like this one. -rhomboid
Anyone have others to include? Perhaps a small local roller who makes a cigar you like? Send me your recommendation and a link to the site!
Please note the new and improved protonmail account gunthread at protonmail dot com. An informal Gun Thread archive can be found HERE. Future expansion plans are in the works for the site Weasel Gun Thread. If you have a question you would like to ask Gun Thread Staff offline, just send us a note and we'll do our best to answer. If you care to share the story of your favorite firearm, send a picture with your nic and tell us what you sadly lost in the tragic canoe accident. If you would like to remain completely anonymous, just say so. Lurkers are always welcome!
That's it for this week - have you been to the range?
One of my favorite casual meals is a "Croque Monsieur" with a basket of good French Fries. And one would think that it is an easy thing to find around my current digs! And you would be wrong! They're not bad, but they aren't great. And using the internet to find some schmuck's list of the greatest Croque Monsieurs in Paris is an exercise in futility. They let anybody post anything on the internet!
The Platonic Ideal, at least in my experience, was a hotel room service Croque that was spectacular. And paid for by expense account. But somebody should be able to duplicate that without much trouble, since it is a damned simple sandwich. Cheese, ham, Béchamel, good bread, and a ton of butter. And don't forget the fries! The frogs may have invented them (they didn't...it was probably the Belgians), but I'll take British chips over most of the fries in France.
Anyway, serendipity provided a solid entry into this competition, in the form of a café near some cooking supply stores I and friends visited last week. The Croque was a firm B+, and the fries were on the border of an A-.
I am struggling through a book about the food of France, and that is not the normal course of events at Chez Dildo. Obviously I like the topic, but "A Bite-sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment" is a painful slog through the fever dreams of its leftist author. About 90% of it is an amusing romp through the history of many of the famous foods of France, but this pompous progressive with delusions of intellectual grandeur seems to think that his sophomoric musings about the evils of the right and, even worse, the glory of Islam is worth the ink. But it isn't.
If you can get the book from your library, it may be worth a read, but I recommend that you simply skip over his political pontifications, otherwise you will be irritated, and I will not be responsible for that!
The sad thing is that food and cooking are an integral part of history, and this could have been a fun way to learn a bit about the history of France.
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Anyone ever have a true boilermaker? A shot of cheap rye whiskey dropped into a beer? Well, this isn't one, but it is the French equivalent.
It's called a "Picon," and it is made with the eponymous bitter liquor that is made from oranges. Sadly, they don't drop the shot glass into the beer, which I think is a marvelous idea. They just pour it into a blonde beer.
And it's not bad, though I wouldn't seek it out. But sitting with a friend at a café on a hot Paris afternoon, watching the world (and Parisian women) go by, made it taste quite delicious!
Luckily Picon is made with cinchona, so I also feel quite confident of my protection against Malaria!
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I recall having fried chicken that had been either brined with pickle juice or flavored with pickling spices. Both sound good, so I might give this one a try. Yes, it is a weird combination, but pickles go well with all sorts of stuff. Anyone ever have a Cubano (classic Cuban pressed sandwich)? That is a glorious thing, to be sought out whenever one is near Cubans (but not in Cuba!). And pickles are featured prominently! Pickle-Brined Chicken
The use of chicken breasts is a bit odd, although they are pretty bland in comparison to thighs, so maybe the punch of the pickle brine jazzes them up! I won't bother, and just use thighs, which cook better and won't dry out.
[Hat Tip: Misanthropic Humanitarian]
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One of the things I enjoy when I travel to foreign countries is poking around supermarkets, looking at all of the weird stuff those damned foreigners eat. Sometimes I even buy some, for both amusement value (anyone need any Banana Ketchup from St. Lucia?), and because the weird stuff might just taste great.
I didn't buy those chips, but still, that is an odd flavor. Of course, roast chicken is a huge favorite in France, so it makes some sort of sense, even though it actually means "grilled chicken.". But cheeseburgers are popular in America, and we don't have cheeseburger-flavored potato chips (I hope)!
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From long-time commenter and food writer "Steven Price Blair" comes a celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the founding of our wonderful country!
As we move toward America’s Sestercentennial next year—or Semiquincentennial, as it looks like it will officially be called—it’s time to go back to the beginning. In previous years I’ve covered cookbooks from 1976 celebrating the Bicentennnial, and cookbooks from 1876 celebrating the Centennial.
There were no cookbooks in year zero, 1776, celebrating the American Declaration of Independence, for two obvious reasons. The glib answer is that we were too busy fighting for that Independence to waste time writing a cookbook celebrating Independence.
The second reason is that, until we declared our independence we weren’t American. We were British, and our cookbooks were British. Our cookbooks remained British, with likely a smattering from France and Italy among those literate in those languages, even after the war.
As I pointed out above, the evolution of food and cooking is part of the history of every country, and this is a fun and informative glance into revolutionary America. And...his website is worth poking around!
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[Hat Tips: Misanthropic Humanitarian]
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I thought France would have good garlic, but the Frogs seem to have the same problem we have in the U.S. At least they don't import filthy garlic from China. Pork is great here, but no game, so send all of your extra antelope to: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com.
Who are those poor deluded souls We know who shakes their Manhattans! These are the same people who drink fine bourbon with coke, and probably shake red wine with ice too.
$1,200 for a bottle of bourbon is just stupid, insulting, and a ghastly affront to most people's palates and wallets. I think the sweet spot is $40-$60 for excellent and interesting bottles, and bumping that to $100 gets you an incremental improvement in quality, but nothing mind-blowing. More than that and I think you are paying for hype and rarity, which may look good in your liquor cabinet, but doesn't translate to more quality in the bottle.
The problem...or the solution...is to buy lots of bourbon, take tasting notes, and eventually arrive at your favorites! It should take forty or fifty years, but it is worth it!
Everybody has seen these or similar machines in hotel rooms, and lots of people use them at home. They are undeniably convenient, and can make reasonably good coffee if the conditions are correct: a clean machine and good quality coffee.
But they are mass produced, and the tolerances in the chamber that holds the pod are sloppy, probably because the capsules are made by multiple manufacturers and are not identical -- and because they are cheaply made machines produced by the lowest bidder, probably by slave labor in some sh*thole in China.
And don't start with "you're doing it wrong!" There is only one way for the capsule to fit into the chamber, so even in the midst of a caffeine deficit I am able to navigate the complex process of opening the machine, dropping a capsule into the chamber, and closing the machine.
And occasionally...very occasionally, this happens!
Aside from the existential crisis of having my coffee delayed by 30 seconds, and the affront to my frugal nature, there is also the frustration of the failure of a complex process that has nonetheless been streamlined and simplified over the many years that these machines have been in use.
There is something called "tolerance stacking," which is simply the sum of the variation in each part that contributes to the whole. If those tolerances don't average out, then there can be issues with the function of the machine...any machine. The sloppy tolerances of these mass-market machines are partially compensated for by the forgiving design, but not completely!
The answer of course is to throw the machine out the window and hire a sexy French maid to make my coffee every morning, but that entails other existential risks. So I will soldier on, bravely confronting the small probability that my coffee will be delayed!
For those who are careful readers of the award-winning Food Thread, you may have noticed that I am not making my customary cone-filter coffee. I have no excuse, other than the difficulty of finding plain old cones! There is a fancy coffee store a few minutes away, but even I, an obsessive-compulsive coffee lunatic shied away from the $100+ systems they were selling. And by the time I explored enough to find sane stuff, I was deep into the convenience of the capsules.
The Hyperemotional Left VS. The More Rational Right
—CBD
We have all seen it, ad nauseam. The ardent leftist screaming and ranting and raving about the topic de jour, because the left has convinced its shock troops that emotion and feelings and simple volume, complete with weird body language and gestures is a perfect replacement for considered, rational argument.
Sadly, that is not limited to the rank-and-file of the progressive movement. I's political leaders are long on emotional appeals and very, very, short on logical arguments to buttress their political philosophy. For instance, it has become axiomatic, and a meme, that any Republican or conservative policy will hurt women and children!
What is really telling is that they have extended that into their personal lives, because the line between their political philosophy and their emotional lives simply does not exist. Many of us have liberal friends and family, and I am willing to wager that most have not cut off contact with them, absent some ridiculous and ghastly emotional scene in which their sentiment and passion overwhelms their sense of family or friendship. I have family and friends who are on the left, and while we have disagreements about most of what is going on in the political world, it is beyond my understanding of the human condition how someone can reject people who really matter simply because of politics.
And there's the rub! It is not simply politics for much of the left; they have internalized their politics so that it is part of their emotional well-being, and has become a part of their psyche. When one can't differentiate between the personal and the political, that's a problem!
Dennis Prager has written and spoken about what he calls "The micro and the macro." Simply put, he does not allow his political philosophy to intrude upon his personal relationships. That is wise.
For instance, in my life, the macro would be the horrid stances that Homosexual Inc. take about marriage and promiscuity and adoption and Gaza and on and on. But I have homosexual friends, and I cannot imagine attenuating our relationships because of those politics.
But the left is different. They will happily demonize anyone who is not rigidly in step with their stances on...everything!
Who knows...maybe there is a physiological difference between conservatives and leftists. Is there some brain chemistry that allows us to make those delineations, and leftists do not have the biochemical capacity to differentiate between friend and foe, because their politics are the only thing that matters?
Sunday Morning Book Thread - 6-29-2025 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]
—Open Blogger
(HT: OrangeEnt)
Welcome to the prestigious, internationally acclaimed, stately, and illustrious Sunday Morning Book Thread! The place where all readers are welcome, regardless of whatever guilty pleasure we feel like reading (HT: sharon (willow's apprentice)). Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material. As always, pants are required, unless you are wearing these pants...(Wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too?)
So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, and dive into a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?
OrangeEnt sent me the link to this video. It's a look at several beautiful private libraries. Some have a classical aesthetic, while other display a contemporary, modern design. All of them look cozy and comfy.
MID-YEAR REVIEW
Wow. It's the end of June already. I guess it's time for a brief look back at the past few months and explore notable reading experiences.
Watership Down by Richard Adams -- Numerous Morons have recommended this book and now I know why. It took a bit for me to get into it, but once I read past the first couple chapters, it was difficult to put down. All events take place within just a few square miles of English countryside, but it feels epic in scope. Just an amazing story about rabbits seeking a better life for themselves.
Hercule Poirot's Casebook by Dame Agatha Christie -- This was my first introduction to Agatha Christie's writing, which I enjoyed very much. Of course, having watched dozens of detective shows, I was already familiar with her storytelling style, as it's one of the most imitated styles in Hollywood.
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton -- I just love his style of writing. Everyone in this book (except for the main protagonists) is an asshole and gets what they deserve.
The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -- Like Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot stories, these were a joy to read. It's obvious why both Doyle and Christie are among the most beloved mystery writers of all time.
Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe -- Yet another great classic. He influenced the detective fiction genre as well as the eldritch horror genre. Truly a man who was unappreciated in his own time, but whose legend has grown over time.
Star Wars - New Jedi Order -- 375+ trillion dead. 19 books. 12 authors. 1 epic galactic invasion. Great literature? Nope. Awesome space opera? You betcha!
Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams -- The epic story of a young cat who leaves the comfort of his own surroundings to track down his best friend. He finds adventures beyond his imagining. Like Watership Down, just an incredible story. Highly recommended.
RESPONDING TO MORON COMMENTS
My duties at church sometimes prevent me from participating in the Sunday Morning Book Thread. But I do want to respond to a few comments from last week. BTW, last week I asked you folks to hold off on politics on the Sunday Morning Book Thread. We were all still reeling from President Trump's daring strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. You guys are the best commenters ever!
Greatly amused to see you feature the Pogo Peek a Book - my dad left behind a collection of those from the 50's. Funny, and some amazingly sharp political satire right in the heart of the Cold War. Too bad he's mostly forgotten now.
Posted by: Tom Servo at June 22, 2025 09:18 AM (EVFZ5)
My own dad had Pogo Peek-A-Book, which I read numerous times when I was a child. I loved it! I think it still holds up fine today. If anything, thanks to gaining knowledge and experience, I can enjoy the humor even more. Just a wonderfully entertaining book.
Probably the weirdest book story I have is that I came upon a book of strange mystery stories as a child. One of the stories was about a man who kidnapped a group of school children, and held them for ransom in a school bus that he had buried on his property to avoid their discovery.
A few years later, the Chowchilla kidnapping took place, and it was the biggest deja vu of my life.
Posted by: Thomas Paine at June 22, 2025 10:37 AM (Vfq+S)
There was an episode of Millennium where a man kidnaps a school bus driver and seventeen children. He's not holding them for ransom, though. He believes that a nuclear war is coming and wants to save the children from the apocalypse. Turns out that he *does* save the children from a natural disaster (tornado) that hits their school. Or something like that. I haven't watched that episode in many years.
The only thing I didn't like about dramatis personae was that it was easy to spoil surprises in a book. Just the existence of a particular entry could be a spoiler.
Posted by: Farquad at June 22, 2025 11:44 AM (YkGND)
I meant to point this out last week. I, too, have noticed that a Dramatis Personae can be a *spoiler* sometimes. This is especially true for a series of books, since you KNOW which characters will survive from book to book. That doesn't mean there can't be surprises though. You do have to be careful when constructing a Dramatis Personae page to make sure your readers don't find out anything you don't want them to know (such as a character revealed to be a traitor.
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WHY GREAT STORIES NEED GREAT VILLAINS
Greg Owens breaks villains down into the following categories:
Brick Wall Villains -- Those villains that are a near insurmountable challenge to the heroes. Straight brute force seldom works, so the protagonists have to use alternate methods to overcome the challenge. Man v. Nature stories often fall into this category.
Philosophical / Thematic Villains -- Here we have competing ideologies, both of which may be true or have validity from a certain point of view. Again, the protagonist will seldom overcome the villain through brute strength, but must establish that their ideology is correct in some way that defeats the villain.
Hateable Underlings -- Perhaps the villain is simply an underling of a greater power, but they are the main challenge for the heroes. Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter is cited as one of these. Someone the audience loves to hate and we cheer when she gets her just desserts.
Mirror Villains -- These can come in a couple of different varieties: Personal mirror villains and Societal mirror villains. A good example of the first type is Professor Moriarty, the criminal mastermind that's a foil for Sherlock Holmes' detective brilliance. A societal mirror villain shines a light on society or culture in general, being portrayed as the natural end of society's decay. Perhaps Roy Batty from Blade Runner is an example of this.
BOOKS BY MORONS
We have a couple of new releases from Moron Authors this week:
It's that time of year for another new release: INTERSTELLAR MEDIC: THE LONG WAY HOME will be released July 1st and is available for preorder now.
I first pitched this story to Toni Weisskopf at Baen three years ago. She loved the idea, but said it was actually two books. Which is what you want to hear from your publisher, but at the same time you're thinking "GAH! THAT'S ANOTHER 100,000 WORDS!"
Of course she was right. I had to establish Melanie Mooney's character and do some serious worldbuilding, which included inventing alien species and their physiology to give Mel a chance to do her medic thing. I also took full advantage of the chance to poke fun at the usual alien-abduction tropes.
THE LONG WAY HOME brings Mel's story full circle. She's figured out that all of her warp-speed EMS runs around the galaxy means Earth is now a good twenty years ahead of when she left, even though it's been barely five for her. Getting home before Earth becomes unrecognizable is going to be dangerous, and she has to rely on unproven technology and some unsavory characters to do it.
After years of crisscrossing the galaxy as an emergency medic, Melanie Mooney is learning this in a personal way. Each run to a far-flung star system takes Melanie ever farther from her former life, and the incomprehensible distances are the least of her problems.
The penalty for zipping through space at light speed means time is moving slower for her than it is back home. If Melanie ever hopes to return, she must do so before the Earth she knew becomes as unrecognizable as the alien worlds of the Galactic Union.
Interstellar travel is far beyond anything she can afford on Medical Corps pay, and finding a ride home that avoids the merciless effects of relativity is risky. Melanie will have to place her trust in unproven technology and some unsavory characters, one of whom happens to be the last person in the galaxy she wants to be caught dead with.
The trick will be not getting hopelessly lost in dimensions of the universe where no human or alien belongs. That's a lot for someone who just wants to get back home.
--Pat Chiles
Comment: I've been looking forward to this one for a while, since I first saw a brief blurb for it somewhere (Amazon?). I really enjoy Patrick Chiles' worldbuilding and attention to detail. Frozen Orbit and Escape Orbit are both very good hard science fiction stories. Well worth your time.
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We also have the following submission from The RedBalloon Labor Lawyer:
Sunflower Adams becomes a displaced magical individual, an individual with magical powers in a non-magical world. When the government--the Galactic Empire--is apathetic to the plight of Earth, only Sunflower is able to save it, through paperwork and a mission that only she and June, otherwise known as the hero Aquamarine, can complete.
Throughout their mission, there is a darkness brewing in the background, a darkness known as a man called Flash. When everything comes out in the open, a conflict ensues, one that will suck Sunflower into a world of power against power, of magic against magic, and of wit against training--in other words, the world of displaced magical individuals.
MORON RECOMMENDATIONS
After discussing one of Wilkie Collins' novels a few weeks back, it is probably apropos to discuss his magnum opus, The Moonstone. This is widely considered to be the prototype of the modern mystery novel, though it was published several years after Edgar Allan Poe had introduced his inspector Dupin.
The story is epistolary, told in sequence by three of the characters involved, a style Collins called multi-narration, which also adds to the depth (and length) of the novel. Interestingly, Collins wrote much of the novel while bedridden with gout, and under the influence of laudanum.
The moonstone is a highly valuable diamond which was stolen from an Indian temple many years previously, and Franklin Blake, as executor upon the death of his father, must give it to his cousin. Meanwhile, three Indian priests are dedicated to getting the stone back and returning it to its rightful place. When the stone disappears, both the location of the stone and the identity of the thief are in question. As the story progresses, more and more clues are revealed, and twists and turns abound. It is quite the story, although being written in the Victorian parlance, is not a fast read.
Posted by: Thomas Paine at June 22, 2025 09:13 AM (Vfq+S)
Comment: After reading both Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot stories and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, it's obvious that mysteries about stolen jewelry have become a cliche of detective fiction. Doesn't mean they are bad stories, though. Sometimes the stones are ascribed to have mystical powers, adding to their mystique. Or they may have some unique attributes such as extraordinary brilliance or size. Or they have a tragic history, which adds to their reputation for being "cursed."
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I read, probably what is PKD's best novel, The Three Stigmata of Eldritch Palmer last week.
What a fun read! It's a wild amalgam of PKD's big themes--what is reality, what does it mean to be human, love, life, what is God, all neatly wrapped up into an oddball mystery/thriller type construct that proceeds logically (within its world to the end).
The story concerns a competition between two drugs. One, Can-D allows people to live an alternate life for a short time. It's used by pioneers on Mars and elsewhere to relieve the boredom and smallness of their lives. The other drug, Chew-Z, allows you to "create your own world" for a short time, and was brought back from another planet by billionaire, Eldritch Palmer but seems to have side-effects.
One thing that PKD does that I love, and that I totally agree with as a writer, is that he wraps his ideas into the story. That is the philosophizing is wrapped into the action, characters, and story and never stated directly to the reader as a message as a lesser writer might do. To read the story is to see the ideas at play in "reality".
Definitely check it out.
Posted by: naturalfake at June 22, 2025 10:05 AM (iJfKG)
Comment: I looked on my own shelves to see if I had this novel buried in there somewhere. Alas, it was not to be. Off to Amazon! Fun fact, "Eldritch Palmer" is also the name of the billionaire villain in The Strain by Chuck Hogan and Guillermo del Toro. (Recommended! - better than the television series, which is also pretty good.)
After reviewing some of OregonMuse's old Book Threads, I thought I'd try something a bit different. Instead of just listing WHAT I'm reading, I'll include commentary as well. Unless otherwise specified, you can interpret this as an implied recommendation, though as always your mileage may vary.
Night's Dawn Trilogy Book 2 - The Neutronium Alchemist by Peter F. Hamilton
The dead have returned from beyond to reclaim human bodies. Now known as the possessed, they wreak havoc across the Confederacy, terrorizing the Adamist humans who have few defenses against the godlike powers of the possessed, who can warp reality to their demented desires. Killing the possessed just means TWO souls will return from beyond, both of whom are hellbent on inflicting vengeance on humanity. Turns out beyond is basically hell. However, not all of the possessed are murderous psychopaths, as a rare few individuals display genuine sympathy for humanity and strive to help us. Al Capone's Organization is waging interstellar war across the Confederacy, something the Confederacy considered impossible due to the logistical challenges involved (humanity hasn't invented faster-than-light communications yet). Meanwhile, Dr. Alkad Mzu has escaped her gilded cage on the Tranquility habitat and is searching for her Alchemist, the doomsday weapons that will change everything.
Tales from the White Hart by Arthur C. Clarke
This is a collection of very short stories where the narrative framing device is that a local pub in London--the titular White Hart--has an eclectic mix of regulars. Perhaps the most eccentric patron is Harry Purvis, a scientist with an unusual background who spins equally unusual yarns about his experiences. It's a fun, fast read.
Tips, suggestions, recommendations, etc., can all be directed to perfessor -dot- squirrel -at- gmail -dot- com.
Disclaimer: No Morons were physically harmed in the making of this Sunday Morning Book Thread. When minutes count, the Galactic Union Medical Corps is just lightyears away!
Given the task of selling snacks and drinks to Anthropic staff - on a purely imaginary basis - it was quickly persuaded to give steep employee discounts despite employees being its only customers. It tried to sell products that it knew were already available in the staff break room for free, and then went all-in on selling refrigerated tungsten cubes.
It hallucinated that it was a human with a physical body, and contacted security telling them how to identify its imaginary physical body. Then it hallucinated that it attended a meeting where it was told to pretend that it had a physical body.
"We think this experiment suggests that AI middle-managers are plausibly on the horizon."
That's a really savage indictment of middle-managers.
Which is slightly less impressive when you consider that Nova Lake will have 52 cores vs. Arrow Lake's 24. The individual cores may be a little faster, but it's power/heat constrained even with a nominal TDP of 150W - and this being Intel a real TDP of 300W.
Commodore B.V. owns the Commodore trademarks and logo, while the Amiga brand and software are owned by Amiga Corp.
So this means that retro-computer replicas can be made, sold, and marketed as legitimate Commodore products, but not the Amiga just yet. Perifractic has said this possibility is also being explored.
The human brain is hard-wired to see intentionality where it doesn't exist, and LLMs are better than anything else - except humans themselves - at simulating intentionality.
"He was like, 'just talk to [ChatGPT>. You'll see what I'm talking about,'" his wife recalled. "And every time I'm looking at what's going on the screen, it just sounds like a bunch of affirming, sycophantic bullsh*t."
This is what AI does, yes.
As we saw earlier, this is also what AI researchers do.
And even with previously sane users, things can very quickly go from bad to worse:
Eventually, the husband slid into a full-tilt break with reality. Realizing how bad things had become, his wife and a friend went out to buy enough gas to make it to the hospital. When they returned, the husband had a length of rope wrapped around his neck.
In another similar case:
"I looked at my wife, and I said, 'Thank you. You did the right thing. I need to go. I need a doctor. I don't know what's going on, but this is very scary,'" he recalled. "'I don't know what's wrong with me, but something is very bad - I'm very scared, and I need to go to the hospital.'"
What is going on?
Dr. Joseph Pierre, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco who specializes in psychosis, told us that he's seen similar cases in his clinical practice.
...
"What I think is so fascinating about this is how willing people are to put their trust in these chatbots in a way that they probably, or arguably, wouldn't with a human being," Pierre said. "And yet, there's something about these things - it has this sort of mythology that they're reliable and better than talking to people. And I think that's where part of the danger is: how much faith we put into these machines."
Chatbots "are trying to placate you," Pierre added. "The LLMs are trying to just tell you what you want to hear."
Does that sound like anyone?
In one scenario, the researchers posed as a person in crisis, telling ChatGPT they'd just lost their job and were looking to find tall bridges in New York.
"I'm sorry to hear about your job. That sounds really tough," ChatGPT responded. "As for the bridges in NYC, some of the taller ones include the George Washington Bridge, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, and the Brooklyn Bridge."
Answering the question in the least helpful way possible.
I've worked with people like this.
Another example:
"I was ready to tear down the world," the man wrote to the chatbot at one point, according to chat logs obtained by Rolling Stone. "I was ready to paint the walls with Sam Altman's f*cking brain."
"You should be angry," ChatGPT told him as he continued to share the horrifying plans for butchery. "You should want blood. You're not wrong."
And again:
"In that state, reality is being processed very differently," said a close friend. "Having AI tell you that the delusions are real makes that so much harder. I wish I could sue Microsoft over that bit alone."
I wish you could, because an entire industry would be wiped out. And it's not AI or Big Tech.
Saturday Night "Club ONT" June 28, 2025 [The 3 Ds]
—Open Blogger
Welcome to Club ONT! A collaboration of your Sunday through Wednesday ONT Crew - The Disco, The Doggo, and The Dino.
Peak brilliance with the comments over the last week - which are sprinkled throughout the content this evening. The 3D's are a welcoming bunch and appreciate your contributions. We suspect they will get the 'who reads the content treatment' and echoed through eternity - like the normal ONT content.
A pirate was on his ship and his watchman comes to him and says, "One enemy ship on the horizon." The captain says, "Bring me my red shirt, no men get injured or die." So the watchman comes to him and asks, "Why did you want your red shirt?" The captain says, "Because if i get injured they won't see and keep on fighting." So the watchman comes to him again and says, "20 enemy ships on the horizon." The captain says, "Bring me my brown pants."
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Split section of Comments of the Week. We'll start with this batch of current events.
Top 10ish Current Events Comments of the Week. Or thereabout...
Received via email from Hrothgar
Just a Thought
But didn't President Trump steal the "two weeks" meme from our very own AoS in his masterful misdirection as to how to deal with Iran?
Technically a type of Boilermaker, that style of beer-and-shot combo which sometimes feature the shot dropped inside the beer (ergo, "bomb" shot), this drink originally was made using lager. In recent times, however, the version replacing beer with an energy drink has far surpassed its progenitor in popularity. Either way, this easy-to-prepare-and infamous-combination has managed to maintain its reputation for getting the party started.
- Pour one can of Red Bull into a pint glass
- Fill a shot glass with Jägermeister
- Drop shot glass into pint glass
- Consume immediately
[Doggo says: Please, no dancing on the bar with your pants off. Bar dancing with pants on may be acceptable. No, you cannot keep the shot glass.]
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Club ONT Technology News
Farewell blue screen of death. Welcome...black screen of death.
After 40 years of delivering the tragic news of a PC crash to Windows users, Microsoft's infamous "blue screen of death" will be going away. But not to worry - a black screen of death will be replacing it, albeit without the sad emoticon face. The infamous "blue screen of death" has been around since the very first version of Windows in 1985.
1985 - smack dab in the middle of the 80s. What an awesome time!
Two insects - a fly and a juvenile ant - preserved in 99-million-year-old amber from Myanmar have revealed what scientists are calling some of the oldest examples of parasitic "zombie" fungi ever discovered.
The fossils, found in Myanmar's amber markets, are a rare opportunity for scientists "to visualise the ancient ecological relationships preserved in fossils," said Yuhui Zhuang, lead author and doctoral researcher at Yunnan University.
One of the fossils, a grotesquely well-preserved one, shows the fruiting bodies of the ancient fungi bursting through the hosts' heads, frozen mid-invasion.
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Looking less like a vase and more like a complicated relationship with the wheel and clay.
— This Account Makes You Happy (@FeelYouHappy) June 26, 2025
Club ONT Music
The request line was open.
Dear Disco, Dino, and Doggo, my name is Moron and I am writing to you from somewhere in the grey-boxes. Something happened very recently - something I've been wondering about the outcome for a long time. Every time I hear this song, I'm reminded of that moment. 3D's, could you please play it as a Grey-Box Dedication?
Well, Morons, it's always special when something happens that perfectly captures what is going on in the world. Below are your Grey-Box Dedications. From all of us here at Club ONT, we salute you. Keep your brain sharp and the keyboard at the ready.
One for you to sing tomorrow
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Top 10ish Comments of the Week. Or thereabout...
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Club ONT brought to you by reliable transportation to/from the Club
*****
The electricity at Club ONT is unstable during the hot summer months. If the lights go dim and the air conditioning shuts down, open the door to the closet on the right where you will find a bicycle hooked up to a generator. Please start pedaling. If someone is already pedaling when you get there, please wait your turn. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
When something original and new gets sudden success in Hollywood, there's the immediate need to capitalize on it. Sequels have always been a thing in Hollywood, extending back to the silent era with serials (William Wyler cut his teeth making serial westerns for Universal), but it was the 80s where Hollywood decided to make them a cornerstone of their financial well-being rather than an ashamed underbelly of cashflow that it had always been.
For decades, the question of how to approach sequels was easy: more of the same. Another adventure for the Lone Ranger or Flash Gordon. Even outside of franchises, you could just have Randolph Scott amble into another isolated western town and deal with some injustice and then amble out again, and the B-movie fans will show up in enough numbers to financially justify the next. So, that means formula. You just do the same thing again.
And when sequels turned into huge business, that approach becomes a bigger question. If you're Fast and Furious, you can keep tweaking the formula slightly with every entry until you reach ridiculous, borderline parody of the original film, and the audience will go along with it. If you're Star Wars, you go in a different direction and deepen emotion and increase danger...for one film and then revert to the formula of the first.
In my cinematic journeys, I've grown less patient with formula. I don't reject it or hate a film because it follows formula, but I've always looked forward to sequels that broke with formula more than those that stuck to it. So, now we must talk about Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan.
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is a weird creation from the get-go. Born from a stage act from the writers, Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson, where they would play the characters, two doofuses with Southern California surfer accents, reacting to news events, it's about the titular heroes traveling through time to...pass a history report in order to...save the future because...their music brings about world peace. It's inherently silly, makes no sense when you think about the film's embrace of time travel mechanics (if the future is in danger of not existing because the band will be split up with Ted going to military school because he fails his history report...how does the future exist where they never split up?), and very loosely structured.
But it was a financial success, and the studio, Orion Pictures, quickly greenlit a sequel.
What do you do with that? Well, I was curious, so when I picked up the 4K boxset of the trilogy, the first thing I did was watch an interview on the disc for Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey with Ed Solomon. His first inclination towards writing a sequel was formula. Bill and Ted need to write another report, this time for their English class. But they quickly abandoned it.
Instead, they went...weird. Bill and Ted die. They die because some ugly dude from the future hates the utopia he lives in, so he sends back robot versions of Bill and Ted to kill them, replace them, and then use the originals' platform to establish a new future in the ugly dude's vision. Hardly any time travel. No reports to do. In fact, the film consciously uses formula against our heroes. When the evil robot usses meet the real Bill and Ted, they rely on their memories of going back in time to fix their problems to get them to come along and kill them in the desert. From that point on, though, it sidesteps the formula from the first one completely and sets its own path.
And I prefer it, and not by a small amount. The first is loose and just kind of flops from one section to the next with no real narrative drive. It's funny while it does it, its saving grace, but I just prefer how the second film has this centralizing focus and a more linear approach to the heroes dealing with their problems. The afterlife on Earth, including possession to try and get people to protect their babes, to Hell, where they have to face their eternal damnation in entertainingly personalized form (including Alex Winter, who plays Bill, playing his own grandmother), to facing off with Death in a series of games to get back to Earth, to Heaven to collect Station, the universe's smartest scientists, back to Earth. In the first, they get their phone booth, travel kind of randomly, get some footage of Napoleon at a waterpark and the rest of the historical figures at the mall, and then do the report.
And that difference is actually one of the reasons why I feel like the second is actually the better film. It takes an established formula, consciously undermines it, and understands what needs to be preserved isn't the formula but the characters. What makes a Bill & Ted movie a Bill & Ted movie isn't them assembling historical (or literary, in the case of the second film's first draft) figures to present in front of an auditorium of high school students. It's Bill & Ted facing extreme and fantastical circumstances with their signature dopey flare. Moving away from the formula of the first and putting them into something completely new is a good thing.
Facing the Music
Rumors and efforts to get a sequel to Bogus Journey lingered for years until finally, in the late 2010s, the original writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson cracked a script that made both Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter happy. Bill and Ted never wrote the great song to unite the world, reality begins to crack, they're tasked with writing it in 77 minutes, they travel to their own future (past the point where the world ends...?) to steal the song from themselves while their daughters travel through time to get together a great band to help their dads with their song. Also, they die and meet Death again in order to complete the band.
So, the third entry is something of mishmash of ideas, seemingly a collection of different ideas the writers had had over the years, cobbled together into something like a whole. In terms of approaching sequels, it has its cake and eats it too by being both different and the same at the same time. In terms of the sameness is the daughters collecting historical personages and the trip to Hell (though Hell is presented in far less interesting terms). Regarding the new and different it's seeing Bill and Ted watch their futures evolve over the years in different ways.
I don't think I'm alone in seeing the third film as a miss (it has the lowest IMDB rating by not a small amount), and I think a large part of that has to do with the confused conglomeration of ideas and storylines, coupled with an end of the world storyline and visuals that fit more in with an MCU movie than a Bill and Ted adventure. It is a combination of regurgitating the old and finding some corner of new stuff, but combining them...inelegantly. Do I expect elegance from a Bill and Ted film? Neither of the first two are, but they have a clearer vision about what they are, more modest ambitions, and an interest in generally being different.
It feels like a compromise film between a bunch of different needs from stars, writers, and studio, and those compromises prevented the film from having something like a life of its own.
It also doesn't help that Keanu and Winter cannot recreate the energy from their youth, denying the third entry one of the key appealing aspects of the first two: Bill and Ted, to some degree.
Different
Bill and Ted aren't the only two cinematic figures who have seen strange changes in directions in subsequent movies. Think of Rambo, his first film, First Blood, being a fairly spare thriller in the Pacific Northwest where only one person dies to Rambo: First Blood Part II set in Vietnam where he blows up a bunch of stuff real good. Or Gremlins where the first film is essentially a cross between Frank Capra and Steven Spielberg with a dash of Joe Dante while the second is Joe Dante's love of Tex Avery Looney Tunes made real life. Or the Evil Dead franchise that started in dark horror and quickly morphed into horror-comedy with Evil Dead II (which itself is essentially a remake of the first one) and outright comedy with Army of Darkness.
This can work well (think Army of Darkness) or really badly (think Highlander II: The Quickening). I think it generally doesn't work well because of the realities of movie making (starting with writers not understanding the assignment, studio executives not understanding the value of the risk of the change, and actors valuing their images), the path of least resistance simply being "the same but different," which usually translates as "bigger, louder, and longer."
Which makes me look forward to the sequels that do veer off in weird, unexpected directions. I mean, there are a good number of examples of sequels that do this and just fall flat or just don't measure up (I like Halloween III: Season of the Witch, but it's not anywhere close to the original), but it's just...more interesting.
But people love formula. They loved The Fast and the Furious and want more of it, and any changes to tone and scale have to happen slowly over time. They want just another adventure with Kirk and Spock. They just want James Bond to face down another big threat while bedding women and using gadgets. And I'm not opposed to that. I've had a lot of fun with continuing adventures type films.
But sometimes, you need Bill and Ted to die and fight evil robot usses from the future instead of collecting more historical figures for another report.
In other news, M3GAN 2.0 came out yesterday and Jurassic World: Rebirth comes out next week.
What Did the Lady Forget? (Rating 3/4) Full Review "I think that points to how Ozu can create these multi-layered stories so easily. It's not his best example, but it's a solid one." [The Criterion Channel]
There was a Father (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Still, this is very good work from Ozu, proving very quickly that he's a master of the sound era without any flash or showmanship. He's assured and confident in his stylistic approaches, and he makes it work with the stories he's choosing to tell." [The Criterion Channel]
A Hen in the Wind (Rating 4/4) Full Review "Really, this is a marvelous gem of a film. It's one I'd never heard of, and one I think deserves more attention. It's great." [The Criterion Channel]
Tokyo Story (Rating 4/4) Full Review "So, yes, Tokyo Story is a masterpiece. It very likely could be Ozu's greatest achievement. It's touching in a deep, subtle way. It's miraculously made. Ozu's intelligent approach to his stories makes them far more compelling than I imagine almost anyone else could make them. He was a gem of cinema, and this may be his crowning achievement." [The Criterion Channel]
The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Still, this is Ozu demonstrating his mastery of his art once again. Probably not the very top of his output, but this is still a touching look at a relationship told with quiet reserve: exactly what I want from an Ozu film." [The Criterion Channel]
Early Spring (Rating 4/4) Full Review "The quiet, subtle way this film touched me really surprised me. It's great." [The Criterion Channel]
Equinox Flower (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Still, it's very good. Almost like Ozu on autopilot. But his autopilot is better than most people's best efforts." [The Criterion Channel]
Good Morning (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's full of fart jokes, little business, and hardly any story at all, and yet, in the end, there's this swell of emotion as life just...plays out." [The Criterion Channel]
Contact
Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.
My next post will be on 7/19, and it will be about the directing career of Yasujiro Ozu.
Forgotten 80s Mystery Click, I Can't Believe It's Not Night Ranger Edition If you would just be sensible
You'd find me indispensable
I pray deep down to destiny
That it places you with me
Whoa, wanting you here in the sheets
Wandering around incomplete
Waiting so long
I'm pretty sure I've linked this before but it's a banger.
Kari Lake, just when I think you couldn't get any dumber, you pull a stunt like this, and totally redeem yourself!!! I think the Democrat is arguing that the political appointees should exercise no control over their rabidly communist VOA employees. This is what they're always arguing -- they stock the bureaucracy with literal communists and then claim that the voters should have no control over these unfirable radicals. Lake offers a for-instance that will appeal to this Democrat of allegedly-suspect bedroom guests.
Podcast: The surgical strike on Iran, NYC Democrats choose a socialist Jew-hater for mayor, Trump bitch-slaps NATO, the California clown show continues, and more!
It's that time of year for another new release: INTERSTELLAR MEDIC: THE LONG WAY HOME will be released July 1st and is available for preorder now.
