1st Annual Alaska MoMe: 7/15-7/17/2022, Willow, Alaska email for info
Texas MoMe 2022:
10/21/2022-10/22/2022
Corsicana,TX
Contact Ben Had
August 14, 2022
Food Thread: Tomatoes And Inflation...Not Inflated Tomatoes!
—CBD
Well, that's one way to deal with extra tomatoes, but there are others that are less messy!
Late last summer as the local tomato harvest was winding down, we lucked into a huge amount of pretty ripe and good tomatoes. There wasn't enough mozzarella and basil and balsamic vinegar in the world to eat that many tomatoes, so I decided to slap them on the grill for a few minutes and see what happened.
And what happened was a very good thing. The tomatoes lost some of their juice (but not much), picked up a delicate smoky flavor...more like roasted really, and I was able to peel them about half way.
So now what? Hell, I plopped them into a blender and was left with sort of a thin tomato sauce that tasted great, was a fantastic addition to pretty much everything, and best of all? It froze perfectly. So in the deepest darkest days of winter I had a taste of high summer. I dug up the last of it out of the freezer a few weeks ago, and used it to tune up some plain old sautéed squash, zucchini and onions. It turned into sort of a vegetable stew, and it was delicious.
Yes, even I, a committed carnivore will eat vegetables when they taste good! Of course it was complemented by a very large grilled pork chop, so that may have helped...
I live in a pretty expensive part of the country, so the raw numbers mean less than the change. I look at baseline prices for my regular purchases...things like eggs and pork rib chops and certain vegetables and bacon...you know: staples. That gives me a better sense of the rate of change than the prices of stuff I don't always buy. Lutefisk and Balut might be hugely expensive, but I don't buy them enough to have any sense of how inflation is affecting them.
So a 50% increase for eggplant, squash and zucchini is a very big deal. But that is nothing compared to eggs, which have doubled since the beginning of the year. Interestingly, meat increased significantly at the beginning of Biden's reign of terror, but the prices have moderated slightly, which sounds nice, but I am suspicious that it is a function of increased slaughtering because of insane feed and processing costs. That may bode ill for us in the long term.
We beat this topic to death during the week here on AoSHQ, but inflation is being wildly undercounted, and I think anyone with a lick of sense can see that. It is an indication of the unseriousness of our government that they cannot simply report inflation as it has always been, and more ominously their constant manipulation of the numbers smacks of disinformation and manipulation in service to their own political agenda. The idea that inflation is less than 10% is simply laughable. Yet they want us to accept that arrant nonsense and just go on with our lives? Many of us are in financial positions that allow us to manage that inflation without much adjustment to our lives, but there are many Americans who will struggle with ever-rising food costs (not to mention everything else). It is a basic violation of the pact between The People and those in whom we have vested authority to govern, especially since inflation is entirely a creation of government policy.
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I usually make pork ribs Sous Vide, then finish them with more dry rub on the grill.
But next weekend I think I am going to try something different. Instead of plain dry rub (I rub a bit of honey on the ribs so the rub sticks nicely) I think I will rub them with yellow mustard. You know...the bright yellow stuff that looks nothing like food but is strangely appealing, at least to my inner seven-year-old? Anyway, I think the rub will stick nicely to that and it might add an interesting tang to the ribs. Besides, when was the last time you had lousy ribs? it is difficult to screw up.
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Go ahead. Make fun of my Sous Vide obsession. That's a pork butt after a 24 hour cook at 165 degrees, then a 90 minute roast with some more dry rub to get it nice and crusty. The pork was incredibly juicy and tender, and pulled perfectly. I have about six pounds of the stuff that I will be gorging on for the next week.
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Muldoon brought up an excellent point about the overall strategy of eating, with some specific tactics for a particular food.
It's right there in the name.
Chex Mix
Keep the Wheat and Corn Chex. Add Rice Chex. Lose one of the pretzels and the mini bread stick.
It's all about the snacking rhythm. The Chex have the delicate crunch. Mild (rice), medium (corn) and extra crunchy (wheat). The crisp hard rye adds a nice interlude between Chex bites. Pretzel is...well...a pretzel, it stands on its own merit. The stupid bread stick just breaks the rhythm, like, "Ewww, what was that? Oh well, wash out the ewww with another Corn Chex!"
I usually chart out a plan of action for my meals. Small tastes of everything to provide a baseline, and then a careful rotation...not more than 10% of each food at a time. I use a timer on my phone as well, because "time-on-site" is as important as volume of food. It probably makes sense to bring a portable scale so I know exactly how much of each I am eating, then I can add weight to the calculation.
How about you? Does chaos reign on your plates, or do you enter the dining room with a plan?
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Commenter "dhmosquito" brings cooking truth!
I don’t know if you like Russian Dressing or not.
I generally had thought of it as essentially 1000 Island Dressing, until we mail ordered a Zingerman’s Deli “Reuben sandwich kit” some time back when it was on sale. They had included with the kit their in-house Russian Dressing and it was OUTSTANDING, not sweet like 1000 Island, but a distinctly different flavor that complemented the corned beef and Emmentaler Swiss perfectly. I have since checked and they do not sell their dressing online, but I found a recipe online that looked interesting, and somewhat genuine sounding.
I followed the recipe and made some Russian Dressing today and it’s pretty. damn. tasty. Great as sandwich dressing or just have a few tablespoons “neat” (like I just did with what would not fit into a Ball canning jar). Enclosed is the recipe I followed, except I added a little more horseradish. I used the creamy Inglehoffer brand horseradish and dried, not fresh, parsley. I was a little generous with lemon juice and Worcestershire, too.
(BTW the best tartar sauce is Red Lobster’s and I have made duplicates of that many times!)
Homemade dressing is just better! Even plain old oil and vinegar is fresher tasting than the stuff out of the bottle, and doesn't have unnecessary additions like emulsifiers and other crap that add nothing to the flavor. Caesar dressing is a great example of that. The stuff in a bottle is pretty awful, but the fresh version (there are tons of good recipes) is absolutely fantastic!
I am following up on a food thread you did late in the summer of 2020 where you pan fried then baked some cod (I think that was the fish) fillets in prosciutto. You were gracious enough to answer my question about how to cook it without an oven and even supplied a professional chefs reply! We finally made it back to Spain this summer, so I tried out your recipe. It was delicious! I made it twice actually. I dragged out the ole Tefal electric grill and went to work with some hake fillets and jamon. One time I did what was suggested and put butter on the fish to keep it from drying out while finishing on the electric grill. It turned out nicely, but apparently too much grease splashed around per Mrs. Mishdog. The second time time I tented them with aluminum foil to finish. They turned out a little tougher but still tasty. Two things I'd like to add: 1. The salt from the jamon dissolved most of the bones that were in still in the fillets (big plus!). But the fish ended up a little salty for our tastes. We put a little Canary Island mojo verde salsa on top and that reduced the saltiness and added some freshness to it.
This is perfect amateur cooking. Play around...make it your own, and tailor it to your taste. It doesn't matter what the recipe says; all that matters is how happy you are with the end result. And that's why having a nice base of cooking technique is so important. It gives you a sense of what is going to work and what is going to be a horrid and embarrassing mess, best scraped down the drain when nobody is looking.
Oh...Mishdog was in Spain. That "jamon" may very well be world class cured ham, the likes of which is rare and expensive in these parts, but is well worth tasting if one can manage a trip to Spain. I think the Spanish ham is better than the Italian equivalent (Prosciutto), although there are a few American producers (La Quercia in Iowa comes to mind) that are doing wonderful things with pigs!
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I can usually figure out how kitchen mishaps occur, but this one is interesting.
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Just send me oysters. Lots of oysters, and I will provide special dispensation for those without taste who insist upon maple syrup with their French Toast. And pork rib roasts from the front end of the pig where all the good and fatty meat lives, carrots that don't taste like stalky chalk, spare bottles of Van Winkle Special Reserve 12 Year Old Bourbon, an herb garden that actually produces herbs (but no basil!), well-marbled NY strip steaks and elk backstrap to: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com.
And don't think that the rest of you are off the hook with maple syrup and French Toast: I'm still watching you! And I am watching you perverts who shake Manhattans and keeping a list for the Burning Times.
We have hard water, and in spite of a reasonably effective water softening system, our glasses eventually pick up that irritating embedded staining that is impossible to remove. Oh, I have tried vinegar and other acids, but short of an Aqua Regia bath, those stains aren't coming off!
Just imagine how it makes my beer feel! How insulting that I have to pour good beer into tainted glasses!
2016 shoplifting incident
On Wednesday, November 9, 2016, an underage African-American Oberlin College student and Student Assistant Treasurer,[7] Jonathan Aladin (aka Elijah Aladin), attempted to purchase a bottle of wine using a fake identification card.[6] The store clerk, Allyn D. Gibson, a son and grandson of the owners,[4] rejected the fake ID. Gibson noticed that the student was concealing two other bottles of wine inside his jacket.[8][4] According to a police report, Gibson told the student he was contacting the police, and when Gibson pulled out his phone to take a photo of the student, the student slapped it away, striking Gibson's face.[9] The student ran out of the store. Gibson followed and then grabbed and held onto the shoplifter outside the store after the shoplifter had also assaulted the store owner, David Gibson.[4] Two other students, Cecelia Whettstone and Endia Lawrence, friends of the shoplifter, joined the scuffle.[4] When the police arrived, they witnessed Gibson lying on the ground with the three students punching and kicking him.[9] The police report stated that Gibson sustained a swollen lip, several cuts, and other minor injuries.[5][10] The police arrested the students, charging all three with assault and the shoplifter with robbery as well. In August 2017, the three students pleaded guilty, stating that they believed Gibson's actions were justified and were not racially motivated.[9][11][12] Their plea deals carried no jail time in exchange for restitution, the public statement, and a promise of future good behavior.[11][13]
Fast forward to 2017.
Civil complaint
In November 2017, Gibson's Bakery filed a civil complaint against Oberlin for libel, slander, interference with business relationships, and interference with contracts in the Lorain County Court of Common Pleas. Gibson's argued that the college supported the protests that damaged its reputation and that the college unlawfully broke its contract with the bakery.[9] In the complaint, the Gibson family alleged that some Oberlin College professors attended the demonstrations, joined in the chants with a bullhorn, and gave course credit to students who skipped class to attend the demonstrations. It also claimed Oberlin employees distributed boycott flyers and allowed them to be photocopied for free on school machines.[6]
The Jury comes back with its decision.
Verdict and responses
In June 2019, the jury found in favor of the Gibson family, awarding $11 million in compensatory damages, before further hearings on punitive damages and legal fees.[19]
Moore’s candidacy in Alabama was derailed after the Washington Post published a report claiming Moore made sexual advances against four teenage girls between 1977 and 1982.
As the Associated Press reported:
The lawsuit centered on one television commercial that recounted accusations against Moore in various news articles. Moore’s attorneys argued the ad, through the juxtaposition of statements, falsely claimed he solicited sex from young girls at a shopping mall, including another 14-year-old who was working as a Santa’s helper, and that resulted in him being banned from the mall.
The advertisement at issue in the lawsuit began with: “What do people who know Roy Moore say?” It followed with the statements “Moore was actually banned from the Gadsden mall … for soliciting sex from young girls” and “One he approached was 14 and working as Santa’s helper.” Both quotes cited various news articles.
“In their ad they strung quotes together to make a single statement. That’s what the jury found offensive. They got up and lied and said they didn’t intend that,” Moore’s attorney Jeff Wittenbrink said.
No criminal charges were filed against Moore, who formerly served as Alabama Supreme Court chief justice.
The jury rightly decided in Moore's favor. But, did this cost the typically safe red senate seat of Alabama to go to Jones the Democrat? My guess and it is only a guess but I would say it contributed greatly.
What is there to stop the next super pac from libeling and defaming a Republican candidate? The super pacs can always hit up their donors for more cash. And Oberlin a private institute of higher learning (Spits and laughs) sits on a huge egg nest of assets.
Moore's adversary promises to appeal. Oberlin is still at it. If you don't have to pay for your improper civil behavior there is no deterrence.
Just how long before Moore receives the compensation he is due? When will Gibson's Bakery be made whole? None of us have the answers and only God knows.
Sunday Morning Book Thread - 08-14-2022 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]
—Open Blogger
(ht: David Carter)
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. Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material, even if it's nothing more than the secret documents hidden in Melania Trump's underpants drawer. As always, pants are required, especially if you are wearing these pants...
So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, tap a keg of maple syrup for your pancakes, and crack open a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?
Moron David Carter sent me the pic of his upstairs library. It's a very nice little reading corner. When I was looking at the picture, I zoomed in on the map that's hanging on the wall, but couldn't quite make it out. I asked David about it and he replied:
That is a mid-19th century map of Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay, with a sidebar map of Chili [sic]. I have several maps of Latin American Countries from that period, plus a map of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires from the late 1890s. I've always loved old maps, and, to my delight, stumbled across a 1908 copy of the Everyman's Atlas of the Ancient and Classical World, which is completely made up of fold-out maps (I've attached a photo) [see below - PS].
The upstairs library is heavy on history books, but I also have most of my collection of 18th century English literature there, too - including my pride and joy, the 1904 Parfraets Edition of The Works of Samuel Johnson, each volume of which includes full color plates depicting various notables from the period - plus my collection of Chesterton and Mencken. It's the one room in the house that looks respectable. We are currently stuck holding on to furniture that belongs to our adult sons, so the rest of the house looks rather like a Goodwill showroom.
IT PAYS TO INCREASE YOUR WORD POWER
Moron fd posted the following comment last week. I admit I was unfamiliar with a couple of words. I'm pretty sure "escapement in horology" doesn't mean running away from ladies of the evening when their pimps come knocking...
Weasel here's book for you. Free on Gutenberg:
WATCH AND CLOCK ESCAPEMENTS
A Complete Study In Theory and Practice of the Lever, Cylinder and Chronometer Escapements, Together with a Brief Account of the Origin and Evolution of the Escapement in Horology
There appears to be a ton of math, so I know you'll like it.
escapement - n. - A mechanism in a clock or watch that alternately checks and releases the train by a fixed amount and transmits a periodic impulse from the spring or weight to the balance wheel or pendulum. This is what causes the clock's hands to advance in a mechanical clock.
horology - n. - The study and measurement of time. The art of making clocks and watches.
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BOOKS BY MORONS (Updates!)
A couple of months ago (06-05-2022), Daniel Humphreys announced a Kickstarter project for his Paxton Locke series of books. That project was successful and his books are now available on Amazon! Congrats!
The series follows a young man cursed with magical powers who ends up working for a secret government agency tasked with protecting the world from the forces of darkness. We know it's fiction because said agency is actually competent. Should be enjoyable for fans of Monster Hunter International and the Dresden Files.
Bob Zimmerman now has hardback and paperback copies of his book, Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space.
The book puts the lie to the 1619 project. See the blurbs and description here:
And in case you've forgotten, JJ Sefton links to my webpage practically every day, linking to my daily "Today's blacklisted American" column, my regular beat covering space and science, and my periodic essays on culture and politics.
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MORON RECOMMENDATIONS
I've just downloaded a Vera Stanhope mystery, The Glass Room by Anne Cleeves. She's always a good reliable read. I loved the Vera series on Britbox. I wish they'd do another season, but from what I've read, the actress who plays Vera says her stamina is pretty much kaput.
Posted by: grammie winger at August 07, 2022 09:09 AM (45fpk)
Comment: I am not familiar with this series, but from researching Anne Cleeves on Amazon, it sounds like her mystery stories are very much character driven. TVTropes compares Vera Stanhope (the main character of this series) to a female Columbo. Irascible, opinionated, yet relentless in the pursuit of justice. Of course, whenever I hear the name "Vera" I tend to think of Jayne Cobb's very favorite gun.
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I also read The Curious Disappearance of Seamus Muldoon, by Muldoon, of course.
When his brother-in-law disappeared on a seemingly normal day, everyone--neighbors, family, friends--had a theory about what have might have happened. Muldoon lays out a number of those theories in short vignettes.
Some are preposterous, but the more likely ones are tragic. My condolences to his family, because the pain of loss never really goes away, and is compounded by the not knowing.
Posted by: April--dash my lace wigs! at August 07, 2022 09:15 AM (OX9vb)
Comment: I don't have much to say here except to express my own condolences on Muldoon's loss. Writing can be a very cathartic way of dealing with tragedy or personal issues.
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The book The Scourge of God was good. It was about Attila the Hun. It showed how the corruption of Roman politics made the Western Empire easy pickings. It also showed how pathetic rulers like Valentinian would rather kill competent generals like Flavius Aetius than rule wisely and well. Some thing never change.
Posted by: Jmel at August 07, 2022 10:50 AM (qL7HS)
Comment: Bad people will do bad things, regardless of time or place. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The FBI (and by extension the Biden junta) is now the poster child for this adage.
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My all-time favourite book title is A Scent of New-Mown Hay, by John Blackburn because I find it incredibly evocative.
It's a fairly obscure sci-fi novel, which possibly no one else on here has read. I certainly could be wrong about.
It's a cold war sci-fi/horror novel in which a Soviet experiment wrong and deadly spores are released, which turn human beings into walking fungi.
When one of the fungi monsters is close they smell like new mown hay.
Back to lurking.
Posted by: N.L. Urker, there are chickens in my trench at August 07, 2022 11:59 AM (eGTCV)
Comment: I had never heard of John Blackburn until now. After looking him up on Wikipedia, I might have to try some of his novels someday. They sound right up my alley. A mix of horror, supernatural, and suspense, along with a touch of science fiction. A Scent of New-Mown Hay was adapted into a BBC radio production in 1969. I love the idea of walking, fungi. There is a trope around this idea: The Worm That Walks.
More Moron-recommended reading material can be found HERE! (347 Moron-recommended books so far!)
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WHAT I'VE BEEN READING THIS PAST WEEK:
On the Steel Breeze by Alistair Reynolds -- Pretty decent "hard" science fiction (no FTL drives) about some horrible conspiracy involving AIs gone rogue...Haven't had much time to read anything else. It's been a weird week...
That's about all I have for this week. Thank you for all of your kind words regarding my Sunday Morning Book Thread. This is a very special place. You are very special people (in all the best ways!). The kindness, generosity, and wisdom of the Moron Horde knows no bounds. Let's keep reading!
If you have any suggestions for improvement, reading recommendations, or writing projects that you'd like to see on the Sunday Morning Book Thread, you can send them to perfessor dot squirrel at-sign gmail dot com. Your feedback is always appreciated! You can also take a virtual tour of OUR library at libib.com/u/perfessorsquirrel. Since I added sections for AoSHQ, I now consider it OUR library, rather than my own personal fiefdom...
Okay, so the hardware in the two tests reported here is sold by google - the Pixel 4a and Pixel 5 - but the software is two versions of Android - /e/OS and GrapheneOS - stripped of all the Google-specific software and tracking.
You can still install the Play Store and install all your usual apps, and they will (mostly) work the same as before. The one thing highlighted here is that you will lose Google's custom camera app - and this results in a marked drop in photo quality because the software is doing most of the magic there.
But if you want out of the Google trap without losing compatibility entirely, either of these might be a viable option.
AMD launches Ryzen 7000 and the matching Socket AM5 motherboards on September 15, and the motherboard makers have gone beyond leaks to official previews of the hardware.
The new boards will bring a few new features: PCIe 5 for double the I/O bandwidth, DDR5 for about 60% more memory bandwidth, and USB 4 for double the bandwidth there if and when 40Gbps USB devices show up.
10Gb Ethernet also seems to be more common than on the last generation, which is welcome given the paucity of PCIe slots these days.
These will offer a lot more compute power than the current generation - two to three times at the high end, but it remains to be seen what that translates to in terms of graphics performance and power consumption. I suspect you'll get something like a 50% improvement at the same MSRP and TDP, with the high-end cards being way out there on both numbers.
A pastor was 10-minutes into his sermon when he noticed his young son in the balcony with a pea-shooter.
He was leaning over the "balcony"—aiming, and popping people in the head.
As the pastor prepared to deliver a very public scolding of his boy – the 7 year-old son hollered out, “You keep preaching Dad, and I’ll keep’em awake! (H/T Isophorone Blog)
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Yes indeed folks, it is the Overnight Open Thread, but it's Saturday night as well. So let's try and have some fun, okie dokie?
Family Spends 48 Hours in the Wild Due to Google Maps, It Should Be a Lesson for Everyone
Google Maps is an incredible piece of software that can make the experience behind the wheel a lot safer and more convenient. But a family of four from Australia learned the hard way that the navigation offered by Google Maps isn’t always flawless.
The bright yellow car pulled into a Wilmington parking lot after 1 a.m., the half-dozen speakers mounted to its roof blaring, according to town police. The car’s license plate, from New Hampshire, read “STATICK.” In three separate towns, residents phoned the police with noise complaints.
It was roughly 1:30 a.m. Monday when Wilmington Police responded to the lot, in the area of Woburn Street and Eames Street, after multiple calls from local residents. Officers found a 22-year-old New Hampshire man, his sun-yellow vehicle and six “full sized” speakers affixed to its roof, they said.
That means a Columbia law student could spend more than $330,000 to complete their three-year degree.
“It’s a pretty crazy large number,” said University of Iowa law professor Derek Muller. “People will point out, ‘Well, there are scholarships.’ But not everyone gets very big scholarships, and very few get anything for cost of living.”
Muller sparked a discussion about the price of attending Columbia and its peer schools this week when he tweeted about the latest cost estimates. New York University School of Law’s estimated annual cost is $109,290; both Harvard and Stanford come in at $107,000; the University of Chicago’s estimate is roughly $106,000; and Georgetown Law's is $103,400 per year.
There are so many ways you can put your microwave to good use, even if you don’t use your device very much. Whether it’s juicing a lemon or reusing stamps, your microwave can do all kinds of cool things that you may have never realized.
Here are 10 things you never knew your microwave could do:
On this day: 13 Aug 2021
US singer, songwriter Nanci Griffith died at the age of 68. In 1994 she won a Grammy Award for the album Other Voices, Other Rooms as well asd recording duets with many artists, among them Emmylou Harris, John Prine, Don McLean, Jimmy Buffett, Adam Duritz (singer of Counting Crows), Darius Rucker (lead singer of Hootie & the Blowfish) and Willie Nelson. via thisdayinmusic.com
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Born on this day: 13 Aug 1951
Dan Fogelberg, US singer songwriter, (1979 album 'Phoenix'). Worked with Joe Walsh, Jackson Browne, Randy Newman. Fogelberg died on 16th Dec 2007 at his home in Maine at the age of 56 of prostate cancer. via thisdayinmusic.com
A burglar got a bit more than he bargained for after a skunk sprayed him while he was being arrested.
Grant Simonson, 28, was detained last Thursday morning after he was caught rifling through a church’s audio equipment in Washington state.
Deputies from the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office arrived on the scene just after 3am after a caller notified them that they could see someone with a mask and a flashlight in the church on its surveillance feed.
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Tonight's Feel Good Story of The Day
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Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by Corrections. (H/T Robert)
Notice: Posted with permission by the custodial staff on duty at the Ace Media Empire Headquarters. No one is at the AceCorp, LLC offices.
Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 8/13/2022 [TheJamesMadison]
—Open Blogger
Wes Craven
This is the first time I've gone through the body of work of a filmmaker and simply regretted the decision. After having done several foreign filmmakers in a row (Kurosawa, Tati, Melville, and Kobayashi), I decided to search out a more modern, American filmmaker with name recognition, and I quickly settled on Wes Craven. I'd known Craven's name for a long time, his work on such big-name horror movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream was simply far too big to ignore or miss.
He certainly has some good films to his name. The aforementioned pair of horror films are joined by The Serpent and the Rainbow, New Nightmare, and Red Eye as his collection of solidly good films. I genuinely enjoy these five. However, he made twenty-four films (included a handful of television movies), and the rest are a mixture of mediocre and outright bad films. The clear majority of his work is just simply not good at all.
As I was getting towards the end of his body of work, the one thing that popped up most prominently was the idea of authorship. Most of his best films he did not write, and most of his worst films were projects where he has the sole writing credit. That really colored my view of him as a storyteller. Of his five films I like best, three (Scream, The Serpent and the Rainbow, and Red Eye) were written by others while the other two (the pair of Nightmare on Elm Street films he directed) were his. Of the six I liked least, he wrote five of them (The Hills Have Eyes Part 2, Shocker, My Soul to Take, Swamp Thing, and Night Visions) while only one (Summer of Fear) was written by someone else.
Craven himself was most fully responsible for the vast majority of his worst films, and his best films were mostly written by other people. Not every great director needs to be a writer as well (Scorsese has writing credits on only five of his films while Spielberg has it on only two of his), but the preponderance of Craven's name on the screenplays of so many of his bad films and on so relatively few of his good ones told me something. It told me that he was simply not very good at telling stories in a cinematic medium.
Craven grew up in Ohio in a Baptist family that did not allow him to see movies. He saw his first movie when he went to Wheaton College as a psychology student. He eventually found his way into the film industry through one of the nastiest little slivers of the industry on the unclear border between exploitation and pornography in New England. His first directorial effort was the exploitation film The Last House on the Left, a project that only got off the ground because his producer friend Sean Cunningham got offered $90,000 to make a horror film.
The one other director I kept thinking of while going through Craven's work, especially his early work, was John Carpenter. They both came to prominence around the same time in the same genre, but the major difference was that Carpenter had a formal education in film while Craven never even had an informal one by growing up with movies. Carpenter's influences were old-Hollywood, especially Howard Hawks, while Craven tried to amalgamate his education in the classics (he was a humanities professor for a brief time before he went into film) with his education in the underground of cinema and a smattering of foreign films that seemed to have taught him no great lessons. The one thing he really learned was to shock.
And his early work is where this uncomfortable marriage of classical education and poor cinema training is the most evident. The Last House on the Left is an Americanized version of The Virgin Spring (a Swedish folktale that Ingmar Bergman turned into a film in the 50s). There's a real effort to find shock here, and the European influence is strong. The film doesn't work (characterization is thin, there's a lot of misplaced and poorly executed comedy, and there's a surprising focus on creating a Home Alone-type situation at the end that doesn't pay off very well), but there's obviously something going on. I was actually quite hopeful.
Horror
I think the one thing to remember most clearly about Wes Craven is something seemingly antithetical to his body of work: he never wanted to make horror films. He took the opportunity to direct The Last House on the Left because it was his first offer to direct a film, and he was going to start his career. He couldn't make another film for five years because he didn't want to make another horror film, and when he moved to Los Angeles, all he got was offers for new horror films. Borderline starving, he and Cunningham eventually came up with The Hills Have Eyes to feed themselves.
What followed was four horror films (Summer of Fear, Deadly Blessing, Swamp Thing, and Invitation to Hell, half of which were made for television), none of which are particularly good, are mostly boring, but do have some moments here and there. They feel like a young filmmaker simply lost. And then he read a pair of articles in the LA newspapers about young people being terrified of going to sleep, eventually falling asleep, and then dying while they slept for no discernable reason. This gave him the germ of an idea for A Nightmare on Elm Street.
I said it a lot while I was going through his work, but Wes Craven desperately needed a writing partner, and ground zero of that argument in my mind is A Nightmare on Elm Street. It is his best film. It taps into something primal about how we are completely vulnerable while we sleep. However, it's really poorly structured with its best kill happening at the twenty-minute mark and there being virtually no sense of escalation. He would eventually write an early draft of the third film, a draft that would get massaged by Frank Darabont, and I imagine Darabont working on the first film's script right before filming. The structure would suddenly be there and more of the film's potential would get mined.
I don't want to undersell how much I enjoy the film. It's really quite good, and the visuals are unparalleled in the entire franchise. However, it really needed a rewrite from someone who understood cinematic storytelling better than Craven.
Trapped
It should not be forgotten that Craven did not want to make horror films, even after his first film typecast him as a horror filmmaker and A Nightmare on Elm Street cemented him there. A couple of years later, he went on to adapt a novel about a teenaged boy who turns his dead potential girlfriend into a robot titled Deadly Friend. There was a test screening that went badly because the audience was filled with Craven fans. The film was a gentle comedy about young people. It wasn't the scare-fest that Craven fans wanted, so the studio demanded reshoots to include dreams and bloody violence.
His second-best film, The Serpent and the Rainbow, was an effort to move into more respectable territory, working from a script by Richard Maxwell adapted from a non-fiction work by Wade Davis. It combined the dreamlike nature of A Nightmare on Elm Street with something real into something almost Dario Argento-like. It's the last time Craven felt like he was advancing as an artist in his career, and he made movies for almost twenty more years.
The centerpiece of my overall argument that Craven was a bad filmmaker and storyteller is Shocker. This film, made the year after The Serpent and the Rainbow, was conceived in no small part because of the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street. The earlier film had become a franchise, earning New Line a lot of money, and Craven had little to do with it, especially financially. So, he set out to create a new horror franchise that he owned completely. Are you familiar with all the Shocker sequels? No? That's a surprise considering that there are...exactly none. It never even inspired straight to video sequels like Darkman did and several others.
Shocker is essentially a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and it feels like it was written by someone who had no idea what made A Nightmare on Elm Street special. Craven wrote them both, by the way. The main antagonist, played by Mitch Pileggi, snarls and has no wit. The storytelling is confused, at best, with unnecessary use of dreams to advance the plot. The rules of the horror make absolutely no sense whatsoever with constantly changing powers, including electricity possessing people? It is a disaster of a film.
Chasing Success
Shocker was the moment it became obvious that Craven was simply chasing financial success. He tried to start more than one television show (including the backdoor television pilot in the form of a television movie Night Visions), directed the seventh Nightmare on Elm Street film, and even made an Eddie Murphy horror comedy (Vampire in Brooklyn).
It was 1995, and he was thinking of putting horror behind him completely. Remember, he never wanted to be a horror filmmaker. There was a script floating around Hollywood getting some attention with the early title Scary Movie. Craven was wondering if he should take it or not when, at a horror convention, a young fan told him he hoped Craven would make another horror film again. Craven decided then and there to take this script, now called Scream, as his next project, and the rest is history.
The problem I have with it isn't about the film itself (I like the first Scream quite a bit, actually), it's that it doesn't feel like a Wes Craven film. It feels like a Kevin Williamson film. Williamson was the writer, and, having seen everything he wrote for Craven and knowing a bit about his other work (mostly television), it's obvious that Craven essentially just didn't screw up Williamson's script. He filmed it workmanlike fashion, like a television director following orders from an executive producer and showrunner. Craven made seven more films in his career, and aside from Music of the Heart (a Meryl Streep nominated Oscar bait bit of nothing) and the perfectly competent thriller Red Eye, literally everything else is an effort to recreate Scream.
The three Scream sequels he made are obvious, but both Cursed (also scripted by Williamson) and My Soul to Take (which Craven scripted himself) feel like desperate efforts to recapture the singular magic of the slasher whodunit that started the whole craze of the late 90s.
Craven spent so much time trying to recreate past successes that he eliminated his own artistic voice. The interesting, if unsuccessful, artist who had found the way to shock audiences in The Last House on the Left had become a glorified television director.
Master of Horror?
Hardly.
A Nightmare on Elm Street tapped into something genuine, but Scream was mostly a Kevin Williamson film.
The rest of his horror output is a mixture of terrible television work (Night Visions feels like a parody of a cop drama), terribly derivative of his own work (Shocker), or heavily compromised (Deadly Friend and Vampire in Brooklyn in particular). His efforts to move firmly outside of horror were largely unremarkable, especially his Oscar bait Music of the Heart.
The simple fact of the matter is that Craven vastly overestimate his ability to tell stories through film. He desperately needed a writing partner. Billy Wilder used I.A.L. Diamond and Charles Brackett. Akira Kurosawa used Hideo Oguni. Craven could have really used someone like Frank Darabont who wrote the final draft of the third Nightmare on Elm Street film, someone who understood storytelling and could convert Craven's horror ideas into more cohesive narratives.
Instead, he thought he could do it himself, and it makes me feel bad about it all. I've watched a few interviews with the man, and he seemed like a wonderful guy. Soft-spoken, warm, and intelligent, Wes Craven seemed like a very nice person. I just wish he had understood the mechanics of cinematic storytelling better.
Prey (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "This is one of those movies that I want to like more than I actually do." [HULU]
Red Eye (Rating 3/4) Full Review "This is a short, simple film without a whole lot to say. It's a solidly entertaining thriller, and it could have been a window to Wes Craven finding a new direction for the final stage of his career. That's not where he went, though." [HBO Max]
Scream 4 (Rating 1/4) Full Review "It's really just Williamson's script, warts and all, brought to the screen. Craven was a mediocre filmmaker who got lucky a couple of times, pigeonholed into a genre that he wanted to exploit when he was in it but didn't have the skill to actually mine on his own." [Library]
Scream (2022) (Rating 2/4) Full Review "It breaks no ground and follows the formula pretty closely, but it mostly entertains as it goes. It's alright." [Library]
Mauvaise Graine (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "he light tone through most of the film carries it a lot, and the ending holds a surprisingly firm grasp of competing emotions. Wilder still had a lot to learn, but he wasn't starting from nothing when he directed his first film. He'd definitely learned something writing at Ufa." [Online...somewhere]
Destiny (Rating 4/4) Full Review "This is still firmly a melodrama, but the tackling of the complex storytelling structure along with the strong emphasis on well-executed fantastical visuals, elevates it above the earlier melodramas or adventures like Four around the Woman or The Spiders films. " [Personal Collection]
Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge (Rating 4/4) Full Review "Lang's silent career is dominated by Metropolis, a science fiction film of unquestionable influence, but I think it may be the second part of Die Nibelungen that is his greatest silent triumph. The physical production is impressive, and the emotional impact is strong. This is great. " [Personal Collection]
Metropolis (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's a marvelous spectacle that appeals to the heart in the most open of ways. Buoyed by a set of very good performances, especially from Helm, it's a grand entertainment. " [Personal Collection]
Spies (Rating 2/4) Full Review "However, as a whole, it's just something I can't really get into. It's something of a mess of a film, and it feels like a real artistic stumble from such a promising director of sensationalist spectacle. " [Personal Collection]
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.
Greetings, all. Time once again to head to the garage, basement, shop, studio, craft room or wherever else you go to make a mess and lose yourself in something creative.
Please note this is not an open thread, so please refrain from things political. Lord knows we have lots of opportunities for that. Okay, here we go.
I've featured Samy from Germany before and once again he makes a futuristic shadowbox diorama from just basic materials like card, styrofoam and Sculpey.
Continuing in the futuristic/dystopian theme, here's an amazingly creative transformation of a cheap action figure into a cool alien miner.
Danish woodworker Jesper makes a really nice table from reclaimed pallet wood. Pallets intrigue me as a source of raw material but it is a lot of work to break down and prepare. Still, I love the wax finish and want to try that out one day.
Jimmy DiResta is the doyen of the YouTube maker movement. He's skilled in virtually any material. Here, he shows off his talents on the sewing machine and walks you through making a heavy duty tool bag.
Peter Lloyd Lee is a model railroad custom builder, and he's also damned good at translating his customers' wishes into realize-able track plans. Here, he walks you through the process.
At the risk of stepping on KT's gardening toes, here's something different to try; aquaponics. Raising fish and plants both as food as well as decorative purposes. Nice beginner's overview.
Another great restoration, this time of an antique coffee mil by TRG.
Ben Uyeda is a talented designer and makes some unique pieces from materials like steel, plywood and concrete. Here's a space saving desk from steel and wood that folds out of the way when not in use.
Do these directions check out? Have you had any experiences with skunk sprays?
What about tomato juice?
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Do these characterizations seem about right?
HOW MANY DOGS DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A LIGHTBULB?
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Meet The PetMorons
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Hello,
Long time lurker, very very occasional poster Pilum57. This is Wessex. His original family returned him after only 4 or 5 months as he had taken to sleeping on top of open doors, shredding curtains, and constantly testing if gravity was only a local phenomenon with full glasses of any given beverage. A very rambunctious ginger. Upon first meeting him he strolled into the room and immediately jumped from the floor to my shoulder in a single bound and took up permanent residence. He clearly knew I was his person from the moment he saw me. Wessex died last August 13th and as this year, August 13th falls on a Saturday, I thought the Pet Thread would be a great memorial for him. He was a fantastic, wildly entertaining, and very sweet cat.
Wessex looks very sweet, with loads of personality. Glad we could do a special anniversary memorial today.
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From a man with no nic:
Max the Anatolian
Looks like a great dog!
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I am long time lurker, SteveF and I finally decided to share photos of my buddy Dudley. He is an Australian Shepard and he turned 16 this year. We have had him for 14 of those years. He is very chill in his old age and has always been super friendly. We love the pet thread and check it every week, keep up the good work. In one photo he is trying his new winter coat and in the other he is trying his favorite chair.
Looks like a different dog in his winter duds!
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Howdy - long time lurker Greywolf here - have sent pet pics in the past (Magnum and Samson the wonder-Collies) and some kittehs.
Wanted to contribute some more - we currently have 5 cats and 2 dogs (as well as one fish and 7 chickens). Being 55 years of age and married for 32 years but not having kids means having LOTS of pets.
I present to you Empress Anastasia - aka Anna Banana - aka Nanner. - A wonderful young woman rescued this old gal from an Italian restaurant's garbage dumpster - she had either been dumped there or had escaped/ran away from her owners and was barely surviving on leftover dumped Italian food. One of her eyes was almost gone and her other eye was not in great shape, either. But she kept begging and crying to anyone who came to the restaurant to save her. We initially decided to foster her (we had previously adopted a cat from this lady) but we fell in love with Ana as she was so sweet and no one seemed to want to adopt an older, special needs cat. She ended up losing one eye but the other is pretty good. She doesn't like our other cats (we assume she was attacked by the other strays in the colony at the Italian restaurant) but is cool with the Collies, and she just loves us.
I highly encourage everyone out there, if you can, to give these older, special case cats and dogs a chance. They have so much love to give, are pretty easy to handle, and they deserve a second chance.
You are treating her like an empress!
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This is Dunson the yellow lab.
I like big sticks and I can not lie
You other doggies can't deny
That when a lappy walks in with an itty bitty stick
And a skinny thing in your face
You get sprung, want to pull up tough
'Cause you notice that twig was stuffed
Deep in the purse she's wearing
I'm hooked and I can't stop staring
I like 'em round and big
And when he's throwin' a gig
I just can't help myself, I'm actin' like an animal
Now here's my scandal
I want to get you home
And ugh, double-up, ugh, ugh
I ain't talkin' bout Playdog
'Cause silicone parts are made for toys
I want 'em real, thick and juicy
So find that juicy double
Dunson's in trouble
Beggin' for a piece of that bubble
Pike Place Pete
We love dog poetry at the Pet Thread!
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If you would like to send pet and/or animal stories, links, etc. for the Ace of Spades Pet Thread, the address is:
petmorons at protonmail dot com
Remember to include the nic or name by which you wish to be known at AoSHQ, or let us know if you want to remain a lurker.
Until next Saturday, have a great week!
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If you start feeling nostalgic, here a link to last week's Pet Thread, the Ace of Spades Pet Thread, August 6. Some special PetMoron stories and photos there.
I closed the comments on this post so you wouldn't get banned for commenting on a week-old post, but don't try it anyway.
That is not a stove, yet. It is a pile of salvaged pavers that I plan to turn into a stove and a walkway at some point.
However it is just the right height to hold my propane cooker.
Nice set-up, and fine-looking cherries!
Ah, Nature
From Grimmy:
The last week has been an adventure with pests at Chez Grimmy,
especially with my fruit trees! The continuing issue has been Japanese beetles, which chew on everything. The last couple years, we used the little bait bags you
can hang from trees to catch them, but they fill up quickly, and get
gross. This year, my wife wanted to modify them so they're mounted
into 5 gallon buckets with soapy water. It works well, but they STILL
get gross quickly, as the soupy carpet of beetles starts to rot, and
overnight, animals (racoons and opposums, I assume) love to knock the
plastic bait top off (or, worse, into) the bucket.
Interesting beetles
(the American Carrion Beetle and 4-spot sap beetle) like to hang
around the buckets, walking along the floating corpses and eating the
bodies.
Delightful!
Chipmunks have been chewing my asparagus down, decapitating the new sprouts, and not even having the decency to eat it...they just leave
the stalks laying there! Well, after seeing them darting out from
under my back steps, I've caught 5 of the little buggers with peanut
butter and sunflower seeds in a Havahart trap (a compromise with my
animal loving tween daughter), and dumped them at a local park. There
are still many more to go.
So cute, so destructive!
Finally, I just noticed a few spots of what I assume is cedar-quince
rust on my quince tree! I have 4 total, and it can also spread to my
medlar trees and aronia bushes! Thankfully, I do have my first (and
only) quince fruit this year, so it'll be interesting to see it develop.
This little guy came in the kitchen on a plant. Mrs. E saved him from Madison The Cat.
Building in 2014, 6 beds 3' wide average /5' long.
That is some garden construction! The long bed is 25 feet.
Here's something exotic:
Looooooong time and frequent lurker, mainly because I check AoS on my ipad and for some reason, commenting is hinky (not usually possible) via iPad. On the rare occasions I can get a comment thru, it's as "Reine'.
At any rate: This is curcuma, a type of ginger plant. If you look closely, you can see that there are purple flowers growing out of the pink flowers! These blooms last and last. Second photo- same as the first, I just did some sort of filter and liked the way it looked - the flowers seem to pop, and it's easier to see the small purple flowers.
Lovely!
Hope everyone has a nice weekend.
If you would like to send photos, stories, links, etc. for the Saturday Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, the address is:
ktinthegarden at g mail dot com
Remember to include the nic or name by which you wish to be known at AoSHQ, or let us know if you want to remain a lurker.
We have seen a lot of stories lately about how our institutions are being taken over by radical ideologies. Today, a few updates, mostly concerning medicine and education. Nurture your personal relationships with people you trust, because as Russell Brand has said, the big institutions (in particular) are not your friends.
Outrages in Medicine
American Academy of Pediatrics
Last week, we reprised Muldoon's piece on the AAP, reviewed criticisms of a bogus paper in their flagship journal and discussed their refusal to allow pediatricians to comment on their position statement concerning care of children and adolescents with gender dysphoria, etc. in What is happening to the The American Academy of Pediatrics?
Update:
There are more comments on the bogus study above, which tried to discredit Abigail Shrier's work and the prior findings of other researchers. The lead author of the bogus paper is also a leading advocate of the idea that if kids who say they are transgender are not affirmed in their belief, they will commit suicide.
And via J.J. Sefton's Morning Report yesterday, physicians are getting around the AAP's refusal to allow commentary on their position statement on this issue during the designated comment period. Physicians are adding their commentary to the position statement on another issue. Heh.
And pediatricians are also "privately slamming" the Academy. Rumble, rumble, rumble.
This is the worst thing I've seen in this madness, and I've seen a lot of terrible things.
Pass a federal law allowing people to sue their doctors and the hospitals at which they were performed for "gender affirming surgeries" through age 40:
Example of outrages are included, along with a mention of Brett Kavanaugh's would-be assassin.
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Update:
Now let's check in with Pittsburgh:
The Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh has been promoting "puberty blockers" for children who say "I'm not really sure if I feel comfortable in my body or what gender I truly identify with." pic.twitter.com/JtuqjVVhAO
Do these people know that the FDA just admitted that these drugs can make kids' brains swell and lead to permanent vision loss? Among all their other side effects???? Kids haven't decided on a gender yet? Maybe that's a clue that they really don't need the lifelong problems of a medical transition.
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Update 2:
Ace's piece also made a brief mention of the decision by NHS England to shut down Tavistock, their only children's gender clinic. Ace may be interested in the details of the first impending class-action suit against the clinic. Ironic that this clinic was involved in anti-gay "conversion therapy".
Staff at the Tavistock used to joke that soon there would be no gay people left.
But it turns out that trying to fix gay and gender non-conforming kids isnt all that funny after all https://t.co/USQqNNzJoH
Think the prospect of lawsuits will deter the California Refuge Law for kids seeking transgender treatment (even without parental permission)?
Wonder if the California legislature is aware of the anti-gay "conversion therapy" issue at Tavistock? There was a big crisis over "conversion therapy" in the California legislature not long ago. In a different context. There were questions like "Should bookstores be allowed to sell Bibles?"
Well, then, should schools be allowed to carry books that tell gay kids and tomboys that they are transgender? Should counselors and physicians be encouraged to continue in the current "if you are uncomfortable about anything related to your body or self-image you are transgender" approach?
I have lost my reference, but I read today that all the books on the California reading list are from 2016 and later, while the Florida list contains many classics. Contrast!
Throwing out the classics in California schools also seems to me to qualify as a form of "book burning".
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And individual districts can get in on the act, too: Los Angeles Unified School District adopts radical 'trans-affirming' programming and instructs teachers to work toward 'the breakdown of the gender binary.' By Chris Rufo.
Los Angeles Unified School District has adopted a radical gender-theory curriculum encouraging teachers to work toward the "breakdown of the gender binary," to experiment with gender pronouns such as "they," "ze," and "tree," and to adopt "trans-affirming" programming to make their classrooms "queer all school year."
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Some deep academic thinking via the UK (may have originated in the USA):
It's a documented fact that by the age of 2 a child has learned:
- Basic shapes. - Rudimentary concept of time. - Decisive signals (nod head for 'yes' etc) - That dominant cisnegative tropes can lead to androgynous social-collectivism, further destabilizing toxic binary ideals. pic.twitter.com/yZwzCrvSsf
Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.
--
Thomas Sowell
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Equity is very important in schools now. You can see a few results of this emphasis already:
The consequence of a political ideology that denies the obvious reality of human variation is either perpetual discontent or well-intentioned but ineffectual attempts to create equality of outcome whose failures inspire more and more coercion and more and more bitterness.
Does anybody *really* believe that humans have equal capacity? Does anybody really believe that I'm not Barry Sanders because of my environment? Or that Joe Biden is not a quantum physicist because he didn't read enough as a child? I doubt it, but I am not longer sure.
But if you don't say you believe it, you may be banned from teaching . . . .
Check the link. The Kamala quote above is real.
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Once again,
Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.
--
Thomas Sowell
A little coffee with one's cream? Unlike my soul, black and bitter.
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Good morning Moron Horde. Just a couple of rules before the Prayer Revival.
1) Opine and/or bloviate away in this open thread.
2) Be nice to one another including the dastardly swamp critters.
3) For heaven's sake, no running with sharp objects.
4) Enjoy your weekend, or don't enjoy it. It's all up to you.
Please submit any prayer requests to me, “Annie’s Stew” at apaslo atsign hotmail dot com. Prayer requests are generally removed after four weeks unless we receive an update.
Prayer Requests:
5/28 – FortWorthMike requests prayers for his grandniece, Chloe, and her family, to find a kidney to transplant. Chloe is a toddler who has been on this prayer list before, and it has helped her. She was born with bad kidneys and had them removed soon after birth. She’s had multiple health issues, and is now getting daily dialysis at home. Her mother’s kidneys aren’t a match, and her father’s are a match, but are too large for her little body. Thanks for your prayers!
7/23 Update – Little Chloe is having a lot of bladder infections, as the medical team works to stretch her bladder (in preparation for receiving a kidney). There have been so many infections that her bladder may need to be removed. Please keep praying: for a kidney match, for her health, and for her worried family.
7/8 – TecumsehTea asks for prayers for her dearest friend, who came down with Covid and is very ill. She is almost 70 and severely immunocompromised. She did not vax and has made it thus far, but she traveled recently. She is taking ivermectin. The Lord holds her in His hand, and He’s in charge, but it doesn’t hurt to ask Him for healing.
7/19 Update – The friend is slowly improving with ivermectin. Her lungs remain clear, but she is still weak, in pain, and has headaches and fatigue and nausea. Even the meds for nausea made her gag and vomit! Thank you for your prayers.
8/4 Update – TecumsehTea sends many thanks for the prayers. Her friend made if through covid. It was rough, but thank God for ivermectin and answered prayers. She is still fatigued and weak but recovering.
7/15 – Chi-Town Jerry requests prayers for his wife, who is in the hospital again with AFIB. Although she got back to regular rhythm in the ER, her kidney numbers concerned them and they are keeping her overnight on IV. Prayers are appreciated.
7/16 – ellipse (…) asked for prayers for a work friend (of 18 years) and fantastic young lady named Lauren, who has been sick and away from work for 3 months.
8/20 Update – Lauren is back at work and sounds very good and very upbeat. Thank you for your prayers.
7/18 – Diogenes asks for prayers for his godson, who just lost his 13-year-old son to a seizure/stroke. The boy had autism and began suffering from a series of strokes over the last few weeks.
7/18 – jewells45 could use some prayers, as she has been sick. Her daughter is in pain and struggling, too, after injuring her leg.
7/18 – Emmie asked for prayers for God’s guidance and His will do be done regarding the sale of their house.
7/28 Update – The potential buyer decided it wouldn’t work for them. The house is officially listed (in a semi-rural area of Colorado). She would appreciate prayer that God would bring together the property and the people who can make good use of it.
7/19 – Fenelon Spoke asked for prayers as she attended the local Board of Education meeting, about the grooming of kids, transgenders, etc. The BOE is paying a group of LGBT teens to tell their stories, and the teacher’s union has had a drag queen show. Please pray for protection for the moms and dads defending their kids.
7/21 – Blanco asked for prayers for the family of former co-blogger Dave in Texas, who passed away recently.
7/23 – DM asks for prayers for his marriage. His wife of 36 years file for divorce.
7/23 – Count de Monet asked for prayers for his friend Cheryl, as she packs up and moves from Texas to Tennessee. Prayers for a smooth closing and safe travels are appreciated.
8/6 Update – Cheryl is busy unpacking at her new place in Tennessee. The closing went smoothly.
7/24 – t_bodie asked for prayers for his son’s girlfriend, who is in the ICU with a failing liver. It came on suddenly and caught everyone by surprise. Please lift K. up for healing and T. for strength.
8/6 Update – K is out of the hospital and still recuperating. She has some lifestyle work to do.
7/26 – N.L.Urker needs a job badly, and prayers are appreciated.
7/26 – Nurse Ratched asked for prayers for Ann, who had a fall recently and is in ICU. She is recovering but has a long row to hoe.
8/1 Update – Rehab is on hold until she is more stable. Her AFIB with high heart rate and significant edema have been way too stubborn, plus they found another infection. Thanks for the continued prayers!
7/26 – Timon asked for prayers. His sister’s son, age 19, was killed in a multi-vehicle accident near Louisville. He was in the Army and stationed at Fort Knox. He was heading home to celebrate his 1 year anniversary in the Army.
7/26 – Browndog requested prayers as a longtime friend of his was taken off life support after a massive heart attack last Friday. He never recovered consciousness. Unfortunately, he was vaxxed to the max.
7/26 – Zod could use some prayers as he recovers, apparently cleared of cancer.
7/28 – Bitter Clinger would like prayers for his mother, who is having breast cancer surgery today.
7/30 Update – Mom came through surgery fine. They are waiting for the lymph node testing results.
7/28 – Jewells45 sends prayers of thanksgiving that their friend is doing well, after he had a heart attack while in recovery after surgery. There was 100% blockage in one of his arteries, and the medical team quickly took care of that.
7/30 Update – Jewells45 is “finally back to my normal goofy self”, and her daughter is healing, but it’s going slowly.
7/30 – Moki asks for prayers. Her cancer surgery has been postponed for 4 months so she can go through a series of extremely invasive and even 1 dangerous test, to prove that she will wake up from anesthesia. If she refuses the tests, they refuse to perform the cancer surgery. Her cancer is renal cell carcinoma, localized to one kidney at this time.
7/30 – Nova Local found our she has the C17 deletion form of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, about 30 years earlier than people normally get it. While it’s not curable, it could be a lot worse.
7/30 – Tonypete asked for prayers for his neighbor Karen. She is in her late 80s, and fell at home recently and gashed her head and broke her hip. She has Alzheimer’s and cancer. Her cancer is under control, but will probably remain in a nursing care unit until the end. Her loving husband simply can’t care for her at home anymore. He also asked for prayers for his granddaughters: C is 8 and has a broken foot. No one knows how this happened(!?) E is 13 and completely out of control on social media. The girls have an unfit, alcoholic mother and an inattentive father. Tonypete and his wife continue to try and gain custody, but family court is not on their side. Additionally, a friend named Marsha recently discovered she has liver and pancreatic cancer, and her prognosis is poor.
8/2 – Hadrian the Seventh asked for prayers. He got the results of his heart exam, and his heart is fine, but they noticed some slight enlargement of the aorta. He has to go back for a CAT scan to find out what it looks like behind his heart, whether it’s still enlarged or not.
8/3 – Fenelon Spoke requests prayers for healing for a congregation member named Dorian, who has a bad case of Covid. Thanks so much!
8/4 – Defenestratus asks for prayers for his young cousin, who was rushed to the hospital for another case of myocarditis. It’s his second episode since he got the vaccine (after having had Covid). He’s incredibly smart, athletic, driven, as well as humble and kind.
8/9 – Fenelon Spoke asks for prayers for her church organist, Jessie, who is having pain and intestinal issues. Thanks so much!
8/10 – Aetius451AD would appreciate prayers for her aunt, who is going in for surgery for cancer. They think it has not spread and they can remove it all without chemo.
For submission guidelines and other relevant info, please contact Annie's Stew, who is managing the prayer list. You can contact her at apaslo at-sign hotmail dot com. If you see a prayer request posted in a thread comment, feel free to copy and paste it and e-mail it to Annie's Stew. She tries to keep up with the requests in the threads, but she's not here all of the time, so she may not see it unless you e-mail it to her. Please note: Prayer requests are generally removed after four weeks or so unless we receive an update.
Romans 8:26-27
26 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. 27 And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.
The Galaxy Z Fold 4 is here, and it's still an outrageously expensive niche product. Which wouldn't matter so much if there were any modern and affordable small Android tablets. Any. Even one.
Fucking Limey. Your opinion hasn't mattered to us for coming up on 250 years. Oh, and by the way, how many tens of thousands of your little girls get raped by "Asians" every year, huh? Think they might like to have a gun? Or their fathers (if they have any)? FUCK OFF! pic.twitter.com/5mjGNG7c4m
This may not be real. I dunno why, it's a nifty image. Silo, hay rolls, what else invokes Iowa in your mind? Tell me about the state fairs in your area. We've got the big one in Dallas starting Sept 30, and the “East Texas state fair” here in Tyler starting on Sept 23 ( I have GOT to have a talk with the organizers about the meaning of the word “state”). I know we're later than most, but guys, it's HOT down here. End Sept is really nice. If we did it in August like most states, we'd melt.
I'm going to take a moment for a personal note here.
On the left is Little, 3 days after he was born. We are watching the Ravens game together. A young Big is in the background. My tiny wee little (my wife would be screaming right now “Tiny wee little? 9lb, 12oz! Try pushing that out through your dickhole, you son of a bitch!”). On the right is the proof for his senior banner (they hang them outside the stadium on game days), 6'1, 215 lbs. Offensive lineman. I'm not crying, you're crying. No, wait, that is me. Sorry, my bad. First scrimmage of the season is tonight. I couldn't be any prouder if I'd laid an egg.
Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by Canadian girls:
This is a really cute video. Jeffrey was a stray who had a broken jaw and was in generally poor, sickly shape. I know a lot of people don't like to see animals in pain. The video actually wasn't that bad, but I've started the video at 0:53, post his jaw surgery, so you can skip that.
While his jaw heals perfectly, it does heal a little off-kilter, which gives him the cutest little crooked smile.
General Michael Hayden, Former Head of the CIA, Deranged Coup Plotter, and Signatory of Bogus "Hunter Biden Laptop Is Russian Disinformation" Letter, Calls for Hanging Former President Trump
—Ace
Now don't any of you call for the hanging of Michael Hayden. Remember, he's a member of The Regime, and only members of The Regime are responsible, reasonable, and informed enough to know when they should and should not call for the execution of their political enemies.
You stupid plebes do not know these things, and would just make fools of yourselves if you tried.
And also, it's illegal for you to do so. Only high members of The Regime have full free speech rights. Any sub-persons such as yourselves attempting to exercise free speech rights similar to high members of The Regime will be put on an FBI watch list and subjected to audits from the 87,000 new IRS agents Biden has hired to harass you into compliance.
Political violence is a very serious issue plaguing our nation, and we're only allowed so much of it, and the left has called "dibs" on all of our allotment.
So back the eff off.
I'm not going to ask what the penalty would be for interfering in a political election not once but twice -- he was also a crazed peddler of Russiagate Conspiracy Theories -- because, being a plebian, I cannot possibly grapple with the sort of intricate, elevated "Let's hang our political enemies" political discourse that Regime luminaries such as Michael Hayden dabble so effortlessly in.
By the way, the original tweet, the one Russiagate Promoter/Laptop Denier Michael Hayden endorsed, was from "presidential historian" Michael Beschloss, who is, I read, one of "about a half dozen" academics that our degenerated-brain puppet "president" Biden routinely meets with.
So Biden's historian-advisor is also calling for the execution of Biden's political enemies.
I want to stress, just because you see your Social, Intellectual, and Moral Superiors calling for the hanging of their political enemies does not entitle you Lowly Lessers to do likewise.
Another Regime official, The Fiercely Heterosexual Cory Booker, said the prodigious quantities of masculine testosterone surging through his totally attracted-to-women veins and coursing through them like untamed, completely-straight mustangs makes him want to physically assault Trump, but again, note that he is simply a more entitled member of a more exalted caste than you are, and is allowed to say things like this without being subjected to, say, dawn raids by the FBI searching for anyone who's come into contact with the diary written by Biden's whore daughter ratting on her pedo father for showering with her.
Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi, the Romans say, which means, "What is permitted to the gods (Jovi) is not permitted to the cattle (bovi)." Michael Hayden, Michael Bechloss, and other Regime luminaries are iovi, gods; you are mere bovi, cattle.
Know your place, cattle.
Below: One of the Iovi. Look at him glow with divine magnificence.
After the Human Centipede of Twitter Know-Nothings just kept shitting the words "Release the warrant" into each other's mouths as if this meant anything -- as if the warrant would contain the affidavit supporting the warrant -- we finally got the warrant, and boy oh boy, does it say... nothing.
The warrant says they've come to seize all of his presidential documents.
The warrant is so specific that in line c., it demands... every Presidential record created during Donald Trump's entire term. Every single one.
So yeah, this is a super-specific warrant. Releasing it really cleared matters up.
Is everyone now illuminated? Now that "Trump's bluff has been called"?
"RELEASE THE WARRANT! RELEASE THE WARRANT!"
"FEED!"
Boy, whoever scouted that incredible Young Conservative Talent and brilliant wide-ranging mind we know as Sarah Isgur Flores, man, I'd like to buy you a steak dinner, sir. You really picked out a winner there.
You definitely did not just promote her as a "conservative" because she had ovaries and could say "I like Reagan, eagles, freedom, and trucks" without giggling too much.
Well done, Conservative, Inc. Well done, as usual!
But we did some "outreach" to stupid AWFL suburban Wine Moms who vote with us once every six cycles! I'm so glad we paid Sarah Isgur Flores all these years instead of actual conservatives who could advance actual conservatism.
Kinzinger admits Trump won their feud, at least "in the short term:" "Yeah, he won. In the short term at least," he said. "There's no use in pretending somehow I scored some major victory and saved the party."
He says he voted for Trump in 2020, which is surprising.
Bang bang Zaslav's Silver Hammer came down upon his snout
Bang bang Zaslav's Silver Hammer made'm sorry he whipped it out...
Breaking911
@Breaking911
Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin leaving CNN
From the Bee:
CELEBS * AUG 12, 2022
Jeffrey Toobin Departing CNN To Expose Himself To New Audiences
Our woke military:
@BillyGribbin
From a friend: "I'm about to fail my workplace violence prevention training because the test was designed by high school girls."
@USNavy really striking fear into the hearts of our enemies these days.
Based on the limited context I see, I think the question concerns someone with a crush on another person, who is disappointed that person doesn't share her feelings, so she crumples a photo of that person. The question is, should this crumpling of a photo be reported to the crumpler's supervisor as a possible sign of workplace violence?
He answered "No," because it's not violence and none of his business.
The Navy -- the US Navy! -- says it is violence, and Navy personnel should now rat on each other to their supervisors about such minor matters.
This is the US Navy, again, whose profession is actual violence, now claiming that photo-crumpling is actual violence.
Jesse Kelly linked this, commenting, "We're going to lose a major war."
Oh there's no doubt about that. The only question is, will that lost war completely destroy the US, or just destroy and humiliate the US government, permitting sane citizens to take the country back?
In four days, Liz Cheney will be unemployed.
Just kidding!
From GrandOldMemes on Twitter.
No but seriously, in addition to immediately inking a deal with CNN to provide "expert commentary" except on any of the issues upon which she might disagree with Jake Tapper, she'll immediately be appointed a "Resident Fellow" at AEI lobbying for Google and FaceBook as well as a job with a foreign policy shop in which she'll lobby for a shady foreign country, possibly Ukraine, without ever registering with FARA but that's okay because she's part of The Regime and The Regime is above the law.
AllahPundit will sink into a deep depression but then he'll check the TVGuide and say:
"Oh, there's a good Maddow on tonight on the new 'MSNBClassic' streaming channel I signed for as a lifetime subscriber for the low, low locked-in price of just $40 per month. It's an episode from January 2018 -- Peak Russiagate.
"Sigh. Peak Russiagate -- those were the days, m'boy! Every day the walls were closing in and every night the train was running out of track! We wuz KANGS then, I tell you! Twitter was an Algonquin Round Table of Russiagate Conspiracy Theorists and Dulcet Rachel was our Dorothy Parker!!
"I think this episode is the one where she talks about Trump's secret backdoor server connection to Russia -- everyone knows that Trump is a very tech-savvy operator and often speaks in binary and alphanumeric to throw off the feds -- and she gets so physically excited by the top-notch all-star reporting of the real journalism site Slate I think you can see her spontaneously lactate on camera!!!"
Noted Deranged Russiagate Conspiracy Theorist Jonah Goldberg, who believed every single impossible-to-believe thing his leftwing media palz told him, suddenly discovered a thing called "skepticism" when confronted with Hunter Biden's laptop.
He believed it was Russian disinformation of some kind. At the very least, he believed the laptop had been insinuated into the public view by shady actors, probably by RUSSIAN AGENTS.
When someone pointed out the laptop and simply been abandoned at a computer repair shop and the owner himself had turned it over to the FBI, Jonah demanded, incredulously, "And you believe that? At face value?"
Well:
Jonah, you either have to get smarter, or you have to lose 70 pounds. That's it, that' my ruling. The "Fat and Dumb" thing just isn't working for me any longer, Jonah. This is no longer the Chris Farley Decade, and it hasn't been for about 12 years.
It's just not funny anymore, Jonah. I guess it was kinda funny when you were younger, but you're old now and your skin looks worse and worse and your hair seems to have moved from the city to the outer suburbs -- each neighbor is now quite far away from the next; each hair can have a party without fear of keeping the neighbors up at night -- and now the whole package is just, well, Sad!
Julie Kelly
@julie_kelly2
Don't forget all the "influencers" on the Right who promised Merrick Garland and Lisa Monaco would run the DOJ fairly and impartially should be run out of the business for being wrong....again.
A walk down memory lane -- and a walk into the near future, from Deb Heine:
Deb Heine, Dissident
@NiceDeb
Gird your loins average Republicans. From day 1, the Biden Regime has (like Obama) sought to punish political enemies. Until now, they focused on politically active folks. Now they appear to be about to revive the Obama era abuse of the IRS to go after conservatives. /1.
Remember those bad old days? Between 2009 and 2011, IRS audits against small businesses increased 32%. Among the 100s of businesses raided by the IRS and Department of Justice, using paramilitary, gestapo like tactics, was Mountain Pure Water Bottling & Duncan Outdoors, Inc. /2
Who can forget the raid on Gibson Guitar (located in Tenn.) where armed agents from the Dept. of Fish and Wildlife raided 4 factories, confiscating guitars and sending hundreds of employees home. Gibson was accused of using illegal wood in violation of the outdated Lacey Act. /3
Underreported at the time was the fact that Gibson's chief executive, Henry Juszkiewicz, contributed to GOP politicians. By contrast, the Dem donor CEO of Martin & Co. a another guitar maker, reportedly used the same type of wood but was left alone.
On 01/18/2012, 40-50 heavily armed, hostile gov agents raided Mountain Pure water, scaring the heck out of everyone in the building. The owner said he was cursed at, spat on & bullied in such an egregious fashion, he felt like they were trying to provoke him to react violently./5
The owner, John Stacks said his son, Court Stacks, the General Manager, had a loaded gun pointed to his face. His seven and a half month pregnant wife watched news coverage of the raid at home in horror. She would later lose the baby. /6
Stacks said one of the agents told him, "we're the federal government and we can do anything we want to." This was all over an SBA loan the owner secured through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to recover tornado losses to his home, warehouse, and associated equipment. /7
A documentary called "Rampant Injustice" exposed some of the Obama-era federal abuses of power. The video features a reenactment of the Mountain Pure Water raid. I was told that the misconduct of the agents were even worse than was depicted in the video.
Cable news and talk radio are brimming with political experts -- pollsters, consultants, former politicians, etc. -- who supposedly have keen insight into what will happen in the world of governance. The thing is, when they make predictions on political matters, they're pretty bad at it.
Between the 1980s and early 2000s, Philip E. Tetlock, a Professor of Psychology at Penn focused on politics and decision-making, conducted a long-term study in which he recruited 284 people whose professions included "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends" to predict the outcome of various political events. At the same time, he had laypersons do the same, collecting 82,361 forecasts over two decades. When the study concluded, the experts barely outperformed the non-experts, if at all.
Reviewing Tetlock's work, Professors Adrian E. Tschoegl and J. Scott Armstrong, both at Penn, noted, "Beyond a low threshold, additional expertise did not result in greater accuracy in forecasting, and there was some evidence that those with the most expertise were less effective at using new information and thus less able to improve their accuracy."
A study published in 2008 echoed Tetlock's results. A Swedish researcher had members of the public, journalists, and political scientists attempt to forecast the outcome of Swedish parliamentary elections. When all of the predictions were aggregated, members of the public were actually most accurate.
Well, I mean, here's the thing: They're not being measured or tracked on these things, apart from these few random studies. What gets measured gets improved; what doesn't, doesn't.
These flakes and phonies are allowed to make as many bad predictions and "wish-casts" as they like without ever being called to task for it.
We see that now in the media, with no one in the media bothering to check any more if "reporters'" reports are actually, you know, accurate. "Reporters" who simply lie are rewarded and allowed to simply continue lying because their lies please a constituency.
...
So why do political experts endure and get rewarded with outrageously high fees if they regularly offer such poor prognostications? Armstrong has a theory: The Seer-Sucker Theory.
"No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers," he wrote. "One explanation is that the client is not interested in accuracy, but only in avoiding responsibility. A client who calls in the best wizard available avoids blame if the forecasts are inaccurate."
I was very briefly hired in a job involving advising clients. I knew nothing about the subject matter. The two pieces of advice I was given: Make definitive statements; people aren't paying you for vague or wishy-washy bullshit, they can imagine that themselves. They already have uncertainty. They want certainty. So give it to them.
And: Just say it confidently. Doesn't matter if you have no idea what you're talking about. Say it confidently.
I guess those are really the same advice, in two different formats.
Every media jerkoff you see on TV is just following that advice.
And also: They're lying for a partisan audience.
And also: They're possibly being paid to front for some client.
Don't believe a word they say.
The FBI's partisanship renders it unfit for purpose:
The media swarmed to defend the FBI, which is a "conservative-leaning organization," which you know it must be, because the hard-left media is so vigorously defending it.
In that compilation, you see the Highly Cucked George Conway, whose wife is, I'm sure, quite sought after by eligible men, and there's not a thing that fat sack of failure can do about it except go on TV and scream "I've still got something to offer!!! Plenty of women will be knockin' on THIS door when they see me on Morning Joe!!!"
Literally one of the dullest-minded and most crazed women I've ever heard or read, but hey, at least the FBI got that Diversity Slot filled.
The media first couldn't wait to call the FBI raid on Trump's home a "raid" to maximize the idea that he was a criminal being targeted, but as the overreach by the FBI became clearer and the Deep State became more defensive, they began running from the term.
This must be one of those cases where if a conservative refuses to talk to a member of the press, she'll regret it, because the "journactivist" will write a hit-piece about her.
Like this journactivist did here.
Pushaw provided this bitch a statement, with the proviso that it be run in full, which of course this bitch disregarded.
Great, The Algorithm's Going to Push This FemCore Song Until It's a "Hit"
—Ace
The song is called "W.I.T.C.H.," which, uh, stands for Woman In Total Control (of) Herself.
Oh, God.
Rumor on the street is that her apples are delicious
The jury said she's charming, but her exes say she's wicked
I swear to God, I saw her howling at the sky
She ain't out to get you, but she's better on your side
And she don't wanna be anybody else
She's a woman in total control of herself
It's such a wonder to be under her spell
What a woman, in total control of herself
Villainous kitty queen, she's got tricks up her sleeve
And I got a few up mine
She said, "Am I bad to the bone 'cause I get what I want?"
Mama said it ain't no crime (ah!)
She don't wanna be anybody else
She's a woman in total control of herself
It's such a wonder to be under her spell
What a woman, in total control of herself
...
Come out and play, it's fun in the dark
Tell me, "Why you're so scared of a woman in charge?"
Baby, don't run, you're breaking my heart
Tell me, "Why you're so scared of a woman in charge?"
Catsu
3 days ago (edited)
This is a great song. I also love how culturally diverse the people are in this mv - a blonde, a brunette, a redhead (tho obvs just dyed hair), african descent and asian descent. It reminds me of W.I.T.C.H. comic series composed of a culturally diverse group of friends as well, with elemental superpowers.
regina wade
3 days ago
So we're all basically a coven now, right? This song is so amazing, you've created something so cool and that not a lot of people are doing cant wait to hear what else you come up with! Sometimes I just dance around burning sage and screaming this song! These last few years have been such a influx of a lot of people connecting to their spiritual sides and finding their path. So excited to see all of us come into our power.
Berta Clapes Fontanet
3 days ago
The image of all of them dancing round the fire literally gave me goosebumps
Literally goosebumps you guys.
Kerry McKee
1 day ago (edited)
This is amazing! I'm a Male Witch but this song really does bring out what being a Witch is about, you're in control of yourself and your life. Being free but united with one another. Even now, a strong woman that has built herself up and become something more than ordinary is still considered a threat, whether she's a Witch or a W.I.T.C.H. I feel you embodied that message in this. Even today, some would fear a group of women dancing around a fire and howling at the sky, not because they're scary but because the power they emit just being their true selves.
Cover your drinks with a coaster, ladies. Male Feminist at large.
Karly Gelinas
3 days ago
I'm a mom and I'm thankful to have a cool song to show my daughter!! Thank you!
I'm sure she's going to love "rapping" with her mom about a woman empowering herself by taking charge in the bedroom.
Biden Administration officials asked Twitter to ban me because of my tweets questioning the Covid vaccines, even as company employees believed I had followed Twitter's rules, internal Twitter communications reveal.
In a White House meeting in April 2021, four months before Twitter suspended my account, the company faced "one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off from the platform," a Twitter employee wrote.
The employee recounted the meeting discussion afterwards on Twitter's internal Slack messaging system. The message, and others, make clear that top federal officials targeted me specifically, potentially violating my basic First Amendment right to free speech.
The First Amendment does not apply to private companies like Twitter. But if the companies are acting on behalf of the federal government they can become "state actors" that must allow free speech and debate, just as the government does.
Previous efforts to file state action lawsuits against the government and social media companies for working together to ban users have failed. Courts have universally held that people who have been banned have not shown the specific demands from government officials that are necessary to support state action claims.
In my case, though, federal officials appear to have gone far beyond generically encouraging Twitter to support Covid vaccines or discourage "misinformation" (i.e. information that the government does not like).
Instead, top officials targeted me personally.
Andrew Slavitt, senior advisor to President Biden's Covid response team, complained specifically about me, according to a Twitter employee in another Slack conversation discussing the White House meeting.
"They really wanted to know about Alex Berenson," the employee wrote. "Andy Slavitt suggested they had seen data viz [visualization] that had showed he was the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public."
So you can see, he's a real Science and Health Nut, and does not permit his politics to influence his scientific analyses whatsoever.
So we should definitely have him in charge of our National State-Imposed Censorship Boards.
According to an interview he gave to the Washington Post in June 2021, Slavitt worked directly with the most powerful officials in the federal government, including Ron Klain, President Biden's chief of staff, and Biden himself.
The Slack conversations also show the pressure Twitter employees felt internally to respond to the government's questions about whether the company was doing enough to suppress "misinformation" about Covid and the vaccines. An employee writes that the questions at the meeting were "pointed" but "mercifully, we had answers."
I wonder what conversations the White House might have had with Twitter about Paul Sperry? He's had a lot of embarrassing scoops about them.
Twitter continued to crackdown on dissenting political views this week with the permanent suspension of columnist and commentator Paul Sperry. The suspension came down after Sperry allegedly tweeted about the FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago. Sperry said that Twitter gave "No warning, no explanation, reason given." That is a signature for the company, which has little transparency or ability to challenge such private censorship.
Twitter has a long and documented history of suspending those with dissenting political, social, or scientific views, particularly before major elections. Sperry says that he tweeted the following:
Funny, don't remember the FBI raiding Chappaqua or Whitehaven to find the 33,000 potential classified documents Hillary Clinton deleted. And she was just a former secretary of state, not a former president.
DEVELOPING: Investigators reportedly met back in June w Trump & his lawyers in Mar-a-Lago storage rm to survey docs & things seemed copasetic but then FBI raids weeks later. Speculation on Hill FBI had PERSONAL stake & searching for classified docs related to its #Spygate scandal.
Sperry went on to note that "the current deputy general counsel at Twitter is also the former general counsel at FBI HQ under Comey. His name as you may know is James Baker, and he was the top attorney who reviewed the fraudulent anti-Trump FISA wiretap warrants for probable cause."
Obviously, all of those points can be -- and have been contested -- by others. However, that is the point. Social media should be a place for the exchange of viewpoints as part of our national dialogue on controversies like the Mar-a-Lago raid. Twitter, however, has long dispensed with any pretense of neutrality in limiting such discussion to fit its own corporate agenda.
Its own corporate agenda -- and also the agenda urged on it by a censorship-crazed government.
The undisclosed Google and FaceBook lobbyists scream bloody murder when Josh Hawley proposes adjusting the Community Decency Act to require political neutrality in moderation for monopoly or near-monopoly-sized platforms only, but when their Silicon Daddies are caught repeatedly taking direct orders from a leftwing White House about which conservatives and which dissenters to ban, the "Muh Corporations" Cartel can't be f***ed to say a thing.
All Green Lights from the National Review MuhCorporations Smart Set on this? You guys don't even want to sound a warning horn to your MuhCorporations buds at Google at FaceBook to stop having these private confabs with the government where they receive their orders as censorship deputies? You don't even want to instruct the White House you supposedly oppose to stop imposing censorship through third-party deputy corporations?
Rich Lowry? AEI "Fellow" Ramesh Ponuru?
You're supporters of this? No problem with it? Weird, National Review has previously been against "public-private partnerships" to accomplish what the government is forbidden from doing, and corporate fascism generally. I guess now you've "evolved" on this issue, as you've evolved on so many other issues.
Do you have any idea how this looks when you all collectively pretend you all "didn't see these stories" each and every time they appear?
Do you know what conclusions people are drawing about your integrity?
And not just the editors -- all of the writers who very conspicuously refuse to cross Google and FaceBook, but then wear National Review's legacy like a skinsut and demand respect.
If you want to defend this, then defend this. Earn your Google money.
But stop pretending "We were absent from work the entire year and a half the Biden Administration was openly pressuring the social media companies to deplatform conservative writers and dissenting covid researchers and scientists."
Start writing The Conservative Case for "Public-Private Partnerships" to Create Compassionate Censorship Codes to Safeguard's America's Purity of Thought.
Boston Children's Hospital Now Advertising "Gender-Affirming Hysterectomies" to Young Girls With a Cheerful-Looking Pitchwoman Who Looks Like She Could be a Mouseketeer
—Ace
They also have services for children nine and under.
At the Post-Millennial: Boston Children's Hospital won't, at the moment, give irreversible hormone therapies or mutilating surgeries to children "nine and under."
They will, however, start preparing them for those hormones and surgeries, which can begin at age 10:
For children 9 and under, the hospital helps facilitate a social transition that prepares them for their 10th birthday, which is when children are offered individualized treatment plans that can include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and chest surgeries.
This is the worst thing I've seen in this madness, and I've seen a lot of terrible things.
Pass a federal law allowing people to sue their doctors and the hospitals at which they were performed for "gender affirming surgeries" through age 40:
⚠️ Special Report: Boston Childrens Hospital boasts of "full suite of surgical options for transgender teens," has 90 videos promoting surgeries to youth on their YouTube page. Co-director allows vaginoplasty on 17 year olds, but hints at even younger.https://t.co/qGULronnZe
These people have mental illnesses underlying their supposed transgenderism, and instead of treating those mental illnesses, degenerate quacks prescribe hormone blockers and two masectomies.
This is, of course, standard industry practice. You come in with anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia, and you leave with anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia -- as well as surgical sterility, mutilated genitals and breasts, and a lifetime problem with urination.
They don't bother treating your underlying mental illnesses -- those are hard!
They just give you hormones.
Last week, Jazz wrote about the decision by Britains National Health Service to close the Tavistock clinic in London after parents complained that the "gender-affirming care" being offered to children was "shoddy." Saturday, the Times of London published a story about a Scottish clinic which one former patient says is just as bad.
The Sandyford clinic in Glasgow offers gender-affirming care to minors and adults. Sinead Watson referred herself to the clinic when she was 24-years-old and transitioned to being a man named Sean.
Well, no she didn't.
But Sinead has since detransitioned and regrets that the clinic didn't do more to address her underlying depression that she now believes drove her desire to transition.
Watson, from Glasgow, told The Times: "I went to Sandyford as a 24-year-old woman with a long history of depression, anxiety, self-harm, alcohol abuse and suicidal ideation.
"I did not have gender dysphoria prior to my teens. Yet for some reason, the clinic thought it was appropriate to ignore all of these other issues. Within a matter of months, I was put on irreversible cross-sex hormones."...
"I met with a gender specialist who asked me about my childhood," she said. "I told him that I was a perfectly normal little girl who didn't have any gender issues at all. They contacted my GP with my permission and got access to all of my medical history. They weren't really interested in exploring the depression, the anxiety or the self-harm. All they were interested in was talking about my gender crisis."..
Sandyford referred Watson, by then living as Sean, to a hospital in Manchester for a mastectomy in 2017. This was a little later than the clinic had intended, she said, because of the numbers of trans men it was sending there. "I was so consumed by my desire that this transition was going to make me feel so much better, that I couldn't wait," she said.
And this is what the Boston's Children's Hospital will be telling nine year olds at their birthday parties.
Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator under President Donald Trump, was one of the "trifecta" of three leading public officials who successfully pushed COVID lockdowns in the United States. Virtually every page of Birx's new book, Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It's Too Late, reads like a how-to guide from the front lines of subverting a democratic superpower from within. It bears repeating, from the outset, that lockdowns were never part of any democratic country's pandemic preparedness plan prior to Xi Jinping's lockdown of Wuhan, China.
The lockdowns that Xi pioneered and Birx so zealously advocated for reportedly led to over 170,000 non-COVID excess deaths among young Americans while failing to meaningfully slow the spread of COVID anywhere they were tried. It would have been impossible for an enemy agent armed with anything less than nuclear weapons to have inflicted so much damage on America's economy, social fabric, and historical freedoms in such a short period of time.
Notably, though Birx's memoir has earned relatively few reviews from human readers on Amazon, it's earned rave reviews from Chinese state media, a feat not shared even by the far more popular pro-lockdown books of professional genuflectors to power like Lawrence Wright.
The glowing response from Chinese state media should come as no surprise. Nearly every sentence of Birx's book faithfully parrots the Chinese Communist Party's foreign and domestic propaganda, which helped facilitate Xi's weaponization of the COVID response to eliminate the independence of the CCP's private sector rivals.
...
From here, it gets worse. One page later, Birx tells us how traumatized she still is from having watched videos of Wuhan residents collapsing and falling dead in January 2020, and praises the "courageous doctor" who shared them online:
The video showed a hallway crowded with patients slumped in chairs. Some of the masked people leaned against the wall for support. The camera didn't pan so much as zigzag while the Chinese doctor maneuvered her smartphone up the narrow corridor. My eye was drawn to two bodies wrapped in sheets lying on the floor amid the cluster of patients and staff. The doctor's colleagues, their face shields and other personal protective equipment in place, barely glanced at the lens as she captured the scene. They looked past her, as if at a harrowing future they could all see and hoped to survive. I tried to increase the volume, but there was no sound. My mind seamlessly filled that void, inserting the sounds from my past, sounds from other wards, other places of great sorrow. I had been here before. I had witnessed scenes like this across the globe, in HIV ravaged communities--when hospitals were full of people dying of AIDS before we had treatment or before we ensured treatment to those who needed it. I had lived this, and it was etched permanently in my brain: the unimaginable, devastating loss of mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, brothers, sisters.
Staring at my computer screen, I was horrified by the images from Wuhan, the suffering they portrayed, but also because they confirmed what I'd suspected for the last three weeks: Not only was the Chinese government underreporting the real numbers of the infected and dying in Wuhan and elsewhere, but the situation was definitely far more dire than most people outside that city realized. Up until now, I'd been only reading or hearing about the virus. Now it had been made visible by a courageous doctor sharing this video online.
Birx's book was published in April 2022. The early videos she recounts as the source of her trauma were exposed as fake by the Associated Press and other outlets in February of 2020.
Our rotten, incompetent government class has three points in common:
1, they are worshipful admirers of China, and wish the US could emulate it in its communist efficiency and brutality
2, they are incomptent
3, they are easily deceived, including by their own delusions
Birx will now demonstrate these features of the rotten incompetent American government class:
In the next paragraph, Birx tells us how she grew even more determined after seeing that the Chinese had built a hospital in 10 days to fight the virus:
Dotting it were various pieces of earth-moving equipment, enough of them in various shapes and sizes that I briefly wondered if the photograph was of a manufacturing plant where the newly assembled machines were on display. Quickly, I learned that the machines were in Wuhan and that they were handling the first phase of preparatory work for the construction of a one-thousand-bed hospital to be completed in just ten days' time ... The Chinese may not have been giving accurate data about the numbers of cases and deaths, but the rapid spread of this disease could be counted in other ways--including in how many Chinese workers were being employed to build new facilities to relieve the pressure on the existing, and impressive, Wuhan health service centers. You build a thousand-bed hospital in ten days only if you are experiencing unrelenting community spread of a highly contagious virus that has eluded your containment measures and is now causing serious illness on a massive scale.
BuzzFeed had proved that images of rapid hospital construction in China were faked on Jan. 27, 2020.
To recap, Deborah Birx--the woman who did more than almost any other person in the United States to promote and prolong COVID lockdowns, and attempted, with the support of mainstream media outlets, to silence anyone who disagreed with her--tells us in 2022 that she'd been inspired in her work by images that were widely known to have been faked (as if the real images of old age homes in Italy and elsewhere weren't bad enough) before the lockdowns even started.
That's Chapter 1.
This is the evidence-based "scientist" who imposed lockdowns on our country for two years.
And, to emphasize again: These fakeries were publicized in 2020. This old sourc*nt published in 2022 -- and even had on-staff fact-checkers at the publisher to check her claims.
I'm just kidding, no one in publishing or the media does that any more. They sometimes claim they do when they get sued, but it's another Media Lie. They fling this bullshit out into the world without the slightest effort to insure accuracy.
I just wanted to make you laugh.
The only time they'll check is if you're making an obviously defamatory claim about someone they're pretty sure is alive.
But she could have checked these claims herself, if she was interested in telling the public the truth.
Got you again. Zing!
He then turns to Birx bragging about how she lied the country into lockdowns. She is upfront about this: She plotted her lies, she lied her lies, and then she reinforced her lies. And later, she boasts about her lies.
But I'll direct you to the article for all of that. If you haven't already read this material -- her endless lies, and her open bragging about how skillful her lying was -- you have to read it.
And enjoy this: Anthony Fauci praises himself, saying that people are going to medical school now because of "The Fauci Effect," because he symbolizes "integrity" and "truth."
Mollie
@MZHemingway
This video depicts a caricature of an evil, world-destroying James Bond villain
"Sources Say" There's a New Spin Why the FBI Had to Raid the President's Home Over Some Paperwork: ThE TrAiToR TrUmP iZ CoNcEaLiNg DoCuMeNtZ aBoUt NuKeZ
—Ace
Okay.
Okay.
Pull the other one. It has bells on.
This is what you got? This is what you're going with now?
Jimmy Failla
@jimmyfailla
Normally an FBI raid is for a VERY specific item located in a VERY specific place but in this case agents spent 9 hours looking around and didnt find much of anything. Sounds like Liz Cheney's dad told her Trump had weapons of mass destruction.
Close!
Election Wizard
@ElectionWiz
Funny how the DOJ/FBI is leaking like sieve just hours after AG Garland told the nation about how professional and honorable the Department is.
Wait, the DOJ/FBI is refusing to offer information publicly, and then leaking unsubstantiated claims to friendly Washington Post stenographers who will ask no questions and offer no pushback...?
Does this feel familiar to anyone else? Does it feel, in fact, like rather well-trod ground?
Does it begin to feel, in fact, like a cliche?
Or are we in reruns of season 2 of The Great Trump Hunt?
If anyone believes that spin, raise your hand.
Now take that hand and slap yourself in the back of your head, dum-dum, to teach yourself not to be such a gullible dope all your life.
Here's an exact transcript of the thought processes that went into this lie:
"Hmmm... how do we justify this new warrant on the president... we have to make it sound good... it has to sound really important. It can't be something lame about the fucking National Archives, those bunch of pansies and bookworms.
"Last time we said it was because he was a Russian Agent. Can we say it's about him being a Russian Agent again? No, people won't believe that. The Russian Agent story kind of blew up in our faces. There's only so many times you can go to the Russian Agent well...
"We kind of need it to be bigger than the Russian Agent story. What's bigger than the President being a Russian Agent...?
"Hmm, we might have made a pretty pickle for ourselves with starting right off with the Russian Agent cover story. That's a hard one to top!
"Oh wait, I know what's bigger than the President being a Russian Agent -- what if he's a concealing NUCLEAR WEAPONS!!!
"No wait, that's stupid -- how could Trump smuggle a nuke out of the White House? And where would he even get one? Unless we can figure out a way to claim he disassembled a nuke and smuggled it out in old Big Mac cartons, this isn't going to work at all...
"But... but we could say he has a document about a nuclear weapon, right...?!
"Right? Right! I mean, shit, US government documents contain a reference to nuclear weapons like every twenty or thirty pages! It's bound to be true, just based on the law of averages! If he's got more than 100 pages of documents, there are probably a solid three or four mentions of nuclear weapons in there!
"So that's it -- we'll say that the president, FORMERLY SUSPECTED OF BEING A RUSSIAN AGENT, IS NOW SUSPECTED OF CONCEALING SENSITIVE DOCUMENTS ABOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS!!!"
Anyone want to bet against me?
"Sources say."
"Sources say" again, huh?
I seem to remember "sources saying" a lot of things during Russiagate.
We are Demanded to Forget all the previous Regime lies in this Empire of Lies, so that we can accept the Regime's new lies, but he rebels, and remembers.
Taibbi remembers that the press previously reported that a FISA warrant would never be issued against a presidential candidate without compelling, substantial, crushing evidence undergirding it, and therefore, of course, there must be compelling, substantial, crushing evidence undergirding the FISA warrant.
Everyone else remembers that, right?
Or has the Regime chant -- Forget... Forget... Forget... -- already begun to work its obliviating magic?
The hugeness of the story has become part of its explanation. An action so extreme, we're told by expert after expert, could only be based upon "pulverizing" evidence.
Throughout the Trump years we've seen a numbing pattern of rhetorical slippage in coverage of investigations. The aforementioned Politics Insider story is no different. "Likely" evidence in the headline becomes more profound in the text. An amazing five bylined writers explain:
Regardless of the raid's focus legal experts quickly reached a consensus about it: A pile of evidence must have backed up the warrant authorizing the search.
They then quoted a "former top official in the Justice Department's National Security Division" -- you'll quickly lose track if you try to count the named and unnamed intel spooks appearing in coverage today -- who said, "There's every reason to think that there's a plus factor in the quantum and quantity of evidence that the government already had to support probable cause in this case."
Politico insisted such an action must have required a magistrate's assent "based upon evidence of a potential crime." CNN wrote how authorities necessarily "had probable grounds to believe a crime had been committed," while the New York Times formulation was that "the F.B.I. would have needed to convince a judge that it had probable cause that a crime had been committed." Social media was full of credentialed observers explaining what must be true. "The affidavit in support of the MAL search warrant must be something else," said Harvard-trained former Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Signorelli, one among a heap of hyperventilating names:
It's amazing how short our cultural memory has become. Apparently few remember all the other times this exact rhetoric was deployed in the interminable list of other Trump investigations, only to backfire later. Does anyone remember this doozy?
Applications for FISA warrants, Comey said, are often thicker than his wrists, and that thickness represents all the work Justice Department attorneys and FBI agents have to do to convince a judge that such surveillance is appropriate in an investigation.
I remember, Matt!
Or at least I want to remember! But The Regime keeps chanting: Forget... Forget... Forget...
That Washington Post story from April 11, 2017, "FBI obtained FISA warrant to monitor former Trump advisor Carter Page," by Devlin Barrett, Ellen Nakashima, and Adam Entous, was one of the key moments in the Trump-Russia scandal. It repeatedly stressed the illustrious credentials of all involved, noting, "any FISA application has to be approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department and the FBI," before dismounting to the crucial conclusion:
The government's application for the surveillance order targeting Page included a lengthy declaration that laid out investigators' basis for believing that Page was an agent of the Russian government and knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of Moscow, officials said.
The next day, the New York Times kicked the story forward by citing "a government official" who confirmed that the FISA court had obtained a warrant against Page "based on evidence that he was operating as a Russian agent."
Within a few days after that, Politics Insider -- the same outlet telling us today about the import of the warrant -- ran a piece by intel community spokescritter Natasha Bertrand called, "We just got a huge sign that the US intelligence community believes the Trump dossier is legitimate." The article deployed the circular logic that drove years of Trump-probe stories. We have evidence of an investigation, therefore the investigation must have evidence:
The FBI reportedly used the explosive, unverified dossier detailing President Donald Trump's alleged ties to Russia to bolster its case for a warrant that would allow it to surveil Carter Page, an early foreign-policy adviser to Trump's campaign. It's a key signal that the FBI had enough confidence in the validity of the document to work to corroborate it and present it in court.
It's impossible to overstate how much mischief and inaccuracy was spread by one Washington Post report about the FISA court approval, which makes it all the more incredible that the paper won the Pulitzer Prize for its Russia coverage.
It's not really incredible, is it?
Militaries have sometimes resorted to hiding their greatest slaughters of innocents... by handing out medals. Hide your greatest catastrophes under a pile of ribbons and awards.
...
Many outlets, like Vox, noted that only the accusers had seen all the evidence, and the mere proles among us had not: "Law enforcement officials and Democrats who've seen the underlying intelligence," they wrote, "emphasize that the dossier allegations were only part of the justification for the Page surveillance." Callum Borchers in the Washington Post went the "FBI must have more" route:
It is wrong to say that this "Western intelligence source," presumably Steele, formed the foundation of an article in which at least three other sources featured more prominently... And it is hard to see how the article could have been a big factor in obtaining a warrant because it contained little, if any, information that the FBI did not already possess or which was not in the public domain.
Lest anyone need reminding about how all of these stories turned out, the Justice Department Inspector General found that "inaccurate information" and a host of other corrupted procedures were used to produce the "probable cause" in Page's FISA warrant. Michael Horowitz, the IG, also found "the FBI did not have information corroborating the specific allegations against Carter Page," and added, for the benefit of commentators like Borchers who insisted the Steele material was not, well, material, that it actually "played a central and essential role in the FBI's... decision to seek the FISA order."
But here we go again. The Regime chants Forget... Forget... Forget... and its courtiers and stenographers are writing the exact same story: They would never have authorized a raid on the president's home without "pulverizing" evidence, therefore, there must have been some truly "pulverizing" evidence.
Top-Level Genius Joe Scarborough -- I mean, he's the guy who landed the shaved she-ape Mitzi Barishnykov or whatever her name is-- just had a guest on to explain the FBI must have had serious evidence backing the warrant, and anyone doubting this is attacking a "non-politicized" agency and "independent law enforcement."
Say, during Russiagate, weren't we also reassured that the judges would demand sufficient evidence before issuing the warrant? Weren't we also assured the FBI was then a non-politicized and independent law enforcement agency?
Forget... Forget... Forget...
So this is all just like Russiagate.
And yet the Russiagaters are not bothered by this at all, and repeat all the same Russiagate laugh lines.
Why? Do they not hear themselves?
Why aren't they bothered at all that this is just exactly like Russiagate?
Let me clue everyone in about something:
David French, AllahPundit, Jake Tapper, Maggie Haberman, Louise Mensch, all the rest of the Russiagate Conspiracists: They've never actually admitted that Russiagate was a conspiracy theory, have they?
Have you ever heard them clearly admit the hoax was concocted?
Or have they just gotten quiet about it, and sought to change the subject?
The latter, right?
Have you ever heard AllahPundit, David French, Jake Tapper, Adam Schiff, Jonah Goldberg, Maggie Haberman, Rachel Maddow, or the rest of the people who peddled these lies admit they peddled these lies? And then demand accountability from the people who infected them with the lies in the first place?
Big font for this answer:
NO YOU HAVE NOT. YOU HAVE NEVER HEARD OR READ THEM DO THAT.
As I say, the most you see them do is get evasive on the point and then try to change the subject. "But what about [this false claim by Trump]!"
They. Never. Admit. That. RussiaGate. Was. Fundamentally. A. Lie.
And here's why:
Partly this is because these people are all disgusting intellectual narcissists who are not in fact very smart and are keenly aware that they are runts pretending to be big dogs.
There are two type of narcissists -- grandiose narcissists, and fragile narcissists.
Grandiose narcissists don't worry too much about their status becaue their narcissism is so great that they always assume they're top dog.
But the fragile narcissists -- the weak narcissists -- the brittle narcissists -- their little narcissistic worlds will come shattering apart if a single crack is allowed in their ego bubbles, so they can never admit fault, ever, and they're always desperately anxious that someone will detect them for the frauds and imposters that they know they are.
And all of these cocksuckers I've named for you are in that camp: Fragile narcissists.
They're not even the good narcissists! They're not even the Top-Drawer Narcissists!
(Like me.)
They're the weakling narcissists, the second-rater narcissists, the poser narcissists.
But the main reason they will never actually admit that Russiagate was a hoax, just something Hillary Clinton made up with the drunken liar and job-seeker Igor Danchenko, is that, despite all of the 100% uncontradicted proof that it was all a fabrication, these strict rationalists and dedicated anti-conspiracy-theorists...
ALL STILL BELIEVE THAT RUSSIAGATE IS TRUE.
What is it that Hemingway, or was it Fitzgerald, said about the poor in America?
There were no poor people in America; there are just millionaires temporarily embarrassed by a lack of funds.
Well, AllahPundit, David French, Jake The Fake Tapper, and the rest of the Russiagate Conspiracy Theory gang -- the same people who are always screaming about QAnon believing in pleasing partisan conspiracy theories, what's that, "WITHOUT EVIDENCE," as Fake Jake Tapper's snarky chyrons say--
They all believe that Russiagate is real and true, just temporarily embarrassed by a lack of evidence.
You cannot get any of these people to actually admit that Russiagate is fake for the same reason you cannot get a cultist to deny his divinity of his master: Because they are True Believers, and it's going to take more than an IG report or a mere lack of "scientific evidence" to disprove their Mighty Faith.
And that is also why they are all still desperate to Get Trump, to get him on anything: Because they believe -- completely illogically, completely irrationally -- that if they can get Trump on some completely unrelated beef, like being in possession of a mere document the National Archives says it wants back, that somehow "rescues" the Russiagate Conspiracy Theory that they know in their heart was true all along, and always will be true.
Has this every happened to you? You have a dream. Something wonderful. You're with the lover of your dreams.
Or you can fly. It's amazing.
I fly a lot. I hate waking up, flightless.
You wake up and none of it was real.
But you want to fly. You want to be with your dream lover.
For the next twenty minutes you begrudge reality and try to wish the dream world into reality.
NeverTrump and the left -- but I repeat myself-- had a nervous breakdown in 2015. They were fed a pleasing lie by Hillary Clinton and her paid operatives in FusionGPS in 2016. This lie helped them cope with their nervous breakdown.
It was all a dream. It was always a fiction.
But it felt so real to them.
And they want it to be real.
These "strict rationalists" -- in their own hyperemotive minds, anyway -- want their pleasing coping fantasy to be real.
They have been attempting to collectively will the fantasy of Russiagate into reality for six fucking years now, and it looks like they will never stop trying.
"NuclearCodeGate" is just the latest attempt to make RussiaGate real.
See this guy, for example.
It was all just a dream... or was it?
If Jake Tapper, AllahPundit, David French, Jonah Goldberg, etc., want to prove me wrong about their mental state and continuing belief that Russiagate Is Real, they can just, for once, forthrightly admit it was a hoax and a lie from the start.
And demand accountability from the people who lied and defrauded the government. And who made them look like pathetic chumps.
But they won't.
They never do.
They've had years to do so, and have always avoided doing so.
Keep the dream alive, fellas.
You strict rationalists, you hyper-empirical anti-conspiracists, you.
The Morning Rant – Awful Corporate Executives Making Awful Decisions
—Buck Throckmorton
United Airlines Plans to Fly an Imaginary Supersonic Plane Using Boutique Biofuel in Just 7 Years
It is becoming painfully obvious that a great many executive offices in corporate America are occupied by idealistic, green enviro-dupes.
A start-up company has promised a radical new supersonic jet that is “net zero” and runs on a boutique fuel, and United Airlines’ credulous executives are already hyping this as a plane they will be flying in just 7 years. (They won’t.)
United entered into a contract with Boom Supersonic in 2021 to buy 15 of their proposed planes. How’s it coming along so far? Well, a drawing of the plane does actually exist. A couple of weeks ago the first design sketch was finally released, with much media hype.
On Tuesday, aviation company Boom Supersonic revealed the design for its highly anticipated Mach 1.7 Overture passenger jet, which touts a speed twice as fast as the standard passenger airline.
Set to begin production in 2024, the supersonic plane seats 65 to 80 people and uses 100 percent sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
United Airlines has already expressed interest in using the jet in the near future, posting a photo of the new design on Instagram with the caption, "Our hearts went BOOM!
Boom has raised about $250 million dollars (including $60 million of your tax dollars,) initially promising that its first test flight would occur by 2019. That first flight hasn’t happened yet.
The company touts its hypothetical airplane as “the world’s fastest and most sustainable commercial airliner.”
And then there’s the laughable promise about running on “Sustainable Aviation Fuel.” Turning french fry grease into mass market fuel is the 21st century equivalent to the fusion energy hype of 40 years ago. The technology for industrial scale SAF doesn’t even exist.
The U.S. Department of Energy is working with the U.S. Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and other federal government agencies to develop a comprehensive strategy for scaling up new technologies to produce SAF on a commercial scale.
You can go ahead and put this on your calendar now, United Airlines will not be flying this supersonic plane in 2029. You know it. I know it. But United’s executives don’t know it. They really want to believe in the sustainable snake oil they’ve been sold.
There was a time when I would have thought United’s executives were just seeking some publicity with this, but having watched auto manufacturers torch their balance sheets by investing in doomed-to-fail EV operations, I have no doubt that United’s executives actually believe this imaginary plane will be flying for them soon.
A whole lot of creative destruction is necessary in the corporate world to cleanse it of the sustainable organic idiots now occupying C-Suites.
*****
Why Your “Delivered” Package Has Not Yet Been Delivered To You, and Other Fraud Incentivized By The “Goal Setting” Management Fad
This story came out just a week ago, and no one should be shocked by these types of employee actions at major corporations any longer. The reality is that executives have incentivized such behaviors with the idiotic “Goal Setting” management fad.
The report said Hino had fixed data to meet emission regulations that were actually exceeded, and falsified fuel performance reports. It also said that the fraud was caused by “an environment and structure in which management was not attentive to the front line and gave priority to schedules and numerical targets rather than appropriate processes.”
If employees are given goals that are unattainable, but they risk losing their jobs if they don’t hit those goals, they will often magically hit those goals, whether it’s fudging emissions testing (Toyota / Hino) or fraudulently opening bank accounts without customers’ consent (Wells Fargo Bank.)
The true scandal at Wells Fargo wasn’t the employees’ behavior. The scandal was that Wells Fargo’s executives - with all those fancy MBAs from all those fancy schools - didn’t understand that they had incentivized their employees to commit fraud as a necessary action to keep their jobs.
Here is an example of employee dishonesty in the face of unattainable goals that I bet many of you see on a regular basis. You check the tracking of a package you are waiting on and it shows “Delivered.” You’ve checked your mailbox and your front porch, but the package isn’t there. It finally shows up later – maybe hours later, maybe days later. So why did the delivery person report it as delivered when it hadn’t been? Because he had goals he had to meet. He is more incentivized to falsely report delivery than to face the consequences of not getting the package delivered within the budgeted time.
When employees en masse decide that dishonesty is the better option than accurately reporting on how they are completing their tasks, the fault is with bad management. Unfortunately, too many pompous executives believe that by simply decreeing a goal, their employees will magically find the capacity to do what is not attainable.
*****
“…for the EV Transition”
I won’t go into all the problems going on at Ford right now, but they are finding it necessary to cut thousands of jobs and drastically reduce expenses. Their official excuse? It’s for the EV transition. That is just brilliant.
Bloomberg, citing unnamed sources familiar with the plan, said July 20 the cuts will come largely in the newly created Ford Blue unit that produces gasoline-powered vehicles, as well as "other salaried operations throughout the company."
What a great all-purpose excuse!
The next time David Burge (@iowahawkblog) crashes his pickup truck into a liquor store, he can just tell the arresting officer that he’s considering an electric vehicle, so it’s all good! The crash can assist in the EV transition.
Got fired from your job? Just tell your spouse that by no longer commuting in your gas-powered SUV you’ll be helping the EV transition.
What have y’all got?
*****
Feliz Viernes
As many of you know, I’ve spent a lot of time in South Texas, and I dearly love the Tejano culture – its people, food, culture, music, etc. The long-awaited re-alignment of Hispanics away from Democrats to Republicans has warmed my heart. Welcome compadres!
With that in mind, it’s Friday, so let’s end this rant with something that’ll put a smile on your face. How about a festive norteña version of Deep In The Heart of Texas!
Good morning, kids. The weekend is here and a story out of my erstwhile hometown has some relevance to the situation we find ourselves in. A buck naked homeless derelict was just strolling through the City Hall subway station the other morning, as commuters walked by like it was nothing. So, what's worse, the naked guy or the non-reaction from the crowd? In the season 2 premiere of the podcast (sidebar and here), CBD posited his concern that like the jaded straphangers, by this November and certainly two years from now, the American people will have become so inured to the economic destruction visited upon them that they're just not going to remember the Gestapo raid on Mar-a-Lago, let alone the theft of the 2020 election. My personal fear is that the American people will have become inured to an increasingly tyrannical government that when the FBI come for their neighbors, they'll just keep their heads down, draw the shades and turn up the volume of The Kardashians to drown out the screams and cries until the sirens fade away.
Whatever one postulates on the reasons behind the raid — the FBI looking to plant evidence, looking for the evidence about its treasonous acts in overthrowing Trump, creating a photo op, or merely sniffing Melania's panties and whacking off to it — this is absolutely unprecedented in the history of this nation. FDR's roundup of Nisei Americans and throwing them into concentration camps is up there, to be sure. But this is an outrage. Meh, why am I getting so worked up about it? I mean, what do you expect from people who will openly and proudly use their power to persecute their political enemies? They literally destroyed our society in 2020 under the pretext of a public health emergency and then the death of a criminal at the hands of police officers doing their duty to create chaos that ultimately undermined our electoral system so as to enable the rigging/theft of a national election.
Did Joe "Sponge-Brain Shits-Pants" know about or even give the go-ahead to Lavrenty Garland and Fey Wray for the raid? Hell, Joey doesn't even know the time of day and shakes hands with the air, but go back to the Halcyon days after the 2010 midterms. Did Barack Obama know that Lois Lerner, John Koskinen and the rest of the IRS, now "fortified" (pun intended) to be bigger than the United States Marine Corps, were going to do everything in their power to sabotage the granting of 501-c3 non-profit status to any political group that was not Democrat or Leftist, specifically any that were affiliated with the Tea Party movement? The salient point is that it didn't matter, the same as it didn't matter if whoever is controlling the drooling paste-eater-in-chief out of Kalorama knew of or gave the order to hit Mar-a-Lago.
White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre had a pre-written response at the ready for when she would inevitably be asked this week whether President Joe Biden had any advance notice that the FBI would be raiding Donald Trump’s home in Florida.
She said no, and that’s probably true. She also repeated the line that the Justice Department works independently. That’s probably true too. And that’s what’s so terrifying.
Democrats and the permanent bureaucracy in Washington are simply following their vindictive impulses. If there’s anything new here, it’s their view that gaining power in 2020 was a license to crush the political momentum that put Trump in office and continues to upset the establishment that preferred things the old way — when their interests were served and to hell with everyone else. . .
. . . The same way Democrats never have to tell the media to write each day that Republicans suck, Biden doesn’t need to tell his Attorney General Merrick Garland or the FBI what to do. He didn’t need to say a word to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They don’t have private conversations on how they’re next going to stick it to the people they hate. They have a common understanding and, besides, they talk about it in public anyway.
“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future?” — Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, three days after the 2020 election.
“[Trump] must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” — Democrat Rep. Jim McGovern in June.
“Merrick Garland Do Your Job!” — Democrat Rep. Hank Johnson in June.
When this is how the party talks openly about its opposition, there’s no need for any kind of private direction or assurance. They want everyone to know.
There's also the parallel question of whether or not they understand that Donald Trump is innocent of any crimes, and more to the point, that those who support his agenda and more broadly those who support the ideals of America as founded are also not guilty. At the highest levels, they don't give a shit. It's purely will to power. On the broader level, they are, as the great Eric Hoffer labeled them "true believers." They are so absolutely sure of their righteousness and our evil, that anything is on the table to achieve justice or paradise on Earth. "By any means necessary."
On the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier in the Second World War was the inscription Gott Mit Uns, "God is with us." "To Serve and Protect" and "Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity" also have a nice ring to them, n'est pas?
Whatever the 11-dimensional chess that the junta is engaging in to either goad Trump into running thinking he'll get crushed, or more likely to goad a Trump supporter into committing an act of violence that can be used as a pretext to really seize absolute power — and given the nature of the FBI they can just manufacture a false flag quicker than you can say Gleiwitz Radio Station — the salient point remains that this latest abomination will not be the end of it. Along with the additional IRS agents who are not going to be auditing anyone except non-Democrats and punishing them via the process, every other apparatchik in every other agency is going to harass the living shit out of us until we cry Uncle Joe.
So where does this leave us going forward? It's either Balkanization or a civil war that leads to liberation or subjugation. If somehow we are to liberate ourselves from this tyranny, there will still be a sizable group in this country of true believers that will never accept it.
It took the U.S. to forcibly dismantle the Nazi systems of Germany and to force Japan to remake their systems.
It may take another, more powerful nation to disband our totalitarian systems, as well. Barring the return of Christ, it might just have to be Russia or China to make our Deep State agencies go the way of the Cheka, the Stasi, and the God-Emperors of Japan.
No President can do this. It's too entrenched. Overwhelming force must be applied, and no President, not even the most Trumpian, has that kind of force.
So when I get black-pilled and told Russia is fighting the American Empire of Lies, I can only wish them Godspeed, for we obviously share the same enemy. Putin's fighting the American Deep State? My answer? "Good! At least someone is."
Posted by: Taqiyyologist, Rickrolled by Jesus at August 10, 2022 07:58 AM (M9XmQ)
On that cheerful note, have a good weekend.
ABOVE THE FOLD, BREAKING, NOTEWORTHY
"Retrenchment has begun on the right. Bereft of a figure like Donald Trump, the right is now moving back toward various old, hollow positions. There is hard work being done to shift the political and intellectual foundation of the right by figures such as Oren Cass, but the inertia has not yet been overcome." The Realignment That Failed
Glenn Reynolds: "Looking around, it seems pretty clear that this isn’t a problem just for BlackRock and the Democrat Party. All over America — and to a substantial degree, the world — institutions seem to be run on behalf of the people who control them rather than to support their missions or the people they’re supposed to serve." Woke Elites Control the Institutions Meant to Serve Us
"Democrats and the permanent bureaucracy in Washington are simply following their vindictive impulses. If there’s anything new here, it’s their view that gaining power in 2020 was a license to crush the political momentum that put Trump in office and continues to upset the establishment that preferred things the old way — when their interests were served and to hell with everyone else." Biden’s DOJ Knows Exactly What To Do To His Political Opponents Without Needing To Be Told
* * * * *
"Once a respectable institution, it has become a moral leper colony." (it was only ever respectable on TV - jjs) An Elegy for the FBI
"The reason each of us commits a felony (plus) a day is that we are becoming a country of too many laws. Lots and lots of laws, layered upon each other with perpetual ambiguity. And it seems we keep adding to the laws that we have, thus making government larger and more unaccountably powerful with each bill the president signs. Enacting more laws, laws that even lawyers cannot understand, makes Americans less free." We Each Commit Three Felonies a Day, Deep State Lying in Wait for Trump
"If the Mar-a-Lago raid proves anything, it is that the establishment still fears Donald Trump. What might the political class do yet to preserve its power?" Is the Biden Junta Trying to Start an Insurrection?
CIVIL WAR 2.0: J-6 FBI FALSE FLAG "RIOT" & AFTERMATH, LEFTIST PERSECUTIONS, DEMOCRAT PUTSCH, AMERICAN DISSOLUTION
Julie Kelly: "Either the commissars prevail at great expense to the safety and liberty of the nation or they are defeated. And the closing chapter is being written right now." FBI Won’t Let Facts Get In the Way of a Good Story
"Our government is much less concerned about protecting the nation from external threats and more targeted than ever on its own citizens." More IRS Agents Than Marines?
"Countries are attempting to divest from the U.S. dollar as sanctions dig into Russian and Iranian economies, with the yuan, ruble and other currencies emerging as alternatives. . . Russia has found new buyers for its coal and petroleum exports in non-dollar denominated currencies, keeping its economy afloat despite sanctions." To Avoid Sanctions, Countries Are Ditching the US Dollar
DOMESTIC AFFAIRS, THE COURTS, WASTE/FRAUD/ABUSE
"Republicans are working to make sure all of their members are in Washington, DC to cast their vote on the bill in person, and intend to pressure Democrats to do the same — to go on record with their position in person, a senior House Republican staffer told Breitbart News." Zero House Republicans to Vote for ‘Inflation Reduction’ Act
"The House of Representatives should reject the Inflation Reduction Act, which will harm Americans by reducing pharmaceutical R&D and expanding needless Obamacare subsidies." A Destructive Piece of Legislation
"Congressional budget rules prohibit measures in reconciliation bills that have 'merely incidental' budgetary effects on policy. The enforcement of these rules, which Senate Democrats tried to work around, means that the EPA will have less authority to regulate coal and also not receive an extra $45 million in funding." West Virginia’s Other Senator Just Saved Its Coal Industry
"At one level it’s inexplicable that nearly all governments and their apparatchiks, believe they can starve capitalism of affordable and reliable energy and yet will it continue to thrive. However, it’s explicable if you inhabit a hypothetical world, as they do, in which modeling prevails. Modeling; configured and constrained to show how it will be done, not whether it can be done Which Came First? The Idiots or the Eggs?
AMERICA, AND THE WORLD, IMPRISONED: CHINESE CORONAVIRUS FICTIONS AND FACTS
"Released Thursday, the new guidelines make a variety of changes that would have been unthinkable a year or even six months ago, including a lift on mandatory quarantines for individuals exposed to the virus, an end to screening people with no symptoms, and the elimination of testing recommendations after potential exposure. Contact tracing will also be limited to hospitals and high-risk groups living in nursing homes." CDC Ends Differentiation of Unvaccinated Under Chinese Coronavirus Guidelines
LOCKDOWN 2: MONKEY POX MONKEY BUSINESS BOOGALOO???
Douglas Murray: "Such people presume that this country can easily absorb millions of illegal migrants every year. Millions of people who have broken the law to get here. Making fools of the people who followed the rules. We’ll see how well this goes. But if the left seriously thinks it can go on then, sorry, but they’re the dreamers." Migrant-Loving Lefties Live in a Dreamerworld
"In Baltimore, law-abiding citizens reject a leftist, pro-criminal prosecutor—and stand up to the race hustle." So Long, Marylin Mosby
FIRST AMENDMENT ISSUES, CENSORSHIP, FAKE NEWS, MEDIA, BIG BROTHER TECH
In addition to suppressing information, Twitter will boost information that it has determined, through non-transparent means, to be accurate. To that end, it will “prebunk” things, “to get ahead of misleading narratives on Twitter, and to proactively address topics that may be the subject of misinformation.” Prompts will appear “directly on people’s timelines” as well as in the search function “when people type related terms, phrases, or hashtags.” Twitter's New 'Civic Integrity' Policy Will 'Protect' Users From 'Harmful' Information
"Jonah Goldberg makes a lot of 'belief' in our country. But what Goldberg actually believes in is the Beltway." (Liberal Fascism wasn't a warning; it was a love letter - jjs) You’re Un-American
ABORTION
"Giving in to the pro-abortion Left out of fear would be the real defeat." No Surrender After Dobbs
"Governor DeSantis’ firing of [Nazi collaborator George] Soros-backed rogue Andrew Warren should have us reexamining election financing." Elections Belong to the States
BIDEN CRIME FAMILY REVELATIONS
"Biden’s Senate papers reportedly fill 1,875 boxes and include 415 gigabytes of electronic records spanning Biden’s time in the Senate between 1973 through 2009. The documents include “committee reports, drafts of legislation,” and Biden’s personal correspondences with his Senate colleagues." Reminder: Joe Biden Senate Papers Still Hidden from Public
"Chris Deluzio didn’t pay his property taxes. He backs a proposal that would increase IRS scrutiny on Americans." ("D" stands for dispensation - jjs) Pennsylvania Dem Neglected to Pay Property Taxes
“The poll shows that Democrats are even vulnerable in New York. I was shocked at Biden’s low approval rating. I was also shocked at Schumer’s vulnerability,” said political consultant Dick Morris, an adviser to former Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton. (meh, maybe Zeldin has a shot but Schemer? No way - jjs) Lee Zeldin in Striking Distance of Kathy Hochul; Voters Tired of Cuck Schemer: Poll
"Massive explosions rocked the airfield, home to aircraft from the Russian Navy’s 43rd Independent Naval Attack Aviation Regiment. The smoke could be seen from miles away. Satellite photos show that Russia lost at least half a dozen aircraft, including top-line Su-30 Flanker fighters and older Su-24 Fencer fighter/bombers." UKRAINE WAR: Russia's Saki Air Base Blew Up and Know One Knows How
"Pelosi’s staff rushed to clarify that she clearly meant Taiwan, not China, but the Global Times pounced on her comments even harder than the Republicans, who are world-champion pouncers and seizers in the estimation of the U.S. media." China Mocks "Selfish Child" Malig-Nancy Pelosi over China Praise Gaffe
“I honestly feel we should not play the national anthem during our season,” WNBA superstar Brittney Griner said in a 2020 interview with the Arizona Republic. “I think we should take that much of a stand.” (I have a feeling she'll become the next Bowe Bergdahl instead of rotting in Kolyma like she deserves - jjs) Brittney Griner's National Anthem Stance Mocked After Her Nine-Year Russian Prison Sentence
"While people infected with Langya virus had symptoms like fever, so far there have been 0 deaths. However, as it is genetically similar to deadly Nipah virus, scientists keeping an eye on cases." New Virus Reported in China is Sparking Concerns
“We know the areas in London where the poliovirus is being transmitted have some of the lowest vaccination rates. This is why the virus is spreading in these communities and puts those residents not fully vaccinated at greater risk.” (Finsbury Park, perhaps? - jjs) Polio Begins Spreading In London For First Time In Decades
"As men’s education and employment opportunities continue to worsen, so, too, will their marriage prospects. The dissatisfaction of young men is bound to increase. Although today’s anti-feminists lack the remedy for this discontent, their movement is an augury of the demographic disaster we will soon face. We dismiss their complaints at our peril." The Rise of the Anti-Feminists
"Whole Foods founder John Mackey is a well-known libertarian who is outspoken in defending free markets and capitalism. He also founded a business management movement called Conscious Capitalism. Now, as he’s set to retire next month, he regrets if Conscious Capitalism inadvertently pushed some companies toward bullying Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) trends." Whole Foods Founder John Mackey: Liberals Are Forcing Companies to Back Their Political Agenda
NOTE: The opinions expressed in the links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue.
ALSO: The Morning Report is cross-posted at CutJibNewsletter.com if you want to continue the conversation all day.
12th gen Intel CPU, up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD**, choice of displays up to a 3840x2400 touchscreen, dual Thunderbolt ports, dual USB-A, HDMI, and headphone jack. No microSD slot but at least with USB-A you can plug in a little adaptor.
Base model is more reasonably priced in Australia than the HP Pavilion Plus - the ThinkPad is currently on sale - but neither the 32GB nor 2TB options are available here.
Redis is not a database server, it's a data structure server. I wouldn't recommend it for permanent data storage (though you can do that, and I have), but for manipulating data before writing it to your primary database it is unrivalled.
It's my estimation that it will take the company five years to come up with a truly competitive product, which would likely mean spending another $3.5 billion. Industry analysts are 50/50 on whether the company is willing to commit to that.
Most of the benefit would be in the datacenter - accelerator cards for things like the dunking llama in the first item sell for far higher prices than desktop graphics cards. Do they need the volume side of the business to keep the effort afloat? I don't know. Should you buy a first-generation Arc graphics card? Absolutely not.
Disclaimer: There's no knives or forks either. Someone's nicked the entire bleedin' cutlery set.
I have to give the website props for its name. I love miso soup. I have a jar of the soup base that I keep around, mostly for a nice hot drink at night when it's too late to drink coffee. Boil some water in the kettle, add the base and Bob's your uncle, a nice hot cup of broth to warm your tummy. Quick, too. Miso soup has been around for a while.
Miso soup emerged during the Kamakura period. (1185-1333).
Suribachi mortars were introduced to Japanese society by Chinese monks, which led to the easy grinding of grains. This was epochal, bringing in a new era for Japan’s mealtime etiquette.
Of course if you're serving it as a starter you add stuff like tofu, scallions and wakame to beef it up a bit, but don't overlook the value of just the soup itself.
Thursday Quiz
Time to redo Chex mix:
I saw this quiz as a poll on another site, and the people there were obviously dealing with mental issues because rye chips were leading. Rye chips are the best. No way I'm removing them unless it was to make a snack that was nothing but rye chips. So what say you? I'd probably remove one of the pretzels, they're redundant.
The ‘discovery’ of America by Europeans in 1492 ushered in an age of discovery that would last until the early 20th century. Men (and women) raced to explore every inch of the globe, competing with one another to sail further than ever before into the unknown, mapping the world in greater detail.
The so-called ‘heroic age of Antarctic exploration’ began in the late 19th century and finished around the same time as the end of World War One: 17 different expeditions from 10 different countries launched Antarctic expeditions with different aims and varying levels of success.
I find it fascinating what these explorers went through on a quest to find the South Pole. Many of them didn't come back. The title of this section is from a book I quite enjoy (as well as the classic Coleridge poem), written in the early 80s. It's an apocalyptic novel, dealing with a planeload of people flying serenely over the Atlantic when WWIII breaks out with an all-out nuclear exchange, I mean everyone launches everything. So, they're OK, but there is nowhere left to go. Eventually they head to McMurdo Base in the Antarctic. What's fascinating about the book is that it ends on a hopeful note – but originally it ended with everyone dying as fallout reached the base. They took out a chapter or two for everything but the first printing or something. I've never been able to find a copy of that original version, and I'd really like to read the missing bits. If one of y'all have access to a first edition, would you mind scanning the last chapter(s) and sending them to me?
I'm not really linking the article for content, frankly, it's shit. Sure, there are some foods that deserve to go away, like 1970s jello mold creations (but when was the last time you saw any of those in real life anyway?), but there's a lot of perfectly good stuff she wants to get rid of, like chain restaurants. No, the reason I link the article is because it's such a perfect example of dripping Zoomer condescension that I almost wonder if it's a parody. On meatloaf:
First of all, meatloaf looks disgusting. Secondly, it's basically tasteless. Even the name itself triggers a vomit reflex. So basically, it doesn't meet the standards for any of the five senses. And when I eat, I expect all of my food to taste, feel, look, smell and sound delightful. There's a reason why hipster food is all the rage these days.
I bet you I know exactly what she looks like.
Tossed Salad And Scrambled Eggs
It's not real. But damn, wouldn't that just be peak 2022? Dark Frasier to go with Dark Brandon.
Single Lady Alert!
Hey guys, guess who's available?
I doubt there's even anything wrong with her elbows. Of course, she's available because she's under arrest for killing her boyfriend. Also, she's an OnlyFans model, so she's probably been taken out for quite a few test drives, and at the time of her arrest she was in rehab. But, hey, she's single. Go for it. Let us know how it works out.
So, apparently she was railing his brother-in-law. Somehow the groom got video of this, and so he had it projected on to the screen at the wedding. I mean....I have to admit that's a power move, but wow.
Kids Raised Right
"Hey, you're doing just great"
Oklahoma little leaguer gets hit in the head and then comforts the pitcher who is shaken up afterward pic.twitter.com/hYYLiy511K
The Orloj is mounted on the southern wall of Old Town Hall in the Old Town Square. The clock mechanism has three main components -- the astronomical dial, representing the position of the Sun and Moon in the sky and displaying various astronomical details; statues of various Catholic saints stand on either side of the clock; "The Walk of the Apostles", an hourly show of moving Apostle figures and other sculptures, notably a figure of a skeleton that represents Death, striking the time; and a calendar dial with medallions representing the months. According to local legend, the city will suffer if the clock is neglected and its good operation is placed in jeopardy; a ghost, mounted on the clock, was supposed to nod its head in confirmation. According to the legend, the only hope was represented by a boy born on New Year's night.
I dont accept a Jew, Israeli or Zionist, or anyone else who speaks Hebrew. Im with killing them wherever they are: children, elderly people, and soldiers."
-- Fady Hanona, New York Times Contributing Reporter ...until Friday, when the NYT got called out and had to dump him. [CBD]
The importance of diversity, accessibility, diversity, updating, diversity, modern sensibilities, diversity, Female Dwarves of Color (FDOCs), and diversity in Amazon's Lord of the Rings billion dollar fanfic Not mentioned: fidelity to Tolkein The scuttlebutt is that Amazon is attempting a Game of Thrones-style intrigue and politics show, set in Tolkein's world. But... that's not really Tolkein, is it? I know this won't help you get that sweet sweet Game of Thrones audience (if that still exists?), but Tolkein wrote male-skewing adventure and war stories. There's not really too much skullduggery and backstabbing because morality in Tolkein is pretty well-defined. There's not going to be a redemption arc for Hot Sauron. Or at least... I hope there's not going to be one! Whatever. Everything's hilariously, wretchedly terrible, it's kind of awesome. There's never been so much Not to Watch. We're living in a Golden Age of Television Not-Viewing.
From What the Hell is Going On, Ari Fleischer discusses his favorite fresh anecdote of leftwing media bias -- and ignorance -- in his new book:
On the Saturday after the election when the networks declared Joe Biden the winner and Fox News declared Joe Biden the winner, church bells went off in Paris. Fireworks went off in London. ABC, NBC and CNN all reported, live on the air, that this was part of the international celebration of Joe Biden's victory, celebrating Donald Trump's defeat, people around the world, because that's how they thought of it. When you were in a newsroom and everybody you know is celebrating Donald Trump's defeat and then you see fireworks or hear church bells, you think, "Aha, the world thinks just like we do." Well, you know what? It was the weekly call to mass in Paris. It happens every Saturday night. And the fireworks in London was a commemoration of a 500 year old holiday called Guy Fawkes Day, Bonfire Night, celebrating the failed assassination attempt on King James in 1605. Nothing to do with America's election.
When your mindset is the world celebrating, you shoehorn events into it, and then because you're a reporter you have the power to go on the air and just tell people that. Well, they were all wrong. And did they retract it? Nope.
Disclose.tv
@disclosetv
JUST IN - Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview New Jersey, is identified as the suspect of stabbing Salman Rushdie, according to law enforcement.
"We will work tirelessly to obscure, confuse, and conceal the motive for this easily-solved crime," the FBI vowed. "Our record in pretending ignorance in violent crimes perpetrated by favored constituencies of the left, and our allied street paramilitaries such as antifa and BLM, speaks for itself."
Thanks to andycanuck
Analysis: Twitter is probably 25% bots, and maybe as high as 50% bots He says Twitter knows this but allows it, and lies about it, because the fact is that people are abandoning Twitter and they don't want the public to know that -- because once people start realizing everyone else is leaving Twitter, it will cause a feedback cycle in which the Cool Thing is to leave Twitter. He says something like this happened to MySpace, and collapsed the service, and its share price.
At a bar having lunch and NFL Network is on. On the crawl, they keep repeating "the midterm elections will be some of the most consequential in our nation's history. Register to vote and make your voice heard. Go to (whatever dot com) for more information"
We're back with Season 2! CBD and J.J. discuss: the horrendous Gestapo-like raid on Mar-a-Lago, the political ramifications for the midterms and '24, how do we defeat the Leviathan, prospects for turning disaffected Dems into MAGAs, the lack of pizza, bagels and a decent museum in shiksa-land and more!
Armond White on Kevin Costner's "I'm With Liz" T-Shirt, and the shallow hippie liberalism on offer in the movies he produces:
"This career arc demonstrates how a political mindset can curdle and -- through sanctimony -- turn toward promoting that authoritarianism that liberals now embrace."
You know who was stung by that line about a liberal political mindset curdling, through sanctimony, into authoritarianism? Grossly fat cvckold Kevin D. Williamson:
With all due respect to Armond White, it is the people who attacked the government of this country on January 6 who are the turncoats, not the people investigating that assault. To call the January 6 hearings "show trials," calling to mind the Stalinist festivals of brutality, is foolish and irresponsible.
As for Kevin Costner, it is true that movie stars sometimes say ill-considered things about politics. Movie critics, too.
Go Shame-Eat another Dunkin Donuts 18-pack, Williamson. Your sugar is dropping again.
From the Things That Definitely Happen All the Time Department:
Alex Thompson
@AlexThomp
On the plane to NH the night of the Iowa caucuses, [Elizabeth] Warren said: "Everyone comes up to me and says, 'I would vote for you, if you had a penis.'" link to Elizabeth Warren's penis fantasies
Herrera Beutler's district does not lean as heavily Republican as Newhouse's, prompting her to vie for the favor of Democrats and independents during her campaign, which was not enough to save her.
I'm so surprised that a NeverTrump liberal sought the votes (and approval) of Democrats. Blow me over with a feather.
Hot Air's Official Bulwark Linker links The Bulwark Oh great, Noted Genius Amanda Carpenter has thoughts. Thanks for alerting me, Allah. Say, has Salem cautioned you about linking your next employer so much while not linking any Salem properties?
An imponderable from Robert...
Who is more Christlike?
A. Jesus
B. David French
Honestly I think it's a trick question -- the more important question is, "Who is more David-French-like?" Did Jesus ever throw open the doors of his wife to the indigent? I think not. Jesus, let's face, had a good run, but David French is the New Hotness Messiah.
The book puts the lie to the 1619 project. See the blurbs and description here:
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Tickets for Joe Scarborough & The Premeditations
on sale now... and tomorrow... and the day after that...
and all the way through showtime...
