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October 11, 2024

CBS "News" Continues Hiding the Real Video of Kamala Harris' Word-Salad Nonsense Answers, and Also Refuses to Make a Transcript of Her Real Words Available, Too

—Ace

A "news" organization is attempting to hide the actual news of their own interview.

Orwell laughs.

CBS News remained mum Wednesday amid mounting pressure to release the full transcript of Kamala Harris' interview with "60 Minutes" -- even as a former correspondent said there's "precedent" for the network doing so when it came to Donald Trump.

Ex-CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge -- who was laid off earlier this year as she investigated the Hunter Biden laptop scandal -- said the network released the full, unedited transcript of her interview with Trump when he was president in 2020.

The Republican presidential candidate has demanded CBS News publish the full interview with Harris after accusations that the Tiffany Network edited her "word salad" answers during the sit-down with Bill Whitaker.

"As Trump campaign calls on @60Minutes to release 'full, unedited transcript' of Kamala Harris interview ... There is precedent," Herridge posted on X on Wednesday.
Vice President Kamala Harris granted an interview to CBS's "60 Minutes" that aired on Monday night. 5


"When I interviewed then President Trump in July 2020. @CBSNews we posted the interview transcript. This is more complete and NOT the same as a transcript of the edited TV report."

The award-winning journalist provided the link to the unedited interview on CBS News in which she grilled Trump on hot-topic issues like the COVID vaccine.

"It's about transparency and standing behind the integrity of the final edit," Herridge said.

A source close to the network said Herridge had pushed for the publication of her full transcript at the time and that it was a "special case."

CBS News declined to comment.

Of course, of course. Why should the Guardians of Truth explain their deceptions to the lower order?

A spokesperson also did not reply to repeated calls and emails from The Post about whether the network would release the unedited "60 Minutes" transcript.

The controversy continued to swirl after a truncated version of the Democratic presidential candidate's response to a question from Whitaker about Israel was broadcast on the "60 Minutes" episode on Monday.

Harris' reply stood in contrast to her longer, stammering answer that was aired as a promo for the interview on "Face the Nation" on Sunday morning.

If you missed this story, they deleted her real answer -- which was another rambling, incoherent word-salad answer -- with something that sounded more confident and coherent, but which was offered as an answer to a different question.

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Posted by Ace at 01:11 PM Comments


King Harv Imperial Coffee

Polls Are For Strippers: An Explanation

—TheJamesMadison

One of the most famous statisticians of the 20th Century, George Box, had a saying that I've known since high school (my dad is a world famous statistician himself who has won the Shewhart Medal, though his area is industrial engineering and experimental design). That saying is, "All models are wrong. Some models are useful." I say this: polling, as it currently exists in the American political space, is not useful.

I've been extremely dismissive of polling in general for a while, and there are lingering questions from commenters I interact with about where the source of that dismissiveness comes from. Well, here is my perspective.

Polling has several innate problems that exacerbate when funded by people with agendas and who don't have the amount of money to do it right. Polling is expensive. Response rates on phone calls for polling are minute. Something like 1 in 10 calls (according to a research paper, it's actually just under that at 9%) gets a response that a firm can actually use. So, to get a 1,000 sample, you have to call about 10,000 numbers. That's a lot of time if you're using real people to make the calls (reportedly the more accurate way to do it). It requires a lot of resources, and that gets expensive. Your fly-by-night polling firms, are they investing in their efforts at that level? The news organizations that pay for polling, the same ones seeing contractions at even the highest "talent" levels, are they investing at that level? Most likely not.

And then you get to the question of incentives: What incentive is there for polling firms to "try and get it right?"

"Well," you say, "that's obvious. You're dumb TJM for not figuring this out. If they're not accurate, then no one will believe them in the future."

That's a great idea, but it doesn't actually hold up with reality. Let's take Quinnipac as a case study. In 2016, their final poll of the presidential race was Clinton 50, Trump 44. The race ended 48 to 46. In 2020, their final poll was Biden 50, Trump 39. The final result was 51 to 47. Their pattern over the last two cycles is to be within a reasonable (we'll get to that) distance of the Democrat number and to regularly (sometimes vastly) underestimating Trump's support. They're not very accurate. They're not very good. What is the generalized opinion of the firm? Well, 538 calls them the 17th most accurate pollster and rates them 2.8/3 stars. How? Quinnipac is terrible.

I'm not interested in seeing what esoteric reasons 538 rates Quinnipac so highly, but it's obvious that them regularly getting things wrong isn't actually a concern for its reputation. Getting it wrong doesn't hurt them. So, what incentive is there in being right?

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Posted by TheJamesMadison at 12:07 PM Comments



THE MORNING RANT: After Moving All-Star Game from Charlotte in Solidarity with LGBTQ, NBA Opens 2024 Season in Abu Dhabi, where Homosexuality is a Crime

—Buck Throckmorton

The new NBA season kicked off with an exhibition game last week in the United Arab Emirates.

“Celtics beat the Nuggets 107-103 in the NBA’s preseason opener at Abu Dhabi” [AP – 10/04/2024]

Like many sports leagues, the NBA seeks to increase its revenue by expanding its global following. For the UAE, being awarded the NBA season opener affirms the country’s stature and importance.

Of note, homosexuality is a crime in the United Arab Emirates, with allowable punishment including the death penalty. Transgender cross-dressing is also a crime.

Also of note, the NBA has established the precedent that it either condones or condemns a location’s criminal code regarding sexual behaviors by how the league awards – or revokes - featured exhibition games. By awarding the season-opening exhibition game to Abu Dhabi, the NBA has endorsed the UAE’s brutal criminalization of LGBTQ behavior.

The NBA’s apparent endorsement of criminalizing homosexuality in the Arab world would seem puzzling, because just a few years ago, the NBA revoked the NBA All-Star game from the city of Charlotte after the North Carolina legislature passed legislation banning biological men from entering women’s restrooms and locker rooms.

While it may be entirely consistent for the NBA to oppose homosexuality while still endorsing the right of men to terrorize women in restrooms and changing facilities, the reason given by NBA Commissioner Adam Silver for yanking the All-Star Game from Charlotte was that it discriminated against LGBTQ people.

“NBA moving 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte due to anti-LGBT bill” [USA Today – 7/21/2016]

In an unprecedented and monumental decision, the NBA will move the 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte, N.C. to another state because of North Carolina’s controversial anti-LGBT law called House Bill 2.

“While we recognize that the NBA cannot choose the law in every city, state, and country in which we do business, we do not believe we can successfully host our All-Star festivities in Charlotte in the climate created by HB2,” the league said in a statement.

What was “the climate” of House Bill 2? This is from a 2016 article at The Federalist titled The Truth About North Carolina’s Bathroom Bill:

This section of HB2 simply and justly states that persons must use the bathroom and locker room that identifies with the gender on their birth certificates. It also states that municipalities requiring different sexes to share public accommodations is inconsistent with North Carolina’s law and constitution.

How hateful! This law prohibited a man in North Carolina from strolling into a women’s restroom and conscripting unsuspecting women into his fetish. Meanwhile in the UAE, this is from the Human Dignity Trust’s website:

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Posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM Comments

Mid-Morning Art Thread

—CBD

Claesz still life.jpg

Vanitas Still Life With The Spinario
Pieter Claesz

Posted by CBD at 09:30 AM Comments

The Morning Report — 10/11/24


—J.J. Sefton

kaosCIA.jpg

Good Morning Kids. Tonight is the start of the most solemn Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. To all of you I wish an easy fast, and a meaningful day. G'mar Chatima tovah and, observing the holiday or not, may you all be inscribed in the Book of Life for the coming year.


So there are a few things that jump right out at me that do not exactly fill me with strength and confidence about what we can expect come the day after Election Day if not the days leading up to it. It is eminently clear that we have a junta in power and a Deep State bureaucracy that will do anything to hold on to and increase its grip on absolute power. The bungled response to two back to back hurricanes, on top of the East Palestine toxic train derailment shows how much the government cares for people whom it views as political enemies. The sheer incompetence of the Maui wildfire response might be to clear land and then give it away to friends of the party like Oprah for pennies on the dollar as a reward for stellar service to the cause.

Let's start off with this rather disturbing nugget:

The Afghan national who was arrested Monday for allegedly plotting an Election Day terrorist attack worked as a security guard for the CIA in Afghanistan, NBC News reported citing sources familiar with the matter.
Twenty-seven-year-old Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi was allegedly planning a “violent attack in the United States in the name of and on behalf of ISIS, which was planned for Election Day,” according to the criminal complaint filed against him. While the CIA has not publicly commented on the revelation, “sources familiar with [Tawhedi’s] work in Afghanistan say he would have had minimal interaction with Americans and he was not a CIA informant or a member of the U.S.-trained and armed paramilitary force known as ‘Zero Units,'” according to NBC News. . . Tawhedi entered the United States on Sept. 9, 2021 on “a special immigrant visa and is currently on parole status pending adjudication of his immigration proceedings,” the complaint states. Tawhedi was residing in Oklahoma. NBC News reports that “two U.S. officials familiar with the matter [say] the charging document is incorrect, and that Tawhedi entered the U.S. on what’s known as humanitarian parole. Officials say humanitarian parole generally entails far less screening than a Special Immigrant Visa.”

Gee, who was occupying the White House back then. And how was it that these thousands of Afghanis suddenly were flooding into the country? Oh yeah, the Biden Junta decided it was a great idea to just bug out of the country and declare the war over while leaving behind billions of dollars worth of our weapons in the hands of Islamic barbarians to use to wage Jihad all over the world.

Is this what Mrs. Emhoff means when she says she's bringing joy to America? Green cards for the Taliban! Get 'em while their hot!

Vice President Kamala Harris is promising to provide tens of thousands of Afghan nationals brought to the United States often without in-person screenings, with green cards. The move would come even as an accused Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist was able to get resettled in Oklahoma from Afghanistan as part of Harris and President Joe Biden’s massive Afghan resettlement operation. In September 2021, the Biden-Harris junta began resettling nearly 100,000 Afghan nationals across American communities. Among those resettled was 27-year-old Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, who was arrested in Oklahoma this month after allegedly plotting an ISIS terrorist attack on American citizens on Election Day.

But aside from this madness is the fact that this individual was and for all we know still may be a CIA asset.

This is the same CIA that is part an parcel of the Deep State bureaucracy that does not want Donald Trump back in office under any circumstances.

Now, however, it has come to light that he worked for the CIA, which casts doubt upon every other aspect of this story. . . What’s the big deal? He was just a security guard, right? That hardly means that he was the Afghan version of Agent 007. Sure, but when the CIA is involved, it’s impossible to dismiss the suspicion that there is more going on here than meets the eye. The agency, like all other intelligence agencies around the world, is not exactly open and honest about who exactly works for it and what they actually do. . . Sometimes it seems as if we can trust absolutely nothing that our governing authorities and the establishment media tell us. That may (or may not) be a wild exaggeration, but those in positions of public trust have no one but themselves to blame for the widespread and increasing suspicion. They’ve been discovered to be dishonest about so very much (remember all the falsehoods that have been attached to Donald Trump: Russian collusion, “insurrection,” rape, fraud, and so very many others) that it’s hard to assume that they’re being aboveboard and honest about literally anything. . .

. . . There is, after all, no good way to spin this. Tawhedi could be a CIA agent and his Election Day jihad plot is fake, perhaps fabricated in order to make Americans afraid to head to the polls and more accepting of mail-in ballots, which can be so easily used to commit election fraud. Alternatively, Tawhedi is a bona fide jihadi who worked as a security guard for the CIA, indicating that the vaunted intelligence agency is incapable of recognizing jihadis even when they’re standing at their own gates.

Now, put all of the above in context to two failed assassination attempts on Trump to which we still don't really know all of the facts on the identities and backgrounds of the shooters and, given the nature of who we are dealing with likely never will. As well as the desperation to keep Trump and anyone who thinks and feels as he does out of power at any cost.
Moving on to the next and not necessarily unrelated item on the agenda, should the polling, tea leaves and vibes indeed point to a Trump victory as well as control of the House and Senate, well look what we have here: Can you say INSURRECTION?

Top House Democrats won’t say for certain if they will certify the results of the 2024 presidential election if former President Donald Trump beats Vice President Kamala Harris, according to a new report. Some of these members, including those who objected to Trump electors in 2017, signaled to Axios that Trump may cause issues with the vote that would give them pause. Democrats would certify a Trump victory “assuming everything goes the way we expect it to,” said Jim McGovern (D-MA), the ranking member of the Rules Committee “We have to see how it all happens,” McGovern said. “My expectation is that we would.” . . . Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who served on the former January 6 panel, suggested Trump may resort to “manipulating” counts in some states.
These are the same revolting, shrieking criminal coprolites who screamed from the rooftops that the results of the 2000, 2004 and 2016 elections were illegitimate.

If Trump please dear God make it so wins come November, there is no way he will be allowed to take a seat behind the Resolute Desk. And should actual protests occur . . . Now get ready for this story:

More in the long train of abuses and usurpations….

Kathleen Hicks is the Deputy Secretary of Defense, or Lloyd Austin’s right-hand gal, and on September 27, the agency issued a new directive, approved by Hicks, that authorized U.S. military personnel to use “lethal force” when “assisting” local law enforcement in its operations.
Hopefully your local police chief isn’t corrupt, and your sheriff isn’t a George Soros purchase!

Sean Miller at InfoWars reported that the DoD directive, titled “DOD INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCE-RELATED ACTIVITIES AND DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE COMPONENT ASSISTANCE TO LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES AND OTHER CIVIL AUTHORITIES”, granted extensive new powers to the federal government, explained below: New provisions within the Directive expand the circumstances under which the DoD can assist law enforcement, including the use of lethal force, although assassinations are forbidden. GreenMed Info reported that the 2016 version of the directive did not mention ‘lethal force’ but rather centered around intelligence gathering.

So, if Trump wins, the paramilitary forces come out and are assisted by the army to move against him and We the People. If he loses or it's stolen yet again, ditto should anyone be dumb enough to march in protest on D.C. or even stand on a soapbox in a public park, lest they too get roasted alive like a house cat or a duck and eaten by Haitians.

What a country. It sure ain't America.

Have a good weekend, and prayers for all still affected by Helene and Milton.


Continue reading


Posted by J.J. Sefton at 06:43 AM Comments

Daily Tech News 11 October 2024

—Pixy Misa

Top Story



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Posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM Comments

An ONT For All Seasons

—WeirdDave

Hello everybody! Welcome to Thursday's ONT. Let's open with words of wisdom from 1947:


Overlap.jpg

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Posted by WeirdDave at 10:00 PM Comments

Rescue Me Cafe

—Ace

tanarlotbali.jpg
Waves hitting the temple at Tanar Lot, Bali, by Ryan Downie

People and puppies grow to resemble each other.

ICYMI: Monkey Train.

Cat will accept belly rubs now.

Abused dog rescued from backyard breeding situation sees the beach for the first time.

Cat rescued from a collapsed building decides to adopt its rescuer.

Horse rescued from a roof in a big flood.


Biker stops to save kitten stuck in the middle of the road.

A poor and beautiful dog was left tied to a fence in the driving rain as people fled their homes in Florida. That cute little pup has been saved.

People are saying whoever left the dog are monsters. I watch Rocky Kanaka on YouTube, and he says we shouldn't assume the worst of dog-abandoners. If you lose your home, your dog becomes, well, difficult to care for. It could be that the people who abandoned this dog had no car but hitched a ride with neighbors, and the dog got sick or started peeing or something and the neighbors told them "either you put the dog out of the car, or you can get out." I know that doesn't make it much better.

The good news is that this good boy is now dry and safe.

Dog is aggressive at dropping hints.

Cats compete, a little dangerously, to pass each other on a beam.

Elephants never forget.

Poor little turtle wants to make frenz with a cat but the cat isn't interested.

Kitten meets kit.

Continue reading


Posted by Ace at 07:33 PM Comments

Ron DeSantis' Emergency Response Efforts are Proceeding Crisply While FEMA is Short-Staffed Due to Providing "Services" For Illegal Aliens at Harris and Biden's Dissolved Border

—Ace

helenedamagetree.jpg
A tree uprooted by Hurricane Helene (not Milton)


Milton made landfall as a category 3 storm.

We're not allowed to say that, though: Kamala, America's Drunken, Embarassing Side-Piece, wants to play president and will go on CNN to say that reporting the actual strength of the storm is "misinformation" because we're all required to lie to amp up the fear and pretend that Kamala Harris is "really showing executive competency."

It wasn't as bad as Experts predicted. Does that mean Global Warming is a lie? They said the power of the storm proved global warming; does the relative weakness of the storm prove global warming is fake?

Just wondering.

Hurricane Milton made landfall near Siesta Key, Florida late Wednesday evening as a Category 3 storm with winds of 120 mph.

Around 3.2 million people in Florida are without power Thursday afternoon as the storm has devastated Florida's coast.

Milton is currently a Category 1 storm and has moved off the coast, bringing destructive winds, flooding rains and storm surge in its wake.

More than 10 inches of rain has fallen so far in some parts of Florida and an additional 8 to 12 inches of rain is possible in many areas.

St. Lucie County Sheriff Keith Pearson also confirmed to Fox Weather that there have been 17 tornadoes along with several fatalities in his county, with "a rescue mission ongoing, and hundreds of homes destroyed."

At least 10 fatalities have been confirmed, with more expected

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gave an update on Hurricane Milton Thursday afternoon after it made landfall the night before as a Category 3 Storm.

By Thursday afternoon, the governor said, at least 340 individuals and 49 pets had been rescued. Florida National Guard, Florida law enforcement, and urban search and rescue teams were continuing to work through the day. Hundreds of rescuers were engaged in more than 125 missions in 26 counties.

"The northern side of the storm had a lot of precipitation. They were just getting water dumped on them. So, whereas [Hurricane] Helene created a lot of storm surge in that part of the state, this one didn't do that here, but it create inland flooding," DeSantis said.

Around 4 million were left without power. As of the 3 p.m. update, around 880,000 had been restored, with 3.2 million accounts still without power.

He pre-deployed 50,000 linesmen so power lines are going back up.



DeSantis said that while Hurricane Milton did inflict damage, "I think in some areas that in terms of what was being predicted, some of the worst case scenarios did not come to pass, certainly in terms of some of the storm surge people were predicting."

He has a warning for Kamala voters -- I mean, "looters."

Gov. DeSantis warned people against taking advantage of a dire situation.

"I'm warning you, don't do that. If you loot, you will be held accountable. If you're doing things that violate the law, if you're gonna try to take advantage of vulnerable people, we're going to throw the book at you," DeSantis said.

He then went on to own the relentless propgandists of the press, who kept demanding he tell them that global warming is real and will kill us all.

At a press conference on Thursday, DeSantis was asked whether "global warming" impacted the hurricane's intensity after Milton spawned several tornadoes that wreaked havoc in the Sunshine State.

DeSantis rejected the premise that Milton was worse than previous hurricanes, stating, "I think you can go back and find tornadoes for all of human history."

Compared to previous storms, Milton had a barometric pressure of about 950 millibars when it made landfall, the governor said. "I think if you go back to 1851, there's probably been about 27 hurricanes that have had lower barometric pressure -- so the lower the barometric pressure, the stronger it is."

The governor noted that 17 hurricanes stronger than Milton made landfall in Florida prior to 1960 and that the strongest hurricane on record since the 1850s was the Labor Day hurricane, which occurred in 1935 and had a barometric pressure of 892 millibars. The most deadly hurricane in Florida history happened in 1928, he added.

"I just think people should put this in perspective there. They tried to take different things that happened with tropical weather and act like it's something -- there's nothing new under the sun," DeSantis said.

"I think what's changed is we've got 23 million people. A storm is likely to hit more people and property than it would have 100 years ago. And so the potential for that damage has grown, but what's also changed is our ability to do the prevention, to pre-stage the assets."

Damn.


JusttheNews reports that FEMA is incompetent under the Harris-Biden Regime because Harris and Biden are diverting FEMA workers to... help build shelters for illegal aliens streaming across the border.

And performing "Covid funerals."

What?

On the eve of Hurricane Milton's landfall on a disaster-weary Florida, FEMA, the nation's disaster relief agency reported a stark shortage of frontline workers available to be deployed: just 8% of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's vaunted Incident Management personnel were still available for deployment.


The stunning declaration in Wednesday's Daily Operations Briefing exposed the longtime impact of FEMA's expanding work on unrelated missions like COVID funerals and illegal immigrant services, a crisis created by a worker shortage, a workforce morale issue and the reality of burnout from a increasingly frenetic natural disaster pace.

Just seven months earlier, the Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of Congress, warned that FEMA was in an increasingly weak position to handle multiple major crises at once.

"Increasingly complex and severe natural disasters coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic and responsibilities at the southern border have created an unprecedented demand for FEMA's disaster workforce," the GAO concluded.

...

Wednesday's situation report showed FEMA had most of its IM (incident management) resources deployed in the region struck by Hurricane Helene two weeks ago or pre-positioned in Florida for Milton. But the 8% in reserves -- only 90 workers -- would be be hard pressed if another disaster like an earthquake or wildfire broke out in the ensuing days.

"I think we plan for multiple events. We've done this before we are prepared for this," she added.

Several factors contribute to the increasing strain on the workforce of the nation's premier disaster relief agency related to the agency's expanding roles and responsibilities outside of traditional disaster relief. The GAO report specifically highlighted the impacts of workforce burnout from increased responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic response and deployments to the U.S. southern border.


FEMA did not respond to additional questions from Just the News about the number of FEMA employees or contractors deployed to the southern border or handling other immigration-related programs.

Recently, Congress has continued to fund FEMA programs for feeding and sheltering illegal immigrants released into the country awaiting court dates at a time when the agency is running short of disaster relief funds. The agency has come under additional scrutiny by Republicans for hiccups in its response to severe flooding in the southeast last month, Just the News reported this week.

White House spokeswoman Karine-Jean Pierre took the lead in trying to suggest it was a "conspiracy theory" to suggest that FEMA was using its resources to aid illegal aliens. Republicans came back with receipts, showing that FEMA had routed $640.9 million in grants to nonprofits aiding immigrants, many of whom have crossed into the U.S. illegally.

...

Last week, a group of Republican Senators who did not support the budget deal wrote to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, expressing concern that its continued "entanglement" with immigration threatens readiness.

"FEMA's continued entanglement in DHS's efforts to respond to the border crisis could impact its readiness and emergency response mission," GOP Senators James Lankford, Josh Hawley, Rand Paul, and Ron Jonson wrote to Biden last week. "Rather than ensuring FEMA is ready to respond to hurricanes and other emergencies, FEMA has been pulled into a border crisis mission."

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Posted by Ace at 06:30 PM Comments

Quick Hits

—Ace

Arab racist Mehdi Hassan is arguing with black racist Brianha Joy-Grey about who hates white people and Jews more and who is higher on the progressive Attention Stack.

mehdivsbrianaha.jpg

LOL: Politico's Propaganda Message of the Day is that we're currently enjoying a "dream economy" but the dumb voters don't appreciate it.

DREAMECONOMY.jpg

This is based on inflation dropping a tenth of a percent from August -- and being a tenth of a point higher than expectations.

Note that the cumulative effect of years of inflation now has prices 20%+ higher than they were before Harris-Biden "fixed" the Trump economy.

But the pace of inflation slightly fell, so prices aren't going up as quickly now, but are still going up from their already high level, and we're in a dream economy and you racists just won't admit it.


A couple of days ago, Trump announced a NYC rally to be held in Madison Square Garden.

A New York State Senator is using his political might to block Trump from speaking (in a safe environment) in New York City. I guess he wants him outdoors, with lots and lots of clear lines of sight for assassins:

Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal @bradhoylman

Let's be clear. Allowing Trump to hold an event at MSG is equivalent to the infamous Nazis rally at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939

. . . .

This is a disastrous decision by Madison Square Garden that will endanger the public safety of New Yorkers and has the potential to incite widespread violence.

For the good of NYC and its residents, I demand @TheGarden keep our city safe by cancelling the Trump rally

You're worried about violence? You're trying to create a good shooting lane for an assassin.

Walz, the Knucklehead, sometimes deals in crude Asian stereotypes but it's just because he's got so much "passion."

Andrew Stiles (not completely seriously):

Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, the serial fabulist running for vice president on the Democratic ticket, has a bigoted code name for his running mate Kamala Harris. During a friendly interview with Democratic fundraiser and former comedian Jimmy Kimmel on Monday, the VP nominee confessed that Harris was listed as "My Dry Cleaner" in his phone contacts. "They told me to come up with something, and that was all I could think of," Walz chuckled.

In fact, there is nothing funny about misogyny and racism. Walz's "dry cleaner" code name is problematic for several reasons. Harris is running to be the first female president of the United States, but Walz's word choice suggests that women are better suited for domestic tasks such as doing laundry or dropping off their husband's work clothes at the dry cleaner. Hey, Tim, the 1950s called; they want their small-minded gender stereotypes back, bigot.

Harris would also be the first Asian-American president in history. Viewed in this context, it is reasonable to conclude that Walz is vehemently biased toward non-white ethnic groups. The Asian dry cleaner is a familiar trope that only a passionate racist would joke about on national television. This might explain Walz's bizarre affinity for communist China. A devoted white supremacist with low self-esteem would presumably enjoy surrounding himself with members of an inferior race. A racist misogynist would presumably view Asian women as subservient sex objects.

He subheds his piece: #StopAsianHate.

Do Better, Chinese agent-in-place.

#DoBetter.

Hillary Clinton's latest "book" bombed harder than Jake Tapper's.

Diminishing Returns: Hillary Clinton's Second Angsty Screed About 2016 Loss Sells Way Fewer Copies Than the First Maybe now she'll finally go away (or at least accept the fact that no one cares) Simon & Schuster

...


Hillary has just written another memoir about how unfair it was that she lost to Donald Trump and why you still owe her an apology for being right about everything. Released last month, Something Lost, Something Gained: Lessons on Life, Love, and Liberty is a tedious slog through familiar grievances and blatant lies about her "thicker skin" and "stiffer spine." She lauds herself as "the first woman to win a presidential primary, the nomination of a major party, and the national popular vote." She remembers the good times when she "flew on Air Force One, dined with kings and queens, and was constantly surrounded by armed guards." She refuses to go away or accept the fact that no one cares.

You probably won't be surprised to learn that sales of her second angsty screed about losing the 2016 election are much lower this time around. Something Lost, Something Gained sold just 27,000 copies in its first week, according to an industry source. That's less than 20 percent of her "record-breaking" haul during the Trump administration, when trauma-brained MSNBC viewers were particularly ravenous for #Resistance slop. That's still an alarming number of copies--more than eight times the week-one sales for Extremely Online (2023), the fawning history of teen influencers by disgraced reporter Taylor Lorenz. But the trend line is promising.

Read our review of Hillary's new book if you'd like to know the unlikely name she's given her "postmenopausal belly," and other sad facts.

Oh boy you know I do! That review is here.

Hillary Clinton isn't going anywhere. Why would she? She was right. She tried to warn us. She was treated so unfairly. She deserved it; we betrayed her. We were sexist. We were duped. She was robbed. Putin, Comey, Facebook, Electoral College. The goddamned voters, man. Sorry? She's not sorry. She's still waiting for an apology from you. From all of us.


...


"These days, I find myself thinking mostly about the future," Hillary bluffs as she relitigates old grievances. "Time and so many battles won and lost have given me a thicker skin and a stiffer spine." How she really feels is revealed in the text. Her "pang of vindication" when Trump was convicted of paying hush money to a porn star. "A fraud was committed against the American people, against all of us," she bristles. "I would have won. ... Even now, just thinking about that moment makes fury well up in my chest." She's owed an apology, dammit, even if we don't deserve her forgiveness just yet.

...

When she's not moping about being right, Hillary tries to convince us she doesn't spend all her time obsessing about politics. That she's fun! You can imagine how persuasive this is. Several chapters recount good times hanging out with old friends who know her as "Big Girl," and her "postmenopausal belly" as "Beulah." (Don't ask.)

Oh I won't.

The Free Beacon has unmasked another woke DEI hire whose career, such as it is, is built on white guilt and massive plagiarism.

The dean of Michigan State University's College of Education, Jerlando Jackson, plagiarized extensively over the course of his career, according to a complaint filed with the university on Thursday, lifting text without attribution and raising questions about his fitness to lead one of the top teacher training programs in the country.

The complaint includes nearly 40 examples of plagiarism that span nine of Jackson's papers, including his Ph.D. thesis, and range from single sentences to full pages. It adds to the allegations of research misconduct already facing the embattled dean, who was a coauthor on several papers implicated in complaints against diversity officials earlier this year, including Harvard University's chief diversity officer, Sherri Ann Charleston.

"Jackson has failed all ordinary standards of academic honesty," said Peter Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars and a former provost at Boston University, where he helped lead plagiarism investigations of faculty and alumni. "As long as he remains as a dean, the university has no legitimate basis to hold students and faculty to basic standards of intellectual integrity."

Michigan State University defines plagiarism as "copying another person's text or ideas and passing the copied material as your own." And Jackson--who can expel students for "academic misconduct," per the university's handbook--has a decades-long record of doing just that.

...


The allegations against Jackson come as teachers are confronting a wave of AI-generated plagiarism in student writing. Demand for AI detection tools has surged since the release of ChatGPT, according to data from the Center for Democracy and Technology, jumping by 30 percentage points in just one year and corresponding to an increase in student discipline.

That context makes the allegations all the more galling, said Steve McGuire, a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, given that graduates of Jackson's program will inherit a plagiarism crisis with no precedent in modern memory.

"It makes a mockery of the whole enterprise of education to have someone who appears to be a serial plagiarist running a school of education, especially in an age in which teachers and professors are increasingly encountering extensive academic dishonesty facilitated by the rise of artificial intelligence," McGuire wrote in an email. "How can educators combat this very real crisis if students can point to academic leaders and accuse them of plagiarism too?"

Jackson and Michigan State University did not respond to requests for comment.

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Posted by Ace at 05:28 PM Comments

Folie a DUH: Studio Scrambling to Figure Out Why a Movie That Was an Undisguised "F*** You" to Its Fans Failed to Find an Audience

—Ace

Here's a quick EduGraphic. The best point is the first one: Joachin Phoenix reportedly awoke from a dream (which one might imagine was in an altered state) and said he had the greatest idea for a sequel -- it should be a musical!

Todd Phillips, who never wanted to make this movie but changed his mind when they offered him $20 million, supposedly loved the idea. Or, more likely, he just couldn't be bothered enough to care and so he said "Sure let's do what this idiot just said."

jokerhowthedisasterhappened.jpg

The thing about Phillips isolating himself at a ranch during the premiere is no big deal. A lot of directors do that. I believe Spielberg and Lucas were hiding out in Hawaii during the release of their films that they started talking about Raiders of the Lost Ark.

But... One imagines Phillips knew he had a problem on his hands and didn't want to hear from anyone in the opening weekend.

From media shill-site Variety: How They Built The Bomb.

Inside the 'Joker: Folie a Deux' Debacle: Todd Phillips 'Wanted Nothing to Do' With DC on the $200 Million Misfire


The article notes that the two men put in charge of Warner Bros. DC universe, James Gunn and Peter Saffron, did not attend the premiere for this bomb.

Because no one wants to be found near a corpse.

Insiders say the duo's glaring absence for a film that is based on one of the biggest draws in the DC canon underscores a dysfunctional dynamic that played out behind the scenes on the ill-fated Warner Bros. musical. Todd Phillips "wanted nothing to do with DC" during the making of the film, says one agent familiar with the director's unique carve-out, which allowed him to bypass any oversight from the brand's gatekeepers. Although Gunn has publicly supported the film on social media, Phillips has distanced himself from DC. As the animated title-card sequence unspooled inside the iconic Hollywood cinema in the opening minutes, it became apparent that Phillips had just given DC the middle finger. There was no DC Studios logo.


Gunn has since been silent about the movie. He doesn't want it tarnishing his own brand.

"If the first movie was about some down-on-his-luck, mentally ill guy in a downtrodden city, it makes maybe $150 [million] worldwide. Not a billion," says a source familiar with the internal awkwardness. "People showed up because that guy was Joker."

(A DC spokesperson downplays any tensions and says Gunn was busy directing the Max series "Peacemaker" in Atlanta, which had lost a day of production due to Hurricane Helene, while Safran was sick. A Warners spokesperson notes that a DC logo appears at the end of the "Joker" sequel. Phillips declined to comment for this story.)


He doesn't have access to Twitter when he's hanging around waiting for the crew to finish setting the lights? No, he's hiding because he doesn't want the radiation from this bomb poisoning him.

Now that the dust has settled on the sequel's disastrous opening weekend, plenty of soul-searching is taking place on the Burbank lot. The overarching question being asked is: Why spend $200 million to make -- and nearly $100 million to market -- a tentpole that ignores the DC fanbase? And "ignores" may be putting it mildly. As a Rolling Stone review of the film succinctly put it: "'Joker: Folie a Deux' Has a Message for Fans: Go F-ck Yourselves."

Alas, the fanboys and fangirls stayed home, resulting in a shocking $37.7 million domestic opening for Phillips' follow-up to his 2019 "Joker," an enormous success that cost just $60 million and earned $1.1 billion. Such disregard for the base has brand repercussions.

...

The movie began production in December 2022, two months after Gunn and Safran took control of DC, and many expected the duo to provide notes and feedback on the R-rated musical, especially given the capital outlay involved. But Phillips balked and would only liaise with De Luca and Abdy.


You know who's probably putting this out to the media? James Gunn. He wants it to be very clear that he had nothing to do with this, and that, while he did offer "notes" to Phillips, Phillips gave him the finger. So you can't blame Gunn's "notes."

And he has done little to dispel the appearance of friction, even though Gunn and Safran were on hand for the first director's cut screening for the studio....


Now Warner Bros.' higher-ups go to the press to say "he ignored us, too!" Zaslav reportedly asked Phillips to reduce the budget by filming in London, which is cheaper, and the UK provides a tax incentive for filming there.

He told Zaslev to get bent. There would be no reducing the hefty price tag. (Phillips' $20 million salary was a part of that price tag, of course.)

The studio also objected to debuting the film at the Venice Film Festival. Note that that was about 45 days before the premiere, so that gave bad reviews plenty of time to set in with the public. Phillips insisted on a Venice debut, and yes, the reviews were bad and ending of the film leaked.

Phillips refused test screenings, claiming he didn't want the ending to leak. But it leaked after Venice. (It's a divisive ending. And the original version was worse.) Those test screenings could have told him what the public objected to in the film, but he was too high on his own supply and wouldn't compromise his artistic vision.

Other battles of will between Phillips and Warners ensued. Phillips refused to test screen "Joker 2." So its premiere in Venice marked the first time an audience saw it. The critics rejected it, and the film tallied a disastrous 33% score on Rotten Tomatoes well before earning a dismal "D" CinemaScore. To put that grade into context, the much reviled "Madame Web" landed a "C+" earlier this year. (A Warners spokesperson says, "Given the film contains spoilers, the studio did not want to unnecessarily divulge plot points too early to test audiences, but rather, allow moviegoers to discover the film in their own time.")


Um, a would-be blockbuster opening in 4,000 theaters isn't built to allow audience to discover it in their own time. It's made to make $200 million opening weekend.

...

"No one could get through to Todd," says one source directly involved with the film. "And the one thing about genre stuff: If you don't listen and pay attention to what the fan expectations are, you're going to fail."


Why doesn't anyone in Hollywood understand this (except for this one source)?

This Variety article is written by a goof who was one of the cringing fearful shitlibs worried the movie would "incite incels," but even he understands that attacking your own audience is bad business.

'Joker: Folie a Deux's' Fatal Flaw Is Turning the Fans Into the Villains of the Sequel

I hated Todd Phillips' original "Joker," which made me feel like a crank when the hit anti(super)hero movie went on to earn the top prize at Venice, an Oscar best picture nomination and more than a billion dollars at the box office back in 2019.

That film struck a nerve with me -- not in a good way, though I fiercely believe that provocation can be one of art's highest aims -- by transforming the beloved Batman villain into a poster boy for incels everywhere. I know people like Arthur Fleck, and the last thing they (or any of us) need is such a film to encourage them. I feared it would go down like "Scarface," as a fictive role model for sick minds.


Flash forward five years, and the character is back for a scandalously unpopular sequel, except that this time, it feels like "Joker" hates us -- or, more to the point, it's as if Phillips turned on his original audience. (Turns out, fans are returning the favor. I spoke to a couple theater managers yesterday, and they reported a strange phenomenon: People are canceling their tickets, or simply not showing up, because of the bad reviews.)


Ask yourself, who is the villain in "Joker: Folie a Deux"? Hint: It's not Arthur Fleck. Instead of fearing Joaquin Phoenix's character, it's his fans we ought to be worried about -- those who want him to reprise his role as the face-painted chaos-monger.

...

You want to know what's wrong with the "Joker" sequel? It's boring.

I've seen critics note that the movie is mostly one long courtroom scene which simply repeats -- or "relitigates," as this article puts it -- the events of the first movie.

I know that retracing your steps -- going back to places, repeating actions and dialogue -- is just absolute poison in a movie, which is always about moving forward. If you go back a step every time you go forward a step, the audience can see the movie is not progressing but just wasting time.

The YouTuber "CaptainMidnight" faults the film for undoing the whole conclusion of Joker and reverting to the midpoint of that film. That is, the first movie is all about Arthur Fleck coming to terms with the idea that he is Joker, and accepting that, after fighting it for most of the movie. In this movie, it reverts back to Arthur fighting this. So the movie undoes the dramatic choice he makes at the end of the first movie, and once again has him go through the same process of debating if he is Joker. This time, he decides he's not, but the movie makes us tread the same ground again.

Hollywood's had so many gigantic bombs the past two years that it's considering doing the unthinkable: Asking the actual fans of these genre films for advice about what their expectations are, and what their red lines are.

Leftwingers have been shrieking, shrieking about this.

This article itself frames this as "Hollywood considers bringing 'the toxic fandom' into the creative process."

"The Acolyte" was the latest high-profile target of "toxic fandom," the catchall term for when fan criticism curdles from good-faith dissatisfaction into a relentlessly negative, often bigoted online campaign against either the project or its stars or creative leaders. In a franchise economy increasingly dependent upon established audience devotion to drive the bottom line, the threat of toxic fandoms poisoning that enthusiasm has become a seemingly intractable headache for almost every studio. And it's only getting worse.

...

Perhaps the greatest irony of this phenomenon is the disproportionate impact these toxic fandoms have relative to their actual number.

Ah yes: the "Tiny Minority of Haters" paradigm.

Weird that this tiny minority is simultaneously so enormous that millions and millions of people around the world are rejecting these movies.

...


Those who did talk with Variety all agreed that the best defense is to avoid provoking fandoms in the first place. In addition to standard focus group testing, studios will assemble a specialized cluster of superfans to assess possible marketing materials for a major franchise project.

"They're very vocal," says the studio exec. "They will just tell us, 'If you do that, fans are going to retaliate.'" These groups have even led studios to alter the projects: "If it's early enough and the movie isn't finished yet, we can make those kinds of changes."

Several studio insiders say they often put their talent through a social media boot camp; in some cases, when a character is intentionally challenging a franchise's status quo, studios will, with the actor's permission, take over their social media accounts entirely. When things get really bad -- especially involving threats of violence -- security firms will scrub talent information from the internet to protect them from doxxing.

The "Toxic Fans" are doing exactly what the SJWs did for years: They are pressuing studios to make movies for them. The SJWs demanded that every male hero be gender-flipped to female and every white character (especially gingers) to black. Hollywood didn't call them "toxic" -- instead, they catered to this actually-tiny minority of incessantly online Identity Warriors. All the "toxic" fans are doing now is trying to push back against the SJWs never-ending brigading and pressure campaigns to object these franchises with nonstop leftwing propaganda messaging.

The leftwingers who demand genre films be made to please their tastes are heroes, the normies who say "No, stop this, make these films without a leftwing agenda" are villains.

But here's the thing:

There sure do seem to be a lot more "villains" than "heroes" in the audience, huh?

Continue reading


Posted by Ace at 04:28 PM Comments

In Bizarre Attempt at Viral Vote-Getting Stunt, Governess Gretchen Whitmer Feeds Doritos to an Influencer on Her Knees In Offensive Mockery of the Giving of the Holy Eucharist

—Ace

I don't know what on earth this is supposed to mean.

These people will do literally anything a woke "young person" tells them to do.

Collin Rugg @CollinRugg

NEW: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer feeds a chip to a begging liberal podcaster on her knees in an effort to get more votes for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

Whitmer joined Canadian feminist Liz Plank for an abortion podcast episode.

The pair released the following video as a bizarre way to get more votes for Harris.

At one point during the podcast, Plank asked Whitmer if she ever thinks about getting a "post-birth abortion" on her two daughters.

The pair also talked about "masculinity" and why men aren't supporting Democrats.

Continue reading


Posted by Ace at 03:13 PM Comments

Elderly Internet Spinster Taylor Lorenz Repeatedly Lied to Her Bosses, Says NPR Hit Piece

—Ace

They just want to date her

Carbon date her that is

Posted by: Stu Podaso

Taylor Lorenz claimed she left the Washington Post of her own accord.

No one believed her, obviously.

Now NPR relays leaks from their buddies at the Washington Post to do a hit-piece on her.

They're all super-left-wing, but they're also catty and vindictive. That's the only reason this was leaked and is being published -- they're personally pissed at her for lying.

The lunacy and gonzo leftwing bias, they're fine with. They just mad that she think she cute.

Oh, and of course: Her gonzo leftwing bias showed itself in attacking the Democrat "President" Joe Biden as a "war criminal," which they cannot abide. The Washington Post are all shitlibs -- they're Democrat operatives, full stop. Yes, they hate Israel and agree that helping Israel makes one a war criminal -- but they don't let you say that. Certainly not during an election year.

When tech columnist Taylor Lorenz left the Washington Post last week, she did so with a splash: An interview with The Hollywood Reporter about launching her own digital magazine, called User Mag.

"I like to have a really interactive relationship with my audience," she said. "I like to be very vocal online, obviously. And I just think all of that is really hard to do in the roles that are available at these legacy institutions."

Lorenz's professional fate at the paper was in doubt even prior to her announcement. Since August, its editors had grappled with the disclosure that Lorenz had labeled President Biden a "war criminal" in a selfie from a White House event in which Biden was visible in the background. She had circulated the picture to friends in a private social media post.

Lorenz, a frequent and often divisive presence online, never wrote for the paper again.

Three people at the Post with knowledge of events tell NPR that Lorenz lost the trust of the newsroom's leadership both by posting that selfie with the caption about Biden and then by willfully misleading editors in claiming that she had not done so.

Lorenz initially denied writing the caption or sharing it. After Jon Levine of The New York Post posted a screengrab of it online, Lorenz tweeted, "You people will fall for any dumbass edit someone makes." She told editors that someone else had added the caption to the photo.

After NPR verified the post was authentic, Lorenz changed her account of what happened, acknowledging to editors she had shared the image.

The Post kicked off a formal review, saying, "Our executive editor and senior editors take alleged violations of our standards seriously." Lorenz maintained she shared the image as a joke echoing an online meme, not as a commentary on Biden.

The paper has not announced the findings of its review. "We are grateful for the work Taylor has produced at The Washington Post," a corporate spokesperson said in a statement. "She has resigned to pursue a career in independent journalism, and we wish her the best." The paper would not comment further.

"I have no idea about their review," Lorenz writes in a text to NPR. "All I know is that they've been incredibly cool to me and very great, and I'm on good terms with them.

"I want out of legacy media as a whole, for so many reasons," Lorenz writes to NPR. "And that's not a knock on legacy media, I love and support all of my friends in that system, but it's not the right environment for me to do the work that I want to do."

When I discussed her firing, I mentioned that it seemed unlikely she wanted to strike out on her own, and that she's the type who wants to be associated with an establishment outfit to lend her credibility and clout. NPR says that's accurate:

Even so, according to counterparts and colleagues who have known her at various points in her career, Lorenz has until now placed great stock in her affiliation with major mainstream news outlets. She reported for The Atlantic magazine and The New York Times before joining the Post. Yet she has consistently tangled online with critics in a way that tested the social media policies of those outlets. Both newspapers have struggled with policies seeking to regulate their journalists' social media postings on contentious issues. Sponsor Message

At the Post, Lorenz was designated a columnist, giving her more leeway for personal expression in print and on her own accounts than a reporter would have. Even so, her work for the newspaper focused on reported articles rather than opinion pieces.

Ha. Hah. Hah.

Obviously if this gross internet stalker had attended a Trump event and labeled him a "war criminal," she'd still be working for the Post.

Posted by Ace at 01:58 PM Comments

CBS Owner Shari Redstone Backs Reporter Tony Dokoupil Over His Woke Inquisitors

—Ace

For all that that matters. And it doesn't matter much. The wokies own the place. It doesn't matter who "legally" owns it.

The chair of Paramount Global, Shari Redstone, is backing CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil after a contentious interview last week with author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

"I frankly think Tony did a great job with that interview," Redstone said on Wednesday. "I was very proud of the work that he did. Yes, as hard as it was for me to go against this company, I think they made a mistake here."

"I just want to be clear that I've been working with the CEOs," the mogul elaborated. "I've been working with the woman who does a lot of our diversity training, and I think we all agree that this was not handled correctly, and we all agree that something needs to be done. I don't have, you know, editorial control. I am not an executive, but I have a voice in our platform, like all of us."

The comments from Redstone come after CBS Mornings co-anchor Tony Dokoupil is said to have discussed the matter with his CBS News colleagues. It is not immediately clear what Dokoupil said.

As I was saying: It doesn't matter what the owners and senior people say.

The young woke semi-literate savages have taken over the newsroom, just as they took over the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN, and they took it over without even a fight from the self-styled "Stunning and Brave Truth-Tellers."

Does CBS News Know Where Jerusalem Is?

'Do not refer to it as being in Israel,' said the network's senior director of standards and practices.

By Oliver Wiseman

October 9, 2024

In late August, Mark Memmott, the senior director of standards and practices at CBS News, sent an email to all CBS News employees reminding them to "be careful with some terms when we talk or write about the news" from Israel and Gaza. One of the words on Memmott's list of terms was Jerusalem.

Of Jerusalem, Memmott wrote: "Do not refer to it as being in Israel."

He continued, in a note sent to thousands of journalists at the network: "Yes, the U.S. embassy is there and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel's capital. But its status is disputed. The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel regards Jerusalem as its 'eternal and undivided' capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem--occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war--as the capital of a future state."

Jerusalem's status is indeed contested. For instance, the United States' embassy in Israel is in Jerusalem, and the Jordanian Islamic Waqf has custody of its holy sites. But acknowledging the competing claims on different parts of the city, or declining to refer to Jerusalem as Israel's capital, are one thing. Denying that it is in Israel at all is quite another.

You know what else is disputed? Whether or not there is a "Palestinian people" at all. Oh, there are people living in Judea who are not Jewish-- but many say they're simply Jordanians, and that the "Palestinian people" idea was manufactured by Yasser Arafat to justify a demand for "a homeland for the Palestinian people" to rebut the Jews' own demands for "a homeland for the Jewish people." There was no real "Palestinian people" before it was created as a propaganda point.

(The people currently living in Gaza and the West Bank are descendants from the people living in the larger country of "Transjordan.")

So: Will CBS "News" also stop referring to "the Palestinian people," as it's also a "contested" point, or not?

Not, right?

Posted by Ace at 12:44 PM Comments

The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

—CBD

punk-monkey.jpg

Listen to Michael Walsh on the CutJibNewsletter podcast about the feminization of our military, and this pathetic display of military weakness will make perfect sense.

The maniacal Houthis are playing in the big leagues by limiting global trade with their ragtag military and some modern missiles and drones supplied by...you guessed it...Iran! But they aren't a big league team, and the curious inability of the American military to do much of anything against them is a searing indictment of the current crop of political cronies and fellow travelers in the upper reaches of our armed forces.

Another US Strike in Yemen But Little Evidence Military Operations Are Deterring Houthis

Major Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters on Monday that the strike involved 15 Houthi targets across five locations, and those targets included "offensive military capabilities, to include Houthi training and weapons storage facilities." He said "initial assessments are that we had good effects on that."

However, the strike involving Navy ships and Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles follows a year of U.S. military operations in the Red Sea aimed at fending off Houthi attacks, yet the rebels have continued to lob missiles and send drones to harass merchant ship traffic.


A year of operations against a 5th rate military that has no air force and is supplied by a single country, and we have failed. whoever planned those operations should be sacked. Whoever looked at the first strikes and didn't fire the planners should be sacked. In fact, everyone involved should be sacked and maybe the United States Military should reach back into its history and find some retired O5s who know how to kill people and break things.

At least we are burning through our stocks of stupidly expensive smart weapons so Raytheon and Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman can sell us some more stuff at inflated rates, far behind schedule!

Shipping data shows that the number of vessels crossing the Suez Canal, a key passage that is near the area of the Red Sea where Houthis are targeting ships, fell by about half at the end of 2023 and has yet to recover to original levels.

Salvatore Mercogliano, a maritime historian and former merchant mariner, told Military.com on Tuesday that despite the fact that "the Houthi attacks are infrequent and seldom effective, with two ships sunk and four mariners killed, [they] have provided enough of a risk to deter shipping companies from risking their high-value ships sailing via the Red Sea."

Mecogliano said the impact has been that “the Houthis have pinched off 15% of world trade, sending the most valuable ships on a detour that has added time, cost, carbon emissions and risk in sailing in the Southern Ocean during wintertime.”


Hah...they can even drag "Global Warming" into this clusterf*ck! 15% of world trade is a very big deal, and the Houthis should have been destroyed in the first month they played their little game

"We're not seeking a full-out war with the Houthis, but we will continue to conduct strikes against the kinds of capabilities that we've seen them use against innocent mariners and maritime traffic as well as military vessels," Ryder said.
Oh good! Just a little war, with tea and scones in the afternoon and no bad guys being killed because that would be mean! let's blow up some empty warehouses and goatherd huts...that'll scare 'em!

There is no other kind of war. Either you fight to destroy the effectiveness of your enemy and cow him into submission, or you fail. Israel proved that over the last 25 years. Accepting some low level war from your enemies is a recipe for failure. There are lots of dead Israelis and many more dead Arabs because the long-term result of a titrated mess of a strategy is a bigger war down the road.

This mess has shown the bad actors of the world exactly how easy it is to disrupt trade and tie up large chunks of a nation's military with a couple of missiles, some off-the-shelf drones, and a few hundred 7th century pirates to threaten shipping. Next time maybe it will be surface-to-air missiles fired at major airports by recent "immigrants." Or maybe it will be a 40' container loaded with explosives detonated in the middle of a major bridge or tunnel in the West.

By not dealing with the Houthis, America and the West has shown that we are paper tigers, and the unintended consequences of this ridiculous, gentle war we are conducting will be far reaching.

[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter]

Posted by CBD at 11:00 AM Comments

Mid-Morning Art Thread

—CBD

Benton Autumn1.jpg

Autumn
Thomas Hart Benton

Posted by CBD at 09:30 AM Comments

The Morning Report — 10/10/24


—J.J. Sefton

walzclown.jpg

Good Morning Kids. So Hurricane Milton has crashed into Florida at/near Sarasota. While not the category 5 horror show that the usual suspects in the media were predicting – and ghoulishly hoping for, the storm surge and sustained winds of over 100 MPH will continue to create havoc as the storm makes its way across the state and out towards the Atlantic coast. 3 million are reportedly without power as of this morning.


In other news, trying to get an accurate feel for where we stand in the upcoming election is giving me whiplash as we bounce back and forth between cautious optimism and throwing our hands up in disgust. We all know that polling is almost completely unreliable until maybe the final days before an election, and even then you take them with a grain of salt. As a great man once said, polls exist not to gauge public opinion but to try and shape it. Well that said, what then to make of supposedly Mrs. Emhoff's internal pollsters, as well as that of confirmed lefty polling outfits and pundits openly going nuts in declaring the sky is falling and that Trump not only is going to win but perhaps in the closest thing to a landslide as we can have in this day and age with the political landscape being what it is that has prevented that from happening for 40 years since Ronald Reagan almost ran away with all 50 states.


Beyond polling, if the panic attacks are merely there to get the base to the polls, why this insanity from Tampon Timmy?

The Harris campaign walked back Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s Tuesday claim that the Electoral College "needs to go," saying that it is not an official campaign position. "I think all of us know the Electoral College needs to go. We need, we need national popular vote, but that’s not the world we live in," Walz said at a campaign fundraiser in California. The campaign clarified later that the Harris-Walz ticket is not advocating for eliminating the Electoral College. "Governor Walz believes that every vote matters in the Electoral College," a campaign official told CNN, adding that Walz "was commenting to a crowd of strong supporters about how the campaign is built to win 270 electoral votes." Walz has made a series of verbal blunders that his campaign has had to clean up, including false claims about being present at the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. During the vice presidential debate on October 1, Walz admitted that he can be "a knucklehead at times." During her 2020 presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris said she was "open to the discussion" of abolishing the Electoral College.


Just as a refresher for why we have it in the first place, for the trolls and other low-rent low intellect lefties lurking about:

The purpose of the Electoral College is to stave off what James Madison called the “tyranny of the majority.” The system gives voters in rural, lesser-populated states a voice in presidential elections by limiting higher-populated states’ ability to solely determine their outcomes. That was also the original design of the U.S. Senate, and without such protections for smaller states, the U.S. Constitution would never have been ratified. That means without constitutional protections for lower-population states, there would be no United States at all.

As with many of America’s institutions, Democrats loathe the Electoral College because it deprives them of the unbridled power to silence all opposition. There’s no need to waste time campaigning to the rubes in “flyover country” if they can juice turnout in Democrat-heavy cities and states instead.

Walz’s fundraiser remarks are an outward display of this disdain. Democrats claim they’re fighting for the “forgotten” man and woman, all the while working to deprive millions of Americans of having a say in the policies that control their lives.

It kind of puts the erasure of our border and flooding of the country with at least 40 million foreigners since the disastrous Teddy Kennedy -pimped Simpson Mazzzoli bill of 1965 with zero means or desire to ensure their assimilation into the American culture. Mostly because the Democrats need to erase that culture in order for them to amass permanent power in the drive to fundamentally transform America into yet another shitty little tyranny that has been humanity's lot until 1776 and then 1789. The Exception to history until the coming of Progressivism that has done nothing but Regress us back towards the dark ages.


So, if they were so cocksure that they had 2024 in the bag, why bring this up at this time? Yeah, Tim Walz is an arrogant, dimwitted fool, and sadly in fairness, far too many people in this country have no idea why there is an Electoral College, the difference between a democracy and a republic nor do they necessarily give a damn. Remember, at the same time our citizenry is being replaced by third world illiterate peasants, America's children have been brainwashed to hate their nation, its history, their birthright and even themselves.


In a not unrelated note, if places like California and New York are guaranteed Democrat wins in every election going forward, then why the freak out over Trump appearing at Madison Square Garden. Surely it's a waste of his time and his money, no?

A New York state Democratic lawmaker sparked outrage Wednesday when he compared Donald Trump’s upcoming campaign stop at Madison Square Garden to a Nazi rally that took place at the famous Big Apple venue 85 years ago. State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, 58, called on MSG officials to cancel Trump’s Oct. 27 rally, claiming it could lead to “widespread violence” as he ripped into the former president and his supporters during the online diatribe. “Let’s be clear. Allowing Trump to hold an event at MSG is equivalent to the infamous Nazis rally at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939,” Hoylman-Sigal, a Democrat, tweeted in reference to the disgraceful Nazi assembly held during the reign of German dictator Adolf Hitler. . .Hoylman-Sigal, whose senate district includes the Garden, said he confirmed Trump’s rally is scheduled for 3 p.m. — just nine days before Election Day. The campaign event was first reported by The Post. “This is a disastrous decision by Madison Square Garden that will endanger the public safety of New Yorkers and has the potential to incite widespread violence,” the Big Apple pol continued. “For the good of NYC and its residents, I demand @TheGarden keep our city safe by cancelling the Trump Rally.”

Aside from Hoylman-Sigal being a miserable worm, the usual despicable sliming of Donald Trump as being Hitler has indeed resulted in violence. Two assassination attempts by Democrats. Somehow, I don't think this is what concerns this Hoylman-Sigal. Who is likely another self-gassing apostate.

Do I think that New York state could be in play for Trump? I strongly doubt it. My gut is that this is more a revolting display of not just hatred of Trump but for the fact that while many New Yorkers either Democrat or Democrat-adjacent might not necessarily dig him, but are becoming more and more disenchanted with Democrat policies, especially the open borders, crime and the crashing economy. It won't flip New York to Trump but it certainly seems to be freaking out the usual suspects about Trump's prospects elsewhere and all over the nation with less than a month until Election Day.

Have a good day.


    ABOVE THE FOLD, BREAKING, NOTEWORTHY

  • How does one justify squelching free speech and censoring opponents? By justifying it by “science.” The authors of a new study published by the scientific journal Nature submit that “differential sharing of misinformation by people identifying with different political groups could lead to political asymmetries in enforcement, even by unbiased policies.”
    The left is using bogus COVID-19 research to censor their opponents

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Posted by J.J. Sefton at 06:57 AM Comments

Daily News Stuff 10 October 2024

—Pixy Misa

Top Story


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Posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM Comments

Overnight Open Thread - 10/09/2024
[Roger Ball]

—Open Blogger

NOAA42.jpg

Being a relief poster, I offer the theme of general and specific relief to the magnificent HORDE.

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Posted by Open Blogger at 09:51 PM Comments

The Blues Grift Cafe

—Ace

icelandhighlands.jpg
Iceland Highlands by Reg Saddler

Disinformation experts tell me this video is dangerous misinformation.

Happy puppy!


I could do this but it seems kinda gay.

Not sure if this is real or staged but that kick does look like it connects.

John Wick @Scentofawoman10

Context : After a German football team failed to score in five straight matches, their fans decided to get clever and use giant neon arrows to remind their players where the goal was.

As Puddy said: "Gotta support the team."

The spectator stunt happened in 2012 in Germany.

First time on the new legs? (IG)

Tiny little pygmy horse racing (IG).

Just a cat preparing to freak you out later.

Ancient Roman road in Germany. Gooooood place for a barbarian ambush.

Helping an old stray dog cross the street.

Little puppy gets on the bandwagon and supports the New Conservative Hot Girl Trend.

Dog greeting owner after three year absence.

Elephant brothers play the "stop touching me" game.

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Posted by Ace at 08:10 PM Comments






Now Available!
The Deplorable Gourmet
A Horde-sourced Cookbook
[All profits go to charity]
Top Headlines
End of the week pallet cleanser: "Dumb hick" can actually play the piano! sweet reaction video. [dri]
CJN podcast 1400 copy.jpg
Michael Walsh joins CBD and J.J. Sefton to discuss his newest book: Against The Corporate Media, the fall of American media, Iran and Militant Islam, and more!
America's Shadow Head of FEMA Ron DeSantis: It's now too late to evacuate; if you're still at your home, just hunker down and try your best to keep dry and safe.
Yacht or Nyacht? "Goodbye Stranger" by Supertramp
Man do I love the instrumental ending. The Yacht or Nyacht website does not even mention Supertramp, not even to say "Nyacht." I'm really starting to doubt the accuracy and integrity of this website and I'm afraid we'll have to resort to our former method of resolving these disputes, fisticuffs and German-style sword dueling.
A commenter linked this 1981 BBC radio broadcast of the Lord of the Rings
You know what I've always wanted to listen to, but never did? The original BBC Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio plays. I understand it's different from the books. Maybe sometime we can start a Group Listen and listen to one part per day.
Update: Nevermind, that listing of shows is incomplete.
Because I've decided I'm now an Honorary Italian, and also because I'm burned out, I'll be taking Monday (Columbus Day) off. Just open threads and animal videos. Friday will also be a little low-effort. Sorry, I need some rest! I've got to get back to Sam and Frodo. This Ring won't bear itself.
Whoops, I linked the wrong Salem's Lot trailer in the thread. I specifically praised it for the song choice, but the trailer I linked had no song. Here's the one I intended to link.
It's a good song to suggest desiccated evil corpses pretending to be alive.
Pitch Meeting: Megalopolis
It's all spoilers, I guess, if this mad mess can even be spoiled. I don't think the story is the main thing here. Not sure what the main thing is. It sounds like something you dream, and you're super-excited about how cool it is, but then you start to write it down and as your mind becomes clearer you say, "Wait a minute, none of this makes any sense! This is just all stupid nonsense-gibberish!"
It sounds like a pipe dream. By which I mean, I think someone beat Coppola with a pipe and he went into a coma and when he woke up he said "Sell my vineyard, I've got a script."
Forgotten 80s Mystery Click
Some time from now you'll bow to pressure
Some things in life you cannot measure by degrees
I'm between the poles and the equator
Don't send no private investigator
to find me please
'Less he speaks Chinese
And can dance like Astaire overseas

Yacht or Nyacht? I'd say no. It's an 80s song, a bit out of the Yacht Rock Era, and Yacht or Nyacht doesn't even list it. I think this is what MTV used to call "alternative," which wound up just meaning "neither metal, nor hard rock, nor rap, nor outright dance-pop." (Which actually is kind of Yacht Rock's playing field but I still say no, too much accoustic guitar and no electric piano.)
Douglas Murray on the debate: The fact that the Marxist Media is now down to attacking JD Vance for his beard shows that the Democrat-Media Party is desperate to talk about anything other than the issues and Kamala Harris's Failure to Position Herself for Success
He notes that the media says that Republicans are "out of ideas" or admitting their own failures when they do this. But now (this is my take, not his) the Marxist Media is praising Kamala Harris for her Cagey Strategy of running only on "vibes" and "joy."
He also opines that the only "women" who are put off by men having beards are "women with beards."
Maddow: JD Vance is a "slicker" speaker only because he, who entered politics like four years ago, has more experience speaking in debates than the 12-year-congressman, current governor of Minnesota.
Note that this insane spin -- that a 20-year politician (he deserted his unit in 2004 to run in 2005) has "more experience" debating policy than a neophyte who just joined the game a couple of years ago -- was put out by Walz campaign before the debate, to lower expectations. (Spoiler: He did not lower expectations enough.) And here's the bitter disinformation-pushing conspiracy-queen Rachel Maddow dutifully propagating it.
Asked for comment about the allegations he publicly slapped a woman at Cannes, Doug Emhoff responded, "Kamala was raised in a middle-class household and her mother is nice."
Rich Lowry observed that while both Vance and Walz agreed with each other and polite, it hit different with each. Vance was clearly beating up this fat retard, so his agreement was seen as magnanimous to a clearly-outclassed opponent. Walz's agreement back did not seem magnanimous, as he was not in any position of strength, but seemed like the stupid kid in class agreeing with the smart kid so that the teacher would move on to the next kid. (On Megyn Kelly's post-debate show.)
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