Wednesday Overnight Open Thread - November 26, 2025 [Zombie Rex]
—Open Blogger
Good evening Horde. The time has come for mid-week shenanigans of the overnight variety.
Welcome to the Wednesday night ONT which means another edition of overnight fun and games. Pull up a chair and sit a spell. Good will offerings of amusing puns are happily accepted. Be nice to your fellow commenters and AoS contributors. No, this is not an officially recognized Food Thread. Don't be a traffic cone.
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Red Sprites at Night Cafe
—Ace
Red sprites over Western Australia by JJ Rao
It's like night and day.
Someone made a nice little hang-out for this squirrel.
When you're such a mensch that you'll even splash through a flood to save a raccoon.
Piebald (?) horse has riz.
Bro's ears are so big he can hear the future. (This is probably AI.)
Dog is made of speed atoms.
It takes this raven a little doing, but eventually she works the problem.
The white ghost elephant has two trunks.
Dude is just "wrassling his wombat," if you catch my drift.
Baby whale is a real scamp.
Mama tortoise is proud of her baby.
Rolling up to an animal shelter and telling them "I'll take whatever poor creature's been here the longest."
When your fighting cocks start their own dog-fighting ring. "I learned it from you, dad!"
This story starts off sad and anger-making, but it ends well.
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The Wednesday In Woke
—Ace
Almost 30 people were shot in Chicago this past weekend.
Three people are dead, and 26 more were injured in shootings in the Democrat-run Windy City this weekend. Yet state and local authorities are much more concerned about ICE arresting illegal aliens than about the sky-high crime rate.CBS Chicago posted the most recent tally as of Monday morning, which was 29 shooting victims this weekend, three of them fatal. The victims ranged in age from a very young 13 to 65. The youngest fatality was a 14-year-old, and the number of deaths could go higher, as multiple individuals were reported in a serious or critical condition by the time they reached hospitals.
The biggest shooting appears to have been the one that made headlines from the popular Loop area of Chicago following Christmas season festivities, which left more than half a dozen teenagers injured.
The Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony in Chicago ended in tragedy after seven 13-to-17-year-olds were shot. Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has been wasting time, resources, and effort on protecting illegal aliens, admitted that there is a threat this holiday season of attempted "teen takeovers." ABC7 staff heard the shots from the State Street studio. Obviously, large crowds are expected in downtown Chicago this holiday season, making the potential impact of shootings much greater.
A separate incident that same night claimed the life of the 14-year-old boy. At the same time, an 18-year-old man was seriously injured, and it is not clear if he will survive. Ironically, Mayor Johnson, who loves to bash law enforcement, promised after that shooting, "we will have a strong police presence. We'll have stronger control over how traffic flows."
Yes but no arrests. One mustn't ever arrest the criminals. You can put police on the streets to discourage them from shooting people right in front of the cops, but if they aren't discouraged and do shoot people -- no arrests.
And if they are arrested: Put them back on the street in three hours.
In Italy, a sixty-year-old woman was raped by a migrant in a park while waling her dog.
But that's not the telling fact. The telling fact is that migrants already gang-raped a woman in this same park, earlier this year.
PARK OF HORRORS Female dog-walker, 60, 'sexually assaulted by migrant' in SAME park where teen 'was gang raped in front of her partner'The dog-walker was raped with such force she suffered serious injuries after the assault
Culture, enriched.
A WOMAN in her 60s was raped by a migrant while walking her dog in the same park a gang of expats brutally attacked and gang raped a teen, forcing her boyfriend to watch.The quiet Tor Tre park in Rome has become the centre of shocking catalogue of sexual violence, with police now probing a string of assaults stretching back months.
The first attack came in the early hours of the morning in August, when a 60-year-old woman was attacked around 6am.
She was dragged into the park near the Via degli Olmi entrance and raped with such force she suffered two broken ribs.
Despite her injuries, she managed to reach the Casilino hospital emergency room, where doctors confirmed clear signs of violent assault.
Detectives later traced the culprit -- a 26-year-old Gambian construction worker captured on local CCTV.
He admitted being under the influence of drugs at the time.
The same man was also linked to another rape just days later, when a 44-year-old woman was attacked at a bus stop.
He is now locked up in Regina Coeli prison.
But the nightmare in Tor Tre Teste didn't end there.
On October 25, just weeks after the dog-walker attack, up to five migrants targeted a young Italian couple parked quietly in a corner of the same park.
The pair -- both naked -- had stopped their car on what should have been a calm evening in the eastern suburbs of Rome.
But within minutes a gang surrounded the vehicle, savaging the car in a crazed outburst before smashing the windows.
Once the glass shattered, one attacker forced open the door and yanked the 24-year-old man out into the darkness.
His 18-year-old fiancée was dragged out seconds later as she desperately tried to cover herself with whatever clothing she could grab.
The man told police he was pinned back by two migrants as the others hauled his fiancée away from the car.
He begged, screamed and threatened the gang -- but was helpless as they allegedly raped the terrified teen metres from the vehicle.
His desperate cries went unheard.
After the assault, the attackers grabbed the couple's belongings and fled into the night.
The traumatised pair immediately reported the attack.
Rome's Flying Squad launched a major investigation, quickly identifying suspects as the hunt widened across Italy.
Two Moroccan men were arrested in the capital within days.
A third suspect was tracked down in Venice and detained just recently.
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Editors Confront New Problem: AI Slop "Written" by Scam "Journalists"
—Ace
I guess as a threshold question, we have to ask: Is AI slop any worse than the leftwing human slop that "journalists" spit out? After all, they just "write" their articles straight from DNC press releases.
But I can relate. As I keep posting in the Cafes: "This had better not be AI." It's an annoying thing to constantly have to be on guard that you're being scammed. Even though it's no big deal if I post AI slop in the Cafe -- could anything be lower stakes? -- there's just a personal aversion to being tricked.
And so I imagine that leftwing editors are annoyed at having to double-check if the articles submitted to them by freelance "journalists" are "real" articles -- put together with the normal amounts of human, or superhuman, bias and narrow-minded PMC provincialism -- or just fake biased articles shit out of Google's biased AI.
An editor at The Local became suspicious of one of his "journalists."
A suspicious pitch from a freelancer led editor Nicholas Hune-Brown to dig into their past work. By the end, four publications, including The Guardian and Dwell, had removed articles from their sites.
After putting out an open call to "journalists" for story pitches about the privatization of Canadian healthcare, he got one he liked.
The writer, Victoria Goldiee, introduced herself as having written for The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and Maisonneuve--Canadian outlets that publish the same kind of feature writing we do....
When I googled her, I saw that Victoria had written stories for a set of publications that collectively painted the picture of an ambitious young freelancer on the rise--short pieces in prestigious outlets like The Cut and The Guardian, lifestyle features in titles like Architectural Digest and Dwell, and in-depth reporting in non-profit and industry publications like Outrider and the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland. Her headshot was of a youthful Black woman. She was, according to her author bio, "a writer with a keen focus on sharing the untold stories of underrepresented communities in the media."At the next editorial story meeting, we decided to take a shot on Victoria and assign the story. Then I began looking more closely at her work.
There were some red flags. The first question I had was whether she was actually in Toronto when so many of her bylines were in New York magazines and British newspapers. And how had she managed to do so many interviews already? Doing so much reporting without the guarantee of pay felt like a big gamble.
When I googled "Victoria Goldiee" with the names of the Canadian publications she said she'd written for, there were no results. We reached out to Danielle Martin, one of the doctors Victoria claimed she'd interviewed. Martin said she'd never heard of her.
I emailed Victoria back: "Are those quotes from your own interviews? And do you mind sending along some clippings, perhaps from your Walrus or Maisonneuve stories?"
She sent a lengthy reply the next day. "The quotes I included in the pitch are from original interviews I've conducted over the past few weeks," she insisted. "In terms of previous work, I write a regular newsletter for The Walrus, which gives a good sense of my ability to balance accessibility with depth while speaking to a broad audience." She attached a link to The Walrus's "Lab Insider" newsletter that did not have her byline.
"I can 100% confirm that they do not write the Lab Insider newsletter," wrote Tracie Jones from The Walrus when I emailed. "How odd to say they do!"
Victoria's stilted email, and a closer read of the original pitch, revealed what should have been clear from the start: with its rote phrasing ("This story matters because of... It is timely because of... It fits your readership because of..."), it had all the hallmarks of an AI-generated piece of writing.
This had better not be AI.
I was embarrassed. I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch's ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it. Worse, the reason the pitch had been appealing to me to begin with was likely because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own prompt asking for stories where "health and money collide," flattering me by sending me back what I wanted to hear.
But if Victoria's pitch appeared to be an AI-generated fabrication, and if she was making up interviews and bylines, what to make of her long list of publications?
An investigation solidified the pattern: Publications this person said she had written for said they had published no pieces by her, and people she quoted in interviews said they'd never spoken to her.
"The quotation did not come from me and, to the best of my recollection, I have never met or spoken to Victoria Goldiee," Elaine Sutherland, professor emerita at the University of Stirling, wrote me. What was even more unsettling, though, was that the sentiments in the soundbite reflected her real beliefs. "The quotation attributed to me is the sort of thing I might say," she wrote.A month after that article, a Victoria Goldiee story in the design publication Dwell--"How to Turn Your Home's Neglected Corners Into Design Gold"--featured a series of quotes purported to be from a wide array of international designers and architects, from Japan to England to California. A cursory read raised questions that probably should have been asked by editors to begin with. Namely, had a freelancer writing an affiliate-link-laden article about putting credenzas in your living room's corners actually interviewed 10 of the world's top designers and architects?
The designers he contacted had no memory of ever having been contacted by this person.
The stories had the characteristic weirdness of articles written by a large language model--invented anecdotes from regular people who didn't appear to exist accompanied by expert commentary from public figures who do, with some biographical details mangled, who are made to voice "quotes" that sound, broadly, like something they might say.
Eventually he gets her to take his phone call, and finds that she's making up more details as she speaks to him. For example, when asked where she lives in Toronto, she answers "Bloor," which is one of the first streets you would see if you googled "what are some streets in Toronto."
I don't think I've ever spoken to someone who I suspected was lying to me with each and every response. I also don't know if I've interviewed anyone I so desperately wanted to hear the truth from.I had so many questions. Was the person on the phone even the same person whose writing was online? Where did she actually live--if not "Bloor," was it the States? The U.K.? Or, as suggested by some of her writing, Nigeria?
Yeah it's probably Nigeria, one of the hubs of the bustling America First internet community.
...Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. If Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and the other late 20th century fakers were looking for the prestige and power that came with journalism in that moment, then this generation's internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment. They're taking advantage of an ecosystem uniquely susceptible to fraud--where publications with prestigious names publish rickety journalism under their brands, where fact-checkers have been axed and editors are overworked, where technology has made falsifying pitches and entire articles trivially easy, and where decades of devaluing journalism as simply more "content" have blurred the lines so much it can be difficult to remember where they were to begin with.
...
My favourite "Victoria Goldiee" story is a piece she published in The Guardian just last month. It's a first-person essay without quotes, and thus difficult to fact-check.
Steven Glass discovered that it was easy to fool the fact-check system: Just quote "people" who are entirely made-up. Fake people do not call into magazines demanding a retraction, after all.
Jayson Blair attributed fake but non-controversial quotes to people he never spoke to. Like, if he was supposedly in New Orleans covering a hurricane -- but in fact never left his NYC apartment -- he'd make up a quote for someone he saw named in someone else's article, but make up a "new quote" for him, like, "The hurricane was bad, but the clean up might even be more stressful."
Something completely empty and anodyne that no one would bother calling up an editor asking for a retraction, because it's just such a nothingburger.
One of the people Blair made up quotes for was later asked why he hadn't called the paper to say he'd never said that.
His answer was illuminating, and true: Because, the man said, I just sort of figured that's what you in the media do all the time.
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Democrats' Karen Prime and AWFL Emeritus for Life Aftyn Behn Is Getting Crazier and Angrier By the Moment
—Ace
The hits keep coming with the Democrats' candidate for the Nashville district, Aftyn Behn.
Democratic Tennessee congressional candidate Aftyn Behn sobbed and screamed at the top of her lungs as security removed her from Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee's office in resurfaced footage from April 2019.Behn and other women with the activist group, Enough is Enough-Tennessee, staged a sit-in inside the state capitol and demanded to speak to Lee about calling for the resignation of the then-Republican state Rep. David Byrd, who was accused of sexual misconduct at the time. The women, including Behn, tried to rush into the governor's office when the doors were open on April 17, 2019, prompting security to remove her from the premises.
Footage posted by NewsChannel 5 Nashville shows security dragging Behn out of the office as she screamed at the top of her lungs. She then sat on her knees and sobbed on the floor.
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DOJ Employee Charged With Terrorism For Doxxing Fellow Federal Agents
—Ace
She doxxed them in the midst of a raid, at the point of maximum danger.
A staffer for the U.S. Department of Justice is facing state-level terrorism charges in South Texas after authorities say she exposed the identity of a federal agent during an immigration-related raid, triggering what investigators called a credible threat against the agent's life.Cameron County officials arrested Karen Olvera De Leon, an employee with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Texas in Brownsville, following a criminal indictment alleging she posted the agent's personal information in the middle of an active law-enforcement operation. She has been charged with one count of terrorism and one count of tampering with physical evidence.
District Attorney Luis Saenz said the case began on June 9, when federal agents executed a raid in Brownsville and bystanders began livestreaming the operation. As the video spread across social media, viewers flooded the comment section. Investigators say one user issued what they deemed a death threat toward the federal agent shown on screen. Moments later, another commenter publicly revealed the agent's identity.
So there's very little doubt that she understood what she was doing might lead to the agent's murder.
According to Saenz, authorities traced the doxxing back to Olvera De Leon, a DOJ employee tasked with supporting federal prosecutions....
Just weeks after the Brownsville doxxing incident, a gunman in tactical gear opened fire at a U.S. Border Patrol building near McAllen International Airport. Police and Border Patrol agents engaged the shooter and ultimately killed him, but not before a McAllen officer was wounded.
She looks like a real Sad Sack unwanted AWFL, except Hispanic.
She'll be trading in her Trader Joe's Box Wine for Prison Toilet Wine.
These women are filthy and disgusting. They support murder, and they crow righteously about their support of murder.
Speaking of seditious federal employees: Judge Boasberg.
Calls for the impeachment of James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, have intensified throughout this year.What began as a partisan reaction to a single ruling has morphed into a broader debate about judicial ethics, political influence and the role of federal courts. The question now is whether Chief Justice John Roberts will act.
The initial push for impeachment came in March, after Judge Boasberg issued an order temporarily blocking the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport purported members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang designated as a foreign terrorist organization.
President Trump responded sharply on social media, calling Boasberg a "Radical Left Lunatic," and posting on X that the judge "should be IMPEACHED!!!"
That same day, Texas GOP Rep. Brandon Gill and five co-sponsors introduced articles of impeachment alleging Boasberg used "his judicial position to advance political gain" and obstructed "the President's constitutional prerogatives." The proposal drew some division within the Republican Party. Sen. John Kennedy, R.-La., called the proposal "idiotic," and Sen. John Cornyn, R.-Texas said, "You don't impeach judges who make decisions you disagree with."
Of course John Cornyn said that. Let's definitely send him back to the Senate, Texas.
The uproar also prompted a rare public statement from Chief Justice John Roberts: "For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose."...
Impeachment pressure intensified after Just the News reported that months before his Alien Enemies Act ruling, Boasberg traveled to Idaho to attend a privately-funded Rodel Institute legal conference. The conference's sponsors and speakers had publicly criticized Trump on immigration and January 6, and one of the conference sessions was titled "Role of Judges in a Democracy."
Critics argued that Boasberg's attendance created at least the appearance of bias. Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz said on the John Solomon Reports podcast that Boasberg's attendance at the Rodel Institute conference was "a creation of, obviously, a conflict of interest, at least in appearance" and that "when you have cases like this, you have to be absolutely above reproach."
...Additional reporting revealed that Boasberg had spoken out about his belief that the Trump administration might disregard federal court rulings and provoke a constitutional crisis during a meeting of the Judicial Conference of the United States.
DOJ files misconduct complaint against Boasberg...
The Department of Justice subsequently filed a misconduct complaint with the D.C. Circuit's Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, alleging that Boasberg violated Canons 1, 2(A), and 3(A)(6) of the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges. These canons require federal judges to "uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary," "act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary," and to avoid "mak[ing] public comments on the merits of a matter pending or impending in any court."
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the complaint publicly, saying that Boasberg's comments "undermined the integrity of the judiciary." DOJ urged Judge Srinivasan to refer the matter to a special investigative committee to determine whether Boasberg's conduct constituted "conduct prejudicial to the effective and expeditious administration of the business of the courts."
And then it turned out, surprise surprise, that this leftwing reliable Rubber Stamp had been "randomly" assigned as the judge in the Arctic Frost fishing expedition, and, get this, the leftwing reliable Rubber Stamp reliably rubber stamped all the subpoenas to spy on Congressmen, and quite illegally ordered the subjects of the subpoenas to keep them secret from the Republican congressmen targeted.
But John Cornyn supports this illegal spying on his fellow Republican Senators. (Cornyn wasn't surveilled, of course!)
Impeachment efforts gained traction again late last month after Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released a set of subpoenas issued during former Special Counsel Jack Smith's election-related investigation into Trump. The investigation, known internally at the FBI as "Arctic Frost," involved 197 subpoenas seeking records on roughly 430 Republican individuals and entities, according to committee documents.The news brought Boasberg back into the spotlight as he signed the subpoenas and nondisclosure orders.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., called on Boasberg to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding this role in the once-secret surveillance of Republican senators. "An Obama-appointed activist judge, James Boasberg, ordered [Verizon] not to tell me about Jack Smith's subpoena for my phone records, falsely claiming I might destroy so-called evidence," Blackburn posted on X. "He must answer before the Senate Judiciary Committee for this blatant abuse of power."
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Rod Blagojevich: Obama Hadn't Even Joined the Senate Yet, and Michelle Obama Was Already on the Phones Demanding Democrats Arrange a Political Patronage Job for Her
—Ace
I simply shannot.
Remember when Michelle Obama was claiming to be Oppressed because, allegedly, she "couldn't work for two years" during the political campaign?
Well, the moment Obama's Senate campaign was over, she decided it was time to Cash In.
Blagojevich painted Obama as a calculating, self-serving politician who wasn't quite the ethical paragon he portrayed himself to be. "He's one of the more selfish people in politics on a one-on-one level," Blagojevich said, "and he's not pure like the driven snow in the sense of his ethics or morality." The former governor described Obama as "kind of cold and impersonal, but okay," and admitted he was initially happy to be helpful to the rising political star.But the real bombshells came when Blagojevich discussed Michelle Obama's corrupt job hunt. According to Blagojevich, as soon as Barack Obama won his Senate race in 2004, Michelle felt entitled to get a high-paying patronage position somewhere. "I was asked to make a phone call on behalf of Michelle Obama 'cause as soon as he won the Senate race, she wanted a job either at Northwestern University or the University of Chicago Hospitals for two to $300,000 a year, the wife of the new senator," Blagojevich revealed.
"Northwestern was willing to pay $200,000 to hire her. This is the wife of the new U.S. senator," and obviously the position would bode well for any institution due to the potential for more federal money, he explained. Blagojevich noted that Michelle Obama ultimately got a better offer. "They got a better offer at the University of Chicago, which is in Hyde Park, where they're from, $300,000, and she ended up working there," he said. Blagojevich made the requested phone call, though he downplayed his role. "She didn't get it 'cause of me, but it didn't hurt to have the governor call."
He also discusses the Tony Resko real estate scam. The Obamas could not afford the mansion they wanted (as soon as Obama was elected to the Senate) with the extensive property they wanted. So the Obamas bought the mansion on one lot and had Tony Rezko buy the adjoining, not-built-upon lot "for himself" -- but he never did anything with it. He bought it so he could keep it in his name for the Obamas.
The mansion they bought with "their own money" was $7.5 million so you can imagine this adjoining lot was worth around a million itself.
What particularly galled Blagojevich was how Obama treated Rezko once the real estate developer became a political liability. "Rezko was really helpful, really helpful to Obama," he emphasized, explaining that when investigations heated up involving fundraising with Rezko as part of it, "Obama just ran from him, did nothing to help him, and pretends like he never knew him."
In case you missed it: The world's most miserable do-nothing millionaire Michelle Obama says black people can't swim because white people force them (like slaves) to straighten their hair all day long.
The former first lady, in a live podcast, recently said: "Let me explain something to white people. Our hair comes out of our head naturally in a curly pattern. So, when we're straightening it to follow your beauty standards, we are trapped by the straightness.
"That's why so many of us can't swim, and we run away from the water. People won't go to the gym because we're trying to keep our hair straight for y'all. It is exhausting, and it is so expensive, and it takes up so much time!"
Who knew that black women straighten their hair to conform to the expectations of whites? Even worse, who knew this oppressive white standard of beauty, according to Obama, has the real-world effect of preventing black kids from learning to swim?
Black people's hair is the new cotton field, pass it on.
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Incredible: A Jury Voted Unanimously to Convict Yet Another Somali Fraudster, Calling His Guilt "Obvious."
Then the Leftwing Judge Set Aside Their Verdict and Set the Somali Free, Based On Her "Feelings."
—Ace
The Somalis scammed the government's welfare programs again. The Somalis here ripped off the American citizens for $7.2 million, running a scam organization that supposedly delivered health care to poor people out of his mailbox, and spending that money on luxury goods and sports cars.
The prosecutors proved that 94% of the money they stole from the government went into their own pockets.
Jurors found him guilty, unanimously.
Then the "progressive" judge stepped in an invalidated the verdict, saying that in her personal opinion, the prosecutors had not disproven other possibilities besides fraud, like, I guess, the possibility that they accidentally stole this money and intended to deliver it to the poor at some future date. (Were they planning on returning their luxury goods and cars? How much did they expect to get back for used luxury goods?)
@amuse @amuseSUICIDAL EMPATHY: A Minnesota Democrat judge just overturned a unanimous jury verdict in a $7.2M Medicaid fraud case, freeing Islamic defendant Abdi Fatah Yusuf. Jurors say the evidence was overwhelming.
Despite a swift unanimous verdict, Judge Sarah S. West, a former public defender, acquitted Abdi Fatah Yusuf on all charges after jurors found he and his wife ran a fake home-health business out of a mailbox and stole $7.2M in Medicaid funds. Jurors say they are stunned because the evidence of fraud, overbilling and luxury spending was "obvious." Community pressure and political considerations are now being blamed for the decision. Yusuf walks free while taxpayers eat the loss.
Abdi will get to keep his new wardrobe from Coach, Canada Goose, Michael Kors, Third Degree Heat, Nike, and Nordstrom and his [new top-end sportscar,] a Porsche 911.
h/t @WallStreetApes
Suicidal empathy? Or personal enrichment?
This is outrageous -- and considering the *fact* that Somalia is the world's most corrupt country, we have to investigate this judge's finances and the finances of her friends and family for a payoff.
This is -- or was -- the nation's "biggest Medicaid fraud case."
The prosecutors are appealing the judge's corrupt negation of the law.
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Axios: Your Turkey Has a Carbon Footprint and You Are Destroying the Environment by Celebrating Thanksgiving
—Ace
You probably won't ponder your carbon footprint when you sit down to devour that Thanksgiving turkey -- but some food and climate activists say you should.Why it matters: With climate change fading in importance on some U.S. lawmakers' priority lists, activists say even small steps from the public are needed.
The big picture: The beloved bird is considered more environmentally friendly than beef. But turkey still produces, in production and post-production, the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming -- even more than chicken, according to the Environmental Working Group.
"Raising and processing a four-ounce turkey serving is the equivalent of nearly three miles' worth of tailpipe emissions," said Iris Myers, the group's senior communications manager.
A four ounce turkey?
Axios is a professionally edited media publication.
...In 2016, Carnegie Mellon researchers calculated the state-by-state footprint of a typical feast, including roast turkey stuffed with sausage and apples, green bean casserole and pumpkin pie.
They found that meals prepared in Washington state and Vermont emitted the lowest amounts of carbon dioxide. Hydropower and wind provide about two-thirds of Washington's energy. while renewables provide almost all of Vermont's.
States that rely more on coal, such as Wyoming, West Virginia and Kentucky, had the highest Turkey Day emissions, the researchers found.
This is important research that I have been compelled to fund.
By the numbers: Thrown-away food is a big contributor to climate change. A new analysis by the anti-food waste group ReFED estimates that 320 million pounds of food will get tossed out this Thanksgiving.
That's the equivalent of more than 800,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, or about the same as driving 190,000 gasoline-powered vehicles for a year, ReFED said.
Of those emissions, 4,800 metric tons of methane -- a potent greenhouse gas -- come from sending that food to landfills.
The bottom line: "Try not to buy more bird than you and your family will eat," Myers said.
Wellllll... generally I would say of course no one should buy and cook more food than they expect to eat, but Thanksgiving is an exception, because, of course, no one knows how many relatives and guests will show up. People make "too much food" because they don't want neighbors to show up without anything to offer them.
But most people will wind up eating most of that over the course of the week.
Thank you for ruining literally everything, Sanctimonious Sociopaths Satanic-Religious Fanatics.
Speaking of your carbon footprint: It is now cheaper to expand your carbon footprint than it's been since, well, Trump's first term.
Gas prices -- and food prices, and rent prices -- are at their lowest levels since covid shutdowns and Biden's printing of trillions of fake dollars.
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Wednesday Morning Non-Rant
—Joe Mannix
Thanksgiving gives us an opportunity to reflect on the good in our lives. The day to day can be dull or even pretty lousy and there will always be particularly bad days and personal disasters. In bad years, many days be will be of this type. Thanksgiving is an opportunity to take a step back and consider our blessings, even when we might otherwise forget that we have them.
Blessings are manifold, despite the tribulations. Thanksgiving is a holiday rooted in tribulation, from the informal celebrations of often hard-pressed colonists in early New England to its relatively recent form first proclaimed during the depths of war in 1863. It wasn't formalized in law until just before WWII, but by then it was a formality (though it did, of course, provide much cause for disagreement in the particulars).
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The Morning Report — 11/26/25
—J.J. Sefton
Good morning kids. Yes, Trump Derangement Syndrome is a thing. But from Chi-Com run "police stations" in major American cities with Chinese immigrant communities, to Chinese intelligence assets everywhere from research labs to the Confucius Institutes on our campuses, to vast tracts of farmland and real estate bordering our military installations owned by the Chi-Coms, and to actual Chinese intel assets embedded in the administrations of local, state and even national governmental officials, dig a bit deeper into the story of several high level American politicians, all ex service members and some still in the reserves, creating a video essentially encouraging American military personnel to commit acts of insubordination and perhaps even insurrection and Treason by as they say "disobeying any illegal orders from the Commander-in-Chief, that being President Trump.
I have never served in the military, but from what I understand of training, every recruit, especially those who are in the officer corps whether coming up through the ranks or as graduates of our military academies, are thoroughly instructed as to what constitutes an "illegal order" and at the very least have the barest minimum of moral rectitude and conscience to know the difference between right and wrong in the context of carrying out their mission. And so in my estimation, we have propagandists and much worse, foreign-influenced agents provocateurs internally sowing dissent in the ranks and laying the groundwork for actual mutiny.
So, the despicable reprehensible behavior of Senator Mark Kelly almost comes as no shock:
On Monday, the Department of War announced that Kelly, a retired Navy captain, could be “recall[ed] to active duty for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures” because of his participation in what has now been dubbed the “Seditious Six” video. . . While Kelly’s participation in his party’s “Seditious Six” gambit is certainly egregious, it shouldn’t be considered surprising. For years, the Arizona Democrat has regularly undertaken actions that undermine America’s national security. . .. . . the Arizona senator criticized the Trump Pentagon’s plans to investigate the retired general [Mark (vanilli) Milley]for reportedly telling his Chinese counterpart that the Trump-led U.S. had no intention of attacking China, and that he would “call [Beijing] ahead of time” if Trump were to launch such an offensive. Rather than condemn Milley’s purported actions, Kelly leapt to his defense. . . It’s almost fitting that Kelly’s apparent lack of concern over Milley’s reported actions involved America’s greatest geopolitical adversary, given the retired Navy captain’s extensive ties to entities connected to the Chinese Communist Party. . . As has been widely reported in recent years, prior to becoming a senator, Kelly co-founded the Arizona-based space tourism company World View in 2012. According to a 2020 report by RealClearPolitics’ Susan Crabtree, World View received investment funds in 2014 and 2016 from Tencent, a Chinese tech giant that owns (and reportedly monitors) the Chinese messaging app WeChat. (Tencent is also known for suspending streaming of NBA games in 2019 after a league general manager voiced support for the Hong Kong protestors.) . . .But Kelly’s role in World View is just the tip of the iceberg. In 2020, The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Arizona Democrat was an adviser to and “held a significant financial interest in a Colorado company that partnered with a Chinese state-financed tech giant to bring supersonic aerospace technology to China in 2018,
Just as surely as mythical Senator Pat Geary was owned by Don Emilio Barzini, Mark Kelly is likely owned by Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. Period Full Stop. And as absolutely disastrous as it would be for one American politician especially at this level to essentially be an intelligence asset of our greatest foreign rival if not enemy (which they sure as hell are) the horrifying reality is that Kelly is not a one-off.
Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) has filed a federal civil lawsuit against President Donald J. Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) director Bill Pulte, accusing him of violating privacy laws by accessing his confidential mortgage records. Swalwell claims these records were improperly used to refer him to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for an investigation into mortgage and tax fraud allegations.The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that Pulte engaged in “unprecedented and unlawful” practices by obtaining mortgage records through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Swalwell, who recently announced his candidacy for Governor of California, stated that the disclosure of these records damaged his reputation at a critical political moment.Pulte has also referred other prominent Democrats, including Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), and Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, to the DOJ for investigation. Schiff and James have denied wrongdoing, while Cook is challenging her removal from the Federal Reserve Board by the Trump administration in a case the Supreme Court will hear in January.
Swalwell is small potatoes, but he is illustrative of how far down the corruptibility of our politicians and others to foreign influence, in this case the Chi-Coms, goes. He was given the nickname of Yum-Yum by GOP Rep Troy Nehls for the former's intimate relationship with know Chinese spy Christine Fang. Currently: Eric Swalwell is a member of the House Committee on the Judiciary and the House Committee on Homeland Security. He also serves on the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law and the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement. Yeah, shagging a Chi-Com spy is no big deal in this context, is it?!
But all that said, what would happen in the event that Red China attacked or attempted to invade and conquer Taiwan by force as they have been planning and itching to do since 1949 and for the past several years have been openly threatening and even planning vis a vis the acquisition of the military hardware necessary for a seaborne operation, as well as the weaponry to prevent a swift American naval response to block such a move.
If President Trump's command authority were undermined in advance by the actions of Kelly and his co-conspirators who have sown dissent and ultimately mutiny in the ranks, it would certainly give the Chi-COM PLA and Navy a strategic edge they might otherwise not have had.
Kelly deserves the wrong end of a rope as do all the others.
Have a good day.
And lastly, a quick shout-out and thank you for your continued support in hitting our tip jar. It truly is appreciated more than you can know.
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Daily Tech News 26 November 2025
—Pixy Misa
Top Story- TSMC, the world's leading manufacturer of high-end chips, says it can meet one third of the demand from AI buildouts. (Tom's Hardware)
Expect shortages of everything electronic. Except hobby stuff like the Raspberry Pi Pico which is made on equipment from 2008 that the AI guys don't even think about.
- Rapidus - a new Japanese chipmaker funded by a list of the top companies in that country including Toyota and Sony - is set to start construction of a 1.4nm fab in Hokkaido in 2027. (Tom's Hardware)
Due to start production in 2029.
So don't expect relief from the crunch any time soon.
Unless the bubble bursts.
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Tuesday Overnight Open Thread - November 25, 2025 [Doof]
—Open Blogger
It's almost Thanksgiving. Get yourself home any way you can!
The Tuesday night ONT is here. So glad you could make it.
How are your Thanksgiving planning and prepping efforts going? Doing anything unusual this year? Trying any new recipes? Expecting any nefarious guests? Tell us all about it!
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The Beastmaster Cafe
—Ace
R to L: A Siberian tiger, a scratching post, lunch
This better not be AI.
This astronomy is making me horny.
Grooming your doe, if you know what I mean.
A mama bear leads her troop of cubs through the snow.
Polar bear cub crawls all over mama.
Olivia Nuzzi just took a flea and tick bath.
Prairie dog yahoos to the chickens. Like Beastmaster's did. (Beastmaster actually had ferrets, I think, whom he called "my friends," but I don't have a ferret video so just play along and pretend he had a prairie dog. Sometimes a post's theme is like Olivia Nuzzi's metaphors -- it has to be forced.)
A bird, maybe an owl, camouflages itself as a log. I'm just glad it didn't reveal itself to be a spider.
Here's the Beastmaster training his dog to dance. (The Beastmaster had a dog, he just wasn't in the movie.)
Lion brothers fight over the bed.
Beastmaster definitely had a leopard. (Or a panther, though commenters have told me these are the same animal.) That one's right on the poster.
Here's the trailer. They make a direct appeal to the Dungeons and Dragons set. I don't really remember the trailer. I do remember that it was on HBO after school, every single day, playing multiple times between 3 and 8. HBO used to reserve R-rated movies for night time and that meant the day was nonstop Beastmaster, Rocky III, Labyrinth, and then topped off by another airing of Beastmaster. Sometimes Beastmaster would come on right after If You Could See What I Hear, about some blind guy, and then you'd have Marc Singer double feature. Here's part one of that great movie.
This is claimed to be the best parts of Beastmaster. The best parts of Beastmaster are actually just "all of Beastmaster," thank you very much.
This was Don Coscarelli's follow-up to Phantasm. Odd move but I guess he just needed to tell the story of Dar.
Beastmaster only has three gears: Awesome, So Awesome You Wouldn't Even Believe It, and the highest gear, "Beastmaster."
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Trump Turns Turkey Pardoning Ceremony Into Roast of Joe Biden's Autopen Pardons
—Ace
These pardons weren't signed by autopen. They'll hold up in court.
President Trump turned Tuesday's White House turkey pardon into a full-blown political roast, using the annual tradition to take a swipe at Joe Biden's "autopen" pardons and even joking that he briefly considered naming this year's birds "Chuck and Nancy."...
Turning to Gobble and Waddle--described by Trump as "two of the fattest, happiest turkeys we've ever had here"--the president joked that when he first saw their photos, he almost went with "Chuck and Nancy." "But then I realized I wouldn't be pardoning them," he added. "I would never pardon those two people."
Gobble and Waddle join a long list of clemency actions in Trump's second term, a tally that already exceeds 1,700 pardons along with numerous commutations. Trump joked that several aides were prematurely preparing to send the birds through El Salvador's anti-gang confinement system--a reference to the administration's deportation push. "Even these turkeys don't want to go there," he said.
Trump also veered into Chicago crime. The president has repeatedly accused Pritzker and the city's mayor of refusing to work with him on a federal crime-reduction effort. "The mayor is incompetent and the governor is a big fat slob," Trump said, stressing that the prepared joke went too easy on Pritzker. "Some speechwriter wrote something about his weight. I don't talk about people being fat. I refuse to say he's a fat slob. I'd like to lose a few pounds too, by the way--and I'm not going to lose it on Thanksgiving."
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Amazing: The New York Times Profiles an Illegal Alien Who Stole an American Man's Identity and Caused Him 20 Years of Legal Nightmares.
The Times Say They're Both Victims.
—Ace
Via David Strom, who quotes the New York Times asserting that both the citizen whose identity was stolen, and the identity thief himself, are both victims of the same broken system and equally deserving of our sympathies.
Dan Kluver saw the police lights flashing in his rearview mirror late last year and eased his car onto the shoulder, thinking there had been some kind of mistake. He had spent four decades in rural Minnesota without ever getting into trouble. He prided himself on a life built around dependability and routine, working at the same factory where his father once did and spending his weekends coaching baseball and teaching Sunday school. He had never fired a gun, or smoked a cigarette, or missed a payment, or been arrested."License and registration, please," the officer said. Kluver, 42, handed them over and waited while the officer went back to his patrol car. He listened to the church bells that rang every hour and watched sunlight reflect off the grain silos in downtown Olivia, where he knew most of the 2,400 residents, including the officer who was walking back to his car.
"Is everything all right?" Kluver asked.
"It's strange, but it looks like your license has been suspended," the officer said. "You've got another driver's license with some issues down in Missouri."
"What?" Kluver said. "I've barely ever been to Missouri. How's that possible?"
The officer had no answers, but Kluver feared he might know what was happening. Over the years, there had been signs that something wasn't right -- stray letters about wages earned in unfamiliar towns and collection notices for debt that wasn't his. Kluver had tried to untangle the mess several times by hiring tax specialists and driving to government offices across the state only to run into the same bureaucratic dead ends. But now the problem was bigger than unpaid taxes. Someone was impersonating him, moving through the world as Dan Kluver, building a life in his name with a government-issued ID.
The identity thief used his Social Security to illegally work. The thief kept the money paid for his illegal labor -- but this citizen got "credited" with the thief's salary, which pushed his tax liabilities up, pushing him, in fact, into a higher tax bracket.
He was expected to pay the taxes on the thief's earnings while the thief kept the earnings himself.
As you can see, they were both victims here.
...Some years the other Dan Kluver had earned more than his own salary at a local sugar beet factory, which pushed the total income under his Social Security number into a higher tax bracket as the debt started to mount. Twice, he'd contacted law enforcement and filed an identity theft report with the federal government, where it landed in a pile along with tens of thousands of similar reports filed each year. He waited for relief while the I.R.S. docked his annual tax returns and garnished a few of his paychecks, costing him thousands. Finally, a few months before their wedding in 2012, Kristy decided to pay off the balance, emptying her savings and sending in a check for $6,000. Their relief lasted until the next tax season, when a new bill arrived -- this one for $22,000.
They spent the next decade living with the consequences -- annual tax audits, budgets that never added up, whispered arguments after the kids went to bed. Kluver kept calling government numbers and waiting on hold until he eventually resigned himself to a payment plan. He agreed to send the I.R.S. $150 each month, which he'd done more than 35 times. "I can't keep obsessing over this and getting nowhere," he told Kristy. "I need to think about something else."
Now the Times turns to the thief. I mean, The Other, More Deserving Victim.
He had lived under enough names and numbers in the United States that they started to blur together. Vincent Trujillo. Reynaldo Guerra. And then, for more than a decade, Daniel Kluver -- the name he used until he could barely remember what it felt like to exist as himself: Romeo Pérez-Bravo, 42, a Guatemalan immigrant who had spent most of his adult life working under borrowed identities.
"Borrowed." They won't even say "stolen."
...Perez-Bravo had come to the United States for the first time at 16 to help earn money for his family, traveling alone to join his father in Marshall, Minn. He hiked out of the Guatemalan highlands, rode atop a freight train for three weeks across Mexico, nearly drowned in the Rio Grande and took a Greyhound to Middle America, where life somehow felt harder. He slept on a couch in his father's apartment and enrolled in high school despite speaking almost no English. Then he began to look for a job, but no one would hire an underage worker without papers.
No one would hire an illegal immigrant barred by the law from working, you mean.
He's definitely the victim. He was forced to steal Dan Kluvin's identity and make his life a living hell.
Read the whole thing from David Strom. The New York Times continues doubling down on the narrative that the first victim of Perez-Bravo's serial identity theft was... Perez-Bravo himself.
The narrative, man. Stick to the narrative. The law-abiding citizen whose life is being turned upside-down may be a victim, but Perez-Bravo has a story to tell, too.
This is exactly the kind of logic that lets criminals walk the streets after tens of arrests. They are people too, so if you look at it the right way, everybody is a victim.And Kluver is white, so really, he is the privileged one and should be happy to help out his brown brother, who suffers from oppression that is almost as bad as Michelle Obama's.
And he also "paid the price."
He was charged with aggravated identity theft and false representation of a Social Security number and was held in detention for six weeks before an initial bond hearing in April. The State of Missouri argued that he was a flight risk who needed to remain in custody until the trial. "What's to stop him from going out and getting another identity and just living underneath that," the prosecutor told the judge. "We've seen that before."But Perez-Bravo had most of his family and several members of his church at the hearing, and his lawyer said that he was "connected to the city in deep ways."
The Times believes that it was outrageous for the prosecutor to assert that this serial identity thief might just steal another identity and flee the court's jurisdiction under a new name if he were set free.
Absolutely outrageous! He has "deep" "connections" to the city he's currently living illegally in!
Amber Duke was herself a victim of a identity thief.
Almost as much a victim of identity thief as the identity thief herself.
She doesn't think her identity thief was the Real Victim Here.
About seven years ago, my identity was stolen in a data breach. I found out fairly quickly because one of the thieves made a mistake: the receipts for their fraudulent purchases were sent to my email address. It still took almost two weeks to shut down the accounts opened in my name and clear them from my credit reports. I was constantly stressed and paranoid and couldn't focus on anything else in my life until my credit was cleared and locked down.I was lucky that I caught the identity theft early. Some people spend years digging themselves out after someone else pretends to be them.
...
Pérez-Bravo had stolen multiple identities throughout his time in the U.S. While living here, he got several DUIs. He was deported in 2005, 2008 and 2009 but came back each time and stole another American's info.
...The story gets even more unbelievable from there. Pérez-Bravo was involved in a fatal accident that killed a 68-year-old grandfather and injured his 9-year-old granddaughter. He was cleared of wrongdoing but the family filed a wrongful death suit against Kluver, whose name was on the fake license Pérez-Bravo provided at the scene.
The police eventually found Pérez-Bravo and he has been charged for his crimes. Nonetheless, the NYT report paints him as just as much a sympathetic victim as Kluver, describing him as a family man and hard worker who essentially had no choice but to steal an identity so he could make money for his family.
I'm so sick of it.
If liberals want to impose liberal policies on the country, they have to at least make sure the worst excesses of those policies are checked.
They cannot allow maniacs to prowl the subway stations throwing grandmothers in front of trains, for example.
And they cannot lionize criminal identity thief illegals.
They have to show that they can demonstrate compassion without turning all of society into violent chaos.
But they can't -- and the new breed doesn't even try.
Their attitude is You deserve it, Colonialist Oppressors.
So all of the illegals will have to go. If there's no protection for the citizens, there is certainly no protection for the fucking illegals.
Kick them out. Kick them all out.
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For Some Reason, Vanity Fair Will Publish an "Abstract Nude" Photo of Its New West Coast Editor and Weird Dick-Riding Flake Olivia Nuzzi
—Ace
What is an "abstract nude"? I don't know. I imagine it's a nude photo which has been digitally altered with various effects and geometric pixelations so you can't see her beaver.
And based on reports, you'll be among the very select group of people who haven't seen her beaver.
This is the media now. This is "journalism."
And do we want to see this? I grant you that she does not have any particular feature which would disqualify her from being "attractive." She's not hugely overweight, she's not decrepitly aged, she has the full complement of limbs and teeth.
But beyond that, is this... "beautiful"? As literally every media outlet demands you believe?
She's a Panera Bread 5.
But whatever, you're going to get to see a picture of her beaver as digitally altered by an Instagram filter. Maybe her beaver will have wacky year 2000 New Years Eve glasses on it or something.
Almost as if I owned a time machine, which I will have assured you, in the future, that I do not have.
Vanity Fair's glossy Hollywood issue will feature an abstract nude portrait of scandal-plagued editor Olivia Nuzzi -- even as staffers privately gripe that she has failed to carry out core duties since joining the magazine, according to a report.The portrait, drawn by artist Isabelle Brourman, will appear in the new print edition that is scheduled to hit newsstands on Dec. 2. No image of the drawing appears to have been circulated publicly, and it's unclear if renderings of the drawing have been produced or circulated among Vanity Fair staffers.
Oh it's a drawing? So it'll be like a cubist sketch of her beaver?
Will it be Escher-like? Will we see various older men walking up and down non-Euclidean stairs into her beaver?
The sketch was commissioned months before the latest wave of allegations engulfed the 32-year-old writer, according to Status.
Brourman previously collaborated with Nuzzi during her tenure at New York Magazine, which ended weeks after it was learned that she had a "sexting" relationship with then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The inclusion of the abstract sketch in Vanity Fair's marquee issue has fueled internal backlash at a moment when the publication is already struggling to contain the fallout of her most recent controversies.
Apparently some staffers complain that, apart from lining up her next affair with a Democrat politician forty years her senior, she doesn't seem to work very much.
Inside Vanity Fair, the controversy has collided with mounting frustration over Nuzzi's limited output. Staffers told Status she has skipped routine meetings and failed to turn in assigned work.Two people told the newsletter that one of her other editing assignments for the most recent issue of the magazine was not completed, leaving colleagues scrambling as the publication closed one of its most scrutinized annual issues.
The turbulence has placed newly appointed editorial director Mark Guiducci under immediate pressure.
Guiducci, who took over in June, has addressed staff at least twice since the allegations resurfaced, according to the Status report.
At a team meeting Thursday, he explained how he first met Nuzzi and tried to calm anxieties inside the newsroom, the newsletter reported.
He also downplayed the allegations, calling them "difficult to investigate because they occurred while she was employed elsewhere," according to Status.
But some staffers remain skeptical that Nuzzi can continue in an editing role when she has produced little work while generating heavy turbulence, according to Status.
Is her talent of such a high level that she's worth all of this "turbulence?"
Well, having skimmed excerpts from her sexual tell-all book American Canto -- which reportedly will feature some of the dirty sexts she exchanged with RFKJr. -- I would say that, as a writer, she's no Ryan Lizza.
Not enough bamboo, for one thing.
She begins by discussing the fires that consumed the Palisades, and asserts that the Palisades fires were very much like the negative publicity she received after her sexting affair was exposed.
A few minutes later, the planes swooped down to spray the flames in the bluffs. I watched from the Pacific Coast Highway, as far away from my problems as I could get on land, which was not far enough.You cannot outrun your life on fire.
Below, apparently her cute gimmick is to refer to RFKJr. only as "The Politician," even though we all know who she means and in fact her publisher's publicity department is out there selling the book by promising RFKJr.'s sext messages.
I would take a bullet for you," the Politician said. He always said that. "Please don't say that," I said. I always said that. From his mouth the bullet theoretical launched the bullet possible.
What?
I did not like to think about it. About the armed man at his speech. Or the armed man who broke into his home. Or the armed men he paid to guard him from armed men who sought to harm him while the federal government denied his pleas for protection from the security agency whose modern protocols were carved by the same bullets that cut boughs from his family tree and cut the track of the American experiment.
I did not like to think about it just as later I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny. I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein. Others thought he was a madman; he was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could. He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm. "Baby, don't worry," he said. "It's not a worm." A doctor he trusted had reviewed the scans of his brain obtained by The New York Times, he said, and concluded that the shadowy figure was likely not a parasite at all. He sighed. It was too late to interfere with what had already vaulted from the sphere of meme to the sphere of screwy legend, but at least I did not have to worry about the worm that was not a worm in his brain.
Let me interrupt to say that Sex and the City ruined would-be female writer.
That show established the terrible trope that female writers are supposed to always look at some very mundane, very trivial AWFL consumer purchase and then make "clever" observations about it and spin that into some (let me get out my supply of Superfluous Quotes) " " " " deep " " " " point about life and -- especially -- dating and sex.
Like, for example, Sarah Jessica Parker will be munching an everything bagel and wondering if all the spices clash with each other and then begin babbling about whether or not one can or should try to have an "everything relationship" or if one should have separate bagels -- different people -- to fulfill different needs. Maybe we need a Sex Bagel and a Confidante Bagel and a Going Shopping on Sunday Bagel. Maybe it's wrong to expect or even want an Everything Bagel for every situation.
I don't know how that monologue would continue because I just shot myself through the temple. Good-bye Cruel World.
Avenge me.
You get what I'm talking about though, right?, I asked ghostilly. This horrific trope has infected so much female writing that... okay, I just basically won't read modern female writers. I pre-judge them. I assume that they're going to do the Sex and the City "clever" observations thing and I say: No.
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Leftwing Propaganda Media Declares DOGE Dead
—Ace
Reuters is claiming that DOGE is dead.
They claimed disco was dead, too. But it still lives on in garrett's heart.
Wait, that's what they did to Trump on J6. I mean, they edited his comments to make it sound like he's saying DOGE is dead, when that isn't what he said at all.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was launched with a bold mission: cut the fat out of the federal government and save taxpayer money. The left hates DOGE and everything about it.So, you can imagine how thrilled Democrats were when Reuters reported on Monday that DOGE "doesn't exist" anymore.
U.S. President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency has disbanded with eight months left to its mandate, ending an initiative launched with fanfare as a symbol of Trump's pledge to slash the government's size but which critics say delivered few measurable savings." That doesn't exist," Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters earlier this month when asked about DOGE's status.
The media pounced on this narrative, declaring DOGE dead, the usual suspects drooling over their keyboards to write misleading headlines, delivering eulogies declaring DOGE a failure.
But, DOGE isn't dead. In fact, the article claiming that DOGE doesn't exist anymore was actually true. Kupor's full comments were spliced. Here's how the article actually read:
"That doesn't exist," Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters earlier this month when asked about DOGE's status.It is no longer a "centralized entity," Kupor added, in the first public comments from the Trump administration on the end of DOGE.
Kupor went on X and blasted Reuters for splicing his comments, clarifying that DOGE as a formal agency might be no more, and that its leadership has shifted under the U.S. Digital Service; the mission itself isn't dead.
Scott Kupor @skuporGood editing by @reuters - spliced my full comments across paragraphs 2/3 to create a grabbing headline 🙂 The truth is: DOGE may not have centralized leadership under @USDS. But, the principles of DOGE remain alive and well: de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; re-shaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen; etc. DOGE catalyzed these changes; the agencies along with @USOPM and @WHOMB will institutionalize them!
John Loftus writes that DOGE, whether technically dead or not, largely failed in its mission.
Unfortunately, Elon Musk wasn't able to deliver on the $2 trillion in savings, then cut to $1 trillion, he promised. (And this sparked his earlier feud with Trump.)
DOGE pledged to save the American taxpayers $1 trillion, but they have fallen well short of that goal, even according to their own accounting. As of Monday, DOGE's website claims the department had secured $214 billion in savings, equivalent to $1,329.19 per taxpayer, through a combination of "asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions."...
All of these discrepancies suggest that DOGE has, in some cases, overstated the savings it achieved. A CBS News analysis published in August found that some cuts were overstated by as much as 97 percent.
DOGE secured minor victories, saved taxpayers a tiny chunk of change, and brought government waste, usually a dry topic, into the spotlight for several news cycles over the course of the year. But the fact remains that the Pentagon budget is still grossly high, with the Trump administration proposing a $1 trillion budget for the fiscal year 2026. Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill is estimated to increase deficits by $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years. The United States is $38 trillion in debt and counting. And DOGE's $214 billion in savings, whether that figure is even accurate or not, amounts to a drop of water in an ocean.
In a sense, DOGE was successful insofar as it was a marketing tool to placate fiscal conservatives. It made for good headlines, and it made it seem like the administration was draining the Swamp for real this time. But it is still business as usual in the morass of D.C., which means more deficit spending, an unaccountable military-industrial complex and a Pentagon that has failed seven straight audits.
I don't think this country will be serious about cutting spending until forced to at the end of a bankruptcy/default gun.
Trump Moves to Designate Some Chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood As Terrorist Organizations
—Ace
As I've mentioned several times: Obama literally had the Muslim Brotherhood in the room as the US military formulated its terrorist-identification policies. They got a veto as to whether intelligence officers could treat certain beliefs as cause to suspect someone as terrorists.
President Trump on Monday called for the U.S. to weigh labeling some Middle Eastern affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist groups, taking aim at the controversial Islamist movement.In an executive order, the president directed his administration to consider whether to designate Muslim Brotherhood chapters in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan or elsewhere as foreign terrorist organizations. He gave Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent 30 days to submit a report, and 45 days after that to take action.
The order claimed the three countries' Muslim Brotherhood affiliates "engage in or facilitate and support violence and destabilization campaigns."
It accused the military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood's Lebanese chapter of helping launch rockets at Israel after the terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and alleged a leader of the Egyptian chapter "encouraged violent attacks against U.S. partners" after the attack.
The White House also said members of the Jordanian chapter have "long provided material support to the militant wing of Hamas," itself a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot and a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization.
If the groups are designated as foreign terrorist organizations, it would become illegal under U.S. law to knowingly provide funding or other material support to them. The designation can also lead to travel bans against members or the freezing of funds held in U.S. banks.
...Some Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt and elsewhere have renounced violence. But the group has long been controversial, with critics -- including U.S. allies -- saying some affiliated groups have engaged in violence or espoused extremist views. Egypt's military government formally banned the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013, and Jordan banned the group earlier this year.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization last week -- and CAIR, too.
Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday designated the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim civil rights group Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as "foreign terrorist" and "transnational criminal" organizations.Why it matters: The designation authorizes "heightened enforcement" against both organizations and their affiliates and bans them from buying or acquiring land in Texas, according to Abbott's office.
It also authorizes Attorney General Ken Paxton to sue the organizations to shut them down, Abbott said on X.
Driving the news: In a proclamation, Abbott accused the Muslim Brotherhood of "engaging in terrorism or attempting to destabilize countries" and calls CAIR its "successor organization."
The order invokes the Texas Penal Code and Property Code, which allow the governor to classify organizations that "threaten the security of this state."
The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, is a transnational Islamist group with offshoots including Hamas.
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