Texas MoMe 2021:
10/22/2021-10/23/2021
Corsicana,TX
Contact Ben Had
May 15, 2021
Unbased Comparatives - or "How to Make Your Point Even If You Really Don't Have One"
—Open Blogger
by Your Raving Roving Science Correspondent
By "unbased comparatives" I mean asserting that something is "better" or "worse" (or "higher" or "lower") without providing the basis for that comparison.
In a previous life I was responsible for reviewing a draft claim set (i.e., the legally operative part for enforcement of a patent) for a patent application drawn to a prodrug in which the independent claim turned on the phrase "to provide better solubility."
Better solubility? Better than what? Brick dust? Glucose? What? A patent litigator on seeing that would either dissolve in laughter or throw a rope over a joist in his garage, depending on which side he was on.
Now that was harmless enough, and readily fixed (although it did reflect badly on the person drafting that claim, who should have known better). But in other contexts, unbased comparatives are a mainstay of writing meretricious but effective propaganda.
For example, a video on a gritty industry in India gravely intoned that one in four workers in that industry died of cancer. This was by way of establishing the horrific conditions in which they worked. Now God knows the conditions were indeed horrific, but that statistic, without more (e.g., age at death, or comparison with other occupations in India), proved nothing, since a cursory search revealed that one in four Americans dies of cancer as well. But the statistic, provided without comparison, clearly invited the conclusion that this rate of cancer mortality was sky-high.
A similar phenomenon occurred recently in the Derek Chauvin case, in which some commentators averred that he was a bad cop because he had 12 complaints of use of excessive force. (All but two of which were dismissed.)
Now is that a lot, a little, or in between? To interpret that number, we'd need a LOT more information: over what period, in what neighborhoods, in connection with how many arrests?
Chauvin had been a cop for 19 years; if he spent all that time patrolling the ghetto, and had made a lot of felony arrests, that's probably not very many at all. (Mother Teresa would probably have a couple dozen such complaints in 19 years of doing that, since I bet criminal suspects oftentimes claim use of excessive force to gain some leverage in the criminal justice system.)
Now I don't know the relevant numbers in Chauvin's case, but to compare a veteran street cop with, say, a police academy graduate who'd been on the force for a week, during which time he was guarding a doughnut shop in an upscale neighborhood would clearly be inappropriate.
So in my opinion, we have no basis for adjudging whether or not Chauvin was a bad cop. But through use of unbased comparatives he was made to look like one - only one of the manifold ways in which he was teed up before ever setting foot in the court room.
OregonMuse asked me for a bit of help with a chest thread, but honestly, that sounds a bit boring. I mean, I like fine furniture as much as the next guy, but still...
Good afternoon and welcome to the almost world famous Ace of Spades Pet Thread. We really appreciate you stopping by on a spring afternoon to check out the wonderful world of animals.
Talk about a pet peeve. The climate alarmists have come for your pets. No, really. A new report from Vox.com is now urging the public to consider offering a home to other pets besides dogs and cats. Why?
The report says their respective diets and lifestyles contribute to global warming for various reasons. In addition, the toilet needs of contemporary dogs include the use of pastel-colored poop bags while cats visit litter boxes where the filler is not necessarily made of natural, eco-friendly materials like wood shavings.
“Are our pets gobbling up the planet? From the meat-based meals to kitty litter to plastic poop bags, pet care is unarguably bad for the environment,” Vox said, offering ways to reduce pets’ carbon pawprint and citing the perils of pet waste — equivalent to “the annual trash of 6.6 million humans.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but when people fall in love with someone really hard, they’re ready to sacrifice anything. Well, almost. We can stop biting nails, eat less junk, and swap that beloved gross hoodie we never part with for a nice shirt, but when it comes to pets, it’s a whole different story.
A 22-old-man has been dating his girlfriend for 7 months and according to him, “she’s amazing and we’re super compatible in a lot of ways.” She’s also a vegan, a fact which shouldn’t make a whole lot of difference, but the way she approaches veganism kind of does.
The Pet Thread received this from our friend Northernlurker: I'm a sucker for this sort of thing. - Northernlurker
You are not alone, we all are.
***
Meet The PetMorons
Below are two pics of our cat (Houdini) and dog (Fenway) from casa de Our Country is Screwed. ‘Dini is 2yrs old feline we adopted as a kitten, and Fenway is a Flatcoat Retriever mix who is 10. You’ve shared them a couple of times on prior Pet Threads, which I thank you for. These two bring much joy and companionship to our home.
‘Dini, pictured below, had hopped up on my legs just as I sat down on the couch and put my feet up. If the eyes don’t give it away, she is absolutely full of personality.
The next picture ‘Dini coming out of hiding and planning on some mischief against Fenway.
AKA “Our Country is Screwed”
The key part of your submission, "These two bring much joy and companionship to our home." I couldn't agree with you more when I look at our 2 knuckleheads. Thanks for stopping by with this story and photos.
***
Long time lurker, rare commenter JR. Attached are two pics, grand-dog Hank at three months and just short of six months. He is now a 75lb termite, no piece of wood is safe around him. He has it rough: walks, treats, snoozing on the couch, crashing my video meetings. Don't trust Hank, Hank is asshoe!
I know this is supposed to be a G-Rated Family Friendly Thread. But, I call Bull Shit. How could such a cutie be an asshoe?
***
Max crossed the Rainbow Bridge into canine Valhalla in early March after twelve wonderful years with me. I was sent to work in Washington DC, Sodom on the Potomac, on temporary duty for six months that stretched into over two and a half years. I had lost my yellow Lab about a year before and my wife wanted a break from dogs. When the job assignment came up, I told her it would be lonely and I needed a companion. The choices were a puppy or a stripper. Needless to say, I got Maximus at eight weeks old instead of an exotic dancer. That was twelve and a half years ago. The photo is of Max sprawled out in my chair, his favorite spot. He is greatly missed and is survived by my two year old black Lab, Angus. Now Angus needs a new friend to keep him occupied when I work, so I am again on the hunt for a new pup (Not for me, but for my bud Angus). Thank you again for running the best thing on the interwebs, The Pet Thread. I never miss it. - "Texas 1911" an I am a lurker
First of all our condolences on the loss of Max. Personally, I know the strains of a long distance marriage and my K9 companion was what kept me sane. Good luck on your search. Thank you for sharing today.
***
This is my little Daphne Moon. After being owned by Goldens and Labs for the past 20 years, I now have this little 5 lb. character. DM is my first adoption, and she came home with me right before the China virus shutdown. I had lost my chocolate Lab, Marley, not even a year earlier, and I was still heartbroken and not looking for another pet - until fate stepped in.
Then along came Daphne. My first experience with a small breed, and she is delightful and hilarious. She can also try my last nerve, but I suspect I try hers at times, as well.
I cannot thank you enough for the Pet Thread. I look forward to it every week, and it is my treat on Sunday mornings. - Daphne Moon in Dixie
It is a funny thing how God works and in mysterious ways as well. Daphne sounds like your typical dog when it comes to the nerve thing. Congrats on your new addition and may you two have many happy years together!
While surfing the web, I ran across this picture of a kitten. I sent it to my daughter with a note: "Ha ha, looks like your cat". She showed it to her friend from whom she got the cat and it turns out that, of all the billions of pictures on the web, I just happened to run across the first picture ever taken of her cat. What are the odds?
The second picture is a recent one of Yin Yang in all of her majesty. She's not a big fan of people yet, but she'll get there.
Thanks for your hard work on the blog.
So Ying Yang is really an internet star. How awesome! Cute kitteh. And quite the story. Of all the gin joints......We are happy to hear you enjoy the Pet Thread. Thanks for sharing this neat story.
***
Bogie likes art, and finds his modernist "Binding of Isaac" to be cheerier and less scary than the one on the art thread. Actually, it's his favorite seat in the family room. I think he smells Rusty's scent on the spot.
Bogie has passed his first training class and will be moving on to less treat oriented sessions. The first week of class left him thinking he'd get treats every morning and it took days to correct this. I substituted a less delicious option. While he is still a bit puppish, he is much less jumpy than he was at first and is better socialized to people. He has not seen us as pups who can be rough housed in quite a while.
We walk about 3 miles a day, which he loves, and he can play a great game of fetch. I am still hesitant to let him run wild in the backyard as he has a regrettable tendency to chase other animals, especially deer. If it was only rabbits and squirrels, I'd be fine with it, but the local deer are far less frightened by people and dogs than they used to be. - CN
My goodness that is a colorful wall behind Bogie. I'm not sure how you can refuse that adorable pup T-R-E-A-T-S every morning. Thanks for sharing your experiences. It is difficult having a pup in an area full of wildlife.
***
Hi, MisHum. This is my friend, Willie...the sweetest pit bull in the
world. He lives across the back fence and considers me a member of his
pack. I got him a new collar recently and then spotted the doggy bling
on Jewells' Etsy site. Here's the result. -creeper
Willie is quite the doggeh. Then add the bling. Wow. Quite a handsome dude. Sounds like you have one sweet neighbor. Thanks for sharing today.
***
What a fantastic group of Morons and PetMorons as usual. Thank you so much for taking the time out to share with us. The In-box was full this week. So we will get to all of your animal related links and PetMoron stories in the near future.
In the meantime if you have something to share you can reach us at petmorons at gmail dot com.
Until next Saturday, God willing and the creeks don't rise, have a great week!
Saturday Gardening and Puttering Thread - May 15 [KT]
—Open Blogger
Hi, everybody! Happy to be back. It will take some time to work through some of the great content submitted by The Horde, but here is a start:
I thought I'd send along this Tree Swallow and Bluebird, which I photographed this week. We birders are happy right now....lots going on in our gardens and yards.
Lizabth
On return, we stopped at little brothers house to spend time and do some brojects.
Here, after almost 4" of rain, is my SIL's garden.
There's kale, beets, only a couple onions, and caged maters. There is abundant weeds! The corrugated is so can walk on mud.
Now these are some flat out crazy critters; they wander out and stop traffic on road, and suddenly start a loud commotion.
Oh, did I say they like onions?
Do the eggs taste like onion if they eat onions?
There's a great crop of calves. A very productive spring.
From Wee Kreek Farm Girl:
Harvested some parsnips, beets and carrots this week and still getting LOTS of kale for salads. Trying to use up a ton of my I'itoi onions, I started with 5 that I sent away for, and the first year I only got 15 which I turned around and planted, which the next year got me about 75, but I think I am about 10 years in and I have so many that I really need to stick to planting 75 a year and keep it at that. The 75 will give me about 750 little onions.
They are fiddly to clean but I like them because I always have onions on hand if I need them and I use them in place of shallots all the time in cooking. I have been harvesting sometimes 40 a day to process, as they freeze well too, but I am hardly making a dent. They have completely taken over a few of my beds which is how I realized I have an I'itoi onion problem. You can leave them in year round and they will just keep producing. I have attached a picture of one of my beds where they have taken over. The problem is I tuck them here and there and forget about them and then I have this situation. They are pretty unfussy and will grow just about anywhere. Here is a link if you want to hear the history of them.
I wonder how they compare in flavor to the "Egyptian Walking Onion"?
GARDENS OF THE HORDE
Wee Kreek Farm Girl, a couple of weeks ago:
So the stalk has turned its flowers into seeds, which I assume you can plant, but I prefer to wait until it makes the baby agaves and plant those as it takes less time. But the stalk is still looking tall and hanging in there.
Things grow fast in spring in the desert. Not long after the photo above:
The agave is starting to make the baby pups on the stalk now and I managed to get a good picture. All the places there were flowers along the stalk there will be a baby agave pup. I have vowed to only start 5, as they are taking over here from years past. But the stalk will probably have 1000 pups on it. Isn't mother nature amazing. This agave stalk really wants to make sure it leaves some babies behind.
Wee Kreek Farm Girl
If you want to grow one of these agaves, speak up! Wee Kreek Farm Girl has seeds and pups. Thousands in all! Aren't the pups cute?
From 40 miles north:
Remember this?
It turned orange, but it's like nothing I've ever seen. Maybe a hybrid? I planted some Icelandics last year, and I always seed California poppies and sometimes corn poppies, but I don't think I planted any English poppies.
I think it's just a fancy California Poppy. Probably bred in England.
Also, some baby grapes.
Past Comment Thread Standouts
Congrats to Grammie Winger on her renewed garden activities.
Got trees where you want to garden?
Back in April, Wee Kreek Farm Girl had the following excellent advice for people with trees in the yard who want a garden:
I posted this in the comments just now but as I was so late commenting I am sure no one will see it but if anyone cares
I am sure no one is reading this now, but I had company yesterday so I couldn't read/comment. Liked all the back and forth in the comments today. You people crack me up. I have to do raised bed here, which is a long hard lesson that I learned. I started doing beds in the ground and after a few years the plants wouldn't do well and I didn't really understand why and I dug one up and found that desert trees are always hungry and greedy for water and they will send their roots EXTREMELY far to get into your garden bed and suck all the water that you are putting in the garden bed for themselves and leave your plants thirsty for any water at all. I have had to dig up and put "bottoms" on all my raised beds to keep the tree roots out of them. I has taken me 5 years to complete the task. I just finished the last section two weeks ago. I even tried concreting the bottom of one of the beds and they managed to find the smallest of cracks and got their little roots in and invaded the bed.
Now I know better. So as much as I would love to plant in the ground, I can't. Mesquite trees are the worst offenders, but if you have any citrus near your raised beds they will do the same.
The picture is the last section of a garden bed that I had to dig out and convert to pots. This was a garden that we created out of an old fountain base that a friend didn't want. When I finally figured out that it was full of tree roots, Mr. Wee Kreek and I dug out all the nice raised bed soil that we had put into it, got all the tree roots out and lined it with heavy duty plastic, put the soil back in and two years later the tree roots had figured out a way to get into the plastic no problem. I thought fine, I will fix you, and Mr. Wee Kreek and I dug out the whole bed again and poured 8 bags of concrete into the bottom of the bed.
I thought for sure I had managed to fix it this time for good. NOPE. The tree roots are insidious. Two years later I could tell the roots were back so we dug it all out again a section at a time and converted it all to large pots which have a bottom and also I have learned to turn my pots every three months so if the tree roots manage to get into any pot that they don't have time to make big roots and get broken off while they are small. It isn't easy gardening in the desert, but I like a challenge. I am hopeful that I may never have to dig out another bed again, but the trees are very sneaky so I will let you know. Sometimes I think they are mocking me for thinking I can beat nature.
And here's a Poppy Mallow from 40 Miles North. You might be able to grow this in a container:
If you would like to send information and/or photos for the Saturday Gardening Thread, the address is:
ktinthegarden
at that g mail dot com place
Include the nic by which you wish to be known when you comment at AoSHQ,
unless you want to remain a lurker.
Well, NPR has turned 50. Tim Graham of Media Matters and NewsBusters wrote a little rant, characterizing it as "still a liberal sandbox".
On May 2, CBS "Sunday Morning" shamelessly aired an eight-minute segment that was more like a commercial selling NPR's view of itself. Every single person interviewed on camera was a current or former NPR employee. At the end, host Jane Pauley oozed, "By the way, the producer of this report, 'Sunday Morning's' Jay Kernis, was himself a pioneering NPR staffer."
Not too long ago, I heard a very unusual weekend broadcast in which "persons of color" employed by NPR criticized the lack of cultural diversity in the organization, but things now seem to be pretty much back to the normal, soothing, "we are in charge here" tone (in my limited listening experience).
Before the recent pipeline disruption, NPR did a feature which seemed to indicate that they are a little worried about the governor of Florida: Ron DeSantis pushes coastal 'resilience' while doing little to tackle climate change.
While the piece acknowledges that Governor DeSantis has done a lot to combat serious environmental problems in the state - in the everglades, coastal waters and beaches especially, he has not done enough to help poor farm workers who are picking tomatoes to put beachfront homes on stilts. (According to my interpretation of the audio). And he has not pushed hard enough to stop Florida residents from using fossil fuels.
If you click over to the NPR piece, you will find that the written text and the audio are not the same. The written piece seems to have some research behind it. What I got from it is that they are rooting for Charlie Crist's candidacy in 2022. A Republican turned Democrat. Perfect:
Some of his critics acknowledge that the $1 billion Resilient Florida plan he announced in January could be a first step toward helping some communities pay for adaptation. But critics also point out that DeSantis has done almost nothing to put Florida on a path to scaling back the state's heavy reliance on fossil fuels.
"I would give him probably a C-minus," said former Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, who served from 2007 to 2011, and now represents St. Petersburg in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat.
Crist still gets plaudits from environmentalists for his administration's climate initiatives, including a cap-and-trade system to curb carbon emissions and an executive order that was intended to put the state on a path to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050. But those were basically abandoned by Gov. Rick Scott, the Republican now serving in the U.S. Senate.
Crist, who switched parties and this week announced he is running for governor in 2022, said DeSantis should be "encouraging renewables such as wind energy, solar energy, and particularly solar. I mean, my goodness, we're the Sunshine State."
The Governor is not working hard enough to keep people in Florida from having access to natural gas, "according to critics".
The written and audio versions of the NPR piece both center on Satellite Beach.
Brick by brick, the stucco shell of a new flood-resilient public works building is taking shape blocks from the beach, the most visible sign yet of a small community's enormous task staving off the rising sea.
"This is actually the highest point in the city," Satellite Beach City Manager Courtney Barker said, adding that right next door to the new public works building will be a new fire station.
It's a close-knit community established by rocket scientists south of Kennedy Space Center, on a low-slung barrier island between the Atlantic Ocean and Indian River Lagoon.
By 2040, community leaders expect significant impacts associated with climate change. Already flooding is a problem, and beach-front homes perch precariously atop a sand dune left exposed after a series of storms and hurricanes washed away a sea wall.
The needs are great, and in Gov. Ron DeSantis, Barker sees a potential ally.
"At least he talks about climate change as actually being real, so that's good," she said. "And he's putting money toward it so that's encouraging."
But Barker also feels DeSantis is doing only part of the job.
"We desperately need to grow up as a state and realize that we need to get our emissions down," Barker said.
Satellite Beach sounds vulnerable. Low-slung barrier island that needs sea walls. Efforts to increase sea grasses by bringing in soil hurt sea turtles . . A little community of about 10,000 people that is already getting a lot of state attention. But this is what the authoritative female NPR narrator says about Ms. Barker:
She hopes that with more state leadership on climate change, her children will be able to live here, too.
I want to know if Ms. Barker and the people at NPR ever talk about the Chinese Communist Party as actually being real. What kind of magical thinking allows them to think that a Florida governor's positions on limiting fossil fuels will outweigh the influence of the CCP's building schedule for new coal-fired energy plants on ocean levels?
Even according to their own "science"?
Music for Minor Hurricane Action
Here, surfers take advantage of surf from Hurricane Joaquin in 2015, back when Obama was still lowering the ocean levels, at Satellite Beach. The assumption that dangerous hurricanes are becoming more frequent due to global warming may be based on when measurement of frequency starts.
You can see at about 2:30 why Satellite Beach would be susceptible to hurricane damage, as well as damage from ground water.
Collectively, Joaquin killed 34 people and caused US$200 million in damages. With all 34 deaths attributed to the storm occurring at sea, Joaquin has the highest offshore death toll for any Atlantic hurricane since the Escuminac hurricane in 1959, which killed 35 people in the Northumberland Strait.
Although Joaquin never directly affected the United States, another large storm system over the southeastern states drew tremendous moisture from the hurricane, resulting in catastrophic flooding in South Carolina.
The assumption that dangerous hurricanes are becoming more frequent may depend on when measuring starts.
So I'm sitting here waiting for Microsoft to join a conference call and explain how when they messed up 911 calling for a whole state government it's somehow my fault.
Spoiler alert, yes pretty much every content-free EMT gets drafted the night before.
I've personally demonstrated that MS is out of RFC spec 3 times in the last 12 months. Every time their response is essentially, "we're Microsoft, fix our deficiencies on your side."
I'm not going to tell you anyone is better.
I'm just saying Microsoft might be the stankiest of the bunch of dicks trying to profit off the work from home imperative Fauci foisted upon the world.
Existing European chip makers - and yes, there are some - are protesting the idea of subsidies for leading-edge chipmakers, saying that subsidies should only go to companies producing chips on older nodes. They have a point, though, since those chips are mostly embedded controllers used in vehicles and appliances and a shortage of $1 engine timing controllers can shut down an entire production line of $40,000 cars.
And coincidentally, those are precisely the chips they make.
In any case, TSMC is looking to not only build the announced 5nm plant in Arizona, but up to five additional plants using even more advanced technology - where each could cost $10 billion or more. Two thirds of TSMC's revenue comes from North America, and only 6% from Europe.
Anime of the day is K-On! Kyoto Animation's classic story of schoolgirls sitting around eating cake. Oh, and they're in a rock band. But mostly cake.
For all those of you who still have working Amigas, which I probably don't, for while there are a couple sitting in a closet in the spare bedroom I haven't looked at them in years and it's highly likely they've suffered a battery or capacitor accident in all that time.
Easier to emulate these days - I mean, there are emulators that even encode to NTSC and back again to produce historically realistic colour - though I applaud those who keep classic hardware working.
The 6600 XT isn't much smaller than the 6700 XT - 2048 shaders vs. 2560 - but it has one third the on-chip RAM, which AMD calls "Infinity Cache". That will mean it's much less capable at higher resolutions; 4K will be out for any even slightly recent game and 1440p dubious. It should make a decent 1080p card, though; it will easily crush the RX 580 that I'm still using.
The 6500 is half of a 6600 XT and will be fine for basic stuff, older games, and modern indie and casual titles. It should also give us an idea of how AMD's upcoming APUs will perform. It's the first low-end RDNA2 part to be released. I mean, it hasn't been released yet, or even announced, but when it is, it will be.
The advantage of reducing the RAM size is that these will be much smaller chips and easy to pump out in volume. They'll also be of little interest to crypto miners; respective quirks of AMD and Nvidia's current generations mean that an Nvidia card with a certain level of gaming performance is much better at mining than an equal ranked AMD card. In the last generation, the opposite was true.
What idiot at YouTube decided that Base64 was a good encoding for video IDs?
I For One Welcome Our New Recursively Oppressive Overlords
It's a lovely touch that a video discussing a government ban on protests against COVID lockdowns carries a forced message linking to official government COVID propa - cough - information.
Another K-On! Anime Music Video of the Day
There are a lot of these. I could spend all week just posting the good ones. But I won't.
Probably.
Just As I Misremembered Hololive Video of the Day
Just yesterday Cover Corp got blanket permission to stream Square Enix games, and today Pekora (Hololive's resident Bugs Bunny character) has jumped head first into Final Fantasy X.
It's the first Final Fantasy game I ever played, and looks just like I remember, which tells you what memory is worth because I played it on the PS2 on an S-Video TV and Pekora is streaming the remastered HD version.
Also wasn't Rikku's ship scarlet red? Or was that another one you got later in the game?
This is streaming live, so if you click the play button you're likely to drop right into the middle of a scene of chocobo slavery or something.
Friday Overnight Open Thread – 05/14/2021 [Buck Throckmorton]
—Open Blogger
*****
ART THREAD OR GARDEN THREAD?
Here is yet another form of art that is better and more creative than most any art taking up space in the Whitney or other museums of modern art…Tree Shaping.
What skills do you have that fill you with an artist’s pride when you complete the project? It could be carpentry, landscaping, car restoration, flower arranging, ice sculpting, whatever. Congratulations on your talent. Let’s hear about it. Heck, feel free to send me a picture. I’d enjoy seeing your handiwork.
*****
REMEMBER THE ALAMO
In tribute to Weird Dave’s new home state of Texas, how ‘bout we Remember The Alamo tonight?
First off – how cool is this photo? It’s a daguerreotype from 1849 – just 13 years after the Battle of the Alamo.
Enrique Esparza gave this first-hand account of the Battle of the Alamo to the San Antonio Light newspaper in 1902. He was 8-years old and in the Alamo compound during the famous 1836 siege. His father Gregory – an Alamo defender – was killed in the battle. His father’s brother was one of Santa Anna’s troops at the battle. This is an amazing recounting of the siege and the battle.
"The roof of the Alamo had been taken off and the south side filled up with dirt almost to the roof on that side so that there was a slanting embankment up which the Americans could run and take positions. During the fight I saw numbers who were shot in the head as soon as they exposed themselves from the roof. There were holes made in the walls of the fort and the Americans continually shot from these also. We also had two cannon, one at the main entrance and one at the northwest corner of the fort near the post office. The cannon were seldom fired. I remember Crockett. He was a tall, slim man, with black whiskers. He was always at the head. The Mexicans called him Don Benito. The Americans said he was Crockett. He would often come to the fire and warm his hands and say a few words to us in the Spanish language. I also remember hearing the names of Travis and Bowie mentioned, but I never saw either of them that I know of.”
*****
WHO’S YOUR FAVORITE DAVY CROCKETT?
2004’s movie version of The Alamo was unfairly panned by critics, mainly because movie critics are leftists who hate the reverence that Americans hold for the martyred heroes of the Alamo, therefore the crtitics had to hate on a good movie. Billy Bob Thornton stole the show as David Crockett.
Who’s your favorite Davy Crockett – Fess Parker, John Wayne, or Billy Bob Thornton? (My vote is with Billy Bob.)
*****
SONGS ABOUT THE ALAMO
With apologies to the great Marty Robbins and his song “Ballad of the Alamo,” my nod for best song about the Alamo is the retro-rockin’ “Stout and High” by Monte Warden and the Wagoneers. Here’s a performance from them on Austin City Limits.
The fighting at the northern wall seems to have stopped
Did you see Travis fall?
God save Texas and my kids, have mercy on my soul,
Great God they’re in the walls
*****
SPEAKING OF BRAVE MEN & THE ALAMO
Speaking of brave men and the Alamo...here is the most decorated soldier of WWII standing in front of the Alamo.
From Murphy’s exposed position on top of the burning tank destroyer, he killed over 20 German soldiers and repelled their attack. For more than an hour, Murphy continued to fire the machine gun, despite being wounded in the leg. He then led his company in a counterattack that killed or wounded 50 more German soldiers. On April 23, 1945, at the age of only 19, Murphy received the Medal of Honor for his actions. Though Murphy’s heroism on January 26 was extraordinary, it was not the first time Murphy had distinguished himself. He had previously received over 20 awards for valor, including the Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Star medals, and two Bronze Star medals for valor in Italy and France.
*****
POET, SONGWRITER, AND MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENT
Did you know that Audie Murphy also wrote poetry, and co-wrote numerous songs (with Scott Turner.) Among the famous singers who recorded Audie’s songs were Charley Pride, Dean Martin, Bobby Bare, Eddy Arnold, and Roy Clark. Here’s Dean Martin singing a sad waltz co-written by Audie.
When Charles Coolidge was growing up outside Chattanooga, his grammar school class received a visit from Sgt. Alvin York, the Tennessean famed for World War I exploits that brought him the Medal of Honor. In the aftermath of World War II, it was Sergeant Coolidge making the rounds of his home state, telling of another harrowing firefight in France, this one bringing him the nation’s highest decoration for valor in his own right. Celebrated in Chattanooga with a park and a highway and at the Charles H. Coolidge National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, Mr. Coolidge died there on Tuesday. He was 99 and the oldest living recipient of the nation’s highest award for valor.
Pictured above are four Medal Of Honor winners including Alvin York behind the wheel, and from left to right are Paul Huff, Charles Coolidge, and Raymond Cooley.
Early Thursday morning, a domestic assault victim called 911 for help. Even though she had been cut and was bleeding, she was told to relocate a block away so police could respond. Her story is not the only one; others in the area have wondered when officers will make it inside the “no-go zone” to provide their service.
*****
GREAT MOMENTS FROM JOHN RITTER
Have you ever watched comedies from the 1970s and realized that the popular shows that critics panned – such as Three’s Company – have stood up over the decades much better than the “intellectual” comedies such as MASH or Maude? Three’s Company had no pretensions about it, yet it starred a comedy genius in John Ritter. Here are some of his great moments:
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LIBERTARIANS LOVE FOREIGN SLAVE LABOR
Confederate slaveowners used the same logic to defend slavery as the Cato Institute uses to defend women living a life as human chattel in foreign sweatshops.
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THE WISDOM OF CASEY STENGEL
Some thoughts from baseball legend Casey Stengel.
Never make predictions, especially about the future.
Good pitching will always stop good hitting, and vice-versa.
The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided.
Son, it ain’t the water cooler that’s striking you out.
I feel greatly honored to have a ballpark named after me, especially since I've been thrown out of so many.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
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CLASSICAL MUSIC YOU KNOW BUT CAN”T NAME
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca is better known as the Turkish March. This is some beautiful piano music
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MOTIVATION
(h/t despair.com)
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THROCKMORTON’S FIRST LAW OF LIVE MUSIC: IF THERE’S AN UPRIGHT BASS IN THE BAND, IT’S PROBABLY GOING TO BE GOOD
Chris Hillman has had a fabulous musical career, including his role as a key member of The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and The Desert Rose Band, with music that encompasses country, folk, rock, bluegrass and gospel. In recent years he has been touring with his old Desert Rose bandmate Herb Pedersen.
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Tonight’s overnight thread has been brought to you by Wooly Chaps. And ladies, it’s never too early to start thinking about Christmas gifts for the cowboy in your life. He’ll love these.
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Thanks again to the horde for letting me play host tonight. Please feel free to offer any helpful feedback, insults, or tips at buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com
I'll include the Vapors because people will call me a cyclone ranger if I don't, but honestly, this is not a double entendre song. That's just something ninth graders made up. The band's always denied it and they have no reason to lie. Plus, I don't even understand how the alleged double entendre is supposed to work.
She's blind at the end of the video. I just got that, 40 years later.
The long, long baseball metaphor at the, um, climax of this Meatloaf song counts, even though the rest of the song is just straight-up surface-level about sex.
Billy Squier has an odd one -- I think it's a reverse double entendre. It sounds very dirty, but it's really about music industry people flattering him and bullshitting him when he was a new rising star.
USAToday Opinion Page Editor: Republicans' Ouster of Liz Cheney Proves That They're a "Bigger Threat Than the 9/11 Hijackers"
—Ace
This is a major media organization's top editor saying this.
By the way, for years, David Mastio was claimed to be a fair, impartial, even conservative-leaning editor that conservatives should treat nicely because you never know, he just might publish your op-ed.
So this is where the media's most "conservative-leaning" and "fair" editors are now.
These people want you dead. I understand it’s hard to accept that your fellow Americans want you dead, but they do. And the sooner you accept that, the sooner it will stop bothering you when they call you “Nazi” and “terrorist”.
Pray that this individual gets the therapy and mental counseling he so desperately needs. Imagine how broken and depraved someone must be to believe that *voting against Liz Cheney for GOP leadership* is worse than murdering 3,000 people in cold blood. https://t.co/VFMeoOJI3O
"The ImmunaBand is the outward symbol of the COVID-19 Vaccination. In every interaction with fellow employees and the public, the ImmunaBand bracelet contributes as a silent witness to the power of the vaccine..."
CULT STATUS:
[ ] YES
[ ] NO
[X] DEFINITELY NOT A
I gotta tell you, I feel the shameful red of embarrassment that I did not see the opportunity to fleece religious maniac dullards and exploit the congenitally stupid by selling them shoddy devotional tchotchkies.
They're such mindless cultists. They're a veritable mint waiting to be unloaded.
Sarah Silverman -- who is obviously no genius anyway, but who is also now radioactively unfunny -- made the bold pronouncement that Bruce "Caitlyn" Jenner is transphobic.
The colorful and uniquely patterned shirts are making a comeback this year, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The news outlet reports that part of the appeal of the shirts is the wide variety of styles they come in, which allow the wearer more freedom to express themselves.
The trend was apparently inspired by a shirt recently worn by David Beckham in Miami. The Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello shirt reportedly inspired more people to attempt to pull off the colorful, yet casual look that Beckham went with.
I've wanted a Hawaiian shirt for a long time, but didn't get one, first because I thought, and this is stupid, "What's with all these flowers and birds? This is gay."
Then I accepted that flowers and birds and pineapples were essential motifs of the shirt, so I sought a shirt with... less gay flowers and less gay birds. Like, manly flowers. Flowers with biceps. Like, birds with guns and dicks.
Again, this is embarrassing. These are the stupid thoughts my stupid brain has when I'm not minding it.
I do not seek your approval. I only seek your pity.
In 2017, Dr. Shi Zengli -- the "Bat Lady" herself, the woman who worried publicly that covid might be one of her own Frankenviruses -- stated in a paper that her work was being funded by Anthony Fauci's NIH/NIAID.
MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt reviewed this paper that was published with financial assistance from Dr. Fauci’s NIH/NIAID and concluded “certain techniques that the researchers used seemed to meet the definition of gain-of-function”
While the Biden Administration pumps millions into the Palestinian Authority, they refuse to commit to selling Israel more of the Iron Dome missiles that saved so many Israeli lives in the latest Hamas terror-bombardment.
Breaking in the last hour: the Biden admin is sending millions in new aid to the Palestinians while refusing to commit to replenishing Israel's Iron Dome missiles. pic.twitter.com/sEExD5kUrl
Pandemic-weary New Yorkers had their hopes deflated Thursday when Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he wasn’t ready to ease the state's mask mandate -- even though the feds gave the green light for vaccinated Americans to finally show their faces and gather indoors again.
In a late-afternoon statement, Cuomo said he and Health Commissioner Howard Zucker had yet to decide if the Empire State would adopt newly announced guidelines from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"In New York, we have always relied on the facts and the science to guide us throughout the worst of this pandemic and in our successful reopening," Cuomo said.
Note that when Washington, DC's leftwing mayor relaxed DC's mask mandate based on changed CDC guidelines, DC's liberal residents rose up in revolt to demand that masks remain required.
And the liberals of Brookline, Massachusetts also turned into Science Deniers and demanded that the town continue forcing people to wear masks.
Rachel Maddow announced that she'll have to "rewire" her own brain so as not to view people not wearing a face beanie "as a threat."
"I feel like I'm going to have to rewire myself so that when I see someone out in the world who's not wearing a mask, I don't instantly think, ‘You are a threat,’" Maddow said. "Or you are selfish or you are a Covid denier and you definitely haven't been vaccinated. I mean, we're going to have to rewire the way that we look at each other."
This is all very much Scientific and not religious face-covering wearing and tribal shibboleth-speaking at all.
This is what Science looks like now, people.
David Hogg straight-up admits he's only wearing the mask to show that he's not a conservative, and to blend in with the tribe in "a very liberal area where 99% of the people you see are wearing masks."
CNN's "Chyron Boy" is very upset that people will no longer be mandated to wear the Religious Face-Covering outdoors:
This is CNN's Chyron Boy.
CNN's Chyron Boy is really, really unhappy that the vaccines are working and they allow people to not have to wear masks. He seems to want us to masked and mentally crippled forever.
CNN keeps pushing the Science-Denying misinformation that it's now safe to not wear masks.
I’m still stunned at the CDC decision. Yes, vaccinated people are well-protected and not a threat to others. But do we trust that the honor system—won’t unvaccinated people pretend to be vaccinated & stop wearing masks? What about our obligation to kids & the immunocompromised? pic.twitter.com/Iq2TUW2VKn
The DHS claims that... terrorists are plotting to exploit America's de-masking.
So don't do it!
From @JuliaEAinsley DHS has extended the terror warning issued in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, and also says extremists could take advantage of easing Covid restrictions.https://t.co/FYQhQyIVP5
— NBC Investigations (@NBCInvestigates) May 14, 2021
Because obviously not mandating that people wear masks obscuring their face is to the advantage of the average terrorist. https://t.co/fqyPeSuWIt
Representative Fartwell -- the Distinguished Fang-Fang-Gang-Bang -- says he will not be "bullied" into removing his mask in a room full of vaccinated people standing quite far apart from each other in a room with a 60 foot high ceiling and so much circulating air it might as well be outdoors.
"Biden says you can take off your mask."
The operative word, there, is "can." If one so chooses.
— Antifa Aspie 🌈 #NeverForget1_6_21 #GOPhatesTruth (@MikeFreethinker) May 14, 2021
Rep. Eric Swalwell on Friday gave an ironic, spit-spewing defense of wearing masks to protect against COVID-19, shouting into the face of a congressional staffer, "You don’t tell me what to f--ing do!'
The China spy-linked California Democrat later admitted to his actions on social media, saying he didn’t like to be "bullied" on face-masking -- one day after the CDC said all vaccinated people can scrap their masks when indoors.
Although Democrats often accused Republicans of "not following science" on COVID-19 the past year, conservatives have flipped the script as many Democrats hesitate to accept the CDC’s guidance on putting away masks if you’ve been fully vaccinated.
Swalwell gave his non-socially distanced defense of mask-wearing when Nick Dyer, a spokesman for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), said to him, "Biden says you can take off your mask."
The Democrat marched over to Dyer and shouted at him, "You don't tell me what to f-ing do!," according to an account that Dyer gave to reporter Scott Wong of The Hill, who watched the confrontation but could not hear Swalwell's words.
So he admits that no one "bullied" him -- he was just girlishly "triggered" by hearing actual science that contradicted the teachings of his Religion of Scientism.
It's like an Estrogen Derby and all the NeverTrumpers are winning:
Same.
I am going to wear masks for the same reason I wear pants...I don't really need them, but man, I am civil enough to not make you see me without them. pic.twitter.com/Np42UEgKd3
Amazing to think the CDC was considered to be the gold standard before the trump admin got their hands into it. Mission accomplished I guess. Everything they touch...
Liz Cheney Goes on Fox News to Repeatedly Lie About Her Role In Pushing the Psyops Disinformation Campaign About "Russian Bounties"
—Ace
In addition to her other lies, Glen Greenwald accuses her of pushing the fraudulent "Russian Bounties" story to the press behind the scenes, and then going on to the same media she pushed the fake narrative to to comment on the story, pretending she had nothing to do with it.
Gee that sounds kind of familiar.
In an interview on Tuesday with Fox News' Bret Baier, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) denied that she spread the discredited CIA "Russian bounty" story. That CIA tale, claiming Russia was paying Taliban fighters to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan, was cooked up by the CIA and then published by The New York Times on June 27 of last year, right as former President Trump announced his plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. The Times story, citing anonymous intelligence officials, was then continually invoked by pro-war Republicans and Democrats -- led by Cheney -- to justify their blocking of that troop withdrawal. The story was discredited when the U.S. intelligence community admitted last month that it had only"“low to moderate confidence" that any of this even happened.
When Baier asked Cheney about her role in spreading this debunked CIA story, Cheney blatantly lied to him, claiming --if you go back and look at what I said -- every single thing I said: I said if those stories are true, we need to know why the President and Vice President were not briefed on them." After Baier pressed her on the fact that she vested this story with credibility, Cheney insisted a second time that she never endorsed the claim but merely spoke conditionally, always using the "if these reports are true" formulation....
Liz Cheney, as she so often does, blatantly lied. That she merely spoke of the Russian bounty story in the conditional -- "every single thing I said: I said if those stories are true" -- is completely and demonstrably false. Indeed, other than Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), there are few if any members of Congress who did more to spread this Russian bounty story as proven truth, all in order to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. In so doing, she borrowed from a pro-war playbook pioneered by her dad, to whom she owes her career: the former Vice President would leak CIA claims to The New York Times to justify war, then go on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, as he did on September 8, 2002, and cite those New York Times reports as though they were independent confirmation of his views coming from that paper rather than from him.
...
So having CIA stories leak to the press that fuel the pro-war case, then having pro-war politicians cite those to justify their pro-war position, is a Cheney Family speciality.
Below, Liz Cheney lies about having merely couched her endorsement of the story she was pushing in the "if it is true" conditional.
As part of her ideological war to reclaim the GOP for neocons, the now-deposed House leader falsely denied to @BretBaier yesterday her role in a tale designed to block withdrawal from Afghanistan. She lied repeatedly in this short clip (from @CurtisHouck): pic.twitter.com/B2auV31OKm
Greenwald points out quotes in which Cheney insisted the "Russian Bounties" hoax was true -- no "if this is true" caveating to be found.
Note she also lied, as Bret Baier suggests, in claiming she just wanted to know why others had not briefed this to President Trump. Of course, Trump's briefers were never the target of Cheney in this disinformation plot; the target was Trump himself, and Cheney is lying to suggest otherwise.
Cheney was also unable to explain how her single-minded Ahab-like hunting of Trump is in any way beneficial to her actual Wyoming constituents, who might prefer to be represented by someone who has more than a single man in her portfolio of resposibility.
Excellent follow-up from @BretBaier: "You're saying you are dedicating your life to opposing him...Why should Wyoming say reelect you when you're spending so much energy opposing him so little opposing Biden?"
The Fair Queen of Grace and Charm then attacked Fox News for not having a suitable level of Trump Derangement System:
This is WILD. Liz Cheney takes issue with @BretBaier's questions about balancing opposing Biden and denouncing Trump, so she goes full Stelter and trash Fox News, suggesting they've failed to do their jobs.
The Israeli military apparently used a brilliant deceptive maneuver to take out Hamas's terrorist fighting force and underground tunnels -- in a single blow.
In what could only be described as killing two birds with one stone, the Israel Defense Forces on Thursday night told news reporters that the Israeli ground forces were on their way to Hamas-held Gaza.
The news spread quickly through the mainstream media and affiliated social media accounts. Believing an Israeli ground invasion to be imminent, Hamas ordered its terrorist fighters to seek shelter in the tunnel network dug up under the Gaza city.
What followed the Hamas mobilization was a massive wave of Israeli airstrikes -- comprising of 160 aircraft -- on the Gaza tunnel network with the jihadi group’s top terror brass sitting underground, right where the IDF wanted them.
The Jerusalem Post seems to imply here that the "foreign press" was all to happy to carry news of Israel's invasion of Hamas-held territory -- because they love depicting Israelis as always attacking peaceful Palestinians.
At midnight, the IDF Spokesperson’s English department tweeted that "IDF air and ground troops are currently attacking in the Gaza Strip." The foreign media jumped at the tweet, interpreting it to mean that Israel was sending ground forces into Gaza, a major escalation in the current operation and a sign that it was far from over.
The media is so predictably, reflexively, robotically anti-semitic that its anti-semitism can be used against them, as well as against the Hamas terrorists the media flacks for.
Thanks to James, Nevergiveup, SMOD and other commenters for alerting the blog to this story.
I would like to associate myself with the remarks of the distinguished Grumpy(98)(c) -- "It. Moved."
Update: Bald lunatic Ayanna Pressley blames Hamas' missile attacks on Israelis on... Israel.
And claims that this is just another example of anti-black cops, and black lives not mattering.
The Group of NeverTrumpers Trying to Form a Third Party...? One of Their Key Signatories is a Former Republican Turned Democrat Turned... Holocaust Denier
Among the founding members of a "principled" group of "prominent Republicans" working to counter conspiracy theories is a prominent Holocaust-denier.
Pete McCloskey, a former congressman who referenced the "so-called Holocaust" in a keynote address that praised a top Holocaust-denial group, joined "A Call for American Renewal" as a founding signatory. According to former congressman Denver Riggleman, the group aims to "counter disinformation and conspiracy theories" and "step up in this fight for truth and integrity."
McCloskey served as a Republican representative for California from 1967 to 1983 but changed his affiliation to the Democratic Party in 2007. After leaving Congress, he gave the keynote address at the Institute for Historical Review's 2000 conference. An infamous Holocaust-denial group with ties to neo-Nazi organizations, IHR has described the Holocaust as "some scattered killings" of Jews. According to the group, there is "not evidence" to support "the systematic extermination of six to eight million Jews in concentration camps."
McCloskey's address to IHR members noted his "respect" for "the thesis of this organization." The former congressman also referenced the "so-called Holocaust," adding, "I don't know whether you are right or wrong about the Holocaust."
Oh, George Conway and Evan McMullin and all the usual suspects are on the list, too. They're just not close enough to McCloskey's name to fit in a screengrab.
Shocking: Fauci Admits That At Least 40%, and Maybe As High as 50%, of His Own Agency's Employees are Refusing to Get the Vaccine
—Ace
A lot of government pressure -- and some rumors of actual legal coercion -- to get you to take the vaccine, while government employees, who could be ordered to get vaccinated as a condition of their employment, refuse and are permitted to refuse.
Fauci firs says "a little bit over half" of his agency is vaccinated, then says "probably sixty percent."
Sixty percent is not "a little bit" over half.
I take the first as more likely to be truthful, and I take his edging that up to sixty percent as a dishonest attempt to cover up for his first more-truthful estimate, after he realized the implications of it.
Rachel Walensky of the CDC refused to even answer! So you know the CDC is just as unvaccinated, or even more so!
So 40-50% of NIH and FDA employees are “anti-vaxxers“?
Our local hospital (one of LA’s biggest) had 60% employee vax acceptance initially. Hospital brass mounted a PR campaign with a goal of getting to 75%. Not sure if they ever did.
These people are engaging in a public pressure campaign to get other people to take the vaccine while refusing to do so themselves?! There is only one reasonable conclusion to draw from this!
Walensky is merely "encouraging" her staffers at the CDC to get vaccinated, while proposing "vaccine passports" to mandate that the rest of us do?!
"Can't imagine Republican House Members would go with Chip Roy--he has not done a great job, and will probably be successfully primaried in his own district," Trump said in a press release. "I support Elise, by far, over Chip!"
So, why did Trump endorse the moderate/liberalish Stefanik over the conservative Chip Roy?
I actually have some original reporting. I am reliably informed that a big obstacle to replacing Liz Cheney the last time they had a vote on this was that no one stepped up to the plate and offered to run to replace her.
You can't beat something with nothing, so Cheney survived the first vote to expel her partly due to simple lack of anyone willing to take the job from her.
Stefanik earned respect for having offered herself up as a replacement for Cheney this time, and in so doing, made it much easier to oust Cheney.
Trump had particular reason to favor Stefanik over Roy because on January 6th, when some voted to object to the electoral college count and some didn't, Stefanik was one of those objecting, and Roy was one of those opposed to the motion to object.
Chip Roy was better on the issues, if you're a conservative. However, he is regarded as being inflexible on his ideology. Which is good in a Congressman, but not necessarily good in a congressional leader, who has to deliver and enforce the consensus caucus opinion, regardless of his personal opinion.
Stefanik is also seen as better at fundraising for other congressmen.
I'm also told that Trump decided to more forcefully endorse Stefanik -- and call Roy weak -- because allies of Roy were talking up the idea that Trump might endorse him over Stefanik. Trump put an end to that chatter.
Despite Stefanik being generally more moderate than Roy, she has shown she can take positions which are extremely unpopular -- toxic even -- to our Ruling Class. Most of the "toxic" positions she's taken have been in support of Trump or his agenda, but that doesn't mean she can't take them in other cases.
She might not be as bad a choice, as far as conservative issues, as people fear. Certainly she has demonstrated repeatedly that she has the one trait that is absolutely necessary in a leader -- the balls to tell the Ruling Class Establishment to go fuck itself blind.
Is there something in the water or the air? Is the moon aligned in poor angles? My week of interacting with the "Customer Service Industry" is today's rant.
On Monday I went to a HVAC shop looking for a particular item. The window claims that they have a showroom and parts. So I thought, I will go in there and see if they have the part I'm looking for. I was greeted by a crabby woman demanding, "What do you want?"
My response was "I'm looking for 1/2" hose with a male and female ends. Length isn't a problem." She left for the back of the building and came back with a hose with a 3/8" and 1/2" ends.
"Excuse me, this isn't what I need." I stated respectfully.
"Well, that's all we have." with a huff she exclaimed.
"Can the plumber make me up one?", I asked politely.
I received a snotty, "No." And he's not here anyway. Go to the local hardware store", she sneered.
I muttered under my breath that was the fucking reason I was here because the hardware store didn't have what I needed. It's OK they didn't have the part, but I'm not sorry for getting her off her fat ass to assist me.
I know the plumber; next time I see him I'm going to mention my experience with "Jane". I've spent a shit ton of money with his firm starting in 2018 when we put up our new house.
So you're saying no big deal Mis. Hum. This now brings me to my next wondrous retail experience.
Wednesday the Fabulous Mrs. Mis. Hum and I went on our every other week date of grocery shopping. It was so pleasant I sent the following to the Supermarket HQ:
Dear (Grocery Store name withheld):
If your company were ever to produce a film entitled "This Is Not How To Provide Customer Service" our experience at your (Location withheld for Rant) store would have been a feature film.
First of all we arrived to find our future check out clerk "Jane" brushing her hair while standing behind her cash register. That was not very appealing to say the least. It is also quite unprofessional. Subsequently, my wife and I proceeded to fill our grocery cart with approximately $225 worth of food. I think we spend approximately $6,000 a year at your store.
We probably should have gone to a different line, but the line we chose was the shortest one. Guess who was working there? If you said "Jane", you are correct. When we arrived at the check-out lane which "Jane" was working at she was waiting on another customer. Her conversation with the customer in front of us was quite audible. She was loud enough that we heard her say, "I miss working at Walmart." Oh boy I thought, nothing like a disgruntled employee. I'm not sure what ever happened to satisfactory customer service and just keeping your mouth shut if you don't have anything positive to say.
The proverbial frosting on the cake was when she threw our two boxes of cereal, two loaves of bread and a bag of Baked Lays. Cereal and chips break enough during regular shipping and handling without help from the check out employee. Even the bagger said something to her about the bread toss. My wife was not happy and told her she would appreciate it if she wouldn't throw our food. Your employee's response: "It's been a busy day, I was in a hurry." No apology. And I'm sure if there would have been one it would have been half-hearted with excuses as to her behavior.
If this was my first experience at your store, I doubt if I would ever return. When we travel about the same to get to (Competitor Store A) or (Competitor Store B) or Your Store it makes one think about checking out the competition. As it is, we will stand in line somewhere else rather than be waited on by this employee.
I will provide you the following information so you know I'm not making up some story. Our receipt states the following:
(Deleted for rant)
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Mis. Hum.
Address
Phone Number
Email Address
Over 24 hours have passed since I emailed this. Have I been contacted? ***SNORT*** This retail chain is now part of the Rant on the world wide web. So the answer is no.
And no, don't ask me how my switch from one cellular provider to another went Thursday. Judas Friggin' Priest.
Is it too much to expect to be treated competently, respectfully and courteously? I'm afraid it is. If we can't or don't expect the people we deal with on a regular basis to have any of these qualities, how can we expect the elected officials in our state houses and Washington, D.C. to be any better? We don't and we continue our slide away from American Exceptionalism.
Good morning kids. Friday and the weekend is here. Well the IDF has launched its ground offensive into Gaza in order to wipe out the terrorists and their rocket launch sites. That's all well and good, and of course necessary. But I don't think it's really going to solve the problem at its root level, which is the toxic combination of inbred Jew-hatred and Iran. Put that aside for a moment. In similar situations over the past 20 or more years, Israel has been schizophrenic in its response to these kind of challenges. Lest we forget, Gaza not that long ago was actually Israeli territory which none other than Ariel Sharon, an ex-general and noted hard-liner, handed over in 2005 to the so-called "Palestinians" as part of, you guessed it, "the peace process." Look what it got him. Naturally, you cannot discount the international community's hatred for the Jewish state coupled now with our own junta's antipathy, and Israel has to defend itself with more than just one hand tied behind its back.
Fact: "Palestine" and "Palestinians" are a fictitious country and people cooked up by the KGB in the early 60s. The Jewish/Israeli connection to the Holy Land goes back thousands of years in recorded, documented actual history.
Reality: the world for the most part sees just the opposite. Lots of parallels between this situation and what we have here in the former United States vis a vis the rewriting of our own history by Marxists, but that's for another time, yet worthy of pondering.
I can't really comment on the mindset and machinations of Israel's leaders and its people. I can only comment as a more than casually interested observer. But from my perspective this cannot go on. For that all-too-brief four year period, President Trump understood with absolute clarity who were the good guys and who were the bad. The results spoke for itself in the Abraham Accords and with Iran on the ropes. As for Israel, short of Rachel Corrie-ing Gaza into the Mediterranean, this crap is going to happen again. More missiles, more terror tunnels and so on. Let's face it; if you step on a snake's tail, it's only going to turn around and bite you. You have to cut off its head. And that's Tehran.
Iran is gambling that with Trump gone and with Obama/Jarret/Soros/Ayers speaking through Biden like Pazuzu speaking through Linda Blair, and the Chi-Coms and Russians set to move into the Middle East without much opposition save for a bit of stray pea soup and a nod-and-a-wink protest, they can build A-bombs to their Turkish delight. They are also gambling that Trump was the glue that held the Abraham Accords together. Trump or no Trump, Iran's neighbors across the Gulf are bitter enemies, culturally and geo-politically. The last thing the Saudis and the Emiratis want is a nuked-up Iran. We'll see if Iran just bet the house and lost. That said, if Israel, the KSA and UAE struck Iran, things could get real interesting real fast.
It could be worse: he could be on the Supreme Court. But as attorney general, Merrick Garland can do as much damage or more to our fragile and besieged republic than he could if Barack Obama had succeeded in placing him on the high court. A revealing piece in Yahoo News by "journalist" Alexander Nazaryan Wednesday revealed not only Garland's frankly troubling agenda, but also how the establishment media runs interference and sells that program to a largely unsuspecting American public.
Garland, according to Nazaryan, "told Congress on Wednesday that violence incited by white supremacists poses 'the most dangerous threat to our democracy.' That assertion reflects near-universal consensus among national security experts, including those who worked for the Trump administration."
Yeah, just like those seventeen intelligence agencies that had come to a consensus that Russia had hacked the 2016 presidential election. In both cases, they had a consensus, they just didn't have any evidence...
...The realities bear restating: the January 6 Capitol riot was not an insurrection. The protesters were unarmed. There was no plan to overthrow the government, no ringleader, no actual incitement or call to violence from Trump. Nothing. And aside from that, they have to go back to Oklahoma City, Waco, and Ruby Ridge, all of which took place over two decades ago, which in itself demonstrates that they don't have any recent incidents of "white supremacist terrorism" to invoke. The Proud Boys are not white supremacists. They aren't terrorists, either; if they had been responsible for any actual terrorist act, you can be sure Alexander Nazaryan would have mentioned it.
Meanwhile, there has been the Boston Marathon jihad attack, and the Orlando and Fort Hood and San Bernardino jihad massacres, and numerous others that have gotten little or no media attention, and no demonstration of concern from Merrick Garland...
...This is deception and deflection at the highest level of government. The agenda of Garland and his colleagues is obvious and insidious: they're going to find those white supremacist terrorists, and they're going to prosecute and destroy them. If they don't find any white supremacists in sufficient numbers, they will claim that law-abiding conservatives are white supremacists, and defame and destroy them accordingly. Garland's spurious assessment of the domestic terror threat must be seen against the backdrop of the left's increasingly common habit of referring to virtually anyone who opposes the hard-left, socialist agenda of Biden's handlers and the establishment media as a white supremacist. This isn't just a smear. It's a smear with a definite purpose, and is heading us straight to the persecution of dissidents. That would be us.
Unlike the so-called mythical "Palestinians," white supremacists actually did exist at one time. They were known as the Armed Militant Wing of the Democrat Party, the Ku Klux Klan. That aside, as per my emphasis above, Spencer's warning is dead on. It's one thing to listen to Democrats spout the usual crap and political attacks on their opponents, but this guy's tone and temperament are chilling. He is a true believer. Even if he isn't, we are at a point where losing is no longer merely politics as usual. This is life and death. For us as individuals and for whatever the hell this nation is or will be going forward. All the marbles.
"You know what, girl? I am 80. I have lived a great life, and I am doing what the hell I please with who I want, and I really couldn't care less what anyone thinks. I don't owe anyone anything and I have nothing to prove. I am as free as I can be."
I almost wept when I read what that woman said. Sounds like what Ronald Reagan referred to when he warned us "one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."
"Jones isn't a martyr; she's a myth-peddler. She isn't a scientist; she's a fabulist. She's not a whistleblower; she's a good old-fashioned confidence trickster. And, like any confidence trickster, she understands her marks better than they understand themselves. On Twitter, on cable news, in Cosmopolitan magazine, and beyond, Jones knows exactly which buttons to push in order to rally the gullible and get out her message." (it's also knowing that her marks were in on the con - jjs) How a Fake Whistleblower Peddled Lies About Florida's Chinese COVID-19 Deaths
"[Netanyahu] promised that Israel would 'would extract a very heavy price from Hamas' in response to repeated rocket attacks that have killed at least seven Israelis." Israeli Ground Troops Attack Targets In Gaza
"In this perverse cosplay, Israel is the 'white' Derek Chauvin, Hamas is the 'brown' George Floyd, and the Left will not let facts or morality get in the way of the preferred narrative." Moral Clarity Versus Moral Depravity in Israel and Gaza
Robert Spencer: "It could be worse: he could be on the Supreme Court. But as attorney general, Merrick Garland can do as much damage or more to our fragile and besieged republic than he could if Barack Obama had succeeded in placing him on the high court." The Big Lie Again: Attorney General Garland Says White Supremacists Top Terror Threat
Julie Kelly: "The script about that day might have been concocted by Democrats and the media but the true account of what happened before, during, and after is still being written." House Republicans Defy the January 6 Narrative
"Military officers from two leading democracies were viciously attacked for warning their fellow countrymen about existential threats." Is Silence Falling in the Mineshaft?
OTHER DEMOCRAT-LEFTIST & RINO SCANDALS, CRIMES, CHUTZ-POCRISY, MESHUGAS
"Pete McCloskey, a former congressman who referenced the 'so-called Holocaust' in a keynote address that praised a top Holocaust-denial group, joined 'A Call for American Renewal' as a founding signatory. According to former congressman Denver Riggleman, the group aims to 'counter disinformation and conspiracy theories' and 'step up in this fight for truth and integrity.'" Holocaust-Denier Among Founders of "Principled" Never Trump Group
"Arizona State Senate President Karen Fann identified those three issues in her letter to Maricopa County Supervisors Board Chairman Jack Sellers as: (1) ongoing non-compliance with legislative subpoenas, deleted data bases (2) chain of custody and ballot organization anomalies, and (3) deleted data bases." (keep shrieking that Joey Bivalve won fair and square, Lefties - jjs) AZ State Senate President Asks Maricopa County to Address Deleted Data Bases, Chain of Custody, Non-Compliance with Subpoenas
"The case does not rely solely on the anecdotal evidence of ballot harvesting, dead citizens voting, or stuffed ballot boxes to seek to overturn an election. This case is different because it involves a solid, objective examination of whether the voting machines used in the election meet the required GA statutory standards. From what I have seen, the answer is -- they do not. If so, the election should be invalidated." (now do the presidential race - jjs) Could This Obscure Legal Case Change Control of the Senate?
"With over a year left before the Wyoming deadline to file to run in the August 2022 Republican primary against Cheney, reports show 'already at least six Republicans plan to run against her.'" Challengers Rush to Primary Lizard Cheney After House GOP Ouster
Baier: "My point is, you were GOP conference chair. And I'm just articulating what some of your colleagues have said. They thought that that was a moment where they thought that your focus on the former president was more important to you than articulating the GOP agenda and what they wished to do." Cubby Baier, Lizard Cheney Go At It Over Russian Bounty Story
"Its attempts to pathologize every instance of Republican opposition to the Democratic program say much about the Left's own anxieties." The Paranoid Style in Progressive Politics
"In truth, as with every third-party effort, there will be a lot of excitement and energy and brass bands, and glowing media coverage. But then comes the nitty-gritty of politics -- raising money, getting candidates on the ballot, and figuring out exactly what you stand for." Democrats Are Delusional if They Believe a Third Party Would Hurt the GOP More Than Them
"New information from Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times reporter, claims National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci personally signed off on funding for gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, which could have potentially sparked the start of the [Chinese] COVID pandemic." Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton Slams Dr. Fauci's "Ugly" Chinese COVID "Scandal" That Deserves "Skepticism"
"We're quite sure The Intercept knows exactly what happens to reporters who cover these protests and riots if antifa catches them. Andy Ngo moved out of the country for a variety of reasons, one of which was to get away from the people in Portland's antifa who threatened to kill him. He calls The Intercept report a 'hit list.'" (well, maybe it's time to form an Anti-Antifa and it can compile its own "list" - jjs) Lefty Rag Goes After Reporters Who Covered BLM/Antifa Riots for Committing Acts of Journalism. And For Another, More Dangerous Reason
"Silenced by media outlets and the tech tyrants, his email blasts -- one or two a day -- are not enough to counter the media's relentless dishonest narrative." Trump Needs to Do a Better Job of Un-Muzzling Himself
"In a video shared on Wednesday, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring urged citizens who believed they were being charged'"an exorbitant amount for gas' to contact his office's Consumer Protection Section." (talk about a red herring... - jjs) Virginia BP Gas Station Charges $6.99 per Gallon amid Fuel Shortage
"California led the nation in creating charter-school alternatives in 1992, but the union-controlled Legislature is killing off this alternative, which helps poor and minority students the most." Dems Continue Their War on Charter Schools
Our intrepid science reporter with a twofer for the weekend. First, he excitedly explains "This story is the most earth-shattering because of what it means in terms of commercial space in the next year." Roscosmos Announces Two Commercial Tourist Flights to ISS
Next up, "After a more than decade of delays and budget overruns -- raising this telescope's budget from 1/2 billion to $10 billion -- it appears that Webb's final schedule delay might occur not because of the telescope but because of the rocket." (what if Webb docked with Hubbell? - jjs) More Delays for Webb Telescope
FEMINAZISM, TRANSGENDER PSYCHOSIS, HOMOSEXUALIZATION, WAR ON MASCULINITY/NORMALCY
"Kamala's niece says LGBT rights advocates must condemn Israeli "oppression" in Palestinian territories, where it's against the law to be gay." Meena Harris Strikes Again
"The list of contraband symbolism, political views, and speech is sure to grow as the war on the specter of white supremacy escalates." It Won't Stop With Confederate Symbols
"Teigen made headlines this week when it was revealed that the model harassed, bullied, and allegedly sent private death threats to a then-16-year-old girl named Courtney Stodden." Target Has Dropped Chrissy Teigen Cookware Line
Katie Hopkins: "Two days of magical cheer in The Villages, Florida." Disneyland for the Old
NOTE: The opinions expressed in some links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue.
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Paying a ransom in response to ransomware does not guarantee a successful outcome, will not protect networks from future attacks, nor will it prevent the possibility of future data leaks. In fact, paying a ransom is likely to encourage criminality to continue to use this approach. Just shoot the fuckers. Oh dear, is the mic still hot?
This story broke a while ago, but this is the first I've heard of a data leak connected with the hack.
ZFS snapshots, people.
Anime of the day isn't an anime at all: Wakfu is a French cartoon animated in Adobe Flash to market an online game. The thing is, it's about seventeen thousand percent better than you'd expect from that description. This one just came out of nowhere.
Unlike their PCIe 3.0 models, though, they're not particularly budget friendly; they're priced just barely under competing models from Samsung and Western Digital.
That's over nine or ten years, though, so while the total is larger it's still around half the rate of TSMC. Though I'm not sure what's included and if the numbers are directly comparable.
Private blockchains are much faster and orders of magnitude cheaper than public, fully-distributed blockchains using proof-of-work algorithms - and don't hoover up all the world's video cards - but it's not clear exactly what they are for.
There are valid uses for a publicly readable cryptographically secure ledger, particularly one that can have hard-wired contracts. Just not as many as people first hoped.
The article mentions the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act, which would require by law that government departments do that which they are already required by law to do, i.e. come back with a warrant.
CXL is a new interface based on PCIe 5.0 - which is expected to show up this year - that will allow you to attach memory to the I/O bus as easily as video cards or SSDs. A PCIe 5.0 x16 slot actually has about the same unidirectional bandwidth as a DDR5-8400 slot, and PCIe is bidirectional.
This will allow servers to have memory bays the way they currently have drive bays, possibly even with the ability to swap modules live if the operating system can swap out the necessary pages.
That's a lot more reasonable but certainly not cheap.
Bucket of Crabs Anime Music Video of the Day
Song is Crabbuckit as covered by the Good Lovelies. Anime is Tamako Market, an original series by Kyoto Animation. Like all their work, the art and animation is first-rate; like all their original series, the story itself is sadly second-rate.
This gives an idea of KyoAni's work. Yes, all these shows look the same, but they were actually chosen for that reason. That's their house style, but not all their work is the same. Lucky Star and Dragon Maid are two that strike out on their own.
If This Is The ONT, It Must Be Frid...Wait, Thursday? I'm Confused
—WeirdDave
Good evening Horde. I leaving on vacation today, this will probably be posted from somewhere close to the Alabama/Mississippi border. Tomorrow you will be getting a guest ONT. Never fear, however, because I will be giving you your weekly dose of memes and merriment tonight instead of tomorrow! I think that calls for a celebration. How about cake? I'm not a huge cake fan, but this could get me to change my mind real quick.
Actually, I am a little bit worried. We're taking the RV to Georgia, where 50% of the stations are out of gas right now. Still, it's only 8% in Alabama, and we can fill up there and make it to where we're going and back on one tank. We should be OK. I hope.
I feel sorry for this guy. He obviously didn't know what to do, but she's not any help. (language warning)
Max Boot writes an article declaring "I am no longer a Republican" every month. Whenever he has a deadline coming up and nothing to write about. He's got a macro set up that writes 90% of the column; he just has to add the Leftwing Outrage of the Week in the introductory paragraph, and then hit "PRINT."
This franchise of endlessly threatening to leave and endlessly actually leaving has had more sequels that Friday the 13th.
JUST
GET
THE
FUCK
OUT
ALREADY.
Your threats are meaningless, and your declaration of defection is hereby...
ACCEPTED.
Now fuck off and do please die.
This woman's a good fighter. Squares up, doesn't get fazed by a sucker punch, advances relentlessly*, even delivers a front kick to a dude's chest.
* I'm not saying that always-advancing is some kind of rule in fighting. But I would say that untrained fighters do not advance this way (except when they duck down and try to tackle the opponent, you know, sloppy grappling as an instinctual default) and don't know what to do when someone keeps advancing up in their face throwing punches.
Quick Hits: Biden's Dying Brain Is Nearly Dead Edition
—Ace
I believe he's trying to say here -- of course reading a line someone else wrote for him, and which he has never seen before this press conference -- something about needing to be either "vaxxed or masked."
Laser-like focus on what's most important to the conservative movement from former Weekly Standard reporter and Bill Kristol flunkie John McCormack, now at the Severely Conservative National Review:
Kevin McCarthy said yesterday: "I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election." https://t.co/stlLIrNE2Y
It's like a new margarine called I Can't Believe It's Not MSNBC!
While actual conservatives (and non-deranged citizens) ask questions about covid's origins, the Biden-approved payoff of Russian hackers, increasing unemployment, surging inflation, and the gas shortage, NeverTrump corporate cvcks keep a laser-like focus on the only issue that matters: Whether or not some of their moles and saboteurs get to keep their phoney-baloney jobs.
I guess if I were a NeverTrumper, "do I get to keep my fake job in Conservative, Inc.?" would be a very personally-pressing question for me, too.
Here's more Very Important News from Weekly Standard's (weak) sister publication, the Washington Examiner, owned by the same billionaire cuck. Corrected: This is from the Washington Times, not the Washington Examiner.
How Google wizardry helped FBI track U.S. Capitol invader. How FBI's tech farm in Quantico helped ID face of another breacher.https://t.co/Ouj9rs2RzA
And these power-worshipping cucks claim that we're the ones with a hard-on for authoritarianism!
LOL, Ellen DeGeneres' show will be cancelled after boring the fuck out of housewives on thorazine for 19 years, because news broke about what a cunt she is.
Biden Continues Rollback Of Trump Policies Like Peace In The Middle East https://t.co/JhibImlyMm
Male to "female" transsexual Fallon Fox, who literally broke a woman's skull in an MMA fight -- I think before he was ID'd as a man -- brags about fracturing the skull of a "TERF."
Bragging about knocking out TERFS isn’t a the good look for trans women you think it is. pic.twitter.com/ekwo8KCeQz
— Arielle Scarcella (@ArielleScarcell) May 12, 2021
This woman got dogpiled by Very Mentally Healthy People for daring to say that women breastfeed and give birth:
Women have wombs. Women give birth. Women have periods. Women are mothers. Women give life.
We are not "cis-women." We are not "birthing units." We are WOMEN.
Can you name two (2) things this person can do which will have a more significant impact on his health than wearing a mask post-vaccination?
For extra credit: write a 500 word essay explaining how people with little control over their own lives (and emotions) have seized upon covid as a lab-made savior, as it has given them what they feel is the moral right to control other people, and the illusory feeling that they're taking control of their own lives by wearing a mouth-doily.
So now they're going to throw them out on their Marxist asses.
Obviously the useless GOP will not save us -- they're actively in league with the left -- so it is down to each of us at the most local of local levels to win this country back from the forces of darkness, chaos, violence, censorship and racism.
Biden, Who Ran Largely on Claims That Trump Was a Puppet of Putin Due to Not Opposing Russia Stridently Enough, Refuses to Comment on Whether He Told Pipeline Company to Pay Off Russian Hackers
—Ace
These hackers are possibly under the direct control of Putin, and, at the very least, are tolerated by Putin only so long as they attack targets Putin approves of.
This was essentially a Russian state-sponsored hacking/ransom attack.
Russian criminals, acting under orders of the Russian government or with that tacit permission of the Russian government -- and probably trained by Russia, too! -- shut down a major artery of fuel and demanded a five million dollar ransom.
Biden refused to say earlier if they should or should not pay the ransom, describing this Russian state sponsored or tolerated attack as a "private matter" between Colonial Pipeline and the state-empowered hackers of Russia.
Two nodes which really pushed the DNC message that "Trump is a pawn of Putin for not escalating into near-military conflict over 'election interference' by Russian-tolerated Internet trolls" are currently silent on the candidate they voted for, Joe Biden, calling a Russian attack on a US company in a critical infrastructure role a "private matter" and then refusing to comment on whether he advised the US party in this "private matter" to pay ransom to the Russian party.
Those nodes are, of course, the Democrat dark-money-funded sites, The Bulwark and The Dispatch. Suddenly it's not just acceptable but Wise and Patriotic to roll over for Russia!
The National Review, which was also happy to push this DNC/Clinton Campaign meme, is also strangely silent on Joe Biden's apparent "admiration for Putin's authoritarian tendencies" and cowing in the face of Russian aggression.
Also silent: Noted True Conservative and Russia Conspiracist AllahPundit.
You know what they say:
Leftists believe none of the things they claim to passionately believe in.
It's almost as if these vanguards of True Conservative Thought-Leadership participated in a DNC propaganda operation that they knew was a lie from the outset.
Related: Quin Hilyer is one of the NeverTrump maggots who pushed Democrat political op after Democrat political op to put Biden into office.
Now he says, Oh dear! Biden's a disaster! Who could have predicted this!?
As a friend says: "Biden Voters Posting Their L's Online."
When pressed by host Savannah Guthrie on whether she would run for president, Cheney said, "I'm gonna do everything that I can. Both to make sure that that never happens, but also to make sure that the Republican Party gets back to substance and policy."
"Right now, I am very focused on making sure that our party becomes again a party that stands for truth and stands for fundamental principles that are conservative and mostly stands for the Constitution," Cheney added when further pressed. "And I won't let a former president or anybody else unravel the democracy. Whatever it takes."
Gee I wonder if she's burning up the phone lines chatting with Bill Kristol and the Lincoln Project and their Democrat donors.
Cheney is in trouble, and she knows it. Thus, she's left grifting off anti-Republican partisans who are rushing to her aide when they would have called her a war criminal two years ago. Cheney isn't dumb. She knows she's got no shot as a presidential candidate, much less in a Republican primary. Heck, she's probably not even going to win re-election in Wyoming unless she shuts up and takes the spotlight off herself, something she seems loathe to do.
What Cheney does know is that by becoming a martyr, there's money and air time to be gained. Why else run to NBC News, a network that quite literally exists at this point to destroy the Republican Party? Why use The Washington Post to leak damaging information about her own caucus? Cheney knows what she's doing, and she's trying to set herself up for prominence once the electorate gets its say about her actions.
In other words, Cheney has shifted on a dime from a conservative, party leader to mimicking Adam Kinzinger, and I think that's clearly a function of her circumstance. Martyrdom brings back-slaps from the Washington cock-tail crowd and even perhaps a way for her to keep her Congressional seat if she can position herself as Lisa Murkowski did after she lost her primary.
What a surprise, this deranged alcoholic meltbrain is already shilling for a Liz Cheney 2024 spoiler candidacy, claiming, falsely, that it will pull more votes from the Democrat than from Trump, so what's the harm?
Oh, and goofing on Christians, too. What a True Conservative.
Ron DeathSantis: I'll Sign a Blanket Clemency For Anyone Being Charged with Mask-Crimes by Local Karen Governments
—Ace
Quick point, first of all: I'm going to join the leftist lunatics in calling him "DeathSantis" because I like to think of him as murdering them and killing their dreams.
Second point: Some might analogize the state government-local government relationship to the federal government-state government relationship, and think that there is some kind of "federalism" problem here, with the state overriding local government.
There's not. The Constitution creates a federal scheme in which the federal government has some powers, and the rest belong to the states.
There is no such competition of sovereigns between state government and local government. All powers that a state has are entrusted to the state government. The only reason local governments have power is because the state government has voluntarily devolved some of it power to them.
And it could take that away if it wanted.
DeathSantis says he will use his own power to simply grant pardons to anyone being hassled over mask mandates and other lockdown violations, because fuck those Karens.
Florida business owners Mike and Jillian Carnevale joined "The Ingraham Angle" Wednesday after being arrested multiple times for not enforcing a mask mandate. Gov. Ron DeSantis also joined the show to grant the couple clemency.
RON DESANTIS: It's a total overreach, Laura. This is exactly what we ordered against last summer many, many months ago, and so I was actually just recently briefed on this case, and we looked at it and so I'm glad you have Mike and Jillian on, and I'm also glad to be on to be able to say that effective tomorrow morning, I'm going to sign a reprieve under my constitutional authority. So that will delay the case for 60 days against both of them, and then when our clemency board meets in the coming weeks, we'll issue pardons not only for Mike and Jillian, but for any Floridian that may have outstanding infractions for things like masks and social distancing.
...
The fact is it's not even right to be wearing masks when you're exercising. The World Health Organization advises against it. It's not healthy for people to be doing that in the first place, so it was a bad restriction, but these things with health should be advisory, they should not be punitive, and so we are happy to use our constitutional authority. I think they've been treated poorly and fortunately, they got a governor that cares.
Good roadmap by Scott Hounsell for the eventual charging documents a Republican AG will put together for Fauci's prosecution.
He analyzes several of Fauci's lies. Here's the rundown on just one:
Claim: Dr. Baric does not do gain-of-function research, but if he does, it's in North Carolina, not in China.
Note that Fauci denied that adding the function of capacity to infect humans was not "gain-of-function" research, which is almost certainly a lie based on technical definitions and common sense.
Though he might have added, with his own hand, some special exemption claiming that giving a virus the capacity to infect humans was not gain-of-function, to avoid a government moratorium on this research.
Remember, he himself authorized the "exemption loophole" that allowed taxpayer money to fund the Wuhan lab from 2014 to 2019, after Obama banned the use of taxpayer money to fund this kind of research generally. Fauci authorized a "national security" exemption to keep the money flowing to Wuhan.
Who knows what else he might have claimed in that exemption-- perhaps, redefining what "gain-of-function" is.
It's indisputable that Dr. Baric does gain-of-function research, and that the NIH has paid him to perform such research. In 2004 Dr. Baric began work on a five-year NIH grant researching SARS reverse genetics. The research specifically states that "the goal of this application is to establish genetic control over the SARS genome and provide uniform reagents that will be used by other groups throughout the country." While not specifically gain-of-function, it certainly discusses genetic control of a viral pathogen.
In 2013 NIH awarded Dr. Baric a $10 million grant to study "the pathogenic activity of viruses including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Ebola, highly pathogenic influenza and herpesvirus HHV8." Dr. Baric put that money to work and in 2015, it was announced that his research had led to the development of "SARS 2.0."
Since Dr. Baric is affiliated with UNC-Chapel Hill, yes, his research is done in North Carolina. However, as Sen. Paul asserted, Baric has partnered with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, that's in China) to conduct NIH-funded gain-of-function research on SARS and MERS viruses.
In June 2015 Baric and Shi published results of NIH-funded research into the mutations necessary for the bat-to-human transmission of MERS coronavirus. They found that when viral protein spikes mutated, humans could become infected with MERS-CoV. In other words, this is the exact research that would be necessary for a lab to synthesize a virus that would infect humans.
A few months later, in November 2015, the duo published the results of separate NIH-funded research which led to the discovery of a new SARS coronavirus, a chimera, they used gain-of-function techniques to create. That research was allowed to go forward even though the US government had issued a moratorium on gain-of-function research on the viruses that cause influenza, SARS, and MERS in October 2014. According to a VICE article on the research (emphasis added):
"The strain grew equally well to SARS in human cells," Dr. Ralph Baric, a professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the lead author of the study, told Motherboard. "It resisted all vaccines and immunotherapy, too."
According to Baric, the risk of "gain-of-function" research is worth it. The findings could provide a way to create vaccines and immunotherapy treatments before the next epidemic strikes. Because we have identified both SARS and SHC014-CoV, it's now possible to develop vaccines that could target those viruses and the viruses that share commonalities between them. In other words, the new findings may help develop vaccines for many more strains of infectious diseases even though we haven't identified them yet.
It seems that everyone in the industry calls this type of research "gain-of-function," except Fauci, who specifically denies it's gain-of-function when giving Congressional testimony.
But Fauci lies a lot. Remember when masks provided no benefit to people? Remember he then admitted he lied about that so that grubby civilians wouldn't buy up masks?
It's startling that with the amount of easily obtainable evidence to the contrary, Dr. Fauci sat there with a straight face and claimed that Baric doesn't do gain-of-function research, or that if he did it's not done in China. Furthermore, to accept Fauci's statements would be accepting that Baric, who is indisputably conducting NIH-funded gain-of-function research, did not share any of that research with or fund any research of, Zhengli or the WIV, despite the fact that we know they conducted a great deal of this research together. At the very minimum, NIH Funded research was shared with and enhanced the abilities of Zhengli and the WIV.
Another lie, of course, is Fauch's very Clintonesque "It depends on what the definition of 'is' is" lie, when he answered a question about whether he had ever funded the Wuhan lab to say he's not currently funding this lab.
Of course he was funding it, via an exemption loophole he wrote himself -- until Trump ordered that stopped in April 2020.
Incredible. Incredible.
On the plus side, this perjurious criminal scumbag has now decreed that you may take off your mask outside if you're vaccinated.
The Wuhan Flu hysteria gave those who seek power over us a golden opportunity to exercise it, consolidate, grow it...but to what end?
As usual, George Orwell had the answer:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.
Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
It is abundantly clear that those who seek to control every part of our world have no altruistic motives; no vision of a better world; no template for the perfectibility of man. They get what they want -- power over us -- and that is the goal.
But what have we lost? What is the opportunity cost of shutting down an economy; killing many thousands of the vulnerable aged; isolating our children from their friends; wearing masks everywhere in public, and a thousand other degradations of our lives?
The insult to our freedom and liberty is self evident, but there are other losses. We will have a generation of children who have lost more than a year of their intellectual and social development. Just imagine a toddler and his boundless curiosity...absorbing everything available...but not being able to play with his friends at recess and being unable to watch people as they speak, and having an imaginary wall placed between him and human contact. That will retard his ability to communicate, and color his interactions with the world. Is it temporary? Who knows?
And that same toddler and his older siblings missed out on the simple but wonderful pleasures of sitting next to their grandparents and sharing a bit of candy and silly faces and napping on the couch.
But what about those kids' parents? Perhaps a year of income lost, never to be regained. That means a decrease in their standard of living, and economic opportunities that can never be recovered. Extrapolate that a bit and you will discover inventions that were never tested by the market, businesses that were never begun, and businesses that failed that could have been wildly successful.
That means cars never purchased and houses never built and families never started and charities never funded and friends never made and the loss of all those interactions that are the backbone of economies and societies.
But the real answer is that we will never know what has been lost; all we know is that we have lost more than a year of our lives; sacrificed on the altar of power.
At least 73 people are reported dead and thousands more are injured following a massive explosion Tuesday that rocked Beirut's port.
The blasts sent a mushroom cloud high into the sky above the Lebanese capital, leveling much of the city's port area, damaging some buildings and blowing out windows in others, officials said.
Preliminary assessments suggest the explosion was a tragic accident -- but authorities have not ruled out the possibility that it was a planned attack, according to Fox News.
The explosions come just days before a United Nations verdict is due on four alleged Hezbollah members accused of killing former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005, Fox News reported.
The blasts also took place in the port area, which is controlled by the Shia Islamic movement, the outlet said.
The explosion that devastated large parts of Beirut and killed more than 190 people was one of the largest non-nuclear blasts in history -- about 1/20th the size of the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima in World Word II, according to a report.
Experts at the UK's Sheffield University found that the size of the blast at the port -- which unleashed a huge shockwave throughout the Lebanese capital -- was the equivalent of between 500 and 1,100 tons of TNT, the BBC reported.
"Beirut's certainly the most powerful non-nuclear explosion of the 21st century," said Sam Rigby of Sheffield's Blast and Impact Engineering Research Group...
No doubt the subhuman savages of Hezbollah would have not taken kindly had the UN officially implicated them in Hariri's death. But an explosion of this magnitude could not have been related to that. Lebanon, which is essentially Gaza with marginally better PR, is for all intents and purposes the front line border between Iran and Israel, with the former using those puppet states as fire bases from which to attack the latter. It is more than likely that the rockets now raining down on Israel were either manufactured in Iran or, given Israel's successful efforts at interdicting arms shipments via the sea, manufactured in Gaza or Lebanon. I think Lebanon has or had factories that would have used the materials that leveled Beirut's harbor last August to build rockets that would have rained down on Israel from the north.
By the way, a Hamas leader himself stated unequivocally he bought the weapons from Iran with Iranian money. And Iranian money ultimately means American money... from pallets of cash. Thanks, Obama!!!
Not that Israel is so big that a barrage from Gaza cannot reach virtually everywhere. But double the missiles from two directions might very well have overwhelmed Israel's so far successful Iron Dome missile defenses with catastrophic results. Hamas is acting at the behest of Iran. This is an attack by Iran on Israel. They are testing them and really the Biden junta to see what its response will be. Finally after a two-day lid, Biden was given his monkey glands and crystal meth cocktail to call for "restraint on both sides," i.e. blame the damned Jooz for not agreeing to shut up and get in the gas chamber.
New York City mayoral candidate and former Democrat presidential candidate Andrew Yang backtracked Wednesday after he tweeted earlier in the week to support Israel as it continues to be bombarded by rockets fired by Palestinian terrorists... .
..But "progressive" Democrats attacked Yang, calling him. "white supremacist" and urging New Yorkers to oppose him. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) even encouraged Muslims not to host him at communal religious celebrations.
On Wednesday, in the face of criticism from anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian activists in his own party, Yang backed down... ..."Support of a people does not make one blind to the pain and suffering of others," Yang wrote. "Again, most everyone simply wants to be able to live and pray in peace."
Well, that was quick. I've seen more backbone from an overcooked lo mein noodle. Seriously, can Andrew Yang or any Democrat for that matter be so completely clueless as to not know that their party long ago ditched Bobby Kennedy in favor of Sirhan-Sirhan?! Yang is not even old enough to remember a time when the Democrat Party was ostensibly pro-Israel in order to maintain its Jewish voting bloc. In fact, hatred of Israel and by extension observant Jews in general is stock in trade of much of the braindead younger generation and sadly far too many elders that ought to know better and abandoned their faith for the church of Marxist-Leninism. Clueless and spineless is no way to go through life, Andrew. But it does help in trying to climb the ranks of the Democrats. So, Yang goes "Kohm."
World's going to hell and I do Trek references. Look if you don't laugh, you cry, right? Anyway, even as nuclear war could break out in the Middle East and the Kalorama Caliphs pulling President Joe Aqualung's strings are hell bent on destroying our economy, there are little rays of hope out there. Such as the parent in Loudon County who just went off on the school board for Critical Master-Race Theory and the growing rejection of the lockdown garbage in Tennessee (as cited) and elsewhere. The open letter from retired military brass while pitch perfect is way too little and way too late. Nice to dream that they have several divisions behind them, but considering what's been done to the DoD, I'm not going to count on that.
"Hamas knew that we would always support Israel's right to defend itself and that no amount of globalist silly leftist pressure would cause us to join in the Palestinian Authority's support of terror. And we certainly weren't going to have U.S. taxpayers underwrite PA leaders who refused to oppose the use of violence," [former Sec. State Mike] Pompeo said. "Now, attacks may be rewarded by the United States blaming Israel. In short, deterrence and supporting your allies work to keep peace." Biden Breaks Silence and Wind, But Mostly Wind, as Hamas Terror Missiles Blast Israel
"In Lod, a city with Jewish and Israeli Arab communities near Ben Gurion airport, an Arab man and his daughter were killed when a rocket fired from Gaza struck their home, also destroying their car parked outside. 'Hamas missiles do not differentiate between Jews and Arabs,' the mayor of Lod, Yair Revivo, was quoted as saying." As Death Toll Rises, Ayatollah Urges So-Called "Palestinians" to "Increase Their Power and Resistance"
"The pretext for Hamas' attacks... are ginned-up concerns about mosques on the Temple Mount and a complex East Jerusalem property dispute. But the real reason is that Hamas and its allies are testing President Joe Biden, to see what Israeli concessions or Washington payoffs might be achievable now that Donald Trump is out of office." Biden is Signaling That War Crimes Against Israel Will Be Rewarded
CIVIL WAR 2.0: LEFTIST PERSECUTIONS, CAPITOL HILL BLACK WEDNESDAY PROTEST AFTERMATH, DEMOCRAT PUTSCH, AMERICAN DISSOLUTION
"Dr. Kara Hunt, the Director of Education and Outreach for the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights, compared police officers and the institution of policing to Nazis and Nazi Germany on two separate occasions during an April 1 racial equity training she conducted for the Montgomery County Parks Department." (Hunt, rhymes with... - jjs) Director Of Civil Rights Commission Under Investigation For Making Nazi Analogy In Policing Discussion
"When Antifa and BLM torch, loot, and murder, it's only the latest reflection of a deep-seated leftist dogma going back at least a century." The Left's Long Love Affair with Criminals
"'Our Nation is in deep peril. We are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776. The conflict is between supporters of Socialism and Marxism vs. supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty,' the letter opens." (unless they can seize control of our armed forces and really march on DC to oust this illegal junta, this is useless verbiage - jjs)
Victor Davis Hanson: "When an arrogant present dismisses the wisdom of the past, then an all too predictable future becomes terrifying." Biden Mocks Ancient Wisdom
"Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats have essentially endorsed Liz Cheney because they think they can use her to distract from disastrous unemployment numbers and spiking inflation." Democrats Fundraise Off of Lizard Cheney's Ouster
"Now, with pressure to relax governments' clenched fists rising, how eager have those in control been to comply? Eagerness is frequently an antonym, rather than a descriptor, for what we have seen displayed." Long Past Time To Open Government's Clenched Fist
"If every cloud has a silver lining, [Chinese] COVID's silver, from which we should try to benefit, has shone the light on the shallowness and fragility or our common sense." Chinese COVID and the Loss of Common Sense
Last week, agents arrested a man who had been convicted of sex crimes in New York. "Taking him to a nearby Border Patrol station for processing, record checks revealed that the Mexican national had been previously convicted of Sexual Abuse in the 1st Degree by Forcible Compulsion," Customs and Border Protection (CBP) notes. "The man also was a registered sex offender in New York State," the agency added. "Alarming Uptrend": Border Patrol Continues Intercepting Felons, Sex Offenders at US Border
FIRST AMENDMENT ISSUES, CENSORSHIP, FAKE NEWS, MEDIA, BIG BROTHER TECH
"The New York Times shared a tweet Tuesday stating that there has been no rise in gas cost, shortages, or lines since the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack." New York Times Finds New Digs Living Under a Rock
"It gave me an eerie feeling to see my efforts and writings being disappeared in this way from one day to another by Google." Getting Disappeared by Google
"When Gordana Schifanelli, a mother in a Maryland school district who is also an immigrant from communist Yugoslavia, created webpages criticizing the pro-Black Lives Matter indoctrination being introduced in the schools by school superintendent Andrea M. Kane, both Facebook and Instagram moved quickly to censor her, while others attempted to destroy her career. She put together a slate of school board candidates running as write-ins, won, and is moving now to replace that superintendent." Today's Blacklisted American: Mom Criticizes School Board, Gets Blacklisted by Facebook and Instagram, Fights Back and Wins
"Among China's many sins, one of the worst is its massive fishing abuses, which are stripping the oceans and leaving people to starve." China and Overfishing
DOMESTIC AFFAIRS, THE BUREAUCRACY, WASTE, FRAUD, ABUSE
"[So-called quote-unquote 'president'] Joe Biden's cabinet officials hesitated when asked when the shortage would end, punting timeline questions to Colonial, the private company in charge of the pipeline." Day Five: Team Biden Can't Say When Gasoline Crisis Will End
"The incentives bureaucrats face may cause them to act in a way that is rational for themselves and their bureaucracies, but is not optimal from a social perspective." If You Want Something, Don't Ask a Bureaucracy to Do It
"The U.S. federal budget deficit rose to a record $1.9 trillion in the first seven months of the fiscal year, the Treasury Department said Wednesday." Budget Deficit Rises to Record High
"If Biden sees his six trillion, you're going to see fuel added to the fire," Olsen warned. "If he is talking about increasing government spending by $600 billion a year for as far as the eye can see, that will add to the inflationary pressures already existing." Here's How Biden's Spending Could Become a Hidden Tax on Everything You Purchase
"ABC 7 notes Muhammad was arrested seven times between 2007 and 2015, and arrested again in 2018 and 2020. The arrests rested on various charges, including harassment and assault." (whatever you do, don't mention Islam - jjs) Farrakhan Muhammad ID'd, Arrested in Connection with Times Square Shooting
"Despite the reopening happy talk, more than half of all California's K-12 students remain in distance learning." Science With the Union Label
"This observation about white people is not only stupid, it's racist. It's stupid because it suggests that parents teach their children how to walk on the sidewalk -- a ludicrous idea born in paranoia and uttered by a blithering idiot. Allen's observations about how white people walk on the sidewalk are equally loony. And this guy edits one of the most respected student newspapers in the country?" Who Knew? The Way You Walk on the Sidewalk Is Racist, Says Black Student Newspaper Editor
"'About everything we do around here is government intrusion in people's lives,' said [former Obama Transport Sec Ray] LaHood. A decade later, according to the Census Bureau report, most Americans were still driving their cars to work. There is one word that explains why they insist on doing so: freedom. They Failed To Coerce Americans out of Their Cars
ACTUAL SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY
Some big news from our intrepid science reporter: "The solution should be obvious to all. Private launch companies that wish to use ISS have to launch either their own docking ports, or their own modules with docking ports. This is Axiom's plan, with its own module scheduled to arrive sometime in '24. A secondary solution would be for private companies to launch their own space stations, independent of ISS. This would not only sidestep the problem of the bottleneck at ISS, it would free such a company from the charges NASA imposes for using ISS." NASA: Commercial Demand Exceeds Supply at ISS
FEMINAZISM, TRANSGENDER PSYCHOSIS, HOMOSEXUALIZATION, WAR ON MASCULINITY/NORMALCY
"For New York City's public officials and educators, changing the names of school holidays is about as far as reform can go." Cancel the Columbus, Keep the Dysfunction
"As long as white guilt is in steady supply and black slavery is allowed to swallow up America's otherwise rich and proud history, power politics will be the dominant form of American black identity." What Needs "Repairing" Isn't America, But White Guilt
NOTE: The opinions expressed in some links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue.
ALSO: The Morning Report is cross-posted at CutJibNewsletter.com if you want to continue the conversation all day.
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Xiaomi makes - as far as I know - only consumer products, which puts them in a very different class from Huawei which makes communications infrastructure as well as cheap (and not so cheap) phones.
I'd advocate for every country in the world to ban all social media, frankly. Automatically ban any platform with more than, say, a million users.
Anime of the day is Gunsmith Cats from 1995. We only ever got three episodes of this, which is a crying shame because those three episodes were really good, and there's a ton of source material - the original manga ran to about 1500 pages.
Though at 169 grams it's just 3 grams lighter than my Oppo A91, which has a 6.4" screen. In fact, apart from the much newer CPU - an Arm X1 instead of the A73 in the Oppo - it's much the same hardware for three times the price. 2400x1080 AMOLED screen with an in-display fingerprint sensor and all.
Speaking of the Oppo A91, it works pretty well. It's smaller than I expected for that screen size, and while certainly not up with the latest flagship models is quite zippy except when you're installing 150 apps all at once.
If you want a huge 4K monitor for work and a 144Hz Freesync gaming monitor and an HDR10 QLED TV with 97% DCI-P3 colour and 1000 nits max brightness that won't spy on you because it can't, all in one unit - and are prepared to spend something like a thousand bucks - this could be it.
They swap positions in the benchmark results because the Xeon supports AVX512 - that is, it can do 16 32-bit calculations per cycle - while the current generation Epyc parts can only do 8. So it depends on the specific benchmark whether the extra cores outweigh the better floating point performance per core.
If you're mostly focused on integer workloads (which includes jobs like websites and databases) then the extra cores will win every time, but in that case the storage subsystem, memory, and networking also play a huge role so it's much harder to create a specific benchmark suite.
Apple made the mistake of hiring someone who speaks the truth:
Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they'd become precisely the sort of useless baggage you'd trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.
Replace "women" with "people" and it's still true. Replace "the Bay Area" with "any large city" and it's still true.
Persimmon Anime Music Video of the Day
I was looking for this one specifically, and couldn't remember what it was called, or what the song was called. The song is called Everything Now which is pretty logical, but the video is called Persimmon and the only multisyllabic fruit starting with P my tired brain could offer up was pomegranate.
I did find it after a little searching though. The anime is Ano Natsu de Matteru from 2012, which is a sort-of-sequel / sort-of-retelling of Onegai Teacher from 2002, and the song is by Arcade Fire. It's quite good, and I'd actually recommend it over the original.
This AMV absolutely nails the feel of the show in just a few minutes.
Disclaimer: As to when the series is set, it's recent enough that 8mm movie cameras are considered archaic, but not so recent that video cameras are considered archaic. Once again, before everything went to hell.
"Between this Emergency Connectivity Fund Program and the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program, we are investing more than $10 billion in American students and households," Jessica Rosenworcel, acting chairwoman of the FCC
Quote II
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't. Erica Jong
Quote III
“We remain an independent organization that can chart its own course, even as we remain in New York to confront our adversaries. The NRA will keep fighting, as we’ve done for over 150 years.” NRA President Wayne LaPierre
Quote IV
More and more, it looks like this doddering fool will probably get us into a war and then never get out of his official presidential seal pajamas to see how it’s going. Stephen Kruiser
A gay Iranian man has been reportedly beheaded by his brother and two cousins after they discovered he had been exempted from military service due to his sexuality.
Alireza Fazeli Monfared, 20, was allegedly taken by the three male members of his family to the village of Borumi, western Iran, and murdered.
Afterwards, the three killers allegedly called Alireza's mother to tell them they had 'finished him off'.
The Cicadas Are Coming. Let’s Eat Them!
Why not embrace Brood X as the free-range, sustainable source of protein that it truly is?
FOR 17 YEARS, the trillions of cicadas known as Brood X have tunneled through dark soil, feeding on sap as they slowly matured. Babies during the George W. Bush years, these long-gestating underground bugs are starting to hatch across the eastern United States, emerging from the earth in astounding numbers. Their time above ground is short: three to six weeks, just long enough to mate and die. As a biological phenomenon, gigantic cicada broods are hard to ignore. They’re like crickets with musical-theater degrees—dramatic, loud, committed to a splashy outfit change. And while some people will delight in their natural spectacle, others will just want to be rid of them. There is, however, another reaction: Grab a fork and knife.
So I wonder if the author, Kate Knibbs, enjoys dining on road kill?
Blown Away
The Biden administration just granted final approval for “Vineyard Wind,” a huge offshore wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts.
The wind farm, which would be the first large-scale facility of its type in the United States, will eventually include 84 turbines about 15 miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, according to The New York Times. Once it’s ready, officials expect the farm to produce 800 megawatts of clean energy, making it an important first step toward the Biden Administration’s climate and energy goals.
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I'll be honest, yes, sometimes I give you filler material. This is one of those...............
This year, we also recognize that in many of our communities, especially Black and brown communities, there is a deep sense of distrust towards law enforcement; a distrust that has been exacerbated by the recent deaths of several Black and brown people at the hands of law enforcement. These deaths have resulted in a profound fear, trauma, pain, and exhaustion for many Black and brown Americans, and the resulting breakdown in trust between law enforcement and the communities they have sworn to protect and serve ultimately makes officers’ jobs harder and more dangerous as well.
In order to rebuild that trust, our State, local, and Federal Government and law enforcement agencies must protect constitutional rights, ensure accountability for misconduct, and embrace policing that reflects community values and ensures community safety. These approaches benefit those who wear the badge and those who count on their protection.
Let’s be clear: Biden’s statement is a slap in the face to every cop in America.
Jeez Joe, why don't you tell these communities to take responsibility like law enforcement? Oh yeah, you need Balkanized factions to keep the Democratic Party afloat. If you really cared about these communities the first thing you would do is flood those areas with school vouchers and let parents get their kids out of Unionista hell holes public schools.
Enough rant.......
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The ONT Musical Interlude
On this day: 2 May 1981
Meat Loaf filed for bankruptcy with debts of over $1 million. The singer stated; "I made almost nothing. That’s how it was back then. The record company said Bat Out Of Hell never made a profit." via thisdayinmusic.com
&&&
Born on this day: 2 May 1948
English musician Steve Winwood, who with the Spencer Davis Group had the 1966 UK No.1 single 'Keep On Running', with Traffic the 1967 UK No.2 single 'Hole In My Shoe', Blind Faith, (with Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Ric Grech), 1969 UK & US No.1 album. Winwood played Hammond organ on the Jimi Hendrix Electric Ladyland album track 'Voodoo Chile'. He also had a successful solo career with hits including 'While You See a Chance', 'Valerie', 'Back in the High Life Again' and during the late 80s two US No.1 hits 'Higher Love' and 'Roll with It'. via thisdayinmusic.com
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. - A Florida woman who was supposed to be a designated driver during a night out became intoxicated and hit three parked cars over the weekend after leaving a bar, authorities said.
Melanie Esclera, 40, had a blood alcohol content twice the legal limit when she was tested by police following the string of crashes just before 1 a.m. Sunday in Port St. Lucie.
When officers arrived at the scene, the engine compartment of her 2010 sedan caught fire.
Officers extinguished the blaze
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Tonight's Feel Good Story of The Day.
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Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by Exhilaration.
Notice: Posted with permission by the Ace Media Empire and AceCorp, LLC. ONT tips, loose change, drink tokens and burner phones to petmorons at gmail dot com.
You mean dropping in trillions upon trillions of phantom dollars into the economy while paying people to not produce services and goods will cause prices to rise?
Inflation is soaring in the United States and at a higher rate than analysts predicted. In April 2021, the consumer price index saw a 4.3 percent jump, the fastest increase since 2008.
"Inflation accelerated at its fastest pace in more than 12 years for April as the U.S. economic recovery kicked into gear and energy prices jumped higher, the Labor Department reported Wednesday. The Consumer Price Index, which measures a basket of goods as well as energy and housing costs, rose 4.2% from a year ago, compared to the Dow Jones estimate for a 3.6% increase. The monthly gain was 0.8%, against the expected 0.2%," CNBC reports. "Excluding volatile food and energy prices, the core CPI increased 3% from the same period in 2020 and 0.9% on a monthly basis. The respective estimates were 2.3% and 0.3%."
I saw a joke headline somewhere that read, "Biden to Spend Two Trillion Dollars to Discover What Causes Inflation."
It's funny. It's funny and it's true.
Look at this gorgeously Weimarian, Venezualianish spike in prices:
Quick Hits: Steven Colbert Rises to Oliver-Willis-Levels of Comedic Brilliance Edition
—Ace
De-center cisgenderism!
Caitlyn Jenner, ne' Bruce, admits that he did vote in the 2020 election, after initially dodging the question of whether he voted for Trump -- apparently dishonestly -- by claiming he didn't vote at all and golfed instead. He now says he voted in purely local races.
That doesn't square with the "I golfed instead of voting" cover story.
David Frum, who brought so much peace to the Middle East that you can't believe it, is slamming Trump's failure to stop Hamas from bombing Israel.
Wait, does he think Trump is still president?
I mean, Trump is still president, but does David Frum believe "the Big Lie" that he remains president? Because he seems to be ascribing Biden's failure to Trump.
I mean, I remember it being just a little bit more successful than yours. https://t.co/l9Bu7AmsOG
I don't know @davidfrum maybe the Abraham Accords should be looked at as a model to build off of as opposed to spiking the football on dead Israelis but what do I know.
Siri, show me why the powers-that-be in D.C. don’t seem to care at all about how a cyberterrorist attack is making it impossible for Americans in flyover country to find gas so they can drive to work and get groceries.
Under network president Jeff Zucker, CNN’s once studiously neutral team now call out politicians, share their feelings and occasionally cry on air. It doesn’t seem to hurt ratings. https://t.co/RCTBBnyxV3
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 12, 2021
— CNN Posting Their L's Online (@CNNPostingLs) May 12, 2021
Did I end this semester with a 4.0? No. Did I have a good experience with virtual classes? No. But, did I learn a lot and become stronger because of it? Also no
The Washington Examiner -- owned by the same liberal corporatist billionaire that allowed/encouraged The Weekly Standard to take a hard left/neoliberal turn -- continues, well, churning out Weekly Standard neoliberalism.
More than seven months after the official launch of the Army Combat Fitness Test, or ACFT, nearly half of female soldiers are still falling short, with enlisted women struggling the most, Military.com has learned. The data again raises questions about whether the Army's attempt to create a fitter force is creating more barriers to success for women.
Internal Army figures from April show 44% of women failed the ACFT, compared to 7% of men since Oct. 1. "Female soldiers continue to lag male soldier scores in all events," according to a United States Army Forces Command briefing obtained by Military.com.
In the below ad to recruit more women into the Army, the Army makes it a primary selling point that the Army welcomes lesbians into its ranks.
Psst, Army: I think the word's already out on that one. I don't think you have to spend money to let lesbians know that.
Maybe you should also make ads letting lesbians know that the WNBA welcomes them, too!
First it was the woke CIA ad, now it is a super-woke woke animated army recruitment ad featuring a lesbian wedding, an LGBT rights parade and women "shattering stereotypes" by joining the world's largest killing machine. pic.twitter.com/xDqP39EQei
This woke bullshit isn't even appealing to the left, as it's designed to do.
Lefties are ridiculing the CIA and Army for promising that when they drop bombs on brown people, at least it will be "diverse" people dropping the bombs.
But I do think that this is about flooding these agencies with leftwingers, to make sure that we do to the CIA and Army what the left has already done to academia and corporate boardrooms -- overtake it so thoroughly that there is no chance of any conservative-leaning person ever advancing in those organizations.
And they'll succeed with the Army, just as they already succeeded with the CIA, the DOJ, and the FBI.
And Republican politicians will continue cheering these institutions.
The only people who aren't aware of this are NeverTrumpers. Even leftwingers know the media has been fully institutionally captured by the left.
It's only NeverTrumpers who credulously believe every single anonymous-"sources" hit-piece on conservatives the media contrives.
According to a Politico report Monday, the White House communications team is editing quotations from Biden administration officials, demanding interviews be performed on "background with quote approval."
Five reporters who cover the White House spoke with Politico, and the outlet confirmed it has "participated in such arrangements too." The above terminology means interview material can be used by reporters but the reporter's transcription must be either approved, vetoed, or edited.
...
Those who spoke with the outlet said it was commonplace during the Barack Obama administration and used by the Donald Trump administration too. For instance, David Remnick of The New Yorker was forced by the Obama White House in a profile of his to “quietly” receive quote approval, according to Gawker. Michael Lewis likewise was involved in such an arrangement for Vanity Fair profile in 2012.
Politico noted that the Trump White House used the practice less frequently.
Oh, the media didn't extend the same service to Trump? I'll bet you any amount of dollars that the few people granted the edit-your-quotes-fluffer-service were internal saboteurs offering anti-Trump quotes.
Update: I've meant to mention this for weeks -- USAToday published an Op-Ed by Stacy Abrams in which she urged corporations to punish Georgia for its election-protection law.
When this became unpopular, they allowed Abrams to self-stealth-edit her article and remove the support for corporations boycotting Georgia.
Then PolitiFact rated claims that she promoted boycotts against her own state as "false" -- based entirely on the op-ed which she had edited to remove her prior statement of support for boycotts!
In arguing on behalf of Stacey Abrams against @BrianKempGA — that she had always argued against boycotts — they cite lines from her op-Ed about boycotts costing jobs.
The Beatles in Japan, 1966 (in color) It's at Bddokon, which I assume is the same hall that Cheap Trick played. A sloppy version of Day Tripper at 8:35.
Adam Carolla interviews Candace Owens Little addition: Carolla asks why the left hates Candace Owens. But Carolla isn't really part of the right, so he doesn't understand this: The liberal Republicans/NeverTrumpers hate Candace Owens more than the left does. And for many of the same reasons. (They *are* corporate progressives, after all, and they LOVE leftwing cancel culture.)