Elites do not see their fellow citizens in exceptional terms of the affinities of a common language, shared history, or sovereign geography. Instead, they envision themselves as Socratic citizens of the world. They are an international siblinghood with common blue-chip educations, wealth, and long service in the administrative state. The anointed alone “see” and “grasp” what is really going on with the world, and therefore what really needs to be done right now, at all costs, regardless of the opposition from what Hillary wrote off as “all that red in the middle.” Victor Davis Hanson
Quote II
It’s a tragedy in that Comey and his former inner circle – the now infamous troika of fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, fired FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page – have attempted to cloak themselves in the FBI’s rich tradition of fidelity, bravery, and integrity.
In reality, these four former FBI officials have done more to hinder the daily work of the 35,000 selfless and hardworking men and women of the FBI than anyone in the storied agency’s history. Former FBI Assistant Director Chris C. Swecker
Quote III
It is not inequality that enrages people, but indifference or disdain toward them as human beings. Theodore Dalrymple
No data encryption, no antivirus programs, no multifactor authentication mechanisms, and 28-year-old unpatched vulnerabilities are just some of the cyber-security failings described in a security audit of the US' ballistic missile system released on Friday by the US Department of Defense Inspector General (DOD IG).
The report [PDF] was put together earlier this year, in April, after DOD IG officials inspected five random locations where the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) had placed ballistic missiles part of the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) --a DOD program developed to protect US territories by launching ballistic missiles to intercept enemy nuclear rockets.
December (and of course, Christmas itself) used to be are a cathartic time for Venezuelans, a time where you could finally wind down after a long year. Rejoice, celebrate, eat, drink, sing, love, give some caress to your household, and prepare yourself for the upcoming year. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore—it’s not gonna be the case for a long time, I’m afraid.
While our Worker President, Driver of Victories, and Son of Chavez (again, I’m not making any of these titles up) has officially decreed the start of our Christmas festivities on November 23th (the day of his birthday) the spirit of this most sacred holiday is absent.
California telecom regulators have abandoned a plan to impose government fees on text-messaging services, saying that a recent Federal Communications Commission vote has limited its authority over text messaging.
The FCC last week voted to classify text-messaging as an information service, rather than a telecommunications service.
"Information service" is the same classification the FCC gave to broadband when it repealed net neutrality rules and claimed that states aren't allowed to impose their own net neutrality laws. California's legislature passed a net neutrality law anyway and is defending it in court. But the state's utility regulator chose not to challenge the FCC on regulation of text messaging.
Having even one night without sleep leads people to view junk food more favourably, research suggests.
Scientists attribute the effect to the way food rewards are processed by the brain. Previous studies have found that a lack of shuteye is linked to expanding waistlines, with some suggesting disrupted sleep might affect hormone levels, resulting in changes in how hungry or full people feel.
But the latest study suggests that with hormones may have little to do with the phenomenon, and that the cause could be changes in the activity within and between regions of the brain involved in reward and regulation. .
“Our data brings us a little closer to understanding the mechanism behind how sleep deprivation changes food valuation,” said Prof Jan Peters, a co-author of the research from the University of Cologne.
The California farm at least partially responsible for the most recent romaine e.coli scare is now recalling its cauliflower, as well as its red- and green-leaf lettuce, USA Today reports. The Adam Bros. Farms of Santa Maria, CA, were identified publicly for the first time by the FDA last Thursday.
In a statement, the farm explained while none of the aforementioned produce has tested positive for e.coli yet, they were issuing the recall "out of an abundance of caution," as there is a possibility it's been contaminated with e.coli. They elaborate they "discovered that sediment from a reservoir near where the produce was grown tested positive for E. coli. Filtered and treated water from the reservoir may have come in contact with the produce after it was harvested.”
America is completely confused these days: a survey from a graphic design company came out with 10% of the people surveyed wanting Santa Claus to be a woman, and 17% wanting HIM to be gender neutral. Or…wanting him to ditch the fancy red suit for skinny jeans and an iPhone. Oh, and tattoos. And Amazon Prime instead of reindeer.
Probably it’s because kids have never seen a reindeer, nor have they ever seen a sleigh or even know what it’s like to ride in one. They have their heads firmly ensconced in the iPhone.
A teenage boy died after he jumped off a tower block while wearing a homemade parachute which failed.
Schoolboy Bogdan Firsov even had his mother by his side supporting him as he stood at the top of the high rise building in Ukraine for his daredevil stunt.
But the 15-year-old's parachute failed to open properly and the boy plummeted to the ground and suffered fatal injuries.
At some point in the near future we'll see the last actual New Thing the entertainment industry ever created. After that, it will just be reboots of old things.
The part she objected to was New York's declaration that even having nunchucks in your own home was illegal. You couldn't even have them in a locker at a martial arts studio, I guess.
That doesn't seem to invalidate less absurd nunchuck laws in other states, which may only ban people from carrying them.
But -- shouldn't it? If you have a right to self-defense, why can't you carry nunchucks?
Ah well. One cat-stance step at a time.
1974 New York state ban on nunchucks that was put into place over fears that youth inspired by martial arts movies would create widespread mayhem is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, a federal court has ruled.
Judge Pamela Chen issued her ruling Friday in a Brooklyn federal court on the martial arts weapon made famous by Bruce Lee.
The plaintiff, James Maloney, started his legal quest after being charged with possession of nunchucks in his home in 2000. He initially filed a complaint in 2003, and appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court when the case went against him. The Supreme Court in 2010 remanded the case back down to be reconsidered in light of a Second Amendment decision it had made in another case, and Maloney filed an amended complaint later that year.
Maloney had been focused on getting the part of the law overturned that banned nunchucks, two rigid rods connected at one end by a chain or rope, even in private homes.
In her ruling, Chen said the court couldn't simply take that part out, and ruled that the state's law as it pertained to possessing nunchuks as well as to manufacturing, transporting or disposing of them was in violation of the Second Amendment.
Nonserverability is a bona fide doctrine of constitutional analysis, until we come to Obamacare, and then, Who Cares.
Les Moonves, the shamed ex-CEO of CBS, will not get his $120 million severance package, CBS announced late Monday, citing his failure to "cooperate fully" with an internal investigation of allegations of sexual misconduct against him.
...
"With regard to Mr. Moonves, we have determined that there are grounds to terminate for cause, including his willful and material misfeasance, violation of Company policies and breach of his employment contract, as well as his willful failure to cooperate fully with the Company’s investigation. Mr. Moonves will not receive any severance payment from the Company," the statement said.
...
His golden parachute looked even more imperiled in late November when The New York Times posted a lengthy story describing how he allegedly forced oral sex on a young actress years ago and then worked with her down-and-out agent to get her roles to keep her quiet after the #MeToo movement exploded.
Under his employment contract, the network would not have to pay Moonves severance if the investigation found evidence that he did not tell the full truth about whether he tried to pay off an accuser with job offers and then tried to hide it.
Moonves' lawyer called the decision a sham and suggested that CBS was defaming Moonves, possibly previewing a coming lawsuit.
I keep telling you guys: We need to listen more to our Media Elite and aspire to be more like them.
Ben Domenech asks an important question: Given that this Establishment Blank lost to a troop-hating, terrorist-supporting, tutu-wearing, Arizona-trashing feminist freak, what are her chances of actually holding the seat?
Under Arizona law, Ducey's appointment of McSally means she is essentially tasked with filling out a sequence of two year terms. She will have to run for re-election in 2020, and run again in 2022. The demands of running non-stop are hard enough when you’re talking about a House seat. In this case, McSally will have to do something she hasn’t done before -- win statewide -- in back to back election cycles.
On paper, McSally looks like an ideal candidate. She has a Harvard degree, a lengthy record of military service, and an ideologically moderate record in Congress. But as a campaigner, she has much to prove. Her first foray into politics was a loss in a special election nomination fight (to Federalist contributor Jesse Kelly); she then lost a general election campaign for the same seat by less than 1 percent; she then won the district in the following election after a recount by 167 votes. McSally has won only one election by a significant margin, and her loss to Kyrsten Sinema in 2018's Senate election was by less than 3 percent of the vote. The historical trend is clear: win or lose, it's usually very close.
This isn't all on Trump, obviously. The Establishment Party in Power still hasn't gotten it through its head that we are tired of their barely-disguised open borders policy and we're not going to accept their bullshit about "virtual fences" any longer.
"We have other ways that we can get to that $5 billion that we'll work with Congress," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told Fox News on Tuesday morning. She added that the Trump administration could support $1.6 billion in border security funding proposed by Senate Democrats, as long as it can "couple that with other funding resources" to get to $5 billion.
She added that "at the end of the day, we don't want to shut down the government. We want to shut down the border." Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi have cast the potential lapse in funding as the "Trump shutdown." When Pelosi goaded Trump into an Oval Office fracas last week, the characterization appeared to irritate the president.
I don't know what alternate funding sources she means. I've heard claims that Trump could direct the military to use its funds for the wall, but that sounds completely wrong.
Still, Trump himself has not weighed in Tuesday on how much money he would accept. As always, a comment or tweet from the president could trample on the message administration officials try to send.
In proposing $1.6 billion in border security funding, Schumer has said it would go to building new or repairing existing fences, rather than the wall as Trump has proposed it. The White House appears to want to claim that funding as "wall" money to promote a victory.
Garage Engineer Builds Glitter/Stink Bomb "Bait" Package to Get Vengeance Against Thieves
—Ace of Spades
I find this unsatisfying because it appears no action was taken to actually get the thieves arrested. It's treated as if they were just mischief makers, and deserve mischief in return.
If you're interested in his other big viral invention -- the dartboard that calculates the exact trajectory of the dart you've thrown and moves itself to score you a bullseye every time -- it's here.
A former actress and model has come forward with claims that she had a relationship with Woody Allen that started when she was 16.
...
"What made me speak is I thought I could provide a perspective," she said. "I'm not attacking Woody. This is not 'bring down this man.' I'm talking about my love story. This made me who I am. I have no regrets."
Allen didn’t provide comment to THR and has not responded to a request for comment by PEOPLE.
Engelhardt said the relationship started when she gave Allen her number at a New York City restaurant in 1976 and he called her a few days later to invite her to his apartment. The two continued a relationship for 8 years in which they often met at his penthouse overlooking Central Park.
"The curtains were always drawn," Engelhardt said. "The view must have been spectacular. I wasn’t there for the view."
But Woody Allen changed the age of the girl in the story.
Nelkin was actually 16, not 17.
Actually, now that I re-read that Wikipedia article, it claims that while Allen met Nelkin when she was 16, they both claim the relationship didn't begin until she was 17.
Well. Okay. If you both claim that.
Since Woody Allen's "relationship" with his almost-a-daughter was revealed in 1992, I always think of this scene he wrote for Bananas, in which a mad dictator decrees, for unknown reasons, that "all girls under 16 years old... are now... 16 years old."
I can't see that as anything other than a way around statutory rape.
Clinton-Appointed Judge in Flynn Sentencing Hearing Accuses Him of Treason, Suggests He'll Sentence Him Beyond What the Plea Deal Calls for
—Ace of Spades
#TheResistance has a new hero.
The Clinton-appointed judge, Emmett Sullivan, claimed that Flynn's suggestion that the FBI misled him (which it, you know, did) cast doubt on Flynn's acceptance of culpability. The not-so-veiled threat from the judge is that if Flynn wouldn't repudiate his previous complaints about the FBI, he'd toss out the plea deal and sentence Flynn more harshly than the plea called for.
He also badgered both Flynn and the prosecutor about whether Flynn had committed "treason."
Though then, after he returned from a break, this Clinton appointee said he wanted to "clarify" that his own previous claim that Flynn was working in the White House when his contacts with foreigners occurred. I guess he bothered to read the actual facts and corrected himself -- well, "clarified" -- that Flynn wasn't in the White House and that he was now not "suggesting" treason.
Which is actually exactly what he did before.
Basically the judge seems to be threatening Flynn with jail time unless he offers more to the Mueller investigation. Flynn has gotten that message, and now says he wants to delay sentencing because he might cooperate more with Mueller.
The court has delayed sentencing to permit this. So, no sentencing today. After threatening Flynn for an hour, Flynn got the message and said he would cooperate more.
Judge Sullivan, having left the bench for a break, is now giving Flynn an opportunity to speak with his lawyers privately. Will Flynn continue with sentencing today? Will he change his mind+cooperate more? Will Sullivan give him a harsher sentence than what Mueller suggested?
Sullivan going into his sentencing considerations now.
"This is a very serious offense," Sullivan said. "A high ranking senior official of the government making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while on the physical premises of the White House."
"Arguably, you sold your country out," Sullivan said. "The court's going to consider all that. I cannot assure you that if you proceed today you will not receive a sentence of incarceration."
He went on:
"I'm not hiding my disgust, my disdain for this criminal offense."
The Leftwing "Activist" Group That Mobbed and Menaced Florida AG Pam Bondi at a Movie Theater Was Financed by George Soros
—Ace of Spades
The Daily Caller's Peter Hasson is reporting this. I guess he didn't get the memo from the NeverTrumpers now seeking Alternative Funding that it's antisemitic to report on George Soros' funding of the hard left.
The left-wing activist group that accosted Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi at a movie theater in June received half a million dollars in 2017 from an organization funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros, documents obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation reveal.
Organize Florida, the group that hounded Bondi from a Florida movie theater, received $500,000 last year from the Open Society Policy Center (OSPC), according to OSPC's most recent tax forms.
OSPC is the advocacy arm of Soros's Open Society Foundations, which the billionaire uses to advance his left-wing worldview around the globe.
Love it or hate it, New York City is The country's (and perhaps the world's) premier city, and to allow it to descend into the maelstrom that Giuliani (and to a lesser extent Bloomberg) rescued it from is criminal.
NYC is the first stop for many tourists, and it gets more visitors -- something like 50,000,000 -- than any other city in America. Politics aside, we should be proud of this gateway too the country, and we should expect that it is maintained to a minimum standard. Unfortunately it is immersed in the politics of pretty much everything under the sun, except for silly things like minimizing crime and keeping the streets clean. DeBlasio is an incompetent hack, and it is sad that most New Yorkers are so apathetic about politics that they allow a small minority of well organized fanatics to control the destiny of what once was a great and safe city.
Though the city’s official crime numbers have not yet worsened, signs of increasing disorder are everywhere. The city is filthy; any mayor should be ashamed to have European tourists witness our inability to keep the streets free of trash. Vagrants are multiplying. The solution to colonization by beggars and addicts is not more taxpayer-subsidized housing, which the city already provides in massive amounts at the expense of basic public services. The solution is enforcement of the law and willingness to insist that the mentally ill stay in treatment.
Those "official" crime numbers are crap. They ignore a lot of stuff, and have decriminalized a lot more, so any comparison is specious. Ask any New Yorker who isn't a liar and he will tell you that, "Yes, it's gotten worse." And the worst is yet to come.
I am literally shaking with rage at the thought of a room filled with people mocking the need for safe spaces. It’s like encountering hundreds of micro-aggressions all at once, like tiny paper cuts embedding themselves into my crevices. The first time I saw that clip, I zipped myself into my portable isolation chamber and ate nothing but tinned pineapple until the fear subsided.
Good morning kids. Tuesday, and we're dealing mostly with the continuation of the usual chazarei but in the lead is Mueller's compliance with Judge Emmet Sullivan's demand for the "302" forms pertaining to the FBI interviews conducted on Michael Flynn. However there seems to still be some confusion/consternation at the fact that evidently not all of the forms were released, which gives the impression that Mueller and the FBI (let's face it; they're colluding to cover up the original crime of spying on candidate Trump) are intentionally still stonewalling and buffaloing any attempt to get to the truth. And since that truth would both exonerate Flynn as well as further trash whatever microscopic vestige of Efrem Zimbalist-esque reputation that agency might have had, the actions or lack thereof speak for themselves. If nothing else Mueller should swing for spoliation of evidence in erasing text messages from Strzok and Page. Two justice systems indeed.
In any case, as we all know by now, the bigger picture is that the Deep State to whatever extent it was at the behest of or knowledge of Obama and Clinton engaged in a campaign to sabotage the candidate Trump and now is engaged in the attempt to simultaneously cover up the greatest political scandal bar none in US history as well as now continue the effort in an attempt to actually overthrow President Trump, the rule of law and the preservation of whatever's left of our civil society, consequences be damned. Beyond the mere tactical day-to-day attacks and sabotaging of his - and by extension our - agenda and smearing of his and his family's good name, there is much bigger and much more dangerous game being played. Whatever happens over the next 2 to 6 more years (please G-d he lasts and thrives that long), he and everyone and everything he holds dear are going to be hounded to the day they die. The vendetta is of course personal but the intention is to send a message to anyone else that dare do what he did and try to derail the Leviathan and the Socialist-Globalist agenda (see the link to Mark Levin warning us about this Letitia James vontz in NY). This is for all the marbles. We better understand that and I hope to G-d Trump does as well.
Next up we make a run for the border where Trump aide Stephen Miller is reassuring us about the President's not giving an inch and insisting that the Border Wall is going to be funded no matter what - including "shutting down" (quote-unquote) the government. For anyone with half a brain the reasons are obvious as illustrated by the link to ICE's report on who and what has been caught this past year.
Before we hit politics head on, in Civil War 2.0 news, federal prosecutors are appealing the insane 30-day sentence given to Rand Paul's neighbor for nearly beating him to death. Other scandals include Fauxca-Has-Been and Kamala-Toe being reprimanded for ethics violations regarding campaigning off of the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, several Democrat Congressmomzers took a secret trip to Qatar which for those not keeping score is an ally/stooge of Iran (despite the fact that we have a huge-ass naval base in Doha), and be on the lookout for a child-molesting sex predator from CAIR. Hell, just dress up a midget cop as that 11-year-old drag queen and send him out as bait...
Elsewhere, James Comey opens his festering cake-hole and Sarah Sanders shuts it good, GOP lawmakers who got beat last November are causing headaches in Congress by not showing up, Nancy Palsi may have got the gavel but the young Maoists are making demands for top committee assignments, three-term useless New Deal establishment stooge Lamar Alexander will not be running in 2020, so hopefully we can beat out CoC pick but not with an Akin, newly elected so-called "Palestinian" Rashida Tlaib (can I buy a vowel?) will culturally appropriate a mythical people for her magic show-cum-inauguration, Jerrold Nadless was against impeachment before he was for it, CNN goes "bananas" on Tom Perez for attacking fellow Dems, and Hillary Clinton is just so utterly narcissistic and tone deaf, it's amazing.
To First Amendment and Fake News Fakery fodder, IBD sez it's time to break up Google, two links on polling shenanigans, rot in peace Weekly Standard, Daniel Greenfield touches on that vis a vis the real Russian connections to the phony Russian collusion crap, and big credit card is acting as Big Brother to silence and destroy conservative voices. Moving down one amendment, a Federal judge throws out New York state's ban on nunchucks citing it as a violation of the second amendment (gotta wonder if that might crop up in a gun case down the road), and despite Little Shitler Camera Hogg and his sidekick Shaved Guevara, a devastating reporting confirms the need for armed teachers in the classroom. And not just with cans of mushy peas or spotted dick.
Not a lot going on overseas although the US vaporized a few dozen al-Shabab-sters in Somalia, the US pushes back against the UN wording of "reproductive rights" in that organizations texts, the Iranians are firing up old al-Sparqi as their "corruption courts" go into over drive (I guess corruption is a convenient way to define dissent downward over there), great news as Air-BnB confirms they still hate Jooz, but Texas' Governor Abbott tells CAIR "FOAD, Fouad!"
Domestically, the CBO indicates that the Prison Reform bill is looking like a shit-show, Corker and Menendez team up for old times sake to try and screw over Trump and his broadcast chief, but the FCC is considering some sort of state internet tax (wtf?!), and Susan Collins reassures us that Brett Kavanaugh's Planned Parenthood decision was totes cool. Feh.
Speaking of sleaze and criminals, a Disney actor has been fired after being arrested for trying to pick up a 13-year-old boy. Considering yesterday's wretch-inducing story about the 11-year-old drag queen, it won't be long before this actor is the next Rosa Parks.
In economic news, as Fed Chair Powell colludes with Soros, Buffett et al to intentionally tank the economy to screw Trump, labor shortages are a boon economically and politically vis a vis the blue collar vote, IBD with two links lamenting California's insanity and everyone's talking about Columbus, Ohio. At least City Journal is with a report on a midwestern renaissance.
In healthcare news, Friday's big Obamacare decision by Judge Reed O'Connor features prominently. John Borasso illustrates the feckless entrenched bureaucratic political bullshit we have to deal with in the GOP, and yet the thing is going to have to be dealt with one way or another and no doubt it will be back at SCOTUS. Considering the abject corruption everywhere in our government, and that Chief Justice Julia Crockovich has the integrity of grifting gyppo, the situation is still very much in doubt. But... Trump! Stay tuned (I know you will).
In Red-Green action, GOP lawmakers want Trump to fight Judge Buch M. Danno's ruling against the Keystone XL Pipeline. Plus, the FemiNazis are all sad that Joo-hate broke up the Women's March. Aww. From hither and yon, Netflix is poison to children, more on the gay writer who came out as conservative and got his ass handed to him (phrasing!), much less money for much Les Moonves and a lament about the Free Shit Army.
Anyway, links from around the world, across the nation and up your street. Have a better one and remain blessed.
Lying to the press isn’t a crime, and paying money to cover up an affair isn’t a crime, either, even if you’re running for president. If these were crimes, John Edwards would be on death row.Ann Coulter
Quote II
“So there’s plenty of opportunity for Republicans if they just pause, look at the world as it really is, and try to come up with something in the tradition of Lincoln and Eisenhower and other great Republicans.” Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA)
Quote III
“McSally strikes me as an unwise choice for a number of reasons,”
“She’s like an NFL team that plays down to its opponents’ level – and she’ll be tasked with running for re-election immediately. Ben Domenech
Because we know your late father-in-law was such a stalwart conservative standing up to the progressive movement.
This law is one of those “sensible restrictions” on gun ownership that liberals like to talk about but that criminals will ignore as the judge who ruled the law constitutional says that despite the asterisk put next to the Second Amendment by the court assures us there is nothing to worry about:
The law, signed by Gov. Phil Murphy in June along with five other new gun laws, gave New Jersey gun owners who currently possess the magazines in question 180 days to either surrender them, permanently modify them to only accept up to 10 rounds, or transfer them to somebody who is allowed to legally own them. The deadline is set to expire on Monday.
A lawsuit brought by the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs and supported by the National Rifle Association failed on Thursday as the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals declared the confiscation law constitutional. Any civilian caught in possession of a magazine capable of holding more than 10 rounds may be arrested and prosecuted. Possession of such magazines after the deadline will be considered a crime of the fourth degree under state law and carry up to 18 months in prison and up to $10,000 in fines or both.
Nearly all modern full-size or compact handguns and rifles sold in the United States come standard with magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition…
Clinton decided to send Morales a letter, telling her she knows what it’s like to run in a contest among boys.
“While I know you may have been disappointed that you did not win President, I am so proud of you for deciding to run in the first place. As I know too well, it’s not easy when you stand up and put yourself in contention for a role that’s only been sought by boys,” she wrote in her letter, dated Dec. 6. “The most important thing is that you fought for what you believed in, and that is always worth it.”
Schools in Brighton have been ordered to teach children as young as eight that people “of all genders” can have periods, as well as to install sanitary waste disposal units in every toilet room.
The instructions were included in guidelines published by the local council earlier this month on ‘Taking a Period Positive Approach in Brighton & Hove Schools’, which assert there is “more work to do across all settings to prevent and reduce stigma related to periods and talking about periods”.
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Everything you wanted to know about Porn Stats. Hawt searches. H/T redc1c4
According to Dr. Laurie Betito, Director of the Pornhub Sexual Wellness Center, “searches like these serve as an indication that people use this site to not only satisfy sexual urges but also to get a different angle on something they are already interested in. To see a famous character or hot topic in a sexual context.”
And you thought I just made this stuff up. Didn't you?
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It is easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. Not always.
In San Francisco, property speculators have made a game out of tearing down historically protected homes, then retroactively applying for demolition permits, and using the now-empty lots to build massive mansions that sell for millions.
Ross Johnstone says that he's not a speculator at all, and that the reason he knocked down modernist architect Richard Neutra's 1936 Twin Peaks Largent House at 49 Hopkins Ave. had nothing to do with the extra money he'd get from increasing the floor plan from 1,300 square feet to about 4,000 (he says he wanted to move his family into the larger house).
The San Francisco City Planning Commission didn't buy this argument, nor the argument that the house had lost its historic character in earlier remodels and was therefore not worthy of preservation. Instead, they've ordered Johnstone to build an exact replica of the house he tore down, "executed beautifully in a way that would be consistent with the home’s original expression," and to post a plaque recounting the history of the house.
Having sex may be one way older adults can feel better and enjoy life more, suggests a new paper published in the journal Sexual Medicine.
“The general conception is that older adults are not as sexually active as younger adults, or not sexually active at all,” says study co-author Lee Smith, a reader in epidemiology at Anglia Ruskin University in the U.K. “Sexual activity does decline as we age, but older adults are not asexual.” In fact, other recent research found that many American seniors have active sex lives; 40% of the people surveyed, who were between age 65 and 80, said they were having sex.
If we want to stop climate change, we’ll have to stop pumping out carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In order to do that, we’ll need to replace all the sources of carbon pollution—like fossil fuel plants and combustion vehicles—with clean, renewable alternatives. But there’s a problem: According to a new study, we might not have enough materials to make that happen.
Plenty of high-tech electronic components, like solar panels, rechargeable batteries, and complex circuits, require specific rare metals. These can include magnetic neodymium, electronic indium, and silver, along with lesser-known metals like praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. These metals are mined in large quantities in countries around the world, and they make their way into the supply chains of all sorts of electronics and renewables companies
Pub crawl + Santa outfits, didn't see this happening......Genius Awards.
Fourteen people were arrested at Hoboken's Santacon on Saturday, including one man who punched a police sergeant in the face, the police chief said on Twitter.
Chief Ken Ferrante was tweeting real-time updates of the police response to SantaCon, a bar crawl in which participants dress in Santa costumes.
Two officers were hurt in a fight near Cadillac Cantina, he said. One of the officers was hospitalized with a dislocated thumb, the other was punched in the face
A young Alton man received a holiday miracle Tuesday evening after his car was reported stolen from the parking lot across the street from Bossanova last Saturday.
Daniel Harris was going to seek some Christmas cheer at the Bossanova Christmas party following the theft of his 2009 Chevrolet Cobalt and the news insurance would not cover the vehicle. Heavy with the thought he would have to invest in a whole new ride, Harris was not expecting the news he received – his car had been found and recovered.
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Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by Math.
Notice: Posted with permission by the Ace Media Empire and AceCorp, LLC. Loose change, drink token and Ikea Gift Certificates are always welcomed.
Two U.S. Marines testified last week that they were attacked by a "mob" of Antifa members who mistook them for participants in a right-wing rally in November.
Alejandro Godinez and Luis Torres testified in a Philadelphia, PA courtroom that they were attending a local event for Marines last month when they were confronted by members of Antifa, including suspects Thomas Massey and Tom Keenan.
Keenan allegedly demanded to know if Godinez and Torres were members of the Proud Boys, a right-wing group that was demonstrating nearby at the time. Godinez explained that he and Torres are Marines, but said that, nonetheless, the group of 10 to 12 Antifa members began mercilessly attacking them.
According to the Marines’ testimony, their attackers started calling them "Nazis" and "white supremacists" while they punched and kicked them. Godinez shouted, "I'm Mexican!" which allegedly caused the attackers to start calling them ethnic slurs like "spic" and "wetback."
Godinez said he was maced, punched in the head and kicked in the ribs. When the attack was over, Torres called 911 and the pair went to the hospital. Godinez still reportedly has eye issues from being maced and said he may need surgery in the future to deal with his other injuries.
And, on this subject, if you read one post today, make it Sexton's post on a former leftist radical explaining the lunacy that he was once part of. You can check that post out for key excerpts plus an interview on Tucker (though note, he's an intellectual type, not a performer; some will find his television manner dry), and if you like those quotes do read his entire essay at Quillette. It's a very insightful piece.
Unfortunately, toxicity in radical communities is not a bug. It is a feature. The ideology and norms of radicalism have evolved to produce toxic, paranoid, depressed subjects. What follows is a picture of what happens in communities that are passionately, sincerely, radically woke, as seen from the perspective of an apostate.
Faith
Commentators have accurately noted how social justice seems to take the form of a religion. This captures the meaning and fulfilment I found in protests and occupations. It also captures how, outside of these harrowing festivals, everyday life in radical communities is mundane but pious. As a radical activist, much of my time was devoted to proselytizing. Non-anarchists were like pagans to be converted through zines and wheatpasted posters rather than by Bible and baptism. When non-radicals listened to my assertions that nazis deserved death, that all life had devolved into spectacle, and that monogamy was a capitalist social construct, they were probably bewildered instead of enticed.
Instead of developing a relationship to God and a recognition of one's own imperfection, we wanted our non-anarchist families and friends to develop their "analysis" and recognize their complicity in the evil of capitalism. These non-anarchist friends grew increasingly sparse the longer I was an anarchist. They didn't see how terrible the world was, and they used problematic language that revealed hopelessly bad politics. Frustrated with them, I retreated further and further into the grey echo-chamber of my "chosen family."
Trent Eady says of his own radicalism in Montreal, "When I was part of groups like this, everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues." When my friends and I did have theoretical disagreements, they tended towards the purely strategic or to philosophical minutiae. Are cops human? If we pay attention to the few white nationalists in town, will that stir them up? Is polyamory queer, or privileged?
Deep and sincere engagement with opposing points of view is out of the question. Radicalism is like a clan too suspicious of outsiders to abandon cousin marriage, and, like incestuous offspring, radicalism's intellectual offspring accumulate genetic load.
The entire last 30-40 minutes of The Creepy Line is about Google's deliberate suppression of negative search results for candidates it supports, like Hillary Clinton. Throughout 2015 and 2016, Google kept all negative search results out of the top ten results for searches on Hillary Clinton.
Google of course allowed negative results to appear in searches for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
The psychologist/researcher Dr. Robert Epstein conducted four different studies to see how suppression of negative search results could sway an election -- one hypothetical one in Australia, one hypothetical one in the US, one real one in India during the Indian elections, and one real one in the US during the 2016 elections.
When he looked down a list of the first ten search results for Hillary Clinton, he noticed that all ten were biased in her favor. He said to the camera, approximately, "If I were doing this, I wouldn't have made all ten of the first results positive for Hillary. I would have been more subtle and included a couple of bad results so it wasn't so blatant."
He found that nearly everyone was influenced in favor of the candidate whose negative search results were suppressed, though not everyone who shifted in opinion towards Hillary Clinton would actually vote for her.
He estimated that the percentage of the population who could be swayed to actually change votes via this simple procedure -- which, I remind you, Google is already running on us -- is ten percent.
Few elections are even won by so much.
He also found that one group was especially persuadable by this technique:
Moderate Republicans.
Who, I posit, have a much higher than normal sensitivity about their status as proper and respectable people in society -- the What Will the Neighbors Think effect -- which may account for their higher-than-normal gullibility when Almighty Google tells them that All the Good and Smart People are only saying nice things about the Democrat.
But whatever, they're a neutral platform. It is written right there in the Constitution itself that trillion-dollar Monster Tech companies should be rewarded with lawsuit immunity based on a lie (that they are neutral platforms) while they deliberately work to manipulate the voting public of the US.
We've just conducted endless investigations into whether or not Russia spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on FaceBook memes to influence an election.
Let's not ask any questions at all about whether or not trillion-dollar monopoly Google is making interference in US elections one of his top corporate priorities.
The media has been writing news to appeal to Google and FaceBook for almost a decade now. The media needs to appeal to them to get their stories read.
What possible danger could their be in politicians crafting their policies to appeal to Google to induce that Internet Search Monopoly to suppress negative search results about them?
Why, none at all. #MuhPrivateMonopolisticTyrant must be protected.
Bob Corker, Primary Director of Your Favorite RINO Failure Theater Productions: The Republican Party Must Remember What It Is, Which Is a Second Liberal Party Which Tries to Compete With the Clintons in the Field of Favors for Corporate Clients
"I do think we've got to remember what the Republican Party is," Corker said. "What's happening right now is not the standard Republicanism that we've had in our country for many, many years and it's very different."
Corker refused to rule out a challenge of his own to Trump, while also declining to say if the president should face a primary challenger at all.
"I want to get away from here and think about that," Corker said. "I think it's important to remind people that we’re going through an anomaly right now as it relates to much of the standard Republican focus that's been around for a long time."
He announced this on MSNBC, which is the chief employer of cucks after Pierre Omidyar.
New York Times Casually Praises Conspiracy Theorist David Icke's Book About the Reptillian Conspiracy (And PS, the Reptilloids Are Jews)
—Ace of Spades
This was in a profile of Alice Walker, though, and we all know that the left has decided that black people cannot be racist or antisemitic, or, at least, should never be called on it.
We just went through this with the antisemitic leadership of the "Women's" March.
And the New York Times has learned nothing.
So here it goes again, promoting antisemites and hiding the truth of it from readers:
Over the weekend, the New York Times Book Review published a full-length interview with Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple. The very first question: "What books are on your nightstand?" Walker replied with four, the second of which was:
"And the Truth Shall Set You Free," by David Icke. In Icke's books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person's dream come true.
This passed without comment from the New York Times interviewer, and the publication passed it on to the readers without qualification. This is rather remarkable because the book is an unhinged anti-Semitic conspiracy tract written by one of Britain's most notorious anti-Semites.
A former soccer player turned professional hate peddler, Icke is one of the most influential conspiracy theorists in Europe, and certainly in Britain. Today, he has over 777,000 followers on Facebook, and speaks to audiences around the world. Like many conspiracy theorists, Icke claims that a secret conspiracy controls the world. And like many conspiracy theorists, Icke claims that this secret conspiracy happens to be Jewish. In And The Truth Shall You Free, the word "Jewish" appears 241 times, and the name "Rothschild" is mentioned 374 times. These references are not compliments. Indeed, the book was so obviously anti-Semitic that Icke's publisher refused to publish it, and he had to print it himself.
In the book and elsewhere, Icke draws liberally upon the infamous anti-Semitic pamphlet, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion--a Russian forgery about an alleged global Jewish cabal that is widely considered one of the most influential anti-Semitic works in history. Magnanimously, Icke calls the hate tract by a different name....
So, is Icke anti-Semitic? Well, here are some other things that he says in the book:
* The Talmud is "among the most appallingly racist documents on the planet."
* B'nai Brith, the world’s oldest Jewish service organization, was behind the slave trade (an anti-Semitic canard popularized by Louis Farrakhan) and controls the Ku Klux Klan...
* Jews are behind anti-Semitic attacks: "If you really want to discredit someone, you arrange for anti-Jewish or anti-whatever events such as the smashing of graves, assaults on people, even a terrorist bomb in the extreme. You then point the finger at your target person or group. You say they are either directly responsible or 'incited' the actions by what they are writing and saying."
* Quotes and seconds the heinous assertion of Gary Allen–the John Birch Society spokesman and former George Wallace speechwriter–that Jews bankrolled their own extermination in the Holocaust...
* Calls on schools to teach the controversy about whether the Holocaust really happened: "Why do we play a part in suppressing alternative information to the official line of the Second World War? How is it right that while this fierce suppression goes on, free copies of the Spielberg film, Schindler’s List, are given to schools to indoctrinate children with the unchallenged version of events? And why do we, who say we oppose tyranny and demand freedom of speech, allow people to go to prison and be vilified, and magazines to be closed down on the spot, for suggesting another version of history?"
(Icke never does explain how Jews could have funded the Holocaust if the Holocaust didn’t actually happen.)
...
This is the book that Alice Walker recommended to New York Times readers.
It seems strange to me that the left has indicted the entire right for an antisemitism which scarcely exists and does so only at the fringiest of fringes, and yet when one of their own engages in straight-up, no-question-about-it Real-Deal-Holyfield antisemitism, they actively spread the doctrine.
David Icke isn't just anti-semitic, of course. He's also anti-reptilian.
Icke proposes that an inter-dimensional race of reptilian beings called the Archons have hijacked the earth and are stopping humanity from realising its true potential. He claims they are the same beings as the Anunnaki, deities from the Babylonian creation myth the Enuma Elis, and the fallen angels, or Watchers, who mated with human women in the Biblical apocrypha.
Icke believes that a genetically modified human/Archon hybrid race of shape-shifting reptilians, known as the "Babylonian Brotherhood" or the Illuminati, manipulate global events to keep humans in constant fear, so the Archons can feed off the 'negative energy' this creates. In The Biggest Secret (1999), Icke identified the Brotherhood as descendants of reptilians from the constellation Draco, and said they live in caverns inside the earth....
Icke states that the reptilians come from not only another planet but another dimension, the lower level of the fourth dimension (the "lower astral dimension"), the one nearest the physical world. It is from this dimension that they control the planet, although just as fourth-dimensional reptilians control us, they in turn are controlled by a fifth dimension. Barkun argues that Icke's introduction of different dimensions allowed him to skip awkward questions about how the reptilians got here.
Was this theory discussed in the book And the Truth Shall Set You Free that Alice Walker praises as essential nourishment for the mind? Why yes it was:
Icke briefly introduced his ancient-astronaut hypothesis in The Robot's Rebellion (1994), citing Milton William Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse (1991), and expanded it in And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995), citing Barbara Marciniak's Bringers of the Dawn (1992).
It should be pointed out that many people think that given that Icke is both a Holocaust denier/Holocaust apologist, and a believer in world control by a shape-shifting half-reptilian race, he intends people to read his Lizard People theory as a disguised indictment of the Jews. But he insists that the Lizard People theory is not a "allegory," and he means actual Lizard People.
I don't know either way -- on one hand, it seems likely that when he talks about Jews controlling the world and shape-shifting reptilians controlling the world, he means these two to be the same group.
On the other hand -- he really does seem to be pushing his Reptilian conspiracy theory in earnest. And he also doesn't seem shy about peddling antisemitism right alongside the Reptilian stuff. So maybe they are distinct in his mind (though, I'd bet, his theory would then include Jews as the Reptilians' agents on earth).
Whatever he might mean by Lizard People, his stuff about the Jews controlling the world and financing their own Holocaust speaks for itself.
At least the New York Times thinks so -- and didn't bother to add even a parenthetical remark about Icke.
Exit Question: Should the New York Times be deplatformed by YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, Google, and MasterCard? Why is the left permitted to engage in sly antisemitic propaganda without any penalty?
If Sargon of Akkad made such sly endorsements of David Icke, what position would YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, Google, and MasterCard take on him?
PS: Don't bother asking Limpdicked Cucks David Brooks or Ross Douthat to comment on their newspaper's 2nd-base-under-the-shirt dalliance with the hardest of hardcore antisemitic conspiracy theories. They shake their pompoms for the New York Times as hard as S.E. Cupp shakes hers for CNN.
Shocker: Starbucks' Anyone-Can-Use-Our-Bathrooms-Policy Results in Stores Locking Up Their Bathrooms and Denying Them to Everyone, Including Paying Customers
Actress Amy Schumer lamented how women in comedy need to look "super fuckable" in order to get attention in the industry in a new interview, saying that she won’t be dressing that way anymore during her standup comedy act.
In an article for Elle titled, "Amy Schumer Doesn"t Want To Look Fuckable,"...
Actually that's gonna be Suuuuper-easy, barely an inconvenience.
...the comedian said, "I'm so grateful to this younger generation for pointing out how little equality there is and how women, to get attention and be treated well, we've had to also try to look super fuckable."
"For me, I was trying to get people to stop flipping the channel, 'Oh, it's a girl in a short dress' then I hoped they would listen to what I was saying....
Then you took two swings at the ball and missed both.
"...The Leather Special was me kind of owning it and relying on my voice because I've earned the right and I have people's attention," the Trainwreck star said.
She looks like she smells like a donkey in a diaper.
"They [CNN viewers] expect you to be anti-Trump, your viewers," Conway said to Cuomo.
"No, they're actually get frustrated with me because they think we're too balanced on this show," Cuomo responded. "They don't want me to have you on. They don't want me to have anyone from the administration. Trust me."
Did Chris Cuomo just throw his own viewers under the bus? Did he just claim "They're the ultrapartisan NPC robots, not me"?
A prominent 'Republican' women's political action committee that regularly receives national media attention for its criticisms of President Donald Trump and the GOP is bankrolled by three liberal billionaire donors and activists, Federal Election Commission filings show.
Republican Women for Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, was founded by Jennifer Lim and Meghan Milloy, both former employees of Republican organizations. The duo also previously founded Republican Women for Hillary and spoke at the Democratic National Convention in the past.
...
Despite Lim's claim that they were supported by donors across the political spectrum, the PAC does not show any Republican contributors after Hoffman's initial donation.
The PAC pulled in an additional $200,000 from Kathryn Murdoch, the progressive activist daughter-in-law of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and $400,000 from Daniel Tierney, the president of Wicklow Capital, a Chicago-based investment firm, filings show.
Both Murdoch and Tierney are major donors to Democratic campaigns and PACs.
Hey, I wonder if any of these public-spirited billionaires want to buy a used magazine, slightly worn, barely read?
Obamacare Going Back to Supreme Court, Now That Lower Court Has Ruled It Unconstititional
—Ace of Spades
Eighteen Republican states attorneys general and two Republican governors sued to strike down Obamacare, arguing that the original bullshit ruling upholding it did so by claiming that the tax power was broad, and that the individual mandate could be construed, sort of, as a tax, and ergo, Obamacare was a tax bill and was presumptively constitutional.
But since then, Congress passed, and President Trump signed, a law eliminating the tax that enforced the individual mandate -- the individual mandate still existed, in theory, but there was no penalty for ignoring it.
Thereby making Obamacare no longer a tax bill, and thereby stealing away Chief Justice Roberts' entire (phony) rationale for claiming an unconstitutional bill was unconstitutional.
"In some ways, the question before the Court involves the intent of both the 2010 and 2017 Congresses," O'Connor wrote in his 55-page decision. "The former enacted the ACA. The latter sawed off the last leg it stood on."
Resolution of these claims rests at the intersection of the ACA, the Supreme Court's decision in NFIB, and the TCJA. In NFIB, the Supreme Court held the Individual Mandate was unconstitutional under the Interstate Commerce Clause but could fairly be read as an exercise of Congress's Tax Power because it triggered a tax. The TCJA eliminated that tax. The Supreme Court's reasoning in NFIB--buttressed by other binding precedent and plain text --thus compels the conclusion that the Individual Mandate may no longer be upheld under the Tax Power. And because the Individual Mandate continues to mandate the purchase of health insurance, it remains unsustainable under the Interstate Commerce Clause--as the Supreme Court already held.
Finally, Congress stated many times unequivocally--through enacted text signed by the President--that the Individual Mandate is "essential" to the ACA. And this essentiality, the ACA's text makes clear, means the mandate must work "together with the other provisions" for the Act to function as intended. All nine Justices to review the ACA acknowledged this text and Congress's manifest intent to establish the Individual Mandate as the ACA's "essential" provision. The current and previous Administrations have recognized that, too. Because rewriting the ACA without its "essential" feature is beyond the power of an Article III court, the Court thus adheres to Congress's textually expressed intent and binding Supreme Court precedent to find the Individual Mandate is inseverable from the ACA’s remaining provisions.
So, the Individual Mandate was "essential" to Obamacare and, being essential to it, the entire Obamacare law falls if this essential, non-severable part of it is struck down. As Roberts (and the rest of the Court) already ruled that there was no part of the Constitution (including the Interstate Commerce Clause) giving Congress such a huge power to simply order people to buy insurance, except for the power of taxation, the idea that the Individual Mandate was a kind of tax was the only justification for this mandate. Now that that's gone, there is no justification for Congress ordering Americans to make purchases, and that section of Obamacare is voided as unconstitutional, and because that part of Obamacare was "essential" to its function in total, the whole law falls.
That ruling, though, did not come with an injunction ordering the federal government and states to stop administering Obamacare. Only leftwing judges, usually from Hawaii, order the rest of the country to obey their decisions without further review.
The ruling is on the books, but will not be enforced until the Supreme Court agrees with it.
The problem, of course, is Roberts. Roberts invented a farcical excuse to rule the unconstitutional law constitutional -- changing his vote from one to strike down the unconstitutional law to one to preserve it after he got pressure from the Democrat media -- and if he was willing to engage in fantasy rule-making once to save Obamacare there's not much to discourage him from doing so again.
The Affordable Care Act -- and the multitude of regulations, taxes and benefits that come with it -- once again could be on the road to the Supreme Court after a Texas judge ruled the law unconstitutional.
The surprise decision Friday already has both sides of the debate posturing, with Democrats claiming the ruling is but a hiccup and Republicans suggesting this could be their chance, at last, to abolish the law -- which remains largely in place despite President Trump’s past claims to the contrary.
A Supreme Court ruling in their favor would be Republicans' only shot at overturning the law in the foreseeable future, with Democrats taking control of the House in January...
"A confirming Supreme Court Decision will lead to GREAT HealthCare results for Americans," Trump tweeted Monday.
[tweet follows]
@realDonaldTrump
The DEDUCTIBLE which comes with ObamaCare is so high that it is practically not even useable! Hurts families badly. We have a chance, working with the Democrats, to deliver great HealthCare! A confirming Supreme Court Decision will lead to GREAT HealthCare results for Americans!
If the court were to overturn the law, it would leave the Trump administration and a divided Congress in a remarkably difficult situation – scrambling to come up with an alternative that has eluded the law’s critics in Washington ever since its passage in 2010.
"We have a chance, working with the Democrats, to deliver great HealthCare!" Trump claimed.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III introduced a resolution back in July that would authorize the legal counsel of the Senate to take part in the legal proceedings against Texas and the other states involved, including Manchin's home state of West Virginia.
It became a key issue for Manchin in part because his 2018 challenger was the state's GOP attorney general.
"This ruling is just plain wrong," Manchin said in a statement issued Friday night. "I look forward to its appeal to a higher court, and I intend to fight to ensure that the Senate has an opportunity to intervene to defend these critical health safeguards."
Democrats tried and failed to force a vote on the Manchin proposal in August, and a Manchin unanimous consent request to call up and pass the measure Sept. 5 faced objection.
All that bill would do is allow Senate Democrats to file their own brief in the case and that kind of thing.
"Ahoy! So it looks like the Weekly Standard has been hulled below the waterline and is now pretty much sunk. They've actually been sinking for a long time. The TWS site got less than a million unique visitors in April of this year. Those are terrible numbers. They went back up to over 2.5 million in September and October per month, but according to ace, this here blog gets 3-3.5 million uniques per month. I find that astounding. A maladroit hermit can put together a web site in his spare time that gets bigger traffic than a professional magazine that no doubt has spent millions of dollars to boost its online presence. Of course, adopting a business plan wherein you piss of 85% of your potential customer base probably wasn't the smartest choice."
Good morning kids. Monday again, and while the Democrat-Left-Media Complex's political grandstanding and smear campaign surrounding their refusal to secure our borders causing a government shutdown (which in fact does not shut down and has essentially zero impact on anyone's life [more on that later]) and the death of a 7-year-old Guatemalan child killed by the stupidity and negligence of her parents attempting to break our laws by illegally jumping our border, something from out of left field is topping the news this morning.
Late Friday, Judge Reed O'Connor out of Fort Worth has ruled in favor of several states that brought suit saying that since the individual mandate is no longer enforceable, then the entirety of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is therefore unconstitutional. The Dem-Left immediately went into freakout mode as did their Renfield-esque enablers and stooges allegedly on our side (see the link for Susan Collins belching up dreck on the Sunday shows). One of the big lies the Dems used in the run up to the midterms was that the GOP and Trump wanted to take away insurance coverage for those with pre-existing conditions. That was and still is a titanic lie since both have repeatedly and loudly claimed just the opposite. But now that the law is seemingly dead, at least in a coma until it makes its way to the Frankenstein lab of Chief Justice Errin' Crockovich, the political hot potato of what to do about it is in the hands of the President and the GOP. The former has taken to Twitter to try and force the issue on Congress while placing the blame for this crap totally on the Dems. While the concept of insurers covering people with pre-existing conditions is the same as demanding you be sold fire insurance as you sift through the still smoldering ruins of your house, I would be willing to compromise on this. I think this is a golden opportunity for both the President and the GOP to outmaneuver the Dems on this. I am no special pleader for insurance companies since they jumped into bed (willingly or not) with Obama to help him seize one-sixth to now, by some estimates, one-fifth of our economy so they could profit off of our servitude. But if Team Trump can craft actual free market reforms that cut the red tape and increase competition, the savings would more than offset what is in reality a welfare program for the heretofore uninsurable. Then again, I trust the GOP to cock-CoC-Koch this up as well. And then there's SCOTUS. Well, good news anyway for now on this front. And imagining Obama on the floor, hugging his knees, bawling his eyes out while shrieking obscenities at his legacy turning to shit is satisfying in and of itself.
Back to Amnesty, Immigration and Invasion where the big story is the blame game over the death of a Guatemalan child at our border. As stated, the Dem-Left-Media complex is attempting to blood-libel President Trump as well as equate the Border Patrol with the Einsatzgruppen (see the link from Rabbi Aryeh Spero about abusing the Holocaust as a political cudgel). Stephen Miller disabuses the media for that garbage quite well and I don't think most Americans are going to fall for it either. Meanwhile, Schemer, Palsi and their ilk are double-dog daring the President about the government shutdown and are promising that the border wall will never get funded. Again, this is another political win for Trump in that the base and I think growing numbers of Americans in general want the border secure. And as I articulated last week, it's a golden opportunity for this President to educate the American people on the totally political stunt a government shutdown is, as the link about GOP Rep Tom Massie illustrates (see the link in the First Amendment section). In any case, just use the DoD to build the wall as a defense priority.
A natural segue straight into politics, but first the scandal sub-set where we have the testimony from the two Marines describing being surrounded by Democrat Antifa goon squads, good news about the college student going up against the Chicago Dem machine and beating them, a story about the Embezzling Nuns (Dominique a'nique a'sneak?), a long rap sheet on the "mythical" electoral fraud that Dems say doesn't exist, and the highly profitable non-profit AARP. Elsewhere, the government is already 75% funded through 2019, the "Republican" PAC that's a leftist front group, this Ilhan Omar dame is a real piece of work, a CNN poll shows bad news about impeachment mostly for CNN, NJ Dems are planning on swiping the state for good, the nightmare of a Doomberg reign, John Hickenlooper polishes a turd, ie his resume, and can the GOP be a working class party?
In First Amendment and Fake News fakery, Jeffrey Lord looks at more attempts to stifle Tucker Carlson and other voices on our side, devil worshipping in stage capitals, the government shutdown myth, and lamenting democracy in the big social media age.
To the Mueller witch hunt and coup against the President, how the FBI leaked to CNN and then used the network's report about their leak as a pretext to secure that fraudulent FISA warrant, with all the revelations about Mueller and the crooked FBI, where does Michael Flynn go to get his life back, and in case you were not aware, Michael Cohen is a truly loathsome insect. Lastly, a very cromulent question why he plead guilty to non-crimes.
Over at the foreign desk, Israel discovers yet another terrorist tunnel, an Iranian general has an oopsie, A look at India's elections, John Kerry's Farsi friend boasts about how to go around sanctions with this one neat trick and the Pope smokes dope. Meanwhile the President will be looking at a potential murder charge of a former Green Beret in the death of an Afghani while on duty there.
Back over here, the retooling of the White House staff begins with PDT tapping Mick Mulvaney to fill in as chief of staff, with Ryan Zinke effectively purged, a look at his accomplishments at the Interior Dept., 86% o government spending is... automatic?!, economic growth and haealth care, a warning about the financial sector, SCOTUS to review a challenge to the SEIU, where did all that polio come from, CDC?, the mayor of Pittsburgh as well as the state of New Jersey want you disarmed and dead (but your money first), Daniel Greenfield on Los Angeles' disastrous homeless policies, a trial date is set for a suspect in a gruesome torture/rape/murder case, the cops nab someone who menaced a synagogue in North Hollywood with a machete, Amazon's green initiatives mean red ink, the government does not feel your literal pain and the transgender madness can be and will be lethal to children.
From hither and yon, Farrakkkahn goes ape over Leah Rimini Scientology documentary showing link to Nation of Islam, Hamilton actor loves FALN terrorist and lastly, another great outing from Victor Davis Hanson on the globalists that hate us.
Anyway, links from around the world, across the nation and up your street. Have a better one and remain blessed.
“We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided,”Tucker Carlson
Quote II
“As a country, we need to stop pretending that the same doors open for everyone, because they don’t. I’m not a person of color. And I haven’t lived your life or experienced anything like the subtle prejudice, or more overt harm, that you may have experienced just because of the color of your skin.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, (D-MA)
Quote III
Not onward, Bill—downward. It’s over for you and your ilk.
We hate Kristol not only due to the aggressive Never Trumping, but also due to the fact that he seemed more than willing to believe it was righteous and conservative to send American soldiers over to die on Israel’s behalf. And he had the sort of spite for America’s indigenous working class that fairly begs for our hatred:
"Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in?….[A]fter two or three generations of hard work everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled—whatever. Then, luckily, you have these waves of people coming in from Italy, Ireland, Russia, and now Mexico, who really want to work hard and really want to succeed…."-Bill Kristol Taki's Magazine
Organically farmed food has a bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed food, due to the greater areas of land required. This is the finding of a new international study involving Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, published in the journal Nature.
The researchers developed a new method for assessing the climate impact from land-use, and used this, along with other methods, to compare organic and conventional food production. The results show that organic food can result in much greater emissions.
Tesla has had only three profitable quarters in the 15 years since its creation. The third-quarter results reported that Tesla made a $312-million profit due to a surge in production and sales of the Tesla Model 3 sedan. The earnings were thanks in part to the company's cost-cutting, spending less on future models, and delaying of payments to suppliers.
Despite the strong recent showing, doubts still linger over whether Tesla can consistently make a profit and meet its production targets. Much of the uncertainty comes because of statements coming from Musk himself, who recently told Axios that his company had been "within single digit weeks" of death. If the financial books at Tesla are really that bad, prospective Tesla buyers, investors, and government funders don't have much to cheer about, especially since the federal electric vehicle tax is slated to get cut in half by Jan. 1.
Millennials who feel they lack some basic life skills can now take "adulting" classes, which are expanding across the country. The classes teach life skills like cooking, budgeting and time management, CBS New York reports, and young adults are signing up for lessons in person and online.
Rachel Flehinger co-founded the aptly named Adulting School in Portland, Maine. This month, she is launching online classes geared toward millennials who want to learn how to sew on a button, understand modern art or even deal with love.
The course curriculum on love will include "how to have a relationship, how to talk to someone, conflict resolution — how not to fight," Flehinger said. It will even offer guidance on how to tell someone you love them.
You would figure in a self-esteem class or 3 they would have taught some life basics.
A Michigan couple have called for the removal of a Catholic priest who who used their son’s funeral to preach against suicide.
Instead of delivering the homily the Hullibarger family expected from Fr Don LaCuesta for their son Maison, 18, the priest used to funeral to tell mourners that the youth may have ruined his chances of getting to heaven by ending his own life on December 4.
I'm not a Catholic, but my faith shares some tenets with Catholicism. One of those includes suicide and the real possibility of being damned forever. My opinion? The funeral is for the living. The priest was concerned about those present and their souls. That being said, the priest should have just advised the family to go to a different congregation as he was uncomfortable with the decedent's manner of death.
***
Being in jail doesn't automatically make you a genius. Mailing your escape plans to the wrong person does. Genius Award Winners.
An escape plot to blast a hole into the Alamance County Detention Center was thwarted when an inmate mailed the plans to the wrong person, according to the sheriff’s office.
A woman received a letter from the Alamance County jail on Dec. 6. Thinking it was a letter to her, she opened it.
Inside, she found a detailed drawing of the Alamance County Detention Center, instructions for making a bomb and a plan for explosives to be planted on the south side of the detention center to create an escape route.
Math? I was told there would be no math!! Why is there math here?!
Last week, discussion in the comments turned to measurement conventions for riflescopes; MOA or Minutes Of Angle, and Mil or Milliradian. It occurred to me that not everyone may be familiar with the two and exactly what each is referring to. So at the risk of introducing math to the thread, let's take a look, shall we?
MOA - Minute(s) of Angle
MOA, or Minute of Angle, is simply an angular unit of measure describing the arc of a circle. A circle can be divided into 360 degrees, and one degree can be divided into 60 minutes. So one MOA is equal to 1/60th of one degree of arc.
On a flat rifle range, the target point straight in front of you is zero degrees elevation, and an imaginary point directly overhead is 90 degrees elevation, which really is just one quarter of a giant circle. One MOA is a teeeensy little wedge of that big angle. Good so far?
The nice thing about circles is the relationship between the radius and the arc remain constant. As the length of the radius increases, so does the arc. If we substitute the radius for range or distance to target, and the arc of the circle for elevation (or windage) we can compute a firing solution.
One Minute of Angle or MOA equals 1.047 inches at 100 yards. [trust me]. One MOA equals 2.094" at 200 yards (1.047x2), and 10.47" at 1000yds (1.047"x10), and so forth. The fractional amount of .047" or 47 thousandths per hundred yards is generally disregarded inside about 600 yards or so.
POP QUIZ:
John and Sue share a delicious Fuji apple, each eating 1/3. What is the value in inches of 1 MOA at 275 yards?
Mils or Milliradians
Mil stands for milliradian which is also an angular unit of measure describing the arc of a circle. A radian is the angle defined when the length of arc is equal to the radius of a circle. A milliradian is simply 1/1000th of one radian, and there are approximately 6.28 radians (rounded) in a full circle (2 x pi). Again, a very small wedge of a much larger angle.
One Mil is equal to 3.6 inches at 100 yards. [trust me again]. One mil equals 7.2" (3.6"x2) at 200 yards, and 36" (3.6"x10) at 1000 yards, and so on.
Fractional Mil adjustments at 100 yds
One Mil is therefore equal to about 3.6 MOA. To convert from MOA to mil, you multiply by 3.6 and to convert from mil to MOA you divide by 3.6
POP QUIZ:
A train leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 mph. What is the value in inches of one Mil at 625 yards?
Your shooting buddy has a mil scope and you have a MOA scope. He tells you he might be slightly gay, and the range to a target is 3.75 mils. How far away do you move your stuff in meters? What do you use for elevation in MOA?
So how is all this useful?
Well I'm glad you asked. Both conventions, the MOA and Milliradian are used to measure the angle, or elevation, of a rifle barrel above the horizontal. Well ain't that some shit! Math and geometry really are good for something!
Which is Better?
In my opinion, neither is clearly superior to the other. They both do the same thing and have very slight advantages and disadvantages (which are beyond the scope of this discussion - HA! See what I did there?) depending on the intended use. I see more scopes with Mil reticles on military rifles with targets ranged in meters and more MOA scopes on civilian competition rifles with targets ranged in yards. While there are slight differences, for example one MOA is a finer adjustment than one Mil, in the end I'd recommend using whichever system you like and are comfy with. The usefulness also depends a lot on matching the reticle to the intended use. I started using MOA riflescopes and will continue to do so because I don't see a reason to switch. If you like Mil scopes, then by all means use a Mil scope. If you're undecided, try both, and ask others who do the same type of shooting you do which they use, and why.
Mil DOT Reticle
Note in the reticle shown above, the distance between the 'dots' is one MIL, or 3.6 inches at 100 yards. Would you choose this scope/reticle combination if your intended use regularly included target shooting at 600 yards? Conversely, would it be a good choice for shooting larger targets at shorter distances where absolute precision was not a priority, but fast target acquisition was bigly important?
Nightforce MIL-RILL Reticle
Nightforce MOA MOAR-T Reticle
Putting it to Use
Depending on the riflescope, rifles are commonly 'zeroed' at 100yds (MOA) or sometimes 100 meters (mil). It's a matter of preference, and some people zero their rifles at longer distances, but the majority of shooters generally use a 100 yd/m zero. What is zeroing a rifle? Simply put it's adjusting the scope so the point of impact occurs exactly on target at 100 yards or 100 meters with zero elevation or windage indicated on the scope.
Here's where the MOA and Mil business begins to matter. Say you're shooting a .308 with an MOA scope at 800 yds. Your data shows 27.3 MOA in elevation is required at this distance. You dial that in (27.25 MOA and hold the rest), take the shot and are high and right about 4 inches. Well at 800 yds, 1 MOA is 8.4" (1.047" x 8 = 8.4" rounded) so I'd take off 1/2 MOA in elevation and wind then hold verrrrrry slightly low and left, and take another shot. If your rifle scope has .25 MOA adjustment, that's two hash marks or 'clicks' of the elevation and windage knobs. Some scopes have finer .125" or eighth MOA adjustments per click and in that case you would want to dial down four hash marks or clicks to equal 1/2 MOA. Mil based scopes usually have 1/10th Mil adjustments.
What's important is the little knobs can be a great tool for making adjustments. They can also create a disaster if you start turning them in the wrong direction, like someone did on firing position 42 in the last relay of Match 3 at the SW Nationals in Phoenix, AZ on February 5th, 2016, or so I've heard. I try to set them at the start of a match and leave them alone during each string, holding for wind and elevation, unless the conditions really change.
A Very Brief Tutorial on Ranging
You're out shooting and didn't realize the fancy rangefinder you got for Christmas uses batteries. Oh no! What do you do? Well you can use your riflescope to determine range if you know the size of the target using the following formulas:
MOA Scope
target size (inches) x 95.5 / size (MOA) = range (yards)
Metric users, estimate target size in centimeters and substitute the constant 34.4 in the formula to determine range in meters.
Mil Scope
target size (inches) x 27.8 / size (mils) = range (yards)
Metric users, estimate the target size in centimeters and substitute the constant 10 in the formula to determine the range in meters.
A good video from our pals at Vortex Optics can be found HERE with examples of ranging with reticles.
One important point on using scopes to determine range to target - Second Focal Plane (SFP) scopes only range accurately at one specific magnification, while First Focal Plane (FFP) scopes range accurately across the entire range of magnification. Again, this is only important when using a scope to determine the range to target. The scope zero and other functions are the same for both types.
Note to Readers This is intended as an introduction to the terms and concepts, rather than an exhaustive look at the use of riflescopes. For those interested, I'm planning a little more in-depth thread on determining elevation and windage and the factors that affect them.
This week's beauty of an Old Gun comes to us courtesy of Warmongerel, with an equally cool story to go with it:
My stepdad gave this to me 20+ years ago. It looked brand new so I figured that it was just some goofy 70's Eurotrash thing and put it in the safe and forgot about it. I looked it up a few years ago. It's an Astra 400 and it's almost 100 years old. They were made for the Spanish civil war and used by both sides. Some of them made it to Germany and were used by the Nazis instead of the Luger.
Very nicely done Warmongerel! Now have you bought a cookbook and signed up for the 2019 NoVaMoMe?
***This Old Cookbook***
OK you clowns - buy a copy of the cookbook. If you already have one for your own bad self, then give one as a gift this season. Remember; it's only pennies per day, all proceeds go to charity, and if you don't buy a copy then bluebell will be sad.
Finally Don't forget to mark your calendars for the NoVaMoMe on February 9, 2019. If you are interested, please email the organizers! There is also a link in the main page left sidebar.
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Please note the new and improved gmail account MoronGunThread for sending in stories and pictures. Again, that's morongunthread at gmail dot com. If you have a question you would like to ask Gun Thread Staff offline, just send us a note and we'll do our best to answer. If you care to share the story of your favorite firearm, send a picture with your nic and tell us what you sadly lost in the tragic canoe accident. If you would like to remain completely anonymous, just say so. Lurkers are welcome!
That's it for this week - have you been to the range?
Food Thread: Primitivo And Pig: A Match Made In Heaven
—CBD
Back in the day, Zinfandel was a poorly understood grape that was used mostly to make insipid white wines that had some residual sugar. Pretty boring and crappy. But there were an intrepid few in Northern California who understood how good the grape could be. Some of them were the Old Italian grape growers who knew of the grape from Italy, where it is called "Primitivo."
Now of course the slim-hipped hipsters have discovered Zinfandel and it is no longer a lovely secret, and the prices have skyrocketed. But the Italian version is still reasonably priced, and it can be a great drink. I was in Hoboken recently for dinner, at an old-school Italian restaurant that served the classics...and did a really good job of it. They had a Primitivo on the menu for not very much money, and it was a pleasure to drink. Fruity and big and without the sere qualities that too many modern wines aspire to.
So all of you wine drinkers out there, give it a try. Don't spend too much...my favorite wine store has two...a nice one for $11 and a fancy-bottle one for $17. A cursory check on the internet has dozens for less than $10, so they haven't gone mad with pricing like the California Zins.
This sounds absolutely spectacular! Pot-roasted Shoulder of Pork with Chilli and Beer
It's a simple recipe, with no weird ingredients, and the technique is basic. And that's as it should be! The liberal use of lemon juice is a nice touch, since it will counter the richness of the fatty meat. I would caution you to be careful with the dried red chili. The typical dried stuff in this country can be quite spicy, and while it will be damned fine eating, it might not be optimal for Red Sox fans and other weak-willed people.
Oh, I'll bet it will work with the other end of the pig. Hams are even cheaper than shoulders!
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I like eggnog! Yeah, it's sort of sweet and sort of thick and to be honest is redolent of mucus, but for whatever reason -- probably the booze -- it hits the spot once each year. Alton Brown's Eggnog sounds like it would be good, especially in comparison to some of the commercial brands. Taste Test: Eggnog is obviously subjective, but a few of these sound repulsive. Home made is worth the trouble, especially since it's only once a year...
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I love this idea, but the pie itself is massive, calling for two pounds of meat (smoked ham is never optional in Dildo World). If I were to make this I would make a few smaller pies, which would require actual thought before attempting, so..um...maybe not. English Pork Pie
Although, now that I think about it, the idea of a slice of pie rather than an entire pie for oneself is appealing.
Here's something a bit different. Fudgy Chocolate Mug Cakes
It's written to be made with, or at least for kids, but it's a quick and simple dessert that works well for just two people. I'm not a big fan of cakes, but hot out of the oven, or in this case microwave, covers up a multitude of sins.
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Food and cooking tips, Haggis, young wild pigs, Scotch Eggs, thick and fluffy pita and good tomatoes that aren't square, pale pink and covered with Mestizo E.coli: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com. Any advocacy of French Toast with syrup will result in disciplinary action up to and including being nuked from orbit.
Barkley plays the buffoon, but I have read that he is quite intelligent and thoughtful. Whether that is true is secondary to the reality that he seems to be a good man, and has good taste in friends. My Dad's Friendship With Charles Barkley What a lovely story!
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It's a huge waste of money, but it is pretty damned cool.
At least it doesn't take up acres and acres of roadway, like the CitiBike system in NYC.
Angela Merkel's Legacy Will Be The Rise Of The Fourth Reich: Muslim Style
—CBD
In Germany, protesters chant "Adolf Hitler" and "Allah-O-Akbar" while giving the Nazi Salute as they wave the Palestinian flag. 'Tis the Season! pic.twitter.com/rCJAeCizOt
There are leaves on the trees, so this isn't recent, and I cannot imagine that the German authorities did absolutely nothing...just the bare minimum. But the tone in Germany has changed; of that there is no doubt.
Perhaps Merkel is pleased, perhaps she is simply overwhelmed, perhaps she is confident that she can ride the tiger. I wonder what the typical German thinks? Are they pleased with the direction their country is taking? Do they look into the future of their children and grandchildren and have hope?
Good morning to all you 'rons, 'ettes, lurkers, and lurkettes, wine moms, frat bros, and everybody who's holding your beer. Welcome once again to the stately, prestigious, internationally acclaimed and high-class Sunday Morning Book Thread, a weekly compendium of reviews, observations, and a continuing conversation on books, reading, and publishing by escaped oafs who follow words with their fingers and whose lips move as they read. Unlike other AoSHQ comment threads, the Sunday Morning Book Thread is so hoity-toity, pants are required. Even if it's these pants which are advertised as Thanksgiving Pleated Drumsticks Pleated Pants, and you can see why. Ugh.
The book tells the stories behind 80 different words and phrases whose origins lie on the world map—so here’s a quick round-the-world thread of some of the etymological tales you’ll find inside... pic.twitter.com/pb2HsRoDe9
I found a used copy of The Works of Anne Bradstreet for my dear wife this year. Mrs. Bradstreet was a woman who was born in England in 1612, emigrated to America in 1630, raised 8 children, and wrote poetry when she could. She was America's first published poet. Bradstreet was a serious Puritan and her Christianity comes out in many of her poems. Modern scholars try to make her out to be some sort of paleo-feminist because she wrote lines such as "I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/Who says my hand a needle better fits" which they interpret to mean she'd be all in on intersectional lesbian folk dancing and smashing the patriarchy if she were alive today. But
By using the lines, "These O protect from stepdame's injury", Bradstreet is calling for her children to be protected from the abuse of a future step mother. The fact that Bradstreet believes that God will grant her husband with a new wife if she dies shows how much Puritan women believed in marriage and how God provided them with this gift.
Bradstreet was a remarkable woman, whether feminist or not, highly educated and, in fact, her husband and her father helped found Harvard University in 1636. Her personal library reputedly contained over 9000 books, although she lost most of them when her house burned down. She even wrote one of her poems about it, "Upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666".
I hope Mrs. Muse enjoys her verse.
Moron Recommendation
218 I finished "Cult City" by Daniel Flynn. It was a compelling read, but a tough read. So much local San Francisco history. It all leads inevitably to the 900+ deaths at Jonestown. Jim Jones was a sick bastard, and it was a shame how all the local pols sucked up to him. Followed by Dan White, a Democrat, and Diane Feinstein protoge running on a gun control platform, goes all shooty at City Hall. $9.99 on kindle. Posted by: navybrat, obtuse by nature at December 09, 2018 11:02 AM (w7KSn)
See, you morons back east, you with your Philly and Baltimore and Cleveland, you think you've won the "Most Corrupt Sh*thole City in America" prize, but I tell you, you've got some competition from the West Coast, specifically from San Francisco, where AIDS got a major signal boost because the hapless municipal health officials didn't want to close down the bathhouses from where it was spreading, because the gays would get mad, and also, as this book details, we have psychopathic cult leaders who are tight with local politicians so they can carry on their madness unchecked.
In life, Jim Jones enjoyed the support of prominent politicians and Hollywood stars even as he preached atheism and communism from the pulpit; in death, he transformed into a fringe figure, a “fundamentalist Christian” and a “fascist.”
In life, Harvey Milk faked hate crimes, outed friends, and falsely claimed that the US Navy dishonorably discharged him over his homosexuality; in death, he is honored in an Oscar-winning movie, with a California state holiday, and a US Navy ship named after him. His assassin, a blue-collar Democrat who often voted with Milk in support of gay issues, is remembered as a right-winger and a homophobe.
But the story extends far beyond Jones and Milk. Author Daniel J. Flynn vividly portrays the strange intersection of mainstream politics and murderous extremism in 1970s San Francisco—the hangover after the high of the Summer of Love.
I still remember seeing the footage from Jonestown live on TV, hundreds of bodies lying all around on the grounds outside, it was one of the most horrific things I had ever seen.
283 Latest book I've read is Prize Money by Adam Hardy, part of the Fox series of sea novels. These are almost forgotten despite being quite good, and I've been slowly collecting them for more than a decade.
Posted by: Christopher R Taylor at December 09, 2018 11:39 AM (39g3+)
Never heard of this author, so I poked around a bit. According to Amazon,
Adam Hardy was a pen name used by Kenneth Bulmer (1921-2005). A prolific writer, Bulmer wrote over 160 novels and innumerable short stories, both under his real name and various pen names. He is best known for science fiction, including his long-running Dray Prescot series of planetary romances, but he wrote in many genres.
The novel referenced by Chris, Prize Money, appears to be the 3rd in a 14-book series featuring the 'Age of Sail' naval adventures of one George Abercrombie Fox. The first Fox novel appeared in 1973. I have no idea how good they are, but the Kindle editions are $2.99 each, so I'd say it's worth the risk. Here are the first three in the series:
I visit Ace multiple times each day, and revel in the content and comments. My wife and I are both artists, and I've been writing a blog for years attacking the corruption of Postmodern art and its corrosive effects on our culture. I've written a book on the subject I'd love to share with the Horde.
Discover Remodernism, a new art movement of the people, by the people, for the people...
Art is a more enduring and vital human experience than the power games of a greedy and fraudulent ruling class. The story of the 21st Century will be the dismantling of centralized power. As always, this course of history was prophesied by artists--those who are intuitively aware of the path unfolding ahead. Their works become maps so that others may find the way. Enduring changes start in the arts.
Remodern America provides an historical overview of how art shapes society and politics. This book exposes how the contemporary art world is used as a tool of oppression. Most importantly, Remodern America provides the solution, and reveals how the power of art can be reclaimed as a force for liberty.
Richard's wife has created a book trailer for it as well. It lasts a little less than a minute.
This introduction to the history of medicine begins with the evolution of infectious diseases at the end of the last ice age. It describes the origin of science and medicine in ancient civilizations, including China and India. The first third of the book covers the early period that is considered the "classical" history of medicine. The remainder describes the evolution of modern medicine and surgery up to the present. The final chapter is a history of medical economics and explains the origin of health insurance, HMOs and medical malpractice lawsuits, subjects explained nowhere else in the medical school curriculum. There is a 40 page index and over 550 footnotes, most of them references to the original articles described in the text. A bibliography of essential sources is also included.
It's a history of medicine intended for medical students, nurses and physicians. I think this mostly means it discusses its topics using medical terms and concepts that should be familiar to those in the field and probably doesn't provide much in the way of definitions for the general reader. Still, I glanced through the Kindle sample, and I think it looks like it would be an interesting read, even for non-specialists.
A memoir of a medical career of 50 years. The memoir is chiefly about patients and their stories. What we did then and what we know now.
I first mentioned these books in 2015, but they were only available in dead tree editions> But now, bothbooks are available on Kindle and they're inexpensively priced at < $6.00.
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Dave Dubrow writes:
The short story anthology I've edited, Appalling Stories 2, is out and available at Amazon. It's the spiritual sequel to the top-selling short story anthology Appalling Stories, and carries on the tradition of ripped-from-the-headlines short fiction written to entertain, amuse, and even horrify.
The Amazon blurb says:
In these pages you'll read stories of humanity's terrifying First Contact with extraterrestrial life, the horrifying secret behind today's radical feminist movement, what happens when the wokest man you know discards the last of his White Privilege, and more. From a far-future history of America's decline to disturbing tales of gun control gone wild, you're sure to find something that will stick with you long after you've closed the book.
And the best part is that you'll be making an SJW so mad when you tell him/her/zir what you're reading.
Also:
And my standard offer applies: anyone who is willing to post a review on Amazon can get a free electronic copy if they email me at davedauthor at gmail.com.
If you like, you can follow me on Twitter, where I make the occasional snarky comment.
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Don't forget the AoSHQ reading group on Goodreads. It's meant to support horde writers and to talk about the great books that come up on the book thread. It's called AoSHQ Moron Horde and the link to it is here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/175335-aoshq-moron-horde.
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So that's all for this week. As always, book thread tips, suggestions, bribes, insults, threats, ugly pants pics and moron library submissions may be sent to OregonMuse, Proprietor, AoSHQ Book Thread, at the book thread e-mail address: aoshqbookthread, followed by the 'at' sign, and then 'G' mail, and then dot cee oh emm.
What have you all been reading this week? Hopefully something good, because, as you all know, life is too short to be reading lousy books.
When I was young I decided to go to Medical School. At the entrance exam, we were asked to rearrange the letters PNEIS and form the name of an important human body part which is most useful when erect. Those who said SPINE are physicians today. The rest of us went to the Corner Bar for a pitcher of beer...
Do you need to build a booby-trap or two? Maybe you can get an idea or two from the Christmas movie, Home Alone.
Check out this incredibly dedicated animated flipbook re-creation of all the booby traps in the 1990 holiday scare-'em film HOME ALONE, starring Macaulay Culkin and Joe Pesci.
Reddit user /u/MundaneSeesaw shared a post recently, claiming that a local Pizza Hut had once overloaded their family’s phone line. According to them, the company declined numerous attempts to reason with them, so they did the only thing they could. They took their time executing their carefully crafted revenge plan, making sure the business received what it deserved. Some, however, argued that maybe the punishment was too harsh, to which /u/MundaneSeesaw replied, “[You] clearly never been to some of the smaller towns in the south with populations that are primarily rednecks.” Scroll down to read the entire thing, and if it doesn’t satisfy your thirst for blood, fire up these 91 Revenge Stories That Will Make You Think Twice Before Being An Asshole To Other People.
P.S. Bored Panda has contacted Pizza Hut and /u/MundaneSeesaw, and we’ll update the post as soon as we get more details.
Three-wheelers have always been a popular mode of public transport in India, and Mahindra is the first major auto player to enter the electric three-wheeler segment. Last month, Mahindra Electric, a division of the Indian retail-to-automobile conglomerate Mahindra & Mahindra, launched two models of e-rickshaws—the Treo and Treo Yaari.
“The sale of personal vehicles is pretty low, particularly four-wheelers,” said Mahesh Babu, CEO of Mahindra Electric. About 2,000 of the company’s electric four-wheelers, which include brands like e2oPlus and eVerito, run as cabs, he said. He added that most of the sales in the last two years have been to commercial fleet operators like Ola, Uber, and car rental company Zoomcar.
The proceeds do not go to the Cob Dental Plan but to very worthwhile charities. So buy a book or three.
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Snow shovel control means knowing where your banks are. But not for this Genius Award Winner.
In a fit of road rage, a drunken man chased a car while brandishing a sword and snow shovel before spitting at police when they took him into custody Saturday, according to jail records.
Early Saturday morning, the man became embroiled in "a road rage incident" on Pioneer Road in Draper, according to jail records. He then followed the other car involved in the incident to the driver’s workplace on Fort Street and confronted the person inside the car, attempting to punch them through the window.
A Southwest Airlines pilot pulled a U-turn to make an unplanned medical delivery to Seattle. A human heart, which was supposed to be delivered to Seattle, wasn’t unloaded from the plane, The Seattle Times reports.
The heart was loaded onto the plane by a courier service for the plane’s Sacramento-to-Seattle leg. The crew realized the heart was still in the cargo hold Sunday in the middle of the Southwest Airlines flight’s Seattle-to-Dallas leg. The pilot made a U-turn and returned to Seattle, the paper reports. The heart was bound for a tissue processor to harvest a valve.
“Nothing is more important to us than the safety of our customers and the safe delivery of the precious cargo we transport every day,” a Southwest spokesman told the Seattle Times.
One passenger told the newspaper that when the captain explained the situation to the people aboard the flight, they reacted with kindness. Once they made it back to Seattle, passengers had to transfer to a different aircraft for an unrelated mechanical issue, causing a total of about a 5-hour delay, the paper reported.
Commercial airlines are known to work with companies that ship organs intended for transplant. That is a small amount of their business, however, with the Dallas Business Journal reporting that it accounts for less than 1% of Southwest’s revenue.
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Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by Effort.
H/T Ladyl
Notice: Posted with permission by the Ace Media Empire and AceCorp, LLC. Ditto.
Saturday Evening Movie Thread 12-15-2018 [Hosted By: TheJamesMadison]
—OregonMuse
A.I. Artificial Intelligence: A Revisitation
For those of you who pay very close attention to what I list I've been watching (which is hopefully previous few), you may remember that a few months back I went through the entirety of Stanley Kubrick's filmography in about two weeks. It was a wonderful experience since I love the man's movie's so much. But that experience birthed an idea in my mind that germinated for months until I finally followed through on it last week. I rewatched A.I. Artificial Intelligence, one of several films Kubrick had toyed with for years while leaving it unfinished.
In 1979, while Kubrick was filming The Shining in England, Steven Spielberg was also filming Raiders of the Lost Ark on the same studio lot. On a day when the lot was largely deserted, Spielberg and Kubrick found each other. In 1979, Spielberg was the wunderkind of Hollywood who had made Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but Kubrick was still the man who had made 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove. Spielberg was in awe, and Kubrick was very open, inviting the younger filmmaker to see some parts of the sets and inviting him to dinner. The two became friends for the rest of Kubrick's life.
It wasn't merely a personal relationship that developed, but a proto-professional one as well, for when Kubrick began toying with the idea of making a movie about a robot boy, he included Spielberg in many conversations. At one point in the early 90s, Kubrick even tried to convince Spielberg to make the film himself, insisting that the material was closer to the younger filmmaker's sensibilities that Kubrick's, but Spielberg never fully committed. There were rumors that Kubrick was going to take up A.I. as his next movie after Eyes Wide Shut, but we'll never know if that's for sure.
As a tribute to Kubrick after his death, Spielberg took on A.I. as his next project.
Based on what I've read, the reason that Kubrick had so much trouble tackling the project was the central character of David, the robot built to love. I think he could never quite answer the question to himself of whether David was something capable of love or just a program, playing out in service to his programming. As the artist in charge of bringing the vision to screen, he needed a firm answer, which he was never able to provide himself.
When Spielberg took over, it feels like he jumped at an answer (yes, David's love is real), and started making the film. However, that answer that Spielberg presumably provides in the movie actually ends up going against some things that are deeper into the movie's intentions, those elements that maintain the question from Kubrick's mind through to the final product. And that contradiction is what ended up fascinating me most about the movie upon this first watch of the movie in over a decade.
But first, let's cover some of the story.
The First Act
One of the things that Spielberg mentions when he talks about this movie is that it's essentially broken down into three parts. The first is everything up to David's abandonment, the second is everything from that point to the arrival at Manhattan, and the third is the rest of the film. He assigns chief authorship of the three parts to either himself or Kubrick. The first and third are all Kubrick's he says, while the second is mostly Spielberg.
I remember some early reviews of the film that got everything about that completely backwards. They assumed that the first part was Spielberg's because it dealt with the home and boyhood, the second was Kubrick's because it was "dark", and the third was Spielberg's because everyone hated it. However, when you actually watch the movie with Spielberg's explanation in the back of your mind, it becomes screamingly obvious about the questions of authorship.
The first act is one of the most Kubrickian pieces of filmmaking that Stanley Kubrick never lensed. The shot composition carries the kind of precision that Kubrick was famous for. The performances have a subtlety and exactness that feel as designed as anything anyone ever did for Kubrick. The scene of the first dinner with David, the robot before he is imprinted to love his mother, Monica, is so fulsomely Kubrick that I could believe it was filmed by his ghost.
In this first act, a grieving mother and father visit their real son who is cryogenically frozen as they await a cure to a life-threatening disease the boy carries. The father works for a major robotics company while his mother refuses to let go of her son. The head of the robotics firm offers a prototype robot to the family, one made in the form of a boy who is designed to love. They are beta-testers. Monica, the mother, is resistant to the very idea, but out of both curiosity and her own melancholy decides to keep the boy robot around. As she grows more fond of the little thing's quirks and she sees the possibility of finding some replacement for the boy she had lost, Monica imprints on David, a process that is irreversible. The twist comes when the real son, Martin, is brought back and the two children are set at odds with each other for the love of their mother. David's purpose is so simple that he has trouble understanding his place is this newly reformed family. After a series of misunderstood acts that look threatening, Monica must send David back to the manufacturers for destruction, but she cannot do it, leaving him in the woods to run away instead.
If this first hour or so of the film were the entire film, I think it might be the single best movie that Spielberg ever made.
The Second Act
That's not to imply that the second act is bad by any means, but where the first act feels so perfect in execution, the second feels inelegant, especially in comparison.
Back to supposition of the backend of production. Kubrick worked on and off of A.I. for almost 15 years. In that time he made two films (Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut) while also trying to develop other films (The Aryan Papers in particular). It's obvious that he never fully fleshed out every point, and I think this major second section of the movie is the part the received the least amount of his attention. We know that the Flesh Fair, where robots are torn apart to the cheers of a human audience, was the brainchild of Spielberg, but Rouge City and Doctor Know were mostly Kubrick's (Robin Williams actually recorded his part at the direction of Kubrick before the director's death). This is the section where the two filmmakers seem to clash the most. This is the section that feels the most Spielbergian.
It's much more active than the first or third acts, with many more moving parts. It introduces Jude Law's character Gigolo Joe, contains a lot of travel and an embrace of special effects in some rather gaudy ways that the other two parts don't share. The act itself is good, but a solid step down from the first.
Where the inelegance really steps up, though, is in two major plot points. The first is around the introduction of Gigolo Joe. Joe is a robot lover/prostitute who services human women. He goes into a hotel to meet a client, finds her dead and her husband there, having done the murder. Joe knows that this means he's in trouble, but the explanation for that is absent. Does Joe believe that he'll be apprehended for her murder? It's unclear why anyone would think so, and that murkiness opens up the second act with a sense of confusion. The second plot point is how David and Joe end up escaping Rouge City. The police arrive to arrest Joe, but leave their amphibicopter unprotected so David can just get into it, play around with the controls a bit, and save Joe. It's not a plot hole, but a point of plot convenience that's extremely unsatisfying that also feels like something that an artist with more time to iron out details would have figured out better.
Still, the images are stark, especially the use of the moon air balloon as the vehicle to steal rogue robots. I really like Joe as a character. The scene with Doctor Know is fun to watch. David's journey through different versions of love and hate, never finding any substitute for his core programming for his mother, is colorful and engaging.
The Third Act
From the moment we join Joe and David flying over the flooded Manhattan, we are firmly in Kubrick territory again. The movie quiets back down and focuses again sharply on David. They fly through the ruins of New York and find the hint they had gathered in Rouge City, the Lions who Weep, statues of lions with water streaming out of their mouths and eyes a hundred feet above the ocean.
It is in this building that the robotics firm has established a presence in wait for David's arrival, but there are surprises waiting for David, all that look exactly like him. David had been told by everyone around him that he was unique, one of a kind. But, according to Professor Hobby, David's creator, he's merely the first of a kind. Is David's love for his mommy unique anymore? He lashes out against the other active David, smashing his head in with a lamp. When Professor Hobby leaves to find others to talk with David, the robot, left with no meaning anymore, throws himself from the building into the water where he sees his next salvation. Joe saves David only to switch places with him in the amphibicoptor as Joe gets captured and David takes the craft into the ocean to face the Blue Fairy (more about her in a little bit) where he spends several thousand years begging her to become a real boy.
Before moving on to the coda, I just want to take a second to mention the marvelous imagery of this section. The lions weeping, the sight of New York, the line of robot boys, David peering through the face of another David to see where his first memory came from. It's all so striking and feels more like it came from the imagination of Kubrick than Spielberg. No offence to Mr. Spielberg, who is a very fine director, but Kubrick's use of imagery always feels more purposeful and thought out.
The Ending
According to Spielberg and Ian Watson (who wrote Kubrick's original treatment for the movie), this ending isn't a creation of Spielberg, but what Kubrick wanted. Kubrick wasn't known for rank sentimentality, so that reading of the ending, if you have it, might need to be revisited.
I recall talking with a teacher of mine after the movie had been out for some time who thought that the film overall was good, but the ending made it bad. I hung along with this opinion for a very long time, thinking that the ending was a mistake, until I watched the movie again recently. Instead of a schmaltzy coda that gave David everything he wanted, I saw a bitter, cynical ending about how David never got what he actually wanted. And that second reading of the film was much sadder to me.
In order to get to that reading though, we have to look at some of the mechanics of the ending.
David has run out of battery power in the ensuing two thousand years when a race of advanced robots wakes him from his sleep. They read his mind and exclaim that this robot knew humans! The next thing we see is David waking up in the home he shared with Monica. Called out to by a voice, he finds the Blue Fairy who promises to give David a long life in this place, but David only wants Monica, his mommy. The Blue Fairy grants his wish and disappears.
Before David sees Monica, though, he's visited by one of the robots who explains to him that they can bring back Monica from the dead, but she will only last one day before she will expire never to return again. Does he really want this? Yes, he wants his mommy. The robots decide to give him what he wants. David proceeds to have the happiest day with his mommy, coloring, cooking, and just having a joyful time before Monica begins to grow tired. David puts her to sleep and falls asleep next to her with the narrator's voice heavily implying that David never woke up again.
On the surface, this seems like David got everything that he wanted, and he received a happy ending, an interpretation aided by the very lovely music John Williams scored for the scene, but I think a different interpretation is in order.
David never actually woke up from his sleep, and the robots put him into a computer simulation. They wanted to learn about either humans or their early ancestor robots and thought that they could learn from David, hoping to use him to understand in greater deal than they already knew. They offered him a long life to explore, and what did he ask for? His mommy. Knowing that they could get no more from him, they learned what they could from his single day fulfilling his purpose of loving and being loved, and they shut him down. They put him down like a sick dog, because that's all he was good for.
Pinocchio
The single largest motif of the film is the children's story Pinocchio. This is another assumption that early film viewers made about the film, that the idea of including the story of the marionette into the film was Spielberg's idea. According to everyone involved with the film, it was Kubrick's. There's a small detail in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the main character talks up the movie version of Pinocchio and tries to convince his family to go to a screening instead of Goofy Golf. And yet, it was still Kubrick's idea.
Like many motifs, the images tied to the ideas are there to highlight the themes and characters of the film. The parallels between Pinocchio's journey and David's are obvious, but the parallels end at appearance, and I think that's the point.
In the original story, Pinocchio goes through his adventures, grows, and eventually does become a real boy. David, on the other hand, is on a facsimile of Pinocchio's journey. He never really grows, and he never becomes a real boy. Even his final moments are a deception (perhaps a self-deception). It's an illuminating thread that helps highlight the central ideas at the core of the film, and I find it rather elegantly intertwined.
The contrast created the idea in my head that Kubrick wanted to say with finality that David's entire life was an act of cruelty. His creation, the imprinting, his abandonment, his journey, and his final day were all deceptions that acted only to create something that could never fully fulfill its mission. If David's emotions are real, then building a never aging robot who can love is purely cruel. He can never grow. He can never develop. He can never find satisfaction. The only way to give him anything like that is to end his existence once he gets a temporary sense of it.
A Note or Two
Thank you to everyone who has prayed for my family this week. Your thoughts have helped us through a difficult time for our family.
Also, I will be on a boat at sea right about now, so I can't comment tonight along with you. However, I will be reading them later, red pen in hand, to correct all of your incorrect opinions.
Movies I Saw This Week: Predestination (Netflix Rating 5/5 | Quality Rating 3.5/4) Poster blurb: "Wonderfully twisty with a great pair of central characters." [Netflix DVD] Altered States (Netflix Rating 3/5 | Quality Rating 2.5/4) "A bunch of interesting ideas in search of a story." [Netflix DVD] Enemy Mine (Netflix Rating 2/5 | Quality Rating 1.5/4) "Represents the absolute worst of science fiction. Obvious, plodding, rote, predictable, and preachy." ["Library"] The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Netflix Rating 5/5 | Quality Rating 4/4) "Makes me want more directors to direct a series of short films around a theme. Absolutely fantastic." [Netflix Instant] The Experiment (Netflix Rating 2/5 | Quality Rating 1/4) "Predictable, unbelievable, and just not that well written." [Netflix Instant] The Place Beyond the Pines (Netflix Rating 4/5 | Quality Rating 3/4) "Intelligent, if a bit emotionally underwhelming, tale of violence." [Netflix Instant] The Lord of the Rings (Netflix Rating 3/5 | Quality Rating 2/4) "An interesting failure of an adaptation that feels more like a highlight reel than a story." [Personal Collection]
Contact
Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.
I feel sorry for the little boy. Evidently, his all-out attack with the king didn't work out as he had hoped.
More Challenging Problem - Black To Play (850)
Goal: Win decisive material
Hint: Force White to give up his rook
8/4kp2/2Qp1p2/5P2/4P3/Pp1q4/1P1r4/KR6 b - - 0 1
Dress Pr0n For The 'Ettes:
Striped glacé silk in bright sky blue that was worn as a wedding dress in 1894, presumably with an eye to practicality as a dress that could be worn subsequently for Sunday best....an eye catching blue bride @Te_Papa#1890s#fashionhistorypic.twitter.com/VTYQvZ0xlS
Pointless is 2.Qc7+ Kf8 3.Qc8+ Kg7 4.Rc1 and White has run out of checks
2...Qc2!
3.Qxc2 bxc2
At this point, White is in a state of zugzwang. 4.Rxd1? is bad because 4...cxd1Q+ and 4.Rb1?? cxb1Q# is even worse. The best White can do is
4.Ka2 Rxc1 and wins the rook outright.
Hope to see you all next week!
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Note: that cryptic line of letters and numbers you see underneath each board diagram is a representation of the position in what is known as "Forsyth-Edwards Notation", or F.E.N. It's actually readable by humans. Most computer applications nowadays can read FEN, so those of you who may want to study the position, you can copy the line of FEN and paste into your chess app and it should automatically recreate the position on its display board. Or, Windows users can just "triple click" on it and the entire line will be highlighted so you can copy and paste it into your chess app.
___________
So that about wraps it up for this week. Chess thread tips, suggestions, bribes, rumors, threats, and insults may be sent to my yahoo address: OregonMuse little-a-in-a-circle yahoo dott com.
Stanford researchers warn that the number of animal bites is likely to rise amid climate change and developmental pressures.
Rising temperatures are already exposing people in temperate climates to more mosquitoes and ticks, and developmental sprawl is reducing the amount of land available exclusively to animals.
"As available habitat for these animals increasingly overlaps with human development and recreational activities," the researchers wrote in a BMJ news release, "it is expected encounters with animals may increase and could result in increased animal-related injuries."
Andrea Gaylord's house in Paradise, California, was completely destroyed by the devastating Camp Fire last month, but she feared she had lost something much more precious.
As she raced to escape a fire that killed 85 people in Northern California, she called to her two dogs, brothers Madison and Miguel, but they were nowhere to be found and had to be left behind.
"It was the worst feeling in the world,'' Gaylord said on TODAY Monday. "It's like you have to choose. The whole time I thought, 'What was going to happen to those dogs?' It was horrible."
-- An animal rescuer responded to a factory in Australia where he drilled a hole to free a cat that somehow became trapped between two walls.
Nigel Williamson of Nigel's Animal Rescue and Pest Control said he was called to a factory in Victoria on Sunday when workers discovered the trapped cat and State Emergency Service volunteers were unable to reach the feline.
***
A couple of links from our friend Hank Curmudgeon.
Here is little Velvet. She is 19 years old. (She is both the tiniest and the longest lived cat I've ever had.) She was abandoned by her mother as a wee kitten in late fall and has been in our hearts ever since. We put food out and were finally able to entice her to come inside from the deck when she was about 6 mos. old. She endured a lot of cold icy nights and lost a hunk of her left ear to frostbite during that unusually brutal winter -- but that all just proves what a survivor she is. Unless one gets really lucky with the lighting it's hard to get good photos of black cats. But in this recent picture she was caught performing one of her favorite wintertime activities these days: blocking warmth to the whole rest of the room while she snoozes on the heat register.
Thank you again for the enjoyable pet section on the blog each Saturday. - (mostly lurker) corn and beans
Wow! 19 years is awesome. Velvet must have a pretty darn good life there at the corn and beans home. Thanks for sharing with us and your kind words about the Pet Thread.
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Chrissy-moose checking out the butt crack of our 12 foot inflatable Santa Claus. She has been snacking and sleeping in our back yard on and off for about a month. She's probably 1-1/2 years old, very fuzzy and healthy looking if a bit small. We also saw her probably paramour roving the neighborhood. He's got quite the rack. :)
tcn in AK
Maybe not a Pet Moron but definitely an Animal Moron unless it identifies as an amphibian. Thanks for sharing, that's a cool photo.
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Hi Ace:
Not an oaf or a lurker, but I am a lout. This is Saki, our kitten. What better name for a mischievous kitten than Japanese rice wine? Should we have named her "Boone's Farm"?
I never thought I would live to see the day when I would have a kitten on my knee watching college football with me. We both disdain the NFL. -Ken
Saki? You could have name her 'Mad Dog'? Just kidding. Nice looking kitteh and glad she watches football and not figure skating. We appreciate you submitting this story.
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I am a faithful lurker , love to see everyone's pets, gardens. I've included pics of our new baby, Harley, a 4 year old Golden Retriever mix. She is always looking for a party, and for a free dog, only cost us $300 at vet, $350 for fencing to complete enclosure of our 5 acres. The other pic is our beloved Springer Spaniel, Biscuit, who passed away at age of 14.He is much missed, a faithful and loved companion. Beside him is Max the Cat, our 16 year old cat, otherwise know as the King of Siam. He is somewhat disgruntled that he now out lived 2 and has to train the third dog to our family. Max is the enforcer of our 5 acres, and a fabulous hunter. -David
Thanks for sharing these wonderful photos. Love the photo of Biscuit and Max, "Let us in, Dammit!". Sorry to hear of Biscuit's passing.
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Thank you for stopping by this afternoon. And a BIG THANK YOU to those who submitted items for the Pet Thread.
If you have something you wish to submit you can at petmorons at gmail dot com.
Saturday Gardening Thread: Not much time before Christmas [KT]
—Open Blogger
Hello, gardeners and friends of gardeners! Are your yard and garden ready for Christmas?
The squirrel above, busy getting ready for winter, was photographed by one of my Swiss friends in a park in the USA. Not sure where. He wasn't writing in English.
If only those little critters were not so destructive.
Hurricane season is over in South Carolina. Thank goodness. My niece and her husband returned to Brookgreen for their Nights of a Thousand Candles.
See Brookgreen Gardens come to life amid the soft glow of more than 4,500 hand-lit candles and countless sparkling lights. From 3 - 10 pm walk the paths with a warm cup of cider, hear the sounds of holiday music, carolers singing, and celebrate the season with family and friends!
Some trees really are adorned by a lot of lights. Can't tell if there is a little elf or something near the base of the trunk.
Palms:
Two views of trees already festooned with Spanish Moss:
You can go indoors for some exhibits, including a Harry Potter-themed miniature train set-up with a flying car on one side and dementors flying above on the other.
Three reminders that Brookgreen was conceived as a sculpture garden:
And here's a community Christmas tree. Do you have one in your town?
Many people are practiced at picking the perfect tree. They'll judge on things like color, size, shape, needle quality, and bushiness. But behind the annual selection of a coniferous house guest--some 30 million of them a year, in the US--is a ton of science.
To Bert Cregg, identifying exactly what makes a tree perfect is more than a holiday tradition, it's a major part of his job. He's a forest researcher at Michigan State University and a renowned expert on Christmas tree production. His work covers two main areas: genetics and culture techniques. "Basically, how can we identify species and seed sources that are going to lead to better Christmas trees, and how can growers manage their farms to produce better trees," he says.
Thirty million. Ever thought about growing your own? Ever grown your own? How did it turn out?
Some of the science is described at the link. Pre-science ritual depicted below:
Here's something a little different. Think this tree is cat-proof? I wouldn't count on it, personally. Maybe there's something I don't know about it.
Edible Gardening, Gifts, etc.
Not much to eat in most gardens this time of year, but the oranges are on here. And here's a banana from somewhere in Central California. Perhaps near the coast. They would fit in most Christmas stockings. Heh.
I have been getting email notifications and gift certificate offers from various seed catalogs. I kind of like the one from Nichols, a smallish nursery in the Northwest. You can order a mail gift certificate or get a PDF certificate until the weekend before Christmas. If you want to place a veggie seed order (0or herbs, spices or teas), use the promo code CHILLY for 20% off on the "view cart" page.
They also carry beer and winemaking supplies and some other stuff. Get some Variegated Barley Cat Grass for your pets. Just a dollar.
I am ordering seeds for a friend from Pinetree.
Gardens of The Horde
Lurker anonymous had another species of aloe from her collection bloom this week:
Just love these succulents. Here is one of my Aloe bainesii in bloom.
Got lucky, great nursery in the area had some agaves on sale and a Charley Brown aloe. (He looks like he fell over and many of his arms are mangled. But he was 1/2 price and he will weather the incident). Think I need to go back and buy three more. I'm addicted, what can I say?
AOS and your garden thread really make my day.
I like the color of the flowers. And they look kind of whimsical to me.
Aloe bainesii is also called Tree Aloe. It grows to 15 meters in its native habitat and up to 30 feet in favored locations in the USA. It gets pretty wide, too. Its current scientic name is Aloe barberae, but it will probably still go by its older scientific name in nurseries for a while.
The plant above will likely be even more impressive in the future.
If you would like to send information and/or photos for the Saturday Gardening Thread, the address is:
ktinthegarden
at g mail dot com
Include your nic unless you just want to be a lurker.
Happy Saturday! Today's musings turned out to be about the efforts of people on The Left to be understood, mostly.
Social Media
I am finding interesting things at Quillette on a regular basis now. The image above is from a piece on the travails of someone from The Left in dealing with Twitter.
So what are we to make of my ban? The only sensible conclusion is that Twitter is run by a coterie of crypto-fascists. Needless to say, this bodes ill for the social justice movement. . .
Do not pity me. As a woman in a heteronormative patriarchal world I am accustomed to males like Jack Dorsey attempting to keep me silent. In my absence from Twitter, I took the opportunity to spend some time at a resort in Val d'Isere, where I could relax and contemplate my oppression. I even managed to write a book which I have entitled Woke: A Guide to Social Justice. I did want to call it My Struggle, but that title was already taken apparently.
Entertainment
We are all aware of the angst caused on The Left by the song, "Baby, It's Cold Outside". But David Thompson alerts us to another American Classic which has been given a fresh, dismaying interpretation:
The Wizard of Oz is a grotesque predictor of Trump's America.
"It says so right here, in The Guardian. Specifically,
Oz is first wondrous and revelatory, then sinister and suspect, a good trip that goes wrong... It's this lurking inner wrongness, the darkness at its edges and the emptiness at its core, that speaks to me now.
"The author of the above is Bidisha, a mono-named entity who may be familiar to long-term readers, and who describes herself, unironically, as a "non-white angry political female." One who seems determined to find yet another staple of Christmas both ghastly and problematic:"
It's impossible to watch the newly crowned 'most influential film ever' without seeing the parallels to the sickly US of today.
"Oh, ye doubters. Madame Bidisha has her reasons."
We can read the catastrophic effects of climate change into the tornado that sets the narrative off,
"I didn't say they would be convincing."
Check out her reasons for being overwhelmed by the predictive power of this movie. Maybe you can help answer her question about why she is reading so much into this movie at this time.
From the comments:
Bad haircuts, small hands, "Munch" rhymes with "Drumpf",
that is certainly no coincidence.
You can see how that could set off the sirens in some minds. Similar effects could be noted with other classic movies.
In fact, 20th century dictators were often writers before they were political leaders, rehearsing their ideological fantasies on paper in anticipation of the day when they would have entire populations at their mercy. At one end of the century, you have Lenin and Mussolini who both had two decades worth of published work behind them when they ascended to power; at the other, you have the Ayatollah Khomeini, writing thick volumes on Islamic jurisprudence and theology before he became the supreme leader of Iran. But dictators also write when they are in power: For instance, Lenin, Stalin, Franco, Saddam Hussein, Salazar, Gaddafi and Mao all found time to write, despite their busy schedules.
The variety is startling. There are novels: Mussolini wrote The Cardinal's Mistress, a historical potboiler; Franco produced Raza, a fictionalized account of the Civil War, while Saddam Hussein wrote four novels in the last years of his regime, among them the historical romance Zabiba and the King. Gaddafi wrote prose miniatures; Mao, Salazar, Stalin and Ho Chi Minh dabbled in poetry; Stalin wrote a pamphlet on linguistics; Enver Hoxha, the dictator of Albania, wrote a sequence of memoirs vast enough to rival Proust, while Kim Jong-il issued treatises on opera, journalism and cinema containing piercing insights such as: "A film's images must look good on the screen."
You might want to read the whole thing. Anybody old enough to remember when college students in the USA carried around copies of Mao's Little Red Book? I don't remember seeing this myself, but I certainly heard about it.
Music
NOTE: This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.
Wow, it's Saturday morning already. Good morning Horde. Let's take a look at a few stories that didn't get too much attention this past week here at the AoSHQ.
Forgotten Eighties Mystery Click Oh here it comes/That funny feeling again winding me up inside/Every time we touch/Hey I don't know/Oh, tell me where to begin cause I never ever/Felt so much Hint: First look at a band with a new frontman
Your Highly Educated, Super-Intelligent Betters in the Journalism Class Can Do No Wrong Oh, except that they claimed that the QAnon "borrowed" the phrase "And the truth will set you free" from David Icke's book title, rather than, you know, recognizing that both got the aphorism from a rather more influential source-- JESUS TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO So smart. Please sign me up for your ridiculous newsletter which you laughably call a newspaper.
'Laverne & Shirley' star Penny Marshall passes away at 75. RIP [Weirddave]
Theresa May: There Will be No Second Referendum on Brexit On the other hand, a FT article notes that she is exploring delaying a vote on her Brexit plan from March 29th to as late as July 2... Apparently July 2 is a hard deadline because that's when the new European Ministers of Parliament would be sat. And if Britain hasn't elected any in May (as it would not, if it were leaving the EU), then they'd have no representation in the EU Parliament, which would create legal problems for May.
NeverTrump Grifter Rick Wilson Now Going on Lavish Junkets to... Qatar LOL! No one saw this coming. I expect a lot of NeverTrumpers will soon be making the pilgrimage to Money Mecca and living the high-life in Doha, Sex in the City 2 style, and they'll come back telling us how important it is for the Iran-Turkey-Qatar axis to be in control of the Middle East. Because of Principles, see??!!!
This video is a jokey one about whether or not the release of The Last Jedi created the worst December 15th in history. He ranks it among other terrible December 15ths. But this entry on the list is the most nightmarish kidnappping I've ever heard of and I'm very surprised I haven't heard of it before. Content warning for real horror. Vicious, horrifying crime.
Interesting Thread: 1, a Random Anonymous Account Once Again Goes After Salena Zito, In Order to Defend His Great Pals at the (Former) Weekly Standard; 2, a Reporter Comes in to Tell Him He Knows For a Fact of At Least One Weekly Standard Staffer Who's Engaged in Coordinated Political Messaging with a Political Party Speaking generally on the subject of journalistic integrity: It's astonishing to me that Jim Swift felt comfortable -- protected, even -- promoting the hit on a fellow journalist at TWS' sister publication Washington Examiner. Why would he feel comfortable doing that? I don't even pay my cobloggers and they are quite scrupulous about not going after someone they know is associated with the blog. They could, but they don't. I mean, I could "fire" them, but what do they care? It's an unpaid volunteer gig. So why did Jim Swift feel like it was okay to go after Zito? He could actually be fired from a paying job, one would assume, for joining, without permission, a scalp-hunting operation for the employee of a sister magazine. I've asked this before, and I'll ask it again: Was there a firewall between TWS and Bill Kristol's other, largely Omidyar-funded political operations? Or did Kristol just casually recruit people being paid by Clarity Media to do some ops for him? I actually don't know --but Bill Kristol had his fingers in two different pots, the independent journalism (supposedly) pot and the paid political operations pot, two pots that must not mix in any real "journalistic" endeavor, and no one has ever even bothered denying that sometimes these might blur together. No one has ever explained what protocols were in place to prevent such a thing and keep TWS business from mixing with Kristol's side-gigs. Does no one else care about this, even a little bit, or does everyone in the know understand and accept that this is just how the donor-supported establishment "conservative" media rolls and has always rolled? Is no one shocked by the payments by Google and "partnerships" with FaceBook (which result in stalwart defenses of Google and FaceBook) because everyone understands they're all whores for money and you can't blame a whore for putting out for rent?
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