Posted by: OregonMuse at 05:34 PM | Comments (443) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Good afternoon and welcome to the almost world famous Ace of Spades Pet Thread. C'mon in and enjoy the world of pets. Its a wonderful place to be for the next couple of hours. So leave the world and current events at the front door.

Posted by: Misanthropic Humanitarian at 04:00 PM | Comments (139) | Trackbacks (Suck)

So far it looks like a go. I think the launch is scheduled for 3:22.

Posted by: Ace at 03:15 PM | Comments (582) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hello gardeners, putterers and dreamers! It's almost June. Anything interesting going on in your garden? First up today, how about we visit Manny's garden on Kauai? Well, actually it's MrsM's garden. Above, a Lobster Claw Heliconia.

And below, a few of MrsM's orchids.

She grows them on the trunks of her Manila palms in the yard.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 12:09 PM | Comments (94) | Trackbacks (Suck)

In previous weeks and months, we have been reviewing developments since the New York Times announced last August that it would be focusing its news coverage, as much as possible, on racism (with particular emphasis on Donald Trump, of course). Other media outlets joined in.

Some other news items have distracted the media since then. But they sure have a bonanza of race-related stories to cover now. I decided to go back and look at one of the essays which was submitted by black Americans for the "1776 Initiative", which is aimed at countering the pernicious effects of the NYT's "1619 Project". Might it have some relevance to today's news?

Shelby Steele

Mr. Steele's essay describes how he decided, after the disillusionment of the late 1960s, not to abandon America, after visiting Africa. It explains how both minorities and white elites gain power and a sense of historical place through promoting a continued emphasis on victimhood.

You might want to read the whole thing. What has changed and what hasn't since the late '60s?

Posted by: Open Blogger at 11:15 AM | Comments (863) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Posted by: Misanthropic Humanitarian at 09:02 AM | Comments (581) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Blue on blue?

Whatevs.

Posted by: krakatoa at 06:00 AM | Comments (616) | Trackbacks (Suck)

So last night I was pretty bushed and I just posted some of the amusing pictures I collect for content, and y'all went almost 1700 comments. It's like sticking my thumb in a bowl of water – interesting to note the impression I make.

Tonight I got to do something I haven't done in months- eat out at a real restaurant like an actual human being! Lockdown Larry said restaurants with “outside seating” could open today and one up the street did. We sat in a tent, but I guess that counts. Our poor server had to be gloved and masked, so I left her a big tip, just because I was so glad to be able to go out to eat.

Related:

Posted by: WeirdDave at 09:55 PM | Comments (1531) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Second video. I included the first to set up the joke Rita Panahi has going.

Update:

It seems that some journalists are suddenly very concerned about "mere property damage," indeed:

Oh, now destroying property is a problem, huh? Now that it inconveniences you?

Posted by: Ace at 08:43 PM | Comments (786) | Trackbacks (Suck)

There will be a reckoning.

Posted by: Ace at 07:28 PM | Comments (562) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Also a couple things about the pandemic.

Posted by: Ace at 06:16 PM | Comments (503) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Oh no...

Not the media...

LEARN TO CODE.

This article is actually three weeks old, but it's new to me!

Also, it's about general trends which are continuing.

Traditional cable and satellite TV providers posted their most massive quarterly subscriber losses in the first three months of 2020, as the COVID-19 tornado started to hit the U.S. economy in March. What's more, internet-delivered "virtual" TV providers registered a net loss in the period, too.

Oh no, TV took a hit on the internet too?

Oh no!

And the cord-cutting bleeding is only going to get worse in Q2, as the economic fallout from the coronavirus takes a deeper bite, analysts predict.

The combination of high prices -- amid the backdrop of record unemployment -- as well as loss of live sports fueled an overall drop of 1.8 million pay-TV subscribers in Q1, per estimates by Wall Street analyst firm MoffettNathanson. That translates into an annual rate of decline of 7.6%, the fastest shrinkage of the sector on record.

"At 63% of occupied households, traditional pay TV penetration has reached a level not previously seen since roughly 1995," analyst Craig Moffett wrote in a research note Friday. "There are now as many non-subscribing households (46M) as there were pay TV subscribers in 1988."

The Hollywood Reporter wrote about this yesterday, stressing that the Great Turn Off will accelerate, not diminish.

The rise in unemployment due to the novel coronavirus pandemic led to a new record in pay TV subscriber losses in the first quarter of 2020, and one pay TV analyst on Thursday predicted cord-cutting would accelerate further.

"We see cord-cutting as a secular trend that likely will kick into high gear during and on the other side of COVID-19," Wells Fargo's Jennifer Fritzsche wrote in a report. "With this belief in mind, we have moved our estimates for residential video subscriber losses lower across our cable coverage" to be "worse than Street for 2020 and 2021."

For example, she still projects Comcast to lose nearly 1.79 million pay TV subscribers in 2020, followed by 1.37 million in 2021, up from her previous estimate for a loss of 1.00 million users.

Comcast is a major cable provider and parent company of NBC Propaganda Operations.

The analyst says her "stress tests" modeling accelerating cord-cutting do not "spell doomsday" for the financial health of the media and cable providers.

But... all of her scenarios are bad, and the worst ones are "really bad."

Learn to code, bitches. Learn to fucking code.

Oh that's right, you're too stupid to code.

Learn to dumpster-hunt, bitches. Learn to fucking dumpster-hunt.

Posted by: Ace at 05:05 PM | Comments (470) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Run them down, a wise man said.

Seriously. If an unruly mob is blocking your car from going forward and attacking it, that is false imprisonment and it may lead to being dragged out of the car and being beaten to death, or raped, or both.

Correction: I should say, run them down when they surround your car and prevent it from moving in any direction. You wouldn't be allowed to run anyone down just because they're blocking forward progress, assuming you could turn around or go into reverse.

But if they're surrounding you and attacking your car: They are attackers. Lethal force isn't authorized by force unlikely to kill (like rolling into someone at 7-10 mph) is.

Not with the intent to injure, but with the intent to flee an attacker using the most expeditious and safe means possible.

No one is required to cooperate with one's kidnappers or obey the commands of an illegal, violent vigilante mob.

Update: It's being claimed that a woman ran after the car and grabbed on to it -- and now The Twitter Mob is saying that is attempted murder, too, because the driver did not stop her car just because Antifa decided she must.

See second video below.

Posted by: Ace at 04:14 PM | Comments (471) | Trackbacks (Suck)

I'm already nodding my head and I haven't even read it yet.

Update: In the past few minutes, Chris Wallace has lied -- again -- and claimed Trump called "the protesters" thugs, when of course he was referring to arsonists, rioters, and looters.

This is FoxNews, baby. The Fair and Balanced News Alternative.

What is happening to Fox News Channel?

With the exception of its primetime lineup and a few regular contributors, Fox News increasingly is indistinguishable from its cable news competitors. The network, once considered the sole antidote to dominant left-wing news organizations--both print and broadcast--is making a fatal brand mistake: Alienating its customer base.

...

[T]here is a noticeable change in the tone at Fox News.... [T]rump haters on the Right--folks who long ago burned their credibility with rank-and-file Republicans and conservatives--continue to earn air time on the network. I mean, Chris Stirewalt? Really?

Once-trusted anchors now are openly hostile to President Trump. In a dramatic repudiation of Trump’s comment that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine, Neil Cavuto ranted that the drug is deadly and not effective.

"If you are in a risky population here and you are taking this as a preventative way to ward off the virus or in a worst-case scenario, you are dealing with the virus and you are in this vulnerable population, it will kill you," Cavuto warned his viewers on May 18. "I can't stress this enough. This will kill you." Cavuto insisted he wasn't making a political point but rather a "life-and-death point"” (Cavuto, who is not a doctor, was referring to one non-peer reviewed, retrospective analysis of 368 Covid-19 patients in VA medical centers.)

I'd also note that Neil Cavuto is not a doctor, and in fact looks like a man who routinely hides from medical advice. But here he was, on his own authority, telling you what the "science" says, and picking and choosing between conflicting studies.

Then she gets to Chris Wallace, who is plainly a fat, decaying MSNBC host who gets on the wrong bus every Sunday and shows up at the wrong "news" organization.

Before the release of the Mueller report, Wallace accused Attorney General William Barr of "acting as the counselor for the defense, the counselor for the president, rather than the attorney general," a common refrain of the Left. In a testy exchange, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Wallace, who claimed the administration was ignoring Russian election interference, that the peevish journalist was "fixated" on Robert Mueller.

Hit the link for more.

She concludes that FoxNews' current, but not eternal, core audience is Trump supporters -- whether the Murdoch Boys like it or not, whether Paul Ryan likes it or not, whether Chris Wallace and Chris Stirewalt like it or not -- and they will soon lose most of their audience if they continue trying to cultivate Rachel Maddow's audience.

Do we need yet another #Resistance TV channel?

If you follow ComicsGate, you know the problem occurred when Marvel looked at its actual audience, and discovered they were almost entirely male, almost entirely in their thirties, forties, or fifties, and mostly white.

And Marvel decided it didn't like this audience, so it would start alienating this audience deliberately and chase a "phantom audience" it liked better, a phatom audience of young multi-ethnic girls who love superhero comics becuse if there's one thing a teenaged girl likes, it's stories which are almost entirely about macho posturing followed by single combats or small-team group skirmishes.

I mean, young girls are just ga-ga for barely-disguised boxing stories and war stories! Everyone knows that.

Why, it's working out so well for Marvel they're now in year five of a five year decline in sales.

But hey -- at least they got rid of some of those Deplorable former customers.

Hey, good luck with your new direction in programming, FoxNews. I'm sure you'll have a lot of success when all conservatives are boycotting you and you're forced to compete for the same audience that's already split seven ways by all the (open) liberal outlets.

Oh -- and I'm sure you'll have success fighting for an audience which has lived on poisonous hate for you for twenty five years.

Hey, I've got an idea for a new show you can run to attract your new Phantom Audience.

Can I interest you in a news show hosted by "The New Warriors"? Maybe "The News Warriors"?

I think that's the direction you should take.

Posted by: Ace at 03:15 PM | Comments (530) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Even though Twitter censored Trump's post for supposedly "glorifying violence," rather than announcing a policy he was entitled to announce, Twitter has not yet censored Kathy Griffin's latest urgings that someone assassinate the President:

Twitter also continues allowing the Ayatollah Khameini to make threats against Americans -- without any cenorship or chiding about "glorifying violence."

Meanwhile, this sexually frustrated, spiritually unfulfilled bored cow of a sterotype of a useless, empty-headed housefrump continues Living Her Best Life on Twitter and playing Sheriff Karen:

All of this could be avoided if David French could just manage to achieve an erection for once in his useless c**k life.

The Frenches. Someone has to slap this hysterical bitch until she chills out.

And after you're done with David, move on to Nancy.

Meanwhile, Trump has a press conference upcoming.

Posted by: Ace at 02:12 PM | Comments (652) | Trackbacks (Suck)

By the way, FoxNews is still calling these "protests."

The Fair and Balanced News Alternative, delivering the same pablum we get on MSNBC.

Clarification: I mean the shows controlled by the so-called "News Division," which is pretty much all of their programming except the "opinion" shows like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. Lord knows we don't see any opinions from Chris Wallace and Brett Baier.

That's where the corporate enforced censorship is occurring.

Posted by: Ace at 01:10 PM | Comments (636) | Trackbacks (Suck)

How serious is Title IX? Well, it's been applied vindictively, mandating, for example, that colleges have to get rid of half of their sports programs because male and female participation should be equal, and if there are more boys than girls interested in sports, whoops, there goes your wrestling team.

I know of a college which had a national champion hockey team. The girls started their own hockey team, which was... not competive. More of a fuck-around than a really competitive program.

Nevertheless, even though the men's team had just won the national championship, and the other was basically Square Dancing 101 on Ice, they were forced to share the ice exactly evenly.

Because... equality.

Women and girls are to be given equal access to their own sports. You can't just have a single wrestling team and say "Girls are invited to try out, but if they fail, oh well."

No, they need their own Women's Wrestling squads.

So how is that in any way reconcilable with the new idea that boys who claim they're really "girls" can compete with actual girls on girls teams?

Spoiler: It's not.

Connecticut's policy allowing transgender girls to compete as girls in high school sports violates the civil rights of athletes who have always identified as female, the U.S. Education Department has determined in a decision that could force the state to change course to keep federal funding and influence others to do the same.

...

The office said in the 45-page letter that it may seek to withhold federal funding over the policy, which allows athletes to participate under the gender with which they identify. The policy is a violation of Title IX, the federal civil rights law that guarantees equal education opportunities for women, including in athletics, the office said.

It has "denied female student-athletes athletic benefits and opportunities, including advancing to the finals in events, higher level competitions, awards, medals, recognition, and the possibility of greater visibility to colleges and other benefits," according to the letter, which is dated May 15.

Posted by: Ace at 12:11 PM | Comments (455) | Trackbacks (Suck)