Food Thread: You Say Dumplings, I say Kneidlach: Let's Call The Whole Thing Off!

I couldn't resist the photo! There is a joke somewhere about it being the major food groups of the Irish, but I would never stoop so low!

That is a full brisket from Wild Fork Foods, which is a frozen-food purveyor with a robust shipping business and also a bunch of stores across the country. I have been pleased with some of their stuff, although it is obvious how they manage costs...their butchers are not the most impressive trimmers in the industry. But that brisket is sold as trimmed, and they do a good enough job at an excellent price, so all I have to do is trim a bit more fat, and it's off to the races, or into the roasting pan for a quick sear.

Well, actually it takes a fair amount of time, because it's a big piece of meat!

What? No! I am not smoking it, because braised (or roasted) brisket is one of the foods of MY people! Passover starts in a few days, and I have a bunch of people for the Seder. While I would have preferred another main course, I was informed that brisket was on the menu this year. No, I have no free will when it comes to these things...why do you ask?

Come to think of it, smoked brisket would be good! There are Jews in Texas...well, do you make traditional or Texan-style for Passover? It's tradition, not religious law, so I could make collard greens and smoked brisket and a big pot of beans, and nobody could complain.... much.

The only thing that is non-negotiable is Matzoh-Ball Soup. For two reasons. First, that's what my mother made, and second, mine is spectacular! And yes, I use duck fat instead of vegetable oil. Of course my mother once made Matzoh-Ball Soup with bacon bits inside, so you can probably guess that I didn't grow up in a Kosher home!

By the way, if you really want to show off, call them "kneidlach," because that's the Yiddish word!

Posted by: CBD at 04:00 PM | Comments (112) | Trackbacks (Suck)

First World Problems...

Yes, it's an old house...coming up on 100 years old in a few years. And of course we'll have a party, with cake and some gasoline and matches!

That is the last of the original moulding (molding?), and as you can see it was pieced together with what I can only assume was scraps from the rest of the house. The math suggests that the house was built in the beginning of the depression, so it is entirely possible that the builder tried mightily to save every penny.

But that line between pieces irritates me every time I see it, so that is the next thing to be replaced.

In my youth I did that sort of work, and I was taught early on how to avoid exactly that sort of problem. And if the trim carpenter who installed that moulding wasn't as good as I was, he was very bad indeed!

I can't even blame the foundation!

Posted by: CBD at 02:00 PM | Comments (138) | Trackbacks (Suck)

No Kings? If We Had A King, These Morons Would Be In Jail

The "No Kings" demonstration on an overpass across Route 4 in Bergen County New Jersey was an anemic, lightly attended hissy fit by a few dozen true believers, even though it is a fairly liberal area.

But what do they believe? Everything they are told by the Democrat party apparatus, without questioning the underlying data or even whether it makes any sense at all. The Democrats have cultivated cadres of shock troops they can mobilize to wear their old Tie-Dye shirts and chant awful rhymes about the cause de jour, and that has been the case for a very long time. "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out!" Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Western Civ Has Got To Go!" "Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?" Those are 60 years old, and even stupider today then they were in the 1960s.

Today's chants are no more intelligent, and no more representative of an honest protest movement based on political differences. "No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA!" Really? A cursory examination of real fascist dictatorships would yield the uncomfortable fact that street protests were and are sometimes met with machine gun fire, mass arrests, and one-way flights on helicopters. Or, "Say It Loud, Say It Clear, Immigrants Are Welcome Here!" That's particularly brain-dead, since it carefully conflates legal vs. illegal immigration, which the parrots on the street don't understand, but their masters on the left certainly do!

The left has always embraced chants and songs and long-winded diatribes that can be trotted out to answer any challenge. That most of these things are utter nonsense, employing circular logic, false historical narratives, and flat-out lies is secondary to their power to inflame the hearts of their true believers.

That is one reason why Charlie Kirk was so effective. He was able to answer their jingoistic canned phrases with facts, and since these people are intellectually bereft, they would often sputter and stutter and stalk off, because their logical basis for their beliefs is simply cant, and without a firm historical or data-driven foundation.

Yet it often works, especially when the left employs their dancing monkeys in the entertainment industry to provide the rhyming and the singing and the angry denunciations of today's crisis.

But the two-edged sword of social media and instant communication has broadened the reach of these script-reading sub-wits, while simultaneously exposing their stupidity to the world. Sure, Springsteen will draw people to the protest, but he looks and sounds like an aging lesbian, especially when he is surrounded on stage by his peers, who also look like aging lesbians! Did Billie Eilish further the cause of... um... indigenous people, or just expose herself as an ignorant and entitled fool? When George Clooney flies to a climate conference on a private jet, he might make a splash on the talk shows, but a lot of people see his rank hypocrisy.

Below the fold is a wonderful example of the intellectual vacuousness of 2026's entertainment spokesmen. It's painful and laughable...you choose which!

Posted by: CBD at 12:00 PM | Comments (250) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Book Thread: (03/29/2026) [Sabrina Chase]

The Secrets of Publishing, part 2 : Bookstores and Libraries and Distributors, oh my!

Greetings, O Book Thread! They let me come back. (Actually, the lock on the door of the server room is a little flimsy...)

So how are bookstores picking their books anyways?

Back in the good old days, a bookstore owner or minions would have some vague idea, from recommendations or personal experience, what books were good and could sell. Then the big publishers consolidated, were run by accountants and NOT book lovers, and books became items in a catalog to be ordered like produce by people who voluntarily eat brussel sprouts. And the bookstores were the same. Books were treated as widgets and rather than personal knowledge bookstore owners went with the recommendations from the publishing houses and ordered only from the big distributors. Maybe some smaller publishing houses that are trendy and/or had kompromat on their purchasing department manager.

But what about small, innocent publishers and indie writers? Can they get their books in bookstores?

Yes, but it is non-trivial. First, you have to get your books in the distributor catalogs and it must have a print version, not just ebook. There are two main ones, Ingrams and Baker&Taylor. They charge a fee per book. Also, your book has to have an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) and it can NOT be the one Amazon gave it. [Sidebar: Publishers hate Amazon and so do bookstores. They firmly believe Amazon is stealing all their business. Well, that part is true ... .

Anyway, they refused to let Amazon books sully their premises. So, you have to have your own ISBN. And they cost money.] All of this is annoying but doable, except ... bookstores demand the right of RETURNS.

Bookstores hate risk. And for various stupid historical reasons, they want to return books that don’t sell, but sending books back is expensive, so they would cut off the cover and send THAT back, and “pulp” the rest of the book. Which is why you sometimes see “if you bought this book without a cover it has been stolen”. Now they don’t even want to do the cover. They just want to either dump the book entirely to get their refund. Oh, and they want a huge chunk of the cover price too. You can actually have a negative invoice if there are too many returns. I have books in the catalogs but not a lot of sales to bookstores. A book with no push from publishers (yes they can provide monetary incentives to bookstores to pick their books) means bookstores overlook it. They will of course have Oprah’s picks and a few other celebrity things but the rest is just based on pub listings and push.

Why bother with bookstores then?

Because a big vector for reader discovery is libraries and they also use the distributors. Even librarians with an interest in new books (and indie) don’t have the time or the resources to hunt them down individually. Their purchasing systems, and I actually worked at a company that made that software so I know a good bit about it, require the ISBN at a minimum and often also the distributor catalog or they can’t make a purchase. This is print and ebook, by the way.

And THEN you get the stupid library purchase rules for ebooks. An ebook is just a computer file, so why can’t they just have infinite copies? They don’t want to pay for infinite copies. Some publishing houses had insane rules like making libraires purchase a new license after 6 borrows (as if the file expired). Things have calmed down a bit and you can now allow “library licensing” where they pay a higher per-book price, once, and only allow one borrower at a time. It’s an “evolving situation” as they say at the War Department …. BUT! I am happy to say that without any effort on my part beyond getting in the catalog, my books are showing up in libraries! Including in Dubai. I have no idea who in Dubai asked for my book. I want to know.

Anyway, people who want more than the sample chapter on Amazon will go to the library to see if an author is worth the money, so I want my free ice cream samples out there. But it is annoying.

How can we get good books in bookstores again?

Good question! Going to bookstores and having them order books (in the catalog) that you know or suspect are good. They then know there is customer demand. Also know the tradpub industry is dying but like any ginourmous dinosaur, they die slowly. You won’t get an accurate feel for the book industry from a bookstore. Really and truly, indie by sales (units and dollars) is already doing better than tradpub. Even I, with my very first indie ebook, sold MORE units and got MORE money than the contract I was offered by tradpub. And all the intellectual property rights remain mine. (Bwahahah!)

Publicity remains the real problem. Tradpub doesn’t understand what the market wants either. You may have heard of Brandon Sanderson breaking Kickstarter with his secret book project in 2022. These are books his tradpublisher didn’t want at first, so he published them himself. That Kickstarter raised 41.7 million dollars in DAYS. The most funded project in Kickstarter’s history.

People really do want to read good books. They will pay good money for those books. Tradpub has proven they don’t know what people really want. The tricky thing is, still, connecting the writers to the readers … and nobody has figured that out yet. But we are working on it!

Posted by: Open Blogger at 09:00 AM | Comments (322) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 29 March 2026

Top Story

• DDR5 RAM prices have dipped slightly following Google's TurboQuant announcement that allows AI models to run in a fraction of the amount of memory. (Notebook Check)
  
  While TurboQuant is real and does substantially reduce the amount of memory taken up for quantized vector database used to store LLM weights while - and this is the trick - not noticeably increasing noise in the models, any connection with commodity DDR5 memory pricing is best expressed in the polar co-ordinate system that TurboQuant is built on.
  
  By which I mean it is imaginary.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the third horseshoe of the Tech Apocalypse has dropped with SSD pricing headed into orbit. (YouTube)
  
  Thanks Steve.
  
  This has been expected since DRAM prices headed the same way starting in November, but it was delayed by the large volume of devices already in the retail channel.
  
  Now reality has hit, hard, with prices doubling and further increases likely. The video notes that spot prices have increased ninefold, though that doesn't mean that drive prices will increase by the same amount.
  
  What it does mean is that the smaller manufacturers who didn't have existing long-term contracts have just been wiped out, while the companies making the NAND flash chips - Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix, again, plus Western Digital, Kioxia, and China's YTMC, can set whatever prices they choose.
  
  (The second horseshoe was the graphics card market, though that has been muted so far unless you were looking to buy an RTX 5070 Ti or higher. Prices of AMD and Intel cards have increased a little, but nothing like the devastation that has hit the memory market.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM | Comments (172) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Saturday Night Club ONT - March 28, 2026 [D Squared]

Welcome to Club ONT - a collaboration of The Disco and The Dino. Come in in, grab a drink or 3. If you do the hokey pokey and turn yourself around, you'll find out what its all about.

[Top photo: Pittsburgh Lightning, Dave DiCello]

Posted by: Open Blogger at 10:00 PM | Comments (341) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 3/28/2026

John Wick

Ooo...edge-lord alert!

Why do the John Wick movies...leave me cold?

Why are they overlong slogs of poorly thought out worldbuilding, self-seriousness, and and self-indulgent senses of coolness that just bore me to tears?

Why do these movies make so much money? Granted, removing Keanu Reeves from a starring role in the spin-off (he has an extended, mostly pointless cameo sprinkled throughout), Ballerina: From the World of John Wick seemed to hurt the last entry's ability to make money at the box office (it pretty obviously lost money considering its reported $90 million budget and $137 million haul at the worldwide box office), but my main focus is the four main entries themselves. I've seen Ballerina, and it does have some of the same problems as the first four, but it fixes one of my main complaints while creating others.

Could these movies have been written...better? Could they have covered the same ground but just been compelling in the interminable two hours of each film that wasn't dedicated to action?

Posted by: TheJamesMadison at 07:45 PM | Comments (305) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hobby Thread - March 28, 2026 [TRex]

Welcome hobbyists! Pull up a chair and sit a spell with the Horde in this little corner of the interweb. This is the mighty, mighty officially sanctioned Ace of Spades Hobby Thread. When you follow the long and windy road, you end up with singing as a theme for this Hobby Thread.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:30 PM | Comments (122) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Ace of Spades Pet Thread, March 28

Courtesy Lyneeta Payne

Poor guy

* * *

Good afternoon and welcome to the almost world famous Ace of Spades Pet Thread. Thanks for stopping by. Kick back and enjoy the world of animals.

Would you like a treat?

Let's relax a little with the animals and leave the world of politics and current events outside today.

Posted by: K.T. at 03:15 PM | Comments (68) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Gardening, Home and Nature Thread, March 28

It's nearing Passover and Easter, and here we have a flower associated with Christmas (maybe a different subspecies). I love its distinctive flowers!

The hellebores started blooming in mid-March. I first planted them by the concrete steps years ago when there was a weeping cherry providing shade. We had to take the cherry down after the trunk split and I expected to need to move the hellebores since they're supposed to be shade plants. They have been growing and blooming for over ten years in full afternoon sun. Hellebores hate being moved, at least in my experience, so I've left them alone since they seem to be doing fine!

Lirio100

*

Posted by: K.T. at 01:25 PM | Comments (40) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Competing Intellectual Systems

This week, I ran across a podcaster who blamed the influence of the "Rockefeller-funded" General Education Board in the 1930s for the inability of Boomers to see that Israel was behind most of the problems in the world. The internet allowed podcasters to show younger people the truth. He thought most Boomers were stuck in limited ways of thinking like Mike Huckabee - - unable the process "gotcha" questions of Tucker Carlson, like one about the ancestors of the Prime Minister of Israel.

Hmmmm.

I kinda think that Mike Huckabee is not the best example of a guy who thinks on his feet in confrontations with intellectual foes. There has been some conflict centered around him recently in connection with his role as ambassador to Israel. While the "Woke Right" thinks he always kowtows to the Israeli point of view, he seems in at least one instance here to have gone in the other direction to appease Catholics and others without knowing the facts. I don't think this had much to do with the General Education Board in the 1930s and Boomers in general.

I'm also not real sure that the typical under-a-minute hot takes from today's podcasts are advances in our intellectual lives, especially if most people stay in "bubbles" with people who agree with them.

Do you think the next step from the internet - robot teachers - will help?

Posted by: K.T. at 11:23 AM | Comments (200) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Classical Saturday Coffee Break & Prayer Revival

[Every. Single Day!]

Good morning boys and girls and every thing in between. Before we enter the Prayer Revival just a few housekeeping matters to go over. (Rulz for those of you in Poy Sippi.)

1) This is an open thread. Feel free to lurk, opine and/or bloviate.
2) Be kind, be nice. Ace's house, Ace's rules.
3) Running with sharp objects is highly frowned upon.
4) Have a great weekend!

Posted by: Misanthropic Humanitarian at 08:06 AM | Comments (222) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily News Stuff 28 March 2026

Top Story

• Windows crashes three times as often as MacOS. (TechSpot)
  
  MacOS is that bad, huh?
  
  Some glitches with the sites aside, this server has been running nonstop for two years, and that's pretty typical for Linux. It only reboots when you reboot it.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile some people at Microsoft are fighting to bring an end to mandatory online accounts for Windows. (Windows Centra)
  
  Nice to have a hobby.
  
  I'm not expecting them to succeed here.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM | Comments (160) | Trackbacks (Suck)

A Man, A Plan, A Canal, ONT!

Well, another week has passed and once again we find ourselves at the Friday meme ONT!

Posted by: WeirdDave at 10:00 PM | Comments (351) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Quality Yak Content Cafe

By Mike Hills

Little girl raises wombat orphaned due to wildfire.

Performing a "shit hot carrier break," which I think means flying in for a carrier landing after a very tight final turn.

Using catapults to launch three wingsuit skydivers off a mountain. Unfortunately, not the kind of catapults you're thinking of. More like launch-sleds.

Special operators drop boats and then parachute out of the back of a C-17.

Men of a certain age will appreciate this hobbyist's efforts to make a Star Wars playset that never existed -- Luke Skywalker's workshop/hangar. You know, where he gives C-3PO the hot oil bath.

Albert the Camel somehow conned his way into a gig as a house pet. (I looked this one up, it seems real. I just got burned on another one.)

Flying a paramotor -- a parachute propelled by a fan -- to 17,500 feet.

Rescuing a giant bat -- a flying fox -- who got stuck in a school bathroom and scared people. Even though he's a cutie.

Wingsuit flyby of a castle. I have it cued to the castle fly-by.

Wingsuit flyby over the mouth of a smoking volcano.

DUCKS!

I get requests for more yak content, as, of course, most bloggers do. I hope this is sufficient: 1. a yak thundering across the steppe (I assume, I'm not clear on what a steppe is), 2, some kind of yak dance, and 3, a Tibetan Yak Butter Churning Dance. As they say in Nepal, "Girl who churns yak butter all day long has Hands of Paradise at night."

I haven't been this excited by erotic butter-churning since 2014.

Now that's some quality yak content I think you will agree.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 07:28 PM | Comments (213) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Week in Woke

Remember when Biden assigned Trump a bunch of fat 5'1" housefraus as his Secret Service "protection" detail during a very heated presidential campaign?

Remember how we all thought, "When Trump wins, I hope he assigns the Bidens the same D-List Dregs"?

Well... Promise Made, Promise Kept.

A U.S. Secret Service agent accidentally shot himself Friday morning while on duty during a security detail for former first lady Jill Biden at Philadelphia International Airport, according to officials and local reports.

The incident unfolded around 8:30 a.m. as agents were assisting with movement through the airport, a heavily trafficked hub at that hour. Authorities said the agent's service weapon discharged while he was handling it, striking him in the leg. The injury was described as non-life-threatening, and the agent was transported to a nearby hospital where he is reported to be in stable condition.

A spokesperson for the United States Secret Service characterized the shooting as a "negligent discharge," indicating the weapon fired unintentionally. Officials emphasized that there was no disruption to the protectee's schedule and that Jill Biden was not present at the time the weapon went off.

Woke Cereal: Cheerios now features "Eat Pray Love" style affirmations on the box because everything is Fake and Gay.

And feminized to absolute death.

Transphobic cops brutalize another out-and-proud transgender "woman."

From last week, but the Hamsters failed me:

Trans woman dressed up like Blues Brothers allegedly murdered millionaire developer in LA

A transgender woman dressed up like a Blues Brother allegedly murdered a millionaire developer in his Los Angeles home before having an hours-long standoff with a SWAT team, authorities said.

Eleanor Beaulieu, 39, was charged Sunday in the killing of Demetrius Doukoullos and is being housed in Los Angeles County's Men's Central Jail, according to inmate records.

Cops responded to check on Doukoullos, 92, at his Hermosa Beach home around 12:30 p.m. Saturday after his realtor hadn't heard from him for about a week, police said.

"It began as a routine welfare check and escalated to a suspected homicide," Hermosa Beach Police Public Information Officer Sgt. Keagan Dadigan said on Monday.

Neighbors reported a foul odor coming from the home and sightings of a suspicious person, according to Easy Reader News.

Suspicious person?

SUSPICIOUS PERSON?!

What was so "suspicious"? Her COURAGE?! Her TRANS JOY?!!

...

When police arrived, Beaulieu told them he was armed, Dadigan said, leading to a tense seven-hour standoff.

"That subject made statements about being armed and dangerous and then barricaded themselves inside the residence," authorities said, KTLA5 reported.

Why are you bigots so prejudiced against transgender murderers with guns?

Eventually, an officer warned Beaulieu through a bullhorn that they would force their way in.

"Eleanor, come out with your hands up. This has been going on long enough," the officer yelled repeatedly, the Daily Mail reported.

Law enforcement sources told NBC4 that Doukoullos' body was partially decomposed with signs of trauma.

...

Beaulieu has been charged with homicide. His bail has been set to $2 million.

The New York Post had previously Respecced the Pronouns but it admirably calls this Trans Hero of Bravery "he" and "him" throughout the account.

Why do Utah politicians need to be told to honor the detainer of a Mexican illegal alien who slit a woman's throat?!

Federal authorities have confirmed that a suspect charged with attempted murder for slashing a woman's throat and leaving her to die in Utah is an illegal alien from Mexico.

...

Ramirez-Padilla reportedly told authorities he and the woman smoked meth together and admitted he "had been having thoughts of killing someone, and today, he decided that he was going to kill (the woman)."

"Jesus said he strangled (the woman) from behind while they were both standing until (she) became unconscious and fell to the ground. Once on the ground, Jesus placed his hands around (her) neck and continued (choking her)."

"Jesus said he wanted to take (the woman) out of her misery and then used a blade to cut her throat two or three times. Jesus told detectives he intended to kill (the woman). Jesus told detectives his state of mind was altered from ingesting drugs," an arrest affidavit stated.

...

In a statement provided exclusively to Border Hawk, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed that Ramirez-Padilla is an illegal alien from Mexico who entered the U.S. at an unknown location and date.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has lodged a detainer against Ramirez-Padilla and is urging local authorities to not release him back into the community.

"Jesus Alejandro Ramirez-Padilla is a dangerous criminal illegal alien who violently strangled and slit a woman's throat multiple times," said DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis.

"We are calling on politicians to not release this barbaric criminal from jail and into American neighborhoods. This criminal illegal alien has no place in American communities."

Can we revoke statehood? Asking for a friend.

The Atlantic cries: Why aren't campus radicals occupying buildings, living illegally in tent cities, and bullying Jews like in the good old days of 2023-2024?

You know who the authoress blames?

That's right, Frank Stallone.

No but really she blames Trump.

Where Are All the Campus Protests?
Two years ago, students occupied buildings and colonized the quad. Now the same places are strangely silent.

The events of the past three months seem almost perfectly engineered to spark campus unrest. In January, mass-deportation operations led to the brazen killing of U.S. citizens at the hands of masked immigration agents. In February, the Environmental Protection Agency declared that it would no longer regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. A few weeks later, the Trump administration joined forces with Israel to launch an attack on Iran without congressional approval. One might expect left-leaning college students to have practically started a revolution.

But campuses across the country--places where, just two years ago, students occupied buildings and colonized the quad to protest Israel's war against Hamas--are strangely silent. These days, those same students mostly head to class. The extent of the change is jarring. David Sengthay, a Stanford senior and the head of the undergraduate-student senate, told me that protests typified the university's history, up to and including his first two years in Palo Alto. But by the time he returned as a junior, in fall 2024, something was different. "My class is the last class to really witness what happened at Stanford during its peak organizing," he said. "People come to Stanford, these young students, and they don't have access to what was promised to them. I know we're not UC Berkeley, but, I mean, we still protested the Vietnam War."

This might seem like an abrupt and mysterious reversal in campus culture. In fact, it's a sign that student protest was never a fact of nature, but rather an administrative choice. Universities chose to let campus demonstrations get out of control; now they're choosing to suppress them. This is why, even as legal challenges have blocked the Trump administration from enacting much of its higher-education agenda, the president has clearly achieved his aim of ending the protest movement. He has been able to do so largely because university leaders, tired of the chaos they had allowed to thrive, were quietly on board.

...

But the protests soon spun out of control... That winter and spring, elite-university presidents were hauled in front of Congress to testify about protesters' conduct and their response to instances of anti-Semitism at the demonstrations. The presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Columbia, and Northwestern subsequently resigned, unable to justify their decisions either to Congress or to their own outraged board members and donors.

The hearings marked a turning point. Universities began taking more aggressive action against protesters. According to Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, the sector's largest trade group, the angry backlash from Congress gave some administrators political cover to do what they privately had already wanted to do....

Once Donald Trump assumed office, shutting down disruptive protests took on even more urgency. Almost immediately, the president signed executive orders promising to investigate and discipline protesters for anti-Semitism. Universities began taking action against their own students before Trump could do so. At Yale, about 200 students began forming an encampment to protest Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir speaking at an event near campus. Administrators told students to disperse, disciplined repeat offenders, and ended Yale's association with a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. At Columbia, when students occupied a library room ahead of finals week, the university immediately called in the police. "Colleges are doing what they can to try to stay out of the spotlight," Robert Kelchen, a professor of education policy at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me. At the same time, some academics think that the students themselves are different: Whether because of concerns about the worsening job market or a cultural shift rightward, they seem less interested in raising hell on campus.

What's clear is that the cost of doing so has gone up. Last March, the Trump administration detained and attempted to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student who had led many of the anti-Israel protests. Later that month, federal agents detained Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University graduate student who had written an opinion piece supporting Palestine. Other students had their active immigration status revoked for activism around Palestine

...

"Students don't even know: Am I waiting to get in trouble by the dean, or am I waiting to get in trouble by, like, DHS?" Amanda Nordstrom, who leads the Campus Rights Advocacy department for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told me.

...

Sengthay said that he and other Stanford students had envisioned college as a "playground for free speech and democracy" before the greater responsibilities and pressures of adult life. They've since discovered that the rules of the game have changed.

O what dark delights this reporter is showing me!

Candace Owens has been scanning Erika Kirk's history, going back to her tweenage years, to find something to accuse her of. She's also investigating Erika Kirk's mother. Now some other people are now "just asking questions" about serial litigant and scofflaw Candace Owens and her own Strange Relations.

Via Beege Wellborn, aggressive colonizers demand that the UK "decolonize" Shakespeare's home because it's White Supremacy that the greatest writer of the all-white-until-thirty-years-ago British Isles was white.

And the UK is, of course, complying with their conquerors' demands.

[Daily Mail:] William Shakespeare's birthplace will be de-colonised over fears that portraying his success as the 'greatest' playwright 'benefits the ideology of white European supremacy'.

...It wants to 'create a more inclusive museum experience' and announced it will move away from Western perspectives after concerns were raised that Shakespeare's ideas were used to advance 'white supremacy' ideas.

The trust also said that some of its items could contain language or depictions that are racist, sexist, or homophobic.

It comes amid an ongoing backlash against the writer. Some productions of his works have been slapped with trigger warnings for misogyny, racism and 'problematic radicalised dynamics' that link whiteness to beauty.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:10 PM | Comments (273) | Trackbacks (Suck)

In Case You Missed It: Intercepts of Foreign Parties Revealed Ukraine's Plot to Take US Taxpayer Dollars Given To Them By Biden to Illegally Contribute to Biden's Reelection Effort

I posted this briefly yesterday before I realized CBD had just posted about the same topic.

Before that:

BREAKING: DHS Sec. Markwayne Mullin has just BEGUN the process of paying some 50,000 THOUSAND TSA agents at President Trump's orders

Pay is set to hit as early as Monday

Posted by: JackStraw at March 27, 2026

The basic story has been reported, and some of this has been hinted at in TV interviews, but this report by Jonathan Solomon and Jerry Dunleavy formalizes those hints and advances the story.

U.S. intercepted Ukraine government messages discussing plot to route money to Biden re-election

Newly-unclassified documents show that in 2022 Ukrainian officials discussed diverting hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars -- earmarked for clean energy -- back to Biden's ill-fated 2024 campaign. There is no evidence the intercepted allegations were investigated during the Biden administration.

There's also no evidence that the formally crazy-about-foreign-interference propaganda media has reported any of this.

It's almost as if they actively support foreign election interference, so long as it benefits their precious Communist "Democrat" Party.

U.S. intelligence intercepted Ukrainian government communications discussing a plot to route hundreds of millions of American tax dollars earmarked for clean energy in the war-torn country and move them to the United States to enrich then-President Joe Biden's 2024 re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee, according to a declassified intelligence report summarizing the intercepts that was obtained by Just the News.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently learned of the intercepts and has asked the U.S. Agency for International Development officials to scour for records to see if the plot actually was carried out and whether a criminal referral should be made to the FBI.

Gabbard's team has not found substantive evidence the intercepted allegations were thoroughly investigated during the Biden administration, and the communications are not believed to be tied to Russian disinformation efforts, officials said.

The declassified report is a summary of raw intercepts from U.S. spy agencies in late 2022 concerning the alleged plot, and officials who have reviewed the files said there seemed to be a lack of curiosity to investigate such an explosive allegation of foreign interference in a U.S. election.

It actually gets worse in the next paragraph: US government personnel were personally involved in the conspiracy.

"The Ukrainian Government and unspecified U.S. Government personnel, through USAID in Kyiv, reportedly developed a plan that would provide hundreds of millions of US taxpayer dollars to fund an infrastructure project for Ukraine that would be used as a cover to send approximately 90% of funds allocated to the DNC to fund Joe Biden's reelection campaign," the declassified summary of the intercepts stated.

"They were confident the project would be funded initially, even though at some time in the future the project would be disapproved as unnecessary. At this time, the money would already be allocated and impossible to return or use for a different purpose," the report added.

The intercepts mentioned two American subcontractors as possible recipients of the money that would eventually be moved to Democratic coffers, officials said. The names are included in still classified raw spy data but were redacted from the declassified report obtained by Just the News.

"The plan included details of how subcontractors would be funded through U.S. companies so that how the funds were spent and allocated would be difficult to track," the declassified summary stated. "Additionally, contracts would be executed that would be difficult to verify. In this manner, most of the U.S. funding would be diverted to Joe Biden's election campaign without the ability to track where exactly the funds came from."

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 05:10 PM | Comments (208) | Trackbacks (Suck)

House Rejects Senate Deal
Plus: JD Vance Affirms That Ilhan "Omar" Committed Immigration Fraud, Vows to Pursue Her Legally

So. Now that the Senate Republicans made a deal without bothering to clear it with their counterparts in the House, the House Republicans have rejected it, and now begins the "It's a Republican shut-down, they're enabling terrorism" op.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., says House Republicans will not accept a Senate-passed bill to fund the majority of the Department of Homeland Security, minus ICE and border patrol.

The Senate bill does not include additional funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Border Patrol -- and it does not include any of the demands Democrats made to limit the tactics of federal immigration officers. Republicans in the House met Friday after the legislation passed and rejected the plan.

"This gambit that was done last night is a joke," Johnson told reporters at the Capitol.

Johnson said the House will vote instead on a stop-gap spending bill to fund the entire Department of Homeland Security until May 22.

"I spoke to the president a few moments ago, he understands exactly what we're doing and why. And he supports it," Johnson said.

Johnson said he expects Republicans will pass the bill in the House, leaving the Senate to take up the measure. However, is very unclear if the stop-gap could pass in the Senate. Senators have already left Washington and Democrats have refused to vote for any spending bill that funds ICE.

Johnson also referred to Trump's promise to pay TSA agents through executive action as a near-term way to alleviate backups at airports across the country. Trump signed a memo Friday, to do so.

Is he right to reject it?

Overton
@overton_news

1h

Mask off moment.

Speaker Mike Johnson QUESTIONS whether Senate Republicans actually read the bill they passed to the House before heading on recess.

Johnson then turned to the cameras and read a jaw-dropping section aloud for the media.

JOHNSON: "This gambit that was done last night is a JOKE."

"I'm quite convinced that it can't be that every Senate Republican read the language of this bill, and I'm going to just read you one excerpt of it, because it's pretty alarming, and it says everything that you need to know."

"In section four...this is on page two of the bill...."

"It says, 'The contents printed under the headings of this bill, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border security operations under the heading of US Customs and Border Patrol and Protection shall have no force or effect for purposes of this act and amounts specified in the final bill under the subheading border security operation, and under the heading U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and under the headings of US Immigration and Customs enforcement, in the Department of Homeland Security shall be...ZERO.'"

"We're not doing that."

I don't know if that means the additional funding that had previously been in the bill is reduced to zero, or if it means all the funding these agencies currently have is reduced to zero. I suspect it means the former, not the latter. That is, it stops the new funding, which I don't like but which we already knew, not the already-in-place funding.

But I'd like clarification.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:10 PM | Comments (255) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Appeals Court Overrules Activist Leftwing Minnesota Judges, Declares That Illegal Aliens Can Be Held Indefinitely Without Bond While Waiting for Their Deportation

This is important because if you want to deport someone -- put them on a plane -- you need to have physical custody of their bodies, and activist judges keep ruling that after ICE captures an illegal alien, he must be allowed to go free. He'll just show up for his actual deportation, right?

No, of course not. He will disappear "into the shadows," as Jeb Bush might say.

But that's what these activist, lawless Democrat judges want -- a soft judicial repeal of the power to deport. They can't just say "we're overruling Congress" -- Congress has the power to make laws about immigration and naturalization, of course -- so instead they just spam out fake requirement after fake requirement to make it effectively impossible to deport anyone.

In short -- they want to codify Biden's lawless executive decision to open the borders and guarantee all comers a permanent residency in America into "law" without having to go through the bother of actually changing the law.

The Eighth Circuit is the second appeals court to tell lowly court judges they do not have the power to overrule both Congress and the President.

Appeals court lets Trump administration hold many immigration detainees without bond

A panel of appeals court judges handed the Trump administration a major legal victory on Wednesday in its quest to detain large swaths of immigrants living in the country illegally, saying that people who entered the United States without inspection and admission can be detained without bond.

The 2-1 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit marks the second time that a federal appellate court has sided with the administration on the issue, even as hundreds of lower court judges across the country have taken the opposite view. The conservative Fifth Circuit issued a similar ruling earlier this year.

Wednesday's ruling could impact more than 1,000 immigration detention cases in Minnesota alone, according to a source in the U.S. Attorney's office in that state. The Eighth Circuit also oversees six other states stretching from North Dakota to Arkansas.

The case involved a man named Joaquin Herrera Avila, a citizen of Mexico who was apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security in Minneapolis last August. DHS detained him without bond and brought removal proceedings against him.

His lawyers filed a petition of habeas corpus seeking his release, and the U.S. District Court in Minnesota granted the request. Wednesday's decision reversed the lower court's ruling.

The majority opinion was drafted by Judge Bobby Shepherd, a George W. Bush appointee, and joined by Judge L. Steven Grasz, a Trump appointee. Judge Ralph R. Erickson, who was appointed during President Trump's first term, dissented.

"Except for a single DUI, for nearly 20 years, Joaquin Herrera Avila had been living a law-abiding life in the United States," Erickson wrote. "For the past 29 years, Avila would have been entitled to a bond hearing during his removal proceedings. The court now holds that Avila--and millions of others--are subject to mandatory detention."

...

But the Trump administration has argued that anyone who entered the U.S. illegally is subject to mandatory deportation, unless immigration authorities grant them parole on humanitarian or public interest grounds.

Last fall, a Justice Department-run immigration court made a sweeping determination that the government could essentially detain a large swath of immigrants indefinitely while their removal proceedings are pending.

Since then, federal courts across the United States have been crushed by a tidal wave of cases filed by immigrants challenging their detention. In most cases, U.S. District Courts have sided with the immigrants and ruled against the government. According to a tally from Politico, more than 400 judges have ruled against the government in more than 5,000 cases.

And that's not all. The Supreme Court appears inclined to side with the Administration on the government's right to turn away "asylum" seekers at the border.

The majority of Supreme Court justices appeared to be sympathetic to the idea that the Trump administration should be able to turn away asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border. If the court rules in favor of the administration, the government will be able to revive a policy used during Trump's first term, where those seeking asylum were stopped at the border from setting foot in the US.

Federal law dictates that those who arrive in the US and are "physically present in the United States" or "arrive in the United States" can apply for asylum. The issue is whether noncitizens merely have to show up to the border to request asylum or if they have to cross the border fully before applying.

The majority of justices appeared to be sympathetic to the Trump administration in the case, per the New York Times. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that "arrives in" means that someone has fully crossed the border.

"'Arriving" sounds more 'in the process of.' 'Arrives in' sounds more like 'you've reached your destination,'" Justice Barrett said in the hearing. "If it's not crossing the physical border, what is the magic thing?" Former President Barak Obama implemented the policy where some seeking asylum would be turned around at the border, which was expanded by Trump. However, that policy was rescinded under the Biden administration.

Biden rejected Trump's border security measures and allowed tens of millions of illegal immigrants to cross into the United States, be paroled, and wait for immigration hearings that were often scheduled five or more years down the road. At one point during his term in office, Biden dismissed a bunch of immigration cases, leaving migrants in a legal limbo with neither legal status nor deporation orders.

The Trump administration has urged the justices to allow the policy to be reinstated. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh suggested that the debate about where a migrant is at when they request asylum is "very artificial." Two of the liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, had tougher questions for the administration in the case. They were the only justices who appeared sympathetic to allowing the full embrace of asylum claims at the border.

Look, we don't give thanks enough. Trump has had some bumps and oopsies this term, but he's been great 96% of the time. 96% will get you an A anywhere. An A+, really, with the curve.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:10 PM | Comments (180) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Jonathan Turley: Florida Grand Jury May Finally Reveal the Truth of the RussiaGate Criminal Conspiracy -- and Maybe the Consequences, Too

The Pine-Scented Druid Philosopher James Comey has been subpoenaed.

I don't know if any of this will result in anything, but my stars, I need some hope.

This week, we learned that the probe into the Russian conspiracy theory in Florida is moving forward with the disclosure that former FBI Director James Comey has been subpoenaed. What is different in this probe is that it is pursuing the real Russia conspiracy -- the creation of a false narrative to kneecap the first Trump administration.

At issue is what could be the greatest political hit job in history. Of course, the growing evidence of this conspiracy continues to be buried by one of its key components: the media. Nevertheless, the "truth will out," and it appears to be coming out in Florida.

Headed by Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, the investigation is building on information uncovered by House and Senate committees that was long buried by the Biden administration. That evidence appears to show a knowing effort to manufacture a Russian conspiracy hoax at the urging of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

Ironically, the Washington Post and the New York Times received Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting promoting this Russian conspiracy hoax. The media spent years in wall-to-wall coverage of disproven allegations, including many claims made in the debunked Steele Dossier that had been secretly funded by the Clinton campaign.

The true Pulitzer Prize-worthy story was staring the media in the face the whole time: a conspiracy to create a false conspiracy narrative to elect Clinton and later to derail the Trump administration. The latter effort succeeded with help from top intelligence figures.

...

Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Peter Strzok, a key figure in the investigation, texted FBI lawyer Lisa Page to assure her "that there's no way [Trump] gets elected," adding that they "can't take that risk." He added that they had it all in hand because "It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40."

In fact, whether it was known to Strzok or not, there was an insurance policy in the works. In July 2016, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Barack Obama on Hillary Clinton's alleged "plan" to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as "a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server."

Brennan is believed to be a target of the current investigation, including possible perjury before Congress.

In reality, within days of that briefing on how Clinton would create this conspiracy theory, the investigation began, just as the Clinton campaign hoped it would.

Early on, the FBI was told by the CIA that its sources -- and the Steele dossier -- were unreliable. However, key FBI officials continued the surveillance and the investigation targeting the Trump campaign and key figures. One official later pleaded guilty to lying to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to continue surveillance without an evidentiary basis.

At the end of 2016, a CIA assessment found that "Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent U.S. election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure." That presidential daily brief was scheduled to be published on Dec. 9, 2016, but the office of James Clapper, Obama's Director of National Intelligence, reportedly stopped the publication "based on some new guidance."

Clapper later joined Obama, along with John Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, and others, in a meeting that would ultimately inject the debunked theory directly into the media.

...

Back in 2016, the rewritten assessment was quickly leaked to an eagerly awaiting media. It was the perfect hit job carried out by top Obama administration officials at the very end of their time in power .

In testimony on May 23, 2017, Brennan claimed that the Steele dossier "wasn't part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment that was done."

Yet the declassified material appears to contradict that sworn statement. Brennan allegedly not only discussed the dossier but also insisted upon its inclusion in the new assessment Obama had requested.

Brennan and his handpicked team went to extraordinary lengths to revive the conspiracy theory that they knew was the original objective of the Clinton campaign.

Analysts complained that the reliance on the Steele Dossier "ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment." One CIA analyst told investigators that Brennan "refused to remove it, and when confronted with the dossier's main flaws, [Brennan] responded, 'Yes, but doesn't it ring true?'"

...

None of this will get anyone a Pulitzer, because the politics is wrong. However, it might just force the truth into the open. With Democrats promising to resume impeachments and investigations if they retake power in the midterms, it would be useful for the public to have a full understanding of what actually occurred last time.

It is time for the public to learn whether top Obama officials and the media pulled off the greatest political hoax in history

John Brennan may be indicted for perjury. He repeatedly testified under oath that the now-heavily-discredited Steele Dossier formed no part of his fake report implicating Trump in RUSSIAN collusion, but in contemporaneous documents, he says he fought for the inclusion of the fake dossier in the report:

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:10 PM | Comments (208) | Trackbacks (Suck)