On The First Day After Christmas My True Love Gave To Me: An ONT!

Hello everyone! Hope y'all had a happy Christmas.

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The Simple Life Cafe

Petit France, Strasbourg

Little Westie will protect you from the mean tyrannosaurus.

A big reach from a good boy.

Wait for me, I've got little legs!

She plays with such passion!

Serenading your donkeys.

More hide-and-seek with a golden dum-dum.

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Flying Bears Open Thread

Out of control. Just completely out of control.

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Ebenezer -- Christopher Nolan's Dark and Gritty Reboot of Ebeneezer Scrooge's Origin Story

Not really, it's fake.

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New York City 1899 Open Thread

Color added, of course.

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Diving Doggo Open Thread

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Buck Rogers Disco Open Thread

Unfortunately I can't find the full clip.

In the first clip, Rogers attends a formal Space Dance where everyone is doing staid Space Dance Moves.

Rogers doesn't like this stiff choreography, so he goes over to the band and teaches them how to "play something funky."

The next clip shows Rogers getting funky to this disco music he just willed into being.

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Battle of the Network Stars Open Thread

How about a little Battle of the Network Stars' T&A?

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The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

The two great evils of the 20th century have faired quite differently in current popular culture. Fascism has been discredited as a political philosophy, even though its most famous acolyte -- Adolph Hitler -- was in reality a socialist who used nationalism to attract the masses. Communism, otherwise known as "international socialism," has never been discredited among the bien-pensants in academia, labor, and the disaffected youth that provides the foot soldiers for the Democrat/progressive movement.

And that is a fantastic feat, because the death toll of communism in the 20th century is at the top of the list by a very wide margin. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and a host of lesser but still dedicated monsters conspired to murder more than 100,000,000 people.

Yet we romanticize communism, or its more civilized (bowdlerized) term: socialism. I watched "Oppenheimer" last night, and the ridiculousness of its presentation of communism was embarrassing. The fixation on the ultimate evil of atomic weapons and the arms race and the cold war was equally ridiculous, and carefully linked to the non-communists! I have written in the past that the atomic weapons used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 was the greatest humanitarian act in history. Their use saved possibly 1,000,000 Allied military lives and probably millions of Japanese, yet their use was presented as at best a murky ethical issue, and at worst the beginning of the end of humanity.

Antonio Gramsci's long march through our institutions is mostly complete, so the defense of communism and the vilification of freedom and free markets is embedded in our educational system. And of course the half-wits who become our "journalists" are particularly susceptible to the allure of the romantic version of communism, so the ranks of useful idiots in media are endemic.

But reality always intrudes upon the savagery and misery that is the ultimate result of every communist experiment. The Soviet Union fell in spite of 70 years of support from the West's left. China is a brutal regime frantically spinning to keep their economy from imploding (one child policy anyone?). Venezuela, Cuba, a bunch of African countries...all failing. And look to the North! Canada, in spite of abundant natural resources and a western work ethic has tumbled into the socialist sewer, courtesy of Castro's spawn, otherwise known as Justin Trudeau.

The evidence is clear that the grand experiment in perfecting Man has failed. All humanity got for it was misery, poverty, and death. All we have to do is teach history, and communism will be firmly planted in the dustbin of history. So why can't we do that?

Power. Communism is a tool to achieve power, not an end in itself. So discrediting it isn't enough...we must build a wall between the power inherent in government and its use for all but the most basic things. The founders of this great country understood that very well, but the desire for power among some overwhelmed even their prescience. They will never stop, so we cannot be complacent and assume that logic and reality will carry the day.

We had a great victory in November, and it may very well be an indication of a fundamental change in the American political and cultural psyche.

Now is the exactly perfect time to solidify those gains and build into our institutions a defense against the insanity that the Left uses to consolidate power. And to that end, the era of collegiality and accommodation and compromise is past. We see that attitude in Donald Trump's cabinet appointments, and we see it in his various pronouncements about Greenland and Panama and Gaza.

It is a return to American Exceptionalism, which is anathema to the communist experiment. And that is a very good thing!

[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter]

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Mid-Morning Art Thread

Traffic Stop
Frank Xavier Leyendecker

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The Morning Report — 12/26/24

Good morning kids. Hope you all had a blessed Christmas and that the light from the menorah this year, more than ever, serves as a beacon of hope not just for Jews but for all of us who yearn for freedom and for the darkness of evil and tyranny wherever it exists to be vanquished.

On that note, let us commence. The late, lamented and brilliant Andrew Breitbart long ago so eloquently observed that "politics is downstream from culture." I certainly agree with this but then it begs the question, what is culture? I'm not really looking for a Funk & Wagnall's definition of the word, but trying to put into words for me what seems to be a sort of chicken vs egg. situation. I guess culture is sort of a distillation, good and bad, of the shared human experience up to a certain moment in time of customs, traditions and patterns of behavior that taken together define a nation, society or community.

Why ask this question, because for me despite the fact that the human experience over thousands of years dictates that for a given society to thrive, people have to organize themselves and behave in a certain way. To wit The Judeo-Christian Western Model. And yet in a quest for absolute power and control, people have time and again demonstrated the need to abandon rationality, sanity and common decency. And when that happens, you create misery, pain, suffering and waste beyond belief.

Not so very long ago, the notion that anyone would be cheering with near orgasmic glee the gunning down in cold blood of UHC CEO Brian Thompson would've been nearly unthinkable to anyone except someone like David Berkowitz.

Of course, those cheering the loudest would immediately point the finger at me accusing me of cheering what Daniel Penny did that caused the death of a deranged man threatening him and fellow passengers on a NYC subway train. The only thing people were cheering was that Daniel Penny had the bravery and presence of mind to risk his own life in restraining the deviant in question who could've been armed and indeed caused grievous bodily harm to Penny and anyone else at that time without warning. No one cheered the death, which sadly, as I and others noted was the fault of Leftist policy that created a deranged drug-addicted lost soul and unleashed him on society. So that being said, and in the wake of a sleeping woman being immolated on a NYC subway train late last week, we get this comment from a supposed thought-leader in and of the left:

Stalin famously said, “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.” This is the statist bean-counter’s view of human life. Humans are sort of like widgets, existing to serve the needs of the state. . . I thought of Stalin’s words when I read what Nate Silver, the statistician, had to say about the fact that an illegal alien allegedly set a woman alight on the New York City subway. Just to get the facts straight, the illegal alien was kicked out of the country on Trump’s watch and sneaked back in on Biden’s watch. He lived for free in a homeless shelter while somehow managing to support a $ 30-a-day drug habit, in addition to drinking heavily.

. . .Bill Ackman points out what most Americans instinctively understand: That poor woman was burned alive in the most horrific fashion because of the Biden administration’s open border. Nate Silver, however, has a different take, which can be summed up thusly: “Hey, it was bad, but crime happens in big cities, so people shouldn’t get their knickers in a twist about the alleged murderer’s immigration status.”
NYC has a considerably lower crime rate than most large American cities. It's also a city of 8+ million where lots of crazy shit happens on a daily basis. I don't blame anyone for being concerned but it's sort of a test for whether you think in terms of narratives or base rates.

. . . I don’t mean to pick only on Nate Silver because his approach to the issue is typical for Democrats. They love to point out that illegal aliens commit fewer crimes than Americans or legal immigrants, which kind of overlooks the fact that every one of them is a criminal by virtue of being here. I also doubt the continuing validity of those statistics given crimes at the border that don’t go into the database, as well as the increasing aggression and geographic spread of Latin American gangs such as Tren de Aragua.

Well, a single death is a tragedy, but Comrade Stalin's fellow travelers in the Democrat Party of 2024 view it as yet another opportunity to blame the society they have worked so very hard to tear down and fundamentally transform by shifting the blame onto us who point out the conditions that allowed this barbarism to occur.

I do not know Nate Silver, nor his background. But for the life of me I cannot fathom how people that I grew up with, attended the same schools with and have similar backgrounds with, can even begin to rationalize things in so cold a manner so as to preserve their own personal political beliefs. His comments just beggar the imagination. I had quite a few liberal if not hardcore leftist professors in college back in the late 70s and yet here I am.

Then again, my mother of blessed memory and her family went through the same hell on earth courtesy of the Nazis as Anthony Blinken's (step?) father and yet there he and his ilk are, eagerly working to destroy the state of Israel and grease the wheels of Iran's atomic weapons program.

Well, if the death of a million per Stalin is a statistic, those who enthusiastically cheered Mangione for what he did, and were aghast at Daniel Penny's acquittal will one day, be the ones who will volunteer to line us up in front of a ditch and shoot us into it with a smile on their faces. That in the cold light of day is or God-forbid will be the politics that is downstream from today's culture.

Luigi Mangione has killer abs, a broad smile and a vendetta against the U.S. health care system. Progressive politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were among several who criticized the killing, only to add “But …” to their statements. . . Chances are a MAGA rally wouldn’t cheer Mangione’s name in any setting, but liberal late-night TV watchers have had a similar reaction to some progressive politicians.Earlier this month, Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” alerted his audience that Mangione had been captured after a brief manhunt.

The crowd’s reaction? Boos. . . Why are late-night TV audiences cheering on Mangione?  It’s a complex constellation of reasons, from the Left’s embrace of political violence to our increasingly divided age. One possible culprit? Late-Night TV. These propaganda shows have been dehumanizing their political opponents for years. Trump is Hitler … and his fans are just as bad.

So, chicken and egg. Is the problem the Late Night schtick-meisters and the rest of the media/entertainment complex or is it the audiences cheering on murderers and the dehumanization of Trump and normal Americans. Or is it a self-licking ice cream cone?

Yesterday, we recalled how we marveled at the view of earth from Apollo 8 at Christmastime in 1968. Lest we forget the mindset of some of our fellow citizens at that time, such as one Bill Ayers, among others.

In No Place to Hide, Grathwohl explains that the Weathermen actually believed that they would be successful in overthrowing the U.S. government and that, with the help of the Cubans, Chinese, Russians, and North Vietnamese, they would occupy America. Americans would have to be "re-educated" in camps, similar to what the communists did in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and other countries they had taken over. Here is one of the chilling revelations Larry Grathwohl made in the film:
I asked, "Well what is going to happen to those people we can’t reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?" And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated.
I asked, "Well what is going to happen to those people we can’t reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?" And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated.
And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers.
And when I say "eliminate," I mean "kill."
Twenty-five million people.
I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people and they were dead serious.

Consider this in light of those cheering on the shooting of Thompson, and the rending of cloth over the acquittal of Daniel Penny, and the passing of laws calling for the arrest of parents who refuse to let their children's genitals be lopped off and for the state to become the parents.

There are signs, the biggest one being the relative landslide victory of Donald Trump last November and a rejection of the more openly avowed Leftist policies of the Democrat party across demographic lines. Let us hope and pray that this trend is indeed a cultural shift reflected in the election and that it continues for years to come, as it must if we and our progeny are to survive and thrive. What cannot go on will not go on. Hopefully it's the evil insanity of Leftist/Progressivism and not our beloved America as we want to restore.

Lastly, a quick shout-out and thank you for your continued support in hitting our tip jar. It truly is appreciated more than you can know. Have a great day!

ABOVE THE FOLD, BREAKING, NOTEWORTHY
• His tweet about the statistics behind the illegal alien burning up a woman on a subway is just chilling.
  Nate Silver shows how leftists think like communists, not like human beings
  
• Prominent figures say they've been kicked out of their banks over politics
  What Is Debanking And Why Are People Talking About It?

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Daily Tech News 26 December 2024

Top Story

• A record 18,000 games were published on Steam in 2024 - around fifty per day. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Of course most of these are small indie titles, but given that most of the tentpole AAA titles in 2024 were catastrophic failures - cough Concord cough - that's not only entirely understandable but a good thing.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile in Europe new game sales dropped by 29% year-on-year. (WCCFTech)
  
  Star Wars Outlaws, one of Ubisoft's biggest failures of 2024, was the 14th best selling title in 2024 out of games released in 2024. But when you include sales of older games, it drops to number 45.

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Wednesday Overnight Open Thread - December 25, 2024 [TRex]

[Photo: Silent Night Chapel, Oberndorf, Austria]

[Click through for Stille Nacht in the native German language, as God intended. No hidden Yoko. Really. How many skeptics want to click anyway just to check? What, you do not trust a dinosaur?]

***

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Christmas Cafe

When a strange dog decides to give you a present and that present is himself.

A lonely golden doodle in a wheelchair makes a friend.

The cutest little shop clerk.

Playing soccer with an elk.

It's too quacking cold!

Deer running on a trail at night.

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In the Lion's Den Open Thread

Whoops I got caught up and forgot I still have to post!

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The Hounds of Christmas Open Thread

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Reindeer Rock Open Thread

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Forgotten Toys Open Thread

Some toy commercials, and a couple of videos looking at older toys.

One of the toylines shown is the "Ding-a-Lings," a line of robot toys. Terrible name, cool toys. They've got a big giant robot that's piloted by a smaller robot that goes inside his head. The smaller robot is "Brain."

And obviously, you have your Star Wars, Steve Austin, Evil Kneval, etc. Also "Action Man," which was (I think) the UK's version of GI Joe. Not sure if they were sold in the US.

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Dog Christmas Open Thread

Merry Christmas to all! And to all, a good boy!

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Christmas Day Non-Rant

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, Horde. For those of you who observe Hanukkah (which, in an unusual but not too rare congruence, also starts tonight), Happy Hanukkah. For those of you who are in interfaith households, both!

It has been a year of ups and downs, but I hope everyone reading today is having a nice holiday and is in the midst of joy. Please enjoy a Christmas open thread and some nice performances of Christmas music between, I hope, spending time with loved ones, cooking and eating, exchanging gifts and praising G-d as we end the year! I am as always both proud and constantly astonished to be a part of the community we have here at the HQ. For those who are checking in on this holiday, once again, Merry Christmas! For those catching up later, I hope you had a lovely holiday!

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