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September 05, 2025

Democrat Senators Attack RFKJr., Trying to Pressure Their Weaker Republican Counterparts to Demand His Ouster

There is a plan, concocted by people in Big Pharma, to oust RFKJr.

On the eve before the US Senate reconvenes, a detailed secret trade-association memo plotting the removal of US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has leaked. It reads like a coup attempt against regulatory reform--and they are spending millions to make sure Kennedy is out of office by September.
It seems that the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), whose membership includes Pfizer, Merck, Novavax, Vaxcyte, and hundreds of biotech firms that profit from regulatory insulation, has a mole. This article critiques the documented lobbying behavior of the trade group BIO, not the internal operations or clinical data of its member corporations.
When the nation's leading pharmaceutical trade group convenes a closed-door strategy meeting and openly discusses the need to "go to The Hill and lobby that it is time for RFK Jr. to go," the issue is no longer health policy--it is democratic integrity.
According to the apparent leaked minutes, verified by the name of the creator of the file, on April 3, 2025, BIO held a "Vaccine Policy Steering Committee" (VPSC) meeting whose internal summary, soon to be publicly available thanks to whistleblowers, reveals a campaign of strategic deception, institutional capture, and psychological warfare and exposes a campaign of institutional deception, investor protection, and coordinated sabotage of the MAHA reform platform.
According to the leaked document, titled "BIO Vaccine Policy Steering Committee -- April 3, 2025", BIO has committed $2 million--half of its cash reserve--to counter what it calls the "threat" posed by Kennedy's rise. But this is no ordinary PR push. It is a multi-pronged campaign designed to deceive the public, silence dissent, and preserve industry dominance through influence operations masquerading as science.
The Plot Exposed
The document opens with a blunt political calculation: Kennedy's candidacy threatens investor confidence, regulatory predictability, and the long-term viability of the vaccine business. BIO leadership in the apparent leaked document states plainly: "It is time to go to The Hill and lobby that it is time for RFK Jr to go."
To achieve this, according to the document, BIO intends to deploy surrogates across the political spectrum, co-opt conservative influencers, and bypass direct engagement with the Kennedy campaign altogether. Among the figures named as potential allies in this covert effort: Dr. Mehmet Oz, former Senator Richard Burr (former Senator NC; Advisor DLA Piper Health Policy Steering Committee), Senator Bill Cassidy (in a section of the document focused on strategic influencer engagement and legislative positioning), and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). These individuals and institutions, the memo suggests, can provide a veneer of bipartisan legitimacy to BIO's core aim: neutralize Kennedy without ever addressing the substance of his critique.

Cassidy, an unrepentant left-liberal who shames the Louisiana GOP that keeps electing him, already declared that Kennedy isn't allowed to fire HHS employees without his approval. Somehow, he believes that a legislator should have executive control.

Unfortunately, the folksy poser Senator John Kennedy joined his fellow Louisiana liberal in suggesting that RFKJr. is causing "chaos" at HHS and we need to support the "scientists" who did such a great job during covid.

Follow the Money
The most revealing detail is that $2 million--precisely half of BIO's entire $4 million reserve--has been allocated to vaccine communications, specifically a D.C.-area pilot campaign called "Why We Vaccinate." The purpose is not education, but behavioral influence: to combine "inspire and frighten" tactics in order to manipulate public sentiment and legislative behavior.
Internal documents state clearly that the campaign's goal is to appeal to the "movable middle" using emotionally charged messaging, capitalizing on fear messaging tied to national security, workforce resilience, and economic productivity.
Why such an aggressive push? Because, as Vaxcyte COO Jim Wassil apparently warned, "investors have stated they are leaving until the next data readout," citing Kennedy's "unpredictability" as a systemic disruption to the vaccine capital pipeline.
Given Kennedy's demand for restored liability, long-term data, and placebo-controlled trials, BIO appears to view Kennedy's proposals as a threat to the entire shortcut pipeline BIO built under EUA conditions.
...
As a reminder, these statements are drawn from the contents of an internal memo that has not been publicly confirmed by the named individuals. Interpretations remain provisional.
Hijacking Language
The VPSC meeting wasn't just about funding. It was also about redefining language. BIO officials emphasized a shift in framing--from "protect," "defend," and "maintain" to "streamline," "optimize," and "enhance."
But these are not reforms. They read as an attempt at narrative laundering operations. When BIO says "efficiency," it means fewer safety requirements. When it says "resilience," it means consumer obedience, not protection from harms from vaccines held to the Kennedy Bar. And when it says "transparency," it means secretive PR-managed theater, not data disclosure.
...
BIO's strategic calculus is unmistakable: avoid confronting RFK, Jr. head-on and instead flood the surrounding narrative space with surrogate voices engineered to appear neutral, authoritative, and scientifically grounded.
The April 3 memo explicitly recommends targeting "Makary and Trump Insiders vs RFK, Jr.," signaling an intention to bypass public debate in favor of internal triangulation. Within this framework, Dr. Mehmet Oz is floated as a potential "public health voice of reason within WH," praised for his healthcare credentials and presumed credibility with conservative audiences.
While no specific action is proposed, the implication is clear--the document suggests BIO may aim to elevate Oz as a counterweight to Kennedy's reform agenda by leveraging his media fluency and perceived scientific legitimacy to repackage industry talking points under the guise of responsible governance. This is not policy--it's psychological misdirection through proxy, as the document implies.
The document also names AEI as a "trusted" conduit for pro-vaccine messaging, with Scott Gottlieb calling the MAHA movement a "cover for an anti-vaccine campaign." It floats Dr. Oz as a possible public face of White House-aligned medical messaging. It outlines plans to use conservative constituents and influencers not to question BIO's agenda, but to normalize it among skeptics.

Senate Democrats savaged RFKJr. at yesterday's Finance Committee hearing,
appearing to be well-incentivized by Big Pharma donations.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., got into a heated debate with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Or., during a hearing on Thursday.
The exchange came as Kennedy was testifying before the Senate Finance Committee. Wyden accused Kennedy of putting children into "harm's way" with his policies and argued Kennedy has shown no regrets about doing so.
"This is about kids being pushed into harm's way by reckless and repeated decisions to get scientists and doctors out of the way and allow conspiracy theories to dictate this country's health policy," Wyden said at the end of his questioning.
"I don't see any evidence that you have any regrets about anything you've done or plans to change it. And my last comment is, I hope that you will tell the American people how many preventable child deaths are an acceptable sacrifice for enacting an agenda that I think is fundamentally cruel and defies common sense. Thank you, Mr. Chairman," Wyden said.
"Do I get a reply?" Kennedy said. "Senator you've sat in that chair how long? 20-25 years while the chronic disease of our children went up to 76%. And you said nothing."
"You never asked the question why it's happening. Why is this happening? Today, for the first time in 20 years, we've learned that infant mortality has increased in our country. It's not because I came in here. It's because of what happened during the Biden administration that we're going to end," he continued.

Sheldon Whitehouse complained that the Department of Health and Human Services wouldn't take his phone calls.

RFKJr. pointed out that this grandstanding c***sucker has his cell phone number, but never bothered to use it.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Thursday excoriated Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., over his complaints that he was being "jerked around" by his agency, saying Whitehouse had the means to contact him personally and never did so.
"I'm being jerked around by your bureaucracy. I would like it to end and get some progress," Whitehouse told Kennedy during his Senate testimony.
Kennedy Jr. was having none of it, however.
"Senator, you raised this during my confirmation hearing... you raised something that makes a lot of sense," he said. "I said to you at that time 'call me and we'd love to come talk about this.'"
"You have my cell phone! You can call me any time! I have never heard from you in seven months," Kennedy quipped. "I would love to meet with you."
Whitehouse cheekily replied, "we'll try. You have 30,000 employees. They could have reached out to me. They know where I live."

This is such a crazy female kind of argument: sure I could have called you if I have a problem but I want you to reach out to me. You should read my mind and just know when I need reassurance.

Speaking of crazy female logic: Maria Cantrell complains that RFKJr. is interrupting her when she insults him, and then, when he stops interrupting her, declares "You, sir, are a charlatan."

Posted by: Ace at 05:05 PM | Comments (328) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Europe Bans Michael Shellenberger's Public Substack Because It Revealed French President Macron's Illegal Efforts to Suppress Speech That Undermines His Lies

Yesterday, I noted that Michael Shellenberger's excellent Public substack reported on the French Twitter Files (Les Dossiers Francais du Twitter), exposing Macron's pressure on Twitter to stop allowing posts that undermined his false claims.

Michael Shellenberger
@shellenberger
TWITTER FILES -- FRANCE
At this moment, the Trump administration is negotiating with the EU over final obstacles to a trade deal, one of which is European censorship of US social media platforms.
Many analysts believe the massive size of the EU will lead US social media firms to impose European censorship, including on Americans. Last year, the EU's then-top digital censor, Thierry Breton, threatened action against Elon Musk after he announced a conversation on X with Donald Trump.
Now, new TWITTER FILES show a coordinated effort by France's President Emmanuel Macron, legislators, and state-affiliated NGOs working together to force the world's most influential social media platform to censor users for legal speech and influence Twitter's worldwide "content moderation" for narrative control.
What's more, TWITTER FILES - FRANCE reveals the birth of the censorship-by-NGO proxy strategy at the heart of the Censorship Industrial Complex:
-- President Macron personally reached out to then-CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey;
-- The timing of Macron's action strongly suggests coordination with NGOs on a pressure campaign to win more censorship and demand sensitive user data from Twitter;
-- The pattern of events indicates potentially illegal activity by various actors.
The TWITTER FILES FRANCE investigation was led by @McmahonPascal and @battleforeurope, and edited by @galexybrane and @shellenberger.
We are releasing the Files here on X and simultaneously publishing a comprehensive report by Clerótte and Fazi on France's invention of the Censorship Industrial Complex.

And, as if they intended to prove Public right about the French War on Speech (I don't favor the French in this war, or any war), France blocked the report from being accessed in Europe.

They're claiming that an article on a respectable platform (Substack) is "malware" that might hijack people's computers.

Posted by: Ace at 03:50 PM | Comments (275) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Federal Appeals Court Overrules Leftwing Lunatic District Court Judge, Rules Alligator Alcatraz Can Remain Open

DeSantis had begun shutting the facility down due to this order. Only a couple hundred emails remained.

And now: They can begin processing illegal alien criminals again.

A federal appeals court has temporarily blocked a judge's order requiring Florida and the federal government to shut down and dismantle a controversial immigration detention facility built in the Everglades, widely referred to as "Alligator Alcatraz."
On Thursday, the Eleventh US Circuit Court of Appeals granted requests from the State of Florida and the US Department of Homeland Security to stay a district court's preliminary injunction that would have forced the site to wind down operations within 60 days. A preliminary injunction is a temporary order put in place until a court can make a final decision in a case.
"After careful consideration, we grant the defendants' motions and we stay the preliminary injunction and the underlying case itself pending appeal," ruled the divided three-judge panel in the majority opinion.
The makeshift detention facility had been the subject of intense criticism for its treatment of migrants who had been confined there amid sweltering heat, bug infestations and meager meals, prompting members of Congress and state representatives that witnessed the conditions to demand its immediate closure.

Suck a dick. That's called "Florida," and that's where these Maryland Men chose to invade.

The stay comes about a week after Florida Division of Emergency Management Executive Director Kevin Guthrie said "we are probably going to be down to 0 individuals within a few days" in an email exchange shared with CNN. Guthrie sent the message to South Florida Rabbi Mario Rojzman in response to his request to provide chaplaincy services at the facility.
Despite the controversy surrounding the facility, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is doubling down on immigrant detention centers in his state -- including the announcement of two new immigration detention facilities he dubbed "Deportation Depot" in northeast Florida and "Panhandle Pokey" in the Florida Panhandle.

You will not be surprised to learn that this Lowly District Court Judge once again completely ignored recent Supreme Court precedent to get the outcome xhe wanted.

Before considering these factors, however, we find it necessary to discuss the nature of the Plaintiffs' claim on appeal here.
The Plaintiffs sought and obtained injunctive relief based on an al-leged violation of NEPA. In Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, 605 U.S. ___, 145 S. Ct. 1497 (2025), the Supreme Court recently addressed what NEPA does--and does not--require, as well as the role of the federal judiciary when considering a claim asserting a violation of that statute. Inexplicably, other than a passing citation using a "see also" signal on page 46, the district court's order does not mention the Supreme Court's most recent decision about the statute lying at the heart of this case.

NEPA, the Supreme Court ruled, imposes no "substantive" restrictions on building, but only requires a process of preparing Environmental Impact Statements (EISs). Those statements do not have to be the basis of a decision to build or not build -- they only need to be prepared, provided to decisionmakers. They create no obligation of political decisionmakers to kill projects due to a negative EIS.

But the lowly district court judge completely ignored this and blew it off with a "see also" instead of taking it as absolutely controlling the outcome of this case, which it does.

As the Supreme Court stated:

Unlike those later-enacted laws, however, NEPA imposes no substantive environmental obligations or restrictions. NEPA is a purely procedural statute
that . . . simply requires an agency to prepare an EIS--in essence, a report. Importantly, NEPA does not require the agency to weigh environmental con-
sequences in any particular way. Rather, an agency may weigh environmental consequences as the agency reasonably sees fit under its governing statute
and any relative substantive environmental laws.
Simply stated, NEPA is a procedural cross-check not a substantive roadblock. The goal of the law is to inform agency decisionmaking, not to paralyze it. Id. Because NEPA is "purely procedural," id. at 1510, and the EIS is "only one input into an agency's decision," id. at 1511, the EIS that NEPA requires "does not itself require any substantive outcome," id. at 1511, nor is an agency "constrained by NEPA from
deciding that other values outweigh the environmental costs," id.

But the lowly left-wing communist judge ignored this and took the EIS as proof that Alligator Alcatraz must be shut down.

And we are mindful that the Supreme Court intended Seven County to act as a "course correction" to bring "judicial review under NEPA back in line with the statutory text and common sense." Id. at 1514. The Court noted the potential for abuse inherent in judicial treatment of NEPA as something other than a procedural
statute: "NEPA has transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool employed by project opponents (who may not always be entirely motivated by concern for the environment) to try to stop or at least slow down new infrastructure and construction projects." Id. at 1513.

This leads me nicely to this NBC Fake News (TM) story: Like cowards, left-wing communist judges are anonymously complaining that the Supreme Court is requiring them to follow Supreme Court precedent and not just make up whatever law is necessary to hand their fellow communists a court victory.

In rare interviews, federal judges criticize Supreme Court's handling of Trump cases

Ten judges tell NBC News the Supreme Court needs to explain its rulings better, with some urging Chief Justice John Roberts to do more to defend the judiciary against external criticism.

So, if you've followed my posts on this, you know that the Lowly District Court judges keep employing the same strategy to ignore clear Supreme Court precedent: they claim that the Supreme Court's rulings are "vague" and therefore that gives them the power to set those "vague" rulings aside and do whatever the F*** they wanna do.

Federal judges are frustrated with the Supreme Court for increasingly overturning lower court rulings involving the Trump administration with little or no explanation, with some worried the practice is undermining the judiciary at a sensitive time.
Some judges believe the Supreme Court, and in particular Chief Justice John Roberts, could be doing more to defend the integrity of their work as President Donald Trump and his allies harshly criticize those who rule against him and as violent threats against judges are on the rise.
In rare interviews with NBC News, a dozen federal judges -- appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents, including Trump, and serving around the country -- pointed to a pattern they say has recently emerged:
Lower court judges are handed contentious cases involving the Trump administration. They painstakingly research the law to reach their rulings. When they go against Trump, administration officials and allies criticize the judges in harsh terms. The government appeals to the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority.

LOL. They "painstakingly research the law."

As you just saw, the lowly district court judge in the Alligator Alcatraz case ignored a recent, clear, controlling Supreme Court ruling by just saying "see also."

Here's my left-wing take on this issue, which I just made up to let the activists win. (Who are, of course, not really questioning Alligator Alcatraz on environmental grounds; they just don't want illegal aliens deported, and this is a handy line of attack.)

Now that I've told you my left-wing motivated reasoning, "see also" the Supreme Court precedent that completely contradicts my own personal left-wing Body of "Law."

And then the Supreme Court, in emergency rulings, swiftly rejects the judges' decisions with little to no explanation.

Because they just ruled on this, and you ignored it, so the "little to no explanation" is "see this case we just decided."

Not "see also" this case, but see only this case which completely controls (that is, determines, forces) your own ruling.

Emergency rulings used to be rare. But their number has dramatically increased in recent years.
Ten of the 12 judges who spoke to NBC News said the Supreme Court should better explain those rulings, noting that the terse decisions leave lower court judges with little guidance for how to proceed. But they also have a new and concerning effect, the judges said, validating the Trump administration's criticisms. A short rebuttal from the Supreme Court, they argue, makes it seem like they did shoddy work and are biased against Trump.

See also.

Posted by: Ace at 02:40 PM | Comments (363) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Revealed: Emails Showed that White House Staffers Scrambled to Find a Justification for Printing Up "Pardons" the "President" Didn't Even Know About

Unfortunately, the one pardon he signed was for Hunter.

But the rest might be challenged. (Though I have no idea how that would work.)

President Biden's sweeping clemency grants during his final days in office caused concern inside the West Wing and Justice Department about how to ensure his wishes were accurately implemented -- and it's unclear whether Biden himself was consulted before thousands of pardons were announced, internal emails obtained exclusively by The Post show.
The messages indicate the 46th president orally approved commutations for inmates jailed for crack cocaine offenses on Jan. 11 -- but his auto-penned signature wasn't affixed to three documents listing about 2,500 recipients until the morning of Jan. 17.
The debate over who exactly to include in the mass pardons and how to modify their sentences came to a head late on the night of Jan. 16.
Then-White House Staff Secretary Stef Feldman, a key gatekeeper of the presidential autopen, wrote to West Wing lawyers she needed evidence Biden had consented before she authorized a mechanical signature on one of the most sweeping acts of clemency in American history.
"I'm going to need email from [Deputy Assistant to the President] Rosa [Po] on original chain confirming P[resident] signs off on the specific documents when they are ready," Feldman wrote to five other Biden aides at 9:16 p.m.
Six minutes later, deputy White House counsel Tyeesha Dixon, one of the email recipients, forwarded the message to Michael Posada, chief of staff to the White House counsel's office.
"Michael, thoughts on how to handle this?" Dixon asked, adding in reference to the documents authorizing clemency: "He doesn't review the warrants."
"Ok talked to Stef," Posada replied to Dixon at 10:06 p.m.

"We will just need something from Rosa once the documents are ready confirming that the 21 people commuted to home confinement are who the president signed off on in the document titled X, and the # individuals listed in document titled Y are those with crack powder disparities who the president intended to commute," he wrote.
"Basically, something from Rosa making clear that the documents accurately reflect his decision. If you can give me a blurb whenever they are ready to suggest to Rosa, I can pass along."
The mass clemency was announced hours later, at 4:59 a.m.

We have no evidence Biden was ever actually consulted -- and some evidence he wasn't. Note the time the "pardons" were announced -- five in the morning.

The exchange took place well outside of Biden's known regular working schedule -- with White House aides leaking to media outlets months earlier that the Democrat was at his best between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on any given day.
...
It's unclear whether Biden actually gave the final go-ahead as Feldman requested Jan. 16, but the emails suggest that aides instead incorporated Po's attestation of what he "intended" to do.
...
The ex-president's public remarks since then indicate he was not aware that only three documents were required for the roughly 2,500 commutations.
He told the New York Times in July that autopen was used to sign clemency warrants "because there were a lot of them."

In other words: Biden is claiming that "three" clemency warrants is "a lot" and that's why he didn't review each of them.

He clearly is not aware that there were only three warrants he had to review. Each of these warrants set free hundreds of criminals -- and that's his confusion showing. He think that each criminal had his own warrant.

They didn't. They were batch-exonerated.

And Biden is completely unaware of the three (just three!) documents he's supposed to have approved. He thinks there were hundreds of them.

....
However, there were surprising aberrations in which violent criminals were included in the near-immediate clemency grants -- including Russell McIntosh, 51, whose crimes included the 1999 murder of a North Carolina woman who threatened to report him to police and her two-year-old child.
...
Legal experts say that auto-signed documents hold full legal force, but must accurately reflect the president's orders, and the emails obtained by The Post indicate attempts to create a paper trail vouching for just that.

Hey guys, did you hear that Trump looks very sick and his health is obviously failing and also that he died last Thursday? It's true, says the media that spent four years claiming an obviously-demented man was mentally fit as a fiddle.

Posted by: Ace at 01:30 PM | Comments (333) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Jerry Dunleavy/JustTheNews: Disgraced, Jailed FBI Agent Who Leaked Critical Information to... CEFC, the ChiCom Front Company That Was Paying Off Hunter Biden and "The Big Guy"

Treason.

Convicted FBI agent tipped off Hunter Biden-linked Chinese company about criminal investigation

A disgraced FBI official tipped off a Chinese company about a criminal investigation while Hunter Biden was pursuing lucrative deals with the CCP-linked business.
By Jerry Dunleavy

The since-convicted FBI official who led counterintelligence efforts in New York leaked information to an affiliate of a Chinese company which was linked to Hunter Biden's business efforts, according to a DOJ watchdog who concluded the leak tipped the Chinese conglomerate off about the bureau's criminal investigation.
Charles McGonigal, the former special-agent-in-charge of the FBI Counterintelligence Division in New York, leaked information to "Person B" -- an unnamed businessman who worked for the Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC -- even as the FBI was secretly investigating the Chinese company, according to the new report by Acting DOJ Inspector General William M. Blier.
McGonigal, who was sentenced in December 2023 for money laundering related to a Russian oligarch and in February 2024 for receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from an Albanian government official, met with prosecutors in November 2023 and "acknowledged during the proffer interview that he shared information with Person B about the CEFC investigation and anticipated arrests arising from it."

Another straight-shooting ham-and-egger.

The DOJ watchdog said that "Person B was a consultant to foreign governments and businesses on international investments, and, in addition to his work for CEFC China, Person B was a non-governmental advisor to the Prime Minister of Albania."

In short, he warned "Person B," who was a consultant to CEFC, about the FBI investigation into them, which permitted them to take steps to cover up their crimes.

And CEFC was at this time shoveling money to Hunter Biden with 10% reserved for "The Big Guy."

The watchdog report assessed that "although the full extent of the harm from McGonigal's leaks of sensitive investigative information to foreign subjects and targets will likely never be fully known, we determined that the impact of McGonigal's conduct on the CEFC investigation, a significant FBI criminal investigation, was substantial."
President Joe Biden's son held a lucrative position on the board of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma when his father was vice president. He also pursued business deals in China and elsewhere during and after his father's tenure and received millions from Chinese government-linked entities. He raked in millions thanks to these associations from 2013 to 2018.
CEFC was a multibillion-dollar Chinese conglomerate founded by Ye Jianming, a Chinese Communist Party-linked business tycoon who subsequently disappeared in China but with whom Hunter Biden had attempted to work out numerous deals. Chinese state-run media named Ye in an alleged corruption case in 2018, and China allowed CEFC to go bankrupt.
Hunter Biden and his associated businesses are also believed to have received $5 million or more in payments from CEFC in 2017 and 2018, and Ye Jianming's deputy, Patrick Ho, also agreed to pay Hunter Biden a $1 million legal retainer after Ho was eventually arrested. Ho agreed to the $1 million retainer with Hunter Biden for "counsel to matters related to U.S. law and advice pertaining to the hiring and legal analysis of any U.S. law firm or lawyer," according to an "attorney engagement letter" located on Hunter Biden's laptop hard drive.
The first call Ho reportedly made after his arrest in late 2017 was to Joe Biden's brother, James, who has said he thought the call was meant for Hunter. Ho had tried reaching out for help because Hunter Biden agreed to represent him as part of his efforts to work out a liquefied natural gas deal worth tens of millions of dollars.
Hunter referred to Ho as "the fucking spy chief of China" in a May 11, 2018, voice recording.
Ho was sentenced to three years in prison in March 2019 for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. He was deported to Hong Kong in June 2021 after serving his sentence. It was later revealed that the Justice Department had likely obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Ho. Republicans accused now-former Attorney General Merrick Garland of not being forthcoming about the apparent FISA against Ho.
The DOJ watchdog said "McGonigal eventually admitted he disclosed to Person B that the FBI planned to arrest individuals associated with CEFC."

The article goes on to note that Joe Biden gave his son a complete pardon for all crimes he committed during a specific 11-year period.

How are you? I'm feeling energetic. Fasting is really good for your sleep.

Any plans for the weekend?

BTW, did anyone see Jaws in the theaters last weekend? It was the #2 movie in America, I think. I wanted to see it but also wanted to be lazy so instead of doing something I did nothing, as usual.

Posted by: Ace at 12:26 PM | Comments (414) | Trackbacks (Suck)

THE MORNING RANT: Perhaps the Populist Left is Finally Turning Against the “Philanthropaths”

A subject I return to periodically is the problem of “philanthropaths.” These are mega-rich sociopaths who are seeking to impose an anti-freedom, global tyranny on the rest of us, deploying their wealth toward their evil agenda in the name of “philanthropy.”

Left-wing political parties across the globe have generally embraced these Bond villains, since their causes tend to align. However, the growing working-class revolt in the western world may finally be causing some people who default to the left to re-think their tribes’ peculiar allegiance to the world’s richest people.

First, a little background. In a 2024 article in The Pipeline I wrote:

So who is funding Just Stop Oil and the Climate Emergency Fund? Its wealthy, left-wing benefactors include Rory Kennedy (daughter of the late Robert Kennedy), Abigail Disney, and co-founder oil heiress Aileen Getty, among others.

A few months ago in a Blaze article titled “Meet the Philanthropaths” I discussed the societal problem of having people with unfathomable wealth seeking to use their fortunes to upend western civilization.

Many of us on the political right once held a principled aversion to telling the ultra-wealthy how to spend their money. If billionaires wanted to build libraries, fund symphonies, or throw lavish parties, fine — they were reinvesting in society, directly or indirectly.
But that was before the rise of the modern “philanthropath,” a new breed of sociopathic billionaire using inherited or self-made fortunes to re-engineer civilization from the top down. These aren’t benevolent stewards. They’re ideological crusaders waging war on tradition, prosperity, and truth.

By their actions, it seems clear to me that Bill Gates, George Soros, the Walton family heirs, and plenty of others are working toward a one-world government that sees everyday people as a pestilence. World Economic Forum guru Yuval Noah Harari stated the ugly truth when he said, “We just don’t need the vast majority of the population.” He’s not referring to himself. He’s referring to you and me. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and his ~~brother~~ ~~sister~~ sibling Jennifer Pritzker have turned Illinois into a sanctuary state for mutilating children in service to the transgender agenda, stating that it’s “a continuation of my family’s tradition of putting personal philanthropy into service for the public good.”

With all that as a lead in, I was intrigued while driving recently and listening to Sirius’ Outlaw Country station when a song with the title “Philanthropist” by Jesse Welles popped up. Although I had never heard of Mr. Welles, I am a fan of Billy Strings, who contributes instrumentally to the song, which made me even more interested. The song is a blistering condemnation of the people I call “philanthropaths,” with lyrics including:

“If if I got bored or money-weary, I'd try my hand in dabbling in social engineering.”

“I'm gonna be a billionaire, with a big foundation. We used to rule in shadows but I'd come right out, and I'd rule the nation.”

“I'm gonna do all my own laundry in a third-world nation state. Experiment with the locals, like some philanthropic saint.”

This song is not conservative by any means, nor is Mr. Welles. He is politically unaffiliated, but he writes in the tradition of populist, left-wing protest singers like Woody Guthrie and Butch Hancock. The music press likens him to Oliver Anthony, who was made famous with his protest song, “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Many conservatives thought a singer mocking the Washington power structure must be Republican, but Mr. Anthony is not.

The good news is that the populist left may be turning on their billionaire benefactors. But much of MAGA’s strength comes from disaffected “deplorables” who have found a champion in Donald Trump. If the RINOs and Republican establishment eventually succeed in purging the GOP of Donald Trump’s blue-collar base, the populist left might be singing a welcoming tune to them.

Anyhow, here is Jesse Welles with “Philanthropist”

*****

My latest piece at The Blaze has been published. “Buc-ee’s Gets Rich by Doing Everything Wall Street Hates” discusses the amazing success story of Buc-ees, which is still owned by its founders. Buc-ees has developed a cult following by employing management practices that repudiate the cost-cutting, poorly staffed, poor-quality ethos that has consumed corporate C-suites and private equity.

Buc-ee's has enormous restrooms that are immaculately clean, cheap gas with often more than 100 pumps, a kitschy-fun shopping experience, and exceptional food — including Texas barbecue and an in-house bakery. In addition, it’s heavily staffed with low-turnover, career employees.
Buc-ee's still understands the power of the previous business model that Las Vegas abandoned: Provide a high-quality “loss leader” or two to get the customers in the door, and then provide high-margin products that entice them to open their wallets.

The piece is behind a paywall, but if you’re a Blaze subscriber, I’d be honored if you’d give it a read.

My latest piece at The Blaze discusses the Buc-ees business model and its fanatic customer loyalty, and how the company prospers by rejecting the toxic business model of Wall Street & private equity. https://t.co/a1lTVqLakS
— Buck Throckmorton (@BuckThrockmort) September 2, 2025

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

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Mid-Morning Art Thread

Charlotte Dubourg
Henri Fantin-Latour

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The Morning Report — 9/5/25

Good morning kids. A couple of positive things to start things off on this Friday, first up We have, despite the propagandist Goebbelsian media's proclamations to the contrary, HHS Sec. RFK Jr. completely owning a Senate panel whose sole objective is to derail the MAHA agenda and in so doing derail the MAGA agenda that it is a component of. In the run-up to the 2024 election, RFK Jr. was looked on by most of us with suspicion due to his far-left pedigree, initial Democrat candidacy and then his abortive independent run. His personal views on vaccines and their effects and even efficacy on children plus their suspected links to autism were and of course remain controversial. And yet he has become a staunch ally of President Trump and his shining a light on both big Pharma and the failings of the CDC and HHS in keeping Americans healthy over the course of many decades, as well as his apostasy in the eyes of Democrats/Leftists in betraying his lefty heritage for all of the aforementioned has put him squarely in their crosshairs. But he seems to be more than up to the task in defending himself and the agenda.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired back at Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) in the early moments of what turned out to be a very contentious Capitol Hill hearing on Thursday, exclaiming at one point, “Do I get a reply?”
Throughout the Senate Finance Committee hearing, Kennedy fielded a number of pointed questions about recent shake-ups at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and his complete overhaul of the panel meant to make recommendations on vaccines — and numerous senators used their time to effectively offer their own testimony in place of his, routinely leaving him barely enough time to answer yes-or-no questions. Wyden, after using some of his time to complain that Kennedy was “politicizing” the committee that recommends vaccines, accused him of compromising children’s health. [You’re] enacting an agenda that I think is fundamentally cruel and defies common sense,” Wyden claimed, before ceding the floor back to the committee chair. “Do I get a reply?” Kennedy asked then, and after apparently getting the go-ahead to respond, he directed his comments at Wyden. “Senator, you’ve sat in that chair for how long? 20, 25 years? While the chronic disease in our children went up to 76%. And you said nothing. You never asked the question why it’s happening, why is this happening?”
“Today, for the first time in 20 years, we learned that infant mortality has increased in our country,” Kennedy continued. “It’s not because I came in here. It’s because of what happened during the Biden administration that we’re going to end.”

Fortuitous that it was Wyden who got smacked, in that aside from being a twisted degenerate tyrannical leftist, he looks as if he's doing embalming fluid shooters? Makes Joey Sponge-Brain Shits-Pants look like Charles freaking Atlas!

Next is the smackdown of a hack-in-black whose nakedly anti-Trump and anti-American anti-constitutional injunction that shut down Alligator Alley has been lifted and once again, those poor alligators have to swim in the same water and be exposed to third world disease-carrying human waste. Oh the huge manatees!

The plaintiffs claimed the government needed to prepare an environmental impact statement. In August, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams granted the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction, ordering authorities to halt all new construction and remove most of the site within 60 days. However, the appeals court panel believes the government will succeed because the site isn’t subject to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). A “major federal action” triggers the requirement for an EIS. Well, the state operates the facility and has not received any federal funding yet (omitted citations):. . . I’m so tired of judges not reading the law. This isn’t hard to interpret. Then again, we have too many gun laws that violate the Second Amendment, so I’m not surprised.

And speaking of the Second Amendment, what to make of this bit of news?

In the wake of the latest deadly attack on a school by a transgender-identifying individual, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is considering blocking trans-identifying people from buying firearms, The Daily Wire has learned. . .
The DOJ’s discussions center on the fact that those who identify as transgender suffer from gender dysphoria, a mental disorder, the DOJ source familiar with the conversations shared with The Daily Wire. Gender dysphoria describes the sense of unease that a man or woman may feel if he or she thinks that their biological sex is mismatched with their so-called gender identity.
A DOJ spokesman would not comment on specific measures being considered, but said that a “range of options” is on the table.

On the one hand, anyone who is a man and looks in the mirror and thinks he's a woman does indeed have some sort of psychosis or mental disorder. Not being a psychiatrist I cannot define exactly medically what that is. Of course in the current political climate, it's perfectly normal and were I an MD my license to practice medicine would be at risk for me to express that opinion. And were I a comedian in the UK, I could be chucked into prison for saying so.

But back to the second Amendment, does being a transexual or transvestite in and of itself negate one's right to keep and bear arms?

It puts the left on defense in both having to defend transsexualism as normal and the right to keep and bear arms which they oppose almost as much as they defend the right to murder infants in utero.

Elsewhere in the world, in the wake of theUS Navy blowing a Venezuelan drug smuggling boat out of the water, before it could drop its load of poison onto our shores, Maduro did something pretty fucking stupid.

“Today, two Maduro regime military aircraft flew near a US Navy vessel in international waters,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “This highly provocative move was designed to interfere with our counter narco-terror operations.”

Aside from being a stereotypical Latin American Marxist banana republic thug he's also directly involved as a major narcotics trafficker who enjoys the logistical and security support of a heavily armed military. On top of that, he has forged strong alliances wit the Iranian terrorist regime whose agents have operated directly out of Venezuela to infiltrate north into America and the rest of Latin America, and in the north of the country to set up some sort of military base, presumably from which Iran could potentially launch ballistic missiles that could reach American targets. Not sure if that project was ever completed, was halted or perhaps with the Iranian regime possibly on the ropes in the wake of US and Israeli strikes on its nuclear sites, permanently stopped.

And of course, the Red Chinese communists under XI continue to ramp up their efforts to gain a foothold in our hemisphere to challenge our security. It's probably fair to assume much of the Chi-Com flooding of fentanyl and opioids into the USA comes through Latin America. Hello Maduro?

The new framework, formalized in the 2025–2027 China-CELAC Joint Action Plan, is based on nearly intuitive premises—Solidarity, Development, Civilization, Peace, and People-to-People Connectivity—reflecting China’s evolving toolkit for influence in the region. However, beneath the language of mutual respect and cooperation lies the most consequential goal: to position China as a dominant actor in the Americas. This plan represents China’s most significant effort to date to bolster its influence in the Americas, revealing the contours of Beijing’s long-term ambitions in the region. It raises urgent questions about the future of sovereignty and strategic alignment for Latin American and Caribbean countries, as well as national security for the U.S.

And 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 weekend!

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Daily Tech News 5 September 2025

Top Story

Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring. (The Verge)

Except it's not.

We could better write this headline as Wikipedia is resilient only to the extent that it is boring because the moment something catches the attention of the politically motivated* they will burn it to the ground in a self-righteous frenzy.

The article goes on at length not to discuss resilience but dysfunction at every level of the organisation.

But it all comes down to one thing: At Wikipedia, Truth is controlled by the True Believers, and the safest bet for factual accuracy is political irrelevance.

* And yes, I mean communists.
Tech Note: Due to the archive sites I was using for sites that block adblockers instituting a "human identification" layer, I'm switching to recommending Brave in its place. It so far seems to cut neatly through the crap.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM | Comments (238) | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 04, 2025

Thursday Overnight Open Thread (9/4/25) Early Bird Edition

*****

The Quote of The Day

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.” Elbert Hubbard

Posted by: Misanthropic Humanitarian at 09:30 PM | Comments (308) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Scaredy-Cat Baby Owls Cafe

Jet landing in Hong Kong

Penguin invasion repelled.

Owl enjoys a bath with a shrewd look on his face.

Rescuing and rehabbing an owl that got caught and wounded by a wire fence.

Photography ~~tricks~~ illusions with a remote-controlled truck.

Baby triceratops.

Animals help a farmer in his chores.

Dog begins training baby.

A VR adventure, courtesy of mom.

Baby rhino defends his mother, not realizing they're vets who've come to help her.

Japan continues to lead the world in Transformer technology.

Even in Romania, bears are out of control.

Posted by: Ace at 07:45 PM | Comments (274) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Quick Hits

Graham Linehan: I was arrested for speaking my mind, in another country.

When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn't help myself. "Don't tell me! You've been sent by trans activists," I said. The officers didn't react.
This was the theme throughout most of the day. Among the rank and file of the police, there was a sort of polite bafflement. They were entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.
Once the officers began reading me my rights, and I realized what was happening, the red mist descended. The officers saw how upset I was and treated me gently after that. They even arranged for a van to meet me on the tarmac so I didn't have to be perp-walked through the airport like a terrorist. Small mercies.
At Heathrow police station, my belt, bag, and devices were confiscated. Then I was shown into a small, green-tiled cell with a bunk and a silver toilet in the corner.
Later, during my interview with an officer, the tone shifted. He asked about each of the posts in turn, with the sort of earnest intensity usually reserved for discussing something serious like. . . oh, I don't know--crime?
I explained that the post about punching a trans-identified man in a female-only space was a serious point made with a joke. Men who enter women's spaces are abusers, and they need to be challenged every time.
The officer mentioned the term trans people. I asked him what he meant by the phrase. "People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth," he said.
"Assigned at birth?" I responded. "Our sex isn't assigned." He called it semantics. I told him he was using activist language.
Eventually, a nurse came to check on me and found my blood pressure was over 200 mm Hg--stroke territory. So, I was escorted to the emergency room, where I wrote this piece after spending about eight hours under observation.
The doctors suggested the high blood pressure was stress-related, combined with long-haul travel and lack of movement. I feel a contributing factor might have been that I've now spent eight years being targeted by trans activists working in tandem with police in a dedicated, persistent harassment campaign, all because I refuse to believe that men can become women.
I was offered bail, on one condition: I am not to go on X. That's it. No threats, no speeches about the seriousness of my crimes--just a legal gag order designed to shut me up while I'm in the UK, and a demand I face another police interview in October.

Linehan was right -- he was reported by a disgraced ex-cop tranny activist.

A disgraced transgender police officer is believed to have reported Graham Linehan, the gender-critic Father Ted creator, to the police over his social media posts.
Former Pc Lynsay Watson, who was born Alex Horwood--

Spoiler: He still is Alex Horwood and always will be.

-- was sacked by Leicestershire Police for gross misconduct in 2023 after allegedly harassing a free speech campaigner and critic of gender ideology.
An anonymous social media account, believed to be linked to Watson, boasted in April this year of reporting Linehan to the police over several social media posts he made about transgender issues. The account encouraged other transgender activists to do the same.

Watson has a well-documented history of calling on police forces to pursue criminal investigations of campaigners who are sceptical of the belief that self-identification, and not biological sex, determines what a man or woman is.

What a shock -- an Arab propagandist is branding a Jewish woman "the real Nazi here."

Jenin Younes
@JeninYounesEsq
I am being attacked for a tweet I wrote this morning comparing Bari Weiss to Goebbels. I made this comparison for a reason. Bari Weiss intentionally put a target on journalist Refaat Al-Areer, resulting in the IDF killing him and his family, knowing that when she says "jump," the IDF asks "how high?"

Wait, so the IDF controls America, but the IDF is controlled by Bari Weiss?

Oh, I give up, who can fathom these Jewish plots.

She has published countless articles denying and/or justifying Israel's genocide in Gaza.

A council of rarefied experts declared it so!

Recently, she touted a piece by fellow propagandist Olivia Reingold, claiming that there's no real starvation in Gaza because many of the children who are dying have shrapnel in their skulls from Israeli bombs and conditions like Rickets.

And also, because Hamas propagandists fake the starvation pictures by claiming that children with muscular dystrophy are only skinny because of Jews.

And also -- who cares? You people will not stop making war on other people despite being shit at making war. That's why your "wars" are simply terrorist murder sprees.

If you want an end to war and all of its miseries, then stop making perpetual war on all non-Muslims!

Now there's an idea, huh?

And also: The Palestinians are settlers, and attacking settlers is justified.

And yes, there are Baby Palestinian Settlers. No seriously, the Palestinians run Sesame-Street-like propaganda featuring toddlers carrying AK-47s and threatening to blow themselves up in martyrdom-granting Jew bombings. So they're valid targets.

That's how this works, right, Hasan "Baby Settlers" Piker?

In what she undoubtedly considers a huge accomplishment, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is responsible for the deaths of at least 100,000 Palestinians including at least 20,000 children, promoted this piece.

Since we're just making numbers up, I have consulted my fellow Experts in the comments and we are now declaring that Netanyahu has killed tennity-billion Palestinians.

Weiss has made it her life's work to defend Israel's actions at all costs--including the killing of children; indeed, she has said as much. I judge people by their actions and their words, not by their identity. That Weiss happens to also be a Jewish lesbian plays no role in my assessment of her morality (or lack thereof). I do not apologize.

Stephen L. Miller
@redsteeze
One of the final obstacles to dehumanizing Jews for these people is to remove the holocaust completely from their history, for Hamas sympathizers to say, "Actually, Jews are Nazis and WE are the ones in concentration camps and gas chambers and genocided."
It's very purposeful. It's part of the playbook.

Will we ever be free of unending Palestinian propaganda justifying their unending murders?

On Aug. 27, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform launched a probe into the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, to determine the role and the methods of foreign individuals in manipulating articles on the platform to influence U.S. public opinion. In the committee's letter to the foundation's CEO, committee Chair James Comer and Subcommittee on Cybersecurity Chair Nancy Mace requested "documents and information related to actions by Wikipedia volunteer editors" to uncover "potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles."
I shed light on these organized efforts in an October 2024 investigative report. Specifically, I identified a network of more than three dozen editors--whom I dubbed the "Gang of 40"--who systematically pushed the most extreme anti-Zionist narratives on Wikipedia. These editors have made 850,000 combined edits across 10,000 articles related to Israel, effectively reshaping the entire topic area. Last month, the group scored its latest and perhaps most brazen victory when a Wikipedia administrator issued a final rejection to an appeal on an extraordinary 12-month freeze these editors had pushed to place on the lead section of the "Zionism" article, thus prohibiting any changes to their edits during that period.
The episode began in January 2024, when Gang of 40 editors implemented what they called a moratorium on a hotly debated sentence inserted by one of the group's leading members in the article's opening paragraph: "Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible."
That claim--which represents the Gang of 40's underlying strategy of equating Zionism with ethnic cleansing or genocide--now caps the second sentence of the most important resource defining Zionism online, and Wikipedia has ruled that it cannot be challenged or corrected for a year.
Several leading Gang of 40 members appear to be foreign citizens, and at least one seems to be aligned with the interests of Iran.
Wikipedia made this exceptional ruling even though the sentence in question was written by Levivich, a veteran editor who was banned along with six other Gang of 40 editors in a sweeping arbitration proceeding (officially called Palestine-Israel articles 5, or PIA5) that followed my initial investigation. In that report, I found that top members of the group--including Nishidani, Selfstudier, Nableezy, Iskander323, Makeandtoss, and Levivich (all of whom would be topic-banned in PIA5)--coordinated over the course of years to systematically recast Zionism through the lenses of colonialism and racial supremacy.

Oh great, another group of "experts" is making an "authoritative declaration."

A group of hundreds of former U.S. intelligence officials -- including some who signed the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter -- has reemerged on the scene to attack FBI Director Kash Patel and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard while handing out endorsements to leftwing Trump foes such as Abigail Spanberger and Eugene Vindman.
The Steady State, a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt "social welfare organization," claims that it has "300+ members" who are former national security officials who "continue to promote democracy, rule of law, and national security based on the values shared by most Americans." The group says it was first formed in 2016 in opposition to President Donald Trump. The group endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, and now has reemerged more prominently in the second Trump term.
Unlike 501(c)(3) public charities, under the tax laws, donations made to a 501(c)(4) are generally not tax-deductible for the donor. At the same time, a 501(c)(4) is allowed to endorse candidates, engage with campaigns even on a paid level, and engage in other political activities.
The first rule of Steady State is don't talk about Steady State
The group says it has been operating since 2016, but its website only appears to have launched in March 2020 -- premiering with an endorsement of then-candidate Biden for president.
Rick Wilson, a leader of the Lincoln Project (a leftist group now promoted by the Steady State), tweeted in November 2019 that "the idea that *anyone* inside the Trump Admin is 'the Resistance' or 'the Steady State' or ANYTHING other than complicit in his corruption, illegality, and overall fuckery is a risible lie."

And it turns out short fat angry low-T "man" Rick Wilson was lying. Now there's a plot twist worthy of its own Scooby-Doo mystery.

"The domestic and international threats that led us to action in 2020 have not disappeared. The gains we have made remain fragile," the group's website now says. "The threats to our democracy and international stability and security have evolved, and in some ways become more acute. The need to promote the values that brought us together three years ago remains as strong as, if not stronger than, ever."
Steven A. Cash, the executive director of the group, told a podcast in June that "I think the Steady State wouldn't exist, probably, if it wasn't for Donald Trump. So we have to be honest about that." Cash told another podcast in May that one-third of the group's members are from the intelligence community, one third from the State Department, and one third from elsewhere. Many of the group's members are not public.
Cash did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to him by Just the News through his LinkedIn, and the Steady State did not immediately respond to a request for comment either.
The October 2020 laptop letter, written to give Biden a "talking point" in his debate against Trump, contributed to the baseless narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop stories were nothing but a product of Russian disinformation -- a narrative happily seized upon by Biden's 2020 campaign and spread by some of the laptop letter signers.
...
Just the News also recently reported that yet another Steady State group member who signed the letter, Larry Pfeiffer, the former chief of staff to then-CIA director Michael Hayden (who also signed the laptop letter), has continued to suggest, without any credible evidence, that "the Russians played some role" in the incriminating laptop. Pfeiffer promoted the Steady State in August, tweeting, "Follow us please."
In attempting to justify his baseless claim about the laptop, Pfeiffer had told the SpyTalk podcast audience to read an article written by and podcasts done by retired CIA officer John Sipher -- who is also a member of the Steady State group. Sipher, a co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, previously said he was proud to have played his part in influencing the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden -- before backtracking and claiming he was being sarcastic.
...
The group has also harshly criticized the declassification efforts by Gabbard related to Russiagate.
"Tulsi Gabbard's role in disclosing classified intelligence in an attempt to validate the coup narrative exemplifies the dangers of politicizing intelligence. Her actions not only contravene the warnings of intelligence professionals but also endanger sensitive national security information," the Steady State wrote in August.
Cash went on PBS's Newshour in August to attack Attorney General Pam Bondi over the Trump DOJ allegedly investigating whether any of those officials involved in the Russiagate hoax may have committed crimes. Cash claimed that "we had a tremendous amount of accountability" already and that Bondi's efforts were "bizarre."

Media Research Center: You're not going to believe this, but CNN "anchorwoman" Abby Philip interrupts conservatives 42 times more (not 42% more, 42 times more) than leftists.

Now Scott, don't you think your rhetoric is too strong in pointing that out?

Since last summer, when CNN NewsNight shifted to an panel discussion-only format, host Abby Phillip has been praised for consistently inviting prominent conservatives onto the otherwise lopsidedly left-wing network. But with how rarely Phillip actually permits said conservative guests to finish a point without interrupting them, NewsNight is more akin to a televised struggle session than the beacon of ideological diversity as which it's sometimes portrayed.
Summary of Findings:
* During a random sample of ten episodes of CNN NewsNight, Phillip interrupted a guest explicitly to contradict him or her ("adversarial interruption") 130 times. Of those, 127 (~98%) were conservatives, while just three (~2%) were liberals. Thus, conservatives were interrupted adversarially 42 times more often than liberals.
* Conservatives were interrupted 60% of the time and were interrupted adversarially 58% of the time. Liberals were interrupted only 8% of the time and were interrupted adversarially just 1% of the time.
* Of the 30 guests (~96%) who were never interrupted adversarially, 29 were liberals. The sole conservative to avoid being cut off by Phillip spoke only twice, for a total of 68 seconds.
MRC analysts examined a randomly-selected sample of ten different episodes of CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip from the second Trump presidency. Each time Phillip interrupted a guest, analysts took note of the timecode, the guest's political affiliation (either conservative or liberal), and the reason for the interruption (to contradict to speaker, to agree with and/or add to the speaker's point, or to direct the conversation to another topic).
Throughout the ten NewsNight editions examined, we found Phillip interrupted guests a total of 149 times. Conservatives were cut off 132 times, while liberals were cut off just 17 times -- a disparity of nearly eight-to-one . That's far from an even split, but likely significantly better than what conservative readers might have guessed.
The numbers look even worse when one factors in the purpose of the interruption: Phillip silenced a conservative guest in order to contest a point 127 times, compared to a paltry 3 times for liberal guests. That means Abby Phillip adversarially interrupted conservatives 42 times more often as she did with liberals.

Don't worry, they'll be bankrupt in two years.

Les Files Twitter, maitenent en Francais.

At this moment, the Trump administration is negotiating with the EU over final obstacles to a trade deal, one of which is European censorship of US social media platforms.
Many analysts believe the massive size of the EU will lead US social media firms to impose European censorship, including on Americans. Last year, the EU's then-top digital censor, Thierry Breton, threatened action against Elon Musk after he announced a conversation on X with Donald Trump.
Now, new TWITTER FILES show a coordinated effort by France's President Emmanuel Macron, legislators, and state-affiliated NGOs working together to force the world's most influential social media platform to censor users for legal speech and influence Twitter's worldwide "content moderation" for narrative control.
What's more, TWITTER FILES - FRANCE reveals the birth of the censorship-by-NGO proxy strategy at the heart of the Censorship Industrial Complex:
-- President Macron personally reached out to then-CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey;
-- The timing of Macron's action strongly suggests coordination with NGOs on a pressure campaign to win more censorship and demand sensitive user data from Twitter;
-- The pattern of events indicates potentially illegal activity by various actors.
The TWITTER FILES FRANCE investigation was led by @McmahonPascal and @battleforeurope, and edited by @galexybrane and @shellenberger. We are releasing the Files here on X and simultaneously publishing a comprehensive report by Clerótte and Fazi on France's invention of the Censorship Industrial Complex.
...
4. "This case is largely about painting Twitter as a dangerous actor in the press."
Macron's request for Dorsey's number appears to be linked with the simultaneous launch of a lawsuit by four French government-linked NGOs against Twitter.
"We were sued back in the spring by four NGOs claiming that we are not doing enough to address hate speech in France (and comparing us unfavorably with Facebook and others)," wrote Karen Colangelo, Associate Director of Litigation, Regulatory, and Competition at Twitter, in an October 19, 2020, email to colleagues. "They seek to have an expert appointed to examine our reporting and enforcement systems."
Colangelo didn't think the goal of the NGOs was to win the lawsuit, which was without merit. Rather, she said, "This case is largely about painting Twitter as a dangerous actor in the press."

I really want to make them rue the day they declared war on dissident speech by outlawing their fucking speech -- and backing that ban up with arrests and jail time. Let them enjoy being silenced.

A couple of years ago we saw that low-cost drones were now capable of taking out $30 million tanks. And killing soldiers with grenades dropped from cheap drones with perfect precision.

I wondered how the US would respond to this threat, because we depend on the asymmetrical advantage of having the most expensive firepower money can buy.

Ukrainians are demonstrating that maybe it's not so hard or expensive to defend against drones.

Ukrainians are hunting down Russian drones armed with nothing more than shotguns and rifles while dangling out of prop lanes as part of a low-tech solution to Moscow's high-tech aerial assassins.
Although Kyiv has some of the West's most advanced air-defense systems, including US-made Patriot missiles and F-16 jets, the nation has been forced to deploy such unconventional tactics to counter Russia's ever-escalating drone bombardments because of the sheer number of devices being deployed.
Pilots and gunners in Ukraine's 11th Army Aviation Brigade have been tapped to take the Soviet-era Yak-52 prop planes to the skies, with the two-person aircraft shooting down 120 drones this past year with only shotguns and rifles, the Wall Street Journal reported.
"There is such great new technology now, yet I am still hanging out of the cockpit shooting at drones with a shotgun," said an auto mechanic-turned gunner who has shot down more than 60 Russian UAVs.
The tactics of the 11th bring back aerial warfare to its World War I days, where marksmen had to lean out of their cockpits with a gun to take out the enemy fighters.
The Yak-52 is so basic that it has no radar, with the pilots only guided by radio before having to rely on their own eyes to spot the Russian drones soaring over the border.
The prop planes fly within 200 to 300 feet of the drone before the gunner opens his plane's canopy to fire.
One of the gunners of the 11th likened the experience to an extreme version of a soldier having to fire his gun while riding on a horse.
The cockpit gets so cold that the pilots and gunners need thick jackets and fur-lined helmets to stay warm, yet another detail that harkens back to the beginnings of aerial combat.
Despite the seemingly low-tech solution, these tactics account for about 10% to 12% of all drones intercepted by Ukraine on a typical day, according to the 11th's deputy commander, Col. Mykola Lykhatskiy.

Posted by: Ace at 06:45 PM | Comments (189) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Trump Extends National Guard Surge in DC Into December; DC's Government Sues Trump to Protect Its Gangsters and Carjackers from Arrest

The surge is working, and not in a George W. Bush fake-type way.

District of Columbia National Guard troops have orders to stay in the district through December, a National Guard official said Wednesday.
President Donald Trump deployed the troops as part of a larger federal law enforcement plan in the district to crack down on crime. He also federalized Washington's police force, the Metropolitan Police Department.

The official said the mission's extension is to ensure National Guard members continue to receive benefits and pay for a mission that looks to last months. They added that all 950 National Guard members in Washington may not serve until December, but the orders are a strong indication that their role is not winding down soon.

The DC government is suing Trump, because it's the end of the quarter and they won't get their bonuses unless the murder rate is up at least 8% YOY.

Washington, D.C., is suing the Trump administration over its deployment of the National Guard in the nation's capital.
The suit states Trump "has run roughshod over a fundamental tenet of American democracy -- that the military should not be involved in domestic law enforcement," NBC News reported.

Anti-human communists and other maniacs continue raging at Trump for, get this, saving the lives of Democrats. Stephen Colbert is apparently making saying "F*** you" to Trump on the air his main "comedy joke."

CBS's Stephen Colbert had an unconvincing rebuttal on Wednesday to President Trump's recent Truth Social posts that portrayed Chicago as a crime-ridden and dangerous city. Colbert's three-part response involved telling Trump "[bleep] you," repeating some false statistics, and saying Chicago can't be that bad because The Late Show traveled there in the summer of 2024 and came back alive.
Breaking out his Trump voice, Colbert ranted, "Yesterday, Trump also posted, 'Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the world, by far.' Worst and most dangerous? Two words: [Bleep] you. You know what? You know what?... Trump slandered on, 'Chicago is the murder capital of the world!'"
Colbert then sought to do some fact-checking, "Fun fact: No. According to the FBI, 22 major cities have higher rates of murder than Chicago."

Fun fact: no. Colbert was citing a Newsweek article headlined "Full List of Major Cities With Higher Murder Rates Than Chicago." However, the list Newsweek provided was "of cities with more than 100,000 residents that have higher crime rates than Chicago, per the FBI report."
In other words, Trump was talking about murder rates, and Newsweek, despite its headline and article, was talking about crime in general. When it comes to murder rates, Chicago, according to Newsweek itself, is a top 10 city. On a per capita basis, it was ranked 8th last year.

Black radical and insurrectionist Brandon Johnson continues running his mouth.

Posted by: Ace at 05:46 PM | Comments (344) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Media Hails "Consensus" of "Experts" Declaring Gaza to be a "Genocide"

The media loves declaring things. NBC "News" portentiously declared Iraq was in a state of civil war in time for the 2004 elections, and of course the media loves when self-selecting "climate scientists" get together to declare that Florida will be entirelu underwater by the year 2020.

Now a group of left-wing, pro-Hamas nobodies declared Israel's invasion of the terror shithole of Gaza to be a "genocide," and treated this as if it was some authoritative bull issued by experts.

It wasn't.

When the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed a resolution declaring that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, mainstream media outlets from the New York Times to the Washington Post to Reuters described the association as a "leading" academic voice on the topic. "On Monday," the Times wrote, "the International Association of Genocide Scholars, a leading group of academic experts on the topic, declared that Israel's policies and actions in Gaza met the legal definition of genocide."
So what exactly is the IAGS? Though the association's title indicates that the IAGS is composed of genocide scholars, its members actually include a swath of "academic scholars, human rights activists, students, museum and memorial professionals, policymakers, educators, anthropologists, independent scholars [i.e., Twitter bloviators], sociologists [wow], artists [wow wow], political scientists, economists, historians, international law scholars, psychologists, and literature and film scholars," according to its website.
Those who don't fit one of those 17 titles need not be discouraged. To become an active IAGS member, one needs only to fill out a biographical form and pay a membership fee--$125 for a year, $210 for two years, or $1,200 for a lifetime. Doing so provides access to the association's internal Listserv, newsletter, job listing notifications, calls for papers, and biennial conferences. It also unlocks the ability to "nominate individuals for and receive IAGS institutional awards" and join the "IAGS Women's Caucus and the Indigenous People's Caucus."
The association's bylaws, meanwhile, state that members must only "be current in their dues" to be considered in good standing--and propose resolutions on genocide. The IAGS executive board then determines "whether or not the proposed resolution will be submitted to the IAGS membership for a vote." Voting is conducted via email.
Passing a resolution is not onerous, either. The permissive membership and resolution proposal policies are important because of the association's low bar for passing resolutions. "For a proposed resolution to pass," IAGS bylaws state, "voting must have been undertaken by a quorum of more than 20% of paid up IAGS members at the time of the vote." The association says it represents "600 members from all continents." Only 129 of those members, or roughly 22 percent, voted on the Gaza resolution, according to Sara Brown, a longtime IAGS member who served on its advisory board. The IAGS told the Post that 86 percent of respondents voted in favor of the resolution. That amounts to roughly 110 yes votes reflecting just 18 percent of the group's total membership.
None of that context made its way into mainstream media coverage of the vote. The Times described the IAGS as "a leading group of academic experts on the topic," while the Post called it "the oldest and largest association of genocide scholars." The Post also touted the fact that a "large majority--86 percent--of members who voted on the resolution approved it" without noting that less than 30 percent of members actually voted.
While it's unclear who exactly voted on the resolution, there's reason to believe that at least some of the respondents were not "genocide scholars." An archived version of the association's public directory lists the first 10 IAGS members as of August 2024. Several have little to no online footprint, including an affiliation with a university of any sort.
Salo Aizenberg, an independent scholar who has contributed to the Times of Israel and Tablet magazine, registered as an IAGS member one day after the association released its Gaza report. He reviewed the Listserv and found that 80 members, or roughly 13 percent of the association's "scholars," were Iraqi. "I've been getting to know some of my fellow genocide scholars," he wrote on X. "Seems that Iraq is a center of knowledge in this field with 80 listed scholars of ~600."
In doing so, Aizenberg inspired a wave of individuals to join the IAGS, including some using names like Mo Cookie and Sheev Palpatine.

You too can become an "genocide expert" just by subscribing to the group for the low low price of thirty buck.

A "leading genocide scholars" group, cited by the Associated Press, Washington Post, and other news outlets, is open to anyone who has $30.
The "International Association of Genocide Scholars is a favored source for the AP -- it cited the group twice already this week.
"Top genocide scholars accuse Israel of genocide," a Sept. 1 article stated. PBS republished this story as well.
"Leading genocide scholars organization says Israel is committing genocide in Gaza," a Sept. 2 article from the AP reported. The Washington Post parroted the language in its own Sept. 1 article
But the group, hailed by the AP as "The largest professional organization of scholars studying genocide," is in fact open to anyone who wants to pay the membership fee.
There's no verification process -- one journalist "signed up" and "became a genocide expert in Yugoslavia, gender, and the Holocaust."

Posted by: Ace at 04:40 PM | Comments (290) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Historic: America's Least-Closeted Closeted Homosexual Senator Proves That Gays Can Still Marry Women for Political Reasons

The Fiercely Heterosexual Cory Booker (TM), who pretended to date LGBTQ-friendly actress before his 2016 presidential run, effectively announced his 2028 presidential run by "proposing" to woman.

Some think the angle here is that she looks like Rosario Dawson. I don't.

I think the story here is that he's gay but proposing to a woman, just like Obama Barack did, to further his political career. You can only "make love to men, but in your imagination" for so long before the public gets suspicious.

In the below story, I've added quotation marks where appropriate and accurate.

Sen. Cory Booker gleefully announced his " "engagement" " to " "girlfriend" " Alexis Lewis on Instagram Tuesday afternoon, and the internet is already buzzing about his "betrothed's" striking resemblance to a famous "ex."
"I'm thrilled to share: Alexis and I are 'engaged'!" the New Jersey Democrat wrote, adding, "I am savoring the soul-affirming wonder of everyday life with my partner, best friend, and now my fiancée."

Partner, huh?

First "straight man" ever to call his girlfriend/fiancée his "partner."

Lewis and Booker, 56, have been "dating" for about a year and a half, and "share a home" in Washington, DC, he told the Washington Examiner earlier this month.

They went from "dating" to "living together" to "engaged" in a year and a half.

I'm sure the political calendar has nothing to do with the pace of this "romance."

...
Dawson, 46, and Booker ended their "romance" in 2022, but remain good "friends," People reported that year.
...
In April, Booker set a "record" for the longest "speech" ever given from the "floor" of the upper chamber, claiming to have "abstained" from food and water before "delivering" a rambling, "25"-hour oratory.

Okay I might have gone a little overboard with the quotation marks in that last sentence, but seriously, this whole story is a bucket of turds.

Posted by: Ace at 04:30 PM | Comments (402) | Trackbacks (Suck)

US Population Could Shrink for First Time Ever Due to Reverse Migration, "Alarming Data" Shows

The NY Post, everyone. It's "alarming" that illegal aliens are leaving the country.

This "alarming" data comes from the American Enterprise Institute, a left-libertarian propaganda outfit for trillion-dollar corporations which hoodwinks conservatives into thinking it serves anyone but its wealthy plutocrat patrons.

The United States could see its population shrink for the first time ever in 2025 as immigration numbers and birth rates have plummeted, according to a report.
Net international migration to the US in 2025 could drop to as low as negative-525,000 this year, according to an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute. With a net of 519,000 births reported by the US Census last year, the US could possibly lose 6,000 people -- the first population decline in nearly 250 years of American history.
AEI predicts that the net immigration into the US will fall off from about 2.8 million to between 115,000 and negative-525,000, which, even at the lower end, is still a 96 percent fall in international immigration, the Telegraph reported.
Even during the American Civil War -- when some 700,000 Americans were killed -- and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the US population has always increased every year, even if not significantly.
The population decrease has also been compounded by an apparent national "sex recession" -- with America's fertility rate projected to average just 1.6 births over the next 30 years, which is below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, according to the Institute for Family Studies.
The IFS survey found that just 37 percent of men and women were having sex weekly, compared to 55 percent in 1990.

Okay, that part is indeed alarming.

The number of immigrants in the US had already dropped for the first time in 50 years, declining by 1.4 million people in the first six months of 2025 after President Trump kicked off his second term with a major crackdown on illegal border crossings and mass deportation efforts, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

The Department of Homeland Security has said that 1.6 million illegal migrants have voluntarily left the US since Trump came back to office -- contributing to the massive decline in the immigrant population.

So alarming for AEI's donors! Imagine if they have to pay their workers more! Quelle catastrophe!

Regarding the "sex recess" or baby bust: It's progressives, of course, who are the main drivers of human extinction, as you'd imagine.

Burn-Murdoch wrote extensively about the data at the Financial Times, but his essay sits behind the paywall. He did offer quite a bit of commentary on Twitter this morning about the data and implications of a November 2024 study published by Biodemography and Social Biology. Titled "Demography leads to more conservative European societies," authors Martin Fiedler and Susanne Huber conclude that self-selection may well push Western societies farther to the Right:

Using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (a total of 66,188 participants from 15 European countries) and the European Gender and Generation Survey (a total of 121,248 participants from 12 countries), we investigated i) whether differences in political attitudes and attitudes toward family values (i.e. attitudes toward homosexual couples, attitudes toward female reproduction) are associated with differences in the average number of children, and ii) whether such an association between fertility and attitudes affects the population share of these attitudes in subsequent generations. We found that in most of the countries analyzed, right-wing (conservative) individuals have, on average, more children and grandchildren than left-wing (liberal) individuals. We also found that the proportion of right-wing individuals increases from generation to generation. Since political attitudes are presumably evolved traits that are socially and genetically transmitted from one generation to the next, these findings may suggest that demographic differences can lead to shifts in prevailing political attitudes. Thus, to some extent, demography may explain longer-term political trends.

Posted by: Ace at 02:30 PM | Comments (352) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Reports: Paramount -- the New Owner of CBS -- Is Close to Buying Bari Weiss' Free Press for As Much as $200 Million, and Giving Weiss a Supervisory Position Over CBS "News" Itself

Dylan Byers reports that the deal, while not yet signed, is on "the 1-yard line."

For those who don't know sportsball, that means that the deal is just 36 inches away from shooting a three-pointer home run.

Paramount is preparing to shell out as much as $200 million for Bari Weiss' buzzy media venture, The Free Press -- and hand her the keys to help steer CBS News -- in a move that's rattling an already shaken news division still reeling from the $8 billion Skydance-Paramount mega-merger.
Weiss, the former New York Times opinion page editor who launched The Free Press in 2022, is reportedly in line for a senior editorial role at CBS News as part of a deal that would fold her outlet into the new Paramount, according to the Puck newsletter.
Paramount declined to comment, but Puck media reporter Dylan Byers pegged the potential purchase price between $100 million and $200 million, with sources saying the talks are in their final stages.
...
The FCC signed off on the transaction after Ellison agreed to sweeping changes at CBS News, including installing an ombudsman to police bias, dismantling DEI programs and promising to elevate "viewpoint diversity."
Those concessions have already rattled the newsroom. One CBS insider told Fox Business that the new ombudsman amounted to a "hall monitor," while former anchors have publicly warned that CBS News' tradition of independent reporting could be in jeopardy.
Now the prospect of Weiss -- a sharp-tongued critic of progressive orthodoxy who quit the Times after blasting the paper's "illiberal environment" -- stepping into a leadership role has only heightened tensions, according to reports.

Bari Weiss is a liberal, but a liberal who dissents from the AWFL Karen Liberal Establishment "consensus." This would be a win for free speech and conservatives, even though it's really yet another media liberal who's profiting.

They'll never let a genuine conservative have any major role in a media outlet, because they're disgusting bigots who deserve what's coming to them.

But this would still advance the cause of conservatism and of free speech.

The boomerang effect -- the NYT fires Weiss, she starts an independent media outlet that soon is worth $100-200 million and becomes a major editorial decision-maker at one of the main outlets of progressive propaganda -- will be an object lesson for the left.

But then, they've shown that they just can't learn, so the object lesson will mean little to them.

Until the next major humiliation and reduction in status that's inflicted on them.

Related: CBS "News" scaremongers over the new rule that those receiving public benefits must, if able-bodied, at least try to pretend to find work.

From the outset, the biggest change to SNAP eligibility comes from people remaining under the work requirement for an additional 10 years- same as you and me. And, in all fairness, the work requirement doesn't mean actual work. It also encompasses looking for work, or studying in lieu of work. But this is presented as a cut to everyone.
That able-bodied individuals not of retirement age should remain in the job market before applying for food stamps is not extraordinary in and of itself, but is presented by CBS as the most draconian thing. How dare people be on the welfare rolls and be made to look for work?

Posted by: Ace at 01:27 PM | Comments (339) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hillary Clinton's Running Mate, Democrat Senator Tim Kaine: Your Rights Don't Come from God, They're Granted by the Government At Its Pleasure, and Christians Saying Otherwise Are Iranian Religious Fanatics

Say, remember when they all used to pretend to go to church and once in a while pretended to give glory to God?

I knew they were lying, of course, but I think I liked the lying better than the truth.

Even if you're secular, the idea that rights derive from God is a very attractive one. It's an alternate way of saying these rights are innate -- inborn, possessed since birth simply as part of the patrimony of being a human being -- and therefore inviolate.

As a somewhat famous Declaration put it:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

It is slightly different to invoke God as the source of these rights, but the gist of it, whether you're religious or secular, is the same: The government does not grant these rights as it chooses, these rights are innate and inviolable, and therefore the government may not steal away these rights, even if it finds them deeply inconvenient.

Adding God into the mix helps secure them, because people will tend to physically fight if someone attempts to steal away God-given rights, and that's a positive thing when it comes to your most basic, fundamental political rights.

Tim Kaine, and all other Democrats, do not want to acknowledge God because they are, whether they realize it or not, Satanists. But the practical reason they want to contradict the Founding Father's own statement that these rights derive from God is because they seek to undo these rights, so they argue that they can increase or decrease your rights as easily as they can increase or decrease the top marginal income tax rates. God's got nothing to do with it, you see, so you have no argument against the state stripping you of your rights.

The Declaration and Constitution are a covenant, and agreement by which the people consent to be governed, and if the terms of that covenant are violated, then the consent to be governed is withdrawn and we may ignore it and physically oppose it.

Otherwise, the government can just alter the terms of our agreement at its own self-interested whim.

Kaine goes even further, and declares that anyone who disagrees and believes that rights derive from God and are therefore inviolable, no matter how much a transitory government wants to violate them, is the equivalent of an Allah-besotted mullah or terrorist in Iran.

And of course Kaine rejects the idea that if the government steals away these rights -- that is, that it becomes "destructive to these ends" of securing liberty -- then that government has forfeited its legitimacy and may justifiably be rebelled against.

The government owns you. It owns you, it owns your children, it owns your souls, it owns your children's souls, and you just have to accept that, Peasant.

Well, this has certainly been clarifying.

Posted by: Ace at 12:23 PM | Comments (477) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

Amateur athletics has been a joke for a very long time. The Olympics, once an important cultural and athletic event, has morphed into a marketing miasma filled with professional athletes in a dizzying variety of sports and pseudo-sports. They began to allow professionals in the 1980s, and every four years the Olympics has become less important, and seemingly more crooked and graft-seeking. Does anyone really care anymore?

But for sheer, disgusting, acquisitive, money-grubbing, power-hungry sleaziness, it is hard to beat the NCAA. It has been around for 115 years, and its stranglehold on college athletics has been a cash-cow for its leadership and major universities, but has also created a massive problem for itself, because it treated the student athletes -- the entire reason for its existence -- as chattel. They didn't want to share any of the oceans of TV money that suddenly flooded into its coffers, and why should they? Student athletes were a dime a dozen! So they created a massive regulatory apparatus that allowed them to control every aspect of college athletics, essentially a modern plantation.

Every dime went to the NCAA and the universities, and if an athlete had the temerity to make a few bucks selling autographs? Bang! Loss of eligibility!

But their generations of total control began to show some flaws, as athletes and even some schools began to attack the NCAA in court. In 2021, NCAA v. Alston, a unanimous SCOTUS decision held that their behavior was illegal, and that student-athletes could be paid.

That was good and bad, as the charming and romantic fiction that major-college athletes were "students" finally fell apart. But at least these athletes can now take financial advantage of their skills.

And the legal attacks keep coming!

College Athletes File Lawsuit Against NCAA To Change The 'Redshirt Rule'

Right now, the five-year rule that is currently in place only allows athletes to compete in four years of the five years granted to them, with plenty of athletes in football, basketball, baseball and other sports only being part of a team if they use a 'redshirt year' as part of their clock. Athletes are not given that opportunity to play in all five years, only four, with a set number of games during the redshirt year in place.
If an athlete wanted to maintain their 'redshirt year', they could only compete in four games during that initial redshirt season. If they were to compete in a fifth, it would count towards their eligibility clock.
In the new lawsuit filed by the 'Texas Trial Group' on Tuesday, they are challenging the NCAA's right to allow these athletes to participate in workouts, practice and other daily activities, but not allowed to play in the actual games.

Hopefully the NCAA will fade into oblivion, as the various college conferences manage their own athletes, and admit to the world that college athletics is a business, and a very big one!

It is sad that amateur athletics is rapidly disappearing, although one wonders whether it ever truly existed. But the eventual demise of the NCAA is an unalloyed good thing, no matter what one may think of the current state of college athletics. They have been a corrosive influence on American sports for too long.

[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter and X/Twitter]. If you folks who are on X/Twitter would follow us it would be much appreciated!

Posted by: CBD at 11:00 AM | Comments (314) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Mid-Morning Art Thread

Bernard et Roger à Bourré
Maurice Boutet de Monvel

Damien...is that you?

Posted by: CBD at 09:30 AM | Comments (255) | Trackbacks (Suck)

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