Sunday Morning Book Thread - 8-3-2025 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]

HT: sharon (willow's apprentice)

Welcome to the prestigious, internationally acclaimed, stately, and illustrious Sunday Morning Book Thread! The place where all readers are welcome, regardless of whatever guilty pleasure we feel like reading. Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material. As always, pants are required, unless you are wearing these pants...

So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, and dive into a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?

I have some bad news for you this morning. Due to my current life circumstances, I will no longer be able to be the custodian of the Sunday Morning Book Thread for the foreseeable future. I simply do not have the time or energy to maintain it. I do know there are many excellent 'rons and 'ettes out there who can pick up the slack. If interested, you can reach out to CBD or MisHum. Their contact information is in the left hand sidebar of the main page.

I know I am in your prayers, just as you are in mine. I also know God has a purpose for me and is now revealing it to me, though I know not where this path shall take me.

Stay blessed, my dear friends.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 09:00 AM | Comments (297) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 3 August 2025

Top Story

• Why Johnny still can't read. (APM Reports)
  
  Well, the original book examining that question was published in 1955, so one possible reason is that Johnny is now 75 and refuses to wear his glasses.
  
  But another reason is exactly what that book explained: Johnny can't read because teachers aren't teaching phonics - aren't teaching the relationship between written letters and spoken sounds.
  
  Back in 1955 the trend was to jump too quickly from phonics to sight reading - recognising an entire word and its pronunciation from memory. If you were already a strong reader you were likely fine with this; if you were at all behind you would be left struggling.
  
  Fast-forward a few decades and we find new generations of children who still can't read because they have been trapped by new - or once new - trendy pedagogies. Molly Woodworth was a poor reader as a child and came up with tricks to help make it through lessons, though the tricks never worked terribly well.
  
  When she looked at the reading lessons for her daughter Claire, she was horrified to discover that the tricks she created for herself - the same ones that didn't work for her - were being taught as standard practice.

  A couple of years ago, Woodworth was volunteering in Claire's kindergarten classroom. The class was reading a book together and the teacher was telling the children to practice the strategies that good readers use.

  The teacher said, "If you don't know the word, just look at this picture up here," Woodworth recalled. "There was a fox and a bear in the picture. And the word was bear, and she said, 'Look at the first letter. It's a "b." Is it fox or bear?'"

  Woodworth was stunned. "I thought, 'Oh my God, those are my strategies.' Those are the things I taught myself to look like a good reader, not the things that good readers do," she said. "These kids were being taught my dirty little secrets."

  Why are teachers deliberately sabotaging reading skills?
  
  Enter Ken Goodman.

  The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information - or "cues" - to identify words as they are reading.

  The theory was first proposed in 1967, when an education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City.

  In the paper, Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words.

  Goodman still believed that when this article was written in 2019 - the author requested and was granted an interview.
  
  The problem is, he was proven wrong fifty years ago:

  So, in 1975, Stanovich and a fellow graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as good at using context.

  They couldn't have been more wrong.

  "To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition."

  Or to put it another way:

  Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut!"

  "Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."

  Why did Goodman still believe in his failed ideas after all this time? (At the time the article was written, he was 91 and had just published a new edition of his book.)
  
  Put as politely as possible, he was a dingbat:

  "Word recognition is a preoccupation," he said. "I don't teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that."

  No, he really meant that:

  I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p//o//n//y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"?

  He dismissed my question.

  "The purpose is not to learn words," he said. "The purpose is to make sense."

  He tripled down minutes later:

  In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

  "My science is different," Goodman said.

  And why is fashionable nonsense so entrenched in education?
  
  Lots of reasons, one primary reason, it seems to me, is that teachers don't have to live with their mistakes. You have a child for a year, cause lasting harm, and then get handed a fresh batch of impressionable young minds the next year.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM | Comments (204) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Saturday Night "Club ONT" August 2, 2025 [The 3 Ds]

Welcome to Club ONT! A collaboration of your Sunday through Wednesday ONT Crew - The Disco, The Doggo, and The Dino. The Summer of Fun.

Club ONT Token Economy - where tokens are earned. One token per witty comment.
No refunds for fish puns nor dad jokes. Who runs Club ONT? The one with the most tokens and the strongest bladder. It's your chance - even Auntie Entity had to wait in line.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 10:00 PM | Comments (353) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Saturday Evening Move Thread[movigique]: The Life Of Chuck/Eddington

A relatively quiet three weeks since we talked about Return of the Living Dead. We saw two new movies: The Life of Chuck and Eddington, and two classics, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and The Apartment.

It probably goes without saying that the new movies are not in the same league as the classics, but it's not really fair to come to any conclusions about the state of cinema from that. On IMDB, The Apartment is #98 on the list of all-time greatest movies, while Cuckoo's Nest clocks in at #19.

The Boy (who is now "nearly 29" himself, creating an odd temporal paradox) is one of my metrics for classic films. He, for example, really enjoyed all the 1984 movies we saw—clear-eyed evaluation of the entertainment value of Return of the Living Dead and Repo Man (good, worthy but started stronger than it ended)—and Cuckoo knocked his socks off.

The Apartment less so. I personally felt a strange nostalgia for this time on aesthetic level. Not the depiction of life, really: The idea of an insurance drone whose rent is a about week's pay ($80) for a West Side New York apartment near Central Park is far enough removed to be a fairy tale in 2025. But, man, this is a good looking film, with Wilder bringing his noir chops into a comedy-drama.

I've never seen a young Shirley MacLaine on the big screen, and she's tragically adorable.

When receiving an international honor, Wilder said the story (which showcases immorality) could have happened in any city in the world except Moscow, the communists all broke out in applause. Then he said, "Because nobody has their own apartment in Moscow."

I could talk about it forever. But we can't live in the past, and we wouldn't want to, unless it was the movie past. So let's soldier on.

A manic-pixie-dream-girl failure film.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 08:13 PM | Comments (238) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hobby Thread - August 2, 2025 [TRex]

Welcome hobbyists! Pull up a chair and sit a spell with the Horde in this little corner of the interweb. This is the mighty, mighty officially sanctioned Ace of Spades Hobby Thread. Good news! The Ace of Spades Wheel of HobbiesTM) is back in service. We gave the Ace of Spades Wheel of Hobbies(TM) a spin and it landed on fishing.

I have faith that you can either find something in the content that resonates or contribute your own hobbying interests.

You might be tempted to say "I have no hobbies or interests." Bah. Dig around in the content and soak in the comments. Be curious. Glad you're here.

[Top photo: Two Fishermen by polynikes (20 x 16)]

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:30 PM | Comments (152) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Ace of Spades Pet Thread August 2

Courtesy William Blair Boulden

* * *

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

Would you like a treat?

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

Posted by: K.T. at 03:23 PM | Comments (109) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Gardening, Home and Nature Thread, August 2

Our tree lilies are out, they fill the house with a lovely smell.

Chris 1051

How glorious!

Posted by: K.T. at 01:07 PM | Comments (45) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Blue Genes (sigh)

What happens when you ignore science

Well, perhaps the most inconsequential, yet prevalent, stories in media right now concern advertisements for blue jeans featuring an attractive young woman with blonde hair and blue eyes. A passing reference was made to "blue jeans" in connection with "genes" and "eye color". This led to wild speculations concerning the coming of a Fourth Reich and so forth. You have seen some of this craziness.

But this advertisement did not happen in a vacuum. As Walter Kirn wrote recently:

Old news is more important than new news because new news is built on top of it. When you are renovating a structure you don't start with the roof but with the foundation.

Let's go back and get the old stories right. Otherwise nothing will be right, from here on out.

Posted by: K.T. at 11:25 AM | Comments (324) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Classical Saturday Morning Coffee Break & Prayer Revival

[H/T to a Moron]

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

1. This is an open thread. Feel free to lurk, opine and/or bloviate.
2. Be Kind, Be Nice. Trolls need admonition.
3. No. You may not run with sharp objects here. Go to Slate or something like tha.
4. Have a great weekend!

Posted by: Misanthropic Humanitarian at 07:47 AM | Comments (321) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 2 August 2025

Top Story

• UK premium luggage service Airportr, which provided door-to-door service and worked with ten European airlines, was not hacked, exactly. (Wired) (archive site)
  
  Because it had no security at all. Anyone could look up anyone's personal information, or even log in as an administrator and redirect their luggage.

  The vulnerabilities resulted in complete confidential private information exposure of all airline customers in all countries who used the service of this company, including full control over all the bookings and baggage. Because once you are the super-admin of their most sensitive systems, you have have the ability to do anything.

  It was found by security analysts before anyone took advantage of it. The CEO of security group Cyber9X is quoted above.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM | Comments (135) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Keep That Pelvis Far From ONT

Howdy-ho, neighborinos! Europe seems to be using the book as a how to guide.

Posted by: WeirdDave at 10:00 PM | Comments (453) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Ainu Cafe

The "Tolkein Door" of St. Edwards Church in Gloucester, England
"Speak Friend and Enter"

I hope I'm not getting Hulk Hoganed again.

Raising a teeny-tiny orphaned puma.

Freshest steaks in town.

The best watchdog is a lion.

Instagram (IG): Rhinos drive lions out of their territory.

IG: Driving an RV through Ireland.

IG: Rutting bison battle for mates.

This glacier thought the boat had a sexy ass.

Dog really enjoys the song Back, Back, Back It Up.

Little tiger cub.

Tiger swimming underwater.

The View at the beach.

Little girls are so much easier to raise than boys. Truth Rating: Incomplete.

I help.

A mother deer broke her leg. A family took her in and immobilized her leg so it could heal. Now the deer and the fawn are frequent visitors.

Harry Potter fantasy achievement unlocked.

This baby is an easy crowd.

Bird rocks out to Ozzy.

Rescuing four abandoned sugar gliders.

Must... destroy... squirrels...

Posted by: Ace at 08:00 PM | Comments (237) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Week In Woke

Trump signs an EO to push blue cities to clear the homeless off the streets.

The order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to reverse precedents that limit state and local governments' ability to commit people on streets who are at risk to themselves or others, according to a White House fact sheet obtained by The Hill.

It also requires interagency work on grants for states to enforce prohibitions on open illicit drug use, urban camping, loitering and squatting, and to track sex offenders. And, it requires redirecting funds to ensure people sleeping on streets and causing public disorder, and suffering from serious mental illness or addiction, are moved to facilities like treatment centers.

Additionally, the order requires that discretionary grants for substance use prevention, treatment and recovery do not go toward funding "drug injection sites or illicit drug use," and it aims to stop sex offenders who receive homelessness assistance from being housed with children and allows programs to house women and children exclusively.

Leftwing deplatforming-and-defamation organization Media Matters is on the verge of bankruptcy.

From Media Matters' ally The NYT:

The organization, which is funded by some of the Democratic Party's biggest donors, has racked up about $15 million in legal fees over the past 20 months to defend itself against lawsuits by Elon Musk, in addition to investigations by Mr. Trump's Federal Trade Commission and Republican state attorneys general.

The group has slashed the size of its staff and scrambled to raise more cash from skittish donors, according to documents and interviews with 11 people familiar with the organization's fight to survive.

Feds charge "Medicaid Millionaire" with fraud.

Louisiana 'Medicaid millionaire' bought Lamborghini while claiming government benefits for years

Investigators say Taylor flaunted luxury lifestyle on social media while fraudulently receiving government benefits

Not so fast.

A Louisiana woman who purchased a Lamborghini while fraudulently obtaining Medicaid benefits is facing a fraud charge, authorities said this week.

Candace Taylor, 35, of Slidell, dubbed the "Medicaid millionaire" by the office of Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, was arrested Monday. The state Bureau of Investigation began looking into Taylor after receiving a complaint from the Louisiana Health Department saying she underreported her income to qualify for Medicaid benefits.

"From 2021 through 2024, Ms. Taylor continued to transfer tens of thousands of dollars between her personal and business accounts, with personal inflows consistently exceeding the eligibility thresholds for Medicaid," the affidavit directly states.

Medicaid provides health insurance for low-income adults and children. The program is partially funded and primarily managed by state governments. The federal government establishes parameters for states to follow. However, each state administers their Medicaid program differently.

Taylor initially applied for Medicaid in May 2019 under the alias Candace Sailor, listing a bi-weekly income of $1,900 and no dependents, authorities said. That application was denied.

Less than a year later, she re-applied under the same misspelled name, prosecutors said. She was allegedly inconsistent with the years she reported having a dependent.

Investigators eventually discovered she owned six different businesses that generated more than $9.5 million between January 2020 and December 2024, according to court documents.

More hospitals are dropping their "gender affirming" genital mutilation services.

The Trump administration is definitely on a roll. Last month the LA Children's hospital announced that it would be shutting down the largest gender-affirming care clinic in the United States, the Center for Transyouth Health and Development. Then a week ago Children's National Hospital in Washington, DC made a similar announcement. This week several more hospitals and medical groups have followed suit.

Sexton reports that Connecticut's Children's Medical Center and Yale New Haven Health have ended their barbaric butcheries, as well as the University of Chicago Medical Center.

And -- this is a big one, because it operates in eight states -- Kaiser Permamente.

Awww: Axios is sad that the FTC is investigating whether Children Mutilation Chop-Shops are making false claims about their experimental surgeries.

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday launched an inquiry into whether health providers are failing to disclose risks connected with gender-affirming care or are making false claims about its benefits.

Why it matters: The action could help make the case for using unfair competition laws to crack down on health providers, by asserting gender-affirming care involves deceptive claims, legal analysts say.

Driving the news: The FTC solicited public comment through Sept. 26 from consumers who "may have been exposed to false or unsupported claims about 'gender-affirming care,' especially as it relates to minors."

The move followed a public workshop the FTC held in early July to "gauge the harms consumers may be experiencing" surrounding gender-affirming care for minors that featured prominent critics of youth gender-affirming care.

The agency justified its involvement by saying its role is to assess whether medical professionals have violated parts of the FTC Act by failing to disclose risks connected with gender-affirming care or making false or unsubstantiated claims about its benefits or effectiveness.

Reality check: Gender-affirming care for minors is supported by major medical organizations including the American Medical Association.

LOL. "The leftwing organizations dominated and whip-sawed by the radical transgender cult says this is all great, and that's all you need to know."

No surprise: "Scientific" and medical publications prioritize woke political propaganda over actual science.

We began by conducting a keyword search of every article published in the JAMA Network--a group of 13 medical journals affiliated with the American Medical Association--between April 1 and May 31. The phrase "diversity, equity, and inclusion" appeared 56 times, more often than atherosclerosis (45) and osteoporosis (16). Another progressive-coded term, "inequity," showed up 99 times--more than asthma (75) or opioid use disorder (65).

All of these papers are left-leaning, according to AI analyses.

DEI-inspired scientific studies are often plagued by poor design: sampling bias, lack of proper control groups, leading survey questions, and circular reasoning. Researchers frequently treat incidental associations as proof of causation. These methodological flaws are baked into published papers, which then get cited, flaws and all, by others. Over time, some DEI-based studies acquire unwarranted credibility and authority.

Take Brad Greenwood and colleagues' research from 2020, which claimed that "newborn-physician racial concordance"--meaning the child and the doctor are the same race--"is associated with a significant improvement in mortality for Black infants." But the original authors failed to control for babies with very low birth weight. When Manhattan Institute researchers replicated the study, they found that racial concordance had no such effect. Nonetheless, the original study has received more than 800 citations, including 21 by articles within the JAMA Network.

Another study with similar left-wing premises has also made the rounds. Kelly Hoffman and colleagues claimed in a 2016 paper that "Black Americans are systematically undertreated for pain relative to white Americans." Their conclusion was based on a sample of 194 medical students and 28 residents, with no attending physicians included except for "10 experienced physicians," whose recommendations served as the benchmark against which sample participants' knowledge was evaluated.

In one of the paper's two case vignettes, these physicians identified narcotics as the appropriate pain management for kidney stones. Had they consulted the 7th edition of Tintinalli's Emergency Medicine Manual from 2012, however, those physicians would have known that NSAIDs are the "primary analgesic of choice" for that condition, not opiates. While this error calls into question the study's conclusions, the paper nevertheless has been cited over 3,000 times, according to Google Scholar.

Nepo baby and former celebrity Jamie Lee Curtis calls plastic surgery a "disfigurement."

Sounds like she's talking about her Freak Friday co-star Lindsay Lohan.

Jamie Lee Curtis is condemning Hollywood's obsession with plastic surgery for "disfiguring" generations of women.

"The concept that you can alter the way you look through chemicals, surgical procedures, fillers -- there's a disfigurement of generations of predominantly women who are altering their appearances," the "Freakier Friday" star said in a new interview with the Guardian.

"It is aided and abetted by AI, because now the filter face is what people want. I'm not filtered right now. The minute I lay a filter on and you see the before and after, it's hard not to go, 'Oh, well that looks better.' But what's better? Better is fake."

To drive her point across even further, Curtis, 66, rocked a pair of oversized wax lips -- which she personally bought from Amazon -- to her accompanying photo shoot with the outlet.

"The wax lips is my statement against plastic surgery," she proclaimed. "I've been very vocal about the genocide of a generation of women by the cosmeceutical industrial complex, who've disfigured themselves. The wax lips really sends it home."

Curtis then defended her use of the word "genocide," recalling its definition of the deliberate and systematic destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. She said she uses it "specifically" because it's a "strong" word.

I don't mind her criticism of the cosmetic surgery industry. What has me scratching my head, though, is her unqualified support for experimental cosmetic surgeries to "affirm gender."

Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon is investigating five fake universities for prioritizing illegal aliens over actual US citizens.

Defund and decertify. We have too many fake universities pumping out uneducated students and giving them fake Participation Trophies of Learning as it is.

A drag queen brings a six-year-old dressed in drag to gyrate for the assembled perverts at a Belfast "pride" festival.

Posted by: Ace at 07:00 PM | Comments (236) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Mark Halperin: Biden's Inner Circle Is Threatening Kamala Harris That If She Dishes About His Cogntivie Impairment, They'll Start Admitting How Incompetent She Is

So now the very mean old man, the most absurdly thin-skinned moron narcissist on the planet -- whoops, except for Jasmine Ratchet -- is threatening Kamala Harris that if she discusses Biden's dementia in her stupid book, they'll open the vaults about her.

During Friday's edition of his "Morning Meeting" newsletter on his 2WAY platform, Halperin dropped a not-so-subtle warning: if Harris ever turns on Biden, the former autopen president's handlers are ready to unleash a barrage of "embarrassing" information to put her in her place.

"I'm going to break a little news here, okay? We talk all the time about what did Kamala Harris know and when did she know it about his cognitive decline... if the Biden people decide that Kamala Harris is coming after Joe Biden, wait till you hear the Palinesque stories about how much they tried to help her be prepared to be vice president and be in a position to run and how much they decided: not happening," Halperin explained.

"And if the Biden people feel threatened, you will hear stories about Kamala Harris as vice president that will not make her look good. Okay? So there's a closeness to the couples -- it's not like they're at war currently -- but I'm telling you, if Joe Biden feels threatened, if his people feel threatened by her, this is going to escalate in a big way," he added.

I mean, I think he was making a similar threat during the campaign. Biden must have told her "Do not EVER disagree with any of my policy choices" -- why else would she have claimed she could not think of a single decision Biden had made that she would have decided differently?

She couldn't possibly be that stupid, could she? Certainly she had her allies in the media repeating the spin that she would govern completely differently than she had previously promised, so she was aware that the progressive policy ship was sinking.

Maybe this is all an okey-doke, with the two people no one wants to hear from ever again promising major revelations in their horrible books just to drive up sales.

Or maybe is real and will be entertaining.

Earlier I said that Kamala's political career was over, and she was essentially admitting that in saying she doesn't "wanna go back" to the "broken system."

But Biden's top advisor Mike Donillon says she's running in 2028:

Posted by: Ace at 06:16 PM | Comments (172) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Trump Signs EO Reversing Obama's Ending of the Presidential Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, Marking the Beginning of Trump GAINZZZ

America will no longer be celebrating weakness and slothfulness as some kind of special virtue of the very unhealthy.

Posted by: Ace at 05:30 PM | Comments (201) | Trackbacks (Suck)

CEO of Jaguar Steps Down After Disastrous Rebrand of Storied Car Company as Trans-Portation

He turned a man's brand into a trans brand.

But men are 49% of the market (actually, more like 90% for a sportscar) and the trans market is.... slightly less than that, right?

Mardell, 64, has been at the company for more than three decades including the last two years as chief executive during one of the most transformative periods in the firm's recent history.

This includes spearheading a remarkable financial turnaround for the company, which has seen it bounce back from heavy losses and debt around the beginning of the 2020s to posting its best profits for a decade last year.

JLR reported a pre-tax profit of £2.5billion in 2024-25.

But arguably Mardell's biggest involvement has been his role in Jaguar's controversial 'woke' rebrand and shift to an electric-only premium car brand from 2026 - including the unveiling of the polarising Type 00 concept.

A spokesperson for JLR told the Daily Mail: 'Adrian Mardell has expressed his desire to retire from JLR after three years as CEO and 35 years with the company. His successor will be announced in due course.'

He will reportedly leave the role on 31 December.

...

Its success has been driven by record wholesale volumes of its Defender 4X4s, which sold 115,404 units over the 12-month period.

In contrast, just 26,862 Jaguars were sold worldwide in the financial year - a 45.8 per cent drop - after production of all models ceased in November as part of a planned 'sunset period' for the manufacturer, its dealers and its customers to prepare for the company's hotly-debated electrified relaunch.

American Eagle has issued a response to ugly cat ladies unashamedly showing their envy and resentment that a white woman is getting more attention online than they are.

No, it's not this one. This one is a parody, though most wish American Eagle would endorse it:

American Eagle's genuine response is good enough: They are defiant, and they say, correctly, that a bunch of ugly harpies coping on TikTok and BlueSky is not real life, and that their own polling shows that 71% of respondents like the ad:

At the Federalist, Rich Cromwell writes that this contretemps, as stupid as it is, is important. It shows that the mentally-ill, unaccomplished social-media-addicted nobodies who have bullied, harrassed, and deplatformed us for ten years are shrieking because they're realizing they have no power here.

They are nameless and formless and accursed. Like Sauron, they are now banished to the void from whence they came.

Given that denim is one of American Eagle's staples and that Sweeney is rather attractive, it's a brilliant pitch replete with a dad-level pun. At least, it's a brilliant pitch to not insane people. For the insane, though, it's "Nazi propaganda," "Nazi fascism," and "an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness."

[T]he completely unhinged and disproportionate response to the campaign shows the inmates who have been running the asylum are losing the plot in real time.

For starters, it's an advertisement for blue jeans and, to be honest, not exactly an original one. Don't get me wrong, it's fantastic marketing, people are talking, and American Eagle's stock trended upward as a result. But using attractive people to sell products isn't some revolutionary idea. It's basically the foundation of advertising, albeit one that was briefly lost to the siren song of "inclusive beauty," which, lol. Businesses may pretend to care about social causes and stakeholders, and there are definitely true believers ensconced in almost every Fortune 500 company out there, but at the end of the day, the purpose of business is to make money, not engineer social change.

But the brief stranglehold the inmates held over businesses gave them a false sense of security, of permanence. They thought they'd won the war, whereas we can now see that they only won a few victories and that those victories were not exactly strategic ones.

...

Much has been made of the vibe shift, which is truly a thing of beauty, especially to those of us old enough to witness the descent into madness over the past decade, but the thing is, the vibe really has shifted. And those whose worldview and, more importantly, income streams depend on fomenting controversy are on the ropes. They may preach equity, but as always, some pigs deserve a little more equity than others.

As such, don't get upset at the dying media for its desperate attempt to cling to the old vibes, to keep beating fascist Nazi colonial whiteness tropes into a bloody pulp better suited for a muumuu than a pair of nice-fitting jeans. (Did I just commit white supremacy by discussing muumuus, insane people of the internet? If so, please let me know on your preferred social media site!)

John Ekdahl
@JohnEkdahl

It cracks me up that for three or four years, people have been scratching their heads and saying "hey, where'd all the white people go in commercials?"

Now they bring one white girl back and it's a five alarm Nazi fire.

Allahpundit's favorite MSNBC host Chris Hayes agreed that it's a "problem" that Democrats have to answer for the silly posts made by rando nobodies, like racists insisting that white women are no longer permitted to be "centered" in advertising campaigns.

He apparently doesn't read MSNBC itself, which published a hit-piece saying, essentially, that any ad featuring white people is an insidious backslide into White Supremacy.

Posted by: Ace at 04:35 PM | Comments (287) | Trackbacks (Suck)

A Cultural Enricher With 43 Prior Counts of Aggravated Cultural Enrichment Attempts to Kidnap a Child at a Virginia Mall

This is in super-progressive, tyrannical Fairfax County, where they cover up "transgender" boys' forcible sodomization of girls in the bathroom so as not to upset The Bigots.

Of course it's also a Sanctuary County.

Virginians 4 Safe Communities
@VA4SafeComm

Fairfax Child Kidnapping Suspect Andres Caceres Jaldin has 30+ charges including Malicious Wounding (Att Murder) & was FREE to victimize kids thanks to Fairfax Soros Prosecutor Steve Descano

Posted by: Ace at 03:30 PM | Comments (308) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Exactly as Predicted, EU Law Supposedly Intended to Protect Children from Porn Is Immediately Deployed Against Its Real Target: Political Speech by Adults That is Critical of the Failing, Traitorous Regime

Trump is warning effeminate ponce Keir Starmer that if the EU continues using this law to stifle Americans' speech, there's going to be big trouble.

White House warns Starmer: Stop threatening US tech companies' free speech

Members of Donald Trump's administration monitoring Online Safety Act with 'great interest and concern'

The White House has warned Sir Keir Starmer to stop threatening American tech companies amid mounting backlash over Britain's online safety law.

Members of Donald Trump's administration are monitoring the Online Safety Act with "great interest and concern" after key allies said it was censoring free speech and imposing unfair burdens on US businesses.

The law, which regulates online speech, allows the British government to levy massive fines on companies like Apple, Truth Social, and X if it finds that rules on hate speech have been broken.

Those in the president's inner circle see the potential penalties as an unwarranted foreign intervention into American free speech.

"President Trump has made it clear that free speech is one of our most cherished freedoms as Americans," a senior US State Department official told The Telegraph.
"Accordingly, we have taken decisive action against foreign actors who have engaged in extraterritorial censorship affecting our companies and fellow citizens.

"We will continue to monitor developments in the UK with great interest and concern."

Since the law came into effect last week, Ofcom, the UK's online regulator, has written to several American firms ordering them to conform to the act, in letters seen by The Telegraph.

It has sparked outrage from US lawmakers and legal experts, who say the overreach is a threat by the UK to silence American companies and citizens.

Congressman Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary GOP committee, said the law was an attack on American companies.

"Ask Apple and they would view it as a $500 million attack," he told The Telegraph.
"There's general concern... and then there's concern on how this impacts American citizens, American companies and infringes on our First Amendment.

"As long as foreign legislators, judges, and regulators continue their attempts to silence US citizens, we will not stop fighting back."

...

During his meeting with the Prime Minister in Scotland, Mr Trump warned Sir Keir not to censor his social-media platform, Truth Social.

"Well, I don't think he's going to censor my site, because I say only good things," Mr Trump said.

There's new news about the Rotherham racist Muslim rape gangs:

Charlie Kirk
@charliekirk11

Incredibly disturbing new details out of the UK reveal that not only were countless little girls raped by migrant grooming gangs, but when they went for help, many were raped again by the police. Take one guess who was staffing the police departments.

So in the UK:

-Authorities ignored migrant grooming and rape gangs because prosecuting them might lead to accusations of racism
-Victims of Pakistani rape gangs who went to the police were instead raped again by the police themselves (who were of Pakistani origin).
-In other cases, police leaked the accusations of victims to perpetrators, who then threatened the victims.
-Judges in Islamic rape cases have allowed defense lawyers to spend entire trials calling grooming gang victims sluts, then denied the release of court transcripts to hide that this happened.
-The government is currently weighing a formal definition of "Islamophobia" that would include linking grooming gangs to Islamic immigration.
-Local governments are hiring "Sharia law administrators"
-Mass censorship is used to cover up protests against this as well as criminally punish those who complain

Is Great Britain just a gigantic Epstein Island?

Yes. Here's the link to the BBC story. Yes, when women went to the Rotherham police to report sexual abuse and r*pe by "Asians," the Asian police at the station also sexually abused them.

We're hitting levels of Cultural Enrichment that shouldn't even be possible.

This issue was discussed in Parliament -- and the discussion in Parliament was censored, with censors citing the "Online Safety Act's" forbiddance of "hate speech."

They cannot win on the immigration issue -- the public is now roused and demanding changes -- so they just claim that anyone urging reforms of immigration law is trafficking in "hate speech" and that it is criminal to make those arguments.

Posted by: Ace at 02:45 PM | Comments (295) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Angry Boxed-Wine Connoisseur AWFL Says She's Totally Proud to Have Written the ICA and the "Steele Dossier" Might Be True

A Brennan stooge named Susan Miller was recruited to write up RussiaGate "reports" which ultimately served as the foundation of the ICA that kicked off RussiaGate.

Actually she claims to have written the ICA itself, which seems to be, what's the word, a lie. But more on that later.

She has now re-emerged to claim that all of her sexless partisan fantasies about Trump and Putin might have, maybe, been halfway true.

The retired CIA spy who says she led the team that helped draft the controversial 2016 U.S. intelligence community assessment on Russian election meddling has called Donald Trump a "dictator" and MAGA supporters "Nazis" -- and insists that the now-discredited Steele dossier "might be true."

Susan Miller, a recently-retired CIA counterintelligence officer, has taken to social media and news media interviews in recent days to tell the story of how she was allegedly hand-picked by former CIA Director John Brennan to lead the team which helped draft the ICA in late 2016, gleefully exposing her anti-Trump sentiments.

She has repeatedly suggested that Trump might be a "Russian asset" or a "Kremlin asset" without providing any evidence, despite recent reports showing that calmer, less politically-driven voices in the intelligence community at the time cast doubt on such allegations, but were squelched by Brennan.

No proof, but it "might" be true?

Miller has also repeatedly claimed in recent weeks that British ex-spy Christopher Steele's anti-Trump dossier might be true, despite the dossier having been thoroughly discredited for years now by a special prosecutor, congressional probes, and even the CIA itself.

She has also claimed that some officials inside the CIA -- whom she refused to name -- had wanted her ICA team to declare that Trump's win was illegitimate due to Russian meddling. She has admitted that although the ICA did not come to that conclusion, she has suggested that her team may have been able to reach that finding if it had been able to poll every single voter to see if they had been swayed by Russian meddling.

According to the University of California at Santa Barbara, 136,787,187 people voted in the 2016 election.

Miller has also sent mixed messages, saying that the ICA team had found "no collusion" when they were writing their assessment in late 2016, and even claimed that this "no collusion" finding was made clear in the ICA. In fact, the ICA's major reference to collusion was a direct citation to a two-page annex on the Steele dossier.

The 2016 ICA was written at the direction of President Barack Obama and largely overseen by Brennan, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and since-fired FBI Director James Comey. It was finished in December 2016, with a publicly declassified version released in early January 2017 and a more extensive classified version declassified and released last week.

...

Miller has also said she doesn't remember basic facts about the ICA timeline, including when Trump was first elected and when the CIA and her ICA team allegedly first received purportedly key intelligence about Putin's motivations. Miller even forgot whether the intelligence had come in before or after Trump's win.

She also couldn't remember if the ICA team she says she led had access to intelligence on a personal directive from Putin himself or not.

Miller decried Ratcliffe's lessons-learned review as a political hit job and claimed that none of it was true, before admitting that key allegations in Ratcliffe's report, including about Brennan insisting that the dossier be included in the ICA, were probably accurate.

She doesn't remember much about the twisting of intelligence, but she is absolutely sure that all criticisms of it are invalid.

...

Miller has used her LinkedIn account to repeatedly attack Trump since leaving the CIA last year.

The New York Times wrote an article in May titled, "FBI Dismantles Elite Public Corruption Squad." Miller's response on LinkedIn? "This is awful! Further proof that Trump is a dictator."

Miller also supported analogies between Trump and Adolf Hitler. An ABC News article from February said that "The Diplomatic Security Service is being targeted for firings. Why that matters: Analysis." A commenter from the United Kingdom said, "I'm just a Brit (you know, that little island off the coast of Europe that stood up to Hitler) but I have to say that harming DSS would be equivalent to shooting yourself in the foot." Miller replied, "Yes....the Hitler analogy is not lost on a bunch of us.....sadly...."

Much more at the article. This woman is clearly a lunatic.

She's also a liar. When JustTheNews contacted her to ask about her clear anti-Trump bias, she claimed she was actually a Republican who was "pro-Trump" and actually voted for Trump.

She... voted for Trump in 2016? And then a month later wrote memos accusing him of being a Russian agent and a reincarnated Hitler?

No, you're a liar and mentally unwell. If she "voted for Trump," then she did so in a primary because Democrats believed Trump would be easy to defeat in the general.

She looks just like you'd expect: Not like a happy, pretty Republican woman who has good relations with men, but an angry, masculine wine-box-demolshing harpy whose husband decided he couldn't take her any longer so now she's going to get Revenge On ALL the Men.

It even turns out that she's lying when she repeatedly claims to have written the ICA itself.

She actually didn't. She's just resorting to that beloved tactic of leftwing power-mad women, Resume Padding.

In response to last week's damning official document release about a now-infamous intelligence document that helped launch years of Russiagate madness, CNN wrote:

Retired CIA official Susan Miller, an author of the agency's 2017 intelligence report on Russian election meddling...

No, she's not.

"Not an author. Not involved," says a senior intelligence official.

"There's a chance she's on some emails or something like that," adds another person familiar with the investigation. "But she's not the author of the ICA... she wasn't leading this effort. So it's just totally bizarre that she claims the opposite."

As if Russiagate weren't a weird enough story already, the sudden appearance of mysterious former CIA officer Susan Miller in a high-profile media campaign reduces the affair to a freak show. In a story about one of the most elaborate media frauds in history, in which the CIA used phony intelligence to prop up a rushed report insisting Russian President Vladimir Putin meddled in the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump, it's only fitting that the person leading the media defense of the original intelligence is not an author of the report in question and may not be significantly involved at all.

In a detail Jonathan Swift might have written, Miller is set to receive the Hidden Hero Award in November from the International Spy Museum in Washington, given to the official who makes "outsized contributions to the intelligence community." Racket made multiple attempts to ask Miller about her role with the ICA. She did not respond.

However, we were about to go to press when Joe MacKinnon of Blaze media excellently beat us to the punch on this story. MacKinnon received an amusing two-part response from Miller. First:

My team and I at CIA wrote a CIA analysis about Russian influence on the election.

Second:

This was a CIA report, briefed to Trump by our then-director, and by me to the Senate and congressional intelligence committees. The DNI used that report as the basis for the ICA... I indeed did not write the ICA, but the ODNI used my report as the basis for theirs.

That's not even a non-denial denial. It's an oops.

Why lie? Well, all of these grifters now rely on partisan payoffs, and there's a big difference in the Grifter Potential between someone who just worked at the CIA during RussiaGate and someone who "wrote the ICA" accusing Trump of being a Soviet spy.

Posted by: Ace at 01:35 PM | Comments (393) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Kamala Harris: I Lost Because "The System" Is "Broken;" "Democracy" Failed to Position Me For Success

Before that: Of course she's writing a book to cash in on her Massive Historic Failure.

The dollar figure of the deal is not yet known.

Kamala Harris is reemerging with a new project: a book titled 107 Days, chronicling her brief and unsuccessful 2024 presidential bid. In a video message Thursday, the former vice president said, "I believe there's value in sharing what I saw, what I learned, and what I know it will take to move forward." She called the writing process one of "candor and reflection."

The book's title refers to the 107-day sprint from President Joe Biden's sudden withdrawal from the race on July 21, 2024, to Election Day. Harris, who stepped in as the Democrat nominee, initially surged in the polls but failed to sustain that momentum. She ultimately lost to President Donald Trump--both in the Electoral College and in the popular vote, breaking a two-decade streak for Democrats.

Harris said the campaign was "high-stakes and deeply personal," and that she's spent considerable time "reflecting on those days." Rumors of a book deal had circulated for months. CNN reported Thursday that the upcoming publication influenced Harris's decision not to pursue the California governorship, a race in which she was widely expected to be a top contender.

Stephen Colbert had this dweebcel politician on his show (of course).

I have constantly written about Kamala Harris's constant complaint -- when she fails, she claims that other people -- usually white men -- have "failed to position her for success." She proves with every utterance that she is nothing but an overpromoted DEI hire. Who else would expect everyone else to do her homework for her but a DEI hire who is endlessly promoted based not on performance but simply for her mere existence?

You can hear that again in her whining on the Colbert show. You see, the system is "broken." The evidence that it's broken is that the country didn't just give this Proud Woman of Color the win she was entitled to based simply on existing.

Pop Base
@PopBase

Kamala Harris tells Stephen Colbert she decided not to run for Governor of California because the system is broken:

"For now, I don't wanna go back in the system. I think it's broken. [...] I always believed that as fragile as our democracy is, our systems would be strong enough to defend our most fundamental principles and I think right now, they're not as strong as they need to be."

A DEI hire finally reached a level of incompetence that caused people to say "No, you've depleted your allotment of Social Promotions," and it's the fault of "democracy" and "our systems" and "most fundamental principles."

Nick Sortor
@nicksortor

In the MOST amount of words possible, Kamala Harris admits President Trump BROKE her, which is why she doesn't want to run for Governor of California

"The system's broken... so I don't wanna go back into the system."

She just GAVE UP

Donors were skeptical of donating again to Kamala Harris. One said she "lacked fire in the belly," that is, she didn't seem like she really wanted to run for governor.

Or president.

She is basically acknowledging that by saying "I don't wanna go back into the system." Even if she attempts to un-retire from politics, donors will take this quote as confirming that she lacks "fire in the belly" and would just be running for the sake of appearances and to fill her bank accounts.

So even if she didn't intend it, this marks her official retirement from elective politics.

Today is a good day. The Trump Curse continues posting W after W.

Posted by: Ace at 12:25 PM | Comments (347) | Trackbacks (Suck)