January 25, 2025
Ace of Spades Pet Thread, January 25
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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 03:22 PM | Comments (87) | Trackbacks (Suck)
Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, Jan. 25
Posted by: K.T. at 01:16 PM | Comments (59) | Trackbacks (Suck)
President Trump Goes to Hollywood
Trump and Newsom share Hollywood hug
after LA fires
Wonder how Newsom felt at that moment?
Yesterday, Friday, was the last business day of the new Trump Presidency, and I was already sort of overwhelmed by everything that he had done. At home, my internet connection was sort if iffy, and I lost the page with my links for the week up until Thursday. Naturally.
On Friday morning, we had an appointment in Fresno and listened to a talk radio station on the way up. A guest they had scheduled for the morning (a congressman, I think - didn't recognize the name) had to re-schedule because he would be traveling with the President to North Carolina and California!
The main conclusion I took from that morning, listening to the banter on the radio, was that the country was becoming divided into (1) people who understood that Donald Trump often presented proposals in terms one might expect if one had read his book The Art of the Deal and (2) people who did not understand this.
Elsewhere (somewhere in my lost links), Walter Kirn referred to the President's statements concerning things like changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America as "chew-bones" to keep the press (and others) busy while he was doing real negotiations.
after LA fires
Posted by: K.T. at 11:18 AM | Comments (440) | Trackbacks (Suck)
The Classical Saturday Morning Coffee Break & Prayer Revival
*****
Good morning boys and girls and everything in between. Hope everyone down south has their snow shoveling duties out of the way.
Before we enter the Prayer Revival just a few housekeeping matters to go over. (Rulz for those of you in Wakefield)
1) This is an open thread. Feel free to lurk, opine and/or bloviate.
2) Be kind, be nice. And no jumping on the furniture.
3) Running with sharp objects? Do you feel lucky?
4) Have a great weekend!
2) Be kind, be nice. And no jumping on the furniture.
3) Running with sharp objects? Do you feel lucky?
4) Have a great weekend!
Posted by: Misanthropic Humanitarian at 08:30 AM | Comments (417) | Trackbacks (Suck)
Daily Tech News 25 January 2025
Top Story
- Computers were a mistake: UnitedHealth has confirmed the ransomware attack on its Change Healthcare unit last February affected around 190 million people in America — nearly double previous estimates. (Tech Crunch)
That's... Rather a lot.In its data breach notice, Change Healthcare said that the cybercriminals stole names and addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, and government identity documents, which included Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, and passport numbers. The stolen health data also includes diagnoses, medications, test results, imaging, and care and treatment plans, as well as health insurance information . Change said the data also includes financial and banking information found in patient claims.
So, basically, everything.UnitedHealth's spokesperson said the company was "not aware of any misuse of individuals' information as a result of this incident and has not seen electronic medical record databases appear in the data during the analysis."
But did you actually look?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM | Comments (241) | Trackbacks (Suck)
January 24, 2025
Into The Valley Of Death Rode The ONT
Hi everybody! Welcome to Friday! Boy, it's been quite a week, hasn't it?
Posted by: WeirdDave at 10:00 PM | Comments (608) | Trackbacks (Suck)
Little Sneezers Cafe
Oppstryn, Norway
Oppstryn, Norway
Posted by: Ace at 07:30 PM | Comments (660) | Trackbacks (Suck)
Hollywood Makes History Again!!!!
The Academy of Motion Pictures & Marxist Propaganda nominated a man as best "actress." This is apparently a guy calling himself "Sofia" Garcon, who appears in a (?) Spanish musical called Emilia Perez or something. Never heard of it. No one will see it. Great movie to give 13 nominations to to Shock the Squares.
Kurt SchlichterBelow is a clip from this incredible movie, so amazing that the Academy showered it with thirteen Oscar nominations. You may think this is some kind of crude MAGA Cheapfake Parody, but this is the real deal Hollyfield.
@KurtSchlichter Apparently, the Oscar nominations came out, and I only heard of them because some guy pretending to be a chick got nominated as a chick because take that and we’ll show you squares. It is remarkable how Hollywood has chosen to commit woke suicide. We're going to break out of their monopoly on content. We're gonna make our own stuff and there’s nothing they can do about it.
Posted by: Ace at 06:30 PM | Comments (459) | Trackbacks (Suck)
Politico's Co-Founder: "Trump is a Great President... He Is the Greatest Political Figure of His Era"
Here's a link to the full op-ed. Some quotes:
Politico wants to be considered objective. LOL.
Politico editor-in-chief calls Trump 'greatest American figure of his era' due to his influence
John Harris said Trump's political opponents should face the fact that Trump is not a 'momentary anomaly'
Politico global editor-in-chief John F. Harris argued in a new piece that President Donald Trump's second victory proves that he has dominated American politics so thoroughly that he will likely be counted among the country's most consequential leaders. Harris clarified that he was not describing Trump as a righteous or evil character, nor was he saying that Trump has been a successful president, but he reiterated that his impact is monumental either way. "He is a force of history," Harris declared in his column published Tuesday. The editor-in-chief said Trump's second inauguration on Monday puts the president in an "entirely new light" -- he is now "holding power under circumstances in which reasonable people cannot deny a basic fact: He is the greatest American figure of his era." Harris explained that assessment of Trump is "an objective description about the dimensions of his record," noting how the president began by "dominating" the GOP nearly a decade ago and now dominates "every discussion of American politics broadly." He noted that Trump's second victory proves he is "not a fluke" despite his opponents in the media hammering his flaws for almost ten years. "He is someone with an ability to perceive opportunities that most politicians do not and forge powerful, sustained connections with large swaths of people in ways that no contemporary can match," the editor-in-chief stated, adding that he himself has been "slow" to see this power. Harris went to say that Trump's political opponents must do away with their strategy to paint Trump as a political aberration. "They cannot push Trump to the margins, by treating him as a momentary anomaly or simply denouncing him as lawless and illegitimate," he stated. "Opponents have no choice but to acknowledge he and his movement represent a large historical argument -- and then rally similarly large arguments to defeat it."
Here's a link to the full op-ed. Some quotes:
He notes that even Democrats may find Trump's victory "liberating," as it has liberated them from their delusions:
Time to Admit It: Trump Is a Great President. He's Still Trying To Be a Good One. The most consequential presidents divided the nation -- before "reuniting it on a new level of understanding."
By John F. Harris John Harris is founding editor and global editor-in-chief of POLITICO. His Altitude column offers a regular perspective on politics in a moment of radical disruption. Donald J. Trump in his second inaugural address was everything his supporters hoped he would be: Breathtakingly expansive about his intention to reshape the vast federal government around his vision; raucously jingoistic in proclaiming that the country will do whatever it wants to advance its interests around the world; openly triumphal in asserting his belief that his survival from an assassin's bullet and his victory show he is God's chosen instrument to lead an American revival. Trump was also everything his adversaries feared: Messianic in tone; lovingly protective of his grievances; wholly uncharitable to the people, sitting just feet from him under the Capitol Rotunda, who he defeated so convincingly. In one light, it was all quite familiar. But the second occasion of Trump taking the oath of office also put him in an entirely new light. For the first time, he is holding power under circumstances in which reasonable people cannot deny a basic fact: He is the greatest American figure of his era. Let's quickly exhale: Great in this context is not about a subjective debate over whether he is a singularly righteous leader or a singularly menacing one. It is now simply an objective description about the dimensions of his record. He began a decade ago by dominating the Republican Party. He soon advanced to dominating every discussion of American politics broadly. Now, his astonishing comeback after his defeat by Joseph Biden in 2020 and the notoriety of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot makes clear there are certain things he is not and one big thing he is. He is not a fluke, who got elected initially in 2016 almost entirely because of the infirmities of his opponent. He is not someone the American public somehow misunderstands -- as though Democrats and the news media have not spent 10 years forcefully highlighting the risks of his record and character. He is someone with an ability to perceive opportunities that most politicians do not and forge powerful, sustained connections with large swaths of people in ways that no contemporary can match. In other words: He is a force of history.
That is because they can no longer place confidence in a strategy that once looked plausible but now has been exposed as illusion. They cannot push Trump to the margins, by treating him as a momentary anomaly or simply denouncing him as lawless and illegitimate. Some voters bought that but not enough to win an election. Opponents have no choice but to acknowledge he and his movement represent a large historical argument -- and then rally similarly large arguments to defeat it. Trump in 2020 showed himself ready to undermine democracy for his own purposes. Trump in 2024 showed that he is also a potent expression of democracy. ... One more signature shown by the most consequential presidents: Uncommon psychological toughness. Have you ever known someone who was facing legal hurdles? In many cases, even if people ultimately win the case, they end up being consumed and shrunken by the searing nature of the experience. Imagine running for president amid huge civil suits, criminal prosecutions, and even felony convictions -- then emerging from this morass as a larger figure than before. No one needs to admire the achievement to recognize that Trump is possessed by some rare traits of denial, combativeness and resilience. My mind goes back to a conversation, just before Bill Clinton began his second term, with the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. He had inherited a tradition from his father, also a renowned scholar, of conducting surveys of historians asking them to rank American presidents from best to worst. Clinton was promising in his second term to be a great national unifier. Schlesinger, who wished greatness for Clinton but mistrusted his ideological centrism, was skeptical. "Great presidents are unifiers mostly in retrospect," he told me. Most great presidents, he later wrote, "divided the nation before reuniting it on a new level of national understanding." This is the same sentiment uttered by FDR: "All our great presidents were leaders of thought at a time when certain ideas in the life of our nation had to be clarified." FDR also said: "I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made."
Posted by: Ace at 05:25 PM | Comments (295) | Trackbacks (Suck)
Fake Captain America Movie Tracking to Do About as Much Business as the Depths-of-Covid Flop "The Eternals"
I don't talk much about Marvel/Disney any longer because it's no longer relevant. It had its chance to course correct; it did not. It cannot be saved and no one even cares that it's dying any longer.
Tickets went on sale for Captain America: Brave New World on Friday. The movie does not feature Steve Rogers, but the Falcon taking over the role so that Marvel can say "We're so progressive we have a Black Captain America now." Ticket sales aren't great:FernandoQuantumania was itself a bomb, and The Marvels and Joker 2 were huge bombs. Eternals was a bomb -- and it was released when theaters were still recovering from covid. By the way, due to extensive and repeated reshoots, required due to poor test screenings, the cost of just filming this piece of crap is estimated at $350 million. Some are saying it would have to make $900 million or a billion before it begins actually making money. That Park Place:
@Luiz_Fernando_J And yeah, #CaptainAmerica: #BraveNewWorld had its pre-sales kickoff on FRI at US #BoxOffice! After 2 days of pre-sales, although nowhere near #Quantumania which opened on the same weekend in 2023, #CaptainAmericaBraveNewWorld is currently 1.4x better than #TheMarvels & #JokerFolieADeux, on par with #Eternals & not that far from #BlackWidow & #DunePartTwo after their first 2 days of pre-sales.
Don't worry: Marvel has a HUGE selling point for this movie. You see, this movie will be the debut of the famous Marvel character Red Hulk. Who's Red Hulk, you ask? Well he was made up in the past 10 or 12 years. You see, he's just like the Hulk, except, and this is gonna blow your mind, he's... Red. And he's violent and destructive. (You know -- like the actual Hulk.) Are you excited now? They did a color swap on The Hulk! Oh, and even better, people say that this Red Hulk is in the movie for "about five minutes." Marvel could have just re-cast Iron Man and Captain America. Just like the James Bond series did. The James Bond people didn't say, "Oh, Sean Connery is retiring, let's have a black agent, 009, take over for him." No, they just recast, because the character was key. Marvel has been pushing a woke agenda. They are very embarrassed that most of their most popular characters, created in decades past before we realized that Diversity is Our Strength and the country was 75%+ white, were white. So Marvel attempted in the comics -- where it failed -- and then in the movies -- where it's failing now -- to implement the "Mantle Strategy." The theory was, it's not the characters who matter, it's just the mantle. The superhero identity. The costume. We can just replace all of our old, unfashionable white characters with race-and-genderswapped replacements. As long as they're wearing the old costume, the audience will never notice the difference. So the "All New All Different" era replaced Bruce Banner with Amadeus Cho, a teenage Asian, and called it "Totally Awesome Hulk." (No, really, google it.) Iron Man was replaced with a black teenage girl genius (of course) called "Iron Heart." Sam Wilson, the Falcon, took over as Captain America. Etc., etc., etc. Like I said, Marvel already ran this experiment, and it failed. Bigtime. Customers rejected the "Mantle Strategy." But Kevin Fiege is a stupid, weak liberal manlet who was convinced I can make it work. I am the True White Savior. Nope! Meanwhile, Hollywood is burning and I don't just mean literally.
The latest box office update for Captain America: Brave New World spells all-too-familiar trouble for Marvel Studios, as presale tickets are tracking just 1.4 times better than The Marvels and on par with The Eternals. While this may sound like a slight improvement on paper, it's a significant red flag for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A Troubling Comparison to The Eternals Released in 2021, The Eternals marked Marvel's first major financial failure, grossing just $164.9 million domestically and $237.2 million internationally for a worldwide total of $402 million. The Eternals had a production budget of $236.2 million. Brave New World faces a much steeper climb. With a rumored production budget between $350 and $375 million--over $100 million more than The Eternals at the lowest projection--this film could become a far bigger bomb even if it performs similarly at the box office. After factoring in marketing costs, which often equal the production budget, and theater cuts of ticket sales, the movie would need to exceed $900 million globally to break even according to some projections. Based on current reports, Brave New World is unlikely to hit that target. Box Office Projections Confirm the Decline As previously reported, opening weekend projections for Brave New World are estimated to land between $81 million and $107 million with a median figure of $96 million. Many outlets are quick to point out that the film is tracking similarly to 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, as if that's a positive. It's not.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier opened domestically at $95 million and grossed $259.7 million at home. Adjusted for inflation, The Winter Soldier's opening weekend climbs to $126.6 million and its domestic haul to $356 million--both far beyond what Brave New World is tracking to achieve. Even worse, ticket prices have increased dramatically since 2014, when the average movie ticket was $8.14. Now, with an average ticket price of $10.78, even matching The Winter Soldier's $95 million opening weekend would mean far fewer people are watching Brave New World. These numbers paint a dire picture for the once-reliable Captain America franchise.
Hollywood Braces for a 'Masks Off' Trump Era "There's more fear in the executive suites now than there ever has been."Are you psyched about Red Hulk yet, bigots? I've been hearing that the test screenings went poorly due to one particular plot point, which they've reshot the movie to avoid. They might have taken out President Red Hulk's imposition of a fascist dictatorship. Or maybe they didn't. Who cares? I'm not going to watch it.
When Donald Trump emerged with raised fist from 2024's never-ending cortisol blast of an election last year, liberal-leaning Hollywood responded to the news with questions. Following a wave of predictably anguished celebrity tweets, the first was: What does this mean for our bottom line? The second: How do we make Trump 2.0 work in our favor? ...
Now, with the arrival of the 45th president's re-inauguration as POTUS 47, most movie-business insiders are hunched in a crash position alongside Disney executives. After facing a pandemic and twin Hollywood strikes, the inhabitants of the Thirty-Mile Zone know sweeping change is coming, even if the precise shape and scope is uncertain. Sources I consulted, ranging from studio executives to hitmaking producers and high-level talent managers as well as on-set crew members (most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity), predict Hollywood will generally become more self-censoring and less capable of critiquing the current political moment, if not less influential overall. "Hollywood doesn't matter as much as it thinks it matters," says a talent manager with A-list clients. "You had the biggest stars in the world support Kamala Harris. She couldn't have drawn more powerful advocates. And it didn't move the needle. What does that tell you? It's unsettling because the people and things you hold in high esteem don't drive the culture. As much as I love movies, they aren't the driver anymore." Will any "culture of resistance" (as when United Talent Agency organized a celeb-packed rally to protest the so-called Muslim ban in 2017) persist? One corporate strategist with interests across film and television described the feeling around town as "preemptive exhaustion." Hollywood is plagued by a sense of doom precipitated not just by financial anxieties but a feeling that a pervasive "woke is broke" mindset will affect what we see on our screens in the coming years ... "The movement away from 'woke' was already in motion even before Trump got re-elected," says a blockbuster producer, who points to two of the three movies in the last Star Wars trilogy (The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker) and several recent Marvel movies (Eternals, The Marvels), all of which underperformed at the box office, backdropped by a din of fanboy complaints about "forced diversity." "We've been seeing the departure of executives at the studios that had been hired to promote DEI in film and TV. Hollywood had swung too far left over the past few years and there was bound to be a reckoning." Perhaps not coincidentally, Trump's reelection comes at the tail end of a year when the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion--bashing Am I Racist?, produced by the Daily Wire, prevailed as 2024's highest-grossing documentary. (Shortly after Participant Media -- the production company known for tough-minded, issue-driven docs like The Cove and An Inconvenient Truth -- abruptly shuttered.) 2024 was also the year Twisters achieved blockbusterdom with a pronounced red-state aesthetic breaking through with audiences in the middle and southern portions of the U.S. Yet it would be a mistake to expect a right-wing reboot entirely. To hear it from several studio and production-company bosses, overt politics simply don't sell. "There isn't a strong desire for rhetorical storytelling in Hollywood," says one production exec. "In certain corners of the entertainment world, there's suddenly this opportunity for conservative-minded viewers to see a bit of their world represented. But I don't know if it's necessarily going to be a flip to the other side of the equation."
... In a more pressing example of what's to come in 2025, there is Marvel's Captain: America: Brave New World, which before June 2023 was titled Captain America: New World Order. (The change was taken as an implicit response to the IRL "New World Order" conspiracy theory gaining traction in right-wing extremist corners of the internet; it posits the existence of a secret global elite conspiring to implement a totalitarian one-world government.) Early test screenings of Brave New World, which hits theaters February 14, were reportedly disastrous, prompting expensive reshoots with major sequences cut from the film. According to a technical crew member on the film with knowledge of both the screenings and the reshoot process (which also took place last year), the character portrayed by Harrison Ford -- Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross, a demagogic military leader who morphs into an irrational, orange-hued superhuman -- created unforeseen political resonances for the studio in an inaugural year. "He's this very powerful general who becomes kind of a fascist and turns into a raging Red Hulk. That was seen as an allusion to Trump," this source explains. "Disney was realizing, Hey, we've been bleeding for a while. Let's try not to piss off our core base anymore than we have been over the past couple of years."
Posted by: Ace at 04:20 PM | Comments (412) | Trackbacks (Suck)
How the Democrat Party Pushed Silicon Valley Into Trump's Arms
He talks about how leftwing campus politics infested the tech industry, until the parasites gained control over the host.
He talks about Trump's election and the freak-out on the left. The left demanded answers to the question "How did we allow Trump to win?" And the answer, of course, "because social media companies made him win." And he was actually eager to help undo the crime of making Trump win. And he and his fellow tech executives were eager censors and eager propagandists. But... the Democrat Party just kept demanding more and more.
Andreessen: I think the Valley before me, from the '50s through the '70s, was normie Republicans. They were businesspeople, C.E.O.s, investors, and they would have been, I assume at the time, big fans of Nixon, big fans of Reagan. That era was basically over by the time I arrived. I met a few of those guys, but when I got there in '94, it was in the full swing of Clinton-Gore, the restoration of the Democratic Party and recovery of liberalism as a mainstream political force. ...
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As a result of that, the most natural thing in the world for somebody like me was, "Oh, of course, I'm a normie Democrat. I'll be a normie Democrat forever." Normie Democrat is what I call the Deal, with a capital D. Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood... Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you're a Democrat, you're pro--gay rights, you're pro-abortion, you're pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal. Then, of course, everybody knows Republicans are just knuckle-dragging racists. It was taken as given that there was going to be this great relationship. And of course, it worked so well for the Democratic Party. Clinton and Gore sailed to a re-election in '96. And the Valley was locked in for 100 years to come to be straight-up conventional blue Democrat. ... Douthat: When did you start to have doubts about the synthesis of Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party? Andreessen: The breakdown was during the second Obama term. It took me by surprise. I think maybe the one person it didn't take by surprise is our mutual friend Peter Thiel. As with a lot of things, I think he saw it coming earlier than I did. But it definitely took me by surprise. And just to give full context there: I had met Obama in, I think, '06 or '07, when he was a new senator. And he seemed great. It's the perfect package. It's literally everything that you could possibly dream for in a president. He has all the right social views, and he seems like an inheritor of Clinton-Gore. He says all the right things about capitalism at the time and about entrepreneurship. He's clearly in love with tech. You may recall the 2012 election. It was literally the story of social media saves democracy, like it was literally that Barack Obama, the good guy, uses advanced technology, including the internet and social media to save the country from the Nazi fascist Mitt Romney. And this was, like, wall-to-wall positive press coverage. ... And then basically, in retrospect, what happened is after Obama's re-election in 2012 through ultimately to 2016, things really started to change. The way the story gets told a lot now is that basically Trump was a new arrival in '15, and then basically lots of changes followed. But what I experienced was the changes started in 2012, 2013, 2014 and were snowballing hard, at least in the Valley, at least among kids. And I think, to some extent, Trump was actually a reaction to those changes. Douthat: Those changes you're talking about, are they fundamentally about policies being made by the Obama White House, or are they fundamentally about the big shift leftward among young people that clearly started in that era? Andreessen: So I would say both, and the unifying thread here is, I believe it's the children of the elites. The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists. They fan out into the professions, and our companies hire a lot of kids out of the top universities, of course. And then, by the way, a lot of them go into government, and so we're not only talking about a wave of new arrivals into the tech companies.
We're also talking about a wave of new arrivals into the congressional offices. And of course, they all know each other, and so all of a sudden you have this influx, this new cohort. And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think, primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq. Throw that in there also. But for whatever reason, they radicalized hard. Douthat: But when you say they radicalized, what did that mean for Silicon Valley? What did they want? ... Andreessen: Revolution. What I now understand it to be historically is a rebirth of the New Left. So it's very analogous.... It turned out to be a coalition of economic radicals, and this was the rise of Bernie Sanders, but the kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way. They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from "Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society" to "Capitalism is evil and should be torn down." And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined. And there was a point where the median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career obsessed striver and their conversation with you was: "When do I get promoted, and how much do I get paid, and when do I end up running the company?" And that was the thing. By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: "[expletive] it. We're burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil." Douthat: But they're working for you. These are people who are working for you. Andreessen: Of course. So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won't name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, "I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us." They're professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. All-hands meetings started to get very contentious. Where you'd get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you'd have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there's way too many white men on the management team. "Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don't you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we're not emitting any carbon." So you just take the laundry list of fashionable kind of radical left-wing positions of that time, and they're spending a huge amount of time at the company, basically organizing around that. And I will say, in fairness, I think in most of these companies this kind of person never got to be anywhere close to 100 percent of the work force. But what happened is they became, like, 20 percent, maybe 30 percent. And then there's this big middle of "go along, get along" people who generally also consider themselves Democrats. And they're just trying to follow along with the trends. So you take this activist core of 20 percent, you add 60 percent of "go along, get along" people, and all of a sudden the C.E.O. experiences, "Oh, my God, 80 percent of my employees have radicalized into a political agenda." What people say from the outside is, "Well, you should just fire those people." But as a C.E.O., you can't fire 80 percent of my team. And by the way, I have to go hire people to replace them. And the other people at the other companies are behaving the same way. And I can't go hire kids out of college, because I'm just going to get more activists. And so that's how these companies became captured.
First of all, let me disabuse you of something, if you haven't already disabused yourself. The view of American C.E.O.s operating as capitalist profit optimizers is just completely wrong. That's like, Goal No. 5 or something. There's four goals that are way more important than that. And that's not just true in the big tech companies. It's true of the executive suite of basically everyone at the Fortune 500. I would say Goal No. 1 is, "I'm a good person." "I'm a good person," is wildly more important than profit margins. Wildly. And this is why you saw these big companies all of a sudden go completely bananas in all their marketing. It's why you saw them go bananas over D.E.I. It's why you saw them all cooperating with all these social media boycotts. I mean, the level of lock step uniformity, unanimity in the thought process between the C.E.O.s of the Fortune 500 and what's in the pages of The New York Times and in the Harvard classroom and in the Ford Foundation -- they're just locked together. Or at least they were through this entire period. ... Here's the reason: It's the famous cliché "We live in a society." These people aren't robots. They're just not. They're members of a society. They're members of an elite class. They either come from the top, most radical education institutions, or they are seeking as hard as they can to assimilate into that same class. Then, by the way, you're not just doing that yourself. You also have a family. And if your kids are in college, I mean, God help you, they're coming for you. Then you've got your radicalized employee base, and you maybe could have nipped the radicalization five years earlier, but now you can't, because it's now 80 percent of your work force. By the way, you also have your shareholders, and this is where things get really bananas. A big part of the tipping point was when the major shareholders turned and became political activists. So you're in this sandwich from all of your constituents, and then you've got the press coming at you. You've got the activists coming at you, and then you've got the [federal] government coming at you. Douthat: But wait, the federal government is run by Donald Trump in this period, right? Andreessen: Not really. Douthat: I mean, this is the peculiar thing about the narrative, right? You're saying everyone is possessed by all these fears, and I grant you, they're powerful fears, but they are in an era when, officially, the Republican Party and Donald Trump are in the White House and have not complete but real power in Washington, D.C. Andreessen: Well, did they? Like sitting here today, would you describe that Donald Trump ran the federal government between 2016 and 2020? ... Andreessen: So things got much worse after 2020. So the part I would agree with is that things got much worse for tech, after they took formal control of the White House. For sure, that's right. ... And then of course, Covid hits, which was a giant radicalizing moment. And at that point, we had lived through eight years of what was increasingly clearly a social revolution. Very clearly, companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change, social revolution. The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era where multiple companies I know felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees. Things got really aggressive during that period. And so I go from watching Brian Williams every night and just being lied to 500 nights in a row to, basically, reading the Mueller report, reading the Horowitz I.G. report and being like, "Oh, my God, none of this is true." And then you try to explain to people, "This isn't true." And then they get really mad at you because how can you possibly have any sympathy for a fascist? Douthat: So you are radicalizing in the late Trump years. Andreessen: Yes, for sure. There were quite a few people like me. Now, none of us were sticking our heads up at that point because, to be clear, it was way too dangerous. None of us were particularly moral heroes at that point. But there were lots and lots of underground peer-to-peer discussions from 2018 through to 2021 saying, "OK, things are off the rails." And my point is, we were softened up for the Biden radicalization. Then when the Biden administration turned out to be far more radical than even we thought that they were going to be then that's what generated the response that ultimately -- ...Below, another tech titan describes his Red Pill moment: When he finally saw the full, unedited clip of Trump's Charlottsville remarks, he realized the media had been straight-up lying to him for years.
Mark Zuckerberg just talked about this on "Rogan." Direct phone calls from senior members of the administration. Screaming executives ordering them to do things. Just full-on "[Expletive] you. We own you. We control you. You're going to do what we want or we're going to destroy you." Then they just came after crypto. Absolutely tried to kill us. They just ran this incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto. Then they were ramping up a similar campaign to try to kill A.I. That's really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics. The crypto attack was so weird that we didn't know what to make of it. We were just hoping it would pass, which it didn't. But it was when they threatened to do the same thing to A.I. that we realized we had to get involved in politics. Then we were up against what looked like the absolutely terrifying prospect of a second term.
Posted by: Ace at 03:15 PM | Comments (425) | Trackbacks (Suck)
In the UK, "Our Strength" Admits to Gleefully Butchering Three Little Girls to Death and Stabbing Eight Others 
art of the blame for this lies with the UK government. Its censorious and narrowly legalistic response to the attack, which limited what the public was allowed to know, created a vacuum in which wild theories and outright lies could flourish. All the authorities were prepared to say in the immediate aftermath of Rudakubana's arrest was that the killings were 'not being treated as terror-related'. However, recent revelations suggest it was not unreasonable to suspect a terrorist motive. We now know that Rudakubana had downloaded an al-Qaeda training manual and had also attempted to produce Ricin, a biological toxin. Furthermore, since his guilty plea, it has emerged that he had been referred to Prevent, the government's counter-extremism programme, on three separate occasions. He was first referred in 2019 when he was 13, and a further two referrals were made in 2021, all when he was a schoolboy living in Lancashire. From this it is fair to infer that the attack could have been terror-related. Yet, seven months on, there is still no conclusive evidence as to Rudakubana's motive. Indeed, the referrals to Prevent were born of concerns around his fascination with violence generally. He poured over materials on school shootings, wars and genocides. It is still not clear if he was attached to any particular ideology. He had been raised a Catholic and there is no evidence of any interest in Islamism, beyond the downloading of the al-Qaeda training manual. Prime minister Keir Starmer has now ordered a public inquiry into the Southport attack. This may shed further light on what drove Rudakubana to commit this atrocity and how the state failed to stop him. But we are a long way from proving that he acted with a terrorist motive.The British left -- the Labour Party, I mean -- thinks they know The Real Villain Here. The Real Villain Here is Amazon, for selling knives online. You see-- it was the knife, not the unassimilatable Islamic extremists, who are causing all these butcheries. Even though this latest example of OUR STRENGTH was found with a knife on ten separate occasions and authorities, such as they are, decided to excuse that and let the lad enjoy life to the full.
The Southport attacker admitted carrying a knife more than ten times before he bought a kitchen knife on Amazon to launch his deadly attack in July last year. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, said it was "a total disgrace" that Axel Rudakubana was "easily able to order a knife on Amazon" despite being aged 17 and having a conviction for violence. It is illegal to sell knives to under-18s. An internal Home Office review of how Prevent, the government's counter-extremism programme, failed to stop Rudakubana found that he was "obsessed with massacre and extreme violence", The Times understands. He was in possession of material about Nazi Germany, self-driving car bombs and massacres, some of which was accessed on social media. The review revealed that he had admitted to carrying a knife ten times, Cooper told MPs. Amazon also faced criticism after Rudakubana bought ingredients for the lethal toxin ricin from its vendors. Experts question whether the company's algorithms were able to flag the purchase of a series of potentially harmful products by a single customer.More from Tree-Hugging Sister. From The Times (UK):
...Teachers flagged concerns about Rudakubana to Prevent after he made inappropriate searches on school computers about conflicts abroad and acts of violence, The Times can disclose. All three referrals were in an educational setting. One was for searching for information on the conflict in Libya and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Each referral was assessed and closed by counterterrorism policing. A Home Office review concluded that all three referrals should not have been ended and should have been escalated to Channel, the next stage of the Prevent scheme that intervenes to divert individuals from radicalisation. The decision not to pursue each referral was due to the absence of an ideology but this had neglected to consider Rudakubana's "vulnerabilities to radicalisation" or take account of whether he was obsessed with massacre or extreme violence, Cooper said. The review concluded that counterterrorism police failed to take account of the cumulative effect of the repeat referrals.It's almost as if "counterterrorism police" have been told to stand down for actual Islamic terrorism and instead investigate trouble-making UK citizens who criticize them for failing to track terrorists.
Posted by: Ace at 02:10 PM | Comments (501) | Trackbacks (Suck)
Former Head of Biden's DOJ Immigration Division: Trump Fired Me and "Gave No Explanation!" I'm Totes Confused!
A former top Justice Department immigration official who was removed from her position by new DOJ leadership this week told ABC News that she did not receive any explanation for her removal. Lauren Alder Reid was one of four top officials from the agency that operates the U.S. immigration courts who was removed from her post. She had been with the agency for more than 14 years. "They did not give me any reason, other than not citing the 16 years of outstanding performance evaluation for lack of any discipline, administrative leave or reassignment in my entire career," Reid told ABC News. The firings come as President Donald Trump has signed a flurry of immigration executive orders after vowing on the campaign trail to clamp down on immigration and undo Biden-era policies. When asked if she's considering legal action, Reid, who was the assistant director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review's office of policy, said that she and the others are considering all options available to them. "It's pretty hard to sit back and imagine that this could begin to happen, at will, to any employee throughout the government, especially when we're talking about public servants who have dedicated their careers to try to make our country the best," she said.
Julie Kelly
@julie_kelly2 The purge at DOJ is so delicious. Explanation? Here's the explanation. WE WON, B*TCH.
Andrew H. GiulianiI saw on X that 538 murderers, rapists, and pedophile aliens have now been deported. Everyone knew where to find these people -- but the Biden Junta let them prey on American citizens because American citizens are the Democrats' ultimate disfavored class.
@AndrewHGiuliani So the head of immigration at DoJ doesn't know why she was fired. She would like an explanation. Hmmm, let me think about this one real hard... what could the reason be, anything, Bueller, Bueller? SOUTHERN BORDER!!!! There's your freakin' explanation!
Posted by: Ace at 01:05 PM | Comments (610) | Trackbacks (Suck)
Former Politico Employers: Politico Editors Buried Our Scoops About the Hunter Biden Laptop
Politico "reporters" admit Politico's cowardly, partisan editors killed their stories about Hunter Biden's laptop. We are real news, Mr. President.
Hello, friends. Welcome to Friday!
Politico "reporters" admit Politico's cowardly, partisan editors killed their stories about Hunter Biden's laptop. We are real news, Mr. President.
A pair of former reporters at venerable DC-focused outlet Politico slammed "cowardly editors" at their ex-outlet for burying stories about Hunter Biden's laptop -- as well as other major stories -- contributing to a false narrative that "misinformation" was being spread about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden before the 2020 election. Puck News scribe Tara Palmeri hosted Axios senior politics reporter Marc Caputo on her "Somebody's Gotta Win" podcast for Inauguration Day to discuss their mutual frustration with what they saw as Politico's mishandling of Biden family coverage. "Politico did that terrible, ill-fated headline: 51 intelligence agents, or former intelligence agents, say that the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation, or bore the hallmarks of disinformation," Caputo carped. "Turns out that story was closer to disinformation because the Hunter Biden laptop appeared to be true." "But then Facebook also pulled all stories down about the Hunter Biden laptop, and I think Twitter did at the same time, too," added Palmeri. "Correct, they punished The New York Post, that didn't help," Caputo went on, referring to The Post being locked out of its Twitter account due to what was later revealed as back-channel pressure from the FBI. "I was covering Biden at the time," he added. "And I was told this came from on high at Politico: Don't write about the laptop, don't talk about the laptop, don't tweet about the laptop." Caputo, however, noted that he'd also had a story, which broached the topic of Hunter Biden's work for the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings, "killed" by an editor as Joe Biden was fighting for support in the Dem primary. A Politico rep pushed back on the characterization in a statement to Mediaite, which first reported on the airing of grievances. "Seems like a case of false memory, given that across the years they referenced, POLITICO journalists lead the way on wide-ranging reporting on the business dealings of Joe Biden's closest relatives," the rep noted. ... Caputo, however, noted that he'd also had a story which broached the topic of Hunter Biden's work for the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings "killed" by an editor as Joe Biden was fighting for support in the lead-up to the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. "In 2019, a rival presidential Democratic campaign of Joe Biden's gave to me the tax lien -- the oppo research -- the tax lien on Hunter Biden for the period of time that he worked at Burisma," he recounted. Palmeri questioned whether other editors were uneasy about an extensive report she co-authored on US Secret Service agents reportedly trying to quietly nab a copy of a federal gun-purchase form the president's son filled out. "And I wrote what would have been a classic story saying, you know, 'The former vice president's son was slapped with a big tax lien for the period of time that he worked for this controversial Ukrainian oil concern, or natural gas concern, which is haunting his father on the campaign trail,'" Caputo said. It was scrapped without explanation, the veteran reporter vented, saying readers "don't understand the dumb decisions of cowardly editors that are made above us." ... "I spent three months on it, I went to the laptop shop, and I did all of the reporting in Delaware," she recalled. "But I do wonder if it could have, if it would have been published a little quicker if it was a different type of story." "It was the beginning of his administration, it was a honeymoon period -- you know what I mean?" she suggested.
Posted by: Ace at 12:00 PM | Comments (419) | Trackbacks (Suck)
THE MORNING RANT: Liberation Day Executive Orders & the Beginning of the End for the Failed EV Transition
A key order signed by Trump on Monday is to scrap the Biden administration’s push for 50% of all new vehicles sold in the US to be electric by 2030. While this was only ever a goal and not legally binding, many car manufacturers had thrown their support behind it. Federal funding for electric vehicle chargers will also be pulled under the new administration. In 2021, Biden allocated $7.5 billion to establish a national network of EV chargers, hoping that as many as 500,000 would be built by 2030.The Biden administration signing an Executive Order urging that auto manufacturers set a goal of 50% electric by 2030 was as “not legally binding” as a handshake loan with the Mob. Just about every story I’ve read about Trump reversing Biden’s mandate denies that there actually is a mandate, because Biden’s EO was “non-binding,” but that involves a degree of dishonest reporting because concurrent with the Biden EV Executive Order, the EPA also imposed new tailpipe emissions rules that could only be met by getting the fleet to about 50% electric. Well more good news, it sounds like Trump is also slapping down the EPA.
Posted by: Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM | Comments (375) | Trackbacks (Suck)
Mid-Morning Art Thread
Jan Provoost
Jan Provoost
Posted by: CBD at 09:30 AM | Comments (472) | Trackbacks (Suck)
The Morning Report — 1/23/25 
And combining the topics of both abortion and illegal immigration, this item kind of jumped out at me:
And combining the topics of both abortion and illegal immigration, this item kind of jumped out at me:
The jackals at The New York Times finally admit that an unborn baby is just that, a baby. However, only in the context of driving the narrative that birthright citizenship is good and predictably President Donald Trump is bad. In their piece titled “A New Fear for Undocumented Women: Will My Unborn Child Be a Citizen?” the NY Times profiles several illegal immigrants who fear that their future children won’t be granted birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment after Trump’s recent E.O. In its desire to play on American emotions about illegal immigration, the NY Times exposed its hypocrisy on abortion. Conservatives have long held the belief that all Americans, born or unborn, deserve the right to human dignity. However, the left only uses this line of thinking when they want to champion whatever their anti-American orthodoxy is at the time. Trump knew that his bold stance on birthright citizenship would come under heavy fire from immigration activists, which is likely why he made it a day-one issue. This sends the 14th Amendment to the courts to decide whether the original intent was to grant citizenship to anyone born in the U.S. or not. Americans have seen birthright citizens weaponized against their own people through illegal immigration in the form of “anchor babies.” . . . “The idea that birthright citizenship applies to anyone but the children of lawfully present permanent residents is a modern re-interpretation. Even as late as 1924, the legal and academic consensus was that the Citizenship Clause was meant to be far more restrictive,” Swearer added.In a sane world, the bastardization of the 14th amendment, would've been tossed decades ago. Let alone the bastardization and trashing of every other amendment and our entire governmental tradition if not morality and ethics that the enemies of this Republic have engaged in for generations now. With that I give you this revolting story:
Dr. S D Rama, who operates a maternity clinic in the United States, told Times of India that a significant increase in pre-term delivery requests has been seen following President Trump’s Monday executive order ending birthright citizenship for children of illegal migrants. Indian women in their eighth or ninth month of pregnancy are now scrambling to schedule C-sections before the February 20, when President Trump’s order is set to go into effect.IIRC Newsom and other Democrat mutant scum revoked the medical licenses of Doctors who refused to perform abortions on religious or even ethical grounds of violating the Hippocratic oath. Sauce for the goose, Mr. President and GOP governors? The sooner these Wog witch doctors are defrocked the safer we all will be. Have a great weekend. 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.
- ABOVE THE FOLD, BREAKING, NOTEWORTHY
- The EO takes aim at the private sector and higher education, requesting an OMB report within 120 days on the worst offenders and targets for federal action. Through our work at the Equal Protection Project, we have already identified numerous recalcitrant and systematically discriminatory institutions and we will be making our findings public long in advance of the OMB report.
Trump’s Merit-Based DEI Executive Order Is A Sledgehammer
- It stinks so bad the attorneys involved in the Inspector General report aren’t fit to hold their positions anymore at the Department of Justice. Too many bureaucrats on the GS scale have used their petty powers to smear and malign Donald Trump and his presidency, as Zerwitz and Ramella did here. Their behavior is particularly despicable because it provides political cover to state officials who were acting in a way that cost lives, the very thing federal law is designed to prevent.
COVID Death Coverup: Trump-Hating Lawyers at DOJ Strike Again
- Christopher F. Rufo: For the past five years, I have been fighting to defeat critical race theory and DEI.
What the Left Did to Me and My Family
Posted by: J.J. Sefton at 07:38 AM | Comments (379) | Trackbacks (Suck)
Daily Tech News 24 January 2025
Top Story
- Nvidia's new RTX 4090 Ti is here. (Tom's Hardware)
Well, they call it the RTX 5090, but compared to the previous model the chips is 25% larger and has 25% cores, and the card uses 25% more power and costs 25% more money to produce 25% better performance.
Which tells us exactly how the other cards in this generation will perform - maybe 10% faster than the previous generation, entirely due to additional processing cores and faster memory. The technological advance here is zero.
Though the 4000 series was already very good. We could just do without the lies.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM | Comments (258) | Trackbacks (Suck)
January 23, 2025
Victory AT ONT!
Howdy folks! Welcome to Thursday night. I saw this cartoon yesterday, and boy does it ring true.
Posted by: WeirdDave at 10:00 PM | Comments (444) | Trackbacks (Suck)
Thunderduck Cafe
Posted by: Ace at 08:28 PM | Comments (889) | Trackbacks (Suck)
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