Saturday Overnight Open Thread (11/2/24)

*****

The Saturday Night Joke

It is easier for men to be Happy...


Men Are Just Happier People! What do you expect from such simple creatures? Your last name stays put. The garage is all yours. Wedding plans take care of themselves. Chocolate is just another snack. You can never be pregnant. You can wear a white T-shirt to a water park. You can wear NO shirt to a water park.

Car mechanics tell you the truth. The world is your urinal. You never have to drive to another gas station restroom because this one is just too icky. You don't have to stop and think of which way to turn a nut on a bolt. Wrinkles add character. Wedding dress - $5,000. Tux rental - $100. People never stare at your chest when you're talking to them.

New shoes don't cut, blister, or mangle your feet. One mood all the time. Phone conversations are over in 30 seconds flat. You know stuff about tanks. A five-day vacation requires only one suitcase. You can open all your own jars.

You get extra credit for the slightest act of thoughtfulness. If someone forgets to invite you, he or she can still be your friend. Your underwear is $8.95 for a three-pack. Two pairs of shoes are more than enough. You almost never have strap problems in public. You are unable to see wrinkles in your clothes.

Everything on your face stays its original colour. The same hairstyle lasts for years, maybe decades. You only have to shave your face and neck. You can play with toys all your life. One wallet and one pair of shoes - one color for all seasons. You can wear shorts no matter how your legs look.

You can 'do' your nails with a pocket knife. You have freedom of choice concerning growing a mustache... You can do Christmas shopping for 25 relatives on December 24 in 25 minutes. No wonder men are happier!

Posted by: Misanthropic Humanitarian at 10:00 PM | Comments (815) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Saturday Night Movie Thread [moviegique]: The Bad and the Beautiful (Megalopolis, Joker 2 & more)

Just as I sometimes will avoid a movie that's too over-hyped, knowing that most movies can't live up to the buzz, I occasionally will see movies that everyone is dumping on, especially if there's some conflicting or interesting angle to the criticisms.

For Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis I saw one review that said only "Free popcorn refills" and another claiming that Coppola had reached Neil Breen levels. But our very own Eris said she kinda loved it, and I knew, at a minimum, Coppola would lard the movie up with cinematic references, which appeal to humble fans of cinema such as yours truly.

I then compounded my woes by going to see Joker 2—I'm not typing out that French crap—and what I can honestly say about both films that Pitch Meeting covered both very accurately. In-between, I saw the restoration of 2006's The Fall, which is a beautiful masterpiece and it got me to thinking about how the other two films failed on fundamentals without being beautiful enough to make their flaws overlookable.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 08:32 PM | Comments (323) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hobby Thread - November 2, 2024 [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.

We gave the Ace of Spades Wheel of Hobbies(TM) a spin and it landed on a theme of 3D printing for this week. Apparently the Wheel likes building things.

Are you a maker? What do you make? Fun? Functional? Fixes? How long have you done 3D printing? Tell us about your most functional project. Tell us about your least functional but most fun project.

Tell us how you got started and learned. Do you have an early success story? Do you have an early disaster story? Have you made something recently to repair something broken or improve something? Was it easier to make your own part than find and buy a part made commercially? Have you designed and built something bespoke that nobody else makes or sells? Is your 3D printer constantly working?

What equipment do you use, both hardware and software? What resources are helpful? Are you interested but paralyzed because there are SO MANY Youtube videos, websites and other resources? What questions do you have? What knowledge can the Horde help with?

Content below to get the conversation started, but looking for participation from our gray box friends. If meaningful to you, it will be meaningful to the Horde.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:30 PM | Comments (237) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Ace of Spades Pet Thread, November 2

* * *

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 03:24 PM | Comments (97) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, Nov. 2

Greetings, everyone! It rained a little this morning. It's been a while.

Something different in the photo above:

I was really not expecting the rose bush at my stepson's house in southeast Georgia (about 20 miles or so from Ft. Stewart) to have anything in bloom this week. I was even more surprised to see what had taken up residence:

Thanks for the posts, even though my thumbs are far from green, I enjoy the content.

tankdemon.

Do you see them?

Posted by: K.T. at 01:31 PM | Comments (43) | Trackbacks (Suck)

So many surprises so close to the election!

The Day Before Halloween

Something surprising happened to me on Wednesday, the day before Halloween.
The news cycle had just changed from hysterical declarations that "Trump hates Latinos, especially Puerto Ricans" because of a misbegotten joke by an insult comedian to "President Biden thinks Trump Supporters are garbage". That story still hasn't completely died. But on Wednesday, Biden's remarks were completely overshadowing the dramatic "closing argument" speech by Kamala Harris. Her message was mostly about how scary Donald Trump is. She seems to have adopted this theme as her final message. Other than that, the news cycles have been changing fast!

Posted by: K.T. at 11:11 AM | Comments (256) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Classical Saturday Morning Coffee Break & Prayer Revival

Posted by: Misanthropic Humanitarian at 08:30 AM | Comments (339) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 2 November 2024

Top Story

• Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are on track to spend a total of $200 billion on AI this year. (BNN Bloomberg)
  
  There are worse things they could be doing with their money, I suppose. De-orbiting the Moon, or promoting polonium as a pizza topping. Reintroducing rinderpest and smallpox.
  
  Okay, those aren't much worse, but they are worse.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM | Comments (208) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Día de los Muertos ONTs

Welcome to November! It's now officially Christmas season, are your decorations up yet?

Posted by: WeirdDave at 10:00 PM | Comments (585) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Ava-launch Cafe

The Rosette Nebula
Also called "the Skull Nebula"

Cute ground-nesting birds.

Symbiotic relationship.

Frolicking into the weekend.

Cuddle puddle.

Long thread claim to show the "Real size" of various big animals. I think in a bunch of cases, we're seeing some perspective shenanigans. But some of the pics and video seem legit. The wolf near the end of the video does look very big compared to the size of the highway lanes it's crossing.

This turtle is innocent! Innocent I say! (Though I should admit, he was caught listening to Kenny Loggins/Michael McDonald collaborations.)

Teaching a rescue seal pup that fish tastes good and you should eat it.

Seal joins the crew.

Bear family crossing the road.

Poseidon's boys.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 07:30 PM | Comments (436) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Bill Clinton, Campaigning for Kamala: Israel's Prime Minister Barak Offered Yasser Arafat and Hamas 96% of Gaza and 4% of Israel and They Turned It Down Because They Didn't Want a Homeland, They Just Wanted to Murder Jews

A very strong statement from Bill Clinton, and one to praise him for.

Probably not the statement that Kamala Harris was looking for, given that she wants to signal, without outright saying, that she supports Hamas' endless terror wars.

Open Source Intel
@Osint613

Bill Clinton On the Palestinians:

"And the only time Yasser Arafat didn't tell me the truth was when he promised me he was gonna accept the peace deal that we had worked out, which would have given the Palestinians a state on 96% of the West Bank and 4% of Israel, and they got to choose where the 4% of Israel was. So they would have the effect of the same land of all the West Bank. They would have a capital in East Jerusalem.

I can hardly talk about this.... And they would have equal access all day every day to the security towers that Israel maintained all through the West Bank up to the Golan Heights.

All this was offered, including, I will say it again, a capital in East Jerusalem and 2 of the 4 quadrants of the old city of Jerusalem, confirmed by the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, and his cabinet. And they said no.

And I think part of it is that Hamas did not care about a homeland for the Palestinians. They wanted to kill Israelis and make Israel uninhabitable.

Well, I got news for them, they were there first before there was their faith existed.

They were there. In the time of King David, in the southern most tribes, Hadjardia and Samaria."

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:46 PM | Comments (255) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Republicans: The Democrats Are So Insane Right Now That When We Tell People Their Agenda, They Don't Believe Us.
So We Have to Tone Down the Democrats' Real Agenda So People Believe a Censored Version of Their Agenda

Park MacDougald at Tablet.

The Democrats' Insanity Defense

Republican activists say they have to water down the reality of their opponents' agenda in focus groups. 'They just don't believe it's true. It can't be.'

I know someone like this. An older woman, and a kind of old school normie liberal Democrat.

CNN doesn't ever run stories about Tren de Aragua taking over apartments in Aurora, so when you tell her, she just says "Oh, more lies from Fox."

She, get this, does not believe the Democrats support gender transitions for children or even pronouns.

In the September debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump said something so ludicrous that many viewers must have dismissed it out of hand. "She did things that nobody would ever think of," Trump said, while rattling off a list of some of the vice president's most radical past positions. "Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison."

The idea that the vice president "wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison" seemed so patently absurd that The New Yorker's Susan Glasser cited it in a column posted the next morning as an example of Trump's lunacy: "What the hell was he talking about?" Glasser wrote of the trans operation lines. "No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris' point."

That reaction was understandable--the idea of the operations was, as Trump himself said, a "thing nobody would ever think of." The problem was that it is true. As CNN had reported that week, Harris, when running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, had written in an ACLU questionnaire that she supported publicly funded "gender-affirming care," including transition surgeries, for federal prison inmates and detained illegal immigrants. Follow-up reporting from The Washington Free Beacon revealed that while serving as California attorney general, Harris had in fact implemented a statewide policy of taxpayer funding for prisoners' sex changes, born out of a settlement in which she agreed to pay for the transition of a man convicted of kidnapping a father of three and then murdering him as he begged for his life. Harris later bragged, on camera, about this policy as evidence of her commitment to the progressive "movement"--in a clip that has since become a staple of Trump campaign ads.

The sequence of events neatly encapsulated a pattern that has played out countless times since Trump entered American political life. Trump says something seemingly insane, to many people's outrage and disbelief, only to have his supposed "lie" revealed to be wholly or at least significantly true. Often the specific truth revealed--that the outgoing Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team in order to gather information for what later became the Russiagate hoax, to cite another example--is in fact "crazier" than Trump's exaggerations or garbling of the details. The insanity of the policy becomes the front line of defense against potential blowback: Who would believe that anyone would actually propose or support something so obviously at odds with public opinion and basic common sense? Trump must be a raving nutjob, just like we told you he was.

The reason that this strategy has worked is because Democrats rely on all nonexplicitly right-wing media to adopt their framing of issues and cite the party's preferred experts, which they do. The party's influence over the country's communications apparatus has, for the past decade, emerged into something like a political superpower, allowing it to act outside the normal bounds of American politics without suffering from political blowback.

"All of it," said a Republican congressional staffer, "is insulated by their absolute confidence that they can just use their control over communications institutions to just say words, including change of language, right? Flip a switch and it's now gender affirming care. Flip a switch and it's now undocumented migrants, or undocumented Americans. Flip a switch and now you can change people's pronouns."

The result, for anyone skeptical of the Democratic Party yet bound to operate within the consensus reality of its discourse, is akin to living in a wilderness of mirrors. How to explain, for instance, that elected Democrats from the Biden White House on down support not only taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens, but policies that allow schools to "socially transition" children without informing their parents? How to explain, without sounding like a lunatic, that the newspapers and expert bodies that recommend life-altering surgeries for children, and defend them as "life-saving" or "medically necessary" care opposed only by cranks and Bible thumpers, either don't know what they're talking about or are lying to you for political reasons? That the claim that such surgeries were rarely if ever performed on children was also a lie? That when President Biden, the kindly old moderate, directed his Department of Health and Human Services to address the "barriers and exclusionary policies" keeping children from accessing "gender medicine," what he was describing was a policy that would see members of his own administration pressuring medical agencies to allow procedures such as breast and penis removal be performed on young children, despite the lack of any proof that these measures contribute to greater mental or physical health?

The same GOP staffer, who is currently working on a competitive congressional race, told me that one problem his campaign regularly faces is that aspects of Democratic governance are simply too insane for voters to find credible, even when they are documented as official U.S. government policy. "When you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don't believe it," he said. "They are critical of things like boys in girls' sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don't believe it's true. It can't be."

Another Republican operative made a related point on the failure of the party's attempt to message on trans issues in 2022, which was that the reality of the procedures was so gruesome that voters simply preferred not to think about it. "Phrases like 'genital mutilation' are disgusting and viscerally off-putting, even to voters who may be sympathetic to the Republicans' position but will just write you off as a freak for talking about it that way."

He then turns to foreign policy. People refuse to believe that Obama "pivoted to Iran" and cultivated the demonic terror state -- the biggest funder of terrorism, including against Americans, in the world -- as a bosom ally.

They can't believe it because it just sounds so insane.

It has to be another one of those Fox Lies -- doesn't it?

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:00 PM | Comments (192) | Trackbacks (Suck)

White House Orders Government Stenographers to Alter the Transcript of Biden's "Garbage" Comments, Turning the Historical Record Into a Democrat Lie

The Secret Apostrophe.

Late Tuesday, as Joe Biden's comment referring to Donald Trump's supporters as "garbage" created a firestorm, top communications aides inside the White House broke with protocol, amending the official transcript of his comment -- without waiting for sign-off from the stenography office.

The edit was a single apostrophe -- but one freighted with political and electoral implications.

...

Biden's statement and the firestorm since has threatened to distract from Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign ahead of Election Day. The call on which Biden made the remarks was held shortly before Harris' campaign speech just hundreds of yards away on the Ellipse making her closing argument for voters to reject Trump.

The edit to the official White House transcript underscores the lengths Biden administration officials went to limit the political damage of Biden's comments. The fallout of the president's remark continues to reverberate, adding even greater anxiety to Biden's final public appearances before the election, expected Friday and Saturday. In addition, Republicans on Capitol Hill are already asking questions about the transcript change, raising the possibility of an investigation.

...

The Associated Press first reported on the administration's altering of the original transcript on Thursday night, adding fuel to a controversy that Harris and the White House are eager to move past. Both Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, were quick on Wednesday morning to disavow any disparaging of people, intended or not, based on who they vote for or support.

That report referenced an email the director of the stenography office, Amy Sands, sent to LaBolt, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and other aides in the press and communications shop on Wednesday laying out what happened and why it was a breach of procedure.

Sands, according to two of the people familiar with the process, had sought out those colleagues in person on Wednesday morning and spoke to at least one of them directly before sending the email.

Sands, who has worked in the White House stenography office for more than a decade, declined to comment.

...

In her email, Sands did not weigh in on the accuracy of the press team's edit or indicate that she would or would not have approved the amended transcript. Her expressed concern was not having the chance to review the audio and make a determination herself.

Michael Shellenberger
@shellenberger

Biden didn't call Trump supporters "garbage," the media said. But he did. And now two officials and an internal email reveal that the White House press office altered the transcript after it "conferred with the president" in direct violation of the Presidential Records Act.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 05:04 PM | Comments (356) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Trump Makes Standard-Issue "Chickenhawk" Argument Against Liz Cheney, Saying She Blithely Sends Out 10,000 Men To Face Death But Won't Face the Fire Herself;
CNN and Jonah Goldberg Claim He's Calling for Her Execution by Firing Squad

Mollie
@MZHemingway

"He's saying quite explicitly and unambiguously that Liz Cheney should be shot, should be executed by firing squad." -- the absolutely broken and self-hating @JonahDispatch, lying BRAZENLY about what was said.

He's not "self-"hating, Mollie. That would imply he's a conservative.

He's not and never has been. He has always been a liberal who grifted the conservative establishment for millions, and that's an easy game, because the conservative establishment itself has always been liberal, except for the One Thing That Matters -- lowering taxes on the liberal billionaires who funded the conservative establishment.

His entire "conservative" life he was controlled opposition -- no, that still implies he opposed the left.

He was controlled opposition, against us.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:05 PM | Comments (358) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Idiot Accidental Billionaire Mark Cuban: The Women Supporting Trump Are Garbage, Too

Before getting to that: The Democrats' attempt to use hysteria to drive votes works. It's working right now.

Watch this hysteria-pushing ad.

Women, who favor Kamala Harris by something like 56-42 over Trump, are outvoting men by 10%.

Men favor Trump over Harris by a similar but greater spread, something like 58-40.

But who men "favor" counts for two things, Jack and Squat, and Jack left town.

Women are turning out to vote while men are saying manana, manana.

A lot of men out there seem to be doing the very unmanly thing of doing nothing and deciding they'll just do whatever the group decides they should do.

Justin Baragona
@justinbaragona

According to NBC News, nearly 60 million votes have already been cast nationally -- and women are outpacing men by 10 points.

A loss this election would be a disaster for the pro-life movment.

Pro-abortion women are voting in droves to make guaranteed abortion until the moment of crowning the law of the land, and they'll end the filibuster and pack the courts with new leftwing judges to do it. Kamala Harris wants to expand the Supreme Court to at least 12 justices, so she can nominate a bunch more leftwingers.

Are pro-life people showing up? If not, and if we lose this, then it's not going to take the GOP long to conclude that they have to drop the pro-life issue back to its former status of "something we insincerely talk about but never do anything about."

They'll have no choice. If abortion-crazed women are going to swamp the polls every two or four years and keep conservatives out of office, the party will have no choice but to all but stop talking about this issue. It's just a matter of math.

Pro-life people are probably never going to be a larger group than pro-abortion people, but they have to at least keep it close.

The pro-abortion zombies are swarming the polling places. Pro-lifers cannot let the narrative be set that the pro-life position is a political killer.

On to Mark Cuban:

If there is any merit to this lawsuit filed by the brother of one of Cuban's players on the Dallas Mavericks, I'm not sure how many women Cuban actually knows.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

But the world's dimmest billionaire announces that there are no "strong, intelligent" women around Trump.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:07 PM | Comments (395) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hugh Hewitt Quits the Washington Post On-Camera and Storms Off the Set Calling the Paper a "Unfair Election Ad"

Hugh Hewitt finally showed he's got a pair.

Definitely worth your watch. Gay black DEI propagandist Jonathan Capeheart and evil prog witch Ruth Marcus complain bitterly about Trump complaining about election irregularities -- without mentioning what Trump is complaining about.

Specifically, he was complaining about Democrat election officials sending people home on the last day of early in-person voting. The law says that if you're in line, the election site must stay open until you've voted. But the Democrat thugs broke the law, stopped the voting, and tried to keep Trump from picking up votes in Bucks County, PA.

The RNC -- not Trump -- went to court over this. The court agreed the election officials had broke the law, and ordered them to reopen in-person voting for a couple of more days to accomodate the people they had denied the right to vote to.

None of that is mentioned by Capeheart and Marcus. Which prompted Hugh Hewitt to justifiably rage-quit.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:08 PM | Comments (337) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Only 12,000 Jobs Were Created In the Nation in October in Biden's Miracle Economy

Not 112,000. 113,000 was the expectation.

No, just 12,000.

Collin Rugg
@CollinRugg

JUST IN: Dismal jobs report released showing the U.S. added just 12,000 jobs in October, falling well short of economist estimates of 110,000.

46,000 manufacturing jobs were reportedly lost.

October was the worst month of job growth in nearly four years.

"The government revised August and September nonfarm payroll estimates down by 112,000, indicating weaker labor market expansion at the end of summer than previously reported," Forbes reports.

A growing economy creates 300,000 new jobs per month.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 01:08 PM | Comments (389) | Trackbacks (Suck)

JD Vance on Rogan

Here's the full interview.

Collin Rugg
@CollinRugg

NEW: JD Vance & Joe Rogan explain how men who are healthier and have higher testosterone levels tend to be conservative.

The men also suspected that META CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now a Trump supporter.

Rogan: "There are very few things that will turn you into a conservative more than martial arts training."

Vance: "Have you seen all these studies that basically connect testosterone levels in young men with conservative politics?"

"Maybe that's why the Democrats want us all to be, you know, poor health and overweight is because, because that means that we're gonna be more liberal."

"If you make people less healthy, they apparently become more politically liberal. That's an interesting observation."

"My secret theory is that Zuck is now a Trump supporter, but he can't say that publicly of course, but hopefully he is."

JD Vance suggests that Democrats want men to be weak and fat because then they'll have lower testosterone and be more liberal.

JD Vance: CNN mentioned the comedian's Puerto Rico joke 143 times in 48 hours. He doesn't think they've covered the actual sitting president calling half of the country "garbage" that many times.

Rogan: the only time we don't get to read a mass shooter's manifesto is when they're trans.

They discuss being bad fathers.

Some excerpts below. First, Kamala Harris lies like a toddler does:

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 12:06 PM | Comments (315) | Trackbacks (Suck)

THE MORNING RANT: Ford to Suspend Production of its Slow-Selling F150 Conflagration Lightning Electric Pickup Truck

The rolling (and occasionally exploding) catastrophe of Ford Motor Company’s regrettable decision to bet big on electric vehicles keeps getting worse. While headlines like those below about Ford suspending production of its awful electric pickup truck give me some schadenfreude, I don’t wish for Ford to fail. I actually wish for the company to be liberated from its enviro-globalist destructor, Jim Farley (CEO), and to re-focus on once again making great American, gas-powered vehicles.

Although Bloomberg is behind a paywall, the simple beauty of the headline at this link brings me a smile: “Ford to Halt F-150 Lightning Production as EV Demand Wanes” [Bloomberg – 10/31/2024]

Here is a CNBC story that is not behind a paywall:

“Ford to halt production of electric F-150 Lightning next month until January” [CNBC – 10/31/2024]

Ford Motor plans to halt production of its all-electric F-150 Lightning from mid-November until early next year to address bloated inventories and narrow losses on the pickup trucks.

“We continue to adjust production for an optimal mix of sales growth and profitability,” Ford said in an emailed statement.

I know exactly how Ford can align production of its E-dsel pickup truck with consumer demand in a way to maximize profitability. Real simple – it just needs to adjust production of the F150 Conflagration Lightning down to zero units, stopping the hemorrhaging, and eliminating the need for costly incentives to get dealers and consumers to take delivery of the unwanted e-pickup.

Ford on Monday said its Model-e EV operations are expected to lose about $5 billion this year.

The production slowdown represents a fall from grace for the F-150 Lightning. Ford executives such as CEO Jim Farley once touted the vehicle as having the same importance as the Model T, but the company has moved to slashing planned output of the pickup in half to begin this year.

Ford’s EV losses are not sustainable. I’ll have plenty more to say about its e-problems, but I did want to get a quick post up about this breaking news, which is another important milestone in the denouement of the corporate EV social contagion.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

Posted by: Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM | Comments (399) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Mid-Morning Art Thread

Diana and Actaeon (Diana Surprised in Her Bath)
Camille Corot

Posted by: CBD at 09:30 AM | Comments (407) | Trackbacks (Suck)