Guest Music Thread [Joe Mannix]

One thing that appears to be on the wane is the specialty music label/record company. There have always been the majors like Capitol Records and the like, of course, but the funky or specialized little labels were fun for two reasons: once you found one, you could assume that something from some other band on that label was probably worth checking out, and the demo discs/tapes from those labels were usually a killer value with decent stuff on them.

Two that spring immediately to mind are Vegas Records and 4AD. Vegas Records was (is? - I can't quite tell) a California-based label specializing in ska and punk. 4AD is still around. It's a British label that used to specialize in alt rock, dream pop, shoegaze and various slightly off-center music genres.

In some ways, this is to be expected. It's easier than ever to be an independent thanks to cheaper good equipment, computers, services like Bandcamp and access to streaming platforms and that's probably a good thing. I do still like - at least nostalgically, anyway - discovering a label that was worth going back to. Do any labels stand out in your collections or preferences?

NOTE: As always, the intro is just a conversation starter if needed. You're welcome to go off-topic, just please keep it to the world of music!

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Posted by: Joe Mannix at 07:30 PM | Comments (261) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hobby Thread - June 22, 2024 [TRex]

Welcome hobbyists! Do not adjust your interweb. This thread is going to be out of this world. A spin of the Ace of Spades "wheel of hobbies" has come up with astronomy.

TRex has always been intrigued by the night sky. What is out there? What can you see? Planets and moons, meteors, comets, and galaxies are tantalizingly close but ever so far away. The sceince is compelling, the artistry is dramatic, and the vast unknown challenges everything we think we know about space and time.

Are you intrigued by astronomy? Do you gaze upward to the heavens? Are planetariums playgrounds for you? Do you have your own telescope equipment? Do you shoot photos of the moon, star trails or the Milky Way? Have you seen the northern lights?

Do you track satellites or the space station?

Do you have a cool telescope? Have you poured a ridiculous amount of money into fancy glass or are you finding amazing things with low-cost simple solutions? Are you computerized? How did you get started? Did someone show you Saturn's rings in a telescope?

While the constellations are named and have their own lore, let's keep the theme to astronomy rather than astrology. Maybe another time...

As usual, keep this thread limited to hobbies. Politics and current events can wait for other threads.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:30 PM | Comments (197) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Ace of Spades Pet Thread, June 22

* * *

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 03:25 PM | Comments (107) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, June 22

Hi, everybody! The heatwave predicted for yesterday is going to hit today, so if our electricity browns out, don't be surprised. Too hot here for the flower above, but some of our weeds are doing quite well. How are things going where you are?

Hi

I had to replace an azalea that no matter what I tried was sickly and doomed so decided to just replace it. I have four large planters on my terrace but they are still containers so limited root area. Because my daylily does so well, decided to go with this Oriental Lily. I noticed that the very end of the stamen has a dark spot at the end. When I checked the day lily, same thing. Do you think this is to mimic something?

Sharon(willow's apprentice)

What does The Horde think about possible mimicry and the dark spot at the end of the stamen?

Posted by: K.T. at 01:20 PM | Comments (90) | Trackbacks (Suck)

When you're a leftist, how do you choose?

How do you know when quiet neighborhoods are not a sign of white supremacy?

Somehow, Ace consistently finds a story on Fridays about which there is more. This week, in his The Wages of Woke post, there's a discussion of a piece in The Atlantic . .

which instructs us that wanting your neighborhood to be peaceful and quiet -- so that people can sleep at night and children can be well-rested for school and adults refreshed for productive work -- is white supremacy.

But what happened when the author of that piece finished the degree for which she apparently didn't need to study and became an adult? David Thompson provides some insight in: Don't Oppress My People With Your Expectations Of Politeness And Basic Consideration

Posted by: K.T. at 11:08 AM | Comments (275) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Classical Saturday Morning Coffee Break & Prayer Revival

*****

Happy Summer and all that BS Morons. Before we enter the Prayer Revival there are just a few housekeeping matters to take care of. (Rulz for those of you in Potosi, WI)

1. This is an open thread, please feel free to lurk, opine and/or bloviate.
2. Be nice to one another. It's troll month somewhere.
3. No running with sharp objects. No is there any glassware near the Barel.
4. Have a nice weekend.

Posted by: Misanthropic Humanitarian at 08:10 AM | Comments (309) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 22 June 2024

Top Story

• NASA has adjusted the scheduled return date of Boeing's Starliner, currently docked with the ISS, from June 26 to don't call us, we'll call you. (Ars Technica)
  
  In fact, the originally scheduled return was the 14th of June, which is in, uh, a week ago. NASA planners have repeatedly delayed the return:

  "We are letting the data drive our decision making relative to managing the small helium system leaks and thruster performance we observed during rendezvous and docking and seeing how soon Elon can get a Crew Dragon up there."

  It is better than just saying YOLO and losing another two astronauts.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM | Comments (248) | Trackbacks (Suck)

When Someone Asks You If You Are An ONT, You Say YES!

Friday night! Time to kick back with this week's crop of memes and enjoy some cheese on raw meat.

LoOk, PoLiTiCiAnS ArE jUsT lIkE uS.

Posted by: WeirdDave at 10:00 PM | Comments (381) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Homer's Dream Cafe

From this account,
which shows how the photo was staged

Chopper Baby: The Baby That Solves Crimes.

This is some quality skimming.

Guy had to "feed peas to the marmosets," if you follow me.

I've linked this before but this video of a beluga whale playing fetch is great.

Either the Northern Lights or "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

A little sea-side property.

Climbing the Hilary Step on Everest.

Twin Volcanic Peaks.

Re-post: Riding a horse through a sea cave. It's a metaphor for David French's marriage.

Is there such a thing as "too many huskies"? The answer is of course "no." But this is close.

Cutest little adopted beaver. Even cuter than Justin Beaver.

Very high wingsuit flight.

Another surfin' dog.

From last year: Mark Rober's backyard Squirrel Olympics.

Pretty wave.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 07:30 PM | Comments (308) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Wages of Woke

A couple years back, a lunatic began attempting to pull open the doors of an airplane in flight. Which would have killed everyone aboard.

Fortunately it takes an enormous amount of strength to open those doors due to pressure differentials. And the lock, of course.

But she tried. Oh did she try.

The aircrew eventually subdued her and duct-taped her into her chair.

They duct-taped her mouth, too.

She has the expected SJW Mental-Illness Danger Hair, of course.

Now the FAA has hit her with a fine for $80,000+.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is suing an apparently unhinged American Airlines passenger who created a chaotic scene while attempting to open the front cabin door mid-flight and forcing flight attendants to duct tape her to a seat.

Heather Wells of San Antonio, 34, bit, kicked and spat at staff and fellow passengers about an hour into a July 6, 2021, flight from Dallas to Charlotte, North Carolina. The plane had been delayed about three hours before it finally departed at midnight, Fox News Digital previously reported.

In viral footage of the incident posted by TikTok user @lol.ariee, the gray-haired woman could be heard screaming "You! You! You!" as passengers exited American Airlines Flight 1774 and flight attendants calmly nodded their goodbyes.

In 2022, the FAA fined Wells a record $81,950 in civil penalties, Business Insider reported. Now, U.S. Attorney Jaime Esparza has filed a lawsuit on the FAA's behalf in San Antonio seeking to collect that money, per the San Antonio Express.

According to the lawsuit filed on June 6, Wells "wanted out" after drinking a neat Jack Daniel's, running to the front of the plane and grabbing the handle of the front cabin door.

She began "talking incoherently with passengers, before crawling back toward the main cabin," and threatened an intervening flight attendant. Wells went for the front door again while yelling profanities before two more stewards restrained her.

Before she was restrained using flex cuffs, per the lawsuit reviewed by the San Antonio Express, Wells managed to strike one attendant in the head several times.

...

Flight attendants gagged Wells in an attempt to stop her screaming outbursts. Even while bound and gagged, Wells continued to "kick and spit and attempted to bite and head-butt a flight attendant and passengers," the lawsuit reads.

Unbelievably, it appears that no actual criminal charges have been filed against her.

I guess some people who belong to social groups that support the Regime are just above the law.

Below: This is your brain on leftwing grievance politics with maybe some Gender Ideology peppered in for flavor.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:15 PM | Comments (245) | Trackbacks (Suck)

So Much "Pride" We're All Going to Throw Up

New book drops!

Just kidding, that's fake.

Fake but accurate.

Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker, is being sued yet again, this time over his refusal to make a "transgender" cake, whatever that is.

Can the Supreme Court finally put an end to this decade-long persecution by mentally-ill perverts?

The Colorado Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday in a lawsuit against a Christian baker who refused to make a cake celebrating a gender transition, one of three such cases from the state that have pitted LGBTQ+ civil rights against First Amendment rights.

Two cases have centered on baker Jack Phillips, who in 2012 refused to bake a cake for a gay couple's wedding. Phillips partially prevailed before the U.S. Supreme Court in that case in 2018.

Phillips was later sued by Autumn Scardina, a transgender woman, after Phillips and his suburban Denver bakery refused to make a pink cake with blue frosting for her birthday that also celebrated her gender transition.

Scardina, an attorney, said [he] brought the lawsuit to "challenge the veracity" of Phillips' statements that he would serve LGBTQ+ customers.

That doesn't even make sense. He already won the right to refuse to make cakes with messages he didn't agree with. So this aggressive toxic male demanded he make a "trans birthday cake," supposedly to see if he'd really "serve LGBTQ customers."

Well, then you should have ordered a normal cake. That would have tested him.

This just tests whether or not he still has the right, which he won at no small cost in terms of money and anguish, to refuse to make cakes with messages that go against his religion.

Why is this even being allowed?

A court can declare a serial litigant to be "vexatious" and require him to get all lawsuits he wants to file approved by a judge before filing them. Obviously, the vicious Colorado court system refuses to do this for Jack Phillips and his mentally-ill persecutor.

ABC "News:" Bud Light is still being "hammered" by boycott as workers and bottlers complain about the foreign company's management.

Bud Light boycott still hammers local distributors 1 year later: 'Very upsetting'

"Sales cratered and sat there," an industry analyst said.

When conservative activists set aflame boxes of Bud Light and urged a boycott in response to an endorsement from a trans influencer last spring, they sent sales of the beer plummeting in a rare success in the long history of consumer movements.

Even more improbably, the backlash continues to hammer Bud Light and strain independent local wholesalers more than a year later, according to third-party sales data shared with ABC News as well as interviews with six Anheuser-Busch wholesalers.

Most of the wholesalers, small- and medium-sized businesses that draw a significant portion of their revenue from Bud Light, said they remain weakened by the decline in sales and uncertain about when, if ever, the brand will fully recover.

The owner of an Anheuser-Busch wholesaler in the Northeast, whose child is trans, told ABC News they have taken a 30% pay cut to make up for the losses and are considering retirement.

"It was really hurtful personally," the owner said. "I'm trying to understand what my kid is going through and then this happens."

...

Another executive at a wholesaler in the Mid-Atlantic said they have spent sleepless nights devising ways to shed costs without laying off employees; and a top official at a distributor in the Southeast said they expect sales of Bud Light will remain down for at least two more years.

...

"Once a consumer drops off a product -- where there is a readily available and similarly priced substitute -- a habit has formed and it's difficult to shake that habit," the executive said. "We have to give them a reason to come back."

...

"Given the history of boycotts and its history of ineffectiveness, it is really surprising that this one has had the staying power that it has," Schweitzer told ABC News.

"In this moment, we're so politicized," Schweitzer added. "The weather is political, the employment rate is political and now beer is political."

Who made these things political?

BTW, ABC "News" lied in that story to, get this, protect Dylan Mulvaney. It claimed that Dylan Mulvaney showed off his bespoke Bud Light can, featuring his rat-like male face, to celebrate his "365 Days of Womanhood."

Of course, the little creep was not claiming to celebrate 365 Days of Womanhood; this adult man was claiming to celebrate 365 Days of Girlhood.

But the public might find that a little creepy, so ABC "News" rewrote the historical record to make it seem a little less weird.

The largest pilot's union has its eyes on the important problems facing aviation.

No, not airplanes dropping out of the skies or pilots being hired based on (checks notes) melanin count and sex organs.

The Air Line Pilots Association doesn't rock with minor concerns like that.

The world's largest airline pilot union, Air Line Pilots Association, Int'l (ALPA), has urged the aviation community to stop using terms considered offensive to women and LGBTQ individuals, such as "cockpit."

Representing over 70,000 pilots globally, ALPA collaborates with a United Nations agency on its policies. Their 2021 diversity, equity, and inclusion language guide lists several terms and phrases to avoid, particularly "masculine generalizations," to promote inclusion and equity.

The guide emphasizes that "inclusive language in communications is essential to our union's solidarity and collective strength and is an important factor in maintaining flight safety."

The guide suggests replacing "cockpit" with "flight deck," citing that the former term has been used derogatorily to exclude women. It also advises against using terms like "manpower," recommending "people/human power" instead, and discourages addressing groups as "guys" due to its non-inclusive nature.

ALPA also recommends avoiding "mother/father" and "husband/wife" to respect diverse family structures and same-sex couples.

Linguist Ben Zimmer noted in a Wall Street Journal article that "cockpit" originated from 16th-century cockfighting, evolving to describe tense environments and later the area on British warships for treating the wounded.

Former FAA safety team representative Kyle Bailey told Fox News Digital that diversity has little to do with safe travel, emphasizing that flight experience and training are paramount. He noted that piloting remains predominantly male, with few young girls aspiring to be pilots.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 05:00 PM | Comments (296) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Estimate: Only 50 of Hamas' 116 Hostages Haven't Been Murdered Yet

The US estimates that Hamas has murdered all but 50 of the hostages they took on October 7th.

US officials believe that as few as 50 of the 116 hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip are still alive, according to a new report.

The assessment, based in part on Israeli intelligence, indicated that 66 of the remaining hostages are now dead, mediators in the hostage talks and a US official told the Wall Street Journal.

Israel previously estimated that 41 remaining hostages were no longer alive, while Hamas has insisted that it does not know how many hostages are alive or dead.

A "peace activist" taken hostage by Hamas and then released says she's not in favor of "peace" any longer.

An Israeli peace activist who was kidnapped and held hostage for 53 days in Gaza said the horrifying experience shattered her longstanding belief that there could be peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

"I don't believe in peace, I don't, sorry. I changed my mind," Ada Sagi, who was captured by Hamas on Oct. 7, at the start of the Israel-Hamas war, told the BBC.

For decades, Sagi, 75, lived in the Nir Oz kibbutz near the Israel-Gaza border and taught Israelis Arabic so that they could speak to their neighbors.

Now, she's urging the Israeli government to agree to a ceasefire and release the other 116 hostages who remain captive by Hamas.

I know that seems to be a contradiction, but she wants the ceasefire just to get the other 116 hostages freed.

Of course, we now estimate that 66 of them have been murdered already.

"For many years, I believed in peace. It's the reason why I started to teach Arabic at school. Maybe it will bring peace between the Arab people in Israel and the Jewish people," she recalled thinking. "But from year to year, I understand Hamas don't want it."

Sagi, who turned 75 while in captivity, was among 105 hostages released in November in exchange for a week-long ceasefire and the release of some 240 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

Ugh. And so the terrorists and kidnappers are right back in action.

I hope Israel killed a lot of them in action.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:00 PM | Comments (195) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Adam Kinzinger Now Pushing the "Cheap Fakes" Lie on Jim Acosta

The wormy NeverTrumper is now trying to make it as a Plus-Sized Influencer.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:00 PM | Comments (260) | Trackbacks (Suck)

In the UK, Reform Vaults Ahead of the Collapsing Tories

The "Conservatives" in the UK enjoyed the same advantage that the pseud-right GOPe enjoys in the US: People hate the party, but won't split from it, because they feel that voting for a minor party would be throwing their vote away.

But now it appears that right-leaning voters are realizing something: The "Conservatives" themselves are now a minor party. Therefore, voting for them is throwing away a vote, and they're also awful on top of that.

So why not vote for the slightly less minor party, Reform?

Matt Goodwin
@GoodwinMJ

NEW BOMBSHELL poll

Labour 35%
Reform 24%
Conservatives 15%
Liberal Democrats 12%
Greens 8%
SNP 3%

PeoplePolling/GBN Jun 18th
Sample: 1,228 British adults

The right will lose the battle, but if they destroy the fake "Conservative" Party that acts as the handmaiden of race-based Marxism, they might wind up winning the war.

Later.

Sometimes, things happen that completely knock you sideways. And today is one such moment. My firm People Polling, on behalf of its client GB News, surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,228 British adults. We asked them how they plan to vote at the UK general election on July 4.

Here are our numbers:

Labour 35%

Reform 24%

Conservatives 15%

Liberal Democrats 12%

Greens 8%

SNP 3%

That's right. Nigel Farage and Reform are on 24%, in second place, and some 9-points clear of Rishi Sunak and the Tories.

Were the above numbers to appear at the general election, in only fifteen days time, then the result would be, well, seismic in more ways than one.

Keir Starmer and the Labour Party would win the election comfortably, with a Labour majority of around 240 seats.

The Tories would crash and burn, falling to only around 45 seats. The Lib Dems would finish with more seats than the Tories, on around 64. Nigel Farage and Reform would not be far behind, on around 50. And the Greens would win two.

Other polls don't yet show Reform pulling ahead of the "Conservatives:"

Furthermore, this evening several MRP polls are likewise pointing to a large Labour majority and putting the Tories on only around 50-108 seats.

One, by YouGov, puts Reform on 15% of the vote and gives Farage & Co. five seats.

But this pollster points out they were the first to detect the collapse of the "Conservatives," which everyone else now confirms:

Matt Goodwin
@GoodwinMJ

Do read the Substack. I've been as open & transparent as poss. We were widely criticised by established pollsters months ago for showing a Tory collapse. We were ahead of the curve. Now we are showing a big Reform surge. Who knows, maybe we're ahead of the curve now

If more polls come out confirming this result, expect most right-leaning voters to dump the sure losers of the "Conservative" Party and vote instead for a better party with a more realistic chance of success.

And if that does happen, then maybe American conservatives will take heart and find the courage to do likewise.

Or maybe the GOP will have the smarts and wisdom to see this outcome coming, and change directions before it's too late.

LOL, just kidding. The GOP will never, ever do that, and never, ever see an obvious disaster coming before it has already befallen them.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:00 PM | Comments (301) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Biden's Now-Disbanded "Homeland Intelligence Experts Group" Plotted to Cultivate a Network of Spies Among Government School Teachers Who Would Inform on Parents and Children Who Resisted Their Trans and DEI Agendas

Dark thoughts.

They weren't just hoping to recruit spies among teachers. They hoped to also recruit AWFL mothers to inform on their family members.

Miranda Divine:

The Biden administration's since-disbanded "Homeland Intelligence Experts Group" planned an insidious influence operation to persuade mothers and teachers to inform on dissident parents and students suspected of "domestic extremism," internal documents obtained by The Post show.

The panel, created in September of last year to ostensibly "provide advice and perspectives on intelligence and national security efforts," included Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan and ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom flaunted their intelligence credentials on the eve of the 2020 election to falsely claim The Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation.

But conservative non-profit America First Legal (AFL) alleged in a November 2023 lawsuit that the group was stacked with Democrat partisans and violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act because of its "lack of balance, the Biden Administration's inappropriate influence over it, and its lack of public notice and participation."

DHS agreed to disband the group and to provide AFL with its internal records as part of an out-of-court settlement in May.

Now, the records have been obtained and provide a chilling insight into the ambitions of this shadowy organization.

In notes from a September 2023 meeting, the Brennan-Clapper group discussed ways for DHS to increase efforts to collect intelligence on Americans across the country, and "get into local communities in a non-threatening way."

Members noted that "Americans have an ambivalent feeling of telling on each other," citing the failure of the post-9/11 "See Something, Say Something" campaign.

The problem, one attendee summarized, was: "How do people safely report a concern about their neighbors?"

One solution proposed at the meeting was to reclassify political dissent as a "public health" crisis to encourage Americans to report family members or neighbors to the federal government if they displayed "concerning" behavior.

"To get a mother or teacher to come forward, it needs to be a public health catcher's mitt," one participant was quoted as saying.

If DHS could not convince mothers and teachers to become informants, one member of the group suggested, the feds should turn to corporate America as a resource of intelligence on their employees.

"There is an industry ecosystem, companies are internally collecting open sources," this person mused. "Are you able to engage and use those products?"

...

The plans have strong echoes of East Germany's secret police agency, the Stasi, which relied on a network of unofficial informants to report friends, family, and neighbors as potential dissidents to the socialist regime between 1950 and 1990.

You say you want to recruit spies and agents of influence in corporations, ay?

How about professional associations which professionals are forced to join just to practice their trade?

Does that grab you, Communist John Brennan?

The Connecticut Bar Association (CBA) issued a warning Friday to public officials who speak out against former President Donald Trump's prosecution.

During his Manhattan trial, Trump often read aloud remarks against his prosecution made by lawyers and media pundits outside the courtroom in avoidance of violating his gag order. Leadership from the CBA railed against "unsubstantiated and reckless" defenses of Trump by lawyers, saying in the statement that "such statements can promote acts of violence against those serving the public as employees of the judicial branch."

"Words matter. Reckless words attacking the integrity of our judicial system matter even more," the statement reads. "In the wake of the recent trial and conviction of former President Donald Trump, public officials have issued statements claiming that the trial was a 'sham,' a 'hoax,' and 'rigged'; our justice system is 'corrupt and rigged'; the judge was 'corrupt' and 'highly unethical'; and, that the jury was 'partisan' and 'precooked.' Others claimed the trial was 'America's first communist show trial'--a reference to historic purges of high-ranking communist officials that were used to eliminate political threats."

The CBA leadership acknowledged that "free speech includes criticism." The statement, however, claimed that "headlines' grabbing, baseless allegations" made by public officials against Trump's prosecution "have no place in the public discourse."

It's not all bad news. The nation's worst censorship group, funded by US taxpayers without their consent or knowledge by the corrupt State Department and "intelligence" service, claims it is out of the "election integrity" business now that exposure has dried up their illegal government funding.

Over the last 18 months, Public has extensively documented the mass censorship effort led by the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) for the United States government. Accounts vary, but either the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asked SIO to lead the effort or SIO's ostensible leader, Alex Stamos, proposed the idea.

The brains of the SIO operation was Renée DiResta, an ostensibly "former" CIA employee. Senate Democrats, the New York Times, and other news media close to the Intelligence Community (IC) heavily promoted DiResta starting in 2018, when she spread disinformation exaggerating the influence of Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. In 2020 and 2021, DiResta and SIO led a DHS effort that successfully pressured social media platforms to censor disfavored views of Covid and interfere in the 2020 elections.

Now, in a major victory for free speech advocates, SIO has decided not to renew its contracts with DiResta and Stamos, who have both left the organization. A blog called "Platformer," which is sympathetic to SIO's censorship efforts, reported yesterday that "the lab will not conduct research into the 2024 election or other elections in the future."

Yes I don't believe them, but at least this CIA front group will have to be more careful and more stealthy about its taxpayer-funded election rigging operations.

The dismissal of DiResta and Stamos is unlikely to be sufficient to stop them from continuing their censorship advocacy, as DiResta's book shows. DiResta and Stamos are two of the top censorship visionaries in the United States and may find resources to continue their lobbying in some other institution. DiResta continues to enjoy fawning coverage from partisan news outlets, such as The Atlantic, which demand ever-more censorship for ideological and financial reasons. And the Supreme Court is likely to allow the kind of third-party censorship pioneered by DiResta and Stamos in a critical free speech case, Murthy v. Missouri.

But Stanford's repudiation of DiResta and Stamos suggests that the university's leadership realizes the reputational damage that DiResta and Stamos caused the institution. Stanford has distanced itself from the two for reasons that had nothing to do with money. Indeed, the two showed themselves adept at raising money. SIO raised $5 million from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, "which allowed Stamos and DiResta to recruit nearly a dozen staff members," notes Platformer. "Eventually, groups like the William D. Flora Hewlett Foundation and the National Science Foundation added their support."

And SIO was the lead group of the four groups in total that advocated censorship on behalf of DHS in 2020 and 2021. "By 2022," notes Platformer, "SIO had become the most visible research institute" engaged in censorship advocacy in the US. "Its staff members published a combined 10 journal articles and 22 op-eds. According to a 2022 annual report, SIO was cited in the media 5,400 times -- a staggering number for a new and relatively small team."

In 2021, DiResta advocated for creating a government censorship center, which she euphemistically described a "Center of Excellence," within the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security acted on DiResta's proposal to create a censorship center, calling it "Disinformation Governance Board," which the agency announced publicly in April 2022.

An intern at the Standford Information Observatory -- sounds so much more scienc-y than "Depraved CIA-Funded Psyops Functionaries" -- writes of her experience there.

My First Job, at the Stanford Internet Observatory

The research center, which is shutting its doors, was supposed to tackle "misinformation." Instead, they hired a bunch of interns to flag social media posts.

...

Like a zillion other bright-eyed Stanford undergrads, I was drawn to work at a place that promised to "learn about the abuse of the internet in real time, to develop a novel curriculum on trust and safety that is a first in computer science, and to translate our research discoveries into training and policy innovations for the public good." To me, that meant ending internet abuse like the glamorization of anorexia on social media or financial scams that steal billions every year. But mostly I worked on the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which SIO ran during the 2020 and 2022 elections. The purpose of that project was to identify so-called "fake news" spreading on social media.

In actuality, SIO hired a load of interns to scan social media for posts deemed to be mis- and disinformation. It turns out that the posts we students flagged were often sent along to moderators at Twitter (now X), Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, which took them down in order to quash dissenting viewpoints--viewpoints that sometimes ended up being right, as in the case of Covid likely being the result of a lab leak, or Hunter Biden's hard drive being his actual hard drive--not Russian disinformation.

Note the SIO is not closing down. They just claim they're ending their election-rigging efforts.

But those efforts will be taken up by the next "Government-Private Partnership But It's Totally a Third-Party Effort for Legal Purposes" censorship organization Renee DiResta starts up.

By the way, the "former" CIA agent who had been in charge of the SIO is Renee DiResta, and she just released a book about her fight against the "Invisible Rulers" who control us.

Of course, Renee DiResta has rigged elections from the shadows for years, all the while being paid by the taxpayers against their will, so she of course is one of the actual "Invisible Rulers" she claims to oppose.

Although Amazon is deleting negative comments and throttling negative reviews, you can give a boost to one serious negative review by reading it and honestly marking it as "helpful" in your book-buying decision.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 01:00 PM | Comments (173) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Woke Coup at the Washington Post Works; Weak, Cowardly Billionaire Jeff Bezos Bends the Knee to Woke Lunatics and Fires the Formerly-Incoming (White Male) Editor in Chief

Happy Friteenth, everybody. On this special day, we celebrate half-price Appeteasers at TGIF's!

This is wonderful news.

The media was already filled with woke progressives but, starting in 2016 and then accelerating after the Summer of George, they hired only minority feminist ultra-progressives. If you didn't have custom pronouns, luridly neon Danger Hair, and more piercings than Quint's abdomen,* you could no longer work in the (giggle) "prestige" media.

The New York Times wokies demanded multiple scalps of White Men (spit) or non-conforming Jews in editorial positions. They got the scalps.

Now the wokies at the even-more subverted Washington Post have gotten the firing they were demanding. The Washington Post itself ran a hit-piece on the incoming White Man! (spit) editor, a story approved by the incompetent woke (but female) current Executive Editor that the new hire was set to replace.

They ran this hit-piece while also staging a rebellion within the paper.

So the craven accidental billionaire Jeff Bezos submitted.

As I said, he's a woke coward himself who craves the approval of the leftwing media. It's astonishing that he's not a GOP politician, really.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 12:00 PM | Comments (353) | Trackbacks (Suck)

THE MORNING RANT: Blue Oval Blues – The Ford EV Debacle Keeps Worsening

Ford’s electric vehicle nightmare is unrelenting, and although it has allegedly backed off of its most aggressive EV timelines, the misfires of Ford’s “Model e” program continue to cause 10-figure losses, dealer resistance, and a multi-billion dollar construction project that is likely to never manufacture a single EV.

In 2021, the gullible Republican-controlled legislature in Tennessee, along with the gullible Republican governor, threw about one billion taxpayer dollars from its Rainy Day Fund at Ford to manufacture a massive new plant outside of Memphis. Known as Blue Oval City, the total cost of the project was estimated at close to $6 billion. The state also helped out by condemning land and building roads. The first electric pickup trucks were supposed to roll off the line in 2025, but just a few months ago Ford announced that production was being pushed back until 2026. The delay is not related to construction issues. It’s because consumers have emphatically rejected Ford’s flagship EV, the F150 Conflagration Lightning. There is no demand for an electric pickup, because it cannot do what consumers need pickups to do.

Not only does Ford not need the EV capacity that the massive new Tennessee plant was going to provide, it pretty much doesn’t need any EV capacity at all. Ford is also postponing EV production plans at other plants.

“Ford delays next-gen EV offerings as it pushes further into hybrids” [Yahoo – 4/04/2024]

Ford said today it is pushing back EV production at its massive Blue Oval City EV campus in Tennessee to 2026 from its initial 2025 start date.

Ford also revealed it is “retiming” the launch of upcoming EVs at its plant in Oakville, Ontario, where it plans to build next-generation three-row EVs, most likely a full-size SUV. The company is aiming to launch those vehicles in 2027, pushing back the original 2025 timeline.

I have been writing about the need for the elected Tennessee officials who voted for this boondoggle to be held accountable, including this piece at The Pipeline, “EV Accountability Is Coming.” With the writing on the wall regarding Blue Oval City, Tennessee officials are finally starting to prepare for the uncomfortable discussion about what happens if/when Ford finally pulls the plug on the West Tennessee plant.

“Dimming electric vehicle market may delay start of full production at Ford’s new West TN plant” [Tennessee Lookout – 6/13/2024]

The state senator in whose district the Ford plant is located is still hopeful…

State Sen. Page Walley, a Savannah Republican, told the Lookout his understanding is that full production of the truck at the BlueOval City campus in Stanton was pushed back earlier this year by nine months from its initially scheduled full production start date. Based on “what’s happening, with (Ford’s) read on the economy,” the company might need “a little bit longer runway” before full production takes off, Walley said.

But with the absence of a market for the unwanted electric pickup that Ford intended to build, the senator is also already hedging his language and test-driving his CYA language for the potential taxpayer backlash:

Walley said, however, he isn’t concerned about the state losing money amid Ford’s slowdown because of a “clawback” provision that would enable Tennessee to reclaim funds if the automaker fails to follow through on its investment and hiring promise. “That’s kind of our security in this,” Walley said.

What if Ford’s failure goes beyond failing to follow through on this investment? The ongoing $5 billion annual losses Ford is booking on its Model e-dsel misadventure, plus the inevitable write off for Blue Oval City, will take a huge toll on its Balance Sheet. Will there be anything left to “claw back”?

The chairman of Tennessee’s megasite authority had the following to say, which doesn’t sound too optimistic.

Posted by: Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM | Comments (304) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Mid-Morning Art Thread

Home from the Sea
Arthur Hughes

Posted by: CBD at 09:30 AM | Comments (335) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Morning Report — 6//21/24

Good Morning Kids. Here's a real howler to get things started, Alvin Bragg, who literally rewrote law to basically fabricate a 34-count writ of attainder to persecute by prosecution Donald Trump did this:

MANHATTAN—The Manhattan district attorney's office, led by anti-Trump prosecutor Alvin Bragg, dismissed trespassing charges against 30 Columbia University protesters who were arrested for occupying a campus building.

The Washington Free Beacon attended the Thursday afternoon proceedings at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse. A trove of students and their supporters, many of whom used face masks and keffiyehs to cover their faces, streamed into the building just before 3 p.m., the Free Beacon observed. inside the courtroom—where audio and video recording is not allowed—a prosecutor in Bragg's office argued that the defendants should not face criminal penalties, citing their lack of criminal histories and arguing that the protesters will face internal discipline at Columbia.

The prosecutor also argued that Bragg's office lacked evidence to land convictions in the cases, given those who occupied Hamilton Hall wore masks and covered up surveillance cameras. New York City police arrested the occupiers while they were inside Hamilton Hall. . .

. . . Once their cases were dismissed, protesters headed outside to hold a defiant press conference. One speaker, whose entire head was covered with a ski mask, said the protesters "resist the pigs, the police in the U.S."

It's not just about replacing the American people with a compliant mass of voters and supporters it's about erasing the collective memory of those still left so future generations cannot rise up and rebel:

The surge of interest in homeschooling since the pandemic is a blessedly welcome development for society, but it has brought with it increased suspicion and scrutiny from the current Powers That Be. Leftwing ideologues have been working on capturing the culture, especially education, for over half a century, ever since they abandoned marching in the streets to make the Long March through the institutions. Homeschooling is a deeply serious threat to the Left’s totalitarian lust for power, and that is why Scientific American, the nation’s leading mainstream science magazine, recently added its voice to the call that homeschooling parents be “regulated.”

. . . The Scientific American op-ed claims that studies which show equal or higher levels of academic achievement among home­schooled students are often “methodologically flawed” – in other words, they produce results that are embarrassing to the establishment. The editors quickly go on to fear-monger about the risk of “horrific abuse” children are exposed to from homeschooling parents; in fact, they’re actually at much greater risk of bullying, violence, and abuse in the Thunderdomes of today’s public schools – not to mention school shootings. The op-ed even warns that some homeschool curricula “extol the virtues of Nazism.” The “Nazi” smear is a sure sign that the aim of this op-ed is to not to ensure the welfare of homeschooled children but to demonize their parents – who tend to (but not always) lean conservative – as A Threat to Democracy™.

. . . Scientific American editors also complain that parents “are not required to have an education themselves to direct instruction.” In response, I would argue three points: one, that there are plenty of video examples online of barely literate, foul-mouthed teachers who don’t know their dangling participle from their XY chromosome; two, that what “educators” are mostly trained to teach today are Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, and anti-Americanism; and three, no one is more passionately committed to give their children a solid education than parents. Countless fathers and mothers (not “birthing parents” who homeschool have simply taken the leap and committed to educating themselves and then their children. It’s demanding but it’s working, and that’s a “meaningful education” for the whole family.

Those same countless parents across the nation are wised up to, and fed up with, the politicized public education system and its obsession with drag queens, pride flags, transgender indoctrination, personal pronouns, and Critical Race Theory racism. They are sick of the Left’s mission to drive a wedge between them and their kids in order to transfer children’s trust and allegiance to the State.

The upshot is this: the aim of the neo-Marxist Left is to break down the family unit by de-legitimizing parents’ legal and moral right to determine how their own children are raised. The Left wants to take your children and grandchildren and raise them as loyal, dependent subjects of the atheistic State, disconnected from their own history and culture, and devoid of critical thinking skills, intellectual independence, or a spiritual dimension. This is no conspiracy theory; the evidence for it comes directly from the horse’s mouth, with many so-called “educators” proudly proclaiming on social media that they consider themselves activists and revolutionaries out to dismantle or smash every social norm. “I’m your parent now,” they openly tell the schoolchildren in their charge.

Meanwhile, things are heating up in the Pacific. If you think the Chi-Coms don't see that Joey Sponge_brain Shits-Pants and the fools in Foggy Bottom are compleletyclueless, this happened:

Chinese forces boarded and overwhelmed U.S.-allied vessels on Monday in one of the most dramatic escalations in recent times in the South China Sea, as seen in chaotic footage of the incident released on Wednesday and Thursday.

The Chinese Coast Guard on Monday confronted Philippine navy boats that were attempting to deliver supplies to an outpost in the South China Sea, according to The Associated Press. Footage recently released by the Philippine military depicts Chinese Coast Guard vessels ramming one of the boats and boarding the second boat, destroying and seizing equipment, injuring crew members, and wielding knives, spears and axes.

As Iran is on the verge of a nuclear breakout and Israel continues to face off against them and their proxies in Gaza and Lebanon, and saboteurs and fifth columnists in their own midst in league with Biden and company.

Update, starting this Monday I will be starting a daily course of chemo and radiation that will last 6 weeks. While I will try my best to post every day, I cannot guarantee I'll have the strength to do so.
As always, your support and words of encouragement have made doing this an honor and a highlight of my day now going on almost 8 years. Wow.

God bless you all.

ABOVE THE FOLD, BREAKING, NOTEWORTHY
• Today, the motivation of those ignoring the current terrorist warnings is that they're terrified to single out Muslims as terrorist suspects. The political cost to Joe Biden in states like Michigan, if he were to highlight the very real threat of Muslim extremists entering the United States through our porous Southern border, outweighs any possible threat to the safety of American citizens. So the Biden junta has remained quiet.
  Sirens Are Blaring and Red Warning Lights Are Blinking at the CIA. Is the White House Listening?
  
• What the push to federally “regulate” homeschooling really is.
  Teach Your Children Well

Posted by: J.J. Sefton at 07:01 AM | Comments (419) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 21 June 2024

Top Story

• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again. (Ludicity)
  
  Man has opinions. The opinions are mostly correct though.

  I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused. The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders.

  Usually both. Usually both.

  And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business - not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.

  Indeed.
  
  
  
• A rant about front-end development. (Frank M Taylor)
  
  Another man of conviction.

  There's a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn't possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air.

  Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.

  Server-side rendering means it's rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.

  Lua is actually pretty good at this.

  Do you have any idea how frustrating it is that that in order to explain my sadness to my therapist I must first explain like 5 different technologies and by the time I'm finished she's sad just hearing it, the session's over, and I didn't even get to what was making me upset? Technology has made my anger a recursive function.

  You don't need a therapist, Frank. You need a weekend blowing up abandoned vehicles with a punt gun.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM | Comments (186) | Trackbacks (Suck)