Wednesday Open Comments
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58 responses to “Wednesday Open Comments”
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His portrayal of Doc Holliday is one for the ages.
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Absolutely.
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Still no O.C. topic?
Well it’s Hump Day! Onward through the fog.
Mornin’ Gang-
The topic is a very informative 33 minute video about your rights as an American citizen when interacting with law enforcement. I recommend it.
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What ^he^ said.
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This is ultimate truth and any day now somebody will post a genuine photo pf some guy just like this.
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Elon Musk is doing similar work with his Neuralink company.
Nearly two decades after suffering a brainstem stroke at the age of 30 that left her unable to speak, a woman in the US regained the ability to turn her thoughts into words in real time thanks to a new brain-computer interface (BCI) process.
and,
To overcome both of these hurdles, the researchers trained a flexible, deep learning neural network on the 47-year-old participant’s sensorimotor cortex activity while she silently ‘spoke’ 100 unique sentences from a vocabulary of just over 1,000 words.
Littlejohn and colleagues also used an assisted form of communication based on 50 phrases using a smaller set of words.
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Dunno about anywhere else but we’ve seen hummingbirds (well, one of each gender, but NOT at the same time) at our feeder…
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We’ve had a few in the last week or so.
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235,200 Birds crossed Dale County AL last night.
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Too cool.
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Cornell University is the world HQ for anything to do with birds. In Bergen County, NJ last night we had only 300 birds cross over. Compared to the vast migratory superhighway of the Texas coast it is nothing.
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Super venture capitalist Marc Andreesen on X:
Everything you read makes sense if you simply translate “experts” as “crazy people”.
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Someday people will look back on radiation and chemotherapy as crude, primitive treatments like the bleeding and mercury procedures of the late 18th century.
Val Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer 10 years ago. He underwent 2 years of radiation, surgeries and chemotherapy. It’s no wonder he died of pneumonia. All that radiation and chemo destroyed most of his immune system. The same thing has happened to two good friends of mine. The cancer treatment was successful but it ended up killing them eventually.
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We should not bypass the reality that radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery are very expensive and those procedures make a lot of people very wealthy.
As long as lots more people are living off of cancer than dying from it the prospects of meaningful change are remote. The current administration could change this reality. -
Your post reminds me of a Star Trek episode, where Kirk, Bones, et al, were thrown back in time. Bones came across a woman being wheeled into surgery to have a kidney removed. Bones was aghast at the “barbarity” of what was about to happen.
Shortly after, the woman is being wheeled back down the hallway, no surgery completed, repeating over and over “He just gave me a pill! He just gave me a pill!”
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I can’t find the article, but some guy the other day wrote (paraphrasing):
“The new generation of missiles being developed by the Pentagon today will be obsolete by the time they are deployed into a drone-heavy battle environment. They will definitely be the last of the missile groups.”
He is right.
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I’m pretty sure this is called FRAUD and the racist a-whole needs to be criminally prosecuted.
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Fewer bluebonnets this year, but the ones that made it are virtually electric blue.
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We need pictures! Sure wish I was there.
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This doesn’t smell right. The US Forest Service runs 1,000 campsites in Pennsylvania and they’re not closing anything. It looks like an anti-Musk PR piece. It seems like somebody in the Army Corps of Engineers is overreaching to make Trump and Musk look bad by shutting down summer recreation sites.
Raystown Lake, in Huntingdon County, is the largest lake entirely within Pennsylvania. The 8,300-acre lake is managed by the U.S. Army Corps Engineers and, according to a news release from the agency’s Baltimore office, staffing shortages will require staff to focus on “dam operations for flood protection and emergency response readiness” ahead of the 2025 season.
According to the Army Corps, the lakes Seven Points, Susquehannock, and Nancy’s Boat-to-Shore Campgrounds will all be closed until further notice. All told, more than 300 campsites will be closed as a result of the announcement, including boat-in only sites.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has targeted cutbacks at a slew of government agencies, including the Army Corps.
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Popped up over yonder Cussins N Fearn Hardware N Auto store. 😉
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Texans take for granted the absence of federal lands and annoying employees in the state thanks to the annexation deal with the USA cut by the these men in 1845. Texas retained rights to all of its land and mineral rights and is the only state out of fifty to have a tiny percentage owned and maintained by Washington DC.
In the Texas presidential race of 1844, Vice President Edward Burleson faced Secretary of State Anson Jones, who had the support of Houston. Jones won by a large vote. After he was inaugurated on December 9, he launched a policy of economy, peaceful relations with the Indians, and a nonaggressive policy toward Mexico. As his administration also tackled the issue of annexation, Jones earned the sobriquet “Architect of Annexation.” He, Houston, and their supporters knew that proper timing was essential in securing annexation. Upon taking office, Jones instructed Isaac Van Zandt, Texan chargé d’affaires to the United States, to decline all offers to negotiate an annexation treaty until it was known that the United States Senate definitely would ratify it. When President John Tyler reopened negotiations on annexation, Mexico became friendly to Texas. At the same time she threatened war with the United States if annexation were approved. In the United States, there was great sympathy for the Texas cause. The collapse of the Santa Fe expedition in 1841 and the Mexican invasions of 1842 had attracted widespread attention. In March 1842, Houston instructed James Reily, the Texas representative to Washington, to sound out the government on annexation. The United States, knowing the British wanted to mediate Texas-Mexican difficulties, saw a strong British influence looming in Texas affairs. President Tyler, a Whig with Southern views on slavery, had indicated in October that he wanted to open discussions leading to the annexation of Texas by treaty. An annexation treaty was completed on April 12, 1844, and signed by Secretary of State John C. Calhoun, Isaac Van Zandt, and Van Zandt’s assistant, J. Pinckney Henderson.
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/snip
In a video released on his social media accounts two days after the cabinet’s decision, the prime minister explained that distrust began with Bar’s insubordination in the wee hours of Oct. 7, when he decided to keep both the minister of defense and the prime minister out of the decision-making process.
This was not an isolated event. This was and still is Bar’s MO. He acts as if Israel’s internal secret service is not accountable to anyone but himself, as if it were free to operate in the shadows outside the control and oversight of Israel’s elected government. He displayed the same contemptuous spirit of insubordination when he ignored a summons by the cabinet to answer questions at the March 20 meeting that decided the future of his career. Instead, he sent a letter in which he point-blank refused to recognize the cabinet’s authority to dismiss him. The decision to remove him, he said in the letter, was tinged with ulterior motives—an allusion to the ongoing investigation into alleged ties with Qatar among Netanyahu’s staff, which has so far produced no convincing evidence, as far as we know, and appears to have nothing to do with Netanyahu himself.
Them danged Israeli snakes are just as bad as ours.
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The Israeli left acts just like ours: with contempt for the rule of law, the citizenry, and the established chain of command. Please RTWDT
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Feeling rather cranky today, trying not to bite Hubby’s head off. I did make two rosaries this morning for my friends at my past parish. They have a fundraiser coming up, so I made some special ones for them. That took a while, on top of waking up late. Here’s rosary number one.
Dangit. Can’t attach here. Will try again.
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Here is rosary number one. Tiger eye and bronze.
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The second one is a milky white semi translucent bead with gold, including a pardon crucifix.
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I guess I can try to get my attitude adjusted by seeing what Mr. Childers has to say today…
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! It’s also President Trump’s “Liberation Day,” though we won’t find out until near suppertime what that means. I hope it doesn’t mean ‘liberated from dinner.’ So it remains a day bursting with optimistic possibilities. Meanwhile, your roundup includes: we dissect the outcomes, fallout, and significant implications of yesterday’s special elections in Wisconsin and Florida; massive same-day layoffs at all the big health bureaucracies terrify and infuriate liberals and medical fetishists; more bad cancer news for young people; liberation day arrives with predictable media meltdowns and market jitters, but what does it mean?; and the JFK declassification journey continues apace, with the new task force holding its first blockbuster hearing.
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Now that is what I call real country music. Great performance.
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Mr. Childers discusses the election results:
…Yesterday’s Wisconsin and Florida special elections were not about 2025. They were a coordinated, high-stakes field test.
I agree. Both parties are trying the toe-in-the-water technique to gauge the temperature of the voting public.
Wisconsin: the R’s were overspent by the D’s there, and the Dem judge was elected. This almost guarantees a loss of 2 R seats in Congress. Bummer.
It was a wake-up call for Republicans: the Democrats are only playing dead.
They are not, in fact, leaderless.
The silver lining was that it exposed the Dems’ real leaders and that Democrats have only been playing dead. This was no grassroots election. It was a polished, professional campaign owned and operated by oligarchs. According to WaPo —pay attention— among others, Ms. Crawford got $1.5 million from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D), $1 million from George Soros, $250,000 from LinkedIn co-founder and lefty lunatic Reid Hoffman, and millions more from shady dark-money PACs.
As usual, follow the money.
Of course, the media is overhyping their win, proclaiming the end of the Trump/Musk era. (How has that worked for them in the past?)
Setting that over-enthused take aside, this wasn’t really a state election. It was an oligarch stress test. They didn’t spend $100 million on a mid-cycle judicial race for fun. They’re war-gaming 2026 and 2028.
Here’s the weirdest glitch: On the same night, Wisconsin voters overwhelmingly passed a state constitutional amendment requiring voter ID— a key conservative priority. You’d think the same voters who elected a Soros judge would also reject voter ID. They didn’t. Some suspect foul play; who knows. But cheating will be much harder next time with the new ID requirement.
I wonder, though – are the polling sites connected in real time so that voters can’t vote more than once if they are bussed from site to site? Voter ID is a great first step, but it’s only one arrow in the quiver.
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Speaking of media election coverage – the lefty media are trying to downplay their shellacking in Florida’s two races. The Dems spent like, gazillions of dollars, in those races…but those pesky voter integrity laws got in the way.
The good news was they still got vaporized. It helps that Florida spent four years tightening its election security. Even though Dems managed to scrape up 20% of their base in early voting, surging past Republicans, they couldn’t crack Florida’s firewall, and the GOP blew them out on election day.
The Mr. C. offers his mea culpa: He blames himself for falling for the “Dems in disarray” story. They are being led by their own set of oligarchs: Soros, Pritzger, et al. They managed to pull off the Wisconsin election, even though they paid a pretty penny to do it.
I apologize; I should have known better. I was swept away by the excitement of the moment….
They’re testing, probing, and learning.
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While Republicans were relaxing because “Democrats are in disarray,” progressives were flexing and quietly lining up their next shots. Soros and Pritzger were testing their 2026 playbook. It was a field test, probing Republican defenses and weaknesses.
We must stop swallowing the lie the Democrats are leaderless, dispirited, or distracted. That is a psyop. If we relax like last time, you know what will happen. We’ve watched that show before.
I hate calling them “progressive”. They are anything but. They are social entropy incarnated.
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Andy Biggs (R-AZ) has filed a resolution calling for the removal of Judge Boasberg for misbehavior, under Article II of the Constitution.
Congress (House and Senate) can remove a judge the same way they are appointed: by a simple majority. -
What I have known and why I am not “MAGA”.
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Tomorrow, because it’s too late now and I don’t assign any serious meaning to MAGA. It’s like any other lightweight, ambiguous slogan or bumpersticker. Obama had them, as did Bush and Clinton.
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This is a beautiful simple destruction of any argument to justify federal district judges declaring injunctions and orders across the entire nation. I have bookmarked it for any future situations. Read the whole thing.
Senator John Kennedy, of course…
Questioning Assistant Attorney General nominee Brett Shumate, Kennedy systematically dismantled any justification for these sweeping judicial orders.
“Mr. Shumate, what’s a universal injunction?” Kennedy asked.
Shumate explained, “Senator, a universal injunction is an order from a court enjoining the government in a way that goes beyond the parties to the case but applies nationwide or in some cases universally.”
Kennedy pressed further, asking, “What’s the statutory basis for a federal judge issuing an order that affects people other than the parties before the court?”
“I’m not aware of a statutory basis, Senator,” Shumate admitted.
“There is no statutory basis, is there?” Kennedy reiterated.
“No, Senator,” Shumate confirmed.
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On to more DOGE news: Mass layoffs happening at a mess of “health agencies,” including FDA, CDC, and other acronymically titled entities.
It might’ve been the biggest single-day purge of the federal government in U.S. history — and it was certainly the largest decapitation of the byzantine health bureaucracies. Newly minted HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. posted on X: “Our hearts go out to those who have lost their jobs. But the reality is clear: what we’ve been doing isn’t working.”
Kennedy is just doing what he said he’d do. He’s Trumpian that way. But it still catches the Dems by surprise. They are used to “things continuing as they are” and “just campaign promises to get the votes”. They can’t comprehend the whole “executing campaign promises” thing; it’s totally foreign to their way of viewing the world.
The event itself was brutal: show up for work and get handed a return ticket home.
Even Fauci’s heir NIAID Director Jeanne Marrazzo was canned — though she reportedly was offered a “transition job” in the less glamorous Indian Health Service. Reuters didn’t say whether she accepted. Maybe she’ll send up a smoke signal from the reservation to let us know.
Okay, I find that amusing. /little snuffle, little snort/
The final axing numbers has yet to be tabulated, but the media is pulling out its usual hysteria vocabulary out: bloodbath, etc. Mr. C. has a response to the fears of “good” employees getting thrown out with the bath water:
That may be true, but they are missing the point. The problem isn’t just the crooks at the top; it’s the culture of cowardice beneath them.
All these “good” CDC and NIH employees kept their mouths shut during covid. They could have spoken up and mitigated the harm. But the “good ones” stayed silent, kept their heads down, to save their jobs. Now, they’ve lost their jobs anyway, since the public has learned the hard way that the bloated health bureaucracies are an imminent danger and must be pruned to protect us all.
Silence in the face of institutional corruption is complicity.
Despite all the pearl-clutching predictions of civilizational collapse, I have yet to see a single example of a clear win for public health. Trump’s critics complain only about things that might happen. …But clearly, the massive investment in public health hasn’t stopped cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, autism, the opioid crisis, or a raft of other burgeoning diseases afflicting our country— things that aren’t happening in other countries.
They even helped enforce a false narrative about Alzheimer’s that stalled progress for twenty-five years.
Sucking on the public teat for years and what do they have to show?
… The pandemic proved the federal health agencies are more dangerous to the public than the diseases they claim to fight.
Trump is the first politician willing and able, able and willing, to break all of the China in that shop, to pull the plug in the swamp’s drain, to upend the political game table, and get real change enacted. And change is scary to all the wrong – or right – people. Trump’s giveadamn button is broken.
His, and all of the people who rode into town with him.
But Trump appointed people who’ve already been through the media’s mangling machine. What can the media now say about Kennedy they haven’t already dished out in heaping measure? Or Bhattacharya, Makary, or the rest? These folks have already been through the cancellation wringer. They don’t care.
And that is great news for law-abiding, freedom loving Americans.
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Next up, the tariff situation, aka “Liberation Day”.
Even in this space — where I usually let the headlines cool off a little before weighing in — I’ve now covered this so-far-non-story for two straight days. That’s the brilliance of Trump’s marketing genius. By keeping his tariffs a secret, assuming he doesn’t push them back again, he’s captured the global headlines. The whole planet is losing its mind in terrified anticipation.
One of Trump’s most effective tactics.
PoliticoEU ran an overwrought story this morning, headlined, “Europe thought it had a way past Trump’s tariffs. He didn’t care.” President Trump is so mean and uncaring. Most entertaining, the article reported that EU diplomats desperately tried to reach the President to negotiate about the tariffs —whatever they are— but, get this, they wound up “hitting a wall of bureaucracy and disinterest in Washington.”
Super LOLs. The snooty, disinterested European bureaucrats hit a wall of themselves.
Okay, /snuffle,snort/
As we discussed yesterday, there’s no structural market problem. The market will stabilize once the tariffs are announced and the speculation bubble bursts. Tomorrow, we’ll be awash in the hot takes about how civilization is about to end— or even worse, democracy. Whatever they turn out to be, you can bet the corporate media won’t like it.
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I see from the CFP headlines that Democrats are still deranged and behaving badly: Democrat throws nails under the tires of Trump supporters
Because love and tolerance is their life goal.
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The hard left in Israel and here in the USA behave the same way, they have institutionally captured chunks of the judiciary and the intelligence community.
They are of the devil. -
Read the C&C today and the Tablet Magazine article I linked at 12:12 and notice the similarities, then think about how the judiciary in France decided to imprison Marine LePen, the leading contender, in the upcoming French elections. The people all over are getting a belly full of the tyranny of the elites and it is not going to be pretty when they are overthrown.
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I’ve been feeling like crap most of the day. Think I’m going to lay down before I run my rosaries to my old parish. The Knights have a meeting tonight and I want to hand my beads to someone personally. Because….the last time left something there for pickup, it disappeared.
I hate to say that about folks at a church, but people are people, no matter where ya’ go.
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Mexican squealer ducks on the powerline in my backyard. Crappy pic from a crappy phone camera. There were a total of five, but I couldn’t get them all in the frame. Embiggen for better detail.
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I had to google my bird book… If you you go to Anahuac Wildlife Refuge you’ll find that they call those ducks Black Bellied Whistlers and they are everywhere
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I just dropped off the rosaries to the Knights of Columbus meeting. My friend was happy to see me, and in return for the rosaries he gave me a buncha holy medals. It’s a good trade, since I use those to make rosary clips. Now I have to order more of those little claw clips to go with…
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What colors are on those ducks? There’s a few subdivisions that I pass on my way into Pearland with big ponds, and there have been some brown and reddish ducks hanging out on their migratory travels.
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Brownish red with some color accents on the wings. Orange beaks and feet.
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Could be they’re family.
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Not surprised if this is true.
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Kenosha is close to Milwaukee, no surprise there.
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The shift is a little disturbing. I am 72 years old and I have 6 year old and 1 year old grandchildren.
My maternal grandmother, born in 1905, was 47 years old when I was born. She had my mother when she was 21 and my mother had me when she was 26.
My grandmother was younger than I am today when I turned 21. My great-grandmother, Sadie Rush, died when I was 16 years old. How many kids to day ever know their great-grand parents ?
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