1986: Holy moly as a 13 year old boy
Hello fellow Oregon Trail enjoyer.
Yeah, I think you're totally right. Bureaucrat sociopaths.
Listen to Hannity on the radio occasionally, so I know he often talks about how the good average FBI officers are good people doing good work, but it's the administration who is politically corrupt?
I would say CIA is different. I think the Directorate of Intelligence, which is literally thousands of people, is just rotten to the core. I would eliminate it completely. Having some 20-something Princeton grad with a masters degree in Political Science from Georgetown trying to dictate foreign policy on Russia or Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever is a recipe for idiocy.
I met some based upper managers. These were generally people who had spent their careers abroad and had face-to-face experience in the field. One senior leader I met (and respected) had been on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon AND evacuated from Tehran in the 70s. That person didn't put up with any bullshit. Not pencil pushers sitting at a desk in McClean VA like Michael Morell.
I worked at CIA for a brief period of time 10+ years ago. I met some smart people and some good people, but none of them were analysts. It was also clear to me, literally from day 1 of orientation, that most CIA officers were more concerned with (a) THE CIA and (b) THE GOVERNMENT than they were actually doing the right or actually supporting the United States.
"The CIA sits at the head of the Intelligence Community circle, we are the first amongst equals, and we do what needs doing and that the others can't--or won't--do."
Orientation was two weeks of "rah rah, go CIA, here are some cool things we've done" and indoctrinating employees into being loyal to CIA. It's ingrained from day 1.
A couple of things about Michael Morell and the CIA.
First of all, the entire agency is fucked, but it's divided into 4 parts:
One division for support activities, one for technological and scientific work. Those are the divisions that keep the place going. In my experience, most of the people there just do their jobs.
Then there's the DO -- the spies on the ground. These people are interesting, and often spend much of their career abroad. In my experience, many of them don't really care about politics, they like their jobs.
Finally, the DI, the directorate of intelligence. This is where you find all the cucked SJW ivy league and other useless 4-year degree types who don't have any real life experience but are now tasked with analyzing and LEADING foreign policy and intelligence decisions. The DI is the heart of the rot and a useless piece of shit.
Historically many CIA leaders have been civilian or come out of the DO.
Michael Morell comes from the DI. He's a useless piece of shit.
I realize I am just a Joe Random on the Internet, but an acquaintance of mine was his personal assistant for some time before he became the interim DCIA. Leaving details sparse for obvious reasons, my friend loathed Morell. I had a few interactions with him and he was abrasive to staff, arrogant beyond all justification, and he was just a big government supremacist to his core.
Working at a place like CIA you get a feel for the type. There are the people who work at CIA because they're into spy shit and you can, potentially, do some really cool stuff that almost nobody in the world gets to do and almost nobody in the world knows about.
The second type is the corrupt Washington politicos. They are political to their core, and everything they do is to serve the GOVERNMENT, not the United States. Michael Morell is this.
Wow. After the last period of outages, threats, and DDOSes, I thought Josh had found a permanent solution.
Never underestimate an autistic rapist, Liz Fong Jones. I'm amazed Liz's employer, Honeycomb, is cool with him spending so much time on his personal vendetta against KF.
This is very bad for the future of the Internet, regardless of your personal feelings about KiwiFarms.
Clearly troll account.
Hilarious tho.
The others people go to have more rabbit holes than getting into 40k or eve online for the first time. You start vanilla then you get scarred for life because you read 177013 and you are now depressed when all you wanted was a quick wank.
I googled this and it's way too long for me to try to read. I need a tl;dr!
"They think y'all aren't having enough babies"
Ignoring the gay appropriation of "y'all", I for one am THRILLED that the lgbtqwtfbbq crowd isn't having babies. If there is a genetic component to it, let the leftwingers breed themselves out of existence. Eldercare and nursing are going to be a different world very soon, when a huge percentage of the elderly population has absolutely no family connections (and probably not savings either--spent it all on Funkopops).
Let me guess...Uncle Hugos
Gonna have to disagree--I love Powell's! Last time I was there I got an out of print Russian cookbook, a handful of oldschool Caldecott and Newberry Award winners from before the 1980s/90s when awards actually meant something (today these awards are basically a participation trophy for being on the progressive stack), and some foreign language books that are very hard to get in the US.
This was probably 7-8 years ago.
Totally agree that the new movie is more accurate to the book than the 1980s Lynch movie. The Lynch movie is long as fuck and weird as fuck, but I love it. Bald women witches, Sting, "OUR STORM!!!", the inner monologue stuff being spoken out loud, the insane set designs. Bizarre and and I love it.
I also love the book (just Dune..not the sequels) but in a very different way.
The new movie was mostly more accurate, some nice cinematography, but I just found it boring. The actors were boring. The characters were boring. I don't even remember what anyone looked like other than Paul and Thufir Hawat. Oh yeah, and they turned Gurney Halleck (Patrick Stewart in the 80s) into a black woman. It has so much of that modern "whispering loudly = drama!!@!@!". Timothy Chalamet is way too mincing to be Paul who is after all supposed to be a very trained fighter. just ... meh.
I saw the new Dune movie, that was my only context. I don't plan to watch the 2nd one. The first one was not bad, but I found it just...very boring.
Twist. If it happened, the cashier was probably black.
Also, I didn't realize Zendaya was black.
Now I want there to be a poster named TheSimpossible1 who only ever comments on articles defending and m'ladying women.
Hah, good post. I was thinking about this recently. I'm a fan of some musicals (including Gilbert & Sullivan), and I saw recently that Phantom of the Opera, one of the most popular musicals of all time, just closed on Broadway.
Phantom was the longest running show in Broadway history. 1988 to 2023. Tens of thousands of showings.
(It's slightly amusing that the last Christine was played a black actress for the first and only time -- this was a big deal with much crowing in the media, etc. And then Phantom closed after less than a year with this Christine. Did black Christine kill the Phantom??)
Anyway, it got me thinking about how many older musicals were about love stories and about normal people and understandable themes. They were not made to appeal to the uppercrust, but to popular forms of entertainment.
Andrew Lloyd Weber made two musicals about Bible stories. Would that happen today without being a harsh commentary on the stories?
Grease...Music Man...so much of Rodgers & Hammerstein WAS working class, popular, understandable plot lines, and story that don't only appeal to upperclass aging cat moms.
Today? I don't know wtf is going on. Looking at the shows on Broadway, they seem to be largely weird as fuck shit, musicals based on nostalgia TV shows, and old musicals going through a revival.
Cultural rot and lack of creativity is everywhere.
Posted without further comment:
Samantha Puc (she/they) is a fat, disabled, lesbian writer and streamer whose work focuses primarily on LGBTQ+ and fat representation in pop culture. Their writing has been featured on Refinery29, Bitch Media, them., and elsewhere. Samantha is the co-creator of Fatventure Mag and she contributed to the award-winning Fat and Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives. They are an original cast member of Death2Divinity, and they are currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative nonfiction at The New School. When Samantha is not working or writing, she loves spending time with her cats, reading, and perfecting her grilled cheese recipe.
Deleted Firefox in 2014 after Brendan Eich, creator of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla was hounded out of the project for a donation to California Prop 8 against gay marriage--that passed with popular support in California!
Fuck Firefox and fuck Mozilla.
Jesus, I thought this was a dup article the first time I read it.
Almost the exact same thing happened 2 years ago, except that poor kid died:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Cannon_Hinnant
How fucking awful.
I will also say that I have often wondered just how much of "modern" society comes down to 50%+ of women being drugged on antidepressant and in most countries the vast majority of women being on hormonal birth control.
From my own personal experience over 15+ years with my wife, our relationship has been much better when she is not on hormonal birth control. Much, much better.
I'm sorry to hear about your tough times. Everything comes down to the individual, but there ARE alternatives to SSRIs that work sometimes. To echo others, when I have had difficult periods (and college was a very difficult period for me at times), sunshine, a regular sleeping schedule, exercise, walking in nature, and reading Stoic philosophy helped me.
I would temper this take. Yes, some people are fucking crazy. I've volunteered at local animal shelters, and I've donated to a local wildlife rescue organization (and used them several times when I found some abandoned baby bunnies, a wounded songbird, etc.). I also am a big meat eater, but I try to buy meat from local farmers where I know the conditions are reasonable, and the slaughter was humane. I'm just saying, there can be a balance, and you can love animal life while also being a meat eater.
Man's bonds to his animals are ancient and deep. Think about Odysseus and his dog Argos, who remained faithful to his master for all those years of absence, dying happy knowing that his master made it home. Think about Alexander the Great and his war horse, Bucephalus, who was loyal to Alexander throughout countless battles. Alexander named a city after Bucephalus when he died.
Don't disparage the connection between man and beast.
I'm with you, lol.
You know, I find this unfortunate, but I also don't find it that surprising. Weird Al has pretty much ALWAYS been absurdist and silly, but never offensive, edgy, or obscene. No swearing, and I can't think of any political messaging either.
If you don't want to get cancelled or banned in leftist establishments, you know what you have to do. My greatest fear with this kind of thing is that it's the tip of the iceberg, and the wokehounds, now having a taste for blood, want more.
Maybe "Eat It" is next--not very fat positive!
I found this on Wikipedia:
In stark contrast to his stage persona, Yankovic is known by friends and associates to be polite, shy, and introverted, even among family.[17] He is a Christian, and a married couple from the church he attends can be seen in the background on the cover of his album Poodle Hat.[74][75] His religious upbringing is reflected in his abstinence from profanity, alcohol, and drugs.
Is it a day ending in "Y"?
I was in Washington a few years ago and went to the timber industry museum. It was fascinating. Private land owners and lumber companies own immense amounts of lands. They can be harvested every 30-50 years, and they go it in chunks, so that it's not just strip clear cut every tree for 50 miles. This helps with erosion, regrowth, etc. Driving along, you could see old growth forests, clear cut areas, young growth, etc., and all had different ecosystems and supported different wildlife (birds, mammals, etc.).
Additionally, millions of acres is National Forest land. This land is managed by the governemnt TO allow lumber harvesting in a sustainable way.
tl;dr, you want to live in modern society, you need wood, which naturally sequesters CO2 from the air, and to get wood, you need a timber industry.
It's a win win.
(Not to destract from the fact that this troon is a freak.)