OPEN THREAD: For what it’s worth.
Archive for 2022
June 22, 2022
THE HORROR…THE HORROR:
Related: Chaim Bloom’s Diamond Life. The senior VP of baseball operations for the Tampa Bay Rays explains how his team changed the way the game is played—and why he keeps a jar of gefilte fish in his office.
GREAT MOMENTS IN LYSENKOISM: I’m An MD Suspended By Twitter For Tweeting A Link To A Scientific Article On COVID-19 Vaccine Lowering Sperm Counts.
SONGS THAT CHANGED MUSIC: Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (video):
(Updated and bumped.)
OUT ON A LIMB: Stop Apologizing To Your Woke Masters. “But for extreme circumstances — see Portnoy and Chappelle above — smear merchants often only bombard a target with mean tweets for 36 hours before moving on to someone else around the 37th hour. If you can stomach a day and a half of ugly Twitter comments, then guess what, you’ll likely survive. So when some schmuck pretending to represent the feelings of a marginalized community comes for you — and they eventually come for everyone — don’t go bending the knee. They don’t have a sword to your throat, they have a Twitter account with flags all over it.”
RIP, GOOSE: Tony Siragusa, former NFL star and TV personality, dead at 55.
The news comes only hours after a current member of the Baltimore Ravens passed away: Ravens Linebacker Jaylon Ferguson Dies at 26. Player was found unresponsive at a Baltimore home Tuesday night; cause of death not yet determined.
MEH, I CAN DO THIS STUFF IN MY SLEEP. SIX WEEKS OF YOGA AND MOST PEOPLE WHO FLUNK THE TEST NOW WILL BE ABLE TO. Can’t Complete This Balance Test? Study Finds It Predicts an Earlier Grave.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Chinese official says its Mars sample mission will beat NASA back to Earth.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: JPMorgan Chase Cuts Thousands of Positions in Mortgage Lending Sector.
Housing sales are dropping fast, but housing values are, on a regional basis, holding steady – for now. However, the banks and lending institutions are preparing for those values, and the contained equity, to drop and disappear precipitously.
Today Bloomberg is reporting that JPMorgan Chase is shifting around 1,000 employees in the mortgage side of finance with some being laid-off and others being reassigned to different parts of the bank and financial services. This should not come as a surprise, but it does align with other less noticeable moves in the banking and home loan sector.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Related: Fed Chairman Jerome Powell Admits It Is Not Russia That Created U.S. Inflation, It Is Joe Biden Policy. Video at the link.
Disney just released Buzz Lightyear, a Pixar animated movie about the character from the Toy Story franchise (or… is it?), aimed at young children.
Obviously, if you’re making that kind of movie, there’s only one thing that’s missing: a gay kiss.
The movie has been banned in fourteen countries, because Disney insisted on sticking a lesbian kiss into a movie aimed a very young children.
Disney has long been inserting gay shit into stuff aimed at children. And then they cut it out of foreign releases, for countries that don’t like gay shit the way Disney’s gay activist employees like gay shit.
The trouble this time is that Disney’s gay activist employees insisted that there could be no cutting — this time, the gratuitous gay kiss must go global.
It is pride month, after all.
The new Pixar animated film Lightyear has become the latest battleground for LGBTQ+ rights. The movie — which is a prequel to the highly successful Toy Story saga — has been banned from 14 countries for including a same-sex kiss. This means that countries in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, as well as a handful of Asian nations, will not be screening one of the most anticipated movies of the summer.The movie features a character called Alisha Hawthorne, who is in a relationship with a woman. In the scene in question, Hawthorne briefly kisses her partner. In 2006, executives at Disney, the parent company of Pixar, asked for this same scene to be cut from the movie. When this decision was revealed in March, it sparked fierce backlash. Hundreds of Disney workers signed a letter calling on the entertainment giant to take a tougher stand in defending LGBTQ+ rights. The workers not only criticized the censorship of the scene, they also demanded that Disney publicly denounce the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida. This measure, which was proposed by Republicans in the state, prohibits class discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity until students are at least nine years old.
“We at Pixar have personally witnessed beautiful stories, full of diverse characters, come back from Disney corporate reviews shaved down to crumbs of what they once were,” the letter sent to Disney CEO Bob Chapek stated. In response, Chapek promised to take a more active role in defending LGBTQ+ rights, and as a sign of this, he ordered the same-sex scene in Lightyear to be put back in the film.
And how did this latest #Woke bomb do at the box office?
Well, it bombed. Buzz Lightyear was projected to sell between $70 and $85 million in tickets.
Instead, it sold a paltry $50.6 million in ticket.
And it performed much more poorly than Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
The Hollywood Reporter blames this partly on “rightwing politicians.”
It couldn’t be because the film has gotten terrible reviews and currently has a 5.2 (out of ten) rating at IMDB, right? “So say you’re a movie studio executive desperately looking through your backlog of titles for some ‘intellectual property’ you already own that you can exploit. You discover that you possess the rights to the farcical Naked Gun series. And it comes to you: You could redo The Naked Gun, only… serious! Watch as a young Frank Drebin breaks up a drug ring as he learns he has to rely on his partners and not go it alone! Yeah… nah. Well, something almost exactly like this happened to the people at Pixar and Disney a few years ago when they looked at their IP and had the blinding flash that they could build a new animated action franchise based on an iconic character from the very first Pixar film: Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear. You can almost hear how a silence must have descended on the meeting in which this notion was first proposed, a silence only ended when someone very high up shouted: ‘Brilliant!’ And thus was born Lightyear. Not brilliant.”
NO THANKS, I’M STILL SOCIAL DISTANCING: DNC Clearance Sale: Act Now, and You Can Get a Selfie With Kamala at 65% Off!
YES. Some of us have been predicting this for a while.
REMINDER: Pistol shooting is a perishable skill.
It is. Though for me I lose speed and gun-handling faster than pure accuracy.
DEAL OF THE DAY: Kidde Smoke & Carbon Monoxide Detectors. #CommissionEarned
OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUD: Biden to Anti-Gun Governors: Pass More Gun Control Laws! Ban All the Things!
“CREWS KNOCKED THE FIRE DOWN BUT IT KEPT RE-IGNITING/OFF-GASSING IN THE BATTERY COMPARTMENT”: Tesla Model S catches fire three weeks after getting sent to junkyard. “In what sounds like the automotive equivalent of The Walking Dead, a Tesla Model S caught fire three weeks after it was involved in an accident and sent to a junkyard. Firefighters had a difficult time putting out the blaze, and they ended up having to submerge the battery.”
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Top 10 most ridiculous campus cancelations in 2021-22 school year.
IT’S THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO FIND OUT COURTESY OF HERTZ: Here’s what it’s like to drive on the moon.
ALL-TOO-FAMILIAR FACES: Meet the 14 GOP Senators Who Voted to Advance ‘Gun Safety’ Bill.
PRIVACY: Mega says it can’t decrypt your files. New POC exploit shows otherwise.
In the decade since larger-than-life character Kim Dotcom founded Mega, the cloud storage service has amassed 250 million registered users and stores a whopping 120 billion files that take up more than 1,000 petabytes of storage. A key selling point that has helped fuel the growth is an extraordinary promise that no top-tier Mega competitors make: Not even Mega can decrypt the data it stores.
On the company’s homepage, for instance, Mega displays an image that compares its offerings to Dropbox and Google Drive. In addition to noting Mega’s lower prices, the comparison emphasizes that Mega offers end-to-end encryption, whereas the other two do not.
…
Research published on Tuesday shows there’s no truth to the claim that Mega, or an entity with control over Mega’s infrastructure, is unable to access data stored on the service. The authors say that the architecture Mega uses to encrypt files is riddled with fundamental cryptography flaws that make it trivial for anyone with control of the platform to perform a full key recovery attack on users once they have logged in a sufficient number of times. With that, the malicious party can decipher stored files or even upload incriminating or otherwise malicious files to an account; these files look indistinguishable from genuinely uploaded data.
Remember, “the cloud” is just a fancy way of saying “someone else’s hard drive.”
If it’s truly important or worth keeping private, don’t store it on anyone else’s hard drive.
TEXAS GOP CHOOSES ANTI-GAY INTOLERANCE OVER LIBERTY AND POLITICAL SUCCESS.
UPDATE: Counterpoint: Texas GOP Pulls No Punches.
ALSO FIBROMYALGIA, WHICH LOOKS A LOT LIKE “LONG COVID:” Women are more likely than men to develop long COVID.