ADS-2020

[Rita Panahi @RitaPanahi]

That's the editor in chief of the Economist @zannymb

Now you know why it's become such a pitiful publication.

[DogeDesigner @cb_doge]

ELON MUSK: "Zero people died because of DOGE"

“USAID was a political organization. USAID funding was not stopped; it was moved to the State Department. There were claims that healthcare programs were shut down, but these claims are false. When funding is stopped for fraudulent organizations, do you think they’re going to say, ‘Please keep funding the fraud,’ or come up with a sympathetic story to get the funding restored? Obviously, it will be the latter. The amount of funding we’re talking about is far less than what could be supported by private foundations like the Gates Foundation or MacKenzie Bezos’s foundation. They have tens of billions of dollars and are capable of acting very quickly. If they didn’t, I would say they’re equally responsible. Zero people died because of DOGE. Zero.”

[Steve Hilton @SteveHiltonx]

Here it is – our first ad from the people who created those fantastic videos for Spencer Pratt.

The People vs The Machine:

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

The behavior of the head of the Smithsonian's Museum of American History at yesterday's hearing was appalling. She made clear she'll keep smearing the US as racist and genocidal, and denying biological sex. If she and @SmithsonianSec don't resign, Congress must defund it.

[ADS-2020 @AnneDS2020]

@ScottEnlow @grok what happened to this bear?

[ADS-2020 @AnneDS2020]

This is not fraud. This is a combination of procedures and federal race and ethnicity reporting categories used by all agencies, health care facilities, jails, etc. For many years. Race (Caucasian/White, African American/Black, Asian, Mixed-Race are the main ones) is separate from Ethnicity (which basically is Hispanic or Not Hispanic). So it's very common to have White Race with Hispanic Ethnicity. Also the procedures on this also changed a lot in the last 30- ish years towards self-identification/ reporting of race and ethnicity as well. So people are what they say they are- even if they don't understand the categories, etc.

[ADS-2020 @AnneDS2020]

The film itself is a “Trojan Horse,” smuggling in and validating modern and far left-wing ideologies and 'policies,' e.g. re DEI. So it is political. Not just online. The Marxist indoctrination in the academy and in media for the past 30+ years is reinforced here re colonizer/colonized simplicities, open borders, male-hating feminism, and the idea that men have cannot be strong / aka warriors without hating themselves.

The most political part of this film? Nolan obviously imposed all those DEI/identity politics casting decisions to pass the demented woke requirements by the Academy Awards. He would have done all the calculations. And I find that really political and really cynical to hire Black, Asian, Latino, and Trans actors - even if in small parts - for what is a Greek classic tale- and for which no Greek actors were hired -only so that his film could be eligible for the very cowardly, cynical and woke Academy awards criteria. Why not stand up against that garbage? Only then will it change.

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

When they come for one of us, they come for all of us.A Jewish father walking home from synagogue on Pico Boulevard was followed, ambushed, choked, thrown to the ground, and told “Free Palestine” as he lay there terrified for his life.
This is not “just” an attack on Jews.
It is an attack on the right of every American to walk freely to worship.
It is an attack on safety in our neighborhoods.
It is an attack on the values that make this country worth defending — freedom, decency, and the refusal to let hate dictate who belongs.
Antisemitism is not a Jewish problem. It is an American problem. It is a human problem. When hatred is allowed to target one group with impunity, it eventually comes for everyone.
We will not be silent.
We will not be divided.
We will not normalize this. To every community, every leader, every citizen of goodwill:
Stand up. Speak out. Show up.
Protect your neighbors. Reject the poison of hate in all its forms. Demand justice without excuses.Hate has no home here.
Not in Los Angeles.
Not in America.
Not anywhere.
We stand together — or we fall divided.
The choice is ours.#WhenTheyComeForOne #HateHasNoHome #StandUnited #NeverAgain #ProtectOurCommunities

Hate crime charge filed in Pico-Robertson attack https://t.co/UY7PN3VlAc

[ADS-2020 @AnneDS2020]

@USCGSoutheast @USCG @USCGLANTAREA Oh my goodness, the poor thing! So glad he was saved and will get treatment/help.

[ADS-2020 @AnneDS2020]

@JenniferSey @WTA Great! And no surprise that the woke NYT/The Athletic had a nonsense take on this.

[ICONS @icons_women]

🎾Breaking: No men allowed in women’s professional tennis

The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) implements sex-screening for all players “to preserve the integrity of women’s professional tennis and maintain fair competition conditions for all players…”

Thank you to tennis stars @Martina @ChrissieEvert and @SabalenkaA for being outspoken advocates of fair sport and equal opportunities for women. 👏👏👏

[Aɴᴛ @AntSpeaks]

So I saw The Odyssey... (Some spoilers ahead)

I'm not going to beat around the bush or spend half the review building up to my opinion.

So here it is. Is it a good movie in the sense that it's entertaining, keeps you hooked, and makes you want to see how the story ends? Yes. In that sense, it is good.

Are all the criticisms regarding the casting, dialogue and other creative decisions still valid despite it being "good"? Absolutely.

It opens with a black rapper playing a bard telling the story, before quickly shifting to what is quite possibly the most ridiculous sequence in the entire film. It's the clip that's been doing the rounds online and gone viral, where Elliot Page's character runs like a 10 year old boy, or Woody from Toy Story, while still very clearly resembling a female, towards the Trojan Horse, only to be almost immediately impaled by Trojan soldiers.

The film then shifts into the story being told through flashbacks, which is true to the original Odyssey.

You quickly forget about Elliot, though the character does appear again later, as the focus shifts to the rest of the cast, many of whom do a very good job. Anne Hathaway is good as Penelope. Tom Holland is good. Robert Pattinson, playing one of the suitors occupying Odysseus' palace, probably gives one of the standout performances.

Matt Damon also does very well in his portrayal of Odysseus. The story flows well, but it doesn't take long before you're constantly reminded that certain decisions were made to tick several DEI boxes. It simply cannot be disputed.

There's one scene where an Indian actor and a black actor, playing warriors, approach a villager and reveal that they are "Greeks of Ithaca." That might be acceptable in a theatre production, where taking liberties with casting is far more common and accepted because you're there to watch a live performance rather than maximise historical authenticity. In a film like this, however, it should simply be more historically accurate.

And yes, the same goes for Helen of Troy. It's an immediate facepalm moment because, despite what some of her fellow cast members have said in interviews, you can easily think of countless actresses who would have been more suitable for the role. And yes, by that I mean someone who fits the historical context, because Helen of Troy simply would not have been Sub Saharan African.

Zendaya as Athena? Also a bad choice, and yes, I'm sorry, but it's for the same reasons.

As mentioned earlier, Elliot Page's character makes a comeback, sort of, and there's a scene where Matt Damon's Odysseus describes "him" as the greatest warrior he's has ever known. Yes, what you saw in that viral clip of Elliot is supposed to be one of the greatest Greek warriors. You can't help but cringe during that scene, knowing Matt Damon is delivering those lines with a completely straight face.

But I still said the movie was "good", so why am I complaining?

Because it could have been great.

It could have completely immersed you in that world, but because of DEI and political correctness, it never quite gets there. That's the issue. It's not because these people were the best choices for the roles. They weren't.

In fact, I'll go further than that. Given Christopher Nolan's reputation and influence in Hollywood, he could have done what Mel Gibson did with some of his films. He could have hired an all Greek cast, or at least had 70 percent of the actors played by Greeks. He could even have had them speak Ancient Greek with English subtitles. In a world that valued historical authenticity and common sense, I genuinely think that film could have broken records.

Instead, Nolan seems to have completely abandoned the historical authenticity he stuck to in Oppenheimer and gone full woke in pursuit of awards, excusing it as a retelling for a "modern audience", whatever that is supposed to mean. The fact there isn't a single Greek actor in this film is genuinely mind boggling. It's no wonder there wasn't even a premiere in Athens.

So yes, The Odyssey is somewhat of a good watch overall, but only good. That doesn't take away from the very legitimate criticisms, and I've only touched on a few of them. There are many more, including the costume design and some of the dialogue being used. Yes the use of "dad" and other modern day phrasings of words is annoying to say the least.

The scenes with Elliot Page are genuinely laughable, and some people will dismiss the entire film on that point alone. Honestly, I don't blame them.

Does the movie deserve all the praise from the critics? No.

Does it deserve all the 10 out of 10 ratings from a supposedly unbiased audience? Absolutely not.

It's also nowhere near a 1 out of 10. But that doesn't really matter, because Nolan has made enough decisions that many people will see it that way regardless.

[Wesley Yang @wesyang]

Transgender children do not exist apart from adults brainwashing quirky kids to label themselves trans.

What is measured by the statistics in Oregon and Mississippi is the incidence of adults brainwashing quirky kids to yearn to be chemically castrated and dismembered.

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.

Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one.

And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you.

So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip.

Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook.

And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review.

An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes.

Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died.

Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result.

Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data.

Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan.

Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it.

Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator.

Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS.

And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair.

That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat.

Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it.

I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers.

You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run.

But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.

@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

[Herod Priovolos @herodpriovolos]

I just watched Christopher Nolan’s #TheOdyssey and I left the cinema with a deep sense of disappointment.
I entered expecting Homer’s world to breathe: salt in the air, darkness over the sea, gods watching from a distance, and a wounded man struggling to return home. Instead, ancient Greece vanished beneath a cold and generic Hollywood spectacle.
The characters felt like modern actors wearing ancient costumes. The dialogue had no poetry, the casting carried none of the story’s identity, and the deepest themes of exile, loyalty, grief and homecoming were buried beneath noise and expensive images.
Because The Odyssey is not really about monsters. The Cyclops, the Sirens and the storms are only the visible dangers. The true journey takes place within Odysseus himself. It asks whether a man can lose his companions, his youth, his name and twenty years of his life, yet still return without losing the person he once was.
That is why the story has survived for almost 3,000 years. Every human being is trying to return to something: a home, a love, an identity, or the self they were before life changed them.
A $250 million production somehow made one of humanity’s greatest meditations on memory, mortality and belonging feel empty. Hollywood borrowed Homer’s name and prestige, but abandoned the soul that made his story immortal.
This was not The Odyssey. It was a monument to money, arrogance and the belief that spectacle can replace meaning.

[ADS-2020 @AnneDS2020]

Great progress! Re her lame left front leg/paw: This type of injury- Brachial Plexus Nerve Injury- which the vet report said was severe - is not in the shoulder itself- but rather to the nerves from the spine to the shoulder/and leg/paw. This is sad because likely it was caused not by the poisoning itself, but grabbing/pulling the dog by her paws (and especially left one) and perhaps in turning her over/ and in the process of doing the CPR- done in the community, which also broke a rib. But the community members were desperate and trying to save her life. https://t.co/L2sd4gSy9V

[ADS-2020 @AnneDS2020]

As in America, the far-left in Ireland are absolute loons. The left-wing authoritarian brain-washing of young people seems much more wide spread in Ireland though.

Not just trans ideology and DEI and other woke stuff. Also re censorship, immigration, the border, crime, fraud/abuse of government funded benefits like housing, support for Islamic terrorists, and the mad levels of anti-zionism and antisemitism in Ireland.

Ireland is destroying itself with all this. That happens when you have for many years so many socialists in power as elected leaders and life-long bureaucrats in govmt, schools, media, and the gazillion "NGOs" (actually govmt agencies). Argentina is a case in point (until Milei now is turning things around).

But somehow there were enough sane people in the past 50 years for Ireland to develop economically, attracting so much tech and other investments. But now, even tourism isn't such a huge source of revenue.

I wonder if successful companies and wealthy productive people who are taxed so much will continue to put up with all this. They can leave and work in America. Though in many blue states, things are getting quite bad in America also.

[Trisha Posner @trishaposner]

Outraged. The top Democratic Congressman on the House Armed Services Committee says he voted to cut aid to Israel because far-left anti-Israel zealots threatened his family, vandalized his home, and an aide was physically assaulted.

Policy gets decided now by who can intimidate officials into submission?

Where is the FBI investigation into these violent threats?

This is intimidation that endangers not just Jews and Israel but undercuts the very essence of a democracy.

https://t.co/0gp11Fqn6E

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

“If Israel falls, then Athens, Paris, and Amsterdam will fall next. Our mothers in the West can sleep peacefully at night, because the mothers of Israeli soldiers lie awake wondering if their child will come back alive from battle.“

- Geert Wilders

[Ben Shapiro @benshapiro]

I tuned into Joe Rogan yesterday and heard Bernie Sanders' economics, Barack Obama's foreign policy, and Ro Khanna's conspiracy theories.

And then I realized JD Vance was talking.

I want a candidate in 2028 who doesn't mirror the Democrats -- and who can win.

Mr. VP, this is not the way.
https://t.co/VcoYxzy89K