[Hot Air] Diversity is our strength. Except, apparently, the more diversity the military seeks, the less strength it requires.
That seems to be the lesson of the Army’s physical fitness standards, which do not apply to people who are getting "gender-affirming" care.
One of the shibboleths of the Left is the claim that increasing the acceptance of "gender-diverse" individuals into the military merely extends the same opportunities to transgender folks as those afforded to people who identify with their natal sex (man, finding the right words is impossible when discussing these issues!).
Combine this idea with the claim that "diversity is our strength," and you are led to believe that the military will be improved by expanding opportunities to transgender applicants.
Yeah, right. Even the Army doesn’t believe that, and they are the ones saying it.
#1
Given that the army for my entire time in had separate physical training standard tests for men and women, with the latter being less than the former, what's new.
[IsraelTimes] Umbrella organization for Soros’ charitable work says it employs some 800 staff members, has offices in over 20 countries; human rights ...which are usually open to widely divergent definitions... groups concerned
Several human rights organizations are concerned about Open Society Foundations plans to lay off 40% of their global staff — the nonprofit’s second major cut in three years — as billionaire investor George Soros ...either Ernst Stavro Blofeld or Auric Goldfinger come true... hands over leadership to his son.
"We are most concerned for social justice movements, which now have to wait for the impact on their sustainability," said Kellea Miller, executive director of the Human Rights Funders Network. "In the field of philanthropy, decisions at the top can have an outsized ripple effect on those enacting change."
Open Society Foundations, the umbrella organization for Soros’ charitable work, said its board of directors "approved significant changes to the Foundations’ operating model."
The layoffs will comply with local regulations, the foundations said, but they have not said where or when they will take place.
"This will involve some difficult decisions," said Mark Arena, a spokesperson for the Open Society Foundations. "We anticipate that implementing the proposed new model would involve the redesign and retooling of our existing operations, and a substantial reduction in headcount of no less than 40% globally."
In 2021, the foundations offered buyouts to dozens of employees and sought to streamline their internal structures while maintaining roughly the same level of grant funding. The foundations say they currently employ around 800 staff members and maintain offices in more than 20 countries.
Kenneth Roth, the former longtime leader of investigative advocacy nonprofit Human Rights Watch, which was a major recipient of OSF funding, said he has no reason to think the OSF layoffs will mean a decline in support for human rights work. It may mean OSF makes fewer, larger grants in the future because the staffing decline makes it harder to handle multiple smaller grants.
According to The Human Rights Funders Network, which researches funding on human rights, OSF was the sector’s third largest funder in 2019, the most recent year it has analyzed.
"We also consider the humanity of those losing jobs at OSF," Miller said. "This is not nominal, and it also means that movements that have longstanding relationships with program officers there now have to rebuild their access and wait for transparency about the implications."
Earlier this month, the foundation announced that Soros was handing over control of his foundations to his 37-year-old son, Alex, who was elected head of OSF’s board in December.
The change to a "new model" is meant to maximize the foundations’ grantmaking dollars, the OSF statement said, and "create a culture of ’strategic opportunism.'" The lack of details about the new plan, however, could provide fodder to those who see Soros as having undue power. Soros’ public profile began to change, experts say, began when he supported John F. I was in Vietnam, you know Kerry Former Senator-for-Life from Massachussetts, self-defined war hero, speaker of French, owner of a lucky hat, conqueror of Cambodia, unsuccessful presidential candidate, and utterly failed Secretary of State... ’s run against then President George W. Bush. Then, Victor Orban, now Hungary’s prime minister, demonized him as a shadowy figure seeking to undermine Europe’s predominantly Christian majority through supporting migration, among other issues.
Europe hasn't been predominantly Christian since the Great Depression. It has, however, been open and liberal — in the old-fashioned sense — which is antithetical to both the culture of the Ummah and the modern Progressives, who are deliberately totalitarian in the same way as the old Fascists. Separately, it should be noted that although he started out as a devoted Young Communist, it was after the Soros Foundation sent him to Oxford to study political science that he entered Hungarian politics as what was eventually defined as the center-right, not at all what Mr. Soros has intended of his proteges.
Republicans in the US have seized on similar conspiracies about Soros, who is Jewish and a survivor of the Holocaust.
Neither being Jewish nor surviving the Holocaust makes a person like unto the angels. The entire spectrum of humanity went into the fire, and a smaller but still entire spectrum came out. My mother is one of the good ones. Mr. Soros is not.
"Can you ever explain what you’re really doing to somebody who believes that a Jewish billionaire is bringing in migrants colonists?" asked Emily Tamkin, a news hound and author of the book "The Influence of George Soros." "Is there anything you can say that can make that person believe that you’re not a negative and nefarious force in society? I don’t think there is, and I definitely don’t think there is for political actors who are convinced that this is a useful device for them."
She’s absolutely right. He may have good intentions, but those, too, pave the road to Hell. Unfortunately, I do not see any indication that he has good intentions.
Alex Soros told the Wall Street Journal, which first reported he would succeed his father at the helm of OSF, that he would be "more political," but hasn’t elaborated further.
In the early years of the foundations’ work, George Soros praised it for being fluid and flexible and empowering staff in countries to run their own projects, said Tamkin.
"[He] contrasted that to these big foundations in New York City with the professional staff and how they were removed from what was actually happening and the people they were actually trying to help," she said. "I think in some ways, philosophically, perhaps people within OSF making this decision see this as a return to form."
Tamkin said it remains to be seen, "whether reducing staff allows that return to flexibility and empowering of people on the ground, or if really the bureaucratic center remains the bureaucratic center just with fewer people."
OSF is perhaps most famous for its work supporting dissident movements in Soviet countries, including Soros’ native Hungary. It continues to pour funds into Central European University, which Soros founded in the early 1990s in Budapest. It was forced to relocate to Austria after Hungary’s parliament passed a new law governing universities with foreign accreditations.
Also among the largest recipients of OSF’s funding is Bard College, which received a $500 million gift in 2021. Alex Soros is a member of the college’s board of trustees.
According to data from the nonprofit Candid, the largest organizations OSF currently funds in Europe, outside of the local independent branches of its foundation, include the human rights campaigner Global Witness, policy group European Council on Foreign Relations and the advocacy group Roma Education Fund. The fund said it was aware of the layoff announcement and credited OSF as being the biggest private donor for Roma-led organizations across Europe. Global Witness said it was grateful for OSF’s support.
#1
Are they having financial problems? One can only hope.
Posted by: Tom ||
07/07/2023 10:43 Comments ||
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#2
They should have cash just from skimming what is going into Ukraine. My guess would be that Soros has identified that a portion of his organization wasn’t doing anything to achieve his goals. They had hired a bunch of people out of the education system that they created who were worthless complainers. Musk made a demonstration to everybody that those people aren’t needed. Soros will be fostering just as much evil at a lower cost which means they can expand their efforts by hiring effective people to replace the deadwood. My guess only.
The deadwood will likely now have resumes fit only for positions at Soros partners like HRW or on college campuses. This will cause a slight metastasis from the center of communistic evil, but it will be mitigated by the useless nature of the parasites that are being disbursed.
For example, once BLM goes broke, those people will contaminate other organizations with like ideas, but their poor performance will mostly hurt their subsequent organizations. Like a class of Megan Markles, these people will be hired as activists, but they will act with entitlement and arrogance, routinely call off work, abuse expense accounts and produce nothing. The leftists have designed a system that produces low performing and incapable drones that eventually collect like plaque in academic and positions at leftist NGOs. Soros is getting liposuction.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/07/2023 12:36 Comments ||
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#3
They should have cash just from skimming what is going into Ukraine.
Don't forget the drug trade...and human trafficking...don't forget the kiddies.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
07/07/2023 13:13 Comments ||
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#4
Yes, I don’t think it is about cash. It is a roster cut down.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/07/2023 13:44 Comments ||
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#5
"We are most concerned for social justice movements, which now have to wait for the impact on their sustainability," said Kellea Miller,
[Rolling Stone] VERY WEEKDAY AT 5:30 a.m., while most of his San Antonio, Texas, neighborhood is still asleep, Albert Martinez gets into his silver Nissan Sentra and starts the drive to Uvalde, 70 miles to the west. That early, U.S. 90, which starts near the Mexican border and ends in Florida, is infinitely dark and leaden, the tiny farms along the way covered in shadows.
Martinez is a 50-year-old music teacher in Uvalde. Usually, he drives in silence. The radio would be a distraction — it’s almost impossible for him to listen to anything without counting in time or wondering why an instrument wasn’t tuned more tightly. Instead, he makes plans, deciding which song his kids might learn next or thinking through upcoming performances. By the time he arrives in Uvalde, the sun has come up.
The rest of the city is starting the day, too: Cars move up and down Main Street, a short strip dotted with a leafy park, an H-E-B grocery store, and an old-school soda fountain with a mural on the side of it, proudly honoring Uvaldeans like Oscar regular Matthew McConaughey and the Grammy-winning Tejano band Los Palominos. There’s an immigration checkpoint in town, but Uvalde isn’t a border town, as it’s often painted — it’s more than 60 miles from Piedras Negras, Mexico. Still, many families, even those here for decades, have held on to their roots, contributing to a culture that’s distinctly Mexican American. Uvalde’s identity is best understood by longtime residents, who agree that this is a small, quiet community — 15,000 people in all — bonded by time, proximity, and routine. "Everybody knows a relative of everyone," one local tells me. "It’s like we’re all connected somehow."
A woman with 800 tattoos says she’s struggling to find gainful employment because bosses cast judgment on her inked-up appearance.
Melissa Sloan, 46, who hails from Wales in the United Kingdom, previously had a job cleaning toilets but says she hasn’t been able to find a similar gig because of the art that adorns her face and body.
"I can’t get a job," Sloan bluntly told the Daily Star. "I applied for a job cleaning toilets where I live, and they won’t have me because of my tattoos.
"People have said I have never had a job in my life, but I have had one once and it didn’t last long," the mother-of-two added. "If someone offered me a job tomorrow, I would go and work — I would take that offer."
#2
A woman with 800 tattoos says she’s struggling to find gainful employment because bosses cast judgment on her inked-up appearance.
Melissa Sloan, 46, who hails from Wales in the United Kingdom, previously had a job cleaning toilets but says she hasn’t been able to find a similar gig because of the art that adorns her face and body.
...Congratulations, Melissa. You're now so unique that no one wants anything to do with you.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/07/2023 12:58 Comments ||
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#12
How did she get money for all that "body art" if she's never had a job? I suppose I should know better than to ask but it might be an interesting piece of information. Did Soros pay for it?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
07/07/2023 13:18 Comments ||
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She was a child prodigy in her chosen career, but now she is an adult and starting to grow her rap sheet. I predict she will follow usual arc among the professional “activists” that ends up with multiple piercings, a surplus of tattoos, strange hair colours, and eventually cutting off key bits of her anatomy.
[DW] Swedish authorities are charging climate activist Greta "Pippi" Thunberg ...an autistic sixteen year old Swedish expert on climate change... with disobeying police orders to leave a protest in Malmo this June.
Swedish prosecutors on Wednesday announced they would be charging "a young woman" for refusing to obey police orders to leave a climate protest in the southern city of Malmo in June.
A spokesperson for 20-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg confirmed that she was in fact being charged.
The charges stem from a climate protest in Malmo, an oil port, lasting several days.
Thunberg participated in the disruption of shipping in the harbor alongside protest organizers from Ta Tillbaka Framtiden (Take Back the Future). Thunberg and others were arrested on June 19, after they succeeded at blocking traffic at the facility.
Thunberg actively commented from the protest, even posting a selfie holding a sign reading "Jag blockerar tankbilar" (I am blocking tankers) while standing in front of a tanker truck.
At the time, she wrote on Instagram: "We choose to not be bystanders, and instead physically stop the fossil fuel infrastructure. We are reclaiming the future."
The young activist has been the face of the youth climate movement since inspiring "Friday's For Future," which grew out of her first solo "School Strikes" at the Swedish Parliament at age 15. She has spoken frankly about the urgency of the climate crisis to activists, and government and business leaders ever since.
In March, she harangued those leaders for their "unprecedented betrayal," after the publication of UN's IPCC climate advisory panel annual report.
Thunberg is now expected to appear at the Malmo District Court before the end of July. Charges for the crime of disobeying police can carry sentences of up to six months in jail, though Prosecutor Charlotte Ottosen told Swedish media most end in fines.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/07/2023 12:09 Comments ||
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#5
Is this the incident when everyone involved was just palling around, then on cue she goes and sits next to some bench or whatever, and the Uniformed People go pick her up and take her off what they thought was off camera and set her down?
Yeah, here's another freak who's never done an honest day's work in her sweet, short life. Does Soros pay the bills? Not that I believe Soros is personally responsible for all the freaks in this world but somebody is paying this young lady's bills and I wonder who.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
07/07/2023 13:22 Comments ||
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[Just The News] Conservative commentator Mark Levin says Target informed his publisher that it will not carry his new book, "The Democrat Party Hates America," when it is released in September.
People buy books at Target? I had no idea.
The book is still available for pre-order on Target's website as of Thursday morning.
Levin said on Twitter Wednesday that Target told his publisher, Simon & Schuster, that "certain customers might be offended by the title" of his book.
"Target is certainly free to do as it wishes. And so are we. A final good riddance to woke corporatists. They should fear my book," he said Thursday.
Amazon carries it. It’s already #1 Best Seller in Ideologies & Doctrines, months before publishing date.
Target was already under fire from conservatives for prominent Pride Month merchandise displays and marketing LGBT items for children.
Twitter users voiced their anger at Target over Levin's announcement.
"Already boycotted Target," one user said.
"I have already stopped shopping at Target. I also have ordered your book, hard copy and audio from Amazon!" another account wrote.
#3
Levin will surely discuss the controversy with Hannity as the compliment each other as being great Americans. Both will then return to their offices to check Indeed.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/07/2023 12:49 Comments ||
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#4
Target backtracks, will sell Mark Levin's forthcoming book in its stores after opposing title
I don't care. I won't buy the book and I won't shop at Target either.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
07/07/2023 13:23 Comments ||
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#5
I can't shop at Target even if I wanted to. It went out of business here years ago.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
07/07/2023 14:35 Comments ||
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#6
I can’t write them off officially until I see a video of Kid Rock blowing away a tasteful set of plates.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/07/2023 14:40 Comments ||
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[Aljazeera] Johannesburg, South Africa — Hundreds of members of the Congress of South African Trade Union (COSATU), the country’s largest labour union, gathered at its head office in the commercial capital Johannesburg on Thursday to demand interest rate cuts, electricity reforms, and job additions.
The union also mobilised workers across South Africa’s nine provinces and major urban centres, such as Cape Town, Durban, Kimberly, Mafikeng and Rustenburg, to present a common front nationwide.
The protests came on the heels of President Cyril Ramaphosa signing off on a 3.8 percent salary increase for all public office holders including judges and parliamentarians because of "serious economic challenges facing the country", according to a July 1 statement from the presidency.
Negotiations between COSATU and the government had led to an increase in the national minimum wage from 23.19 rand ($1.21) per hour to 25.42 rand ($1.33) per hour, as announced on March 1.
But union officials have said prevailing economic conditions including high interest rates have offset the effect of the latest increase which targets.
#1
Running out of other people’s money, but the socialist politicians will suck the last drips from the spigot before they book it out of the country and leave the proles to the whim of their new Chinese masters.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/07/2023 12:43 Comments ||
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#2
/\ Same scenario as here, they're just a few years ahead of us.
[NYP] Wall Street’s main indexes tumbled on Thursday in a broad selloff after data showing a strong labor market boosted bond yields and fanned fears the Federal Reserve will be aggressive in raising interest rates.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had plummeted 500 points earlier, fell 366.38 points, or 1.1%, to 33,922.26. The Nasdaq and S&P 500 each dropped 0.8%.
Private payrolls increased more than expected in June, the ADP National Employment report showed, indicating the labor market remained strong despite growing risks of a recession from higher interest rates.
Another survey showed the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits increased moderately last week.
"We don’t see any softening in the labor market," said Brad McMillan, chief investment officer for Commonwealth Financial Network. "The Fed doesn’t have to worry about the jobs market. When you look at their mandate, they have no reason not to keep hiking and to keep hiking for a while."
#1
While the ADP report is important, it is incomplete. They are one of three large payroll providers (Hewitt and PayChex are the others), and so you only see a partial picture here.
The Labor Department statistics released this morning showed a gain of only 209,000. And one of the biggest gainers there was government hiring.
So what is going on? Still somewhat murky. But the job market does remain strong, no matter whose statistics you read.
Posted by: Tom ||
07/07/2023 10:46 Comments ||
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#2
Dire financial consequences for numbers that the Biden folks are surely juicing.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/07/2023 12:45 Comments ||
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[Breitbart] China now dominates the world’s supply of nickel, a critical mineral needed to manufacture batteries for Electric Vehicles (EVs) in the United States, a new report details.
By rapidly expanding its growth across Indonesia, a country that sits on a vast nickel ore supply, China has been able to dominate the market for critical minerals that the U.S. needs to produce EVs — an issue for any "Made in America" agenda, especially one laid out by President Joe Biden’s administration.
According to the Wall Street Journal, China’s moving in on Indonesia’s nickel supply "is a blow to U.S. efforts to lessen American firms’ dependency on China," with the Biden administration being largely outpaced.
[JustTheNews] GFANZ and NZAM, they assert, may have violated antitrust laws by "coordinating their members' agreements" to decarbonize their assets. A fine argument, but the physics aren't there is you don't control the DoJ
The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday sent letters to several asset managers and climate organizations over potential antitrust violations related to "decarbonization" agreements between firms as part of a larger investigative inquiry into Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) practices in the financial sector.
ESG investing is the practice of using investor capital to advance non-financial goals, among them those outlined in ESG initiatives. Conservative critics have contended that the practice may constitute a breach of an asset manager's fiduciary duties to its investors.
The Judiciary Committee in June issued a subpoena to climate group Ceres over a concern that its Climate Action 100+ initiative may have violated antitrust law.
The Thursday inquiries address the same issue, namely that cooperation between asset managers to advance ESG initiatives may result in harmful effects on the economy and particularly impact disfavored industries such as fossil fuels. Read the rest at the link
About climate groups Net Zero Asset Managers initiative (NZAM) and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ).
[Epoch Times] Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has teased that it’s launching a platform to rival Twitter. Called "Threads," the Meta-backed microblogging platform is billed as "Instagram’s text-based conversation app," according to a listing on Apple’s App Store.
The listing indicates that Threads will released on Thursday, July 6. Already reports that it's censoring posts...
"Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow," the app description reads.
Musk, who bought Twitter last October, reacted to news of the emergence of [code named] P92 by challenging Zuckerberg to a mixed martial arts (MMA) cage match.
Zuckerberg, who’s been training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu since 2022 and has already won medals in a tournament, promptly accepted.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/07/2023 07:35 ||
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[13 views]
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#1
Musk threatens to sue for 'unlawful misappropriation'. Red State
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/07/2023 7:50 Comments ||
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#2
Seems the answer to Twitter being scraped for data would be end-to-end encryption.
Of course, not using it at all is even more secure.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
07/07/2023 8:08 Comments ||
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#3
threads is a tricky one
if you want to delete a thread, you have to cancel your instagram account
Posted by: lord garth ||
07/07/2023 19:52 Comments ||
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#4
Cable company wants something similar. To cancel your cable you have to quitclaim your property...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
07/07/2023 20:52 Comments ||
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[NYP] You’ve heard of "long COVID," the cases of people who can’t shake the lingering symptoms of COVID-19.
Now comes "long vax" — a rare, but baffling set of symptoms that follow a small number of people for months after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.
"You see one or two patients and you wonder if it’s a coincidence," Dr. Anne Louise Oaklander, a neurologist and researcher at Harvard Medical School, told Science.
"But by the time you’ve seen 10, 20 [patients]," she said, "where there’s smoke, there’s fire."
Cases are very rare — even less common than the few reported cases of long COVID — and medical experts are still analyzing data to determine what might be behind them.
Symptoms of long vax can mimic those of long COVID: headaches, intense fatigue and abnormal heart rate and blood pressure.
No knowing whether it’s a strong vaccine like smallpox and polio, or a weak vaccine like Covid19. Still, we should have sufficient data 18 million people from now.
18 million doses of first-ever malaria vaccine allocated to 12 African countries https://t.co/ne0xvgnWbK
#2
We highlight problems with the MVIP mortality data, including potential confounding, inappropriate use of severe malaria as a surrogate marker, a statistically non-significant effect, and assessment after 2 years instead of the stipulated 4 years, which could have inflated the benefits and deflated the risks associated with the vaccine. We conclude that the claimed impact of the MVIP on mortality is not based on enough scientific evidence and that the MVIP findings do not rule out the possibility of increased mortality among vaccinated girls compared with vaccinated boys, as observed in the phase 3 studies.
From the Lancet. I
Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/07/2023 12:56 Comments ||
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[The Hill] It marks the first-ever approval of a drug proven to moderately slow the course of Alzheimer’s disease.
The FDA said the approval was based on clinical trial data that showed Leqembi, from drugmakers Eisai and Biogen, slows cognitive decline by about 27 percent compared to a placebo among Alzheimer’s patients who are in the early stages of the disease.
But the agency also added a black box warning to the label, a nod to the concerns over serious side effects. The FDA said that in rare cases the drug can cause "serious and life-threatening events" and that there have been cases of brain bleeding, "some of which have been fatal."
"Today’s action is the first verification that a drug targeting the underlying disease process of Alzheimer’s disease has shown clinical benefit in this devastating disease," said Teresa Buracchio, acting director of the Office of Neuroscience in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.
#2
I am hoping to lose all recall of the various villains from the original Lost In Space racially the talking carrot and those weird purple faced guys wearing bowler hats. Unfortunately, I mostly forget where I put my keys or stamps.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/07/2023 12:39 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...either Ernst Stavro Blofeld or Auric Goldfinger come true...
[NYP] She’s failed to ink a job deal.
...an autistic sixteen year old Swedish expert on climate change...
[Epoch Times] Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has teased that it’s launching a platform to rival Twitter. Called "Threads," the Meta-backed microblogging platform is billed as "Instagram’s text-based conversation app," according to a listing on Apple’s App Store.
[NYP] You’ve heard of "long COVID," the cases of people who can’t shake the lingering symptoms of COVID-19.
