Ironhold

What you're forgetting is that in the United States, "Jewish" is functionally an ethnicity. Ask yourself how many of those people are actually actively practicing any sort of religious belief system. Also, there are quite a few people of Jewish ancestry in the entertainment industry who are not engaged in what you claim they're engaged in. Classic examples include such talents as Jack Benny, the Marx Brothers, and Soupy Sales, while more recent examples include Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. And I'm going to need to see your source citations on most of the rest of that. As it is, a *lot* of the deaths attributed to the early Soviet Union were actually the result of famine. The Soviet leadership refused to accept Darwinistic evolution as a theory regarding how humanity came into existence, and so Astroturf'd a fringe theory called Lysenkoism into the forefront. Lysenko's theory argued that genes in plants and animals like were changed by the struggle to survive, and so several key agricultural officials gave very foolish orders to the Soviet farmers in the belief that doing so would force the seeds to grow and thrive, orders like "scatter your seeds onto the snow packs so that they can grow hardy by having to resist the cold". Couple this with a lot of other key agricultural leaders not actually understanding agriculture, and you have people starving to death in droves. Famine was also a major cause of death in China's "Great Leap Forward", where land owners were forcibly deprived of their lands (and often their lives), land which was to be tended to by unskilled individuals who had been forcibly evicted from the cities and relocated to these farms without any sort of training or experience in how to grow crops or tend to livestock. ...And it's been a major cause of death in Zimbabwe, the result of the ruling government also confiscating land and redistributing it to people who didn't know what they were doing... In fact, to this day one can find supporters of communism, anti-white discrimination, and other such "progressive" beliefs who don't have the first clue how to run a farm or ranch yet are dead set on the belief that literally anyone can do it with no training at all...

The Marriott School of Business has a perennial spot on Bloomberg Business Week's top 40 list when it comes to business schools in the United States, and BYU's animation department is slowly getting attention.

As someone who has known - and been pet parent of - quite a few orange kitties in my time, I can testify that orange kitties are very unique in the sense that they are all, in fact, barely-contained balls of pure chaos energy in a fluffy covering. Imagine something you think no cat could ever do, and it's only a matter of time before an orange kitty will figure out how. Intellectually, they run the gamut. I've seen orange kitties who were smarter than many humans, and orange kitties whose learning curve had long since gone flat. They also run an emotional gamut, in that they will be fiercely loyal to and a loving companion of their designated human but but have no qualms turning into little furry buzzsaws at a moment's provocation. Orange kitty getting too close to a live crab? Not surprised.

I've actually read Gene's circa 2001 autobiography "KISS and Make-Up". In it, he claims that he, Paul, Peter, and IIRC Ace were brainstorming names while at a stoplight one day, and KISS was something they regarded as mutually acceptable; it was short enough to be easily remembered, but distinctive enough that it stood out. As it is, Gene went to Hebrew school after he and his mother arrived in New York City, and so he admitted in the book that he would frequently quote the Bible right back at people who accused him of Satanism back in the 1970s to see what their reaction was. The whole glam rock vibe? Gene claimed that he and Paul were bored with seeing bands that just stood around or sat around playing & didn't do anything to justify the cost of seeing them live. They figured that if they were going to make it worth it for people to buy their tickets they were going to put on an absolute spectacle.

1. Vivziepop is *not* a good example of anything other than possibly having undiagnosed mental health issues if what I've heard from various people who are familiar with her and her creations are anything to go by. 2. A better example would actually be the original "Diamonds Are Forever" novel as written by Ian Fleming all the way back in 1956. When Bond is meeting with Felix Leitner, Felix implies - using terminology of the day - that Wint and Kidd, a pair of hired goons working for the Spang Brothers, are a homosexual couple. At first this seems like a bizarre bit to throw in, but then near the end of the book Bond has to neutralize them on a crowded ocean liner without arousing suspicion and so stages their deaths to look like a murder-suicide after a heated dispute - the kind angry lovers might have - got out of hand & a gun was drawn. Fleming was, surprisingly, far *more* progressive in his handling of the two characters than the 1971 movie would be, with the movie depicting them in a very stereotypical fashion for the era.

In addition to being an entertainment writer, I've also dabbled in writing fiction. I've encountered a number of people who identify as LGBT over the years. Most of these individuals see their identity as a *part* of who they are, and would generally rather be known for the sum total of their being than simply this one single aspect or any other single aspect. Some of them have actually expressed to me their disdain at how a lot of modern content creators are choosing to "represent" the movement, as they feel that the content creators are all too often either not doing it for honest reasons or trying to force stereotypical characters in place as "representation" instead of producing well-rounded and holistic characters who just happen to be LGBT. Have I written any openly LGBT characters? No. However, I do admit that if I was working on a series with a large enough ensemble cast it wouldn't be off the table... provided, of course, that the character being LGBT actually serves some sort of purpose beyond just being metaphorical window-dressing and some of the LGBT people I know sign off on the character as being properly holistic and not just stereotypical. What he's talking about, however, is... more of the same that some of those very same LGBT individuals I know have been complaining about. I don't think that's going to work out the way he thinks it's going to work out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimba_the_White_Lion_(TV_series) There's a long-running conspiracy theory which holds that Disney was intending to create an adaptation of Japanese franchise "Kimba The White Lion" since the English dub of the anime was in the public domain in the United States, only to learn that someone was trying to obtain a new copyright for a new English dub, at which point they hastily reworked their plans into the legally distinct Lion King. Evidence for this theory includes early production artwork that shows Simba as white in color, a TV Guide entry that wrongly refers to the film as "The Jungle Emperor" (an alternate name for Kimba), and the various parallels between the film and various previous entries in the Kimba franchise.

I had to have a bit of a talk with the staff at the wound care clinic today. Back in the Fall of 2022 I had a real-life event that pushed me to the limit physically and mentally, such that I basically blew my heart out. It's been a long road to recovery, and as part of it I've had swelling in my legs and feet. My cardiologist seconded me to the wound care facility at a local hospital to deal with it, and I've been seeing them every so many weeks since. Well, last December I was supposed to have an in-home visit from someone who dealt in medical devices. He was supposed to check me out for a special device that would help with my legs, but an hour before he was supposed to show up he called me to cancel. 1. He was so busy he couldn't make it. 2. My deductible was the highest he'd ever seen and I was nowhere close to even meeting it despite it being December, so I'd have had to pay out of pocket anyway. In his eyes, it was better for everyone if I waited until this year started. I had to explain to wound care what happened, how high my deductible was, and why I got stuck with such a terrible Exchange insurance plan to where I'm not getting all of the treatment I need.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controversy That was indeed the case. For those who aren't aware, weeks before the 2020 election the New York Post ran a story claiming that Hunter Biden had left a laptop at a computer repair facility for so long that the store's "pick it up within X amount of time or we own it" policy kicked in. The owner cloned the hard drive so that he had a backup of the data, the idea being that he could otherwise purge and do a factory-level refresh of the computer to sell it as a used device in order to recover his expenses in fixing it. The story further went that when the owner was going through the data on the cloned hard drive, he discovered significant evidence that Hunter Biden had engaged in numerous illegal activities and might have even been involved in a kickback scheme involving his father. When the Post published the information, Facebook and Twitter responded by locking their accounts, hastily declaring the material to be "Russian disinformation", and refusing to unlock the accounts until such time as the Post agreed to retract the story and delete all references to it. In the four years since then, it's been confirmed that the information did indeed come from a computer Hunter owned, that it did indeed show him engaged in various illegal activities (such as the consumption of illicit substances), that the story was essentially real, and that there *was* an active effort on the part of various individuals both at those companies *and* inside the government to suppress the story ahead of the election. IIRC, some of this material was actually used as evidence in the legal case against Hunter. It's undeniable that this story was forcibly suppressed in order to help Biden win in 2020, and the fact that most of the allegations have retroactively been confirmed to some degree has fed the overall conspiracy theory claiming that 2020 was stolen. Throw in Biden's blanket pardon of Hunter despite his promise, and it's now believed that Biden may indeed have been trying to cover something up.

While racial supremacists - of *all* races - do exist, various law enforcement groups have fixated on white supremacist groups and people they suspect of such almost to the exclusion of other groups they should have been watching out for. Not helping matters any is that there are people who fear reporting folks of certain demographic groups lest they be accused of racism or bigotry. This was a big part of why Nidal Hassan wasn't stopped before he shot up Fort Hood, as his co-workers feared that if they tried to warn the higher-ups that he was becoming violent and angry they'd be accused of being bigoted towards Muslims and would thus have their careers destroyed.

As I've tried to explain to other individuals, when it comes to the extreme right and extreme left there's an alarming level of overlap in the stances they hold; the only real difference is the *motivation behind* those stances. We need to be wary of what's going on around us.

https://apnews.com/article/jimmy-carter-dies-18c198c20352c835bca3eec276020dd7 It's been confirmed that President Carter has passed away.

merry christmas.

happy birthday

What I've heard is this: Supposedly, a medical device that was mildly radioactive or had radioactive material inside of it went missing in the area where most of the original drone sightings were reported. This has led to suspicions that law enforcement is using drones to scout for the device from a safe distance, and that for some reason they've chosen not to alert the public. Now that the drone activity has been spotted, however, people are feeding the frenzy deliberately.

OK. Yesterday it was announced that a scene in an upcoming Pixar TV series was pulled because it's about one of the characters - a teenage soccer player - being transgender. Well, someone leaked what's known as an animatic, basically a proof of concept in which the storyboard artwork is stitched together. I saw the animatic. It uses surrealistic artwork, and I mean full-on Picasso-level imagery, to try and convey the character's gender dysphoria. After seeing it, I suspect that the scene only got as far *as* the animatic stage before being nixed on the basis that it could likely frighten or confuse children. Based on this, I went back and did some double-checking because an episode of the cartoon series "Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur" was, according to some of the artists who worked on the show, yanked at the last minute because, they claimed, Trump's win was such that Disney was no longer comfortable airing an episode about trans rights. Well... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Girl_and_Devil_Dinosaur#Release ...Wikipedia cites a writer for Polygon who claims that the episode *was pulled a year ago* due to concerns on the part of Disney executives, and that the subsequent decision to cancel the series means that the episode will likely remain unaired despite having been leaked... and people seeing that the episode was about as subtle as a cruise missile strike. So... it seems like Disney, or at least employees for Disney, are now trying to engage in some form of gaslighting over certain kids' cartoons with transgender themes not getting approved.

Out of curiosity, what did you think about the ones you listened to?

Reports and allegations are flying fast & furious, but it's now suspected that the "prisoner" a CNN camera crew helped "escape" one prison facility may have in fact been an interrogator for the regime who they unwittingly helped flee justice. So yeah...

https://apnews.com/article/finance-minister-chrystia-freeland-resigns-trudeau-a8355a62870edd962fee8138dc6bfc77 Apparently, a dispute between the finance minister and PM Trudeau over how best for Canada to handle Trump's threatened tariffs got bitter enough that she's resigned. I don't know the details, but she was a key part of Trudeau's cabinet and so if she's gone he might be gone as well. If that's the case then Trump's tariffs have just upended a foreign government without even having been enacted yet.

Rob Halford - "Away In A Manger" Rob Halford - "What Child Is This?" Rob Halford - "Good King Wenceslas" Manowar - "Stille Nacht" Northern Lights Orchestra - "Celebrate Christmas" Enuff Z'Nuff - "Happy Holiday" Shinedown - "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" Slade - "Merry Xmas Everybody" ("So here it is, Merry Christmas! Everybody's having fun! Look to the future now, it's only just begun!") Trans-Siberian Orchestra - "Old City Bar" I would also recommend Rob Halford's "Get Into The Spirit" due to how absolutely positive the vibes are, but there's a non-zero chance that'll blow your speakers out. "Get into the spirit! Reach up to the sky! Get into the spirit! Raise your spirits! Raise your spirits high!"

YouTube is blocking me because I have an ad blocker going, otherwise I'd have directly linked things already.

"And when the emptiness still gets you down / all alone you walk the lonely ground / just think about the ones you love / and take the loss and rise above" - Enuff Z'Nuff, "Happy Holidays" Believe it or not, I find that rock, metal, and "power pop" bands often have a very real and very *human* grasp of things when it comes to Christmas music, both the classics - like Rob Halford's rendition of "Good King Wenceslas" and Manowar's rendition of "Stille Nacht" - and original songs, like the one I quoted above or the Northern Lights Orchestra's "Celebrate Christmas". I actually prefer Shinedown's version of "Happy X-Mas (War Is Over)" to the original because their rendition is so comparatively raw that it's as if the singer is someone who has just been at war *with themselves* and has now found peace.

In the aftermath of Columbine, one of the things the media latched onto was the revelation that the shooters were on a prescription medication that was *not* approved for use in minors due to instances of psychotic episodes. This medication, coupled with the "Doom" video game franchise and the film "The Basketball Diaries", soon became the official scapegoats for what took place so that society could go on ignoring the sheer number of red flags that should have been highly visible leading up to the incident. A month ago I was trying to explain this to someone who claimed to be a mental health professional, noting that this scapegoating by the media led to a segment of the population coming to distrust prescription psychiatric medications even 30 years on. She had just encountered a person who was distrustful to the point of paranoia, and wondered why the person felt that way. She basically went nuclear with rage when I explained it to her because she somehow believed that I believed it as well. The previous encounter, coupled with her lack of understanding about the chain of events, caused her to fly off the handle. I had to explain things to her repeatedly for her to understand that my neutral tone of voice should have tipped her off, and even then there was never an apology. Rather, she was so fixed in place mentally that she couldn't step outside of herself and see the views of another, let alone comprehend why they might feel that way. This kind of rigid thinking is part of the problem, and likely part of why the apostles didn't catch on sooner.

Basically, so long as the US Military and US Veteran's Administration health care systems - both of which are government-run - are disaster areas, then they'll be cited as examples for why the government can't be trusted to run health care. Most people see it as either for-profit or government-run, so they'll go to the for-profit side instead.

Unlike certain other individuals in the public eye, I don't try to hide my flaws or blame scapegoats. I admit issues I have, and recognize that while certain things hindered my decision-making at times I still made certain decisions and engaged in certain actions. I'm trying to slowly nudge my audience - which often includes the local schools via the Newspapers in Education program - to be better and not make my mistakes.