The first morning slot on a Sunday is usually musical, baroque, but if there is none, then my second thought is Pater Gunn … and there are many awaiting us in the vault … but maybe later. This time, 0900, really needs to be musical, e.g. Vivaldi but we’ve had most of him recently … so a thought started to form (careful, dangerous).
Let’s have the jazz early, not pre-last post. You’ll recall this past week it started shimmying, then jitterbug, zydeco, ragtime, non-vocal jazz, even some Goodman and Peggy Lee swing … there was a long post on Keith Emerson and Oscar Peterson, which brought in boogie, plus modern jazz (not my bag I’m afraid, quite Felonious, I’d rather be a Monk, frankly).
One interesting diversion were the Gennett and Vocalion recordings, inc. jam sessions (the Midnight Rounders below, late 20s) … but first, Jelly Rolls opening of non-vocal jazz to the masses earlier in the 20s.
Those Gennett and Vocalion jam sessions .. players crouded into the studio, see what they could come up with, free form:
And then, past Oscar Peterson asking Keith Emerson why … why go back to early forms, e.g. ragtime and boogie, stride? People like it, that’s why. Even Brendan here had people interested:
Me? I love the more raw sound, the garage rock, early artists. Refined is nice, admirable … but the early years give it all context imho. And voices in the bkgd, showing there were humans present, having a ball.
(0755) Morning all … it’s confused in the sky out there. Please don’t forget the opening post on Alberta weekend, also Aberfan tomorrow. (0844) Brighter out there now. (0845)
7. One for the Lord, via Ed
6. One of mine from X
5. Steve at 1518
Wisconsin Elections Commission Sparks Uproar After Banning All Municipal Clerks from Checking If Voters are US Citizens – Ruling Comes Days Before Critical Gubernatorial Election
Here is the Discovery that Triggered the Federal Agents’ Raid on Ilhan Omar’s DC Home
WA School District That Forced Kids to Hide Bibles in “Concealed Envelopes” Must Now Apologize, Undergo Religious Liberty Training, and Fork Over $275K
Iran Used Submarines to Arm Yemen’s Houthis
Ukrainian Man-Catchers Breached Moldova’s Border for “Prey”
The 25-minute threshold: Why prolonged sitting silences your muscles and how to counteract it
NHS nurse denied state vaccine injury payout because she was assessed as less than 60% disabled by AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine
Study that claimed Amish were worse off for refusing COVID measures and vaccines was flawed
A ‘No’ Vote On Virginia Amendment 2 Is A Vote for Marriage
Much more.
4. Quora this morning (US site, remember)
How come men aren’t sympathetic to the female loneliness epidemic
I’m going to answer this as a guy whose friends are mostly (>50%) are women. Most of them are my age, plus-minus 10 years, and most of them are indeed single.
In these gender discussions online, on Quora included, I feel like I’m the outlier because I’ve rarely found anything resembling what the typical answers by men say. This question is no different. And I think this is because I do talk to my women friends freely about their (and my) romantic life.
Many of them are single because the men they kept finding does NOT meet the bare minimum standard. And I don’t mean any crazy lofty things like high 6-figure salary or their own house right after college (in fact, none of them ever mentioned material wants—maybe because most of them have Master’s or PhD and/or a good job, so can take care of themselves), but just being a decent guy. I’m talking about basic hygiene, a little common sense, and not being misogynistic. They will get hundreds of likes on Tinder and the likes but this simple filter eliminates an unbelievably huge number of them.
I can dismiss this as a fluke if this happened to one person in one place, but since there are many of them and they are spread through the entire length of continental US, then it’s got to be more than a coincidence.
Firstly, they want someone who have similar views about relationships. Many of them, at this stage, want a permanent partner, i.e. old-school marriage. No, as far as I know, they don’t sleep around campus back in the day (I’ve been friends with some of them for nearly 10 years and it would be obvious), so there goes your typical incel rant against them. But despite all that craze surrounding tradwives, not many men of my age are really committed to marriage.
After that, they will also filter for personal preferences. Political views can be one (and in this age of Trump, that’s more important than ever for many of them). Interests could be another, after all you better have a common ground to talk about when you’re spending time with each other. Similar level of intelligence and education is also good. I’m not being elitist with that one because one of them went out for a few dates with this guy who has an expensive Master’s degree from a private college and yet is dumber than a bag of rocks and has the awareness of a koala when it comes to anything beyond his daily life; it was impossible for her or me and my friends to talk to him. The funniest one was how one of them broke up because he’s a vegetarian and she’s not and she can’t really go out to eat with him. I don’t see that being petty; it’s bound to cause issues later on if not discussed early.
After this, only very few guys are left, if any. Many of them simply never got more than a few dates before they realize they aren’t compatible. In a way, I do feel honored that I must have passed their filters as a friend.
What about friends? You ask. Similar filters, but less stringent. However, it still baffles my mind just how many guys can’t pass the misogyny filter. I wish I’m exaggerating, but there is indeed a significant number of young men who still can’t see women as equals. I’ve experienced it myself as a teaching assistant, where students act differently in front of me vs one of my friends even though we are quite similar in physical build and academic qualifications—others have it even worse.
If there’s a takeaway from this is that women are generally reasonable but many men can’t meet their requirement. However, I can say the same with many women too. And it’s not hard for men to be sympathetic; we just need to sit down and listen.
3. DAD at 1518
a) French flee as Mélenchon unveils radical 2027 budget plan. Wealthy French citizens are rushing to move assets abroad amid fears that far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s proposed 100-billion-euro tax increase could devastate their fortunes.
b) French Member of the European Parliament Marion Maréchal [niece of Marine Le Pen] denounced the “taboo” around discussions of the underlying causes of the youth revolt spreading across the country, which she said is the failure to assimilate immigrant groups into French culture. The demonstrations and riots ostensibly over a lack of school funding will hit their one-month anniversary this week, with mayhem and violence continuing despite thousands of arrests.
c) Migration has cost German taxpayers at least €400 billion since 2016. The €400 billion figure does not include education, police, court, prison, and healthcare costs, just to name a few, which means the real burden on German taxpayers is far higher.
d) The modern welfare state is a European invention—but can it survive? At the Social Sciences Plenary, Stein Kuhnle traced its golden age, its crisis decades, and rising social spending across OECD countries, before asking whether economic, political, and moral sustainability can hold amid demographic change, geopolitical crises, and deepening inequality.
e) E85 Superethanol Under One Euro Per Litre Wins Over Drivers. Sales of conversion kits enabling petrol vehicles to run on cheaper E85 biofuel are soaring across France, with some manufacturers reporting tenfold increases as motorists seek relief from pump prices. The conversion devices range in price from approximately 600 to 1,200 euros depending on engine size and manufacturer.
Good reader, leave aside for now whether Alberta has a hope in hades of doing it … the point is the progress of the process versus evil karney and globopsycho. That’s the true point here.
When those outside of Alberta start speaking of it, that’s good. Again I say, where it ends up is in the lap of the Lord. Our job is to do our part, as one small cog each, that’s all.
Going to open here with an X post from some days back …
Remember that Alberta officially votes on October 19th but people I know have already early voted … I presume by mail-in. These are the ballot and other papers, sent by Sarah @shankarita .
Afterthoughts
(This will remain open for me to add to from Sarah, X, elsewhere, through today and tomorrow.)
Ari Emmanuel gets a mentioned – he who tried to rehabilitate Ginge and Whinge. It’s a big club etc etc…
14. Steve
Rupert Lowe and Eva Vlaar: A bold vision to Restore Britain and Save Europe:
13. Greedy eyes, eyeing your home
That does seem the type of thing they’re trying on over here. Do you have any spare rooms you don’t really need? Fit three or four guests in there, govt can.
12. Thought this an excellent piece of advice I should take onboard
11. This one’s from Quora
… remembering it’s the US workplace, though I’ve seen examples in the UK during a brief spell of jobhunting (between positions let’s say a couple of decades back). The account below is quite jaundiced but I’m thinking not without reason … it’s about HR.
Going back many decades, apart from long periods of self-employment … when I was actually looking, it was usual to go through a known agency in the field who interviewed us and decided where we best fitted what had come in. HR as a department was not around yet afa I know.
The question was “What makes HR instantly reject a candidate after an interview?”
Assuming here that the CV-resume, qualifications, personability, attire, manner, age … all that stands up … what is it at the interview, other than these, which is an immediate dealbreaker? One chap replied thus:
“The reason: HR people — the single most incompetent members of any firm or university — don’t like to be confronted with the truth. They make a point of confronting candidates with the many (arguable) mistakes the candidates come in with, but HR people never doubt their own magical analyzing powers over others — even if their own meager CV says otherwise.
Time and again, I’ver learned that HR people are in a committee to make candidates suffer — or at least, to show how much power they have (even though they lack the expertise).
THE DON’Ts: never claim, in your two-yearly HR follow-up, that you are doing great, and that nothing’s going wrong whatsoever: the HR person will put you to the sword, because you dared to feel fine about yourself. HR people — they come from social sciences, so what did you expect ? — will show you that this very evaluation is not about feeling fine. You have mistakes, you made them, and you will admit to them (even if none of them are true).
THE DOs: my own approach is very simple. I enter the room knowing very well what is good and what might not be good about me, and even if everything is perfect, I start — I do not wait: I START — listing all my shortcomings and mistakes, even if nothing in it is true. Next, I summarize my action plan to work on my many mistakes. (On the way, I mention some of my plus points.)
The HR person wants to jump me (but doesn’t just yet), because she thinks that vulnerable people are great, and confident people are bad. That’s what she learned, and still believes. (It’s social sciences after all.)
She has no idea I am playing her, because the HR philosophy does not allow for an extra layer of depth. It always works because she doesn’t understand the very mechanism in which she fails time and again.
So to be very honest, I think your question does not have any merit: the HR department is not capable to evaluate candidates, unless it boils down to ticking off simple boxes that any other member of the company should be able to do as well. With less fuss, of course —
And much more competence.”
Right … I remember being sent to an office in a nearby city worked by one HR woman and she was quite personable to be honest. We had the interview, she even asked if I had any more questions, don’t hesitate … she seemed fine. Silly me, I did have one, seconds after departing, knocked again, she came to the door and literally demanded: “What do you want?” That’s true. Her attitude had totally altered to savage. I excused myself and went.
It was the sudden change which got me, like two different people. I’m wondering what’s the best way to describe the type … I think a “Joyce Thacker” or “Anneliese Dodds” … actually, any female Labour MP would do. Very bad news, incompetent and one thing they always do is say (if with a firm) something like: “I’ve been in coding now for eighteen years,” or similar. No she has not … she’s been in HR since her waitressing or bartending.
Think I dodged a few bullets, the way things went in my working life … I can imagine her saying sorry, no can do, so that I can do the John Cleese thing … “Yes, well that’s the kind of blinkered, philistine pig-ignorance I’ve come to expect from you non-creative garbage …” and so on. Never had the chance. Best I could get was, “There’s a lot of hate in you, James,” from a psychology teacher who got Fromm wrong, easy slip to make. I understand she stormed into the staffroom cursing after that session. There we go. The AV man told me next day they were creasing themselves. Still, not good on my part … sorry me.
For a start, it’s called Dr. Broadway, not whatever’s on the front … it also restarts at a tad after 21 minutes. Says it’s a crime mystery but seems more 40s comedy. Shall have to scroll through first and see.
… with an impressive point numbering system further down:
Israeli spyware is confirmed on our phones. This should be headline news but none of our mainstream media is covering it, of course. So we will.
An Israeli ad company called Discover-Tech used ordinary online ads to plant spyware on people’s devices, and nobody had to click anything. The ad just had to load on a website or inside an app for you to be infected.
Citizen Lab and the ad security firm Confiant published the findings yesterday. Researchers went through roughly 4 billion ad-bidding records and found Discover-Tech ads running on more than 120,000 websites and 70,000 apps between March and June of this year. Confiant says the company was serving at least 10 million ads a day.
The platform was called Controlium. According to Citizen Lab, it let spyware companies use ad auctions to profile and unmask users, then send an infected ad to the one person they wanted to hack. The ads were also pulling cookies and login tokens from the sites they ran on. Israeli corporate records list Dekel Boni as the company’s founding director and sole shareholder.
The main spyware customer was Candiru, the Israeli firm the U.S. government blacklisted in 2021, which now goes by Integrity Labs. Five years after that blacklisting, it was still reaching devices through ad inventory on Google, Comcast-owned Beeswax and Russia’s Yandex. Google had Discover-Tech on its approved vendor list from 2020 until this week.
At least 45 Al Jazeera devices were targeted in 2024 and 2025. Candiru’s 2021 shareholder filings reportedly listed a minority investor described as a proxy for Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, and Qatar also funds Al Jazeera. If that holds up, Qatari state money was sitting inside the company whose spyware was later aimed at Qatar’s own news network.
The heaviest targeting was in the Palestinian territories, where Discover-Tech served almost 2% of all digital ads and about 10% on April 7. Traffic also reached the Armenian prime minister’s office, courts, universities and defense organizations.
Google and the other ad platforms cut Discover-Tech off after the report came out. What nobody has answered yet is who paid for the ad buys, and how a company working with a U.S.-blacklisted spyware vendor passed vendor review for six years.
I am going to look into this today to see if we can figure out who was buying the ads. Interesting timing considering my article yesterday….
Here’s what to do to protect yourself:
(1) Use an ad blocker. Citizen Lab calls ad-blocking a cybersecurity best practice and says there is no consistently safe way to be exposed to targeted ads. On iPhone, add a Safari content blocker. On Android, use Brave or Firefox with uBlock Origin. Ad blockers only work in your browser, not inside apps, so it also helps to delete free ad-supported apps you don’t need. Kill your advertising ID.
(2) iPhone: Settings > Privacy & Security > Tracking, and turn off “Allow Apps to Request to Track.” Then Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising, and turn Personalized Ads off.
(2) Android 12 or later: Settings > Privacy > Ads > Delete Advertising ID. Then in Settings > Google > All Services > Privacy & security > Ads > Ads privacy, turn off Ad topics and Ad measurement.
(3) Windows 11: Settings > Privacy & Security > General, and turn off personalized ads using your advertising ID.
(4) Update your phone and restart it often. Many zero-click exploits don’t survive a reboot, so a daily restart forces attackers to reinfect you.
Victor Davis Hanson Talks About Shifting Midterms and GOP Momentum: ‘Something’s Definitely Going On’
Florida: 1,827 Noncitizens Removed from Voter Rolls Allegedly Cast 7,035 Ballots — Thousands More Removed as Election Integrity Groups Demand Answers
California: Trump DOJ Officially Sues Far-Left California After State Refuses to Review More Than 20,000 Suspected Noncitizens Sent Mail-In Ballots
Hollywood Mega Producer Admits to Joe Rogan That Once Societies Abandon God, They Turn To Tyranny
Few Massive Bunker-Busters Left in US for Future Iran Strikes
Ukraine Runs Out of Patriot Missiles as Trump Turns on Zelensky
Morning Exercise Associated With Lower Cardiometabolic Risk, Study Finds
Scary and astonishing truths about the toxic COVID vaccine
Soros’ puppet files lawsuit against CDC for not recommending childhood vaccines
Much more.
4. Running this as a discussion point rather than as fact
3. DAD at 1517
a) Retour des Gilets jaunes. {Return of the Yellow Vests.} November 2018: the Gilets Jaunes movement began, just eighteen months after the election of President Emmanuel Macron. Even then, fuel prices were the driving force behind this popular mobilisation, which brought together millions of people across the country. October 2026: the situation remains just as explosive, and Petrol is still just as expensive—with another presidential election now only seven months away.
b) French Student Protesters chant “Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres” — roughly translating to “In the name of God, it’s the darkness”. A slogan mixing Islamic invocation “Bismillah” with French street slang has become a controversial rallying cry for high school protests….[One asks oneself, Why?]
c) National Security Adviser’s wife appears to back Palestine Action. Author Sarah Helm, married to NSA Jonathan Powell, tweeted in support of Sally Rooney in the wake of Adam Boulton’s criticism:… “God help us authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action”. Reform’s Danny Kruger has written to Andy Burnham after Sarah Helm, wife of National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell, appeared to support Palestine Action in a post on X yesterday. Palestine Action is a proscribed organisation.
d) Calling migrants ‘illegal’, criticising political Islam, holding party socials centred around alcohol or highlighting Islamic hostility towards homosexuality could all fall under the Muslim Greens’ proposed guidance on Islamophobia. The recently published document comes as the party itself battles extremism and Islamist influence from within.
e) Kiran Kaur, the mother of Henry Nowak’s murderer, who was imprisoned for hiding the dagger used in the killing, could be released after serving just one-third of her three-year sentence under Labour’s new Earned Progression Scheme. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage called the move an ‘insult to decency’ and said she should serve the full term before being deported. (JH: Typical Farage full steam on the easy ones to improve his cred while avoiding the tough questions.)
Three possible topics this Saturday morning with much incoming on them:
The Katie Zacharia ousting, Susan Wiles etc. (goes on nearly forever)
The food additive tale in the UK (we discussed at UHC yesterday)
Doctors’ appointments through NHS now (only one item)
I’m thinking the most useful for Orphans and Jstack readers might be the food additive avoidance ideas, assuming you know about the December 13th mandatory adding of folic acid, not folate, to non wholemeal flour in the UK, though I note it’s already in breads I saw in the US.
Contra-indications, medically, are a few, inc. those with stents (inc. moi) and those it’s meant to help are apparently pregnant women. There’s the aspect of the govt messing with our food of course, plus major commercial industrialising of food, inc. seed oils, palm oil … ain’t good.
They also sell French flour which is unfortified. Ooh la la! If we make bread for the freezer we cut it into toaster sized slices first then it is always ready for breakfast or snacking. Nothing worse than fancying a piece of toast and having to wait to defrost the whole loaf.
Andy wrote: I’m getting spelt flour from Morrisons. M&S also don’t fortify their flour or bread mixes yet, or just aren’t telling us. I hand made a white loaf the other day from a bread mix, yeast etc added. Turned out nice. Next time I’ll bake two or three, good way to fill up corners of the freezer.
Isilme: Another place in the UK to get flour without folic acid (white or wholemeal) is . https://www.buywholefoodsonline.co.uk/ But I like the look of Ratton Pantry too. I will have to investigate fully as they seem to have a range of unusual flours. I’m enjoying making bread but I’m unhappy with the breadmaker now because the loaves have a hole where the paddle goes. So when I have a bit of time I might try making a no-knead bread and see how that gets on.
JH: Ratton Pantry, by the way, is in Eastbourne. Also, if I missed your suggestions here, pls forgive, not intentional, do tell us.
