Blake Lively allegedly threatened to leak embarrassing private texts from bestie Taylor Swift unless the pop star agreed to publicly back the actress in her feud with co-star Justin Baldoni, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.
The explosive revelation appears in a legal letter filed Wednesday by Baldoni’s lawyers, in response to Lively’s request to quash their subpoena to the singer.
The court filing alleges that the Gossip Girl alum had tried to pressure Swift, 35, to issue a public statement in support of her and urged her to delete text messages between them during her escalating legal battle with Baldoni, 41.
I was pretty sure this wasn’t going to end well for Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds, but I had no idea they were in this far over their heads. Taylor Swift goes out of her way to destroy guys she dated for three weeks, imagine what she’s likely to do when faced with this sort of betrayal from a former friend.
One has to assume Russian scientists are watching the situation closely, since this might be the most devastating non-nuclear weapon to be dropped since the Oreshnik was introduced.
The original plan was to print THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY in the same Italian cowhide with which we’ve been binding the Library and History books to date. However, after five years of searching, we have finally located quality pigskin leather in the quantities we require and we also have access to some higher-quality cowhide from the same supplier. Hence the poll at the Castalia Library substack concerning the preferences of the backers and prospective retroactive backers.
It’s no longer possible to pretend that the Episcopalian Church is Christian anymore:
Sean Rowe, the head of the Episcopal Migration Ministries, which leads The Episcopal Church, announced his organization will not resettle white Afrikaners refugees from South Africa.
In a letter published on May 12, Rowe revealed that the United States federal government requested Episcopal Migration Ministries to “resettle white Afrikaners from South Africa whom the U.S. government classified as refugees.”
However, he then announced the organization would not be doing it. He explained, “In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step.”
Episcopalians are more committed to diversity and the Devil, and worshiping at the altar of their black gods, than they are to the Churchian principles that they formerly espoused. Of course, those Churchian principles were always fake modifications of genuine Christian principles.
So much for all that “Jesus was a refugee” nonsense. Which was always blitheringly stupid and historically ignorant, considering that his family did the Roman equivalent of moving from New Jersey to Alabama because they had fallen afoul of the mayor of Newark.
There are multiple reports that Hungary has moved potential invasion forces to the Ukrainian border:
Unexpected: Hungary pulls tanks and heavy armored vehicles to the border with Ukraine
Hungary has deployed tanks and armored vehicles to 5 main checkpoints on the Hungarian-Ukrainian border: Zakhony, Beregshurany, Tisabech, Barabash and Nagybodosh.
It is noteworthy that this happened after the espionage scandal, when Hungary expelled two Ukrainians from the embassy who were engaged in espionage. This led to the breakdown of negotiations in Uzhhorod, where 11 conditions for the restoration of the rights of the Hungarian national minority were to be discussed on May 12.
Since the EU is already threatening to strip Hungary of its right to vote, Hungary might as well take action to recover the land that was historically Hungarian and is populated by Hungarian-speaking Hungarians. There certainly won’t be anything that the Kiev regime could do about it, and it would open another front at a time that the regime’s forces are on the verge of collapse all across the various Russian fronts.
Hal Turner sees this potential reclamation of Transcarpathia as a major threat to the stability of the European Union.
If this is what Hungary is actually doing, re-taking Transcarpathia, the European Union will likely go berserk. They are already fed-up with Hungary voting to deny additional aid to Ukraine. A vote coming later this week, is specifically being designed to neutralize Hungary’s ability to bloc further EU aid to Ukraine; they will adopt legislation in a manner that prevents a single nation from blocking more aid. Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who leads Hungary, has already seen the writing on the wall of Europe when, last month, discussions took place to strip Hungary of EU voting rights.
If Hungary is going to switch sides, as it certainly should, this would probably be an optimal time to do so, since there aren’t any forces in Europe capable of intervening, especially not if Russia recognizes Hungary’s right to reclaim its historical land and respects the rights to self-determination of the Transcarpathians.
I’m 49 and Australian. Without any shadow of doubt, this singular Owen and Vox conversation was more intellectually charged than anything our local media had thrown up in my entire lifetime.
High praise indeed. If you haven’t resubscribed yet, this is the time to do so, unless you’re outside the USA, in which case you’ll need to wait two more weeks. My current streaming schedule:
Monday: Big Bear Stream with Owen
Wednesday: Darkstream
Thursday: Arkhaven Nights with JDA
Friday/Saturday: Darkstream
I plan to keep to this schedule over the summer as we work to rebuild the subscriber base. And I haven’t forgotten about the Taiwan Invasion analysis; I will give everyone a heads-up before I stream that one.
The NBA is fixed. Not just the playoff games, but even the team rosters. There hasn’t been an NBA draft lottery this obviously fixed since 1985, when the New York Knicks won the right to draft Patrick Ewing.
When David Stern opened the envelope containing the No.1 pick, it contained the Knicks logo. Some argue that the league froze the Knicks’ envelope so Stern could identify it. The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, who was then working for ESPN, believed in the theory that the Knicks’ envelope had a crease so the commissioner could pick it from the group.
“So you’re telling me that, out of the seven envelopes in that glass drum, during a lottery when the NBA desperately needed the most ballyhooed college center in 15 years to save the league’s marquee franchise, the commissioner coincidentally pulled out the envelope with a giant crease in the corner that happened to have the Knicks logo in it?” wrote Simmons.
Of course, Commissioner Stern denied the accusations. Some league and team officials even laughed about it. However, given what Simmons called “indisputable video evidence” and the circumstances surrounding the 1985 NBA Draft, there was enough reason to believe it was not impossible.
Now the Dallas Mavericks have “defied the odds” and despite a 1.8 percent chance, managed to win the first pick in the 2025 draft lottery.
Three months removed from the most shocking trade in league history, Dallas defied the 1.8% lottery odds and suddenly has life again.
Translation: Dallas just collected its reward from the league for gifting Luka Dončić to the league’s marquis franchise in Los Angeles. I was wondering why on Earth Dallas would ever send him to LA, but now we know what their real incentive was.
An SG reader is struggling with the idea that only a small percentage of the population are emotionally exosynaesthetic:
I’m struggling with the idea that only a small portion of the population has that capacity.
Why? Have you talked to any actual humans lately? It’s much more likely that you simply don’t understand what empathy actually is.
Note that these five examples below are not definitions that cover the entire meaning of the terms and set limits on their applications, they are just explanatory examples meant to help you understand the differences between the concepts.
Empathy: I know how you feel in your situation.
Chrysopathy: I know how I would feel in your situation.
Sympathy: I feel bad about your situation.
Apathy: I have no feelings about your situation.
Antipathy: I feel pleased about your situation.
Now think about how few people even bother to know what someone else’s situation actually is, much less have basic sympathy for it. Chrysopathy is the best that most people can do; because women are solipsistic they have absolutely no empathetic ability whatsoever and it is a very good thing that they do not.
34 years ago it was my honor and privilege to lead American soldiers to victory in battle to witness the courage and valor of American soldiers at a time and a place when death was all around us. Fortunately we sustained very few casualties however in the years that followed I watched many of the soldiers I served with pass on, not on foreign battlefields, but on American soil, frequently forgotten by the nation they served. In one case, a major who served with me as a lieutenant in 1993 committed suicide, the memories of the friends he lost in Iraq during a pointless, self-defeating occupation after 2003 were more than he could bear.
Yet who today remembers the Iraq war that began in 2003, or that the American military intervention was justified on the utterly false grounds that weapons of mass destruction were being built inside Iraq. The conflict took the lives of nearly 4,500 Americans in uniform, not including contractors, of course, and cost $2 trillion. At least 800,000 Iraqi citizens were internally displaced and several hundred thousand Iraqi citizens lost their lives.
Tonight I break my silence, not just for the young officer that committed suicide, but for the wives, husbands, children, and parents who endured the crushing grief of loss, who received a folded flag and were left alone to trace the name of a loved one on a cold gravestone. War is a predator. It consumes our best, our strength, and our resources, but its most terrible damage is often unseen. War also forces Americans to embrace brutality, to justify barbarism, to become something harder, colder, less humane. President Trump promised to stop the endless wars; now he really needs to do it. Americans currently stand at what Lincoln would call the fiery trial, through which we pass war with Iran or peace for America. The choice will echo through generations. We’re very fortunate the Iranians are willing to talk to us again, and perhaps we can reach a solution but, there are no guarantees. That will take leadership from the highest levels from President Trump.
Let me speak plainly about what awaits if Washington chooses war with Iran. Within hours of the first strike, Iran will seal the straight of Hormuz, choking the artery through which one of the world’s oil flows. Gas prices will not merely rise they may erupt like a volcano burning through family budgets. The economic security Americans built with their own hands since the pandemic disaster could be wrecked. Immediate price increases and loss of supplies could also result, yet the cost and treasure stands as nothing before the cost in blood. Iran is not the Iraq of our past wars. Iran consists of 85 million people fortified by mountains when the Roman Empire was young, defended by modern weapons and effectively allied with nuclear-armed powers, Russia and China, that have drawn clear and unambiguous red lines.
For the first time since missiles stood in Cuba we face not only the shadow but the real substance of nuclear confrontation, not for our country, but for the regional ambitions of a foreign state 7,000 miles from home. We must face the truth that weaker allies often attempt to make their wars our wars. America’s soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines should not be sacrificed for territoria lexpansions that serve no vital American strategic interest.
I did not witness war through PowerPoint slides or sanitized screens and situation rooms, but through bloody fog of war. I tell you with the full authority of my battlefield experience, this war, if it comes with Iran, is not necessary. this war is also not just. This war is not worthy of America. We must not sacrifice American lives on foreign soil while American soil thirsts for our attention. We must not trade American prosperity for another state’s regional hegemony while American prosperity deteriorates. We must not abandon America’s democratic principles for imperial ambition while those principles, our best hope for justice, fade for lack of devotion. The true strength of America has never been measured by regimes toppled, but by lives improved.
James Delingpole actually reads Machiavelli for the first time and discovers that the generally accepted narrative about the Florentine is almost completely false:
Machiavelli was the victim of a Europe-wide hit job. By the time anyone outside Italy had read The Prince – it wasn’t translated into English til 1640 – Machiavelli’s name had long since become a byword for evil. England’s last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury Cardinal Pole, who resented his anti-clericism and his rudery towards the Pope, set the ball rolling by declaring him an ‘Enemy of the human race’. Machiavelli’s Christian name – Niccolo – was said to have given the devil his nickname, “Old Nick”. Elizabethan dramatists blamed him as the inspiration for all the scheming and murder that took place in Renaissance Italy. They hated him in France, too, where he was blamed for inspiring the behaviour of Catherine de Medici.
But what had Machiavelli actually done to deserve all this? Not a lot, as it happens. But enough Renaissance history and literary criticism. I want to conclude by extrapolating a more general truth about the nature of our understanding of the world. And about how the dark rulers who currently lord it over us – the modern equivalent of the Medicis, the Pope, Charles V and the various Italian city states, I suppose – get away so easily with doing to us what they do.
One of the things we Awake types are often lamenting is the way in which the tiniest, smallest sliver of a fraction of the world’s population – the Cabal; the Predator Class; The Powers That Be; the Satanic Bloodlines; call them what you will – has yet been able to treat us like cattle, or worse than cattle, for generation upon generation. And while obviously, I’m not letting the Cabal off the hook – they really are evil – I do think there’s a degree to which we have invited our own destruction by being so complacent and lazy.
I’m blaming myself as much as anyone. Especially the person I was before I woke up. There I was, blessed with one of the best educations the world supposedly offers, and yet still, mostly, I remained mired in ignorance because I took too easily for granted what I had been told by my imagined superiors – parents, teachers, the government, ‘experts’, whoever.
The Machiavelli thing is just one tiny example of this. Here, briefly, I have with luck demonstrated that everything 99.99 per cent of the people who’ve heard of Machiavelli know about one of the bigger names in history, or political philosophy anyway, is a caricature of a travesty of complete nonsense. It’s at best a crass simplification; at worst – probably for the usual reasons of propaganda and political intrigue – a cynical misrepresentation.
And it happened because, as usual, none of us did our homework. We regurgitated what teacher wanted to hear – Machiavelli bad, m’kay – and the reason teacher wanted to hear it was because he or she hadn’t bothered to do the homework either. Rather than read the actual book, we all went with the received idea of people who hadn’t read the book and took it on trust that the generally accepted narrative was the correct one.
I am aware that some are dubious about my contention about the importance of the Junior Classics, Castalia Library, UATV, and preserving knowledge for the future. But when one considers the fact that every single backer of the Junior Classics, and every subscriber to Castalia Library, are observably better informed with regards to history, philosophy, science, and religion than even the graduates of some of the most elite college educations in the West, that contention suddenly appears much more soundly based on the available evidence.
