Yesterday, ProPublica released the results of an investigation they did into “Terrorgram.” They worked in cooperation with PBS’s “Frontline,” and if you watch it regularly, you saw this last night. if not, you can read about it here, and or pick up links to YouTube, the PBS a[[, and Frontline’s website, and watch it at one of those. Only by knowing how these – people – operate can we hope to detect them and report them. Also yesterday, Louis DeJoy resigned – at the worst possible time. Just at the right moment for the Valencia Vlad-the-Impaler to appoint a lunatic who will buy and privatize the Postal Service. Is Philadelphia having earthquakes? Benjamin Franklin is probably finding that turning over is not enough, and taking up break dancing instead.
Yeah, “The Week Ahead” is late. But she has put together a number of related ideas that are being mentioned, but mostly not together, and personalizing it from her own experience.
Also late, and also from Joyce Vance, a discussion of something Judge Boasberg might do (or, of course, might not, but he seems like someone who might.) Incidentally, if you see anyone refer to him as “Jeb” Boasberg, J.E.B. are his initials. There is precedent for the nickname.
This is old from Wonkette also. But it is so surreal that I couldn’t resist.
Sunday, I couldn’t find any decks of playing cards in the game locker, and I had managed to time my arrival so that Virgil was already there when I got to the visiting room, so I grabbed the Scrabble board instead. We payed three games which brought us right to the end of the visiting time. We accepted a lot of things I’m pretty sure are not acceptable, but we did have fun. It must be close to a year since we played Scrabble, and I can see some deterioration in Virgil, but as long as he remembers me, and that he loves me and I love him, and is more or less happy most of the time, I don’t worry. He is getting good care, much better than I could possibly care for him; he has many people he considers friends among both other inmates and staff, there is even a resident dog (almost certainly not a purebred black Lab, but he looks and acts like one.) Pretty much the only time he gets upset is if he has a vivid dream that he believes actually happened, and when that happens he calls me and I calm him down. And they are getting noticeably less frequent. (An example of one of those dreams would be that he thought his first wife phoned him demanding back child support. For one thing, no one can phone him – the phones they are allowed to use cannot receive calls. Secondly, I’m pretty confident she has no idea where he is. Thirdly, even if she did, she is not on his visitor list, so would not be allowed to contact him. Fourthly, the child in question is now 56. And he can grasp all of that – but he can also forget it.)
Yesterday, I see there was apparently a huge security breach wherein the top editor at The Atlantic was “accidentally” included in a Signal chat regarding airstrikes in Yemen. I don’t for a moment believe this was an accident. I think we will see more and more f this type of event until the media stops covering them. Let’s face it – we have no national security.
So far what I’ve had to say for today has been fairly bleak. But if you read this, it should put you in a mood to thank the universe that we still have people like Boasberg. I can’t confirm this, but I think I read somewhere that his ancestry is at least pertly Ukrainian. I remember thinking that would not surprise me. Back when the Russians were telling tha Vikings, “Hay, you guys are pretty good managers, why don’t you stay her and form our government,” the Ukrainians – Cossacks – were mercenary soldiers who never, ever, swore any oath or had personal loyalty to any of the monarchs who paid them. Yes, a deal was a deal, but they remained independent.
I need to explain that this is not a cartoon. It is an actual mail piece I received last week. I did not open it, I just scanned it front and back – I plan to forward it to the Governor unopened. There is, however, enough information on the outside for anyone to know whom to boycott.
Yesterday, the radio opera was a double bill of Ravel’s “L’enfant et les sortilèges” (on the one hundredth anniversary, to the day, of its premier) and Poulanc’s “Les Mamelles de Tirésias.” The former “is the story of a rude child who is reprimanded by the objects in his room, which he has been destroying. After being scolded by his mother in the beginning of the opera, the child throws a tantrum, destroying the room around him and harming the animals nearby. He is then surprised to find that the unhappy objects in his room come to life.” (Wikikpedia) The latter is absurdist, in the literary sense, which was written and performed right after the first World War. It takes off on the idea of Tiresias having been “the only human ever to have experienced being a man and also being a woman” (without surgery – since Tiresias was a mythical character dating from about 1000 BCE). Its premise is to convince French people to be as fertile as possible in order to replenish the population losses of the Great War. It has a plot, but that plot is so absurd I’m not going there. Off to see Virgil now – will check back in in a comment.
Yes, I’m having to go to sites like Good New Network to find anything calm enough for Sundays. And, while current, this story harks back to history – not just the obvious WWII history, but back to the Middle Ages. Take that, “Monument Men.”
Colorado Public Radio often has good news, but I’m behind (surprise, surprise!) on reading their newsletters. I found this story from Grist by searching sites which specialize in finding good news – a particular site which additionally specializes in finding happy stories written by proven, experienced, real journalists. It’s about what locals are doing to speed recovery from the devastating wildfires in California so recently.
Yesterday, I realized I hadn’t received a response to my email to reserve my visit to Virgil, so I looked up the phone number and called. They had not received the email, but made the reservation from my call. So I need to find what the bug is there and correct it. I guess I just didn’t have enough to do [sarcasm]. I also paid some bills and verified that I had already paid some others. And I set up a few days posts in advance – so if anything exciting happens over the weekend you’ll have to wait a bit to hear my take on it.
A no-paywall link from The Guardian on a story you may have heard about – the actress disappeared for two weeks by ICE – but here it’s told by her personally. Along with at least parts of stories from other women she encountered during her ordeal.
This is from Robert Reich from Thursday – but it’s still in plenty of time for anyone who wants to to get involved. So if anyone is looking for some good trouble, here’s one possibility.
Yesterday, I hid a boatload of fonts and downloaded a couple of my favorites. I already discovered on the previous computer that not only are the English fonts that come with Windows 10 all alike and equally boring, but that, with all the non-English fonts displaying, it takes forever to find the right font for the project (if it’s even there.) I had been coping by constructing memes on the 8.1 and either bringing them to the 10 on a flash drive, or just uploading them to PP from the 8.1 and searching for them if they had been pushed down from the top. I don’t have all the fonts I will want yet, but i have a good start, and I need to be choosy, since paint can only show so many before sending me to font jail.
This from Wonkette was posted Wednesday. And there’s a lot in it. Now that the Clementine Caligula figures he’s not accountable to anyone, I don’t know how much it will really do to slow him down. But at least there are people with some authority who are trying.
Harry Litman has more to say about Justice Roberts’s social media post. He makes the implications of it pellucidly clear. I agree that the Roberts who made that post is the Roberts we need. But it’s not enough.
Yesterday, The new (to me) PC is here now and I was able to get it connected to everything and running much faster then I’ll be able to get everything organized on it. But it’s looking a lot more feasible. And I did find out my games are going to work now, except for the ones which depended on Adobe Flash (Sadly, there’s no workaround for that – I asked about that some time ago, and instead of a workaround they gave me a free game coupon to get something else.) Oh, and happy Spring Equinox to those who celebrate.
Jim Stewartson has a background in entertainment, including videogames. When he realized that technology he had helped develop was being used in far-right propaganda and psyops, he founded the organization Antifascist USUA to help deprogram victims. So, though not academically trained in psyops, he has been on the frontlines for a while. I am taking this seriously. This link is to his own website, but he is also on Substack now.
Robert Hubbell has retired from lawyering, but he doesn’t appear to have forgotten much. The post is from this week, but before John Roberts released his social media post about impeachment, with which Hubbell clearly disagrees, at least in part. (Off topic, but as I was typing I typoed “media: as “mefia.” And it occurred to me that all that needs is an “a” in the second position to be all too accurate.)
Yesterday, still slogging along. I did look for an image of St. Joseph, since March 19 is his day, but they were all too – TBH – white. Then I remembered that March 19th is also the day that the swallow (theoretically – it’s really just a legend) return to San Juan Capistrano mission after a winter in South America. As legends go, this one is pretty benign. So I thought I’d refer to it and maybe make up a little for having missed Pi Day.
Clearly none of this has anything to do with actual DEI, the point of which is to prevent us all from being limited to dealing exclusively with stupid white people. The point of these efforts is to erase history and convince people of the clearly false belief that white people are better than anyone else (and also that men are better than women, also clearly false.) I hope to heaven no one tells any of these dodos (apology to actual dodos) about the USS Doris Miller. (And yes, the Mount Suribachi photo is a target also.)
I always have difficulty reading The Root – I click to the page and maybe manage to read a paragraph and then it whites out (I think it’s my browser – I can read it in edge, I just hate edge.) I expect we all know what happened, including law enforcement though they are not admitting it, and likely no one will be held accountable. Someone commented that the Mango Monster and Dork Vader have taken us back 80 years in two months. I disagree. It’s more like 85 to 90 years. 80 years ago we were about to celebrate VE day in a couple of months and no one here was admitting to being a Nazi, or at least not in public.
Yesterday, the day was as close to the time from sunrise to sunset (and vice versa) both being exactly 12 hours as we are going to get here. Worldwide, that doesn’t happen until the 20th (this year). I kept working on preparing to move to a different PC. It’s still slow, but I’m still making progress. Thanks for bearing with me.
This Talking Points Memo is from yesterday, and, at the time of posting, I’m not sure why I am not hearing a whole lot more and louder screaming about it. I haven’t read all my mail yet – maybe it’s there and I haven’t seen it – I haven’t read all the legal newsletters. But it feels like “In [the United States] today such things happen every minute.” (Later – I still haven’t read everything, but it’s clear that sane lawyers are pretty much in a state of shock. Well, I am too.)
I’m unhappy with Schumer too, and so is the F* News. And the graph in the post speaks for itself so plainly that I don’t know how anyone could miss the message. But I also recognize that he (like any caucus leader) is between a rock and a hard place. I don’t blame anyone who’s angry with him – I truly get that – but I would say be careful what you wish for. (If you want to know who I do blame, frankly, it’s all those Democrats who talked Joe into dropping out of the race in 2024. That was what ultimately put misogyny into play. And at or near the top of the list of people hurt by it is Kamala.)
