It baffles and distresses me to know that people who were born *after* the religious attacks of 9/11 are old enough to vote and join the military and be screwed over by the tax system. I didn’t see this now nearly year-old remastering of the Jules Naudet video of the first airplane impact until just now. This was one of the most astonishing things ever caught on video, now clearer than ever before.
Never forget. Never forgive.
Those days are gone.
Gotta wonder why some people are like this.
As promised, I’ve set up a backup blog, using Bluehost. While it is also a WordPress blog, irritatingly, the same “theme” isn’t available so the other blog looks different from this one, as well as having a different blog-creation interface. Grrr. There also seems to be a fair gap between blog posting and the post actually appearing. Sigh. But, at least it seems to work.
So, for now, *this* blog will remain the “official” blog, with the backup blog being used as just a backup in the event that *this* one goes down again. Feel free to bookmark the backup.
*This* blog could go down again at any time due to Mystery Technical Issues. And there is always politics.
Shoot, I can’t imagine even getting 125 people together to watch that dull, dull “sport,” much less getting them excited about it.
The blog was out for a day for Unexplainable Tech Reasons. Tech support gave up and said they couldn’t fix the problem – I couldn’t log in to either of my blogs, so I couldn’t edit posts, couldn’t make new ones. They gave no hope of the problem being fixed. And yet… here we are. Yay. They work now.
That said, I’m rather sick of the problems popping up with irritating regularity. So I want to examine options. One clear problem is that both blogs (the other being https://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/) are on the same host, so if something mysteriously appears to plague one blog, it often plagues the other. I need to separate them.
I’ve tried – and hate – Discord, Facebook and Twitter. I *like* the WordPress blog, if for no other reason than I’ve grown accustomed to it. So what I might do is get new “Unwanted Blog” and “Aerospace Projects Review Blog” WordPress blogs, hosted elsewhere, then simply park a “this blog is now over yonder” post at the top of each of the legacy blogs. If someone has suggestions along those lines, by all means drop a comment.
Mood: annoyed.
Sometimes you see things that cannot be unseen. So, rather than just go “bleah” and try to find some sort of mind bleach to wipe out an image you weren’t looking for but stumbled across anyway, try to come up with an alternate explanation for what you saw. In this case “polycystic kidney.” Don’t do a Google Image search for “polycystic kidney.” Seriously, don’t. It won’t improve your day. However, if you *do* do such a search, you will likely be met with a wide array of post-surgical photos of kidneys that have been removed. If you think about these things as currently residing within you, right now, at this very moment… you will not be happy. They will give you an uncomfortableness. However… an alternate approach is to think of them not as human organs that have gone very, very wrong, but as baby shoggoths straight out of Lovecraftian horror. It won’t make you any more comfortable, but at least … well, I dunno. There’s no real upside, I suppose, unless you are a movie or game designer tasked with creating a shoggoth. Cuz this will do.
You’re welcome.
So Russia has blamed the west for sabotaging the pipeline; everybody else on the planet blames Russia for sabotaging the pipeline. But there is another possibility. Consider, for a moment, the fact that the same culture of corruption, arrogance and vodka that gave us Chernobyl was also responsible for maintaining the pipeline.
Yeah. No sabotage needed to explain massive mechanical failures.
An interesting read full of things you probably haven’t considered:
Might be advisable to figure out of this was just a maintenance fail before people start nuking each other over it.
For starters, it has the FBI actually doing its job. Shocking, I know.
Not so much “leak” as “sell.” The medical information seems to be medical records of military personnel and their families, a pile of data that does not immediately seem all that terribly useful. But then, the Russians do not seem to have actually been involved here; these people were baited by the FBI. And what people they are:
During an initial Aug. 17 meeting in a Baltimore hotel room, (Anna) Gabrielian told the agent she was “motivated by patriotism toward Russia to provide any assistance she could to Russia, even if it meant being fired or going to jail.”
Nice. But where it gets more interesting: the female doctors spouse, also arrested, has been in the news before:
(Jamie Lee) Henry received attention in 2015 after becoming the first known active-duty Army officer to come out as transgender. A Buzzfeed article from that time said she was also, to her knowledge and to the knowledge of LGBTQ advocates, the first and only active duty service member who had changed her name and gender within the United States military.
In the one photo in the article Henry looks like a dude. But I guess Henry considers Henry to be female. Shrug.
“My point of view is until the United States actually declares war against Russia, I’m able to help as much as I want,” Henry, 39, told the agent, according to the indictment. “At that point, I’ll have some ethical issues I’ll have to work through.”
“You’ll work through those ethical issues,” Gabrielian replied.
Henry also told the agent she had looked into volunteering to join the Russian Army after the conflict in Ukraine began.
Wonderful. *These* are the sort of people the military is hiring *and* promoting.
It seems that both of these characters consider themselves women. So the fact that they have some number of children is a bit unusual; once again, biology ain’t what it once was. But also:
Gabrielian did fear what might happen to the couple’s children if she put herself at risk of arrest, demanding that the kids be put on “a nice flight to Turkey to go on vacation” if arrest seemed imminent.
What the hell is in Turkey awaiting these kids? “Gabrielian” is an *Armenian* surname. I may not be a world-reknowned historian, but I do seem to recall some unpleasantness between the Turks and Armenians that would tend to suggest that they’re not real fond of each other.
Lots to contemplate here:
On top of everything else, the Library of Congress deemed it proper to hand over a priceless (and doubtless fragile) historic artifact to be used as a prop or a toy on stage by someone with demonstrated and clearly obvious impulse control issues.
“B****! I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from 1800’s!” she said, after handing the flute back to a representative from the Library of Congress.
Indeed.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/desecration