It’s been raining here all week but today is supposed to finally be nice. Perhaps these April showers will bring us some May flowers. Happy Friday Deadsplinterati!
Yayyyyyy!! CNN busted out their BIG FONT for this one.
Senate confirms Ketanji Brown Jackson to be first Black woman to sit on Supreme Court
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/07/politics/ketanji-brown-jackson-senate-vote-latest/index.html
Stonks! Pile on the Peter Thiel hate in the comments. What a tool.
Peter Thiel calls Warren Buffett a ‘sociopathic grandpa from Omaha’ and bitcoin’s ‘enemy number one’
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/07/thiel-calls-buffett-sociopathic-grandpa-from-omaha-about-bitcoin.html
Sprots!
Masters 2022 — Tiger Woods does not look ready to play like an old man
https://www.espn.com/golf/story/_/id/33691779/masters-2022-tiger-woods-does-not-look-ready-play-old-man
Oops.
Thieving sea lions break into salmon farm and gorge on feast of fish
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/07/sea-lions-fish-farm-british-columbia
He just seems so damn charming.
Have a great weekend!
And here, even when there were rain breaks, the wind…
Hawk enables trash like Shawn White, so….
…been a long time since I had much of a clue who was who in terms of skaters…although I gather white is also (possibly mainly) a snowboarder…so I’d confess ignorance about the trash part…but he seems to have been pretty successful so presumably he’d owe that to more than one aging skateboarder?
…surprised there’s much to complain about where tony hawk is concerned, I guess…seldom seem to see anyone say anything about him that isn’t nice?
Tony might actually be a really good dude and I’m not trying to make too big a deal out of it but I was reading how the other day at I think it was the Grammys Tony hawk Christian Slater and Sean White were in attendance together and I just thought that was kind of fucked up cuz Sean White is an abuser and just a real shitty person overall so if Tony hawk’s associating with him it just didn’t seem right to me but on the grand scheme of things who am I to judge.
…fair enough…I don’t tend to know much about sports people but I can see how he might be a shitty choice to hang out with in that case
…but there’s a small enough pool of likable famous names so I guess I’m loathe to take tony hawk off that list is all…not that I’m in any position to know either way or anything
I dig it.
Nobody is one dimensional, eh? Tony Hawk has a brilliant nonprofit called the Skatepark Project.
I used to shoot for some lesser known skate magazines and hang out with some pro skaters. I never met Tony Hawk but the riders I met that did had only good things to say about him. Many skaters back in the day embraced the criminal label people wanted to give them but he always seemed above that and is definitely the greatest ambassador of the sport.
I’ll say it again: Who are all these people who know what Tony Hawk looks like? I mean, I know who he is, but I wouldn’t recognize him at the mall.
Same. He was on the Oscars and I was like, who’s that? And even after that, if he climbed on an elevator with me, I wouldn’t recognize him.
Okay, did some googling. I think my lack of familiarity stems from several causes:
1. The vast majority of the pictures I’ve seen have him in helmets and gear, which obscure his appearance.
2. I’ve mostly only seen cover art of him on his video games, which is highly stylized.
3. Based on points 1 and 2, I never realized that he was as old as he is. Ten seconds of thought would make me realize he was, but I never put in the 10 seconds. Most of the photos you pull up are from years back.
4. He’s six-foot-three! That threw me off at the Oscars because I mentally assume skateboarders are a lot more … compact than that.
5. He’s relatively nondescript.
Even after research, I still wouldn’t be able to recognize him.
Librarians to the rescue.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/08/ukraine-digital-history/
Librarians!!!!
This case of two guys posing as federal agents and apparently compromising members of the Secret Service is really weird:
https://wtop.com/dc/2022/04/prosecutors-seek-to-hold-2-charged-with-impersonating-federal-agents-without-bail/
It was no small job — they evidently had multiple apartments, guns, sniper scopes, body armor, and visas for visits to Iran and Pakistan.
That is very disturbing. I mean, I’m glad they got caught, but the extent of what they were doing is astonishing. Looks like if you throw enough money around, you can get away with a lot of covert stuff. It also looks like some Secret Service agents were compromised, which is scary as hell.
Every Karen on the street reports every Black man they see, but two Middle Eastern dudes throwing around money and setting up extensive surveillance networks get a pass? That’s bullshit. So much for “If you see something, say something.”
It’s been reported that a while back a neighbor saw through a window a bunch of guns that are illegal in DC for regular citizens, called the police, and the guys were able to con their way out of it when police showed up. Which only adds to the mystery.
It sure seems like the same MAGA law enforcement rot from within that had so many officers turning a blind eye on Jan. 6.
You’d think it would be the opposite with these two guys being from the Middle East. I’m surprised the cops didn’t bust them right then and there.
Unless the plan was to go after Biden and the officers were QAnon. Which is not really that far-fetched.
I haven’t been able to find an article on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s name (other than how to pronounce her given name). So I figure I’ll ask my DS colleagues. Why do some people refer to her as Jackson? Is it not Brown Jackson? Or shouldn’t it be shortened to Brown because Brown comes before Jackson? It feels lazy and disrespectful to me that the President and others don’t use her full surname. Unless she introduces herself as Jackson. Then nevermind and carry on.
In the official opinions of the DC Court of Appeals she is listed as “Jackson” and not “Brown Jackson” so I think that Jackson by itself is formally correct.
Thanks for the clarification! My research skills are currently garbage.
Oh, and this is a nice tribute for the great media analyst Eric Boehlert, who just died, from his former editor, Joan Walsh:
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/eric-boehlert-media-criticism/
He was a leader in defining the ways the political press failed their most basic obligations of honest reporting. And in addition to noting the financial incentives for being hacks, he also dug into the ideological biases and personal intellectual failures of the political press.
Walsh includes quotes from Boehlert’s coverage of the miserable reporting on Al Gore, bringing up a rogue’s gallery of supposedly reapectable names who turned out over the following years to be broken incompetents: Brit Hume, Chris Matthews, Maureen Dowd, Mary McGrory and Juan Wlliams. They just hated Gore on a personal level, were proud of it, and were offended that anyone might care.
In recent years some of this criticism has sunk in, especially among some younger reporters. Unfortunately, the stakes are even higher if there is no end to the hackery that enabled the well-predicted disaster of the George W. Bush years.
Zombies like Dowd, Wolf Blitzer and Thomas Friedman still roam the political landscape, along with their acolytes. And even worse, their editors and executives still operate in the shadows above them. They enabled Bush, the Iraq War, climate disaster, the economic collapse of 2008, Trump, hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths, the Ukraine invasion, and the rise of neo-Nazis and their growing repression of women, non-whites, non-fundamentalists and LGBTQ people.
But yeah, NY Times, CNN and all the rest, the real threat was the personalities of Gore, Kerry, Obama, Hillary, and Biden…. Thanks to Eric Boehlert for fighting back.
I was really shocked to hear of his death! He was a great media critic.
I was told to pile on Peter Thiel hate in the comments so here I am to say: Fuck that guy.
Even if Bitcoin wasn’t a dumb idea and total environmental disaster, that he is gung-ho for it would be enough for me to hate it on principle.
I have told this story before but it is pretty amazing. Sea lions are super smart and will do anything to return to a place with an easy good meal!
https://hakaimagazine.com/features/herschel-the-very-hungry-sea-lion/
God, I fucking hate her.
This asshole had a smart lawyer who knew that a bench trial in front of a Trump judge was much more likely to go his way than a jury trial where they would have to gamble on who had the capacity for critical thought.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-appointed-federal-judge-acquits-161210228.html
This will definitely be the model for more of these cases. Get a Trump judge assigned and have them make the final verdict. Skate on the charges and become a hero of the psychopathic right.