…fair warning…I’ll do my best to rein it in & all…but while a combination of factors led to me being effectively absent around these parts for the best part of a week…on the one hand an almost farcical amount of stuff happened in that time
Former Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon arrested in finances inquiry [NBC]
[…sort of semantics…not unlike a certain treasonous tangerine tantrum’s escapade today…more by way of a contextual legal nicety in regards to the framing of the extended interview…but…not sure I share the confidence of the current leader of the SNP who hasn’t even temporarily suspended her from the party…though in fairness she left without being charged with anything]
Is the Biden administration downplaying China’s plans for a listening post in Cuba? [NBC]
[…when the bits of foreign relations you most need to communicate clearly to the foreign component are often lost in the translation before reaching a domestic audience…who can scry? …but if you like that sort of thing…or the works of le carré…maybe you’d rather while away your time with the tale of the spy who came in by cold call…otherwise…we’re barely getting started]
Furious Tories turn against Boris Johnson after ‘bias’ outburst [Guardian]
[…I’d say good riddance to bad rubbish…but the proverbial fat lady stubbornly refuses to sing the dirge devoutly to be wished…instead there’s a lot of “tensions rising” between richy rishi & team bullingdon chums…who are making a lot of threatening noises about him being a free agent who could form like voltron with nigel farage as his right boot…& presumably hop about in the absence of anyone willing to be on his left…though now gove’s back to the backstabbing line I guess the recently elevated lord muckety muck sir jacob rees-mogg would be first in line for the job of hand sinister?]
Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden seal landmark deal on UK-US cooperation [Guardian]
[…n.b. rishi also recently spouted a bunch of nonsense about the web3 future & blockchain…so…however special needs the new iteration of the special relationship might be…it signally lacks the magic pixie dust of the much touted trade deal the brexit faithful swore blind would have been done & dusted by now…which might have…wossname…financial implications]
Saudi Arabia bought golf with its Ukraine war profits [WaPo]
Deepfake porn of TikTok stars thrives on Twitter even though it breaks the platform’s rules [NBC]
…which would be sort of independent of what kept me away from a keyboard…& I’ve had a fair bit on my mind…which wouldn’t…so…there’s some non-trivial stuff I’d like to try to get to if I don’t run out of time or lapse into incoherence
…& on the other hand…since I don’t have the technical chops to divide this up into sections you can fast forward past piecemeal or skip back & forth through* & I lack the patience or time management skills required to appropriately sub-divide it into separate posts
[* – recurrent PSA – the little digit to the right of the speech bubble between the title & the header picture skips you past all my nonsense straight to the comments in a single click…you can always scroll up from there if you want to see if you like any of the tunes…& speaking of scrolling up…the little white arrow in the red box in the bottom-right corner of your screen (most of the time) will punt you right back up to where you can avail yourself of that forward skip if you think you made a terrible mistake & need to bail at any point…because you should always remember @myopicprophet has your back that way]
William Barr says Trump may be ‘toast’ after ‘very damning’ indictment [Guardian]
…I’ll try to start with a brief bit of context that whilst not necessarily connected seems like it has at least glancing pertinence
…you see
Trump charges will test social media rules on violent rhetoric [WaPo]
‘He Has Nothing Else’: Our Writers on Trump and the 2024 Election [NYT]
12m Americans believe violence is justified to restore Trump to power [Guardian]
Trump’s Miami court date brings fears of violence, rally plans [WaPo]
…I can see how when you put something in a post on a thursday saying
…scrubbing the rest of my week on a wednesday because I’m sick of people not letting me have everything my own way…does in fairness sometimes seem like an appealing option
…& then dip for a long weekend…it’d be easy to take that & run not too far with it to a conclusion that whatever it was that hadn’t shaken out to my liking had me picking up my ball & taking it home in a snit…hell, I can even muster a pretty good facsimile of that chain of cause & effect based on the underlying reality…& mildly scrubbed after the fashion of the doxxing-averse reflexes of posting online it wouldn’t be too hard to take that & arbitrarily assign the “whatever it was” to something that happened in the context of this site…it’d be such a woeful misinterpretation of the reality as to be a literal absurdity
Republican red meat: Ron DeSantis bids to outflank Trump on the right [Guardian]
…but
…it’d be easy
Lawyer for witness in Trump docs probe alleges prosecutorial misconduct [NBC]
…& that’s something I’ve been seeing a lot of in a lot of places where I wish I didn’t
…so…for the record, absence-wise…personally, I’m agnostic in religious terms…maybe because I have a tendency not to make up my mind one way or another…maybe because sometimes atheism behaves a lot like a religion by another name & I’m more comfortable with imponderables than insufferables…but I aim as a matter of choice to be respectful of others…including those who cleave to a sustained faith in entities that I can’t honestly profess to sharing…& last week someone I know…or rather, knew…succumbed to a tag team of cancers…someone, despite my luck in knowing not a few lovely people, I would be hard pressed to improve on as a walking example of a genuine…& genuinely lovely…human being…with a realistic shot of threading the needle to actually leaving the world better than they found it to the tune of the difference they made to the lives that they touched…but not now of ever gracing us with their company for long enough to get into the arena of “a good innings”…or see their kids grow up
…& I didn’t stop reading the news when I stopped interacting online
…for what in the grand scheme of things was a blink of an eye in sabbatical terms
…so the truth is I was at a point where I just about wished there would turn out to be a god…just so me & whichever deity it turned out to be could someday have what is sometimes euphemistically described as “a full & frank exchange of views”
…& truth be told I didn’t trust myself not to pick that fight with some unwitting proxy over some thin pretext online the way I was pretty sure I could avoid the temptation to do in person…at least in the places I needed to be to get the things done I’d said I would
…so with an abundance of gratitude I accepted @elliecoo ‘s kind offer to pick up my slack on sunday &…licked my wounds, I guess you could say…but…I tried to keep up…& there was one thing I saw that I kind of mulled over maybe more than might have been intended
its intimidating round here you know…ya’ll are smart fuckers
and rip speaks a version of english thats on the very edge of my understanding
not like oppo
where everyone is a twelve year old moron
…@farscythe…who as @hannibal pointed out…is plenty smart…& thus surprising nobody…makes a good point
…language fascinates me…but if sometimes the way I attempt to amuse myself while typing things that I don’t find amusing drifts over the line into “puttin’ on airs”…as a rule I blithely assume that the rules hereabouts are approximately “no harm, no foul”…with a side of “among friends”…& that I mostly manage to keep the right side of the line…but…I lurked for many a year before I created the first of surprisingly few online accounts with posting privileges for someone of my vintage…& I did so because that fateful day I hit the end of my rope & I just couldn’t sit through passively reading yet another example of someone trying to do exactly that online & succeeding because nobody who could see what a travesty that made of the “debate” left on the page was apparently willing to engage in something wisdom & discretion dictated were a waste of time
…so it’d be worth noting in passing that in addition to not laying claim to any particularly unique wisdom
…or an overabundance of discretion
…I don’t say or do anything around here with the intention of it being intimidating
…truth be told when we were first trying to make it clear that there were some folks home & the lights were on at this address it bothered the hell out of me that for the longest time posts & comments with my name on made up something upwards of 10% of the total…as someone who has constant access to more of my thoughts than are arguably helpful that simply isn’t the conversational ratio I have an interest in…I go online to hear other people’s thoughts…call it selfish…but the ones of mine I throw out…or the bits of other people’s I try to outnumber those with…almost always show up in the hope that there might be a return on the investment…I forget if I’ve said it here before or not…but…& hopefully here is where this starts to be relevant to the more usual fare to follow…that’s because I think there’s a widespread misunderstanding of the phrase “the smartest person in the room”™…that shit is not a thing to aim for…even if you’re the kind of dipshit that thinks they’re something called the “main character”…& not a bit part in the story of humanity just like everybody else…wishing it on someone is up there with hoping they live in “interesting times”…this is about as devout a belief as I can muster a lot of the time so I could most likely go on about it for longer than I usually manage to wrestle these posts down to…but the tl;dr boils down to approximately this…the smartest person in the room™ isn’t learning…or, if you want to be pedantic about it…can only trust what they think they’re learning to the extent they can objectively trust their own bias to be predictable enough to account for…& their mind & its blindspots not to otherwise betray or blindside them…or their premise…let alone any attendant hypothesis…& even then only on a contingent basis until they learn otherwise by exercising due diligence in light of matters they prove to have given less consideration than they deserve …sure…if you’re actually smart that wouldn’t preclude you also being shrewd enough to discern a fair bit & you might manage to bootstrap your way to learning something as a result…but the smartest person in the room™ isn’t smart any more than the nice guy™ is nice
…& if your brain is wired like mine…that’s a hideous fate I wouldn’t wish on
…well…ok…I’d maybe wish on a few select & deserving people…not that I’d have to…just look around you…there are a lot of ways to spot someone who is either convinced they’re the smartest person in the room…or has some pathological need to deny anything that might indicate otherwise with a seemingly existential fervor…often wedded to a bizarre feat of cognitive dissonance that implies they genuinely have achieved the nirvana of solipsism…in that they believe they have mastered the art of shaping reality by the simple act of didactic assertion
‘I’ll never leave’: Trump vows to stay in 2024 presidential race even if convicted [Guardian]
…& that may offer the most exponential uptake of modern history when it comes to selling a bill of goods as an article of faith
…it is what it is, at the end of the day
The Mar-a-Lago Indictment Is a Tactical Nuke [emptywheel]
…& when you’ve been waiting on the end of that day for longer than seems reasonable
What Donald Trump and Reality Winner Have in Common [NYT]
…well
…it’s easy for that to start feeling like you’re living through the end of days
…& that tends to bring out the crazies
Republicans rally behind Donald Trump after classified documents indictment [Guardian]
…but
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/09/us/trump-indictment-document-annotated.html
Where Documents Were Found at Mar-a-Lago [NYT]
…when you hear all this white noise about how applying the law to this one guy means you have to apply it consistently
What the Women of the World’s Oldest Colony Know About Violence [NYT]
In a letter first shared with NBC News, the Office of Special Counsel determined that Jean-Pierre’s choice of words in referring to Republican candidates was in violation of the Hatch Act.
“Because Ms. Jean‐Pierre made the statements while acting in her official capacity, she violated the Hatch Act prohibition against using her official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election,” Ana Galindo‐Marrone, who leads the agency’s Hatch Act Unit, wrote in a June 7 letter.
During a White House press briefing on Nov. 2, Jean-Pierre referred to “mega MAGA Republican officials who don’t believe in the rule of law” and made other comments disparaging Republican candidates, according to a Hatch Act complaint filed in November 2022 against Jean-Pierre by conservative watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust.
The group called Jean-Pierre’s remarks “an inappropriate attempt to influence the vote.”
[…]
“[I]t is unclear whether OSC’s contrary analysis regarding the use of ‘MAGA Republicans’ was ever conveyed to Ms. Jean‐Pierre,” Galindo‐Marrone added.In response to a request for comment, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement: “As has been made clear throughout the administration, we take the law seriously and uphold the Hatch Act. We are reviewing this opinion.”
Jean-Pierre has cited the Hatch Act repeatedly when declining to answer certain questions by reporters or when explaining why she can only offer a limited response, including in the weeks leading up to the 2022 midterm elections.
[…]
Trump administration officials came under fire for breaching the law numerous times, with a November 2021 report from the Office of Special Counsel characterizing their behavior as “especially pernicious” in light of comments ahead of the 2020 election.“This failure to impose discipline created the conditions for what appeared to be a taxpayer-funded campaign apparatus within the upper echelons of the executive branch,” the 2021 report said.
www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/white-house-press-secretary-violated-hatch-act-watchdog-agency-says
…you’d think they’d listen to someone who’d had it applied to them under his watch
Reality Winner says she’s ‘blown away’ by details in indictment against Trump [NBC]
…& I know…it’s hard to believe I wasn’t lying about trying to rein it in…I wasn’t…but I can see how that’s potentially unconvincing if you’re convinced you have enough evidence to the contrary
George Soros hands control of his $25 billion empire to his son Alex [NBC]
…& more or less by definition at that point nobody involved has the time to demonstrate the error of your ways…so I’m not going to attempt to cover the ways in which people mistaking the florida indictment for the ballgame are taking their eye off the ball…& not just on this account
Georgia is likely next ground zero for Trump’s battle with law enforcement [WaPo]
…but I guess I’d note that jack smith talking about a speedy trial puts you potentially on a fast-track timetable…& claiming to be able to complete the trial portion of proceedings in 21days…is not the sort of brag lawyers of his stature make idly…&…as dr wheeler among others have pointed out…making this indictment public allows it to be offered up as part of presentations to other grand jury proceedings in other jurisdictions that remain under seal…such as those to which it might be useful to be able to point out that it seems they have evidence he transported some of the still-yet-to-be-surrendered NDI materials…so…big splash notwithstanding…it looks like a stepping stone to me?
John Eastman, an architect of Donald Trump’s last-ditch bid to subvert the 2020 election on Jan. 6, is about to go on trial — but not in a criminal court.
Rather, the attorney is fighting to save his California bar license from authorities who say he repeatedly breached professional ethics — and possibly the law — in his bid to keep a defeated Trump in power. And those proceedings, while not as prominent as the Jan. 6 select committee or as potentially punitive as a criminal prosecution, are slated to elicit some of the most revealing and comprehensive testimony from figures who aided Trump’s effort to derail the transfer of power.
[…] the state’s case to punish Eastman on 11 professional charges, which include failure to support the laws and Constitution, seeking to mislead a court, misrepresentations to other Trump aides and the public, and moral turpitude.
[…]
The bar proceedings, including a pretrial conference Monday and two weeks of testimony later in the month, are an example of the myriad forms of accountability facing those in Trump’s orbit Jan. 6 — particularly lawyers, whose roles are often shrouded in the murky domain of legal advice and attorney-client privilege. Though national attention has been riveted to the potential prosecutions of Trump and his allies in Washington and Georgia, state bars have also been marshaled to pursue investigations of these matters and in some cases have produced much quicker results.For example, amid pressure from bar authorities in Colorado, Trump attorney Jenna Ellis admitted in March that she had repeatedly misrepresented evidence about the integrity of the 2020 election. Rudy Giuliani’s law license was suspended in December after D.C. bar discipline proceedings resulted in a finding that he violated professional ethics and rules. And former Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Clark is awaiting similar proceedings in Washington, which were cleared to proceed last week after an eight-month delay.
[…]
Efforts by the Jan. 6 select committee to obtain Eastman’s emails from his former employer, Chapman University, also resulted in one of the most remarkable court rulings of the post-Jan. 6 era: A federal judge’s determination that Eastman and Trump likely conspired to obstruct congressional proceedings and defraud the public. That ruling, by California-based jurist David Carter, was part of long-running litigation that gave the select committee access to thousands of Eastman’s emails, including some after Carter applied the “crime-fraud” exception to attorney-client privilege.In addition to Jacob, the California bar counsel plans to call election officials from five states, including Benson and Stephen Richer, the county recorder of Maricopa County, Ariz. The bar authorities also plan to call at least two constitutional experts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Eastman’s interpretation of the law and Constitution.
Eastman has tapped Yoo to argue about his interpretation of the 12th Amendment. Carling indicated in a recent filing, however, that Yoo sat for a May 26 deposition and provided testimony that undercuts some of Eastman’s claims.
www.politico.com/news/2023/06/11/john-eastman-disbarment-trial-trump
[…]
Roland has already agreed to prohibit at least some of the testimony of another expert Eastman intended to call, former Washington federal appeals court Judge Janice Rogers Brown.
…also…unless I’m much mistaken…the specific charges in the florida package don’t invoke the PRA so all the column inches of desperate GOP takes about how that makes it totally okay to pull this shit if you just misconstrue it the right way would appear to be the literal definition of besides the point…but what do you expect from people breathlessly trying to tell you all about a thing they haven’t read & prefer to imagine to be the way they assume
What lies behind Russia’s acts of extreme violence? Freudian analysis offers an answer [Guardian]
…any which way you cut it…there’s a good chance you’d rather spend that time on something with better odds of proving edifying
Introducing Deep Reads [WaPo]
…& maybe you don’t care about the loop or whether or not you’re in it
…but…if you bobbed your way through kinja’s herb-induced storm in a teacup…you’re going to find some familiar landmarks
…management might be an art
…but tech generally falls in the science column
…so…I suppose I’d advocate examining the evidence before declaring which way it comes down on your chosen hypothesis…even though ultimately it might come down to matters that remain hitherto undisclosed…or…as wittgenstein put it that one time
whereof one can not speak thereof one must be silent
[r/askphilosophy…currently gone dark just to hammer that symbolism home]
…sadly I think one of them is the r/dataisbeautiful lot who had a nice graphic I saw at one point…but…last I checked u/spez trying to jack up the pricing for API calls to recoup some sort of rake from the kind of scraping tools used to collate datasets for LLMs…as well as enabling accessibility features & the kinds of superior tools that make third party apps (like the one reddit bought out & killed rather than use instead of their homebrewed & widely-reviled “native” app) the hands-down (or indeed tools-down) choice for the largely unsung army of volunteer enthusiasts who moderate the place so that it doesn’t devolve into another #-chan cesspool of drooling malignancy…had resulted in various levels of “going dark” for some 7742/8299 subreddits…but you can always check the count
Sorry for your loss @SplinterRip.
“sometimes atheism behaves a lot like a religion by another name & I’m more comfortable with imponderables than insufferables”
This ! 👆🏼
I will be using it in future discussions with proper credit of course.
…feel free to steal it unattributed…I claim no trademark on word pairings & am likely not the first to consider that dichotomy
…& the condolences are appreciated
…so you’re welcome & ta muchly
You’re not Scottish, are you? Someone here must be. I thought Wee Nikki’s husband was the one who was up to his eyeballs in corruption, not she herself. So she actually resigned because she was on the take and not because she advocated for assigning a convicted male rapist into a women’s prison?
Also, you know what sucks is death, but I bet not for the dead. No, it’s we, who are left behind, who grieve. I had a milestone birthday not long ago and someone asked, “So what do you wish for?” I said, unprompted and completely sober, “I want to predecease Better Half. He’s healthy as a horse now, and I’m not, but I have like a wasting disease with no known cause or cure and not lethal, and I’m afraid he will just go one day, heart attack, stroke, aneurysm [you would not believe how many friends and family members we had/knew where this happened] and the last thing I want is to arrange for—”
BH interrupted me. “My will is very explicit. It’ll be quite simple, and you’ll be a very rich man.”
“Do you think Timothée Chalamet would consider moving in here? I mean, he was gay-for-pay in that movie with the cannibal, what’s-his-name. It was called something like ‘Call Me Maybe.'”
“Mattie.”
…next to the US scotland is home to the biggest collection of relatives I can point to
…& she’s not necessarily guilty…but she, hubby & the treasurer you’d assume would have known the deal?
…like mr soon-to-be-ex-boebert…but not?
Rip.
…what’s done is done…& I’ll try to behave come thursday?
Sometimes you just need to let it out of your system.
It’s a cliché at this point, but cancers sucks. Condolences.
Hang in there, dude.
I am conducting psy-ops against poor Better Half. He spends ten hours a day chatting, gabbing, Zoom-calling, people all over the globe. Why send off a quick email when you can can spend 45 minutes “catching up” and “sharing insights.”
In the background, I’ve been playing this.
It’s just loud enough for it to be vaguely audible to BH, but when he gets off the calls and comes in to investigate, I close the browser window and feign ignorance. I have spent more than 35 years trying to teach him rudimentary German, because no one in New York speaks German (plenty of people speak Yiddish, which can be very close, but it has Hebrew and Russian thrown in…) so that I could say to him in public, “That stupid fucking—” and no one would understand me. I could say it in Spanish, another language BH doesn’t understand and has no interest in, but half of New York is Anglo-Spanish bilingual, so.
Now I’m revisiting the still of that Youtube video and it makes me so depressed. When I spent my week at the Humboldt University, I used to enter East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie. What that photo shows is the Brandenburg Gate where, after a dreary day spent in the dusty archives rifling through possessions of people long-dead, my handler would escort me out of that section of the city. We became kind of chummy and I used to ask him to walk with me to the Brandenburg Gate. There used to be another entrance/exit there, but it was like a diplomatic exchange point, not really a…
Anyway, I was able to exit from there, and I’m a HUGE fan of grandiose public architecture. When East Berlin was occupied by the Russians the East Germans had a lot of postwar communal guilt and brainwashed into thinking they had thrown off one new era, which began in 1933, and welcomed an even better one, in 1945. Neither was true, of course. Both eras were horrendous. And it was strange that an advanced, western, industrialized country fell for any of this. But history takes strange twists and turns.
Why was I…? Oh yes. If you look through the Brandenburg Gate, that left-most view, that tall futuristic tower is the Television Tower, the Fernsehturm. That is completely fabulous. Now that Germany has been unified for longer than many Americans have been alive, it’s become an overpriced tourist trap, but when I was being escorted around it was completely free. I happened to be in the elevator with my handler, who spoke English, but also Spanish, and it was only the two of us, so I said to him, in Spanish, “I’m coming back tomorrow. Can I bring you something?” The look of horror on his face. Germans are great linguists and I’m sure many people listening in, because 1/3 of the country was spying on the other 2/3, were interested in this little exchange.
The Reddit shutdown is certainly disturbing. I think the unpaid mods who decided to turn subreddits off are doing a smart flex because this is the kind of thing that shows up fast in the company’s spreadsheets. But who knows how it plays out, and there isn’t a lot to replace them at this point.
You also have the Writers Guild strike, Twitter springing leaks, the New York Times laying off a bunch of Athletic writers, a major podcast company going belly up, CNN going stupidly right…. Over and over big money seems to be provoking fights for petty, short term reasons, or following destructive paths out of spite. And that’s just in the media, not even the big money like energy or insurance.
I don’t understand what is so difficult
[BREAKING: One of Black Better Half’s white coworkers, on speakerphone of course, just tried to explain to their international colleagues why the company was closed for Juneteenth. He got many aspects of it wrong, but BH said nothing, because he has no idea what the hell it is either.]
what is so difficult about presenting the news. Just, straightforward. The five Ws. Who, What, When, Where, Why. Any context or backgrounding, save that for the explicitly dedicated editorial pages.
In the case of particular stories the Ws work, but in the aggregate they’re often terrible.
If you ever watch the local news, there’s nothing wrong with the typical standup at a three alarm fire where the reporter holds a mic up to the fire chief who dutifully says what little he knows. It’s perfectly fine reporting.
But over the course of a year, you see only stories on the local news about homes burning down and nothing about homes being built, and people wonder why the entire city isn’t ashes by now. You need context to set the record straight.
The problem with context stories is that most organizations do a terrible job. They know how to hit the standard cues for a fire, but explaining bigger things so that people can understand them requires reporters and editors to understand those things too. And very often they don’t.
So you will see absolutely terrible reporting on inflation most of the time because reporters and editors couldn’t even begin to explain what the actual meaning of 1%, 3% or 10% inflation is, what’s the practical difference between those rates, or what causes it. And this ignorance drives the reporting.
In two points: Never mistake that what [news organization’s] ownership wants is NOT the same thing as what [news organization’s] workers want vis a vis “covering the news” — one side would like to do it and one side would like the make the most possible profit and guess which side always wins?
Secondly, people always say they just want the facts and every new news iteration presents itself as THIS time, this is the one, this is the basic facts and … usually they’re not just the basic facts but also audiences for bland fact-heavy news are actually extremely small. This isn’t necessarily a “blame the audience” thing but there’s a reason editorial pages exist and even good old-time newspapers mixed big stories with lurid crime and “Golly, Martha” stories on the front page: People don’t always just want broccoli no matter how important the story is.
…it’s a revenue play pre-IPO…that part’s straightforward enough…but it straight up murders the apps the mods rely on…& reddit is less without them than kinja minus commenters
…but the shitshow of an AMA he did was an absolute dumpster fire so he torched any goodwill he had & the mods & devs…particularly the apollo guy he talked a bunch of made up blame-shifting bullshit about before it turned out his scapegoat had receipts to show him for a self-serving liar…they quite fairly want to see him shown the door & a real negotiation about a workable price structure
…not exactly wild demands on their part
It’s obviously a short term money plan, and you’re right that it shows astonishing ignorance of how the product even works.
I think one of the problems (among many) with the way finance deals work is that there is so little transparency on who is really coming up with them. We still don’t know who at Morgan Stanley thought it was a good idea to back Musk’s Twitter debt plan, and that giant blacked out section of Twitter’s backers is another example.
Hollywood is a swamp, but the whole process of crediting screenwriters, directors and producers is a huge step up from finance. You can be misled on one movie whether a particular director is any good, but it’s not so hard to tell once the credits for a series of movies come out. How do you know with the players at Morgan Stanley?
Sorry for your loss @SplinterRIP.
Man this is a lot to take in.
Just an observation not complaint.
A few stream of consciousness comments:
Sure, blame Gladis and her trauma instead of maybe rising water temperatures, food scarcity, underwater noise pollution etc to name a few man-made culprits.
https://www.insider.com/sailor-orca-attack-twice-getting-quicker-2023-6?amp
@SplinterRIP I’m sorry to hear about your friend’s passing. Thank you for sharing about how wonderful they were in life.
And I am sorry for your loss, Splinter, cancer does indeed suck. May their memory be a blessing!
…been running about doing a passable impression of getting things done so I would have thanked folks individually but this is going to be a one-for-all
…the condolences are all appreciated…truly…for a bunch of random internet strangers you folks are a lovely bunch in your own right & I’m glad to have the option of hanging out here with y’all
…they were indeed a wonderful person & will be missed more than I’d ever expect to be…& rightly so…so I think the memory-a-blessing thing is going to come pretty naturally…once I get done being mad they’re gone, anyway…so we got that going for us
…anyway…there’s a reason they say it’s the thought that counts…& I really do thank you for those
sorry for your loss mate
also..as you mentioned the comment up above…i wasnt really trying to make a point…literally just stating your command of the english language is a couple notches above mine
makes reading it a bit of a challenge sometimes…but thats not a bad thing
…I didn’t figure you were outing a grudge or anything…but it honestly did give me some stuff to think about…in what I hope is a good way…so I kinda owe you one, I think?
…at some point in my trajectory through academia I think I settled into the view that there were (thankfully for all of us) no shortage of people smarter than me…but that the ones who seemed most inclined to browbeat or intellectually intimidate others (didn’t have to be me) were reliably several rungs lower on that pecking order than they made out to be…while the so-smart-it-makes-me-dizzy people I’ve met waste zero time trying to prove to anyone that they’re smarter
…small sample size…anecdata…could be I’ve had the wrong end of that stick for a long time…but I’m set in my ways at this point so I don’t see it changing overmuch…& a few decades in I feel like making a choice not to confuse feeling less smart with being intimidated…& learning to be fine with one & resistant to the other…is one of my better choices, life-wise
…then there’s the part where I just run my mouth a bunch for borderline recreational purposes…so…I’d not want that part to wind up resulting in hearing less from people whose views & thoughts I’d be interested in getting to read more of than I do…least of all if it were because they felt intimidated…even by another name that reticent reflex is one I’d prefer to be able to reverse than reinforce, if that makes sense?
it makes sense….i wouldnt worry about it too much….i mostly intimidate myself
sure everyone here being a smart cookie makes it easier to do
but mostly i just overthink everything and knock my own self confidence through the floor
…I have a friend who once suggested to me one time that overthinking things might be my superpower
…I…found that description to be…inapposite?
…I know what they were going for but it doesn’t feel like a power that I can tell…might be connected to my fondness for irony, though…which I contend is the nearest available real-world analogue for the thing described as the force in star wars…suffuses all things…has a light side & a dark side…binds the universe together…or was that duct tape…I forget?
…helps if it’s the irony thing, though…that way laughter is always an appropriate response…which in my experience beats crying almost every time
…also…I know a very, very clever…no, really…too-clever-by-half clever…individual who shall remain nameless…bona fide scientist…has been allowed under the hood of extremely expensive & delicately-calibrated equipment in ways that could be argued to void the warranty…who also managed to knock themselves across a room with an electric shock they got through failing to think through the order of operations involved in changing out the fuse on a plug for a lamp
…sometimes the levels of self-confidence possessed by clever people is where they keep a lot of their surplus dumb, is I guess what I’m saying…so…way I see it…that’s arguably pretty smart on your part to entertain the question…don’t take my word for it, though…according to plato his boy socrates said that true wisdom lies in knowing how little you know…so you can’t be wise if you think you are
…see…imponderables are fun…or is that just me?
Losing anyone you care about to cancer is just tough.
I found the feeling of haplessness and impotence at watching the person you care about wither away the worst. On one hand it is a terrible thing to witness, but also he trusted me enough to be one of two non family members who could visit him in the hospice.
Ironically my friend died in 2021 at about the same time (June 9 actually). What still gets me is how many folks among my meatspace “acquaintances now, used to be friends because I don’t see them except once every 2 years” group are still oblivious about what he went through. I just keep that shit to myself because it is better I shut up as I can be a dick about it if I unload on them.
…yeah…I feel you on that, as the saying goes
…wish I could say it’s the first time I saw that side of cancer’s bag of shitty tricks…but they remain exactly as shitty as ever
…& it’s…difficult…when you have that sort of thing burning a hole in your pocket & just looking to unload itself somewhere…not to start seeing anything taller than it is wide as a potential nail just waiting for you to drop that hammer
…but…it helps in a way to know that that the person I’m pissed about having snatched from us…to be blunt…early & ugly…would give me hell if I went & took out frustrations on undeserving people…in their name, no less
…yeah…they would have nipped that kind of nonsense in the bud & no mistake…as they once pointed out to me in happier times…there’s plenty of people who deserve that piece of your mind…but if you’re lucky you won’t be stuck in their company long enough to deliver it…& if you’re not that lucky…if you can still refrain then surely you must be straight clocking up that good karma like the paperclip machine in that thought experiment…only with less consuming-all-of-creation
…mind you…another friend once told me when I started in on saying something similar that “aren’t you just shadow-boxing at this point?”
…& I have to admit my response was “maybe – but something’s casting that shadow & it seems to me like punching it in the head would be appropriate…so maybe that’s fitting?”
Trump’s been arrested!?…not sure what it all means. But yay!
…sadly…unless I’ve missed something important…which wouldn’t be the first time…I think he gets to go home rather than to holding…so arrested like nicola sturgeon rather than the guy leaving the bank in a hockey mask with a bag marked “swag”
…which…& this is a bizarre thing to type…would be like the last time he got arrested as a formality related to a bunch of counts of an assortment of federal charges?
…some funny guy on twitter did some elementary arithmetic after the indictment was unsealed…& talk about fucking with the curve…as of this week presidents of the US average 1.54 federal charges a head, I think it was…truly there are lies, damn lies & statistics?
I’d like nothing more to see him in a jumpsuit that’s even oranger than his fake tan.
Not holding my breath, though.
…well…shit
…the border trilogy was probably my favorite…got the omnibus sculling about somewhere so maybe I ought to dust that off…not a lot ellipses to be found in his stuff…or any punctuation he could avoid, really
…but he might beat out joyce for the title of all time run-on sentence master?
Sorry that you’ve gotten the ‘ol razor-covered boulder dropped *directly* into your living room, Rip!💔💞💓💗
Cancer sucks rocks, dog hair, goats, and donkey-butt!😠😡🤬🤬🤬
May that boulder grow a nice, thick, protective layer of moss, *very* quickly, so that you can maneuver & take a breath, without getting scraped up & bleed-y, every time you take a step!💖💫💝
Like you, I’m the sort to use humor to shove on through, lest one end up in a blubbering puddle-y *heap* on the floor… so hopefully, to give you a chuckle, I’ll give you the prompts of your post reminding me of the *best* & pun-niest of the Old Gawkerverse Pirate Ship–back where we all “met” one another, before
Voldemor… Hulk Hogan et. al tried blowing her to smithereens with cannon-fire, before Herb and the VultureCapatalists tried to burn the hull to the waterline & past, by “Stick(ing) to Sprotz!”…With all the mentions of Reddit going dark in solidarity, the Trumpty-dumpty/Maga-t shenanigans, Noel driving the Twitterverse into the ground, *plus* your mentions of Scotland–in varying directions–and then, too, the political happenings over there (and in England, too!)?
It all came full circle in my head, as I was reading–because *so much* lately combines into nearly textbook illustrations of the ‘ol “No True Scotsman!” fallacy–*especially* everything in *Trumplandia, and the Grifterverse!*😉😆🤣💖
Bangarang, my friend!
May your seas settle to gentle breezes soon, and may a kind sun & moon light your way!💖💕💞💓💗💝
And, adding to the tunes, the ones your post made me think of, tonight;