Midweek Meh-Ness [DOT 26/3/25]

26/3/25 MegMegMcGee 52

Slowest week ever?

Not if you’re The Atlantic. What a scoop!

Democrats slam intel chiefs over Trump team’s Signal leak
https://wapo.st/4cbaiHq

Trump dismisses Signal blunder as ‘glitch’ as top Democrat condemns ‘sloppy, careless, incompetent’ error – live
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/mar/25/donald-trump-military-intelligence-breach-signal-failure-blunder-journalist-atlantic-live-news

Butter Emails

Hillary Clinton reacts to military plans leak: ‘You have got to be kidding me’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/25/hillary-clinton-white-house-military-plans-leak

Florida Man

Florida debates lifting some child labor laws to fill jobs vacated by undocumented immigrants
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/25/business/florida-child-labor-laws/index.html

Ugh

‘Targeted’ and ‘cruel’: NASA staff react to layoffs as broader changes loom
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/24/science/nasa-layoffs-policy-office/index.html

Delete yourselves…from 23andMe

How to delete your 23andMe data after the company filed for bankruptcy
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/25/nx-s1-5339695/how-delete-23andme-data-bankruptcy

Hamdan Ballal: Oscar-winning Palestinian director released from Israeli detention
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/25/oscar-winning-palestinian-director-hamdan-ballal-released-from-israeli-detention

That’s all I’ve got for now. What other fuckery did I miss?

Have a great day!

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52 Comments

  1. …presumably I have something wrong or I’m missing a bit…but…so far…it seems like it goes a bit like this

    …oh, that chat – how do you know about that chat? …someone invites you to a group thread which shouldn’t have been happening in an app that’s not supposed to be installed on the sort of device that sort of chat could be happening on…&…you’re a not-especially-beholden journalist?

    …well, that’s a…glitch…for which this one guy is responsible…who says he doesn’t know how he could add you when you aren’t a number in his phonebook…& anyway none of the stuff that was talked about was the sort of classified that would mean anything really happened here…if you overlook what kind of stuff it was…& don’t know the sorts of not-for-public-presentation there are for which there are in fact quite specific rules…that all the people on that chat were breaking…that they’re baldly claiming just…aren’t a thing

    …& most of it rides on people going no further into it than “some sort of glitch”…like fucking gremlins did that shit to a perfectly competent bunch of serious people we didn’t all just see pull the most embarrassing shit anyone with a government paycheck ever saw in their lives

    …do I have that approximately right?

    …because menken may have claimed nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the american people…but I have my doubts…I think plenty of dumb ideas went broke when the people wouldn’t buy it…which would make those people smarter than that business plan estimated they would be

    …somewhere out there…there is a limit…& how dumb they’re asking you to tell them you are when they ask you to take their word for what you’re watching…at this point?

    …the MAGA base is famously thin-skinned…& that shit has been flagrantly insulting for a while…but this is some weekend-warriors-on-whatsapp level shit repping you on the world stage…& the ask is you say it represents a “no biggie” but also “all our other fuck-ups have been of even lesser consequence”…so nobody should be in trouble or anything…let alone lose their job

    …not like a bunch of you…who are totally losing your jobs while we blow up the economy so the benefits you won’t get either wouldn’t be enough if we did give them to you…& the deficit will be getting jacked up for years so there won’t be any help coming down the pike, neither…you see we needed to cut back the tax burden on the people who have enough money to be countries & your grandkids’ grandkids will be paying that shit off like a student loan for a degree they didn’t get from a school they didn’t attend

    …I…get nervous when @bryanlsplinter admits to some of the worst case scenarios that spring to mind…I cleave pretty strongly to the belief that the better case scenarios that come with securely ratcheting some principles into a sort of locked-in step up some sort of moral ladder for societies’ baseline decency tend to happen when people aren’t racking up the classic kung-fu movie protagonist motivator…namely the death of a close friend/personal relative/mentor…& your more significant sorts of civil unrest have a tendency to run that risk

    …but…those people are seemingly fueled by grievance…largely in proportion to their perception of it rather than any objective sense of much that makes sense…& they run enough of a surplus that it jets out under pressure from anywhere they’re told they get to vent it

    …if that reservoir gets around to perceiving how much of a fucking fool they’re being told to their face the people they’re playing culture warrior for think they are…& mix that with their material circumstances getting demonstrably worse

    …who or what are we hoping holds that back behind the dam they’ve been poking all these holes in all this time?

    • I’ve been surprised at the Dem response (laudatory) because it seems like they’re actually trying with this one. Jefferies has already demanded firings and they grilled Tulsi — a know-nothing who knows nothing — yesterday. The media hasn’t played it as big as a Democratic scandal — BIDEN OLD BIDEN OLD BIDEN OLD BIDEN OLD BIDEN OLD — but they’ve actually paid attention to it because Goldberg is an Establishment Member In Good Standing so it’s something that matters to them. I’ve even heard some rumblings about “well did this happen or didn’t it, you’ve said both three different times now” which is almost never EVER allowed to be said by the media in regards to right-wing excuse making.

      The Dems should keep it up … and instead they’re still voting for Trump appointees. So my hopes aren’t high. But at least they seem to be taking a swing at a pitch (after striking out looking for the past 6 innings)

  5. Bye bye democratic elections…

    https://apnews.com/article/voting-elections-trump-executive-order-4e9edb53f47e61e241a43ceef8164022

    Not Big Balls again?

    https://www.reuters.com/world/us/doge-staffer-big-balls-provided-tech-support-cybercrime-ring-records-show-2025-03-26/

    If you can’t win in court, just eliminate it!  (I had my money on just ignore rulings.)

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-mike-johnson-floats-eliminating-federal-courts-rcna197986

    • No. Despite the media’s framing of the King handing down a proclamation, Trump has 0 power to just edit election law. It’s not even a federal thing — it’s all for the states!

      Now of course he wants to do this and surely this is a call for red states to close ranks and do what he wants, but he legitimately has no power whatsoever to do what he’s proposing and it’s journalistic malpractice not to say so with all of these stories rather than have one paragraph halfway through saying “Oh yeah actually only states can do this and this means nothing.”

      • Trump has 0 power to do most of what he has already done w/out congress but that hasn’t stopped him.  If Elon & his merry band of assholes are given the voter rolls, I have no doubt they will just delete every voter that is not also on the Trump donation list.  They don’t plan on being stopped by laws & lawsuits & nobody has found a way to make him accountable yet.

        • But most of what he’s doing is federal government related. This is not. He can’t get the voter rolls because those are held by states, not in D.C. “Congress won’t stop me from wrecking the federal government” is one thing — a very bad thing, obviously — but short of rolling up the army on state Capitols, he has no way to do what he’s proposing here.

            • He can threaten that but it’s a relatively empty threat for most blue states, which almost entirely pay in more than they take out. But a) it’s not that easy to just shut off the spigot (as Elon and crew are finding) and b) while a lot of people are folding under that pressure now, you eventually lose that lever when you say you’re going to cut off funding over basically everything already.

              A lot of people are going to want to knuckle under, but as we’ve already seen with Columbia, giving in doesn’t actually keep the bully away and generally pisses off everyone else. Even with my low opinion of Democrats, they still want to win elections and giving away editable voter data is an very obvious suicide.

  7. I’ve planned outings on Whatsapp or txt, but only morons would use it for a classified military op.

    Especially amusing after Faux Newz et al went full hard on over Hils’ email server for a decade. It’s not the first time a Trump Admin fucked up modern communications (cough, Jared/Ivanka’s private email server) but it never got traction like Hils’ saga did.

    • It’s one of the craziest political turnarounds I think I’ve ever seen. It took Labour over a decade to finally beat the Tories in Britain even as the country withered; Trump pissed Canada off so much that it took basically a few weeks to flip from a likely Con sweep to a very possible Lib majority.

      • What I actually kind of hope for, but probably not going to happen is that Maple MAGAts get blamed for this and get tossed out of Canadian politics.

        PP actually has only himself to blame for this as his Trump adjacent policies and Trump style campaigning, plus pics of he and various loons of his caucus supporting the Trucker Fucker Convoy (whose leaders are members of the vague/stupid Maverick Party of Alberta who actually want to join Murrica, specifically Trump’s version of Murrica) that rampaged thru Ottawa 4 years ago. Despite all the flaws of the Libs, they at least were willing to fight.

        Throw in Quislings like Danielle Smith and Scott Moe (who are still popular in their home provinces but shouldn’t be) begging the Donald to help PP, it’s not good.

        • We need to draw up a quisling list and make it go viral.

          PP also burt himself by ILLEGALLY campaigning for two full years. People are bored of him.

          I go for lunch at a plaza where kids from 3 high schools meet and even they are talking about how ridiculous he and his slogans and namecalling are. They are pissed they can’t vote.

          • Wayne Gretzky

            Pat King

            Tamara Licht

            Kevin O’Leary

            Danielle Smith

            Scott Moe

            PP

            PP’s campaign manager who had pics of her in MAGAt gear

            Any Canadian Citizen wearing MAGAt gear including this angry double parked (white natch) lumpy asshole last year at the Mount Sinai Hospital while wearing a T-shirt claiming Socialized Medicine is Murder (yes, I rolled my eyes at the irony of a socialist medicine hating dipshit going to a (world class BTW) public hospital.))

            • …I’mma need that dude to break out the crayons…it’s gonna take someone drawing me a picture to see how the socialized part turns medicine to murder

              …did he just really not understand how belladonna is related to heart meds…or maybe have an actual frontal lobotomy…or is this like the time the french had a fashion brand called naf naf…which…is not a noise you want brits to make when they look at your outfit…even if that’s usually a 2-f word…maybe that’s another one?

              …blusterfuck…& that’s a 2-f-word…like that’s an f(-word)² deal…the density of fuckery requires you to square the f-word part by multiplying it by itself

              …ok…that’s 2…barely scratching the surface but we can’t all be wittgenstein & I’m not trying to just headcannon a private language…if you lot hear any good ones in the wild I sincerely hope you’ll feel like sharing with the class?

    • …meanwhile those rivian folks have an actual load-bed…that you can extend with the tailgate locked down…with a spot in the front like a small trunk…& a sort of tunnel under the load-bed…& all of those have useable sockets to power stuff from

      …there’s other electric trucks but that lot really seemed like they actually thought it through…while elon was “watching” that one simpsons episode where homer & a comedian get to build a car the way he “read” iain m banks’ stuff

      …& even if the jokes about shipping them out to stack like containers on mars once they’re pressurized weren’t as ridiculous as the idea that it’s a genius play to develop mars-friendly rides for down the line

      …he’s always banging on about the share of “humanity’s payload” space X is ploughing up to orbit on the ones that don’t explode…so why make a thing with battery & motor weight you can’t lose out of some of the heaviest materials you can find when people already did the hard part of figuring out for you how to make it safe & light…just so the glass can break when you lob a metal rock at it…on stage…& skip any kind of finish on the panelwork so when some more-money-than-sense fanboi vinyl wraps the thing & then decides that isn’t working out for them & peels that off…the shit underneath is fucking wrecked

      …with all due respect to the kids of friends that I know & like that tell me they like the cybertruck…it’s a dumb-ass ride that’s dumb enough that if it’s your ride you need to be proving pretty regularly that you’re not a dumbass if you expect people not to treat you like you are…& they’ll assume you have more money than you need, too…so it’s not like they’ll feel like they need to feel bad about it or anything

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