Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
Burnt out, over the hill autistic IT nerd and longtime SSC lurker
User ID: 3219
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
19hr ago
I mean, Mark Felt did turn out to be Deep Throat. And wasn't E. Howard Hunt one of those involved in spying on Goldwater for LBJ?
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
5d ago
I mean, Firefly fans are legendary for their influence, from the full page Thank You ad to managing to help get the Big Damn Movie the green light, they've delivered. I'm sure they'll signal boost this as much as possible, but I personally had no idea that there was still even a torch to be carried for a second season to get this far!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
6d ago
Nathan Fillion announced on Instagram that a second Firefly season is in development.
WHAT.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
7d ago
What the Hell Did I Just Read? (John Dies at the End: Book 3) by Jason Pargin. FWIW, I didn't like the second as much as the first but #3 is exploring concepts that are more interesting to me and I'm liking it better than #2.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
7d ago
It was supposed to be a cheap fighter in the same way that the Affordable Care Act was supposed to lower the cost of healthcare in the US by bending the cost curve, which is to say that this is merely how it was sold to John Q. Public[1]. In reality, the F-35 is a large scale graft patronage program that ultimately happened to produce a thoroughly overpriced and under-performing hangar queen of a 5th generation fighter for multiple trillions of dollars more that the US otherwise would have spent on developing separate aircraft tailored to specific needs, but institutional knowledge had decayed to the point where the lessons of the past had largely been forgotten and thus needed to be repeated.
[1] Whether or not this is related to "the stupidity of the American voter" is a separate question. On the gripping hand, the F-35 passed during a comparatively information-starved period of time where it was relatively trivial for politicians to get away with saying one thing while doing another. Moreover, WRT the ACA specifically, while Americans did indeed want something to be done about the cost of their healthcare and their access to same, the ACA was unimpressive enough that there was widespread dissatisfaction with what congress was actually proposing, so much so that Massachusetts voters actually voted in a Republican to Ted Kennedy's vacant seat in order to try and tank the whole thing before the differences were worked out between the House and Senate versions of the bill, which of course Nancy Pelosi solved by having the House pass the Senate version of the bill. On the sinister hand, far too many folks ultimately go back to hugging their televisions rather than actually updating their priors.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
11d ago
Brilliant, it's one hell of a movie and I think I can safely say that the car chase alone is worth the price of admission!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
12d ago
I have an as-yet unexplained fondness for Demolition Man.
What needs to be explained about that? It's Demolition Man!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
13d ago
And I do think that actual behind-the-scenes collusion takes place pretty regularly, at least collusion-lite. Surely there are WhatsApp groups and such for progressive journalists; it must happen now and then that a member of the group posts something like "I'm thinking about reporting on topic X from angle Y. Thoughts?"
It was ever thus. Before Social Media was a Thing, there was the JournoList email group, which itself a successor to the townhouse email group. I'm sure if you were to search for certain Narratives, you'd be able to find supercuts of various co-ordinated "kill shot" messages being disseminated by various talking heads going back to the earliest days of Youtube, and quite probably before.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
13d ago
It was nowhere near that simple, but to be fair, you really had to be there. Once the long-awaited OIG report dropped detailing serious Shenanigans[1], Flynn motioned to withdraw his guilty plea. Here is a supplement that details the misconduct of Covington & Burling LLP, his original lawyers in his case, and here[2] is the supplement that spells out the relevant parts of the FBI and DOJ misconduct in his case. As new evidence, such as the official closing of the Flynn investigation on 1/4/17, and an email documenting an unofficial promise not to prosecute Mike Jr.[3], continued to accumulate, Brandon Van Grack was removed from the case. By May, the DOJ was motioning to dismiss, but even as exculpatory evidence continued to be produced, the circus just kept going.
Revisiting all of this the better part of a decade later, I've had significant difficulty locating the some of the supplements and exhibits that I remember reading that provide even more context, which is frustrating to say the least. It's admittedly possible that they have all blurred together in my memory, as I followed all of that business rather closely. This is a preface to say that what I have linked here is merely what I hope is a decent sampling of the evidence underlying the smorgasbord of bullshit that was the Flynn prosecution. Alas, I have spent the bulk of my evening typing this lone reply rather than attending to my own needs and despite (allegedly) knowing better. More fool me.
[1]. As with all good political documents, the devil is in the details while the executive summary is considerably more... neutered tidy. More importantly, Flynn's new counsel had repeatedly filed motions to compel Brady material, aka exculpatory evidence, which the FBI and DOJ both denied existed.
[2]. This supplement rebutted the DOJ's downplaying of the OIG report, saying that it wasn't that bad and that it didn't pertain to Flynn, which considering that Flynn was in fact Crossfire Razor, was a lie "lacked candor" in OIG-speak.
[3]. This bit was relevant both because Van Grack denied threatening to prosecute Flynn Jr. and also because he would have been required to report an official agreement, hence the unofficial nature of the offer detailed in the email.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
14d ago
I thought the news media couldn't get worse than "firey but mostly peaceful protests." But somehow they've managed to reach a new low.
Gell-Mann amnesia strikes again!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
14d ago
This Book is Full of Spiders (John Dies at the End: Book 2) by Jason Pargin.
Just started re-reading John Dies at the End by Jason Pargin. I scored the sequels on sale for cheap from the Kindle Bookstore and it's been so long since I read it that I really don't remember much of it outside of my enjoyment of it.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
21d ago
One of my favorite snarky comments about US foreign policy in the Middle East during the early teens went like this:
So if I have this straight, we've armed ISIS to overthrow Assad in Syria because he's a partner with Iran, and we're seeking Iran as a partner for doing air strikes to overthrow ISIS in Iraq, and now we need to partner with ISIS to overthrow the Iranian-puppet insurgency in Yemen.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
23d ago
Ooh, nice, that sounds lovely and the flavor profile definitely checks out. Indian and SE Asian coffees in general are bigger on the nut and spice notes and have an earthy taste to them that most other coffees don't have. They're excellent coffees, especially for those that enjoy darker roasts. I actually thought a lot about getting an aged Sumatran in my latest order (yeah, I caved, what can one do?) but I'd already loaded up on a bumper crop of good looking Ethiopian beans so I chose a different Indonesian coffee instead. Always good to have some Asian coffee in the mix for variety!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
23d ago
Coffee Haters Club
I'm in the process of trying to roast and drink my way through all of my older coffees as well as testing my olfactory senses versus the expected flavor profile of said coffees. This week's roast is a Rwandan coffee from yikes, several years ago. My first go 'round, I got a lot of "generic good pourover" flavor initially, that mellowed into a more generic sweetness with some citrus tartness on the side. I wondered to myself if my senses were dulling or, more charitably, if they were just a little rusty. The next day, when preparing my coffee, I realized that I had my water temperature set to 200 degrees, which could definitely flatten the more delicate flavors, so I dialed it down to 195 and had my second cup. The initial flavor mellowed more quickly, of course, and again the sweetness was there right away, along with the citrus and some tantalizing fruitiness that I couldn't put a finger on. Okay, time to face the music and compare my own tasting notes to the notes of the cupper and... "base sweetness of sugarcane juice, spiced Darjeeling tea aroma, fruited hints, lemon citrus accent, acidic impressions, elegant pourover."
Huh. I guess my olfactory nerves aren't so badly calibrated after all!
Next up is likely to be an old Guatemalan that I never got around to trying before I disassembled my roaster for cleaning. I'll be doing the same blind tasting and hopefully I'll still be on the same page as the cupper!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
27d ago
I let a MathCounts club nerd-snipe me
Wow, I had no idea that was still even a Thing!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
28d ago
Ground State: Expeditionary Force Book 19 by Craig Alanson; I ended up wanting his brand of humor again more quickly than I'd anticipated!
Come to the dark side, we have cookies optimize All The Things, even the eating of the fruit!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Don't forget that in size and weight they're virtually indistinguishable from a quarter. Were they larger and heavier, like a fifty cent piece or a British pound, I expect they'd be more popular.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
The 2016 commons "breaking down" didn't come out of nowhere and didn't start in 2016. It comes out of many reasons, among them a long line of short term decisions being made to solve problems and kicking the can down the road; even a relatively short term view that only considers federal governance alone can be dated back to the LBJ Great Society, the chain from Ford-Carter-Reagan, Dubya 1, the Clinton corporatization consolidation years, Dubya 2's action and then the Obama-era expansion of the surveillance state. That's without talking about money, the economy, the labor and mortgage markets.
Somewhere, FDR is pulling a sad Pikachu face because he was left out of this line.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
People don’t want to do things unless they’re ideal.
The Noob Returns (Noobtown Book 9) by Ryan Rimmel. Haven't quite finished it yet but fuck, it's fun to return to this world after a decent stretch between books.
What the Hell Did I Just Read ended up disappointing me, mostly because Pargin ultimately only played around with the differing perspectives of the characters, leading to a pointless, dare I say ruined, climax and no real resolution. I was hoping with the way it was going that it'd be an Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade sort of situation but instead, it felt more like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. And I can't help but notice that the original John Dies at the End has, overall, been funnier than the subsequent books combined.
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