Rats, sinking ship, yadda yadda yadda

Some bad guys are getting betrayal for Christmas. There are hints that Mark Meadows may have been turned. Meadows was Trump’s chief of staff, and there are already piles of incriminating memos and text messages during the insurrection that have turned up, so maybe he’s seeing some advantages of turning into a witness for the prosecution.

“There is a very tantalizing comment in the executive summary,” said Weissmann, a former assistant U.S. attorney who worked on Mueller’s team. “It’s hard to call it that because it’s 160 pages, but in that executive summary there’s a reference to why the Department of Justice may not have sought to charge Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino with contempt.”

“If you recall, they were both referred by the committee to the Department of Justice for contempt failing to comply with a subpoena, and one of the things the report says, is it sort of speculates, but odd that it says it may be that they’re already cooperating,” Weissmann added, “and with Mark Meadows, that would be huge. I mean, he is in the place to know everything so, obviously, if not cooperating already, there is a ton of pressure that is going to be put on him.”

Meadows is a real sleaze, but I’d be happy to trade him for a more robust criminal prosecution against the big orange guy.

Also in the news — Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested, but the question has been…where is his partner-in-crime, Caroline Ellison? While SBF has been babbling to everyone, including minor league youtubers as well as the big money press, Ellison has been lying low, silent. The answer has been revealed: she’s been singing like a canary to the feds.

Two former colleagues of disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges that they helped him orchestrate a years-long scheme to defraud investors in FTX, the crypto trading platform that collapsed last month, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York said Wednesday.

The executives — Caroline Ellison, who served as chief executive of Alameda Research, a hedge fund owned by Bankman-Fried, and Gary Wang, FTX’s former chief technology officer — are cooperating with prosecutors, said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams.

You dirty, yellow-bellied rat!

I’m not complaining. None of the rats will ever be trusted again.

A manly soup

My wife says, “Manly, aye, but I like it too.” (you have to be a certain age to get that reference.)

It started out as a bland bean soup, but after I added carrots and potatoes and sausage (Impossible Sausage, so still vegan) and onions and garlic and a lot of mysterious spices, it became hearty enough to keep a man (and a woman) warm and strong through even the most savage blizzard Minnesota might throw at us.

Awaiting a blizzard

Doesn’t it give you a little thrill when the National Weather Service informs you of “life-threatening conditions” about to descend upon your home?

…WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL NOON CST THURSDAY… …WIND CHILL WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 6 AM THURSDAY TO NOON CST SATURDAY… …BLIZZARD WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM NOON THURSDAY TO 6 AM CST SATURDAY…

WHAT…For the Wind Chill Warning, dangerously cold wind chills expected. Wind chills as low as 40 below zero. For the Winter Storm Warning, heavy snow expected. Total snow accumulations of 5 to 8 inches. For the Blizzard Warning, blizzard conditions expected. Winds gusting as high as 50 mph. For the Wind Chill Advisory, very cold wind chills. Wind chills as low as 30 below zero.

WHERE…Stevens, Pope and Swift Counties.

WHEN…For the Wind Chill Warning, from 6 AM Thursday to noon CST Saturday. For the Winter Storm Warning, from 6 AM Wednesday to noon CST Thursday. For the Blizzard Warning, from noon Thursday to 6 AM CST Saturday. For the Wind Chill Advisory, until midnight CST tonight.

IMPACTS…Travel could be very difficult or impossible. Widespread blowing snow could significantly reduce visibility. Gusty winds could bring down tree branches. The dangerously cold wind chills could cause frostbite on exposed skin in as little as 10 minutes.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS…This could be a life-threatening situation if you get stranded traveling late this week. Consider adjusting any travel plans now.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS…

Travel should be restricted to emergencies only. If you must travel, have a winter survival kit with you. If you get stranded, stay with your vehicle.

The latest road conditions for the state you are calling from can be obtained by calling 5 1 1. Road conditions can also be found at 511mn.org for Minnesota or 511wi.gov for Wisconsin.
More Information
…ACCUMULATING SNOW WEDNESDAY FOLLOWED BY GROUND BLIZZARD AND DANGEROUSLY COLD CONDITIONS THURSDAY AND FRIDAY… …TRAVEL THURSDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH FRIDAY NIGHT COULD BE IMPOSSIBLE AND LIFE-THREATENING…

.Snow will overspread the region Wednesday and bring 5 to 9 inches of fluffy accumulation through Wednesday night north of a line from Madison to Mankato To Eau Claire, with 3 to 5 inches to the south. Winds will be relatively light Wednesday and Wednesday evening. There should be a break in severe winter conditions late Wednesday night and early Thursday. Then, strong northwest winds gusting as high as 50 mph and dangerously cold air will surge in Thursday afternoon through Friday night. Whiteout conditions are expected during that time with travel becoming very difficult or impossible. This event could be life- threatening if you are stranded with wind chills in the 30 below to 45 below zero range. Travel plans for late this week should be adjusted now. In addition, heavy snow remaining on trees from the last storm and strong winds arriving could result in tree damage and power outages as temperatures drop below zero.

A Winter Storm Warning is in effect Wednesday and Wednesday evening. Then, a Blizzard Warning goes into effect Thursday across southern and western Minnesota, with the Winter Storm Watch continuing north and east where wind and blowing snow will begin a bit later.

So, today — lots of snow. Tomorrow and the next day — 50mph winds pick up all the light fluffy stuff and blow it around and around, reducing visibility, making it painfully dangerous to be outside, and drifting all over the roads and highways. I just looked out my window and the snow is already here.

I’m taking this seriously, of course. Shortly, before the snow gets too high, I’m going across the street to the lab to feed all the spiders and set up the fly stocks for genetics that arrived yesterday, and then I’ll dart home and hunker down. I’m planning a big pot of soup — maybe more of a stew, I’m planning to throw in lots of chunky vegetables — that’ll tide us over for a few days. And then tonight, I’ll huddle around the warm glow of the computer monitor and have a conversation with anyone who wants to join in. Unless the power goes out.

Stay safe, everyone!

The Menu is a different kind of horror movie

The Menu is getting a very short run at the Morris Theater, only a couple of days and then it’s out tonight. It’s not exactly holiday fare, I guess. I got in to see it last night, in a nearly empty theater (the competition running on the second screen is Avatar, which doesn’t interest me in the slightest).

It’s worth seeing! I didn’t know what to expect, and was continually surprised. I could summarize it as your standard horror/slasher movie: obsessed chef with a cult following invites obnoxious upper-class snobs to a private dinner in order to kill them all, the sort of thing you might expect a Vincent Price to headline. But that’s not it at all. Ralph Fiennes is marvelously intense as a chef who has lost all joy in his craft, and plays it with a sorrowful despair. His guests might be frightened at first, but mostly they sink into resignation. “We’re all going to die tonight,” one says, while passively remaining seated at the table. They all stay and eat — no, taste and savor — the weirdly finicky plates of little tidbits artfully tweezered into miniature tableaus in front of them.

Instead of the traditional grisly-murder-one-after-the-other, most of the diners survive to the very end. They instead face psychological torture, becoming increasingly aware of their doom. Even the one set-piece event, in which the men are released onto the island with a 45 second head start before the waitstaff will hunt them down, doesn’t end with any killing — they’re caught and brought back and sit down for the next course. It was more horrifying than culminating the hunt in gore and splatter.

Even the staff are caught up in a cult of depression and despair. No one will get out alive, and all seem to welcome the release of death. There’s no point in living, you know. You’ll never be great enough, other people will suck all the life out of you eventually. Serve the chef, that is all.

The exception to all the doom-and-gloom is Anya Taylor-Joy (is she going to be in every movie from now on?) who plays a prostitute hired by one of the pretentious twits to be his plus one. She is mainly pissed off when she learns her client knew ahead of time that this dinner was going to end in death, and he hired her because he know he couldn’t attend without a partner. She fights back by reminding the chef of a time when he wasn’t jaded and cynical, and even gets an honest smile out of him.

The real monster in the movie turns out to be wealth and capitalism and greed, and how it consumes people with ennui. But it is at heart a true horror movie, it’s just lacking an Abominable Dr Phibes and replaces him with a sense of sorrowful futility.

A perfect Christmas movie!

Now I’m going to miss Twitter even more…not.

According to grinning asshat Jesse Waters, its demographic skews atheist female — urban, atheist, overeducated female! We’ve seen the metrics on it. It is mostly single women that have graduate degrees.

Wow, really? That sounds great! Conversations with smart women, sign me up.

Except…that doesn’t jibe with my personal experience of Twitter, and, well, it’s out of the lying mouth of Jesse Waters, and the numbers don’t match up with reality at all, as we might expect of Fox News.

70.4% of Twitter users are male, while only 29.6% are female.

Women get harassed and abused so much more than men on Twitter, so that’s much more in alignment with my impressions.

I won’t do that

I am constantly surprised by all the companies that want to pay me money to advertise on my YouTube channel. It’s a tiny channel, infrequently updated, so they must be desperate if they’re reaching out to me. This latest offer, though…guess what I think of it?

Avalanche Software, Inc.
Centrum Sumavska, Sumavska 416/15, 602 00
Brno, Czech Republic
Esteemed Prospective Partner:
Our company has found your YouTube channel interesting as a subject to promote our game “Hogwarts Legacy”.
We have been exploring your channel for some time and we enjoy your creativity so we are sure that we can be useful to each other!
If you are interested in our offer, please reply to this email and we will send you a media kit which includes a promotional video and the terms of the advertising contract!
Kind regards,
John Bahringer

First, I am put off by dishonesty. No, you didn’t find my channel interesting, and you probably never even looked at the content. You’ve got a ranked list by order of the number of subscribers, and you’ve been working through it and found me down near the bottom. That’s it.

But secondly, and more importantly — advertise Hogwarts Legacy? HELL NO. You want me to contribute to the coffers of wicked transphobe and bad writer JK Rowling? Not gonna happen. Never in my lifetime. I’ll go the other way and suggest that everyone should boycott Hogwarts Legacy. I’m going to side with Jessie Gender on that.

In addition to being an obnoxious writer of tedious potboilers, that thread also shows that JK Rowling can’t read.

Slowly grinding wheels

Remember Harvey Weinstein? I thought he was done five years ago, but no! He has been getting slowly chewed up in the judicial system — I guess we need to learn to appreciate that the cycle doesn’t actually fit into the one-hour story of a Law & Order episode, where the crime is committed before the first commercial, the culprit is arrested by the second, and then we squeeze in a twist or two and get a quick clean conviction before the final credits roll.

So, just yesterday, on 19 December 2022, Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of rape. Again, not a simple result, though — some of his accusers dropped out early, he got a hung jury on multiple instances, but in one case he was convicted of “rape, forced oral copulation and another sexual misconduct count”, verdicts that are piled on top of prior convictions in New York. I won’t go into the details, but there was one satisfying moment.

Weinstein looked down at the table and appeared to put his face in his hands when the initial guilty counts were read. He looked forward as the rest of the verdict was read.

He faces up to 24 years in prison when he is sentenced. Prosecutors and defence attorneys had no immediate comment on the verdict.

“Harvey Weinstein will never be able to rape another woman. He will spend the rest of his life behind bars where he belongs,” Siebel Newsom said in a statement. “Throughout the trial, Weinstein’s lawyers used sexism, misogyny, and bullying tactics to intimidate, demean, and ridicule us survivors. The trial was a stark reminder that we as a society have work to do.”

I sometimes despair at the sluggishness of justice in this country. I just have to hope that maybe, in five years or so, there will be a moment where Donald Trump puts his face in his hands and gets to look forward to spending the remainder of his life in prison.

Although, knowing what we do of Trump, he probably wouldn’t be going with even that much dignity. There’d probably be squalling and cursing and lying on the floor kicking. Which will be even more satisfying.

Also, I’d like to be at the point where I’m wondering, “Who? Trump? They’re still trying him?” when I’m told he’s been convicted.

The 6 Jan Committee has reached the conclusion that…

…Trump ought to be prosecuted.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol voted Monday to send to Justice Department prosecutors a recommendation that former president Donald Trump be charged with four crimes: inciting or assisting an insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to make a false statement. The move has no legal weight, but marks the first time Congress has made such a referral for a former president.

Will the Justice Dept. do anything about it? Will Trump be allowed to continue to run for president? Will there be any consequences at all?

I have no confidence in justice in this country anymore.

Conservatives being racist again

This is Rob Finnerty, a newsreader for Newsmax. Nice hair, strong chin, looks like a real Chad.

Also, he’s real mad about something, like a real Chad. He’s mad about the availability of dolls, which is a little off-brand for a Chad…unless he can make it about black people.

“My daughter is just a cute little 6-year-old white girl — we couldn’t find anybody that looked like my daughter,” Finnerty said in the video. “It was—the whole place, it was, like wokeified. How long has this been going on with American Girls? It was somewhat of a bizarre experience.”

“Wokeified”? This word is getting overused by the Right.

Also, he lied. Check out the American Girl store online — there’s a wide range of skin tones available. A TikToker visited the same store shortly after his rant, and found it well-stocked.

Almost immediately, Fidel noticed that the store was brimming with white dolls — not only on display but in boxes stacked high on shelves and in animated videos on the wall.

“The literal first doll that you see when you walk into the store,” Fidel says, zooming in on a smiling white doll with blond pigtails.

Fidel continues to walk around the store, recording the multitude of white dolls on shelves and in boxes. He remarks that, while the store has “thrown in some other races,” a “great portion” of the dolls on display are white.

The Root checked out the story as well.

The Root’s office is located just a few steps from the American Girl store. Our writers and editors pass by it everyday and we can clearly say the store is mostly filled with white dolls.

“Did he stop to think that perhaps all of the white dolls were sold out at the store? Was going on the American Girl website not an option for him? Surely if he did, his panic would’ve subsided,” she wrote. “In the All Dolls section, you must scroll through almost 20 white dolls before you get to a doll of color.

“I also imagine he forgot about the decades that cute, little Black and brown girls could only choose from all-white doll shelves — none of which looked anything like them. Why? Because whiteness was the default.”

You must forgive Chad…I mean, Rob. He’s not a journalist. He doesn’t actually investigate anything. He reads a teleprompter, and looks for things that will inflame his audience of old racists. He didn’t get the job because he’s perceptive, or intelligent, or well-educated, he’s there to look smart on TV. He is what he is, which is the very lowest rung on the information ladder. He’s also not a trustworthy rung, so ignore him.

Was there ever a good internet?

I doubt it, and having been on this evolving beast we call “the internet” since the early 1990s, I can pretty convincingly assert that it has been a mixed bag from the very beginning. But I will also claim that it used to be better. I think this article hits the nail on the head.

Wil Wheaton just published a great opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal with the title “The Internet Used to be Smaller and Nicer. Let’s Get It Back.” I’ll get to the content of the article in moment, but first I want to discuss the choice of publication. By publishing in the WSJ, the piece is behind a paywall, though it does seem to randomly allow people to get in (often seems to work if you click through via Twitter). In some ways, the fact that Wil chose to publish in the WSJ is a microcosm of the issue that he’s discussing in the piece: you publish in the WSJ because it’s likely to attract a larger audience than publishing on your own site (and Wil does maintain and regularly publish his own independent blog which is full of great content).

I haven’t read Wheaton’s article, and it’s unlikely that I will. It’s behind a paywall, and do I look like the kind of guy who would subscribe to the WSJ? That’s the problem — that we constantly cede access to information to wealthy corporations. Elon Musk, with his arbitrary, capricious, small-minded limiting of the privilege of posting on Twitter is not a new phenomenon. That’s been a problem for the last decade, when Google killed the independent web.

But, there are always tradeoffs. Relying on someone else’s platform is often just much easier. It doesn’t involve having to maintain your own site, and it’s also often where the audience is. The issue with blogs is that you had to attract — and then keep — an audience. Tools like RSS acted as a method for keeping people coming back, but… then Google became the de facto provider of RSS reading tools, and then killed it. To this day, that move is still considered one of the defining moments in the shift from a more distributed, independent web to one that is controlled by a few large companies.

If you don’t remember the heyday of RSS, it was…different. You had to customize your access a little bit — when you stumbled across an interesting article, you’d click a button and tell your reader to check this site out in the future and let you know when something new appeared there. It wasn’t hard to do at all, but it did require that you personally flag sites of interest. Then, you’d have a page in your web browser that would automatically list all the recently updated sites.

You had to do your own curation, rather than the current situation, where Google and Facebook and Twitter do all the work and tell you what you want to read. You know all this algorithm nonsense? That’s all that it is, big companies thinking for you and telling you what you want to look at…and buy. And it all happened in 2013, when Google decided it wasn’t going to let you make your own decisions anymore.

We were all at fault, though. It’s so much easier to let capitalism control what you see. I’m guilty, too — there’s a list of blog links to the left on this page that are a vestige of when I tried to replace Google Reader’s functionality with my own list of cool things on the web. I haven’t updated it in years! It’s just there, mostly ignored, because it’s easier to be distracted by “trending” pages and the stuff that pours in as soon as I open Google.

I have a New Year’s resolution, for a change, and that is to clean that stuff up and make it more of a habit to use my RSS reader (it’s Feedly, by the way, easy to use and free, although I’m open to other recommendations). You should try it too — you’ll get a more varied diet of information and escape out from under the corporate thumb, a little bit.