This pretty much captures it, amirite?
Finding stuff like this is why having a 17 y.o. cynic for a son is so rewarding.
Thread along, friends jackals.
This post is in: Humorous, Open Threads, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own
This pretty much captures it, amirite?
Finding stuff like this is why having a 17 y.o. cynic for a son is so rewarding.
Thread along, friends jackals.
by TaMara| 104 Comments
This post is in: Cooking, Open Threads
I believe Betty C did….
While her husband was making her a nice healing batch of soup, I was doing the same. This one to be exact. I made it as spicy as I dared to help fend off a persistent virus.
And it became clear that my Kuhn Rikon pressure cooker is not long for this world. The safety release valve has been failing and there is no reliable replacement part available, I suppose due to the age of the cookware. The one they had available, they pulled because it was defective.
So now I’m stuck. I don’t really want to (nor can I really afford at the moment) to pay another $200 for a pressure cooker AND I am intrigued by the electric ones as a more affordable alternative.
My question is: who has an electric pressure cooker (often called instant pots), what brand (Insta Pot seems to be the one all my friends have) and how do you like it? It will be in heavy rotation in my kitchen, so durability is a concern.
Help a cook out if you can…
Bonus puppeh:
As I’ve been writing this, the ducks keep wandering past my window. Probably looking for a warm spot in the sun. I get the feeling they are blaming me for the cold snap.
Happy New Year!
Did Someone Say Soup? I Need Some AdvicePost + Comments (104)
This post is in: Excellent Links, Military, Daydream Believers, Security Theatre
I’ll probably get clipped for saying this — I may even deserve it! — but after reading Kerry Howley’s NYMag profile, I think Reality Winner and Heather Heyer (killed by a Nazi in Charlottesville) would’ve been friends. “Not every leaker is an ideological combatant like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Reality Winner may be the unlikeliest of all”:
Reality Winner grew up in a carefully kept manufactured home on the edge of a cattle farm 100 miles north of the Mexican border in a majority-Latino town where her mother, Billie, still lives. From the back porch, a carpet of green meets the horizon, and when a neighbor shoots a gun for target practice, a half-dozen local dogs run under the trailer to hide. Billie worked for Child Protective Services, and in Ricardo, Texas, the steady income made her daughters feel well-off; the fact that they had a dishwasher seemed evidence of elevated social standing. Billie, a chatty redhead with the high-pitched voice of a doll, supported the family while her husband, Ronald, she says, “collected degrees.” It was Ronald who named Reality. The deal had been that Billie got to name their first — Brittany — but their second was his to choose. He noticed, on a T-shirt at their Lamaze class, the words I COACHED A REAL WINNER. He wanted a success story and felt that an aspirational name would increase his chances of producing one. Billie did not object; a deal is a deal.
Ronald was intellectually engaged, though never, during his marriage, employed, and Reality’s parents separated in 1999, when she was 8. Two years later, when the Towers fell, Ronald held long, intense conversations about geopolitics with his daughters. He was careful to distinguish for them the religion of Islam from the ideologies that fueled terrorism. “I learned,” says Reality, “that the fastest route to conflict resolution is understanding.” She credits her father with her interest in Arabic, which she began studying seriously, outside school and of her own accord, at 17. It was this interest in languages that eventually drew her into a security state, unimaginable before 9/11, that she chose to betray. Fifteen years after those first conversations with her father, Reality’s interest in Arabic would be turned against her in a Georgia courtroom, taken as evidence that she sympathized with the nation’s most feared enemies…
No one was surprised when Reality’s sister, Brittany, went on to college, absurd amounts of college, such that she walked out of Michigan State with a Ph.D. in pharmacology and toxicology last year. But Reality had then, and has now, a skepticism of academic degrees, which she recently described to me as “hundred-thousand-dollar pieces of paper that say you’ve never had a job.” (“It’s interesting,” her mother notes, “because of her father?”) She wanted her life to start. She wanted to make the biggest difference she could, as soon as she could. It wasn’t until she was getting on the bus for basic training that she told her mother she’d applied to engineering school at Texas A&M–Kingsville, received a full scholarship, and turned it down.
Based on her test scores, Reality was selected to be a cryptolinguist, which is to say she was tapped to help the military eavesdrop on people speaking languages other than English. She wanted Arabic, but the ones assigned to her were Dari and Farsi — languages of use to a military vacuuming up conversations from Afghanistan and Iran. She would spend two years becoming fluent and another year in intelligence training before she was sent to Maryland’s Fort Meade. Along the way, she’d be one of a few students admitted to a selective program in Pashto, yet another language in which she would become fluent.
In Maryland, her life, according to those closest to her, involved an exceptionally punishing exercise regimen, volunteer work, and 12-hour shifts listening to the private conversations of men and women thousands of miles away. There was also anxiety. Reality worried about global warming. She worried about Syrian children. She worried about famine and poverty all over the globe. Highly critical of her carbon-spewing, famine-ignoring fellow citizens, she nevertheless thought her humanitarian impulses were compatible with the military’s mission, and wished her fellow Airmen were not just more competent in their jobs but more motivated to do them well, to save the vulnerable from acts of terror…
Reality would later tell the FBI that she worked in the drone program; as a cryptolinguist, her job would likely have been to translate communications so that drone operators would know whom to target. “It was definitely traumatizing,” says Boyle. “You’re watching people die. You have U.S. troops on the ground getting shot at, you miss something, a bomb goes off, and you get three people killed.”
As a matter of record, she helped kill hundreds of people. A commendation she received in October 2016 praises her for “assisting in geolocating 120 enemy combatants during 734 airborne sorties.” She is commended for “removing more than 100 enemies from the battlefield.” She aided in 650 “enemy captures” and 600 “enemies killed in action.”…
By December 2016, when Reality returned to Georgia, it was common for a certain class of educated and politically sophisticated people to refer to the “deep state,” a term that conjures dark-suited men self-satisfied in their grim capacity for discretion. This image fails to account for the fact that those 1.4 million hold top security clearance; that most of the intelligence budget now redounds to private contractors employing tens of thousands of middle-class Americans; that armies of security-cleared analysts are required to sift through all the data the state collects. If your definition of “deep state” cannot accommodate an idealistic 25-year-old CrossFit fanatic with unmatched socks, you’ve underestimated both the reach and scope of American surveillance…
Reality was searched for thumb drives and cell phones every morning as she walked into the Whitelaw Building; her lunch, security guards noted as they pawed through it, was very healthy. She translated Farsi in documents relating to Iran’s aerospace program, work for which she had no particular affinity and which seems to have bored her. For those mornings when she did not feel like reading more documents about Iran’s aerospace program, she evidently had access to documents well outside her area of expertise. She had access, for example, to a five-page classified report detailing a Russian attempt to access American election infrastructure through a private software company. This would be, ultimately, the document she leaked. According to the analysis in the report, Russian intelligence sent phishing emails to the employees of a company that provides election support to eight states. After obtaining log-in credentials, the Russians sent emails infected with malware to over 100 election officials, days before the election, from what looked like the software company’s address…
In those first months on the job, the country was still adjusting to Trump, and it seemed possible to some people that he would be quickly impeached. Reality listened to a podcast called Intercepted, hosted by the left-wing anti-security-state website the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill and featuring its public face, Glenn Greenwald, and listened intensely enough to email the Intercept and ask for a transcript of an episode. Scahill and Greenwald had been, and continue to be, cautious about accusations of Russian election meddling, which they foresee being used as a pretext for justifying U.S. militarism. “There is a tremendous amount of hysterics, a lot of theories, a lot of premature conclusions being drawn around all of this Russia stuff,” Scahill said on the podcast in March. “And there’s not a lot of hard evidence to back it up. There may be evidence, but it’s not here yet.”
There was evidence available to Reality.
The document was marked top secret, which is supposed to mean that its disclosure could “reasonably be expected” to cause “exceptionally grave damage” to the U.S. Sometimes, this is true. Reality would have known that, in releasing the document, she ran the risk of alerting the Russians to what the intelligence community knew, but it seemed to her that this specific account ought to be a matter of public discourse. Why isn’t this getting out there? she thought. Why can’t this be public? It was surprising to her that someone hadn’t already done it…
Excellent Read: ‘The World’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread’Post + Comments (125)
This post is in: Beer Blogging, Open Threads
NOTE: This is a re-run of an old post, but I figured some folks might not have seen it, and we could use a new open thread. Cheers!
This really happened. One year, right after Christmas, my mom decided to drive herself, my little sister and me up to North Carolina to see snow. As native Floridians, my sister and I had never seen snow before. We complained bitterly about this fact, especially during the holidays when all the TV specials featured snowmen, sleigh rides, etc.
This was a very long time ago, back when people drove ugly green station wagons with fake wood paneling. Anyhoo, we had a little dog—a poodle mix of some sort. He was a kind of goldish color, so we named him Butterscotch. But we all called him Scotch.
We couldn’t take Scotch with us since we were staying with dog-phobic relatives in North Carolina. So my mom asked her younger sister to housesit and watch after Scotch. Auntie agreed to do this for us and promised to take good care of our beloved pet:
Poor Auntie had to spend New Year’s Eve all by herself. However, my mom had generously given Auntie permission to raid the liquor cabinet. She polished off a few cocktails and then rang in the New Year watching Dick Clark on TV as she lounged in our recliner and finished an entire bottle of champagne:
As the next morning dawned, Auntie blearily awoke and immediately noticed something was missing:
She looked all over the house, but she couldn’t find him. Then she remembered that we had a doggie door in the back of the house. She thought maybe Scotch had let himself out. She looked out the window into the empty back yard. Then she noticed the hole in the fence:
Now Auntie was in a full-fledged panic. She knew how much we loved our little dog. Horrifying scenes played through her mind—finding Scotch run over in the street and having to break the news to us. She ran out into the front yard and called Scotch repeatedly at the top of her voice:
But he didn’t come. She ran into the house and grabbed his doggie dish, thinking maybe if he saw it, he would come to her. She walked up and down the streets in our neighborhood, holding out a silver dish and screaming SCOTCH!!! The neighbors were not impressed:
After an hour or so of this, with cranky, hung-over neighbors jeering at her from every window, Auntie walked back home, dejected. She wondered how on earth she was going to tell her beloved little nieces that she’d become intoxicated and misplaced their pet.
But when she got to our yard, Scotch was waiting:
THE END
This post is in: Don't Agonize - Organize, Open Threads, Daydream Believers
Photo by from the inimitable Jeffrey W. As an animist, I’m allowed to hope it’s an augury for a mob of smart, aggressive Blue Dems retaking their seats at the table, leaving the Red Repubs sulking on the periphery.
What’s on the agenda as we flip the calendar and prepare to start afresh?
Resolution: don't let anyone else tell you how to love America.
— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) January 1, 2018
In 2017, @HillaryClinton staffers built orgs to elect women, protect the ACA, fight Russia, and use the courts to counter Trump.
Fighting for what’s right is worth it–and in 2018, we’re gonna win. ?? @DemocracyFwd @GetUSCovered @risetorun @runforsomething @SecureDemocracy
— Corey Ciorciari (@CoreyCiorciari) December 31, 2017
(L) Me at the beginning of 2017
(R) Me at the end of 2017#HappyNewYear2018 pic.twitter.com/kjT77a05N6— @HamillHimself (@HamillHimself) December 31, 2017
Monday Morning Open Thread: First in A New SeriesPost + Comments (148)
by Alain Chamot (1971-2020)| 5 Comments
This post is in: On The Road, Open Threads, Readership Capture
Good Morning All,
There are issues with the form; I’ll work on them later this week.
Have a wonderful day, and Happy New Year!
No pictures today because I didn’t get it done before I left home/my computer. I’ll have normal content and work from there beginning tomorrow.
One last thing – as we begin a New Year with all possibility, let’s be hopeful and make some magic happen!
One again, to submit pictures: the form is broken so Send an Email
by John Cole| 58 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Happy New Year, east coasters! And soon to our left coast friends!
The view from my lap is remarkably similar to 2017: