Theft, potential conflict of interest (and actual ones), abuse of state resources, corruption, vendor kickbacks, “significant” violations of law or regulations, conspiring to overturn a certified election, LOL!
Maryland the “Stop Fraud State” ROTFLMAO!
This imp was grinning up at me in an Asian market. It was before the pandemic, when you could simply walk into any store.
These two subway riders had on great masks, funny, macabre, slightly disturbing. I’d given one of them, the Barry Goldwater lookalike who made eye contact with me, a thumbs up and called across to him “great mask!” He nodded, with that same fixed, mad, clownish smile plastered across the lower part of his face.
I was sorely tempted to photograph them, and eventually did, realizing, as I cropped the photo there in the subway car, that nobody has any reasonable expectation of privacy any more.
About a week ago I went to post something on this blahg, which I rent from WordPress (they never fail to thank me each time they automatically bill my credit card), and got this message:
Currently, my laptop won’t allow me to so much as visit my blahg, out of an overwhelming concern for my privacy. There was no way to overcome this uncompromising protection of my privacy to post on this blahg, or even visit, except on my phone. I contacted WordPress (email only) and was told I probably need to update my macbook operating system. I noted:
I resist doing the updates on the macbook because Apple, in its infinite greed, is notorious for disabling useful features of their native programs with each update, clawing back once-included capabilities so they can sell them back to you.
A few days later I was given three things to try, by Happiness Engineer Tish, (the second idea was overcoming my reluctance to have all programs reformatted and some randomly rendered useless) and wrote back:
Hi Tish,
Took a weekend away from technology. Now I’m trying your suggested fixes.
1- clicking this link got to the same message as the screen shot I sent a few days ago, Your Connection is Not Private!
2– still reluctant to have all of my programs reconfigured/disabled by Apple as they have been every update since at least 10.6.7
3– installing Firefox now (unless I get a Connection Not Private! message preventing it), Here you go:
There used to be a game in the Chinatown Arcade in NYC where a live chicken would play all comers at tic tac toe for 50 cents a game. The bird went first. If you played well you could tie, but I’d never seen anyone beat the bird. After the bird beat the sucker, right after its victory dance (the disk it stood on would wobble and it would exert itself not to fall over) it would frantically claw for a couple of kernels of dry corn, literally two or three, that were its reward. While this was going on a big lighted sign flashed BIRD WINS.
Perfect parallel for technology companies of all kinds. You want the feature you’ve always used? Tough. We had a team of geniuses redesign it completely and it’s what you want now. Choice is for the people who bring you this miraculous technology, they know better than mere “users” what is actually desirable in the product. Capitalism runs on eternal “improvement” and built-in obsolescence. Tech companies, even a nice outfit like WordPress, are the masters of this. New design, new world order. Read Shoshanah Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” and shudder for the amazing world of crushing pressure to conform kids are growing up in now, ushered in by “social media” and unlimited, ever more thorough data collection from “users”, in the name of… well, profit, mostly.
Anyway, thanks for your help. I’ll probably wind up updating this machine and using it just as a word processor, as nature intended.
Eliot
P.S. Before I sent this I tried one more thing. DuckDuckGo just fixed it, I can get to the innovative (and, like, totally improved, even if the theme I use is now “unsupported”) WordPress block composer from there.
I did not bother to add, for Tish, a complete stranger, that I am clearly, as my father more than once noted, the kind of person who’d complain if he was hanged with a new rope.
Punchline, which I sent to “tech support”:
DuckDuckGo allowed me to get on the WordPress site, write and post an entry. Once. Now I get this again:
BIRD WINS!
NOTE: had to add this using my phone…
when you try to defeat this unwanted “protection” you get this message:
gratuitousblahg.com normally uses encryption to protect your information. When Google Chrome tried to connect to gratuitousblahg.com this time, the website sent back unusual and incorrect credentials. This may happen when an attacker is trying to pretend to be gratuitousblahg.com, or a Wi-Fi sign-in screen has interrupted the connection. Your information is still secure because Google Chrome stopped the connection before any data was exchanged.
You cannot visit gratuitousblahg.com right now because the website uses HSTS. Network errors and attacks are usually temporary, so this page will probably work later.
Or, if you prefer, Go fuck yourself. Have a great day!
Hitler supporters called the democratically elected German officials who signed the punitive armistice that ended the First World War “the November Criminals”, traitorous cowards who stabbed the victorious German army in the back. Criminalizing your opponents is a great way to underscore for your people that this is an existential war between morality and Evil. It did not hurt the German rightwing narrative that some of the November Criminals were Jews, who, you know, no need to say more.
Isn’t that right Adam Schiff?
Right wing legal extremist John Eastman needs to testify about his expansive role in Trump’s wild plan to overturn certified election results and have himself declared the winner of an election he lost by an 8,000,000 vote margin and an Electoral College tally identical to the one he racked up while kicking Crooked Hillary’s ass, while losing by a much more respectable 3,000,000 votes.
Mr. Eastman had put himself on the radar of Mr. Trump’s political aides during the election when Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign, had shared on Twitter an article Mr. Eastman had written. The article, in an echo of racist questions stoked by Mr. Trump about where President Barack Obama had been born, questioned whether Kamala Harris, Mr. Biden’s running mate, could legally become president because her parents had not been born in the United States.
Now, confronting election results that showed Mr. Trump lost, one of Mr. Trump’s aides reached out to Mr. Eastman to see whether he could come over to the hotel to help Mr. Trump’s team.
Mr. Eastman said he was only in the room for 15 minutes before being ushered out — but it was long enough, he said, for him to catch Covid-19 there, and he became ill for several weeks. By the time he felt better, it was the beginning of December — when Mr. Trump called to see whether Mr. Eastman could help bring legal action directly before the Supreme Court. In the days that followed, Mr. Eastman filed two briefs with the Supreme Court on Mr. Trump’s behalf, but those efforts quickly failed.
The Lawyer Behind the Memo on How Trump Could Stay in Office https://nyti.ms/3A7XCfE
This legally sophisticated pettifogging Birther seditionist needs to testify under oath about his role in advising the former president on a supremely brazen last ditch extralegal way to cling to power, and about the intent behind his speech to help whip up the crowd who marched down to the Capitol and lynch the weak, disloyal Mike Pence.
Am I wrong?
Talk about cold, Rudy “America’s Mayor” Giuliani was informed by officials at FOX, the day before the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, that he was no longer welcome on The Fair and Balanced network. Talk about cold-bloodedness enhanced by brutal timing. I don’t like Rudy, he was an abusive, self-aggrandizing right-wing dick as NYC mayor, he has always been a litigious blowhard, defender of inadvertent police violence, bringer of frivolous lawsuits on behalf of a would-be tyrant, desperate promoter of the deranged lies of his former best friend, the former POTUS. I don’t like anything about Rudy, but, damn, that was cold of FOX, after all the views the demented former prosecutor provided for the network over the years.
Seth Meyers put Rudy’s subsequent bad mood in perspective, highlighting just one example of Rudy going on when he’d have better served himself by keeping his own counsel, and his mouth shut:
Now THIS shit is kind of funny.
We all know that sometimes the Orange Polyp flies into a childish rage. When he does he often sues somebody and makes them spend thousands of dollars defending against a frivolous suit. Here in America, contrary to what I learned in law school and while practicing law, there seems to be little consequence for a wealthy litigant who hires an army of lawyers to fight endless frivolous legal battles to bludgeon his enemies. The American Rule says that the other side isn’t going to be able to recoup legal fees, even if the suit gets tossed out of court after a few rounds of expensive legal wrangling, so it’s win-win for a rich guy who uses lawsuits to attack people he hates. The lawyers too seem immune from any consequences for filing and prosecuting their unethical, technically illegal, expensive, process-abusing lawsuits.
Now he is suing the New York Times for publishing true facts about him, based on documents his niece Mary Trump provided them. He is also suing Mary, the niece he ripped off when she was a teenager, after the death of her father, Fred Christ Trump Jr., Fred Christ Trump the first’s one-time favorite and all-around good guy. The Polyp used lifelong medical care for Mary’s disabled infant nephew as leverage in the fight over the contested will.
A week after they went to court, a Trump family company cut off health insurance to Mary Trump, her mother, brother and her brother’s family, including Fred III’s 9-month-old son William, who had suffered from seizure disorders and would be diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Donald Trump acknowledged the termination of the insurance was related to the fight over his father’s will.
“When [Fred III] sued us, we said, ‘Why should we give him medical coverage?’” he told The Daily News at the time. Mary Trump told the newspaper that by contesting the will she was fighting for their father to be recognized. “He existed, he lived, he was their oldest son. And William is my father’s grandson,” she said.
Litigation over the will and the health insurance became the vehicles for the Trumps to hurl insults and raise grievances that had hung in the air for years.
source
Mary Trump had this to say about her uncle’s frivolous lawsuit “Donald is a fucking loser.” His lawsuit is a loser too, of course, since, in order to proceed the Polyp must undergo the deposition the NY Times and Mary Trump will demand. Since he is unable to refrain from lying, saying anything under oath, subject to the penalties for perjury, is always a problem for him. Here is the heart of the Polyp’s claim against his niece, his suit accuses the NY Times and:
As Glenn Kirschner put it when reviewing the case:
Let’s face it, if there’s anybody who knows what it’s like to be motivated by a personal vendetta, a desire to gain fame, notoriety, acclaim and a financial windfall, it’s the orange one.
watch the video
gratuitousblahg 