Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

A bit of mixed feelings re: Alexendria Ocasio Cortez lately. On the one hand, I agree with Jimmy Dore that she’s too conciliatory with Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, but on the other, hot damn, she is the undisputed Queen of the twitter smackdown.
It started when she said something about there should be investigations into the GameStop brouhaha (I’ll circle back to that), and Cruz simply tweeted “I agree.” Now, normally, when somebody says they agree with you, you just shut up and accept it, but she wasn’t having any. “I am happy to work with Republicans on this issue where there’s common ground, but you almost had me murdered 3 weeks ago so you can sit this one out. Happy to work w/ almost any other GOP that aren’t trying to get me killed. In the meantime if you want to help, you can resign.”
You almost had me murdered three weeks ago. And she’s not being insanely hyperbolic. Just normally hyperbolic. It’s not as if Ted Cruz was holding the gun or anything, but they were his people who stormed the Capitol and he had been nothing but supportive of them up until January 6th.
There were definitely moments in the Sanders campaign when I would have liked to have seen that fire.
But, back to the investigation into Reddit’s Ambush (what this event needs is a cool name, so I’m going with that.) Does it really require a government investigation? Some rich Wall St. bastards thought they were going to make a bunch of money and force GameStart into bankruptcy, but a new player walked into the room. A whole lot of people made a bit of money, a couple of billionaires lost a shitload, and that’s that. That’s the game, there are winners and losers. Nothing illegal was done, and since it was all done over the internet, there’s a clear trail.
Not only do I think it’s wrong for the government to interfere in private business transactions, I think it’s bogus because there’s really nothing to investigate.

There are times when I weigh in on a subject I know little about, which we all do, of course, because the amount of possible knowledge in the universe is as large as the entire universe, maybe even more so, and our brain capacity is limited to the amount of information that can be stored in a brain that’s no bigger than a small rabbit.
But, for today’s topic, we are at a confluence of several things I know nothing about. I’d never heard of GameStop until yesterday, although they bill themselves as the world’s largest retailer of video games. I guess they are, or were at some point, a big deal in the U.S., where I haven’t lived for over 20 years. Reddit is something I’ve heard of, of course, in the same way I’ve heard of TikTok, SnapChat, Instagram, and maybe a half dozen others. I’ve heard of them, but never used them, and find them all a bit confusing. Shorting stocks is something I’ve read about, and understand the concept, sort of, I think, but am not going to try and explain it here. Go to Google, type in ‘shorting stocks’ and get it from somebody who knows what they’re talking about.
But, I’m fascinated by the story of how a bunch of Reddit users beat the hedge fund managers who were trying to short GameStop stocks, and made them cry. I am happy with anything that makes billionaires cry. Way to go, Reddit. More of this kind of thing, please.

I don’t have any full fledged theories about what happened in any of these cases, but I read a couple of things today that made me stop and think “Hey, wait a minute. That doesn’t sound right and I suspect we’re not getting the whole story.
One is the story of Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys, who the FBI is now claiming has been an informant for them since 2012. First, it strikes me as bizarre that someone named Enrique Tarrio should be the leader of a white supremacist organization. I guess the membership was willing to put aside their hatred of Mexicans as long as he hated blacks just as much as they did.
Officials said he helped bust people for all sorts of stuff, from marijuana to human trafficking.
There was one thing in the article that gave me pause, though. That was the quote from Tarrio himself. “I don’t know about any of this. I don’t remember any of this.”
When people assert their innocence, I tend to believe them. At least for a moment. And, if he had been an informant, why would the FBI be so eager to give him up now? Of course, you could assume it’s down to due diligence from some reporter at Reuters, but there are quotes in the article from law enforcement people. They are making no effort at all to protect their informant, which shouldn’t surprise me too much, law enforcement are among the least trustworthy people on the planet, but what’s their motive? It seems to me that maybe they are setting him up. Plaster it all over the papers that he narked on everybody and maybe his own people will kill him.
Certainly, if he turns up dead that’s what I’m going to suspect.
The other two incidents were two D.C. cops, who were present at the Capitol, who have committed suicide since then. It could be coincidence, I suppose. Just two, and maybe both of them had personal reasons. But, it seems suspicious to me. Did they know something they shouldn’t have known, was there actually some police involvement, beyond just not being prepared, or where the scenes of mayhem and carnage SO traumatizing? I’d like to know more about this one, too. Although we probably never will.

I just read an article about a 17 year old intern at NASA who discovered an exoplanet orbiting a binary star. Now, that is a fine thing, and I certainly don’t want to take anything away from New York High School student Wolf Cukier. I’m sure he’s justifiably pleased with himself and his friends and family are reveling in his 15 minutes of fame. I hope he has a long and distinguished career as an astronomer, if that’s what he chooses to do.
My beef, as usual is with the institution of journalism, and the many ways the story is misleading. First, the process of exoplanet discovery is largely automated. If the light of a star dims periodically, there’s something orbiting it. We have discovered thousands. Young Wolf just happened to be on shift when that one passed and, credit where it’s due, was sufficiently alert to spot it.
And it is an interesting discovery. Once upon a time not that long ago, it was thought that binary stars couldn’t have planets, because the competing gravitation of their stars would pull them apart. It’s still unknown if planets in such systems could harbor life. They almost certainly will have extreme fluctuations in climate.
But, really, we don’t know much about this new planet except the distance from its sun to ours (1,300 light years), it’s size (about 7 times larger than Earth), and probably its distance from its own sun and period of rotation.
And yet the article consists of a series of very large pictures of this planet, with a sentence or two between each one. To the newspapers credit, they didn’t lie. They did include, one sentence before the last one, the factoid that these aren’t actual photographs, just a totally made up artist’s rendition. Done by a computer, which says something very cool about computers, but it’s a bit of a misrepresentation as far as the planet goes.
And that could be very misleading to people who don’t know much about space, and they are exactly the ones who the article should be informing.
Yay, scientists, you’re doing a great job. Boo, journalists. You suck.

I just saw an article – which, I admit, is different from ‘I read an article.’ I confess, I am a headline browser, if I really want to know more about a subject I will read the article, but with this kind of thing I get enough from the headline for a good laugh and don’t really need to know the details.
A guy who was arrested for being in the Capitol riots had been previously banned from an airline for refusal to wear a mask. Not really surprising, just makes him more of a dick and makes me double happy that he got arrested. In fact, with so many of these arrests, there is some little tidbit that tickles the old schadenfreude, that tickles, titillates and amuses.
From the guy who did the Davy Crockett/Viking/American flag genre crossover cosplay wanting organic food in jail to the women who was shot dead, who had tweeted “Nothing will stop us!” just a day earlier, there has been so much delicious irony. Some of it might have been a bit exaggerated. I don’t know if heart attack guy actually tazed himself in the balls while trying to steal a painting, or if the woman carrying the Gadsden ‘Don’t Tread on Me flag was actually trampled to death, but it might have happened. “Medical emergency” covers such a wide range of things, doesn’t it?
Another rather ironic twist is how many of these people are being turned in by friends and family members. It isn’t just the vast majority of the American public was sick and tired of these unhooded klansmen, the people they know apparently don’t all like them very much, either. I can imagine. Always carrying a gun at the Dairy Queen, bringing up politics at Thanksgiving dinner, and rooting for the wrong side in all of the old WWII movies.
One other thing that encourages me about these arrest stories is that they are still making arrests. Some of them might even face justice. Wouldn’t that be grand.