reACTIONary
reACTIONary's JournalTurn on the bubble machine....
Found on Face Book:
All I can say to those who complain about having to endure their grandparents watching Lawrence Welk once a week for an hour (including commercials) is, “Hold my beer.”
I grew up living next door to Welk’s xylophonist, who was a very nice man and a most diligent musician. Do you have any idea what it it like hearing the SAME SONG played over and over again on a bloody xylophone? Or worse, THE SAME DIFFICULT PASSAGE? Of course you don’t; it’s probably outlawed by the Geneva Convention.
I remain, to this day, triggered by xylophones.
TURBO AI!!!!!
I just saw an add for a vending machine - The Genius Vend AI Smart vending machine. Yep, an AI vending machine - is that dumb or what?
Remember "Turbo"? It all started with "Turbo Pascal". It became the go-to product name prefix for software and other tech products. Everything became "Turbo". Turbo-this, Turbo-that. It lives on in TurboTax.
Same with the i prefix - started with iPhone. And "e". There are all sorts of iThnigs and eThings.
"AI" - a step up from "Intelligent", which is a step up from "Smart".
Well, the new Turbo is AI. Everything has to be "AI enabled" - whether it is or not. My guess is that about 90% of "AI" is just plain old software. Not even "smart" or "intelligent".
Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair
I just saw Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, and, unexpectedly, actually enjoyed the four and a half hours! My spouse likes Tarantino and enjoyed the Kill Bills when first released, but I never really cared for his sensibility, and never saw them. But I went along.
What made it entertaining is that it doesn't take itself seriously and actually has a lot of laughs. The crude "special effects" (blood, gore) are over the top and rival those of Dr, Who. The characters are cartoonish beyond stereotypes - especially the Kung Fu master.
The only disappointment was the ending, which was maudlin, something like really weird Hallmark schlock. Oh well.
Lost pages reveal an alternate ending to a classic Caribbean novel
Discovery from UChicago’s Kaneesha Parsard sheds new light on “Minty Alley” by political theorist C.L.R. James
C.L.R. James—historian, Marxist theorist, cricket commentator and one of the twentieth century’s most prolific writers—wrote only one novel in his lifetime: Minty Alley, published in 1936. Set in a Trinidadian yard, a form of communal housing, the book follows Haynes, a middle-class man navigating life among working-class neighbors.
Almost 90 years later, University of Chicago Asst. Prof. Kaneesha Parsard encountered a set of five new pages of Minty Alley—typed and annotated in James’s hand—that reimagine the novel’s ending.
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/lost-pages-reveal-alternate-ending-classic-caribbean-novel
Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all
Source: WaPo, No Paywall, Registration Required
As two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors.
The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.
Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Massachusetts), a Marine Corps veteran and vocal Trump critic who received a classified briefing from Pentagon officials on the strikes in late October with other members of the House Armed Services Committee said, “Mark my words: It may take some time, but Americans will be prosecuted for this, either as a war crime or outright murder.”
Read more: https://wapo.st/49KbUJ1
The National Guard shooting suspect was in one of the CIA's 'Zero Units'
Source: WaPo, no paywall
The man charged with shooting two National Guard members in D.C. is an Afghan national who came to the United States in September 2021 and worked with the CIA.
Lakanwal was part of one of the CIA’s “Zero Units” that were involved in combat missions to seize or kill suspected terrorists, according to several people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation. Further details about his specific role and service with the CIA are not yet known.
Read more: https://wapo.st/4pgh7Nt
50 years ago, he saw a document in the JFK file. Where is it now?
Despite Trump’s orders, report that Mexico believed Cuba was behind the assassination has not emerged.
In March 1976, a young Senate staffer named James Johnston who was investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was summoned to CIA headquarters to meet an unidentified agency representative. The man showed him an explosive document whose existence has never been revealed publicly — until now.
In March 1976, a young Senate staffer named James Johnston who was investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was summoned to CIA headquarters to meet an unidentified agency representative. The man showed him an explosive document whose existence has never been revealed publicly — until now.
https://wapo.st/43UCzyW WaPo, no paywall
Statement from Senator Kelly
https://www.kelly.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/statement-from-senator-kelly/“When I was 22 years old, I commissioned as an Ensign in the United States Navy and swore an oath to the Constitution. I upheld that oath through flight school, multiple deployments on the USS Midway, 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm, test pilot school, four space shuttle flights at NASA, and every day since I retired – which I did after my wife Gabby was shot in the head while serving her constituents.
“In combat, I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets. At NASA, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died on Columbia. I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much.
“Secretary Hegseth’s tweet is the first I heard of this. I also saw the President’s posts saying I should be arrested, hanged, and put to death.
“If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work. I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”
The Situation: The Inanities Continue in the Comey Case
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-situation--the-inanities-continue-in-the-comey-caseIt is actually hard to keep up with the pace of developments. Multiple times a day, documents land on this docket that contain new inanities, new abominations in the sight of the law, new factual revelations, new reasons to wonder not whether this case will collapse but only how. At the hearing the other day, Judge Michael Nachmanoff seemed to be struggling with exactly this question, asking an attorney for Comey—in effect—which motion he wants the judge to dismiss the case based on..........
.........Let me translate this exchange, for those who don’t speak the somewhat rarified language of federal court oral arguments, into the vernacular:
THE COURT: Holy shit, dude! You’ve got like ten motions to dismiss that seem like winners, plus a bunch of other stuff. What order do you want me to handle these in?
DREEBEN: I feel you, my man. Do the vindictive prosecution motion and the fact that Halligan isn’t lawfully appointed first. And maybe throw in that the illegally appointed U.S. attorney didn’t even bother to present the indictment to the grand jury? The other stuff is dope too but it’s a little less foundational.
Inside the CIA's secret mission to sabotage Afghanistan's opium
Source: WaPo, no paywall
In a decade-long covert operation, the U.S. spy agency dropped modified poppy seeds in an attempt to degrade the potency of Afghanistan’s billion-dollar opium crop.
Read more: https://wapo.st/4qWea62
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Member since: Sun Jun 5, 2011, 06:28 PMNumber of posts: 6,926