Skip the middle men and just start leaving shit in insecure places you want the press to get, I say.

Story time about how much our media sucks:

2007, I was working for a small local television station in Washington state. Governors election between Christine Gregoire and Dino Rossi. Through rummaging around on reddit, I found a lawyer with evidence that Rossi had illegally been accepting large donations from the Master Builders Association.

This was direct from the lawyer and court documents. I printed up copies and put them on every newsies desk, since I was just News Production, and not a “journalist” myself.

I’ll never forget our Producer talking to me about it, and how she “hadn’t seen anything about it on the AP newswire” so she wasn’t sure about it being true. I pointed out these were court documents and asked “have you ever heard of ‘breaking a story?’”

We would not run the story until two weeks later, when the story had finally been picked up by the AP newswire… then we finally ran the story. Doing your own research as a journalist? That’s outside the job description apparently.

This is up there with when NASA was going to be testing Lunar Rovers two hours away and our journalists were like “isn’t that outside of our coverage area?” Still photos of the lunar rover testing were the top story on wired.com internationally for a month afterwards. I guess the whole world was outside of our coverage area.

Anyway, this is the kind of thinking you’re working against. Don’t break a story, don’t go outside your “coverage area.” These stories from me are almost 20 years old but I don’t expect for the television industry to have gotten smarter since then.

So leaving the documents for them to find can easily result in those documents just getting memory-holed unless they show up on the AP newswire.

Maybe I should just give up and become a scammer.

Everyone’s like “it won’t happen” but I remember post-9/11 a specific Linux news site got hit with claims of radicalism and some folks who frequented the site got put on watch lists. For interest in Linux.

There was a reason folks like me were against all the surveillance from the PATRIOT Act back then, and this is why.

EDIT:

Similarly, the Bush admin had the FBI spying on Quakers, the only religious group that anti-violence is such a central tenet to their religion that they by default are considered conscientious objectors and cannot be drafted into the military without violating their beliefs.

Post-9/11 the government thought peaceful Quaker anti-war activists were dangerous.

That was post-9/11 in the War on Terror years… It can happen here.

Sources:

Linuxjournal gets “extra surveillance:”

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/nsa-linux-journal-extremist-forum-and-its-readers-get-flagged-extra-surveillance

Quakers being spied on by FBI:

https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fbi-nsac/

Mr. Show Season 4 Episode 2 was titled “Show Me Your Weenis!”

I don’t have to believe in horses, I bought an Electric Monk to believe in things for me since believing things is exhausting.

Fuck you too, Joe.

Just more traditional media letting these people goose step all over them and not answer questions.

Our journalists fucking suck at their god damned jobs.

Fuck it man, I’ll take it, you can still spin that up with Linux and run a bunch of microservices on it. Not a great form factor for a server, but guess what, if these China tariffs take off, you’re gonna be so glad you have a 10 year old machine to have around for extra compute power, since buying new compute will be obscenely costly. (Assuming you’re in the USA of course, if you’re in Europe you’ll be fine)

Yeah, notice there isn’t a McResistance this time around like there was with the performative pussy hats and shit.

You forget yourself .

He totally did, claimed Clinton couldn’t have won the popular vote.

He won and still claimed it was rigged.

Nostalgia’s a helluva drug. I’ve done my best to try to avoid it, but we all like that hit from time to time.

I mean, to be fair, the beginnings of most movies with sequels don’t actually start by being titled, say “Back to the Future Part 1.”

The Fellowship of the Ring, for example, wasn’t titled “Lord of the Rings 1: The Fellowship of the Ring” if it mentioned Lord of the Rings at all, it didn’t imply a number, it just stood on its own. People knew sequels were coming, they didn’t need numbers to know that.

So to be fair to Wicked, naming it something like Wicked Part One is dumb anyway. Especially if it flops and they shelve the sequel for a tax break.

Damn, this hits so fucking hard. It’s just a hard truth. Put simply and straightforward, in a way that’s inarguable.

I realized that while I prepared him for Vice President Harris winning, I did not prepare him for her losing. I’m not sure I even prepared myself. It’s like having a doctor telling you to prepare for the death of a loved one. What does that even mean or entail?

I mean, that’s on you, in all brutal honesty. Even the death of a loved one is something you can plan for, despite how difficult it may be.

Sometimes, you can tell when people haven’t faced real hardship, because they’ve made almost no effort to accept that hardship is a thing that is possible to have happen.

The Republicans have been trying to gut Social Security for my entire life, and so I always told my disabled partner she needed to be pursuing education while being on disability to ensure that when they finally succeeded she would have a plan to fall back on, and if in the best case scenario where she kept her disability, she got the bonus of an education. Looks like getting those degrees was the right idea, because there’s a high likelihood of that cut to her disability is coming.

Always hope the best but prepare for the worst. Because “hope” isn’t enough. It’s out there with “thoughts and prayers” in terms of usefulness. Hope is important, but hanging your future on it is a gamble.

Only Weird Al could turn something by Diddy into something good.

100 gigabytes of RAM is still a lot of RAM, well done Al.

He says this and yet jumps to Bluesky, a platform created by Jack Dorsey and now owned and managed by a crypto bro?

It seems so malicious.

I guess he was being honest about all that revenge talk, eh? I mean, it is actively and onerously malicious, but just like last time, everyone’s just gonna let Trump steamroll them, because the federal government has long had hesitance to hold figures like presidents, senators, and supreme court justices to account, and this is just an extension of that.

I mean, we didn’t prosecute Bush and Cheney for war crimes. Hillary Clinton was proud of her friendship with Henry Kissinger. Kamala Harris was proud of her endorsement by Dick Cheney.

“It’s a big club and we ain’t in it,” but Trump and co. don’t feel the need to put up the facade anymore.

Oh poor Frodo.

Some classic internet, that’s what.

Alternately it could be called “Frodo dubbed over”

Epilogue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYajv8xsgIk