You shouldn't leave that opening. You want a landslide for Biden.
You have me wondering. I think Trump wouldn't hesitate to buy a landslide, as long as he is using other people's money.
If Trump creates widespread violence in American cities, and campaigns on law and order, with millions of newly homeless people unable to vote because they don't have an address, plus the usual Republican cheating dialed up to 11, maybe he could get a landslide.
I've got stuff to do today. Maybe I needed that shot of adrenaline.
07/22 briefing:
This afternoon, I'm also announcing that the Department of Justice will provide more than $61 million in grants to hire hundreds of new police officers in cities that are the focus of Operation LeGend.
Well that could be good, the cities already have enough police dedicated to getting into fights and guarding objects, so maybe they can hire more to investigate crimes.
This is a golden age for white collar crime Maybe we could teach the people who keep stealing bicycles something about investment fraud?
At least it's prompting mass response in Portland. It feels like the phase of the "Revolutions" podcast where the king and his advisors are convinced simple shows of force will cow everyone and are baffled there's any backlash at all. (As opposed to other slightly cleverer advisors like Metternich and his spiritual successors who focus on secret police and imprisonment.)
And the Portland mayor, after being highly deferential to both his goonish police and the feds, got tear-gassed for his trouble.
Certain local officials in small cities that I am familiar with just got a creepy-sounding spam email from the White House hyping "Operation Legend." A quote:
Operation Legend is a sustained, systematic and coordinated law enforcement initiative in which federal law enforcement agencies work in conjunction with state and local law enforcement officials to fight violent crime. The Operation was first launched on July 8 in Kansas City, Missouri, as a result of President Trump's promise to assist America's cities that are plagued by recent violence. Operation Legend is named after four-year-old LeGend Taliferro, who was shot and killed while he slept early in the morning of June 29 in Kansas City.
So apparently they are moving beyond protecting federal buildings and have decided to take over local policing which, I don't know, seems like the kind of idea maybe that should first be run past Congress.
Looking up that letter, I assume it's this.
As part of Operation Legend, Attorney General Barr directed the FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, DEA, and ATF to significantly increase resources into Chicago and Albuquerque in the coming weeks to help state and local officials fight high levels of violent crime, particularly gun violence. Chicago is currently experiencing a significant increase in violent crime, with homicides currently up 51 percent over 2019. Over the weekend of July 17, more than 60 people were shot in the city of Chicago, with 14 fatalities. Similarly, Albuquerque is currently on pace to break 2019's record for homicides in the city. On the weekend of July 10, there were four murders in Albuquerque within a 24-hour period.
In Chicago, the Department of Justice will supplement state and local law enforcement agencies by sending over 100 federal investigators from the FBI, DEA, and ATF to the city. Under the leadership of John R. Lausch Jr., U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, these investigators will complement the work already underway by existing joint federal, state and local task forces focused on combating Chicago's violent gangs, gun crime, and drug trafficking organizations. The investigatory efforts will be advanced by more than 100 members of the U.S. Marshals Service Great Lakes Task Force, which will direct violent fugitive apprehension operations within Chicago to identify wanted gang members, violent criminals, and firearms violators. The Department of Homeland Security's Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) are also committing at least 100 agents, already stationed in Chicago, to Operation Legend. HSI agents will conduct investigations into gangs, narcotics traffickers, violent offenders, and firearms traffickers.
MAGAWWMTDSPITL3.5YBWGDBASO (Make America great again which we meant to do some point in the last three and a half years but we got distracted by a shiny object)
There was a good twitter thread that I can't find that described when protests finally bring regime change. His theory is that everyone knows there are people that are OK to beat up during a protest and people that aren't OK to beat up during a protest. So long as protests are only the type of people that are OK to beat up, they don't accomplish regime change. But they can grow and grow until they include the kinds of people that aren't OK to beat up. Then, when state goons beat up the kinds of people that aren't OK to beat up, everyone is incensed and the regime changes.
The Portland Moms are perhaps the very core of people that aren't OK to beat up, so white and frumpy and idealized (or maybe white kids). Their presence, and that they are getting beat up, may well be a sign of impending regime change.
I remember seeing this research (which I wouldn't put too much weight on)
There are, of course, many ethical reasons to use nonviolent strategies. But compelling research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, confirms that civil disobedience is not only the moral choice; it is also the most powerful way of shaping world politics - by a long way.
Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.
9 - That's actually from a press release attached to fill out the letter. It starts off like this:
Local Leaders,
Today, Wednesday July 22, President Donald J. Trump detailed actions to assist State and local officials in combating violent crime in American cities. Standing beside Attorney General William Barr, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, and other Federal, State and local law enforcement leaders from across the country, President Trump announced the expansion of "Operation Legend," a Department of Justice (DOJ), inter-agency surge of resources into cities across the United States that are experiencing upticks in violent crime.
🎬 President Trump: View the President's Remarks here
Operation Legend was successfully launched on July 8 in Kansas City, where four year old LeGend Taliferro was shot and killed on June 29th. Taliferro's mother, Sharon, joined President Trump for today's announcement. "This operation is personal to us. We want justice for our son and others. We have to take a stand in our communities and speak-up to help this operation be successful," she stated in remarks.
It seems like it went to the email box of every municipal official in the country. This appears to be a new email list - the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs never sent out anything like this for Covid-19.
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Off topic but does anyone know how to find the post where someone--Heebie? Ogged?---cottoned on to the great fraud that was Theranos just based on the composition of the board? Before everyone else thought so?
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I didn't invest much in it regardless.
Didn't actually cotton onto the fraud, just noticed the sketchiness of the board.
It looks like Nathan Williams saw right through it, in the second comment.
Bad Blood: great book, or the greatest book?
Maybe it's just that 2014 was before makeup youtube was ubiquitous or something, but it's surprising that given all the discussion of Holmes's looks in that thread, there's no discussion of how weird aspects of her hair and makeup are. Like everyone on that thread is talking as though she looks like an actor or something, but she doesn't actually look like she has a professional doing her hair and makeup.
Related: In about to go for my first professional haircut of 2020.
Use your artificially lowest voice to command respect.
22: I think that's what people were getting at with the comments that all companies of that sort have carefully posed professional well-posed photos of their executives on their website, and she didn't seem to be doing anything in her photos that was especially glamorous except being a young woman.
Sure, but there's also something interesting going on which is that her make-up and hair are weird and I don't understand why. Her persona is so constructed (especially the voice), but is that raccoonyness of the makeup and the damaged hair part of that construct? If so, what's its purpose? If not, how does that fit with the thought put into the voice and the Jobsian clothes? Compare Theranos-era photos to current photos of her which have normal rich celebrity hair and makeup.
You're right, it's strange. But she was managing a fraudulent house of cards, had to be time-intensive. Maybe she has more free time now?
Were her makeup/hair choices all that weird? Like, slightly less polished than you'd expect for a public figure, but I'd think within the realm of not needing to be explained beyond not being super good at it herself or consistently paying for top quality assistance. Like, paying someone else to apply your makeup in the morning is something that entertainment industry people probably do, but if you're not in that world, even if you have the money you're probably putting on your own eyeliner and that's limited by your own taste and skill.
They're not that weird, but they're weird enough that I actually think it was intentional given the rest of her persona. I'm just not sure what exactly the reason was.
If you're convinced that lack of skill/taste and effort is really that implausible, I'm not going to talk you out of it. You know who else I heard the same thing about? Anna Sorokin/Delvey, the Russian con artist. I'll never find the specific thing that was commenting on it, but the same kind of "she had split ends in a way a real rich woman wouldn't ever."
It seems very much like something out of a fairy tale, somehow -- once a woman's been detected as a fraudster, you can go back over her appearance and presentation, and if you scrutinize it closely enough you can show that you should have been able to tell that she wasn't a true princess all along.
Well, but in her case you don't have to dig deep: the voice is clearly weird and constructed and she didn't use it pre-Theranos or post-Theranos.
Right. I'm not saying that her appearance/voice wasn't intended to create an effect. Everyone's is. I just don't think there's any double-reverse secret trick that's going to extract meaning from her unprofessional-looking eyeliner -- she did her makeup and hair the way she did because she thought it made her look some combination of credible and attractive, like pretty much every other person in the world. The fact that you find her choices and execution puzzling or misguided in retrospect isn't going to tell you anything meaningful about either women who commit fraud or women with damaged hair generally.
And of course, to unpack my own subtext, I think subjecting women visible in public to this kind of close reading of their appearances, such that every esthetic choice is assumed to be a meaningful and important insight into their character and professional capacity, is really pernicious. Sometimes a split end is just a split end.
I think I'm expecting it to say something interesting about the *marks*, not so much about her.
By that, you mean that she had such a finely honed sense of what a bunch of old rich men would find credible that she deliberately didn't condition her hair because they'd find split ends more credible? It is not literally impossible, but I find it a lot less likely than that she just fried her hair bleaching it.
Subtle fashion choices really do not generally act as mind control over the men who see them.
Subtle fashion choices really do not generally act as mind control over the men who see them.
Industries, and indeed civilizations, have turned on the inaccuracy of this statement.
40: I know your intent here is to be all "vive le difference!" cute, but it is genuinely ghastly and oppressive that men blame their behavior on how some woman looked or dressed or groomed herself where they could see her, and it's dispiriting to see decent men saying "but it's true!" because they think it's adorable.
People form opinions about each other based on what they look and sound like, and they dress themselves to take advantage of that, sure. But there aren't secret subtle buttons you can push by having untidy eyeliner and damaged hair that makes men helpless to realize that your inventions don't work.
32: This? (Possibly ripping off someone on Twitter.)
CC, I accidently put this in an old thread so you probably never saw it, but one of my childhood friends who lives in your town came down with COVID.
42: Thanks, that's it. The thing I found enraging about that piece was the idea that someone who'd analyzed both women's hair closely enough would have known they weren't for real. If it only works in hindsight, maybe it's possible that every goddam flaw in a woman's appearance doesn't give you deep insight into what's going on with her. Come back and write me an article busting someone as a crook for having a chipped manicure before she gets caught by conventional means, why don't you.
40: I know your intent here is to be all "vive le difference!" cute, . . .
I agree with LB that (a) it's important to be very precise when making claims about how subtle cues control the audience because (b) that idea can be deeply pernicious. I also think that being able to signal class (and just, "the right sort of people" in various ways) is both subtle and very powerful.
No particular opinion about Elizabeth Holmes.
I suppose the fact that no one brought this up in the old thread is pretty strong evidence towards LB's view that it's only visible in hindsight
Fantastic! Thank you. Yes, my memory was a very perceptive thread that got continually validated.
Back to Portland -- this is a tweet from I don't know who with I don't know what credibility, but it's claiming that some of the "federal officers" in Portland are mercenaries rather than government law enforcement: https://twitter.com/jamespmorrison/status/1286694122988769281?s=21
Has anyone seen anything else saying the same thing?
Having read that article, I think it's highly unlikely Holmes tried to make her hair and makeup look worse. She may have resisted suggestions to spend more time, money, and effort in making it all look better, under the reasonable belief that looking too polished would ruin her "genius" vibe, but I don't think she looks "weird" beyond the affected black turtleneck. Her hair just looks like she used a blow dryer and straightening iron on it every morning, to its detriment, and her eye makeup is not at all unusual for a woman her age (two years younger than I am, I think) who has been told to play up her eyes.
49: A friend who lives in Portland writes on another social media platform (with accompanying photo), "White jarhead dude in U of Texas shirt enters montavillla restaurant (right off the exit from the airport highway) mask-less and refusing to wear one to go from the door to his table. My spouse overhears them talking about impressions of Portland. On a scale from 1 to 10, how much of a federal cop/Blackwater contractor (that will be gassing protestors in 2 hours) is this guy?
"Also not his muscular Black companion who has a flattop I've never seen on anyone in Portlant. Not saying he's definitely a cop but I don't know anyone who looks like this who isn't military or ex-military."
So yes, 49 is a live concern.
Trump wants to create a new federal jobs program to help rebuild the economy, except instead of the CCC, its for hired goons.
49: I saw something on Medium. Didn't actually read it because it looked speculative - basically, given DHS policies, they could be mercenaries ...
1: Since the president has repeatedly denounced voting by mail for its potential to enable fraud, one should assume he is involved in some sort of operation to commit fraud by mail-in voting.