Human beings are so funny. You can have an horrifying and awful disaster back in 2017, and widespread agreement that it was a disaster, and then eight years later, people sign right back up to do it all over again.

Tickets to the second Fyre festival have gone on sale this week, promising a more successful experience than the first, which was the subject of a lawsuit.

Its founder, Billy McFarland, described by Vanity Fair as "the poster boy for millennial scamming", was convicted of fraud and sentenced to six years in prison. He was later released after less than four years. A New York court also awarded $7,220 each to 277 attendees.

"I'm sure many people think I'm crazy for doing this again," McFarland said in a statement. "But I feel I'd be crazy not to do it again."

What a unique situation! Let's never learn.

(via E. Messily)

Last Trump presidency, I felt worried for others, and not particularly for myself. This time I'm starting to feel a little more freaked out personally, by things like weakening the Clean Water Act. Like, how would I know if some toxin leaches into the water table? and 10 years from now, the whole community gets cancer?

Also yesterday was wildly windy, and a fire did break out further north in our county, and I got myself all tied up in knots over that.

Is this another week of Supreme Court decisions that will make our lives worse?

(I can't find the link now, but recently I read a thing that we should stop verbally labeling clearly unconstitutional Supreme Court decisions as "the law of the land" and start calling them rogue or illegitimate decisions, or something like that.)

From this.

It appears to work? My attempt under the jump.

1. Normal inquiry:

2. Implementing the strategy:

Google AI hates bad words!

On the AskHistorians subreddit, someone posed this question:

After JFK's assassination, Jackie intentionally appeared on television with her still-bloody clothes on. When someone offered to get her fresh clothes, she said "I want them to see what they have done to Jack." Who was the "they" she was referring to?

The top answer is saying the John Birchers. (Full answer under the jump.)

What I'm struck by is how much it sounds just like MAGA of 2025. Usually we trace the roots of the current MAGA movement back to Newt Gingrich, or maybe Reagan, but it's clear that it's just in our DNA to be hysterically shrill and conservative, and the only thing that waxes and wanes is the degree to which we can keep that vein out of power.

I'm a bit surprised the circumstances of this haven't been discussed here before, at least from what I can find in a quick search.

It related to a conversation she had that morning with her husband that got covered originally in William Manchester's The Death of a President, the summary of which has been used in various other Kennedy assassination material since the original's publication in 1967.

That morning, the Dallas News ran an absolutely ridiculous ad from the John Birch Society and a couple other reactionaries on Page 14 to 'greet' JFK on his arrival in their city. You can read it here. Manchester's summary of it is incomplete (he leaves out the part of 'ignoring the Constitution' among other broadsides) but he highlights that JFK was accused of responsibility for the imprisonment, starvation, and persecution of "thousands of Cubans...selling food to Communist soldiers who were killing Americans in Vietnam, hinted strongly that he had reached a secret agreement with the U.S. Communist party, and asked, among other things, "Why have you ordered or permitted your brother Bobby, the Attorney General, to go soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you, your administration, and your leadership?"'

Even for the News - which was no friend to him and had put out some really hostile headlines that morning ("STORM OF POLITICAL CONTROVERSY SWIRLS AROUND KENNEDY ON VISIT", "YARBOROUGH SNUBS LBJ", and "PRESIDENT'S VISIT SEEN WIDENING STATE DEMOCRATIC SPLIT"), this was so over the top that under normal circumstances it would never have been accepted. Unfortunately, the publisher's son had just gotten back from out of town late the night before and discovered the ad was already set; neither he nor the advertising director, who had also been gone, would have approved it, but in their absence it went all the way up to his father the publisher, who happily did so. When the son discovered it he called his father and told him that it was the equivalent of "inviting someone to dinner and then throwing tapioca in his face." Manchester concludes that "[the publisher's son] thought of the time he and other conservative young businessmen had spent in their eleventh-hour attempt to polish up the blemished image of Big D and hung up, bitterly discouraged. It was too late now. The thing was in print."

It takes JFK a few minutes that morning to get to the ad itself - the articles are bad enough - but when he does he halts and tells Ken O'Donnell, "Can you imagine a paper doing a thing like that?" To Jackie, he tells her, "We're heading into nut country today," then stops and says, "You know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a President...I mean it. There was the rain, and the night, and we were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase..." - Manchester notes then that JFK "gestured vividly, pointing his rigid index finger at the wall and jerking his thumb twice to show the action of the hammer" - "...then he could have dropped the gun and the briefcase and melted away in the crowd."

I won't go further into the broader conservative movement of the era - it's a fairly detailed top level question - but this is almost certainly the "they" that Jackie Kennedy suspected and was referring to at the time, having had her husband himself already set it up that morning. The ad itself, by the way, was also found in Jack Ruby's car afterwards.

There are a lot of other interesting answers at that thread, too.

I don't really know how to actually fix the error ("It works!") that you sometimes get when you try to come to Unfogged, but I hope that everyone knows to go into the url and delete the s after http when it happens.

(It's lately happening way more to me than it used to.)