dad-friend

[dad-friend]

[dad-friend]

I swear every day I’m reading novel sentences heretofore not encountered by humans and I’m not enjoying it

[dad-friend]

Lev Parnas at MediasTouch:

As I woke up this morning and saw the breaking news that Assistant Attorney General Todd Blanche announced—on behalf of Trump’s Department of Justice and Attorney General Pam Bondi—that he will be meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell in the coming days, I knew what was coming. You’re going to see a flood of headlines. You’re going to hear official statements. And you’re going to get a lot of spin today. But almost none of these pundits know Todd Blanche like I do. I want to take you back and remind you: Todd Blanche was originally Paul Manafort’s attorney. Later, he was supposed to be on my legal team. But when I made the decision to stop protecting Trump’s criminal operation and started telling the truth, Blanche quickly became my adversary. He stayed on to represent my co-defendant, Igor Fruman, and worked against me at every turn.

At that time, I was fighting to reveal the truth about Trump’s shadow diplomacy in Ukraine. But instead of standing for justice, Todd Blanche did everything in his power to keep that truth buried. He made contradictory statements to the press. He tried to seal documents I was preparing for Congress. He tried to silence me. And now? Blanche is back. This time, his job is to do the same thing to Ghislaine Maxwell. Let’s not pretend this is about justice. Let’s not pretend this is a neutral fact-finding mission. Trump is sending in his most loyal fixer—Todd Blanche—to a prison cell to “negotiate” with Maxwell before she can speak freely. The goal is not to seek the truth. The goal is to contain it.

[...] And now—today—Todd Blanche announces he’s going in to talk to Maxwell. Blanche claims this is the first time anyone from the DOJ has reached out to her. But don’t be fooled. This is not about investigating Epstein. It’s not about justice for the victims. It’s about controlling the narrative before it controls them. Blanche will try to cut a deal. Offer leniency, maybe even early release. And in return, he’ll want a story. One that implicates someone like Bill Clinton and clears Trump. He’s not going to Maxwell for facts—he’s going for leverage.

And I know that playbook, because I lived it. Back then, it was Bill Barr pulling the strings. Rudy Giuliani. Todd Blanche. They told me to stay quiet. Told me if I said nothing, I’d walk free. But I didn’t stay quiet. I chose to speak out. I chose to risk everything to tell the truth. And what I’m watching unfold right now with Maxwell… it looks exactly the same. They don’t want to hear the truth. They want to shut her up. Just like they tried to do with me. Because they don’t want justice. They want control.

And let me be absolutely clear—because there’s no gray area here. I am in no way defending Ghislaine Maxwell or advocating for her to receive any leniency. On the contrary, I believe Maxwell may be even worse than Epstein himself. She used trust, charm, and access to lure vulnerable girls into a predatory system. She enabled it. She helped build it. She was a key part of a disgusting, criminal pedophile trafficking ring that destroyed lives. She deserves every day of her sentence—and then some.

But if we truly want justice—if we actually want to get to the bottom of this—I believe we need all the facts. And that means hearing the truth from every player involved, no matter how repulsive. What I won’t stand for is a government that manipulates that truth, rewrites history, and buries the parts that implicate their allies. That’s what this is really about. And that’s why I’m speaking up.

The Trump Regime has sent in a fixer by the name of Todd Blanche in a bid to grant leniency or even early release to Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell to prevent the truth about Donald Trump’s involvement from being revealed to the public.

See Also:

HuffPost: Trump Administration 'Reaching Out' To Ghislaine Maxwell: 'What Do You Know?'

Ray Hartmann's Soapbox: Trump Enforcer To Pay Maxwell A Visit

Daily Kos: Is Trump preparing to pardon Epstein's notorious accomplice?

[dad-friend]

You have to admit it's funny

[dad-friend]

[dad-friend]

I actually think it's so funny that the way a hormonal IUD works is that it just lies to your uterus and fools it into believing it's pregnant. but instead of a fetus there's just a little plastic doodad in there. I'm pregnant and it's The Contraption.

[dad-friend]

[dad-friend]

"I was unhappy with my service, and I will not be coming back!"

Cool. Don't

[dad-friend]

Too many people are leaving Jasmine out of their comments about D20: On a Bus. She destroys the bus, she heightens the energy by yelling (like a little green army guy would), she knows what the bit is and rises to it. Like I get that lots of people love Brennan, Aabria, and Matt's work, I do too, but like Jasmine was there and she's also an amazing GM and player.

If you're like, I don't know Jasmine's work, try D20's Coffin Run for something short and Desiquest for something long. There's also a one-shot of her in thirsty sword lesbians on Dropouts Parlor Room

[dad-friend]

I lent my mom a book before I read it and apparently right at the beginning they tell a true story about all our chestnut trees dying and it made my mother SO DEPRESSED that she couldn't sleep and now she's been researching chestnut trees for the past half hour looking sick

[dad-friend]

[dad-friend]

i have this unrealistic fantasy in my head where if you calmly and logically explain something to someone perfectly they will understand your position and gain knowledge from the exchange. unfortunately in the real world this does not happen often

[dad-friend]

I was not expecting this admittedly.

[dad-friend]

I’m not sure if this is permissible in other countries, but here in the US, advertisers are allowed to use any kind of malignant psychology they want in their ads so long as those ads fit within the allotted time-frame.

Back in high school, my class watched a video on how a certain Coca-Cola advertisement was made. You may have seen it, but for those who haven’t: The ad featured a cinematic montage of a crowded beach with smiling thin white people enjoying their leisure time and drinking Coca-Cola out of a common plastic bottle.

The big takeaway from this video was that the ad wasn’t actually advertising Coca-Cola. It was advertising a lifestyle. By associating Coca-Cola with a desirable lifestyle (as well as qualities associated with desirability) it plants the association of “Coca-Cola” with “happiness” in people’s subconscious minds.

This becomes clear when you consider who the ad was meant for. The target audience wasn’t the smiling thin white people that the ad featured, but instead it was people who wanted to be smiling thin white people. This was an ad for the Gen X mom of three kids who worked full-time, who relied on shelf-stable foods to keep everyone fed, and whose nervous system was chronically fried from the stress of never having adequate time for herself.

If she was at the grocery store, and saw the very same bottle of Coca-Cola featured in that ad, she’d be far more likely to pick it up than she was before watching it. If she didn’t anticipate finding relief for her stress, then she could at least drink up the idea of it.

Of course, the thing about ads is that they stop working. Eventually, people’s minds grow wise to the fact buying a certain product doesn’t actually grant them the lifestyle associated with them.

But there’s a lot of other tricks ads employ beyond this.

The reason why Geico is the first company you consider when thinking about buying car insurance is because of the calm, consistent nature of their ads and the fact they’re ubiquitous enough to be familiar. Their mascot forms a kind of parasocial rapport with the audience, so Geico already feels familiar to you by the time you’re looking to buy insurance.

Cereal brands use cartoon-character-like mascots to make their product memorable to kids who can’t read. The reason why so many cereal mascots exhibit such frenetic, possessive behavior is to teach kids to emulate that behavior to compel parents into buying them the cereal, especially if they saw that behavior rewarded in the ad (with the cereal).

You only really see ads for apps on an app-based devices for a reason.

Then there are the ads that don’t look like ads, but look like people on TikTok sharing a new secret product with their audience using the only communication format we regularly trust: word-of-mouth.

And let’s not forget the sheer magnitude of ads that exist. I can’t go outside without seeing them. I can’t watch videos online without exposing myself to ads that wants to skewer my emotions within 10 seconds.

There’s no reprieve from it unless I wall myself off from our culture entirely.

Ads are parasites to both culture and to cognition, and they must be regulated.

[dad-friend]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about some of the people I interact with. I have a coworker who I am pretty sure is a MAGA type, and she is also a lovely woman who is dreadfully overworked and so good at connecting to patients when they call. I can see the conflict on her face when she talks to me, a gigantic tranny dork who speaks Spanish and affirms the LGBT community, but can also talk to her about her cows and knows about guns and stuff. I can see the fear in the eyes of my former Young Men’s leader when he misgenders me and realizes that I’m not an ideology but a person he has known for a long time. I can see the way my extended family stop and stutter over political discussions when they realize they are talking about me. And I don’t know why but lately it’s just made me think about my neighbor as a kid.

When we moved to Arizona, we moved next door to a lovely retired couple - John and Lucy. John was a veteran of WWII, he had an M.D. and a Ph.D. in radiology, and he LOVED us to pieces. His wife, Lucy, was a sharp and gifted woman - well spoken, very observant, and VERY clever. I just know that she used that cleverness as a mom to great effect, because with my and my siblings she always managed to find a way to send us home with candy and treats for a week despite my dad’s protests. We loved them, growing up, and even though they have long-since passed away I love them still, and I love what I learned from them.

John was, as stated, a WWII veteran. He was enlisted as a rifleman, and later as a front line medic, starting at Point Du Hoc and moving inwards to France and towards the Rhine. He let me do a report on him in 6th grade where he shared war stories with me he had kept to himself his whole life - he said it was out of respect for his friends who didn’t get to come home and tell their stories.

He said he told me because he knew I could respect the memories of his friends.

He showed me his collection of medals, and which he’d kept hidden away in a sock in his attic because he’d feel an immense grief any time he saw them. He had wanted to be a doctor his whole life, prior to being drafted he was studying medicine and had taken the Hippocratic oath to Do No Harm. He saw his medals as a reminder that he had Done Harm.

After telling me his stories he was able to convince himself that while he had Done Harm, it was only because his only other alternative was, to him, cowardice. He chose to be brave even if it meant acting against his Oath because he felt that if he didn’t do it someone else would have to go in his place and he would be responsible for the harm that befell them. I don’t think that’s true, but for him it was and that was something no being on earth could have ever dissuaded him from believing.

He shared wild stories - melee combat on the beach, clearing artillery bunkers, receiving a Purple Heart for being injured in hand-to-hand combat with a Wehrmacht rifleman he said he felt pity for because they were the same age and he had to imagine the man he was fighting had been drafted just like him.

He shared how he was awarded a Silver Star for charging a machine gun nest, but shared that he was most proud of not killing anyone in the process. He threw a grenade with the pin still in it and when the machine gunners jumped to avoid being blown up they were killed by someone else so he didn’t have to do it. He took the machine gun and shot the other machine gun in that French field to pieces so he didn’t have to kill the people operating it. He said they were giving out Silver Stars like candy but I knew he was being modest.

He told me about being redesignated as a medic, about how he crawled for about 500 yards on his belly to rescue an injured tank driver, then threw him over his back and crawled the same 500 yards back (1000 yards total) to treat his injuries. He said he met the man in an Army hospital in England after his spine was broken by a high explosive panzer shell was fired through a hollowed out French farmhouse and landed about 20 feet away from him.

He told me about all the people he helped and saved as a medic, he told me about his work in radiology and research after the war. He showed me a hallway that was quite literally wallpapered with academic honors he’d earned as a researcher. He told me about how his first Fourth of July back was a horror show for him because fireworks and German artillery make very similar sounds. He told me about how he woke up in a cold sweat well over half a century later hearing the screams of German artillery men being burned alive with flamethrowers, or hearing his own voice apologizing to the young German soldier he stabbed in the heart at Point Du Hoc.

He told me that when he was asked to present at a medical conference in Germany 25 years after the war ended that he was so scared he couldn’t step off the plane, and that his wife had to hold his hand and lead/pull him with her. He said he was not scared because he was worried about being triggered, but because he knew that someone somewhere outside of that plane had the course of their life irreparably altered by his military service. That to someone out there he was the cause of immense suffering and harm. That some unwitting waiter could be the son of the Nazi Officer he stabbed in the heart with a 12-inch hunting knife. That some woman asking questions in the audience would be the daughter or widow of a man he sent to judgement with a .30-06. He was scared that they would hate him.

He knew what the Nazi’s had done, he knew better than anyone I’d ever met. He’d watched the documentaries, he’s seen the PoWs returning from camps, he’d seen the civilians massacred and tortured by their regime, but he also knew that among the monsters were people like him - idealistic 20-somethings who only wanted to make the world better and were ripped away from that life by the Nazi war machine. And he spent his whole life mourning the loss of innocence and peace that was forced on so many people by such a corrupt power.

To be honest I don’t know if I could do that, but he could. He told me he could still feel the dead and lost with him, both when he slept and when he woke. He told me he thought he’d go to his grave never having told a word of this to anyone. That the stories of him and his friends and allies would disappear silently with him and those like him. That he had wanted that until he realized that he didn’t have to sell out to share the stories - that he could give the stories away for free to someone who would love the people in them, and not just the content of them. He didn’t want his stories to be used as Patriotic Pornography by some TV network or magazine. He wanted the people he knew to be respected, he wanted their memories to be honored and loved, and he entrusted me, a 12-year-old “boy” to do that.

He told me for years afterwards that after telling me these stories that he slept better than he ever had. That by sharing the stories with someone who could hear Him over the din of victory and glory and honor and revisionistic history. Someone who could see the man in the story and not just see the plot of a battle being won. He wanted to be human, and he wanted the people he saw die to be human too - everyone, not just the people on his side. He wanted someone to see and to know the anguish of having to look someone in the eye as heartblood muddies the ground beneath them and hope that they understand that this was not an act of love or hatred but an act of desperation. To hope that you had just taken out One Of The Bad Ones instead of a medical student or a poet who had been drafted. He wanted me to see how hard he had worked since then to build a world without scarcity, to build a world of peace. He wanted me to know SO badly that the cost of violence, any violence, even necessary violence, is always ALWAYS paid by both parties involved.

I think about the rise of the new right wing - the new Nazi movement’s traction in politics, and I feel sad and scared - the world that Johnathan J Yobaggy, my neighbor, my friend, and my hero, worked SO hard to build is being done away with by people who do not understand the cost of the path they are entering. I can see brief moments of recognition in the eyes of some of the people I mentioned - The former young men’s president who immediately regrets misgendering me and hen he makes eye contact with me and sees Me staring back at him and not a faceless “ideology.” I can hear it in the voice of my uncle who quietly comes up to me to apologize for some homophobic comment he made absentmindedly. I can see it in the eyes of racists and sexists being interviewed on TV when they realize that they didn’t vote for a concept, they voted for a real thing. And honestly, I have mixed emotions about it. Because while I understand frustration with the status quo, the importance of basic human needs like affordable good and rent, and I know the fear that comes with feeling powerless, I also can’t help but grieve the endless wheel of history bringing us back to this God Damned Fucking Place again. I hope we can avoid this fate, not just for our sake but for the sake of everyone who has ever tried to make the world safer. For everyone who has ever tried to make up for human nature, for everyone who has ever placed themselves on the offering plate to protect others from the cruelty they know lies just under the surface of mankind’s tenuous grip on progress. I want SO badly for there to be a solution to this, for the people who idolize the Nazi party and the impact of fascism to see that the price of this path is paid in more than just blood but in soul. That they’re allowing themselves to be devoured too. I want for the centrists and the fence sitters and the idealists who want to “change it from the inside” to see how dangerous our politics have become. I want them to see that they’re losing the things that make them great in exchange for a security blanket that’s now become far far far too small to ever work for them again.

Safety found in the past is already gone, and safety found in the future is only as real as a daydream. That any ideology that promises that by “joining us now we’ll make things rough so we can make things safe in a decade” is a promise made by those who will not have to fight the battles they send you to.

I don’t know if America was ever really great, but as long as John was alive it felt great to me. There is no ideology that can replace a neighbor. No tax plan that can replace a friend. No grocery bill that can replace community and connection. No amount of budget cuts that can replace kindness. No amount of suffering from people I hate that will ever make more love. I don’t know how to make America great, but I know how to make my America great and it is not by selling out integrity and compassion and community and fucking humanity to make eggs and gas cheaper. It is by seeing and hearing the people around me. I’m not Mormon anymore, but I still know the value of mourning with those that mourn and comforting those that stand in need of comfort. I’m not Christian anymore but I still have Eyes That Can See and Ears That Can Hear. I want to make this all stop but I can’t stop the collective power of tens of millions of people so instead I listen to my MAGA coworker tell me about how sick her kid was last week. I make jokes with my Young Men’s leader. I hug my uncle. I let them see me fully, as a human and not an ideology. As a woman and not the concept of gender. As a whole person and not someone who can be easily summarized or boiled down into something short and quippy. And I let them know I can see them fully too, and I can see all their humanity as easily as they can see mine. I just have to hope that this works - that enough people can See and Hear the people in their lives who matter to them to bring them out of their personal world of forms and into the real world.

I am probably, honestly, just spiraling a little bit. I took my ADHD meds today and in addition to helping me focus they make me a little anxious so I doubt things are as bad right now as they seem. But just in case there’s any truth to the way things seem to be going, remember, and I mean this seriously: Be kinder to each other, be gayer, and read more Terry Pratchett.

And for the love of god day hello to your neighbor.

[dad-friend]

[ID: a rough doodle of a grimacing person, labelled "me," opening a bottle of sparkling cider, labelled "cider that apparently got shookened." the bottle shoots a blast of cider, labelled "Beam Attack," at a cat, labelled "gertrude."]

[dad-friend]

I don’t think I have an Attention Deficit. I think I have an Attention Surplus. Attention is pointing Everywhere and frankly whatever you wrote in your email is not as captivating as That Radom Noise I’m Hearing