crickets
crickets's JournalGosar sent in a video. Disgusting. (edited)
Both Gosar and Greene should get their leashes yanked for this, but I'm not holding my breath.
eta - Apparently AZ Senator Wendy Rogers promoted the event, though she didn't participate. Also, Gosar spoke in person at AFPAC last year. Ugh, they're all terrible.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/arizona-state-senator-wendy-rogers-promotes-far-right-event-featuring-hanukkah-basher-baked-alaska
The post was far from Rogers’ first in support of Fuentes, an open bigot. (“This is going to be the most racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying speech in all of Dallas this weekend,” Fuentes boasted of one of his upcoming speeches after he was kicked out of CPAC in 2021.) Rogers has authored at least two dozen fawning posts about Fuentes, according to Left Coast Right Watch. [snip]
Rogers’ involvement with AFPAC, outside her work as its hypewoman, is unclear. But she wouldn’t be the first Arizona politician to align with the far-right conference. Last year, U.S. Rep Paul Gosar (R-AZ) delivered the event’s keynote address. Gosar, a 2020 election denialist who just this week retweeted a different white nationalist, later posed with Fuentes at a restaurant. (A Gosar spokesperson did not return a request for comment on whether Gosar would attend the conference this year.)
Both Gosar and Rogers have well-documented ties to the militant right, particularly the paramilitary group the Oath Keepers. Rogers announced her membership to the group several years ago and gave a speech for members in March 2021, while Gosar allegedly told an Arizona Oath Keepers leader that the U.S. was already in a civil war, “we just haven’t started shooting yet.”
They sat in Belarus too long and sold off the diesel for vodka and cookies.
FEB 19 - they'd been there for about a month when this article was written.
'They Drink A Lot, Sell Their Fuel': Belarusians Give Low Marks To Russian Troops Deployed For Drills
https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-troops-belarus-exercises-ukraine/31711282.html
The first Russian troops began arriving in Belarus for the unexpected Union Determination-2022 exercises on January 18. The maneuvers, a 10-day exercise set to end on February 20 and involving an estimated 30,000 Russian troops and almost the entire Belarusian military, come at a time when Russia has massed military assets around Ukraine and in the occupied Ukrainian region of Crimea, sparking fears of a new invasion. [snip]
"Military equipment is frequently dropped from the platforms during unloading," the channel wrote. "After unloading, a lot of abandoned equipment -- body armor, helmets, personal gear -- remained." [snip]
"Over a stretch of 3 kilometers there were 100-liter trash bags every 20 meters, as well vodka bottles, empty plastic beer kegs, and empty cookie packages," the Telegram channel reported. An anonymous commenter responded acerbically that the state railway would just arrange an "emergency" Saturday working day and "the railway workers will clean up everything after our 'brothers.'"
The troops thought they were going for a ten day exercise. They were there for weeks, and then... oops.
Found a translation of "A message for the Russian people"
The poem is translated in the tweets following this one:
https://twitter.com/RB_Lemberg/status/1497630437828710406
Way to go, people of Romania!
I started cheering when I read this. (My neighbors probably think I'm nuts, heh.)
https://twitter.com/AM_Friedman/status/1497351012234977291
Apparently, thousands of Romanians have been waiting in their personal vehicles to pick up #refugees at one of the NE borders with #Ukraine. I'm not often elated at news from back home, but this makes my heart swell. #StandWithUkriane #standwithrefugees
[image]
6:21 PM · Feb 25, 2022
https://twitter.com/AM_Friedman/status/1497366546204835856
Replying to @IrrevrentNatSec and @leighwasme
Apparently - it's from one of the NE border points (Vama Siret) - but I've heard it's widespread. I'm also very cautious when sharing anything in this disinformation era. I've already seen pics across the social media that turned out to be old or false.
7:22 PM · Feb 25, 2022
Riveting thread showing Ukraine Amb. Kyslytsy, during a UN Sec Council meeting Feb 23rd,
citing the UN Charter and asking for documents. Starts here:
https://twitter.com/HayesBrown/status/1496710912648044548
Accompanying article:
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/ukraine-s-u-n-ambassador-calls-russia-s-veto-question-n1289826
MSNBC's article is a little more hopeful than the one at The Conversation, while acknowledging that any attempt to oust Russia from their seat would take time, enough that it would do Ukraine little good in the near future. It is a fascinating question, and one that deserves further investigation.
Fascinating individual - thanks, Swede.
Also, I had no idea of the impact Ukraine has had in Canada's politics.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-how-ukrainian-politics-became-the-most-canadian-of-politics/
Almost from the beginning, Canadian leaders realized that they needed to make the Ukrainians’ interests, and their relationship to their homeland, part of the Canadian political vocabulary.
After a second wave of Ukrainians arrived in the 1930s, fleeing Stalin’s horrors, Canadian leaders began to speak of their role using a new language of pluralism. In 1936, governor-general Lord Tweedsmuir – also known as Scottish novelist John Buchan – gave a landmark speech to a crowd of Ukrainian-Canadians in Fraserwood, Man., promoting his notion of British Empire multiculturalism: “You will all be better Canadians for being also good Ukrainians … the strongest nations are those that are made up of different racial elements.”
In other words, more than a decade before Canadian citizenship came into existence, officials were inspired by the Ukrainian experience to promote a hyphenated form of Canadianism.
Though that political history was not always so rosy as the picture this article seems to paint.
Ukrainian Canadians: Internment (1914–1920)
The entire page is an engrossing read. Today I learned.
It's way, way past time for social media to take more responsibility for their platforms.
Twitter's silly "oopsie, we deleted all of those Ukraine open source intelligence accounts by mistake" idiocy today proves they are quite capable of doing it. Facebook has needed a swift kick for all of their bot farm nonsense for a long, long time. All of these social media companies are capable of targeting and removing the bulk of Putin's propaganda minders. They need to persuaded to do it. Propaganda is a given as a tool of war. Whose side are they on?
Excellent article, and I love that Tech Policy linked to Garry Kasparov:
https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1496867412746149891
-Recall all ambassadors from Russia. There is no point in talking. The new unified message is "stop or be isolated completely".
-Ban all elements of Putin's global propaganda machine. Turn them off, shut them down, send them home. Stop helping the dictator spread lies & hate.
3/5
10:19 AM · Feb 24, 2022
https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1496871285917470720
Cannot ignore the political 5th column of Putinists, from the far right & left in EU to the tankies & Trump & his GOP followers in the US. They may have the right to support a brutal dictator's war in order to criticize Biden, but it's disgusting and anti-American. Do not forget.
10:34 AM · Feb 24, 2022
Disgusting.
And Facebook will do something about it in 3...2... ... ... likely never. 
Of particular concern is the discussion regarding UTM codes. You see them all the time at the end of URLs, e.g.
https://somewhereontheweb.com/pagename.html?utm_source=miscletters&symbols
There's very good reason for stripping everything after the question mark in most URLs. It's often code that reports where the link was found, an unnecessary string of data that has nothing to do with retrieving the page for you and everything to do with tracking how or where you found it. Another code seen all the time is the Facebook click identifier and the GCLID Google click identifier.
?fbclid=miscletters&symbols
?gclid=miscletters&symbols
It doesn't always work since not all links are constructed the same these days, but when sharing links, remember that proper links often end in '.html' - stripping everything after the question mark is usually good web hygiene. Screw the web tracking analytics and screw Conservative Brief's potential UTM code kickback scheme.
Ella Fitzgerald wasn't exactly charged for singing, but it's just as bad.
Thanks for posting about this, tblue. I had no idea about any of it - found this linked later on in the thread. Apparently, vice cops showed up that night looking for any excuse. Poor Ella cried at the police station. The charges were later dropped, and even the police chief admitted that the arrests were an overreaction. Fortunately, the ugly incident failed to stop the second show.
https://blog.chron.com/bayoucityhistory/2011/01/on-integration-jazz-and-the-arrest-of-ella-fitzgerald-and-dizzy-gillespie-in-houston/
The incident was recently the subject of an article in Houston History magazine. Aimee L’Heureux has written a detailed account of the arrests and how the concert played a role in Jacquet and Granz’s efforts to integrate audiences here. (It’s also worth noting that the Houston Press did a fine write-up on Jacquet and the incident in a 1999 article.)
Fitzgerald and Gillespie were performing in Houston at the Music Hall as part of Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic tour, which included other jazz legends like Buddy Rich, Oscar Peterson, Gene Krupa and Lester Young. Saxophonist Jacquet — also on the bill — was the prime mover in bringing the show to Houston and making sure the concert (which featured both black and white musicians) would be integrated. [snip]
Of course, one finds it highly suspicious that vice officers would bust the five of them on a night meant to show how smoothly Houston audiences could integrate. The vice officers weren’t the only officers at the concert as eight other uniformed officers were hired to work security that night. In Gillespie’s autobiography, Granz says one of the vice officers even threatened him during the raid after he accused the officer of trying to plant drugs in a bathroom at the Music Hall. [more]
Go, Gavin Newsome.
https://news.yahoo.com/newsom-supports-bill-allow-residents-220851679.htmlDuring a press conference to unveil the blueprint, Newsom said California would use the proposed law to take advantage of the "wide open" door he said the Supreme Court opened with the Texas law.
"There is no principled way the U.S. Supreme Court cannot uphold this California law," Newsom said. "None. Period, full stop. It is quite literally modeled after the law they just upheld in Texas."
The bill would allow a plaintiff to seek injunctive relief to halt the distribution of weapons and also recover $10,000 in damages for every firearm involved in a complaint. Supporters of the plan said it would reduce gun violence in California while taking advantage of the Supreme Court's decision.
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