Mike 03
Mike 03's JournalThere are some interesting but elusive suspects.
Allegedly, Arthur Leigh Allen was eliminated as a suspect because his fingerprints didn't match those found at the scene of the Paul Stine murder. He still is such an intriguing suspect.
This is one that always interested me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_Killer#Public_speculation
He fits with the theory that this was someone who spent long periods of time away from the Bay Area, perhaps someone in the Navy (because of the location of the Stine murder). But who knows?
There some others too. (And there are some ridiculous speculative suspects too, like the Unabomber). I wish we could solve this one in my lifetime.
This is going to be a huge story in the "True Crime" corridors of the
internet.
Slaves and paradise? Hmmm. This will be controversial because of how it departs from the other letters. Unless he was doing what he did best: teasing the reporters and police, leading them down blind alleys. Maybe the Zodiac experts will be able to eliminate/narrow down suspects.
Very interesting.
Kick and Rec
and this:
add this:
..while at the same time destroying the institutions of the state and replacing its civil servants with avowed loyalists...
For some reason, some people like to compartmentalize Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot
away from other dictators, but someone (maybe Masha Gessen or maybe Timothy Snyder or the new biographer of Stalin?) said it is more constructive not to view them as left/right but rather as two sides of the same coin, so I study both Hitler and Stalin, and Pol Pot and Pinochet. There are similarities and I think it's crazy to make special excuses for far left dictators. One difference is they are already closed systems, so a democracy isn't being wrecked when a new dictator comes to power. They are assuming a power that in theory already belongs to them. (True also of N Korea).
Why is it somehow not comforting that a widespread attempt to overturn the
most secure election in history will almost certainly fail? Such a thing should never have happened here in the first place. What have they learned during this process that will make it easier for them to actually succeed next time?
A door that is never opened, opened once, becomes a door that is more frequently used.
Authoritarians like Trump deliberately "don't lead."
Their whole raison d'etre is to instigate crises for political advantage, because it plays into their narrative that there is a disintegrating world that only they can protect the nation from. They create crisis and blame somebody else, and rally their supporters to blame those people too because having shared enemies is a dream come true for someone who aspires to be a dictator.
Kicking
Doctors and virologists very early on on "Doctor Radio" (SiriusXM) said this could well be the case because coronaviruses are like this (like colds). Then they stopped talking about it when all the vaccines went into development.
Anecdotal stories piled up, but I was hoping people were shedding dead virus particles.
Well, now that multiple infections are being confirmed scientifically, i guess we have to face this new unwelcome complication. I wonder what this means in terms of the frequency of vaccinations. Four shots a year (two and two spaced six months apart? Will that be enough? Do we need six shots a year? Two, two and two spaced four months apart? This will be fun.)
I think what we don't get about the Republican Party is that it's not really
anything like the Democratic Party. We are a coalition of coalitions who unite around policies.
The Republican Party is like an identity group (or maybe it's identitarian?). They unite around the idea of being in the same group, and opposing liberalism at any cost. And they were conditioned to do that by a RW media designed just for that purpose, not to be serious journalism but to become a sphere where they teach eachother what to think and what to say. You'll notice, it's only a language of opposing things. It is not constructive. It is only a language of tearing down and destroying.
Other than a few figleaf policies, like Immigration and Abortion, they do not care about policies. I don't care what they say, they don't care about deficits or budgets. Not one fucking bit.
I was just reading about a study where they cut up a bunch of things Trump said that were totally contradictory, and Republicans agreed with them no matter how liberal if they knew Trump had said it.
Masha Gessen says something in her new book, that we need to get off of policies and find a more aspiration language to talk about politics. For our own survival.
Ted Cruz badly wants to inherit the Christian RW element of the
Trump base. (He had that support before they threw him aside to coalesce around Trump.)
When people ask, "Who will be the next Trump," I don't say it will be Cruz, but he's one of a few people I'm keeping my eye on because of how fully he's prepared to throw his self-respect away to obtain it.
Every time people have underestimated Trump's capacity to violate norms it
has blown up in our faces, so I don't put anything past an authoritarian on the brink of losing power.
I always remember Mary Trump saying that in the Trump family it is worse to lose than to die, and that point is reiterated by authoritarian expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat in her new book Strongmen. That moment where power is, or could be, lost is, for them, the existential crisis of their lives.
Profile Information
Gender: MaleHometown: Modesto California
Home country: United States
Current location: Arizona
Member since: Mon Oct 27, 2008, 06:14 PM
Number of posts: 16,616
