Sat: Is It Easier to Convert a Cancer Cell Than a QANON Pers

Three More Missing in Mexico

Two sisters from Texas and a friend are missing in Mexico after they crossed the border last month to sell clothes at a flea market, U.S. authorities said Friday.

The fate of the three women, who haven’t been heard from in about two weeks, remains a mystery and has garnered relatively little publicity.

Do You Think That's Bad?

More than 550 Americans are reported as missing in Mexico, a little-known facet of a broader tragedy that has honeycombed this country with mass graves. Soaring violence and government dysfunction have fueled a crisis that’s left at least 112,150 people missing, according to government records here.

Americans make up a small part of that ghastly toll. And they are a tiny percentage of the millions of U.S. citizens who travel to Mexico every year for tourism, work and family visits. But just as there’s been an uproar in Mexico over the government’s all-out effort to find the four Americans, compared with its far more limited search for its own abducted citizens, relatives of the Americans still missing are asking why their loved ones haven’t been a higher priority for Washington.

The Bourne E-Mail.  It is Not Another Matt Damon Film. Fox Noise Gets their Material From a Total Wack Job

Dominion Voting Systems’ billion-dollar defamation lawsuit against Fox News continues to reveal how craven, duplicitous, and lazy the right-wing propaganda machine truly is. The evidence presented in the form of emails, text messages, and on-air lies has exposed the moral bankruptcy of everyone from ownership down to the hosts and the producers of its shows. It has also revealed how lazy the on-air talent is and how easily conmen and cranks can be allowed to present themselves to the world as “experts.”

Marlene Bourne might not be a name you’ve heard before, but she’s representative of how far away from reality Fox News will go in order to promote a minority rule government. The Daily Beast has done a deep dive on Bourne, as she seems to have been one of the sources—and probably inadvertently somewhat plagiarized by lazy host Maria Bartiromo.

According to the report, Dominion lawyers collected an email written by Bourne and sent to former Trump lawyer and Big Lie pusher Sidney Powell. Powell subsequently sent that email to Bartiromo. A short while later (three minutes, to be exact) Bartiromo sent this email to her producer, and the next day Bartiromo had Powell on her show spewing the half-baked ideas from Bourne’s email. But what did Bourne write? Hold on to your seat, and maybe put a bunch of soft cushions around you.

The Daily Beast reports that Bourne is a self-proclaimed “cactus artist” who, as far as anyone can tell, was a completely unknown person to Powell and Bartiromo before she was able to send this important email. According to Bourne herself, who spoke with The Daily Beast, she came up with a sort of unified conspiracy theory by reading a “variety” of sources that included hidden messages in movies and song lyrics, as well as “overheard conversations she hears while in line at the supermarket checkout.” Her theories are global cabal conspiracy theories of full media control over the government and everything else.

In November 2020, hours after media outlets (including Fox News) called the election for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, Bourne sent Powell (as well as former Howdy Doody impersonator Lou Dobbs and litigious right-wing activist Tom Fitton) an email. Bourne chose these people because they had clearly been big Trump defenders who had very frequently thrown out conspiracy theory-esque statements concerning “deep state” figures and the like.

According to The Daily Beast, the fact that this woman, previously unknown to Powell, who believes the election was possibly stolen by Dominion Voting Systems was able to get the Big Lie lawyer to bite is not the story. The story is that the email itself, from a complete unknown, which made all of the claims of a Dominion Voting Systems conspiracy to rig the election, was filled with a ton of Bourne’s other ideas about things. Those things, which Bartiromo and her producer seemed fine with, include:

-“Justice Scalia wasn’t accidentally shot during a hunting trip. He was purposefully killed at the annual Bohemian Grove camp. A club for members of the Mega-Group, during a weeklong human hunting expedition. NEVER accept an invitation to be a guest at that camp. Ever.”
-Explaining that she was “internally decapitated” during a car accident, which led to this revelation: “The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it.”

During depositions, Bartiromo admitted the email was “kooky, absolutely,” and David Clark, the producer of Bartiromo’s show, told lawyers that he would “concede that this e-mail is crazy.” But according to all accounts, Bartiromo and her team brought on Powell as a guest, and the two based their entire segment on one source: Marlene Bourne.

How Dumb Is Russia's War Strategy?

From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 2.5M tons of ordnance on Laos during 580,000 bombing sorties—equal to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years – making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. — legacy of war.org

Communists in Laos during our own “special military operation,” if you will, did not capitulate to the US, nor did it actively try to stop North Vietnam from sending supplies to South Vietnam to end the war. The Vietnam War, again despite being part of the largest campaign of bombing ever, did not stop the nation from becoming communist.

The reason has to do with a tragic miscalculation regarding human nature. You see, when you kill and blow up a bunch of people and buildings in someone’s neighborhood. For some reason those people don’t just all say “lets quit and overthrow our government.” People who go and bomb things usually think after being shocked and awed this would have to be the case. Instead, however, people usually just GET REALLY MAD at whoever attacked them and want to KILL THEM INSTEAD. Go figure... Bombing civilian targets is worse than useless, it actually strengthens your enemies desire to win.

He Likes to Grab 'Em By the Pussy. They Want to Grab Him by the Pocketbook

The tape of Donald Trump boasting about sexual aggression towards women that detonated late in the 2016 election campaign but did not prevent him from winning the presidency will be permitted at a forthcoming civil trial in New York.

A federal judge ruled on Friday that the columnist E Jean Carroll can use the 2005 remarks by Trump, caught on tape in conversation with an Access Hollywood TV show personality, in support of her lawsuit accusing Trump of raping her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s.

Carroll sued Trump for defamation after he denied the rape ever happened or that he even knew the former longtime Elle magazine columnist, after she first described in a 2019 book her encounter with Trump in late 1995 or early 1996.

In the leaked tape, the former president boasts graphically while talking to Billy Bush, then with Access Hollywood, about how celebrities such as himself can grope women without waiting for consent.

“In this case, a jury reasonably could find, even from the Access Hollywood tape alone, that Mr Trump admitted in the Access Hollywood tape that he in fact has had contact with women’s genitalia in the past without their consent, or that he has attempted to do so,” Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote.

Dang, I like reading articles like this one.  They fly under the mega media radar and show that in the background a lot of good things are happening.  The Economist has articles on topics like this in in their Science and Technology section and they too lift my mood.  In spite of those who are trying to break us apart by their lies being told in loud voices, there still are others who are quietly trying to better our lives.  This is my homage to them.