There was a whole series of stories I intentionally kept out of this week’s Friday Five because it’s an involved tale that falls into a theme I’ve blogged about a lot, and I had more than a few thoughts on it. So I had planned to run it as a Weekend Update post. I also kept this week’s Friday Five a bit more succinct than has been typical, of late, in part because since I had Friday off, I had intended to spend Thursday evening binging Lucifer season 4 on Netflix. Which I did.
No spoilers: I laughed, I cried, I gasped, I cheered, and please oh please let there be a season 5!
Anyway, my extended weekend started off both relaxing and productive. I had some errands and chores I wanted to get done, and most of those have been attended to. I’ve also napped more than I meant to, I’ve gotten a lot of reading in, and so forth. By Saturday morning when I originally planned to finish the other blog post, I just didn’t want to. Because, often my weekend updates are about really sordid things, and that’s what this series of stories is. I just wasn’t in the mood, or rather, I didn’t want to put myself into the sort of mood I would likely be after I finished that post. And I thought, well, there is a certain resonance to posting it on Sunday, so maybe I’ll work on it then.
Instead, I got up, took my meds, did a little bit of tidying in the kitchen, then laid down and slept for something like five ours. And I still don’t want to go there. So you’re getting a brief, and late, Weekend Update that is about good or cool or rockin’ things, instead of the sordid stuff about a public figure.
First up, just a nice little feel good story: Mom Gets a Surprise When She Skips Her Own Graduation to Attend Her Son’s. Woman goes back to school later in life, and finds out that the day she is supposed to accept her Bachelor of Science in Business Administration at one university, is the same day that her son is getting his Bachelor’s in Music at a different university. So she decides to skip her ceremony to attend her son’s. A classmate of the son happens to have a workstudy job in the office of the university president, and told the president the story. So the president calls the president of the other university and the cook up the scheme to surprise both mother and son, by presenting mom’s diploma at their ceremony.
Novelist and comic-book writer Chuck Wendig has been tweeting a lot about the family of foxes that have a den not far from his writing shed, and he’s posted an album of the adorable photos for all to see.
Finally, a couple of cool things:
Coeur d’Alene artist turns decaying tree into little library:
(click to embiggen)It’s Friday! We’ve reached the second Friday in May.
We’ve gone from weather than feels like spring to temperatures that would be more appropriate in summer. So we’ve been making meals that minimize how often we turn on the stove. Including grilling things outside.
Anyway, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, five stories related to various political things, and five videos (plus some things I wrote).
It feels like spring here in Seattle. We’re having warm days (though still cold-ish nights) and almost no rain. Last year we set a record for the driest May ever, and we might just get a repeat.
Anyway, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about awful people, five stories about what should happen next to the alleged president, and five videos (plus notable deaths and some things I wrote).
Straight, male, (mostly) white, trump-supporting Americans are committing all the domestic terrorism…It’s time for a news update. There have been, once again, some news stories that broke after my Friday Five which I want to comment on and don’t want to wait until next Friday—when there will have been at least three dozen new scandals from the current regime, alone. Because we now live in a dystopia where so many awful things happen that horrific events from a mere six days ago feel as if they are ancient history. And that sucks.
First, last night my husband and I saw Avengers: Endgame at the nearby theatre where you can get real food and drinks brought out to you. They make an nice Old Fashioned, by the way. Anyway, we had just gotten seated in the crowded theatre before the advertisements started and my phone buzzed—and before you say anything, I always shut it off before the Previews start and I put my watch into theatre mode, so I’m not one of those guys. Anyway, I check it and there is a panicked text message from one of my aunts who is scared that my husband or I are dead. Or something. Why, because she saw this news: 4 dead after construction crane crushes cars in Seattle.
I refrained from pointing out that since the greater metropolitan Seattle area has a population of about 1.5 million, the probability that Michael or I were part of an incident were four people died and three more were injured was about 0.0000046%. And statistically there is a traffic fatality in the region about once every three days. And we don’t actually live in Seattle, any more, and tend to spend our entire weekends up in Shoreline and Edmonds and the other neighboring suburbs. But I understand that it’s a very grisly image: you’re driving along, minding your own business, and several tons of steel fall out of the sky, crushing your car and several around you. As it was, the crane had fallen several hours earlier, when Michael and I were eating a late brunch in a Family Pancake restaurant in Edmonds. And at the time my aunt heard the news and panicked, we were sitting in a theatre in Mountlake Terrace—we weren’t in Seattle at all.
Today in follow-up news I learn there is kind of a connection: one of the four people killed was a student at Seattle Pacific University, where I attended years ago. I am happy to learn that the baby and mother who were among the injured were released from the hospital last night. I hope they have a speedy recovery.
Hate crimes are up since the alleged president was unduly elected. And they are being committed by angry white men who are often literally citing the pussy-grabber-in-chief during the execution of their crimes. This isn’t tragedy, this is part of an active campaign of hate and terror, encouraged by the person currently occupying the White House: Opinion: Why Poway Proves Again That Trump Has To Go. But also aided and abetted by the vast majority of the Republican Party. Yesterday I linked to a story about why Twitter doesn’t mass ban Nazis (Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too), but there’s more to it than policy. The algorithms which work perfectly fine in other parts of the world to identify and ban Nazis and Nazi sympathizers to conform with local laws, sweep up a lot of Republican politicians, including the president. Not because the algorithms are less perceptive than humans, but because those politicians are saying, promoting, and encouraging the genocidal beliefs and policies of the Nazis.
And I will say it again: this isn’t a new phenomenon. The Republican Party has been the home of white nationalism since the sixties.
And those white nationalists are just getting bolder and bolder: Self-Proclaimed Nationalists Interrupt Author, Chant ‘This Land Is Our Land’ at Politics and Prose Bookstore. They’re completely oblivious to the fact that the land all of us U.S. citizens live on was stolen from Native Americans, who were massacred and driven off. It’s stolen land. I’m also irritated at them stealing lyrics from the guy who’s guitar famously sported the slogan, “This machine kills fascists.”
They were there because Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology, medicine, and health at Vanderbilt University, as at the store to do a reading and discuss his recent book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland. The protestors are apparently all former members of Identity Evropa, another white supremacist group many of whose members were recently identified as members of the military and police officers—who began losing their jobs because of some of the illegal activities associate with the group. The new group calls itself AIM (American Identity Movement), and was insisting that they had nothing to do with the old group, but that’s already been shown to be a lie.
In another act of thievery, I have to point at the the initialism AIM is also the name of the American Indian Movement, an group that advocates for Native America civil rights and so forth. So it’s not enough that they try to assert ownership of stolen land, but they’re operating under a stolen name, too.
“We’re not going to be intimidated or deterred. Terror will not win and as Americans, we can’t and won’t cower in the face of this senseless hate… A little bit of light pushes away a lot of darkness. We need a lot of light now.”
It’s Friday! The final Friday in April, and Avengers: Endgame is finally here!
Got back from my mmini-vacation and then worked super late the next three days. Oh, what a week!
Anyway, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about what should happen next to the alleged president, and five videos (plus some things I wrote).
Yep! (click to embiggen)It’s Friday! The third Friday in April, already! And nearly Easter!
My husband and I are attending The 42nd Northwest Science Fiction Convention (NorWesCon). Other than a couple of years, I have been attending this convention or a portion of it since 1987—which means that yes, I definitely am an old fart! I had fun the first day, even though we arrived a bit later than we had intended to. It’s fun seeing friends, especially some that I haven’t seen since last year!
Anyway, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I am not bringing you any stories about the contents of the heavily redacted Mueller report. There are a couple links below related to in, but I decided to put the five stories that I thought were most interesting about what information we do have in a separate post last night, and it is behind a cut-tag. So if you’re just browsing you don’t have to look at it. If, on the other hang, you are interested, click here.
For this week’s Friday Five I bring you: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, the top five science and sci fi stories of the week, five stories about deplorable people, five stories about things not going so well for the alleged president and five videos (plus notable obituaries and things I wrote).
Good question (click to embiggen)Since every news site was talking about the Mueller report, it seems a bit redundant for me to include much about it in the Friday Five. So I decided to make a separate post just about what was learned the first day the report was out.
Virulently anti-gay disgraced former congressman caught making out with a guy with his hands down the guy’s pants at Coachella.
So, disgraced former Republican Congressman Aaron Shock is in the news again: Former GOP Congressman Aaron Schock spotted at Coachella making out with a guy and What Happens at Coachella Doesn’t Stay at Coachella (If You’re Hanging with a Gay Right Wing Republican). He was a public official who voted for and campaigned on anti-gay causes. He tried to make it legal for people to fire folks merely for being suspected of being gay. He voted against amending federal hate crimes laws to include crimes where the victims were targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, gender and disability. He voted against the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in December 2010. He has never renounced those positions, even after resigned from office while he was being charged with a lot of financial malfeasance.
Last month prosecutors reached an agreement with Schock where all charges against him were dropped in exchange for him paying $42,000 to the IRS (taxes owed on a fraction of the money he illegally obtained while in congress) and $68,000 to his congressional campaign fund. As part of the deal, Schock’s campaign committee pled guilty to a misdemeanor count of failing to properly report expenses.
For years rumors circulated around about the anti-gay congressmen, because of his unusual fashion choices and the years of being unmarried and wealthy but always having unmarried male “roommates.” But things hit mainstream media after someone reported that his personal Twitter account and Instagram account was following hundreds of gay models and male athletes who were always known for posting pictures of themselves scantily clad. Shock abruptly unfollowed those hundreds of accounts en mass when a major news site finally mentioned the gay rumors
Then on a taxpayer-funded trip abroad Congressman Shock had this guy who was listed as a staff photographer (but he never took pictures) put in a hotel room with a door adjoining his, get upgrades and other things using programs that are usually meant for spouses, and so on. The supposed photographer sat with Shock at banquets similarly to the spouses of other congressmen on the trip, The supposed photographed posed in pictures standing beside Shock like the spouses of other congressmen and the American service members abroad they met with on the trip. Read that again: the official staff photographer didn’t take pictures, he posed as if he was the congressman’s spouse in the pictures.
Totally normal to have your photographer (far right) pose with you in all the official photos rather than actually operating a camera. Even if the taxpayer is picking up the photographer’s tab, right?Let’s not forget the time when when he was walking around a gay neighborhood with reporters during Pride week where he was supposed to be talking about some urban issues but he kept getting distracted on camera with his eyes following the hot shirtless men who walked by. Those are among the many, many, many reasons that everyone with a lick of sense had been saying for years that the anti-gay (ex-)Congressman is probably a closeted gay man.
I’ve seen people–gay people–posting on some sites that Shock’s private life is his business, and if out gay guys want to hang with him, we shouldn’t judge.
No.
He used the power of his office to cause harm to queer people. He used the power of his office to argue that anyone should have the right to fire, evict, or refuse to give medical services if they even suspect that person might be gay. He argued that employers and private citizens should be able to pry into other queer people’s private lives and discriminate against them. Until he makes amends for that by coming out, apologizing for the harm he caused, and make some kind of significant contribution to pro-queer causes, he has forfeited any right to a private sex life of his own. And I can absolutely judge any other queer people who friends with the douche who enabled hate crimes and more.
We went to the moon! (click to embiggen)Once again here we are with some stories that broke after I completed this week’s Friday Five or have had further developments since being reported in an earlier Friday Five or Weekend Update. Specifically stories that I want to editorialize a bit more about than I usually do in the Friday Five. And spoilers: it isn’t all bad news!
Let’s begin with a series of stories that are specifically relevant here in my home state of Washington.
I have occasionally written before about our local perennial anti-tax, anti-gay, anti-well-anything-decent initiative filer Tim Eyman. A man whose full-time job for a couple of decades has been running these shitty initiatives to restrict the power of the legislature to raise taxes, to make it difficult for local governments and counties to raise taxes, to stop transit projects, to repeal gay civil rights protections and so many more. He famously planned to make his official announcement of filing one anti-gay initiative dressed in a pink tutu because he somehow thought that would be funny—one of his supporters showed up with a rented Darth Vader costume and convinced him to wear that instead.
A bit over a month ago his usually operation switched gears when the Attorney General filed a lawsuit against him and one of his paid signature gathering groups for campaign finance violations including money laundering and diverting a lot of funds for Eyman’s personal use. The state elections commission had already ruled on some of his earlier campaigns that this sort of thing was frequently happening, and in a settlement of those charges some years ago, Eyman agreed to never the the treasurer of an initiative campaign or similar operation. But that apparently didn’t stop the malfeasance.
So, right after that, he sent out a whining money beg to his supporters, in which he also mentioned that he was filing for personal bankruptcy and that his wife was divorcing him. And it is mostly in the realm of that separate bankruptcy filing that he came into the news this week: Judge refuses to let Eyman back out of bankruptcy. So, when he filed for bankruptcy, his claim was that between his wife leaving him and that fundraising has become less successful (which he was blaming on the lawsuit that had just been filed—I guess his argument was that donors heard rumors of the lawsuit coming and had stopped sending in money?), plus the estimated legal fees for defending in that lawsuit, that he was going broke. He filed for Chapter 11, which allows for a reorganization and gives the bankrupt person some same in how the finances are sorted out.
The state has since asked the court to convert this to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, where all assets are liquidated and then the court decides how to parcel out to the debtors. They argued that the primary purpose of the filing was to protect his wealth from the lawsuit—in other words, to prevent any punitive action of the courts from actually, you know, punishing him. And to bolster their argument, they produced bank records showing that he is spending money and an incredible rate, among other things.
This news going public apparently is not going over well with the donors who had started sending in money for his legal defense fund. So Eyman had filed a counter motion to end the bankruptcy proceedings entirely, all but admitting that the only real point of the filing was to avoid being penalized later.
The judge didn’t let him out of the filing, but also didn’t grant the state’s request. What he did do was order that Eyman has to every month file a list of exactly what he’s spending his money on, along with an estimate of his expenses for the coming months, and that at a particular date ahead, file a budget that the court will enforce.
This comes one week after the judge in the lawsuit dealt him another blow: Tim Eyman loses in court, faces possible lifetime ban on managing political finances . The lawsuit is still in early stages. There isn’t a jury or anything, yet. But part of the process includes the state outlining the kinds of penalties they will ask the jury and the judge to consider. And one of those was a lifetime ban on having any management or control over the finances of any political campaign. Eyman countered that this would infringe on his constitution right to free speech, because the courts have ruled that political spending is a form of speech.
The judge ruled, based on Supreme Court rulings in the matter, that what the court has said that spending your own money for political reasons is protected speech, but not spending other people’s money. She also pointed out that similar lifetime bans have been handed out in various jurisdictions (such as the one forbidding him from being a treasurer of a political committee) without the courts ruling them unconstitutional. This doesn’t mean that he has been banned, it just means that it remains an option in the proceedings.
And all of this is separate from his criminal trial of stealing an office chair from a store: Watch-WA Anti Tax Zealot, Tim Eyman, Steals Office Chair from Office Supply Store- in campaign shirt. And don’t forget the follow-up: Tim Eyman films himself trying to return the chair he allegedly stole. I’m sorry, just watch the video in the first story. Tell me that was an accident! He claims that since he came back inside the store and bought other things, that he meant to tell the clerk about the chair, or that he thought he did tell the clerk. But witnesses at the scene note that he tried to decline the offer of one of the employees to carry take his heavy purchases out to his car on a handtruck, and when they wouldn’t be deterred, insisted that they stack the stuff up next to his car, then he fumbled with his keys for many minutes until the clerk went back inside.
My only regret on this story is that, since Tim is a well-to-do white guy, that he’ll only get a slap on the wrist for stealing a $70 chair.
Imagine for a minute how all of this would go down if he wasn’t white…
Now we go from anti-tax/anti-gay a-holes who troll the tax system, to another kind of troll: Online trolls hijacked a scientist’s image to attack Katie Bouman. They picked the wrong astrophysicist. So, along with the story about that image that scientists created from 5 million terrabytes of data from hundreds of telescopes around the world to finally get a look at the supermassive accretion disk around a supermassive blackhole, people were sharing images of astrophysicist Katie Bouman with the giant stack of hard drives.
A bunch of misogynist guys online started spreading the story that another scientist had done most of the work. And the put his picture and several lies into memes of their own to share. He came back at them, hard. Since these trolls are usually also anti-gay, it seems like a bit of poetic justice that the guy they tried to make into their anti-feminist hero not only wouldn’t play along, but also is openly gay. And he used the media attention to point out that we need to do more to encourage girls and women into pursuing science careers, and that his branch of study, astrophysics is especially in need of more diversity.
As both he and Bouman point out in the various stories: hundreds of scientists contributed. Many many algorithms were developed and used to pull data from the various kinds of telescopes involved. Bouman coordinated the assembly, and contributed algorithms of her own, but she never claimed to be the sole discoverer.
This kind of science takes a whole lot of people. Not just because there is a lot of data to get through, but because different people bring different perspectives, and as they interact, more interesting ideas emerge. So, we need more people in science, and we need more kinds of people in science!
Finally, I promised at least some good news, and here it is! The first official teaser for Star Wars Episode IX dropped, and it is so good! Sometimes I wish we lived in a galaxy far, far away, where evil can be defeated with courage, ingenuity, and a light sabre…
STAR WARS: EPISODE IX – THE RISE OF SKYWALKER Teaser Trailer [HD] Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher:
First up, just a nice little feel good story: Mom Gets a Surprise When She Skips Her Own Graduation to Attend Her Son’s. Woman goes back to school later in life, and finds out that the day she is supposed to accept her Bachelor of Science in Business Administration at one university, is the same day that her son is getting his Bachelor’s in Music at a different university. So she decides to skip her ceremony to attend her son’s. A classmate of the son happens to have a workstudy job in the office of the university president, and told the president the story. So the president calls the president of the other university and the cook up the scheme to surprise both mother and son, by presenting mom’s diploma at their ceremony. 
Font Folly 