Tinker Tailor Soldier Dumbass

I am on the record as a fan of spy thrillers, anything by Fredrick Forsyth, Trevanian, or John le Carré is catnip for me.  I particularly love those works which feature a cat-and-mouse (or rather, mole) game between brilliant antagonists.  Give me Beryl Reid remembering the thrill of matching wits with a deadly enemy any day, and I'm happy.

Via Tengrain, we have the story of Project Veritas, in conjunction with Erik Prince, enlisting the services of a former British intelligence agent to attempt to entrap insufficiently loyal members of Trump's government.  This spy-type-guy, one Richard Seddon, ran a training camp at a Wyoming ranch and a Georgetown home for PV operatives.  This has been known for a while, but the details have only emerged recently, with news of a mission to use a honeypot to record Trump national security advisor H.R. McMaster disparaging the Former Guy.  Other plots involved the use of honeypots to wheedle information out of FBI agents and other 'Deep State' operatives.

James O'Keefe, the head of Project Veritas, is known for his 'Scooby Doo' villain antics, which led to his one major 'victory', the destruction of antipoverty and social justice organization ACORN... with, of course, the complicity of a media more interested in reporting the freak show than getting to the bottom of the false narrative.  At any rate, O'Keefe, whose own sex boat scheme was to have been a reverse honeypot, alienated Seddon with his low-set sights, or in his words "O'Keefe's desire to produce quick media content rather than to run long-term infiltration operations."

This is what you get when your intelligence operation is run by the stupid.  While Seddon wanted some real cloak-and-dagger stuff, O'Keefe just wanted to produce boob bait to keep the rubes' money flowing in.  

Tinker 

Tailor 

Soldier 

Sailor 

Rich Man 

Poor Man

Stupid Man

O'Keefe

She Knows How to Deal With Workplace Harassment

My mother is a Bronx girl, and even after twenty-odd years living in Northern Virginia, she still retains the accent and bearing of her native borough... you can take the girl out of the Bronx, but you can't take the Bronx out of the girl.  So it is with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who left a yelling Marjorie Taylor Greene in her wake, refusing to take the debate bait being dangled by the Congress conspiracist.  Greene was framing her argument in terms of Black Lives Matter and antifascist activists being terrorists.  There's nothing to gain by being dragged into an argument with a loon whose positions are based on false premises.

AOC is a New Yorker, we are all used to dealing with ranting lunatics on the street.  AOC's skill at dealing with abusive idiots was further honed by her work as a bartender, and her description of her interaction was pitch-perfect:

AOC says of MTG: “I used to work as a bartender. These are the kinds of people that I threw out of bars all the time.”

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) May 13, 2021

AOC is a magnet for all sorts of right-wing loons, who want to 'debate' her (and pure creep nonsense, for that matter), and her responses are always spot on, the reponses a woman has to formulate while simply existing. She doesn't owe her time to anyone but her constituents. She especially doesn't owe any time to psycho reactionaries:  

"For me, this isn't even about how I feel. It's that I refuse to allow young women, people of color, people who are standing up for what they believe, to see this kind of intimidation attempts by a person who supports White supremacists in our nation's capital." 

Representative Ocasio-Cortez is a Bronx girl, she knows how to deal with harassers of all stripes. You can take the girl out of the Bronx, but you can't take the Bronx out of the girl.

Antibodies Do a Body Good

 It's been two weeks since my second Pfizer inoculation, two weeks of building antibodies to fight the COVID-19 virus.  Being fortified thus, I indulged in a year-long dream, and went out for a draft beer at the Captain Lawrence Brewery in Elmsford, NY.  I have been going to the brewery since it opened in 2006 in a smaller location in Pleasantville, NY, and love the beer and the people.  The founder knew he wanted to be a brewmaster before he was of legal drinking age, received the blessings of his parents, and made his dream happen in a big way, even going to college in the San Francisco Bay Area so he could intern with the Anchor Steam Brewing company.  He's a good guy, living out his passion, and he makes a fine variety of beers, which he sells by the growler.  As I noted, I've been jonesing a draft beer for a year, and a locally brewed brown ale was the perfect reintroduction.

I was fortunate enough to be able to meet with several friends as well, and now that we are all vaccinated, I even shook hands, once considered a risky proposition.  Of course, masks were still de rigeur while not sitting at our table, but that's a small concession to drinking a real, bonafide draft beer.  If it weren't a work night, I'd probably have consumed four of five, just to remember what drinking beer properly feels like.

The next course of action is to download the New York State Excelsior Pass (named in honor of Stan Lee, I suppose) when I become eligible tomorrow, and then it's time to buy a New York MTA metrocard and end my year long exile from Manhattan and Brooklyn.  Being full of antibodies, this body can now move beyond the boundaries that have been imposed for a year.

He Shamed His Dojo

One rule of thumb that I live by, stated half-jocularly, is "Do not bring shame upon your dojo."  It's partly a riff on the wuxia movie trope of one's pupils possibly going bad,  but it's mostly a sincere expression of the need for respect when playing a potentially dangerous contact sport.  When we judoka enter a dojo, we bow to show our respect- I liken this to acknowledging that we are entering an uncommon space where we must be better than our normal inclinations- and we bow to each other, to demonstrate trust and respect.

It is with this in mind that I am expressing my real disgust and horror at the story, out of Taiwan, of a seven year old boy who remains in a coma after a judo class run by an incompetent sadist:

A disturbing video has emerged showing him being thrown on a mat by an older classmate during judo practice.

As the lesson continues, he is heard screaming "my leg", "my head" and "I don't want it!" but his coach keeps ordering him to stand up and tells the older boy to go on throwing him. 

When Wei Wei is too weak to get up, the coach, much bigger than him, picks him up and throws him several times as well. At one point, the child vomits, but the "training" doesn't stop.

Altogether, his family says, he was thrown more than 27 times.

As a teacher of children's judo classes, I consider this a most egregious betrayal of a child who wanted to learn judo, of his trusting parents, and of the other students in the class.  I get sick thinking that this child, if he had caring senseis, could have continued playing judo until after his retirement age, rather than lying in a vegetative state at the age of seven.

We stress a safe environment in which to learn and grow together, and we closely monitor those occasions in which the children compete against each other.  We also make sure they have a strong grounding in safe falling techniques, and safe, clean throwing techniques.  When we have older students working with younger students, we trust them to treat the little kids with compassion.  We're lucky to have a great bunch of kids to teach, a bunch of kids who have a genuine love for each other.  A judo class shouldn't be a painful ordeal, it should be a joy.  This is what a workout should look like.

This Ho idiot in Taiwan brought shame upon his dojo, and his betrayal forces the rest of us to justify ourselves to the public.  Judo is supposed to have a moral component, one of the principles of judo, articulated by founder Sensei Jigoro Kano, is the concept of jita kyōei, harmony and cooperation for mutual benefit.  We're not saints, but we strive to be decent people, so an atrocity like the grievous wounding of seven year old Wei Wei cuts to the bone.

I'm Beginning to See a Trend

 For the third time in the space of a week, I'm able to riff off of a classic line delivered by Alec Guinness in the original Star Wars.  Yes, once again, it's a post about an elegant weapon for a more civilized age, and this one's a doozy, by which I mean a dookie...

There is no detail about the story of a crazy drunken man attacking police with a full colostomy bag that isn't perfect... the fact that it occurred at the 'Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N Roll Steakhouse' owned by Kid Rock (himself a colostomy bag) is perfect, the perpetrator's face tattoos, pefect!  Now THAT is an shitty elegant weapon for a more crappy civilized age!

This is truly the American Greatness that Donald Trump sought to recapture in his campaign and maladministration... what could be more emblematic in MAGAland than a drunken boor, enraged at being told not to block a safety exit, flinging his poo at those around him until he is forcibly stopped?  This is truly a man who exercises his Amendment Number Two rights.  If he is isn't incarcerated in 2022, he'd make a perfect GOP congressional candidate.

I can already see his campaign slogan: "What can brown do for you?"

Happy Mothers' Day, to a Certain Extent

Here's wishing a happy Mothers' Day to all of the mothers in my reading audience. It's tough celebrating Mothers' Day while remaining socially isolated, but I think we've learned to make due with suboptimal holidays. I called Mom up this morning after getting home from work, and had a nice chat. I'm sure that my other siblings all followed suit, we being a devoted lot. The weather being pretty crappy here on the Eastern Seaboard, Mom had no real plans more than relaxing at home (something uncharacteristic of my active, hardworking mother). 

Mom received her second Pfizer inoculation last Thursday, so I can plan a trip to see her in a week and a half or so. I figure that she could use some help with her Spring planting, the weather being non-conducive right now for planting annuals. I mean, she was talking about temperatures hitting 40F (4.4C) tonight. I joked about the current conditions favoring procrastinators. 

At any rate, Mom is in good spirits, but I can tell she's champing at the bit to hit the road to see her kids and grandkids. That will come soon, and that is the best procrastinators' Mothers' Day present of all. Happy Mothers' Day, everybody.

From the House Floor, I Stab at Thee

 It's not every week that I can write a second topical post using the 'elegant weapon for a more civilized age' trope, but this is not an ordinary week.  Arizona representative Ruben Gallego (D-7th district), a former Marine, used the elegant weapon of sarcasm on Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Cloudcuckooland), describing a search for an elegant weapon:

I was trying to figure what type of pen to stab your friends with if they overran us on the floor of the House of Representatives while trying to conduct a democratic transition of power. So please shut your seditious, Qanon loving mouth when it comes to who loves America. https://t.co/NycvFNHkJ9

— Ruben Gallego (@RubenGallego) May 2, 2021

We live in a society in which the seemingly ever-present danger of workplace violence has led to discussions about the need to improvise weapons in case the unthinkable occurs, and the unthinkable occurring is largely due to the policies and rhetoric of evil mothers like Taylor Greene. I can picture Representative Gallego shopping for steel nib fountain pens the day after the Insurrection. Post title adapted, of course, from Moby Dick, by which I mean The Wrath of Khan.