Jay Swan

How about 12333.

Another one of those things that somehow made it onto "best practices" checklists without a moment of adversarial thinking.

I've always wondered why someone would risk subverting a massive regulatory apparatus fundamentally designed for the FI mission when the agencies actually interested in domestic surveillance can just buy everything they need without oversight.

The whole episode reads to me like the SecDef was so traumatized by someone sending him their pronouns in an email signature that he decided to destroy capitalism.

Ooo, I haven't read that one yet. Will have to get it on the shortlist. The world needs more Bryher threads.

I haven't unsubbed to your channel even though I only listen via Patreon now. One of the odd things is that YT hasn't figured out that I prefer the intel side and it's always trying to show me "operator" content instead. On other topics it seems smarter.

My brother, it makes me feel every day of my age when a Wired author of all people neglects to point out that "maxing" as slang (albeit with one x) dates at least to its use by the decidedly liberated YT in Snow Crash (1992).

Or they went to a "leadership" conference and got a sampler of Sherman Kent paint in the swag bag.

On the flipside, the managerial class loves to dumb down certainty. I worked APT cases where we had evidence as close as you can get to hands-on-keyboard without having surveillance video, and management kept adding "likely" to my reports. <Cue Jessica Chastain meme>

My version of this was getting in a cab (!) in SF twenty years ago and having the driver launch into a lecture about contemporary classical music, a subject about which I knew and know almost nothing but was fascinated to learn about for the 15 minute ride.

It might not be exactly what you’re looking for, but Machete Season by Jean Hatzfeld, about the Rwandan genocide, is instructive.

My only real interests in the Winter Olympics are ice dancing and biathlon and I’m pretty stoked with the amount I can watch this year.

Reposting just because I want to see @kikta.net's head explode. In a good way, of course.

Nights by H.D.

Finished H.D.'s dark novella about the extremely complicated Bauhaus bisexual polycule situation that she inhabited in Switzerland circa 1930. One of her more accessible works of fiction, it's a nice reminder that while the past may be a another country, it also had lots of interpersonal drama.

Bryher, a butch white person with dark hair, in the mid-late 30s, a decade she spent doing a great deal of heartbreaking psychoanalysis to try & cure herself of--or at least explain--her lifelong belief that she was a boy trapped in a girl's body (her words, circa 1920). Using "her" because Bryher did, though if he'd been alive today he would have been an insufferable bro with a weightroom set-up & a despicable job in finance. At the very least he would have boxed & told you too much about it.

Bryher, a butch white person with dark hair, in the 1930 Paul Robeson movie Borderline alongside Charlotte Arthur. They're standing in a bar. Bryher got a slouchy double-breasted coat situation happening, and Charlotte, in a wrinkled housecoat, is pretending to be, or is actually, smashed.

having written upwards of 90k, fiction & nonfiction, about-or-thinly-veiled-about my favorite Modernist antifascist wife-guy Bryher (pictured), there's now the possibility I might get to publish a bit of it in essay form this/next year. fingers crossed it happens, & grateful for the chance.

You know you could singlehandedly make renfaire medieval hoods into the de rigeur concert accessory.

How much for just the hood.

Some things that are very different from, but connected to The HD Book in my mind are some things by Susan Howe, Anne Carson, Sarah Bakewell, Rebecca Goldstein.

Interesting! I have not read that but Augustine has also been on my to-revisit list. One of H.D. study partners is very knowledgeable about Augustine so I'll ask her about it.

In the last year or so I've also been reading Bryher, Djuna Barnes, Frances Gregg, Marianne Moore. Trying and so far failing to motivate myself to revisit Stein, Joyce, and Pound.

Same. I've been reading Trilogy for 35 years, and am currently on a Helen in Egypt expedition. I like Duncan's prose (e.g. The H.D. Book) better than his poems but Roots and Branches and The Opening of the Field are my favorites.

Duncan and H.D. are my perpetual projects. I've never read Wieners.

Join me in my new masculinity cult: quit your job, lift heavy, run far, eat whatever you want, read obscure mid-20th century LGBTQ literature.

I enjoyed Mick's story on the podcast yesterday about how they dumped their Turkish minders in Kurdistan with the extremely secret Agency tradecraft of giving them an XBox.

A visualisation of the rivers of the Colorado basin

The Colorado basin.

#rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Something similar happened to me in 2000 when the "senior" admin at a rural ISP where I'd worked for 3 weeks rage quit and took all the router passwords with him. The only real consequences were that I quickly memorized the Cisco password override process & learned a lot of Colorado back roads.

My son keeps telling me I would like this band and I keep forgetting the same thing. Singular or plural?

I remember asking my dad (born 1936) why he was such a Heinlein fan when Heinlein is just not that good, and he replied "because he was way better than all the other crap we read back then."

Great read. An additional point though is how many colleges have long relied on underpaid adjuncts to teach these courses. Even at Stanford in 1987, 2 of 3 trimesters of my great books track were taught by an amazing career adjunct & the third was by an awful senior prof who was just mailing it in.

It's the part about not wanting to tell Congress that implies sensitivity. My first thought was she burned a SIGINT program, second thought was she ordered or facilitated abuse of legal authorities.