Signal Boost: "We’re Seth Rich’s parents. Stop politicizing our son’s murder."

Although the following Washington Post editorial co-authored by Mary and Joel Rich - the parents of murder victim and current conspiracy theory target Seth Rich - was intended to stop the nonsense being spouted about the circumstances of his murder, I'm under the sad impression that it'll fall on mainly deaf ears (for one thing, opportunistic ghoul Sean Hannity didn't give up repeating it even after Fox News did, so why should he stop now?) considering who it was intended for.

Regardless of that, the editorial bears repeating - especially since this is becoming more and more like Vince Foster all over again, and for no good reason other than what only a hardened cynic might be able to dredge up in their worst imagination.

Imagine living in a nightmare that you can never wake up from. Imagine having to face every single day knowing that your son was murdered. Imagine you have no answers — that no one has been brought to justice and there are few clues leading to the killer or killers. Imagine that every single day, with every phone call you hope that it’s the police, calling to tell you that there has been a break in the case.

Imagine that instead, every call that comes in is a reporter asking what you think of a series of lies or conspiracies about the death. That nightmare is what our family goes through every day.

Our beloved son Seth Rich was gunned down in the early hours of July 10, 2016, in his Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Bloomingdale. On the day he was murdered, Seth was excited about a new job he had been offered on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Seth had dedicated his life to public service, and he told us that he wanted to work on the campaign’s effort to expand voter participation because he loved our country dearly and believed deeply in the promise of democratic engagement. Seth had been walking around, calling friends, family and his girlfriend, pondering the broader picture of what the job change would mean. He wondered how he would pick up and move to New York City for four months, the strain that might put on his relationships, and how it would all affect the life he had built for himself in Washington.

We know that Seth was abruptly confronted on the street, that he had been on the phone and quickly ended the call. We also know that there were signs of a struggle, including a watchband torn when the assailants attempted to rip it off his wrist. Law-enforcement officials told us that Seth’s murder looked like a botched robbery attempt in which the assailants — after shooting our son — panicked, immediately ran and abandoned Seth’s personal belongings. We have seen no evidence, by any person at any time, that Seth’s murder had any connection to his job at the Democratic National Committee or his life in politics. Anyone who claims to have such evidence is either concealing it from us or lying.
 Still, conservative news outlets and commentators continue, day after painful day, to peddle discredited conspiracy theories that Seth was killed after having provided WikiLeaks with emails from the DNC. Those theories, which some reporters have since retracted, are baseless, and they are unspeakably cruel.

We know that Seth’s personal email and his personal computer were both inspected by detectives early in the investigation and that the inspection revealed no evidence of any communications with anyone at WikiLeaks or anyone associated with WikiLeaks. Nor did that inspection reveal any evidence that Seth had leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks or to anyone else. Indeed, those who have suggested that Seth’s role as a data analyst at the DNC gave him access to a wide trove of emails are simply incorrect — Seth’s job was to develop analytical models to encourage voters to turn out to vote. He didn’t have access to DNC emails, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee emails, John Podesta’s emails or Hillary Clinton’s emails. That simply wasn’t his job.

Despite these facts, our family’s nightmare persists. Seth’s death has been turned into a political football. Every day we wake up to new headlines, new lies, new factual errors, new people approaching us to take advantage of us and Seth’s legacy. It just won’t stop. The amount of pain and anguish this has caused us is unbearable. With every conspiratorial flare-up, we are forced to relive Seth’s murder and a small piece of us dies as more of Seth’s memory is torn away from us.

To those who sincerely want to get to the bottom of Seth’s murder, we don’t hold this against you. We don’t think you are monsters, and we don’t think you are terrible people. We know that so many people out there really do care, don’t know what to think and are angry at the lack of answers.

We also know that many people are angry at our government and want to see justice done in some way, somehow. We are asking you to please consider our feelings and words. There are people who are using our beloved Seth’s memory and legacy for their own political goals, and they are using your outrage to perpetuate our nightmare. We ask those purveying falsehoods to give us peace, and to give law enforcement the time and space to do the investigation they need to solve our son’s murder.

In Memoriam: Chris Cornell, 1964-2017

I still have a hard time believing this.


I'm having an even harder one accepting it.

Schadenfreude: Roger Ailes

Again, I don't wish death on people I can't stand. However, I also refuse to fete the memory of assholes in a hypocritical manner after their passing, and I won't do it for Ailes, either.


It wasn't merely that Ailes made it possible for lunatics like Louis Gohmert or Michelle Bachmann viable forces in national politics via Fox News, but he also succeeded in making it possible - or even mandatory - for people to act like petulant 8-year-old bullies raging away on an uncontrollable sugar high in order to get elected to office. That also means that he made Donald Trump possible as well - and just look where that's gotten us all.


Oh, and then there's the entire sexual harassment thing as well, on top of all that other happy horseshit.


So if you want to see a eulogy, go look at Charles P. Pierce's. Or maybe the one from Deadspin is brutal enough.

In other "alternative facts" news, water is now dry

It seems that the biggest enemy of a President who changes his mind this rapidly on the efficacy of an agency's director is the institutional memory of the press. Witness this tidbit from a New York Times editorial, for example:

By firing the F.B.I. director, James Comey, late Tuesday afternoon, President Trump has cast grave doubt on the viability of any further investigation into what could be one of the biggest political scandals in the country’s history.

The explanation for this shocking move — that Mr. Comey’s bungling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server violated longstanding Justice Department policy and profoundly damaged public trust in the agency — is impossible to take at face value. Certainly Mr. Comey deserves all the criticism heaped upon him for his repeated missteps in that case, but just as certainly, that’s not the reason Mr. Trump fired him.

Mr. Trump had nothing but praise for Mr. Comey when, in the final days of the presidential campaign, he informed Congress that the bureau was reopening the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails. “He brought back his reputation,” Mr. Trump said at the time. “It took a lot of guts.”

Of course, if Mr. Trump truly believed, as he said in his letter of dismissal, that Mr. Comey had undermined “public trust and confidence” in the agency, he could just as well have fired him on his first day in office.

Mr. Comey was fired because he was leading an active investigation that could bring down a president. Though compromised by his own poor judgment, Mr. Comey’s agency has been pursuing ties between the Russian government and Mr. Trump and his associates, with potentially ruinous consequences for the administration.

The part about Comey being compromised by his own poor judgment is a relevant one, since earlier that day it was noted by several media outlets about what a belly-flop he took on the subject of the Huma Abedin emails. Granted, those mistakes were serious. Serious enough to probably cost Hilary Clinton the 2016 Presidential election, in fact. But not as serious as the fact that Comey wanted more money in order to expand the investigation into Russia's influence with the Trump administration, or the fact that Comey was supposed to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday before he got axed.

And now he won't.

Funny how that works out, isn't it?

Uh oh

Everyone's had more than one moment in their lives where national - or even international - events have the tone of the other shoe dropping, and I'm completely convinced that this might not just be a shoe; it might be the entire shoe rack:

The White House has fired FBI Director James Comey, who was overseeing an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections and possible ties to the Trump campaign and top aides.

"Today, President Donald J. Trump informed FBI Director James Comey that he has been terminated and removed from office. President Trump acted based on the clear recommendations of both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions," White House press secretary Sean Spicer said in a statement.

"The FBI is one of our Nation's most cherished and respected institutions and today will mark a new beginning for our crown jewel of law enforcement," the president said in the statement.

Two points:

1) The oddest things about crown jewels is that if you're not paying attention somebody can very easily replace them with ones made out of paste;

2) Oh, Archibald Cox. A pity you passed away in 2004. I'm sure you'd be sending Comey a sympathy card with a pocket edition of the Constitution wedged inside (and the phone number of a lawyer to help with his future Senate testimony) about 5 minutes after he got axed.

Well, there's a huge non-shock

It's not so much the "I don't stand by anything" admission that gets me as it is the fact that President Unintelligible decided the best way to follow that up was to toss CBS' John Dickerson out of the oval office and continue to beat the "Obama tapped* my phones" drum sans proof all over again.

(*Or "tapped", since PU's spelling in a tweet about this was "tapp". After all, "speling countz".)

Jay Maynard and the perils of selection bias

Other people have done most of the legwork in attempting to refute Jay "Tron Guy" Maynard's singularly odd take on this year's Penguicon (such as Jer Lance), but I decided to go out on a limb and just looked at the list of panels and events with an eye towards seeing if it really was nearly as bent toward politics as he said it was, much less the politics he seems to abhor.

Huge surprise that it wasn't.

If you look at on Penguicon's schedule, it comes off as so screamingly bent towards the mix of hacker/Linux and SF enthusiast programming that you really, really wonder precisely what alternate reality Maynard was attending his Penguicon in. Another major problem is that even if you only look at the "Life" programming category (which is the rock you'd think that political discussions would  be found under), so much of it is oriented towards non-political subject matter that you begin to fear for Maynard's sense of reality testing. This perception isn't exactly helped by the following series of complaints he made (as quoted from File 770):

Still, I’d promised this year’s con chair that she’d get a fair chance to address my concerns, so I came back one more time. Guess what? More hard-left GoHs — the odious Coraline Ada Ehmke, she of the Contributor Covenant that prohibits project members from being politically incorrect any time, anywhere, in any venue, on pain of expulsion (who had to cancel due to an emergency); Sumana Harihareswara, who I found out the hard way was a hard-core feminist as well; and Cory Doctorow, well-known left-wing author — more politically correct panels, 15 of them on such topics as “Queering Your Fiction” and “Let’s Get the Taste of 2016 Out of Our Mouths” and “Exploring Themes in Zen Cho’s Work” (with “Intersectionality, diaspora and immigration, the culture of British education, and queer relationships also appear in Cho’s stories over and over” in the description). When I was asked to submit lists of panel topics, I was instructed not to be controversial, but it seems the Left has no such admonition.

Uh huh. The problem with all of that, however, is this:

Ehmke is an Open Source developer, and this is a con heavily devoted to that subject regardless of her political leanings. The same applies to Harihareswara. Doctorow is a...oh, c'mon. And as to those "politically correct" panels Maynard is bitching about, one of them - wait for it - is entitled in full Whiskey Tasting 2017 - Let's Get the Taste of 2016 Out of Our Mouths!, hosted by that raving Trotskyist (and former Capricon con chair) Greg "Guido" Williams.

As to the rest of those panels, no one pointed a gun at Maynard's head and demanded he attend them. Or Penguicon. Granted, he could have gone to the likes of Basic Design of 3D Printed Firearms  as a corrective instead, but...well, that would have led to severe cognitive dissonance issues - or merely the disproof of Maynard's screed.

And you can't actually have facts trespassing on the sacred fantasy-based territory of a good screed, can you?

Of course not.

Oh Noes!

I now haz a Dreamwidth account.

As to why, here it is in a nutshell:

LiveJournal was bought by the Russian company SUP Media in 2007, but the servers themselves weren’t relocated to Russia until December of 2016. The new Terms of Service (TOS) agreement bans “political solicitation” and requires that any content which is considered “inappropriate for children according to Russian law” be marked as adult/18+ content. Given Russia’s attitudes toward LGBTQIA content, this likely means any queer content must be marked as 18+. Some users have argued that the new terms could even constitute an outright ban on LGBTQIA content.

In addition, any LiveJournal blog which receives more than 3,000 viewers in a 24-hour period must register as a media outlet; this places that blog’s content under even further content restrictions. Critics of the new policy further worry that LiveJournal’s compliance efforts will expose users to the Russian police force’s invasive web monitoring.
Uh, no. Afraid not. Thanks, but I'll pass.

Stupid vendettas just keep getting stupider all the time

Beale's Syndrome (n.): a psychological condition that causes already long-standing, petty vendettas to become increasingly moronic over time and repeated incidents.

So, this guy was at it again with his vendetta against SF author John Scalzi, and -

Wait a minute.

Putting out an over-obvious parody of a soon-to-be-released Scalzi novel on Amazon in a weak effort to tweak his nose (or whatever Castalia House was trying to accomplish) is one thing, but resorting to some of the crap mentioned below is precisely the reason why VD has gotten his entirely deserved reputation as an thoroughly unsavory, egomaniacal pain in the ass who's always glad to go the extra unwanted step in proving it. A few examples from File 770, below:

Rev. Bob:

Well, THIS is a revolting development…
I was browsing on Amazon half an hour ago and noticed that The Corroding Empire showed up in the mentions for the book I was looking at – so I clicked and took a look. I opened the preview and felt my red pen twitching at the very first line of the narrative, which is never a good sign. I not only did not proceed to purchase the book, but left a one-star review explaining why:

The confused tenses in the very first sentence of the narrative (visible in the preview) tell me there’s no need to read more. It’s obvious to me that the editor/publisher spent more time and effort in ripping off the cover than he did getting the text right.

A few minutes later, I was given a compelling reason to edit the review. I suspect it will be of interest to others…

EDIT: How fascinating. Mere minutes after leaving the above review, I received a phone call from someone identifying himself as a Castalia House representative. That individual then proceeded to threaten to publicize my private information and stated that he was recording the telephone call – neither of which I had consented to.
Buyer, beware! Stay FAR away from this company!

Specifically, the caller read off a street address (which I did not confirm to be mine or not) and had obviously obtained my phone number, claiming Amazon had provided the data because I was a Castalia House customer. (Not true in any sense. Amazon doesn’t give ebook buyers any such information, and I hadn’t made the purchase.) That’s not the way to win friends and influence people, Teddy.No kidding.

A little bit later, he explains further about the fallout from the really fun dealings he had with this minion of VD's:

I notified Amazon very soon after receiving the call. Considering that the caller claimed to be with Castalia House (distributed on Amazon) and represented himself as having received my contact information from Amazon (a blatant falsehood) as a result of a purchase (which I did not make), it seemed to me that Amazon would want to be made aware of the incident.

If I’d known at the time that Beale had given the caller his approval, I would have included that nugget as well. As it stands, I added a comment under my review with that info, as well as replying to Amazon Customer Service’s “how’d we do?” email with the update and a link to the page.
The Amazon agent I spoke with sounded properly appalled by the incident, and I made it plain to her that I did not hold her or Amazon responsible for an instant. (I’ve worked in customer service; I know how important it is to distinguish between frustration at the situation and anger at the person helping you.) I know Amazon doesn’t pass along such customer-specific detail to ebook sellers even when a purchase takes place, but the fact that someone CLAIMED they had goes to… is it defamation when it involves a business rather than a person? Definitely not good, potentially actionable, and since Amazon’s got all the power in the relationship with VD/CH, as well as an army of lawyers around the globe, they may as well be the ones to look into it further.

So let me get this straight, now: this was over a "parody" that - as far as I can tell - was a poorly written, transparent attempt to blunt sales of Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire prior to its release. Or something. And now VD is having people harassing reviewers on the phone over this crap.

Seriously?

This is something an alleged fucking adult does? His ego is just that thin? And, furthermore, he's conned other alleged adults (his Dread Ilk come off as being just as terminally cartoony fanboy as their name suggests) into doing it for him?

Oh, but there are other examples as well. From rochrist:

I made the mistake of making a snarking comment in one of the fake reviews. The fellow immediately tracked me down in RL. He assures me though that it will be Vox himself I hear from. He is just a dutiful minion.
A dutiful sucker is more like it, since these little third-party threats always make it easy for the ringleader to claim innocence while his minion takes the fall.

Look, everybody knows that SF fandom has been historical rife with feuds. Tons of them, in fact. But this is an entirely new weapons-grade load of bullshit that misses one very important point: fiction, still being an art form above all else regardless of the genre it might fall into, is always going to result in criticism. Fair criticism, petty or inaccurate criticism, but criticism all the same. It's entirely inevitable. And if your reaction to such criticism about a work that wasn't intended as serious in the first place is to get a group of your dopey little "friends" (again, the word "sucker" comes to mind as being more accurate, as does "sycophant") to harass online critics is indicative of the fact that you have a very, very serious problem in dealing with the adult world.

Then again, VD has always assumed that he's a genius and that his supposed enemies are all far, far lesser men than he.

And you remember the old joke about what happens when you assume, right...?

Thumped

It's not exactly startling - at least, not now - that the FBI is investigating Donald Trump's potential deep ties to Russia, but it's hardly the bombshell that some people might make it out to be considering how he was running around cheerleading for Russian hackers even before he got elected. However, here's the statement by FBI director James Comey in his testimony on March 20th that will probably ruin Trump's day the most:

Comey said there is “no information” that supports Trump’s claims that his predecessor ordered surveillance of Trump Tower during the election campaign.
 
“I have no information that supports those tweets,’’ he said. “We have looked carefully inside the FBI,’’ and agents found nothing to support those claims.
Under questioning from the top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), Comey said no president could order such surveillance. He added that the Justice Department had asked him to also tell the committee that that agency has no such information, either.


Oops.

Now reading

Distraction by Bruce Sterling.

(Or re-reading it, as the case may be - I ended up losing my original paperback a few years ago on a train [joining a parade of gloves, winter caps, umbrellas and who the hell knows what else] and hope not to repeat that feat all over again before I finish it this time...)