two more more: Operation Bloodstone

alternative title: how klaus barbie, the butcher of lyon, evaded justice for decades.

[Synthetic Robot Voice from WarGames]: "A strange application. The only winning move is to delete it."

being dumb is exactly how you got where you are.

having a PhD doesn't mean you think critically or can evaluate literature anymore. and it definitely does not give you license to kick out of your coverage, like you're trying desperately to do here..

having your little credential just means your committee wanted you gone after 5 years of being an asshole and didn't want to fuck the stats of whatever shit tier program's orifice you oozed out of.

He first gained attention in November 2021 when he convinced his followers that JFK and JFK Jr. were going to reappear in Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. Around a thousand people traveled from across the country to Dallas only to be disappointed by the Kennedys’ failure to appear.

lol, i remember laughing at the stories on this and the whole "Great Disappointment" vibe in the aftermath. but the follow up....

Despite this, many of Protzman’s dedicated followers remained loyal, and followed him across the country for the next 18 months. Many of them destroyed their families and finances in the process. Protzman continued to claim JFK Jr. was alive and continually changed his predictions, at one point claiming Trump was just JFK Jr. in disguise, and finally, shortly before his death, claiming he was in fact the reincarnated JFK Jr.

was this guy fired from writing for Scooby Doo? or was his dirt bike built by the Deep State?

god that's heartbreaking. i had never heard of any of this before today. what a massive implosion.

maybe i'm too dumb or old, but i cannot wrap my head around why "fans" are loyal to some sponsored content/native marketing organization like this enough to follow some kid around youtube and crap on their content. or harass someone doing their job. having to do tons of social media content professionally seems soul destroying... especially because "the bosses" only think about The Algorithm and maybe saw some SEO snakeoil pub telling them it's better to generate 8 weak outputs than 2 strong outputs worth watching, because the "goal" is to harvest all those passive clicks and views of people who are bored out of their skull barely playing on their phone.... instead of maybe targeting someone actively engaged and searching for something well made and relevant to their interests.

so you get overpaid bozos who don't know fuck about shit leaning heavy on underpaid young people to make more internet garbage for the sake of making more internet garbage, and then later complaining that views per output are down or reactions are lukewarm or engagement is off. imagine that job and then a handful of fuckups following you around and shitting on your online presence because you're doing what you're told in order to have a roof over your head and food to eat and dreams of a mildly secure future.

as someone who was once idealistic and full of energy and stamina that was taken advantage of by ego-driven and deceptive exploiters: beware assholes, the rest of us can come together and build a world without a place for you in it.

maybe they meant one of our langley-based fedposters.

somebody should tell all these s

• their principled opposition to the Iraq war in 2003-20?? was actually Baathist propaganda sweetie
• they were all just bots shilling for Saddam Hussein
• and also how dare they stand against the freedom loving and liberation focused Coalition of The Willing which is there to STOP torture and extrajudicial executions
• there will be no consequences for backing violent extremists in the region because their thirst for the blood of our geopolitical rivals is well under control and easily manipulated
• what's ISIS? you mean the thing from TV's Archer?

lmao, insane assistant-lacross-coach-at-a-private-high-school-in-maryland ass mayo name. looking at his picture, it looks like he changed it from Biff "Whitey" Corngood.

i work near a hospital's ER intake and at some point in the last couple of years, some Class 1 dipshit showed up, pulled a piece, and started waving it around, creating a hostage situation that went on for hours. it wasn't even over something understandable, like wanting to put two in some administrator's chest over a surprise bill. it was like a child custody thing. obviously, an all time move for getting the courts to restore your visitation rights: getting tooled up and coming into an ER, in full yosemite sam mode.

anyway, so there's been a security checkpoint there ever since. gotta go by the armed guy with the security wand before you can even get into the ER. every time i see it i remember how fucked this country is and how me or somebody i know is gonna get clipped over some idiot's personal bullshit because we were in the background buying toilet paper and cat food.

the average manager/boss is so inculcated with "job creator" brain worms in the US, they believe they, as benevolent nobles, are the ones generating value in the organization while their underlings extract value as salary/wages. it leads to shit like this where bosses are baffled they can't actually get everything they want by snapping their fingers, even though they control the immediate material access to housing, healthcare, etc.

as it turns out, workers are the critical resource because they make it all go. the execs are the ones extracting massive value as salary/benefits or stock manipulation, while realistically only going to meetings to strategize ways to get more value out of workers without sharing any increases. workers are paying managers to boss them around all day and act important.

jesus, listening to the clip the actual phrasing is:

“I could have been relaxing at Mar-a-Lago or in the south of France ― which I would prefer being in this country, frankly.”

honestly, it sounds more like he's saying he would prefer being in this country [the US] rathern than be in the south of france. it absolutely sounds like a quick shout out to the USA in the middle of bragging about how he could have been living large instead of punishing himself with public service... which seems to be 90% of his messaging lately.

even the author leaves wiggle room about its interpretation before linking a tweet misquoting him and then tons of quote tweets of that tweet. what a nothing burger of an article.

in secondary school (ages 14-18) it was highly encouraged to take at least 2 years of a foreign language, though american sign language counted. and kids on the "not college" pipeline didn't have to do that. j'ai trois ans de les cours de francais, but i haven't had much opportunity to practice or use it conversationally in like the 25 years since.

edit: secondary school offered french, spanish, german or ASL. the private $$$ schools offered mandarin and others.

they have to check with the senate parliamentarian to see if such a thing can be proposed during this phase of the moon, or if acting to quickly to prevent children from being maimed by bosses for money would violate norms and rules. our government is far too complex of a machine to do anything quickly, except send several billion dollars of cluster bombs anywhere on the planet in 36 hours.

i'm sure someone is working on a subsidized loan so that the kid can purchase a new hand using his HSA and that he loan will be forgiven if he starts a small business in an underserved community and maintains operations for 3 years.

where i grew up in burger land, back in the 80s, the public schools were teaching us all spanish in from age 5 to 10. not like true bilingual education, but we had a spanish class once a week. it last about 2 years before the white nationalists--who panic at the idea of working class people easily communicating with each other--got it shut down. between that and some years working with seasonal agricultural workers practicing their english, i am at the comprehension level of an inebriated toddler. i wish i had more opportunities to practice. honestly, the US should have all its signs in english and spanish anyway, but you know the reactionaries would go info a full blown pogrom over even a whiff of that being proposed.

i remember some small business tyrant in florida in the 2000s called up my work one time and wanted me to pass along his complaint to my boss that our phone system had an option to "press ocho for espanol". he said that our company even offering the option to "those people" was wrong... in FLORIDA... the state with the name that means "land of flowers" in spanish.

i bought acid a couple of times off this guy who talked about how the layout of the pyramid complexes in egypt perfectly line up with some astrological formation of celestial bodies and how north africa used to be a tropical rainforest, but the early egyptians used to teleport to and from the stars using the pyramids but something went wrong and they brought down the "harshness of space" which destroyed the biome, turning it into a desert.

15 years later, i was working alongside this actual legit archaeologist/egyptologist and relayed this story, totally deadpan like i bought it, and when i was done she was not even remotely impressed. the look on her face was priceless.

i joined chacha as a lifeboat years ago when the CTH reddit got banned and stayed as it became Ursus hexagonalis. the lack of ads, the memes, irreverence for institutions combined with respect for humans, and the absolute god-tier emoji selection is what keeps me here.

also, the megathread topics are very interesting/informative as a People's History, since many of the stories come from the "periphery" for all my world systems nerds out there. living in the imperial core, the constant cacophony of cultural outputs and hegemonic discourses, i appreciate any channel that connects me with post-colonial narratives, critical theory, etc.

"I just executed my landlord. Requesting exfiltration, grid 42069."