March rambling: Dismantling

The Strange, Post-Partisan Popularity of the Unabomber

Used by permission of Clay Bennett, Editorial Cartoonist, Chattanooga Times Free Press

“We Are Watching the Deliberate Dismantling of American Democracy” – Heather Cox Richardson with Katie Couric

Mark Evanier has posted nearly daily a series of Fact Checks over the last month that suggest members of the regime LIE regularly, especially FOTUS.

The regime seeks to starve libraries and museums of funding. Fight back with ALA.

The executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution will “eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the institute’s museums, centers, and the National Zoo in Washington.

Pete Hegseth Sent Secret War Plans to Journalist by Accident. Here Are the Texted War Plans That He Said ‘Nobody Was Texting’ on Signal. “A reminder that various administration officials lied under oath in the Senate.”

Millions face delays as administration ends Social Security phone verification. A new policy eliminating phone verification for Social Security benefits threatens to overwhelm field offices, cut off vulnerable recipients, and accelerate efforts to privatize the system.

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Pentagon restores some webpages honoring minority service members but defends DEI purge.

Rights, Privileges, and Mahmoud Khalil

Decades ago, Columbia refused to pay him $400 million. The university was looking to expand. It considered and rejected property owned by djt. He did not forget it.

People named in JFK assassination documents are not happy their personal information was released.

FOTUS has big dreams for the Kennedy Center but doesn’t seem to know what it does. His hostile takeover of the Washington, D.C., cultural institution will probably chase away the very people who like to attend shows there

Here’s What RFK Jr. Got Wrong About H5N1 Bird Flu— “This is Hollywood science, not real science,” one expert said

EPA Teases Evisceration of Scientific Research Office

FCC Chair Brendan Carr, FOTUS’ Media Pit Bull Is “Off the Leash”

Cory Doctorow: Twinkump Linkdump (22 Mar 2025)

How DOGE is making government almost comically inefficient

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From Catherine Rampell – WaPo:

At the IRS, employees spend Mondays queued up at shared computers to submit their DOGE-mandated “five things I did last week” emails. Meanwhile, taxpayer customer service calls go unanswered.

At the Bureau of Land Management, federal surveyors are no longer permitted to buy replacement equipment. So, when a shovel breaks at a field site, they can’t just drive to the nearest town or hardware store. Instead, work stops as employees track down one of the few managers nationwide authorized to file an official procurement form and order new parts.

At the Food and Drug Administration, leadership canceled the agency’s subscription to LexisNexis, an online reference tool that employees need to conduct regulatory research. However, some workers might not have noticed this loss yet because the agency’s incompetently planned return-to-office order this week left them too busy hunting for insufficient parking and toilet paper. (Multiple bathrooms have run out of bath tissue, employees report.)
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The Strange, Post-Partisan Popularity of the Unabomber: When Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto appeared 30 years ago, the internet was brand-new. Now, his dark vision is finding fans who don’t remember life before the iPhone. Paragraph 173: “If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave.”

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Richard Chamberlain, King of the Melodramatic Miniseries, Dies at 90. One of my sisters had a massive crush when he played ‘Dr. Kildare’

 

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MUSIC

Jesse Colin Young, Youngbloods’ Frontman, Dies at 83. Get Together was one of the very few singles I ever purchased.

Herb Alpert turns 90 today. He’s still performing. I had half of his early albums, including his first, The Lonely Bull. Here’s Herb and the Tijuana Brass on that title track

Signal Leak – Jesse Welles

You Were Not Supposed to Message It Through – Marsh Family Parody of the Bee Gees on #Signalgate

I Put Up Tariffs – Marsh Family adaptation of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ I Shot the Sheriff

Vivaldi’s Summer/Mozart’s Semplice/Mack The Knife

Get Away and three other songs – Jimi Somewhere

Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique

Please Please Please – Sabrina Carpenter,  feat. Dolly Parton

On A Clear Day, You Can See Forever – Voctave

The Song (Love Is All) – Sadie Sink from the movie O’DESSA

Two of Hearts – Stacey Q

Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) – Marvin Gaye 

Under African Skies – Paul Simon

Can’t Fight This Feeling – REO Speedwagon

The Most ‘Beatles’ Beatle Song The Beatles Ever Beatled; btw, I disagree with the conclusion

Best Albums of 2025 (First Quarter)

Condolences to David Kaczynski

NYADP

In my news feed, I read that the guy identified as the Unabomber, who conducted a bombing spree that spanned nearly two decades, killing three people and injuring 23. had died, apparently by suicide. I immediately thought about his very decent brother, David Kaczynski.

The first time I saw David was about a quarter-century ago at my current church. He was the person who turned in his brother Ted to the authorities.

This 2003 article in the Cornell Daily Sun captured a similar gathering that David had brought together. “Gary Wright… was hit with 200 pieces of shrapnel in February of 1997 by one of [Ted] Kaczynski’s bombs…”

“Bill Babbitt talked about his brother, Manny Babbitt, [the Vietnam vet] who was executed in 1999 for the murder of Leah Schendel” after Bill turned in HIS brother. He believed Manny would be “spared a death sentence — a promise the police” couldn’t keep.

For me, the most compelling speaker was Bud Welch. His “23-year-old daughter, Julie… was killed on April 19, 1995, in the Oklahoma City Bombing… In the days following the crime, Welch said he saw no need for a trial at all. Now, he says he was ‘temporarily insane’ for eight or nine months… He said his views changed slowly, and he realized that [executing] Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols would be an act of vengeance.”

Moreover, Bud Welch became friends with Timothy McVeigh’s father and realized the elder McVeigh, too, was a victim of the heinous crime. I wrote about Bud a few years ago.

Tragedies united these seemingly disparate gentlemen in a common cause: to fight the death penalty. It was a remarkable evening.

Radio silence

From The Business Insider: “In 1995, The Washington Post published a 35,000-word manifesto written by the Unabomber, whose real identity at the time remained unknown, about how technology was destroying humanity.

“The time following the manifesto’s publication was emotionally taxing for David. ‘We never found anything conclusive,’ he stated, ‘for me, it was like a roller coaster. I thought, ‘Am I crazy? A suspicion does not make him the Unabomber.'”

David “remembered Ted as a loving, caring, older brother figure, not a terrorist. He recalled telling himself, ‘I grew up with this man; is it possible I grew up with evil in my own family but was too blind to see who he truly was?'” Ultimately, David made the agonizing decision to turn Ted over to the FBI.

Wikipedia: His brother’s confrontation with the death penalty later motivated David Kaczynski to become an anti-death-penalty activist. In 2001, Kaczynski was named executive director of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty [now, New Yorkers for Alternatives to the Death Penalty].

“While the mission of NYADP originally focused only on ending the death penalty, under Kaczynski’s guidance in 2008, it broadened its mission to address the unmet needs of all those affected by violence, including victims and their families.”

David’s “decision prompted Ted to cease all communication with his family, including rejecting all of David’s attempted correspondence during his imprisonment.” So I can imagine that David is mourning Ted’s passing because Ted was his big brother, not just the Unabomber.

Ramblin' with Roger
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