There is overlap between that Dialog member list and the Epstein files. I don’t have time to go through it right now, but at first glance just skimming the Bluesky list, Larry Summers is in the Epstein files, as is Peter Attia.

I’d bet anything they’re not the only ones on both, either. If I get the opportunity I’ll look through it later and see if I can spot more.

Funny thing about American voting: for all the ways that people insist voting doesn’t matter, the one place in America where one vote travels the absolute farthest is in a small town election, and right next to that are county elections, for positions like these.

County sheriffs are often elected, as are county commissioners; who gets elected and who gets appointed depends entirely on applicable state and local law. But even if both of these positions are appointed in Madison County, North Carolina, where this debacle took place, the appointer will almost always be an elected official, like a mayor.

In other words, there is in fact a place where the buck stops in local politics, whether it’s with the mayor or the commissioner or the sheriff or all of the above, and everyone who lives there already knows exactly where it does, especially in a back wood county in the hills like this one.

Add the fact that the meeting was already full of angry people, people who cared enough about the whole thing to make the drive into the county seat and attend, only to be shut up once they arrived.

So while they were silenced at this meeting, it’s not over. None of them want Flock cameras, and nobody wants to take the time and trouble to come to a goddamn podunk county commission meeting only to be told to shut up and sit down.

Come election season, any neighbors with short memories will absolutely be reminded of this, in the kind of local election where often every single vote counts.

The article quotes a Madison County privacy org directly:

“The Sheriff Office claims they are only using this technology for serious crimes, yet published audit logs tell a different story,” a website called Madison for Privacy says. “Madison County has searched the nationwide database over 1,200 times over just a 60 day period. In a county over only 20,000 residents, its hard to understand what could warrant this many searches.”

Holy shit, they’re not wrong. Follow that haveibeenflocked.com link to the Madison County sheriff’s office Flock searches, and the accompanying note:

These are some of the searches performed by Madison County NC SO. We have seen a total of 1,216 searches for this agency, performed by 1 person over 62 days between 3/11/2026 and 5/11/2026 (1 user was active in the most recent six months) The most recent import of records for this agency happened on 5/17/2026.

Madison County is southwest of Asheville on the state line between NC and TN, comprised mostly of unincorporated communities, which is a polite way of saying most residents live in the hills, not in the towns. The entire county has a population of roughly 21,000, and the largest town, Mars Hill, has only 2,000 residents. It doesn’t get much more rural than this on the East Coast.

So given the population and its distribution, and the fact that the sheriff’s office only serves the unincorporated communities because the three towns have their own municipal police, where the fuck does the sheriff’s office get cause or even time for what averages out to 600 Flock searches in a month?

But it gets even stranger. I clicked on a few searches, just to see what I could see, and every single one I clicked on with an unredacted reason* was associated with the same two or three other non-local police departments as the source of the information retrieved, two of which were the exact same ones every time: Forest Park Ohio PD, Tifton Georgia PD, and occasionally the Douglas County Nevada SO. There were a couple others, but always at least one of those three. (If you go to the little i next to the other PDs, it tells you, “This audit record appears in [n] different public record files.”)

This is true whether I clicked on a homicide, a non-DUI alcohol inquiry, a burglary, a car theft, or a sex offense. No matter what reason I chose, no matter how disparate the crime or the date, one if not all of those three law enforcement agencies came up as the source of the Flock information that inquiry pulled from. And this is the same of every search I clicked on, over and over and over again.

(*The sole exceptions to all this were where the crime itself was redacted, and then the associated source of information was Buncombe County, NC, which neighbors Madison County and could potentially be a valid law enforcement reason to search Flock data.)

And when I selected the Repeat Searches checkbox at the top, defined as “Display filter that hides likely duplicate searches (identical searches within 5 minutes). Does not affect server-side counts or downloads,” an even 800 of those 1,216 searches get loaded. So fully two thirds of those searches across two months qualify as duplicates executed within five minutes of each other, to Flock parameters at least. (Or maybe one third, if I’m understanding it wrong; I’m sure someone will be along to correct me shortly.) But that’s still a fuckton of duplicates executed within five minutes of each other.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t understand how it all works on the Flock side, but it almost seems like someone in the Madison County, NC sheriff’s office is just sitting on their ass keeping serious tabs on a short list of people living in other places.

Yesterday’s NYT expose of the Epstein panic in the White House last summer mentions that the name Mar-a-Lago appears in the Epstein files over 38,000 times.

That’s a hell of a lot of orange smoke for a tiny little nothing-to-see-here fire.

Excellent comment.

Yeah, no problem, there are just too many to remember. She is always stirring up shit for the press.

For myself I like to source my comments, and I even tried to look up the ones I remembered when I was writing my own comment and there are just too many. It is overwhelming.

The same men telling women in the SBC to get out of the pulpit are the same men telling the victims of sexual offenses in SBC churches to shut up and get over it.

While women may have held a quieter role in supporting the pedo/rapey shit that goes down in the SBC and maybe still do, the VAST list of SCB sexual offenders and their protectors is made of men, the internal hierarchy of power is rigid and unyielding, and for as much concerned pearl-clutching as SBC leaders engage in every time it hits the news, which it does frequently, they still haven’t really done anything to slow it down. A couple of these articles are older, but nothing substantial has changed:

20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms – Houston Chronicle

How an Alleged Predator Remade the Southern Baptist Convention – Texas Monthly

New Lawsuit: Paige Patterson, former Southern Baptist leader, humiliated woman who reported rape – Houston Chronicle

Read these at your own risk: they are thoroughly sickening. But there is a pattern: for every individual who is harmed, there appears to be a machine ready to shut them down, one that was operative as far back as the 1970s.

So knowing what I know about what goes down in the SBC and has for decades, when I see a headline like the above, “Southern Baptists vote to advance a formal ban on churches with women pastors,” I don’t see it as having anything primarily to do with doctrine, especially since if the doctrine were that important there would be any number of things they’d already be doing differently.

Rather, I see a group of predators seeking to ensure that their hunting grounds remain fresh, open, and uncluttered with victims they have already used and/or anyone who would speak for them or act on their behalf.

I’m not a Christian and I have no dog in this hunt, but if there was ever a religious organization that desperately needs to be stopped on its institutional slide back to the 1950s (or 1750s), the SBC would absolutely be it.

Wasn’t Mace the one who was just consistently nasty to anyone she met even in public? I seen to recall her throwing tantrums at her local airport, in at least one makeup store* in her district, shaking hands, wherever she went.

She’s vicious not just to trans people, though that is certainly her favorite target, but anywhere there are people she deems her lessers, and she seems to go out of her way to start conflict wherever she can make a public show of it.

I mention it only because, while what she did to Sarah McBride was truly revolting and at or near the top of Mace’s own personal list of despicable acts toward other human beings, there’s actually going to be a long, long line of people enjoying the schadenfreude, bless her shriveled little heart.

*Shouldn’t be mean to people when you desperately need their help, Nancy

That is so horrible. I talked to a guy who was actually there, and got out right around the time it closed. He trusted me enough to tell me some of the shit that went down. From what I have learned since his experience was just the norm. NO kid should ever have to go through that.

Bernadette Banner also has many videos on doing this with simple hand sewing

I was looking for historical costume project information once on YT and saw her channel. Very interesting. It’s worth noting that the hand-sewn historical garments she was copying, hundreds of years old already, are often worn, even well worn, and where there are defects it’s because the material itself failed before the seams did.

One time I had to sew up the entire side seam of a dress shirt with needle and thread, there was no one around with a sewing machine to do it for me and I needed that shirt, so I did it myself. I drew a line and used a backstitch with the smallest spacing I could manage. It took a couple hours maybe. When I got done with it, it looked and felt indestructible. Couldn’t even tell it had been resewn from the outside.

But I can’t take credit for just knowing how. Long, long ago when I was a kid, everyone had to take Home Ec at some point in their schooling; for me it was junior high iirc. It was a required subject. Everyone I went to school with knew how to turn on a stove, follow a recipe, use an iron, sew a simple project like a potholder, that kind of thing. All of it was useful, but hand sewing especially is an incredibly handy skill to have. I honestly thought it was stupid at the time – “For what purpose could I possibly need a potholder?” – but I can’t count the number of times I have used that skill since.

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Didn’t read the article and don’t know how state government works?

Pritzker called on state lawmakers this year to suspend incentives for two years while they hammer out a comprehensive review of the impact centers are having on communities.

Pritzker is making the move after lawmakers did not act. The governor cannot unilaterally halt the program, but the executive branch does wield some control over processing applications, according to his office.

He recently did an interview with Heather Cox Richardson that lays his ideas out pretty clearly. He’s an interesting guy, and they talk a lot about what he’s already done and how and why, not about what he’s going to do. Which is to say it’s not the usual load of jam tomorrow political bullshit because he’s already done what he talked about doing. Listen (or read the transcript) for yourself.

For myself, I don’t want another fucking billionaire in power. But if it’s Pritzker I would make an exception, because while he’s not perfect he’s demonstrably worked (and is still working) very hard for his state and its people in the ways that matter right now. I am sure there are things he could do better or more of, but he’s doing a lot of things right, especially when it comes to building Illinois’ economy and protecting individual rights.

He’s also trying to make it as difficult as possible for the orange hitler to fuck with Illinois, and right now that’s a huge plus in my eyes, as it speaks to character: does a politician actually see all citizens as equal, and immigrants deserving of all their rights under the law in this country? Pritzker does, which is admittedly a low bar in itself but jesus fuck do some people currently in power manage to limbo under it these days. Or I could just say, “He’s not a fascist,” but it’s the same thing. Ten years ago I’d have laughed; today it’s at the top of my list of necessary qualifications for public office.

Or to put it another way, we regular Americans have never been so hated by those in power as we are right now, especially in the midwest and southeast: take a look at some of those governors and senators and appointees and tell me they don’t fucking loathe their own voter base. Pritzker is genuinely not among those that hate their own constituents: he seems to love Illinois and its people and it’s been working out well for Illinois.

Pain in my dick, motherless goatfucking, horsehit-happy asshole, corporate varmints

Off topic, but that’s a nice spattering of invective you got there, OP. Well done. I genuinely appreciate a well-crafted compound insult.

Yeah, that’s off. Especially taken in conjunction with this:

The tickets were “allocated at no charge [0 USD] due to a prior payment issue during the checkout process,” Fifa said

So a tranche of impossible tickets shows up for sale on the World Cup site a full three months after the head of FIFA announced the games were sold out, the one guy who would know for sure but somehow did not, and are then very quietly made available much later on a single day in such a way that the buyers are making what looks like a standard purchase of tickets, except the system is also just as bizarrely set to charge them $0.

Do people actually keep checking on the official site instead of resellers for available tickets long after they’re supposed to have been sold out?

Huh. I don’t know enough about how FIFA ticket sales work to know with any certainty, but at first glance it looks almost like a plan that worked exactly as it was supposed to, except that some people who were not the intended recipients lucked into it as well.

It could also be something FIFA did not set up directly, but an insider or group of insiders who figured out a way to set aside some tickets, and now FIFA’s collecting after the fact.

Or it could all just be a magically lucky series of coincidences. I really don’t know but it’s hinky as hell.

Also of note in the article (emphasis mine):

The profit margins of facilities like Delaney Hall depend on coercing people into working for otherwise illegal rates, Andrew Free, an immigration lawyer and journalist who researches conditions in ICE detention, said. “The way you keep the place clean is you use the people who are inside to clean it.”

Those dollar-a-day rates have held since 1950, when they were established by Congress. It was keyed to the “international standard for prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, which was three Swiss francs.”

And,

But it’s generally cheaper to let people go than to transfer strikers to different facilities, Free said. So when some detained people are released—like an 18-year-old who was freed from Delaney Hall earlier this week after missing her high school prom—“that is just as much a predictable consequence of these hunger and labor strikes as the repression and retaliation.”

sufficiently grease the right palms

Or the right poles. Melania was not particularly a moneymaker when she is alleged to have violated the terms of her initial visitor visa to work as a model.

he’s the wealthiest person in the US

As an aside, I’m not at all certain this is still true, if it ever really was.

What IS certain is that the absolute dollar value of the very wealthy is an ongoing shell game that reveals more if they want loans, and far less when it comes to paying judgements and taxes.

Even so, ketboy’s claimed wealth could stand a great deal more examination, especially these days. He gets a lot of access and influence thrown his way just on the claim alone. I’d like to see him stop getting that anticipatory cooperation based on a claim that has not been self-apparent for some time.

I’d put him in the top twenty of US wealthiest individuals, sure. But first place? Especially with what’s been happening with Tesla and X, not anymore.

Thank you for this context. I had actually suspected as much, especially in regard to how people use the Talmud for prooftexting (selectively pulling bits out of a text with which to authoritatively settle disputes) because that’s exactly how the Christian bible is used by the same sort of people, But as I said above I’m not overly familiar with the Talmud, so this tracks. And yeah, it is really dry reading! I did try a few times, lol.

But it’s depressing how similar some people are in their tactics to suppress real questions and debate, even across faiths.

It’s great when people bring the receipts and take the time to source a comment. Seriously, thank you.