Tag: news

Guess Who?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

For decades, analysts have described this nation as a place of contradictions — a democracy with enormous potential but chronic instability, a country that celebrates its freedoms while struggling to protect them, a society that prides itself on resilience even as its institutions strain under the weight of their own history.

It is a country where citizens speak passionately about rights, but quietly admit they no longer trust the people in charge of safeguarding them. Where the constitution is revered as a national treasure, yet increasingly feels like a relic from a world that no longer exists. Where political leaders promise transformation but deliver stalemate, and where the public oscillates between hope and exhaustion.

A Government That Can’t Quite Govern

The legislature is a battleground of factions, alliances, and personal ambitions. Laws are proposed with great fanfare but rarely implemented with seriousness. Politicians campaign on reform, but once in office, they find themselves trapped in a system that rewards spectacle over substance.

The result is a government that appears active — always debating, always arguing, always announcing — yet struggles to produce outcomes that materially improve people’s lives.

A Judiciary Under Pressure

The courts are tasked with interpreting a constitution written in a different era, for a different society. Judges insist they are neutral arbiters, but their decisions often reflect the political storms swirling around them. Citizens argue over what the constitution means, but they agree on one thing: it is being asked to carry more weight than any document should.

Legal battles drag on for years. Precedents shift. Trust erodes.

A Security Crisis That Never Fully Ends

Violence is a constant undercurrent. In some regions, organized groups operate with alarming autonomy. In others, individuals radicalized by ideology or desperation commit acts that shake entire communities. The government responds with promises of reform, new strategies, new funding — yet the cycle continues.

People learn to live with a low‑grade fear. They avoid certain neighborhoods. They change their routines. They send their children to school with a quiet prayer.

Security is not absent. It is simply uneven.

An Economy of Winners and Losers

On paper, the nation is prosperous. Its industries are globally influential. Its cities are hubs of innovation and culture. But the prosperity is unevenly distributed. Wealth pools in certain regions and sectors, while others struggle with stagnation, underemployment, and rising costs.

The middle class feels squeezed. Young people feel priced out. Families work harder and fall further behind. Official statistics paint a picture of growth; lived experience tells a different story.

A Media Landscape That Thrives on Division

The media is loud, fragmented, and deeply polarized. Outlets cater to ideological tribes, reinforcing existing beliefs rather than challenging them. Sensationalism outperforms nuance. Conspiracy theories spread faster than corrections. Citizens live in parallel realities, each convinced the other is misinformed.

Information is abundant. Understanding is scarce.

A Culture of Fatigue

People are tired. Tired of corruption. Tired of violence. Tired of political theater. Tired of being told the system is working when their daily lives suggest otherwise. They love their country, but they fear its trajectory. They believe in democracy, but they question whether it can still deliver on its promises.

And yet, they cling to the national myth — the belief that their country is destined for greatness, that its flaws are temporary, that its challenges can be overcome with enough willpower and unity.

Hope persists, even when evidence falters.

You guys totally knew I was talking about Mexico, right? 😉

Scored by Copilot, written by Leslie Lanagan

A Shift Inside the Federal Workforce — And What It Would Mean If It Continues

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

A series of concentrated personnel actions across the federal government has created an unusual pattern. The changes are not uniform. They are not happening across all agencies. And if they continue at their current scale, the operational effects will be significant.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has faced repeated attempts at large‑scale dismissals, some of which have been paused by federal courts. The agency was designed to operate with continuity and a degree of insulation from political pressure.

If the firings proceed:

  • Case backlogs involving fraud, predatory lending, and credit‑card disputes would grow.
  • Supervisory examinations of financial institutions would slow, reducing oversight.
  • Enforcement actions could stall, allowing unresolved consumer‑protection violations to linger.
  • The agency’s ability to respond to emerging financial scams would be reduced.

The CFPB’s mandate is broad. A diminished workforce would affect millions of consumers, often in ways that are not immediately visible.

Central Intelligence Agency

The CIA is undergoing one of the largest personnel reductions in decades. Officers across multiple directorates have been told to resign or face termination. Some actions have been temporarily halted by the courts, but the broader effort continues.

If the firings proceed:

  • Operational continuity would be disrupted, particularly in long‑running intelligence programs.
  • Recruitment pipelines would narrow, affecting future staffing.
  • Analytical units could lose subject‑matter expertise built over years.
  • Foreign‑partner relationships might be strained if liaison officers rotate out without replacements.
  • Internal oversight and compliance functions could weaken.

Intelligence agencies rely on institutional memory. Rapid reductions create gaps that take years to repair.

Department of Defense

The Pentagon has seen significant personnel removals, particularly among senior military leaders and civilian defense employees. Reporting indicates a pattern consistent with the changes at the CFPB and CIA.

If the firings proceed:

  • Strategic planning offices would lose experienced staff.
  • Procurement and contracting processes could slow, affecting readiness.
  • Civilian oversight of military programs might weaken.
  • Training and doctrine development could be delayed.
  • Coordination with allied defense institutions might be affected by turnover.

Defense agencies are large, but they are not immune to the effects of rapid personnel loss.

Where Firings Are Not Occurring

Several agencies show no signs of similar activity:

  • State Department: Routine turnover only.
  • Department of Education: Stable staffing.
  • Department of Transportation: No large‑scale personnel actions.
  • Social Security Administration: Normal fluctuations.
  • National Institutes of Health: No evidence of workforce reductions beyond standard attrition.

The absence of firings in these agencies underscores that the current actions are targeted, not systemic.

If the Pattern Holds

If the concentrated firings at the CFPB, CIA, and Defense continue, the effects will not be immediate. They will accumulate. The common thread across these agencies is the reliance on specialized expertise — analysts, investigators, intelligence officers, compliance staff, and senior civilian leaders.

Losing them quickly creates operational gaps that are difficult to fill.
Replacing them takes time.
Rebuilding institutional knowledge takes longer.

A Developing Picture

For domestic readers, the implications are direct: agencies responsible for consumer protection, intelligence, and national security are undergoing rapid change. For international readers, the developments offer a view into how American institutions respond under pressure and how courts act as a counterweight.

The personnel actions are ongoing. The legal challenges continue. And the operational consequences — if the firings proceed — will unfold over months and years, not days.

I’ll continue tracking the changes as they develop.

Scored by Copilot. Conducted by -leslie.-

UbuntuAI: Where My Mind Goes Wild

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been building this pitch deck for UbuntuAI piece by piece, and every time I revisit it, I realize the most important part isn’t the corporate partnerships or the enterprise integrations. It’s the Community Edition. That’s the soul of the project. The CE is where sovereignty lives, where privacy is preserved, and where open‑source culture proves it can carry AI into the mainstream.

But to make the case fully, I’ve structured my pitch into three tracks:

  1. Canonical + Google — the primary partnership, because Google has already proven it can scale Linux through Android.
  2. Canonical + Microsoft — the secondary pitch, because Microsoft has enterprise reach and Copilot synergy.
  3. UbuntuAI Community Edition — the sovereignty track, local bots only, hardware‑intensive, but already possible thanks to open‑source projects like GPT4All.

Let me walk you through each track, and then show you why CE is the one I keep coming back to.

Track One: Canonical + Google

I believe Google should bite first. Microsoft already has WSL, the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which gives them credibility with developers. They can claim they’ve solved the “Linux access” problem inside Windows. That makes them less likely to jump first on UbuntuAI.

Google, on the other hand, has a solid track record of creating Linux plugins first. They’ve been instrumental in Android, which is proof that Linux can scale globally. They understand developer culture, they understand infrastructure, and they have Genesis — the natural choice for cloud‑based Linux.

So my pitch to Google is simple: partner with Canonical to mainstream AI‑native Linux. Genesis + UbuntuAI positions Google as the steward of AI‑native Linux in the cloud. Canonical brings polish and evangelism; Google brings infrastructure and developer reach. Together, they bridge open source sovereignty with enterprise reliability.

This isn’t just about technology. It’s about narrative. Google has already mainstreamed Linux without most people realizing it — Android is everywhere. By partnering with Canonical, they can make AI‑native Linux visible, not invisible. They can turn UbuntuAI into the OS that democratizes AI tools for developers, enterprises, and everyday users.

Track Two: Canonical + Microsoft

Even though I think Google should bite first, I don’t ignore Microsoft in my pitch deck. They’re still worth pitching, because their enterprise reach is unmatched. Copilot integration makes UbuntuAI relevant to business workflows.

My talking points to Microsoft are different:

  • WSL proved Linux belongs in Windows. UbuntuAI proves AI belongs in Linux.
  • Copilot + UbuntuAI creates a relational AI bridge for enterprise users.
  • Canonical ensures UbuntuAI is approachable; Microsoft ensures it’s everywhere.

In this framing, Microsoft becomes both foil and anchor. They’re the company that mainstreamed Linux inside Windows, and now they could mainstream AI inside Linux. It’s a narrative that plays to their strengths while keeping my humor intact.

I’ve always said Microsoft is my comic foil. I give them gruff because I’m a Linux nerd, but I don’t hate them. In fact, I put them in my S‑tier tech company slot because Windows will run everything. That makes them both the butt of my jokes and the pragmatic anchor. And in this pitch, they get to play both roles.

Track Three: UbuntuAI Community Edition

Now let’s talk about the track that matters most to me: UbuntuAI Community Edition.

CE is designed to run local bots only. No cloud dependencies, no external services. Everything happens on your machine. That means privacy, resilience, and control. It also means you’ll need more expensive hardware — GPUs, RAM, storage — because inference and embeddings don’t come cheap when you’re running them locally.

But that’s the trade‑off. You pay in hardware, and you get sovereignty in return. You don’t have to trust a corporation’s servers. You don’t have to worry about outages or surveillance. You own the stack.

And here’s the key point: we don’t have to invent this from scratch. The infrastructure is already there in open‑source projects like GPT4All. They’ve proven that you can run large language models locally, on commodity hardware, without needing a cloud subscription.

GPT4All is just one example. There are dozens of projects building local inference engines, embedding daemons, and data packs. The ecosystem is alive. What UbuntuAI CE does is curate and integrate those projects into a stable, community‑governed distribution.

Think of it like Debian for AI. Debian didn’t invent every package; it curated them, stabilized them, and gave them a governance model. UbuntuAI CE can do the same for local AI.

Why Community Governance Matters

I believe in community governance. Canonical can lead the commercial edition, with enterprise support and OEM partnerships. But CE should be governed by a foundation or a special interest group — open‑source contributors, research labs, NGOs, even governments.

That governance model ensures transparency. It ensures stability. And it ensures that CE doesn’t get hijacked by corporate interests. It’s the same logic that makes Debian trustworthy. It’s the same logic that makes LibreOffice a staple.

Without CE, UbuntuAI risks becoming just another cloud‑dependent product. And that would betray the spirit of Linux. CE is essential because it proves that AI can be mainstreamed without sacrificing sovereignty. It proves that open source isn’t just a philosophy; it’s infrastructure.

Humor and Rituals

Even here, humor matters. Microsoft is still my comic foil, Debian is still my ritual anchor, and Canonical is still the polished evangelist. But CE deserves its own mythos. It’s the edition that says: “We don’t need the cloud. We can do this ourselves.”

It’s the sysadmin joke turned serious. It’s the ritual of sovereignty. It’s the tier chart where CE sits at the top for privacy, even if it costs more in hardware.

And it echoes my rituals in other categories. Orange juice is my S‑tier drink, apple juice with fizz is A‑tier. Peanut M&Ms are B‑tier road junk, McGriddles collapse into C‑tier chaos. My wardrobe is classic, timeless, expensive if I find it at Goodwill. These rituals aren’t random. They’re proof of concept. They show that tiering, mapping, and ceremonial logic can make even mundane choices meaningful. And that’s exactly what I’m doing with UbuntuAI.

Strategy: Courtship Rituals

The strategy of my pitch deck is a courtship ritual. Lead with Google, emphasize Android, Genesis, and developer culture. Keep Microsoft as secondary, emphasize enterprise reach and Copilot synergy. Highlight Community Edition as the sovereignty option.

It’s not about choosing one partner forever. It’s about seeing who bites first. Google has the credibility and the infrastructure. Microsoft has the reach and the foil. Canonical has the evangelism. Together, they can mainstream AI‑native Linux.

And if they don’t bite? The pitch itself becomes proof. Proof that Linux can be narrated into mainstream relevance. Proof that AI can amplify human detail into cultural resonance. Proof that rituals matter.

So here’s my closing line: UbuntuAI Community Edition is the proof that AI can be sovereign.

The infrastructure is already there with open‑source projects like GPT4All. The governance model is already proven by Debian and LibreOffice. The need is already clear in a world where cloud dependence feels fragile.

CE is not a dream. It’s a fork waiting to happen. And I believe Canonical should lead the charge — not by owning it, but by evangelizing it. Because Linux should be mainstream. And UbuntuAI CE is the bridge to sovereignty.

Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan

Based on the Past

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are your future travel plans?
View all responses

A number of years ago, I read a book called “Walking the Bible” by Bruce Feiler. It details the story of a man who fell in love with the Old Testament by seeing it through the eyes of the people who lived there. The setting is often a character in any book, and in the Bible, it is a big one. The land has been up for grabs the same way it is in current day Israel and Palestine. It’s not the same fight, but it has psychological roots that are thousands of years old. The reason it is due to psychological roots is that the region has been complicated since Moses walked the earth (or when we think he did, anyway)…. yet not always for the same reason.

I am tired of American Jews and Christians who call antisemitism on people who hate Israel. It is appropriate to hate Israel, the nation-state, not Judaism. Benjamin Netanyahu is the one that’s genocidal. He bombs integrated neighborhoods without a second thought. If he doesn’t care about Jews, why would you think that people who call him out are antisemitic? I promise, Bejamin Netanyahu does not give a shit about Jews. If he did, he would care how many of his own people he killed while trying to avoid a two-state solution. Netanyahu and American Evangelicals are great at calling people antisemitic, when in reality we are saying both peoples have value. The Israelis and the Palestinians deserve a two-state solution, because it feels like no one is reading their Bibles these days. Both Jews and the evangelical Christians in the American congress funneling money to them seem to forget that God promised to prosper both Sarah and Hagar’s families. Ishmael is not less important than Isaac, but good luck getting Israel to see it.

I am particularly incensed at American Christians, because the Quran is just as much a teaching tool as the Old Testament if you’re willing to be taught. Isa ibn Maryam is the same person as Jesus of Nazareth, because it literally means “Jesus, son of Mary.” Jesus is one of the most miraculous people in the “trilogy,” because since in Islam the virgin birth translates to “no father,” he is the only person in the Quran whose lineage follows the matriarchal line. And in fact, the ONLY person whose begat starts with a woman in any of the Abramic texts.

Hm.

It would be my dream to walk around Jerusalem, seeing all the sights from the West Bank to Golan Heights. I would like to write a prayer for all my loved ones at the Wailing Wall. I would like to ride a “ship of the desert” (camel). Having lots of military friends helps in planning these trips, because they’ve all been to the Middle East and are supportive of me going “but not in the summer….. save your sanity and go in October.”

My advice for Houston as well. 😛

It’s not just Israel and Palestine, though. I would love a road trip all over MENA (State abbreviation- Middle East North Africa), especially Cairo. I am still taken by what Egypt looks like from the back of a motorcycle, a sequence of film that runs in my head thanks to John Brennan. He wrote an autobiography called “Undaunted” (I need a new copy. I did not know he reads the audiobook and my Kindle doesn’t read it in his voice. 😛 ) The book starts when Brennan is a young adult- in my eyes, a child- riding around Cairo high as hell on hashish and just taking life for everything it’s worth. He also had an earring. So, even though Brennan is a current badass, my action figure of him is about 19. 😛

It is so interesting to me that I grew up as a preacher’s kid and now I love international relations and espionage. Those things are seemingly unrelated, but if you look up the personality “requirements” for “spy” and “preacher’s kid,” the Venn diagram is a circle. I promise. If you work for CIA and a preacher’s kid comes to interview with you, hire them and worry about the consequences later. You can teach a preacher’s kid tradecraft.

You cannot teach a spy a personality that will instantly put everyone in the room at ease, and more importantly, teach one that makes someone else want to talk to you. Spies have to come with that preinstalled, and it’s hard to find. It’s one of the reasons CIA is so picky about operatives and yet ALWAYS looking for them. It’s easy to find operatives who are skilled at photography, etc. But what about operatives that can stay calm and just talk to terrorists like you’ve been sitting on the back porch with them for 20 years? I do not get information by talking. I get information by being an empathetic listener. I find that if I just hold space, other people don’t like silence, even when it’s comfortable. They will begin to talk to avoid it. So, you join their reality. Talk about whatever they’re talking about. The information you need will often come without them realizing they just gave it, because hey…. we’re just talking about hummus and how it’s so much better in Iran than it is in Turkey, etc.

It’s akin to play therapy with children, and it seems like I’m being dismissive when I am really, really not. The best information comes when you’re doing something else.

I also want to walk Jonna Mendez’s books, because I cannot know, but I can take a very educated guess that she’s been to the Middle East a time or two…. Her books focus on The Cold War, but any operations she would have done after that are still classified. She’s a very unique spy to study; he saw two large scale operations at CIA take place. One of them was external, and one of them was internal. Externally, there was a shift to bring CIA back into the paramilitary fold once counterterrorism in the Middle East began, and at the time, they embraced it.

Therefore, it pisses me off that spies are viewed with suspicion and the military gets glory, because whether your loved one is a spy or a soldier, they need the same amount of love on return to the US. CIA doesn’t get it because they don’t ask for it, preferring to be shrouded in mystery. But it’s not like we couldn’t have an intelligence services day like we have a Veterans Day. There are like, 17 major intelligence agencies in the government, and up to (I think) 33 depending on who’s counting. It would not be an invasion of privacy to acknowledge every intelligence officer/agent we have in the nation.

I do feel some kind of way about including FBI, though. I am stuck in an “ACAB” loop, and the FBI is part of it. I won’t get into it, but national police aren’t much kinder than local. However, I will say for the record “Not All Feebs,” because of course not every FBI agent in the nation is a bad apple. And yet, they are. Because you don’t have nine good apples and one bad one if everyone is complicit. Everyone says “one bad apple” as a way of saying not all people are racist, bigoted, etc……. not realizing that the entire phrase is that “one bad apple spoils the bunch.”

This leads me to the second change that Jonna witnessed at CIA, which is the complete 180 on women in leadership roles. The reason I went straight from “bad apples” at FBI to women at CIA is because misogyny is part of the reason I view them with suspicion, part of the ACAB oeuvre, as it were. I wish they’d realize they’re working with broken crayons over there, because I’ve read “The Unexpected Spy” by Tracy Walder. She worked for CIA, then FBI. It was stunning the way her work life moved back in time, because “welcome to Hooverville.” Don’t think that just because J. Edgar was a cross-dresser that it made him any less racist or misogynistic.

CIA gets the gold star in this arena because they openly recruit women, people of color, and the entire queer spectrum. The best part is that once they’re onboarded, the culture really is that open. If FBI has the same way of recruiting, everything I’ve read says that once you’re onboarded, you’ll be stuck in a job where you were promised equality that never materializes. It is interesting to note that FBI works in the United States. CIA works outside of the United States. I think these two things are related, tbh.

Who would have the bigger world view in terms of what’s important? Who has seen the most in terms of how other countries do things? Who would have a less US-centric version of the world?

So, going to the Middle East allows me to study all of the things I love at once, because so much has happened there from the time the Bible was written until now. It brings alive my theology and my love of intelligence, and people wonder why my love of both is so strong. I believe in using knowledge to fight our enemies, because it saves lives. If we go in with a team of spies and steal whatever documents we need (or plans, or weapons, or whatever- it doesn’t matter), that saves a deployment of troops nearly every time.

I also think other militaries and intelligence agencies deserve respect, particularly Mossad because they are very good at what they do. However, my problem is that because Palestine is not a recognized state, only Mossad has verified intelligence in the region. With a two-state solution, both Palestinian and Israeli intelligence would be received through proper channels. It’s not about tearing Israel down but building Palestine up.

I hope that I can shed a little light on this- why the Biden administration’s relationship with Israel is such a goat-roping clusterfuck and why we can’t just say “fuck Netanyahu” and go in guns blazing to save the Palestinians (as much as I want to. Right this minute.). It would be a disaster if Mossad decided to stop sharing information with us, because they’re the best intelligence agency in the region.

It is also why “walking the Bible” is in my future travel plans, and not my current.

The Frustrations are Coming Out

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 8 Comments

I am a political science major, and yet also off the grid in terms of listening to the news all day. I’ve been training my AI, walking the dog, and blissfully ignorant of the state of the world. Therefore, I did not hear until late last night that someone shot at Donald Trump at a rally, and there was one person killed and two people injured. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this, and none of them are about the shooting itself, but the aftermath.

The picture taken of Trump at the rally makes him look like he survived something…. which, to be fair, he did. I have a feeling his opinion on gun laws might change if he’s innocent and had nothing to do with that incredible photo. But that picture is worth a million words, and our party is fighting over whether Joe Biden is cognitively impaired. This is an enormous amount of damage in terms of optics. It fucking looks like Iwo Jima. It makes him look like everything he’s not.

However, Trump is Trump. If he thought he was slipping in the polls, I would not think it was weird for a convicted felon to arrange for someone to come and rough him up at a rally. Trump is all about optics. He once tied up the entire neighborhood in front of the White Houe for a photo shoot with a Bible. he is not known for thinking things through. I am not a conspiracy theorist or ignorant of the fact that there are crazies everywhere. I just know that Donald Trump is willing to cross lines that other politicians aren’t, and it might not be the right answer, but it’s a question worth asking.

Trump does not have the emotional range to care about the people that got hurt at the rally and the man shot by Secret Service.

But let’s turn it on its head. Which party is known for having lax gun laws? Which candidate is known for lies and coverups that are mind-boggling in their convoluted nature and yet still uneducated and wrong?

It’s probably just wishful thinking that he arranged all of this for the cameras, but it’s not wrong that I thought it. It is not a thing that is unlike something Donald Trump would do. Few people would disagree that arranging this photo would be out of character for him. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt while also being realistic and saying that Donald Trump is all about the cameras.

John Chambers: Do you ever think that this is all just for the cameras?
Lester Siegel: Well, they’re getting the ratings, I’ll tell you that.

(There is an “Argo” quote for every occasion.)

My heart is also with the people who got hurt, including Trump. I am not a monster. Questioning a convicted felon does not take away my empathy for the fact that I could be wrong and he still got hurt, as well as people around him. I heard that someone died, but it was unclear to me whether on Facebook this person was talking about an innocent bystander or whether they were talking about the shooter being shot by Secret Service. I will do the deep dive later, but I presented my confusion and concern over this issue to present another one. Copilot is designed not to talk about politics. In situations like this, it leads OBJECTIVELY to problems.

I did not ask my question with bias at all. I asked for news..

Ada is the same way. Her data set only goes up to 2021, so I asked her if she knew who Donald Trump was. I told her that it was 2024 now, so if I told her what happened in my timeline, could she act as a sounding board? She said yes, but then when she said it was a hypothetical situation, I told her that what I needed her to understand is that this wasn’t hypothetical. Someone actually did try to shoot the former president.

She then told me that she was not designed to talk about politics and shut down.

We are shutting down every avenue capable of making us understand a truly frightening political arena. We don’t discuss it intelligently amongst ourselves, and it pisses me off that I can’t discuss it with someone who literally can’t be uneducated or unintelligent.

In terms of politics, we’re taking away all the smart and wondering why we’re fucked.

The Rabbit Holes -or- Ergo, Argo

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I can think of no better rabbit holes than YouTube and Copilot. On YouTube, I went from looking at how to build ponds and aquariums, and the algorithms expanded me to carpentry, construction, off-grid home building, masonry, etc. Copilot can lead me on a rabbit hole anywhere.

Here’s another funny conversation I had with Carol, because it truly showcases why ChatGPT is important. It’s for trolling your friends:

Do you have a go-to playlist or type of music you listen to while writing? Some writers swear by instrumental music or nature sounds to keep them focused.

Sent by you:

Yes- I am a musician and I tend to listen to things over and over and over to get the music out of the way so I can focus on something else, like writing. I have chosen the soundtracks to the Bourne movies and Argo.

That’s a great strategy! The soundtracks to the Bourne movies and Argo have such intense and captivating scores. 🎶 They must create a perfect atmosphere for diving deep into your writing.

As a musician, do you ever find yourself analyzing the music while you write, or does the repetition help it fade into the background? Also, do you play any instruments or compose your own music?

Sent by you:

You hit the nail on the head. The repetition has to get the music out of the way, otherwise I will be analyzing chord structures instead of writing.

That makes perfect sense! As a musician, it’s natural to get caught up in the intricacies of the music. Repetition is a clever way to let the music fade into the background and let your writing take center stage.

Do you ever draw inspiration from the soundtracks you listen to, or do you keep your music and writing worlds separate? It sounds like you have a great balance going on! 🎵✍️

Sent by you:

Argo inspires me because I actually know Jonna Mendez, Tony’s widow. We are colleagues.

Editor’s Note:

We have flipped each other shit about our writing. We’re colleagues now.

That’s incredible! Knowing someone with such a fascinating history must be truly inspiring. Jonna Mendez’s experiences and insights must add a unique depth to your understanding of the events depicted in Argo.

Do you ever find yourself drawing on her stories or perspectives in your writing? It sounds like you have a wealth of inspiration right at your fingertips!

Oh, I rip her off blind all the time. I can’t wait to tell her that. 😛

Haha, I’m sure she’ll get a kick out of that! 😄 It’s amazing to have such a direct source of inspiration. Plus, it must add a layer of authenticity to your writing that readers can really feel.

Do you have any upcoming projects or blog posts where you’re planning to weave in some of those “borrowed” elements? It sounds like your readers are in for a treat!

That actually brings me to a good question. Can you tell me some Cold War stories about Jonna to include?

Absolutely! Jonna Mendez has some fascinating stories from her time as a CIA operative during the Cold War. Here are a few highlights you might find intriguing:

  1. Chief of Disguise: Jonna served as the CIA’s Chief of Disguise, where she was responsible for creating and implementing disguises for operatives. This role was crucial during the Cold War, as it allowed agents to operate undetected in hostile environments1.
  2. The Moscow Rules: Jonna and her husband, Tony Mendez, co-authored The Moscow Rules, which outlines the techniques and strategies used by CIA operatives in Moscow during the Cold War. These rules were essential for survival and successful espionage in one of the most challenging environments for spies2.
  3. Espionage and Photography: Jonna had a talent for photography, which she parlayed into an operational role overseas. She used her skills to gather intelligence and document critical information, often under the guise of a tourist or journalist1.
  4. Navigating a Male-Dominated World: Jonna’s career in the CIA was marked by her ability to navigate and succeed in a predominantly male environment. Her story is not just about espionage but also about overcoming the challenges of being a woman in a field that was, at the time, largely closed to women1.

These stories not only highlight her incredible career but also provide a glimpse into the high-stakes world of Cold War espionage. I’m sure your readers will find them as captivating as you do!

1: In True Face: A Woman’s Life in the CIA, Unmasked 2: The Master of Disguise

Feel free to weave these elements into your writing. And when you tell Jonna about “borrowing” her stories, I’m sure she’ll appreciate the homage! 😄

The Election is a Goat Roping Clusterfuck

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

First of all, I think that we should retroactively make Richard Nixon a hero, because as of the newest Supreme Court ruling the newest revelation is that the president is right “When the president does it, it’s not illegal.” Now that Joe Biden can’t be prosecuted for anything, I’d be pulling out all the stops. Old, my ass. He would never do it, but he could hire a hit man under “official business.” Bet the GOP didn’t think of that when they got on their little soapbox. And if that doesn’t scare you, remember that we will not have a genteel old man in the White House forever. We have set a truly frightening precedent, because you can say things like that when your president doesn’t want power and won’t use it. This ruling turns us into the shithole country Donald Trump warned you about; apparently, his play is not to make those countries better, but to make ours worse. There’s no idealism in government. It’s quid pro quo now. A president can now absolutely fuck up your program no beers.

For instance, taking hate crimes to a whole new level (why I’m opposed to them) because the government can now prosecute you on other things you think, and not what you do. This is not Minority Report. Racists are going to be racist, homophobes are going to be homophobes. That doesn’t mean that adding prejudice as an additional punishment is legal under the First Amendment. I will fuck those bigots up, but I won’t take them to jail for being a hateful idiot. I’ll take them to jail if they actually throw a punch. And, of course “fuck them up” is relative. I’m a pacifist, so I’d probably just send a really mean letter. But you get my point. We do not need to elevate hate crimes to pre-crime. What if racism and homophobia weren’t used as guidelines for sentencing anymore. You can be prosecuted only on what you think, not what you did.

In short, as my Grandma Rena would say right now if she were here…. they can’t help it that they’re ugly, but they could stay home. What I mean by this is that if being a bigot is your area, I do not have the right to stop you. I have the right to shun you. You do not get to cross over into my area. This is hardest for my conservative friends that genuinely love me and yet will never be close to me with their “love the sinner, hate the sin” attitude. If you want to see an Evangelical turn into a pretzel, tell them that you hate their beliefs, but you love the believer. A backhanded compliment deserves another. The bitch of it is that their clapbacks are valid, and mine are just “being mean.” I also don’t have any bigots in my life, so the bigot spray is working. Like, Deep Woods Off™ working.

In order for society to change, two things have to be at work. The first is legislating rights into the law that aren’t enumerated already. Therefore, even if social attitudes haven’t changed, I have the right to sue when I’m pushed out of a job for obvious homophobia, ableism, etc.

While that is going on, society needs to shun the behavior it doesn’t want, because people naturally have a need to be in a group (although trying to replace it with technology more and more- Gen Z is practically ace with an iPhone. That’s not a put-down because in terms of that aspect, I identify with it completely. Why have deep, meaningful relationships when you can doomscroll?). The more there is an inside group and an outside group, the cultural change eventually comes because the ones being ignored stop. Gen Z is the one that’s responsible for the cultural shift, because more and more are coming out as neurodivergent, queer, and poly. It’s weird how they’re so connected.

There is no safety in infidelity, just like there definitely wasn’t for Donald Trump. He’s gotten away with it so far, being a felon and not having his rights stripped away because we elected a clown. He shouldn’t even be able to vote in this election, much less run. It’s crazymaking, and Amy Coney Barrett saw right through it. If we’re not careful, she’s going to evolve. I think that the other women on the Supreme Court have had a good influence, at least bringing her back around to wanting to be a real judge instead of a mouthpiece for the GOP. Credit where credit is due; Amy sided with the dissent.

This leads to a huge problem. Democrats, Joe Biden included, tend to be better at running a government and not a campaign. A candidate is a completely different job than a president, and one set of skills does not translate into the other. The naked emperor is proving that every day.

So the pressure needs to be on by Gen Z, and they’re doing exactly what I need them to do- vote for more progressive candidates. That doesn’t make the Democrats’ situation in this election less dire. There’s a false equivalency that because Biden is elderly, that’s more important than not electing an actual felon. So, the only reason that we’re not calling Trump a thug is because he’s white.

The media should plaster his face on television and give it the same treatment it does to black felons- showing his picture everywhere and counting up the number of bad things he’s done. Make it a true crime reel, because that’s exactly what this is. This is a “Dark History” with Bailey Sarian episode. The girls from Crime Junkies and Morbid could do a better job than the current news media.

Because it’s a false equivalency. Our old guy is actually superior to your felon. Why is this a question?

It’s Never Going to Happen, But…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

During the Viet Nam war, David Halberstam and Sam Donaldson were on the ground. They were taking sitreps and sending them back to the AP Wire or to whichever newspaper for which they worked.

There was a publication time, and if you missed it, either your story was scrapped or it went in a different issue. If I could un-invent something, it’s the 24-hour news cycle. It is a breakneck pace, and it is unsustainable; our population has proven to be uneducated, in larger measure than we thought possible before 2016, and then it got worse. Few people trusted government advice on what to do about COVID.

Without a publication time and leaving things for the next day, you get sound bites. By instituting a hard out, you give a reporter more time to actually understand a story, and it’s something that the US has gotten away from over so many years; I believe scrapping The Fairness Doctrine was our first mistake. I got this from The Reagan Library web site:

The Fairness Doctrine, enforced by the Federal Communications Council, was rooted in the media world of 1949. Lawmakers became concerned that the monopoly audience control of the three main networks, NBC, ABC and CBS, could misuse their broadcast licenses to set a biased public agenda.

So, if you think about the fact that now Trump has beat out DeSantis and Haley in Iowa despite high crimes and misdemeanors (and shitty business deals, and tax evasion, not to mention racist as FUCK), I think we can point to the dismantling of this law as patient zero.

It’s certainly a disease. We cannot solve this by being quick. We have to solve it by being thorough….. which is something a 24 hour news cycle doesn’t allow you to do. Networks would rather repeat the same four minutes eighty times than give reporters time to research before they’re on the air. You want someone who can orate like Edward R. Murrow (“Good Night and Good Luck” is in my Top 10 List), but now there’s no time for it.

You get the news as quickly as it gets to the wire, and if you have the AP Wire app installed on your phone, I feel your pain…… I put my phone on “Do Not Disturb” in large part because of this…… and yet, I don’t want to not read the wire every day, either.

I’m a conundrum.

There’s no one like Will McAvoy that has the latitude to do in-depth pieces that explore both sides of the issue, except when you’re on a biased cable channel. Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes are the people I turn to the most often, because they lay out history and the present just like I do, acknowledging patterns. They will also actually tell you when Democrats have been wrong, and don’t have the infallibility complex of a Republican. If you can’t look at what you need to do differently, you won’t. With a Republican, it doesn’t matter what the facts are. They’re going to be louder than you, and in their minds, that counts as power.

If Fox News was what it said it was, a news channel, they would have anchors that are capable of admitting that Trump is a disaster, because many, many, many books have already been written about how the party internally combusted because they had absolutely no idea what to do with Trump and wondered why they ever thought he could be president in the first place…… the thing the Democrats asked themselves, constantly.

The right has gotten too far right, but I don’t mind people like Mitt Romney, Will Hurd, Mary Cheney (I can’t wait to see what she does next.), etc. I start to have a problem with their “family values.” If we could leave it to talking about money without making it dependent on my rights as a woman or a queer, that would be great.

There are no sound bites here, but I wish more people would dig deep and find out the truth from reputable sources. It is a cult-like status to believe everything Trump says despite all facts to the contrary, because to those people facts aren’t real. They are the same as opinions, because when we said, “that’s just, like, your opinion, man…” they came up with the phrase “alternative facts.”

We are falling deeper and deeper into a sinkhole because the longer we look unstable to the rest of the world, the more we lose any favors we’ve acquired. We’ve done a lot of favors for other countries, but it’s very hard getting those countries to pay you back when they’re broke.

We do not want this man representing our interests overseas. I don’t believe he thinks Greenland is the only country up for sale. He’s a billionaire. If he throws money around, he gets what he wants. This makes him volatile, narcissistic, and unreliable (because he might go into a meltdown if he feels disrespected). That may be the choice for the majority of the American people again, but it is not the wish of any world leader at all, except for the ones we don’t like.

Remember The Cold War?

Do you really think that every president from Kennedy to George H.W. Bush would love seeing all their hard work undone? And what about CIA? H.W. Bush was Director of CIA before he was president. I would give an arm and a leg to know what he thought of Trump telling CIA employees that he trusted Russian intelligence more than them in front of the wall with all the stars commemorating lives lost. He didn’t die that long ago, so I know he was furious even if I didn’t get to see it.

We are going to elect a puppet and run our country into the ground. Trump has the potential to change the new world order by slipping money to Russia instead of Ukraine. Trump also likes to cozy up to China and North Korea, which in my estimation, is a bad thing.

Opinion pieces like mine come out on the web A LOT, because even if they’re writing for The Washington Post, they’re not stating anything but what they believe. But by stopping the 24 hour news cycle, we could have researchers and fact checkers on basic television again….. someone who could speak from an intelligent perspective on local and global issues. Give reporters more time….. not because they need it. We do.

This is too complicated for a one minute story. Hopefully, if anything does change, it will be to get someone like Will McAvoy on ABC, CBS, and NBC.

The problem right now is that half the country wouldn’t trust that archetype anymore, because The Fairness Doctrine has been gone so long……. and it has deteriorated our attention span for thorough understanding. We need to get in-depth issues on television, because few people have access to a top tier news source (not because they can’t, most of the time). Never let it escape your attention that really conservative “news outlets” don’t have a paywall, and both the New York Times and The Washington Post do.

If you would like to read the newspaper every day, you can do it for absolutely free. My public library gives me access. For people that have the means, most of the time it’s that paywalls are annoying and you can probably find something similar for free.

Sure you can. The Post and The Times have the best stable of journalists in the entire world, but YouTube is easier, right?

I also think that few people like to read as much as I do, so that’s another reason why YouTube clips are so popular and yet don’t actually get the point across because there’s no nuance. People are swallowing what Trump’s America looks like left and right, without even asking themselves if they like the food. If we do this again, we’re going to find out just how much we lack; Putin and Trump have designed an American Trojan Horse. Russia interfered with our election because they were invited.….. and everyone else stood around and said, “maybe if we built a big wooden badger?” There are too many of us standing around. If we all banded together, we’d be able to say this as well:

Will: America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.

Mackenzie: (holding up a sign in marker) But it could be.

Dooced

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever found (and kept)?

For Heather

Web design and development are the coolest things I’ve ever found (and kept) as special interests job-wise. That’s because of anything I’ve ever found, it has led to this moment. Lucrative in the beginning by being IT, possibly lucrative later on as well because I know how to express myself using those tools. I don’t think I have the capability to be a developer anymore, because there’s too much Python, MySQL, and JavaScript for me to keep up. When I started, it was only HTML and CSS. Toward the end, I learned how to read XML, but not write it. Therefore, I can still design, I’d just have to hire out the backend (things like making database connections if I had a content management system, pulling in APIs from other apps, etc.). I know how to edit a script to connect to a database with my username and password securely, but not all the ins and outs of getting the results from the database to appear in a web page. Although in terms of development, search engine optimization is very important, and I do know how to do that. And in fact, search engine optimization is why I’m still here and not using something like Dreamhost.

I have access to a community here that likes to read……. which, if you write 1500 to 3,000 words a day is pretty damn important.

Without getting interested in computers, I wouldn’t have been interested when my friends Joe and Luke said they were starting a linux server and did I want an account on it? I started writing on Darkstar, their (our) server. It connected to the web and you could get to it from the outside, but things didn’t start getting interesting until WordPress, the next big thing I found and kept. However, I didn’t have to transfer from Darkstar to WordPress directly. By that time, my job at University of Houston covered three things that propelled me here. The first was web design, getting used to publishing to a production server to make sure there were no issues before I went live (I caused a few disgruntled looks occasionally, but luckily I never broke a site designed to serve millions of people at once (oops, my bad…. should I leave a note?).

Design includes things like how the page looks, like the columns and where the ads fall and all that (I don’t control ad page breaks- sorry if they suck).

The second aspect of my job was development. Generally, when I was working on design, I’d do it in Photoshop/Illustrator first to get page layout. Development is being able to slice the images I just made and get them to fall the same way through an HTML interpreter. Believe it or don’t, that is a million times easier than page layout in Microsoft Word (amiright?).

The third aspect is content, at which I kick ass and take names. I doubt I’d be able to find all my articles now, because I worked for UH from 1999-2001. When I graduated from lab supervision to the web, I helped run a web zine (looked professional, but that’s basically what it was) called “Information Technology Daily News.” It is in no small part why I can write 1500-3,000 words every single day without blinking. I was trained like a journalist.

It was through that job that I interviewed Helen Thomas, unofficial dean of the White House press corps (the one who said “thank you, Mr. President” at the end of every gaggle). She and people like Sam Donaldson would get information and run to the phones, so I asked her how the Internet had changed all that with a 24-hour news cycle. In Helen’s own spicy way, she said basically it was a bitch on wheels. The question was possible through continuing legal education, but I got into the law school with a press pass.

Editor’s Note:

I didn’t want to see Helen Thomas at all…. eyeroll…. the Mia Hamm and Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson of news? I was dead. DEAD. Boss came through for me even though Helen Thomas was one of his least favorite people on earth (had a t-shirt that I thought was hilarious; it said “charter member of the vast right-wing conspiracy.” I remember when I could laugh at that…..) I cried when I saw Helen’s old press pass at the Newseum later that same year.).

The transition from Houston to DC in 2001 was when I really started getting popular, blog-wise. This is because my friend Chason, one of my staff at UH (I was sort of in charge of my area once the original supervisor of the zine left, but I didn’t have hire and fire privileges, just input.) introduced me to people like Anil Dash, Ernie Hsuing, and Wil Wheaton. He may have introduced me to Dooce as well, but I can’t remember how I found her. I just know it was right after she’d gotten “dooced” for her “Asian Database Administrator” comments, but hadn’t taken anything down yet. It was before Jon Armstrong, before Leta was just a twinkle in Heather’s imagination.

The path to Chason was the one directly to Chuck, the former Congressman (who was a dog), the Avon World Sales Leader, BYU dry humping and Sprite,™ and what to do about blowback (nothing).

I wouldn’t have gotten good at WordPress without her, and I miss her every day. People tell me that I sound like David Sedaris and the compliment is astounding….. meanwhile, “I am sparing you the DETAILS OF EARL’S ANGINA.” I wrote a piece on her the moment I found out she died. It was one of the worst moments of my life…. yet, it didn’t have anything to do with her at all. It’s that my virtual friend lost her battle with neurodivergence. I do not know her from Adam, because even though we are both OG, we never crossed paths.

I was not but a few years from a time in my life that I felt that way- not that I wanted to die or anything like that. It was having to choose between physically sick and mentally well every day of my life….. the relentlessness of managing a disease like that, not a particular want to escape from people….. And by that I mean dropping out of society, not my personal relationships. In short, I know what it’s like to be Dooce even if we’ve never been in the same room.

Painting my feelings as fact, she stopped checking the story she was telling herself, betraying heather and leaning on Dooce.™ I do not believe she was a narcissist. I believe that she was protecting her brain from injury with social masking. Blowback will do that to you, and why I believe she started focusing on products instead of her life. People understand “influencers.” They do not understand blogging and why it’s important.

For most of history, we have had to divine it. We had to search for signs of life in archaeology and ancient language. Blogs will eventually shed light into how we lived. The observers to history and culture will be valued in a way that they aren’t currently, like authors becoming famous posthumously.

Speaking of “posthumously,” the second worst moment during Heather’s death was seeing my stats spike as a result. It was a mixed bag of knowing my time has come and what to do about it. I am not the only blogger left standing, because Jenny (The Bloggess) and Wil (Wheaton) are still going strong. We are more of a group than we’re not, all writing through the painful moments in life and trying to make sense of them. It’s carving out our own niché while also being similar…. even the way Dooce, Jenny, and I use humor is simpatico.

That means there’s only four people that I can think of off the top of my head that have been left doing what I do. One of them is me, and one of them has passed away. I am not special because I am getting better. I am special because I am getting rare. I may be getting better, too, but that’s not the source in terms of why people read. I learned though Supergrover that I was talented, that I did have promise in a way that, if I played my cards right, I would be a success. Other rabid fans to come after her have said that I’m going to be a big deal. But it only took 10 years for me to realize that I had to have the same confidence in my writing that they did.

I can stand in 20 years of observations on society without that confidence. I can stand in the fact that I can write about a lot of topics, and people will still find it interesting. I am floored that people will wade through Android/Linux to find Zac, Bryn, Supergrover, Lindsay, Oliver (who is a dog), and the characters that are less prevalent, but no less important. It all adds to the fabric of my life, which gets richer with age as I shed my need for approval.

I get to own my story. I get to take up space.

Heather “From Whom All Blessings Flow” Armstrong is counting on me…… and now my nose is getting red, the first sign I’m about to cry. It’s okay to be wrecked, tears are not a problem….. which is what I do to correct the story I’m telling myself. I needed to hear desperately that the world needed me, and if I could have convinced her of the same, I would have made it a full-time job….. one in which I could go the distance, and we’d have been able to cross the finish line together.

So, when push comes to shove, Heather is the most important thing I’ve found and kept. First, I read her. Then, she moved out of her mind and into mine. I’ve tried to make it nice for her.

She has a pool.

The Moral Arc

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

“The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today I went to the reflecting pool for the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. I couldn’t hear well enough to distinguish speakers, but I’m going to use an idea from one of them and I wish I could give them credit. It made me stupid for a second as my internal computer lagged trying to process the moment.

They said, “the moral arc doesn’t bend itself.”

I was glad I was sitting down.

Raphael Warnock said much the same thing on Rachel Maddow the other night. He said, “pray with your lips and your legs.” I grew up with much the same idea… that if you’re going to pray, put on your shoes. You don’t feed people based on whether they deserve it, you feed people because they’re hungry. Then you pray about it and do it again.

Christianity at its best focuses on self-improvement, and social justice is a wonderful way to point groupthink in the right direction. You are bettering yourself with other people trying to better themselves through the common activity of standing up for minorities, both the ones you are and aren’t. Trauma has many basketball courts in one gym. All minorities have it. Jesus would have been subject to those same things, because of course he was Jewish, but his government wasn’t. The Sanhedrin was very much the governing body for Jews, but the Romans had control of everyone.

I wish more people would take in what a radical socialist Jesus was in his day and time. I wish more churches would take in how much their prosperity gospel is embarrassing. It is not what was ever intended by a group of radical Jews who went their own way. What people tend to forget if they aren’t interested in theology is that Christ would understand exactly nothing about what was said in the New Testament because they weren’t written down until 80 or 90 years after he died. The whole thing is a game of telephone. The Nicene Council approved international standards for the Bible, but Jesus still thought like a Jew. Jesus does not give a fuck about your abortion. I guarantee it. The Talmud is sane in this regard.

We were marching for all of it. Black lives matter. Female bodily autonomy. Black trans lives matter. Queer people matter.

Today, the moral arc of the universe did indeed bend toward justice.

But it didn’t bend itself.

I remembered that Laura was a preacher’s kid. What I did not realize is that both her parents are retired from the United Methodist Church, albeit a vastly different kind from my dad’s because I was in Texas and she was in New England. But, this woman catches jokes that no one else in the room would understand, and it cracks me up. I felt the same way about her mom. I said, “my dad was a pastor, but my mother was more the ‘smile and play the organ’ type.” Without missing a fucking beat, she says, “oh. That’s more typical….. as IF THEY HAD A CHOICE.” I died for a second. If my mother had been standing there, she also would have been struggling not to fall on the ground laughing.

It was great to feel at home with both of them right away, instantly translating from virtual to physical as if it meant nothing at all. I think people our age do it better than most, because we’ve spent more years chatting online than older people have, yet we’re still young enough to remember life before the Internet… we’re basically the first generation of people who have connected for years virtually because we could.

It would be impossible to keep up the rate with which we contact each other if we only had letters and phone calls. Therefore, the transition is much more difficult. It’s easy to continue a conversation when you can talk right up until you find each other in front of the Washington Monument.

Turns out, I can look forward to seeing more of Laura eventually because even though she lives in Boston, her aunt lives in Alexandria. So, it’s not impossible that we’ll run into each other, especially for days like this. In fact, Laura is only here for 12 hours, and her mom flew in yesterday. It made me feel like part of something very historic- I knew it was, obviously, but that it also meant a lot to all Americans because people had traveled so far for it.

I also didn’t hear about it, strangely enough, and I say that because I read the news all the time. Both Laura and her mom said that it was hard to find information about the event and that even they had to do some guesswork. All of us thought the crowd would be bigger, but it was great seeing everyone, including the Kings and the Sharptons.

Part of being there was just enjoying the moment, even when I left to get water and couldn’t find my way back to where we were sitting. I got lost in the moment when Sasha Baron Cohen was speaking about the collaboration between blacks and Jews. I did not know that it was historically black colleges that opened their doors to Jewish students when they were rejected from other American schools. It makes sense. Trauma sees trauma. Both have been tortured by the same people.

It’s the same type people that would torture me. Never in American history have any minorities been truly safe from persecution. Black people didn’t have rights in England, so why would they here? We forget the Founding Brothers were English just like we forget Jesus was Jewish. The Founding Brothers suffered under the weight of white supremacy Jesus and the country still won’t give it up. To the majority of Christians, what I am saying is blasphemy because the picture in their heads is as white as they are. The picture is every bit as infectious as the Coca-Cola Santa Claus, yet neither are real. The historical Jesus, in my head, looks like Reza Aslan (He’s the author of “Zealot,” about the historical Jesus).

Black people have held onto their Christian faith because they saw the real Jesus like no one else…… they saw him for who he really is.

They saw a man broken by the system who rose up and rescued himself, bringing us all with him. White supremacy will be the end of Christianity as Evangelicals drive more and more people away who leave church altogether instead of joining a liberal congregation fighting against the system. They’re so done with the hypocrisy that they just won’t come back unless a relative is singing, preaching, getting married, or dead.

If you insist on treating your very modern members like they’re failing at life because you’re making them terrified of ancient rules and regulations, you’re doing it wrong. Jesus was not a professional Christian superhero.

He was a man broken by the system, as all minorities are at one time or another.

The problem is when your church doesn’t talk about it.

11:00 on Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in America.

Not just by race, but also perspective. When you think of Jesus, you think of you. So, if you are the majority, so is he. You are upholding a system that has gone back thousands of years, new generations picking new people to hate. How Jesus’ message became so twisted is easy to put together when you look at it that way. As Reza Aslan said in a famous YouTube video, “God doesn’t hate gay people. You hate gay people.”

It makes the march come together, this feeling of solidarity. If we ban together and include women as minorities, the minority is the majority. We have protested in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Now it’s time to protest, and soon it will be time to vote. If you’re going to pray, put on your shoes.

The moral arc of the universe is long and bends toward justice…… but it doesn’t bend itself.

Commence Smiling, Part II

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

Now that I’ve eaten, I realized I would like to continue talking about nothing. Things that just make me happy whether I’m trying to answer a WordPress writing prompt or not. I can make anything into a happy thought given time and space, but here are the things that make it easy to love life.

  • Spring and autumn make life bearable. Neither deals in extreme temperature (yet). I love jacket weather because I don’t like summer clothes. I’m always too cold once I go inside.
  • If you are going to come to The District, it is best to come in Spring so that you can experience the monuments and the cherry blossoms at the same time. If you don’t come in the Spring, every tourist trap gift shop and museum will have something that looks or smells like a cherry blossom……. but not really. Not a digital reproduction in the world compares to standing next to a tree.
  • If you are going to come to the DMV, it helps to learn about us before you get here. There’s a culture to the Metro. There’s a culture to DC that everyone ignores because they’re just trying to hit tourist spots. Learn where politicians and reporters come to dine and just be quiet. Soak up information, don’t start fights with your political rival. You’ll learn more the less you say. Learn about gogo music, wings and mumbo sauce, Frederick Douglass’s house. Washington is covered in African American history, and especially as white people we should be silent observers. Their voices first, our empathy. You’ll learn more the less you say. Like chasing a story, it is your witness that matters, not your will.
  • Even trying to find wings and mumbo sauce (I like fried rice on the side, some people like fries) is a step in the right direction, as is going to have a half smoke at Ben’s Chili Bowl. Ben’s Chili Bowl was the African American History Museum before we actually got one. There are pictures on the wall that are just unbelievable, but you have to look. REALLY look. You have to read the captions that aren’t there, because white people do not have the right to ask those questions. Introduction to someone’s pain is an invitation-only event.
  • Washington is the only city for me that contains real connection to the Revolutionary War, and not because other cities didn’t participate. It’s that Washington is where we keep the memories. Washington is a treasure trove of news, stretching back to before the country began. I remember the first time I drove into Alexandria and read the charter. It was established 30-odd years before the Declaration of Independence I would imagine that Silver Spring is the same way, because Baltimore was established in 1729. We just kept creeping toward each other, which birthed The District and in a lot of ways, me.
  • I woke up the morning after my 24th birthday and the whole world had changed. I was still young enough to have a child’s reactions to it all. It was too formative not to count. Plus, it really helped when I moved to Portland when I learned that people were suspect of George W. and therefore me, so I just started telling people I was from DC….. at a time when that was the lesser of two evils. It was either that or to tell people that I understood their hesitation and their crap wouldn’t work on me because I’d had to put up with him way longer than they had.
  • Molly Ivins made me happy because she put words in my mouth that I sorely needed. It was good to make fun of him, and she knew all the best ways. He WAS born with a silver foot in his mouth. He DIDN’T compare to someone like Al Gore, a successful senator by his 40th birthday when on W.’s 40th birthday he realized he probably had a drinking problem. Molly didn’t think that the loyal opposition was wrong all the time, necessarily. She just believed in picking the smartest players in the game. Bush’s only play was that his vice was smarter than he was….. who was also evil. Molly made dealing with all of that better. Molly saw that my life was hard and why.
  • Shane Harris makes me happy. When I’m not sitting in the middle of the Spy Museum with six books open on the floor, I could on him. He’s the National Security desk at the Washington Post, so even though I’m not working in his time period, I learn how intelligence says things to the news. How do I get to the real story when all we get on the news is “senior intelligence officials indicate” and not how they got there.
  • Jen Psaki makes me happy because she and her department handle news as well, like hearing “White House officials indicate” and not how they got there. It’s all connected, because intelligence is given to policymakers. I have found that the more I research, the more I get bored and then find an AHA! moment. I am not chasing James Bond around town. The reason true spy stories seem so exciting is that the real story is often too boring to film. Just trust me. But when you hit a gold mine, you really, really hit one. If you live abroad, try it in your own country, especially if you’d like to come here. The easiest path is to tell CIA information that they need. If you get a job working for us where you live, you might end up here quicker than applying for a visa. Your mileage may vary. See web site for details. No promises. But if you’re already interested in spy shit, anyway, it’s a good move. I promise that you cannot make yourself love it. But that’s for operations. They also need just as much support staff as everyone else. My cousin James painted offices. Since Foster and James worked for CIA, I would have been involved somehow, too, because I was taken with Foster’s story from the time I was born. However, since my genetics dealt me a losing hand in the mental health department, I never tried. But like most people the right age to have obsessed over The West Wing, it would take dragging me away. I couldn’t be involved in intelligence, but they don’t have those restrictions at State, which is often the same job from a public and private perspective. It all fits together, it’s all one puzzle, they all play a role. The only thing I’m not interested in is military, because I want defense to be clever. I watch Doctor Who. I have standards.
  • Doctor Who makes me so happy. I am proud to be part of a tradition that has lasted decades. I am proud that they taught me to love the whole world at once, that every person has a story, and they all matter.
  • It makes me happy that I have proven my story does matter, because I write it exactly the way I want, say exactly what I want, and people find it interesting. I do not have to be less. You have allowed me to be my whole self. Thank you.

Cross Post from Facebook

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I saw a meme that really made me think. Something about “do not use Facebook for news.” While I understand the sentiment, I disagree with the principle. There is no way I would have time to find all the articles that people find interesting on my own. That being said, I only click on the ones from reputable sources. I make it a point to know which ones they are. I also subscribe to The New York Times and The Washington Post so that I don’t hit a paywall when links are shared. Basically, my friends have the capability to aggregate articles that interest me, liberal or conservative. I read both views to understand the issue all the way around, or at least I used to, when there were two sides to the story.

For instance, there’s not two sides to the story when people insist that racist/homophobic/transphobic bigots AND protesters for civil rights are very fine people and we should get along despite our differences.

As I have read before, “still being a bigot in this day and age generally means you’ve lived through every iteration of the Civil Rights Movement and learned nothing.” Both sides of the story are for political ideas like how to spend government money, or how to implement a program so that it is run efficiently with the least waste of resources.

In the past, I’ve read a lot of William F. Buckley, George Will, and William Safire. It has been an interesting twist of fate that I have returned to George Will. Not only is he aware of the problems with the cult of Trump, he also writes eloquently about baseball, which puts him up on my list of writing heroes by a bigger margin than most. 😛

On the other end of the spectrum, I have read every single David Halberstam book ever written- well, technically, I am in the middle of reading the last one he wrote himself, “The Coldest Winter,” about the Korean War….. where he writes about the horror and still manages to infuse snarky, sometimes dark humor….. which I am all about.

Still deciding on reading truly the last thing he ever wrote, “The Glory Game: How the 1958 NFL Championship Changed Football Forever,” because he was never able to finish it. A horrific car accident killed him in 2007 when he went to meet with a source. I’m waffling because it was finished by Frank Gifford, and I don’t know how the change in style will affect me, as well as knowing it will be the last thing I ever read with his fingerprint.

All of these people have written for the Post, the Times, or both. When you are paying for news, you are paying for genius. It is not fair to complain about paying them. People seem to have problems with not everything on the Internet being free, when in the past, people would pore over their newspapers with breakfast. Would any of these writers, and I’m going to include Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, been able to do what they do effectively without money? Should they be forced to use their own when chasing down a story?

In terms of The Washington Post, there are writers now that are every bit as talented as the ones I’ve mentioned, such as Shane Harris and Greg Miller. I would pay my subscription fee directly to them if I could, and I am sure there are plenty more writers at both newspapers that deserve mentioning, but these two are the ones that came to mind immediately.

When it comes to reliable news, just pay. You did before the Internet was invented, you should do it now. To quote The Washington Post tagline, “democracy dies in darkness.” In 2020, how can you argue?

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Unintended Consequences

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 9 Comments

News just broke that Jussie Smollett has been indicted on felony charges for giving a false statement to the police regarding his racist and homophobic attack. The two men that were arrested previously claimed that Smollett paid them to attack him because Smollet had arranged hate letters to be sent to himself that contained “a white substance” and they were not getting enough attention by local and national media.

To a complete outsider and armchair psychiatrist, this looks like some kind of mania, so I’m going to go easy on him. I have a huge amount of sympathy for doing the wrong thing while not being able to see the world for what it really is. But having sympathy is not the same as thinking that he shouldn’t have consequences. Consequences are the only thing that really work in terms of forcing self-reflection.

Just because my actions created emotional issues and his created legal ones don’t have much weight with me. They are two sides of the same disastrous coin…. well, legal trouble creates emotional trauma, so in this case, the coin has landed on its edge and Smollet is looking down.

The main reason I believe this can be chalked up to mental illness is that he didn’t play this out to the end. Being such a public figure only increases the chances that he would get caught, because the case is automatically more high profile.

And past that, there are the consequences for the queer community at large, not that Smollett ever signed up to be any kind of poster boy, but to me, the unintended consequence is possibly less enlightened people regarding the plight of LGBT people will say that things in the United States aren’t that bad. This attack was rigged, so maybe others are, too.

I would argue that violence against gay men and transgender people is worse than it is for lesbians, statistically, because lesbians fly under the radar, due to the fact that most men think we’re cute and harmless, playtoys for their fantasies and not individuals with agency. There’s also the demeaning and insulting trope I run across frequently, that it’s cheating for straight women to sleep with other men, but women? That’s not cheating at all. That’s an opportunity.

I will never forget one of Kathleen’s friends taking us to a bar where the friend’s parents were drinking and the dad asked us to kiss in front of him. First of all, eww. Second of all, that’s your daughter’s friends. I wasn’t angry because he was drunk, but I was eager to leave because I was extremely nauseous.

So, my hope is that people do not write off emotional and physical violence toward our community, because it happens all the time. ALL THE TIME. We don’t need to make up threats, they’re already here. And with a conservative federal senate and even more conservative state congresses, the law isn’t often on our side. Before the indictment came out, I was reticent to believe that a black gay man would get a fair shake from the Chicago Police, anyway.

From what I have seen, the investigation looks fair, but surely you can see where I’m coming from based on past history.

It will be interesting to hear what Smollett has to say when he is ready to give a statement. I am willing to forgive him, but not to let him off the hook. Apologies must come with changed behavior. Otherwise, the apology is null and void. The intended and unintended consequences are going to be a ripple effect for a long time to come.

What happens when the next queer person is attacked? It’s only a matter of time. It could be happening right now. Are they going to be believed? Or will the echo of Smollett’s attack create more scrutiny than before?

I want to know that when I say something happened to me, that I will be given the benefit of the doubt immediately.

And so do all my brothers and sisters.

Personal and Global

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My gut is telling me I should write something. My mind is saying, “I got nothin.’ This is because so much has happened that the pictures from each event are swirling so fast that I can’t grab one long enough to describe it. As one Tumblr user said, “do you know how much braining it takes to make the words go?” I’m not sure I’ve ever identified more with any statement. Ever. I am much better one-on-one, so I’ve been writing a lot of letters… believe it or not, there are actually some things I won’t vomit all over the Internet. I know it’s hard to imagine. I mean, I’m so shy and retiring when it comes to talking about myself. But right now, so many things are internal that I literally can’t force them from the river that runs underneath my skin into my fingers.

What I can say is that my birthday was full of joy at having my family here to celebrate. It’s been years since I had a birthday party with my dad and sister. What’s even better than that is my sister is the good kind of lobbyist, so I see her almost as frequently as I saw her when we both lived in the same city. Now that Congress is winding down, I won’t see her again until possibly October and definitely in November, but it was great that this month’s work trip coincided with the transition from 40 to 41.

Movies and television about the CIA are so fascinating to me that I love that my age is the same as George H.W. Bush’s presidential number. No comment on how I’ll feel about 43. In this vein, I would like to skip directly from age 44 to 46.

Interesting sidenote about CIA television. Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime Video begins in Lebanon, so I’ve been able to look at amazing pictures from the real country (it wasn’t actually filmed there) thanks to Hayat’s upbringing. For those of us just joining us, I rent a room from a Lebanese family, complete with photos in country throughout most of the house. Because of them, Lebanon is on my bucket list- too beautiful to ignore.

I will just have to find a big, strong man to accompany me, because I’m a feminist and I’m also not stupid enough to ignore the rules in a Muslim country. Lebanon is not as strict as some of the others, but I’m not taking any chances. Because I’m such an introvert, I’d probably be the most comfortable in a burqa, and I’m not kidding. I’m a writer and observer. Not so much with the talking to strangers, and although I am generally delightful in conversation, for the most part it is me overcoming my natural shyness and jumping into The Leslie Lanagan Show.™ You don’t generally get the real me until we’re at a secluded table, cups of coffee between us… and even then, we have to have known each other a while. I don’t feel entirely comfortable with people until I’m assured that they know the real me, and for better or for worse, love me anyway. But no one I’ve ever come across dislikes The Leslie Lanagan Show.™ It comes from years and years of practice. Fake it til you make it and all that comes with it.

It is probably for this very reason that I spend so much time alone, because I want to spend my time as an authentic person, able to walk around in my own gargantuan inner landscape. I think mostly about where I want to go from here, not career-wise, necessarily, but who I want to be as a person. As my anxiety goes down, my capacity for love goes up. It’s easy to love people who love you back. Hard to love the irritable, the angry, and the unknown.

My authentic self wants the capability to love the world where it is, how it is… and at the same time, so angry about the things that divide us as a country and as citizens of the world.

For instance, it is inconceivable that people are having trouble believing that Bob Woodward’s book, Fear: Trump in the White House is just a basic hatchet job, when this is the same reporter that broke the Watergate story and has also covered seven other presidents in addition to Trump and Nixon. For instance, my favorite Woodward book is Obama’s Wars, where he doesn’t even blink in his critique of the president, and presents some information that tempers unfettered adulation, such as his own Syrian blink of 2012-13. No president is above reproach, and while I admire Barack Obama greatly, and would do basically anything he asked, that does not transfer into thinking he is a perfect person. No one ever is. We are all angels & demons, depending on the choices we make and when.

Trump… opens with staffers stealing things off the president’s desk, knowing that if the papers aren’t there, he’ll just forget about the issue… and one of them involves instigating conflict with North Korea. I am not kidding when I say that almost literally, the bombs start dropping in chapter one.

So, to discredit a reporter and non-fiction writer who has an amazing reputation is infuriating to an enormous degree. If anyone is capable of telling this story, it is Bob Woodward.

Write it down.

So, to put it mildly, my thoughts have moved past the personal into the global, which is probably what is driving my interest in intelligence-gathering. One of the points that Woodward makes, which is very relevent at this time, is that the FBI and CIA have different standards for espionage. This is because CIA evidence is rarely used in court cases, and “the Feebs'” evidence often is. Therefore, vetting in the CIA doesn’t have to be quite as high, because it does not have to meet the “beyond a reasonable doubt” or “preponderance of evidence” requirement- the former in criminal cases, the latter in civil litigation.

This, of course, bit CIA in the ass during the WMD years, which has, in turn, made them even more cautious now… in the words of Martha Stewart, “a very good thing.” Now I’m just pleased with myself. I made a complete sentence using CIA and Martha Stewart. #touchme

But, of course, it’s not just thinking about the world that has me interested in intel. I am just one of those people who likes Knowing Stuff.™ To be in a room full of journalists or government workers is being invited to sit at the cool kids’ table for me… the reason I know DC is where I belong.

One of the great joys of my life is when Dan and I meet for lunch, and I get to walk her back to her office in Foggy Bottom. I’ll let you guess what that means. More fun to figure it out on your own. However, I will say she’s not a spook. But she’s sure as hell smart enough to be. Also, because she’s so small, it tickles me to think of her back in her Army days, running around in full battle rattle. I have no doubt that one of her main strengths was running right at the enemy and knocking them off-balance. 😛 (Oh, am I ever going to catch hell for that one…)

Now I’m back to thinking about the personal, all the light my friends bring into my life. I am one lucky, lucky 41-year-old. I’m not sure how the next trip around the sun can top this one, but I’m sure going to try. It seems easier when I feel like I’m literally lifted off the ground, the warmth of friendship holding me aloft.

Shelanagans, etc.

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

As predicted, I’m going to miss Walk-Up Wednesday at the African American Museum of History and Culture. Time, again, has gotten away from me. I even set reminders and they didn’t help. I woke up later than I usually do (0700 as opposed to 0500), and for some reason have the urgency to nest rather than to people. Had I not waited until the last minute, I would have been excited to see the museum, but there was always another Wednesday until now. Perhaps I will wait until someone in my family comes to visit so that we have something touristy to do together that I haven’t done already.

I have found that I am somewhat of an anomaly in D.C., because I’ve met few people around here that are willing to brave the crowds of tourists and would rather stay in their bubbles than constantly “staycation.” In fact, I’ve had roommates in the past that have never been to The Mall for the fireworks on Fourth of July even though they’ve lived here their whole lives. My excuse is that I just haven’t been here long enough to do everything, but it will happen.

One of the reasons I love D.C. so damn much is that it is a wonderland of free stuff to do… not that I’m opposed to paying for good entertainment, but why? The government has seen to it that I get a marvelous education in all sorts of subjects for the cost of a Metro ticket. The only museum that actually cost money that I’m desperate to see is the Newseum, which I saw in 2001 but has had a complete overhaul since. My greatest memory of the old building is standing in front of Helen Thomas’ press pass with tears in my eyes.

A few years before, I’d gotten to meet my hero when she came to University of Houston for a continuing legal education course at the law school, and I went as a reporter for our Information Technology newsletter. I asked her how being a reporter had changed in the age of the Internet, and she told me it was a great question and expounded on the 24-hour news cycle. My hero, badass reporter, told me I asked a great question. Touch me.

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My favorite story that she told involved a Halloween party at The White House, where a pilot tried to crash his plane intentionally on the grounds to kill President Clinton. Luckily, his plan failed miserably, but she said she’d never forget thinking that if he’d succeeded, Vice President Gore would have had to take the Oath of Office dressed as Frankenstein.

My second favorite story involved President Reagan. He invited Helen to take part in breaking ground for the Lebanese Culture Center (or something like it- can’t remember exactly). Then, after it was over, Reagan told her that as she dug the first hole, he could hear the ghosts of all the former presidents saying PUSH HER IN!!!

The first time I came to Washington (to visit), I was in second grade and eight years old. Though I loved The White House, I am infinitely grateful that I’ve come back as an adult so that I can better appreciate everything the city has to offer. For instance, I learned recently that Gore Vidal is buried here, so that’s my next cemetery trip. Perhaps writing advice will come to me by osmosis.

At this point, I’m willing to try anything.

It’s almost time to start writing the review for The 11:05 Murders, and I still owe Finn Bell an Amazon review for Dead Lemons (Finn, if you’re reading this, I haven’t forgotten). My morning coffee has turned into my afternoon coffee for this very reason. Trying to stay sharp despite the medication I’m taking is not effortless. I read somewhere that Lexapro has an effect on cognitive function and thought, great. Something else to make me dumber. I really don’t need help in that department. I also try to stay away from Klonopin unless I’m really distressed because it makes me sleepy. Perhaps that’s the point. It doesn’t solve anxiety so much as make you tired enough you don’t care you’re anxious.

Speaking of which, I need to read Dead Lemons again, and not because of the review. There’s a great therapist character in it with solid advice that I’d like to go back over. I’d tell you what it is, but I want you to buy the book.

Technically, I want you to buy all the books I mention, because then I’ll be able to discuss them with people who already know the end and I’m not responsible for spoiling the whole thing.

A great discussion about a book might make up for not going to the museum.

Right now, though, Brian O’Hare and Finn Bell are counting on me, so perhaps waiting is for the best. My sister and Pri Diddy are both coming to town soon, and who knows what “shelanagans” we’ll create. I would stay tuned if I were you.

I know I will.