National, Regional and Local News

[ti-amie]

[ponchi101]

Sorry. I got lost. Who are these women? WHAT are these women?

[ti-amie]

Sorry. I got lost. Who are these women? WHAT are these women?

Actors.

[ti-amie]

Lauren Camera @laurenonthehill

There are thousands of meme queens across the country. Let me introduce you to another one – my former best friend.
We grew up together, were inseparable throughout high school, drove to school together every morning, went on vacations with each other’s families. Sometimes i went to church with her family and sometimes she came to church with mine. We were in each other’s weddings.

She graduated from a good college and went into finance. She didn’t like it much. She moved to California with her husband, went to nursing school and became a delivery nurse. She loved it.

She had a baby, and then had two more. But she had a difficult time finding reliable childcare, and not being near any family, she found it increasingly impossible to juggle work and children.

She left her job and began selling women’s clothing through LulaRoe – one of those pyramid scheme-like companies that’s very good at duping SAHMs into opening their own online boutique.

As often happens with childhood friends, we drifted apart. This happened increasingly quickly after she moved to California. But as is also the case with childhood best friends, we stayed in touch via text, especially for birthdays and at holidays.

She has never been active politically, but the 2016 election stirred something in her. She proudly posted that she was part of the “Never Clinton” cabal. But she never posted about being pro-Trump. In fact, I don’t think she liked him much at the time, or even voted for him.

It happened very slowly at first. The Facebook and Instagram posts were only semi-offensive and far and few between. I had the privilege of being able to shrug it off. Besides, I had a lot going on too – a new baby and demanding job, thousands of miles away.

But then came the pizzagate posts, the posts about the Clintons, Obamas, Gates and others running a pedophile ring, eating babies. Lots of pro-life posts and warnings about child trafficking.

Whatever was happening to her intensified dramatically in March and April of 2019, around the time that the coronavirus shuttered schools and businesses across the U.S.

The posts became angry, racist and more and more bizarre. Photos “proving” Michelle Obama is a man, explainers about Bill Gates trying to change our DNA through vaccinations, full on COVID-19 denial.

Suddenly she was professing to be a patriot fighting for our country, began worshiping President Trump and reposting memes disparaging Joe Biden, his family and other Democrats. What threw me off the most was just how angry and mean she was being.

I’ve always tried to maintain a firewall between my career as a reporter and the politics of family and friends. That’s something I’m actively reassessing after what’s transpired these last 10 months.

I flagged almost everything she posted to Instagram as false through the site’s reporting system, but never confronted her personally. Her account was temporarily frozen a handful of times, so I know others were reporting her too.

She always came back, meaner, angrier and more sure that she was on the right side of history.

Things came to a head for me personally on Friday, when she posted memes supporting the rioters and the insurrection, posted images of a militarized Washington, DC, and made references to future, imminent attacks.

I messaged her that what she was posting was disgusting and dangerous, that this city is my family’s home and that the person I knew her to be was better than this.

I wasn’t expecting an apology or a change in heart. I didn’t have any grand illusions of rekindling a friendship and driving off into the sunset for a girls weekend.

But I certainly wasn’t expecting the wrath of hate the spewed my way within three seconds of messaging her.

“Just you wait,” she fired back. “I know exactly what’s happening. Sad you don’t.”

“And don’t for one second say you know [me],” she wrote. “I tried to keep you but there was just nothing left between us. I’m sorry you have no idea what’s happening but your precious Biden will be behind bars.”

“Did you know the inauguration is canceled? Did you know the insurrection act was signed 1/9? Do you know how many assassination attempts have been made on OUR president in the last 4 years? Do you know that the riots were planned by BLM AND ANTIFA?”

“Did you know that the election was stolen by the Vatican and 5 other huge key players?”

“You think your [SIC] a journalist but you are just as brainwashed as the people watching MSM.”

“STAY HOME. DONT GO TO WORK. KEEP YOUR KIDS HOME. YOUR CITY IS GOING TO BE A WARZONE.”

There’s more, but you get the idea. I didn’t argue. I knew immediately how far gone she was. I wrote, “I love you,” and then she blocked me on all social media.

If you’re reading this and you think you don’t have friends and family this is happening to, I promise you’re wrong. Check in with the people you love, make sure they’re doing ok.

I also want to thank reporters like
@BrandyZadrozny @oneunderscore__and others, whose meticulous reporting on the dark corners of the Internet is something everyone should have been giving much more attention.

I don’t know how the Biden administration solves this. I really don’t. I don’t know if they can. Is it even their problem to solve? But hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and I will always hope to get my friend back.

[ti-amie]

Anyone who watches House Hunters is familiar with the couple with 2-3 children looking for more space. The husband will invariably want someplace where the neighbors can't look over the fence and see what they're doing, a place isolated and away from too many people. Sometimes the wife goes along with this and sometimes she will say she wants to be able to talk to other mothers and have her children interact with other kids. Many times the women lose the fight.

I know these things are scripted and that the couple has to actually have a house in contract but before I stopped watching a lot I saw this more and more.

It's a social and mental health issue but with the US health system overwhelmed because of C19 the social isolation many of these women experience is not at the top of the to do list.
It's been years in the making.

[JazzNU]

It's been a long month, and it's not even over.

[ti-amie]

[ponchi101]

It would be the best and fastest way.
But...
I had once a car accident, in which I was rear-ended. Totally not my fault. So the insurance company for the other person gave me a card like that. Which, if I wanted to take the money from an ATM, charged me for the withdrawal, and if wanted to pay stuff, did too. So I really never got ALL my money. The insurance company kept some, VISA kept some.
You know, the scum of the earth. Do that to 50 million Americans and you can see that one dollar here, another there, and they will make a killing, for basically doing nothing.

[ti-amie]

It's really bad. Send folks a check. Or direct deposit.

[dave g]

Hmmm. Mine came in the mail as a check. Do we have any verification of other people getting their stimulus money in VISA cards?

[ti-amie]

[ti-amie]

[ponchi101]

(Don't jump to conclusion, P, don't jump to conclusions...)

[ti-amie]

(Don't jump to conclusion, P, don't jump to conclusions...)

Big Internet outages hit the East Coast, causing issues for Verizon, Zoom, Slack, Gmail
Internet outages and slowed services hit many areas of the East Coast just as the work and school day was ramping up Tuesday.

By
Rachel Lerman
Jan. 26, 2021 at 1:33 p.m. EST

People across the East Coast were having trouble accessing core Internet services Tuesday morning, just as they were logging on for work and school.

Users reported trouble loading Gmail, Slack and Zoom — apps that have become necessities to keep work-from-home life running smoothly during the coronavirus pandemic. Downdetector, which tracks reports of outages, showed widespread issues with Verizon, Google, Zoom, YouTube, Slack, Amazon Web Services and others Tuesday just before noon.

On Twitter, which many still were able to access, people reported they were seeing issues with their Verizon Fios Internet service. Verizon’s customer support team said on Twitter Tuesday that a fiber had been cut in Brooklyn, which could possibly account for some of the issues. The support account on Twitter quickly became inundated with customers asking why their internet was slow and bumpy.

It was not immediately clear what was causing the outages, though many people pointed to issues with their Verizon Fios service. Amazon Web Services’ status page showed its service, which provides computing power to large swaths of the Internet, was experiencing an issue with an external provider. On its status page, it said that it is “investigating connectivity issues with an internet provider, mainly affecting the East Coast of the United States, outside of the AWS Network.” Slack and Google said there were no issues with their own services.

Verizon and Zoom did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The outage also disrupted school districts’ online teaching programs, which have become essential in the past year.

In Northern Virginia, the outages wreaked havoc in online classrooms, bringing the virtual school day to a standstill. In Alexandria City Public Schools, which serves 16,000 and is currently offering online-only instruction, many teachers could not dial into Zoom to lead their Tuesday afternoon classes.

And in Fairfax County Public Schools, whose 186,000 students make it the largest school system in the state, students were unable to log into virtual lessons, according to a tweet from the school division. Like neighboring Alexandria, Fairfax is pursuing 100 percent remote learning.

“FCPS is aware that many people in our region are experiencing internet outages,” the school’s Twitter account wrote. “We will provide updates as we know more.”

Prince William County Public Schools in Virginia tweeted just after noon Tuesday that it is “aware of Internet connection problems with Verizon FIOS impacting students and staff.”

Hannah Natanson contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... ast-coast/

[ti-amie]

I'll say this. A fiber cut in Brooklyn would not (should not) affect the east coast down to Miami as this does per this info from Thousand Eyes.
https://www.thousandeyes.com/outages/

A cut in Brooklyn sounds like a contractor who didn't go through the proper channels for his/her permit. Remember the Nashville bombng?
I'm not saying this is the same but knocking out a major hub somewhere could cause this.