Notices by Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)

After a day of not seeing the (very partial here) eclipse due to cloud cover, I'm looking forward to staying up late to not see the Perseids due to both cloud cover and light pollution.

Former SPLC CFO arrested for overseeng payments to informants embedded inside white supremacy groups. https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/12/politics/exclusive-splc-fraud-cfo-charges?Date=20260812

The government is portraying this as a fraud against donors, which is absurd. As a donor, this is exactly the sort of investigative work I expected SPLC to use my money for.

@AnarchoNinaWrites I had assumed he was was building one of those pits filled will brightly colored plastic balls that you drop your toddler in while shopping at Ikea.

Also, the headlines saying Trump was hiding in a "catering cart" are a bit confusing/misleading. He boarded the plane via one of those containers that they drive up to airplane doors to load and unload things like catering carts. Not in one of the little trollies that flight attendants push down the asile when passing out meals.

It’s worth noting how extremely unusual this is. A US president’s movements are almost impossible to keep secret, not least because they’re accompanied by a press entourage and very prominent security and communications details. Even in the presence of threats or sensitive meetings, they don’t generally even try to do something like this. This suggests the threat was considered very serious.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/us/politics/trump-plane-ruse.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4lA.Hk94.-JNuzgyxKCpz

One thing that wasn’t clear is whether the decoy VC-25A, flying as AF1, carried the staff and WH press corps for the (at risk) flight from Turkey to the UK.

He's in the new emolumental 747-800, with one of the old VC-25A accompanying as backup.

Hmm, Trump just departed LAX en route Las Vegas. I wonder if he's planning to crash the Voting Village.

@Nshrubs @ai6yr @smellsofbikes @blogdiva When the new (2 dose, but lifetime) shingles vaccine came out, I was the first in line to get it (coincidentally had just aged into eligibility for it).

The second dose knocked me out of commission for a couple days (a bit worse than the worst covid vax side effects I've experienced), but completely worth it compared with shingles.

@Nshrubs @ai6yr @smellsofbikes @blogdiva My mom got shingles and described it as the worst illness she had ever experienced.

@heidilifeldman And the possibility that the fraudulent prosecution of an innocent bystander was directed by the president himself, for entirely political purposes, would have been relentlessly investigated at a Watergate level.

@heidilifeldman Hearn may have a difficult case here, but it's worth forcing ourselves to remember that not long ago, this ALONE would have been sufficient to force Pirro to fall on her sword and resign, be fired, or get impeached.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@andreamm/117010585163840329

Welcome to the future, where the TV volume is controlled by "the corporate office".

Sen. Joe McCarthy notoriously smeared those who invoked their rights before his committee as “fifth amendment communists”. I suppose Rand Paul will talk about “fifth amendment scientists” now.

Reminder: Telling people - especially strangers - who are being harassed online to "just ignore it" is, at best, not at all helpful.

Been completely dead on Amtrak in NJ (train WiFi works though)

In the absence of any actual information, I’m going to baselessly but confidently assert that rogue voting machines are using satellites to hack the T-Mobile network.

36 years ago, on January 15, 1990, a software bug in the 4ESS switch triggered a cascade of failures that took down most of the AT&T long distance telephone network for about nine hours.

It was treated as a national crisis. There were investigations and task forces, both internal and external, and detailed findings were published and scrutinized. The case is still studied today in networking and software engineering courses.

Today's national T-Mobile failure will be forgotten by next week.

What's the difference between 1990 and today? AT&T in 1990 was no longer a monopoly; there was competition in long distance, so some calls got through, just as calls went through today on T-Mobile's competetors.

The main difference was expectation. 1990 was still the era of "5 9's" of reliability (99.999% uptime). Telephone services were simply not expected to fail.

We expect phone (and Internet) service today to be MOSTLY reliable, but we're now conditioned not to expect it all the time.

Major T-Mobile outage, started earlier in Western ststes, seems to have just hit NYC metro area.