Ballad of a shirtless man

From what I've been able to gather about the guy and his works, life is too short to spend much time listening to Alex Jones, so I haven't bothered with him. Based on what I see of him from social media, he seems to be an angry guy who likes (a) conspiracy theories, and (b) to be photographed without his shirt on, even though he appears to be pretty tubby. I will add that nearly every time I see something about him, it's because a lefty has called it to my attention.

But something is happening here, and you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?

All but one of the major content platforms have banned the American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, as the companies raced to act in the wake of Apple’s decision to remove five podcasts by Jones and his Infowars website.

Facebook unpublished four pages run by Jones for “repeated violations of community standards”, the company said on Monday. YouTube terminated Jones’s account over him repeatedly appearing in videos despite being subject to a 90-day ban from the website, and Spotify removed the entirety of one of Jones’s podcasts for “hate content”.

Facebook’s removal of the pages – the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones Page, the Infowars Page and the Infowars Nightly News Page – comes after the social network imposed a 30-day ban on Jones personally “for his role in posting violating content to these pages”.

Is there evidence that Jones has become a more effective propagandist? Has his following increased? If his stuff was okay before, why isn't it now?

This is dumb. If the argument is this guy is too dangerous to have his stuff out there for public consumption, banning him is the best way possible to ensure he'll get even a larger audience. We've known this since the Garden of Eden, which was also well known for shirtless dudes -- forbidden fruit is always going to have an audience. What does Alex Jones know that "they" don't want you to know? This is Conspiracy Theory 101.

It's not a First Amendment issue, because the government isn't stopping Jones from speaking. If you want that sort of thing, you need to check with Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. Still, I'm not crazy about the trendline. As long as I'm free to continue ignoring Alex Jones, I'm free. Once we are told his nonsense cannot be considered in any context, we have a much larger problem than whatever he's talking about. Based on what I know, Alex Jones is a bad dude. It's always a bad idea to make a bad dude a martyr.

Every 1's a Winner

Girls just want to have fun:

A 25-year-old federal contract worker in Georgia is facing federal charges for leaking classified materials to the media, the Department of Justice says.

Reality Leigh Winner, of Augusta, was arrested by the FBI on June 3 and appeared in federal court on June 5. She remains in federal custody pending a hearing scheduled for June 8.

She was charged with gathering, transmitting or losing defense information that could have been damaging to the U.S. She is accused of taking a top secret National Security Agency document, copying it and mailing it to a news organization believed to be The Intercept, NBC News reported, though the organization was not named in the federal court documents.

It's apparently not that difficult to get a top-secret security clearance. An image of Reality:

Likes her selfies

 The news reports I've read indicate the feds have her pretty much dead to rights. The evidence available indicates she's a Bernie supporter and hates Trump. No surprise there. She's also a bit into self-negation:

Weasel and the white girl's cool

But perhaps my favorite part of this whole sorry saga -- it's pretty clear that The Intercept, which published the documents that Winner apparently stole, actually made it pretty easy for the feds to track down Winner:

The government was not aware Winner leaked the document until a news outlet contacted government officials for comment on an upcoming report based on a document they believed to be classified. After receiving and reviewing a copy of the document, the government began an investigation.

"The U.S. Government Agency examined the document shared by the News Outlet and determined the pages of the intelligence reporting appeared to be folded and/or creased, suggesting they had been printed and hand-carried out of a secured space," the affidavit read.

Essentially, the Intercept gave their source up for nothing. Given Glenn Greenwald's experiences, especially with regard to Edward Snowden, you have to have to wonder what's up with that. My guess? If you spend all your time looking at the SJW Bernie Girl, you don't pay attention to the other actors. If you think the game is on, you're likely right, but we're still pretty deep into the funhouse. Reality, baby!

Palm Sunday Bombs

Although we are often reminded of such things from the pulpit, the history of Christianity has been filled with martyrs. We now have more in Egypt, following two bombings of Coptic churches yesterday:

Egypt's president called for a three-month state of emergency Sunday after at least 44 people were killed and more than 100 more were injured in two Palm Sunday suicide attacks at Coptic Christian churches, each carried out by the ISIS terror group.

Sunday's first blast happened at St. George Church in the Nile Delta town of Tanta, where at least 27 people were killed and 78 others wounded, officials said.

Television footage showed the inside of the church, where a large number of people gathered around what appeared to be lifeless, bloody bodies covered with papers.

A second explosion – which Egypt’s Interior Ministry says was caused by a suicide bomber who tried to storm St. Mark's Cathedral in the coastal city of Alexandria -- left at least 17 dead, and 48 injured. The attack came just after Pope Tawadros II -- leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria -- finished services, but aides told local media that he was unharmed.

We prayed for our brethren yesterday during our own Palm Sunday Mass. I'm glad we did, but I wonder how much it really meant. We don't have much to worry about in our sanctuaries -- the bombers don't come to our suburban churches and while we name many of our churches in honor of those who paid the ultimate price for the faith, we don't spend much time thinking about the meaning of those sacrifices, even during Holy Week. Perhaps we should.