Double-secret probation.

Kevin is still on probation. After a nipping incident Monday morning, I was ready to surrender him to a shelter, but a very nice trainer saw my Facebook post on it, dropped everything and came right over. She worked with him a while and taught us some tricks to get some manners into his head. Her assessment: A very smart dog, but stubborn, and virtually untrained. We’re working on Sit/Stay, and he’s doing pretty well. Still to come: Down, Shut Up and No Goddamn Dogs on the Bed. But I have faith in the little bastard, who has many good traits besides cuteness — a prancing walk that’s fun to watch, 99 percent housebroken, walks well on the leash for a lunatic and a lotta personality.

Fingers crossed for Kevin, who may yet need a good lawyer.

Sometimes my morning rambles take me past the Indiana Policy Review, the right-wing organization in the Hoosier state, which the editorial-page editor of my former employer departed to found and run sometime in the late 80s/early 90s, can’t remember. They exist to spread ideas, etc., because there’s a real shortage of those in Indiana. Some of you have mentioned that the Kendallville papers run the column they offer by my former colleague Leo. Does anything else they offer ever see eyeballs other than in their magazine/website? Because I gotta say: This shit is whack.

The founder, who signs his pieces “tcl” but otherwise goes by T. Craig Ladwig, devoted the home page today to an attack on, get this, the Indiana Daily Student, the student newspaper. For an opinion piece. About the right’s favorite pinup girl, Ann Coulter.

Craig, like lots of newspaper editorial writers, considered himself something of an oracle. He didn’t mix much, but when he did he’d say things like “the problem with journalism today is a lack of adult supervision,” which I never quite understood but he seems to think quite witty, because it’s a phrase that turns up often in his work. It seems to be the driving force of this column about the IDS, anyway. He starts by complaining that the speech wasn’t covered by any other media, “for posterity,” although a quick Google turned up a video of part of the speech and a fairly perfunctory report from the local public-media stations. The speech was billed as, “Conservatism. Let’s Review the Evidence with Ann Coulter,” but the news seemed to be that Coulter abruptly left the stage, claiming she had a plane to catch and had already stayed longer than she’d agreed to. (She’d make a good prostitute. Admirable time management.)

It doesn’t sound like she was shouted down or otherwise abused, although she complained about the final question (about her religion) before leaving. What I found weird? In that video I posted above? Look at all that male-pattern baldness on the heads watching. Doesn’t look like a student crowd.

Maybe Craig hasn’t figured out Google yet.

But I don’t want to go deep on the Indiana Policy Review, an outfit that essentially hung another co-founder, Mike Pence, out to dry after January 6 — he wasn’t asked to do anything other than give us a little more time to investigate was the argument, as I recall. For years now, it’s essentially functioned as a sinecure for Ladwig and maybe a couple of others.

A sinecure. That would be nice, except for the putting-your-balls-in-escrow part.

What an exhausting week, and it’s only Tuesday. I feel like Josef Stalin, and all I’ve done in the last three days is yell NO and grab this dog out of one form of mischief or another. Let’s get over the hump and see what the downslope offers. Please behave, Kevin.

Posted at 8:42 pm in Media, Same ol' same ol' |
 

40 responses to “Double-secret probation.”

  1. Jeff Gill said on April 5, 2022 at 10:23 pm

    Nancy, please don’t kill all the kulaks.

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  2. brian stouder said on April 5, 2022 at 10:58 pm

    Pam and the girls and I just got back from Purdue Fort Wayne, where Monica Lewinski gave an interesting lecture and took some questions from the gallery. I’d no real idea what to expect. Heck, I was thinking she’d written a book, which we could buy and she’d inscribe after the event, but I was wrong. Instead, a professor and she presented an altogether enthralling diologue, and then took a few questions from the assembled crowd at the end, and on the drive home Pam and the girls and I gabbed about just how remarkable (and scarey!!) her story – and her bravery and strength -truly was/is

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  3. alex said on April 6, 2022 at 6:36 am

    I’m rather surprised that Turning Point USA would be inviting a candy-assed has-been like La Coulter rather than one of the right’s more luminous disingenuous hacks, but maybe it comes down to affording speaker fees and Kellyanne was busy at Mar-a-Lago helping launch David Bossie’s new feature film about the stolen election to a select group of top donors.

    Ladwig’s beef seems to be that Coulter’s arguments weren’t presented fully or rebutted fully; that the IDS is somehow obligated to pretend that even bullshit has merit and that student journalists should waste precious column space presenting it rather than dismissing it out of hand.

    It’s a testament to fairness that universities, in the spirit of academic freedom, allow bad faith actors to spew hate speech and political agitprop, which can hardly be taken seriously as an exchange of ideas. Here’s betting those student journalists recognize the folly of mainstream media indulging the right in the same way instead of calling it out. Hurry up and graduate, kids. Your country needs you.

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  4. Alan Stamm said on April 6, 2022 at 7:36 am

    Kevin seems more angelic than four others in this post’s roster of reprobates (tcl, Coulter, Pence, Stalin).

    And the putting-you-balls-in-escrow part is good.

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  5. Mark P said on April 6, 2022 at 8:46 am

    It sounds like you have a real canine barbarian on your hands, and I don’t mean the two-legged kind. A really good previous dog makes it especially hard. Our “new” dog is, let’s say, rambunctious, but nipping would be a disaster since she’s about 85 pounds with a snout like an alligator — German Shepard/possibly Doberman mix.

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  6. Andrea said on April 6, 2022 at 9:38 am

    We have a similar set up here in Illinois with the Illinois Policy Institute. Hilarity ensued when our last Republican Governor abruptly cleaned house to bring in a bunch of IPI folks.
    https://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/12/bruce-rauner-fires-top-staffers-240460
    They were so astonishingly incompetent at governing that the ringleader lasted less than 3 months in the job. https://www.illinoischannel.org/2017/10/06/kristina-rasmussen-out-as-gov-rauners-chief-of-staff-after-88-days/
    Seems about right.

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  7. Jeff Borden said on April 6, 2022 at 9:51 am

    Neil Steinberg in today’s Sun-Times has a penetrating look at the lies people like Coulter and her ilk spread around like rotten mayonnaise, but its focus is on the shroud of untruth Putin has spread over Russia. . .all nine time zones. Since I’m not sure about a paywall, here’s a link to Steinberg’s blog you may cut and paste.

    https://www.everygoddamnday.com

    Coulter’s sell-by date passed long ago. She’s 60 now, but still working the long blond hair and sleeveless dress look, which doesn’t really make her look sexy or young so much as sadly clinging to her imagined youth.

    She’s really not worth mentioning since so many more assholes have emerged to claim her title, but it’s always been strikingly hypocritical to me that she is stridently conservative on all social matters, but remains a single, childless, never married woman. Then again, hypocrisy is a requirement for conservatives.

    And those of you who have scoffed SCOTUS may someday turn its attention to Griswold should check out today’s Page 1 story in the NYT, where Texass is working to ban the abortion pill after more or less wiping out every abortion provider in that hideous state. Watch and see. Contraceptives will be in the bullseye much sooner than you think. With six right-wingers on the court, they’re shooting for the moon.

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  8. David C said on April 6, 2022 at 9:53 am

    We dodged a bullet with our school board yesterday. They two CRT nuts lost, barely, but they lost. What they said was bad and what the didn’t say could only be worse.

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  9. Suzanne said on April 6, 2022 at 10:07 am

    I believe you are correct, Jeff @7. Most ardent pro-lifers that I know believe almost any contraceptive except condoms are abortifacients. Even condoms are suspect because to use one is to waste a man’s precious seed.
    Most steadfastly refuse to believe that anti-abortion laws will target every woman who miscarries. Was it truly a miscarriage? He comes the detective. No, that will never happen, they say. They mean well, they believe life is precious (so do I) but most are hopelessly naive and are being played by the power hungry. They have no idea.

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  10. Jenine said on April 6, 2022 at 10:46 am

    @David C. so glad to hear that. I hope that most cities are aware that school board elections are in play and it’s so important to vote for constructive candidates rather than the malicious actors.

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  11. Sherri said on April 6, 2022 at 11:15 am

    Of course Griswold is in their sights, not so much because it’s about contraception but because it’s the foundation for so much else. It’s the key case that established a right to privacy, and Roe v Wade, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergfell all rely on it. Kick over Griswold, and you undermine all of it, and they can turn back the clock on those battles they’ve lost.

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  12. Icarus said on April 6, 2022 at 11:24 am

    I think we need to refer to it as the Day After Pill. Calling it the Abortion Pill is what is giving the right ammunition to feed the uneducated and uninformed who believe it causes abortions. One thing the Right beats the Left at is marketing.

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  13. Sherri said on April 6, 2022 at 11:37 am

    Not the cheeriest interview, but lot of important stuff here.

    https://the.ink/p/is-this-how-russia-ends?s=r

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  14. Sherri said on April 6, 2022 at 11:56 am

    I’m grumpy today because I had to attend last night’s city council meeting, in person, on planning commission business, which meant that I had to sit in a room with a bunch of firefighters who had been terminated because they refused to get vaccinated. They’re still trying to get reinstated, and they were there with their families and extended families and supporters last night, testifying about how they risked their lives for this community and were heroes who deserved to be restored to their jobs. Firefighters are considered health care workers, and Redmond firefighters were among the first exposed to Covid way back in 2020.

    None of these heroes who cared so much for our community but wouldn’t get vaccinated wore a mask last night. Not a one. I sat there in my KN95 mask and was livid. They had managed to convince one council member to introduce a resolution to overturn the mayor’s action, though the city attorney told them they didn’t have the authority, and even if they did, the governor’s mandate still held, but only two council members voted to restore their jobs. (I’ll add the these firefighters have not had the support of their union during any of this.)

    They’ve already had one lawsuit dismissed, but they don’t seem done. Between the lack of masking and the misinformation they spewed last night, I’m not sure why I should trust them to use PPE appropriately on the job, anyway.

    Poor, pitiful firefighters, facing the consequences of their choices.

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  15. nancy said on April 6, 2022 at 12:51 pm

    Holy shit. At the Indiana Policy Review, another column about the Coulter incident, although not really. I think the writer’s premise is that listening to music they’ve chosen themselves – because technology! – has made students intellectually weak.

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  16. alex said on April 6, 2022 at 1:17 pm

    Go ahead. Blame it on the music. Surely college students couldn’t possibly have any objections to a university allowing hate speech and derp to be passed off as intellectual discourse worthy of their consideration.

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  17. Sherri said on April 6, 2022 at 1:25 pm

    The Indiana Policy Review is member of the State Policy Network, a collection of these little right wing think tanks tied to ALEC and Koch money. It’s all right wing welfare paying hacks to produce garbage in support of Koch talking points. The local equivalent here is the Washington Policy Center, though the WPC is bigger scale (more like $4 million of funding compared to the IPR’s $100k)

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  18. Scout said on April 6, 2022 at 2:10 pm

    A group of my friends and I ordered tickets to the Ann Coulter event. Most reserved 10, I reserved 6. We are all in AZ. I wonder how attendance was and if sparse attendance helped in Coulter’s decision to bug out.

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  19. Bitter Scribe said on April 6, 2022 at 4:01 pm

    Ann Coulter? IIRC, she pretty much got banished to the hinterlands because she started attacking Trump from the right, as not fanatical enough about immigration. Trump had as much patience or use for her as he does for most critics, and he dismissed her, likely with a sexist insult or two for good measure. That’s where she remains today: the Trumpies want nothing to do with her because Dear Leader disdains her, and everyone else, well, this is Ann Coulter we’re talking about.

    Anyway, how many of her few remaining elderly fans can really tell her from Laura Ingraham?

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  20. Deborah said on April 6, 2022 at 5:06 pm

    I was wrong about no spring signs in Chicago yet. I went for a walk today and tulips are definitely sprouting, no flowers yet just stems and leaves but they’re 6-8″ or so tall already. Also some other tiny little white flowers I don’t know the name of, they look like lily of the valley but leaves are different. Anyway, I guess allergy season is here.

    LB took another covid test today, still negative thank god.

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  21. LAMary said on April 6, 2022 at 5:27 pm

    Bill Maher had the hots for her, didn’t he? As if there were not enough reasons to dislike Bill Maher.

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  22. Jeff Borden said on April 6, 2022 at 5:42 pm

    You’re correct LAMary. She was a regular on “Politically Incorrect” before Maher stepped in it by saying the terrorists who crashed into the WTC and Pentagon were not cowards. She, in turn, contributed blurbs to one of his books.

    For what it’s worth, one of my best friends in Chicago (now deceased) was an entertainment writer at the Tribune. He said Bill Maher was –hands down– the biggest asshole celebrity he ever met. And my pal was sweet, good-natured man.

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  23. ROGirl said on April 6, 2022 at 6:33 pm

    “so many more assholes have emerged to claim her title.”

    True dat.

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  24. Dexter Friend said on April 7, 2022 at 3:59 am

    Snarky Bill Maher lost me years ago when he praised Bush43 for “Shock and Awe” and the aftermath. I can’t stand him and never watch his shows.
    Finally, Tennessee passed a bill preventing child marriage, while nationally, Marjorie Taylor Greene is out blabbing about the Democrats being the party of pedophiles. Now you’d think any sane , reasonable person would know she is crazy, she and Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson as well, for spouting such nonsense. Somebody should shut them up, they are so clownishly goofy. And most Republicans believe this shit.
    Here in Ohio, the Republicans who are fighting for Portman’s lame duck Senate seat are all out-Trumping themselves. Every ad I see , each candidate says they are more pro-Trump than all the others. It’s sickening. And on highly traveled US 6, east of Bryan a few miles, a rural resident is flying an oversized pair of flags, one of Trump, and the other with giant lettering “FUCK BIDEN”. I am one of the oldest contributors here; I never saw any “fuck Nixon” flags, never anything like that for Clinton, the Bushes, even Reagan, nor Carter, nor LBJ…ever, until now.

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  25. Jeff Gill said on April 7, 2022 at 7:35 am

    Didn’t Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine always harp on how modern/pop music rot young people’s critical thinking faculty? That is when he & his adherents weren’t going on about how Queen Elizabeth was the head of a global drug cartel.

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  26. alex said on April 7, 2022 at 7:38 am

    My problem with Maher is that he was just a liberal version of Coulter and a discredit to liberalism just as she’s a discredit to conservatism — provocative, mean-spirited and disingenuous. I’ve never felt that social justice, environmental consciousness or any of my ideals need to be represented by a dishonest asshole.

    Dex, I’m seeing plenty of FUCK BIDEN flags around here too. The right’s insular media bubble seems to be working better than I thought it ever could.

    My partner mentioned a nasty office encounter yesterday with some douche who announced after a secretary passed by “Did you know she’s a Democrat?” My partner responded “Yeah, so am I.” The douche was quite taken aback and wasn’t ready to be peppered with my partner’s “Orange Turd” ripostes when the douche persisted by attacking Biden. Evidently right-wing media have done quite a number on people. The other day a waitress told me that even though she had voted for Biden, she had misgivings because of the child-sniffing video that she’d seen on Tik-Tok or somewhere.

    I remember years ago feeling browbeaten into silence when Republicans talked smack about Dems and liberals, but no more. I might not shake them out of their alternative reality, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them insult me by mischaracterizing my values.

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  27. Elaine said on April 7, 2022 at 10:54 am

    What kills me about the “Fuck Biden” flags and bumper stickers is that the very same owners of these items who proudly display them in places for everyone to see work themselves into a tizzy about young adult books in libraries bearing the same “F” word.

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  28. annie said on April 7, 2022 at 12:49 pm

    FWIW, yesterday I saw (here in southern california) a young woman wearing a FUCK TRUMP T-shirt.

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  29. Sherri said on April 7, 2022 at 2:02 pm

    I think that conservatives aren’t as hypocritical as we think we are, because we are attributing the wrong set of values to them. We see them in a tizzy about coarse language sometimes, and think they value civility, and are confused when they turn around and employ coarse language. But they don’t value civility. What they value is best summed up by a quote I’ve seen floating around the Internet:

    There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

    Think about it. Everything we see from the right wing is consistent with this proposition, including Trump.

    Finding the source of this quote let me down an interesting rabbit hole. It is attributed to Frank Wilhoit. Okay, makes sense, a Frank Wilhoit was a political science professor at Duke. But this quote isn’t from any of his books. It appears in a comment thread on a blog post in 2018, and that Frank Wilhoit died in 2010. So, one of the more profound things I’ve read, that explains much about how our world works, was apparently made by a music composer commenting on a blog post!

    https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

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  30. Julie Robinson said on April 7, 2022 at 2:30 pm

    Nancy has frequently shared pictures and stories about the Detroit Packard plant, which my morning paper tells me has finally come to the end of its road. On March 31 a judge ordered it demolished. Reading its history is fascinating–first use of reinforced concrete, a teenage Betty White singing there during an experimental TV broadcast in 1939, years of auto production changing over to war material, then a series of owners pledging redevelopment and but being defeated in their efforts.

    If I lived near then I would probably be rejoicing, but at this distance it feels melancholic. We’ve been to a couple of old auto factories that are now museums, and of course the GE plant in Fort Wayne is finding new life after sitting empty for years. I know not everything can be save but I’m sad.

    Edit: Ketanji Brown Jackson has been confirmed. Finally, something to cheer about.

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  31. Deborah said on April 7, 2022 at 3:53 pm

    So glad there is a new Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

    I’ve been watching snippets of an Axios video of Jonathan Swan interviewing McConnell. The stuff McConnell said responding to Swan was appalling, the guy has no morals. Swan did a good job of pushing back but McConnell was unfazed.

    Today I got a call from a sales person that I thought was funny. I usually never answer a phone call from a number I don’t recognize but we were expecting a guy to come to fix one of our window blinds that broke. The call showed up as a 312 number (our area code) so I thought maybe it was the repairman or something. The salesperson that called me said they were from such and such company and had been referred to me by Joseph Smith. I burst out laughing because they obviously picked the most common name possible to claim as the person doing the referring. Just about everyone knows a Joe Smith. Anyway, I thought it was funny, I guess you had to be there. I hung up on them of course.

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  32. Jeff Gill said on April 7, 2022 at 5:10 pm

    Now if it was Joseph Smith, Jr. . . .

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  33. Sherri said on April 7, 2022 at 6:31 pm

    Remember this the next time the right wing talks about how liberals don’t respect them: when Justice Jackson was confirmed in the Senate, Mitch McConnell and the Republicans walked out of the chamber.

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  34. Sherri said on April 7, 2022 at 6:56 pm

    It is gloriously sunny and mid-70s here today. By Saturday night, we might get snow flurries. Ahh, spring.

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  35. basset said on April 7, 2022 at 8:59 pm

    Almost the same here, with a frost warning overnight Saturday. Our 70s were a few days ago, but still.

    Spent nine hours today in a hotel meeting room with a dozen other medical test dummies, getting ultrasounds practiced on us at a doctors’ convention. I can now confirm that my blood is flowing and breathing continues.

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  36. Julie Robinson said on April 7, 2022 at 9:10 pm

    Rained all day here, got soaked running errands, so I curled up in bed with a book. The book featured a woman pilot delivering Spitfires to English bases during WWII. Spitfires were powered by Merlin engines made at the Detroit Packard plant.

    There’s a neat bit of symmetry.

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  37. Dexter Friend said on April 8, 2022 at 4:31 am

    Just finished Apple’s “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey”. Worthwhile. Now to finish “Severance”.
    I have heard if you think you smell burning tires, burned toast, or burned electrical wires it may mean you are having a stroke. I thought I smelled burning plastic-covered wiring for a second, inspected the house…nothing, smell gone. I even checked my blood pressure, all OK. I now think it was a dog fart and my brain registered burning something or other, as I had just witnessed a house fire on TV. Or else a fire is smoldering and …oh shit, who knows? I can’t seem to find anything or any area with the smell now. Dog Fart it musta been.

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  38. alex said on April 8, 2022 at 7:46 am

    So Curtis Hill, Indiana’s disgraced former AG best known for groping women during his tenure, as well as a lot of stupid right-wing political stunts masquerading as lawsuits, is hosting “America’s Grand Jury,” a mock grand jury trial of Dr. Anthony Fauci that will be live streamed. It’s an audience-participatory grand jury where you pay $25 to be a juror or $10K to be a VIP juror. (Gotta fleece them rubes while they’re all hot under the collar.)

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/anti-vaxxers-charge-followers-to-join-fake-anthony-fauci-grand-jury

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  39. basset said on April 8, 2022 at 8:22 am

    And I feel much healthier and safer now that the Tennessee legislature has approved over the counter ivermectin… quote here from the bill’s Senate sponsor:
    “It’s a lot safer to go to your pharmacist and let him tell you how much ivermectin to take than it is to go to the CO-OP and guess what size horse you are…”
    Still needs the Governor’s signature, but that seems likely.

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  40. Mark P said on April 8, 2022 at 9:08 am

    I’ve considered getting a Facebook account and start posting things like,”Cyanide cures Covid, plus increases libido.” But no one would be stupid enough to believe it, and that would be wrong.

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