{"id":56281,"date":"2025-02-25T06:00:28","date_gmt":"2025-02-25T14:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=56281"},"modified":"2025-02-24T18:28:14","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T02:28:14","slug":"open-thread-february-25-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2025\/02\/25\/open-thread-february-25-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread February 25 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, I had not even finished with Sunday&#8217;s emails, and then I slept in even more than I planned to, because, after being drowsy all day, I still had some difficulty getting to sleep Sunday night. So a lot of them from both days went into my files without being read first. Also, just for my own satisfaction, I looked up &#8220;musk&#8221; (little &#8220;m&#8221;) at Wikipedia. I&#8217;m old enough to remember when natural musk was still in use and notable mainly for its unpleasant odor. But the etymology was new to me, and amusing.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been seeing a fair amount of articles headlined that the Mango Monster was recruited as a Russian agent in the 1980s, which in itself is pretty old news. When I did a search (I use DuckDuckGo) I found that many of the articles dated from 2017 or 2021 &#8211; I did say this was old news. In order to fins a new (within 3-4 days or so) take, I had to use the search term &#8220;Krasnov.&#8221; Before sharing one of these, I checked the reputation of the outlet on Media Bias\/FactCheck. <a href=\"https:\/\/uk.news.yahoo.com\/donald-trump-recruited-kgb-codename-180759277.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Yahoo news<\/a> is listed as having a Left-Center Bias (based on the subject matter of articles) and high credibility (meaning MBFC could not catch them in any false &#8220;facts&#8221;.) I take the Bias score with a grain of salt, based on my belief in and understanding of the saying &#8220;reality has a liberal bias.&#8221; But the point is the fact checking and the credibility. I also looked at Snopes on the story &#8211; they can&#8217;t actually prove &#8211; or disprove &#8211; any of it so there&#8217;s that. I probably don&#8217;t need to say that all of this took some time. But I wanted to get it right. I also decided to use the meme from &#8220;Know Your Meme&#8221; as today&#8217;s cartoon. I cannot argue with it.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s Tuesday, a bit late for <a href=\"https:\/\/joycevance.substack.com\/p\/the-week-ahead-aed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Joyce Vance&#8217;s The Week Ahead<\/a> &#8211; but then, with all the chaos, looking at the week ahead is no longer a matter of looking at schedules, but more of a guessing game of &#8220;What fresh hell will this be?&#8221; (apologies Dorothy Parker.) So I thought it worthwhile.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/RQOgHBrcRrA?si=6jvBHpOsiu4hT1Yx\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/bovq1cLQxLE?si=RkknYsygmEKefJ8u\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-56280\" src=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Krasnov.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"750\" height=\"844\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Krasnov.jpg 750w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Krasnov-267x300.jpg 267w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Krasnov-133x150.jpg 133w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, I had not even finished with Sunday&#8217;s emails, and then I slept in even more than I planned to, because, after being drowsy all day, I still had some difficulty getting to sleep Sunday night. So a lot of them from both days went into my files without being read first. Also, just for <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2025\/02\/25\/open-thread-february-25-2025\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":56112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[6248,4355,4999,6234,5077,6249,6220],"class_list":["post-56281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","tag-krasnov","tag-animals","tag-birds","tag-doge","tag-espionage","tag-russian-asset","tag-this-week","category-35-id","category-3-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}