What a Week
Did anything of note happen this week? Oh yeah, but where to start. And some updates on the migration off of Substack tacked on the end.
Last weekend when I made the conscious decision to migrate from Substack to Ghost, little did I know that there would be mega-fuckery going on. Read on for some snippets with my usual snark. At the very end, I will have a small section on the transition to Ghost from Substack, feel free to ignore that.
Before I dive in, one of the negatives of leaving Substack is that I am no longer in their notes ecosystem, so all new subscribers and traffic will come from your sharing and amplification. Post it to your socials, and if someone you know might enjoy reading it, forward that email to them.
The Epstein Files continues on
I am going to admit that originally I figured this was a 48- or 72-hour freakout in the media before they got bored and moved on to the next fuckery in the queue.
How wrong was I.
If you've been in a vacuum for the last 8 years or so, you might have not had any awareness of the whole Epstein kerfuffle. But it was the rallying cry of the 8-chan/Q-anon masses. And boy did they latch onto it like a Burmese python catching a rat. (I was going to look for an image, but holy fuck, gonna need some eye bleach now).
That said, in early June when there was the very public breakup between Musk and Trump, and in that spat, Musk dropped the bomb on Twitter that Trump was in the Epstein files.
At the time, I thought, sure, that is not news, but whatever.
The MAGA base though has steeped in the Epstein conspiracies for so long that their whole world has revolved around the core belief that sure Trump was friends with Epstein, but that the worst was all Democrats and left leaning financiers. This was always a warped view, but whatever. If there were high level Democrats in the list, fuck them, prosecute them, burn them to the ground. And if Bill Clinton was diddling kids, nuke that fucker from orbit.
Then the Wall Street Journal dropped the bombshell of Trump's "bawdy" letter to Epstein for a leather-bound book marking Epstein's 50th birthday.
And the freakout by Trump and his minions was palpable. The denial machine was on, and a lawsuit was filed for $10B against the WSJ.
Alas, I doubt this will go forward, as that would mean that Trump has to sit for a deposition, and there's no fucking way his handlers would allow that.
Of course, this is all done now, right?
Congress Chickens out
One has to almost have some sympathy for the MAGA Republicans in Congress. On one hand, they have to have blind obeyance to the Tangerine Rhino in the oval office, who is telling them to shut the fuck up about Epstein.
But on the other, they have their rabid constituents who are yelling at them in mail, email, and voicemails about getting the Epstein files into the public.
What are they supposed to do when those pesky Democrats and enough Republicans are constantly trying to pass a discharge petition?
Well, if you are Mike Johnson, the most closeted Speaker in history, you just say "Fuck it" and send Congress home a half week early for the August recess. That will make this go away, right?
Yeah, that will totally work my dude...
Mr. Johnson’s move will, for now, deny Democrats the chance to force procedural votes that would call on the Justice Department to make the information public. It reflected how deep divisions among Republicans on the matter have paralyzed the House, where G.O.P. lawmakers are trying to avoid another politically perilous vote on an issue that is confounding President Trump and roiling the MAGA base.
“We’re done being lectured on transparency,” Mr. Johnson said at a news conference, where the typically unflappable speaker appeared frustrated.
Uh, this is so correct that they are transparent...
More from the article:
Mr. Johnson’s decision to shut down the House early was the latest example of how the speaker has in many ways ceded the chamber’s independence in order to please or avoid angering Mr. Trump. He has deferred to the president on matters large and small, including when it comes to Congress’s spending power. He quietly maneuvered this year to yield the House’s ability to weigh in on Mr. Trump’s tariffs, in order to spare Republicans from having to cast politically tricky votes on whether to end them.
But, as Billy Mays loved to say:
The piece de resistance
The disgusting capitulation to Trump by Paramount over the absolutely frivolous 60 Minutes lawsuit against CBS, wherein Paramount settled with the Felon in chief for $16M dollars over claims of bias in editing the Harris interview last year was disgraceful.
This was purely Paramount owner Shari Redstone wanting to grease the skids for a sale to the Failson Scion of Larry Ellison (note: Ellison got so rich by owning Oracle, a tech company that really just extorts obscene rents from big and not so big companies, so much so that ORACLE is One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison) netting her a cool $1.5B.
On Wednesday that deal was approved by the FTC.
However, on Monday of this week, Paramount secured the exclusive streaming rights to the popular adult animated comedy show South Park for a stunning $1.5B dollars.
On Thursday at the season 27 premier, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creatives behind the foul mouthed fourth graders dropped a nuclear bomb on Trump. Whilst I cannot share the PSA at the end, I can drop this link from Charlotte Clymer (do support her on Substack):
Substack
I recommend clicking through and watching the video. It is EPIC.
Updates on the migration
You can skip this bit of geeking out.
I spent the early part of the week testing and validating the system, especially the connection to the bulk mailer.
You need a bulk mailer instead of just running a local server (that will get you black listed instantly), or trying to use a paid mail account like Google, Fastmail, or my favorite, Proton Mail. Those commercial mailers will look at me trying to sending 2K emails at a whack and shut that shit down.
There are some mail services that are optimized for this. Part of it is the ability to handle lots of traffic, but that is only part of the equation. To get bulk mail past spam filters, and other sieves, around black lists and IP range bans, they put in a lot of effort building peer relationships.
Side note: Almost 60% of my subscribers use a gmail account. Having a good relationship and trust with Google is critical for ensuring you get my emails, and that is why I will be spending real money every month with Mailgun.
It wasn't that difficult, but there are three tiers of entries into the DNS records (DNS is Domain Name Services, a scheme that ties URLs like google.com to an IP address . Google is 172.217.12.110. Imagine having to remember that number to access google search!)
Once that was validated, I pulled an export from Substack and then imported that into my new server.
That was smooth (and fast. My pre-run I used a minimal VM, and in 1G ram, and 1 vCPU it took 8 hours to process my 698 posts and subscribers. In my production VM, 2G ram, and 2 vCPUs it took about 10 minutes).
I then needed to build a snazzy theme, and make it look right, and start going through the posts. Turns out that about 90% of the posts were perfectly imported, but about ten percent of them had some subscribe links back to Substack. No bueno.
Oh, and I way over-rotated into music posts post 2024 election. I will work to pare that back.
The last thing that I am slowly working through is fixing where I linked to other Substack posts. I will be working through the full list, but it will take me some time.
If you find anything like this, please drop a comment and I will laser into it to get it fixed.
Upon my first publish yesterday, there were 16 permanent bounces. They were mostly for accounts that no longer existed, so I culled them. I do take proper mail list hygiene seriously and will remove people whose accounts are dead.
I will write a deep dive into the ghost migration and what you need to know if you choose to make the jump. It will not be for everyone though.
