BURNER PHONES With the FBI MIA, What IS Thanksgiving? And You Are NOT Legally Required to Eat Turkey!
Anytime you hear the word “burner phone,” it is going to be associated with either a crime or an affair, and those, of course, are not mutually exclusive. There are people in this country with less money and credit, and they purchase prepaid phones, but they simply call these devices “my phone,” not “burner phones.” No, burner phone means crime.
So when the Rolling Stone story (Linked below) broke this morning about organizers of the January 6th rally purchasing three “burner phones,” and that it was the “utmost importance” that they were to be paid with cash, it was more than intriguing… even before we read that the phones were used to communicate with - at a minimum, Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Mark Meadows, and a Trump campaign aide.
If Trump was involved with planning the rally, that’s not a crime. If the organizers wanted Trump’s input on the rally, that’s not a crime. All of that could be done on phones registered to specific people. But if the rally really wasn’t so much a rally as it was one element in a day-long conspiracy, well - then you would prefer to burn your phone and your name as much as possible.
Okay, everyone understands that much, especially the G-Men:
Figliuzzi is a former assistant director of the FBI. Remember the FBI? Those are the guys that find all those rioters in weird coats and masks and haul them into court. And bless them for it. But we’re now forced to ask, as I have in two articles today, why the fck are we learning about burner phones making calls between rally organizers and Eric Trump from Rolling Stone? Why are we not learning about them in a NYT headline, (Six months ago); “FBI Raids Home of Trump Rally Organizer and Gathers All Electronic Equipment… In part, due to a tip that organizers used burner phones to communicate with … ” ??
There is a book out, entitled “I Along Can Fix It,” written by two respected Washington Post reporters, in which they state that Vice President Mike Pence refused to get into a Secret Service SUV because Pence feared that there was a conspiracy - evidently, one involving getting him out of the Capitol, ideally nothing more and it involved the Secret Service.
One would think that a very credible report directly alleging that the Vice President of the United States did not trust the Secret Service, and that this distrust manifested itself on the very same day we almost lost our democracy to an attempted coup, would scare our Department of Justice and FBI (to say nothing of the Treasury Department’s Special Counsel) enough that they would have long ago known of and exposed the “burner phone” angle and that they were working themselves through various more important defendants and witnesses by this point.
And though - as I always say - the FBI operates in secret and they operate slowly, they are, actually, supposed to operate, and… we’re just not seeing it.
A president should not be directing his Attorney General regarding any specific case. That is a given. DOJ should enjoy a lot of independence from the White House, but not 100% independence. Joe Biden is well within his right to call Merrick Garland, first to find out whether he ever shows up to work, and second, to say; “Why do I keep reading these horrific revelations in the media and almost nothing coming from you?” (Presuming the FBI/DOJ have not been doing much investigating).
I simply refuse to believe that Joe Biden is the one saying “Let bygones be bygones.” Biden, better than any of us, understands the threat Trump and the MAGAs represent or he wouldn’t have even run for president. He has grandkids to enjoy. If Trump’s team plotted January 6th out in a way to get Pence out of the Capitol on January 6th (as I believe), then I think Biden would want that exposed.
Which leads us back to Garland, whom I’ve already said “had to go” in this newsletter just two weeks ago and that was back before we learned that the word “burner phone” applied to both the rally organizers and their calls into people working at the highest levels of the White House.
At this point, we are forced - much as it pains me to admit it, to await either another big shoe to drop in the media or some real stuff dug up by the Select Committee, to produce enough evidence of a crime that DOJ simply cannot ignore it anymore, it just can’t.
Shocking. But that is where things stand.
The Thanksgiving Dilemma
Whatever happened on that first Thanksgiving will probably never be known with real accuracy. There were no IPhones back then, no one put it on Tik Tok or YouTube and, as historian David McCullough once said, during a talk I was lucky enough to attend, no one walked around saying; “Isn’t this fascinating, being right in the middle of history.” They did not know they were creating an incredibly important historic event. Memories even then were foggy and depended upon who one asked.
People who found themselves at history’s great intersections were living their lives just as we do now (something to remember when thinking about what to do with one’s life), struggling, laughing, wondering what’s next for them, not four hundred years down the road.
Having said that, something “positive” must have happened on that first Thanksgiving and the positive aspect involved our Native American ancestors. The problem, of course, is that the story of the first Thanksgiving can be as sweet as pumpkin pie but it won’t remove the horror of the genocide that was to follow for the next three hundred years.
It is for that reason that - at least in my family - that story about the first Thanksgiving plays exactly no role in what we celebrate. We set the history aside and use the holiday to remind ourselves that our current existence is not that bad and that our problems are First World problems.
We have a shitload for which to be thankful. And while it is true that First graders will probably be making Pilgrim hats and Native American headdresses for the next generation or two, the holiday would actually be better off leaving the glamorization of the first Thanksgiving out and instead teaching our kids that our country was once exceptional at exterminating people - and could be so again, if not prevented. That isn’t Critical Race Theory, that’s just accurate history. And yes, America does have a lot of exceptionally good history, too.
Far from “ruining” Thanksgiving, it might make the holiday mean that much more. Forget the pilgrims, be thankful that you’re warm, safe, have food to eat, and people that love you. If you can check off each box on that list, you’ve got a few things that at least a couple of billion people on Earth would love to have. Be thankful. I sure am.
MUST WE?
I get it. The “traditional” Thanksgiving, just mentioned above, involved eating the biggest fowl found in those parts in those days, along with some venison, we’re sure and traditions are important. But is the tradition this important? Good thing the Pilgrims didn’t have a bunch of chickens running around or we’d be having nuggets tomorrow.
Thanksgiving, at its most fundamental, is about the meal, perhaps the most celebrated meal we eat in the year, at least as a family gathering. And when meals become that important, should some traditions not give way to food that reflects the importance of the occasion? Is there a rule that says we are forced to eat dry white meat with enough gravy that we can say, somewhat truthfully; “It’s delicious”? (Unless the bird has been split, breast cooked separately, the white meat better be dry, or it means the dark meat isn’t cooked all the way through.) Everyone knows the dark meat is better, everyone worries it’s undercooked.
But I looked this up and… if there is a meal that is a quintessential family favorite? You are, technically, allowed to serve it for Thanksgiving:
For those of you who follow the “No Nose Diet” (Not eating any meat from an animal with a nose, but willing to eat animals with beaks and gills), you could honor our Northwest Native American tribes (the wealthiest on the continent in 1500) by serving up some gorgeous salmon:
And for the vegetarians and vegan friends, well - I have no idea what is considered especially delectable (According to every Vegan I’ve ever met, it is all unbelievably good, so good it’s amazing, it’s perfect, there has never been a shitty vegan meal served, it’s… isn’t it sometimes just peanut butter?)
But for Vegans:
This is not yet another case of another liberal trying to ruin another good thing. Far from it, I want to make Thanksgiving that much better. I want to bring Thanksgiving into the 21st Century, where we have a lot to be thankful for.
Can’t see your sister on Thanksgiving? Face chat while cooking. What would the pilgrims have thought of that? How stupid were they? (Not at all, it’s just we have a lot of science for which to be thankful). Worried you screwed up the stuffing? Get mom on face chat and have her look it over while preparing it. Want to see mom? Get in an aluminum tube and go 500 mph for three hours and land in mom’s town halfway across the continent. And be thankful that the price of food is such that - though there is food insecurity in this country, there are very few who go hungry. If you are not among them, be thankful. Going back 50,000 years, 99% of your relatives experienced real hunger at some point, something that is far more awful than any of us appreciate.
So while we’re all so thankful, make that meal as special as it ought to be! Don’t settle for what tradition tells you just for tradition’s sake unless you want to. Make what you LOVE! And be that much more thankful.
That is what my two-member family will be doing tomorrow as we eat our… Turkey.
The “woman” of the house, the fourteen-year-old girl, has decided she likes traditional Thanksgiving, at least this year. Of course, I never offered King Crab, either - for a reason. We have a ton for which to be thankful but - thankfully - we still have to use a little discipline. I say “thankfully,” because - if one could have everything and anything, at all times and in all places, as we damned near do, then what would we ever have to be thankful for?
Happy Thanksgiving everyone and thank you for subscribing. We hit a major milestone today in subscribers. Now, if we can just add a zero and convert everyone to paid subscribers, then it’s king crab next Thanksgiving… Just kidding. We have a long way to go, but the direction is great and if I’ve earned it, please pass this along with a recommendation.
Jason