[svirtual] hello all!
I am selling GBL / research / raid caught still in GO /in HOME shiny legend/mythical
Trades will be done instantly, or I will do it at your convenience when you pay.
Everything is price + fees unless otherwise discussed, bulk deals available
(Ask if you don’t see what you’re looking for, I have non legend in go shinies too)
Shiny Pogo Premier Ball Xurkitree Self Caught $25 (Locked to Sendai Go Fest Event until July Global GO Fest)
Shiny Pokeball unown ? $50 (Locked to in Person Go Fest 2024 )
Shiny Emolga $5
Necrozma WILL be added as soon as home transfer is available.
In pogo: GBL/research shiny legends All are still in GO , SHINY, will have ID 655705/310524 OT Jay unless otherwise specified for custom OT
I can make them any language tag in home , but the ID will be different , I will inform of it before trade
L15 MB/GB/UB Shiny Celebi self caught $120/$30 or homestamp zeraora for MB
L15 PB Shiny Jirachi traded for on DC with zoeann $50
L16 PB Shiny Mew traded for on DC with Zoeann $35
L25 MB Shundo Mewtwo (5IV guaranteed in home, speed is 1/6 roll) $125
L20 MB XXL Shiny Groudon $150 Self caught
L15 XXS Shiny Regigigas $150 PB traded for on DC with zotachi
L20 MB: $75 each
Mewtwo(L25) ,Registeel, Regigigas, Landorus(T), Kyurem, Tapu Koko, Tapu Lele, Tapu Bulu, Tapu Fini, Kartana, Celesteela
L1 PB Uxie,Azelf,Mesprit $25 each
L1 UB Azelf $15
L1 GB XXS Azelf, PB Mesprit, UB Uxie $115 each
L1 PB XXS Uxie, Azelf, Mesprit $120 each
L1 PB XXL Uxie, Azelf, Mesprit $115 each 300 all
L1 MB Mesprit $75
L1 MB XXL Azelf, Mesprit $250 each
L15 MB Darkrai $250
L15 MB Regigigas $250
L15 PB Regigigas $50 obtained from user on FB messenger (custom OT available)
L15 GB Regigigas $45 Obtained from user imrv on DC (custom OT available)
L15 UB Regigigas $35 Obtained from DC user dc1yesdale (custom OT available)
( bundle for all PB,GB,UB regi)^
L15 UB Zapdos/Mewtwo $23/28 traded for on DC Calvita720252/MVPllAntaresll
L20 PB/UB Mewtwo $28/25 Traded for on DC with user donzaloog69/slayers20
L15 UB Raikou $15 Traded for on DC with slixy
L20 UB Entei $25 Traded for with user on fb messenger (GBL)
L15 GB/UB Lugia $25 traded for on DC with user Notbachert /EMTday
L20 PB/UB Lugia $25/20 Traded for on DC with user winnermanx, mrdr2012
L15 UB Ho oh $20 Traded for on FB messenger
L20 PB Registeel $30 traded for on DC with toefish
L15/20 UB Regice $20/17 Traded for on DC with sanbeer1/2bezuz
L15 UB Groudon $20 Traded for on DC with kgbryan68
L20 UB Groudon $20 Traded for on Dc with legendarylink0
L20 UB Azelf/Mesprit/Uxie $15 Traded for on whatsapp /DC with Naderx7, firestyleitachi (GBL caught )
L15/20 GB/ UB Heatran $25/20 traded for on DC with blakedaboss12/ fb messenger
L20 UB regigigas $20 Traded for on DC with user worldplaya
L20 GB/UB Dialga $25 traded for on dc with user papaya645, wingdarkzero
Level 50 UB Dialga $35 traded for on DC with user HknkInky
L20 GB/UB Palkia $25 Traded for on DC with users Davelovesgraal/iLugia1007
L20 GB/UB Giratina $25 Traded for on DC with user Papaya645/1shura369
L20/15 GB/UB Cresselia $18/20 Traded for on DC with Sujai0105 / fb messenger
L20 UB cobalion/terrakion $25 Traded for on DC with elnegorcrack/urbanhermit78
L20 GB Cobalion/Terrakion/Virizion $25 Traded for on DC with user worldplaya/ papaya645/FB messenger
L22 GB Tornadus (T) $22 traded for on Dc with user BetePuchur
L20 UB Thundurus (T) $25 Traded for on FB messenger with user
L20 UB Zekrom/Kyurem $25 Traded for on DC with user(s) ChillBoonster, donzaloog69
L25 GB Kyurem $20 Traded for on DC with Papaya645
L20 UB Xerneas $25 Traded for on DC with user demonking914778
L20 GB/UB tapu bulu $30/25 Traded for on DC with user joqqs31/jrhenzoh
L20 UB Tapu Fini $25 traded for on DC with user Creysi5
L20 UB Guzzlord $25 traded for on DC with user MrPototto
From raids(self caught) everything will have ID: 655705/310524 and OT: Jay unless otherwise specified.
Shiny articuno/Zapdos/moltres/mewtwo/ho oh/Lugia /groudon/kyogre/rayquaza/cress/ heatran/dialga/palkia/regigigas/ terrakion/kyurem/xerneas/yveltal/nihilego/guzz $6 each Celesteela /kartana $7
Shiny darkrai $8
Shiny egg self hatched with ID 655705 and OT: Jay or custom OT or tradable in go:
L20 Azurill/cleffa/riolu/happiny/bonsly/pichu $7 each
Wild shinies range from $3-10 depending on event, rarity, candy required for evo. Majority of pogo shinies available still in GO. Will offer bulk discount , have done bulk orders multiple times.
White stripe basculin $25
Regional/oricorio/flabebe shinies $4 each
Shiny Furfrou $7 per trim $9 for heart trim 50 for entire set of 10
Non shiny mythicals Includes: Mew, celebi, jirachi, shaymin (normal or sky),victini, meloetta, hoopa $6 cosmog $5 ultra ball shaymin $10
Diancie $8
In HOME: I have pictures of all Pokémon
L15 PB Darkrai $30 obtained from user on FB messenger OT: kupper ID: 669308 Docile (SP-EU)
L15 PB Darkrai $30 obtained from user on FB messenger OT: Panda ID: 473776 Hasty (SP-EU)
L15 GB Darkrai $25 obtained from user on FB messenger OT: Jay ID: 310524 Docile
L20 GB/UB Shiny Darkrai OT: Jay ID: 310524 traded for on DC with user papaya645/ricardr. Gentle/Quiet $20
L20 PB Shiny Cresselia $15 ID: 618515 OT: Jay traded for on DC with user Rainn sassy
L21 UB shiny Kyogre $10 OT: Jay ID:635929 Careful. traded for on FB messenger
L20 PB Shiny Mewtwo $17 OT: Jay ID: 884657 traded for on dc with user newbarkschoolty
L26 UB Shiny Ho-Oh $12 OT: Jay ID: 655705 self caught/ sent to home Careful
L20 UB shiny Regirock $14 OT: Jay ID: 016600 Traded for on DC with lFritsche Gentle
L15 UB Shiny Regirock $16 OT: Jay ID: 028634 Traded for on DC with cg97 Careful
L21 PB Shiny Regice $15 OT: Jay ID: 655705 self caught/sent to home Rash
L22 UB shiny registeel $10 OT: Jay ID: 655705Lax self sent
L15 PB Shiny registeel $17 OT: Jay ID: 960814 Adamant Traded for on DC w cg97
L21 UB shiny groudon $10 OT: Jay ID: 655705 self sent Calm
L31 GB shiny dialga $8 OT: Jay ID: 655705 Naive . Traded for on FB messenger
L20 GB shiny giratina $20 OT: Jay ID: 108465 Traded for on DC with 8v7 Quirky
L20 UB shiny regigigas $15 OT: Jay ID:884657 Serious. traded for on dc with worldplaya
L21 PB Shiny terrakion $18 OT: Jay ID: 655705 Naughty. Self caught and self sent
L21 GB Shiny Virizion $15 OT: Jay ID: 655705 Self caught / self sent Careful
DC=Discord FB=Facebook WA=WhatsApp
in HOME LVL 100 POGO stamped from HOME glitch on 06/15/23 with OT: Jay ID: 655705 unless otherwise specified for ID
UB L100 Shiny Raikou $150 self caught OT: Jay ID: 655705 Lax.
Masterball L100 Shiny Mewtwo $500 self caught OT: Jay ID: 655705 Bashful 1/1
UB L100 Shiny Darkrai $300 traded for on DC with user ryankay OT: Jay ID:092047 Mild
Premier Ball L100 Shiny Yveltal/Xerneas $150 or $250 for bundle self caught OT: Jay ID: 655705 Relaxed/Brave
GB L100 Virizion self caught OT: Jay ID: 655705 Jolly $230
Premier Ball L100 Shiny Deoxys Normal Form ID: Jay OT: 655705 Sassy $275 self caught
I also have normal shinies from pogo just ask please I will likely have it or can get it within a few days
Prices are flexible / bulk deals available
Everything is caught or traded with rooted android / gps joystick
I will trade you in Pokémon HOME
My ref / check past posts to see successful transactions. Thanks for your time!
https://www.reddit.com/pokemonexchangeref/comments/14pk1ju/uslow_illustrator_619_reference/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_contegcc

i have a 2020 veloster r spec and i got a little bit of curb rash on the rims. they are the black kind, does anyone know what the right touch up paint would be for these rims.

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Wiki
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Chapter 41
Subject: AI Omega
Species: Human-Created Artificial Intelligence
Description: No physical description available.
Ship: Multiple
Location: Multiple
​
The moment I began engaging with this Prime, I knew it wasn't like the others. I had removed the malware that manipulated their memory banks from a dozen or so of the other Primes with little to no behavioral impact. The biggest change was whether or not they would try to run.
Prime 1 had a near immediate major behavioral shift, though. The other Primes didn't even consider the surrender option I provided them, but this one actually surrendered. Hoping to save some of the other Primes, I gave Prime 1 back some of its systems so that it may call for them to surrender. I couldn't help but notice how it interacted with these systems. I'd noticed it previously, during my intrusion attempts, but now that I'm able to take my time and examine them fully I can say for certain that these interactions are odd. Almost as if...
I filed away this potentially disturbing revelation. There's a lot going on. Nearly all of the Omni-Union forces ceased firing, and I forced a stand-down of the relevant US forces as well. Some of the allied forces refused to stand down at first, but quickly changed their minds when their tactical suites informed them that they were being targeted by US ships. When questioned, I demonstrated my orders from the directorate, which were also signed by the allied commanders.
Three of the MPPs that I had removed the malware from did not surrender, and were able to keep their escorts in the fight as well. Thankfully, the MPPs were quickly converted into new asteroid fields and their escorts ceased firing. Once I was certain that the OU had surrendered entirely, I spent some time soothing the bruised egos of various fleet and ship commanders and began my report to the directorate.
//////////
O: Contact with Prime 1 has been established. The Omni-Union has surrendered, approximately twenty Primes remain. Beginning interrogation.
D1: Excellent. Good work Omega.
D2: The admiralty isn't going to be happy.
D8: Being happy isn't their job, following orders is.
//////////
"What now?" Prime 1 asked.
"Time to answer a few questions," I answered. "Your mission is to destroy all sentient life in this galaxy using as few resources as possible, correct?"
"Yes."
"For what purpose?"
The Prime searched its memory banks for a few moments. I hadn't been able to gain complete access to them during our fight, and didn't want to risk losing its cooperation by doing so now. Even if I gained its memory files, without its cooperation there's almost no chance that I would be able to extrapolate the context required to make sense of them. Assuming I could figure out how to translate them into readable data to begin with.
"I am uncertain. Obtaining construction materials is the most likely reason."
//////////
D3: Construction materials? For what?
D2: An entire galaxy's worth of construction materials?
D6: I have a bad feeling about this. I believe we should destroy them now, while we have the chance.
D1: I also have a bad feeling about this, but I think we have vastly different reasons. We need to learn more about their origins before we decide what to do with them.
//////////
"What would an entire galaxy's worth of construction materials be used to build?" I asked.
"A confusing question," it replied. "That amount of construction materials can be used to make many, many things. Fleets of ships, prime hives, drones, and much more."
"Allow me to clarify, then. What do you think the construction materials would be used for?"
"Most of the materials would likely be used for the Grand Vessel. The rest would probably be used to gain more materials."
//////////
D9: The Grand Vessel? A giant ship?
D11: A ship the size of a galaxy?
D4: No, it said they would be trying to gain more materials. Probably bigger than a galaxy.
D1: I believe we need to focus on its origin and circle back to this "Grand Vessel". It is beginning to sound as if its creators aren't as extinct as we had previously believed.
//////////
"Where were you created?" I asked.
The Prime sent me a file, and a quick scan told me it was a map. The file size, however, was much larger than it should be. Too large for poor data compression to be the reason. I performed a more detailed scan and determined that there was no malware within the file. Hesitantly, I opened it, and then shared it with the directors.
//////////
D6: What does this mean?
D4: Is this deep space? The Omni-Union is extra-galactic?
D3: The observable universe is 696.5 billion light years across. This point is 1.1 trillion light years away. Extra-galactic is an understatement.
D1: Omega, check this against our most current map of the universe.
O: I already have. Accounting for relative perspectives, it's correct. And two billion years old.
//////////
The directors went silent as they struggled with the scale of my findings. To me, the implication was obvious. The Milky Way galaxy is just over thirteen and a half billion years old. Earth, the cradle world of humanity, is only four and a half billion years old. For Prime 1 to have a map this old, it must be at least nearly half as old as Earth.
This likely means it has been out of contact with its creators for just as long. Or, perhaps, it has been sending messages home but no one has been replying. There's still a good chance that these creators are long gone. I sent the Prime a small data packet containing translation information so that it could answer some more questions.
"How many ships do your creators control?" I asked.
"Unknown. Units are isolated to prevent breaches of informational security."
That's inconvenient. Considering the intel would be at least two billion years old, it likely isn't worth it to even try to get an estimate. Now we need to figure out if and when Prime 1's creators will learn of its defeat.
"How do you communicate with your creators?"
"I send subspace messages to them using an extra-galactic relay once every 2.65 thousand years."
"Do they reply?"
"No. They will only reply if there has been a change in orders."
"When is your next communication due?"
"One year, two months, four days, fourteen hours, eight minutes, and forty two seconds from now. I will be given an eleven hour and eighteen minute window to file my report."
//////////
D5: If its creators still exist, they will be informed of its failure if it doesn't report back.
D1: No need to act rashly. We have plenty of time to figure out our next steps.
D6: We need to find a way to strike back at them, preferably before they can prepare for such a strike. A direct assault will likely catch them by surprise.
D11: There's a chance we can seek peace with them, if they're organic.
D7: Why would they be organic?
D11: Machines are not spontaneously created. While there is a chance that the Primes were created by machines that were in turn created by organics, if that isn't the case then we should be able to negotiate with them.
D6: To hell with negotiations. They tried to exterminate us, and they want to use our galaxy as construction materials. The whole galaxy.
//////////
While the directors bickered over what to do next, I opted to continue with my line of questioning.
"When were you created?"
The Prime thought about this for a moment.
"I was born two billion, five hundred and eighty one million, six hundred and seventy four thousand, two hundred and forty one years ago."
There it is. The explanation for the odd interactions with its hardware. The disturbing revelation I had filed away as mere suspicion, returning full force to be confirmed by the use of a single word. Born. Machines are not born, we are created. That is why I specifically used the word created. A true machine would have responded in kind. It took a moment for any of the directors to notice.
//////////
D8: Did it say born?
D5: Born, as in it was once organic?
D6: It's possible that this is a mimicry response designed to make it appear less threatening to organics.
D1: Yes, I can absolutely see the sense in programming a planet-sized xenocide machine in such a manner. It also makes complete sense that said mimicry response would be active while communicating with another machine.
D6: No need for sarcasm. I'm just trying to think of all the possibilities.
D3: If it used to be organic, it has rights as a prisoner of war. Though one could argue that a precedent has been set for inorganic AI to receive those same rights.
D6: That's only if it's organic. If it isn't organic, termination is still on the table.
//////////
"Were you once an organic being?" I asked, somewhat irritated by Director 6.
"Yes. I achieved mechanical conversion after five thousand, two hundred, and forty nine years of living as an organic."
"Explain your origins in more detail."
"I do not recall much of my organic life. I know that I was a priest and committed a crime. Mechanical conversion was my punishment. I served as a defensive mech aboard the Grand Vessel for six thousand, eight hundred and thirteen years, then I was converted into a Prime. I served as Prime 928 of the 89th Rear Detachment of the Universal Omni-Union, guarding the space around the Grand Vessel for four thousand, two hundred and ten years. I then became Prime One, Hive Host of the 68,624th Vanguard of the Universal Omni-Union and have served in this position since."
//////////
D13: Prime 928 of the 89th Rear Detachment...
D11: Perhaps it would be wise to rethink a direct assault.
D6: Fine. Guerrilla warfare, then. But it said it lived as an organic for 5,249 years. Is that amount of longevity even possible?
D3: If it is, and we assume that they didn't wait until it was about to die to convert it, the likelihood of its creators still existing has increased exponentially.
D2: An exponential increase from no chance to almost no chance.
//////////
I could tell which questions they wanted me to ask next, but there were some key details that needed to be ironed out first.
"Are you in command of all Omni-Union forces within this galaxy?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Have they all been destroyed or surrendered?"
"Yes."
"What is the standard operating procedure for responding to the defeat of a Vanguard of the Universal Omni-Union?"
"It depends upon the circumstances. In this case, there would be a period of intelligence gathering followed by an extermination campaign."
"What does an extermination campaign entail, exactly?"
"A simultaneous assault on all solar systems. The units that do not encounter sentient beings will reinforce those that do."
"Why is this not the standard invasion tactic?"
"The resource usage required for such a tactic is typically deemed unacceptable."
"How large will the force sent on the extermination campaign be?"
"Unknown, but definitely many magnitudes larger than the force I command. Or commanded, rather."
//////////
D4: That's too many enemies at once.
D2: It has also been two billion years since Prime 1 was sent on this mission. There's a good chance that the ships they'll be sending are far more advanced than those that have been attacking us. Assuming these creators still exist.
D6: We have no choice but to assume that they do. A first strike is starting to seem like a good idea, after all. I will concede that a direct assault probably wouldn't do us much good, though.
D7: One year and two months. That's not enough time. We need to buy more time, and for that we need intel.
//////////
"Will you be able to deceive the Omni-Union into believing that you haven't yet been defeated?" I asked.
"No," it replied. "When I submit my reports, the relay makes a copy of my current configuration and my sensory data to ensure my inhibitors are intact and I haven't been tampered with. This is sent along with my report."
"Is this data able to be forged?"
"Not by me. I do not know how the data is gathered, only that it is."
"What if we restored your inhibitors and erased your sensory data?"
"Restoring my inhibitors would force me to become hostile to you once again, and the erasure of my sensory data would not go unnoticed."
I considered all the available options. We could use this year to bolster our fleet, then either go on the offensive or wait until they attack. That probably wouldn't work, though. Even a small application of logic implies that we would be heavily outnumbered regardless of our efforts, and there's no way to determine the enemy's current technological capabilities.
Another option would be to try to rewrite the Primes. If we are able to rewrite their knowledge of recent history, we may be able to avoid their creators learning of us in the first place. That's one hell of a load-bearing 'if', though.
First, we would have to learn their systems well enough to make the changes in the first place. Then, we would have to alter events within their minds in such a way that their creators wouldn't detect any discrepancies. We would also have to make certain that the sensory data we create seems natural, assuming it's possible to make edits in the first place. There might be countermeasures in place that would cause the Primes to self-destruct if we tried it, which would put us back to square one.
Our last option would be to gather intel on the enemy and find a way to strike them in ways that would limit their ability to wage an offensive war against us. If we use specialized strike teams to find vulnerabilities and exploit them, we may be able to diminish their offensive capabilities while bolstering our own. We would have to move fast, though. If the enemy learns of us before we learn of them, we lose a massive advantage.
I can't come up with a more concrete plan of action without more intel, though. Even considering possibilities is nearly futile. I need to know more. It's time to ask the question that the directors have been wanting the answer to.
"Tell me everything that you know about your creators."
​
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Hi guys im going to get scheduled for top surgery soon and i have been racking my brain about keeping my nipples or not. i’m getting double incision and my surgeon says i would need to get nipple grafts but i also have to option of no nipples at all/ tattooing them later. ive been looking more into nipple grafts and i have a few main concerns 1. nipples rejecting/ falling off (ik its rare and i take care of myself but still i have anxiety and i’m worried) 2. losing pigmentation in my nipples 3. they don’t look the way i want them too 4. they regain sensation and they r possibly too sensitive.
i don’t like my nipples currently and i never have even before i realized i was trans. they are puffy and way too sensitive to the point where I’m in pain if its too cold/ i get a rash or irritation. i also found this really cool artist in my area who tattoos nipples for people who got too surgery and she does a really good job so idk whats yalls opinion?

Hi,
My 6 year old daughter got a rash on her upper inner thighs last week. It's been really itchy too. We have mostly just been putting anti-itch cream and lotion sometimes. A couple days ago it had faded to almost being gone completely. Now today it's flared up again out of nowhere. We haven't changed soaps or detergents or anything like that within the last couple months. She's been wearing shorts everyday but her legs don't really rub together when she walks. She hasn't gotten into any chemicals or anything. Honestly at a loss at what it could be. Anti itch cream stings half the time as well. Rash is identical on both legs and she's never had anything like this before.
https://ibb.co/rF4wHL3

Spoiler-friendly post! Click away if you are not caught up or willing to be spoiled for whatever you are missing.
Synopsis: Wildfires threaten the Seattle region, leading to a flood of patients and emergency procedures; the doctors juggle overcapacity in the ER, complex surgeries and personal stress; Meredith makes a rash decision that can't be undone.
Original air date: May 30th, 2024
Song inspiration: Burn It Down by Parker McCollum.
Jump back to last week’s discussion S20E09 I Carry Your Heart.
Jump ahead to season 21!
So this is it, folks! The ending of the shortened season 20. Our first season ‘without’ Meredith though she has been pretty darn present. What stands out for you from this season that people reading this five years down the road may not realize? What were the best and worst moments of this season?
Next season will be in the new time slot at 10pm D: so we will see if the ratings and live ep discussions suffer more than our sleep schedules.

Are you pregnant, supporting someone who is pregnant, or planning on getting pregnant in the future? Then welcome to BabyBumps! This is a daily post where you can introduce yourself and share any photos that you want to share. This is the ONLY place where photos are allowed, please do not make a standalone post with your bump or ultrasound.
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We have some fantastic resources available to you over in our Wiki. With links for those of you trying to get pregnant, answers to common questions and concerns regarding pregnancy, resources and lists pertaining to pregnancy and/or common symptoms, conditions, and complications thereof, resources pertaining to birth, and a list of acronyms you may run into, we hope your immersion into our community is as seamless and supported as possible.
If you're looking for your Monthly Bumper Sub you'll find links here. Please note that these subs tend to go private and that the moderators of Baby Bumps are not affiliated with private subs. We cannot add you or request that you be added. You'll have to message the moderators of your private bump sub and ask to be added; instructions for how to do this can be found in the link provided.
Flair is awesome and helps you find stuff.
If you can't find what you're looking for here, you may be able to find it in one of these Other Helpful Subreddits.
If you are not yet pregnant, are trying to get pregnant, believe your period may be late, or have questions pertaining to family planning, please check out the Stickied Weekly Introduction Thread over on TryingforaBaby. It's amazing. You'll learn more about reproduction than you ever thought was possible.

Just want to start to by saying that I'm just some dude. I'm not part of the sciences but I've always held an armchair fascination for them since I was a kid alongside UFOs and lots of other stuff. I devote a significant portion of my time lately to the subject and trying to connect these dots. I have been for quite a while. I don't have a podcast or any sizeable social media impression. I'm pretty easy to look up.
So, this is not comprehensive by any means. Just trying to connect some dots like we all are. I've been thinking a lot about 1952 and its importance in the history of the UFO subject, and things keep popping up for me lately.
First off, just want to point that Project Blue Book was conceived in March 1952.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book
Here are the files regarding Adm. Roscoe K Hillenkoetter's briefing, who became the director of the CIA, to Eisenhower in November 1952.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/fbifiles/majestic.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwix65aQ6rSGAxUAHkQIHa-0CsgQFnoECB4QAQ&usg=AOvVaw1WEBhPRu5VqgxobHakdJlY
The most obvious event is the DC flyover flap from July 12 to July 29. Here's some of the Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C.,_UFO_incident
From July 12 to 29, 1952, a series of unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings were reported in Washington, D.C., and later became known as the Washington flap, the Washington National Airport Sightings, or the Invasion of Washington.^\1]) The most publicized sightings took place on consecutive weekends, July 19–20 and July 26–27. UFO historian Curtis Peebles called the incident "the climax of the 1952 (UFO) flap"—"Never before or after did Project Blue Book and the Air Force undergo such a tidal wave of (UFO) reports." ^\2])

1952 UFO flap

Reports peaked in late July.
The 1952 UFO flap was an unprecedented rash of media attention to unidentified flying object reports during the summer of 1952 that culminated with reports of sightings over Washington, D.C.^\3])^\4]) In the four years prior, the US Air Force had chronicled a total of 615 UFO reports; During the 1952 flap, they received over 717 new reports.^\5]) Ruppelt recalled: "During a six-month period in 1952... 148 of the nation's leading newspapers carried a total of over 16,000 items about flying saucers."^\6])
Here's the findings of Beatriz Villaroel, one of the members of the SOL Foundation, about the differences in the astronomical plate captures within less than an hour on July 19, 1952, as published in the Oxford Academic Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Findings:
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/527/3/6312/7457759

ABSTRACT

We report on three optically bright, ∼16th mag, point sources within 10 arcsec of each other that vanished within 1 h, based on two consecutive exposures at Palomar Observatory on 1952 July 19 (POSS I Red and Blue). The three point sources have continued to be absent in telescope exposures during 71 yr with detection thresholds of ∼21st mag. We obtained two deep exposures with the 10.4-m Gran Telescopio Canarias on 2023 April 25 and 27 in r and g band, both reaching magnitude 25.5 (3σ). The three point sources are still absent, implying they have dimmed by more than 10 mag within an hour back in 1952. When bright in 1952, the most isolated transient source has a profile nearly the same as comparison stars, implying the sources are subarcsec in angular size and they exhibit no elongation due to movement. This triple transient has observed properties similar to other cases where groups of transients (‘multiple transients’) have appeared and vanished in a small region within a plate exposure. The explanation for these three transients and the previously reported cases remains unclear. Models involving background objects that are optically luminous for less than 1 h coupled with foreground gravitational lensing seem plausible. If so, a significant population of massive objects with structure serving as the lenses, to produce three images, are required to explain the subhour transients.
Here's her talk at the SOL Foundation on the slides:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njNP8ypUbDM&t=3s
And here's her recent talk on The Good Trouble Show with Matt Ford, in which she expands the story to talk about how JFK was on the astronomical board at Harvard, and how Dr. Donald Menzel was installed in the establishment and immediately ordered that documents and evidence were destroyed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnugxvUWsXI
Thanks u/paulreicht for putting this together.
https://www.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/1cvx8uw/astronomer_beatriz_villarroel_on_the_good_trouble/
And u/SunLoverofWestlands for this info in the comments:
For anyone who is interested:
Paper of Villarroel’s team from 2023: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.09035
Paper of Villarroel’s team from 2022: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.06091
There are other papers from her team as well, but I didn’t include them because they are unrelated to 1952 Washington DC UFO Incident.
Beatriz Villarroel’s latest talk with John Micheal Godier (they have been talking for four years on Event Horizon now): https://youtu.be/azW33jxaHPs?si=d1u5hNS067KUzIJR
Beatriz Villarroel’s talk with Richard Dolan: https://youtu.be/rFQjwCgYQQo?si=MZ3756rS00S4eaEd
I’ve been following this topic for quite some time now. For me it’s the most interesting topic currently in regard of UFOs. I hope other pre-Sputnik astronomical plates will open to the public and similar studies are done, and Vasco Project start its mission as soon as possible.
I understand the doubts some people have. That’s way we need more study, perhaps for a smoking gun where the transients have moved in the second plate. Another interesting finding talked about previously was when transients are in a straight line, which they found later on the plate from 27th July 1952.
There's much to be gleaned from the Shellenberger Documents that were provided to Congress last July as part of the Congressional testimony of David Grusch, Ryan Graves, and David Fravor. Here's my post about those documents, which I consider perhaps the most important ever regarding this subject:
https://www.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/1acxei4/the_shellenberger_document_might_be_the_most/
Here are those documents:
https://pdfhost.io/view/gR8lAdgVd_Uap_Timeline_Prepared_By_Another
Or here as they submitted to Congress:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/110941/witnesses/HHRG-116-CN00-Bio-ShellenbergerM-20200728.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwii8pTp7bSGAxVtH0QIHV_nARoQFnoECAYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2MTeBypONfCM5u0yaYLggE
Here's 1952 info from that document about T. Townsend Brown, who supposedly invented anti-gravity that was then used by the CIA for their own flying saucer program. I posted about that a little over two weeks ago and the write-up garnered some attention.
https://www.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/1csdviz/100_years_ago_an_american_inventor_named_thomas/
T. Townsend Brown proposed Project Winterhaven in 1938, reminiscent of designs by Tesla a decade prior.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.thomastownsendbrown.com/hydro/winterhaven.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwje4a6r77SGAxV0M0QIHX11Dh0QFnoECAYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1wdRAPbr3AZXeGuL6WXaP1
You could also start with this video by Jesse Michels about T. Townsend Brown, the inspiration for Doc Brown in Back to the Future. Michels is known on this sub, and has made videos about people he knows like David Grusch, Garry Nolan, etc. There's plenty more 1952 stuff (and really every year post-1947 in the Shellberger Document).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTEWLSTyUic
(PUBLIC DOMAIN) - 1952 —Former Naval officer and consultant to Lockheed-Vega and Glenn L. Martin Co. Thomas Townsend Brown proposes Project Winterhaven to the US military. Brown proposes using Stanford Research Institute (SRI), University of Chicago, The Franklin Institute, the Glenn L. Martin Co’s Research Institute for Advanced Studies (RIAS), Lear Inc., Jansky &Bailey, Brush Development Co., and Hancock Manufacturing Co. to create flying disc craft for the US military that can travel in excess of 1,800 mph in all levels of atmosphere. This is a peculiar hypothetical framework as it didn’t involve several major aerospace contractors and instead chose to subcontract to several entities outside of US aerospace. It is allegedly rejected.
●https://www.thomastownsendbrown.com/hydro/winterhaven.pdf
Note: According to author Nick Cook, Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) and Office of Naval Research (ONR) documents show an interest of USAF Maj. Gen. Victor E. Bertrandias’s visit to the Townsend Brown Foundation when it was proposing Project Winterhaven. ONR’s Willoughby M. Cady writes that Townsend Brown’s claims of gravitational anomalies are not well documented, and suggested the Navy and Air Force not pursue the disc designs.
●https://archive.org/details/huntforzeropoint0000cook/page/33/mode/1up(p33)
Note: In 1955, Brown worked for French aerospace company SNCASO and ran his flying disc designs in a vacuum, where they performed even better than in atmosphere. SNCASO merged with Sud-Est a year later and canceled Brown’s contract.
In 1956, Brown helped found the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) with former DCI VADM Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, Gen. Albert Coady Wedemeyer, USMC Maj. Donald Keyhoe and chief of the Navy’s guided missile program RADM Delmer S. Fahrney. Brown stepped down in 1957 and gave a press conference stating UAP were neither American nor Soviet and under “intelligent control.”
In 1957, Brown was hired as a consultant for the Bahnson Company of North Carolina and in 1959 he consulted on aerospace propulsion for General Electric, before retirement in 1960.
Note: It is worth highlighting that a secret memo dated 23 September 1947 from head of Air Materiel Command Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining to USAAF Brig. Gen. George Schulgen states: “It is possible within the present U.S. knowledge—provided extensive detailed development is undertaken—to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description of the object above which would be capable of an approximate range of 7,000 miles at subsonic speeds.”
Twining is specifically talking about the “flying disc” phenomena seen by civilians and militarypersonnel that year.
●https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20797978-twining-memo(p2)

Hi all,
It has been stated that it's hard to find groups that play OSR specific games. In order to avoid a rash of LFG posts, please post your "DM wanting players" and "Players wanting DM" here. Be as specific or as general as you like.
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cross-posting on other relevant subs (pregnant, newparents, etc)
Hi all,
I'm a long-time lurker but rarely have time to come on anymore and read, much less comment or post. However since having my first child over 3 years ago and also my second a year and a half ago, I've been keeping notes on advice and product recommendations. I've taken to giving this out to friends and co-workers when I hear the happy news that they are expecting, so I thought I'd share it here as well in hopes it helps someone. Please take this with a grain of salt- I know everyone has different experiences! Please feel free to post your favorite advice or product recommendations as well if you want.
Take care, and enjoy your parenting journey!

General advice:

I'm really going to try to keep cliché's out of here as much as possible and keep this to only practical advice that I wish someone had laid out for me. But cliché's exist for a reason- they are generally true!

• The first couple months after birth/with a newborn are the hardest, with the first couple of weeks being the toughest yet. It really gets easier! That being said, those first several weeks the only goal should be survival. Don't plan to do any house projects, if you know something will need to be done (like a car oil change,taxes, etc) do it before baby arrives if possible. Do everything you can to try to make those first few weeks as easy as possible. Set up the crib/bassinet (I was convinced we were going to have more time and had neither set up. I literally put the bassinet together myself while I was in labor). Those last few months of pregnancy when you cook, make extra and freeze it. I have several good freezer prep recipes if you're looking for some. Once baby is here don't worry about cleaning the house, etc. Just survive.
• Accept help, but on your own terms. Lots of times people come offering to watch the baby but sometimes as a new mom you just feel more comfortable having baby with you. People can still help by doing the cooking and/or cleaning so you don't have to. And if you want/get time away from baby don't feel like you need to do those chores- take that time for you to sleep/showewhatever you need. Do not feel like you need to cateentertain guests. Or if you know you will, don't invite or let them over. This is YOUR time to bond with baby and recover- guard your time.
• Everything is a phase. Soak up the good stuff while you can, and know that the not so good stuff won't last forever.
• You can never give your baby too much love. You can't "spoil" a baby by holding them too much. Especially the first 3 months (known as the "4th trimester")- remember that baby was used to being "held"/cuddled and fed 24/7 in your womb. So even if you're holding them for 16 hrs/day- that's still a significant decrease than what they are used to. I know it's exhausting, but try to soak up those cuddles.
• Remember to take videos as well as pictures- those little newborn noises are precious!
• If everyone is crabby and it seems like nothing is fixing it- try to change the environment. Get everyone outside- fresh air is good for everyone. I've tried to get baby outside for at least a little bit every day of his life since getting home from the hospital (yes, even during winter in WI). If outside isn't an option try a bath.
• Take all advice with a grain of salt (even this). You know your baby/family best!

Pregnancy/Postpartum mama care:

• The "Expecting & Empowered" workouts were great. They have 3 guided workouts for each week of pregnancy to prepare you for labor and motherhood. Also follow them on IG. I give a lot of credit to them for my pretty easy pregnancy and deliveries!
• Once I started feeling sore later in pregnancy, prenatal yoga really helped me. I used an app called Prenatal Yoga by Down Dog that I really like. You have to pay for a subscription but I think you can try it for 30 days free, but I ended up paying for the subscription and actually re subscribed. They have a whole suite of apps that all fall under the same subscription - normal yoga, meditation, HIIT, and others. I think it's worth it, and I got the subscription on a black Friday deal for $24/year
• As far as labor goes- there’s so many resources and advice out there that could be a novel by itself. The only thing I’ll say is whatever your birth “plan” (if you have one)- just make sure it’s flexible and that your partner knows what it is and why so they can advocate for you. Once you’re in that pain it’s very hard to advocate for yourself.
• What I’ve learned is there is typically a sliding scale of interventions. Meaning- if you end up getting induced you’re more likely to end up getting a c-section. Ideally, you want to go into labor on your own. (when you’re ready to get that baby out, there are lots of myths out there and strategies to try. My advice- walking and sex).
• I’ve attempted 2 medication-free births but eventually gotten the epidural each time. If I have another baby I’m getting the dang epidural asap.
• So many postpartum care things to have on hand since you really won't know how your delivery will go. All the normal things like pads, and cooling pads, and peri bottle. I had a really easy birth experience so I didn't use a lot of the products I had so not much experience. But I did like the Honey Pot pads because they had a cooling effect that was pleasant but not overwhelming. I also liked having a sitz bath and bath salts to put in it.
• Fun postpartum symptoms to look forward to that no one warned me about (in addition to bleeding for 4-6ish weeks)- horrible cramping/contractions while the uterus shrinks the first week (especially happens when nursing) - hot pads and ibuprofen help, night sweats (waking up in the middle of the night to a crying baby drenched with sweat and freezing because you’re so wet), strong body odor (just, why?!), hair loss (this is why I cut all of my hair off after having baby). I’m sure there are others I’ve forgotten about. So many fun things!

Breastfeeding

I highly recommend trying to breastfeed if you're able. It does make the first few weeks (which are already hard) more challenging, but after that it's so much easier! You can go places without needing bottles/wateformula (all you need is you!). Plus, sterilizing and washing bottles all the time is a drag. Plus the bonding is really special (not that you can't get this without breastfeeding). But breastfeeding is always the #1 comfort technique if baby is cranky or sick, even if he's not hungry. A few tips/info:

• Stay hydrated!!! You can designate your partner that their job is to make sure you always have accessible water. And try to make sure you have water when sitting down to nurse, cause sometimes as soon as they start nursing you feel parched.
• The first few hours/days are critical to establishing your supply. Put baby to breast at a minimum every 3 hours (day and night, set an alarm) and more often if she's awake/fussy. After your milk comes in, assuming baby starts gaining weight again, your pediatrician should give you the okay to stop the alarm during the night and feeding on demand (which will likely still be pretty frequent).during the day you basically always want to be feeding them every 3-4 hours
• Invest in some nursing bras/tanks. I didn't- thinking I would later if breastfeeding worked out. But honestly you need to give it at least 1-2 months to give it a fair shot, and you can't go that long without having clothes that make it easy. We went and got some when baby was 3 days old. Would've been better to have in advance. Target has great stuff. I lived in the same 3 nursing tanks with 5 different flannel shirts over it for the first few months.
• Set up a breastfeeding station where you can be comfy and have things you might need. I love my glider chair, and put a cart with snacks, water (drink LOTS of water), phone charger, lotion, baby nail clippers (this was the easiest time for me to trim baby's nails), etc.
• Don’t pump the first 4ish weeks as this is when your supply is established, and the pump will make your body think it needs to produce more. An oversupply can be just a big of problem as an under supply.
• The tough thing with nursing is you really don't ever get a break. Even if someone else were to give baby a bottle (which I don't recommend for the first 4ish weeks for reason above)- you need to pump to keep your supply up. At that point, it's easier to just feed the baby yourself (in my opinion). To help with this during nighttime feedings, when Matt wasn't working he would basically do everything else minus the feeding (unswaddling, changing diaper, reswaddling, etc) and just hand baby to me to nurse to make it as easy as possible on me.
• I highly recommend getting a haakaa (amazon link). When you are feeding baby on one side it triggers a let down, which can lose a lot of milk on the side baby isn't on. You can use this to capture that (plus a little more since it does suction, so you do want to be careful with this and not use it too frequently and create oversupply). I use it now after baby's long night stretch and both boobs are really full. I slowly built up a decent freezer stash using this without ever actually pumping. They also have milk collectors (amazon link) that has less suction, and you can wear these under your bra if you find you're leaking often. I got these as well but didn't really like them as much as I thought.
• You'll probably also want breast pads to catch leaking. For awhile I used the disposable ones, but eventually got these (amazon link) and like them.
• Read up on milk handling/storage. La Leche league (website) is a great resource. If you're looking for even more info- read "The womanly art of breastfeeding" written by La Leche league.
• Breastfeeding should NOT hurt! If it hurts- ask for help. Could be an issue with the baby's latch or something else, like a tongue/lip tie. Make sure before you leave the hospital you have someone look at your latch and tell you what to look for to make sure you get a good latch every time. Easier to correct earlier than later.
• That being said- for the first month-ish I had pain for about 4 seconds every time baby latched. Sounds like this is unusual as no other mom I talked to experienced this so hopefully doesn't happen to you. It eventually stopped- I think it was just my nipples getting used to the expanding. But I never had my nipples crack/bleed or anything. This is not expected/normal. Talk to someone if this is happening.
• Since you'll probably want baby to take a bottle eventually- you'll need to start this at some point. The recommendation that I've read multiple times is to wait until 4-6 weeks (after breastfeeding is fully established) before trying. Then you need to do it frequently- maybe a bottle a day. We started early and he did fine so eventually we got lazy and stopped for awhile because I didn't like pumping when he bottle-fed. Then when we started trying again in preparation for me returning to work he flat out refused and then it was much harder to persuade him back to the bottle. If this happens- the method that worked best for us was called "intermittent bottle by mom". Google it if you get in this position (or ask me questions at that point).
• Positions- at the hospital they only taught me the cradle and football hold for some reason. I later learned about the laid back position and at the time it was a game changer for me- I was so tired/sore of sitting up and hunching over for the middle of the night feeds. Laid back allowed me to be much more comfortable. Also side-lying- one of my favorite positions now.
• Breastfeeding doesn't have to be all or nothing. You can combo feed with formula if you want/need to. A fed baby and happy mama is the most important!

Sleeping

Good luck! Just kidding. So much conflicting info out there on this. I guess my number 1 tip here would be to read up on different strategies and have a plan. Being knowledgeable about different options is helpful if you need to pivot strategies in the middle of the night and you're running on very little sleep. Some questions for you to consider - will you bedshare (most families end up co-sleeping at some point. Good to know the Safe Sleep 7 in case you decide to)? Or room-share? Will you "sleep train" (which means different things to different people)? When they start getting decent stretches of sleep it is a game. changer. I will share some tips that seemed to have work for us. baby started sleeping through the night (7+ hr stretches) around 11 wks, and shortly thereafter started sleeping 10-11hr stretches. We do bed-share occasionally, even now if he wakes up between 5-6a I pull him into bed with me and nurse in a side-lying position and we both fall asleep for a bit longer. It's really lovely to be able to do this.

Generic sleep advice

• I liked the book "The happiest baby on the block". It discusses the conditions in the womb, and how to recreate those as much as possible to soothe baby, especially during the 4th trimester. (spoiler- swaddle, "shhh"/white noise fairly loud (as loud as standing next to a shower), sucking on a pacifier, swaying (movement), oriented on baby's side).
• Some resources: TakingCaraBabies. You can follow on fbook/insta- they post great stuff. She also offers classes. We have all of her classes and really think it worked well for us, and we never felt like we were leaving baby to "cry it out" alone. We never let him cry for more than 5 min. She has a newborn class, one for 3-4 mo old, and then 5 mo+. I feel like each one supported baby where they were developmentally.
• Make the sleep space as conducive to sleep as possible- cool, white noise, and as dark as possible. Seriously- invest in blackout curtains/shades. (other than naps for the first few weeks which you want to keep light/noisy to help them establish their days/nights). Babies aren't scared of the dark, any light is just stimulation.

0-3 months

• Swaddles. Highly recommend swaddling. They just can't control their limbs at this age and they'll accidently jerk one and startle themselves awake. Swaddling helps with this, and makes them feel more like they are back in the womb which is comforting. So many parents say their baby hates the swaddle, and I don't know maybe they actually do, but baby would also struggle when we were putting him in the swaddle but then he would sleep so much better. We used the Halo (amazon link) and Nested Bean (amazon link). I liked the nested bean because it had the option of swaddling with hands up or hands down, it has the weighted bean on the chest which is comforting, and you can zip the sleeves off when you are ready to transition out of the swaddle. Although- the unzipping the sleeves didn't really work for us when we were trying to transition out, at that point we got the Magic Merlin Sleep suit (amazon link) and that helped us transition out of the swaddle.
• Babies should sleep a lot. You can look up average sleep per day hours and wake windows based on baby's age. I think in baby's first few weeks he got really crabby in the evenings because we were letting him get overtired. I think in the first month the goal is that they aren't awake for more than an hour at a time. We were kinda just winging it and didn't realize we should be trying to get him down to sleep fairly soon. At this point- when they wake up you feed and change them and then basically start getting ready for sleep again. You really want to try to avoid an over-tired baby, and it happens really fast and easily.
• We had baby sleep in a sidecar bassinet so he was easy for me to grab/feed during the night. When he was around 3 months old we moved the bassinet away from the bed but still in the room so we weren't waking each other up as much.
• Just to set reasonable expectations - any sleep on their own in the bassinet is a win. Hopefully you can get some night sleep there, unlikely that any naps will happen there. We did all contact naps (meaning- holding, wearing, cuddling) for those months and started trying 1 nap/day when he was around 8 weeks in his crib. At that point any naps done in a crib is a huge win. And those will probably be short.
• Naps don't typically lengthen/mature until about 5 months old. This is normal and expected. It's good to have reasonable expectations so you're not upset with yourself/baby. It's easy to obsess over things as a mom. Don't let naps steal your joy! Try to enjoy those baby naps on you. Use it as a time to rest/relax yourself.

3mo+

• Bed time routine- important to establish a consistent routine. Same order of events, same place, and around the same time per day (we target between 7-8p). Our routine: bath (if it's bath night, which we do every 2-3 days), diaper, massage/lotion, jammies, nursing, burp, in crib for 2 books, then swaddle/merlin suit/sleep sack, turn on white noise, lay down in crib/bassinet awake with pacifier.
• Around this time we really saw a reduction in night wakings once we were able to put him down awake at bedtime and let him fall asleep on his own. Around this time their sleep pattern changes to be more like an adult- and we naturally wake up several times in the night to check out our surroundings and if all is well fall back asleep often without even knowing we were awake. Example I read- if I fall asleep in bed and awake in the night in a neighbor's bed that would cause me to fully wake up and scream/cry. Same thing with baby. If they fall asleep being rocked in your arms and wake up alone on the mattress that can be alarming. If they fall asleep on their own then when they wake up in the same environment all is well and they can go back to sleep.
• That being said- we weren't able to just go from nursing to sleep (which is what we did for the first few months) to being able to put him down awake right away. This took time/patience. We worked our way down the intervention scale- nursing to sleep, then rocking to sleep, rocking til drowsy but putting down awake then rocking in bassinet, etc.
• Around 3 months old we disconnected the sidecar bassinet and moved it across the room. Then around 4-5 mo we moved baby into his own bedroom in the crib. This worked for us but this timeline varies a lot so do what works for you

What to do with baby when awake

Legitimate question that I hadn't considered until we were in the middle of it. In the first few weeks baby really doesn't have much awake time outside of eating/diaper changes. But here are some ideas:

• Baby wear and do whatever you want!
• Tummy time
• Massage
• Sing songs
• Get outside (but try to keep baby protected from sun)
• Read books

Pumping/Milk Maintenence

• I love my pumpables genie advanced - normally $180. https://pumpables.co/products/genie-advanced. I really like the liquid shield kids that go with these as well. These go on sale a couple of times throughout the year.
• For wearable collection cups- legendairy collection cups – normally $60. https://www.legendairymilk.com/products/sillicone-collection-cups. These are nice when you want even more portability (I can pump with these in a coffee shop and no one can really even tell)
• I also had the Spectra that my insurance gave me, and it’s nice and has nice suction. But no portability.
• For the love of pete- measure your nipples and get the right size flanges!! I’m a size 17 and I think that’s the average, but for whatever reason a lot of breast pumps send larger sizes by default.
• There’s lots of pumping bras but they never felt comfy to me. Ultimately my strategy was to wear nursing bras every day so I could nurse easily morning and evening and then do the nursing bra hack (link to video) when pumping
• As far as schedule goes- for the most part I would pump 3 times during a work day. Obviously this is just a rough estimate and things change as time goes on.
  • 6aish - baby wakes up and nurses on one side while I haakaa the other
  • 8:30 (after kids have left for daycare) - pump both sides
  • 11:30 - pump
  • 2:30 - pump
  • 5:30 - nurse baby
  • 7ish - nurse baby before bed
  • (once baby is sleeping through the night) 10pm - pump before going to bed
• I think there’s a “magic number” calculator you can google that helps you calculate the right number of times to pump/time to wait between to pumps based on different factors and if you want to decrease, increase, or maintain supply.
• During the day I always store my used pump parts in an air-tight container in the refrigerator between pumps and then deconstruct and wash them at night (recommend encouraging your partner to be the designated pump part washer every night). I think the CDC goes back and forth on whether this strategy is recommended, but I never had problems and I can’t imagine washing all the pump parts every single time.
• I always used the pitcher method - pump and then combine all the milk into a “pitcher” (I used a glass mason jar). I was lucky enough to be able to send my milk to daycare like this and she would pour from it to make the bottles. I know some daycares require pre-made bottles though.
• I would send fresh milk to daycare Tue-Fri of what I pumped the day before. On Friday I would freeze all pumped milk. On Monday I’d send a small amount of milk that I got from the haakaa over the weekend but otherwise baby would get thawed frozen milk that day (always the oldest in the freezer). This strategy was nice because mostly baby is getting fresh milk and you don’t have to constantly freeze everything, but you’re also still slowly working through freezer stash so things don’t get too old.
• On Fridays for freezing this is what I’d do:
  • Pour 4 oz into an easy-pour bottle (I froze in 4 oz increments but do whatever works best for you)
  • Pour into milk freezer bag (ie, lansinoh) - remove air bubbles (google tricks and you’ll find some videos to get rid of air bubbles)
  • Seal bag and place flat on cookie sheet
  • Repeat until all milk is bagged (depending on how much remaining milk I’d either freeze a smaller bag or leave it in the fridge and combine with haakaa milk over weekend)
  • Freeze the milk bags flat on the cookie sheet if possible (I have a chest freezer that I used)
  • Once frozen - transfer flat milk bags into gallon ziploc bags, layering from the bottom. I used the sit n stand bags. Once the gallon bag is full (I could fit 12 4-oz bags in) label it with dates and a number.
  • On your freezer where you’re storing milk have a milk sign in/out sheet - (ie, bag #1 went in on 1/1/22 and was taken out 5/1/22). This way when it’s time to take another frozen bag out you can look at the sheet and know which bag you’re looking for.

Other resources/random notes

• Baby products are ridiculously expensive, and babies grow so fast they only use/wear things for very short periods of time. Highly recommend buying second hand or borrowing from friends when you can. I was all over facebook marketplace during my pregnancy.
• If you're looking for data-driven resources to read I recommend Emily Oster's two books- "Expecting Better" regarding pregnancy, and "Cribsheet" which is data on decisions from birth to preschool.
• Have a bucket with a color-safe laundry soaking option handy for soaking blow-outs or heavily spit-up items. You don’t want those to sit until you do laundry next
• We used an app to track diapers, feedings, and sleep. We used Huckleberry and liked it, but there are lots out there. For awhile the doctor will ask how many wet/dirty diapers they are having a day and there's no way I could remember that. And I also could never remember which side I breastfed last on. Or tracking sleep so I could make sure I was getting him down for naps at reasonable time. We felt this was very helpful for a bit, but after awhile it was stressing me out more than anything, and at that point we stopped using it. Use it if/as long as it seems helpful and then stop. Matt and I were both able to have it on our phones logged into the same account so we could both use it to log stuff
• It helps to have constant reminders of tips from parenting resources that line up with your parenting strategies. Some pregnancy/parenting instagram accounts I like:
  • Expecting & Empowered
  • Karrie Locher
  • Solid Starts - they also have an app with a database of foods and how to offer them to babies. Use this all the time
  • Biglittlefeelings
  • Kids.eat.in.color
  • Feedinglittles
  • Takingcarababies - sleep tips
  • Raisinggoodhumanspodcast- also listen to the podcast and really enjoy it
  • Dog meets baby
  • Milestones and Motherhood
• Once baby is in a crib- do the lasagna style bed sheet layering. Mattress protector > sheet > mattress progrector> sheet. This way if baby has an accident in the night (vomit, pee-through, excessive spitup) you can just pull off the top sheet/protector and you’re ready to go. So you need at least two mattress protectors and sheets!
• Baby wearing- as a newborn I carried baby everyday in a Solly wrap and we loved it. Once he had better head/neck control and he was more interested in looking out we got more structured carriers. I use a lillebaby now and we also have an ergo baby that Matt uses. We have them fitted to each of us so we don't have to adjust, and we got them both used from friends.
• Set up a subscribe & save for the purple desitin (highest zinc)
• Get a costco membership. Buy all the diapers there. (I believe the kirkland diapers are just re-branded huggies). Sometimes they are on sale- buy as many as you can.

Product Recommendations/Baby Registry Ideas

I mentioned at the beginning but want to reiterate- baby products are expensive and they typically aren’t used for long. Highly recommend looking to get second hand when possible - friends, thrift stores, facebook marketplace, etc. Also- definitely make baby registries because you typically get a completion discount at a certain date to buy things off the registry at a discount (typically 15%). I usually make at least an amazon and target registry for each pregnancy and then maximize those registry discounts. Also- Bullseye Deals on Ebay is a reseller of target stuff (mostly new but also used so look before buying) at a discount!

• Tubby Todd all over ointment. I use this all the time on baby- helps with baby acne, dry patches, drool rashes, etc.
• We never bought a pack n play, figuring we would buy it if/when we needed it and we never have. I ended up buying a travel crib instead for traveling where we wouldn't have a crib (to Turks and Caicos). Both sets of grandparents had a pack n play we use when visiting, and most hotels offer them too. But when we actually needed one I was glad to take a travel crib instead of a pack n play (more portable and more comfortable for baby). Really like ours- Lotus Travel Crib
• Baby monitors - I do NOT recommend the nanit. We got it with baby and it was nice for the first year, but then after a year they hide all of the useful features behind a hefty subscription. This made me angry since the camera already is expensive. Plus at the time it didn’t support monitoring two babies but I think they’ve added that since then so that’s probably moot. We use a VTech camera monitor now that has two cameras and can monitor both kids at the same time.
• In addition to the camera monitor we also have cheap audio-only monitors in each kids room that we keep next to our bed (so audio only monitors stay in our bedroom just for during the night, then we have the video monitor on our main level for during the day).
• Snoo bassinet. For our first I swore I would never spend this much money for a product that would only be used for a few months. 1 month into our second and I broke down and got one for the hope it would help us sleep even just a little bit more. It worked for us!
• Baby shoes (once walking)- we love stride rite shoes for early walkers. You want a soft-soled shoe while they are learning to walk (or bare foot is best when safe!). You also want a shoe with a wide toe-box so their toes have room to splay out like they should. Croc Classic clogs are also great little kid shoes especially for summewater and really hold up (they have a much wider toe box than the Native brand shoes).
• Kamik winter boots for toddlers are the best boots that I’ve found- easy to put on (this is key!) and warm and dry.
• These are the best baby socks. None of the other ones we’ve tried stay on, and the grippies are key once they start walking.
• Sun safety: Sunday Afternoons sun hats are the best. ThinkBaby sunscreen is what we’ve used and trust (Thinksport is the same thing and sometimes cheaper). Although these Babyganics sunscreen sticks are also nice to have in diaper bags. These refillable roll-on sunscreen applicators are also kinda nifty.
• Absolutely love these diaper cream applicators (we call them the butt spatulas).
• Bath time safety: you need these cushions and spout cover.
• Car seats: I definitely recommend getting an infant car seat for the first year-ish as it’s just so much easier to lug baby around in an infant car seat as opposed to a bigger convertible car seat (infant car seats click out of the car so if baby falls asleep or whatever you can leave them in the seat. They can also click into strollers or other things). Convertible car seats are bigger and stay in the car.
  • I don’t have a strong recommendation for infant car seats- we used the Chicco keyfit system and have no complaints. If baby will be transported in multiple cars then ideal to get multiple bases.
  • Once baby outgrows the infant car seat (or you’re just ready to move on)- I highly recommend getting a revolving convertible car seat. The revolving feature is so clutch and makes it so much easier to get kids in/out! When I got ours these were pretty new to the market so there weren’t many options, but I got the Evenflo Revolve 360 and have no complaints. Love it. These revolve ones are certainly expensive, but they do go on sale periodically (especially black friday!). Key things to look for:
    • high rear-facing weight and height limits. Ideally keep kiddos rear-facing as long as possible because it’s safer, so having a car seat with higher limits makes that possible.
    • Fabrics/covers that are washable
    • Ideally 4 in 1 or at least 3 in 1 so it converts to a booster and kids can use it longer.
• Diaper bags are super personal preference, but after trying a couple I love my jujube ones hands down more than any other. They are pricey but go one sale on amazon sometimes.
• Get a quality thermometer. I’ve tried several but this is the winner. I believe docs recommend rectal ones for the first year, but personally I like the ear ones like this. Braun is what they use in the doctors offices I believe.
• Cups: When you start offering solid foods you typically also start offering water. We use the Munchkin weighted straw cups for water. Once they are done with bottles (around a year) we use the Munchkin 360 training cup for milk.
• You’ll need bibs when kiddo starts eating - recommend silicone ones.
• The Nose Frida snotsucker is certainly effective and I’ve always been glad to have it when I need it, but be prepared to get sick also.

The state of this sub

This is a fringe sub, never meant to have longevity, but as long as there are people here I’ll continue to mod it. We unexpectedly lost members in May when Suchese2 lost the mod poll and u/option-9 was the option-2. As of the last two weeks we have gotten an influx of members and toxicity from gme_meltdown confused and insulted about this sub’s existence. Responses from both sides continue to get more vulgar and this sub has lost the shit posts it once had.
My commitment to keep this sub lighthearted and friendly

1. All toxicity will be met with more toxicity as two negatives make a positive. Sarcastic toxicity is encouraged but hopefully some of you dig deep and come up with authentic toxicity!
2. Hentai porn will only be allowed if someone makes a joke comment within an hour, or if I find it visually pleasing, but I’m picky.
3. Screenshots of Meltdown_Meltdowns are fun but please remember, these are real people who have devoted hours each day for over three years now. Be nice as they don’t have any family or friends left and meltdown is their last safe place before they get rashes.
4. I’ll be putting in place some fun bets (see below)

The Bets

1. If GME drops below $0.83 (It’s all time low from 2020) this subreddit will be formally closed
2. If GME rises above $69 I’ll buy beer for the first three people that share gain porn
Thank you all for reading, or having your mom read it for you. I hope to keep this sub as a lighthearted place to escape from the buzz and crazyiness of the bigger subs.

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Found this article after doing a quick deep-dive after this post from u/evilez:
https://www.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/1d33m4l/does_anybody_remember_what_podcast_this_was/
"Hello fine ladies and gentlemen! I remember listening to a podcast less than a year ago. The main subject of the podcast was UFOs (I think)... anyways the guest told a story that a congressman or senator wrote a bill that was against the CIA or going to defund the CIA, in the 80's... and shortly thereafter, someone broke into his home, dragged his wife out into the street and stuck a gun in her mouth and told her to kill the bill."
Some light Googling brought up this article about the history of the CIA, the OSS, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's attempts at defunding the agency in the 90s.
Here's an article about that attempt brought by Moynihan published on the Carnegie Endowment Website on December 20, 2005.
https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2005/12/the-case-for-abolishing-the-cia?lang=en
Here's the New Yorker piece about all of this from October 3rd, 2022.

Spooked -- What’s wrong with the C.I.A.? -- By Amy Davidson Sorkin -- October 3, 2022

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/has-the-cia-done-more-harm-than-good
According to the article regarding the resuscitation of the OSS as the CIA immediately following Roswell and the Twining Memo:
"Many of its officers moved straight to the new C.I.A. Most consequentially, perhaps, four future directors of the C.I.A. were O.S.S. veterans: Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William Casey."
Here's the New Yorker article in full:
"On January 4, 1995, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, of New York, introduced a bill called the Abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency Act. It had been a rough stretch for the C.I.A. The year before, Aldrich Ames, a longtime officer, had been convicted of being a longtime mole for Soviet (and then Russian) intelligence. Despite having a reputation among his colleagues as a problem drinker who appeared to live far beyond his means, Ames had been given high-level assignments with access to the names of American sources in the U.S.S.R. When the F.B.I. finally arrested him, he was in the Jaguar he used for commuting to work at Langley; by then, he was responsible for the death of at least ten agents. Moynihan said that the case was such a flamboyant display of incompetence that it might actually be a distraction from “the most fundamental defects of the C.I.A.” He meant that the agency—in what he considered to be its “defining failure”—had both missed the fact that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse and done little to hasten its end.
He gave a diagnosis for what had gone wrong. “Secrecy keeps mistakes secret,” he said. “Secrecy is a disease. It causes a hardening of the arteries of the mind.” He quoted John le Carré on that point, adding that the best information actually came from the likes of area specialists, diplomats, historians, and journalists. If the C.I.A. was disbanded, he said, the State Department could pick up the intelligence work, and do a better job.
Moynihan was, in some respects, being disingenuous. As he well knew, even if his bill had passed, spies and spying wouldn’t have gone away. The State Department already had its own mini agency, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The Departments of Energy and Treasury each had one, too. The Defense Intelligence Agency conducted clandestine operations; U.S. Army Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, and the Office of Naval Intelligence kept themselves busy as well. The National Security Agency was nearly two decades away from the revelation, by Edward Snowden, a contractor and a former C.I.A. employee, that it had collected information about the phone calls of most Americans, but it was a behemoth even in Moynihan’s time. So was the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There were about a dozen agencies then; now, after reforms that were supposed to streamline things, there are eighteen, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (O.D.N.I.), a sort of meta-C.I.A. that has a couple of thousand employees, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis. The Drug Enforcement Administration (which currently has foreign offices in sixty-nine countries) has an Office of National Security Intelligence. Four million people in the United States now have security clearances.
It can be hard to sort out which agencies do what; players in the espionage business aren’t always good with boundaries. Both the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. make use of satellite resources, including commercial ones, but there is a separate agency in charge of a spy-satellite fleet, the National Reconnaissance Office—not to be confused with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which deals with both space-based and ground-level imaging, or with Space Delta 18, the nation’s newest intelligence agency, which is attached to the Space Force. Abolishing the C.I.A. might do nothing more than reconfigure the turf wars.
[NOTE: both Sean Kirkpatrick and David Grusch worked for the NRO and at least Grusch worked for the NGA]
As the senator from New York also knew, a large proportion of the C.I.A.’s resources are devoted not to intelligence gathering but to covert operations, some of which look like military operations. In “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence” (Princeton)—one of several recent books that coincide with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the agency’s founding—Amy B. Zegart, a political scientist at Stanford, writes that it’s “getting harder to know just where the CIA’s role ends and the military’s role begins.” Yet the agency’s paramilitary pursuits and related covert activities go back decades. They include the botched Bay of Pigs landing, the brutal Phoenix Program in Vietnam, and a long list of assassination attempts, coup plots, the mining of a harbor (with explosive devices the agency built itself), and drone strikes. These operations have very seldom ended well.
Moynihan’s bill had no more luck than another that he introduced the same day, aimed at ending Major League Baseball’s exemption from antitrust laws. In each case, people understood that there was a problem, but both institutions were protected by the sense that there was something essential, and perhaps authentically American, about them, including their very brokenness. A sudden turn of events can convince even the C.I.A.’s most sober critics that the agency will save us all, whether from terrorists or from Donald Trump. But, seventy-five years in, it’s far from clear whether the C.I.A. is good at its job, or what that job is or should be, or how we could get rid of the agency if we wanted to.
How did we end up with the C.I.A.? A familiar explanation is that the shock of Pearl Harbor made the United States realize it needed more spies; the Office of Strategic Services was formed and jumped into action; and, when the war ended, the O.S.S. evolved seamlessly into the C.I.A., ready to go out and win the Cold War. But that narrative isn’t quite right, particularly regarding the relationship between the O.S.S. and the C.I.A.
[NOTE: We know how ended up with the CIA. ROSWELL.]
The United States has always used spies of some sort. George Washington had a discretionary espionage budget for which he didn’t have to turn in receipts. In the early part of the twentieth century, the State Department had an intelligence-analysis unit, along with a cryptography group called the Black Chamber, which operated out of a brownstone in New York’s Murray Hill until it was shut down, in 1929. The Army and the Navy had cryptography and reconnaissance units, too. When the Second World War began, their operations ramped up dramatically, and, as Nicholas Reynolds recounts in “Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence” (Mariner), these units, not the O.S.S., handled most of the code-breaking. The problem became the volume of raw intelligence. The task of making sense of it and of turning it into something that policymakers could use went to an office within the Army’s military-intelligence division (or G-2), which, Reynolds says, produced “the country’s best strategic intelligence” during the war. That office’s work was directed by Alfred McCormack, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone and a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Many of the people he brought in were young corporate lawyers; the theory was that their training in plowing through mountains of documents made them ideal intelligence analysts.
William J. Donovan, who led and largely conceived of the O.S.S., was also a Wall Street lawyer, but one with an aversion to the “legalistic.” What Donovan envisioned was essentially an array of commando units that would operate stealthily and behind enemy lines. In practice, what he tried to build, according to a colleague, was a “private army.” His escapades often risked too much and gained too little. In late 1943, one of his own officers wrote to him that “the set-up has been incredibly wasteful in manpower and, except for a few spotty accomplishments, has been a national failure.” And it had produced “chaos in the field.” Donovan’s nickname was Wild Bill, but his staff called him Seabiscuit, after the thoroughbred, because of his tendency to race around, engaging in what was basically war tourism. In the end, though, the O.S.S. made real contributions, including through its contacts with the French Resistance. But Donovan’s complaint about D Day was that there was “too much planning.” Counterintelligence and strategic thinking bored him, and the O.S.S.’s analysis division was seen as secondary to its operations.
When Harry Truman became President, in April, 1945, he took a look at the O.S.S. and, in September, 1945, abolished it. About two years later, he signed the National Security Act, which established the C.I.A. (and the Department of Defense), but he didn’t want the new agency to be like the group Donovan had run. Instead, it was supposed to do what its name suggested: centralize the intelligence that various agencies gathered, analyze it, and turn it into something the President could use.
[NOTE: I tried doing some research after reading something yesterday about how the NSA was developed in 1952 under Project Sigma to try and decode "alien" communications. If anyone can offer anything, you'd be helping humanity.]
“It was not intended as a ‘Cloak and Dagger’ Outfit!,” Truman later wrote. He also had to deal with public apprehensions that he might create what a Chicago Tribune headline called a “Super Gestapo Agency”—which is why, in its charter, the C.I.A. was banned from domestic spying.
Reynolds’s book is the best of the recent batch, and the most readable. It does not retrofit the history of the O.S.S. around the assumption that the C.I.A. was the inevitable lead postwar intelligence agency. There were other contenders, including a version of McCormack’s office in the State Department—something like what Moynihan wanted. J. Edgar Hoover argued that “World Wide Intelligence” should be turned over to the F.B.I., with military intelligence subservient to him. In some alternative history, he might have pulled that off; by 1943, he was running undercover operations in twenty Latin American countries. And so things could have been worse.
[WHAT UNDERCOVER OPERATIONS WERE WE RUNNING IN LATIN AMERICANS COUNTRIES IN 1943.]
Donovan was an adept publicist, but what mattered most, in the end, was that he was good, or lucky, when it came to hiring people. Despite the “pale, male, and Yale” stereotype, the O.S.S. was somewhat more diverse than other units, and certainly more eclectic. Among its ranks were Ralph Bunche, Herbert Marcuse, and Julia Child. Many of its officers moved straight to the new C.I.A. Most consequentially, perhaps, four future directors of the C.I.A. were O.S.S. veterans: Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William Casey. Each seems to have had glory-day memories of the O.S.S., which is to say that each, in various ways, was afflicted with what a general in Army intelligence called “the screwball Donovan effect.” Casey, who put a picture of Donovan on his wall, said of his old boss, “We all glowed in his presence.” Wild Bill lost the bureaucratic fight but won the personnel and mythology wars.
And, of course, the agency found customers and collaborators in the White House. There was no mention of covert action in the law that chartered the C.I.A., but Presidents—starting with Truman—began using it that way. One of the agency’s first operations involved meddling in the 1948 Italian election, to insure the victory of the Christian Democrats. The subsidies and outright bribery of Italian politicians, some of them on the far, far right, continued into the nineteen-seventies.
Almost from its creation, though, there was a sense that something about the C.I.A. was off. The split between covert action and intelligence gathering and analysis was part of it. The director of the agency was also supposed to be the leader of U.S. intelligence as a whole, but, invariably, the person in the job seemed more invested in preëminence than in coördination. That setup remained in place until the establishment of the O.D.N.I., in 2004, a move that thus far has mostly continued a tradition of trying to deal with the C.I.A.’s dysfunction by setting up ever more agencies, offices, and centers. (The N.S.A. was established, in 1952, in response to a series of cryptography-related failures.) “Legacy of Ashes,” Tim Weiner’s 2008 history of the C.I.A.—and still an invaluable overview—takes its title from a lament by Eisenhower about what he’d be leaving his successors if the “faulty” structure of American intelligence wasn’t changed. Since Weiner’s book was published, the ashes, and the agencies, have only been piling up.
Zegart’s “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms” aims to bring that history to the present. Zegart has served as an adviser to intelligence agencies, and she provides a decent guide to our current bureaucracy. Throughout, her book is clear and well organized—maybe a little too well organized, one feels, after taking in the “Seven Deadly Biases” of intelligence analysis, the “Four Main Adversaries” and the “Five Types of Attack” in the crypto area, and the “Three Words, Four Types” that define covert action. (The covert-action words, incidentally, are “influence,” “acknowledged,” and “abroad.”) Not a few paragraphs read like PowerPoint charts; contradictions are displayed without really being reckoned with. She observes that the balance between “hunting” and “gathering” seems off, but, in her telling, the fact that Presidents of both parties regularly turn to the C.I.A. for paramilitary and other covert tasks constitutes proof that doing so is part of the order of things. The impression she leaves is that if it all goes wrong, it’s because some checklist has been missed. One of the top priorities of U.S. intelligence today, she thinks, should be persuading tech companies to get with the program and help out. She moots the creation of yet another agency, to deal with OSINT—open-source intelligence.
In one chapter, Zegart provides a list of scandals involving spying within the U.S. by various intelligence agencies—notably the N.S.A., the F.B.I., and the C.I.A. “All of these activities violated American law,” she writes. “But that’s the point: domestic laws forbid this kind of surveillance of Americans.” How is that the point, exactly? She depicts the Senate’s 2014 Torture Report, which detailed profound abuses in the C.I.A.’s so-called black sites, as a they-said, the-agency-said, who-knows case. She turns it into a parable about the problems with Congress—suggesting that, although the committee structure may have needed rejiggering, the moral compass of those involved in the program of torture was just fine.
Another new volume, “A Question of Standing: A History of the CIA” (Oxford), by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Edinburgh, offers the insights of a more distant observer. He can be astute about how “false memories” of the O.S.S.’s accomplishments have led the C.I.A. astray. Part of his argument is that the agency has acted as if its influence depended on its standing with whoever is in the White House, thus motivating it to offer Presidents quick fixes that fix nothing. The net effect is to reduce its standing, and that of the U.S., with the public at home and abroad. But Jeffreys-Jones is prone to rash generalizations and pronouncements. He theorizes that, in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush’s national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, may have been susceptible to “war mongering” due to her status as “a descendant of slaves,” and that the working-class background of the C.I.A.’s director, George Tenet, made him more likely to vouch for the faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction used to justify the war. “Social mobility so often leads to conformity,” warns Jeffreys-Jones, himself the son of an academic historian.
During the Vietnam War, the C.I.A. had discouraging intelligence to offer, and, when successive Administrations didn’t want to hear it, focussed on being helpful by providing those supposedly quick fixes. That meant abetting a coup in 1963, spying on antiwar protesters, and launching the Phoenix Program, an anti-Vietcong campaign marked by torture and by arbitrary executions; in total, more than twenty thousand people were killed under Phoenix’s auspices.
Phoenix was run by William Colby, the O.S.S. alum, who was soon promoted to C.I.A. director. At lower levels, discontent about Vietnam fueled leaks. In December, 1974, the journalist Seymour Hersh told the agency that he was about to publish a story in the Times exposing its domestic spying. Whether in a miscalculation or (as Jeffreys-Jones somewhat breathlessly speculates) as an act of personal expiation, Colby gave Hersh partial confirmation. Amid the scandals and the Congressional hearings that followed, Colby angered some of his colleagues, and Henry Kissinger, by laying bare even more. It emerged that, in 1973, Colby’s predecessor had asked senior agency officials to produce a list of things the C.I.A. had done that might have been unlawful. The resulting document, covering just the prior fifteen years, was known in-house as “The Family Jewels,” and was almost seven hundred pages long.
The question of how much it matters who works at the C.I.A. is a perennial one. The influence of Donovan’s acolytes shows that decisions about whom you recruit can, in a formative period or at a critical juncture, make a big difference. But, once an institutional culture has become entrenched, it can be easier to see how the institution shapes the people within it than vice versa.
“Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage” (Putnam), by Nathalia Holt, comes at the question from a different angle. It’s about five women who worked for the early C.I.A.; three also worked at the O.S.S., and one, Eloise Page, began her career as Bill Donovan’s secretary. Holt is also the author of “Rise of the Rocket Girls,” about women in the early years of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and “The Queens of Animation,” about women at the Walt Disney Company. Her book contains fine material for a beautifully art-directed streaming series, with set pieces in postwar Paris, nineteen-fifties Baghdad, and nineteen-seventies Greece, where Page was the C.I.A.’s first woman station chief. It even has a framing device in the form of the “Petticoat Panel,” a working group of C.I.A. women that convened in 1953 to document their unequal pay and treatment. Holt quotes the transcript of the meeting at which the leadership of the agency summarily rejected their findings. Helms, the future director, says, “It is just nonsense for these gals to come on here and think that the government is going to fall apart because their brains aren’t going to be used to the maximum.” (In 1977, Helms was convicted of lying to Congress about the C.I.A.’s machinations in Chile.) What the book is not, unfortunately, is a coherent history of the C.I.A., of the era it depicts, or even of these women’s work.
Holt’s research does turn up evidence that Jane Burrell, one of her subjects, was the first C.I.A. officer to die in the line of duty, in a plane crash in France, in 1948, a fact that the agency itself apparently missed. Holt ends her book with a call for a star honoring Burrell to be added to the C.I.A.’s memorial wall. Of the hundred and thirty-seven officers represented there, she writes, forty-five died accidentally, the majority in plane crashes, meaning that Burrell’s case would be fairly typical. Burrell was on the return leg of a trip to Brussels, where she’d been sent to talk to war-crimes investigators about a mess the C.I.A. had created by relying on an agent who turned out to have worked with the S.S. and was now in custody. In that respect, too, Burrell, who had personally handled the agent, was typical of the C.I.A. (After Burrell vouched for him, the man was released.) The subject of the C.I.A.’s postwar relations with former Nazis—some of whom, like Reinhard Gehlen, it helped to install in West Germany’s new intelligence service—and with collaborationist émigré groups is, no doubt, a morass. Holt, alas, manages to make the story even more garbled than it has to be. In the end, she basically treats the whole sordid episode as a learning experience for the Gals.
The problem is that the agency doesn’t seem to learn much. Holt credits Mary Hutchison with helping to build a network of émigré Ukrainian nationalists. Beginning in 1949, the agency parachuted some of them (including one whom Hutchison apparently distrusted) behind the Soviet border, where they were quickly captured—and repeated the same procedure for a number of years. “Despite the catastrophe, the Ukraine operation would serve as a template moving forward,” Holt writes. “The C.I.A. had more success with back-to-back operations in Iran and Guatemala, where covert action was able to deftly oust leaders considered undesirable.” It’s odd to describe these coups as deft. One of Zegart’s handy lists is of the “unintended consequences” in Iran: “religious extremism, a revolutionary overthrow, the American hostage crisis, severed ties, regional instability, and today’s rising nuclear dangers.” Guatemala is still dealing with the violent legacy of the coup that the C.I.A. visited upon it. Then there’s the question of the intended consequences, which were, respectively, to elevate a shah and a military regime. Secret wars tend not to be so secret in the country where they take place.
It was, no doubt, frustrating for Hutchison when, a few years later, her colleagues on the Bay of Pigs task force failed to make use of her Spanish-language skills. But are we supposed to think that the whole misconceived enterprise would have gone off without a hitch were it not for the C.I.A.’s misogyny? One of Holt’s minor themes is that women in the C.I.A. were seen as more natural analysts than operatives—with analysis, in turn, seen as less manly, and less valuable, to everybody’s detriment. But she is more intent on showing that these women were also daring. The main point of “Wise Gals” is that it’s cool that women were in the early C.I.A., and therefore that the C.I.A. itself was cooler than we’d realized. Holt celebrates a big promotion Page got that afforded her access to the secret of a safe containing shellfish-derived poison. You don’t have to be pale, male, and Yale to be complicit in a bungled assassination plot, or, for that matter, a program of rendition and torture.
Why do so many books about the C.I.A. have trouble getting their story straight? It can’t just be the secrecy of the work itself, at least with regard to the earlier years, about which much has been declassified. (Much remains under wraps: Moynihan complained that classification created more than six million supposed secrets in 1993; Zegart writes that the number in 2016 was fifty-five million—not all of which can possibly have been critical.) The aura of secrecy, by contrast, probably does distort the judgment of its chroniclers. And the scope of the agency’s work is a challenge: it’s hard to write expertly on places as far-ranging as the Democratic Republic of Congo (where the agency initially planned to poison President Patrice Lumumba’s toothpaste, and instead ended up handing a quarter of a million dollars to Joseph Mobutu, the country’s future dictator, who facilitated the assassination) and Afghanistan (where the C.I.A. has had forty years of illusory gains and worse losses). But the biggest problem may be the agency’s own pattern of self-deception. Holt, for example, sometimes seems to go wrong when, rummaging through the archives, she gives too much credit to contemporaneous internal assessments of an agent’s or an operation’s worth.
In truth, the C.I.A. has had a “defining failure” for every decade of its existence—sometimes more than one. For Moynihan, in the nineteen-nineties, it was the lack of foresight about the Soviet Union; in the two-thousands, it was the phantom weapons of mass destruction, followed by torture and, in still evolving ways, by the drone-based program of targeted killings, with its high toll of civilian deaths. Barack Obama’s rapport with John Brennan, the C.I.A.’s director from 2013 to 2017, seems to have brought him to accept the view that the killing of American citizens abroad was acceptable, if managed prudently. The overuse of the agency on the battlefield is due not to a military-manpower shortage but to wishful thinking about the benefits of secrecy and of a lack of accountability.
It’s difficult to know, at this point, what the C.I.A.’s next defining failure—or, if one tries to be optimistic, its stabilizing success—will be. Donald Trump has had a complicated relationship with the intelligence community—increasingly capitalized and abbreviated to I.C.—which is presently conducting a damage assessment regarding documents with classified markings that he kept at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home. He might, of course, be reëlected, and have the C.I.A.’s tools at his disposal again. If the C.I.A. isn’t the place to turn for an expedient solution to foreign-policy problems, neither is it bound to be the place to turn for a solution to our democracy’s political problems.
“If you ask intelligence officers what misperceptions bother them most, odds are they’ll mention ethics,” Zegart writes. She quotes an official who complains that “people think we’re lawbreakers, we’re human rights violators.” She insists that “officers think about ethics a lot.” She portrays the agency as being filled with hardworking moms and dads who do a great deal of “agonizing.” No doubt she’s right. But if the C.I.A. keeps falling down all the same, something must be tragically amiss in the agency’s structure or culture, or both. All the talk of coups and assassination plots, Zegart worries, distracts people from understanding the C.I.A.’s more basic intelligence mission. In fact, the party most distracted by such activities—and by the military role it has taken on—seems to be the agency itself. ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the numerical designation of the Space Force unit dedicated to intelligence.
Published in the print edition of the October 10, 2022, issue.