Today I Learned

I'm going into battle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_FQU4KzN7A

Also, his brother is Matt Groening, the guy who created The Simpsons.

I have been reading about the Iraq invasion and this story was particularly horrific. I created the post with the NSFW flag, but I removed the flag to comply with the community rules. There are no graphic images, but the text is difficult to read.

The Mahmudiyah rape and killings were a series of war crimes committed by five U.S. Army soldiers during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, involving the gang-rape and murder of 14-year-old Iraqi girl Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and the murder of her family on March 12, 2006. It occurred in the family's house to the southwest of Yusufiyah, a village to the west of the city of Mahmoudiyah, Iraq. Other members of al-Janabi's family murdered by American soldiers include her 34-year-old mother Fakhriyah Taha Muhasen, 45-year-old father Qassim Hamza Raheem, and six-year-old sister Hadeel Qassim Hamza al-Janabi.[1] The two remaining survivors of the family, al-Janabi's 9-year-old brother Ahmed and 11-year-old brother Mohammed, were at school during the massacre and orphaned by the event.

"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same"

In the most recent episode of her podcast New Orleans Unsolved, independent investigator Anna Christie provides details regarding contracts between U.S. cities and the world's largest sex offender database OffenderWatch (parent company Watch Systems LLC).

According to Christie, a contract between Lansing, MI and Offender Watch/Watch Systems LLC, written prior to 2020 specifies that all sex offender data will be stored by a data management company called Rackspace in San Antonio, Texas.

This seemingly minor detail that Christie has uncovered, could actually be extremely significant, given that Rackspace was acquired by Leon Black's Apollo Global Management in August of 2016. (Interesting side note, this was the same month that a Rackspace employee was sentenced to 12 months in federal prison for child pornography):

•Aug 2016: Apollo Global Management Acquires Rackspace, Pins Hopes on Struggling Cloud Provider

•Aug 2016: Rackspace fired Jason Maurice Kirby, 39, from his $75,000-a-year job in November 2014 after an audit turned up the inappropriate activity, and an FBI forensic examination of his work and home computers located nearly 3,400 child porn images. Agents also found he used software to “wipe” his activity and try to cover his tracks, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracy Thompson.

Leon Black previously stepped down from his position as CEO of Apollo, due to controversy regarding his ties to Epstein. After his departure, a new CEO, Marc Rowen, was appointed to the company. However, as Christie also points out, recently released Epstein Files indicate meetings and communications between Rowen and Epstein continued, including an email from Epstein to Rowan regarding Rothschild funding.

•In February 2016 Epstein and Rowan traded emails about a potential Apollo corporate inversion, a tax maneuver designed to lower a company’s tax rate by reincorporating in a lower-tax country. The two discussed tapping banking firm Rothschild for the potential inversion. “i can join the call if you think appropriate,” Epstein emailed Rowan. “using rothschild for the inversion allows interesting structures.” Rowan replied: “Agreed.”

This past Monday, March 2nd, 2026, a class action lawsuit was brought against Apollo regarding these Epstein ties.

•Legal: Class action accuses Apollo of hiding Epstein ties in SEC filings

The suit, filed March 2 in the Southern District of New York, targets the alternative asset giant alongside CEO Marc Rowan and co-founder Leon Black. At its core, the case claims that what Apollo told investors and regulators — that the firm never did business with Epstein — was false.

The documented business transactions between Rowan, Black, and Epstein, which were previously denied, are disturbing to say the least. It's hard to dismiss the possibility that Epstein (or any of the powerful individuals in his network), could have used this influence to their advantage.

I'm currently searching for a copy of the Lansing, MI contract, and will add a link here once I find it, but I was able to find another OffenderWatch contract mentioned in the episode.

Oddly, as Christie also points out in the episode, an OffenderWatch/Watch System LLC contract with the city of Fort Worth, TX, contains an odd but potentially related paragraph regarding vendors who boycott Israel:

•https://publicdocuments.fortworthtexas.gov/CSODOCS/DocView.aspx?id=221086&dbid=0&repo=city-secretary&cr=1

If you're unfamiliar with the podcast and wondering what any of this has to do with an unsolved murder in New Orleans, it turns out that the OffenderWatch database was created by St. Tammany Louisiana native Lou Luzynski along with former St. Tammany Sheriff, Jack Strain.

Former St. Tammany Sheriff Jack Strain guilty on all sex crime charges

While Christie's podcast began as an attempt to investigate the unsolved 1982 murder of a young boy in New Orleans named Eddie Wells, it soon turned into an investigation of several seemingly related murders in Orleans and St. Tammany parishes, that all involved a former New Orleans police officer and lead detective for the NOPD pedophile unit, Stanley Burkhardt.

Former NOPD detective, convicted sex offender, back in jail facing new charges

Early in her investigation, Christie noticed Wells' death certificate listed an incorrect address in St. Tammany parish rather than his mother's address in Orleans, and she suspected this information may have been intentionally falsified by Burkhardt.

As Christie explains in this episode, the address incorrectly listed on Wells' death certificate, 516 Rutland Avenue in Covington Louisiana, is also the current address of OffenderWatch parent company, Watch Systems LLC.

By reviewing old public records, Christie was able to confirm that at the time of Wells' death and the other unsolved murders, the property listed on his death certificate, was owned by Lou Luzynski, creator of the largest sex offender database, OffenderWatch.

In October 2025, OffenderWatch announced the company had received a large investment from STG Allegro to expand its reach.

Through this strategic partnership, OffenderWatch® and STG will use the capital to enhance the Company's product offerings, accelerate innovation, and expand its reach to deliver even greater value to law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve.

Authorities claimed that homosexuality was the result of bourgeois Western and German fascist influence, and the official Soviet newspaper Pravda published an article which ended with the slogan: “Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear!”

From the beginning of 1934, gay men began to be arrested in large numbers in major Russian cities and sent to the gulags. One prisoner, Valery Klimov, wrote about the treatment gay detainees received:

"there were about 10 occasions when gays were murdered before my eyes. One was beaten to death in a prison in Sverdlovsk. There were 100 men in our cell; three or four raped him every day and then chucked him under the bunks. It was bestial, a nightmare. Once 10 of them raped him and then jumped on his head. I nearly went mad there; my hair turned grey. That's how people lose their sanity; many never recover even after they leave."

While lesbianism was never prohibited, and some masculine lesbians were valued in the military, many lesbians did still suffer persecution such as termination of studies or jobs, bullying, threats to remove custody of their children or being committed to psychiatric facilities.

For more than three decades, the Bayt-e Rahbari (also referred to as the Bayt), has been the single most important entity in the Islamic Republic’s policymaking

Despite its centrality and frequent references by Iranian observers, there is remarkably little public information about this secretive and complex institution and relatively little scholarly attention to it.

Economically, the Bayt controls almost all aspects of Iran's economy. Starting in 2003, the Bayt began to play an active political role in engineering election outcomes, not least facilitating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rise to the presidency two years later

The Bayt has been intentionally organized and structured like a dark and tangled web, complex in design and opaque in its workings.

While some observers interpreted Khamenei’s limited public presence after the 12-day war with Israel as a sign of a looming power vacuum, in reality, it underscored something very different. The Bayt ensures that the supreme leader’s dominance is not dependent on his physical presence.

This structure — layered, opaque, and entrenched — makes the Islamic Republic uniquely resilient to external and internal shocks. It's not Khamenei the man, but the Bayt as an institution, that provides durability and continuity.

For any meaningful change to occur in the Islamic Republic—including regime change—the Bayt and its apparatus must be significantly weakened

Context: The First Red Scare was a massive domestic crackdown brought about by anarchist activity and the wave of mail bombings that targeted government officials in 1919. Even though the era is often associated with the Russian Revolution, the U.S. government’s most aggressive tactics were specifically aimed at the anarchist movement. They saw it as the primary threat to the country, leading to the Palmer Raids and the mass deportation of non-citizen radicals. The whole period was defined by an obsession with dismantling anarchist groups, making them the central target of the federal government's legal and police actions during that time.

Contrary to future folklore, Myrient (a video game archive service or ROM site) will not shutdown because of any copyright laws, rather a long list of other reasons, it was too good and has collapsed under its own weight from external factors.

After reading more about the book "The Five Ages of the Universe", I noticed the logo's galactic theme with a bright star at the top and found more topics related to The Primordial, Stelliferous and Degenerate Era.

It's design shows how the M (μ) logo had its own universe and the white cresend moon C shaped light from a star that lights the darkness within that universe.

To be honest, the rest is too complicated for me to describe them in a forum post, so I will leave for others to decide.