Seriously Silly

I spent a lot of my time on Friday, cutting out the background shapes for the Temperature quilt while watching the cable news coverage of the big indictment news. My ridiculously oversized labels are working even if they are silly sized.

The two things went together pretty well, I didn't have to look at the screen all that much so I could concentrate on cutting. The numbers and so forth for cutting were very well defined so I could use most of my brain power on taking in the information that was being disseminated for several hours. There's so much there of course, but as a person who formerly held a US government security clearance designation at the Secret level it's too much to bear or even contemplate. 

It's hard to describe the way it was drilled into us day in day out, the extreme penalties we would encounter if we ever even whispered about what we were working on or with to those without the same clearance or the same "need to know". Much less actually intentionally taking the documents home and refusing to return them. Or waving them around and boasting about them. And that this was a former president who did all that? Inconceivable.

The fix is of course serious penalties and jail time. Lock him up? Yeah, absolutely. If we have laws, they've got to apply to everyone, most especially to the people at the top who really really know what's at stake. Literally any other person would already be in jail. I would not want to be a US Diplomat or spy right now, having to convince our allies that they can  continue to trust us after seeing a Five Eyes Only document on the floor of a maybe unlocked storage room at a un-hardened public/private beach resort. 

The thing is, the vast majority of the US public hardly knows or ever thinks about all this international relations or spy stuff. It's all in the bucket of things we can't do much about, so why worry about it. The truth is we will likely never really know the effects of what he did, what alliances fell or were weakened, which assassinations of our contacts in other countries were or were not due to this breach. The power inherent in the possession of these documents is not something we normally think about. It's just a piece of paper, a file folder. But it's the possession, it's who has it, who knows, who's willing to sell it or trade it away. 

Ahem, back to our regularly scheduled quilting programming! I had to buy all that lovely black background fabric to cut it up, thanks to Santa Cruz Vac n' Sew, I had either Kona or Painter's Palette to choose from. I chose the latter, and the color name is Ebony not black, I also picked up some more Wonder Clips to keep all these cut out pieces organized, another can of Odif 505 basting spray, some waistband elastic so I can make a skirt. 

Also pictured is a SpeedWeve which I got from Amazon, it was getting talked about at the BAM retreat and it sounded very handy for clothes mending.  DS saw it and thought it was a kalimba.