Trump's cabinet picks started off normal enough. Marco Rubio as SecState? Sure, dude's been a senator for over a decade, with most of that time on the Senate Committee for Foreign Relations and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (he's currently the ranking member on the latter), and that's as solid a resume for the job as you can want.
Things got progressively sillier from there, though. I'd make fun of RFK, Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services, but that's been thoroughly covered elsewhere.
The proposed Director of National Intelligence, though, is a huge yikes. You know who's excited about her? Komsomolskaya Pravda.
I was trying to think of something that would poll worse among the general population than "hating Taylor Swift and football", and here comes the Heritage Foundation with "ending recreational sex".
On the Left, their Extremely Online weirdos may have taken over the faculty lounges, but over on the Right, the "Needs to Turn Off Their Computer and Touch Some Frickin' Grass" demographic has hijacked the think tanks and is about to finish conquering the party machinery.
I got news for the Heritage Foundation: The guy who wanted to ban dancing was not the hero of Footloose. It's like these guys are running around finding every 80/20 issue they can and jumping on the 20% side of it with both feet. The problem with segregating yourself into little social media agreeing bubbles is that you end up thinking that the percentage of the voting public made up of Terminally Online dorks with Roman statue profile pics is a lot bigger than it really is.
It's one thing to accidentally step on the occasional rake. It's another thing to go to the store, buy a bunch of rakes, scatter them across your lawn, and run around stomping on them on purpose.
Man, I remember when I took the Heritage Foundation seriously...
Didn't we kill an awful lot of redcoats specifically to ensure that I wouldn't have to endure television newspeople telling me the condition of the king of England's junk before the breakfast hour?
I realize that RAF Typhoons are doing yeoman's work helping us bomb Houthi launch sites further back into the stone age right now, but if splashing a couple of them in an egregious blue-on-blue incident would get the talk of the royal package off my morning TV news, I'd be at least moderately in favor of it.
With their departed host Tucker Carlson reduced to flirting with flat eartherism to attract eyeballs and harvest clicks on The Website Formerly Known As Twitter, Fox News's prime time replacement has to get really weird to keep up.
I gotta admit, I didn't have "The MAGAverse gets assmad about the very existence of Taylor Swift" on my bingo card.
Just reading the linked article made my tea-in-the-harbor throwing muscles twitch reflexively.
The archaic excesses of monarchy were a lot easier to overlook when its public face was the kindly old Liz the Deuce. Her kid Chuck, though, is a thoroughly unlikeable chap who must incite republican twinges in all but the most heavily starched Tories.
It seems like his reign would be an ideal time for Great Britain to spring forward into the mid-Nineteenth Century.
Apparently something in the post about the Lamborghini Huracán violated Facebook's Community Standards for Cybersecurity.
Now, hell if I know what magic combination of words triggered it.
I have pretty much never run afoul of the normal posting standards. I know not to use violent verbs with direct referents because robots are too dumb to tell when you're threatening to kneecap someone as a joke or for realsies, and I don't use the array of impolite slurs that would get me flagged because I'm not a boor. But I have no idea what innocent terms happen to be current cybersecurity buzzwords.
From the department of "A Stopped Clock is Right Twice a Day" comes this notification that it's one of those times.
When you're getting pushback from leading gun control proponents, you might have overreached.
Gov. Lujan Grisham has done stepped in it. I mean, one of the foundational principles of leadership is "never give an order you know won't be obeyed" and, uh...
I don't know what she saw as the upside of this. She's freshly re-elected, but term-limited, so she'll be looking for work come 2026. There're rumors that the senior senator from NM might be eyeing the governor's office come the next election cycle, so maybe she wants his job? I dunno, though, I can't see this playing well in statewide elections in that fairly purple state.
The wee hours of Friday morning in scenic downtown Anderson, Indiana (pop. 54,788) suddenly turned into something out of "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Meets the Keystone Kops".
Three dudes are at the gas pumps of the Jackson Mart convenience store at the corner of Jackson & 5th, kitty corner from the Anderson Fire Department HQ, when all of a sudden and for no reason at all, some dude (or dudes) in a passing vehicle took umbrage at them and cut loose with a fusillade of bullets at the trio.
Well, not appreciating being the target of a drive-by shooting, our protagonists at the gas pumps produce pistols of their own and return fire at their passing antagonists.
Meanwhile, stopped at the red light there at 5th & Jackson, is one Deputy Lemon of the Madison County Sheriff's Department. He doesn't see the drive-by shooter, just the dudes at the gas pump blazing away. Deducing that they must be shooting at him, he decides that what this situation needs is yet another person shooting up the environs of the Anderson business district at zero dark thirty, so he exits his cruiser, draws his popper, and gets to poppin'.
Net casualties (that we know of) are one 20-yr. old Mr. Ivy, one of the original trio at the gas pump, who stopped a bullet...although whose bullet he stopped is not yet known at the time of this writing. He was treated and released at a local hospital, and the Indiana State Police are trying to sort out who it was who winged him. As far as I can tell, the drivers-by are still at large.
My personal takeaways from this incident: "Avoid kwik-e-marts in the middle of the night unless absolutely necessary", and "Just because other people are shooting it doesn't mean I have to start blazing away, too".
So, imagine you got a job as an IT dude at WidgetCo, Inc.
Obviously, in order to keep WidgetCo's networks up and running, you have to be given administrator access to the network, right?
But what you're expected to be doing is keeping the network running, not farting around and sifting through sales records and the manager's emails and all the files in the HR department. If you were doing that, you could get in trouble.
On that note, hey, let's see what's shakin' in the Massachusetts Air National Guard!
So, basically this kid was caught multiple times and repeatedly told "Mr. Bunny Rabbit, those carrots aren't for you! Or the kids in your War Thunder Discord channel!"
"I pinkie-swear I won't write things down in the SCIF again!"
I swear to Vishnu, this is the by-gawd dumbest Clancy novel I've ever been stuck in.
If every man-jack in this dude's chain of command isn't finishing out what's left of their wrecked careers conducting polar bear censuses at Pituffik Space Base, heads need to roll.
Well, when you're the digital plumber in charge of keeping the Sooper Seekrit series of network tubes unclogged and running and you have superuser access, they gotta give you clearance. Sure, they make you pinkie swear that you won't look at stuff you're not supposed to look at, but sometimes that just doesn't work out so hot.
As they say in the sewers of the internet: “wew, lads”.
Dude has thoroughly wrecked his life and damaged national security and also possibly the global order, all for the sake of some clout-chasing with a couple dozen incel gamers in a Discord server. It's not even like he got seduced by a hawt Russian agent or was promised a jillion bucks; he just wanted to flex for his Minecraft pals.
That is wack. That is some straight-up führerprinzip shit right there. An American should have been embarrassed to type anything so ludicrously slavish.
How is that any different from Rudolf Hess saying "The Party is Hitler. But Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler" in any meaningfully significant way?
I made sure to screen shot it in case whoever typed it drunk last night wakes up sober and embarrassed this morning, but I'm guessing the person who wrote that used "Ability to Feel Shame" as their dump stat.
Man, remember when we thought people might be getting a little excessively fannish about Barry O? Those were some quaintly innocent times.
I like this guy on Gun Broker asking big money for a "PINNED AND RECESSED" Smith & Wesson Model 940 that clearly does not have a pinned barrel, nor ever did any 940 have recessed chambers. Plus the gun has a clearly visible 7-digit alphanumeric serial number with a "BKR" prefix that dates to the early Nineties, a decade after any pinned-barrel Smith left the factory.
What do people like this even think "pinned & recessed" means these days? Are they just using it as shorthand for "I think it's old?"
"Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children's ice cream!...
You know when fluoridation began?...1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love...Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I-I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.
I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women, er, women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake...but I do deny them my essence."
Out in the kook-o-sphere, someone got big mad at my post yesterday afternoon, the one explaining why I hadn't gone out of my way to make a special 9/11 post.
My lack of doing so, as a matter of fact, is (and I quote) "why it will happen again".
I had no idea that my posts here on this low-traffic D-list blog had such a powerful effect on the fabric of reality.
I got worried.
So I scrolled back through the September 11ths of the last few years on this blog, making it as far back as 2018 before I got bored. I have really been slacking off in my performative angst, because none of those years had a stock photo of the burning towers and some glurgetext.
Worse, it's been a while since I made a special post on December 7th, so I've been putting the entire Pacific Fleet in danger from the Chrysanthemum Menace with my neglect.
Meanwhile, the mad dude in question keeps calling for the disbandment or defunding of the actual agencies who really do work to prevent another 9/11. He thinks they're the "deep state"*.
It's strange out there sometimes.
*I can't remember if he thinks they were actually behind the first one or not, but the odds are at least 50/50.
.jpg)
