In today's episode of "The Internet Was A Mistake"...

What is this I can't even

Done GIFfrom Done GIFs

*headdesk*

Me: *spends literal decades on the internet trying to explain to people that there’s not a dial labeled ”GAS PRICES” on the Resolute desk*

POTUS, yesterday:

WTAF?

I have no idea what's supposed to be going on in this AI slop picture. Is that Jefferey Epstein or Hunter Biden he's laying hands on?

EDITED TO ADD: Ell. Oh. Ell. This post took so much blowback from MAGA stalwarts that it got deleted.

Cult of the Victim

What is it with these Right wing snowflakes and all their imaginary persecutions?

The "war on protein" is as much made-up ragebait as are the ones on Christmas or Christians.

You can’t swing a Happy Meal in this country without hitting a burger joint or a barbecue shack or a steakhouse. (And thank heavens for that.)

If there was a war on protein, then protein won a crushing, lopsided, complete victory sometime before I was born. I mean, Dr. Atkins wrote his book while we still had boots on the ground in Vietnam.

And why are they using a photo of RFK, Jr. that makes him look like the bad guy from a low-budget Saw ripoff?

WH Comms Director: "Did you get that picture of Bobby for the socials?"

Photographer: "Sure did, boss. All creepy and sinister just like you asked."

WH Comms Director: "What?"

Go Back!

You know that the whole "internet of things" has gone too far when AWS cloud services goes down and it bricks your $2700 bed.

Look, of all the things I don't need connected to the cloud, it's my damn bed. 

You know what's worse than an internet-powered smart bed? A $600 'net-connected smart camera pointing into your toilet to photograph your poop to make sure... I don't know... that you're pooping correctly or something?

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Touch grass, dude.

It turns out that winning a bajillion dollars in startup lotto around age thirty and then not having anybody tell you "no" for the next quarter century will absolutely cook your brain.

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Hypocrites

Can you imagine how the posters at TheFiringLine or TheHighRoad would have absolutely lost their shit about official "Clinton 2000" or "Obama 2016" merch back in the day?

"hUrR dUrR hE's jUsT tRoLlInG LiBs!"

That's beside the point.

Tab Clearing...

• ROK government not amused by treatment of S. Korean nationals in ICE raid at Hyundai EV/battery plant in Georgia.


• Hackers compromise company that stores vast amounts of your dash cam videos.


• This surrogacy story is absolutely bonkers.

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The Internet Was A Mistake

@dr.eric.b This is not only dumb, but also incredibly dangerous. I’m begging you to not listen to random grifters with 0 expertise when it comes to your health. They don’t care about you or your health. #fyp ♬ original sound - Eric

It's like I'm stuck in bizzaroworld...

If Obama had announced that the government would own 10% of Intel & have a seat on the board of US Steel, put federal agents on the streets of DC to check the papers of people riding the subway, and had the FBI raiding the houses of people who made him mad, the Right would be losing their goddamn minds and yelling about voting from the rooftops. 

I guess that boot's real tasty if it's on the right foot.

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Can't make this stuff up...

Yes, this is a real tweet from the GOP's official account.

Yes, the car in the picture is a Lada. A Soviet-era Lada.

I'm about to palm my face off.

First this:

The United States will increase military sales to India starting in 2025 and will eventually provide F-35 fighter jets, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday.

Hey, why not just send them to Beijing via Moscow and eliminate the middlemen? This is absolutely feckless. Fortunately some responsible adults are giving that statement the whole "Well, it's just a proposal to initiate a study and we'll look into it" treatment. Hopefully they can slow walk it for long enough for POTUS to get bored and find another shiny object.

Then this:

All probationary NNSA employees terminated

Word came down this afternoon

That's 300-some people. A sixth of the National Nuclear Security Agency. The people who, among other things, guard warheads being transported and are tasked with keeping the Super Bowl from glowing in the dark like in one of Clancy's later, too-long novels.

But don't worry! This is all in the hands of DOGE, who is running their server with an unsecured database on a service being hosted by one of Elon's broccoli-headed minions like it was Hillary's emails or something.

thisisfine.jpeg

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Clownshoes

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.

“The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian newspaper, wrote on Friday in a glowing profile of Ms. Gabbard, noting, positively, that Ukrainians consider her “an agent of the Russian state.” Rossiya-1, a state television channel, called her a Russian “comrade” in Mr. Trump’s emerging cabinet.

Jesus wept.

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Say "Moose and Squirrel"

Did you see the one about the retired light colonel who got catfished into giving away secrets on a dating site? Check this stuff out:

"Please my handsome beloved, give launch codes."

Jesus, this clown makes A1C Teixeira look like Kim muhfuggin' Philby.

"She is communicating with you through her soul and her deep, penetrating eyes you have conjured up in your imagination based on a few almost naked pictures she has likely posted. She thinks you're great and hot and successful and masculine. She loves you! The way no other woman has before. Oh, Svetlana, I love you, too! You’re super hot, but I also love you for your brains. We share an interest in US national defense issues! You’re a rare gem who gets off on talk about military targets. Yeah, baby. Let me tell you about my missile!

But actually, this is Svetlana: An overweight Russian named Boris who is slugging vodka and belching up borscht while typing with potato fingers."

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Good plan, GOP.

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...

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YHGTBSM

"We keep spending most our lives

Living in a grifter's paradise..."

Way Too Much Information

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.

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National Enquirification Proceeding Apace

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.

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It's a Family Tradition

Every time I get to thinking that the British monarchy is a quaint and harmless tourist attraction of a tradition, I run across a story like this:

Like many so-called traditions, the feudal hangover that is bona vacantia should have been consigned to the dustbin of history centuries ago, but it has been all too tempting for successive royals to preserve this royal fruit machine that pays out again and again. Over the past 10 years, it has collected more than £60m.

Under this system, the Duchy of Cornwall, owned by Prince William, can claim the assets of people who die in Cornwall intestate – without a will – if no relatives can be found. Charles’s Duchy of Lancaster does the same when their last known residence is within what was historically known as Lancashire county palatine.

Edward VIII found cash from those who died intestate in the boundaries of the duchy was sitting in an account in case claims arose against it. He simply stole a million pounds from it, leaving almost nothing in that kitty.

George VI did very well out of the loyal servicemen who died serving their country in the second world war, who originated from within the confines of the duchy and had no will. “For king and country” took on a whole new meaning.

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.

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Security through obscurity.

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.

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