Politics as Team Sportsball

So Bumpstock Donnie is coming back because in the Fox News Cinematic Universe anybody to the left of Pinochet is a "communist"*.

Inflation's down, unemployment's as low as it's been in decades, and they keep having to add new lines to the top of stock market charts in newspaper business sections because the market's never been this high... and apparently neither have American voters because everyone seems sure that we're in the middle of The Great Depression II: Electric Boogaloo.

Ask the Man (or Woman) on the Street (or Facebook) what the state of the nation is, and you get some unfocused argelbargle along the lines of "Eggs are eating our pets and immigrants are expensive and it costs four dollars a gallon to trans our kids or something. Plus Ukraine** is taking all the FEMA away from decent American retirees."

Truly we are a fundamentally unserious people.

*Y'ever notice how you can't call someone "Hitler" until they've actually killed six million people and invaded Poland, but if someone proposes jacking the upper marginal tax rate a few percent, they're definitely Stalin?

**You know they broke out the good vodka in the Kremlin this morning.

Ты с ума сошел, бро?

Russia is big mad that some Russkie channels have been removed from YouTube, so a Moscow arbitration court has fined the tech giant a jillion squillion hojillion dollars, which is roughly a bazillion times more than all the money in the world.

The fine, imposed after certain channels were blocked on YouTube, which Google owns, has reached more than 2 undecillion rubles, Russian business newspaper RBC reported this week. That’s about $20 decillion — a two followed by 34 zeros.

The fine is significantly more money than the combined total global net wealth of $477 trillion, according to Boston Consulting Group, and the worldwide gross domestic product last year of about $105 trillion, according to the World Bank.

Google’s parent company Alphabet — one of the five most valuable companies in the world — is valued at about $2 trillion, about 10 billion trillion times smaller than the fine.

LOL.

ROFLMAO, even.

This certainly makes me take Russia seriously and not think of them like a cross between a comic opera kleptocracy and the fictional bad guy country from an Austin Powers movie.

(The post title is, of course, Google Translate's attempt at "You mad, bro?" in Russian. Is it accurate? I don't know, and I also don't care, much like Google doesn't care about bogus fines issued by some phony-baloney court.)

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Tab Clearing...

• Tribal Lore of the People of the Gun: A great list of essential reading from Gorillafritz. If you don't know where yo've come from, it's hard to figure out which way you should be going.


• A weird longing for the communist past among some Russians, and the weird love of Russia from some Americans are two things I just do not understand. The Cold War sucked.


• Bobbi fell into a burning (jalapeño) ring of fire.

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I'll never order a lemonade & ice tea blend the same way again.

The op-ed and political pages at the Washington Post and New York Times have been laboriously "sanewashing" the former president's speeches, translating his rambling, discursive weirdness into something resembling policy positions in the interest of trying to present somewhat normal coverage of a typical quadrennial political horse race.

Yesterday at a rally in Pennsylvania, though, the Donald finally said something too weird for the WaPo to try and spin it into normal political dialogue.

Seventeen days from the election, here in arguably the most decisive swing state, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump spent the first 10 minutes of his speech without mentioning politics.

Instead, he delivered a long tribute to Arnold Palmer, the late golfer who was born here and is the namesake of the airport where Trump was speaking. Trump’s soliloquy about Palmer included an account of how other athletes reacted to seeing him in the showers.

“Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women and I love women. But this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable,’” Trump said.

That was a dong too far for the Post's writers...

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Dead Wagon

The US auto market has essentially given up on station wagons for whatever reason.

Take, as Exhibit A, the 2018-2020 Buick Regal TourX wagon, based on the Opel Insignia Country Tourer.

I can't believe that Buick released a longroof with AWD and the 250 horsepower turbo four from the base Camaro, and it put down performance numbers basically identical to my '94 Mustang GT & '98 Z3 2.8, plus it looked really good, and the market shrugged and said "Whaddaya got in a blobby crossover SUV instead?"

Heck, Buick didn't just give up the Regal wagon, they gave up all the Regals...and actually all the cars. Buick is solely a purveyor of SUVs and crossovers now.

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Unhorsed

Everyone's familiar with the phenomenon of "de-branding", where they remove or obscure product logos to avoid handing out free advertising for another company, like covering up or editing out the Apple logos on laptops seen on TV, right? Well I just stumbled across the most extreme example I've ever seen.

So there’s a prescription drug commercial currently on TV where this lady is driving around in an orange 64-65 Mustang convertible. It’s impossible to guess the year because they’ve used CGI to turn it into a rolling bar of soap.

No badges, all the styling lines on the side gone, nothing. The pony in the grille and the gas cap between the taillights are wiped away.

The first time I saw the commercial out of the corner of my eye, I thought it was a Jensen-Healey.

Check it out...

Great Moments in Bad Ideas

On this day in 1995, Robert Overacker rode a jet ski off the brink of Niagara Falls and into history...and eternity.

Yowza

How in the heck can it be September already? It was April only five minutes ago!

Time has gotten so wonky since March of 2020. Things that feel like they happened just the other day actually happened a year and a half ago. Meanwhile, the last three weeks of this election season have dragged on for months.

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Oh, puh-leeze...

"Vance’s memo and intensive scrutiny of President Biden’s ambassador nominees reflects his view that cultural elitism has infected America’s diplomatic corps and needs to be rooted out through extraordinary vetting efforts, said U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss closed-door meetings."

Listening to a multimillionaire Yale lawyer venture capitalist rant about “elites” is surreal. It’s like water denouncing wetness.

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TSA Follies

The airport here in Indianapolis has the newer baggage scanners that don’t require you to remove your laptops or tablets from your carryon, which is handy. Things tend to move pretty ricky-tick at IND.

Last week was, like, maybe only the third or fourth time I’d ever flown without checking a bag, so I was looking forward to the experience of hopping out of my Uber at the curb and just breezing my way to the gate like most normies do.

I tossed my shoes, camera, and my gun burkha into a tray, my camera bag into another, and then slid both of those and my Maxpedition Fliegerduffel into the tunnel. Then I stepped through the porn-o-scan to await my gear so I could trot off to the gate.

They pulled the Fliegerduffel to the side for further inspection.

That was weird. I half expect them to pull the tray with my gun burkha, because it’s got my wallet and my wallet has a Sparrows Hall Pass and a lockpick card, both of which have drawn scrutiny in the past, but are devoid of sharp edges. My suitcase, though? Maybe they wanted to look at the trauma shears in the blowout kit attached to the MOLLE loops?

Nope, the dude opened the bag and pulled out my little toiletries kit. Nothing in there but some nail clippers and some tweezers, so…?

Friends, the dude pulled out my Secret solid antiperspirant and swabbed it with the bomb detector swab. Hand to God, I have never seen that before.

Holden is attached to the bag via MEOWLLE loops.

As far as the return flight goes? Well, the less said about the seething mob of aberrant humanity I was trapped in for better than thirty minutes at the MSY security checkpoint, the better.

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Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

I was today years old the first time I heard about this website. Someone went and dropped a reference to this wonderfully off-kilter web page and I've been stuck in the mystery flesh pit all morning.

Careful! It's deep!

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It's a plague upon the land...

I’m half expecting Maher, Seinfeld, and Dennis Miller to merge, forming some nightmarish Cranky Late Boomer Formerly Funny Voltron and go on a rampage across the late night talk show stages of America.

“He’s 27 feet tall, has laser eyes, hasn’t told a funny joke since 2002, and he can’t take a hint: He’s Overstayed His Welcome Man!”

It's like this formulaic attempt at a career reboot with a "Didja ever notice they won't let you tell jokes about fat people, chicks, and Asians anymore?" routine is being circulated in some private Telegram channel for past their best-by-date comedians.

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Too late, they've bred...

The Collinses didn’t tell me Simone was eight months pregnant when we were making plans for me to spend a Saturday with them at home in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, but I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. They are the poster children of the pronatalist movement, on a mission to save humanity by having as many babies as possible.

Malcolm, 37, answers the door of their 18th-century farmhouse with four-year-old Octavian George, who is thrilled to have a visitor, bringing toy after toy to show me like an overexcited golden retriever. His little brother, two-year-old Torsten Savage, is on his iPad somewhere upstairs. Simone, 36, in an apron that strains across her belly, has her daughter, 16-month-old Titan Invictus, strapped to her back. The imminent arrival of their fourth child, a girl they plan to name Industry Americus Collins, turns out to be only the first in a string of surprises – and one really shocking thing – that I will encounter during my day with the pronatalists.

I don't get these people who act like a bit of population shrinkage would be the worst thing in the world. Remember what a barren, empty hellscape this country was when it only had two thirds as many people as it does now, way back in 1976? Yeah, me too.

Also, are these people trying to make their kids hate them?

Me: "Hahahaha those countries with baby-naming laws are so quaint and authoritarian."

These Dweebs: *name their human daughter in 21st Century America "Titan Invictus"*

Me: "Okay, so about those baby-naming laws..."

I'm like "You people get that these aren't, like, Funko Pops or collectible action figures or lifestyle achievement badges to show off to your friends in your private Discord server, but are actual independent humans who are going to have a life of their own in a surprisingly short number of years and are probably going to loathe their weird-ass given names, right?"

(And before you say "Well, Black people have been naming their kids funny-sounding names for years..." what I want you to understand is that there's a difference between wanting to have names that are cultural signifiers... yet still recognizably names ...that aren't the ones that had been assigned to your family by the people who bought and sold your ancestors as chattel, and just being weird for the sake of being weird. D'shaun or Latisha are names, made-up names, sure, but names nonetheless*. "Industry Americanus" is a dorky-ass affectation.)

*"Why don't they use names from the part of Africa their families came from?" you ask, and the answer is that nobody knows where they came from because it's not like their abductors or purchasers took careful notes on that stuff.

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Do it, bro!

Photobucket has been sending me messages for literal years that my inactive account would be deleted and that if I didn’t respond, it’d be a goner.

I’ve never responded, but those dudes still haven’t deleted my account (which I am hoping they will. I only had it because a couple forums on which I was active a decade or more ago didn’t have their own photo hosting.)

Are you gonna bark all day, little Photobucket? Our are you gonna bite?

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Angry Manbaby

As you may know, Elon Musk has been nursing an incredible case of butthurt for something like twenty years because the rest of the board at PayPal wouldn't agree with him that "X" was a totally bitchin' name for an online finance company.

He's been so obsessively assmad about it that he inflicted "X" on one of his offspring as their legal moniker, thereby pretty much guaranteeing future estrangement issues when the kid becomes old enough to realize that daddy is a nerdy weirdo.

Most famously, as soon as he bought Twitter, he renamed it "X", which was the corporate equivalent of drunk-dialing the person who dumped you back in 2001 just to go "NEENER NEENER! I don't miss you at all!"

If you want an example of how petty and obsessive he is about this issue, check this shit out:

If a user typed in "Twitter.com," they would see "Twitter.com" as they typed it before hitting "Post." But, after submitting, the platform would show "X.com" in its place on the X for iOS app, without the user's permission, for everyone viewing the post.

They can't do anything about the hordes of ░P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░O ░ spambots, but they had coders diligently working to make sure you didn't hurt Elon's fee-fees by deadnaming his company.

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Uh Oh

Anyone familiar with the Taxonomy of Modern Dangers is aware of the potential monkey menace. Well it looks like things are jumping off in Thailand.

Warring monkey gangs? Like the Jets and the Sharks?

"Familiarity with firearms"?!? 

I hope that just means that the macaques recognize the tranquilizer guns the cops are using and flee before they can get darted. Because the other possible interpretation is... well, we've all seen that movie and it doesn't end well.

Wait, we have the org charts for the gangs?

Clearly, there's only one solution to this problem: We have to get a monkey boy from one gang and a monkey girl from the other to meet and fall in love...

"Two troupes, both alike in dignity,
In fair Lopburi, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where monkey blood makes monkey paws unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife."

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Fashionably Dumb

My eye started twitching the first time I heard about books being sold by the foot, available in whatever colors were needed to complement a room's decor.

This site, for instance, sells "Authentic books for interior design, décor, wedding centerpieces, movie props, staging and more!" At least they sell "authentic" books. If that's too much trouble, or you want to avoid the musty smell of pages full of knowledge in your living room, you can buy fake ones online at BezosMart. Ironic, if you ask me, given Amazon's humble origins.

Since social media can ruin anything, even something as awful as decorative books, it's now working on doing it to this trend. Interior Design TikTok has come up with a name for it: "Bookshelf Wealth".

Kailee Blalock, an interior designer in San Diego, posted a video to TikTok last month that sought to define bookshelf wealth and school viewers in achieving the aesthetic in their own homes.

“These aren’t display books,” Ms. Blalock, 26, cautions in the video, which has been viewed over 1.3 million times. “These are books that have actually been curated and read.”

I wonder if I can get a job working for an interior designer where I break the spines on books, dog-ear a few pages, scribble a random note or two in the margins, and maybe leave a yellowed old Fresh Market receipt in the pages like a bookmark.

Something's Amiss Among the Wing-Wipers

Ah, the USAF Air National Guard, America's thirty-seventh line of defense... 

I kid, I kid. Thanks to post-Vietnam reorganization, the U.S. military actually depends pretty heavily on National Guard components for its combat power. The Hoosier Air National Guard, for instance, includes the 122nd Fighter Wing out of Fort Wayne, currently in the process of transitioning back to F-16's from A-10's.

But I gotta say that some of the Air National Guard's junior enlisted didn't exactly cover themselves in glory in the media in the Year of Our Lord 2023.

There was, of course, the high-profile incident of A1C Jack Teixeira back in April, who got busted for trying to impress his fellow dorks in a video game chatroom with the classified documents he copied from his day job as a Guard bum at a Massachusetts ANG intel wing.

What flew beneath my radar was that the same month saw A1C Josiah Garcia of the Tennessee ANG decide he wanted to be a hitman, using his 1337 TNANG combat skills (he claimed his nickname in the unit was "Reaper".)

So he went to a parody rent-a-hitman site on the internet and... get this ...he sent them a resume.

The parody site helpfully hooked A1C Garcia up with a not-at-all-a-parody FBI agent who offered him real money to ice an imaginary person. Garcia accepted the bogus assignment and the real bucks and is now looking at time in the graybar motel.

Folks, all that hire-a-hitman stuff doesn't work in real life the way it does in the movies. 

When I'm shopping for a store-brand John Wick, I look for a dude with his finger on the trigger of a derp tier AR that looks like a Cheaper Than Dirt catalog threw up on it.

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At this point, sure, why not?

In my email in-box:

Probably because what good is living in a horrible cyberpunk dystopia without people looking like they're living in a horrible cyberpunk dystopia, I guess?

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We Live in a World of Miracles & Wonders

This is a headline that describes an actual thing that really happened:

Tomato lost in space by history-making astronaut has been found

H/T to Kevin D. Williamson