Sportsball Man Melts Brain

Apparently Steelers wide receiver DK Metcalf has spent too much time around QB Aaron Rodgers and managed to sandblast his brain smooth in the process.

Metcalf wants to know what is really going on in Antarctica. That is, what’s really going on in Antarctica.

“I think it’s another world,” Metcalf says.

What do you mean, “another world”?

“I think there is another civilization inside of Earth.”

[SNIP]

“You can go to Alaska. You could go to the North Pole,” Metcalf says. “But why not Antarctica? Why can’t you just book a trip to Antarctica?”

Here you go, Mr. Metcalf. I'm sure the fat stacks you make as an NFL player will cover a stateroom.

There's a whole city in Argentina where one of the main sectors of its economy is people flying in to board cruise ships for Antarctica. Look! A whole Wikipedia article on "Antarctic gateway cities"! This information takes ten seconds to find.

How come these "Just asking questions, doing my own research" people never actually ask any questions or do any research? (Or at least any that doesn't confirm their biases.)

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

What is this I can't even

Done GIFfrom Done GIFs

Weirdos.

I see the thought leaders on the Right are yet again rolling a critical failure on their "Can You Just Be Normal For Once In Your Life?" saving throws.

Eyeroll...

An experimental all‑female nightclub concept made headlines [citation needed] this week after industry insiders revealed it shut its doors shortly after its first official night, with organizers blaming a complete lack of bottle purchases as the main reason for the abrupt closure. The venue [what was the venue's name?], marketed as a space dedicated exclusively to women and designed to create a safer, inclusive nightlife environment, opened with much fanfare in a major city [which city?] — but according to reports circulating on social platforms and nightlife forums [citation needed], the night ended without a single champagne or bottle service sale, a revenue stream most clubs rely on to stay afloat.

Two seconds of work with a search engine will show that this whole thing originated out of whole cloth as an Instagram post from a viral content mill back in September, and has been embroidered upon, had more clickbait buzzwords added, and been relaunched at social media grifter Lauren Chen's* FB page and has been repeated uncritically in social media from there.

"LOL silly feminazis! How could a bar exist without the mens?" It's like none of these gullible** people have ever heard of a lesbian bar.

* Lauren is apparently trying to get her grift spun back up after getting busted taking millions from the Russians back in 2024.

**Did you know that the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary? If you don't believe me you can go look it up.
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Lunatics running the asylum.

This guy graduated from the University of Florida and went on to obtain a Juris Doctor sheepskin from the same institution. He is on his fourth term as a Representative from Florida's 17th District.

So either he knows what contrails are and is saying stuff like this because he thinks his constituents are smoothbrained yahoos and will eat this stuff up, or else the University of Florida is handing out diplomas to smoothbrained yahoos who don't know what contrails are.

Neither of those things is really very good.

Fundamentally Unserious

If there's anything more emblematic of just how far this country has fallen since the days of the Merkin Muffley administration, it's that the War Room is now a blanket fort and the "Big Board" is displaying Twitter.

Before

After. Yes, that's Twitter on the big screen. You've got the head of the CIA in the room and you've got some OSINT Twitter account on the screen. WTF?

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Like a Well-Oiled Machine

Y’ever watch a whole school of fish suddenly change direction all at once? Thousands of creatures with less brainpower than a smartwatch all executing a one-eighty simultaneously with a level of precision that makes the finest human drill team look shambolic? 

Well, if a foolish consistency truly is the hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson famously wrote, then the right wing grifterverse has some galaxy brains indeed. What's the wildest part is that any random MAGA-on-the-street will still give you an earful about neocons and John Bolton and regime change.

My little mind was agin' it when Bush did it in Iraq in '03, and was agin' it when Obama did it in Libya in '11, and I'm still agin' it now.

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Battle what, now?

From a piece at the WSJ on current naval affairs...

Ah, yes. History buffs will recall that, after the Imperial Japanese Navy shelled Pearl Harbor and sank all our carriers with gunfire, we famously pivoted to a battleship-based strategy in 1942 because... I'm sorry, I can't even do this as sarcasm. It's just too laughable.

Dude's a retired Navy officer. He knows what he's saying is BS, but it's being phrased for an audience of one, because gotta suck up to that audience for budget money.

Like, imagine being so willing to abase yourself before the current power structure that you're willing to say something on the record that is so dumb on its face that you know you're gonna get absolutely dragged if it's quoted, but you go ahead and do it anyway.

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These are the people who call other people "snowflakes"

Imagine being assmad about the sign language person. “Show me on the Binky doll where the mean disabled person hurt you…”

"That person is doing sign language to make me feel powerless" is such a fricking bonkers take.

Lady, you need to go touch some grass, stat. You've been hittin' the culture war sauce a little too hard lately it seems.

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Player One was not, in fact, ready...

Just...wow.

Imagine being able to afford a limitless expanse of grass you could be touching and instead spending your Friday night getting dunked on for being embarrassingly online and not even good at it.

"Richest man in the world gets stuffed into a locker on a Fortnite livestream by a Zoomer playing a video game" is a thing I could not possibly explain to my 20-year-old self.

This is some straight up Bruce Sterling Neal Stephenson shit.

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Pull the other one, it's got bells on it...

"It can babysit your kids, walk your dog..." says frequent Dad of the Year candidate, Elon Musk.

Yeah, let's pick two activities that are more complicated and require more attention and interaction than driving a car: Interacting with a live critter or a small human.

Given how low Elon’s bar is for adequate involvement with a child, I cannot imagine what he thinks is sufficient dog walking capability. I can just see C3P0’s idiot cousin taking the family cocker spaniel for a drag around the block.

Oh, also, that windowless death box with no windows or internal controls and seating for twenty, the "Robovan"? Have you heard how he pronounces it?

"Ruh-BOE-vahn". 

Christ, what a dork.

Edited to add BONUS CONTENT!

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The First Rule of Dunning-Kruger Club...

ZCQOTD: "This man has built an impregnable stone house with lovely west-facing balconies on the summit of Mount Stupid."

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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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Clownshoes

In today's episode of "Real life or The Onion?"...

This is some fundamentally unserious nonsense.

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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..."

Half everyone's dumber than average.

Via the NYT, we hear of this Monmouth University poll:

"Just under 1 in 5 Americans believe the singer Taylor Swift is part of a covert effort to help President Joe Biden win the 2024 election.

[snip]

Just under half (46%) of the American public has heard something about Swift being part of a supposed covert government effort to help Biden win the 2024 presidential election. Just under 1 in 5 Americans (18%) believe such a conspiracy involving Swift exists."

"Wow," you say, "That's crazy!" Except it's not really that out of line with overall numbers in a land where better than one in ten agreed with the statement "The moon landings were faked" and less than six in ten agreed with "Humans evolved".

I mean, the New York Times is wringing its hands about one in five people believing in this moronic TaySway conspiracy only a few thin sheets of newsprint away from where it prints the frickin' horoscope!

We are a fundamentally unserious people, and one in five of your neighbors, at minimum, is a credulous moron.

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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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Gourmet Tater Tots?

Some dude was whingeing about Half Liter BBQ on Yelp.

Who orders tater tots expecting freshly grated Yukon gold spuds artisanally hand rolled between silk cloths by Bavarian tater nuns?

It says “tater tots” right there on the menu, hoss. They’re tater tots.

(Secret Menu Dining ProTip: Half Liter has loaded spuds on the menu, so if you order a side of tots you can also ask for some sour cream on the side and…presto!…you have unlocked the hidden bowl of mini latkes.)

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Real Men of Genius

So the guy who owns the 5th busiest website by traffic, one that relies on advertising and is constantly trying to panhandle you for eight bucks a month because it's hemorrhaging money, wonders why the 7th busiest website by traffic, which doesn't sell ads and is entirely supported by donations...is asking for donations.

"Hey, Elmo! Why do you need all that money to operate Twitter? You can literally fit its source code on your phone!"

Smartest guy in the room, you betcha.

Turns out that he knows roughly as much about website infrastructure as he does about launch pads.

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