There's a reason I refer to it as "Karens-Dot-Com".

The official yard sign of NextDoor and every neighborhood Facebook group ever.

NextDoor is largely populated by the Ladies Auxiliary of these guys...

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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Simple Math

Autism was first labeled and described by a Swiss psychiatrist in 1910.  Paracetamol (aka acetaminophen) was first marketed under the brand name Trigesic in the USA in 1950.

Do you know how many years difference that is? If you take one thousand, nine hundred and fifty and subtract one thousand, nine hundred and ten, you're left with release the full un-redacted Epstein files.

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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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Ironically Orwellian

Look, I get that the World War Memorial downtown is an historically significant monument and one of the crown jewels of Indianapolis. We don't want it vandalized and it's probably a good idea to have video surveillance to help apprehend anyone who would do such a thing.

But could they have picked a slightly less ironically Orwellian location for the camera housings?

"Safe beneath the watchful eyes!"

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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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The Best Car Holster!

I’ve come up with* this really badass car holster that attaches to your belt. That way if you have to un-ass your ride in a hurry, the gun comes with you automatically. Even better, it saves you money because you can use it as your restaurant holster and your mall holster, too!

Steal this look!

* I mean, technically PHLster came up with the holster. They're just missing the marketing gold mine of branding it as a "car holster", because the low-information toter sure seems to want a car holster really bad judging by the garbage emails that clog my spam filter.

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Gasp. Shock.

Wow, who could have seen this surprising plot twist coming?

And here I'd been thinking he had the Russian constitution amended just for kicks...

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QotD: Politics Is Showbiz For Ugly People Edition...

"In the age of social media, one need only be right for a moment—for one pithy putdown or quick comeback. That kind of superficial politics inevitably leads to figures such as Santos." -Kevin D. Williamson

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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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It got me to click, alright...

This was the blurb in the sidebar at the NYT this morning:

I chortled. "Well, that sure puts them one up on the average American voter."

But I clicked through. It's an interesting bit of experimentation that shows that, after repeatedly swimming into something, box jellyfish will adjust their behavior and stop bumping into it.

"After a handful of collisions, the box jellies changed their behavior. Less than eight minutes after arriving in the bucket, they were swimming 50 percent farther from the pattern on the walls, and they had nearly quadrupled the number of times they performed their about-face maneuver. They seemed to have made a connection between the stripes ahead of them and the sensation of collision."

Meanwhile, despite actually physically having a brain, the average voter sends the same people to Congress over and over again and it's shaping up that next year's presidential election is going to be a rerun of 2020's Battle of the Fogies.

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What do you call a snowflake made of milk?

Apparently a bunch of senators have been lobbied by Big Dairy to propose some vital legislation that would prevent things that weren't squirted out of udders being referred to in commerce as "milk".

Coconut milk has been called coconut milk longer than Vermont has been called Vermont.

Don't you have something serious you could be doing, Senator? https://t.co/xMlP17GoPL

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 8, 2023

Clank Clank Goes the Tank

There's been a lot of hand-wringing about sending weapons to Ukraine, both from the US and our European allies. Early in the war, Germany in particular was mocked for sending naught but some ballistic helmets, apparently afraid that if they sent anything more belligerent, such as excess Bundeswehr pocket knives, a Russian soldier might get shivved with one and the Russkies would make Berlin glow in the dark in retaliation.

After enough T-80s and T-90s got blowed up by Javelins, Western governments eased up and began sending artillery systems and heavier antiaircraft hardware, as well as taking the opportunity to clean out old storage closets of leftover antique armored personnel carriers.

Lately we've been tap dancing up to even heavier gear. The US has announced we'll be sending some M2 Bradley IFVs, and France chipped in some AMX-10 RC heavy armored cars. While referred to as a char, or tank, in French service and apparently some obscure EU regulation classifies anything above a certain weight and with a big enough gun as a tank...and the AMX-10 clears those hurdles...war nerds will insist that unless it comes from the tank region of France it's just a sparkling armored fighting vehicle.

It looks like the inhibition on sending tanks is finally cracking, though. While Germany is still dithering over letting Poland send some of its Leopard 2's, Britain has announced it's sending 14 Challenger 2 main battle tanks.

I found that particular number interesting. Late Cold War and post-Cold War Russian armored units use three-tank platoons and three platoons plus a commander's tank make a ten tank company.

The British Army, from whose stores the Challengers will be pulled, uses some archaic TO&E, possibly left over from the Wars of the Roses or Cromwell's New Model Army, wherein four tanks equal a Bonnet*, and four Bonnets plus two more tanks in a headquarters Bonnet equal an eighteen-tank Spanner†.

Fourteen tanks, however, is enough for three four-tank platoons plus two tanks for an HQ platoon, equalling a fourteen tank US-style armored company. Apparently the Ukies are using a US/(most of)NATO TO&E for their armored units. So the Ukrainians will have at least one company of Western MBTs.

While this is an almost symbolic amount, hopefully Britain's gesture will get Germany off its ass with those Leos. (Ironically, if the West does start sending those Leopard 2s and/or Abrams, the Challenger company is going to be a logistical problem, because the L30A1 main gun on the British tanks is rifled and uses separate bagged propellant charges & projectiles; it's not compatible with the 120mm smoothbores used by the Leo2 and Abrams.)

*Bonnet = Troop

†Spanner = Squadron

Whirled Cup

It's time for the quadrennial festival of soccer, the World Cup.

The small percentage of Americans who are enthusiasts of the sport are, like curling fans every Winter Olympiad, going to try to convince the rest of us how awesome the sport is, with less success than soccer athletes have trying to get the ball in the goal.

Hey, how is soccer like an incel track meet? There's an awful lot of running around and almost zero scoring!

Ba-dum!

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lol no

From Jonah Goldberg:

Elon Musk recently tweeted a fairly gross and stupid proposal for ending the war in Ukraine. His solution? Let’s have a “real” referendum in the annexed territories of Ukraine administered by the U.N. It’s gross because the Russians have murdered, displaced, or kidnapped hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians from these areas. His proposal erases those deaths and ignores those facts. I suppose I’d be more open to it if every dead or exiled Ukrainian was automatically counted as a vote for staying in Ukraine. It’s stupid because Musk has a thumbless grasp of the political reality on the ground. He looked at some election return maps from 2013 and deduced that he understands the aspirations and desires of Eastern Ukrainians in 2022. As many have pointed out, even his reading of the maps was wrong. To be clear, I admire Musk for many of his accomplishments. But knowing how to get a rocket into orbit or an electric car to market doesn’t make you a Ukraine expert.

Except Elon doesn't know how to get a rocket into orbit or an electric car to market. He knows how to buy the people who know how to do those things. 

He got lucky because he was in on the ground floor of PayPal and, even though he got shoved off the board of directors for being a massive douchebag, he was still the largest shareholder when it got sold to eBay in '02 and therefore pocketed almost $180,000,000 from the deal.

Just because you won bigly at techbro startup roulette, it make doesn't make you the second coming of Metternich.

When Cletus picks the winning Powerball numbers we don't ask him to draft an updated Law of the Sea Treaty, do we?

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Special Needs Waterboy!

Big "Luhansk seniors division basketball team celebrates with their special needs water boy-slash-mascot" vibe in this photo. pic.twitter.com/hTcgCOpnqH

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) October 3, 2022

Lucy's got her football out...

https://t.co/ZD7qfllnze pic.twitter.com/AxS8cGQgVL

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 23, 2022