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RIP

Duncan Sheik – Duncan Sheik (1996)

Singer and songwriter Duncan Sheik, who was Grammy nominated for his 1996 hit “Barely Breathing” and won two Tony Awards as the composer of “Spring Awakening,” died September 17, 2026, at a hospital in New York City of cardiac arrest at the age of 56. 

Sheik’s career traced an unusual arc from pop radio to the theater world, and in doing so he helped redraw the boundary between the two. He proved that intimate, literary songwriting could carry a Broadway score just as it drove an alternative hit. This opened the door for a generation of singer-songwriters who followed him from the recording studio to the stage.

Born November 18, 1969, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Sheik attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He studied semiotics at Brown University, where his classmates included Lisa Loeb, known for her 1994 song “Stay (I Missed You).” The two were in the band Liz and Lisa together; Sheik played guitar. His early career also included a guest appearance with the Seattle alternative band His Boy Elroy.

On his own, Sheik signed with Atlantic Records and released his self-titled debut in 1996. Written largely by Sheik, it included “Barely Breathing,” which topped the Adult Alternative Airplay chart and spent more than a year on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at No. 16. The song was ranked among VH1’s “100 Greatest Songs of the ’90s” and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.

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🤣 🤣 🤣

According to an Amazon Web Services update on Tuesday, Iranian drone strikes left some of the tech giant’s data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in tatters – and that it was “unable to restore access to the resources and data hostedại on them.

“The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” Amazon admitted. It told customers to move their data to other cloud regions and make use of any remote backups.

As the company points out, the drone strikes first began in March, first highlighting how critical digital infrastructure near an active warzone has quickly become a major vulnerability, giving Iranian forces a key target and plenty of leverage.

It’s a particularly pertinent topic due to how much money is being poured into Gulf states to expand key infrastructure to support Al. Indeed, just weeks after the March incidents, more Iranian drones struck Amazon data centers in Bahrain again, causing a major “service disruption.”

Just last week, officials in the UAE announced that they were revising Al data center plans following the latest attacks – further highlighting a key vulnerability for both their own nation and big American business that Iran is exploiting with relative ease.

You know what I have to say to that?

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It Turns Out That Ten Is Enough

It’s just that the particular ten change over time.

I sold the silver D-EJ985 (recouping what I’ ‘d spent for it), so I immediately turned around and added the D-NE820 to the collection. This one came from a seller in Japan, and while the general consensus is that buying from Japan is at best a crapshoot, the few times I’ve done it I’ve never had any problems. This time I was worried about tariffs, but they were already included in the very reasonable US $15 shipping cost, and I’ll say this about Japanese sellers: they pack things to survive the journey.

The NE820 is my current favorite. Unlike the EJ915 or the EJ985, it’s all plastic construction, but damn if it isn’t heavy. The fit and finish of the player definitely highlights Sony’s expertise at the time. And again, the color. People got all excited when Apple introduced a pale rainbow of iMacs a few years ago or even the latest burgundy iPhone [rolling eyes], but they could still take a lesson from Sony. Sony knew how to do color twenty years ago, and they weren’t afraid use it.

And with that, because I have any of this stuff, we come to tonight’s jazz fusion musical selection:

Jerry Goodman – On The Future Of Aviation (1985)

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A Fun Afternoon Soundtrack

Various Artists – Dancing Queens (2001)

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Trump banned CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House on Friday in response to media coverage he doesn’t like. This morning, all three filed legal challenges arguing that this was a blatant violation of the First Amendment. (See also: fork found in kitchen.)

Then the major TV networks turned the cameras off in solidarity.

In practice, that meant that Trump’s ribbon cutting ceremony was broadcast with no audio; only static buzzed atop footage of the coronation of his precious helipad. But more broadly, it means that we’ve crossed the rubicon in Trump’s ongoing and interminable war with our free press.

At long last, the media seems to have finally woken up to the fact that they are stronger together than they are fighting individual one-off battles against Trump in the most cowardly ways possible. Like, for example, by heaping millions of dollars to settle frivolous lawsuits into his pockets. Caving to Trump’s demands doesn’t advance their position. All it does is prove to him that they are weak, that he owns them, and that he can make them cave again.

That’s what he was betting would happen this time. It hasn’t.

Rather than retreating to their newsrooms to tie themselves in knots trying to regain access to the White House, these outlets banded together to fight back. CNN, MSNOW, and Politico have filed the legal challenges. The White House TV pool suspended its coverage. That means no White House event footage from ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, or even Fox News.

While I certainly believe that depriving Trump of his precious microphones and cameras is an appropriate consequence for his actions, let’s be clear: this isn’t about retaliation. This isn’t a strategy or a negotiating tactic or even a punishment. This is the media taking the necessary step of organizing to demand the reinstatement of CNN, MSNOW, and Politico because press freedom is fundamental in this country and there is no other option. We have a first amendment right to a free press in the United States. Period.

So yes, the product of this move is that Trump will surrender the attention that he so desperately craves, but we don’t actually need to justify this any more than recognizing the fact that the Constitution affords Americans an assurance that the government will not attempt to ban the free press. 

I wish it didn’t take two years into this autocratic president’s second term for the media to learn how to respond to these attacks. I wish we didn’t have to watch news outlets offer millions of dollars to this president to curry favor with him. I wish we didn’t have to wait for the AP to win a lawsuit in front of a district court judge before they were allowed back into the Press Briefing Room for the crime of calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico. I wish, I wish, I wish.

Eventually, though, we landed at a place where legacy media finally learned the value of organizing to protect press freedom, understanding that banning one or two or three outlets effectively gives Trump tacit permission to ban anyone who doesn’t curry favor with him. It gives any future president tacit permission to ban anyone who doesn’t curry favor with them. The pendulum swings both ways, after all.

So while I understand that most people (myself included) will applaud the fact that Trump has effectively silenced himself and recognize that that’s a pretty damn effective strategy to get this media hound of a president to very quickly change course, that is not why the press is doing it, nor should it be why the press is doing it. The only justification that’s needed here is that we have a fundamental First Amendment right to press freedom in this country.

That alone is worth fighting for.

A SMALL sample of what’s being said on Threads today:

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I Often Wonder…

…what I will post once the Felon—and the rest of his roach infestation—has been removed from the White House and prosecuted, either by force of law or their own mortality. I mean, it’s been most of what I’ve posted over the past decade, even when Biden was president because it seemed that every. damned. day. it was something new with him or one of his brain-dead followers.

I just want him to shut the fuck up, y’know?

I don’t know about of you, but I have every intention of outliving the bastard, just so I can see (and participate in) the worldwide celebration that erupts even before that big, beautiful headline we’ve all been waiting for is dry on the page.

But what then? Surely there will be a long queue of assholes waiting to grab the spotlight after he’s cremated and his ashes scattered in the middle of the Pacific. (Because you know he won’t receive a regular grave; it would be piss-soaked within an hour of him being lowered into it.)

I faced a similar quandary when Bush II left the stage. I initially started blogging because of that asshole, but in comparison to The Felon, George was a pious schoolboy.

Undoubtedly, my posts will be much like they are now, minus the Felon. There will be a lot of pointing and laughing and the now-defanged Republicans as they bitch and moan about whatever culture war crap they’ve enlisted to rile up the base, and if they’re stripped of both houses of Congress in 2026 and the Presidency in 2028, it will be a laugh riot indeed to watch them impotently rage against the Democrats and the voters who handed them the majority.

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It’s About Fucking Time

This is Yuuuge!

I Would Hate To Be Whoever Cleans The Ketchup Off The Walls Of The Oval Office Today

Oh to be a fly on the wall when the news is delivered to him…

Major TV networks that rotate covering the president for wider media distribution say they will not do so moving forward after President Trump banned three media outlets from the White House last week.⁠
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Fox News Media, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News and CNN responded to the ban in a rare joint statement, saying “the public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government.”⁠
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“No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting,” the outlets added.⁠
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The statement came after the White House pool said in a note to subscribers on Monday that “effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President.”⁠

Read the full article here.

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Happy Equinox!

And in honor of the day, the morning soundtrack:

Jean Michel Jarre – Equinoxe (1978)

And once again I am twenty years old, skimming over a vast sea of golden dunes in my landspeeder under a double sun in a hazy, wheat-colored sky…

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My Visions Coming To Life

A little over a year ago when I first started playing around with ChatGPT, I thew several of my sketches and paintings into it with the simple instruction, “Make photorealistic.” I was amazed at the results, even though a few images took dozens of iterations and never reallly did come out the way I intended (ahem, The Hitchhiker) At the time ChatCPT very much had a mind of its own and decided how my work should look, not how I wanted it to look.

Well, several generations later things have gotten better. It leaves things pretty much as they were in the original but—as I instructed—makes them more photorealistic.

With some images, however it remained painfully stubborn. Granted it did an excellent job of turning a basic line drawing into the image below, but for the life of me I couldn’t get it to position the light source to the left and over the viewer’s shoulder as it was in the original sketch. I gave up after a dozen iterations with increasingly more specific instructions. I will no doubt revisit all this in another year or so after the models have improved still more. (If we’re all even still around by that point.)

This one below was not done a year and a half ago. The original was little more than a simple pen and ink doodle. My original prompt to GPT was, Make a photorealistic, Santorini-like island rising out of a red ocean with red vegetation among the buildings. The original one it came up with looked way too CGI. So I added, Add atmospheric softening. that helped, but it still looks fake to my eye. At the same time, considering the original image I fed in, it’s fucking amazing.

This one below still isn’t where I really want it to be. While much more realistic, I almost like the prior version more.

Prior Image:

Another thing I tried this time was converting portraits I’d done back into photorealistic images to see how closely they match the photos (or at least my memory of the photos) I originally worked off of. The ultimate test I guess is to look at one of these “reverse engineered” images and say, “Yes, that’s so-and-so,” or “Who the fuck is that?”

This one is definitely Joe.

This one stil looks a little too artificial, but in comparison to the previous version, it looks so much better.

Yeah, that’s Trevor…

This one actually looks better than Gio…

I looked at this one and went, “Wow!” The detail of the vehicle is so much better than last time.

The previous version:

This one was a pain in the ass and after a dozen iterations, I think it’s beautiful, it still hasn’t gotten the vehicle correct. And of course I just realized why it was having so much difficulty and I’ll revisit it at a later date.

Yeah, that’s Steve…

This was just some random boy from a magazine. When it generated just now I looked at it and thought, “Ugh. I prefer the old one,” but comparing them side by side, yes, this one is definitely better than the original.

This is almost Tom. Something’s a little bit off about it.

This one definitely falls under the category of “Who The Fuck Is That?” It’s definitelynot Patrick, but if you didn’t know who Patrick was, you’d never know it wasn’t a photo of a real human being.

These three came out way better than the ones from a year ago. They match almost exactly my original line drawings. I will say, however, that I had ChatCPT generate the oblique view from the two views above it, and as much as I messed with the prompt, I just couldn’t get it right.

This is another one that’s almost identical to the photo I worked from. But honestly I get more Ricky Richardo than a some guy from what was it…BukBuddies?

The algorithm initially balked at this one, telling me it violated their standards or some nonsense. I replied with, “Two men kissing is not a violation. Make it photorealistic.” And a little story behind the original painting: I did it shortly after I moved into my own apartment back in ’81. There was a very nosy woman who lived upstairs and always made a point of staring in my patio door as she went up the stairs. I finally decided to give her something to look at, and from that point forward her eyes were always on the stairs and not my living room.

And lastly, I barely remember the original photo this came from, but it was some COLT publication that I no longer have. I think it’s a pretty accurate reverse-engineered image, but I’m not willing to bet money on it. My painting was obviously in color, but the original photo was black and white.

So, my biggest takeaway from this exercise is that yes, the AI Models are definitely improving. The portraits that I reverted back to photographs are—generally speaking—damn near impossible to fault. I mean, if you didn’t know the people, you wouldn’t realize that they weren’t real human beings in the pictures.

Also, the level of detail that the models are generating is unreal; something I didn’t actually realize until I started comparing this generation of images with the ones I made previously.

Finally, an interesting artifact of fine tuning the prompts on each generation of image is that yes, like in The Backrooms, the AI forgets more than it remembers with each new copy. Objects disappear or are subtly distorted. Things move. The suns in the image of the two guys on the cliff (the one with the vehicle that was giving me so much grief) sank lower and lower in the sky with each passing tweak. I finally had to tell the program to restore them to their original position!

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Sunday Afternoon Through The Stargate

Constance Demby – Novus Magnificat (1986)

This piece of music burst into my life when I was still living in Tucson, a few months before relocating to San Francisco. There was a program of “Space Music” that aired on our local NPR FM station every Sunday night called Hearts of Space that I faithfully recorded onto cassette for later listening enjoyment. Novus Magnificat was the music I subsequently used for meditation for many years afterward, but the one instance of that mediation that really stands out in my memory was one afternoon in June or July 1986. I was floating on an air mattress in the swimming pool, my little tape walkman in a sealed plastic bag to prevent it from getting wet, headphones in place, and eyes closed.

All of a sudden I saw myself in San Francisco and I had just met Justin Banks, cover and featured model of the June 1986 issue of MEN. My heart fluttered.

It was a premonition that actually manifested about eighteen months later. The details of our meeting were very different from what I saw in my vision, but the fact that the meeting and subsequent brief affair happened at all still seems fantastical. Was that future already in place and my meditative state just allowed me a distorted glimpse into it, or did my meditation cause it? Was it all just sheer coincidence? I’ll never know. But I do know is that I came away that instant with the absolute certainty that eventually our paths would cross. I didn’t know where. I didn’t know when (especially since the actual timing and circumstances of my San Francisco move were still very nebulous), but I knew it would happen. Looking back at it all now while it’s true that our relationship that never turned into anything more than casual dating/fucking, much less the love-of-my-life thing that I’d hoped for while floating in that pool, Justin was a lesson—albeit a painful one—that I needed to learn. (And it wasn’t just “never date a porn star.”)

But back to Novus Magnificat, I had the pleasure of meeting Constance Demby in person a few weeks before I met Justin. Dave, a guy I’d been dating somehow managed to get us invited to the small recital she was holding one night at her home in Marin County.

It wasn’t a huge house, but the energy it contained was amazing. “Sparkly and Purple” are two words that even today, nearly 40 years later, best describe it. I remember several museum-quality crystals scattered around the living room, but the one that stands out the most in my memory of the evening was a three-foot-tall group of amethyst crystals that was standing off to the side of where she had her instruments set up. (Probably where the “sparkly and purple” impression came from come to think of it.)

She sat down to play and the room fell silent. When we left several hours later I won’t go so far as to say we were high, but we were definitely buzzing.

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I’ve seen some stupid shit in my life.

I watched an absolutely shitfaced grown-ass man sprint down a cobblestone street with both hands jammed in his pockets, entrusting his entire dental future to the footwork of a man who couldn’t have successfully operated a juice box. And I watched him go down mouth-first, having selected his fucking incisors as his preferred landing gear, and at least two teeth skittered into the gutter like loose Chiclets while his hands remained safely tucked away. 

Thank God. Wouldn’t want to hurt a finger.

I watched a car full of teenagers flip off a state trooper because they’d mistaken the median between the local and express roadways for an international fucking border. Just a sedan stuffed with middle fingers and fully unearned confidence, cruising through the sovereign republic of Suck My Dick. And I watched that median end about four-fifths of a mile later. A tragically short republic.

(Okay, that was me.)

I watched a woman get so homesick for the house she grew up in that she roasted a marshmallow on a metal fork over her New York City stove, then put that fork directly into her fucking mouth. An adult. With voting rights. I heard the sizzle. Four little grill marks on her lip like she’d tried to French-kiss a panini press.

(OK, that one was me too, but you take my point.)

I’ve seen some (and done some) dumb shit.

But I have never seen anything as fucking dumb as this.

Because Donald Trump — that bunker-brained, bronzer-basted, bullshit-buttressed baron of bad taste, that swollen sultan of stucco, that fat Satan in a forty-inch fucking tie — is now saying he wants to put SNIPERS on his preposterous, pitiful, piteous, piss-poor, please-love-me participation trophy. 👇

Apparently the evil genius plan, temporarily not involving sharks with laser beams, though it’s early yet, is to recycle the exact same bullshit he used on the ballroom he wasn’t allowed to build to “make the case” for the arch he isn’t allowed to build.

You know. That two-hundred-and-fifty-foot, taxpayer-tapping, tomb-adjacent tribute to his own tremendous self.

That gargantuan, gold-leafed, grief-trampling gateway to a cemetery. A hundred million dollars of our money, fifteen million of it already shoveled out the door by the National Endowment for the fucking Humanities, to bolt a slab of granite to himself at the front gates of Arlington National Cemetery.

And he can’t help himself, because a hunk of rock is the only erection this man has ever gotten to stay upright past the thirty-second mark, and the entire planet already knows it.

But “please clap for my concrete cock” is a tough sell, so now his architectural schmeckle insecurity needs a military escort.

And he can’t even respect us enough to come up with a halfway decent lie. Just plops this down in front of us like a cat presenting a dead mouse and waits for somebody to tell him he’s a good boy:

“At the strong request of the United States Military.”

Oh, absolutely. The military begged.

And I’m a natural fucking blonde virgin who doesn’t drink and once fainted because somebody said “darn” at a christening.

Are we supposed to believe the Pentagon came to him, unprompted, hats in hand, medals trembling against their big military nipples, to request permission to stuff his taxpayer-funded stone stiffy full of drones, gunmen and live rounds?

“Please, sir. We’ve exhausted every other option. The security of the republic depends on making your decorative doorway shoot people.”

And he “agreed”. Bless his selfless little bone spurs. Imagine the courage it took to sit there and let a room full of four-stars explain that the thing he’d been whining for since last spring was actually his solemn duty to the nation.

You can practically hear the generals choking back tears.

“Our men can’t spend another Christmas without somewhere to store their tactical narcissist. Morale is collapsing. Sergeant Johnson hasn’t seen a gilded cornice in eight months.”

Next thing you know, the Joint Chiefs are standing around a conference table pushing little models of tanks across a map while one of them points at Washington with a pool cue:

“Gentlemen, we’ve identified the vulnerability. Not enough fucking arches.”

And by the way, just as an aside, who was it that ranked these “59 top cities and Capitals”?

Which fifty-nine, Donald? Where’s the fucking list? You can’t remember what country you bombed, but you’ve got municipal pageant results down to the runner-up?

Did number sixty get eliminated in the swimsuit competition? Did Brussels drop a baton and mouth “fuck” in front of the judges? Did Copenhagen show up without a headshot and have to borrow Oslo’s tit tape?

Was Vienna standing there in a borrowed ball gown, thirty seconds to explain what world peace means to her while Paris smiled through the Vaseline on her teeth and quietly called her a whore?

But I do need to know how we missed the semifinals of So You Think You Can Arch.

And look, I’m sorry Paris sent you an unsolicited arch pic, but we shouldn’t all have to live inside your heavily armed architectural schlong-measuring contest.

His cult of course, will swallow the sniper story whole, the way they swallow everything. Unfortunately for Donald, the rest of us need a little more convincing than the kind of men who buy the extended warranty on a fucking rotisserie chicken.

And he fucking knows it.

He knows nobody wants this. He knows the polling. He knows exactly how it plays to stick a hundred-million-dollar gluttonous, grasping, grabby, gimme-gimme grope for attention in the driveway of the cemetery where the actual heroes are buried, and he does not give a single fuck.

Because under the kabuki foundation and the fifteen-step comb-over, he knows the brutal truth.

He didn’t serve. Even his fucking feet needed nepotism. Other people’s kids got orders to report; Little Lord Fauntlefraud got bone spurs from a podiatrist who happened to rent his office from Fred Trump. A medical emergency conveniently located inside his daddy’s rental portfolio.

And now he wants to loom over the ones who actually went, his big beautiful bullshit visible from the graves of people whose parents couldn’t get them out of a war by calling the guy downstairs.

What the fuck are we commemorating? The Battle of Somebody Else’s Problem?

He wants history to remember his name.

He built nothing. He fixed nothing. He saved nobody.

The only permanent record with his name on it is a criminal one.

So now the vainglorious, vein-mapped, varicose Vesuvius of vanity waddles around the District in his little elevator shoes spraying himself on everything that isn’t nailed down, a wheezing Nebuchadnezzar in a girdle, a god complex with a golf cart, hiking a leg on the Mall and hosing down every marble surface in the capital like a diabetic tomcat working his way through a room full of curtains.

Because he can feel what’s coming the second he’s cold. Not that we forget him. That we get the fuck to work with a bucket and a wire brush and scrub his name off every goddamn thing he pissed it onto.

Which is why he’s bolting military equipment to his vanity projects like a man handcuffing himself to the furniture during an eviction.

He slapped “national security” on the ballroom nobody needed and thinks that means we bought the bullshit. Now he’s dragging the same sweaty sales pitch across the Potomac: if you won’t pay to admire him, he’ll tell you it’s “dangerous not to.”

Yes, there’s real security work going in underground over there. That’s the fig leaf, and it’s about four sizes too small. The courts already pulled the two apart: the buried infrastructure is one thing, the ninety thousand square feet of aboveground party barn squatting on top of it is another.

But apparently Ramses the Rotund discovered the greatest loophole in American government: want something gaudy, gilded, gargantuan and completely fucking unnecessary? Reclassify your personal wish list as a strategic defense imperative.

The Pentagon requires my chandeliers! CENTCOM specifically requested the marble! NORAD cannot possibly defend the continental United States without a cocktail terrace and sixteen fucking bidets!

He hears “defense spending” and lights up like a fucking pinball machine, because the only thing this man has ever defended in his life is that papery, piss-baby, porcelain-thin, perpetually punctured pride of his.

The entire federal budget repurposed as a blast door for one motherfucker’s feelings.

This isn’t the Department of Defense. It’s the Department of Don’t Care What You Dipshits Think, Daddy’s Doing It Anyway, Directorate of Just Look at the Fucking Size of It.

At this rate that Mar-a-Lago Medici is probably wandering through the White House right now pointing at shit he wants like a toddler loose in Costco.

“I want the ball pit from the McDonald’s PlayPlace.”

National security.

“Fill it with Adderall, loose Sudafed and my cocaine retainers.”

Counterterrorism.

“I need a 40-foot marble statue of myself. Shirtless. Riding a bald eagle. Give me the abs of a Romanian gymnast. Golf club in one hand, chocolate cake in the other. Bigger hands. I want to be able to finger Lake America. Give the bird my mug shot face and point my snausage crotch at Canada. They’ll know why.”

Cyber Command asked for it.

And this doesn’t end here. Every memorial, every monument, every building in the citadel of our democracy is next in line to get this secondhand, scratch-and-dent, spray-tanned strongman’s name spackled across the front of it.

Next up: the Donald J. Trump Center for Performing Arts and Precision-Guided Munitions.

“Please silence your phones, locate your nearest emergency exit and secure the fucking perimeter.”

The coat-check lady has Q clearance.

The Rockettes have been replaced by the 82nd Airborne and wardrobe is issuing Kevlar tutus.

Grandma unwraps one petrified disc of black licorice during Swan Lake and six sharpshooters acquire her position.

Act Two has been delayed because somebody parked a Reaper behind the fucking scrim.

And why stop there?

Hollow out the Resolute Desk and fill it with grenades.

Dress an Abrams tank up as the Easter Bunny.

Stick an aircraft carrier in the Reflecting Pool and hide it behind the peeling paint.

Gold-plate the nuclear football and have Vanna White present it every time somebody enters the Situation Room.

At least commit to the bit, asshole.

Anywhere else on Earth, a room of exhausted people spends eleven months arguing over which mountain, which desert, how many miles from the nearest road.

This fucking idiot walked into that meeting and said:

“I’m thinking a giant, ornate, golden arch and a ballroom.”

Nothing screams classified military installation like a colossal, conspicuous, camera-ready Corinthian cock ring visible from fucking space.

It’s stealth technology for people who think Liberace was being too subtle.

Covert operations by way of Caesars Palace.

A Wish-dot-com Versailles with a sniper’s nest in the attic and a Saddam-grade gold finish on the fucking doorknobs.

This isn’t national security.

It’s militarized megalomania.

A garish, gold-plated, gun-packed, government-funded glory hole for one man’s bottomless, blistering, building-sized need to turn the nation’s capital into his personal presidential peacock parade.

And THAT is the scam underneath all the stucco.

He wanted the ballroom.

He wanted the arch.

And now, what an astonishing coincidence, the United States military desperately “needs” both.

Every decorative boner His Royal Smallness dreams up magically develops a tactical purpose the minute somebody asks why the fuck we need it.

And this sure as shit, is NOT something we need.

Actual governments run by adults spend obscene amounts of money making sensitive military facilities boring, buried, hardened, hidden and difficult to identify. Secret tunnels. Blast doors. Decoys. Restricted schematics. Classified coordinates. Entire systems designed around one extraordinarily complicated military principle:

DON’T TELL EVERYBODY WHERE THE FUCKING WEAPONS ARE.

Meanwhile this man, who lies the way the rest of us breathe and has the impulse control of a cracked-out cockatoo, wants to raise a 250-foot gilded bullseye in the middle of Washington, announce what he plans to stash inside it, identify where the shooters will be positioned, brag about the caliber, and presumably put the finishing touch on American operational security: a fucking bedazzled sign reading “SECRET WEAPONS THIS WAY” while a Liberty Tax guy dressed as Uncle Sam spins an arrow on the sidewalk and Kid Rock works the valet stand.

It’s all just so exhaustingly fucking stupid, isn’t it?

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