Late Stage Capitalism Summed Up
First Thing I Thought Of When I Saw This
Wait, What?
I’m Not Holding Out Hope
Dan Quayle was an idiot who proved his idiocy time and time again. Yet Republicans insisted he was a giant, because he fit the warped mold of what they consider leadership (white, male, arrogant, rich, and full of it). It wasn’t until Quayle misspelled “potato” that his political viability came crashing down on him.
It was a nothing moment, really. Quayle didn’t even necessarily get it wrong (“potatoe” is an obsolete alternative spelling). But it was a moment that prompted everyone to see what Quayle’s critics had been saying about him from day one: he was an empty shirted buffoon.
Why am I writing about Dan Quayle of all people? Because as inconsequential as that moment was, as inconsequential as he ended up being, the “potatoe” moment still serves as a case study for something being so on the nose that it finally shattered any illusions (or delusions) that anyone was holding about him. There was really no way to defend his intellect after that; after all, the guy couldn’t even spell “potato.”
That was, of course, a comparatively innocent time. Back then we were still debating whether someone was too full of it and stupid to be President of the United States (or Vice President, as it were). We’ve since been subjected to a President of the United States who can’t spell anything, and can barely speak a coherent sentence, yet his illiteracy isn’t among the thousand most disqualifying things about him. We have a President who is a recently convicted felon, whose entire business empire has been exposed as a long running fraud with thoroughly cooked books, who was found by the courts to have sexually assaulted a woman, who tried to violently overthrow the government of the United States, who has advanced dementia and appears to be dying, who was already rejected once for being the worst President in the history of the United States… and he’s back to being President again?
The bar has been set so low over the past decade that Dan Quayle could never even get the Republican nomination because he’s far too literate – and not nearly evil enough. For some reason, for some utterly psychotic reason, Americans decided to try making the worst person in the world the President, and when that was a disastrous failure, they later decided to make him President again. There’s really nothing that could finally turn Americans against him, right?
But that’s when the on-the-nose last straw comes in. Rob Reiner, a lovely man whose life’s work has inspired millions and whose activism was marked by his dignified approach to it, was tragically murdered by his mentally unwell son. It was one of those moments that has caught everyone off guard. I loved everything about Reiner. But even if you didn’t like anything about Reiner, there’s just no way you’d root for him to go out like this, or anything like this. It’s horrifying, and except for the very fringe of internet trolls, no one was going to find any joy in this awful moment.
Even this so-called President of the United States, who openly despised Rob Reiner and everyone knew it, was surely going to sit this one out, right? This small fraction of a man, even if he was celebrating Reiner’s murder privately, surely had the sense not to say it out loud, right? And even if the Asshole-in-Chief was going to say something negative about Reiner in the wake of his murder, he’d at least… I don’t even know. You just thought that even this worthless husk of a man, whose repugnant behavior has been at its absolute worst of late, just might have stopped at the water’s edge on this one.
But no. This deranged individual occupying the Oval Office, who I’m so angry at right now that I can’t even bring myself to use his name in this article, announced that Rob Reiner got himself murdered by being too angrily opposed to – well, we’re not using his name today.
Where does one even start? Never mind that this insane man… no, you know what? I’m not even going to try to analyze it. I don’t want to know what’s going on in his rotten festering mind, and I no longer care. To hell with him. There’s nothing left to analyze, other than to observe that his dementia appears to be making his worst qualities even worse.
But this isn’t about the man whose name I can’t bring myself to type today. It’s about his supporters. It’s about how, after a decade of warning signs, flashing red lights, loud sirens, and glaringly evil thoughts expressed in exact words, this cretin finally said something that prompted many of his own most prominent supporters to loudly and publicly condemn him. It’s about how this monster finally did something that was so on-the-nose monstrous, his weary supporters could no longer hang in there and pretend it was okay – or even keep it to themselves.
There is no way to predict where this will go next. For all we know, his supporters may well fall back in line with him by the time you’re reading this article. They may even have second thoughts about what the cretin said about Rob Reiner, decide it was justified, and start parroting it themselves. It’s happened before. But yesterday felt different. It was as if they knew their toad god had finally done something so egregious that they knew they weren’t going to be able to credibly defend him on it. For one brief cogent moment on their part, they were as repulsed by this repugnant man as the rest of us have been from the start. Something finally pierced the bubble of delusion that had spent a decade pretending up was down, wrong was right, and the most vile and most destructive man on earth was somehow a classy working class hero.
We’ll see what happens now. But maybe, just maybe, something as simple as a President of the United States publicly gloating derangedly over a political adversary’s murder is finally on the nose enough to jolt his remaining supporters into acknowledging that something is very, very wrong.
365 Days Of UNF: December 16th
Valid Question
Valid Question…
Whatever You Do, Don’t Call… 😉
Another Cause For Celebration
As it turns out, you can purée almost anything and push it through a g-tube!
We were out shopping yesterday afternoon and as we were heading to the last destination on our itinerary, we passed one of the few remaining Long John Silver’s restaurants in Phoenix.
In short, we stopped on the way home and I picked up a two piece fish basket, thinking I’d try to eat at least a bit of it normally and throw the rest of it in the Ninja and push it through the tube.
Which is exactly what I did. I chewed and swallowed one of the two big fish pieces. And it was delicious. The other piece of fish, the fries, the hush puppies, the little deep fried batter bits, and the coleslaw went into the Ninja (although not all at once). I can’t describe how…satisfying…it was to have a full stomach after so many months of a liquid diet.
Today, after my PT session, I stopped at Lenny’s Burgers on the way home and satisfied my long-running craving for cheeseburger (never mind my 20 minute wait in the drive-thru even though I was only the second in line; slowest fucking drive-through in Phoenix), thinking I would do the same thing.
I ate half and Ninja’ed the remainder.
I don’t need to tell you how much this has improved my mood.
Baby steps, right?
Perhaps still not as satisfying as sitting down and stuffing my face with wanton abandon, but damn…this will be an acceptable alternative until I can do that again!
“I Am Number Two You Are Number Six” Energy
Evening Soundtrack
“What Are You Waiting For?”
Aspire To Greatness
Solved It!
I finally solved the two remaining problems I was having with downgrading from Tahoe to Sequoia today.
The first that the plug-in “1Password Safari” was crashing the moment Safari started up. It had been working fine prior to my last reinstall. I solved the problem by completely removing both 1Password and the extension. And by completely, I mean completely, drilling down into hidden folders and ripping it all out by the roots. I also logged out of my 1Password account. After I reinstalled both apps from scratch, I was prompted to log into my account, and the extension worked again.
The Ghostscript issue took a bit more detective work. I uninstalled Homebrew and its install of Ghostscript. Then I tried a different loader (MacPorts). All that did was install it in a different location that XnView couldn’t find either…
More Googling/Redditing led me to a website where Ghostscript had been packaged into a stand-alone installer. I ran the next-to-latest version (in case it was some kind of compatibility issue) and held my breath as I rebooted and launched XnView.
Saturday Adventure
As is our holiday tradition in this house, we spent Saturday evening at the Desert Botanical Gardens, enjoying Las Noches de las Luminarias.
Let’s Face It—He’s A Sociopath, Devoid Of All Human Emotion
on Saturday afternoon, some fuckface obtained a weapon of mass death, just as our founders intended. he took that weapon into Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and opened fire, just as our founders intended, indiscriminately spraying bullets, just as our founders intended, and sending nine people to the hospital and two to the morgue, just as our founders intended.
the unknown shooter then ran off and, as of this writing, is still at large, just as our founders intended.
terrified students spent the entire night barricaded in their classrooms, just as our founders intended.
it was the 465th mass shooting in America this year, just as our founders intended.
just another fucked-up day in the United States of Guntopia.
before we get to Donny Convict’s disgracefully callous response to this tragedy, here’s how a real president mourns.
Joe Biden: “Students should have the freedom to learn in school without having to fear for their lives. Period. We must never accept senseless violence that leaves families and communities shattered. It pierces the very soul of our nation. We can and must do more to prevent gun violence and save lives. Jill and I are grieving the lives lost and those wounded at Brown University, and we are keeping the victims, their loved ones, and all of Providence in our prayers.”
thank you. I miss this guy every day.
now let’s compare that with the reaction of the diaper-shittingest sociopath ever to befoul the Oval Bordello.
“and, uh. Brown University. great school. great— great, really one of the greatest schools anywhere in the world. things can happen.”
first of all, excellent job on the makeup, Mister President. my compliments to your embalmer.
uh, this fucking guy. not one single shred of humanity. just a dispassionate, monotone ‘things can happen.’ Donny puts more emotion into talking about Arnold Palmer’s dick.
we got the same fucked-up response last month, as Donny sat next to the Crown Prince of Bone Saw Arabia and rationalized away the murder of Jamal Khashoggi: ‘things happen.’
this isn’t how a president talks. this is how a mob boss talks.
the shit Donny says makes so much more sense if you imagine it coming out of the mouth of Tony Soprano. ‘so, some kids got shot up? some journalist got bone-sawed? hey, things happen. now leave me alone, can’t you see I’m busy?’
but at least Donny switches it up every now and then. when schoolchildren were gunned down in their classrooms in Perry, Iowa, he didn’t tell us that ‘things happen.’ instead it was ‘we have to get over it.’
thank you for your wise counsel, Preznit Fuckwit.
Donny could give a shit about what happens to other people. he’s too broken-inside to even fake a proper reaction. grief? empathy? what the fuck are those things? he is incapable of a human response to tragedy.
Donny’s handlers have completely given up trying to house-train him.
back in 2018, when Donny met with survivors of the Parkland school shooting, they handed him a cheat-sheet of things to say, so he could at least pretend to give a shit.
they don’t even bother trying to civilize Donny any more. they just shove him in front of the camera and let the chips fall where they may.
so now, all we get is ‘shit happens’ — and then it’s onto the topic on Donny’s list.
unless it’s misshapen garden gnome Charlie Kirk. then we get flags at half staff and an Oval Bordello address.
fuck this fucking fuck.
let’s do a palate cleanse — because this is the perfect moment to watch Secretary of Defense Flippy McCrushnuts do to his thing.
now let’s mock the shit out the rest of yesterday’s press event. here’s a super-fun thing that happened. President No Filters got distracted by a blonde woman standing among the assembled reporters.
“this is the most interesting story. [pointing] boy, do you look like Ivanka. has anyone ever told you that? look at— I’m saying ‘is that Iva—.’ could you just turn around for the camera? does she look— does she look like Ivanka? it’s the most unbelievable thing. I— it’s— I wouldn’t— I didn’t wanna take a chance. I say, ‘is that Ivanka?’ you look just like Ivanka, which is a great compliment.”
ugh. fuck off, you creep.
I’m pretty sure if I were a woman, the last thing I’d want to hear seeping out of Donny’s geriatric anus-mouth would be ‘you remind me of the daughter I want to quote-unquote ‘date.’’
for those of you keeping score at home: if you’re a black woman, it’s ‘shut up, piggy’ — but if you’re a white woman with long blonde hair, it’s ‘come here and let me grope you.’
ugh.
oh, and in case you’re wondering, a loss of sexual inhibition is absolutely one sign of dementia.
oh look, Donny’s Slovenian rent-a-wife was standing next to him the whole time — and boy, does she ever look happy to be there. I’ll bet she’s thrilled whenever her husband starts drooling uncontrollably over every woman who looks like his daughter.
anyway, Donny’s very proud of his plans to shit out an endless series of vulgar monuments, all over Washington DC.
“we have a policy thing that’s gonna— be unbelievable, happening. should I announce it, or should I keep quiet? I put Vince in charge of the Triumphal Arc. we’re building an arc like the Arc de Triomphe… it is something that is so special. it will be like the one in— in Paris but it to be honest with you, it blows it away.”
oh, lovely. Donny’s building an endless series of gaudy totems to himself while We the People struggle to feed our families.
you get two government-approved dolls and five pencils, while Donny gets a fugly arch, a tacky dance hall where the East Wing used to be, three more golf courses, and god knows what else he’s got up his sleeve.
you know who else wanted a ginormous fucking arch to commemorate his glorious Thousand-Year Reich, don’t you? of course you do.
and, finally, what. the. fuck. is. this.
“you heard— did you hear this story? and so, he’s, uh, he’s being read his rites and his— this is— they thought he was dead three times. three different times. they carried him out, feeding him the anti-venom, and over a period of months he was unconscious for a long time, many— weeks. and— he made it. I asked him, ‘how ya doin’ today?’ he said, ‘is it perfect?’ look how quiet everybody is. you know— you know, it’s funny. when you talk about snakes and— things like that. that uhhhhh, people find it interesting. would anybody like to go and— go to Peru and walk around the forest with the— he says ‘no thank you, I’ll say no thank you’— but uh, this was a real— did they ever find the snake, by the way?”
what a charming tale to tell at a White House Christmas reception.
this whole rambling anecdote about snakes is one more five-alarm reminder that President Pudding Cup’s brain has gone fuckity-bye. he can no longer fart out a coherent sentence. and the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled press — the very same reporters who turned every one of Joe Biden’s verbal slips into a weeks-long scandal — just stand there like useless lumps.
hey, Jake Tapper — you could probably get three books’ worth of material just from this minute-long clip alone. any interest in following up?
I thought so.
before I let you go, I want to ask: what the fuck is wrong with Greg Bovino?
Obergruppenführer Bovino, you’ll recall, is the psychopath who’s currently ‘commander at large’ for the Border Patrol. I think his official title is Fuckface Who Hurls Tear Gas Canisters At Children And Lies About It To A Judge.
Greggers sure loves him some Nazi cosplay. dude has an entire Third Reich living in his head. I shit you not.
look at how Greg tarted himself up when he showed up on Newsmax yesterday.
so, my question to you is: who wore it better?
this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:
practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.
to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.
we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.
365 Days Of UNF: December 15th
Sunday Tiedrich
oh dear, look what Preznit Fuckwit has done now. not satisfied with tarting up the Oval Bordello and the Cabinet Room with vulgar dime-store fake-gold tat, he’s now gluing that shit to the exterior walls of the White House — most recently, above each portrait on his infantile ‘presidential walk of fame.’ you know, the one where Joe Biden is represented by a photo of an autopen.
stay classy, Donny.
and oh look — the entryway to the West Wing now bears signage in the same tasteless golden script that’s outside the Oval Office. does Donny not realize how rinky-dink all this crap makes the White House look? of course he doesn’t. this is what passes for ‘sophisticated’ inside his worm-chewed brain.
hey, do you know who needs to have once-familiar objects labeled for them? dementia patients, that’s who. is that what all this dumbfuckery is about, so Sundowning Grandpa Befuddlepants doesn’t get confused and wander into traffic while trying to make his way from the Oval Office to the West Wing?
when Donny oozed his way back into power last January, we knew it was going to be a five-alarm shit-show. ‘fucking everything all to hell’ was a low bar, but somehow Dear Leader has managed to slither under it.
in less than a year, Donny has clownfucked the White House — and much of America — into something unrecognizable. and he’s not done — he remains obsessed with taking a massive shit all over literally everything.
The Trump administration issued a notice of default to the group that manages Washington’s three municipal golf courses, escalating a behind-the-scenes struggle over who will control some of the District’s most visible public land and effectively positioning the president to operate its public golf properties.
why? what possible reason could Agolf Shitler have for taking control of Washington’s three public golf courses, other than malignant megalomania?
doesn’t Donny already have enough golf motels? doesn’t he have, you know, a day job that should keep him too busy to have time for this meddlesome shit?
that’s what this micromanaging dipshit is focused on: golf courses, not affordability, not healthcare. not anything that would benefit We the People. because Donny lives inside a fact-free fantasy-bubble where he’s already made everything amazing — and now he’s taken to yelling at MAGA for not understanding how awesome their lives are now.
“When will I get credit for having created, with No Inflation, perhaps the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country? When will people understand what is happening? When will Polls reflect the Greatness of America at this point in time, and how bad it was just one year ago?”
let us know how browbeating your own cultists works out for you, bro. because here’s a free clue: people do ‘understand what is happening.’ every time someone walks into a grocery store and tries to figure out how they’re going to pay for basic necessities, they understand exactly what is happening — and who to blame.
meanwhile, while Donny’s off in cloud-cuckoo land, fiddling with golf courses, his sewer clowns are batshitting at the speed of light.
get ready to pick your jaw up off the floor — because apparently, FBI Director Krazee-Eyes Kash Patel and his flunky, Dan Bingo Bongo Bongino, have been holding secret meetings with Ukraine’s top peace negotiator.
“spark concern” is doing a metric fuckload of heavy lifting in that headline — because think about it: since when does US law enforcement get involved with peace talks, secret or otherwise?
on what planet does this make any sense?
Secret meetings between Ukraine’s top peace negotiator and FBI leaders have injected new uncertainty into the high-stakes talks to end the war there, according to diplomats and officials familiar with the matter.
* * *
The meetings have caused alarm among Western officials who remain in the dark about their intent and purpose.
gee, d’ya think?
who approved this? who thought it was a good idea who take two nitwits with no negotiating skills — or experience — and insert them into the peace process?
Kash and Bongino aren’t even law enforcement experts, much less diplomats they’re grifters and conspiracy-theory podcasters who are in way over their heads.
Krazee-Eyes Kash and Bingo Bongo are running the FBI for the same reason a piss-drunk Fox News dunk tank clown is in charge our nation’s armed forces: because Dear Leader values loyalty over competence.
it’s been that way his entire life. it’s how he ran the Trump Organization — which is why every single one of his business ventures has crashed and burned. Donny doesn’t want experts who might disagree with him, and tell him no. he wants compliant yes-men who will happily rubberstamp whatever fuckbrained scheme he concocts.
and now these two shitwits have inserted themselves into the Ukraine peace process. is the idea to sabotage the whole thing? who even knows?
here’s another bit of fuckwafflery that Donny’s brainiacs have come up with.
that’s right, pal. you want entry into the United States? well then hand over your phone, so Donny’s minions can paw through it and see what you’ve been up to.
It is especially notable that this rule will apply to foreign tourists and visitors from every country, including those where visas are waived. Currently, a British tourist is required to complete the U.S. Electronic System for Travel Authorizations to visit the country, and the social media disclosure would presumably be added directly to this process. However, according to the same notice, foreign travelers will also be expected to surrender other information as well, including all email addresses and phone numbers used in the last five years, as well as the physical addresses, names and contact information of family members.
excuse me?
I don’t know about you, but if I wanted to travel to some country, and was told that first I had to fork over five years of personal data, I’d cordially invite them to eat my entire ass — and then I’d cancel my plans.
no fucking way.
what’s the goal here? to deny entry to anyone who four years ago tweeted ‘Donny is a poopyhead’? or is it to compile a privacy-destroying database of everyone’s personal information?
it’s probably both.
did anyone think this through? implementing this cockamamie idea is going to be a nightmare. the federal government will either need to create a massive new bureaucracy with thousands of civil servants spending hours a day scrolling through millions of social media posts — or, more likely, some fucked-up AI going is going to be turned loose on everyone’s personal data. oh, great. that’s going to be a clusterfuck.
hey, maybe Glenn Beck’s AI George Washington will be pressed into service to keep tabs on all our tik-tok and instagram posts.
is the idea to completely collapse the US tourism industry? spoiler alert: it’s already working.
can anyone explain to me how destroying tourism Makes America Great Again? that shit brings billions of dollars into the United States every year.
EDITORIAL COMMENT FROM YOUR HOST:
END EDITORIAL COMMENT FROM YOUR HOST.
it’s important for us to never forget that none of it is normal.
wearing us down is how fascism wins. we have to keep on top of all of this shit, and ensure none of it gets normalized. it’s fucking exhausting — but necessary.
here’s the good news: Donny is as shit at fascism as he is at running casinos. we’re seeing the wheels coming off Dear Leader’s clown car. the GOP is backing away from his toxic policies, as they lose election after election.
steady on, folks. we’re going to get through this. I promise.
this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:
practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.
to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.
we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.
I’m Really Starting To HATE Apple
Rant incoming.
It wasn’t the “liquid glass” user interface per se. It wasn’t the overly rounded corners on every. damned. window (annoying, but not a total deal breaker). It was the fact that so. much. stuff. was broken. What am I talking about? MacOS 26, aka “Tahoe” of course!
A few days ago I reached my breaking point with things spontaneously opening, Safari refusing to load websites, and numerous other glitches too numerous to mention. As much as I knew it was going to be a pain to go back to Sequoia, I knew it had to be done to maintain my sanity. My only real concern was that when I tried to downgrade another Apple OS many years ago, I learned that with each OS upgrade, Apple also changed the mail database structure, making it impossible to open any locally stored mailboxes once you’ve downgraded to an earlier version. Throwing caution to the wind, however, after verifying the previous night’s full-disc backup was good and creating a Sequoia installer USB, I erased the main drive and set about reinstalling the previous O/S.
After I got Sequoia up and running, I did not use the Migration Assistant to restore all my files and settings from the backup because I didn’t want to transfer all the extra, obsolete garbage that had accumulated over the past several years and O/S installations. So I started reinstalling applications and transferring everything manually.
I was about a quarter of the way through it when I thought, “What if there’s nothing wrong with Tahoe, but rather it was just dealing with all that detritus from previous installations?
So I booted into the recovery partition, verified that “Reinstall Tahoe” was an option (since my previous Tahoe installation had overwritten the recovery partition), and went ahead and erased the drive and started fresh. I booted back into the recovery partition and this time, instead of being greeted with the “Reinstall Tahoe” option, the only thing I had available was “Reinstall Sequoia.”
What the fuck?
Since I had little choice at this point but to reinstall Sequoia again in order to install a fresh copy of Tahoe, I shut down, inserted the Sequoia boot USB (because it would be quicker than downloading from the internet, which is what that recovery partition option would do), rebooted, and loaded the O/S again from the USB. This still wasn’t ideal since in order to get a clean Tahoe install I would have to install over the clean Sequoia install.
Now if I’d been thinking (which clearly I hadn’t been), I would’ve created a Tahoe USB installer which would have allowed me a new pristine installation of Tahoe to test my theory. But I wasn’t. And I didn’t.
TLDR: After nearly 48 hours, I finally have a functioning system again. At one point yesterday I told Ben, “I quit Windows because of it taking an entire day to rebuild and restore a PC!” I finally gave up on the Tahoe experiment and late last evening I was finally back up and running with a clean install of Sequoia. Everything I tested worked (with a couple notable exceptions below), and in some cases, worked in ways they hadn’t worked in years. (Did you know you were supposed to get audible notifications when new mail arrived?)
Speaking of mail…my worries about the mail databases was unfounded. I was able to import the original mailboxes without any issues popping up. So that had changed since the last time I attempted it. (Mountain Lion or Mavericks as I remember.)
I realized this morning I’d transferred all my music and the associated library file but had failed to actually start up the Music app to verify that everything worked. I did that and it balked at the library file. “Cannot use library file because it was created by a later version of MacOS.”
Fuck me.
I’d dodged that bullet with my mail files, but apparently I wasn’t going to be so lucky with my music collection. Visions of me having to reassign thousands of pieces of album art to my collection flashed before my eyes. But what was I gonna do? I went ahead and imported all the files and afterward was pleasantly surprised to see that all but a few dozen recordings were missing art. That I could live with and correct as time allowed.
The other issue that I’m still dealing with is XNView (the application I started using several years ago to catalog and view images when Adobe Bridge started glitching too much) can no longer preview or internally view .pdf files. A prerequisite for this functionality is that Ghostscript is present on the system, so I dutifully installed GS via Homebrew. Despite it being installed, XNView refuses to acknowledge its presence. XNView also insisted on starting fresh when I opened it, even though the configuration files were transferred from my backup. Normally this wouldn’t be horrible because I can recreate all the customization, but I also lost the markers that I’d assigned to individual images to indicate if I’d blogged them, and no matter what I do I have been unable to bring them back.
So if you start noticing duplicates on VoenixRising, you’ll know why.
If I start the application via the terminal everything works, so that tells me Ghostscript is installed correctly. The path to Ghostscript is in the path (I think. Setting paths in MacOS is not anywhere near as simple as it is in Windows), but when starting XNView directly, it’s not finding it.
So this is what I’ve been banging my head against all afternoon, with no resolution in sight.
Oh…and for some reason, two of my contacts absolutely refused to sync from iCloud back to the Mac—but I was able to recreate them locally.
So that’s where we stand this evening. Good, but not great. If there are any Mac users out there who are familiar with setting paths (or getting Ghostscript to be recognized by programs that need it), I’d love to hear from you.
Saturday Tiedrich
as another stupid week comes to a close here in America, let’s look back at the dumbest fucking shit that happened.
monday: life, liberty and the pursuit of what in the actual fuck
here’s some nightmare fuel no one asked for — or wanted — but Glenn Beck is inflicting it on us anyway: his ‘interview’ with an AI-generated George Washington.
for some inexplicable reason, AI George (who looks more like AI Gavin Newsom to me) is tarted up in a tight black t-shirt, as if he were some tech-bro version of a founding father.
oh, and excellent job on George’s fingers, Glenn.
but there’s only one thing you need to know about the video: AI George (whose mouth doesn’t match the words coming out of it) is too erudite for a dumbfuck like Beck to understand.
AI George: “if I may speak plainly, my countrymen, the danger, the greatest danger to our republic, lies not in foreign arms or in political faction, but—”
Glenn Beck: “may I interrupt you for a second? could you just dumb it down just a little bit?”
how unfair of Fake George to use big words like ‘countrymen’ and ‘republic.’
I can’t wait until some fuckface comes up with a MAGAfied AI Jesus and uses it to ‘prove’ that ‘blessed are the demented Mad Kings, for they shall shit themselves raw in the Oval Bordello.’
anyway, who needs Glenn Beck’s George Washington when we have Jesse Duquette’s?
tuesday: deck the halls with boughs of what in the actual fuck
look who showed up at this year’s White House Christmas Party: Florida Congresswoman Ann Appalling Lunatic — and she’s brought a friend with her: five-time international lap-hockey champion, Handy Oakley.
questions, as always, abound.
foremost, why is Handy humping Anna’s leg? Handy’s not very big on boundaries, is she. it looks as if she’s just seconds away from giving Anna a vigorous beetlejuicing.
why is Handy always posing like she’s engaging in the world’s oldest profession? she’s standing there as if she were under the gas lamps, luring the farm boys.
is Handy of the impression that the Oval Bordello is an actual bordello?I mean, sure, it’s hard to tell the difference, what with all that vulgar gold-spray-painted tat. but still. come on, woman — you’re embarrassing AI George Washington.
wednesday: have yourself a merry little what in the actual fuck
Fox News has a cheery holiday message for the dunderheads watching at home:
‘oh, were you expecting a nice, live Christmas tree this year? go fuck yourselves, Big Data needs that land for gigantic server farms, so that Glenn Beck can shit out an endless series of fake founding fathers.’
“this server farm is a hundred and fifty acres. yeah, there’s gonna be farms. and there will be transmission lines that have to go through developments. that’s the very nature of a growing economy. like that’s just— everybody needs to get on board. I just don’t— you know what? buy a fake tree.”
for those of you keeping score at home, you are officially allotted five pencils, two dolls and one plastic Christmas tree.
what the fuck kind of messaging is this? ‘you peons should be happy with less, while tech bros are allowed eat up more energy than many entire countries use in a year.’
here’s my reply to Big Data: piss up a rope, pal. you need a server farm? go knock down one of Dear Leader’s shitty golf motels. in fact, flatten all of them. boom — problem solved!
where does this dumbfuckery end? it’s a legit question to ask, because it’s only a short step from telling the cultists to ‘enjoy your fake tree’ to convincing them to willingly become batteries for the Matrix.
come on, loyal patriots — step into the tank. everyone needs to get on board!
thursday: me, myself and what in the actual fuck
oh look — the world’s wealthiest shitwad is out here having a perfectly normal one.
“I’d like to know who the asshole was that came up with the pronouns bullshit in the first place. That dipshit deserves a solid punch in the face.”
gee, the Space Snowflake seems a bit triggered. show us on the doll where pronouns hurt you, bro.
Elon has more money than god. dude could be doing anything in the world, and this is how he chooses to spend his time — hanging out at his own Nazi bar, and airing every single one of his petty grievances. how tiny is that?
since everyone is so into AI this week, let’s waste a few gigawatts on asking one ‘when were pronouns invented?’
look like the Space Nazi is going to have to invent a time machine before he can beat the shit out of the inventor of he, she and it.
you know, there’s only one good response to these fragile shitwits who crap their drawers every time their delicate ears encounter a pronoun — and forgive me for bragging, but I came with it years ago.
friday: the further adventures of some fucking idiot
Friday got off to a great start for some fucking idiot, with the release of super creepy photos from the estate of his dead pedo bestie.
what’s the biggie? who among us hasn’t been photographed with girls whose faces had to be blacked out because they’re all underage victims?
the fucking idiot had a perfectly normal reaction to the news.
President Donald Trump went on a posting spree just minutes after some of the photos from trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s estate were released by Congress.
There were 21 different posts in seven minutes, including memes and videos celebrating Trump and what he paints as his achievements.
the fucking idiot then held some Oval Bordello event, during which he was careful to hide his rotting hand as best he could.
the fucking idiot was ostensibly signing a bill honoring the members of the 1980 Olympic hockey team (why?) — so why the cowboy hats?
what the fuck even is this?
no, seriously — what the fuck?
who wore it better?
then, for the eighth time this month, the fucking idiot insulted a black woman to her face.
and not one worthless scribbler of the corporate-controlled media stood up to ask ‘what the fuck is wrong with you?’
how fucking idiotic is that?
this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:
practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.
to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.
we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.
Released 43 Years Ago Today
Culture Club: Kissing to Be Clever (1982)
The year that performers like Boy George and Annie Lennox burst on the scene…it was the year of total androgyny.
Boys Will Be Boys
Thursday Tiedrich
yesterday, America’s Mad King summoned his royal scribes to the Oval Bordello and proudly announced that ‘it had been an interesting day in terms of news’ (his dumb-ass choice of words, not mine). here’s what was so ‘interesting’: US armed forces had boarded an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela and taken possession of it.
what the fuck? was that an act of war? was it piracy? are we pirates, running around going ‘arrrrrrr, matey, give us your tanker’?
wait — Venezuela is part of the Caribbean. are we the fucking Pirates of the Caribbean now?
Venezuela’s calling it piracy.
US forces have seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, in a major escalation of Donald Trump’s four-month pressure campaign against the South American country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, whose government called the seizure “an act of international piracy”.
but look at Donny. he can’t even create an international incident without also pulling on his clown shoes and going buffooning.
“it’s been an interesting day from the standpoint of news. as you probably know, we’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela. large tanker. very large. largest one ever seized, actually.”
can you believe that? Donny actually bragged about the size of the ship.how fragile and needy is that? he can’t even do a simple piracy without going off on a tangent about how it was the greatest piracy off all time. a piracy like no one thought possible. big strong sailors with tears in their eyes were going ‘sir! sir! no one ever boarded us like you did, sir! how do you do it? sir!’
you can’t even parody this stuff, because Donny will get there eventually.
I know that Dear Leader wants us to fear him, but come on. he’s a dipshit — a stupid preening performative-nonsense dipshit. one who gets super aroused by big boats and trucks.
because of course it is. you cannot make this shit up.
so what’s the end-game here? is Donny taking us to war with Venezuela? all the fuckery he’s been up to lately sure makes it look that way.
Since August, the US has put a $50m bounty on Maduro’s head, launched the biggest naval deployment in the Caribbean Sea since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and carried out a series of deadly airstrikes on alleged drug boats that have killed more than 80 people.
Democratic Senator Chris Coons seems to think so.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) expressed fear Tuesday that President Trump is “sleepwalking us into a war” with Venezuela in the wake of recent tension between the U.S. and the South American country.
“I’m afraid that Secretary [Pete] Hegseth and President Trump are sleepwalking us into a war with Venezuela, and that regime change and access to the critical mineral resources and oil and gas of Venezuela is the real purpose and real goal here,” Coons told MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace on “Deadline: White House.”
“It sounds a lot like the beginning of a war,” Paul told NewsNation’s Hannah Brandt on Capitol Hill.
stop breaking our hearts, Rand.
on the other hand, this retired Marine colonel says no fucking way.
“The United States does not have the ground forces needed for an invasion,” said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and co-author of the analysis. “The Venezuelan ground forces number some 90,000 including the army, marines and National Guard. The United States has only 2,200 Marines [nearby], and there’s no movement to reinforce them.”
but when has not being ready ever stopped Donny from doing something monumentally stupid?
Donny is an impulsive imbecile who acts first and thinks never. he tore down the entire East Wing without bothering to have a plan in place for the gaudy dance hall that’s supposed to replace it. it’s a fucking hole in the ground right now. he shitcanned Obamacare subsidies without having anything to replace them.
do you really think Donny’s going to let something silly like not having enough Marines in place keep him from going to war, if he wakes up in a bad enough mood?
Donny says he wants regime change in Venezuela, and to bring democracy to its people. does any of that sound familiar?
hey, remember what happened the last time the good old US of A went war-for-oiling, in Iraq?
it was supposed to be a cakewalk — over in six weeks — with grateful Iraqis throwing flowers, and hailing us as liberators.
remember what actually happened? quagmire city. we were stuck in Iraq for nine years. hundreds of thousands of people died. trillions of dollars got flushed straight down the shitter. and for what? Iraq is a failed state now, and we never actually did get their oil.
that war was planned by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld.
this oil war — if we have one — is going to be planned by a Mad King, a piss-drunk dunk-tank clown, and Liddle Marco. those ass-clowns are a thousand times dumber than the shitwits who bogged us down in Iraq. whatever they cook up is bound to be a fucking disaster.
when Cheney and his neocons lied us into war with Iraq, at least they had the decency to send Colin Powell over to the UN with bogus ‘evidence’ of Iraq’s fuckery.
we’re still waiting for one single shred of evidence that any of the Venezuelan fishing boats we’ve blown up have had any drugs on them at all.
meanwhile, Donny continues to wander out where the buses don’t run. here’s another inexplicable dollop of what-the-fuck from yesterday’s event.
“Boeing gave me the award for the greatest salesman in the history of Boeing, which was a nice little award. I think I’ve sold a thousand Boeing planes. can you believe it?”
no, we can’t believe it because — spoiler alert — these is no such award. Donny is so thirsty for accolades — and so demented — that he’s now inventing imaginary honors.
wait, that gives me an idea. I have a cunning plan. here’s how we end this thing peacefully.
let’s get Venezuelan President Maduro to announce that Donny has won — oh, I don’t know, let’s call it the Caracas Peace Prize For Being A Super Genius Who Ended All The Wars.
then Maduro can throw a gaudy ceremony for Donny, just like FIFA did. he can give a five-minute speech flattering the shit out of Donny, telling him how amazing he is, and then give him some cheap-ass gold-plated medallion he can hang around his neck.
afterwards, Maduro and Donny can walk off together, best friends forever.
look at me. I just stopped a war. where’s my FIFA Peace Prize?
this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:
practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.
to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.
we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.
















































































































































































