Sunday Tiedrich


it’s been nine days since Prenit Fuckwit waged his glorious Three-Hour War against Venezuela, declared permanent victory and preened for the cameras.

now that Maduro — the thieving rat-bastard who had the temerity to steal Donny’s slick dance moves — has been kidnapped from his Caracas home and chucked into some hellhole jailhouse in Brooklyn, I’ll bet Venezuela has become a paradise on Earth. I’ll bet its grateful citizens are throwing flowers at Americans right now, and hailing them as liberators. it’s probably a—

oh dear.

The United States has urged its citizens to leave Venezuela immediately amid reports that armed paramilitaries are trying to track down US citizens, one week after the capture of the South American country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

how awesome. both the government and citizens of Venezuela are super fucking pissed at us — and are out for revenge. here’s what the State Department posted to Elon’s Nazi Bar and Child Porn Emporium:

lovely. by acting first and thinking never, Donny and his merry band of warmongers have painted a target on the back of every American in Venezuela.

“There are reports of groups of armed militias, known as colectivos, setting up roadblocks and searching vehicles for evidence of U.S. citizenship or support for the United States.”

oh, huh. that seems bad.

how did the shitwits who cooked up the cockamamie scheme to kidnap Maduro not foresee this? they removed exactly one person from Venezuela’s repressive regime — and left everyone else in place. what in the hallowed name of Magical-Thinking Jesus did they imagine would happen? the national guard, the army, the national police, the intelligence service — they’re all still run by Maduro loyalists. did Donny’s flunkies think they could just click their heels three times and all that shit would go away?

it’s so obvious that there was no planning whatsoever for dealing with any of the fallout from their actions. not one of these shit-kazoos bothered to ask ‘and what happens next?’ — it was just ‘grab Maduro and hope for the best.’ and now, as a result, every American down there has to run for their lives.

newsflash: this isn’t reality TV. this isn’t The Apprentice, where the producers could just edit out every disastrous decision of Donny’s, and make it seem like he was some kind of business savant. this is the real world. you can’t hide the dumbfuckery.

look at Little Donny Fuckface. he has no idea that he’s no longer part of some stage-managed entertainment spectacle. he’s still imagining that he can pretend everything is hunky-dory, just by saying so. here’s what he was posting at the same time the State Department was issuing its warning.

“I love the Venezuelan people, and am already making Venezuela rich and safe again. Congratulations and thank you to all of those people who are making this possible!!! President DJT”

on what fucking planet is any of that happening? oh, my dear sweet lord. shitting out hallucinatory nonsense on his crappy app doesn’t make it so.

you look at the collection of oddballs and chowderheads running our government and that famous line from All the President’s Men keeps running through your head.

the truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.’

except in our case, the truth is that these people are complete fucking imbeciles, and everything is getting out of hand. lucky us.

and for what? Venezuela’s oil? ha fucking ha. it’s becoming more clear with every passing day that Big Oil wants very little to do with Donny’s plans to steal all that crude. it’s too expensive to extract.

Paul Krugman has written an excellent post about all of this.

the long-story-short of Krugman’s post is —

    • Venezuela’s oil infrastructure has been fucked to hell, and will take years and many billions of dollars in investment to restore.
    • it would be insane to invest that much time and money in a politically-unstable country.
    • Venezuelan crude is damn near worthless, because it’s difficult to extract and difficult to refine.
    • there’s an oil glut right now. the world doesn’t need more oil.

you can’t explain any of that to Donny. his brain is stuck in the 1950s.he doesn’t want to know that the world has changed. all he wants is for his lizard-brain to be fed. he wants all the power, all the money and all the attention — and now you can add to it all the oil. it doesn’t matter that it’s worthless. he just wants to show it off, just like he wants to show off all the hideous golden tat in the Oval Bordello, and the future Epstein Dance Hall. it’s just another totem of wealth.

and it’s going to be the same deal with Greenland, too, should that clusterfuck-to-come ever happen.

“Greenland’s harsh environment, lack of key infrastructure and difficult geology have so far prevented anyone from building a mine to extract the sought-after rare earth elements that many high-tech products require. Even if President Donald Trump prevails in his effort to take control of the arctic island, those challenges won’t go away.”

as with Venezuela, there’s a reason all of Greenland’s resources remain buried — it’s just too fucking expensive to extract. and in Greenland’s case, it would be an ecological disaster.

Another concern is the prospect of mining rare earths in the fragile Arctic environment just as Greenland tries to build a thriving tourism industry, said Patrick Schröder, a senior fellow in the Environment and Society program at the Chatham House think-tank in London.

“Toxic chemicals needed to separate the minerals out from the rock, so that can be highly polluting and further downstream as well, the processing,” Shröder said.

but again, you can’t explain this to Donny. he’ll just wing a ketchup bottle at your head and scream at you to get it done.

Donny’s destabilizing the entire planet — and destroying decades-old alliances — all because he has a toddler’s understanding of how the world works.

we really do live in the stupidest fucking timeline.

by the way, you have to love this line from the State Department’s warning.

“Venezuela has the highest Travel Advisory level – Level 4: Do Not Travel – due to severe risks to Americans, including wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, and poor health infrastructure.”

did your irony detector just start shrieking? mine did — because you can replace ‘Venezuela’ with ‘Minneapolis’ and not have to change one word in the rest of that paragraph.

ace job, you assholes — you’ve turned an entire American city into a South-American-style banana republic.


loyal and patriotic citizens, please stand by for a message of the utmost importance from the President of the United States, Royal King of America, and God’s Own Avatar on Earth.

“The New York Football Giants should hire, without question, John Harbaugh – And John, a great guy, should TAKE THE JOB!!! President DJT”

Christ on a corkscrew, with all the chaos and crises going on — all the result of his own fascistic overreach — this is what Lord Fucksnot is focused on: the hiring decisions of the ‘New York Football Giants.’

that’s it, his brain is cooked. 25th Amendment — now. I’ll take my chances with Couchfuck McGee.


here are your heroes of the day: We the People of the United States of America. massive, peaceful anti-ICE protests took place across the nation yesterday. let’s just briefly sample a few.

here’s what went down in San Francisco.

and in Portland.

and in the rain in New York City.

and, of course, in Minneapolis, the scene of the crime.

thank you, everyone, for keeping it peaceful. Donny and his minions are super fucking horny to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law. we must not give him reasons.


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.

Vomiting It All Up

Sorry…I’m cleaning out my downloads folder today.

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“Fuck You, Make Me” Without Saying The Words

Elizabeth Lopatto, writing at The Verge, “Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai Are Cowards”:

Since X’s users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple’s and Google’s app stores. The fact that it hasn’t happened yet tells me something serious about Silicon Valley’s leadership: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are spineless cowards who are terrified of Elon Musk.

Lopatto’s outrage and righteous anger are justified, but I think mostly misdirected. Apple and Google — and thus, Cook and Pichai, as the men who sit behind the desks where the buck stops at both companies — are culpable. But this is ultimately not about them, and not about Musk. It’s Trump, as president, they fear. Not Musk. And they are correct to fear Trump.

Year one of Trump 2.0 has crystallized what had become — after decades of deliberate restraint after World War II, and even more so after the end of the Cold War — overlooked. The Presidency of the United States bestows upon its officeholder enormous, unparalleled, power. No one was afraid of Trump after he lost to Joe Biden in 2020. The man was convicted of 34 felonies in a cold New York City courtroom in May 2024, a mere 19 months ago. Trump expected and asked for riots outside the courtroom. He got nothing but pathetic support from a handful of kooks. A year earlier, he lost a humiliating sexual assault civil lawsuit to E. Jean Carrol. Trump, just a year and a half ago, was a buffoon getting his mug shot taken. Today he’s arguing that his power is unchecked by anything other than his own sense of morality.

No other president has ever abused (or, if you support him, wielded) the powers of the office like Trump has. The power and influence of Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, CEOs of two of the top five companies in the world, isn’t merely superseded by Trump’s power and influence as president. Their power and influence are dwarfed by Trump’s. Any credible argument about how they should act must acknowledge that profound imbalance.

Lopatto, in her closing:

I never want to hear any moral grandstanding from these boys ever again. The next time Tim Cook says “privacy is a human right,” the only possible response is to laugh in his face. I mean, Apple and Google are fine distributing an app that has created an undressed image Grok made of Renee Nicole Good, the mother who was shot by ICE in Minneapolis. How do you plan to defend getting rid of the ICEBlock app while allowing X to generate degrading images of a woman ICE killed? Can Apple and Google even identify their values beyond their commitment to “shareholder value”? What’s your fucking endgame here, guys?

The profound power imbalance here is frustrating. But also terrifying. It’s folly to think these CEOs should steer their companies into direct confrontation with Trump. It would do no ultimate good for Apple or Google to burn themselves to the ground in protest. These men aren’t beholden to shareholders, per se. They’re doing their duty to institutions they’ve devoted their lives to. Companies that are worth preserving and protecting. Perhaps not in your estimation, but certainly from theirs.

But abject obsequiousness — which more and more seems the path Cook and Pichai are choosing — is no more justifiable a response than corporate suicide. The situation is not binary: acquiescence or war. There is a broad middle ground, founded on principle.

Disney’s response to the Jimmy Kimmel controversy a few months ago shows the way. Defend the company’s principles while simultaneously defending the company from Trump’s demented wrath. You can take the position of “Fuck you, make me” without ever saying those words. Objection is not confrontation. Do the right thing and enforce the App Store and Play Store guidelines, and remove X and Grok from the stores. Make Musk object. Make the Trump administration object. Make them defend the indefensible — in public. Make clear why the apps were removed from the app stores and force Musk — and Trump, if he chooses — to argue that those things are A-OK by them. In court.

The judicious path for Apple and Google (and every other U.S. company) may well be to obey the law, even when the law is being actively corrupted. But the correct path is not to obey in advance. Stand behind the law while the law still exists on your side. Disney resisted Trump’s preposterous demand that they fire Jimmy Kimmel without lasting controversy, simply by standing firm in their conviction. Apple and Google could certainly do the same regarding apps that are being used to generate CSAM and deepfake harassment, regardless if the apps are part of the private fiefdom of Trump’s ally Elon Musk. It’s wise for Cook and Pichai to pick their battles. This one, I think, is worth picking. This is a moment when the App Store and Play Store can stand firmly on the side of longstanding and correct societal norms.

[source]

Workhorses

WARNING: GEEK/MINIDISC STUFF AHEAD.

I am a geek. I think that fact has been well established.

Ben tunes out the world by watching Drag Race news and reviews on YouTube, and I watch videos about how to fix broken stereo gear.

Those videos have gotten me into trouble more than once, giving me a false sense of proficiency when in fact I had none. But those are stories for another time.

I’ve been able to find videos describing how to take apart and fix just about every piece of audio gear I own—with two notable exceptions: my Tascam MiniDisc decks.

MD-350
MD-CD1MKIII

There are plenty of videos of people showing them off, describing how they work, or were obviously created for providing “proof of life” to potential buyers in an eBay auction. And so many of those videos are based out of Vietnam. WTF? Did Tascam saturate the Vietnamese market with these things?

In nearly a year of searching, I’ve found only one video that describes the actual repair of a misbehaving Tascam MD mechanism.

But why is that? There are literally dozens of repair videos for Sony units—portables and decks. With the decks, the most common malady is a decomposing rubber belt that prevents the minidisc from loading or ejecting—a simple fix once you obtain a new belt and see how it’s done. With the portables it’s almost always dried-up lubricant or corrosion from leaking batteries that someone failed to remove from the player twenty years ago. But Tascam? Just the one.

(Not that I need repair videos for these two units; they’re both working just fine. I just find the videos fascinating.)

Is this dearth of videos because the Tascams are built like tanks and simply don’t break down? They were sold as “professional” machines, intended to be used in recording studios and radio stations, so they were supposedly built to a higher standard (evidenced by the pictures below) than units manufactured for home use. But they were also marketed (in a silver finish with different model numbers) under their parent company’s Teac name, which was squarely a consumer audio company.

To point out the difference in build quality, this is my Sony…

MDS-JE480

vs. Tascam…

MD-350
MD-CD1MKIII

Or is it that Tascams don’t need repair videos created because the MD mechanisms don’t use any belts for loading and unloading the discs? The only belt I’m aware of is in the CD player portion of the MD-CD1MKIII and that drive is a standard, commercially available (at least at the time these were being built) IDE computer CD/DVD writer.

While it’s kind of disappointing that there’s only one Tascam MiniDisc repair video on YouTube, it’s also rather reassuring if this is indicative of their longevity, knowing that my two decks will likely keep humming along for many, many more years. (And there are more than enough Sony videos—of all their audio gear—that allow me to disconnect from the dystopian hellscape we currently find ourselves in.)

 

Quote Of The Day

The coward who shot Renee Good in the face represents the very core of what is wrong with everything. He’s not just a 21st century man-baby playing tactical gear dress up. He is the man who did his own research. He is your mom’s new boyfriend who refused to mask up at the height of the pandemic. He is the woman who voted for Trump three times because her pastor told her it was the Christian thing to do.

He is the suburban WASP who is afraid of the city. He is the tradwife and her POS husband chronicling their journey on TikTok. He is the social media troll who doesn’t realize all of his Facebook friends are bots. He is the alpha capitalist whose corporation relies on government subsidies. He is the poor man who opposes taxes on the 1% because he assumes that one day, he too will be a billionaire. He is the man who would rather resent every woman in his life than talk to a therapist. He is the person who tells you that a gun is a tool just like any other tool.

He is Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, JD Vance, and Derek Chauvin. He is the person trying to convince you at this very moment that she was a domestic terrorist and he did what he had to do. There is video. By defending it, you are essentially saying that this is also how you should react to a car slowly turning away from you. Fuck you.” ~ jake._.luck on Instagram

Do You Think It’s Possible?

Ordinarily I would say, “And then I woke up,” but I dunno….based on the demonstrations occurring across the fucking country, Renee Good’s murder may—and I stress the word may—be that tipping point.

There has to be a tipping point, right? If not this, then WHAT?1

FUCK ICE, FUCK MAGA, FUCK JD VANCE, FUCK LITTLE STEVIE MILLER, and most importantly…

Pluribus

Upon recommendation from one of my readers (thanks, David!), I jumped into Pluribus on Apple TV on Tuesday. Screencaps had kept popping up on my Tumblr feed, so between that and this personal recommendation, I decided to give it a shot.

I was not disappointed. In fact, I ended up binging the entire first series in one day.

I’m not going to do a review; I’ll leave you to explore this review which is better than anything I could possibly put together and decide for yourselves if this series is worth your time..