Get The Net.

Following up on my earlier post

From Wonkette:

We Must Discuss This Bonkers 7 Point Plan To Re-Install Trump Going Around CPAC

As has been widely publicized, there was a flyer going around CPAC this weekend, detailing a ridiculous seven-point-plan for reinstalling Donald Trump as president, which involved Nancy Pelosi melting like the Wicked Witch of the West and then a "trusted conservative" replacing her as Speaker of the House, then having said "trusted conservative" prove that the election was stolen, then install Trump as Speaker of the House, impeach Biden and Harris and BOOM! Trump is president again.

The flyer appears to have been written entirely by one Robert J. Antonellis, who describes himself as an "investigative researcher and engineer" and reads:

7-PT. PLAN TO RESTORE DONALD J. TRUMP IN DAYS, NOT YEARS:

1. Reveal ACHILLES' HEEL: Pull back the curtain on the horror show that is today's "Democrat Party". Watch Pelosi melt, like the Wicked Witch of the West. See the Black Caucus and other key groups flip, unexpectedly, and watch the tables turn.

2. Witness a trusted Conservative elected as Speaker of the House and, FINALLY, reveal suppressed results of existing investigations into election racketeering.

3. Correct the official record. Reveal that Trump legitimately won the 2020 Election.

4. The Speaker of the House drafts Articles of Impeachment for Biden-Harris.

5. Citizen Donald J. Trump is placed into the line of Presidential succession, behind the Vice President, by electing him Speaker of the House.

6. Speaker of the House Donald J. Trump then calls for a vote to impeach, charge, and remove impostors, Biden and Harris.

7. Duly impeach, charge and remove Biden and Harris, whereby rendering all acts of said impostors, while in office, null and void and of no effect! Then, duly elected Donald J. Trump resumes his rightful place as U.S. President.

It's no more or less ridiculous than any of the other plans to reinstall Trump as Dictator for Life … until you go to the website listed on the bottom of the flyer, TrumpCard.PatriotsSoar.com and see what it is that they think is going to make Pelosi melt and the Black Caucus turn Republican. Because, oh boy, it is really something. And yes, it involves Satan and Satanic Ritual Sacrifices, because of course the fuck it does.

The plan hinges on Antonellis' theory that the "Democrat" party was built on the occult sacrifices of Martin Luther King, Jr, JFK Jr. (of fucking course) and… Mary Jo Kopechne, whom the flyer claims represents the Virgin Mary. The plan, apparently, is to ask Nancy Pelosi about this theory and then … I guess she's supposed to melt or something?

These are the questions. They are very normal questions.

– Nancy, will you please order investigations into these three related Occult sacrifices?

– No?! Nancy, are you Anti-Catholic? A racist? Anti-Kennedy? Or, all of the above?!

– Nancy, do you have any information about the numerous coincidences which connect Joe Biden, MaryJo Kopechne, Bethlehem and Nazareth, Pennsylvania?

– Nancy, is Joe Biden scripted as the anti-Christ?

THEN, he will ask her about her relationship with Jim Jones! And she'll be so freaked out because of how she definitely personally did Jonestown

– Nancy, what was your relationship with Jim Jones? And when did it begin?

– Nancy, have you ever apologized to African Americans for having had any association with Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre of over 600 African American women and their children?

– Nancy, did you create Jim Jones? Or did Jim Jones create you?!

Then, he's going to ask her if more stuff he made up is true! And also about her opinions on Charles Manson. I'm guessing we are to assume that Nancy Pelosi loves Charles Manson, here?

– Nancy, are you surprised to learn that BLM was the rebirth of the BLA? The Black Liberation Army, a support group of the Weather Underground?

– Nancy, do you think Charles Manson was a good American?

And if she can't answer them by the morning, she will be beheaded. Wait, no, that is the plot of Turandot.

ANYWAY, because I am a masochist, I watched one of the videos linked to in the PDF, and boy does it ever contain some batshit ideas. I made a list!

    • The Democratic Party arranged the death of Mary Jo Kopechne in Ted Kennedy's car, because she was a "Catholic heterosexual virgin" named MARY.
    • Ted Kennedy maybe wasn't driving the car in Chapaquiddick that night — it could have been the CIA! And Kennedy was forced, for reasons (of Satan) to make it look like he did it.
    • Mary-Jo Kopechne's initials were MJK, Martin Luther King's initials were MLK … and there was an L on Ted Kennedy's license plate, just like the one beginning Martin Luther King's middle name, and also the car was black. Like Martin Luther King. And these coincidence are just too strong to ignore.
    • The car was a Delmont, which is a slang term for "male sodomy" (does not appear to be a thing, but I could be wrong).
    • The license plate number was L78–207, and two 8s mean "Heil Hitler" … and also that comes before 0 so H20, and that means water, which was related to Mary-Jo Kopechne being sacrificed in water, under the astrological sign of Cancer … which makes Ted Kennedy the Zodiac Killer. Even though, according to this guy, it was a CIA guy what killed her.
    • Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4 … and Mary-Ko Kopechne grew up in Wilkes-Barre, which is nicknamed Forty Fort (nope that's just another place in Pennsylvania) and it was named as such because it was 44 miles from the Sugarloaf massacre (again, no) … which took place … ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1780. Get it? Because September 11? Yeah. That's here too.

How is Joe Biden involved in this? SACRED GEOMETRY.

Right, okay, continuing with this list.

    • The freemasons made the top of Delaware a half circle, and Joe Biden lived in that circle … area.
    • DELAWARE LOOKS LIKE A GIANT PENIS AND THAT IS EVIDENCE OF A THING.
    • Also maybe the top of Delaware is the Satanic arch of Baal? Or the Grim Reaper's hook?
    • Maybe Joe Biden is the actual Grim Reaper?
    • Are Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff Satanic-Americans?
    • Is Cancel Culture Satanists shaming good people for being good Americans?
    • Boston is shaped like a hammer and sickle! Therefore, communism. Or maybe it is also a dick, the guy is not sure. One of those two things.
    • You know who lives in Boston? Henry Louis Gates.
    • The British still control America. Through all the Satanists.

And now we're back to Chappaquiddick!

    • Chappaquiddick actually comes from British slang. Chap-pa-quid-dick. Man-father-dollar-penis. A place for men to buy sex from other men, possibly in some kind of incestuous manner. And that is why the Satanists chose to do their sacrifice there.
    • There is a Nazareth, Pennsylvania and a Bethlehem, Pennsylvania … and that is why they chose Mary-Jo Kopechne to sacrifice. And both of those towns are in between Scranton, where Joe Biden was born, and Greenville, Delaware, where he later lived.
    • Probably someone from Joe Biden's freemason lodge found Mary-Jo and asked her to be a stand-in for the Virgin Mary and then somehow this led to Joe Biden being President now, but not any of the other times that he ran. I guess.

THE END.

"It Just Works"

Another Apple rant. Quelle surprise.

I ran across a post today that was pointing out it's been 22 years since Madonna released Ray of Light (something I noted here last month.) and this made me realize I hadn't heard the album in quite some time, so I went to fire it up in iTunes. It wasn't there.

This was odd because I know I'd purchased the album years ago and if I wasn't mistaken I'd even transferred it to my phone about six months ago. I checked my phone, and it was conspicuously absent as well. I looked up my purchases so I could download it again, thinking that perhaps I'd inadvertently deleted it from iTunes.

Sure enough, it was showing "purchased," but there was no option to download it again. After about a half hour of sleuthing, I discovered that it—and in fact MY EVERY PURCHASE I EVER MADE THROUGH ITUNES—was now located in "hidden" purchases!

It didn't seem that I was missing music from the library, and several of the "hidden" purchases played just fine, but nevertheless I started manually unhiding all the purchases, ONE BY ONE—because Apple—of course there was no option to unhide everything all at once. (Actually there was a button to "unhide all," but once again—because Apple—clicking on it didn't do a damned thing.) I gave up after restoring the two missing Madonna albums that were actually gone from my library and about a couple dozen other items, because I realized this is not how I intended to spend the rest of my afternoon.

After the two missing Madonna albums were visible again, I was able to download them.

What's weird is that it looked like the rest of my purchased music was still in my library…

IT JUST WORKS. IT JUST WORKS. IT JUST WORKS, GODDAMNIT. YOU'RE JUST USING IT WRONG!

Was it Earthquakes?

I wish the creators of Star Trek would decide where in the fuck to put Starfleet Headquarters. I mean seriously. That place has moved more than I have over the last 40 years. In Star Trek The Motion Picture it looks like it's somewhere near the Palace of Fine Arts:

Then it magically moves to the Presidio:

Then, in the Marin Headlands?

And most recently, in Picard, it's taken over Horseshoe Bay and pushed into the Bay itself?

I know the story spans a couple centuries and the San Andreas has undoubtedly slipped more than once during that time, but c'mon…pick a site and stick with it.

OK, Boomer

Overheard at work:

"But if we give up our land line and only use our cell phones that means my wife and I will have two different numbers where we can be reached. Right now people know to just call the home number if they need to reach either of us. How's that gonna work?"

Ben and I haven't had a land line for almost the entire length of time we've been together, and it hasn't proven to be a barrier to anyone getting in touch with us…

 

 

Apple Teaches Us To Accept Being Inconvenienced

"It just works!"

If you buy into the Apple ecosystem, something you need to know is that you're going to be inconvenienced…a lot.

When I got my latest iPhone, I knew going in that I'd be losing the headphone jack. No problem, I thought; it comes with an adapter that I can use to connect it to the head unit in the car (sadly, Anderson is not bluetooth-equipped). What I didn't forsee were those rare instances when I wanted to listen to music through headphones as I fell asleep. I have bluetooth earphones, but they're impossible to sleep in. And yeah, I could pull out the crappy lightning earbuds that came with the phone, but for me they're also incredibly uncomfortable, fall out, and sound like crap. So I'm faced with either bringing the stupid headphone-to-lightning adapter in from the car every damn day on the off chance I might want to fall asleep to music, or dropping $10 for another fucking adapter that I can keep bedside.

And then there's the ongoing issue with my nearly-new $2K laptop and it's goddamned keyboard. When you buy something from Apple, it comes with the expectation that—at least hardware wise—you're getting the finest engineering on the planet. That used to be true, but lately it seems that in Jony Ive's quest to make everything no thicker than a sheet of paper, that has fallen by the wayside. While I figured out how to safely remove the keycaps and blow compressed air into the butterfly mechanism to clean out dustI shouldn't have to.

Yesterday, the N-key just stopped working altogether. Since I knew this was eventually going to happen, I'd ordered a replacement key cat and it was supposedly sitting at home in my mailbox, so I pried the top off the key again and gave the whole thing another good dusting. The functionality returned to what it was prior to yesterday, and after getting a really good look at what's going on under there I decided that I would live with it until I absolutely had to tear the key completely apart to replace the dome mechanism.

I shouldn't have to do this, Apple.

Yes, it's obviously still under warranty, but taking the machine back to Apple is also an unacceptable solution because for some reason the key can't just be replaced by their Geniuses like I was about to do. No, the whole thing has to be sent out for a complete upper case replacement because the keyboard is glued in place and I'd be without it for one-to-two weeks. And even then there'd be no guarantee another key wouldn't get fucked up.

What the hell, Apple?

There are rumblings of a manufacturer recall. My fingers are crossed.

Finally, there's the issue of my Apple ID. Last week Apple finally started allowing people to change their main Apple ID to an icloud.com or mac.com address (something that you haven't been able to do ever). When I set up my account back in 2009 on my very first Mac, I chose voenixrising because I was new to the this untrusted environment and didn't want to use my real name because reasons. Over the years, that of course changed, and now I use my realname@icloud.com (an alias I set up under the main account) address for pretty much everything.

So when news of this change became known, I was ecstatic. I could finally ditch the otherwise unused g-mail account I'd been using as an Apple ID. I logged in, went through all the steps, sent up all the offerings to the Apple gods, did the proscribed incantations and…"you cannot use an icloud address as your main ID."

WHAT THE FUCK, APPLE?

And that error only occurred when attempting to use the realname@icloud.com account. Every other alias I'd created could be used.

I called AppleCare the next day, and to his credit, the guy on the other end of the line was incredibly helpful. Unfortunately, we still couldn't get it switched over at that time because apparently if you have been using an @icloud.com address as your emergency backup address in the Apple world, you can't use it as your main ID for thirty days after you unhook it as the emergency contact. And my realname@icloud.com was the backup.

Inconvenience, thy name is Apple.

UPDATE: Late this afternoon the H-key started acting up. Again. So I gently pried the keycap off and dusted it out. I noticed when I replaced the cap it was loose on one corner. It turns out one of the little pins on the butterfly mechanism had broken off at some point.

So now I have two wonky keys. They work, but not without issues. I'd take the damn laptop into Apple tomorrow if Ben's old backup machine was usable enough for me to transfer everything over, but it isn't. It needs both a RAM upgrade as well as a larger hard drive so I don't have to pick and choose what to restore from Time Machine when restoring to it. Until I can afford to make those upgrades, I guess I'm just going to have to carry the little Apple bluetooth keyboard I bought back in 2010 with me.

This is BULLSHIT, Apple.