Tuesday Tiedrich


there are days when everything in the news is so profoundly idiotic that I don’t even know where to begin. yesterday was one of those days — so once again, I’m just going to drag out the Big Wheel of Moron™, give it a spin, and see where it lands. ready? here we go.

 

what. in the actual. fuck.

first of all, let’s all breathe a sigh of relief, because this vulgar abomination isn’t real — at least, it isn’t real yet. what Preznit Fuckwit’s shat out onto his crappy app is the product of some janky six-fingered plagiarism robot.

but the question must be asked: was the AI that ginned this up trained on a copy of The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich? it’s a legit question, because you know who else was in madly in love with eagles with their wings all spread out and shit? of course you do.

oh look, it’s Adolf Hitler, giving a speech in front of a ginormous Nazi eagle, and everyone in the audience is sieg heiling to beat the band. which, as long as we’re on the subject, reminds us of —

why does everything this administration does turn out to be something the Nazis did first?

nobody asked for this. nobody said, ‘gee, Donny there isn’t enough golden shit trashing up the White House yet. is there any way you can wedge some vulgar Nazi-themed eagle into the mix, maybe above the front door?’

it’s bad enough that all of Donny’s policies remind that he’s trying to build his own fucked-up Turd Reich, does he really have to steal all their symbolism as well?


well, that was fun. are you ready for another spin of the wheel? here we go

fuck, it landed on Donny again. come on Donny, stop being such an attention hog.

reporter: “what are your plans for the housing bill?”

Donny: “I don’t— know. I think it’s so— unimportant by compared to— by compared to the Save America Act. the housing bill is a bill that can get approved. they worked on it long and hard. it’s very— bipartisan. that means Democrats like it. and it’s uhhhhh— maybe— even— uhhhhh, it’s, it’s probably maybe more that way, they’re getting things that I wouldn’t necessarily agree to. nobody knows more than housing in the history of the presidency, nobody, nobody, no— well like me, in housing. I made a lot of— I made a lot of money. I made a lot of money with housing.”

heh heh, he said ‘long and hard.’

oh my god, Donny’s brain is fried. folks, I want to assure you there are no transcription errors in that excerpt. I took great pains to type out that torrent of incoherence exactly as it seeped from Dear Leader’s rancid anus-mouth. yes, he actually said ‘by compared to’ — twice.

let me ask you a question: do you think Donny even knows what’s in the housing bill he’s refusing to sign? because he sounds like a fifth-grader called upon to get up in front of the whole class to give an oral report on a book he absolutely forgot to read.

‘… and so if you have courage, they give you a red badge, and that’s why everyone should read The Red Badge of Courage.’

Donny’s oral report on the Red Badge of Housing Bill is just as nonsensical, because — spoiler alert — the illiterate fuck didn’t read it, and he can’t remember what he was told about it, because he was too busy watching himself on Fox News to listen. all he knows is that Democrats like it, which means it must be baaaaaad.

look, you can take Donny’s word for it, because he knows more about housing than all the housers. big strong housings, with tears in their eyes, come up and tell him so every day.

this guy’s a fucking idiot, and he’s making policy decisions based on vibes. what could possibly go wrong?

ugh. help us, Big Wheel of Moron™, and spin us the fuck out of here.


“let anyone who comes to this district, who thinks that he or she is going to vandalize the reflecting pool, you’re facing 10 years in prison.”

Jeanine Pirro sure loves to talk tough and come out with guns blazing, doesn’t she? Jeanine is what would happen if Yosemite Sam drank the entire box of wine in one gulp.

so, for those of you keeping score at home:

if you come to our nation’s capital and you so much as dip your pinky into the sacred and holy Epstein Reflecting Pool, you will spend the rest of your life in the hoosegow.

but it you come to DC in order to bludgeon cops with flagpoles, break into the Capitol, and take a shit on the floor of the House, the government will pardon you, apologize to you for the inconvenience, and — if Donny gets his way — enrich you beyond your wildest dreams

holy shit. spin us out of here, Big Wheel.


Dr. Oz has no freaking clue how insurance works, does he?

“of the people who signed up, 40% never use the insurance. let me ask you, John, you have health insurance — do you use it once a year? in Obamacare right now 40% of the people ostensibly signed up never use the insurance … we have a lot of fake people on the policies.”

wait, what?

on what planet is paying for insurance and not using it proof of fraud?

now look. I pay X dollars a month for car insurance. I’ve never filed a claim, because I’ve never had an accident. according to Dr. Oz, that somehow means I’ve been defrauding that cute little Geico gecko for years. I would never do that. I mean, look at this little homey. he’s fucking adorable.

now, this would all be hilarious of Dr. Oz were merely some loudmouth drunk at the end of the bar, ranting about all those goddamned Obamacare fraudsters, before passing out face-down in a puddle of his own sick.

but Oz is the administrator of the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. that’s way too much power for any crackpot this ignorant to hold — and he’s going to use this counterfactual bullshit as an excuse to kick people off Obamacare.

my head hurts. let’s give this accursed Wheel one final spin.


ha! you knew we’d eventually land on Donny’s Big Vacant Shitpile Of Nothingness, didn’t you?

as Aaron Rupar sagely observed when he posted this clip, this is some epic cope.’

Larry ‘Three Sheets’ Kudlow: “help me out, I want to be a part of this.”

Fox correspondent: “perhaps now that the closing bell is here, we’re gonna get more people out here.”

yeah, you keep telling yourself that — that people were only waiting for Wall Street’s closing bell to ring at 4pm before heading to the Mall. let us know how that works out for you.

my god, Fox News wants so hard for Donny’s Ginormous Barren Abyss to be a success, and it just ain’t happening. four days after it opened, the Great American State Fair remains a ghost town.

oh, wait — here comes someone. let’s see if we can get them to stop for an interview.

oops, our mistake. it was just some random tumbleweed.

it’s four more days until July 4th, and things are just going to keep getting stupider.

lucky us.


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.

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Well, Well, Well…

@astrophilesz: Astronomers used the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes together to confirm one of the most troubling conundrums in physics, that the universe appears to be expanding at different speeds depending on where you look. This is called the Hubble Tension. A study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters used a triple check combining both telescopes to rule out the possibility of measurement error for good.

Lead author Adam Riess, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the 1998 discovery of dark energy, said that with measurement errors negated, what remains is the real possibility that we have misunderstood the universe.

Here is the contradiction in plain terms. Measurements from the local universe, taken using Cepheid variable stars, give one expansion rate. Measurements based on the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang mapped by the Planck satellite, give a different rate entirely. The discrepancy holds steady no matter how the data is checked.

Researchers expanded the dataset to include 1,000 more Cepheid stars across five galaxies as far as 130 million light years away, and the disagreement remained exactly where it was.

A Nobel laureate physicist did not mince words about what this means. David Gross, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, said at a conference that this should not be called a tension or a problem. It should be called a crisis.

What makes this significant is what it is not. It is not a calibration error. It is not an instrument flaw. Two independent, repeatedly verified measurement methods are producing two different answers to the same fundamental question about how fast the universe is expanding. Cosmologists are now asking whether resolving this requires new physics altogether, something currently missing from the standard model of the universe.

The universe is not behaving the way our best equations say it should. Nobody currently knows why.

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Donald Trump Is A Rapist


(Warning: this article contains depictions of sexual violence and may be triggering for survivors of assault)

Donald Trump is a court-adjudicated rapist.

This is not speculation.

It is not conjecture.

It’s not a Left-Wing talking point.

This is documented, established fact.

It was unequivocally declared by a judge.

It has been repeatedly upheld in the courts.

He is a rapist.

And to any decent human being, that would have been a dealbreaker.

It wasn’t for them.

Donald Trump’s name is listed tens of thousands of times in the files documenting one of the most prolific and vile child trafficking rings in history, orchestrated by a man with whom he was a close friend and collaborator, one he traveled with. partied with, and corresponded with.

For people with normal ethical standards, this would be a stark, uncrossable red line.

For them, it proved not to be.

Donald Trump has been accused by dozens of women of rape, sexual abuse, and physical violence, including a woman who testified before the FBI that Trump raped her when she was just 13 years old.

For actual followers of Jesus, this would all be stomach-turning and condemned as the darkest kind of evil.

For them, it hasn’t been.

For tens of millions of our family members, lifelong friends, neighbors, coworkers, and classmates, none of this has mattered. His well-documented brutality has never been a liability.

Despite a vast and reprehensible body of work, filled with proven sexual assault, alleged pedophilia, boasts about forced affection, credible accusations, and vicious public verbal attacks on women, he still receives their undying allegiance.

Instead of joining decent humanity in dragging him and his accomplices into the raking light of legal accountability for their atrocities against the most vulnerable, they obfuscate, they feign ignorance, they move the goalposts, and they slander the victims.

For all their performative sermonizing about protecting girls and young women, Trump’s supporters have shown through their silence, through their refusal to acknowledge reality, and through their steadfast adoration no matter how disgusting the revelations that they simply don’t give a damn.

Unthinkable violence against children, sadistic degradation of women, absolutely monstrous allegations of assault; they’re all trumped by the pathetic cultic affection they have for a man who in any other sphere of life would be a pariah where good people gather.

They have put political wins, Supreme Court Seats, and the cheap high they get off hurting people vicariously through him above the dignity and safety of other human beings. In the face of legal reckoning, he has received the protection of the highest seat of power in this nation, one they’ve helped him retain.

They know what he’s done, and it has not dampened their passion.

And this, perhaps as much as any moral or ethical malpractice they’ve engaged in to support him (and there has been so much), cannot be something we let them off the hook for, no matter what they say after he is no longer in power or no longer walking this earth.

When time and justice catch up to him, when his regime is finally dismantled, and some kind of normalcy and stability return to our nation, their breathless worship of a violent, sadistic sexual deviant will be their legacy.

He is who he is, and his supporters are who they are.

Donald Trump is a rapist.

He will always be a rapist.

His supporters will always have passionately supported a rapist.

They cannot be excused for that.

They cannot be forgiven for that.

 

 

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Released 40 Years Ago Today

Madonna: True Blue (1986)

From Behind the Grooves: (sadly, link is broken as of 2026)

“True Blue”, the third album by Madonna is released. Produced by Madonna, Patrick Leonard and Stephen Bray, it is recorded at Channel Recording in Los Angeles, CA from December 1985 – April 1986. After the massive whirlwind success of the “Like A Virgin” album and “The Virgin Tour”, the pop superstar does not rest on her laurels, beginning work on the crucial follow up at the end of 1985. Working with long time collaborator Stephen Bray and new producer Patrick Leonard (Michael Jackson, Jody Watley), the album is praised upon its release as her strongest effort to date, and is widely regarded today as one of the best albums of her career. It spins off five top five hits including “Live To Tell” (#1 Pop), “Papa Don’t Preach” (#1 Pop), “Open Your Heart” (#1 Pop) and the title track (#3 Pop). “True Blue” also marks the beginning Madonna’s long association with famed fashion photographer Herb Ritts who shoots the LP’s iconic cover photo. The original LP package also includes a poster of the album cover shot. As a promotion for the album, MTV sponsors the “Make My Video” contest, inviting viewers to submit their own visual interpretations of the title track. The winning entry comes from Angel Gracia and Cliff Guest, whose black & white clip is rotated heavily on the video channel. The pair are awarded a check for $25,000 by the pop superstar herself at MTV’s New York studios. The alternate video directed by James Foley, featuring Madonna with close friends actress Debi Mazur and fashion designer Erika Belle is shown largely outside the US. Madonna also supports the album with the worldwide “Who’s That Girl Tour” beginning in June of 1987. It is remastered and reissued on CD in 2001, with the extended 12″ mixes of “La Isla Bonita” and the title track included as bonus tracks. The vinyl LP is reissued in Europe in 2012, including the original inner sleeve lyric sheet and poster featured in the original release. In October of 2016, a limited edition release of the LP pressed on blue vinyl, is issued as exclusive through the European supermarket chain Sainsbury’s. “True Blue” spends five weeks at number one on the Billboard Top 200, and is certified 7x Platinum in the US by the RIAA.

I mean, the whole album is bangin’ and deserves to be played at 1 am disco-packed-with-big-sweaty-menz volume, but the title track especially moves me. It’s one of those songs that when it comes on I have to stop what I’m doing, crank the volume to angelic heaven-is-a-disco, make your ears bleed volume and DANCELa Isla Bonita is a close second in that category.

My unbridled love for this album and the accompanying quest to acquire it on “true blue” vinyl has been well documented on this blog, so I won’t add anything more and instead will sign off and go listen to it.

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Is Anyone Surprised?

I fully expect a rant on Truth Social claiming that the photos were fake and that this was the largest celebration in US history. “Millions of people on the mall!”

Screenshot

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