Those three bright points forming Orion’s Belt are Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. They look like three neighboring stars from Earth, but they are enormous, hot stellar systems separated from us by hundreds to thousands of light-years.
All three are far hotter and more massive than the Sun. NASA describes the prominent Belt stars as blue supergiants, with older NASA educational estimates putting Alnitak and Mintaka at roughly 20 solar masses and Alnilam around 40 solar masses.
Their apparent alignment is mostly a matter of perspective. NASA places Alnitak at roughly 800 light-years away, Mintaka around 900 light-years away and Alnilam about 1,300 light-years away in one commonly cited set of estimates. They aren’t actually sitting side-by-side in space.
They’re also more complicated than three simple stars. Mintaka is a multiple-star system containing five stars, while Alnitak is itself a multiple system. What your eyes perceive as single points can therefore represent entire stellar systems.
These massive stars burn through their nuclear fuel much faster than the Sun. Stars this massive live comparatively short lives and are expected eventually to end through core-collapse supernovae, leaving behind neutron stars or black holes depending on their final masses.
The surrounding region is equally spectacular. Near Alnitak lie the famous Horsehead and Flame Nebulae, while below the Belt sits the Orion Nebula, one of the nearest major star-forming regions to Earth.
So when you find those three simple dots in the night sky, you’re looking toward some of the most massive stars visible to the naked eye—and into an enormous stellar nursery where new stars are still being born.
Mad King Donny continues to deteriorate before our very eyes.
Yesterday, sweaty and unsteady on his feet, he shambled into the Oval Bordello, half an hour late for the dog-and-pony show that his minders had set up for him.
Surrounded by his Emotional Support Flunkies, Dear Leader sat down at his Big Boy Resolute Desk and struggled to read from his prepared text.
And, of course, as soon as someone else started speaking, the narcoleptic old fart factory fell fast asleep, and started crop-dusting the room with the pungent aroma of ass music.
The whole event was a clownfucktacular shit-show — or, as we call it around here, Monday.
“Because of tariffs, we— are— taking in HUNDREDS of billions of dollars of dollars— of profits. It’s one of the reasons I can offer, if— Republicans win the— HOUSE and Senate. $5,000 to every adult. And we can do it and the Democrats can’t, because the Democrats don’t have any income.”
Holy shit. Every word that just seeped from Donny’s rancid anus-mouth is either a fever-swamp fantasy, an outright lie, or just a basic failure to understand how money works. It staggers the mind when you consider that this low-wattage fuckwad is in charge of our entire nation’s economy.
A $5,000 payment to every US adult would cost about $1.25 trillion. The government collected $195 billion in customs duties in FY2025. Net tariff revenue turned negative in some months of 2026 due to Supreme Court-ordered refunds. Analyses show tariffs cannot fund it.
Got that? There isn’t enough money to give every adult in America five large. It’s just not there, no matter how many times Donny clicks his bloated cankles together and wishes it were so.
And it’s just fucking weird that Donny considers money taken in via taxes and tariffs to be profits. they’re not — they’re revenues.
This is a fundamental mistake that all these shit-gibbons who insist that ‘government should be run like a business’ make. Governments are not businesses. The revenues that a governments takes in are — in any sane country — used to provide for the public well-being of its people. They’re notprofits, for some tinpot fucksnoot like Donny to hoard for his own personal use.
And what’s all this nonsense about ‘Democrats don’t have any income’? There aren’t two treasuries, one for each major political party. There isn’t Republican money and Democratic money. It’s just money money.
Not only is it fucking insane that Donny believes this, it’s insane that every worthless scribbler of the corporate-controlled press just sits there and nods their head and goes, ‘well, I guess if Donny says so.’
None of this shit is normal. Is it really too much to ask of our media to stop treating it as if it were?
Donny’s hare-brained schemes are in no way ‘ideas for aiding US consumers’ — they’re the mouth-farts of a panicked idiot who is throwing everything the wall in a desperate attempt to not lose the midterms.
Dear Leader couldn’t give a shit about ‘aiding US consumers.’ He only gives a fuck about himself. He just wants to remain in power indefinitely.
Oh, and it’s also fucking against the law to bribe people into voting a certain way. How about reporting on that?
I guess if MAGA is too memory-impaired to remember how many times Dear Leader has lied to them about free money from the government, they’ll also be fooled by the ‘migrant caravan’ that has magically appeared, five weeks before an election.
Here we go again. Every time an election looms, the entire wingnut outrage-industrial complex starts flooding the airwaves with bullshit scare-stories about swarthy brown-skinned migrants walking thousands of miles on foot, just so they can cross our border and fuck our shit.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a strong warning to a major migrant caravan that crossed into Mexico and was moving north with hopes of reaching the U.S.-Mexico border.
“USBP is closely engaged with its international partners to monitor their movement and any additional developments,” DHS told Fox News in a statement. “[United States Border Patrol] USBP reminds migrants that under the leadership of President Trump and Homeland Secretary Mullin, the border has remained closed and secured for the last 16 months.”
Yeah, like I would believe anything that comes out of the mouths of Marky Two-Names and his racist band of shitweasels at the Department of Homeland Security.
What ever happened to fun scare tactics like that? Fox News is really falling down on the job here. It’s all so patently ridiculous that even the three-toed freak of nature, Marjorie Sporkfoot Greene, can smell a rat.
We have not seen a caravan headed to the U.S. southern border in several years, why now? Oh yeah, there is an election coming and the GOP needs to scare you into voting because nothing else is working.
She’s not wrong — but please don’t be fooled by MTG’s supposed change of heart. It’s all an act. She’s not our friend. Never forget that she spent years promoting this racist garbage, and has never apologized for it.
You would think that the cultists would remember that Sporky and her ilk have been hoodwinking them with this garbage since all the way back in 2018 — but you would think wrong.
And, lastly, we have this fucking fuck to contend with. Holy Mike Johnson — the limpest dick ever to wield the House Speaker’s gavel — wants you to know that if you object to data centers, you’re just falling for commie Chinese propaganda.
Mike Johnson says opposition to data centers “is a Chinese psyop. I really believe that. That’s not a conspiracy theory.”
Mike Johnson can fuck himself straight into the sea. Data centers are a nightmare to live with. They’re noisy. They pollute. They deplete local water supplies. They jack up everyone’s electricity bills, and destroy everyone’s property values.
I have an idea whose time has come: how about every one of these shit-kazoo politicians who claim that data centers are no biggie, be forced to live next to one for a year?
let’s see how they like it.
who’s with me?
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.
“You shouldn’t let politics get in the way of your relationships.”
As we approach one of the most consequential elections in our nation’s 250-year lifespan, I see this sentiment pop up on social media a good bit in think pieces and news stories: the idea that family members and friends are too important to lose over a political position, a party affiliation, or a ballot choice.
This may have been a reasonable and healthy idea back when we had parties and candidates who genuinely desired the common good; when we were debating methodology or financial approach to solving problems that we all agreed were problems. It made sense to preserve relationships when we imagined that our fathers, cousins, neighbors, and lifelong friends cared about diversity and justice and personal freedoms and helping people as much as we did.
We are way past that.
For a decade now, Donald Trump and his surrogates have offered an openly nihilistic, misogynistic, hate-poisoned vision of an intentionally divided nation without empathy for the poor or the sick. Their movement has been a naked declaration of white supremacy and intolerant nationalism; a movement completely devoid of policy and oriented solely around those it would exclude and punish and banish.
And that is what so many of the people we once shared this life with have chosen, many for the third time now. That doesn’t just point to political fissure or ideological misalignment, but a complete moral incompatibility.
Year after year, we have witnessed those we love repeatedly confirm their deviations regarding affordable healthcare, human rights, environmental protections, body autonomy, foreign genocide, sexual violence, and the legal and moral standards leaders should be held to.
This is no longer about policy differences, not simple disagreements on the humane and responsible way to deal with collective national challenges. It isn’t a matter of agreeing to disagree on less-than-critical subjects where a stalemate is acceptable.
The coming election (much like our political sides in this iteration of America) is about whether we will embrace or reject unapologetic racism, rabid nationalism, mindless homophobia, the dehumanization of immigrants, narcissistic greed, and the coddling of sexual predators.
And these things are worth cutting people off, severing ties, and muting on social media. They have to be if our values matter to us.
The lives of millions of flesh-and-blood human beings hang in the balance as we enter the voting booth: their freedom to make healthcare decisions for themselves, their access to fundamental liberties promised in the Constitution, their agency to govern their own destinies, their basic sense of safety from harassment and harm and violence.
If there was ever something that justified a deleted contact number, an empty chair at the Thanksgiving table, an exodus from a church, or the termination of a friendship, it is this.
If we aspire to being decent human beings, at some point, we need to choose whether we will lean into our deepest convictions or preserve relationships with people whose presence increasingly causes us to compromise, conceal, or deny those convictions.
We need to decide whether we will keep a tenuous peace with those we share blood and tradition with, but little else, or whether we will step out into the raking light of full authenticity and fight for the things that break our hearts and boil our blood, for the human beings we know are and will be under great duress because of the choices our loved ones and friends have made.
The choices we make in November are far more consequential than merely altering the balance of power in Congress, flipping key seats, or ousting incumbents committing malpractice.
The tangible impact of our votes on people of color, on LGBTQ human beings, on the sick and the poor and the elderly, on our immigrant communities (let alone the rest of the world) is beyond what we can comprehend right now.
The outcome in November will determine the opportunities people have to earn a living wage, to feed their children, to choose their homeland, to define their gender, to live free from violence at the hands of their government. This isn’t politics, it’s elemental humanity.
I’m not saying we should disconnect from everyone we know who doesn’t perfectly align with us politically, as learning to bear with reasonable disagreement, hearing another’s perspective, and finding compromise are often necessary and helpful. But when the misalignments are philosophical, ethical, or moral, we all need to ask if that’s cause for distance or disconnection.
If we haven’t gotten there yet, many of us may decide that we cannot forgive or abide those close to us who have repeatedly chosen leaders and policies that have caused so much unnecessary sorrow to so many human beings. We might decide that we no longer desire relational or physical proximity to people who have allowed our nation to be handed over to such a cancerous malevolence, and who did so with perverse joy and unrepentant cruelty.
If that isn’t reason to end a relationship, nothing is.
When you elect clowns, you really, really, really should expect a circus.
And that’s exactly what was on display at Jack Smith’s Senate hearing in what we still, with an increasingly heroic commitment to irony, call the world’s greatest deliberative body: the United States Senate.
What a dumpster-fire shitshow.
What a nine-layer dip of pathetic, performative, preening, principle-free, prostate-polishing political self-debasement.
Four hours of gutless congressional cosplay from a collection of quivering, kowtowing, credibility-castrated courtiers competing to see who could crawl the farthest up Donald Trump’s ass and come back out wearing his prostate as a party hat.
Former special counsel Jack Smith sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee, square-jawed and steady, staring down a firing squad of partisan fuckery after years of threats, investigations, intimidation, vilification and demands for his prosecution.
And he didn’t flinch.
Smith has spent decades as a public servant and prosecutor, and he walked straight into a room packed with people desperate to discredit him, raised his right hand, swore to tell the truth and stood behind his work while they hurled handfuls of rhetorical feces in his direction.
Facing him?
A senatorial skid mark. A bought-off, backbone-bereft, brownnosing bootlicker brigade and a panoply of pusillanimous, puckered, peacocking political lickspittles, craven courtiers and MAGA meat-riders conducting themselves with all the dignity of a bachelor party being escorted out of Medieval Times because one of them tried to reverse-cowgirl the jousting horse.
Senator Foghorn Liehorn Kennedy spent his time pecking away at Jack Smith about his WIFE. Her political views. Her opinions about Trump. Her opinions about the Obamas. Smith repeatedly told him he wasn’t there to discuss his family, but Kennedy kept gnawing on it, turning a Senate Judiciary hearing into the world’s shittiest couples-therapy intake form before asking a former federal prosecutor, with a completely straight face, whether he believed in the Tooth Fairy.
The Tooth Fairy.
In the United States Senate.
This Oxford-educated Rhodes Scholar, who perpetually talks like he left his dentures soaking in a jelly jar, cinched up his little aw-shucks verbal overalls, cranked the cornpone dial until the knob came off and started chewing his consonants into oatmeal like he’d moseyed in from the Louisiana swamp with a crawdad in his pocket and constitutional jurisprudence written on the back of a Piggly Wiggly receipt.
Give me a fucking break.
Kennedy has a law degree from the University of Virginia and studied at Oxford, but point a television camera at him and suddenly he’s three syllables away from telling us his meemaw always said you can’t prosecute a possum during crawfish season.
It’s not folksiness.
It’s intellectual drag.
And somehow, some fucking how, it got even more ridiculous when Ted “I Cream My Pants for the Guy Who Called My Wife Ugly” Cruz compared Jack Smith to Javert from Les Misérables, because nothing says grave Senate oversight quite like a set of sentient jowl merkins testing the outer limits of his scientifically punchable face while shoehorning French musical theater into congressional testimony.
Cruz fled freezing Texas for Cancún and initially explained that trip by saying his daughters wanted to go, and this is a senator whose reputation among his colleagues once inspired Lindsey Graham to joke that if somebody killed Cruz on the Senate floor, nobody there would convict them.
Bipartisanship lives!
But Cruz wasn’t even the most mortifying ambulatory sack of Senate stationery in the room.
By the time Eric Schmitt got rolling, and I’ll be honest, I had no idea this guy was even in the United States Senate until he cannonballed into this hearing, I was watching him make a serious run at the title of Most Willfully Ignorant Idiot in Congress.
And Tommy Tuberville exists.
If these people retained even a vestigial capacity for shame, Schmitt would’ve left the hearing disguised as a ficus and spent the remainder of his term communicating with Missouri exclusively through burner phones, because he tried to accuse Jack Smith of lying under oath over where he’d been on a particular day and came armed with documents, a prosecutorial erection and a giant visual aid that was supposed to blow the lid off Watergate II.
Schmitt saw “Hawk,” slammed the emergency brake on his frontal lobe and decided the remaining syllables were decorative, leaving him in the wrong city, in the wrong state, at the wrong game, telling the wrong fucking story with the confidence of a detective who’d just found the Lindbergh baby in his glove compartment.
You could watch the realization crawl across the dais in real time, that exquisitely nauseating moment when everyone in the car knows they’ve gone over the cliff except the driver, who is still explaining the excellent brakes, and Katie Britt’s jaw dropped so spectacularly that her face may have become the meme of the century before Schmitt had finished stepping on his own dick.
Her expression said, Eric, what in the Kentucky-fried fuck have you done?
Republicans have become the stepping-on-rakes party. They step on a rake, get walloped in the face, stagger backward onto another rake, take another handle directly to the taint, fall forward onto the first rake again and then, while concussed and bleeding from the forehead, convene a congressional hearing called Who Put All These Rakes Here? The Weaponization of Lawn Care Against Conservatives.
And Eric Schmitt is out there barefoot in the fucking garden.
Amy Klobuchar eventually had to walk a United States senator through the conceptual distinction between professional basketball in Georgia and a university team from Iowa while his enormous accusation loomed behind him looking like a Denny’s placemat for people ordering the Grand Slam with a side of senatorial brain damage.
And we fucking paid for it.
Schmitt had the mistake enlarged and mounted. A computer was involved. Staffers presumably touched this thing. Fonts were selected. Dimensions were discussed. Somebody sent a file to a printer, somebody approved it, somebody hauled that magnificent monument to refusing to Google a goddamn thing into the hearing room, and at no point in this relay race of intellectual malpractice did anyone stop and say, “Hey, Eric, are we sure these are the same fucking birds?”
It’s one thing to shit your pants.
It’s another thing entirely to have them professionally printed.
Kennedy is rummaging around in children’s folklore, Cruz is staging an off-Broadway production inside his own skull, Schmitt just lost a cage match with two bird mascots, and sitting right there among them is Josh Hawley, a congressional Go-Gurt tube stuffed stem to stern with enough hypocrisy to stock the entire Republican caucus.
He saluted the January 6 crowd with that infamous fist outside the Capitol, only to have surveillance cameras later catch him hauling ass through the corridors after the building was breached like somebody had fired a starter pistol directly into his sphincter. This wasn’t a brisk evacuation. This was prairie flight, a Missouri gazelle discovering consequences at full gallop, knees writing checks his ideology had absolutely no intention of cashing.
Now this chest-puffing congressional hall monitor, who kisses his wife with all the erotic urgency of somebody checking a CPR dummy for residual body heat, is sitting safely behind a microphone calling Jack Smith’s work political “from day one” and demanding that he be disbarred.
And Hawley wants to puff himself up about Mar-a-Lago too? The FBI searched the place on August 8, 2022. Jack Smith wasn’t appointed special counsel until November 18, more than three months later, when Garland handed him investigations that were already underway.
So if we’re assigning Smith retroactive responsibility for everything that happened before he got the job, Hawley might as well demand to know why he didn’t stop the Hindenburg, subpoena him over Pearl Harbor and ask whether he has an alibi for the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.
And Jesus Christ, if Josh Hawley isn’t the whole fucking scam squeezed into a necktie: pounding the table about punishing Jack Smith after America watched him evacuate the Capitol at a speed previously associated with stolen catalytic converters.
Josh Hawley and the rest of the senators who were inside that building don’t need a history lesson about January 6. They heard that history smashing through the fucking doors. The roar outside breached the walls and came screaming down the hallways, glass breaking, alarms shrieking, bodies slamming against barricades, Capitol Police running toward the violence while lawmakers were being yanked away from it, human beings putting flesh and bone between elected officials and a mob as the building filled with shouting, smoke, chemical spray, shattered glass, blood and panic.
Those cops protected them.
But talk about any of that and suddenly these assholes develop the attention span of a Labrador in a tennis-ball factory. Wives. Broadway. Childhood mythology. Avian forensics. Phone records. Conspiracy confetti. Anything to keep the conversation pinballing around the room in a frantic little production of look-over-here kabuki theater instead of landing on the thing they cannot fucking explain away.
Jack Smith forced the hearing back onto the people who held the line that day: “It is inconceivable to me how you can pardon people who assault law enforcement officers and then vilify the officers who are trying to uphold the rule of law.”
They know he’s right.
They know because those were THEIR asses being hustled away while other people stayed behind to get crushed, struck, sprayed and dragged into the melee. They know exactly who stood between them and that mob.
Somewhere between running for their lives and crawling back to Donald Trump, terror became fealty, and now the same people who needed protection from his mob are attacking the prosecutor who tried to hold anyone accountable for putting them in danger.
Cowardice feels insufficient. Cravenness needs a protein shake. Spinelessness is standing in the corner begging not to be associated with whatever this is, so we may actually have to exhume the old vocabulary.
Centuries of English-speaking people looked upon quivering, supplicant, boneless little specimens and kept inventing new words for them, and the United States Senate has assembled the fucking box set.
This is something wetter, smaller and more servile, a gelatinous, genuflecting, groveling kind of self-erasure from sniveling sycophants who have fed their vertebrae into a Vitamix and poured the resulting slurry directly into Donald Trump’s water bowl.
This isn’t disagreement. It isn’t partisanship.
It’s self-abasement.
They survived the fire and volunteered to carry gasoline for the person who started it.
So spare me the flag pins, the solemn baritone speeches about patriotism and every sanctimonious syllable about the Constitution from people willing to turn constitutional oversight into a publicly financed clown car because consequences might inconvenience their melon-hued meal ticket.
Patriotism isn’t a lapel accessory. Public service isn’t seasonal decor. And the Constitution isn’t the cocktail napkin underneath Donald Trump’s Diet Coke.
All the flag-fucking pageantry in the world can’t hide the choice they made. They chose ambition over country, obedience over truth and Donald Trump over whatever microscopic remnant of principle hadn’t already leaked out through their shoes.
History isn’t going to give a shit about their oversized props, their rehearsed indignation or whatever diversionary horseshit they managed to cram into five minutes of camera time.
It’s going to remember what they were when it counted.
Their fecklessness.
Their moral surrender.
Their complicity.
It will remember that they knew what happened, knew who was responsible, knew who kept them alive and still enlisted themselves as enablers in the machinery of our collective demise.
When their country demanded truth, they manufactured distraction.
When the moment demanded a spine, they produced an easel.
And when American democracy needed them to stand the fuck up, they got down on their knees.
Or is it just the last remaining bit of gastronomic joy I can experience?
Why are you spending $7 a day for something you can’t even really taste?
Well, first of all Karen, I do still get a hint of taste with everything that goes into that g-tube; it’s just not the full-on experience I’d have otherwise. Don’t ask me how this happens. I only know it does—and my nutritionist has confirmed that many of her patients experience the same thing.
But in regard to the question if it’s addiction, devotion, or just plain enjoyment, I’m just going to go with a solid yes all around.
The house is located on a flat, square-shaped plot oriented along a North-South axis, near a pine forest and the beach. The single-story structure fits within a context of similarly scaled, detached homes in a low-density setting.
The main entrance is situated on the northern side of the plot, and the house is laid out in an “L” shape, resulting from a clear separation between the social and private wings. This layout promotes natural cross ventilation and optimal solar exposure, eliminating the need for any air conditioning or mechanical ventilation systems. At the same time, the shape protects the private outdoor space from the prevailing northern and western winds.For this project, the studio explored the potential of a prefabricated, three-dimensional modular system based on U-shaped reinforced concrete components, which are grouped according to the needs of the housing program.To reduce construction time, site preparation, earthworks, excavation, and foundation work were carried out in parallel with the off-site production of the modular components. Additionally, the modules were delivered to the site with parts of the electrical and plumbing systems already pre-installed.Each module leaves the factory containing the structural reinforced concrete and an outer layer of cement-based composite incorporating rice husk. This material—an agro-industrial byproduct typically discarded or burned—is locally sourced from the rice fields of the Lower Mondego region and transformed here into a biobased construction material.
I would like to see a third bedroom (we need two offices in this house) and an additional full bath, but other than that, I could live there.
Played on a period-appropriate CD player, no less!
I love this album so very. much. Not only is the recording itself…
technically and sonically superb, but the songs themselves are a perfect reflection of the late 80s. In my opinion, Faith and Listen Without Prejudice perfectly reflect George Michael at his peak. Neither Patienceor Olderwere bad, but both are eclipsed by the two previous releases. And as far as Songs From the 20th Century is concerned, as much as I want to like it, I still listen and my reaction remains, “Wut?”
