More Than Ever, I’m Embarrassed To Be An American

remember the 2006 movie Idiocracy? its premise was ‘what if everyone in America was a fucking moron — and what if the biggest fucking moron of all was the president?’

within the world of the movie, it took hundreds of years for the United States to devolve into a state of permanent, unending stupidity.

it real life, it only took ten.

lucky us.

take a look at the heaping slice of dumbfuckery that happened on Saturday, the day before Donny’s beloved cage fight: motorcycles were zipping through the air above the White House fountain.

let me just gif that shit, because you won’t believe it unless you see it. does this not look like a deleted scene from Idiocracy?

it was a crass display of toxic hypermachismo, just as our founders intended.

seriously, I’ll bet if old Ben Franklin could have seen this, he would have been all “I said ‘it’s a republic, if you can keep it.’ I didn’t say anything about a pedo president shitting his vulgar aesthetic all over the People’s House. what the fuck is wrong with you?”

look, if watching dipshits do somersaults on motorcycles floats your boat, go for it. we’re not here to police anyone’s idea of entertainment. but keep that shit off the grounds of the White House. it’s loutish and undignified.

when Idiocracy was released in 2006, the idea of a nation of morons ruled over by a oafish fool seemed like something that could only be mocked in a movie — yet here we are. that’s because stupid timelines don’t get stupid all by themselves. they need idiots like Preznit Fuckwit to make them stupid.

hey, remember in Idiocracy how President Camacho made his State of the Union entrance, firing an assault weapon?

I guarantee that Donny Convict would love to make an entrance like this, but he’s too old and feeble — and, above all, Preznit Five Deferments is much too chickenshit to ever pull an actual trigger. so he does the next best thing: he arranges for muscle-bound numbskulls to beat the shit out of each other for his own personal entertainment.

Roman Empire much?

that’s really what this is all about: Donny’s infantile winners-and-losers worldview. I would love nothing more than to explain this to you, but Robert Reich has beaten me to it.

Trump and his regime are seeking to project an America that’s like the winner of a cage match.

Trump sees everything and everyone in terms of dominance or submission, and he’s hellbent on dominance. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong,” he told his supporters on January 6, 2021, before urging them to go the Capitol.

He views America as locked in a zero-sum match with the rest of the world, and there’s no limit to our violence.

well-adjusted people don’t think like this. well-adjusted people understand that we’re all trapped on this planet together, and the best possible outcome requires all of us to peacefully coexist and get along with each other.

but just try explaining any of that to the Oval Bordello diaper-shitter whose entire life has been one long mission to prove to the world that he’s not the whiny loser that his tyrant Klansman father always told him he was.

here’s one problem with seeing every fucking thing as a battle to be won: you end up beefing with the weather.

his was all so fucking pointless and stupid. it’s an objective fact that the Sunday weather forecast in DC was abysmal, and it’s also fact that the cagefuck event had to be delayed for hours because of the abysmal weather

but because the White House is run by children who shit their pants over every fucking thing, they had to insult the poor schmuck whose job it was to accurately report the weather, calling them a ‘friendless loser.’

it’s all so fucking dumb.


wait, did I say that this cage-fight thing was all about Donny’s dominance-and-submission worldview? I was wrong. it was also about making a profit, and making sure Dear Leader gets a cut of the action.

it turns out that the whole goddamned thing was a money-making venture, from start to finish. this gaudy cagefuck was held on the lawn of the People’s House, but if We the People wanted to see it, we had to pony up first.

as for the event itself, it was just one shameless commercial after another, projected onto screens right in front of the White House

here’s Brendan Ballou, founder of the Public Integrity Project, to lay out just why this is so fucked up.

MS Now: “right now let’s take a look at some of the ads appearing on the White House lawn. there is beer, crypto, nicotine pouch ads, and they’re all inside the claw there. and you took issue at the branding at the event and UFC’s broadcast partner Paramount Skydance, so what are your concerns about the branding?”

Brendan Ballou: “ultimately, we have any number of laws that are trying to prevent our national parks and national monuments being used for for-profit, corrupt endeavors, which is exactly what’s going on here. the UFC, which is very closely allied to Donald Trump, stands to make a lot of money from it’s branding, not to mention the 1.5 million dollar individual sponsorship packages that it’s selling. Donald Trump stands to make a lot of money through the stock that he has invested in the UFC’s Paramount company… this is a literalization of the corruption we’re experiencing in America right now, where you literally have sponsorships that the president and his friends are going to benefit from at our national monuments.

corporate logos slapped all over our government, that shit’s literally out of Idiocracy.

nd now, we really need to hear from Josh Hokit, who had this heartfelt message of peace and unity after successfully beating the shit out of his opponent.

“Michelle Obama is a man!”

what a charmer.

why even go there? it is too really much to ask that these fuckstains check their hate and bigotry at the door, and not vomit it into all of our faces? if this nitwit had kept his hateful mouth shut, we could have only assumed he was a piece of shit. now that he’s opened it, we all know it for sure.

this is what happens when you give the worst people in the world free reign to be the worst people in the world: the truth always outs.

instead of having Josh Hokit whale the tar out of dinguses, can we not arrange for him to try to get the round peg in the round hole? because that’s what really would be entertaining to me.

the ultimate joke’s on this asshole, however, because he’s getting paid in fake money.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) announced on Friday that it will pay bonuses to fighters in a form of cryptocurrency issued by Trump family business World Liberty Financial at the heavily publicized White House mixed martial arts event on Sunday.

The development connects the Trump family’s financial interests to the high-profile UFC competition being promoted on government property. The competition on the south White House lawn is scheduled for 14 June, Donald Trump’s birthday.

oh how great. not only are these violent dipshits getting imaginary money whose only use is paying for crimes, it’s being done so in a way that personally profits Dear Leader — because of course it does.

everything is a grift with this gonif.

it’s cheap, it’s crass, and it’s downright un-American.

in the 1970s, Jimmy Carter had to sell his peanut farm just so there wouldn’t be any appearance of impropriety. fifty years later, all that shit’s out the window. we’ve normalized greed and corruption. Donny turns everything into one more opportunity to enrich himself off the powers of his office, and the cowards in Congress and the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled press just stand around like the useless lumps they are.

Idiocracy. it’s what’s for breakfast.


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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Did Some Housekeeping

My blog categories have become unmanageable.

I had 31 pages of 20 cateories each. 620 categores in total! There were duplicates, small variations of names, things that should’ve been subcategories but weren’t…that sort of shit. It was a mess.

This here blog thingie currently has 29,306 posts. Now I could’ve gone through and fixed all the issues by opening each post manually and changing the categories that were categorized incorrectly or should’ve been in subcategories, but…

So what I ended up doing was going through and deleting categories wholesale. I kept the basics: Art, Blogging, Health, Hot Menz (with no subcategories at the moment, sorry—and to be honest they might not return), Humor, Music, Photography, Politics, Science, Tech, Teh St00pid, Work, and of course the default category, Uncategorized.

In my haste to clean things up, I deleted a few main categories that shouldn’t have been deleted: Art, Blogging, Health, Politics, and Science. I do have a backup of the website on the server, but because I’d have to restore the main database to get the categories back, it would wipe out any changes I’ve made to the entire blog since the snapshot was taken (not to mention all the weeding I’d just done). So…yeah. Not gonna happen.

Deleting the categories didn’t delete the original posts the tags were assigned to, so I didn’t lose anything as far as that’s concerned.

Apologies to anyone who used categories to find posts. I will repopulate those empty categories with new posts as time goes by.

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I’m Such A Geek

What audio geek does not appreciate some nekkid pix?

I want to say that getting the top cover off was the hardest point, but getting it back on was much, much worse. More than once the fiddly bits that keep it locked in place went flying when I was trying to get them back in. Thankfully I found them each time.

Curiosity almost killed the cat.

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That’s One Big House

QUADROS House / gruta.arquitetos
Bauru, Brazil
333 m² = 3584 ft²
Photographs: Daniel Santo

The house design was developed to accommodate a couple and their three children. On a 620m² lot within a gated community, care was taken to ensure the layout was compartmentalized in a way that the required setbacks could integrate the social spaces.

By densifying the private areas into a longitudinal block, it became possible to understand how to configure the layout, and the starting point emerged.
The family shares an integrated dynamic, practicing music, visual arts, and gastronomy. Occasionally, the activities occur simultaneously, and the suggestion of a permeable social environment facilitated the communion between the practices.The social area encompasses virtually the entire functional program of the house, with an office/studio and living/music room separated by a clearing with a jaboticaba tree and an adjoining kitchen/barbecue area, transitioning to the back where the swimming pool and television room are located.

[source]

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Saturday Afternoon Coffee and Tunes

This particular CD Walkman, the Sony D-EJ915 is among my favorites the company produced in the late 90s. While it has no built-in display (you need the external remote to see track numbers, times, and to access all the secondary functions like programming and sound control), it does have physical buttons on the unit itself to handle all the basic functions. I have the remote, but I hate Sony MD/CD remotes so it’s always important to me that I can access the basic functions from the player itself.

I understand the 915 was their flagship model from 1999 to 2000 and it reeks of quality. The top case is solid aluminum, has skip-free G-Protection and seems to run forever on two gum stick batteries. It’s also among the last players Sony made that allowed you to see the spinning disc (a big plus for me just because).

Shadowfax’s Dreams of Children dates from about 1984 and while not era-specific to the player (something YouTube guys like to point out when demoing/repairing their equipment), for me it invokes memories of San Francisco and embodies my whole “New Age” music period. I found it at a thrift store for $1 earlier this week.

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I Hope I Don’t Live To Regret This

CAUTION: Geek stuff ahead.

Every year, like clockwork a new macOS appears at WWDC. And every year I swear I’m not going to install it until the final version is released to the public. At that point it’s generally assumed that all the big bugs have been worked out—although this isn’t the Apple of fifteen years ago and there are always seem to be glitches now.

Based on everything I’ve read online since last week, the latest iteration macOS, aka Golden Gate—even Developer Beta 1—is incredibly stable right out of the gate.

It purports to address all the complaints that have plagued Tahoe since it was released a year ago, kind of how Snow Leopard concentrated on fixing everything that was wrong with Leopard.

Naturally curious—but cautious since I’ve been burned too many times in the past—to play with a new OS, I created a new container on my Mac and loaded Golden Gate there. Yeah, this route is safest one possible short of installing it on an external drive and lets me play with it without putting any of my data at risk (I backup my entire drive every night to external storage, so even if something gets screwed up I can always wipe and restore everything from the night before). The downside is that this is basically a virgin installation and none of my apps are accessible (although even that seems to be working for the first time with Golden Gate), rendering the whole exercise kind of immaterial for personal real-world testing.

In a fit of madness last night, I threw caution to the wind. I made a full backup of my Tahoe installation, created a new USB Tahoe installer(in case I needed to wipe everything and reinstall that OS and then restore from my backup). And installed Golden Gate on my main drive.

After installing, the machine rebooted and…well, it worked.

I checked all my apps and everything functioned normally. (I know, I just jinxed it by writing that, didn’t I?)

16 hours in, and I’m pleasantly surprised. It’s far more responsive than Tahoe ever was, and for the most part all the graphic glitches and inconsistencies that Tahoe gave us are finally gone. Maybe the change of the head of software development at Apple is actually bringing about real change.

The only thing I worry about is that as the development cycle continues through the summer toward the release of the finished product in September or October is that in the past, each new beta—while squashing bugs in the previous release—often introduced new ones, rendering the whole installation unusable, or at least severely compromised from the previous version.

To that end, I’m going to keep my backup from yesterday intact, but I will also create another backup on a separate external drive of my new install and continue to back that up nightly so if—in case the unthinkable happens and some future beta fucks things up—I can still go back to Tahoe and restore any new material I created under Golden Gate since upgrading.

I’ve also learned to keep copies of the installers for each beta iteration so I can go restore to the most recent unfucked one instead of bailing completely and returning to the previous OS.

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First The Kennedy Center, Then America


Are you feeling this, America?

What is unfolding at the Kennedy Center:

This joyous subtraction.

This glorious removal.

This is the collective jubilation of watching a vile disfigurement reversed, a terrible stain erased, a brutal injury repaired.

With the smallest restoration of justice unfolding on a massive wall of white marble, we are experiencing on a microscopic scale what it feels like when a tyrant falls.

And this is just a heartening foretaste of what is coming if we choose to manifest it together.

It can be a harbinger of what is possible; the nation we might still fashion out of the hideous bastardization we have become, but only if we remember who the hell we are and what is still within our hands.

We can be blamed for our shared amnesia.

For a decade, we have been living inside a malignant narcissist’s fever dream, never getting to fully exhale from one unprecedented violation of Democracy or humanity or legality before being thrust into another. The relentlessness has been both by design and effective.

We’ve begun to believe that this lawless authoritarianism is our fate, that our termination has been ordained, that the funeral for our Republic is inevitable. We’ve allowed ourselves to be gaslighted into apathy and beaten into resignation, believing that our agency has all but evaporated.

But those twelve letters ripped from their unearned spot on hallowed ground remind us that we can always reverse our course into the abyss in the way that so many other beleaguered nations have done before us; by wielding the weapon of our collective humanity like a wrecking ball.

We can, and we will tear it all the hell down, demolish every garish monument to his vanity. We can, and we will, take back every undeserved spoil, rebuild every bulldozed bit of history. We can, and we will, rewrite the pathetic fiction he has spent crafting where he is noble, revered, or beloved.

Like those letters, his efforts to craft his legacy will all fall. The raking light of truth will eventually burn away all his desperate myths typed out in midnight all-caps diatribes.

Before this is over, We the People are going to take that vile, traitorous sex offender’s name and handprints off of every part of this nation that he has poisoned and polluted over the last decade.

He and his cadre of racist, phobic, sycophantic enablers are going to be made legally and politically accountable, and together, we are going to course correct from the greatest shared error in our 250-year history.

He will not write our epitaph.

We will outvote and outnumber and outlove his cultic disciples and tear down every remnant of him and of his disgraceful movement.

First, this single wall of marble and then our beloved nation, both can be freed from the sickening stain of his cancerous presence once and for all.

May all decent, patriotic Americans be heard and counted in these moments.

May the demolition of his inhumanity begin.

 

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Then And Now

1984
2003 
2026

One of the apartments I lived in…

It was brand new when I moved in. I was the first resident, something I always strove for when moving. In fact, I waited several months for construction to be completed while I remained in the townhouse I shared with my ex and a mutual friend.

The complex fell into complete disrepair in the early 2000s. It was kind of disheartening to see what a disaster it had become. The first word that comes to mind is “ghetto.”

But sometime since then, it was purchased by a different company and completely renovated. Based on the website, I’d say the transformation is stunning.

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