How About That OPSEC?

 

Look at that Murderer's Row in the above picture. You've got NSA Mike Waltz, who added The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat, you've got very pompous VP JD Vance, SECDEF Pete Hegseth. who let us know America USED to be foolish (whatever we look like now, he will probably have to face in the morning after he's slept it off a bit), Secretary of State Lil Marco (Alleged Adult) Rubio, DNI Tulsi We Don't Compromise Classified Intel Gabbard, and Steve Witlesskopf--who was using his cell phone to join in from Moscow where Putin was making him wait. 

Everyone on that chat should have known better than to be on that Signal chat. If they preferred Signal for some reason, it's hard not to think it was to avoid FOIA. So, they chose being potentially open to access by GRU (known to try to exploit apps like Signal by following people of interest) over institutional transparency. 

Maybe I Have This Twisted

 

Last night, I had the stupidity to forget how kiss-up, punch-down hierarchies work because I have never actually lived in a fully corrupted banana republic before. My dumb ass posted: 

And DOGE undermining the social safety net and intimating that Medicare and Social Security need big cuts is actually very bad? 

Because of course that is--but his antipathy to democracy at all is also really bad. 

I think it gets worse from here for Musk.. And I think I like it that way. As he starts to sink and stink, Trump will cut ties, because that's how he rolls. 

Except that was dumb, because if Trump truly believes he is post-"elections matter", well, he no longer has to care about whether people hate Elon. He just has to protect the guy who can easily dump $100M into his PAC (slush fund). 

Joe Six-Pack with the retirement fund and a MAGA hat isn't his main concern. Elon SuperPAC donor is.

Ergo, he turned the front of the White House into a sales lot for Tesla and cut a promo. They are cutting the Board of Education, Veteran's medical access, Social Security functionality as a whole thing, IRS (the revenue-finders!) and so on, but the White House had to help rescue one stock today.

The DOW lost many points. Tesla had a little unreality rally. Also, too, Trump declared folks vandalizing Tesla dealerships were "domestic terrorists."  

Let me get this straight. Pardon the idjits who attacked the Capitol with great violence on 1/6/2021 but the people protesting Tesla are the real villains against the US? 

Glory to the Heroes

 

I can't imagine anything more appalling than Jethro Dull Vance being the condescending haughty motherfucker who ended the leadership of the United States in the free world. But he was the one who, with his jumped-up ding-a-ling hauteur, who tried to interject a font of pure RU agitprop, and invoked Zelenskyy's need to set things straight and tell the bloody simple stupid truth, that Russia is never to be trusted, has broken ceasefires, and is the source of grotesque war crimes, at Bucha, at Izium.  Wherever the Russian army has had its way, mass slaughter has been their plan. 

It was always about genocide of the Ukrainian people--why else would Russia say they are not a country, and they haven't a proper language and try to stamp out their history? You can't surrender anything to a genocide. You just can't. The terms of peace are maybe you keep your right arm, except to the elbow-today. Until we don't like the look of your other arm tomorrow. And what about those dangerous legs? Will you defend freedom on stumps? 

President Zelenskyy told the truth--his people are truly being slaughtered. Sure, the odds are bad--but surrender is worse. Because of the rape, the mass graves, the kidnapping of children. And the Trump Administration response is to ask a man who almost certainly has reason to fear assassination from Russia---whose people every day have the threat of a bomb killing them, mothers and children--maybe even especially, since the enemy targets maternity hospitals and schools and all--to consider what if a bomb?! Landed on him?!

Trans de Agua

 

Pam Bondi calls Tren de Aragua "trans de agua" pic.twitter.com/2wLfuhKPHq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 20, 2025

February 20, 2025

So, a funny/not funny thing happened in Colorado, where conservatives made up a thing where Venezuelan gangs were taking up whole blocks of apartments. Which meant of course, if that were true, the first place ICE would have to raid would be those occupied dangerous gang apartment scary no-go zones, right?

Right?

Well, they did! And SOMEHOW, everyone and their mother found out about it, and the op was even delayed for a bit? (Even though ICE raids are basically, just like, Tuesday, even during the Biden Administration.) But then they did the thing, with hundreds of guys. Like, a whole multi-agency thing. 

Anyway, I guess everything was very disappointing for the Trump Administration, because maybe there weren't as many arrests as they hoped? So they sacked the experienced acting head of ICE. People figuring out there would be a stepped-up ICE presence out there was definitely the result of "leaks". And Kristi Noem is ready to get out the polygraph tests to sniff out the real problem in why deportation preparations have broken down, promising to get you and your little dog too if you were a DHS employee responsible for leaking. (I may have made that last bit up.)

Doesn't Anyone Have a Price?

 

This one is just for the slow kids: the thing where Elon Musk supposedly doesn't have a price? I'm skeptical because why did this guy get "so rich"? What are his goals? What does he love?

One metric of stupidity is the lack of imagination. Stealing jokes or posts to get laughs is a sign of not being creative or imaginative. Carrying a sink to meme-ishly say "Let that sink in" is way dumber than anything Carrottop or Gallagher does, for example.  Even if you respect their brand of comedy--it's weak. Doing a chainsaw thing like Javier Milei is sort of clownish. 

All kinds of people are losing their jobs under this indiscriminate and dumbass regime. Dedicated public servants, veterans. Look--he might know something about cars or rockets or social media (He doesn't! That's the joke!) but clearly, he is supposedly sharp enough to pass a US citizenship test (also no!). 

Stupid people with money do stupid things with their money all of the time. Don't assume because Musk has billions he is SATISFIED with his life.

Acknowledging President Musk

 

There are tens of millions of people fraudulently receiving Social Security payments according to the genius minds of DOGE, led by our Dark Shadow President, The Elon. Or not. Actually, it could be that the CoderJugend and Musk himself are basically innumerate with regards to government processes and legacy computer systems that are basically a palimpsest of changes in technology and law going back decades. 

They could have requested some sort of agency-related sherpas to guide them through the mountains of data they were reviewing to not seem like hot messes, but somehow Trump was compelled to fire various inspector generals who would be those exact people, except they were kind of investigating Trump and Musk variously for just being all kinds of fraudulent little billionaire monsters. 

Land of a Thousand Outbreaks

 

We've been looking at the avian flu situation for a few years, so I guess what I want people to know about what we are looking at with respects to future outbreaks or epidemic situations, what we have got is not a "plandemic" in the conspiracy-fueled mindset of people who feel like masks and vaccines and the like are social control mechanisms fueled by some Big Pharma control or whatever.  You know who has cared about avian flu? People who care about birds. We used to have a birdfeeder out back of Strangely Estates. Then, we realized it might not be a great idea to have random birds congregating together if we couldn't regularly ensure we were cleaning out old feed, rinsing off poo, etc. 

We still have the birdbath up. It's heated. We get starlings, cardinals, jays. I don't know if it's a good thing or not. I understand there's a lot of risk with avian flu re: waterfowl. I look forward to the seasonal influx of geese along the Delaware. I don't want to see what I think we will. There's a good chance H5N1 and H5N9 are everywhere. This is why there are higher egg prices and massive bird livestock culls--but we are also seeing H5N1 in dairy cattle herds. 

Kash Patel Is Incredibly Disqualified

 

Antisemitic far-right broadcaster Stew Peters responds to Kash Patel claiming that he is not familiar with Peters, despite appearing on his show multiple times: "Clearly, Kash Patel is lying. He absolutely does know who I am." https://t.co/gc5MlT7NVs pic.twitter.com/UqX9mAFFlE

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) January 30, 2025

He straight up lied. There's no beating around that point--he also lied about the 1/6 choir--he bragged about producing their single and now wants to pretend he doesn't know much about that "community".  He pretends he disagrees with Trump's clemency for the violent offenders sentenced for their 1/6 activities, but that doesn't square with his broad, conspiracy-theory based defense that the FBI (the agency he wants to lead) was behind it--

When what was behind it was Trump inviting these people to "Stop the Steal", a slogan based on a whole-ass lie, and Patel himself can't even admit Trump lost the 2020 election. 

Elon Musk Goes Full Ford

 

It's not too soon to talk about Henry Ford being a whole racist who bought a newspaper just be extra-racist and who that reminds me of, right? Wow. But anyway, Elon Musk on the social media site he purchased to pretend to be a nonpartisan free speech warrior endorsed AfD which is pretty outstanding neo-Nazi stuff. They are pro-Putin and anti-NATO compared to the rest of Germany for the most part. The big thing is the neo-Nazi thing, though. They are even against climate change science, which I thought the head of Tesla would understand is crucial!

I don't think we should be so quick to define Musk. His own father tells us he isn't exactly what we think he is:

Giuliani and the Boomerang

 

The Bullshit Artist formerly Known as "America's Mayor", who lied about the 2020 election and had to admit that he didn't have any proof whatsoever that the election was stolen, has been ordered to start turning his various valuable personal belongings into receivership to satisfy a judgment against him for defaming two election workers who were endangered by his lies and had actually not done anything wrong. 

Some people believe in karma. I don't know if I do--but I do believe if you throw shit around, don't be surprised if a stiff wind blows it right back in your face. You shouldn't be surprised if what you put out there comes back to you.

This man used to have a good reputation (I don't know to what degree he earned it, but he did). Then he decided to use up everything he was for Trump. And now he can lose everything he had. 

There's an example in there.

TWGB: Occupied America

 

Trump seems to be closing in on the finish line by wallowing in increasingly "blood and soil" fascist, anti-immigrant rhetoric, so I want to point out that there is a kind of irony that he wants to pretend there is an "occupied America." This depends upon a Pizzagate-level bit of idiocy--that a whole town could be occupied by a gang and it wouldn't be front-page news. Just like there could supposedly be a rash of pet-murders and it wouldn't be a major thing if it were actually true. And just like the mayor of Springfield had to come out and debunk Trump/Vance lies, the mayor of Aurora had to do the same. 

"Occupation" is an interesting term. I can think of, for example, the Bundy ranch militia occupation, which had checkpoints and everything. But you know what I really think about? MAGA occupation of the public sphere in terroristic ways. Like way FEMA operations in North Carolina were recently disrupted by a local RW militia. One man has since been arrested. 

You want to know who has also been threatened? Meteorologists. That's insane. But they are getting threats for talking about climate change. As opposed to, I guess, talking about weather machines in the possession of Zionist Communist multi billionaires, or whatever the stupid conspiracy theory is today. 

You could well ask, as former President Obama thoughtfully asked--"When did this become okay?" This is certainly not how it used to be. We didn't, for example, think of a riot at the Capitol as Speaker Mike Johnson recently stupidly put it, part of the election process. Maybe we could have once counted on responsible adults calling out Italian satellites, Venezuelan voting machines, German servers, Chinese thermostats and the like as being deadass stupid. 

"Unity" Trump and the New Attitude

 

Trump: Crazy Nancy Pelosi followed by a hammer motion. pic.twitter.com/TpXuwZlv0Z

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) July 19, 2024

As the pundits were desperately hoping for--Ecce Homo: the Man Reborn,  who was definitely not going to ramble on, self-pityingly, spitefully, mockingly, calling Nancy Pelosi crazy while once again referring to the tragic assault on her husband, referring to the "China virus" in a way that has inspired racist animosity against Asian people, degrading the discourse as you know....

He always does. Was he supposed to change, now? After all this time? On his biggest stage, he gave an extended-play version of his regular rally speech, with a cameo from our old friend the "late, great Hannibal Lector" and a wistful concern that Kim Jong-Un misses him. 

I'm only mildly surprised we were spared his feelings about the water pressure in his toilets. 

Biden is old. Sure. He gets tired. Sure. He gets tongue-tied. And then there are the things that deliberately come out of Donald Trump's sewer of a mouth. 

Was there anything upbeat at all in his speech to the RNC, coming after the brilliant use of the lead-up by showcasing the values of the current party as represented by Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan and Dana White?

Well, there was a shout-out to Tom Homan, a former Trump Administration official who is a significant contributor to Heritage Foundation's Project 2025--which we were not supposed to think about as being the Trump Agenda except for being constantly reminded of it. But then again, Trump also gave a shout-out to Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who is "doing a great job". At what, I'd bet you two ham sandwiches you could not say. Does Trump think he's still governor? 

Climate Sunday: Fire, Water, and the Sacred Things

 

Saudi Health Minister Fahd bin Abdurrahman Al-Jalajel said that 83% of the 1,301 fatalities were unauthorized pilgrims who walked long distances in soaring temperatures to perform the Hajj rituals in and around the holy city of Mecca.https://t.co/ULoOMijRBI

— KATU News (@KATUNews) June 23, 2024

The Saudi Health minister can go ahead and blame the faithful for being "unauthorized" to come to do the Hajj, but this denial is hiding a very terrible story--the Hajj is becoming unsustainable. The pilgrimage to the site of the two holy places is too hot in the summer months for many people--the aged, the disabled. The faith of the pilgrims is great--the human ability to withstand the temperatures that are becoming more common is limited.

We've seen climate activists target several works of art, but most recently, the painting of Stonehenge got our attention:

This act disturbs ancient lichens that have protected the stones for one thing (ignore JK Rowling--she actually is Dolores Umbridge which is just the worst thing, and even worse, she is and probably knows it).  It's a weird act of vandalism that detracts from the message that we need to protect the things we love, for another. Also, just as a person with some ancestral connection to Blighty, there's some folk shit you need to leave alone. You fuck about with ancients liths and you are bound to get spirited off and knackered by rogue Morris dancers the next time you're exiting last call at the pub. 

His Wounds!

 

Trump: If I took this shirt off, you would see a beautiful beautiful person. But you would see wounds all over. I’ve taken a lot of wounds I can tell you. More than I suspect any president ever pic.twitter.com/ETzIt9jJI0

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 22, 2024

My goodness! The hand Trump has been dealt in life. First, foot spurs, then, low water pressure, and now, a body full of scars! He's a bigger pincushion than St. Sebastian! No one has suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune like this poor sod. Bleed a little money for him, will you? No American president ever suff....

Here I must interject.  Surely, James Garfield gets honorable mention, right? He was shot up so bad his doctors resorted to rectal feeding. And if Trump wants that kind of special treatment, I can stop by the produce discount (pineapple, artichoke, prickly pears....) 

He's not comparing himself to Garfield or Lincoln though--he's on his sufferin' Savior routine for the benefit of the God-Botherer Faith and Freedom convention. How actual people of faith stomach this sort of thing, I just can't fathom. It's both maudlin and a bit blasphemous. 

But he also gave us a funny moment--his refuttal! 

Happy St. Pats to Everyone but RFK Jr.

 

Sometimes an entire family is needed to properly slap a cabbage-headed man into something like reality, but also, it hardly works when he's long been away with the fairies. Some people have noted that despite the talk of anti-vax RFK. Jr. selecting anti-vax sports figure Aaron Rodgers as his running mate, he's liable to declare some wealthy idiot named Nicole Shanahan who has enough money to maybe get him on some ballots as his running mate. 

I guess I don't know for sure she's an idiot. I guess it depends on whether she agrees to be the Kennedy idiot's running mate. For all I know, the idiot he runs with is Jesse Ventura, although, despite his lad working for RT, I never thought Ventura was quite that kind of idiot, except possibly in the "fire doesn't melt steel bars" kind of way. 

Anyway cheers to St. Pat, who got the snakes out of Ireland. I truly would love it if there was a saint who would ger the sheer idiots out of politics. But I am proud to support Joe Biden because of his anti-malarkism. 

It's a brilliant start. 

So, Iowa Picked the Rapist with 91 Felony counts?

 

I don't especially enjoy the primary season because the idea of caucuses themselves are dense and dumb to me--what the whole fuck is going on with those? People are dropping votes randomly into paper bags and empty popcorn buckets. Who knows who is showing up? (I see no ID's in the deep freeze, they don't need these when the voters are all Y.T.'s.) 

And then there's Iowa itself--an entire state that feels like a FOX news set-up in a rural PA diner no more than ten miles from the nearest militia training site. What gets me is the state gets these political creatures camping out among them, speechifying at them, trying to shake hands with them for at least six months out of the year, and when the inevitable man/woman-in the street interviews take place, they just say the most normie, uninformed things. Like, one guy was hung up on where Vivek Ramaswamy was from because of 9/11. There were no Hindu people with Indian ancestry having anything to do with that. And if he was concerned, how about looking up anything at all ever? Candidates do townhalls, have debates, have featured articles in newspapers and magazines and there's FUCKING WIKIPEDIA and some dolt allowed to vote doesn't know where this man's people are from. OR who did 9/11. 

One young lady said she was just thinking about Jesus and how he died for our sins, and wasn't that why Trump was going through all these trials? No, damn it, I want to yell--you weren't thinking that; Trump and every asshole warming up the crowds for him told you that and it somehow drilled its way into the thing you pick out sandwich fixin's with. Being in trouble for defaming one of his rape/assault/harassment victims has NOTHING to do with you. He stole government docs belonging to the US Gov't which is basically all of us, and that is a crime against you. The insurrection was a crime against our government. Also against you. 

How in the hell did about half the caucus goers decide the guy who has been determined to be a rapist and a fraud, is twice-impeached, and had a whole bathroom's worth of White House docs, PLUS, horked out of his Florida home is still somehow fit to be president?

Magnets-How Do They Work?

 

Trump: All I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets pic.twitter.com/TopK4BRsOq

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 6, 2024

Look, just take a kitchen magnet and get it wet.  It will still work. I don't know what he thinks will happen.  I don't know where this thing came from. Anyway, he thinks gas sells for $8 a gallon. He has said people need to show their ID to buy groceries. He doesn't know how things work, which is why he also says things like he was going to sell US oil and gas to Europe to pay the national debt.  He has a real problem with windmills. He just kind of thinks everyone else also does not know how things work and will also think what he is saying is great and smart. 

He still seems to not know how bills become laws or what branch of government does what or how he got indicted four times. It's very concerning.

Judge Chutkan and Jack Smith were recently swatted. It's really hard for me to reconcile going out of one's way to terrorize people to try and get one's favored candidate for office clear of a lot of very serious charges with that person also being a transparent idiot. 

This is TDS in a Single Screenshot

 

I tried to find the thread where the above comment came from or to sort out whether it was a not-particularly funny parody of ultra-MAGA thought, but deep down, I have a feeling this is where some of Trump's followers really are: they may know perfectly well he lost 2020, they may know he incited an insurrection, they may completely be aware that he had taken top secret documents for which he had no good purpose (and a lot of bad ones), and he may even be a rapist--and he's still their guy. 

I know this because when asked in man-in-the-street interviews whether there's anything Trump could do to lose their support, you can see the little tumblers flipping behind their eyes and no combination matches rejection. Even though a poll in summer of last year showed that over half of Republicans might balk if Trump was in prison, Fox News Propagandists are going after normalizing convict candidates.

This is the real definition of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" in action: the literal cultists who would watch him shoot a man on 5th Avenue and declare it was good thing he did, and he should have immunity for it, anyway.

How many people are ACTUALLY this cultish, vs. how many are just saying they are? 

It totally beats me--and I guess that's the disturbing part. Just how big is that "basket of deplorables" anyway?

TWGB: Fit to be Gagged

 

This is not the judge’s wife’s account. He is posting lies to incite violence, plain and simple. pic.twitter.com/P2d3UKrrYE

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 1, 2023

Trump's vicious attacks on his detractors have long been including lies--but attacking the wife of the judge in his civil case in NY supposedly without checking if this even plausibly is her account makes it really hard to say he shouldn't be clapped into a cell overnight for his flaunting of his gag order, recently reinstated, and for very good reasons. The man has earned his gagging by what he's been and done. And what his little old fan club wants to see done.

And let's face it, when he lets his mouth just fly, it gets ugly in a hurry. Like when he's demeaning one of his rape victims again. Oh, did it seem like I'm playing like there's multiple rape victims?  I don't know how often I need to read about any man's faults as seen by his victims without thinking "Goddamn, there are victims." 

Anyway, Trump just got caught trying to move money from his business to pay his personal stuff, like his civil debt to E. Jean Carroll and his taxes, by moving money from his business without contacting his court-appointed minder. 

Maybe that's why HER name was in his social media mouth again.  And he should pay for that too.

So Much for the Bentley Bomber

 

At the top of the above picture, just past the border checkpoint, you can see a car frozen in air after its driver had made some very poor speed-related decisions. This unfortunate launch of a generally land-based vehicle resulted in an explosion that Fox News, among others, wanted to term a terrorist attack. 

It wasn't, but a lot of right-wing fear-mongers jumped on the news:

Ted Cruz reposting noted journalist Benny Johnson to say his "worst fears" were confirmed is amusing to me in a way I don't think Sen. Cruz would understand. 

Sometimes I think to myself that conservative "news" outlets and the politicians they have a symbiotic relationship with are just cynical liars, but I also think they do believe their own bullshit. People who say things like "open borders" in all serious are like people who say "post-birth abortion"--what they fuck are they on about? It's delusional. They assumed that OF COURSE an explosion on a bridge was terrorism. Because OPEN BORDERS: is why! I think there's some people this morning who are mad their talking point got, um, exploded.

But man, I am still trying to wrap my head around who is doing terrorism in a Bentley. That is a distant Saudi prince with Jason Chaffetz's turkey in his lap kind of high-priced terrorism....