Someday, I could be a houseplant

First, I’d have to become a corpse, though…so no hurry. No hurry at all. Here’s a video about “natural organic reduction”, or corpse composting, which is a pretty cool option. The body is put into a box for a month, breaks down, gets turned into soil, and then can be used for soil restoration, or just for gardening, if you’d like.

Unfortunately, there’s only a few states that allow this legally. My home state of Washington — even my home town south of Seattle — have facilities for this, so maybe I’ll be able to take advantage of it someday.

I’m thinking, maybe a spider plant?

Armed and fortified

Will this approach finally work? You’d think all the macho weirdos fearing for their masculinity would be lining up to get augmented immune systems armed with trained commando immunocytes.

Hah. My immune system can beat up your immune system, wimp.

Sexy cyborg costume 10% complete!

I got to hang out in a doctor’s office this morning, because I have “massive, extreme” [her words] bone spurs on my left heel. Yay, what else can go wrong? Also learned from the X-rays that I’m a mutant, with a congenital fusion of two of my foot bones that gives me very high arches but also increases the impact of my heel hitting the ground. So cool, when nature gives you defects, artifice gives you fancy boots.

I get to wear this for a few weeks to get the inflammation down, then we assess.

It’s just in time for Halloween. I was thinking…sexy cyborg? Sexy robot? Sexy Frankenstein’s monster?

Sorry, Australia

The first thing I learned this morning is that Candace Owens wants us to invade Australia. You might be curious about what prompted this bellicose idea: it’s because they are managing the pandemic better than we are.

“When do we deploy troops to Australia?” she said before the Victoria lockdown was eased. “When do we invade Australia and free an oppressed people who are suffering under a totalitarian regime?

“When do we spend trillions of dollars to spread democracy in Australia?” she added. “Australia currently, make no mistake, is a tyrannical police state. Its citizens are quite literally being imprisoned against their will. So when do we deploy?”

It seems she’s just following the lead of Ted Cruz.

Owens’ comments follow a similar swipe against Australian authorities made last week by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) who tweeted: “The Covid tyranny of their current government is disgraceful and sad,” before adding: “Individual liberty matters.”

It’s embarrassing. Don’t worry, Australia, these are just the stupid Republicans that are currently afflicting our country, they don’t speak for us. With any luck, they’ll be dying off thanks to their own mismanagement of our health policy.

If you felt like turning around and invading us to liberate our country from a totalitarian, insane political party, I wouldn’t object. I’d be grateful.

Don’t you dare jinx Neil Gaiman!

After I posted about how so many comedians are disappointing people, I found that Abbey had written about Neil Gaiman and how you shouldn’t have heroes except Gaiman seems to be living up to expectations.

“Don’t have heroes” is a huge important philosophical axiom for me, born out of long sad experience that it isn’t safe to have them. Once upon a time, I liked Harry Potter; I liked Father Ted and The IT Crowd. I thought the latter was particularly interesting as a learnable style of humor. We know how those turned out. But those are extreme author behaviors and minor influences. Back in the day, I was a huge fan of Firefly and it still holds a place in my heart (and thereby writing); I used to consider Joss Whedon the pinnacle influence for screenwriting, and sought to be like him… before we found out that the “him” I would have wanted to be like was mostly PR vapor and he was the usual kind of abusive douche that all men with a grain of power in Hollywood seem to be. But I can’t shake it with Gaiman, because he keeps living up to it, the bastard.

Jinx, jinx, JINX! I’m not usually this superstitious, but the pattern of people we thought good collapsing as their clay feet slump into goo is so consistent that I think we need to keep the pressure on. Don’t praise him. Give him nothing but squinky-eyed looks. Make sure he knows you have a big knife hanging on your belt, and when (not if, WHEN) he slips up, you’ll be there ready to go all sewing machine on his kidneys. It is the way. It is the only way. Fear will keep him on the straight and narrow.

That shouldn’t be a problem, it shouldn’t be at all discouraging to Neil. It’s not as if anyone should be behaving well for praise, you know.

Comedian suicide-bombers

Louis CK remains the king — wow, but that guy destroyed his reputation spectacularly — but it looks like Dave Chappelle is working hard to catch up. Where once I could respect him for the ol’ “speaking truth to power” routine and his sometimes exceedingly edgy comedy, I guess he found that work too taxing and has decided it’s easier to punch down and start mocking the trans community, while getting highly paid by Netflix.

Netflix, unfortunately, has so much money that quality doesn’t matter anymore — they’ll greenlight anything. I’ve learned that any science-fiction movie promoted by Netflix is going to be mostly garbage, so I’ve been skipping the service more and more. Comedy specials are even worse. They’re ridiculously cheap to make, so it seems that any bigot who wants to make other bigots laugh will get handed a platform. There are exceptions, of course. Netflix put on Hannah Gadsby, who was marvelous and thought-provoking, but that was a rare occasion in a sea of same ol’, same ol’ boring white men with grievances.

Now a Netflix executive, Ted Sarandos, is trying to rationalize hosting an ugly anti-trans comedian by claiming it’s all about “diversity”. I got news for you, Ted: diversity does not mean you should encourage hatred and ignorance. We don’t need stupid to counterbalance intelligence, and we don’t need to slather shit on a tasty sandwich to make it better. I don’t need to “teach the controversy” in the classroom and educate students about evolution by promoting creationist propaganda.

And then he cites Hannah Gadsby as an example of their rainbow of lovely entertainment choices. Gadsby has a few words for that.

Hey Ted Sarandos! Just a quick note to let you know that I would prefer if you didn’t drag my name into your mess. Now I have to deal with even more of the hate and anger that Dave Chapelle’s fans like to unleash on me every time Dave gets 20 million dollars to process his emotionally stunted partial world view. You didn’t pay me nearly enough to deal with the real world consequences of the hate speech dog whistling you refuse to acknowledge, Ted. Fuck you and your amoral algorithm cult…I do shits with more back bone than you. That’s just a joke! I definitely didn’t cross a line because you just told the world there isn’t one.

Gadsby just shot the cash cow, very good.

Sadly, Chappelle (and Louis CK) will only experience fleeting interruptions in their careers. They’ll bounce right back — in Chappelle’s case, there doesn’t seem to have been any significant pushback at all — and will see their fans rushing into the warm embrace of comfortable bigotry again.

He really, really, really misses Twitter

Donald Trump tried this before, with his pathetic little “blog” that closed up shop in short order. Now he’s trying again, with what he calls his new social media company.

Donald Trump has announced plans to launch a social media platform called TRUTH Social that will rolled be out early next year.

The former president, who was banned from Facebook and Twitter earlier this year, says his goal is to rival the tech companies that have denied him the megaphone that was paramount to his rise.

Like his previous effort, though, he’s just half-assing it, taking existing frameworks and making the minimal effort to slap a few cosmetic changes on it. This TRUTH social thing seems to be nothing but a Mastodon instance with his name on it, and there is zero thought put into security and checking accounts on the back end. People have already cracked it and found the registration page, despite the fact it isn’t opened yet, and created joke accounts on it. I saw that someone managed to put a photo of a pig pooping on its testicles prominently displayed (I’ll spare you all), as well as registering under various obvious pseudonyms.

This thing is going to flop and fail hard. Once word gets out to the gullible millions that it’s really just an unintentional honey trap — sign up to praise Lord Trump, and someone is going to slurp up your registration info to laugh at you, or worse — I don’t think it can thrive. Hey, did you hear that hackers stole the Oath Keepers registration list and have exposed 35,000 members identities, including a swarm of Republican politicians? TRUTH Social is going to be so fragile and porous, with tissue-paper thin defenses, the hackers are just going to drool in its general direction and rip on through.

But that doesn’t matter. This is an ego-trip for the ex-president. Or is it something more? Like maybe another grift?

Former president Donald Trump’s media venture, Truth Social, could give his new company access to $300 million.

However, some of the investors who funded the venture weren’t aware that Trump would be involved, according to a report from the New York Times.

“The details of Mr. Trump’s latest partnership were vague,” the Times reports. “The statement he issued was reminiscent of the kind of claims he made about his business dealings in New York as a real estate developer. It was replete with high-dollar amounts and superlatives that could not be verified.”

He knows who his real marks are: stupid rich investment bankers who don’t even bother to look to see who they’re giving hundreds of millions of dollars to. And who needs that much money to set up a Mastodon instance?

After this one goes belly up, look for the Donald to beg for half a billion dollars to set up a Discord server. And for his clientele to pay for it.

I know that pain

Lawsuits, as I know from personal experience, cause great personal stress and financial difficulty. They are effective when appropriately applied against the bad guys.

A federal lawsuit against the organizers of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which has rattled hate groups and white supremacist leaders, goes to trial this month.

The suit already has helped to dismantle some of America’s most well-known white supremacist groups, and it has financially crippled one leader of the so-called “alt-right,” the white supremacist and nationalist movement that came to prominence under President Donald Trump.

“It’s very stressful, and very costly,” said Richard Spencer, one of the defendants in the lawsuit and the former de facto leader of the “alt-right,” in an interview. “This level of pressure is definitely scary.”

Good. He should be scared. When we were sued, we could at least console ourselves with the awareness that we had done nothing wrong (not always an adequate defense when dealing with the law), but these fascist neo-nazis have to know that they’re doing evil.

It does remind me of two things, though.

  • Damn Richard Carrier for making me feel a tiny glimmer of sympathy for the murderous Charlottesville rally organizers.
  • I have to periodically express my gratitude for our readers and donors who dug us out of that unpleasant hole. Thank you all very much!

I’d rather not think about the fact that a national mob of anti-Semitic criminal rioters probably has more supporters than a blog network that promotes something as benevolent as freethought.

There’s a tumor growing in Texas

A very red state

Behold, the official Republican Party Platform for Texas in 2020. THIS…IS…MADNESS!

opposing any effort to classify carbon emissions as a pollutant
abolishing the EPA
repealing the Endangered Species Act
prohibiting teaching “sex education, sexual health or sexual choice or identity in any public school”
recognizing pornography as a “public health crisis”
abolishing Child Protective Services
abolishing the Department of Education
teaching American history courses “heavily weighted toward the study of original founding documents”
opposing the use of any national or international education standards
requiring mandatory daily pledges of allegiance to both the United States and Texas
banning critical race theory from schools
banning any lockdowns, contact tracing, or mask mandates as public health measures
newly limiting the time disabled people can receive SSDI benefits
eliminating the minimum wage
banning cities from passing paid sick leave ordinances, rent control, or plastic bag bans
abolishing school-based mental health care providers
“oppos[ing] all efforts to validate transgender identity”
repealing all limits on campaign contributions to politicians
repealing all estate taxes
eliminating same-sex marriage
eliminating no-fault divorce and supporting covenant marriage
entirely eliminating abortion
introducing a right to use cryptocurrency to the Texas Bill of Rights
requiring employers to verify citizenship status through E-Verify
abolishing all federal welfare programs
drug testing state welfare recipients
adding “the right to refuse vaccination” to the Texas Bill of Rights
stopping fluoridation of the water supply
disallowing prescription drugs manufactured outside the U.S.
limiting Medicaid
banning Drag Queen Story Hour from libraries
allowing people to bring guns into schools
a prohibition on using gas or vehicle taxes for public transit or bike lanes
opposing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and using mass deportation instead
abolishing the refugee resettlement program
eliminating birthright citizenship
new criminal penalties for desecrating the American or Texas flag
revoking the tax-exempt status of any organization that “knowingly aid[s] and abet[s] illegal immigrants”
ending the H1B foreign worker visa program
ending daylight saving time
“support[ing] an aggressive war on terrorism”
requiring cities that cut police budgets to cut property taxes by the same percentage
eliminating all public funding for public broadcasting
repealing the “motor voter” law that allows voter registration at state DMVs
withdrawing from the United Nations
“unequivocally oppos[ing]” the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

This is just the same old poisonous crap I heard from the John Birch Society in the 1970s…except I don’t recall that they hated bike lanes quite so much. I might believe some people are so deluded that they think some those options are a good idea, but the majority of Texans, if confronted with this list, would reel back in horror. Wouldn’t they?

Ooh, such a dangerous job

The police are constantly begging for more, more, more: more money, more guns, more surplus military equipment, because, after all, killing unarmed black people in their cars is hard, dangerous work. But now they are opposing vaccine mandates because, I don’t know, it’s not macho to protect your health in the same way as wearing a bullet proof vest and carrying a big gun is? They’re kind of failing a basic risk assessment test here.

There were 245 law enforcement deaths from Covid-19 in 2020, according to ODMP.
The coronavirus has become the leading cause of death for officers despite law enforcement being among the first groups eligible to receive the vaccine at the end of 2020. The total stands at 476 Covid-19 related deaths since the start of the pandemic, compared to 94 from gunfire in the same period.

Don’t give guns to people who are too stupid to get vaccinated, please.