How To Lose A Kingdom Without Even Trying: UK 2026 Edition

And I thought American politics was a complete shitshow. What the hell, Great Britain? (via Lauren Frayer at NPR)

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has resigned as leader of the United Kingdom's governing Labour Party, clearing a path for the country's seventh prime minister in a decade.

Starmer said he will remain as caretaker prime minister until his party selects a new leader, asking his party to begin nominations on July 9.

Andy Burnham, the popular former mayor of Greater Manchester, England, confirmed on social media that he'll seek to succeed Starmer. Another potential contender, former U.K. Health Secretary Wes Streeting, posted a letter saying he would back Burnham's bid. So Burnham could run for the Labour Party leadership — and ultimately prime minister — uncontested, and enter office in late July.

The center-left Labour Party was elected two years ago with a landslide majority in the U.K. Parliament. Since then, Starmer's personal approval ratings have slumped to a historic low. Polls show voters believe he failed to deliver palpable change after austerity and budget cuts under 14 years of previous Conservative Party rule. He was also criticized for appointing Peter Mandelson, a close friend of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as British ambassador to Washington.

This is the seventh turnover at 10 Downing Street since David Cameron resigned ten years ago. At this point, just fucking promote Larry the Cat to PM.

At least Starmer lasted longer than Liz Truss, but considering it's less than two years since that huge electoral win in July 2024, this is not a great sign for Labour on how they're handling things in the UK.

I mean, look back at how things were that 4th of July:

I'm not sure how the Tories are going to convince themselves they know what they're doing after a massive shift in voter support like this. They had picked up a major victory in 2019 gaining an 80-seat majority, and by the next election are losing 170 seats. A comparable situation would be like the House Republicans getting their 6-seat majority in 2022 only to have the Democrats flip it to a 60 seat majority in 2024 (postscript: goddammit American voters)...

Next will be a question of how Labour is going to fix all the damage - the austerity economics getting out of the Great Recession, the various scandals over their tenure, and of course Brexit - this inept, corrupt Tory leadership has done since 2010.

And that was the thing: Starmer and the Labour Party had a huge mandate from their voters, a massive shift of control in Parliament that had to be an angry response from their nation over the decades-long failures of the Conservative Party. The mandate was obvious: Do Anything and Everything Opposite of What the Bloody Tories Did.

And then Starmer... kind of did nothing. Other than perform miscue after miscue, failing to push needed changes to the economy, and getting ensnared in scandals that were easily avoided (via Jill Lawless and Pan Pylas with AP News, but linked through PBS Newshour):

It's a precipitous downfall from July 4, 2024, when Starmer brought the center-left Labour Party back to power after 14 years, winning 411 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons.

Standing outside 10 Downing St. the next day, Starmer pledged to restore "respect to politics" and lead a government of "public service." After the chaos of the last years of Conservative rule, which saw a constant churn of scandal and the toppling of prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss in quick succession, Starmer promised to lower the temperature and make politics a little bit more boring.

Some of the problems that felled him were baked into his victory, which was built on a wide but shallow base of support. Labour won a huge majority in Parliament but was backed by only 34% of voters — and many of those appeared motivated by anger at the Conservatives rather than enthusiasm for Labour. It's been termed the "loveless landslide."

This lack of excitement for his government was compounded by missteps. An early furor over accepting valuable gifts, including designer spectacles and Taylor Swift concert tickets, was followed by a series of policy U-turns, especially clumsy attempts to cut welfare spending that stirred anger in Labour ranks.

What ultimately destroyed his credibility was his appointment of Peter Mandelson to the plum post of the United Kingdom's ambassador to the U.S. It was an error of judgment he couldn't shake off.

Mandelson, a Labour Party elder statesman nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness," was seen as someone who could help Britain navigate U.S. President Donald Trump's second term. His trade expertise and comfort around the ultra-rich were considered major assets.

But the choice of Mandelson — who in 2003 called himself Epstein's "best pal" — backfired spectacularly when documents came to light in September 2025 showing how close his ties to Epstein had been. Starmer fired Mandelson, but further revelations in the following months plunged his leadership into crisis...

First elected to Parliament in 2015, Starmer was picked to lead and rebuild Labour five years later after the party's worst election result since 1935. Starmer dragged Labour toward the political center after taking over from veteran socialist Jeremy Corbyn, who led Labour to election defeats in 2017 and 2019. Starmer ditched some of his predecessor's more left-wing policies and apologized for antisemitism that an internal investigation concluded had been allowed to spread under Corbyn.

Starmer's forensic and prosecutorial skills were on display in Parliament, where he tormented the three Conservative prime ministers he faced. He was especially scathing in attacks on Boris Johnson, who allowed parties inside Downing Street during the COVID-19 pandemic, in violation of the country's lockdown rules.

But being prime minister required a different skill set and Starmer often fell short, lacking the flexibility and political instincts that the job requires — at least on the domestic front.

He attracted a level of vitriol from some voters out of step with his managerial demeanor. Hard-right activists shouted crude abuse at protests, he alienated retirees and working-class families with attempts to cut welfare benefits and angered pro-Palestinian voters with a perceived reluctance to criticize Israel during the Gaza war...

A number of other things happened - and didn't happen - which condemned the Labour leadership. The overt attempts to pander to a "centrist" position alienated the left-leaning base and did nothing to draw the right-leaning voters away from the extremism of Farage. Above all, what ruined Starmer was inaction resolving the major political issue of the United Kingdom - Brexit - that politicians didn't even want to discuss while a growing majority of Brits hate it and want it gone.

For any deeper insight on Brexit, I read Chris Grey's Brexit blog: His observations a week back - during the theatrics of by-elections leading up to Starmer's resignation - are thorough.

After all, assuming that, as polls increasingly suggest is likely, Andy Burnham wins in Makerfield that seems likely to herald several weeks of a Labour leadership contest ending, potentially, with yet another new Prime Minister. That seems all the more possible with the resignation of the Defence Secretary yesterday, followed by that of the Armed Forces Minister, adding to the existing sense that Keir Starmer’s leadership is in crisis and its days are numbered. Perhaps a Burnham premiership would bring some fresh momentum to politics, and some impression of direction, but it’s hard to be optimistic about that, if only because not only are Britain’s problems deeper than its leader but they also tend to militate against any leader being effective...

That is frankly pitiful given that the reset was Labour’s central policy on what has been the defining political issue of the last decade, and that David Lammy, the then Shadow Foreign Secretary, said in 2023 that it would be Labour’s “number one” foreign policy priority if they came to power. It is all the more pitiful given the profound changes and dangers in international relations since then. And if it is true (which seems highly plausible) that it is agreeing a YMS which is holding things up then that is not just pitiful but shameful, in two ways. First because it shows a lack of realism, given that this was always the key EU requirement if there was to be a deal on the UK’s priorities. And secondly because it shows another of the ways that the government has chosen to be driven by the anti-immigration agenda of Reform.

The latter connects with the much deeper reason why the present moment is not just wearisome but one of despair and, even, fear. It is apparently now inevitable that every time there is a serious crime which has any connection with immigration it will be followed by street violence accompanied by a vicious, frenzied ‘debate’ conducted in terms framed by Nigel Farage and others on the far right, not least because major broadcasters, most importantly the BBC, are prone to adopt that framing. This is not simply an opinion on my part, or an evidence-free jibe: it flows directly from the plans the BBC drew up last year to win over Reform voters, who it feared were losing trust in its output, by changing both its news “story selection” and drama offerings so as to appeal to them...

This is part of why Starmer and Labour are struggling: They're fighting a Far Right fearmongering Narrative that their nation's own media deploys to the detriment of everyone, which drives the party to tack to a centrist spot that's not even centrist (it's racist. I digress). Regarding a murder case where "reverse racism" was tossed about creating disinfo and distrust, Grey noted:

In short, this case does not demonstrate the “two-tier policing” or the “anti-white prejudice” Farage claimed, in a preposterously self-important “emergency address” to the nation. Yet such claims had the unsurprising consequence of significant public disorder in Southampton, just as the furore after the Southport murders did (and, as in that case, the treatment of the rioters was treated as further evidence of two-tier policing). Equally unsurprisingly, it turned out that, far from being ‘ordinary decent people’ expressing their ‘legitimate concerns’, many of the Southampton ‘protestors’ were neo-Nazi activists, whilst one of the first to appear in court was a thug with a string of previous convictions for violence.

It has been suggested, not implausibly, that Farage was motivated to stir up, in his words, “pure, cold rage” partly as a distraction from the questions he has sought to avoid about his £5 million gift and partly to respond to the electoral threat from Rupert Lowe’s Restore party in the Makerfield by-election and the more general competition between the two men and their parties. Perhaps, but it is surely the case that, even without those incentives, he would have done the same thing since he routinely does so...

This highly febrile moment was the worst imaginable time for the news that a grotesque attempted murder had been allegedly committed by a Sudanese refugee in Belfast. The case was very different in its details, but the familiar patterns of social media outrage quickly led to far more extreme violence in Belfast than had occurred in Southampton. In Belfast, gangs of masked men sought out individuals and families who were refugees, or simply ‘foreign’, to attack them and burn their homes, along with wider violence against the police and other targets. Evidence is now emerging that a ‘target list’ of immigrants’ addresses had been drawn up months ago, well before this week’s stabbing, suggesting that this was merely a pretext.

These were not, as the Telegraph described them, “protests”. A more accurate term was that used by the Times: it was a “pogrom”. That term, more often associated with anti-Semitic violence, has a particular, and controversial, historical association in Northern Ireland, dating back to the 1920s and in that and other ways the meaning of this week’s violence in Northern Ireland is somewhat different to that in mainland Britain...

As for Farage, if he had indeed felt any sense of shame the previous week there was no sign of it in his response to the Belfast violence as he gloatingly ‘warned’ that “things will continue to kick off” and will continue to do so “over the course of the summer”, whilst claiming that “the vast majority” involved in the disorder are not “bad actors” but (he implied but did not say) just ordinary decent people with legitimate concerns. He could hardly conceal his glee, any more than could those recycling the now-popular predictions of imminent civil war.

It's in that kind of social media environment - a Far Right mob one match away from starting an inferno - similar to the conditions here in the United States over the past 20-30 years, where Culture War upstarts, thence Tea Party protestors, thence MAGA insurrectionists skew the public discourse towards racism, anti-immigration outrage, and threats (and acts) of violence towards those liberals they deem "enemies". As much as we've seen the likes of Obama and Biden try to placate the other side of the aisle with bipartisan appeals, none of it ever worked. And it's in that kind of environment Starmer offered similar appeals and failed.

Starmer has been quite robust, ever since the asylum hostel riots shortly after he first came to power, in condemning far-right violence. Yet he and his government have done nothing to counter the general proposition that immigration and asylum seekers are a ‘problem’ requiring draconian restrictions. Indeed, as regards Brexit, specifically, there can be no doubt that the main reason for the ‘red lines’ is to forestall the return of freedom of movement of people. The most charitable reading of Labour’s approach to immigration is that it is a tactic to de-fang the far right: if so, it is abundantly clear that it has failed.

Not mentioned in Grey's article was the speech Starmer offered back in 2025 that could highlight the moment Starmer lost his own party base: the "Island of Strangers" anti-immigrant screed that immediately backfired on him (via Rajeev Syal at the Guardian):

The rhetoric was likened by some critics to the language of Enoch Powell, and the prime minister was accused of pandering to the populist right by insisting he intended to “take back control of our borders” and end a “squalid chapter” of rising inward migration.

Some politicians claimed that his words had echoed Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech, which imagined a future multicultural Britain where the white population “found themselves made strangers in their own country”.

When asked to respond to accusations he had adopted Powell’s rhetoric, Starmer told the Guardian: “Migrants make a massive contribution to the UK, and I would never denigrate that.”

But in words that could further enrage his critics, Starmer insisted that new migrants must “learn the language and integrate” once in the UK. He said: “Britain is an inclusive and tolerant country, but the public expect that people who come here should be expected to learn the language and integrate.”

Several Labour MPs questioned whether Starmer’s policies were fuelling racism. Sarah Owen, the Labour chair of the women and equalities committee, who is of Malaysian-Chinese heritage, said: “Chasing the tail of the right risks taking our country down a very dark path.

“The best way to avoid becoming an ‘island of strangers’ is investing in communities to thrive – not pitting people against each other.”

Rose Judson over at Balloon Juice - the resident UK resident for that site - shared a few snippets of Starmer's failure including a Bluesky skeet that showed how that "island of strangers" speech angered the Labour base and did nothing to appeal to the racist Right:

Then came a new flashpoint: the "islands of strangers" speech. Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters reacted strongly against it, with Starmer losing net positive favourability among 2024 Labour voters for the first time, while receiving absolutely no credit from voters on the right.

[image or embed]

— Dylan Difford (@dylandifford.bsky.social) June 21, 2026 at 1:20 PM

Just in case the skeet disappears or the embed fails...

Pandering Never Works, case study no. 9876543210.

Judson has to live with this mess, and she's not thrilled about how it's staging to be the same old same old:

And there isn’t a woman or non-white person in the frame anywhere, which tells you a lot about the state of this party. It’s a depressing brew made from the dregs of Blairism, which was the dregs of Thatcherism, and all of it poisoned by Brexit.

Will an ambitious metropolitan mayor bring change at Number 10? For reasons, I have my doubts, especially since Burnham’s recent public statements include a bit of tacking to the center. We’ll see what happens in the coming months. Fingers crossed it won’t be same shit, different hair.

The best that the people of the United Kingdom can hope for is that the incoming PM - Burnham until further notice (or scandal) - makes a strong plan to undo Brexit and restart their struggling economy (which is now performing worse than Mississippi, one of the poorest states we've got), that he confronts the likes of Farage and hold him accountable for his incitements to race riots, and that he gets on the BBC's case and brings Doctor Who back out of hiatus, preferably with Emilia Jones as the new Doctor.

...I'm not joking.

Hegseth: Starving Our Troops While Feasting on Steak And Lobster

Update: thank you again Steve in Manhattan for including this article in Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! 

The USA Today headline doesn't spell it out, but the lede does and the story gets even worse from there (via Cybele Mayes-Osterman):

Dan F. was alarmed when his daughter, a Marine aboard the USS Tripoli, a warship deployed to fight the Iran war, sent him a photo of a meal served on the ship. A lunch tray, two-thirds empty, carried one small scoop of shredded meat and a single folded tortilla.

A picture of a mid-April dinner on the USS Abraham Lincoln, shared by a service member with his family, was similarly unappetizing – a small handful of boiled carrots, a dry meat patty and a gray slab of processed meat.

Dan and other military family members worried that their loved ones deployed to the Middle East are going hungry are filling boxes with items they hope could help service members ride out prolonged deployments in the Middle East – homemade fudge, Jolly Ranchers, crossword puzzle books, playing cards, toothpaste, Girl Scout cookies and fresh socks. But mail delivery to military ZIP codes across the Middle East has been indefinitely suspended as of April, and packages in transit now hang in limbo.

Dan asked to go by his first name only to protect his daughter from retaliation.

It's less about the lack of shipping personal items to their loved ones abroad, and more about the U.S. military under Secretary of Steaks and Lobsters Pete Hegseth absolutely unable to run the army in any competent fashion.

I noted this last month when word got out our military strikes against Iran were running out of missiles, ammo, and other equipment:

So the money is there - you would think - for a lot of weapons production and resources getting shipped out to our armed forces. And yet, we're getting warning signs from our own Pentagon officials that things are amiss, that they're not getting all these weapons and material to fight the wars they're being asked to fight.

This is a serious question: Just where the hell is all our defense spending going to these corporations that are supposed to be manufacturing all this shit? What happened to all the resources that are supposed to be pouring into our munitions factories to pump out the missiles and bullets and body armor and helmets and battlefield supplies?

Now we're witnessing the other failures at simple logistics - logistics, one of the most vital elements of any great army - affecting our own armed forces, unable to feed our troops and sailors at the very battlefronts trump and Hegseth want to wage their wars. The U.S. military used to be great at logistics, putting us at levels of preparedness and effectiveness that no other military on the planet could achieve.

Within two years of trump getting back into power, and within two years of Hegseth purging our armed forces over "woke" and "diversity" in ways that have clearly disrupted our chains of command and ruined morale at the worst possible time; we can't even feed our frontline people. 

There's an old saying - attributed to Napoleon, but it's probably been out there since the days of Roman military might (the guys who perfected logistics to a science) - that "an army travels on its stomach."

From the USA Today article
The only recognizable food on that half-empty tray are the carrots

You feed any army that and you are going to bring that army to its knees.

WHERE THE HELL DID THE BILLIONS IN THE MILITARY BUDGET FOR FOOD GO, HEGSETH??? YOU are starving our people, this is YOUR accountability, YOUR responsibility running the armed forces, YOU better have a GODDAMN solution for this ASAP.

Hit By the Shrapnel

Zaphod: Could be. I’m a pretty dangerous dude when I’m cornered.
Ford: Yeah. You go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel.
-- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams

donald trump gave a speech to the nation last night.

Well, not so much a speech as it was a full-tilt rant by an aging, rapacious, gaslighting freak.

I didn't watch it - I cannot handle that whining voice of his - but there were others who sacrificed their time and their brain cells to document the atrocity. And what they have to report is that it was a total disaster for a panicking and desperate trump (via Tom Sullivan at Digby's Hullabaloo): 

Criminal, murderous, and far less intelligent than Hans, the president of the United States Wednesday night delivered a jaw-dropping, ideological speech most notable for the red-alert pace of it. I haven’t spoken that fast since my first grade-school book report...

“Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it,” Trump began. Nevertheless, whatever economic stress you feel, whatever grocery store sticker shock you experience, he didn’t do it, nobody saw him do it, you can’t prove anything.

America under Joe Biden, was “laughed at from all over the world. But they’re not laughing anymore,” Trump said, reprising one of his 40-year-old greatest-hit complaints. The world in fact “alternates between laughing and crying. Neither in a good way,” responded Ron Filipkowski.

“At times he seemed to be yelling,” reports The New York Times, “almost as if he didn’t believe he had to take the time to convince his audience of how well his first 11 months had gone.” The speech “included a long list of exaggerations and misleading statements” and no mention of consumers’ affordability concerns Trump has described as a Democratic “con job...”

It was a Gish gallop of lies that CNN’s Ana Navarro described as the “wah, wah, wah” teacher voice from Charlie Brown cartoons. CNN fact checker Daniel Dale, no stranger to rapid-fire debunking, had a go at Trump’s fictions and too little airtime to touch on them all...

Sullivan also gave a quick quote from Tom Nichols over at the Atlantic, but we need to read more of what Nichols observed:

The president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps.

When a president asks for network time, it’s usually to announce something important. But tonight, Donald Trump did not give anything like a normal speech or address. He was clearly working from a prepared text, but it sounded like one he’d written—or dictated angrily—himself, because it was full of bizarre howlers that even Trump’s second-rate speech-writing shop would probably have avoided, such as his assertion that inflation when he took office was the worst it had been in 48 years... He read the speech quickly, his voice rising in frustration as he hurled one lie after another into the camera.

We could take apart Trump’s fake facts, as checkers and pundits will do in the next few days. But perhaps more important than false statements—which for Trump are par for the course—was his demeanor. Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job. For 20 minutes, he vented his hurt feelings without a molecule of empathy or awareness. Economic concerns? Shut up, you fools, the economy is doing fine. (And if it isn’t, it’s not his fault—it’s Joe Biden’s.) Foreign-policy jitters? Zip it, you wimps, America is strong and respected.

In effect, Trump took to the airwaves, pointed his finger, and said: Quiet, piggy.

There were concerns - rumors among the Far Right media types - that trump was going to use this speech to declare open war on Venezuela, as a follow-up to his orders to blockade and seize any more oil tankers. Instead, trump spent the speech rehashing old grievances, demanding our fealty and fear, and posing himself as a strong bully instead of a desperate crook drenching in flop sweat.

trump may be panicking over the current poll numbers that have him sinking to historic lows, especially on economic issues that can doom a party's midterm chances. he may be panicking over the reality that the congressional order to release a trove of Epstein documents - that can expose even more unsettling scandals tying trump to a known child sex trafficker - is due to happen this Friday. trump may be panicking over the reality that his unpopular tariffs could well be overturned by a Supreme Court who will bend to the needs of the corporations over that of trump's fantasies.

We could also be witnessing the mental breakdown of an unwell, aging, dementia-addled sociopath who needs to feel powerful and in control of everything around him, even though he's not.

The more trump panics, the more likely he's going to lash out in painful and dangerous ways.

Stay safe, people. We are going to deal with even nastier shit from this administration soon.

"Like a Thoughtless Child, Just Wandering by a Garden Yanking Leaves Along the Way..."

We not only live in the Darkest Timeline, also we live in the DUMBEST Timeline.

"Third Place" Marco Rubio just declared war on typography (via Humeyra Pamuk at Reuters):

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.

What the... The default font in Microsoft Word is WOKE?

The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.

Anything positive for disabled people apparently triggers the Far Right...

Some studies suggest that sans-serif fonts, such as Calibri, are easier to read for those with certain visual disabilities.

Trump, a Republican, moved quickly after taking office in January to eradicate federal DEI programs and discourage them in the private sector and education, including by directing the firing of diversity officers at federal agencies and pulling grant funding for a wide range of programs.

DEI policies became more widespread after nationwide protests in 2020 against police killings of unarmed Black people, spurring a conservative backlash. Trump and other critics of diversity initiatives say they are discriminatory against white people and men and have eroded merit-based decision making.

All of the things that should matter in these dark times - ending Russia's invasion of Ukraine, ending Israel's devastation of both Gaza and the West Bank, stopping the war in Sudan, pulling back on trump's hostility towards Venezuela and most of Central/South America - Rubio is going after font usage because certain fonts offends the Far Right Male sensibilities.

I swear, I've seen this before in a Saturday Night Live skit:

You can just picture poor Marco suffering the way Ryan Gosling did:

Yeah. He just highlighted Avatar, he clicked the drop down menu and then he randomly selected Papyrus. Like a thoughtless child, just wandering by a garden yanking leaves along the way...

He just got away with it. This man, this professional graphic designer. Was it laziness? Was it cruelty...?

And now, here I am doing what I vowed to never do again, sitting outside his house, hoping to catch a glimpse of him to see him doing his little things, live his insane little life...

Ryan: Do you remember the Avatar logo?

Heidi: Um, yeah. It was tribal, yet futuristic.

Ryan: Papyrus!!!

(He sees the graphic designer glaring at him through a window)

Ryan: I know what you did! I... KNOW... WHAT... YOU... DID!!!

Seriously, if the Alpha Male Wannabes in the trump inner circle are obsessed with manliness, they should have gone with Trajan, a more accurate Roman based font.

Just one more thing that makes us THINK ABOUT ROME!!!

I can finally say Io Saturnalia, peeps!

To the AI Bots Raiding My Blog

In the past few weeks, I've noticed an insane uptick in traffic to this blog. Normally I'd be thrilled that more people are finding my ramblings to be coherent and plausible (yes I'm an influencer at last) except that I have no idea where the traffic is coming from. 

At least until I saw one source was ChatGPT. 

Crap.

The onslaught by our tech overlords to insert their Artificial Intelligence bots into every crevice of the Internet - Gemini on Google, Copilot on Microsoft products, whatever the hell they call it on Apple devices - is creating an environment where anything posted on the Internet can get vacuumed up by these AI bots as use in someone else's work. Without citing sources or providing links to the original work, and in the case of artists and musicians (and even professional writers) failing to pay them for their work. Violating copyright laws left and right.

So let me state here, loud and clear.

I did not give consent, I DO NOT give consent, I WILL NOT GIVE CONSENT TO HAVE MY WRITINGS USED WITHOUT CREDIT TO MY EFFORTS.

I'm not making any money off this blog, so I can't claim loss of revenue. But I do claim my rights as the person who wrote this junk to get cited by others referencing what I've written. These are my thoughts and opinions and I'm damn well entitled to defend them.

What bothers me is how these AI systems could well go after my published writings, the stuff I have as ebooks. THAT is a source of revenue, I should get paid for what's on the market, and if anybody steals "Road Trip to Vegas" or "The Brides of WiFi" I will be very vexed indeed.

I'm reading up now on how to block AI scavengers from this blog. I've gotten as far as "robots.txt" but I have no idea how to apply to a Blogger site. If anyone's got pointers, please help.

And to the Silicon Valley thieves who think they can take everything and leave us with nothing: Please die in a fire. It's the least YOU can do to save the world from your greed.

The Bleak Parade

Just as donald Shitgibbon trump ruined January 6th in my mind, the bastard is going to ruin June 14th on a personal level as well. 

Where June 14th is officially Flag Day for the United States and the anniversary of the official formation of the Continental Army that evolved into the US Armed Forces 250 years later, it also happens to be trump's birthday.

So we're getting the unwarranted - and in some ways offensive - spectacle of a military parade in front of the White House while trump stands there and revels in it.

If this was going to be a celebration of the Army there were better places to host such an event, like Valley Forge or one of the nearby bases, or a memorial held at Arlington National Cemetery. However, trump is not a fan of cemeteries - unless he's the focus of everything - and considering how he keeps dumping on soldiers as "suckers", he's not about to honor the troops with anything when he's too busy honoring himself.

Let Eliot A. Cohen at the Atlantic spell it out for us (paywalled):

The United States Army deserves a celebration, as do the other armed services during their upcoming birthdays. Tens of millions of Americans have passed through the Army’s ranks, and something close to a million have died in the line of duty, while many more were wounded or taken prisoner, or suffered extraordinary hardships. We owe them a lot.

The administration, however, is orchestrating a parade not to honor service, but to celebrate power. Tanks and infantry fighting vehicles will tear up the capital’s streets as helicopters thrash overhead. Tough-guy stuff, in other words, designed to show the world that we are, in the much-overused word of the secretary of defense, lethal...

Nor is this hardware relevant to the strategic choices the Trump administration has avowed, leaving Europe and the Middle East and focusing on the Indo-Pacific. Tanks will not persuade China to keep the People’s Liberation Army Navy behind the first island chain. This is about preening for the American public and indulging a kind of juvenile fascination with big, noisy armored vehicles...

If the draft-evading president and disgruntled former National Guard major running the Department of Defense better understood the American military, they would know that by sending National Guardsmen (and now Marines) to deal with riots when neither the governor of the state nor the mayor of the city concerned want them, they are courting danger. They would not promise, as Trump has, the use of “heavy force” against protesters. They would not, in other words, anticipate, almost with glee, the prospect of Americans in uniform shooting their fellow citizens. For that matter, they would know that deploying thousands of military personnel to the southern border disrupts training for war, which they supposedly value highly...

All this so a confirmed draft-dodging felon and sex offender can pretend to be an Alpha Male in front of his lackeys.

At the least, we should expect the roads of Washington DC torn up by the heavy tanks and transports rolling up and down the square (the military's promised they reinforced the roads but I doubt it will help), adding millions of wasted dollars being spent to deploy the troops and equipment this way.

At the worst, I'm dreading how trump could turn this parade into a public call of a military takeover (technically an autoglope) and declaring the Constitution suspended while he orders the entire military to join in with ICE's mass deportation pogroms across our major (mostly Democratic) cities. And attack any protests that rise up against him.

No matter what happens, I am making the rather miniscule - hello, ten readers of this blog! - call to my fellow Americans to avoid this bleak trumpian parade at all costs. Just don't be in Washington DC at all. Don't add to the numbers that trump will try to claim as turnout, make it as deserted as his 2017 inauguration.

There's a ton of other places to be this Saturday. There's these No Kings rallies happening by the by that you can register and attend across every state. If you're in Chicago, Da Pope is hosting a livestream mass as a blatant counterpunch to trump's self-indulgence (although I've heard it's sold out). If you're not inclined to protest or pray, you can always go to the beaches (it's a bit of a drive to Virginia Beach but worth it)

Just remember that this parade isn't honoring our Army, it's not for the troops to display their discipline and training, it's not anything honoring America.

This parade is for trump's vanity and his alone, and it will be as vulgar as he can make it.

Flirtin' with Disaster Once Again: Welcome to the 2025 trump Hurricane Season

Update: Hello again, those of you coming from Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Thanks as always to Batocchio for including this blog to the array of socio-political blogs still out there. Good luck, and stay safe.

In the "What Could Possibly Go Wrong" category of bad news today, Reuters is dropping this particular tidbit about trump's pick to run our federal disaster relief agency (via Leah Douglas, Ted Hesson, and Nathan Layne):

Staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency were left baffled on Monday after the head of the U.S. disaster agency said during a briefing that he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season, according to four sources familiar with the situation.

Insert every facepalm GIF you can find, folks.

The U.S. hurricane season officially began on Sunday and lasts through November. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast last week that this year's season is expected to bring as many as 10 hurricanes.

The remark was made by David Richardson, who has led FEMA since early May. It was not clear to staff whether he meant it literally, as a joke, or in some other context.

Richardson said during the briefing that there would be no changes to the agency's disaster response plans despite having told staff to expect a new plan in May, the sources told Reuters.

Richardson's comments come amid widespread concern that the departures of a raft of top FEMA officials, staff cuts and reductions in hurricane preparations will leave the agency ill-prepared for a storm season forecast to be above normal.

Hurricanes kill dozens of people and cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually across a swath of U.S. states every year. The storms have become increasingly more destructive and costly due to the effects of climate change...

Richardson, who has no disaster response experience, said during Monday's briefing, a daily all-hands meeting held by phone and videoconference, that he will not be issuing a new disaster plan because he does not want to make changes that might counter the FEMA Review Council, the sources said.

President Donald Trump created the council to evaluate FEMA. Its members include DHS head Kristi Noem, governors and other officials.

trump, of course, would like to use that "council" to make recommendations to gut that relief agency - and anything that would highlight the reality that climate change is happening - altogether. When you consider how trump is refusing to send aid to states like North Carolina still recovering from last year's hurricane season, we are facing a grim situation that when the storms do slam into the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts that our federal government is not going to lift one damn finger to help even if the heavily Republican-controlled states getting hit are screaming to high heaven.

Add to this how trump is denying aid to the midwestern states getting hit by tornadoes, and we're talking about an administration that doesn't give a damn about the lives on the ground. 

And so YES, Red state America. Every single one of you who voted for trump this 2024 you are getting exactly what you voted for: Cruelty and denial.

We are so royally fucked (again).

Between The Rock and The Dumb Place

With all of the unsettling things donald trump is doing to our international trade, our global standing, our farmers, and our tourism industry, it's the deeply insane shit he's posting on social media that distracts just a bit. But there may be something darker in trump's latest brain-fart to re-open the infamous Alcatraz prison as a holding place for the worst criminals the most defiant opponents (via Bill Chappell at NPR):

President Trump says he is ordering federal agencies to rebuild and reopen Alcatraz — the notorious maximum security prison that closed more than 60 years ago.

"I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America's most ruthless and violent Offenders," Trump said in a post on Truth Social...

Trump's message suggests he wants to restore Alcatraz to its original dual purpose. The twin goals for building the original prison, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, were "to deal with the most incorrigible inmates in Federal prisons, and to show the law-abiding public that the Federal Government was serious" about stopping rampant crime in the 1920s and 1930s..."

Trump did not provide details about a timeline for reopening the prison. And the National Park Service did not reply to NPR's request for comment about the president's new plan for Alcatraz before this story published.

But enacting Trump's proposal would come with a steep price tag, both for constructing and operating a new prison facility on an island whose most plentiful natural resource is sandstone.

Alcatraz was shuttered "because the institution was too expensive to continue operating," according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. It said operating the island prison was nearly three times more expensive than any other federal prison at the time.

"This isolation meant that everything (food, supplies, water, fuel...) had to be brought to Alcatraz by boat," the bureau says. "For example, the island had no source of fresh water, so nearly one million gallons of water had to be barged to the island each week."

I remembered my travel to San Francisco for a librarian convention in June 2001 (right before 9/11, before air travel required 108 checkpoints and hoops to jump through) and saved the photos here and there on my computers. I made a visit out to the place in-between convention meetings and such.

Welcome to The Rock! - Sean Connery

I'm a librarian. OF COURSE I TOOK A PICTURE OF
ALCATRAZ'S LIBRARY!

I was 31 at the time. I had more hair back then.

(I'm not including the photos of my foray to Colma to pay my respects to Emperor Norton. Then again, Norton would be a far wiser and saner leader for America at this point)

I remember what the tour guide said about Alcatraz as a prison: The costs of shipping everything across the bay made it impractical, they couldn't install pipelines for water or fuel, and they had no way to add facilities like desalination plants. It also didn't help that by sitting in the middle of a saltwater bay, they dealt with serious corrosion of the steel and concrete that made it harder to maintain as a prison (this is what Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers took advantage of). I saw someone post on Bluesky how back in 1963 it cost the government three times what a normal prison cost, and held fewer prisoners. We're making more money out of Alcatraz as a tourist attraction than as a prison.

So why is trump suddenly fixated on converting an abandoned prison that would cost wasteful hundreds of millions of dollars to restore? (Other than trump being a brain-dead idiot that is)

We need to look closely at trump's Truth Social rant (well, to read someone else's screenshot, let's not login to that place shall we). Here's a screenshot from Bluesky via John Brooks  :

Yes, I agree, 8 years of you is indeed far too long

[image or embed]

— John Brooks (@johnbrooks.bsky.social) May 4, 2025 at 8:42 PM

Beneath the opening rants of using the prison to house "the dregs of society," and threatening to throw "violent offenders" into Alcatraz, trump is including "judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals, who came to our country illegally." One of these things is not like the others... 

Don't forgot, right now trump is locked into a legal fight with federal judges who are refusing to bend to trump's agenda to ship without due process a number of criminal migrants but also too many honest legal migrants that trump's ICE thugs are rounding up under false pretenses and unproven allegations. We're close to the point where these judges are going to hold trump's DOJ lawyers in full contempt of their courts, and we're already in a constitutional crisis over trump's refusal to respect the Writ of Habeas Corpus and the Rule of Law.

Obviously frustrated with these legal barriers to his ambition to rule without restraint, trump is breaking out the bullying threats by telling everyone he's willing to jail these judges if they keep protecting the rights of those trump and his wingnut ilk condemned (without proof) as "criminals". But why threaten to send these judges to places like Leavenworth or Florence Supermax - places most Americans might not recognize - when he can threaten them with Alcatraz, one of the most infamous prisons in modern history (it defines a whole Trope, after all)? Everyone knows Alcatraz, even if they've never been to San Francisco to see it in person (and you can see it - once the bay fog lifts - pretty clearly along the bay shore).

All trump thinks they need to do is splash the prison with a new coat of paint, install some modern cots, put his name in large gold letters outside the main gate, and viola! Instant place of intimidation to his foes and allies alike.

And like all things trump thinks about, he honestly didn't think this through. The judges are going to ignore his threats because they're more concerned about upholding the Rule of Law (without that, judges lose all power and they know it). trump's already threatening migrants - especially the legal residents and their children - so yet another prison threat is no different than threatening them with shipping to El Salvador. And arguing to open such an expensive location for what is clearly an ego-driven fantasy undercuts every claim trump makes that he's "cutting costs" and saving us money.

We could laugh away trump's obsession with re-opening such a relic, but don't laugh away the underlying threat to it all. trump wants to break the judges against him, he wants to destroy every aspect of the Rule of Law.

In this, we need to stand firm. Like a Rock.

(yes, simile intended)

The Bank Alarms Are Going Off, But Will Anyone Stop Musk's Raids?

This is how chaotic things are going with President trump Elon Musk taking a sledgehammer to the federal government (via Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Jacqueline Alemany at the Washington Post, so it may be paywalled):

The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department left the agency after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.

David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk as acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.

Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration...

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate...

With the kind of control Musk is seeking, you have to question by what authority Musk can do any of this. He's not a Secretary of the Cabinet, he's the head of a non-approved advisory committee that Congress never budgeted or signed off on. Yet he's out here doing the things a Cabinet member would be doing, and without any accountability to anyone except trump. And even trump might not be in control of this train wreck.

This is what's scaring the experts and people in the know:

The executive order Trump signed creating DOGE also instructed all agencies to ensure it has “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” which would appear to include the Treasury payment systems.

It is unclear precisely why Musk’s team sought access to those systems. But both Musk and the Trump administration more broadly have sought to control spending in ways that far exceed efforts by their predecessors and have alarmed legal experts.

Musk is going after the money: Either to shut down spending in part or in whole - which is unconstitutional and would crash the economy - or to funnel moneys into his and others pockets - which would be the largest bank heist in history and also crash the economy.

All of this is happening on the whims of a person whom NO ONE ELECTED to any office. Musk does not have the approval of the voters, he does not have confirmation from the Senate, he does not have any established legal authority outside of trump's executive orders. What he's doing ought to be illegal as hell.

And yet, thanks to the President First Felon in the White House, all of the checks and balances from the legislature or the judiciary might not be able to hold Musk - or trump - to account here.

If any advocacy groups outside of the federal government have the power to fight these corrupt acts, for the love of GOD do so, please and thank you.

Otherwise, the nation drowns in Grover's Elon's bathtub.

And Injustice For All, Because Justice Came Too Late

The January 6th part of Jack Smith's Special Counsel report is officially out.

You can read for yourselves the parts where donald trump intentionally started and condoned a riot in our nation's capitol to interfere with the 2020 election results. These were things Smith was convinced could be proved in a court of law and leading to trump's conviction on federal charges. This is why people called it an insurrection and what should have disqualified trump from ever running for office again.

And yet, he did run for office again. The Republican Party failed to maintain any personal ethics and allowed this viper the chance to run again; Merrick Garland and the Justice Department moved too slow out of fears of politicizing matters, refusing to convene a grand jury and press for indictments for years; the Supreme Court refused to hold trump accountable and even granted more executive powers that trump can now abuse; the mainstream media ignored all the evidence and all the corruption, and failed to label trump as the violent insurrectionist that he is; and above all 77 million of our fellow Americans decided to vote for the crooked son of a bitch back into the White House where trump will inflict worse horrors on the nation.

What the hell, America. THIS monster - this court-confirmed sex offender, this convicted felon, this sociopathic insurrectionist - is what you want to lead you. The cruelty and injustice we're about to suffer is ALL ON YOU.

One Sentence Description of trump Selecting Gaetz for Attorney General

trump seriously wants to wreck every last concept of justice in America by choosing a guy the Justice Department - and even his fellow congressmembers - exposed as a sex-obsessed statutory-raping drug abuser who has every reason to force our government to never expose Republican crimes again.

Unhappy Thoughts Part One

Currently coping with a swirl of thoughts, most of them unsettling and troubling. There's so many of them that I'm going to have to break them down into bite-sized chunks.

I seriously believe the level of sexism in this nation means we will never see a woman elected to the Presidency. I know that people are pointing to "other issues" as to the reasons why the two major candidates - with Hillary in 2016 getting tarred with "her emails" fake scandal, with Kamala in 2024 getting tarred with "inflation" - lost to a clearly unqualified (and by 2024 clearly criminal) donald trump, but the backlash they both got from male voters can't be ignored. Olga Khazan at the Atlantic makes the case:

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was a former secretary of state and senator running against the politically inexperienced real-estate tycoon Donald Trump. She lost. People would vote for a woman, the thinking went, just not that woman.

In 2024, Kamala Harris was the vice president, a former senator, and a former attorney general also running against Trump, who was by then a convicted felon and sexual abuser. She also lost. People would vote for a woman, once again, just not that woman.

The events of the past eight years might prompt some to wonder: If Clinton wasn’t good enough, and neither was Harris, will a woman ever be good enough to be president? What kind of a woman would it take? According to interviews I conducted with six researchers who study gender and politics, sexism was a small but significant factor that worked against Harris. And it’s going to be a problem for any woman who runs for president. “American voters tend to believe in the abstract that they support the idea of a woman candidate, but when they get the real women in front of them, they find some other reason not to like the candidate,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a communications professor at Colorado State University, told me. In 2017, she wrote an article about the long odds faced by women running for president. The title? “Every Woman Is the Wrong Woman.”

...In 2017, a study found that about 13 percent of Americans were “angry or upset” about the idea of a woman serving as president. In an experiment that same year using hypothetical political candidates, Yoshikuni Ono and Barry Burden, political scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that voters punish female candidates running for president by 2.4 percentage points. This means that a hypothetical female candidate would get, say, 47 percent of the vote, rather than 49.4 percent if she were a man. This bias against female presidential candidates, Ono and Burden found, was most pronounced among men and among politically unaffiliated voters—two demographics that Harris struggled with.

There is painful irony that women candidates lost to a man exposed as a vulgarian towards women, a court-adjudicated rapist and confirmed misogynist.

For all the decent - if not great - choices of women leaders in the Democratic ranks like Governor Whitmer or AOC, it is insane that too many men - even among liberals! - just won't consider it.

The Willful Blindness

Update: Steve in Manhattan, thank you again for sharing this blog to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-up! And to those of you stopping by, can you do me a favor and Follow Me if you can? It's... I'd like to know people out there are supporting each other. P.S. As soon as I can get a selfie of it made, I'm going to quit Twitter with both middle fingers aimed at Elon while I head off to Bluesky Social! Look for me there.

This is the thing driving me insane at this moment, and will likely keep me insane for a thousand lifetimes.

Due to the Republicans' effort to overturn Roe with the Dobbs decision, there were ten states this election cycle that had pro-abortion rights amendments for their state constitutions. The results showed that most of those states' voters - even dominated by Far Right powers - sided in favor of abortion rights (via Geoff Mulvihill and Christine Fernando at AP News):

Voters in Missouri cleared the way to undo one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans in one of seven victories for abortion rights advocates, while Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota defeated similar constitutional amendments, leaving bans in place.

Abortion rights amendments also passed in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland and Montana. Nevada voters also approved an amendment, but they’ll need to pass it again it 2026 for it to take effect. Another that bans discrimination on the basis of “pregnancy outcomes” prevailed in New York.

The results include firsts for the abortion landscape, which underwent a seismic shift in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a ruling that ended a nationwide right to abortion and cleared the way for bans to take effect in most Republican-controlled states...

For me the sad news is that Florida's pro-abortion amendment didn't pass, but only due to a super-majority (60 percent) requirement for state amendments. It still received 57 percent support, showing a clear number of residents - including other Republicans! - wanted women to have that right to abortion based on medical and psychological needs. If only 3 percent more had any more understanding of how rape victims and women suffering miscarriage are now burdened - or worse, forced to die - because Amendment Four didn't pass.

But what's driving me insane is how many of those same voters - here in Florida, and in Missouri, and Montana, and several others like Kansas and Ohio that saw pro-abortion support in voter referenda - went and voted back into office the same Republican bastards who took away abortion rights in the first place.

It's like those voters refused to pay attention to who caused this problem with women's rights. They didn't blame donald trump for appointing three anti-abortion Justices to the Supreme Court that passed the Dobbs ruling. They didn't hold accountable the Republican Senators who approved those Justices, and in fact gave the GOP control of the incoming Senate term. And they certainly didn't vote out of office the state-level Republicans who are so partisan in their Far Right agenda that they will ignore, obstruct, or defy those state amendments however they can.

In Florida's case, the pro-abortion amendment's failure is likely going to encourage DeSantis - that bastard - and the legislators still controlling Tallahassee to pursue even harsher measures such as going after birth control. They are going to double down on punishing women for being women, I guarantee you this.

How self-defeating can you get? Did ANY of you pay attention?

It wasn't just on abortion that the majority of American voters showed this schizoid desire to support relatively liberal positions while voting into office extremist conservative SOBs.

trump and the Republican Party pretty much campaigned on demonizing immigrants, not just the illegals crossing the border but lawful migrants like Haitians. For the love of God, trump held a last-minute Hate Rally in Madison Square Garden where Puerto Ricans - official citizens since 1917! - were insulted to their faces. And yet more Latinos ended up voting for trump and Republicans, in spite of the reality that trump and the likes of Stephen Miller are openly planning to attack birthright citizenship and attempt "denaturalization" of those who already cleared legal hurdles to citizenship. It's as though those Latino voters - and American voters whose communities rely on migrant workers to survive - don't believe the leopards will be coming to eat their own faces.

Most of the voters' ire towards the Democrats revolved around the high inflation that hit the nation in the Post-COVID economy. Nevermind the fact President Biden passed an Inflation Reduction Act that generated jobs and worked - slowly, alas - to reduce the inflation rate. And those angry voters sided with trump who wants to replace our income tax system with high tariffs that will create WORSE inflation - we're talking Great Depression levels - than we've ever known.

And in spite of the relative success of the ACA (Obamacare) that aid most Americans with their health care costs, those Americans just gave power back to a Republican Party eager to repeal the whole thing (and this time with no clear Replace plan to offer). The same Republican Party that literally DID NOTHING this past term of Congress (the lowest level of legislative activity ever seen).

This isn't about me being some "elitist" liberal snob - I'm barely middle class, goddammit - wondering why my fellow Americans just won't vote the way I want them to. This is me genuinely wondering HOW my fellow Americans haven't paid attention to who (evangelical Far Right greedheads) - and what (racism and sexism) - are causing the problems and turmoil that do affect them as much as all of us.

This is why I'm screaming into the void anymore. The willful blindness of my neighbors and even some family members to the real problems out there and how the Republicans they just voted for are the cause of those problems looking to double down on that madness.

It's like nobody among those 73 million trump voters remembered the madness, the cruelty, the broken acts of poor governance that trump and his Far Right cohorts brought about the first time around between 2017 to 2020. It's like they refuse to remember how since 1988 every time a Republican-led government broke things - Bush the Elder's recession, Bush the Lesser's failed wars and financial meltdowns, trump's excessive tax cuts and refusal to handle the COVID emergency with ANY level of competency or compassion - their partisan extremism made it impossible to solve those crises and were disastrous AND deadly for our nation.

What the hell, America. Seriously. Did you pay ANY attention at ALL?

The Void In Me

I went back into my blog to cross out all the hopeful things I had posted leading up to Election Day.

Gods. A nightmare.

My personal mood is stuck between Despair and Fatigue.

I've stopped playing a lot of video games. I've stopped watching television. I've stopped going to movies. I'm finding it harder to read any books now. 

I don't think I will ever experience true joy in my life. The brief moments of any kind of happiness I experience end quick, and I have so few people in my life within reach to share that happiness. I know what it's like to be in love, but I also know what it's like to never share it, to never figure out relationships, to figure out other people, to be normal. The only thing I know about love is the shape of the void it makes in my life.

My writing interest is waning. My short story submissions keep getting rejected and I can't find any other places to submit my work. I'm at the point of "why bother?"

After having all my blog articles for the Royal Palm Literary Awards ignored for FWA, it's just piling onto my despair of spending all these years raging against the madness of motherfucking trump and changing none of it. For all the limited views, for all the brief bumps I get from Crooks & Liars traffic, it's not worth it, is it? Anything I write is meaningless against the fear and hatred that a majority of Americans revel in today.

My chronic depression eats away at me. My social anxiety makes it harder and harder to even try and find people near me I could find friendship, or comfort. And it's hard already being stuck in a Deep Red county in a damned Deep Red state to find people who share my world-view.

If this reads like self-pity or wallowing, it probably is. But I've got nothing else to offer right now.

This is all I am: a tired, aging, emotionally broken nobody.

Screaming Into the Void

I went to bed early on Election Night because I didn't want the stress to get the worst of me.

I wake up to a goddamn nightmare.

I thought the worst case nightmare of a trump "win" was that he was going to fight legal challenges all the way up to the Supreme Court. I didn't consider even the possibility trump would claim more popular votes than Harris. trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by three million votes, and lost it more by seven million in 2020. trump had done nothing to improve his favorability numbers in all that time, and yet... what the hell?

And it's not that trump's winning by garnering a higher count than the 74 million he got in 2020: his current total is below that (last saw it was 71 million) and even after all the final tallying is done by this weekend it doesn't look like it'll be any higher than that 74 million from last time.

What's horrifying is how Kamala's vote total - based off the 81 million Biden got earlier - dropped off a literal cliff down to 66 million(!). That total should increase slightly during the final ballot counting, but there's no way she's finding 15 million votes hiding away under a sofa or something to regain the popular vote or flip the Electoral College. This is... wrong. This is broken.

WHERE THE HELL DID 15 MILLION DEMOCRATIC VOTES GO?

This was after all the reports of increased voter registration, this was after all the early voting reports of higher turnout. Pennsylvania and Florida in particular were reporting big turnout overall. There were few signs that the turnout numbers were favoring trump or Republicans. If anything, most of the turnout numbers were matching - if not exceeding in some states - 2020 numbers. AND YET. There's 15 million votes unaccounted for.

This can't be right.

By all accounts, Harris ran the final stages of the campaign - taking over from President Biden when he dropped out from media pressure to do so - just right. She fundraised better than trump. Her rallies drew bigger crowds. The ground game was knocking on every door in the battleground states and then some. There weren't any signs from the voting base itself that they disapproved of Harris (other than the pro-Palestinians fearing the year-long war Israel was inflicting on the Gaza and West Bank citizenry).

There wasn't any evidence that turnout was going to drop this bad. Where the hell did 15 million voters from 2020 go?

Other than grappling at the conspiracy train of thought that the voting machines were rigged - across every battleground state, even the ones where Democrats held local control - the only other thought is that all that voter turnout was a mirage, or that voters avoided marking off a choice for President on the ballots either way.

Looking at the results nationwide, it's not as though that 15 million votes went towards the Libertarian or Green candidates (the Libertarians had barely 540,000 votes, and the Greens got 611,000). Those 15 million votes are just... gone.

What the hell happened to the 81 million voters who showed up for Biden where 15 million of them refused - in an election that could have stopped a known felon and sex offender in trump - to show up for Harris?

This is both frustrating and alarming as hell.

And now we're stuck in hell.

I am regretting ever getting this emotionally invested into my nation's own well-being and survival against the forces of darkness that trump (and his BFF Putin) represent.

For a long time, I thought the Far Right was too extreme, too cruel, too corrupt to truly represent what the United States could be (even with all the racism and sexism dripping through our history books).

I believed the Republican Party wasn't truly reflective of the majority of Americans - not since the 1990s when the sheen of Reaganism fell away - and that they were really a minority party surviving on gerrymandering and voter suppression. The possibility that massive voter suppression happened last night is there, but on this scale? Considering how so many Americans ARE happy voting for a known criminal felon, tax fraud, and sex offender in trump, the only honest reality is that GODS HELP US a majority of Americans are truly this blind, truly this cruel, truly this spiteful towards their own communities and families.

I'm despairing for the poor, for the Blacks facing law enforcement crackdowns to serve trump's obsession for violence against them, for the Latinos and Arabs about to suffer hardships under a vicious anti-immigrant regime, for the women who are about to lose even more rights to an evangelical mob, for the children about to see their personal lives and their safety violated by anti-trans and anti-gay haters.

I'm not despairing for America though. Those sons of bitches voted for a monster about to blow everything up to feed their fear and hate, and they will get caught in the chaos and destruction they thought was going to inflict everyone else.

Goddamn us tonight. History and humanity will never forgive us.

trump Off The Rails But Will The Beltway Even NOTICE?

Something weird has happened to this Darkest Timeline to where the only way to describe the craziness is simply copy/paste the AP News headline:

I felt it was necessary to include a photo of his hand gesture

I haven't dared check to see how the New York Times tried to "sanewash" - yes, that is a word now, and ironically it was aimed at liberals back in 2020 - trump's increasing public displays of dementia and idiocy.

Remember how angry I was at the mainstream media for how they went after Joe Biden's increasing signs of aging and mental fatigue? trump had been showing similar signs, with public displays of meandering thought, failure to keep names straight, open angry outbursts that were one N-Word drop away from becoming blatant five-alarm fires: And yet the major news outlets - the Times especially - were going out of their way to clean up trump's ramblings to make him appear functional and coherent (via Jon Allsop at Columbia Journalism Review):

As applied to Trump, the idea is that major mainstream news outlets are routinely taking his incoherent, highly abnormal rants—be they on social media or at in-person events—and selectively quoting from them to emphasize lines that, in isolation, might sound coherent or normal, thus giving a misleading impression of the whole for people who didn’t read or watch the entire thing. In her column, Molloy called out CNN for sanitizing a Trump screed about tomorrow’s presidential debate and the New York Times for omitting an allusion to a conspiracy theory about vaccines and autism from its summary of a Trump pledge to tap Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to help make health policy; since then, she and others have applied the same analysis to coverage of Trump’s incoherent remarks—particularly around the costs of childcare and a proposed Elon Musk–led “efficiency commission”—at an economic forum in New York. “This ‘sanewashing’ of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism,” Molloy wrote. “It’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy.”

The threat being a dementia-riddled trump in the White House will act even worse than how trump behaved between 2017 to 2021, and rely even more on handlers and lackeys who will get free rein to commit their own atrocities with trump's rambling racist seal of approval.

But these were signs cropping even back then - Recall how trump tried to redraw literal maps to cover for his brain farts - and it should have been the mainstream media's duty to highlight trump's growing dementia and failures to prove himself capable of leadership.

The presidency is not a horse race: It's not about who wins or who loses. It's about who LEADS the nation, and that requires a level of coherence and competency to ensure a majority of Americans - and most of the free world - are safe and secure in their persons and livelihoods.

trump's inability to even pretend - allowing his mind to ramble off in directions it really shouldn't go - should be a massive warning sign to Americans - especially those of us who are voting - that he and his Republican allies can't be trusted with high office.

For the LOVE OF GOD, America. trump's brain is toast. Do NOT vote for him.

The Constant trumpian Grift: Shilling Worthless Watches Edition

donald trump really only knows how to do one thing: market himself as a fucking brand.

Not just putting his name in gold on buildings, golf courses, steaks, fake universities: In the past few years even in the midst of fighting criminal charges and running for President (again) trump's been out here shilling NFTs, his own publicly traded media stock, overpriced golden sneakers, trump-themed Bibles (!) that alone should be an epic form of blasphemy, cryptocurrency, and now - what the actual fuck - overpriced watches (Alistair Charlton at Wired shared my horror):

Celebrities partnering with watch brands is nothing new. Sometimes a bona fide watch enthusiast like John Mayer partners with Audemars Piguet, or Ed Sheeran (owner of a unique Patek Philippe, no less) teams up with Casio. Then there's the other end of the scale, where controversial Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy and his own watch company resides.

Now, however, there’s a new nadir: the Trump Watch. Announced this week by former US president Donald Trump, the collection consists of two pieces. One is called “Fight Fight Fight” and is priced from $499, and the other is the “Victory Tourbillon.” The latter is claimed to be made from solid 18-karat gold, with 122 diamonds and a tourbillon automatic movement. It’s priced at a nice, round $100,000—about three times the price of an equivalent Rolex Submariner—and, yes, crypto payment is available.

The watches are claimed to feature “premium, Swiss-Made materials and intricate details,” but so far as we can tell, the Fight Fight Fight uses a movement by Japanese company Seiko, while the Victory Tourbillon has a movement alleged to be partially built from Chinese components...

Everything we know about trump and his business empire is that he will cut corners, buy cheap with no care for quality, and sell to excess (and try to trick his suckers customers into spending even more). This watch will be no different.

But don’t just take our word for it. WIRED Watch expert Tim Barber told us: “Trump evidently has some cut-through among certain watch fans, since the gold sneakers he auctioned earlier this year were bought by Roman Sharf, one of the most prominent gray-market watch dealers, with a sizable YouTube following." (Incidentally, the companies that made the gold sneakers and the new Trump Watches were established by the same register agent, Andrew Pierce of Cloud Peak Law, Wyoming.)

“Having said that, I doubt these hideous pieces will increase his equity among most watch collectors. As it happens, all-gold watches being very on trend in the luxury market at the moment, he joins Rolex in producing a gold dive watch this year. But I would be less confident of this sharing any other qualities with a Rolex...”

Now for the Tourbillon, the $100,000 flagship of the Trump watch collection. “This isn’t just any watch,” the former president said. “It’s one of the best watches made,” he adds without context...

This is Trump as Used Car Salesman: he's going to tell you "this is the best ever" and "everybody's talking about" (that part is right, although laughing/screaming in horror is more apt). The kind of fake oversell for shoddy product that led to a ton of Lemon Laws. I digress.

The watch is claimed to use a “TX07 Tourbillon” with 105 hours of power reserve, but finding any record of such a movement online is tricky. Watch commentator Nico Leonard van der Horst said in an Instagram post: “This is hilarious … the manufacturer of this movement is Olivier Mory, who ironically is known for making very affordable Tourbillons half made in China, half made in Switzerland.” Van der Horst added: “If you were to buy this movement and put it in your own watch, you would be able to buy it for under $3.5k...”

Why even sell a watch so much that your average MAGA voter - most of them middle-class/self-employed (car salesmen themselves more likely) - can't afford one? It's a watch meant for the oligarch class, the foreign millionaires and billionaires still looking to curry favor with trump should he ever cheat his way back into the White House. It doesn't help that trump is encouraging people to use crypto as a way to purchase these watches, because that kind of money can't be tracked.

trump is not just violating the Emoluments Clause, he's mocking it: because he knows Congress can't touch him and the courts have no idea how - or no willingness - to enforce it.

Hell, why I am sitting here whining about what trump's doing? If trump is out here shilling overpriced watches to gullible buyers reasonable markets, I can be doing that too!

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