Living in Texas, don't feel Texan. Listening to New Order and dreaming of the Pacific Ocean.
I'm a Navy brat, Army veteran, and work for the DoD as a contractor. Despite that pedigree, I am not a jingoist.
I prefer to spend my time consuming science fiction in various media and playing with computers. In recent years, it seems "ignoring politics" is not a wise strategy, so I'm trying to be a better citizen. So far, not having a lot of luck - see above about living in Texas. :-)
I was annoyed listening to a summary of the entire 75-year history of Fort Ord (ironically the year before it closed), while standing in uniform with fixed bayonet. I don't know how I'd handle this cheesy campaign rally and Confederacy apologia being forced on me.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/10/politics/fort-bragg-troops-trump-lies
No more TV, but a pretty cool-looking video game.
Shades of @fatsam - "They never look up."
If "police" are just showing up masked, no name tapes, and in random clothing, how do we know they aren't just random violent assholes looking for a fight? Or is that redundant?
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:otnmnkaxchvelzwrifs64rbq/post/3lqzva2mhsc2v
So much winning.
www.cnbc.com/2025/06/04/a...
Private sector hiring rose by ...
In all the times I went to Disneyland over the years, I can only think of two food items that stick my memory. Churros on a chilly day are awesome, and the Dole whip at the Tiki Room is nostalgia made manifest.
Apparently they have decent food outside the Bayou now?
I Tried Every Food at Disneyla...
Geeks have been predicting the "Year of the Linux Desktop" for literally decades now. While people seem reluctant to upgrade from Win10 to Win11, I somehow doubt that it will lead to a massive uptake for Linux distros. Hope springs eternal, I guess.
Random brain activity this morning: Going to talk to one of the exercises running, thinking, "good to go." On your radio. And I'm cold getting paid cuz Rick said so. Make your woofers wallop... Weird place, this brain.
Nineteen pending relief requests, one dating from January - this administration will let people die rather than following the budget passed into law by Congress.
wapo.st/44X3kEp
FEMA faces backlog of emergenc...
"90 to 95 of those being ousted are policy or subject-matter experts."
Well, who needs experts when you've got a puddle of goo under your piss candy floss hair?
apnews.com/article/trum...
White House slashing staff in ...
This is an insane bill attempting to criminalize abortion medication. But on top of that...
"The bill also contains a controversial provision that says it cannot be challenged in state court before it is enforced, and a state judge who holds the law to be unconstitutional can be personally sued for $100,000."
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/23/texas-legislature-abortion-pills-crackdown/
"What has driven rising deficits are the George W. Bush and Donald Trump tax cuts, which had added $8 trillion and $1.7 trillion, respectively, to the debt by the end of the 2023 fiscal year."
Objective reality, how does that work? As an extra spicy indicator of "cui bono," the bill also forbids any regulation of AI by states.
"[T]he tax cuts would go into effect immediately, the cuts to Medicaid are currently scheduled not to hit until 2029."
"The continuing Republican insistence that spending is out of control does not reflect reality. In fact, discretionary spending has fallen more than 40% in the past 50 years as a percentage of gross domestic product, from 11% to 6.3%.
Cognitive Decline
Jake Tapper’s new book came out this week, so there’s wall-to-wall coverage of how the previous President was obviously suffering cognitive decline and his team covered for him. None of that is shocking, if you were paying the slightest attention. But, also who cares in 2025? Maybe we should spend a little time looking at the obvious cognitive decline of the current President.
Gotta love Jordan Klepper’s reaction to whatever the fuck this was. Buckle up, it’s a ride.
“When you look at what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine the drone is killing tremendous numbers of people. You hide behind a tree and the drone comes down and it circles you with fire. You don’t have a chance and the tree comes down also by the way.
It’s so intense the.. I mean you see these trees being knocked down like… Like they’re being sawed down by a top of the line, uhh, timber man like — like — you know who? Sean.. Duffy.”
Do you know that Sean Duffy, the head of the Transportation Department, who’s working right now on the airports and getting a system because Biden didn’t do a thing for four years and Pete Buttigieg was the head and he goes bicycling to work. He takes a bicycle to work, can you believe it? He’s head… he’s running the biggest air system in the world and he takes a bicycle to work. What a — and they say he’s going to run for president, I don’t see it.
Who knows right? But I don’t see it.
But, uh, when I look at what they’ve done uh, it’s so horrible what they’ve done and the work they did do they wasted billions of dollars. They tried to hook up air systems to — to copper. They tried to hook up copper to glass and the glass doesn’t work with the copper and… uh they had 30,000 different contractors doing 30,000 jobs and when they put it all together they spent billions of dollars. It didn’t even come close to working and we’re going to be giving out a brand new system. It’s very important. We’ll have the best system. And we think we know who that system is but we have a lot of bidding.
But we want one check.. we want a unified system. We don’t have, uh, 5,000 contractors and all different places, some digging ditches and some not doing ditches because they want to go by satellite. Satellite seems to be the way to go. We’re going to be giving that out pretty soon.
But what people don’t know about Sean cause I mentioned lumberjacks that Sean… you probably didn’t know this that uh… I’m not talking about this Sean, this Sean no, not, this is not… This is a different Sean. Sean Duffy, the head of Transportation. He’s a great Sean though, I have to tell you but Sean Duffy was the world champion for five years climbing trees and down, up and down, world champion. So that’s what you call a serious a lumberjack.
And he’s doing a fantastic job too, a really respected guy and terrific guy and I mentioned the champion because when somebody’s the champion — he’s the world champion for a long time — he came down, when you come down those trees, coming down at a rapid.. he said that started getting your back. You will often break your back. You.. you miss.. you miss a shot and you’re coming down a lot faster than the human body was meant to come down. But he’s doing a fantastic job at Transportation. But this has been a very, uh, historic trip.”
I've been hearing about how airships will become the new hotness for cargo and passenger (at least tourism) flights for literally decades now. You'd think something would be here instead of "the future of air travel" by now.
wapo.st/43vL6IH
Why these startups think zeppe...
The breathless misreading of "86" as "murder" is so blatantly performative that nobody should take it seriously. Unfortunately, this bullshit dinner theater production stars the actual Director of National Intelligence, who is not quite as stupid as she pretends to be.
James Comey investigated over ...
The first two episodes of #Murderbot were released last night. Who else has watched them? It's been a few years since I read "All Systems Red," so I can be surprised by plot points. I was a little surprised they went with sitcom-length episodes, but they've been good so far.
Maybe we can stop pretending that cutting taxes on rich people is a good policy? No? Cool cool.
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:jjheidmljqrsatjic4e6hmm2/post/3lpcbkifjwp2o