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http://subgenius.wikia.com/wiki/Stephen_Paddock

Drags Magdalene for losing custody of her kids, accuses Legume of pederasty, and then

http://subgenius.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:Stephen_Paddock

Blames me for the article.

And you're their pal.  Fuck you.  Die in a fire.

1.  When you wake up screaming, it's because
A.  Donald Trump really IS president.
B.  Nazis really ARE walking around in broad daylight.
C.  Weasels ran off with your spouse.
D.  All of the above.

2.  The collection cup for date night is now collecting
A.  Vomit.
B.  Blood.
C.  Your fingernail clippings.
D.  Someone else's fingernails.

3.  You are running because
A.  Insane cops.
B.  Nazi death creatures from the hollow earth.
C.  More weasels.
D.  You still have legs.

4.  You are crying because
A.  You vaguely remember having loved ones.
B.  Tear gas.
C.  Nobody witnessed you all shiny and chrome.
D.  "irregardless" made it into the dictionary.

5.  You won't eat your pudding because
A.  You didn't eat all of your meat.
B.  You knew the guy the pudding used to be.
C.  You no longer have the required orifices.
D.  It's frozen solid, like everything else for a hundred miles in any direction.

6.  Even though the Earth is vomiting up the dead, and the government hasn't issued any edicts in weeks, you
A.  Are safe in your buried storage container, eating your previous relatives, offspring, etc.
B.  At least still have your guns.
C.  Managed to save your waifu pillow
D.  All of the above.

7.  Your neighbors are all raptured, leaving you behind with the weasels.  You
A.  Help yourself to their stuff.
B.  Console yourself that at least that crooked Hillary didn't win.
C.  Run to the nearest church and explain to God that he has overlooked your exceptionalism.
D.  Dance while the weasels rip your flesh.

8.  You are placed in charge of morale.  Your slogan is
A.  Fallout is the new confetti.
B.  Whiteboard your optimized personal demise.
C.  Weasels are just fun with fangs.
D.  I'm not crying.

9.  Your house is surrounded by zombies.  You
A.  Don't notice.
B.  Don't care.
C.  Are green with envy.
D.  Are a member of the zombie horde.

10.  Starvation has given you visions.  You realize
A.  The Mormons - of all people - had it right.  You scream your rage to the universe.  It doesn't care.
B.  You have run out of relatives and your storage container's air is getting pretty manky.
C.  That tickling sensation?  Weasels.
D.  You're late for work.  Again.

I am feeling a little proud of my country today, which has become a rarity these days.

http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/1/a/7/1a7a5422d160f199/Hour_of_Slack_1634.mp3?c_id=16391380&expiration=1502515393&hwt=bc58254ab3dbb7c7a71c9f6fdcdb9329



Starts at 49:49

Uncle BadTouch is back all over FB, now as "Kayla Spears".  Do not look at profile, full of horrible kiddie shit. 

[Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.- some wiseguy]

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
- some wiseguy

The thing about problem solving is that it's hard fucking work.  It isn't over when you peel away all the bullshit and find the answer...Because then you have to prove it, and if you're particularly unlucky, you have to impliment it.  Act on it.

And this is really the point at which you can sort your basic ivory tower bullshit from genuinely useful information.  An unworkable answer is no answer at all, and all you've done is waste everyone's irreplaceable time on this planet.  This handy tip lets you discard communism, libertarianism, anarchism, supply side economics, and every damn clickbait "science" page ever inflicted on the internet.  If you want to sit around coming up with "solutions" that can't work, great.  Just do it in private and maybe wash your hands afterward.

Now, this doesn't mean you can't bring experts in.  Hell, you probably should, if it's anything technical.  But if you're just an "idea man", then no amount of experts can help you.  Nor can they help you if you hire them and then don't listen to them.  You might be the best engineer in the damn world, but don't try to explain porosity to a welder, if you know what I mean.  And I think you do.

Which brings me to my next point.

You might be smart, but you're not the only one that is smart.

You MIGHT be an iconoclastic thinker.  Everyone else MIGHT be doing things wrong just because "that's how we've done it for 20 years" (and this DOES happen), but you can spare yourself a ton of misery, wasted effort, and the mockery of your peers if you just SHUT YOUR DAMN PIE HOLE and LISTEN when someone brings up an objection to your beautiful idea.  Especially if they've been doing it for 20 years.  Experience is a painful teacher, and why not learn something the EASY way, by which I mean "listening to what the other person has to say" rather than by signing up for what might be an unreasonable amount of said painful learning?

The future isn't just brought on by revolutionary speakers.  No.  Mostly, in fact, it is brought on by lifetimess of accumulated knowledge, of one generation after another learning from the mistakes of the people who came before them.  So when the blue collar dude who has been running that machine since before you were born tells you your idea is flawed, at least hear the guy out.  He might just save your reputation; in some cases, he might just save your life.

Which in fact leads to...

You are useless by yourself.

Humans are a cooperative species.  If you can't cooperate to achieve results, you have failed at "human".  If you discourage or punish cooperation, just throw yourself off the nearest bridge, because you are in fact directly harming the species by your very presence.  The world will not miss your "alpha" ass, and neither will the people around you.  You are not a leader or lone wolf, you are an impediment to everyone around you.

This also implies that you might have to share the credit for your beautiful idea's translation into real-world application.  How awful.  How terribly unfair.  Scream to me your anger at the very notion...But don't expect any sympathy from me, because almost all the great things in the world you live in came from humans being the insanely inventive, *cooperative* species that it is.

To be continued.

[Aristotle was a toe-rag, and if his grave is ever located, people should crap on it.]

Aristotle was a toe-rag, and if his grave is ever located, people should crap on it.

There, I said it.

When approaching a problem, people tend to want to use either inductive reasoning or deductive reasoning, but successful problem-solvers use both.  Inductive reasoning is applied to generate a broad range of possible root causes, and then deductive reasoning is used to narrow the list until a solution is found.   The trick is to never allow a beautiful theory to blind you to what the data is telling you.  Logic relies on the brain structure of weaponized apes, and that structure imposes limitations that said apes must be able to look past by not ignoring what the actual, real-world results are.

In other words, Aristotle had it totally backwards and set humanity back a thousand years because he was one of the "ancients" and everyone had to listen to his stupid ass.

Know your own limitations.

I've been thinking about autism recently, and the perceived upsurge in the frequency in which it occurs.  It seems mostly to happen in developed areas, and seems to be a relatively recent thing.  In fact, the recorded frequency seems to have a direct correlation with increased calorie intake in a population.

Hypothesis:  Autism is related to the human mind's pattern recognition capability (people with mild autism are *really* good at spotting patterns), and people with autism simply have that part of their brain augmented by a decent diet during its development, similar to how well-nourished children tend to have better cognitive skills in general.

And since pattern recognition is so critical to our survival, maybe a higher level of development in that area could actually have adverse effects?  Like not being able to do anything but recognize patterns?

BUT:  I am not a neurologist.  And I am operating off of "data" that is largely not data at all, but rather general impressions.  For all I know, autism has always been around, but was referred to as "the village idiot" or "that guy who died from stepping on a bear."  Inductive reasoning has produced a really neat-looking hypothesis, but that's all it is...Neat-looking. 

And this is the part where a lot of people crawl up their own arse and go full David Avocado Wolfe.   The hypothesis is absolutely useless until it has been tested and data has been collected (again, fuck you, Aristotle) and the whole thing repeated, preferably by somebody else who really wants to tear you a very public new asshole.  If your hypothesis can survive that, it's probably worth taking seriously.

The universe doesn't lie to you, but YOU lie to you.

The universe follows exacting rules, no matter how it got there.  It never breaks its own rules, even when it seems to...If it looks like it's breaking the rules, you just don't know enough about the situation.  "Spooky action at a distance" is spooky because it's at a distance, or because you just flat out cannot see enough of the situation.  But humans will decide that the rules actually don't work at times, if it fits their comfort zone.

This is exactly why agnostics are so fucking annoying.  Everybody hates those guys...They're the only people who are doing it right, because you can't gather data on whether or not an omnipresent God or three are actually there or not.  Needless to say, agnostics are smug as hell about the whole thing, and should be kicked up and down the block until they wipe that smirk off of their faces.

To be continued.

So one of our inexperienced guys, working under an inexperienced supervisor (skilled engineer, but new to supervision), managed to mash his finger doing a job that was outside of his training.  And he wasn't trained enough to *know* that it was outside of his training.  7 stitches, an OSHA recordable incident, yada yada.  He has fully recovered, with only a teensy scar.

Now corporate safety is inclined to fire the guy and his supervisor.

The common joke is that North Korea can't make proper rockets because they shoot anyone that fails, under the assumption that you motivate people to succeed by getting rid of anyone who fails due to lack of experience.

Does anyone else see the fatal flaw here, or is it just me?

Any body of knowledge is built on a foundation of failures and mistakes.  You don't learn by success, because whatever you did was right and the assumption of being right is addictive as hell.  No, you learn by sometimes mashing your finger.

And learning should not be punishable by being fired.

What most people don't know is that QG is a real estate agent.  Specifically, she clears out unwanted people so the new owners can move in.  This is normally accomplished with some level of violence.  Example:  Last week a preeminent climate change scientist tripped over his own feet and fell in a farming combine.  Total mystery how he was so klutzy.

She is also the driving force behind the religious movements to ban contraception.

It's worth noting that her clients are not from around here.  No.  If only there were.  If only they were even mammals.

I hear people saying LMNO let the beat drop.

Thing is, I was there, and he did no such thing.  He was standing there, hair blowing in the wind, and hollering something about glitter and dynamite and "cutting ballast".  Then he cut the chain with bolt cutters, and all of the elderly Trump voters rolled off the back and onto the highway.  At speed.  Then he hopped onto the running board, yanked the door open, and shoved me over into the passenger seat.  He hit the off ramp at 90 MPH, and the cattle-catcher sliced a Prius clean in half. 

"THAT'S WHY WE HAVE WINDSHIELD WIPER FLUID", he howled, running over a Dodge Charger and one of those ugly-ass "Cube" things.  No big loss there.  When we hit the emergency room, we were still doing at least 60, and the wall caved right in.  We didn't stop until we were halfway through the cardiac ward. 

LMNO just GRINNED at me, and loaded his shotgun.  You know the rest from the video coverage.

So no, LMNO did not "let the beat drop."  He spiked that sumbitch.

Who among us has never had a friend like Cain?  Who among us has never helped scrub every surface with bleach and tears?  Is there any person who has not sprayed acetone to destroy epithelial cells?  The stains still remain, no matter how hard you cry.  The smell never leaves, even when you get clever with lemon juice.  The Earth is soaked in vicious deeds and errant students, that's a fact, and not a square inch of the planet hasn't been touched by terrible deeds.

Not a person in his hometown can ever remember Cain being a child, and they'll not thank you for asking the details.  Hoary old greybeards tell yarns their grandfathers told them, of Cain's wickedness and his GRIN and his awful stare.  The town, the world, resembles a conveyor belt, with the youngsters dropped on one end, while the elderly fall off the other, down into the whirling blades.  Who among us has never tried to dodge the undertaker?  Who among us has not made pacts with shadowy powers?  It never works. 

Yet Cain remains, smiling at us all from under the hat he made from Johnny Rotten's face.

This is a great 4th of July.  Congress is dumb, the president is a clown, and we're all standing around and waiting for the end.

Well, maybe you are.

What we have in front of us is a series of technical challenges.  How to deal with global warming and an insanely large world population.  How to squeeze out more energy from a limited set of natural resources.  How to pull a Spiro Agnew on Pence before Trump has a stroke.  Sounds bad, but so does everything if you're scared.  Or addicted to postmodernism. 

But, you know, we went to the moon.  We split the atom, because why the fuck not?.  THEN we survived the cold war.

So, yeah, shit looks bad.  Shit looks really bad.  But so what?  The worst thing that can happen is that we die trying, and yanno, that's gonna happen anyway.

So stop your worrying, and learn to love the insanity for its own sake.  It's what we've always done.

Or Kill Me.

 

https://www.njhomelandsecurity.gov/analysis/anarchist-extremists-antifa

http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7801374/ariana-grande-manchester-arena-concert-19-dead-50-injured

Oh I'm just a White tribalist. I denounce violence and hatred.

You know...like a moderate Muslim.

On the plus side, for you, that sort of shit is tolerated here.  For reasons that escape me.

This is the day where we learn to SIT DOWN AND SHUT OUR FACES.  OR ELSE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory and Joseph Lister, acting on the French microbiologist's research, practiced and operated, using hygienic methods, with great success. In 1865, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum, where he died at age 47 of pyaemia, after being beaten by the guards, only 14 days after he was committed.

Go in to work my first day today, my boss resigned (effective 2 weeks).  The plant engineer quit 3 months ago, and his office is haunted.  The plant manager quit 3 weeks ago in disgrace and nobody has done the regulatory shit.  The site manager is a nice old guy who smiles and wants me to tell him that everything is okay.  It's not.  But it will be.  As long as we fix the fucking parking lots before we get sinkholes.  The environmental engineer has a brand new degree and lead in the water, and came into my office and asked for my advice.  AN ENGINEER ASKED FOR ADVICE.  Of course I'm giving him advice,  this shit needs to be encouraged.  I *think* I see the problem, but we're going to collect data anyway.

The safety lady (also brand new) is an empire builder who was furious that I was taking security away from her.  NOPE.  TAKE IT, DON'T HAVE TIME FOR IT.  It runs itself and all that is required is making ID badges.  She was going to go to war over making ID badges.  The acting maintenance manager is a bigwig from the corporate home office who announced that I am to be considered management instead of a coordinator, then vanished back into his den.  The accountant and the purchasing agent are just happy to see someone come IN rather than go out.  The IT guy is awesome and helped me locate the listening device in my office, which is apparently a corporate standard.  We do all our serious talking over by the chillers, where you have to whisper at 100 decibels.

It's absolute chaos, because nobody wants to take control.  Well, the Captain has arrived.

Now I just have to talk my boss out of resigning, and talk corporate bigwig into letting her retract her resignation.

Letting vicious llamas run loose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8mUMSi5M8g

This can only end in madness and death.

Hello.  Assuming you're not a google-spider thing or a wrathful ex-member seeking your glorious revenge, there are a few things you need to know, and a few things we need to know.  I'll start with what we need to know:

1.  Who the hell are you, and how did you find this place?  You're a cop, right?  Yeah you are.  Or you're wearing a wire.  I can smell that shit, and you are most definitely some kind of spy for government agencies that never heard of us and wouldn't care if they did.  Fess up.

2.  Why on Earth would you join a religion that worships a Greek God...And not just ANY Greek God, but the one all the OTHER Greek Gods thought was a troublemaker?  You're just asking for it, you know.

3.  Do you know any good recipes?  Because we have a section for that, and I'm trying to learn to cook.

Now, what you need to know:

1.  We've read the Principia Discordia (and we don't advise it to anyone).  We have all seen every Monty Python movie ever made.  Quoting either one gets you The Punishment™.  Or at least gets you ignored.

2.  We are a bundle of bad wiring, so don't try to be the weirdest person in the room your first time out.  Absurdism only works if it's funny, and word salad isn't funny.

3.  Nobody here believes that "all opinions are of equal value", so be warned: If you're spouting alt-right shit or the dogma of lesser religions, you're going to get laughed at. 

4.  We only have 6 rules that get you banned.  Learn them.

5.  If you want to pimp your music or your art or anything like that, please restrict it to the subforum "Bring & Brag".  If that's all you're here to do, shove off.

6.  Our board's owner ("The Mgt") left in disgust recently.  That should tell you what you're in for.  The board is currently run by an Irish guy who doesn't give a shit about any of us.  He just sits in a drafty castle in Ireland somewhere, eating corned beef and listening to The Bay City Rollers on Pandora.  He doesn't care if we live or die. 

7.  There are two admins and one moderator that are here on a semi-regular basis...Myself, Cain, and LMNO.  We don't care if you're being trolled or whatnot, we only care about the 6 bannable offenses.  Again, learn them.  If someone's giving you grief, use the ignore function.  If one of the admins is that person, you can't ignore us, so just scroll on by.

All that being said, go ahead and introduce yourself.  People will say "Hi, new guy!", because we've lost our mojo and can't bring ourselves to shit on noobs like back in the day.  We apologize for this, and hope you are not too disappointed.

The original:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELD2AwFN9Nc

The contenders:

Denmark
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryppmnDbqJY
Portugal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcehg0LG5J4
Switzerland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reuJ8yVCgSM
Lithuania
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piri8VeFZVw
Belgium
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5q5wTBhGRA
Germany
https://youtu.be/WcH9eWBs9fw?t=109

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2017/01/24/the-true-correct-story-of-what-happened-at-donald-trumps-inauguration/?utm_term=.ae2080bc315e

I apologize to Donald Trump. As Sean Spicer so wisely said at his first news conference on Monday (It was the first. The one that happened on Saturday did not happen at all, and I recognize that!), it is unfair to be so mean and negative all the time.

Here is the fair and unbiased story about the inauguration written in compliance with the Trump style guidelines that we should have been obeying all along.

Nothing that has ever happened or will ever happen was as great as Donald Trump's inauguration.

The crowd was magnificent and huge, bigger than any crowd had ever been before! It stretched all the way to the moon. The Pope, who was there, confirmed it.

"Thanks for being here, Pope," Donald Trump told him.

"Are you kidding? You're my best friend," the Pope said. "I wouldn't miss your big day for anything!" He gave Donald Trump a big high-five.

Everyone in the world had come there at great expense. They sold all their possessions — their homes, their "Hamilton" tickets, which were worthless to them — to raise money to come and see this great sight. They could not believe that a perfect being such as Donald Trump even existed. They thought that he was a myth or a legend or a decades-long series of fabrications.

But then they saw him, and their doubts fell away.

The media was there, too, and they were very sorry. "Donald," the newscasters said, "we were mean to you. We used to laugh and call you names. We were no better than all of the other reindeer. How can you ever forgive us?"

"Forgive you?" Donald Trump asked. "I've already forgotten." He smiled a big, beautiful smile. That was just who Donald Trump was: forgiving, like Jesus, but blond.

It was a wonderful start to the day.

Everyone liked Donald Trump's speech and the words that he used. They liked even more the part where he rolled up his sleeve and showed off his bicep. It was a great bicep. It made the Rock so upset to see it that he threw something down on the ground and said "darn."

Donald Trump pulled out a violin and played a solo, and then he pulled out a guitar and played an even sicker solo. The whole ground was soon covered with women's undergarments. (Millions of women were there to support Donald Trump, and they were all AT LEAST sevens.) Also, every woman that Donald Trump had ever dated was there, and they were not upset with him, just ashamed that they had not lived up to his required standard.

"Trump! Trump! Trump!" the crowd cheered.

Donald Trump touched many people in the crowd in a way that they all thought was welcome and appropriate, and he cured their ailments, from cancer to autism.

"If only we could bottle your touch," someone said, "children could stop getting vaccinated altogether."

Donald Trump winked. "Don't worry!" he said. "I'm on it!"

Then Donald Trump served loaves and fishes to everyone there. There were enough loaves and fishes for everyone, and they all were Made in America and said "TRUMP" on them. It was like the Oscars, but also like Woodstock, but also like the Super Bowl, but also like the Sermon on the Mount. If you were not there, you should just go home and die, because nothing in your life will have purpose or meaning by comparison, not even holding your newborn child in your arms or having health insurance. This is what FOMO was talking about for all these years.

Bono, and Bruce Springsteen, and Elton John, and the Rolling Stones, and Beyonce, and all the top artists were there. They fought hard over who would be allowed to sing. Finally Bruce Springsteen won. Bono cried and cried, and the other artists had to console him. When Bruce Springsteen had finished singing, he walked over to Donald Trump, extended his hand, and said, "You are the only real hero left in the world."

The people were so excited that they built a very special stone pyramid just for Donald Trump so that he would not have to wait until he died to see what his monument would look like. But they were silly to be concerned. Donald Trump will never die!

A little child was in the audience, and he started to cry because the emperor was wearing so many clothes. Also, he could tell that he was not and never had been racist.

Donald Trump's beautiful big family was there. His favorite childhood dog was there, too, back from the farm where he still lives to this day.

Donald Trump can talk to the animals, and his eyes are lasers. When the floor is lava, Donald Trump can walk on it, but only Donald Trump. When Donald Trump points his finger at you, you have to lie down. But when other people point their fingers at Donald Trump, he does not have to. Donald Trump's block tower is the biggest. He does not need a nap or a snack. He has the longest, biggest attention span. Everyone loves Donald Trump, and what he has to say interests them.

Donald Trump is the star. People love him.

He won the popular vote, too.

I was aware this was a thing for a very long time, but I didn't know the term for it until now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling

Virtue signalling is a generally pejorative characterization of the expression or promotion of viewpoints that are especially valued within a social group, especially when it is said to be done primarily to enhance the social standing of the speaker.[1][2][3]

The term was first used in signalling theory, to describe any behavior that could be used to signal virtue, and especially conspicuous piety among the religious faithful.[4] Since 2015, the term has been most conspicuously used by commentators to criticize what they regard as the platitudinous and empty or superficial support of socially progressive views on social media,[2][3] but has also been used to describe analogous behavior in other groups, such as pro-gun-rights grandstanding among the American right.[3]

More or less what we used to call "the fart blanket".

The blog LessWrong was another early user of the term, where the idea was first alluded to in February 2009[5] and later squarely expressed in July 2013:

    "My upbringing and social circles are moderately left-wing. There's a well-observed failure mode in these circles, not entirely dissimilar to what's discussed in Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, where participants sabotage cooperation by going out of their way to find things to disagree about, presumably for moral posturing and virtue-signalling reasons."[6]

Or, as was described here at PD, a method of claiming status in a group at the expense of the group's goals.  Or, hell, during the post-primary phase of the election, with the left fragmenting into subgroups that all hate each other.  And, in a lot of cases, still do.

And look what that got us.   

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/12/things-can-only-get-better-par.html

http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/seafloorscience/slopes/slopes_slides.html

As the ocean level and temperature changes, we can probably expect a return of these bastards.

Tsunamis in weird places aside, I'm just thinking of what will happen to offshore drilling rigs.

Okay, so my country has failed to meet my minimum standards.  Just short of 60 million of my neighbors have decided that voting Nazi was an acceptable thing to do, because they are so tired of even a semi-functional republic.

Scary times.

And some folks have very good reason to be scared.  A lot of women I know are talking about getting IUDs before January, and who can blame them?  Trump has said he'll leave the petty details of actual governance to Pence, and Pence is a Dominionist who very much wants to make birth control illegal because it makes women uppity.  Given the rash of swastikas being sprayed all over everything flat surface, the chants of "build a wall" in middle schools, hijab-grabbing, and grab ass sexual assault ("This is a free country now, bitch"), it's not just women that should be worried.  It's also worth mentioning that the FBI, who would normally stop much of this shit, helped engineer it.

We are very much on our own.  This is, after the last eight years, a very rough concept to wrap your mind around, but sticking your head in the sand isn't going to help.

HOWEVER:

This is the first time in 50 years that The Machine has presented a handle.  Something concrete, a place in which to start picking away at the threads.  That handle isn't a government office or a corporate boardroom or anything like that.  No, it is our fellow citizens, every slack-jawed goober in a MAGA hat.  The cockroaches have crawled out of the corners, and it is our job to step on them. 

What makes this possible is that half of them know what they're supporting is wrong.  They won't admit it, but they're worried and ashamed of what they've done.  And that is the handle, here.  Not persuasion, not tolerance, but shame.  Society has finally barfed forth those that need to be told to shit in their hats, and who are we to turn this opportunity down?

That's going to require some teamwork, of course...And though some of us have very legitimate beefs with each other, I'd like to suggest that we have bigger fish to fry right now.  Not saying we need to sing Kumbaya and pretend that those legitimate beefs never occurred (one way and/or the other), but the hilarious times coming seem to indicate that - as some old radical once said - we will either hang together or we shall surely hang apart.

I told you guys years ago that this is our century.  Events have proven me right, in ways that surprise and horrify me.  But what's Discordia for, if not some horrormirth and KICKING THEM IN THE NADS?  Fuck, this is the first time in a decade that it's been morally right to kick them in the nads! 

ALL THE FUN, NO GUILT.

Or Kill Me.

Okay, so let's just talk about Jill Stein, and we'll leave out the boring crazy bits.  Dr Stein's primary plank is "stopping the wars"....Which is sort of one of those "outsider" ideas that ignores the fact that our republic is in its terminal phase, and we will never be at peace again under our current form of government.  If by some miracle she won, and stepped foot in the beast, I strongly doubt she'd have the moral courage to actually make the attempt to stop the wars.

And if she DID, she'd be given a ride in a convertible in Dallas.  Or just have a good, old-fashioned heart attack.  No more little Dr Stein being a nuisance.  Not to get HER out of the way.  No.  An inconvenient president can be ignored (see: Jimmy Carter).  The reason she'd be suborned or killed would be as a message.

A similar message to the one send by the Chelsea police (London Chelsea, that is) when, just days after riots over police brutality, the pepper-sprayed a young man until he died, for the heinous crime of being the only person at the address from which he himself had called in a domestic dispute.

The message is "Shut up or we'll kill you.  If we can be bothered."  It's all about the message, after all, and Stein would make the perfect telegram to the few remaining peaceniks in the country. .."Your opinion does not matter, and nothing can stop The Machine."

Remember Occupy?  Neither do I.  Occupy was doomed from the moment it began, for more reasons than I can fit into this post, but the big one was their hilarious insistence on "general assemblies" that accomplished nothing but the generation of factionalism and butthurt that saw Occupy dwindle from out outraged horde to a few homeless people using the idea as a means by which to keep cops from moving them along.

Why?  Because they slipped right back into the training and indoctrination they have received since childhood.  Think about it: You vote every two years, and it doesn't seem to make much difference.  So why would it make any difference if you voted in an Occupy general assembly?  The majority of people are going to vote for the ideas of the most charismatic speaker, or for the ideas they arrived with, no matter what other ideas they are given to consider.  This does not lead to effective decision-making, and the idea of having no leaders doesn't work with more than 7 domesticated primates at a time.

In short, the same failure of the US system is what killed or will kill any opposition to the system, literally or figuratively.  It's been like that since day one, but we put up with it because it keeps the wheels on.

These "messages" are what a certain type of people call "psyops", but then that person will generally start hollering about bogus moon landings or the Earth being flat.  They are that annoying species that refer to themselves as "woke", who would be, in any civilized society, humanely euthanized. 

But they aren't completely wrong.  Psyops are practiced by governments, multinationals, asymmetric warfighters, and of course the thing that we used to call Madison Avenue.    The most cost-effective ones are the asymmetrical warfare guys, who can fuck with the minds of a billion people just by taping a beheading on their smartphone.  The most overall effective ones, though, are the non-government actors that have a vested interest in making sure you STAY afraid of the terrorists who put their $2 operation up on youtube for free.  What crazy hijinks will you do to get on plane?  More to the point, what sort of background checks are you willing to go through for the purpose of buying yourselves out of those antics?

And now, thanks to Clive Bundy and people like him, anyone who points any of this out is obviously crazy, and everyone else slides over to the other side of the bus...Even if you point out that there isn't A Conspiracy, but instead loads of little conspiracies that each occupy a different niche.

No, Jill Stein isn't going to fix this.  Nothing is.  The fight is over, the future won, and it isn't done with you yet.

(more to follow tonight or tomorrow)

We here at HowlCo™ would like to extend to you ABSOLUTELY FREE a chance to SHUT THE FUCK UP¹!

If you're a Trump voter, we've known your beliefs since 75 years, and nothing about them has changed, so you shut the fuck up.  Bernie Sanders voters, it's over, so YOU shut the fuck up.  Jill Stein voters, take your meds and then shut the fuck up.  Clinton voters, you already have our votes and we can't vote twice, so nothing you can say will make the situation better, SO.  JUST.  SHUT.  UP.  Gary Johnson voters...um, you just keep doing your thing.  Loudly.  In public.  We're laughing with you.  Honest.

If you are "woke", shut the fuck up.  Seriously.  You are baby cultists, and that's boring.  If you are here to tell us taxation is theft, we are here to laugh until our guts bleed.  Some of us understand that the bills gotta get paid.  If you are an anti-vaxxer, shut up in the privacy of your own home, you plague-mongering cock-wobblers.  AND if you are here to tell us climate change isn't happening, go SHUT UP on the Marshall Islands.  While you still can.  Bring a snorkel.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are getting head from the person you secretly dream about, the person you find to be the most attractive thing since Bea Arthur.  Is there anything you can SAY that will enhance the moment, or are you just allowing a greater-than-zero chance that you will fuck it all up and they will stop and walk out the door?  Then SHUT UP.

Or perhaps you have just farted in the board room.  Everyone knows it was either you or the guy next to you.  Do you open your stupid fucking face and let the world know it was you, or do you just SHUT UP and glare at the unfortunate sitting beside you? That's right. 

We have always said that words are bad.  They are wrong.  They are an indication of a poor value set, and are most often employed by the sort of person who is selling you something².  You hate that and we hate that, and only the cumbersome rule of law prevents us both from shutting them up with a crowbar.  In fact, the only GOOD words are the ones that make fun of Vladimir Putin, given that there is a small but extant chance that he will launch and then everyone will SHUT UP LIKE HELL.

Thank you for your time.



¹  With purchase of equal or greater value.  Since this is the most valuable thing ever, it isn't actually free and we'll be sending the boys around.

²  Except for us, of course.  We are both different and exceptional.

I'm in.

where do we start?

It was a long and productive day.  I had spent most of it giving our junior electrician some on-the-job remedial training.  Three problems, two of which took less time to repair than to explain, and one absolute bastard of a problem in the solar telescope.  The solar telescope is, more or less, a mammoth computer using only technology available in 1958.  You can see my problem, here; it was so low tech, it took five minutes to walk from one component in the circuit to another, and also involved repeatedly going up and down a three hundred foot ladder.  By the end of the day, I was a winded, sweaty hot mess.

But then the day ended and everyone went home.  Well, mostly everyone.  I'm here overnight, doing some thermography with Ron (one of the senior scientists of the old school, with thinning hair and a truly glorious Einstein mustache).  Which means I am on the mountain at night.  More to the point, I was here for the opening.

The opening is one of the truly magnificent things about this place.  An hour after sunset, the domes begin to wake up, like a pack of hung over R2D2s.  There are twenty-two domes, and only two of them have people in them tonight...All of them are at least partially automated.  So all at once – because on-sky time is priceless and irreplaceable – the shutters on the domes slowly open, and begin to track whatever targets they have been assigned to observe.

Ron and I take every chance we can to stay up here to stand at the base of the four meter dome, watching machines that don't really need us go about their business.  We always do this together, because we both understand that watching this alone carries a very real risk of driving you mad.

Then the rounds of IR photography, walking around the inside of the opened four meter dome...Which under a full moon resembles nothing less than a cathedral, with a roof one hundred and twelve feet over your head, the full moon shining down through the shutter, and the very distant city lights barely visible through the louvers that are spaced around the floor level of the control room floor.  The two Berkeley astronomers are in the belly of the structure, testing the DESI prototype, so the thermal image of the telescope itself looks like a flare on an oil rig, with a blindingly white and blue spot in the middle – the targeting camera – cooled to -55 centigrade with liquid nitrogen.

You can see how this invariably becomes a religion for people who work here.

But I will flee the mountain before dawn, before it all shuts down for the day.  Watching the shutters close and the domes stop their slow rotation is the saddest thing in the world.  It is as if you are alone in the world save for these great machines...And now they too are dying on you, leaving you at the mercy of the endless primate hordes.

So then it will be a 90 minute drive, down into the sickeningly thick atmosphere, into the heat, on a deserted road that will eventually go up through Twin Peaks Pass, and then to bed.  Until the next time.

So, next week is the Kitt Peak Time Trials, the annual bicycle race UP the mountain.  12 miles at an 8-10 degree grade.  It is worth noting that we do not close the road to vehicular traffic for this, and also that we all drive like Steve McQueen (though it many cases it isn't intentional, it just happens that way).  There will be a couple of hundred bicyclists involved, and I cannot be bothered to give a shit about any of them.  This is pure stupidity, and I do not feel that should be rewarded.  Did I mention it's been non-stop thunderstorms for the last 2 weeks?  I admit that I am not opposed to sitting on the 4 meter dome wall and watching idiots in spandex pants get blasted by whatever God is in charge this week.

But that's not what this rant is about.  This rant is about the decline in the quality of the coffee in the mess hall.  They have gone from making it in delicious 5 gallon batches of crunchy goodness to running a hot water line into the back of a machine that contains a gallon of concentrated coffee sludge which then drops unevenly mixed coffee into your cup.  It might be see-through church coffee, or it might be the coffee equivalent of eating an entire bar of unsweetened baker's chocolate. 

This has not improved my mood.

You can do a lot of things to my quality of life, and I will probably ignore them.  Spy on me with drones?  That's your misfortune.  Wiretap me?  Okay, but you might want to check to make sure I'm not prank-calling the receptionist at whatever agency it is in which you work.  Tell me that my e-cig counts as a real cigarette for the purposes of where I can use it?  I'll just ignore you.  But fucking with a man's coffee is wrong.  It's low.

So while you're painfully riding your titanium racing bike up the horrible mountain road, if you see a bearded freak standing behind a giant boulder with a seven-foot pry bar, don't blame me.    It's the kitchen's fault.  I'm just trying to be all I can be.  I'm just trying to state my case.  I'm just trying to address the immoral and unethical things that have been done to me in the name of economy.

Or Kill Me.

This is in response to the weird shit that we've just witnessed.  Anyone who wants to contribute is more than welcome to do so.

Futurism has boiled itself down into two basic groups (leaving aside the wild-eyed dreamers, "transhumanists", and flat-out charlatans.)

First, you have your urbanists.  This includes urban designers, economists (who never sleep at all), ecologists, process/systems engineers, neurology types, medical doctors, that sort of thing.  They worry about stuff like how many liters of water have to be moved out of a city to keep it from drowning in its own shit.  Hurricane Sandy completely overwhelmed the pumps for all 5 boroughs, but they had the shit flowing in the right direction 13 hours later, because some bright folks had sat down ahead of time and said "what if?" 

Urbanists study cities the same way a good oncologist studies you as a patient.  Look for what's there, but also look for what is inferred to exist by what isn't there.   Urbanists require a huge amount of multi-discipline training to be effective...Looking back to the shit question, you need knowledge of fluid dynamics, mechanical knowledge of pipes and pumps, and also what storm surges you might expect in a given area.  They tend to obsess over data, to the exclusion of what's actually going on.

Strategic forecasters, on the other hand, are the guys who obsess about the newest and best ways to put a hurting on someone.  They come up with things like Swarm/AC drones and stoop targeting, stratelites, and other goodies.  This requires slightly less training, but also requires having a mind full of angry wasps and broken hypodermic needles. 

Swarm/AC.  You have one medium drone that does all kinds of processing, using things like DESI and bog-standard facial recognition software.  It selects, for example, the ring leaders in a protest, mostly by the way they walk (or stand still) in the crowd.  It then sends this info to police, etc.  Or maybe it doesn't.  Maybe it sends it to stoop.

Stoop.  Picture a cloud of drones shaped like 10 penny nails, with a little rotor on the blunt end and a disposable fuel & computer packet on the sharp end.  It receives the signal from Swarm/AT, and aims at the ringleader.  The packet and rotors drop off, and the tiny explosive in the flat end drives the drone down into the head of the victim.  Where it also explodes.

It's worth mentioning that strategic forecasters are absolute solutionists.

It may seem like you can pick out the white hats from the black hats by which form of futurism they embrace, but this isn't the case.  ISIS mostly uses an informal kind of urbanism to get their funnier ideas.  They know that cities are our "safe spaces", so most of what they do is aimed at city dwellers.  Including the beheading thing, which Cain could describe better than I can, in terms of psychological impact.

It's also worth mentioning that these people do not work for free.  They in fact have a huge price tag, because the educational requirements are immense. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/how-women-are-harassed-out-of-science/492521/?utm_source=atlfb

Normally, I don't like to post a link with no argument, but in this case the article says it all. 

I was born rotten, of this I am assured by relatives.  Nasty little bugger, and now amount of talking or spanking would drum civilization through my thick skull.  In short, a typical child in the time and place where I grew up.  There was no conflict, I was what I was.

The little bastard grew up into a monster by age 17 or so, and stayed gleefully in that condition for another 17 years.  And that's when I fucked up.  At age 34, I suddenly developed an urge to be liked.  Never mind that I lacked the skills to be liked, or the social filters that would allow me to fake those skills, I had just decided that I wanted to be approved of.  The only thing that monsters do that popular humans do is tell tales.  Just something to while away the hours between patrols or whatever else had to be done.

So it's been 13 years of awkwardness.  I can imagine that Charley's Kitchen had to be cringe-worthy.  I could feel it at the time, I just couldn't do anything to change it.  And that's not even counting Jenne (EB&G Jenn, not my wife), Charley, Alty, and others that one day decided that I could not be tolerated, for reasons that were never made clear...Or, for that matter, people who seem to like you enough, but not enough to actually respond to you.

But then you get to see a sliver of your own, personal future, and you ask yourself "Why the fuck did I want these knob ends to like me again?"  Why do I give a shit what humans think of me?  Why do I try to be something I'm not when other people are around?"  Or even, "Why was a face-to-face condescending sneer allowed to go unanswered in the appropriate, time-honored manner?"

I'm fucking tired of humans.  Outside of my immediate family, two friends whom I know have my back, and Cain (because he seems to have a keen understanding of what makes me tick, and seems interested), the rest of the species can just stagger off into its glorious, over-heated future without me.  Because let's face facts: You never really liked me anyway, and - from your point of view - there's probably good reason for that.  But, you know, fuck you anyway.

That's it.  Insert clever tag line.

I had screamed myself hoarse, but LMNO wouldn't stop igniting the damn giraffes.  His wife likes them better that way, and there's nothing he won't do for her.  But that doesn't mean he had to GRIN like that while he did it.  EoC was critiquing his style, like he was bowling or some shit, and Richter was bellowing the national anthem in the style of Roseanne Barr at the superbowl.

This is exactly why I've started abusing drugs again, you know.

queen Gogira side-stepped a flaming giraffe, her camera clicking rapid fire.  In black and white, of course.  we've talked about this.  Everything is worse in black and white, and there's nothing she likes better than making shit worse.

Paesor and Signora Paesor were haw-hawing about our quaint American customs when a giraffe veered at them and detonated.  Take that, you Caribbean swine!  Jesus isn't taking your shit today.

Then, as if it were previously arranged, the giraffes started exploding.  Richter reached into the window of his car and turned the stereo up.  It was the 1812 Overture, naturally.  Tadada da da DA da da *BOOM*, one less giraffa camelopardalis uglying up the joint.

Cain had spent the entire time hanging a pinata.  A special pinata.  A neighborhood kid nailed it on his 3rd or 4th swing, and Nigel Farage's dismembered body fell out.  won't THAT kid have tales to tell his grandchildren?   From the attic, presumably.

More as events develop.  Feel free to add your own observations.

Most of you know LMNO.  He's that Big Gay Cowboy that rides the plains, serenading his wife by playing the drum solo to I want Candy.  It's always Saturday Night™, and if you can't dance for shit, he isn't concerned.  The Lady don't mind.  And before the end of each episode, he deals with the banditos and great white sharks, his sequin shirt glittering as he smiles and deals death though his pearl-handled revolvers.

But that's in Montana.  Things are reasonable sane there...Unlike, say, West Texas.  For in West Texas, among other things, dwells the anti-LMNO.  He's the mean cattle rancher from the Prude Ranch, out to shut down those lousy sodbusters.  The anti-LMNO is that greatest of sinners:  A man who can dance, but won't.  He is Stop That.  He is Get Back to Work.  He is We Need You in For a Full Day This Saturday or don't bother coming in on Monday.

He worries about Gay folks doing their thing, and whom is in which bathroom.  He does not approve of Saturday Night™.  It's frivolous, and causes people to stop thinking about important things:  Patriotism.  God.  Mom & Apple Pie.  If he knew Bearforce1 existed, he'd have them all killed.  He is unsure if Conway Twitty is dangerous to our youth, and doesn't believe in taking chances.

So what DOES the anti-LMNO do?  Why, he externalizes his core competencies.  By which I mean, he raises cattle and sends them off to be slaughtered.  This is, after all, why ranches exist.  It is their purpose, their function.  Everything else is a distraction and should be avoided, though if the hands are feeling very bored, he might allow one of them to play the harmonica at night.  As long as that person doesn't know how to actually play it well.  Or at all.

They are Team Weak Coffee, and if they wanted music, they'd buy an iPod.

Legend has it that the two LMNOs will one day meet.  What happens then is anyone's guess.  They might mutually annihilate like matter and antimatter.  They might fight to the death.  The might have one of those horribly dangerous and destructive Charleston dance-offs.  Nobody knows. 

And if you think about it, none of the possibilities matter.  If you jump off of a cliff, is it worse to land on jagged rocks, or worse to land in molten lava?  It doesn't matter, because dude, you just jumped off of a cliff.

Or Kill Me.

So, 9 hours of driving through the desert, from Tucson to west Texas.  Shortly after we passed through the ruined and abandoned town of Victoria, we came across random desert Prada.



I have no fucking idea, so don't ask.

Driving down county 555, we found the anti-LMNO.



HET dome.  where the sex is.



Air bearing plenum, as I mentioned earlier.



Part of the mirror lab.  More later.



91 FUCKING MIRRORS



Airlock being prepped for Bethany and I.



I learned 3 things that you never say to Bethany in an airlock.  No matter how bored you get.

1.  You ever get one of those sweatballs running down the crack of your ass, but you can't do anything because you're in a Michelin Man pressure suit?  Because that's a thing.  As we speak.

2.  I can hear you farting over the intercom.

3.  Can you hear me farting?  Because that's like a lazy man's commo check.

(It's worth mentioning that even in a pressure suit, you fart non-stop when pumping down to, say, 4 Pascals of pressure)

Then she threatened to cut my suit with her wire cutters, which I felt was unreasonable escalation.

Then the HET lens, above the 91 FUCKING MIRRORS:



Calibration Telescope, pic 1



Cal scope, pic 2



HET catwalk



"The Mangler", 1940 telescope, still useful for calibrating the HET.



As for what's going on with all of this, that's next installment.  But it's like the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program added together while you bugger congress in broad daylight.  It's fucking amazing.

(There will of course be more odd behavior, but God's Toilet has run dry of revelations.)

I work in the capitol of anachronisms.  We explore the stars with impossibly futuristic instruments that are controlled by 1990s Sparx workstations, programmed in Fourth, in 60 year old buildings on land that has belonged to The Nation at least a thousand years.  Time means nothing on the mountain.

Below, you scurry in your motorcars and your steam trains, you clog the highways with your hybrid driverless cars and high speed rail; you darken the skies with your blimps and your suborbital shuttles...All depending which side of the mountain from which I am observing.

LMNO relaxes with his beautiful wife, contentedly forgetting everything that happened at the office.  This Saturday night, they're going dancing.  Life is pretty damn good, if you don't let the bastards bog you down.

Up here, the DESI and STARSHADE projects move forward.  58 years of accumulated knowledge, all coming together.  We can smell the stars from here, we're so close that we can spit to Rigel.  The fabric of the universe is our canvass.  We can do anything, anything at all, given funding and enough skilled personnel.

Payne is dead in 99.9995% of all universes, and just keeps popping back up in the other .0005.  Richter refined his art to a point the size of the Planck Constant.  Faust gets an upgrade from the server and staggers out into daylight to preach the word.  Trivial can't exist in your reality, so calm the fuck down.  You can trust me on this, I'm not like the others.

Somewhere else, I'Itoy has woken up because those crazy foreigners are finally doing something interesting for once.  I am not the only one to realize this.  The Odham are skittish, and fuck if they're going to talk to ME about it.  I can't blame them, I am not one of them, and this is definitely family business.   

President Television learns to stop worrying; he is free.  P3NT realizes that there's really no reason to continue being completely human anymore.  Queen Gogira is trying to tell you that there's a perfectly good universe right next door, but you're too busy staring in horror at this one.

Everything is changing, and I alone have survived to tell thee.

Lighting flashed nearby, startling me so badly that I almost fell off of the rock I was sitting on.  It was pouring rain but I had planned for that and was in a lean-to made with an old army poncho liner and some elastic tie-downs.  I shrugged, and woofed up the cactus I had eaten.

Now, it is important to understand that everything that follows was driven by that cactus.  Because when the lightning flashed again, the world went split-screen, and I was shown many things.

Behold America; a beast with 327 million heads, rolling over the landscape, absorbing everything it touches, and crapping out homogenous strip malls and casinos and LED billboards.  The beast sends its teenagers out with rifles when foreigners or malcontents object to being assimilated.  We are the Borg, except without the leather bondage gear.

The lightning flashed again, and for a split second I could see posterity watching me:  A starveling crowd of Anne Franks, staring at me from across the lake.

Isaac wrote the calculus, giving us the language of the gods.  The operating code of the universe, which he set down on paper in between bouts of writing vicious religious tracks, and bashing on Hook, whom he hated as a rival.  Isaac was a very good hater.  Albert was not a hater, but he took Isaac's work and told us all some very important things.  The most important was "matter tells space how to bend, and space tells matter how to move".  Most people took Albert's work as a collection of Thou Shall Nots, but that is stupid and wrong.   Uncle Albert just showed us a framework of how things couldn't be done.  It was up to us to infer solutions by looking at the gaps in Albert's framework.

Despite the temperature falling due to the unceasing rainstorm, I was sweating heavily.  I could no longer see the Anne Franks.  Were they walking around the lake toward me?  Was I to pay for America's refusal to grant that brilliant child asylum?  They/she looked pretty damn hungry.

America thinks of itself as a republic, but it has always been an empire.  It was always intended to be an empire.  The doctrine of manifest destiny is as clear a statement of intent as anyone could ever ask for.  People were already living here, but The Beast knew how to deal with that.  Sicken them with alcohol and smallpox and kill all the buffalo.  Pretty soon the indigenous folk are formed into neat blocks of tofu, slowly decaying on the reservation.  I'Itoy watched all of this, I think, but his followers had all been told to worship another God, one that lived way the hell over in Rome.  He could do nothing; nobody had asked him to help.

Lightning flashed again, and the Anne Franks were all around my lean-to, staring at me.  They are the studio audience.  The laugh track was unbearable.  Please clap.  No, wait, please for the love of God, don't clap.  Go away.  I wasn't even born when they killed you.

Some astronomers and physicists now understand that the holes in Albert's framework are loopholes in reality.  They know a Gordian Knot when they see one, and if they can't do what they want because the universe won't let them, they'll just bugger off into some other universe to achieve their goals.  If reality won't bend, get a new reality.  Others think that the above scientists are hunting snarks.  The universe is what it is, and is all that exists.   I tend to believe that the latter group are afraid of the idea, both because it sets everything we know on its ear, and also because where there are snarks, there might also be boojums.  Some of those boojums involve the fear of ridicule, and some might be a vague idea that these other universes might be really, really bad for us.

"The most wonderful thing I can think of," the Anne Franks said, "Is that you never have to wait before doing good in the name of humanity."  They continue staring, and it occurs to me that I haven't actually done a lot of good.  No, I was for most of my life a perfect example of The Beast.  I would of course decry How Awful It All Was, but you can't lie to Ann Frank...For when evil men proposed to do evil things, I stood by, having found no goodness inside me.  Instead there was only mischief and a terrible mirth.

Having consumed the North American tribes, The Beast looked outward.  A number of tiny wars followed, mostly in the name of Standard Oil and United Fruit.  Then a big war came along.  A different beast, which threatened our hegemony.  The world burned for a few years.  And then there was The Bomb.  The dangerous thing about the bomb wasn't the destructive capacity of the devices themselves, or even the threat of extinction via nuclear warfare.  No, the bomb instead vaporized doubt.  Before the bomb, we felt that we could do anything.  After the bomb, we KNEW we could do anything.

Anne Frank looks at me.  "You are sick," she says, "You have a ball of hatred and bitterness in your guts.  If you don't get rid of it, it will poison you and you will die."  Who knows?  She might even be right...But I am what I am.  I say so.
"Nonsense," she continues, "Everyone can change.  Your reality tunnel is a storehouse of petty slights, betrayals both real and perceived, and old horrors from years gone by."  She gave a shy smile.  "All you have to do is turn around and walk back out of that particular tunnel."

The Beast began to drive the scientists, and the curve of knowledge increased and increased until it is now damn near vertical.  The Beast has realized, at an unconscious level, that it has fouled its own nest and had damn well better find another one.  But something strange is also happening.  The Beast remains a giant stupid pile of evil, but the people are changing, largely if not entirely due to the very same technology.  Jesus hasn't saved us, so we'd better damn well do it ourselves.

"But not you," Anne Frank says, "You refuse to change."  I tried to explain.  I tried to tell her how I CAN'T just walk away from what I consider to be righteous gripes...But she was gone.  I felt a pang of regret as I felt the cactus losing its hold on me.  What if she was right?

Balls.  I get up and shamble toward the truck, laughing at the very idea.  I am the Good Reverend Roger.  Redemption is not on the table.. 

It occurred to me as I got in the truck that I'Itoy hadn't made an appearance, despite loads of chemical assistance to make sure that I might at least think it would happen.  How very strange.

Apparently, only I'Itoi is allowed to shit in his toilet.  And I am to stop spelling his name wrong.  This is what He told me...Or, perhaps, what Merck told me via heroic doses of Lorazapam.  I spend a lot of time down at the lake, 1039 feet below my office.  My Odham employees just shake their heads.  Another white boy who made the mistake of listening to a God with a 400 year grudge, going all to pieces.

But why not?  Listening to white folks hasn't exactly been good for me.  They snarl and they babble and they say nothing at all, while my blood pressure makes my eyes bulge out.  They put small bombs in Target bathrooms, which is totally not terrorism, but – as stated by two different news outlets – a "criticism".

This is the church, this is the steeple, get out of line and we'll kill all of You People.

They argue over whether it's better to elect an outright Nazi to the office of the presidency, if that's what it takes to show how upset they are that democracy means the winner is selected by the MOST votes, not THEIR vote.  Their sense of exceptionalism has been offended, and they can't even blame a brown person (but they will anyway).

Gods have never understood why people get SO upset when they are given what they ask for.  This is to them both puzzling and offensive, and is exactly why they hardly ever answer the phone anymore.

I'Itoi, however, is a "big brother" god, not an "all father" god.  He understands that we're going through a phase, and that we'll get over it in another hundred thousand years or so.  Even if he is selfish about his bathroom.  But then again, so was MY brother when we were teenagers.  Even after what we did to his people, he doesn't want to destroy us.  He just wants to fuck us up real bad.

Interstellar travel research is smiled upon.  Get in your rocket ships and go away, whitey.  Then one day, WE will come looking for YOU.  Father Kino?  Who the fuck was HE?

I am all about this.  I am all about a god that brays his laughter in your face when you're dumb enough to believe him.  I am NOT claiming to be a shaman or anything like that; I am unqualified for many reasons, the least of which being that I know almost nothing about Odham culture or religion.  Nor would I want to be one if I could.  But if he's going to hand out bad advice and prophecies of doom, who the fuck am I to "close my ears"?  I remember how Moses wound up. 

Besides, this is more of a Book of Job thing.  I walk upon the Earth and about it.  I am The Good Reverend Roger, and if you see me coming, bubba, you better run.

Or Kill Me.   

The world is getting pretty dark and weird again.  Neither primary is over, but the candidates have been chosen.  Ugliness and failure dog our steps in all of our endeavors as a nation, despite the fact that there's nothing wrong now that wasn't wrong two years ago.  Even people who hate Obama fear the end of his presidency, because when he goes, sanity goes with him.  The house of representatives is addicted to him, as is Fox News.  He is their drug, and they don't know what they'll do with themselves when he's gone.

The Bernie bots are now totally out of control, going into frenzies every time Trump comes into town.  One time they got so excited, they attacked each other.  Clinton smiles like she grew up in Innsmouth, and coos to the Sanders fans, waiting for them to come join the fold.  Meanwhile, the Nazi Cheetoh gets weirder and nastier when he should be moving to the center.  He masturbates on live television during interviews, yanking his ancient penis until nothing comes out but bloody foam.  It's gotten so bad that Lyndsey Graham has threatened to change parties.

This comes to no surprise to me, as I can gaze into Lltoy's toilet and see it all coming.    I have taken to chemical assistance to get me through that awful business.  I am armed with brain-smashing pharmaceuticals that will keep the Manitou away, or whatever it is that these Southwestern natives use as hitmen.

Cain will move back to Australia, to teach people in Melbourne how to speak English.  They will reject his preaching and devour him like Captain Cook, but the joke will be on them, as they will ingest fatal levels of British food that he has been accumulating in his arteries.

I've got snakes made out of smoke with obsidian axes to the South, just waiting for their moment.  The mighty whitey is staggering under the load of his own entitlement, and Atzlan has learned to be patient.  When the day comes, there will be hard reckoning in Tempe and Orange County, and none of us will miss them.

Paesior and Signor Paesior will spawn a new breed of Kiwi, and New Zealand will become a place of dread that not even the Deep Ones will mess with.   Mightly Cthulu is in his house in R'ley, with the doors locked and dead-bolted, one tentacle on his life alert pendant and another on his smartphone.  He will roar in fear, but the police will not save him.

This is what we've waited for – at least what we say we've waited for.  This is the Face of Chaos.  This is the post-American century, this is the new millennium, and ain't no parking on the dance floor, bubba.

Angela will preside over the San Diego Museum, and those that touch the exhibits will be brought to her, never to be seen again. There really is no choice, in an age where Texans break fingers off of statues in Florence, Italy, because they are special snowflakes and they just had to handle the merchandise.  Skulls will line the marble steps, as a warning to the others.

Praying will do no good.  No self-respecting God would drag us out of this mess, because we DEMANDED it.  We lined up in front of the carnival barkers and PAID for it.  And Gods, being smart fellas, won't interfere with monkeys in rut.  This is not their first barbeque, and they know we'd just fuck it all up again.   Remember the golden calf?  Neither do I.

Cramulus gets diabetes III, and has to have amputations.  They slice a little more off each time, like deli meat, until he is kidnapped by Los Angles thugs for use in nugget porn.  He is not heard to complain, given that he costars with what's left of Chloe Kardashian, who by that date is nothing more than a pair of enormous breasts attached to silicon lips by nerve ganglia.

Whether you want to admit it or not, these are the signs of our times.  They are written out clearly in every billboard.  They are read aloud to us on commercial breaks from Preacher.  They are in the stains of bus seats and carried on the wind on the farts of the WalMart people. 

Ignore them at your peril.

Or Kill Me.

This mountain is wrong.  Not bad, just wrong.  We are just North of Baboquivari (pronounced boe-bah-hee-vray), where the Llttoy (ee-toy), the Tohono O'odham God lives.  On our mountain, we have his "punch bowl", or so The Nation tells us.

But it doesn't look like a punchbowl.  No.  I don't even think the ancient Nation drank punch.  I think it looks like a toilet bowl.  The Nation, however, says that if you look into the lake at the bottom of the canyon, you can see visions.  Bear in mind that their religious beliefs dictate that Llttoy sent white people to them so they'd have someone to play jokes on.

However, the visions thing is true, even if I am basically staring into God's toilet bowl (pffft.  I live in Tucson.  Impress me.)  And I don't even need drugs, thought that won't necessarily stop me, either, because doing it straight is hard on the nerves.

LMNO, in a fit of prophecy, is holding his briefcase tightly against his chest.  He's older, and his hairline has receded.  He hasn't been out to the GAY BAR in longer than he can remember.  He starts to mumble to himself...Not like a crazy man, just plumb wore out.  "I can be anything I want to be."

Things don't look good for whitey.  Things in fact look really bad.  The snake is eating itself from the tail up.  Bad omens, filthy tales of failure as the best possible outcome.  It's worth mentioning that there isn't a single coyote on the mountain, but God damn those ravens are huge.  Bigger than the biggest parrots I've ever seen.  They are cheeky, and absolutely unafraid of men.

Junkenstein got the contract of his life.  He is to demolish the constitutional monarchy, all the way down to the House of Commons; Lord Protector Cameron is paying a pretty coin.  And it's not as if Junkie has any sort of loyalty to his fellow subjects.  They were dumb, and now they will get exactly what they asked for.

It's kind of like the ghost dance, but the white devil is doing it to himself.  And herself.  Posterity is a cattle car full of emaciated corpses, watching the play unfold.  They do not clap.  Please clap.

Queen Gogira and her friends man the barricades, as the newly-formed Morality Brigades™ march towards them, stun batons clashing on shields.  She clutches her can of oven cleaner, determined to give at least one of them a farewell present that he's never going to forget, before they haul her down off of the improvised roadblock.  Remember how fun the FIRST pride parade was?  Well, this is the LAST parade, and it's going to be a riot.

I'd tell you to pray, but it wouldn't do any good.  You earned this.  You in fact stood on the roof with your underwear on your head and DEMANDED it.  And now it has arrived...And so has the invoice.

More later.  My fingers feel like tiny sausages and typing is a chore.  And it's lunch time, so I'm off to the lake.

Or Kill Me.

You will not be saved by Bernie or Bust.  You will not be saved by making America great again.  You will not be saved by Hillary Clinton, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Jill Stein or Whichever whacko they have running for the libertarian party.

The ones that might be able to save us know enough about the system that they won't bother.  The other clowns, fools, and cheap hucksters are looking at the situation and seeing what they want to see, and we know how that ends up.

You will not be saved by single-payer health care or overturning Roe v Wade.  It may take a village to raise a child, but the village is poor as dirt and the kids are all on meth.  Quantitative easing didn't work on the economy, so let's apply it to student debt.  Everyone should vote, but the delegates don't care.  You will not be saved by the free market, because the free market doesn't exist and never will.

All of these ideas will fail because they run counter to two million years of monkey programming.

You will not be saved by the impossible drive, or the "poof, you're there" drive.  You will not be saved by 800 billion "Earth-like" planets in the Milky Way.  "Earth-like" isn't "Earth", even if we CAN get there, and just one tiny factor of an alien ecology could doom any number of colonists, unless you had time to do it right, and time is the one thing we do not have and cannot buy with our wealth.  You will not be saved by Mars, because Mars is a death trap and living like a mole on another planet isn't "surviving".  In any case, you and I won't be going, anyway.

There's nowhere to run.  7.5 billion primates gotta take a shit.  Here it comes.

You will not be saved by Jesus, because that's the wrong kind of saving, and it's probably the wrong kind of Jesus, anyway.  You will not be saved by Yahweh, Illtoy, Buddha, Allah, or Vishnu.

What made you think that was even on their agenda?

In short, you will not be saved, so relax; It's only slapstick.

So while you huddle among your possessions, waiting in terror for the day the lights go out and the faucet stops running and things get just a wee bit out of hand, remember the words that I - your spiritual adviser - told you, lo these many moons ago, and just dance like hell.  Do the Lindy when Trump takes office.  Do the Twist when we break off relations with everyone.  Do the Charleston in the smoking ruins, to the beat of the car alarms and the screams of the horribly burned.  Do the Running Man as you are shot for dinner by rogue remnants of the national guard.

This is, obviously, not a good era for people who aren't serious about having a good time.

Or Kill Me.

I do not agree, therefore I shall not share. 

That doesn't just apply to Facebook.  I'm not sharing anything with anyone on any medium until such time as I find something with which I can agree. Get your own bag.  There is no room in my beautiful car for you, take the bus.

I do not agree, therefore I shall not participate.

Though I might come by and accidentally all over your Tea Party or your Target bathroom protest.  Preach at me while I'm buying underwear, will you?  Come here you fucked up primate you, I know a better place for that bible.

I do not agree, therefore I shall actively oppose you.

No, I don't want to help defund the Arizona education system for Jesus via proposition 123.  If you think you can take back this clipboard full of signatures, you just try it, buddy.  There's got to be 600 names on this petition.  You should go for it.

I do not agree, therefore I shall DESTROY YOU.

I ran over your tiny house.  Sorry.  I got my carbon footprint all over your vaccine-free lifestyle.  What can I say?  I'm a bad person.

Fact is, I don't agree with much.  I am a contrarian by nature, really, and if you want me to agree, convince me.  Tell me why it is in my best physical or moral interests to jump on board that train of yours.  Explain to me why I should wear that uniform.  Tell me in no uncertain terms why I should help make sure Those People don't take over the day to day operations of this glorious nation of ours.  Point out to me why I should make America great again.

Because, you know, I'm not inclined to help, really.  I'm more about lighting the entire thing on fire and kicking it down the stairs.  I come not to "jake" Caesar, but to bury him.  And I think you know what the back-fill has to be.  And I've been into the curry again.

I am a wrecker and a walking glitch and a bit of a cunt, by anyone's standards.  Not because you earned it (you did), not because you deserve it (you do), but because I do not agree.

Or Kill Me.

Everyone know about Schrodinger's cat.  You stuff the cat in a box with a device that is exactly 50% likely to be lethal in a specified amount of time, and when that time is up, the cat is both alive and dead until you look (or neither alive nor dead until you look, it's the same fucking thing).  What I am here to propose is Schrodinger's Primate.  What this is, is the same thing as the cat (box, 50% lethal doodad, etc), except that you don't give a shit about the specified length of time.  Nor do you care about which way things turned out.  You just fuck off and have a beer or two, and try to forget the annoying thumping noises and pleas for mercy coming out of the box.

Because, let's face it, You don't like that primate and I don't like that primate and he can stay in an undetermined state until enough time intervals go by that his odds of survival aren't worth computing.  The challenge here is obvious.  You need a big enough box for 7.5 billion primates.

But wait!  We DO have such a box!

Five of the Solomon Islands were reported yesterday to now be underwater, due to rising ocean levels, in turn due to climate change...While the same monkeys deny that any of it is happening, because they are special and God wouldn't do that to them.  Having read the old testament, I am reasonably sure they are talking about a different God...Because the God they THINK they are worshiping has never been shy about killing off primates. 

I have actually had a teabagger tell me that this is Oceana's problem, that the water rising over there doesn't necessarily mean anything over here is wrong, and that Those People should just move.  I shit you not.  Basic physics isn't a thing for the sort of people who still deny the elephant in the living room, and because of this they will all die.  And whether or not anyone else survives, billions of dead po'buckers will give me at least a sense of satisfaction, and a little time to do the I Told You So mocking jig at them before I, too, croak.

Or Kill Me.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/05/06/meet_can_you_not_the_pac_dedicated_to_dissuading_straight_white_men_from.html



I was halfway into it before I realized that it wasn't actually satire.

After last Tuesday, the democratic primary is more or less a done deal.  Barring an outright miracle (like Sanders winning ALL of California), Hillary Clinton will be the nominee, and I am going to have to vote for her.  I am less than thrilled about this, given her comments towards those of us who voted for Sanders in the primary.  But I'm going to vote for her anyway, because I can't see leaving every non-straight, non-white protestant I know behind (my kid included), just because I personally am - more or less - immune to most of the effects of a republican victory in November.

So at this point, I have to consider the "Bernie or Bust" crowd to be my enemies.  It's not hard to do, between their tantrums and their insistence that four years of pain would do us all a world of good.  No, that sort of shit makes me hate them almost as bad as the Clinton supporters who have spent the last 6+ months actively making me hate them, though for very different reasons.

I am uninterested in this big fucking elephant in the living room.  I am apathetic towards it entirely.  I will go vote the straight democratic ticket, then I will go home and hate the democratic party, from Hillary and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz all the way down to the shitbags that decided to tell me WHAT weeks or months ago.  I am doing this because I can tell the difference between "bad" and "worse", not because I have seen the light or failed to notice a rigged election or three.  I can look past all of that to see my youngest kid.  For whatever reason, the bernie-bots cannot.  They would prefer Trump over Clinton, because they are having what amounts to a screeching tantrum.

You may notice that I am in the slightly bizarre position of hating every single faction in an election.  I am of course okay with that.

That being said, it's also worth mentioning that where you get elephants, you get lots and lots of elephant poop.  One of the mighty stacks of said poop has red hair and a beard. and is snarling at you, saying:

"If you hated on me because I voted for Sanders OR because I am willing to face a few stark realities and vote for Clinton...If that was all it took to call me a "Clinton shill" or a "racist" or "part of the problem", then do not bother trying to reconnect with me following the general election.  No, instead you should go find new friends, because I am not nor will be your friend after what's been going on.  Not because I'm so terribly butthurt about the election, but because you don't meet my standards of friendship.  I have your contempt and you have my hate and so far everyone seems to be happy with the situation.  So fuck off."

Or kill me, dirtbags.


(This is being cross-posted at a political board on FB, and more is on the way)

The Coming Weird Times didn't make you crazy.  The New World Order didn't make you crazy.  Crazy is your default state; it is the new normal.  After all, crazy is the only thing that works when wearing shoes at the airport is outlawed and children are sold ballistic blankets to go to school.  Craziness is a survival trait, and paranoia is just the condition of having enough of the facts to form a decision.

What's awesome about the shoes business is that not only is it an admission of defeat in the face of terrorism, you can ALSO arrange "pre-screening" in advance to avoid all that business.  Said pre-screening consists of a fee...So it's not about making you safe, it's about showing the mob who the peasants are, and who the "quality people" are.

The blanket, now...It costs $400 after markdown (was originally $700).  A cheap handgun in Dallas, Texas runs from $20 (has drops on it) to $100 (new).  Call ammunition another $50.  So, a class of thirty needs $12,000 worth of ballistic blanket that may or may not protect them, and a school shooter needs $150, max.  To further that, protecting a school would cost about $425,000 vs that $150, and this in a system in which teachers are expected to pay for classroom supplies out of their own meager paycheck.  And that's all leaving aside the REAL lesson to the kids:  "In this world it is normal that complete strangers will come to try to kill you."

Assuming the police don't, of course.

Our technology is up, but the fabric of our society is in tatters.  Is it any wonder that people try to simplify their lives in foolish ways?  Is it any wonder that science is rejected in favor of "alternative medicine"?  Or that the best way to deal with geo-sats demonstrating the ocean level rising is to turn off the geo-sats?  Don't laugh too hard at that last one, because how do we deal with Afghanistan, the longest-running war in our history?  Oh, yeah.  We turn the TV off.

We have been conditioned to hate smart people, yet demand the things those smart people develop for us.  We have been conditioned to holler "buy American!" in the same exact breath we use to explain that off-shoring happens because the blue collar class is greedy and wants to take money off of the shareholders.  We have drug commercials on TV telling us they can make our heads feel better, with a mild risk of anal bleeding, stroke, and death.

Is there any doubt at all as to why people are crazy?  There is no "grand conspiracy", just a combination of greed and stupidity that has demoralized our population until someone like Ammon Bundy thinks that seizing a BIRD SANCTUARY is somehow a good idea, while the rest of the country huddles in their homes waiting for the crazy to go away and could we have our 1980s back please?  That's particularly ironic, given that all this shit really got rolling in the 1980s, but again, popular culture depicts the serene soccer mom as being a very 1980s housewife, white button-up shirt and capris and everything.  Mostly because very few people – comparatively – remember the 50s, and the current crop decision-makers grew up in the Reagan years.

This also explains those God-awful nostalgia memes that bombard social media 300 times a day.

So there they are, 47%+ of the population, wanting to pray in a candidate to take them back to those "great days".  Well, America, praying won't do you any good, not really, because you asked for this.  You demanded it.  You thought you were just being outraged or maybe pissing off your local hippies, but what actually happened is that laws got made...And now you piss & moan because 6 year olds are being arrested on felony charges for acting out in class, or Kansas has decided to put an actual bounty on transgender persons using the "wrong" bathroom.

Well, I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I'm happy that you have built this.  This is the future I was promised.  This is the time foretold.  And I have no sympathy, because, well, you earned it.

Or Kill Me