SAM, I AM

To follow up on my recent post about Starfleet Academy, last night's episode, "Series Acclimation Mil", was fantastic. It wasn't a perfect story - a few filler scenes could have been shortened, but any episode that makes me tear-up three separate times is a winner in my book. Seriously, if you love (or even like) Trek, especially the golden age of the mid-nineties, watch this one. So good.

Who are you again?

Melania Trump, today:

"We need to unify," Trump told "Fox and Friends." "I'm calling for unity. I know my husband, the president had a great call yesterday with the governor and the mayor. And they are working together to make it peaceful and without riots. I'm against the violence, so please, if you protest, protest in peace."

Why don't you talk to the husband you can't stand, you plagiarizing, vacuous, mannequin? He's directly responsible for ALL of the violence in our country right now, especially in Minnesota. He could end it with a single phone call.

Yes, let's all unify behind the fascists. What a fantastic idea.

Fuck off.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

For the record, I'm really enjoying Starfleet Academy on Paramount+. I like the characters, the setting is unique, and I really appreciate the tone, which is closer to the best of the modern Trek shows, the irreverent, loving tribute, Lower Decks, than it is to traditional Star Trek. I'm not a fan of current Trek runner Alex Kurtzman, but this show is working for me.

Of course, conservative Trek fans, like Stephen Miller(!), the Joseph Goebbels of the Trump Regime, have been bitching about it. They dismiss all modern Trek as "woke" because they don't like the focus on strong women and POC characters (the Chancellor of the Academy and her Number One are both women). Of course, Star Trek has always been "woke", i.e. embracing human rights, inclusion, equity, diversity and equality. Did these assholes ever watch the show? Seriously, what part of Trek do they actually like? Its very philosophy is in direct opposition to MAGA.

Anyway, really enjoying Academy, even more so because it's making MAGA sociopaths uncomfortable. To paraphrase Wreck-It Ralph, "If those psychotic douchebags hate it, how bad can it be?"

This Modern World - Late January, 2026

From Tom:

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Neediest boy ever needs his binky

This is just an excuse for his warmongering, but clearly demonstrates the broken thinking of the giant diaper baby who squats in the Oval Office.

Trump wants recompense from Denmark for NOT getting the Nobel Peace Prize from the independent Nobel Committee in Norway. And this slight is so big in his eyes that he's quickly moving to destroy NATO because of his infinite, childish need for validation (and Putin's orders). Apparently being gifted a medal he didn't earn isn't enough for him. Nothing ever is for this bloated mass of Big Macs and sociopathy.

In related news, every time I hear or read a story about this, they say that Trump is angry after he was "snubbed" for the prize. This is infuriating.

Trump wasn't SNUBBED. He didn't stop "8 wars PLUS". This warmongering asshole, who has attacked several countries over the past year while his MAGA Gestapo is attacking American citizens and legal immigrants, did not qualify for the prize because of his own sanctioned violence. He deserves the Nobel Peace Prize as much as I deserve an Oscar.

And the idea that he has done more for NATO than any other person is ludicrous.

This is always appropriate: 

How to say you're a fucking moron without actually saying it

The Florida Panthers recently won the top award in whatever sport they play, and so were invited to the White House.

Look at these chuckleheads.

Not a lick of sense among them. They better check to make sure they returned home with the actual Stanley Cup and not a cheap fake.

I'm not sure why, but it reminded me of this, which I'm sure aged really well for these guys, assuming they survived.

The name Legion of Doom was unfortunately already taken

Are you an up-and-coming country that wants a shortcut to power and respect? Do you have $1 billion and no sense of honor or dignity? Are you just extremely gullible? Then you're in luck!

Because right now you have a historic opportunity to join "the Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place."

Membership is now open for the Donald J. Trump Board of Peace! 

(No joke. This is absolutely something he announced this week).

The terms are that it's free to join for three years, with an invitation by Trump, but for the billion bucks, you get unlimited membership, with all the privileges that brings, probably including the mini-bar at Mar-a-Lago. Other terms include Trump being the Chair, setting the agenda, and being solely responsible for all the $1 billion contributions. Also, member states will be able to vote on board decisions, but Trump will have sole authority to approve them. Sounds perfectly fair. Who needs the U.N. when this will be chaired by the most peace-loving guy on the planet?

So far confirmed invitations include Jordan, Argentina, Egypt, Paraguay, Pakistan, Greece, Turkey, Albania, Hungary and Cyprus. What an absolutely brilliant list of freedom-loving countries!

And if you're worried that things might go astray before all the member countries are sorted out, don't worry! They've already got support from these superstars! 

The White House said on Friday that the founding members of the executive board would include U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, World Bank chief Ajay Banga and Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff. Also named on the board are Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, U.S. billionaire Marc Rowan and Robert Gabriel, a national security adviser in the U.S.  

Wow! They got Kushner! What are the chances?

Anyway, if this does anything but funnel billions of dollars directly into Trump's pocket, then I clearly have skipped to an alternate universe where Trump isn't 100% a psychotic, narcissistic, demented, hateful, stupid, rapist, criminal, grifting, pedophile. Maybe in this new universe, he's just 99.99% of those things.

Support, Admiration and Respect

To the people and state of Minnesota. What you're going through is terrifying and I thank you for your courage in the face of the United States' fascist government. I know you didn't choose this, but you have responded with bravery, kindness, imagination, and dignity.

Get ready for some stupid shit

Trump is meeting with Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado today. Expect her to give Trump her recently won Nobel Peace Prize in an attempt to flatter him to make her the legitimate President of Venezuela.

Expect Trump to accept it, as if he had really won it, and then do nothing for her.

It's basically a cynical exercise all the way down and should be a humiliation for all concerned.

Crime and Punishment

MAGA at all levels are soooo bad at made up explanations.

"The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement," Trump told reporters on Air Force One after being asked if he thought the officer's use of force was warranted. "You saw that. They were harassing, they were following for days and for hours, and I think, frankly, they're professional agitators. And I'd like to find out and we are going to find out who's paying for it, with their brand new signs and all these different things. But these are professional agitators and law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff. What that woman and what her friend ... were doing to law enforcement ... is outrageous."

None of that is true. It's the usual gaslighting.

Oh, and:

Being disrespectful to "law enforcement" is NOT a crime punishable by DEATH in the United States, you stupid, demented fascist.

Excuses

Now that the inevitable cold-blooded murder of an unarmed American citizen at the hands of an ICE agent has occurred, MAGA cannot justify it fast enough.

The victim was Renee Nicole Good, a 37 year old mother of three, and every statement below was offered as JUSTIFICATION for her murder.

Trump:  She ran over the Agent so he shot her in self-defense.

Trump:  Her behavior was terrible.

Kristi Noem:  She was a domestic terrorist.

Kristi Noem:  She was harassing and impeding law enforcement operations.

Paul Sperry (rightwing "reporter"):  She once donated to Bernie Sanders.

JD Vance:  She was a deranged leftist who tried to run him over.

Jessie Waters:  She had pronouns in her bio and was a lesbian.

Mark Hemingway (rightwing "reporter"):  She shouldn't have been there to begin with.

Rep. Mark Fine (R-FL):  “If you impede the actions of our law enforcement as they seek to repel foreign invaders from our country, you get what's coming to you. I do not feel bad for the woman that was involved.”

Multiple videos from the scene showed that she didn't run anyone over. The agent placed himself at the corner of her vehicle, and when she tried to follow conflicting instructions to drive away from the scene, instead of stepping aside, the agent opened up, shooting three times at her head at point blank range.

This was murder. This bloodthirsty, probably untrained, and obviously cowardly, agent decided without any justification that this woman should die and her six-year old be orphaned. He undoubtedly got a thrill out of ending her life.

MAGA at all levels condone it and are gaslighting Americans to cover up the crime.

There had better be some Nuremberg-level accountability at the end of this nightmare or we have all failed (even more than we already have).

A shocking development no one would ever believe!

Noooo! I can't believe the winner of the FIFA Peace Prize, one of the top contenders for the Nobel Peace Prize would just invade a sovereign country like that! And here I thought Kamala Harris was the candidate most likely to get us into war. Who would have thought it?!?

Thanks, MAGA. And now we get to watch you spin on a dime to embrace America in a manufactured war. But at least President Bonespurs invaded Venezuela for the best of reasons. ::checks notes:: To steal their oil! Fantastic! Truly a great reason.

To be fair, regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan worked really well for George W. Bush, so I'm sure it'll be okay.

Pretty but deadly

I caught the opening scene of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith this morning. The sequence features a cool race by Anakin and Obi-Wan through a huge space battle with hundreds of ships over the Republic capitol planet of Coruscant. 20 years later and it still looks great.

What occurred to me as I watched this scene for maybe the hundredth time is that this attack is going to devastate Coruscant for years. All the wreckage from those ships exploding in orbit is going to rain down on a planet that is one giant city. Thousands will be killed by toxic, deadly metal falling from the sky. 

Furthermore, if Coruscant has an orbital satellite system, it will be damaged or destroyed from the clouds of debris orbiting the planet. This is a phenomenon known as Kessler syndrome and one which we're worried about here on Earth, as we allow billionaire morons to shoot thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit to make themselves even more money.  

In short, they won the battle, but this is pretty much a catastrophe for Coruscant and its people.

Nazi Chic

Greg Bovino is a senior official in the United States Border Patrol. You'll be happy to know that he does love him some cool uniforms, as is the culture at the Border Patrol.

Here he is modeling a fashionable jacket and dark uniform.  Hmm, what does that remind me of?

And here he is on Newsmax!

That outfit, especially the belt, reminds me of something too! Wish I could figure it out!

Oh, hey, apropos of nothing, here's a picture of Adolf Hitler.

Hey, wait a minute! Just a coincidence, I'm sure.

Donald Trump is Losing

Here's an excellent article that just might give you a sense of hope, right now when we need it.

In the first months of the year, Trump seemed to be on quite the march. It seemed many days like the United States was careening toward fascism — and, indeed, I still believe that sometime in August we crossed a never-before-crossed invisible line into an authoritarian state — but since the summer, Trump’s efforts to cement his corrupt rule have faltered. Whether traditional American democracy and rule-of-law will return in the future remains very much an open question, but I’m more hopeful in recent weeks than I have been all year.

(And this was written before the world's worst person attacked a beloved murder victim and made it all about himself.)

Go read the whole thing. I guarantee it will make you feel better.

Blog Update

Hey folks.

Life taking precedence at the moment. Nothing personally horrible, just busy. And the shitshow from the White House is more of the same wearing, demoralizing, garbage fire. That's not going anywhere.

Talk at you soon.

Happy Veteran's Day

I can't speak of the 19th century Presidents, but there hasn't been one in my lifetime who held those who serve/served their country in the American military in such open disdain.

The Trump administration said Monday that it expects the Department of Veterans Affairs to lose nearly 30,000 employees by October due to a mix of resignations, early retirements and attrition amid a hiring freeze.

The agency said the mass exodus would “eliminat[e] the need for a large-scale reduction-in-force,” or RIF, which was expected to cut the agency’s headcount by as much as 80,000. The administration appears to have recognized that the prospect of a RIF has alarmed many veterans who rely on the VA for their care and raised concerns even among Republican lawmakers.  Link

Lovely. But at least billionaires got a tax cut, right?

Implausible Deniability

This is seriously fucked up

Who had "tear down parts of the historic White House, in violation of the law" on their Trump bingo card?

Stupid bastard.

Maf is hard

Dr. Oz, in the Oval Office, talking about a hypothetical discount drug plan.

“you’ll notice, these are discounted from $242 to $10. I don’t know what the math is on that. we can’t even calculate it. it’s a lot. it’s too high to calculate without a more studied approach.”

MAGA are the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet.

We are the dumbest country on the planet

The US is investigating yet another stupid conspiracy theory.

Academics cite Wallace’s story as one of the catalysts behind a fringe concept that has spread among adherents to the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement and is gaining traction at the highest levels of the federal government. Its treatment as a serious issue underscores that under President Donald Trump, unscientific ideas have unusual power to take hold and shape public health policy.

...

HHS is expected to appoint a special government employee to investigate climate and weather control, according to Gray Delany, former head of the agency’s MAHA agenda, who said he drafted the memo. The agency has interviewed applicants to lead a “chemtrails” task force, said Jim Lee, a blogger focused on weather and climate who Delany said helped edit the memo, which Lee confirmed.

Of course, "chemtrails" are just water vapor from jet engines at high altitude. They've been around since the invention of jet engines and are NOT harmful or intentional. Their existence is just physics. (Vapor trails often gave away the position of our bombers in WWII. If the military could have gotten rid of them, they would have, and they certainly wouldn't have deliberately sprayed something from the engines to make our planes more visible.)

It should be noted that these same people WANT to continue using gasoline car engines, which *actually* spew a whole bunch of toxic chemicals into our atmosphere at ground level and have known harmful health effects. 

Also, if "chemtrails" are under the control of the Federal government, why didn't Trump stop them during his first term or since? 

MAHA/MAGA would rather pander to their base and the most stupid folk in America than follow the actual science and help people.

Flunky of the House

The Speaker of the House Is Abetting Authoritarianism

Every Trump needs his Johnson: a flunky who will rationalize his crimes.

MIKE JOHNSON, THE REPUBLICAN SPEAKER of the House of Representatives, worries that the United States could become a dictatorship. At a press conference on Wednesday, he warned that “a Marxist ideology [is] taking over the Democrat party” and could soon be “turning us into a Communist country.” On Thursday, as he fielded calls on C-SPAN, Johnson invoked the language of The Communist Manifesto: “What if the socialists take over the Senate, and Democrat socialists are in charge, and they want to grow government and take over the means of production?”

Johnson isn’t wrong to fear dictatorship in this country. He’s just wrong about where that threat is coming from. It’s coming from his own party. And he’s paving the way.

To bring a democracy under authoritarian control, you need more than a strongman. You need politicians who will assure the public, as we slide toward one-man rule, that nothing odd is happening. That’s the role Johnson is playing in Donald Trump’s takeover of America.  From Will Saletan at The Bulwark

Soooo disingenuous. Soooo stupid. Somehow the Democrats are moving us towards a dictatorship when, last time I checked, the Democrats controlled no part of the federal government. That's some gaslighting, right there.

Of course, the current shutdown is all about the Epstein files. If the House comes back into session, Johnson will have to swear in the new Representative from Arizona and the House will have enough votes to release the Epstein files. If that happens, apparently Trump and many others are cooked. So Johnson would rather keep the government closed than allow that.

And he'll continue to lie to the rubes about a leftist dictatorship.

A prediction from Ipecac!

Long a dream of people looking for clean, safe energy, nuclear fusion could provide limitless power while eliminating the need for all fossil fuels and their terrible cost. 

My prediction: as soon as scientists finally perfect a viable fusion reactor, MAGA will declare it woke and fight it with everything in their arsenal of stupid.

The Shutdown

I hope to post about my experiences as a federal worker during this administration, but for now, I want to express my support for the current government shutdown.

The Trump Administration has been an absolute nightmare for civil rights, healthcare, foreign relations, and all Americans (even if some don't know it yet). Congressional Democrats holding the line to protect the healthcare of millions of Americans is the right thing to do. It's long overdue, but they're finally standing up to the would-be dictator and his genuflecting toadies in Congress.

This federal worker supports the shutdown until Trump and MAGA restore the Obamacare subsidies.

Also, release the Epstein files.

Cowards and Ignoramuses Speaking to Professionals

After the ridiculous spectacle of two morons, Trump and Hegseth, lecturing America's military leadership this week, Paul Krugman has it right again.

War still requires extraordinary courage from the men and women engaged in combat — courage that, according to officers I’ve spoken with, is rooted in a sense of honor, not swaggering machismo. Combatants also have to be physically fit enough to endure incredible hardship.

But they don’t have to look like bodybuilders — and anyway, only a small fraction of a modern army engages directly in combat. These days, war is conducted largely with machines and ranged weapons, and most of an army’s personnel are employed, one way or another, keeping those machines and weapons in action and providing the intelligence that makes them effective. These noncombatants are every bit as essential to victory as front-line troops.

Actually, this has been true for a long time, at least since World War II. I very much doubt that Hegseth would consider the team led by Alan Turing, which broke Germany’s Enigma code, or the group led by Joseph Rochefort, which broke Japan’s naval code, warriors — even leaving aside the fact that Turing was gay. Yet they contributed as much to victory as any front-line soldier.

And the “warrior ethos” Hegseth touts is even less sufficient, on its own, to win wars today.

We don’t have to speculate about what a 21st century war would look like, because there’s ferocious, dare I say lethal, combat happening in Ukraine as you read this.

Seriously, how arrogant and stupid do you have to be to think you could lecture these guys on military ethics and readiness? And Trump gave his standard stump speech, which is completely inappropriate. 

It's a tribute to their discipline that the assembled Generals and Admirals didn't jump up and arrest these clowns right then and there.