What The Hell...

is this madness?

😲

Giant-Sized Puzzle Pieces

So...Stormy Daniels...

and Cesar Sayoc...

worked at the same strip club...

Across the street from a Trump golf course...

Just a few miles from Broward County...

Really? I..can't...even...

Nothing to see here.

Brackets, Cowbells, and Echos

I learn something new every day. I've been seeing brackets ((( ))) in several comments on various sites lately, and I've wondered what they mean. To me, they connote hugs, but judging from the context of these posts, I knew that there really had to be another explanation. According to a Slate writer (yeah, I know) they signify Jewishness. And not in a good way.

Mic has a good exposé on the origins of the cowbell: Known to alt-right activists as an “echo,” the symbol sprang from a hardcore conservative podcast named the Daily Shoah. The Shoah “featured a segment called ‘Merchant Minute’ that gave Jewish names a cartoonish ‘echo’ sound effect when uttered,” Cooper Fleishman and Anthony Smith explain. When they reached out to the podcast editors for more information, they were told that the meme also functioned as a critique of “Jewish power”:

"The inner parenthesis represent the Jews' subversion of the home [and] destruction of the family through mass-media degeneracy. The next [parenthesis] represents the destruction of the nation through mass immigration, and the outer [parenthesis] represents international Jewry and world Zionism."

Don't bother  reading the article unless you're into "Freudian effluvium that pours out of Trump-adjacent spigots of the Internet." Yep, he really said that. Or she did. Or zhe did. Whatevah. 

Strange times we live in. Very strange indeed.  Frankly, I could care less. Sticks and stones, and all that. Free speech is free speech. We wouldn't need laws (and a Constitutional amendment) to protect it if it was always rainbows and unicorn farts.

When you see me using brackets, rest assured that I'm hugging you and not labeling you a subversive, immigration-loving, world-conquering zionist. 

Crazy Train and the GOPe

I guess we'll just have to wait and see who the Big Guys select for us. Voting is SO yesterday's politics....

China Steps Into The Abyss

This is scary. Very scary. 

China’s Communist government is rolling out a plan to assign everyone in the country “citizenship scores.” According to the ACLU, “China appears to be leveraging all the tools of the information age—electronic purchasing data, social networks, algorithmic sorting—to construct the ultimate tool of social control. It is, as one commentator put it, ‘authoritarianism, gamified.’ ” In the system, everyone is measured by a score ranging from 350 to 950, and that score is linked to a national ID card. In addition to measuring your financial credit, it will also measure political compliance. Expressing the wrong opinion—or merely having friends who express the wrong opinion—will hurt your score. The higher your score, the more privileges the government will grant you.

Everything we email, post on FB, instagram, twitter, everything we post on this forum and others...the state knows us. Big Brother is watching. Could this happen here? Political scores for what? The privilege of buying a house or car? Of having vacation time? Having a child? Or even...buying food? And water?

The whole thing sends a shiver down my spine.

Friday Night Funny

For those of you who haven't seen this yet...it. is. hilarious.  Seems that the UK has been gripped by a (horrible) trend whereby pubs, caffs, bistros, rest au rantes, coffee shops, etcetera, go out of their way to serve all manner of food and drink on/in something other than plates, glasses and cups.  Witness here the joy of being served your steak and melted garlic butter on a well used (and knife marked) flat wooden board.  Or your full English breakfast on a shovel!  A fruit shake in a light bulb and butter on a rock.  Witness too the ingenuity of food served on construction debris and pieces of clothing. And sometimes just on the table top itself. Too hilarious (and frightening) for words.

Enjoy!  Oh, and Bon Appetite!

Crazy Train: Friday Edition

This.

What a wild coincidence...I was thinking about digging a tunnel in a nearby park too!   Five years and thousands of man-hours and cash? Pfft. This guy has the right idea.  It'd be GREAT to barbecue in an enclosed underground space. *cough cough* And what better place to invite friends over to watch a game? Oh hey, sorry about the dirt that fell in your guacamole dude....