Optimism

For the first time in over a year, I have some optimism regarding the future of the world. Because the cult is cracking.

Last week's near-unanimous vote to release the Epstein files and the flailing attempts by the regime to deflect and stonewall in spite of it, Felon47's crackpot social media ranting about executing Democratic legislators who quote from the Uniform Code of Military Justice, MTG's surprise resignation from Congress, the Mondani charm offensive at the White House, the courts blocking Texas from more gerrymandering (though Sam Alito wants to overrule that)... all of that, in combination with reality finally seeping through the cracks as the MAGA dupes realize inflation is worse now and their local hospitals are going away, has me feeling like the dam is going to burst sooner rather then later.

Maybe. I mean, I distinctly remember thinking at this time in 2016 that within a year or two we'd be living in a country governed by the President Pence administration. So I have overestimated the American people and Republican elected officials before.

It was a bad move for the eight senators who capitulated in the government shutdown a couple weeks ago to remove serious leverage from the opposition's toolbox. It still pisses me off that those eight couldn't see the forest for the trees. But ending the shutdown did hasten the vote on the Epstein files. It did beget the summoning of Republican Congresswomen Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace to browbeating/pleading/shakedown/threatening demands from Felon47 regarding their names on the House discharge petition to call the vote. It escalated the White House's feud with MTG.

Speaker Mike Johnson is more rattled than ever. MTG's resignation removes a GOP member from the House at least temporarily once the next Congress convenes. Republicans are, perhaps, finally realizing that Felon47 is weak and there are alternatives to licking his boots that don't necessarily end their careers.

The MAGA base is confused and horrified by Felon47's praise of Mayor-elect Mondani today. They're having more trouble than ever reconciling their dear leader's claims that inflation is down with the fact that everything costs more. Some of them—precious few, I fear—may even be belatedly realizing that having an openly misogynist president is bad for them and that all their outrage about pedophiles was directed at the wrong public figures.

I wouldn't hazard a guess as to what happens next. There is no bottom to the depths this regime will stoop to, but there might still be a limit to what some Republicans in Congress will tolerate. Today MTG, tomorrow...who knows?

It would be too much to hope for a sizeable number of people to recognize that the tyrant-in-chief's tantrum about the video made by six Democratic lawmakers, veterans of either military or intelligence services all, is tantamount to a confession of his own treason, but maybe it will get through to a GOP veteran or two. The video released by Sen. Mark Kelly, Sen. Elissa Slotkin, Rep. Chris DeLuzio, Rep. Maggie Goodlander, Rep. Jason Crowe, and Rep. Chrissy Houlihan simply reminds service members of a key provision in their oaths: the duty to refuse unlawful orders. Citing the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the six lawmakers each state that as a service member, "you can refuse illegal orders." One of them—I think it was Crowe, but it might be DeLuzio—actually said "you must" rather than "you can," which at least implies consequences; the Supreme Court may have told the president that he's immune from prosecution, but that doesn't apply to soldiers and officers. Despite some military folk hemming and hawing about the clarity or vagueness of the video's message, it shouldn't be overlooked that Felon47's batshit-crazy response to it—calling the six Democrats "seditious" and calling for them to be hanged—means that he wants to issue illegal orders with impunity and have them obeyed. Well, guess what, Felon47 isn't going to be president forever, one way or another his regime will end, and when it does all of the henchmen, all of the aiders and abettors, and all of the soldiers and officers that followed his treasonous orders will be subject to prosecution. Republican officeholders should remember that.

In fact, I want everyone campaigning for congress and any presidential hopefuls throwing their hats in the ring to make accountability and damage control the primary focus of their candidacy. I don't want a reverse-parroting of 2016's "lock her up" crap, I want well-considered plans and goals for holding perpetrators accountable for criminal behavior. A mini-Nuremberg trials, if you will, for the two administrations of Felon47 and Fraudster45. Legislative proposals for strengthening voting rights, for restoring public health infrastructure, for anti-corruption laws with teeth.

And for now, in this moment, I feel like we might actually see that happen.

Posted on November 21, 2025 at 9:51PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Pop culture and fighting the black hole

My mood since returning from my California travels has been in a state of flux, vacillating between "meh" and "we live in the worst timeline everything is misery." OK, I exaggerate slightly—truly miserable hasn't been part of my black-hole-of-depression episodes since the Zoloft Rx, it's actually more ennui than misery. But you take my point, it's not been peaches and cream. Unless the peaches are moldy and the cream curdled, I guess you could go that route in your metaphors if you like. "Darmok and Jilad at the expired food buffet."

Anyway, I won't go into the state-of-the-world portion of what's depressing in this post. You can look to the news media or your health insurance renewals for those sorts of bummers for now. In fact, for this post I don't think I want to go into any of the stuff that's been bumming me out, the bulk of which is something I don't really have a handle on anyway. Instead, let's discuss some stuff I've actually enjoyed lately.

My consumption of entertainment on the TV machine of late has included a few standouts that I heartily recommend:

• 

  The Big Thing of the Moment in the streaming world is Plur1bus, on AppleTV+, and it really is as good as its hype. It's high-concept sci-fi, so not for everyone, but the story follows Carol (Rhea Seehorn), a romance novelist with contempt for her readers, who is among a very few people worldwide who have not been afflicted with a mysterious ... something? Ailment? Virus? Extraterrestrial takeover? Freak sunspot storm? ... that has put the vast majority of the global human population into a sort of group mind. There have only been three episodes so far, so the mystery is still quite mysterious, but it's a premise that poses a Big Picture question, if you will, which is: Are people better off content in a happy groupthink mental commune, or as individuals with all of the messy conflicts that are possible between them? Created by Vince Gilligan of X-Files fame, the show's tagline is "The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness." The show works only because Carol is such a well-realized character and Seehorn is so good at embodying her. Without Seehorn in the role I think the show would fail, or at best be something quite different. It's intense, but very well done.

• 

  Wayward, on Netflix, is a mystery show from creator/star Mae Martin. I liked Martin's prior show Feel Good, so I thought I'd give this one a shot too. It's a whole different kind of thing—Feel Good is a semi-autobiographical slice-of-life comedy/drama, Wayward is about a tiny town in Vermont where there are no children and an academy for teens that "students" run away from as often as possible because horrible things happen there. Based at least in part on the experience of a childhood friend of Martin's who was sent away to a "troubled teen" camp of sorts called CEDU—that friend is a consulting producer of the show—the series follows two parallel tracks: one, a pair of Toronto teenagers who find themselves "enrolled" in the cult-like academy; and two, Martin's character, a cop newly-transplanted to the tiny town who dives into figuring out the mystery of the academy while the entirety of the town tries to prevent anyone exposing its secrets. It's good, but the ending is unsatisfying; it gives two different versions and its unclear which character imagines the false one or if it's supposed to be more of a you-the-audience-can-choose-which-ending-you-like-better kind of thing or what. I liked it overall, though, and it's worth spotlighting the sort of "troubled teen" institutions that still exist and still cause problems in our world of abuses.

• 

  Then there's The Lazarus Project, a British sci-fi show that follows George, a new recruit to a secret government agency that intervenes to prevent disaster from befalling humanity and uses its most powerful tool to turn the clock back if the worst comes to pass. George notices he's in a time loop, repeating three months of his life, and since people aren't supposed to remember things that happen before a "reset" the agency takes interest and brings him into the fold. When someone has the power to reset the world—always back to the most recent July 1st—there have to be understandings that resets only happen in the most critical circumstances or else there's nothing but chaos. But what if one of the agents feels his/her personal needs outweigh the rules? And what happens if other people discover this whole time-reset thing and try to develop their own method? Or a way to send someone back beyond a reset point? Time-travel stories all tend to have similar elements, but I like the way this one skews them and the way the multiethnic British cast fills out a complex bunch of characters. It's not a show that has any real standout staying power, but its well-produced and well-performed. I enjoyed it.
• A Man on the Inside is a show I watched when it first came out last year, but I rewatched it while visiting Dad & Marty in California a few weeks back. It has a new resonance for me now that my dad is going through some stuff that relates heavily to some elements of the mystery Ted Danson's character of Charles is placed in a retirement home to investigate. Really great stuff, and season two is scheduled to drop this week. Looking forward to it.

Then there's the world of comics. I've been asked a few times, mostly by my friend Nikki, why I, a middle-aged adult man, still spend anywhere from $50-$100 a month on comic books. I don't always have a good answer. Lifelong hobby, appreciation of the art form, investment in the fictional worlds they embody. A lot of them I read and then say, well, that's not memorable or special at all, and think I should reassess my ordering habits. (I'll turn some of them around and sell them on eBay if I don't find any other value in them.) Sometimes I keep getting a particular title for the collector-completeness motive even though there's not much there. Mostly, I simply enjoy them and that's good enough for me. But occasionally something will surprise me, a mainstream superhero comic or a little indy curiosity that reminds me, yeah, that's why I always loved comics.

The most recent of those standouts are Detective Comics #1100 and the 2025 Titans Annual.

Detective #1100 is an oversized milestone edition with several Batman short stories, all of which are stylishly done and satisfying in their own ways. "Lost and Found" is a silent (i.e. no dialogue, no narrative captions) tale of Batman, aided by Ace the Bat-Hound (a deep cut going back to the goofy Batman comics of the 1950s), helping a deaf child recover his lost dog. It's derivative—Matt Fraction and David Aja did a fantastic issue of Hawkeye several years ago that was from the perspective of Hawkeye's dog Lucky (aka Pizza Dog) that wasn't exactly silent, but the only dialogue rendered in non-gibberish were words Lucky knew—but still fun. "The Knife and Gun Club" barely features Batman at all, it's a peek into the doctors and nurses on staff at the emergency room that treats people involved in a typical night in Gotham City—victims of crime and perpetrators of same that, in one way or another, are sent to the ER by Batman. One doctor is outraged at the number of injured people arriving thanks to the actions of Batman. Another much prefers the injuries they treat now over the fatalities that were the norm pre-Batman. A reveal at the end has Batman himself sneaking in to have a laceration stitched up. "Your Role in the Community" juxtaposes Batman's crime-fighting efforts with the image cultivated by his alter ego Bruce Wayne, who is shown at a fund-raising event in Gotham being browbeaten by a journalist who takes him to task for merely throwing money at society's problems. The last story is "The Fall," which doesn't do anything for me but is illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz, whose gritty, ink-wash style is always interesting even if not particularly appealing to me.

Titans Annual 2025 is a more traditional single-story issue, entirely character-based as Donna Troy recounts her attempt to meet and get to know her birth father. That particular character has had a mysterious background for a long time and there have been a few iterations of "Who is Donna Troy" going back to the ’80s, but this was a welcome addition to the canon, spectacularly written and drawn by Phil Jimenez. The regular Titans title I should probably quit buying, it's one that I simply have a lot of nostalgia for as one of the favorites of my comics-fan heyday even though lately it's been forgettable and ... let's say, unsophisticated. But, had I not been getting it I might have passed on this Annual, and I'm glad to have gotten it.

 I've also started the novel Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie. It was recommended to me as "in my wheelhouse," but thus far I'm kind of struggling to get into it. Hopefully it'll pick up soon.

So, anything y'all would recommend I add to the entertainment pile?

Tagged TV, Comics, The Black Hole, Posted on November 19, 2025 at 12:48AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Dear Democrats

Feckless leader

An open letter to Senate Democrats. Seven specific ones, really, plus independent Angus King. And to one other, alleged minority leader Chuck Schumer.

To Senators Kaine, Durbin, Shaheen, Hassan, Rosen, Masto, Fetterman, and King, along with "leader" Schumer:

Today you voted to advance a Republican measure to reopen the government. (All of you except Sen. Schumer, but we'll get to you in a minute, Chuck.) You must have had your reasons for doing this. They might even make sense to you in some weird way. But that being the case, I have to ask one rather fundamental question of you all:

What the fuck is wrong with you?!

The Federal government has been shut down now for 40 days—insert Noah's Ark joke here—with Democrats holding firm on one comparatively minor demand, one that is politically beneficial for all parties, for agreement on ending the shutdown: Restore subsidies for the Affordable Care Act that Republicans eliminated in their Big Bloodbath of a Bill earlier this year. That's it, that's the one thing Democrats were demanding, and for a while it appeared that you all would stand together and force the issue.

Then came today.

Today, when the eight of you capitulated to the Republican terrorists who have been "negotiating" in bad faith and governing illegally for nearly ten months and counting. You voted to advance the GOP measure rather than use the leverage you had to actually get what you allegedly wanted and allegedly deemed important for the American people. Why?

Senator Shaheen said she voted for it because "this was the only deal on the table." Oh? So next time when the Republicans put up a measure that jails half of all Americans with Spanish surnames instead of all of them, you'll vote for it because it's the only deal on the table?

Last Tuesday the off-year elections showed us that the American people writ large do not support today's Republicans or their policies. Republicans got their clocks cleaned. We're approaching major holiday travel season, with air travel being disrupted in significant ways that are untenable. GOP officials are refusing to do their jobs in the House, taking literal wrecking balls to the White House, and committing crimes at a pace one can't even keep current with. They are exceedingly vulnerable.

They are behaving like authoritarians, and you had a significant piece of leverage to use against them. Until today, when you eight pissed it away.

For what? Let's look at the so-called "deal" you made with the Republicans. This measure does the following:

• Officially funds the government through January 30, 2026. I say "officially" because the Felon47 regime has demonstrated repeatedly that whey do not respect Congressional appropriations and have simply chosen not to spend money they're legally obligated to spend. So what did you get here? Things will be funded, but only at the whim of the regime.
• Guarantees retroactive pay for furloughed workers and those working without pay during the shutdown. Congratulations, you got a promise to OBEY THE EXISTING LAW. Well done.
• Likewise, SNAP benefits will resume being paid. Likewise, the courts were forcing that to happen anyway because the Republicans were withholding that money illegally.
• Rehires employees that were fired during the shutdown and prohibits new firings through January 30. OK, but what's to keep them from being fired again on January 31? Anything? No? Good job.
• Funds the VA and the USDA through fiscal 2026. Really? You believe that? You think the regime won't just decide not to pay those bills like they've refused so many others thus far? Suckers.
• Requires a Senate vote on ACA subsidies by the middle of December. Great, you got a promise for a symbolic vote. In one chamber of Congress. That won't pass. And even if it did, that the Speaker of the House has already said he won't put it up for a vote in his chamber. Utterly worthless.

That's it. Am I missing anything? No?

To paraphrase the late great Gene Wilder, "You got nothing. Good day and get bent."

If one were cynical, one might think you eight were more concerned with your own travel plans being disturbed than in advocating for your constituents. Yes, disrupted air travel is an inconvenience. Potentially a severe one. An untenable one. You know what else it was? Leverage.

Democrats have, once again, bailed out the Republicans. Rather than force them to face the consequences of their disastrous, painful, massively unpopular policy agenda, the eight of you have rewarded them by removing at least some of those consequences. Every time the Republicans enact some policy or other that will, by design, inflict great pain on the American people, they know Democrats will mitigate the damage. They're arsonists that count on the fire brigade to check some of the blazes while they continue to light other infernos with impunity.

I get that you don't want people to go without their paychecks and you don't want travel disrupted. But you were also supposed to be looking out for people's health care. What you have done is communicate to Republicans that terrorism works. That threats of starvation by illegally withholding SNAP funds is a viable tactic. That all it takes to get you to capitulate to their plan to make health insurance unaffordable for many and less affordable for all is to throw empty assurances at you and promise that this time, for real, you'll be allowed to kick the football.

And you, Chuck Schumer:

You didn't vote for this, so good on you for that, but you're supposed to be the leader here. You hold that title. How is it, then, that these defections were allowed to happen? You couldn't communicate the basic facts of the matter here, that this measure gets your party bupkis? That this is not only bad for the country but bad politics? That giving in tells people that there was a 40+ day government shutdown for what in the end was no reason whatsoever? You couldn't keep your caucus in line to prevent doubling and tripling health insurance premiums because flights were being delayed??!

This should have been a gimme issue for you, Chuck, and you blew it. Are you truly that feckless as party leader? Apparently you are. I implore you to recognize that you have failed and resign as leader. Right now. You clearly suck at this now.

May all eight of you—no, all nine of you, this goes for you too, Chuck—may you all lose in primaries the next time you're up for election. And for those of you that have already declared your retirements, may you reap the karmic consequences of your cowardice and spinelessness in whatever post-Senate ventures you undertake.

Assholes.

The only positive that might—might—come out of this is that once the final bill gets out of the Senate the House will have to vote on it, which means the House will have to be in session, which means Speaker Johnson will have to convene the House and swear in Representative-elect Grijalva, which will force a vote to release the Epstein files and bring that scandal back to the forefront. Johnson might invent some new reason not to, though. He's nothing if not craven, he's proven he'll stop at nothing to protect the pedophile in chief.

We'll see if the House Democrats will use their leverage or if they, too, will capitulate to the GOP terrorists.

Tagged Politics, Republicans, Democrats, Posted on November 10, 2025 at 1:34AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Technical difficulties

I've been spending a ridiculous amount of time lately trying to police the traffic on this here website from robots. There's a new generation of crawler bots online, ones that ignore directives from robots.txt files and successfully masquerade as a human user, and they've become the majority of my traffic here, sucking up resources.

Granted, not a heck of a lot of resources, they're not interfering with any actual humans being able to access things here. But they're annoying. And, more importantly, I don't know what they're doing.

Best guess is that they're scrapers, looking for email addresses or other things in the text of websites that will facilitate marketing/spamming/nuisance assholery. Secondary guess is that they're bots sucking up text to use in building so-called AI large language models. Which is, at its core, copyright infringement.

Anyway, nothing has worked to block the bots. They get around everything. They avoid the bot blocks by spoofing a browser signature, so I block the version of the browser they pretend to use. That fails, because they're not really using it. I block the IP address range, but they just VPN their way to new ones.

It's pissing me off. But I'm also out of ideas, at least for the moment.

In the course of trying various block strategies, I broke the RSS feed. So for the less-than-one-percent of you that use the feed in Outlook or a browser RSS plugin, and for the few of you that rely on email updates (which are based on the RSS feed), you may have encountered some wonkiness over the past couple of days. Sorry about that. It's fixed now.

If I could just find a fix for the damn bots.

 

Tagged Site issues, Posted on November 7, 2025 at 7:51PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Home is where the rain is

My field of vision since returning has largely been feline-based

I have returned from nearly two weeks away from home, and the cats are glad. I am, too.

The drive home from greater Palm Springs was largely uneventful and, frankly, pretty dull. I opted for the most direct route for a change, anxious to get back and not dally, but I tell you, it makes a big difference in how much I enjoy the trip. Sticking entirely to the Interstates (or CA 99 for a stretch, which is basically just like an Interstate) might make for better speed, but it's monotonous and more stressful. The less-trafficked roads are a whole different experience, and worth the extra few hours' travel time.

I drove most of it at night, as that's oddly when I'm most awake. I thought maybe it being dark would make the choice of route less of a factor, but no. Even at night I-10 to I-5 and straight on through (with a switch to 99 from about Bakersfield to Sacramento because of fuel availability/cost) is a lousy choice. Live and learn. The entirety of the trip from around Mt. Shasta on to the end was done in the rain, too, which felt oddly nice. Welcome, traveler, you are now reentering the home region, where fall = wet. Enjoy.

It did make it faster, though, and I was glad to be back and discover the various messes three bored cats make over the course of many days. There might have been more that my neighbor took care of when she came into feed them, but hey, you go away without permission and things are gonna get knocked around and hairballs gonna get spit up in odd places. Standard cat/guardian dynamics.

I slept most of today, as the drive was long and tiring and I didn't sleep terribly well the whole time I was gone. I may have grown up in a desert environment, but it's been a long time since I was used to arid conditions. Plus, despite the dry air there are always lots of mosquitos at my dad's place and I am apparently very tasty. And maybe lack of cats on the bed made it hard to drift off, I don't know.

Anyway, I'm back, the cats are making it clear they'd rather I not skip out without permission again—there was slight panic when I went out for groceries a couple hours ago, but they'll adjust to normalcy soon—and I'm content to stick around for a good while yet.

Tagged Traveling, Cats, Posted on November 5, 2025 at 10:21PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Hollywood Halloween

My sister and brother-in-law are pretty gung-ho when it comes to Halloween. They always decorate their yard with some sort of semi-elaborate decor (though never as over-the-top elaborate as one of their neighbors around the corner, those people are wild). We went out to LA a few days back and did a little birthday thing for my dad, so I got to see this year's front-yard accoutrements.

Apropos for LA, this year's theme is movies. So we've got skeletons representing The Dude from The Big Lebowski; Lloyd Dobler from Say Anything; and my favorites, Quellek and Lliari, Thermians from Galaxy Quest.

 

The dude abides

 

I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.

 

Never give up, never surrender

 

No Halloween activity for me, really, I spent it here at Dad & Marty's house watching the World Series and nibbling on candy ostensibly for trick-or-treaters (there weren't any, unsurprisingly).

I'll be heading home in a few days, soon enough to keep a vet appointment (just routine) on Thursday.

Tagged Traveling, Posted on November 1, 2025 at 1:30PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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