Why people buy things they don't need, with money they haven't earned, to impress people they don't like.
May 26, 2025
Today's Keith
It's possible Trump is exacting a little revenge because (it's rumored) that his boy, Barron, applied to Harvard and was rejected.
It's also than possible he just wants the homage - he needs them to pay him tribute. So he's trying to extort them. He's the boss and everybody has to pony up his piece of the action.
And I think that's the main theme of all the shit he's throwing. He acts like the biggest baddest motherfucker ever in order to cover the truth - that he's just another whiny-butt little pussy who believes the world has treated him badly, so now that he has the power, he's going to punish everybody.
He's that classic sullen teenaged punk who thinks the world owes him something.
May 25, 2025
On A Sunday - Overheard
Feel free to mock me
for being atheist.
It won't hurt my feelings,
it won't shake my "faith" in
sound practical reasoning,
and I won't kill you for it.
May 24, 2025
While I'm Out
- Don't add to the population
- Don't subtract from the population
- Don't damage any property
- Stay out of the hospital, the news, and jail.
Phone List
The Big Beautiful Bamboozle Has To Be Stopped
Alabama: Tommy Tuberville 202-224-4124
Alaska: Lisa Murkowski 202-224-6665
Alaska: Dan Sullivan 202-224-3004
Arkansas: John Boozman 202-224-4843
Arkansas: Tom Cotton 202-224-2353
Florida: Ashley Moody 202-224-3041
Florida: Rick Scott 202-224-5274
Idaho: Mike Crapo 202-224-6142
Idaho: James Risch 202-224-2752
Indiana: Jim Banks 202-224-4814
Indiana: Todd Young 202-224-5623
Iowa: Joni Ernst 202-224-3254
Iowa: Chuck Grassley 202-224-3744
Kansas: Roger Marshall 202-224-4774
Kansas: Jerry Moran 202-224-6521
Kentucky: Mitch McConnell 202-224-2541
Kentucky: Rand Paul 202-224-4343
Louisiana: Bill Cassidy 202-224-5824
Louisiana: John Kennedy 202-224-4623
Maine: Susan Collins 202-224-2523
Mississippi: Cindy Hyde-Smith 202-224-5054
Mississippi: Roger Wicker 202-224-6253
Missouri: Josh Hawley 202-224-6154
Missouri: Eric Schmitt 202-224-5721
Montana: Steve Daines 202-224-2651
Montana: Tim Sheehy 202-224-2644
Nebraska: Deb Fischer 202-224-6551
Nebraska: Pete Ricketts 202-224-4224
North Carolina: Ted Budd 202-224-3154
North Carolina: Thom Tillis 202-224-6342
North Dakota: Kevin Cramer 202-224-2043
North Dakota: John Hoeven 202-224-2551
Ohio: Jon Husted 202-224-3353
Ohio: Bernie Moreno 202-224-2315
Oklahoma: James Lankford 202-224-5754
Oklahoma: Markwayne Mullin 202-224-4721
Pennsylvania: David McCormick 202-224-6324
South Carolina: Lindsey Graham 202-224-5972
South Carolina: Tim Scott 202-224-6121
South Dakota: Mike Rounds 202-224-5842
South Dakota: John Thune 202-224-2321
Tennessee: Marsha Blackburn 202-224-3344
Tennessee: Bill Hagerty 202-224-4944
Texas: John Cornyn 202-224-2934
Texas: Ted Cruz 202-224-5922
Utah: John Curtis 202-224-5251
Utah: Mike Lee 202-224-5444
West Virginia: Shelley Capito 202-224-6472
West Virginia: James Justice 202-224-3954
Wisconsin: Ron Johnson 202-224-5323
Wyoming: John Barrasso 202-224-6441
Wyoming: Cynthia Lummis 202-224-3424
May 23, 2025
The Lights Are Flashing
Ten years ago, it was Social Media and bot farms.
The culture is changing with startling rapidity, especially now that the operative phrase is "Go fast and break things".
The road to tyranny
is crowded with people
telling us we're overreacting
The Big Beautiful Enabling Bill
Buried in the bill is a provision that forbids courts from charging Trump or other Executive Branch officials with contempt for defying court orders.
Since SCOTUS invented 'Presidential Immunity', this little piece of Republican fuckery sets the stage for Trump to become America's dictator.
202-224-3121
RAISE HELL
aka: The Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich
Today's Belle
The bank giveth and the bank taketh away.
Foreclosure rates go up as lenders and insurance carriers perceive greater risk.
As the costs of borrowing and insuring your home go up, so does the rate of foreclosure.
A nation of debtors and renters - the American Plutocrat's dream.
May 22, 2025
On The Farm
A lot of us have memories of our city-dwelling farmer grandparents with the giant gardens (filled with stuff we couldn't even name), who told us old-timey stories of making molasses and persimmon preserves, but very few of us have any real idea of how a farm actually works.
I don't anyway. I can't even do houseplants.
So it's good to get a little education from somebody who literally knows her shit.
The Florida Finagle
I don't like thinking I'm adding to the problem of the Fire Hose Of Shit, but when practically every day gives us another major grift, I don't know how I can just brush it off, and let it become part of a very ugly process of normalizing official corruption.
So - sorry - here's today's shit.
May 21, 2025
Today's Dark Brandon
I don't want to poke the bear here, but yeah - why has Biden not been arrested?
What about these??
- Hillary
- Fauci
- Comey
- All those Epstein villains
- Fraudsters stealing trillions from Social Security
- Pelosi
- Obama
- and
- and
- and
No Joke
Every day, a guy stops at the newsstand, scans the headlines, and walks on, never buying a paper.
One day the newsie asks him, "You come by here everyday looking at the front pages, but you never buy a paper - what's up with that?"
"I'm looking for an obituary."
"But those are always in back of the papers", says the newsie.
And the man replies, "Not the one I'm looking for."
It's Coming
As Trump's goons continue to dismantle our government, we can expect some more pretty shitty things to happen.
May 20, 2025
That'll Suck
If Earth stays at its current levels of warming -- below policymakers’ goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius -- polar ice sheets may melt, causing seas to rise and displacing coastal communities, a study finds.
Ten years ago, policymakers and nation states set the world’s most important climate goal: limiting planetary warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). If the Earth could stay below that threshold, a climate catastrophe and major rise in sea levels might be staved off.
But a group of scientists has demonstrated that if the world stays on course to warm up to 1.5 degrees — or even stays at its current level of 1.2 degrees above preindustrial levels — polar ice sheets will probably continue to quickly melt, causing seas to rise and displacing coastal communities, according to a study published Tuesday in Communications Earth and Environment.
“There was a kind of misunderstanding that 1.5 was going to solve all our problems,” said Chris Stokes, a professor at Durham University in England who focuses on glaciers and ice sheets, and an author of the study. Now, the team surmised that limit is closer to around 1 degree Celsius, though more research is needed to come to an official conclusion.
The team focused on Greenland and Antarctica, behemoth ice sheets that together could raise global sea levels by more than 210 feet if they melted. They are losing around 370 billion metric tons of ice each year at a rate that has quadrupled since the 1990s.
To come to their analyses, scientists pored over more than 150 research papers and focused on three aspects of sea-level rise: recent observations of rapidly melting ice sheets, modeling that uses equations to predict how temperatures could affect the rates of ice melting, and past sea-level change tens of thousands of years ago.
To help gauge how high sea levels could rise over the coming centuries, scientists have looked back at what happened the last time the Earth was as warm as it is now: roughly 125,000 years ago, during a period known to scientists as the Last Interglacial.
Back then, research shows, a wobble in Earth’s orbit had changed how much sunlight hit the northern hemisphere, raising global temperatures. The warmer conditions allowed Neanderthals to venture into northern Europe. Mammoths and giant ground sloths migrated poleward. And the ice caps covering the Arctic and Antarctica began to melt, raising sea levels around the world.
A vast array of ancient evidence — including ice cores, fossils, deep sea sediments and even octopus DNA — allowed the researchers to reconstruct how this sea-level rise unfolded. For example, ancient coral reefs found 25 feet above the current sea surface mark where the water once reached. Bits of bedrock uncovered in the middle of the ocean reveal how icebergs calved off disintegrating glaciers and then drifted across the sea.
This research into Earth’s ancient climate has revealed that ice sheet collapse depends on complex processes and can happen at surprising speed. Pulses of sudden sea-level rise, when the ocean surface may have risen multiple feet in less than a century, indicated that the ice sheets could have crossed temperature thresholds that caused them to shed mass all at once.
The scientists then fed their findings into computer models of the Earth system, allowing them to confirm that the models’ outputs matched what actually occurred. This gave them confidence in the models’ forecasts for the future, and the results were sobering.
“Every fraction of a degree matters,” said Andrea Dutton, a research professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was a co-author of the study. “We can’t just adapt to this type of sea-level rise. We can’t just engineer our way out of this.”
Around 230 million people live within about three feet of sea level, the researchers noted. Over the coming centuries, if the Earth stays at the same temperature, the sea could rise several meters, displacing entire cities and even states.
Because of gravitational effects, said Stokes, places closer to the equator, including Pacific islands like Micronesia and some Caribbean islands, will experience more sea-level rise.
“It’s an existential threat,” he said. “Some of these entire states are going to be underwater in a few centuries.”
Pro-Mortalism?
"I need to kill you and myself in order to prevent suffering in the future, so I have to blow up this IVF clinic."
Fake lord have mercy. But y'know, we might just make it if we can convince more of these guys to take themselves out of the gene pool.
Today's Belle
Scott Bessent is the sales guy who knows the boss has fucked up the product, so he has to try to bullshit his way thru with techno-terms that he desperately hopes will fog the issues just enough to keep the customer placated.
He Just Doesn't Like Them
Trump shit-talks Venezuela for years, saying what a horrible place it is. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans immigrate to the US to get away from the horribleness, and if you're a normal person, you'd think it makes sense for a politician to put those two things together and pat himself on the back for being such a good guy about it.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to strip legal protections from 350,000 Venezuelans, potentially exposing them to deportation.
The court’s order, with only one noted dissent, puts on hold a ruling from a federal judge in San Francisco that kept in place Temporary Protected Status for the Venezuelans that would have otherwise expired last month. The justices provided no rationale, which is common in emergency appeals.
The status allows people already in the United States to live and work legally because their native countries are deemed unsafe for return due to natural disaster or civil strife.
The high court’s order appears to be the “single largest action in modern American history stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, one of the attorneys for Venezuelan migrants.
“This decision will force families to be in an impossible position either choosing to survive or choosing stability,” said Cecilia Gonzalez Herrera, who sued to try and stop the Trump administration from revoking legal protections from her and others like her.
“Venezuelans are not criminals,” Gonzalez Herrera said.
“We all deserve the chance to thrive without being sent back to danger,” she said.
The ramifications for the hundreds of thousands of people affected aren’t yet clear, Arulanantham said.
Mariana Moleros, her husband and their daughter left their native Venezuela in September 2005 after receiving death threats for their open political opposition to the socialist government. They came to the United States hoping to find peace and protection and requested asylum, but their application was denied.
They were temporarily granted TPS but now they live in fear again — fear of being detained and deported to a country where they don’t feel safe.
“Today we are all exposed to being imprisoned in Venezuela if the U.S. return us,” said Moleros, a 44-year-old Venezuelan attorney who lives in Florida. “They should not deport someone who is at risk of being assassinated, torture and incarcerated.”
A federal appeals court had earlier rejected the administration’s request to put the order on hold while the lawsuit continues. A hearing is set for next week in front of U.S. District Judge Edward Chen, who had paused the administration’s plans.
In a statement, Homeland Security called the court’s decision a “win for the American people and the safety of our communities” and said the Biden administration “exploited programs to let poorly vetted migrants into this country.”
“The Trump administration is reinstituting integrity into our immigration system to keep our homeland and its people safe,” said spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin.
The case is the latest in a string of emergency appeals President Donald Trump’s administration has made to the Supreme Court, many of them related to immigration and involving Venezuela. Last week, the government asked the court to allow it to end humanitarian parole for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, setting them up for potential deportation as well.
The high court also has been involved in slowing Trump’s efforts to swiftly deport Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador under an 18th century wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.
The complex economic and political crisis in Venezuela has driven more than 7.7 million people to leave the South American nation since 2013. Venezuela’s most recent economic troubles pushed year-over-year inflation in April to 172%. The latest chapter even prompted President Nicolás Maduro to declare an “economic emergency” last month. Maduro, whose reelection last year to a third term has been condemned internationally as illegitimate, also has cracked down on his political opponents.
In the dispute over TPS, the administration has moved aggressively to withdraw various protections that have allowed immigrants to remain in the country, including ending the temporary protected status for a total of 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians. That status is granted in 18-month increments. Venezuela was first designated for TPS in 2021; Haiti, in 2010.
Last week, DHS announced that TPS for Afghanistan, first provided in 2022, would end in mid-July.
The protections for Venezuelans had been set to expire April 7, but Chen found that the expiration threatened to severely disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and could cost billions in lost economic activity.
Chen, who was appointed to the bench by Democratic President Barack Obama, found the government hadn’t shown any harm caused by keeping the program alive.
But Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote on behalf of the administration that Chen’s order impermissibly interferes with the administration’s power over immigration and foreign affairs.
In addition, Sauer told the justices, people affected by ending the protected status might have other legal options to try to remain in the country because the “decision to terminate TPS is not equivalent to a final removal order.”
Congress created TPS in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters or civil strife.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she would have rejected the administration’s emergency appeal.
But this is Trump - so even though big bunches of US citizens of Venezuelan origin voted for him, he has to fuck with all immigrants because his brand and his racist devotees demand it.
And I think Trump's DHS is finding out that the hoopla about all these terrible problems caused by all these terrible immigrants is wildly overblown. But they set a target of a million deportations this year, and they're behind schedule, so - just as we suspected - they're busily identifying groups of brown people they can round up, because they need to show the boss what good little Schutzstaffel assholes they are.
The court’s order, with only one noted dissent, puts on hold a ruling from a federal judge in San Francisco that kept in place Temporary Protected Status for the Venezuelans that would have otherwise expired last month. The justices provided no rationale, which is common in emergency appeals.
The status allows people already in the United States to live and work legally because their native countries are deemed unsafe for return due to natural disaster or civil strife.
The high court’s order appears to be the “single largest action in modern American history stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, one of the attorneys for Venezuelan migrants.
“This decision will force families to be in an impossible position either choosing to survive or choosing stability,” said Cecilia Gonzalez Herrera, who sued to try and stop the Trump administration from revoking legal protections from her and others like her.
“Venezuelans are not criminals,” Gonzalez Herrera said.
“We all deserve the chance to thrive without being sent back to danger,” she said.
The ramifications for the hundreds of thousands of people affected aren’t yet clear, Arulanantham said.
Mariana Moleros, her husband and their daughter left their native Venezuela in September 2005 after receiving death threats for their open political opposition to the socialist government. They came to the United States hoping to find peace and protection and requested asylum, but their application was denied.
They were temporarily granted TPS but now they live in fear again — fear of being detained and deported to a country where they don’t feel safe.
“Today we are all exposed to being imprisoned in Venezuela if the U.S. return us,” said Moleros, a 44-year-old Venezuelan attorney who lives in Florida. “They should not deport someone who is at risk of being assassinated, torture and incarcerated.”
A federal appeals court had earlier rejected the administration’s request to put the order on hold while the lawsuit continues. A hearing is set for next week in front of U.S. District Judge Edward Chen, who had paused the administration’s plans.
In a statement, Homeland Security called the court’s decision a “win for the American people and the safety of our communities” and said the Biden administration “exploited programs to let poorly vetted migrants into this country.”
“The Trump administration is reinstituting integrity into our immigration system to keep our homeland and its people safe,” said spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin.
The case is the latest in a string of emergency appeals President Donald Trump’s administration has made to the Supreme Court, many of them related to immigration and involving Venezuela. Last week, the government asked the court to allow it to end humanitarian parole for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, setting them up for potential deportation as well.
The high court also has been involved in slowing Trump’s efforts to swiftly deport Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador under an 18th century wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.
The complex economic and political crisis in Venezuela has driven more than 7.7 million people to leave the South American nation since 2013. Venezuela’s most recent economic troubles pushed year-over-year inflation in April to 172%. The latest chapter even prompted President Nicolás Maduro to declare an “economic emergency” last month. Maduro, whose reelection last year to a third term has been condemned internationally as illegitimate, also has cracked down on his political opponents.
In the dispute over TPS, the administration has moved aggressively to withdraw various protections that have allowed immigrants to remain in the country, including ending the temporary protected status for a total of 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians. That status is granted in 18-month increments. Venezuela was first designated for TPS in 2021; Haiti, in 2010.
Last week, DHS announced that TPS for Afghanistan, first provided in 2022, would end in mid-July.
The protections for Venezuelans had been set to expire April 7, but Chen found that the expiration threatened to severely disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and could cost billions in lost economic activity.
Chen, who was appointed to the bench by Democratic President Barack Obama, found the government hadn’t shown any harm caused by keeping the program alive.
But Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote on behalf of the administration that Chen’s order impermissibly interferes with the administration’s power over immigration and foreign affairs.
In addition, Sauer told the justices, people affected by ending the protected status might have other legal options to try to remain in the country because the “decision to terminate TPS is not equivalent to a final removal order.”
Congress created TPS in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters or civil strife.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she would have rejected the administration’s emergency appeal.
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