I am prone to think up the most fucked up political scenarios and I’ve come up a new one. At the moment, we have an “acting” Speaker of the House. My question is — if the absolute worst happened, would Rep. Patrick McHenry be in the line of presidential succession? Or would it go directly to the Senate’s President Pro Temp?
The fact that that is not know for a fact one way or another is very unnerving. I remember how Al Haig made an ass out of himself after Reagan was shot by saying, “I am in charge,” even though he clearly wasn’t.
The only reason why I even bring it up is the longer we’re in this fucking up situation, the more likely it is that Something Bad might happen that would force the issue. And the last thing you want in a crisis situation is the massive uncertainty of who the fuck the president is.
And that doesn’t even begin to address the lingering issue of no one has challenged the Presidential Succession Act. I just don’t like the idea that America could be in some massive, earth shattering crisis and rather than address the issue at hand, we’ll all have to collective sit on our hands while we figure out if McHenry is POTUS or not.
Anyway, this is just more of my usual “hysterical doom shit.” Move along, there’s nothing to see here.
I honestly don’t know why I continue to use Twitter or “X.” It is now nothing more than just a sewer of MAGA disinformation and bots that like my tweets in a weird attempt to catch my attention.
Or, if they’re not bots, they’re catfishing me. I say that because I seem to attract the putative accounts of way too many cute Asian girls who just got onto Twitter in the last month or so and have almost no followers. It’s enough to make me a little bit paranoid.
It makes me wonder if people with ill-intent read this blog and are for some reason trying to fuck with me. Maybe it’s a co-ordinated effort at a mind fuck from whomever that person in California who is obsessed with this site is. But, hopefully, that’s just me being paranoid.
I’m really — at the moment at least — all that important. That’s why anyone who gives me sudden, unexpected attention is suspect. I think that may be my age showing, if nothing else.
It’s too bad that that it’s now impossible for any real innovation in the social media space that doesn’t involve AI. Unless Space Karen unexpectedly pulls the plug on X, we’re stuck with Twitter as a very shitty global town square.
I have no inside information, but I do know someone wealthy who lives on the coast of the eastern seaboard and I think I’ve figured out the origin of Trump’s quixotic hatred of windmills. I think what’s going on is Trump plutocrat friends complain about beach windmills cluttering up their expensive beach views and, as such, this plutocrat bitching and moaning leaks out of Trump’s brain as a weird vendetta against windmills.
This seems to make as much sense as any other possible reason.
I will note, however, that it’s clear that the U.S. Government isn’t hiding shit from us about any sort of secret “Hard First Contact” because if it was, Trump would spend all this time having a strange, vague fascination with the subject that none of us could understand.
I say this because Trump’s obsession with not being able to flush toilets the way he likes apparently came from all the government documents he would tear up and try to flush down White House toilets.
One thing I’ve noticed is a certain level of clueless, oblivious naivete on the part of some people who should know better when it comes to what a Second American Civil War might be like.
I’m working on the assumption that if there is an actual 2ACW, it will be because Trump loses in 2024 and, in a desperate attempt to evade prison and starts to rant about the need for a National Divorce and, lo and behold, states like Texas take him up on the idea.
There is a far small chance of a Blue “Resistance Revolution” if Trump wins and is incoming agenda is just too radical for Blues, but I have serious doubts that Blues, by nature, would have it in them to do such a thing.
But the issue is that any National Divorce would lead to a 2ACW because of how Purple the country is, in general. A lot of Red States have a dollop of Blue in them in the guise of their major cities. As such, if a state like Texas or Tennessee secedes, their Blue Cities will probably be the site of some serious fucking flashpoints.
There is a real risk that America will go all Cambodia on itself, with the rural areas of the country rising up and emptying the cities to establish American Killing Fields. Or something, something gruesome like that.
Way too many members of the nattering nabobs of negativism have STILL yet to come to grips with how dark our future is. American politics are collapsing before our very eyes and once we finally reach the Singularity — we’re probably going to fight it out in the real world with real weapons, instead of just being fucking keyboard warriors.
And, remember, once you crack the egg of civil war or revolution, things usually get out of control –just as the French. Once MAGA finally goes septic, loudmouth cranks like me will be right behind Jewish people when it comes to being packed up and sent to a weaponized ICE camps.
The main thing to remember is the United States is a lot less stable, in general, than we would like to think. It definitely seems as though 2024 will be the most significant election in American history since 1860. The only thing that spared us the symmetry of 2020 being it is, well, Mike Pence decided to destroy his political career by doing what he was supposed to.
But the issue remains –we are careening towards a potentially catastrophic near future. I, of course, can’t predict the future, so there is always a chance that some how, some way, we’ll do what we did in 2020 and find some sort of “third way” that allows us to punt our severe structural problems down the road another four years.
I just don’t know. They say you go bankrupt gradually, then all at once, so it could be one of those things where we just don’t know what is going to happen…until it happen.
There are a number of scifi franchises that have been so strip mined over the years that they just need to be left alone for a little while. But the time will come when they can finally be hard rebooted for a new generation.
Here’s an idea for how to do it with the Terminator.
The movie ostensibly is simply a near shot-for-shot remake of the original, but with a far bigger budget. Maybe get someone like Jason Momoa to be the new Terminator.
But there would be a trick ending — Sarah Conner dies at the end of the second act!
The remainder of the film would be an exploration into an error on the part of the people who sent Kyle Reese back in time. They thought they were sending him back to the same timeline as their own, when, in fact, by definition, time travel causes a new timeline to be spawned the moment you appear in the past.
This is a way to bring new life into a very old and beat up franchise. I think Gen Z would really dig the use of the multiverse concept.
The social media era is over. There’s just no buzz around it anymore. After a lot of crypto hype, we’re now fully in the AI Revolution. But occasionally, I find myself mulling what could have been, especially given how fucked up Twitter is now because of Space Karen.
There are a few key elements that could have been included in a new social media service that I think would have made it a success. One is, having some sort of paid editorial staff. If you had people who were paid by your social media service specifically to churn out high quality reporting, I think that would be a key advantage over other, similar services.
Also, I continue to believe that could have be useful is the idea of Groups. Now, of course, some will say that was tried with Google+’s “Circles” but that’s not at all my vision. In my version of things, everyone would have the ability to create as many “Groups” as they liked and even be able to manage who might be able to Post in each Group.
You would have a full page Post to work with and threaded discussions of those Posts.
But, alas, I just don’t see any of this happening. The moment is over. We’ve all moved on.
A few days ago, I was talking to someone about the “old way” one would get information about a movie. You would flip open the local newspaper, find the ad for the newspaper you might be interested in and go from there.
Well, this conversation crossed my mind again recently and lo and behold, that very same day I was pushed a video on Tik-Tok that detailed that exact process. It was so specific to what I had talked about that I was taken aback.
Now, obviously, there are three possible explanations for this odd situation.
One, it’s just a coincidence. I’m reading into all of this a lot more than I should and let’s move on to something else.
Meanwhile, there is also the idea that Tik-Tok is actively listening to our conversations using our phone’s mic. If this was happening, it would be alarming for a number of reasons, least of which would be the national security implications of a Chinese company with ties to the CCP listening to the conversations of millions of Americans. (Not that I don’t think American Big Tech isn’t doing the same thing as well.)
The THIRD, most bonkers idea, is digital telepathy — Tik-Tok is reading our minds. I don’t believe this is happening — don’t believe it’s even possible to do — but these weird “coincidences” involving Tik-Tok seemingly knowing my inner monologue happen again and again to a surreal degree.
Anyway. Something unusual is going on, I just don’t know what.
They say that every new technological advancement is always used to make porn first and I think we’re careening towards a moment when we’re going to be flooded by AI-generated celebrity porn. We aren’t quite there yet — AI still can’t handle fingers — but I would say in about 18 months AI-generated celebrity porn will be every fucking where.
It is interesting that Emma Watson seems to be someone that all the horny nerds want to see with realistic, yet exaggerated proportions. In fact, to date, that has been one way I have been able to tell for sure that celebrity porn is fake — they all look like what some fucking horny nerd would like this or that female celebrity to look like.
A lot of female celebrities are popular because of their personality, just as much as they are for the size of of their bosom. And, yet, I keep seeing image after image on Twitter of Gal Gadot far more voluptuous than she is in real life. It will be interesting to see if, in 18 months when there is an obscene amount of AI-generated celebrity porn online, if the people generating it even try to stick to the actual dimensions of the women they so admire.
I have my doubts. Horny nerds can’t be stopped.
Of course, at some point in the near future, the law is going to step in. It seems clear that what to do about AI-generated celebrity porn is going to be one of the biggest tests of the courts. It definitely seems as though we’re careening towards a Petite Singularity just as The Fourth Turning is about to happen to us as well.
There is nothing short of panic on Tik-Tok from writers like me who use Google Docs. A number of people have Tik-Tok have urgently suggested that all writers take all of their writing off of Google Docs immediately and use Word instead (or whatever.)
I find this very curious for a number of reasons.
I understand where these writers are coming from, and, yet, I’ve actually looked into the scraping Google is doing and it seems a little too late to worry about such things. Now only is AI everywhere now, but I just don’t know how much my writing is going to make a difference if Google is scraping the entirety of Google Docs to train their LLMs.
Some of the hysterical talk on Tik-Tok seems just that — hysterical doom shit that assumes there’s some way to prevent, completely one’s words from somehow, someway being used to train LLMs.
But I will at amit that I just don’t know. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe if I just turn to Word I can somehow, magically, prevent anything I write from finding itself in the maw of AI.
At the moment, I’m taking a very measured wait-and-see approach. While I understand that if I keep my writing on Google Docs that it may, in some way, influence Google’s LLMs, it’s not like my, specific writing and ideas are going to magically pop up somewhere and be produced by Google Movies.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s exactly what is going to happen. I just don’t know at the moment.
There is a lingering mystery in the air when it comes to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. I find it astonishing that we honestly have no idea what the fuck is going on with UAPs and yet the idea has — to date- gotten zero traction in the public imagination.
Given just a little bit of thought, however, this is kind of bonkers. There are strange, powerful objects zipping around the skies of the globe and we have no idea what they are or where they’re from? Why is no one freaking out about this? It’s all very strange.
The most obvious explanations — that either a state or non-state actor has come up with some very, very advanced technology — doesn’t seem to fit what’s going on. So, there is the third, seemingly impossible option: these UAPs are probes are of non-human origin.
If we accept that the seemingly impossible is, in fact, what’s going on…that really opens a can of worms. And, yet, this idea doesn’t seem to matter to the general population. The idea that ETs are using probes to take regular looky-loos at Humanity should at least give people…pause for thought?
But, no. Nothing. Nobody cares.
It seems as though the only way anyone is going to care is if there is Hard First Contact with little green men landing on the front lawn of the White House. It’s enough to make one believe that if the government did release what it might know about ETs that…no one would care.
Only space nerds would get excited, everyone else would go back to fighting over the culture wars.
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