Happy Friday gang. If you’re ‘merican, may you at least have the day off, even without much to celebrate…
Trump is set to cement a budget-busting legacy, adding to the national debt
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/07/03/trump-big-beautiful-tax-bill-national-debt
EPA suspends and investigates around 140 employees who signed a letter critical of the agency
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/03/climate/epa-letter-employees-suspended-investigation
You’d never guess how old that guy is by looking at him
Emil Bove’s confirmation hearing was a travesty
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/03/emil-bove-trump-nominee-confirmation-hearing
#RIP
Actor Michael Madsen, known for ‘Kill Bill’ and ‘Reservoir Dogs,’ dead at 67
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/03/nx-s1-5455860/michael-madsen-dead
Have a great weekend!
…not having a handle on where it might be appropriate to start without putting people off their fireworks…in low hanging fruit today we have the NYT showing its editorial ass…again…but…somehow…in a way that still manages to surprise people…so…that’s fun?
…obviously this panders to my tendency to critique forms on the basis that the onus is on the form to be able to accommodate the accurate information…because people needing to only come in formats that match the form is dumber than shit…but…this is what they got…& they had to scrape *that* barrel for it?
…you know…I still know at least one person who likes to think of themselves as culling a “just the facts, ma’am” perspective out of the morass of news media…but…stuff like this is why I believe they believe that more than I believe they achieve that…like…I know them…they don’t get these facts if they just scan the column the NYT threw up…& if you put these facts in front of them the way you might lay out a fact pattern in a legal proceeding they would demand exhaustive proof that it wasn’t made up for the sake of farming discontent with the NYT for online clout
…being chronically online is clearly not a healthy pursuit…but not being chronically online does not miraculously imbue you with an immunity to buying a bill of goods without noticing who just sold you what
…&…at the risk of sounding like I’m pandering to myself about the revitalizing properties of irony if handled responsibly…what with all that frothing nonsense being in the internet waters today…I…was sort of thinking about the variable meanings of “independence”…so…maybe that should have been “fun” with the quotes?
[P.S. …your boy b-boy bouiebaisse is still hanging in there…don’t know if the posts he deleted were the ones where he explained why he didn’t aim to quit writing things that show up in the NYT…but they made a decent amount of sense if you ask me?]
The NYT, the NYP for the 1%ers.
The Skullfuckers really want their tax cuts and will stop at nothing to get them.
And on another front, WaPo continues to refuse to identify things as they are. “term seen as”? How about “President uses antisemitic slur”?
President uses term seen as antisemitic slur to refer to unscrupulous bankers
…the question is surely did he mean to say shysters or was it fully on purpose…& if it wasn’t what cognitive feedback loop made the substitution…was it an “I heard someone say this just the other day” one or a “these are synonyms it doesn’t matter which you say” one?
…it’s not an *important* question compared to “how is a man not in command of the words that fall out of his mouth getting to have the say so on so much that ain’t the way he says?”…but diagnostically it would help dial in on the source of the infection?
Dementia. It’s always dementia. And the press rushes to cover it up. And the more obviously offensive the term is, the quicker they chime in with “well, it’s really not that bad.”
When he inevitably drops the n-word, we will see headlines like “President inadvertently uses a term that a very few people associate with racism.”
Happy Birthday Murrica to Deadsplinters!
Not so much to celebrate.
Happy Independece Day to all. I just felt I needed to tell you that another of Better Half’s strange pastimes are TikToks. Who knows how he finds them. He found one last night that was a compilation of people shocked by and complaining about food prices. This must have been 2 or 3 years old because I think we’ve all adjusted.
One woman was outraged by milk prices. “Ya know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna get me my own cow and milk that bitch.”
So please, this Independence Day, try to remember to take a moment and milk that bitch.
Would a goat also work?
I don’t know what goats milk tastes like, but I do really like goat cheese.
…do we defer to the holiday & not talk about the guy who spent 2hrs on a call with his boy vlad reneging on promised resupply of munitions to the folks pooters just sicced his biggest salvo of drones on yet overnight…& how his take on it was pretty much “it doesn’t look like he’s going to stop”…but still thinks stopping that reload for the defense…makes sense?
…because otherwise there could be a comparison to be made with the use of fireworks…& maybe how those are more expensive because tariffs…& the dollar is weaker against foreign currency…so you literally get less bang for your buck
…just sayin’?
My hope is that Zelenskyy, who is MUCH smarter than Orange, saw this betrayal coming and has sourced alternatives.
Trump is a lot of things (98% horrible) but he’s not subtle. If he were a baseball pitcher then he’d be lit up on a regular basis because of how he telegraphs every move.
98% horrible? Optimist.
I recently posted a YT video with the “best” of fireworks fuckups.
But people are stupid.
My friend who recently graduated in physics once spent part of the summer in a demolitions course as part of his then mining engineering schooling. Problem… It was always on Sat morning and mining engineers are notorious for boozing. Even those barely sober hungover mofos knew enough to not to fuck with explosives.
I knew a guy, ages ago, who blew off three of his fingers fucking around on the 4th.
He’s known as Lefty?
I gotta go see my family today. After yesterday’s events, I’m not looking forward to it. At all. The family text chain got racist last night, so I’m not expecting much civil behavior today.
We’re going in with an exit strategy. “We gotta go. I don’t want to drive home in the rain and dark. Good to see you, let us know about Thanksgiving.”
We’ve already decided that Thanksgivings will be celebrated solely with my immediate family. Last year we just got reservations and went out to eat and it was the best Thanksgiving we’ve had since my parents died.
Best of luck and hope your excuses work out.
I don’t know if it’s tariffs making fireworks more expensive or if enough morons are out of jobs and have no money to blow on fireworks (I know tons of good people are out of jobs, by morons here I mean specifically the clowns who like to shoot off fireworks for a week before the 4th at random times late at night, waking people up and being annoying AF), but it has been one of the quietest 4th of July weeks in years here.
I don’t think it has anything to do with patriotism and national sentiment since people just like blowing shit up and lighting fireworks.
I’m not mad about it at all.
It’s the same here. Very quiet, and we also usually have idiots starting a week early. And yes, prices are up.
Star-spangled bummer
From fireworks to beef, higher prices are costing July 4 revelers.
“Both Lokenauth and Flynn say they hope this year counts as a blip and that they’ll get back to hosting massive Fourth of July parties again soon.”
Oh yeah, because if we learned anything about how prices of consumer goods have gone up in the last 10 years, they totally will come down again once things settle down….
…so…I thought it was a gag bit…but hair furore actually does want to host a UFC MMA cage-fight at the white house to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the US?
It’s cool. Totally tracks with his base.
Signed,
when I was in grad school in Alabama, one of the school districts ran a fundraiser that was a cage match UFC style fight in the parking lot of the Hooters
I’m not joking.
I believe it only because I have seen AR-15 clones raffled off as prizes.
in unrelated news…..
i has decided i need a gracula
(correction…i has ordered a gracula…)
aaaand….well thats oppo in a nutshell
…if hippies & surfers could drive beetles that were a 30s design…even if the campers were, what…10-20 years or so post-war…if nothing else it goes to show that the elon effect can run the other way & get people to buy used-to-be-nazi cars
…& now I’m somehow comparing the market trajectory of the VW bus with the cybertruck & starting to be concerned the symmetry holds up on my throwaway allusion better than it has any business doing
…personally…I blame oppo…that place is a terrible influence?
a good product is a good product..even if the producer is evil
teslas are shit tho
and musk isnt even worth being called a twat
and honestly if you compare the vw van to the cyber truck
well… theres no hope for you
you know….. ones an iconic pile of shit…..and ones a tesla
…I was thinking by “compare” that one is a fairly humble but useful bit of design-classic stuff that got a whole subculture with lots of examples of people who had them that lots of people would agree were pretty cool…that was popular & affordable in a variety of configurations from a basic van to a full on camper
…& people took them to all kinds of places all over the world & some of those weren’t easy to get to
…& some people took the versatile platform thing to extremes & rebuilt the things as VW-bus-ish-shaped totally different thing…because you could…or…well…you if you’re farscy or whoever decides it might be fun to win a drag race in a hippie bus…or make it a monster truck (thinking this is less likely to be a farscy-approved option but you never know?)
…& the other one is massively expensive & less useful for being anything but a statement eyesore than a cheaper thing that would do the job better…that can’t go lots of those places…& would be worse to travel &/or live out of…which steinbeck did just fine out of a camper sat in the flatbed of a (now) old-school pick-up truck with a packing list he laid out in the opening of “travels with charley” …& if it hadn’t been for the reams upon reams of paper & the typewriter weighing so much he probably wouldn’t even have had to reinforce the suspension
…elon musk is the antithesis of cool the way the cybertruck is the antithesis of the VW camper…that’s the thing that the other thing is responsible for putting in my head…& now it’s my head-canon…&…that’s the part I blame on oppo’s bad influence
…hmmm
…sensing that nowhere in that do I seem to have hit upon a means to refute there being no hope me
…but I feel like maybe a lot of folks might be feeling that way at the minute for rather more substantial reasons…so…mustn’t grumble?